Flower Power

Went down to see the Sakura (cherry blossoms) at the University of Washington this weekend. It seems even birds enjoy flowers.

Lip Service

Good Morning America was still talking about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright this morning. Must have been a slow news day yesterday.

Anyway, I was wondering why no-one else had encountered this sort of issue. But it occurred to me that someone has. Well, sort of, anyway. When Senator John Kerry was running for president, he was dogged by a persistent question:

"Can Kerry be a good Catholic and yet take positions as a lawmaker that contradict the teachings of the church on 'life issues,' especially abortion and embryonic stem-cell research?"
"John Kerry's Catholic Problem" Terry Eastland - The Daily Standard

Kerry's problem wasn't that people felt that his choice of church meant that he wasn't committed to his politics - it was that people felt that his politics showed that we wasn't committed to his church.

Somehow, I suspect that Senator Hillary Clinton would have the same problem, if someone cared to look. I don't know where she goes to church, outside of having encountered a David Horsey comic in which he ribs her about trying to appeal to Evangelicals by touting her Methodist upbringing. Now, I've never been to a Methodist church before, but I suspect that their doctrine is no more pro-choice than Roman Catholicism. But no-one has accused her of being a closet pro-lifer, despite that fact.

So in the end, it seems that Obama's problem is only partially his former pastor. It's also the fact, that unlike pretty much every other candidate, he's expected to take his pastor seriously.

Self Service

"Greed doesn't self regulate"
Ben Wiseley

Robert Salisbury has his Jacksonville, Oregon home ransacked by people who'd read a Craigslist ad claiming that he'd been forced to leave the area suddenly, and that he was abandoning all of his worldly possessions, including his horse, to anyone who wanted them. Sure enough, the locusts appeared.

I find it hard to believe that people honestly thought that this was on the level, especially in light of the fact that just last year, the same thing happened in Tacoma. It wasn't just a local story - it showed up in the New York Times, for crying out loud. One woman, after having taken Salisbury's horse, decided that something wasn't kosher and called the police to verify that things were as they seemed. And when they weren't, she returned the things she'd taken. Others however, when confronted, insisted that the ad was genuine, and that they were entitled to take what they wanted.

One wonders why we're so upset with our government for going out of its way to avoid finding out what they wanted to believe about Iraq to be false when it seems pretty clear that a segment of the general population is willing to turn a blind eye to the truth when it gets between them and looting someone's home.

Now I've Seen Everything

I'd never heard of "Aggravated and Heinous Battery" before. I hadn't even realized that "heinous" was a legal term.

I think I have to agree with The Daily Weekly on this one. Collectively, the perpetrators do add up to "Five Good Arguments for the Death Penalty." Of course, they haven't actually been found guilty of anything yet, so calling for them to hang is somewhat jumping the gun, if I may be allowed the understatement. And treating their eventual convictions as forgone conclusions sort of defeats the purpose of having a legal system, doesn't it?

I have to take my hat off to which poor sods from the the Public Defenders office wind up on this case. They're really going to have their hands full with trying to get the best outcome for their clients. I don't know if Illinois' Death Penalty moratorium is still in effect or not. These guys might just manage to put an end to it. I'm pretty sure the Court of Public Opinion will gladly sign the death warrants.

Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens

Andrew Sullivan has done something that perhaps the rest of us should have done. He looked up the full text of one of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's sermons. (And posted it to his blog.) In this case, it's the one where he talks about the atomic bombings of Japan and their (long term) connection to the attacks of September 11th, 2001. Unlike what we've seen and heard in the press, it's not so much that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki "justified" the destruction of the World Trade Center. It's that military action against civilian targets begets hatred, which, in turn, begets the desire for revenge, which, like it or not, is liable to lead to attacks against civilians.

"America's chickens are coming home, to roost. Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred, and terrorism begets terrorism."

I don't think that it can be argued that the Second World War was violent. It was, after all, one of the major wars of modern human history. Last I looked, that was kind of the definition of violent. And I'm pretty sure that there was hatred. Even if you cast the internment camps as a reasonable precaution (which I don't) I was watching a history of superhero comic books in the United States a couple of weeks ago, and I can still hear Keith David's rich voice intoning: "There were two types of depictions of the Japanese in comic books during World War Two. Buck-toothed, and fanged." (At issue here were the differences between the depictions of the Germans and the Japanese in the hyper-patriotic {jingoistic?} comic books of the time.)

I've always wrestled with the idea that the atomic bombings constituted a form of terrorism against the Japanese. On the one hand, it was pretty clear that the point that the United States was making was "surrender, or we'll keep doing this." The point behind dropping two bombs was, after all, to let the Japanese know that we had more than one, so they'd be under the impression that we could keep it up. I read that President Harry Truman's stated goal in ordering the bombings was to resolve the war in the Pacific quickly by inflicting destruction, and instilling the fear of further destruction, sufficient to cause the Japanese to surrender. While this strikes me as a smart tactic, especially in the face of what would have gone down had the United States actually had to resort to Operation Downfall, which would certain have included the production and use of more atomic weapons, it did smack of making war on civilians in order to lever the Japanese government into surrender. (But then again, so do the Ten Plagues of Egypt, none of which targeted Pharaoh himself. The Tenth killed his firstborn son, who, it seems, was not involved in any of the decision-making processes that would have freed the Israelites. And that was a close as it gets.)

Of course, a chicken and egg argument can be triggered here, with debates over who really started the chain of violence. After all, who says that the atomic bombings were not Japan's chickens, roosting in a particularly spectacular fashion?

But for me, the chickens coming home to roost argument simply casts the al-Quaeda hijackers as agents of a karmic cycle that exists outside of their own desires. I've always been leery of attempts to cast the United States as the dominant moral authority on Earth (take the argument against torture that says that if we do it, others will too), as it implies that we in America are the only people on the planet capable of making independent moral choices. Everyone else is reduced to unthinking, knee-jerk reactioneering to whatever the United States has done this week. If we take the high ground, the world becomes a better place - if we take the low road, the entire planet sinks into a morass. Does no-one think for themselves?

So maybe the problem with Reverend Wright's sermons isn't that they're anti-American. It's that they look down on everyone else.