Fundamentalists to the Right, Fundamentalists to the Left
What my hate mail tells me about Christian factions today.

By Frank Schaeffer

I abandoned Protestant Christian fundamentalism many years ago for Greek Orthodoxy. I converted because the Orthodox tradition embraces paradox and mystery. For someone raised in a strict Calvinist home, relief from absolutist certainty was most welcome.

But Christian fundamentalism has not abandoned me. It's come back to haunt me in both liberal and conservative forms. I find myself a minor lightning rod in the culture wars: apparently, I haven't chosen sides well enough.
You see, I write novels and nonfiction for a living. My novels describe a boy growing up in Switzerland as the son of American Calvinist missionaries. In these books, I take what I hope is an empathetically amusing insider's look at what it's like to grow up in a home run by zealots who make it their life's work to separate themselves from the World.

My most recent nonfiction work, "Keeping Faith, A Father-Son Story About Love and The United States Marine Corps," I co-wrote with my son John. It's about the aftermath of his 1999 decision to join the U.S. Marine Corps.

So now I'm swimming in a vortex of indignant e-mail from members of both the "Christian right" and the "Christian left." Some Christian evangelical/fundamentalists who disliked my earlier novels find my latest one particularly offensive. They've written to me that they hate everything about it, starting with its "pornographic" cover (a bra and postcard of the Matterhorn are featured). In the book, the fourteen-year-old protagonist is torn between his volcanic burgeoning sexuality and a fundamentalist family so strict that he has never seen a movie, watched television, or danced (read an excerpt).

Apparently, some fundamentalists recognize themselves in the parents portrayed in the book and don't like looking in the mirror. They also don't like sex. The gist of their angry letters is: Take a number, God will kill you soon.

On the other side of the fence, my liberal readers assume I must be "some sort of right-wing war monger" because the book I wrote with my son expressed admiration for the Marine Corps. They accuse me of being the sort of imperialist who would stone Jesus to death if given the chance.

These two groups of Christians presumably don't like one another, but from where I'm sitting, they are more alike than different. To these members of the religious right and left, there seem to be only two choices: for or against their dogmas. And, like certain fundamentalist Muslims much in the news of late, they too seem to have no concept of the separation of art, culture, and religion. Dogmatic purity must be adhered to in all endeavors and the slightest deviation is a serious offense. Moreover, no one with a sense of humor about religion (let alone sex!) need apply.

I know something about fundamentalism. I'm the son of a fundamentalist evangelist. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a guru/prophet to his evangelical followers. Almost 20 years after his death, thousands of his books still sell each year. My father was very influential in the beginnings of the so-called Religious Right. Through his voluminous writings, he provided intellectual underpinnings for the views of tens of thousands of fundamentalists on such issues as a literal interpretation of scripture.

The Christian fundamentalists who stumble across my novels because of the family name detest them because they're about religious people and are set in Europe, where my parents had their mission. Some evangelical readers take them as biographies and are offended that the parents in the stories are portrayed warts and all, thus besmirching the memory of Francis Schaeffer. Other fundamentalists just don't like anything that pokes fun at the narrow legalistic Christianity in which they have invested themselves and with which they are inflicting their children.

Meanwhile, one liberal reader e-mailed me about my Marines book: "You seem not to understand the simple purpose and message that was Christ's life... I, for once, am gladdened that MY [Catholic] church has demonstrated the backbone to speak against this criminal invasion [of Iraq]... Yes, Jesus was/is a radical and you seem to be the kind of person in the crowd throwing stones at him for challenging the status quo." Never mind that my son and I wrote our decidedly personal, non-political account before the Iraq war was even on the horizon -- in fact, before 9-11.

And, in a letter that appeared in the Los Angeles Times (April 17, 2003), another reader suggests that my problem is that not only that am I pro-Marines but that I'm white. "Schaeffer obviously suffers from guilt based on perceived privilege of class and race. (He is white, of course.) It is the use of young people like his son for imperialist projects in the invasion of Iraq that is the shame here, not a rejection of military service..." You get the idea.

Then a reader who liked the Marine book but hated my latest novel wrote: "WHY did you write these novels? Are you trying to insult the evangelicals? If so, you are succeeding... I admonish you, remove these books from the marketplace." Then this from a fan who used the fact that my son is currently deployed in the Middle East to amplify his critique: "In your 'Zermatt' you get cheap laughs at fundamentalists who actually believe in avoiding fornication even as your own 'heart,' your son, is in harm's way. Frank, God isn't mocked. A friend of mine just died of a massive stroke Friday night. Repent before it's too late. It isn't going to matter what Publisher's Weekly said about you back in 2003 when you stand before God's throne...."

So I'm caught in the shrinking space between two calcified political doctrines of the left and right. My correspondents seem so certain of everything -- especially that God is on their side.

I hope there is still room in our polarized country for Christians like me, who don't subscribe to any one-dogma-fits-all. It seems to me that life is too short, sweet, and mysterious for us to be able to exhaustively "explain" anything much, let alone explain everything with certainty.

For those of us who write, the choice these days seems to be between picking an ideological side (and learning to see things in black and white), or being wanderers unwelcome in either hostile camp. Come to think of it, that is not a bad place to be, at least for someone who believes in paradox and mystery.

Frank Schaeffer's new novel is 'Zermatt.' His most recent work of nonfiction, co-authored with his son, Corporal John Schaeffer, is 'Keeping Faith, A Father-Son Story about Love And The United States Marine Corps.' For more information, visit www.frankschaeffer.com

From Opinion Journal:

Heedful Hip Hop
Attacks on rap now come from within.
By Martha Bayles

Thursday, April 28, 2005

On April 9 a young black working mother came to midtown Manhattan to attend a public forum on hip-hop violence sponsored by the Rev. Al Sharpton's National Action Network. The event was prompted by a shootout, one month earlier, between rival rap entourages outside Hot 97, one of New York's leading radio stations.

When the station's general manager, Barry Mayo, recited the cliché that parents should control what their children listen to and watch, the young woman rose to her feet: "I have a 12-year-old son, and I fear for him every day. I don't let him watch the videos, but I can't do it all by myself. I need help!"

Last spring another young woman, a student at Spelman College in Atlanta named Moya Bailey, was moved to protest by "Tip Drill," a video in which the male rapper Nelly takes to a new level the image of African-American women as "rump-shaking" meat available for cash by swiping a credit card between a dancer's thonged buttocks.




Violence and vulgarity are hardly unique to rap. The mainstream is full of gore and borderline porn. But these tendencies are undiluted in rap, which is why many young African-Americans and Latinos who grew up embracing hip hop as a grassroots, multimedia art form now deplore rap as a cynical "neominstrelsy" being mass-marketed not just nationally but globally.

This global twist is new. A decade ago, critics worried that "gangsta" rap was portraying African-Americans as drug dealers, killers, "bitches" and "ho's." Today the worry is international. Essence magazine recently launched an online debate about the image of black women in rap, and according to former editor Diane Weathers, that debate now includes Africans. "They are disgusted by what their African-American brothers and sisters are doing in entertainment," she says. "They wonder if we've lost our minds."

Significantly, these new protests come not as attacks from the outside but as self-examination from within. "Nobody is happy in hip hop anymore," comments Alison Duke, a Canadian filmmaker whose scathing documentary, "Booty Nation," was screened earlier this month at a conference at the Center for Race, Politics, and Culture at the University of Chicago. "We've allowed the system of slavery to come back into our communities."

If things are that bad, then perhaps these insider critics should be seeking allies in the larger society. Millions of Americans are fed up with the calculated coarseness that now passes for "edginess" in the entertainment industry, and many (not all) might be willing to join forces with hip-hop fans. Such a broad-based, genuinely diverse movement might actually have an impact. But don't expect it anytime soon--there are three major obstacles in the way.

The first obstacle is the shameless manipulativeness of the rap industry. Present at the Sharpton event were several community activists, such as writer Kevin Powell and youth organizer Erica Ford, who implied strongly that the gunplay outside Hot 97 (in which no one was seriously hurt) was a publicity stunt designed to pump the "street cred" of two rappers, 50 Cent and the Game (both on Interscope Records).

If true, this is a damning accusation. But amazingly, none of the industry representatives on the panel bothered to deny it. Instead, two smooth black executives, Ron Gilliard of Interscope and Kelly G of BET, reassured the crowd that they were "here to listen." Then two "gangsta"-attired moguls, Dave Mays and Ray Benzino of Source magazine, picked a "beef" with E-Bro from Hot 97, thereby reducing the meeting to the verbal equivalent of a sidewalk shoot-out.

Watching this happen was like watching an SUV collide with a bicycle: The big machine (the rap industry) kept rolling, while the little one (the community) got crushed. The industry's primary audience is not black: Between 70% and 80% of all rap CDs are sold to whites. Yet because rap draws its talent and mystique from poor black communities, the executives present seemed to regard sessions like this as nothing more than the cost of doing business.

Mr. Sharpton is a latecomer to this protest, according to Davey D, an Oakland-based DJ and well-known hip-hop commentator. But Mr. Sharpton is welcome, Davey D adds, as long as he aims at the right target: "Instead of calling the radio station and complaining about the artist, we need to ask who's in charge? Who's provoking violence and letting DJs use the 'N' word?"

According to Davey D, some of the younger activists have been reaching out to potential allies in the media, education and social work. But here we encounter the second obstacle to a larger movement: Mr. Sharpton's in-your-face style of politics may attract attention, but it rarely attracts supporters beyond his own narrow following.




The third obstacle is academic feminism. At the University of Chicago conference, "Feminism and Hip Hop," the focus was on "crunk," the Atlanta-based style of rap that casts black men as pimps and black women as strippers and "ho's." Some speakers--notably Ms. Bailey from Spelman and Joan Morgan from Essence--used the language of morality when describing how crunk degrades women. But when the academic feminists weighed in, moral revulsion got bracketed as naive, and we groundlings were instructed to view "Tip Drill" as part of a "hegemonic intertextuality" in which "the structures of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism and advanced consumer capitalism" are "embedded" or "inscribed" (I forget which).

This sort of thing may sustain graduate students through long Chicago winters, but it is not going to advance the anticrunk cause. For one thing, academic feminism rejects something most people hold dear, the traditional family. As one earnest graduate student put it, the late Tupac Shakur was a true artist because his lyrics "cut against the grain of the normative family," an institution she clearly regarded as the root of all patriarchal evil.

One is tempted to ask: Is this really an appropriate standard for judging any form of art? Like posters and cabaret, hip hop is an inherently populist and political art. But it is an art all the same, and it is striking that only one participant, Ms. Morgan of Essence, spoke about it in aesthetic terms.

At any rate, if rap is praised as an attack on the family, then feminist critics are not going to find many allies in either the white or the black mainstream. Yet interestingly, antifamily sentiment was not the dominant message of the conference. That message was articulated by Rachel Raimist, a Minnesota-based filmmaker, who said: "I've worked in the rap industry. I love hip hop. But when my seven-year-old daughter gets up and says, 'Shake it,' I realize something is wrong."

So perhaps there is some common ground here. No movement wants to get between the sheets with its political enemies. But politics makes for strange bedfellows, and unless these new critics of rap are willing to give some credence to the views of those who criticize it from the standpoint of public morality, neither side is likely to succeed.

Ms. Bayles is author of "Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music."

America's Recruiting Dilemma
By Robert Novak

WASHINGTON -- Retired Army Lt. Col. Charles Krohn got himself in trouble with his superiors as a Pentagon civilian public affairs official during the first three and one-half years of the Bush administration by telling the truth. He is still at it in private life. He says not to blame the military recruiters for the current recruiting "scandal." Blame the war.

"Army recruiting is in a death spiral, through no fault of the Army," Krohn told me. Always defending uniformed personnel, he resents hard-pressed recruiters being attacked for offering unauthorized benefits to make quotas. In a recent e-mail sent to friends (mostly retired military), Krohn complained that the "Army is having to compensate for a problem of national scope."

The Army's dilemma is maintaining an all-volunteer service when volunteering means going in harm's way in Iraq. The dilemma extends to national policy. How can the United States maintain its global credibility against the Islamists, if military ranks cannot be filled by volunteers and there is no public will for a draft?

Krohn's e-mail describes the problem: "Consider the implications of being unable to find sufficient volunteers, as seen by our adversaries. Has the United States lost its will to survive? What's happened to the Great Satan when so few are willing to fight to defend the country? Surely bin Laden et al are making this argument, telling supporters victory is just around the corner if they are a bit more patient. And if they're successful, the energy sources in the Mideast may be within their grasp."

Krohn says this reality is accepted by recipients of his message. It also meets agreement from active duty officers I have contacted but who cannot speak publicly. They ponder how an all-volunteer force can be maintained when generals say there is no end in sight for U.S. troops facing an increasingly sophisticated insurgency.

Krohn's message goes on to say that "the recruiting problem is an unintended consequence of a prolonged war in Iraq, especially given the failure to find WMD [weapons of mass destruction]." He therefore calls for a "national consensus to address the root causes" of the recruiting problem -- that is, the war in Iraq.

But the focus at the Defense Department has been on the excesses of desperate recruiters, 37 of whom reflected their frustration in trying to meet quotas by going AWOL over the last two and one-half years. The official response was a 24-hour stand-down in recruiting to review proper procedures. It also has been proposed that enlistments, now usually three to four years with a minimum of 24 months, be cut to 15 months.

The recruiting guru Charles Moskos, professor emeritus at Northwestern University who once suggested an 18-month tour, now says shorter enlistment will not help. He proposes restoring the draft, but that is a political non-starter. Democratic Rep.

Charles Rangel, who as a drafted soldier won the Bronze Star in Korea, is one of the very few members of Congress who advocate the draft. He does not hide his motive: a president would be politically unable to take a conscript army into wars such as Iraq.

In contrast, Krohn is a lifelong Republican who actively supported George W. Bush's presidential candidacy in 2000. He specified in his e-mail that "I'm not now blaming" President Bush or Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for the situation. "We have a problem that transcends politics," Krohn added.

The current Iraq war is America's first prolonged conflict fought entirely with volunteers. It is a more professional and in every way a better army than the conscript army of Korean War vintage in which I served, or the conscript army that fought in Vietnam for seven years. The problem was signaled when the 9/11 attack on America did not generate the enlistments expected. Three and one-half years later, willingness to face personal peril in Iraq has faded.

That means the problem goes beyond mechanics of recruiting and the details of volunteer service and is found in the war itself. Paraphrasing Rumsfelds' comment about going into battle with the Army we had, Charles Krohn said: "The war we have now is not the war we started off with. It's much more serious."

From The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Joyce Meyer Ministries
The big squeeze

Saturday, May. 07 2005

THERE IS IN AMERICA a popular image of the good pastor as a person who seeks
reward in heaven rather than on Earth. The preacher preaches the Bible,
comforts the sick, cares for the poor and lives a comfortable but modest life while doing it.

This image may be unfair. Still, we don't quite know what to do with a preacher who thinks she deserves to live in extravagant wealth right here on Earth using money given to the ministry by its believers.

In Jefferson County, assessor Randy Holman thinks he knows what to do. He wantsto revoke the tax exemption for the 52-acre, $20 million headquarters ofJoyce Meyer Ministries. We're not sure the assessor is legally correct, but Ms. Meyer seems to be cruising close to the line separating a religious ministry from a for-profit operation.

Ms. Meyer, a televangelist and author, preaches a variation of the"prosperity gospel." Donate to God through her ministry, and God will reward you, she preaches. That reward may be spiritual, or it may come in the form of prosperity and wealth on Earth.

The Bible says, "Give and it shall be given unto you," she tells the thousands who gather at her revival-like "conferences" around the country. So she's not shy about asking for money. "Make your checks payable to Joyce Meyer Ministries/Life in the Word. And million is spelled M-I-L-L-I-O-N," she says with some levity.

Ms. Meyer says she's living proof of the payback phenomenon. Sexually abused as a child, she endured a failed marriage, then found a good husband and religious faith. She launched a powerful national ministry with legions of devoted followers and more than $90 million in annual revenue.

Her reward for that has been a mother lode of earthly wealth. As reported by
Carolyn Tuft of the Post-Dispatch on Sunday, Ms. Meyer and her family have received millions from the ministry in recent years.

For 2002 and 2003, the board approved $900,000 annual salaries for Ms. Meyer
and $450,000 for her husband as well as the use of a $2 million home where all the bills are paid by the ministry. The ministry also has paid $1.475 million for three houses for Ms. Meyer's children.

The ministry didn't volunteer those figures; they came from filings in the tax assessment case. But Ms. Meyer doesn't hide the fact that she does very well."I'm living now in my reward," she told an audience in 2003.

Although out of fashion these days, the idea that God enriches his servants on Earth is not new. It stretches back hundreds of years in Christianity. In some versions, great wealth is a sign of God's personal approval. Nor do we lack examples of clergy living in worldly splendor. The Roman Emperor Constantine let bishops keep a quarter of church revenue. Today's televangelizing millionaires follow in the worldly shoes of the palace-dwelling bishops of the Middle Ages.

In a nation that values freedom of religion, the state never should pass
judgment on Ms. Meyer's theology. Neither would this editorial page question a person's faith. But the state has to set criteria for tax exemptions. That's where Mr. Holman comes in.

State law says that a tax-exempt church property must be used "exclusively for religious worship, for schools and colleges or for purposes purely charitable and not held for private or corporate profit."

Besides the Meyer family's paychecks, Mr. Holman says it was the lavish
accouterments of the headquarters that convinced him that Ms. Meyer's ministry isn't purely charitable. Those included a $30,000 table, among other high-priced furniture, and several pieces of fine art, some of which are religious. To Mr. Holman's mind, Ms. Meyer's ministry is in business to make money.

Of course, such extravagance must be balanced by the good done by the ministry, and there obviously has been quite a bit. Thousands find inspiration in Ms. Meyer's life story and her down-home advice
about day-to-day living, keeping a family together and about the power of faith to redeem lives. That's why they donate and buy the books and tapes hawked endlessly at her conferences.

The Meyer family's own multimillion take is, after all, just a small percentage of the ministry's $90 million-plus revenue. Ministry spokesman Mark Sutherland says the ministry spends 20 percent on administration, with the rest going to good works. Those include support for 18 orphanages around the world, 3.5 million meals donated to the poor, 145 wells dug in poor nations and missions to AIDS hospitals and leper colonies.

It's tempting to ask why a ministry would spend $30,000 on a fancy table rather than digging a few more wells for poor Africans. But the legal balance may tip in favor of Ms. Meyer keeping her tax exemption.

In the Gospel of St. Matthew, Jesus says, "It is easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of
God." Ms. Meyer would seem to believe she can make the squeeze. Those who feel that preachers shouldn't live like royalty always have the option of directing their donations elsewhere.

From The San Francisco Chronicle: Nice appreciation of a fine novel by the late Ross Thomas. I first bought the book in paperback at News and Novels at the old Kroger Shopping Center on West Market Street in Greensboro when Keith Ferrell was manager, back in the late 70s.

A wink and a grin at the spies among us
By David Kipen

Chinaman's Chance
By Ross Thomas

Introduction by William Heffernan

St. Martin's; 320 pages; $14.95
------------------------------------------------------------------------
There's a kind of code that crops up in the "about the author" copy of certain novelists, especially suspense novelists. One sees it on the jackets of Charles McCarry, whose fine books both old ("The Tears of Autumn") and new ("Old Boys") are finally getting a nice push from the Overlook Press these days. My old copy of "The Miernik Dossier" calls McCarry "a former newspaperman and speechwriter," but where exactly did he write all these speeches and newspaper articles? It doesn't say. It never does. Whenever they tell you somebody wrote a lot but don't tell you for whom, it's usually because they were really writing for us -- specifically, for the CIA.

Then there's Ross Thomas, whom an old edition of "Chinaman's Chance" fingered as "a reporter and an editor and public relations director for numerous publications, radio stations, national organizations, and political candidates in the United States, Europe, and Africa.'' E. Howard Hunt's jacket bio couldn't have put it any more delicately.

Unlike McCarry, Thomas didn't live to see the revival he's now enjoying. He died in 1995, and only now is St. Martin's Press mercifully rolling out much of his glorious backlist: "Ah, Treachery!" introduced by Joe Gores; "Briarpatch" introed by Lawrence Block; "Out on the Rim" with an essay by Donald E. Westlake; "Twilight at Mac's Place" fronted by T. Jefferson Parker; not to omit the enduringly perverse escapade titled, with a political incorrectness apparent even in 1978, "Chinaman's Chance."

For a Company man, Thomas always made excellent company. The puckishness of "Chinaman's Chance" starts with its title. Raised in a San Francisco orphanage, Artie Wu habitually leaves nothing whatever to chance. He trips over a dead pelican on a California beach in the first paragraph to set Thomas' intricate plot in motion, but even that stumble turns out to be anything but an accident.

Anybody who can trace the convolutions of Thomas' plot deserves a secret presidential commendation, but here's a stab at it: Artie's mishap leads him into the company of Randall Piers, an electronics billionaire whose nymphomaniacal actress wife used to sing in a folk trio with her sisters, one of whom is sending cryptic notes from undisclosed locations about the supposed murder-suicide of her congressman lover. Together with his witty, haunted partner, Quincy Durant, Artie has to sort out a couple of murders, clean up a dilapidated beach town modeled on Long Beach and all the while keep his signature thin oval cigars from going out. Oh, and did I mention a backstory featuring Castro and Jack Ruby?

After a while, all this byzantine playfulness starts to seem like something a former CIA agent ought to know a thing or two about: namely, a cover story. Possibly there's a real story underneath, some kernel of fact that Thomas has artfully obscured, but that seems too far-fetched. No, my guess is that all of "Chinaman's Chance" is simply a shaggy-dog pretext for Thomas to show off the one gift he had in greater abundance than any thriller writer who ever lived, and maybe any writer, period: a contagious air of utter bemusement, an unruffled intimation that nothing ever fits and all is folly.

How Thomas modulated his prose in such a way that a reader's smile becomes constant -- never cracking into a laugh, yet never quite evaporating, either -- is a greater mystery than any played out here by all his silk-cut arch-villains, slatternly femmes fatales and knavish thugs.

Check out this specimen of Thomas' prophetic cynicism, exhaling like marsh gas from another of his patented explanatory speeches: "[R]eal gambling will come to California, sooner probably than any of us think. The voters will decide that they'd rather have legalized gambling than confiscatory property taxes. It's wonderful, don't you think, how flexible one's lifelong convictions usually are?"

Bear in mind that the mercenary-turned-mafioso quoted is making his predictions as Proposition 13 was passing in 1978, probably before. And never mind that few real people, and even fewer mobsters, tend to throw around words like "confiscatory." Thomas isn't after realism -- more like a heightened sense of how the world would work if only criminals were as articulate, and antiheroes as brilliant, as we might want them.

Some readers may find all this a bit dated, however entertainingly it plays. One hungers to know what Thomas would be writing today, when cynicism seems at once more justified and more dangerous than it ever did. Thomas' books ultimately leave the reader with a sense of society as terminally corrupt, and all the funnier for it. One wouldn't want to live in any of them for very long.

But as a temporary posting, a furlough from geopolitical cares scarier than anything Thomas ever contrived, "Chinaman's Chance" is a perfectly rendered exercise in utter oblivion. This is the quintessential book to take to a deserted island, because fundamentally it is a deserted island -- a place apart, paced to its own rhythm, with little to think about but much to admire.

McCain Sells Out The GOP
By Pat Buchanan

With the Republican Senate 24 hours away from liberating all seven judicial hostages of Minority Leader Harry Reid and his Democrats, Sen. John McCain stepped in to snatch compromise from the jaws of victory.

We will, said McCain, settle for only three. McCain's Gang of Seven had just engineered a Republican Munich.

As of Monday, Majority Leader Bill Frist had the 51 votes needed to free all seven. Had a cloture vote been taken, all seven Bush appellate court appointees would soon be on their way to the federal bench. Reid's Democratic minority would have been stripped permanently of its power to abuse, delay and kill Bush judges and Supreme Court justices.

After months of painstaking work and press abuse, Republicans were on the precipice of a triumph. The McCain Seven stepped in -- to trade the horse for a rabbit.

Now, instead of Republicans winning all seven and disarming Reid, Ted Kennedy and Co. of their lethal weapon, Democrats agreed to release three hostages, but hold the other four -- and were given a GOP blessing to use their filibuster-veto in "extraordinary circumstances," i.e., should Bush name to the Supreme Court a jurist like William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas.

McCain is doing victory laps on the morning talk shows and assuring us, "The country won." But Dick Durbin and Reid are talking like men who just rubbed Republican noses in the dirt. "The nuclear option is off the table," said Sen. Durbin. Reid was especially gracious: "Abuse of power will not be tolerated, and attempts to trample the Constitution and grab absolute control are over."

As of now, the winners are McCain -- who has burnished his credentials with liberals -- Democrats and the mainstream media, who will lacquer up any Republican who sells out the right. The losers are Bill Frist, the Republican majority, the four abandoned nominees -- now back in limbo -- and George Bush.

In a shot at the president, South Carolina's Sen. Lindsey Graham, who appears to look to McCain as his future leader rather than Bush as his present leader, said: "We're going to start talking about who would be a good judge and who wouldn't. And the White House is going to get more involved and going to listen more."

Not only did Graham dump his party to go with the Gang of Seven and collude with Democrats, he gave credence to the liberal charge that some Bush nominees are indeed beyond the pale.

Graham should state exactly which conservative jurist Bush named who would not be a "good judge." If he believes Bush has failed to consult, or appointed unqualified men or women, why not vote them down, rather than let liberal obstructionists keep their lethal weapon to kill Republican Supreme Court nominees?

What McCain has done is to cobble together a small but controlling block of dissident Republicans to deny the GOP majority its right to rule and run the Senate, except on McCain's terms.

This is a direct challenge to Bill Frist. If he and the GOP majority accept the McCain Compromise, they will invite the contempt of the people who sent them here with a conservative mandate. At that top of that agenda is to remake the federal courts and to terminate the Supreme Court's 50-year tenure as judicial dictator and supreme agent of social, cultural and moral revolution in America.

What ought Frist to do?

Hold a press conference and declare to the party and country that, while the McCain Compromise may bind the seven, it does not bind the Senate, and, as majority leader, he intends to give every nominee to come out of the Judiciary Committee a floor vote. Should any nominee be filibustered, he will move to invoke cloture and shut off debate.

If McCain's Gang of Seven wishes to vote with 45 Democrats to let judicial nominees be filibuster-vetoed, that is their right. But they will have to vote with Reid, Barbara Boxer and Kennedy, and against their fellow Republicans and President Bush.

McCain has thrown down a challenge to Bush, as well. Before Monday, the Democratic minority was dictating which judges would be held hostage and which ones would be released. Now, it is the Democratic minority, plus the McCain Seven, that is doing the dictating.

What Bush should reply is: There is not an extremist among them.

All are men and women of integrity, intelligence and judicial demeanor. I want them all voted up or voted down. To deny them a vote is to do them and the nation an injustice.

If the president and Frist move toughly, and together, they can scatter the McCain gang, get every judge voted on and disarm the Democrats of their lethal weapon. They have the votes. The question is: Do they have the nerve?

Comedian Howard Morris, 85, Dies
By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, May 23, 2005

Howard Morris, 85, the compact comic whirligig from the early days of television who lent his raspy voice to hundreds of cartoons and commercial voice-overs, died May 21 at his home in Hollywood. He had heart ailments in recent years.

Mr. Morris was a bar mitzvah band drummer, a radio performer and briefly a Shakespearean actor before he shot to prominence as part of the Sid Caesar ensemble casts of the 1950s, along with Carl Reiner and Imogene Coca.

Although "second banana" to the domineering forces of Caesar and Reiner, Mr. Morris was regarded as a staple of "Admiral Broadway Review," "Your Show of Shows" and "Caesar's Hour" -- programs beloved by tens of millions of viewers.

He found kindred actors, if similarly untamed pranksters, among his cohorts, who thrived on improvisation and turned scripts into free-for-alls. He had mixed, sometimes profane, feelings about Caesar, a dynamo whose substance abuse often made him difficult.

"He was the most skillful performer I ever met, observed or worked with, but I don't want to be buried with the guy," he told the Knoxville News Sentinel in 2001. Still, he credited Caesar for showing him that once you can make a character real, "you can fly it to the moon."

Mr. Morris's favorite sketch role, which appeared on "Your Show of Shows," was a spoof of the mawkish reunion show "This Is Your Life."

He played Uncle Goopy, the emotional wreck who constantly leaps into the arms of his long-lost nephew (Caesar). He also sticks to the leg of the host (Reiner) like an adhesive and cries inconsolably, evidently much to the surprise of fellow cast members. Mr. Morris was largely responsible for tearing down the set and ending the episode on a high note.

The scene was so memorable that Billy Crystal later called it a defining early influence: "That's how I used to go to bed. I'd grab my dad's leg, and he'd drag me to bed like Sid Caesar."

Howard Jerome Morris was born Sept. 4, 1919, in the Bronx, N.Y. His father, a rubber company executive, had a fatal heart attack shortly after losing his job during the Depression, and Mr. Morris, the only child, helped support his mother. She played organ during silent movies, and Howard found himself drawn to mimicking on-screen performers.

He attended New York University on a scholarship but dropped out to serve in the Army during World War II. He was sent to the Pacific theater of operations, but his work was mainly in the operations of theater: He worked in the entertainment unit based in Hawaii.

"We did everything from small shows called 'Five Jerks in a Jeep' to 'Hamlet,' " he told an interviewer.

The latter was a production starring the classical actor Maurice Evans as the doomed Dane and Mr. Morris in the minor role of Rosencrantz. It was in this 1945 "GI version" that Mr. Morris made his Broadway debut. Twelve years later, he and Evans appeared in a much-praised 1957 television production of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," with Mr. Morris as the clownish Feste and Evans as Malvolio.

While continuing to do theater work in the late 1940s, he was hired for a bit part in "The Admiral Broadway Review," produced by Max Liebman.

Catching sight of the burly Caesar ("a hulk"), the diminutive Mr. Morris found himself being assaulted: "He grabbed me by the lapels and lifted me up in the air and said, 'Max! Him! Get!' And that was my audition for 'The Admiral Broadway Review.' "

The cast returned for the Emmy Award-winning "The Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris Special" (1967). One skit, parodying the Beatles, featured the three men in long-haired wigs singing "If I Could Take a Ring and Put It on My Finger -- I'd Marry Me."

Other television offers kept Mr. Morris busy as an actor and director; he directed the pilot episode of "Get Smart," the spy comedy created by his friend Mel Brooks.

Perhaps one of the more memorable characters he created was on the "The Andy Griffith Show." Playing hillbilly Ernest T. Bass, he wooed the local women by throwing too-large rocks through their windows and reciting doggerel.

"None of the scripts called for Ernest to jump around like a nut," he wrote for an Internet fan site. "That was just the result of my innards searching for ways that the character needed to move. I also used poetry to fill in other character gaps which results from an actor's basic insecurity in terms of the character having a unique depth of personality. I discovered even more personality elements using poetry. This occurred by pure accident. Each silly line came to me on set as the cameras rolled."

Mr. Morris directed a handful of feature films, from "With Six You Get Eggroll" (1968), a Doris Day comedy, to the Donny and Marie Osmond feature "Goin' Coconuts" (1978). He also played Jerry Lewis's father in "The Nutty Professor" (1963) and Prof. Lilloman ("Little old man") in Brooks's Hitchcock spoof "High Anxiety" (1977).

He provided voices for Hanna Barbera-produced cartoon characters and also ran an advertising agency for a while, winning such lucrative accounts as Kellogg's and McDonald's. "I have a beach house at Malibu with arches on top of it," he once told Adweek.

Mr. Morris was married and divorced five times, twice to the same woman. His son, David, said his father's personality mirrored what audiences saw. "Living with him, for me, was like having a cartoon character as a best friend," he said. "It was craziness."

From The Chicago Tribune. I'm usually averse to posting articles this long. It's too good to edit. What Bono has to say is brilliant.

Bono: 'We need to talk'

U2's frontman sits down with Greg Kot to 'clear the air' about negative reviews, the band's direction and the role of rock 'n' roll

By Greg Kot
Chicago Tribune music critic
Published May 22, 2005

Bono is steamed.

It's not every day that I answer my cell phone and hear the lead singer of U2 expressing serious disagreement with something I've written, but that day has arrived.

"You've offended us," he says as I weave up Lake Shore Drive during evening rush hour, trying not to crash into a concrete barrier while I reach for my notebook. "There's a dark cloud over us and we need to talk."

I've covered the band for 15 years, interviewed Bono a half-dozen times and attended virtually every one of U2's Chicago concerts since the Irish quartet first played at Park West in 1981. Along with R.E.M., U2 is the most important mainstream rock band of my generation, a band that set a new standard for how an arena rock concert could feel and what it could communicate. In the '90s, Bono, guitarist The Edge, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton gave their well-honed approach a twist on such adventurous albums as "Achtung Baby" (1991), "Zooropa" (1993), the "Passengers: Original Soundtracks I" side project (1995) and "Pop" (1997).

But "Pop" bombed commercially by U2 standards, and the band seemed to lose its nerve. It made two consecutive albums, "All That You Can't Leave Behind" (2000) and "How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb" (2004), that retreated from the innovations of the '90s and settled for a retro '80s sound. In February, the Tribune published an article in which I chastised the band for a series of dubious artistic and business decisions. It was prompted by a flood of irate e-mails from fans who had paid $40 to join U2's fan club in order to gain access to pre-sale tickets for the band's North American tour. The sale was a public-relations disaster. Some fan-club members reported they couldn't even get tickets, or paid nearly $200 for third-balcony seats, while scalpers were selling tickets on eBay for more than $600. It was the latest in a series of missteps that prompted me to question whether this once-vital band was turning into the Rolling Stones, more of a corporation focused on perpetuating itself than a creative force.

There was the ubiquitous television ad (for which they were not paid) in which "Vertigo," the first single from "Atomic Bomb," was turned into a commercial for Apple's portable music device, the iPod. There were the unusually conservative albums, evidence that the band had run out of ideas or the will to challenge itself and its audience. There was the live appearance at the Super Bowl halftime in February 2002, the type of marketing opportunity that presented even the most idealistic brand of rock as just another product.

It was these criticisms that prompted Bono's Lake Shore Drive call. A day after that conversation, I attended the first concert in U2's four-night sold-out run at the United Center. My review focused on the tired set list. U2 played some new songs early in the two-hour performance, but instead of building a case for the new album and possibly redeeming it, the quartet reserved all the big-bang moments for its greatest hits, songs that had been in the set list for a decade or more. They sounded more than ever like the bands they once arose to replace, the dinosaur acts of the '60s.

All of this is part of what should be the relationship among the artist, the critic and even the audience, which at the United Center was wildly cheering (as they always do) every note. Critics, on the other hand, are not cheerleaders. They are paid to honestly and passionately react to what the artist does -- for better or worse. When it's the latter, audiences are often more vocal in their defense than the artists. But Bono was different.

After the review appeared in the Tribune, Bono invited me to attend another show. Later, he would acknowledge that my review of the first concert wasn't off base. "We weren't at our best," he said. When I attended the final show of the four-night stand, the song deck had been shuffled, and the band grew more daring. A new song that wasn't in the first night's set, "Original of the Species," was a highlight. It's a soul ballad with a melody so suggestive that it compelled me to go back and hear what I had missed the first time on the "Atomic Bomb" album. If not a return to the old boldness, the performance certainly made me aware of something that I had missed about the album several months before: the classic beauty of some of the less-immediate songs.

The next morning, Bono and I met at a corner table in a swanky restaurant overlooking Michigan Avenue. "Stick 'em up," he rasped as he approached from behind, finger on an imaginary trigger pressing into my left kidney. It was 9 a.m., and the previous night's concert had left the unshaven singer a touch hoarse. But he was in a spry mood and claimed to do all his best work before noon. "I sometimes wish we could play our concerts right after I wake up," he said, peering out from behind his tinted wraparound glasses after ordering a breakfast of poached eggs and toast. The ire in his voice of the previous week had softened to a contentious but melodious brogue.

"Larry [Mullen, the band's drummer] is going to kill me for doing this," Bono said. "But I want this on the record. Some of what is going around as a result of your article is not just unhelpful to our group and our relationship to our audience, but just really problematic for what in the broad sense you might call rock music. The things you think are wrong with it, and the things that I think are wrong with rock music, are polar opposite. Your vision of rock and mine are 180 degrees apart. And that's why I need to talk to you."

A portion of that 90-minute conversation, edited for length, clarity and language, follows.

KOT: You're an important band for my generation. A band that led by example: This is how to do it, how to be a successful band without compromising your principles. But when the ticket sale went wrong this year, I got hundreds of e-mails from fans who felt you had let them down, that their loyalty was betrayed.

BONO: Everybody in this band knows about that debacle, and regrets it, and we've taken steps to prevent it from happening again. I think most fans understand what happened. Our eyes were not on that ball the way they normally would be. Our eyes were on trying to determine whether we would be going on tour at all. There are things that we can't discuss in the interview that were going on within the band that just took precedence. Most U2 fans knew what that was [serious health problems in the family of a band member]. I thought it was really disingenuous of them and you not to recognize that this is not normal behavior from this band. Complain, yeah. Something did go wrong. That was a mistake, and we tried to put it right.

KOT: The first I heard about the internal problems in the band was when Larry apologized about it at the Grammys. Before the article was published, I tried for three weeks to get information from the band, to interview you. Yes, this was not normal behavior from U2. Instead, you steer me to the record company president and the tour promoter. You let these business guys answer for you.

BONO: I'm really sorry about that. It's our fault that didn't happen. But it's done, and we've taken care of it.

KOT: The ticket sale to me was just the tip of a larger issue, which is: Is the band losing sight of what it once was? The iPod ad, the Super Bowl halftime appearance, the Grammy Awards appearances -- I didn't think U2 was about that sort of promotion.

BONO: That's a really important point that I want to get across to you. There's this poverty of ambition, in terms of what rock people will do to promote their work. That's a critical issue to me. The excitement of punk rock, in the Irish and UK scene when we were coming up, was seeing our favorite band on "Top of the Pops," right next to the "enemy." That would be exciting. We did talk shows, TV shows, back then. The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto. I don't like that kind of thinking. I know some of it exists, and some of our best friends are part of it. It's not for me. Progressive rock was the enemy in 1976. And it still is. And it has many, many faces. This beast is lurking everywhere. It can describe itself as indie rock. It's the same [blanking] thing. It's misery. I have seen so many great minds struck down by it. . . . When you suggest we're betraying ourselves by doing TV shows and promotional stuff, to me the Super Bowl was our Ed Sullivan moment. It just came 25 years later. I didn't expect it. But it is one of the moments I'm most proud of in my life.

KOT: Why is the idea of associating a song with a product a good idea?

BONO: I accept that that is alarming. I really do. Our being on TV, I don't have a problem with that -- we should be on TV. But OK, associating our music with a product. You've got to deal with the devil. Let's have a look. The devil here is a bunch of creative minds, more creative than a lot of people in rock bands. The lead singer is Steve Jobs. These men have helped design the most beautiful object art in music culture since the electric guitar. That's the iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away. Everywhere we look we see ugly cars, ugly buildings . . . [he pauses, and looks out the window at the Chicago skyline]. . . . You're lucky here in Chicago on that front. But you see ugly objects in the workplace. Everywhere. And these people are making beautiful objects. Selling out is doing something you don't really want to do for money. That's what selling out is. We asked to be in the ad. We could see where rock music is, fighting for relevance next to hip-hop. And I love hip-hop. It's the new black entrepreneur. It's about being out there, loud and proud about what you're doing. Selling it on the street corner if you have to. From pent-house to pavement. Advertising the new song in another song. Taking on the world. Meanwhile, a bunch of white, middle-class kids are practicing in Daddy's garage, saying [adopts fake Midwestern whine], "No, man, that is just so un-cool." As hard as it is, as ghetto as it is, hip-hop is pop music. It's the sound of music getting out of the ghetto, while rock is looking for a ghetto. We never wanted to be a garage band. We wanted to get as quick as we could out of the garage. The people who say they like the garage usually have two or three cars parked outside. Rock music is niche. We want people who aren't in our niche listening to our music. If you pour your life into songs, you want them to be heard. It's a desire to communicate. A deep desire to communicate inspires songwriting. Rock music was most exciting when it was in the 45 [rpm single], when it was disciplined into a single. Whether it was the Sex Pistols, Clash, Buzzcocks, Nirvana, the Beatles, the Stones. The 45 is the pure rock to me. That is why I wanted to be in a band.
KOT: I understand that, but I've seen some of my favorite songs corrupted because of that attitude. [Iggy Pop's] "Lust for Life" is now a Jamaican vacation commercial. I don't know if I want to listen to that song anymore.

BONO: If I love the song, I love the song. We looked at the iPod commercial as a rock video. We chose the director. We thought, how are we going to get our single off in the days when rock music is niche? When it's unlikely to get a three-minute punk-rock song on top of the radio? So we piggybacked this phenomenon to get ourselves to a new, younger audience, and we succeeded. And it's exciting. I'm proud of the commercial, I'm proud of the association. We have turned down enormous sums of money to put our songs in a commercial, where we felt, to your point, where it might change the way people appreciated the song. We were offered $23 million for just the music to "Where the Streets Have No Name." We thought we could do a lot of good with that money. Give it away. But if a show is a little off, and there's a hole, that's the one song we can guarantee that God will walk through the room as soon as we play it. So the idea that when we played it, people would go, "That's the 'such-and-such' commercial," we couldn't live with it. Had it been a cool thing, or didn't have a bad association, or it was a different song, we might've done it. But we have to start thinking about new ways of getting our songs across, of communicating in this new world, with so many channels, with rock music becoming a niche. I hear so many songwriters describe their songs as their children, that they have to look after them. [Nonsense!] They're your parents, they tell you what to do. They tell you how to dress, how to behave when you're playing them. They tell you what the video looks like. If you listen to them, they manage you. And if you get it right, they pay for your retirement [laughs]. Because songs demand to be heard. "Vertigo," which you didn't like, is deceptively simple. That riff, you can think, "Aw yeah, another rock song." It doesn't become great the first time you hear it. It becomes great the thousandth time you hear it. And that's true of a lot of rock riffs. So we have to get the density of exposure for that to be a hit.

KOT: You told me the other day that U2 had "Kid A'd" itself to death [a reference to Radiohead's 2000 progressive-rock album "Kid A"]. It was a funny line, but I'm disappointed to hear that.

BONO: I want to hear Radiohead, extraordinary band that they are, on MTV. I want them setting fire to the imaginations of 16-, 15-, 14-year-old kids. I was 14 when John Lennon set fire to my imagination. At that age, you're just [angry], and your moods swing, and it's an incredible time to be hit with something like that. Our last two albums are essentially about the combo. We used the limitations of the combo. We had 10 years of experimentation. We decided to rope it in, and tie ourselves to only one thing. And that's the only discipline. Is it a great song? Is it fresh? Experimenting in rock is at its best when you dream from the perimeters and bring it back to the center. All my favorite innovators disappear into the woods and bring something back, and you get to hear the songs distilled from those experiments. I used "Kid A" as an example, because I love the album. We did our "Zooropa," we did our "Passengers," even our "Pop" experiment. There were great ideas on that album, but we didn't have the discipline to screw the thing down and turn them into magic pop songs. We'd become progressive rock! Ahhh!

KOT: You're killing me now. I thought those '90s albums were great. I didn't understand "Achtung Baby" right away. But after seeing the tour, I realized it was your best album. I still feel that way. And I loved "Zooropa" in that way, and "Pas-sengers." I even liked "Pop." To me, you guys were showing us how it should be done. You were [screwing] with our heads and making great music. You were doing those weird ballads from "Pop" as an encore at Soldier Field [in 1997]. I loved that you were so far out on a limb with saw in hand, and you were trying things, pushing things. And now you never play songs from those albums anymore. What happened?

BONO: We have ideas that we want to communicate [in a concert], not just a bunch of songs. If we get it right, it feels like one song. What band at our level would play 10 songs, seven from the new album and three from our first album? The reason we do that is because this album and our first album have very similar themes. The first is an ode to innocence, as it's being held onto. The latest is an ode to innocence, as it's been remembered, with the thought that you can get back to it. There's nothing in U2's catalog that sounds remotely like "Vertigo." It's completely fresh. "Ver-tigo" is actually quite a gem, contrary to what you say, and it's very new. For the second half of the show, we take on this notion of the journey of equality. This is our generation's challenge. So we thought about using flags as a backdrop during "Where the Streets Have No Name." I remember singing it the first night: It's not a very good lyric, but it has really great ideas suggested in the lyric, the idea that you could go on a journey to that other place. That lyric was written in a dusty field in northern Ethiopia, and I can finally make sense of it because of what we're talking about in this show. And then we go into "One," and we could do a new arrangement of "One" as you might want us to, but you see, I'm only one member of this band, and Edge is three. And if he thinks an arrangement is perfect, why mess with it? He says, "I'm not jamming here. That's a guitar melody. I've written it. I can't improve on it." Adam and I are the jazz men in the band. But the Teutonic Larry Mullen and the Presbyterian Edge always demand, "No fat. Back to the original arrangement. We're not going to change the bass line just because we feel like it."

KOT: It helped when you put "Original of the Species" in the set last night. It made me want to hear what I missed on the re-cord. That's what was lacking in the first show [at the United Center].

BONO: It's a classic, especially on the album. We have to figure out how are we going to get that song on MTV. Those songs do not come around easy. The melodies of most songs are A-B, A-B, and this is A-B-C-D. The construction of it is unique. And I want you to want us to have that song out on the radio. Because it's about other bands [who value songwriting] coming through. It's not just us. Rap-metal nearly put the white race in jeopardy [as a creative force]. It's a travesty. Those [rap-metal] people should just take suicide pills and go away. What we have to offer, if we're lucky, are lyrics, some interesting arrangements and beautiful melody. That's what rock music can do right now. To be relevant, to set the imagination off on a new generation coming up. Songs that up the ante.

KOT: It sounds like "Pop" didn't work for you because it didn't sell. To my mind, it worked because it was a good, daring album. There's no shame in not selling.

BONO: It didn't communicate the way it was intended to. It was supposed to change the mood of that summer [1997]. An album changes the mood of a summer when you walk out of a pub and you have those songs in your head. And you hear them coming from a car, an open window. It changes the mood of the season. Instead it became a niche record. And I know you're a man who appreciates the niche. And I'm glad you appreciate that one, but that's not what it was intended to be. It's not about sales; we don't need the cash. It's about your ambition for the song. With "Pop," I always think if we'd just had another month, we could have finished it. But we did a really bad thing. We let the manager book the tour, known in this camp as the worst decision U2 ever made, and we had to wrap up the album sooner than we wanted. You don't need an album to communicate for you to enjoy it, you don't need it to be trimmed of fat to enjoy it, because you're enjoying the ideas, the textures. But for me to enjoy it, I need it to do that [communicate on a wider level].

KOT: The last two albums look back. With "All That You Can't Leave Behind," I thought you made your retro record, you'd made your [version of the Stones' 1978 album] "Some Girls," an album that sums up all your best moves in a concise way. You're allowed to make that album, once. Now you've made "All That You Can't Leave Behind," and you're looking back and I think, whoops, you really are turning into the Stones. I expected more; I expected you to break out of that box.

BONO: Hey, there are some amazing songs on [the Stones' 1994 album] "Voodoo Lounge." But what you're missing is that each time [in history] has a mood. You think it's looking back-ward; I think it's looking forward. I think to be in a studio, tied to the four-piece band setup right now is a very modern thing to do. And to use that mystery and power to write songs, we did two records like that. This one goes even further than the last one in that direction. You get beauty like "Original of the Species" that you can play on a piano. Just put piano and voice on that song, and it's special. That's not retreat. That is progressive. That is progress.

KOT: The strength of your band has always been that you build a case for your new music on the road. And it's my job to say when you don't.

BONO: As a writer who cares deeply about music, you're right to give rock bands a kicking when they deserve it. And we have deserved it at times. But you also need to explain to us how rock can progress. And I would like it if writers would step back and look at what we've done . . . [apart from] the codified rules and regulations that are suffocating rock music right now. Great groups were broken up, like the Clash, because of ridiculous concepts like not selling out. It's the cultural revolution in China all over again: Let's rid rock music of thinkers; let's rid rock music of big ideas. I saw it destroy great groups like Echo and the Bunnymen, extraordinary talents who crashed and burned on these things. You tell me about the hundreds of e-mails you got, well I got them with every single turn this band has made. I got them when we made the "War" album. I got them when we made "Joshua Tree." I got them when we made "Achtung Baby." Of course we're going to lose fans along the way who don't like what we're doing. But you need to understand what we're actually trying to do, and that's why we had to have this talk.

KOT: I had to laugh, because at last night's show you said that "some really annoying people are standing up" for what they believe in, "and God bless them." That reminds me of you, including the annoying part.

BONO: [Laughs] Yes, you're right.

KOT: But you do have the courage of your convictions. You don't care what people think of you for having those convictions. You sparked a weeklong debate in this town about music, and what kind of social role it should play, and why people care about it, and why they should care about it.

BONO: We've always annoyed people. Around the time of "Zoo TV," we were in danger of being cool, but we fixed that [laughs]. Now there are loads of people who would love to murder me on a daily basis. Stirring it up, it's good. Our definition of art is putting your head above the parapet, and be ready for the custard pie. I happen to love the taste of it.

Moral nihilism at Newsweek
By Patrick J. Buchanan

Either Newsweek's editors were oblivious to the inflammatory nature of what they were publishing – when they reported that U.S. soldiers flushed a Quran down a toilet – or they knew the explosive character of the story.

If the first is true, i.e., Newsweek's editors had no inkling of a potentially violent Islamic reaction, they are so devoid of judgment as to disqualify themselves from running the Harvard Crimson.

But if Newsweek's editors sensed this was an explosive item and printed it anyway, they may fairly be charged with sabotaging U.S. war policy and compromising the cause for which American soldiers are fighting and dying in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Only a few have urged that Newsweek's editors be brought up on sedition charges. But what Newsweek did is worse than the anti-war activity for which labor leader Eugene Debs was given 10 years in prison during World War I.

Why did Newsweek do it? Even if the item were true and had been verified, why print it? What benefit could come of the world knowing a U.S. soldier had desecrated a Quran?

Clearly, if a soldier did this in a Guantanamo cellblock, he was not thinking of the worldwide consequences if it were reported. But Newsweek surely had to consider the consequences. Al Jazeera did, when it rebroadcast the item to the Islamic world. The imams in the mosques, who excoriated America, knew what the effect of their sermons would be: to ratchet up hatred of America and spark violent actions. How could Newsweek not have known?

Was Newsweek innocently serving the people's right to know, and in a regrettable mistake, failed to double-check a source?

The fallback position of Newsweek defenders is that it is the journalist's job to report, not censor the news, that they may have made a regrettable mistake in not double-checking the source, for which they apologize, but they are only the messenger, doing his duty, reporting the bad news as well as the good.

This default position cannot stand, for the journalists of our generation have reveled in their power and purpose. They claim to have advanced the civil-rights revolution, brought down a president, helped end the Vietnam War. But people who can start revolutions, bring down presidents and end wars have real power. And when they wield that power of the press, they cannot revert – when things go horribly wrong – to the role of simple messenger who brings to the sovereign the painful truth. People who wield power, as the major media do, are responsible for the consequences of its exercise.

In this case, Newsweek helped produce riots in Afghanistan, Pakistan and across the Islamic world, resulting in 16 dead and causing severe damage to the U.S. campaign to convince a billion Muslims that our enemy is al-Qaida, not Islam. When Muslims vote in the elections President Bush is promoting, the effect of that Newsweek report will be to propel them toward candidates who openly detest America.

How much of the goodwill done by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq has been undone? How much greater is the danger today to our friends, our soldiers, our civilian volunteers, and even our tourists in the Middle East? We cannot know.

But it must be considerable. What, after all, is the sense of President Bush setting up a powerful State Department office under Karen Hughes to battle the negative image of America in the Islamic world, when Newsweek, with one item, can wipe out years of work?

But there is an even larger point here. Does America have the capacity to run an empire or manage any global coalition, when her image in the world is in the custody of baby boomers marinated in a culture of contempt for the sacred?

In recent years, we have seen movies like "The Last Temptation of Christ" make a mockery of the Savior of Mankind. We have seen scatological images of the Virgin Mary featured in museums. We have seen "Piss Christ" and other outrages funded by our National Endowment for the Arts – and defended by our free press.

A country and a culture like this, in which everything may be ridiculed, mocked and parodied, including Jesus of Nazareth, Islam and the Quran – as in Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" – cannot win a war for the hearts and minds of pious, poor and devout Muslims, to whom the Quran is the literal word of Allah, for whom they should be willing to lay down their lives.

Twentieth-century Americans lack the temperament, the reserve and the respect for foreign faiths and cultures – the reverence for the sacred needed to lead a world where religious fundamentalism is soaring.

Give up the empire. We're going to lose it anyhow. You can't run an empire with moral nihilists in charge of your culture and of the image of America as presented to the world.

Tillman's Parents Are Critical Of Army
Family Questions Reversal On Cause of Ranger's Death

By Josh White
Washington Post Staff Writer

Monday, May 23, 2005

Former NFL player Pat Tillman's family is lashing out against the Army, saying that the military's investigations into Tillman's friendly-fire death in Afghanistan last year were a sham and that Army efforts to cover up the truth have made it harder for them to deal with their loss.

More than a year after their son was shot several times by his fellow Army Rangers on a craggy hillside near the Pakistani border, Tillman's mother and father said in interviews that they believe the military and the government created a heroic tale about how their son died to foster a patriotic response across the country. They say the Army's "lies" about what happened have made them suspicious, and that they are certain they will never get the full story.

"Pat had high ideals about the country; that's why he did what he did," Mary Tillman said in her first lengthy interview since her son's death. "The military let him down. The administration let him down. It was a sign of disrespect. The fact that he was the ultimate team player and he watched his own men kill him is absolutely heartbreaking and tragic. The fact that they lied about it afterward is disgusting."

Tillman, a popular player for the Arizona Cardinals, gave up stardom in the National Football League after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to join the Army Rangers with his brother. After a tour in Iraq, their unit was sent to Afghanistan in spring 2004, where they were to hunt for the Taliban and Osama bin Laden. Shortly after arriving in the mountains to fight, Tillman was killed in a barrage of gunfire from his own men, mistaken for the enemy as he got into position to defend them.

Immediately, the Army kept the soldiers on the ground quiet and told Tillman's family and the public that he was killed by enemy fire while storming a hill, barking orders to his fellow Rangers. After a public memorial service, at which Tillman received the Silver Star, the Army told Tillman's family what had really happened, that he had been killed by his own men.

In separate interviews in their home town of San Jose and by telephone, Tillman's parents, who are divorced, spoke about their ordeal with the Army with simmering frustration and anger. A series of military investigations have offered differing accounts of Tillman's death. The most recent report revealed more deeply the confusion and disarray surrounding the mission he was on, and more clearly showed that the family had been kept in the dark about details of his death.

The latest investigation, written about by The Washington Post earlier this month, showed that soldiers in Afghanistan knew almost immediately that they had killed Tillman by mistake in what they believed was a firefight with enemies on a tight canyon road. The investigation also revealed that soldiers later burned Tillman's uniform and body armor.

That information was slow to make it back to the United States, the report said, and Army officials here were unaware that his death on April 22, 2004, was fratricide when they notified the family that Tillman had been shot.

Over the next 10 days, however, top-ranking Army officials -- including the theater commander, Army Gen. John P. Abizaid -- were told of the reports that Tillman had been killed by his own men, the investigation said. But the Army waited until a formal investigation was finished before telling the family -- which was weeks after a nationally televised memorial service that honored Tillman on May 3, 2004.

Patrick Tillman Sr., a San Jose lawyer, said he is furious about what he found in the volumes of witness statements and investigative documents the Army has given to the family. He decried what he calls a "botched homicide investigation" and blames high-ranking Army officers for presenting "outright lies" to the family and to the public.

"After it happened, all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script this," Patrick Tillman said. "They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up. I think they thought they could control it, and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to go to hell in a handbasket if the truth about his death got out. They blew up their poster boy."

Army spokesmen maintain that the Army has done everything it can to keep the family informed about the investigation, offering to answer relatives' questions and going back to them as investigators gathered more information.

Army officials said Friday that the Army "reaffirms its heartfelt sorrow to the Tillman family and all families who have lost loved ones during this war." Brig. Gen. Vincent K. Brooks, an Army spokesman, said the Army acts with compassion and heartfelt commitment when informing grieving families, often a painful duty.

"In the case of the death of Corporal Patrick Tillman, the Army made mistakes in reporting the circumstances of his death to the family," Brooks said. "For these, we apologize. We cannot undo those early mistakes."

Brooks said the Army has "actively and directly" informed the Tillman family regarding investigations into his death and has dedicated a team of soldiers and civilians to answering the family's questions through phone calls and personal meetings while ensuring the family "was as well informed as they could be."

Mary Tillman keeps her son's wedding album in the living room of the house where he grew up, and his Arizona State University football jersey, still dirty from the 1997 Rose Bowl game, hangs in a nearby closet. With each new version of events, her mind swirls with new theories about what really happened and why. She questions how an elite Army unit could gun down its most recognizable member at such close range. She dwells on distances and boulders and piles of documents and the words of frenzied men.

"It makes you feel like you're losing your mind in a way," she said. "You imagine things. When you don't know the truth, certain details can be blown out of proportion. The truth may be painful, but it's the truth. You start to contrive all these scenarios that could have taken place because they just kept lying. If you feel you're being lied to, you can never put it to rest."

Patrick Tillman Sr. believes he will never get the truth, and he says he is resigned to that now. But he wants everyone in the chain of command, from Tillman's direct supervisors to the one-star general who conducted the latest investigation, to face discipline for "dishonorable acts." He also said the soldiers who killed his son have not been adequately punished.

"Maybe lying's not a big deal anymore," he said. "Pat's dead, and this isn't going to bring him back. But these guys should have been held up to scrutiny, right up the chain of command, and no one has."

That their son was famous opened up the situation to problems, the Tillmans say, in part because of the devastating public relations loss his death represented for the military. Mary Tillman says the government used her son for weeks after his death, perpetuating an untrue story to capitalize on his altruism -- just as the Abu Ghraib prison scandal was erupting publicly. She said she was particularly offended when President Bush offered a taped memorial message to Tillman at a Cardinals football game shortly before the presidential election last fall. She again felt as though her son was being used, something he never would have wanted.

"Every day is sort of emotional," Mary Tillman said. "It just keeps slapping me in the face. To find that he was killed in this debacle -- everything that could have gone wrong did -- it's so much harder to take. We should not have been subjected to all of this. This lie was to cover their image. I think there's a lot more yet that we don't even know, or they wouldn't still be covering their tails.

"If this is what happens when someone high profile dies, I can only imagine what happens with everyone else."