Watching History In Person

Chelsea Gilbert, 8th grade teacher at the Mission Parish School in San Juan Capistrano, had the exciting idea to take her class to the inauguration of the next President (whoever it was; she hatched the plan before the election). They're raising over $50,000 to pull it off. Thanks to Jackie Franke, with whom I go to church at St. John's, the kids visited the Nixon Library two weeks ago. Read their story here.

Can Hamas Learn?

Hamas wants to emasculate Fatah. According to Shmuel Rosner, Israel will win the war if it succeeds in beginning to pacify Hamas:

The outcome of the military campaign, which is still in its early stages, will help observers decide whether the operation was a wise move on Israel's part. The outcome of negotiations leading to the conclusion of the campaign—the terms under which a renewed cease-fire will be achieved—will also determine whether the Gaza war was successful. But most of all, it is the expectations of all parties involved that will dictate how this round of violence will be perceived by Israelis, Palestinians, and the rest of the world. Anyone who expects this to be the last round is delusional. Anyone who hopes that the days of Hamas rule in Gaza are numbered is unrealistic. Only those who think Hamas will learn a lesson that might make it less likely to permit the shelling of Israeli citizens—while maintaining its power and its ability to cause trouble whenever it chooses—might be right. Time will tell.

Sometimes The Fake Tree Wins

While trees wait to be mulched in Yorba Linda, California, the noble plywood still stands tall on the ninth day of Christmas, cheering a foggy Back Bay in Newport Beach.

"Have Them Send A Chopper, Daddy!"

Overrated

A travel-savvy friend sent this link to a photo feature of 24 destinations deemed overrated by LA Times readers. Some are obvious, I suppose. Las Vegas? Vulgar and expensive, said a grumpy reader. Of course she hated gambling, so you have to wonder whether she and her husband had done enough research. Nothing to do on Catalina Island? I guess I can buy that, although the buffalo, imported years ago for a movie shoot, are worth hunting down.

But also on the list were Bali, Costa Rica, and Greece, where notwithstanding its being the birthplace of democracy the dissenting couple had a bad experience as a result of loud music and people smoking too much in a nightclub. It's a free country; blame it on Pericles.

As I read through the escalating grumps, I said to myself, "Somebody had better not complain about the Grand Canyon." The friend who sent me the link probably said the same thing to himself about his beloved Hawaii, which didn't make the list. But sure enough, here's bellyache #18:

Although the canyon is certainly a geological sight to behold, the campgrounds are atrocious, about as charming as pitching a tent in the alley behind your local big-box store and just as close to nature. Hiking is limited to down the canyon and up the canyon, and although, yeah, I know that's why you're there, not every member of every family is capable of such strenuous effort. Despite the family demographic, you won't find playgrounds to keep the kids grounded. The Grand Canyon is a great destination if you are under 30 with a good prostate, balance and a taste for trail mix.

The thing is, looking at the Grand Canyon and walking in and out of it are why we go there. That fact actually can't be logically modified by a "while" or an "although." For the same reason, you just can't say, "Although Renoir's 'Luncheon Of The Boating Party' is a beautiful painting, it doesn't say anything funny or serve caffeine-free Diet Coke." In other words, the Grand Canyon is a great destination, period. When a culture has reached the point where people are willing to complain in print, over their own names, about the alleged shortcomings of the most beautiful places in the known universe, we might consider redoubling our efforts in the "count your blessings" department.

One of my blogfollowers (my elder daughter) and I walked in and out of the canyon in November 1998. Quick energy from trail mix, taken in small handsful every 20 minutes, was our salvation. While my prostate was already well beyond 30, the attraction, which indeed has fewer rest rooms than Universal Studios, offers more than enough bushes to hide behind.

On the canyon floor, whose two-billion-year-old rock should give the young earth folks something to thing about, we stayed at the Phantom Ranch, where (at least back then) visitors were offered either steak or beef stew. In the men's bunkhouse, I lay awake most of the night, listening to the rain and wondering how we were possibly going to make it out again.

Yet walking up the Bright Angel Trail the second day was actually easier than the descent. Something about what walking straight downhill for six or seven hours does to your calve muscles. About a third of a way down, Valerie, 13, had sat down on a rock and said, "Daddy, I can't go any further. Have them send a chopper." The next day, she didn't complain once. She walked, and rested, and walked some more, for nearly nine hours. I will never be able to describe the feeling of arriving with my daughter at the trailhead. Overrated, huh? Top five experiences of my life. The LA Times and its reader might consider giving it another try. I suggest they wear two pair of socks, however. I can still feel the blisters.

Photo by Steven Pinker

New Ideas In Troubled Times

Bill Simon on how the wealth of principled conservatives can help our economy recover.

Imagine: Frost Complaining More Than We

Sir David Frost is steamed about the 10-15% of Ron Howard and Peter Morgan's "Frost/Nixon" that he says is pure fiction. Does he mean the drunken phone call from President Nixon that never happened? RN saying that Watergate was "not illegal" as opposed to aggressive measures to combat domestic extremists during wartime? His appearance before the "Orthodontists Society of Houston?"

Those weren't the fictional parts of the movie that piqued Frost. They were the parts about Frost:

I voluntarily gave up my rights to editorial control of it. I'm not complaining but it does mean that 10 to 15 per cent of the film is fiction. I wasn't just a talk show host before (Richard Nixon). I'd done British prime ministers - Harold Wilson, Ted Heath - all the U.S. presidential candidates, Robert Kennedy, Ronald Reagan. I think Peter (Morgan) did it this way to make me out to be the underdog - more a showman than a journalist.

For Nixon insider Frank Gannon's review of the movie, which received the coveted full five Checkers rating at The New Nixon, go here. Mine's at the second link above.

What We Do Today And Tomorrow

Israel's attack on the radical Islamist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip is in its sixth day. These details from a New York Times report help underscore the cultural gulf between the combatants in this heartbreaking New Year's war, in which about 400 have died so far (between a tenth and a quarter of them civilians):

The Israeli air force on Thursday afternoon bombed the house of Nizar Rayyan, a senior Hamas leader, killing him along with two of his wives and four children, Palestinian hospital officials said. Mr. Rayyan was the first high ranking Hamas figure killed so far in the Israeli campaign.

The Israeli military confirmed the strike and described Mr. Rayyan, who was 46 and lived in Jabaliya, north of Gaza City, as an extremist who had helped plan suicide bombings and had sent his own son on a suicide mission in 2001.

Rayyan was a polygamist who sent his son to die in a suicide mission and purposely exposed other family members to death today. I don't write that to call him names. They're the bald facts of the life he chose to lead.

Tolerated or encouraged in most of the Islamic world, polygamy is countenanced by the Koran and is thought to have been practiced by the prophet himself. It is said that after his first wife died, he took others to protect them from economic privation. While the practice has its proponents in the West (I was surprised to learn that the Utah ACLU opposes the LDS's ban on multiple wives), it's inconsistent with modern principles of equality and mutuality among free individuals. The Koran, it should be noted, does not permit women to take up to four husbands. Polyandry was never a Mormon practice, either.

By devaluing women, polygamy seems to encourage the kind of deep-set thinking whereby a military leader is excused and even celebrated by others in his culture for keeping his family close to him even when he's being targeted by an enemy, as Rayyan has known to be the case since the Israeli bombardment began. Instead, the Times recounts, he refused to leave his home, and even took reporters up on the roof to to call further attention to himself (and of course the women and children living downstairs). Had he survived, as the wording of the article suggests, he had even more women and children to offer as martyrs. After all,

Mr. Rayyan was known in Gaza ...as a popular Hamas preacher who openly extolled and championed the idea of martyrdom.

Women such as Rayyan's wives are victims both of historical circumstance and the males in authority in their culture and families. As long as they are willing to keep following orders and give their lives for the sake of destroying Israel, the war will go on.

In fairness, something similar (but not the same) can be said about those who are willing to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces. All wars ultimately depend on the willingness of soldiers to fight. But that is as far as the moral equivalence goes. Whatever Israel's own sins or excesses, Hamas is getting exactly what it wanted this week. The purpose of its missile attacks on Israel was to provoke a disproportionate response that would emasculate the Palestinian Authority's president, Mahmoud Abbas, who heads the more moderate Fatah party in control of the West Bank. Protesters filling the Arab street are playing their parts as well, condemning an attack on Hamas that Hamas did everything it could to bring about. This wasting circular logic will continue until someone, or a preponderance of someones, finally says, "Stop."

As I wrote in March 2008 after Al Abu Dhaim's murderous attack on a seminary in Jerusalem:

The operation fit perfectly into Hamas’s plan to promote chaos by provoking Israel and ultimately discrediting Abbas in the eyes of his people. It’s what violent extremists so often do — destroy hope by attacking the center and by exposing everyone residing there to the temptation of becoming violent extremists themselves in their grief, rage, and sheer frustration.

So how can the world’s responsible voices not join in support for Olmert and Abbas, Bush and Rice? How can we not keep faith with the hope that Israel and Palestine will someday live in peace, side by side? How do we keep extremists from wresting control of events from those who are committed to peace? Palestinians I know seem prepared for this work..., prepared to live into the truth that God wants them to share the Holy Land. Last summer I spent over a week in Al Abu Dhaim’s own east Jerusalem, albeit in the cloistered grounds of St. George’s Cathedral, seat of Jerusalem’s Episcopal bishop. Bright young Arab Palestinian Anglicans (better read that twice) working, studying, and worshiping at St. George’s reminded me of Cold War-era Muscovites in that they were capable of sitting up until after midnight one night after another talking about politics. Their brief against Israel is as heartfelt and seemingly cogent as Israelis’s against them. One is tempted to choose sides and then compelled not to, both by a newcomer’s humility as well as the feeling that Israelis and Palestinians could play they-did-it-first all the way back to Abram and the Amalekites without resolving anything. In the end, all that matters (this is admittedly a theological statement more than a sophisticated political position) is what we do today and tomorrow.

Uncle Jay Explains 2008

Hat tip to Mark Shier

Hearts Turning Outwards

From the Archbishop of Canterbury's New Year's message:

[W]hat about a New Year in which we try and ask consistently about our own personal decisions and about public polices, national and international, ‘Does this feel like something that looks after our real treasure, something that keeps our real wealth safe - the lives and welfare of the youngest and most vulnerable?’

Jesus said where our treasure is, that’s where our hearts will be. Our hearts will be in a very bad way if they’re focused only on the state of our finances. They’ll be healthy if they are capable of turning outwards, looking at the real treasure that is our fellow human beings.

January 1: The Feast Of The Holy Name

Eternal Father, you gave to your incarnate Son the holy name of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation: Plant in every heart, we pray, the love of him who is the Savior of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen. BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER