Stella Borealis IV - Blog Comments, Letters and Stuff

Good piece by John Allen on Pius XII

2007-06-08T16:05:00.000-05:00

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John L. Allen, Jr., the ubiquitous fair-minded former Rome correspondent for the lefty National Catholic Reporter in his weekly flash as a very good piece on, get this… why Pope Pius XII ought to be beatified immediately.

I grew up with Pope Pius (he died when I was 16, but in those days before live television, he was a very remote figure to me, and probably most American Catholics).

I have a question about the canonization process which is taking place at a time when many of the Vatican’s records from the World War II period are just being released and it will be many years before the records up until the year of his death in 1958 will be released.

Have the officials responsible for the ultimate recommendation had access to all of those records still kept under lock and key?

Pius’ role in World Affairs after the Soviet Union took over Eastern Europe and Mao took over China might be something need to be examined.

I doubt that anything but laudable actions would be discovered.

But I guess my real question is “Is it too soon for his canonization?”
Comment by ray from mn — 8 June 2007 @ 3:03 pm

Holier Than Thou

2007-06-05T07:53:00.000-05:00

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Originally posted on AbbeyRoads2

Ray from MN Says:
June 5th, 2007 at 6:53 am

Well, now that you brought it up, Terry, I can no longer keep my silence on the matter.

I have raised the issue with a canon lawyer (who did not give me the courtesy of a reply).

No before you think I have gone off the deep end on this issue hear me out.

I have no problem with the Saturday (and Holy Day) vigil Masses. I’ve got other things to worry about.

But, being a constitutional conservative and legal literalist, there is a problem with the argument used to justify the vigil Masses.

Reverting to the pre-wristwatch days of the Old and New Testament, the canon lawyers have determined that the “day” lasts from Sundown to Sundown and accordingly, “Saturday at Sundown” is legally “Sunday.”

I won’t quibble about the 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. vigil Masses that take place long before Sundown, especially in the Summer months under Daylight Savings Time.

What I do wonder about are all those 5:00, 6:00, 6:30, 7:30 and 9:00 p.m. (in the Twin Cities) Masses that take place on Sunday Evenings.

Especially in the winter months here, aren’t those times legally “Monday?”

It seems to me that a strict interpretation of the Saturday Vigil Mass rule would declare that all of those who attend Sunday Evening Masses have missed their Sunday Mass Obligation.

What do you think?

"I'm O.K. with you being a Catholic, as long as you aren't actually Catholic"

2007-06-05T07:30:00.000-05:00

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Originally posted on Recovering Dissident Catholic on June 4, 2007

Ray from MN said...

There are a lot of CINO's out there. And they feel threatened by ORCIMMN!'s out there (Orthodox Roman Catholic is my middle name!).

I have been volunteering at the local Veterans Hospital for the past few months. Frankly some of my most rewarding interactions with patients are with those who admit that they haven't been a good Catholic.

The honesty brings tears to my eyes.

Today a patient admitted that he hadn't been practicing his faith. It sounded like he had had almost no education in his faith. He was in for some major surgery and admitted that he had been near death.

That got him reminiscing a bit and he mentioned a time when he was in Vietnam and his Division was engaged in some kind of major movement and as the men moved by, a "Mexican Priest" stood on a high platform and "splashed water on us" and prayed the Hail Mary over them.

He claimed that he had always remembered the prayer and agreed to say it with me (but he didn't remember most of the words).

I later brought him a little prayer book with the words and asked him to pray "one Hail Mary a day."

Many of you might have heard Father Corapi tell how his mother send him a holy card with the Hail Mary on the back and asked him to do that when he was at his lowest in California. It worked.

June 04, 2007 4:51 PM

Change of Concentration

2007-06-05T07:28:00.000-05:00

I haven't been posting anything here for over a year. I am going to start posting comments that I have made on other blogs and "letter to the editor" and other things like that here.

Suing the Church

2006-05-05T02:30:00.000-05:00

Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

Last summer, attorneys in Colorado filed the first sex-abuse lawsuits against the archdiocese of Denver since the national clergy abuse scandal began four years ago. All of the suits involved two men: one, a laicized former priest who left active ministry more than a decade ago, and the other, a priest dead for more than a decade. Several of the suits have since named individual parishes as targets along with the diocese. Every claimed incident of abuse occurred more than twenty-five years ago. Nearly all occurred in the 1960s and 1970s.

Under Colorado law, plaintiffs’ attorneys have a problem. So many years have passed since the incidents claimed by their clients that their suits may be barred by the statute of limitations. This frustrates victims who seek what they perceive as justice and closure. It also stymies attorneys who know that suing the Catholic Church can be extremely lucrative. Since the early 1990s, the flow of current abuse cases has steadily declined. Breaking open the past could provide a new and profitable frontier for continued sex-abuse litigation. But that requires changing the rules—and applying them retroactively.

And so in Colorado, and a dozen other states, a new and unsettling legal struggle has opened to eliminate or sharply revise the current statutes of limitations that govern lawsuits concerning the sexual abuse of minors. The outcome will have enormous implications for the future of Catholic life in the United States.

Statutes of limitations exist for good reasons: to protect justice, not prevent it. They were created to encourage a timely and fair resolution of claims, which is why law-enforcement officials support them. Over time, memories fade, witnesses die, evidence grows stale, and fraudulent claims increase. But state laws involve two different kinds of statutes of limitations: criminal and civil. Criminal statutes cannot be amended and then applied to past actions, since the United States Constitution expressly forbids retroactive criminal laws, known as ex post facto law. But some lower courts have ruled that civil statutes can be extended into the past. Civil lawsuits have a much lower threshold for proof than criminal cases. As a result, retroactive civil liability puts a huge defense burden on any accused individual or institution. In fact, just the possible cost of a legal defense can force a diocese into settlement talks. This serves plaintiffs’ attorneys and the persons they represent quite well. Whether it really serves justice is another matter.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys and victims’ groups often work together in this new strategy of amending the statutes of limitations. Victims’ groups may act as stimulants to sympathetic news media and state lawmakers. Plaintiffs’ attorneys may then offer help in drafting new legislation from which they themselves hope to benefit. This happened in California with Senate Bill 1779, which became catastrophic state law. The bill opened a one-year window to revive expired California sex-abuse claims, some from seventy years ago, and more than a thousand plaintiffs then filed previously expired claims. The California bill was developed with the direct assistance of attorney Jeffrey Anderson, who has very profitably sued Catholic dioceses and institutions across the country for years. A proposed Colorado version of the legislation is modeled directly on California’s.

Once the public is suitably sensitized by news media in a target area, pressure on lawmakers grows to provide “justice” for those victims whose claims have expired due to statutes of limitations. Some victims may say they were too frightened to come forward until now. Others may say they were so traumatized that they couldn’t remember their abuse until recently. Typically, attorneys will then argue that the only way their clients will get closure and peace is by litigating their expired cases. It’s an effective, appealing argument, and no one can dispute the real suffering that goes with the experience of abuse.

In judging it, however, we need to consider the bill’s basic fairness. Any revision to civil statutes of limitations must be comprehensive, fair, and equally applied. This almost never happens. The data clearly show that the sexual abuse of minors is not a disproportionately Catholic problem. In fact, some of the worst adult sexual misconduct with minors occurs in public institutions, particularly public schools. But in most states, those schools enjoy some form of governmental immunity. In other words, it’s far easier to sue a private institution, such as a Catholic diocese, than it is to sue a public-school district. It’s also a lot more lucrative since, even if governmental immunity were waived, public schools and institutions usually enjoy the added protection of low caps on damages (in Colorado, $150,000). For exactly the same sexual abuse in a public school and a Catholic parish, the difference in financial exposure is millions of dollars.

This has a clearly prejudicial impact on Catholics. But it’s also bad law for everybody. Hofstra University’s Charol Shakeshaft, the leading expert on public school sexual misconduct, testified to the Colorado General Assembly earlier this year that nearly 7 percent of students nationally report “being sexually abused in a physical manner by an educator in public schools.” That means, according to Shakeshaft, that “of the approximately 45 million students attending public and private K-12 schools, more than 3 million will have been the target of physical sexual exploitation by an employee of the school by 11th grade.”

If the sexual abuse of minors is so grievous—and it most certainly is—why should its punishment be harsh for Catholic and other private institutions, but soft for public schools where it occurs more frequently? Ironically, most current state laws hold public schools and institutions less accountable—precisely because citizens pay taxes for them. That makes no sense.

Worse, as Shakeshaft points out, “national data indicate that few [public school] administrators report educator sexual misconduct to the police or district attorney. When this abuse is reported to the criminal justice system, it comes from parents or others.” And reporting patterns in public schools “show that when students do report [educator sexual misconduct], they are often ignored. Teachers and other staff in public schools are often moved from school to school when allegations emerge, rather than the school attempting to remove the teacher from the district.” This is exactly what many Catholic dioceses have been accused of in the past, but with devastating financial consequences for the dioceses.

There is an inequity hardwired into the whole national discussion of sexual abuse. Catholics can live with hard laws if they serve the common good—but the laws need to be equally hard for all offending persons and institutions, with the same rules and penalties and no hidden escape clauses.

Revenge, Francis Bacon once warned, is “a kind of wild justice, which the more man’s nature runs to, the more ought the law to weed it out.” It makes no sense to hold innocent people accountable today for the evil actions of a small number of individuals from decades ago. Diocesan insurance policies, when they apply at all, cover only a modest portion of the crippling sex-abuse settlements that have now become routine. No secret vault of gold exists to bail Catholics out of this attorney-driven legal siege. The people paying for these abuse settlements are innocent Catholic families who had no part in events of the past. Revenge is not justice, no matter how piously one argues it. Punishing the innocent is wrong, yet that’s exactly what laws imposing “retroactive liability” are designed to do.

Then, too, settlements should be based on balanced restitution. They should be rooted in the facts of what will help a wounded person heal and find a fresh start—and not on a litigation “market price” based on the last highest settlement paid by another institutional defendant. Justice is a right balance of competing legitimate rights and obligations; it is not a form of auctioneering. Communities of faith have an obligation to generously help the people who have been hurt by their members, past or present. But they also have a right to maintain their mission of serving others and to be protected from predatory judgments designed to gut their resources and identity.

The current effort to amend the civil statutes of limitations governing sexual abuse—which really involves an effort to impose retroactive liability and a new wave of lawsuits on Catholic communities—will continue in more states in the coming months. It could easily decimate the remaining resources of the Catholic faithful in the United States and steal the religious future from a generation of Catholic young people.

In working to protect the future of the Catholic community, we always need to remember that innocent people and innocent families were hurt in the past by some members of the clergy who did terrible things. Some victims have recovered and moved on. For others, the wounds never heal. All of their lives are precious in the eyes of Jesus Christ, and therefore also in the eyes of Christ’s followers. Helping them, supporting them, praying for them, and seeking to understand their suffering—while also defending the Church—cannot be mutually exclusive, since all these things serve the truth. Caring for the victims of abuse and assisting them sacrificially is a good and urgent thing. So is fighting bad laws. We need to focus earnestly on both.

Most Reverend Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., is the archbishop of Denver.

Cabinet Government: England v. U.S.

2006-05-01T04:52:00.000-05:00

England's Prime Minister, the "Clintonesque" Tony Blair, is under tremendous pressure from his Labor Party backers to name that date when he will step down from his posts as party leader (since 1994) and Prime Minister which he has held since 1997. This is an interesting article from the Guardian that gives a cursory survey of the state of the Labor government today and the problems still facing Blair.

There are many things for which he can be given credit, not mentioned in this article, but surely Blair doesn't want to go out leaving his successor, whether Labor or Conservative, a mess to deal with.

The most interesting aspect of the article is the rundown of the names of the various cabinet ministers and the problems facing them. It appears that they are really important to the running of their departments and some are doing a much better job than others.

I would defy most Americans to name more than three or four American cabinet Secretaries in George Bush's "cabinet." Offhand, I can come up with only Rumsfeld and Rice. Back when "I really cared", and in days when it probably mattered more who they were, I used to be able to name them all.

I would wager that Bush hasn't had more than three "cabinet meetings" in six years and those were probably photo opportunities. All power seems to be located in the White House and most of the cabinet Secretaries are just message deliverers to the permanent staff of their department.

And this is in a government maybe 20 times bigger than England's and 100 times more important.

PM left with little room to manoeuvre
Patrick Wintour
Monday May 1, 2006

Guardian

As Tony Blair considers what is likely to be his last reshuffle, he finds himself in the curious position of having limited room for manoeuvre, with many more candidates for demotion than promotion. Yet this is a reshuffle that will reveal whether Mr Blair has either the agenda or the political authority to justify staying in office for more than another year.

Mr Blair's decisions are in the short term dependent on the fate of the home secretary, Charles Clarke, and his deputy, John Prescott. Mr Blair is reluctant to lose either man, but if one or other were to fall on his sword, it would give him more options. So would a restructuring of the government machinery, possibly by breaking up the Home Office.

Shuffling the pack of existing middle-ranking cabinet posts is hardly likely to refresh or inject competence into a government that badly needs to do the once simple task of good administration again. Labour backbenchers are openly calling for the long-delayed reshuffle to follow the local elections, and to be widespread.

In the past three months, no fewer than seven of Mr Blair's cabinet ministers have been in the political doghouse. Mr Clarke is famously in the mire. There is also John Prescott's admission of an affair, and Patricia Hewitt is in danger of losing the support of NHS staff as she pushes through reforms that will expose troubling financial deficits in NHS trusts at a time of record investment.

The education secretary, Ruth Kelly, has looked more confident recently, but has been criticised for allowing sex offenders into Britain's schools and for failing initially to sell the education bill to her own backbenchers. The party chairman, Ian McCartney, has been attacked for not being abreast of the party's finances in the cash for peerages row. The culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, has separated from her husband, David Mills, following allegations about his business relationship with Silvio Berlusconi, and the chief whip, Hilary Armstrong, was accused of mislaying a large government majority in the Commons. Even the industry secretary, Alan Johnson, is accused of blotting an impressive copybook by mishandling pension negotiations with public-sector workers. To cap it all, the long-serving and normally impressive environment secretary, Margaret Beckett, has a farmers' revolt on her hands due to messing up the new system of rural payments.

The best ministers these days seem to be those who court little publicity, such as the defiantly uncharismatic transport secretary. Alistair Darling, the steady leader of the Commons, Geoff Hoon, or the bright but currently low-profile Europe minister Douglas Alexander. One backbencher claimed the Cabinet Office was proving to be the best-run department - it has not had a cabinet minister for four months.

Many of the other ministers not in trouble have portfolios that require them not to move. David Miliband is currently writing the local government white paper, but may be needed in extremis elsewhere. The work and pension secretary, John Hutton, is in the middle of fraught and detailed talks with the Treasury over the future of pension reform following the recommendations of the Turner commission. If he is to be shifted, possibly back to health where he served for many years as an admired minister, only Mr Johnson, a previous work and pensions secretary, or Mr Hutton's current deputy responsible for pensions, Stephen Timms, would be credible replacements. The Department for Work and Pensions has been through five cabinet ministers in five years, and all in a sphere requiring long-term planning. The only other possible replacements include Ms Hewitt, who understands the technical details of pensions and would impress the pensions industry. Ruth Kelly also knows pensions from her time at the Treasury. But Mr Hutton is also responsible for an important bill on incapacity benefit, an area he has handled well so far by forestalling a potential backbench rebellion.

Equally, Peter Hain, the Northern Ireland secretary, has shown competence but is in the middle of make-or-break talks to restore power sharing to the province. John Reid, the firefighting defence secretary, has Afghanistan and Iraq on his plate.

The cabinet minister most likely to be promoted is Hilary Benn, the international development secretary, a man who exudes much-needed moral authority. He has avoided the great Brown-Blair battles, and impressed both camps by his commitment to Africa. Outside the cabinet, there will be a shakeup at health, promotion to cabinet for Hazel Blears, possibly as party chairman, and possibly a step up for the schools minister, Jacqui Smith, and cabinet office minister Jim Murphy. New or further ministerial postings look likely for others of the best and brightest such as Ed Balls, John Healey, David Cairns and Ed Miliband.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

Obscenities in Foreign Languages

2006-04-30T20:55:00.000-05:00

[Me: from Gen Dobry, a monthly Polish Genealogy Newsletter put out by Author Fred Hoffman]

* * * * * * * * * G E N D O B R Y ! * * * * * * * * *

Volume VII, No. 4 30 April 2006

Subject: Obscenity

[Editor -- Ray Marshall had a comment on a name I deleted from a list in the last issue because it happened to be spelled the same way as "the Queen Mother of all dirty words":]

I don't think this has to be printed, but you can make that decision. It does serve to point out the fact that in dealing with languages, it takes more than a dictionary sometimes to determine the "meaning" of a word and whether or not it should be used. I'm no linguist, but I can order a Bier and Kaeserahmschnitzel auf Deutsch.

With respect to the "Queen Mother of all dirty words," I recall that when I was stationed in the Army in a rural area in southern Bavaria in the 60s, that word was commonly heard in conversation in the Gasthaus. Not often, but no eyebrows seemed to be raised when it was heard. _Mist_ and _Scheisse_ were also used.

But you never heard blasphemies, or even the word _verdammt_, "damned," in that highly Catholic area.

Of course, none of those words would be seen in your average genealogical document. _Hoffentlich!_

Ray Marshall

[Editor -- This is something I've noticed, too, and somewhere I read a comment on it by linguists. In our culture we tend to regard as obscene both blasphemous language and language that refers to body functions. But in German culture, for instance, words for bodily functions are not that big a deal; references to _Mist_, "dung," or _Scheisse_, "s--t," while hardly welcome in polite society, are often heard. They're considered vulgar, but not terribly shocking. What really upsets people is any kind of blasphemy. You hear it sometimes, of course, but most people avoid it. I imagine they feel messing with God is taking on way more than any mere human can handle! This is especially true of areas where Catholicism has had a strong impact on the culture.
[I'm not sure about Polish culture, but I from what I can gather, Poles aren't too big on "four-letter words" of any kind. I suspect they, too, would regard blasphemy as much worse than an occasional scatological reference. But I don't know this for a fact.
[If anyone wishes to share his or her experience in this regard, I'd like to hear about it. Many people, of course, prefer not to even discuss this subject. But as a linguist I find obscenities fascinating, once you get past the shock value. They can tell you a lot about a culture!]

Whining Free Enterprise-Loving Insurance Companies Begging the Feds to Bail Them Out

2006-04-30T06:43:00.000-05:00

Shell-shocked insurers retreat from coasts
Katrina losses may push future disaster costs onto taxpayers

By Spencer S. Hsu

The Washington Post

Updated: 9:51 p.m. ET April 29, 2006

Alarmed at the sharply rising cost of hurricanes and other disasters, home insurers are pulling back from some U.S. coastal markets, warning of gathering financial storm clouds over how the United States pays for the damage of catastrophe.

The development is yet another legacy of Hurricane Katrina, whose mounting toll of destruction along the Gulf Coast has crystallized a growing industry debate about the combined effect of climate trends and population growth in coastal areas. Some believe the two are creating a risk of losses so large that insurers could be pushed to the breaking point, leaving the government and taxpayers holding the tab for the next disaster.

Since Aug. 29 -- when the hurricane made landfall along the Gulf Coast -- Allstate Corp., the industry's second-largest company, has ceased writing homeowners policies in Louisiana, Florida and coastal parts of Texas and New York state. The firm has stopped underwriting earthquake coverage in California and elsewhere. Other firms have pulled back from the Gulf Coast to Cape Cod, notifying Florida of plans to cancel 500,000 policies.

Meanwhile, homeowners are moving to state-backed insurer plans of last resort, which tend to be subsidized by taxpayers, and whose costs also are rising.

Unusual alliance trumpets overhaul
As companies raise premiums, shed customers and battle homeowner claims in hurricane-damaged states, an overhaul of the industry is being promoted by an unusual coalition. It includes Allstate and State Farm Fire and Casualty Co. as well as a bipartisan group of state regulators, academic experts and former homeland security officials.

They propose establishing a greater role for the federal government in backing up new state catastrophe funds or private insurance firms when losses exceed a certain level, toughening state and local building codes and increasing premiums to accurately price risks.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12554207/

Isn’t it nice that the champions of “free enterprise” start whining to the government as soon as they start losing money?

The Epic of Iran - The Book of Kings"

2006-04-30T05:44:00.000-05:00

April 30, 2006
Essay NYTimes

The Epic of Iran

By REZA ASLAN
FOUR hundred miles from the bustling metropolis of Tehran lie the magnificent ruins of Persepolis. Built some 2,500 years ago, Persepolis was the royal seat of an Iranian empire that, at its height, stretched from the Indus Valley to the Mediterranean Sea. Though the imperial city was sacked two centuries later by Alexander "the Accursed" (as Iranian chroniclers referred to him), the towering columns and winged beasts that still stand guard over the lost throne of Iran serve as a reminder of what was once among the most advanced civilizations on earth.

I first visited Persepolis two years ago. Born in Iran but raised in the United States, I knew the place only from dusty academic books about the glories of pre-Islamic Iran. I was totally unprepared for the crowds I saw there. Busloads of schoolchildren from nearby Shiraz filed through the complex of temples and palaces. A tour guide walked an older group up a stone stairway etched with row upon row of subject nations humbly presenting themselves before the king, or shah, of Iran. Families laid out sheets and napped in the shade cast by the intricately carved walls.

Breaking away from the crowd, I noticed a boy scrawling graffiti on the side of a massive stone block. Horrified, I shooed him away. When I moved closer to see what he had written, I immediately recognized a verse, familiar to many Iranians, taken from the pages of Iran's national epic, the "Shahnameh."

Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate,
That uncivilized Arabs have come to make me Muslim.

Written more than a thousand years ago by Abolqasem Ferdowsi, the "Shahnameh," or "Book of Kings," recounts the mythological history of Iran from the first fitful moments of creation to the Arab conquest of the Persian Empire in the seventh century A.D. Ferdowsi was a member of Iran's aristocratic class, which maintained a strong attachment to the heritage of pre-Islamic Iran. According to legend, he composed the "Shahnameh" under the patronage of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, who promised him one dinar for every couplet. But when Ferdowsi presented the sultan with nearly 60,000 couplets, a flustered Mahmud offered him a fraction of his promised reward. Insulted, Ferdowsi rejected the money and returned home to the city of Tus, where he died impoverished and embittered. But his poem endured.

Numerous partial translations of the "Shahnameh" exist in English, but the only complete version went out of print more than 80 years ago. Now, Viking Press has published most of the poem in an accessible volume translated by the Iran scholar Dick Davis. A poet himself, Davis brings to his translation a nuanced awareness of Ferdowsi's subtle rhythms and cadences. His "Shahnameh" is rendered in an exquisite blend of poetry and prose, with none of the antiquated flourishes that so often mar translations of epic poetry.

The "Shahnameh" has much in common with the blood-soaked epics of Homer and with "Paradise Lost" and "The Divine Comedy." But in truth, it's difficult to find a literary equivalent, especially one that has had as profound an impact in shaping, and preserving, one nation's identity. Most Iranians have either read the "Shahnameh" or have heard it read. Its verses are sprinkled into everyday conversation. Children are named after its heroes and political enemies likened to its villains. For many Iranians, the "Shahnameh" links past and present, forming a cohesive mytho-historical narrative through which they understand their place in the world. The poem is, in a sense, Iran's national scripture, and Ferdowsi Iran's national prophet.

Ferdowsi wrote only in Persian, and his history of creation ignores traditional Islamic cosmology in favor of the "pagan" creation myths of his ancient Iranian ancestors. But this should not be seen as reflecting any hostility toward Islam. As Davis notes in his introduction, Ferdowsi was a pious Muslim; his epic speaks reverently of the Prophet Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali. Nevertheless, the "Shahnameh" displays an unmistakable antagonism toward the Arabs and the culture, if not the religion, they imposed on Iran. The book's first villain is an Arab — the Demon-King Zahhak, whose shoulders, kissed by Satan, sprout two voracious serpents that feast daily on the brains of young Iranian men. Zahhak is ultimately defeated by a noble Iranian peasant warrior named Feraydun, who imprisons him in Mount Damavand, where he will suffer eternally for daring to usurp the throne of Iran.

The message is hardly subtle. In fact, Ferdowsi's animosity toward the Arabs carries the poem to its tragic end, when the warrior Rostam stands before the invading Arab armies and laments,

When the pulpit's equal to the throne
And Abu Bakr's and Omar's names are known
Our long travails will be as naught, and all
The glory we have known will fade and fall.
The stars are with the Arabs, and you'll see
No crown or throne, no royal sovereignty.

Still, the marvel of Ferdowsi's poem is how it tries to strike a balance between the two dominant threads of Iranian cultural identity, Persian and Islamic. And yet throughout Iran's history, the "Shahnameh" has often been used as a weapon in the continuing struggle between the turban and the crown.

For example, the Pahlavi shahs, who came to power in 1925, promoted study of the poem as a means of de-emphasizing the country's Islamic heritage and thus stripping the clerics of their ideological authority. They built a magnificent mausoleum for Ferdowsi in Tus to serve as an alternative pilgrimage site to the tombs of the imams. They commissioned an official edition of the "Shahnameh" and compelled schoolchildren to memorize passages that emphasized the glories of kingly rule. In 1971, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi journeyed to Persepolis to celebrate 2,500 years of kingship with an opulent party for hundreds of international luminaries featuring plates of roast peacock stuffed with foie gras and 5,000 bottles of Champagne. Standing on that hallowed ground, surrounded by soldiers dressed as ancient warriors, the last shah brazenly linked his rule to that of the semi-divine kings of the "Shahnameh."

It was an extravagant gesture that alienated Iranians and hastened the shah's downfall. Eight years later, during Iran's revolution, he was forced into exile. Almost immediately, the clerical regime began a vigorous campaign to cleanse the new Islamic Republic of all references not just to the Pahlavis but more generally to the country's pre-Islamic past. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini considered the "Shahnameh" an offensive, even sacrilegious, text that explicitly endorsed monarchy. He discouraged public readings of it, declaring all nonreligious poetry as makruh, or "detestable." In 1979, Khomeini's right-hand man, the Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, tried to bulldoze both Ferdowsi's tomb and Persepolis, before the provisional government stopped him.

Today, as a new generation of Iranians struggles to define itself in opposition to a widely reviled religious regime, the "Shahnameh" is re-emerging as the supreme expression of a cultural identity transcending all notions of politics or piety. Radio Tehran, "the voice of the Islamic Republic," begins every morning's broadcast with a reading from the poem. The country's most popular tourist attraction is not Khomeini's tomb or the tombs of the imams, but the ruins of Persepolis, where the government is currently rebuilding the gardens and pavilion built for the shah's infamous Persepolis spectacular.

When I visited, young Iranians were milling about the grounds in a trance, touching everything, as though a touch could transport them to another Iran. I stood with them in front of the palace walls, trying to imagine Persepolis as Ferdowsi must have seen it, recalling the eulogy he wrote a thousand years ago for a civilization he watched pass away in his mind's eye.

Where are your valiant warriors and your priests,
Where are your hunting parties and your feasts?
Where is that warlike mien, and where are those
Great armies that destroyed our country's foes? . . .
Count Persia as a ruin, as the lair
Of lions and leopards. Look now and despair.

Reza Aslan is an Iranian-American scholar of religions and author of "No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam."

Rant: U.S. seals deal on military bases in Bulgaria

2006-04-28T08:05:00.000-05:00

[EMail to various folks today]

I think Bush is insane.

He's bogged down in Afghanistan.

He's bogged down in Iraq.

He wants to declare war on Iran

He's got some troops and air bases in Poland

He's got bases in Turkey

He's got bases coming to Romania.

He just signed a deal for bases in Bulgaria.

If you look at the map of the World, what does that mean? Why just that paranoid Russians (Russia being the ONLY country that is a real threat to the mainland United States) are under attack from the West and the South! (China wouldn’t dare attack us. If we cut off payments for their trade, they would go bankrupt within a month and there would be riots throughout the entire country).

I repeat, Bush is insane and should be committed.

He knows that no President can be considered “great” unless he wins a war. He wants to avenge his father’s mediocre reputation. So he’s desperate to have a war he thinks he can win in the next 2 ½ years.

U.S. seals deal on military bases in Bulgaria

Plan linked to U.S. efforts to move smaller bases closer to Middle East

MSNBC
Updated: 7:05 a.m. ET April 28, 2006

SOFIA, Bulgaria - The United States signed an agreement on Friday to establish three military bases in Bulgaria as it shifts troops from old Cold War positions to smaller installations closer to the Middle East and Africa.

Under the deal, the United States will deploy 2,500 soldiers on short rotations to Bulgaria as it draws down tens of thousands of troops from Cold War bases in Europe and Asia.

“The agreement indeed will enhance our cooperation, allowing the shared use of Bulgarian training facilities and strengthening our ability to operate militarily,” said U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice after a signing ceremony on the sidelines of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Sofia.

Bulgaria, an ex-communist country of 7.7 million, has been eager to repay Washington for supporting its 2004 NATO membership. It has backed the United States in Iraq despite widespread public opposition to the war.

The 10-year agreement includes the Bezmer airfield and Novo Selo shooting range, both near Bulgaria’s border with Turkey, and the Graf Ignatievo airfield in central Bulgaria.

U.S. forces will also have access to a storage facility near Bulgaria’s port of Bourgas. The total number of soldiers may double for short periods during rotations every six months.

The United States said the first troops would most likely arrive next year. Under the arrangement, Washington may launch attacks against third countries from the bases after consulting Bulgarian authorities. Both sides have said the facilities will be shared and used mainly for training.

The agreement must still be ratified by Bulgaria’s parliament, in which the three-party Socialist-led coalition holds a commanding majority.

A recent opinion survey showed 60 percent of Bulgarians were against the bases which are expected to bring tens of millions of dollars in badly-needed foreign investment and create jobs.

Bulgaria’s far-right opposition Attack party has been one of the loudest opponents. It mustered around 5,000 people in protests in Sofia on Thursday.

Rights groups have expressed concern over the bases following allegations the United States may have used installations in Romania, Poland and other European states as secret CIA jails.

The plan closely resembles a deal signed in December between Washington and Bulgaria’s northern Black Sea neighbor Romania.

Trying to Understand Angry Atheists

2006-04-28T08:02:00.000-05:00

Trying to Understand Angry Atheists

Why do nonbelievers seem to be threatened by the idea of God?

WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY

By Marc Gellman

Newsweek

Updated: 1:28 p.m. ET April 26, 2006

April 26, 2006 - I think I need to understand atheists better. I bear them no ill will. I don't think they need to be religious to be good, kind and charitable people, and I have no desire to debate or convert them. I do think they are wrong about the biggest question, “Are we alone?” and I will admit to occasionally viewing atheists with the kind of patient sympathy often shown to me by Christians who can't quite understand why the Good News of Jesus' death and resurrection has not reached me or my people. However, there is something I am missing about atheists: what I simply do not understand is why they are often so angry.

So we disagree about God. I'm sometimes at odds with Yankee fans, people who like rap music and people who don't like animals, but I try to be civil. I don't know many religious folk who wake up thinking of new ways to aggravate atheists, but many people who do not believe in God seem to find the religion of their neighbors terribly offensive or oppressive, particularly if the folks next door are evangelical Christians. I just don't get it.

This must sound condescending and a large generalization, and I don't mean it that way, but I am tempted to believe that behind atheist anger there are oftentimes uncomfortable personal histories. Perhaps their atheism was the result of the tragic death of a loved one, or an angry degrading sermon, or an insensitive eulogy, or an unfeeling castigation of lifestyle choices or perhaps something even worse. I would ask for forgiveness from the angry atheists who write to me if I thought it would help. Religion must remain an audacious, daring and, yes, uncomfortable assault on our desires to do what we want when we want to do it. All religions must teach a way to discipline our animal urges, to overcome racism and materialism, selfishness and arrogance and the sinful oppression of the most vulnerable and the most innocent among us.

Some religious leaders obviously betray the teachings of the faith they claim to represent, but their sacred scriptures remain a critique of them and also of every thing we do to betray the better angels of our nature. But our world is better and kinder and more hopeful because of the daily sacrifice and witness of millions of pious people over thousands of years.

To be called to a level of goodness and sacrifice so constantly and so patiently by a loving but demanding God may seem like a naive demand to achieve what is only a remote human possibility. However, such a vision need not be seen as a red flag to those who believe nothing. I can humbly ask whether my atheist brothers and sisters really believe that their lives are better, richer and more hopeful by clinging to Camus's existential despair: “The purpose of life is that it ends." I can agree to make peace with atheists whom I believe ask too little of life here on planet earth if they will agree to make peace with me and with other religious folk who perhaps have asked too much. I believe that the philosopher-rabbi Mordecai Kaplan was right when he said, “It is hell to live without hope, and religion saves people from hell.” I urge my atheist brothers and sisters to see things as Spinoza urged, sub specie aeternitatis—“under the perspective of eternity.”

And to try a little positivity. Last Sunday I took two high-school girls to Cold Spring Labs to meet Dr. James Watson. One of the girls wants to be a research scientist, and the other has no idea yet, but I think she will be a great writer. I think they also both want boyfriends. I want them to stay smart and not dumb down to get a boy. Watson spoke and listened to the girls, and they left, I hope, proud about being smart. I know that Jim believes way more in Darwin than in Deuteronomy, but he also believes that at Cold Spring Labs the most important thing is not whether you are a man or a woman, not whether you believe in God. The most important thing, as he says, is “to get something done.” Now there's an atheist I can believe in.

Plagiarism Epidemic

2006-04-27T05:35:00.000-05:00

press box - SLATE
Why Plagiarists Do It
Because they can.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Wednesday, April 26, 2006, at 6:57 PM ET

Has any plagiarist ever owned up to stealing—deliberately—another writer's words? None that I can recall. Mostly they peddle apologies and excuses like the ones offered by Harvard student and novelist Kaavya Viswanathan, whom the Harvard Crimson busted this week for word thievery. Viswanathan tells the New York Times that the 29 cited instances in which she lifted from another novelist's language for her novel were "unintentional and unconscious."

Please! Pinching one or two phrases from another book in the course of writing a 320-page novel might be accidental. But by the time a novelist does it 29 times, the effort is transparently intentional and conscious. Unless, of course, Viswanathan composed her entire novel during Ambien-induced sleep-writing episodes.

I also dismiss the lame plea offered this week by Raytheon Co. CEO and book author William H. Swanson, who was caught plagiarizing a 1944 engineering text. Swanson now admits that he did "not properly credit" the source. Yes, he did not properly credit the source in the same way a shoplifter did not properly pay the store clerk for the George Foreman Grill he stuck under his sweatshirt. Why not come out and tell the truth: I ripped the 1944 text off because I thought nobody would catch me. My Slate colleagues Timothy Noah and David Plotz have amply chronicled similar obfuscations by historian-plagiarists Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose.

The standard rundown of plagiarism excuses includes accidental copying, occupational or personal stress, and even mental illness, as in the case of former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. I reject those excuses, too, and counter with a more plausible set of explanations that rely on neither psychobabble nor the DSM-IV.

Ambition Often Exceeds Talent: I know of very few examples in which an exceptional writer got caught plagiarizing. Sometimes writers accept jobs or assignments beyond their talents. When the deadline whistle blows, they find themselves facing this cost-benefit quandary: Shall I tell the truth and bail, damaging my career for sure, or shall I steal copy and only risk damaging my career?

Writing Is Hard Work: A corollary to ambition exceeding talent. Even prolific writers, who can toss off a thousand words an hour, complain about the difficulty of writing. Writing well is a difficult enterprise. So is writing poorly. With so many examples of good writing out there to "borrow," why suffer only to write poorly?

The Thrill Factor: As anybody who has ever shoplifted a pack of Bazooka bubble gum can tell you, people steal not only for material gain but for psychic gain. It's a gas to pad the company expense account, leave a restaurant without paying, or rifle though a friend's medicine cabinet to steal his most potent medications.

Evening the Score: If you hate your boss at the car factory, you might express your fury by sabotaging every tenth car on the line. If you hate your editor or your publication, perhaps you stick it to him by plagiarizing. It doesn't make sense, but neither does sabotaging every tenth car.

Force of Habit: If nobody catches you running stop lights in college or tickets you for doing the same at your first newspaper job, you eventually stop paying attention. One day, red, yellow, and green all mean "go."

Contempt for the Business: Show me the writer who calls himself and everybody he works with a "hack," and I'll show you a potential plagiarist.

Even If You Get Caught, You'll Probably Get Away With It: Trudy Lieberman reported in the July/August 1995 Columbia Journalism Review that many journalists caught plagiarizing paid little or no price for their transgressions. Lieberman describes a "circle-the-wagons" mentality in the news business when plagiarism breaks out. Providing a number of examples, she also notes the double standard of journalists who gave Sen. Joseph Biden holy grief when he committed plagiarism in a presidential campaign speech but cut their colleagues slack.

How severely will the book industry punish Kaavya Viswanathan? I predict that she'll weather the storm with all the grace and denial of Doris Kearns Goodwin.

******

Thanks to Rachel Shteir and others who let me pick their brains and promised not to accuse me of plagiarism. Send your plagiarism tips to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise.)

Jack Shafer is Slate's editor at large.

As a genealogist, I've "collected" thousands of images, articles and facts over the years. Some, I know where I got them, the early ones, I don't. I don't suppose a fellow genealogist would sue (for one thing, publishing genealogy stuff is a labor of love, not income), but it does one feel guilty when I see something that I value but I don't know who wrote it. I suppose the best thing to do, rather than ignore it, is to cite it this way (author unknown because I was too lazy to write it down).

You, To, Can Right Like a Blogger

2006-04-27T05:08:00.000-05:00

You, To, Can Right Like a Blogger

Wired News

By Tony Long
02:00 AM Apr, 27, 2006

The Luddite

Sitting around the cafe the other day, pondering the many ways in which technology has contrived to screw up my otherwise placid existence, the talk of my table mates turned to the craft (or is it the art?) of writing.

"There's a case to be made that the internet has actually helped improve the quality of writing in general," said, well, we'll call him "Topsy." I leaned in close to see if any alcohol was present on Topsy's breath. Detecting nothing beyond the usual halitosis, I surmised that he was being serious.

"Make the case," I said.

Topsy's line of reasoning, as best I could follow (for nothing is ever simple in Topsy's world), is that the easy access and limitless nature of the web allow you to expose yourself to tons of writing, both good and bad. Presumably, the average educated swine will gravitate toward the good writing and, as a result, improve his own skills as he increases his knowledge. I expressed skepticism.

"Because our chief job in life is pattern recognition," Topsy said, pressing his point, "and the chief job of the internet, through googling, is pattern recognition, what we do by living on the internet is discriminate between good and bad writing. Bad writing is, by its genes, something that doesn't convey information, whether artful or factual.

"The question is, are there enough of 'us' out there (I presume he was referring to the aforementioned educated swine), through this passive-aggressive process, to make any difference at all in this overpopulated world?"

I looked longingly at the bottle of Chianti behind the counter, but resisted the urge. It's hard enough staying with Topsy's train of thought while nursing a latte. I was left to wonder, though. If he's right -- if only a relative few in our post-literate society can tell good writing from bad, whether it's online, in print or scratched in the mud with a stick -- then what's the point?

As a mere stripling, I was advised that if I hoped to become a good writer, I should write every day. More than that, I should read good writing every day. This can be accomplished on the internet as easily as it can by reading a book or magazine. But if you're the sort who prefers People to The New Yorker, well, again, what's the point?

So my riposte to Topsy was, while the internet may be a nifty vehicle for delivering one's polished prose and penetrating insights to an impatiently waiting world, it can't help you become a better writer if you, pardon my French, suck.

Moreover, the internet leads to all sorts of unsavory writing practices, like blogging. You know, the journal of the 21st century.

Keeping a diary or journal ("journaling" they now call it, thanks to the modern world's habit of turning perfectly good nouns into verbs) was common among the literate before television came along and hooked us up to the communal drool bucket.

A journal exists for its author to reflect on, well, anything. A fading love, political turmoil, a spat with a friend, the weather in Buffalo, New York, on June 10, 1946. The writer is free to express the most intimate thoughts, because the nature of keeping a journal is to keep it private.

Occasionally, if the journal belongs to a writer or an artist or a statesman, the writing is so compelling that it finds its way into print after the author dies. In the best of those, we are invited into the mind behind the creative process and we emerge with a deeper understanding of a masterwork, say, or the thinking behind a crucial political decision.

Most journals go unread, though, and that's the way it should be. The contents were only intended for the writer's eyes, after all.

A lot of people will tell you that blogging is merely journaling online. It is not. Blogging is not private, but very public. And very few blogs involve the kind of introspection that characterizes a serious journal. Most blogging is sheer exhibitionism, either the self-absorbed ramblings of an individual blogger or the corporate site that exists for the sole purpose of making money. (If anyone sees a disturbing parallel between blogging and column writing, kindly keep it to yourself.)

This doesn't mean blogs have to be badly written. It just means that most are.

But let's be fair and balanced, like Fox News. Of the 27 million or so "daily diaries" floating like space junk in the blogosphere, there are a handful that aren't bad. Some are well written and insightful. But understand that we're talking about a precious few needles in a mighty big haystack.

Were Truman Capote alive today he might be moved to say, "That's not writing. That's blogging."

- - -

Tony Long, copy chief at Wired News, cries plaintively, "Can't anybody out there diagram a sentence anymore?"

I'm a pretty decent typist and the worst part about writing while blogging is that my fingers can't distinguish homonyms/homophones well. Greatly increases the proofreading chore.

First East-West Non-Stop Trans-Atlantic Flight - April 2000

2006-04-24T22:49:00.000-05:00

First East-West Non-Stop Atlantic Flight: The `Bremen'

April 2000

By Antonio Cormier

History has recorded the celebrated Atlantic crossing by the Spirit of Saint Louis in 1927, but few people are aware that the crossing of the ocean in the opposite direction was made under more spectacular conditions by the Bremen between April 12 and 13, 1928. Two German flyers and Irish Commandant accomplished this exploit.

At first The Bremen, a monoplane built in Germany by the Junkers Company in Dessau, landed at Ile Verte (Greenly Island) near Lourdes Blanc Sablon on April 13, 1928 at 6:08 PM, Greenwich Mean Time. It had left Baldonnel in Ireland the day before, April 12, 1928 at 5:38 a.m. Greenwich Time.

Nine years earlier, in June 1919, John William Alcock and Arthur Whidden Brown had made the first west-east crossing of the Atlantic from Newfoundland to Ireland. This time, 1928, news was flashed that the first east-west crossing of The Atlantic had been made.

History was made that time when two German flyers and an Irishman joined together to make the historic flight. The three aviators were Captain Herman Koehl, Baron Ehrenfreid Guenther Von Huenefeld and Commandant James C. Fitzmaurice.

Their exploit did much to further Trans-Atlantic flights. The numerous victims of previous attempts to fly the Atlantic had contributed nothing to public opinion with regard to the safety of such flights.

Even official opinion described such flights as useless and they should be banned. The facts of the time confirmed that opinion. Including Charles Nungesser and Francois Coli, 20 people had lost their lives trying to fly across the Atlantic. The intrepid trio knew what a challenge awaited them, and that death on some unknown icy plain might be their lot, the price of failure.

When the three flyers left Baldonnel Airport near Dublin on April 12, 1928, their planned destination was New York. From that moment until the end of their voyage, the task of piloting the Junkers was not just a dream but also required tremendous physical effort on the part of the two pilots. In order to make their trip as easy as possible they replaced each other at the controls every half-hour. One tried to sleep while the other worked.

The cockpit was sheltered from the worst of the elements, but there was no heating system in the plane, even in the cabin. There was no radio and once they left sight of Oul' Erin the rest of the world would hear nothing from them until their attempt became an accomplishment.

For 36 and a half hours of their flight, they fought an inch-by-inch battle. The very wind, which supported them in the air, became an invisible wall, reducing their speed to a 100 miles an hour for the greater part of the crossing.

On April 13, a gray and cloudy dawn slowly announced a new day. The pilots peered anxiously through the dimness trying to find a parcel of land which might serve as a geographical reference to give them their approximate landfall.

They were lucky: through the thickening snow an object suddenly appeared on the horizon. They took it for the funnel of a ship but passing over it, they were delighted to realize that it was a lighthouse. They knew they were over the Western Hemisphere, but where? That was the question. They were tired; gas running out, so they decided to land their machine somewhere. They took a short fly-over to find the right place.

There seemed to be a good spot near the lighthouse, but poor visibility played with their judgment. Hardly had the Bremen touched ground when its front wheels went through the ice, causing damage to the propeller. Happy that their landing had not been disastrous, the men descended to terra firma and within a few minutes the light keeper strode forward to welcome them.

The aviators were astonished at how far off course they had managed to go. They were certainly not on United States soil, far from it. They landed on Greenly Island, a tiny piece of land situated between the northern extremity of Newfoundland and Lourdes Blanc Sablon, Province of Quebec.

The incredulity of the lightkeeper reached a peak when the first man to meet Fitzmaurice, told them what he had learned. Johnny Letemplier met the plane and Fitzmaurice asked him where they were.

There was astonishment on both sides when the flyers learned where they were, and the Greenly Island men were told that the single motored plane arrived on a non-stop flight from the airport of Baldonel in Ireland. When my grandfather Alfred Cormier of Lourdes Blanc Sablon, the telegraph operator, was informed of their exploit he sent the news out immediately that the first east-west trans-Atlantic flight had been achieved.

The pilots thought that they were more or less abandoned in this near desert island. But help was not long arriving. Trans Canada Continental Airways Limited sent two Fairchild FC2W ski planes from Lake St Agnes near Malbaie in Quebec. The experienced bush pilots received orders to get to "Greenly Island as fast as possible," a distance of 700 miles, in order to collect the aviators and bring them all the help they needed.

The pilot Duke Schiller left in the first plane on April 14, and had on board Doctor Louis Cuisinier, technical director of Trans Continental Airways Limited and Eugene Thibeault, mechanic. Romeo Vachon piloted the second plane with a journalist and two New York photographers on board. They reached Greenly Island on the April 15 and 18 respectively after flying through snowstorms, with one obligatory stop.

At first, the men believed that they could repair the Bremen and fly it to New York. With this in mind, Schiller flew back to Lake St Agnes, taking with him James Fitzmaurice who would order the necessary pieces from New York.

In New York Hertha Junkers, the daughter of Professor Hugo Junkers, builder of the planes, filled the order with the collaboration of Otto Scherrer, chief engineer of the Junkers Corporation in America.

The pieces were sent by train to Montreal under the supervision of the mechanic Ernest Koeppen of the Junkers Company, and from Montreal to Lake St. Agnes

From Malbaie, Hertha Junkers ordered a plane flown in by Floyd Bennett and Bernt Balchen, a Ford Trimotor N114542. Its mission was to carry the pieces for the repairs on the Bremen to Greenly Island.

When the plane arrived in Malbaie, Floyd Bennett was sick with double pneumonia, and had to be brought to Jeffrey Hale's Hospital in Quebec City. Charles Lindberg flew a military plane to Quebec City with serum for Bennett but he arrived too late to cure the sick man of the aggravated condition of the pneumonia. Bennett died the following morning.

James Fitzmaurice then replaced Bennett as co-pilot with Berbt Balchen to fly to Greenly Island, on April 23, 1928. On board were the Junkers mechanic Ernest Koeppen, and American photographer, Charles Murphy. They spent the night at Sept-Iles and left at 5:30 A.M. the next day, arriving at Greenly Island six hours later.

On Greenly Island Koeppen and Thibeault got to work to repair the Bremen but they could not get the engine to work. Faced with the possibility of a long delay, and urged on by the desire of the aviators to be in New York for the burial of Floyd Bennett, the men decided to leave the responsibility of the Bremen in the hands of Doctor Louis Cuisinier and Eugene Thibeault.

The pilots of the Bremen then boarded the Ford airplane to go to New York with Ernest Koeppen. The Bremen was then towed to Lourdes Blanc Sablon and installed on the hill. A Loening OA-1 under an American Army Air Force commander was sent to this place. He was accompanied by the pilot Fred Melchior from the Junkers Company who was supposed to pilot the Brement to New York.

Since heavy ice prevented them from landing, they decided to drop the pilot in by parachute. Dr Cuisinier and Thibeault, still on site, had succeeded in getting the engine started, and boarded with Melchior. Unfortunately, there was not enough runway for the plane to take off. It hurtled over the cleared land and was badly damaged in the rougher terrain, undercarriage and propeller being broken into pieces.

The Bremen was consequently brought to Quebec City by the ship North Shore. >From there it was sent to Bremen in Germany on the ship Krefeld on September 17, 1928. It arrived there ten days later, and then was sent to New York on the ship "Columbus" on May 10, 1929.

Later on, Henry Ford acquired the plane for his museum, the Henry Ford Museum in Greenfield Village near Detroit, Michigan where it can still be viewed. The outcome of this daring feat is commemorated on Greenly Island by a stone monument, placed there by the Clarke Steamship Company of Montreal which used to carry passengers and goods for the Lower North Shore communities.

The dedication took place on August 14, 1928. Monseigneur Jean-Marie Leventoux, Catholic Bishop of the North Shore presided over the ceremony, Father Gallix of Natasquan, Father Francois Hesry of the parish of Lourdes Blanc Sablon, Alfred Cormier, telegraph operator of Lourdes Blanc Sablon as well, Captain J.A. Brie, Master, the officer and men of Clarke Steamship were present. Besides other Canadians present, there were tourists from the United States, as well as fishermen and residents of Greenly Island and their families.

The inscription on the monument marks an important event in the history of world aviation: On this island landed the Bremen, Friday April 13, 1928, after the first east-west non-stop flight, having left Ireland at dawn on Thursday April 12, 1928. The crew members were Baron Ehrenfreid Guenther Von Huenefeld of Germany, Major James C. Fitzmaurice of Ireland. Erected by the Clarke Steamship Company Limited of Montreal in recognition of this great exploit.

Had it not been for the generosity of president Desmond A. Clarke and his company which defrayed the cost of the erection of the monument, it is quite likely that this faraway spot where the Bremen landed might never have been recognized, and there would be an unfortunate gap in the history of aviation.

Antonio Cormier is a historian, based in Lourdes Blanc Sablon in the Province of Quebec. Translation was provided by Marianna O'Gallagher.

Slobodan Milosevic: Myth and Responsibility 16 March 2006

2006-04-24T22:42:00.000-05:00

Slobodan Milosevic: myth and responsibility
Julie A Mertus
16 - 3 - 2006

The career of the Serbian leader who achieved power by exploiting the potency of the "Kosovo myth" carries a warning for Serbia’s and Kosovo’s future, says Julie A Mertus.

When I began studying Kosovo in 1993, few people had ever heard the name of the small province in southern Yugoslavia. I had been sent there on an investigatory trip for a major international human-rights group, and I couldn't get the dusty, decayed place out of my head. An eager, newly graduated human-rights attorney, I wanted to discover the facts that would expose, once and for all, the real truth about this strange place where the bubbling ethnic hatred between the Serb minority and the Albanian majority made an eventual explosion seem inevitable.

"Like rabbits, they sit on the hill and shoot at us like rabbits", began my first op-ed on Kosovo, published in 1993 in the International Herald Tribune. After about a dozen op-eds and journal articles explaining the plight of Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo, I realised that I had it all wrong. To explain the ethnic animosities in Kosovo required exposure not of truth as fact, but, rather, truth as myth. Serbs and Albanians based their behaviour on what they believed to be true, not on what anyone could guarantee was factually true.

Julie A Mertus is an associate professor of international relations at the American University in Washington, where she co-directs the ethics, peace and global affairs programme. Her six books include Kosovo: How Myths and truths started a War (University of California Press, 1999), The United Nations and Human Rights: A Guide for a New Era (Routledge, 2005) and Bait and switch: Human rights and U.S. Foreign Policy

The most important kind of myth informing Serb and Albanian identities structuring social relations concerned victimhood. After all – and in a pattern familiar in conflict situations across the world – it was the victims who could claim the moral high ground, and thus absolve themselves from any responsibility for being perpetrators. So, in the hot days of the mid-1990s, I set aside all my human-rights reportage and began asking questions about Kosovo myths.

I knew I was on to something when, almost immediately after I changed my approach, my life was threatened. Myth-raking was dangerous business.

The reason soon became evident. The myths of Kosovo were far more than random collections of individual stories: they were internally consistent worldviews capable of accommodating diverse experiences, drawing on real events, while spinning them into a pattern that reinforced the perspective of one side of a social fracture. The ability of powerful figures to mobilise those myths only became fully apparent later; what was clear was that in Kosovo, the myths were central to the politics.

The path to power

Both communities in Kosovo nourished their myths, but two factors made the Serbian "myth of Kosovo" the more potent: the fact that behind it lay an apparatus of statehood and political power, and the way that Kosovo operated as the historic locus of Serb nationhood. During the heyday of Slobodan Milosevic's political career, Kosovo became the single most important myth informing the Serbian collective imagination during Milosevic's heyday; it remains the single most important myth determining the future direction of the Serbian state and nation.

The historical centrepiece of the myth is an incident before the battle at Kosovo Polje (the "field of blackbirds", near modern Pristina) in June 1389 between the Ottoman army and the resisting Serb forces led by Prince Lazar. Lazar, the tale goes, was offered a choice between a heavenly kingdom or an earthly one. The brave Serb warrior chose the heavenly kingdom. With righteousness on their side, the prince and his troops bravely went to battle and were slaughtered by the Turks. From that day, Kosovo has been Serb "holy ground" under divine providence, territory to which Serbs are forever linked and from which they should never be sundered.

Milosevic did not create the myth of Kosovo, nor was he the first in the late 20th century to use it to justify Serb political demands. That bright idea came from within Serbia's academic elite, namely a group of intellectuals within the prestigious Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences (Sanu). In a lengthy "memorandum" leaked to the press in 1986, they lamented alleged Serbian victimisation in Kosovo under the federal Yugoslav state that had granted considerable autonomy to the region, and called for constitutional revisions to allow for greater centralised control from Belgrade.

The memorandum contained allegations of violence, forced expulsion and desecration targeted against the Serb minority in Kosovo. It provoked a huge political storm; many saw in it the appearance in public life of a dangerous new discourse of nationalist self-assertion among Yugoslavia's pivotal nationality.

Slobodan Milosevic, then an unremarkable communist functionary, was one of the few among the communist elite who did not publicly condemn the memorandum (on Milosevic's "ambiguous" stance, see Jasna Dragovic-Soso, "Saviours of the Nation": Serbia's Intellectual Opposition and the Revival of Nationalism [C Hurst, 2002]). In its wake, he started to develop a new platform for renewed Serb control over Kosovo. At a rally in 1986 in Kragujevac, an industrial city on the border with Serbia and the main initial destination for Serbs leaving Kosovo, Milosevic warned that changing the status of Kosovo would be difficult to achieve, because "other areas and individuals will be against the change".

The Kragujevac speech was only a warm-up. In January 1987, Milosevic staged a rally near Belgrade in which he called for a reduction in the autonomy of Kosovo, using the fighting words: "Serbia will be united or there will be no Serbia". In April, Milosevic was sent to Kosovo by his boss, Ivan Stambolic (later one of the many victims of his rule, abducted and murdered while jogging) to hear firsthand the complaints of Kosovar Serbs. A large public protest of angry Serbs greeted him in Kosovo Polje, and amid the confused uproar and cries that the local Serbs were being beaten, Milosevic can be caught on film uttering words that would earn him heroic status and catapult his career: "no one has the right to beat you!" (sometimes rendered as "no one shall ever beat you again!").

Also in openDemocracy after the death of Slobodan Milosevic on 11 March 2006:

Misha Glenny, "Milosevic's last victory"

Tom Gallagher, "Understanding Slobodan Milosevic: between the cold war and Iraq"

Dusan Velickovic, "Milosevic and I"

Anthony Dworkin, "The Hague tribunal after Milosevic"

Marko Attila Hoare, "Slobodan Milosevic: the spirit of the age"

If you find this material enjoyable or provoking please consider commenting in our forums – and supporting openDemocracy by sending us a donation so that we can continue our work for democratic dialogue

The last myth

Through his commanding response to the "Kosovo question" and other strategic political actions, Milosevic propelled himself to power in Serbia and, subsequently, Yugoslavia. In the late 1980s, he solidified his control by pushing through constitutional changes and instituting emergency rule, which gave Serbia ironclad control over Kosovo. An extraordinary moment in this period was the commemoration at Kosovo Polje of the 600th anniversary of the 1389 battle, marked by a speech where Milosevic ominously announced to an enormous gathering of Serbs: “Six centuries later, we are again engaged in battles. They are not armed battles, though such things cannot be excluded”.

By 1990, Milosevic was in position to extend the methods he had used in Kosovo to other parts of the Yugoslav federation. In expanding his drive for power and domination to Croatia and Bosnia, Milosevic had to add only two more ingredients – tighter control over the media and a few staged "incidents" in which Serbs were harmed. Then, the number of Serbs willing to fight would increase exponentially.

Milosevic was indeed a great manipulator. To blame Milosevic alone for the bloodshed in the Balkans, however, would be a grave mistake. He had many willing executioners. The death of Milosevic does not signal the end of the myth of Kosovo, nor of the wider complex of chauvinistic nationalisms of which it forms a part.

In my book, Kosovo: How Myths and Truths Started a War – published in March 1999, just as the modern conflict over Kosovo was approaching its latest climax – I argued that Serbian nationalism has always had some degree of autonomy that preceded and shaped the political struggles of Milosevic's time. Milosevic was able to tap into the already existing chauvinistic nationalism as a theory of political legitimacy to justify the political reality he would create. To recognise this is to reject two notions: both that politics is the cause of everything and that nationalism has nothing to do with it, and that conflict in the Balkans is simply the result of age-old, primordial hatreds which no one can salve until – well, until these people stop killing each other.

One factor that makes the continuation of Serb-Albanian violence in Kosovo likely, as long as the two communities coexist in the area in substantial numbers, is the continuation of chauvinistic nationalism on both sides. Milosevic is gone and he can no longer fan the flames of hatred through his references to Serb victimisation. Nor can the people of the Balkans continue to blame him for all their troubles.

Milosevic leaves the scene with the future constitutional status of Kosovo uncertain and open to high-level negotiation involving Serbs, Albanians and the international community. But in any case, the future of Kosovo was never his to determine. Certainly, Milosevic's myth-mongering has been instrumental in ensuring Kosovo's "loss" to Serbia. But, ultimately, the map for Kosovo's future has always been a matter for the people who would have to find a way to live together, or break apart.

The frenzied nationalism that Milosevic exploited and channelled was also not his to abandon. It too was a matter for the Serb people, many of whom – albeit with many honourable exceptions, including human-rights workers, journalists, students and civilians in all walks of life – embraced this destructive ideology long before it was resurrected by the Serbian academy in 1986 and given political shape and leadership by Milosevic. The low-key reaction to Milosevic's death may have demonstrated how few Serbs today publicly endorse such a worldview, but this may also owe something to the fact that the former leader had made the myth an instrument of catastrophic Serb defeat. At a deeper level, the ideology and the myth it embodies is still espoused by enough people to make a peaceful solution to the status of Kosovo very difficult.

Milosevic's myth-mongering must, as a matter of course, be a component of Serbs' self-examination after his demise. The Serb myth has poisoned the Serb reality. Nations can't live without myths, but they need to be rooted in realities and inspire the kind of constructive, creative national projects that promote long-term peace and justice. When the Serbs truly realise this, Slobodan Milosevic will finally have died.

Copyright © Julie A Mertus, Published by openDemocracy Ltd. You may download and print extracts from this article for your own personal and non-commercial use only. If you teach at a university we ask that your department make a donation. Contact us if you wish to discuss republication. Some articles on this site are published under different terms.

Did the Cubans Assassinate Kennedy? - 04 Jan 06

2006-04-24T06:36:00.000-05:00

Did the Cubans assassinate Kennedy?
By Kate Connolly in Berlin
(Filed: 04/01/2006)

The Cuban secret service was behind the assassination of President John F Kennedy, according to evidence presented in a new television documentary.

Rendezvous with Death, to be shown on German television on Friday, offers the most convincing evidence that Fidel Castro's regime was behind the most talked-about murder of the 20th century.


	John F Kennedy in Dallas just before he was shot and killed

A former agent of the Cuban secret service G2 talks for the first time about how Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin, was, he claims, pointed out to the Cubans by the KGB.

Oscar Marino, who fell out with the Castro regime, said the Cubans were desperate to eliminate Kennedy, an opponent of the revolution who wanted to kill Castro.

"You ask why we took Oswald?" he said to the German film maker Wilfried Huismann. "Oswald was a dissident: he hated his country. He possessed certain characteristics.

"There wasn't anyone else. You take what you can get. . . Oswald volunteered to kill Kennedy."

Oswald was a Communist who spent three years in the Soviet Union and shot Kennedy in Dallas. He was killed by Jack Ruby after his arrest, leaving his motives shrouded in mystery.

Huismann spent three years persuading people to break their silence about Oswald's alleged Cuba connections. His film is based on testimony by former US, Cuban and Russian agents, KGB files and Mexican archives.

One of the main witnesses is a retired FBI agent, Lawrence Keenan, now in his eighties. Keenan was sent after the assassination to trace Oswald's footsteps in Mexico.

The evidence he found - linking the Cubans with the murder - prompted the FBI head, J Edgar Hoover, on the orders of President Lyndon Johnson, to withdraw Keenan after three days.

"This was perhaps the worst investigation the FBI was ever involved in," said Keenan.

"I realised that I was used. I felt ashamed. We missed a moment in history."

Mexico City was considered a "Pandora's Box" by the Johnson administration, which feared a war with Cuba were the truth to be revealed to the American people.

"They were afraid of what will happen. They didn't want to. . . know the truth for fear it would mean we go to war. Johnson sincerely feared for his own life." It was convenient therefore for the administration to paint Oswald as a loner.

Alexander Haig, a military adviser to Kennedy and Johnson who became secretary of state in 1981, said in the film that Johnson was terrified his people would learn the truth.

"He [Johnson] said 'we simply must not allow the American people to believe that Fidel Castro could have killed our president'.

"And the reason was that there would be a Right-wing uprising in America, which would keep the Democratic party out of power for two generations."

Mr Haig added: "He [Johnson] was convinced Castro killed Kennedy, and he took it to his grave."

Huismann's interviews and documents he found show the extent of the secret war, involving murder and sabotage plots, between Castro and the Kennedy brothers.

Without the knowledge of Congress or the American public, John and Robert Kennedy allegedly planned eight assassination attempts on Castro, all of which failed.

Huismann's explanation for the failures is a Cuban who fought alongside Castro but who later fell out with him.

The film-maker claims that this man was "contracted" by Robert Kennedy to murder the "Maximo Lider", and was provided by the CIA with pistols disguised as fountain pens and powerful poison to carry out the task.

But Castro always found out about the plots in advance, leading to suspicions of a double agent.

The film claims that in November 1963 the Cuban took his last order from Robert Kennedy to murder Castro. The act, involving poison and the fountain pen, was to be carried out on Nov 22, the very day Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas.

"Unfortunately, Castro was better than us," said a CIA agent in the film who is not identified.

Marino said Oswald was recruited to the secret service organisation by the same agent who had been recruited to kill Castro, a year before the Kennedy assassination.

"In other words the very man Robert Kennedy recruited to kill Fidel Castro hired his brother's murderer," Huismann said.

KGB files released in Moscow document a meeting between Oswald and the Cuban, who is now a retired surgeon living in Madrid.

Interviewed for the film, however, he denied any connection to Oswald, calling it an "outrageous lie".

Marino did not want to answer the question as to whether Castro had direct knowledge of the Oswald assassination plan.

Huismann wrote his film with Gus Russo, author of the 1998 book on the Castro-JFK rivalry, Live by the Sword.

22 November 2003: The greatest murder mystery of all time

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/01/04/wkenn04.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/01/04/ixnewstop.html

States Ranked by Total Taxes and Per Capita Amount - 30 Mar 2006

2006-04-23T06:46:00.000-05:00

States Ranked by Total Taxes and Per Capita Amount: 2005
(Amounts in thousands. Per capita amounts in dollars)
Total tax			Total tax per capita
Rank	State	Amount	Rank	State	Amount

	United States…..	648,606,245		United States…..	2,192.27

1	California…..	98,434,685	1	Vermont…..	3,600.16
2	New York…..	50,190,396	2	Hawaii…..	3,477.93
3	Florida…..	33,894,971	3	Wyoming…..	3,417.77
4	Texas…..	32,784,942	4	Connecticut…..	3,300.49
5	Pennsylvania…..	27,262,969	5	Delaware…..	3,228.79
6	Illinois…..	26,411,689	6	Minnesota…..	3,093.93
7	Michigan…..	24,340,487	7	Massachusetts…..	2,815.23
8	Ohio…..	24,006,560	8	Alaska…..	2,786.90
9	New Jersey…..	22,933,999	9	California…..	2,724.31
10	North Carolina…..	18,639,618	10	New Jersey…..	2,630.65
11	Massachusetts…..	18,014,681	11	New York…..	2,606.62
12	Virginia…..	15,918,847	12	Rhode Island…..	2,443.07
13	Minnesota…..	15,881,131	13	Wisconsin…..	2,429.96
14	Georgia…..	15,675,655	14	Maryland…..	2,410.23
15	Washington…..	14,839,634	15	Michigan…..	2,404.95
16	Maryland…..	13,497,281	16	West Virginia…..	2,367.17
17	Wisconsin…..	13,452,250	17	Washington…..	2,359.99
18	Indiana…..	12,853,976	18	Arkansas…..	2,357.84
19	Connecticut…..	11,584,728	19	Maine…..	2,323.12
20	Arizona…..	11,008,428	20	New Mexico…..	2,319.23
21	Tennessee…..	10,007,292	21	North Dakota…..	2,202.97
22	Missouri…..	9,543,814	22	Pennsylvania…..	2,193.32
23	Kentucky…..	9,090,882	23	Kentucky…..	2,178.50
24	Louisiana…..	8,638,674	24	Nebraska…..	2,158.36
25	Alabama…..	7,799,948	25	North Carolina…..	2,146.68
26	Colorado…..	7,648,456	26	Virginia…..	2,103.72
27	South Carolina…..	7,318,388	27	Ohio…..	2,094.08
28	Oklahoma…..	6,859,030	28	Nevada…..	2,074.72
29	Arkansas…..	6,552,449	29	Illinois…..	2,069.40
30	Oregon…..	6,522,665	30	Idaho…..	2,053.51
31	Iowa…..	5,750,629	31	Indiana…..	2,049.42
32	Kansas…..	5,598,700	32	Kansas…..	2,039.60
33	Mississippi…..	5,432,152	33	Iowa…..	1,938.85
34	Nevada…..	5,010,443	34	Oklahoma…..	1,933.21
35	Utah…..	4,686,381	35	Montana…..	1,910.14
36	New Mexico…..	4,471,477	36	Louisiana…..	1,909.52
37	Hawaii…..	4,434,356	37	Florida…..	1,905.28
38	West Virginia…..	4,301,156	38	Utah…..	1,897.32
39	Nebraska…..	3,796,551	39	Mississippi…..	1,859.69
40	Maine…..	3,071,161	40	Arizona…..	1,853.58
41	Idaho…..	2,934,459	41	Oregon…..	1,791.45
42	Delaware…..	2,725,095	42	Georgia…..	1,727.73
43	Rhode Island…..	2,628,747	43	South Carolina…..	1,719.95
44	Vermont…..	2,242,902	44	Alabama…..	1,711.27
45	New Hampshire…..	2,022,146	45	Tennessee…..	1,678.23
46	Alaska…..	1,850,502	46	Missouri…..	1,645.49
47	Montana…..	1,787,889	47	Colorado…..	1,639.54
48	Wyoming…..	1,739,646	48	New Hampshire…..	1,543.62
49	North Dakota…..	1,403,293	49	Texas…..	1,434.16
50	South Dakota…..	1,110,035	50	South Dakota…..	1,430.46


Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Governments Division Created: March 29 2006 Last Revised: March 30 2006 Skip this navigation Census Bureau Links: Home · Search · Subjects A-Z · FAQs · Data Tools · Catalog · Census 2000 · Quality · Privacy Policy · Contact Us Page Last Modified: March 30, 2006

The Incoherence of Hannah Arendt; Breaking the Marriage Between Heaven and Earth - Mar-Apr 2006

2006-04-23T06:39:00.000-05:00

Christianity Today

Books & Culture, March/April 2006

The Incoherence of Hannah Arendt
Breaking the marriage between heaven and earth.
by Eugene McCarraher

On a sunny March morning in 1962, a taxi bearing Hannah Arendt collided with a truck as it sped across Central Park. Awakening in the ambulance, Arendt moved her limbs, rolled her eyes, and tested her memory by recalling decades, stanzas of poetry, and telephone numbers. As she later described the episode to her close friend Mary McCarthy, "for a fleeting moment I had the feeling that it was up to me whether I wanted to live or die." While she "did not think that death was terrible," she also thought that "life was quite beautiful and that I rather like it."

Today, Arendt's brush with the Reaper might become another saccharine epiphany, denatured and packaged for the burgeoning market in "uplift" and "inspiration." Arendt herself would surely recoil from much of our "life-affirming" drivel. If it isn't advertising—"smell the roses" in our flower shop, "appreciate the little things" with help from our investment firm—it's an unwitting invitation to forget the larger concerns of politics, philosophy, and religion. Having spent her life pondering the carnage and futility of the 20th, most murderous of centuries, and having escaped calamities far worse than an auto wreck, Arendt might well admonish us that beauty is always bound up with the broader forces of history, whose evasion and neglect will inevitably rob the world of its deepest charms.


	Like John Dewey and Richard Rorty—two thinkers with whom she certainly has little else in common—Arendt was attempting to uncouple a largely Christian moral sensibility from the embarrassment of Christian theology.

This rich and intelligent "love of the world," as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl characterizes Arendt's intellectual career, could hardly be more urgently needed or imperiled than it is in this very year, her centenary. It's a perverse and benighted time when worldliness is the stock-in-trade of bilious bon vivants like Christopher Hitchens. The last exponent of Arendt's kind of worldliness was Edward W. Said, who embodied, for many of us, that civilized and cosmopolitan humanism so often caricatured as haughtiness or sophistry. Both Said and Arendt enunciated stubborn and inconvenient truths, and detested the culture of euphemism that neutralized thought and camouflaged cruelty. Though grateful for the shelter and good fortune afforded by the United States, they saw much in the bustle of their adopted homeland that mocked a true love of life. And they scorned the sort of specious and imperialist universalism that corrupts our punditocracy, all those nostrums about "freedom" (for the market) and "human rights" (to be invaded) that comprise a beguiling form of parochialism.

Over the last decade or so, Arendt has inspired a growing legion of scholars and admirers. Most of them are responding, I suspect, to the contraction of moral and political imagination among the Western intelligentsia, or to the bloodbaths that flooded out the parade for the vaunted "end of history." Of course, not all evil would appear to be banal—does this word adequately convey the horrors of Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, or Sudan? But as the premier investigator of modern evil's bureaucratic demeanor, Arendt would seem to be an unassailable scourge of today's well-mannered iniquity, whereby torture receives the imprimatur of our own attorney general. Who better to diagnose the sado-militarism in the corridors of Abu Ghraib, or the lack of concern or even interest in the scandal in the fabled Christian heartland?

But can Arendt's work fully reward this renewal of interest? If Arendt, like Said, remained adamant that worldliness required the rejection of supernatural hope, is her love of the world sustainable without an otherworldly desire? Do her insights into "the banality of evil" themselves hang over a void? She offers a great deal that's corrective or seminal to the political culture of our time, incapable as it is of envisioning much beyond a global shopping mall or a theater for American righteousness. Her Augustinian reflections on the nature of evil will outlast all moralistic prattle about "evildoers" and wickedness. And her affirmation of "action" can embolden us to replenish our stale and dwindling inventory of political possibility.

Nevertheless, there's much that's abortive and dispensable in her work—the suggestive but misleading formulation of "totalitarianism," to take a salient example, her indifference to the "social question," her incorrigibly exalted conception of political life—and these features do not derive, I think, from datedness or reportage. Our critical powers can be easily disarmed when faced with a resumé as illustrious as Arendt's, and we bestow the benefit of too many doubts if we're stunned into submission by her stature. An "éminence grise among éminence grises," as a fawning journalist once wrote of her, Arendt has become an idol of profundity, and a reflexive deference to all things "profound" can make our appropriation of her work all too timid and reverential.

We should read her more often in the spirit of Eric Hobsbawm, who once noted drolly that Arendt displayed "a certain lack of interest in mere fact." Some of Arendt's most renowned work is indeed empirically impaired, but a more serious problem, I think, is a certain lack of interest in consistency, and we should not be so overwhelmed by the shadow of her gravitas that we decline to point this out. Arendt's corpus exhibits an overall lack of architectural integrity, and its basic flaw is the notion that worldliness can survive without faith in divinity. Like many modern intellectuals, Arendt thought that religious insights could subsist without their roots in theology, and the result, in her case, was a panoramic oeuvre of portentous incoherence. Rather than continue to genuflect before the intimidating force of her mind, we should see in Arendt's career a scene in the drama of atheistic humanism, the conclusion of which, Henri de Lubac reminds us, is a morass of confusion and despair. So for all her invaluable and borrowed insight, Arendt cannot teach us how to love the world, for loving the world is not too much but rather not enough.

Like many an icon of crisis, Arendt has received the dubious honor of being more cited than read: one can now drop phrases like "banality of evil" without ever opening Eichmann in Jerusalem. The Origins of Totalitarianism is still assigned, even though many scholars now consider its central concept misleading or useless: even as sympathetic an interpreter as Hannah Pitkin criticizes Arendt for reifying "totalitarianism" into a "Blob" that metastasizes without any human agency. And like references to her Riverside neighbor Reinhold Niebuhr, those to Arendt are always good for a shimmer of moral authority.

That authority derives in part from the spell still cast by the principal settings she inhabited: Wilhemine and Weimar Germany and Cold War New York. Arendt grew up before World War I among the Jewish bourgeoisie of Konigsberg—where Kant had strolled the streets after musing on the ding an sich—and studied in the city's Gymnasium after being tossed out of one of its hochschulen for "insubordination." The friend of New Left radicals received a thorough classical education, proving that, as she later wrote, it is "exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child [that] education must be conservative." Exposed to little in the way of overt anti-Semitism, Arendt and her cohorts assumed that their assimilation into Hohenzollern Germany would continue unimpeded. But after the slaughter of the Great War and the disenchantment of Progress, they faced what the historian Detlev Peukert has called "the crisis of classical modernity." In the midst of cultural despair, worthless deutschmarks, and the earliest brays of fascism, Arendt and her generation invented kulturkritik, their makeshift armada of vessels for navigating the maelstrom of the modern: the neue Sachlichkeit, the Frankfurt School, psychoanalysis, and existentialism.

Moving through the universities of Berlin, Marburg, and Heidelberg, Arendt met many in the gallery of Weimar luminaries: Romano Guardini (then a rising Catholic star who taught her theology); Martin Heidegger (her mentor at Marburg, also her lover); Karl Jaspers (her teacher at Heidelberg and a lifelong friend); not to mention Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who earned her everlasting dislike by lambasting her first husband's habilitationschrift. (Though enormously gifted in the study and at the piano, Adorno comes across in Arendt's letters as a peevish little snit.) Like many of these figures, Arendt hit the road when the Nazis came to power, migrating to America just a step or two ahead of the storm troopers.

Arriving in New York in 1941 after eight years on the run in Europe, she became the most glamorous and erudite of that legendary band of eggheads dubbed "the New York intellectuals." Far too much praise has been lavished on this island tribe, most of whose work now seems far more brilliant than enduring. Gliding through the salons of postwar Manhattan, Arendt shared dinner and conversation with Lionel Trilling, Dwight Macdonald, and Daniel Bell, and endured a marriage proposal from an infatuated W. H. Auden. But she also suffered the likes of like Irving Howe, Norman Podhoretz, and Sidney Hook, the latter an especially self-important pedant who thought Arendt was afraid to debate him. She married Heinrich Blucher, a roguish figure who talked incessantly, wrote little of interest, and strikes me as something of a blowhard. Arendt was a paragon of the breed, from the lacy whirl of cigarette smoke that always enveloped her head to her dazzling segues from philosophy to history to contemporary affairs, all executed with a facility rare among today's better-paid intelligentsia. (Her New Yorker essays still serve as models for intellectual journalism.)

She appears to have been genuinely uninterested in acquiring or counseling power, another virtue increasingly scarce among our "public intellectuals." Witness her long-running feud with fellow-émigré Leo Strauss, who became a colleague of Arendt's at the University of Chicago. Besides rebuffing his amorous advances (what minor nightmares they must been), Arendt saw in Strauss' careful attitude toward the Nazis all the signs of a sniveling opportunist, especially when, as a Jew, he could hardly expect any favors. In the 1960s, Arendt became a grossmutter of sorts to many student radicals, while Strauss helped concoct the intoxicating blend of powerlust and esoterica that evolved into neoconservatism. His intellectual spawn now occupy editorial offices, university faculties, and the Bush Administration, and their Platonic noble lies, having issued in a needless and protracted war in Iraq, have stoked the flames of hatred and recrimination throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. Having seen the Master in action, Arendt would have known what to make of the Straussian cabal of sycophants and mediocrities.

She would probably have observed that their reckless lust for power stems from a refusal to accept without bitterness the evanescence of earthly life. "What I have loved / I cannot hold. / What lies around me / I cannot leave": more than mere adolescent sturm und drang, these lines articulate Arendt's embrace of our beautifully fleeting condition. Even her ill-considered affair with Heidegger—a married man who, in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's understatement, "was not an exemplary Mensch"—did not occasion resentment. Read their letters, composed in the high-minded ardor of eros and erudition. Imprisoned in a respectable but stifling marriage, Heidegger becomes the unbuttoned bourgeois—"you saucy wood nymph," he teases—and the unsuspected poet, simply and movingly describing Arendt's loveliness in a rainstorm. (He also dotes on her "feminine essence" and "womanly Being" with a paternalism worthy of the Curia.) Arendt's devotion opened her eyes to "colorful and strange realms"—philosophy and sexuality—that conjured up her childhood longings for "the extraordinary, the magical." The affair lasted barely a year—ended, apparently, by Heidegger, who remained wedded, in the end, to his domestic security—but Arendt continued to correspond with her former paramour for four decades, even after his disgraceful and unrepentant deference to the Nazis. Much like Dorothy Day in The Long Loneliness—who saw in her own erotic misadventures the sources of spiritual insight—Arendt was strong and wise enough to bear more than guilt from her folly with Heidegger.

So it's risky but not facile to note that Arendt's intellectual debut was a dissertation on Augustine's conception of love. (Of all Arendt scholars, only Young-Bruehl seems to even hint at such a connection.) It's a convoluted and repetitious monograph, bathed in the brooding earnestness of Existenz philosophy. Arendt delineates the crucial Augustinian distinction between cupiditas—the love of worldly goods for their ministration to one's immediate desires—and caritas—the love of eternal goods and especially of God, a love which then enables us to love earthly things rightly. For those possessed by cupiditas, earthly life is a tragedy of accumulation, for the things and people they acquire or control cannot satisfy the desire for eternal happiness that animates their errant love. Even worse for the prisoners of cupiditas, life's intractable brevity implies no horizon beyond the grave, and so the avoidance of death, "transformed into the worst evil," compels the most desperate and even horrific conduct. While she must have remembered the sting of cupiditas in her futile love for Heidegger, Arendt seems to have recognized the outlines of caritas in their philosophical communion.

Arendt also saw that memory was central to Augustine's moral reflection, for in revisiting what he dubbed "the camps and vast palaces of memory," we also glimpse the kingdom that lies beyond the injustice and suffering of the earthly city. If God is the Alpha and the Omega, the genesis and the telos, then "the return to one's origin," as she glossed Augustine, "can be an anticipatory reference to one's end." Those who fully recognize and accept their beginning in time will practice "remembrance and gratitude," an unstinting thankfulness for the unmerited gift of existence from which all genuine virtue arises. And finally, eschatology, Arendt realized, is a remembrance of things future, a capacity, as Eliot put it, to see the place for the first time. Indeed, "it is memory and not expectation . . . that gives unity and wholeness to human existence." Contrary to Marx, for whom the past was a burden on the brains of the living, Arendt maintained that memory—the personal and collective storehouse of injustice, heroism, barbarity, and magnificence—is an ark of liberation, a reminder that the present does not define the limits of human possibility. Arendt thus belongs to that motley and distinguished roster of intellectuals who avow the promise of memory: Walter Benjamin, H. Richard Niebuhr, Christopher Lasch, and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Yet as Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark observe, many reviewers faulted Arendt's avowed indifference to the theological content of Augustine's ideas about love and human community. While this may sound like yet another tempest in a classroom, these objections anticipated the central weakness of Arendt's later work: her attempt to sever theological notions from their theological context. Approaching Augustine with an "intentional detachment from all doctrinal elements," Arendt immediately distorted the theological character of Augustine's ideas about love, and rendered unintelligible his conviction that delusion and ruin will inevitably attend a worldliness rooted in something other than worship.

Arendt spent much of her subsequent career attempting to appropriate the aura of theology without its nettlesome claims to veracity and commitment, and her evasive maneuvers in this regard have largely eluded detection or censure. I think we should stop treating her so gingerly. Take her courteous assertion, in an oft-cited 1950 Partisan Review symposium on "Religion and the Intellectuals," that she neither "explicitly rejected traditional religious beliefs" nor "accepted" them. Why do we not call this "punting" or "equivocation"? Compared to this mite of triangulation, the blasphemous bravado of a Hitchens is more admirable and refreshing. Eight years later, in The Human Condition, after informing her readers that "the question about the nature of man is no less a theological question than the question about the nature of God," Arendt proceeded to altogether ignore theology, even in the midst of a moving and astute discussion of forgiveness. (To my knowledge, only Charles Mathewes calls attention to this masterpiece of obfuscation in his long and thoughtful reflection on Arendt in Evil and the Augustinian Tradition.)

Having abandoned Augustine's theology, Arendt naturally eschewed his Christian account of human nature as the imago Dei, and she came to adopt an existentialist anthropology that undermines, if it doesn't quite discredit, much of what is valuable in her work. Here we encounter one of Arendt's most hallowed notions: "action," or—what seems to me pretty much indistinguishable from that concept—"natality." Elaborated rather ponderously in The Human Condition, "action" is the uniquely human capacity to initiate something new, especially in thought, and it reaches its highest (indeed, its only) development in the "public" or "political" realm. As our only safeguard and consolation against the mortality of earthly life—itself embodied in "work," the realm of biological processes, and "labor," the world of human making—action is "the miracle that saves the world." And like any good miracle, it is utterly unpredictable: as Arendt put it succinctly in Between Past and Future, "action insofar as it is free is neither under the guidance of the intellect nor under the dictate of the will."

Now when our democratic vistas are as narrow and kitschy as they are today—when, for instance, a huckster like Thomas Friedman is mistaken for a prophet—we need reminding that we have the capacity to make things not only "better" but new. And I hear echoes of Arendtian "action" when Alain Badiou or Slavoj Zizek speaks of the authentic political "act": in times of heightened turbulence, some become capable, not merely of "seeing what is possible," but of breaking and extending the boundaries of possibility, and redefining the very coordinates of what we can and cannot do.

But clear away the brain-fog induced by the words "miracle" and "free" in Arendt's description of "action," and ask yourself if she isn't suggesting something disembodied, irrational, even sinister. Though applauding Arendt's political theory of memory and narrative, Julia Kristeva admonishes her for "relegating the body to an uninteresting generality," a dismissal that makes Arendt a problem for feminists. ("Such nonsense is starting up again," the admirer of Rosa Luxemburg sighed at the dawn of Women's Liberation.) Dana Villa writes inelegantly that Arendtian action defines "praxis outside the teleological framework," while Mathewes chides its "effectively Pelagian concept of human freedom." I fail to see how Arendt's anthropology differs all that much from nihilism—or, if we're more generous, incoherence. I'll return later to the conflicted political import that "action" bears. But whether you dub it nihilistic or incoherent, Arendt's disavowal of a human nature desirous of beatitude doesn't, in the end, put her all that far away from Jean-Paul Sartre—a writer she loathed, without a trace of irony, for making "everything entirely arbitrary."

Isn't it obtuse if not utterly perverse to charge the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem with nihilism? Only if we read Arendt's most absorbing book in isolation from the rest of her work, and only if we forget that "the banality of evil" relied on theological ideas she "neither rejected nor accepted." As a piece of journalism (a venerable genre, I might add, at its best far more than what professional historians condescend to call the "first draft of history"), Eichmann remains a bold and unsettling document of moral portraiture. We are treated to unforgettable accounts of David Ben-Gurion's cynical stage-management of the trial; the Danish people's intrepid resistance to the Final Solution; and the Vatican's constipated and cowardly disclaimer that it did not want its protests of genocide understood as coming from "a false sense of compassion." We learn that the Allied policy of saturation bombing, which culminated, Arendt argues, in the atomic annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was clearly a war crime under the protocols of the Hague Convention.

And then there's Eichmann himself, whose excruciatingly average life is a study in the evil of banality. Arendt is at her appalled and incisive best when sketching this deadly little nebbish, especially when recounting the "grotesque silliness" of Eichmann's final words: after declaring his unbelief in God or an afterlife, he assures his executioners that "we shall meet again." (I wonder if Stanley Kubrick was thinking of Eichmann when he put "We'll Meet Again" on the soundtrack of Dr. Strangelove.) But the absurdity of Eichmann's death was a fitting end to the inanity of his life, for as Arendt notes, he had always been "incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché."

We don't pay enough attention to the relationship Arendt establishes between the omnipresence of cliché and the banality of evil. Of course, much has been made of the "banality of evil": its explosive imprecision as a phrase, its location in the postwar critique of "conformity," its secularized Augustinian pedigree. Yet Arendt realized that platitude is the anesthesia of the intellect and the bromide of the soul, a narcotic that enables its addicts to perform with efficiency and tranquility. "The most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others," cliché casts a shroud over the world, smothering its lushness and euphony under a blanket of triteness and euphemism. Our culture of death has a diversified portfolio of "reliable safeguards," small but lucrative investments in the enterprises of domination and self-deception : "family values," "choice," "freedom is on the march," even "culture of life," a phrase purloined and mangled by the vindictive likes of Tom DeLay.

So the devil, contrary to cliché, does not have all the best tunes, and goodness is never banal or boring. How could Arendt assert such a thing without believing that reality is good? And how could she believe such a thing without theological warrant? On what basis can she claim that genocide is an outrage against "the very nature of humanity" if her anthropology acknowledges no such essence beyond a radical contingency? When Arendt remarks that Eichmann was "not very much interested in metaphysics," I feel compelled to retort that this is rather rich coming from someone who never exhibited such an interest herself. Scholars rightly trace "the banality of evil" to Arendt's Augustinian inheritance, and even a theologian as suspicious of secular lineages as John Milbank has praised her resistance to the Manichaean notion of "radical evil." But few notice the incongruity, if not the contradiction, between Arendt's account of evil as privation and her lack of interest, as Young-Bruehl puts it, in any "quest for the Good, or for rules and laws defining what the Good is." Doesn't a conception of evil depend on a conception of the Good—how else can one write of "privation"? Once again, the specter of incoherence hovers over the entirety of Arendt's career.

This incoherence also aborts what I think could have been Arendt's most fruitful contribution to political thought: the discovery of forgiveness as a political virtue. Musing in The Human Condition that the Western political canon has tended to "exclude from articulate conceptualization a great variety of political experiences," Arendt sought to recover one of the cardinal Judeo-Christian virtues for political theory. Those across the spectrum who demand that people "get what they deserve" should think very hard about what they're saying, for justice alone is a merciless ideal. Without mercy or forgiveness, Arendt reminds us, we would be forever "confined to one single deed from which we could never recover." Far more than a cancellation of debts, the political marvel of forgiveness lies in its liberation for the future, for "only through this constant mutual release from what they do can men remain free agents . . . to begin something new." Yet as Milbank has recently argued, forgiveness makes sense only within a theological account of time as "participating in the divine." Otherwise, he writes, time "passes away . . . into pure oblivion," rendering forgiveness and renewal as pointless as retribution. Why forgive debts if death is the ultimate creditor?

Many will object to my rebuking Arendt in this way, but I think we need to be clear about the import of her attempt to write checks on a closed account. Like John Dewey and Richard Rorty—two thinkers with whom she certainly has little else in common—Arendt was attempting to uncouple a largely Christian moral sensibility from the embarrassment of Christian theology. As Rorty put it with candor and succinctness in Achieving Our Country, many modern political intellectuals have aimed to "separate the fraternity and loving kindness urged by the Christian scriptures from the ideas of supernatural parentage, immortality, providence, and sin." Lamed by her own "intentional detachment from all doctrinal elements," Arendt's most disturbing and invaluable insights illustrate the dubiousness, if not the impossibility, of that achievement.

Of course, Arendt considered herself a political thinker, and many of her discrete political insights were acute and enduring. Along with Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, and other Jewish advocates of an urbane and capacious Zionism, Arendt was repulsed by the Ben-Gurion government's brutal dispossession of indigenous Arabs, and she long harbored a fear that Israeli nationalism was becoming increasingly chauvinist and belligerent. (Richard Ben Cramer's How Israel Lost is a depressing confirmation of Arendt's unease.) Warning New Left students against Sartre's delusional exhortations to revolutionary violence, Arendt pointed to the civil rights movement as evidence that "the means used to achieve political goals are often of greater relevance than the intended goals," adding for good measure that violence was "more the weapon of reform than revolution."

The heft these judgments possessed came first from The Origins of Totalitarianism. Against a still-powerful tendency to lift the Judeocide out of historical time and into the realm of the "inexplicable," Arendt located it in the main currents of modern history, setting a precedent for later historians such as Raul Hilberg, David Wyman, and Arno Mayer. Totalitarianism, she maintains, is a ghastly resolution to the central problem of industrial modernity: the creation, through mechanization and mass democracy, of large, restless, and mobile populations, whose volatile superfluity must be mobilized or eliminated. This problem lurked behind all efforts to contain or erase "the masses": racism, nationalism, imperialism, eugenics, and finally the death camps, the ultimate application of Stalin's brutal maxim, "no person, no problem."

Yet while she draws attention to the populist character of fascism, Arendt does not argue a "revolt of the masses" thesis that totalitarianism resulted from "growing equality of conditions, from the spread of general education and its inevitable lowering of standards and popularization of content." Rather, she assigns the main responsibility for fascism to two groups: intellectuals who, eager to merge with "the people," defaulted on their critical responsibilities; and the fearful, drifting bourgeoisie, willing to sacrifice anything and anyone to protect their loot and their self-regard.

But Totalitarianism also exhibits some of the signature vices of Cold War intellectual culture. Akin to bogeymen like Eric Hoffer's "true believer" and Czeslaw Milosz's "captive mind," "totalitarianism" is arguably the other side of a coin marked "end of ideology," a currency minted and traded among New York intellectuals eager to repent of their misspent leftist youths. Epitomized by Bell's celebrated 1960 volume, the "end of ideology" was the "end of history" of its time, the graying liberal's avuncular disparagement of radical aspiration. In her chapter on "ideology and terror," Arendt rehearsed the standard lecture of the Manhattan mandarinate. Impatient with the prudence and sagacity induced by "common sense," ideologies, Arendt explains, are "isms which . . . explain everything and every occurrence by deducing it from a single premise." The ideological mind revolts at the contingent and indeterminate "miracle of being" and inevitably employs terror to "make the world consistent, to prove that its supersense has been right."

The most important reply to all of this is that a lot of it is demonstrably false, and that Arendt's uses of "ideology" and "totalitarianism" work to discourage any attempt at systematic cultural and political transformation. As Marxist intellectuals from George Lukacs to Terry Eagleton have reiterated again and again—and Arendt was surely acquainted with the former's History and Class Consciousness—"ideology" is not just any abstract, rigid, and self-conscious system of thought. Present in everything from game shows to academic philosophy, it's a form of consciousness engendered by social and material conditions, one that depends for its endurance on a volatile blend of truth and falsehood. Arendt and other Cold War sages conveniently forgot that, understood in this way, the concept of "ideology" is a powerful critical tool, and may well include in its purview the "common sense" of a given time and place. Arendt herself demonstrated a talent for keen ideological discernment: much of modern imperialism followed inexorably, in her view, from the "never-ending accumulation of power necessary for the protection of a never-ending accumulation of capital." Those who hear Marxist claptrap in "no blood for oil" would do well to ponder that line.

I think this is crucial in understanding not only the historical valence of "totalitarianism" but also the contemporary horror of something called "fundamentalism." Given the demise of fascism, only socialist or Communist political movements remained available for stigmatization by Cold War intellectuals, and so Arendt's book became a front-line weapon in the arsenal of "maturity" and "realism." Any comprehensive program for social and political change could be branded as a blueprint for the Gulag. So while it would be stupid and meretricious to dismiss Totalitarianism as a "mere" piece of ideology, its scholarly value is arguably diminished by its ideological entanglement.

Recent reflection on "totalitarianism," and especially on fascism, underlines this problem. As Robert O. Paxton—no leftist—has recently argued in The Anatomy of Fascism, fascism is "inconceivable in the absence of a mature and expanding socialist left." Underlining the fear of socialism that occasioned not only fascism but also the timidity of Western liberal democracies in the face of Hitler, Paxton's claim suggests that the antipathy between fascists and socialists grew out of a real conflict of political visions, one which, in Slavoj Zizek's view, mandates a distinction in the way we assess them. Stalinism, he contends, should be considered the murderous perversion of a worthy desire for material plenty and cosmopolitan equality—a love for the world that Arendt could (and should) have affirmed. But how, Zizek asks, could we see anything in the Nazi death camps but the fulfillment of fascist aspiration toward racial and sexual purity? Indeed, Zizek concludes, the oft-made comparison of Stalinism with Hitlerism serves, in effect, to disparage socialism or any other project of egalitarian social reconstruction.

But could we not suggest then that much of our postmodern distaste for large-scale, "totalizing" perspectives on human affairs—now encapsulated in the expletive "fundamentalism"—is itself a study in ideology? That "fundamentalism" is now the heir of the obloquy once heaped on socialism? The similar trajectories of socialism and religion in the political culture of Western intellectuals are worth noting here: both are disparaged as inherently "dogmatic" and violent antagonists of an "open," peaceful world, the secular eschaton of liberal democracy and corporate capitalism portrayed in the National Security Strategy.

As Zizek's remarks imply, "totalitarianism" was also the starkest form assumed by Arendt's perennial postwar bogeyman: "the social question" whose presence she always considered a low-born intrusion on the high calling of politics. (In Arendt's terms, a political resolution of social issues confuses the realms of "work," "labor," and "action.") Here, we should turn to On Revolution, in which—with the postcolonial movements of "national liberation" clearly in mind, and with the student movement emerging in the West—Arendt aimed to recover "the revolutionary tradition and its lost treasures." The most precious coins in that treasury, she thought, were numerous albeit short-lived experiments in decentralized, radically democratic political organization: the Jacobin sections of revolutionary France; the Paris Commune of 1871; the pre-Bolshevik soviets established by revolutionary workers and soldiers; the councils set up by Hungarian students and workers before they were crushed by the Stalinist government in 1956. The centralizing villains of the piece were Marx and Lenin, while the heroine was Rosa Luxemburg, whose courageous and eloquent indictment of Lenin exhibited "amazing clear-sightedness about the issues at stake."

And yet Arendt obscured the fact that, right up to her murder by the proto-fascist Freikorps, Luxemburg remained a Marxist, and thus presumably committed to resolving that "social question" Arendt ruled inadmissible in political life. Nowhere does Arendt seem to sense the inconsistency of her admiration for Luxemburg and the fact of Luxemburg's revolutionary socialism. Arendt notes generically and unhelpfully that all decentralist attempts to venture beyond "the political" and into social and economic governance have proven chaotic and tyrannical. Though she links the political failure of decentralism to the party system and the nation-state, Arendt never suspects that these two forces—along with their sponsoring bourgeoisie—might also be culpable in the misfortunes of decentralized answers to the social question.

"The political" (or "the public") sphere is a notoriously high-faluting realm for Arendt. As the exemplary forum for "action," politics properly speaking has, for her, no connection with the inarticulate necessities of the erotic, laboring body. Severed from material and social life, politics for Arendt has all the intellectual quality of Plato's guardian class without its ascetic communism. Indeed, it's not clear what besides displays of rhetorical ingenuity people are supposed to actually do in the political world. What's more, taken by the manly and "fierce agonal spirit" displayed in the Athenian polis, Arendt never stops to consider the slaves and women on whose backs this exclusively male sphere was borne. (That nonsense is starting up again. . . .) Hence George Kateb's gibe that Arendt dreamed of "male Greeks in togas."

This mandarin disdain for "the social question" could be embarrassingly disengaged and unseemly. A decade after she criticized black parents in "Reflections on Little Rock" for "using" their children to achieve racial integration, Arendt needed Ralph Ellison to explain to her the ideal of sacrifice that motivated them. Later, in On Revolution, Arendt disparaged the material dreams of immigrants who—"unhappily," in her view—saw in America "a 'promised land' where milk and honey flow." Only a refugee with a Guggenheim grant could see that dream as ignoble. In the same book, Arendt expressed bewilderment that American political thought had "dried up almost immediately" after the Federalist Papers, and that the American Revolution "has remained sterile in terms of world politics," an infertility she considered a "failure." It never occurred to her that the barrenness and failure might have derived from inattention to social issues, and that the "failure" might, from the standpoint of the propertied, be considered a success.

As with so much of her work, Arendt's repudiation of theology illuminates her insistence on preserving politics from contamination by social issues. In On Revolution, Arendt articulated two competing ontologies of human community. Pointing to the stories of Cain and Abel and of Romulus and Remus, she claimed that the founding stories of "our biblical and secular traditions" conveyed a sobering truth: "whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide." But if human community originated in bloodshed—"in the beginning was a crime"—salvation commenced in peace: "in the beginning was the Word." Once again, action miraculously saves the world. Yet Arendt never reconciles these two political ontologies. If crime lies at the origin of community—and Arendt seems clearly to think violence the more historically probable ontology—then it is hard to see how words can avoid being tarnished. And if action is as unconditioned and arbitrary as Arendt conceives it, how can it avoid becoming another form of violence?

But if the world and human community are founded in an order of love, peace, and plenty, then we—those rooted in Christian theology—would have to recognize that Arendt's difficulties here stem from her reluctance to join fully in what Charles Taylor has called "the affirmation of ordinary life." Since, as Taylor observes, the modern affirmation of ordinariness can be traced to the Judeo-Christian tradition, Arendt's stratospheric conception of politics can be traced to her rejection of theology. Though clearly inflected by her inordinate regard for an idealized polis of Greek antiquity, Arendt's refusal or inability to see social life as an inherently political realm ultimately stems from her lack of faith in a created order of abundance and love.

If Christian theology entails an ontology of abundance, an anthropology of beatific desire, and a politics of everyday life, then I think we will have to affirm Marx's insight, as Arendt glosses it dismissively, that "poverty is a political, not a natural phenomenon, the result of violence and violation rather than of scarcity." It is not enough to say, as Arendt did in The Human Condition, that "the social" is an "exchange market" inhabited by "a society of jobholders," for to stop there leaves the social question answerable only in the terms of capital. And we would have to recognize that, despite Arendt's indictment of commodification, her insulation of politics from social and economic conflicts—the efflux of her attempt to separate work, labor, and action—would disable the only politics capable of challenging what Edith Wharton once called "the vast, gilded void" of commodity culture. We would also have to resist any attempt, from whatever quarter, to vilify as inherently "totalitarian" a politics of social transformation.

And so, unanchored in a broader and deeper theology of ordinary life, Arendt's epiphany in the ambulance can be of only limited import for us. Life is quite beautiful, and we owe its radiance and splendor to a God who thought our bodies worthy of an Incarnation. Hannah Arendt lacked that sacramental faith in the marriage of heaven and earth, and her work ultimately founders on her attempt to annul this inseparable union.

Eugene McCarraher is currently a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. He is completing The Enchantments of Mammon: Corporate Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination.

Books consulted for this essay:

By Hannah Arendt:
Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: Letters 1925-1975, ed. Ursula Ludz (Harcourt, 2003).

Love and St. Augustine, ed. Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott and Judith Chelius Stark (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996).

The Origins of Totalitarianism (Schocken, 2004 [1951]).

The Human Condition (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958]).

Between Past and Future (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993 [1961]).

On Revolution (Penguin, 1991 [1963]).

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Study in the Banality of Evil (Penguin, 1992 [1963]).

On Violence (Harcourt, 1969).

by others:
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (Yale Univ. Press, 1983).

Charles Mathewes, Evil and the Augustinian Tradition (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001).

Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of "The Social" (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998).

Dana R. Villa, Politics, Philosophy, Terror: Essays on the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Princeton Univ. Press, 1999).

Julia Kristeva, Hannah Arendt: Life Is a Narrative (Univ. of Toronto Press, 2000).

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture magazine.
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March/April 2006, Vol. 12, No. 2, Page 32

The State of the News Media 2006

2006-04-23T06:21:00.000-05:00

An Annual Report on American Journalism

By the Project for Excellence in Journalism

In 2005 the decline of network news viewership continued.

On the evening newscasts, the audience declines accelerated.
The lone exception was CBS Evening News, whose audience and ratings rose for the first time in years.
The general audience declines extended to the highly profitable morning news programs as well in 2005, something worth watching to see if that becomes a trend.
The audience for prime-time magazines, however, at least those that had survived, stabilized in 2005, a sign perhaps that the genre has completed its thinning-out process.

The audience declines in the mornings and evenings, moreover, took place during a year when major national and world crises occurred at a rapid and steady pace. There was Hurricane Katrina and its failed response, followed by Hurricane Rita; the death of Pope John Paul II and the appointment of Pope Benedict XVI; and the continuing war in Iraq.

The question heading into 2006 was whether network news would begin to make a serious move toward Web newscasts and other innovations that will free the medium from the limitations of television time slots, and if it did, whether that would bring audiences back to network news and attract sought-after younger viewers.

Nightly Newscasts

The evening network news programs continued their steady but bumpy decline.

Between November 2004 and November 2005, ratings for the nightly news fell 6% and share fell 3%. That is an acceleration of the pace of decline in recent years. It translates into overall viewership on the three commercial nightly newscasts of 27 million viewers, or a decline of some 1.8 million viewers from November 2004. From the start of CNN in 1980, nightly news viewership for the Big Three networks has fallen by some 25 million, or 48%.

As measured in ratings, the percentage of nightly news viewing in all TV households, the three network evening newscasts had a combined 18.9 in November 2005, down from 20.2 a year earlier.

As measured in share, the percentage of just those television sets that are on at the time, the three newscasts earned a 37 share in November 2005, a drop from the 38 earned in November 2004.

Evening News Viewership, All Networks

November 1980 to November 2005

[Line graph showing consistent decrease from 53 million down to 27 million viewers]

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research, used under license

* Ratings taken for month of November.

In the previous editions of this report, we have illustrated the decline in viewership for the nightly network newscasts by using two landmarks: 1969, the historic peak of nightly news viewership, and 1980, the launch of the cable news network CNN. In 1969, the three commercial nightly network newscasts had a combined 50 rating and an 85 share. In 1980, they had a 37 rating and a 75 share. Based on November data for 2005, ratings have fallen 62% since 1969 and 48% since 1980. Share has fallen 56% since 1969 and 51% since 1980.¹

Evening News Ratings

November 1980 to November 2005

[3 Major networks showing decrease from 13-16 million down to 5-7 million]

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research, used under license

* Ratings taken for month of November.

In its first year, 2004, this report discussed in detail the various factors affecting nightly news viewership. In brief, those factors include longer work days, expanded commutes, growing competition from new technology, the end of the cold war, cutbacks in network news content, and generational lack of interest in the news.

What is it, then, that does bring viewers to the Big Three network newscasts? In a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (conducted in association with the Project for Excellence in Journalism) people with a favorable view of network television news were asked in follow-up interviews to explain what they felt was best about it. Respondents agreed “that these programs do a good job of summarizing news, and provide a considerable range and breadth of coverage in an understandable fashion.”² Taking that a step further, the convenience of a 30-minute news wrap-up in the evening or first thing in the morning suited those viewers.

But the same survey found that more people, roughly a quarter of respondents, said they got their news on national and international issues from cable outlets like CNN (24%) or Fox News’s cable channel (22%). The Big Three broadcast networks were cited to a lesser degree: ABC (16%), NBC (16%) and CBS (12%).³ Cable viewers said what they liked was the up-to-the-minute news that, in addition, could be tuned in anytime.

The challenge for network evening news producers ever since 1980 with the start of CNN has been how to match whatever experience, brand and story-telling strengths they have with the constant availability and rapid response of cable. After 25 years, the network overall nightly news audience still accounts for the largest number of people watching news at any one time. The notion that these programs are dying is clearly exaggerated. But the continuous decline in audience makes the size of the audience by itself less reassuring.

Heading into 2006, however, the Big Three network news organizations may never have been in a better position to re-conceptualize the evening broadcasts than they were in 2005. Each had anchor chairs to fill, with the stepping aside of Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and the death of Jennings at age 67. Each had held his anchor chair since the 1980s, and the programs were inevitably identified, despite whatever changes were made, with figures who were older, male and white and delivered the news in a traditional, authoritative anchoring style. Yet the continuing presence of the old anchors probably inhibited innovation. Changes were minor, not revolutionary (Brokaw stood rather than sat). Now, with new faces at NBC and ABC and new ones coming at CBS, there was at least the opportunity for a greater pace of change and higher level of innovation. Network news was standing at the edge of a new-media revolution where information is traded online, over cell phones, by bloggers and even vloggers (the v is for video). Probably the most interesting question moving into 2006 was whether new faces in the anchor chairs signaled a new kind of network news, in particular one where the TV set is not the only serious focus. That certainly was part of what the networks were saying publicly.

At the same time, the sheer size of the network evening news audience always seemed to make the networks leery of risk. Jim Murphy, executive producer of the CBS Evening News for six years until being replaced at the end of 2005, put it this way: “The winners will be the ones who stick to smart plans and the right people. The losers will be the ones who think they are being bold or daring but sacrifice their traditional audiences.”⁴

Evening News Share

1993-2005, November to November

[3 major networks news % share from 18-20% down to 11-14%]

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research, used under license

* Ratings taken for month of November.

Nightly News Audience Demographics

A major factor in all such calculations is the age of the audience of the network evening news. The evening newscasts, according to information from the December 2005 edition of MAGNA Global’s quarterly “daypart briefings” report, skews older than any other component of network programming. An expanding range of media options heightens this concern. Age groups that once naturally began watching the nightly newscast as they spent evenings at home with their families may now be as likely to turn to online or other alternative resources for news.

According to the December season-to-date numbers, the median age of nightly network news viewers remained basically unchanged at roughly 60.⁵ But the figures were not the same across the board. The median age of two of the Big Three’s broadcasts, ABC and NBC, was slightly younger in 2005. The CBS Evening News audience, fronted in 2005 by 66-year-old Bob Schieffer, was older compared to data from 2004.

The changes naturally raise the question whether placing younger people in the anchor chairs (the NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams is 46, ABC’s Bob Woodruff is 44 and Elizabeth Vargas is 43) will attract younger viewers. Or do the limitations of time slot, the pull against innovation for fear of losing the existing audience base, and the traditional anchor-dominated style of an 18-minute evening newscast put inevitable limits on how much younger viewers will gravitate to those programs?

Median Age of Nightly News Viewers

2002, 2004, 2005

[All three networks, median age over 59 years]

Design Your Own Chart

Source: MagnaGlobal USA

The Race Among the Networks

When it comes to horserace, “NBC Nightly News” remained first in audience among the evening newscasts in 2005, following the arrival of Brian Williams as anchor in November 2004. The program continued to lose viewers in the past year, but still led in ratings, share and number of viewers. Roughly a year after the departure of Tom Brokaw, it fell from 11.2 million to 10.3 million viewers, fewer than in November 2003.

The declines should be put in perspective. The evening news under Williams had to contend with significant declines in NBC’s entertainment programming, which means fewer people to watch promotions for NBC news and fewer sets tuned to NBC when they were turned off and then turned back on. Williams retained more of his program’s audience, relatively, than the rest of NBC programming. The same problems, and same relative success, are also true of the “Today Show.”

ABC’s entertainment line-up was faring better but in a year when “World News Tonight” relied on substitute anchors, it suffered the biggest drop, falling to 8.9 million viewers by November 2005. That was a 16% decline in November viewership since 2000 and a 10% decline from November 2004. The unexpected death of Jennings, and the on-air search process for a replacement seemed to hurt ABC. That would particularly have disappointed Jennings, who had hoped that Brokaw’s departure followed by Rather’s would provide his network with an opportunity to regain the No.1 position.

Meanwhile, “CBS Evening News” with the interim anchor Bob Schieffer crept up by some 100,000 viewers, moving from 7.7 million to 7.8 million. That success under Schieffer bears note. NBC and ABC brought in younger anchors that also function as in-the-field reporters but CBS, unsure about its long term, picked Schieffer as an interim choice. He epitomized tradition, a familiar face from the older generation of network news, someone who in the last quarter-century had anchored morning, mid-day and weekend newscasts and functioned as Chief Washington correspondent. He has also been the anchor for “Face the Nation” since May of 1991. According to the biography posted on the CBS News Web site, Schieffer is also “…one of few broadcast or print journalists to have covered all four major beats in the nation’s capital — the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and Capitol Hill.”⁶

And it was Schieffer, not his younger rivals, who enjoyed the audience gain in 2005. What might explain that? One argument might be that being in third place, CBS was the most likely to grow after an anchor change. Another factor might be that some viewers who would no longer watch Rather preferred Schieffer and were likely to give him a try as a known commodity. A third factor could be that uncertainty at ABC with Jennings ’s illness put viewers in play, and some of them might have been older viewers. A fourth factor might be change in the newscast under Schieffer, who seemed to become increasingly comfortable over time, and to interact naturally and skillfully with his correspondents, asking them probing questions with an apparently genuine curiosity. Schiefffer also was the beneficiary of the success of CBS’s prime-time lineup. It is possible, too, that Schieffer’s long experience simply paid off, giving him a depth some viewers appreciated. If so, the fact that the other networks have looked to people in their 40s for their next anchors may give CBS pause as it looks to replace Schieffer, the anchor who today is enjoying the best audience trend line.

Evening News Viewership, by Network

1980 - 2005, November - November

[All three networks, 16-19 million down to 8-10 million]

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research, used under license

PBS

When viewed alongside the declining overall viewership of the three commercial broadcast television networks, the health and stability of “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS is impressive. Data provided by the NewsHour indicate that viewership of the program continues to remain close to 3 million each night, with some 8 million unique viewers watching at least one night a week.⁷ According to information provided to the Project by the NewsHour, that nightly number has remained at the 3 million level for the past several years.⁸ The program is carried by some 300 PBS member stations and, according to data from A.C. Nielsen, is capable of reaching 98% of U.S. television households.⁹

As with its commercial counterparts, however, there have been leadership changes at the NewsHour. Executive producer Lester M. Crystal, whose significant career includes having been the executive producer of the “NBC Nightly News” with John Chancellor from 1973 to 1976 and president of NBC News from 1977 to 1979, ended a run of more than 20 years with the program. Crystal continues his association with the production as the president of MacNeil/Lehrer Productions.

As the three commercial networks see decline, and the cable news channels other than Fox do, too, that naturally raises the question whether PBS should be trying to expand its news offerings to capture the kind of dramatic audience growth of National Public Radio, whose listeners have increased nearly 50% over the last five years.

Morning News

Among the morning programs offered by the three network news divisions, viewership declines occurred across the board. NBC’s “Today Show” remained the industry leader, followed by ABC’s “Good Morning America” and the CBS “Early Show.”

On Thursday, July 14, 2005 , “Today” achieved an unprecedented 500 weeks at the top of the morning-show ratings. In December, it celebrated a full 10 top-rated years.

“Good Morning America ” edged closer to “Today” in 2005, but seemed unlikely to overtake the peacock’s morning show in 2006, particularly since NBC would be airing the Olympics. But faced with two years of declining audiences and rumors that the “Today” host Katie Couric was being courted by CBS to fill its evening anchor chair, it was not likely that NBC was taking the closing gap lightly.

From November 2004 to November 2005, overall morning news viewership dropped from 14.6 million viewers to 14.1 million. The viewership trend line for morning news has always been a bit more erratic than its evening news counterpart. While November 2005 viewership was lower than in 2003 or 2004, the decline still left total viewership higher than in either 2002 or 2001.

Morning News Viewership, All Networks

November 1993 to November 2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research, used under license

*Ratings taken for month of November.

Morning News Viewership, by Network

November 1993 to November 2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research, used under license

* Ratings taken in month of November.

In November 2005, “Today” averaged 6 million, down 5% from 6.3 million in 2004. Perhaps more worrisome for NBC, it was the second straight year of decline.

At ABC, meanwhile, “Good Morning America” averaged 5.3 million viewers, down 2% from 5.4 million in 2004. The “Early Show” averaged 2.7 million, down 7% from 2.9 million in November 2004.

What might account for the decline in morning viewers? Is it anything more than a temporary bump that will pick up, as it did in 2003?

Trying to sort that out is probably premature. Despite some major news events in 2005, with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the death of a Pope, the Terry Schiavo right-to-die case and more, there may have been some letdown in viewership because the year earlier was an election year. There was a similar decline in audience from 2000 to 2001. But it is also possible that the growing reliance of people on the Internet, the expansion of local morning programs before 7 a.m. and other competition were beginning to cut into the networks’ morning shows. The next year should provide at least some indication.

To turn those a.m. programs into two-hour-a-day economic Energizer Bunnies for their corporate parents (three hours in the case of “Today”) the networks go further with sponsored segments, cross-promotions, and product tie-ins than anything else in network news. “Today” played host to Donald Trump’s fired apprentices (contestants from Martha Stewart’s version appeared on her own morning program). Failed “Survivor” contestants took a seat on the couches of CBS’s “Early Show,” and “Good Morning America” doled out deleted scenes from “Desperate Housewives” for viewers who hadn’t gotten enough of ABC’s hit Sunday night series.

At least occasionally, though it does not appear to be common, those packages violated even more basic standards. In April 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported that the “Today Show” tech editor Corey Greenberg had been receiving payments from companies like Apple, Seiko Epson and Hewlett-Packard, whose products he was advocating in his role as tech editor. The Washington Post writer Howard Kurtz noted in an article the following day that when Greenberg appeared in a July 2004 segment of the “Today Show” he referred to Apple’s iPod as “a great portable musical player…the coolest-looking one” and suggested a compatible device to “share your music with other people.” “This is the way to go,” he declared.”¹⁰ In what Kurtz noted was a well-placed though unintentionally accurate comment, the host Matt Lauer told Greenberg, “Let’s cut the Apple commercial right now, okay?”¹¹

Morning News Ratings

1993-2005, November to November

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research, used under license

* Ratings taken for month of November.

While there was some movement in the median age figures for individual morning news shows, the overall picture remained the same from December 2004 to December 2005, much as it did for the evening newscasts. The median age of the Big Three morning viewers combined was 53. While the “Today” audience age moved from 51 to 52 the program still enjoyed the youngest audience of the Big Three. The median age of the “Good Morning America” audience moved downward from 54 to 53. The “Early Show” audience held at roughly 53.

Morning News Share

1993-2005, November to November

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research, used under license

* Ratings taken for month of November.

Median Age of Morning News Viewers

2003, 2004, and 2005

[Median age of viewers of morning news for all three networks over 52]

Design Your Own Chart

Source: MagnaGlobal USA

The Sunday Shows

Any discussion of the state of network broadcast news would be incomplete without mention of the Sunday morning programs. The vast majority of the public knows those shows less from actually viewing them and more from the references to them in the Monday morning papers or clips on other TV news programs. The Sunday shows are largely designed and programmed for a stable, affluent, influential niche audience that is demographically appealing for advertisers. A survey of Sunday Nielsen weekly average numbers on Media Life Magazine’s Web site shows a picture almost identical to a year earlier —particularly striking because 2004 was an election year when most politically focused programs experience swells, with dips the next year. It appears that contemporary Sunday morning news is immune to that pattern.

Network by network, the picture looks the same as well. NBC’s “Meet the Press” leads, with ABC’s “This Week” holding a lead over “Fox News Sunday” but still trailing CBS’s “Face the Nation.” In November 2005, “Meet the Press” won the sweeps period with an average of 4.3 million viewers. That was 34% more than “Face the Nation” (3.2 million) and more than 60% over “This Week” (2.6 million). “Fox News Sunday” was a distant fourth with just 1.4 million viewers.¹² Sunday morning is the only part of the day all week when Fox’s news operation competes directly with the networks on its broadcast stations. At other times its competition is confined to its news cable channel. That may change in 2006. Fox is reportedly preparing a half-hour broadcast news program to compete each evening as well.

There is also the perennial odd man out of the Sunday programs. CBS’s long-running “Sunday Morning” program is a blend of arts and culture reporting that stands in contrast to the hard-line political conversations of the other network other fare on those mornings. It also contrasts with the celebrity, show-business focus of the weekday morning programs’ entertainment coverage. And it more than holds its own. (PBS’s NewsHour does devote a fair amount of time to the subject, our content studies suggest.)¹³

Prime-Time Magazines

It was not that long ago that the prime-time news magazine was a programming and profit mainstay of each of the Big Three networks’ news divisions. These slickly produced hours, often specializing in long-form pieces on consumerism, true crime, human interest and celebrity, peppered the schedule. As PBS’s NewsHour noted, in 1999 prime-time news magazines were broadcasting “six nights out of seven and have exploded in just nine years from four hours of prime time programming per week to the currently scheduled 13.”¹⁴ Part of their appeal was that they cost much less to produce than an hour of drama or sitcoms, and added value to a news division within the network budget to boot. (On the other hand, prime-time magazine segments, generally, do not offer the same potential for re-runs that entertainment programming does.)

But with the rise of reality programming, prime-time magazines lost their edge as a source of cheaper programming that could earn a profit with a smaller audience. A reality hit could be even cheaper to produce and had the potential for a huge audience. What’s more, news magazines tend to attract an older demographic — people not falling into the prized 18-to-34 age range.

In 2005 the decline of the news magazine format continued with the death of “60 Minutes II.” Moving into 2006, only NBC’s “Dateline” continued regularly to air more than once a week.

The decline of the prime-time magazines, however, has other consequences for the news divisions, beyond shrinking the share of profit they contribute to their networks. One adverse consequence, network officials told us, was seen in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. In the days when the magazines were seemingly ubiquitous during prime time, they afforded the networks an easy way to compete with the cable news channels, allowing for expanded hard-news coverage without having to pre-empt entertainment programming. In September 2005, the networks could cover Katrina in the morning, in the evening, and on ABC late at night, with “Nightline.” They failed to take the lead in Katrina coverage during prime time.

The effect of having fewer news magazines, however, has not been uniformly negative on the surviving programs.

Nielsen data for November 2005 showed a largely stable picture for the remaining news magazines. Despite a rocky year in 2004, the “60 Minutes” flagship edition on Sunday nights led the field with 14.9 million viewers. NBC’s signature “Dateline” program was second with 19.7 million viewers (over 2 nights) followed by ABC’s “20/20” (8.8 million), CBS’s “48 Hours Mystery” (7.4 million), “Primetime Live” (6.7 million) and “Nightline’s” (3.9 million).

Despite “Dateline’s” success, the network has other commitments. For now, “Dateline Friday” is moving to “Dateline Saturday,” and next season the thinking is that “Dateline Sunday” will be eliminated because of the network’s new NFL commitment. One possibility is that “Dateline” might move to two hours on Saturday or come back with more episodes in the spring.

Meanwhile, the ratings numbers alone may not be a safe predictor of the future. The key questions for a magazine show, network officials say, are 1) how does a magazine do in the time slot relative to what had been there or relative to the lead-ins? and 2) how committed is each network to a magazine?

In 2006, CBS appears the most committed. Its “60 Minutes” is an institution. “Dateline” may be more vulnerable. Saturday is always a risky time slot because the networks have begun using the night for rerunning prime time dramas such as “Law and Order” and “CSI,” and those reruns negate the economic advantage of a magazine. For the moment, however, insiders say, “48 Hours Mystery” (on Saturday) appears secure.

At ABC, as the prime-time schedule improves, the magazines may be vulnerable. On Thursday, for instance, “Primetime Live” was considered secure because the network thought it had limited prospects at 10 p.m. , up against ER on NBC. So an inexpensive news magazine was a good alternative. Yet that may be beginning to change. ER is aging, and the program that leads into “Primetime Live” last year saw better ratings. The network may begin to feel it can now draw more viewers with a drama at 10 p.m. rather than with a news magazine. Until now, the prospects for that—up against ER on NBC and CSI on CBS, were considered dim. If that changes, “Primetime,” say insiders, could get bumped.

At NBC, Saturday night is a difficult night for magazines. Some network officials believe that “Dateline,” which for years had been an economic engine for the network, could be in real danger.

By the end of the 2004-2005 season “60 Minutes” was the only news magazine to make the top 25 programs. That was despite the cancellation of the program’s “60 Minutes Wednesday” (also called 60 Minutes II”) and the potential backlash from that program’s airing of an ill-conceived report concerning President George W. Bush’s Air National Guard service.¹⁵

Prime-Time News Magazine Viewership

November 2005

Design Your Own Chart

Source: Nielsen Media Research, used under license

* Primetime Live data includes an average of Friday and Sunday numbers.

‘Nightline’

“Nightline,” over the years, was something of an outlier among evening magazines. First, it existed outside prime time. It followed local news, and while it competed against comedy programming, it maintained a seriousness that made it difficult to categorize.

In 2005, the “Nightline” program that had been on the air for a quarter-century ended and was replaced by a new one with the same name. The impact of the change remains to be seen.

In late March 2005, Ted Koppel announced that he would be leaving the program and the ABC network when his contract expired in December 2005. The resignation came amid debate at the network about the future design of the show. (The battle became an almost iconic symbol for the critical importance of network news, at least in public-relations terms, when it became known that ABC was trying to replace the program with a talk show vehicle hosted by the CBS personality David Letterman.)

According to a Washington Post article by Howard Kurtz, while one proposal had “Nightline” becoming a “younger and hipper hour-long show…without anchor Ted Koppel…an alternative approach [was] being developed by Koppel’s staff, a more traditional ‘Nightline’ [that] would expand to an hour while remaining largely a taped and edited program…”¹⁶ Disney was reportedly entertaining talk of a “sports or entertainment show that would end the quarter-century run of ‘Nightline’…”¹⁷

It would be October 2005 before ABC would (at least temporarily) secure the program’s future and announce a replacement, or rather a team of replacements, for Koppel. ABC News would field a three-anchor team: Martin Bashir (a reporter perhaps best known for his tabloid interview with Michael Jackson), the “Primetime” co-anchor and senior legal correspondent Cynthia McFadden, and “World News Tonight Sunday’s” anchor, and the senior White House correspondent, Terry Moran. The program would broadcast from Washington, and from ABC’s Times Square studios in New York, where Bashir and McFadden would be based. In addition to multiple anchors and locations, the program would break from its former approach of focusing on a single topic and instead deal with multiple topics.

Koppel’s final show took place on November 22, 2005.

Much of the talk surrounding the premiere of the “new Nightline” focused on the fact that it abandoned two of its hallmarks, the single-topic focus and its simple, unadorned packaging. When the show finally premiered (at 12:45 a.m. EST November 28 th, 2005) following Monday Night Football), viewers were greeted not by the focus they had come to expect but by what Robert Bianco of USA Today called “a half-hour version of ‘20/20.’”¹⁸

The new “Nightline,” indeed, was more similar to other programs on network TV than to what it replaced. It carried two or three pieces in a 22-minute newshole. The packaging, graphics and framing of the pieces were more hyperventilated than in the past, and several critics contended that the program’s reports did not always deliver on some of the more grandiose promotional promises. The premiere episode featured the first installment in a series called “ Iraq : Stay In or Pull Out?” The following morning, USA Today’s Bianco noted that while “…Moran's taped interview with U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad was newsworthy, we'll apparently have to wait for him to address the question in the segment's title…”¹⁹ There have also been signs of some of the same cross-promotional use of the program that has come to characterize other network news programs, particularly in the morning. One early segment, for instance, was a celebrity interview with the comedian Sarah Silverman, whose boyfriend, the program mentioned, is Jimmy Kimmel. Kimmel’s show, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” airs after Nightline.²⁰ Still, some of the segments remained focused on major news events.

More structurally, doing more stories each night logically raises the risk that people will have less time to work on their pieces. TV critics were mostly negative. Initial responses were that this was no longer “Nightline” as it used to be but a different program with the same name, and one that was less distinct from what is available elsewhere on the dial.

But it is perhaps unfair to judge the new “Nightline” so early in its transition. It was probably predictable, after all, that the program would be dinged after such a long and serious tenure. The argument could be made that critics and media watchers expected too much out of the box, or were primed to be critical.

Early ratings indicated that “Nightline’s” audience has not fully made up its mind about the new format, either. According to Media Life magazine, “For the week ended January 15, ‘Nightline’ averaged 3.6 million viewers, its highest viewership since the triumverate of Cynthia McFadden, Martin Bashir and Terry Moran took over as hosts in late November. But that was down 8% from the comparable week last year, when Koppel averaged 3.9 million viewers.”²¹

Public Television and the Documentary

In last year’s report, we discussed the unique role played by PBS’s “Frontline” program. With the new multi-story format of “Nightline,” Frontline stands even further apart from other network journalism offerings. With its focus on a single theme, “Frontline’s” documentary filmmaking approach and high production values attracted some 3 million viewers for each program during the 2004-2005 season.²²

Heading into 2006, some observers speculated that the situation for journalistic documentaries might be improving. Certainly documentaries have found a new foothold in theaters and on DVDs. Films like “Supersize Me” and “Fahrenheit 9/11” broke through the perception that documentaries were stuffy, academic affairs. Oscar-nominated works like “The Boys of Baraka,” “March of the Penguins” and “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room” illustrated the versatility of the genre.

While network television news divisions were moving away from documentaries, Public Broadcasting continued giving them an outlet. Along with “Frontline,” programs like “Wide Angle,” “POV” and “American Experience” offered viewers the opportunity to see current events, quite literally, through a new lens. “Wide Angle’s” “Border Jumpers” was an hour-long piece devoted to the subject of people attempting to illegally cross the national border of their wealthy neighbor in search of better jobs and opportunities. The countries in question, however, were not Mexico and the U.S. but Zimbabwe and Botswana . On “POV,” the filmmaker Ross McElwee’s “Bright Leaves” looked at the tobacco industry from an autobiographical perspective — his great-grandfather founded Bull Durham Tobacco. “American Experience” devoted a program to the September 1970 hijacking and eventual destruction of four commercial aircraft by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Some of those programs have had a decided liberal cast, but that is hardly the case exclusively. Perspective could become more of an issue, however, and add to pressures on PBS, if documentaries were found to play a significant role in future elections.

Meanwhile, cable channels like the History Channel, Discovery and others have always included documentaries in their programming, and some new players are moving high-profile projects to the airwaves. Showtime will be airing a new video version of the highly popular public radio show “This American Life.” Ted Koppel and members of the former “Nightline” team have moved their shop over to the Discovery Channel to start a documentary program on that network (See Economics, The Message of Nightline).

Click here to view footnotes for this section.

Nazi Archive has Millions of Victim Names - 19 April 2006

2006-04-23T06:14:00.000-05:00

Washington Post

Nazi Archive Has Millions of Victim Names

By MATT MOORE
The Associated Press
Wednesday, April 19, 2006; 4:27 PM

BAD AROLSEN, Germany -- Row upon row of metal cabinets at the International Tracing Service hold the key to the lives _ and deaths _ of 17.5 million of Adolf Hitler's victims.

Much of it is simple, stark facts _ a name on a concentration camp death list _ while other information is more descriptive: accounts of mental illness, real or imputed homosexuality, medical records, even the presence of head lice.

Privacy concerns have held up the opening of the center's 30 million documents to historians and the public, a restriction that could end soon under pressure from Holocaust researchers and Jewish organizations.

In a key breakthrough, the German government said Tuesday it was ready to work with the United States on the issue, though no final agreement has been reached.

Maria Raabe, assistant to the center's director, said it will ultimately be up to the 11 countries that oversee the archive _ Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Israel, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Britain and the United States. Their representatives meet May 16 in Luxembourg.

"It's there that a decision will be taken on opening the archives and in what way," she said. "We have very delicate and sensitive information about illness, homosexuality, dementia."

One card shows the name of a Frenchman taken to Norway and forced to work as a carpenter building a submarine pen for the German navy. Another lists a Hungarian said to suffer from schizophrenia. Another bears the name of a German imprisoned at Buchenwald for saying anti-Nazi slogans and freed on orders of the U.S. Army on May 7, 1945 _ the day the war ended.

Many of the records are registration documents, ID cards or lists. Yet they provide powerful testimony to the lives and deaths of those imprisoned, forced to work for German industry or killed in concentration camps during World War II.

The agency, which opened in 1943 in London and moved to Germany in 1945, helps relatives of Nazi victims discover their fates.

More than 50 million references to the victims have been catalogued, cross-referenced and, in most cases, digitally scanned to form a huge database. Some 150,000 requests were dealt with last year alone.

It is by far the most complete listing of those who suffered in World War II, said Udo Jost, archive manager for the International Tracing Service.

Some death camps "didn't have much use for records," Jost told The Associated Press. In some cases, documents were destroyed by the Nazis as the Russians advanced from the east and the Allies from the west.

Other camps were ardent record keepers. Mauthausen, in Austria, diligently recorded the deaths of its inmates, listing them by name, serial and prisoner number, as well as place and date of birth.

"It also shows how they died," Jost said, displaying the camp's Totenbuch, or Death Book, for 1942 and 1943. "These prisoners were killed every two minutes with a shot to the back of the head."

In a few hours, 300 were executed on April 20, 1942.

"That was Hitler's birthday. The camp commandant did it as a birthday gift for him," Jost said.

The Nazis documented everything from the mundane _ how many meals a forced laborer received _ to the horrific, describing prisoners' deaths in painstaking detail.

People requesting information about themselves or relatives are given priority, as do the elderly or sick, and those seeking information for legal settlements.

Still, it takes 3 1/2 years on average, Raabe said.

"Some are seeking information on relatives who were taken to Germany to work and then emigrated after the war to somewhere else," she said. "Others need to prove that they were in a concentration camp."

When a family member is seeking a lost relative, the agency tries to track down that person. Most times it is successful, but not everyone is eager to be found.

"When that happens, we notify them that we were not successful," she said, adding that the agency does not divulge confidential information.

Even advocates of opening the records to historical research or the public acknowledge the privacy issue.

The Central Council of Jews in Germany is "very much in favor of opening up the archive," said general secretary Stephan J. Kramer.

"Yes, we are concerned that personal information be treated carefully," he added, noting that Holocaust centers such as Israel's Yad Vashem have extensive experience balancing privacy concerns with researchers needs and can be trusted to handle the data carefully.

The issue has been debated for years, but German Justice Ministry spokeswoman Cristiane Wirtz said the treaties that govern the center made change difficult. "These treaties, which make possible the work of this archive, do not foresee that opening of the archives for research purposes. That is the legal problem," she said.

"We will have to wait and see what comes out of this assembly. The fact is that there have been intensive talks ... and we will have to wait and see whether all problems have been solved to the extent that we can actually open the archives for research purposes."

Several Holocaust scholars applauded Germany's decision to consider allowing wider access.

"We are pleased," said Iris Rosenberg, spokeswoman for Yad Vashem. Israel's Holocaust museum "believes that all information related to the Holocaust should be open to scholars and the general public."

"The opening of these records is an important step forward that will give the victims of Nazi genocide their names back," added David Marwell, director of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. "The German government has found the appropriate balance of personal privacy and open access."

Times of London

Secret archives of Holocaust to be opened after 60 years

From Roger Boyes in Berlin

ONE of the most comprehensive sources of information about Jews killed or lost in the Holocaust is to be thrown open to historians after an about-turn by Germany.

For 60 years a wall of secrecy has surrounded the archive at Bad Arolsen in central Germany, which contains 50 million documents and the names of 17 million Nazi victims. Germany had claimed that opening the files would break its strict privacy laws.

Now, under pressure from Holocaust researchers and the US, it has relented. As a result, the documents could be made available to help historians, family members and others to establish how the victims of the Holocaust met their fate.

“This represents a really important step,” said Sara Bloomfield, director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. She was speaking after a meeting with Brigitte Zypries, the German Justice Minister.

The files — mainly German papers impounded by Allied forces — are a testimony to the Nazi obsession with documentary detail. Among the papers, stored in an old SS barracks, there are lice inspection reports from concentration camps and insurance policies signed by German companies when they took on slave labourers. The many documents form a remarkable mosaic that shows the lives and tribulations of Jews, slave labourers and other victims.

The archive has been used since the war as a tracing service by the International Committee of the Red Cross. As Holocaust victims die out, the service has become less important. Even so it succeeds in reuniting dozens of families every year. The archive is supervised by 11 countries: the US, Britain, Belgium, Israel, Italy, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Greece and Luxembourg. The decision to open the files has to be approved by all 11.

So far, Germany has been the main obstacle. As well as its privacy laws, there were also fears that the documents could leave the German state exposed to a myriad of lawsuits.

The change of policy could see the release of digital copies of the documents. It has not yet been agreed whether they would be available online.

Ms Bloomfield said: “We are losing the survivors and anti-Semitism is on the rise, so this could not be more timely.”

Paul Shapiro, director of the museum’s centre for advanced Holocaust studies, said: “It makes it possible to learn a lot more about the fate of individuals and to learn a lot more about the Holocaust itself — concentration camps, deportations, slave-enforced labour and displaced persons.” Karol Fracapane, executive secretary of the taskforce for International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research, said: “This is about the memory of the most appalling event in human history and about respect for the survivors today. It is extremely important for the archives to become open as soon as possible and give survivors and their families relevant information before they die.”

Now that Germany has bowed to pressure, the next step will be a formal decision in Luxembourg next month. Frau Zypries believes that the 1955 treaty limiting access to the archives could be revised within the next six months.

DEATH LIST

· Since its inception in 1943, the service has collected information on 17.5 million people in 50 million reference files

· The archive has 25,000 metres (16 miles) of shelf space, 225,000m of microfilm and more than 100,000 micro files

· Work is under way to digitise files, to make searches easier and to preserve the record

· The centre has responded to 11 million requests and has a two-year backlog. It processes more than 200,000 inquiries a year

· Files are not open for general research. A specific individual must be sought

Stonehenge on Shortlist of New World Wonders - 2 Jan 2006

2006-04-23T06:12:00.000-05:00

Stonehenge on shortlist of new world wonders
(Filed: 02/01/2006) Telegraph

Stonehenge has been short-listed in a seven-year poll to identify the seven wonders of the modern world.

The ancient stone circle in Wiltshire is the only British landmark in the top 21 short-list after tens of millions of public votes worldwide.

The Tower of London, Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, St Paul's Cathedral, the London Eye and Greenwich Observatory were the other British contenders among the 77 nominated sites.

But all these popular London tourist attractions missed out as they were whittled down to 21.

The other 20 entries include the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal in India, the Colosseum in Rome and the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

The Kremlin, Machu Picchu in Peru, the Sydney Opera House and New York's Statue of Liberty are also finalists.

Voting will now continue throughout the year to select the seven wonders, which will be announced on New Year's Day 2007.

The poll was launched in 2000 by the New 7 Wonders Society, a Swiss group which aims to alert the world to the destruction of man-made heritage.

The rules are strict, with all nominations having to be man-made and to have been completed by 2000.

They must also be in an "acceptable" state of preservation, which excludes all ruins.

The list of the seven wonders of the ancient world was drawn up by Philon of Byzantium in the second century BC.

His choices were essentially a travel guide for fellow Athenians and were all located around the accessible Mediterranean basin.

Only the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt is still standing and that makes it on to the new short-list along with another magnificent pyramid at Chichen Itza in Mexico.

The other six ancient wonders were the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Statue of Zeus at Olympia, the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, the Colossus of Rhodes and the Lighthouse of Alexandria

The full final 21 shortlist in alphabetical order is:

1 Acropolis, Athens, Greece
2 Alhambra, Granada, Spain
3 Angkor, Cambodia
4 Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico
5 Christ Redeemer, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
6 Colosseum, Rome, Italy
7 Easter Island Statues, Chile
8 Eiffel Tower, Paris, France
9 Great Wall, China
10 Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey
11 Kyomizu Temple, Kyoto, Japan
12 Kremlin, Moscow, Russia
13 Machu Picchu, Peru
14 Neuschwanstein Castle, Füssen, Germany
15 Petra, Jordan
16 Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
17 Statue of Liberty, New York, USA
18 Stonehenge, Amesbury, United Kingdom
19 Sydney Opera House, Australia
20 Taj Mahal, Agra, India
21 Timbuktu, Mali

http://www.endex.com/gf/buildings/ltpisa/7wonders.htm

from National Geographic website:

The Seven Wonders of the Middle Ages:

The Colosseum of Rome
The Catacombs of Alexandria
The Great Wall of China
Hagia Sophia of Constantinople
Stonehenge
The Leaning Tower of Pisa
The Porcelain Pagoda of Nanjing

The Seven Wonders of Today:
(compiled in 1931 after the completion of the Empire State Building):

The Great Pyramids (Egypt)
Hagia Sophia (Turkey)
Leaning Tower of Pisa (Italy)
Washington Monument (U.S.)
Eiffel Tower (France)
Taj Mahal (India)
Empire State Building (U.S.)

Seven Wonders of the Ancient World:

The Pyramids of Giza
The Hanging Gardens of Babylon
The temple of Artemis at Ephesus
The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus
The Pharos (lighthouse) of Alexandria
The statue of Zeus at Olympia, Greece
Colossus of Rhodes (statue of the sun god Helios)

Seven Natural Wonders of the World
(Content varies from different sources):

The Grand Canyon (U.S.)
Iguazú Falls (Argentina)
Yosemite Valley's Giant Sequoias (U.S.)
Mount Everest (Tibet/Nepal)
The Harbor of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
The Nile River (Egypt)
The Aaurora Borealis (the northern lights)
Niagara Falls (U.S./Canada)
Rainbow Natural Bridge (U.S.)
The Petrified Forest (U.S.)
among others.

Listing the seven wonders of the world began during the time of the Greeks. The first lists were for travelers of that time, listing man-made objects of particular architectural or sculptural note. Today there are many such lists, including the Seven Modern Wonders, the Seven Wonders of the Medieval World, the Seven Natural Wonders, the Seven Wonders of Medicine, etc. There are many other such lists; none are definitive, of course.

The United Nations’ World Heritage Convention (part of UNESCO) has compiled an inventory of the world’s wonders that it plans to preserve and protect. To qualify, a site must be judged to have “outstanding universal value,” either “natural” like Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park and Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, or “cultural” like Haiti’s Citadel and Sans Souci and France’s Chartres Cathedral. Among the hundreds of sites listed by the World Heritage Convention are the ancient city of Cuzco in Peru, Virunga National Park in Zaire, the U.S.’s Statue of Liberty, Altamira Cave in Spain, and Sri Lanka’s sacred city of Anuradhapura. You can read more about some of the World Heritage Sites in the Society’s book Our World’s Heritage, published in 1987.

http://www.ralentz.com/old/misc/wired-wonders.html

· Wired 1.6: Seven Wired Wonders

· Other Wired Wonders

· In the Eyes of Other Wired Thinkers

Jesuit Writes Anti-Islamic Screed - 10 April 2006

2006-04-23T06:08:00.000-05:00

American Papist

The important points in the article if you don't have time to read it (Magister introduces it first):

An article by one of the Jesuits of “La Civiltà Cattolica” makes an extremely critical analysis of Islam...
One of the four topics considered by Benedict XVI and the cardinals during their day “of reflection and prayer” at the last consistory, on March 23, was Islam.
Rahman (an Afghan citizen condemned to death for converting to Christianity) was in fact freed and transferred to Italy under protective custody. And he has Benedict XVI to thank for that.
But can this more energetic approach to the question of Islam also be found in the analysis the Church makes of the phenomenon? The answer is yes. The essay is entitled “The Islamic Question,” and occupies 30 pages of the journal Studium. It is accompanied by extensive footnotes, and is featured prominently beginning with the cover, which depicts a minaret standing out among the skyscrapers of a Western city.
But the really interesting thing about the article is its authors, Roberto A.M. Bertacchini and Piersandro Vanzan, and in particular the latter of these. Vanzan is a Jesuit, a professor of pastoral theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and above all he is part of the college of writers for “La Civiltà Cattolica,” the magazine of the Rome Jesuits that is printed with the inspection and authorization of the Vatican authorities. Because of its explosive contents, it was unthinkable that the essay by Bertacchini and Vanzan would be published in a magazine strictly connected to the Holy See by statute, and representative of its official stance.
The only substantial point that separates Oriana Fallaci’s analysis from that of Bertacchini and Vanzan is that, while she maintains that Islam is incapable of reform and incompatible with the Christian West, the other two acknowledge that an integration of the two civilizations is possible, albeit extremely difficult. And Benedict XVI is also known to acknowledge this last possibility.

My highlights from the article itself (here's where it gets good):

The pervasiveness of the global village is such that there is only one way to escape its grasp: destroy it. And this is Al-Zawahiri’s ideological program, which he pursues with a complex strategy. For the formula of “modernizing Islam,” he substitutes another: “Islamizing modernity,” and therefore the West.

This pan-Islamist program might make some smirk, just as many smirked at Hitler before his political ascent. But this is a real program, which is being carried out according to a clear plan, and although it is working slowly, it is producing results. That this is a real program can be seen in many ways.
The first piece of macroscopic data is that from Afghanistan to Kashmir to Chechnya to Ossetia to the Philippines to Saudi Arabia to Bosnia to Kosovo to Palestine to Egypt to Algeria to Morocco, sizeable groups have unleashed a war against the West. It is impossible to think that these attacks are completely independent from each other.
The second piece of macroscopic data is terrorism, especially if one has the patience to follow the thread that extends from July 7, 2005 to 1969, and the airplane from the Rome Fiumicino airport that Leila Khaled hijacked and blew up in Damascus.
The third piece of evidence is anti-Zionism...
The fourth indication is missionary activity...
and the fifth is immigration. Aisha Farina, an Italian woman from Milan who converted to Islam and has publicly expressed her veneration for Bin Laden as for a reliable guide, said this: “Maybe all the Italians will end up converting. In any case, we will conquer you peacefully, because our numbers double every generation, but you are at zero growth.”
But Islam is advancing in other ways, too...
But there is an obstacle to this strategy: the American troops on Islamic soil...
The sixth and final piece of evidence is the feelings of joy expressed by the Islamic population in the public squares, on websites, and even in the press after September 11, 2001, and also after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which the Kuwait daily “Al’Siyassa” called “a soldier sent by God.” If one comes to the point of rejoicing at horrible things, this joy breaks off natural human solidarity and sharpens the meaning of the expression “infidel dogs.” A massacre of dogs doesn’t affect me; they are not human. This is racism, and one must begin with calling it by its name, and then arrive at the appropriate consequences.
In short, the Islamization of the West is neither a phantasm nor merely something feared: it is an intention and a fact that emerges from an objective examination of the evidence.
Moderate Islam, properly so called, does not exist because there is no institutional and moderate form of Islamic theology. There are moderate Muslims, and some of them see things with a clear and long-term perspective. But Islam itself, or rather the institutional religious culture of the Muslims, has reacted in its encounter with modernity by entrenching itself in fundamentalist positions...
The necessity for extensive self-criticism on relations with Islam, one that would finally emerge from a blind and suicidal “niceness,” is therefore unavoidable.
Dialoguing with those who have, in the back of their minds, the idea of Islamizing us and reducing us to dhimmi status, as subjects of an inferior order, simply makes no sense...

As you can see, there is a GREAT DEAL of information in this article, so I encourage reading the rest.

What is particularly important about this article (besides its excellent and insightful points about the Muslim world), is who is saying this. Though these sentiments are not yet being published in mainline Vatican-affiliated publications (such as La Civiltà Cattolica), they are being published by the regular contributors to these publications... Magister explains the situation more comprehensively of course.

Anyway, there is a clear path here towards this type of honest evaluation of the situation receiving press attention in more "mainstream" publications and from more prominant sources...

Oriana Fallaci Has Enrolled in the Society of Jesus
An article by one of the Jesuits of “La Civiltà Cattolica” makes an extremely critical analysis of Islam, one very similar to that of the famous author – whose work Benedict XVI reads with admiration

by Sandro Magister

ROMA, April 10, 2006 – One of the four topics considered by Benedict XVI and the cardinals during their day “of reflection and prayer” at the last consistory, on March 23, was Islam.

Or, more precisely: “the position of the Catholic Church, and of the Holy See, in the face of Islam today.”

The discussion was held in private, but some of the cardinals afterward remarked that much more concern was shown than in the past over the challenge that Islam presents to Christianity and the West, and that there was general agreement with Benedict XVI’s energetic opposition to terrorism and the violation of religious liberty.

One month earlier, on February 20, pope Joseph Ratzinger received Morocco’s new ambassador to the Holy See, Ali Achour, and made a vigorous appeal for the rejection of violence and for full respect for religious liberty, “in a reciprocal manner in all societies.”

And on March 22, on the eve of the consistory, the pope, acting through his secretary of state Angelo Sodano, had sent to the president of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, an urgent request for the liberation of Abdul Rahman, an Afghan citizen condemned to death for converting to Christianity.

Rahman was in fact freed and transferred to Italy under protective custody. And he has Benedict XVI to thank for that.

But can this more energetic approach to the question of Islam also be found in the analysis the Church makes of the phenomenon?

The answer is yes. One outstanding proof of this is an essay that appeared in the most recent edition of “Studium,” an authoritative Italian bimonthly journal on Catholic culture founded in 1906, which is printed by the publishing house of the same name and directed by two scholars of great prestige: Vincenzo Cappelletti, a philosopher of science and director of the Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia, and Francesco Paolo Casavola, a jurist and former president of the constitutional court. The dedicated collaborators of “Studium” have included Giovanni Battista Montini, who became pope under the name of Paul VI.

The essay is entitled “The Islamic Question,” and occupies 30 pages of the journal. It is accompanied by extensive footnotes, and is featured prominently beginning with the cover, which depicts a minaret standing out among the skyscrapers of a Western city.

But the really interesting thing about the article is its authors, Roberto A.M. Bertacchini and Piersandro Vanzan, and in particular the latter of these. Vanzan is a Jesuit, a professor of pastoral theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, and above all he is part of the college of writers for “La Civiltà Cattolica,” the magazine of the Rome Jesuits that is printed with the inspection and authorization of the Vatican authorities.

Because of its explosive contents, it was unthinkable that the essay by Bertacchini and Vanzan would be published in a magazine strictly connected to the Holy See by statute, and representative of its official stance.

But the fact that the essay’s principal author is a Jesuit from “La Civiltà Cattolica,” and that it was published by an authoritative Catholic journal like “Studium,” are still important indications.

Those who have read “La rabbia e l’orgoglio [Rage and Pride]” and other writings on Islam by Oriana Fallaci – an author of worldwide fame who has lived in New York for many years – will find many points in common with hers in the essay by Bertacchini and Vanzan.

Oriana Fallaci is an extremely harsh critic of the religious and cultural factors that, in her view, feed into the Muslim world’s challenge against the West and Christianity, which she fiercely defends in spite of being a declared atheist.

She is a great admirer of Benedict XVI, who has read a number of her books and received her in a private audience last August 1 at Castel Gandolfo.

The only substantial point that separates Oriana Fallaci’s analysis from that of Bertacchini and Vanzan is that, while she maintains that Islam is incapable of reform and incompatible with the Christian West, the other two acknowledge that an integration of the two civilizations is possible, albeit extremely difficult.

And Benedict XVI is also known to acknowledge this last possibility.

Here is an extract from the much more extensive essay published in the January-February 2006 issue of “Studium”:

The Islamic Question

by Roberto A.M. Bertacchini and Piersandro Vanzan S.I.

Islamic terrorism is a rather complex response to the confrontation with the West, which Islam sees as a devastating, deadly threat.

At the end of the 1980’s, there was a pitched battle within the Islamist camp between the positions of Abdullah Azzam and the more extremist positions of Ayman Al-Zawahiri, a true ideologue of jihad in the form it has taken today, which includes in the category of enemy the “Herodians,” or those who collaborate with the West. On November 24, 1989, Azzam was assassinated in Peshawar, and Al-Zawahiri had an open field.

For the zealots, everything that comes from the outside is like poison to their traditional ways of life, so they hold that there is only one way to avert cultural catastrophe: expel the invader and hermetically seal off the borders, so nothing can pollute or corrupt their miniature world. This is, in part, the position of Osama Bin Laden, who is opposed to the American presence, not only in Iraq, but also in Saudi Arabia.

But this defensive program would never work against Western civilization. Unlike all previous civilizations, it is not localized or territorially circumscribed. The pervasiveness of the global village is such that there is only one way to escape its grasp: destroy it. And this is Al-Zawahiri’s ideological program, which he pursues with a complex strategy. For the formula of “modernizing Islam,” he substitutes another: “Islamizing modernity,” and therefore the West.

Within the Muslim world, Islamization means de-Westernizing everything: from political and cultural institutions to economic ones, even to the point of rethinking banking operations. On the outside, it means spreading Islam through vigorous missionary activity, in both Europe and the United States: this activity is supported above all by Saudia Arabia. But according to the most radical interpretations, Islamizing the West means violently attacking its political and economic power, without sparing the civilian population.

This pan-Islamist program might make some smirk, just as many smirked at Hitler before his political ascent. But this is a real program, which is being carried out according to a clear plan, and although it is working slowly, it is producing results.

That this is a real program can be seen in many ways.

* * *

The first piece of macroscopic data is that from Afghanistan to Kashmir to Chechnya to Ossetia to the Philippines to Saudi Arabia to Bosnia to Kosovo to Palestine to Egypt to Algeria to Morocco, sizeable groups have unleashed a war against the West. It is impossible to think that these attacks are completely independent from each other.

The second piece of macroscopic data is terrorism, especially if one has the patience to follow the thread that extends from July 7, 2005 to 1969, and the airplane from the Rome Fiumicino airport that Leila Khaled hijacked and blew up in Damascus.

1972 was the year of the Olympics in Munich and the massacre that happened there. But before that, on August 16 of that same year, an airplane headed for Tel Aviv was blown up by a record player rigged with explosives that a couple of English tourists had received from two Arabic men who had been romancing them. Thinking about it today brings chills: Al-Qaeda is a new and closely related phenomenon. Courting two women in order to carry out an attack means being deeply steeped in ideology. And it means that there is a connection between ideology and organization – you can’t just pick up an exploding record player at the local hardware store. Unless two Arabs happened to meet two tourists going to Tel Aviv, and then happened to get the idea of carrying out an attack, and again happened to have a friend at the ready to provide them with the surprise package. But already in 1970, six airplanes had been hijacked or blown up on the ground or during flight.

The conditions for carrying out the attack of August 16, 1972, were so complex that they required a plan constructed over years, assisted by excellent propaganda systems and economic and human resources of the highest caliber. People’s sense morality cannot be altered in the blink of an eye. The young women were probably attractive, and there may have been some tenderness in them. Placing this episode side by side with the massacre at the school in Beslan in 2004, with one hundred fifty children killed, with those three days of torment in the gymnasium and the torture of withholding water, with the girls who were first raped and then killed, we see a ferocity at work that is so opposed to the common sense of morality that it must be sustained by an absolute ideological commitment. And such an ideology, which has religious foundations, requires that the theologians themselves weave together the theoretical justifications for terror.

The third piece of evidence is anti-Zionism. Let’s take a look at the sequence of events. Anti-Zionism is evident in the first attacks of the 1970’s: the episode in Munich makes this utterly clear. In 1973, we had the war of Yom Kippur, which again saw the Islamic countries forced to concede defeat. But on October 16 and 17 of that year, during the Syro-Egyptian war against Israel, OPEC held a conference in Kuwait City that established: a) the quadrupling of the price of crude oil; b) the embargo against the United States, Denmark, and Holland; c) the progressive reduction of the amount of oil extracted; d) the effort to extend the embargo to countries that would not accept their conditions; e) including among their political conditions the acceptance of the withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories on the part of their economic partners, the recognition of the Palestinians, the presence of the PLO at the peace negotiations, and the application of UN resolution 242. It is a positive fact that the Islamic countries did not recognize the newly established state of Israel. And Saddam Hussein’s hostility towards Israel was evident to the very end. So there is a clear convergence of economic, military, and terrorist policies. After the attacks on New York, Madrid, London, and Sharm El Sheik, one would have to be blind not to see the almost maniacal sense of coordination and timing in this form of Islam. But there was also coordination between the OPEC conference and the war of Yom Kippur. This sense of timing and coordination is a cultural message directed toward the Muslim world itself, an eminent means of asserting that Islam is united and coordinated.

The fourth indication is missionary activity, and the fifth is immigration. Aisha Farina, an Italian woman from Milan who converted to Islam and has publicly expressed her veneration for Bin Laden as for a reliable guide, said this: “Maybe all the Italians will end up converting. In any case, we will conquer you peacefully, because our numbers double every generation, but you are at zero growth.”

But Islam is advancing in other ways, too. In Mazara del Vallo in Sicily, since the end of the 1970’s there has been a Tunisian community that obtained permission to preserve its identity in all respects, with Tunisian schools, teachers sent from Tunisia, Tunisian laws, etc. So although polygamy is illegal there, it is tolerated. In other places, Muslims open unauthorized schools, but no intervention is made. Infibulation is practiced on women, but no one is put on trial. One the whole, this creates an asymmetry among citizens before the law, by virtue of which some minorities are first protected, but then become privileged. And this proves the incompatibility of radical multiculturalism and the rule of law.

But there is an obstacle to this strategy: the American troops on Islamic soil. From this are derived two political stances that differ not according to the result they seek, but according to the strategies they employ. In fact, Bin Laden – but also Iran, and perhaps Pakistan – thinks that the oil pump will, in the end, be less influential than the nuclear trigger. Two reasons are given for why blackmail using oil supplies cannot last for long: one is that if the price of crude is raised too high, other sources of energy will become more economically attractive. The other is that, when the West is really put into a bind, it will react with force. That is why a different strategy is necessary, which, by bringing the war into the heart of Europe and America, blocks the use of nuclear weapons. But doing this requires an enormous amount of money and control of the political power that is now in the hands of less radical Muslims. So the terrorist political approach proceeds along two parallel guidelines: fighting the “moderate” Islamic regimes and carrying out spectacular attacks in the West, in order to reinforce its own prestige in the eyes of the Muslim world and establish itself as a legitimate guide. If these are the plausible scenarios, the politics of George W. Bush also takes on an entirely different meaning. It is the politics of the “countertrigger.” The validity of this option is yet to be verified.

The sixth and final piece of evidence is the feelings of joy expressed by the Islamic population in the public squares, on websites, and even in the press after September 11, 2001, and also after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which the Kuwait daily “Al’Siyassa” called “a soldier sent by God.” If one comes to the point of rejoicing at horrible things, this joy breaks off natural human solidarity and sharpens the meaning of the expression “infidel dogs.” A massacre of dogs doesn’t affect me; they are not human. This is racism, and one must begin with calling it by its name, and then arrive at the appropriate consequences.

* * *

In short, the Islamization of the West is neither a phantasm nor merely something feared: it is an intention and a fact that emerges from an objective examination of the evidence.

Moderate Islam, properly so called, does not exist because there is no institutional and moderate form of Islamic theology. There are moderate Muslims, and some of them see things with a clear and long-term perspective. But Islam itself, or rather the institutional religious culture of the Muslims, has reacted in its encounter with modernity by entrenching itself in fundamentalist positions. And this is true not only in Iran or Pakistan, but also in Egypt.

There is, therefore, an objective convergence between the trend in Islamic theology and the ideology of the terrorists. Fortunately, not all the imams have the same zeal for jihad, but the problem is that there is no moderate Islam, or rather there does not exist an Islamic theology that has integrated modernity. This is why it would not only be prudent, as cardinal Giacomo Biffi has suggested, to discourage Islamic immigration in Europe, it would be masochistic to encourage it without demanding reciprocation in terms of integration.

Islam is not compatible with liberal democracies for stronger and deeper reasons than those that usually come to mind: it is not only a question of polygamy, the veil, Friday religious observance, etc. That is, it is not only a problem of the rules of behavior, morals, and worship. It is seen in how Islam functions on its home turf. In Iran, there are mullahs who are appointed to supervise morality. And apart from peering into the bedroom, many more of them scrutinize the cinema, the press, and books: this is the monitoring of the public expressions of thought, which are censured if they are not in conformity with shari’a or the Qur’an and its official interpretation. A professor cannot say what he likes at school, and if an intellectual publishes his own views, he is taking a risk.

By way of explaining this issue, it is true that the Church did not abolish the index of prohibited books until Vatican II, but before it was abolished this institution did not carry any weight in civil affairs. That’s not how it is in Islam. Religious censure is “ipso facto” civil censure, because the religious authorities have civil authority, and vice versa. The entire spectrum of these and other related facts calls for intellectual honesty on our part, because we cannot interpret them as isolated cases devoid of general significance. And if these are not isolated cases, only one conclusion can be drawn: the word “freedom” did not exist in Arabic for centuries because Islamic civilization simply makes no provision for it (it was introduced with the word “hurriyya,” meaning “entitlement,” only in 1774, and out of the necessity of signing treaties with Westerners). So the absolutism of Saudi Arabia or other emirates, the legal inferiority of women and so forth, are not correctible eccentricities. They are the effects of a deep-rooted cause, which cannot be removed without destroying Islam. And this is why these eccentricities are so fiercely defended: because they have an intrinsic relationship with Muslim identity. And therefore integration can be achieved with Muslims on an individual basis, but not with Islam.

Unfortunately, open and liberal society becomes paralyzed when it encounters a closed and incompatible civilization. The problem of tolerance was worked out within Christian civilization in order to defuse its internal conflicts. But its introduction made sense, because tolerance was a value recognized by all parties, in that it was able to find a theological foundation.

But in Islam, there is no foundation for tolerance in the broad sense that characterizes our secular societies. Freedom of the press does not make sense. The Middle Ages had Boccaccio, and the Renaissance had Pietro Aretino. But in a much less offensive case, Islam censured the mathematician and poet Omar Khayyam (1048-1122) for talking about wine and drunkenness. And the fact that he was rehabilitated to some extent in Iran at the end of the twentieth century does not represent the sort of openness that one would like to believe it does. In Saudi Arabia, Islam protects itself by banning even the visible wearing of a necklace with a cross. But how can it protect itself in Europe? It’s not just the problem of girls wearing jeans. It is the problem of schools, newspapers, labor unions, women in leadership roles, cinema, television, libraries: it is the West in the sum total of its institutions that is a threat to Islam. And not because it wants to be, but simply because it exists. Like Israel.

* * *

The necessity for extensive self-criticism on relations with Islam, one that would finally emerge from a blind and suicidal “niceness,” is therefore unavoidable.

Dialoguing with those who have, in the back of their minds, the idea of Islamizing us and reducing us to dhimmi status, as subjects of an inferior order, simply makes no sense. Dialogue with moderate Muslims should not only be pursued; it should be increased, and the moderates supported in every way possible, even more so than the support that was given to the anti-Soviet resistance. But these forms of openness must be combined with a politics of distrust and suspicion, which would tighten the net as much as possible and utterly discourage the presence of the Islamizers in Europe. These are, in fact, the ideological column of terrorism: you cannot fight the one without opposing the other.

In order to enter the banquet, one must wear the wedding garment, which we must demand of those who knock on our door. It is a garment that makes acceptance dependant upon the observance of our laws. Otherwise we cannot prevent some mosques, centers of Islamic culture, and circuits of electronic preaching from cultivating hatred against us. And that’s just it, hatred – a sentiment toward which we have for too long shown a suicidal tolerance. It is a sentiment that renders social life impossible.

And anyway, it would be too sad if everything were to end this way. We should, instead, be the prophetic proponents of a phase of tolerance and integration.

From the point of view of intercultural relations, a certain reduction of the level of secularism in Western societies is probably necessary, and this will not happen without overcoming great resistance. But from the point of view of Islamic theology, the road ahead is not so obvious, in part because their cultural centers seem like fortresses that will be difficult to expunge. One way that might be practicable is that of returning to the great mystics of the Muslim world: for example, Rabi’a or Al-Hallaji. But Al-Hallaji was martyred by a caliph, and not by the Christians. So this problem is connected with that of the theoretical and practical possibility for a pluralistic Islamic theology. We think that the problem is a an arduous one, but that it would be equally wrong to maintain either that it is insurmountable or that it does not exist.

And this also holds true on the political level. Today’s Islam presents Europe with the problem of the civil recognition of its identity. This is a serious problem, which Christianity has not been able to present on its own behalf with the same forcefulness. Finding a solution on a basis of equity – of harmonizing and safeguarding the rights of all religious groups in the same way – will not be easy, but it is unthinkable that a Muslim minority would be granted the civil protection of its identity and the cultural recognition that the secularism sprung from the French Enlightenment presumes to withhold from the Christian majority.

__________

The website of the journal in which the essay by Bertacchini and Vanzan was published:

> “Studium”

__________

On this website, previous articles on this topic:

> Focus on ISLAM

__________

English translation by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com

For the latest articles go to the English home page:

> www.chiesa.espressonline.it

Sandro Magister’s e-mail address is s.magister@espressoedit.it

__________

Origins of the "Hot Dog" 4 April 2006

2006-04-23T06:04:00.000-05:00

From: H-Net Gilded Age and Progressive Era List [H-SHGAPE@H-NET.MSU.EDU]

on behalf of Katherine Osburn [KOsburn@TNTECH.EDU]

Sent: Tuesday, April 04, 2006 10:19 AM

To: H-SHGAPE@H-NET.MSU.EDU

Subject: Four Replies to the Hot Dog Query

(1)

I've seen several Food TV shows that give a pop-history of the hot dog,

and along with the "official" history from the National Hot Dog and

Sausage Council , I'll accept

that the 400-500 year-old dachshund sausage is probably the origin of

the "hot dog."

The Chicago Colombian Exposition made the treat popular.

Gene Preuss, PhD

University of Houston-Downtown

preuss@MAIL.H-NET.MSU.EDU

(2)

I am certain I read in a book on the Coney Island 'resorts' (published

sometime in the last 20 years) that one park, perhaps Luna Park, served

sausages called "red hots." Since they were not recognizable as any

particular kind of European sausage and given the justifiable suspicions

about the meat packing industry, the Coney Island folks nicknamed red

hots as "hot dogs." Sorry, I cannot provide a proper citation.

Harold S. Forsythe

Visiting Fellow (2005-2006)

Program in Agrarian Studies

Yale University

djackson23@NYC.RR.COM

(3)

It will always be a "Liberty Sausage" in my book, which I prefer to eat

with pickled Liberty Cabbage on top and side order of Freedom Fries.

Which is to say, I thought the "Hot dog" emerged out of WWI but maybe I

am wrong. Either way, two with mustard would be good about now.

Paul Finkelman

paul-finkelman@UTULSA.EDU

(4)

Cited From:

http://www.wordorigins.org/wordorh.htm

Hot Dog

There are many stories about the origin of the term hot dog, most of

them false. First, let's start with what we know.

The first known use of the term is in the Yale Record of 19 Oct 1895,

which contains the sentence:

They contentedly munched hot dogs during the whole service.

Two weeks earlier, that same paper recorded:

But I delight to bite the dog

When placed inside the bun.

The hot is obvious, but why dog? It is a reference to the alleged

contents of the sausage. The association of sausages and dog meat goes

back quite a bit further. The term dog has been used as a synonym for

sausage since at least 1884 and citations accusing sausage-makers of

using dog meat date to at least 1845. So hot dog is simply an extension

of the older use of dog to mean a sausage.

Perhaps the most persistent false story about the origins of hot dog is

the one concerning sausage vendor Harry Stevens, cartoonist T.A. "Tad"

Dorgan, and the Polo Grounds. According to myth, c. 1900 Stevens was

selling the new type of snack at a New York Giants game. Dorgan recorded

the event in a cartoon, labeling the sausages "hot dogs" because he

didn't know how to spell "frankfurter." Other variants have Stevens

naming the delicacy and Dorgan recording it. Unfortunately, the dates

don't work. The incident at the Polo Grounds is alleged to have happened

after the term was coined. Also no one has found the Dorgan cartoon in

question. There is a 1906 Dorgan cartoon featuring hot dogs at a

sporting event, but besides being even later, is from a bicycle race at

Madison Square Garden, not a baseball game at the Polo Grounds.

The use of hot dog to mean skilled or proficient is unrelated to the

sausage. In a bit of linguistic coincidence, this usage also appears in

the 1890s. It first appears in 1894 in the sense of a well-dressed

college student, a clothes horse. This usage is probably a variation on

the older expression putting on the dog (1871, why dog is not known, but

there is a well-established slang usage of dog meaning flashy or showy

from the 1870s). It quickly moved from this sense of suave sartorial

splendor to proficient, accomplished and eventually to its modern

association with extreme sports and risky action.

I am indebted to word sleuth Barry Popik, who has conducted most of the

relevant research on the origin of hot dog.

Checking up on Popik one stumbles across:

ADS-L -- the American Dialect Society discussion list

http://www.americandialect.org/index.php/amerdial/ads_l_the_american_dia

lect_society_email_discussion_list/

Matthew Gilmore

H-Net VP Networks / E-i-C

editor@MAIL.H-NET.MSU.EDU

Old Mill Victim of Change in Paper Industry [and Greedy Owners] 23 Apr 2006

2006-04-23T05:34:00.000-05:00

If ownership wasn't so intent on paying themselves those quarterly dividends, they would have been able to pay for the needed modern equipment that would have kept them competitive with the rest of the world's paper industry (and saved those 17,000 jobs).

Posted on Sun, Apr. 23, 2006

Old mill victim of change in paper industry

300 workers lose good-paying jobs

BY ROBERT IMRIE

Associated Press

Tom Ratzlaff is mayor of a small town reeling from the closure of its more than 100-year-old paper mill. And he's among the 300 workers who lost a good-paying job — his livelihood for nearly three decades.

"Some days, I just wake up and I don't know what I am going to do, but you just got to keep going," said Ratzlaff, 45. "You can only cry in your beer for so long."

What Park Falls faces is not new among cities with strong links to an industry that has made Wisconsin the No. 1 paper producer in the United States for decades. The part-time mayor has plenty of company at the unemployment line.

New competition from foreign paper makers, a recession at the turn of the century and new technology — such as e-mail and online advertising that have tamped down demand for traditional papers — have hurt an overbuilt industry all over the United States, said John Mechem, a spokesman for the American Forest and Paper Association in Washington, D.C.

Nationally, 95 paper mills have closed and 123,000 jobs have been eliminated since 2000, he said.

Since the late 1990s, Wisconsin has lost more than 17,000 jobs, or 30 percent of the work force, at paper mills, pulp mills and converting operations, and five mills have either closed or are in the process of closing, according to the Neenah-based Wisconsin Paper Council, an industry group representing 25 paper companies with factories in the state.

Ratzlaff said he was aware of that trend but saw it as a positive for him and his mill.

"You were always hoping that was enhancing your ability to stay open," he said. "Many of those that have shut down were competitors for this mill."

Patrick Schillinger, president of the Wisconsin Paper Council, said more job cutting is likely, and the jobs — some of the highest-paying manufacturing careers in Wisconsin — are gone forever.

"You will probably see more consolidation or mergers within the industry," he said.

Recent developments highlight a trend that Schillinger said started at least seven years ago:

• SMART Papers LLC of Hamilton, Ohio, closed the Park Falls mill barely a year after buying it from Toronto-based Fraser Papers.

• Glatfelter Co. has announced plans to close by June 30 a Neenah plant that makes specialty papers, costing 200 workers their jobs.

• Riverside Paper Corp. has said it will close its mill in Appleton, founded in 1893, eliminating about 100 jobs making specialty papers.

According to Schillinger, paper- and cardboard-making jobs in Wisconsin peaked at 54,300 in July 1999 before plunging to 36,800 in January.

FOREIGN COMPETITION

The job losses, in part, occurred as a once mostly regional industry faced new competition and lower prices from paper makers in China and South America, industry experts say.

Printers can buy paper cheaper from China than walking down to a local mill, Schillinger said. For some products, prices have rolled back to 1996 levels just to compete, he said.

Tom Howatt, president and CEO of Wausau Paper Corp., which operates mills in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, New Hampshire and Maine, said prices for some writing papers are down 10 percent from just five years ago.

In addition, according to Schillinger, during the "roaring" economy of the 1990s, U.S. manufacturers expanded to produce more paper. Then a global recession hit, easing demand, followed by the growth of new technology unfriendly to paper makers, he said.

The business use of e-mail, companies doing more work online and the growth of online and Internet advertising reduced the need for paper, a drop that could not be offset by a growth in paper used in homes because of computers and printers, Schillinger said.

"It was sort of the perfect storm," he said. "All of those factors have meant a leaner paper industry."

For Park Falls — a city of 2,800 carved out of a forest in northern Wisconsin and nicknamed the ruffed grouse capital of the world — the mill's sale to SMART Paper a year ago rekindled hopes about the factory's future.

The sprawling mill sits just a block off the city's main street, dominating the downtown landscape along the Flambeau River. A yard is piled with 120,000 cords of logs — a mountain of wood waiting to be made into paper.

SMART Paper filed for bankruptcy in shutting down the mill, citing unprecedented high fuel costs and "rapid deterioration" of market conditions.

"Most people have the feeling that they just came in and bled the place dry and that was it," said Ratzlaff, whose wife, brother-in-law and sister-in-law also lost jobs in the shutdown. "A couple of weeks ago, somebody wrote on a piece of paper, 'Place for sale' and put it up front."

On average, the mill's workers earned $17 an hour, and jobs just don't exist to readily absorb them, Ratzlaff said. The ripple effect of the closure hits at least 300 loggers, he said.

OUTDATED MACHINES

Gerry Ring, professor of paper science at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, the only college in the state offering such a degree, said the mill's closing has more to do with outdated, less efficient paper making machines than anything else.

"What should have happened a long time ago — at a lot more of the mills, if they wanted to keep the market — was reinvest in modern machinery," he said. "We could make good paper on old machines far longer than we should. Eventually, the costs get to you when the latest and the greatest comes on line, and then all of a sudden, 'Oh my God. They can make in a half a second what it takes us an hour to make.' "

Ring believes that the continuing rise in energy prices will ultimately lead to a resurgence of regional paper markets for the industry as transportation costs rise.

"You are not going to make paper in China and sell it in Wisconsin ultimately. They can do it for the short run, but oil prices will change that whole picture," he said.

Jim Stueber, owner of True Value Hardware in Park Falls, called the paper mill the life of the community, and said so far his business hasn't been hurt. In fact, it's picked up a little and that worries him.

"They are fixing their homes up," the businessman said. "I have a feeling they are fixing them up to move."

Booming ethanol plants get large state subsidies - 23 Apr 2006

2006-04-23T05:25:00.000-05:00

I'd rather pay millions of dollars to American farmers and ethanol producers than billions of dollars to pacify the Middle East.

posted on Sun, Apr. 23, 2006

Booming ethanol plants get large state subsidies

Minnesota still hands over $26 million a year to industry 'drowning in profits'

BY TOM WEBB

Pioneer Press

Ethanol was just a 98-pound weakling in the late 1980s, when Minnesota officials first decided to muscle it up into a strong and prosperous industry.

Today ethanol is booming as oil prices soar, yet Minnesota taxpayers still are priming the pump. Taxpayers continue to be billed $26 million a year to subsidize 11 privately owned ethanol plants that are now profitable beyond anyone's dreams.

Purdue University economist Wally Tyner calculates that at today's fuel prices, even an ethanol plant costing $100 million can be fully paid off in less than a year. "They're hugely profitable, that's why so many of them are being built," Tyner said.

Yet Minnesotans are funding ethanol subsidies even beyond that. Four times a year, the state sends checks to the farmers who own the 11 plants. The next payday arrives in May, when another $4.3 million will be paid, plus another $2.3 million in IOUs the state promises to pay later.

"The industry itself is basically drowning in profits right now, which I'm happy for, but why would we want to send them (more subsidies)?" said ex-farmer Alan Roebke of Chaska, a critic of current farm policies. "It's absolutely ridiculous."

Some corn growers don't agree. Gerald Tumbleson, a Martin County farmer who has invested in three ethanol plants, has seen benefits sprout across rural Minnesota as ethanol plants generate sales, jobs, energy and optimism.

"For every $30 million invested, they got back $400 million" worth of economic activity in rural Minnesota, Tumbleson said. "It was one of the best investments that Minnesota ever made."

DEMAND IS FEVERISH

In the past year, almost everything has changed for ethanol. Soaring gasoline prices have sent ethanol prices skyrocketing. Demand for new plants is so feverish that construction firms are booked until 2008. Refiners are clamoring for the corn-based fuel, amid worries of an ethanol shortage. But none of that has stopped the parade of state subsidy checks.

Back in 2003, the Legislature did consider scrapping the state subsidy because ethanol, even then, was solidly profitable. But the corn farmers who owned the plants objected. The program stayed.

But back then, oil was under $30 a barrel. Today it has soared to $75 a barrel. Yet now there's virtual silence at the Minnesota Capitol about reworking the ethanol producer payment.

"The Minnesota Legislature made a commitment, and they intend to keep it," said Jim Boerboom, assistant commissioner of agriculture.

But did anyone think that prices for oil would climb so high?

"No, absolutely not," Boerboom said.

Over the years, $274 million in payments have been sent to Minnesota ethanol producers, along with $45 million in IOUs. On every gallon of ethanol, the state pays producers 20 cents — 13 cents quarterly, and 7 cents more in deferred payments — up to 15 million gallons per producer.

Minnesota is now the nation's No. 3 ethanol producer, with 16 plants making 550 million gallons of ethanol a year.

"Without those producer payments, we probably still wouldn't have much, if any, ethanol production in the state," said Ralph Groschen of the state Agriculture Department.

SHUNNED IN '80s

The roots of the subsidy program go back to the ruinous farm crisis of the mid-1980s, when corn-based ethanol offered one glimmer of hope. Officials tried, but no corporation was interested back then in building an ethanol plant in Minnesota. Battered rural banks couldn't take the risk, either.

"We were losing thousands of farmers a year, and a good two-thirds of our corn was exported, unfed and unprocessed, and Minnesota corn prices were among the lowest in the country," Groschen said. "Since the large corporations declined to build here, we helped farmers to build their own plants."

The partnership worked like this: Once local farmers raised $10 million in start-up money for a new plant, the state promised 10 years of payments. A plant that produced up to 15 million gallons of ethanol a year could collect a maximum of $3 million a year.

"When these plants went up in these small towns, my goodness, it was really a shot in the arm for these rural communities," Groschen said. And when the first plants proved profitable, farm cooperatives usually built a second plant, and sometimes a third.

Several Minnesota plants have now collected more than $25 million each through the program. Roebke, a former Minnesota ethanol plant investor himself, does the math.

"FIRST PLANT IS FREE"

'We basically give 'em the first plant for free," said Roebke, who now runs a Web site on farm and energy policy. "The second one, they'll have to pay for, but the first one is free."

During the 1990s, when oil prices were mostly under $20 a barrel, the ethanol subsidy kept the industry profitable. So did the state requirement that every gallon of gasoline sold in Minnesota contain a 10 percent ethanol blend.

Minnesota's producer payment is set to expire at the end of this decade. Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, proposed ending it in 2003 during the state budget crisis, but rural Republicans strongly objected. The Legislature settled for spreading out the payments instead.

"The rural areas out there are still politically quite powerful, and they do continue to lean Republican," said David Strom, president of the Minnesota Taxpayers League and a foe of all ethanol subsidies. "It's a very powerful and important Republican constituency."

MARKET COULD CRASH

Vern Eidman, a biofuels specialist at the University of Minnesota, has talked to farmers who worry that the volatile commodity markets could crash as quickly as they soared.

"They clearly understand subsidies aren't needed at the current time, but what they're worried about is, what will happen if they're taken away and then they're needed again," Eidman said. "This is a commodity business."

To date there's been very little grumbling about ethanol subsidies as gasoline nears $3 a gallon, but that may be changing. The Wall Street Journal recently editorialized against the "heavily subsidized domestic ethanol industry that is getting rich off U.S. drivers."

And economists like Purdue's Tyner think a rewrite of ethanol subsidies makes sense, so that farmer-owners are protected during times of hardship, not lavishly rewarded during booms.

U.S. taxpayers will pay over $2 billion in federal ethanol subsidies this year, and he doesn't blame farmers for taking the money.

"If I gave you the choice of, 'Would you like $2 billion or not,' what would you say?" he asked. "But is it good public policy?"

Tom Webb can be reached at twebb@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5428.

$26 million

Amount Minnesota taxpayers pay each year to subsidize ethanol production

$1.10

Typical cost of producing a gallon of ethanol in Minnesota

$2.50

Recent selling price per gallon for Minnesota-produced ethanol

20 cents

State subsidy on every gallon of ethanol produced, up to 15 million gallons

Confronting the New Misanthropy - Spiked - 18 Apr 2006

2006-04-22T14:34:00.000-05:00

Go to: spiked-central spiked-essays

Essay
18 April 2006

Confronting the New Misanthropy
The big question today is not whether humans will survive the twenty-first century, but whether our faith in humanity will survive it.

by Frank Furedi

Discussions about the future increasingly tend to focus on whether humans will survive. According to green author and Gaia theorist James Lovelock, 'before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be kept in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable' (1).

More and more books predict there will be an unavoidable global catastrophe; there is James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, and Eugene Linden's The Winds of Change: Weather and the Destruction of Civilisations. Kunstler's book warns that 'this is a much darker time than 1938, the eve of World War II' (2). In the media there are alarming stories about a mass 'die-off' in the near future and of cities engulfed by rising oceans as a consequence of climate change.

Today we don't just have Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse but an entire cavalry regiment of doom-mongers. It is like a secular version of St John's Revelations, except it is even worse - apparently there is no future for humanity after this predicted apocalypse. Instead of being redeemed, human beings will, it seems, disappear without a trace.

Anxieties about human survival are as old as human history itself. Through catastrophes such as the Deluge or Sodom and Gomorrah, the religious imagination fantasised about the end of the world. More recently, apocalyptic ideas once rooted in magic and theology have been recast as allegedly scientific statements about human destructiveness and irresponsibility. Elbowing aside the mystical St John, Lovelock poses as a prophet-scientist when he states: 'I take my profession seriously, and now I, too, have to bring bad news….' (3) Today, the future of the Earth is said to be jeopardised by human consumption, technological development or by 'man playing God'. And instead of original sin leading to the Fall of Man, we fear the degradation of Nature by an apparently malevolent human species.

All of today's various doomsday scenarios - whether it's the millennium bug, oil depletion, global warming, avian flu or the destruction of biodiversity - emphasise human culpability. Their premise is that the human species is essentially destructive and morally bankrupt. 'With breathtaking insolence', warns Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia, 'humans have taken the stores of carbon that Gaia buried to keep oxygen at its proper level and burnt them'.

Human activity is continually blamed for threatening the Earth's existence. Scare stories about the scale of human destruction appear in the media and are promoted by advocacy groups and politicians. For example, it was recently claimed that human activity has reduced the number of birds and fish species by 35 per cent over the past 30 years. That story was circulated by the environmentalist news service Planet Ark and picked up by the mainstream media, and widely cited as evidence that human action causes ecological destruction. Our engagement with nature is frequently described as 'ecocide', the heedless and deliberate destruction of the environment. In short, humanity's attempt to domesticate nature is discussed as something akin to genocide or the Holocaust. The title of Franz Broswimmer's polemic Ecocide: A Short History of the Mass Extinction of Species captures this sense of loathing towards humanity. According to Jared Diamond, 'ecocide has now come to overshadow nuclear war and emerging diseases as the threat to global civilisations' (4).

Increasingly, the term 'human impact' is associated with pollution, wanton destruction and the stripping bare of the Earth's assets. Former US vice president Al Gore is concerned that the 'power of technologies now at our disposal vastly magnifies the impact each individual can have on the natural world', causing a 'violent destructive collision between our civilisation and the Earth' (5). Over the past 400 years, the human impact on the world, which led to the humanisation of nature, was celebrated by Western culture - these days, human ingenuity is regarded ambiguously or even suspiciously.

Indeed, the very idea of civilisation is presented as a force for ecological destruction. 'Civilisations have been destroying the living systems of the Earth for at least 5,000 years', says one misanthrophic account (6). According to some environmentalists, humans are a 'foreign negative element', even a 'cancer on the environment' (7). For radical environmentalists, the degradation of nature stems from our species' belief in its unique qualities. Such a belief - dubbed 'anthropocentrism' - is openly denounced for endangering the planet. Human-centred ideology, which views nature from the perspective of its utility for people, is said to be destroying the environment. And this tendency to depict humans as parasites on the planet is not confined to any small circle of cultural pessimists. Michael Meacher, Britain's former minister for the environment, has referred to humans as 'the virus' infecting the Earth's body.

Western culture's estrangement from its humanity

The rising popularity of a term like 'ecological footprint' shows how much resonance the association of normal human activity with destruction has today. This term, which implies that having an impact on the environment is necessarily a bad thing, is rarely criticised for its misanthropic assumptions. On TV and in film and popular culture, the development of civilisation, and particularly the advance of science and technology, is depicted as the source of environmental destruction and social disintegration. The idea that civilisation is responsible for the perils we face today depicts the human species as the problem, rather than as the maker of solutions. And the most striking manifestation of this anti-humanism is the belief that, if the Earth is to survive, there will have to be a significant reduction in the number of human beings.

The Malthusian objective of reducing populations is alive and kicking. For deep ecologists, the issue is straightforward - their starting point, as spelled out by leading ecologists Arne Naess and George Sessions in 1984, is that a 'substantial reduction in human population is needed for the flourishing of non-human life'. Numerous commentators embrace these Malthusian sentiments. 'The current world population of 6.5 billion has no hope whatsoever of sustaining itself at current levels, and the fundamental conditions of life on Earth are about to force the issue', warns Kunstler (8). The Australian academic David McNight has tried to reconcile neo-Malthusianism with his version of 'new humanism', arguing that 'creating a sustainable society based on human values will necessitate stopping the growth of human population and accepting limits on human material desire' (9).

If anything, today's neo-Malthusian thinking is far more dismal and misanthropic than the original thing. For all his intellectual pessimism and lack of imagination, Thomas Malthus believed in humanity far more than his contemporary followers do. He argued, in his book On The Principle of Population, that although 'our future prospects respecting the mitigation of the evils arising from the principle of population may not be so bright as we could wish…they are far from being entirely disheartening, and by no means preclude that gradual and progressive improvement in human society, which before the late wild speculations on this subject, was the object of rational expectation' (10). Malthus' reservations about the human potential were influenced by a hostility to the optimistic humanism of his intellectual opponents, including Condorcet and Godwin. Nevertheless, despite his pessimistic account of population growth, he said 'it is hoped that the general result of the inquiry is not such as not to make us give up the improvement of human society in despair' (11).

Over the past two centuries, Malthus' followers often disparaged people who came from the 'wrong classes' or the 'wrong races' - but despite their prejudices they affirmed the special status of the human species. In some instances, such as the eugenic movement, rabid prejudice against so-called racial inferiors combined with a belief in human progress (12). Today's neo-Malthusians share the old prejudices, but in addition they harbour a powerful sense of loathing against the human species itself.

It's worth recalling that Malthus justified ringing the alarm bells about demographic growth on the basis that the human race lacked the capacity and ingenuity to feed itself. Today, the anti-natalist lobby decries the fact that humanity has become all too successful at reproducing itself - and human ingenuity and development are depicted as the greatest threat to the wellbeing of the planet.

The loss of faith in humanity is strikingly expressed in the stigma attached to speciesism. Speciesism is the sin of elevating humanity above other species. Those who invented this Orwellian-sounding word think humans do not possess any morally unique qualities and people are no better than other lifeforms. They argue that those who claim a special or a higher status for humans are no better than those who talk about racial or male superiority. Animal rights activist Peter Singer defines speciesism as 'a prejudice or attitude of bias towards the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species'. Although speciesism has not yet entered the vernacular, the assumption that it is wrong to prioritise humans over animals has become mainstream. Animal experimentation is increasingly seen as a crime and the boundary dividing humans from animals has become more and more porous. As Josie Appleton has pointed out on spiked, many people take DNA as 'their measure of moral value' (13). And since studies indicate that people share some 98.4 per cent of their DNA with chimpanzees, they claim that as proof of moral equivalence between humans and apes.

The new misanthropy

Our declining faith in humanity might be most clearly expressed in apocalyptic thinking about the environment, but it pervades everyday life. So it is frequently assumed that people have emotional deficits. We are described as having addictive personalities, or we're seen as 'damaged' or 'scarred for life'. Human relations come with health warnings. We don't simply pollute the environment, it seems, but also one another. We talk about 'toxic relationships', 'toxic parents' and 'toxic families'. Indeed, scare stories about the risks of human relationships are often very similar to discussions about the environment.

Susan Forward, author of Toxic Parents, compares the effects of bad parenting to 'invisible weeds that invaded your life in ways you never dreamed of'. Apparently parents emit poisonous substances which contaminate their kids in much the same way that humans pollute the environment. There is virtually a new genre of literature on the apparently poisonous nature of human relationships. There are books titled Toxic Bachelors, Toxic People: 10 Ways of Dealing with People Who Make Your Life Miserable, Toxic Relationships And How To Change Them, Toxic Friends, Toxic Coworkers: How To Deal With Dysfunctional People On The Job and Toxic Stress - all of which send the same misanthropic message about relationships as neo-Malthusians spread about population and the environment. And the metaphor is not confined to relationships. Public institutions also come with the toxic-warning label; consider these book titles: Toxic Churches: Restoration from Spiritual Abuse, Toxic Work, The Allure of Toxic Leaders and Toxic Psychiatry.

This reinterpretation of human relations as toxic is driven by a moralising impulse. Pollution traditionally involved an act of defilement and desecration; in previous times, to pollute was to profane, to stain, to sully, to corrupt. But when moral defilement is anticipated and depicted as being normal, pollution becomes a routine form of behaviour - with important implications for how we view humans.

Misanthropy has a profound influence on public policy and political debate. Back in the Fifties sociological research found that there was a clear correlation between how society viewed people and the prevailing political attitudes. One study of individuals' views of human nature suggested they were shaped by political attitudes in general (14). So attitudes towards the democratic ideal of free speech are directly influenced by whether we believe people are capable of making an intelligent choice between competing views. 'The advocate of freedom of speech is likely to believe that most men are not easily deceived, are not swayed by uncontrolled emotions, and are capable of sound judgement', noted this 1950s study. This implied a high level of faith in humanity. In contrast, 'the individual with low faith in people tends to believe in suppression of weak, deviant, or dangerous groups'. The study concluded that the 'individual's view of human nature would appear to have significant implications for the doctrine of political liberty' (15). People who viewed human nature positively tended to be more tolerant towards free speech and social experimentation. People who saw humans as being driven by narrow self-interest, greed and other destructive passions were inclined to support measures that curbed freedom.

Today, the growth of censorship, the criminalisation of thought by the enactment of so-called hate crimes legislation and speech codes, and the widespread frowning upon causing offence to individuals and groups is underpinned by the idea that people cannot be trusted to make up their minds about controversial subjects. Today's censorious imperative is driven by a paternalistic and negative view of human nature, and by a lack of faith in people's capacity to discriminate between right and wrong.

Not since the Dark Ages has there been so much concern about the malevolent passions that afflict humanity. Panics about Satanic abuse have erupted on both sides of the Atlantic, and throughout the Western world there is a morbid expectation that virtually every home contains a potential abuser. Predatory monsters are seen everywhere. People regard others with a suspicion that would have been rare just a few decades ago. Parents wonder whether the daycare centre workers looking after their children can be trusted; in schools, children with bruises arouse teachers' suspicion about their parents' behaviour, while parents wonder whether any physical contact between their child and his or her teacher is permissible. In Britain, any adult employee who might come into contact with children has to undergo a police check, and sections of the child protection industry believe this police vetting should be extended to the university sector, too.

The obsession with abuse is not confined to relationships between adults and children. All interactions that involve emotions, physicality or sexuality are labelled as potentially abusive. 'Peer abuse' is seen as one of the key problems of our time; others demand action against 'elder abuse'; and for good measure alarms have been raised about 'pet abuse' and 'chicken abuse'.

Renewing our faith in people

How we view humanity really matters. If we insist on seeing humans as morally degraded parasites, then every significant technical problem from the millennium bug to the avian flu will be feared as a potential catastrophe beyond our control. Today's intellectual pessimism and cultural disorientation distracts the human imagination from confronting challenges that lie ahead. All the talk about human survival expresses a crisis of belief in humanity - and that is why the real question today is not whether humanity will survive the twenty-first century, but whether our belief in humanity can survive it.

Despite Western culture's profound sense of estrangement from its human sensibilities, individuals possess an unprecedented potential for influencing the way they live their lives. It is only now that significant sections of the public have real, meaningful choice and control. We must reinvigorate the belief in autonomy and self-determination, and recognise that we have moved from the Stone Age to a time when people's transformative potential is a remarkable force.

We also know that history does not issue any guarantees. Purposeful change is a risky enterprise. But whether we like it or not, taking risks in order to transform our lives and ourselves is one of our most distinct human qualities. That is why, instead of worrying about our 'ecological footprint', we should take all the steps necessary for moving towards a better future.

Misanthropy threatens to envelop us in a new Dark Age of prejudice where we become scared of ourselves. In such conditions, we have two choices: we can renounce the human qualities that have helped to transform the world and resign ourselves to the culture of fatalism that prevails; or we can do the opposite. Instead of abandoning faith in humanity we can turn our creative energies towards taking control of our futures. Instead of being preoccupied with 'what will happen to us' we should search for answers to the question: 'What needs to be done to humanise the future?'

Human beings are not angels; on a bad day they are capable of evil deeds. But the very fact that we can designate certain acts as evil shows that we are capable of rectifying acts of injustice. And on balance we aspire to do good. Contrary to the fantasies of romantic primitivism, civilisation and development have made our species more knowledgeable and sensitive about the workings of nature. The aspiration to improve the conditions of life - the most basic motive of people throughout the ages - is one that has driven humanity from the Stone Age through to the twenty-first century.

If believing in the human potential is today labelled 'anthropocentrism' and 'speciesism', then I wholeheartedly plead guilty to subscribing to both of those views.

Frank Furedi is author of Politics of Fear: Beyond Left and Right (buy this book from Amazon (UK) or Amazon (USA)).

He is a co-founder of the Manifesto Club, a new humanist political project - for more information visit its website here or email info@manifestoclub.com. Visit his website here.

(1) James Lovelock 'The Earth Is About To Catch A Morbid Fever That May Last As Long As 1000 Years', Independent, 16 January 2006

(2) James Howard Kunstler (2005) The Long Emergency; Surviving The Converging Catastrophes Of The Twenty-First Century, Atlantic Books: London, p.61.

(3) James Lovelock 'The Earth Is About To Catch A Morbid Fever That May Last As Long As 1000 Years', Independent, 16 January 2006

(4) Jared Diamond (2004) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, Allen Lane: London

(5) Al Gore, The time to act is now - The climate crisis and the need for leadership, 5 March 2006

(6) Thomas Lough 'Energy, Agriculture, Patriarchy and Ecocide', Human Ecology Review, vol.6, no.2 1999

(7) See Einarrson, N. (1993) 'All animals are equal but some are cetaceans', in Milton, K. (1993) Environmentalism: The View from Anthropology, Routledge: London

(8) Kuntsler, op.cit., p.61.

(9) McNight, D. (2005) Beyond Right And Left: New Politics And The Culture Wars, (Allen & Unwin : Crows Nest), p.249.

(10) T.R.Malthus (undated) On The Principle of Population, vol.2 (Everyman's Library: London), p.261.

(11) ibid.p.262.

(12) For a discussion of different forms of Malthusianism see Frank Furedi (1997) Population and Development; A Critical Introduction, Polity Press.

(13) See Josie Appleton, Speciesism; a beastly concept

(14) Morris Rosenberg 'Misanthropy and Political Ideology', American Sociological Review, vol.21, no.6, 1956.

(15) Ibid.p.694