We wish to fulfill the dreams of those Americans, both the living and the dead, who struggled unremittingly and courageously over the past two centuries to expand those freedoms to more Americans. Often we have fallen short, but the marvel and the miracle of America is that we keep marching forward for justice.
The Sunlit Uplands, whom my esteemed blogging colleague Waldo has so cleverly nick-named Savonrola, will no doubt have his fancy tickled by this:
The Group will be in town for the Charleston International Choir Festival. What'll really get Savonrola moist is the fact that they'll be performing in a Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina Church - a diocese who's previous and current Bishop have share no love loss for the national Episcopal Church and Conference and who have been making overtures towards the GAFCON and Southern Cone folks. Sphere: Related ContentEngland's famed Canterbury Cathedral Choir, one of the oldest choruses in the world, will visit the U.S. for the first time in 10 years. Its nine-city tour was organized primarily to raise money for critical and costly restoration work. The cathedral structure has deteriorated dramatically due to years of benign neglect, and it requires repairs to its walls, towers, roof, organ and historic stained-glass windows, say organizers.
The goal is to raise the equivalent of $90 million over 10 years, according to Capers Cross, organist and choirmaster at St. Philip's Episcopal Church. Cross is responsible for securing the choir's visit to Charleston.
"If American churches don't step up to the plate, I don't know where they're going to get the money," he said.
The Canterbury Cathedral Choir is led by David Flood and consists of 12 professional adult male singers and 30 boy choristers ages 8-13 who attend St. Edmund's School in Canterbury. Young choir members receive a scholarship toward their education and boarding at the Choir House on cathedral grounds. The choir sings at services six days a week and at special events, performing music from the 13th century to the present.
Premium seats for the 3 p.m. April 19 concert cost $75, which includes an invitation to a reception following the event. Other tickets are $25 and $10 (restricted view). Tickets can be purchased at www.dioceseofsc.org or at the St. Luke & St. Paul office. Call 722-7345.
Thanks to About Today for the heads up, and as always the appropriate music criticism:k-os, 4-3-2-1
I’m so excited that k-os has a new album coming out. The way he blends hip-hop, soul, jazz, funk, rock, and damn near anything else he finds appealing is just jaw-dropping. Take this for example. This is his hip-hop respone to Feist’s ‘1-2-3-4.’ Who else would think to do that? Then you pair it with a video with some nice effects, and you have one of my favorite hip-hop tracks of this year. k-os’s new album Yes! hits
3/31.
I discovered them with their album Atlantis, and fell in love with this track, Sunday Morning:
It always reminds me of that wonderful weekend in Atlanta that I spent with my better half and that Sunday in little five points at Criminal Records buying this cd. I love you baby!
The writers at the State Newspaper unknowingly provide an image that is at once post modern and fully southern gothic,
It [Canal Side Park] features a fountain made from granite blocks taken from Cell Block One, South Carolina’s former Death Row.Waldo you'll have to excuse my co-opting your blog title, for this post but it seemed to appropriate. Sphere: Related Content
Those who dissent should consider whether it is not really they who are being divisive. [excellent!] I fail to see why I should portrayed as divisive when I step up in defence of the Church and align myself with the Pope. Something is not right there." [Right!]
Movements of all kinds (including religious orders) are a constant source of renewal for the Church. But there are risks and problems associated with any movement, and it is the Church’s responsibility - and by “Church” I mean every one of us - to view movements with open eyes, to see the good, be wary of the bad and call the evil to task.
Secrecy, hero-worship, deification of individuals, reflexive dismissal of critics as wrong-headed or even of the devil, an untoward interest in money and appearance, manipulation of members, demeaning attitudes toward non-members, deceptive means…
trouble.
The question comes naturally: was all of this really inevitable, once the pope had decided to lift the excommunication of the Lefebvrist bishops? Or was the disaster produced by the errors and omissions of the men who are supposed to implement the pope's decisions? The facts point to the second hypothesis.
The decree revoking the excommunication bears the signature of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the congregation for bishops. Another cardinal, Darío Castrillón Hoyos, is the president of the pontifical commission "Ecclesia Dei," which, ever since its creation in 1988, has dealt with the followers of Lefebvre. Both of these cardinals have said that they were taken by surprise, after the fact, by the interview with Bishop Williamson, and that they were never aware that he was a Holocaust denier. But wasn't it the primary responsibility of these two cardinals to carry out an
in-depth examination of Williamson's personal profile, and of the three other bishops? The fact that they did not do so seems inexcusable. Such an examination wasn't even difficult. Williamson has never concealed his distaste for Judaism. He has publicly defended the authenticity of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." In 1989, in Canada, he risked being taken to court for praising the books written by Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel. After September 11, 2001, he supported conspiracy theories to explain the collapse of the Twin Towers. Just a click on Google would have turned up all of this background material.Another serious lapse concerned the pontifical council for the promotion of Christian unity. Reversing the schism with the Lefebvrists is logically part of its competencies, which also include relations between the Church and Judaism. But the cardinal who heads the council, Walter Kasper, says that he was kept out of the deliberations: this is all the more surprising in that the issuing of the decree lifting the excommunication took place during the annual week of prayer for Christian unity, and a few days before International Holocaust Remembrance Day. That's not all.
The media release of the decision also seems to have been entirely negligent. The Vatican press office limited itself, on Saturday, January 24, to distributing the text of the decree, in spite of the fact that the news had already leaked out a few days earlier, and a fiery controversy was already growing around the statements denying the Holocaust made by Williamson.
There is an illuminating comparison to be made. The previous day, on January 23, the same press office had organized, with great pomp, the launching of the Vatican channel on YouTube. And a few days later, on January 29, it announced, again with a great deployment of persons and resources, an international conference on Galileo Galilei, scheduled for the end of May. In each case, the objective was to transmit the authentic meaning of the initiative to the media. But nothing of the sort was done for the decree concerning the Lefebvrist bishops. And yet all of the elements necessary for an appropriate announcement were there. Even the timing was right. The week of prayer for Christian unity was underway; Holocaust remembrance day was just
around the corner; in Italy just a few days earlier, on January 17, there had been the day for dialogue between Catholics and Jews. Cardinal Kasper, the leading curia official in both areas, would have been the ideal person to present the decree, situate it within the persistent situation of schism, explain the purpose of lifting the excommunication, and summarize the points on which the Lefebvrists were being asked to reconsider their positions, from full acceptance of Vatican Council II to the overcoming of their anti-Judaism. As for Williamson, it would not have been difficult to clearly delineate his situation: if he were to remain firm on his aberrant ideas denying the Holocaust, he would exclude himself from the pope's gesture of "mercy."
And yet, if nothing of this was done, it was not the fault of the Vatican press office and its director, Jesuit Fr. Federico Lombardi, but of the offices of the curia from which they receive their orders.These offices of the curia converge in the secretariat of state.
Bertone [the Vatican Secretary of State] does most of his work not inside the walls of the Vatican, but on the outside, in an endless round of conferences, celebrations, inaugurations. His visits abroad are as frequents and as packed with meetings and speeches as those of a John Paul II in vigorous health: he was in Mexico from January 15-19, and is now visiting Spain. As a result, all of the work that the offices of the secretariat of state dedicate to his external activities leaves that much less work available for the pope. ...
Bertone's personal devotion to Benedict XVI is beyond all doubt. Not so that of the other curia officials, who continue to have free rein. It is possible that some of them deliberately oppose this pontificate. It is certain that most of them simply do not understand it, do not measure up to it.
Gianna Amore, Miss August 1989 from Playboy - The Complete Centerfolds, picture from Here at PlayboyThings go downhill in the 1980s as breast implants became popular: the new boobs are globe-like and tactile only in the way that bowling balls are tactile. Some of them cast a glare, like cartoon balloons. Food metaphors no longer apply.
an excellent book review on Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds.
The Nickelodeon Theater is playing The Times of Harvey Milk, for one night only - tomorrow night January 14 at 6:00. It's a part of the Nick's community film forum and will be followed by a panel discussion. For tickets click here.
Sphere: Related ContentTa-Nehisi Coates has a great piece up today on the validity of the word conversate. He had an opportunity to speak with an editor-at-large with the Oxford English Dictionary. And while yes, 'conversate' is a word, it's all about context. People say, "We don't need conversate, we have converse." Well then, we don't need hip because we have cool. We don't need illness because we have malady. It's all context which can be different for various Anglophone regions.
More interesting is the non-conversate portion of the conversation.
Let me give you an example, in terms of looking at things historically. At the beginning of this conversation you pronounced the word "ask" as "aks." This is something that people often object to. People say it's the wrong pronunciation, and it's stupid. But if you look at the history of the English language, you can't tell if the correct pronunciation is "aks" or "ask." The "aks" pronunciation goes back 1000 years. It's in Beowulf. It's in Chaucer.
What happened was both were in use. But at some point, the dialect in which the "ask" pronunciation was used became dominant. But both continued and have been in use since then. When you look at America, the "aks" pronunciation is widespread in Southern American English. African-Americans used this because they were in the South--it's not especially African-American, but its Southern.
This got me thinking about another Southern idiom that is a phonetic word though one rarely written, and when it is - there's a variety of spellings. But in all cases the meaning and the pronunciation is the same though no one can tell me the origin of the word.
Is the suspense killing you yet? Ok, I'm talking about the word sirsee. It's also spelled Sursee, Cercie, Surcie, Circi, Surcy, Searcy, etc etc...
So what is it -- it's a triffle, a small gift, something given for no reason but not anything extravagant, a simple gift out of affection or thanks generally. The Urban dictionary now has it spelled under sursy. The Dictionary of American Regional English (Dare) has it under it's various forms giving it's earliest inclusion to the 1968 edition of DARE. The DARE acknowledges that the etymology is unknown.
Perhaps the closest to figuring it out is the Word Detective who revisited sirsee and received a reply from the DARE folks who took a stab at it: "The etymology is uncertain, but one plausible source is the Scots verb "sussie," meaning "to take trouble, to care, to bother oneself." This probably came to Scotland from the French "souci," meaning "care, trouble."
This makes sense and who knows it could be a hybrid word between the two. Colonial South Carolina was a melting pot of language and cultures. In the low country and along the coast you had high concentrations of French Huguenot. In the Pee Dee, back country you had a lot of Scots Irish, in the Midlands German. And then over all this was English. So it makes sense that the language would meld and however you spell it, would appear.
This may be to complex of an origin, another possibility could be the easiest. It's a treat, a trifle. And if you were giving your boss something you would say "Sir, see" as you handed the item over. Lots of poor white laborers and african slaves - all with bosses and masters to answer to; all with obligations to give up to their benevolent overlords. But that is too simplistic...
Any philologists out there want to take a crack?
I had what was for me a memorable conversation with an art student when she was my patient. She was in her second year of art school, and told me that one of the things she enjoyed most about it was art history. I asked what they taught in art history.
'The first year,' she said, 'we did African art. But now in the second year we're doing western art.'
I asked what particular aspect of western art they were doing.
'Roy Liechtenstein.'As satire would be impossible, so commentary would be superfluous
Mr. Dalrymple/Daniels was railing against the presentation of the creations of Mr. Jeff Koons in the Versailles Palace. Mr. Koons is a sculptor - I use the term loosely. His main form is giant stainless steel balloon dogs of varying colours and hanging lobsters. Talk about Arts and Crafts! But Dalrymple goes beyond the follies of Mr. Koon and laments,The successful modern artist’s subject is himself, not in any genuinely self-examining way that would tell us something about the human condition, but as an ego to distinguish himself from other egos, as distinctly and noisily as he can. Like Oscar Wilde at the New York customs, he has nothing to declare but his genius: which, if he is lucky, will lead to fame and fortune. Of all the artistic disciplines nowadays, self-advertisement is by far the most important.
The Epiphany of the Lord
In England we celebrate this feast today.
A quick thought: compare the pro-Christ Magi who follow the star, with the anti-Christ Herod who uses scripture to discover the whereabouts of the infant.
The Magi come to worship, the anti-Christ Herod comes to destroy.
Do we build up faith through our devotion or come to destroy it by giving scandal?
Are we pro-Christ, or anti-Christ?
The revised lawsuit criticizes the Army's 2008 manual on suicide prevention, quoting it as promoting "religiosity" as a necessary part of prevention and describing "connectivity to the divine" as "fundamental."
The lawsuit cites comments from a chaplain and a second soldier in Christian
missionary publications about attempts to convert Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the two soldiers' desire to distribute Bibles.The lawsuit also notes that in 2007, the Air Force sponsored "Team Faith,"
which performs motocross stunt shows to "lead extreme sports athletes to Christ."
Earlier today News reports stated that premarital sex is on the rise in Iran, the explanation of which is easy according to the Iranian Government's sociologist,However, Hojatoleslam Ghasem Ebrahimipour, a sociologist, told Shabestan news agency that the trend was due to the availability of premarital sex, and feminism among educated women. "When a woman is educated and has an income, she does not want to accept masculine domination through marriage," he said.
Make me groan...
Damien Thompson the snark behind the spook at Holy Smoke, points out that one of the "mainstream" Muslim Advocacy Groups in the UK, who are the media go to people when it comes to Britains 'moderate' Muslims, are still after the identities (lives) of eight Sufi Muslims who assisted a think tank in their research of the amount of hate literature being distributed in Britain's Mosques. From their post "The Hunt for 8 Sufi Zio-Con Frauds": MPAC now wants to find out exactly who these Sufis are, who are working for the Zio-Con think tank. There were 8 Sufis who worked for them, and all apparently have gone abroad to hide while the storm is raging. They worked, according to Policy Exchange for over a year on the project, so some Muslim out there must have come into contact with them. Who are they, what are their backgrounds … MPACUK will dig deeper and expose every last detail of the Sufis who tried to destroy their own community. If you know who they are – please write in and we will expose these men and women for all the Muslim community to see. Write in now and let us do what the incompetent idiots in the Mosque should be doing, protecting our community.
And while if you replaced the language for Muslims with language about the SC Blogosphere and SC 'Conservatism' and squinted really hard you might, just might, have read hints of Fogle, the fact is - his Fatwa, in longevity of interest and scale of vehemenence pales in comparison to these 'moderate' folks. Unlike this, Fogle's Fatwa ended as quickly and less spectacularly than sex with someone who has ED and no blue pill.
As if to underscore just how radical these 'moderates' are - just look at their home page. Everything that happens to Muslims are the 'Zionists' fault. (And if you feel like donating to the Muslim version of Human Events then click here)
And while I'm a liberal and by far not an ultra zionist or exceptionalist and believe that the two state solution is the only solution to the perpetual crisis of middle east politics, this is just too much and too disgusting. Are their are recriminations? Sure on both sides and we must admit that no one's hands are clean in this matter, but seriously?
The likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda are a boil on the face of Islam, and one that has festered for so long that political leadership in so called nations are neutered and can't offer any sort of option to the radicalization of Muslims. Some states capitalize and utilize this, Iran and Saudi Arabia, while other despotic regimes are wary of democratization (as are the Western Powers that prop them up) because of the ideologies that have spread like a plague of Biblical proportion amongst the people, states like Egypt, Pakistan, amongst others. At some point in time the population will slough off the radicals and it can only come either at the tip of the sword or the tip of the pen with the preference being the latter.
Saying such though will get you burnt in effigy and Fatwa's placed upon your life. The Pope insulted the Islamic world when the "gotcha liberal media," to quote OLW, took his words out of much needed context - it caused an up roar.
Spike has an interesting book review for an upcoming publication that posits that Liberalism has created their own multicultrialist monster in an Islam that has become a caricature of itself as a response to European multiculturalism - it's own Dutch Cartoon series. I can acknowledge as much. Liberalism's understanding of multiculturalism - especially in Europe - though never as entrenched in America - shifted, to overemphasize the ghetto as an appropriate way to foster multiculturalism. As the review states, Liberals' "abandonment of the politics of universalism in favour of ethnic particularism, the shift from the politics of ideology to the politics of identity" helps create within various groups a fractured since of identity that is often times in contention with each other. "Multiculturalism didn't create radical Islam, but it [does] create a space for it..." Perhaps, though, the most saddening assesment of Liberalism that the review offers is this,Twenty years ago, most liberals defended Rushdie’s right to publish The Satanic Verses despite the offence it caused many Muslims. Today, many argue that whatever may appear to be right in principle, in practice one must appease religious and cultural sensibilities because such sensibilities are so deeply felt. The avoidance of ‘cultural pain’ is seen as more important than what is regarded as an abstract right to freedom of expression.
This as the reviewer states has created a culture of greivences, which is why Muslims - and other groups (including >>gasp<< conservatives!) And while the liberal "outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: [in that] instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment," (Betrand Russell) acknowledging ambiguity and the tenuousness of doctrines in our journey towards Truth doesn't mean one has to demure and simply roll over at the first sign of reproach.
This is how this voice of "moderate" Islam in Britain, the folks at MPAC, which probably exists in the physical world in the Muslim ghettos of London and South England, get to make such pronouncements and be taken seriously and as apparently they are by the media types like Channel 4 amongst others. This is how and why when Israel does defend itself generally the world is less than squeamish to support their efforts despite weighted justification, this is why Western Europe and especially Britain has a problem with matriculation (yeah they've probably forgotten that word), this is how in America the majorities of the right have learned (from the Muslim world and the old [now dead?] identity politics of the last 40 years) to take advantage of this built in liberal defect and frame pro gay rights movements as Christophobia, and frame abortion politics in context of America's original sin - slavery, both of which are arguements as absurd as Islamic conspiracy theorists finding ways of blaming everything on a Jew sitting in a room anywhere on the planet.
And while Fogle may not be pissed about this post, who knows how much I'll piss off the guy in Charlotte, Samir ibn Zafar Khan - our very own local Al Qaeda sympathiser and promoter, maybe I'll get a Fatwa like Rushdie, and those 8 Sufis.
Yesterday I read an article published by Reuters which was picked up by the Huffington Post on the Pope's Christmas remarks to the Roman Curia.
Immediately I e-mailed my friend Gashwin saying that I seriously doubt what the Pope had to say could be appropriately boiled down to the byline they were shilling, and the snipits they were including without any context.
And sure enough I was right.
But what's the point of pushing a story, titled Pope likens"saving"gays to saving the Rain Forest. The only point is to push a narrative, as opposed to the facts (See The Historian's Craft). The consequence of which is to rile people up, get reactions which then cause counter reactions - is it productive? Hardly, but it pushes a preferred narrative, and it sells.
Like Dominos falling, the blogosphere was alight with reactions based soley off the reporting of Reuters, who as I stated had a sexy title and some soundbites. And while I can appreciate the righteous anger of folks like my friend Bilgrimage, who speak from an honest place and have prophetic things to say about the struggle for Gay Rights, I suppose my generation can't fully comprehend and appreciate the old culture warrior approach of our parents.
It doesn't mean we don't agree with them it's just not our style. I tend to think that my generation, while it can be reactionary, is a little more circumspect especially in which battles we choose to fight.
Reuters and others honed in on the word Gender: "He turned his attention to those people who call themselves in Italian “gender” or “transgender” — a broad term that includes anyone who doesn’t identify entirely with their assigned sex and can include homosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals and others."
What the Reuters writer is guilty of is creating a narrative where one simply does. not. exist.
So what did Benedict say? From Whispers in the Loggia,
Since faith in the Creator is an essential part of the Christian Credo, the Church cannot and should not confine itself to passing on the message of salvation alone. It has a responsibility for the created order and ought to make this responsibility prevail, even in public. And in so doing, it ought to safeguard not only the earth, water, and air as gifts of creation, belonging to everyone. It ought also to protect man against the destruction of himself. What is necessary is a kind of ecology of man, understood in the correct sense. When the Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman and asks that this order of creation be respected, it is not the result of an outdated metaphysic. It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God. That which is often expressed and understood by the term “gender”, results finally in the self-emancipation of man from creation and from the Creator. Man wishes to act alone and to dispose ever and exclusively of that alone which concerns him. But in this way he is living contrary to the truth, he is living contrary to the Spirit Creator. The tropical forests are deserving, yes, of our protection, but man merits no less than the creature, in which there is written a message which does not mean a contradiction of our liberty, but its condition. The great Scholastic theologians have characterised matrimony, the life-long bond between man and woman, as a sacrament of creation, instituted by the Creator himself and which Christ – without modifying the message of creation – has incorporated into the history of his covenant with mankind. This forms part of the message that the Church must recover the witness in favour of the Spirit Creator present in nature in its entirety and in a particular way in the nature of man, created in the image of God. Beginning from this perspective, it would be beneficial to read again the Encyclical Humanae Vitae: the intention of Pope Paul VI was to defend love against sexuality as a consumer entity, the future as opposed to the exclusive pretext of the present, and the nature of man against its manipulation.
Wow that's a mouthful, but it's also called context, and yeah I emphasized what I picked out from context clues what the actual theses of this passage are.
"It is a question here of faith in the Creator and of listening to the language of creation, the devaluation of which leads to the self-destruction of man and therefore to the destruction of the same work of God"
The destruction of the same work of God here is speaking to the fact that from the foundation of the world he knew us and formed us individually, uniquely and yet in his image. To compromise the temple of our body in such a way as to fundamentally change or destroy the image of God is the problem.
"Man wishes to act alone and to dispose ever and exclusively of that alone which concerns him. But in this way he is living contrary to the truth, he is living contrary to the Spirit Creator"
We were given charge as stewards of creation and one another, as such we've embraced a culture that assumes absolute control over not only creation, but ourselves in totality unconsciously (or consciously) individually and corporately cuts us off from God on whom we depend, it is in this way that we hear but do not listen to the Word of God dwelling within us. This is speaking more to the notion of transgenderism as something recognized, not by the fully formed adult mind of the person who experiences it, but by folks in charge of minor persons who make decisions on behalf of those persons which could be taking advantage of them. It also speaks to postmodern concepts of gender theory which has as it object gender as a completly mutable expression completely independent of physicality and not limited to true transgendered persons. It reduces the complimentarity of the sexes and the natural roles (though not necessarily "traditional" roles for my feminist friends) to whimsy and conscious choice.
"This [marriage] forms part of the message that the Church must recover the witness in favour of the Spirit Creator present in nature in its entirety and in a particular way in the nature of man, created in the image of God"
The nature of sacramental and ontological marriage is one of equality, stewardardship, companionship and complimentarity between the sexes. It is the church's job to protect and uphold the institution between man and woman help them reclaim the ontological understanding of marriage as a reflection of the communion of the Godhead and to protect individuals from potential marital relationships that aren't oriented towards fulfilling those four qualities and embolden them to work towards it. As such as much as the LGBT community may find this offensive and exclusionary it probably serves more as a teaching moment for the heterosexual community against things like failing to exhibit or work towards those qualities in marriage and all those activities and personal qualities that lead to marital dissolution.
All three of the previous are best expressed in the "main idea" of the talk that the Church is to,
"defend love against sexuality as a consumer entity, the future as opposed to the exclusive pretext of the present, and the nature of man against its manipulation"
Again as much as the gay community thinks that the church is exclusively rejecting them at this time of year, she's sending out a message to the broader human family that we are not products on the shelf, we are not as humans a commodity to be exchanged to be torn down and built up in an image that is pleasing to the dominant capitalist, consumerist culture but are to be true to ourselves and our God and live relationally in that manner.
... it sometimes seems to the general reader that "dispassionate historian" is an oxymoron.
The new Carolingian order [of the later 8th century]...was religiously intolerant, intellectually impoverished, socially calcified, and economically primitive. Measured by these same vectors of religion, culture, class, and prosperity, 'Abd al-Rahman's Muslim Iberia was at least four centuries more advanced than Western Christendom in 800 CE. An ironic intelligence from another planet might have observed that if Carolingian Europeans believed that Charles the Hammer's victory at Poitiers made their world possible, then it was a fair question to ask whether or not defeat might have been preferable.
What can one say about this sort of thing? Is there any truth in it? Well, yes, there is some. It is often the case, in history's great churnings, that one nation strides ahead of another, only to fall back into decadence or barbarism a century or few later. And as Michael Hart notes in his recent book Understanding Human History: "Although at times the Moslem world was more advanced culturally than the Byzantines, it was never much more advanced." Notice Lewis's comparison, though: Western Christendom, Carolingean Europeans. His is a much narrower scope than a thorough comparison of Islam and Christendom would require.Counterfactual speculations of the kind that Lewis is trading in are in any case airy and insubstantial because we lack the knowledge required to evaluate them.
On the other hand, for Derbyshire - Kennedy does a decent job of presenting a historical understanding of Islam in his work. In Kennedy's work facts are presented and the narrative arises from those facts. And so Derbyshire says, "His aim in The Great Arab Conquests is strictly narrative: to tell a curious nonspecialist what the Arabs did between the death of Mohammed in A.D. 632 and the fall of the Umayyads 118 years later. There are no counterfactual speculations here." In fact he asserts that Kennedy as a writer of History, "is at pains all through his book to emphasize the scarcity and unreliability of sources for the period. This was, after all, the Dark Ages. Kennedy tells us what is known. When he has to choose between conflicting accounts, or fill a void with speculation, he does so with utmost caution and many warnings..."
The beauty and danger with Jenkins' writing is that he challenges assumptions, but generally does it with a healthy balance of fact and narrative. This doesn't mean that Mr. Jenkins is innocent of pomo tendencies in writing - he's just more of a Gibbon, than a Spencer or Lewis. He's not out to completely change and scrap the narrative framework that we operate in as much as expand it to be more inclusive without having to make extreme mental leaps. He is a passionate dispassionate historian.
All of this to say that I can't wait to read it.
[Full disclosure: I had the honour and pleasure of meeting Dr. Jenkins at a series of Lectures he gave at USC on Europe, Islam and Christianity. They can be read here and here.]
But unlike Frost and Nixon, Dick Cheney is showing that he can surpass Richard Nixon these days with all the "confessions" and logical fallicies and obfuscation to justify his actions and assertions that at no time is the President accountable to anyone, and he does it blithely and nonchalantly and with such hubris - it's like watching a crumudgeoned serial killer's dance during an interrogation with cops, the same sociopathic pyschosexual gratification when the killer believes and tells you that you will never catch them.
The cops can posture and sputter and question, and for the serial killer they can admit gleefully yes, all the while not believing that they can be touched - and scariest of all is that sometimes they're right.
[On Monday of this past week, Cheney admitted to Jake Tapper of ABC that he was instrumental and authorized torture]
God help us all that this shadow of a man should not live much longer but hurry to fade and to become the distant nightmare that he is destined and willing to become - a ghost story used to scare children at halloween.
The latest from Fox News Sunday is so telling, it's like looking at an alternate universe, except sadly it's not, from this week's creature feature:
WALLACE: If you could conceptualize it for me, sir, what do you think are the powers of the president relative to Congress and relative to the courts during war?
CHENEY: Well, I think in wartime, when you consider his responsibilities as commander in chief, clearly that means command of the armed forces.
It also, when you get into use of forces in wartime, means collecting intelligence. And therefore, I think you're fully justified in setting up a terror surveillance program to be able to intercept the communications of people who are communicating with terrorists outside the United States.
I think you can have a robust interrogation program with respect to high-value detainees. Now, those are all steps we took that I believe the president was fully authorized in taking and provided invaluable intelligence which has been the key to our ability to defeat Al Qaida over these last seven years.
WALLACE: This is at the core of the controversies that I want to get to with you in a moment. If the president during war decides to do something to protect the country, is it legal?
CHENEY: General proposition, I'd say yes. You need to be more specific than that. I mean — but clearly, when you take the oath of office on January 20th of 2001, as we did, you take the oath to support and defend and protect the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
There's no question about what your responsibilities are in that regard. And again, I think that there are bound to be debates and arguments from time to time, and wrestling back and forth, about what kind of authority is appropriate in any specific circumstance.
But I think that what we've done has been totally consistent with what the Constitution provides for.
The president of the United States now for 50 years is followed at all times, 24 hours a day, by a military aide carrying a football that contains the nuclear codes that he would use and be authorized to use in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States.
He could launch a kind of devastating attack the world's never seen. He doesn't have to check with anybody. He doesn't have to call the Congress. He doesn't have to check with the courts. He has that authority because of the nature of the world we live in.
WALLACE: So what...
CHENEY: It's unfortunate, but I think we're perfectly appropriate to take the steps we have.
And go back and look at how eager the country was to have us work in the aftermath of 9/11 to make certain that that never happened again. Now we've had a lot of time pass over it, so we've had, I think, people more complacent, perhaps, than was true some time ago.
We've also had a lot of our critics who want to score political points made what I think are outrageous charges. But in my mind...
WALLACE: So what rights do the Congress — what constitutional rights do the Congress and the courts have to limit the power of the president when it comes to these matters of national security?
CHENEY: Well, the Congress has — clearly has the ability to write statutes and has certain constitutional authorities granted in the Constitution.
But I would argue that they do not have the right by statute to alter a presidential constitutional power. In other words, you can't override his constitutional authorities and responsibilities.
WALLACE: So if they want to say he can't surveille or he can't detain...
CHENEY: Well, they have, for example, said — passed the War Powers Act. The War Powers Act is still in force out there today. That requires him to grant certain notifications to the Congress and give them the authority to supersede those by vote, if they want to, when it comes to committing troops.
No president has ever signed off on the proposition that the War Powers Act is constitutional. I would argue that it is, in fact, a violation of the Constitution, that it's an infringement on the president's authority as the commander in chief.
It's never been resolved, but I think it's a very good example of a way in which Congress has tried to limit presidents' authority and, frankly, can't.
And it goes from there. January 20, 2009 can't get here quickly enough.
Sphere: Related Content
Sphere: Related Content
Officers developed information during an on-going investigation of drug dealing in the Gaston community that a large amount of marijuana would be transported to Pine Ridge, Metts said. Officers said they saw the suspects riding in a pickup truck and conducted a traffic stop on the vehicle.
Officers spotted two large plastic trash bags in the bed of the pickup, Metts said. Marijuana was seen from the open end of the bags.
In the bags were 16 plastic zip-lock bags that each held about one pound of marijuana, Metts said. Officers also said they found three bales of marijuana in the cab of the pickup. Each bale weighed about 13 pounds, he said. A shotgun and $956 in cash were also found in the truck, Metts said.
A Columbia woman is behind bars after pleading guilty to her involvement in trafficking six tons of marijuana.
According to the Richland County Solicitor's Office, Angela Fuller was arrested in July of 2007 and admitted to purchasing cocaine from an undercover Richland County deputy.
She also confessed to being a part of a drug ring alleged to have trafficked 40 kilos of cocaine and 12,000 pounds of marijuana in the two years prior to her arrest.
[Have] I-- have most of us--succumbed to the tedious, excessively revelatory ways of modern American society, which assumes that every ounce of everyone's life constitutes a narrative-in-waiting, a parable, a morality tale--which assumes, in fact, that nothing is ever banal.
Last week, we said that historical blame for the 'War on Christmas' should be and is ultimately laid at the foot of American Protestantism and more directly certain aspects society that developed from the heritage of our forefathers - mainly the same industriousness and exceptionalism that we also hold so dear as 'values' in our modern society.
It seems like every year department stores and marketing firms solicit Christmas sales earlier and earlier putting trees out first not just on black Friday - but now even before thanksgiving you see stores slashing prices and marketeers playing seasonal songs well before the snow falls in snowy locales.
And as America has prospered and her population boom she's come to embrace the pluralism she proclaimed in her founding documents even at the expense and definitely the chagrin of Christian (Protestant) majority. To reap the benefits and leave no market segment, no focus group out - department stores, greeting card companies, marketeers began slowly to shift the focus from Christmas, which in the protestant tradition is only one day, to the whole gambit of holidays which fall under their bloated schedule aimed at making up for slagging sales by inducing desire and guilt but not just on the Christian majority - ah the joys of capitalism. The question then becomes, why does the majority allow for this? Why do most Christians stand by and allow themselves to be hoodwinked into the "holiday season" and decorate their trees earlier and earlier as well as shop and shop. The answer?
Well who can blame them? Have you lived the stress filled lives that most of us do? We work harder and get paid less and less, we have a multiplicity of experiences a majority of them generating a sense of brokenness. Who can blame us for buying into the notion of a Holiday Season? It's a chance to escape or at least balm the murk and mire and believe, even if briefly that there is a little bit of joy in the world, a little bit of happiness.
And because of this and our embrace of the pluralism that we have a vague notion of we'll say happy holidays and send holiday cards as we have friends who may celebrate Hanukkah and when the lunar calendar calls for it, yes even our Muslim friends who celebrate Ramadan. And then two what about the Hispanic family down the street that observes Dia de la Guadalupe? What about the Greeks and Russians who celebrate the festival of St. Nicholas? And then there are the secular holidays - like Thanksgiving and Pearl Harbor day. Where did it go wrong?
It went wrong when the busyness that we were trying to avoid, infected our time of escape - the joy of buying gifts and sending cards became the same competition that we exhibit and live through during the rest of the year, and it intensified. The focus is changed and the comercializers driven to make the bottom line have no problem exploiting it. But it's not just that zealous competition and commercialization - though that's problematic, it's also the pluralism. Or at least that's what certain Christian Fundamentalist want us to believe.
It's one thing to embrace the pluralism ethos that our country was founded upon and to be friends with persons of other (if any faith) or belong to mixed households on the micro level which Christianists don't pay attention to - it's the macro that get's their goat, and nothing says macro like the government. These conservative elites dislike the trickle up acceptance of pluralism and try and stir the masses into anger over it.
The public religion which for years has been an innocuous Christmas Tree with presents are no longer called Christmas Trees but 'holiday trees.' And in certain corners where nativity scenes were used (especially in small towns around the country where the population has boomed and shifted) these communities have been forced to shift the emphasis from their closed community beliefs to be inclusive of new residents of differing views. Perhaps this is even more problematic than the 'holiday tree' - this has become the crux of concern because now the nativity scenes are being taken down from government property or even worse they're being accompanied by symbols and representations from other faith traditions who also celebrate a holiday around the 25 of December (or in some cases statements of disbelief from the local atheist).
Perhaps people will take a moment and relax, or better yet - as the Gospel lesson this week implored - prepare a way for the Lord, prepare for his coming at Christmas and realize that it doesn't matter if town hall calls it a holiday tree - and perhaps it's better off city hall doesn't have a nativity scene up - so long as the church does and you do in your house. But even more important than that flash point issue, perhaps people will take the time to breathe and relax and not go so commercially crazy during the holiday season.
After all -- it is advent - not yet Christmas, and at least according to my tradition there's no need to get hopped up and anxious over one day when you have at least 12 days to celebrate.
And do you know who's leading the charge on the more problematic aspects of the 'holiday season'? Well not the commentariat class or the conservative elites -- they're focused to much on who's got a nativity scene up and where - it's the young engaged protestants. Yes how many generations after their forefathers sent that first shot against 'popery' it's protestants who now recognize the hallmark of popery, Advent, as an appropriate interval between the festivities of Thanksgiving and Christmas - who are attempting to open up and share the splendor of quiet yearning and preparation (most of my Catholic co-religionsits take Advent for granted if they don't get swept up with the AEP in the commercial hype of the season).
One of the best campaigns for recognizing Advent is adventconspiracy.org -- check out this effective bit of counter-marketing on their part and take it to heart.
