God, King, and Country

Okay, I’m not gonna spend too much time on this because it’s all over the news and I don’t know that there’s much I can say about it that hasn’t already been said (and I keep saying this isn’t a political blog), but I can’t let it pass without saying something.

For those of you who live in caves, Senator John McCain has added an amendment to the Defense Department Appropriations bill to eliminate the already illegal practice of torturing POWs held by American forces. McCain, himself a former POW and victim of abuse by the Vietnamese (a fact that the draft-dodger Bush used against him in the 2000 campaign, saying that McCain’s experiences at the “Hanoi Hilton” made him psychologically unfit for command) spoke eloquently on the Senate floor when arguing for his amendment: “Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them even unto death. But every one of us—every single one of us—knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies.”

Senators from both parties flocked to McCain. The vote in the Senate was 90-9. If you’re interested in knowing which bloodthirsty sons of bitches voted against it, they were: Wayne Allard of Colorado, Christopher Bond of Missouri, Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, Thad Cochran of Mississippi, John Cornyn of Texas, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Pat Roberts of Kansas, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, and Ted Stevens of Alaska. I didn't include which party they belong to because thye all belong to the same party and I'm betting you can guess which one.

However, regardless of those nine, the President’s own party supported the measure overwhelmingly. 46 of them, including many who usually condone whatever ugliness the Administration can concoct (such as Bill Frist and Virginia's own George Allen), voted for the bill. It had broad bi-partisan as well as public support, which is beside the fact that it's clearly the right thing to do. So, of course, Bush immediately threatened to veto it.

In other words, this President (who in large part owes his job to the mistaken notion that a vote for him supports our troops) is willing to deny much-needed money our already underfunded soldiers in Iraq because he wants to assert the right (which he does not have) to expose prisoners of war (and let’s not forget that, according to the Red Cross, 90% of the inmates at Abu Ghraib turned out to be innocent) to torture, humiliation, and death. I hope that all of you folks out there who voted for him are proud of your boy.

* * * * * * *

There’s been a lot of talk about Harriet Miers recently, as well. I don’t know what the President was thinking here. I mean, if you want to put a super-conservative fundamentalist on the Court, that’s one thing. I can also see that, if you’re going to do that, it’s a good idea to pick someone whose personal views aren’t that widely known, because most of the country isn’t as crazy right-wing fundamentalist as the President, or as his nominee is said (in some quarters) to be. But if you’re going to do that, you have to pick someone who is so over-the-top qualified for the job that her credibility can’t be questioned without her accuser himself becoming a posterboy for partisan politics.

So, instead of doing that, Bush picks a completely unqualified person for the seat, assuring that there will be a hail of questions about competence from both sides, weakening the position of the nominee before her views are even an issue.

And then, before that’s even remotely under control, he leaks her ultra-conservative leanings, thus guaranteeing that both the left and the right will oppose the nomination. I mean, WHAT?

I’ll tell you the truth, though. What Ms. Miers believes isn’t that important to me right now. I’m bothered more about her writing.

David Brooks wrote a piece for the Times about the column Ms. Miers used to write for the Texas Bar Journal. The quotations he includes in his story (which you can read here) are pretty horrific, but not for political reasons. They’re just terrible, bad in every aesthetic way possible. This is a bigger problem than is at first glance apparent. As Brooks writes:

I don't know if by mere quotation I can fully convey the relentless march of vapid abstractions that mark Miers's prose. Nearly every idea is vague and depersonalized. Nearly every debatable point is elided. It's not that Miers didn't attempt to tackle interesting subjects. She wrote about unequal access to the justice system, about the under-representation of minorities in the law and about whether pro bono work should be mandatory. But she presents no arguments or ideas, except the repetition of the bromide that bad things can be eliminated if people of good will come together to eliminate bad things.

Or as she puts it, "There is always a necessity to tend to a myriad of responsibilities on a number of cases as well as matters not directly related to the practice of law." And yet, "Disciplining ourselves to provide the opportunity for thought and analysis has to rise again to a high priority."

I’m not Shakespeare myself, of course, but I write better than that (and, of course, I haven’t been nominated to a lifetime position on the highest court in the land). So forget how conservative she is. The question isn’t what she thinks, but rather whether she thinks.

No, that’s unfair. People who know her report that she’s an intelligent woman, and I’m willing to believe that. After all, one can’t rise to be the president of the state Bar, even in Texas, without intelligence. But, as Brooks (himself a conservative) says, “Throw aside ideology. Surely the threshold skill required of a Supreme Court justice is the ability to write clearly and argue incisively. Miers's columns provide no evidence of that.”

We’ve given Bush a pretty free ride so far, for the most part, but nominating Justices is the most important thing a President does outside of war (which, you know, don’t get me started). He owes his country a serious nominee, and since he doesn’t respect that obligation, we owe it to ourselves to hold him to it.

Also, Brooks makes a good point about the friction between conservatives and Republicans, but we’ll have to go into that later. I have too much to say tonight.

* * * * * * *

I owe the Dyspraxic Fundamentalist a response from last week, and I’d like first to apologize for taking so long to get back to it. Last week was kinda crazy. Anyway, I want to address a couple of things he wrote to me.

First, he objects to my characterization of St. Paul as “anti-intellectual.” He writes: “Please remember that he was higly (sic) educated, knowledgable (sic) about the Scriptures of the Hebrews, the philosophy of the Greeks and the traditions of the Orient.” So his objection is that, as an educated man, Paul couldn’t have been anti-intellectual. This argument is fallacious for three reasons:

1) There is no evidence that Paul was particularly well-educated. According to tradition, he had been taught by Gamaliel, a Pharisee. This would explain his encyclopedic knowledge of the Jewish Scriptures, but lack of training in any other intellectual field. Paul was a tent-maker by trade until becoming an apostle; this is not a trade that requires any education. And though Paul could speak and write Greek fluently, scholars report that his style, though emotionally compelling, was merely “competent” and never achieved any polish. Certainly he had little or no education in even the rudiments of Greek philosophy; even his grammar was stilted. There’s little biographical information about Paul, and what we do have is unreliable, but what evidence there is indicates a man of some, but not extensive, education.

2) Even if Paul could be shown to have had the first-century equivalent of a Ph.D. from Columbia, that in itself would prove nothing. Educated people are frequently anti-intellectual. My President, for example, has a degree from Yale. Insert your own joke here.

3) Finally, beyond these somewhat abstract theories about his education, the content of Paul’s writing itself declares him anti-intellectual. Maybe it was a reaction to the way he was laughed out of Athens when his theological arguments couldn’t stand up to the questions of the Greek thinkers…Paul seems to have been a man for holding grudges. Whatever the reason, Paul very early distanced Christian belief from reason and logic. If I may include an excerpt from Charles Freeman’s wonderful book, The Closing of the Western Mind:

The idea of being open to “faith” is a powerful one; the longing to surrender the self to another who can provide certainty is an enduring part of the human psyche. However, for those who believe in the importance of using reason to define the truth, this surrender must raise concerns. Plato, for instance, specifically condemned “faith” as a means of finding the truth; for him the only secure way of understanding the immaterial world was through the use of reason…Although there is no evidence that Paul knew of Plato’s thought, we can assume that he realized that his concept of “faith” was vulnerable when set against the mainstream of the Greek intellectual tradition. As we have seen, he may have been unsettled by his confrontation with the pagan philosophers in Athens. His response was to hit back with highly emotional rhetoric, the only weapon to hand. So for Paul it is not only the Law that has been superseded by the coming of Christ, it is the concept of rational argument, the core of the Greek intellectual achievement itself. “The more they (non-Christians) called themselves philosophers,” he tells the Romans (I:21-22), “the more stupid they grew…they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened.”…There is something of the mystic in Paul’s disregard of logic (and a paradox in the way he uses his considerable rhetorical skills to attack the very intellectual tradition of which logic was a part). This disregard had unfortunate consequences. As Paul’s writings came to be seen as authoritative, it became a mark of the committed Christian to be able to reject rational thought, and even the evidence of empirical experience. Christians would often pride themselves on their lack of education, associating independent philosophical thinking with the sin of pride….the Greek intellectual tradition was to be increasingly stifled by the churches. So here are the roots of the conflict between religion and science that still pervades debates on Christianity to this day. By proposing that Christian faith (which exists in the world of muthos) might contain “truths” superior to those achieved by rational argument (logoi), it was Paul, perhaps unwittingly in that he appears to have known virtually nothing of the Greek philosophical tradition he condemned, who declared the war and prepared the battlefield.

I recemmend the book for a fuller treatment of the subject; space is somewhat limited here.

So, actually, when I call Paul an anti-intellectual, I’m doing him a disservice. He was, in fact, the great greasy granddaddy of all anti-intellectuals. His opposition to logic, reason, and the philosophic tradition is marked. And given that that tradition, rediscovered by the Renaissance Humanists, is the basis of Western society; given that it gave birth to our modern world with its vast scientific achievements and tremendous political freedom and high quality of life; given also that these things were accomplished over the objections of Paul's church; given those things, Paul’s opposition to it seems telling, as well as tragic.

I include this because I wanted to respond to the DR’s statement about Paul, but it is, again, outside the scope of my original argument, to which I want to return now (for those who missed it, my argument is stated in the post The Wrath of God, and the beginning of my discussion with the DR is on the comments page of that post). Touching on my original argument, the DR writes: “Your theological argument is an argument from values. You insist that your moral values are correct and right, but who says so? Suppose it is your opinion that gambling is a really bad thing. Who cares? I might want to gamble and think it is great.”

Okay, let me say first that, in actual point of fact, gambling is in my opinion a really bad thing, in that I’ve seen it destroy many people. On the other hand, I have no moral objection to drinking or drugs, and I’ve known a lot of junkies and alcoholics and seen a lot of people destroyed by substance abuse. My personal feeling is just that, a personal feeling.

I understand that the fact that I dislike gambling doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be allowed to do it, and I would never support a law banning gambling (though lotteries bother me, because I don’t see why the state should actively promote gambling). For that matter, I'd legalize drugs across the board, and prostitution as well.

But understand, what we’re talking about here is wholesale murder and mass suffering. It isn’t my opinion that these things are wrong; that’s as close to a universally accepted moral truth as we, as human beings, are ever likely to get. My problem with God certainly is, as you say, moral, but don’t downplay the depths of immorality that I’m accusing God of; a croupier or a gigolo or a junkie has nothing on God when it comes to sin. The God of the fundamentalists endorses genocide, for Christ’s sake. The God of the fundamentalists destroys entire cities, entire cultures, to weed out a few bad eggs. Moral values may change from place to place and from person to person, but can’t we all agree that genocide is wrong?

Further on, he says: “You say that the God of the Bible is not worth worshipping. Of course you would; the God of the Bible demands what you do not want to give, hence you reject Him…You do not have an intellectual problem, you have a moral problem. God has revealed His nature and you do not like it, so you reject all the evidence for God.”

The bit about rejecting all evidence for God is beside the point, of course, because my argument stipulates that the Biblical God does exist, so we’ll pass that one. More important within the context of this discussion is the assertion that I reject this God because he wants what I do not want to give.

That isn’t what I said. I don’t reject God because he won’t let me do what I want to do. If it was only a question of God telling me I couldn’t whore around or kill or beat people or bliss out on heroin, then there wouldn’t be a problem, because I don’t whore around or kill or beat people or bliss out on heroin (anymore—you can get too old for that stuff). I don’t reject God because he wants me to live a certain way and living that way is hard. I reject him because he’s cruel and wicked. I reject him because I find him morally inferior to myself. I reject him, not because I’m unwilling to be held to a higher standard, but because I reject the lower standard he holds himself to, the personality of a spoiled and vicious child that his putative Word depicts.

I say again: an all-powerful being who could punish the guilty while sparing the innocent but refuses to do so deserves not worship but condemnation. If you could show me a just and loving God, that would be one thing, but the God of the fundamentalists ain’t it.

There is, as Freeman points out, something in the human psyche that longs for the certainty and security of a divine father and the assurance of eternal life. In the words of my beloved Voltaire, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” I don’t know that I’m any different from anyone else in this regard. I have moments of lonliness and despair, when a faith that everything will ultimately work out for the best would be very comforting. But I won’t sacrifice my love of justice and compassion for that comfort.

Give me a God that doesn’t offend my conscience. Then we’ll talk.

* * * * * * *

So, I was out drinking last night and ran into a friend from the English department, who wishes to remain nameless (she doesn’t even want a pseudonym, because she’s afraid I'll pick one that will reflect badly on her). We talked for quite a bit, the conversation ranging from books about baseball to hippie festivals to Dr. Johnson and Shakespeare.

She was there when I finished my first pitcher of beer and ordered my second. This prompted her to ask what I get out of drinking, that I drink so much. And that’s a damn good question. The quick, easy answer is that we all do this, everyone in my family. We’re all either tee-totallers or alcoholics, with the exception of my brother (who has the sort of self-discipline you usually only find in Shaolin monks). And it’s bigger than alcohol, too; we really just have addictive personalities. We are not moderate people, and the ones who aren’t alcoholics or junkies are gambling addicts or religious fanatics or gluttons or something along those lines.

So, I can claim genetics as the culprit, and for the most part I’m perfectly comfortable with that explanation. The real answer, though, is more involved.

I told her briefly about Christine, a friend back home during the Blackout Years and one of the very finest people I’ve ever known. She was a psychology major, and decided to use me as the subject of her thesis or keystone or whatever it is you have to do before they’ll let you graduate.

So of course she interviewed me on several occasions, and in one of these interviews she asked the question point-blank: “Why do you drink so much? What does it do for you that you must do it this much?”

I didn’t want to give her a simple answer that wouldn’t be true. So I went off and wrote her a ten- or twelve-page paper, outlining the conscious reasons for my drinking (the biological ones are another matter; you’d have to ask a doctor). I don’t, unfortunately, have that paper anymore. I didn’t make copies, and she never gave it back to me. If you really want it, you could ask her. Last I heard, she was living in Boulder, Colorado. Look her up. Hi from me.

Anyway, that paper was the answer, if there is one. And it’s too long an answer for a casual converstation in a bar, and it’s also too long to include in this already over-long post.

If anyone’s interested, maybe I’ll try to reconstruct that paper over the next few days and give it a post of its own. But really, the best answer to the question is this: if you aren’t an alcoholic, I don’t know that there’s any way I can make you understand. Still, I’ve been writing this from the beginning (well, at least at the beginning) so that outsiders could get a glimpse into our lives. So, I’ll make an effort to quantify all of this for you non-alcoholics. I hope it’ll make sense when it’s done.

* * * * * * *

Also, my English department friend and I talked about this blog. She believes that I use this as an outlet for a self-destructive impulse. That could be true. Probably every alcoholic feels that impulse, and I know I’ve always felt drawn to people in the grip of it. For exampe, I loved Mills and April (the people responsible for my going to California, and for the Dave Matthews debacle as well) as much as I’ve ever loved anyone. Mills was a band-mate, a great guitarist with a natural feel for the perfect riff, plus which his middle name was "Godly," which I always loved. April was maybe the smartest person I've ever known (present company excluded, of course), a talented writer who now makes an excellent living as a globe-hopping freelance writer, and also one of the genuine loves of my life. And let me tell you about these two: it's said that easygoing people skate through life, and if that's true, then Mills and April were definitely traveling in bumper cars. My other friends and I used to discuss their apparent death wish at great length; probably similar conversations were had about me, as well.

Anyway, yeah, maybe. I don’t know where the impulse comes from, if it causes or is caused by the alcoholism, or is identical to or completely separate from it, but it’s definitely there. And maybe it does manifest itself in this blog. Certainly I’ve damaged myself with this thing, losing a home and most of my friends because of it. And I’ve probably been too open on these pages, put too much of myself on them. I'm quite sure, for example, that if I ever run for public office I’ll be haunted by the things I’ve written here.

But I don’t see this blog as an instrument of self-destruction. Quite the contrary, in fact; to me it feels redemptive. My friend asked me if I thought of this as therapy, and maybe that’s part of it. But mostly it’s just that this is where I am who I am, where I say what I think and feel. Most of us spend our whole lives not being listened to, and this blog gives me the opportunity to be heard, or at least the illusion that people are hearing me. This is where I speak from the mountaintop, and if mine is not the voice for these ears, well, that’s okay. It’s still MY voice.