Eric Johnson: December 2004 Archives

Almost a year ago, I wrote a short post called "Killing poor people by keeping them poor," about poverty's role in massively lethal natural disasters. I expressed my contempt for the "activists" who campaign to keep Third World peasants in a Rousseau-like state of nature. For some reason, most people think these activists are selfless, but they are pursuing a prideful, secular vision of Paradise and causing human misery. As I said then,

...The anti-globalizers on the Left want to ensure that these disasters happen from now until the end of time. Who cares about mothers wailing for their children, or thousands of homes wiped out in a few minutes of screaming, suffocating chaos? All these things must be offered up to the god of environmental primitivism.

What do I mean by "environmental primitivism"? The anti-globalizers think that poor non-Western people are cute, so they don't want them to change their charmingly backward ways, which are (they imagine) the way people lived before the nasty Industrial Revolution with its so-called "abundant food," "long lifespans," and "housing codes." They love that poor people don't consume much energy or natural resources, and they use "organic" methods of agriculture -- which aren't very helpful for crop yields, but they don't use evil pesticides or fertilizers. And harvesting by hand -- so darn cute!

The "Diplomad," an American diplomat, confirmed this thesis:
Having served and visited extensively in Central and South American countries with large "indigenous" populations, I can freely state that the region's "indigenous" cultures largely ceased to exist hundreds of years ago; "indigenous" culture today means rural poverty. As the saying goes, "I was born at night, but not last night," so even I understand, therefore, that calling to protect "indigenous culture" really means seeking to preserve rural poverty; to keep people poor, sick, illiterate, and isolated from the great and small wonders of our age. It means helping condemn them to half lives consumed with superstition, disease, and of watching their puny children struggle to live past the age of five. It's a call to keep certain people as either an ethnic curio on the shelf for the enjoyment of European and North American anthropologists or, equally vile, as exploitable pawns for the use of political activists.
This jibes with my trip to rural Nicaragua a few years ago, where it occured to me that they could use a little globalization in Juigalpa province. (It wasn't all misery, though; I'd go back in a heartbeat.)

Now with the tsunami-created disasters, we see this effect play out once again. I am certainly not blaming the victims for dying — they had nothing to do with it. And neither did anyone else, really. So instead of trying to explain that submarine tectonic movements are a result of global warming, why not try to figure out how these poor people can gain enough wealth to build more durable homes?

Father Andrew Greeley never presents his credentials for commenting on the Iraq War, so I presume he has no special credibility in the matter. As he is not a bishop, we are obliged to listen respectfully, but his words do not spring from any charism of infallibility. His field of expertise is sociology, which might help him understand why societies make war, but is a rather inexact guide to practical statecraft.

Father Greeley's writing is not always devoid of charm or thoughtfulness, but it is here. You could spend days unpacking the ignorance:

One must support the troops, I am told. I certainly support the troops the best way possible: Bring them home, get them out of a war for which the planning was inadequate, the training nonexistent, the goal obscure, and the equipment and especially the armor for their vehicles inferior.
You could answer each of those clauses with facts — that months of planning went into the invasion and postwar phases (we received endless briefings on those subjects before the war); that when you hear we have the "best-trained" military in history, it's not hyperbole, it's demonstrably true; and as I wrote here, armor plating isn't like a force field on the starship Enterprise.

But once Father has worked himself up into a lather, there's no stopping him. He accuses American officials of being "criminals" but doesn't get around to specifying the crimes, though to a left-wing audience I'm sure those crimes need no enumeration, they merely need to be asserted. You could try pointing out that "reasonable chance of victory" wasn't part of just war theory at the beginning, and that the theory is just that — an ideathat describes the right use of force, but is not de fide or beyond modification. But it's best to just let Father vent his spleen, and hope he takes a nap.

Now, Father might be right about the Iraq War and I may be wrong. It may well be unjust and immoral, although to the depth of my very soul I do not think Jesus looks unkindly on the liberation of the oppressed. But his (Greeley's, not Jesus') public life consists in authoring books with smutty elements, and running interference for pro-abortion liberal Democrats.

Occasionally, Father Greeley takes a stand for something the culture opposes, such as clerical celebacy. On balance, however, a fair observer could conclude that he has harmed the Body of Christ with his writings. Perhaps someone who knows him ought to say: "My friend, my fellow brother in Christ, you are a fool, and have no idea what you are talking about." Someone like Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz:

No Catholics of any sense will take any pastoral advice from Father Andrew Greeley, a superficial writer who appears to spend his time promoting himself to various elements in the secular media....

In his self-important buffoonery, he has appointed himself as instructor to Bishops and to Catholics nationwide. In [writing an article defending pro-abortion Catholic politicians], he merely announces to every thoughtful Catholic that his views are totally self-serving and undeserving of any serious consideration....

My advice to any Catholics who would ask me about that Greeley article would be to give it the same view as you would the words and acts of a clown.

When Will Jesus Bring the Vicodin?

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George Carlin, author of "banned" book When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops?, announced that he is entering a rehab clinic for alcohol and drug addiction. He says he's addicted to wine and Vicodin. (A good, earthy red burgundy would match well with Vicodin, I think.)

carlin_cover.jpgCarlin's latest book was "banned" by Wal-Mart because the title was offensive to many Christians, as well as the dustcover art that showed Carlin in the place of Jesus at the Last Supper. As modern blasphemy goes, that is pretty tame: it's smirking parody, as opposed to out-and-out maliciousness. Like night follows day, a bunch of "civil libertarians" rushed to defend Carlin's right to...well, nobody's really sure which of his constitutional rights were violated. He was free to write it, his publisher was free to publish it, Christians were free to protest it, and Wal-Mart was free to reject it. Wal-Mart can't "ban" books any more than they can make war, levy taxes, or coin money — only governments can do those things.

Although he is technically too old to be a baby boomer, Carlin has followed that generation's degradation, going from gadfly commentator to intellectually bankrupt performer to grumpy, nasty old man. My parents thought George Carlin was funny and raunchy back in the '60s. In the '80s, I saw one of his HBO concerts, and I agreed that he was raunchy. As for funny, he was sporadically amusing, but the audience must have been comprised of boomers who were thinking of his old routines, because the material wasn't particularly clever or pointed.

Today, he's apparently reduced to making fun of such things as "the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree, dopey athletes and cutthroat businessmen." Here are some quotations from the book:

--Carlin on the media: The media comprises equal parts business, politics, advertising, public relations, and show business. Nice combination. Enough bull for Texas to open a chain of branch offices.
--Carlin on the battle of the sexes: Here's all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid....
--Carlin on evasive language: Just to demonstrate how far using euphemisms in language has gone, some psychologists are now actually referring to ugly people as those with "severe appearance deficits." Hey, Doctor. How's that for "denial"?
--Carlin on politics: No self-respecting politician would ever admit to working in the government. They prefer to think of themselves "serving the nation." To help visualize the service they provide the country, you may wish to picture the things that take place on a stud farm.

Keep in mind that the quotations above are supposed to whet your appetite for buying the book. This reminds me of "The Simpsons," where Bart and Milhous pick up Mad Magazine and see an article called "The Lighter Side of Hippies." "They don't care whose toes they step on!" Bart laughs. It's part of a running joke, that Mad's humor tends to be obvious and about ten minutes too late. ("They're really sockin' it to that Spiro Agnew guy again!")

When he's not trodding the same ground as a thousand other second-rate comics, Carlin takes on groups that no one else has thought to challenge, mainly because there's nothing particularly funny about doing so. He dismisses peanut allergies as a fantasy, saying that people who think they have that condition are delusional.

As it happens, my brother is highly allergic to all nuts, among other things. Wherever he goes, he has to carry an adrenaline-filled syringe in case he accidently eats food with a slight trace of nuts. If he isn't treated, his throat swells up, he turns blue and will die soon after that. I'm not offended at Carlin for insulting people like my brother. I just think it's bizarre and sad that he would resort to mocking a serious, medically verifiable, genetic condition. Is he going to mock Down Syndrome kids next? Or has he already done that?

Predictably, the prefab "controversy" over the book has brought out the best on both sides of the cultural divide. On the right, you have the folks WHO HAVE A CAPS LOCK KEY AND THEY ARENT AFRAID TO USE IT BUT THEY DONT CONCENTRAT ON GOOD SPELLIN OR PUCNTUATION. On the left, you have people like this reviewer on Amazon, who titled his review "Hey Morons and Idiots":

First off let's get one thing straight, Jesus Christ, to me, is Lord and Savoir, everything else that followed after his resurection was man done. The Catholic Church, a bunch of morons and hipocritical idiots, the Protestants, ugly women that gather to protest abortion. Methodist, them I don't have a problem with, at least the one's I know, liberal to the bone, they have methods to their love.
Lord and Savoir, eh? Jesus did have panache, that's for sure. Lesson: if you're going to mock someone else's intelligence, you should at least know how to spell the words you're using.

Unlike Rush Limbaugh's detractors, who rushed to call him a hypocrite, liar, child-abuser, forger, cross-dresser, and whatever else they could think of, I wish Mr. Carlin well and I sincerely hope he emerges from the clinic having turned his bad habits into good ones. A relative of mine had similar problems, and met with an unhappy end. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

I do reserve the right to make jokes about it, however. He's a comedian, after all. He can take it.

Metro is saved!

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Last week, I commented on the sad decline of the Washington Metrorail system, saying "the slack-jawed yokels who run it are slowly turning it into a costly mess with Third World-quality service." My friend and frequent Catholic Light contributor Victor Morton e-mailed me with the happy solution: former mayor Marion Barry is probably going to be on the Metro board.

You may remember Mayor Barry from a popular video he made in 1989. The production values were low, but his "How to Light a Crack Pipe" was an international hit. He also did many other noteworthy things, to wit:

He turned a solid local reputation as a civil rights leader into an international reputation as a crack addict and frequenter of loose women.

He went to jail for six months, and during a family visitation period, in a roomful of adults and children, he received a Lewinsky from a "friend" who was there visiting him.

He wasn't mayor the whole time, but in 30 years D.C. went from a city of 800,000 people in the mid-1960s to fewer than 500,000.

At one point, the Control Board appointed to straighten out the city's mess could not account for over $100,000,000 spent by the Barry administration.

That's just off the top of my head. But the people quoted in the article are probably right: he's one of the most qualified local officials to help run Metro. He's already bankrupted and despoiled the city: why not extend that success to the whole D.C. area, too?

Ah, anti-Semitism: so old, yet forever new. In the Middle Ages, many ignorant people thought that rabbis stole Christian children to use as a blood-sacrifice. They neither demanded proof nor expected any — having decided that Jews were collectively evil, they felt free to invent any malicious stories they wished.

We're past that, because the Holocaust has awakened us out of our moral stupor and in this post-modern, relativistic, multicultural world, nobody would dare make up such crude falsehoods.

Yet in our enlightened world, a state-run Iranian television channel can broadcast a TV show about Israeli doctors stealing the eyes of Palestinian children. The news media won't give this 1% of the air time they spent on examining whether "The Passion of the Christ" was anti-Semitic. This bile is hardly atypical — browse MEMRI's site and you'll see what I mean. But the Middle Eastern hate-peddlers get a pass because, of course, they don't have white skin.

I never met a Middle Easterner who was entirely free of paranoia and conspiracy theories. One example: a former co-worker, an American citizen from Palestine with whom I enjoy a warm friendship, is convinced that every time Starbucks sells a cup of coffee, they send a nickel to the Israeli stettlements in the Palestinian territories. Bewildered, I asked him for proof, but he kept insisting it was true. (If you're reading this, R.A., send me proof and I'll post it right here!) This is one of the more sensible, admirable people I know, who isn't by any means irrational or filled with hatred toward anyone.

I keep hearing some people bleet that we should get out of Iraq and the region in general (including Israel). Do you really think that if we disengage from the Middle East, it will somehow become better? As if we are the primary contagion of all these pathologies? The world will continue to buy Middle Eastern oil, the oil-fattened sociopaths in these regimes will continue to oppress their own people and promote an anti-Western and anti-Semitic ideology that encourages external, aggressive death and destruction.

We weren't doing much of anything in the region throughout the 1990s besides protecting one Muslim country (Saudi Arabia) from invasion by another Muslim country (Iraq). That and telling Israel to make generous concessions to the Palestinians in exchange for paper promises of security. In return, Israel got hundreds of its citizens blown up and a suppressed economy. The U.S. got its servicemen blown up at Khobar Towers and in the U.S.S. Cole, two embassies bombed in Africa, and the coup de grace on September 11. If we disengage, why does anyone think these outrages would cease? As if terrorists and the despots who love them are suddenly going to change their ways when we turn tail and run.

I do not contend that the Bush administration's policies sprang fully formed from the brow of God, nor do I think the execution of their policies is beyond question or critique. But if you're going to say they're wrong, it's incumbent on you to say what you would do differently. And whatever solution you come up with needs to address the deep spiritual sickness that infects a good portion of the Muslim world. The conflict between the Islamists and the West starts with the soul, not with politics.

The New York Times continues its slanted coverage of detainees in the War on Terror. Reporting on such things isn't a bad idea: the subject is legitimate, and if a government official did something wrong, he should be punished for it, whether he is a PFC or a major general.

That being said, this article is shoddy and dishonest even by NYT standards. The article conflates prisoner abuse in Iraq with detainee treatment in Guantanamo. I'll save you the trouble of skimming the thing several times like I did. First, there is no doubt that enemy prisoners have been abused in Iraq. (Incidently, the word "enemy" doesn't show up in the entire article.) Second, there is no doubt that the Guantanamo detainees are made uncomfortable before they are interrogated, as a way to break their wills.

But pooping on yourself or being exposed to cold temperatures isn't like having a lit cigarette stuck in your ear. The former actions are uncomfortable and possibly humiliating, but the latter is potentially debilitating. Misleading the illegal combatants in Cuba (who are not, not, not prisoners of war!) by telling them you are an FBI agent isn't even a crime; I question whether it's a sin, unless you think al Qaeda members have a "right to know" who is questioning them.

The article says, "The documents are the most recent in a series of disclosures that have increasingly contradicted the military's statements that harsh treatment of prisoners happened only in limited, isolated cases." Not really — the Pentagon they're investigating the abuse claims. These new documents don't say much about the frequency or degree of abuse.

As I've said numerous times, the legal, just, and prudent thing to with unlawful combatants is to interrogate them, then execute them swiftly as an example to others. Bearing arms against a legitimate authority without wearing a uniform, not answering to a chain of command, and committing atrocities against civilians are each enough to place one outside Geneva protections. Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan and the insurgents in Iraq should have been punished for making private wars (a duellum, in classic Just War terminology) against legitimate authority.

I don't say that because I have lost my love for human life. Quite the opposite: I love life so much that I want to see it defended with the maximum amount of vigor. Nothing but death will deter those who have descended below the level of beasts, and even then the threat of death may not be enough to stop them.

Question: do liberals have to bow several times a day in the direction of New York Times headquarters? Is that a requirement, or just a practice they encourage?

Also: why does the NYT pedantically put periods in "F.B.I." and "D.O.D.," even when quoting written documents that almost certainly didn't have periods within the acronyms?

And finally: The New York Times offers a summation of its case against the Iraq War, including "the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the death of civilians in American attacks, the arrest of Sunni clerics, the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the illegality of the U.S. invasion."

Whoops, sorry: that was a Iraqi Sunni preacher encouraging the terrorist thugs and murderers who bomb Muslim schoolkids and assassinate election workers. My bad — it's hard to tell the difference.

As you know, today in D.C. it was cold. As I was walking to get some coffee in the Nameless Entity's first floor, I saw a guy with a black fur-trimmed hat way down the corridor. I thought the hat looked Russian, and sure enough, it was — right down to the shiny medallion on the front of it with the hammer and sickle.

I doubt very seriously that the man was a Communist. He probably just liked the warmth, and the hat's provenance made it a good conversation piece. It was, you know, kitsch: if I were to take it seriously, and ask him why he was wearing a symbol of mass murder and oppression, he would have laughed.

Now, if the guy were wearing a cold-weather S.S. hat with a swastika, that would be another story. From his dress, I'd guess that either he worked for the Entity itself or an affiliated entity. Wearing Nazi paraphernalia would be a career-ending move, especially if he worked with any Jews (and there are more than a few at the Entity). However, if he worked with Ukrainians or Afghanis (again, not very far-fetched), their complaints would not be taken as seriously, even though the Soviets murdered millions of their countrymen.

As you know, I am a lackey of neoconservative Zionist cabal that controls American foreign policy, so I have no problem with people looking down on Naziism. But why doesn't Communism get the same treatment? I'm hardly the first person to ask this question, but I've never heard a satisfying answer. Some say that the Nazis are uniquely evil in a way that the Soviets were not; I have no idea how one evaluates such a statement, and I know of no crime (genocide, slavery, tyrrany, predatory war, forced deportation of populations) the Nazis committed that the Soviets rejected.

The best explanation is that since the Left controls the academy and the media, they are the only ones in the position to administer stigmas such as the Nazis have received, and they are unwilling to stigmatize their ideological cousins. After all, if people get turned off by collectivism, they might get squeamish about applying a statist solution to health care. And so Soviet kitsch is still safe in the halls of the U.S. Federal government.

Cold in D.C. today

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It is very, very cold today in the D.C. area. It's so cold, my thick Russian wool coat feels as protective as a wife-beater t-shirt when the wind blows. It's so cold, when I speak outside, my words freeze in mid-air and fall to the ground, where they smash into pieces.

Naturally, there were delays on the Metrorail this morning, so about 200 people and I were left standing on the freezing station platform until a train arrived, which took over 20 minutes. The Metro was formerly the sole glory of the Washington-area transportation system, but the slack-jawed yokels who run it are slowly turning it into a costly mess with Third World-quality service. Used to be that although the roads were terrible, you couldn't get an ambulance, the police were incompetent ("Ask Us About Our 200 Unsolved Murders This Year!" is their slogan), Washingtonians could at least point to the Metro as the one thing that worked in the city.

The Metro board, made up of obscure elected officials from Washington, Virginia, and Maryland, can pat themselves on the back for taking a public good and running it into the ground — and making it more expensive, too. In three years, my daily commute has gone from less than $6 to $8.55. That actually masks the true price rise, because if you added $10 or more to your farecard, they used to give you a 10% bonus credit. What they are doing with that money, I cannot say: there are broken escalators at lots of stations, and they've reduced the frequency of trains during the off-peak hours, to the point that walking is a better option if you're going less than a mile.

But the point is: it's cold today. Also, the St. Blogs comment function seems to be broken, and Richard needs to fix it because the rest of us have no idea how to do it.

I get the impression that the Giant Turd, Michael Moore, really isn't very bright. I'm not saying that just because I despise him and everything he does in public. He's either kind of dumb, or being dumb is part of his schtick.

Granted, he is very manipulative, especially for the lemmings on the Left, and he is charismatic to the same folks. But I don't see much evidence that he has persuaded anyone except possibly the ignorant. He doesn't so much argue as throw facts around, many of them questionable, in an inflammatory manner, without regard to whether those facts contradict themselves.

For example, in his latest screed, the Turd says that "...America has never thrown a sitting president out during wartime. That’s the facts." But wait a sec, Mike...you said in your book "Dude, Where's My Country?" that there is no war on terror. I saw you on the "Today" show with my own eyes, and you said those exact words: "There is no war on terror." I wouldn't be surprised if you copyrighted the phrase, and sold t-shirts with it on your Web site.

So the war doesn't exist, but somehow that non-existent war managed to sink your candidate? Your candidate who, if you didn't notice, did think there was a war on terror, one that he could fight in a "more sensitive" manner?

How can those two statements possibly be reconciled? Does the Turd think that there isn't a war on terror, but Evil Karl Rove convinced 51% of the American population that there was, and therefore the faulty impression that George Bush was a wartime president was enough to defeat Kerry? Or maybe he doesn't remember his previous statement that there was no war?

It's all too much to contemplate on a Friday afternoon. Happy Christmas shopping this weekend.

I've been wondering when they'd make a movie about anything related to the War on Terror, and shockingly enough, Hollywood is on the verge of starting one. Even more shockingly, the story will be written by a former Marine who observed the battle for Fallujah, and the Marines will be the good guys. And it won't star some second-rate has-been, but Harrison Ford. Granted, Ford is about 137 years old now, but still. Read about it in the Guardian here and here.

It is impossible to make a movie about Marines that don't make them look like badasses. Even when the Marine is the bad guy, as in the colonel in "A Few Good Men" and the drill instructor in "Full Metal Jacket," he ends up being strangely compelling. Plus, the spectacle of Marines administering some rough justice to murderous thugs should be interesting to a lot of people. I mean, the insurgents actually do wear black, kill humanitarian aid workers, and beat women for not dressing properly. You can't make up bad guys like that.

Meanwhile, in other film news, Oliver Stone proved that anti-anti-terrorism is the new anti-anti-Communism. He has apologized for the 1979 movie "Midnight Express," which portrayed Turkish prisons as unpleasant places, and Turkish justice as, shall we say, unenlightened by liberal standards. By this schedule, that means in just seven years, Stone will apologize to the U.S. Army for "Platoon," and in 25 years he will apologize to Greeks for "Alexander." I would like a personal apology for the time I accidently watched 10 minutes of "Natural Born Killers" while flipping through channels in a hotel room.

Last entry of the night! Yes, I spent the evening browsing the Web instead of finishing my thesis project! No, this isn't the first time that's happened!

Growing up, my family lived in a modest townhouse, and often I found myself arguing with liberal kids whose parents' fancy German cars were worth more than my home. Most of them had all the money they wanted for designer clothes. Meanwhile, in order to pay for my share of the family car insurance, I was earning two bucks an hour after taxes to sling popcorn and clean out theaters at the local movie house.

As a Republican, I didn't care they they had it materially better than we did (and I still don't). However, it did gall me to be lectured about "the poor" by another teenager who never lifted a finger in her life. That reminded me of this post by Sarah of Trying to Grok:

When I sat down at our office Christmas lunch, I immediately remembered that I don't like any of the people I work with.
How could any paragraph possibly live up to that intro?
...The table conversation would've been funny, I suppose, if it didn't make me want to throw up. One woman was complaining about health care in the US and about how much better it is in Germany. She said that German doctors weren't motivated by money like American doctors and that they earn the same salary as schoolteachers. "Then what's the incentive to become a doctor?" I asked. She got all flustered and condescending. "But that's thinking like an American! You can't think like that!" "But I am an American," I responded. "I'm an American to the bone." "But life isn't about money!" she whined. So here's where the fun began. "OK," I said, "then since we all work equally hard in our education center to help soldiers, why don't we pool our money and all get paid the same salary?" "Oh, but that's different because we work under the American system..." she trailed off. Different, really, how? Oh, because she makes $61,000 a year and I make $12,000. It's her pocketbook now, so it's different. "Germans aren't motivated by greed like everyone is in the US," she continued. Her mental gynastics were simply stunning: this is the woman who gets an outrageous housing allowance from the American government, illegally rents part of her house out, and uses the profit to buy up property in Germany and re-sell it. I suppose she does all of that out of the goodness of her heart and not for profit or anything.
Sarah, you and your soldier husband are welcome in the Johnson home anytime.

My second post about self-sacrifice is about a little Iraqi girl who risked her life to save others (don't worry, there's a very happy ending.)

On a didactic note: this story shows the folly of consequentialism, an error propounded by some liberal theologians and explicitly condemned by the Holy Father in Veritatis Splendor. Consequentialism is the idea that you can only know if an action is truly good or bad according to the outcome of the action. But that's foolish because, since no one can know the ultimate outcome of any given action, there's no way you can accurately gauge its effect beforehand. Therefore, you should do good and hope that good comes of it.

As if to illustrate this principle, a small act of almsgiving led to a huge act of bravery. Seriously, read the story. I personally guarantee you won't regret it.

On dying for others

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...At the fourth house they encountered that morning the Marines kicked in the door and "cleared" the front rooms, but then noticed a locked door off to the side that required inspection. Sgt. Rafael Peralta threw open the closed door, but behind it were three terrorists with AK-47s. Peralta was hit in the head and chest with multiple shots at close range.

Peralta's fellow Marines had to step over his body to continue the shootout with the terrorists. As the firefight raged on, a "yellow, foreign-made, oval-shaped grenade," as Lance Corporal Travis Kaemmerer described it, rolled into the room where they were all standing and came to a stop near Peralta's body.

But Sgt. Rafael Peralta wasn't dead — yet. This young immigrant of 25 years, who enlisted in the Marines when he received his green card, who volunteered for the front line duty in Fallujah, had one last act of heroism in him.

...In his parent's home, on his bedroom walls hung only three items - a copy of the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and his boot camp graduation certificate. Before he set out for Fallujah, he wrote to his 14-year old brother, "be proud of me, bro...and be proud of being an American."

Not only can Rafael's family be proud of him, but his fellow Marines are alive because of him. As Sgt. Rafael Peralta lay near death on the floor of a Fallujah terrorist hideout, he spotted the yellow grenade that had rolled next to his near-lifeless body. Once detonated, it would take out the rest of Peralta's squad. To save his fellow Marines, Peralta reached out, grabbed the grenade, and tucked it under his abdomen where it exploded.

Imagine what it must be like to be those Marines who were saved by Rafael Peralta. Every Christian knows that salvation was purchased with Christ's blood, but that fact can feel abstract in the quotidian reality in which we dwell. Those men know that every moment they live was directly purchased by a man who sacrificed his earthly life for them.

Many actions are Christ-like, such as feeding the poor or comforting the sick. To will your own death on behalf of others is to make yourself an alter Christus, another Christ, just as St. Paul wrote. As the article says, Sgt. Peralta may well receive the Congressional Medal of Honor. I pray that he is enjoying the greater honor of seeing the Holy One face to face.

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends." (John 15:13)

When I was 15, I subscribed to Policy Review magazine, as part of my ongoing project to outwit my liberal teachers by knowing more facts than they did. (In many cases, that wasn't very hard.) Though I read a lot about politics, I wasn't an outcast — by my senior year, I was the president of our high school's student government, as the Schultz Boys can attest, and I ruled with an iron fist. "El Queso Grande," people called me, though never to my face.

Anyway: there are two excellent articles in the December issue that I commend for your attention. The first is by Jesuit Father James V. Schall, who puts the case for the just use of force as well as I wish I could:

A calm and reasonable case can and should be made for the possession and effective use of force in today’s world. It is irresponsible not to plan for the necessity of force in the face of real turmoils and enemies actually present in the world. No talk of peace, justice, truth, or virtue is complete without a clear understanding that certain individuals, movements, and nations must be met with measured force, however much we might prefer to deal with them peacefully or pleasantly. Without force, many will not talk seriously at all, and some not even then. Human, moral, and economic problems are greater today for the lack of adequate military force or, more often, for the failure to use it when necessary. [full article]
As a bonus, read "Eminem Is Right," by Mary Eberstadt:
...If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music — the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before — is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers. Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain and Nirvana, Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Eminem — these and other singers and bands, all of them award-winning top-40 performers who either are or were among the most popular icons in America, have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager. Surprising though it may be to some, that answer is: dysfunctional childhood. Moreover, and just as interesting, many bands and singers explicitly link the most deplored themes in music today — suicide, misogyny, and drugs — with that lack of a quasi-normal, intact-home personal past.

To put this perhaps unexpected point more broadly, during the same years in which progressive-minded and politically correct adults have been excoriating Ozzie and Harriet as an artifact of 1950s-style oppression, many millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new generation of music idols whose shared generational signature in song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear family has done to them. This is quite a fascinating puzzle of the times. The self-perceived emotional damage scrawled large across contemporary music may not be statistically quantifiable, but it is nonetheless among the most striking of all the unanticipated consequences of our home-alone world. [full article]

Well, there was. Only his name was spelled "John Carey." Unlike Senator John Kerry, Blessed John Carey was Irish.

Non-whites denied the right to vote!

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I thought that allowing non-whites to vote was a major priority of the Left. Yet what will their reaction be when murderous thugs try to prevent non-whites from voting in Iraq? If their reaction to prior injustices are any clue, the answer will be "not much."

What does the Left say about the thugs murdering innocent Iraqis on the street? Nothing.

What did they say when religious fanatics made women cover themselves completely in Fallujah, and beat them when they disobey? Nothing. What did they say when Marines and soldiers liberated the city, including its oppressed women? Nothing.

What did the Left say when four American contractors were murdered, burned to death, and hung from a bridge? Mostly nothing (although some leftists called the dead men "mercenaries," when they were really just security guards protecting a food shipment. That's right: THEY DIED WHILE TRYING TO GET FOOD TO POOR PEOPLE. And the Voices of Compassion and Goodness called them "mercenaries.")

The Left isn't completely silent: they blame all problems in the Middle East on President Bush, as if prior to January 20, 2001, it was the Garden of Eden. They have nothing bad to say about the people doing all the murdering and bombing and kidnapping, because they think Bushitler forced them to do it, and non-whites are never completely culpable for their own actions.

It began with their hysterical defense of Bill Clinton, and it continues with the excuse-making for Islamic terrorism. The Left's fire-sale of its principles continues apace.

I keep seeing the word "perks" to describe special privileges, such as: "A free parking space is one of the perks of the job." It should be perqs, as in "perquisites":

Etymology: Middle English, property acquired by means other than inheritance, from Medieval Latin perquisitum, from neuter of perquisitus, past participle of perquirere to purchase, acquire, from Latin, to search for thoroughly, from per- thoroughly + quaerere to seek
1 : a privilege, gain, or profit incidental to regular salary or wages; especially : one expected or promised
2 : GRATUITY, TIP
3 : something held or claimed as an exclusive right or possession

Madrassas hit by sex abuse claims

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(BBC) — A Pakistani minister has revealed hundreds of cases of alleged child sex abuse at Islamic schools, or madrassas.

There were 500 complaints this year of abuse allegedly committed by clerics, Aamer Liaquat Hussain, a minister in the religious affairs department, said.

Mark Shea is on hiatus, so I'll say it for him: If only women could be radical Islamists! If only radical Islamists could get married! Then none of this would happen.

I guess original sin is in the Muslim world, too. Some of you have been telling me that we can't trust Catholic bishops. Next thing you know, we won't be able to trust Saudi-funded anti-Semitic suicide-bombing anti-Western imams, either!

Armored Hummers: not a panacea

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Secretary Rumsfeld is getting some grief this week for not waving his magic wand and making all Humvees impervious to bad guys by adding armor to them. But I can think of two very good reasons that the up-armored Humvees wouldn't necessarily be desirable....

(The rest of this post was transferred to CommentaryPage.com)

Hentoff and the death penalty

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Personally, I am fairly ambivalent about the death penalty. It would not bother me terribly if the death penalty were suspended in all the states, but I would not consider it a civilizational advance, nor do I think the culture-of-death-loving European governments are morally superior for having abolished it. On balance, I do believe it is a deterrent for dedicated criminals, as most criminals calibrate their actions based on very rational risk/reward criteria.

Nat Hentoff is a man of the Left for whom I have the utmost respect. An atheist, he is nonetheless pro-life, and outspokenly so. Being a civil-liberties fetishist, he is wrong about many things, yet his manner is never anything other than courtly and reasoned. When he speaks on an issue, I pay much greater attention to him than nasty-tongued liberals such as Michael Kinsley or Maureen Dowd.

Hentoff's article on Alberto Gonzalez, the incoming attorney general, made me stop and think about how the death penalty is applied. Gonzalez, as the legal counsel to President Bush when he was governor of Texas, wrote 57 briefings about death-row inmates facing the imposition of their sentences. Hentoff relies on an Atlantic Monthly article about Gonzalez, which criticizes him for relying on the Texas appeals courts' decisions:

As I and other journalists reported during Bush's governorship, the Texas appeals courts notoriously championed, as they still do, the death penalty....Gonzales, by his mechanical reliance on lethal decisions by those courts, ignored, as [Atlantic writer] Alan Berlow notes, "one of the most basic reasons for clemency: the fact that the justice system makes mistakes."
No anti-death-penalty article is complete without The Questionable Execution Story, and here is Hentoff's:
One of the cases in the article was that of "Terry Washington, a mentally retarded thirty-three-year-old man with the communication skills of a seven-year-old." In his three-page report on Terry Washington, Gonzales never mentioned that Washington, as a child, along with his 10 siblings, was "regularly beaten with whips, water hoses, extension cords, wire hangers, and fan belts." And this was "never made known to the jury, although both the district attorney and Washington's trial lawyer knew of this potentially mitigating evidence." Just hours after Gonzales's brief report to Bush, Washington was executed.
From Berlow saying "the justice system makes mistakes," to the facts about Terry Washington's upbringing, you might conclude that Washington was unjustly executed.

You might conclude that — if you believe that all executions are wrong. That would be defensible, because then we're getting down to the real issue, which has nothing to do with whether Terry Washington was innocent or not.

This being the age of the Internet, I wondered if I could find more facts about this case. Google, when I searched for "Terry Washington" murder execution, returned results for articles that sounded very much like Hentoff's, with the implicit message that Washington was not responsible for his crimes because he was retarded. Then I found the actual ruling of the circuit court that denied his appeal, and you can read for yourself to see if he's guilty:

Beatrice Huling and Terry Washington worked at Julie's Place, a restaurant in College Station, Texas. Huling was the restaurant's night manager, and Washington worked as a dishwasher. As part of her duties, Huling would count the night's receipts at the close of business, place cash in the register for the next day, deposit the surplus cash in the office safe, wait for the dishwasher to finish cleaning, set the security alarm, and lock the restaurant....

At 2:30 a.m. that same morning, Michael Jennings was in the parking lot next to Julie's Place. He heard an object hit the ground and went to investigate. Jennings found a purse and immediately called the police. The police arrived shortly thereafter and found Beatrice Huling's name and address in the purse and her car in the parking lot. The restaurant was closed and locked. The police ultimately entered the restaurant and discovered Huling's dead body ten to fifteen feet from the back door, lying in a pool of blood, with her head next to the base of the office safe. She had multiple stab wounds.

The investigation of the crime scene and the autopsy showed that Huling's hands had been tied with apron strings and that she had suffered eighty-five stab wounds, seven of which were fatal. The medical examiner testified at trial that the murder weapon had a five-and-a-half inch blade and that he believed it took Huling ten to fifteen minutes to die. The investigation further found no signs of forced entry into the restaurant, and that $628.00 had been stolen.

The evidence at trial overwhelmingly implicated Washington as the murderer. The State produced evidence linking Washington's boots to an impression made in a pool of Huling's blood. Willie Hemphill, Washington's neighbor, testified that on January 15 he went with Washington to buy some beer and noticed Washington had a lot of money. Additionally, Hemphill saw Washington with a hunting knife which had a blade consistent with the type of wounds inflicted upon Huling. Maud Swanson also saw Washington on January 15 and testified that he had a lot of money in his billfold when he took it out, and that when she asked him about the murder at the restaurant, Washington said "to hell with Bea, or something like that." Scott Milton, the manager of the restaurant, testified that when Washington picked up his paycheck on the day of the murder he told Milton, "The police are hassling me about this, but I'm too smart for them." Billy and Mary Sandles testified that they heard Washington say, "I killed the b---." A teller at a local bank testified that sometime within a week of the murder, Washington changed $450.00 of small bills and coins for larger bills. An employee of J&J Bail Bond testified that shortly after the murder, Washington paid $468.00 in cash for a bond relating to traffic citations, paying with three hundred dollar bills and the rest in twenties and change.

If first-degree murderers deserve death, then Terry Washington deserved death, because there is little question that he plotted the intentional killing of his co-worker. Look, if you oppose the death penalty, just oppose it. Don't get into this stuff about bad defense lawyers and hard childhoods, etc. — that's an argument for reforming the death-penalty process, not abolishing it. I might be convinced, and so might other people. But you're not going to do it by insinuating that vile murderers aren't really vile murderers because their trials weren't absolutely perfect.

BANGKOK (AP) — A massive airdrop of paper birds intended to promote peace failed to halt violence in Thailand's restive south, with a spate of new attacks Monday that targeted soldiers and local officials.
Do you think the writer who wrote "failed to halt violence" was laughing when he wrote it? I know I laughed when I read it.
The bombings, shootings and arson attacks came hours after Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said Sunday's airdrop of nearly 100 million Japanese-style origami cranes over the predominantly Muslim region had achieved an "enormous, positive psychological effect" toward peace.
Except for the fact that it touched off murder and property destruction, it was a great success.
Encouraged by the government, Thais across the country — Cabinet ministers, office workers, schoolchildren and even convicts — folded more than 130 million birds to promote peace in the south. Approximately 30 million will be delivered by land.
The land-delivered ones are probably flightless paper birds, like penguins or ostriches.

And here I thought California had all the whimsical peace nuts.

Stop dumping on the clergy

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My older two kids and I were leaving our church today, on our way to the back parking lot to meet my wife, who was the cantor at the next Mass. Charlie and Anna scampered ahead of me to our pastor, as they always do, and started pulling on his vestments (as I've told them not to do). Father is a very patient man, with the young and the old. When my kids' enthusiasm has gotten the better of their manners, he is laughingly indulgent, and when adults argue against Church teachings, he is earnest but firm.

Both of those scenarios were happening simultaneously as I walked up to him. As my children begged for his attention, a chubby guy in jeans was haranguing Father, asking where in the Bible it said that homosexuality was a sin. Father seemed surprised that anyone would even question what Scripture has to say about the subject, pointing out that homosexual behavior is condemned several times in the Old and New Testaments.

"No, that was like in a war crime, you weren't supposed to do that during a war," the chubby heterodox guy said. His female companion started looking more embarrassed.

"Well, the Bible also says you're not supposed to engage in that behavior outside of war, too," Father replied.

I have to admit that was a new one for me. I've heard the canard that the men of Sodom and Gomorrah were "violating hospitality" by threatening to gang-rape the angels and men who were visiting them. That seems like a rather mild way of putting it.

The Bible doesn't explicitly condemn genocide, conducting dangerous medical experiments on people without their consent, or poking somebody in the eye with a sharp stick. Yet those are all sins. Homosexual conduct is condemned much more explicitly than any of those things (do I really need to list the passages?) Consensual sodomy is less sinful than male-on-male rape, I'm sure, yet just because a thing is less bad does not therefore make it good.

Even more than this specific issue — and there are few issues that bore me more than homosexuality — I am impressed with the gall the chubby guy had. The only time I've ever challenged a priest after Mass was when he said something that was explicitly unorthodox, and I think that's only happened twice, neither time at my parish. Visiting priests have occasionally said things that made me uncomfortable, but if I gave them the charity to which they are entitled, I could not say they were speaking against the faith.

If you have a problem or a question about something a priest said, you ought to take it up with him privately, either in person or in a letter. When you challenge him on a point of Christian teaching, you ought to make sure that you are supported by the ancient teaching of the Church, not by the secular anything-goes materialism that appeared on the world-historical scene the day before yesterday.

Let me widen my net, to complete my point: if you are an orthodox Catholic, believing all that Holy Mother Church teaches, and you have a cynical, bitter attitude toward the men who serve the Body of Christ as priests and bishops, you are little better than the heterodox. If you say you believe that the bishops are the successors of the Apostles, yet you condemn them en masse as unworthy of their offices, are you not insulting the Holy Spirit, who guides the Church? Can you not see that by acknowledging apostolic succession with one side of your mouth, and insulting the successors of the apostles out of the other, you give scandal to non-Catholics and gladden the hearts of the Church's enemies?

Have you never looked into your own souls, to see what darkness lies there? Have you no fear of judgment?

Hatred of priests is hatred of Christ. Hatred of Christ's commandments is hatred of Christ. Either one will kill your soul.

David Pryce-Jones, the insightful and often brilliant writer about the Middle East, Arabs, and Islam, has a typically trenchant article in Commentary magazine titled "The Islamization of Europe?" An excerpt:

Does this crisis amount to a “clash of civilizations”? Many people reject that notion as too sweeping or downright misleading. Yet whether or not it applies to, say, the situation in Iraq, or to the war on terror, the phrase has much to recommend it as a description of what is going on inside Europe today. As Yves Charles Zarka, a French philosopher and analyst, has written: “there is taking place in France a central phase of the more general and mutually conflicting encounter between the West and Islam, which only someone completely blind or of radical bad faith, or possibly of disconcerting naiveté, could fail to recognize.” In the opinion of Bassam Tibi, an academic of Syrian origins who lives in Germany, Europeans are facing a stark alternative: “Either Islam gets Europeanized, or Europe gets Islamized.” Going still farther, the eminent historian Bernard Lewis has speculated that the clash may well be over by the end of this century, at which time, if present demographic trends continue, Europe itself will be Muslim.
Take a look at the quotation I highlighted — kinda sounds like a president who shall remain nameless, with his lack of "nuance" and stark view of the world. Lewis — the unassailable dean of Middle Eastern scholars — underscores two things Belloc predicted in the last century, that Islam would rise again, and that if Europe ceased to be Catholic, it would cease to be at all. (Belloc said this after he stole the idol from Indiana Jones, by the way.)

What? Who?

On life and living in communion with the Catholic Church.

Richard Chonak

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