Stromata Blog

Denvention Three?

Denver hosted the Third World Science Fiction Convention, in 1941, then waited forty years for Denvention Two. Last weekend at Midwestcon, after many months of foreshadowing, Denver 2008 publicly began its quest for Denvention Three.

Bid chairman Kent Bloom was transplanted about a decade ago from Washington, D.C. to Colorado Springs, where he and his wife Mary Morman founded First Friday Fandom, sponsor SMOFCon 16 in 1998 and parent of the annual local con COSine. I’m not sure how long the idea of a Worldcon bid has been percolating in his mind. There are a lot of, er, “challenges” facing a Denver candidacy, and it would have been easy to put it off from year to year, waiting for the time to slowly, slowly ripen.

Compared to the cities already in the race, Chicago (I’m the Chicago bidcomm’s treasurer, so take that fact into account as you read this) and Columbus, Denver has one strong plus: Kent is far better known in fandom than the chieftains of the rival bids (Dave McCarty (no, not the baseball player) and Kim Williams (no, not the golfer), respectively) and has a much more substantial record of fanac. Balancing that are a number of minuses: It’s been a long while since Colorado fandom made much of a mark; the best known local fen aren’t visibly involved with the bid; the other bids have long head starts (which Kent denies gives them any real benefit; we’ll see); and, with voting (at L.A. Con IV) less than 14 months away, the Denver facilities remain unsettled. Kent has an option on the newly renovated Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver for his preferred dates (August 6–10, 2008), but when he first approached the adjacent Hyatt, he got a puzzled response: Wasn’t the 2008 World Science Fiction Convention already booked at the Hyatt Regency Chicago?

After having the site selection process explained to it, the Denver Hyatt now understands that it can compete with its sister Hyatts (Columbus’ HQ hotel is also in the chain) but isn’t sure that it wants to offer the kind of room rates that Worldcon goers are used to. There are, however, other nearby prospects. The Adam’s Mark, for instance, located four blocks from the Convention Center, is a bit bigger than the Hyatt (1,225 vs. 1,100 sleeping rooms) and has 130,000 square feet of function space.

For those who would like to hear the Denver spiel from its advocates’ mouths, there will be bid parties at this weekend’s Westercon and, naturally, at Interaction, followed, Kent assures me, by a torrent of subsequent outings (though, oddly enough, there doesn’t appear to be much overlap between the Denver and Chicago itineraries).

When WSFS abandoned the old Worldcon zone system, worriers like me feared that competitive races were doomed: Bidders would pick dates far in advance and squat on them. So far, that hasn’t been the case. Because of grandfathering and inertia, No-Zone didn’t really take hold until the 2006 selection. That year was vigorously contested, as was 2007, and 2008 clearly will be the same story. That’s a hopeful beginning, though my pessimism has yet to abate completely.

9/11 and Vietnam: The Clash of Lessons

Many liberals are upset, indeed “offended”, that President Bush last night harped on the lesson that he has drawn from the 9/11 attacks, to wit,

After September the 11th, I made a commitment to the American people: This nation will not wait to be attacked again. We will defend our freedom. We will take the fight to the enemy.

The objection raised against this sentiment by such parties as the New York Times editorial board is weirdly off-point: invocation of the left-wing myth that Saddam Hussein had no connection with al-Qa’eda and therefore ought to have been left to misrule Iraq in peace. Regardless of the merits of that contention, it amounts to fighting the last war. In the one being fought now, as the President observed, al-Qa’eda and its close allies are heavily engaged in Iraq and see that conflict as integral to their jihad against America and the West.

Our military reports that we have killed or captured hundreds of foreign fighters in Iraq who have come from Saudi Arabia and Syria, Iran, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, Libya and others. They are making common cause with criminal elements, Iraqi insurgents, and remnants of Saddam Hussein's regime who want to restore the old order. They fight because they know that the survival of their hateful ideology is at stake. They know that as freedom takes root in Iraq, it will inspire millions across the Middle East to claim their liberty, as well. And when the Middle East grows in democracy and prosperity and hope, the terrorists will lose their sponsors, lose their recruits, and lose their hopes for turning that region into a base for attacks on America and our allies around the world.

Some wonder whether Iraq is a central front in the war on terror. Among the terrorists, there is no debate. Hear the words of Osama Bin Laden: “This Third World War is raging” in Iraq. “The whole world is watching this war.” He says it will end in “victory and glory, or misery and humiliation.”

One could argue, of course, that Osama is mistaken about what al-Qa’eda is up to. He is, after all, rather out of touch in whatever troglodytic hideout he currently inhabits. But no one seriously argues that point. Instead, we are presented with the monumental absurdity that, because Saddam was “innocent”, terrorists in Iraq are entitled to immunity from American reprisals.

I doubt that even the NYT consciously takes such nonsense-on-stilts literally. Its criticism is better read as a temperamental revulsion against drawing any lessons at all from what Rep. Pelosi fatuously referred to as “the sacred ground of 9/11”. The terrible event is to be embalmed and interred, never analyzed in order to forestall a repetition.

That attitude isn’t surprising, because learning from 9/11 would mean unlearning what the Left took away from the sacred ground of Vietnam. The earlier war supposedly taught us that “taking the fight to the enemy” is futile, if not immoral. The Clinton Administration’s sluggish response to al-Qa’eda was consistent with that lesson. After Osama’s henchmen murdered 3,000 Americans, much of the Left remained reluctant to pursue them into distant Afghanistan. I suppose that hardly anybody now remembers Senator Biden’s outcry that dropping bombs on the Taliban made the United States look like a “high-tech bully” or the calls to put off military action until after Ramadan, a rather obvious prelude to waiting for the Greek Calends. Since then, there has been not a smidgeon of liberal enthusiasm for doing anything anywhere outside the borders of the United States. Within them, civil defense preparations are okay, particularly those that transfer large sums of money to Democratic city officials, so long as one remains properly “sensitive” to civil liberties and Moslem anxieties.

Liberals will inevitably continue to tilt the same way – always toward the least vigorous available option – and that tilt will drain energy from the War on Terror, so long as they live in thrall to their Vietnam schooling. It is therefore past time for a determined campaign of truth telling, much as one may dislike rehashing forty-year-old controversies.

It conceivably made sense c. 1970, when much about the Vietnamese situation was obscured in a journalistic and political haze, to think that American withdrawal from Indochina was the most prudent course of action. Now that we have the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the bases for that opinion were fallacious: The Vietnamese communists were not democratic nationalists seeking to bring colonial rule to an end. The Viet Cong did not represent an indigenous resistance to an oppressive regime in Saigon. The U.S. and ARVN forces did not lose the war on the ground. South Vietnam did not collapse from internal weakness; with modest American support, it could have staved off subjugation indefinitely. (I won’t spend time debating these points at this particular moment. Readers interested in delving into them may wish to start with Lewis Sorley’s A Better War.)

Following the passive course that, on the Left’s view, was the correct one in Vietnam would not, we can see in retrospect, have accomplished anything positive. It would only have handed control of Indochina to Hanoi ten years sooner, giving the North Vietnamese a precious decade in which to seek to expand further. Scorned though the “domino theory” is, can anyone seriously doubt that countries like Thailand and Malaysia would, at the very least, have had a worse time of it in the Seventies if a victorious, unblooded communist regime had reached their borders as early as 1965 or ’68?

Learning geopolitics from the Left’s version of Vietnam is as senseless as learning biology from Lysenko. In the middle of a war, it is dangerous, too.

The Religious “Grandfather Clause”

Bench Memos points out that the decisive vote in the Supreme Court’s two Ten Commandments cases was that of Justice Breyer, who applied a principle novel to First Amendment jurisprudence:

The particular factor that Breyer finds “determinative” in this case—but don’t jump to the foolish conclusion that anything similar might be determinative in any other case—is that “40 years passed in which the presence of this monument, legally speaking, went unchallenged.” By contrast, the Kentucky displays had a “short (and stormy) history.” And “a more contemporary state effort to focus attention upon a religious text is certainly likely to prove divisive in a way that this longstanding, pre-existing monument has not.”

My first reaction was as scoffing as Power Line’s:

Justice Breyer rests everything on the jackass test – the government can display the Ten Commandments on public property in your town unless one jackass decides, within an unspecified time period, to get sufficiently worked up about it. I suspect that this is all the invitation the jackasses of America will need to get worked up en masse.

On second thought, though, a rule “grandfathering” all existing public religious displays while forbidding the creation of new ones mightn’t be so terrible. It would eliminate tiresome challenges to the Pledge of Allegiance, military chaplains, prayers at the opening of legislative sessions, crosses on state and city crests, creches and menorahs in public parks, etc., etc. In return, believers would lose the right to set up new replicas of the Ten Commandments on public property or otherwise create new annoyances for the ACLU. As a bargain, that has its virtues. It would soothe a continuing source of civic irritation, prevent the eradication of religious symbols from the public square and do no harm to anyone’s faith. Think of it as a cease fire in place.

A truce wouldn’t be acceptable to secularist fanatics or to Christian grandstanders like former Judge Roy Moore and would be nonsense as Constitutional law. Therefore, unless four more Stephen Breyers are appointed to the High Court (a development that I do not advocate), it won’t come to pass. Nonetheless, I wish, at least semi-seriously, that it could.

The Mullarchy’s Calculation

Given the nature of the Iranian regime and the absence of neutral observers, I see no reason to think that last Friday’s presidential “election” was anything more than a charade, in which few voters took part and the outcome was dictated in advance by Ayatollah Khameini and his minions. (Vide Michael Ledeen’s account of the farcical first round of the pseudo-contest.) The only interesting point is that the mullarchy decided that it no longer needs a “moderate” front man. The ineffectual faux-reformer Mohammed Khatami will be succeeded by the Islamofascist mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is, incidentally, wanted for murder in Germany and Austria. There will be no more pretense that the government is split between hard-liners and figures open to accommodation with the rest of the world.

This decision presumably stems from the mullarchs’ evaluation of the willingness of the West to resist Iran’s development of nuclear weapons and provision of aid and comfort to terrorists. The reform façade was a necessary evil so long as the regime feared for its safety. It now evidently feels secure and confident, convinced that its enemies are too demoralized to do anything more than talk.

I’m not sure about the correctness of that calculation, but it is certainly understandable, particularly if the mullahs get their information from the elite Western media. If the giaours lack the will to run a prison camp (how the mullahs must laugh at Senator Durbin’s concept of “torture”), they must be terrified of the power of Allah. No more need to string them along by holding out hope of cooperation.

Because Americans pay almost no attention to political developments in other countries, we tend to forget that the rest of the world, especially that part of it that wishes us ill, keeps watch on what goes on here and takes the mood of American public opinion into account in reckoning what actions are dangerous or safe. That is the only rational basis for maneuver in the shadow of a hyperpower. Therefore, when President Bush dips in the polls and leading politicians compare Guantanamo Bay to Nazi death camps, it is natural for Tehran to suppose that it has wide latitude, that subventions to suicide bombers in Iraq have finally borne fruit, and that the Great Satan will soon submit to becoming the Great Dhimmi.

Meanwhile, I await the reaction of our liberal pundits to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s elevation. Perhaps their illusions about Iran will be shattered and they will see the necessity of disarming the mullahs, even if all of the possible ways to reach that end carry high costs and more than negligible risks. On the other hand, they may declare that the West has been too hostile to poor, misunderstood Iran, thereby “alienating” the “Iranian street”, whose affection now must be wooed through friendly gestures toward the new president. My cynical side already knows which to anticipate, but it’s still possible to hope for an advent of good sense. The mullarchs have based their calculations on believing what they read in the New York Times. So have plenty of other losers.

Further reading: Michael Ledeen, “Iran Votes, Again”

Manufacturing Malaise

On occasions I think that the Left has adopted vis-à-vis the Bush Administration a strategy resting on the same premise as that of the terrorists in Iraq: If we hold out long enough, the enemy will weary of the battle and go away. This modus operandi does not seek to win hearts and minds. In many ways it alienates waverers. But the aim is to win by forfeit, after the other team stops competing, so the lack of any program beyond negation of the incumbent regime is unimportant.

We can label this the “Vietnam Strategy”, after its one shining success. There the United States, undefeated on the battlefield and immensely stronger than its adversaries, lost the will to fight, because the contest had dragged on for too many years and had cost large, though far from catastrophic, quantities of treasure and blood. If you don’t instantly see the parallel between Howard Dean’s war plan and Ho Chi Minh’s, ponder how the Democratic Party has approached a selection of this year’s key issues:

• Social Security reform: Unyielding opposition to all proposals (except for a huge increase in marginal tax rates) to improve the program’s long-term financial condition, coupled with little effort to demonstrate the viability of the status quo

• The War on Terror: Incessant criticism of the conduct of the war, coupled with a complete absence of ideas for eliminating the terrorist threat

• The United Nations: Stubborn opposition to John Bolton’s nomination, coupled with insouciance toward the U.N.’s multiple and metastasizing scandals

• Taxes: Continuing resistance to making the EGTRRA tax cuts permanent, coupled with refusal to think about fundamental tax reform

And so on. This stance entails taking unpopular positions – e. g., that the enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay are being treated too harshly, that the United Nations is above serious reproach, that the estate tax should be left intact – and balances them with very few appealing ones. In brief, the Vietnam Strategy makes liberals in general and Democrats in particular look cynical, bitter and reactionary. Conservatives tried that tack for forty-some years before the Reagan Revolution. It didn’t work.

To listen to malaise-filled right-wing commentators recently, one might think that the only reason why it didn’t work was that the media weren’t on our side. By contrast, the MSM cheers for the Left and covers up its idiotic moments. Therefore, the gloomy forecast goes, the public will inevitably turn away from George W. Bush, despite having reelected him by a solid margin less than eight months ago.

What lies behind this discouraged attitude is easy to discern: Victory in the election didn’t lead instantly to legislative triumphs, just as the swift overthrow of the Iraqi Ba’athists didn’t lead to immediate tranquility. Democrats have enough legislative power to block most of the Administration’s agenda, just as Saddamites and jihadists have the capacity to set off bombs. Neither of them, however, has a path to augmenting its support and turning its minority into a majority. If conservatives in America and liberals in Iraq refuse to surrender, they can’t be beaten by purely negative tactics.

To say, don’t panic and keep pushing our program, whether or not we have to votes to overcome filibustering Dems, may sound a trifle Pollyannish, but it is simple realism. One of the least debatable political maxims is, You can’t beat somebody with nobody. Likewise, you can’t beat something with nothing. The Democrats are currently offering less than nothing. They can stir discontent, because public opinion would like to see progress and reflexively directs its dissatisfaction at the incumbents when none is forthcoming. Once an election rolls around, though, candidates who scream, All is rotten!, then have no concept of how to get rid of the rot, have an historical record of not doing well. The Vietnam Strategy worked once; it has failed many, many times. If it guides the Democratic Party for the next several years, the Right’s present malaise will be retrospectively comical.

The Moral Claims of Terrorists

Senator Dick Durbin (Idiotarian–Ill.) has issued an “apology” – long on tears and short on contrition – for comparing American interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to Nazis, Stalinists and the Khmer Rouge. The nub of his statement – “Some may believe that my remarks crossed the line. To them I extend my heartfelt apologies” – is bound to become a classic of its genre. Another “some”, I take it, believe that no line was crossed, and the Senator is not going to choose between those opinions. Maybe piping bad rock music into prisoners’ cells, dousing them with water in the middle of the night and making them look at photographs of 9/11 victims is indistinguishable from ripping out their fingernails, working them 14 hours a day on 1,000 calorie diets and occasionally killing a few to encourage the rest; or maybe not. Who is Dick to say?

Still, this is, I suppose, as close as he will come to confessing that his accusations were monstrous and absurd. It’s more than we will get from Harry Reid, his immediate superior in the Democratic Senate hierarchy, who yesterday declared, “The statements made by Senator Durbin speak for themselves. I stand by the statement he made. We are not going to discuss this any more.”

If one takes Senator Reid at face value, he squares or cubes his subordinate’s outrageousness. He “stands by” the statement that what the U.S. does at Camp X-Ray is as evil as what Pol Pot did in the Cambodian killing fields. So he is guilty of giving credence to a gross slander. Then, if he actually believes it to be true, he is guilty of keeping silent about atrocities: “We are not going to discuss this any more.”

Neither of these smearmongers is, of course, sincere. Their complaints about Guantanamo Bay are taunts, not reasoned analyses. The analog is the schoolboy’s, “Your momma wears combat boots!” Basically, they loath the Bush Administration and hurl mindless insults.

American conduct at Guantanamo has other critics, many less intemperate, but none, so far as I can see, much more rational. They begin their criticism by describing conditions at the camp, either accurately or not, and end there, taking it for granted that what they have depicted is inarguably inhumane. There is, however, no way to judge the “plight” of the detainees without first considering how men captured while fighting on behalf of terrorism ought to be treated. They certainly have some moral claims, as is shown by the fact that we don’t shoot them out of hand, burn them at the stake or throw them to ravening mobs to be stoned to death. How extensive are those claims, and how well, based on the information available, is the U.S. honoring them?

Let’s concentrate on interrogation, the topic that specifically evoked Senator Durbin’s wrath. There is a wide range of ways to seek information, from asking politely with a lawyer present to breaking on the wheel. At some point in between, questioning metamorphoses into torture.

In trying to ascertain that point, we should begin, I think, by asking how strong a right the interrogatee has to withhold the information sought. Assuming that the questioner’s aim is to prevent future terrorist attacks and disable the networks that carry them out, the answer must be, no right at all. If it is wrong, indeed evil, to terrorize innocent people, it is similarly wrong to abet such actions, and refusing to furnish data that would help stop them is a strong form of abetting. It seems self-evident that a terrorist abettor has only a weak moral claim to protection against steps whose goal is to bring to light what he has no right to keep secret. He cannot legitimately object to suffering discomfort, deprivation and a level of pain so long as he persists in his course of immoral conduct.

That does not mean that questioners have carte blanche to do whatever they like to him. A fundamental moral principle is that no one has the right to inflict pain, even mild degrees of pain, on another without a good and proportionate reason. The reason establishes the boundary between legitimate interrogation and torture. In this case, the rationale is the need for useful anti-terrorist information. Therefore, acts that serve other, unjustified ends, such as gratifying private sadism (as occurred at Abu Ghraib), are immoral. So are those that are disproportionate to their objective.

By those standards, Guantanamo doesn’t strike me as even a borderline case, much less an atrocious one. Many of those held there are high-ranking members of al-Qa’eda. There is no doubt that they know a great deal about the enemy’s tactics, policies and personnel. The methods employed to interrogate them aren’t namby-pamby, but they are not, according to all extant accounts, intolerably painful or permanently disabling. They appear to rely primarily on disorientation, confusion and demoralization rather than physical agony. When not being questioned, prisoners are treated humanely: well-fed, decently housed, allowed to communicate with the outside world and practice their religion. A couple of hundred have been set free after hearings; several have responded to that kindliness by taking up arms again.

If there is anything wrong with the Guantanamo prison regime, it is that it takes a middle class American standard of living as its base line and assumes that anything worse than that is coercive. We are probably several steps, if not a couple of leagues, away from making the lives of the captives miserable. A just and rational critic would perhaps denounce our military’s soft and indecisive treatment of men whose comrades in arms practice genuine torture and who don’t hide their desire for the deaths of tens of thousands of our countrymen.

After Andersen, KPMG?

As I write this, it isn’t known whether the Department of Justice will arrange for KPMG Peat Marwick to be indicted. It is known that the firm will have to grovel for any mercy that may be extended. Already the apologies and promises of future amendment flow copiously and abjectly. They may or may not be sufficient to avert another Andersen-like collapse. That will be decided not by what clients want but by whether the depth of humiliation and fervor of repentance satisfy federal lawyers and state accounting regulators.

As Andersen’s fate showed, the White Queen’s “sentence first, verdict later” is the rule for professional firms, and guilt by association is adequate grounds for capital punishment. Andersen was associated with Enron. KPMG’s fatal association is with a more nebulous wrongdoer: “illegal tax shelters”. By that phrase the DoJ’s publicists do not mean schemes that violate clear principles of tax law or that courts have condemned. They refer to complex financial transactions that, in the opinion of the IRS, lack economic substance and therefore are to be disregarded for tax purposes. There is usually room for argument. The parties to a carefully designed shelter typically buy or sell assets, borrow money and engage in other financial dealings that individually have tangible economic effects and collectively produce a large tax deduction. The question, often hard to resolve, is whether the flurry of transactions reflected real economic activity or was a sham undertaken for no purpose but the generation of tax benefits.

Various KPMG partners played leading roles in devising “shelters”, dubbed with acronyms like “FLIP” and “BLIPS” and “OPIS”, and touting them to clients. They backed up their sales pitches with tax opinions, which analyzed the applicable law and concluded that it supported the purported tax consequences. These opinions frequently had to delve into hazy areas of the law, including the definition of “economic substance” itself, where little light was shed by any available authority. The Justice Department’s criminal case against KPMG rests on the theory that these analyses were not good enough, that more acute reasoning would have revealed that the courts were not likely to rule in favor of the techniques and that a conscientious tax advisor could not recommend their use. (There are also, inevitably, “cover-up” allegations, which aren’t my subject here, though they give the appearance of being based on no more than the accused’s refusal to turn documents over to investigators until ordered by a judge and otherwise defending itself too vigorously.)

If KPMG was wrong about tax law, one might suppose that the government had a simple remedy: Disallow the claimed deductions, and let their validity be decided by the courts. That is how tax disputes are ordinarily handled. Since all of the taxpayers that adopted KPMG’s schemes were wealthy and sophisticated, the government could be confident that a few court victories would lead to the extinction of any shelter found to be truly illegal. What is the point, then, of invoking criminal sanctions against taxpayers’ advisors?

A useful comparative case is that of marketers of phony tax avoidance trusts for less-than-sophisticated individuals. The courts have repeatedly agreed with the IRS that these devices do not legitimately reduce tax liability, but the nature of the target market is such that legal defeats don’t hobble the sales pitches. The only way to put those shelters out of business is to send the promoters, whose persistence in the face of adverse court decisions evidences either bad faith or invincible stupidity, to prison.

Was KPMG similarly culpable? Its legal argumentation was good enough to attract clients with first-rate internal tax expertise and had not been disapproved by any court; to a great extent, it has not been judicially tested to this day. Yet the Justice Department intimates that the firm’s techniques were so clearly fraudulent that selling them was a crime – not just on the part of the individuals who did the promoting but of KPMG itself.

A successful prosecution of the firm is virtually unimaginable. Also unimaginable, though, is a successful future for it following an indictment. In effect, if the government proceeds with this case, it will create a new, incredibly vague crime by executive fiat and punish it without trial. This from an Administration that is continually accused of excessive solicitude for business interests!

DoJ lawyers may, I realize, disagree with my assessment of the strength of their case. Fine. They have a ready course of action that will penalize any actual criminal activity without risking injustice: Indict one of the individual partners who promoted KPMG’s products, and bring him to a speedy trial. After he is convicted, if he is, is the time to think about sanctions against the firm as an entity.

The government won’t follow that strategy for two reasons: First, it isn’t likely to succeed. Even if the defendant’s weighing of tax authorities is proved to be negligent, more than negligence is needed to establish that he committed a crime.

Second, the not particularly concealed purpose of the exercise is not the punish past wrongdoing but to shape future tax advice. The IRS has learned over the decades that the Gorghemghast-like Internal Revenue Code and its baroque trellises of regulations foster expertise in discovering and exploiting oddities in their structure. There are too many rules, and their interaction is too predictable. Slowly the IRS is giving up the effort to struggle for revenue on a loophole-by-loophole basis. Its new idea is to make tax inventiveness so risky that advisors will shy away from it and content themselves with routine compliance chores. Right now, tax law has a reputation as a place where really bright people congregate. The IRS’s implicit goal is to increase the proportion of dullards. Ideal would be a world in which “tax strategy” was an obsolete concept and no business or wealthy individual planned for tax consequences.

Such a world has obvious attractions for tax bureaucrats, for their word would be the final authority among risk-intolerant return preparers. It is possible, too, that a species of self-censorship would lead to higher revenues, as taxpayers faced with alternatives grew into the habit of automatically selecting the “safest” and most expensive.

I doubt, however, that self-interest will ever grow so weak as to let that IRS ideal come into existence. As the cadre of intellectual tax experts dwindles, tax schemes won’t disappear; they will simply become the province of lower quality specialists and of individual taxpayers’ amateur imaginations. Certainly they will remain just as great a nuisance as before.

The current anti-tax shelter strategy is on a par with spraying pesticide on roaches while leaving food scattered around the house. Getting rid of the pests requires eliminating favorable conditions for their proliferation. The conditions that favor tax scheming are high tax rates and complicated rules that try to micromanage the economy rather than produce revenue in a simple, consistent fashion. Until and unless Congress develops the will to clean up the Internal Revenue Code, hanging a hundred KPMG Peat Marwicks will accomplish nothing worthwhile.

The Last Word on Terri Schiavo

. . . is not in the autopsy report, which has nothing unexpected to say. Quite a few people who saw nothing wrong with killing Mrs. Schiavo seemed to be chuffed by the finding that she had no prospect of recovery, and some in the other camp have argued (unnecessarily, as we shall see) that the “persistent vegetative state” diagnosis is wrong. For myself, I find some consolation in the evidence that Terri’s brain damage deprived her of awareness of what was happening to her body, from which one can infer that she did not die in agony. Unhappily, we do not know how much consciousness she retained or how little consciousness it takes to feel pain, so no hopeful inference can be a certainty.

What is certain is that, whatever she felt after nourishment was taken away, she did not suffer before then. She did not have enough brain function to realize that she was helpless or to be distressed by her plight.

The emotional case for ending the lives of people like Terri Schiavo is an imaginative projection: If I were bedridden and infantile, I would be miserable, so death is a mercy. But imputing that thought to someone who doesn’t think is a version of the pathetic fallacy. The woman on the hospice bed didn’t care about the quality of her life. If we wish to take her wishes as the guide to her treatment, we must approach the matter from a different perspective.

Let’s start with a strictly secular view: The patient will not know or care, now and forever, what course of treatment is chosen. The people who will be affected are those who are close to her, and their feelings deserve consideration. In Mrs. Schiavo’s case, her parents and siblings wanted her to live. They were willing and able to provide care until she either recovered miraculously or passed away according to nature. On the other side was her husband. Other cases may be harder, but in this one the prolongation of his wife’s mortal existence entailed no palpable negatives: She was not a financial burden; he did not have to look after her; he had begun a new family and could have obtained a divorce in order to clean that slate. By no reasonable balancing could it be said that his moral interest in Terri’s death outweighed the other relatives’ desire for her continued life.

If one adds considerations of eternity, the conclusion is stronger. Let’s suppose that Mrs. Schiavo really did say, before her mishap, that she would want to be killed if she ever fell into a persistent vegetative state or facsimile thereof. Now, in the afterlife, she can evaluate that choice. If she is in Heaven, as one prays, she is unembarrassed by remembrance of physical debility; if elsewhere, everything is an embarrassment. On either assumption, do we think that she is pleased by events that gave such pain to her closest relatives?

“Living wills” are popular these days, but they would rest on a sounder foundation if their makers looked at death from afterward rather than only before. So long as anyone whom we care about would suffer from our passing, and no one, including our then-selves, would be intolerably burdened by the opposite, what right have we to inflict pain by choosing to die? Why do people who denounce selfishness in economic transactions make it the lodestar of this aspect of our relations with others?

My intention is not, however, to claim a last word for myself on these difficult questions. That I wish to leave to Paul McHugh, a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, who writes in the current issue of Commentary about “Annihilating Terri Schiavo” [N. B.: Link will vanish when the next issue is posted.]

Conspicuously missing from the chorus of voices arguing over the meaning and implications of the Schiavo case have been the views of a class of people with a uniquely relevant body of experience and insight: namely, the doctors and nurses who customarily provide care to patients like Terri Schiavo. As a result, few people appear to have grasped that the way she died was most unusual. That, instead, it has been widely understood to be not only a proper but also a perfectly commonsensical way to die, a way approved of by most doctors and nurses, can only be explained by a deep change that has taken place over the last decades in our thinking about how to care for the helpless and the disabled among us. . . .

Terri Schiavo was examined by qualified neurologists. Most of them concluded that she fit into the rather amorphous group of severely brain-injured patients defined as being in a “persistent vegetative state” (PVS). This diagnostic category encompasses individuals with cerebral diseases of various kinds who, though only dimly wakeful, retain the life-sustaining functions of respiration, blood circulation, and metabolic integrity. . . .

The neurologists who coined the diagnostic category PVS did so out of the best of clinical motives. In particular, they wanted to distinguish it from the “brain-dead” state, where no functional capacities—to breathe, to swallow, or to respond—remain. With “brain death,” a patient evinces no response to any stimulus. Brain monitors show no activity. Heart and viscera can carry on their automatic activity only with the aid of mechanical, ventilator-driven respiration, and will cease when it is discontinued.

By definition, then, PVS is not death hidden by machinery. It is human life under altered neurological circumstances. And this distinction makes all the difference in how doctors and nurses think about it and treat its sufferers.

The phrase “life under altered circumstances” encompasses every human sickness and disability. It also speaks to what is entailed in the professional art of medicine—the art, that is, of identifying, differentiating, curing, rehabilitating, defending, and, in the words of the Hippocratic oath, “benefiting” the sick. Given that doctors and nurses naturally align themselves with life, and are trained to care for whatever life brings, including “life under altered neurological circumstances,” it is only to be expected that they would reject and shrink from actions that aim to kill. . . .

In the late 1950’s, I was the resident neurologist on a team responsible for the care of some 25 chronically ill, permanently disabled, and bed-bound patients suffering from advanced neuro-psychiatric disorders. Each morning I would travel from bed to bed in the company of several junior interns, pushing a cart with the patients’ records and checking up on them while simultaneously discoursing on what I knew about their condition. Because patients in such a chronic setting change little from day to day, finding something new to say about them becomes a challenge.

One of those patients was a famous medical researcher, reduced after an unsuccessful brain operation to a state not much unlike Terri Schiavo’s.

We young physicians felt honored to be caring for this man, who was of our fraternity. . . . But this did not ease the task before me upon visiting his bedside each morning as I searched for something interesting to say to my jaded interns. Soon enough they began to grumble that I was repeating myself as I would note dutifully that, although Dr. A’s apathetic state was profound and unchanging, occasionally such a patient might, if startled, give out a coherent response revealing some human consciousness. Looking at the man lying before them, they thought they had ample reason to doubt the applicability of my ideas to this case. A particularly bold intern challenged me one morning: “Enough of that, show us that he can respond.”

I knew perfectly well that I was being baited over a matter where I was unsure of my ground, but I moved briskly from the records cart to the bed, shook the patient by the shoulder, and asked in a sharp voice: “Dr. A, what’s the serum calcium in pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism?” For the first time in my experience with him, he glanced up at me and, loudly enough for all the interns to hear, said: “It’s just about normal.”

A full and complete sentence had emerged from a man whom none of us had ever heard speak before. His answer was correct—as he should know, having discovered and named the condition I asked him about. Subsequently, in all the months we cared for him, he would never utter another word. But what a difference that moment had made to all of us. We matured that day not only in matters of the mind but in matters of the heart. Somehow, deep inside that body and damaged brain, he was there—and our job was to help him. If we had ever had misgivings before, we would never again doubt the value of caring for people like him. And we didn’t give a fig that his EEG was grossly abnormal. . . .

As soon as Terri Schiavo’s case moved into the law courts of Florida, the concept of “life under altered circumstances” went by the boards—and so, necessarily, did any consideration of how to serve such life. Both had been trumped by the concept of “life unworthy of life,” and how to end it.

I use the term “life unworthy of life” advisedly. The phrase first appeared a long time ago—as the title of a book published in Germany in 1920, co-authored by a lawyer and a psychiatrist. Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwertes Leben translates as “Lifting Constraint from the Annihilation of Life Unworthy of Life.” Terri Schiavo’s husband and his clinical and legal advisers, believing that hers was now a life unworthy of life, sought, and achieved, its annihilation. Claiming to respect her undocumented wish not to live dependently, they were willing to have her suffer pain and, by specific force of law, to block her caregivers from offering her oral feedings of the kind provided to all terminal patients in a hospice—even to the point of prohibiting mouth-soothing ice chips. Everything else flowed from there.

How could such a thing happen? This, after all, is not Nazi Germany, where the culture of death foreshadowed in the awful title of that book would reach such horrendous public proportions. But we in this country have our own, homegrown culture of death, whose face is legal and moral and benignly individualistic rather than authoritarian and pseudo-scientific. It has many roots, which would require a long historical treatise to unravel, with obligatory chapters considering such factors as the growth of life-sustaining and life-extending technologies and the dilemmas they bring, the increasingly assertive deprecation of medical expertise and understanding in favor of patients’ “autonomous” decision-making, the explosion in rights-related personal law and the associated explosion in medical-malpractice suits, and much else besides.

The shift from caring for “life under altered circumstances” to annihilating “life unworthy of life” is a profound one, and its victims are not women like Terri Schiavo but all the rest of us, for we turn ourselves into lesser human beings. As Plato taught, choosing evil is worse than death.

Related Posts: What We Learned from Terri Schiavo
Strange Spirits
Civil Obedience
Fake-But-Accurate and the Schiavo Case
Schiavo Quotes of the Day
Terri Schiavo’s Golgotha
You Don’t Have to Be Pro-Life to Love Terri Schiavo
“Vegetables” Who Think

The Dhimmi Way of War

Today’s Best of the Web leads off by declaring Senator George Voinovich (RINO–Ohio) “the most ridiculous man in politics today”. Wait, I thought: The lachrymose Buckeye is rather weird but surely not as ridiculous as Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray, Cynthia McKinney, Eleanor Holmes Norton or Madeleine Albright. Then it struck me: James Taranto is going PC on us, abandoning the generic masculine for androgynous femmespeak. He should have written, “the most ridiculous male in politics today”.

But that isn’t what this post is about. My subject is the second item after the Voinovich rakeover (that is, immediately after a glance at a ridiculous statement by Madame Albright). Mr. Taranto calls attention to Diana West’s Townhall.com column “What’s Being Desecrated Here?”, which describes the Koran-handling rules that the Army imposes on guards at Guantanamo Bay, all designed to avoid bringing the blush of outrage to the cheek of the tenderest Islamofascist terrorist:

. . . the Army doesn’t just distribute its Qurans like any other religious book. That is, the Bible may get passed around, riffled through, dropped, tossed and stuffed into hotel room drawers. But not the Quran. According to United States Army policy, the standard operating procedure is: “Handle the Quran as if it were a fragile piece of delicate art.”

What’s going on here? By official order, a whole lot of “respecting the dignity of the Quran.” According to Section 6-5-c(3), should a Quran need to be removed from a detainee’s cell – you know, carried somewhere – and the detainee is personally unable to move it (best option), and the Muslim chaplain, librarian and interpreter are also unable to move it (second-best option), then the U.S. Army guard, as a very last resort, may take action.

Then the insanity really begins. The guard is directed to don “clean gloves ... in full view of the detainees prior to handling.” He must use “two hands ... at all times when handling the Quran in manner signaling respect and reverence.” Why “respect” alone isn’t abundantly sufficient isn’t mentioned. While signaling two-handed respect and reverence, however, the guard must be mindful that “care should be used so that the right hand is the primary one used to manipulate any part of the Quran due to the cultural association with the left hand.”

It goes on. There’s more “reverent manner,” more instructions for conveying the book inside a “clean, dry detainee towel.” The cockeyed picture is clear. But it doesn’t explain what’s going on.

Miss West’s view of “what’s going on” is that these instructions do not simply “exemplify a bizarre excess of good manners, an absurdly obsequious respect for a largely foreign faith”. Instead, they represent official U.S. acceptance, at least in appearance, of the notion, believed literally by the kind of men who wind up at Guantanamo, that non-Moslems are “unclean”.

The term is “najis.” On the multilingual Web site of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, the leading Iraqi Shi’ite cleric, there is a catalogue of Islamic laws (www.sistani.org). This includes a list of “najis things.” There are 10, beginning with an assortment of excretions and body fluids – obvious stuff that really shouldn’t need special mention. On the “najis” list with urine, feces, etc., are the pig, the dog and the “kafir.” That means the Christian, the Jew, the unbeliever in Islam – and, chances are, the Gitmo guard.

Mr. Taranto takes exception to the conclusion drawn from this picture: that “The Gitmo rules are . . . blatantly about surrender, a voluntary self-extinguishment, a spreading condition of denial of what is right and worth standing for.”

This seems like an overreaction. To our mind, the military’s deference to Muslim law is an act of magnanimity, not surrender. Lots of religions believe things that seem silly to nonbelievers, and if a Muslim fundamentalist believes we’re “unclean,” there’s no reason that should bother us any more than if a Christian fundamentalist believes we’re going to hell. Muslim terrorists are our enemies because they’re trying to kill us, not because they think we’re unclean.

That strikes me as an underreaction. Let’s imagine that a prison warden deferred to an Aryan supremacist’s demand that none of his meals be prepared by Jews or blacks. Would we call that “an act of magnanimity”? Or would we suspect that the warden at some level shared the prisoner’s racism.

In this case it is not, of course, a matter of sharing the incarcerated terrorists’ aberrant world view but of shrinking from rejecting it forthrightly. In their exaggerated “respect and reverence” for Islam (to a degree that very few American Moslems demand of their Christian neighbors), our soldiers act like dhimmis. They may have momentary physical dominance over Moslems, but they implicitly concede Islamic spiritual superiority. In their hearts they doubtless regard the charade as silly, but the prisoners are not mind readers. They know what they see, not what their captors think.

The mainstream media reaction has been more straightforwardly dhimmi-like. If commentators saw respect for the Koran as merely a matter of “magnanimity”, they would not express such horror at the handful of instances in which guards have not observed the letter of the “respect and reverence” orders. Magnanimous conduct is far from the expected norm in warfare or in prisons; its absence is not an outrage. It would have been magnanimous if, during World War II, Allied soldiers guarding Japanese POW’s had referred to the Emperor only in hushed, deferential tones, but I’ll bet they didn’t. Anyone who suggested that their impoliteness toward Shinto doctrines verged on a war crime would be a laughingstock. Yet it is not, in the eyes of Newsweek, Time and their ilk sufficient to be polite to Islam; we must be “reverent” and are seriously at fault if we fall short of that standard.

If Americans treat Korans like idols, we have little chance of convincing Islamofascists that we are never going to give in to them, no matter how many of us they murder. We already show quite enough politeness, indeed magnanimity, by handing the volume out to inmates. Has any Christian or Jew taken hostage by Moslems ever been given a Bible? We would do better to stock the library at Guantanamo with Islamic classics – ibn-Khaldun’s Muqaddimah would furnish useful historical perspective – and the writings of Moslem progressives. If only Korans in the vicinity were the personal copies of Moslem military chaplains, the question of “reverence” would be moot.

Moving Away from the NCC

I was tempted to head this post with a Taranto-style “We Get Results”, but it is in fact merely a coincidence. Just four days after I lamented Orthodox participation in the National Council of Churches, Orthodoxy Today called attention to a position paper on “Orthodox Relations”, prepared for consideration at the Orthodox Church in America’s 14th All-American Council (hat tip: Sarx). The document is far from an Orthodox chauvinist screed against ecumenicism. Indeed, the authors state,

Inter-Christian relations are not optional. Formal inter-Christian ministry demands a serious, credible and concerted effort on our part. Because of our identification with the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, in all of Her fullness, the onus of ecumenical engagement falls heaviest on us (in this sense, ecumenism is very much an “Orthodox problem”). Thus, while temporary withdrawals from dialogues or organizations may be appropriate as pastoral measures, long-term disengagement is impossible. There must always be a concrete, viable, and active policy in place to further inter-Christian relations.

They recognize, however, that ecumenical discourse cannot always be filled with sweetness and light.

With the advent of a “modern” and “postmodern” Christianity, the testimony of Orthodoxy in general and the Orthodox Church in America in particular on occasion had to become adversarial, challenging the new trends, saying “no” to new developments in the thinking of some Christians and in the worldview of society. Thus, Orthodox have participated vigorously in the Right to Life movement, in collaboration with like-minded Catholics and Protestants. His Beatitude Metropolitan Herman has given strong leadership to the Right to Life movement by his very visible participation in the annual Right to Life March in Washington, DC, in the month of January. In the ecumenical organizations, joining the other Orthodox Churches, the Orthodox Church in America has stood up for traditional faith and theology.

The dilemma, implied though not stated outright, is that certain “ecumenical” organizations, most notably the National Council of Churches, take stands vehemently contrary to Orthodoxy (and to historical Christianity of any stripe). The general secretary of the NCC is, let it be noted, boastful about his role as a pro-abortion spokesman.

Recalling his previous career as “one of the top-ten most liberal congressmen,” the NCC general secretary spoke of how “proud” he had been when the Moral Majority called his uncompromising support of abortion “immoral.” Edgar said he “laughed at” that criticism and wore it as “a badge of honor.”

If Orthodox Christians participate in an organization whose leaders identify so strongly with the pro-abortion cause, what can we expect the world to think? Most likely, non-Orthodox will conclude that our witness to the Right to Life is just a pose, that we are at heart content to go along with what John Paul II aptly labeled “the Culture of Death”. Thus our membership in the NCC, regardless of our bishops’ excellent intentions, fosters public acceptance of an abomination.

Striving for fairness and balance, “Orthodox Relations” is not that blunt. Its conclusions are, however, unambiguous:

In the current Christian setting, both in the United States and globally, there are more Protestants and Pentecostals outside the ecumenical organizations such as the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC) and the World Council of Churches (WCC) than there are within these organizations. Furthermore, neither the NCC nor the WCC can count the Roman Catholic Church among their member churches. . . .

Nevertheless, for the most part the Orthodox Church in America participates in ecumenical organizations which represent a minority of Christians. Furthermore, the ecumenical organizations in which we participate, in their theological and social views, are oriented towards policies which are not in harmony with Orthodox views. Thus our participation and the participation of other Orthodox Churches lend credibility and legitimacy to ecumenical organizations which, in the public perception, are espousing beliefs often antithetical to the Orthodox convictions.

The most advisable course for the Orthodox Church in America would be eventually to withdraw from the NCC and the WCC. This movement towards withdrawal should not be motivated by any “fundamentalism” or “anti-ecumenism.” To the contrary, the announcement of our withdrawal should be framed in the context of a defense of the proper and necessary ecumenical vision. Those ecumenical streams or contexts which hold theological promise – for example, the Faith and Order streams of the NCC and the WCC – should be affirmed. And ecumenical Christian relations should be sought with conservative Christian bodies. . . .

While such a policy by us would be seen by some as a voluntary “marginalization” of the Orthodox Church in America, it is important to remember that marginalization is a matter of perspective and interpretation. Another perspective would show us acting responsibly, with care and concern for the other Orthodox Churches, yet adhering firmly to principle and a realistic assessment of the prevailing ecumenical reality.

Without being triumphalist, it is time for Orthodox to realize that the Protestant “mainstream” has dwindled in the past half century to a stagnant puddle, while American Orthodoxy has emerged from its ethnic ghettos (albeit the effects of the earlier period linger yet). Much as its official spokesmen despise Orthodox teachings, the NCC needs us far more than we need it. Men like Bob Edgar are eager to maintain the pretense of speaking for a vigorous Christian tradition. By letting them claim to represent Orthodoxy and impliedly attribute their secular leftist views to us, we facilitate that delusion.

Further reading: “An Open Letter to the Holy Synod of the Orthodox Church in America”

Good and Evil in Litteris

Now you can learn what evil lurks in the heart of texts, thanks to The Gematriculator, which is not the blog of someone enrolled in a jewelry school but instead –

. . . uses the infallible methods of Gematria developed by Mr. Ivan Panin to determine how good or evil a web site or a text passage is.

Basically, Gematria is searching for different patterns through the text, such as the amount of words beginning with a vowel. If the amount of these matches is divisible by a certain number, such as 7 (which is said to be God’s number), there is an incontestable argument that the Spirit of God is ever present in the text. Another important aspect in gematria are [sic] the numerical values of letters: A=1, B=2 ... I=9, J=10, K=20 and so on. The Gematriculator uses Finnish alphabet, in which Y is a vowel.

Experts consider the mathematical patterns in the text of the Holy Bible as God’s watermark of authenticity. Thus, the Gematriculator provides only results that are absolutely correct [emphasis in original].

That sounds much easier and more definitive than actually reading content, but how well does it work in practice?

Well, this site (before I posted this message) was rated 66 percent good. By way of comparison, here are some other Goodness ratings:

Trufen 78%
Matthew Hoy 78%
Power Line 73%
Instapundit 69%
Right Wing News 72%
Little Green Footballs 67%
Tim Blair 67%
Andrew Sullivan 65%
Kevin Drum 63%
David Corn 62%
Democratic Underground 42%

But before one gets too excited over this discovery, it should be noted that “Sin is good” is rated at an astounding 99 percent. Oh, well, back to the drawing board.

Addendum: For many amusing hours of gematriatic folly, don’t miss Gunnar Tómasson’s Shakespeare-Saga Cipher Articles, which apply a form of gematria that the author claims to have discovered in a 13th Century Icelandic manuscript. It seems to have been known to everybody in 16th Century England, down to the sexton who kept the records of the church at Stratford-upon-Avon, but then mysteriously vanished from human consciousness until Mr. Tómasson “rediscovered” it. The essence of the cipher message is that “William Shakespeare” was a purely fictitious character whose works were actually written by a gigantic Elizabethan committee.

An Atrocity in Greece, Half a Century After

My church held a memorial service today for the victims of a World War II Nazi massacre.

Four days after the Allied invasion of Normandy, a most despicable atrocity took place in the village of Distomo in the province of Boeotia in Central Greece. A unit of the SS Police Panzergrenadier Regiment No 7, on an antipartisan sweep, massacred 218 Greek civilians in the village. Packed into seven trucks, the unit drove through the village without incident but a short distance beyond the village the convoy was ambushed by a guerrilla band that resulted in the killing of seven SS soldiers. The SS unit doubled back into the village and in a last ditch effort to crush partisan activities, the reprisals, including looting, burning and rape, began. When a Red Cross delegation visited the village some days later they found bodies hanging from trees along the main street. One survivor, Yannes Basdekis, recalled, “I walked into a house and saw a woman, stripped naked and covered in blood. Her breasts had been sliced off. Her baby lay dead nearby, the cut off nipple still in its mouth.”

The unit commander, SS Hauptstrumführer Lautenbach, was later charged with falsifying a military report on the massacre but the charges were dropped as the massacre was judged a “military necessity”. Today, the skulls and bones of the victims are displayed in the Mausoleum of Distomo. In 1960, Germany paid the Greek government 115 million marks as compensation for the suffering of its citizens during the German occupation but as yet no payment is forthcoming for the victims of Distomo. It was not until 1990 that members of the German embassy first took part in the wreath laying ceremony on the annual anniversary of the massacre.

(More about the massacre, in somewhat fractured English, can be found on Distomo’s municipal Web site.)

Distomo was not the only or worst atrocity of the war. (On the same day in France, over twice as many civilians were slaughtered by SS troops at Oradour-sur-Glane.) It was, nonetheless, horrifying enough. In an age when the mistreatment of books has been elevated to the status of a war crime, we need to remember what real barbarism looks like.

Facilis Descensus to Bigotry

It didn’t surprise me at all when Howard Dean denounced Republicans as “a white Christian party”, intending not an empirical statement (four-fifths of Republicans, like two-thirds of Americans and a three-fifths of Democrats, are in fact Christian and white), but a pejorative. The “white Christians” who make up the GOP are, in Dr. Dean’s view, people who “all look the same”, “all behave the same” and “are not very friendly to different kinds of people”.

This is the way that racists talk about blacks and antisemites about Jews. And why shouldn’t the chairman of the Democratic National Committee believe that “white Christians” are a sinister breed? Haven’t his ideological allies taken to charging that politically conservative Christians (overwhelmingly people of pallor) want to turn the United States into a “theocracy”? He is probably inclined, like most people, to accept uncritically what sympatico people tell him is true, especially when they speak loudly and authoritatively. Hence, he is sincerely alarmed at the prospect of a religious dictatorship and imagines that he is doing his country a service by raising the hue and cry against “White Christianity”. He would do the same if all friends said that Zionist bankers were plotting to take over the world.

There is – and overexcitable Christians need to remember this – not the slightest danger that the bigotry of the Angry Left will have a palpable impact on the liberty enjoyed by Christians in the United States (though it may give unintended moral support to persecutors in regions where Christianity is less securely entrenched). The risk we face is that bigotry will lead to misperception of the forces at work in American politics and misperception to extremist words and deeds, eventuating in, at best, a domestic equivalent to the Cold War.

Some of the strategic thinkers on the Left may be less interested in whether the theocratic conspiracy really exists than in how clamor against it can be used to divide secular from religious conservatives. Sad to say, there are right-wingers who label all socially conservative opinions “theocratic” and thus edge toward Deaniac territory.

Now, if opposition to abortion, pornography, easy divorce, promiscuity, same-sex marriage and medical experimentation on unborn infants makes a nation a theocracy, almost the whole world was theocratic until about thirty years ago. Those who persist in their opposition to those practices may be wrong, but their desire to preserve (or revive) social norms that were commonplace during the lifetimes of many now living can’t reasonably be equated with zeal to convert the Bible into a legal code.

There are real theocrats in the world, namely, those Islamic extremists who seek to make shari’a law universal and pursue their end through violent means. Confounding them with “white Christians” – indeed, shouting frantically about the latter while worrying about whether the civil liberties of the former are adequately respected – is a self-inflicted and potentially fatal blindness.

Quote of the Day

From the OpinionJournal Political Diary (a bargain at $3.95/month):

“You make a radical Muslim mad, and he won’t rip off your bumper sticker, he’ll rip off your bumper – then your car will be found in another state, and he’ll put a fatwa on you. I think fearing for your life is a pretty good reason not to do it” – veteran TV producer Larry Gelbart on why the film industry doesn’t make movies portraying Islamic extremists as bad guys (quoted in the Hollywood Reporter).

The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy of the Month Club

An e-mail from Joseph T. Major reminds me that last month the sinister force controlling the Bush Administration was the (factually non-existent) “Constitution in Exile” movement. Oddly, that group of alleged conspirators consisted of libertarians like Richard Epstein and Judge Douglas Ginsburg, whose opinions on social issues and the role of religion in government are diametrically opposite from the Dominionists’. The month before that, the sinister manipulators were the neoconservatives, who are neither libertarian nor Christian. Of course, antisemites have never seen any contradiction in declaring that the secret government of Jewish bankers is behind the rise of communism.

Joe offered another interesting hypothesis:

I once formed a theory that it all stems from the “Vital Center” idea of the fifties, where it was proclaimed that every mainstream politician was a New Dealer, and only Communists and a few left-over Old Rightists did otherwise, and they were fringes who could be ignored.

Schlesinger/Hofstadter/Rossiter liberals were saner and more temperate (except when foaming at the mouth about Barry Goldwater) than their epigonoi, but they did instill in the American Left the concept that All Rational Human Beings agree with the fundamentals of mid-20th Century liberal doctrine. Hence, anyone who doesn’t agree is either irrational or deceitful. Howard Dean is merely expounding that logic in rather crude form. (Not that the old-time liberals couldn’t be crude. National Review could provide interesting historical perspective by exhuming from its archives the “Voices of Moderation” series that it ran during the 1964 Presidential campaign.)

“Irrelevant” to the NCC

The National Council of Churches likes to include Orthodox Christians among the people for whom it purports to speak. Most of the Orthodox jurisdictions in this country lend plausibility to that claim by keeping up membership in the group, regardless of the wide gap on issues of faith and morals between our beliefs and those that NCC officials regularly proclaim.

Maybe this practice of linking Orthodoxy publicly with modernist Protestantism served a purpose when the Orthodox in America were perceived as Arabs, Greeks and Slavs clinging to a quaint, anti-intellectual Old World denomination. It wasn’t irrational to think that a dollop of Episcopalian, Lutheran, Methodist and Presbyterian respectability would rub off on us. Now, however, when Orthodoxy attracts converts of high spiritual caliber and is arguably the most dynamic non-evangelical Christian movement in the United States, while the mainline Protestant churches shrink, splinter and grow sterile, it is Orthodox participation in the NCC that makes that body credible as a “Christian” organization. Were the Orthodox to depart, no one would think of it as anything but a left-wing political lobby.

One can hope that, even to our risk-averse bishops, a conference recently co-sponsored by the NCC, at which its general secretary was a featured speaker, will be one provocation too many. John Lomperis of the Institute on Religion and Democracy describes the affair (hat tip to Midwest Conservative Journal):

On April 29 and 30, liberal activists gathered in New York City for a weekend conference on “Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right.” The program consisted of speeches with alarmist titles like “The Rise of Dominionism in U.S. Government,” “Is an Unholy American Theocracy Here?,” “Christian Jihad,” and “Fundamentalism: The Fear and The Rage.” There were no conservative Christians on the program.

The conference was sponsored by People for the American Way, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, and the National Council of Churches (NCC), along with the left-wing periodicals The Nation and The Village Voice. It was organized by the New York Open Center and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

A leading theme of the gathering was that “Dominionism”, a tiny, eccentric movement that hardly anyone had heard of until a couple of months ago, wields vast influence over conservative Christianity and the Bush Administration. The speakers viewed it with the same alarm as Birchers ranting about communist control of the United States. The difference is that communism in its heyday was backed by the world’s second most powerful nation, while Dominionism consists of a handful of obscure writers and a trickle of little-read books. Ironically, the only member of the cult ever to come close to the best seller lists is Gary North, author of None Dare Call It Conspiracy. That title would have fit the conference well.

”We’ve got a police state-plus going on here!” cried author Mark Crispin Miller. Miller also claimed that there was “significant Christian extremism in the Pentagon” and that the U.S. Air Force Academy is “like a madrassah.”

Without elaborating, writer Jeff Sharlet claimed that the government of Norway is controlled “through and through” by Doug Coe’s Virginia-based Christian group known as the International Foundation. [Has anyone informed Bjørn Stærk?] . . .

An essay by columnist John Sugg, distributed at the conference, claimed that the “nationwide movement” of Reconstructionism has “established a beachhead in the White House.” The essay referred to the Presbyterian Church in America and the Orthodox Presbyterian Church as “Reconstruction-occupied territory.” Citing authors Frederick Clarkson and Daniel Levitas, Sugg reported that “Reconstructionists have taken over the Southern Baptist Convention’s national leadership” and that Reconstructionism “has been the driving force behind the Christian Right for some time.”

Speakers at the conference saw evidence of the vast power of the “theocrats” on every side: in the “Christian nation” rhetoric of some conservatives, in the expressed belief of some prominent officials that governments ultimately derive their authority from God, in President Bush’s description of terrorism as “evil,” in Bush’s promotion of a “culture of life,” in widespread opposition to euthanasia, in the Texas Republican Party platform’s support of a smaller federal government, in recent tax cuts and alleged declines in government social welfare spending, in the growth of the national debt, and in the elevation of Rick Santorum, a social conservative, to a leadership position among his fellow Senate Republicans.

”I think John Kerry won this election; I think that he won it handily!,” declared Miller to loud applause. He argued that “we have no evidence” that Bush won “other than the official counts,” but that “there’s several smoking guns” to cast doubt on Bush's victory. Miller also appeared to indicate his support for a revolution, provoking applause by saying, “It’s going to take what it took in the Soviet Union, Venezuela, Ukraine, and this country hundreds of years ago.”

Did the Rev. Bob Edgar, general secretary of the NCC, try to stir sanity into this paranoid stew? Did he perhaps suggest that the Left approach its adversaries with the same ecumenical forbearance that his own organization displays for Fidel Castro and the Palestinian Authority? Ha and ha and ha-ha!

“Our liberties are at stake!” [he] declared. . . . Edgar added that “these may be the darkest times in our history.” . . . According to the NCC leader, all of the gains of the civil rights movement are imperiled by “those in power in Washington” who are “taking us back to the 1940s.” . . .

Edgar shared “The Gospel According to a Religious Progressive.” He faulted “the religious left” for having not been active enough in fighting “the religious right.” Recalling his previous career as “one of the top-ten most liberal congressmen,” the NCC general secretary spoke of how “proud” he had been when the Moral Majority called his uncompromising support of abortion “immoral.” Edgar said he “laughed at” that criticism and wore it as “a badge of honor.” The NCC, which describes itself as “the preeminent expression in the United States of the movement toward Christian unity,” ostensibly takes no position on abortion. Several of its member denominations [including, of course, all of the participating Orthodox jurisdictions] share the same moral reservations about abortion at which Edgar laughed. . . .

Edgar indicated that he has no intention of finding common ground with conservative Christians. When asked by an audience member if “we” should try to reach out to “the religious right” or simply fight it, the NCC leader replied that since “the right already has its structure,” the “religious left” should instead focus on organizing itself, “infiltrat[ing] our seminaries,” and reaching out to “the middle church, the middle synagogue, the middle mosque.” Edgar told his audience of his policy when the NCC is criticized by conservatives. In such instances, he said, he simply sends a memo out to his staff with the instruction: “Find them [the conservatives] irrelevant.”

The general secretary’s venom was on this occasion directed toward anti-modernist Protestants, but can one doubt that he was also expressing his feelings toward traditional Christians of all stripes, including the Orthodox from whom his organization derives money (a little) and credibility (a lot)? We can be sure that he finds us “irrelevant”, too. We ought to be proud of that irrelevance and nurture it by cutting all ties with the NCC gang of conspiracy-mongering hysteriacs.

Any Time-Traveling Restaurants in Glasgow?

Since this year’s World Science Fiction Convention will be held in Glasgow, I was interested to see on the invaluable Cronaca an item on Glaswegian cuisine. The city is famous for the unhealthfulness of its denizens’ typical diet, so much so that one would have been, according to this report, better off dining there six centuries ago.

Glaswegians in 1405 had a better diet than the citizens of 2005, eating their “five-a-day” 600 years ahead of its time.

Even their light beer was healthier than sugar-laden fizzy concoctions that are today's favourite, according to new archaeological evidence. . . .

By analysing cesspit material, archaeologists discovered medieval citizens ate a healthy diet of fruit, vegetables, cereals and fish. It is a long way in time and culture from modern Glasgow, where obesity is so commonplace because of a junk food diet of pizza, burgers and fish suppers that the Scottish Executive is considering opening an NHS-funded stomach-stapling clinic in the city.

Professor Stephen Driscoll of Glasgow University’s archaeology department, said: “Around 100 bodies examined showed good health and the teeth were worn rather than decayed.

“The diet was healthier than today, with porridge, a little meat, fish, milk, cottage cheese and vegetables and fruits.”. . .

Frankie Phillips, of the British Dietetics Association, said: “There wouldn’t have been too many obese people in medieval times. We could certainly learn from some aspects of the diet that was uncovered.”

I’m not all that sentimental about the “healthy” medieval diet, which was seasonally deficient in vitamins and generally accompanied by a hundred hour work week, but the current “Glesca diet” may not be ideal for the well-being of science fiction fandom. If only a few 15th Century pubs would appear, Brigadoon-like, to supplement the chips-and-lemonade shops.

ROTS? No, Not Really

When all the film critics and millions of former fans are quietly rooting for a movie maker to fail, he does well to pay close attention to acronyms. Revenge of the Sith was a real gamble as titles go. So many charming possibilities for review headers: “Yep, It ROTS”, “ROTS from the Head Downward”, “A New Hope ROTS Away”, “With All That Wooden Acting, Of Course This Flick ROTS”, and so on.

What I think of ROTS’s actual merits doesn’t matter a lot, as every other American of movie going age saw it before me. Nonetheless, I’ll offer my belated opinion, based on viewing it yesterday in an extremely uncrowded Las Vegas theater: This is the best of the Star Wars movies since the first one and so far superior to its immediate predecessors, so much so that I wonder whether George Lucas has been replaced by a cinematically savvy pod person.

There are, admittedly, a few plot slippages: Anakin and Padmé are living in the same apartment, yet Obi-Wan Kenobi figures out only at the last minute that Anakin is the cause of Padme’s rather obvious pregnancy. (I guess that the Jedi are more like monks than I thought.) Neither the Jedis’ special powers nor the advanced medical technology of the Galactic Republic are aware that Padmé is bearing twins. (Is our civilization atypical in having invented ultrasound before FTL travel?) And Padmé still looks pregnant at her funeral, which is rather disconcerting. (I hope that this doesn’t mean that Natalie Portman has gotten fat.)

Incongruous with the ultimate conclusion of the series, if not an actual plot hole, is Anakin’s slaughter of the Jedi younglings. On no other occasion does Anakin/Vader engage in gratuitous (emphasize gratuitous; blowing up a rebel planet is purposeful) violence against innocents, a fact that made his redemption at the finale of Return of the Jedi morally acceptable. In light of what we now know, he has no right to such cheap grace.

On larger matters, though, Revenge of the Sith moves forward plausibly, with some deft ironies. Three are particularly worthy of note. First, in a twist as old as Greek legend, Anakin’s efforts to avert the prophecy of Padmé’s death lead to its fulfillment. Second, Anakin’s crisis of conscience over killing the helpless Count Dooku influences his crucial decision to save the seemingly helpless Chancellor Palpatine from death at the hands of Jedi Master Mace Windu. Finally, though this is evident only when one thinks ahead to Episode “IV” (the real and original Star Wars), the lie that brings Anakin fully over to the Dark Side – that his own angry blow killed Padmé – removes any motive for tracking down their child and thus leads to the Sith Emperor’s ultimate defeat.

So far as spectacle is concerned, this movie at least equals any of the others in quantity and quality. After the cheesy special effects in Attack of the Clones, which reminded me a lot of Flash Gordon, without the excuse of a minimal budget and primitive technology, we are shown thunderous space battles, dazzling planetscapes and not-too-bad light saber duels. So what if gravity in space acts arbitrarily or Obi-Wan needs a long time to think of just shooting General Grievous instead of sparring with him.

I’ve seen many warnings against the insinuation of politically correct, anti-War on Terror themes into ROTS, and a few are indeed present. They are, however, contradicted by the main thrust of the film. Obi-Wan’s “Only a Sith thinks in absolutes” was doubtless intended as a shot against President Bush, but it has no force, because Sith do not “think in absolutes”. Palpatine bases his appeal to Anakin on the necessity of going beyond narrow-minded hostility to the Dark Side, and Anakin, after his transformation into Darth Vader, declares that evil depends on one’s point of view. The Sith are power-hungry moral relativists. That the Jedi misapprehend them fits with the order’s limited imagination and intelligence. Luke Skywalker’s image of the Jedi Knights, built on Obi-Wan’s and Yoda’s nostalgic mythmaking, is an idealization. The Jedi of the first three Episodes are in many ways like the popular image of the knights of the middle ages: physically powerful but short on subtlety and easy to deceive.

The Jedis’ shortcomings are a key to Anakin’s conversion to evil. Their overt distrust, repressed jealousy and misjudgement of the young knight’s idealism push him toward the Dark Side just as much as Palpatine lures him. Thus, as in a proper tragedy, evil arises from the flaws in good men, not simply the machinations of villains.

What a pity that George Lucas lost his touch so badly in Episodes I and II. But what a consolation that it was not lost for good.

Vote Fraud: No Cure from the Courts

Today’s court ruling on the challenge to last year’s Washington State gubernatorial election was almost certainly wrong in a factual sense: There can be little doubt that illegal ballots gave Christine Gregoire her tainted victory. The massive malfeasance of King County’s election officials (along with lesser malfeasance in other counties) is indisputable (nor did Judge Bridges deny its existence), and its impact was clearly not random, as anyone who has followed the tortuous contest (best covered by Sound Politics) is aware.

What was wrong in fact may nonetheless be correct in law. Because the ballots cast by ineligible voters or added by zealous election workers (hundreds more votes were counted in King County than the number of people recorded as voting there) can’t be segregated from the mass of legal votes, the plaintiffs faced an insurmountable burden of proof. And maybe that burden should be insurmountable. One can readily imagine that a contrary decision in this case encouraging court battles over every close election and leading judges to find “creative” reasons to toss out results that they dislike.

The central problem with the Washington State election process – and with elections all around the country – is that fraud is easy to commit, difficult to detect, hard to punish and, as Judge Bridges’ ruling demonstrates, nearly impossible to reverse. That is especially true of the phenomenon to which Jim Miller has given the name “distributed vote fraud”: fraud committed by individual citizens on their own initiative, as opposed to the centralized ballot box stuffing of old-fashioned political machines. It is easy to buy or extort votes, because mail-in voting makes ballot secrecy optional. It is easy to register a non-existent “voter” or to keep on the rolls one who has died or moved out of state. It is easy for felons, aliens, nonresidents and other ineligibles to vote. It is easy to cast someone else’s ballot, either by mail or at the polling place (where identification standards are lower than for getting onto an airplane). In Mr. Miller’s words,

An analogy may illuminate what has happened. Suppose that a manager in a retail chain wanted, for whatever reason, to encourage theft by employees. It would be easy to think of ways for the manager to do that, from getting rid of cash registers to keeping poorer inventories. Anything that made it easier to steal would increase theft, since there are always some who will be tempted. But the manager would have no direct connection to the theft. He would have facilitated it, but there would be no way to prosecute him for the theft.

Similarly, increasingly lax election laws have facilitated fraud while diminishing the likelihood that anybody will be held accountable. When one adds the Manichaean conviction of many leftists that conservatives are latter-day Nazis who must be kept out of power by any means necessary, debacles like that in Washington State – or in Wisconsin, where the Presidential election may well have been stolen for John Kerry – are foreseeable and unsurprising.

In the long run, distributed vote fraud is in no one’s best interests. Right now, the game seems to be mostly a left-wing sport, but conservatives can play too if it becomes evident that there is no honest way to win elections. Rather than have that happen, we should stop this downward spiral now. Let me repeat my suggested package of modest reforms:

1. All votes should have to be cast in person, unless the voter was absent from his home county on election day for a good reason. Casting an absentee ballot without good cause should be a criminal offense. (That may sound drastic, but the practice needs to be reined in, and only criminal penalties will persuade voters and election officials to take a prohibition seriously.) To ease any burden that these restrictions may impose, states should be allowed to set up pre-election day polling stations, as Florida plans to do in future elections. Also needed are stringent standards to make sure that legitimate absentees, such as soldiers serving abroad, receive ballots in time to return them.

2. Every voter should have to present photographic identification at the polling place. Every state issues photo ID’s, so this requirement is no hardship.

3. Voters should have to register at least 30 days before the election, and in federal elections states should be required to verify that new registrants are eligible voters who are not registered anywhere else. Congress should appropriate money – even if it means cutting a farm subsidy here or federally funded museum there – to pay for this process. We will need to figure out what to do about people who move within 30 days of an election, who of course should not be disenfranchised, but that is a detail.

4. Hand recounts, which are prone to unintentional or deliberate human error, should be permitted only under extraordinary circumstances.

Alternatively, we can let democracy degenerate into competitive theft. The choice is that stark. Our children will not thank us for getting it wrong.

Also America’s (and George W. Bush’s) Fault

Via Midwest Conservative Journal, we are treated to one U.S. Episcopalian bishop’s analysis of why ECUSA presiding bishop Frank Griswold was so frostily received at the last Lambeth Conference, where a majority of the Anglican primates refused to celebrate the Eucharist with him. It was not because ECUSA has declared that the Holy Spirit led it to consecrate a practicing homosexual as a bishop. No, the real reason, according to the Right Reverend Carolyn Tanner Irish, was revulsion against George W. Bush’s Amerikkka:

In addition to everything else, he [Bishop Griswold] was painfully aware that among most of the Primates, our church is closely identified with the present political administration, economic exploitation, and our TV culture, programmed all over the world, and seen as seriously destructive of their values and cultures. Our own glorification of 1st Amendment protection doesn’t cut it elsewhere.

Once upon a time, somebody called the Episcopalian Church “the Republican Party at prayer”. Bishop Irish, I suspect, believes that still to be the case and sees herself and her fellow (oops, sorry for the sexism) comradely progressives as brave enlighteners of the benighted pew sitters. Also noteworthy is her casual contempt for the First Amendment. If constitutional protection for the free exercise of religious “doesn’t cut it elsewhere”, does that mean that the persecution of Christians in Third World countries isn’t an evil worth worrying about? Just coincidentally, the most outspoken of the ECUSA-unfriendly prelates at Lambeth was the Archbishop of Nigeria, whose flock, the largest in the Anglican Communion, is seriously threatened by Moslem pogroms. But Archbishop Akinola holds retrograde opinions on the “gay question”, so Bishop Irish doesn’t seem much concerned about what happens to Nigerian Anglicans. The duty of the Third World is to cheer on the Left. When it deviates from its right and proper role, it can be left to the mercies of sharia.

What “Deep Throat” Wrought

Having been pleasantly ensconced on the Oregon sea coast for the past few days, with no Internet contact beyond that furnished, along with Earl Grey tea and tasty bagels, by the Bald Eagle Coffee Shop of Cannon Beach, I’ve found it easy not to read the billions of words (so it seems) inspired by the revelation of “Deep Throat”’s secret identity. Just skimming them reminds me of how context-free is the contemporary view of the Watergate era. Or, one could equally well say, they signal how vastly American political life has changed in a generation.

The label “Watergate” now summarizes a pattern of conduct much larger than the burglary of the Democratic Party headquarters. It embraces a wide range of executive branch practices that operated outside public view and aimed to frustrate foreign and domestic enemies through “dirty tricks”. The standard assumption these days is that Richard Nixon devised, or at least was the most overbearing user of, these techniques. In reality, his administration followed precedents going back to Franklin Roosevelt. In some respects, Nixon was more restrained than FDR; he never tried to jail or bankrupt his political enemies, in contrast to the Roosevelt Administration’s vendettas against Moses Annenberg (successful) and Andrew Mellon (less so).

Post-Nixon scruples make it unpleasant to contemplate that a great many good effects flowed from what would today be regarded as intolerable overreaching and abuse, e. g., the dismemberment of the Ku Klux Klan by FBI infiltration the discrediting of Joe McCarthy through selective White House leaks (as approvingly chronicled by William Bragg Ewald in Who Killed Joe McCarthy? (1984)). The first two-thirds of the Cold War, until the Church Committee and the War Powers Act emasculated covert operations, was conducted mostly by a little-fettered American Presidency, with the other branches of government in secondary supporting roles. Unmentionable though the “illegalities” of that era may be, they made it possible for anti-communists to raise their voices against the blare of the leftist European media and helped keep parts of the world, such as Iran, Guatemala and Chile, out of pro-Soviet hands.

Mark Felt, alias “Deep Throat”, fully shared the pre-Watergate executive mentalité. He was a high-ranking FBI official under J. Edgar Hoover who employed his chief’s methods without reservation. In 1980 he was convicted of authorizing warrantless searches of war protesters’ homes (an offense for which President Reagan granted a pardon while the case was on appeal). Whatever his interior motivation for passing grand jury testimony and other confidential information to the Woodward-Bernstein team, it is highly unlikely that he disapproved in principle of the Watergate burglary or the attempt to cover it up. It’s easy to imagine how he would have viewed the incident: The country was at war; well-organized, well-financed “protest” groups openly sided with the enemy; many of those same groups had strong ties to the Democratic Party. Wasn’t it a natural response – one that the recently deceased and still generally revered “Speed” Hoover would have approved – to search the files of the Democratic National Committee for possible leads to quasi-treasonous activities?

Theories about why Agent Felt turned against his own principles and interests are of little importance when set beside the titanic impact of what he did. Perhaps Watergate without Deep Throat would have wound to much the same ending, yet Woodward and Bernstein had few other sources with which to ballast their narrative of anti-constitutional conspiracies. Their famous series might well have dwindled to mere ranting, and the fire of public indignation that incinerated Richard Nixon’s reputation and the pre-Watergate foundations of executive power might never have been sparked. “Tricky Dick” had a pretty good record of putting out fires; had this one had just a little less kindling, it might have burned no more acreage than Sherman Adams’ vicuna coat scandal.

Imagining an alternative post-1973 history without the Watergate “reforms” is nigh to impossible, for the role of the President, particularly in foreign affairs and national security matters, has changed fundamentally. He is no longer a true chief executive, with broad authority to use any means necessary to confront our nation’s enemies. Instead, he is a factional leader, who must struggle to mobilize public opinion behind his faction’s proposals for dealing with the rest of the world. Ronald Reagan’s term of office marked and solidified the transition. When he tried to operate in the old style, with the secret program of aid to the Nicaraguan anti-communists, he generated near-fatal controversy. On the other hand, he was brilliantly successful at rallying the country behind the military expansion and anti-Soviet maneuvering that brought the Cold War to a successful end.

That the Cold War did end in American victory suggests that the old, secretive, semi-legal methods may not have been tactical necessities. (We will never be sure, however, and I doubt that the world would be a better place if the CIA had not covertly funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom.) In any event, we have unilaterally deprived ourselves of those weapons and now face the task of waging a conflict that may be as protracted as the Cold War under conditions of unprecedented transparency, openness and toleration of sedition. American leaders cannot make plans in secret, cannot shroud facts to our country’s advantage and must give free rein to “dissenters” who work in close tandem with overt enemies. One reason why President Reagan deserves to be remembered as one of history’s greatest war leaders is that he triumphed despite those handicaps. If President Bush can set us on the path to victory in the current war, he will be worthy of a place in the same pantheon.

John G. B. Thomson (1951-2005), R.I.P.

As one grows older, posts like this sadly become more frequent. Last Monday night an old friend, John Thomson, died suddenly. His wife Becky, another old friend, called with the news just as I was leaving my office for a dental appointment, so I got to mull it over while the dentist was drilling. John had been suffering health problems for years, including overweight, sleep apnea, severe arthritis and a bout with cancer, so his death was not an actuarial surprise, just a shock.

Despite its abrupt, unhappy end, his life was inspiring in ways that more fortunate ones cannot be. He was born in Scotland to a dirt-poor family that emigrated to Canada when he was seven but grew no wealthier there. His father died when he was in high school. Thanks to native intelligence, he was able to start college, but lack of money and self-discipline kept him from finishing.

In his wayward twenties, he found companionship among fellow science fiction fans in British Columbia. He met Becky at a Vancouver convention. After a few years of intermittent courtship, they got married in 1980, moved diagonally across the continent to Florida, and adopted a son. They lived first on the Gulf coast, then moved to Orlando, where they got in touch with local fandom and conceived the mad scheme of bidding for the World Science Fiction Convention. The idea of running in 1992 – Becky’s first, cautious impulse was to wait till 1995 – was John’s, as was the convention’s name, “MagiCon”.

During this period, the self-described afficionado of “sex, alcohol and rock-and-roll” dramatically changed trajectory. His enrolled in college, earned a degree with honors, and added an M.B.A. At the same time he developed a taste for classical music and a strong interest in Greek and Roman culture. These new pastimes somewhat crowded fandom out of his life, though he remained an avid follower of science fiction on TV and in the movies. I relied on him to tell me what stalks in the current crop were worth reaping.

He and Becky recrossed the continent in 1997, settling near Seattle, where he worked as a financial analyst at an HMO. His main avocations were a local classics club, Toastmasters International and the Unitarian Church. He also collected fancy chess sets and practiced semi-gourmet cooking (to the occasional despair of his non-gourmand family). His principal responsibility, in his own eyes, was helping his son Sean through the difficulties of adolescence. He had the satisfaction of seeing the lad turn 21, hold down a steady job and accumulate the money to buy his first car.

In the last few years of his life, his greatest delight was helping to raise two foster grandchildren, the daughters of a close friend’s dysfunctional daughter. He looked forward to seeing them grow up. In the nearer term, he planned, as soon as his health improved, to visit Greece and see the classical sites about which he had read so much.

All in all, John’s life mixed happiness and melancholy, as do most. He was not able to do all that he desired, yet he deserves much credit for this: He did not drift. His life was the one that he, not Tyche, made for him.

Update (6/10/05): A memorial service for John will be held Saturday, June 18, at 5:00 p.m., at the Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church, 25701 14th Place South, Des Moines, Washington 98198.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to the Saltwater Church or to Harlequin Productions Real Live Theater.