Rational Philosophy

The New Yorker has a long history of offending people with its notoriously tasteless and offensive output of low-brow hackery. Obama spokesman Bill Burton rightly dismisses the magazine’s latest outrageous cover cartoon: “The New Yorker may think… that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Senator Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create,” Burton says, before he draws a fiery breath, “but most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

We agree, indeed. What else would we do, applaud the New Yorker for tackling head-on the kinds of issues that all other publications skirt?

Satire has no place in an enlightened society. After all, to appreciate satire one must simultaneously understand the direct impact of the satirical object as well as its indirect object. Surely we shouldn’t be expected to hold opposing or divergent concepts in our minds at one time, that’s just barbaric! This is one nation under god, godamnit!

I sympathize with Barack Obama or Bill Burton, or whoever it was who most felt the affront of the New Yorker’s tasteless and offensive campaign. Getting to be president is a sensitive business and one must protect one’s thin skin if one is going to successfully attain the office.

Republican opposer — John McCain — no stranger himself to satire, limped nimbly to Obama’s support, declaring: “New York can go take a hike! Oh, wait a minute, there aren’t any decent hiking trails around New York. Come to think of it, the only place you can even safely fire your gun in New York is from the roof of a New York City housing project, and who would want to set foot in one of those places…”

(McCain may be old but his mind wanders beautifully.)

So, when you get your hands of a copy of the current New Yorker, be sure to set it on fire and toss it into the grate as quickly as you can. At least, tear off the cover and set fire to that… we’ll decide later what to do with the rest of it.

But before you toss the cover, take a quick look at the cartoon: See how Blitt has cunningly distorted Obama’s face so that it seems confident, unperturbed, wily even. What a scam, what a ruse.

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On Obama’s political promise and compromise, Kripalu’s spiritual economics, and a country’s declared intent.

“The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.”

- Sir Winston Churchill

The New York Times editorial board today criticizes Barack Obama, saying that he’s already slipped from his bold promises to eschew big money contributions and stand up to special interest groups. The editorial board’s concerns seem to be valid in some respects, but not in others: Yes, Obama has allowed himself to be persuaded that it’s OK to take lots of donor money. Yes, Obama has reversed his earlier position on telecom company immunity re wire-tapping for no good reason. And yes, Obama has begun pandering to religious groups in an alarming way by promising further erosion of the separation of church and state.

But the editorial board also criticizes Obama for his right of center positions on gun control and the death penalty. I can understand the board not liking these of Obama’s positions, but they reflect a consistency in his opinion rather than a divergence. Obama seems a bit of a social conservative when it comes to certain issues. Here’s what he says in The Audacity of Hope: “While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes — mass murder, the rape and murder of a child — so heinous…that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment.”

While this opinion on the death penalty reflects a moral weakness that disturbs me (outrage is enough of a reason to kill people?) Obama can’t be said to have conveniently changed his mind.

Even the boldest and strongest politician (and it’s yet to be seen whether Obama is one of them) feels the tug of interdependence. How crucial is it to hold onto one’s views and beliefs if they seem sure to hurt your chances of election? Of what use is a politician without office?

“What are the needs of the market, and what are the needs of society?  What we’re looking at is what will someone pay to take a vacation to do.” So says Ila Sarley, president of Kripalu Center for Yoga And Health. The description of the Kripalu back office sounds every bit as spiritual as the booking office for Ringlings. But despite and within the commercial mundanity that the center’s bureaucracy has become, there still exists, I imagine some room to kindle the kind of healing work that started the whole thing. The instructors come. The students come. The classes happen. And spirits are lifted, muscles stretched, minds opened.

To reach more people, the independent acts of teaching and growing become dependent on the commerce of marketing, sales and management.

The original “fair copy” of the Declaration of Independence, the one present on July 4 when it was passed, hasn’t been seen since. But there are a couple of dozen printed copies (containing slight variations) still at hand. And then there’s the ‘official’ copy that sits in the National Archives behind bulletproof glass. But this is a later copy that was post-dated.

Even something as fixed and seemingly concrete as a manuscript can’t alwats be genuine. So what hope the intent, inspiration and concept of such a manuscript?

As we enter the twilight years of the American domination of global commerce, which brought with it a political domination backed up by an insurmountably powerful military, we begin to see how fleeting and frail the concept of independence can be. Once wielding a big stick when it came to oil prices, for instance, the US now doesn’t have much say, and we’re left suffering at the pump. As China and India forge ahead, we’ll soon be just another alsoran, looking to find ways to leverage where we can.

This isn’t necessarily a failure, nor a position to lament. Independence is always in tension with interdependence. We exist in a universe in which all things fundamentally result from different arrangements and forms of energy bound together in a single universal instance of space and time.

What matters is that we’re aware of this tension, that we don’t try to deny it or defeat it. Not that Obama should shed his convictions for reasons of political expediency, but if he does shed some along the way, let’s hope he does it with full awareness of the sacrifice he’s making. Likewise those trade-offs faced in every life and pursuit, from Kripalu retreats to the trajectory of nations.

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On exciting brain research, insightful psychological studies, and the latest shocker from the ill-thunk war on terror.

Quotes of the day:

“I can’t speculate on previous decisions that may have been made prior to current D.O.D. policy on interrogations,”

Lt. Col Patrick Ryder, in reference to the Guantánamo interrogation training chart repurposed from 1950s Chinese torture methods that elicited false confessions.

“All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I myself deny it.”

H. L. Mencken US editor (1880 - 1956)

Using structural and functional brain imaging, scientists now have unprecedented insight into the mechanisms of thought. Writing in the Public Library of Science, Liza Gross cites the ‘form follows function’ edict of architect Louis Sullivan, which itself echoed Aristotle’s essential philosophy of form, in describing the findings of Patric Hagmann, Olaf Sporns, and their colleagues. Hagmann and Sporns found that a dense set of core neural pathways acts as an interconnection hub to the brain’s cerebral cortex the home of higher cognitive thinking and self awareness. The elegant, symmetrical spread of pathways — like the branches of a tree extending from the trunk — correlates to the brain’s seamless processing of information on different levels and in different ways. (Gross’s use of computer technology analogies I find unhelpful. The brain is not like a computer, after all, a computer is, somewhat, like the brain.) Interestingly, the hubs correspond to a recently reported neural system that shows increased activity levels when we are at rest.

Psychologists seem to have uncovered where we aim some of that resting activity — self rationalization. (”The duality of virtue: Deconstructing the moral hypocrite.” Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, in press. “Moral Hypocrisy: Social Groups and the Flexibility of Virtue.” Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno. Psychological Science, 2007.) The researchers devised cunning experiments to lure subjects into choosing an easy chore over a hard one while maintaining that they’d been acting fairly in leaving the harder chore for someone else. In the abstract, the subjects understood that choosing the easy chore wasn’t fair, but in practice most of them chose it anyway. But the true genius in the research came when the researchers asked the subjects to hold a sequence of numbers in their heads while they judged the fairness of their choice. All of a sudden they judged their actions just as harshly as anyone else would.

So, what kept them from admitting their unfairness wasn’t a failure to recognize it, it was a failure to admit to it. And the act of hypocrisy required considerable brain cycles.

Interrogation experts should take note. If you want to extract an honest answer, break out the Sodoku puzzles rather than the water buckets and manacles.

Since form follows function, it is no surprise that the form of the administration’s war on terror has evolved into a horrifying, amorphous mess. The New York Times reveals that the interrogation chart used as a training device for interrogators back in 2002 derived from a 1957 article entitled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.” Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist working for the Air Force, had put together the chart to document interviews with American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators falsely confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities (Chinese Torture Techniques - See page 4 of Biderman’s original report).

So, let’s see if I have this straight: In 1957, Biderman set out what Chinese interrogators did to obtain false confessions.  The army then used this to help them train the next generation of American soldiers so that they could avoid providing false confessions. And a few generations later the DOD used the same material to train interrogators on how to extract (false) confessions…

The only change made to the chart used at Guantánamo? The trainers dropped the original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”

No, that wouldn’t look good at all would it, using “communist” coercive methods.

Here’s the opening sentence of Biderman’s 1957 report: “The United States Air Force has expended considerable effort to get a full, accurate and meaningful account of what happened to its personnel who were captured in Korea.”

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Barack Obama vs. John McCain, Robert Mugabe vs. Zimbabwe, Abu Ghraib detainees vs. US interrogation contractors.

“We don’t bother much about dress and manners in England, because as a nation we don’t dress well and we’ve no manners.”

- George Bernard Shaw

As the presidential campaign continues, the exchanges between the Obama and McCain camps have honed in on the relative patriotism of the two candidates. Retired General Wesley Clark, speaking on CBS’ Face The Nation and acting, we are told, as a mouthpiece of the Obama campaign opined that “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.” Meanwhile, over on ABC’s This Week, Minnesota Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty said, “I think Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope perhaps should be retitled ‘The Audacity of Hypocrisy.’ ”

Not surprisingly, Obama wishes to steer the campaign away from a contest over who is the more patriotic. He’s smart enough to know that patriotism is a double-edged sword, and principled enough to want to avoid hollow pledges of undying allegiance to the idea of a country. McCain, the ultimate ironist, knows that he will always win any such contest, not just because of his war record, but also because he can claim undying patriotism with sufficient earnestness to convince those who care.

But it seems that we have some philosophical distinctions to make before we can decide whether Obama or McCain is the better patriot. The media loves the stereotypical definition of patriotism, the flag-waving, ’til-death, America-the-greatest kind of patriotism. McCain understands this and allows himself to be adorned by that mantle.  Privately he understands that the people who inhabit the rest of the world might beg to differ. Nevertheless one can imagine that if he had to choose a preferred country, McCain wouldn’t hesitate to choose America.

Obama’s patriotism comes from a different bottle. Obama believes that we can and should put our allegiance somewhere; that we should invest our hope in the potential of a thing or place or person. Obama’s patriotism acknowledges and mourns the shame, faults and frailties of the country, past and present, and he resolves that we can and should do better. America, the land of freedom, Obama understands, is the land of slavery, segregation, rendition, invasion and torture. McCain understands this, too, but he’s not about to ruin his chances of election by pointing it out. For the many millions of Americans who believe in America the way that an apple believes in gravity — as something inevitable and unswervingly sure — Obama’s patriotism inspires suspicion, ridicule, and fear.

Is Robert Mugabe patriotic for defining Zimbabwe and constraining it to his definition? Morgan Tsvangirai, who withdrew as the opposition candidate because of violence and intimidation by Mugabe’s thugs, would doubtless argue he’s not.

Unfortunately the conceptual ground of patriotism rests in the drawing of distinctions between ourselves and others. We measure the qualities of our own country in opposition to those of other countries. The aim and end of patriotism must be to inspire in us the assurance that we live in the best country there is. As soon as it moves beyond a benign, feel-good, group hug (and it always does) patriotism becomes corrosive and dangerous.

Today several Abu Ghraib detainees filed suit (here in the US) against the government contractors they say tortured them. Surely we won’t find a better example of patriotism’s failures and illusions. The Bush administration, the face and fist of American foreign policy for the past seven years, repeatedly ignored, twisted and refashioned international conventions and US law in its treatment of the detainees. Official investigations naturally failed to find and attribute fault to any but the most lowly and least culpable offenders. And now the detainees have turned to the American civil justice system to seek recompense.

Contorting our national pride to find a silver lining even in this sad cloud, Susan L. Burke, of the Philadelphia law firm Burke O’Neil, had this to say about the suit: “These men came to U.S. courts because our laws, as they have for generations, allow their claims to be heard here.”

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On Bear Stearns executives charged with deception, a military lawyer’s defense by attack, and Bush’s call for an end to the 27-year old ban on off-shore drilling.

Ralph R. Cioffi and Matthew Tannin managed two risky Bear Stearns funds that ultimately collapsed early in the subprime market tumble. The investors lost all their money. 100%. Federal prosecutors have now charged Cioffi and Tannin with deceiving investors while protecting their own interests. Cioffi and Tannin knew that the funds were losing value rapidly and could collapse, but presented a confident picture to investors. Meanwhile Cioffi moved $2M (of $6M) of his own money out into a lower risk fund.

Ranked on impact, Cioffi and Tannin’s deception falls at the far end of the deception spectrum. But if every business person who deceived were to be subject to criminal prosecution, America (and most everywhere else) would be out of business. In practice, crime becomes a matter of degree. Small, unremarkable lies go unremarked. Medium lies maybe wrinkle your reputation. Big lies with real impact get you shunned. And maybe a huge lie with devastating business impact will get you an indictment.

The concept of crime requires the concept of law. And the concept of law rests on the idea that we can codify certain acts as wrongdoing. Society identifies behaviors it doesn’t want to tolerate and enacts laws so that people can be punished for such behavior.  Cioffi and Tannin may have broken a codified law by lying (we’ll have to see what the courts say) but for sure they broke an uncodified law; they lied big and the people they lied to lost a lot of money.

Military lawyer Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler has been going on the offensive in his defense of a Canadian, Omar Khadr, who has been charged with lobbing the grenade that killed an American soldier in Afghanistan in 2002. Kuebler has publicly and repeatedly attacked the military court system by which his client is being tried. Devoutly religious and ultra-conservative, Kuebler might seem like an unlikely activist. But he’s a stickler for fairness. It seems likely that Khadr isn’t an innocent party — he has the pedigree of a terrorist, and he wasn’t in Afghanistan sight-seeing. But Kuebler defends his aggressive defense tactics. “If we’re not advocating against the process,” Kuebler says, “we’re not competently representing our clients.”

Another way of reconciling Kuebler’s philosophy would be to say that if a society must have laws it should have some tension balancing the enactment and enforcement of those laws against the protection of its members against arbitrary, unjust or inappropriate indictment and punishment under the law. If not, the laws will inevitably become arbitrary, unjust or inappropriate.

Ironically, those who make law — politicians — are often some of the most deceptive and corrupt members of society. This, I expect, is no coincidence. Politicians have a feel for matters of rightness and wrongness because they identify with the urge leverage any advantage for their gain. And, as we’ve seen with Elliott Spitzer, they’ll be no less zealous for their empathy with the perpetrator of the crimes they seek to prosecute.

I’m trying to get to the idea of whether such a thing as natural or fundamental crime exists or is merely fabrication. In Plato’s dialogues Socrates pushes and pulls his interlocutors in an attempt to have them break free of the idea that something is right or wrong, good or bad, because we feel it is so. You can get many or most people to agree on whether some things are a crime. Other things tend to be more difficult to gain consensus on. But the ground of wrongdoing, if such a thing exists, must find its feet beyond human judgment.

The only pertinent to existence is whether it continues to exist. As human beings we feel this same urge. To continue to exist, to persist. And if we examine our feelings about right and wrong we find that they tend to stem from a judgment about whether an action will contribute to the persistence of a person or group or not.

A former co-worker asked me in an e-mail today whether consciousness, through the potential for personal growth, doesn’t offer in itself some goal or reward outside the persistence of humanity and existence. Valerie, a frequent commentor to this blog, coined a term ‘the evolution of consciousness’ which puts me in mind of the same idea.

I am tempted to subscribe to this idea. After all, why must consciousness be subordinate to material existence just because it came after and through material existence?

This may explain my disgusted reaction to George Bush’s grandstanding about oil drilling. I don’t even care whether he’s right. I just don’t like the idea that someone with so little integrity and such narrow thoughts could hold so much sway. If consciousness does have an independent evolutionary trajectory, we can only hope that the Bush’s of this world will one day be no more than fossils in the museum of intellectual history.

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Part I in brief — The Supreme Court decided that it would not be fair to deny Guantanamo detainees the right to represent their innocence and present evidence of such. (A constitutional right, with its own clause, no less.) I applauded this decision but lamented the 5 - 4 vote. I wanted less equality in the spectrum of views of the court.

I then explained how the concept of equality derives from the fundamental principles of existence…

The NY Times magazine has one of those really long stories (a feature, I think they’re called) about shared child care or shared parenting. I like reading these magazine feature articles on-line because for some strange reason I don’t feel obligated to read past the first page. I figure the rest of the article is most likely just more of the same.

I have this to say about the idea that men and women should, as a point of general fairness, share parenting equally — hooey!!

I say this with all due respect to those who choose to do so, but with an equal amount of respect for those who don’t.

My wife and I, parents of a four year old and a nine week old, have been working through our perceptions and the realities of shared parenting. This afternoon I was at the playground with both children while my wife went to a yoga class. (This morning I went for a swim, while she was with the baby and our son was at pre-K.) At the playground, I watched as a mother chatted with another mother while her two year old wandered off with another kid’s wagon (my son’s) and then spilled, dropped, and drank out of the other kid’s (my son’s) sippy cup. I intervened at various points to retrieve the purloined and abused items. She apologized but didn’t take any steps to be more watchful.

She seemed like a normal enough person, but if I had been as neglectful as she I would have felt guilty. And if I’d seen a father behave that way a part of me would have blamed it on his being a man. But through my unscientific and highly personal parent-watching lens, I’d say I have a belief that women make better parents that often isn’t borne out by my observations.

So in any parenting relationship, how likely would it be that each parent can be as good a parent as the other in all ways? More than likely they have their strengths and weaknesses, each their own degree of enjoyment and or acceptance of the role. What’s most important, surely, is that the parents amicably agree, either implicitly or explicitly, and with the good of the children in mind, what will be the appropriate roles. On any other path we will find friction and unhappiness for all concerned.

And finally to the media coverage of Hillary Clinton. Was it gender biased? How biased? And, perhaps least importantly and most difficult to answer, did it make a difference?

Since I’ve written a lot already, and since it’s late, and since you’re probably getting bored, I’ll cut to the chase — the media reflects the nation. If the media coverage was biased it’s because the prevalent perspective of the country is biased. This question couldn’t come up in England, for instance, not because England doesn’t have gender bias but because that gender bias is subordinated to a general sense of ability to do the job. Margaret Thatcher, love her or hate her (more sensibly the latter) was Prime Minister of England decades ago. She was tough, overbearing, ruthless and wore skirts. I’m sure there were unkind and derogatory comments made about her gender, but it didn’t shape the country’s perception of her capacity to do the job, or of the media’s ability to portray her fairly.

But the matter has come up with Hillary because in many people here still feel that competence and ability is subordinate to one’s gender. In Barack Obama’s case, many people feel competence is subordinate to one’s race.

If Hillary is a victim, America is to blame as much as the media. More fervently than I am pleased that Hillary didn’t win (because her fundamental sense of goodness seems predicated on her success more than on anything of value to others) I am fervently afraid that Obama’s presidential candidacy will suffer too greatly from the country’s focus on his race and ethnicity rather than his ability to do the job. What a terrible shame that would be for America, for the world and for the next four years.

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On the Supreme Court’s split snub to Bush, shared childcare, and news media coverage of Hillary Clinton. (In two parts because it got really long…)

By a 5 - 4 majority, the Supreme Court has decided that this country wants, deserves and damn well should have equal rights of representation for its accused, whether they be detained at the local precinct for fare evasion, or captured, rendered, disappeared for three years and then reappeared again just in time for a Guantanamo military tribunal hearing before the election ends Bush’s reckless rampage through the fields of decency, honesty, restraint and respect for human rights. Hip hooray for equality!!

It’s a good thing, of course, that there is an odd number of justices on the supreme court. Equality in some matters — such as making decisions — isn’t helpful at all. It’s also not encouraging that the decision was so equally balanced. I would have preferred to see a little less equality in the spectrum of opinions. 7 - 2 perhaps? Or 8 - 1? How about some gross inequality? — a 9 - 0 decision in favor of upholding the constitutional rights of our detainees.

Chief Justice Roberts in his dissent said that the constitutional right of habeus corpus wasn’t really that important and that the detainees were really getting some very generous treatment. (I guess that happened while they were disappeared.) So four S.C. justices, almost half, don’t understand the fuss. This indicates a problem. The NY Times editorial frames it as a political problem, but one wonders how we can tolerate a system that could so easily politicize the court.

Without the concept of equality the world would be an odd, unendingly complicated place. And we owe the concept of equality to the orderly and consistent principles of existence. Space and time and the stuff of matter obeys laws of equivalence. The mass of a proton is the same wherever you go. (As a side note, I believe that this indicates that time and space and, fundamentally, units of energy are quantized, as I explain in the appendix to LIFE.) It is because we have this absolute equivalence that we can draw conclusions about presumptive equivalence — that the rights of one person should be the same as another, for instance.

Continued in Part II — shared parenting and the accusation of discriminatory coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

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On the conditions and cures of the personal debt culture, and the inevitability of the division of labor.

Why is it that I invariably disagree with David Brooks? He seems like a nice enough guy, smart, sensitive… But I just can’t help thinking that he is mostly wrong-headed. Today, he writes an impassioned piece about the problems with our “values,” government policies, and economic institutions that have led to an exponential growth in personal debt over the past thirty years.

Brooks hangs his argument the idea that those who founded the country embodied traditions of “hard work, temperance and frugality.” He then niftily declares that these early traditions resulted in the country’s prosperity. (Thereby overlooking any other reasons why the country might have been prosperous — such as an abundance of natural resources, the absence of any incumbent public or private institutions that in Europe complicated and inhibited growth over the same period, and the immigration of millions of people who had the drive and ambition to up and travel thousands of miles by boat to seek their fortunes.)

Central to Brook’s theme is thrift. He points out that while we’re smoking less and trying to protect the environment, we’re ever more reckless with money. I’m grateful for these problematic comparisons because they give us an insight into where Brooks is going wrong.

People tend to smoke less these days because they realize it’s bad for them. People tend to care more about the environment because they realize that if they don’t we’ll destroy it. Brooks could have also mentioned the curtailing of promiscuity (primarily because of AIDS).

My point is that our behavior is influenced by perceived cause and effect as much as it is by our values. Or, put another way, values are nothing more than nebulous, intangible codifications of cause and effect that have become untethered from their origins. The reason that some people get into debt or anything else that’s “bad” for them is very simple — they haven’t realized how harmful it can be, or they can’t help themselves.

Citing history as a finger to wag at the present, as Brooks does, seems to be a sure sign of sloppy reasoning. People are people, after all, and we’ve been making the same mistakes and smart decisions for thousands of years.

In his Freakonomics column Stephen Dubner points to a similar example about specialization. Dubner makes a pint of ice cream at home for $12, exemplifying some of the problems with small scale, local production — it’s wasteful, inefficient and uncompetitive. Dubner points out that there has been specialization of trades in society for thousands of years — long before conglomerates, and mass farming.

Dubner’s in pursuit of a rational discussion about sound environmental decision making. But his train of thought also says something about the way that society naturally and inevitably reflects human instincts, reasons and choices. There will always be some people who want to make their own ice cream. And there will always be plenty of people who don’t. And just so long as there’s a profit to be made in mass production, it will continue to exist.

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On what we choose to do and how those choices define us.

This is the best picture, make that the only picture I could find of George Bush’s White House reception yesterday for Major League Soccer’s league champions the Houston Dynamos. Although apparently Bush “brought the entire roster into the Oval Office and took individual pictures with each player.” Bush was also present a few weeks ago at the team’s ring ceremony.

But then the Dynamos are a Texas team, no matter that Bush is in the White House, and no matter that while he was receiving the Dynamos Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, the accused and self-claimed architect of the September 11 attacks, five years after his capture appeared before a military court in Guantanamo bay. And no matter that a Senate panel after five years of investigation finally released its findings in which it accused President Bush, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and others of deceiving or misleading the American public in various ways about the link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, and about Iraq’s threat to the region and the world.

So I’ve been sitting here wondering what made Khalid Mohammad choose to plot and execute such acts of terror, even assuming that he’s taking credit for more than he should. And wondering too what would make the Bush administration take matters of such dire significance into their own hands, acting with such careless, callous and criminal imperiousness. The war has destabilized the region, killed thousands of innocents, and perhaps put us at greater risk of future terrorist attacks.

If, as it seems possible, what underlies both motives is a lack of perspective, a lack of humanity (Khalid Mohammad sees America as unholy, unworthy of compassion, Bush’s crowd sees the Islamic world the same way) why do we feel strongly that there is a difference?

(When I start to equate the two too directly I remind myself that Bush feted his home state Dynamos, Saddam’s son tortured Iraq’s soccer team.)

Khalid Shaikh Mohammad wasn’t born a terrorist. So when and how did it happen? After leaving his native Kuwait as a teenager he moved to North Carolina and studied engineering. At some point as a young adult he made a series of choices about what he believed which culminated in a single-minded dedication to acts of violence against the West in the name of his religion. If we summon up a picture of him in a sleepy North Carolina suburb, a newly minted engineer, picking up the newspaper and perusing the job listings, one can imagine him having made a different set of choices, perhaps ending up living a more or less peaceful life.

But he made a choice to believe in something bigger than himself, bigger than any act of terror he could dream up. His choice was so powerful and freeing that he seems never to have looked back, never to have doubted whether it was right.

As a young man George Bush was a screw up. He excelled only at failure as far as we can tell. But Bush too made a series of choices. He chose to sober up. He chose to go into politics. And he chose to commit himself to religious faith as an influence and guide, something bigger than himself.

The similarity then, the reason we deplore the terrorism of Khalid Mohammad and the duplicity and bloody recklessness of the Bush administration is that both have chosen to forgo personal responsibility in favor of ideological responsibility.

If ever we were to go seeking a definition of evil, this might be it — to choose to set aside one’s personal conscience, to deliberately let it go, so that one can experience the freedom of living by a creed.

Clinton (Hillary), Polanski (Roman), Young Earth (In Texas), and red wine.

The Times reports that ‘Hillary Rosen, one of Mrs. Clinton’s most prominent women supporters, wrote on the Huffington Post Web site. “I am sure I was not alone in privately urging the campaign over the last two weeks to use the moment to take her due, pass the torch and cement her grace.”’

Ah, yes, the cementing of one’s grace; the trowel’s slap against the wet lime. For Clinton, one can imagine, this is the sound of the bricks being laid for her mausoleum. To let go of this campaign, once an inevitable victory, and to accept its loss, her oblivion. How long must it have been since Clinton defined herself in anything but political terms?

Roman Polanski has suffered tragedy (the murder of his family) and inflicted harm and misery (by having sex with a thirteen year-old girl). He’s also imbued the world with grace through his artistic endeavors. His victim, 30 years on, expresses her desire to let go of his crime. That crime has defined him these past thirty years, but has also defined her, to some extent, as its victim. If she can let go, she will be free of that definition. Whereas oddly, and rightly one feels, he will remain attached to his.

Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist in Central Texas, chairs the state’s education board. As the Times reports, Dr. McLeroy believes that ‘Earth’s appearance is a recent geologic event — thousands of years old, not 4.5 billion. “I believe a lot of incredible things,” he said, “The most incredible thing I believe is the Christmas story. That little baby born in the manger was the god that created the universe.”’

‘“I just don’t think [evolution is] true or it’s ever happened” … when he considers the case for evolution, Dr. McLeroy said, “it’s just not there.”’

I feel the same way about dentists. After all, before a dentist looks in your mouth, your teeth are fine, they’ve been getting along quite well. But as soon as a dentist pokes around in there all of a sudden you’ve got all of these problems that have been lurking for years.

And, come to think of it, I feel that way about Texas, too. The idea that such a state exists is just so preposterous. Sure, you can make a compelling case for Austin, but what about the rest? Naah. It’s just some left wing conspiracy to scare the rest of us into voting Democrat.

But if the Texas state education board succeeds in having schools teach the weaknesses of evolutionary theory, as it is dangerously close to doing, I may have to let go of the conviction that Texas and its dentists don’t exist.

Which brings me to today’s philosophic conundrum:

Should I drown my days of sorrow in red wine if it will only serve to extend them?