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Friday, July 4th, 2008
7:24 am	India: Official and Caste Persecution of Christian Dalits Dalit Converts to Christianity Face Persecution and Violence (...Share by Jim Wallis (notes) Yesterday at 12:55pm As you were singing carols, placing the last presents under the tree, and worshiping at a Christmas Eve service this past year, Indian Christians halfway across the world were being victimized by the largest attack on the Christian community in India's democratic history. The complex and combustible layers of caste-based oppression and religious persecution came to a head on Dec. 24, 2007, through a spate of violence in the Kandhamal District of Orissa state. During the course of a four-day campaign of terror, more than 100 churches were damaged, at least 700 homes were destroyed, and thousands of Dalit and tribal Christians were forced from their homes. As preparations were being made to celebrate Christmas, Christian leaders approached the police ... ... seeking to delay a strike organized by Hindu radicals designed to disrupt their celebration. In the town of Brahminigaon, Dalit converts to Christianity have enjoyed greater social and economic empowerment, which threatens the social order put in place through the Hindu caste system. These Dalit and tribal Christians were beginning to own shops and repudiate their inferior status. According to Christian Solidarity Worldwide, the violence was rooted "in a long-term campaign to Hinduise a tribal population, which involved the vilification of religious conversions to Christianity." Hindu nationalists and extremists had been fomenting violence in the region, pitting the majority Hindu population, who are from the lower castes but still maintain a higher position in the caste order than Dalits and tribals, against tribal and Dalit Christians. The police, siding with the non-Christian community leaders, decided to allow the strike to proceed. The stage was set as tensions between the Christian and non-Christian communities reached an apex. On the day before Christmas, the rampage began after a dispute in a local market. Churches and homes were targeted with impunity. The people of Kandhamal awoke on Christmas Day gripped by fear as the attacks escalated and spread across the district. Reportedly, no churches held worship services for several weeks. I prayed with a tribal leader who recently converted from Hinduism to Christianity. Because of his conversion he was given a choice by Hindu extremists to either re-convert to Hinduism and be spared or have his home destroyed and be killed. He courageously chose his Christian faith and fled his village. Five months later, after having rebuilt his home with his own meager resources, his report filed with the police remains unanswered and his community continues to face intimidation and threats. The state of Orissa is one of seven states in India that have passed anti-conversion laws, which severely curtail conversions. In most of these laws, there are particularly severe penalties if Dalits or Tribals change their religion without prior permission from a district magistrate. Even though these laws arguably violate the Indian Constitution's protections for religious freedom, they remain in place. Under India's constitution, Dalits are entitled to affirmative-action benefits, including 15 percent of all federal government jobs and admissions in government-funded universities. Tribals who convert to another religion maintain their affirmative-action privileges. In contrast, Dalits that convert to a religion other than Sikhism, Buddhism, or Hinduism are stripped of these affirmative-action benefits, called reservations. India's Supreme Court is currently reviewing several challenges filed by Christian and Muslim Dalits that could result in an overturning of the affirmative-action exclusion. A separate bill to remove the restriction is pending in Parliament. Government members, influenced by India's 150 million-strong Muslim community, have indicated their cautious support. The Dalit struggle and Christian persecution is inextricably tied to a broken and biased justice system that fails time and time again to prosecute perpetrators of crimes. Just as all politics are local, all justice seems locally administered in India. According to local leaders, six months after the attack not a single perpetrator has been brought to justice. While dozens were arrested, most have been released and no leaders were implicated. Meanwhile, many communities live under the constant specter of intimidation and fear. Women in one village described being threatened and chased by Hindus living in adjoining villages anytime they tried to bathe or wash clothes in a nearby lake. Dalit Christians who assert their rights and claim their equality pose a direct threat to the established caste system. Many Dalits are turning to Christianity, attracted by the message of a God who made everyone equal. A cover story in The Wall Street Journal last year reported that, to the dismay of Hindu nationalist groups, the number of India's secret Christians has climbed in recent years to an estimated 25 million, about the size of the officially registered Christian population. According to Dr. Joseph D'souza, AICC president and DFN international president, "Conversion is the way of revolt taught to the Dalits by their champion and liberator, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, a lawyer educated in the U.S. who turned to Buddhism himself. His writings are well-known all over India among the Dalits. Amdedkar clearly called for the Dalits to convert in order to escape caste-based humiliation and discrimination. In response, some Dalits probably convert due to a motivation to simply protest, but the Christian faith demands that the church receive all -- including Dalits -- who want to follow Christ." While the vast majority of Hindus in India are friendly or ambivalent toward Christians, Hindu fundamentalist groups led by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, the World Hindu Council) are instigating violence and exacerbating tensions. Most Rev. Raphael Cheenath, archbishop of Cuttack-Bhubaneswar, offered a critical insight into how the church must respond, saying the "church needs to open itself up to all sectors of society," arguing that the future security of the church rests in its ability to build real relationships throughout the Hindu community. During our sojourn through Khandhamal, we stayed at a Catholic training center that was spared during the attack, in large part due to Hindus in the area who protected the center. The center had opened its doors to Hindu organizations, allowing Hindus to sponsor trainings, events, and conferences. According to Archbishop Cheenath, "the church must learn to teach the gospel without demeaning Hinduism and serve the community without proselytizing." Other acts of violence targeting Christians are much more sporadic and smaller in scale, lacking the gravity and scale to grab headlines both in India and across the world. Catholic lay leader and AICC Secretary John Dayal said that, unfortunately, "the conscience of the world is driven by numbers." On the other hand, attacks each year on Dalits are around 25,000. And there are probably thousands that are unreported. Yet Hindu religion casts a protective shadow over the plight of the Dalits. The Western world is reluctant to fully engage in the Dalit struggle due to fears of being accused of religious intolerance, cultural insensitivity, and sheer ignorance. However, a pernicious distortion of the Bible was used to sanction the systems of Jim Crow in the South and apartheid in South Africa. However, the world can't escape the harsh reality that oppression against Dalits is inextricably linked to the Hindu-based caste system within India. Indians must ask whether Hinduism can survive without caste? Prayerfully, the answer is yes. Adam Taylor is the senior political director for Sojourners. (Comment on this)
6:59 am	Rove: Trying to Swift-Boat Obama? Rove’s Third Term By PAUL KRUGMAN Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet. Howard Dean didn’t scream. Hillary Clinton didn’t say she was staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. And Wesley Clark didn’t impugn John McCain’s military service. Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, titled his tell-all memoir “What Happened.” But a true account of modern American politics should be titled “What Didn’t Happen.” Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place. The latest fake scandal fit the usual pattern as an awkwardly phrased remark, lifted out of context and willfully misinterpreted, exploded across the airwaves. What General Clark actually said was that Mr. McCain’s war service, though heroic, didn’t necessarily constitute a qualification for the presidency. It was a blunt but truthful remark, and not at all outrageous — especially given the fact that General Clark is himself a bona fide war hero. Yet the Clark affair did reveal something important — not about General Clark, but about Mr. McCain. Now we know what a McCain administration would represent: namely, a third term for Karl Rove. It was predictable that the McCain campaign would go wild over the Clark remarks. Mr. McCain’s run for the White House has always been based on persona rather than policy: he doesn’t have ideas that voters agree with, but he does have an inspiring life story — which, contrary to the myth of the modest maverick, he talks about all the time. The suggestion that this life story isn’t relevant to his quest for office was bound to provoke a violent reaction. But the McCain campaign went beyond condemning General Clark’s remarks; it went out of its way to distort them. “This backhanded slap against John as not being a worthy warrior because he just got shot down is one of the more surprising insults in my military history,” said retired Col. Bud Day, who participated in a conference call organized by the campaign. In fact, General Clark had said no such thing. The irony, not lost on Democrats, is that Col. Day himself has done what he falsely accused Wesley Clark of doing: he appeared in the 2004 Swift boat ads that impugned John Kerry’s wartime service. The willingness of the McCain campaign to engage in these tactics, employing such tainted spokesmen, tells us that the campaign has decided to go negative — specifically, to apply the strategy Karl Rove used so effectively in 2002 and 2004 (but not so effectively in 2006), that of portraying Democrats as unpatriotic. And sure enough, Adam Nagourney of The New York Times reports signs of the “increasing influence of veterans of Mr. Rove’s shop in the McCain operation.” Will Rovian tactics work this year? In 2002 and 2004, Republicans were so successful at playing the patriotism card thanks to a combination of compliant media and cowering Democrats. At first, the Clark affair suggested that nothing has changed. News organizations reported as fact the false assertion that General Clark criticized Mr. McCain’s military service, and the Obama campaign rushed to “reject” his remarks. “Two days into the Wesley Clark fallout,” wrote the Columbia Journalism Review on Tuesday morning, “the press, the G.O.P., and the Obama campaign all seem to have agreed that Clark’s recent remarks on John McCain’s service record were at best impolitic and at worst despicable.” Since then, however, both the press and the Obama campaign seem to have recovered some of their balance. Opinion pieces have started to appear pointing out that General Clark didn’t say what he’s accused of saying. Mr. Obama has also declared that General Clark doesn’t owe Mr. McCain an apology for his “inartful” remarks and denies that his own condemnation, in a speech given on Monday, of those who “devalue” military service was aimed at the general. In the end, the Clark affair may have strengthened the Obama campaign. Last week, with his cave-in on wiretapping, Mr. Obama was showing disturbing signs of falling into the usual Democratic cringe on national security. This may have been the week he rediscovered the virtues of standing tall. Furthermore, my sense, though it’s hard to prove, is that the press is feeling a bit ashamed about the way it piled on General Clark. If so, news organizations may think twice before buying into the next fake scandal. If so, the campaign has just taken a major turn in Mr. Obama’s favor. After all, if this campaign isn’t dominated by faux outrage over fake scandals, it will have to be about things that really did happen, like a failed economic policy and a disastrous war — both of which Mr. McCain promises will continue if he wins. David Brooks is off today. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
7:07 am	Irish Perspective on Politics An Irish perspective on politicsShare by Vinnie Kinsella (notes) Yesterday at 12:51am I couldn't resist posting this one. We, in Ireland, can't figure out why you are even bothering to hold an election in the United States. On the one side, you have a lawyer, married to a lawyer, who ran against a lawyer who is married to a lawyer. On the other side, you have a war hero married to a good looking woman who owns a beer distributorship. What are you lads thinking over there? (Comment on this)
7:06 am	Low Band Low: Struggling but Hopeful (by John Potter)Share by Jim Wallis (notes) Yesterday at 2:02pm Low is a band that defies easy characterization. Over their 15 years as lauded pioneers of the minimalist brand of indie rock they're so closely identified with (they're not crazy about the oft-applied term "slow-core"), the husband-and-wife team of guitarist Alan Sparhawk and drummer Mimi Parker -- plus a revolving roster of bassists -- has seemed to thrive on juxtaposition. At once reflective of their faith and steeped in the violence of the human condition, Low's music is anchored by the couple's haunting vocal harmonies. Dutch filmmaker David Kleijwegt's fascinating new documentary about the band, You May Need a Murderer, chronicles their life at home in Duluth, Minnesota, as well as on the road, touring for Low's latest record, Drums and Guns (Sub Pop, 2007). The film opens with Sparhawk dressed for church, reading the words, "Repent, for the great day of the Lord has come." He says to the camera, "The coldness of man to one another is such that, even in modernized, enlightened times, we still find justifications for going to war and killing each other." In the same breath, he says, "No matter what terrible things we do to each other as brothers and sisters, I think we still have a loving God, a parent giving us every opportunity to resolve that." Drums and Guns covers decidedly darker terrain than most of Low's previous work, concentrating mostly on various types of warfare. Alternately preachy ("Our bodies break/ And the blood just spills and spills/ But here we sit, debating math," Parker and Sparhawk plead on "Breaker") and contemplative ("Where would you go/ If the gun fell in your hands?" asks "Sandinista"), Drums continues to move away from the group's quiet beginnings, enhancing the harsher sonic edge they began experimenting with on Things We Lost in the Fire (Kranky, 2001) and built on with The Great Destroyer (Sub Pop, 2005). Murderer makes clear that Sparhawk, particularly, has wrestled with identity. "Where's the place of music, in its godly nature, when the lights are flashing and people are drunk and screaming?" he asks of playing in bars and clubs. "I don't know. Jesus went to the temple, but he also spent a lot of time on the edge of town." Its narrative, though, is rooted in the remarkable balancing act he and Parker, who both grew up in the same rural county -- "the poorest in Minnesota," Sparhawk points out -- are able to navigate raising two children and taking a rock band across the world. (One scene depicts the family in their living room, improvising the song "Sharp-Tooth Dinosaur.") Parker tells a story about members of their church approaching the two after a Low show, asking them about the meaning of their titular song, "You May Need a Murderer," with its lyrics, "One more thing I'll ask you, Lord/ You may need a murderer/ Someone to do your dirty work." Sparhawk clarified, "It's about a moment when a person comes before God, asking to be a tool of God's hand, but as that tool, to be vengeful." Emphasizing the song's theme of extremism, Sparhawk says, "Nobody's listening to God anymore. And the people who say they are are liars." Whether that answer, or the couple's vocational choice for that matter, satisfied their fellow congregants doesn't seem to concern Sparhawk too greatly. "I don't think the point of church is to gather all the good people, or the perfect people," he says in Murderer. "It's to gather those that are struggling and have the same hope." John Potter, a former Sojourners intern, is on staff at Bread for the World. He writes about music and movies at On Tape. (Comment on this)
6:39 am	Oil-men Profiteers Move on Kurdish Contract Panel Questions State Dept. Role in Iraq Oil Deal By JAMES GLANZ and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr. Bush administration officials knew that a Texas oil company with close ties to President Bush was planning to sign an oil deal with the regional Kurdistan government that ran counter to American policy and undercut Iraq’s central government, a Congressional committee has concluded. The conclusions were based on e-mail messages and other documents that the committee released Wednesday. United States policy is to warn companies that they incur risks in signing contracts until Iraq passes an oil law and to strengthen Iraq’s central government. The Kurdistan deal, by ceding responsibility for writing contracts directly to a regional government, infuriated Iraqi officials. But State Department officials did nothing to discourage the deal and in some cases appeared to welcome it, the documents show. The company, Hunt Oil of Dallas, signed the deal with Kurdistan’s semiautonomous government last September. Its chief executive, Ray L. Hunt, a close political ally of President Bush, briefed an advisory board to Mr. Bush on his contacts with Kurdish officials before the deal was signed. In an e-mail message released by the Congressional committee, a State Department official in Washington, briefed by a colleague about the impending deal with the Kurdistan Regional Government, wrote: “Many thanks for the heads up; getting an American company to sign a deal with the K.R.G. will make big news back here. Please keep us posted.” The release of the documents comes as the administration is defending help that United States officials provided in drawing up a separate set of no-bid contracts, still pending, between Iraq’s Oil Ministry in Baghdad and five major Western oil companies to provide services at other Iraqi oil fields. In the no-bid contracts, the administration said it had provided what it called purely technical help writing the contracts. The United States played no role in choosing the companies, the administration has said. Disclosure of those contracts has provided substantial fuel to critics of the Iraq war, both in the United States and abroad, who contend that the enormous Iraqi oil reserves were a motivation for the American-led invasion — an assertion the administration has repeatedly denied. Iraq’s oil minister, Hussain al-Shahristani, has condemned the Kurdistan deal as illegal because it was not approved by Iraq’s central government and was struck without an oil law, which has still not been passed. After the deal was signed last year, a senior State Department official in Baghdad criticized it, saying, “We believe these contracts have needlessly elevated tensions between the K.R.G. and the national government of Iraq.” The State Department said Wednesday that it had discouraged the deal. Hunt officials declined to comment, and Kurdish government officials said there was no impropriety. In a letter to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, whose chairman is Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, a State Department official wrote that the department had strongly discouraged Hunt from signing the deal until an oil law had been passed. The State Department told Hunt that “we continue to advise all companies that they incur significant political and legal risk by signing contracts” before then, wrote Jeffrey T. Bergner, an assistant secretary for legislative affairs at the department, in one of the documents made public on Wednesday. But in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Mr. Waxman wrote that the documents his committee had collected “tell a different story about the role of administration officials.” In letters obtained by the committee, Mr. Hunt informed the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, of which he was a member, last July and August that he was pursuing serious business interests in Kurdistan. “We were approached a month ago by representatives of a private group in Kurdistan as to the possibility of our becoming interested in that region,” Mr. Hunt wrote to the board last July 12. “We had one team of geoscientists travel to Kurdistan several weeks ago and we were encouraged by what we saw.” In August 2007, Mr. Hunt informed State Department officials directly of his intentions in Kurdistan, and on Sept. 5, three days before the deal was signed, a flurry of e-mail messages among Hunt and State Department officials make clear that the department was aware of what was in the works. In a message to a colleague with the subject line “Hunt Oil to Sign Contract With K.R.G.,” one State Department official gives a highly detailed summary of the agreement. Mr. Hunt, the official wrote, “is expecting to sign an exploration contract with the K.R.G. for a field located in the Shakkan district, an area under K.R.G. control (inside the Green Line) but technically in Nineveh Governorate.” “Hunt would be the first U.S. company to sign such a deal,” the official wrote, suggesting that the news should be rushed onto the State Department’s internal distribution network as quickly as possible. Despite those exchanges, a State Department official said Wednesday that the company had in fact been discouraged from completing its deal. “All companies, including Hunt Oil, which have spoken with the United States government about investing in Iraq’s oil sector, have and will continue to be given the same advice,” John Fleming, an Iraq press officer in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, wrote Wednesday in an e-mailed response to questions. “We advise companies that they incur significant political and legal risk by signing any contracts with any party before a national law is passed by the Iraqi Parliament.” Another State Department official, who asked to remain anonymous, expressed frustration, saying that a local State Department official in Erbil, the Kurdish provincial capital, who was the head of a so-called Regional Reconstruction Team, tried to dissuade Hunt officials from making the deal. But no notes were taken at that meeting, the official said, and Hunt representatives later gave a conflicting account of what had been said. “I have talked to the R.R.T. team leader personally, and he sticks by his story and they stick by theirs,” the State Department official said. Jeanne L. Phillips, a senior vice president for corporate affairs and international relations at Hunt Oil whose correspondence appears at certain points in the documents released Wednesday, said that because Mr. Waxman’s letter was not addressed directly to the company, she could not comment on it. “As a matter of company policy, Hunt Oil Company does not comment on correspondence between third parties,” Ms. Phillips wrote in an e-mail message. An official in the Kurdistan Regional Government reached late Wednesday who asked not to be named said that the government had written some 22 contracts to date. “Anyone can have a contract with the K.R.G., but it must be accepted and suitable according to assessment by our experts,” the official said. “Hunt is a good company and never had its contracts with us illegally or improperly.” The documents released by Mr. Waxman also lay bare what has become a serious dispute between the company and the State Department over what was said between them before the deal last year. For example, a senior Hunt official said he was told by State Department officials during a meeting on June 15, 2007, that the United States government did not object to deals with the Kurdish regional government. “I specifically asked if the U.S.G. had a policy toward companies entering contracts with the K.R.G.,” the Hunt official, David McDonald, wrote in an e-mail message to a colleague last Sept. 28. The State Department officials, Mr. McDonald wrote, replied that there was no policy, neither for nor against. His message concluded: “There was no communication to me or in my presence made by the nine State Department officials with whom I met prior to 8 September that Hunt should not pursue our course of action leading to a contract. In fact, there was ample opportunity to do so, but it did not happen.” The encouragement by State Department officials did not end with the signing of the contract on Sept. 8, the documents suggest. Five days later, a State Department official in the southern city of Basra wrote to Ms. Phillips, “I read and heard about with interest your deal with the regional Kurdish government.” “I don’t know if you are aware of another opportunity,” the official wrote, mentioning an enormous port project and a natural gas project in the south. After a few more lines, the official concluded, “This seems like it would be a good opportunity for Hunt.” James Glanz reported from New York, and Richard A. Oppel Jr. from Baghdad. Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Moscow, Mudhafer al-Husaini from Baghdad and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times from Kurdistan. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
6:34 am	Youthening of the College Faculty The ’60s Begin to Fade as Liberal Professors Retire By PATRICIA COHEN MADISON, Wis. — When Michael Olneck was standing, arms linked with other protesters, singing “We Shall Not Be Moved” in front of Columbia University’s library in 1968, Sara Goldrick-Rab had not yet been born. When he won tenure at the University of Wisconsin here in 1980, she was 3. And in January, when he retires at 62, Ms. Goldrick-Rab will be just across the hall, working to earn a permanent spot on the same faculty from which he is departing. Together, these Midwestern academics, one leaving the professoriate and another working her way up, are part of a vast generational change that is likely to profoundly alter the culture at American universities and colleges over the next decade. Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate. “There’s definitely something happening,” said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. “I hear from quite a few faculty members and graduate students from around the country. They are not really interested in fighting the battles that have been fought over the last 20 years.” Individual colleges and organizations like the American Association of University Professors are already bracing for what has been labeled the graying of the faculty. More than 54 percent of full-time faculty members in the United States were older than 50 in 2005, compared with 22.5 percent in 1969. How many will actually retire in the next decade or so depends on personal preferences and health, as well as how their pensions fare in the financial markets. Yet already there are signs that the intense passions and polemics that roiled campuses during the past couple of decades have begun to fade. At Stanford a divided anthropology department reunited last year after a bitter split in 1998 broke it into two entities, one focusing on culture, the other on biology. At Amherst, where military recruiters were kicked out in 1987, students crammed into a lecture hall this year to listen as alumni who served in Iraq urged them to join the military. In general, information on professors’ political and ideological leanings tends to be scarce. But a new study of the social and political views of American professors by Neil Gross at the University of British Columbia and Solon Simmons at George Mason University found that the notion of a generational divide is more than a glancing impression. “Self-described liberals are most common within the ranks of those professors aged 50-64, who were teenagers or young adults in the 1960s,” they wrote, making up just under 50 percent. At the same time, the youngest group, ages 26 to 35, contains the highest percentage of moderates, some 60 percent, and the lowest percentage of liberals, just under a third. When it comes to those who consider themselves “liberal activists,” 17.2 percent of the 50-64 age group take up the banner compared with only 1.3 percent of professors 35 and younger. “These findings with regard to age provide further support for the idea that, in recent years, the trend has been toward increasing moderatism,” the study says. The authors are not talking about a political realignment. Democrats continue to overwhelmingly outnumber Republicans among faculty, young and old. But as educators have noted, the generation coming up appears less interested in ideological confrontations, summoning Barack Obama’s statement about the elections of 2000 and 2004: “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.” With more than 675,000 professors at the nation’s more than 4,100 four-year and two-year institutions, it is easy to find faculty members, young and old, who defy any mold. Still, this move to the middle is “certainly the conventional wisdom,” said Jack H. Schuster, who along with Martin J. Finkelstein, wrote “The American Faculty,” a comprehensive analysis of existing data on the profession. “The agenda is different now than what it had been.” With previous battles already settled, like the creation of women’s and ethnic studies departments, moderation can be found at both ends of the political spectrum. David DesRosiers, executive director of the Veritas Fund for Higher Education Reform, which contributes to conservative activities on campuses, said impending retirements present an opportunity. However, he added, “we’re not looking for fights,” but rather “a civil dialogue.” His model? A seminar on great books at Princeton jointly taught by two philosophers, the left-wing Cornel West and the right-wing Robert P. George. Changes in institutions of higher education themselves are reinforcing the generational shuffle. Health sciences, computer science, engineering and business — fields that have tended to attract a somewhat greater proportion of moderates and conservatives — have grown in importance and size compared with the more liberal social sciences and humanities, where many of the bitterest fights over curriculum and theory occurred. At the same time, shrinking public resources overall and fewer tenure-track jobs in the humanities have pushed younger professors in those fields to concentrate more single-mindedly on their careers. Academia, once somewhat insulated from market pressures, is today treated like a business. This switch is a “major ideological and philosophical shift in how society views higher education,” Mr. Schuster and Mr. Finkelstein write in “The American Faculty.” And with more women in the ranks (nearly 40 percent of the total in 2005 compared with 17.3 percent in 1969), different sorts of issues like family-friendly benefits have been brought to the table. One way to understand the sense that a new mood is emerging on American campuses is to look at the difference between the world that existed when Mr. Olneck was making his way and the one in which Ms. Goldrick-Rab is coming up. The ’60s Generation Michael Olneck slides into a booth at Kabul Restaurant on State Street, a few steps from the sprawling Madison campus and its 41,000 students. “I was a pink-diaper baby,” he said pushing his bicycle helmet aside and smoothing the unruly strands of gray hair on his head. His father was a Socialist. Right out of high school, in 1964, Mr. Olneck organized support for the Mississippi Project’s black voter-registration drives. Later, he took a bus to Washington to protest the war in Vietnam, served on the strike coordinating committee at Harvard during the American invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and demonstrated at President Nixon’s inauguration in 1973. Similar events embedded themselves in the minds of many students at the time. A few blocks from the restaurant is a plaque commemorating protests that rattled the university in the 1960s and ’70s: the seizure of the student movement by radicals, the deadly bombing of a campus research lab, the clubbing of antiwar demonstrators. Those sorts of experiences are alien to younger professors, Mr. Olneck explained, so “they may not be as instinctively anti-authoritarian; they just don’t have that in their background.” The protests ultimately died down here and elsewhere. Mr. Olneck ended up in front of the class, and like many academics from his generation, he brought the same spirited questioning and conscience that had animated his student years to his job as an education and sociology professor. Yet to some traditionalists, preoccupations like Mr. Olneck’s grated. The conservative philosopher Allan Bloom captured the bitter splits — better known as the culture wars — in his influential best seller “The Closing of the American Mind” in 1987. He detailed fights over the scarcity of women and people of color in the curriculum, the proliferation of pop-culture courses, doubts about the existence of any eternal truths and new theories that declared moral values to be merely an expression of power. These rancorous disputes often spilled into the nation’s political discourse. When Mr. Olneck earned his degree, traditional views of American education were also being upended. Radical revisionists ridiculed the view of public education as a beneficent democratic project. They raised questions about equal access, how schools reinforced class differences, and whether social science should, or even could be free of ideology. At the start of his career, Mr. Olneck traced the links between where someone’s family came from and where they ended up on the economic and social ladder. Although he has done quantitative research, 20 years ago he jettisoned number-centric studies for historical narrative, exploring how schools throughout the 20th century responded to immigrants and diversity. In his work one can detect some of the era’s preoccupations when he argues, for instance, that fights over bilingualism and standard English were about power. The same goes for his extracurricular activities. In 1989 he worked to kick the R.O.T.C. off campus because of the Defense Department’s ban on homosexuals. (The effort failed.) More recently, his neighborhood was riled by a Walgreens plan to open a drugstore. “All these people who had protested the war and civil rights,” Mr. Olneck said, laughing; Walgreens “didn’t know what hit ’em.” Last fall, he taught Race, Ethnicity and Inequality in American Education, which he introduces in the syllabus: “Schools in the United States promise equal opportunity. They have not kept that promise. In this course, we will try to find out why.” Like many sociologists and education researchers, Mr. Olneck said that today both the kinds of analyses and the theories that prevailed when he was in college have changed. Overarching narratives, societal critiques and clarion calls for change — of the capitalist system or the social structure — have gone out of style. Today, with advances in statistical methods, many sociologists have moved to model themselves on clinical researchers with large, randomized experiments as their gold standard. In their eyes, this more scientific approach is less explicitly ideological than other kinds of research. Ms. Goldrick-Rab has embraced such experiments. A graduate course she created — partly based on her research of community colleges — focused on “educational opportunity and inequality” at community colleges, with an “emphasis on the critical evaluation and assessment of current up-to-date research.” Another Wisconsin professor, Erik Olin Wright, a 61-year-old sociologist and a Marxist theorist, described it this way: “There has been some shift away from grand frameworks to more focused empirical questions.” As for his own approach, Mr. Wright said, “in the late ’60s and ’70s, the Marxist impulse was central for those interested in social justice.” Now it resides at the margins. A New Generation “I was part of a new wave of hires,” Sara Goldrick-Rab said, peering over the top of her laptop at her favorite off-campus work site, the Espresso Royale cafe. She came to the University of Wisconsin in 2004 and, like Mr. Olneck, has a joint appointment in educational policy studies and sociology, both departments considered among the best in the country. Now 31, she grew up in a Washington suburb, Fairfax, Va., when Ronald Reagan was in the White House and corporate mergers were the rage. At George Washington University she was active in a campaign to end the death penalty, but for most of her classmates the late 1990s were marked by economic growth, peace and student apathy. “My generation is not so ideologically driven,” she said. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to engage a larger audience and influence policy. She considers herself the “intellectual heir” of her senior colleagues — “It’s like working with your grandparents,” she said fondly — and she cares deeply about educational inequality, often writing about the subject on a blog she created with her husband. But she also is aware of differences between the generations. A Sensibility Gap “Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different,” she said. They want to question values and norms; “we are more driven by data.” Her newest project is collaborating on what she calls the “first rigorous test in the country” to measure whether needs-based financial aid increases the chances that low-income students will graduate from college. It involves 42 colleges and 6,000 students, and will combine statistics with more in-depth interviews. As for partisan politics, when she wrote an article in May for Pajamasmedia.com about welfare reform cutting off poor people’s access to higher education, some friends and co-workers were surprised by its appearance on that conservative blog. She said she didn’t know; she had not paid attention to its political bent. When Ms. Goldrick-Rab speaks of added pressures on her generation, she talks about being pregnant or taking care of her 17-month-old while trying to earn tenure. The lack of paid leave for mothers is high on her list of complaints about university life. At a conference titled “Generational Shockwaves,” sponsored in November by the TIAA-CREF Institute, Joan Girgus, a special assistant to the dean of faculty at Princeton, underscored how these sorts of concerns were increasingly on the minds of younger faculty members. Universities need to focus more on the “life” side of the work-life balance “because faculties historically were almost entirely male and the wives took care of the family side,” Ms. Girgus said. “I don’t think we can do that anymore.” Ask Ms. Goldrick-Rab if she believes there is a gap between her generation and the boomers, and she immediately answers yes. Mr. Olneck and Mr. Wright are more cautious. “Some of my closest colleagues are 25 years younger than I am and I feel absolutely no barrier of sensibility,” Mr. Wright said. For him, the institutional shifts outweigh any others: “I don’t think the big things have anything to do with generational change, but with financial pressures on education,” he said. Wisconsin is part of the state’s university’s system, for example, but it receives only 18 percent of its total budget from the Legislature. The rest comes from donations, foundations, federal research grants and corporations. Mr. Wright and Mr. Olneck worry how constantly having a hand out — particularly to corporations — may affect attitudes and policies. Mr. Olneck mentioned the long list of labs and classrooms named after companies like Halliburton, Pillsbury and Ford Motor Company. The market sensibility may account for what Mr. Olneck and others call an increasing careerism among junior faculty members. Jackson Lears, 62, a historian at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said, “I don’t think that necessarily means a move to the right, but a less overt stance of political engagement.” Gerald Graff, president of the Modern Language Association and author of the 1992 book “Beyond the Culture Wars,” is more skeptical, saying he hasn’t seen evidence of change at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where he teaches English. “You’d think that the further we get away from the ’60s, where a lot of our political attitudes are nurtured, there would be,” he said, “but I have to say it doesn’t seem to be happening.” Certainly some disciplines, like literary studies, seem more resistant to change. Elsewhere, senior faculty members are more likely to hire young scholars in their own mold, while some baby boomers have adopted the attitudes and styles of their younger peers. But as scholars across fields argue, the historical era in which a generation develops — the Depression, wartime or peaceful affluence — is a defining moment for its members. “My generational paradigm is the end of the cold war,” said Matthew Woessner, a 35-year-old conservative and political scientist at Penn State Harrisburg. He and his wife, April Kelly-Woessner, a political scientist at nearby Elizabethtown College who is a year younger and a moderate, have been analyzing faculty survey responses for a new book. The notion that campuses are naturally radical or the birthplace of social movements, Ms. Kelly-Woessner said, was specific to the 1960s and ’70s. “I think the younger generation does look at it differently.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
6:27 am	Tilt to the Right? A Supreme Court on the Brink In some ways, the Supreme Court term that just ended seems muddled: disturbing, highly conservative rulings on subjects like voting rights and gun control, along with important defenses of basic liberties in other areas, including the rights of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The key to understanding the term lies in the fragility of the court’s center. Some of the most important decisions came on 5-to-4 votes — a stark reminder that the court is just one justice away from solidifying a far-right majority that would do great damage to the Constitution and the rights of ordinary Americans. The Supreme Court abandoned its special role in protecting voting rights when it rejected a challenge to Indiana’s harshly anti-democratic voter ID law. Critics warned that the law, which bars anyone without a government-issued photo ID from voting, would disenfranchise poor people, minorities and the elderly, all of whom disproportionately lack drivers’ licenses. The critics were right. In the Indiana presidential primary, shortly after the ruling, about 12 nuns in their 80s and 90s were turned away at the polls for not having acceptable ID. In another sharp break with its traditions, the court struck down parts of the District of Columbia’s gun-control law. After seven decades of holding that the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms is tied to raising a militia, the court reversed itself and ruled that it confers on individuals the right to keep guns in their homes for personal use. The decision will no doubt add significantly to the number of Americans killed by gun violence. Corporations fared especially well in this term. The court reduced the punitive-damages award against Exxon Mobil for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill from $2.5 billion to about $500 million, a pittance for the energy company. In the process, the court declared that in maritime cases, punitive damages should not exceed the actual damages in a case. It is a rule that foils the purposes of punitive damages: to punish and to deter bad conduct. In the term’s most cold-hearted decision, the court endorsed Kentucky’s use of lethal injection to execute prisoners. Despite evidence that the procedure that Kentucky uses can cause excruciating pain, the court ruled that it does not violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel-and-unusual punishment. It was a squandered chance to set rules requiring that executions be carried out as humanely as possible. There was some undeniable good news. The court came through with a critically important decision in favor of the detainees being held in Guantánamo Bay. It ruled that they have habeas corpus rights: the right to challenge their confinement before a federal judge. The decision was the court’s third rebuke to the Bush administration on Guantánamo and a major win for the Constitution and the rule of law. In a second capital punishment case, the court ruled that the death penalty cannot be imposed for the rape of a child. Horrific as that crime is, the court wisely drew a clear line and said that capital punishment can only be imposed for crimes in which the victim’s life was taken. The court also issued several welcome rulings in favor of workers, including employees who charged that they were retaliated against for accusing their employers of discrimination. It was a reversal from last year, when the court issued a much-criticized ruling against a woman who was discriminated against in pay, baselessly deciding that she had filed her complaint too late. In placing these rulings in the larger context of the court after two appointments by President Bush — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, both dedicated members of the conservative movement — it is important to note that the Guantánamo decision was 5 to 4. Anthony Kennedy, the court’s swing justice, cast the deciding vote. In other cases, like the gun-control decision, the rulings might have been more sweeping and more damaging if the conservative bloc had not needed the moderate-conservative Justice Kennedy’s vote to form a majority. One more conservative appointment would shift the balance to the far-right bloc. If that happens, the court can be expected to push even further in a dangerous direction. It would most likely begin stripping away civil liberties, like the habeas rights vindicated in the Guantánamo case. The constitutional protection of women’s reproductive rights could be eliminated. The court might well strike down laws that protect the environment, workers’ rights and the rights of racial and religious minorities. The court was teetering on the brink in this term. Voters should keep that firmly in mind when they go to the polls in November. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
6:23 am	War Profiteering is Treason The Imprecise Meaning of War Unless Congress closes a gaping hole in the law against war profiteering, companies ripping off taxpayers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars may never be fully prosecuted. This is because the latest conflicts are not declared wars. The anti-fraud law dating to World War II allows prosecution of contractors up to three years after a war ends. But this statute of limitations was omitted from the resolutions authorizing military force in Iraq and Afghanistan, which carried no formal war declaration. Investigators say that current war fraud runs into untold billions, including faulty ammunition and vehicles and not-so-bullet-proof vests. Investigative officials and the inspector general for Iraq reconstruction have testified that they’re hampered by the ongoing conflicts and need more time to catch contract thieves after they end. The solution is a bipartisan bill clarifying that “war” absolutely includes Congressional authorizations of military force. The repair also wisely allows prosecution for five years after a war. The Senate Judiciary Committee just approved this crucial measure and the rest of Congress should quickly enact it. Or else the loophole will continue to invite war contracting as “a free-for-all with no criminal accountability,” in the words of Senator Charles Grassley, the bill’s Republican sponsor. The Justice Department, meanwhile, is reportedly sitting on a backlog of more than 900 cases in which whistle-blowers have accused government contractors of billions in fraud, in both military and domestic spending. Long delays bog down the information in secrecy as the department, understaffed and overloaded, weighs whether the allegations have merit, according to The Washington Post. On both the war front and the home front, the government must do a far more convincing job of going after profiteers who are gouging the taxpayers. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
7:37 am	Faith Based Aid Obama's Faith-Based Plan (by Jim Wallis)Share by Jim Wallis (notes) Yesterday at 3:11pm In 2000 I was part of a small group of religious leaders who were invited to Austin, Texas to discuss a new White House faith-based initiative with George W. Bush before he came to Washington, DC as President. I was an early supporter of the initiative because I believed that partnerships between the faith community and government in alleviating poverty were both necessary and appropriate within the framework of the constitution. For two years I was in regular conversation with the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under the leadership of John DiIulio and, later, Jim Touhy and Sojourners and the Call to Renewal collaborated with the new office on a number of dialogues and initiatives. But my relationship to the White House ended after my public criticism of President Bush's path to war in Iraq. Yet, I continued to support the idea and promise of the faith-based initiative. But I was disappointed with the corresponding lack of policy commitment to reduce poverty by the Bush administration, and the eventual politicizing of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives along partisan lines. Instead of a partnership, this initiative became a substitute for necessary public policies attacking the causes and consequences of poverty within the United States. Despite this failure, my commitment to public-private partnership involving the faith community has never diminished. I have hoped that both of the presidential candidates would re-commit the nation to this necessary and positive vision of partnership between the public sector and the faith community on the goals of poverty reduction. Today, Barack Obama outlined his plan to engage faith-based and community organizations from the White House in order to create "the foundation of a new project of American renewal." Obama affirmed the idea of a faith-based initiative on the solid foundations of both real partnership and the necessary commitment of government to sound public policy to reduce poverty. Prior to today, the danger was that Democrats might revert to old secular biases and end the faith-based program all together preferring only public sector approaches as the remedy to poverty instead of also forging vital partnerships with civil society that include the faith community. It was good to see that the failures of the Bush faith-based initiative have not deterred Obama from proposing a robust vision of his own. The key to today's proposal is that it is based on public and faith-based partnership, and will not become another replacement for sound public policy. To truly be successful, this initiative must utilize the unique resources and identity of the faith community while, at the same time, recognizing the indispensible role that government and public policy must play in tackling the root causes of poverty. Obama's proposals also contain necessary protections for religious liberty, pluralism and constitutional safeguards. This initiative has the potential to unite people across partisan lines. I truly hope that a recommitment to engaging the valuable role of faith-based organizations doesn't get mired in the endless political debates of the past while God's concerns for the weak and vulnerable get ignored. (Comment on this)
7:31 am	Guantanemo: China Brainwashing Techniques From Korean War Copied by US Military China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo By SCOTT SHANE WASHINGTON — The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.” What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners. The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency. Some methods were used against a small number of prisoners at Guantánamo before 2005, when Congress banned the use of coercion by the military. The C.I.A. is still authorized by President Bush to use a number of secret “alternative” interrogation methods. Several Guantánamo documents, including the chart outlining coercive methods, were made public at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing June 17 that examined how such tactics came to be employed. But committee investigators were not aware of the chart’s source in the half-century-old journal article, a connection pointed out to The New York Times by an independent expert on interrogation who spoke on condition of anonymity. The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War” and written by Alfred D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities. Those orchestrated confessions led to allegations that the American prisoners had been “brainwashed,” and provoked the military to revamp its training to give some military personnel a taste of the enemies’ harsh methods to inoculate them against quick capitulation if captured. In 2002, the training program, known as SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, became a source of interrogation methods both for the C.I.A. and the military. In what critics describe as a remarkable case of historical amnesia, officials who drew on the SERE program appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners. Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said after reviewing the 1957 article that “every American would be shocked” by the origin of the training document. “What makes this document doubly stunning is that these were techniques to get false confessions,” Mr. Levin said. “People say we need intelligence, and we do. But we don’t need false intelligence.” A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, said he could not comment on the Guantánamo training chart. “I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,” Colonel Ryder said. “I can tell you that current D.O.D. policy is clear — we treat all detainees humanely.” Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article described “one form of torture” used by the Chinese as forcing American prisoners to stand “for exceedingly long periods,” sometimes in conditions of “extreme cold.” Such passive methods, he wrote, were more common than outright physical violence. Prolonged standing and exposure to cold have both been used by American military and C.I.A. interrogators against terrorist suspects. The chart also listed other techniques used by the Chinese, including “Semi-Starvation,” “Exploitation of Wounds,” and “Filthy, Infested Surroundings,” and with their effects: “Makes Victim Dependent on Interrogator,” “Weakens Mental and Physical Ability to Resist,” and “Reduces Prisoner to ‘Animal Level’ Concerns.” The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.” The documents released last month include an e-mail message from two SERE trainers reporting on a trip to Guantánamo from Dec. 29, 2002, to Jan. 4, 2003. Their purpose, the message said, was to present to interrogators “the theory and application of the physical pressures utilized during our training.” The sessions included “an in-depth class on Biderman’s Principles,” the message said, referring to the chart from Mr. Biderman’s 1957 article. Versions of the same chart, often identified as “Biderman’s Chart of Coercion,” have circulated on anti-cult sites on the Web, where the methods are used to describe how cults control their members. Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatrist who also studied the returning prisoners of war and wrote an accompanying article in the same 1957 issue of The Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, said in an interview that he was disturbed to learn that the Chinese methods had been recycled and taught at Guantánamo. “It saddens me,” said Dr. Lifton, who wrote a 1961 book on what the Chinese called “thought reform” and became known in popular American parlance as brainwashing. He called the use of the Chinese techniques by American interrogators at Guantánamo a “180-degree turn.” The harshest known interrogation at Guantánamo was that of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a member of Al Qaeda suspected of being the intended 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks. Mr. Qahtani’s interrogation involved sleep deprivation, stress positions, exposure to cold and other methods also used by the Chinese. Terror charges against Mr. Qahtani were dropped unexpectedly in May. Officials said the charges could be reinstated later and declined to say whether the decision was influenced by concern about Mr. Qahtani’s treatment. Mr. Bush has defended the use the interrogation methods, saying they helped provide critical intelligence and prevented new terrorist attacks. But the issue continues to complicate the long-delayed prosecutions now proceeding at Guantánamo. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Qaeda member accused of playing a major role in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, was charged with murder and other crimes on Monday. In previous hearings, Mr. Nashiri, who was subjected to waterboarding, has said he confessed to participating in the bombing falsely only because he was tortured. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
7:20 am	Zimbabwe: Can Mugabe be Fired? Does Zimbabwe Need a President? By MARK Y. ROSENBERG Johannesburg, South Africa NOW that President Robert Mugabe has been sworn into a sixth term after an election widely viewed as illegitimate, what is the rest of the world going to do about it? So far, the response has been slow or ineffective; the United Nations Security Council has managed to pass only watered-down condemnations of Mr. Mugabe’s electoral terror because of resistance from South Africa, China and Russia. And Tuesday, the African Union urged Mr. Mugabe to join in a power-sharing agreement — a government of national unity. But a better idea may be for Zimbabwe’s elected officials to cut the 84-year-old Mr. Mugabe out altogether — by getting rid of the office of president. At first glance that may appear difficult: the Zimbabwean regime is marked by an extremely powerful executive presidency coupled with a largely neutered Parliament. Nearly all state power now rests with Mr. Mugabe, who has run the country since independence in 1980, and now presides over a nation with severe fuel and food shortages and an inflation rate of more than a million percent a year. Yet it is possible for the Parliament to jettison the presidency. Recall that Zimbabwe’s parliamentary elections in March gave the opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change led by Morgan Tsvangirai, 109 seats in the House of Assembly to 97 for Mr. Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF. Though by no means flawless, these elections were not marred by the same degree of violence and intimidation as the recent presidential election, in which the winner of the first round, Mr. Tsvangirai, withdrew from the race in fear for his life and those of his supporters. The Movement for Democratic Change’s slight majority is a relatively accurate depiction of the country’s political landscape, giving both sides significant representation in Parliament, with the M.D.C. controlling the 210-seat lower house, and the parties effectively tied in the Senate. That would allow a Prime Minister Tsvangirai to govern while still requiring his party to compromise with ZANU-PF to gain the two-thirds majority needed to pass constitutional amendments — like getting rid of the presidency for good. That would also help protect ZANU-PF supporters, including military officers, from state-sponsored revenge. More immediately, a newly empowered Parliament would give reformist elements in ZANU-PF a forum in which to conduct politics and make deals. The party is no longer a monolith: former Finance Minister Simba Makoni ran for president against Mr. Mugabe in the first round, and there are leaders within ZANU-PF who are more than willing to abandon the “old man” given the opportunity to do so. These leaders — including Gen. Solomon Mujuru and former Home Affairs Minister Dumiso Dabengwa — are the natural negotiating partners of the Movement for Democratic Change, not the indefatigable Mr. Mugabe and his coterie of hard-liners. The newly elected parliamentarians haven’t been sworn in yet, and some seats remain contested. But once they find a way to meet, they could rather quickly declare the Parliament sovereign and terminate Mr. Mugabe’s reign. In the last few decades, African countries like Benin and Mali made transitions from authoritarian rule by taking similar actions at so-called national conferences. What’s more, a sovereign parliament with significant ZANU-PF backing could credibly offer amnesty deals to the generals who had sustained Mr. Mugabe’s tyranny. Although distasteful, such amnesty deals would be critical to any lasting settlement and would be far easier to achieve without Mr. Mugabe in the picture — particularly if the Parliament’s sovereignty were recognized by the African Union and the United Nations. A parliamentary government would have the virtue of not only dislodging Mr. Mugabe, but assuring a more democratic Zimbabwe in the future. Indeed, Zimbabwe began as a parliamentary democracy, but Mr. Mugabe found that form of government too restrictive and abolished the office of prime minister in 1987, concentrating power in an executive presidency. Political scientists have demonstrated that parliamentary regimes are more likely to remain democratic than their presidential counterparts. Power and legitimacy in the new regime would be vested in a representative body, not a single person or office. Moreover, parliaments are institutionally appropriate for politically and ethnically divided societies like Zimbabwe: they ensure representation for political minorities and generally require compromise in order to form governments. With other geriatric presidents clinging to power throughout Africa — Omar Bongo in Gabon and Paul Biya in Cameroon are but two examples — more Zimbabwe-like crises may be on the horizon. The international community would be well served to support institutional alternatives to the continent’s over-empowered executives, beginning with a parliamentary (and free) Zimbabwe. Mark Y. Rosenberg is the southern Africa analyst for Freedom House. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 1st, 2008
7:37 am	Empire of Jesus? Agreeing to Disagree (by Jim Wallis)Share by Jim Wallis (notes) Yesterday at 1:08pm Beliefnet invited Jim Wallis to participate in a "blogalogue" with David Klinghoffer, author of How Would God Vote? Why the Bible Commands You to Be a Conservative. Here's Jim's response to David's final post, "The Bible Says Poverty and Morality are Connected" The problem with using the Bible as the basis for running a society is that it would always be somebody's interpretation of the Bible, and a worst-case scenario is that it might be your interpretation, Mr. Klinghoffer. I too have read and studied the Bible all of my life, and I just can't recognize the Bible in so much of what you have said in our "dialogue." I really work at finding common ground with people across the political spectrum on moral issues that transcend ideology and politics. But we have been unable to find much common ground in this dialogue. I still find many of the things you have said absolutely astonishing. I still can't get over your contention that most of what the Bible says about the poor doesn't apply to America because our poor people are so well-off here. I replied that most Christian clergy and Jewish rabbis that I know would find that statement incredulous, but got no direct reply from you. In your latest post you say, in an equally unbelievable way, that wealth is the most consistent test of whether a society is righteous in God's eyes. I read the Hebrew prophets in a totally different way -- that the best test of a nation's righteousness is how it treats the poorest and most vulnerable. That is always how God judges a society. Read Isaiah, Amos, and Micah. Then you say that war is just a "tool of statecraft." Really? The Hebrew scriptures warn against militarism -- "not trusting in horses and chariots" -- and Jesus calls we Christians to be peacemakers and love our enemies. In fact, you note in your book Christians who believe that: Quakers, Amish, and Mennonites, among others, can point to the teachings not only of Jesus himself but of ancient and medieval sages -- Tertullian, Origen, Francis of Assisi, Menno Simons, down to a twentieth-century figure like Thomas Merton. It's interesting that "Jesus himself" and the earliest church fathers were all opposed to war. So, what happened? You say, quite correctly, "With the conversion of the Emperor Constantine (324 C.E.), all that changed." Indeed, it did. And you then cite such esteemed theologians as Oliver Cromwell and Gen. George S. Patton. When you say in your latest post that war is merely the normal tool of statecraft, does that mean all wars? Every time a nation decides to go to war as an expression of its statecraft is justifiable? What about when one nation with Christians and Jews decides to go to war with another nation with Christians and Jews? Are both nations justified? Is there any religious critique or discrimination possible here? Let me guess: You support all the wars America has fought. I could never get you to tell me what you think about the war in Iraq. I could go on, issue after issue, but I don't think that would be productive. We just disagree, profoundly, on what biblical imperatives suggest about society and politics. I am very glad that America has a separation of church and state and that people who would prefer a more theocratic vision of society (as I interpret you to prefer) don't get to run things they way they would like. We both have to convince our fellow citizens that what we believe is best for the common good. That's a good thing, and I welcome that debate. Thanks for this one. (Comment on this)
7:20 am	Destruction of Old Houses Holding Back the Wrecking Ball The downturn in the real estate market has slowed but by no means halted the number of teardowns. Teardowns is the practice of buying an older home to demolish it and replace it with a house that dwarfs structures nearby and covers most of its own lot. Just this month in Greenwich, Conn., a granite 1886 Richardsonian Romanesque home was razed with nary a peep of protest. In the last three years, Greenwich has lost scores of homes built in the 1800s. The issue is not merely taste. Some “starter castles” irrevocably change the character of established neighborhoods. And while few mourn the passing of a 1965 split-level ranch, razing real architectural gems should not be taken lightly. In 2002, the National Trust for Historic Preservation identified 100 communities in 20 states where teardowns were taking place in architecturally significant neighborhoods. By 2008 the list had grown to around 500 communities in 40 states — with about a third of those in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. In Dallas, during the last 10 years, as many as 1,000 homes have been torn down in the early-20th-century sections of Highland Park and University Park, and teardowns have proliferated in a dozen historic neighborhoods in Denver. Communities are properly wary of denying owners the right to build, but circumstances can demand action. Hinsdale, Ill., which has lost one third of its houses to teardowns since the 1980s, restricted the practice when the spread of pavement and patios prevented water from sinking into the soil and increased flooding problems. The most thoughtful approach increases public awareness and participation. In Westport, Conn., a popular Web site features Teardown of the Day, which publicizes planned demolitions as well as before-and-after pictures. Other towns have imposed mandatory demolition delays for houses older than 60 years to give time for the public to react and offer alternatives. That, at least, gives preservationists a fighting chance. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
7:00 am	Faith-Based Obama Obama to expand Bush's faith based programs July 01, 2008 7:41 AM EDT CHICAGO - Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush's program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and - in a move sure to cause controversy - support some ability to hire and fire based on faith. Obama was unveiling his approach to getting religious charities more involved in government anti-poverty programs during a tour and remarks Tuesday in Zanesville, Ohio, at Eastside Community Ministry, which provides food, clothes, youth ministry and other services. "The challenges we face today ... are simply too big for government to solve alone," Obama was to say, according to a prepared text of his remarks obtained by The Associated Press. "We need all hands on deck." Obama's announcement is part of a series of events leading up to Friday's Fourth of July holiday that are focused on American values. The Democratic presidential candidate spent Monday talking about his vision of patriotism in the battleground state of Missouri. By twinning that with Tuesday's talk about faith in another battleground state, he was attempting to settle debate in two key areas where his beliefs have come under question while also trying to make inroads with constituencies traditionally loyal to Republicans. But Obama's support for letting religious charities that receive federal funding consider religion in employment decisions could invite a storm of protest from those who view such faith requirements as discrimination. Obama does not support requiring religious tests for recipients of aid nor using federal money to proselytize, according to a campaign fact sheet. He also only supports letting religious institutions hire and fire based on faith in the non-taxypayer funded portions of their activities, said a senior adviser to the campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity to more freely describe the new policy. Bush supports broader freedoms for taxpayer-funded religious charities. But he never got Congress to go along so he has conducted the program through administrative actions and executive orders. David Kuo, a conservative Christian who was deputy director of Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives until 2003 and later became a critic of Bush's commitment to the cause, said Obama's position on hiring has the potential to be a major "Sister Souljah moment" for his campaign. This is a reference to Bill Clinton's accusation in his 1992 presidential campaign that the hip hop artist incited violence against whites. Because Clinton said this before a black audience, it fed into an image of him as a bold politician who was willing to take risks and refused to pander. "This is a massive deal," said Kuo, who is not an Obama adviser or supporter but was contacted by the campaign to review the new plan. Kuo called Obama's approach smart, impressive and well thought-out but took a wait-and-see attitude about whether it would deliver. "When it comes to promises to help the poor, promises are easy," said Kuo, who wrote a 2006 book describing his frustration at what he called Bush's lackluster enthusiasm for the program. "The question is commitment." Obama proposes to elevate the program to a "moral center" of his administration, by renaming it the Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and changing training from occasional huge conferences to empowering larger religious charities to mentor smaller ones in their communities. Saying social service spending has been shortchanged under Bush, he also proposes a $500 million per year program to provide summer learning for 1 million poor children to help close achievement gaps with white and wealthier students. A campaign fact sheet said he would pay for it by better managing surplus federal properties, reducing growth in the federal travel budget and streamlining the federal procurement process. Like Bush, Obama was arguing that religious organizations can and should play a bigger role in serving the poor and meeting other social needs. But while Bush argued that the strength of religious charities lies primarily in shared religious identity between workers and recipients, Obama was to tout the benefits of their "bottom-up" approach. "Because they're so close to the people, they're well-placed to offer help," he was to say. He also planned to talk bluntly about the genesis of his Christian faith in his work as a community organizer in Chicago, and its importance to him now. "In time, I came to see faith as being both a personal commitment to Christ and a commitment to my community; that while I could sit in church and pray all I want, I wouldn't be fulfilling God's will unless I went out and did the Lord's work," he was to say. Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 30th, 2008
4:21 am	The Breakaway Anglicans Anglicans Face Wider Split Over Policy on Gays By DINA KRAFT and LAURIE GOODSTEIN JERUSALEM — Anglican conservatives, frustrated by the continuing stalemate over homosexuality in the Anglican Communion, declared Sunday that they would defy historic lines of authority and create a new power bloc within the communion led by a council predominantly of African archbishops. The announcement came at the close of an unprecedented weeklong meeting in Jerusalem of Anglican conservatives who contend that they represent a majority of the 77 million members of the Anglican Communion. They depicted their efforts as the culmination of an anti-colonial struggle against the communion’s seat of power in Britain, from which missionaries first carried Anglican Christianity to the developing world. The conservatives say many of the descendants of those Anglican missionaries in Britain and North America are following a “false gospel” that allows a malleable interpretation of Scripture. They insisted that they were not breaking away from the Anglican Communion or creating a schism. But their plans, if carried out, could create severe upheaval in the communion, the world’s third largest grouping of churches, after the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches. After more than 1,000 delegates to the meeting — mostly Africans, Australians, South Americans and Indians — affirmed their platform statement at a hotel here, they gathered for prayer, dancing and swaying to a Swahili hymn and shouting full-throated hallelujahs. Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, who leads the largest province in the communion, said at a news conference, “It’s quite clear we have been in turmoil.” But he added, “With this decision we have a fresh beginning.” He was accompanied by the archbishops of Uganda, Rwanda and Sydney, Australia, as well as an American, the Rt. Rev. David C. Anderson Sr., whom Archbishop Akinola made a bishop of the Church of Nigeria. The statement the delegates released said it was time to create a new ecclesiastical province in the United States and Canada to absorb the parishes that have been outraged by the American church’s consecration of an openly gay bishop in 2003 and the Canadian church’s blessing of same-sex unions. Bishop Anderson said a new province would unite believers in North America who had abandoned the Episcopal Church in recent decades because they disagreed with the ordination of female priests and bishops, its interpretation of Scripture or its acceptance of homosexuality. “It brings them the hope now, finally, of regathering the portion of the church that scattered when heterodoxy just became untenable and many were driven out — not all at once, but over the years in different stages,” he said. The conservatives also challenged the authority of the archbishop of Canterbury. The current archbishop, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, has disappointed conservatives by not disciplining the liberal North Americans or engineering their expulsion. The archbishop of Canterbury historically has not had the power to decree policy in the Anglican Communion, but has determined which churches belonged to it. The conservatives’ statement said that although they acknowledged that historic position, they did not accept the idea “that Anglican identity is determined necessarily through recognition by the archbishop of Canterbury.” They said membership in their conservative alliance within the communion would be determined by 14 principles of theological orthodoxy laid out in a manifesto they released on Sunday, which they called the Jerusalem Declaration. There was no official response from the archbishop of Canterbury, the Episcopal Church in the United States or the Anglican Church of Canada. Asked for his reaction, Bishop Mark Sisk, the Episcopal bishop of New York, said: “I don’t think you can be an Anglican and say the archbishop of Canterbury’s recognition is not critical. That becomes an innovation that moves beyond Anglicanism.” Some liberal American Episcopalians sought to play down the conservatives’ actions, dismissing them as nothing new. Jim Naughton, canon for communications of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., said: “What the leaders of the communion may decide to do is just slowly erode the credibility of this thing. Because even though they’ve presented it to the world as this large body of Anglicans, when push comes to shove, it remains five angry provinces and their allies in the West.” The conservatives say their new council of primates, or church leaders, will include the archbishops of the provinces of Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, West Africa and the Southern Cone of South America. Tanzanian Anglicans may participate if they get an endorsement from their House of Bishops. The Anglican Communion has 38 primates. Some primates in Africa, Asia and Latin America have already annexed conservative American parishes that chose to break with the Episcopal Church. But it has been hard to confirm independently the number of those parishes because the process has been decentralized and has taken years. One conservative American organization, the Anglican Communion Network, has a list of 150 breakaway parishes, but it contends that there are 300 in all. The Episcopal Church lists 7,347 member parishes. The conservatives held their meeting, which they called the Global Anglican Future Conference, in Jerusalem despite attempts to deter them by Bishop Suheil Dawani of the Anglican Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem and the Middle East; he said the conference would set back relations with other churches and religions in the Middle East. Most of the conservatives at the meeting said they would boycott the Lambeth Conference, a gathering of Anglican bishops from around the world that takes place once every 10 years in Britain. That conference begins in mid-July. Dina Kraft reported from Jerusalem, and Laurie Goodstein from New York. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
4:08 am	Nordic Heritage Identities on Display: Bonding at the Museum By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN SEATTLE — In Ballard, a quiet neighborhood not far from the waterfront where many of its residents once worked, I found a replica of an Icelandic badstofa. I am sure I am not alone in never having seen a badstofa, nor even in knowing what one is. But looking inside at its sharply slanted wooden roof, the large tome open at its far end, the two blond children — mannequins — glancing up during a dark night, I began to get some idea. This was, after all, a badstofa in a museum, and the accompanying text let me know that as old-fashioned as this life-size diorama might seem, it was a shrine to memories of 19th-century living spaces — the badstofa — in Iceland. The floorboards of this one, we are told, were salvaged from a fishing vessel and laid down as they traditionally had been, with gaps to allow the body heat of the animals kept below to warm the badstofa. During long winter nights, each family would enact a cultural ritual — a kvoldvaka — as the sounds, smells and warmth from the animals would rise from below: reading aloud from medieval Icelandic sagas or the Bible, singing, weaving, talking by candlelight. And out of such badstofa — and this was the main point — many Icelanders also made their way across the Atlantic and then across America to settle in Seattle. Out of such crucibles were modern citizens made. And from such citizens came institutions like this: the Nordic Heritage Museum. Almost 30 years old and housed in a former school building, it is said to be the only museum in the country devoted to immigrants from Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden. Special exhibitions focus on each country, giving some sense of the lands left behind and the cultures that evolved when transplanted to a strange and distant place. The major exhibition here, which originated in the mid-1980s in two Danish museums, chronicles the shared modern saga of these Nordic peoples, their rural pasts, their hazardous journeys to the Midwest heartland and their arrival, finally, at the northwest corner of the United States. Here the landscape was familiar, and logging, fishing and mining were vital trades. By 1918 a third of the residents of Seattle came from Nordic lands. Now, the museum reports, 17 percent of the population of Washington State claims Nordic ancestry. In many ways this modern saga is quite familiar, with adventures as imposing as in ancient tales. And despite all its variants, it is the defining saga of the contemporary identity museum, the kind of institution that is as central for our time as the imperial art museum was for 19th-century Europe. The identity museum is created by a group to recount its past trials and present achievements. It is also a community center and meeting place, meant to solidify the identity it celebrates. Here are our origins in a distant place and time, these museums say. We left them behind, setting out on a great journey facing untold horrors, nourished only by that past. We had to overcome many difficulties, some of which tempted us to forget who we were. Now, finally, we have triumphed. The museum is a monument to a reforged identity in which our past is a hyphenated part of our future. That is also the subliminal tale in the recently rebuilt Wing Luke Asian Museum here. That is the narrative of the Arab American National Museum that opened in 2005 in Dearborn, Mich. In March a relatively modest Northwest African American Museum opened here, with its main exhibition hall telling that tale about the migration of blacks to this area. (Slavery did not extend this far west; there were also only 406 black residents in Seattle in 1900.) The museum recounts aspects of black success in its art exhibitions, and in its tribute to this city’s great jazz clubs of the early-20th century. The National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., retains a similar structure, even though it addresses native peoples.I It just inverts the perspective: our trials began not when we moved to faraway lands but when others journeyed to ours. Narratives of testing and triumph lie behind many Jewish museums as well. The most epic example may end up being told when the National Museum of African American History and Culture opens in Washington in 2015. The dominance of this saga is partly due to its accuracy. Though it is deeply preoccupied with a group’s trials, its overall message is also affirmative. It is the great modern story of liberal democracy overcoming tyranny, injustice or racism. That story is given a twist derived from recent decades of activism: identity, not liberal democracy, is the real savior. It is by being true to our tribal past, or to our racial roots, or to our ethnic origins, that we finally overcome. That is one reason to preserve our identity — indeed, for enshrining it in a museum. It is by elevating identity that liberation is achieved. But there is something strange. First, almost all these museums end up defining identity not by its intrinsic solidity but by the opposition it encountered. There may be similarities among Japanese, Korean and Chinese cultures, for example, but they are united as “Asian” solely because of resemblances in discrimination or characterization encountered as immigrants; long, diverse and often hostile histories dissolve into a single identity. Indian tribal history, even before European settlers, is rife with warfare and rivalry, but that is irrelevant to the American Indian museum. Its view of identity even insists on similarities between, say, the Tapirapé of the Brazilian jungles and the Yupik of Alaska, connections that may exist only because of shared difficulties in confronting nontribal modernity. Even the Nordic identity subsumes historical differences: a parade takes place in Seattle every May 17 because that is the date Norwegians celebrate their constitutional independence from the Danes and Swedes. There is much artifice, then, in celebrations of identity, and in some cases much distortion as well. This may partly account for the almost old-fashioned romanticism of some of these museums, in which origins and identity triumph over modernity. That is one effect too of the Nordic Heritage Museum, which is rustic, crafts-loving, nostalgic and even quaint in its display. But the Nordic is also one of the most intriguing identity museums I have seen because it is so secure about its past. The museum’s literature explains that it developed from the growing focus on identity in the 1960s and ’70s, but it is distinctive because it has so little to be aggrieved about. It simply pays homage to its peoples — giving their origins a roseate hue — while informing us about them. It will be interesting to see how that story is transformed as the museum rebuilds itself in a new location in Ballard that promises to lure far more than its current 55,000 annual visitors. In the meantime, at the very moment of the supremacy of the identity museum, there also seems something overripe about it. It has begun to seem formulaic, old-fashioned. And that means it is time to retreat to the badstofa to rethink the past and how we shape it. Connections is a critic’s perspective on arts and ideas. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
3:58 am	Revisit the Florida Vote Expanding Democracy in Florida Among the world’s democracies, the United States is uniquely unforgiving in denying ex-offenders the right to vote. Nowhere is the problem worse than in Florida, where criminal justice experts estimate that as many as 950,000 felons are barred from the voting booth. Last year, Gov. Charlie Crist pushed through new rules that made it easier for some ex-offenders to become full citizens and helped restore voting rights to more than 100,000 former prisoners. But this is well short of what’s needed — a complete overhaul of a wildly illogical system. In most states, inmates win back their voting rights as soon as they are released from prison or when they complete parole or probation. One big reason that does not happen in Florida is that state law requires felons to first make restitution to their victims. And until their voting rights are restored, former prisoners are barred from scores of state-regulated occupations for which the restoration of voting rights is listed as a condition of employment. Quite apart from the fact that it is undemocratic to bar people from the voting booth because they owe money, the system is transparently counterproductive since it prevents people from landing the jobs they will need to make restitution. Denying ex-offenders a chance to make an honest living is a sure way to drive them back to jail. The system also requires extensive and unnecessary background checks before voting rights can be restored for some applicants, making it hard to reduce the backlog. Florida could clear up that backlog in a hurry, treat all ex-offenders fairly and enhance democracy by automatically restoring voting rights to inmates who have completed their sentences. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
3:55 am	Restore Civil Liberties How to Put Civil Liberties in the White House By GEOFFREY R. STONE Chicago AS we approach July 4, it is worth reminding ourselves of America’s foundational idea. This country is set apart from the rest of the world because of its unparalleled commitment to personal freedom and the dignity of the individual. It is a vision captured in the guarantee of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, due process of law, equal protection under the law and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and cruel and unusual punishment. We do not always live up to these aspirations. Over time, we have embarrassed ourselves and tarnished our image as a country that is respectful of civil liberties. We have persecuted dissenters, interned the innocent, suspended habeas corpus, invaded reasonable expectations of privacy. We have even engaged in torture. What, then, can we do to see to it that we more reliably honor our core values? Here’s a start. Presidents have a wide range of official advisers. There is a secretary of defense, a secretary of labor, a national security adviser, to name just a few. The next president should create a new executive branch position: a civil liberties adviser. Within the highest councils of every administration there should be a respected public official whose charge it is to defend our civil liberties against all comers. Many administrations have included high-level officials who have been strong advocates for civil liberties, even though this was not their explicit job description. At times, such officials have made a real difference. During World War I, for example, the administration of Woodrow Wilson conducted a devastating campaign to squelch dissent. Although the Justice Department vigorously supported this campaign — prosecuting some 2,000 people for criticizing Wilson’s war policies — several key figures in the department (most notably John Lord O’Brian and Alfred Bettman) effectively moderated the government’s campaign of repression. Some years later, Francis Biddle, as Franklin Roosevelt’s attorney general, championed respect for individual liberties from within the White House. He vigorously opposed the prosecution of dissenters, the mass detention of enemy aliens, J. Edgar Hoover’s effort to authorize unbridled loyalty investigations of Americans and the internment of Japanese-Americans. Biddle did not always prevail, but he made a critical difference in our nation’s policies. Too often, though, presidents have excluded voices supporting civil liberties from their highest councils. The results — from Harry Truman’s federal loyalty program and Richard Nixon’s prosecution of war protesters to the actions of the current administration — have never been happy. In some sense, these failures are not surprising. The preservation of civil liberties usually involves protecting the rights of dissenters, minorities and outsiders. It is often politically expedient to look the other way when the liberties of such people are denied. But as Francis Biddle observed, every man “who cares about freedom must fight” to protect it “for the other man” as well as for himself. Some may object to the idea of an official civil liberties adviser (or a Council of Civil Liberties Advisers analogous to the Council of Economic Advisers) on the ground that we already have an attorney general, a legal counselor to the president, an office of legal counsel and a host of other lawyers in the executive branch. (The president himself is often a lawyer.) But all these officials, presidents included, have mixed and often conflicting agendas and responsibilities. None is assigned the specific responsibility of articulating and advancing the cause of civil liberties. Of course, the civil liberties advisers may sometimes lose the debate, or even be shunted aside. But sometimes they will win — and at the very least, they will always be heard. Geoffrey R. Stone is a professor of law at the University of Chicago. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 29th, 2008
5:55 am	Revival Bluegrass Forbidden Revivals and the Birth of Bluegrass (by Phyllis Tickle)Share by Jim Wallis (notes) Today at 4:21am In the days of my childhood, summer was the season of the big-tent revivals. More than any other of the myriad things that summer could be and was, it was the revivals that were for me the major descriptor of what a complete and proper summer was. This rather peculiar fixation was, no doubt, due in large measure to the fact that I was forbidden to even get near the things. For my Ph.D., Presbyterian father, everything that happened under those tents was suspect, and most of it was downright dangerous. In those pre-air-conditioning days, we would often get in the car after supper and go for a drive simply to cool off enough to go to sleep. Windows down and breeze blowing, we would drive up and down the wider streets and most of the back roads surrounding the university town where we lived. And we would pass them. We would pass those great, gray-brown interruptions staked out like monoliths on empty city lots and in unmown fields. Always the naked lightbulbs swung by the dozens from strings of overhead wiring. Always the sawdust ... oh, I loved the sawdust and ached to be barefoot in it. Always the metal folding chairs in "discobbobalated" (my mother's word for them) rows, like snaggled teeth in the mouth of a 6-year-old. But more than that, more tantalizing and more forbidden ... always there was the music that passed through the windows of our passing car. I don't like music particularly, at least not in the popular sense of having an iPod or a fine collection of CDs or even a favorite radio station. Music gets in my head, if I let it get near me, and then it takes over. I can't hear the words of my profession for all the nonverbal conversation of the music. But when I was a child, I didn't know that. I just knew that that music, that 1930's revival music, was my soul fulfilled and still feasting. This reaction was, of course, no doubt the precise reason why my father forbade our going to the things in the first place. The only time I can ever remember his breaking his rule, in fact, was one summer night in my seventh or eighth year when I was weepy with longing. To pacify my mother who, undoubtedly, was desperate to pacify me, he stopped the car, took me by the hand, and let me stand just inside the ring of sawdust and listen for perhaps five minutes. It was heaven, or as near as I had, at that stage of life, ever thought to be. But World War II brought a lot of changes with it, as well as a lot of misery and a lot of goodness. No war is ever without a mixed bag of consequences. One of the war's consequences was increased urbanization and much better technology. Both of them forever changed the tent revival, or if not the revival per se, then certainly its music. The men and women who belted out or wept out or crooned out the glories of my childhood had not grown up on electricity, much less on electrified instruments. No, not at all. So they had played instead the acoustic instruments of their own childhoods -- the guitars, fiddles, mandolins, harmonicas, and guitars of their own past. And it was this sound, I later realized, that I so loved. After the war, when music began to electrify and musicians began to entertain, instead of speak for, their audiences, there were apparently more folk than I who yearned to go home to the sound of the old ways. Bluegrass was born. Wonderful, fulsome, acoustic, down-home bluegrass. Lord, how I loved it. In fact, my great claim to fame (if you will forgive my bragging a bit here) is that once I was on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry as a guest of a friend and was standing just back of the wash of the stage lights and adjacent to the corner of the band's dais. Bill Monroe had just finished a set when, in turning from the front of the stage toward its back, he somehow caught his foot on the corner of the dais and fell straight into my arms, mandolin and all. It is not an immodest exaggeration to say that once upon a summer night, I saved Bill Monroe from some kind of nasty discomfort and his mandolin from certain destruction. All that digression aside, however, the truth still is that bluegrass was and is just the revival glory of the '30s come into the 21st century. Blessedly, it still wrings out its sweetness with acoustical instruments and alternates its leads and riffs with egalitarian elegance. If it doesn't include so many hymns now, it still sings the certainty of goodness that those hymns were about. And it is that certainty, I now understand, that drew me as a child and still draws me now. I realized this -- in the sense of at last perceiving it at a level I can articulate -- last Saturday. That day, Sam and I left Lucy, Tennessee, where we live, and drove about 60 miles southeast to Williston, Tennessee. Neither of those places is what anybody would call a major geographic site or a strong economic center. But that doesn't matter. What matters is that the Harrison Crawford Bluegrass Festival is held every June on the old Crawford farm just south of Williston. There's no tent, of course, but there is a huge metal-roofed, open-sided shed that Mr. Crawford built for the festival long before he died. And there is a stage of sorts -- adequate certainly for bluegrass needs. And all the straggly rows of mismatched chairs. And the concessionaires and the porta-potties and the campers and the two-acre parking lot and the music ... Oh, Lord, there it is, rolling over dozens of acres and who even knows how many people as set after set is played, and people clap and sway and clog and, then, transport to that place they all came hoping to go to in the first place. That place where goodness dwells so fully that nothing other than goodness could ever be there. Ah, the goodness. And I left that afternoon of bluegrass and of swaying, clogging, clapping people knowing, yet once again, that my father was right about two things: The music is untamed, and the music can seduce you. He was wrong -- my beloved father -- only in that he himself was, by time and circumstance, forbidden to see or say that the Lord of the Dance calls by many tunes and many means. It is a good and joyful thing for me this summer Sunday to be able to know and understand that. Blessed be the name of the Lord of the Dance. Phyllis Tickle (www.phyllistickle.com) is the founding editor of the religion department of Publishers Weekly and author of The Words of Jesus: A Gospel of the Sayings of Our Lord and the forthcoming fall release, The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
9:32 pm	It Was War for Oil Oh, no, they told us, Iraq isn't a war about oil. That's cynical and simplistic, they said. It's about terror and al-Qaeda and toppling a dictator and spreading democracy and protecting ourselves from weapons of mass destruction. But one by one, these concocted rationales went up in smoke, fire and ashes. And now the bottom line turns out to be ... the bottom line. It is about oil. Alan Greenspan said so last fall. The former chairman of the Federal Reserve, safely out of office, confessed in his memoir, "Everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil." He elaborated in an interview with The Washington Post's Bob Woodward, "If Saddam Hussein had been head of Iraq and there was no oil under those sands, our response to him would not have been as strong as it was in the first Gulf War." Remember, also, that soon after the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld's deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, told the press that war was our only strategic choice. "We had virtually no economic options with Iraq," he explained, "because the country floats on a sea of oil." Shades of Daniel Plainview, the monstrous petroleum tycoon in the movie, "There Will Be Blood." Half-mad, he exclaims, "There's a whole ocean of oil under our feet!" then adds, "No one can get at it except for me!" No wonder American troops only guarded the Ministries of Oil and the Interior in Baghdad, even as looters pillaged museums of their priceless antiquities. They were making sure no one could get at the oil except ... guess who? Here's a recent headline in The New York Times: "Deals With Iraq Are Set to Bring Oil Giants Back." Read on: "Four western companies are in the final stages of negotiations this month on contracts that will return them to Iraq, 36 years after losing their oil concession to nationalization as Saddam Hussein rose to power." There you have it. After a long exile, Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP are back in Iraq. And on the wings of no-bid contracts - that's right, sweetheart deals like those given Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater. The kind of deals you get only if you have friends in high places. And these war profiteers have friends in very high places. Let's go back a few years to the 1990's, when private citizen Dick Cheney was running Halliburton, the big energy supplier. That's when he told the oil industry that, "By 2010 we will need on the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the oil going to come from? While many regions of the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies." Fast forward to Cheney's first heady days in the White House. The oil industry and other energy conglomerates were handed backdoor keys to the White House, and their CEO's and lobbyists were trooping in and out for meetings with their old pal, now Vice President Cheney. The meetings were secret, conducted under tight security, but as we reported five years ago, among the documents that turned up from some of those meetings were maps of oil fields in Iraq - and a list of companies who wanted access to them. The conservative group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club filed suit to try to find out who attended the meetings and what was discussed, but the White House fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep the press and public from learning the whole truth. Think about it. These secret meetings took place six months before 9/11, two years before Bush and Cheney invaded Iraq. We still don't know what they were about. What we know is that this is the oil industry that's enjoying swollen profits these days. It would be laughable if it weren't so painful to remember that their erstwhile cheerleader for invading Iraq - the press mogul Rupert Murdoch - once said that a successful war there would bring us $20-a-barrel oil. The last time we looked, it was more than $140 a barrel. Where are you, Rupert, when the facts need checking and the predictions are revisited? At a Congressional hearing this week, James Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who exactly twenty years ago alerted Congress and the world to the dangers of global warming, compared the chief executives of Big Oil to the tobacco moguls who denied that nicotine is addictive or that there's a link between smoking and cancer. Hansen, whom the administration has tried again and again to silence, said these barons of black gold should be tried for committing crimes against humanity and nature in opposing efforts to deal with global warming. Perhaps those sweetheart deals in Iraq should be added to his proposed indictments. They have been purchased at a very high price. Four thousand American soldiers dead, tens of thousands permanently wounded, hundreds of thousands of dead and crippled Iraqis plus five million displaced, and a cost that will mount into trillions of dollars. The political analyst Kevin Phillips says America has become little more than an "energy protection force," doing anything to gain access to expensive fuel without regard to the lives of others or the earth itself. One thinks again of Daniel Plainview in "There Will Be Blood." His lust for oil came at the price of his son and his soul. ----------- Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday nights on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers. Editor's Note: This Bill Moyers comment on America's oil policy was presented on Friday 27 June 2008 on Bill Moyers Journal. Other portions of the program can be viewed here TO/vh (Comment on this)