Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for praise for Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism

I am flattered and delighted that Andrew Sullivan, over at his blog The Daily Dish, (unaccountably) listed my Weekly Standard essay from last week, Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism: The deeply dispririting Romney-Huckabee religion showdown, as his pick for best political essay of 2007.  It might well have been the last political essay of 2007 that Mr. Sullivan happened to read, but far be it from me ever turn down praise like that.   My thanks to Andrew Sullivan; I am honored.  (Let me also thank, once again, my editor at the Weekly Standard, Richard Starr, who both did a superb editing job and also gave me the space to say what I wanted to say.)

(Thanks Scott for pointing me to this.)

Reactions to my Weekly Standard, Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism article

I've received a fair amount of email traffic reacting to my Weekly Standard piece (open link at the WS, a blog summary here, and a letter back to Michael Novak re his (mis)summary, here).  The emails have been very mixed, very divided - not a big surprise. 

Among the various blog reactions, I wanted to flag to readers' attention the blog Levantine Dreamhouse - Abu Kareem, in New York, writes a very interesting blog that I recommend quite apart from the discussion of the Mormons, Muslims, Multiculturalism piece.  It's both reasoned and witty.

***

What has surprised me among the reactions, however, is how many evangelicals were most offended not by things I said about Huckabee or even about evangelicals (I think some of them decided not to take public offense, but instead to wallow in silent martyrdom=quiet resentment), but instead by my having the chutzpah to cite not just to Isaiah 3, but to the corresponding verses in the Book of Mormon. 

My goodness.  The horror, the horror. 

Very, very telling.   

Did Michael Novak actually read my Weekly Standard article?

19 November 2007

To the editor, National Review Online:

I ran across the following article by Michael Novak in the National Review, "Salt Lake Debate," December 17, 2007, taking a quick shot at the end at my Weekly Standard article this week, "Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism," available online here (and some additional discussion at my blog post, here).

Look, I grant that the article was very long and had a long list of targets.  I acknowledge that numbers of people - including intellectuals, professors, theologians, etc., had some trouble following the argument.  Inelegant?  Possibly. My fault for bad writing?  Maybe.   Emotional?  No doubt, for reasons I explain at length in the essay. 

Still, it is hard to believe that Mr. Novak actually read the article before penning the following paragraph about it:

In another vein, a writer in The Weekly Standard, a former Mormon, urged publicly testing candidates even about purely theological matters — transubstantiation, baptism by immersion, circumcision, and other particular practices or beliefs of various faiths — just to see how, by the criteria of Enlightenment and liberal correct reasoning, the candidate “reasoned” about such matters. This, I think, makes Enlightenment and liberal political philosophy a new orthodoxy. And that test would provide a very narrow gate into republican self-government. By that test, only a small part of the population of the United States might pass. Most Americans have a much larger definition of “reason” and the “reasonable” than that.

Does my article urge publicly testing candidates about purely theological matters as transubstantiation, baptism by immersion, circumcision, etc., just to see how by the criteria of the Enlightenment and liberal correct reasoning, the candidate "reasoned about such matters?  

I offer three basic rules of thumb for what it is okay to ask of a candidate for public office about his or her religious doctrines.  The first is that any question of religious doctrine must have something to do with public policy or governance.  Specifically, I say:

[A]re there principles that can help define what religious questions should be in-bounds and what should be out of bounds in a tolerant, liberal polity?

First, for something to be "in," [bounds for questions] there does have to be a connection to governance, politics, and the public sphere. This is the most traditional form of American religious toleration in politics. A Buddhist's belief in reincarnation ought to be neither here nor there; a Mormon's conception of the Savior likewise; and a Jew's refusal to regard Jesus as Lord likewise.

Well, I don't know, that sounds to me like it rules out questions of transubstantiation, baptism by immersion, etc.  How else would Mr. Novak take it?  Indeed, the article does specifically raise transubstantiation and the Virgin Birth.  What does the article say?

Just as it is not considered irrelevant to know if one believes that space aliens came to Roswell, New Mexico, or has views on Area 51--shades of Dennis Kucinich?--a candidate's views on the Virgin Birth or transubstantiation or creationism are likewise relevant to making an informed electoral choice as to a candidate's fundamental rationality.

True, that does sound like it subjects the Virgin Birth and transubstantiation to politically correct tests of reason.  It sounds indeed as though this would create a new orthodoxy of reason, as Mr. Novak suggests.  But suppose we actually look at the article and see to whom this view is attributed:

And note that on this matter, atheistic rationalists and religious overbelievers join hands to say, all-in. A Hitchens, after all, would say that the electorate deserves to know the full irrationality of a candidate, and that is best expressed in his or her religious beliefs, even apparently private ones. (He would say this, and has said it: "Phooey," writes Hitchens, "to the false reticence of the press and to the bogus sensitivities that underlie it.")

So, this new orthodoxy of reason is attributed to ... the atheist rationalist Christopher Hitchens but also religious zealots like Huckabee who would insist that all religious practice, including weird aspects of Mormon belief and ritual that have no connection to governance, should be considered in deciding for whom to vote.  Mr. Novak's plainly rejects that and, I would have thought pretty obviously, so do I.  I'm arguing against it.  It is stated pretty clearly in this paragraph.  I don't believe that Mr. Novak read it, or at least not closely enough to follow it.

Past this first principle - that the religious belief in question has to have some relevance to public governance in order to be up for question at all - I further add a second, still more limiting principle on questions about religious doctrines.  It is that even where a religious belief does conceivably have a connection to governance - such as abortion or opposition to the death penalty - questions put to a candidate should be framed in a way that focus on the issue of the candidate's private conscience and belief about such matters, and not on the religion as such, in order to avoid, as Romney correctly said, making the candidate a spokesperson for the corporate religion as such.  I praised Romney on that very point, and took it even further in defense of liberal toleration:

To be sure, there was something good and liberal in part of his answer, and we should start with that. Romney said--correctly as a matter of deep liberalism--that for him to give representations as to the content of his faith would make him a representative of that faith, rather than of the people, who are of many faiths. To do so would be to head down the path of communalism, a political space defined not by a religiously neutral public sphere but by a division accepted as reasonably legitimate consisting of groups--religious, ethnic, whatever--that have claims on behalf of their immutably identified members.

How Mr. Novak could get from that to an assertion of a new liberal orthodoxy is quite beyond me.  I simply doubt he read the article.  What is so hard about this?

Finally, I offer a third principle, for when it is appropriate to take account of religious doctrine of a candidate.  It is in a limited circumstance - important, but limited by the previous two principles.  If a candidate asserts, or gives sufficiently good reason by his or her actions to show, that a position is rooted not in religious belief as such, but in the authority of the church, and thus puts an officeholder squarely between two authorities and obligations - church and the polity - then it is legitimate to inquire into the content of doctrine. 

I offer an example that I say flatly is hypothetical and indeed "fantastical" - the Catholic bishops announcing that any Catholic politician voting for abortion funding will be excommunicated and is therefore in peril of his or her salvation.  In that case, a genuinely devout candidate is genuinely caught between two competing authorities, the obligation to God and the obligation to the commonwealth, if, for purposes of the hypothetical, that is the will of the populace and, for example, prior to the announcement of this new doctrine, the candidate had promised to support abortion funding (saying, eg, that this was not his or her private religious view, but following the clear will of the majority).  In that case, it seems to me perfectly liberal and consistent with toleration for citizens to inquire into the content of doctrine that might lead a candidate, or even an officeholder, to vote in a way that is loyal to one's soul and God, but not loyal necessarily to one's citizens who are not necessarily of the faith. 

Any reasonable reader - no, any reader - of my article would recognize that the intent of this essay is to offer straightforward principles of liberal toleration that Mr. Novak himself would broadly endorse.  It seems pretty obvious to me that he started reading, perhaps got annoyed at the length (but surely Mr. Novak is used to reading things longer than 1500 words?) or at the tone of the essay, landed on a particular paragraph without bothering to read to whom its view was attributed, decided that it was my view, and engaged in a little drive-by libel. 

I understand that some readers found this essay hard to follow.  I don't defend its elegance; I was quite annoyed when I wrote it, and decided to take on all targets.  If it was too scattershot or emotional for Mr. Novak's sensibilities, my regrets.  But I can hardly think that the views he attributed to the me or the article by Mr. Novak are correct on any reading.  They are exactly what they are - views attributed to my foils, in this case Hitchens in particular.  Thirty seconds more of reading would have shown Mr. Novak this. 

I don't defend the readability of the article.  If it confused Mr. Novak then I will grant it had its problems of readability.  I do think Mr. Novak, whether my fault or his, has quite misread it.  He is, with good reason, a widely respected commentator, and his views on what the article said will and, all things being equal, should carry weight with those who might read the article Would Mr. Novak care to withdraw or amend his reading of it?

My Weekly Standard article, Mormons, Muslims, Multiculturalism

(I am indeed taking a break from blogging, but I do plan to use this blog as a way of making available things I am writing and publishing, as well as the occasional announcement of other things.)

I have a new piece in the Weekly Standard, December 24, 2007 issue, titled Mormons, Muslims, and Multiculturalism: The Deeply Dispiriting Romney-Huckabee Religion Showdown.  You can find it at the Weekly Standard, open link, here.

(PS.  I respond to Michael Novak's blatant misreading of my article (it appears in a quick drive-by attack in a National Review article) in a letter to the editor posted to the blog here, including links to Novak's article.)

(PPS.  Looking at some comments and links people have put to Amazon and elsewhere - Kenneth Anderson is a pretty common name, so be aware that I am not the author of any books on Mormonism or religion or anything like that.  Also not the Kenneth Anderson who blogs at the Brad Blog or Bonehead Compendium.  I'm also not, alas, the wonderful author of the books on India, a descendent of that British general in WWII, the great African-American singer, the Harvard medical school professor, etc., etc.  (I'm also not the Kenneth Anderson convicted recently of child molestation in some public school in the midwest.  Amazing what you find when you google a common name like mine.)  Also, if I might make a suggestion - actually reading my article, although it is long, is a pretty good idea before thinking to comment.  You can get to it through the link to the Weekly Standard.)

The essay is very long - some 5-6,000 words, in fact - and I am very grateful to the Weekly Standard, and my editor Richard Starr in particular, for giving me such a sizable amount of space for this essay.  As will be evident, oh, two sentences into the piece, I was quite angry when I wrote it - angry that there really does appear to be 30% or so of this country that is prepared to vote against someone - not my candidate - solely on account of their religion.  Not aspects of that person's religion that have to do with public policy, but simply the religion itself and its most un-public policy, un-governance related aspects of it.  So I did not hesitate to lampoon the evangelicals who are displaying this season such remarkable religious bigotry.

That said, the fact that I can lampoon them, fairly nastily, and know that at most they will leave rude blog comments - rather than firebombing my house - is a credit to them.  It should not really be such a great credit to anyone, of course, that on account of angry or offensive speech, you forbear from killing them (wow! such restraint!), but these days I suppose you take what you can get.

The essay also sharply attacks Mitt Romney's Mormon speech - not on the usual liberal grounds that he left out the unbelievers, which I think it is true and wrong but not actually the greatest wrong of that speech - but instead on the grounds that he offers the country a sort of conservative multiculturalism, a conservative moral relativism, that puts his and everyone else's religion entirely beyond discussion.

That multiculturalism, while leaving Romney maximum ability to deflect questions of religion, is wrong because there are in fact important questions of religion that do need to be asked of candidates.  And many of them need to be asked if, and at some point in time - as I deeply hope, will in fact be one of these days - that there are Muslims in America who, again as I deeply hope, will think that they have as much reason to be president as any other person does.  Multiculturalism says that any questions about any of this are illegitimate, and that is both wrong and a practical disaster because it precludes the possibility of true integration and assimilation into the political culture.

Well, you can judge for yourself.  It does manage to attack evangelicals, Mormons, Muslims, and Christopher Hitchens, which is why it is so long.  I apologize to all those I left out as targets; perhaps next time.  It is available at the Weekly Standard, and I look forward to the debate that I hope will follow.

I don't actually write very much about Mormons and Mormonism.  However, I have written two review essays, both back in the 1990s, one for the Times Literary Supplement, here, and the other for the Los Angeles Times Book Review, here.  The links are to SSRN, and you can download the pdfs free from that site if you like.

Here is a bit of the Weekly Standard essay:

***

Now consider Mitt Romney’s speech and the answer he
gave to the matter of religious tests. Leave aside the whining
secularists who complain that Romney left no place
for unbelievers in the Republic. Correct and not of unconcern
by any means, but frankly far less important than the
question of multiculturalism; and anyway, one may trust
left secularists to look after their interests in such matters.
No, the much more important matter was that Romney
announced what might be called, appallingly, “conservative
multiculturalism”—indeed, a form of conservative
moral relativism. If the demand of the evangelicals was
all‑in, then his answer was all-out.

To be sure, there was something good and liberal in
part of his answer, and we should start with that. Romney
said—correctly as a matter of deep liberalism—that for
him to give representations as to the content of his faith
would make him a representative of that faith, rather than
of the people, who are of many faiths. To do so would be
to head down the path of communalism, a political space
defined not by a religiously neutral public sphere but by
a division accepted as reasonably legitimate consisting of
groups—religious, ethnic, whatever—that have claims on
behalf of their immutably identified members. This is, by
the way, the relatively humane (in historical perspective),
but altogether illiberal political order of the Ottoman
Empire. It is what many Muslims from those historical
lands appear to think would be the best and natural political
order in the lands to which they have emigrated—Canada,
for example (which anyway has its own powerfully
illiberal forces driving toward group-identity communalism),
and, increasingly, Britain. It is not—at least not so
far—the American way, and Romney was right firmly to
reject it.

But he did so, unfortunately, in a typically Romneylike
way, with a corrupt little wink-and-nod to his evangelical
inquisitors—oh, but don’t worry, “I believe that Jesus
Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of mankind,” etc.;
just don’t ask me about Mormon underwear. It is corrupt
not because it is untrue, but because it aims to let him eat
his cake and have it, too. He rejected demands to explain
his faith, but did so while letting his interlocutors know
that he was really one of them. Too clever by half, in the
end, because they will not actually believe him, but this
is what comes of positions of moral conviction devised by
management consultants.

The “all-out” answer that Romney gave was the denial
that citizens might ever legitimately and ethically demand
to know the content of religious doctrines professed by a
candidate for public office. (“Each religion has its own
unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism
but rather a test of our tolerance.”) It is multiculturalist
because it essentially treats all private beliefs as immutable
and beyond reason, and because it says that to propose
to subject any of them to public scrutiny of reason is an act
of intolerance akin to racism. It is a position traditionally
asserted by the left on behalf of its identity-politics constituencies.
It is dismaying, to say the least, that Romney would
claim it for his own to deny the legitimacy of all questions.

It is, moreover, relativist in implication. Toleration is
not an assertion of relativism. It is, rather, the forbearance
from judging and acting on judgments in the public sphere
that one might well believe oneself entitled to make in private.
Toleration entails the suspension of public disbelief,
or at least political action thereupon, about matters that
one might nonetheless consider well within the realm of
private moral judgment. Relativism, by contrast, is denial
of grounds for judging at all. They could not be more different—
and, crucially, relativism removes the possibility
of toleration because it removes the possibility of reasoned
judgment.

Romney’s “all-out” stance goes well beyond a plea for
liberal toleration to an assertion of genuine relativism and
the denial of the very possibility of moral judgment. And
all of this in the midst of a lecture on the decline of religion
in Europe. But of course it is not declining, it is rising
in the form of an Islam whose liberal commitments are in
doubt at best. Romney answered as a Mormon looking for
maximum room to maneuver, but seemingly without any
thought whatsoever to the institutional settlement implicitly
proposed, affecting not just Mormons and evangelicals,
but Catholics and Buddhists and Muslims and Hindus,
as well as the unbelievers and atheists he could not bring
himself to mention.

And then toward the end:

The firm demand of the state for conformity to neutral
standards is what—contrary to the claims of the multiculturalists—
provides the grounds of liberal toleration. There are many reasons, but the simplest is this: Taken together, the demands of religious groups for ever stronger and expansive special accommodations must eventually result in profound and antagonistic standoffs and conflicts.
Indeed, we have gone too far with special accommodations for religions that depart from neutral governance.

 

(Thanks to Ms. Althouse for the link, here.  And welcome Instapunditeers, and thanks Glenn!  Thanks also to Sandy Levinson for the link from Balkinization.  And to Andrew Sullivan for calling this essay, um, "ornerily brilliant."  Thanks also to Powerline, who correctly describe me as a Powerline reader, here.  Also Peter Leithart.  And Andrea Urseem at ReligionWriter.) 

Taking a break from blogging

I've been thinking for a while that I should take a break from blogging, in order to focus on a couple of projects ... I enjoy it very much, even though this blog has a tiny audience, and even though I don't actually post that much, it somehow occupies more of my mental energy than I realize. I had been thinking that for a while, and last night a long time and close friend whose opinion on these kinds of things I take very seriously urged me to do the same. (Thanks, David.)

So I am going to take a break from blogging. I may occasionally post things up here, but it will frankly be more or less self-advertising, announcements of my articles and other professional things that I am doing, rather than chat about me. I may come back to this blog in some other form at some point - perhaps less chatty and more substantive, I don't know, perhaps more limited to first draft discussions of law and policy topics, rather than anything from law to music to my family to food. Likely something I will do is post something brief on books that I think are worth reading.

But I need to focus on some projects that require a kind of in-turned focus for a while. If anyone wants to reach me, I'm not entering a monastery or anything - the easiest way to reach me is at my Washington College of Law, American University email, kanders@wcl.american.edu. And to all, ummmm ... good night and good luck? Ken

(ps. thanks for the very kind comments. And thanks to some of the big bloggers, Instapundit in particular, whom I've never met but who have been kind enough to link to things that I was eager to have reach a larger audience than I could muster either in an academic context or my own blog. And Opinio Juris and Legal Theory Blog. I won't be disappearing from here entirely, and I am leaving the blog up, minus a few posts that I've decided in retrospect were intemperate or mean-spirited, or anyway more than ordinarily mean-spirited, in case they are useful to undergraduates doing term papers on just war theory or law of war or Koskiennemi or what-not. I will check back here from time to time, and anyone who would like to reach me can always do so at my school email, above.)

(pps. At risk of being a bit like Tom Sawyer showing up just in time to hear praises for himself at his own funeral, let me thank Duncan Hollis over at Opinio Juris for the kind words, as well as all the good friends at Opinio Juris, and to those who have left me messages in the comments. I really am not completely abandoning ship here - I will post stuff here about things I am writing and maybe some other stuff. I might post the occasional topical comment at the Telos website. And unless the ASIL discussion on media stuff dis-invites me as an ex-blogger, I will plan to comment there in April on why I have decided to drop it for the present time.

Two things in anticipation of that. First, I think group blogs like Opinio Juris or Balkinization or VC are a better thing for people ostensibly blogging in professional areas like law - the group nature of the blog tends to keep people like me and our dilettantish propensities in check, tends to keep people like me more focused on the topic at hand.

Second, I have been privileged to have some of the journalism world's best editors over the years - John Ryle and various of his colleagues at the TLS, Steve Wasserman at the LA Times Book Review, Scott Malcomson at the NYT, Tod Lindberg at Policy Review, Gerry Marzorati then at Harper's, Richard Starr at the Weekly Standard, plus some close writer friends such as David Rieff (also occasional collaborator) - and several of them, whom I won't name but have enormous respect for, have said more or less the same thing, viz, that blogging makes me a worse writer. I admire the folks at Balkinization and Opinio Juris and Volokh Con who seem to be able to switch effortlessly between blogging and regular publication writing, but as my writer friends and editors tell me, in my case it seems to lead to flabby writing that is brief and unargued when it should be long and detailed, and long and chatty when it should be brief and tough.

I don't know why that is, except that I find as a matter of prose that the blog plays to my worst temptations to instant publishing gratification and lack of re-write. I know that is not true for many fine law bloggers, but it does indeed tend to be true of me.

So I am going to take a little break from actual blogging, use this blog for posting up stuff that I am actually publishing, and see if I can recover both my prose style and my general sense of rewrite discipline. Perhaps when I return, I will look to join a group blog that can help keep my dissolute tendencies in line. As one friend said, "Ken, I used to think of you as a polymath [which was entirely too generous of him but who am I to dispute that?], but to judge by your blog, I think you've slid from polymath to dilettante." Hmm.)

Amazon prime is convenient

... and highly addictive. On the one hand, I find myself buying books that I actually do need but never quite got around to pushing the one click button because I was deterred by the shipping price, and trying to figure out the shipping options. Jean-Marie signed up for the flat rate prime program, and I do find myself clicking the button more. Truth is, though, I don't have time or interest in shopping in a store for anything this Christmas that I can buy online. When I look at the grocery section on Amazon and realize that cool coffee and chocolate and that kind of goo-gah can be bought and have delivered with no additional pain or expense - well, I'm going online for everything I possibly can this year.

Larry Solum gives thanks for Rogers Albritton, and so do I

Larry Solum, over at Legal Theory Blog, gives thanks by remembering Rogers Albritton. Here. I don't think Larry will mind if I just repost the whole thing:

This Thanksgiving, I have been thinking about Rogers Albritton--the great Wittgensteinian philosopher and the single most significant influence on my intellectual development. I took every class that Albritton offered at UCLA in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Albritton taught the value of clarity, and of not giving up on a problem no matter how long it took. In the past few weeks, I've been working on a paper entitled "Semantic Originalism." The roots of the paper are in a conversation that I had with Albritton more than twenty-five years ago. Albritton told me to read Paul Grice, and since that conversation I've returned to Grice's work, again and again, in a long, slow, and painful effort to understand how laws mean. A lesson that Albritton taught and I have only recently begun to appreciate is that some work cannot be done in a week, a month, a year, or even a decade.
Thank you Rogers.

Let me echo Larry's sentiments. Rogers was also my professor, and I have never stopped thinking about things he taught me, and the method he taught me, in areas ranging from metaphysics to epistemology to ethics to religion. I have thought especially hard on his lectures on the philosophy of religion across the last twenty five years. I raise them in discussions with people a lot - most recently, with a friend here in DC talking about how she, a nominal Catholic, and her husband, a nominal Jew, planned to raise their some-day un-nominal children. I thought about it when posting to this blog about the future of Buddhism a couple of weeks ago.

Apart from the substance - well, what Larry says, the idea that some things require a long, long time to think about. This sometimes makes things tough from a career standpoint - I suppose I should be cranking out books by now, and I am working on doing that. But one thing that training from Rogers, and also from Philippa Foot, instilled in me was a sense that short articles are better vehicles for thinking, most of the time, than long books - and that in writing conceptually difficult things, to tie oneself to a text was a good idea. It is hard for me to conceptualize whole books; likewise my fondness for the substantive review essay, tied to a text or set of texts. I don't suppose it looks like intellectual progress; but in my case at least, I feel on surer ground intellectually.

I was blessed with having a whole host of world class intellectuals in my undergraduate education at UCLA, in approximately the same years as Larry - we were classmates and friends together in the philosophy department there. Rogers, Philippa Foot, Herbert Morris, David Rapoport (with whom I am still active in the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence, of which he is the editor), Robert Brenner; and, passing through, Rosalind Hursthouse, Joshua Cohen, David Pears, and many others. It was a model of what a public university could offer in the way of genuinely world class intellectual life. The conversations with Rogers covered so much ground and would go on for hours after class. They were some of the great intellectual experiences of my life, and I wish that every undergraduate could have that kind of experience.

(ps. More from Larry here, on Rogers and also on his classes with Josh Cohen. And thanks Larry for the link!)

My Day-Light light box

I tend toward seasonal slumps during winter, so this year I took my psychiatrist brother's advice and got a light box - Day Light, from Uplift Technologies, which I bought through Amazon. Since it is sunny and 72 degrees out today on Thanksgiving, I'm not so sure I need it, but I have been faithfully using it each morning. Will it help? I'm sure I would also feel much better in the winter if I exercised twice as much. But heck, I'll take placebo effects as well as real ones. And in any case, on low power it is a fine desk working light. It sits on stilts directly over my computer monitor and shines down beneficently upon me. It wasn't cheap, at $179, but I'm willing to give it a shot.

End of daylight savings time ... time to perform the New Fire Ceremony?

The weekend when daylight savings ends is, almost by definition, the worst weekend of the entire year. The light will go out forever. The sun will never be seen again. By five o'clock, and then four o'clock, darkness will be upon the face of the deep.

(I think this year I am going to buy a light box and sit in front of it. Any suggestions on time and effectiveness and where to get it? Do they really help?)

Thinking it over carefully, I have decided the Aztecs were right. Unless we perform the New Fire Ceremony, and rip out the heart of a specially chosen sacrificial victim, light a new fire in his/her chest cavity so to relight all the fires in the world, the sun will fail to rise and we will be left in darkness for all eternity.

Back from Antigua, Guatemala

I got back last night from Guatemala, where I was attending the MDLF media forum and also a board meeting. I want publicly to thank Jose Ruben Zamora, editor of El Periodico newspaper, and a longtime client of MDLF, for the extraordinary kindnesses he and his staff showed to all the participants in the media forum, who came from around the world to discuss conditions of independent journalism.

The last night of the conference, El Periodico hosted a wonderful reception, concert, and dinner in Antigua. An excellent string quartet, the Guatemalan Contemporary Quartet, played for the guests. They did some 19th century Guatemalan music, some contemporary pieces by the cellist in the group, and an 18th century classical piece. It was lovely, and then they followed that up by an unusual film, with them playing the soundtrack on the film, but then accompanying the soundtrack with additional tracks live on stage. The film covered a number of highland Guatemalan scenes, places I have been in the past but haven't seen in many years - Sacatepequez, for example. That was followed by a terrific dinner, in which I had very interesting conversations with journalists from Bolivia and Columbia. And I am pleased to say that they complimented me on my Spanish! - not the pronunciation, to be sure, but my "excelencia de expresion." Quite so, I'm sure.

I came back with gifts for the girls. Black jade earrings for Jean-Marie, and a large selection of magazines and newspapers in Spanish to use with her classes - she teaches high school boys at St Alban's in DC, so I figured she couldn't go wrong with sports and sex - Maxim in Spanish. A necklace for Renee, but I had spent so much money on her birthday - Daddy compensation for missing her 15th birthday last week - that I thought I really shouldn't. (The vintage designer dress from 1960 and the 1972 onesie - well, it okay, she doesn't really need college - I understood all of a sudden exactly what it must be like to be a divorced Dad trying to dump material love on a teenage kid.) And coffee - vast quantities of Antigua coffee and coffee from Jose Ruben's coffee farm. Even I, coffee novice, could taste how low acid and sweet it is. Roasted at a little place in Antigua, it is great.

Feeling guilty about going to bed while my daughter is still doing homework at 11:30 pm

I feel like going to bed. It's past eleven pm, on a Wednesday night, I have to teach classes tomorrow morning, and anyway, I'm tired. But I am sitting here still working away because my kid is still slaving away down at her desk in the basement. I feel like there's something wrong with my quitting work before she does. Especially when she gets up earlier than I do. Call it my expression of solidarity. Actually, it's just guilt. Should I feel guilty about knocking off before she does?

Oh well, it has enabled me to make much more progress on my UN-US relations manuscript. And I'm about a thousand words into a short, just-the-facts review of Judge Posner's three books for Rowman and Littlefield on counterterrorism - I'm going to see if the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence would like to run it at 1200 words.

And here's the current draft table of contents for my very short UN essay book (25-30,000 words) in the same Rowman and Littlefield series as Judge Posner's (all very much subject to revision, as it's very possible I might change my mind about this whole structure and do something more conventional) (also, if someone could tell me the Latin for perpetual immobility, that would be useful):

The Two Faces of Multilateralism:
United States-United Nations Relations after the Bush Administration

Contents

1
After the Bush administration

2
The UN of Multilateralism

3
The UN of Insecurity and Perpetue Inmobile

4
The UN of Anti-Americanism

5
The UN of Values and Anti-Values

6
The UN of Incompetence, Rent-seeking, Theft, and Anti-Reform

7
The Leveraged Buyout of the UN of Competence

8
The UN of Thankless Tasks

9
The UN of Global Governance

10
A reversion to the multilateral mean?

Notes
Appendices
Acknowledgements
Index

Politics and Prose bookstore on a Sunday afternoon

Where I just spent, um, 160 dollars on books. Most of them were supersale books, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok, ok. Now I am sitting in the coffeeshop, looking around at my fellow aging boomers, on our laptops, feeling very coffeehouse like. Anyone with any sense and the functional hips and knees would be outside on a bike on a day as nice as this. We feel so gentle, genteel, birkesnstoccky and ... old. We're all people, one way or another, in the "helping professions." We're practicing for our French class in one corner, and drafting a document for the senior nursing staff of the nursing facility, describing how we're going to reduce falls and mistaken meds rates, in another. We're virtuous and we drink expensive coffee, dress schlumpy and badly, but in an understated way. I've fallen into a David Brooks' comic sociology! Upstairs in the bookstore, the Utne Reader (God, it still exists?!) had a cover article on how baby boomers, as elders, can save the world ... again! I myself wasn't aware we had saved it the first time around.

I came to pick up some books for my kid's 15th birthday at the end of the month. I'm not quite sure why - her old school, by dint of so much busywork due the next morning, pretty much drove out of her any desire to read anything not absolutely required. She doesn't read, she watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer - my goodness, how we've fallen from a family that for many years really didn't watch TV or DVDs to one that can't get by without them; and, truth, truth, truth, I'm happy to accompany her, because reading is even less social with your offspring than watching Buffy. But she does tend to read teen girl angst novels once in a while, so I thought I'd get her a novel reviewed in the New York Times, Jenny Downham's Before I Die. Sixteen year old girl dying of leukemia, review said it was pretty funny, and even if it's not, it should have the requisite adolescent girl angst. It could be good. Anyway, it's teen rather than adult fiction, so can't be that demanding a read. Naturally it wasn't yet in bookstores, so I overcompensated and bought things for ... me!

Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms; Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It; Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories, Olivier Roy's new book on Islam in Europe, and so much more!

Piano music I like while reading counterterrorism books

... while re-reading (blue pen, red pen, yellow highlighter, and post-it plastic tabs) Jack Goldsmith's utterly engaging The Terrorism Presidency and Judge Richard A. Posner's sober and sobering Countering Terrorism:

Domenico Scarlatti, Keyboard Sonatas, 1685-1757 (Mikhail Pletnev, piano). Like a broken string of pearls scattering across a polished floor, as I seem to remember one Scarlatti contemporary describing them.

Handel, Suites for Keyboard (Keith Jarrett, piano). This is by far my favorite album of piano music, ever, I think. Partly it is the music - I have the Ur-text editions and often play along with the bass line on my cello, to the household's great unhappiness. But it is also Keith Jarrett's delicate, moving without ever getting schmaltzy, reading of the pieces. I've listened to the CD hundreds of times.

New York, early fall

There is, all said and done, one capital of everything.

It also happens to have the best tasting water - straight from the tap - compared to any bottled water I have ever tasted. Is it bottled by some enterprising soul and sold? I would buy it.

I'm only here 24 hours, for meetings of the nonprofit development fund whose board I chair. And I have other work that has to be done. No time to play!

Sixteen years

... of marriage. Today is Jean-Marie's and my sixteenth wedding anniversary. They have been sixteen very happy years, spanning our days in New York City and Washington DC. One of these days - well, one of these anniversaries - I'll post something about our wedding day. But for now, let me just say thanks, as Jean-Marie and I do every year at this time, to Aryeh and Yvette Neier for their extraordinary generosity all those many years ago in offering their home in the Village for the wedding ceremony. They served as something like informal godparents in the whole process. Special thanks to Yvette, among so many, many things, for securing the judge to perform the ceremony and an announcement in the Times above the fold. Aryeh, for his part, performed the invaluable service of introducing Jean-Marie and me in the first place and, as I now observe in retrospect, it was no accident.

If I had four daughters and were naming them ...

This exceedingly goofy thought arose out of listening to my daughter and her friend talk about where their names came from (grandmothers in each case). Well. If I had four daughters - and this is assuming that my wife had no say in the matter, meaning this is alternative universes, possible worlds stuff - I would name them:

Sarabande (Sara)
Chaconne (Chaca?)
Allemande (Allie)
Giga (Gigi)

Daughter and friend told me this was one of the worst child-naming schemes anyone on the whole planet had ever dreamed up. Quite possibly so. I'm going to take a break and practice the cello. It is almost 8:00 pm and still feels like a steambath outside in DC today. I couldn't even get myself to go to the gym, which was not good at all. Then I'll suggest to the girls and my wife that we watch something sort of scary ... the 1950s version of ... Village of the Damned.

(Update. Renee added later on ... and if you had a fifth girl, you'd probably want to name her ... Tarantella (Tara). Hmm ...)

What would Bart do? And the Baroque violin music of Nicola Matteis

The Baroque violin music of Nicola Matteis (b Naples ?, d London? 1714? Although not much is known about his birth and death, don't feel too badly for him - he came from Italy, married a rich widow in London and retired wealthy from the music scene, which is why not so much is known) is mostly virtuosic and pretty, rather than deep and beautiful. Ornamental and diverting, not profound. On the other hand, the second movement of the suite in A major, Book IV, Nos. 1-11, the 2 minute long Andamento con divisione is so sweet without being overwhelming that it just stops me on the album until I've played it three or four times in a row. There's something about the ostinato in three - very hard to explain except that I can play it over and over. (The Arcadian Academy, on Harmonia Mundi, here.)

Meanwhile, I am sitting here on a Saturday morning deep in the midst of writing my TLS review essay of ... the Simpsons Movie. Knowing that I will be launching something that, although unlikely to encounter too many fanatics among the readers of the TLS, nonetheless will be likely scrutinized at some point by some hard core fan, so I have been online making sure the details are right.

My review is filled with plot spoilers, I'm afraid. Worse, I am committing the (venal) sin of doing a serious review of a fun and funny summer movie, a cartoon no less. I am pairing it with a review of my colleague Angela J. Davis's new, brilliant book on the overwheening power of prosecutors in America, Arbitrary Justice (Oxford UP 2007). I should have included this in my reading post, earlier, but didn't because I knew I'd be reviewing the book - this book is must-reading for anyone trying to understand what has gone so dreadfully wrong with street-level American justice. As regular readers of this blog know, as some sort of libertarian conservative, I am willing to defend many institutions and policies in America that progressives find indefensible - the war on terror, the war in Iraq, not infrequently the Bush administration - but the American criminal justice system is not one of them, and that fundamentally for the reasons Professor Davis says.

Combining the Simpsons and Professor Davis might turn out to be a bad idea, from the craft of review writing point of view - downmarketing Professor Davis's intellectual and legal policy tour de force while making the Simpson out to be more than it is. But while watching and laughing my way through the movie, I kept being struck by the thought: that T-shirt I used to see in the 90s, "What Would Bart Do?" (checking Google, I see you could get the slogan on a thong, too) today should be replaced with "What Would They Do To Bart?"

The latter not as cute and catchy as the former, granted. But in today's world of apparently unconstrained prosecutorial power, possibly more relevant. Godalmighty, what do you say about someone sentenced ten years for consensual oral sex with a fifteen year when he was seventeen and in high school in Georgia - finally, finally overturned by a judge after pretty much every other appeal had been exhausted - except that he was pursued by a crazed and unaccountable prosecutor? And then the butt swatting thirteen year old middle schoolers pursued by a mad, unaccountable, self-righteous prosecutor in Oregon on felony sexual assault charges designed to put the boys, as he said in interviews, on the sexual offenders register for child molesters and pedophiles for the rest of their lives. Life imitates a Simpsons cartoon - without necessarily the happy cartoon endings.

The email said ...

"Professor Anderson, really, any excuse to put up pictures of Dominique Sanda ..."

Well, yes. Of course.

***
(PS. Let me bring up this comment into the post. I think, per Anon's comment, that had I met, or even seen, Dominique Sanda even once in the early 1980s - before, of course, Aryeh Neier introduced my beloved Jean-Marie and me - I would not have been able to concentrate for the rest of the decade.)

Anonymous said...
It's not bragging, really, but during one stay in Paris, about 20 years ago (everything seems to be 20 years ago) I met with this lady three times on the same day. Of course, I was the only one of the two to notice...Is my comment excuse enough for another photo ? By the way, I am writing you from Spain. ¡Bravo! for your article in LIBROS.

Okay, I am on the lookout for another photo of Sanda, from about the same period of late 70s-early 80s.

Also, you can never, ever go wrong on this blog praising my efforts in Spanish, such as they are, and especially my Fukuyama piece in the the Revista de Libros, even if it was Luis Gago's (really, really superb) translation, not mine.

***
Someone else dropped me a note asking, as a kind of reference point, what I thought some of the really good movies are - given that I don't take movies seriously as a source of Truth or Beauty or, god knows, Politics.

(Thinking about movies and politics. I'm never quite sure how to respond, given the exquisitely calibrated and easily offended sensibilities of many of my law students, what to say when one of them, in a class on international business transactions or something, proceeds to cite, say, that 2006 film Lord of War as a primer on the weapons trade. And really and sincerely means it. Actually, that one is easy; I used to be the director of HRW's arms division, and spent lots and lots of time looking at light weapons and small arms global trade, so I have politically correct credentials to suggest that the film doesn't quite get it right. Or that recent movie on the blood diamonds trade - actually, the HRW work touched on that too. Anyway, I would say that the current generation of students has absorbed into their beings great strides forward in not getting their politics from movies, especially compared to my boomer generation - my daughter's generation is one step even further along, thinking quite correctly that if it is silly to get one's politics from actors and musicians, well, equally so from teachers and professors, especially if they teach in the humanities - but still not strides quite great enough.)

Well. I'll put up a post one of these days with a list of Truly Excellent movies. In the meantime, think sex, violence, sci-fi.

Busting a Bodum coffee press; and a note on some DVDs at home

Coffee. I've only taken up drinking coffee, decaf or regular, in the last year, a residual non-habit from my long lapsed days as Mormon. So I still have a lot to learn about making coffee. I have (had, that is) a medium size Bodum glass coffee press. This morning I put in a lot of coffee - having taken up this particular vice with particular gusto - and poured in hot but not boiling water. Filled it up to the top, saw that not all the coffee had mixed with the water, so I stirred it with a long spoon. I guess I must have tapped or something on the glass, but all of a sudden the glass broke, and coffee and grounds spewed across half the kitchen. A big mess to clean up; thank you Jean-Marie for helping. I'm thinking that although the water was at the correct temperature, I poured it in too fast, heating up the glass to quickly, stressing it. Then when I stirred with the spoon and probably tapped the glass from the inside - kaboom!

I think that as I get older I've started to prefer darker, more bitter flavors, like coffee (I know, it is supposed to be sweet in its own way, but not sweet like orange soda). I seem to like coffee very strong, so I let it steep a long time in the Bodum, which is possibly a mistake and makes it bitter, I'm not sure. I also like the coffee a little thick and muddy, so I grind the beans very fine. For some reason, when hot I don't especially like it black, but with some milk and even better, sugar (although one reason I decided to try coffee was that I thought it would be Slimming). Cold though, over ice, I like it best straight black and no milk or sugar. I even make my own espresso ice cubes!

***

Movies. The video store in our neighborhood is closing, and I've been scooping up some used videos on sale - so has Jean-Marie. She picked up a lovely little French film that I haven't seen since it first came out when I was at UCLA, Eric Rohmer's Pauline at the Beach. I wasn't sure my fourteen year old would like it - possibly too much sex - but in fact she really liked it. I think it is because Pauline, who is fifteen in the film, is the most down to earth, straightforward of the whole little ensemble.

We then tried a movie I remembered with extraordinarily fond memories from when it first came out in the early 1980s, another French art film, Voyage en Douce, with Dominique Sanda and Geraldine Chaplin as two women engaged in endlessly sexual fantasies as they drove around Provence looking for a summer house. I couldn't remember it all that well - just that I had worshipped it and saw it a bunch of times when it came out, in art movie houses in Santa Monica. I had two distinct and one indistinct memory of it - an indistinct memory of the gorgeous light and airy Provence countryside. But truth is, as a California kid who hadn't really traveled much, for me that mostly meant that it reminded me of California. It looked like home to me, not some exotic place.

The two distinct memories? Well, first off, Dominique Sanda, who sometimes seems to me the most beautiful woman I have ever seen - partly her looks, but also the extraordinary way she carries herself, her expressions. I hadn't forgotten that. And the second, the featured Beethoven piano bagatelle (op. 126) - a bagatelle that, after seeing the film (twice in quick succession) my older brother, now psychiatrist, but then research psych grad student and sometime actor, put down his usual violin, went back to the piano, and learned it, and could play it extraordinarily well for an amateur pianist. But in Mormon church services, which sometimes have someone, play an instrument or a song, as part of the worship but also as part of providing a place to perform in public - well, Richard several times performed that piece, and I kept thinking, hmm, what he associates with this piece is not exactly Jesus, it's Dominique Sanda with her clothes off. I've never forgotten the bagatelle, either.

Anyway, I had worries when I switched it on last night that I would be horribly embarrassed by a seventies movie throwback - after all, I can't stand art films these days, haven't been able to since - I don't know, more or less since I got married, why is that? - and that Jean-Marie would hate it since, although in theory she appreciates Good Cinema and Film-as-Art, in actual practice, on an individual, discrete basis she can't stand art films and always falls asleep. I had this fear that I would want to turn off the soundtrack and just stare at Sanda.

Well, in the event, Jean-Marie rather liked it, I still thought it was okay, but Renee found it all too embarrassing - not so overtly sexual, but still too much sex. So we switched over to ... Harrison Ford in Air Force One.

(I've stuck some photos of Sanda above - pictures from around the time of this film, 1980.)

Q: What does the Simpsons Movie have to do with the TLS?

A: Nothing to speak of - except that I am writing the TLS review! Renee and I are about to go off and see it, my beloved wife Jean-Marie having bowed out. Also, if you are not a TLS subscriber, you should be ... go here.

(Update. Alas, the review I wrote of the Simpsons wound up mixing up, in all the wrong ways, the summer comedy movie review with a serious discussion of out of control prosecutors engaged in all sorts of stuff that would work well in a Simpsons episode but in fact is tragic in real life - the mad, wicked prosecutor in Oregon, for example, and his butt swatting sexual assault charges. It made for an illmixed review, unfortunately, and I agree with the TLS editor that it couldn't really run. Too bad, but the editor is right. I may run some bits of the review here, but it really wasn't ready for prime time publication, as it were. It's actually quit helpful to have editors who will tell you that, straight out.)