From The Washington Post:
Neil Young's Musical Lifeline
A Brush With Death Hastened Album That Led to Concert Film
By William Booth
Saturday, January 28, 2006
PARK CITY, Utah -- Early last spring, after undergoing a routine brain scan to search for clues to his mysterious migraines, Neil Young was told he had a potentially fatal aneurysm waiting like an assassin inside his skull.
His doctors scheduled surgery, and Young had almost two weeks to await his fate. Who knows what any of us would do with that kind of time? Young went into a kind of artistic trance, writing and recording a bighearted album called "Prairie Wind," a suite of songs about his wife and children, his friends, God and love, his father and memories of growing up on the prairies of Canada. He was waving goodbye, just in case.
"I had the feeling I might not be able to make another record," he says. "I wasn't looking for anything and I didn't have a plan. I just let whatever was in me come out. Just covering the bases, you know, if for any reason I wasn't able to communicate after this procedure."
The 60-year-old singer-songwriter has come to the Sundance Film Festival for the world premiere of director Jonathan Demme's concert film "Neil Young: Heart of Gold," which was shot on location in the historic Ryman Auditorium in Nashville five months after Young came out of the operating room. Calling it "a dream concert," Demme filmed Young and his band performing the new material from "Prairie Wind" followed by 10 old songs, including such classics as "Comes a Time," "Harvest Moon" and "Old Man." The film is scheduled to open in Washington on Feb. 17.
After the premiere, Young and Demme hunkered down in a hotel room at the foot of the snowy slopes of Park City and talked about life, death and the muse. One might expect Young to be a hard planet to reach. In his concerts, especially in his electric work, he can come off like an avenging gunslinger, dangerous at close range. Not an artist who much likes answering questions.
So it comes perhaps as a surprise that Young appears almost gentle, a patient and solicitous man, taking pains to describe how something wonderful -- something mysterious even to him -- happened when he picked up his guitar as the world around him got suddenly mortal and finite.
When doctors discovered "the health issue," as Young calls it, he had already booked a studio and gathered his fellow musicians. "I had to wait for the doctor to perform the thing and so I had almost two weeks to kill and who wants to sit around for two weeks thinking about an aneurysm. So I thought I might as well go ahead and do what I was going to do, make a record in Nashville."
As a distraction? "Yeah, and maybe as fuel," he says.
When he arrived in Nashville, Young and his wife took a room at the Hermitage, one of his favorite hotels. He hadn't written any of the songs and says he did not have an idea or even a theme for the album.
"I'd start by writing a little melody before I went to bed, just a rhythm, a feel, a chord. Something that felt like a song to me. Then I'd get up in the morning and write all the words, first thing, when I'm just a clean slate, before I'd had any conversations. Then go to the studio and record. We'd be there all night. Then go home, pick up the guitar, play some more chords and start all over again," he says.
Accompanying him on the record were his longtime musical collaborators, including his wife, Pegi, country singer Emmylou Harris and Ben Keith, who brings to Young's work that trademark sound of pedal steel guitar.
There is a plainspoken, sparse poetry to the lyrics in the new songs. "I wasn't really working at it. Just giving myself a chance," he says. "I didn't judge it. Didn't try to edit it. Most of these songs, I still have the original documents. Most of them, there's no lines through anything. Just the way it came out."
In the songs, he thanks his wife for their time together and he sings to his college-age daughter that he misses her and he tries to "remember what daddy said, before too much time took away his head." His father, Scott Young, was the dean of Canadian sportswriters and died in June at the age of 87. In his later years he suffered from dementia.
"I'm just the tool," Young says. He describes the experience as getting into a groove -- "the music will put you into a trance, like a mantra, and if you open yourself up it all comes out and you don't have time to judge it. People sometimes ask me where I come up with the ideas for my songs. I don't have any ideas. They're thoughts. There's a difference. An idea is something you work on, like an essay. That's not what this is. Not all the time, at least on this record."
Demme, who also directed "Philadelphia," "The Silence of the Lambs" and another concert film about the Talking Heads called "Stop Making Sense," says he decided he wanted to create a feeling of complete intimacy, and though the two performances at Ryman Auditorium were in front of live audiences, the camera never cuts to them. Demme also decided that Young and the other players should appear in timeless Western wear. With their cowboy hats and muttonchops and long gray hair, and with the sets all acoustic, they could be playing at a saloon in Deadwood in 1877.
Young was surprised and moved at how the film turned out, especially how the new songs give the old songs later in the concert fresh meanings.
"The songs in the first half were brand-new songs sung by an old man from that perspective," he says. And the old songs, some written 40 years ago, "are mature songs written by a young man and now sung by an older man." In this way, the older material is vibrant and alive again.
"There's something going on in there that I can't really explain. You can't really understand why these old songs become so emotional. Why am I feeling like I'm hearing them for the first time?"
Young says he felt this onstage during the filming. "I was playing to the great spirits on that theater, for all those who came before." He was thinking of Johnny Cash and the Carter Family and Hank Williams, whose old guitar he was playing in the movie. "This old guitar ain't mine to keep," Young sings. "It's only mine for a while."
Saturday, January 28, 2006
Friday, January 27, 2006
Money quote on Islam from Mere Comments:
The Enemy of My Enemy
"In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law the doctrine of one omnipotent God, he connected indissolubly with it the audacious falsehood that he was himself His prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus the faith and hope of immortal life and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE ... Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant ... While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace on earth, and good will towards men."
-- John Quincy Adams (emphasis his)
The Enemy of My Enemy
"In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law the doctrine of one omnipotent God, he connected indissolubly with it the audacious falsehood that he was himself His prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus the faith and hope of immortal life and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE ... Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant ... While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace on earth, and good will towards men."
-- John Quincy Adams (emphasis his)
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Interesting essay from a non-believer. From spiked-online.com:
The curious rise of anti-religious hysteria
It is the Anglo-American cultural elites' insecurity about their own values that encourages their frenzied attacks on religion.
by Frank Furedi
The verdict of my son's 10-year-old mates was that it was 'not bad', but a little bit 'boring'. Maddie, a sassy nine-year-old, said it was 'okay for young kids' but it was not in the same league as King Kong. In a few years' time, these kids will recall the unexceptional film that was Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and wonder why it attracted so much adult controversy.
The intense and venomous attacks on the Disney-produced Narnia film are truly puzzling. The novelist Phillip Pullman has described CS Lewis' original book as 'one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read'. With the zeal of a veteran cultural crusader Polly Toynbee of the UK Guardian cut straight to the chase: 'Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion.'
What Toynbee seems to find most hateful about religion is that it is able to express a powerful sense of faith. 'US born-agains are using the movie', she warned. Many critics seem especially outraged by this prospect of religious organisations 'using' the film to promote their faith. The advocacy group Media Transparency warns that the film is based on a book that has a 'frankly religious element' - which is not really surprising when you consider that the author was a well-known publicist for Christianity. What is surprising, however, is that Christians promoting Christian propaganda should invite such bitter condemnation.
First there was the controversy provoked by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in 2004, and now there is this censorious dismissal of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Both are testaments to a potent mood of intolerance towards expressions of religious faith in popular culture today. The artistic representation of religious conviction is frequently stigmatised with terms such as 'fundamentalist', 'intolerant', 'dogmatic', 'exclusive', 'irrational' or 'right-wing'. As a secular humanist who is instinctively uncomfortable with zealot-like moralism, I am suspicious of the motives behind these doctrinaire denunciations of films with a religious message. Such fervour reminds me of the way that reactionaries in the past policed Hollywood for hints of blasphemy or expressions of 'Un-American values'. Replacing the zealotry of religious intolerance with a secular version is hardly an enlightened alternative.
I wonder how today's anti-religious crusaders would respond to The Nun's Story, the 1959 film about a woman who gives up everything to become a nun? Would it be denounced as a subversive plot to manipulate the emotions of vulnerable girls? Or a conspiracy to give fundamentalism a human face? Might it be described as a sick film with a subliminal plot that promoted the 'Just Say No' campaign?
There is little doubt that if Ben Hur (1959, starring Charlton Heston) was released today it would be denounced as a shameless attempt to promote 'muscular Christianity'. As for the wretched 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street! Its privileging of Christmas would be crucified as a crude example of the politics of exclusion. Instead of enjoying the acclaim of the cultural elites of old, films like The Robe, Quo Vadis or The Ten Commandments are today likely to be dismissed as insidious and disturbing religious propaganda.
Until recently, cultural expressions of religious faith were simply considered old-fashioned and gauche. But over the past decade, scorn has turned into bigotry and hatred.
It is a sign of the times that even some of the people associated with the making of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe self-consciously deny that the film has a Christian agenda. 'We believe we have not made a religious movie', said Dennis Rice, Disney's senior vice president of publicity. Andrew Adamson, the film's director, says the story's obvious Christian message is 'open to the audience to interpret'. 'Faith is in the eyes of the beholder', said actress Tilda Swinton, who plays the White Witch. This defensive response suggests that the alleged 'muscular Christianity' behind the film is in fact rather flabby. According to Stanley Mattson, president of the CS Lewis Foundation in Redlands, California, such defensiveness is understandable since today's cultural elites tend to discredit anything judged 'Christian'.
The attempts to dissociate the film from any explicit Christian project are not only motivated by commercial thinking. Despite the claims of the anti-religious crusaders - especially in the US - that the Christian right is on the rise, in fact in cultural terms it is increasingly marginalised. Films with a Christian message find it difficult to convey a powerful sense of faith and meaning. Instead, religious values and beliefs tend to be transmitted through non-human anthropomorphic forms. The attempt to endow even the behaviour of penguins with transcendental meaning - in the widely acclaimed March of the Penguins - is symptomatic of this theological illiteracy. The enthusiasm with which Christian organisations embraced March of the Penguins showed up their disorientation, if not desperation, rather than their aggressive confidence. After the penguin it is the turn of another animal - Aslan, the lion in the Narnia film - to serve as a symbol of innocence, sacrifice and resurrection. What beast will Christian filmmakers pick next?
Even when films depict religiosity in human terms, such as in the figure of Christ in Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, it tends to be in a degraded fashion. In Gibson's vision Jesus is reduced to little more than a lump of meat, the victim of whippings and abuse whose physical suffering is shown in gruesome detail. It is far from uplifting.
So preoccupied are the critics of religious activism with the alleged threat posed by their enemies that they fail to notice that many Christian groups lack the courage of their convictions today, and seem to doubt the authority of their own faith. This is particularly striking in relation to the controversy surrounding Intelligent Design. This theory holds that certain features of the universe, and of animal and human life, are 'best explained' as having an 'intelligent cause' rather than being the product of natural selection. Many see only the danger of superstition in Intelligent Design, describing it as a new form of Creationism on the march. They overlook the remarkable concession that Intelligent Design makes to the authority of science.
Unable to justify creationism as a matter of faith based on divine revelation, advocates of Intelligent Design are forced to adopt the language of science to legitimate their arguments and the existence of some kind of God. This highlights their theological opportunism and inability to justify religion in its own terms. Of course Intelligent Design isn't science; but its appeal to faith in science exposes the limits of the authority of religious faith today.
Superstition and prejudice should continually be countered by rational argument. But the vitriolic invective hurled at Christian believers today is symptomatic of the passions normally associated with a fanatical Inquisitor. Like the old Spanish Inquisition, anti-religious fanatics are constantly on the look out for fundamentalist plots. Richard Dawkins' recent two-part TV rant against religion on Channel 4 demonstrated the fanatical intolerance of critics of religion. The language and tone adopted by the anti-religious crusade - especially in the US - frequently acquires pathological dimensions. So, many anti-religious warriors repeat Dawkins' assertion that St Paul's idea of atonement for original sin is 'essentially, psychological and emotional child abuse' (1).
Others continue to attack religious organisations for trying to exploit films with a religious message or motif. There is a double standard at work here. After all, films and propaganda are inextricably linked. AIDS campaigners, for example, embraced films such as Philadelphia - in which Tom Hanks played a dignified man dying from AIDS - for the positive way they promote their cause. Currently gay organisations are celebrating Ang Lee's gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain for its affirmation of gay love and identity. 'Using' films to promote a cause is hardly the prerogative of religious movements.
So what is the liberal elite so worried about?
The fantasy of theocratic menace
The liberal elite's obsession with the insidious threat posed by faith-based films is paralleled by its paranoia about the religious right. Anti-religious crusaders, in particular in the US, continually exaggerate the influence of Christianity in culture and politics. Every time I visit America, this fear seems to have worsened. Raising the alarm about Christian fundamentalists has become a taken-for-granted affectation among those who define themselves as liberal or left-wing, who are forever telling horror stories about the power of the religious right.
It is now commonplace to attribute the re-election of President George W Bush in 2004 to his army of religious supporters. 'The fundamentalists and evangelicals who came out in such great numbers in this election are driven, and have always been driven, by fear', argues one critic of creeping theocracy (2). Instead of asking the harder question of why some of their own arguments fail to resonate with significant sections of the public, many prefer to point the finger at the religious right and blame them for using 'fear' and unfair arguments.
The idea that religious fundamentalism is on the offensive and threatening to dominate public life is widely held on both sides of the Atlantic. It is fuelled by the belief that recent developments in the world of politics point to a revival of moralism. Many liberal commentators argue, for example, that the re-election of Bush was made possible by the ability of the religious right to connect with the search for meaning among everyday folk. According to this now-standard interpretation, much of the public 'found a "politics of meaning" in the political Right'. Why? Because 'in the right-wing churches and synagogues these voters are presented with a coherent worldview that speaks to their "meaning needs"' (3).
The religious right is often said to be mobilising and gaining support around values that appeal to a primitive and simplistic electorate. That is why even a kids' film like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe can provoke such hostility. The liberal elite's unease with religion is often motivated by the fear that it will become even more isolated from the public unless it can engage with the 'big questions' they are apparently asking. It is also concerned that unless it can project a positive vision on to society, people will become influenced by value-driven 'extremists', by religious and political organisations that are hostile to the status quo. In short, religion is seen as a powerful force that appeals to those apparently simple people whom sophisticated members of the elite cannot reach.
Such beliefs are underpinned by the patronising assumption that, unlike educated urbane people, ordinary members of the public need simplistic black-and-white answers about the meaning of life. In private conversation, some in the liberal elite discuss the masses - or 'rednecks', Nascar dads, tabloid readers, etc - as being crass, materialistic, simplistic, racist, sexist, homophobic.
New theories are doing the rounds to account for the kind of audience that flocks to see The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and other feelgood films and who respond to the appeals of the religious right. George Lakoff - whose book Don't Think of An Elephant has become a kind of bible that explains their electoral demise for many liberal Democrats in the US - describes those who tend to vote for Bush as the products of authoritarian 'strict father families' who are motivated by self-interest, greed and competitiveness. These people hate 'nurturance and care', apparently, are religious bigots and lack the therapeutic sensibilities of their liberal cousins.
In the guise of a political theory, Lakoff offers a diagnosis of human inferiority. You can almost hear him murmur: 'They actually take their children to see The Passion of the Christ….' In previous times, such contempt for people was the trademark of the authoritarian right. In today's 'inclusive' society, it is okay to denigrate sections of the electorate as simpletons if they are still gripped by the power of faith.
Lakoff and others argue that many people who vote for Bush, or who are influenced by the religious right, simply do not know what is in their best interests. Instead of acknowledging the failure of its own political projects, the liberal elite prefers to indict sections of the public for being thick and gullible.
This trend for blaming the rise of theocracy on ordinary folks' apparent penchant for simplistic black-and-white solutions shifts the focus from the elite's failure to promote and uphold a positive vision of the future on to the alleged political illiteracy of the masses. That is why discussions of so-called fundamentalist movements often contain an implicit condemnation of the people who support them - and why the alleged creations of fundamentalist culture are implicitly condemned as immoral. It is the insecurity of the Anglo-American cultural elites about their own values and moral vision of the world that encourages their frenzied attacks on religion. There is a powerful element of bad faith here: many leftists and liberals denounce those who appeal to moral values as being inferior, but they are also envious of them. So when the 'progressive' Rabbi Michael Lerner criticises his fellow liberals for their 'long-standing disdain for religion' and for being 'tone-deaf to the spiritual needs that underline the move to the Right', he is implicitly paying homage to the power of persuasion among his fundamentalist opponents (4).
In the confused cultural elite's fears of a powerful religious right winning over the masses, we can see a good example of bad faith worrying about real faith.
If you can't beat them…
Lerner represents a growing body of liberal and centrist opinion that recognises it is not enough simply to denounce religion. Intemperate attacks on the religious right resonate with progressives, but such attacks clearly do little to undermine the powerful search for meaning that prevails across society. That is why a growing number of liberal and leftist politicians have called for a new moral dimension in their own political platforms.
In the US, this argument was eloquently spelled out by Roberto Unger and Cornel West in their book The Future of American Progressivism (1998) and by Thomas Frank in his influential What's The Matter With America? (2004). Frank believes that values are important because they can connect with what he refers to as 'they'; that is, normal people. Across the Atlantic in the UK, this point is echoed by New Labour minister Douglas Alexander. In his pamphlet Telling It Like It Could Be, Alexander expresses his concerns that the Labour Party will lose its way if it does not discover a sense of moral purpose.
The sense of desperation with which some opportunist politicians are searching for moral values indicates what they really hate about the Narnia film: that Aslan is not on their side. Aslan possesses a superabundance of faith - something that the cultural and liberal elite conspicuously lack. When Lerner exclaims that the 'last time Democrats had real social power was when they linked their legislative agenda with a spiritual politics articulated by Martin Luther King', he only draws attention to the moral wasteland inhabited by his political associates today (5).
There is now a new genre of pseudo-religious political books written by the spiritual mentors of the left. Lerner's Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul succeeds in combining the platitudes usually associated with third-rate self-help books with the mumbo-jumbo generally associated with dogmatic religious tracts. However, when it comes to banality, Jim Wallis' God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It beats his competitors to the post. This motivational text became an instant bestseller as Democrats looked for ready-made moral formulae with which they might connect with common people. Wallis, billed as a left-wing Evangelical, is critical of the secular dismissal of religion and offers moral values to the disoriented liberal.
The problem with politically motivated calls for the restoration of a moral dimension to public life is that they are driven by the instrumental purpose of gaining or retaining power. But a morality manufactured in response to the demands of political pragmatism is bound to lack any organic relationship to lived experience, and is thus unlikely to find resonance with the wider public. An unfocused and disconnected oligarchy is unlikely to possess sufficient sensitivity to the day-to-day problems confronting the public. That is why the pragmatic search for a ready-made moral purpose usually turns into an arbitrary exercise in picking and choosing some inoffensive values. Alexander ends up by opting for the public service ethos of the National Health Service and tackling world poverty - but it could as easily have been world peace or compassion towards the infirm or the celebration of respect, etc. These arbitrary lists of New Labour Hurrah Values only highlight the absence of a purposeful moral perspective that grows from engagement with the public and our concerns.
At the end of the day, politically motivated calls among liberals and the left for morality are not so far from the way in which Christians 'use' The March of the Penguins or The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Both are cynical gestures driven by political calculations rather than by a moral inspiration that comes from the soul. What is particularly cynical is that these attempts to construct a 'moral dimension' are always aimed at others: those who apparently need 'simple' answers and 'meaning'. Such a cynical view of the public was clearly spelled out by William Davies of the London-based Institute for Public Policy research. 'The liberal, secular left has somehow to find ways of supplying citizens with emotional and metaphysical comforts even when it does not itself believe in such things', he warned (6). This provision of so-called metaphysical comforts serves the same function that adult-invented cautionary tales play for children. Which takes us back to Narnia: clearly the problem is not the comforts provided by CS Lewis, but the way in which they're branded.
A final point. The very term 'metaphysical comforts' suggests values built by calculation, instrumentalism, manipulation and cynicism. Morality marketed by people who do not necessarily 'believe in such things' is unlikely to set the world on fire. That is why they resent and hate the Narnia film so much. For all its faults, the movie attempts to transmit a powerful sense of belief, bravery and sacrifice. Such sentiments are alien to a cultural elite that regards the expression of any sort of strong belief as another form of that dreaded fundamentalism. Envy, bad faith and instrumentalism: these are the raw materials that fuel today's anti-religious crusade.
Frank Furedi is author of Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).
The curious rise of anti-religious hysteria
It is the Anglo-American cultural elites' insecurity about their own values that encourages their frenzied attacks on religion.
by Frank Furedi
The verdict of my son's 10-year-old mates was that it was 'not bad', but a little bit 'boring'. Maddie, a sassy nine-year-old, said it was 'okay for young kids' but it was not in the same league as King Kong. In a few years' time, these kids will recall the unexceptional film that was Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and wonder why it attracted so much adult controversy.
The intense and venomous attacks on the Disney-produced Narnia film are truly puzzling. The novelist Phillip Pullman has described CS Lewis' original book as 'one of the most ugly, poisonous things I have ever read'. With the zeal of a veteran cultural crusader Polly Toynbee of the UK Guardian cut straight to the chase: 'Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion.'
What Toynbee seems to find most hateful about religion is that it is able to express a powerful sense of faith. 'US born-agains are using the movie', she warned. Many critics seem especially outraged by this prospect of religious organisations 'using' the film to promote their faith. The advocacy group Media Transparency warns that the film is based on a book that has a 'frankly religious element' - which is not really surprising when you consider that the author was a well-known publicist for Christianity. What is surprising, however, is that Christians promoting Christian propaganda should invite such bitter condemnation.
First there was the controversy provoked by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ in 2004, and now there is this censorious dismissal of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Both are testaments to a potent mood of intolerance towards expressions of religious faith in popular culture today. The artistic representation of religious conviction is frequently stigmatised with terms such as 'fundamentalist', 'intolerant', 'dogmatic', 'exclusive', 'irrational' or 'right-wing'. As a secular humanist who is instinctively uncomfortable with zealot-like moralism, I am suspicious of the motives behind these doctrinaire denunciations of films with a religious message. Such fervour reminds me of the way that reactionaries in the past policed Hollywood for hints of blasphemy or expressions of 'Un-American values'. Replacing the zealotry of religious intolerance with a secular version is hardly an enlightened alternative.
I wonder how today's anti-religious crusaders would respond to The Nun's Story, the 1959 film about a woman who gives up everything to become a nun? Would it be denounced as a subversive plot to manipulate the emotions of vulnerable girls? Or a conspiracy to give fundamentalism a human face? Might it be described as a sick film with a subliminal plot that promoted the 'Just Say No' campaign?
There is little doubt that if Ben Hur (1959, starring Charlton Heston) was released today it would be denounced as a shameless attempt to promote 'muscular Christianity'. As for the wretched 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street! Its privileging of Christmas would be crucified as a crude example of the politics of exclusion. Instead of enjoying the acclaim of the cultural elites of old, films like The Robe, Quo Vadis or The Ten Commandments are today likely to be dismissed as insidious and disturbing religious propaganda.
Until recently, cultural expressions of religious faith were simply considered old-fashioned and gauche. But over the past decade, scorn has turned into bigotry and hatred.
It is a sign of the times that even some of the people associated with the making of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe self-consciously deny that the film has a Christian agenda. 'We believe we have not made a religious movie', said Dennis Rice, Disney's senior vice president of publicity. Andrew Adamson, the film's director, says the story's obvious Christian message is 'open to the audience to interpret'. 'Faith is in the eyes of the beholder', said actress Tilda Swinton, who plays the White Witch. This defensive response suggests that the alleged 'muscular Christianity' behind the film is in fact rather flabby. According to Stanley Mattson, president of the CS Lewis Foundation in Redlands, California, such defensiveness is understandable since today's cultural elites tend to discredit anything judged 'Christian'.
The attempts to dissociate the film from any explicit Christian project are not only motivated by commercial thinking. Despite the claims of the anti-religious crusaders - especially in the US - that the Christian right is on the rise, in fact in cultural terms it is increasingly marginalised. Films with a Christian message find it difficult to convey a powerful sense of faith and meaning. Instead, religious values and beliefs tend to be transmitted through non-human anthropomorphic forms. The attempt to endow even the behaviour of penguins with transcendental meaning - in the widely acclaimed March of the Penguins - is symptomatic of this theological illiteracy. The enthusiasm with which Christian organisations embraced March of the Penguins showed up their disorientation, if not desperation, rather than their aggressive confidence. After the penguin it is the turn of another animal - Aslan, the lion in the Narnia film - to serve as a symbol of innocence, sacrifice and resurrection. What beast will Christian filmmakers pick next?
Even when films depict religiosity in human terms, such as in the figure of Christ in Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, it tends to be in a degraded fashion. In Gibson's vision Jesus is reduced to little more than a lump of meat, the victim of whippings and abuse whose physical suffering is shown in gruesome detail. It is far from uplifting.
So preoccupied are the critics of religious activism with the alleged threat posed by their enemies that they fail to notice that many Christian groups lack the courage of their convictions today, and seem to doubt the authority of their own faith. This is particularly striking in relation to the controversy surrounding Intelligent Design. This theory holds that certain features of the universe, and of animal and human life, are 'best explained' as having an 'intelligent cause' rather than being the product of natural selection. Many see only the danger of superstition in Intelligent Design, describing it as a new form of Creationism on the march. They overlook the remarkable concession that Intelligent Design makes to the authority of science.
Unable to justify creationism as a matter of faith based on divine revelation, advocates of Intelligent Design are forced to adopt the language of science to legitimate their arguments and the existence of some kind of God. This highlights their theological opportunism and inability to justify religion in its own terms. Of course Intelligent Design isn't science; but its appeal to faith in science exposes the limits of the authority of religious faith today.
Superstition and prejudice should continually be countered by rational argument. But the vitriolic invective hurled at Christian believers today is symptomatic of the passions normally associated with a fanatical Inquisitor. Like the old Spanish Inquisition, anti-religious fanatics are constantly on the look out for fundamentalist plots. Richard Dawkins' recent two-part TV rant against religion on Channel 4 demonstrated the fanatical intolerance of critics of religion. The language and tone adopted by the anti-religious crusade - especially in the US - frequently acquires pathological dimensions. So, many anti-religious warriors repeat Dawkins' assertion that St Paul's idea of atonement for original sin is 'essentially, psychological and emotional child abuse' (1).
Others continue to attack religious organisations for trying to exploit films with a religious message or motif. There is a double standard at work here. After all, films and propaganda are inextricably linked. AIDS campaigners, for example, embraced films such as Philadelphia - in which Tom Hanks played a dignified man dying from AIDS - for the positive way they promote their cause. Currently gay organisations are celebrating Ang Lee's gay cowboy movie Brokeback Mountain for its affirmation of gay love and identity. 'Using' films to promote a cause is hardly the prerogative of religious movements.
So what is the liberal elite so worried about?
The fantasy of theocratic menace
The liberal elite's obsession with the insidious threat posed by faith-based films is paralleled by its paranoia about the religious right. Anti-religious crusaders, in particular in the US, continually exaggerate the influence of Christianity in culture and politics. Every time I visit America, this fear seems to have worsened. Raising the alarm about Christian fundamentalists has become a taken-for-granted affectation among those who define themselves as liberal or left-wing, who are forever telling horror stories about the power of the religious right.
It is now commonplace to attribute the re-election of President George W Bush in 2004 to his army of religious supporters. 'The fundamentalists and evangelicals who came out in such great numbers in this election are driven, and have always been driven, by fear', argues one critic of creeping theocracy (2). Instead of asking the harder question of why some of their own arguments fail to resonate with significant sections of the public, many prefer to point the finger at the religious right and blame them for using 'fear' and unfair arguments.
The idea that religious fundamentalism is on the offensive and threatening to dominate public life is widely held on both sides of the Atlantic. It is fuelled by the belief that recent developments in the world of politics point to a revival of moralism. Many liberal commentators argue, for example, that the re-election of Bush was made possible by the ability of the religious right to connect with the search for meaning among everyday folk. According to this now-standard interpretation, much of the public 'found a "politics of meaning" in the political Right'. Why? Because 'in the right-wing churches and synagogues these voters are presented with a coherent worldview that speaks to their "meaning needs"' (3).
The religious right is often said to be mobilising and gaining support around values that appeal to a primitive and simplistic electorate. That is why even a kids' film like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe can provoke such hostility. The liberal elite's unease with religion is often motivated by the fear that it will become even more isolated from the public unless it can engage with the 'big questions' they are apparently asking. It is also concerned that unless it can project a positive vision on to society, people will become influenced by value-driven 'extremists', by religious and political organisations that are hostile to the status quo. In short, religion is seen as a powerful force that appeals to those apparently simple people whom sophisticated members of the elite cannot reach.
Such beliefs are underpinned by the patronising assumption that, unlike educated urbane people, ordinary members of the public need simplistic black-and-white answers about the meaning of life. In private conversation, some in the liberal elite discuss the masses - or 'rednecks', Nascar dads, tabloid readers, etc - as being crass, materialistic, simplistic, racist, sexist, homophobic.
New theories are doing the rounds to account for the kind of audience that flocks to see The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and other feelgood films and who respond to the appeals of the religious right. George Lakoff - whose book Don't Think of An Elephant has become a kind of bible that explains their electoral demise for many liberal Democrats in the US - describes those who tend to vote for Bush as the products of authoritarian 'strict father families' who are motivated by self-interest, greed and competitiveness. These people hate 'nurturance and care', apparently, are religious bigots and lack the therapeutic sensibilities of their liberal cousins.
In the guise of a political theory, Lakoff offers a diagnosis of human inferiority. You can almost hear him murmur: 'They actually take their children to see The Passion of the Christ….' In previous times, such contempt for people was the trademark of the authoritarian right. In today's 'inclusive' society, it is okay to denigrate sections of the electorate as simpletons if they are still gripped by the power of faith.
Lakoff and others argue that many people who vote for Bush, or who are influenced by the religious right, simply do not know what is in their best interests. Instead of acknowledging the failure of its own political projects, the liberal elite prefers to indict sections of the public for being thick and gullible.
This trend for blaming the rise of theocracy on ordinary folks' apparent penchant for simplistic black-and-white solutions shifts the focus from the elite's failure to promote and uphold a positive vision of the future on to the alleged political illiteracy of the masses. That is why discussions of so-called fundamentalist movements often contain an implicit condemnation of the people who support them - and why the alleged creations of fundamentalist culture are implicitly condemned as immoral. It is the insecurity of the Anglo-American cultural elites about their own values and moral vision of the world that encourages their frenzied attacks on religion. There is a powerful element of bad faith here: many leftists and liberals denounce those who appeal to moral values as being inferior, but they are also envious of them. So when the 'progressive' Rabbi Michael Lerner criticises his fellow liberals for their 'long-standing disdain for religion' and for being 'tone-deaf to the spiritual needs that underline the move to the Right', he is implicitly paying homage to the power of persuasion among his fundamentalist opponents (4).
In the confused cultural elite's fears of a powerful religious right winning over the masses, we can see a good example of bad faith worrying about real faith.
If you can't beat them…
Lerner represents a growing body of liberal and centrist opinion that recognises it is not enough simply to denounce religion. Intemperate attacks on the religious right resonate with progressives, but such attacks clearly do little to undermine the powerful search for meaning that prevails across society. That is why a growing number of liberal and leftist politicians have called for a new moral dimension in their own political platforms.
In the US, this argument was eloquently spelled out by Roberto Unger and Cornel West in their book The Future of American Progressivism (1998) and by Thomas Frank in his influential What's The Matter With America? (2004). Frank believes that values are important because they can connect with what he refers to as 'they'; that is, normal people. Across the Atlantic in the UK, this point is echoed by New Labour minister Douglas Alexander. In his pamphlet Telling It Like It Could Be, Alexander expresses his concerns that the Labour Party will lose its way if it does not discover a sense of moral purpose.
The sense of desperation with which some opportunist politicians are searching for moral values indicates what they really hate about the Narnia film: that Aslan is not on their side. Aslan possesses a superabundance of faith - something that the cultural and liberal elite conspicuously lack. When Lerner exclaims that the 'last time Democrats had real social power was when they linked their legislative agenda with a spiritual politics articulated by Martin Luther King', he only draws attention to the moral wasteland inhabited by his political associates today (5).
There is now a new genre of pseudo-religious political books written by the spiritual mentors of the left. Lerner's Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul succeeds in combining the platitudes usually associated with third-rate self-help books with the mumbo-jumbo generally associated with dogmatic religious tracts. However, when it comes to banality, Jim Wallis' God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It beats his competitors to the post. This motivational text became an instant bestseller as Democrats looked for ready-made moral formulae with which they might connect with common people. Wallis, billed as a left-wing Evangelical, is critical of the secular dismissal of religion and offers moral values to the disoriented liberal.
The problem with politically motivated calls for the restoration of a moral dimension to public life is that they are driven by the instrumental purpose of gaining or retaining power. But a morality manufactured in response to the demands of political pragmatism is bound to lack any organic relationship to lived experience, and is thus unlikely to find resonance with the wider public. An unfocused and disconnected oligarchy is unlikely to possess sufficient sensitivity to the day-to-day problems confronting the public. That is why the pragmatic search for a ready-made moral purpose usually turns into an arbitrary exercise in picking and choosing some inoffensive values. Alexander ends up by opting for the public service ethos of the National Health Service and tackling world poverty - but it could as easily have been world peace or compassion towards the infirm or the celebration of respect, etc. These arbitrary lists of New Labour Hurrah Values only highlight the absence of a purposeful moral perspective that grows from engagement with the public and our concerns.
At the end of the day, politically motivated calls among liberals and the left for morality are not so far from the way in which Christians 'use' The March of the Penguins or The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Both are cynical gestures driven by political calculations rather than by a moral inspiration that comes from the soul. What is particularly cynical is that these attempts to construct a 'moral dimension' are always aimed at others: those who apparently need 'simple' answers and 'meaning'. Such a cynical view of the public was clearly spelled out by William Davies of the London-based Institute for Public Policy research. 'The liberal, secular left has somehow to find ways of supplying citizens with emotional and metaphysical comforts even when it does not itself believe in such things', he warned (6). This provision of so-called metaphysical comforts serves the same function that adult-invented cautionary tales play for children. Which takes us back to Narnia: clearly the problem is not the comforts provided by CS Lewis, but the way in which they're branded.
A final point. The very term 'metaphysical comforts' suggests values built by calculation, instrumentalism, manipulation and cynicism. Morality marketed by people who do not necessarily 'believe in such things' is unlikely to set the world on fire. That is why they resent and hate the Narnia film so much. For all its faults, the movie attempts to transmit a powerful sense of belief, bravery and sacrifice. Such sentiments are alien to a cultural elite that regards the expression of any sort of strong belief as another form of that dreaded fundamentalism. Envy, bad faith and instrumentalism: these are the raw materials that fuel today's anti-religious crusade.
Frank Furedi is author of Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
From the blog Summa Contra Mundum, thoughts on Benedict's first encyclical:
ENCYCLICAL LETTER
DEUS CARITAS EST
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
BENEDICT XVI
TO THE BISHOPS
PRIESTS AND DEACONS
MEN AND WOMEN RELIGIOUS
AND ALL THE LAY FAITHFUL
ON CHRISTIAN LOVE
First impressions.
This is Benedict XVI's first encyclical, issued on the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord, but delayed in publication for a month. It consists of two parts, the first entitled “The Unity of Love in Creation and in Salvation History,” and the second, entitled “The Practice of Love by the Church as a `Community of Love,'” which gives some apparently uncontroversial comments on the way the Church practices charity. I confess that I was much more interested in the first part, but, as I read, I started to feel guilty that I was a little bored with the concrete details of charity. In fact, I take this to be the point of the encyclical: that charity is, along with the preaching of the Gospel and the sacramental life of the Church, essential. One cannot be a Christian who does not love.
Benedict starts with an exploration of the concept of love. “Love” is a word with many meanings and uses, all of which have at best a tenuous connection. I love my wife, my new fountain pen, my baseball team, pizza, my children, Notre Dame football, and God. Is there some unity to these concepts? Benedict suggests that there is: “Amid this multiplicity of meanings, however, one in particular stands out: love between man and woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness.” (2) This is a striking way of describing love in its erotic dimension: why do we seek the other, often at great expense and difficulty? Because we have glimpsed in her face, in her being, a promise of happiness. “With her, I will be happy,” we may think. Love promises joy.
But isn't it the case, Benedict argues, that the Church restricts this joy? That it encumbers it with rules and “thou shalt not's?” No. Not so. In fact, this desirous, ascending love (called eros in Greek) is a very dangerous thing. When left to itself, it is self-destructive. If one gives in to the passions, one will lose the joy. Benedict speaks of the ancient custom of temple prostitutes, in the days when Eros was a god: “Indeed, the prostitutes in the temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing `divine madness'; far from being goddesses, they were human beings being exploited.” (4) This exploitation is the constant danger inherent in eros. If desire for the other is not purified, it becomes degraded, or, to put it crudely, it ceases to be desire for the other and becomes desire for the other's posterior. The insistence on a higher love is the only way to preserve eros as desire for the other.
The Church presents a different love, called agape, that moves beyond the joy that the other person gives to the self. Rather, it is a complete self-giving to the other, exemplified by Christ on the Cross.
Can these two different loves, eros and agape, be unified? There is a tendency in modern philosophy deriving from Kant to sunder the two. If I help others because it makes me happy, then my actions are not genuinely moral. True love of neighbor should be thoroughly disinterested, in order to be a true example of a good will. Benedict does not mention Kant by name, but It seems to be in the background of his thinking. Can eros and agape be separated? It's another way of asking the question whether being good is the same as being happy.
Benedict answers that they can be united, and, in fact, must be united. He calls eros “ascending love” and agape “descending love”, in that it descends to the other and bestows love. Eros or desire for the other that never matured into concern for the other would be incomplete, and agape without joy would die. “Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow (cf. Jn 7:37-38). Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God (cf. Jn 19:34).” Thus the two loves must go together.
Christianity is unique in that it presents us with the person of Christ, with God made man who incarnates love, and guarantees its possibility. One reaction to the concept of agape is “What's in it for me?” Another is “That's nice, but impossible; people aren't really like that.” But Jesus shows us that it is, and then motivates our love and gives it efficacy. First, we experience the love of Christ. We are not the first movers, but are moved by Him who loves us, that the Byzantine liturgy repeatedly calls philanthropos, the lover of mankind. “In the Church's Liturgy, in her prayer in the living community of believers, we experience the love of God, we perceive his presence and we thus learn to recognize that presence in our daily lives.” (17) God loves us, and in our experience of that love we desire to respond with love of God.
This love of God then becomes the basis of all agape, of all love of neighbor. If I love God, “Then I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend.” (18) The other person is not just a human, just a person, but is loved by God who loves me. Since true love involves a communion of wills, I should love him whom God loves. “If I have no contact whatsoever with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than the other, and I am incapable of seeing in him the image of God.” (18) All reductionism in morality has its root in a failure to acknowledge the other as loved by God.
From this point Benedict talks about the practice of love in the Church, noting that charitable service is present from the beginning, in the establishment of the order of the diaconate (“deacon” means “servant” in Greek) to serve the needs of the poor, through the charitable work of bishops and laity throughout the ages. One thing of note is his continual presentation of three main activities of the Church: Word, sacrament, and charity. Generally I think of Christian life more in terms of the first two than the latter, but it is true that to be a Christian is love.
Does this mean that the gospel and the liturgy can be neglected? No. In fact, to try to love correctly without praying or believing correctly, without nourishing oneself with the Eucharist, will lead to disaster. Our faith in Christ will give us sure hope that all are in God's hands. There is a temptation, when confronted with poverty, to despair of helping, or to embrace revolutionary tactics to do in our time what God does in His time, doing unspeakable things to humans out of love for humanity. “At such times, a living relationship with Christ is decisive if we are to keep on the right path without falling into an arrogant contempt for man, something not only unconstructive but actually destructive, or surrendering to a resignation which would prevent us from being guided by love in the service of others.” (36) The guarantee against these temptations is prayer. Those who would love well must pray well. I am reminded of the saint who said “If you don't have time to pray, you don't have time for anything else.”
The pope ends with a wonderful reflection on Mary's charity, the love she shows by visiting Elizabeth in the final days of her pregnancy, by her tactful intervention at Cana, and by her humble withdrawal from the stage during Jesus' ministry. She is able to do this because her thoughts are imbued with the Word of God; Benedict uses the Magnificat as proof this, since the entire prayer is drawn from the Scriptures. It shows Mary wills as God wills, and it is this co-willing, this union with God, that ultimately makes genuine human love possible.
So much for my summary. I may have more reflections on it later, but I think it is a solid explanation of the Church's teaching on love, and is perhaps motivated by a desire to reach those in Western Europe and the Americas for whom the Church and religion are seen as something joyless, always saying “no” to love. It is the case, as Benedict teaches, that the situation is exactly the opposite. It is only the Christian who can genuinely love. Christians make better lovers, someone could put on a T-shirt. As it is, the encyclical proposes no new norms or disciplinary directives, as many expected would be forthcoming from Benedict. But it does set the stage nicely for all sorts of actions, since it emphasizes that love (eros) is not enough. Augustine says “Love and do what you will,” but that statement is only true if love is complete, a union of eros and agape, and that only comes about by a purification or ascesis of eros. You have to love in the right way, in order to love well.
ENCYCLICAL LETTER
DEUS CARITAS EST
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
BENEDICT XVI
TO THE BISHOPS
PRIESTS AND DEACONS
MEN AND WOMEN RELIGIOUS
AND ALL THE LAY FAITHFUL
ON CHRISTIAN LOVE
First impressions.
This is Benedict XVI's first encyclical, issued on the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord, but delayed in publication for a month. It consists of two parts, the first entitled “The Unity of Love in Creation and in Salvation History,” and the second, entitled “The Practice of Love by the Church as a `Community of Love,'” which gives some apparently uncontroversial comments on the way the Church practices charity. I confess that I was much more interested in the first part, but, as I read, I started to feel guilty that I was a little bored with the concrete details of charity. In fact, I take this to be the point of the encyclical: that charity is, along with the preaching of the Gospel and the sacramental life of the Church, essential. One cannot be a Christian who does not love.
Benedict starts with an exploration of the concept of love. “Love” is a word with many meanings and uses, all of which have at best a tenuous connection. I love my wife, my new fountain pen, my baseball team, pizza, my children, Notre Dame football, and God. Is there some unity to these concepts? Benedict suggests that there is: “Amid this multiplicity of meanings, however, one in particular stands out: love between man and woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness.” (2) This is a striking way of describing love in its erotic dimension: why do we seek the other, often at great expense and difficulty? Because we have glimpsed in her face, in her being, a promise of happiness. “With her, I will be happy,” we may think. Love promises joy.
But isn't it the case, Benedict argues, that the Church restricts this joy? That it encumbers it with rules and “thou shalt not's?” No. Not so. In fact, this desirous, ascending love (called eros in Greek) is a very dangerous thing. When left to itself, it is self-destructive. If one gives in to the passions, one will lose the joy. Benedict speaks of the ancient custom of temple prostitutes, in the days when Eros was a god: “Indeed, the prostitutes in the temple, who had to bestow this divine intoxication, were not treated as human beings and persons, but simply used as a means of arousing `divine madness'; far from being goddesses, they were human beings being exploited.” (4) This exploitation is the constant danger inherent in eros. If desire for the other is not purified, it becomes degraded, or, to put it crudely, it ceases to be desire for the other and becomes desire for the other's posterior. The insistence on a higher love is the only way to preserve eros as desire for the other.
The Church presents a different love, called agape, that moves beyond the joy that the other person gives to the self. Rather, it is a complete self-giving to the other, exemplified by Christ on the Cross.
Can these two different loves, eros and agape, be unified? There is a tendency in modern philosophy deriving from Kant to sunder the two. If I help others because it makes me happy, then my actions are not genuinely moral. True love of neighbor should be thoroughly disinterested, in order to be a true example of a good will. Benedict does not mention Kant by name, but It seems to be in the background of his thinking. Can eros and agape be separated? It's another way of asking the question whether being good is the same as being happy.
Benedict answers that they can be united, and, in fact, must be united. He calls eros “ascending love” and agape “descending love”, in that it descends to the other and bestows love. Eros or desire for the other that never matured into concern for the other would be incomplete, and agape without joy would die. “Anyone who wishes to give love must also receive love as a gift. Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can become a source from which rivers of living water flow (cf. Jn 7:37-38). Yet to become such a source, one must constantly drink anew from the original source, which is Jesus Christ, from whose pierced heart flows the love of God (cf. Jn 19:34).” Thus the two loves must go together.
Christianity is unique in that it presents us with the person of Christ, with God made man who incarnates love, and guarantees its possibility. One reaction to the concept of agape is “What's in it for me?” Another is “That's nice, but impossible; people aren't really like that.” But Jesus shows us that it is, and then motivates our love and gives it efficacy. First, we experience the love of Christ. We are not the first movers, but are moved by Him who loves us, that the Byzantine liturgy repeatedly calls philanthropos, the lover of mankind. “In the Church's Liturgy, in her prayer in the living community of believers, we experience the love of God, we perceive his presence and we thus learn to recognize that presence in our daily lives.” (17) God loves us, and in our experience of that love we desire to respond with love of God.
This love of God then becomes the basis of all agape, of all love of neighbor. If I love God, “Then I learn to look on this other person not simply with my eyes and my feelings, but from the perspective of Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend.” (18) The other person is not just a human, just a person, but is loved by God who loves me. Since true love involves a communion of wills, I should love him whom God loves. “If I have no contact whatsoever with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than the other, and I am incapable of seeing in him the image of God.” (18) All reductionism in morality has its root in a failure to acknowledge the other as loved by God.
From this point Benedict talks about the practice of love in the Church, noting that charitable service is present from the beginning, in the establishment of the order of the diaconate (“deacon” means “servant” in Greek) to serve the needs of the poor, through the charitable work of bishops and laity throughout the ages. One thing of note is his continual presentation of three main activities of the Church: Word, sacrament, and charity. Generally I think of Christian life more in terms of the first two than the latter, but it is true that to be a Christian is love.
Does this mean that the gospel and the liturgy can be neglected? No. In fact, to try to love correctly without praying or believing correctly, without nourishing oneself with the Eucharist, will lead to disaster. Our faith in Christ will give us sure hope that all are in God's hands. There is a temptation, when confronted with poverty, to despair of helping, or to embrace revolutionary tactics to do in our time what God does in His time, doing unspeakable things to humans out of love for humanity. “At such times, a living relationship with Christ is decisive if we are to keep on the right path without falling into an arrogant contempt for man, something not only unconstructive but actually destructive, or surrendering to a resignation which would prevent us from being guided by love in the service of others.” (36) The guarantee against these temptations is prayer. Those who would love well must pray well. I am reminded of the saint who said “If you don't have time to pray, you don't have time for anything else.”
The pope ends with a wonderful reflection on Mary's charity, the love she shows by visiting Elizabeth in the final days of her pregnancy, by her tactful intervention at Cana, and by her humble withdrawal from the stage during Jesus' ministry. She is able to do this because her thoughts are imbued with the Word of God; Benedict uses the Magnificat as proof this, since the entire prayer is drawn from the Scriptures. It shows Mary wills as God wills, and it is this co-willing, this union with God, that ultimately makes genuine human love possible.
So much for my summary. I may have more reflections on it later, but I think it is a solid explanation of the Church's teaching on love, and is perhaps motivated by a desire to reach those in Western Europe and the Americas for whom the Church and religion are seen as something joyless, always saying “no” to love. It is the case, as Benedict teaches, that the situation is exactly the opposite. It is only the Christian who can genuinely love. Christians make better lovers, someone could put on a T-shirt. As it is, the encyclical proposes no new norms or disciplinary directives, as many expected would be forthcoming from Benedict. But it does set the stage nicely for all sorts of actions, since it emphasizes that love (eros) is not enough. Augustine says “Love and do what you will,” but that statement is only true if love is complete, a union of eros and agape, and that only comes about by a purification or ascesis of eros. You have to love in the right way, in order to love well.
Tuesday, January 24, 2006
From The Corner at NRO:
MAGNUM
[Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Seth Leibsohn e-mails:
There are several reasons why every man loved Magnum: first, the associative connection-every man wanted to be Magnum, with the car, the looks, the setting of one's hours...but second, the reality principle-every man was Magnum, for all the good looks (with rare exception), Magnum never could 'get' the girl, she was just out of reach or elusive for complex reasons. Third, his friends-every man had friends in the roles of TC and Rick. Fourth, the anti-communism, the one scene where he' reading National Review, and Higgins (the 'man' or boss whose reality and occasional buzz-kill we all had to face).
MAGNUM
[Kathryn Jean Lopez]
Seth Leibsohn e-mails:
There are several reasons why every man loved Magnum: first, the associative connection-every man wanted to be Magnum, with the car, the looks, the setting of one's hours...but second, the reality principle-every man was Magnum, for all the good looks (with rare exception), Magnum never could 'get' the girl, she was just out of reach or elusive for complex reasons. Third, his friends-every man had friends in the roles of TC and Rick. Fourth, the anti-communism, the one scene where he' reading National Review, and Higgins (the 'man' or boss whose reality and occasional buzz-kill we all had to face).
Monday, January 23, 2006
From Opinion Journal:
Hillary's Plantation
Hillary Clinton reveals her fear of Condi Rice.
By Shelby Steele
Monday, January 23, 2006
Of course Hillary Clinton's recent claim that Republicans run the House of Representatives like a "plantation" was old-fashioned political and racial pandering. After all, she uttered this remark at what certainly would have been a prime venue for her husband: a largely black audience on Martin Luther King Day. So, clearly, she was looking to connect with this most loyal Democratic constituency. But Mrs. Clinton is possessed of a tin ear precisely where her husband is all deftness and charm. Black audiences are beyond her. The room of black faces that brings her husband alive, freezes her in overbearing rectitude.
And yet, pandering of the sort she exhibited on MLK Day requires a convincing human identification in order to work. The political panderer always identifies with the suffering of those pandered to--always "feels their pain." And this is where a tin ear can be disastrous: In giving witness to a group's suffering, one can seem to be shaming the group. Must blacks have their slave past rubbed in their face simply for Hillary Clinton to make a little hay against modern-day Republicans?
When political pandering goes awry, it calls you a name. On an emotional level, many blacks will hear Hillary's remark as follows: "I say Republicans run the House like a plantation because I am speaking to Negroes--the wretched of the earth, a slave people--who will surely know all about plantations." Is this a tin ear or a Freudian slip, blacks will wonder? Does she really see us as she projects us--as a people so backward that our support can be won with a simple plantation reference, and the implication that Republicans are racist? Quite possibly so, since no apology has been forthcoming.
If Newt Gingrich also once used the plantation metaphor in reference to Congress, his goal was only an innocuous one: to be descriptive, not to pander. He was speaking to a reporter, not to a black audience, and he had the good taste to cast himself as a slave who would "lead the slave rebellion." Thus, he identified with the black struggle for freedom, not with the helplessness and humiliation of the plantation slave. If the plantation metaphor will always be inaccurate and hyperbolic where Congress is concerned, at least Mr. Gingrich's use of it carried no offense.
And even Mrs. Clinton's "offense" would have amounted to very little had it come from nothing more than an awkward metaphor. But, in fact, it came from a corruption in post-'60s liberalism and Democratic politics that profoundly insults blacks. Mrs. Clinton came to Al Sharpton's MLK celebration looking for an easy harvest of black votes. And she knew the drill--white liberals and Dems whistle for the black vote by pandering to the black sense of grievance. Once positioned as the white champions of this grievance, they actually turn black resentment into white liberal power. Today, Democrats cannot be competitive without this alchemy. So Mrs. Clinton's real insult to blacks--one far uglier than her plantation metaphor--is to value them only for their sense of grievance.
Mrs. Clinton's husband was a master of this alchemy, and his presidency also illustrated its greatest advantage. Once black grievance is morphed into liberal power, it need never be honored. President Clinton notoriously felt black pain, won the black vote, and then rewarded blacks with the cold shower of welfare reform. And here, now, is Mrs. Clinton sidling up to the trough of black grievance, eyes wide in expectation, but also a tad contemptuous. It is hard to fully respect one's suckers.
A great achievement of modern liberalism--and a primary reason for its surviving decades past the credibility of its ideas--is that it captured black resentment as an exclusive source of power. It even gave this resentment a Democratic Party affiliation. (Antiwar sentiment is the other great source of liberal power, but it is not the steady provider that black and minority resentment has been.) Republicans have often envied this power, but have never competed well for it because it can be accessed only by pandering to the socialistic longings of minority leaders--vast government spending, social programs, higher taxes and so on. Republicans and conservatives have simply never had an easy or glib mechanism for addressing profound social grievances.
But this Republican "weakness" has now begun to emerge as a great--if still largely potential--Republican advantage. Precisely because Republicans cannot easily pander to black grievance, they have no need to value blacks only for their sense of grievance. Unlike Democrats, they can celebrate what is positive and constructive in minority life without losing power. The dilemma for Democrats, liberals and the civil rights establishment is that they become redundant and lose power the instant blacks move beyond grievance and begin to succeed by dint of their own hard work. So they persecute such blacks, attack their credibility as blacks, just as they pander to blacks who define their political relationship to America through grievance. Republicans are generally freer of the political bigotry by which the left either panders to or persecutes black Americans.
No one on the current political scene better embodies this Republican advantage than the current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. The archetype that Ms. Rice represents is "overcoming" rather than grievance. Despite a childhood in the segregated South that might entitle her to a grievance identity, she has clearly chosen that older black American tradition in which blacks neither deny injustice nor allow themselves to be defined by it. This tradition, as Ralph Ellison once put it, "springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done." And, because Ms. Rice is grounded in this tradition, she is of absolutely no value to modern liberalism or the Democratic Party despite her many talents and achievements. Quite the reverse, she is their worst nightmare. If blacks were to take her example and embrace overcoming rather than grievance, the wound to liberalism would be mortal. It is impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton's "plantation" pandering in a room full of Condi Rices.
This is why so many Republicans (including Laura Bush) now salivate at the thought of a Rice presidential bid. No other potential Republican candidate could--to borrow an old Marxist phrase--better "heighten the contradictions" of modern liberalism and Democratic power than Ms. Rice. The more ugly her persecution by the civil rights establishment and the left, the more she would give liberalism the look of communism in its last days--an ideology long since hollowed of its idealism and left with nothing save its meanness and repressiveness. Who can say what Ms. Rice will do. But history is calling her, or someone like her. She is the object of a deep longing in America for race to be finally handled, not by political idealisms, but by the classic principles of freedom and fairness.
Idealisms quickly descend into evil because they are so easily seized as a means to ordinary power. The politics of black uplift was once an idealism, but today it has become the work of hacks, tired apparatchiks and petty demagogues looking for power. And there, on TV last week, as if to illustrate this truth, was the specter of Mrs. Clinton and Al Sharpton embracing at the podium, mere captives of power making the tired charge--via an encrusted plantation metaphor--that Republicans are racists. What exhaustion! And what evil, to labor so hard at keeping blacks mired in grievance. Kind of reminds one of a plantation, though here the harvest is surely grievance rather than cotton.
Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era," forthcoming from HarperCollins.
Hillary's Plantation
Hillary Clinton reveals her fear of Condi Rice.
By Shelby Steele
Monday, January 23, 2006
Of course Hillary Clinton's recent claim that Republicans run the House of Representatives like a "plantation" was old-fashioned political and racial pandering. After all, she uttered this remark at what certainly would have been a prime venue for her husband: a largely black audience on Martin Luther King Day. So, clearly, she was looking to connect with this most loyal Democratic constituency. But Mrs. Clinton is possessed of a tin ear precisely where her husband is all deftness and charm. Black audiences are beyond her. The room of black faces that brings her husband alive, freezes her in overbearing rectitude.
And yet, pandering of the sort she exhibited on MLK Day requires a convincing human identification in order to work. The political panderer always identifies with the suffering of those pandered to--always "feels their pain." And this is where a tin ear can be disastrous: In giving witness to a group's suffering, one can seem to be shaming the group. Must blacks have their slave past rubbed in their face simply for Hillary Clinton to make a little hay against modern-day Republicans?
When political pandering goes awry, it calls you a name. On an emotional level, many blacks will hear Hillary's remark as follows: "I say Republicans run the House like a plantation because I am speaking to Negroes--the wretched of the earth, a slave people--who will surely know all about plantations." Is this a tin ear or a Freudian slip, blacks will wonder? Does she really see us as she projects us--as a people so backward that our support can be won with a simple plantation reference, and the implication that Republicans are racist? Quite possibly so, since no apology has been forthcoming.
If Newt Gingrich also once used the plantation metaphor in reference to Congress, his goal was only an innocuous one: to be descriptive, not to pander. He was speaking to a reporter, not to a black audience, and he had the good taste to cast himself as a slave who would "lead the slave rebellion." Thus, he identified with the black struggle for freedom, not with the helplessness and humiliation of the plantation slave. If the plantation metaphor will always be inaccurate and hyperbolic where Congress is concerned, at least Mr. Gingrich's use of it carried no offense.
And even Mrs. Clinton's "offense" would have amounted to very little had it come from nothing more than an awkward metaphor. But, in fact, it came from a corruption in post-'60s liberalism and Democratic politics that profoundly insults blacks. Mrs. Clinton came to Al Sharpton's MLK celebration looking for an easy harvest of black votes. And she knew the drill--white liberals and Dems whistle for the black vote by pandering to the black sense of grievance. Once positioned as the white champions of this grievance, they actually turn black resentment into white liberal power. Today, Democrats cannot be competitive without this alchemy. So Mrs. Clinton's real insult to blacks--one far uglier than her plantation metaphor--is to value them only for their sense of grievance.
Mrs. Clinton's husband was a master of this alchemy, and his presidency also illustrated its greatest advantage. Once black grievance is morphed into liberal power, it need never be honored. President Clinton notoriously felt black pain, won the black vote, and then rewarded blacks with the cold shower of welfare reform. And here, now, is Mrs. Clinton sidling up to the trough of black grievance, eyes wide in expectation, but also a tad contemptuous. It is hard to fully respect one's suckers.
A great achievement of modern liberalism--and a primary reason for its surviving decades past the credibility of its ideas--is that it captured black resentment as an exclusive source of power. It even gave this resentment a Democratic Party affiliation. (Antiwar sentiment is the other great source of liberal power, but it is not the steady provider that black and minority resentment has been.) Republicans have often envied this power, but have never competed well for it because it can be accessed only by pandering to the socialistic longings of minority leaders--vast government spending, social programs, higher taxes and so on. Republicans and conservatives have simply never had an easy or glib mechanism for addressing profound social grievances.
But this Republican "weakness" has now begun to emerge as a great--if still largely potential--Republican advantage. Precisely because Republicans cannot easily pander to black grievance, they have no need to value blacks only for their sense of grievance. Unlike Democrats, they can celebrate what is positive and constructive in minority life without losing power. The dilemma for Democrats, liberals and the civil rights establishment is that they become redundant and lose power the instant blacks move beyond grievance and begin to succeed by dint of their own hard work. So they persecute such blacks, attack their credibility as blacks, just as they pander to blacks who define their political relationship to America through grievance. Republicans are generally freer of the political bigotry by which the left either panders to or persecutes black Americans.
No one on the current political scene better embodies this Republican advantage than the current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. The archetype that Ms. Rice represents is "overcoming" rather than grievance. Despite a childhood in the segregated South that might entitle her to a grievance identity, she has clearly chosen that older black American tradition in which blacks neither deny injustice nor allow themselves to be defined by it. This tradition, as Ralph Ellison once put it, "springs not from a desire to deny the harshness of existence but from a will to deal with it as men at their best have always done." And, because Ms. Rice is grounded in this tradition, she is of absolutely no value to modern liberalism or the Democratic Party despite her many talents and achievements. Quite the reverse, she is their worst nightmare. If blacks were to take her example and embrace overcoming rather than grievance, the wound to liberalism would be mortal. It is impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton's "plantation" pandering in a room full of Condi Rices.
This is why so many Republicans (including Laura Bush) now salivate at the thought of a Rice presidential bid. No other potential Republican candidate could--to borrow an old Marxist phrase--better "heighten the contradictions" of modern liberalism and Democratic power than Ms. Rice. The more ugly her persecution by the civil rights establishment and the left, the more she would give liberalism the look of communism in its last days--an ideology long since hollowed of its idealism and left with nothing save its meanness and repressiveness. Who can say what Ms. Rice will do. But history is calling her, or someone like her. She is the object of a deep longing in America for race to be finally handled, not by political idealisms, but by the classic principles of freedom and fairness.
Idealisms quickly descend into evil because they are so easily seized as a means to ordinary power. The politics of black uplift was once an idealism, but today it has become the work of hacks, tired apparatchiks and petty demagogues looking for power. And there, on TV last week, as if to illustrate this truth, was the specter of Mrs. Clinton and Al Sharpton embracing at the podium, mere captives of power making the tired charge--via an encrusted plantation metaphor--that Republicans are racists. What exhaustion! And what evil, to labor so hard at keeping blacks mired in grievance. Kind of reminds one of a plantation, though here the harvest is surely grievance rather than cotton.
Mr. Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the author of "White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era," forthcoming from HarperCollins.
From Backstreets.com:
HAMMERSMITH: IT'S NOT JUST FOR VIDEO ANYMORE
1975 London concert to get 2CD release on February 28
What would, until very recently, have been a shout-it-from-the-hilltops event -- a new live album from Springsteen and the E Street Band, consisting of a complete show from 1975 -- will likely be rolled out with little fanfare by Columbia and perhaps even met with a shrug from some fans.
But the fact that this Hammersmith concert has already been released on video form on DVD (as part of the Born to Run 30th anniversary box) makes this no less momentous: a fine addition to Springsteen's album canon, with the young-and-hungry E Street Band woefully under-represented in live album form; a boon to fans who'd like to take this show on the road in cars or iPods; and yet another step toward a why-don't-they-just-do-it? series of releases from the archives. Hammersmith Odeon, London '75 will be issued as a two-CD set on February 28 and available through iTunes even sooner, on February 7.
HAMMERSMITH: IT'S NOT JUST FOR VIDEO ANYMORE
1975 London concert to get 2CD release on February 28
What would, until very recently, have been a shout-it-from-the-hilltops event -- a new live album from Springsteen and the E Street Band, consisting of a complete show from 1975 -- will likely be rolled out with little fanfare by Columbia and perhaps even met with a shrug from some fans.
But the fact that this Hammersmith concert has already been released on video form on DVD (as part of the Born to Run 30th anniversary box) makes this no less momentous: a fine addition to Springsteen's album canon, with the young-and-hungry E Street Band woefully under-represented in live album form; a boon to fans who'd like to take this show on the road in cars or iPods; and yet another step toward a why-don't-they-just-do-it? series of releases from the archives. Hammersmith Odeon, London '75 will be issued as a two-CD set on February 28 and available through iTunes even sooner, on February 7.
Sunday, January 22, 2006
Don't Delay, Clean House
By Debra Saunders
House Republicans are scrambling to rub some of the tarnish off their dingy ethics image. They're desperately proposing reforms that would prevent members from taking pricey golf junkets paid for by special interests -- that is, they want to ban trips they never should have accepted. They're even holding a Feb. 2 in-House election to replace the indicted Texan Rep. Tom DeLay as House majority leader.
Give it up. A new face on the organizational chart picked from Team DeLay won't save the sorry image of House Repubs. Ditto ethics rules that any half-competent politician can subvert faster than you can say "election lawyer." If Republicans want to convince voters that they've reformed, here's a suggestion: Pick Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo., to replace DeLay.
It would be glorious payback. When Hefley was chairman of the House ethics committee, he stood up to DeLay. In 2004, his committee unanimously admonished DeLay three times -- for offering to trade a candidate endorsement for a vote in favor of the Medicare drug plan, for cozying up to energy lobbyists in a way that "at a minimum, created the appearance that donors were being provided with special access" and for asking a federal agency to track a plane carrying members of the Texas Legislature during a political squabble. GOP biggies were miffed -- not at DeLay, as they should have been, but at Hefley.
In retaliation, the GOP leadership announced it would change committee rules to make it harder to investigate complaints, and thus shielded DeLay. Hefley complained that the changes threatened "the integrity of the House." The GOP leadership kindly dumped Hefley and found a new man to chair the committee.
What better man to replace DeLay then the man who lost a committee for standing up to "The Hammer"?
As the Almanac of American Politics noted, Hefley said of DeLay: "He lets me know repeatedly I'm not part of his team, and that's fine. I don't want to be part of his team."
Here's another welcome departure from the frenzied logrolling that has been endemic under House Speaker Dennis Hastert: "He often offers amendments to cut appropriations by 1 percent and in September 2004 stripped dozens of transportation projects off an appropriation because they had not been authorized," wrote the Almanac. Hefley had explained, "It's just an exercise to illustrate that you ought to do it by the proper procedure."
Hefley's Web site targets "the Porker of the Week" -- and if Hefley doesn't find a porker every week, at least he is willing to target the worst projects pushed by the most profligate Republicans. In November, for example, Hefley took after the infamous $320 million earmark for Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere."
And this is downright quaint: Hefley raised a measly $100,000 for his last re-election campaign, and won handily.
Under Hastert and DeLay, the GOP leadership has betrayed Republican principles. Deficit spending has been the leadership's crutch, and fund raising its addiction. It's clear DeLay and his cronies would still be living large and skirting rules if uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff had not pleaded guilty to defrauding Indian tribal clients, conspiring to bribe members of Congress and evading taxes. If the GOP is calling for reforms, it's not because the party saw the light. It's because the leaders got caught.
That's not why voters elect Republicans. The GOP is built on people who want less government, not record spending. They want their lawmakers to be pro-business, but also expect their representatives to feel more allegiance to their constituents than sleazy lobbyists flashing first-class plane tickets.
Hefley spokesperson Kim Sears told me the congressman has received "some encouragement" to pursue the plum House majority leader position, but he is "not actively seeking it." As Hefley told Sears, to win leadership posts, a member has to devote years to working up the ladder -- it doesn't seem likely that a lawmaker who put his district first could become leader.
Changing the ethics rules won't help the Republicans if they continue to choose leaders because they are the biggest fund-raisers and the best backslappers. If Republicans want to get back to their philosophical roots, they should find a leader who remembers why he went to Washington. They should choose a leader who still believes in "the integrity of the House."
By Debra Saunders
House Republicans are scrambling to rub some of the tarnish off their dingy ethics image. They're desperately proposing reforms that would prevent members from taking pricey golf junkets paid for by special interests -- that is, they want to ban trips they never should have accepted. They're even holding a Feb. 2 in-House election to replace the indicted Texan Rep. Tom DeLay as House majority leader.
Give it up. A new face on the organizational chart picked from Team DeLay won't save the sorry image of House Repubs. Ditto ethics rules that any half-competent politician can subvert faster than you can say "election lawyer." If Republicans want to convince voters that they've reformed, here's a suggestion: Pick Rep. Joel Hefley, R-Colo., to replace DeLay.
It would be glorious payback. When Hefley was chairman of the House ethics committee, he stood up to DeLay. In 2004, his committee unanimously admonished DeLay three times -- for offering to trade a candidate endorsement for a vote in favor of the Medicare drug plan, for cozying up to energy lobbyists in a way that "at a minimum, created the appearance that donors were being provided with special access" and for asking a federal agency to track a plane carrying members of the Texas Legislature during a political squabble. GOP biggies were miffed -- not at DeLay, as they should have been, but at Hefley.
In retaliation, the GOP leadership announced it would change committee rules to make it harder to investigate complaints, and thus shielded DeLay. Hefley complained that the changes threatened "the integrity of the House." The GOP leadership kindly dumped Hefley and found a new man to chair the committee.
What better man to replace DeLay then the man who lost a committee for standing up to "The Hammer"?
As the Almanac of American Politics noted, Hefley said of DeLay: "He lets me know repeatedly I'm not part of his team, and that's fine. I don't want to be part of his team."
Here's another welcome departure from the frenzied logrolling that has been endemic under House Speaker Dennis Hastert: "He often offers amendments to cut appropriations by 1 percent and in September 2004 stripped dozens of transportation projects off an appropriation because they had not been authorized," wrote the Almanac. Hefley had explained, "It's just an exercise to illustrate that you ought to do it by the proper procedure."
Hefley's Web site targets "the Porker of the Week" -- and if Hefley doesn't find a porker every week, at least he is willing to target the worst projects pushed by the most profligate Republicans. In November, for example, Hefley took after the infamous $320 million earmark for Alaska's "Bridge to Nowhere."
And this is downright quaint: Hefley raised a measly $100,000 for his last re-election campaign, and won handily.
Under Hastert and DeLay, the GOP leadership has betrayed Republican principles. Deficit spending has been the leadership's crutch, and fund raising its addiction. It's clear DeLay and his cronies would still be living large and skirting rules if uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff had not pleaded guilty to defrauding Indian tribal clients, conspiring to bribe members of Congress and evading taxes. If the GOP is calling for reforms, it's not because the party saw the light. It's because the leaders got caught.
That's not why voters elect Republicans. The GOP is built on people who want less government, not record spending. They want their lawmakers to be pro-business, but also expect their representatives to feel more allegiance to their constituents than sleazy lobbyists flashing first-class plane tickets.
Hefley spokesperson Kim Sears told me the congressman has received "some encouragement" to pursue the plum House majority leader position, but he is "not actively seeking it." As Hefley told Sears, to win leadership posts, a member has to devote years to working up the ladder -- it doesn't seem likely that a lawmaker who put his district first could become leader.
Changing the ethics rules won't help the Republicans if they continue to choose leaders because they are the biggest fund-raisers and the best backslappers. If Republicans want to get back to their philosophical roots, they should find a leader who remembers why he went to Washington. They should choose a leader who still believes in "the integrity of the House."
From The New York Times:
Rosanne Cash Walks a Line of Her Own
By ALAN LIGHT
RECENTLY, Rosanne Cash - singer, songwriter, Grammy winner, author and member of the first family of country music - heard her daughter Chelsea's songs for the first time. "She's like a Southern, female Leonard Cohen," said Ms. Cash, "and when I heard the songs I thought, man, I can relax. She's so much better than I was at her age, she got there so much quicker - maybe that's what happens generation to generation."
Soon after, Chelsea, who is 23, called with a question. "She wanted to know how you can be a musician and not have a public life," Ms. Cash recounted with a full-throated laugh. "And I told her, maybe she better ask somebody else."
Relationships between parents and children, between the past and the future, between public and private lives are among the threads running through Ms. Cash's new album, "Black Cadillac" (which is being released this week on Capitol). Its 12 songs were written between the spring of 2003 and the spring of 2005, a period in which Ms. Cash, now 50, lost three parents: her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin; her stepmother, June Carter Cash; and, in between, her father, Johnny Cash.
With her characteristic sense of craft and precision, Ms. Cash explores a kaleidoscopic range of experiences related to loss and mortality on "Black Cadillac," reaching from when her parents first met through her responses to their passing, her anger, her regrets. Sipping tea a few blocks from her home in Chelsea, she described the album as "a map - a geographical map, a spiritual map, an emotional map - and I was just examining the different spots and corners."
She added that she had been intimidated by tackling this subject matter, and that despite a career nearing 30 years, these songs "felt like a paradigm shift for me as a writer, and as a person."
"You kind of get transformed when you lose your parents," she added. "There's nobody to rebel against, nobody to report to."
Once Ms. Cash decided, in the weeks following her father's death in September 2003, that she would be devoting a full album to this theme, she maintains that her greatest challenge came in showing the proper restraint. "I had to be so careful about not tilting over into self-pity or sentimentality, because either of those things would have killed it," she said. And she said her husband, John Leventhal, who produced half the songs on the album, told her: " 'You've got to make sure you write some songs that have geography and artifacts in them. Get outside yourself.' He reminded me to keep my spirit taut and not disintegrate into navel-gazing. That kind of writing, the self-absorbed, precious thing, really creeps me out."
It's hard to imagine her lapsing into self-indulgence. The songs she has written over the past three decades - including 11 No. 1 country hits (many of them spotlighted on a recent reissue series of her finest albums) - have been defined by their focus and integrity. On her 1981 breakthrough single, "Seven Year Ache," she confronted the challenges of sustaining a relationship, and did so in a voice that was strikingly mature for a 25-year-old. One of her most acclaimed albums, "Interiors" (1990), was a spare, finely etched chronicle of the end of her marriage to the singer and songwriter Rodney Crowell. Subsequent recordings have established her as one of the few voices in pop music offering the perspective of a grown woman, complete with fears, doubts and triumphs.
"Although a lot of men like Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam were seen as being responsible for the 'great credibility scare' of the 80's, " the country singer Lee Ann Womack said via e-mail, "it was a woman who actually paved the way. That woman was Rosanne Cash."
The singer Robbie Fulks said, also via e-mail, "She's one of those who have forcefully expanded the idea of what 'country music' can be, and who it can reach - a rare accomplishment and (in her case anyway) an admirable one."
Musically, Ms. Cash has long blurred the line between country, pop and rock, even experimenting with new wave on 1985's "Rhythm and Romance" before settling into the roots-tinged adult pop sound of her recent work (a style much closer to Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shawn Colvin and even Sheryl Crow than to anything on country radio). "Black Cadillac" flows effortlessly from intimate acoustic moments to bluegrass-inflected songs like "House on the Lake," mirroring the scope and ambition of the lyrics.
Along with such musical curiosity, Ms. Cash - the eldest of Johnny Cash's four daughters - seems to have inherited from her father a certain sense of gravity. There's nothing frivolous about her, in her songs or her conversation. Like most New York City parents, she will speak at length about the joys of her four children (three with Mr. Crowell, one with Mr. Leventhal) and the headaches of school placement for Jake, the youngest. But she does so with the same intensity with which she discusses her work.
"Rosanne's writing is perfectly in sync with her life," said Lyle Lovett, who has toured and recorded with her. "What makes her special as a writer is what makes her special as a person - she's thoughtful, sensitive, perceptive. She writes about things that are real to her, and that's why you don't just listen to her songs, you feel them."
Ms. Cash, the author of a novel and a children's book and the editor of a collection of short stories written by musicians, possesses a sharp and diverse intellect. She sent an e-mail message the day after our interview that - "lest you think I'm being original," she wrote - mentioned other works of art that deal with death and grief, from albums by Lou Reed and Loudon Wainwright III to an exhibition titled "Mélancolie" that she attended in Paris ("From the obvious William Blake, Dante, Dürer, etc., up through Victorian sentimentality, and visions of madness and mise-en-scènes of death and despair").
Of course, the loss of loved ones is usually a private matter. But what if the people you think of as parents are thought of by the rest of the world as celebrities and country music royalty? It's never been more so than at this very moment, with the film "Walk the Line" winning over new fans (and garnering awards); Johnny Cash's 1998 autobiography, "Cash," back on the best-seller lists; and "Ring of Fire," a musical based on his work, heading soon to Broadway.
Ms. Cash, who spent several years in the 70's as part of Johnny and June's road show, tried not to emphasize the public aspects of her parents' lives.
"The back story is huge," she said, "and there's no need for me to say anything else about that, because people already have their own versions, their own feelings about it. I have my own feelings about the back story, but they're private. I know that there are people who have impulses to reveal more about themselves and their families and to correct the story and get it straight, but I have no impulses for that. It doesn't matter to me."
But she bristles at the suggestion, which some have already registered, that "Black Cadillac" exploits her family's fame. "What am I supposed to do, go in the corner and hide because the world wants to make my father an icon?" she said. "Just not do my work? I've been doing this for 28 years, but I should stop now because everybody else is out of their minds?"
Those who share her experience, however, stand by her decisions. "Rosanne Cash has been and will remain an honest artist," said Holly Williams, granddaughter of Hank Williams and daughter of Hank Jr. "We both know what it's like to grow up with the pressure of a famous last name, but she didn't let that change her unique style."
Ms. Cash delayed the release of the album, which had been scheduled for September, to move it further from the opening of "Walk the Line," only to bump up against Oscar buzz for the movie's stars, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, who both won Golden Globes last week. As for the Broadway musical, she said: "I know I should be really nice and say 'Oh, it's fantastic,' but I have no feelings about it, to tell you the truth. I have all my dad's records myself and my own memories, and I don't know if I need to do that. I certainly didn't need the movie." (Although her sister Cindy criticized the film for what she felt was a harsh depiction of Ms. Liberto, Mr. Cash's first wife, Ms. Cash said that "I thought my mother was portrayed pretty fairly; she was a woman who wanted to hold her family together, and that was pretty clear.")
In any case, she says that she had no choice but to write the songs on "Black Cadillac," and that they arrived with a power she had never felt before. "I was kept awake at night by some of them," she said. "Usually if I'm writing, I can put it aside and come back to it, but this was very all-consuming." With the album completed, Ms. Cash is making plans to tour this summer (when Jake will be finished with first grade and can join her on the road), and continues work on her third book, a memoir.
But as intense and personal as the songwriting process was, she sees the result as a matter of shared experience. "What I think about is how many funerals I've been to in the last five years," she said. "I'm a baby boomer - this is what's happening to us right now. It's not like I'm the first person to lose my parents, it just so happens that they were incredibly famous. But I've given this record to friends of mine who've lost parents, and they tell me what's meaningful to them about these songs, and to me that service is the ultimate. If that doesn't happen, then it's just narcissism."
Rosanne Cash Walks a Line of Her Own
By ALAN LIGHT
RECENTLY, Rosanne Cash - singer, songwriter, Grammy winner, author and member of the first family of country music - heard her daughter Chelsea's songs for the first time. "She's like a Southern, female Leonard Cohen," said Ms. Cash, "and when I heard the songs I thought, man, I can relax. She's so much better than I was at her age, she got there so much quicker - maybe that's what happens generation to generation."
Soon after, Chelsea, who is 23, called with a question. "She wanted to know how you can be a musician and not have a public life," Ms. Cash recounted with a full-throated laugh. "And I told her, maybe she better ask somebody else."
Relationships between parents and children, between the past and the future, between public and private lives are among the threads running through Ms. Cash's new album, "Black Cadillac" (which is being released this week on Capitol). Its 12 songs were written between the spring of 2003 and the spring of 2005, a period in which Ms. Cash, now 50, lost three parents: her mother, Vivian Liberto Cash Distin; her stepmother, June Carter Cash; and, in between, her father, Johnny Cash.
With her characteristic sense of craft and precision, Ms. Cash explores a kaleidoscopic range of experiences related to loss and mortality on "Black Cadillac," reaching from when her parents first met through her responses to their passing, her anger, her regrets. Sipping tea a few blocks from her home in Chelsea, she described the album as "a map - a geographical map, a spiritual map, an emotional map - and I was just examining the different spots and corners."
She added that she had been intimidated by tackling this subject matter, and that despite a career nearing 30 years, these songs "felt like a paradigm shift for me as a writer, and as a person."
"You kind of get transformed when you lose your parents," she added. "There's nobody to rebel against, nobody to report to."
Once Ms. Cash decided, in the weeks following her father's death in September 2003, that she would be devoting a full album to this theme, she maintains that her greatest challenge came in showing the proper restraint. "I had to be so careful about not tilting over into self-pity or sentimentality, because either of those things would have killed it," she said. And she said her husband, John Leventhal, who produced half the songs on the album, told her: " 'You've got to make sure you write some songs that have geography and artifacts in them. Get outside yourself.' He reminded me to keep my spirit taut and not disintegrate into navel-gazing. That kind of writing, the self-absorbed, precious thing, really creeps me out."
It's hard to imagine her lapsing into self-indulgence. The songs she has written over the past three decades - including 11 No. 1 country hits (many of them spotlighted on a recent reissue series of her finest albums) - have been defined by their focus and integrity. On her 1981 breakthrough single, "Seven Year Ache," she confronted the challenges of sustaining a relationship, and did so in a voice that was strikingly mature for a 25-year-old. One of her most acclaimed albums, "Interiors" (1990), was a spare, finely etched chronicle of the end of her marriage to the singer and songwriter Rodney Crowell. Subsequent recordings have established her as one of the few voices in pop music offering the perspective of a grown woman, complete with fears, doubts and triumphs.
"Although a lot of men like Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle and Dwight Yoakam were seen as being responsible for the 'great credibility scare' of the 80's, " the country singer Lee Ann Womack said via e-mail, "it was a woman who actually paved the way. That woman was Rosanne Cash."
The singer Robbie Fulks said, also via e-mail, "She's one of those who have forcefully expanded the idea of what 'country music' can be, and who it can reach - a rare accomplishment and (in her case anyway) an admirable one."
Musically, Ms. Cash has long blurred the line between country, pop and rock, even experimenting with new wave on 1985's "Rhythm and Romance" before settling into the roots-tinged adult pop sound of her recent work (a style much closer to Mary Chapin Carpenter, Shawn Colvin and even Sheryl Crow than to anything on country radio). "Black Cadillac" flows effortlessly from intimate acoustic moments to bluegrass-inflected songs like "House on the Lake," mirroring the scope and ambition of the lyrics.
Along with such musical curiosity, Ms. Cash - the eldest of Johnny Cash's four daughters - seems to have inherited from her father a certain sense of gravity. There's nothing frivolous about her, in her songs or her conversation. Like most New York City parents, she will speak at length about the joys of her four children (three with Mr. Crowell, one with Mr. Leventhal) and the headaches of school placement for Jake, the youngest. But she does so with the same intensity with which she discusses her work.
"Rosanne's writing is perfectly in sync with her life," said Lyle Lovett, who has toured and recorded with her. "What makes her special as a writer is what makes her special as a person - she's thoughtful, sensitive, perceptive. She writes about things that are real to her, and that's why you don't just listen to her songs, you feel them."
Ms. Cash, the author of a novel and a children's book and the editor of a collection of short stories written by musicians, possesses a sharp and diverse intellect. She sent an e-mail message the day after our interview that - "lest you think I'm being original," she wrote - mentioned other works of art that deal with death and grief, from albums by Lou Reed and Loudon Wainwright III to an exhibition titled "Mélancolie" that she attended in Paris ("From the obvious William Blake, Dante, Dürer, etc., up through Victorian sentimentality, and visions of madness and mise-en-scènes of death and despair").
Of course, the loss of loved ones is usually a private matter. But what if the people you think of as parents are thought of by the rest of the world as celebrities and country music royalty? It's never been more so than at this very moment, with the film "Walk the Line" winning over new fans (and garnering awards); Johnny Cash's 1998 autobiography, "Cash," back on the best-seller lists; and "Ring of Fire," a musical based on his work, heading soon to Broadway.
Ms. Cash, who spent several years in the 70's as part of Johnny and June's road show, tried not to emphasize the public aspects of her parents' lives.
"The back story is huge," she said, "and there's no need for me to say anything else about that, because people already have their own versions, their own feelings about it. I have my own feelings about the back story, but they're private. I know that there are people who have impulses to reveal more about themselves and their families and to correct the story and get it straight, but I have no impulses for that. It doesn't matter to me."
But she bristles at the suggestion, which some have already registered, that "Black Cadillac" exploits her family's fame. "What am I supposed to do, go in the corner and hide because the world wants to make my father an icon?" she said. "Just not do my work? I've been doing this for 28 years, but I should stop now because everybody else is out of their minds?"
Those who share her experience, however, stand by her decisions. "Rosanne Cash has been and will remain an honest artist," said Holly Williams, granddaughter of Hank Williams and daughter of Hank Jr. "We both know what it's like to grow up with the pressure of a famous last name, but she didn't let that change her unique style."
Ms. Cash delayed the release of the album, which had been scheduled for September, to move it further from the opening of "Walk the Line," only to bump up against Oscar buzz for the movie's stars, Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, who both won Golden Globes last week. As for the Broadway musical, she said: "I know I should be really nice and say 'Oh, it's fantastic,' but I have no feelings about it, to tell you the truth. I have all my dad's records myself and my own memories, and I don't know if I need to do that. I certainly didn't need the movie." (Although her sister Cindy criticized the film for what she felt was a harsh depiction of Ms. Liberto, Mr. Cash's first wife, Ms. Cash said that "I thought my mother was portrayed pretty fairly; she was a woman who wanted to hold her family together, and that was pretty clear.")
In any case, she says that she had no choice but to write the songs on "Black Cadillac," and that they arrived with a power she had never felt before. "I was kept awake at night by some of them," she said. "Usually if I'm writing, I can put it aside and come back to it, but this was very all-consuming." With the album completed, Ms. Cash is making plans to tour this summer (when Jake will be finished with first grade and can join her on the road), and continues work on her third book, a memoir.
But as intense and personal as the songwriting process was, she sees the result as a matter of shared experience. "What I think about is how many funerals I've been to in the last five years," she said. "I'm a baby boomer - this is what's happening to us right now. It's not like I'm the first person to lose my parents, it just so happens that they were incredibly famous. But I've given this record to friends of mine who've lost parents, and they tell me what's meaningful to them about these songs, and to me that service is the ultimate. If that doesn't happen, then it's just narcissism."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
