According to Marie Colvin in The Sunday Times…
AMERICAN officials held secret talks with leaders of the Iraqi insurgency last week after admitting that their two-month clampdown on violence in Baghdad had failed.
Few details of the discussions in the Jordanian capital Amman have emerged but an Iraqi source close to the negotiations said the participants had met for at least two days.
I held onto AKMA’s “Faithful Interpretation…” for a week or so. It was tough reading. I bristled and groaned. I grumbled and moaned. Dr. Weinberger suggested I start with AKMA’s 1995 volume, “What is Postmodern Biblical Criticism?” I ordered that book too.
Saturday we had twenty adults and six children here for a Quakerly retreat, a lengthy period (two and a half hours seated in silence) of silent worship, a wonderful lunch, and an afternoon of “worship sharing” — a few more hours with each of us reflecting on a couple of queries regarding faith, religion, and community.
I had an interesting exchange with a Friend from Dubuque. It was complicated and I can’t do it justice here, but my friend suggested that knowledge and common understanding are not absolutes, that the word a-p-p-l-e is not an “apple” and that it doesn’t mean “apple” the same way biting into a crisp and juicy McIntosh does, and in fact that each of us experiences that in a subtly different way. I thought he would enjoy AKMA’s book.
Toward the end of the day most of us went out into the drizzly gray afternoon and walked the labyrinth. Molly played football with the kids. Then we all came back together in the living room, centered again into silence, thanked each other for a wonderful day and went each our own ways.
So, I gave away my copy of “Faithful Interpretation…” to the Dubuque Meeting, and after our friends had departed I went to the mailbox to collect Saturday’s mail. There was “What is Postmodern Biblical Criticism?”
Six months ago, or more, the US government banned importation of the vile ’stryne substance known as Vegemite. Thanks to Cory Doctorow, this news is now wide… ummm spread. The Vegemite problem is solved. Now what will the FDA do about kimchi?
George W. Bush must be apprehended and tried. Where do we begin? A Democrat congress is only a start. He must be apprehended before he can flee the country and avoid extradition. How do we get the soccer moms and dads, the NASCAR ass-hats, out of their mini-vans and SUVs and into the streets?
President Bush: Yet with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few. Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously? And did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?
Olbermann: Does he understand the irony of those words when taken out of the context of this particular passage or of what he perceives as the war against terror, and that, in fact, the threat we may be facing is the threat of President George W. Bush?
Turley: Well, this is going to go down in history as one of our greatest self-inflicted wounds. And I think you can feel the judgment of history. It won’t be kind to President Bush.
But frankly, I don’t think that it will be kind to the rest of us. I think that history will ask, Where were you? What did you do when this thing was signed into law? There were people that protested the Japanese concentration camps, there were people that protested these other acts. But we are strangely silent in this national yawn as our rights evaporate.
Tracy and Margaret dropped in today and laid out a labyrinth that Amy had designed in the field. Beth and I walked it when I got home tonight. I didn’t measure it but I’d guess it’s about forty feet in diameter, laid out with ribbon stapled to the ground with wire from clothes hangers. Tomorrow we have twenty-eight people coming by, including half a dozen kids who we hope will elaborate the labyrinth with rocks, perhaps, or firewood, or other basic natural stuff.
Molly was racing across it while we followed the path. She was sublimely indifferent to the boundaries we were observing, a thoroughly modern dog. She’s been to the groomer and looks and smells real good. I had forgotten how much of her fur is white.
Doc Searls has been serving up some tasty material this week since his return from Scandinavia. Yesterday’s linkage to Lakoff’s book, Pinker’s review, and Lakoff’s response was especially delicious.
“Faithful Interpretation: Reading the Bible in a Postmodern World” arrived. George Mosse gets a citation, and Eric Idle, and of course Reichsbishop Ludwig Muller. There are perhaps fewer really big words than my headline use of the adjective “megagaltastic” might imply, but the use of commas is creative and permits a parsimonious approach to the use of end-stops, as witness:
If, however, we allow that no lode of meaning lies embedded in our texts, that we (and not texts) sponsor and permit interpretations, that communication and interpretation constitute phenomena of far greater intricacy than the verbal paradigm allows, and that we may honestly and fairly consider the possibility that a given expression may mean several different things — if we yield on these points, the guild of biblical scholars suspects that we will disrupt the exquisite architecture of human communication (and especially, of course, of God’s communication with humanity), rapidly declining into inarticulate grunts and brutality.
Flipping the pages I see that there’s a lot of food for thought in here… an opportunity to re-visit Luce Irigaray’s sense of feminine identity and difference, nuanced linguistics, Julia Kristeva… it’ll be cool. I’ll be glad for reading it. Will I find the power of an authentic universal connection, the wailing of trumpets of spirit and truth? I’ll tell you later.
Charles Starkweather and the freshly kindled space race shared the news in the fall of 1957. Sputnik went up in October, Vanguard crashed and burned in December and the Charles Starkweather’s killing spree pushed the space competition out of the headlines for a while, distracting us from the cold war angst we felt with a Russian satellite in space and a failed Vanguard launch still smoldering on the pad at Canaveral. Starkweather distracted us when we needed distracting, and then on January 29th he was apprehended and two days later we caught up with Russians with a successful Explorer launch.
A few weeks ago Beth Adams (The Cassandra Pages) wrote comparing responsible media coverage of an event of public concern (an overpass collapse) with the sensationalist coverage of school shootings and the like. Ms. Adams gently urges self censorship in the latter case and encourages investigative reporting in the former. Reading that post I was reminded of the media self censorship in the US that began in the 1970’s during the wind down of the Vietnam war.
While the war progressed, media coverage of opposition across the nation was commonplace. People were aware of the broad opposition because the media reported broadly on dramatic events: civil disturbance, arrests, marches, protests, rallies. At some point in the mid-seventies that reportage ended and it has never been re-established that it is in the national interest for local opposition to be broadly reported. Thus the Bush wars, while facing significant opposition from the beginning, have not been subject to national scrutiny. When Bush arrives in La Crosse, Wisconsin and faces hundreds of demonstrators opposing his policies, it is reported as a local matter and ignored by the national press. Whenever he goes out campaigning he faces significant populist opposition in the streets, but it is not reported. The press has disciplined itself because the experience during Vietnam was painful and dangerous. People were blowing shit up.
Thus the ironic circumstance… the press can discipline itself in matters relating to public policy and freedom of expression, limiting the exposure that dissident voices receive, but it will almost certainly refuse to discipline itself from he soft-core prurience of second hand reportage of tragic events involving hate crimes. Adams asks,
Who are the people sitting in editorial offices today? How do they feel, I wonder, about their decisions of what to publish, and what not to publish, or how much play to give a particular story? On the other hand, with free access to the internet across the globe, is the cat so far out of the bag now that we simply have to live with the consequences of instantaneous reporting, lurid detail, and the desire - in an increasingly impersonal and alienated society - for brief moments of “fame” which occasionally turn very dark indeed?
Okay bmo, do me a favor and sit through both of these tiresome boring and simple-minded presentations. Now consider the financial support model… anything wrong? anything right?
http://amandacongdon.com/roadblog/2006/10/18/chuck-olsen-is-cool/
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/10/101806.html
(I like “micro-duckie sponsorship” better myself — I mean, holy-moly, ze made two thousand simoleons on his first try with that scam! — but then that pay-per-post ad is kind of lame, so I’d call it a draw. What do you think?)
So why, I wonder, did I get so teared up over Joy’s write-up of her daughter Jory’s marriage this weekend?
clip-clop clip-clop clip-clop BLAM BLAM BLAM-DE-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM-BLAM clip-clop clip-clop clip-clop
– Amish drive-by
This post is not about the grim and twisted irony of the violence of a school shooting in Amish country. Rather, I want to draw attention to the unspoken horror of the misogyny, the hate crime against the female gender that it represents. Jessica at Feministing wrote about this when it happened. Imagine being a girl, a child immersed in the news that people like you were so devalued that they could be singled out and shot, their deaths made the subject of national mass media attention, their powerlessness in the vile face of male hatred made obvious, yet the nature of the crime not remarked upon.
Bob Herbert opined yesterday in the NYT that the Pennsylvania Amish school house shootings were a gender crime of misogynistic violence and not mere inexplicable psycho-trash random acts. Too bad the piece is locked behind a paid subscription firewall. I’m glad I read it in dead trees syndication today, and also glad to see it discussed by Page Rockwell at Broadsheet (free for the viewing of a commercial).
Herbert suggests that most media outlets glossed over the victims’ gender because we’ve all become desensitized to violence against women and girls: “[No outcry] occurred,” he wrote, “because these were just girls, and we have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that violence against females is more or less to be expected. Stories about the rape, murder and mutilation of women and girls are staples of the news, as familiar to us as weather forecasts. The startling aspect of the Pennsylvania attack was that this terrible thing happened at a school in Amish country, not that it happened to girls.”
It’s time to start naming these crimes against females, pointing them out for the hate crimes they are. The prurience implicit in making national a story about this kind of deviant behavior stokes the fires, emboldens those ill enough to be aroused by the story. Echidne wrote, Yesterday’s massacre of little girls was not because they were Amish. It was because they were girls. And only a few days earlier another murderer selected smaller teenaged girls for his violence in another school. Yet this is something the radio news last night didn’t mention when discussing “school violence”.
Misogyny is everywhere. It’s in the burka. It’s in the genital mutilation of so-called “female circumcision.” It’s in the Chinese infanticide of baby girls. It’s practically a human condition. Yet once slavery was a human condition too, and now, except for a few corporate monsters, some backwards nations, and the perversion of sexual slavery it has largely been wiped out. Can we make progress against misogyny too?
Received this in one of those special personal messages…
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Yeah, that “SLL incryption” is the one “wich” sure makes me feel secure!
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