A Cross For All America

Two years ago Los Angeles sculptor Jon Krawczyk was presented with a unique opportunity.

The image of the I-beam cross left standing in the rubble of the World Trade Center is a familiar one. In the days and weeks following 9/11 the cross became many things for many people: a symbol of hope and healing; a representation of the unyielding stance of good in the face of evil; a sign of God's presence; a meaningless coincidence. After standing for several years on a pedestal at the corner of the former Trade Center site the cross was in October 2006 moved a block away, to a place along the sidewalk next to St. Peter's Catholic Church (which itself was not only damaged when the towers fell but also played a vital role in the recovery efforts carried out in the wake of the attack). This I-beam cross would eventually be moved back to its original site, as a permanent part of the September 11th Memorial & Museum. The St. Peter's community, meanwhile, had grown attached to the cross and what it represented, and began searching for someone who could create a new cross to stand in its place. My friend Jon Krawczyk, a New Jersey native, accepted the task.

Rather than replace that I-beam cross with a replica, Jon wanted to create something completely different. After many months of designing (and redesigning), Jon had ready a model of a sculpture that, while in the basic shape of a cross, took on in abstract form the shape of a human body, comprised of several uniquely contoured pieces that came together into a single entity. The symbolism, Jon hoped, would transcend the traditional significance of the cross and make this memorial a conduit of remembrance that would embrace all Americans.

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A New Political Dialectic

<cross-posted at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen>

Jackson Lears has a riveting piece up at the Nation which soundly routs the new parapositivism taking the popular and newspaper science cultures by storm.  The piece is called "Same Old New Atheism: On Sam Harris".  It's a takedown of Harris couched within a takedown of the New Atheist conceptual framework couched within a takedown of a positivism which oversteps its bounds.  Freddie deBoer recently praised the piece:

I think that absolutely everyone should read this profoundly necessary evisceration of Sam Harris, the Moe of the New Atheist Three Stooges, written by Jackson Lears and published by the Nation. It may be my favorite essay published this year; it goes well beyond the usual stalking horses of New Atheism and speaks to some of the fundamental analytical and ethical issues confronting our species, particularly when it comes to progress and the limits of knowledge. Read the whole thing, seriously.

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Drug Policy: Engaging with Reality

In Japan, there is a widespread benign ignorance about the effects of recreational drug use on the human body.  I know only one person here who has tried a hardcore drug (by which I mean it doesn't pass the lunchbreak test), and he happens to be an extremely unique, strongwilled, powerful, and privileged individual.  Drugs (besides of course alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, nitrous, and until recently, both marijuana and mushrooms) are not a part of Japanese culture, and so if Japanese people do not dispassionately understand the physiological effects of crystal meth, who cares?  

However in America, a country saturated with recreational drug use, we suffer from a malignant almost willful ignorance on the part of parents and authority figures.  Our drug laws and programs designed to combat youth drug use, personal experimentation, and addiction are universally poor and self-defeating.  Nowhere is this more apparent than in the easily-debunkable urban legends and boogieman stories disseminated through networks of parents and school officials engaging in discussions of mutual ignorance.  Like priests and nuns lecturing Catholic school students about sex, bureaucrats, PTA officials, and politicians not named Hunter S. Thompson should not be formulating drug policy or setting curricula.  This job should be the proper province of neuroscientists who understand the physiology of addiction, and illegal drugs should be scientifically reviewed and assessed by the chemists and clinical researchers at the FDA.

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Conservatism Eats Itself

The point of view Texas just correctedThe Texas school board's new curriculum continues the tragic decline of modern American "conservatism" as a movement with intellectual heft and consistency of thought.  Conservatives once imagined that they stood athwart the breach that threatened to replace individualism, inherited values and freedom with the top-down collective conformity of the Soviet Union.  Now, the right indoctrinates the young before college to counter the propaganda of the liberal intelligentsia, brands anyone that opposes extra-legal torture as "soft on terror" and attempts to "bureaucracize" language by calling torture "enhanced interrogation" and capitalism "free-market enterprise."  It is a tragedy that conservatives would embrace propaganda and torture, reducing their legacy of strident opposition to Communism and its evils to froth of partisanship.  Communism was evil because of what it did, not why it did it, if we do evil then we are no better.  If only more people were temperamentally conservative - humble, careful and limited in their approach to politics- rather than ideologically conservative, which amounts to a shopping list of positions their team supports.

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Fake History in Texas

According to the New York Times, a group of ten socially conservative Texas Board of Education members have won a decisive victory for determining the content of the state's social studies and economics curricula for the next decade.  No historians or economists were consulted in making the changes, which will affect more than 6.5 million students over the next ten years

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Crossing the Line

Repent Amarillo's Spirtual MapThe internet is abuzz with reports of an extreme Christian group in Amarillo, Texas that has used aggressive measures to punish sinful behavior to prevent their town from becoming a "demonic stronghold."  Repent Amarillo's views of what constitutes immorality are no different than many other Christians, but their methods are on the extreme fringe.  In an expose entitled "He Who Cast the First Stone" the Texas Observer recounts a year of intimidation against a private, middle class swingers club:

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The Catholic Church: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

I'm proud to be a Catholic.  While Protestants were busy reading the Bible, addressing each other as "Goody", building barns, and milking cows, my religious ancestors were hunting down witches and heretics and setting them on fire, writing books about damning people to Hell and following through by actually damning them to hell, devising complex codes and secret societies to keep losers at bay, invading an entire region of the globe in search for a magic cup, building labyrinths, burning surviving classical texts, improving torture techniques, trying to keep a dead language alive, and otherwise founding Western civilization.  But to really appreciate how cool Catholicism is when compared to Protestantism, one need only compare Gregorian Chant to Creed.

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A Response to Jonathan Chait

For years now, people far less libertarian than I have been recommending I read Ayn Rand.  While I admit I have no interest in reading her books, I know enough about the author to find her distasteful, iconoclastic, and hypocritical.  Libertarianism is an ideal which treasures self-governance - that is, personal responsibility for one's actions and the freedom to make really bad mistakes as well as the freedom to believe something stupid.  I was excited when I heard about Jonathan Chait's New Republic trashing of Rand, but after I read the article, I couldn't help but feel angry and offended.

Chait, like many, many political commentators from the left, assumes that libertarianism is a simple, unnuanced ideal, that libertarians are incapable of breaking with dogma, and, in general, are a group of elitists who seek to control the world via some sort of perceived innate ability to be better than everyone else at almost anything.  This is an absurd caricature.  Libertarianism is motivated by different factors for different people, despite the fact that Chait suggests it is a psychological disease resulting from abusive parents!

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Breakthrough or Sign of the Apocalypse?

It bothers me that science and faith are so often at war.  As a person without faith- or at least religious faith - perhaps I oversimplify the difficulty of rationalizing deeply held beliefs with another view point that is so rigid that it can be doctrinaire.  It pains me to see centuries old science dismissed as mere guesswork, but when religious views are repeatedly undermined perhaps it is natural to eventually believe that there is malicious intent.  Some days, even I wonder if perhaps the scientists aren't just sticking it to them; exhibit A, Stanford researcher have discovered a process to make sperm and eggs from embryonic stem cells- a process that works no matter what the gender of the donor is.  Christians believe life begins at conception so this is murder, though to be fair, turning an embryo into sperm and eggs which can become another embryo is pretty muddy ethically.  I suppose their answer would be that either way it thwarts God's will, but that does seem to skirt the larger questions.  How can life begin at conception if it can be restarted and become a different life?  If embryos are capable of being unwound back to their parts then how can they be a completed human life?  

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