Ph.D. Octopus

A parishioner of a German priest who continued to work with children for thirty years following his conviction for child molestation, and who was only just suspended, neatly sums up the morality of the Catholic Church:

“If you get divorced and remarry you can’t take communion, but someone convicted of molesting children can celebrate Mass for the rest of his life,” she said.

I confess a part of me hopes this scandal does further “embroil” (to use the Times’ verb¹) the current Pope – he was the archbishop at the time of the original molestation case. Perhaps that would be the only way to get the Catholic Church to make a meaningful change. It’s often said the cover-up is more damaging than the crime; in the instance of priests serially abusing children – and their supervisors serially abetting such abuse – both stink to the darkening heavens.

Nonetheless (and here cue the drastic segue; along with the Pope story, these were simply both items in today’s Times), the Church feels no compunction about continuing to weigh in on pressing moral and political issues. Thus we have the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops “sharply criticizing“ the Senate version of the health care bill for not doing enough to constrain a women’s right to choose and, not to be undone, on the Protestant side, Hiram Monserrate, a candidate for state Senate in Queens is reportedly relying on the support of “a network of evangelical churches” that have endorsed him, in part, because of his opposition to same-sex marriage. Said opposition must weigh pretty heavily in the balance because, in doing so, the evangelicals have elected to overlook Monserrate’s recent domestic assault conviction which got him expelled from the Senate in the first place.

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan on the role of the Pope:

If this person headed a secular organization, or if he were a politician, he would be forced to resign. Why are the standards for the Catholic church so much lower on tolerance of child abuse than the rest of society? [...] When, in other words, will the real victims come first? And moral responsibility meaningfully taken?

(Sullivan also had a better picture accompanying his post so I have, er, borrowed it. I like the way it gets at the ceremonial trappings of power, and how the ring hints obliquely at the powerful ethic of omertà underlying the Church and its abusers.)

*

¹OED check (subs. required): Embroil, from the noun broil, cf. the Italian broglio ‘hurlie burlie, confusion, mingle mangle.’

1591 SHAKES. 1 Hen. VI, I. i. 53 Prosper this Realme, keepe it from Ciuill Broyles. 1797 T. JEFFERSON Writ. (1859) IV. 173 Plunging us in all the broils of the European nations. 1876 GREEN Short Hist. iii. §4 (1882) 130 A tavern row between scholar and townsman widens into a general broil.

Also from the French embrouiller:  Mêler (des choses les unes avec les autres) dans un grand désordre; replier (un fil, une corde sur lui/elle-même) en désordre, en faisant des nœuds.

Elle [Madame de Pathmos] se conduisait comme une midinette. Comme dans la voiture, elle avait embrouillé ses longues jambes dans les miennes (Cendrars, Homme foudr., 1945, p. 148).

Is there any promise the Obama brain-trust isn’t prepared to break? I mean, I thought I had pretty successfully sworn off any lingering sense of wounded outrage at the discarded campaign pledges, the often abject, unaccountable pursuit of continuity with the policies of the previous administration (policies whose very unpopularity were in large measure responsible for Obama’s election). And even though my astonishment at the lack of political smarts was harder to let go, with practice, I was making progress. But now this: “Obama advisers set to recommend military tribunal for alleged 9/11 plotters.” (It’s nice, isn’t it, kind of a throwback to a more reasonable age, that the Post headline writer still felt obliged to stick in that “alleged”? Obama didn’t feel similarly constrained when discussing the case. I mean, I don’t have much reason to doubt KSM’s responsibility, but that’s not the issue, the rule of law is. But after eight years of Bush, I suppose we all get inured to such abuses of the presidential bully pulpit.) So, after weeks of preparing the ground, inching back ever so ignominiously from one of the few brave decisions the administration had managed, it seems the voices of unreason have won again, and KSM et al. won’t only not be tried in New York, they won’t be tried by a civilian court at all.

To put it mildly, this is a terrible decision. Let’s start with rendering justice to the perpetrators. If your concern is locking these guys up and throwing away the key – or having them executed by the state (though, like Camus, I’m appalled by your blood-thirst) – there is simply no non-demagogic case to be made that a military commission will have a better chance of producing a verdict closer to your liking. To the contrary, military commissions have no proven track record of performing such a task, and their use in such an instance would, from the get-go, be on deeply contestable legal ground. On the other hand, the US (and other countries around the world who keep sentencing terrorists left and right) has a long history of successfully prosecuting terrorists in civilian courts. (Indeed, I believe the US just did so – and in cowering New York of all places!)

So for you “death- to-the-terrorists” types, with your terrible prose and your muddled, hateful, paranoiac logic, I regret to inform you that the Rule of Law is unfortunately your way to go. That is, as a Rule of Law’er of the first order myself, we’re both forced to the same page – J/justice with both a small and large “J,” I guess. So, once ventured, this should have been a decision the Obama admin could reasonably defend. But they don’t, do they? As with health care, ye shall know them by their weak, or absent, defense.

Such gutlessness is surely strategic, but isn’t it becoming increasingly clear that it’s a self-defeating strategy? I mean, let’s leave justice (large and small) to one side for the moment. To be crass, to put on our hateful pundits’ hats: what position have the Rahm-led, Lindsey-Graham-fearing, Joe-Lieberman-pandering Best & Brightest navigated themselves to now? Whom do they imagine this latest epic, public climb-down will win over to their side? (Indeed, isn’t part of the “messaging” problem of the Obama admin that the public is increasingly less certain if they even have a “side,” I mean one they’ll actually screw their courage to the sticking-place for?)

I’m sure you recall hearing the clip of Eric Holder announcing the civilian trial for the 9-11 plotters (alleged!) – the media played it again and again, no doubt as surprised as the rest of us – and the odd, and seemingly triumphant, manner in which Holder repeated, and emphasized, the trial’s location: “in New York, New York.” It was as if he was signalling his own internal victory (never mind that the A-G is supposed to be free from political interference; it’s pretty clear – and, again, eight years of Bush/Rove inured everyone to this reality – that political hands have been all over this decision from the get-go). Yet first comes the embarrassing retreat over holding the trial in New York – at the behest of condo developers and downtowners concerned over a lack of parking – and now they look to be preparing to abandon the idea altogether.

Again, I’d like to say it’s the lack of backbone that shocks & awes me, but then I never assumed the Obama B&B had much of a backbone – at least not for the kind of policies I would support, or even for the kind of policies they purported to endorse during the now-so-distant days of “Si se puede“. But what does still shock me is the lack of political smarts. I mean, here’s Obama making his principled case for civilian trials four months ago, and now here’s the seeming nail in the coffin of such principles strategically leaked – think of it as the endgame of the softening-up process – to The WP. Beyond what we might quaintly call the ethics and morality of it all, it makes for terrible strategy, reinforcing the very myth of weakness and lack of conviction Obama et al. are so very clearly cowed by in the first place.

by wotty

Excellent post from Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick cataloguing the most recent outbreaks of the syndrome that continues to plague, and define, the US of A:

…what was once tough on terror is now soft on terror. And each time the Republicans move their own crazy-place goal posts, the Obama administration moves right along with them.

For exiled Canucks – and even the non-exiled – it’s always pulse-quickening to encounter a reference to Canada in a non-Canadian newspaper, let alone a whole column by liberal economist and bien-pensant Paul Krugman singing our praises in The New York Times! (Hey, what do you want? We’re a dominated people clinging to the border of Manifest Destiny.) Unfortunately, Krugman’s column is ho-hum at best, and wrong, in an important way, about both Canada and the U.S.

The point of Krugman’s column is to ask: why did Canada’s banks weather the recent (chronicle of a) financial crisis (foretold) so much better than their American counterparts? The answer he offers is stricter regulation. This is fine as far as it goes, yet given the striking disparity between the Canadian and American experiences both the question and answer have been asked and answered before. Moreover, Krugman neglects to point out the successful opposition in Canada to bank mergers in the late 1990s. Not only would such mergers have created even bigger banks too big to fail, but they also might have paved the way for foreign buyouts of Canadian banks (imagine how Canadian banks might have emerged from the financial crisis if they’d been bought by, say, Citigroup). Indeed, the opposition was a rare instance of public outcry defeating a plan cherished by the country’s political and financial elite and, given the present American context, it was a missed opportunity for Krugman not to highlight it. (For more of such social-democratic Canuck analysis see these thoughts from Mel Watkins – full disclaimer: he may be related.)

But all this great lake carping aside, the real problem with Krugman’s analysis lies in this claim:

I’ve always considered Canada fascinating, precisely because it’s similar to the United States in many but not all ways. The point is that when Canadian and U.S. experience diverge, it’s a very good bet that policy differences, rather than differences in culture or economic structure, are responsible for that divergence.

Actually, if the scorched-earth experience of the Bush years had any salutary effects, one of them was to underscore the fact that Canada and the US are in many respects starkly different, differences that, when it comes to influencing daily life and government direction, easily outweigh the similarities. And these differences are about policy, certainly, but that policy, pace Krugman (god it feels good to get a pace out of my system), is generally the result of profound cultural differences. By which I mean, the chief cultural difference separating – the image of an abyss comes to mind – Canadians and Americans is the respective attitudes to government. Yes, after a few years of our own scorched-earth débâcle, the belief in Canada is reeling somewhat, but in the main, Canadians do see a necessary and beneficial role for government to play. We do not reflexively distrust regulation or imagine government to be so inherently inefficient and corrupt that everything possible should be left up to the private sector. It was precisely this belief – a deep-seated cultural presupposition – that helped defeat bank mergers, and created the culture of regulation praised by Krugman.

Indeed, in the American context, it was precisely the flip-side of this belief – that government is the problem, not the solution, to quote the unlamented Gipper, or that government should “get out of the way” to cite, with a heavy heart, the darkly risible ex-governor of Alaska – that Obama’s election seemed briefly to point a way past. At least, that’s how I read the reception of the “Yes We Can” bumper sticker. That is, yes we can solve our problems, and yes that’s going to involve some collective action. It’s deeply distressing, then, to see how this moment has been so utterly squandered by the Obama Best & Brightest; indeed, so much so, one wonders whether they ever had any intention of trying to capitalize on it… But that’s the subject of another column. Maybe I’ll suggest it to Paul.

So far this emerging web-log has been (almost) entirely devoted to death; being of a superstitious bent, I see no cause to depart from this nascent trend. To wit, I draw your attention to this supremely well-observed “Appraisal” of the newly-lamented J.D. Salinger by the Times’ Michiko Kakutani. Along with the following arresting thought from Franny - “everything everybody does is so — I don’t know — not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid necessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless and — sad-making” – Kakutani also uses one of my favourite under-employed verbs: limn (from the OED: 1878 GLADSTONE Prim. Homer 130 The Odusseus is limned with..incomparable art).

The Times’ full-length obit is also very much worth the read.

Now, I was also going to muse about my recent re-discovery of Song to the Siren by This Mortal Coil (and my discovery tout court of the original version of the song by Tim Buckley, father to Jeff – hmm, more death), but, for the moment, This Mortal Coil just seems rather too morbid.

To quote from Buckley’s lyrics (which I’ve remembered since my older brother put TMC’s version on a slow-dance mix tape called ‘Matthew’s Mood Music’ he made for a party I hosted in grade 8):  ”I’m as puzzled as a newborn child / I’m as riddled as the time.”