May the Lawns be Green and the Sun Warm on Your Fur

Tonight our Molly, our dog, who was our family for fourteen and a half years, fell asleep -- asleep asleep.

I felt sick leaving her on the linoleum floor, as we opened the veterinarian's door and exited, too quickly, undramatically. I wanted slow motion visuals and music with minor chords.

My dad wept, but I wouldn't even know how to do that. Out of practice I guess.

I feel no agony for her. She went peacefully. Just, awake one minute, asleep the next. You could see her abdomen cease struggling against the tumors in her lungs. Calmly, quietly she went. And then we went, without her.

If I feel any loss it's in the spaces she carved in our lives over a decade and a half. Spaces she created -- and thus spaces only she fills. Tonight, for the first time in 15 years, I ate a sandwich without her waiting, eyes and ears alert, for any crumb that I might offer. I considered sleeping on the couch beside the fire, but she didn't join me downstairs like she had every time since we moved to this house a decade ago.

Still, it's difficult to ignore Kurt Vonnegut's pragmatism now. "So it goes," he wrote after witnessing more death than any of us would care to. It's a truth that kept him sane. And yes, I agree: the world turns, our cells replicate, then mutate. That's decay. It kills us, all of us, every living thing. Or something else does first.

But it doesn't help me wrap my mind around permanence. That the spaces Molly formed in our lives will always remain empty. That it will take me months to break the habit of getting home and calling for her. That I can never recall her to my side to see her bright eyes or hear the roar with which she announced that she was ready to play.

Permanence haunts me in my drafty Castle Rationale. She's gone, and that leaves a void in me. Which is why death bothers us, right? And divorce, and foreclosure, and graduation. People, pets and places act as cues, as keys to our memories. Without them we can't get the whole memory. They carry parts of our selves, and take them with them when they go. Or when we go. Even if we reunite, we miss other pieces of the memories, or have new contexts that compel us to interpret them differently. We only have now. All else is inaccessible. My Molly, her, now, I cannot reach again.

Emily Dickenson wrote: That it shall never come again is what makes life so sweet.

And as I recently wrote:

I will chisel an Epitaph to my Home:

All the king's horses and all the king's men

Couldn't put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Again, again, again, again: that's it, right there. The impossibility of an Again.

With what words do we conclude?

Adieu: To God? I don't know. Is there a soul?

Au revoir: Til we meet again? No, the impossible Again.

Bonne nuit: Good night?

Dors bien: Sleep well?

Yes, that. Fais de beaux rêves. Make beautiful dreams, Molly. I'm sorry to see you go.

The Flawless Symphony

Recently I received an email from a friend explaining how the IPCC made a mistake in their report, “Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”. Apparently, New Scientist had interviewed an Indian glaciologist who'd speculated about the fate of the glaciers. An Indian report had cited the interview. WWF Nepal then cited the Indian report, which was then cited by a writer contributing to the IPCC Assessment Report #4.

You see it was a problem with footnotes. The writer working on the IPCC report didn't follow the three levels of citations back to their original and only source.

This mistake has been leapt upon by so-called Climate Deniers, just like a single office at a single university in England that issued inconsistent reports. In both cases, the Climate Deniers accurately identify that an error has been committed.

Yet, as I thought about it tonight I realized the Climate Deniers are being a bit unrealistic in their expectations of the humans writing these reports, especially in the case of the IPCC report. 

Expecting perfection from countless contributors each citing thousands of independent pieces of research (each with their own citations) to aggregate a whole and accurate picture of the earth's current climate is like expecting a symphony to play each of Mozart's 41 symphonies on sequential nights, 41 nights in a row, without making a mistake.

But whether such a feat is possible doesn't interest me nearly as much as the realization that at each symphony, some number of the ninety or so musicians will make a mistake. 

And, unless they all flub at the same moment, it won't matter a bit.

The symphony will still astound.

My Rights are Your Rights

I've just finished reading a New Yorker article about the furor regarding Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in United States criminal courts.

The timbre of the article leaves me with an image of the writer, Jane Mayer, with one hand on her hip and the other pointing particularly at a phrase in the Declaration of Independence.

She hopes you'll recall that many of the men who sculpted the constitution also signed, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights," with emphasis on "all men" and "Creator-endowed unalienable Rights."

I'll briefly summarize and provide context. Eric Holder's first argument for holding the cases in federal criminal courts, rather than by military commission, reduces to the fact that his prosecutors have a better case than the military does. They have produced evidence without resorting to torture. Evidence via torture is just about all the military prosecutors have, and they hardly have that.

As Amy Jeffress, Holder's national-security adviser, is quoted in the article, "There was no file for each detainee. The information was scattered all over the government. You'd look at what the Department of Defense had, and it was something, but, as a prosecutor, it wasn’t what you’d like to see as evidence. . . . It was pretty thin stuff."

Holder's second argument is simply sound public relations: much of the world considers the military commission system established by George Bush to be illegitimate, and certainly the Islamic world is concerned about convictions based on evidence obtained via torture.

As Holder is quoted, "Values matter in this fight. We need to give those who might follow these mad men a good sense of what America is, and what America can be. We are militarily strong, but we are morally stronger."

The legal argument against holding the cases by military commission rather than in criminal courts, where the defendants will be afforded all rights under the constitution, is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, et al, are enemy combatants and therefore needn't be afforded said rights.

The article quotes Andrew McCarthy, the former Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney who led the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center attacks, declaring that Holder didn’t "understand what rule of law has always been in wartime." He said, "It’s military commissions. It’s not to wrap our enemies in our Bill of Rights."

Or as Scott Brown's campaign asserted, "Some people believe our Constitution exists to grant rights to terrorists who want to harm us. I disagree."

Some common people agree with McCarthy and Brown. Ms. Mayer quotes a protestor, Carolyn Walton, "How can someone who is not an American have any right to our rights? Holder wants to help the terrorists."

America is Universal Rights

But our American identity depends on the idea that our country upholds Rights we profess are universal ("all men") and absolute ("inalienable", "endowed by their Creator"). We believe we were given these Rights not because we are American, but because we are Human.

We love our country because it is one of the few that exists precisely to protect those Rights. America is not merely a space of land: it's a set of ideas that hold all people as created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights. That set of ideas, and not our territory or economic might, has justified our intervention in the affairs of the world.

The United States crossed oceans twice to defend the inalienable Rights of humanity against dictators who sought absolute power. The United States stood against the spread of Stalinism, because Stalin spit on Russians' Creator-endowed Rights. The United States intervened in Kuwait when a dictator extended his reach.

The United States assisted Afghanis twice: once to defend civilians against Soviet aggression, and once to free citizens from the grip of totalitarians who stripped them of their Rights. The United States supported Iranians last summer as their government violated their Creator-endowed Rights to speak freely, to gather and to govern themselves.

We act contrary to our American identity when we avert our eyes to abuse of inalienable Rights or when we support dictators who impinge the very Rights we uphold (Pinochet, Noriega, Maximilio Hernadez). We disgrace ourselves when we treat prisoners in a way that implies, "We will summarily rob you of your Creator-endowed Rights to assure ours."

We disgrace ourselves if we say, "All men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, if by 'all men' you mean US Citizens."

If we are Americans, then we must not deny those Rights to any person. Not even if we believe they're a terrorist. Not even if we believe they're a war criminal. Not even if we believe they're our enemy.

Only if we prove them guilty -- by a fair trial, by a jury of their peers, with evidence not extracted by violating their Creator-endowed inalienable Rights -- may we call them felons and punish them appropriately.

If we can act justly at Nuremberg when trying some of the most depraved humans in recent history, then surely we can act justly when trying Pakistani villagers.

Answering the Skeptic

A good skeptic will ask, What if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is found innocent? An argument for the military commissions is the relative certainty that they will convict.

But truly, if the best prosecutors in the United States cannot convince twelve Americans that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is guilty, then maybe he is actually innocent. Few events could damage the United States' efforts to protect the Rights of humanity than if we execute an innocent foreigner.

If a military commission executes a man who is later exonerated, then for the next century, each time the United States attempts to defend the rights of humans in Cambodia or China, we will be firmly reminded of our own violations.

If the United States wishes to preserve its moral capital, it must remain above reproach.

The upside to this whole debate is that Holder's prosecutors claim they have sound evidence. If we allow the Justice Department to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in US criminal court and he is found guilty, he will be punished with death, just as if he were convicted by a military tribunal.

But by trying him in US criminal court, we uphold our American identity as the defender of the inalienable Rights of all humanity.


PS. To be fair, there's a very practical argument against trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in criminal court: the case will cost too much, with estimates ranging from a few hundred million dollars to a billion. Clearly those costs must be controlled, and decreased. Even at the low-end, 300 million dollars for a trial is absurd. On the other hand, we've spent around a billion dollars improving and servicing the detainment facilities at Guantanamo since the first prisoners arrived there eight years ago. I address money only to predict anyone who deflects the moral argument in favor of arguing finances. The financial cost will be high either way, but the longer we delay, the more the prisoners cost us.

Every statement should end with a question mark?

My friend Ryan Georgioff recently wrote,

Naturally, I can't help but feel this is one big cosmic joke.

Have you felt it? That hesitant panic that maybe you've been duped, been done over by Zeus and his Creons?

I'm not the first to feel it, I know, but when the curtain falls and Jesus is standing there with uncorked champagne toasting the end of life-as-we-know-it... well, that would just be fucking bizarre.

But no moreso than, say, the way life-as-we-know-it operates.

You really shouldn't read something like Ishmael if you're looking for inner peace, and you sure as hell shouldn't be reading anarchist literature. Yet this is how I've spent my recent days, pondering the perilous paths of precedents in full knowledge of the futile nature of my quest... yet questing nonetheless.

Oh, where my journey has taken me!

In my mind I have smashed the bank teller window and spray-painted vulgar graffiti on the McDonald's arch. I have marched hand-in-hand with flower children and acid-tripping hippies from the Nineteen-Sixties. When the riot police machines come I always throw their tear gas back to them, though they've forgotten how to cry. These glorious and grandiose dreams are then beset by the realities of my life.

No job, no money, and no real desire to have either. Like I said, don't look to Ishmael for a reason to keep at your mindless job or for motivation to stick it out and finish that lingering degree.

My mind is all-over-the-fucking-place.

I am posting this because I can, despite the fact that it's all shit. And to think I want to write for a living.

Ryan approaches his search for personal and spiritual enlightenment with passionate honesty. I admire his courage: I can vouch from personal experience it's terrifying to set off into the wilderness. Imagine climbing the face of Half Dome in Yosemite. Half way up you meet an obstacle, only passable by unclipping yourself from your safety ropes. You face a sickening choice: unclip and keep climbing, or stick with the safety net and lower yourself back to the banal you climbed to escape.

Ryan and I both left our ropes behind. We're at various stages in that climb up Half Dome now. While he's championing his choice, "Oh, where my journey has taken me!", I'm second-guessing myself, clinging wearily to the perilous cliff, wondering if the ropes were really so constraining, if the institutions I abandoned were really so corrupt, really so evil, and imagining how happy my life could have been within them.

Certainly a grassy meadow, however illusory, appeals to a ropeless climber a kilometer above.

While Ryan reveled in the glory of the climb in his post above, I questioned our sanity, in my comment below:

What if this isn't all one cosmic joke. What if it's all true. What if in our efforts to tear down artifice, we pile the rubble in the doorways, walling ourselves in for a cloistered death. Starving ourselves of options by writing off entire movements, entire economies, entire ideas.

What if unfettered embracing, rejoicing, ego, and amorality, really is evil -- what if we evolved into orderly species because those who were disposed towards order procreated most successfully.

What if anarchy is what we fear in mobs. Just it's been tempered so far by the police. What if The Man is like Jesus said: established by Divine Right. And the police are God's fingertips, loving us toughly, for our own good.

What if McDonald's and Dow Chemical and British Petroleum really are symbols of the holiest system of social-darwinism ever devised by the divinely-inspired minds of righteously misogynistic white men. What if WE are genetically defective, unevolved. Is that why we despise dinero. Rejecting the nutrients that sustain us, like a baby refusing a breast.

What if we reach utopia. What if we hate that we've achieved equality and found no superior being to blame. What if we're not optimists. What if we're whiners. What if what Buddha was trying to say was stop suffering for your ideals, detach yourself from your humanitarian lust for justice, put on a suit, smile, and swallow the cum.

The Divine Chain Letter

I'm reading Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ". I'm in the first chapter, and already the book has inspired new questions about Christianity.

As I read, I'd like to raise these questions for discussion, in case anyone has insights or answers.

On page 30, the theologian Dr. Craig Blomberg is quoted, 

"Jesus says, 'Whoever acknowledges me, I will acknowledge before my father in heaven.' Final judgment is based on one's reaction to -- whom? This mere human being? No, that would be a very arrogant claim. Final judgment is based on one's reaction to Jesus as God."

Besides the irony of Blomberg's views on arrogance, he's making a gigantic assertion there. He seems to be saying final judgment is based on one's acknowledgement of Jesus as God.

Yet, supporting evidence for his claim is readily available: Jesus said in his commission at the end of Mark's gospel, "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned." Jesus seems to say, Believe and then publicly demonstrate that belief. Or, according to Paul in his letter to the Romans, "That if you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." In this case you have to say the belief out loud, and then you're saved. 

Salvation according to Blomberg and Paul appears to come down to demonstrating you believe Jesus is God by telling someone else. You have to publicly step up and say, "Yes, I heard the gospel and I believe what I heard." Then you're saved.

I can't accept this interpretation. The message of Jesus could not possibly be so inane. This interpretation reduces the message of Jesus to a chain letter.

Exhibit A: "If you forward this message to ten of your friends, you'll have great sex for three years. If you don't, you'll be crushed by a flying camel."

Every time someone forwards a chain letter, they imply they are concerned about flying camels. They imply they believe the threat or hope for the promise. Those who believe follow the instructions and we who don't believe get junk mail. 

Exhibit B: If you publicly admit you believe the Gospel you'll live eternally on streets paved with gold. If you don't, you'll boil in the lake of fire.

The Christian church has glossed over the transformative message Jesus brought in favor of the chain letter version, to their detriment. "Tell someone you believe or you'll go to hell" may be a brilliant distribution strategy, but what use is it to spread a message that says merely, "Spread this message"?

Imagine if twelve people received an email tomorrow that said only, "Forward this." What would be the effect if they forwarded it to everyone they knew, who forwarded it again, until everyone on earth had received it? Well, we'd all have read and forwarded an email. Nice! 

Then what?

The message of Jesus should not be reduced to a chain letter. Regardless of opinions on his divinity, he preached vital advice on living well and peacefully with each other. Ascribing divinity to him only emphasizes the rightness of his message and should convince the church to implement it with all haste. 

Advice to Apostles and Theologians

What should Blomberg have said? What should Paul have said? They could be right. Maybe acknowledging belief ensures salvation. But what if they had said, "Implement the message of Jesus on earth. Then you shall be saved"? Would it have harmed their message?

You could argue that not everyone who believes Jesus' divinity will also be willing to implement Jesus' message on earth. But if they believe he's God, what delusion prevents them from obeying him? Clearly they do not actually believe.

The class of people who implements Jesus' message will always include every person who believes in Jesus. If you don't implement Jesus' message, you do not believe. 

(Yes, that class of people will also include a number who don't believe, or are undecided about, Jesus' divinity. If God is so legalistic, I wonder if he weeps that his caveat separates him from these samaritans.)

So it would have been safe for Blomberg and Paul to argue for sustainable action. Out with the chain letter, in with world transformation.

But what about Jesus? He also claimed those who believed and acknowledged (via baptism) would be saved. Was he advocating the chain letter approach to salvation? Well, then, he got what he asked for: the most popular chain letter ever. 

But, I don't think he wanted something so simple. I think he expected further action, and if he did, then the church needs to get back to implementing Jesus' message of living well with each other. If they do that, they're going to improve a lot of lives. If they don't, humans will suffer twice -- on earth first, and then in hell.

Maybe I'm complicating this. Maybe the church has it right. Perhaps Jesus too ascribed to the chain letter idea. Maybe he just wanted to get the message out, so that everyone would clearly hear the gospel: "Forward this or go to hell."

PS Let me stress my concern here is not with Jesus or scripture. It's with Christianity's portrayal of the aforementioned. For example, at university I learned in biblical studies that the word "saved" is "sozo" in the original Greek. "Sozo" doesn't mean salvation like Christianity traditionally teaches, a boolean switch between "unsaved" to "saved". Instead it means "restore", as in, if you publicly acknowledge your belief in Jesus, you'll be restored -- most likely a promise of gradual restoration to a whole peace and right relationship with earth, others, yourself, and God. It's called "shalom" in Hebrew.

PPS This may be off-topic, but look at the rest of that last chapter of Mark:

Jesus says, "And these signs will accompany those who believe: In my name they will drive out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up snakes with their hands; and when they drink deadly poison, it will not hurt them at all; they will place their hands on sick people, and they will get well. After the Lord Jesus had spoken to them, he was taken up into heaven and he sat at the right hand of God. Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it."

Those who believe will drive out demons, speak multiple languages, pal around with deadly animals, escape assassination and heal by touch. And according to Mark the signs actually occurred. Whenever a Christian preaches to me, I'm going to demand they prove they speak in Jesus' name. There's enough sick people around to last a lifetime. Either we'll eliminate the need for universal health care, or God isn't real, or the Christian doesn't believe.

Books for the Next Decade

Recommended book for the new decade: Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. An excerpt:

There is a phrase which has grown so common in the world's mouth that it has come to seem to have sense and meaning -- the sense and meaning implied when it is used -- that is the phrase which refers to this or that or the other nation as possibly being "capable of self-government"; and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a nation somewhere, sometime or other which wasn't capable of it -- wasn't as able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would be to govern it. The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only -- not from its privileged classes; and so, no matter what the nation's intellectual grade was, whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw the day that it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern itself. Which is to assert an always self-proven fact: that even the best governed and most free and most enlightened monarchy is still behind the best condition attainable by its people; and that the same is true of kindred governments of lower grades, all the way down to the lowest.

Who better than the people, through the framework of a sound government, to legislate themselves. To be clear, the narrator is advocating for a republic, as opposed to monarchy or plutocracy. The risks of the United States' plutocracy are little differentiated from those Twain feared in Monarchy. 

The US has for the past two centuries inched from its foundation of Aquinian pre-lapsarian liberalism towards Augustinian moral progressivism. The self-righteous of various tints have claimed a mandate for a strongly moral government, which finds its closest analog in Hobbes' Leviathan and not in later forms of social-contract, like those advocated by James Madison and John Adam's in the Federalist papers. 

The question is not whether to be democratic or hegemonic, but rather if we can return to our roots of a simple, efficient federal vessel of government. If we can, we can also hold out hope that self-government can be revived in local manifestations of community: city, county and state government.

We can govern ourselves peacefully, if we can pry loose the hands of the plutocracy from our throats.