Weaving the tangled web of deception: confessions of an April fool

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it’s the morning after (or, rather, the afternoon after). And in the sober light of a non-April Fool’s Day, as I reflect back on my little prank of yesterday, I’m chastened. Chastened, but still a neo-neocon.

I had no idea so many people might think, even for a moment, that yesterday’s post was true. I feel a tiny tiny bit like Orson Welles after his “War of the Worlds” radio show stunt.

When I was quite young, my mother had told me all about Welles’s hoax, which she vividly remembered. Welles asserted he had never meant to fool anyone into thinking the Martians had actually landed. And in fact there were disclaimers at the beginning of the show and at an intermission, but (at least according to my mother) most people missed the beginning because they were listening to the end of another very popular radio program (if memory serves me, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy). And later, people were too panicked to hear:

Welles had no idea of the consequences of this seemingly innocuous choice of entertainment. The play used the names of actual places well known to most, especially those on the east cost, and was set in current time with its use of apparent live and remote announcers in the field,; tales of fiery meteors falling to the earth… of strange metallic cylinders embedded in the ground emitting unearthly noises and the subsequent uprising of monstrous, mechanized Martian war machines bent on world conquest. The play became all too real for hundreds of thousands of Americans who were apparently glued to their radios aghast. Whether they missed the introduction and the intermission, both of which stated plainly that what was being broadcast was merely a radio-play, or whether holiday spirits enhanced the naturally alarming elements of something dreadful and terrifying coming from another world… we’ll never really know. But it became known as the night that panicked America.

As I said, I only feel a little bit like Welles. And, speaking of which–at the time of the Halloween hoax, Welles was only a little bit like the Welles he later became. Take a look:


Definitely–most definitely!–hotter than John Dean of Watergate times.

I had another “interesting” April Fool’s experience yesterday. I was at the customer service counter ( a somewhat Orwellian designation, in this case) of a major chain store that will remain nameless. I was having one of those experiences I often have there, in which something that was supposed to have been put on hold was nowhere to be found. While I waited, and waited, another employee was dealing with the somewhat easier business of a youngish man next to me. The customer seemed a trifle spacey; he seemed to think it was Friday, not Saturday. The clerk told him what day it actually was, and added–with a great big smile–“And don’t forget to set your clocks forward tonight!”

Now, I’d somehow missed the fact that it was time to reset the clocks again (how, I don’t know; perhaps I‘m the space shot). But because of the clerk’s huge smile (I even imagined I’d seen him wink conspiratorially), I was sure it was an April Fool’s joke.

This placed me in an uncomfortable ethical dilemma. Should I remain silent, let the prank stand, and allow this poor young man to go home, set his clock ahead, and bear the consequences? Or was it my duty to be a party pooper and to warn him that his leg was being pulled?

Ah, the stresses of trying to live the moral life. I mulled the quandary over a while, deciding to remain silent, but after a few minutes more of guilt (that poor man! He’d wake up tomorrow and he’d miss church, or brunch with his mother, or whatever, and it would be my fault, all my fault!) I could take it no more. I blurted out that it was April Fool’s Day, and added that it was not the day to change the clocks; that that had been a joke. This time the clerk looked at me with a big, broad smile (no doubt thinking that I had decided to make a rather clever and convoluted April Fool’s joke). Transaction over.

I went home that evening feeling the warm glow of self-righteousness. Duty had called, and I had not shirked it. I had saved that young man from the dire consequences of the cruel hoax the clerk had been trying to play on him. And I basked in that warm glow of the doer of the good deed, right up until late that night when I turned on the TV and discovered that it was in fact time to set the clocks forward–and felt myself to be quite the April fool, indeed.

Glad it’s the 2nd.

Exclusive: neo-neocon rerats

The New Neo Posted on by

[HINT: note the date]

If you’re a regular reader here, you probably already know that Winston Churchill is my idol– well, one of my idols, anyway, along with all the contestants on “American Idol.”

One of Churchill’s many famous quotes is “Anyone can rat, but it takes a certain ingenuity to rerat.” Now, for those of you who don’t speak English English, the term “rat” refers to a change of political affiliation. Churchill started out as a Conservative, became a Liberal a few years later, and about twenty years afterwards returned to the Conservative Party.

Well, even though he’s someone I look up to, I really can’t follow in his footsteps. For one thing, I’m sure his feet were a lot bigger than mine. For another, I’m not British, and I’ve never smoked a cigar. And it’s too late to follow his political trajectory, because I didn’t start out as a Conservative (although I certainly would have if I’d known that he had; that’s how much I admire the man).

But there is one way in which I’m already like him: I’ve ratted. Big time. And today I’m announcing another way I intend to be like Churchill: I’m going to rerat.

Yes, it’s official: neo-neocon is returning to her roots and becoming a liberal Democrat once more. I’m not sure what to rename the blog: perhaps “neo-exneocon?”

But I’m not going to worry about nomenclature at this point. In fact, I’m not going to worry about anything. I’m going to stick my head in the sand and put my fingers in my ears (although that might be difficult to do simultaneously) and I will Whistle a Happy Tune, as long as I don’t get sand in my mouth.

Because I am tired. Bone tired. And I can see it now: the prodigal daughter will return, and I’ll be welcomed with open arms. They’ll kill a fatted calf, and we’ll have a barbecue and some brewskis. I’ll lay down my weary load. And I can take that silly apple away from my face before the computer company or the Beatles or Magritte’s estate ends up suing me.

“Why, neo-neocon, why?” you might ask (except, don’t call me that any more!). The turning point might seem rather odd. In fact, it is rather odd. But please try to understand, and to forgive–it comes from a love long suppressed.

“Love?” you ask. “What’s love got to do with it?” The answer: John Dean.

Yes, John Dean, Watergate whistleblower. I had a tremendous crush on him back in 1973. Don’t laugh, he was hot; and he didn’t have any holes in his soles:

Although I liked him better with the glasses on–but I digress.

All these long intervening years I’ve been wondering where he’s been–and if his wife Mo (she of the slick-backed every-hair-in-place blond bun)

is still there with him, (turns out she is).

And then, lo and behold, when I’d almost given up hope, yesterday he ups and testifies in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asking that Bush be censured for eavesdropping on calls to terrorists without getting warrants.

Dean said that Bush’s offenses are even more serious than Nixon’s during Watergate. I’m not so sure I follow exactly why that might be, but Dean ought to know–after all, he wrote the book on Watergate (or rather, he had the book on Watergate partly ghostwritten by Taylor Branch. Whatever.)

And, not only did he write the book on Watergate, but he wrote the one on Bush, too, the one that said Bush’s offenses were worse than Watergate (that’s the title, Worse Than Watergate), although it was written before the wiretappings were revealed.

When I heard that Dean was testifying again, the years fell away and I saw the error of my recent ways. I know it’s sudden, and may not seem very well-thought-out, but that’s the way I am: impulsive, emotional, madcap, throwing caution to the winds.

And so it’s over for me, this crazy neocon venture. It was a good trip while it lasted, but I’m returning to my roots.

At least, that is, till April Fool’s Day is over.

[NOTE: In the interests of clarity, and to any readers out there who may not be aware of this fact, I am hereby stating that today, April 1st (otherwise known as April Fool’s Day) is a day in which hoaxes and practical jokes are traditional in the English-speaking world, as well as in France.

So, there’s been no reratting; all of this was merely an attempt (and probably a feeble one, at that) at a joke. Neo-neocon will remain neo-neocon for the foreseeable future.

But I actually did have a tiny little crush on John Dean back in ’73. Loved those glasses.]

The guilt of Europe survives

The New Neo Posted on by

Shrinkwrapped has written a series of thought-provoking posts on the survivor guilt of post-WWII Europeans, and how they might be dealing with it. Well worth reading. Three parts have been already written, and a fourth is planned.

He writes of an ex-patient of his (“Gudrun”) who seemed to take on the burden of guilt for what her parents–who were not high-level Nazi functionaries but ordinary Germans–did (or didn’t do) during World War II. Her extreme sense of shame about her mother’s family’s failure to protect and save Jewish neighbors caused Gudrun to sabotage her own life in many ways, and to decide never to have children.

In Part III of the series, Shrinkwrapped connects the present-day pacifism and passivity of many Europeans with their failure to face their own guilt about their (or their parents’) behavior during World War II.

There is no question that Europeans were deeply traumatized by both World War I and World War II in a way that we Americans–who fought in both wars but did not experience destruction on our own soil, nor were we faced with the sort of “Sophie’s Choice” decisions that many Europeans faced–may find it hard to fathom. Part of the European experience was their own relative guilt in the Holocaust, and this was not just true of Germans. The example of the maternal family of Shrinkwrapped’s patient “Gudrun” is an excellent one: they were faced with the choice of trying to save their Jewish friends and neighbors at the risk of danger to themselves, and they chose their own safety over heroism. They were not evil people, but they were passive when they might have been active against evil. Every European who was not an active member of the resistance during the war, and their children and children’s children, must on some level deal with the issue of guilt.

Some, of course, deal with it through denial or even identification with the aggressor. Some just aren’t troubled by such concerns and consider the past the past. Some, such as Shrinkwrapped’s patient, are tortured by guilt even though they, as individuals, bear none (Gudrun wasn’t even alive during the war). We don’t know enough about the human heart and mind to explain such differences; we merely note them.

Shrinkwrapped writes that the source of current European attitudes towards the Jews may also be found in their WWII experience and the need to deny feelings of guilt that, if accepted, might threaten to overwhelm them, as they did Shrinkwrapped’s patient:

The European elites show a great deal of pathology in their culture. They attempt to deal with their shame by attacking what they see as the source of their shame. If the Jews would only disappear, the memory of the Holocaust could be consigned to the distant past and never thought of again.

I would phrase it somewhat differently. I don’t think the desire is for the Jews to disappear, exactly. But I think the desire is to prove the Jews to be as guilty as the Europeans were, and thus to absolve the Europeans of guilt for participating in and cooperating with the Holocaust in such great numbers. And if the Jews and/or Israelis should happen to disappear as a side-effect of the present-day attitude of the Europeans, then so be it.

This can be seen in the eagerness with which explicit and frequent comparisons are made between Jews–especially Israelis–and Nazis. And, in a separate but related phenomenon, I think it’s at least partly behind the comparison of Bush to Hitler. If the Israelis/Jews (and American Presidents) are as bad as the Nazis and their European collaborators, this serves a double function: first, it norms Europe’s behavior during WWII (“see, there’s nothing special about the guilt of Europeans, move along now”); and second, it can even be seen as justifying the Holocaust, as well (“Jews are evil, so it was okay for us to cooperate in attempting to destroy them”).

Anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism not only both have a long history in Europe (the first phenomenon is an ancient one; the second has existed for centuries), but they both have a more recent function, and that it is to deflect and sooth European guilt. As the case of Shrinkwrapped’s patient indicates, guilt can be an extremely unpleasant and sometimes even unbearable emotion. It’s not so surprising that people will do what they can to avoid feeling its ravages.

One other thing about guilt and Europe. There is some connection between guilt and religion. No, it’s not at all necessary to believe in religion to feel guilt. But guilt is an emotion specifically addressed by religion: when it is appropriate for a person to feel it, and the various ways for which it can be atoned. It’s beyond the scope of this particular post to go into the manner in which different religions answer these questions; but suffice to say it’s one of the major tasks of religion to try to give people a way to assess guilt, and then to expiate it.

Europe has become far less religious in recent decades, and perhaps the loss of this mechanism for dealing with guilt is another reason the emotion has to be so strongly deflected there. What remains as a tool for dealing with guilt is the somewhat secular religion of psychiatry and psychology, and Shrinkwrapped’s tale of his patient’s treatment reveals some of the limitations of that approach to the problem.

Would Gudrun–and other European survivors and their children–be helped by mechanisms such as the Catholic confessional, or Yom Kippur and other Jewish mechanisms for expiation (please see this fascinating discussion of the Jewish attitude toward repentance and forgiveness)? Perhaps.

In any event, Europe’s unshrived and denied guilt can go on to produce monsters:

History reasserts itself, in rhyme

The New Neo Posted on by

Gerard Van der Leun has written a rumination on the return of history, post-9/11.

I offer a few excerpts here, although they don’t really capture the full flavor of the thing (to do that, it needs to be read as a whole):

The History of Me was huge in the 90s and rolled right through the millennium. It even had a Customized President to preside over those years; the Most Me President ever…It was better when we lived in The History of Me…The meaning of this history was not deep but was to be found in the world “fun.”…

Now we find ourselves back in history as it has always been and it is not fun. Not fun at all. The history of history has little to do with fun, almost nothing at all.

Should the nation choose to continue in the elections of this year to move forward, to stay the course and continue the offensive, our encounter with history will move forward at much the same pace as it has these past four years, perhaps a bit accelerated. Should the nation choose to step back, to retreat, it will simply retard the process that grips it a bit more than otherwise might be the case. Neither result wil place us back in the History of Me no matter how many yearn for it.

History, having returned, will continue to happen, not to Me, but to Us.

We will have war whether we wish it or not…

Personally, I wasn’t too much a part of the 90’s “Me” movement, although I remember noticing it. I was too busy raising a child and going to graduate school, and listening to the personal histories of my clients.

But during that decade I definitely relaxed my grip on the notion of being part of a larger history that was frightening; with the end of the Cold War I thought history had turned out to be a paper tiger, a pussycat compared to what we had expected during the 50s and 60s. This perception was a big relief to me (which I’ve written about here).

Call me naive–and you would be correct to do so–but those were the years in which pears loomed much larger than tanks, in Milan Kundera’s image, and I was happy to see those pears. Who wouldn’t have been? Yes, there were rumblings that not all was well–many rumblings, if I look back and see with different eyes–but somehow the haze of optimism continued to obscure where this was all heading.

I think a good analogy to those years was the era shortly before WWI, when people thought mankind was progressing almost inevitably to a better and better future. There had been a long time of relative peace, and then “poof!”, it all blew up in their faces in a way they hadn’t ever imagined, barbaric and bloody and seemingly endless. As the British poet Philip Larkin, quoted in Paul Fussell’s wonderful book The Great War and Modern Memory, wrote: “never such innocence again.”

Well, I guess one should never say “never”–since it turns out that many (although not all) of us were so innocent once again. And many still remain so, despite 9/11.

That is, almost so innocent; the innocence of those pre-WWI Europeans seems to have been even more profound, as Fussell describes it:

Out of the world of summer, 1914, marched a unique generation. It believed in Progress and Art and in no way doubted even the benignity of technology. The word machine was not yet invariably coupled with the word gun.

As Henry James, spokesman for the disillusionment of the era, wrote to a friend on the day afer the British entered the war:

The plunge of civilization into this abyss of blood and darkness…is a thing that so gives away the whole long age during which we have supposed the world to be, with whatever abatement, gradually bettering, that to have to take it all now for what the treacherous years were all the while really making for and meaning is too tragic for any words.

I’ve written at some length here about my own 90s version of the glorious prewar summer of 1914, in which I’d imagined that we’d somehow escaped the horrific apocalypse envisioned in the ’50s–in other words, that we’d escaped history. I, much like James, had lacked a sense of what those years were “making for and meaning.”

But on 9/11 I had an almost instantaneous perception that this threat was more serious than anything that had come before, at least in my lifetime, because this opponent had revealed itself to be unusually implacable, determined, and vicious; and was quite unconcerned with such mundane affairs as living. The latter represented the unique thing about this particular enemy; the Dark Ages had somehow merged with the Quantum Age, and it was not a good combination.

But one thing I never envisioned on 9/11 was the fact that, despite my sense that we could be successful in beating back these destructive forces if we ourselves had some unity of purpose and resolve, many people would be only too eager to go right back to their sweet dreamy repose (what Gerard Van der Leun calls “fun”) and to think that it was Bush who was the real bogeyman–that he’s the one spoiling all the fun, for his own nefarious purposes.

So history is indeed–to paraphrase another writer, James Joyce–a nightmare from which many of us try to awake. But try as we may, it reasserts itself into our lives, not with a whimper but with a bang.

This page of history quotations contains quite a few gems, such as one from the much-maligned Machiavelli:

Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results.

And one of my favorites, from Mark Twain:

The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.

And how about this, by Anonymous (not the same “anonymous” who posts here, I’m afraid):

We cannot escape history and neither can we escape a desire to understand it.

And I didn’t realize Harry Truman was this much of a philosopher:

The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.

And then there’s an observation by Cicero that seems apropos:

To be ignorant of the past is to remain a child.

I will close with a simple statement by Lincoln, from his message to Congress of Dec. 1, 1862,

We cannot escape history.

But that sure doesn’t stop us from trying, does it?

The Rahman case and the Inquisition

The New Neo Posted on by

Now that the case against Abdul Rahman has been dropped, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi has offered him sanctuary:

“I say that we are very glad to be able to welcome someone who has been so courageous,” Premier Silvio Berlusconi said.

Berlusconi himself is no slouch in the courage department. And of course who could forget another incredibly brave Italian, Fabrizio Quattrocchi.

The Afghan clerics, however, haven’t given up:

Muslim clerics condemned Rahman’s release, saying it was a “betrayal of Islam,” and threatened to incite violent protests.

Some 500 Muslim leaders, students and others gathered Wednesday in a mosque in southern Qalat town and criticized the government for releasing Rahman, said Abdulrahman Jan, the top cleric in Zabul province.

He said the government should either force Rahman to convert back to Islam or kill him.

“This is a terrible thing and a major shame for Afghanistan,” he said.

Note the word “shame” here, and the notion that killing this man for his change of religious faith would somehow restore a sense of honor! Of course, in the eyes of most of us, it would only have increased Afghanistan’s shame. But Abdulrahman Jan and others don’t seem to agree.

On reading Abdulrahman’s chilling words, The Spanish Inquisition was the first thing that came to my mind. But, on further reflection, I decided that the comparison was not all that apt, despite certain similarities.

The Inquisition, although it featured the same sort of violent religious absolutism with death as the Draconian punishment, was actually dedicated to the opposite goal of Islamic clerics such as Abdulrahman Jan. Inquisitors–including, of course, the famous Torquemada–were interested (or professed to be interested; their motives were probably far more complex than that) in rooting out false converts to Catholicism. They were involved in preventing people from insincerely professing to be Catholics, whereas the Moslem clerics are interested in preventing people from leaving Islam, no matter what their consciences might dictate.

It’s an interesting difference of emphasis, is it not? The Moslem clerics are only looking at the outward appearance of things, whereas the Inquisitors took individual beliefs into consideration, or at least said they did. But both involve imposing the ultimate punishment for what we would consider to be no crime at all: a change of religious conscience. That’s a process our post-Enlightenment minds would regard as the domain of the individual, and solely between him/her and the deity.

The present-day Moslem clerics don’t seem to regard the actual viewpoint of the individual involved to be of any importance; obedience to the faith is the goal, whatever the internal belief system. Of course, in a way, that’s better than the Inquisitors: at least one can get around the Moslem system by a public lie and a profession of adherence to the Moslem faith. That was exactly what the Inquisitors were interested in eliminating.

So, you pays your money and you takes your choice. Suffice to say they are both abominable ways of dealing with a matter of individual belief.

In researching the Spanish Inquisition briefly for this post, however, I came across a fact I hadn’t previously known (that is, if one can believe the Wikipedia article in this respect), which is that the Pope of the time was initially against its excesses, but later bowed to political pressure from Ferdinand and gave the Spanish Inquisition his approval. And note the role of the war with Islam in the entire story of how this pressure was brought to bear:

The Pope did not want the Inquisition established in Spain at all, but Ferdinand insisted. He prevailed upon Rodrigo Borgia, then Bishop of Valencia and the Papal Vice-Chancellor as well as a cardinal, to lobby Rome on his behalf. Borgia was partially successful, as Pope Sixtus IV sanctioned the Inquisition only in the state of Castile…

Sixtus IV was Pope when the Spanish Inquisition was instituted in Seville. He worked against it, but bowed to pressure from Ferdinand, who threatened to withhold military support from his kingdom of Sicily. Sixtus issued a papal Bull establishing the order in 1478. Nevertheless, Sixtus was unhappy with the excesses of the Inquisition and took measures to suppress their abuses.

The Pope disapproved of the extreme measures being taken by Ferdinand, and categorically disallowed their spread to the kingdom of Aragon. He alleged that the Inquisition was a cynical ploy by Ferdinand and Isabella to confiscate the Jews’ property…

Ferdinand had some important levers he could use to bend the Pope to his will. Venice, traditionally the defender against the Turks in the East, was greatly weakened after a protracted war which lasted from 1463 to 1479. The Turks had taken possession of Greece and the Greek islands. France, as always, was looking for signs of weakness which it could use to its advantage. And in the midst of all these threats, in August of 1480 the Sultan of Turkey had attacked Italy itself, at the port of Otranto, with several thousand janissaries who pillaged the countryside for three days, largely unopposed.

Under these conditions, Ferdinand’s position in Sicily ”” he was king of Sicily as well as Aragon and several other kingdoms ”” gave him the leverage he needed. He threatened to withhold military support for the Holy See, and the Pope relented.

Sixtus then blessed the royal institution of the Spanish Inquisition. Ferdinand had won everything he sought: the Inquisition was under his sole control, but had the blessing of the Pope.

So the Inquisition received the Pope’s blessing in order to counter the threat of the Moslems battering at the gates of Italy.

Another interesting point is that, although converted Jews were definitely a major target of the Spanish Inquisition, Moslem converts to Catholicism were definitely very much at risk as well:

There were many motivations for Ferdinand to create the Inquisition. Spain, historically an area with disparate religious traditions and ethnic groups, needed a common religion – Catholicism – if it was to have a sense of unity. Ferdinand was particularly concerned with false converts to Catholicism who often remained loyal to the rule of Islam during the final years of Reconquista, and the Inquisition, which had no jurisdiction over non-Catholics, was his method of identifying them.

I mention all of this as a matter of historical interest only. What I’m most definitely not saying is that, because Christianity (or any other religion, for that matter) has had its wretched and horrific (and yes, shameful) excesses, that this fact would in any way justify or excuse what’s happening today with Islam.

The important thing is that today there is no longer any Inquisition in Christianity, nor does there appear to be any on the horizon. In fact, all the great world religions of today seem to have adopted religious tolerance as a whole, as well as respect for the individual religious decisions of adherents, into their worldviews–except for one.

Yes, there are Christian sects who believe nonbelievers are doomed to eternal punishment. Yes, there are members of certain religions who shun and ostracize those who leave the fold. But that’s a far, far cry from calling for their deaths. No, there is only one religion today that does this, and that is Islam.

And yes, I’m sure not all adherants of Islam subscribe to the idea that apostates and converts must die. But it seems to be an extremely common position. It puzzles me that a religion that believes in itself wouldn’t have more faith in its own ability to draw people to the fold–and to keep them there without the rather persuasive compulsion of the threat of death.

[NOTE: And this guy reminds me a bit of the Taliban. Bonfire of the Vanities, anyone?]

[ADDENDUM: Here are some figures on the official Moslem legal position on the crime of apostasy, including how often it is prosecuted in the Moslem world:

A broad consensus exists through much of the Islamic world that apostates from the faith deserve to be killed. This consensus could be glimpsed in Abdul Rahman’s case, where the judge, Ansarullah Mawlavezada, said, “In this country we have the perfect constitution. It is Islamic law and it is illegal to be a Christian and it should be punished.” Even the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, expected to take a more moderate stance, called for Abdul Rahman’s punishment, claiming that he clearly violated Islamic law.

But apostasy laws stretch far beyond Afghanistan. At least 14 Islamic countries make conversion out of Islam illegal. The crime is punishable by death in at least eight of these states, either through explicit anti-apostasy laws or the broader offense of blasphemy.

Official proceedings against those who convert out of Islam are rare, at least in part because most of those who leave Islam choose to keep it secret. More often the government looks the other way while irate citizens mete out their own punishment. In July Paul Marshall, a senior fellow at Freedom House’s Center for Religious Freedom, estimated that dozens of apostates from Islam had been killed throughout the world in the previous year. Bolstering Marshall’s estimate, the Compass Direct News Agency was able to identify 23 expatriate Christian workers who were killed in the Muslim world between 2002 and July 2005.

So, although the law is on the books in many countries, prosecution is usually left to the mob, and is not all that common even then. This, at least, is better than if these prosecutions and/or killings were an everyday event. But still, not very encouraging.

The article concludes with the assertion–and I agree–that it is necessary not only to encourage the growth of democracy in countries such as Afghanistan, but the concomitant protection of human rights. Freedom of religion is one of the most basic human rights–one we hold to be “self-evident,” under the rubric of “liberty”–and it must go hand in hand with any democracy.

This idea, of course, is on a collision course with the principles of Islam. The Rahman case is important because it confronted this inherent contradiction, which must be resolved if this sort of thing is not to go on. And since it strikes to the heart of Islam, the resolution is not going to be easy, I’m afraid.]

I guess I need to be careful about that apple logo

The New Neo Posted on by


I better not start using this site to sell any music, or the Beatles will be breathing down my neck (of course, at an earlier time in my life, that would have been the fulfillment of a dream):

Two legendary companies in the music industry faced off in court Wednesday in a trademark battle over a piece of fruit.

Apple Corps Ltd., the Beatles’ record company and guardian of the band’s musical heritage and business interests, is suing Apple Computer Inc., claiming the company violated a 1991 agreement by entering the music business with its iTunes online store…

The computer company’s logo is a cartoonish apple with a neat bite out of the side; the record company is represented by a perfect, shiny green Granny Smith apple…

The 15-year-old agreement between the two Apples had ended a long-running trademark fight in which each agreed not to tread on the other’s toes by entering into a ”field of use” agreement.

Of course, it’s a good deal more lucrative to sue Apple; their pockets are just a mite deeper than mine. But still, one can’t be too careful.

The cavalry never came: Moussaoui’s confession

The New Neo Posted on by

The ongoing carnival of the Moussaoui trial has introduced still another act: the main character turning the tables on his defense team (and himself) by a spectacular in-court confession during the sentencing stage of his trial.

This gesture of Moussaoui’s may guarantee that he gets the death penalty, which is probably exactly and precisely what he wants.

The Moussaoui trial has become–among other things–an exercise in the negatives involved in treating terrorists as ordinary criminals, including allowing them a bully pulpit for spewing forth propaganda–not that anyone who wasn’t already a jihadi would have been convinced of much of anything by the rantings of Moussaoui. His testimony is also painful for the 9/11 families, who now are confronted with the idea that if this man had spilled the beans earlier, the attacks might have been thwarted (the basis of the death penalty charge for Moussaoui):

The sister of a pilot whose hijacked plane struck the Pentagon on Sept. 11 says watching Zacarias Moussaoui’s chilling testimony on Monday provided new information for families desperate for answers, yet only worsened their emotional wounds. From a federal courthouse, Debra Burlingame watched the al-Qaida conspirator on a special video monitor set up for families of the victims of the attacks….

Burlingame shook her fists as she described testimony that the hijackers would have taken the planes into the ground if they had seen fighter planes in the air around them.

“My brother was a fighter pilot,” she said.

Her voice cracked as she dwelled on a truth too painful to bear: “The cavalry never came. The cavalry never came.”

So, is Moussaoui telling the truth now? He’s given out so many conflicting stories it’s hard to tell. But this one has some legs to it:

Gerald Leone, a former first assistant US attorney in Boston who was the lead prosecutor in the shoe-bombing case against Reid, said yesterday that it is impossible to know whether Moussaoui is telling the truth. Moussaoui may finally be coming clean, he said, or instead is now embellishing his role. But Leone said Moussaoui’s story is consistent with what is known about Reid.

Investigators know that Reid and Moussaoui knew each other, went to the same London mosque and the same training camps in Afghanistan, and had at least one Al Qaeda handler in common, he said. ….

Leone said that Reid told his interrogators that he had been ”disappointed” that he didn’t participate in the 9/11 attacks and that he had had a dream in which he missed a van carrying the 9/11 hijackers and thus could not join the plot….

“It’s just so difficult to tell with a guy like Moussaoui where his motivations and intentions lie,” Leone said. ”I don’t think anyone is even clear whether he considers the death penalty to be a badge of honor or not. He’s clearly said he wants to die a martyr, but not at the hands of the government. So it’s a mixed bag.”

Ah, the sorrow of missing out on all the glory! Failed suicidal jihadis such as Reid (and probably Moussaoui) seem to be plagued by their own version of the student anxiety dream. Bummer.

It is probable that, once a person makes up his/her mind to be a suicide mass murderer, a line is crossed. The person has accepted the necessity and reality of his/her death (I’m tired of this PC gender stuff; from here on in this essay I am just using the masculine, since the vast majority of these people are men); visualized it and gloried in it, as well as expecting that this martyrdom will lead to lasting glory. It must be a cruel cheat to be deprived of such a “consummation devoutly to be wished.”

So, if a man is prepared to die, and considers himself a “dead man walking” already, it’s only the manner of his death that remains at issue. Unable to effect the death of his choice–taking thousands of people with him–he goes for the next best thing, now that his task is done. He has already made the legal system look bad (not so difficult, as it turns out), cost us plenty of money (likewise, not too hard), taken full advantage of the stage he was given, and increased the grief of the 9/11 survivors. Not too bad for a man on trial for his life.

Another motive I think may be driving Moussaoui in particular: from the very start, he has shown great contempt for his own lawyers. Yesterday’s courtroom scene must have been quite the show, his defense attorneys trying desperately to shut him up, and then scrambling to negate what he’d said. So another perk of his confession would be to stick it to the hated lawyers.

It stands to reason that Moussaoui despises their attempts to save him as unworthy of a jihadi, not to mention being stupid (and inexplicable) activities against the US’s own interest, since Moussaoui doesn’t seem to appreciate the US legal system–in fact, he’s made it clear he despises it, also.

All in all, a good day for Moussaoui, by his lights.

[NOTE: A while back I wrote this post discussing the bizarre Moussaoui family and its history. It’s well worth reading, I think–and I think you’ll be surprised by what some of his siblings are up to.

The story of this family is a sad and terrible tale, though a fascinating one (at least to me). I do not, however, offer it as an excuse for Moussaoui, who must bear the responsibility for his own actions.]

Richard Landes reports from France, the paralyzed ostrich

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Richard Landes, of the blog Augean Stables and the website Second Draft, has recently returned from a trip to France and filed this eminently readable report on which way the wind is blowing in France today (and you don’t need a weatherman).

The situation Landes reports is not reassuring, to say the least. Depending on how one looks at it, the following exchange could be considered hopeful, or not:

We visit old friends from way back (the wife is a childhood friend). They are from the upper classes ”“ educated, Catholic, intellectually lively, international in outlook, with smart kids who travel the globe studying and doing internships. In the past, the husband has taken the principled position of the ostrich in response to my warnings.

Not this time. This time he’s eager to talk, and quite open in his concerns. A description of what I have been trying to say for three years now.
“So what do you think the French will do?”
“Mais nous sommes tétanisés,” he says. [We’re paralyzed.]

What can you do when you pick your head up and see you’re between the tracks and the train is bearing down on you?

The good news: a growing awareness. The bad news: has it come too late?

And then there’s this:

…I was haunted by the remark of an French friend, “The French cannot forgive America for saving them twice”…[T]he French [seem unable] to give the Americans a compliment without taking it back, without re-asserting their primacy in all that really matters. Sa gloire…Like the Arabs, the French were once the leaders of European and global culture (from the 11th to the mid-19th centuries); and like the Arabs, they have a deep sense of grievance at “history gone wrong.”

Is that what’s going on here? Is the obtuseness of the French the product of some deep resentment at America because they sit where the French should sit? Is this their secret bond with the Arabs ”” the brotherhood of envy?

Magritte would not be pleased, and neither is neo-neocon: the apple transformed

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The apple–and most particularly that tart green variety known as the Granny Smith (and there really was a Granny Smith, by the way)–is an especially beautiful fruit. With color, shape, healthfulness, and taste, the apple has it all.

Just ask Magritte, whose work “The Son of Man” I’ve quoted in my own portrait.


The apple is rich in subtext as well as health value. The Garden of Eden story may represent a mistranslation of the original (was it actually an orange? or fig?), but artists had a field day with the eminently paintable apple:


But alas, the apple may be going the way of the–carrot.

Yes, the carrot. Remember back when carrots were those lengthy things that a person peeled and then ate (originally, they even came with green tops), rather than small bite-sized precut modules?

When the bagged mini-carrot first came into vogue, I assumed they represented wastefulness–that part of an ordinary and otherwise usable carrot had to be discarded to make those neat little shapes. But it turns out I was wrong; mini-carrots actually reduce waste. Baby-cut carrots (which are not baby carrots at all, but large ones trimmed into small bits) originated with California farmer Mike Yurosek’s observation that a great many ugly carrots were being rejected:

It all began about 16 years ago when Mike Yurosek of Newhall, Calif, got tired of seeing 400 tons of carrots a day drop down the cull shoot at his packing plant in Bakersfield. Culls are carrots that are too twisted, knobby, bent or broken to sell. In some loads, as many as 70% of carrots were tossed. And there are only so many discarded carrots you can feed to a pig or a steer, says Yurosek, now 82 and retired. “After that, their fat turns orange,” he says.

Well, I guess we just can’t have ugly carrots or orange-fatted pork, can we? Thus the baby-cut carrot–which has come to represent a large portion of the carrot market and has led to a surge in carrot consumption–was born.

And now the same is being done for the apple, according to an article in the Feb. 12 New York Times Sunday Magazine.

It turns out that whole apples, despite their good rep as an especially healthful food–after all, “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”–are now considered just too difficult for most people to even contemplate eating:

“You look at the number of meals being eaten in automobiles,” Steve Lutz says (research by John Nihoff, a Culinary Institute of America food historian, estimates that 19 percent of all meals or snacks in this country are eaten there), “and you’d think the apple is convenient already. But when you finish it, you have a core to deal with. You have waste. Plus, once you’ve started an apple, you’re sort of committed to eating the whole thing.”

“I don’t think consumers are very comfortable leaving a half-eaten apple lying around their car or their house,” Lutz adds.

In addition, people seem to have become more sensitive–actually, extraordinarily sensitive–to the disgust value of certain foods. It’s hard to believe that there could be anything offensive about an apple, but apparently that core-in-the-making has become a big turnoff:

Paul Rozin is a cultural psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania and, though he may not introduce himself this way at parties, an authority on disgust. “As the world gets more and more cleaned up of these things, and as you get highly sensitive to disgust, a bitten piece of food in your hand is not too nice,” he posited. An eater of the whole apple must, with each bite, readdress his mouth to “the unsavoriness of the bitten edge in front of you.” But eating apple slices means treating yourself to a clean, unspoiled, appealingly geometric shape every few seconds.

Enter Tony Freytag, the Mike Yurosek of the apple world. Freytag has found a way to meet the special challenge apples present to the snack-food industry–their tendency to turn to brown mush when cut into pieces:

Crunch Pak was one of the first companies that labored to bring the new apple on line. Each found early on that what can be done casually at home ”” slicing an apple and squeezing lemon juice on it ”” is maddeningly difficult to pull off in a factory. The anti-browning bath is only one movement in a grand symphony of technologies at work. For nearly two decades, teams of food scientists, engineers and can-do businessmen struggled to pin down the apple, while the apple skirted and ducked them at every turn. They zigged, the apple zagged. Clearing one hurdle only brought more into view, and even now the particulars of production must be reassessed and rejiggered daily. The apple, Freytag told me when we first met, “is a moving target.”

…NatureSeal is the product of a decade of U.S.D.A. and private research. It’s a flavorless white powder that, mixed with water, penetrates a few millimeters beneath the surface of a cut apple…The ascorbic acid in NatureSeal searches out and bonds to the loose phenols, blocking them off from the polyphenol oxidase enzyme and interrupting the browning reaction. The calcium salts work like cement to stiffen the fruit’s softening cell walls. All of this happens inside the apple, so the solution leaves no perceptible layer or shell on the surface.

Making apples into sanitized snack food bits seems–as with carrots–to increase their desirability as food. It may be paradoxical, but cutting a food into small pieces encourages people to eat more of it, not less:

Industry insiders now talk about elevating a food’s “snackability,” which, in short, means engineering it with enough convenience that picking up a piece and putting it in your mouth becomes an almost perfunctory transaction. A snackable food is crumbless and fussless. It is most likely broken into bite-size pieces, encouraging us to eat more. If the food’s form itself doesn’t imply a portion size ”” the way, say, one apple or one cupcake does ”” there’s no obvious signal to stop. This triggers what one marketer, Barb Stuckey, calls “mindless munching” ”” the hand’s almost hypnotic back and forth between bag and mouth.

“Mindless munching” is indeed a concept with which I’m all too familiar, although I didn’t know it had a name.

I’ll leave the last word to Freytag:

A bowl of apples is like a piece of art…It’s display. People won’t touch it. But you put out a tray of cut-up apples ”” that’s food.”

Conflict of laws: the Abdul Rahman case

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[NOTE: I wrote the bulk of this post late last night, and am now happy to report that the charges against Rahman have been dropped. I’ve added to the post to reflect that updated information, but the issues involved are still basic controversies and tensions that exist between Islam and the West, and within Islam itself.]

The blogosphere is abuzz with the Abdul Rahman apostasy case in Afghanistan. It’s an extremely dramatic example of the ways in which Islamic law is in basic conflict with cherished Western Enlightenment ideals of religious freedom and human rights.

The beef is with sharia itself, as this article points out (via Dr. Sanity)):

What the case allows the West, and the moderates, to do is to give a name to the enemy, and the name is shari’a…The question thus becomes, which way is the current trend trending? In many ways, it seems the moderate Islamic states are on the defensive against the radicals. The Rahman case, by publicizing the most odious side of shari’a, will ultimately help move the trend in the right direction. Either the man will be martyred, or the authorities will have to back down. And if they back down, it will be clear that they, and the forces of radicalism and repression, have suffered a defeat.

Today we have learned that, at least for now, the forces of repression have suffered a defeat. The line in the sand was drawn, and the sharia court blinked.

Courts–even sharia-based courts, it seems–have myriad ways of avoiding coming to certain verdicts that they wish to circumvent. In this case, the ostensible reason for the dropped case was lack of evidence. But the truth is probably that the pressure brought to bear by the West was too great, and that a guilty verdict would have damaged the fragile Karzai government.

But there’s no way to know to what extent this result also reflects moderate forces within the nation and Islam itself–because such a war is going on, and has been going on for a very long time. It’s very hard to gauge the actual numbers of the forces on each side, but it seems fairly clear that, since the Iranian revolution of the late 70s, the forces of repression have been in the ascendance. Whether or not this case represents a turning point in that process remains to be seen. But allowing for and encouraging such a turning point was one of the goals of the Afghan War.

The fact that this case was brought at all is an outrageous state of affairs, especially in a country liberated by the West from the yoke of the Taliban (and, somewhat off the topic, it’s no surprise to me that the issue was first raised in the bitter atmosphere of a custody battle). Who doesn’t recall those Christian aid workers who were facing the death penalty at the hands of the Taliban for proselytizing, and who were freed by the Afghan invasion, much to our great relief? Now, irony of ironies, the government that replaced the Taliban, installed at the cost of bloodshed, seemed about to come close to committing a similarly egregious offense against religious freedom.

Historical parallels with the Inquisition and the low points of other religions in this arena are quite beside the point; as the Baron at Gates of Vienna points out, this case happened now.

Since the entire question of change is one that interests me greatly, this case has made me think about the more general question of how laws evolve (much too big a question for me to tackle in depth at this moment, but maybe someday…). The horrific excesses of the Inquistion, as well as our traditional laws outlawing heresy (originally punishable by death) and blasphemy didn’t disappear overnight, after all. Their demise was the result of a process of slow attrition reflecting cultural and philosophic changes in society as a whole. The usual course of events in such matters is a slowly decreasing number of prosecutions through a lessening of prosecutorial zeal, increasing leniency of sentences, and then the repeal of the law (that last de jure step is often eliminated, if it has already happened anyway, de facto). The disposition of the Rahman case–dismissal–is consistent with this process, speeded up no doubt by outside pressures.

It’s not unheard of that gradual internal processes of change are accelerated by more forced external pressures. For example, when we took over countries through force in the past, we usually imposed certain rules on those countries from the outside (for example, in post-WWII American-occupied Japan, MacArthur and the Americans wrote the Japanese constitution to conform to our idea of what was needed). With great responsibility came a great ability to dictate things.

In recent years, however, we’ve shied away from imposing our will out of respect for and tolerance of the belief system of other cultures. The Rahman trial not only starkly highlighted the inevitable conflict between moderate Islamic countries (or those striving for moderation) and the parallel track of sharia law in those states, but the conflict between our new efforts at nation-building and our desire to conform to PC delicacy while doing so. Both conflicts seem inevitable, and certainly are not going to disappear with the disappearance of the charges against Abdul Rahman.

Here’s an excellent summation of the contradictions inherent in the hastily-drawn-up Afghan Constitution. The Constitution explicitly endorses the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which defends religious freedom–and, in particular, the freedom to convert–while it upholds sharia law, which of course requires the death penalty for Moslem apostasy. So here we have a conflict of laws situation.

Freedom of religion is a secular, Enlightenment viewpoint, the result of massive societal change that occurred in the West over the course of centuries. If we seek to drag a country such as Afghanistan into supporting freedom of religion, there is going to be a disagreement of fairly huge proportions. Old-fashioned imperialists were upfront and–well, imperial–about this sort of conflict; they didn’t shy away from imposing their points of view, and believed in the superiority thereof.

There’s that old British statement about the custom of suttee in India (the burning alive of the wife when the husband dies) which I quoted here in a post about the contradictions inherent in tolerating the intolerent. Mark Steyn has quoted the same incident in a column directly about the Rahman case:

In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee” – the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Gen. Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:

“You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks, and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”

The truth is that the whole concept of “tolerance” is a mockery if it extends to tolerating the intolerent. Logically speaking, one precludes the other; the two contain a paradox that renders them incompatible. And what we tolerate within our own borders and society is one thing; what we allow another society to do is another. Ordinarily we have no say in the matter, but Afghanistan is a case in which, although it’s a sovereign country, we have what one might call a “special relationship” towards it.

So the outcome of this case–which was a test of how far the Afghan government is willing to go towards tolerating the intolerant within its own borders–was also a case of how far we are willing to go in tolerating the intolerent in a country in which we have, for better or for worse (and so far it is for better) engaged in regime change and nation-building. The fact that the Afghan court backed down allows us the luxury of taking our time to answer the question of how far we are willing to go, but it’s a question that won’t go away (and who knows what pressure we in fact brought to bear behind the scenes?).

Nations are not built–or rebuilt–in a day, and profound cultural change is ordinarily not a fast process. Fast-tracking such change has been a dilemma faced over and over in the last several hundred years, with differing consequences: from Russia and Peter the Great, to Western imperialist ventures around the globe, to our own “melting pot,” to Turkey and Ataturk, to the aforementioned Allies and Japan, to the Shah and Iran, to France and the wearing of the veil among her Moslem immigrant population–and to the coalition and the Karzai government in Afghanistan. No doubt similar dilemmas will face us in Iraq.

The dismissal of the case has allowed Karzai to buy time. Personally, I would love to see the Karzai government abolish the death penalty for apostasy. But in doing so against the will of the people, it might be setting itself up for that very thing so many are wary of in Iraq: civil war. Feelings run high; Karzai is in an “awkward position” indeed.

Sometimes it doesn’t pay to go too far too fast; the results can be a retrenchment. As it is, it seems likely that Rahman himself may have to go into exile for his own protection against those who would take an extra-legal sort of revenge against him.

One thing is certain: this case has spotlighted the glaring intolerance of sharia law and traditional Islamic rules about apostasy, an intolerance that is at odds with the defense of human rights to which the new government of Afghanistan aspires. This contradiction will not go away easily, and must be faced sooner or later by that government and that society, within Islam itself, and between Islam and the West.

The only question is whether it must be faced sooner and through radical change, or whether a temporary way out can be found in order for a more gradual process to occur–and whether such change is compatible with Islam. Can a change about such a fundamental part of the religion ever be assimilated into Moslem thought in the way in which similar changes have been integrated into other religions? The jury is still out on that one.

Miscellaneous Saturday thoughts

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Very light blogging today. I’m busy having fun–a novel idea, I know!

So, see you tomorrow. But I just wanted to mention a couple of things, and I’ll be uncharacteristically brief.

The first is that after yesterday’s discussion of kitcsh, I’ve had one of those phenomena the Germans call an “earworm,” in which a phrase goes round repetitively (and often annoyingly) in one’s head. This time, the phrase people say to babies, “kitchy-kitchy-coo,” was transformed into “kitschy-kitschy-coo.” And it turns out I’m not the only one who’s ever had the thought.

On a far more serious note, I want to recommend this post by Dr. Sanity about some of the new documents indicating connections between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda, and the mechanisms of denial that seems to be operating in those who have staked many of their arguments on the nonexistence of any such connection.