Shepherds Pie? I Prefer Humble…

(http://www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/update/bn091806.htm - Allen’s article from which his op-ed is drawn. The op-ed is restricted access so most quotes are from the article.)

John L. Allen Jr., the National Catholic Reporter’s Vatican correspondent, was recently on the op-ed page of the New York Times defending Pope Benedict’s controversial comments on Islam. “Seen in context,” Allen writes, the Pope’s citation of Byzantine emperor Michael II Paleologus was “not intended as an anti-Islamic broadside.” Instead, Benedict’s real target was “not Islam but the West, especially its tendency to separate reason and faith.” Allen calls this “German professor meets soundbyte culture.”

I do sympathize. Modern media (except, of course, our beloved blog form) can be cruel and unforgiving when it comes to issues of context. But Allen’s context, drawn from his years of experience covering the Vatican, might be better called gloss – he only quotes the speech’s most controversial five words (“things only evil and inhuman”), focusing most of his column space on this Pope’s more “muscular” and “hawkish” stance towards Islam than his predecessor, the late, great, John Paul II. Benedict’s words are but the grain of sand at the center of Allen’s pearl.

The National Catholic Reporter is unaffiliated with the Vatican, but Allen’s article (much of which appeared on the NCR website) is one of many that defend this Papal Bullshit. And there is a pattern to their spin: the tacit acknowledgment of guilt, or at least that such comments might be inappropriate, and then a redirection, reaffirming the Orientalist legacy of our early scholars. Maintaining their Manichaeism.

Allen offers what should be an even more damning quotation, as it comes directly from then Cardinal Ratzinger, unfiltered and unframed: "One has to have a clear understanding that [Islam] is not simply a denomination that can be included in the free realm of a democratic society.” Allen then explains, in what almost sounds like an excuse for the Pope’s radical views, that the issue is one of reciprocity. “The most notorious example,” he writes, is that “the Saudis contributed $20 million to build Europe's largest mosque in Rome, [but] Christians cannot build churches in Saudi Arabia.”

This demand for equivalency is presumptive, arrogant, and reveals the worst kind of evangelical sentiment. I believe in the right to worship, but I also believe in the right of self-determination. And isn’t the export of Western liberal ideals what got us into this mess in the first place? The irony is that Benedict’s radicalism regarding Islam means that he and bin Laden, who (apparently) just called on Westerners to convert, have more in common than they thought.

George W. Bush was recently heard speaking of a “Third Awakening,” a new era of religious activity. In the realm of politics, certainly, this much is clear. From Islamic Republics to Benedict’s policy recommendations to Bush’s own personal crusade, religion – often times apocalyptic in focus – is infusing the debate with radicalism and a fundamentally anti-democratic spirit. It is not religion itself, but the inability to compromise associated with its leadership, that is at fault.

Amidst all this, the Bush administration is bringing the executive branch to unprecedented levels of dominance in a government previously of checks and balances. Benedict seems to be aiding this process, if not literally, than at least ideologically. His arguments against the dehellenization of Christianity, that is, “stripping it of its Greco-Roman encrustations and returning it to a state of "pure faith," actually strengthen his own executive position, including secular affairs in his own spiritual authority.

This is not a clash of civilizations – it is a battle of shepherds, and the sheep stand to lose.

Bombay Teaser

My mom yells at me a lot.

Did you do the dishes? Did you? Good, now go outside. Can’t have a moment of peace with you in this house. Go clean the spears. The spears have blood from yesterday’s hunt and I won’t have blood in here. Just cleaned the floors. I know you didn’t put it there. But you might put it here with all that fucking around by the stream. And since you’re not old enough to hunt its your job to clean the spears, now clean the fucking spears and then clean your fucking hands because you better not bring any bloody hands inside this house.

It’s not that bad. Out in the back of the house there’s a stream, it runs behind all the houses on our block. Mountain water. The mountains are behind the stream – horizon to horizon, tall, Mount Stephen twenty thousand feet easy according to the other people on West End Avenue. Snowcaps even in summer, deep green tree cover down to the streams and the town.

West End Avenue the western edge of Bombay, a town that hides at the bottom of its mountain. The human presence in a Japanese painting. The town has two art museums and a sushi joint we sometimes go to with fresh salmon from where our stream meets some other streams and becomes the Stephen River. Dad said he’d take me fishing there when I’m old enough. He also said he’d take me to hunt the buffalo.

Happy Patriot Day

So, happy Patriot Day.

What, you didn’t know? By official proclamation, September 11th is known as Patriot Day. And so it has been for a number of years, making the national holiday one of the few disappointments in a string of linguistic victories – your Death Taxes, Enemy Combatants, and, of course, Freedom Fries. And though I’m tempted to say enough already, that these words sound hollow and bureaucratic, that the game is played out, I can reluctantly agree in principle to the President’s strategy. It is, after all, the natural course of government to bend language to ideology. Until this, the fourth (fifth?) Patriot Day, this lazy ignorance mixed with quiet acceptance suited me fine.

But behind the allegedly apolitical nature of the day’s events – Chris Matthews was quick to inform us that President Bush, placing a wreath in a memorial pool, was acting as a head of state, not as a member of the GOP – I found a distinctly political reflection in the shiny patriotic gloss, one I think my fellow unconvinced ought to find distasteful. Ann Coulter was right to spit her venom, though she had her target wrong. It is not the “9-11 Widows” that are to blame, it is the architects of Patriot Day, manipulating our worst fears and biases.

That many used September 11th for political purposes is an obvious, almost trite thing to say, and today’s events should have been nothing new, but the GOP’s attempts are often disguised, mostly from themselves, by a fundamentalist interpretation of country as homeland, or, better yet, mother/fatherland. To those behind the Patriot Act, and to those forced to do the Patriot Act (that’s Jeffery Ross’s material), waving a flag is as natural as burning one is a perversion of nature. Like the defense of the hetero-normative white wedding: Adam and Eve, man, not Adam and Steve.

In this second-grade rhetoric, however, the newly empowered morals movement forgets that it is itself like Adam, given the right to conquer his xenophobic fears by naming God’s numerous, unknown, unclassified, wild and possibly dangerous creations. Because this is not just a struggle of civilizations, it is a struggle for civilization – Western, particularly American, civilization. And just so we’re clear, America’s a woman – a blonde, corn-fed, Daisy Duke Desdemona – who needs our devoted protection, from walls to government departments, and two days worth of pampering. Why not make Independence Day and Patriot Day the new Memorial Day and Labor Day, and just call summer the Patriot Season? And when it’s over, you can’t wear white, or red, or blue.

God named her woman, man tucked inside the word as neatly as Adam’s rib inside Eve; it was Shakespeare who called her Desdemona, and gave her Iago as a defense against what racial pseudo-science would later call miscegenation. Now the cabal in the White House has sublimated the storyline, but still, we have Jessica Lynch, an over-hyped reminder from the second of our revenge fantasies. A true Patriot, that Jessica Lynch. Went back to the hospital just so we could rescue her. And her name, how can you not love her?

Patriot Day is about indulging these revenge fantasies, reveling in them, rolling around like a pig in shit. And the fantasies are delusions, because the entire thing has taken on the quality of a dream, aided by the barrage of televised reenactments and dramatizations. Amidst all this, however, a critical tone is developing, one I think is important. On the safely pro-establishment side of things, the controversy over ABC’s miniseries shows that some facts are up for interpretation, and at the most extreme, films like “Loose Change” are completely rejecting the government’s explanation of the events. Resistance to the linguistic ascendance of Patriot Day and all that implies has made strange bedfellows of these different sorts of doubters.

Perhaps it is a libertarian reaction – keep your filthy paws off my calendar. Or perhaps it is a bias against unilateralism – people from almost two hundred countries died that day. But mostly I think it is a defense of emotional property, of the right to react and cope how one will. Because once the revenge fantasy is indulged, the neoconservative mindstate is achieved and the victory becomes psychological.

I do consider myself a patriot, in some sense of the word, but not the kind they made a day for. Because in the past two months over 3,000 Iraqi civilians have died, and though it doesn’t mean exactly the same thing to me, it is still enough to make me doubt the blind faith and hero worship of Patriot Day.

So happy September 11th. Next year in Damascus?