Twenty years after Bhopal…

(Excerpt) On the night of 2 December 1984, poisonous methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas leaked from the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal. Thousands were killed immediately. Thousands more were to die from the effects of that night in the months and years that followed.

[---]

“The disaster shocked the world and raised fundamental questions about corporate and government responsibility for industrial accidents that devastate human life and local environments,” the report reads.

“Yet 20 years on, the survivors still await just compensation, adequate medical assistance and treatment, and comprehensive economic and social rehabilitation. The plant site has still not been cleaned up so toxic wastes still pollute the environment and contaminate water that surrounding communities rely on. And, astonishingly, no one has been held to account for the leak and its appalling consequences.”

[---]

The report confirms survivors’ claims that far more died in the immediate aftermath of the gas leak than the figure of 2,000 claimed by the Madhya Pradesh state government. Amnesty’s found that 7,000 died in the immediate aftermath, and 15,000 more have died of related diseases since 1984. It reveals that 100,000 people still suffer from chronic or debilitating illnesses. “The company decided to store quantities of the ‘ultra-hazardous’ MIC in Bhopal in bulk, and did not equip the plant with a corresponding safety capacity,” the report says.

Repeat: no one has been held to account…

Frank Rich last week, in one of the many pieces I didn’t get to pass on here:

“The mainstream press, itself in love with the “moral values” story line and traumatized by the visual exaggerations of the red-blue map, is too cowed to challenge the likes of the American Family Association. So are politicians of both parties. It took a British publication, The Economist, to point out that the percentage of American voters citing moral and ethical values as their prime concern is actually down from 2000 (35 percent) and 1996 (40 percent).”

Now this would have been a very useful statistic for Rev. Jim Wallis to toss out yesterday on Meet the Press during the “sometimes heated discussion” he held with the Revs. Al Sharpton, Jerry Falwell and Richard Land. “Discussion” is a generous way to describe this exchange, which revealed nothing new and found very little common ground. Here’s the transcript. Tim Russert moderated, albeit ineffectually, on topics of faith, politics, moral values, and whatever sound bites the participants spat out - including whether God could be pro-war, and who takes the Bible more seriously (Falwell, of course). (Disclaimer: I lived in NYC during Sharpton’s Tawana Brawley years, and must confess to being somewhat flummoxed by his transformation into a social justice dignitary and apparently serious presidential candidate. Having him on this program to represent religious progressives along with Jim Wallis was… an interesting choice.) Russert brought up the fact that divorce rates are higher in the “red states,” and that “Desperate Housewives” is watched as much in the red states as the blue, but the Reverends didn’t really take the bait. And actually, TNR’s Jeffrey Friedman makes a good case for the flawed logic in assuming that red state voters are the same folks that are getting divorces and watching “Desperate Housewives.” In any case, it was pretty clear that this was little more than a chance to trumpet already established positions, not to seek compromise or agreement. And with right-wing ministers like the abominably smug and proudly intolerant James Kennedy telling non-believers and non-right wingers to “repent” in the face of a conservative Christian-controlled government, I don’t expect compromise or agreement is in the offing.

A dispatch from beyond the Reality-Based Community informs us that global warming may in fact be beneficial to humankind:

The International Policy Network will publish its long-awaited study, claiming that the science warning of an environmental disaster caused by climate change is ‘fatally flawed’. It will state that previous predictions of changes in sea level of a metre over the next 100 years were overestimates.

Instead, the report will say that sea level rises will reach a maximum of just 20cms during the next century, adding that global warming could, in fact, benefit mankind by increasing fish stocks.

No mention of the benefits associated with natural disasters and the concommitant economic crisis anticipated by the world’s second largest insurer…

I wish I could say I’m closely following developments in Ukraine, but I’m not. I’m following other people following the developments. Julie Saltman (via Pandagon) spotted this delicious irony:

The Bush adminstration has refused to accept the Ukrainian election results because they suspect fraud. Apparently the conservative candidate has claimed victory by a narrow margin but — and I am not making this up — the results are under suspicion because the exit polls gave a narrow victory to his liberal challenger…

The Supreme Court was asked to overturn the decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court that legalized gay marriage. They declined without comment. Dang those activist judges.

Wal-Mart had a bleak Black Friday, but sales of high-end, luxury items were up. I’m sure this has nothing to do with beneficiaries of Bush’s tax policies…

Coincidental to my Django Reinhardt item last week, The New Yorker reviews a new biography about him.

Postings will remain unpredictable for a couple of weeks, yet, but don’t give up on me!

I haven’t been very good about attending to the blogroll on the right - updating it with my new discoveries, etc. But I just noticed that at least one or two that I added some time ago weren’t actually showing up on the site… because I failed to close a quotation mark! So allow me to momentarily point you to Father Jake Stops the World and FaithAsAWayofLife, because I’ve been enjoying them both, and meant to share the discoveries awhile ago! I’ll get organized and add some other ones, soon.

Many apologies for the brown-out here this week. I have not had internet access and am easily overwhelmed, now, by the dense text and long, repetitive columns of an old-fashioned newspaper. So I limited my news media interactions to talking back to television reporters on “Today” and “Good Morning America” as I go dressed, and I’ve been concentrating on learning my new job and getting the house ready for yesterday’s T-day gathering.

• This is good news for those of us who are concerned about the election process, but probably the kiss of death for the GAO (Government Accountability Office): They have begun investigating the many reports of election day problems and irregularities. We can probably bet the farm on severe GAO budget cuts next year?
  

  WASHINGTON (AP) - Congress’ investigative agency, responding to complaints from around the country, has begun to look into the Nov. 2 vote count, including the handling of provisional ballots and malfunctions of voting machines.

  The presidential results won’t change, but the studies could lead to changes.

  The Government Accountability Office usually begins investigations in response to specific requests from Congress, but the agency’s head, Comptroller General David Walker, said the GAO acted on its own because of the many comments it received about ballot counting.

  GAO officials said the investigation was not triggered by a request from several House Democrats, who wrote the agency this month seeking an investigation. The effort, led by senior Judiciary Committee Democrat John Conyers of Michigan, was not joined by any Republicans.

  Walker said in a statement that some of the election work is under way. The probe will cover voter registration, voting machine problems and handling of provisional ballots, which were given to voters who said they were eligible to cast votes although their names were not on the rolls.

  He cautioned that the GAO cannot enforce the law if voting irregularities are found, noting that state officials regulate elections and the Justice Department prosecutes voting rights violations and election fraud.

  Conyers said in an interview Wednesday that several House Democrats “want the widest, most impartial investigation that can be had. Whether they (GAO investigators) want to go as far as we want to go, we’re not certain. We’re at first base. Where do we go from here?”

  The congressman said he plans to meet with Walker and key Republicans to see whether Congress should take action to improve election systems.

  He said he would like the investigation to include allegations that insufficient numbers of voting machines were sent to some Democratic areas.

  The study also should cover how election officials responded to problems they encountered, he said.

  Thousands of complaints have poured in to Congress and appeared on Internet sites about problems with the elections, the Democrats said.

  In make-or-break Ohio, where Bush won 20 electoral votes, voters cast 155,337 provisional ballots. They are under review by state elections officials, who count them if registration is confirmed. About 78 percent of the ballots counted so far have been deemed valid.

  Meanwhile, election officials in two Ohio counties have discovered possible cases of people voting twice in the presidential election, and a third county found about 2,600 ballots were double-counted.

  Groups checking election results have overwhelmed Ohio county boards of election with requests for information, and a statewide recount of the presidential vote appears inevitable after a pair of third-party candidates collected enough money to demand one.

  Other examples of problems cited by Conyers and other House Democrats:

  _In Columbus, Ohio, an electronic voting system gave President Bush nearly 4,000 extra votes.

  _An electronic count of a South Florida gambling ballot initiative failed to record thousands of votes.

  _In Guilford County, N.C., vote totals were so large that the tabulation computer didn’t count some votes, and a recount awarded an additional 22,000 votes to Democrat John Kerry.

  _In San Francisco, a glitch in voting machine software left votes uncounted.

  _In Youngstown, Ohio, voters who tried to cast ballots for Kerry on electronic machines saw their votes recorded for President Bush instead.

  _In Sarpy County, Neb., a computer problem added thousands of votes to the county total. It was not clear which presidential candidate benefited from the error in the overwhelmingly Republican state.

• At dinner yesterday, one guest remarked that the US government could never be taken over by religious fundamentalists… Meet Phil Burress and reflect on his plans.
• Congress is threatening to withhold aid to any country that refuses to grant US personnel immunity from war crimes tribunals.
• Which reminds me… apparently anyone can grow up to be a torturer.
• Granted, Mr. Bush’s plans to privatize social security and restructure the tax code (to provide even more relief to the very rich) weren’t the centerpieces of his stump speech - so even hardcore believers might have been surprised to learn that their top priorities were not actually his top priorities, but given this post-election poll, one really wonders what the hell those 59 million thought they were voting for.
  

  At a time when the White House has portrayed Mr. Bush’s 3.5-million-vote victory as a mandate, the poll found that Americans are at best ambivalent about Mr. Bush’s plans to reshape Social Security, rewrite the tax code, cut taxes and appoint conservative judges to the bench. There is continuing disapproval of Mr. Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq, with a plurality now saying it was a mistake to invade in the first ple.

• Worldwide, the number of women infected with AIDS is now higher than men:
  

  (Excerpt)In every region of the world - including the US, where Aids is one of the biggest killers of African-American women, and Europe - it is the same story, said Kathleen Cravero, deputy executive director of UNAids, yesterday, and it means that a new strategy must be adopted.

  “The prevention strategies now in place are missing the point when it comes to women and girls,” she said. The ABC mantra favoured by the US - abstinence, be faithful and use a condom - is useless to women who do not have the power to refuse sex, sometimes from an older, sexually experienced husband who already has HIV.

  Social and cultural change is the only way to check the pandemic in countries where women have no status or power, UNAids says - although it accepts that revolution is not on the cards.

  “What we’re talking about is very specific actions that are do-able, moving to a situation where every woman gets to keep her house and her land and her furniture when her partner dies,” said Ms Cravero. “It doesn’t mean turning society on its head. It means getting the right laws in place and making them enforceable.

  “We have to work against the fatalistic idea that you can never change these things.”

  Folks, our delusional president and his Republican congress is not going to take the lead on this. (Unless you call withholding funds from agencies that provide family planning and birth control “leading.”) Here’s the UNAIDS site.

• “Dead-checking” — that’s what marines call the actions of the young man who executed a wounded Iraqi in a mosque a couple weeks ago. A wounded Iraqi can still shoot you as you walk away. A dead one can’t. “What does the American public think happens when they tell us to assault a city?” one of them said. “Marines don’t shoot rainbows out of our asses. We fucking kill people.” Evan Wright’s column on the reality of war dead is pretty harrowing reading.

Djangled

Djangled
Originally uploaded by mizm_sf.

(Django Reinhardt photo by the great William Gottlieb.) I stumbled across this terrific CD in a used bookstore (where else?) and have been listening to it all weekend. I first heard a Django Reinhardt recording when I was about 17 — I’d found a cheap re-release of some kind, along with several other guitar-instrumental LPs I was collecting for inspiration. The sound quality was lousy, and I didn’t spend much time really appreciating Django’s stylings. 25 years later he’s one of many, many guitarists I listen to, but I only recently learned this: his right hand was badly burned when he and his young family were trying to escape a fire. The last two fingers - you can see the scarring in the photo above - were permanently curled from tendon damage. To accomodate his new reality, he reconfigured all of his chord patterns, and developed solos he could play with his two good fingers! That makes his playing all the more amazing to me. Give him a listen some time, if you haven’t. (He also couldn’t read or write music, so he never played a solo the same way twice.)

• And God created Pierolapithecus catalaunicus and madeth it to appear very old (13 million years) and buried it near Barcelona, deep, but not too deep… (If your kids are in Philly’s Dover school district, they probably won’t be hearing about this fascinating find; then again, if you’ve got your kids in that school district, you probably don’t want them hearing about this, eh?)

• Point - Counterpoint:
  

  “I guess you could say I’m a good steward of the land…” GW Bush, in the second presidential debate this year.

  “The Sierra Club today released documents showing that the Bush administration gave special treatment to Texas-based Davis Brothers Oil Producers, Inc., when it reversed a longstanding policy in order to allow oil and gas drilling underneath certain national parks, preserves and refuges regardless of potential environmental impacts. More than a dozen National Park Service areas could be impacted by the rule, including Big Thicket National Preserve and Padre Island National Seashore in Texas, New River Gorge in West Virginia, and Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida.

  Documents obtained by Sierra Club through the Freedom of Information Act show that the Bush administration changed the rule specifically at the request of Ross Davis, who runs Davis Brothers Oil Producers.

  Moreover, the administration made its decision in secret and bypassed the regular rulemaking process, which allows for public input and a high degree of transparency.”

• “It’s like experimenting with drugs,” Davies said. “You just keep playing with it and it becomes customary… If it’s OK to dress like a girl today, then why is it not OK in the future?” Can someone please get Delana Davies the help she so desperately needs? Her children, too, if they’re to have any hope of a normal life. Davies forced her son’s school district to cancel one of its traditional homecoming week gags, a “cross-dressing” day. They will all wear military camouflage gear instead.
• Ohio’s Green Party and Ohio Honest Elections Campaign will try to force a recount after gathering mounds of evidence on deliberate vote suppression, electronic voting disparities, and confusion over provisional balloting. Meanwhile, the University of California’s Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team released a statistical study suggesting that electronic voting machines “may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election.” The study can be found at: http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/. (Kevin Drum links to a couple of studies that question the Berkeley findings, however.)
• Just trying to keep up here: the Pentagon is pressing for US-imposed “regime change” in Iran, even as the US considers boosting troop levels in the existing mess in Iraq, which we apparently can only do by calling up aging and out of shape military retirees? By the way, Bob Simon had a segment on 60 Minutes tonight dealing with the military’s shameful disregard of non-combat casualties from the Iraq war. Between 15,000 (military estimate provided to Simon in a letter - not provided to news media on a daily basis!) and 30,000 (estimate from Globalsecurity.org) men and women have been evacuated from Iraq due to illness or injury. That’s a far cry more than the approximately 5000 figure we’re more likely to hear in the press. That’s because the military - undoubtedly concerned about losing public support for the “action” - doesn’t include the men and women injured in “non-combat” situations (in once case, a tank awaiting action tumbled into the Tigris when the land beneath it gave way; two men were killed, and another was paralyzed from the neck down. None of them are listed as casualties.). Conveniently, this also denies a host of benefits to these men and women. Beyond reprehensible.
• Harold Myerson and James Carville are among the latest to opine that Democrats need a “theme.” Someone somewhere else derided the Democratic party’s “laundry list.” (I can’t find the link.) Oliver Willis has gone so far as to create a whole (admittedly creative) “branding” campaign. Even ZZ Packer, in a smart piece on Democratic marginalizing of the religious voices in the party, plugs the “theme” theme: “…What we Democrats need is our own political brand of evangelism. The conservatives have a well-wrought message, but no works. We have the substantive works, but no message, and certainly no overarching vision…” I have fallen on both sides, and smack on the fence, on this issue, but today, I’m of this mind: it’s pathetic that we are talking this way. It’s gross. It’s Republican. I know that great segments of the electorate are giving other segments of the electorate good reasons to puzzle deeply over their cognitive processes, but at this moment, the whole idea of branding and creating a party “theme” strikes me as the height of manipulative cynicism. If Democrats are not recognizeable by their works, convictions and priorities, then it is because we are losing sight of them ourselves, and are beginning to hybridize and mutate. (I might be picking up on some of Thomas Frank’s observations here.) There is nothing uninformative about a “litany” or a “list” if it reflects the priorities of the person(s) who created it. I run my whole life on lists: I make a “to-do” list, and trust that the items I put on it are going to bear some approximation or relationship to the values I hold. To the world around me, those values will - I hope - become clear in my daily conduct. Not once has one of my lists tricked me into doing something against my convictions! “Let’s see… #4… ‘Support legislation to lower vehicle emission standards and open more roadless areas in national forests to off-road vehicles.’ Done. Wait! Dammit! How’d that get on my list?!” Perhaps we can trust that the American people — maybe at least half of them — have the inductive reasoning abilities to recognize a few governing principles, and to develop expectations, from the actions we Democrats take? (OK, true, we’ll need to work fast, because this administration is working doubletime to restrict advanced education.)

  For those who continue to insist on a theme, I think the terrific Pax Christi campaign covers everything: Life does not end at birth.

• Here’s how members of the Moral Values Party react when a journalist, in the process of doing his job, reports an unpleasant truth about an American soldier…
• Republicans yesterday tried to sneak a line through a massive omnibus spending bill that would have given any committee chair and his/her staffers the right to look at ANY AMERICAN’S TAX RETURN. Daily Kos contributors caught the action on CSPAN. That spending bill passed, by the way - and includes the very special provision that allows hospitals and doctors to refuse abortions without sacrificing state or federal money. The Senate added a “range of priorities” that included a presidential yacht. In what moral value system can a “yacht” appear as a “priority”? Why, that of the ruling majority, of course. MyDD has more on the urgency of that budget item, and Atrios thinks the DNC should have some commercials out this week.
• I guess now that Bush is safely back in office, Greenspan can admit that we’re nearing economic catastrophe…
• If the Washington Post doesn’t have an apology or a good explanation for this, I will join the boycott. You’ll have to find your WaPo links elsewhere. Here is some follow-up on the quackpot whose work the supplement cites. I’ll check WaPo a few times to see if they’ve accounted for their judgement, but no further.

My cold medicine is kicking in. I’d better get back to my books while the words still appear in straight lines.

• Ah, Powell. The good soldier to the end. And we should believe him now because he’s been so accurate in the past, right? Not that it matters; Kevin Drum sees ominous signs…

• Dowd today pretty much sums up the administration in one sentence: “First, faith trumped facts. Now, loyalty trumps competence.”
• Barbara Ehrenreich:
  

  Of all the loathsome spectacles we’ve endured since Nov. 2 – the vampire-like gloating of CNN commentator Robert Novak, Bush embracing his “mandate” – none are more repulsive than that of Democrats conceding the “moral values” edge to the party that brought us Abu Ghraib. The cries for Democrats to overcome their “out-of-touch-ness” and embrace the predominant faith all dodge the full horror of the situation: A criminal has been enabled to continue his bloody work with the help, in no small part, of self-identified Christians.
  
  [---]
  
  In the aftermath of election 2004, centrist Democrats should not be flirting with faith but re-examining their affinity for candidates too mumble-mouthed and compromised to articulate poverty and war as the urgent moral issues they are. Jesus is on our side here, and secular liberals should not be afraid to invoke him. Policies of pre-emptive war and the upward redistribution of wealth are inversions of the Judeo-Christian ethic, which is for the most part silent, or mysteriously cryptic, on gays and abortion. At the very least, we need a firm commitment to public forms of childcare, healthcare, housing and education – for people of all faiths and no faith at all. Secondly, progressives should perhaps rethink their own disdain for service-based outreach programs. Once it was the left that provided “alternative services” in the form of free clinics, women’s health centers, food co-ops and inner-city multi-service storefronts. Enterprises like these are not substitutes for an adequate public welfare state, but they can become the springboards from which to demand one.

• Speaking of… The Party of the Moral Values Voters has voted to let members of Congress retain leadership positions even if they have been indicted, you know, just in case anybody tries to give poor Tom DeLay a hard time. They owe him, after all that effort he put into a potentially illegel redistricting scheme in the state of Texas that won them five more seats. One of the delicious ironies about this is that Republicans concocted this rule in 1993 in order to cripple Democratic Ways and Means Chair, Dan Rostenkowski, during his own “challenges.”
• Good question, Father Jake. Where go the moral values voters when US soldiers are slaughtering terrified families:
  

  “Why is there little moral outrage about this? I thought the American people recently claimed that “moral values” were at the top of their list of priorities?

  I suppose that there’s only so much moral outrage to go around. So much has been expended on legislating sex and denying health care for women that there’s not much left for war crimes.”

  Meanwhile, Margaret Hassan is gone. A terrible, terrible shame that accomplishes nothing but increased hardship for the Iraqis she served, and would probably go a long way toward turning sympathies against her kidnappers, if only the US could keep its own savageries and war crimes off the front pages for a few weeks.

• I’ll have to consult with a couple of learned Hebrew expert friends to get their take on this, but it sounds spectacular and I can’t wait to read it: Robert Alter has published a new English translation of the first five books of the Hebrew Bible…
  

  “…His argument is that past translations either get the Hebrew wrong or mangle the Bible’s syntax or lose the power of the work or even are so up-to-the-minute that they become too conversational to be accurate or interesting.

  He was also determined to get back into the book every single “and” that other translators left out, saying that part of book’s majesty is built by its use of repetitions.

  The 1611 King James version, perhaps the most famous book ever written by a committee, may reach poetic heights, but Alter says it is fraught with “embarrassing inaccuracies” and often substitutes Greek or Latin words and Renaissance English tonalities and rhythms for biblical ones…”

Thanks for your patience this week. I’m getting settled in to the new schedule, and still bouncing between offices. Things should lighten up after Friday!

I started my new data consulting job today, and had no computer access. What an interesting feeling. Count on postings to remain light and unpredictable this week, as I get adjusted. And they’ll probably come online at night. But I’m trying to get caught up!

I’ll have more to say about this topic eventually (no promises when), because it relates to my developing masters thesis. Just please cogitate on Wangari Maathai’s wise words, for now. She is Kenya’s Assistant Minister for Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife, founder of Kenya’s Green Belt Movement, and winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mount Kenya is a World Heritage Site. The equator passes right on its top, and it has a unique habitat and heritage.

Because it is a glacier-topped mountain, it is the source of many of Kenya’s rivers. Now, partly because of climate change and partly because of logging and encroachment through cultivation of crops, the glaciers are melting. Many of the rivers flowing from Mount Kenya have either dried up or become very low. Its biological diversity is threatened as the forests fall.

“What shall we do to conserve this forest?” I asked myself.

As I tried to encourage women and the African people in general to understand the need to conserve the environment, I discovered how crucial it is to return constantly to our cultural heritage. Mount Kenya used to be a holy mountain for my people, the Kikuyus. They believed that their God dwelled on the mountain and that everything good – the rains, clean drinking water – flowed from it. As long as they saw the clouds (the mountain is a very shy mountain, usually hiding behind clouds), they knew they would get rain.

And then the missionaries came. With all due respect to the missionaries (they are the ones who really taught me), in their wisdom, or lack of it, they said, “God does not dwell on Mount Kenya. God dwells in heaven.”

We have been looking for heaven, but we have not found it. Men and women have gone to the moon and back and have not seen heaven. Heaven is not above us: it is right here, right now.

So the Kikuyu people were not wrong when they said that God dwelled on the mountain, because if God is omnipresent, as theology tells us, then God is on Mount Kenya too. If believing that God is on Mount Kenya is what helps people conserve their mountain, I say that’s okay. If people still believed this, they would not have allowed illegal logging or clear-cutting of the forests.

Do read the rest.

It somehow seems appropriate to put these items together: the US is blocking medical aid to Falluja civilians, shooting injured insurgents at point blank range (you think the one they happened to catch on film is the only one?) and the blogger of Baghdad Burning cries “WHERE IS EVERYONE???”

Have you seen this site? Click on “gallery” for the myriad of photo postings and apologies. It’s an international hit.

Word came down this weekend that new CIA director Porter Goss has been authorized to purge the CIA of anyone who appears to lack loyalty to President Bush. That should take care of the “dissenting opinion” problem. Then we had the cascade of cabinet resignations: Powell, which isn’t a big surprise, along with Agriculture Secretary Veneman and Energy Secretary Spencer. Rice, God help us, appears to be replacing Powell, and a Rumsfeld resignation is just too much to hope for.

Shoot. Starting next year, I’m not gonna be able to studiously ignore William Safire anymore.

Ah ha! Exeedingly useful trivia! I occasionally get confused about Red States and Blue States (though certainly not this year) because it seemed to me that I was “red” one of the times I voted for Clinton. I chalked it up to my aging memory. But the colors really have switched!

Hey, the good people of Moving Ideas have added Left At The Altar to their progressive blogroll! So if you’re just starting to visit from there, welcome! Please entertain yourself with the archives until I get my new job/school act together and start posting more predictably!

I know I’m gonna hear it for the snarky caption on the map graphic. And for my evolution education diatribe. I suppose my thinking grows a little more polarized and heuristic (can I use that as an adjective?) when I’m several hundred pages behind on my homework, and several hundred minutes behind on sleep, and still absolutely disgusted by the results of the election! (Dang! I’ve been trying to keep that under control!)

I’ve been meaning, since the “moral values” post-election day explanatory narrative started to take shape in the media, to link back to an oldie-but-goodie, a terrific column by Anna Quindlen entitled “At then Left Hand of God.” I linked to it way back in April, I think, when I started this blog — because it’s one of the things that made me want to. An excerpt:

When did it first become gospel that only conservatives knew God? It sure wasn’t true 40 years ago for a Roman Catholic kid in a Catholic neighborhood, when the knock on John F. Kennedy was that religion was likely to be too much a part of his politics and he’d be on the phone to the Holy See so often, the pope would be a de facto cabinet member. Jimmy Carter’s faith was as much a part of his persona as that Chiclets smile, and I’d like to meet the guy who could go head to head with Mario Cuomo on theology and not cry for mercy by the end of the exercise.

All that made perfect sense to me because I had long ago concluded that I had become a liberal largely through religion. Loving your neighbor as yourself, giving your cloak to the man who had none, blessed are the peacemakers: taken together, all of it seemed a clarion call to social justice and the obligation of individuals and institutions to help those who needed help. Jesus was the first radical rabble-rouser I’d ever read about in school, and the best.

Yet the other night I listened to Bill O’Reilly speak of “secularists” on Fox News, and as I tried to parse out who those secularists might be, I discovered to my surprise that they would be me…

My good friend Anne Carey filled in for our vacationing pastor at church today. Speaking to the Gospel text Luke 21:5-10 and the need for Christians to have the courage of their convictions, she worked her way to this elegant statement:

“It is crystal clear today that our national discourse on religion desperately needs to hear the voices of those who find in the gospel message of Jesus something more, something greater than the so-called ‘moral values’ of private piety. So I’ll go out on a limb here and propose that, according to the Gospel, eliminating povery is a moral value. Seeking peace is a moral value. Loving your neighbor is a moral value. Making an effort to understand who you neighbor is is a moral value. Caring for God’s good earth is a moral value. Working to heal divisions among God’s people and within the Christian family is a moral value. Welcoming the stranger and the alien, the widow and the orphan is a moral value. Justice for all, regardless of social position or economic status or any other form of classification, is most definitely a moral value. I didn’t just make all this up; every single value I mentioned is grounded in scripture.”

Amen.

From the Department of Says It All…

uselectionmap
Originally uploaded by mizm_sf.

A future contributor to this blog sent me this graphic (thanks, J!). I deleted the email before I grabbed the source, so I’m still trying to track down the original creator/context. (I see this blog has it, too, but has no more information than I can find.) Yeeesh. No comment needed?

I think I am going to impose my own “litmus test” on future scientific and medical practitioners who have anything to do with my body: if you graduated from this school system or one like it (which includes some school systems in Georgia, Kansas and Ohio), don’t touch me unless your actions will be limited to stitching shut a gaping wound or applying defibrillator paddles. If my doctor gets through school while willfully ignoring scientific evidence of evolutionary processes (hellooooooo, anyone seen a domesticated dog today?), I probably don’t want her in a position to weigh the variety of options for my medical treatment. (For the one of you who is going to write to me and complain about this attitude, wait until I’ve had a little more sleep. Perhaps I’ll reconsider and apologize, or I’ll at least pay lip service to appreciating diverse points of view.)

Anyway, in honor of this Pennsylvania School Board decision, I have searched the far corners of the internet for a document I first read some 15 years ago. I kept a paper copy of it FOREVER (I thought), photocopied it for others, passed it around… But when I went to my collection of cherished articles this afternoon, in order to type it in here, it was gone. But this person has it on his web site (thank you, Thomas Batzler, whoever you are!). I don’t know who wrote it originally - perhaps an as-yet undiscovered Priestly Writer? - but it is a work of art:

The Book of Creation

Chapter 1

1

In the beginning God created Dates.

2

And the date was Monday, July 4, 4004 BC.

3

And God said, let there be light; and there was light. And when there was Light, God saw the Date, that it was Monday, and he got down to work; for verily, he had a Big Job to do.

4

And God made pottery shards and Silurian mollusks and pre-Cambrian limestone strata; and flints and Jurassic Mastodon tusks and Picanthopus erectus skulls and Cretaceous placentals made he; and those cave paintings at Lasceaux. And that was that, for the first Work Day.

5

And God saw that he had made many wondrous things, but that he had not wherein to put it all. And God said, Let the heavens be divided from the earth; and let us bury all of these Things which we have made in the earth; but not too deep.

6

And God buried all the Things which he had made, and that was that.

7

And the morning and the evening and the overtime were Tuesday.

8

And God said, Let there be water; and let the dry land appear; and that was that.

9

And God called the dry land Real Estate; and the water called he the Sea. And in the land and beneath it put he crude oil, grades one through six; and natural gas put he thereunder, and prehistoric carboniferous forests yielding anthracite and other ligneous matter; and all these called he Resources; and he made them Abundant.

10

And likewise all that was in the sea, even unto two hundred miles from the dry land, called he resources; all that was therein, like manganese nodules, for instance.

11

And the morning unto the evening had been a long day; which he called Wednesday.

12

And God said, Let the earth bring forth abundantly every moving creature I can think of, with or without backbones, with or without wings or feet, or fins or claws, vestigial limbs and all, right now; and let each one be of a separate species. For lo, I can make whatsoever I like, whensoever I like.

13

And the earth brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, with and without backbones, with and without wings and feet and fins and claws, vestigial limbs and all, from bugs to brontosauruses.

14

But God blessed them all, saying, Be fruitful and multiply and Evolve Not.

15

And God looked upon the species he hath made, and saw that the earth was exceedingly crowded, and he said unto them, Let each species compete for what it needed; for Healthy Competition is My Law. And the species competeth amongst themselves, the cattle and the creeping things; and some madeth it and some didn’t; and the dogs ate the dinosaurs and God was pleased.

16

And God took the bones from the dinosaurs, and caused them to appear mighty old; and cast he them about the land and the sea. And he took every tiny creature that had not madeth it, and caused them to become fossils; and cast he them about likewise.

17

And just to put matters beyond the valley of the shadow of a doubt God created carbon dating. And this is the origin of species.

18

And in the Evening of the day which was Thursday, God saw that he had put in another good day’s work.

19

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness, which is tall and well-formed and pale of hue: and let us also make monkeys, which resembleth us not in any wise, but are short and ill-formed and hairy. And God added, Let man have dominion over the monkeys and the fowl of the air and every species, endangered or otherwise.

20

So God created Man in His own image; tall and well-formed and pale of hue created He him, and nothing at all like the monkeys.

21

And God said, Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of the earth. But ye shalt not smoketh it, lest it giveth you ideas.

22

And to every beast of the earth and every fowl of the air I have given also every green herb, and to them it shall be for meat. But they shall be for you. And the Lord God your Host suggesteth that the flesh of cattle goeth well with that of the fin and the claw; thus shall Surf be wedded unto Turf.

23

And God saw everything he had made, and he saw that it was very good; and God said, It just goes to show Me what the private sector can accomplish. With a lot of fool regulations this could have taken billions of years.

24

And the evening of the fifth day, which had been the roughest day yet, God said, Thank me it’s Friday. And God made the weekend.

(There are two more chapters…)

Earlier this week I warned that postings would be light, but I hate letting multiple days go by without an update. I hope to get back on track shortly. Thanks for checking back!

• I tuned into Science Friday today as I drove back from school and caught the tail end of a discussion of the report I linked to early this week about Arctic melting. One of the participants doesn’t seem to be listed on the link above, but she had some good points to make. First, she explained the physics of the issue: there’s a “pump” action in Arctic sea water — cold salt water is heavy and sinks to the bottom, making room for warmer water from the Gulf of Mexico, which passes Europe on its way. This current is called the “North Atlantic Drift,” and it is responsible for Europe’s relatively mild climate. Melting ice “floods” the Arctic sea waters with fresh water, which disrupts this pump action and, in turn, that warm water current. Continued disruption of that current could eventually plunge temperatures in Europe. (Here’s a good graphic and a better explanation than I’m giving.) So in addition to the devastating near-term effects on indigenous people and wildlife, the impact goes “global” in a big way. This woman then answered a question about the recommendations for reducing global warming. She said a “political” body is responsible for writing the policy recommendations, and they will be presenting their report on or around November 24. She said they took the scientists’ findings, created policy recommendations, took the recs back to the scientists and asked if they were saying anything that couldn’t be backed up with the science, and the scientists gave their blessing. But, she says, this committee is encountering resistance. 8 countries that make up the Arctic Council (those countries with some part of their landmass in the Artic Circle) - Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden and the US. 7 of them are supporting the panel’s recommendations for policy changes to slow the melting. One wild guess who’s not…

  I’ve tried to tell myself that even with their majority in Congress, some Republican senators will have a hard time selling constituents on drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But it really looks as though ANWR’s days are numbered. A foot is already in the door.

• I really am - for the moment, at least - tired of the electoral post-mortems. I’m especially tired of the easy “moral values” story that misses what are sure to be far more proximal causes. I’m also just plain tired; my brain isn’t working very well. So maybe someone can help me figure out what Brad Carson is saying here. I watched Carson - Democratic senate candidate from Oklahoma - on “Meet the Press” a few weeks ago, when he appeared with his opponent Tom Coburn (who brought the crisis of “rampant lesbianism” in Oklahoma schools to national attention). I didn’t realize who I was watching, at first, and thought they were both conservative Republicans. Just “shows to go ya” (as my father would say) what passes for a Democrat in some parts of the country. So the tone of his column here doesn’t surprise me, but I can’t figure out what he’s advocating here by blaming “modernity.”
  

  The culture war is real, and it is a conflict not merely about some particular policy or legislative item, but about modernity itself. Banning gay marriage or abortion would not be sufficient to heal the cultural gulf that exists in this nation. The culture war is about matters more fundamental still: whether nationality is, in a globalized world, a random fact of no more significance than what hospital one was born in or whether it is the source of identity and even political legitimacy; whether one’s self is a matter of choice or whether it is predetermined, before birth, by the cultural membership of one’s family; whether an individual is just that–a free-floating atom–or whether the individual is part of a long chain that both predates and continues long after any particular person; whether concepts like honor and shame, which seem so quaint, are still relevant in a world that values only “tolerance.” These are questions not for politicians but for philosophers, and, in the end, it is the failure of liberal philosophy that we saw on November 2.

  For the vast majority of Oklahomans–and, I would suspect, voters in other red states–these transcendent cultural concerns are more important than universal health care or raising the minimum wage or preserving farm subsidies. Pace Thomas Frank, the voters aren’t deluded or uneducated. They simply reject the notion that material concerns are more real than spiritual or cultural ones. The political left has always had a hard time understanding this, preferring to believe that the masses are enthralled by a “false consciousness” or Fox News or whatever today’s excuse might be. But the truth is quite simple: Most voters in a state like Oklahoma–and I venture to say most other Southern and Midwestern states–reject the general direction of American culture and celebrate the political party that promises to reform or revise it.

  That is what Antonin Scalia famously called the Kulturkampf. And there can be no doubt either that this is a fundamental dynamic in American politics or on which side of this conflict the electorate rests. Last Tuesday, I ran 7 percent ahead of John Kerry, and my opponent ran a full 13 percent behind President Bush. In most states, this would have been more than sufficient to ensure my victory. But not in Oklahoma. At least not last Tuesday. And, while the defeat was all my own, the failure was of the party to which I swear allegiance, which uncritically embraces a modernity that so many others reject.

• Jac Wilder VerSteeg asks “is there a ‘Christian’ tax code?” in this great piece (via The Revealer):
  

  Liberals are elitists, and that’s one reason John Kerry and his ilk lost. To reverse their inclination to elitism, liberals must study at the feet of the heartland’s Christian conservatives, the only people on Earth who know what God wants and therefore possess a mandate to make all creatures conform to His will. Such depth of humility will be difficult to match.

  With the transformation from Grand Old Party to God’s Own Party, every aspect of Republican policy must be imbued with “values.”

  Interestingly, of all the domestic policy issues he might take on, President Bush has put tax reform at the top of his second term’s to-do list.

  The dry tax code might seem the opposite of a values-rich opportunity; in fact, it is anything but. The “value” of money is different from the “values” that played such a key role on Nov. 2, but how an individual or an individual nation expends money’s value is a clear expression of core moral values.

  My grandfather, John M. VerSteeg, a minister who spent most of his career in Ohio, regularly preached on the connection between money and morals. He even wrote a book about it in 1943, When Christ Controls, in which he advocated, “Having preached that Christ needs some of our cash, let us preach that all of our cash needs Christ.”

  Christian conservatives have been very clear about how they don’t want their tax money spent. None of it must go to abortions here or abroad, none of it must pay for sex education that goes beyond abstinence, none of it must pay benefits to gay partners of public employees. If they could, some Christian conservatives would add all public education to their must-not-support list. While these items involve serious moral issues, aside from education they don’t make much budgetary difference.

  On a federal level, even public education isn’t that big a deal. States and local governments pay more than 90 percent of public education’s cost.

  Less clear is what Christian conservatives think the federal government should spend its money on. Defense, for sure. Because aggression isn’t a moral value, however, the government should expect Christians to be aware of the dividing line and withdraw support from politicians who cross it. Revenge isn’t a moral value, either, and it would be disappointing to find Christians supporting politicians who spend the Pentagon’s billions for that purpose.

  Some conservatives, Christian and otherwise, would stop after defense and, perhaps, transportation infrastructure. Let families and private charities fill in for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, which are government’s other major expenditures, aside from debt. How would those private entities afford it? With money they don’t pay in federal taxes, of course.

  Two major problems pop up. Replace comprehensive programs such as Social Security with a patchwork, and more people will fall through the cracks and suffer — not an example of Christian charity. Equally troublesome is that just cutting what people pay in taxes could not possibly cover what government spends on social programs. There’s a huge deficit, remember? It’s hard to imagine Christians being content with the outcome if they take over the levers of government power and use them to drop the trap door from under the nation’s needy and infirm. Christian control of government would seem to argue for more money spent on medicine, shelter and other essentials.

  No matter how President Bush reforms the tax code, it is likely that the major government expenditures will remain the same. In reality, the tax code reforms he’s talking about involve not so much how the money is spent but how the money is raised and from whom. President Bush’s first-term policies shifted the tax burden from wealthier people not so much onto today’s less affluent people as onto our children. There’s that deficit again. Several reforms that will get a look this term — such as a flat tax, a national sales tax and its first cousin, the value-added tax — would, in their pure forms, shift the tax burden even more from the wealthy onto the middle class.

  Is there such a thing as a Christian tax code? Certainly, there’s a tax code that embodies Judeo-Christian values. It cares for the sick and recognizes the obligation of the wealthy to aid the poor. Call it a values-added tax. If that is what the values voters who returned George Bush to the White House really want, this elitist liberal would humbly support them.

  (Recall that conservative Republican evangelical Alabama governor Bob Riley tried to propose a Christian tax code, and was eaten alive for it, even by his own kind.)

• One of the many reasons we won’t miss him:
  

  …In his first remarks since his resignation was announced Tuesday, Ashcroft forcefully denounced what he called “a profoundly disturbing trend” among some judges to interfere in the president’s constitutional authority to make decisions during war.

  “The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas an put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war,” Ashcroft said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers’ group…

• Finally, in honor of Veteran’s Day yesterday, please reflect on these faces.