Category: Personal

Respected imam Pat Robertson, speaking from his influential mosque, has issued a fatwa calling for the assassination of Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

Isn’t this exactly the sort of extremist preaching we’re always calling on Muslim societies to control? When American soldiers are dying in a war against terrorists motivated by religious extremism, Roberts’s call for an act of terrorism is especially obscene.

Dunno how India’s going to pay for it, but the BBC reports that the lower house of India’s parliament today passed a bill guaranteeing 100 days of employment to at least one member of each of the country’s 60 million rural households, whose members amount to 70 percent of the population overall. Under the bill, which the Beeb says should pass easily in the upper house, “people employed by the scheme will work on projects such as building roads, improving rural infrastructure, constructing canals or working on water conservation schemes.” (Hopefully this means building water tanks, not just giant dams, a favorite boondoggle of corrupt governments everywhere.)

My cousin Lu has started a blog that has a lot of posts about her son and my godson, Will, who is six years old and very smart and starting kindergarten this year.

A couple of recent entries make it clear that Will is starting to ask the big moral questions — What, if anything, is infinite? Why do people die? — probably in part because his parents take these questions seriously, and in part because he’s got an unusually rich variety of moral theories and structures in his life: various strains of Paganism, Judaism, Episcopalianism, and probably some other stuff besides. These questions are a whole lot tougher than the “Why is the sky blue?” variety, because the adult world has no consensus answers for why people die, what happens when they do, what lasts forever, etc.

Death is not an easy concept for children, and I’m not sure it’s an easy concept for adults. Early and indigenous religions seem to have settled for an awkward vagueness: the dead go to some shadowland like Sheol or Valhalla or the Elysian Fields, or they become some kind of spirit, or something.

Beginning around 2600 years ago or so, a series of religions began to develop clearer views of what happens after death. There is much debate about this, but some scholars think the Hindu concept of karmic rebirth is actually Buddhist in origin rather than vice versa — that rather than Buddhism adopting the cosmology of Hinduism, the indigenous religion (Hinduism) absorbed the Buddhist innovation. There’s also some possibility — and this is my own sketchy idea — that the Christian concepts of heaven as reward for good deeds and hell as punishment for bad deeds are actually derived from Mahayana Buddhism, which traditionally has a very strong emphasis on heaven and hell. The Jewish notions of heaven and a purgatorial hell then derive from Christianity, not the other way around. And obviously Islam adopted the Christian view as well.

The vast majority of people in the world believe in Buddhism, Christianity, Islam or a post-Buddhist variant of Hinduism, and I think that these religions’ satisfying answers about death are key to their success. Indeed, it seems like wherever two cosmologies are in competition, the winner is the one with a clear answer about what happens after death. (A possible exception to this rule would be the triumph of Neo-Confucianism over Buddhism in late-medieval East Asia, but Neo-Confucianism won adherents in part by insisting that it took better care of the dead, prescribing detailed rites for ancestor worship and disparaging Buddhist monks for abandoning their ancestors and for failing to produce offspring to look after them in future.)

What makes the afterlife narratives of the major world religions so satisfying is that they essentially deny death: we do not cease to be, but merely change our surroundings. You look forward to moving to heaven, or to being reborn, the way you might look forward to retiring and moving to Florida. It’s comforting to believe that after life is more life in a form that we would recognize. By believing in an afterlife, we escape from the terrifying possibility that death is merely cessation, or that it is something else altogether that we cannot possibly know in advance.

Unfortunately, the visions of the afterlife promulgated by the world’s major religions are unverifiable. There is no way to prove that one or another theory of the afterlife is true, so we are left with divine revelation, and the available revelations are contradictory. My guess is that religious theories of the afterlife are no more accurate than religious theories about physics, astronomy, biological history or anything else. Unlike these fields, however, the afterlife is closed to scientific enquiry, so religious views persist.

In my own life, I try to avoid falling prey to the illusion that I know what happens after death. I don’t. This unknowing is very scary, and at times I envy the faith of those who know they’ll be hanging out with Jesus or rocking the Casbah with their 70 virgins. (Do they replace the virgins when they cease to be virgins? Or do you just get 70 who you have to ration out to yourself for the duration of eternity? Or do they become virgins all over again each time? And what’s so great about virgins anyway?) But I would rather face death squarely than pretend it’s some kind of graduation ceremony.

I hope that by acknowledging the inevitability and unknowability of death, I will be able to cherish life more fully, without worrying whether I’ve made the right preparations for whatever comes next.

The historian Ki-baik Lee describes the late-Joseon-era Korean genre painter Sin Yun-bok as depicting “scenes from the ordinary events of everyday life … mainly the mores of the townspeople of his time, with a focus on the activities of women.

That’s one way of putting it. Upon googling the artist’s name, I was startled to discover a cache of erotic paintings that, though they resemble Japanese shunga prints, are distinctly Korean in style and content. I hadn’t known that any such images existed. The depiction of homosexuality between two women in the uppermost left image is also noteworthy considering the complete absence of any homoeroticism, male or female, in contemporary Korean pornography, in sharp contrast to the freewheeling weirdness that is Japanese erotica.

The images come from a book by Seo Jeong-geol called Korean Erotic Paintings (info and images here; available for purchase from Seoul Selection).

In this week’s New Yorker, Peter J. Boyer’s profile of the preacher Billy Graham (accompanying slide show here) provides a useful short history of American Protestantism in the 20th century — one that thankfully doesn’t mention Barry Goldwater — and draws the frequently overlooked but important distinction between Evangelical Christians and Christian Fundamentalists.

To a lot of left-leaning, non-churchy types, myself included, these terms are largely interchangeable epithets for a poorly understood mass of Americans who believe in creationism, attend megachurches or else miniscule weirdo churches with snakes and speaking in tongues, and buy Tim LaHaye novels. Boyer makes it clear that this perception elides two distinct movements within American Protestantism that have often been in conflict.

Going back to the mid-19th century, there was essentially only what would later be known as fundamentalism: the traditional Protestant belief in the Bible as a literally true description of the world and the sole source of legitimate Christian doctrine. Belief in a six-day creation, a fiery hell and the redemptive power of faith were more or less standard. By the turn of the 20th century, scientific views of our planet’s history, and especially Darwinism, coupled with historical approaches to Biblical texts, had begun to erode this set of beliefs. In response, a new theological movement, liberalism, allowed for greater latitude of belief, seeing much of the Bible as allegory and sometimes denying the divinity of Christ. (Saint John the Divine, in Manhattan, was erected as a cathedral for the preaching of this particular Gospel.)

Fundamentalism was a reactionary movement that rejected liberalism and insisted on maintaining the old truths and rejecting the relativism and compromise of the liberals. By the time of the famous Scopes trial, most American Protestants had come to see fundamentalism as ridiculous and backward. It was also fractious. Its devotion to rooting out error meant that fundamentalist sects were constantly splitting off and condemning each other. One sect declared that only the King James translation of the Bible was legitimate. It is this movement that has given us the strange, small churches, especially in the South.

Meanwhile, the liberal theologians took over the mainline Protestant denominations, often to the discomfort of their flocks. A movement called the New Evangelism then arose as a kind of middle ground between liberalism and fundamentalism, appealing to people who were unhappy with liberal theology but wished to remain loyal to their denominations and to avoid the absurdities and embarrassments of fundamentalism. It adhered to traditional Protestant beliefs, but made a serious effort to back this belief with rigorous scholarship. It also got involved in social issues, refusing to cede good works to the liberals as the more insular fundamentalists had.

This is the movement to which the relatively tolerant Billy Graham belongs, and it’s the movement that has given us megachurches and Christian rock bands, as well as inspiring efforts to help the Sudanese and others. It is much more politically active and powerful than fundamentalism, whose theology it shares to a great extent. With its message of welcome and salvation rather than condemnation and hellfire, Evangelicalism is also responsible for a certain smugness: when you set up the big tent and make the compromises necessary to fill it, you run the risk of telling people what they want to hear. Movements like prosperity theology, which insists that God wants Christian believers to be rich, are products of Evangelicalism. These things tend to upset the fundamentalists, who fiercely opposed the Evangelicals, especially early on.

I don’t know to what extent America’s Christians are aware of this distinction between fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, or what role it plays in today’s political Christianity, but I’m guessing that it still matters considerably. I am more familiar with similar distinctions in Judaism, between the traditionally Orthodox, who are not terribly political and whose numbers remain low, and Chassidic (especially Chabad Lubavitch) Judaism, which proselytizes among Jews and is heavily engaged in Israeli politics. As far as I can tell, Islam also has this dynamic, though I’m not knowledgeable enough to say much on the subject.

Interestingly, both Chassidus and the New Evangelical movement began as efforts to be more tolerant and inclusive, and both movements have over time become known for their extremism and intolerance. What stands out, however, is that unlike intolerant sects of the past, the New Evangelicals and the Chassidim (and the Islamists?) have managed to condemn on a grand scale while still welcoming those whose practice and belief may not yet meet muster. If you roar up to a Chabad House on the back of a Harley on the Sabbath, no one inside will make a fuss about it; instead, they’ll welcome you and sing with you and give you reasons to come roaring back next Saturday, allowing your interest and devotion to develop gradually. This combination of ideological rigor and social welcome can be enormously compelling, and it is perhaps the most important development of religious practice in the 20th century.

Today, bowing to pressure from the victims’ families and a lawsuit from the New York Times, New York City released thousands of pages of oral histories from the weeks after September 11, 2001, as well as dispatch tapes and phone logs recorded as the events were unfolding (NY Times article here). The Times put up an interactive feature with excerpts from the dispatch tapes (complete tapes here), which are recordings of calls back and forth between emergency personnel and the Manhattan command center, as well as one harrowing sequence in which a civilian calls in from inside the cab of a fire engine after the second tower has collapsed.

Because of how I found out about the attacks — from a radio report in the snack bar at Glacier Point in Yosemite, after both towers were already down — I have to imagine what it would have been like to experience the events in sequence as they unfolded. These tapes give at least some sense of that, as the situation steadily worsens and the confusion increases, culminating in the nightmare cloud of dust as the second tower collapses.

I don’t have much to add. These tapes are painful listening. Thinking about September 11 still makes me tear up, and I wasn’t even there. To all who bore the weight of that morning as it unfolded, my deepest sympathies. That’s about it.

What’s the largest financial institution in the world? It may surprise you to learn that it’s Japan Post, whose insurance and savings businesses hold nearly $3 trillion in deposits.

It goes without saying that this has an enormously distorting effect on the Japanese economy, tying up vast sums of capital in the hands of the government and serving as a tremendous resource for patronage. Among other things, Japan Post is the biggest buyer of Japanese government bonds. This cozy arrangement has helped to keep the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in power since 1955 (excepting a gap between 1993 and 1996).

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi had made the privatization of Japan Post a centerpiece of his administration. Today his postal reform bill was defeated in parliament, leading Koizumi to call a snap election that he might actually lose. What this means for the future of Japan Post, and of Japan, is uncertain.

It’s that time of year again: the New York Korean Film Festival is coming, running from September 2nd to 6th at The Lighthouse Theater on East 59th Street between Lexington and Park, then from September 7th to 11th at BAM in Brooklyn.

In the last few years, Korean film has gained a strong reputation, particularly for action and horror, though my tastes lean more toward the movies that depict Korean culture more straightforwardly. Of this year’s crop of films, I’m especially interested in The President’s Barber, Mapado, and My Mother, the Mermaid.

According to a Washington Post article, the United States plans to transfer 70 percent of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay to the governments of Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. As Talking Points Memo points out, there is no way we’d be turning over anyone we were seriously worried about to governments as sketchy as these, particularly the Afghan government, which may not even remain in existence a few years down the road. So again, the US government is admitting without admitting that a key part of its strategy in the Global War on Terror has failed.

This is, of course, welcome news. It comes a few days after the New Yorker commented on the name change from Global War on Terror, or GWOT, to Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, or G-SAVE, reporting that “In June, a Marine lieutenant general, Wallace Gregson, floated the new thinking in a speech: ‘This is no more a war on terrorism than the Second World War was a war on submarines,’ he said. ‘The decisive terrain in this war is the vast majority of people who are not directly involved but whose support, willing or coerced, is necessary to insurgent operations around the world.'”

This thinking is painfully long overdue, but that doesn’t make it less correct. It seems that our government is at last coming to terms with the reality of who and what it is that we should be fighting — of who and what, in other words, is fighting us. At last the US is recognizing that “Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people,” as the New Yorker reported General Gregson said.

The most dangerous thing about the first Bush administration, I thought, was its utter inability to admit mistakes. The second time around, though, after blundering badly on domestic issues (Social Security, Terri Schiavo, the filibuster battle, the Karl Rove scandal), the administration has shown itself remarkably lithe, able to shift course without drawing harsh criticism for the failures that required the shifts in the first place. To some extent, this is because those who have opposed this White House are so pleased to see it adopting saner policies and showing some spirit of compromise at last. The nomination of John Roberts is a case in point: the hard right may grumble, but Bush doesn’t need them anymore — he’s never running for office again — and the left, after revving itself up for a big fight, has been largely deflated.

I’m not sure what’s driving all this change. Much of this course correction seems to have been in the works for a while. Rumsfeld’s famous memo asking, “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?” dates from October 2003. Rove’s reelection strategy for Bush seems to have been to admit no mistakes at all, but that doesn’t mean that everyone in the administration was genuinely convinced that all was well. Perhaps we are seeing a strategic shift to greater compromise and subtlety because those in charge genuinely believe that more compromise and subtlety are needed if we are to keep America safe and strong.

One can only hope.

During our apartment search, Jenny and I saw a promising duplex on Luquer Street, but we worried about living on a street we couldn’t pronounce.

At first I pronounced it lucre, as in filthy, but my friend Daniel, who lives a few blocks away, calls it lu-COOR, roughly like the fancy alcohol, and real estate agents called it everything from lu-CURR to lu-CARE to Lu-KWAIR. Fortunately, Forgotten NY has come to the rescue, explaining that today’s Luquer used to be Luqueer, named after a Dutch family, and though I don’t know how the Dutch would say it, locals still pronounce it lu-QUEER.

So why the change? Forgotten NY thinks it has to do with the older negative connotations of the word queer, not the word’s more recent connection with homosexuality, that made folks drop the second E. But it could just as well be random drift, almost like a mutation. Whatever the reason, though, I will now pronounce it lu-QUEER — at least until some local tells me otherwise.