Wogs At It

More on the Miss World gangs in Nigeria.

Hundreds of Muslim youths have gone on the rampage in Nigeria's capital, Abuja, following Friday prayers.

Gee, wonder what the sermon was about?

The BBC's Haruna Bahago in Abuja says people armed with sticks, daggers and knives set fire to vehicles and attacked anyone they suspected of being Christian...

He was himself surrounded by a group of angry Muslim radicals, who suspected he was Christian and had to shout "Allahu Akbar" (God is great) until they let him go.

If there were gangs of Christian youth in American cities looking to butcher anyone Muslim... and forcing them to say "Jesus is Lord"...would Reuters, the NY Times, the BBC, the Guardian, the Arab press--be at pains to remind the world that America is primarily a peaceful nation?

And be on guard for anyone leaping to condemn Americans in general? "Yes there are extremist elements in America, but Muslims must not overlook their role in creating this situation. Condemning the entire U.S. without realizing the range of opinion there, would be gross and not constructive, and likely only to inflame the Americans further."

No, the howls would, of course, be deafening. "Finally: an America we can really hate." But in this case it's the wogs...you can't really blame them. They do like their mosques.

Muslims: Force of nature. Treat it like a tornado.
Americans: Primary free and moral agent in the world, excruciatingly responsible for just about anything that goes wrong.

Either we whipped them up somehow to begin with, or we should be fixing their poverty, or staying out altogether, or...

How warped do things have to become, before the Western press stops seeing its primary responsibilty as dampening down Western alarm and indignation towards Islamofascism? Why must we accept that the Palestinian issue is the #1 human rights problem on earth right now, as Al Jazeera would have it?

The Western press is complicit with the Arab press in putting it as the #1 issue... and it's tearing the West apart: Europe vs. America, red vs. blue, literary elites vs. unliterary masses.

Gandhi and Lenses

Excellent review of the film Gandhi, by way of Cella's Review:

A comparison is in order. At the famous Amritsar massacre of 1919, shot in elaborate and loving detail in the present movie and treated by post-independence Indian historians as if it were Auschwitz, Ghurka troops under the command of a British officer, General Dyer, fired into an unarmed crowd of Indians defying a ban and demonstrating for Indian independence. The crowd contained women and children; 379 persons died; it was all quite horrible. Dyer was court-martialed and cashiered, but the incident lay heavily on British consciences for the next three decades, producing a severe inhibiting effect. Never again would the British empire commit another Amritsar, anywhere.

As soon as the oppressive British were gone, however, the Indians--gentle, tolerant people that they are gave themselves over to an orgy of bloodletting. Trained troops did not pick off targets at a distance with Enfield rifles. Blood-crazed Hindus, or Muslims, ran through the streets with knives, beheading babies, stabbing women, old people. Interestingly, our movie shows none of this on camera (the oldest way of stacking the deck in Hollywood). All we see is the aged Gandhi, grieving, and of course fasting, at these terrible reports of riots. And, naturally, the film doesn't whisper a clue as to the total number of dead, which might spoil the mood somehow. The fact is that we will never know how many Indians were murdered by other Indians during the country's Independence Massacres, but almost all serious studies place the figure over a million, and some, such as Payne's sources, go to 4 million. So, for those who like round numbers, the British killed some 400 seditious colonials at Amritsar and the name Amritsar lives in infamy, while Indians may have killed some *4 million* of their own countrymen for no other reason than that they were of a different religious faith and people think their great leader would make an inspirational subject for a movie. Ahimsa, as can be seen, then, had an absolutely tremendous moral effect when used against Britain, but not only would it not have worked against Nazi Germany (the most obvious reproach, and of course quite true), but, the crowning irony, it had virtually no effect whatever when Gandhi tried to bring it into play against violent Indians.

The blinders go on Western Intellectuals circa 1920, and they've functioned like funhouse distorting lenses ever since.

• 400 indians killed by british (worth wringing our hands over for a century)
• 4 million indians killed (not worth a single visual in movie)

Distortion factor: 10,000 to 1.

• about 1,500 Palestinians killed in Intifada (biggest moral issue in history, justifying destruction of America and Israel)
• 2 million killed in Sudan (ho hum. what?)

Distortion factor: over 1,000 to 1.

Western intellectuals have got their needles permanently stuck in this mea culpa range (100 to 10,000 distortion factor)

As with the warping of space and time predicted in general relativity, when the distortion becomes sufficiently extreme you get odd singularities, like drag queens siding with mullahs.

Light bends as well, with objects like Stalin, Mao, and Ho Chi Minh appearing as Washington, Madison, and Jefferson.

"Caution: sins in mirror may be smaller than they appear."

If the "mea" culpas weren't actually "youra" culpas, these extravagant distortion factors would make these people positively saintly. But, alas we are not quite dealing with saints who self-flagellate and wear hair shirts, and see their own sins with an immense and bitter clarity. No....put "Blowing in the Wind" on the stereo and they are tragically vulnerable to opportunites to disrobe in Marin and spell out "PEACE". And there they are, naked on the field, a most perfect "youra culpa" aimed at Bush and the troglodytes who voted for him: enlightened, concerned, and sacrificing a yoga class to prevent the toppling of a dictator.

Born Anti-Gay?

This from Andrew Sullivan's Letters Page:

Are people "born gay"? I would agree with the point of view that, yes, some people are born with a tendency to be attracted to their own sex, to varying degrees. But given that, it seems (to me) obvious that people who have a deep homosexual revulsion were also "born" that way (not to totally disregard the lifelong reinforcement of such revulsion). From a purely Darwinian standpoint, homosexual revulsion would certainly be a highly favorable trait.

It's something that I feel, that I felt when I was a kid - before I heard my first "faggot" joke, hell, before I knew what a "faggot" was.

All I'm saying is that, as the gay community fights for its rights (deservedly so), it should realize that it is fighting feelings as instinctual, and as deeply felt as their own. They should realize that they're asking for a lot - they're asking people to overcome the way they were born. Sound familiar?

In any case, when a gay man finds them attractive, it says to them: "You're doing it wrong." What oh what is it that he's doing that signalled the fag? What could he have done that was so queer-looking? Couple the perceived repudiation of his heterosexyness with the natural discomfort that accompanies unwanted attention/attaction from anyone, and you have fightin' words.

I've had a couple of gay guys look my way, and I had no problem with it. I felt basically the same way that I have about certain females who had a one-sided interest in me. In other words, Thanks but No Thanks. But that's just me. I'm well educated, introspective, and slow to anger.

Very interesting point. We're so used to marinating in a bath of ad hominem arguments that point in habitual directions, that it's very arresting to see a logical and opposite ad hominem point made like this. The "Spirit of the Age" is being challenged here, confronted with its own flawed methods. I think a lot more letters like this need to happen, in a lot more areas.

When it comes to ad hominem arguments, what's good for the gay goose should be good for the gander.

Remembering Everything

By way of GeekPress. Project MyLifeBits:

It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them searchable. "Imagine being able to run a Google-like search on your life," says Gordon Bell, one of the developers...

Of course the system takes up a huge amount of memory. But Bell's group calculates that within five years, a 1000-gigabyte hard drive will cost less than $300 - and that is enough to store four hours of video every day for a year...

A really accurate, searchable store of events could also help us preserve our experiences more vividly for posterity. Doug de Groot, who works on computer-generated beings called avatars and other types of digital "life" at Leiden University in the Netherlands, says Bell's system could eventually form the basis for "meet the ancestor" style educational tools, where people will quiz their ancestors on what happened in their lifetimes.

Forget ancestors...wouldn't lovers get lost in each other's pasts?

Those San Francisco Nights

Had a great evening tonight at the symphony. Wynton Marsalis and his Lincoln Center jazz group performing, backed up by the SF symphony and full chorus.

Normally I subscribe to the "jazz conspiracy" theory--that no one really enjoys jazz and it's all a plot to fool the rest of us. Da da da da dee dee dee dee doo doo doo. It all sounds the same, being the accusation.

But, this was truly exciting. I guess what you have to realize is: it's all about the performer. What's he going to get up and do? A matador, the chef at Benihana, a Chinese calligrapher. As opposed to classically sitting back and listening to the music of the spheres. It's gesture, it's Zorro making his Z.

And the ovation. Is it meaningful, that the two biggest ovations I've ever witnessed at Symphony Hall here are 1) Sweeney Todd a couple years ago (when Sondheim himself came out); and 2) tonight? Bigger than Beethoven's 9th, than Mahler's 8th (with 400 performers on stage), than Carmina Burana. Classical fans just aren't that demonstrative I suppose. There was even whistling tonight, and I was wondering whether shouting my usual "bravo" sounded a bit effete.

Not sure if this has opened my ears to jazz or not...but I did think back to the 1997 performance of Mahler's 3rd, up in the balcony with free tickets from my friend David, that opened my ears to Mahler. We went out to Virgin Records at 11 o'clock that night because I had to get a disk of it. Funny a couple friends had tried to interest me in Mahler, even giving me CDs, but it never caught grabbed me til I heard it live. All this was great timing for the 1998 Mahler Festival, when David and I positively OD'ed on Mahler (seeing the 8th alone two or three times that weekend).

Will I be mainlining Marsalis? Further experiment will determine how necessary to my appreciation of jazz are a great seat, a top performer, and a martini.

The box I was sitting in was typically San Franciscan. An old financial advisor who's had season tickets for 30 years and has seen all the conductors come and go...and feels it's kept getting better. A dowdy woman in her 70's with blue top and white stockings and slip spilling out her skirt she'd forgotten to zip. A 50-something woman, kind of aging Erin Brokovich, her first time at the symphony, wondering whether we should tell the 70 year old about her slip. "She probably wants it that way. If her breast spills out I'll speak to her." A drag queen (God I hope I'm right) in her 50's, black beret, demurely dressed, who brought a book to read. Delightfully knowledgeable about Marsalis and all the various past virtuoso performances there. We reminisced about Yo Yo Ma and she had a good story about his string breaking during a performance, the audience freezing for two minutes, and him coming back and continuing right where he left off, the emotional moment having been kept. And my host, a guy I work with, chewing Nicorettes as he quits smoking, his motorcycle helmet under the seat. And not there but in spirit--I happened to be sitting in the regular seat of Eda--the 83 year old Jewish woman who painted the Chinese style painting above my dining room table. She's still among the living, it just wasn't her night.

Black Prayers?

Interesting detail in this "newspaper office trashed in Nigeria" story:

At least one Muslim group has embarked on a campaign of “black prayers” wishing plagues of illness and bad luck upon organisers and participants.

Just who do these people think they are praying to?

That Hideous Strength

"That Hideous Strength" by C.S. Lewis is a very good book. It may not be good as a book, but it's very good, and it's a book.

But This Urban Legend is True

The invaluable Snopes has a piece on two customers who got bad service at a hotel and created a powerpoint about it for the edification of management.

The Exorcist: Factually Based?

William Peter Blatty based his book "The Exorcist" (1971) on an actual 1949 case of a 13 year old boy in Maryland. And the Discovery Channel recently re-aired a scary 1997 documentary account of the boy's case, called "In the Grip of Evil".

The filmed interview with the elderly Father Halloran was fairly impressive to me. At the age of 26 he'd been present as an assistant at the boy's exorcism.

But a Mark Opsasnick, reporting in Strange Magazine #20 (1998), has done an ambitious investigation of the case, tracking down the actual boy (whose identity had been protected), identifying the actual address where the possession took place (and no it wasn't in Mount Rainier, MD as popularly thought), and interviewing people who knew the family, including the boy's best friend at the time (who says they had practiced precision-spitting at targets ten feet away together).

All in all, Opsasnick casts a lot of doubt on the whether this was a genuine case of demonic possession. Here is his phone interview with Father Halloran.

Did the boy speak in any languages other than English?”
“Just Latin.”

“Did it appear he understood the Latin he was speaking?”
“I think he mimicked us.”

“Was there any change in the boy’s voice?”
“Not really.”

“When the boy struck you in the nose, did he exhibit extraordinary strength?”
“I don’t know, I never even thought very much about it. It certainly wasn’t [former world boxing champion Mike] Tyson hitting me in the nose or something like that (laughs).”

I asked Halloran to elaborate and describe to me some of the things he witnessed that he could not explain. He paused and slowly said, “I saw a bottle slide from a dresser across the room—there was no one near it. The bed moving....” I interrupted and asked if the bed was stationary or on rollers. He said, “It was on rollers like any bed, but I was leaning on it when it moved one time.”

I inquired about the boy’s spitting, urinating and vomiting, all activities that he was said to have indulged in with great vigor during various points of the exorcism. Halloran responded, “Well, spitting was frequent...it wasn’t significant...there wasn’t any vomiting or urinating that I recall.”

Opsasnick doesn't make this point but I think it's valid: Halloran seems an honest guy, refraining from embellishment and unwilling to lie to advance an agenda. It would be the easiest thing in the world for him, after 50 years, to exaggerate details. He doesn't seem to be that type of guy, yet having been on the scene, he believed and continues to believe the boy was possessed.

I don't dismiss the idea of demonic possession out of hand. The books "People of the Lie" and "Hostage to the Devil" impressed me, though the latter in particular seemed a bit pat in its choice of five cases that so neatly illustrated five heresies its author seemed perturbed about: heresies like New Age thinking, and Theilard de Chardin's naturalistic view of Christ. It also worried me how "Hostage" so uncritically accepted (in its fifth case) the notion that a parapsychology professor was actually practicing telekinesis or astral projection. (That seemed so very 70's to me, and I should know--I grew up in that crazy era. Bent spoon, anyone? Or a Chariot of the Gods?)

I tend to think demonic possession exists, but that it's rare. I discussed it with an Anglican pastor recently and he told me that some time ago he knew the exorcist of his diocese in England. Who said that in ten years in the position he'd seen hundreds of cases, and only one genuine. The case involved speaking in languages not known to the person, an entirely different voice, etc., and that the problem went away post-exorcism. He also said it was incredibly draining and that he hoped never to do it again.

Unclothed Empresses in Marin

Oh this is rich. You should click to see the pic.

MAKING THEIR BODIES FIGURES OF SPEECH – West Marin women are serious enough about PEACE to spell it out. Wearing nothing but afternoon rain, 50 determined women lay down on Love Field near the Green Bridge Tuesday afternoon to literally embody PEACE and "show solidarity with the people of Iraq," said the organizers. "Women from all ages and walks of life took off their clothes, not because they are exhibitionists but because they felt it was imperative to do so," the organizers added. "They wanted to unveil the truth about the horrors of war, to commune in their nudity with the vulnerability of Iraqi innocents, and to shock a seemingly indifferent Bush Administration into paying attention." The coordinators, who came up with the idea only a day earlier, said that the coming together of this group on short notice was a testament to the seriousness with which the women view the threat of war with Iraq. "Remembering that tens of thousands of civilians have already died in Iraq as a result of US bombing and sanctions, these women are not convinced by Bush Administration fear mongering that one more person should die," organizers said. They hope the president and news media take notice.

My favorite bit is the "who came up with the idea only a day earlier". One can only imagine the logistical challenges they had to surmount. "Hey, who's got a camera?"

I would pay...PAY...for transcripts of the phone tree that went into this. "Hello Joyce...Katya and I were talking and we had a great idea about Iraq..."

Do they take requests? Maybe on two days notice they can spell out: "Please don't give a nuke to Al Qaeda, Saddam". They can even spell it Qaida if they're short on women who feel the imperative.

There ain't nothing like a dame, especially for the kind of naked spelling that shocks people into action.

Wonder how John Walker Lindh might feel about this going on in his old stomping ground? He applauds the intention but respectfully suggests some veils might be in order?

Letter to a Clergyman, or Render Unto Bush?

Dear Father ________,

I heard you give a homily at ________ about five weeks ago on the "render unto Caesar" text, and I came away puzzled by a few points, and my puzzlement hasn't gone away. Rather I've continued to scratch my head over it, from time to time, so I thought I would take cyber pen in hand and ask you directly.

Your homily was apparently about Iraq, and since you began by talking about how "smiling American politicians" are good at obscuring the truth, we were left in little doubt on which side you have taken in this contentious debate.

Your position itself is not particularly puzzling. It is, I daresay, shared by a majority of San Franciscans, and perhaps by an even greater majority of the congregation. When at the start of your homily you voiced some trepidation on how we might react, I suppose you were worried some might feel such a political subject shouldn't be brought up at all from the pulpit. But assuming you were going to voice an opinion on the matter, surely you realized you were choosing the safer and more popular opinion.

My puzzlement, then, is not about the side you chose in the debate, but rather this: Your use of the "render unto Caesar" text as the basis for your homily. This seems profoundly illogical to me, requiring contortions I can't myself imagine.

It's as if the text said "don't eat pork", and you took it as a jumping off point on the virtues of bacon.

The chief priests and scribes were trying to trap Jesus into saying taxes should be withheld from an unjust government. Jesus denies this.

But you commended precisely this notion of withholding taxes in your homily--that they might be withheld from a sufficiently unjust government, sufficiently given to the killing of innocents. Our own government, presumably, since ours are the politicians with those sinister smiles.

This boxes me in, logically, to a couple positions, when I try to imagine what you were thinking when speaking on that text:

• 1. America today is worse than Rome, and Jesus might have come round to a "tax protestor" point of view, if only he'd been confronted with a government vile enough.

  Rome...with its mass crucifixions, its executions of all inhabitants of certain towns by way of example, its slavery, its worship of pagan gods, its direct invasion of everyone around it, its occupation of the Holy Land and its subjugation of the Chosen People...

  Jesus would consider Rome less objectionable than America today?

  "No, Rome is not quite bad enough, my scribes and Pharisees... Pay your taxes. For true evil, we must wait 2000 years.... Innocents that you are, you can't imagine the moral horrors awaiting. There shall be a Beast, a "Burning Bush"... and though he be not an emperor he shall steal an election in which he had slightly less than 50% of the vote...and cause such suffering of innocents and liberals as humanity has never seen...and the time shall come when all righteous men shall withhold their taxes. But that time has not come. For now, you must pay..."

  Can you seriously believe that?

• 2. You were vaguely moved by certain words in the text (government, taxes) to a meditation on what you see as a profound moral issue, Iraq, and you simply weren't too engaged with the specifics. Seeing the phrase "don't eat pork", you saw the word "pork" and it reminded you how bacon goes well with eggs, and your heart was moved and you were off. In other words a certain fuzziness and free association would seem to be necessary in order to give that homily, on that text.

  I could see giving an anti-Iraq-War/tax protest homily based on some general text about righteousness, but giving it on the "render unto Caesar" text, of all things, would seem to require as much chutzpah as giving a "pro litigation" sermon on the text about Christians not suing other Christians, or a "pro divorce" homily on the "one flesh" text, or a "gay rights" sermon on the "come out and let us know you" text from Sodom. (I am happily gay by the way).

So as you can see I've thought about your homily a bit, and I've come away perplexed by its relationship to the Scripture text-- a relationship that might best be expressed as direct contradiction.

And even if you hadn't chosen to give a homily on that particular text, I'm also perplexed how you'd reconcile your U.S. tax protest idea with Jesus's specific words on the subject, and a comparison of the relative evils of U.S. vs. Rome.

Finally, I might also be puzzled by how you reconcile your homily to your actions, depending on whether you yourself are currently risking jail by withholding your taxes. If a few folks in the congregation, based on your homily, withheld their taxes and went to jail while you remained free, how would you feel?

Given that you consider current American policy on Iraq so evil as to merit such an immoderate homily on the subject and the suggestion of measures like tax protest, I am curious what actual risks and sacrifices you are undertaking on this most serious matter? Was your concern about the injustice and murder of thousands of innocents a bit of rhetorical bluster, or are you seriously doing something about it beyond preaching to the choir in a sympathetic church--which would seem to offer a pleasant illusion of daring while entailing zero actual risk? You might at worst discomfit a few of the minority of parishioners who disagree with your politics (like myself), leading to at worst a dissenting personal note (like this), which I trust you will recover from most quickly as you recall the indisputable righteousness of your views. God does not want this invasion to occur, basically, as you conveyed to us a few Sundays ago.

So to sum up I'm perplexed on how to reconcile these three pairs:

• Your tax protest idea, and the text (even if you hadn't chosen to give a homily on it)
• Your homily, and the text (seemingly a most improbable combination)
• Your actions, and your homily (unless perhaps you are now conscientiously objecting from a jail cell somewhere)

Sincerely,