At the end of the 19th Century, Senator Aldrich and the Republicans were under great pressure from the public to lower the tariff.  It was the issue on which the election was fought.  Near the end of the campaign Aldrich came out with a promise to revise the tariff. 

After the Republicans won the election, Adrich, instead of lowering the tariff, raised it.  He laughed and said, "I didn't say in which direction I would revise it." 

This is, I believe, called dissembling. It is when you deliberately create the impression that you mean one thing and then, by a tendentious construal of a word, mean, and do, something else.  

What was called a despicable lie in Aldrich's time is now called "clever lawyering" (instapundit.com).  The Supreme Court of Massachusetts has just ruled against the state's application of a law denying a Massachusetts marriage license to any couple that couldn't get married under their own state's laws to a gay couple from Rhode Island because, even though the RI defines marriage as between a "bride and groom" it does not specifically rule out the bride and groom being of the same sex. 

The Court does not bother to argue that the writers of the Rhode Island statues meant to permit gay marriage.  It goes on directly to lecturing the public on why they, the Court, think gay marriage is a good idea.       

Aldrich was called arrogant at the time, but compared to the Court he was modest.  He was exercising raw power, doing it because he could.  His laugh was a way of saying, "yeah, I lied, what are you going to do about it?" 

Refreshing honesty compared to the Court.

The Pope has got us all into trouble.  He has quoted one of his predecessors to the effect that Islam is a violent religion.  Angry mobs throughout the Muslim world have protested, claiming that Islam is a religion of peace and that anyone who implies that it isn’t must be put to death where ever they are found.

 

The Muslims are understandably offended.  Given that this Pope that Pope Gregory is quoting was under siege by Muslim armies and would in fact, just two years later be killed and see his city sacked by the followers of the world’s number one religion of peace, he was hardly an unbiased observer.   Of all the Patriarchs of the Eastern Orthodox Church he could have quoted, he chooses one that was killed by Muslims.  And then he wonders why they are offended.

 

The timing couldn’t be more tragic.  The wounds were just beginning to heal in the Muslim world inflicted by nervous stares so many Muslim men were unjustly subjected to in airports of the Christian world after the last hijacking. 

 

Still, this misconceived connection in the mind of people outside the Sublime faith is so widespread that the origins of the misconception are worth looking into.  One source of the misconception are certain historical facts such as the liberal application of the death penalty to the unbelievers. 

 

This is first of all just plain incorrect.  The leaders of the Muslim world in its heyday far from forcing people to convert by the sword actively discouraged it.  They even set up financial incentives to prevent themselves from backsliding on religious tolerance by taxing dihimmis (the word for nonbelievers in living under Muslim protection) at a higher rate.  That way if any of them, in a moment of weakness, ever did start to mix religion and the sword they would be penalizing themselves financially.  The system worked so well that the Sultans actively discouraged conversion to the final revelation. The only time they would punish people was when they left it to convert back to their original religion, which would signal that the person had been evading their taxes all the time they were pretending to be a Muslim.  So even this small intrusion of force into matters of religion could be looked at as much as a matter of taxation as religion.

 

The Muslims of the past not only compare favorably with their Christian contemporaries, they were progressive enough to be able to teach our so-called advanced societies something today.  Many Western societies are intolerant of different modes of dress.  In France, for instance, girls are barred from wearing the hijab to school and in the Netherlands they are forced to bare their faces to grown men outside their families to have drivers license photos taken. 

 

The Caliphate was so tolerant faith based sartorial diversity that they actually enforced it.   Jews got to wear a special armband, Christians got to wear a special hat.  And they were all encouraged to express their unique and rich heritages by riding on donkeys, instead of horses, which was the preferred vehicle of Muslim self-expression in transport.

 

Now there is no compunction in religion.  Some people are unfairly generalizing from some isolated incidents of friction between the Muslim world and the infidels.  Naturally, a naïve observer might get the wrong idea from the ‘forced’ confessions of the two Fox News Reporters after they had been kidnapped in the West Bank.  This one had the Imams working overtime denouncing misguided attempts to generalize about the nature of the Muslim faith from this incident that these kidnappers did not represent Islam.  One can understand their frustration.  They have had a busy year of massacres committed in the name of their religion to explain had nothing to do with their religion.  The high-school girls beheaded in Thailand, the report that majority of rapes committed in the Netherlands were committed by the 5% ‘non-Dutch’ population. 

 

Their difficulties were compounded by what one can most charitably term misguided suggestions on the part of some non-Muslims that the Imams would be more convincing if they had spent less time denouncing those who wondered aloud about the connection between Islam and the violence committed in its name and more time denouncing those who committed violence in its name. 

 

Though one suspects that such suggestions are disingenuous, it is probably worth reviewing why the Imams would not do so in the interests of not playing into the hands of the intolerant. 

 

Obviously, if the Imams were to denounce, say, the kidnappers of the two Fox reporters, they would be playing into the hands of those that wish to draw a connection between Islam and terrorism.  It is bad enough that those who wish to smear Islam have the handful of fanatics committing intolerant acts creating a connection in the public mind between Islam and terrorism.  How much worse would it be if every time the viewer saw a prominent Imam denouncing some one who happens to be Muslim for committing an act of terror, or worse, compulsion in religion?  The people that know this is false know it a priori, that all religions are equally true, that all religions have their fanatics (don’t make us go through medieval history books to dig up our own) and that any temporary correlations that may appear to obtain between any of the world’s faith communities can only be the residual effects of that community’s oppression by another.  The people that don’t know this have managed to persist in such retrograde beliefs in spite of at least 12 years of state mandated sensitivity training.  How can we expect foreign teachers to succeed where our own efforts have failed? 

 

 It is to be hoped that our leaders recognise the peaceful nature of Islam before their insesnsitivity gets us killed.     

People remark on how unfair it is that the Sudanese can kill millions and not get the level of condemnation and criticism the Israelis recieve when just 900 are killed.  But this "disproportion" has a bright side.  If the world paid any attention to the slaughter of of African Christians by the Muslim government of Sudan we would have to sit through a new tortured series of arguments about how the Israeli occupation was the "root cause" of the violence. 

Are Democrats really so desperate to believe that they will have a political issue that they are hyping this district court decision against the administration's NSA wire tapping program?  Surely no one thinks that the decision of the lower court judge will be of any importance when the real decision is made two levels up at the Supreme court level.  

I have to admit, I was wrong.  When the peace deal was announced with France taking the lead in the UN force I was pessimistic but hopeful.  On the one hand, I thought that the UN force would be vulnerable to the kind of attacks that eventually drove us (and the French) out of Beruit in the 1980s.  I also thought that in the long term the international forces would end up being high value human sheilds.  But the French have managed to sink below even my low expectations.  They have bugged out before even being there.  Who but the French could find a way to retreat before arriving?   

So, I am finally back from Central Asia and am going to post all the notes and thoughts I had while I was there.  I was not able to post from Kyrgyzstan.  It was not, strictly speaking, impossible, but it was not easy.  So, here are all the little notes I was jotting down and never got around to posting.

 

 

 

Soccer.  The great danger of living abroad is that your stay might coincide with something called the world cup, a tournament that determines the international champion of a game that foreigners insist on calling football.  If you are not careful you may have to watch one. 

 

The arrival of this event means that every place that serves onion rings and has tobasco sauce or serves diet coke is infested with projection tv sets showing interminable shots of green fields with great crowds chanting in the background.  There are small figures, men in shorts, running around on the field in a strange hopping motion.  If you look closely you can see that they are kicking a ball.  

 

For those of you brought up in civilization, allow me to briefly explain the rules of soccer. The object of the game is to prevent your opponent from scoring for 90 minutes, during which time you may find the opportunity, occasioned by some casual contact, to fall on the ground and cry like a girl.   If one is convincing enough the referees may award your team with a penalty kick, which is, baring your opponents’ mistakenly knocking the ball into their own goal, the only way to score in soccer. 

 

The scoring is very low.  I was forced, out of desire for English speaking contact, to sit through some 7 or 8 of these spectacles.  I can’t really tell, they run into each other.  Actually, the only way you can tell one of these things has ended is when the foreigner who has taken on the task of converting you into a member of the world wide soccer cult turns to you and says, “well, that was not a very good game.  Usually, they are much better.” 

 

No number of cases of boring games ever seem to support the conclusion that there is something wrong with the game itself.  Soccer is a platonic ideal, like a true triangle that doesn’t need any triangle in the real world to disclose its secrets, no actual soccer games can ever detract from the idea of soccer. 

 

The game is so boring the main attraction of watching it is the opportunity that actual soccer games provide for discussing the distance of the game one happens to be watching from the ideal triangle, the platonic soccer that exists and always has existed in Platonic space waiting for us to figure out how to play it.

 

The few things I remember are so ridiculous they would be hard to make up.  I remember that England won one of its first games 1 to 0 only because the opposing team accidentally knocked the ball into its’ own goal on a head shot (whatever you call it when the man knocks the ball into the net with his head—I think it is an affront to human dignity to use one’s head as a tool for striking things, that is what goats do).

 

The whole idea of not using your hands is somehow inhuman and unmanly.

 

Unmanly.  I know that is a word that you are not supposed to use these days, especially when you don’t have tenure.  But I think that it is the case that people still have an idea of some virtues that are more appropriate to men than to women, and this accounts for some of the difference in interest on the part of fans and participants in male and female sports.  

 

Now one problem with Soccer is the disproportionate weight penalties and ambiguous penalties at that have on the outcome of the game.  In Football (“real football” “but for the rest of the world soccer is football.  We are the only people in the world that doesn’t…”  “shut up”) you are penalized by degrading your placement on the field, which may or may not translate into scoring.  In soccer they can’ award you field position because that is too cheap.  80% of the distance to the goal is more or less free, available for no more than a good kick from one’s goalie.   So you have to award scoring opportunities.  The way in which these scoring opportunities swamps the value of the efforts made during the other 99% of the playing time.

 

There seems to be some sort of political component to the determined efforts some Americans seem to make to convince themselves that they actually enjoy soccer.  Soccer is supposed to be somehow less violent and territorial than football.  With this in mind, it is interesting that the most memorable moment of the tournament was the head butt.  The French star just up and decked a guy with his head.  The story is that the Italian said something about the guy’s mother. 

 

The commentary was about how disgraceful the French guy’s behavior was.  Personally, I have no problem with decking a guy for insulting your mother.  Everyone describes it as a vicious head butt.  A head butt to the chest strikes me as more comical than anything else, but that is just me I suppose. 

 

What if found more unattractive was the way the previous game had ended.  A head butt is an excess of manliness.  The display of triumphalism at the end of the previous game which they won only on a penalty kick awarded on a dubious penalty.  Running around the field with their hands in the air, raised in fists.  “Yes, we kept anything from happening for 85 minutes.  We fell on the ground and cried much more convincingly than our opponents.” 

 

My theory is that people pretend to like soccer because it is the only competitive sport that is not dominated by the US.  Once we win that people will have to invent an even more boring game that we will not be bothered to learn for a few decades.    

 

This would be a great problem for the US, because the real marker of national identity is not English language proficiency but indifference to soccer.  There are plenty of fluent English speaking Mexicans that are never really Americans in the fullest sense because they are actually interested in soccer.  I think in the whole illegal immigration debate the emphasis on a common language should be decreased and the emphasis on our common contempt be increased. 

Richard Corless speculates on why there are so few movies about about 9/11 in contrast to WWII.  He gets it wrong and he inadvertently reveals the real reason in his suggestions for what kind of movies could be made: Holly Wood's ideology is too far out of touch with the way the rest of America feels, or at least felt, in the first four years after 9/11.

The kind of movie he thinks should be made is one that exposes the "real" reasons behind the invasion of Iraq or lays bare the ways that Bush manipulated public opinion to its own purposes after the attack. The kind of movies that people would have wanted to see were the kind that he gives backhanded praise to in his article, the ones that were being made after WWII, ones about a confrontation between good and evil.  Movies where the evil is represented by the enemy, not mysterious right-wing forces in our own government.  

Notice that Clooney portrays his two movies as being relevant to contemporary events--his movie about McCarthyism and his movie about a CIA plot to install a compliant dictator in a small Arab country. In other words, movies where the American right is the real villain. These are the only kinds of movies that Hollywood and contemporary intellectuals would regard as serious.  A movie that made the bad guys, well, the bad guys, would be regarded by Hollywood as unserious at best, jingoistic at worst.  

Once again President Bush’s tactless tongue has offended world opinion, this time by describing terrorists who happen to be of the Muslim faith as, “Islamic fascists.” Many leaders of that community have demanded he apologize and I agree. President Bush owes an immediate and heartfelt apology to the Fascists everywhere.

 

Sadly, since the Fascists are not here to speak for themselves (a less enlightened generation of Americans, not understanding the futility of trying to solve a political problem by military means, failed to leave enough Fascists alive to keep up their end of the public dialogue), I will do my best to explain why such comparisons are so insensitive.

 

Part of the reason that Fascists are held in such low public regard, you will recall, is the way they treated civilians. The pictures of little Jewish children baring their arms to display the tattoos the Nazi’s had given them at the death camps have been a particularly difficult image to live down. But, say what you will about how the Fascists treated other people’s children, they were reluctant to hide behind their own.  Can you recall any stories about Germans placing their missile launchers near their own schools?  Loading up the van that transports missiles with kids before heading off to the front? 

 

And uniforms.  If ever there were a people that loved uniforms it was the Fascists. Even when the Germans used their own children as soldiers during the final fight for Berlin they were careful to put them in uniforms.  So it must be particularly galling to Fascists everywhere to be compared to the one group of people that seems positively allergic to uniforms.  For if there is one thing that defines the present conflict in Lebanon (and Iraq) it is that the Islamic side refuses to wear uniforms.

 

Now admittedly, that is not entirely fair.  The Islamists have nothing against uniforms per se, they just don’t like to wear them when there is shooting going on.  Anyone who has seen their interminable parades of tanks and even guys dressed up for suicide would have to admit that they love uniforms and have even made contributions to the art of uniform design—who before the Islamists could have come up a uniform for a suicide bomber?  And who can forget those adorable little suicide bomber uniforms that toddlers were wearing in the family portraits that were found adorning the walls of so many Palestinian homes?

 

But the Islamists seem to lose all their enthusiasm for uniforms during the actual war.  Those uniforms we see during the Hezbollah day parade are for display to adoring crowds; when it comes time to actually fight, the uniform becomes and impediment.

 

And this is why it is so unfair to tar the Fascists with the Islamic brush. The uniform is not just a fashion statement. It is a tool to make oneself a target in order to protect the non-combatants on your own side. Thus, wearing a uniform represents a double loss. It makes the ‘soldier’ more vulnerable to getting killed and makes the civilian less so. Given that generating civilian casualties is among their chief war aims, actually wearing a uniform to the fighting represents a lose-lose for the Islamists.

 

To be fair there are some points on which the Islamists have bragging rights. They are, for instance, rather more straightforward about their intentions.  Hitler, as one may recall, did not demand that Europe bow down and submit to Nazi rule.  His negotiating position was that he just wanted justice for the Germans of Czechoslovakia.  True, a new local grievance was found as soon as the last “final demand” was met (protection from Polish aggression being my favorite), but Neville Chamberlain still had the problem of figuring out which Fascist statement to believe.

 

Hezbollah and their backers, in contrast, have been admirably forthright.  President Ahmadinejad of Iran has relieved the rest of the world of the burden of deciding whether any ceasefire agreed to by the Islamists would be genuine.  "Although the main solution is for the elimination of the Zionist regime, at this stage an immediate cease-fire must be implemented"

 

If only the Fascists had been so direct.  Imagine all the divisive floor speeches from Churchill we might have been spared had Hitler had the decency to just say, “Oh, by the way, that peace agreement we just signed?  Just kidding.” 

 

Then again, Hitler couldn’t afford to be so careless with the truth.  After all, his adversaries had a certain amount of intelligence and integrity.  Comparing the current leaders of the West to Neville Chamberlain would be an insult—to Neville Chamberlain.  

There is a great example of confirmation bias in the news right now with the arrest in the Jon Bene Ramesey murder.  The police initially became suspicious of the Father when he found the body.  The initial police report is full of “telling” details, like how the Father got more and more nervous the longer it took to find her, that he seemed to be unable to stand the tension as the police were unable to turn up any sign of his daughter.  That he finally struck off on his own and seemed to go directly to where the body was.  And then he deliberately messes up the crime scene in bringing his daughter’s body up stairs and pretending to try and revive her. 

 

Of course all of these details are also consistent with a Father not knowing where his daughter is.  The longer it takes to find her the more worried he gets.  He gets an idea of where she might be.  He goes straight there because it is his house, not a particularly large house, and he knows that all the other places have been checked.  He messes up the crime scene because he is inexperienced at finding his daughter murdered and doesn’t really know how to investigate a murder—something which one is tempted to say of the Denver police.