Ayn Rand, Gen. Petraeus and Other Random Thoughts

Mike Barnicle, who used to write for the Boston Globe, would occasionally devote a column to a list of quick observations. If I remember correctly, the columns were always titled "Not That It Matters, But ..."

For your consideration, my own "Not That It Matters, But...":

1. Ayn Rand, whose "Atlas Shrugged" was published 50 years ago this week, was a pain in the butt. She may have given literary voice to her charmless philosophy of greed, and may have been influential in capitalist circles (as though the profit motive has ever really needed philosophical buttressing) but the ideas she expressed are now commonplace. Furthermore, carried out a few decimal places, they quickly become reprehensible. Yes, Ayn, let's kill all the handicapped people, since they sap society's strength and keep all us productive people from giving ourselves singlemindedly to the pursuit of pleasure and profit. Sometimes, it matters whether an object of veneration was actually a decent person or not. She wasn't. (Check out the 1957 NY Times review of "Atlas," which was brutal.)




2. This morning, walking on the treadmill at the gym, I flipped back and forth between three Sunday morning news shows: Meet the Press, Face the Nation, and Fox's whatever-they-call-it. Each, predictably, featured panels of politicians talking about Iraq. John Kerry made some reasonable points; John McCain sounded cornered and defensive; Bill Kristol and Juan Williams got testy with one another; and all the Fox moderator wanted to do was make the liberals on his panel admit that MoveOn.org was wrong (read: unpatriotic) to call Gen. Petraeus "General Betray Us." And everybody sounded like they'd enjoy talking about something else for a change, because they know as well as anybody that in a time of war, the President will get what he wants, and all their speechifying about it is boring, inconclusive and ineffectual.




3. Bush shouldn't get what he wants, but like the pope, he seems to view himself as infallible, and apparently that's what counts right now. And that's despite what the rest of the country may think or believe or even ardently desire. So, this, we must acknowledge, is democracy.
   
   


4. It's apple-picking time in New Hampshire, and the orchards are crowded with people giving their little kids the chance to see where fruit really comes from. My part of New Hampshire is so heavily covered with apple trees that the new upscale houses cropping up on every hillside are really just sitting on lawns cut into old orchards. Quaint theme-parks, really, and requiring something only the rich could afford: lawn service companies that specialize in tending trees, picking up fallen apples, and mowing around dozens of precisely spaced, gnarled trunks.

20,000 Prayers, No Answer Required

Excerpt from an email sent by Sojourners, the progressive evangelical group:

As people of faith, we believe in the power of prayer to soften the hardest of hearts and open the way to peace and reconciliation. So, as General Petraeus testifies, we're planning to match his surge with one of our own – 20,000 prayers for Congress to bring an end to this war.

I'm a big fan of Sojourners and its SojoMail e-bulletins and related blog. I like knowing what liberal religious people are thinking and talking about; I especially like knowing that there are liberal religious people out there pushing back against the pernicious idea, promulgated by our current president, that religion is the property of conservatives. The Sojourners crew is smart and earnest and on the right side of every issue I can think of.

But this email bothers me, because it seems to me that when any grassroots group begins asking people to pray for change in national policy, the group's all but admitted its utter inability to do anything but pray. And when a religious group sets up a fusillade of prayer directed at recalcitrant politicians, it only suggests how irrelevant it is to the political process.

I know the folks at Sojourners would take umbrage; they'd say prayer is an essential expression of spiritual integrity and power, and that it's capable of almost anything. But is it? Personally, there's no doubt that prayer can be transformative. But not politically. Surely flipping through the pages of any history book should be enough to convince anyone of that fundamental truth. Is there even the slightest evidence that prayer has ever been effective in changing the course of historical, or even natural, events, if by changing we mean improving? No. Yet religious people persist in claiming that prayers make a difference. If (and I'm assuming there must surely be condition or two) they're sincere enough, or plentiful enough, or something enough.

It's easy to be disdainful of certain religious practices, but that's not what I'm doing here. Taking cheap shots at Christians doesn't interest me, and especially not Sojourners, which is providing much-needed public pushback to the wizened, mean-spirited brand of Christianity that has found so much public expression in the last decade.

But yet, I'm confused about the implications of this "prayer surge." If, after 20,000 prayers, Congress doesn't bring an end to the Iraq war, what shall we conclude? That God supports the war? That God wasn't listening to the prayers? Or rather, that he was listening, but decided that letting the war run its course would for some reason be better than ending it?

In a way it doesn't matter, because prayer of this type is a win-win for God. He gets credit no matter what he does, something or nothing, because he's all-knowing and always makes the best decision for us. Nor can he be held accountable for any bad outcome, because, after all, we created our own mess and are to blame for any suffering that results from it. All the credit, none of the blame, no real responsibility. This is God as Christians understand him?

Which is exactly why I thought many Christians had more or less given up intercessory prayer. It makes us all look a little bit foolish. God, too, when you think about it.

Scary American Guys Wish You a Merry Christmas

Spotted yesterday, on the office wall in a dank garage in Waltham, Mass.:

A Christmas card, still taped up eight months later:

On it, here's what we see: A leering skeleton wearing a Santa's hat, clutching an automatic rifle in its bony arms. He's aiming it at us. And then underneath, in Gothic letters, this line: "Merry Christmas. Know that while you sleep men wait in the night, ready to visit violence on enemies who would attack us. PEACE ISN'T PRETTY." All against a death-black background.

Now this card was a real curiosity to me, and as I stood there, waiting to pay my bill, I tried to figure it out. Because while I'd obviously seen a lot of this sort of over-the-top celebration of American militarism before, on bumper stickers and car windows and the like, this was the most ... what to call it? There's no word, really.

Forget the disconnect between the supposed innocence of Christmas, with its tinsel and lighted church windows, and this bloody-thirsty death-skull avenger. The disconnect is the point, obviously.

Instead my thoughts were really just a series of questions, all having to do with my conviction that hey, apparently a lot of people like this sort of thing.

This whole concept - don't worry, go on nestling in your beds, dreaming sweet dreams, because we'll kill them for you - is actually comforting to some people. It cheers them, makes them happy.

It's not just men who think this way, but it's mostly men, I would guess - the kind of men who hang shiny steel testicles from their trailer hitches, to show they're macho (I suppose that's what they mean to show). And the kind of men who have bumper stickers that say, "Never trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die." These guys are rough types, not too educated, not thinking they're in need of any education.

How many of these guys are out there? Are they a big slice of us? And do we utterly rely on them and their cartoonish machismo to implement our relationships with other countries in the world? I'm afraid the answer is yes. We do. That, standing in the garage, was what I was thinking.

It's Not About Breasts, But It's Worthwhile Just the Same

I agree with Ann Althouse that Hillary Clinton's cleavage is a fascinating and significant issue, worth at least several days of debate. But the carnage in Iraq has led me instead to consider something a little darker and, in its own way, more important that political decolletage - the American Civil War.

I've read a lot of history - I'm the type who loves poking around old battlefields and reading obscure war memoirs - but I've never come across a trajectory quite so unusual as the one traced by three books, one old and two quite new.

I read "Little Women" in the fifth grade, crying my way through math class the day Beth died. The novel was no more or less significant to me than it was to lots of other girls my age; we all wanted to be Jo, though most of the time we acted like Amy. The book, for those unlucky people who haven't read it, is set in Concord, Mass., during the Civil War, and the March family's father, who never makes an appearance, is "down South," presumably in the thick of it.

As an adult I visited Fruitlands, the failed Utopian community Louisa May Alcott's father (who was a tiresomely sanctimonious teacher, philosopher and ne'er-do-well ) co-founded. Though it failed after one disastrous winter, the cluster of buildings on the beautiful sloping Massachusetts hills still suggest his family's dogged devotion to him. Paintings of and by the Alcotts still hang in one of the main buildings.

"American Bloomsbury," Susan Cheever's recent book about the Transcendentalists of Concord (Thoreau, Emerson, Margaret Fuller, the Alcotts and a few others) was a revelation to me: what a slight movement Transcendentalism was! How gauzy it remains. In reality, it apparently was little more than a series of letters and speeches, though it became so important that New Englanders, always contrarian, still embrace it as a homegrown progressive theology.

To cap off all this Civil War-era reading, I just finished "March," Geraldine Brooks' novel-based-on-reality that won the Pultizer Prize last year. This is a truly wonderful and unlikely book: the Alcotts retrofitted into the story of "Little Women," which itself, of course, was originally based upon the Alcotts. It's full of things I didn't know about the Civil War: about northern overseers, for instance, who went to revive nearly destroyed Southern plantations, only to fall prey to the Southern resistance when the Yankee troops pulled out.

The book is violent and poetic, and so fine that anyone interested in the Civil War or religion in America really must read it. Even if you don't care about the Alcotts and their abolitionist/vegetarian/Transcendentalist principles, it's worth reading for the reminder that war, then and now, has always been unimaginably ugly.

Alert: You Don't Have to be American to be Dead

I stole this graph from a stridently right-wing blog, where it stood alone, without comment, as though the facts it conveyed said it all. But what does the chart really say, and about whom?

Here are some ideas:

1. It says that very few Americans have died in the Iraq War, compared to other wars, so stop making such a big deal out of it; and

2. That grievously injured soldiers saved by our whizz-bang technology don't count either, though they may come to wish they had died outright, rather than piece by piece; and

3. American lives are the only ones anybody's counting, anyway. Only we matter, because we're, ah ... us.

How insulting all the way around. If my 18-year-old son had been hurt or killed in Iraq, I'd feel like reaching through cyberspace and strangling the designer of this graph (and the soul-dead partisan who heralds it as though it actually says something good), gladly raising the war-related death toll by two.

But the more important point is this. Now listen up, because here's some key information. Iraqis who are dead because of this war are dead. They're people, too, just like us, and they didn't invite us to come on over, blow their country apart and ignite a civil war that would get thousands of them killed.

No one can contest these facts.

So, in the name of plain decency, let's say it again. It's worth saying. You don't have to be an American to be dead, to lose everything, and to weep forever over the loss of the people you love most.