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The recent decision by US Attorney General, Eric Holder—that five Guantanamo detainees believed to have masterminded the 9/11 attacks will be brought to the US to be tried in a non-military court in lower Manhattan—has raised cries of outrage from many quarters. Here is yet another complex contemporary issue that does not seem to break down neatly according to the old logic of “liberal and conservative” politics.  

Some object to the decision not to try the five in military tribunals instead. Some object to the symbolism of bringing the men onto US soil. Others embrace the symbolism of trying the five in lower Manhattan, in the symbolic shadow of Ground Zero. Some worry that this cannot serve as anything other than a show-trial, whose outcome is already clear; the idea is that this decision would never have been rendered were the Attorney General in any doubt about the final outcome.

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There is a fine but important line to be drawn between reasonable disagreement and irresponsible name-calling. It is thus surprising when a commenter baber begins with name-calling in response to a claim by Karen Armstrong with which he might simply have chosen to disagree.

Here, then, is Armstrong’s claim, via Brian McGrath Davis’ review here on RD:

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A deeply fractious, but culturally very interesting, battle is brewing at the University of California at Berkeley, symbolic epicenter of left academic activism and California-style progressivism. It is a battle that offers a cautionary tale for our times.

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From the position of a wistful and quixotic leftism, the announcement by the Nobel Committee of its decision to award President Barack Obama the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize created not so much ambivalence as dismay. And I have struggled with the meaning of the decision—interested less in having something new to say about it, and more in how to figure out how to feel about it, and how to discern its symbolic message, intended or not.

An obvious and immediate concern was that this award was tailor-made to serve the interests of the talk-show savvy political right.

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The brouhaha stirred up by the President's sudden decision to travel to Copenhagen in order to lobby for Chicago's bid to host the 2016 Olympic Games should not really be surprising. Each and every President faces the challenge of remembering where they came from, politically speaking, even as they make the transition to a global stage. Bush's long periods back in Crawford, Texas, are but the most recent example of the ways in which a president tries to shore up his or her power base "back home," while at the same time loosening those same ties, lest their leadership seem overly partisan and geographically narrow.

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The main topic on last weekend's round of talk shows and political roundtables was whether there is a meaningful analogy to be drawn between the US experience in Vietnam and current debates over our policy in Afghanistan and its somewhat dubious future. There are no such things as perfect analogies, of course, but suggestive connections there surely are.

Most of them received a helpful airing.

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The Christian Century recently asked a group of distinguished culture commentators how they get their news, focusing on what they read and how they read when their topic is religion.

Mark Silk—a wonderfully thoughtful and creative analyst of religion in the news, especially the new media outlets that proliferate, and professor of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College—walked us through his day in an interesting, provocative, and remarkably recognizable way.

He reads two newspapers at home in the morning:

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Philip Clayton’s wonderful essay on the troubled relationship between religion and science represents one of those superlative and subtle interventions for which I have come to rely on him. Sly and suggestive, stunning in its breezy historical range, Clayton’s essay offers us, in the end, a fairly simple message about the urgent need for thoughtful and creative dialogue, across the disciplines. I will return to that second idea—creativity—in a moment. I also want to locate the academic study of Religion more explicitly within the Humanities, for reasons that I hope to explain below.

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On Wednesday evening, the President of the United States of America addressed a joint session of Congress; there is no more solemn setting, and it was, and remains, a legitimate question as to whether this was the right venue for this speech. I am not convinced that it was, for reasons that will take time to explain.

Presidents very rarely do this. Franklin Delano Roosevelt did it only once—to declare war on Japan. Lyndon Johnson did so, after the assassination of President Kennedy. George W. Bush did so, after the 9/11 attacks. And perhaps most tellingly, Bill Clinton did so to speak about health care reform. It was not an auspicious setting for an intractable public debate.

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I belong to a food co-op; I have for several years. It's wonderful institution and I genuinely like visiting the place, as I do (at a minimum) several times a week. It's invitingly New-Agey, has wonderful organic and Fair Trade products, and several delicious items I can't seem to find anywhere else.

The thing is, I can't imagine going there for health-care, excepting certain herbal remedies they carry.

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Mark Seal published the fourth in his series of “The Madoff Chronicles” for Vanity Fair magazine this month; this time he turns his attention to the still-mysterious figure of Ruth Madoff, wife to the criminal du jour. It makes for strange reading.

The question, of course, is as obvious and inescapable as it is unanswerable: what did she know and when did she know (or suspect) it?

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The swirl of debate on this Sunday's morning talk-shows hinged, predictably enough, on two questions. First, has the fracas at so many town hall meetings held recently to discuss various health care reform proposals been orchestrated by Republican and other elites, or is it a real grassroots outpouring of outrage and raw political emotion?

And second, what degree of responsibility do Republican leaders like Sarah Palin bear for correcting egregious and alarmist references to governmental "death panels," and in what way might they be held accountable for repeating such deliberate errors of fact and distorting others?

Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) was asked point-blank whether Sarah Palin was correct in her original assertion about the existence of such "death panels," or whether her Republican colleagues from Alaska who roundly condemned the statement, and condemned her for making it., were more on the mark Astonishingly, if not surprisingly, Hatch sidestepped the question and refused to answer it.

"Many different people have many different opinions about this," he opined.

Astonishing.

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Yes, there are times when the wildest idea, the most obviously impossible scheme, becomes so strongly planted in one’s mind that one begins to regard it as something quite realizeable. Moreover, if that thought is combined with a powerful and passionate desire, at certain moments it will loom as something fateful, inevitable, predestined, as something that cannot fail to happen. Perhaps this feeling is due to a combination of premonition, enormous strength of will, and intoxication with one’s own fantasy, or perhaps something else—I don’t know.

--Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Gambler,

Like Dostoevsky, George W. Bush was an inveterate gambler. And while it is a dangerous game to blame all of our current troubles on the grossest gambles of a previous administration, the debts in this case are fairly obvious ones. President Obama, and the nation, now bear the staggering costs of two wars, an ideological commitment to deregulation and an almost staggering faith in the power of free markets.

It is easy to forget the way Bush’s career began. He managed to lose 20 million dollars on the surest of sure things: Texas oil. His father’s friends paid the notes when they came due. So he rolled the dice again, on a long-shot this time, and won big, unseating his well-loved opponent as governor of Texas. And thus was a gambling career born.

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There are bars you never forget, places the sheer memory of which can get you through the long winter months… or trying weeks at work. The Veggera Beach Bar on the northern coast of Corfu, in a small seaside resort called Acharavi, is that place for me. A great deal of human energy has been expended there over many years simply to create an atmosphere in which you will feel instantly happy and at home.

No, not at home. Better than that. So that you will feel like you are in paradise.

Such utopias are rare. And the kind of utopians who devote themselves to their sustenance and care are rarer still. I had the supreme good fortune of meeting one such utopian, an old and dear personal friend, for cocktails at the Veggera, as the Ionian sun drifted lazily into the sea. It was the sort of scene before which words fail, sinking happily into the silence of that same sea.

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Greenwich Village has a rare beauty in the early summer, when the days tend to be breezy and nights are still cool. I have never seen the place better kept, each and every park and thoroughfare brilliantly manicured with flowers and spices positively exploding into an orgiastic display of midsummer colors. Most all of the storefronts were painted in rainbow patterns that beautifully set off the gardens. It was the summer solstice. And it is the fortieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots that symbolically announced the birth of a gay rights movement in the United States, rights for a community that would no longer be ignored. Quite suddenly, coming out of the closet meant hitting the streets.

Admittedly, I was simply strolling on a sleepy late Monday morning; no doubt there are parades and concerts and lectures associated with the anniversary (billboards announced a week-long observance, ending on June 28th). But as I wandered the streets and tried to imagine the tumult forty years earlier, I wondered what it all had meant, and what had been achieved.

On a progressive note, nearly every storefront was participating in this commemoration; solidarity with an aggrieved community is the surest sign of social progress. But in addition to the tourists taking pictures of various shop windows and their common refrain—“Be Proud”—there were the predictable offhand street-smart remarks and muttering from out-of-town visitors, reading the signs and placards aloud in effected voices dripping with irony, or ill-disguised contempt.

What had it all meant? What had been achieved?

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Kathryn Lofton’s luminous essay on the ritual form of the wedding announcement helped me to understand what has perplexed and fascinated me so about reportage of the Madoff scandal. The issue is one of tone, finding the right tone for a wedding announcement, or for a meditation on a scandal of such colossal proportions.

Lofton captures the melancholic heart of the thing—if it were not so, then why should death play such a prominent part in the very ceremony from which we should most wish to protect it? “Til death do us part,” we say, reminding ourselves in the very moment of joining that we are committing ourselves equally to an inevitable parting.

How should we look upon the smiling faces, the desperate notes, the brief snippets of biography, the inspiring hopes, the sense of infinite possibility? Lofton invites us into an almost terrifying honesty: when we gaze upon such pictures, we cannot help but imagine the whole thing unraveling, as fully half of these unions will, statistically speaking. As Susan Sontag noted long ago, photography has always enjoyed a special intimacy with catastrophe.

So I return to Vanity Fair, and its attempts to put a human face on the Bernie Madoff saga.

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Unsurprisingly perhaps, the Bernie Madoff saga plays longer and better in New York than anywhere else in the world. The sleek New York-based monthly, Vanity Fair, has devoted three months now to an ongoing series it calls "The Madoff Chronicles." And in June it published its biggest scoop of to date: the personal story of Madoff's longtime secretary (she was hired in 1984), Eleanor Squillari.

The article begins with a jolt, even before it moves into Squillari's own story. "In writing about Bernard Madoff for Vanity Fair's April issue, I frequently heard his victims refer to him as another Hitler, who decimated his largely Jewish clientele by stealing their money in the biggest Ponzi scheme in history."

Madoff and Hitler. Seven billion dollars and six million souls. It just doesn't add up. In fact, it's a shocking claim. Yet the connection has a seductive appeal, and once you've heard it you can't stop thinking about it.

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A recent essay on the death penalty I wrote for RD was picked up recently by Rod Parsley on his website, and recommended to his confessedly Christian readership, in part I take it, as an example of how not to argue from the Bible.

I was, and remain, grateful for his careful reading of the piece, and for his judicious reflection on specifically Christian reasons to oppose the death penalty—primarily the fundamental, and really quite moving, idea that no human soul is irredeemable, and that even in prison, redemption happens.

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The first of this summer’s literary extravaganzas was held last Tuesday night at the old Basilica di Massenzio near the Roman Forum. It is part of an impressive annual cultural series, where an international group of writers is invited to offer readings dedicated to the theme of that year.

This year’s theme is “Terra Luna”, commemorating the forty-year anniversary of the first moon-walk, and the first two writers in the series were an American (Andrew Sean Greer, who spends his time equally between San Francisco and New York), and a far better-known Italian author (Margaret Mazzentini, who is married to a wonderfully gifted actor, Sergio Castellito, who read her first piece in tandem with her).

The night could not have been more perfect for a festival dedicated to the Moon. The massive brick-faced antiquities were exquisitely illuminated in the twilight, and a pale sliver of moon was visible to the left of the stage just when the reading began. It was a mesmerizing space of two hours in every sense, because all the senses were quickened. This, I thought, was Rome at its best and most seductive.

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The afternoon of the third day of the conference on Critical Theory that I attended in Rome (discussed in my previous post) was devoted primarily to the work of Walter Benjamin.

In the so-called Frankfurt School but not of it, Benjamin had an unusual and complex relationship to the other critical theorists I mentioned there. Several of the most prominent figures in the movement between the wars, most notably Theodor Adorno, were great admirers of Benjamin’s quirky brilliance, and sometime-boosters of his work. But the fact that he continued to write about religious topics, especially Jewish topics, was perplexing to thinkers who were committed to the critical work of Marx and Freud, among others.

Benjamin made almost mystical claims for the revelatory status of the interlinear Bible, wrote difficult and suggestive essays contrasting “divine violence” with “mystic violence,” and in some intriguing notes for a philosophy of history he never completed, he meditated on the contemporary meaning of “messianic” hope. His ideas were heterodox to be sure, but heterodoxy remains within the religious family or the tribe, as Benjamin himself seemed willing to do.

One of the most striking differences about Walter Benjamin is that he tragically failed to escape the reach of the Nazis in France, and failed to flee to the New World as most of his fellow-travelers did.

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In the trendy Trastevere district of Rome, the American-based John Cabot University sponsored an impressive three-day conference on Critical Theory, one entitled "Images of a Demystified World." Truly international, boasting scholars and presenters from four continents, it has been a provocative and engaging forum for thinking about global problems—from religion and violence, war and peace, terror and torture, to the future of global capital—in a more authentically global way. The main thinkers under discussion here are not household names in the US, though they should be (many of them spent formative years during the War in the US). Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin… all of them saw similar-seeming political and economic crises in Europe between the wars, and all reflected deeply on various strategies for resistance and for radical social change.

Some of them remained hopeful in the face of despair.

All of them viewed art as one critical human resource in the face of crisis and despair.

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This week’s announcement by Arlen Specter, Republican Senator from Pennsylvania, of his intention to switch party affiliation and to seek the Democratic nomination from his state has generated considerable discussion in the news. It has largely been discussion that speaks to the increasingly partisan cultural landscape just one hundred days into an Obama administration that ran on the promise of “changing the culture of Washington, DC.” Plus ça change…

Cultures do not change as easily as political affiliation, alas. And most of the current discussion misses the mark in some profound ways. The questions concerning what this means for the future of the Republican Party are premature, at least in the terms currently posed. For the embittered leadership of the Republican Party, Specter’s was a personal decision with absolutely zero broader electoral implications.

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This year’s Pulitzer Prizes were announced on Monday afternoon, and several of the journalistic prizes caught my attention. I mention four of them.

For “Breaking News Reporting,” the New York Times received the Prize for its reporting of then-Governor Eliot Spitzer’s dalliance with a prostitute, a dalliance that forced him from office.

For “Local Reporting,” the Detroit Free Press received the award for uncovering a sexual liaison between then-Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and a female staffer. Both were jailed for perjury.

In other words, intense press attention on the private sexual lives of public officials, however ill-advised—attention that led to the tremendous turmoil that inevitably accompanies expulsion from office in mid-term—such attention was rewarded with the highest form of recognition a journalist or a newspaper can receive.

Where have I seen this before?

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Who knew? Newt’s back, and he’s bad. And he seems to be moving deliberately into the power vacuum created by the implosion of Bush-style conservatism and the embarrassment caused by the dawning impression that Rush Limbaugh is now the intellectual heavyweight of American conservatism.

But Newt Gingrich has done three very visible and very vocal things that are very difficult to think together.

First, he converted to Roman Catholicism; second, he became a public sponsor of the nationwide “tea parties” held on Tax Day; and third, he has become the point person for a withering attack on President Obama’s emerging foreign policy approach.

This last issue has been the issue du jour as Newt makes the round of talk shows and television news. His talking points are impressive:

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Of all the rhetorical tropes deployed in the current frenzy of reflection and debate about the current proposals for economic recovery, none is more shopworn than the distinction “between Wall Street and Main Street.” Yet the phrase’s very overuse, especially by President Obama’s Economic Team, underlines an important and distressing reality. Wall Street is being bailed out in a way that Main Street is not.

There are various reasons for this, the first and foremost being the obvious fact that we are hard-pressed to know how to reach Main Street in the same way that federal programs can reasonably hope to reach large banks and corporations. The most immediate relief for Main Streeters is for those who have certain types of jobs, and it just kicked in: these people will see reductions in their federal withholding taxes already in this end-of-month’s paycheck. But that only helps Main Streeters who have jobs, and more specifically, jobs with paychecks. Waiters and waitresses and bar staff are not assisted in this way; indeed, such service industries will continue to be among those hardest hit by lay-offs and worse.

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