Personal Empowerment By Means Of Penguins

Via a webcam, I took this photo of a guy feeding the penguins a few minutes ago at a zoo in Miyagi Prefecture, Japan. Why? Because it's my day off, and I can.

Shefa-'Amr To Rancho Santa Margarita

The Rev. Fuad Dagher is an Arab Christian who lives and does ministry in a predominately Arab Muslim community in northern Israel -- and if that doesn't encapsulate the dilemma and opportunities of life in the Middle East, nothing does. Fr. Fuad is the energetic rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Shefa-'Amr, a town of 35,000 that's part of the five-nation Diocese of Jerusalem. Among his current projects is building a school for those with physical disabilities.

As a pilgrim in 2007, I enjoyed the hospitality of Fr. Fuad and his wife, Hana, at St. Paul's. This Sunday, he'll be our guest at St. John's in Rancho Santa Margarita, where he'll meet with St. John's pilgrims who visited Israel and the West Bank last year and another group whose members are planning a visit in January 2011 -- our hoped-for Epiphany in the land of light. In the meantime, we'll be praying for peace and justice for Fr. Fuad and all his neighbors.

"Tricky Dicky"? "MacArthur's Park"? What Is It With Those English?

Richard Nixon's current crisis jumps the pond.

Read It And Worry

Based on a mess of interviews, Jeffrey Goldberg says Israel will attack Iran's nuclear sites next spring.

We're Gonna Hire Our Political Enemies

Thanks to an NPR retrospective on the death of Daniel Schorr (left), I've belatedly learned about a local angle (besides the man from Yorba Linda himself) on the 1974 articles of impeachment against Richard Nixon, namely Orange County businessman Larry Higby, once Nixon chief of staff Bob Haldeman's aide.

It all started when the White House decided it didn't like Schorr's reporting on the CBS Evening News. As Schorr told NPR's Terry Gross in a 1994 (rebroadcast on July 30, a week after Schorr's death; the transcript is here, and you check it out on iTunes here):

[Nixon] had Haldeman have his assistant Larry Higby call J. Edgar Hoover and simply say the boss, the president, wants to have some background stuff on a correspondent named Daniel Schorr.

But either Higby or the FBI's usually pretty canny director missed the point. Rather than dishing whatever dirt happened to be on hand, Hoover ordered a full field investigation, the kind the FBI does on those in line for high-level government jobs. When agents visited Schorr himself, inadvertently revealing that the White House and a federal police agency had developed a constitutionally unhealthful fixation on him, Nixon aides concocted the story that they were planning to offer one of Washington's most prominent journalists the lofty post of PR man for the Council on Environmental Quality.

This bumptious episode turned deadly serious, Schorr told Gross, when the use of the FBI against a journalist was cited by the House Judiciary Committee in one of the three articles of impeachment it approved in the summer of 1974.

Admiring Nixon for his final comeback, Schorr became a regular guest at Nixon Center events in Washington during the 1990s. At one, the ex-president smiled at him and said, "Damn near hired you once." To Gross's apparent surprise, Schorr chose to take Nixon's remark as a backhanded apology. "[Only] he who is without blemish should be casting stones around," Schorr said. "I consider life too short to have grudges, retain grudges, and furthermore, I find him interesting."

Bibi Aisha's Rule

Charles Krauthammer makes a vigorous argument against the mosque and cultural center being proposed for a site near the World Trade Center. His strongest point --

Pope John Paul II ordered the Carmelite nuns to leave the convent they had established at Auschwitz. He was in no way devaluing their heartfelt mission to pray for the souls of the dead. He was teaching them a lesson in respect: This is not your place; it belongs to others. However pure your voice, better to let silence reign.

-- doesn't persuade me to affirm any government agency in the United States denying a building permit on the basis that there is an atmospheric problem with people observing a certain religion there. Nazis killed Jews expressly because they were Jews, and as a matter of fact, they had appropriated enough elements of the German church and of the energy of post-Reformation European Christian anti-Semitism that displaying a cross near a death camp could clearly be seen as objectionable.

Besides, the property in and around Auschwitz isn't governed by the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution. Osama bin Laden murdered people on Sept. 11 not because they were Christians, Jews, and Muslims, which they happened to be, but because they were mostly Americans. He wanted to hurt America, and we hurt America more by compromising a core First Amendment principle.

And yet there's another uniquely western principle that may well be at stake in this debate. I've seen stories about the mosque planners' questionable views on the root causes of Sept. 11. I've read and heard wild speculation about whether this or any other mosque will spawn terrorists. But I haven't yet read of anyone asking if girls and young women in the lower Manhattan cultural center will be treated exactly the same as the males -- empowered, encouraged, and educated in the same way and taught that Muslim women in the United States are guaranteed the same rights and opportunities as men. Call it the Bibi Aisha rule. Give the wrong answer, and maybe you get your building permit but lose your tax-exempt status.

Pool Reporters

For the first time since the series ended, I'm watching NBC's "The West Wing" from beginning to end. Someone has to keep the classics alive. And who better to probe the frequent Nixon resonances? Who, period?

Here's one: In a subplot during episode #11 of the second season (2:11, the canonically minded might say), "The Leadership Breakfast," broadcast in January 2001, White House aide Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) proposes a space-saving efficiency: Moving the press briefing room from the West Wing to the Old Executive Office Building. Press secretary C.J. Cregg (Allison Janney) demurs, saying reporters would assume the White House was hiding things from them. "We are hiding things from them," Sam says.

In the course of the show we learn that the press room was built over a swimming pool. What series creator (and 2:11 writer) Aaron Sorkin doesn't reveal is that the pool was installed for FDR and decommissioned and drained by Nixon. The new digs were more spacious than journalists' traditional haunt, the Roosevelt Room, which couldn't contain their burgeoning arsenal of broadcast gear. In addition, Nixon wanted them further away from the Oval Office. He was hiding things from them, too.

A Companion, Not An Enemy

Talking with NRP's Terry Gross about his new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell explains how he domesticated the stammer that he had found paralyzing and isolating when he was younger:

It took a long, long time to understand that a stammer is more like a kind of a force field, and the more you throw at it, the more it throws back at you. You sort of have to outwit it rather than outfight it. And, in a way, not even outwit it.... I think of it now as a kind of a companion. It's a part of me. It has a right to exist as I do and I need to sort of come to a working accommodation with it.

A friend who was an alcoholic once said to me that an alcoholic never stops being an alcoholic. He may - but what you have to aspire to be is a teetotal alcoholic. And in the same way a stammerer, I think, certainly in my case, will never not be a stammerer but you have to aspire to becoming a non-stammering stammerer. And this involves certain strategies and techniques that you can sort of encrypt into how you speak so that I'm able to do this interview, for example, which 20 years ago would've been unthinkable. And in the end, these strategies can become so well-integrated into who you are and how you speak that they become behavior and speech patterns rather than techniques....

I view my stammer now as a companion and not an enemy. I might've been a writer without it, but I certainly wouldn't have been this writer. One of the strategies I was referring to, which you meet quite early on in your career as a stammerer, is you autocue sentences ahead of time. You see what words are coming up, and say right now I'd have difficulties with words beginning with S. If I, certainly as a younger person, if I saw an S word was approaching then I would try and reengineer that sentence to avoid needing that S word. And this teaches you how language can be employed many, many different ways to say the same thing.

And then the lesson from his experience for the rest of us:

If life is obstacleless, if you're just coasting along without responsibilities, without duties, without sort of having to take care of an elderly relative or an offspring with special needs or whatever, well, perhaps, that's what existential malaise is. Maybe that's sort of when you start to drift and have problems of another type. Maybe your problems and your obstacles, rather like your stammer, is in fact, a kind of friend in disguise for you. I don't know if we're venturing into self-help territory too much here, but it's something that I kind of believe in.

Junk E-Mails You Wish You Got

Subject: Exciting Setting of Responsorial Psalms‏

"The Nixon Library's Greatest Advocate"

Kathy O'Connor, President Nixon's last chief of staff, was honored today by the Nixon Library's dedicated, loyal corps of volunteer docents for nearly three decades of service to Mr. Nixon and his library. One docent put it best: "President Nixon's guardian angel, the Nixon Library's greatest advocate whose devotion to [his] legacy will never be surpassed." Amen! Congratulations, Kathy -- and well done, good and faithful servant.

Photos by JR Davis