Cold 'Lanta

A rumor surged through our pilgrim band Sunday night that our Monday evening flight from Atlanta to Tel Aviv had been canceled. Remembering that our LORD's way up to Jerusalem, while not snowy, was also not easy, we shook off the temptation to discouragement and arrived at LAX this morning bravely girded for rerouting. Then word came (via Pilgrim Pam's insider contacts at Delta) that if there was one flight from LA that the airline was going to operate into the teeth of the mighty storm today, it was ours.

We arrived in snowbound Georgia 30 minutes ahead of schedule. Our Tel Aviv connection is one of the few flights still scheduled tonight. Deb and Cheryl (right, above) and our friend from St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Fulleton, Nancy, received a humble pilgrim's welcome in the food court of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. In a few hours, we'll set our faces for gate E-16.

Sanity And Boehner Rising

You want sensible reactions to Saturday's tragedy? Two out of three ain't bad. From this morning's New York Times:

“I don’t understand how anybody can be held responsible for somebody who is completely mentally unstable like this,” an adviser to Ms. Palin, Rebecca Mansour, said in an interview with a conservative radio host, Tammy Bruce. Responding to accusatory messages on the Web, Ms. Mansour added: “People actually accuse Governor Palin of this. It’s appalling — appalling. I can’t actually express how disgusting that is.”

Ms. Mansour said that the cross hairs, in fact, were not meant to be an allusion to guns, and agreed with her interviewer’s reference to them as “surveyors symbols.”

Two problems with that. First, it's almost impossible to believe that they weren't intended as cross hairs. Mansour helps neither Palin nor the country by claiming otherwise. Second, "disgusting"? She may think that, but playing the victim when the only victims were in Tucson is, again, poor form. Palin must find a way to adjust her public posture. She can acknowledge the reality of an unfortunate situation -- the correlation between recent events and her frontier rhetoric and choice of graphics -- without taking any personal responsibility. If she doesn't, I don't see how she avoids becoming a marginal figure in U.S. politics.

Meanwhile, at the White House:

Mr. Obama was considering delivering a speech about the greater context surrounding the shooting, but advisers said it was premature to do so until Ms. Giffords’s condition stabilized and more became known about the gunman’s motives.

Sounds just right, especially in the light of the comments by a Clinton administration veteran:

“The only way you gain political advantage is by doing absolutely nothing to take advantage — and not have a lot of people backgrounding about how clever your political strategy is,” said Michael D. McCurry, who was Mr. Clinton’s press secretary at the time of the Oklahoma bombing.

This is a situation where political advantage and the moral high ground may well coincide, not only for Obama but the GOP. Regardless of what we learn about the suspect, in fewer than 48 hours it's become a commonplace to say that we have to restore some civility to our political and media conversation. But the only way to do that is just do it. Scapegoating Palin or anyone else for Tucson is an escalation in the political wars. So is the Palin camp's own harsh, defensive rhetoric.

One Republican who has gotten it right is the speaker of the House, John Boehner. He's done so, as far as I can tell, because of the quality of his heart, which has been much derided recently. We could do worse than having his tear-stained face as the new face of responsible conservative leadership.

Come With Us Pilgrims. Come To Jersualem!

While there's no wrong time to go to Jerusalem, a moment of trauma -- whether global, national, or personal -- may be the best time of all.

Weather permitting, 30 pilgrims from St. John's Episcopal Church depart tomorrow, LAX-Atlanta-Tel Aviv, and then, on Tuesday afternoon, up to Jerusalem by bus. If the Holy Spirit is at our backs, we should be standing before the Damascus Gate of the Old City by dinnertime, the abundant life of the Muslim Quarter swirling around us. If past experience is any guide, we'll be exhausted -- it will feel like the end of one long day -- and exhilarated at the same time, the way anyone feels coming home after a long journey.

I took the photo above on an earlier pilgrimage, inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where the light seems to embrace the small inner chapel where the church believes that Jesus Christ's body was laid after his crucifixion. Experts' best guess is that his death, burial, and Resurrection all occurred inside of a few hundred square feet. Surely there's no better place -- along with the Western Wall -- to take our prayers for Rep. Giffords and Saturday's other victims, their alleged attacker, ourselves, our families, our church, our country, and all who are in need in our glorious, broken world.

If you like, follow along with us by checking in here every day. Eight nights out of 11, we'll be at the pilgrim guest house at St. George's Cathedral in east Jerusalem, where visitors enjoy the peace of Christ and free in-room wireless.

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).

The Quintessence Of Courage

The New York Times:

Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik of Pima County described a chaotic scene of terror and heroism as the shots rang out. He said one woman who was injured in the shooting fought to wrestle a magazine of ammunition away from the suspected gunman as he tried to reload. He succeeded in reloading, the sheriff said, but was then tackled to the ground. Officials, who did not name the woman, said the attack could have been more devastating had she not tried to stop the suspect.

Tales Of Two Lees

Andrew Sullivan's quote of the day is from William Manchester's Death of a President:

In that third year of the Kennedy Presidency a kind of fever lay over Dallas County. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed "Impeach Earl Warren.” Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas. Fanatical young matrons swayed in public to the chant, “Stevenson’s going to die–his heart will stop, stop, stop and he will burn, burn burn!” Radical Right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; junior executives were required to attend radical seminars. Dallas had become the mecca for medicine-show evangelists of the National Indignation Convention, the Christian Crusaders, the Minutemen, the John Birch and Patrick Henry societies . . .

In Dallas a retired major general flew the American flag upside down in front of his house, and when, on Labor Day of 1963, the Stars and Stripes were hoisted right side up outside his own home by County Treasurer Warren G. Harding–named by Democratic parents for a Republican President in an era when all Texas children were taught to respect the Presidency, regardless of party–Harding was accosted by a physician’s son, who remarked bitterly, “That’s the Democrat flag. Why not just run up the hammer and sickle while you’re at it?

More ironies but still not much clarity. Is the idea that Dallas' nutty, toxic right-wing dynamics provoked Lee Harvey Oswald to murder President Kennedy? How could they have, since Oswald was a communist? Also, reading how bad it was then, I'm a little less discouraged about how things are now.

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?"

A Prayer For Rep. Giffords

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat from Arizona, and at least 11 others were injured this morning by a gunman who plunged into a crowd at a public event in Tucson and began firing. The congresswoman's condition is unknown. The man was reportedly tackled by a witness and taken into custody. Some leaving comments at blog and web sites are already blaming Fox News and Sarah Palin. It's impossible to blame anyone besides the suspect without knowing something about him.

O God, the strength of the weak and the comfort of sufferers: Mercifully accept our prayers, and grant to Gabrielle the help of your power, that her injury may be turned into health, and our sorrow into joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Driving Our Narrative For The Rest Of Our Lives

Andrew Sullivan on the implacable rise of religious -- mainly, Islamic -- fundamentalism.

Bring On The Nixon Psychobiographers!

Richard Nixon, who strenuously resisted introspection, despised nothing more than so-called psychobiography, which combined the traditional historical method with speculation about subjects' hidden (even to themselves) motivations. As far as I can tell, that kind of history has gone mainstream, as it probably should have. Leaders are far more than the sum of their memoranda, especially ones as emotionally reserved and complicated as Nixon. Politics probably couldn't have been an unhappier choice for someone of his driven but painfully introverted temperament. Yet he felt called to make a difference, and his powers of solitary concentration and focus enabled him to envision foreign policy moves that made the world safer for billions of people.

Some insiders' insights from historian and former Nixon tapes archivist Maarja Krusten's new blog, NixoNARA. First, from one of Maarja's latest posts:

[I]n Nixon’s approach to issues as a student, a candidate, a president, and a creator of government records, we see...what has become an all-too-familiar refrain, “they’re against us, we won’t be treated fairly, try to out maneuver or crush them.” Ironically, more openness to reflection, and a willingness to consider data rather than relying so heavily on emotivism—a sense that archivists as civil servants would not treat his records fairly–would have made it much easier for him and for the National Archives.

Was his suspicion of civil servants -- not just archivists but members of the diplomatic and intelligence services -- a function of temperament or philosophy? Probably a little of both. Like many during the Cold War, Nixon had a Manichean view of the struggle between freedom and communism. At home, in the political and policy arenas, he saw everything (literally) as a matter of right vs. left. Since civil servants tended to be liberal, it seems not to have been much a stretch for Nixon to conclude that, knowingly or unknowingly, they were participating, if only in a tangential or a symbolic way, in the global communist project. A natural consequence of their ideological bias, in his view, was their hostility to him, the hated persecutor of Alger Hiss.

Getting to know them better would've enabled a more accurate view, but Nixon's introversion ruled that out. I take exception with those such as Rick Perlstein who focus on Nixon's alleged class resentments. Like many introverts, he resented those who were more socially adept than he, which, in politics, was just about everyone, no matter what side of the tracks they came from. He'd always tell us that socializing was a waste of time, but the real issue was that he didn't enjoy it, because it was exhausting. Instead, he spent a considerable amount of time alone, reading, thinking, planning, deciding, and accomplishing.

And yet there's no question about the unfortunate consequences of Nixon's corrosive assumptions about civil servants. In a comment at Maarja's blog, the former head of the Nixon tape processing unit, Fred Graboske, writes:

Our tapes processing staff held widely-ranging political views. Some, such as Maarja and I, were Republicans. Others were Democrats, some Independent, some agnostic, and one was a Socialist. I saw no evidence that anyone’s personal views of Nixon, or general political views, affected their archival work. President Nixon believed that the civil service was predominantly Democrat in its views (probably correct) and that it consequently attempted to sabotage his programs (not correct). If Nixon had understood this, he could have spared himself some grief during his Presidency...

The nadir of Nixon's cold war against federal bureaucrats was his asking one of his aides, Fred Malek, to count the number of Jews working in the Bureau of Labor Statistics, where, Nixon had decided, liberal officials were purposely skewing data to hurt the administration. First he had another aide, Larry Higby, make sure Malek wasn't Jewish. The unsavory episode is described in the upcoming Nixon library Watergate exhibit that's been opposed by Nixon's White House aides.

About the worst excesses of Nixon and his men, another NixonNARA commentator, historian and blogger Jeremy C. Young (shown here), says this:

To be fair, had Nixon possessed “more openness to reflection, and a willingness to consider data rather than relying so heavily on emotivism,” he probably wouldn’t have done the things that make his aides so sensitive to the publicizing of his papers. Gerald Ford, a man possessed of a very similar political worldview to Nixon’s, committed none of Nixon’s sins and was accordingly unconcerned with the publication of his official papers.

Ford also committed none of Nixon's political and policy breakthroughs. He would probably have finished his career as House minority leader if Nixon hadn't turned to him in 1973 as the choice for vice president that would be least offensive to the most U.S. senators. Also thanks to his inoffensiveness, he ended up as the right president for the aftermath of Watergate. But it's hard to imagine him (or Ronald Reagan for that matter) functioning as effectively as Nixon did in the first four years of his presidency -- for starters, transforming relations with the Soviets and the Chinese and the conduct of the Vietnam war.