Sunday Blogger

AOL Time Warner Is Not Your Mother, Clean Up After Yourself

The winner of the world's most cluttered corporate home page has finally been decided. Amazing when you consider what a snazzy site this corporate sibling has.

Tacitus is on the Bustamente-Mecha case again. That's in California and I'm in Illinois, so what do I care about any of that, but there was a broader point I made deep in his comments a couple of weeks ago that I'll recycle now as slightly interesting:

What I find interesting about a group like Mecha (insofar as they are interesting) is sort of what I find interesting about the slavery reparations movement, which is-- why NOW? It's hard not to arrive at the glib answer, "because we ran out of real problems." Obviously neither group has exactly run out of real problems, but as long as they were seriously ground under the heel of white America, they didn't propose politically impossible schemes like autonomous homelands and big cash payouts-- they stuck to the piddly stuff like the right to vote, the right to work, the right not to get lynched for looking at a white girl. Only when your group has achieved such goals, and started to build a middle class and a place on the American cultural radar, do you have the political room and the tolerance in the public realm to start demanding crazy and improbable stuff.

So there's the best reason to want to see someone like Bustamente reject Mecha-- to prove that he's like one of the Black Panthers who became an alderman and learned how to work the vote and pass out the pork like an effective pol, instead of one of those nuts like Maxine Waters (or Dorothy Tillman here in Chicago) who's in office purely for the chance it offers to exercise a big mouth.

Excerpts from emails about why Judge Roy Moore is a poltroon, un-American, and a danger in these times:

The real question I have-- of course it's not really a question-- about this whole Roy Moore business is not whether it should or should not be constitutional to display the Ten Commandments, but-- why do you want this so badly? Because we should honor the laws that led to our laws? Nonsense, no one is clamoring this instant to put up a statue to the Magna Carta or German common law (or even George Mason). You said as much yourself, that Moore bore false witness-- oh, excuse me, was "clever"-- about his true intentions by working a few other historical precedents into his design, like chorus girls supporting the headliner. If merely honoring the Ten C's was the only objective, there is surely every opportunity to erect a 500-foot blinking neon Decalogue with observation deck and gift shop on private property anywhere in that town, and a hundred others throughout the Bible Belt. (When I lived in Kansas, I greatly enjoyed visiting the giant praying hands at Oral Roberts University a few hours away, which were said in the town to open wide whenever they heard money jangling.)

What reason could there be, indeed, to put that monument in this one spot and no other, besides the desire to establish primacy for one religio-ethnic group over all others? To say that no matter what that there Constitution may say, boy, this here is Jesus Country and don't you forget it, exactly as the white population in the South has traditionally used public spaces and symbols to make its power known. I see very little difference between this effort and the ones to fly the Confederate flag, in the message they are intended to communicate about the true sympathies of those who wield state power. And that's why it is an ignoble fight, and even an ugly one, and one that any Christian who has the tolerance and respect for his fellow citizens that make him better than a Wahhabi imam ought to shun. For my part, I often think the ACLU and their sort go too far, and I have a hard time seeing the harm in the occasional creche on public property around the holiday season-- that is, until a Roy Moore comes along and reminds me of the real motives of those pushing for it.

I also believe it is a fundamental (no pun intended) matter of respect for others, that putatively religious value (do unto others...) that is forgotten by religion whenever it gets its hands on civil or even significant social power. The big change that's coming is that for 200 years we could look at this strictly in terms of a Christian (Protestant) majority, a Catholic minority who were increasingly swept into that calculus as part of the Christian majority, and a small but influential Jewish minority that was also occasionally co-opted under the heading of a Judeo-Christian tradition. That left the whole country basically pointed at about three cranky atheists (someday I'll write a paper on how American society has room for only one famous atheist at a time-- Robert Ingersoll in the late 19th century, Mencken in the 20s and 30s, Madalyn Murray O'Hair in the 60s, now I think Gore Vidal is in the process of handing the job to Christopher Hitchens.)

For the first time, non-Judeo-Christian populations are becoming statistically significant in the US. Asians on the west coast (though many are Christians, many are not), Muslim populations throughout the country, Hindis throughout the technical and medical professions (sheesh, walk through a hospital in Chicago and try to find a resident who's not Asian). For the first time, you have people who, seeing a creche or the Ten Commandments on government property, see something that's completely outside their traditions, that says "not for you" on the central seats of government power.

Take the obviously most troublesome population among them-- Muslims. Is that really the message we want our courthouses to give to them-- that American law, American justice, is merely Christian justice, Christian power in action? Or would it be better to say, we have a pluralist tradition, a tradition of neutrality and impartiality and blind justice, that treats everyone fairly and equally-- so when we convict some guys for plotting to bomb something, it wasn't just an excuse to round up some Muslims because we have the power and they don't.

Seems to me that's NEVER been more important than it is right now.

Director's commentary on this post:

Earlier this week I was in Instapundit, apparently because I was the fastest guy to respond with a fairly obvious retort to somebody else's post. Here's the sequence of events:

1. Somebody did a Photoshop parody in which the Ten Commandments outside that courtroom in Alabama and the signs of the protesters, etc. were replaced with images of the demonic Cthulhu (from the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft).

2. Instapundit thought it was funny and linked to it.

3. An Instapundit reader wrote in complaining that the parody was unfair, or inapt, or something, because there's nothing objectionable about erecting a monument to the Ten Commandments outside a U.S. courthouse-- since our Founding Fathers were all devout Christians, and practically copied the whole Constitution out of Leviticus (hence the 6th Amendment: "Congress shall make no law permitting the cutting of beards, or the eating of shellfish and other treif, nor the spilling of seed upon the ground").

4. Your humble servant (me) did about 2 minutes worth of Internet research and quickly produced an assortment of quotes demonstrating that whatever the religious faiths of our Founding Fathers (which ranged from hard to determine, in the case of wily old Franklin, to fairly clearly agnostic, in the case of Jefferson), they were all pretty clear on the idea that the Constitution was an earthly product, not God's law, and religion should be kept at arm's length from the controls of government.

5. Having used the phrase "Founding Fathers" more times than usual that day, yr hmbl svt (me) had one of the tunes from "1776" in his head for the rest of the day.

Then things got interesting, when a fairly-well-known blogger named Clayton Cramer, who I think used to be part of The Volokh Conspiracy but parted ways with them because he seemed to be noticeably to their right on homosexuality, wrote in to Instapundit claiming that my quotes were basically fraudulent.

Part of the problem was that Instapundit had added a mistaken quote to the list, attributed to George Washington. I had also actually seen the same quote, which came from the language of a treaty, but when I saw it it was attributed to John Adams-- and even that is apparently inaccurate (except in the sense that the treaty issued from Adams' administration and was presumably blessed by him). My quotes, however, are accurate, in the pretty normal sense of the term which means "the guy I said said this actually said this," and the only real issue is, can they be argued away as irrelevant, as Cramer has argued on his blog (saying they related only to very specific circumstances and shouldn't be taken to imply anything bigger), or do they indicate-- as I think they very clearly do-- that the Founding Fathers generally had a pretty good grasp of the ways that religions had abused civil power whenever they got the police on their side, and were determined to make America different.

So anyway, I sent a rebuttal of Cramer to Instapundit and Cramer; Instapundit had long since moved on, but Cramer and I have corresponded a few times since about the issues involved here.

I'm not going to reproduce all of that, it's long and repetitive and anyway I haven't asked his permission, but I thought the above encapsulated pretty well why this just strikes me as just that much more bad behavior on the part of officials in the South who kinda missed the parts about "all the people" in civics class.

Here's another couple of chunks (to reward you for reading all this), explaining why I think the idea that our government is a product of Christianity is seriously overblown:

You skip the other point [the Founding Fathers] often made, which is that an established religion, a religion with civil power, is inevitably a weakened, corrupted, cruel one. "A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law." --Ben Franklin (as Mrs. Dogood)

I am willing, like Lincoln, to give you half of your case. I think it's impossible to say what part of the Western heritage is Christianity and what part is not, because so many of the things that our system comes out of also pushed Christianity in those same new directions. So I grant that there is a significant degree of Christian tradition behind our laws-- though there are many rather obvious examples of Christian laws that did NOT make it into the criminal code.

But this all started with someone implicitly claiming that "our laws, culture, and customs were based in large part upon the principles" of Christianity. He was trying to lay claim to all of our Western tradition as specifically Christian and therefore endorsing the idea that our system is avowedly Christian by nature, which is possible only when you ignore that so many parts of that tradition-- the revival of interest in Greek and Roman philosophy during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, etc.-- were rebellions against the power of state-sanctioned religion. So his claim is blatantly false. Whether this FF or that was more or less religious is irrelevant-- they have to be frickin' Cromwell to get to where he wants them to be, and it just ain't gonna happen. That's my core point which is, so far as I can see, untouched by this dancing around whether Franklin truly believed what he said on this day to one guy or that day to somebody else...

All of [the quotes Cramer cited in which the Founders talk about religion more positively] fall far, far short of doing what you want them to do-- prove that when they said "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion," what they meant was, "But of course since we're all Christian gentlemen, the whole country should be set up to mirror our lifestyles and personal opinions as closely as possible for all time." Even from there, you would have to argue why the living document of the Constitution should never have evolved from that viewpoint as the religious mix of the country changed further-- and as the West moved two centuries further from the age when every omnipotent god was backed with a king's army, just to be safe. But a few quotes from second-tier founding fathers and one or two colonies out of 13 doesn't even get you close.

In effect, you're saying that their religious affiliation (however strong or loose) gets to outvote the votes they cast for a government studiously neutral on matters of religion. If a troupe of Chinese had been brought into the deliberations and produced the exact same document, would you say that America was now a Buddhist nation because of the makeup of the body that produced it? Or would you finally forget that, and look at the actual words in the actual document for guidance? They made our government religion-neutral on purpose. Respect that if you respect them; it has done more good for religion in this country than an entire army of yahoos like Roy Moore ever will.

I thought it was kind of funny when one of the DVD box sets of The Simpsons was prefaced by the disclaimer that the views expressed on the commentaries did not represent those of 20th Century Fox, its affiliates, its shareholders, its close friends in the Chinese government, etc. Because, you know, there was a lot of danger that you might mistake Matt Groening's lefty counterculture-sarcastic viewpoint for the official positions of Rupert Murdoch, or at least Bill O'Reilly.

But I just acquired F.W. Murnau's 1927 silent classic Sunrise (by the way, great deal at Costco in a 4-pack with All About Eve, How Green Was My Valley and Gentleman's Agreement, which works out to about $15 a movie after you smash Gentleman's Agreement with a ball-peen hammer). And I see that-- in a great feat of needless lawyering-- the same disclaimer appears on it as well. So I have to ask, if these aren't the official views of Rupert Murdoch on how Murnau synthesized the Reinhardtian and Piscatorian German Expressionist stage with the moving camera style he and Karl Freund pioneered on Der Letzte Mann to create a distinctively universal and poetic mise-en-scene, then dammit, what are they? Why are we letting him buy up TV stations and newspapers while this question goes unanswered, thanks to the slippery manuevers of the Fox legal department?