I just want to thank all of you who nominated me. It all started as a joke…I never expected it to get this far.

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Sounds like bad news for the future of my habit-forming dirty martinis:

High summer temperatures and ever-increasing levels of U.S. beverage consumption are causing ice cubes across the nation to melt at “an alarmingly unprecedented rate,” the U.S. Department of Consumer Affairs reported Tuesday.

“We are looking at a nationwide trend of crisis proportions,” said Clyde Simms, director of the USDCA’s potables division and Clinton-appointed Beverage Czar. “If the current rate of melting continues, we may face a situation in which Americans are not assured the option of having an ice-cold beverage in their hands at any given moment.”

Of the 28.9 billion tons of ice cubes produced commercially in August, it is estimated that less than half remains. With these frozen resources already depleted—most of them having been removed from proper storage facilities and left to melt in glasses, paper cups and styrofoam coolers—government officials are powerless to stem the tide.

“So far, we have been able to replenish our ice-cube reserves at a fast enough rate to maintain an acceptable level of comfort,” Simms said. “But how long will this melting continue? How long can we keep up?”

[snip]

In the wake of Tuesday’s announcement, supermarket, convenience-mart and liquor-store owners across the U.S. are anxiously monitoring their ice chests, hoping they will have enough bags of cubes and blocks to meet demand.

Enlarge Image U.S. Ice Cubes Melting At Alarming Rate

U.S. Ice Cubes Melting At Alarming Rate

“Where are the 18,000 pounds of ice we made just last month?” asked Brian Ketterling of Chicago’s Central Refrigeration, which produces ice 24 hours a day. “I’ll tell you where: nowhere. Even the puddles are gone.”

“People say ice cubes are a renewable resource,” Ketterling continued, “but try telling that to anyone facing a freezer full of empty trays when it’s time to make a 7&7. The last thing on their minds is renewability; they need ice cubes, and they need them now.”

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(Germany; Post WWII Surrender. Still trying to source.)

Filed under: Catholicism | 3 Comments »

As a writer, struggling to synthesize my Catholic identity with my desire to write believable fiction, I’ve long been a fan of the following quote from the Venerable Cardinal John Henry Newman: “It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless literature about a sinful man.”

I haven’t ever read any Newman, though, so I didn’t know where it came from. I decided recently that it was time I looked it up, because, after all, context is king. I found that the quote belongs in Newmans’ Idea of a University, and the section in which it resides speaks directly to our debate over whether to engage or withdraw from the culture. Permit me, please, to quote at some length Newman’s brilliantly eloquent analysis (with my emphasis):

Some one will say to me perhaps: “Our youth shall not be corrupted. We will dispense with all general or national Literature whatever, if it be so exceptionable; we will have a Christian Literature of our own, as pure, as true, as the Jewish.” You cannot have it:—I do not say you cannot form a select literature for the young, nay, even for the middle or lower classes; this is another matter altogether: I am speaking of University Education, which implies an extended range of reading, which has to deal with standard works of genius, or what are called the classics of a language: and I say, from the nature of the case, if Literature is to be made a study of human nature, you cannot have a Christian Literature. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man. You may gather together something very great and high, something higher than any Literature ever was; and when you have done so, you will find that it is not Literature at all. You will have simply left the delineation of man, as such, and have substituted for it, as far as you have had any thing to substitute, that of man, as he is or might be, under certain special advantages. Give up the study of man, as such, if so it must be; but say you do so. Do not say you are studying him, his history, his mind and his heart, when you are studying something else. Man is a being of genius, passion, intellect, conscience, power. He exercises these {230} various gifts in various ways, in great deeds, in great thoughts, in heroic acts, in hateful crimes. He founds states, he fights battles, he builds cities, he ploughs the forest, he subdues the elements, he rules his kind. He creates vast ideas, and influences many generations. He takes a thousand shapes, and undergoes a thousand fortunes. Literature records them all to the life,

Quicquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas,
Gaudia, discursus.

He pours out his fervid soul in poetry; he sways to and fro, he soars, he dives, in his restless speculations; his lips drop eloquence; he touches the canvas, and it glows with beauty; he sweeps the strings, and they thrill with an ecstatic meaning. He looks back into himself, and he reads his own thoughts, and notes them down; he looks out into the universe, and tells over and celebrates the elements and principles of which it is the product.

Such is man: put him aside, keep him before you; but, whatever you do, do not take him for what he is not, for something more divine and sacred, for man regenerate. Nay, beware of showing God’s grace and its work at such disadvantage as to make the few whom it has thoroughly influenced compete in intellect with the vast multitude who either have it not, or use it ill. The elect are few to choose out of, and the world is inexhaustible. From the first, Jabel and Tubalcain, Nimrod “the stout hunter,” the learning of the Pharaohs, and the wisdom of the East country, are of the world. Every now and then they are rivalled by a Solomon or a Beseleel, but the habitat of natural gifts is the natural man. The Church may use them, she cannot at her will originate {231} them. Not till the whole human race is made new will its literature be pure and true. Possible of course it is in idea, for nature, inspired by heavenly grace, to exhibit itself on a large scale, in an originality of thought or action, even far beyond what the world’s literature has recorded or exemplified; but, if you would in fact have a literature of saints, first of all have a nation of them.

[snip]

“…Why do we educate, except to prepare for the world? Why do we cultivate the intellect of the many beyond the first elements of knowledge, except for this world? Will it be much matter in the world to come whether our bodily health or whether our intellectual strength was more or less, except of course as this world is in all its circumstances a trial for the next? If then a University is a direct preparation for this world, let it be what it professes. It is not a Convent, it is not a Seminary; it is a place to fit men of the world for the world. We cannot possibly keep them from plunging into the world, with all its ways and principles and maxims, when their time comes; but we can prepare them against what is inevitable; and it is not the way to learn to swim in troubled waters, never to have gone into them. Proscribe (I do not merely say particular authors, particular works, particular passages) but Secular Literature as such; cut out from your class books all broad manifestations of the natural man; and those manifestations are waiting for your pupil’s benefit at the very doors of your lecture room in living and {233} breathing substance. They will meet him there in all the charm of novelty, and all the fascination of genius or of amiableness. Today a pupil, tomorrow a member of the great world: today confined to the Lives of the Saints, tomorrow thrown upon Babel;—thrown on Babel, without the honest indulgence of wit and humour and imagination having ever been permitted to him, without any fastidiousness of taste wrought into him, without any rule given him for discriminating “the precious from the vile,” beauty from sin, the truth from the sophistry of nature, what is innocent from what is poison. You have refused him the masters of human thought, who would in some sense have educated him, because of their incidental corruption: you have shut up from him those whose thoughts strike home to our hearts, whose words are proverbs, whose names are indigenous to all the world, who are the standard of their mother tongue, and the pride and boast of their countrymen, Homer, Ariosto, Cervantes, Shakespeare, because the old Adam smelt rank in them; and for what have you reserved him? You have given him “a liberty unto” the multitudinous blasphemy of his day; you have made him free of its newspapers, its reviews, its magazines, its novels, its controversial pamphlets, of its Parliamentary debates, its law proceedings, its platform speeches, its songs, its drama, its theatre, of its enveloping, stifling atmosphere of death. You have succeeded but in this,—in making the world his University.

When facing the question of retreat from society, those of us called to be in the world (read: families) aren’t exactly going to sit in divine contemplation on top of poles in the desert or live out our days in the silent, contemplative work/prayer cycle of Monte Casino.

We have a right to erect barriers, a firewall, if you will, between us and the world, so that we may guard against what comes in. I find, however, that it is unrealistic and perhaps even irresponsible to throw in our hand and say, “I’m done. All of it is garbage, we will be corrupted, so none of it may enter these gates.” Nor is it sufficient to merely draw what was good from the past and ignore entirely what is going on in the present.

As Newman says, if you proscribe secular literature, if you forbid your students (or children, when they are old enough) out of contempt for the world, “its newspapers, its reviews, its magazines, its novels, its controversial pamphlets…its Parliamentary debates, its law proceedings, its platform speeches, its songs, its drama, its theatre…its enveloping, stifling atmosphere of death” within the confines of their education and formation, they will enter the world and find that experience becomes their university.

I’ve watched this happen. I’ve watched strong Catholic families forbid too much, withdraw too much, attempt to use the faith as a barrier and shield and at times a cudgel to keep the spirit of the age out of their homes and away from their children. I’ve watched then, as those children became adults, fall prey to as they encountered things which, due to the insufficiency of their formation, they were unable to discern as “”the precious from the vile,” beauty from sin, the truth from the sophistry of nature, what is innocent from what is poison.”

Some abandoned their faith. Others became schismatic. Others still became apathetic, and indulged in the delights which, sheltered from, they were never adequately fortified against (lots of unwed mothers in this category).

Of course, this won’t always be the case, but the tendency is strong. Newman encourages us to filter what our chilren receive, but as we grow to adulthood and face real education, we need to be ready to engage the world. That doesn’t happen in a vaccuum. It doesn’t happen unless the approach, even through the filters of childhood, is one that prepares us for the real education. Because by the time we get to University it may be too late to start forming the defenses that allow us to exist in the world and not of it.

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Jehova’s Witnesses:

Mormons:

The Spread of Vamprisim:

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From the so-called “Letter to Diognetus“:

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign..

…Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body’s hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.

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While my scanner somehow managed to make this photo look like it was taken by a 1970s-era Polaroid camera, it was five years ago today that I made the best decision of my life. (Those of you who know how indecisive I am may interject that it was the only decision I ever made; if so, I’m glad it was such a good one.)

Five years of marriage to the most wonderful, beautiful, loving, difficult, stubborn, challenging, amazing woman I have ever met. I’ll never forget the first time I saw her walking down the aisle - my heart skipped a beat. She was stunning, her radiant smile beaming out from beneath her veil. I was so sure that morning that it didn’t even occur to me what a nervous smile it was on her part (and to be sure, I was getting by far the better part of the deal.)

I love her more now than I did then. And there’s so much more room to grow.

Thanks, Jamie, for being my everything.

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Barbara Nicolosi wrote a post on Monday that, in her characteristic fashion, pokes a finger right into that whole hornet’s nest that is the Catholic bunker mentality. In an interview with Lay Witness, she talks about the problems we have with Christians - Catholics in particular - being ignorant of the culture they live in. This all comes within the context of a discussion of art, and who the patrons of art should be. It used to be the Church, but it isn’t anymore. Nicolosi seeks to answer the question of where the departure point was for the Church:

Was there a time when the Church just stopped caring about the arts?

I’m not an art historian, but I am sure it is all connected to the fact that the community of artists went with social Darwinism and began to attack belief in the transcendent, and so the community of faith and the community of arts ended up at odds with each other for the first time in human history.

On a national level, America became the most influential country in the world and was dominated by Protestants. And Protestantism is, of course, touched by Jansenism, so they are not a people of the arts. The only art form that Protestants are comfortable with is music, for reasons I don’t understand.

The interesting thing is, in the United States the national Catholic Church became the Irish Church, which was the one European Church that did not have a vibrant artistic tradition. There is a fascinating book called Why Catholics Don’t Sing by Thomas Day, in which he makes the case that because the Irish Church was a persecuted Church, it had no artistic expression. They used to huddle in a field and say Mass because they weren’t even allowed to have churches while they were persecuted by the British. So the Irish clergy came to America and didn’t bring a sense of visual or musical aesthetics with them, and they became the national Church here. How else to explain the embrace of the awful music in Glory and Praise.

I don’t know what they’re problem in Europe was, except maybe they just reached the point of saturation where they were surrounded by sacred art. You know, there’s a church on every block in Italy, and it’s stuffed with stuff. So at a certain point, they had so much that they couldn’t even see it anymore, and in this country, we had so little that we had nothing to see.

But what happened, of course, too, was a huge movement after Vatican II for everybody to become like Thomas Merton in the Abbey of Gethsemane. Rip out all the statuary and lose the colors and symbols and just have white walls. Well, that’s probably OK for Cistercian monks who live in complete silence and have no distractions, but we lay people really need the sensory helps to stay focused at Church! Somebody should have thought it through better before allowing the terrible iconoclasm of the 1970’s and ’80s to eviscerate our beautiful churches.

[snip]

It’s a sin what we have been doing with the arts in the Church for the last few decades. I get really mad when people criticize Hollywood and say, “Why doesn’t Hollywood make better movies?” And I respond, “Excuse me, why doesn’t St. Mary’s have better music at the 10 o’clock Mass? When you get your act together, we can talk about Hollywood.”

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: When it comes to religion and the apprehension of truth, AESTHETICS MATTER. Barbara Nicolosi gets this in a way that few who are out there, working in the world, do. And that’s a problem that she is more than willing to indict others for:

On the darkest side, the refusal of Christians to have a voice in the mainstream culture comes from fear and ignorance and laziness. We haven’t experienced the love of God enough to send us surging into the culture to express our joy. We don’t really care about our neighbors who are languishing amidst the messages of a culture of death.

The best spin I can put on Christians ducking down in caves of their own making today is the desire to protect their kids from negative influences. However, from a pastoral standpoint, the emphasis needs to be not on protecting our children. The emphasis needs to be on preparing our children. The fact is, your little kid is not going to become a disciple when he’s 18. He’s a disciple when he’s 6 to his kindergarten class. And he needs to be comfortable in his moment, which is a 24-hour news cycle, visual image dominated Internet world.

We need to be people who are disciples of 2007. As John Paul II called for over and over and over, we need to “Throw open the doors of the media to Christ.” Imagine that! Throw open the doors of the media to Christ! That is not dwell in the cave and shut it out, whining that, “It’s all garbage.” That is saying that we need to infuse these means that God has given us to fill the world with tidings of goodness and truth and beauty.

Now, the question is, if you’ve been raised in a cave, are you going to become a film director? Are you going to ever be on the Today show as an actor talking to Katie Couric and saying, “Oh yeah, and I go to church on Sunday,” if you’ve been raised in a cave? No.

So by raising Christian kids in a “safe” cave by shutting out the culture in the hope that they’re going to be unscathed, what we actually do is we create useless, impotent disciples for this modern time. They would be great disciples for 1827. But the fact is, they cannot enter into this moment. They can’t read and enter into dialogue with the signs of their own times.

This is why, despite my own temptations to just shut off the TV and move to the boonies I can’t. Correction - that’s partially why I can’t. Part of it is that I’m simply drawn to it like a moth to a flame. I want the city. I want to go see movies. I want to sit down once in a while with a beer and a good real-time strategy game. I want to be a part of everything that’s going on, to get right square in the middle of it and separate the wheat from the chaff. Maybe that’s dancing the edge a little too much for some, but anything else just isn’t living as far as I’m concerned.  If I were still single, I’d move in a heartbeat to New York or Rome or Tokyo. Or even Los Angeles. Because whatever assessments we have about the good and bad things that stem from our culture, that’s where the culture is coming from. And we need to be aware of it to know where it’s headed, and what we can do.

And I can’t, can’t, can’t stand hiding from it. It’s not who I am.

This is why I get uppity about arbitrary anachronisms, or the adoption of homeliness as a fashion statement by Catholics. We shouldn’t be throwbacks just because we’re afraid of today. We shouldn’t adopt the look of the FLDS because we’re afraid of immodesty or impropriety. We need to work to be the best we can within the parameters of what’s going on, right now, every day. And it’s possible, I know, because I see it. It’s out there, often unwittingly. There are people with no connection to our belief system out there wearing modest clothes because they find them fashionable, or making good art because it’s beautiful, or making and enjoying good food because it delights the senses.

They don’t realize it, but they are tapping into the sacramentality of life that we are not taking advantage of. How many times have you heard that some celebrity is Catholic, only to say, “Yeah, and I’m sure I know how orthodox they are.” Well just where the hell are the good Catholic paragons of society going to come from if not from our families?

Nicolosi has so many good things to say I can’t possibly fit them all in, but here’s more that needs to be read. When asked what her Act One Hollywood training program is looking for, she responds:

Well, the first thing we’re looking for on the writing side is people who can spell! I wish I was kidding! I get people all the time that come to me and they want to be writers but they can barely write two sentences that are clear. It’s very rare to find somebody who actually has a good writing style.

And then we need people who have been reasonably well educated in storytelling. We give our writers a list of the hundred most influential novels ever written. And we ask them to check off how many they’ve read—not how many they’ve seen in the movies, but how many they’ve read. The young people coming to us on the average have read only seven of the hundred most influential stories ever written. And these people are top of their classes! We’re not talking obscure stuff here. I’m talking Hemingway and Hawthorne and Austen and the Greeks. So we have a huge problem. This a particular challenge for these two up-and-coming generations—the Gen-Xers and the Millennials—they’ve been completely cut off from their cultural heritage.

And then they need to be somewhat culturally savvy. They ought to have a sense of what is the best work that is out there and why. Often, the real conservative Christian kids that come to us have seen every movie done in the Golden Age but they haven’t seen anything since Star Wars. And it’s the same problem because if you haven’t seen The Matrix, you don’t know your audience today.

On the executive side, we want people from top schools, top undergraduate programs, and even grad programs, who are primarily law and finance oriented. So we want lawyers, law students, MBAs, people with finance degrees and any other people with corporate or business experience. We’re preparing people there for the executive suites of Hollywood, and that’s the talent pool the industry draws from.

I would say the next thing we want is committed Christians. We have all denominations. I’m very sad that we have had so few Catholics go through the program. I have gone to these schools—the Catholic schools, the special Catholic schools—I’ve gone to them all several times and spoken there and pleaded, and what I find there is that kids do not have any apostolic drive. After getting these great Great Books educations, what they want to be is maybe a DRE in a small country parish in the backwoods where nobody will notice them and they can just shut the world down and out. You know, there’s nothing apostolic in that. St. Paul could’ve done that—the Church would be nothing if we had done that. We have not received a mandate to head for the hills.

There is something wrong in a Church in which we are preparing kids to only play in the Catholic subculture. [whispers] There was never supposed to be a Catholic subculture! You know what disciples do in the Catholic subculture? They have personality fights and power struggles. Well, I’d rather be martyred by the world and the devil than be killed by a fellow Catholic because they don’t like the way I say the Rosary or something.

YES! EXACTLY! How much navel gazing have we spent our time on? Forget “we”! How much navel gazing have I wasted my time on?!? I think I’m fighting the good fight, battling with the progressives and anti-traditionalists of the world, but I’m bringing the fight to other Catholics who, wrong as they are, are at least on the inside.

I am a writer. A story teller. A videographer. A photographer. A lover of fiction. A lover of films. An aesthete. And what have I done with it? Jack-diddly, thanks very much, because I’m either too lazy or too afraid or too stupid to realize I have only so much time on this earth to use the gifts God has given me for something other than comm-box wars.

A balance must be struck. It may be ugly out there, but that doesn’t avoiding it all is the right solution.

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Christopher Hitchens, author of the atheist screed God Is Not Great, allowed himself to be waterboarded for an article in Vanity Fair.

I’ll let you savor that for a moment before moving on.

Ready? Ok then. Hitchens describes (in less detail, perhaps, than would be truly helpful) what his experience was like:

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered. This was very rapidly brought home to me when, on top of the hood, which still admitted a few flashes of random and worrying strobe light to my vision, three layers of enveloping towel were added. In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and—as you might expect—inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

This is because I had read that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, invariably referred to as the “mastermind” of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, had impressed his interrogators by holding out for upwards of two minutes before cracking. (By the way, this story is not confirmed. My North Carolina friends jeered at it. “Hell,” said one, “from what I heard they only washed his damn face before he babbled.”) But, hell, I thought in my turn, no Hitchens is going to do worse than that. Well, O.K., I admit I didn’t outdo him. And so then I said, with slightly more bravado than was justified, that I’d like to try it one more time. There was a paramedic present who checked my racing pulse and warned me about adrenaline rush. An interval was ordered, and then I felt the mask come down again. Steeling myself to remember what it had been like last time, and to learn from the previous panic attack, I fought down the first, and some of the second, wave of nausea and terror but soon found that I was an abject prisoner of my gag reflex. The interrogators would hardly have had time to ask me any questions, and I knew that I would quite readily have agreed to supply any answer. I still feel ashamed when I think about it. Also, in case it’s of interest, I have since woken up trying to push the bedcovers off my face, and if I do anything that makes me short of breath I find myself clawing at the air with a horrible sensation of smothering and claustrophobia. No doubt this will pass. As if detecting my misery and shame, one of my interrogators comfortingly said, “Any time is a long time when you’re breathing water.”

I’ve read this before, and the distinction is an important one - waterboarding does not simply simulate drowning; waterboarding IS drowning. Slowly, and under controlled circumstances, and with the aid of a physician so that, if necessary, the subject may be brought back to life, but there’s no part of breathing in water that is simulated. Try it sometime when you’re in the pool.

Hitchens goes on to describe the two schools of thought on whether what he experienced as torture, is, in fact, torture:

The team who agreed to give me a hard time in the woods of North Carolina belong to a highly honorable group. This group regards itself as out on the front line in defense of a society that is too spoiled and too ungrateful to appreciate those solid, underpaid volunteers who guard us while we sleep. These heroes stay on the ramparts at all hours and in all weather, and if they make a mistake they may be arraigned in order to scratch some domestic political itch. Faced with appalling enemies who make horror videos of torture and beheadings, they feel that they are the ones who confront denunciation in our press, and possible prosecution. As they have just tried to demonstrate to me, a man who has been waterboarded may well emerge from the experience a bit shaky, but he is in a mood to surrender the relevant information and is unmarked and undamaged and indeed ready for another bout in quite a short time. When contrasted to actual torture, waterboarding is more like foreplay. No thumbscrew, no pincers, no electrodes, no rack. Can one say this of those who have been captured by the tormentors and murderers of (say) Daniel Pearl? On this analysis, any call to indict the United States for torture is therefore a lame and diseased attempt to arrive at a moral equivalence between those who defend civilization and those who exploit its freedoms to hollow it out, and ultimately to bring it down. I myself do not trust anybody who does not clearly understand this viewpoint.

Against it, however, I call as my main witness Mr. Malcolm Nance. Mr. Nance is not what you call a bleeding heart. In fact, speaking of the coronary area, he has said that, in battlefield conditions, he “would personally cut bin Laden’s heart out with a plastic M.R.E. spoon.” He was to the fore on September 11, 2001, dealing with the burning nightmare in the debris of the Pentagon. He has been involved with the sere program since 1997. He speaks Arabic and has been on al-Qaeda’s tail since the early 1990s. His most recent book, The Terrorists of Iraq, is a highly potent analysis both of the jihadist threat in Mesopotamia and of the ways in which we have made its life easier. I passed one of the most dramatic evenings of my life listening to his cold but enraged denunciation of the adoption of waterboarding by the United States. The argument goes like this:

1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.

2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.

3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.

4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.

Ultimately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Hitchens comes to no real resolution on the matter. The title of his article is “Believe Me, It’s Torture”, but in the end you’re left to puzzle out why he didn’t make a stronger case in this regard.

I suppose since he’s made a career out of telling people why God doesn’t exist, he’s a bit short on the whole concept of proof points. On that note, in fact, I can’t help but wonder how things would have turned out if he breathed a little too much H20 and wound up having to be “brought back”. Might he have had an encounter with the eternal beyond? Could he, like St. Paul, have been knocked from his high horse, only to return and write a new book debunking his previous one?

I suppose, like question posed in this article, we may never find a completely satisfactory answer.

Filed under: American Empire | 3 Comments »

A new study ranks the United States at number 16 among the nations of the world as regards “happiness”. A bit more about the research:

The World Values Survey (WVS) is the work of a global network of social scientists who perform periodic surveys addressing a number of issues. The latest surveys, taken in the United States and in several developing countries, showed increased happiness from 1981 to 2007 in 45 of 52 countries for which substantial time series data was available.

Researchers responsible for the analysis, from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research (ISR) in Ann Arbor, say the overall rise in reported happiness is due to greater economic growth, democratization and social tolerance.

Looking at this, I can’t help but wonder how, according to the scientific method, happiness is determined? Or to quote Gene Wilder as Willy Wonka quoting Shakespeare, “Where is fancy bred - in the heart, or in the head?”

If the conditions really are “greater economic growth, democratization and social tolerance” then what consideration is given to spirituality, family life, committed love, healthy relationships, satisfaction from meaningful work, the joy of true culture, etc.?

There’s a lot more to life than prosperity, the ability to vote, and not having anyone tell you what you’re doing is wrong. Heck, I’d push all of those down to near the bottom of my “must have” list, with the possible exception of the freedom from stress that prosperity, rightly handled, can bring. (It would mean that all the contributing factors to the financial Sword of Damocles that always seems to be hanging over my head might take a vacation for a while, anyway.)

I’m not sure what to make of this. The details of the study as reported here are too vague. And if people are self-identifying as happy despite being more disconnected than ever from what we know to be the source of true happiness, what’s the disconnect? Are they really that deluded? I see far more unhappy Catholics than I do non-Catholics. Maybe thinking that whatever you want to do is OK really is the key to happiness in this life.

As for the next one, well, that’s another story.

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