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Flavia nicely disses the 9/11 movie.

September 13, 2006 by Andrew | Permalink

Philadelphia Daily News | 09/12/2006 | Flavia Monteiro Colgan | ABC’s ‘9/11’: Clinton was right

The tragic events of 9/11 are not something to be trifled with. Putting words into people’s mouths and showing them doing things they never did is not acceptable.

The docudrama portrayed Clinton as a president who didn’t care about terrorism, but his record tells a different story. He had daily briefings on al Qaeda and meetings three times a week. Compare that to a president who couldn’t break away from clearing brush to read a memo that said, “Bin Laden Determined to Attack America.”

The fact is that Clinton proposed an additional $1.1 billion in anti-terror efforts. Clinton was acutely aware of the financial aspects of terror and wanted us not to do business with international banks that held al Qaeda money. A bill that would have mandated that was called totalitarian by some Republicans – and they gutted it.

It’s incredible to me how blatantly people can manipulate the record in the public mind and get away with it. I’d like to think that all the voices that have said this movie is wrong will keep most people from being affected much by it, but I’m not that optimistic. Narrative storytelling is always more powerful than logical exposition. Always. I even find myself sometimes believing a particular ‘fact’ that my intellect should know better than to think only because the story was so compelling.

Coulter’s shovel problem

August 14, 2006 by AndrewH | Permalink

In my last post, I opined at excruciating length about how so much of what makes one’s message in corporate life effective is the context and how one plays that context. It has to do with much more than appearance, which is just one factor; it’s about presence. That self-assurance that in some people seems arrogant or cocky but in others makes you want to defer to their judgment automatically.

Con artists use this very well. It’s a ‘confidence’ game, after all, and the con artist understands intuitively that confidence in oneself is necessary in order for others to have confidence in you.

Ann Coulter is one such con artist. She’s peddled her (relatively speaking, when compared to other political pundits) photogenic looks, rapier tongue and unapologetic attitude into a lucrative, powerful career as one of the most televised dilettantes alive. Oh, and she writes books too.

I have a hard time imagining Coulter sitting at a laptop surrounded by piles of meticulously perused research. I have an easier time imagining her spewing vitriol into a tape recorder and paying some hack(s) to edit it into something coherent, and run out and find anything in print that might be used as evidence. At least, that’s how her prose reads to me.

There’s a big difference between thoughtful, reasoned prose based on thorough research and crude polemic dressed up as respectable political opinion. That’s why I doubt Coulter would’ve gotten far in her career if she’d just written books. Like a trashy pop singer, it’s her TV appearances that make her career.

And it’s in those appearances where she performs brilliantly. Not that I think she’s brilliant. She’s a brilliant performer. She’s smart, certainly, but I think she actually believes she’s making intelligent, logical arguments, which signals to me that she’s not really as smart as she thinks.

That said, the lack of logical argumentation in her rantings doesn’t seem to be a problem. She knows she can get away with so much because she’s amazing at manipulating conversations. For example, on the rare occasion that someone argues with her or contradicts something she’s said, she weasels out of it by one of several strategems: 1. impugn the honor of the other person by making some outrageous, straw-man assertion about them because they would even think of contradicting her; 2. impugn the intelligence of the other person by quoting from “facts” that the other person doesn’t know, pointing to her book and squawking “I have XX pages of footnotes on this,” leaving the other person stammering and wondering if maybe they haven’t really done their homework; 3. making some other outrageous claim about someone not even in the room in order to derail the conversation. (This last one was evidenced most recently when she asserted that Clinton was a latent homosexual.)

Why does she get away with it? I think it’s in her delivery. In her utter and complete confidence. Couple that with a very quick mind (again, brilliant and quick are two different things) that can pop a comeback at an interviewer faster than the Williams sisters can nail a poorly lobbed serve, and time and time again you see people stumble over themselves trying to get around her. And she thrives on it; you can see it in her face. The television interview is her favorite element, and she plays it like a virtuoso.

This combination for an honest person would be admirable. But in someone who twists others’ words in order to fuel her unfounded pronouncements and allegations, it’s insidious.

The second trick works especially well. Claiming that you have numbers and research to back up your claims is a great way to shut other people up, especially if it’s during a TV taping or live interview when they can’t go and check your facts. She does it a lot, according to Media Matters.

This was hardly the first time Coulter and her defenders have offered the large number of footnotes contained in her book as “evidence” of the quality of her scholarship. Also on July 7, Terence Jeffrey, editor of conservative weekly Human Events, defended Coulter’s book on CNN’s The Situation Room by citing her “19 pages of footnotes.” And when similar questions were raised about her 2002 book, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right (Crown, June 2002), Coulter repeatedly cited her “35 pages of footnotes” as evidence that her claims were accurate.

The same Media Matters article goes on to check these oft-cited footnotes, and finds them lacking.

Media Matters’ analysis of the endnotes in Godless revealed that Coulter routinely misrepresented the information of her sources, as well as omitted inconvenient information within those same sources that refuted her claims. Coulter relied upon secondary sources to support many of her claims, as well as unreliable or outdated information.

In addition to demonstrating her poor scholarship, this analysis also made clear Coulter’s lack of respect for her readers, who she clearly assumed would believe anything she wrote, as long as there was a citation attached to it.

That last bit is awfully accurate. People really do swallow a lot if it has the appearance of authority, and they rarely bother to look beneath the veneer. I’m guilty of it frequently. Who has the time? And if you’re predisposed to believe the points they’re making anyway, why not roll with it? We all walk around assuming that big publishing houses would never publish something that wasn’t well-documented.

I’m sure there’s plenty of left-leaning stuff published with similar weaknesses. What steams me about Coulter, though, is that she’s so hateful. She delights in polarizing people, and in objectifying and criminalizing her opposition. What she does is only a couple of tiny steps away from the sort of hate speech people use for minorities when they call them “vermin.” Calling ‘liberals’ things like “Godless” and “Traitors” is the sort of talk that one uses to start wars or pogroms.

What really disturbs me is that this woman is paraded as a real expert, as someone we should listen to, along with the other professional windblowers from both sides of the political spectrum, just because her antics grab viewers.

Obviously, the woman shovels a lot of crap; she’s got a real problem with that shovel. But nobody’s going to talk about it. I’d love to see the networks and news shows jumping on her about this stuff, but they didn’t do it about the last books so why this one?

It makes me nostalgic for the days when we had no 24-hour news channels that had to fill their hours no matter what. Back when the nightly news was 30 minutes, and that was it, there was at least some vetting of sources. Can you imagine CBS circa 1975 wasting even 15 seconds getting an opinion from a hack like Coulter? Not that things were perfect in 1975, by a long shot.

I don’t have a pithy wrapup for this post… just a pleading hope that, in the same way people get sick of so many other things and then move on, maybe we’ll all get sick of this and leave people like Coulter to the dust heap of “what were we thinking?”

David Byrne on “Jesus Camp”

August 11, 2006 by AndrewH | Permalink

This is unbelievably creepy …

David Byrne Journal: 8.2.06: American Madrassas

Saw a screening of a documentary called Jesus Camp. It focuses on a woman preacher (Becky Fischer) who indoctrinates children in a summer camp in North Dakota. Right wing political agendas and slogans are mixed with born again rituals that end with most of the kids in tears. Jesus CampTears of release and joy, they would claim — the children are not physically abused. The kids are around 9 or 10 years old, recruited from various churches, and are pliant willing receptacles. They are instructed that evolution is being forced upon us by evil Godless secular humanists, that abortion must be stopped at all costs, that we must form an “army” to defeat the Godless influences, that we must band together to insure that the right judges and politicians get into the courts and office and that global warming is a lie.

The Lab is Burning

August 2, 2006 by AndrewH | Permalink

Just in case anyone has forgotten, the dream of the neocons was quite different from what has actually transpired in Iraq.

They honestly thought their twisted ideology was going to result in the perfect case study for their beliefs (and line their wallets in the process). Far from the privatized utopia they were expecting, their experiment on the flesh and blood residents of Iraq has instead resulted in an ever escalating death toll.

Here’s a bit from the article by Naomi Klein in Harper’s way back in 2004.

In only a few months, the postwar plan to turn Iraq into a laboratory for the neocons had been realized. Leo Strauss may have provided the intellectual framework for invading Iraq preemptively, but it was that other University of Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, author of the anti-government manifesto Capitalism and Freedom, who supplied the manual for what to do once the country was safely in America’s hands. This represented an enormous victory for the most ideological wing of the Bush Administration. But it was also something more: the culmination of two interlinked power struggles, one among Iraqi exiles advising the White House on its postwar strategy, the other within the White House itself.

O Solo Veto

July 21, 2006 by AndrewH | No comments

The world is going to the crapper in the Middle East right now, so in a way part of me wonders why I’m obsessing over this issue, but it’s important. Like everybody else I’m wondering how President Bush has managed never to veto a single thing in all his years in office.

I mean, if you’d hired a quality control officer in your company and, unlike every q.c. officer before him, he’d not found a single bit of quality to control and said “well I got the factory to change everything to my specifications before it got to the point where it had to be sent back” would you be suspicious? I would. Either the guy is a genius who just reinvented your quality capabilities or he’s slacking. And there aren’t that many geniuses in the world.

Anyway, this stem cell thing … there are many reasoned arguments on both sides. I’ve heard some very decent and rational people explain how, if you define life as beginning at conception, an embryo is a human being and therefore should be protected under the law. Fair enough. But if that’s the case, why do we dispose of so many of them?

According to the legislation that was vetoed, there are thousands of them disposed of every year. The legislation only sets boundaries saying we can use the ones that would’ve been disposed of for research, and only if the donors agree to it. These would never be implanted in a woman. If they’re all human life, why are they being disposed of to begin with?

Part of U.S. Congressman Mike Castle’s letter to Bush:

* The stem cells were derived from human embryos that have been donated from in vitro fertilization clinics, were created for the purposes of fertility treatment, and were in excess of the clinical need of the individuals seeking such treatment. Prior to the consideration of embryo donation and through consultation with the individuals seeking fertility treatment, it was determined that the embryos would never be implanted in a woman and would otherwise be discarded.
* The individuals seeking fertility treatment donated the embryos with written informed consent and without receiving any financial or other inducements to make the donation.

This logic goes unmentioned in the administration’s denouncements.

What we’re really witnessing is a calculated pandering to ignorance. I don’t think Bush is pandering, though — I think he really believes each blastocyst is a human child crying out for a uterus. He’s swallowing whole the dogma spoon fed to him by Rove, especially. (Rove, who has been distorting the science to begin with — and we know Bush won’t actually read anything for himself, so whatever Rove says, Bush takes as gospel.)

This is frightening to me because of the implications — that even with a Republican majority in Congress passing this bill, the President still sees it as his responsibility to be the voice of his version of God for our nation. I can’t find the link right now, but it’s on record that at least four senators who spoke against the bill invoked God’s name saying the Creator would be very displeased and would do bad things to America if we passed it.

Ben Franklin and the rest of them are rolling in their graves.

The pandering is possible because of the semantics involved. What do we mean by “life” and “child”? Who gets to decide if a blastocyst is a child or not? Obviously, in reality, it’s more complicated than “cell a plus cell b equals Junior.” Nature doesn’t treat it that way; even the Bible doesn’t treat it that way (it refers to life as “breath” not blastocysts; so much of scripture is misquoted, mistranslated and misinterpreted to support all kinds of views that I’ve given up trying to even discuss it in those terms with anyone). And evidently our own laws don’t treat it that way either, because the law allows the discarding of these blastocysts in fertility clinics.

This is a way for an administration that has championed so much death to doubletalk their way into being all about life, to hold onto their shredding political base by pandering to the ignorant, superstitious and misguided who keep putting them in office.

I don’t necessarily mean “ignorant” as an insult, either. Everybody can’t be an expert on everything. People are busy with their regular lives. In an information saturated world, we depend on sound bites to navigate the terrain. I confess that, listening to the bits and pieces coming over the airwaves, I too figured using embryos for research sounded creepy to me. But being informed about it with an open mind goes a long way toward understanding it’s not so simple, especially when you weigh the benefits.

The NIH has an excellent overview here.

Over four hundred thousand blastocysts are out there, frozen, and a tiny fraction of them are ever “adopted” for attempted impregnation. Plus, if I understand Castle’s letter quoted above, only cell groups that are flagged by donors as ok for research would ever be used.

It’s a slippery ontological question: who decides a group of cells is a human person and who doesn’t? If someone is brain-dead, and the family insists the person is alive enough to still be the person they knew, should the government be allowed to pull the plug anyway? Probably not. Then why would the government be allowed to decide the converse — that a microscpopic blastocyst is a person when the people who created it say it isn’t? It’s uncomfortable to discuss, but necessary.

However, rational discussion is impossible with the rampant disinformation and ignorance being spread (by both sides, in some instances, but the *science* and logic are on the pro-research side, it seems to me). The most ridiculous stuff is coming from the silly portion of the right wing, such as Limbaugh claiming that you have to have abortions to get stem cells.

Why am I angry about this? Because of the same reasons that most of the country should be up in arms about it. Because I have people I love who could be helped by this research — the brightest light in the dark tunnel of medicine for so many people with diseases that don’t respond to anything as simple as a miracle vaccine. It’s the same reason Arlen Specter breaks with his more extreme Republican brethren on the issue on the Senate floor. Because for him it’s a matter of life and death, but not in the sense of superstition and theory:

There are some 400k frozen embryos, and the choice is discarding them or using them to save lives; Sen. Brownback and I had a debate where he challenged me on when life began, and I retorted, suffering from Hodgkins cancer myself, the question on my mind was when life ended, and life will never begin for these embroys because there are 400 thousand and notwithstanding millions of dollars appropriated to encourage adoption, only 128 have been adopted; so those [potential] lives [of the remaining embryos] will not begin, but many other lives will end if we do not use all the scientific resources available.”

This is real-world thinking. The kind of thinking that stands up and makes adult, difficult choices about the reality of the world around us. My stepfather (with Alzheimer’s disease) and others close to me with things like immunological disorders could be helped by this research. My daughter and I just sent flowers to a funeral of a loved one who died from complications after a stem-cell procedure that could’ve been improved if the research hadn’t been stymied for the last five years.

But any such morally responsible thinking is precluded by the insidious manipulative drivel piped into the conversation by dogmatic fundamentalists who believe the cells from our bodies belong to the government, not us. And they’re so effective at this twisting of logic, that even my own mother (my ailing stepfather’s wife, who has to face their last years together under the weight of Alzheimer’s) is convinced that her President is a saint who would never do her wrong.

Yeah, that’s why I’m angry.

A still, small voice.

June 8, 2006 by AndrewH | No comments

Ava Lowrey is a 15 year old girl in Alabama, which is not exactly a bastion of tolerance and independent thinking, so her website, “Peace Takes Courage,” is all the more remarkable for it.

Whether or not her expression of faith or politics is fully informed or “mature” is beside the point. She’s crafted what amounts to powerful commentary — a sort of quiet polemic — about the insanity of our current political leadership.

Her work illustrates the power of the Internet, as well. That she could express what she does and have it immediately available to the globe.

Evidently, this young lady has received death threats and expressions of vitriolic hate from people who call themselves “Christian.”

These bits of media are, indeed, hard to watch. But truth often is, no?

http://peacetakescourage.cf.huffingtonpost.com/

Reframing the debate

October 17, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

Victor blogs about a book he’s reading, (Don’t Think of an Elephant — which is about how progressives can re-frame political discourse), and he’s channeling some notes into his post.

Always start with values, values everyone shares.
Use rhetorical questions: “Wouldn’t it be better if…”
Show moral outrage with controlled passion.
Always be on the offense. Don’t negate the other person’s claims; reframe. Never answer a question framed from your opponents point of view.
Tell a story where your frame is built into the story.

It occurs to me this sort of thing isn’t bad advice for *any* situation where you’re trying to effect change. For example, if you’re trying to get your company to think differently about how it develops software, and how its current practices are antithetical to its purported values … not that I know of any companies that would do such a thing.

Interview with Jonathan Haidt

October 12, 2005 by AndrewH | No comments

This is a terrific article: The Believer – Interview with Jonathan Haidt

Haidt makes some thought-provoking points: the evolutionary origins of morality; why some people find some things repugnant and others not; the difference between moral pluralism and moral relativism; and other great stuff.

He also reminds us not to objectify people with whom we may not agree, and not to make too many assumptions (usually to our own detriment):

First, it would help if liberals understood conservatives better. If I have a mission in life, it is to convince people that everyone is morally motivated—everyone except for psychopaths. Everyone else is morally motivated. Liberals need to understand that conservatives are motivated by more than greed and hatred. And Americans and George Bush in particular need to understand that even terrorists are pursuing moral goods. One of the most psychologically stupid things anyone ever said is that the 9/11 terrorists did this because they hate our freedom. That’s just idiotic. Nobody says: “They’re free over there. I hate that. I want to kill them.” They did this because they hate us, they’re angry at us for many reasons, and terrorism and violence are “moral” actions, by which I don’t mean morally right, I mean morally motivated.

Some people will read Haidt and immediately dismiss him because they reject a scientific (i.e. evolutionarily based) point of view on matters of human morality and ethics. But whatever. That’d be too bad, because it actually gives some solid, rational reasons for the “left” to be a lot more tolerant and understanding of the “right.” (Even if they don’t agree.)

More ‘isms!!

October 11, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

In a comment on my previous post, Patrick mentioned that maybe I was a libertarian, and pointed out this blog entry from Andrew Sullivan on the difference between “secularism” and “Christianism” (basically saying that secularism is a fine and grand tradition that is about freedom, not persecution, therefore not an enemy of Christianity at all). The following isn’t directed at the comment (I’m not dumping at Patrick :-) ) … but his comment made me feel like opining …

First, the “secularism” thing: what a lot of liberal/progressive people don’t seem to get is that for over a generation “secular humanism” has been systematically taught as a “religion” within evangelical Christian circles. When I was a teenager and going to “non-denominational” mega-church Sunday school, I heard it said time and again (and read it in the various books I was reading) that secular humanism is, in essence, a religious point of view that worships the human being, and that is actively “anti-God.” That secular humanism’s aim is the eradication of faith in anything other than our own abilities as flesh and blood people. That it was an insidious movement full of conniving, conspiring elitists who were at the forefront of bringing on the age of the Anti-Christ.

No, I am not kidding.

So, I think Sullivan is a little naive on this score. He doesn’t want to see “secularism” stained with the same stigma we now see with “liberalism” — but he doesn’t seem to realize we’re dealing with millions of people who hear “secularism” and react as if you said “Nazism.” Secularism sounds much worse to them than merely “liberal.” They feel that saying our founding fathers were secularists is a revision of history; and that teaching secular values in our schools is essentially breaching the separation of church and state, because to teach it is to deny their children their beliefs in God and Christ.

[Edited to add: upon reading Sullivan’s later posts, I see that others took him to task on this already.]

So, as my folks back home would say, “we got a tough row to hoe.” Overcoming this systematic indoctrination in misinformation is a tall order.

Second, as for libertarianism, there are elements of it that definitely appeal to me. I’m relatively liberal in terms of my politics, I suppose, but I’m not a party-line person, and there are a few bits of conservative thinking I tend to agree with as well as libertarian thinking. For example, I agree government should leave us alone as much as possible. That is, government should not initiate interference in our lives unless it’s necessary for the public good. And even then, only when absolutely necessary.

But what is necessary? I think that’s where I differ from a lot of libertarians. I think it’s necessary that the country provide opportunity to even the most downtrodden. By opportunity, I mean helping to remove barriers to improving their lives, not necessarily subsidizing the continuation of their current state. Much harder to do than to say, I realize, but that takes government.

I believe in having excellent infrastructure within which individuals and communities can thrive. But I don’t think it works to leave that up to the grass roots or the “rugged individual” — it takes government too. People like to point to Bill Gates and other success stories and say “they earned their money, they should be able to keep it” but without an infrastructure supported by a strong federal system these companies wouldn’t have had a chance to exist.

Also, I believe in the idea of public education. It’s an important part of socializing citizens into the national fabric, and requiring our children to grow up literate is essential to having an informed public. Without that, the Constitution simply wouldn’t work.

Basically, I’m not a believer in the idea that if you just leave the “market” alone, it will do everything right, or that smaller government is always good. It took government to keep the Union together during the Civil War. It took government to break apart monopolies and trusts, and to create better working conditions, and to enforce civil rights (a little late in the game, but better late than never).

I do think, however, that huge government programs should only be created if they include baked-in limits on themselves. That is, huge programs should, whenever possible, make themselves obsolete by actually solving problems and not just covering them over. I do think we have layer upon layer of inefficient band-aid stuff in government that people get used to and take for granted. (Much like people say that “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance is “an American tradition” when it’s only about 60 years old.) I agree there’s a lot of waste. Some of it, unfortunately, is just going to be there no matter what we do — there’s noise in any human system. But government is absolutely necessary, and sometimes it has to be big to save its citizens from chaos, oppression, and despair. It’s our responsibility as the people who comprise our own government to keep it in check, though, and shrink it back down when we can. I suppose that’s a conservative value? But I don’t know any liberals who would disagree with this essential premise.

Rationalist Conservatism

October 6, 2005 by AndrewH | No comments

This has been quoted all over the place, but I just ran across it. It makes me nostalgic for intellectual, secular conservatism. It’s a perspective from a wholly other “George W” …

George Will in Newsweek, May 2005:
The Oddness of Everything – Newsweek Columnists – MSNBC.com

the greatest threat to civility—and ultimately to civilization—is an excess of certitude. The world is much menaced just now by people who think that the world and their duties in it are clear and simple. They are certain that they know what—who—created the universe and what this creator wants them to do to make our little speck in the universe perfect, even if extreme measures—even violence—are required.

America is currently awash in an unpleasant surplus of clanging, clashing certitudes. That is why there is a rhetorical bitterness absurdly disproportionate to our real differences. It has been well said that the spirit of liberty is the spirit of not being too sure that you are right. One way to immunize ourselves against misplaced certitude is to contemplate—even to savor—the unfathomable strangeness of everything, including ourselves.

This is much closer to the mindset held by the people who founded this country.

Andrew Sullivan discussed a similar divide back in April, between the “conservatism of faith and the conservatism of doubt .”

Edited to add: I meant to mention … Sullivan’s article is terrific. He makes it very clear how the GOP essentially fell asleep next to a body-snatcher pod and has turned into something quite different. (My metaphor, not his … but you get the drift.)

The way he describes the traditional “conservatism of doubt” actually sounds a hell of a lot more like my own politics than what many conservatives think of as “liberal” … I think many conservatives especially (and middle america in general) hear “liberal” and what pops into their heads is ideologue/atheist academic hippies and activist gays in tutus. And while those people are all kind of fun to watch in a parade, and while I love it that America is diverse enough to contain them all, they’re not necessarily the people I think are balanced enough in their perspectives to run our country. What I mean is that we have to watch out for wild-eyed fundamentalists of any stripe.

Editing again to add!:

A friend pointed out to me that an activist who likes tutus isn’t necessarily unreasonable. So, yes, mea culpa, I overgeneralized. Lots of very reasonable people are eccentric or non-mainstream in their appearance and social style. I was meaning militant/fundamentalist-activist, not just people engaged on activism. (PETA vs. the Humane Society, perhaps? Though, heck, somebody will probably disagree with that too.)

What I was trying to get at was I’ve met people from all different walks who are so narrow in their views, and militant, that it would be a bad idea to put them in office. Whether gay or straight, Christian or Atheist, liberal or conservative.

Essentially, anyone who favors less diversity of thought over more, or who would make everyone follow their ideology if given the chance, doesn’t “get” our country well enough to be entrusted with leading it. The Constitution makes it clear that the only ideology that’s “sacred” is protecting the rights of people to think and say what they want (without endangering people or lying for personal gain, etc). Otherwise, what is this “liberty” stuff anyway?

But are they allowed to run for office? Sure. Can people vote them in? Absolutely. Which is yet another reason why the separation of powers and checks and balances are good things. People with extremist agendas can be slowed down long enough to vote them back out when the populace comes to its senses (we hope and pray).

Constitutional Ignorance

October 3, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

People should be made to take a test on the US Constitution before they can serve in any government post.

Karen Hughes, W’s whitebread image-stylist, is quoted at the Guardian:

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bin Laden’s little helper

“Many people around the world do not understand the important role that faith plays in Americans’ lives,” she said. When an Egyptian opposition leader inquired why Mr Bush mentions God in his speeches, Hughes asked him whether he was aware that “previous American presidents have also cited God, and that our constitution cites ‘one nation under God’.”

The problem is, she’s an ignorant git. Our constitution cites no such thing. On purpose.

In fact, our constitution doesn’t explicitly invoke the name of any deity. Go to any text of the Constitution of the US and search for God or Deity or even Providence and you won’t find any mention. (Providence is mentioned once, but only as the name of a geographical area, not as invoking a deity.) Not even the Articles of Confederation, which was the first “constitution” of our country, contain the word “God.”

But wait… I think there was once a US Constitution that mentioned God … the Constitution of the Confederate States of America. Yeah, the slave states. Their constitution, which is sort of a bizarro-version of the US Constitution (much like a satanic black mass is a twisted version of a catholic mass?) adds the words “favor and guidance of Almighty God.”

Maybe Ms. Hughes is trying to secede?

Honestly, for myself personally, I had to learn about the US Constitution several times over my school career from primary through college before it really started to stick. I’ll admit it. The ideas upon which our country is founded aren’t super-easy to grasp. It requires at least a rudimentary understanding the history that made the document necessary, and a grasp of the differences in powers and how they all work together in creative tension to form a sort of word-machine (for that’s precisely what this constitution is; a machine invented by a group of diverse enlightenment rationalists).

An understanding of the Constitution should be required for everyone wanting a driver’s license, in my humble opinion. Except that, frankly, such a policy would probably be unconstitutional. Alas.

Sharon Olds RSVP’s

September 26, 2005 by AndrewH | Permalink

Poet Sharon Olds wrote back to the White House (to Laura Bush) her reasons for not attending the National Book Festival as a featured writer & speaker. It’s reprinted at The Nation. The quotation below is something she leads up to, and doesn’t just come right out and say in the beginning. In fact, the letter is somewhat disarming for a bit, somewhat chatty and warm, but then it suddenly turns downward and ends with:

So many Americans who had felt pride in our country now feel anguish and shame, for the current regime of blood, wounds and fire. I thought of the clean linens at your table, the shining knives and the flames of the candles, and I could not stomach it.

Olds has a knack for plain, visceral imagery that takes ordinary words and weaves them for extraordinary effect.

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