No more churches!

From sea to shining seas, the land of the United States of America is scarred with the blood of martyrs, people who fell before a force bent on power and world domination. These cruel destroyers also pledged faith to a religion, and they claimed that this religion demanded that all other religions be expelled in the name of their one true God. More than that, they claimed their religion entitled them to the land of others, and required that they slaughter those who would not submit. Admittedly, even some of the more fanatical members of this religion would find genocidal slaughter unpalatable today. Nevertheless, I feel that all followers of this religion should be held responsible for the cruelty of particular individual adherents. These so-called "Christians" should be prohibited from building any more "victory churches" on the land of those who suffered, even if some surviving family members of the honored dead now consider themselves to be "Christians."

I write this to be sarcastic and facetious about the current debate over the Park51 project in Lower Manhattan. While I can imagine no better memorial to 9/11 than to erect a Sufi community center that honors and demands religious tolerance, the particular affiliation of Park51 is beyond the point. All religions are entitled to practice their faith freely as long as it does not involve murder. While I wish that I did not have to be harassed by Jews for Jesus on the New York City subways, we are supposed to tolerate the religious faiths of others, even if we don't like them or we object to activities undertaken by their followers. Although I was disappointed in President Obama's backtracking, I felt the need to post today because I was moved by Mayor Michael Bloomberg's speech last night on the Park51 project, the rights of Muslims to worship anywhere in Manhattan (rights hard-won by previous religious minorities including Jews, Quakers, and Catholics), and his send-up of Dumbledore. I believe that we are called to religious tolerance, and that Christians, of all people, should be realistic about, and sympathetic toward, the plurality of individuals who can adhere to one broader religious faith. More than that, the Constitution of the United States, which continues to rule over the blood of innocent individuals conquered in its name, nevertheless guarantees such freedoms. If you love the Constitution so much, then you have no choice but to support the building of a Muslim center anywhere, especially if it is, as Keith Olberman pointed out, not in fact at Ground Zero.

Anosognosia, Errol Morris, and a Failure of Imagination

Last week, I was reading a New York Times blog post by Errol Morris, who had made one of my favorite documentaries, The Fog of War. In a series of blog posts, Morris explored "The Anosognosic's Dilemma". In his first post, Morris defines anosognosia as "a condition in which a person who suffers from a disability seems unaware of or denies the existence of his or her disability." Morris then expands this definition to include studies that demonstrate how our own incompetence generally blinds us to that same incompetence. For instance, students who are bad at grammar often don't understand why they are getting bad grades and believe that they are really good at grammar. (I admit, certain public figures like Sarah Palin come to mind). Morris's anosognosia puts an interesting twist on the old quote attributed to Mark Twain, Artemis Ward, and a few others, "It ain't the things we don't know that gets us into trouble. It's the things we know for sure that just ain't so."

What matters most is that we think we are competent, and we fail to imagine the possibilities for our incompetence. While on a personal level, such a perspective can send me into a panic over my own potential incompetence, I was reminded of Morris's anosognosia today while I was reading another series of articles in the New York Times. One looks at the fraying social safety net in Spain. Another describes the way that civil employee allies have now turned against labor benefits. The third is Paul Krugman's editorial on the start of the third depression. One of the pair profiled in the article on Spain observed that the bankers should be paying for this bad economy, not him. The second article, profiling New Jersey, struck me with the early proposal that benefits for police officers (you know, those people who can make terrible mistakes, but upon whom we ultimately depend for loyal and uncorrupt service to the common good) be cut because they cost New Jersey too much. Then there was Krugman's ultimate point that tightening government spending will only lead to further unemployment; he doesn't mention bankers, but he does note that it is the unemployed who will suffer. I would like to add so will the underemployed as I have an overeducated, overqualified good friend working in a gift shop because she can't find a job in her field.

Why do I connect these economic crisis pieces to Morris's anosognosia? In a republic populated with Tea-partiers decrying our exploding budget and our government spending while still demanding social security checkes, I have been intrigued by our unwillingness to pay more taxes (and our unwillingness even to suggest anything reasonable sounding to do about the economy). I do not think taxes should be raised on everyone, but those of who are gainfully employed and economically stable should be willing to pay more. I think Joe Biden was right that paying taxes is a civic duty, and one we should take pride in. I have also been intrigued that, as Krugman describes, despite historical examples, our world seems hell bent on repeating past mistakes and reducing government spending when we need it most. But I have been most intrigued that our government was willing to spend money to bail out banks but not to restart say the Civilian Conservation Corps, which my grandfather, who recently past away, prized as among the best experiences of his life. I understand that we don't want to pay more money for tax bailouts, and I still want heads to roll Marie Antoinette style from the banking industry. But why on earth would we cut the benefits of police officers in order to address the economic crisis? Why on earth wouldn't we demand the creation of more jobs?

These questions then led me to wonder about the acrimony of our current political climate, and that is where I return to anosognosia? What are the alternatives we have failed to consider, either because of political divisions (an inability that I share, an inability to think outside of certain political ideologies about acceptable economic responses), or because we are no longer deep thinkers in the age of the iPhone? Where has our imagination failed us? Is our incompetence so grave that we cannot recognize the possibility that we could be grotesquely wrong? Will historians in some distant era be left to ponder what we could have done differently if only we had broadened our frame of reference? Will they diagnose us with a collective anosognosia?

Of imperialism and expansionism

As a child, one of my favorite films was Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. In ways that I did not fully understand at the time, I enjoyed its meditations on the end of the Cold War as much as its special effects and Klingon make-up. In one scene, a Klingon delegation is dining aboard the enterprise, conversing about what it might mean for there to be a peace agreement between the Federation and the Klingons. Having played a bit where one Klingon character quotes "to be or not to be" and another character cites Shakespeare's Hamlet as the source, the conversation turns to the challenges before the Klingons in making peace with the Federation. Christopher Plummer's General Chang states that "We [the Klingons] need breathing room," to which Captain Kirk responds by suggesting that same statement was made by Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.

I have taken this little jaunt because Kirk's response intimates the fine line that exists between a people stating they "need breathing room" and a people heading out upon a campaign of imperialist expansion. I note this because after reading about the Texas School Board's curricular alterations, it became clear that some of these Texas schoolboard members seem to think that "American expansionism" is somehow benign, noble, and patriotic, while "imperialism" is somehow bad and therefore not an apt description for the U.S.'s nineteenth-century campaign across the continent. I offer up Kirk's observation that to need "breathing room," which as Frederick Jackson Turner long ago described as the undergirding drive of frontier settlement, may also entail "bad," viral, imperialist expansion. While the Texas schoolboard both wishes to rewrite history (and to write out important figures like César Chávez), they are also making semantic distinctions that must mean something in their particular subculture, but they are semantic distinctions that can seem meaningless from another point of view (like say you are Arapaho, Apache, Navajo, Cherokee, etc...U.S. expansionism is the same as imperialism and still has the same consequences). My point here is that the Texas School Board is so concerned with (white) liberal misinterpretations of history that they miss the ways that their own words and views can be misinterpreted by people different than themselves.

In a recent Los Angeles Times editorial, Jonathan Zimmerman notes that we all read history from our particular, biased location, and perhaps it would be fair to demand that U.S. history courses teach "both sides" of U.S. history. Yes, I agree that we all interpret history from a biased standpoint, and that multiple perspectives on history should be presented in class; that more importantly, students should be taught how to think about history and how to read historians critically. That said, I have not fallen so far down the postmodern rabbit hole that I think all readings of history are equally valid because some are just wrong by virtue of what they intentionally hide and leave out. I am also more of a postmodernist than Zimmerman because I think any approach to U.S. history that presumes an overarching narrative can't be good history. In his editorial, Zimmerman posits that there are two sides to the history of the U.S., when in fact there are more, and the only two sides he presents are conservative and liberal patriotism. There are many other perspectives besides just these two, both of which are guilty of eliding certain historical particularities in service of a greater grand narrative. Zimmerman is correct that there are many problems with how U.S. history is currently taught in high schools, but the solution is not to teach less history as the Texas standards suggest.

Rather we must ask more of the generations ahead than have been asked of the generations behind; they must learn the histories we have known while also being taught how to read them critically and how to craft their own perspectives. I think that is some of what Zimmerman is getting at, and that would be a good idea as long as it doesn't presuppose that there are two simplistic sides to U.S. history, a (white, elite, male) liberal view and a (white, elite, Christian) conservatie view. Then perhaps students can critically read the myth of expansionism for what Captain Kirk knew it to be; just because someone claims they need "breathing room" doesn't mean they aren't imperialists. It means that they have a semantic universe where expansionism is somehow neutrally valued while imperialism is valenced negatively, even while an outsider to that semantic universe would not see such a distinction.

Give to Haiti

In reading up on responses to that fascinating "We are the World" video, I discovered the tragically ended "ill doctrine" blog of Jay Smooth and the new "nil doctrine" blog. It's good stuff. The video above says more, and better than I could say, about giving to Haiti. The video below is the most appropriate response to John Mayer that I've seen.

Massachusetts, please vote for Martha Coakley

What is up with Massachusetts? I get that the Democrats are often too lily-livered, that the Healthcare bill lacks the teeth we would want, that they did not go after the banks hard enough, that they did not spend enough money bailing out our economy, and that we continue to fight a losing war in Afghanistan for reasons Rudolph Giuliani can't even remember anymore (how many terrorist attacks happened under George W. Bush, Rudy?).

I have been away from the blogging both because I've been busy, but also because I've been tired of watching us all act like idiots. People on the right demonstrate an ideologically driven short-term memory, people in the center demonstrate an even greater short-term, fly-by-the-seat-of-one's-pants sensitivity, and people on the left have a short-term memory, lack-of-common-sense about how to fight on, unite, and compromise when necessary. After a couple of great months at the end of 2008, I returned to being sick of being a U.S. citizen, or being member of the human race really.

This sudden turn of events that are pro-Brown in Massachusetts made me even sicker. This weekend John McCain sent out a brief email soliciting support for Brown by saying "one of America's first colonies started in Massachusetts with a small group of citizens determined to lead and resolved to make a difference. Together they made history and overcame impossible odds when nobody thought they could. On Tuesday, we have an opportunity to do it all over again." Are we really going to let conservatives write the history of Massachusetts? I would like to remind Massachusetts readers that they made the mistake of sicking Mitt Romney on the world, but they were also home to some of the greatest liberal thinkers and actors in U.S. history. For all their scandal, the Kennedys served the U.S. faithfully, loyally, intelligently, and, yes, liberally for so long. Don't let Ted Kennedy's dreams of healthcare reform die with him. Don't forget that John F. Kennedy was a liberal who called Martin Luther King, Jr. in prison. Don't deny the radical visions of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Massachusetts first legalized gay marriage, proving that some states in the U.S. really could support equality for all. Instead of caving to the inchoate babble of the rest of the U.S., Massachusetts should show what the rest of the U.S. can learn from the legacy of Massachusetts liberalism.

Really, do you want to return power to the do-not-tax, but spend-in-debt-to-China, cowboy-diplomatic, socially asphyxiated Republicans who got us into two wars and a global financial meltdown? Our economic, military, and terrorism woes are the fault of Republicans, a party whose 2008 vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, didn't think Massachusetts was "real America." The Democrats' problem is that they have no ability to stand together and fight for what needs to be done to turn this country around, and so yes, we have a compromised healthcare reform bill. But some reform is better than nothing. Please, for the love of that "America" that fought for equality and justice for all, please vote for Martha Coakley.

And this is why I haven't been blogging in months. Listening to the political conversations in the U.S. makes me sound just as angry, sound-byte, simplistic, and trivial as everyone else. Please let 2010 be a better decade.

What was the Nobel committee smoking?

If you know me and read this blog, then you know that I strongly support President Barack Obama, even though I don't always agree with him. I would love to see Barack Obama achieve many of the goals he has laid out: withdrawal (not just a draw down) of U.S. troops from Iraq, peace in Afghanistan, the closing of Guantanamo Bay and a U.S. that adheres to international human rights law, increased global dialogue as part of diplomacy, increased understanding between different religious communities, and the elimination of nuclear weapons. I believe that he could accomplish some of this in the next fifteen years as president and as a past-president, but I'm not sure that his mere presence on the world stage is enough to deserve the Nobel Prize. More than that, I think it ill-advised for the Nobel Peace Prize to be awarded to any sitting president in charge of a major military power (U.S., China, Russia, Israel, etc.) unless they really have brought about total world peace in the last year. But the U.S. has the largest military of any country in the world and is fighting a war on two fronts while Guantanamo remains open. Barack Obama is not a private citizen as Jimmy Carter and Al Gore were when they won their Nobels. He is the leader of the United States of America, in charge of the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet, and that office should not be rewarded.

That said, Barack Obama gave a terrific and gracious speech this morning. He seems to recognize that he hasn't earned this honor yet, and hopefully the Nobel Peace Prize will spur him on in pursuit of peace, nuclear disarmament, and dialogue as he suggests.

Even though I don't think that he deserves it quite yet, the U.S. should reckon itself lucky to have a president that others find symbolic of the ideals of peace. After eight years of war-mongering leadership, that is a pretty fantastic change. Felicidades to us!

Melrose Place, 1992. What happened?

When I was in New York last month, I ran across several ads on bus stops and phone booths for the new Melrose Place. These ads had charming, subtle catch-phrases on them, like "Tuesday's the new hump day" or "Tuesdays are a bitch." I admit, I didn't recall the old Melrose Place to be a particularly subtle series, but I thought these ads were tacky even by Melrose Place standards.

Because I hadn't seen the original Melrose Place since I was a child, I decided to watch the first season for free on CBS.com. I was shocked to discover that the show didn't actually start off as the crazy prime time soap opera filled with wicked villains that existed in my memory. The characters were full of ordinary brokenness, sad childhoods, unfulfilled dreams, and lots of ABC after-school special plotlines. The show starts with the sexually harassing boss that gets sued in the end. The offending harasser was not even a resident at Melrose Place; it's one of the poor young residents who has to cope with being harassed by her boss and rescued by her roommate. When some of the characters do something bad, it's out of stupidity or irrationality or accidental cruelty, but deep down they are all good people capable of apologies and redemption. Even the doctor, Michael Mancini, whom I remember as viciously evil, is just a kind of goofy and insensitive husband in those first episodes, capable of being devoted and loving when required. And the sex, well, there was some sex early on, but it wasn't exactly steamy. And the show tried to tackle serious topics like discrimination against Matt because he's gay, tensions between African American and Anglo Angelenos in the wake of the riots (the show first aired in 1992), domestic abuse, student loan repayment in a weak job market, and twenty-somethings lacking health insurance. It was amazing to see that the characters were realistically struggling to make ends meet. Of course, virtually none of the original characters could live in the apartment complex now in a much more expensive Los Angeles (even in a recession). A taxi driver, a receptionist, an aerobics instructor, a waitress, a mechanic.

So how did Melrose Place go from the ABC after-school special for twenty-somethings to the prototype of soap opera? I don't know; I haven't watched that far into the show. I do wonder if it's when Heather Locklear shows up, but I also wonder about what caused the shift (besides the beautiful blonde vixen). Was it a move to get better ratings? Or did viewer tastes change leaving behind the 1980s and moving into the 1990s? Was it about Bill Clinton and the end of Reagan-Bush; did the change in presidents signal a change in era, a higher desire for steamy subplots and catharsis watching truly wicked villains? What about 90210? Was 90210 a family-friendly drama once upon a time too that became the master of melodrama only after a while?

I haven't seen the new show; I doubt it's premiered yet. But the ads suggest that it will start out with high melodrama, outrageous villains, and plenty of sex from day one. What was the shift in popular culture that accounts for the very different series starts?

Blaming the faculty yet again

So I'm not completely sure what it is about professors that makes other professionals despise them so much. Maybe it's their narcissistic smug superiority, a characteristic that makes me despise spending time with many academics. Whatever it is, it may lead to the end of what's good about university life, because it seems like activists from the "liberal media" through to conservative bloggers are determined to make college faculty members into hyper controlled high school teachers, with no time for research or the life of the mind. Only teach what we can measure empirically. We live in a society that has fallen so in love with corporate capitalism, even though it has royally screwed most of us at least as often as it has helped us, that we refuse to allow that there are things we do, like police, healthcare, and education that probably shouldn't be profit driven.

Today, the New York Times questioned why college tuition goes up even in a recession, and never goes down. This is certainly a question I would like an answer to, but I'm baffled as to why the New York Times focuses the first part of the article on how cutting university costs is so difficult because of those pain-in-the-ass faculty (instead of wealthy donors or over-paid bureaucrats, let's say). So, damn those faculty because they fight for a life of the mind, for intellectual engagement that may not have tangible measures, like profit, but has other measures of success. So damn those professors for keeping us from cutting the art budget, which is expensive and brings in no wealthy donor alums.

On the other hand, let's never question why most private colleges spend so much money on sports, when very few sports are a profit revenue except at large schools (most $50,000/year small private liberal arts college spend a lot of money on sports that they certainly "lose" money on; though personally I think it's good the students have the sports to play and engage them physically. I think it's often money well spent, but it's not "profitable."). And let's not question that schools need large bureaucracies and overpaid bureaucrats, or that parents expect their children to have access to top-of-the-line technology, and professors are all expected now to teach in powerpoint and online. No, instead, let's question the comparatively small part of college and university budgets that pay for faculty to take research leave, or let's focus on the fact that professors only teach a few classes a semester. Surely they can teach more classes.

Of course, most faculty, even those at liberal arts colleges where they only teach two or three classes a semester, work 60 hours per week between teaching, working with students, and service to the university; that doesn't include their research time, which they are expected to do to get tenure (which most people working in the academy can no longer aspire to because 50% of professors teaching teach as adjuncts or contract laborers, and not as these tenured faculty anyways), but which the New York Times seems to think is fun hobby work that doesn't really make faculty into better teachers (yeah, I would certainly prefer learning biology from a sixty-year-old professor who still teaches from the biology textbook he learned from forty years earlier in graduate school). And they certainly don't get paid what a less well-educated lawyer or corporate executive gets paid. And the only reason a college professor teaches (especially in the sciences) instead of doing something else more lucrative is to have time in the winter, the summer, and every seven years to do more research, to keep up with their field. So, let's just eliminate the incentive for great scholars to teach as well, and maybe that will fix the university system in this country that we all think needs so much repair. Wouldn't it be better if all those smug brainiacs went and worked in finance too so we could tank the world economy that much faster next time?

And one more thing, I like how the New York Times and others care about the high cost of quality private education now that it is pricing upper middle class students how and hitting their pocketbooks. Twenty years ago, even public education became beyond the reach of much of the lower middle class, but now we have to fix these super expensive private schools because well-to-do parents may have to send their kids to the local public college instead.

Universities do cost more than they should, and there are a million reasons for that, a million things that could and should be changed about that, but why are faculty the first targets of all criticism? They are not likable people, but they are more often than not, hardworking and caring teachers whose research life makes them better at teaching students. There is another danger about really good faculty as James Baldwin observed a long time ago; if they teach too well, then yes, people do tend to question the things about society that are unjust or don't work. So, maybe we should pay faculty less to teach more. Maybe then everyone in this country will get the quality of education that will truly make the U.S. the idiocracy it is already becoming. Well at least we won't have to talk about those pain-in-the-ass, life-of-the-mind faculty since they will no longer exist.

Dick Cheney is a War Criminal

I've said it before, and I'll say it again, the former Vice President is a war criminal, and he should be brought to justice. This past Sunday, Dick Cheney took aim again at the Obama administration's investigation of CIA abuses. In his comments (see today's New York Times piece for a rundown), Cheney freely admitted that he knew about waterboarding as a general technique, and that he supported officers who used unauthorized techniques because they did so to protect the U.S. Cheney also claimed that the Obama administration's investigation was partisan motivated.

How about responsibility motivated? Normally I'm a fan of complexity, but there is no gray area on this issue, and if you think there is, I hope there is a special place in hell reserved for you (and by hell, I mean I hope you accidentally go for a hike in a civil-war-torn part of Pakistan and get kidnapped and tortured by the Taliban). After millennia of countless human cruelties, the Geneva Conventions set up a framework for how we can treat prisoners of war (and I don't care how you class the people interrogated by the CIA, they deserve to be treated the way you would want to be treated if you were captured). Torture is wrong. It is wrong when done to U.S. citizens, and it is wrong when undertaken by U.S. citizens.

First, we have the fact that "enhanced interrogation techniques" achieve limited success, even in the rare "ticking-time-bomb scenario." The most successful long-term interrogation techniques involve making someone feel safe, not abused. I don't know about you, but I would say anything you wanted me to if you started waterboarding me, whether it was true or not. Second, Cheney, and that weaselly Dianne Feinstein (see Los Angeles Times piece today) both suggest that this investigation may harm the U.S.'s current fight against terror. As far as I can tell, things like Abu Ghraib increased hatred of the U.S. and thus made terrorist recruitment that much easier. Perhaps if we proved that we were a country that respected international law, that we're willing to hold our own citizens accountable (no matter how wealthy or powerful), then we would gain back some of the international respect lost in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. In both of those locations, people were detained and abused because they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That's right, U.S. interrogators didn't just torture terrorists, they also just tortured random people. Obviously Cheney defends these torture techniques (and they are torture, whatever words he uses) because Cheney never has to worry about an al-Qaeda operative capturing and torturing him, unlike our soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan who do have to fear these things. Ultimately, however, whether abusive interrogation techniques work is beyond the moral point. That Cheney is willing to justify torture policy proves that he is precisely the imperialist barbarian, the Great Satan, that al-Qaeda recruits against, and it proves just how much he believes himself to be above international law. The U.S. Constitution is based on the premise that, unlike medieval European monarchs, no person in the United States, including the president and vice president, should be above the law. We haven't always honored that ideal, but in a case as clear cut as this, we should.

Some have advocated for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that will lay bare the tragic mistakes of the Bush administration. I would be happy for such a thing to work through what lower level interrogators did at the behest of and with the support of the Bush administration's Justice Department, but for someone like Cheney, we have no choice but to prosecute him for his crimes against a Constitution he swore to defend. And as punishment following such a case, Cheney should be delivered to the Hague and made to answer for his crimes before the International Criminal Court, because his crimes were not only against the citizens of the U.S., but against those citizens of the world who were detained and abused while they were, unlike Cheney, not guilty.

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On a side note, I am terrible at smiling in photographs, but I have always been amazed that in Dick Cheney's official White House photo, for which you know they took at least 200 shots, that this leer was the closest to a smile he could approximate. I mean seriously, the man is his own cartoon.

Saint Teddy vs. Saint Junípero. I vote for Teddy.

Yesterday I blogged my sorrow over the loss of Ted Kennedy. Reading Religion Dispatches today, I realized this may have a lot to do with my U.S. Catholic background. Frances Kissling describes Kennedy as a Catholic we could canonize because he really did take up the fights for social justice, even when they were unpopular. Kissling linked to another blog post in America: The National Catholic Weekly that pointed out how special Kennedy was to U.S. Catholics, many of whom have pictures of the Kennedy family hanging in their homes next to the cross. My birth name speaks to my mother's love for the Kennedy clan. So yes, my fondness for Ted Kennedy no doubt owes to my U.S. Catholic context.

Was Kennedy a saint? Yesterday, I would have answered, certainly not. Yet today's Los Angeles Times reminded me that all it takes to become a saint is a little bit of luck and a really good campaigner. The fight to get Junípero Serra, unintentional co-perpetrator of genocide (and just because it's unintentional doesn't make it okay), canonized lives on. The founder of the Alta California (the contemporary state of California) mission system in the late eighteenth century, Serra was one intense character. He regularly whipped himself with chains, beat himself with a stone and a crucifix, and burnt himself with flaming candles. Publicly. As a follow-up to sermons to get his point across; a congregant actually died while trying to imitate Serra during a Mass. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Serra had no problems with the use of corporal punishment against indigenous Californians in his missions. These same missions basically imprisoned thousands of native Californians, and Serra strove his whole life for their spiritual and cultural conversion, which maybe some people think is a good thing, but I quite disagree (and so does Native American scholar and theologian George Tinker in his book Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide). Serra is one official miracle shy of sainthood, and there is a Panamanian artist, Sheila E. Lichacz, who says she can prove the venerable Serra saved her life. People have fought for Serra's sainthood since shortly after his death when Francisco Palóu, his confessor, friend, and pupil, took up the cause for Serra's sainthood in his hagiographical biography published in 1787.

Palóu's work coupled with the fact that California became California are the only reasons that anyone discusses Serra's sainthood. If Serra had spent his whole life in the Sierra Gorda, we would not have this conversation; it's just so California can have a saint. Fr. John Vaughn continues the fight to this day, telling the Times that you just can't judge someone from the eighteenth century by our standards. His rebuttal being that the Founding Fathers had slaves. And they did, and no one is fighting for Thomas Jefferson or George Washington to be declared a "saint," which, as scholar James Sandos points out to the Times, is a category for someone whose holiness can transcend time. I think Jefferson's owning slaves would disqualify him for sainthood, but at least with him, as with Ted Kennedy, I would say that the long-term effects of his work have indeed made the world a better place. I'm not sure that is saintly "holiness." Yet, we should all be grateful that Jefferson and Kennedy lived the lives of public service they led. I just can't say the same thing about Serra. I don't think we're better off for his life of service, and the Catholic Church should be ashamed to canonize someone just because he was a religiously devout man (unless they want to send the message of rah rah, religious mania and genocide) who happened to found missions in a now wealthy and famous place. Of course his religious devotion was more in an al-Qaeda-style maniacal character (Mike Davis made that comparison first, not me); Serra hoped to die a martyr (his words) converting indigenous Americans, and his main goal in life was the spiritual and cultural conversion ("conquista," conquest, would be the actual word Serra used in his own writings) of indigenous peoples. Conquest is not now, nor should it ever be again, viewed as saintly behavior. Worse than that, to make Serra a saint is to insult anyone on this continent descended from indigenous Americans by spitting on the graves of their ancestors.

So, today, do I think the late Edward Kennedy is a saint? Given this information about Serra, I say, let's fight to canonize Ted Kennedy. Surely politically minded, Irish American Catholics deserve their own icon as much as California does. I'll get started on the hagiography. My mother would be the first to testify to the miracles he wrought in her life. Plus we probably already have an image somewhere, making him easy to pray to for aid. Sure, he killed one person in a car accident, but if Serra can be a candidate for sainthood in the face of a 90% drop in native Californian population in the eighteenth century, I think one person in a car accident is no big deal. So here's to Saint Teddy in 300 years!

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Image of Junípero Serra comes from the PBS page, New Perspectives on the West. Kennedy's image comes from Kissling's Religion Dispatches essay.

I'll miss Ted Kennedy

It is not often that I really care if a U.S. senator lives or dies (a cold statement I know, but really, I don't find them to be a terribly admirable crowd). For the last year, we have all known that Ted Kennedy only had a short time to live, that soon John Kerry would be the senior senator from Massachusetts. Still, living a day without Ted Kennedy in this world has been sadder than I was prepared for. I join the rest of the liberal wing of this country in mourning a great legislator. For all of my life (he had been a senator since well before I was born), Kennedy was a uniquely powerful senator, championing legislation that helped people, and fighting with backbone while other Democrats cowered in corners. I think he was an admirable senator despite some significant human shortcomings, especially in those years before I was born. Ted Kennedy's passing does truly mark the end of an era (not just because he was a "Kennedy"), and some of us miss him already.

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Picture from abc.com's slideshow of Kennedy through the years.

When walking around New Jersey is a crime and other strange news

Yes, that's right, Bob Dylan got stopped by New Jersey police just for walking around a neighborhood and killing time before the show. Apparently, he was super polite and everything, but I want to know, when did taking a walk become the kind of suspicious activity that requires the questioning of a 68-year-old man?

Oh, and one other random piece of news today, I was not the least bit surprised to see Charles de Gaulle top an informal internet survey of worst airports to sleep in. While I think Paris is a great city and that people in the U.S. should make fewer jokes at the expense of French citizens, I have to admit, Charles de Gaulle is hands down the worst airport I have had to travel through. I was also not surprised to see Amsterdam near the top of the list; that is one super nice airport (which is kind of ironic since Air France is an infinitely better airline than KLM).

Of Health Care, Socialism, and Economic Recovery

I had a student once who critiqued an article's incorrect use of capitalism. She defined capitalism as the non-interference of the state in corporate interests. Since her definition did not mesh with mine, I realized that defining capitalism is tricky business, and I went to an economics professor. He pointed out, and I quite agree, that capitalism is like many terms in the English language, too dangerous to define specifically. It's best just to highlight general characteristics but try not to pin it down too neatly. That said, I want to sit briefly with a broad definition that must be widely held in public as it is on the public encyclopedia, wikipedia: "Capitalism typically refers to an economic and social system in which the means of production (also known as capital) are privately controlled; labor, goods and capital are traded in a market; profits are distributed to owners or invested in new technologies and industries; and wages are paid to labor." My student's definition of capitalism would certainly fit under this rubric, but so would a number of other definitions that might not sound like hers. Every term in that definition is debatable, but generally capitalism is opposed to "socialism," which supports some form of public or shared ownership of resources and means of production. Since preserving "capitalism" against "socialism" seems to be part of the healthcare debate, I think that the problem we have is this: can a system still be capitalist and involve government control? And if not, do we really want to live in such a capitalist system?

Based on the recent healthcare debates, obviously a significant and vocal portion (though, polls suggest, not a majority) of this country seems to think that the slightest slip toward socialism would damage our great capitalist tradition (while crying keep your government hands off my Medicare, the government-run program; and while I could talk about the use of race-baiting and fear of change in these town hall meetings, I will leave that to other commentators). First of all, Democratic Party Health Care proposals have so far left out the proposal I most support (to paraphrase Jimmy Smits from the final season of the West Wing), removing "over 65" from Medicare, thus making Medicare available to everyone. Why have they avoided this? Because somehow it might be socialism to have a government, single-payer health insurance option that competes with private insurance and that regulates health care costs. Socialism, by the way, would mean complete government control of the health care system, from nurse to hospital to insurance. No Democratic proposal supports a socialist health care system; the hospitals and doctors remain private, and private insurance options would remain (and if they think they can't compete with a public, single-payer option, then that should tell you something about what kind of crappy job your private health insurance does for you). In the 1100-page House bill, there is no mention of "death panels" or "communal standards." The bill and many health care reformers do advocate government regulation of health care. If you're a libertarian, that will piss you off, but for the rest of us, that should be fine. It is not socialism, it barely qualifies as a mixed economy, it's just government intervention in the capitalist market place for the sake of the consumer, something that we should support if we think that cars should be safety-tested before they are sold.

If we are to accept the libertarian definition of capitalism, and we think the U.S. should be a pure capitalist state, then there should be no tax-payer-paid police, no state-supported military, no public schools, no public libraries, no regulation on any industry whatsoever (including the FDA that tries to keep lead out of baby formula), and we, as individuals, should pave our own roads. If you are a libertarian, then you would find the U.S. government has disgustingly indulged in a "mixed economy" since its inception. If capitalism means a complete lack of state intervention in anything, I don't think most of us, when it comes down to it, want to live in such a country. If you like that a government agency won't let poison be packaged as medicine, then you like the FDA, and you like government regulation in the pharmaceutical industry (and I wish there was more of it, personally). So the debate should not be how to keep socialism out of our capitalism, rather how mixed should our economy be and in what places. This, of course requires that "socialism" not be treated as a demonic concept; it requires that we live in a world filled not with black (capitalism) and white (socialism), but shades of gray where we pick which blend works best for us as a nation and a society.

Just so you know, countries that have been sporting more mixed economies are faring better than us these days. The WHO rankings are well known; the U.S. healthcare system comes in at a staggeringly low 37 (if you consider how much richer the U.S. is than #36, Costa Rica). France is #1; the U.K. is #18. While conservatives in the U.S. have been making digs at the British NHS, the British blogosphere has fought back in defense of their system. It is imperfect they note, but a hell of a lot better than the U.S. system. Even Canada is ranked higher, at #30, than the U.S.

And those mixed economies of France and Germany have actually exited the recession. We are still in a recession for reasons similar to the BBC's explanation for the U.K. Finance was too big a chunk of our economy, but, and the BBC notes this as well, our economy was not the right mix of capitalism and socialism in a time like this. France and Germany's mixed economy had social safety nets that better protected their economies, and so their economies are growing again. Ours is still shrinking, and there are people for whom unemployment protections are running out. So the next time someone demands that we preserve pure capitalism at all costs, I hope that they can also think about their support for the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan (paid for by that socialist defense budget of ours) and how we got stuck in a recession longer than states with more mixed economies.

On the plus side (responding to my own previous post)

Both Sonia Sotomayor and Miguel Diaz have been confirmed and now go out to their respective posts. The first Latina on the Supreme Court, and the first Latino Ambassador to the Vatican. President Obama's Latin@ Outreach moves have had some marked success.

Life in the Racialized United States of America

In case some of you out there still want to argue that we are somehow "post-race," I have found events of the last few weeks to be quite instructive on this front. Famously, of course, we have the beer summit attempting to resolve a conflict between a black academic and the white police officer who arrested him, a police officer who apparently survived a bunch of racial sensitivity training yet was unprepared to face an angry black academic. That Glenn Beck can then call Barack Obama "racist" for saying the Cambridge police acted "stupidly" (and by the way, there is no other way to describe Officer Crowley's arrest of Gates, aside from either "acting stupidly" or "acting on the basis of testosterone and ego," i.e. acting without consulting one's rational faculties, i.e. acting stupidly) is proof that we are a long way from the postracial utopia.

But nothing has galled me more than the "birther" controversy, in which a collection of idiotic conservatives appear intent on proving that racism is still a severe problem. It seems to me that they refuse to admit that someone who isn't white-enough-looking can be a natural-born citizen (to which I refer you to the Fourteenth Amendment or the 1898 Supreme Court decision regarding Chinese Americans or the 1917 law making Puerto Ricans into U.S. citizens for the purpose of the draft). So there can be absolutely no doubt as to where I stand on this, I have included a picture of Barack Obama's birth certificate, certifying his birth in Hawai'i (on U.S. soil) to a U.S. mother, both of which make him incontrovertibly a natural-born U.S. citizen (see the Los Angeles Times "Top of the Ticket" blog post from which I pulled the birth certificate if you don't believe me). And no, I do not think the state of Hawai'i, currently governed by a Republican, could be conspiring with Kenya to keep a non-U.S. citizen in the White House. I am writing because I am taking up Bill Maher's challenge to do what I can, in my small way, to fight this absolute inanity.

The question of whether Barack Hussein Obama, now president of the United States of America, is a "natural-born citizen" is possible only because of the racist and xenophobic history of this country. As much as I would never want Governor Schwarzenegger to be president, I do think it's plain xenophobia not to allow a naturalized citizen, someone who has probably had to express more commitment to this country and its ideals than your average "natural-born citizen," to be president. But the constitution says "natural-born citizen," so then who is naturally born a citizen? Well, U.S. legal history is complicated on this issue because of a history of racism, racism about whether formerly enslaved Africans were citizens, about whether Mexicans resident in territories stolen from them were citizens, about whether Native Americans were allowed to vote in a land wrested from their own ancestors as part of U.S. conquest, of whether people born to Chinese or Japanese parents on U.S. soil actually could consider themselves to have the same rights as U.S. citizens born on the same soil to European parents. These are all questions that laws or supreme court decisions have been issued to decide. So no wonder some crazy right-wing nutjobs feel the need to protest that Kenyans, in some long-term strategy reaching back to the era of Jim Crow, conceived a plan to hijack the U.S. presidency by impregnating a "white" U.S. citizen. The U.S. has had a long history of not recognizing anyone as a U.S. citizen who doesn't look like George Washington (and that means women too, who couldn't vote, and thus couldn't be president either before 1920).

That said, the facts are simple. Barack Obama was born in Honolulu, Hawai'i in 1961, which is one of the 50 United States of America. And even if he wasn't, he is the son of a U.S. citizen and has lived his life as a U.S. citizen, receiving a U.S. passport because no one at the state department ever found reason to question his citizenship. He was never naturalized as a U.S. citizen because he was naturally born one. That "birthers" refuse to recognize that Barack Obama could possibly have been born a U.S. citizen is because, on some level, they are racist and xenophobic, and they are just sore losers. And I can't help but feel, as I have felt before, that we idealize different things about this country. I, for one, think it speaks well for the U.S. that the president can have a mixed ancestry and specifically does have relatives from a small town in Kansas and a village in Kenya.

Birthright Citizenship and White Paranoia

Writing in today's Los Angeles Times, Mitchell Young advocated the end of "birthright citizenship" in the United States, firmly established by the Supreme Court in 1898, a right the Irish voted to end in 2004. Young suggests that birthright citizenship is a product of feudal law, and is just untenable in a land of 11 million undocumented immigrants. What he is too educated and polite to say is what undergirds any problem with "birthright citizenship." Seeking to end "birthright citizenship" speaks, on one level, to a policy opposing state responsibilities to undocumented immigrant parents of U.S. citizens. I don't have much sympathy for that line of argument either, but at least it's a rational view from a policy standpoint.

The bigger issue is that Young and others are looking at the first president to have a father hailing from the 2/3 world, whose mother was an Anglo U.S. citizen, though a few conservatives have sought to prove that President is somehow not a citizen of the U.S. President Obama speaks symbolically to a larger truth. If birthright citizenship and current immigration trends continue, traditional "white" U.S. citizens will be a minority in a country they believe is theirs. The fear that this country will belong to people who no longer phenotypically resemble the "Founding Fathers" undergirds Young's real concern. Even if birthright citizenship originates in English feudal common law, it is practiced by most respectable countries in the world who attempt to be non-racist in their legislation from Costa Rica to Germany. Japan and Ireland, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait are the places who would deny birthright citizenship, and most people understand that racism undergirds most of their reasoning. I would be pretty disgusted if the U.S. decided to join their ranks out of fear.

But Mr. Young, let's run with your point. I will support denying birthright citizenship if every single adult person (under 70) living in the U.S. is required to take the exact same citizenship test that those who become naturalized citizens are required to take. I'm not sure what poor country should be given the large swath of U.S. citizens who won't pass the test. Maybe they should just spend their life in detention facilities, dying of a heart attack without care and being erased from legal memory like Pakistani immigrant, Ahmad Tanveer.

Barack Obama has long thought about nuclear disarmament

A recent New York Times piece highlights how President Barack Obama thought about nuclear disarmament even in his youth, you know when he was a college student, the same age as those ASU students interviewed for The Daily Show. It's just nice to discover that a president has given long-term thought to these things, that he wrote about them in 1983 as a senior in college, that he even wrote a seminar paper on how to negotiate nuclear disarmament with Russia while a college student.

Fighting for Democracy

I have been intensely interested in the Iranian protests this past weekend. While I cannot know the truth about the election, such an uprising suggests that while President Ahmadinejad still has strong support, it cannot be as strong as the official numbers purported. What is amazing to me, having lived through the U.S.A.'s 2000 election, is how much votes matter to people. Here are millions of people rising up and demanding their votes be counted; when 5 Supreme Court justices decided an election here, all we did was grumble. Ahmadinejad has compared the protesters to angry soccer fans and to dirt on the street. Well, it would seem these protesters are taking their vote a little bit more seriously than a soccer match (not to belittle soccer), but they are now risking their lives to have their votes counted, and I doubt millions of people would do so, for several days, after a bad referee's call at a soccer game. I think the problem is that people in the U.S. treat our politics like they are nothing more than football games, like they don't really matter that much. We could all learn a lesson from Iranians this time around; sometimes politics do matter.

Of perhaps even greater interest to me, though, is the way that Iran shows itself to share some of the significant statistical divides one sees in the U.S., that the more urban and the better educated tend to support Mousavi in Iran, just as the more urban and better educated tend to support the Democrats here. I do not mean to ove simplify the issues at stake in Iran (or the ones in the U.S. too; there is crossover and division within each conglomeration, even here); they are a complex society, with an even more complex political system that is not directly parallel to ours. But I am fascinated and disturbed, given the recent dramatic increase in gun and ammunition sales in the U.S., that we are staring down the mouth of our own potential civil war, one between urban and rural cultures (more people now live in cities than in the country now, globally, which is a dramatic cultural shift in the history of human civilization) and that Iran may be facing such an internal struggle right now too.

One other note of concern I need to sound though, despite my simplistic comparison there, is that we need to think complexly. Roger Cohen of the New York Times has done such a striking job with that. Disappointingly, most of the comments on Cohen's editorial, "Iran's Day of Anguish," missed his complexity entirely. Many of the people seemed incapable of perceiving that members of the Iranian establishment, which Mousavi was a definite member of, are divided among themselves, that the brutality is one wing of an establishment against another. That what is going on is enormously complex, that Iranians are complex and reflect a range of opinions on the world, on life, on the best course for their own future. To some extent I also think a global culture war now exists between those capable of seeing shades of gray and those who see things in black and white (not to cast the world into too many camps of two; I think we all exist in several competing camps at the same time, but at certain nexus points in history some views seem to predominate and divide us; we may be approaching such a moment).

Another excellent piece was posted today on The Public Sphere. Mohammad Razi points to both the promise and the potentially horrific failures of revolution.

Finally, I need to express my shock at discovering that Twitter is not just a self-indulgent narcissistic personality disorder self-publicity invention. It has actually played a critical role in the Iranian protests this weekend. Apparently the revolution will not be televised, but it might be tweeted.

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Image from an Iranian American graphic designer, popularly circulating around the web right now.

Obama's Latina/o Outreach Week

President Barack Obama not only named the first Latina nominee to the Supreme Court this week. He also just named Latino Catholic theologian, Miguel Díaz, as Ambassador to Vatican City. Díaz will be the first Latino to serve in that post since Ronald Reagan first started sending an ambassador there.

More Stupid Catholic Tricks for the Easter Season

So yes, after my last blog post, the Catholic church continued to produce confusing spectacles of itself, like the Pope weaving together a tricky explanation for how condemns worsen the spread of AIDS by protecting the sinful consciousness responsible. A Vatican official did come out in defense of the poor Brazilian mother who saved her daughter's life by taking her to get an abortion.

In the U.S., some conservative Catholics decided to make a political farce over Barack Obama and Notre Dame. The University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, once home to a great NCAA football legend, but always known as a Catholic university, has invited President Obama to speak at commencement and receive an honorary degree. As Notre Dame has done this to several presidents, including Ronald Reagan, surely there would be nothing odd about inviting Obama to Notre Dame and giving him an honorary degree?

Well apparently there is, if you think Notre Dame should act more like an arm of the U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops than a university. Never mind that Notre Dame as a university should have some freedom from the stranglehold of Vatican teachings that do not mesh with academic discourse in non-Catholic institutions. Never mind that Notre Dame has a complex history and complex cast of alumnae, many of whom aren't even Catholic, and many of whom are pro-choice. Notre Dame alum and Reagan staffer, Richard Allen, sought a compromise in today's New York Times by saying that Obama should still serve as a commencement speaker while being denied an honorary degree.

I appreciate Allen's Reaganesque approach at a compromise emptied of all meaning or recognition. Allen even attempts to use the example of President Ronald Reagan, whom Notre Dame honored with a commencement address and honorary degree, supposedly in part because of his brave stance on Roe v. Wade. Why wasn't anyone up in arms about letting a remarried divorcee speak at Notre Dame's commencement? The Catholic Church has institutionally opposed divorce for a lot longer than it has opposed abortion (for your information: the institutional church has taught that divorce was a bad idea since the Gospel of Matthew was written some time in the late first century; Catholics have debated whether abortion was murder and at which point one could have an abortion until the late 19th century; St. Augustine did not belief a human soul could reside in an unformed body, and thus abortion was not murder if done in roughly the first trimester). So it would seem to me divorce should be a bigger issue. Just as I queried in my last post, what is so damn special about abortion, that the institutional church feels the need to fight against it over all other sins (like say repeated raping a girl between ages 6 and 9)? My only guess is that abortion prevents white Catholics from reproducing at the rate they would like, and that all birth control prevents women from getting pregnant thus allowing them to pursue other careers, like becoming an Episcopalian priest since the Catholics won't ordain them. My other guess is that Catholic bishops think they gain something from focusing on this one issue, but as far as I can tell, all they look like are automated tools for right-wing politics and pundits, many of whom aren't even Catholic. Try being independent for once and go protest capital punishment, something Catholicism has equally strong opposition to.

If Obama is receiving an honorary degree in Catholic ethics, then perhaps there would be some basis for denying him this degree or for denying him a speaking engagement at Notre Dame's commencement. But that's not the case. Notre Dame graduates many students whose ethical views diverge from that of the established church, and they support many speakers on campus with different views. That is how it should be. First of all, neither is Obama, nor are many of the other degree recipients or speakers, a Catholic, and no 21st century Catholic educational institution should have a theological litmus test for someone who is not Catholic (it would be better for them not to have them at all, but let's compromise for the moment). Second, the Catholic church would do well to remember that university institutions are spaces of free inquiry, and that such free inquiry is essential for the survival of religious minorities, as Catholics are in the U.S. Perhaps the bishops should think about one other thing. Their opposition to free inquiry may also explain why there has only ever been one Catholic president of the U.S.A., and he got there by promising he did not really listen to the Vatican.