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Operation “Phantom Victory”
"So we made it," said a surprised and sweating Lance Cpl. Carlos Cabezasrojas of Secaucus, N.J., as his company launched its final attack of the day. "I got my confirmed kill, too."
Looks like he knows why he is doing this. And look at these officers. They do have a very gentlemen like behaviour.
Capt. Gil Juarez, the light armored reconnaissance company commander, began the assault by blasting his 25mm turret gun down a street toward a target house. Teams fired small mortars. "You want me to fire one more volley?" Juarez asked a Bravo Company officer.
"Please, sir, if you would," the officer replied.
Marines blast into Fallujah
Meanwhile there is a new Iraq-US-alliance forming between Riverbend and Rumsfeld. She writes:
There are a couple of things I agree with. The first is the following:
"Over time you’ll find that the process of tipping will take place, that more
and more of the Iraqis will be angry about the fact that their innocent
people are being killed…"
He’s right. It is going to have a decisive affect on Iraqi opinion …
The second thing Rumsfeld said made me think he was reading my mind:
"Rule of Iraq assassins must end…"
I couldn’t agree more: Get out Americans.
hmmmmm. I assume that religion belives that god runs the show. At the very leat god confers approval of this or that behavior in humans. I don’t demand some complicated exegesis about christianity here. I’m just trying to zero in on what I think is terrifying to people like me that the country is divided between persons who believe in enlightenment, and everyone who believe in the easter bunny (no offense intended; it’s just what it feels like now).
sooo. I’m not reassured that christianity accommodates enlightenment EVEN WHEN RELIGION SEEMS TO JUSTIFY LIBERATION THEOLOGY, ETC. One can throw down with the cool cats in the Age of Reason, and still value god’s word more than the sinuous consensus-building among us mere mortals. That the deliberation of humans and the exercize of reason occasionally verifies the word o0f god, does not convince me that the unreason of religion deserves a hearing in any place that condescends uitsel to be democratic.
I don’t know how to say this in a better way, so I’ll append a longish letter from a colleague of mine who unpleasantly forced me to think about the easter bunny believers:
Dear friends:
Some of you know that I’m on leave and finishing a book for — it turns out — a big evangelical Christian publishing house. …it’s about my struggle, as a Christian, to learn how to pray. Tyndale is calling it a prayer memoir.
Having grown up, like many African Americans, in a strict, church-going family, and now as a “Bible-believing” — as the evangelicals like to say — Christian, I am riveted by the new interest in evangelical thinking. While I didn’t vote for Bush (most African Americans didn’t, but that’s a topic for another discussion), I understand the experience of being part of a group that others don’t understand. In fact, however, isn’t evangelical fervor distinctly American, a natural extension of the moment that religious historians call The Great Awakening (and the follow-up Second
Great Awakening) in the 17th and 18th Centuries? But I believe most undergrad religious-studies courses still describe how these Awakenings — fired by the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, George Whitfield. among others — challenged two key schools of thought: the Calvinistic idea of “divine election” and the scientific and
humanistic ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. In Calvinism, if I remember right, divine election argued that only God could decide who was electable for heaven — and, notably, that God didn’t grant this status to many.
Meanwhile, of course, the bright lights of the Enlightenment held out the significant proposition that man, not unlike God, could also know the secrets of a scientific universe. In the 1700s and 1800s in America, among this nation’s inhabitants — many living in far-flung and isolated circumstances, far from European-style city churches, surviving by their own strength and wits in harsh circumstances — these various church and scientific arguments held little currency or relevancy. Instead, the descendents of lapsed Puritans and lapsed Calvinists were worried more about where to find the next meal in the wilderness. If they didn’t survive, and their destiny was the burning hell promised by Calvinism, what hope did they have?
Well, here come Edwards and Whitfield and their ilk, daring to propose that, in fact, any sinner who believed in Jesus could get to know God and get to heaven, too. No fancy church liturgy or doctrine or scientific inquiry were necessary. As the old American hymn goes, just “come to Jesus — just as I am.”
Well, all across the nation, the unchurched fell on this promise like the drowning to fresh water. True, in establishment Protestantism, the “sinners saved by grace” argument was ridiculed as simplistic and maybe anti-canonical. But by then, evangelical fervor was unstoppable and still thrives. In —, at one of the biggest non-denominational “mega” churches in the metro area — the sprawling church building has always been decorated by a HUGE banner spanning the church front: “SINNERS WELCOMED HERE.”
This wording seems unbelievably old-fashioned. And yet on any Sunday, the place is packed. If you could even find a Calvinist church nearby, I dare say a few aged souls might have gathered for a rather dry sermon and liturgical service. At the evangelical Heritage Center, however, the Great Awakening gets played out every day of the week — usually to the tune of some very good American gospel music, in fact — and places like this are jammed with fervent people. Or voters?
I don’t know how many evangelicals voted in past national elections. This time, however, their pastors said go vote and they did. Or when Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion” was released — and establishment movie critics and others trashed it, some calling it anti-Semitic, among other criticisms — their evangelical pastors said don’t listen to that establishment nonsense. Besides, we are pro-Israel. So go see the movie. And we know what happened with that.
While I don’t defend this seemingly ‘”sheep-like” behavior, I also deeply understand that for evangelicals, the willingness to “follow” is based on personal experience with the saving grace of a personal God. These folks have brought their broken families — drug-addicted kids, drunken husbands, adulterous wives, bankrupt family finances, and every other aspect of American life damaged by “modern” cultural influences and sometimes by bad personal choices — to the altar in prayer. And, as many would tell you, “God turned my life around.” I can’t count how many times I’ve heard that testimony. I am willing to argue that in many ways evangelicalism is exquisitely America.
It is isolationist, inward-looking, family-centered, anti-establishment and values-loaded. Do we like this picture? Do we understand it? If we don’t, we won’t know our neighbors — let alone the person in the next voting booth.
As for African American churchgoers — who overwhelmingly voted against Bush — evangelicalism gets interpreted not in reaction to modern culture but in what black social scientists have for years called liberation theology. So while some conservative black evangelicals may wring their hands over gay marriage, for example, they may wring them tighter over social injustice, poverty, education and health care inequities, unfair prison sentencing, etc.
The “media elite” are finally paying attention to all of this. But I fear the inquiries will be tainted by bias and mockery. Moreover, few in the media will look to their own role in sustaining religious conservatism. In fact, any alarmist report on a typical nightly news broadcast helps feed evangelical isolationism. Indeed, J-Schools teach the kind of conflict-driven journalism that, in many ways, helps sustain religious conservatism. But how many elite journalists will we ever hear saying that? How many will add “religious difference” to their diversity discussions — and include not just Muslims now, but white evangelical Christians? (Kudos,
however, to PBS for including evangelical pastor Rick Warren in a recent post-election broadcast — presumably because Warren’s hot book, “The Purpose-Driven Life,” has sold some 15 million hard-back copies.)
Finally, to —‘s question, who among Democrats would be a great candidate in 2008? I humbly propose that we Dems look to two of this year’s biggest winners — both people of color, incidentally — to help truly mobilize another big sleeping giant: the ethnic electorate and its allies. Barack Obama trounced the religious conservative Keyes in Illinois. Ken Salazar bested Coors. Obama, in particular, would absolutely ignite Democratic Party passions as a vice presidential candidate and, heck, maybe as the presidential candidate. As for the argument that he doesn’t yet have
“enough” experience, does anybody really believe that George W. Bush has proven it necessary to have experience? As for Hillary in 2008, are Dems prepared for yet another losing candidate?
One final note. During Obama’s acceptance speech after winning his Senate seat, he first thanked his campaign staff. Then, in the next breath, he said: “Let me thank my pastor, Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. of Trinity United Church of Christ…” This is the man supported by 80-plus percent of the electorate in Illinois. Credit him, indeed, for turning a red state blue.
Have a great discussion.
Posted by: slothrop | Nov 10 2004 21:29 utc | 20
@x as you know even better than I, I’m sure, there are many distinct threads in what is called Christianity — ranging from the monotheistic primitive-Statism which repeatedly calls Jesus “Prince” and “King” [the attempt to fit him into the royal house of David and a specifically nationalist-revanchist myth of redemption and revenge on the occupiers]; all the borrowings from the Mithra cults and similar… what we go about calling “Christianity” is a palimpsest of mutually contradictory stories and aspirations, which perhaps explains its Protean ability to fit into any ideological mould and be wielded for every purpose. the Christianity that you’re defending, i.e. your own and that of exemplary, humane, tolerant, wise and gentle co-religionists, is not the only “Christianity” that can get in the door if the separation of Church and State is abandoned. it is a cordon sanitaire which I for one wish very much to preserve.
I share slothrop’s fears, iow. the only grounds I understand for wise decision-making are empirical: the assessment of facts — experiment and result. “Doctor, it hurts when I do that — so, don’t do that.” whenever faith (and I don’t care whether it’s faith in God or Marx or Friedman) is allowed to eclipse fact, when real results in the real world are ignored or covered up or denied because they don’t fit the theory — then we are not well served, our errors are not corrected, we drift into denial and fantasy. and we get the IMF resolutely applying the same “medicine” to country after country no matter how many of its “patients” sicken and die. wasn’t that Einstein’s def of madness, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result?
more specifically I have to take exception (as an empiricist) with the suggestion that the Nazi regime somehow embodies a triumph of rationalism. it was in cahoots with nationalist/rightist Christian forces from the beginning (hence the motto “Gott Mit Uns”); it drew heavily on superstition, astrology, and magical spectacle for its ideology and public appeal; and it suppressed objective research, the sciences, etc. with an iron hand. and its ideology of racist mumbojumbo was utterly divorced from fact from the git-go.
the “rationalism” of the Nazis is, I think, the rationalism of psychosis. what I mean is that psychotics are very, very logical — once you accept their initial assumptions, then everything they do makes perfect sense 🙂 often they are more obsessed about consistency and “doing things right” than any so-called sane person. the Nazi horror starts with a psychotic delusion, or rather a whole kit bag of them: a paranoid fantasy about treachery within is required for denial of a genuine crushing defeat in WWI, a twitchy fear of modernity and cosmopolitanism (feminism, gay visibility, class unrest, influx of foreigners and foreign influence, rapid technological development) is compounded with pre-existing racism and parlayed into a grand delusion of racial superiority and a sentimental hankering for the Good Old Days.
the two delusional systems are not merely compatible but synergistic. we need someone to blame for the defeat, we need someone to blame for all this disturbing modernity — and the racial fantasy provides us with a scapegoat. so the whole thing starts from a ground position of absurd reality-denial: like some dangerous psychotic individuals, the psychotic State moves logically and obsessively in its attempt to force the world to conform to its fantasy.
but this is not rationality. the trappings of scientism in which the Nazis dressed their delusions are terrifying but, had less evil and torment resulted, they would have been as pathetic as the (imho somehow related) elaborate calculations of Ptolemaists, the pseudo-quantitative charting of astrologers, the obsessive reams of numerology cranked out by Baconians, Kabbalists and the like (and in these ranks I include the elaborate mathematical absurdities of the Chicago School of econ).
the human brain is wired for taxonomy, and apparently for counting and numbering (pace for the moment the “innumerate tribe” researchers), and these faculties can be bent to madness and obsession like any other human faculty. the wiring can go Tilt.
it is particularly chilling to recall or revisit the noxious pseudo-scientism of the Nazi era — the phrenology, the nasal profile measurement charts, the godawful “experiments” (the use of medical experimentation as a good cover story for all-out sadism did not originate, nor did it end with them). it is the shudder that one feels in the presence of intelligent madness, the cheerful common-sense of the mass murder explaining why dismemberment was the sensible thing to do and where he got a good deal on the trash bags.
for me the shudder is the same when I contemplate the perversion of Christian doctrine to justify the torture of the heretic, the enslavement of the indigene, etc. it is, imho no more correct to think that the Nazis — anti-intellectual, censorious, dogmatic, many deeply superstitious — represent “an excess of reason” than to think that the burning, racking, etc. of heretics represent an “excess of love.”
the Nazis mimicked the superficial trappings of modernity, but they rejected and destroyed every aspect of modernity save one: industrial efficiency. which kind of brings us back around….
Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 11 2004 0:15 utc | 56
This thread could well become infinite 🙂
couple of passing thoughts
The rationalism of the Nazis was not true rationalism, but it was disguised as ultimate rationalism — i.e. the terminally sick are going to die anyway, they are a waste of resources to care for them, so we should send them to the camps for the good of the society. Compassion as a virtue, the value of human life in anything but material terms, was rejected.
this to me is merely one aspect of their mimicry of modernity, i.e. industrialism. what is described above is nothing more or less than CBA (cost/benefit analysis), the kabbalistic obsession of the high priests of monetism. cf John Adams’ brilliant essay “And How Much for your Grandmother”, among others. the Nazis attempted to apply Harvard MBA methods to the ugly old human horror of mob violence and genocide. they “rationalised” it. I don’t think this makes them genuinely rational — but then I think that modern economic theory is at least as psychotic as the Nazi behaviour pattern, and its kill rate may not be that much lower.
We often must make decisions based on situations we don’t completely understand, facts we can’t know (like the future choice of an opponent). In such cases, in real life, we have to make decisions all the time based on faith in something, because we don’t necessarily know all the facts, we can’t necessarily know for a certainty what outcome something will have, what future thing will happen.
this is utterly true, and leads us to I think the primary division between faith-based and empirical decision making. in empirical decision making, all decisions are provisional — i.e. there is always the possibility that the decision is wrong. in empirical decision making one does not pray to G-d for guidance, get an inspiration showing what is Right, and then stick to that at all costs — one starts down a path based on the best evidence available, and if the results are not as desired or expected one re-evaluates and corrects course. this is the empiricism that is completely lacking in the policy and politics of hardwired ideologies — be they Christian, Communist, or Capitalist, which leads to what Tuchman called in her eponymous book The March of Folly. when decisions are based on faith (in a theory or an outcome) then it is very hard to revoke them except by abjuring the faith on which they were based. that makes it very difficult to change course or re-evaluate when things are going wrong.
unfortunately it is hard on the human brain and heart to live with uncertainty and provisionality. we don’t live well in Schroediner’s Box, even though it’s our natural habitat. one reason the public likes the Shrub is that he gives the appearance of dead certainty. they would rather follow a leader who looks like he knows where he’s going, strutting out boldly and refusing to ask for directions, than a wise old codger like Gandalf who admits he’s lost, sits down part-way into the mines of Moria, and thinks for long hard hours about the fork in the path ahead. the success of the Rovemeister in painting Kerry as a “flip flopper” illustrates the pathetic human fear of uncertainty or empiricism and the desire for absolute certainty or faith. imho.
now, the finest theologians I’ve ever read (and I do sometimes read ’em) are those who manage to balance faith and doubt, uncertainty against a moral compass, valuing humility over doctrinal certainty. but I think that is about who they are more than about the specifics of what they believe, that is, I have come to a distressing POV over the years — distressing for a weary old ideologue, that is…
… I’ve come to the upsetting notion that people’s goodness and badness, their reasonableness or fanaticism, their kindness or cruelty, fairness or injustice, generosity or greed, isn’t linked neatly and tidily to any specifics of their belief system. what I mean is that no religion, no anti-religion, no single political dogma, offers a sure inoculant against the whispering of the reptilian brain. I think we can make a good guess at which belief systems or political styles actively stoke up, amplify, tickle and encourage the reptilian brain. what’s harder is to figure out how to calm it down.
lastly, the comment that xtianity is a palimpsest of periods, mythologies, etc is one endorsed by most comparative religious scholars. the word “christianity” covers everything from the chilly capitalist Calvinism of the White upper classes to the snake-handling miracle cults of the poverty belt south, from MLK’s gorgeous, heart-true, stirring speeches to Pat Robertson’s hateful rants, from a literal belief in the Virgin Birth and all the other miracle tales, to a highly sophisticated, abstracted Deism, Unitarianism, etc — from icon worship and a roaring trade in bogus relics to the near-Buddhist simplicity of Quakerism — from Jesus’ compassion for Mary Magdalene to Paul’s harsh, hateful misogyny. miracle cult, sophisticated humanist philosophy — “xtianity” stretches so far to cover so many varieties of human personality, so much good and so much wickedness, that it becomes almost meaniingless as a noun.
Posted by: DeAnander | Nov 11 2004 22:31 utc | 69
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