Terror and Liberalism

by Paul Berman

Several people recommended this book, but it took a while for my hold at the library to come through. It was worth the wait.

Before I address the book and its arguments in detail, let me recommend The God Who Is There by Francis Schaeffer. In it he details the evolution (decay) of modern philosophy and its effect on our culture. His examples are a bit dated but the intervening years have brought even more dramatic illustrations, and his description of trends is even more apt now than it was then. Schaeffer's analysis of the West and Qutb's both look to a religious failure as the core of the decline they percieve in the West, but their interpretations and prescriptions are very different.

OK, why bring up Schaeffer and Qutb when talking about a book by Berman? Because Berman was able to lay hands on English translations of several of the volumes of In the Shade of the Qur'an, and part of his book explains what he found in Qutb--and I think that Schaeffer answers Qutb.

In a nutshell, Berman sees the great struggles of the 20'th century and the present day as mostly coming from a conflict between classical liberalism and the totalitarian cult of death as expressed in such various forms as Stalinism, Nazism, Phalangists, and Qutbists--for he discerns its influence on the nominally pure Muslim Qutb as well. He makes a pretty good case for this too.

Berman's credentials and Bush

He begins by asserting his credentials, describing an editorial he wrote for the Times in opposition to Nixon's "realpolitik" support of the 1991 Gulf War, in which Paul also supported the war, but did so on anti-facist grounds.

I didn't give a damn about the politics of oil, per se, nor about "vital interests"--though I'm sure it was naive of me not to take those things a little more seriously. I didn't spend my days fretting over America's ability to scare its enemies. The very word "credibility" gave me the willies. ... "Credibility" in Nixon's day brought nothing but calamity to America and Indochina alike.

Still, I did worry about Saddam Hussein. I thought that, in Saddam and his government, we were facing a totalitarian menace--something akin to facism. Saddam's regime was aggressive, dynamic, irrational, paranoid, murderous, grandiose, and demagogic. ... He had already fought a horrendous war with Iran, which features poison gas attacks by his own army. ... Saddam was terrifying. Here was credibility.

...

The entire situation had the look of Europe in 1939, updated to the post-Cold War Middle East.

Rebellion, obedience, and death

Berman sketches the history of rebellion in modern thought (frequently quoting Camus), and the eventual mixture of rebellion and a sinister obsession with murder and suicide. "Murder as rebellion, suicide as honor, murder and suicide as the joint emblem of human freedom--those were Hugo's themes" (in Hernani, a play about a Romantic hero conspiring to kill the king). Then Baudelaire goes a step further, with a fascination for murder and suicide not as side effects of an honest rebellion against tyranny, but "for the sake of crime." As Schaeffer pointed out, the change starts with the philosophers, then moves into the artists, and then into the general public. In Russia revolutionaries started "a fad for political assassination," at first with care to avoid unintended casualties and an eagerness to accept the consequences (dying for the cause, accepting punishment for the crime). Dying for the cause showed your commitment, and your nobility, and after a while the link (the cause) seemed to shrink, and dying and nobility were connected imaginatively (as in the Sorrows of Young Werther). It didn't take long before the anarchist revolutionaries moved on to things like the Wall Street bombing and "aesthetic act of terror--'aesthetic' was his {Galleani's} own word--in which the beauty or artistic quality consisted in murdering anonymously. Here the nihilism was unlimited, and the transgression total."

World War I was notoriously a tremendous shock to the West, utterly discrediting the popular notion of inevitable progress.

And now the deepest disaster of all got underway. The old Romantic literary fashion for muder and suicide, the dandy's fondness for the irrational and the irresponsible, the little nihilist groups of left-wing desperadoes with their dreams of poetic death--those several tendencies and impulses of the nineteenth century came together with a few additional tendencies that Camus had never bothered to discuss: the dark philosophies of the extreme right in Germany and other countries, with their violent loathing of progress and liberalism; the anti-Semites of Vienna with their mad proposal to cleanse Vienna of its most brilliant aspects; the demented scientists of racial theory. All this which had once been small and marginal, began to metastasize and spread. ... And the movements of a "new type" devoted themselves to a single, all-consuming obsession, which was a hatred of liberal civilization.

Lenin was the first, and "History with a capitol H was innocent. When Lenin acted, he acted in History's name. He ordered killing en masse; and everything he did was, by definition, as innocent as the lamb." The Facists seemed their opposites; dreaming of the local triumph rather than the universal, nationalists, champions of irrationality ... but Mussolini had been an ultra-leftist to start with.

By a strange change the urge to rebel had been channeled into an urge to submit --as you rebel against the old ways you must gather together with like-minded rebels and follow the example of the most strongminded and rebellious. And so it follows that there must be mass chants, and a uniform (red or black or brown shirts as you please), and an unquestionable theory of mankind.

And here Berman brings in Cohn as the discoverer of the ur-myth of the 20'th century; a "people of God" under attack from the wealthy and corrupt world without and treachery within, but sure to win in the end thanks to the power of the "man on horseback" with the power of life and death in the great battle of Armageddon. (This isn't quite the way I read Revelation, but ...)

Moving to the Mideast

In every country and sometimes in every province the Facist or facist-like movement wanted to show how parochial were its instincts, how deeply rooted in local traditions, how unique and idiosyncratic. A Facist inspiration from Europe that had spread to other places would make every effort not to look like a Facist inspiration that had spread from Europe

Nevertheless the Nazi and Facist roots of the Baathist parties are now well known. The Muslim Brotherhood formed at about the same time, and "The Baathi and the Islamists were two branches of a single impulse, which was Muslim totalitarianism--the Muslim variation on the European idea." The intellectual light of the Muslim Brotherhood was Qutb.

Qutb

Qutb saw that modern culture had reached a crisis, with men alienated from their own nature and searching desperately in alcohol, pointless sex, dark and desperate "doctrines such as existentialism and its disastrous analogous ideologies." In the most materially affluent societies people lead miserable and purposeless lives. Any objections so far? I thought not.

Qutb saw three forces acting to destroy the secular society: Maldistribution of resources (with the usual socialist analysis); "weakening of moral values which leads, sooner or later, to the destruction of moral prosperity" (and eventually physical prosperity, for {though it isn't explicated here} the value of money is trust; and the less you can trust the more lawyers you need and the less you can risk--drying up the investment culture that drives capitalism); and a pervasive fear which hurts the mind and body. That "maldistribution of resources" is necessarily a dangerous thing is debateable--people don't seem to mind so much if they believe they can have a chance at the goodies, but it is obviously bad when people resent it. The rest of the forces he describes pretty well.

His analysis of why the West decayed says the reason was religious. Judaism (which as a Muslim he regarded as coming from a genuine revelation) called for the worship of God and not idols, and demanded that the Jews obey not just a ritual code for worship but also a moral code and a civil code as well. He held that they had degenerated into ritual-only, and Jesus was sent to reform the code and call everyone to a higher spiritual dimension of obedience. Many gentiles followed Jesus, but the Jews largely rejected him, and in the resulting disputes the Gospels were garbled and Paul, in battling the Jews, rejected the civil aspects of Jesus' message and drew instead from Greek philosophy. Thus Christianity began crippled, with authority only over the spiritual and not over the civil part of life. Then Constantine hypocritically "converted" the empire, and the horrified church invented asceticism and monasticism in reaction to the lawless lifestyles of the powerful--denying the nature of man and further crippling Christianity with a schizophrenic split between spirit and body, until the arrival of Mohammed.

There are several problems with this analysis: the synoptic Gospels show no signs of the controversies of the early church (which you'd expect if they were written later or corrupted to suit the times); Paul doesn't actually draw that much from the Greeks, though he does explain things to gentiles using their own language; Qutb's thumbnail description of monasticism doesn't agree very well with the history I read; and I gather he relies on the Qur'an rather than (much older!) histories to discover what Christians believe--the Qur'an is known to be in error on several points (such as what Christians say the Trinity is). In brief, Qutb is wrong.

Schaeffer much more accurately traced the origins of the West's malaise to the Renaissance: which is much more plausible since the philosophies of the West changed direction then.

Returning to Qutb, he held that the Muslim world lost its grip on Muslim principles sometime between the third and fifth Caliphate, even though the empire still spread. Berman doesn't describe what this loss of grip was, but I surmise from Qutb's bete noir that it had to do with the rise of civil power not completely united with spiritual power. The discovery of the inductive method (scientific method) in Muslim Andalusia (shades of the Soviet "we invented it first"ers!) spread to Europe where it caught on and caused the boom in Western power. That power spreading around the world carried the schizophrenic Western split between spirit and the physical world (what Schaeffer calls the "Line of Despair") with it to infect every culture, including the Muslim.

"But, though Qutb was evidently following some main trends of twentieth-centure social criticism and philosophy, he made a great show of referring to European or American thinkers as rarely as possible, except perjoratively or polemically." He rejected the racial parties (like Nazis) and warned against Arab chauvisism. "Marxism itself struck him as the ne plus ultra of every ghastly trait that had developed in Europe," reducing man to an economic animal with neither a human nature or a divine spirit. But his strongest attacks were against liberalism and the notion of the separation of church and state: "such a society denies or suspends Gods sovereignty on earth." He asserted that the foundation of such a society is that the human heart is the final arbiter of right and wrong, when plainly God is. Or is it founded in the more pragmatic worry that while God never misleads, His nominal representatives often do?

He also warned against the Jews.

He explicitly warned against emphasizing the Koran's tolerant expressions of forgiveness of the Jews. Nor did he want to look at the story of Medina as merely an event from the seventh century. In Qutb's interpretation, the sins of the Medina Jews in the seventh centure have a cosmic, eternal quality--rather like the sins and crimes of the Jerusalem Jews in some of the traditional interpretations of the Gospels. In his commentary on Surah 2, Qutb speculated that, during their time of slavery under Pharaoh in Egypt, oppression may have corrupted the Jews, with permanent effects on all Jews everywhere.

He held that the slogan "Culture is the human heritage" was merely a trick by Jews intended to eliminate all limits so that Jews could penetrate the body politic of the whole world to perpetrate their evil designs, chief among which was requiring usury. "Qutb's anti-Semitism was Islamic; but it was not just Islamic. It was classic."

Qutb has been accused of being prudish, but this is in the eye of the beholder. His actual argument was that the appearance of freedom in the liberal cultures really meant that women were "free" to be cogs in an economic machine rather than trainers of human beings, because the culture values money more than people. A society where God's values don't translate into the culture results in people being pressured to ruin themselves and others. He said the liberal society values "love" more than fidelity: the transient feelings of the human heart trump marriage vows. Accurate enough... And this shows ignorance of human nature and God's laws.

Qutb worried that the liberal doctrines about religion would infect the Muslim minds, and destroy Islam. "True Islam would become partial Islam, and partial Islam does not exist." Ataturk had abolished the caliphate, and showed that Islam was vulnerable. So what needed to be done?

First, sound the warning of the assult on the mind from without and the assult on Islam from within, from the false Muslims polluted by evil ideas.

Islam's champions seemed to be few, but numbers were nothing to worry about. ... The vanguard had to form a kind of Islamic counterculture--a mini-society where true Muslims could be themselves. ... The vanguard had to recognize that the false Muslims or "hypocrites" who ruled the Muslim world were no Muslims at all. ... The goal, in short, was to resurrect the pristine Islamic society, from before the period of decline--to resurrect the original model in such a way that everyone could see its success.

The Islamic society means sharia, which Qutb painted in rosy colors: but somehow the "freedom of conscience" he advertised seems less than appealing when the alternative is to be a dhimmi. Jihad had rules (don't kill women and children), but in the end jihad would win the world.

Qutb's doctrine was wonderfully original and deeply Muslim, looked at from one angle; and from another angle, merely one more version of the European totalitarian idea. And if his doctrine was recognizable, its consequences were certainly going to be predictable. Qutb's vanguard, if such a vanguard ever mobilized itself, was going to inaugurate a rebellion--this time, a rebellion in the name of Islam, against the liberal values of the West. (Totalitarian movements always, but always, rise up in rebellion against the liberal values of the West. That is their purpose.) And the rebellion was bound to end in a cult of death.

And so it proved in Afghanistan. To ensure a perfect society, every detail of sharia needs to be inforced, and sharia covers every detail of life--including which direction to urinate.

Back to history

Because the definitions of some of the terms like jihad were a little vague, the Islamists had some flexibility in portraying themselves and taking advantage of situations. Their anti-communism made them more acceptable in Washington, and in Israel (Arafat's first terrorist groups were funded from Moscow), and even in Paris. The two critical events in the rise of Islamism were the rise of Khomeini and the success of the Afghan fighters. Khomeini borrowed a lot of leftist rhetoric, but his revolution was essentially Islamic, and inspired a death cult of staggering proportions: thousands of men eagerly marching out to step on land mines to prepare the way for the regular forces to follow. Saddam's cruelty was also staggering, and strangely popular in the "Arab street." But Khomeini's influence was greater around the world, and one of those influences was the death cult.

Berman looks at Sudan as a "remarkable example of Islamism in practice" in its jihad against the Christian and pagan south, with over a million dead and huge numbers of slaves. This is, unfortunately, not remarkable, but was in fact standard operating procedure for Islam for a thousand years. Africa has always been a source of slaves for Arab Muslims. The Palestinians are the more horrible example: They began initially by more or less fighting the army, but with the second intifada they celebrate mass murder and suicide. More and more radical Islamists groups coalesced, with Al Qaeda being only the most famous. Sheikh Rahman, Abdullah Azzam, Ali Benhadj and many more; all calling for suicide warriors and blood.

The "pathological political movements" seem incomprehensible to the "good-hearted" people who believe in "universal rationality." To deny these movements is to ignore the entire 20'th century. And yet people did, and still do. Berman tells the grim story of the anti-war Socialist of France during World War II, who held so true to their anti-war instincts and distrust of the arms manufacturures that they ended up supporting Petain and his program "for strength and virility, a Europe ruled by a single party state instead of the corrupt cliques of bourgeois democracy, a Europe cleansed of the impurities of Judaism and of the Jews themselves." They ended as facists, though a chain of small adjustments.

Berman calls the 2000 offer to the Palestinians generous, and describes the triumph of Hamas that rejected it. Even uglier than the suicide murders was the reaction around the world: people around the world, from Bove in France to the academic chairs in the US to Latin America, were attracted to the terrorism, and supported it! Hamas did not want a Palestinian state, they wanted murder and death--and the violence attracted support. (When Israel cracked down, and the death rate went down, the support waned.) The measure of their violence was taken to be the measure of the injustice done to them, so the injustice done to the Palestinians is now taken to be unprecedentedly evil (despite the facts of the case). Around the world men believe that Israel is worse than the Nazis, and facts are ignored or twisted to fit this immutable doctrine.

Berman then goes on to ream out Chomsky, whose philosophy had no place for pathological mass movements or evil outside the US. Faced with the facts, Chomsky proceeded to use his considerable skills in the service of denial and lies. (I remember one of his peices written back around 72 or 73. It seemed so plausible, until you started asking questions.) Yet the self-deception wasn't limited to Chomsky. "Everyone, unto the chiefest of Indian chiefs, turned out to be a simpleminded rationalist, expecting the world to act in sensible ways, without mystery, self-contradiction, murk, or madness. In this country, we are all Noam Chomsky."

Chapter 7 (Mental War) critiques the "end of history" and asks why liberal democracy so often seems to be thought of as a "oh well, let's try this" option, rather than the revolutionary approach it is. He cites Lincoln who fought a war to keep a liberal democracy intact, and notes that the Gettysburg address was in a cemetery--not to celebrate death as good, but to celebrate the devotion of the dead and the goal. Berman has little sympathy for the countries that mouth lofty sentiments and do nothing--like Sweden and Switzerland in World War II, or Mitterand about Sarajevo.

Europe was a society that could not defend the weak, or its own religious minorities, or its own principles. Even in the 1990's The Balkan Wars were Europe's Lincolnian "test;" and Europe could not produce its Lincolns. Still, the French did make their move, and the Brittish soldiers were exceptionally brave, and the Europeans demonstrated an ability to play at least a lively supporting role, so long as the United States played the lead. ... Human rights, humanitarianism, international accords and treaties, the wispy thing called "Europe"-- this language was not entirely hopeless. The ambigous terms could take on specific meanings, if someone insisted.

Then came September 11, and a wave of support for the US--at least nominal support (other sources suggest French popular support was less than profound). Berman believes Bush injured the cause by speaking getting bin Laden "dead or alive;" invoking images of an irresponsible cowboy in some and failing to get across the wide scope of the developing war in others. "And, as the fog of peace rolled away, a huge panorama, the reality of our present moment, appeared across the breadth of Afghanistan. It was the landscape of modern totalitarianism, arrayed in layered seams, perceptible at last." I like the "fog of peace" phrase! And the war went well.

But all is not well

Berman judges that Bush has done a pretty fair job of managing the war so far, but complains that he

failed to take up the larger war of ideas. He did talk about such a war. He announced a war of ideas in his first, brave, spirited speech to Congress, a little more than a week after 9/11. But he himself had no ability of language to articulate the ideas of the modern age, and neither did any of the people around him.

Instead he launched a program to produce Hollywood TV ads about the virtues of America. ... That was laughable--mere ads to counter the most scholarly of doctrines, the most learned of religious authorities, the greatest of modern authors.

He says Bush spoke and even acted on the principles of overthrowing totalitarianism and bringing the benefits of a free society, but had hesitations and cautions that undercut his actions. He dislikes the "old Nixon hands," and thought the "preemptive war doctrine" was irrelevant and only caused trouble. Berman likes the strong emphasis on feminism in the Afghanistan war, as hitting the Jihadists in a weak spot, but he thinks Bush hypocritical for trying "to roll back the legal right to abortion" (as though that were a bad thing). Bush, he says, does not speak the modern "language of liberal democracy" (treaties, international law, and human rights), which make his pronouncements unwelcome even among those who actually agree with him in Europe.

Berman faults Bush for failing to talk about the need for reform in Saudi Arabia. Here I think Berman has brain freeze. We want to reform or destroy the House of Saud, but we can't say so out loud without stirring up a hurricane.

He faults Bush for failing to ask Americans to sacrifice for the war. My mother remembers World War II, and wonders the same thing. I agree, but I wonder if Americans are willing to sacrifice for a low level war that looks like it will last a good 20 years or so--or willing to sacrifice much at all for anything. (We have a brave volunteer Army/Navy/AirForce, but are they representative?) And I'm certain that if we start talking now about our long term aims we will have loyal Muslims around the world fighting us in "defence of the holy places;" no matter that we don't have any plans to capture them.

OK, are we agreed that Berman isn't a Bush partisan?

Philosophy matters

This following quote makes me think of Chesterton who said that the philosopher was the really practical man.

Foreign policy "realism," by my lights, is a specific doctrine, which is why I put it in quotation marks. It is a doctrine from the nineteenth centure. It is a kind of materialism, even if most of its adherents would swear otherwise. Karl Marx, the king of materialists in the field of politics, figured that world history was driven by a single tangible force, namely, the system of economic production. Hippolyte Taine, the king of materialism in the field of literary criticism, figured that world literature was driven by three tangible forces, which he identified as race, time, and geography. In the same vein, the "realists" of today--in my caricature--figure that world politics is likewise driven by three tangible forces. These are wealth, power, and geography. All of the nineteenth century materialist doctrines give off a confident air of hard-bitten sophistication, and that is true of foreign policy "realism" as well. A "realist," like a Marxist, is someone who, no matter what bizarre events may take place around the world, will profess not to be surprised. This is "realisms"s weakness, though. Wisdom consists of the ability to be shocked.

I remember (though I can't recall the source! I think it was in one of "Adam Smith's" books) an economist's bewildered complaint that revolutionary Iran was not behaving in economically rational ways.

And a little warning, taken out of context...

A thousand commentators have pointed out, in retrospect, that Ronald Reagan's policy in Afghanistan back in the 1980s did lead to difficulties in later years, which is indisputable. In Afghanistan, just as in Saudi Arabia, America's beneficiaries turned out to be America's worst enemies. The world is full of back-stabbing sons-of-bitches: such is the lesson of modern history. (It is not a new lesson.)

72 Raisins?

A German scholar claims that the Koran wasn't originally written in Arabic, and has been mistranslated. I have to confess to a certain skepticism of the textual criticism field in general. The article claims that the 3rd caliph destroyed the original copies--I'd heard that as "collected the best copies and destroyed the bogus ones." If this is the reporter's take on it, fine--I know how far to trust reporters. But Luxenburg should know better.

And his thesis conflicts with common sense. The text in hand is claimed to be beautiful poetry. (I can't verify that--my efforts at learning Arabic have not advanced far.) It is known to be very obscure in places, but beautiful. I can't see a crufted-up semi-Aramaic version being considered beautiful. Of course, maybe the reporter has really loused up the story...

I've been on vacation, which means of course that I've been working even harder than usual, and haven't had time to post. Regrets....

Some friends of ours have been very dubious about Harry Potter, and declined to let their children read the series. (We've encouraged the parents to read it for themselves.) Their children introduced mine to Anne Rice. Go figure.

David Warren on Marriage in Canada

His post is typically articulate and succinct, and will serve as a preview for Gallagher's books (which I promise to post reviews of shortly).

Tides of War by Steven Pressfield

You ask, Jason [the prisoner Palemides spoke], which aspect is most distasteful of the assassin's art. Knowing you as the paragon of probity you are, you no doubt anticipate some response involving bloodguilt or ritual pollution, perhaps some physical difficulty of the kill. It is neither. The hardest part is bringing back the head.

You have to, to get paid.

Athens and Sparta fought for dominion over what's now Greece and part of Turkey: Athens with its famous navy and Sparta with its famous army, and both with rosters of more or less reliable allies. Before its final defeat, Athens made a rather remarkable showing. At this distance in time it seems as though Athens defeated itself. In their fear of tyranny, the Athenians had made almost every office elective--including the military offices. What happens when a political faction succeeds in forcing the ouster and trial in absentia of the ambitious supreme commander of your armed forces--in the middle of a war?

Such is the setting for Tides of War: A novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War, as seen by Palemides (and his defence attorny Jason), a soldier, mercenary, marine, slave, bodyguard, and eventually hired executioner. Alcibiades was, of course, the historical large-than-life commander whose vision and charisma drove the course of the war; and whose god was Necessity. Necessity seems to have always meant taking bold steps to expand the empire... no matter which side he was fighting for.

I found the book a page-turner, though I didn't like it as well as Gates of Fire--probably because the hero is rather a less pleasant character, and partly because the interrupted flashback approach breaks the flow. Alcibiades sometimes comes across as a bit too much larger than life, but that may just be because I've not run across people like him or like Rogers from Northwest Passage, (which this book reminds me of).

I've a rough-and-ready rule for measuring how good a book is: How often do I reread it? Lord of the Rings I've reread many times, for example. I suspect I'll come back to this again someday.

Three cheers for the Young Eagles!

We went to the Oshkosh EAA Museum and Pioneer Air Field this past week. Our 9-year old son was thrilled to ride in a little 2-seater plane, piloted by a Young Eagles volunteer. The program gives 8-17 year olds a chance for a personal plane ride, in the hopes of encouraging interest in aviation. Afterwards, he didn't want to try a simulator--he'd ridden in a real one.

Intervene in Liberia?

5-July-2003

Many people in Liberia are begging us to intervene to stop their horrible civil war--by unspecified means. Even President-by-intimidation Taylor is asking for help. Liberia's neighbors would also undoubtedly love to see us clean up this infectious hell-hole. UN leaders are asking for a peacekeeping force as well.

Do we have any duty to Liberians? If we have no duty to interfere, is it advisable on other grounds? Do we have any right to interfere? If we did interfere, what should we do?

The formal answer to the first question has to be no. The first duty of our government is to our own people, and secondarily to those with whom we have agreements of alliance. Liberians fall into neither category. But the formal answer isn't the whole story, of course. Most Americans know nothing of Liberia and its history with the US; but it has been a friendly and cooperative partner, albeit a rather corrupt one, for its whole history. From allowing air bases during WWII to siting a huge VOA station during the Cold War it has worked as a minor military partner--not an ally, true; but a cooperative partner.

Arguments that we have a duty to help Liberians don't seem overwhelming, but they're not negligible either. It might be a hard sell to Americans who don't know much about our mutual history, but could be successfully argued.

Unfortunately Liberia's troubles make that whole section of West Africa unstable and ungovernable; and we know what happens when a section of the world becomes ungovernable--especially a section of the world with a lot of Muslems in it. Contrary to statements I've seen elsewhere, Liberia does have a substantial Muslem population, and the Ivory Coast is becoming polarized a la Nigeria. Humanitarian issues aside, we have a strategic interest in making sure the region doesn't contain lawless pits where our terrorist enemies can form enclaves.

Quite a number of unrelated groups outside Liberia are also asking us to intervene on humanitarian ground, intimating that we can get back in their good graces by doing so. However, since these same people (Kofi et al) will wail about "imperialism" after the first Liberian casualty, we can safely discount any implied goodwill.

---

The question of a right to interfere is a rather vexed question with a counter intuitive answer.

When a nation's survival is at stake (no matter what philosophers and theologians say), we accept it as given that that nation has the right to attack its active enemies, and even enemies that are not currently threatening them if this makes strategic sense. We invaded Iraq on these grounds, though the proximate cause was Iraq's non-compliance with disarmament rules made to enforce the peace agreements. We invaded France as a step toward rolling up the Nazi empire, though France was not a grave threat to us.

Life is more clear-cut when you limit wars to self-interest. Mugabe is a despicable villain who uses starvation as a political tool, but he does not threaten American interests, and so he knows he is safe from US attack. But if we allow "humanitarian reasons" as a trigger for war, he cannot think himself safe at all. You may think "Wonderful! The creep ought to worry." But think instead what an amazingly wide scope "humanitarian reasons" covers. Mugabe starves only a small fraction of Zimbabwe's population. You can trivially find terrible abuses in South Africa, or Libya, or Morocco, or France, or any prison anywhere in the world. Suppose a group of Gypsies in Hungary beg for relief from the abuse of their human rights from anybody willing to invade Hungary. Do you need a threshold for action that says people's lives have to be in danger? Here in the US we have a population that the EU considers oppressed, and whose lives are at stake: death row inmates. Nobody is safe, anybody is a target.

You can't safely rely on appeals for outside intervention, either: who do you listen to, and who do you trust? You can find a Quisling in any country, to say that they need the German army to come restore order. Don't complaint about the grammar in that sentence, it means what it says.

The cold-blooded rule of self-interest turns out to restrict war more than the more tender-hearted defense of human rights. I have to class "humanitarian reasons" together with "our country's honor" and "our country's destiny" as invitations to unnecessary wars.

And . . . it never hurts to remember that power corrupts. We are not holy angels. Even our intricate systems of accountability don't always work, as the Arthur Anderson and the brokerage scandals recently showed. This time the cries of "No blood for oil" were so much cow dung--the Iraq war worked against the oil industry's interests. Next time it might be an honest indictment. Want to bet who'll be president in 2009? Bush has been an honest man, as far as I can tell. But who comes after him?

I don't see that the words "humanitarian relief" automatically give us the right to do what needs to be done.

---

What do we want to be done?

For starters, the status quo is abominable. Even if the rebels magically vanished, Liberia under Taylor hardly resembles a country at all. Taylor was elected by a thoroughly intimidated population. In no significant way has he tried to improve the country. I've seen the regular news articles about "The First Lady gave" this or that, but the dollar amounts are small. The Presidential mansion has electricity; nothing else does in Monrovia unless the firm has its own generator. The armies (one hesitates to think of them as a single force) are corrupt and poorly controlled. Taylor seems to have pioneered the use of drugged children as foot-soldiers. Their loyalty is assured by making sure that they participate in atrocities that keep them from ever going home again.

The borders are a joke. The armies are so far from controlling areas they nominally cover that rebel forces regularly bypass them. The war is more a matter of the encounters of wandering bandits than the of Western tradition of armies trying to overrun the land. Checkpoints are where the money is for the ordinary soldier, although he will make do by stealing the cookpots of the poor villagers he terrorizes.

The President is a cannibal kleptocrat who is and has been doing his level best to overthrow all of the region's governments.

Are the rebels any better? It is hard to say. They seem to be somewhat less interested in committing atrocities than Taylor's gangs, but unfortunately that isn't saying much. They are not very communicative.

So, what we want is for the government and rebel gangs to be suppressed, the current regime to go away (to prison or to Hell, whichever), the borders to be sealed to prevent incursions of rebel groups and (more importantly) the excursions of mercenary bands of Liberians into neighboring countries, and political and economic infrastructure to be rebuilt. Nation-building, in short.

Note well though, that peacekeepers cannot do the job. The standard-issue UN peacekeeper stands in the gap between the combatants and doesn't take sides. To solve Liberia's problems the intervening force has to take a side: against essentially all the other armed forces in the country, including what is considered to be the government. By the way, relying on ECOMOG troops (neighboring nation peacekeeping forces) proved to be a bad idea earlier in Liberian history, and also in Sierra Leone. They proved (especially the Nigerians) to be quite adept at theft themselves, and not very interested in nation-building.

Some parts of this are not technically hard. The bulk of the armed forces are ill-equipped and very ill-trained, and would scatter on hearing that Americans forces were planning to shoot back. However good they are at terrorizing unarmed villagers, they are lousy at coordinated and sustained fighting.

An incident from the war of Taylor's victory over Doe: During the battle for Monrovia some of Taylor's fighters wrested control of a street corner in Monrovia from Doe's (American-trained) troops. It being a fairly strategic objective, they were delighted, and went off to celebrate by looting some beer. When they returned, Doe's men had retaken the street corner.

Sealing the border is quite difficult: at a minimum we'd want to bulldoze a wide strip and patrol it to stop all traffic and commerce except at tightly controlled access points. That sounds to me like a couple of soldiers every 200 yards for 3 shifts over the entire border: say about 50 soldiers per mile for over 500 miles, with some reserves here and there to deal with large excursions. I estimate over 25,000 soldiers. (I've never been in the army, and these numbers are just my best guesses.) Don't even think of using Liberian soldiers for this purpose. That is too bitter a joke to be funny--they are the biggest part of the problem.

Chucking out the current government would not be very hard, but it would certainly be problematic. If we went in on invitation and then turned on them, it would set a precedent that would make it pretty much impossible for any country to contemplate asking for our assistance again, or even allowing us to base troops there. Very very bad idea. The Iraq invasion would have been impossible without bases nearby. If Qatar and Kuwait had been unwilling to let us base forces, we'd have had to give up on Iraq, invade somewhere else and install bases by force, or go nuclear. These don't seem good options.

Going in on the understanding that the current government has to go might be doable, if Taylor agrees to go first. Even so, whoever else has a vested interest in keeping in power might object and "change the government's mind," leaving us back with the previous paragraph's problem. We'd have to root out essentially all the old guard, and they won't like it. Diplomats can only do so much--we don't want to give the old guard what they really want, which is continued power.

---

So, let's pretend we want to intervene. What options do we have?

• We can toss in some US troops to serve with a UN/ECOMOG peacekeeping force. We'd get a lot of respect and nominal cooperation at first, but if we go in with the usual UN rules of engagement that will evaporate pretty quickly. Liberia is afflicted with many free-lance bandit gangs, loosely associated with warring factions. Unless we have the authority to chase after them when they show up nearby, we're pretty useless.
• If we go in with the understanding that our soldiers get to patrol wherever they want and shoot anybody who annoys them, the roadblock checkpoints will go away and the refugee problem will start to be solved. However, the same keptocrats that are currently entrenched will still be there, and with somewhat less of an imperative to change. It does not matter much whether Taylor himself is still in the country or not. The people he surrounded himself with are of the same stripe as he.
• We can do the above, and start importing guns and ammo and training village elders in their use. Of course Taylor's people would go ape, but if we could get around that problem the scheme might actually work. The idea relies on the fact that the bandit groups are not trained, and rely on superior firepower to terrorize and make up for their poor marksmanship. If your bandit group discovers that villages can fight back, they can either try to change tactics or look for easier prey. Bear in mind that an attacked village doesn't have a lot to hope for as it is, so fighting back can't hurt. This scheme takes far too long, though: months at least to supply and train, and many more months for bandits to start getting scared.
• We can intervene as part of a UN peacekeeping force, and then turn on the government. I've said before I think this a terrible option--probably the worst thing we could do.
• We can try to get agreement beforehand that Liberia as a government and a country no longer exists. On the basis of our historic ties with the land we are in a better position than Britain, France, or the UN to try to chase out the bandits and rebuild the nation. This would be very scary to a lot of kleptocratic governments out there, but I think we might be able to define non-existence tightly enough to keep focused on the real basket cases. Then we land Marines. Since that can't happen instantly, Taylor et al will have time to escape. And possibly go back to the bush and try for another revolution when we're gone. So somebody needs to take out Taylor too.

See the followup

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (JK Rowlings) is good. I have a few minor quibbles (Umbridge isn't very politically savvy, Hagrid ought to be deadlier when he's mad, the Death Eaters are wayyyy out of practice at fighting), but set these aside. Harry's reluctance to confide in adults is even more pronounced as his teenage years advance, which is both insanely stupid in his circumstances and annoyingly accurate (three teenagers so far, two in waiting). As usual, Harry is not a solitary hero, though for a while you wonder if he will manage to keep any friends. Go read it. (You have to have read the other 4 books first, of course.)

The best children's books can be enjoyed by adults: Alice in Wonderland, Goodnight Moon, The Wind in the Willows, Gulliver's Travels, the old folk/fairy tales, and so on. (In fact, some were written for adults.) If you haven't read these, by all means do: they are good fun. (Goodnight Moon is a short and very fine poem: I wish I could write like that.) Likewise Harry Potter: I'll take that over The Accidental Tourist any day. ~

Sex roles and betrayal

Many years ago I watched Flip Wilson do a comic sketch on the difference between the way a black man from the inner city spoke to a black woman and the way he would speak to a black man. To the woman he would speak in low tones, slowly and confidently; with movements to match. To the man his voice was high pitched, quick and agressive with short phrases. I remember thinking "Yep, I've seen this, and Flip nailed it."

Of course, things like this are more dramatic when seen from outside the culture. Still, if you look closely, you can see the same kinds of differences in how men act with other men and with women in mainstream culture. It's a bit harder to spot the differences in environments where everybody is taught to be aware of how they act and to be afraid of accusations of sexual harassment. Even so, watch the body language.

When women are around, men go on display. Married or single doesn't matter. Only with the very old or very young or close kin does this effect not kick in. [I assume the same thing happens with women but by definition I'm not there when women are alone together.] So long as a woman is around, the men are "strutting" and there is an atmosphere of . . . the only phrase that fits is "sexual tension." It is mild, of course--I'm not talking about heavy breathing and bedroom eyes; not talking about a mating dance; just a form of roleplaying.

Received wisdom to the contrary, I've never found any evidence that this is intrinsically bad. The details of the display vary from culture to subculture, but I see displays everywhere. When women arrive, men do the psychological equivalent of sucking in the gut and standing taller. And in some subcultures the change is quite dramatic.

When the women leave the men "relax." That doesn't mean they're glad when women leave, just that they stop the display.

You needn't remind me of situations where a woman is considered "one of the guys." Sure, that can happen; though I suspect she often isn't as much one of them as she thinks. I'm interested in the general picture here.

That general picture shows men going to the extra effort and tension of a display when women are around, and not taking on those extra roles when only men are present. It seems to me reasonable that men should properly want to spend time both with and without female company. Since this seems to be adequately backed up by observations of anthropologists (sometimes with very odd theories), I'll take it as given.

Given that men will want time with other men, what will their expectations be? During that time they expect no sexual tension; no need to display; and no worry of being evaluated on their sexual attractiveness.

This has nothing to do with "homoerotic" motives. On the contrary, introducing a homosexual into the group frustrates the expectations of the other men and can be experienced as a betrayal: betrayal of the expectation that there is no-one evaluating their attractiveness, betrayal of the expectation that "we can all relax and be secure."

Some claim that someone who reacts with displeasure to the presence of a homosexual is insecure with his own latent homosexuality. Aside from the utter lack of evidence for this claim, it never seemed very convincing psychologically. My "betrayal" model has just as much evidence to back it up, and seems to fit the character of some people I've known rather better.

FYI: TV and radio ignorance

You may notice that I write virtually nothing about current radio and TV personalities. I know very little about them--just what I read in the papers, and I know how far to trust that. I watch virtually no TV, and listen mostly to the NPR classical music station when I have the radio on at all at work. (My daughters tend to monopolize the radio at home.) The only episode of Seinfeld I saw was while I was in the hospital emergency waiting room--for some reason the show didn't seem very funny. Chatter distracts me at work, and we found years ago that letting the kids watch TV made them hyper and hard to get to bed.

I got out of the habit of watching the tube, and never troubled myself to get back in. My experience of Rush is 15 minutes of his TV show over 15 years ago; I've no real clue who Michael Savage is; and what I've heard about Howard Stern tells me I don't want to hear him. Is this blissful ignorance?

Side effects :-)

I see that low-on-the-hips pants are quite popular among the young ladies, often with a fairly long bare midriff. The allure of bare skin needs no explanation. The very low pants line combines the element of danger (near falloff) with an emphasised hip movement.

When the waistline is high, the straight line rests on a part of the body that is stable during walking. The outer edges of the hips shift up and down, so when the waistline is low it seesaws, drawing attention to the hips. In addition, the straight line of the waistband contrasts with the curve of the hips, and once again emphasises the hips.

And all's well, if the woman is wearing shorts. However, long pants are in style, and so is wearing the waistband very low. If the lady wants the pants to stay on, she has to cinch them tight.

The result is perhaps not quite what the wearer intends... If you pull tight, the waistband pulls in and the flesh bulges out above and below. Now the seesawing waistline draws attention to a new curve--a pudge on an otherwise svelte lady.

I don't know if there's a big-screen market for a movie about Carrie Nation

but I think it would make a bock-buster video.

The Power to Tax

is the power to destroy: Justice John Marshall. So, a tax on my income is like attacks on my income?

All the news that doesn't bother anybody, we print

I have no great interest in the sports pages, and I've noticed that referring to teams by mascot names leads to confusion (how many different Cardinals are there?). I don't doubt that some of the Indian mascot names really are offensive, and serve no particular purpose.

From this article in the Wisconsin State Journal, comes this quote:

Kathleen Rutledge, editor of the Lincoln Journal Star, the most recent paper to adopt a policy against using the offensive team names and mascots, said the issue of accuracy was discussed at her paper.

"But the thing that guided us at our paper was respect," Rutledge said. "We decided that respect trumped accuracy and objectivity."

When something is beyond satire words fail me. Is this really the guiding philosophy of their newspaper?

Colors of the Wind

Blue is for the half-burned hydrocarbons
Red the nitrous oxides in a haze
Yellow is the airborne sulfur acids
And green is from a heavy metal glaze . . .
 Green is from a heavy metal glaze.
...
You can own the Earth and still
All you'll own is earth until
You can free the hidden elemental powers
And you paint with all the colors of the wind.

OK, so maybe that isn't quite the way Disney Co. wanted it to read. But there was a line from the original that I find horribly stupid: "But I know ev'ry rock and tree and creature Has a life, has a spirit, has a name."

There's a word for this: animism. The definition in the dictionary doesn't improve on Disney's lyric. In a nice comfortable country at a nice safe distance this view of the world sounds comforting and inspiring.

In the real world, though, nature is not all sweetness and light. For every beautiful vista there's a snake hiding in the bush. The terrors of nature--floods, lightening, cold, heat, silent predators, disease, death in childbirth--are more dramatic. If every rock and creature has a spirit, a lot of them are malign. The world of the animist is not full of joyful recognition but of terror and perpetual uncertainty--"have I run afoul of some spirit I didn't know about?"

I'm not being theoretical--this is how they actually live. We forget how liberating monotheism is.

Inquiring minds want to know

Do college English professors still give a play-by-play on Shakespeare?

When the baby spits his apple juice all over himself, does that make it a topical beverage?

Historical Fiction

Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield was recommended to me at a party last month--I'd never heard of him before. I'll be looking up his other books now. The story of Thermopylae is told from as the personal history of a squire to the Spartan knight Dienekes. I'm not a Greek history scholar, but wherever I knew something about the era Pressfield got it right. The descriptions of the battles are impressively detailed and plausible. Recall that the Greek soldiers used heavy shields with long lances marching in tight formation--rather like porcupines, with another line of porcupines right behind them, and then another. What do you do when fighting like this, and why? He shows how intelligent warriers would be willing to fight that way.

The Spartans used notoriously brutal training to produce some of the finest fighters of the era, and were held up as admirable models for almost two thousand years (they've fallen a bit out of favor lately). Pressfield makes you see how they could be admirable.

Scholarship is a good thing, but the point of a novel is to tell an engrossing story. I'm happy to say that Pressfield succeeds very well at both telling the story and at engaging your interest in the people from that almost-alien culture.

I have a few mild quibbles: To tell the story he has to get the Spartans to talk rather more than their fabled laconic style would suggest. Their attitude towards their slaves seems a little more benevolent than seems plausible. And although religion is a very big deal, and our hero has a divine encounter, he doesn't have the daily sense of fear/awe you expect to find in a polytheist/animist society. Minor quibbles all.

Go for it. Have fun. I did.

Department of Redundancy Department?

On a bag of Green Gro Composted Manure the label also reads:
"with organic matter."

Hiatus

Thursday as I sat resting after work with our idling computer behind me I suddenly heard the deadly tick-tick-tick that told of a hard drive now destined for the trash. And my last backup 5 months old--mea culpa... The smallest disk available (I'm cheap) turned out to be too big for the BIOS on the slowly failing motherboard, so I went for a new HP Pavilion 515 (and kissed disposable income goodbye for quite a while).

Nice features: it is quiet, compact, has things like the USB ports on the front (I don't use USB, but that's the right place for them), and a nifty hinged hard drive box so you can easily insert the un-returnable drive you picked up the night before. Kudo's to the engineer that came up with that one.

Not-nice: air circulation is very poor around the hard drive box--I'm going to have to kludge some fans to hang on it. The main drive is partitioned with one giant partition and a small system backup partition. For safety's sake I like a system partition and a user partition--but if I split the monster up the "drive" letter of the backup will change and I wouldn't bet that the backup will work right anymore. I miss having a copy of the OS around for the day when the hard drive goes south, but that lack isn't HP's fault. And some of the software is unwelcome, and not easy for a non-expert to get rid of: the hp-center and the freedom software come to mind, for example.

Using Linux/Mozilla/Blogger

I hear the praises of MoveableType and other tools for blogging, and if I composed at great speed I don't doubt that these would help. However, I compose more slowly than I type as a rule, and so I find it no great hassle to toss in the HTML commands as I plow along.

I don't use anything sophisticated for text composition: just vi or nedit. When I think I'm done, I log into blogger and cut/paste my deathless (undead?) prose, click Post+Publish, and log out. Of course, there's a slight catch.

Blogger has a little problem with RedHat (6.1-7.3) + Mozilla (1.1-1.3) which I figured a work-around for. The composition window has several frames, one of which has the text input region and the Post/Post+Publish buttons. If I enter text in the text window, eventually it scrolls and so do the buttons! They don't scroll back, either. So I right-click on the text-input frame and open that frame in a new window. In that window the buttons don't scroll away forever, so I can paste my text in without losing the ability to Post.

Then I have to remember to update my index posts :-)

Cloning a near miss?

I see one group is making progress on cloning the Tasmanian tiger. Except, of course, that they will have to use the egg of a different species to host the DNA. It seems plain enough that the RNA is important to the way the DNA is expressed, and we won't have exactly the right RNA for the tiger's DNA--the expression is going to have to be different.

I have no feel for how different the result will be. Between the mother and child there's some difference, but not a great deal. Within a species, I expect a little more variation, but probably not enough to cause harm. I would expect that the same embryo growing in its mother will turn out differently than if it were grown in a surrogate of the same species. Remember that CC has different markings than the cat it was cloned from. I expect there are other minor differences as well.

But from one species to another the differences could be lethal. Maybe you could clone something mammoth-like using an elephant, but I'd be astonished if you could clone a dog using a cat.

Perhaps the hope for cloning is the second generation, where the RNA ought to match the DNA.

It seems a bit ironic that our materialist culture relies on intangibles. The value of money depends entirely on trust--a mental action. And we all know that your car is less valuable (it depreciates) than your promise to pay for it; which has its value ultimately in your integrity, which is a spiritual quality.

The demolition seems to be nearly done on second floor. The floor quivered when they broke up the walls under my office, but I see only about 10 feet of block wall left. (So why the jackhammer this morning?)

The cast wall is turning out to be problematic: plans call for it to be ripped out, but it turns out that wall supports an exterior wall for floors 3-6. I was under the impression that architects were paid the big bucks for paying attention to details like that, but perhaps I was misled.

OK, erase the board and send the next student up

In Luke Chapter 20:37-38, Jesus says that God is not "God of the dead but of the living: for all live unto him." To look at this another way, everything past present and future is all present with God. The completion of a new house with the paint just drying is just as much present with God as the completion of a newer house on the site of the original and the lean-to a hunter used to keep the rain off a thousand years before.

Nothing we build really lasts in this world. The American habit of trying to turn every other building into a historical monument to be preserved for eternity promises to pave the countryside with bronze plaques and clog the cities with untouchable "Rank Lloyd Frights." If we weren't blessed with so much space the silliness of it all would be more vivid.

It is humiliating to think that little or nothing I do will even last my own lifetime, but it makes sense to design a world this way. If everything we made endured and was honored in the world forever, we'd run out of places to build new gardens. In a world where everything has to be maintained, and eventually replaced, there's room for my children to design something different when my things wear out. The same decay that tears down my designs gives scope to theirs.

All of which is very cold comfort, since I want my work to have some meaning and some finality. And, of course, it does--not because future generations will stare at my palaces in awe, but because God (remember Him?) holds everything eternally present. The work I did laying bricks is present with God, though the building was destroyed; and He judges whether I was careful or sloppy and built with love or with greed. One day no man will know English, and every word I've written will be lost: except to God.

God is not just an archivist, but the judge. And if my works and His judgement of them are eternally present with Him, it seems likely that they will also be present with me hereafter--and I've done a lot that I'm not proud of. Will that last? 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 seems to refer to this: the evil gone and the careless burned away--what remains?

I suffer from the same malady as many others: things I can see and touch seem more real than what and Who I know exists behind them. So I'm distracted into valuing only the physical and neglecting the eternal. May God forgive and correct.

I'm reading the Narnia chronicles to our youngest. (You haven't read them? Quit surfing and go get them out of the library.) He doesn't seem to be enthused about The Horse and His Boy. I wasn't all that keen on it either until I was older. Maybe that's because the characters start out alien, with no point of contact or common interests. Shasta is a slave/son of a fisherman in a Persia-like country who meets a talking horse with whom he contrives to escape. My son's never met anybody like the main characters, and even horses aren't as common around here as a few generations ago (though some of the other 4H kids have some). Maybe I should have read Sinbad first...

The Dixie Chicks are back in the news again, losing another concert--probably more fallout from their anti-Bush remarks. This is the sort of thing you can expect when you alienate your fan base, but ...

If a man acts from the courage of his convictions and takes the consequences, you must admire that--even if he is dead wrong. Right or wrong; courage is noble in itself, and not that common either.

Is that what we have here?

• Taking the last point first, are they accepting the consequences as the natural price of their courage? Not exactly--it sounds more like whining that they were misunderstood. Unfortunately, the New York Times is not the only news source with a cheerful disregard for inconvenient facts that clutter up a juicy story, so I don't actually know for certain all that the Chicks have said on their own behalf. I could spend a couple hours and find out, but I think I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for the sake of the argument. A lot of the moans about 'censorship' were made on their behalf by other folks.

  On the other hand, they very quickly decided on emergency measures to shore up their popularity: getting naked on the cover of a national magazine. I gather that the ephithets sprinkled over their bodies were meant to make this look like a political statement about freedom of speech, instead of the usual "Why can't they put their hands somewhere else?" attention-getter. (Exercise for the reader: "Demi Moore is famous for...?") They revealed their desperation as well as their hips, and the use of the epithets suggest that either they're politically tone-deaf or cynical. I vote for cynical.

• Convictions is a strong word to use to describe most people's opinions. At least half the people I know, left and right, fell into their opinions instead of thinking their way into them. Since they usually hang out with like-minded sorts, they're never challenged, and never have to deliberately sort out the true from the uncertain. (How often have you heard that the Iraq campaign was designed to help the US oil interests, despite the rather obvious fact that it would hurt them instead? The slogan-shouters never thought through their ideas but merely accepted them on faith.)

  Anybody with a little spare time can research an issue, think it through, and come up with their own judgements on it. With a little more time, they can find a sparring partner to argue the issue with, and sharpen up or even change their judgements. Everybody should--this is what makes a democracy work. But when I hear sloppy ideas, careless reasoning, and flat-out false claims I have to suspect that on this subject at least, the speaker has inherited his opinions and not actually judged the issue.

  What I heard Natalie quoted as saying sounded like sloppy thinking.

• Were they courageous? If they were from the east or west coast entertainment environments, I'd bet not. In those cultures it shows no courage to oppose war, or indeed anything a Republican might advocate; and from the whining about censorship I hear I suspect that the entertainment business types are so insulated from the rest of us that they have no notion that honest people can disagree with them. However, the Chicks are supposed to be more of a country group; and I don't know much about the Nashville political scene. Natalie issued apologies that I don't think would even be thinkable in Hollywood. So, I guess that their attitudes bucked the local trends.

  The comments that got them in hot water were made overseas, at a foreign crowd. The comments sounded like Natalie getting the sense of a crowd; trying to please the crowd; saying what the crowd wanted to hear. They wanted applause, and got it. Not courageous.

It would hardly seem worth the effort to analyse their few remarks, if it weren't that there's still some stir about them. I tentatively conclude from the above list that the Dixie Chicks are not brave and admirable souls, standing up for the truth as they see it. Too bad. On the other hand, they get enough benefit of the doubt that I can't classify them among the usual fatuous Hollywood crowd.

And, although my daughters regard listening to any country music as a sign of a deep character flaw, I like Long Time Gone.

Adventures in Missing the Point

How the Culture-Controlled Church Neutered the Gospel by Brian D. McLaren and Tony Campolo is a kind of tag-team book. First one author writes a chapter, then the other writes a rebuttal or clarification. The subtitle of the book spells out the thesis pretty clearly--the evangelical church in America fell prey to cultural influences and neglected the gospel's message, substituting something related but not quite right. The indictments mostly deal with evangelical churches, because that's where our authors come from. The liberal churches notoriously went their own way long ago. The Catholic church seems to have become an umbrella organization covering a wide spectrum of belief and practice. But the evangelicals pride themselves on keeping close to Scripture.

As one example take the chapter that deals with the church service itself. The authors assert, and I can confirm, that many churches work hard to provide an emotional atmosphere that is supposed to be conducive to piety. They calibrate the songs for emotional effect--but they seem to be afraid of silence. And in the end it is not our emotions we meet to get in touch with, but God.

Other points: The Gospels demand that our beliefs work themselves out in action, in helping our neighbors. That requirement is not entirely fulfilled by preaching the gospel to him--it needs to be tangible. (Charles Williams once said that "In the end, all loves must be physical.") I am not better than the notorious backslider--he is just notorious and I'm not. But how easy it is to feel and act superior!

I'm afraid I agree with Campolo that McLaren defines postmodernism entirely in negative, and therefore rather useless terms, and judge it a pretty worthless foundation for studying theology. And I have no idea why they want to try to revisit the adequately clear and humane orthodox doctrine on homosexuality--unless they too have been snowed by the local culture. Aside from my complaints about those two chapters I have no hesitation in recommending the book.

Consumption

If you assert that some friends have more money than they know what to do with and they deny it, are you entitled to point to their fancy hot tub and announce "J'accuse?"

Given how much I pay for blogger, I can't gripe too much, but things have been pretty tangled up recently. I couldn't update my template with new pointers to the revised index blogs, I couldn't publish a new entry, and republish didn't work from the archive--all efforts going west with some missing script file. Perhaps my heart isn't pure enough--I generally use Mozilla from a Linux box, not IE from Windows; and that has caused problems in the past. (Not this time, though--I tried both).

Weekend

This past weekend we went to a wedding. Great people, and I wish them all the best.

The weather for the trip was great; cool and sunny, with birds and green and few crazy drivers (even in Chicago). I remember my wedding, being overwhelmed with unfamiliar names and faces; and the groom here seemed also dazed. I think it would be a great comfort to offer the couple a "scorecard" with the family trees and who's at the wedding--a "cheat sheet."

The billboards in Indiana were odd--3/5 for casinos and most of the rest for Krazy Kaplan's fireworks. (Would you trust the safety of a "crazy" fireworks shop?)

War: obsolete index

War

Everybody else already put their oars in, so I guess it is my turn.

• We are in a religious war
• Winning a religious war
• Winning a religious war correction
• Comment on comment on MidEast
• France
• Should France be grateful?
• Vichy and D-day question
• American Empire
• War reporting
• A new campaign begins
• Our World-Historical Gamble
• TV reporting of the war
• Terror and Liberalism and Qutb

I find that I cannot edit long-archived posts and have the results show up reliably on blogger. Thus, in order to keep the index posts up-to-date, I have to repost the index posts from time to time. Major nuisance.

Scattered, by Gabor Mate

is subtitled How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It. I have to admit that's an attention-grabber. People have said that its description of early life at home was right on, and left them weeping. Parents of ADD kids say they've felt indicted by the book. I can see why.

Mate's thesis is that ADD is largely due to environment, not heredity. He explains that all the correlations explainable by heredity are also explainable by the parental environment (including some of the twin studies: twins tend not to go to radically different environments from each other). On the assertion that environment is the key, he goes on to slay the dragon.

Some people are exceptionally sensitive. If a very sensitive baby is raised by parents who are extremely stressed, the attunement between parent and child doesn't happen enough, and there is empaired brain development. (The brain is extremely plastic.)

It is not that a disorder develops, but that certain important brain circuits do not develop. Interference with the conditions required for the healthy development of the prefrontal cortex, I believe, accounts for virtually all cases of ADD.

And what does that do for us?

The prefrontal cortex may be seen as that policeman. (traffic cop) One of its major tasks is inhibition. It evaluates the myraid impressions, thoughts, sensations and impulses reaching it from the environment, from the body and from the lower brain centers. It must select what is essential and helpful and inhibit input and impulses that are not useful to the organism in the given situation. Our initial response to a stimulus, whether anxiety producing or pleasurable, is unconscious. It comes not from the cortex but from lower brain centers where emotions originate. The cortex has a split second to decide whether to give permission to the impulse or to cancel it. One way to understand ADD neurologically is as a lack of inhibition, a chronic underactivity of the prefrontal cortex. ... Hence the efficacy of stimulant medications: they arouse the inhibuitory function.

(from the chapter titled Forgetting to Remember the Future).

As a baby grows he learns to remember the future, to shut out certain stimuli in order to focus on something of interest. It seems quite plausible that if you inhibit the development of this skill you will develop something very like ADD.

Mate spends some time describing himself (classic ADD) and his extremely stressful (for his mother) early years (a Jew in Nazi Europe), and various case histories. He asserts that a stressed parent cannot bond ideally with the baby. Children pick up very quickly on emotions, and on indifference or distraction. Children predisposed to extra sensitivity don't develop the comfort/confidence to be able to focus on one thing well.

His solution to ADD issues with young children is to deal with the parents' stresses first, and only then look to medication if still needed. The ADD child needs pro-active love and attention, and unconditional love and accptance. He goes on in detail about suggestions for parents and teachers of ADD. Teachers need to have ways of letting ADD kids exercise and be creative without disrupting the other students: something most schools are not at all well-equipped to handle.

He has suggestions for adults with ADD as well. I think these deserve some detailed description. My interest isn't moot: we have an adult son with ADD.

The ADD adult, like the child, needs more than organizational tools and behavior modification techniques. Although these do have their place, they will not address the fundamental problem, which is not how the person manages this or that duty or self-appointed task but in what relationship he stands vis-a-vis his own self. The issue still remains one of relationship, but this time parent and child are combined in one and the same person.

The steps he lays out for the ADD adult are

• Compassionate curiosity in the search for self-insight. Notice, not judging the behavior and the feelings that drive it, to find out what the underlying feelings actually are.
• Self-acceptance: tolerating guilt and anxiety. Guilt is intrinsically useful, but can be inappropriate. Learn to decide where guilt is real, and what causes it when it isn't.
• You don't punish yourself for where you find yourself.
• Choosing a guide: psychotherapy and counseling. (Can be $$$, but choose your priorities)
• The physical space. Make a conscious choice about how to live; set small, incremental tasks if you must, with strict time limits rather than job completion goals.
• Sleep hygiene. The ADD adult is often a night owl: separation anxiety? But lack of sleep undermines your emotional and mental state. Be proactive about getting sleep.
• Nutrition. Pretty obvious.
• Physical exercise. Pretty obvious.
• Nature. Get outdoors, relax away from the urban--even if it is only lying staring at the grass in a yard.
• Extracurricular duties. Don't overcommit yourself.
• Recreation. This is NOT the same as entertaining diversions. TV is entertaining "but not a process that re-creates."
• Creative expression. "It is unusual for me to meet an ADD adult who does not have some secret longing for artistic expression, and almost as unusual to find one actively doing something about it." Creativity and ADD "originate in the same inborn trait: sensitivity." Maybe you won't be a famous artist, but you'll be your own artist (in whatever art form: music or math).
• Meditation and mindfulness. This includes the obvious: TM-like generic meditation, but also the spiritual exercises of prayer and contemplation. Contemplative solitude, or "any activity, from gardening to martial arts, that promotes mindful concentration will bring benefits."

That many people would feel indicted by the book is no surprise. No parent can honestly claim that they've never been distracted or unstressed and always ready for their child; and the suggestion that this lack could have injured their child is heartbreaking. So pretty much everybody will recognize themselves in the situations, whether or not there is reason to feel guilty. Remember the "refrigerator mother" explanation for autism? This is somewhat kin to it.

Which is not to say that he is wrong. ADD is on the rise at a rate that doesn't seem explainable by superior diagnostic methods. We have a very stressful and child-unfriendly society. I include the TV babysitter among the disasters of our culture. It cuts off real human contact and self-directed play. TV uses shortcuts to attract our attention and focus, and (Mr Rogers being one of the few exceptions) offers frantic changes in topic and scene that can't possibly help develop concentration. How can you develop concentration of your own when the topic changes are not self-directed by determined by the implacable schedule laid down by the director?

I'm not an expert in this field, unless you count trying to raise someone with ADD. But the first rule of medicine is to do no harm, and the suggestions Mate provides can't hurt, and are bound to help make life more pleasant.

I've skimmed a lot. If you have or deal with ADD children, find Scattered and see if you find it useful.

My earlier comments were not unmotivated, but preparation for this.

Let me begin by asserting my credentials in a backwards kind of way: Most of the public claims of racism are malicious lies. When I hear Jesse or Al complaining that some hapless bystander is racist, I assume they are lying and that the rest of their complaint may be safely discarded. The term has been so abused at the hands of the politically correct and the professional victim class that it has essentially lost all meaning except as unrefutable abuse.

This loss of meaning is dangerous, because there are racists: I've met some--both black and white. While pretending that there hasn't been progress in race relations is culpably deliberate blindness, there's still some attitudes that need some work.

One of them you can see in just about any high school. Count the number of white girls with black boyfriends, and compare that to the number of black girls with white boyfriends. In a big enough school you'll find a few of the latter, but a lot of the former.

Why would black boys be in greater demand in the dating whirl than black girls?

• Girls are held to much tighter standards of physical beauty than boys, and the female standard of beauty is strongly northern European. You may remind me that some high-paid models are black, but notice how many are of East African ancestry, with facial features much closer to Caucasian than West or Central African. It isn't racist to have single standard of beauty, but it isn't terribly clever, given how dramatically beatiful women can differ.
• Women are often attracted to the "bad boy" types, and a stereotypically rebellious/dangerous teenage boy stands a fair chance of attracting girls. Here we start getting into racist stereotypes--or sort-of stereotypes. Given the relative rates at which black boys wind up in conflict with the law compared to other groups, it is an easy stereotype to maintain. (In some places the rates are higher than 1 in 3. Not here, AFAIK.)

  Why women are interested in "bad boys" I can't say for certain: maybe it is the same general principle as that behind the "trophy wife," just transposed into an "I'm good enough to tame the very worst." Maybe the "bad boy" is a budding alpha male and she wants a strong protector. Maybe I should ask a couple of women to review this for me...

  At any rate, insofar as the "bad boy" effect applies, it worries me that the black boy can be so easily considered a "bad boy."

• Our society has a history of the myth of the super-sexual black man. This is somewhat related to the "bad boy" effect, but I think it different enought to deserve its own category. This component is very worrisome, because it springs out of the attitude that the other is inferior, as I described in a previous post. Not just unruly, inferior.

So far so no good. However, there is another effect at work, rather more benign. Both men and women can be attracted to "the girl/boy next door" or "the exotic stranger." The advantage of the familiar is having a stable home life for the kids, and the advantage of the stranger is adventure and mixing up the gene pool a bit. The black boy comes from a different enough environment, even if local, that he qualifies as "the exotic stranger." So should the black girl--but she doesn't seem to. Is this because a super-sexual man is "admired" but a super-sexual woman is "a slut?" Or am I missing something obvious--like social pressures in the black community suppressing black-girl/white-boy combinations? I hope I'm missing something obvious here, otherwise we have a longer way to go than we think.

FWIW, evidence that police stop black men more often than other groups is NOT convincing evidence of racism. Irritating as the policy undoubtedly is, it is merely an efficient use of the limited police resources to target a group much more likely to actually be criminals. Whether police resources ought to be used efficiently is perhaps a political question.

Why do we in the West have a myth that primitive cultures/primitive men are highly sexual? I don't know for sure about other cultures, but from a few hints I think this myth is found in the Mid-East and China as well. How many "Polack jokes" refer to the sexual prowess of the Polish? Think of the Southern (and Northern too) post- and ante-bellum fears of super-sexual negroes, and the lynchings that came of the fear.

Let me make clear at the outset that I judge this myth to be false. Primitive generally refers to the technology and education of a people, not to character traits. People in the most primitive societies spend tremendous amounts of time trying to make sure they have enough food for themselves and their families. They may have many children, but most die because the whole family is living on the edge of disaster.

In White Lotus Hershey suggested that slaves (in his book they were West Coast whites captured by Chinese) found sex a bigger part of their lives because there wasn't much else to do when the day's labor was done. Close but no cigar. I think they are perceived as having nothing else to do. The civilized man finds a multitude of obligations that interfere with climbing in bed with his wife: meetings, social gatherings, late nights with financial issues, taking care of children, and so on. He perceives the "primitive" man in terms of irresponsibility, or lack of responsibilities, and assumes the primitive man would do what he himself thinks he would prefer to be doing.

In addition the primitive man or the slave is quite possibly physically stronger than the civilized man; and it seems plausible that he also possesses greater sexual stamina.

Of course the real slave is apt to be dead tired at night and not have his time his own in the morning, and the real primitive hunter will be thoroughly occupied by finding food and fixing his tools. Our civilized man's perception is mistaken, based partly on projection and partly on non-random sampling. (The slaves' festival dances were the exception, and not common. Of course that's the time the master saw what they were doing: non-random sampling.)

But the master, or the amateur anthropologist, whose time and energies are eaten up by the responsibilities arising from the very variety of opportunities of which he is so proud, feels weak and thinks the primitive man is strong.

Concepts

Francis Schaeffer noticed long ago that a generation had grown up that didn't use the word truth to mean the same thing previous generations did, and things have only gotten weirder since then. Sin doesn't seem to be a concept most kids in college have a handle on--even some of the religious ones. But ask them this: "Have you ever done something that, if you knew your friend had done it, would break your friendship?" It'll take them a while to sift through that question, but sooner or later something will come to mind. And when they do they're not apt to admit it to you, but they've recognized sin.

OK, so I have trouble resisting a good pun. Or a bad pun.

This blogging is a tad frustrating. I feel a little delicacy about using the machines at work for this sort of thing, and there's always much to do with kids when I get home, and competition for the machine when the little ones go to bed. So, I compose late at night, and most of my stellar insights during the day go begging. Trust me, they were brilliant. Just like yours.

With so many Brittany-wanna-looklikes, this University is looking more like a Navel Academy.

The Road to Hell

When The Road to Hell (by Michael Maren) came out I spotted it on the library shelf and grabbed it. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," and what intentions could be better than helping to keep people from starving to death? Around the world, but most especially in Africa, Non-Governmental Organizations and UN programs work to provide famine relief.

The problem is that the hungry people are often spread out over a large area. It is hard and expensive to bring the food to them. So: bring the people to the food!

The results are hideous. The same concentration of people that makes food distribution efficient means that sanitation becomes a major problem. The farmers are uprooted from their farms, and even if they could grow a crop (and they can usually grow something, even if it isn't enough to live off during a famine), they can't. So the amount of food available drops even farther. The farmers that remain on their land can't afford to grow more than subsistence crops, because they can't compete with the free food offered at the concentration camps--so they only grow what they need. If farmers have been encouraged to buy fertilizers or pesticides, they will already be in debt, and so will go out of business completely because of the competition from free food.

In the camps there is nothing to do, unless you can get a job with the NGO. So children grow up (sometimes for a few years) with no traditional children's chores and no examples of parents working, and lose part of the work ethic.

In countries with civil wars, the situation is even worse. The concentration of people and supplies makes them targets, unless the NGO workers pay bribes and hire (generally from among the bandits) guards for themselves and the goods. So the aid workers wind up funding the very civil wars they are trying to ameliorate the effects of.

The aid workers ... OK, let me be a bit more accurate. Some of the aid groups, especially religous ones, try to be more sensitive and spend money as much as possible to the benefit of the locals. But in the more secular ones (the UN groups dramatically so) even the field workers tend to treat themselves in the manner to which they became accustomed in Europe or America, and the generator runs air conditioning for the office in the camp while the refugees swelter in plastic tents without even fans. SUV's for the staff rank in priority right up there with trucks for the food, and don't forget the per diem!

All of this might be dismissed as unfortunate side effects, but Maren uncovered UN documents showing that some refugee relief groups didn't care that their work was worse than useless. Their only significant interests were in maintaining their staffs and the funding levels.

Peter Biddlecomb wrote of visiting one aid/training center which was trying to teach the local farmers how to use modern equipment. Their star tractor driver, Peter discovered, was blind in one eye and so afraid to turn left that he would drive miles out of his way doing right turns to get where he needed to go. He was the star driver because of the number of miles he logged.

An aid group wants to be able to measure how well it is giving aid and number of tons of food imported (not necessarily distributed--see "bribes for bandits" above) or miles driven or number of children in a camp are easy things to measure. The number of people who didn't starve is harder to count, as is the number of farmers who didn't go out of business. The things that actually help aren't always easy to measure.

For example, one proposal for nomadic tribes is a "cattle bank," in which a fellow who is flush with cows or goats in good times can make a "deposit" in exchange for a promise of return in kind or the equivalent in money on demand. When drought strikes cattle can die, and the nomad has nothing to sell for food; but if he has made "deposits" he still has a cushion to support his family.

But how do you measure how well such a thing works to explain it to the donors in the US? By the number of nomads who don't lose everything in the drought 11 years from now? Easier to round up people into camps after the fact, and take juicy photos of starving children to make the donors feel guilty.

Recent years unveiled the sex for food scandals of UN-run camps in Sierra Leone; and the utterly politicized "refugee camps" of Palestine are utter abombinations. NGO's can do good work, even noble work--but the structural problems mean most of the effort is wasted or even damaging. You're safer giving to a religious group, but even there you should consider whether what they do makes sense. Will the people be more self-sufficient after the aid comes through or less?

On the road this morning I saw a fairly new car with a Van Halen 1984 bumper sticker. I hope the owner kept it as a souvenir of his work with the group's tour, because otherwise it seems rather sad. Was the most dramatic thing in this person's life an entertainment 20 years ago?

Lest you think that all I read

are histories and books about current events, let me introduce you to Terry Pratchett's Night Watch. For those not familiar with him, he is a science fiction/fantasy writer who has most recently been writing novels based in his Discworld: a magical flat world carried on the back of four elephants riding on the back of a giant turtle swimming through space. You should already get the idea that whimsy and satire are his stock in trade. Pratchett also rejoices in a pleasant writing style and a love of humorous asides and literate in-jokes.

There are many different regions and groups of characters on Discworld: Ankh-Morpork (a large and very grimy city, home to the wizards acadamy and the Night Watch), Ramtop (up in the mountains, rural with witches), Uberwald (kind of medieval, with werewolves and vampires), anywhere (Death, a Tooth Fairy, etc), and so on.

Vimes is the commander of the Night Watch, which is Ankh-Morpork's police force. (The Day Watch is a bit more political.) He stars in number of the books as the man who tries to arrange for some kind of order and justice in a city with an official Thieve's Guild and less than a dozen watchmen with no tradition of public service. As time (and books) go by he acquires more loyal watchmen, including dwarves, werewolves, and the incognito/unwilling heir to the throne.

In this book Pratchett throws Vines back in time to a critical time of revolution when the young Vines had just joined the force--and a worthless crew of corrupt doughnut-snarfers it was. Unfortunately, it looks like history has been changed, and young Vines will "go to to the dark side" unless the older Vines can figure out what to do.

Sure, it sounds unbelievably complicated, but this is all happening on the back of a tortoise, remember?

Vines indulges in too much irritable introspection for my taste, but I enjoyed the book anyhow.

I prefer the books with the Watch or the Invisible University (and Rhincewind the runaway wizard) to those with the witches, but I can tell Terry prefers the witches--they get the good lines. One series of books deals with Death, a skeleton with the job you probably expect, and his attempts to understand human life. I think the best of those I've read is A Thief of Time. I get annoyed with his dislike for religion (he uses Andre Norton's idea that gods get power from their worshipper's belief {doesn't sound a bit like Exodus, does it?}); and he's as careless with metaphysics as he is careful with logic (believe it or not) and physics.

From Pyramids this nice bit of physics:

Light moves slowly, lazily on the Disc. It's in no hurry to get anywhere. Why bother? At lightspeed, everywhere is the same time.

Or this observation about Egyptian-style embalmers

Possibly thirty-five years in the funeral business, which had given him a steady hand, a philosophic manner and a keen interest in vegetarianism, had also granted him powers of hearing beyond the ordinary.

Bernard Lewis again

I'm back to Bernard Lewis again with his The Crisis of Islam. (Please forgive me if I don't stick in links to Amazon--I get most of my books out of the library. Three cheers for the South Central Library System of Wisconsin!) This is Lewis' first book since September 11 (What Went Wrong went to the printers before that date, though it was published after).

The book is an expansion of an article for The New Yorker in which he brings to bear his understanding of Middle Eastern history to explain why bin Ladin's views of the world are so popular. Earlier works have been more generic: this one is focussed on how the attitudes in the Moslem Middle East, and to some extent elsewhere, developed the form they have.

He reviews the nature and purpose of jihad, the shock of not just stopped in advance but losing ground, the shock of losing control of all but the most sacred lands in Islam to colonial powers, the shock of losing the Caliphate (felt even in Indonesia according to another source), and the failure of almost every attempt to create their own governments. The Arab response has essentially been to assume that

• We have been betrayed and tricked by the West. The solution is to oppose any Western solutions and ideas, which merely seduce us from the true path. All Westerners are liars, especially the newspapers. The great Satan (seducer/trickster) is the United States.
• We have not been holy enough (following Qtub and Wahabbi), and so God is punishing us. The solution is to be holier in following God's law, with no exceptions.
• We have been betrayed and tricked by false Moslem leaders. The solution is to consider them infidels, especially if they work with the West.
• The Jews are behind all our troubles.

The self-deception and hunger for conspiracy theories of the "secular" Arab population make it hard to communicate with them, and the Qtub/Wahabbist influenced religious Arabs don't want to hear us at all. Terrorism is an old tool in the Middle East, but the confluence of Khomeini's interpretations of Shiism and the exigencies of the Iran-Iraq war (in which Iran used volunteers to run through mine fields in advance of their soldiers), together with the demand for more effective terrorist attacks against Israel, formed the cult the suicide bomber. This is novel in Islam, but attracts very little condemnation.

As usual, Bernard Lewis is knowledgeable and clear, and gets my thumbs-up. If there is one flaw in his analysis, I think it lies in his treatment of the centrality of the Arab/Israeli conflict in Moslem thought. I am not convinced that the reasons are purely political and historical--this doesn't seem to give it enough force in non-Arab regions. I think we should look to Bat Ye'or for another part of the answer: It is because Israel is Jewish that it is such an affront. Israel is not a Western colony, and not a followup to the Crusades, but a revolt by the oldest group of those given a Divine revelation against the "Seal of the Prophets" (TM). It is felt as a betrayal, since the Jews were nominally given respect and protection and "their place" in the world (see Bat Ye'or for how this worked out in practice).

Blood Diamonds

by Greg Campbell, tells the story of how diamonds in Sierra Leone fueled one of the most bizarre civil wars in history. Increasingly corrupt governments failed to address basic needs and basic responsibilities (such as control of the borders), and a flourishing smuggling trade grew up. The diamond cartel (founded by the infamous Cecil Rhoades) had and has a strong interest in buying up all the rough diamonds it can, in order to keep the price from collapsing, so these all-too-easily transported rocks always had ready buyers.

The RUF was formed as a thin veneer of revolutionary rhetoric over an organization designed to smuggle the diamonds that they mined using slave labor in the conquered territory. The proceeds bought more guns, helicopter, cars, and drugs. Even AlQaida took an interest in the trade, buying large numbers of rough stones (which can't be traced through bank transaction records).

The RUF is best known for their intimidation campaigns, in which they attacked civilians and chopped off hands of the people they left alive. They had no affinity for any local ethnic group, no ideology, no plans for government, and no long term schemes for keeping the wealth they accumulated--most of which seems to have gone for guns and drugs. They were vicious thugs looking only at short term money and power.

The groups that opposed them tended to become like them. The Kamajors were tribes from near the border with Liberia that armed to fight the RUF, but they soon found that they needed money, thus they needed diamonds; and they got into the smuggling and intimidation business. The governments troops were not controllable, and often banded together with rebel groups. The ECOMOG (West African economic community military forces--mostly Nigerian) peace keepers were venal and careless, and came to represent "Every Car Or Movable Object Gone." The UN peace keeping forces (in the most expensive peace keeping effort in UN history) were ill-coordinated, ill-equipped, given ill-considered mandates and generally ineffective.

There were only two bright stars in this ugly mess: Executive Outcomes (a mercenary company!), and the British government which sent in paratroopers to straighten out the mess the UN had gotten into. In an absolutely staggering oversight, Campbell completely omits the role of the British troops in salvaging the peace. If you read his book you'll think the UN troops and workers eventually saved the day--and it wasn't so. The UN was in deep trouble until the Brits arrived and put the fear of real armies into the combatants, and started training real police instead of the freelance shakedown artists.

Campbell names names and sources, and I learned a few things (I'd been keeping an eye on events here for some years, so it wasn't exactly new to me). Yes, find and read this book. And see if you want to buy a diamond again, even if only 3% of the share comes from bloody regions. Who says "Diamonds are Forever?" (Answer: The folks trying to keep prices artificially high by monopolizing the supply. DeBeers cannot have 3 executives in the US at the same time or they become liable to arrest and prosecution under US anti-monopoly laws.)

We've had some arguments

with teenage daughters about radio stations and TV shows. When is it reasonable to pick out the good stuff and just turn off the bad, as opposed to chucking the whole thing and leaving the TV off completely?

I think this ties in with the book of Judges. If you will forgive an illustrative short story....

---

Three Israelite brothers, Moesh, Tulax, and Jesh moved to a small valley to farm. They worshipped God, held the feasts, and gave tithes to the Levites, and tried to do what God wanted. In this valley lived a few pagan families who worshipped several different gods: one of fire, one of harvests, another of rain, and so on.

Moesh thought that some of the pagan women were very pretty, but he remembered that he was not supposed to marry a pagan woman, so he married another Israelite from several valleys away, and they started a family. Sometimes he traded food with some of the pagan families, and sometimes they got together for dinner. He noticed that his neighbor Sulla would always splash a little of his drink out onto the floor before he drank any. Moesh asked Sulla why, and Sulla said that this was what they always did--it was one of the customs of the country. When Moesh ate at Sulla's home, everybody splashed a little out of their drink, from the grandfather to the baby (who splashed a lot!). The only one who didn't was Moesh, and he felt a little uncomfortable.

One evening he sloshed a little bit himself when everyone else did, though he tried to make it look like an accident. The next week he did it again, and pretty soon he was splashing a little out just like everyone else.

When their families ate together, Moesh's son BarMoesh noticed that his daddy was splashed a bit of milk out on the floor with the Sulla family, and asked why. Moesh told his son "That's nothing, its just the way they do things here." So, BarMoesh cheerfully splashed his milk too, and not just with the Sulla family, but sometimes when he was alone as well. He asked his friend BenSulla one day why: he'd never thought to ask before. BenSulla said "Oh, that's just so it will rain."

When BarMoesh grew up he married and had children of his own, and at every meal and every time they drank water outside they splashed a little on the ground first--just to make sure the rain would come. One day his son Mobat asked his friend Sulbat about splashing, since Sulbat seemed to know more than he did. Sulbat told him that the splashing was an offering to Ba-el, the rain god; and that every year you were supposed to sacrifice a sheep on an altar in the hills as well. Since Mobat knew the splashing was all right, and helped the rain come, because his daddy said so, he supposed that the sacrifice in the hills was OK too. And so, when Mobat grew up, he took a sacrifice to God at the tabernacle and another one to Bael in the hills. But the altar to Bael was closer, and it even had a statue of Bael he could look at, so he liked it better.

Tulax (remember, Moesh's brother), when he moved to the valley, also saw the pretty women, and decided that one of them was too pretty, and too good a cook to pass up, so he married Murpa. Murpa was a very nice woman, and she loved their children, but she insisted on keeping some of her family's customs, such as going up in the hills once a year to an altar that Tulax needn't bother going to and always putting the chicken head in the fire. Tulax wanted peace and quiet in the house, so he let Murpa do what she wanted.

Murpa told their children BarTulax and Melpa stories about people, and about the land, and about the spirits in the stream, and about the gods. Tulax told them about God and how Moses had led the Israelites out of Egypt, which always impressed the children, but Murpa told them most of what they heard, so when they grew up they thought there were many gods. So they went to the tabernacle with their father, but they more often went to the altar in the hills with their mother, or offered a chicken to the fire god themselves.

When BarTulax and Melpa grew up and had children of their own, they told their children about all the gods and spirits they knew, but the real God was only one, and He seemed a bit far away, so their children didn't pay much attention to Him.

Jesh saw the pagan women, but he knew he wasn't supposed to marry one, so he eventually found a wife several valleys away. He made friends with his neighbors, and traded food with them, and sometimes ate with Sulla. Sulla would splash a little out of his cup before drinking, and Jesh asked him why. Sulla said it was just the custom of the country. Jesh asked, "Why is it a custom?" Sulla said, "Well, it is to make sure it rains."

Jesh asked "Why does that help make it rain?" Sulla said, "It is a little offering to Ba-el to remind him that we need rain."

Jesh said, "I can't do that; I can only worship God." Sulla didn't say anything.

But after that, Jesh felt more and more uncomfortable eating with Sulla and his family, and so he tried to only meet with them at times when they wouldn't be eating. Sulla thought Jesh was being standoffish and unfriendly, but Jesh wouldn't eat with the Sullas, nor would he let his family eat with them anymore.

When Jesh's children asked Jesh why the Sulla family splashed milk before drinking it, Jesh explained that the Sulla family was worshiping an idol, and that he wanted his family only to worship God. When Jesh's children grew up and had children of their own, they told them the same thing, and told them the stories of Moses bringing the Israelites out of Egypt.

So, three Israelites came to the valley. One was a compromiser, one was disobedient, and one was faithful. The grandchildren of the compromiser became idolaters. The children of the disobedient man became idolaters, and their children as well. Only the grandchildren of the faithful man were still faithful. It was so easy for the compromising man to compromise, and so easy for the disobedient man to give in to his pagan wife, and so easy for the children to worship nearby idols; that it is no wonder that so many of them became idol worshippers.

Deuteronomy 23:24-25

says "If you enter your neighbor's vineyard, you may eat all the grapes you want, but do not put any in your basket. If you enter your neighbor's grainfield, you may pick kernels with your hands, but you must not put a sickle to his standing grain."

Deuteronomy 24:19-22 says "When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the alien, the fatherless and the widow, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches a second time. Leave what remains for the alien, the fatherless and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the vines again. Leave what remains for the alien, the fatherless and the widow. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this."

When I lived in Aurora, the apartment complex was at the edge of the city, next to a farmer's field. If the inhabitants of our complex had tried this kind of "snack harvest" we'd have taken out about a full row's worth of grain: two if the folks from the complex a few blocks down had joined in. Maybe the farmer could stand the loss, but it wouldn't be trivial.

So set aside the literal application of this. Never mind about trying to find modern equivalents (the grocer survives on a thin enough profit margin as it is). What is the principle to follow, or the attitude we're to cultivate?

I think both passages are really aimed at the owner. The first asserts a limited claim of one neighbor on the produce of another. One principle is that the owner is not entitled to demand the entire produce of his land. The second passage asserts the same principle, though in a slightly different context. The first passage says that neighbors have a share, and the second that the helpless have a share. The owner of the land is not the absolute owner.

We are accustomed to seeing this principle in a different context: property taxes. The owner is not the absolute owner because the state has a permanent lien on his land for taxes.

In this case in Deuteronomy the limit on ownership is not so easily calculated or predicted. Neighbors may come around frequently, or there may be more poor around than usual (Ruth 2:15-16). You can think of this limit as creating a certain fuzziness about what is mine and what my neighbor has a claim on. My neighbor is not entitled to steal: going into my vineyard with a basket goes beyond neighborly commonality into greed and theft. But I am not entitled to demand every kernel of corn from my field.

Interestingly enough, if I plant to the edges of my land and harvest every grain, I leave no room and no food for the overlooked birds and insects that pollinate and help keep my land fertile and versatile. If I plant every year and don't let the land lie fallow now and then I'll have to drag in extra fertilizers. Once again, if I assert absolute ownership I run into troubles--not with God's law this time (at least not explicitly) but with ecological law.

Can this sort of fuzziness ever be made part of statutory or common law? I can recall instances when this would have been a useful principle. Recall George Lucas and the "Phantom Edit" revisions. However amused Lucas may have been by the revisions, he had no choice but to assert his property rights over the material, on pain of losing it all. There was no room for fuzziness--and there ought to have been some. Changing the law would have all sorts of unintended consequences, and I'm not advocating such changes; merely showing that justice and art would have been better served with less claim to absolute ownership in this case.

At any rate, the intent of the Deuteronomy passages seems clear enough: I am not to consider myself as absolute owner, and am to consider my neighbor and the helpless as having liens upon my increase/income. This falls short of the New Testament view, but it is hard enough to obey the Deuteronomic rule.

I've found the secret for growing luxuriant grass in my yard: plant a garden.

"Of beauty I am not a star.
There are others more handsome by far.
My face: I don't mind it
Because I'm behind it;
Its the ones out in front that I jar."

I bought a hat recently, without my wife's input. For some reason she winces when I it on. I don't know why--it keeps the sun off quite nicely.

I don't watch much TV at all.

The last time I turned ours on at home was for the shuttle crash, and even then I only watched for 10 minutes every hour or so. The incremental benefit of another minute's worth of "news" was very small--nobody was going to know anything new for another hour or so, so why not do something useful and check back in an hour?

No, I didn't even turn on the war news. I knew what to expect: reporters with exotic backgrounds, stock footage, the most dramatic footage they could tease out of the can, and breathless magnification of each burst of gunfire into hopeless failure or overwhelming victory. I want to know what's going on overall. Embedded reporters are nice for human interest, but don't tell me much about what's really going on--even with their particular unit. This is partly because reporters as a class seem to be trained for dramatic writing rather than careful observation, and also because really critical details are probably kept secret.

Last week I took a couple of daughters down to visit grandparents. They have cable, and had the TV on a lot. So, I finally got to see the Emerald City of Oz. And the same footage of artillary on at least 4 different networks. And lots of sameness. And far less information in an hour than I could pick up in 15 minutes on the web. And commercials (and commercials and commercials and ...).

The BBC is bitterly anti-US and anti-UK in this campaign (the headline for British forces destroying 14 probing Iraqi tanks had the word victory in quotes!), and relying on it as your sole source of information is stupid. However, relying on American TV is likewise stupid. You'll see endless footage of the rescue of Jessi and statues falling. You'll miss a lot of the problems, and get no context whatever. Whatever your source, you have to weight the reporting by the bias of the agency that reports it--and sometimes discount what's said. When a US general said we had full control of the Bagdad airport, I discounted that to mean "enough troops to mop up and gain full control," and I was right. When ArabNews writes of thousands of Iraqi children murdered, I discount that to a handful of accidental deaths, and I suspect that I'm again right. (I complain about US reporters, but I find I have to completely disregard most Arabic news sources. One is stupid but honest, and the other knowledgeable and lies.)

Plainly there's a lot in this campaign that's been hidden behind the scenes. Some people agreed to stay out of the fight, others helped in one way or another--and they won't want these things known. I probably won't live long enough to hear the whole story. Knowing that I won't know enough, can you understand why I don't care very much about the TV coverage? I know how hard it is and how long it can be to get the full story and get it right. That's my job.

On the lighter side of things, I recommend Umberto Eco's How to Travel With a Salmon. It is a collection of mostly short essays on society and life taken from a column he wrote. He writes of the epic adventure of trying to get a replacement driver's licence in Italy, of how to survive riding an American train, of coffee, and how to buy gadgets. In the essay on gadgets, just describing the contents of one of those in-flight 'magazines' is enough--you don't even need a punchline.

I had fun--and learned a bit about Italy. I don't know if Eco does his own translation or someone else does it for him, but whoever it is has good word sense.