In Fairness To The Monks

After reading about Rod Dreher's blog for years, I'm a little embarrassed that it took a nudge from David Brooks this morning to pay closer attention. He has a fascinating (and, for a political blog, exceptionally civil) discussion thread about the post-Christmas Day monk mash at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. I left this comment:

As a three-time pilgrim, I try not to be too critical about the occasional clashes at churches in the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher [shown here], where, as you may know, six denominations have been co-managing the premises (with a Muslim family controlling the keys) for over 150 years. I actually think we could learn something from them. How would any of us do, coexisting with our arch rivals in incredibly close quarters for the sake of a shared goal (in the case of the Holy Sepulcher, preserving and venerating the place all six agree was the site of Jesus Christ’s death and Resurrection)?

Christians do take their faith and doctrinal differences seriously in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, which makes the long days and nights of uneasy peace and cooperation between these well-publicized incidents all the more remarkable — even beautiful if one has a chance to see the intricately scheduled and sometimes overlapping worship that occurs almost constantly around Christ’s tomb.

Some of us can't take a ten-minute drive without getting mad at another motorist. Twelve members of a congressional super-committee with a combined 220 years of education couldn't agree on a budget. U.S. bosses spend millions of hours a year mediating employees' squabbles over turf, office supplies, and who was mean to whom first. (I made that statistic up, but I'll bet it's true.) Find one on-line debate about the Middle East that doesn't descend into ad hominem attacks, and we don't even live there. We're really going to make fun of people who've dedicated their live to preserving our LORD's birthplace because they sometimes have a bad day, too?

Vote For Me. I'll Probably Do Just As Well.

Reflecting 0n the Jan. 20 "Fresh Air" on the proliferation (or, I'd say, the continuation) of violent rhetoric in politics, Geoff Nunberg says that Sarah Palin got a bum rap when she was accused of having had anything to do with inspiring the Jan. 8 shooter in Arizona. He concludes:

It's a strength of modern political culture that these apocalyptic metaphors no longer rouse people to armed insurrection. But then indignation has never had so many recreational outlets before. We can spend all our waking hours listening to broadcast political invective or writing sarcastic blog comments to excoriate the morons on the other side. That's the dirty little secret of political vituperation: left and right, we all enjoy going there sometimes.

But even if these violent reveries are almost never acted out, they coarsen the debate and dehumanize the other side. The scenarios behind those fantasies goes a long way toward creating the so-called climate of hate. If you're going to imagine yourself riding to the rescue of the republic, you're going to need to see your opponents as nefarious alien life forms. You put on a cowboy suit, and suddenly everybody else is an Indian.

As Nunberg notes, over the centuries a considerable amount of real violence has been sublimated into angry political conversation. Not only is it better to yell at than shoot each other, doing the former probably helps keep us from doing the latter. Palin's critics were seeing it the other way around.

And while I'd certainly enjoy more civility in political discourse, I wonder how practical that desire is in any system based on regularly scheduled, honest elections. Republicans wouldn't get very far mounting a challenge to President Obama by saying that while he's doing pretty well under the circumstances, they deserve a chance, too. It's hard to run against an incumbent without saying that all is lost if she continues in office; and it's hard to make that almost-always-incorrect accusation without doing a certain amount of rhetorical violence.

The alternative is to have elections only when we really need them. Anyone interested?

Both Sides For Now

Chris Mooney:

[I]ncreasingly, evolution and climate change are being tied together in attacks on science education. The strategy tends to be the same: Students are encouraged to “critique” or examine "strengths and weaknesses" or hear “both sides”—but only a few hot button subjects are singled out.

I get nervous when people put "both sides" in quotes (except when it comes to slavery and the Holocaust) because it suggests an effort to anathematize and perhaps someday punish an unpopular point of view. But there I go, putting "both sides" in quotes myself on two subjects, and I'll bet I can think of others (giving women the vote; anything that's illegal in a free society; I'm rolling now!). May we at least agree that the smaller the number of subjects about which we try to close off intelligent, civil discussion, the better?

Anti-Semitism And The Attack On Rep. Giffords

Information emerges about some troubling "far-right" associations of Jerod Lee Loughner. I put far right in quotes not to minimize that element by any means but because among his passions, at least according to this initial information, is anti-Zionism, a sentiment which is also sometimes associated with the left.

The possibility of an anti-Semitic dimension to the attack on Rep. Giffords hadn't occurred to me before now. Obviously that would dramatically complicate any effort to associate Loughner with any one political bloc, as many of us seem driven to try to do. If you want to read thoroughly uncivil and even bloodcurdling rhetoric, go to any blog where the Middle East is discussed, such as Matthew Yglesias' (I refer not to his language but to that of some of those who leave comments).

We're Free Not To Judge Too Quickly

The murders and attempted murders in Arizona, which have left a dedicated, principled, and gracious member of the House, Gabrielle Giffords, in critical condition, have also unleashed an onslaught of premature certitude about what is wrong with our political culture. As is often the case when a story is breaking, Andrew Sullivan's "The Daily Dish" is usefully aggregating news as well as the reactions of Sullivan and his correspondents. So far, no matter what anyone says, it's a fluid and completely inconclusive picture.

The suspect, 22-year-old Jerod Lee Loughner, has videos on YouTube that strongly suggest he is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, according to one of Sullivan's commentators, who adds that politics would therefore be irrelevant. Sullivan's own tangential reference to the tea parties prompted another correspondent to say he or she wished Sullivan would be murdered. According to tweets by a friend of Loughner, as recently as 2007 he was a left-winger who was obsessed with prophecies about the end of the world in 2012. Loughner himself writes:

I had favorite books: Animal Farm, Brave New World, The Wizard Of OZ, Aesop Fables, The Odyssey, Alice Adventures Into Wonderland, Fahrenheit 451, Peter Pan, To Kill A Mockingbird, We The Living, Phantom Toll Booth, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Pulp,Through The Looking Glass, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha, The Old Man And The Sea, Gulliver's Travels, Mein Kampf, The Republic, and Meno.

If I may briefly atone, one of the first things I did when I heard the story was download a copy of Sarah Palin's infamous map labeling the districts of vulnerable members of Congress, including Rep. Giffords', with rifle cross hairs. The irony was overwhelming, and besides, I'm not a Palin fan.

Then I caught myself. What did I really know about the suspect? Was I really on the verge of trying to score a political point while Rep. Giffords was still in surgery? As the moments and hours passed and the picture became muddier, I resolved to withhold judgment until we had more facts. Meanwhile, tweets and on-line comments blamed Palin and Fox News in ways that struck me as being crudely opportunistic. I'm sorry to say that at LA's usually diligent CBS radio outlet, KNX, senior political correspondent Dick Helton persistently made the same facile and undocumented connections. There but for the grace of God.

Yes, it's ironic that Palin's PAC targeted (as they say in politics all the time) Giffords, even more ironic that U.S. District Court judge John Roll (shown at right), who was murdered today, received death threats after a ruling in a case involving a claim against an Arizona rancher by illegal immigrants.

But irony and truth don't always coincide. Some suggest, including Sullivan, that extreme political rhetoric can trigger psychotic violence by a troubled person such as the suspect. Perhaps so. Still, before we turn this tragedy into an object lesson about the incivility of our politics culture and especially before we name names, don't we need to see some evidence that Loughner was actually paying attention to whatever rhetoric we most passionately want to anathematize? It's not that he hasn't left plenty of documentation for experts to study. For instance, we know (again, from Sullivan's live-blogging) that Loughner was a Jimi Hendrix fan. What do we do if we find out that the last thing he listened to before heading out to Rep. Giffords' meeting was "Hey Joe" from "Are You Experienced?"

You Are Part Of The Great Connecting

Just because you can doesn't make it right. Hat tip to my St. John's colleague Catherine Sjostedt for this call to digital civility.

A Nut Case

In the Oct. 4 "New Yorker," Rebecca Mead (left) begins an article about Delaware's GOP candidate for U.S. Senate, Christine O'Donnell (for whom I wouldn't vote, incidentally), and other Tea Party conservatives with a long paragraph about Great Britain's Official Monster Raving Loony Party. "One [candidate] promised to stick juvenile delinquents together with Super Glue," Mead writes, "and one...campaigned on an anti-gravity platform." Mead explicitly puts O'Donnell in this category and lists the reasons: She wears a beehive hairdo at times, went through a Goth phase, is an evangelical Christian who opposes premarital sex and homosexuality, and defaulted on a mortgage.

It troubles me when people call those with whom they disagree crazy. The Soviet Union took the concept to its logical extreme by imprisoning dissidents in mental hospitals. "The New Yorker" just thought it was being funny. But its Googleicious attack on O'Donnell didn't contribute anything to the reader's understanding of her popularity. Calling somebody nuts in tendentious 15-sentence paragraphs is the Upper East Side equivalent of Tea Party signs attacking President Obama. Whether written on a MacBook or poster board from Michael's, they contribute in equal measure to everybody's favorite subject (besides their rivals' moral unworthiness, of course): Declining civility.

#1: Concentrate On What Others Are Saying

Listening takes practice.

Joe Wilson And Second Manassas

At "Salon," Rich Benjamin says Rep. Wilson's rude outburst was actually the result of generations of pent-up white southern Republican racial nativist fear and resentment. Benjamin doesn't go all the back to the Civil War, but almost. If his critics make him a pin-up boy for everything they despise, and if the right retaliates by turning his '10 re-election bid into a national talk show funding opportunity, even more politicians and pundits will grasp the benefits of venting their civility-destroying self-righteousness.