So the lovely and talented Britney Spears has reached that beautiful moment in a young celebrity's life when the media decides they need to draft your obituary. Yes, it seems the AP has concluded that Ms. Spears' mortality is sufficiently imminent they need to prepare for the story. Of course, drafting an obit in advance is an industry-wide practice, but for a 26-year-old? Of course, 27 is the age to die at for rock stars: Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Brian Jones are all prominent members of the 27 Club, so perhaps the universe will conspire to add Britney Spears to that hallowed cast. Or perhaps it conspire to prevent just that by kicking the stool out from under her sometime before Dec. 2, 2008. Whatever the case, the entire process got us thinking: the one part of an obit you can't write till the day it hits layout is the first line, the cause of death. But surely the intelligent writer could could make an educated guess, to hedge their bets against a tight deadline down the road...
Britney Spears' Obit Opening: Proposal 1:
Oops, she won't be doing that again - The troubled life of pop star Britney Spears was cut tragically short last night following a suspected cocaine overdose in the home of a convicted prostitute.
Britney Spears' Obit Opening: Proposal 2:
You Drive Me Crazy - Britney Spears' film debut in Crossroads (2002) proved prophetic last night, when the troubled celeb wrapped a stolen Lincoln Continental around a light post at the intersection of Sunset & N. Beverly, scattering debris and hundreds of tubes of what police call "shoplifted lipstick" across Will Rogers Park. She was 26.
Britney Spears' Obit Opening: Proposal 3:
K-Dead (& Britney, too)- In a surprise-twist ending to a rollercoaster life before the cameras, diva and tabloid-fixture Britney Spears was found dead in her Manhattan apartment yesterday. She was awaiting trial on murder charges stemming from the stomping death of her ex-husband and former back-up dancer, Kevin Federline.
It's an unspoken rule in politics not to speak ill of the dead--the actual, that is. People genuflected and spoke bon mots at the grave of Richard Nixon. But in the years between his disgraced exit from the White House and the day that tiny heart of his could no longer keep pumping on the power of hate and hate alone, it was a no-holds-barred slugfest of mudslinging and vituperation. Same with Ronald Reagan. Will be the same Henry Kissinger.
So in that spirit, today we celebrate the political death of one of the most loathed political figures of our generation: Karl Rove, a.k.a, the wizard, a.k.a., the devil, has retired from his belfry at the White House to feast on the blood of small children in countries where the rule of law is not so absolute. And in that spirit, I'd like to remind my readers of just why Rove and Bush are such assholes deserving of our hatred.
Dick Armey, the House Republican majority leader when Bush took office (and no more a shrinking violet than DeLay), told me a story that captures the exquisite pettiness of most members of Congress and the arrogance that made Bush and Rove so inept at handling them. "For all the years he was president," Armey told me, "Bill Clinton and I had a little thing we'd do where every time I went to the White House, I would take the little name tag they give you and pass it to the president, who, without saying a word, would sign and date it. Bill Clinton and I didn't like each other. He said I was his least-favorite member of Congress. But he knew that when I left his office, the first schoolkid I came across would be given that card, and some kid who had come to Washington with his mama would go home with the president's autograph. I think Clinton thought it was a nice thing to do for some kid, and he was happy to do it." Armey said that when he went to his first meeting in the White House with President Bush, he explained the tradition with Clinton and asked the president if he would care to continue it. "Bush refused to sign the card. Rove, who was sitting across the table, said, 'It would probably wind up on eBay,'" Armey continued.
Thought nothing could be worse than our transportation policy? Think again.
By Jeremy M. Barker
It’s hard to remember now, but once upon a time, George W. Bush thought he could get something done. Declaring that his 2004 re-election had left him with “political capital” to spend, he set out to push an ambitious conservative agenda collected under the label of an “ownership society.” Item one on the agenda: privatize Social Security.
It quickly transpired that Bush didn’t have the political capital to accomplish much of anything; the Social Security plan went down in flames and Bush became a lame duck seemingly no sooner than he’d been re-inaugurated. But on one crucial front, the logic of Bush’s ownership society has swept the nation and become deeply ingrained in the American imagination: owning your own home.
Since Sept. 11, more or less, the pseudo-economic recovery of the US after the dot-com bubble burst was driven by low interest rates that promoted borrowing, which in the last few years has led to rapidly increasing home prices and new development in urban areas. Bush’s “ownership society” plan may have tanked, but an unlikely coalition of government and non-profits have been shoving the idea that owning is a good idea down the public’s throat to the point that a great number of people who lacked the financial stability to buy decided to do so anyway—and found a breadbasket of subsidies and tax breaks waiting to help them along. Coupled with increased market speculation—from condo developers to amateur house “flippers”—prices have soared in response to drastically increased demand.
But now, the crumbling sub-prime lending market—the variable interest loans offered to high-risk borrowers who, shockingly, are defaulting at high rates—has caused the Dow to lose almost a thousand points between mid-July and the beginning of August. Internet chatter (and a number of good economists) confirms that most people anticipate a sharp decrease in demand, and in some areas, housing prices are already falling, leaving borrowers who bought at the height of the bubble with debt worth more than their house. But do our intrepid local business reporters get any of this? Apparently not.
On Aug. 1, P-I reporter Jennifer Langston picked up the new Case-Shiller Home Price Index data for May, which shows the appreciation of housing prices dropping off steadily. But her local angle? “Seattle-area home values continued to rise in May, bucking a national trend of declining home prices, according to a Tuesday report.”
Over at SeattleBubble.com—one of the websites that those in-the-know increasingly visit to actually get what’s happening—“The Tim” (Timothy Ellis) has a name for these sorts of stories: the “Seattle is Special” story. On July 26, he put it quite eloquently: “As the nation’s home lending situation continues to deteriorate before our eyes, you can count on the local press to keep pushing the ‘we’re completely immune here’ line.”
According to Tim’s more insightful analysis, Seattle’s just several months behind the curve. On May 29, he published probably his most elegant explanation of the phenomenon (absolutely worth reading). Examining the same Case-Shiller Home Price Index reports, Tim showed that of the cities tracked by Case-Shiller, on average it took 19.6 months from the point at which the year-over-year change in home price peaked until the year-over-year change turned negative (i.e., the house is losing value). By comparing Seattle to other cities, he shows that Seattle is likely just several months behind other cities, whose falling home prices are causing all the news. In other words, a simple analysis shows how far off-base the “professional” business reporters are.
But has this information percolated through City Hall or the rest of the business chattering classes? On July 26, Forbes declared Seattle the number 1 place for flipping houses, and the mayor’s office has proposed a series of subsidies and regulations intended to put more affordable housing for sale on the market—likely exacerbating the rapacious condo-conversion that’s rapidly shrinking the number of affordable rentals in the city, even as demand for rentals skyrockets. In other words, much like all of Seattle’s economic and development policies, this isn’t a well-oiled machine, it’s a clusterfuck that’s about to screw both renters and owners.
As I wrote at the beginning of the year, one of Seattle’s top priorities should be reforming condoization law. Currently, the over-hyped promise of quick money has kept condo-converters racing to decimate Seattle’s stock of affordable rentals. But as demand is increasing, we’re likely to see a situation of painfully low rental vacancies and glutted market of condos that won’t sell. The economic consequences of that scenario will be devastating, but as always, City Hall just doesn’t seem to give a shit.
Last night at the Showbox, we were reminded of something Gino Srdjan Yevdjevic said in an interview with us last year: we don't remember the quote exactly, but it was something to the effect that "World Music" was "shit." Not the music or the musicians, per se, but rather the genre, the peculiarly American way of pigeon-holing and marketing foreign music. Gino understood the process only too well: Back in the 1980s, he was a glammy Duran Duran-esque pop singer in his native Yugoslavia. Only when war forced him to flee to the US in the 1990s did he wind up a "world musician," performing traditional Balkan music in restaurants for disinterested diners. While he admitted that this original incarnation of the band Kultur Shock could have done well in the World Music market, it's easy to see why he rebelled by adding punk rock guitar to the line-up and starting to yuk it up as a sex-crazed Eastern European immigrant à la Steve Martin and Dan Ackroyd's "Wild and Crazy Guys" sketch.
All of which is to try to introduce the problem we face here, trying to be all, "Yes, we are professional music critics!" about Femi Kuti's performance last night at the Showbox. We'll start out by being honest: we really know for shit about Femi Kuti. This is only slightly less than we know about his dad, Fela Kuti, of whom we are vaguely aware from back in our college days when we experimented with potentially dangerous habits: in this case, listening to NPR, only moderate use of which can transform you into an insufferable middle-class white liberal.
But to continue trying to play the part, here's how we'd have written this piece if we were a real music critic for some mainstream newspaper or magazine (or, God forbid, NPR), where our paycheck depended on us constantly demonstrating decisiveness and never admitting we didn't know the name of a single song we heard at a concert we were reviewing. First, we'd start by talking about Fela Kuti and how he was a pioneer of Afrobeat, which mixed jazz with more traditional African music, and became a superstar in Nigeria. Being forever obsessed with how pop music was tenuously related to Sixties radicalism, we'd applaud Fela Kuti's political activism, and talk about how, from his Nigerian commune, his willingness to give voice to the oppressed threatened thuggish Nigerian dictators, successive regimes of which would jail him, only to have the next coup release him to win the public's good will, only to then have to jail him yet again once he justly criticized their corruption and barbarism. And we'd note the fact he took some 25 wives at once during the 1970s, and thus burnish our multiculturalist creds by accepting polygamy from a leftist African icon in a way we never would of nut-job Mormon fundamentalists down in Utah. Then we'd note Fela's tragic death of AIDS in 1997, even as he continued fighting for political freedom in Nigeria, and then segue into how Femi Kuti took up where his dad left off, continuing the tradition of politically engaged Afrobeat music, mixing American influences (jazz, funk, prog-rock) with native musical styles. And, once the issue hit the streets, we'd sit back and wait for the call from Da Capo requesting rights to include the piece in the latest installment of Best Music Writing.
But alas, we've been around the block enough times to know that mostly, the above is BS. Yes, Fela Kuti was an icon and dissident. But like most political icons who make their name opposing oppressive regimes, Fela's lionization relies on the convenient fact that he never actually became the president of Nigeria, despite several attempts, and thus never met the same fate as Lech Wałęsa or Václav Havel or Léopold Sédar Senghor, who had the misfortune of having to try to run a country, their dissident credentials tarnished by years of politics and all the attendant shortcomings, disappointments, and compromises.
Furthermore, while Femi's music gets pseudo-indie cred by virtue of being international, we have to remember that fundamentally, it's mainstream pop back in Nigeria. While Femi hits all the right political notes—a song about fighting AIDS, a spoken-word discourse on the evils of European colonialism—is it any more credible coming from him than Madonna or Kanye West? Or is it a sign of how we continue to fetishize Africans who puppet the rhetoric Westerners like to hear that we keep from lumping Femi Kuti in with the Live Eight crowd? Surely his non-threatening music and politically correct sentiments, coupled with the fact he's a true-blue African, could add some badly needed credibility to bloated big-budget affairs where celebrities repeat self-righteous truisms about the world and after which nothing changes.
So what can we really say here about Femi's show? It was good—talented musicians, charismatic lead man, a solid stage show with scantily clad back-up singers. He packed the Showbox fuller than we've, well, ever seen it. And he got the crowd going. College kids awkwardly gyrating, hippies doing that flailing-arm dance-thing they do, clouds of pot smoke hazily rising from crowd. Femi demonstrated he's a talented multi-instrumentalism, switching fluidly between sax, guitar, and keyboard. People cheered when he exhorted them, listened attentatively when he discoursed. But quite honestly, we left wondering if Femi's appeal is the same back in Nigeria. All too often when it comes to culture—whether it's movies or books or music—what America imports from overseas says a lot more about us than the cultures that created it.
For the foreign cutting edge to break into the American market, it either has to be sufficiently non-threatening to please the moderate liberal middle-class culture consumers, or demonstrate enough mass appeal or street credibility to overcome negative responses. Think of Reggaetón, which took 30 years before it was sufficiently pop music to make the grade in the US, or how dancehall superstar Buju Banton's refusal to reject the gay-bashing of songs like "Boom Bye Bye" gets his shows cancelled on Seattle's "tolerant" Capitol Hill. On the streets of Lagos, does Femi have the same credibility his father once enjoyed, or is he more akin to Jakob Dylan, an uninspired musician whose career was jump-started by an anachronistic attachment to what his dad did, and whose own music was never as innovative?
Somehow, we're guessing that in the gritty slums of Lagos, the real au courant music is much more in the hip-hop vein (as it is everywhere), where kids who can't afford two drummers, keyboards and a horn section are spilling their hearts out on dubbed tapes. Surely there's posturing in imitation of American rappers, but at the same time these kids are telling it like it is, or at least expressing what they think about the world and their own hard-scrabble lives. In a country still mired in corruption, the airwaves and recording studios are probably still off limits to those whose ideas are actually dangerous, and without that access, how are Americans even going to have the chance to hear their music? And even if we did, would we like what they have to say as much as Femi's retro-Third World liberation rhetoric, which hippies old and young can get behind? If we could heard what the kids in the ghetto really thought about women and AIDS and America and gays, would it still get promoed on "All Songs Considered"? We're not so sure.
We don't mean to tear Femi down here—like we said, frankly, we don't know how to judge his work other than admitting it was fairly danceable and everyone seemed to have a reasonably good time at his show. But for a musician whose name and career are so intertwined with his father and with politics and with a certain American market segment's tastes and preferences, it's impossible to avoid trying to talk about what we're supposed to take away from the show. To give Femi his due, he was there to educate as much as to entertain, which leaves us asking the very legitimate question as to whether he's really more credible a source for political commentary than the likes of Cypress Hill, whose album liner notes provided the primary sources for those stoners we knew in high school and their inevitable pro-legalization essays. Not to ask such questions is really to help suppress and constrain Femi's message, essentially taking away his voice and perspective by uncritically accepting anything he has to say. So, is Femi a real activist making us ask difficult questions, or is his music another commodity, an ethnicky trinket picked up from Pier 1 to give a touch of exotic color to a living room? Gino understood this dilemma precisely, and that's why he utterly rejected the World Music racket.
And here we are, semi-pro music critics faced with either puppeting sweet nothings about Femi we got from the "real" critics, or trying to grapple with the limitations of our own understanding of the still-quite-large (whatever Internet idealists like to think) world in which we live. In the end, that's probably the best thing we can say about Femi and his adoring American fans—we may not truly be able to understand the world he comes from or how he fits into it, but he made us ask questions without easy answer, which is a good deal more an achievement than getting a crowd nodding along to socio-political slogans, never certain whether that's a sign of agreement or merely moving to a beat.
A slightly different version of this piece appeared on Seattlest.com on July 26 as "World Music 101: Femi Kuti at The Showbox."
FROM THE FILM REVIEW DESK: Harry Potter 5: A Series of Incoherent Events
Librarians rejoice: "Reading is saved!"
By Jeremy M. Barker
Ever since Warner Bros. acquired the rights to the wildly successful and beloved Harry Potter series by British novelist J.K. Rowling, librarians, booksellers, educators and fans have accused Hollywood of ruining the simple joy of reading that young people were discovering around the world by creating gauche, special-effects-laden film versions. Yet with the fifth installment of the film franchise out this week, a mere ten days before the release of the seventh and final book in the series, critics are singing a different tune.
Variously described as "awful ," "unwatchable" and "insulting", Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is such a disappointment that even the most cynical book lover is unlikely to go so far as to suggest it might siphon away readers.
The film's failure is largely attributed to director David Yates, a self-described "third-year sophomore" at the Los Angeles County Community College video production program. Yates, who described his cinematic influences as "maybe Dogma 95" which he "probably read about on the Internet," made a number of unorthodox production choices.
According to Yates, his concept was formed when he realized that the film featured both Michael Gambon and David Thewliss, who Yates had previously seen in a film production of Samuel Beckett's Endgame in "some theater or world lit class I took at the community college."
"I figured, if they could do nothing in a movie for an hour and a half, carry it with no plot or action or things happening or anything making sense, maybe I could do the same thing with Harry Potter," explained Yates. "Except, not deep or anything."
The filming script was produced by de-spining a copy of the novel, scattering the loose-leaf pages around a livingroom, randomly selecting thirty or so of them, and roughly developing dialogue based on what was left. "We showed a rough-cut to the people at Warner Bros.," explained Yates, "and they didn't think it offered 'climax.' Since we were dangerously under-budget, we tagged on twenty minutes or so of random CGI over some improv-ed fight scenes, and then closed with what is basically the end of Return of the Jedi. That was awesome."
While Hollywood insiders are at a loss as to the seemingly inexplicable choice of Yates to direct, most suggest it was likely an attempt to reclaim some of the success of the third installment of the series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
In a shameless attempt to increase profits by lowering production costs, Warner Bros. Entertainment president Barry M. Meyer demanded producers replace key production personnel with "lower paid, non-union, Mexican equivalents." Tapped to direct was Alfonso Cuaron, a leading filmmaker of the Mexican New Wave and the auteur of such films as Y Tu Mama Tambien. Cuaron managed to deliver the most successful film adaptation thus far, by making a film that managed to be both watchable (the only one so far under two hours) and true to spirit of the book.
Yet Cuaron, asked at the premiere of Mex/Drama recently in Mexico City to explain how he somehow managed to make a good Harry Potter movie, suggested that originally, the people at Warner Bros. had been less than impressed with his film.
"When the first saw our cut, they said it was too dark--literally and figuratively. They said Hogwarts seemed dangerous, the teachers threatening, and that they weren't entirely comfortable releasing a film about a murder in which children's lives were in danger. They demanded to know where I got my ideas, so I told them, I read the book." He paused. "They asked, 'What book?'"
Still, there are occasional supporters for the film franchise. Steven Barber, an educator at an adult literacy center in Fort Worth, Texas, recently led a class field-trip to see the film. "These days, it can be really hard to motivate adult illiterates to learn to read," explained Barber. "They get case workers at the welfare office, McDonald's even has a picture menu. But they all want to get in on the Harry Potter buzz. So we take them to the movie." He winks knowingly. "Works every time!"
Sometimes, a reader comes across a brief passage, as if by chance, that is both so brilliantly and scathingly put that it deserves to be stolen over and over again, and at the same time reminds you of what makes good people. I found such a lovely passage today, reading an article entitled "Kipling in South Africa" from the London Review of Books, about the friendship between dear Rudy and Cecil Rhodes, the beast who co-founded DeBeers, colonized what is today Zimbabwe, helped brutalize both the blacks and the Boers of southern Africa, and played a particularly estimable role in the godawful ruthlessness and brutality that marked European colonialism in the late 19th century. He was a man of such horrific ambitions that he once commented, "all of these stars...these vast worlds that remain out of reach. If I could, I would annex other planets."
Reading about such awful people, I was blown away when I followed a little footnote and came across this absolute gem from the man who remains our country's finest writer, Mr. Samuel Clemens. In Following the Equator from 1897, Mark Twain wrote:
In the opinion of many people Mr Rhodes is South Africa; others think he is only a large part of it. These latter consider that South Africa consists of Table Mountain, the diamond mines, the Johannesburg goldfields, and Cecil Rhodes . . . I admire him, I frankly confess it; and when his time comes I shall buy a piece of the rope for a keepsake.
Just when you thought that Americans couldn't handle anymore droll anti-religious screeds as shrill and cloying as the fieriest-and-most-brimstoniest preacher's sermon, along comes drunken sod and world-class asshole Christopher Hitchens with his own contribution to the, er, "literature": God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
Not satisfied with having been proven painfully fucking wrong on Iraq, Hitchens--who clings to the liberal left with the tenaciousness that a maudlin drunk clings to "this guy!" whom he "loves" at the bar--has decided to issue a new blast to make the rest of us look bad, and to keep the sad, stupid debate about religion in contemporary society roiling in the opinion pages.
Now, I've written about this sad debate a couple times before ("Why Should Darwinists Care About Creationists' Feelings?", "Cranky Old British Scholars Duke it Out Over Jesus") and frankly I'm depressed to have to return to it. But to get to my point (besides making fun of Hitchens--seriously, the guy's a lush), I find both the ardent atheists (Hitchens, Dawkins) and their middle-of-the-road critics in the media equally objectionable, the former because--as a non-believer and skeptic myself--I can't bring myself to trust anyone who believes in something that strongly, and the latter because I'm sick of the liberal media adopting this strange, apologist, kumbaya, "can't-we-all-just-get-along?" attitude towards the religious right. This isn't a zero-sum game; not all religious people are Osama Bin Laden, whatever Mr. Hitchens might like to believe, but that doesn't excuse the rather shocking and at times just plain crazy crap we get in America from the Christian right.
In the broader political context, this apologetic tone serves to play down differences between liberals and conservatives for political gain; the moderate liberal press has thrown in the towel in the fight against religious conservatism and the defense of secular society, having decided electoral success lies in seducing the faithful away from the Republican right. But while it's now the prevailing wisdom that Gore's loss in 2000 and Kerry's in 2004 were the result of Karl Rove's wizardry at bringing the religious right to the polls, that's just not true. As has been consistently shown, the percentage of Americans who list moral values as a prevailing electoral concern has been declining since the mid-1990s. Moreover, this interpretation ignores the fact that centrist Democratic consultants sabotaged both Gore and Kerry by pulling the rug out from under them on what should have been their core electoral values (the environment for Gore, the war for war-hero and anti-Vietnam War-hero John Kerry); most Americans could be forgiven for assuming in 2004 that the war was going fine and that anyway, a Kerry victory wouldn't signal a substantial change. (Well, "forgiven" is too strong a word--most Americans are fucking idiots and you have to beat the truth into their skulls with metaphorical hammers, otherwise they just don't notice.)
In this case, the objectionable middle-of-the-road apologist is Anthony Gottlieb, reviewing Hitchens' no doubt insufferable book in The New Yorker ("Atheists with Attitude," May 21, 2007).
I agree with Gottlieb when he challenges Hitchens et al. on the tendency to be reductive in attacking religion; the problem of "the varieties of religious experience" is one rarely addressed by anti-religious cranks. (Though to give him his due credit, Hitchens makes very clear that he hates all religious observance equally, arguing that moderate religious institutions and their followers make possible the radicals. From a political perspective, he has a point: often times we find damning links between theoretically moderate institutions and radical groups aligned with them, as we've seen with Western Islamic charities and links to terrorist organizations, or between Christian and Catholic groups in the US and violent counterinsurgencies in Latin America during the Cold War. That said, it seems to me this is most pervasive as a political issue, rather than a religious one.) Gottlieb writes:
One practical problem for antireligious writers is the diversity of religious views. However carefully a skeptic frames his attacks, he will be told that what people in fact believe is something different. For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review of Books, he wrote that “card-carrying rationalists” like Dawkins “invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” That is unfair, because millions of the faithful around the world believe things that would make a first-year theology student wince. A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches.
Now, in a sense, I'm totally in agreement with the above. What I find strange about the anti-religious is how much credit they give the religious and their beliefs. They treat religious practice as a constant, act as though religious texts like the Bible have but one singular interpretation. In short, they're radically orthodox when it comes to religion.
Now, as one of those damned secular humanists who believe in the Big Bang and evolution and all, I was under the impression that, given that God does not exist to establish universal constants or deliver divine texts to the world, that religion should be therefore viewed as a socio-cultural phenomenon, its tenets and practices prone to evolution, its texts endlessly reinterpreted by successive generations in order to remain pertinent to the ever-changing quotidian demands on the faithful. And of course I'm right about that. No religion is absolute, and any reasonable historian of religion could easily provide countless demonstrations of how religious practice and theological interpretation have evolved over the centuries. Does religion influence the society at large? Yes, and the society at large influences religion. By ignoring that fundamental reality, Dawkins, Hitchens and their ilk open themselves up to an idiotic chicken-and-egg style argument (which, for the record, Gottlieb chooses to indulge: "The idea that people would have been nicer to one another if they had never got religion, as Hitchens, Dawkins, and [Sam] Harris seem to think, is a strange position for an atheist to take. For if man is wicked enough to have invented religion for himself he is surely wicked enough to have found alternative ways of making mischief.")
Furthermore, Gottlieb clearly agrees with me on the charge that these "atheists with attitudes", like Hitchens, are more than a little shrill and hyperbolic: "After rightly railing against female genital mutilation in Africa," writes Gottlieb,
which is an indigenous cultural practice with no very firm ties to any particular religion, Hitchens lunges at male circumcision. He claims that it is a medically dangerous procedure that has made countless lives miserable. This will come as news to the Jewish community, where male circumcision is universal, and where doctors, hypochondria, and overprotective mothers are not exactly unknown. Jews, Muslims, and others among the nearly one-third of the world’s male population who have been circumcised may be reassured by the World Health Organization’s recent announcement that it recommends male circumcision as a means of preventing the spread of AIDS.
But my problem with Gottlieb is his attempt, like so many people in the liberal media, to problematize the atheists' arguments with counterpoints:
When Hitchens weighs the pros and cons of religion in the recent past, the evidence he provides is sometimes lopsided. He discusses the role of the Dutch Reformed Church in maintaining apartheid in South Africa, but does not mention the role of the Anglican Church in ending it. He attacks some in the Catholic Church, especially Pope Pius XII, for their appeasement of Nazism, but says little about the opposition to Nazism that came from religious communities and institutions. In “Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century,” Jonathan Glover, who is the director of the Center of Medical Law and Ethics at Kings College London, documents such opposition, and writes, “It is striking how many protests against and acts of resistance to atrocity have . . . come from principled religious commitment.” The loss of such commitment, Glover suggests, should be of concern even to nonbelievers.
Now, is it me, or does the reader of the above paragraph not come up with a rather different interpretation than Gottlieb, using Glover to speak for him? Again, religion stems not from the word of God absolute (as both Hitchens and his enemies in the cloth believe) but as a cultural practice that--as Gottlieb illustrates with contrasting examples--is just as amenable to cruelty and destruction as to righteousness and justice.
What's fascinating to me here is that both Gottlieb and Hitchens are simultaneously engaged in trying to generate a political narrative regarding the role of religion in society starting from the same political perspective: the liberal left. Hitchens embraces a radical criticism of religion on the grounds that it leads to extreme partisanship between diverse sects and religions, while religious texts generally encourage militancy and hatred of religious and cultural others. In the process, he forgets his own humanist perspective and sets up a straw man that turns out to be a three-ton stone statue by giving religion the credit its most ardent believers demand: that it be treated as immutable, eternal, and singular, instead of evolving and open to diverse interpretation, as any reasonable liberal knows. Finally, Hitchens' critique is linked to the same ignoble service as his support for the Iraq war. While it may not at first be patently obvious--given the Bush administration's evangelical zeal--that this is the case, the reality is that the "religion is the cause of all the world's problems" argument goes a long way to absolving the Bush administration of fault for the current disaster in Iraq, as well as encouraging everyone to ignore the rather obvious social, economic and political causes of many of the world's ills and our rather shameful role in bringing them about. It becomes the catch-all explanation for radical Islam, the internecine conflict in Iraq, Al Qaeda, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and why otherwise westernized second-generation Muslims in Europe turn vehemently on their host countries. (A good corrective to this is Mahmood Mamdani's Good Muslim, Bad Muslim, which goes a long way in explaining how our current problems stem both from the messy aftermath of colonialism and America's post-Vietnam containment policies.)
Gottlieb, in contrast, starts from the liberal position that, well, we've lost the culture war. Blue collar Christians will keep Republicans in power no matter how bad Republican policies are for their pocketbooks (and their children's future) until we give in and make peace on abortion and gays and prayer in school. And so he looks through the history books and, hey, turns out not all religious leaders were crazed zealots. There was Niebuhr, and MLK, and probably some others. Moreover, religious leaders helped fight peaceful crusades against injustices they opposed with their religious values. So maybe there is some common ground. But from my perhaps ignorant humanist perspective, aren't the achievements we credit to the religious here really achievements of human decency when confronted with injustice and cruelty? Or in other words, while Pope John Paul II was certainly a crucial figure in the anti-Communist reform movements in Eastern Europe in the 1980s, is it really fair to give him as much credit for their eventual success as his hagiographers have? He was not, after all, the one who had to strike or go on march and--God forbid--risk arrest, torture, or death for his freedom. And while the marchers at the Lenin Ship Yard or Wenceslas Square may have taken comfort in the Pope's support, the likelihood either he or God was going to be able to save them from a Soviet crackdown, as had occurred in Hungary in 1956, was, I think, rather small.
But to follow the apologetic liberal line that religion also does good things (look at Civil Rights!) ignores how bad their electoral values are for many of their constituents. As Thomas Frank rather devastatingly showed in What's the Matter With Kansas?, the legislative priorities of Republicans are painfully at odds with the needs of the American working and middle classes. The Moral Majority has a lot of blood on its hands when it comes to the dismal future its Republican allies have made for many Americans. And these days, Christians seem more united in denying rights to women and gays--while indulging in no small amount of self-pity at their own perceived oppression and marginalization--than in fighting injustice in the world.
In this, Gottlieb's own narrative ignores one of the few things that Hitchens does get right: that religious observance is far less absolute than religious leaders would have us believe, that the religious right has not achieved a critical mass capable of achieving their political and cultural aims. Attempts by creationist school-board members to force "intelligent design" on schools have been most decisively rebuked not by the courts but by the outraged electorate which has, in virtually every case, voted out the offending members the first chance they got. On abortion, the majority of the population has consistently supported legal access, and the victories Christians have won are narrow and incremental and may lead nowhere. And as far as gay rights are concerned, gay marriage remains legal in one state and looks to stay that way; nationwide, attitudes are becoming more and more progressive on gay rights. So why the hell do Gottlieb & co. continue arguing we should step back?
In short, Hitchens is a moron with a booze-addled brain and no one should pay attention to him. His credibility was shot from supporting a cruel war in Iraq for bad reasons. And I for one am not amenable to having my atheism represented by a man who himself maintains a number of beliefs--such as America's ability to remake the world in its image--on faith and faith alone. In other words, Hitchens needs to be taking lessons in skepticism, not giving them. But the alternative offered by middle-of-the-road liberals in the Times and The New Yorker, the make-nice approach, is no better for the commonweal. Given the degree to which the conservative religious establishment believes it should be given deference in issues of marriage, child-birth, women's rights, and education, it seems increasingly clear that what's needed is not rapprochement but rather a staking of claims. For the good of our country and our society, we need to establish norms for the separation of secular and religious spheres of influence; for my money, I think the religious right has already gone too far. The last thing we should be doing is encouraging them by all but admitting our fault. That doesn't mean we need embrace shrill radicals like Hitchens and Dawkins, but rather that secular society needs to assert that (a) it can develop ethical norms without the need of religious assistance, and (b) that a free society both ensures the freedom of religious institutions within their realm, while divorcing that realm from the secular one. It is precisely this sepatation to which the political religious establishment most objects, and therefore it is of paramount importance it be defended against encroachment.
Yet this entire issue is all but absent from the work of the above-mentioned anti-religious radicals. For them, rationalism and religion are engaged in existential struggle, which only one will survive. The reality is that both religion and secular rationalism are here for the long haul, and the real issues that face America in addressing this uncomfortable marriage of liberalism and anti-liberal doctrines (with a great many churches falling in the first category, it should behoove us to remember) are no better served by the salvos issued by the drunken prat in question than they are by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, or any of the other pseudo-religious figures who put the faith of their flocks in the service of political radicals.
A Seattle-based writer and occasional theatre artist, my work has appeared in The Belltown Messenger, The Seattle Sinner, and regularly on Seattlest.com. For more information, see my lengthy bio, and please visit website of my literary magazine, The New Libertine, to appear in spring 2008. Feel free to email me.
