Ideologies of Power

Ever alert to the intersection of religion and politics, Ghost Town Orange noticed the Pope's installation homily (Sunday, April 24):

The symbol of the lamb also has a deeper meaning. In the Ancient Near East, it was customary for kings to style themselves shepherds of their people. This was an image of their power, a cynical image: to them their subjects were like sheep, which the shepherd could dispose of as he wished. When the shepherd of all humanity, the living God, himself became a lamb, he stood on the side of the lambs, with those who are downtrodden and killed. This is how he reveals himself to be the true shepherd: "I am the Good Shepherd . . . I lay down my life for the sheep", Jesus says of himself (Jn 10:14f). It is not power, but love that redeems us! This is God's sign: he himself is love. How often we wish that God would make show himself stronger, that he would strike decisively, defeating evil and creating a better world. All ideologies of power justify themselves in exactly this way, they justify the destruction of whatever would stand in the way of progress and the liberation of humanity. We suffer on account of God's patience. And yet, we need his patience. God, who became a lamb, tells us that the world is saved by the Crucified One, not by those who crucified him. The world is redeemed by the patience of God. It is destroyed by the impatience of man.

Additional resource: The (unofficial) Pope Blog.

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988

Two for the filing cabinet and an observation

Filing cabinet entries:

1. Recent volumes of the State Department's massive series Foreign Relations of the United States are available on-line. Cold war historians--take note and dig in!
2. The USDA's new "My Pyramid Plan"

Observation:

The sidebar feature "Today in History" has an obvious right-wing bias. For example, one of today's items reads "1983 President Reagan signs a $165B bail out for Social Security." It seems that when a Republican president signs a massive tax increase it is a "bail out," not a tax increase.

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988

Despoilers of the land at work

Larry Schweiger has a review of Rick Bass's new book, Caribou Rising: Defending the Porcupine Herd, Gwich-'in Culture, and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge:

"Each year," Bass writes, "I become more ashamed and mortified by my government, and by the widening disparity between the people's will and the secret practices, secret allegiances, of big business and government."

(Longtime readers of Ghost Town Orange [are there any?] may remember my post on one of Rick Bass's short stories.)

Meanwhile, in Washington DC the anti-environmentalists are busy at work:

WHEN NOVELIST MICHAEL CRICHTON took the stage before a lunchtime crowd in Washington, D.C., one Friday in late January, the event might have seemed, at first, like one more unremarkable appearance by a popular author with a book to sell. Indeed, Crichton had just such a book, his new thriller, State of Fear. But the content of the novel, the setting of the talk, and the audience who came to listen transformed the Crichton event into something closer to a hybrid of campaign rally and undergraduate seminar. State of Fear is an anti-environmentalist page-turner in which shady ecoterrorists plot catastrophic weather disruptions to stoke unfounded fears about global climate change. However fantastical the book's story line, its author was received as an expert by the sharply dressed policy wonks crowding into the plush Wohlstetter Conference Center of the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI). In his introduction, AEI president and former Reagan budget official Christopher DeMuth praised the author for conveying "serious science with a sense of drama to a popular audience." The title of the lecture was "Science Policy in the 21st Century [transcript pdf]."

[Source: Mother Jones, with a hat tip to Grist, emphasis added.]

Mother Jones has the details on ExxonMobil's funding of anti-environment propaganda--ExxonMobil has pumped more than $8 million into more than 40 think tanks; media outlets; and consumer, religious, and even civil rights groups that preach skepticism about the oncoming climate catastrophe. The American Enterprise Institute has received $960,000 from ExxonMobil. No wonder they provide a platform for Mr. Crichton's imagination: "Shady ecoterrorists plot catastrophic weather disruptions to stoke unfounded fears about global climate change."

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988

Pope Benedict XVI

Johann Christoph Arnold of the Bruderhof knows the new pope, and has met with him several times.

On another encounter I was told that he was not well and would have only a few minutes for me; that he was tired and might seem inattentive due to his physical condition. We had come to Rome with a delegation from the United States and Germany to talk about the role of the Catholic Church in the persecution of Anabaptists four hundred years earlier. Much of this persecution had occurred right in the area of Munich, where Ratzinger comes from, and our delegation included people whose forefathers had been burned at the stake.

At first he did seem tired, but as our conversation progressed, he became more and more attentive, and I will never forget how by the end of the meeting, he had tears in his eyes, and how he encouraged us with words of love and reconciliation: "When hatred can be overcome and forgiveness be given, that is the work of the Holy Spirit. Then we know that we are in Christ."

It is just this message that the world needs today. With the many challenges that face him now--from poverty and AIDS in the developing world to sex scandals in the United States and the decline of faith in Europe and America, the church needs a man like Ratzinger. Clearly he is not popular in some circles: many prayed and hoped for someone more lenient, someone who would give in to their wishes and complaints. But in selecting Ratzinger the cardinals made a brave and bold choice, because the answers to the challenges and crises of our present age will not be found in compromise, but in returning to the simple and age-old truths of Jesus.

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988

John Brown

Madman, terrorist, or crucial spark in the struggle to end slavery in the United States?

John Brown, illustrated by Gregory Nemec for the New York Times 
The new book 'John Brown, Abolitionist': A Soldier in the Army of the Lord by David S. Reynolds was reviewed recently by Barbara Ehrenreich in the New York Times. The militant abolitionist John Brown is frequently dismissed as a crazy person or as a terrorist. David S. Reynolds takes a look at him in light of the times in which he lived:

In the 1850's, it was the pro-slavery forces that held a monopoly on armed force -- terrorizing antislavery citizens in the Midwest as well as the South, or proudly proclaiming, as did one Kansas newspaper editor, that he lived to kill an abolitionist: ''If I can't kill a man, I'll kill a woman; and if I can't kill a woman, I'll kill a child!'' Antislavery activists, on the other hand, were often pacifists and usually the victims of their political opponents -- a relationship symbolized by a South Carolina congressman's crippling beating of the abolitionist Charles Sumner on the floor of the United States Senate. With his guns and pikes, Brown reversed the equation -- stiffening the backbones of Northern abolitionists, terrifying the white South -- and hastening, through both effects, the Civil War and emancipation.

According to the book,

... if terrorism is defined as the random killing of civilians to make a political point, then it is not just misleading to call Brown a terrorist, it is flat-out wrong. Brown selected his victims carefully; all had reportedly threatened abolitionists and the Brown family in particular.

Grounds for further research...

The New York Times has an excerpt from the first chapter. [I don't know if this is a permanently available link.]

Here is another review of John Brown by Kathleen Krog in the Miami Herald.

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988

Bringing History Closer to Home

Check this out: local history research by high school students at primaryresearch.org.

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988

Social Security

The study of history can change your mind. Jeffrey L. Pasley has had his mind changed about Social Security: History Made Me a Liberal (And it has something to teach us about Social Security)[from the current issue of Common-Place, an on-line American history journal:

The current Social Security debate presents a great example of an issue on which history has changed my mind. Before graduate school--and a forced march through the literature on American social history--I was one of those post-baby boomers who thought Social Security was a big crock, an outmoded boondoggle that transferred wealth from younger workers starting families to older people who did not need it, while still not paying retirees enough to live comfortably. Back in the '80s, I was encouraged in these views by a series of articles in neoliberal magazines like the Washington Monthly, the Atlantic, and my journalistic alma mater, the New Republic. While out-and-out conservatives openly pushed privatization (much more openly than President Bush does now with his disingenuous talk of saving Social Security by taking money out of the program, the destroying-the-village-in-order-to-save-it option), the magazines I was reading often took the reasonably liberal position that some sort of smaller, means-tested old-age pension program, paid for through progressive taxation, would be greatly preferable to FDR's universal entitlement.

What Social Security actually accomplished rarely came up in the 1980s debates, any more than it does today. That requires some knowledge of what went before Social Security and the other forms of retirement assistance that now go along with it. Here is where the facts start to cause problems.

Go read the rest. I, too, used to accept the conventional wisdom--Social Security was a Ponzi scheme--and that it wouldn't still be around by the time I retired. The SCLM really had me brain-washed.

For reference, here is Jeffrey L. Pasley's list of Further Reading. Go do your homework before spouting off about Social Security:

While I presume that much literature on the social and policy history of aging has come out in the last fifteen years, it seemed fair given the premise of this piece (and less time consuming, too), to rely on my old comps reading. Thus most of the detail above, except for the congressional debate on revolutionary pensions, comes from David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York, 1978); Robert A. Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York, 1976); Philip J. Greven Jr., Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970); Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790-1840 (New York, 1989); and Gary B. Nash, "Poverty and Poor Relief in Pre-Revolutionary Philadelphia," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser, 33 (1976): 3-30. It is my own spin, however, so none of these authors should be blamed for my lapses. I first learned about the Civil War pension system in Theda Skocpol's American Political Development seminar, and her book Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, 1995) controversially places great interpretive stress on this lost first welfare state. To remind myself about the 1930s, I exhumed a couple of other books I have had for years: Alan Brinkley, Voices of Protest: Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and the Great Depression (New York, 1983), and William E. Leuchtenberg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York, 1963). The neoliberal case against Social Security as I knew it is summarized in Phillip Longman, Born to Pay: The New Politics of Aging in America (Boston, 1987). The best coverage of the current Social Security debate is appearing at Talking Points Memo, a blog edited by Joshua Micah Marshall, the only prominent political journalist I am aware of with a Ph.D. in early American history. I suspect he remembers his comps reading, too. The Florida "dictator professors" bill, one of several Horowitz-inspired measures around the country, came to my attention via the editor of Common-Place and a posting by the king (sultan?) of historian bloggers, Juan Cole.

And I'll add one more resource: the very useful Center for Economic and Policy Research. Look for the Social Security Reporting Review, where stories about Social Security are analyzed--see what the SCLM neglects to report...

God our security,
who alone can defend us
against the principalities and powers
that rule this present age;
may we trust in no weapons
except the whole armor of faith,
that in dying we may live,
and, having nothing, we may own the world,
through Jesus Christ. AMEN
--Janet Morley, All desires known, 1988

Civic Duty vs. Distractions

If I were a good citizen, I would be plowing through the new report on the 'intelligence failure' regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. But I would rather browse the New York Public Library Digital Gallery, play this grid-game [I was able to score 1437; then my son Tim stepped up and scored 1576], or play Snood (shareware download available).

This morning's op/ed in USA Today summarizes neatly and tells what the report didn't say:

More interesting, though, is what's missing from this new report. The report didn't attempt to connect the intelligence failures to the fateful decision they encouraged: to go to war on what proved to be false grounds.

If the report is taken at face value, this was all the fault of the spy agencies' blundering. The bipartisan commission found no evidence that intelligence judgments were changed because of political pressure. The commission chairs, senior federal Judge Laurence Silberman and former Virginia senator Charles Robb, reiterated that finding on Thursday.

But in a few telling paragraphs among more than 600 pages, the panel allowed that some analysts were influenced by the conventional wisdom, which said Saddam Hussein was hiding an arsenal, and "the sense that challenges to it - or even refusals to find its confirmation - would not be welcome."

Little wonder. In the months before the war, Vice President Cheney said there was "no doubt" Saddam was amassing weapons. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that even "a trained ape" knew it was true. President Bush repeatedly made the case not just that war in Iraq was necessary, but that it was urgent.

That is not a climate that would lead anyone to conclude that facts still needed to be discerned. And it is one that needs change, beginning at the intelligence agencies.

Even 9/11 and the deaths of more 1,500 U.S. troops in Iraq haven't budged them from bad habits, particularly refusals to share information and encourage differing views, the commission said. The nation's new intelligence czar will need to knock heads.

For the political leadership, the task is simpler. They need only leave room for facts to get in the way of their conclusions - and use war only as a last resort.

Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing column yesterday [Washington Post, registration required, no permanent link?] had links to the full unclassified part of the report[PDF] itself and much more:

Conclusion 26: "The Intelligence Community did not make or change any analytic judgments in response to political pressure to reach a particular conclusion, but the pervasive conventional wisdom that Saddam retained WMD affected the analytic process."

The commission acknowledges this: "Many observers of the Intelligence Community have expressed concern that Intelligence Community judgments concerning Iraq's purported WMD programs may have been warped by inappropriate political pressure."

Mr. Froomkin provided links to references to this part of the report:

• "Senator Carl Levin, 'Buildup to War on Iraq,' Congressional Record (July 15, 2003) at pp. S9358-S9360
• Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, 'Some Iraq Analysts Felt Pressure from Cheney Visits,' Washington Post (June 5, 2003) at p. A1
• Nicholas D. Kristof, 'White House in Denial,' New York Times (June 13, 2003) at p. A33
• Jay Taylor, 'When Intelligence Reports Become Political Tools . . . ' Washington Post (June 29, 2003) at p. B2
• Douglas Jehl, 'After the War: Weapons Intelligence; Iraq Arms Critic Reacts to Report on Wife,' New York Times (Aug. 8, 2003) at p. A8
• Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus, 'As Rationales for War Erode, Issue of Blame Looms Large,' Washington Post (July 10, 2004) at p. A1
• Glenn Kessler, 'Analyst Questioned Sources' Reliability; Warning Came Before Powell Report to UN,' Washington Post (July 10, 2004) at p. A9
• T. Christian Miller and Maura Reynolds, 'Question of Pressure Splits Panel,' Los Angeles Times (July 10, 2004) at p. A1
• James Risen and Douglas Jehl, 'Expert Said to Tell Legislators He Was Pressed to Distort Some Evidence,' New York Times (June 25, 2003) at p. A11
• Robert Schlesinger, 'Bush Aides Discredit Analysts' Doubts on Trailers,' The Boston Globe (June 27, 2003) at p. A25
• Seymour M. Hersh, 'The Stovepipe,' The New Yorker (Oct. 27, 2003) at p. 77."

[for most of these links, I presume registration will be required; many will be behind the subscription barrier.] I will read this stuff when I'm not distracted by other things.