Columnist.
Seventy percent of Americans oppose the barely visible military support the Obama administration last week promised the Syrian rebels. Seventy percent! I doubt if such a large figure could quickly be gotten up in favor of free lemonade on the 4th of July. The public, according to Pew, feared the rebels might be no better than the government; in which case, why were we helping them? The New York Times itself -- house organ for the administration -- expressed uneasiness "about getting pulled into yet war in the Middle East," given our dismal appreciation of how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq "sapped the United States" without producing results classed as more than "ambiguous."
The 29-year-old computer technician who spilled U.S. surveillance secrets all over the floor last week explained himself in an interview with the Guardian newspaper in England. Note, please, the boldfaced type that ensues. "**I** don't want to live in a society that does these sorts of things (conduct wide surveillance to prevent terror attacks). **I** do not want to live in a world where everything **I** do and say is recorded. That is not something **I** am willing to support or live under." See how simple it is? **I** don't like the look, the smell, of the thing. **My** mind is made up. Don't agree? That's your problem, according to the worldview of Edward Joseph Snowden, a very 21st-century moralist -- the jerk.
We have a progressive income tax system in this country because ... because ... Well, why do we? The system raises, but also loses, lots of money. Nobody understands the tax code. And the code, insofar as anybody does understand it, affords unlimited latitude for abuse of the citizenry, or, rather, selected portions of the citizenry, on whom the Internal Revenue Service can lean virtually without supervision. Ask practically any 501(c)(4) official of the conservative persuasion, especially one whose organization professes kissing cousinship with the tea party. So why do we have an income tax system in this country? For two reasons, essentially.
Score another triumph for modern American culture -- the sexual assault scandal now racking the military. A "scourge," Defense Secretary Charles Hagel called it, speaking at West Point. "A national disgrace," says Speaker John Boehner, reacting to the Pentagon's estimates of 26,000 assaults typed as sexual last year. Naturally, President Obama had plenty to say, lecturing Pentagon leaders on the matter: a crime made worse by making the military "less effective than it can be." The elements of the matter have been all over the news: Ironically enough, in the weeks leading up to Memorial Day, when ancient convention calls for Americans to celebrate, rather than deplore, their warriors. Of whom, yes, a distinct minority are at the center of the scandal.
So sad, so affecting -- the cases of various newborns whose lives a Philadelphia jury found Dr. Kermit Gosnell to have taken through quick, deft application of scissors. The district attorney called Gosnell "a monster. Any doctor who cuts into the necks, severing the spinal cords of living, breathing babies, who would survive with proper medical attention, is a murderer and a monster." He kept jars full of baby body parts around his filthy clinic. He served, if you call it serving, a clientele of poor and minority-group women -- at least two of whom died from his ministrations. A judge last week sentenced him to three life terms in prison. Yes, and so ... ? Having digested the charges and proof in a case closely watched across the land, by pro-life and pro-choice people alike, we ... what exactly? Besides tell the Gallup Poll that our views on abortion remain pretty much what they've been for years?
"Trust us" is the mantra of Big Government. Trust us, why? Because -- the words hardly need speaking these days -- "We know what you need; we know what you want; we know how to deliver. You don't need to know our names, our faces. All you need to know is that we care." Big Government cares so deeply that it wishes to protect Americans from exhortations by suspicious groups made of suspicious people who are critical of our national direction. Maybe such groups will earn tax-exempt status, and maybe -- heh-heh -- they won't.
On the one hand, here's hyper-talkative Barack Obama losing presidential traction every day, it seems, on account of the apparent gap between his oratorical gifts and his political abilities. On the other hand, here's James Carville, of Clinton White House fame, thumping hyper-talkative Ted Cruz on the back for pepping up Republicans more than anyone Carville has seen in 30 years. What goes on here?
Naturally enough, the blowout at the Bush Presidential Center in Dallas last week was all about the Bush who gave the center its name -- George Walker Bush, aka "Bush 43," or, for convenience, Dubya. Another George Bush was on hand nevertheless. We all know him, or at least we once did. In tribute to his son, the man known as "Bush 41" -- otherwise former President George Herbert Walker Bush -- rose from his wheelchair with assistance. He spoke a few simple, direct sentences full of affirmation and pride. Then he resumed the seat to which Parkinson's, or a variation of this life-sapping malady, has consigned him.
While presiding over a war someone else started, George W. Bush received abuse and vilification unprecedented for a U. S. president. He still does, as a matter of fact, if you troll news sites featuring stories on the Boston atrocity of last week. The president's -- now the ex-president's -- offenses were practically historic. He was a liar! He was a warmonger and torturer and violator of civil rights, not to mention a cheap show-off (that "Mission Accomplished" business)! If only we could be cleansed from the touch of the man who stole the hanging chads and, with them, the election! The George W. Bush Presidential Center opens this week in Dallas, and the shouting, spitting, eye-gouging match over Bush's stewardship of the nation from 2001 to 2009 can commence with renewed fury. Not the least point of dispute will be the war on terror, which conflict we seem to be re-fighting in the aftermath of the Boston slaughter.
The Wall Street Journal relates the sad saga of a Christian body riven by dissension at an awful moment for dissension among Christians. "Episcopalians along the South Carolina Coast," says the Journal, "are battling in court to determine which of two factions owns an estimated $500 million in church buildings, grounds and cemeteries, following an acrimonious split last year over social issues." Two-thirds of Episcopalians in the venerable Diocese of South Carolina (whose cathedral is at Charleston) have chosen reluctantly to stand apart from a national church structure they see as warping the Christian Gospel into a legal brief for political and social goals. There might have been room for discussion of various matters that fall under such a heading but for the longtime talent of the Catholic Church's legislative body (in which I serve as a lay deputy) for stifling objections to the new vision.
The point to keep in mind about people such as Maggie Thatcher is that their like don't really die. To live large is to live on: a point easy to grasp in an age when the doing of great deeds, the taking up of mighty tasks, passes as a personal eccentricity. Consider the prime minister's reaction to caution flags hoisted by her own foreign office as the Royal Navy, in 1982, prepared to take back the Falkland Islands from the Argentines. Mrs. Thatcher allowed in her memoirs that certain of the cautions had force; e.g., "the risk of the Soviets becoming involved, the disadvantage of being looked at as a colonial power." Yes? Really? "(W)hen you are at war you cannot allow the difficulties to dominate your thinking: you have to set out with an iron will to overcome them. And anyway what was the alternative? That a common or garden dictator should rule over the Queen's Subjects and prevail by fraud and violence? Not while I was Prime Minister."
The American public's apparent surrender to same-sex marriage -- the Pew Research Center says 49 percent of us now support it, with just 44 percent opposed -- has been much remarked lately. I think I can explain it in part. The problem is with the failure of the culture to take marriage itself with the seriousness it used to receive. Connected more with pleasure than with responsibility, marriage functions more and more as just as a set of personal preferences. If it feels good, tastes good, looks good, etc., -- hey, why not? If none of the above, never mind. Each to his own. It 's one big case of the modern moral disorder, the one known as ... "whatever."
Sometime in June, the U. S. Supreme Court will define marriage for us: a prospect that helps to define the moral mess we're in as a people. May gays marry gays, or do we, should we, will we stick with the ancient prescription -- one man, one woman? Judges are the ones to tell us? The larger question, maybe, is how in the world did we get to this point? We got sucked into it, I want to suggest. We climbed, culturally speaking, aboard a train that steadily gathered speed. Every turn of the wheel advanced the radical notion that when we want something badly enough and feel deprived for the lack of it, government is under the sacred obligation to provide it.
The Democrats have to be bent over in derisive laughter as the national Republican party flagellates itself for irrelevance, backwardness and plain old stupidity. (Ow! Ow! Hee, hee, haw, haw!) The party's Growth and Opportunity Project, in a report founded on extensive post-mortem interviews, consultations and focus group probing, says the party's image is that of a "scary," "narrow-minded" bunch, run by "stuffy old men." Accordingly, Republicans must "change course, modernize the party and learn once again how to appeal to more people, including those who share some but not all of our conservative principles." That's at the national level. At the state level, what with Republican governors and lawmakers flexing muscle, reveling in new ideas and acts of leadership, GOP prospects brighten. Those national guys, nonetheless, get the hook or else a new mode of operation.
Church-state separation never seems more a reality in America than when the media begin to appraise both the qualifications for a new pope and the challenges he -- whoever "he" turns out to be -- must face. The idea arises quickly on these occasions that the cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church are choosing a chief executive like the president of General Mills or, for that matter, the president of the United States. Thus what we need (it seems) is a genial man with obvious people skills. A spiritual Bill Clinton? We may or may not need a European. It seems to depend on whether the church needs to reflect in its supreme head the changing ethnic nature of Roman Catholicism.
This week, the Walt Disney Company releases its $325 million spectacular, "Oz the Great and Powerful" -- a "prequel," as these things are called, to You Know What. We learn (one supposes) exactly how a Kansas carnival balloonist became the Wizard. We'll have to pay in order to divine the secret, but a certain intuition grows and spreads, namely that the Wiz, after the example of pitchmen in all times and places, became what he became by talking. About his own wonderfulness. Does he put you in mind of anyone who appears on television a lot these days, jetting all over the country at taxpayer expense, delivering speeches, holding press conferences, making bold pronouncements as to actions he requires and outcomes he expects?
Hardly had the shooting stopped at Sandy Hook Elementary School before the national commentary machine cranked up. Everyone and his dog had something to say: Most of it, as events would show, centered on the compelling need, or lack of it, for gun control. To the Rev. Dr. Bill Dickson, it seemed the time had come for a metaphorically deeper treatment, focused on the seething, slithering abode of evil itself and the inhabitants thereof. "Something shocking is going on in the world," Dr. Dickson, rector of St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Fort Worth, told me the other day. "It's not explained in human nature. We need to realize we are in a spiritual battle, facing an evil opposition that wants to destroy us."
If political success equates with how often you drive The New York Times nuts, the freshly minted junior senator from Texas could be bound for some conservative Rushmore. "The GOP's Nasty Newcomer" is how a Times headline characterizes Sen. Ted Cruz on the basis of his performance since January: voting against John Kerry's confirmation as secretary of state, questioning Chuck Hagel's to head the defense department, voting against raising the debt ceiling, opposing renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, saying no to the barrel of congressional pork wherein aid for the victims of Hurricane Sandy was encased.
The Boy Scouts of America got front-page ink, as we say in the newspaper trade, for their currently postponed meditations on the topic of admitting avowed gays to membership. Word had leaked out that the Scouts were considering a local option solution to the vexed question of their supposed right to determine who can become a member and who can't. At a top-drawer meeting in Irving, Tex., the topic proved too vast and complex for immediate resolution. Consultation and deliberation will take place prior to May meeting of Scouts' national council. I spoke of the Scouts' "supposed" right to oversee their membership rolls. A decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld that right in the Scouts' case, in response to court challenges seeking the overthrow of policies that "discriminate" against gays. That might have settled matters, but for restlessness and motion in the larger society whose present values sometimes cause the Scouts, with their old-fashioned devotion to God and country, to look more and more like outliers.
Male or female, those of us who've been around for a while can recall clearly the objectives of the feminist movement as it geared up in the early 1970s. Workplace fairness was the goal. A lot of manufactured indignation attended the feminist rising; e. g, who says we have to wear bras? Basically, nonetheless, what the rebels said they wanted was opportunity too long denied them by chauvinistic males. Opportunity they received from government, and in a larger sense, from the hand of a culture they prodded or embarrassed into agreement with most of what they said. Jobs opened up; power, avenues to self-determination, rights galore, culminating the other day in what I guess we might call the right to be blown to smithereens or take a burst of machine gun slugs in the abdomen.
