As a conservative, my basic approach to economics is that of Pope John Paul II, who said that man was not made for the market, but the market was made for man. He meant that the free market is only moral if it serves the end of authentic human flourishing. If it undermines human flourishing, then the market must be reformed. The point is, the market is not an end, but a means to the proper end, which is the health of the community — especially, in Catholic teaching, the family.
Monday, September 12, 2011
Rod Dreher on the free market
Makes sense to me:
Philadelphia newspapers move into the tablet age
The Inquirer, meanwhile, is launching its own "new multimedia Inquirer tablet app"for iPad. (Actually, it launched Aug. 26, but is just now being announced.) It's not that new—it's a single-branded version of the multi-newspaper PressReader app that the Inquirer was already promoting as its tablet app—and it's not that multimedia: Basically it's a PDF of the paper, and if you push a button a computer voice will read the stories to you.
You've got to applaud the Philadelphia Media Network for trying something bold with its tablet experiment. On the other hand, the replica edition that's available seems like weak tea. We'll see if it works.
UPDATE: Ad Week has more details.
UPDATE: Ad Week has more details.
9/12: Why disunity is OK, and why it's not
In a slightly nihilistic moment last week, I bitterly lamented the loss of post-9/11 unity. " We are sweatily intimate with the details of what divides us in this country," I wrote. "So much so, at this point, that I believe the next terror attack would be more likely to further expose those rifts than to eventemporarily obscure them."
After 9/11, some people thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq. Some of us didn't. After 9/11, some people thought it was good to use waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques. Some of us didn't. After 9/11, some people thought it that warrantless wiretapping, with no oversight, was justified in the name of national security. Some of us didn't. And after 9/11, some of us thought that the invocation of "war" against terrorism meant the president and the executive branch had carte blanche to ignore whatever laws and treaty obligations the United States had committed itself to over the previous few decades.
Some of us didn't.
I count myself largely in the "some of us didn't" group on all those counts, of course. But in my most generous moments, I have to acknowledge that many people—many of our leaders—were so frightened of another attack and the effect it might have on the national well-being that they were willing to take almost any step to prevent a repeat of that horrible, awful day in New York, Washington, and Shanksville. In my most generous moments, I have to acknowledge that men—and they were overwhelmingly men—who made the decisions that I criticize were very often acting in what they thought were the best interests of the country, and of keeping it safe.
In my less generous moments, I get a bit cynical when reading all the way to the end of Steve's post:
It's OK that we didn't maintain our unity after 9/11, because I suspect a healthy country needs both people who vigorously advocate for security and people who vigorously advocate for liberties. To the degree I'm angry and cynical about the dissolution of that unity, it's not for unity's sake—but because some people used those differing ideas to paint the rest of us as un-American, and un-worthy of the freedoms we were trying to exercise. In such cases, continued "unity" would've meant hopping on a bandwagon to hell. Good riddance to that.
I still think that's true, but a couple of essays in the last few days have convinced me that the disunity hasn't been entirely bad—and that, in fact, it might even be a good thing. One was David Cole's piece at the New York Review of Books, which acknowledged the encroachment on civil liberties in the aftermath of 9/11, but also celebrated the pushback by institutions and individuals that kept many of those encroachments from gaining ground permanently:
Yet despite the fact that no detainee has been released by court order, more than 600 of the 775 people once held at Guantánamo Bay have been released. Torture and inhumane treatment are no longer official US policy. The NSA spying program now has a statutory footing and is subject to judicial approval and oversight. Widespread preventive detention of Muslim and Arab immigrants in the United States has not been repeated. There have been no reports of rendition to torture in years. And the CIA’s black sites are closed.
If these changes cannot be attributed to judicial enforcement or congressional mandates, what was the moving force? The answer is not to be found in the institutions of government, but in civil society—in the loosely coordinated political actions of concerned individuals and groups, here and abroad. Following September 11, many organizations took up the task of defending liberty—among them the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. Most of these groups did not even exist in the McCarthy era, our nation’s last security crisis.The other piece was my friend Steve Hayward's post at Power Line, pointing out that unity has always been fleeting in wartime:
Fred Siegel’s terrific and underappreciated book, Troubled Journey: From Pearl Harbor to Ronald Reagan, reminds us that “Wartime surveys taken by the Army revealed that troop morale was dangerously low.” The isolationist America Firsters did not go away, but, like 9/11 Truthers today, spread the word that FDR was complicit in a plot to bring about Pearl Harbor: “They were convinced that a devilishly clever Roosevelt had maneuvered the country into an unnecessary war against the wrong foe just as he had used his wiles at home to foist the alien measures of the New Deal’s ‘creeping socialism’ on an unsuspecting nation.” A number of Republicans complained openly they while we should of course fight Japan, why are we fighting in Europe? (Shades of the criticism of our war against Iraq a few years ago.)Steve's invocation of Iraq, combined with Cole's celebration of the pushback against the Bush Administration's post-9/11 excesses, made me realize that the dissolution of the post-attack unity was probably a good and healthy thing. Really. Simply put, we had very real, very legitimate differences over how to proceed after 9/11. It would have been bizarre if those differences had never emerged.
After 9/11, some people thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq. Some of us didn't. After 9/11, some people thought it was good to use waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" techniques. Some of us didn't. After 9/11, some people thought it that warrantless wiretapping, with no oversight, was justified in the name of national security. Some of us didn't. And after 9/11, some of us thought that the invocation of "war" against terrorism meant the president and the executive branch had carte blanche to ignore whatever laws and treaty obligations the United States had committed itself to over the previous few decades.
Some of us didn't.
I count myself largely in the "some of us didn't" group on all those counts, of course. But in my most generous moments, I have to acknowledge that many people—many of our leaders—were so frightened of another attack and the effect it might have on the national well-being that they were willing to take almost any step to prevent a repeat of that horrible, awful day in New York, Washington, and Shanksville. In my most generous moments, I have to acknowledge that men—and they were overwhelmingly men—who made the decisions that I criticize were very often acting in what they thought were the best interests of the country, and of keeping it safe.
In my less generous moments, I get a bit cynical when reading all the way to the end of Steve's post:
Next time you hear some lefty say something along the lines of “it’s our fault” or “we had it coming on 9/11,” just say, “Yeah—just like the Japanese at Hiroshima,” and sit back and watch the reaction. Because as we all know you can only use that argument on America.Now, there are surely some "America had it coming" folks on the left. (And in the GOP presidential primary field!) But as a general rule, most of us who were in the "some of us didn't" group didn't see it that way. We thought, and think, we were challenging America to be true to itself—to the rule of law, to the Bill of Rights, to checks and balances. We found ourselves labeled "objectively pro-terrorist" as a result. And we saw folks like Karl Rove push such nasty ideas—exploit and exacerbate those differences—as a means of consolidating political power for Republicans.
It's OK that we didn't maintain our unity after 9/11, because I suspect a healthy country needs both people who vigorously advocate for security and people who vigorously advocate for liberties. To the degree I'm angry and cynical about the dissolution of that unity, it's not for unity's sake—but because some people used those differing ideas to paint the rest of us as un-American, and un-worthy of the freedoms we were trying to exercise. In such cases, continued "unity" would've meant hopping on a bandwagon to hell. Good riddance to that.
Friday, September 9, 2011
Glenn Greenwald is wrong about Osama bin Laden
Lots of my conservative friends like to accuse Salon's Glenn Greenwald of "moral equivalency," but I generally am glad that there's somebody with a halfway prominent media voice who brings a quality of hard-nosed empathy to our political debates. We Americans can become overly enamored of our own righteousness, to the point that we assume other people see us as we see ourselves—a sometimes fatal blinkeredness. Greenwald has repeatedly asked this question: If you were a run-of-the-mill Muslim family in the Middle East and your child died in an accidental NATO bombing, how would you react? It's not a bad question, and it's even strategically useful, but it makes lots of people mad that he keeps doing that.
Nonetheless, I think Greenwald takes his tendency a little too far with his reaction to the GOP audience that cheered Texas' 234 executions at the Republican debate the other night.
I didn't participate in the "giddy dancing" over bin Laden's death—in part because I'd had major emergency surgery a few hours earlier, but also because I'm temperamentally inclined to believe that even on the rare occasions when government-sponsored death is necessary and right, it's still an awful and grim business. But I don't blame people for celebrating, either. They weren't—like the GOP crowd—celebrating death. They were happy that a rough justice had been served upon a specific man—a villain, actually—responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths on 9/11 and a decade of misery and quagmire that has followed. There was bound to be an extremely emotional reaction to bin Laden's death or capture. That reaction was an instinct; the GOP audience, meanwhile, was cheering on possibly mistaken executions as a matter of thoroughly considered ideology.
Like I said, I find much of Greenwald's work useful. But not all government-sponsored death is equivalent, or equivalently bad. (If it was, we could never allow our police to shoot at Columbine or Virginia Tech gunmen.) In this matter, he's simply wrong.
Nonetheless, I think Greenwald takes his tendency a little too far with his reaction to the GOP audience that cheered Texas' 234 executions at the Republican debate the other night.
This morning's orgy of progressive condemnation made me think of very similar death-celebrations that erupted at the news that the U.S. military had pumped bullets into Osama bin Laden's skull and then dumped his corpse into the ocean. Those of us back then whoexpressed serious reservations about the boisterous public chanting and celebratory cheering of executions were accused by Good Democrats of all manner of deficiencies.
Yes, the 9/11 attack was an atrocious act of slaughter; so were many of the violent, horrendous crimes which executed convicts unquestionably (sometimes by their own confession) committed. In all cases, performing giddy dances over state-produced corpses is odious and wrong.Perhaps I'm overly parsing here, but I see a real difference. I thought the GOP reaction was a bit repugnant because it cheered government-sponsored death generally, and in the context of questioning a governor who seems to have overseen the execution of an innocent man and blocked any real investigation into the possibility of both the man's innocence and the governor's indifference to it.
I didn't participate in the "giddy dancing" over bin Laden's death—in part because I'd had major emergency surgery a few hours earlier, but also because I'm temperamentally inclined to believe that even on the rare occasions when government-sponsored death is necessary and right, it's still an awful and grim business. But I don't blame people for celebrating, either. They weren't—like the GOP crowd—celebrating death. They were happy that a rough justice had been served upon a specific man—a villain, actually—responsible for nearly 3,000 deaths on 9/11 and a decade of misery and quagmire that has followed. There was bound to be an extremely emotional reaction to bin Laden's death or capture. That reaction was an instinct; the GOP audience, meanwhile, was cheering on possibly mistaken executions as a matter of thoroughly considered ideology.
Like I said, I find much of Greenwald's work useful. But not all government-sponsored death is equivalent, or equivalently bad. (If it was, we could never allow our police to shoot at Columbine or Virginia Tech gunmen.) In this matter, he's simply wrong.
Post-9/11 unity isn't coming back
I may be feeling particularly nihilistic this morning, but I don't see the point of spending much energy lamenting the loss of our post-9/11 "unity," as President Obama does in an op-ed for USA Today:
There is no more good faith. We can't wish it back.
Firefighters, police and first responders rushed into danger to save others. Americans came together in candlelight vigils, in our houses of worship and on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. Volunteers lined up to give blood and drove across the country to lend a hand. Schoolchildren donated their savings. Communities, faith groups and businesses collected food and clothing. We were united, as Americans.
This is the true spirit of America we must reclaim this anniversary — the ordinary goodness and patriotism of the American people and the unity that we needed to move forward together, as one nation.Ten years on, that unity seems like a mirage. We are sweatily intimate with the details of what divides us in this country—so much so, at this point, that I believe the next terror attack would be more likely to further expose those rifts than to even temporarily obscure them. Each side would suspect—and accuse—the other of exploiting the attack to further whatever agenda was already on their plate. And each side would probably be right. Instead of grief and anger, we'd just have anger.
There is no more good faith. We can't wish it back.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
9/11 and Sylvester Stallone
 |
| In the movies, at least, it's the bad guys who torture. |
It was common in 2001 to hear that America had “lost its innocence.”
Certainly, the country did seem to lose some of its nobility. Look no further than the films of Sylvester Stallone.
Laugh, if you like. For those of us who came of age during the 1980s, though, Stallone’s B-movie blockbusters also served as morality tales — fantasies that illuminated the stakes of the Cold War against the Soviets. In “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” Communist evil was demonstrated when a Russian officer strapped Stallone to a metal stand and tortured him with electric shock.
The message was clear: Torture was for the bad guys. We were the good guys. That stance was affirmed in real life, when Ronald Reagan signed the U.N. Convention on Torture — in part to shame the Soviets — which prohibited the infliction of “pain or suffering” for the purposes of obtaining information.
We know now that America resorted to torture in the first years after 9/11, inflicting pain and suffering on terror suspects — some of them bad guys, yes, but some of them innocent — and almost never in a “ticking time bomb” scenario. At least three men were “waterboarded;” many others subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation, and worse. Some of them died.
None of this is disputed. But Americans seem mostly fine with it.
Nobody has ever been prosecuted.
Stallone’s latest hit, incidentally, was “The Expendables.” In that movie, the villains strap an innocent woman to a table and poor water on her face and down her throat — all but drowning her. It is a perfect demonstration of waterboarding. In some movies, at least, the bad guys are still torturers.
America is not the villain of 9/11: That distinction belongs to Al Qaida and the 19 men who hijacked planes that day. But are we the heroes of this decade? That’s tougher to say.
Sunday, September 4, 2011
9/11/01
My workday began a little earlier than usual the morning of September 11, 2001. I was a young City Hall reporter for the Lawrence Journal-World in Kansas, used to covering night meetings, but a special committee in charge of crafting the town's tax abatement policy met at 8 am that day, and the topic was important enough that I was there.
The meeting was being run by Jim Henry, a member of the city commission. I didn't notice when he slipped out of the gathering—but suddenly he burst back in. The Twin Towers and Pentagon had been hit by suicide bombers, he said. There was terror in his voice. "It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel," I thought. The meeting was over. I went back to the office.
I spent most of the rest of the day in the newsroom, watching the tiny television as the first tower—and then the second—came down. The Journal-World put out an extra edition that afternoon; I spent my day vainly trying to get NYTimes.com and CNN.com to load.
It wasn't long before I had a realization: I had become a reporter because I wanted to see history with my own eyes. And history was being made half-a-continent away. One thing led to another, and in late October I found myself in my car, driving to Pennsylvania and New York to interview people and see the devastation with my own eyes.
Weeks had passed, but the devastation was still fresh—particularly in New York, where a facade of one of the towers still rose high above the street, higher than any building I knew in Kansas. A fire was still burning in the pit of Ground Zero, and the entire section of lower Manhattan smelled—as I think I wrote for the Journal-World at the time—like a giant, rancid barbecue pit.
The experience changed my life, profoundly, though it would take some time for the changes to make themselves apparent—and perhaps they still are. The changes were most noticeable in three areas of my life:
• I LOST MY FAITH: This, admittedly, was a process that had been going on a long time. For some years prior to 9/11, I had realized that I didn't believe that Christianity was the exclusive route to God—a hard realization, considering my upbringing and my Mennonite college education. Nonetheless, I continued to attend church, finding a happy home at a quite liberal Lawrence Mennonite congregation. I justified myself with the thought that while Christianity wasn't the only way to God, it was the language of faith I'd been given. The direction, pointed at God, was what mattered.
In the aftermath of 9/11—and as religious conflicts seemingly found their way into the news more and more often—that approach made less and less sense to me. It wasn't that Christianity and Islam were different languages trying to describe the same phenomenon; both languages, and multiple others, constantly asserted that they were the only true language. And I realized that without God making Godself visible to sort it out for us, there was no way to properly pick out the true approach; it would all be guesswork and gut feelings, at the end of the day. No way to know you're right, and a million ways to go wrong. I decided that if God existed, God would forgive me for refusing to play a game I couldn't possibly know how to win. And in the process, I'd remove myself from a grander battle of truth assertions that no human could ever really adjudicate. There were better ways to spend my time; the words of hymns and prayers started to taste like lies in my mouth.
About a year after 9/11, I called my pastor and told her I was leaving the church.
A key part of my Mennonite faith, incidentally was a very strict pacifism. Without that faith, my unbreakable nonviolence crumbled. I remain extremely dovish. But it doesn't bother me that Osama bin Laden is dead; it would've, a little, 10 years ago.
• I STARTED TO CARE ABOUT POLITICS: I'd always been interested in politics, but as the first phase of the Afghanistan War wound down and as the campaign for the Iraq Invasion began—and as hints emerged that the United States was torturing terrorist suspects—my cynicism and detachment dropped by the wayside. I got angry at all the ways the Bush Administration seemed to violate civil liberties, manipulate public opinion, and conduct war. I began to read more deeply than I ever had: the New York Times and Washington Post, every day. As many books as I could read—my devotion to novels suffered mightily in favor of research from Thomas Ricks and Jane Mayer and Seymour Hirsch and so on and so forth.
My anger made it more difficult to continue under the guise of an objective, neutral reporter. So when the opportunity arose in late 2007 to do opinion writing for Scripps Howard News Service, I jumped. I didn't turn back.
• MY WORLD GOT BIGGER: I had never been in New York before the trip that took me to the still-smoking Ground Zero. I spent the week making my way gradually, stopping at towns along the way to interview ordinary Americans about how their lives had changed. Along the way, I began to realize the country was much, much bigger than I'd ever contemplated.
It wasn't just the distance—although a 2,000-mile solo driving trip will give you plenty of time to contemplate. It was the experience. In New York, I was taken to the apartment of a Puerto Rican family to interview them about their experiences; they were excellent hosts, but my mind reeled at their living conditions—a well-appointed apartment, yes, but how could a family of four live in such a space? That's what single-family houses were for! It dawned on me in a visceral way that not everybody lived the way I had been raised in rural Kansas.
Which was obvious enough, even to me, but I'd never felt the difference before. And in the years after I left New York, I began to chafe. Not only did I read more widely, I wanted to travel more widely. (Which I did to the limited extent a reporter's salary would allow.) Before 9/11, my expectation was to have a career in Kansas newspapers. Maybe I'd even end up with a big regional newspaper in Kansas City or St. Louis. Somehow, I ended up in Philadelphia. Freelancing. It is nothing I ever would have anticipated, or even aimed for, until it happened.
Philadelphia is not better than Kansas. But it is certainly different, and different from my wife's Arkansas upbringing. We live with our son in a smaller apartment than the one I visited in New York, and we find it mostly satisfying. And I feel fairly certain I wouldn't be here without 9/11, and the reaction it produced in me.
It is, perhaps, narcissistic in the extreme to take a look at a key moment in our nation's recent history and reflect on what it means for me personally. But history doesn't exist merely in the broad sweep: It changes lives, dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions of people at a time. I am a different man today than I was on 9/11 because 10 years have passed, and because I am married and have a son now. But I am a different man, too, because 9/11 happened. Because of that, my son is living a different life than he would have. It's all normal, and it's all completely different.
The meeting was being run by Jim Henry, a member of the city commission. I didn't notice when he slipped out of the gathering—but suddenly he burst back in. The Twin Towers and Pentagon had been hit by suicide bombers, he said. There was terror in his voice. "It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel," I thought. The meeting was over. I went back to the office.
I spent most of the rest of the day in the newsroom, watching the tiny television as the first tower—and then the second—came down. The Journal-World put out an extra edition that afternoon; I spent my day vainly trying to get NYTimes.com and CNN.com to load.
It wasn't long before I had a realization: I had become a reporter because I wanted to see history with my own eyes. And history was being made half-a-continent away. One thing led to another, and in late October I found myself in my car, driving to Pennsylvania and New York to interview people and see the devastation with my own eyes.
Weeks had passed, but the devastation was still fresh—particularly in New York, where a facade of one of the towers still rose high above the street, higher than any building I knew in Kansas. A fire was still burning in the pit of Ground Zero, and the entire section of lower Manhattan smelled—as I think I wrote for the Journal-World at the time—like a giant, rancid barbecue pit.
The experience changed my life, profoundly, though it would take some time for the changes to make themselves apparent—and perhaps they still are. The changes were most noticeable in three areas of my life:
• I LOST MY FAITH: This, admittedly, was a process that had been going on a long time. For some years prior to 9/11, I had realized that I didn't believe that Christianity was the exclusive route to God—a hard realization, considering my upbringing and my Mennonite college education. Nonetheless, I continued to attend church, finding a happy home at a quite liberal Lawrence Mennonite congregation. I justified myself with the thought that while Christianity wasn't the only way to God, it was the language of faith I'd been given. The direction, pointed at God, was what mattered.
In the aftermath of 9/11—and as religious conflicts seemingly found their way into the news more and more often—that approach made less and less sense to me. It wasn't that Christianity and Islam were different languages trying to describe the same phenomenon; both languages, and multiple others, constantly asserted that they were the only true language. And I realized that without God making Godself visible to sort it out for us, there was no way to properly pick out the true approach; it would all be guesswork and gut feelings, at the end of the day. No way to know you're right, and a million ways to go wrong. I decided that if God existed, God would forgive me for refusing to play a game I couldn't possibly know how to win. And in the process, I'd remove myself from a grander battle of truth assertions that no human could ever really adjudicate. There were better ways to spend my time; the words of hymns and prayers started to taste like lies in my mouth.
About a year after 9/11, I called my pastor and told her I was leaving the church.
A key part of my Mennonite faith, incidentally was a very strict pacifism. Without that faith, my unbreakable nonviolence crumbled. I remain extremely dovish. But it doesn't bother me that Osama bin Laden is dead; it would've, a little, 10 years ago.
• I STARTED TO CARE ABOUT POLITICS: I'd always been interested in politics, but as the first phase of the Afghanistan War wound down and as the campaign for the Iraq Invasion began—and as hints emerged that the United States was torturing terrorist suspects—my cynicism and detachment dropped by the wayside. I got angry at all the ways the Bush Administration seemed to violate civil liberties, manipulate public opinion, and conduct war. I began to read more deeply than I ever had: the New York Times and Washington Post, every day. As many books as I could read—my devotion to novels suffered mightily in favor of research from Thomas Ricks and Jane Mayer and Seymour Hirsch and so on and so forth.
My anger made it more difficult to continue under the guise of an objective, neutral reporter. So when the opportunity arose in late 2007 to do opinion writing for Scripps Howard News Service, I jumped. I didn't turn back.
• MY WORLD GOT BIGGER: I had never been in New York before the trip that took me to the still-smoking Ground Zero. I spent the week making my way gradually, stopping at towns along the way to interview ordinary Americans about how their lives had changed. Along the way, I began to realize the country was much, much bigger than I'd ever contemplated.
It wasn't just the distance—although a 2,000-mile solo driving trip will give you plenty of time to contemplate. It was the experience. In New York, I was taken to the apartment of a Puerto Rican family to interview them about their experiences; they were excellent hosts, but my mind reeled at their living conditions—a well-appointed apartment, yes, but how could a family of four live in such a space? That's what single-family houses were for! It dawned on me in a visceral way that not everybody lived the way I had been raised in rural Kansas.
Which was obvious enough, even to me, but I'd never felt the difference before. And in the years after I left New York, I began to chafe. Not only did I read more widely, I wanted to travel more widely. (Which I did to the limited extent a reporter's salary would allow.) Before 9/11, my expectation was to have a career in Kansas newspapers. Maybe I'd even end up with a big regional newspaper in Kansas City or St. Louis. Somehow, I ended up in Philadelphia. Freelancing. It is nothing I ever would have anticipated, or even aimed for, until it happened.
Philadelphia is not better than Kansas. But it is certainly different, and different from my wife's Arkansas upbringing. We live with our son in a smaller apartment than the one I visited in New York, and we find it mostly satisfying. And I feel fairly certain I wouldn't be here without 9/11, and the reaction it produced in me.
It is, perhaps, narcissistic in the extreme to take a look at a key moment in our nation's recent history and reflect on what it means for me personally. But history doesn't exist merely in the broad sweep: It changes lives, dozens and hundreds and thousands and millions of people at a time. I am a different man today than I was on 9/11 because 10 years have passed, and because I am married and have a son now. But I am a different man, too, because 9/11 happened. Because of that, my son is living a different life than he would have. It's all normal, and it's all completely different.
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