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.

God's Boot Camp

"It hurts to be beautiful." Now there's a gospel message! Plus it's bad advertising. We'll leave aside the obvious problem that I, just for example, could work out four hours a day and never be mistaken for Brad Pitt (or, to be more age appropriate, Sean Connery). The larger issue has to do with our culture's prevailing value, which is avoiding pain at almost all costs. Relatively few of us will actually pay to suffer.

But is it better than saying that weight loss and fitness are effortless? Maybe. Still, I'd prefer the double meaning of a middle-ground message: "Being beautiful is easier than you think." So it is, when, as a matter of rigorous (and popularly priced) spiritual exercise, you begin to see yourself as God does. Besides, even Marine recruiters minimize the pain of basic training until they actually get you inside the gates of Camp Lejeune.

Christian Heroes

Muslims offer themselves as human shields for Coptic Christians attending Christmas worship in Egypt.

Hat tip to Maarja Krusten

Church Rites And Civil Rights

Reflecting on her Jan. 1 marriage to a female colleague in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, the Very Rev. Katherine Ragsdale, dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, writes:

The fact that the State authorizes a marriage in no way compels any Church to perform or recognize it. As priests, we are entitled to refuse to perform any marriage for any reason. Roman Catholics routinely demonstrate this liberty when they refuse to perform marriages of divorced persons, even though the State allows them to do so. Similarly, they refuse to recognize marriages of non-Roman Catholics even though the State has issued a license. Political arguments against states allowing same-sex marriages and the federal government recognizing these marriages that claim it would violate the “sanctity” of marriage and force churches to do something contrary to their teaching or their conscience, are blatantly misleading and dishonest. Marriage equality merely guarantees equality under the law to all citizens; it does not compel churches to do anything.

"Dishonest" sounds too harsh. Proponents of marriage equality make the classic civil rights argument that government shouldn't prohibit a class of people from enjoying a contract that confers financial and other benefits. Once the state acts to end a discriminatory practice, the reaction throughout society is resounding, and appropriately so. Have you heard much about racist priests or pastors refusing to marry an interracial or African-American couple? It's a horrifying that anyone could think that way, but if they did, you can bet they would probably keep it to themselves. If a couple had such an experience at a church, one can easily imagine their arguing that no pastor or institution engaged in such practices should enjoy any advantages under federal and state tax codes. (My February 2009 rumination on the same subject is here.)

For the same reason, in marriage equality states, it's easy to anticipate lawsuits against pastors who won't do same-gender marriages. A 2008 ruling in New Jersey suggests that churches that make their facilities available to the general public for weddings or other events might be vulnerable to legal action by same-gender couples. That wouldn't be true for the other categories Ragsdale mentions: Divorced persons or members of couples dissed by the Roman Catholic Church. They would have no leverage over the church because they haven't organized themselves as a class to seek protection of their civil rights under federal law. Besides, it's a lot easier to find a more friendly church, which is also, I'm sure, what most same-gender couples will do. Who wants to force a pastor to marry you?

And yet all it takes is one person who wants to use the courts to make a larger point. Perhaps a constitutional expert will set me straight about whether that person would make any progress. Our society extends broad protections to many varieties of religious expression, unless you're a moderate Muslim who wants to build a cultural center in lower Manhattan. (For my warning that Newt Gingrich and other opponents of Cordoba House have sanctified political pressure on people of faith, go here and here.) But from a strictly moral perspective, it's hard to accept the idea that a non-profit organization or church engaged in openly racist practices should get any public benefits, including tax-deductible status for its members' donations or income tax advantages for its pastor. I'll just bet I could find a federal judge or two who'd agree with me.

I'm not ready to say that churches that refuse to do same-sex marriages deserve to be punished. If proponents of same-gender marriage feel they should be, I doubt they would say so now. They may even take the view that civil marriage equality will run into less resistance from the religious community if its more conservative denizens are reassured that faith institutions won't be punished for refusing to go along. But it's hardly dishonest to recognize that the barrier between civil and sacramental marriage may not be as impervious as Dean Ragsdale says.

Hat tip to Susan Russell

7.7% Of Congress Won't Sit In Front Row

"Episcopal Cafe":

According to a Pew Forum survey, Anglicans/Episcopalians are the most overrepresented denomination in the 112th Congress: They hold 7.7% of the seats yet are 1.5% of the adult population. No other Christian denomination is close in terms of over representation although Presbyterians are also heavily over represented.

Anglicans/Episcopalians have 41 of the 535 seats. Although Baptists have more than 50% percent more seats than Anglicans/ Episcopalians, Baptists are 17.2% of the adult population.

16.1% of American adults say they are unaffiliated. No members of the House or Senate are unaffiliated.

Islamist Egypt

The murder of 21 Christians in Egypt in an al-Qaeda-style operation exposes a frightening political reality, Michael Slackman writes:

“If [President Hosni] Mubarak disappears tomorrow, you will have the Islamists as the strongest political force in the country,” said Mohammed Salmawy, head of the Arab Writers Union. “The political parties, even lumped together, do not have the power to take over, and you have the army, which will not allow the country to go into chaos. Worse yet, you might have military Islamic rule because there is no reason to suppose the army is any different than society.”