Fish for Friday

For public-relations conscious football, it is, to say the least, a bad situation: three players knocked out of a game in the first quarter with concussions and two more out later from vicious hits, alleged bounties paid to players for knocking out the other team's stars, an entire coaching staff suspended for the rest of the season and all of next year.

Becoming too contrary?

In Frank Rich's October 27 review of Brian Kellow's new biography (A Life in the Dark) of movie critic Pauline Kael (1919-2001) ("Roaring at the Screen with Pauline Kael"), he refers to Kael's "self-dramatizing contrarianism" and writes that she should have gotten out while the getting was good, before she would "invariably flame out in...self-parody [and] first-person megalomania."
    Self-conscious about my own recent possibly excessive contrariness (see, for example, "What was that about Halloween?"), I have to stop to wonder and consider whether I'm in danger of turning into a grumpy old man, as an old friend observes with a wink and a smile. Clues that this might be so include an occasional pervading sense of unease—not entirely relieved by going back, often several times, to try to reduce a post's rough edges—and the wish that I hadn't posted something or shared it to Facebook before I'd done the sanding.
    Too late, too late.
    For those particular posts, anyway, but hopefully not for myself.

The growing denomination "None"

Heartening news from Frank Rich's op-ed piece ("The Culture Warriors Get Laid Off") in yesterday's New York Times¹:

The latest American Religious Identification Survey, published last week, found that most faiths have lost ground since 1990 and that the fastest-growing religious choice is “None,” up from 8 percent to 15 percent (which makes it larger than all denominations except Roman Catholics and Baptists). Another highly regarded poll, the General Social Survey, had an even more startling finding in its preliminary 2008 data released this month: Twice as many Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in the scientific community as do in organized religion. How the almighty has fallen: organized religion is in a dead heat with banks and financial institutions on the confidence scale.
    This, too, is a replay of the Great Depression. “One might have expected that in such a crisis great numbers of these people would have turned to the consolations of and inspirations of religion,” wrote Frederick Lewis Allen in “Since Yesterday,” his history of the 1930s published in 1940. But that did not happen: “The long slow retreat of the churches into less and less significance in the life of the country, and even in the lives of the majority of their members, continued almost unabated.”
    The new American faith, Allen wrote, was the “secular religion of social consciousness.” It took the form of campaigns for economic and social justice — as exemplified by the New Deal and those movements that challenged it from both the left and the right. It’s too early in our crisis and too early in the new administration to know whether this decade will so closely replicate the 1930s, but so far Obama has far more moral authority than any religious leader in America with the possible exception of his sometime ally, the Rev. Rick Warren.

I'm of course cavalier in calling the decline in church affiliation "heartening." But my regular readers will know why I say this. For example, just this morning on NPR, I was listening to a commentary about the need for Christians and Muslims to cooperate to further human rights. True enough that cooperation would be nice, but the commentary might more usefully have included some information about how both religions stand in the way of various human rights. Christians in the way of rights for gays, for example. Muslims in the way of rights for women. And on and on.
    As Sam Harris rightly recommended in his 2004 book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, progress demands that religion not be given a free pass when it comes to criticism.
_______________

1. It has come to my attention that columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. has also written about these findings, in his syndicated article, "Wake-Up Call for Organized Religion," in the Miami (FL) Herald, March 14, 2009.
       Pitts allows that "God and religion are not synonymous." I agree; god doesn't exist, religion does.

A reverse slam dump?

Last Tuesday, for the sake of continuing political entertainment, I expressed the hope that vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin not be dumped but remain on the ticket through Election Day. Indeed, her stand-up routine Thursday night (i.e., she didn't fall off the stage) allayed my apprehension, and we’ve since been treated to her statement, after reading in the paper that McCain had decided to give up Michigan, that she wants to go there and try to turn the tide, and to her statement, reported this morning, that Obama has palled around with terrorists.

The front page where I read about the alleged palling around also informed me that in Alamance County, North Carolina, 5,203 new voters have registered since last November 1, and Democratic registrations have outnumbered Republican 2,660 to 679. The proximity of the two news items of course made me wonder whether Palin had heard the news from Alamance County and hoped to play Moses here too.

But in this morning’s New York Times, op-ed columnist Frank Rich, in his column, “Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain,” suggests that nevertheless Palin may very well be “dumped”—but not in the way you may be thinking.

After enumerating a number of particulars about “Mr. Past, poor old John McCain,” Rich asks,

So how can a desperate G.O.P. save itself? As McCain continues to fade into incoherence and irrelevance, the last hope is that he’ll come up with some new game-changing stunt to match his initial pick of Palin or his ill-fated campaign “suspension.” Until Thursday night, more than a few Republicans were fantasizing that his final Hail Mary pass would be to ditch Palin so she can “spend more time” with her ever-growing family. But the debate reminded Republicans once again that it’s Palin, not McCain, who is their last hope for victory.

You have to wonder how long it will be before they plead with him to think of his health, get out of the way and pull the ultimate stunt of flipping the ticket. Palin, we can be certain, wouldn’t even blink.

The “wouldn't even blink” was a reference to earlier paragraphs about how Palin had responded to Gwen Ifill’s question how the two vice presidential candidates would govern “if the worst happened” and the president died in office. Without hesitating or even blinking, Palin said “that as a ‘maverick’ she’d go her own way.”

I think she winked, though.

In the woods

My wife and our poodle and I took a long walk in the nearby woods yesterday. We walked through glorious fall foliage, up and down some fairly rugged, rocky hills, along a wild-enough creek to provide many sounds of falling water and continual picturesque vistas. Though at no moment did I experience one of those "surpassing feelings,"¹ the walk restored in me a sense of calm and balance. And I needed that.

Ironically, the way this country is "in the woods" politically now is anything but calm and balanced.

In his New York Times op-ed piece Friday ("Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence"),Thomas L. Friedman wrote:

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip² about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry – a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service – and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.

...if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq – and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate – it means our country has become a banana republic.

And in today's New York Times ("Throw the Truthiness Bums Out"), Frank Rich writes:

While lying politicians and hyperbolic negative TV campaign ads are American staples, the artificial realities created this year are on a scale worthy of Disney, if not Stalin. In the campaign’s final stretch, Congress and President Bush passed with great fanfare a new law to erect a 700-mile border fence to keep out rampaging Mexican immigrants, but guaranteed no money to actually build it. Rush Limbaugh tried to persuade his devoted audience that Michael J. Fox had exaggerated his Parkinson’s symptoms in an ad for candidates who support stem-cell research purely as an act.

In a class by itself is the president’s down-to-the-wire effort to brand his party as the defender of “traditional” marriage even as the same-sex scandals of conservative leaders on and off Capitol Hill make “La Cage aux Folles” look like “The Sound of Music.” Just in recent days, the Rev. Ted Haggard, a favored Bush spiritual adviser and visitor to the Oval Office (if not the Lincoln Bedroom), resigned as leader of the National Association of Evangelicals after accusations that he patronized a male prostitute, and the Talking Points Memo blog broke the story of the Republican Party taking money from a gay-porn distributor whose stars include active-duty soldiers. (A film version of Mrs. Cheney’s "Sisters," alas, still awaits. [Sisters is an out-of-print lesbian sex novel by the wife of "vice president" Dick Cheenie.])

As I said, American politics is the cheapest entertainment going, but it's not pretty or funny or fun³.
_________________

1. My post about a "God experience" in my back yard.
2. But why would the hapless Kerry joke [a verb] about this in the first place? Pathetic. When he read my post about Bush jokes not being funny, he obviously didn't get it.
3. My first post about Kerry's "joke."