Swift-Boating McCain

In a striking display of cowardice, the McCain campaign has declined to comment on a current book by Jerome Corsi, which regurgitates the familiar anti-Obama smears (drug addict, Muslim, etc.).  This would be unremarkable in politics, had not Senator McCain, in his earlier and more honorable phase, taken a firm position against such nonsense.  Does he even remember calling for a "politics of civility" and scolding some of the early bad-mouthers?

For that display of courtesy, the candidate received a public tongue-lashing from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, and so now, it appears, he has chickened out.  He will stand by, helplessly, while others do on his behalf work which he positively knows to be dirty.  So much for guts.

This saddens us, for many reasons.  We are sad to see McCain's good instincts, which are many, fall victim to cynicism and lust for power.  We are sad because, whether he wins or loses the presidency, McCain will have permanently surrendered the reputation for (comparative) honesty and integrity which made him an appealing and effective across-the-aisle legislator.

Beyond our sadness, though, we are a little surprised that McCain would put up with this, when it so clearly poses a risk to his own aspirations.  The bottom-feeders of American politics, those ultrapartisan hacks who seemingly have nothing better to do with their lives than spew slander, hoping that it will slowly be passed upward along the food-chain, pose an equal threat to candidates of both parties. 

For a demonstration, click the link up top to see the website of "Vietnam Veteran Against John McCain."  Its self-proclaimed mission is to "dispel the myth of  [the] straight talkin’, principled, maverick war hero," and to argue that McCain is unfit for the presidency.  It labels him "the Manchurian Candidate," and argues that his entire military career (and possibly the political career which followed) was the result of special favors from secret backers.  It accuses him of belittling the families of PWs and MIAs, of "collaborating with the Communists."   

As with the best lies, there is an element of truth to most of this.  As the son and grandson of admirals, McCain never lacked protective cover for his many youthful screw-ups.  Like some 9/11 families, some families of soldiers lost in Viet Nam went on to demand more from the government -- including especially sympathetic listeners like McCain -- than it was able to provide, and eventually earned a certain measure of firm treatment.  As for "collaboration," he has often admitted that he broke down under interrogation.

But even those who don't support McCain's candidacy will see at a glance that the website as a whole is the work of crazy people -- and not sweet cuddly, crazy people, either.  It is crazy, mean-spirited and more than a little paranoid.  No surprise, since the guy behind it all -- an former Green Beret named Ted Sampley -- has a track record of crazy, mean and paranoid.

If the name of the crew sounds familiar, it is because a similarly-named organization launched a bitter attack on John Kerry, which may well have cost him the presidency.  Sampley was behind that, too, although he was greatly assisted by donations from oil gazillionaire T. Boone Pickens. Together they spread what appear to be utter and complete lies about Kerry's military service, which to this day Pickens refuses to acknowledge as lies.

So here's our point:  These crazies can cost a candidate the election.  If McCain thinks that he is playing it safe by letting Jerome Corsi's slander go uncondemned, he had best watch his own six, because Ted Sampley is closing fast.

Fighting the Dirty Finn

Stephen Colbert explains Olympic geopolitics, circa 1952.

The Promised Land

"Diversity" in these here parts means that you're free to be Danish or Swedish or Norwegian, but at the end of the day, you all toddle on down to the [Lutheran church] on the corner.

A Connecticut reporter visits the upper Midwest.  And cruelly discriminates against Finns.

Pope Hangs with Lutherans

Apparently, Ratzinger has made a long custom of gathering his former students together for academic check-ins, and has not given the custom up since getting his new job.  So a couple of Lutherans, Martin Hengel and Peter Stuhlmacher, both retired from Tubingen, will be among those invited to lecture at Castel Gandolfo later this month.

We propose that, after a big supper and a few beers, when the Pontiff appears to be dozing a bit, they ask for his autograph.  And then slip him a copy of the Augsburg Confession.

They Got Bigfoot!

He's in a freezer.  In Atlanta.  Next to the Montauk Monster.

Christianists Bear False Witness

Surfing these wild Internets, we came across a passionate op-ed piece in the Kansas City Star, entitled "Don't Forget That Our nation Was Born to be Christian."  It argues the usual "America is a Christian nation" case, which we at the Egg have actually become tired of both mocking and rebutting.  

What jumped out at us in this case, though, was a quotation attributed to George Washington: "It is impossible to rightly govern …without God and the Bible.”   Honestly, this didn't sound like the Indispensable Man, whose belief has always seemed in our reading to be in a somewhat less distinctively delineated god than the Biblical one.  So we wondered about the ellipsis.  Had some sly qualifier originally taken the place of those three dots?  

Three minutes with our parish subintroducta, Madame Google, turned up something interesting.  The quotation is completely bogus.  It is one among many spurious remarks routinely attributed by Christianists to various Founders, often cited from specific documents -- in this case, Washington's 1795 Thanksgiving Day proclamation.  Click here for more information.

So, yes, there is a cottage industry in the fabrication and dissemination of fake quotations, designed to make the Founders appear to be more pious, or at least more conventionally so, than they actually were.  Which, for our money, is a violation of the Eighth Commandment.

Who's the New Hitler?

For years, we have listened to well-intentioned supporters of the Iraq adventure make the "if you could stop Hitler" case.  That is to say, they assert that Saddam Hussein was like der Fuehrer, except that we had the chance to stop him before the Anschluss (and, by extension, before the Final Solution).

Lately, we have heard a variation on this argument used by opponents of Senator Obama.  Not long ago, a certain officer in a certain branch of the armed services, shortly before destroying Father A. in badminton, asserted baldly that Obama's willingness to talk to Ahmadinejad without preconditions "is exactly what Neville Chamberlain did."

Let's just call time on this piffle, shall we?  It is every bit as silly as the left's knee-jerk assertion that every conservative is a fascist.  (Do you notice they don't do that so much anymore?)  Chamberlain's mistake had nothing to do with preconditions; it was in believing that the rise of Nazism was a response to the Treaty of Versailles (which it may have been) and that diplomatic efforts to soften those terms could solve the problem (which they couldn't).  But in any case, although Saddam was a monster and Ahmadinejad is, at the very least, a creep, neither one is Hitler.  And do you know why?  Hitler commanded the most powerful army in Europe.   England's decision to declare war on Germany -- a decision that Chamberlain ultimately made -- was very nearly suicidal, and certainly would have been without help from Russia and, eventually, America.

So the situations are not remotely comparable.  America now may bear some passing resemblance to the late British Empire, but the nasties in the Middle East are not Hitler -- they are simply the nasties in the Middle East, the same ones who kept the Brits busy back in the day.

But here's our point, and -- fair warning -- it's a scary one.  There is one world leader who controls a truly significant army, including numerous nukes attached to long-range missiles.  This leader is clearly determined to project his nation's power into neighboring countries, by force if necessary, and he does not appear to take diplomatic dissuasion seriously.

If we really want to play "you could stop Hitler," we need to attack Russia.

Click the link for a quickie comparison of Putin's underreported prewar machinations in East Ossetia to Hitler's in Czechoslovakia.  Think about it long and hard, and the odds are you will feel considerable sympathy for the much-vilified Mr. Chamberlain.

Chinese Own America, Now Buying France

For decades, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his Front Nationale have been the jokers in the deck of French politics.  "France for the French," they have shouted, fists raised and flags waving, at rallies and marches and (we suppose) dinner tables. 

This week, they sold their headquarters outside Paris to a Shanghai university.  Tous ensemble, mes amis:  France pour les Chinois!

Al Qaeda Declares War on Cucumbers

You want to laugh, but then you cry.

Our friends at Al Qaeda in Mesopotamian are losing support in the provinces because, among other things, they have forbidden women to buy cucumbers.  And yes, you can guess why.

It should be funny, because it so clearly reveals what idiots these guys are.  It would be funny, if only these idiots were not also bloodthirsty lunatics.  Such is their horror of female sexuality that, according to a Sunni elder quoted by Reuters, "They even killed female goats because their private parts were not covered and their tails were pointed upward, which they said was haram."  They also prohibit selling ice-cream, because it did not exist in the days of Muhammad. 

Yeah.  And then you cry.  Because the same elder reports, "I saw them slaughter a nine-year old boy like a sheep because his family didn't pledge allegiance to them."

More from Cenk Uygur

In the same post linked below, Uygur makes a side point:

I love the idea of someone saying Alexander the Great can't lead his empire because he's cheating on his wife (by the way, doesn't Alexander's bisexuality single-handedly destroy the idea that gays can't serve in the military).

That doesn't mean that we at the Egg will suddenly begin supporting adultery, in uniform or out, or expect our red-state readers to chill out on homosexuality.  We don't, they won't.  But let's be honest about why, shall we?  It's not about "unit cohesion."  It's about our moral convictions, which are fundamentally religious -- and must therefore be treated very carefully by a nation dedicated to secularism and pluralism.

Stick a Fork in Edwards

'Cuz he's done.

That seems to be the consensus among the media chatterati.  Probably correctly, too -- John Edwards looks to go the way of Gary Hart, slinking off into the sunset, only to reappear years later as an unelectable elder statesman, distinguished primarily by writing op-ed pieces.  Morally, this seems only fitting.  Both men committed high-profile adultery, which is (need we remind our readers?)  one of God's top ten no-nos.  

Hart's press-baiting was more egregious, but on Edwards' affair was more profoundly wretched, if only because he cheated on Elizabeth.  We love that woman.  And his snarky non-defense -- "first of all, she was in remission" -- makes our gorge rise.  So, yeah, we at the Egg are disappointed by Edwards, and don't think he has much of a future in politics.  (And for crying out loud, don't pity the man:  He's still young, rich and good-looking.)

HuffPo blogger Cenk Uygur fights the tide of received opinion, and complains that it shouldn't oughtta be this way.  He makes a few points worth considering:  

Does John Edwards care less about poor people today than he did yesterday? Would his affair lead him to change his position on NAFTA? How would it alter his policy on Iran? ... 

Some will claim, as they did with Bill Clinton, that it's not the affair but the lies that went along with it. Really? ... Every man that has ever cheated on his wife has lied (and so has every woman who has ever cheated). It is part and parcel of the affair.

True enough, but not convincing.  More interesting is Uygur's observation that John McCain's multiple adulteries don't seem to have ended his political career -- and yes, he's fairly open about them now, decades after the fact.  But was he then?  And Uygur doesn't mention a certain former mayor of New York, but we will, at the drop of a hat.  Why has time rehabilitated these men, but not Hart or, as we are given to predict, Edwards?

Frankly, we are inclined to suspect a difference in partisan groupthink.  To put it as bluntly as possible, Democrats are slow to forgive a man for cheating on his wife with another woman; Republicans are slow to forgive a man for cheating on his wife with another man.  

If true, this is the result of their respective party bases.  Democrats skew feminist and pro-gay, Republicans skew macho and anti-gay.  So, once a member of the party faithful gets over his or her initial reaction to a scandal, there comes a time when the various cliches are repeated into his or her ear.  Man cheats with a woman, Democrats mutter "How could that SOB do such a thing to his loving, smart, accomplished wife?" while Republicans grunt "Hey, men have urges, y'know?"  Man cheats with a man, it's "Poor guy, forced to deny the truth about his nature all those years" versus "Another damn pervert, like Roy Cohn, Edgar Hoover, Bob Allen, Mark Foley, Jeff Gannon and Larry Craig."

Oh, sure, this is too simple.  There are exceptions and qualifiers.  Most Dems continued to support Bill Clinton during the impeachment -- but he was an embattled president, and to abandon him was effectively to abandon your own party and all its causes.  (Note that in the Spitzer case, even the embattled-executive impulse couldn't trump the "his loving wife".)  We'd be surprised if the GOP ever runs David Vittner for anything again, although in his case the rage may come less from adultery or lies than from paying for it.

But, even with some exceptions, we think we're onto something.

Lambeth: Forgive Us Our Debts?

Apparently, the boycott by 200 conservative bishops left the Church of England with a deficit of something like 1.2 million sterling.  

This leads to two thoughts.  First:  So this thing is organized by the CofE, but actually funded by a fee paid by each bishop?  Or by the various national churches? No wonder the poorer countries found it expedient to stay home.

And second:  You think they'll have the chutzpah to ask the Episcopalians for a handout?  (Do you even think Anglicans know what chutzpah is?)

Do Us a Favor

Click the link up top, and vote for Natalia Paruz, "the Saw Lady."  And do it NOW -- after 8pm EST Sunday and before 8pm Monday.  [NOTE:  the link has been fixed, thanks to a sharp-eyed reader.]

Natalia is a New York City subway performer, and we at the Egg are asking you to support her in a competition among subway performers.  She plays the musical saw, a rare and spookily beautiful instrument.  And she's damn good; they routinely give her the best spot in the system, right by the restrooms in Times Square -- and she always has a crowd.  But she is much more than that. 

For years, Natalia has organized an International Musical Saw Festival, which draws musicians and aficionados from all over the world (and this year, it drew them to the church where Father Anonymous is blessed to preside).  She is also an expert in bells and other percussive instruments, the more obscure the better.  Although Jewish herself, she plays with the handbell choir at Father A.'s parish, just for the fun of making things ring.

Oh, and she's a delightful human being, too.  If you'd like to learn more, check out her site here -- but above all, vote.

Baptists "Just Say No to the Big O"

They mean Oprah, not that other big O. Apparently.

The Salt Lake Tribune has an article about the rising tide of Christianist complaints about Oprah Winfrey's "nontraditional spirituality." This from people who won't baptize babies, and publicized by people who believe ... well, Mormon stuff.

It's not that they are mistaken about Oprah, necessarily. Just that they are mistaken about tradition.

U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Okay, okay.  We know the Olympics are supposed to be about international cooperation, rather than competition.  And we also know that nobody takes that seriously -- people root for their own country, at least as much as for the best athlete and far more than for an idealized vision of pure sportsmanship, whatever that means.

Since the only Olympic sport we at the Egg care about even remotely is fencing (and, in winter, the biathlon), this poses a bit of a problem.  Rooting for US fencers is a lot like being a Cubs fan.  Through most of Olympic history, no US fencer won much of anything until Peter Westbrook walked off with a bronze in the 1980s.

Yeah, well, that was then, baby.  The Curse of the Billy Goat has been broken, at least as far as fencing goes.  Mariel Zagunis, Sada Jacobson and Rebecca Ward may not be household names, but as far as we're concerned they are national heroes.  They just swept the Women's Sabre competition, respectively taking gold, silver and bronze, and putting the US (temporarily) ahead in the overall medal count.  More to the point:  they are the only Americans ever to sweep an Olympic fencing event.  Ever.

Courtesy of an emergency call from the splendid Mrs. A, Father Anonymous was able interrupt his sermon-writing and catch the last magnificent touch on television.  When an interviewer asked the girls how it felt, at the awards ceremony, to see three American flags unfurled side-by-side, Jacobsen burst into tears and said "It was the most beautiful sight in the world."

At least today, darling.

The Fireworks Begin

No sooner has a military tribunal sentenced Salim Hamdam to time served plus five months, than the Pentagon begins hemming and hawing.  A spokesman says, equivocally, "He will serve his time for the conviction and then he will still be an enemy combatant, and as an enemy combatant the process for potential transfer or release will apply." And since they don't transfer or release prisoners to Hamdam's native Yemen .... hmm ... maybe they'll just keep him at Gitmo forever.

Our favorite bit of hyperbole is Olberman's aside, when reporting the original verdict and predicting the outcome:  "How much Constitution is there left for you to shred, Mr. President?  Our favorite bit of understatement in the WaPo article:

Defense Department officials said there are concerns about the public perception of holding Hamdan after his prison term runs out, because it could label the military commissions a "show process" with no meaning to its sentences.

Really? They think that, do they?

The System ... Works?

All through the trial of Salim Hamdam, one question has been nagging at us.  Assuming that he committed the war crimes for which he is on trial, we asked ourselves, how serious are those crimes, exactly?

He was Osama bin Laden's driver.  And bin Laden is a horrible man, one of the few human beings on earth whom, given five minutes in a locked room, we at the Egg would gladly beat to death with our own fists. 

But Hamdam was his driver.  His chauffeur.  Sure, it's a form of collaboration, but it has to be the least collaborative form there is.  Blaming him for 9/11 is like blaming Iraq on the pilot of Air Force One, or waterboarding on the cab driver who gives David Addington a lift across town.

Given our level of confidence in the military court hearing the case, we fully expected that a guilty verdict would be (a) inevitable and (b) immediately followed by the maximum sentence allowable.  And when the prosecutors asked for 30-to-life, we fully expected them to get it.  And that's where the anonymous tribunal caught us off guard.

They sentenced him to 5 1/2 years, including time served -- and he has already served five years.  The guy could be free in six months.  (Although the Navy also says it won't release anybody it considers a threat, so expect some legal and political fireworks in early 2009).

We can't help wondering whether the jury was sending a message up through the chain of command, and into the political leadership.  If so, it might have been something like this: 

You people, the incompetent politicians and the hamstrung brass, have spent years attacking the wrong target, and everybody knows it.  Seven years later, bin Laden is still alive, and the whole country knows it, and it reveals your impotence to the world.  So you figured we could use this guy -- the driver, for God's sake -- as a scapegoat, a straw man to knock down in Osama's place and appease the bloodthirsty crowd.  And you figured that we would be angry and vindictive and obedient enough to do it, didn't you?  But guess what:  We are still have something none of the rest of you, on our side or theirs, seems to have left:  Our honor.

We at the Egg find even our own icy-cold hearts are actually touched by the HuffPo description of the sentencing:

Hamdan thanked the jurors for the sentence and repeated his apology for having served bin Laden.

"I would like to apologize one more time to all the members and I would like to thank you for what you have done for me," Hamdan told the panel of six U.S. military officers, hand-picked by the Pentagon for the first U.S. war crimes trial in a half century. ...

"I hope the day comes that you return to your wife and daughters and your country, and you're able to be a provider, a father, and a husband in the best sense of all those terms," the judge told Hamdan.

Hamdan, dressed in a charcoal sports coat and white robe, responded: "God willing."

1936: The Transgender Olympics

Apparently, Dora Ratjen wasn't the only Olympian with some candy to hide.  Per Jennifer Finney Boylan in the Times:

In the 1936 Olympic Games, the sprinter Stella Walsh — running for Poland and known as the fastest woman in the world — was beaten by Helen Stephens of St. Louis, who set a world record by running 100 meters in 11.4 seconds. After the race, a Polish journalist protested that Stephens must be a man. After all, no woman in the world could run that fast.

Olympic officials performed a “sex test” on Stephens, who was found, in fact, to be female, proving once and for all that a person could be incredibly fast and female at the same time.

Forty-four years later, Walsh, who had become an American citizen, was shot to death in the parking lot of a discount store in Cleveland. Her autopsy revealed a surprise: It was Stella Walsh, and not Helen Stephens, who turned out to have been male all along, at least according to the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s office.

 As she goes on to explain, Walsh seems to have had male genitalia, but both xx and xy chromosomes.  The same year, Hermann/Dora Ratjen was also competing for Germany.    Apparently, Ratjen's genitalia were "ambiguous."  Now, it strikes us a weird coincidence that both of them were competing in the same year, but maybe not so much.  The more we study it, the more evidently the biological line between male and female is neither bright nor clear. Boylan argues that Walsh was a woman and Ratjen was a man, not because of their physical characteristics but because of how they lived their lives.  Walsh lived as  a woman; Ratjen, after the competitive years were over, went back to life as a man. 

Boylan's essay, which compares Ratjen and Walsh, is a thought-provoking meditation on the nature of gender and its relation to sport.  Well and good.  But we at the Egg are still stuck on the Berlin Olympics.  Nazis, crossdressers, androgynes, and Jesse Owen shoving it in Hitler's face.  Seriously -- weirdest Olympiad ever? 

You Sank My Battleship!

We at the Egg are no experts on military procurement.  But we are taxpayers, and we do have a passing interest in the way our money is spent.  (Our government spending priorities?  Education, mass transit, and sending diminutive ministers to into space). 

So we are troubled to learn of the Pentgon's latest massive -- what's that quaint word they use in the armed services? Oh, yes -- clusterfuck.  Seems the Navy brass have been lying to Congress for years about their very expensive new battleship, the Zumwalt class DDG-1000.  Specifically, they have been talking about its enhanced "survivability" in combat, even though it cannot defend itself against missiles.

Missiles, we might remind you, are what people often use when they want to blow up a boat and kill a lot of sailors. They've been doing this since World War II, and show no inclination to stop.  They also use torpedoes, which are basically missiles in the water.  And although pretty good in shallow water, this new craft has underpowered sonar, which means it isn't especially good at deep-water antisubmarine warfare.  In other words:  it can't defend itself competently against the two main weapons with which it could expect to be attacked.

For a sharp analysis written for military professional, click the link.  For a more civilian-friendly description, read the Wired takeout.

To its credit, the Navy has canceled this program after the delivery of one ship.  To its lasting shame, the Navy commissioned this floating coffin in the first place.  And to the chagrin of Americans concerned about wasteful military spending (see under:  comfort pods), the Navy paid for all this with our money.

I'd like my Mars trip now, please.

Department of No Surprise: Bioweapons Edition

From ABC News:  Feds:  Anthrax Suspect Had Mental Health Issues.

Really?  A guy who works for decades with the world's deadliest toxins, in a top-secret laboratory, then begins (allegedly) mailing the stuff out before finally killing himself?  We had no idea.

"See you at the debate, bitches"

So says Paris Hilton, in her new campaign ad.

Yes, that's right: campaign ad. Since McCain used her image in his now-famous "Celebrity" ad, she reasons that he's made her a candidate. And as the voice-over says: "He's the oldest celebrity in the world. Like, super old. Old enough to remember when dancing was a sin, and beer was served in a bucket. But is he ready to lead?"

Click above for the ad, or here for some background. And may we add: We have never loved Paris Hilton more than we do at this moment.

Lambeth: Wrap-Up

Well.  That was a bit of a disappointment, at least for snarky bloggers seeking fireworks at the expense of somebody else's religious community.  Also for legit journalists seeking a story with a beginning, middle and -- especially -- an end.  It was probably disappointing for ideologically polarized Anglicans seeking victory over their enemies, even at the cost of their Communion, fiat iustitia et ruat caelum.

But for anybody who hopes to preserve the Anglican Communion, or even the memory of the Elizabethan Settlement, this year's Lambeth Conference was a modest, qualified and don't-say-it-out loud success.  Nobody walked out, nobody exchanged anathemas (except perhaps in the men's room after cocktails), nobody excommunicated anybody.  Since Archbishop Williams designed the event to (a) exclude the most polarizing figures, and (b) preclude resolutions, the grandstanding was presumably minimized and there were no resolutions to pass.

This doesn't mean that anybody left overflowing with good cheer.  They didn't.  Nor does it mean that a schism has been averted.  It hasn't.  But, still, it could all have been a lot worse.  

For a good summary, mixed with some critique of the press coverage, click the link to GetReligion.

Summer Camp

Andrew Sullivan has blogged a couple of pieces under the heading "Exhuming Newman."  They are worth reading in their entirety here and here , not only out of academic interest but because of light they may shine onto current events.

The gist is that John Henry Newman, the famous convert first from Evangelicalism to Anglo-Catholicism, and then from Canterbury to Rome, was "an effeminate, delicate intellectual who had almost no real interaction with women at all and bonded mainly with younger men."  In short, what in crude boyhood we would have called a pansy. 

Of immediate interest is Newman's lifelong intimate friendship with the linguist Ambrose St. John -- a friendship so intimate that the two men arranged to be buried in the same grave.  (A reader observes that Robert Bellarmine had done something similar).  Sullivan is irritated by current plans to exhume and rebury Newman without St. John, a violation of the wishes expressed by both men, which he attributes to "the now pathologically homophobic Vatican."

Is is nothing new to observe that early Anglo-Catholic circles seem to have included a great many intense male friendships.  Nor is is only then, or only among Anglicans.  Setting aside purely theological concerns, we suspect that a great deal of emotional resistance to liturgical renewal has historically come from a perception that its proponents are insufficiently masculine.  (Come on.  Men in dresses with silk gowns funny hats?  How does that not sound gay, prima freakin' facie?)  This perception almost always goes unspoken, and must be teased out by historians, as for example by a close-reading of Kinglsey's attack on Newman, searching for buried codewords.

Now, in rush the qualifiers.  (1) Newman may have been, ahem, a pansy, but that does not mean that he was "gay" in the modern sense, much less "queer."  The evidence is strong that he was serious in his commitment to celibacy, and we are inclined to suspect that the only consummation he and St. John contemplated was a spiritual union beyond the grave.  The same is surely true of a great many lesser figures with similar characteristics. (2) Victorian same-sex friendships, as scholars have demonstrated over and over, often included a degree of physical and verbal intimacy that misleads modern readers -- if they had all been as gay as they sound, there would never have been any Edwardians.  (3) Then as now, we are only describing a minority even of the ultra-high-church crowd.  (Why, the Egg pressroom itself is as masculine a retreat as one can imagine, from the buffalo head mounted over the pipe rack to the college football regalia covering up some vintage Playboys.) 

But with all that said, let us acknowledge the underlying reality:  many of the best minds and most creative ministries in catholic-revival circles have always belonged to men who were not romantically  inclined toward women.  Some of them were celibate, others probably were not.  Nearly everybody has always known this, but -- what with good manners and  charitable assumptions -- it has always been a difficult and uncomfortable thing to talk about.

Some readers, especially the young and naive, may therefore find it remarkable that so much of the hostility toward equal treatment of gay people in Christianity has come from the high church types.  (Which it has -- among Lutherans, for example, this has created the truly strange alliance between the Society of the Holy Trinity and the WordAlone Network , organizations that in a rightly-ordered world would be devoted to mutual assured destruction.) Thus, the charge against Gene Robinson is being led not only by crypto-tyrants like Peter Akinola, but also by deeply closeted gay bishops, apparently including  Lindsay Unwin.  Look at the so-called "theocons," and then count the career bachelors.  If younger readers don't get this, it is because they no longer recognize the stereotypical "self-hating homosexual," who like his brother the "self-hating Jew," is en route to being forgotten, an image requiring a footnote for graduate students when they stumble over it in American literature of the 1950s.

What's up with that?  There is a lot to say on the subject.  At the most superficial level, catholic revival movements, by definition, have a strong conservative element.  They are all about repristination and the retrieval of lost traditions.  But of course, they also have a radical, counter-cultural element -- click the sidebar for info on Anglo-Catholic Socialism.  At the emotional and psychological level, just as the slave may begin to love his chains because they are all he knows, so too the repressed love their repression, the closeted their closet.   For many gay men of a certain generation, the closet is a warm and comfortable place, and they wish nothing more than to have theirs well-furnished with the likes of Ambrose St. John.  Women were bad enough, but nothing compared to the post-Stonewall gays and queers, who insist both on being here and having others get used to it.  They are a terrifying sign of the end times.

Our point is that the battle over the Church's treatment of gays, and especially gay clergy, is to some degree a battle between the elderly closet queens and the youngish queer activists.  And there are days when one is tempted to set conviction aside and just let them fight it out.

Apparently, Some Muslims Don't Hate Puppies

We will stand by the substance of our own post below, but have to acknowledge an unrelated newspaper hoax in Britain.  The Daily Mail ran a story claiming that a picture of a cute widdle puppy sitting in a policeman's hat had sparked the usual uproar among English Muslims.

Turns out the Daily Mail was full of puppy-poop.  Click the link to see a cute dog.

Nazis Forced Man to Dress as Woman

 You think this is about the Max Mosley incident incident.  But it's actually a bit of Berlin Olympics trivia.

In 1936, afraid of getting their Fascist clocks cleaned by freedom-loving Americans, the Nazis decided to cheat.  They pressured a fellow named Hermann Ratjen to pass himself off as a female high-jumper named Dora.  S/he took fourth, and -- more remarkably -- continued competing for two more years.  Her teammates say they "never suspected a thing," despite the fact that Ratjen "was pretty weird" and had a deep voice.   

We learned all of this from our newest enthusiasm, an online newsletter called Lutheran (True) Confessions.  Click the link for a witty and well-written take on ELCA politics, especially the sex stuff.

The Horror, the Horror

When summer becomes insufferable, youngsters here in the Minor Outlying Islands often yearn for the sea breeze and a chance to chug overpriced drinks in an atmosphere of vulgar hedonism.  Thus, the exodus to the East End begins.  By train, by car or by bus (excusez nous, we meant to say jitney), they haul themselves out to the once-pleasant Hamptons or, for those without a trust fund, the bucolic fishing village called Montauk.

And there, the horror begins.

Summer's boozy pleasures have been disrupted this year by sightings of a hideous creature, said to resemble a hairless dog with a beak and foreclaw.  

Legal secretaries are afraid to stumble home to their rented cottage in the wee hours, and ex-jocks trying to make it as stockbrokers have been seen retching piteously into the shrubbery, no doubt after glimpsing the Montauk Monster.  

The Church has not been silent in the face of this abomination -- at least not entirely.

One Manhattan congregation bravely hosted a prayer vigil, to support those endangered by this creature.  And make no mistake:  this is an urban problem.  An astute zoological observer has observed that a creature so hideous must surely have its origin in the most polluted waterway in North America, Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal.

Now, we at the Egg have a confession.  These stories chill our blood at a personal level. (Or as they say these days, "a deeply personal level.") Years ago, we briefly shared a Montauk cottage.  And in those same years, we lived in a third-floor walkup beside the Gowanus Canal.  Our memories are hazy, but there was one morning when we woke up red with what must have been claw marks.  So, ever since the story broke, we have have hunkered down in the sacristy, surrounded by scapulars and Latin formularies, trying to exorcise ourselves of one haunting terror.  In our youth, we may -- just may -- have hooked up with the Montauk Monster.

Muslims Hate Puppies

You think we're joking, don't you?  But we're not.

The Saudi religious police, whose duty is to enforce Wahabism in all its extremity, have recently demanded that pet stores stop selling cats and dogs, and that owners desist from walking their pets.  And why?  Apparently, men sometimes use the animals to "make passes on [sic] women and disturb families."

These are the same Saudis, mind you, who are said to rank among America's closest allies in the war against Muslim extremism.  The same Saudis who recently banned the color red  because it might make people think of St. Valentine's Day.

So, one more time:  who exactly hates our freedoms?

A Month Without Plastic?

No cellophane wrapping, go-cups, not even plastic toothbrushes.  Can it be done?

BBC correspondent Christine Jeavans is trying.  Click the link for more.

US Services Commit Atrocities Against Our Own Troops

And cover them up, at the highest levels.

Rep. Jane Harman visited a VA hospital where doctors told her that 41% of the female veterans seen there reported that they were victims of sexual assault while serving in the US military.  Assault, that is, by their fellow-soldiers.  29% of them were raped.  An independent investigation by the GAO suggests that the numbers may be still higher because of many unreported cases. 

Congress is holding hearings, and issued a subpoena to Dr. Kaye Whitley, the Pentagon's expert on the subject.  She was ordered not to testify.  Ordered, we repeat, by her superiors -- whom we dearly hope to see held accountable.  Oh, and we suspect this was a last-minute change of plans.  The DoD news page indicated (and at this writing still does) that Whitley and other Pentagonals would testify.  So who rearranged her schedule -- and why?

Up until today, we have tried to believe in the traditional American story of a proud military, soldiers who live by a code of honor which sets them apart from the thugs and cretins who run our government and corporations.  It has been difficult to believe this, in the face of atrocities like Abu Ghraib and Mahmudiya, not to mention the Air Force's inability to keep track of nuclear weapons and its passion for designing VIP comfort pods.  But we have managed, despite the mounting evidence, to believe that the career soldiers (including sailors, marines, and even airmen) who guard our country genuinely do hold themselves to a higher standard.

But 41% is a lot of women.  A lot of daughters and sisters and mothers.  A lot of American soldiers, abused in ways that are war crimes pure and simple when committed by an enemy.

Some people will give a sigh and shed a few crocodile tears that barely cover their satisfaction, and then mutter that they always said women didn't belong in the Army.  But women aren't the ones committing these crimes.  The crimes are committed by men, who commit them because they have reason to believe that they will not be seriously punished.  

That needs to change.  Now.

Woe Unto the Shepherds

News from Alabama:  a preacher's wife discovered that he was sexually molesting their 11-year-old daughter.  So he killed his wife, and forced the daughter to help him hide the body in a freezer.  Which is where police found it four years later.

Obviously, Anthony Hopkins is an evil S.O.B., and even though he is a black man in Alabama, the criminal justice system cannot punish him severely enough.  Fortunately, God can. 

We do need to register a complaint with CNN, though.  Their story identifies Hopkins as "an evangelical."  It seems obvious from the context that he was better identified as a Pentecostal or Holiness preacher.  There is a pretty significant difference there, even in the mass media are beginning to lose touch with it.

And we also wonder, parenthetically, about Hopkins' friend and colleague Jerry Porter.  On one hand, Porter seems to have suspected something was wrong -- when Hopkins couldn't answer such basic questions as "Where's your wife today," he barred him from preaching.  On the other hand, he didn't (a) call the cops, (b) demand a straight answer, or (c) call the cops again.  

"True Blue" As in Blue Movie

In 2006, Texas congressman Pete Sessions was given a "true blue" award from the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family, well-known organizations devoted to an especially restrictive vision of family values.  We aren't quite sure what he had done to deserve the prize, although in 2004, after Janet Jackson's Superbowl wardrobe malfunction, he criticized Jackson and Justin Timberlake for imposing "their liberal values upon the rest of the country."

So we are mildly amused to learn that Sessions has held several fundraisers at a Las Vegas Strip club.

Oh, there was no stripping involved, Sessions' rep is quick to assure us.  This place is really a burlesque house, so the ladies didn't actually get nekkid.  (Or so he says; the owner describes the difference between a regular titty-bar and his burlesque house by saying,  "The key component would be to have girls who were dancers taking their clothes off, not just girls taking their clothes off. ")  And we have to admit that Sessions didn't impose his values upon the whole country.  

But, that said, we have to wonder what kind of family would recognize among its values the virtue of asking young girls to parade about in their dainties while wealthy old men leer at them.  FLDS, anybody?

Japan's Booming Sex Niche: Elder Porn

That's the title of a Time article, and it is neither metaphorical nor euphemistic.

Reading the article, one naturally tries to imagine the things it describes.  And then wishes one hadn't, and yet can't erase the images from one's tortured brain.

What Terrorists Read

Sunday morning in Knoxville, a man named Jim David Adkisson walked into a Unitarian worship space during a children's performance on Annie and started shooting.  He killed two people, and was evidently prepared to kill many more.  

Clearly, Adkisson is deranged.  But before we dismiss him as "just a madman," let's also make note of his own reasons for committing this crime, which were expressly religious and political.  According to the police, Adkisson chose the Unitarian community "because of its liberal teachings and his belief that all liberals should be killed." It was also expressly terroristic, in the sense that it was not an effort to kill his perceived enemies (America's political leaders) but rather to intimidate those who support them: He said that "that because he could not get to the leaders of the liberal movement he would then target those that had voted them in office."

In other words, like the Shiite militias in Iraq, Adkisson used a combination of religious and political factors to choose the target for his terrorist attack.

What inspires a terrorist? Religion and politics, of course; a sense of personal alienation; but also, the persuasion of charismatic public figures. In the Middle East, it is the mullahs. And in Adkisson's home, investigators found these three books: Bill O'Reilly's The O'Reilly Factor; Michael Savage's Liberalism is a Mental Disorder; and Sean Hannity's Let Freedom Ring:  Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism.  At least one reader did not take the subtitle to be a metaphor.

Lutherans to Apologize for 500-year-old Crimes

During the Reformation, there was only one thing upon which Lutheran and Roman Catholic forces could agree, at least in the political sphere:  that Anabaptists should be exterminated.  Much bloodthirsty warfare ensued, notably the Siege of Munster, not to mention widespread persecution.

The Lutheran Word Federation is making plans to issue a public apology to the Anabaptists, including Mennonites and Amish.  In the oft-ridiculed world of apologies for things that one's ancestors did, this qualifies as a comparatively reasonable and purposeful example.  It will help to heal an old wound, and allow smoother working relations between two modern church bodies with a strong commitment to works of peace and justice.

Our question, which will probably not help much with those things, is this:  When will Anabaptists apologize to the rest of Christianity for introducing the historically and theologically anomalous idea that we should withhold baptism from infants? 

We Told Them So.

Over our toast with lemon curd this morning, the beautiful Mrs. A read aloud this nugget from Sunday's Times, regarding Henry Paulson, the former Goldman, Sachs chair, and present Bush administration Treasury secretary:

Even Mr. Paulson, for all his Wall Street experience and market savvy, occasionally appears flummoxed by the scale and complexity of the current crisis.

"Funny," she remarked.  "You and I are humble parish priests, and yet we saw this coming two years ago.  Why is one of the world's most powerful money-men flummoxed?"  

She was quite correct as to the fact; two summers back, flush with prenatal nesting hormones, we had briefly considered the purchase of a home.  Eventually, however, we decided not to buy, because it was clear to us that said home -- although attractive and so beautifully located that it breaks my heart to think of it -- had been dramatically overpriced by a market that was already weakening.  Although we could have obtained a mortgage, the terms would have included provisions for low initial rates followed by much higher ones within a few years, and that was plainly foolish.

In other words, two naive and unsophisticated potential buyers, armed with nothing but the facts available from the Times and a few visits to a realtor, could see the housing bubble beginning to burst, and could project from that the inevitable crisis which would affect both families that had accepted predatory mortgages, and banks which had bundled those mortgages into securities.  None of it made sense, even to us.

So how did the world banking community miss it?  And why are they "flummoxed" today?

This is just one among many recent instances of policy failures which appeared likely from the outset to even casual observers, but which have surprised the supposed experts.  

For example, beginning the in the mid-1970s, it was pretty obvious to Father A., then a schoolboy in short pants, that an economy based upon fossil fuels was not viable over the long term.  There were three reasons, both obvious and widely discussed at the time:  (a) carbon emissions (or as we said in those days, "air pollution"); (b) a finite supply which could not keep pace with a rapidly escalating demand; and (c) the political instability of the region from which much of our petroleum was purchased.  One need not have been a child during the oil embargo to have seen all this clearly, but it may have helped.  But all you really needed was a subscription to the Mother Earth News, which ran monthly articles on the fiscal virtue of energy derived from the sun and wind.  Father A. recalls a college course on environmental physics in which, after examining the evidence (all of it available in a textbook by then) and doing a few basic equations, the only policy question left was whether to ditch petroleum in favor of solar or in favor of nuclear.

So if a teenager knew that stuff thirty years ago, why is the government still not stepping up the plate with some serious R&D funding for wind farms and the like?

By the late 1980s, well ahead of the curve, Father A. -- by then, an adventurous young man with a proclivity for visiting exotic places -- had observed the popularity of light trucks fitted out as luxury cars in Haiti and Central America, and predicted the later rise of the American SUV.  But, already having thought through the environmental and financial implications, he always knew the craze would end abruptly, and that the market for used gas-guzzlers would shrivel to nothing.  So he feels no pity for the US auto industry, which -- already in peril -- chose to stake its fortune on the dumbest vehicle it possibly could.

The list goes on.  Iran-Contra didn't surprise anybody who had paid attention to (a) the Reagan Administration's support for Central American death squads and insurgencies, as well as (b) Reagan's own strained relationship with facts.  Airline deregulation hasn't worked out so well, either.  We've always argued that federal subsidies for highways over railroads are perverse, and suddenly we're not alone on that, either.  

Now, in all fairness, we have sometimes been wrong.  Despite our prediction, Bush I's Gulf War is generally considered a success, by everybody except the soldiers with a mysterious illness for which no cure is known, and the land itself, now littered with depleted uranium.  

But the big one, still, is Iraq.  In the months preceding the US invasion of Iraq, a great many people, both in the United States and outside it, argued forcefully that the war would be a mistake.  These arguments followed several main lines:  (a) America had been attacked by stateless terrorists based in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Sudan, so we needed to focus our attention on those people and those places; (b) a war in Iraq would be a drain on America's financial resources and the human resources of the military; (c) the status of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was unclear, but a significant minority doubted their existence, and UN inspectors -- the people with the most detailed first-hand information -- practically begged for more time to do their work.  (Does anybody even remember Hans Blix and Scott Ritter anymore?)

The Bush Administration either ignored these concerns, or responded to them with deceit and misdirection.  A link between Iraq and 9/11 was widely adverted, most notably by Dick Cheney, the member of the Administration likeliest to become fabulously wealthy if a war ensued.  Congress was assured that the adventure would be brief ("Six days, maybe six weeks, I doubt six months") and self-financing.  Colin Powell stood before the UN and showed maps, photographs and scary white powder, all meant to somehow "prove" the existence of the WMDs that didn't exist.

Now, we at the Egg don't claim to be prophets.  (Nor are we knee-jerk peaceniks; ask us about Afghanistan sometime).  When we worried that the pending invasion would be a mistake, we were not by any means a lone voice crying in the wilderness.  Millions of people in hundreds of cities all over the world took to the streets in protest, making the same statement.  Pope John Paul II sent his special envoy, Pio Cardinal Laghi, to ask Bush personally not to begin a war, which would be a "defeat for humanity" and neither legally not morally just.

But the war happened anyway, and it is a mess of historic proportions, one which -- along with our financial woes, and the rise of our Asian competition -- bids fair to reduce America's prosperity at home and influence abroad, quite possibly signaling the beginning of the end of American hegemony.

And so our question is:  Aren't these people experts?  So why -- if a paunchy cleric with neither economic nor scientific training can routinely predict the failure of an American policy -- are the supposed experts who run our government and our large corporations routinely unable to do so?  And if they aren't experts, why do we let them run things?

Bush Administration Electrocutes US Troops

We knew the guyed liked the electric chair, but come on.

Per the Times, electrical work done by Halliburton's KBR subsidiary at US bases in Iraq, long since revealed to be defective, is more thoroughly incompetent than originally understood.  We knew, for example, that 13 soldiers had been electrocuted so far; we did not know that wiring in one Baghdad building was so inept that soldiers received shocks in their own quarters every single day.  

The details are sketchy, but internal KBR and Pentagon documents suggest that both parties have long been aware of the fact that the Administration's favorite contractor was, through sheer incompetence, endangering the lives of American soldiers.

One graf reminds us of the bigger picture:

The reports of shoddy electrical work have raised new questions about the Bush administration’s heavy reliance on contractors in Iraq, particularly because they come after other high-profile disputes involving KBR. They include accusations of overbilling, providing unsafe water to soldiers and failing to protect female employees who were sexually assaulted.

Oh, that's right.  American citizens are paying through the nose so that these guys can electrocute and poison our soldiers and rape their own employees with impunity.

UN Soft on Killer Bunnies

The United Nations' human rights committee this week came down hard on the United Kingdom.  In particular, it criticized changes in the law that governs pretrial detention of terror suspects, from 28 to 42 days.  And it asked for firm measures to combat "negative attitudes" toward Muslims that are growing within the general public.

Well, fair enough.  No harm in asking, right?  But let's be serious for a moment.  A seven-week holding period for somebody you suspect was trying to, let's say, blow up the Houses of Parliament isn't really such a big deal, if you can use those seven weeks to either round up his confederates and build a case, or else establish his innocence.  Keep him in a clean, well-lighted room, give him some books to read (Hume and Locke by preference) and carry on.  It's not exactly Gitmo.

And as for asking the government to "combat negative attitudes," let's be careful.  In a general way, asking the government to shape public perceptions strikes us as more than a little Big-Brotherish.  In this case, we wonder whether those attitudes have been shaped by Muslims themselves, particularly those in Gaza, who broadcast  children's TV show called Tomorrow's Pioneers, which features a gigantic bunny rabbit who encourages the little tykes to kill and eat Jews.  (And Danes).

The show is broadcast via satellite, and can be seen in the UK.  The host insists that her program does not spread extremism.  She is either lying or stupid, but we have no idea which.  Why, in the course of writing this post, we ourselves have become more extremist.  48 days now seems far too brief, and a clean room far too generous.  

To their credit, Muslim leaders in Britain have begun to criticize this delightful bit of whimsy.  And rightly so.  But if the UN really wants to to protect Muslims in Britain (or anywhere else) from negative stereotyping by the general population, they ought to take it up not with HM's government, but with al-Aqsa TV and the lovely people at Hamas.

Gotham City Politics

Father A. saw The Dark Knight yesterday, and -- unsurprisingly -- loved it.  For those who don't know, the testy little cleric has been a Bat-fan since early childhood.  As Mrs. A wearily tells her friends, "You can tell he took it all too seriously; even as an adult, he puts on a black suit and fights evil."

Yes, Heath Ledger redefines the Joker, in a performance that certainly deserves consideration by the various awards committees.  And Aaron Eckhart deserves more attention than he has gotten, for a deeply-realized portrayal of a crusading D.A. who fights monsters so hard that he becomes one.  

Indeed, the question of how to fight monsters without becoming like them is the heart of the movie.  (Well, that and a lot of black latex, and some explosions.)  And so naturally, there is an argument brewing about the political content of the picture.  There are spoilers below, so please exercise caution.

Writing on the WSJ editorial page, mystery novelist Andrew Klavan argues that Batman is, basically, George W. Bush:  

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past. ... "The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror.

He goes on to complain that whereas Hollywood liberals can make anti-war movies that are realistic and contemporary, conservatives have to hide their pro-war sentiment behind the mask of historical fantasy ("300") or, in this case, actual masks.

On the surface, Klavan seems to have a point.  As comics readers know, Frank Miller -- whose graphic vision of Thermopylae was the basis for "300" -- is an unabashed conservative, and his groundbreaking 80s miniseries, "The Dark Knight Returns," portrayed a Batman who might have inspired subway vigilante Berhard Goetz (although Miller's Batman is a far better-developed character than the supposedly flesh-and-blood Goetz).  

And the movie at hand makes no secret of its political subtext.  The Joker is referred to in the script as a terrorist, and rightly so.  He works with criminals, but makes a point of saying that his goal different than theirs.  They want to get rich; he is "an agent of chaos."  At one point, in fact, he lights up an enormous pile of cash, while delivering, a speech to effect that he doesn't need money since "the things I like -- gasoline, gunpowder -- are all cheap."  Fighting against Batman, whose work is prodigiously funded and hi-tech, the Joker is a model of asymmetrical warfare.

So Klavan is right about the Joker.  But he misses the point about Batman.  Yes, our hero does "push the boundaries of civil rights," and pushes them pretty hard.  At one point, questioning a mobster, he deliberately breaks the guy's leg just to show that he's serious.  He eavesdrops on a colossal scale, at one point bugging every telephone in the city.  But much of the movie's action hangs on the idea that Batman operates by a strict moral code -- he will not kill his enemies, no matter how hard they try to kill him, and no matter who else they may try to kill.  When another character threatens a witness at gunpoint, Batman intervenes, arguing that (a) the witness probably doesn't have any useful information, and (b) the good guys have to stay good.

(This is an old and absurd trope in superhero comics -- the Lone Ranger used to shoot guns out of the hands of bank robbers.  Reaction against this absurdity led to a slew of 80s comics in which heroes abandoned the code and killed their enemies; as recently as last year, even Wonder Woman did this.  But Batman, one of the comics characters best suited for wetwork, has studiously avoided it.)  

This code stands in symbolically for all the actual ethical codes that we tell ourselves (with ever less justice) separate us from our enemies.  Without this code, the story would collapse.  In one of the climactic sequences, of which the picture has too many, the Joker hatches another plan to commit mass murder, which depends upon the willingness of people, both criminals and ordinary citizens, to commit murder in order to avoid being murdered themselves. (Think of soldiers massacring a village for fear that it sheltered one or two insurgents). Batman's strategy, which ultimately succeeds, depends upon his conviction that people -- even criminals -- are fundamentally decent. Without his direct intervention, they save themselves simply by expressing, despite the temptation not to, their own moral decency.

And the movie provides one set piece in which it gives a blunt opinion of how effective torture is as a tool against terrorists.  The Joker is captured by the police, and interrogated by three people:    

(1) Commissioner Gordon asks him some questions, to which he gives no useful answer.  

(2)  Gordon leaves the room, and Batman enters, using a great deal more violence than the police are allowed to.  It works -- he tells them what they wanted to know, the location of the McGuffin.  Except it doesn't work, because he tells them a deliberate lie, which sends people going to the wrong places, and results (as the Joker intended) in death and mutilation.   In this episode, Batman seems tough in a way that is emotionally rewarding to viewers, but in fact he loses dramatically. 

(3) Another cop decides to beat the Joker up -- not torture for the sake of extracting information, but as an expression of rage.  The Joker seizes control of the situation, and not only escapes but creates mayhem on a vast scale.  If they had just left him in jail, he would still have killed a lot of people, but not nearly as many.

The message is not crystalline, nor should it be, but it is still pretty clear:  The inappropriate reaction of "civilized" people to terror is what gives the terrorists their power.  Torture doesn't work; it deprives us of our moral advantage without conferring any meaningful tactical advantage.  Even the truly wicked have rights which must be observed, as much for our sake as for theirs.  

The movie may not be intended as a rebuke to President Bush, nor to his thuggish vice-president; it may not be intended as a rebuke to Guantanamo Bay and the extraordinary renditions.  But it seems very likely that the director and his co-writer set out to rebuke the primary expression of militant conservatism in Hollywood these days, specifically with regard to the questions of torture and the rights of detainees.  Bruce Wayne is neither a stand-in for the president nor a response to him; he is a comic-book character who answers another comic-book character:  Jack Bauer.

"The Dark Knight" is the Anti-24.

Cellphones Rot Your Brain

We've heard talk about this for a while now.  Although the evidence published to date in peer-reviewd journals is not especially frightening, the director of the University of Pittsburgh's Cancer Institute has access to research that has not yet been published.  Based upon that evidence, he is warning his own faculty and staff to limit their cellphone exposure, for fear of causing brain cancer.

The risk is apparently higher for children.

Finnish Lesbians!

We know:  you came here from your search engine, looking for hot, steamy videos of Nordic beauties.  Our strategy worked; now down to business.

In fact, it seems that lesbian marriages are no longer uncommon in the Church of Finland, although neither do they take place in church buildings or with official approval.  Most recently, the dean of the Espoo cathedral, Liisa Tuovinen, performed a ceremony a church camp.  A couple of years back, another pastor performed one in a Helsinki restaurant, and Pr Tuovinen says that home ceremonies have also been performed.

Apparently, non of this takes place as yet within the church's rules, but the matter will be reviewed by the bishops next year.

The End of Evangelism?

Elizabeth Eaton is the Bishop of the Northeastern Ohio Synod (ELCA).  Egg readers may recall that she had the unfortunate duty of making public statements when one of the pastors in her jurisdiction was arrested for child molestation.  Recently, she also had the duty -- which we hope was more pleasant -- of preaching at the Eucharist which concluded a Women of the ELCA convention.

The church's press release on the subject gives an account of her sermon which, while fragmentary and difficult to follow, has nonetheless piqued our interest.  (Click above to read it).  In many of the extracted quotations, Bp Eaton appears to be chastising congregations for familiar faults ("we have ... bought into a culture of scarcity and fear") while exhorting them to pursue familiar goals (support global mission).  There is nothing wrong with this; we have often  chastised and encouraged in the same vein.

But in places, the press release seems to describe a more provocative sermon.  

Out of context, it is hard to know just what she meant when she said, "Folks are not going to come into our churches. They only did that in the '50s for a few short years.  Everyone who is in is already there. So, don't expect by opening the doors they're going to come walking in."  After all, it is an observable fact that people do walk into churches, and that they can only do so when the doors are open.  But she is quite correct to observe that they don't do so in such large numbers, and upon this observation might potentially hang a very remarkable sermon, especially by a bishop.  

After all, to venture far in this direction is to contradict much of the contemporary talk about passively "welcoming the stranger" as a means of evangelism.   It is, indeed, even to cast some doubt upon the likelihood of re-evangelizing the secularized West, or our de-churched neighborhoods, anytime soon.  As she also said, "We are surrounded by a culture that does not think that the church is marvelous. It thinks in a lot of cases that the church is inconsequential."  It is to portray the Church as a permanent minority, one which ought not to fritter away its energy chasing a will o' the wisp called Growth.

If this was her point, or even a significant part of it, then we are very interested in what Bp Eaton actually said.  One of the pressing debates in our own synod, and one which stirred some emotions during a recent assembly, is the question of why our churches, especially those in the city proper, have declined so dramatically over the past three-quarters of a century, and what we should do about that fact.  At risk of oversimplifying an extremely complex and emotionally-laden issue, there seem to be two camps.  One believes, or at least claims publicly, that the decline results from failures of vision and imagination, especially on the part of the clergy, and that sufficiently persuasive recruitment techniques can reverse the trend.  The other camp, which is far smaller or least far more timid about speaking up, argues that the decline results primarily from demographic and cultural changes, over which local churches have little control, and that our task now is to assess the ways in which we can serve God from the margins of our new society.

Does Bp Eaton see wisdom in the second position?  And if so, what is her vision for the Church as a minority report, a pinch of salt which adds savor to a much larger stew?   It is difficult to tell from the jumbled hash of a press release.  The ELCA has also posted an excerpt from her sermon, which is also too brief to tell us much.  (But listen here).  It includes a reference, with attribution, to Monty Python (the parrot isn't dead; he's pining for the fjords), and another reference, not attributed, to the conservative cultural critic Christopher Lasch, and his assertion that "nostalgia [an illness affecting most Christians and all Lutherans] is an abdication of memory."  

All in all, while it is impossible for the Egg to know quite what Bp Eaton said or meant to say, we have here hints of a sermon which does not merely challenge listeners, but which may possibly challenge them to think new thoughts.

"A Matter of History"

The campaign press seems awfully fond of gaffes this year.  McCain is confused about Purim; Obama seems to think he is on the Senate Banking Committee; McCain is confused about the breakup of Czechoslovakia.  Oh, and McCain is confused about the nonexistent Iraq/Afghanistan border.

We've chuckled over this stuff, and we will continue to do so, all the while recognizing that we ourselves are prone to misspeaking -- there is one member of our congregation who, after nearly every sermon, makes a point of correcting misquoted song lyrics, verses of poetry, or what have you.   It is irritating beyond words, but it keeps us honest -- which is likely how the candidates feel as well.

For the record, the gaffe-hunters are really using the wrong word.  None of these are "gaffes" according to the standard definition, which is a social error, or faux pas.  Both the press and my little old lady are observing errors of fact, usually minor, made while speaking off the cuff.  The technical word is probably "goofs."  And anybody who speaks off the cuff much is going to make them. 

But the HuffPo's Ilan Goldenberg has observed a rather more serious error of fact in a recent McCain interview.  It goes like this:

Katie Couric asks about Obama's contention that, although the surge has helped, Iraqi security has been improved principally by the Sunni Awakening and government crackdown on the militias.

McCain lashes out, accusing Obama of a "a false depiction" -- what you and I would call a lie. He explains, incorrectly, that the surge was what made the awakening possible.  This, he insists, "is just a matter of history," and to say otherwise is to do a disservice to the dead US troops.

Goldenberg produces ample evidence that McCain is mistaken:  a series of military and press descriptions of the Sunni Awakening that predate the surge.  He concludes:  

... what is most disturbing is that according to McCain's inaccurate version of history, military force came first and solved all of our problems. If that is the lesson he takes from the Anbar Awakening, I am afraid it is the lesson he will apply to every other crisis he faces including, for example, Iran.

This is surely true.  But it is also noteworthy that when faced with his opponent's accurate assessment of the situation, McCain's response is to (a) call the truth a lie; and (b) to offer up his own lie as the truth; and (c) to cloak his lie in the garment of patriotism.  This, we think, speaks very poorly for his character and his judgment -- not to mention his grasp of the facts.

Dept. of Misdirection: Obama and the New Yorker

One of the funny things about a subscription to the New Yorker, which we at the Egg had maintained since our youth, is that it does not get the magazine to you very quickly.  Indeed, it is usually on the newsstands several days, or even a week, before it arrives in your mailbox.  (This is an irritating feature in a weekly magazine.)

The result is that we had read all about the NYer's Obama cover, and even shared our own thoughts about it, before we ever opened the July 21 issue.  Having now done so, we now see something clearly:  the cover is a dumb stunt, which -- whatever its editorial intent -- serves to distract public attention from the genuinely disturbing article inside.  And no, we don't mean Denby's review of The Dark Knight.

Ryan Lizza's extended piece on the early stages of Obama's political career, aptly titled Making It, depicts an unfamiliar aspect of the Illinois senator:  typical politician.  Obama comes across as ambitious, cutthroat, temperamental and  -- most surprisingly -- ungrateful, at least to his early supporter Alice Palmer.  He comes to Chicago, a town notorious for its tough politics, and sets off many of the same fireworks he has set of nationally this year -- and even then, early on, he is plainly contemplating a run for national office.  He is plainly bored with local politics, and has bad relations with the black political class.  He makes naive mistakes, and learns hard lessons from them.  He seizes every advantage, even when it risks hurting his own party.  He redraws voting districts to reflect the peculiar demographics to which he appeals -- black, but not too black, with a dose of limousine liberalism.

In one scene, which seems difficult to reconcile with Obama's cooler-than-thou demeanor, he gets into a a shouting match with legislator Rickey Hendon on the floor of the state senate.  The two nearly come to blows before they are separated by a female staffer -- but not before Obama (who turns out to be a trained boxer) shouts something on the order of "I'm gonna kick your ass."

Not incidentally, we also get brief vignettes concerning some of Obama's controversial decisions.  His relationships with the ex-Weathermen, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn, don't look like much of anything; they had become advisors to the mayor, "long acceptable in polite Chicago society" (if such a thing exists).  And before joining Trinity UCC, Obama worries not about the pastor's inflammatory pulpit oratory, but about the possibility that the congregation may be perceived in the black community as "too upwardly mobile."

The article is a bracing corrective to the comically worshipful coverage Obama often gets from the press (see under:  McCain's whining, below).  That does not, necessarily, make it "anti-Obama."   For the most part, the New Yorker is  pretty friendly to Obama's candidacy, even embarrassingly so.   But this portrait removes some of the phony halo, and lets us see the real man underneath. 

All of which makes the kerfluffle over the cover seem sort of overblown.  As we have said, on several occasions, to Islamic rioters burning the Danish flag:  It's a cartoon, you nitwits.  Get over it.  And yet the media buzz has been all about the cover -- which means it has missed the real point.  When, this week, Ryan Lizza was denied a seat on the plane to accompany Obama to the Middle East, the chattering classes at HuffPo and The Swamp saw it as revenge for the cover.

Nonsense.  It's not the cover, it's the content.   Obama apparently liked the halo, and is less than thrilled by the thought that we might see him as flesh-and-blood.