Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid

Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid

Paul Krugman: The Wastrel Son

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Wastrel Son

He was a stock character in 19th-century fiction: the wastrel son who runs up gambling debts in the belief that his wealthy family, concerned for its prestige, will have no choice but to pay off his creditors. In the novels such characters always come to a bad end. Either they bring ruin to their families, or they eventually find themselves disowned.

George Bush reminds me of those characters — and not just because of his early career, in which friends of the family repeatedly bailed out his failing business ventures. Now that he sits in the White House, he's still counting on other people to settle his debts — not to protect the reputation of his family, but to protect the reputation of the country.

One by one, our erstwhile allies are disowning us; they don't want an unstable, anti-Western Iraq any more than we do, but they have concluded that President Bush is incorrigible. Spain has washed its hands of our problems, Italy is edging toward the door, and Britain will join the rush for the exit soon enough, with or without Tony Blair.

At home, however, Mr. Bush's protectors are not yet ready to make the break.

Last week Mr. Bush asked Congress for yet more money for the "Iraq Freedom Fund" — $25 billion for starters, although Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, says that the bill for the full fiscal year will probably exceed $50 billion, and independent experts think even that is an underestimate. And you know what? He'll get it.

Before the war, officials refused to discuss costs, except to insist that they would be minimal. It was only after the shooting started, and Congress was in no position to balk, that the administration demanded $75 billion for the Iraq Freedom Fund.

Then, after declaring "mission accomplished" and pushing through a big tax cut — and after several months when administration officials played down the need for more funds — Mr. Bush told Congress that he needed an additional $87 billion. Assured that the situation in Iraq was steadily improving, and warned that American soldiers would suffer if the money wasn't forthcoming, Congress gave Mr. Bush another blank check.

Now Mr. Bush is back for more. Given this history, one might have expected him to show some contrition — to promise to change his ways and to offer at least a pretense that Congress would henceforth have some say in how money was spent.

But the tone of the cover letter Mr. Bush sent with last week's budget request can best be described as contemptuous: it's up to Congress to "ensure that our men and women in uniform continue to have the resources they need when they need them." This from an administration that, by rejecting warnings from military professionals, ensured that our men and women in uniform didn't have remotely enough resources to do the job.

The budget request itself was almost a caricature of the administration's "just trust us" approach to governing.

It ran to less than a page, with no supporting information. Of the $25 billion, $5 billion is purely a slush fund, to be used at the secretary of defense's discretion. The rest is allocated to specific branches of the military, but with the proviso that the administration can reallocate the money at will as long as it notifies the appropriate committees.

Senators are balking for the moment, but everyone knows that they'll give in, after demanding, at most, cosmetic changes. Once again, Mr. Bush has put Congress in a bind: it was his decision to put American forces in harm's way, but if members of Congress fail to give him the money he demands, he'll blame them for letting down the troops.

As long as political figures aren't willing to disown Mr. Bush's debt — the impossible situation in which he has placed America's soldiers — there isn't much they can do.

So how will it all end? The cries of "stay the course" are getting fainter, while the calls for a quick exit are growing. In other words, it seems increasingly likely that the nation will end up disowning Mr. Bush and his debts.

That will mean settling for an outcome in Iraq that, however we spin it, will look a lot like defeat — and the nation's prestige will be damaged by that outcome. But lost prestige is better than ruin.

David Brooks: In Iraq, America's Shakeout Moment

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: In Iraq, America's Shakeout Moment

Book Summary

Steven Greffenius has done what few academics would: written a book praising the virtues of Ronald Reagan as a statesman and politician. Through analysis of Reagan's speeches and policies, Greffenius portrays a political leader who integrated American traditions and ideals. The book reaches into Reagan's heart and mind, and emerges with a president who was thoughtful, prophetic, and liberal minded. People who respect democratic principles and the fundamentals of American life—and who sense the erosion of these—should read this book.

An examination copy is available as a complimentary e-book to anyone who would like to consider The Last Jeffersonian for classroom use. The book is easy to download, easy to navigate, and fully searchable. Your bookstore can order copies of The Last Jeffersonian at a discount directly from the publisher.

"The critics have been quick to dismiss Reagan as a master of myths, slogans, anecdotes, and theatrical gestures. The glory of the Greffenius defense is to display these as intrinsic to the content of Reagan's ideas. He shows how Reagan spoke and acted outside the political boxes of his times by thinking in terms of a latent tradition of Jeffersonian democracy that had survived into postwar America mainly as scattered stories and occasional catchwords. Reagan brought to these a distinctively republican feeling for heroism in the everyday lives of ordinary citizens. He added an extraordinary capacity of invention, attuning values and vistas from earlier times to the landscapes of politics late in the twentieth century. The Greffenius argument is that the resulting ideas, the political rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, deserve to be taken seriously by people who would understand and improve American politics. The case is convincing." From the Foreword by John S. Nelson.

The Last Jeffersonian considers President Reagan's political thought with care. The book's table of contents is listed below. Please click the title for Chapter 5 for a quick look at a sample chapter.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Last Jeffersonian

Chapter 2: The Actor and the Politician

Chapter 3: Jefferson's Legacy

Chapter 4: Visions of America

Chapter 5: Self-Improvement

Chapter 6: Dreams of Wealth

Chapter 6: The Idealist

Chapter 8: Self-Government

Chapter 9: Domestic Divisions

Chapter 10: Money and Taxes

Chapter 11: Good Guys and Bad Guys

Chapter 12: Democracy Is Not a Fragile Flower

Chapter 13: Heroes of the Story

Chapter 14: Conclusion

Comments from Jonathan Pack

I just wanted to point out a few things about the U.N.
Would we had known of the oil-for-food BILLIONS that have
been laundered if we had not gone into Iraq?  The program
that is headed by the Secretary General Annon.  And as far
as our allies against us in Iraq, if you were France or
Russia and you knew that "your" oil fields were going to be
taken from you and given back to Iraq, wouldn't you be
against the war?  France and Russia both had the rights to
the 3 largest oil fields in Iraq.  I'm pretty sure I know
why they were against, along with the BILLIONS that they
would eventually stop getting from the oil-for-food
program.  Now I am only 20 years old and most likely you
won't take me seriously, but these are just my
observations.  What would Reagan say to this?  Are you
writing your thoughts or the your ideas of what Reagan
would say?  I do believe Reagan was somewhat of a right vs.
wrong guy.  However, I have not had the years that you have
had to research and discover, but no matter what you say,
and no matter what evidence you put in front of me, I
believe the basic fact of this war is that we are helping a
country feel freedom.  Whether this was the idea of
President Bush's plot to go into Iraq, we may never know,
but the Iraqi people, in many areas, are doing things that
they couldn't even dream of under Saddam.  Yes, there are
still terror groups and certain Iraqi groups that are
causing many troubles, and our embarrassing those Iraqi
prisoners and our ourselves did not help, but I do believe
that Iraq will be much more stable in the near future.
Heck, look at when we started our democracy over 200 years
ago.  We had turmoil.  We had fights.  We had chaos.  It
may not have been to the extent of today, but we still had
a lot of trouble in our beginning.  These are just my
thoughts, and I hope you read and critique them if you may.
Thank you for reading.

Jonathan Pack

Ronald Reagan on Equality

"Andrew Sullivan nominates a fairly bland quote from Bush's excellent Lott denunciation for inclusion in Bartlett's. But isn't this the star sentence --

Every day our nation was segregated was a day that America was unfaithful to our founding ideals.

When it comes to recent Republican presidential egalitarianism, I still prefer Ronald Reagan's far more difficult appeal for social equality (as opposed to mere legal equality or equality of opportunity):

"Whether we come from poverty or wealth... we are all equal in the eyes of God. But as Americans that is not enough--we must be equal in the eyes of each other. "

Books & Culture's Book of the Week: "Trust but Verify" - Christianity Today Magazine

The New York Times > International > Middle East > Powell Says C.I.A. Was Misled About Weapons

Ugly War: Why America Should Leave Iraq

The latest news from Iraq shifts our attention from the fighting in Fallujah, Baghdad and Najaf to the treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. 60 Minutes did the right thing to distribute those pictures, and the public reaction has been indignation: "How can that be? Who would have thought? This is an outrage. What's going on here?" How else can you react in public? Who will take responsibility for something like that?

So how do people think we are treating Saddam right now? Do we think he has a TV set in his cell and a weight room next door? If we found out that he was kept naked in a damp cell with a bag over his head, would we be too disturbed? How about Osama? Suppose we caught him? That's an even clearer case, because he's an enemy who actually attacked us. How concerned would we be over proper treatment if we were interrogating him?

The Israelis have used interrogation methods like the ones we've seen in Iraq for a long time. In fact, we learned these methods from the Israelis. What's the best way to wear a prisoner down without actually torturing him? We've never issued a word of objection to the Israelis' methods. We've adopted the same stance as the Israelis: when it comes to stopping people who want to blow up little children in shopping centers, the ends justify the means.

How do you suppose we've been treating the prisoners we caught in Afghanistan? Do we have congressmen who want to know what's been going on in Guantanamo? If we thought that torture would help us find the people who planned 9/11, or that we could stop a future attack with interrogation methods that clearly violate international norms, would we stop at humiliation? Who doesn't think that we've already used those methods to gather information from the people we've captured in Afghanistan?

The reason we're reacting this way to abuse of Iraqi prisoners is that we have a bad war on our conscience. Iraqis are not our enemies. For the most part, they are honorable people. We know that if an army invaded our country and then occupied it, we would stand up to them, just as they have stood up to us. We know that those Iraqi prisoners threaten us because we're in their country when we shouldn't be. That's far different from the case of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who brought their war to us.

So now those contractors and reservists are going to pay, probably with prison time, for their acts. Someone has to pay, and the perpetrators will be the ones. They took pictures of themselves and their victims, ugly snapshots to show how much fun they were having. It's not often you get to treat other people this way! Let's have a party! But some of those guards, even though they're guilty, will be scapegoats nevertheless. We'll be so indignant about the acts of the guilty few, that it'll be easy to forget that wars are inherently ugly, especially wars that were wrong from the beginning.

In fact, we've been distracting ourselves from this question of right and wrong from the start. I've heard these arguments so often: "If our leaders say it's the right thing to do, it must be the right thing to do." And: "We have to get the terrorists." Well, who are the terrorists? Anyone we don't like and anyone we're afraid of? Where is the cold, ruthless focus on the people who actually want to do us harm?

The last big distraction from our guilt was several months ago, when it became apparent at last that we weren't going to find dangerous weapons in Iraq. We were all discussing whether the intelligence agencies were to blame for feeding bad analysis to the president and his advisors. The premise of the whole controversy was that if we had found weapons, our invasion would have been justified. As it was, we made a big mistake that hurt our credibility, and we have to find out who is to blame. But this effort to blame the CIA for bad information misses two important points.

The first one is that this war wouldn't be justified even if Hussein did have the weapons Bush said he had. We had already conducted air operations over Iraq for a long time, and if we discovered weapons or materials we wanted to get rid of, we could have done so easily, just as the Israelis did when they bombed the Iraqi nuclear reactor a generation ago. We did not need to bomb Baghdad and send in 200,000 troops to get rid of dangerous weapons. We needed to do that to get rid of Hussein, and that was clearly our aim.

The other point we managed to miss during the intelligence controversy is that Bush clearly cooked up any argument he thought would succeed during the lead-up to war. He even said that Hussein helped to carry out the 9/11 attacks, and people believed him! When reporters challenged him to defend the war after we couldn't find any weapons, he said, "What's the difference?" For Bush, it didn't matter whether Hussein actually had any weapons. What mattered was that he wanted them, and in a post-9/11 environment, anyone who could be dangerous in the future has to be crushed.

It does remind me of an old saying that I read in grad school. George Kennan or someone of his temperament said that "Anyone is free to think the whole world is his enemy, and if he believes it long enough, it'll be true." Here again, though, Bush and his people have given themselves away. If they really believed in their own doctrine of preemption, they'd pull out of Iraq and go on to the next dangerous character on their axis of evil list. The list is pretty long, you know. In fact, they want to stick it out in Iraq, because their real motive was to get Hussein, and to make an example of Iraq to the rest of the world. See what we can do to a tyrant like that, and how we can reshape his country in our image? See what will happen to you if you mess with us?

Now a lot more people want to mess with us. And they will. They already have. We can't pull out of Iraq for fear that it'll become another Afghanistan, racked by civil war and home to radical Islamists who can train and plot and organize. We can't stay unless we truly want to become an occupying, not a liberating power. The measures we must use as an occupying power are a lot harsher than the measures used in Abu Ghraib prison. Ask the families in Fallujah who lost brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, what occupying powers have to do to "pacify" a defeated nation.

We have no business in Iraq, and we have already paid so much for our mistake. I don't mean dollars, either. Who can remember now the good will that flowed toward our shores in the weeks and months after 9/11? Tony Blair's was only the most eloquent voice: he spoke for the rest of our brothers and sisters all over the world, all those people who had themselves suffered the scourge of radical Islam and other vicious movements for decades. Now the United States, the most powerful member of the international community, could lead good and brave people everywhere in a cause that was right and necessary. Positive action had been too long in coming, but now the people who lay buried under the concrete of the World Trade Center required some response. Justice required punishment, prevention, and perseverance. We had the opportunity to fight a just war, and to do much good with the help of others.

It's almost a laughable understatement now to say that we squandered the good will that existed two and a half years ago. We wanted, needed, and had the support of good Muslims everywhere, people who recognized the totalitarian threat that Al Qaeda and its sympathizers posed to their own civilization. We had allies everywhere, people who would help us without our even asking for help. Among those who saw 9/11 not only as a tragedy but as an opportunity, moderate Muslims would see the possibilities for reconciliation and mutual assistance most clearly. Instead, we went nuts, to use a phrase that has come to mind altogether too often in the last year. We killed so many people who had nothing to do with the war we were involved in. So many people who wished us no harm, and nothing but good.

I need to make a few more points here. One has to do with the place criticism of this sort has in post-Vietnam America. The second, related to the first, has to do with the origins of my own judgments on this matter. The third has to do with what we should have done in 2002 instead of planning a war with Iraq, and what we can still do in our fight against Al Qaeda. And the fourth concerns what we have to do in Iraq right now, to keep a bad situation from reaching the so-called tipping point. For make no mistake, we could lose our special place in the world for good here. We could follow a course that will lead historians two centuries from now to say, "Here is where it started. Here was the beginning of the end for America's supreme position in the world."

Before I take up these points, though, let me recall another thought that has come to mind many times since 9/11. In the days after that shocking event, I said we need a Winston Churchill to lead us now. We need someone with his eloquence, his faith, his sense of aggressive perseverance, and his defiance. He was Europe's last great defender of democracy and freedom during a troubled time, and but for him, the Nazis might have established themselves across the continent for much more than four years. In late 2001, we needed someone like that, and I didn't see anyone able to take that role.

Then Bush gave his speech to the joint session of Congress, and one could feel a bit more hopeful about our leadership. The speech was well-written and well-delivered: Bush issued a resolute, decisive response to our enemies and a clear request for action to our friends. Then we went to war in Afghanistan, and for once we had allies who would actually fight. The northern alliance, as the soldiers fighting the Taliban were called, proved willing to fight hard, and the victory was theirs with our assistance from the air. Things looked better as we had the former rulers of that long-suffering country on the run.

After that war, we needed to plan what to do next. Who could have expected, during that time, that the administration had already set its military sights on Iraq, and had done so from the first days after 9/11? They even thought that Iraq could be a repeat of Afghanistan. Our agile force had succeeded so quickly in Afghanistan - we could do the same thing with our other enemy across the way, and finish off the work we had started during the Gulf War ten years ago. Richard Clarke said that Bush asked him right after 9/11 to find out if Hussein had some connection with the attack. Clarke was astonished. "But Mr. President," he said, "It was Al Qaeda." "I know, I know," the president responded, "But look into it anyway." Clarke wrote later that the war against Iraq represented colossal misdirection. It was as if the United States, after the attack at Pearl Harbor, had attacked Mexico.

Well, here's what we should have done in Afghanistan. We should have put a lot more troops on the ground during the war itself. We should have made sure the victory was ours, not a victory that could be claimed by the local warlords. Most assuredly we should have allied ourselves with them, but we should have directed the war from the ground, not primarily from the air. After the war, we should have consolidated our position there. We should have put 500,000 troops on the ground there, even if we don't have 500,000 troops on active duty right now. We should have found the people somewhere, and made Afghanistan an outpost, just as we did over the years with Germany, Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. We could have achieved more progress against Al Qaeda from that outpost than from any other place, and most Afghanis would have welcomed us there. What an opportunity we had to bring peace and prosperity to much of south Asia, and to serve our own interests at the same time.

We didn't do that, though, and my vehemence about what we did instead so often gets the better of me. I have to tell people that I'm not one of those anti-war throwbacks, who recall the days of the anti-war movement during the sixties with a kind of warped nostalgia. Who would wish for that sort of political divisiveness again? Who would wish for a time when patriotism was dishonorable, and our military men and women received mockery and spittle in the face as they arrived home from their tours of duty in Vietnam? The memories of that time are still so vivid, that criticism of the war in Iraq comes under suspicion because the speaker is undermining our troops, not giving them the support they need.

It's not so: opponents of this war believe in the goodness, the abilities and the fortitude of our soldiers as much as ever. Now the families, the moms and dads of those soldiers are beginning to question this war and the reasons for fighting it, and I thank them for it. They've made it possible for others to speak more freely about the horrible thing we've done, without having to apologize because we're making our soldiers' jobs more difficult. Opposition to this war and support of our troops easily go together. In fact, opposition to this war and support of our troops have to go together, because we have to get our fighting men and women out of there. We can't support a government that puts our young people in harm's way for bad reasons. Our young people shouldn't have to pay for other people's mistakes and poor judgment. They shouldn't have to come home in anonymous coffins, victims of a war where, for the first time in our history, we are clearly guilty of aggression. If we have to have victims, let our battlefield casualties come from the mountains in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, where our real enemies are hiding, and fighting.

So I started to say why you should listen to me, why you shouldn't dismiss my opposition as a throwback to the anti-war rhetoric of the sixties. I studied international politics, and the ethics of war and peace, for a long time. I wrote my first book on the logic of conflict, and I spent a long time analyzing the Arab-Israeli conflict to find lessons and insights into international war. I thought, and taught, about mutual perception and misperception, the use of force, the significance of international law, the necessity for violence and the establishment of peace in relations among states.

More than that, I served in the Navy for over four years, during the period when we first sent ships to the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea. I served in the Western Pacific when the Iranian hostage crisis began, and my ship was among the first to go to that remote part of the world's oceans. I know what it's like to serve in the military, how dangerous the job is, and the devotion our soldiers and sailors show in the execution of their duties. I joined the Navy in 1977, a year out of college, as a junior officer. This kind of thing was unthinkable among my peers. Our military defeat, loss of men and bitter humiliation in southeast Asia still hung over our culture, and especially over our youth at that time. Joining any branch of the military, especially if you were from the north and from the upper middle class, was not something you did. After the war in Vietnam, people regarded the armed services a little bit as they would a failed cult. It didn't come back to its place of honor and respect until the Reagan years, and Reagan himself can claim credit for that restoration. Patriotism and admiration for our armed forces have burned with a steady light since then.

So that's why the reports of abuse in Iraqi prisons pose such a threat to our self-respect. We don't have to go far in our memories before we encounter My Lai and other unpleasant legacies of Vietnam. It's not going to be enough to say that war is nasty, and that's what happens when you start one. It's not going to be enough to say that the perpetrators were following orders, that they weren't well trained or that they were poorly supervised. They're going to be made into scapegoats, and the self-righteous men and women who committed the greater crime will be self-righteous about these poor soldiers as well. And I don't say poor soldiers because I think what they did is okay, or because I think they don't deserve punishment for what they did.

I say it because at least some of those guards probably did what they did to go along with their buddies. Sadistic leaders wanted to soften the prisoners up for interrogation, or to punish them for getting out of line. They already regarded their prisoners as animals, and they would prove it. Now the only way for an underling soldier to do the right thing is to stand out from the group, to refuse to go along, to make yourself conspicuous for your disobedience. And that's about the hardest thing for anyone to do, because refusal to go along means ostracism, and when you're far away from home, away from your family and other anchors, and the only friends you have are the ones you work with every day, you are not going to stand out, you are not going to refuse to go along. You are going to do what the others are doing.

So I've taken a while to say what we should do now. The most urgent thing to do is change our leadership. Chamberlain had to go after Munich, and Bush has to go after Iraq. I won't say that Kerry is our Churchill, but he's our only choice. We know that Bush and his advisors won't do anything constructive in this situation. They're going to grant fake sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30, they're going to keep being dishonest with themselves, which means they aren't going to admit they've made any mistakes. Without that admission, we can't begin to put things right. And if we don't put things right, we'll be amazed at how much worse things can get.

If we were to pull out of Iraq tomorrow, a lot of interesting things would happen there. Not all of them would be good. I expect that by and large, and gradually, things would get better than they are now. We probably wouldn't see a lot of unity among the three regions of the country: the north, the center, and the south. We might see more warfare than we care for, and a lot of developments that look threatening to us. Yes, it could turn into the sort of haven for our enemies that Afghanistan became under the Taliban. On the whole, though, it's hard to see that conditions in Iraq would become much worse than they are now. The Iraqis want their country back. I don't think they're going to turn over any part of it to Al Qaeda, the way the Taliban did in Afghanistan. The Iraqis are too smart to do something like that - how's that for a helpful observation about national character? - and they're too smart to start a civil war, too.

That's kind of a flip way of saying they have too much else to do. If we were to leave there, I think we'd see a lot of interesting politics, equivalent in its way to the ten years or so after the British left their American colonies in the early 1780s. You'd see a lot of conflict, and a nation trying to refashion itself. We went through a cruel civil war before we worked things out, and we'd have to be willing to see Iraq go through something like that, too. But it would make a difference that the Iraqis were building a new state with a legitimate government, without an occupying army and foreign administrators around to interfere.

Well, we're not going to leave tomorrow, so we have to ask what would happen if we leave more slowly. And we have to ask what part the UN will play as we get out of there. More than one commentator, from Wesley Clark to a British official with the UN, has said that we need to pay close attention to the political process in Iraq as we try to disengage ourselves from the place. People who know Iraq know this isn't an easy job - they know the chances of failure are pretty good at this point. I won't try to summarize their line of argument right here - I can say though that their remarks on the radio came across clearly enough. We have sophisticated analysts out there who can help us: they serve in the UN and in other posts all over the world. We need their advice.

We are the only country in the world right now that thinks the UN shouldn't play a leading part in the political transition coming up in Iraq. We have given the UN its current advisory role only as a last resort: we couldn't see any other way out of the problems we created for ourselves. The UN is indeed our only way out now - out of our problems and out of the country. If we give real responsibility to the UN and to the Iraqis themselves, now, we could still redeem something from the situation, even if we have to admit our mistakes. But even if isn't the right phrase here: the only way to redeem anything from the situation is if we admit our mistakes.

Most importantly, intelligent disengagement means we would have a real opportunity to resume the war we should be fighting. We wouldn't be distracting ourselves with blame, when the truly big mistakes go unpunished and even unnoticed. We have made a horrible mistake here, and somebody has to say so. I don't hear Kerry saying so. Somebody with stature has to say it: this war is wrong, and we have to confess it. Then we have to seek forgiveness, atone if that's possible, and fight again. When we fight again, let's pick the right enemy.

Article by David Brooks on fighting terror, April 13, 2004:

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: The Uncertainty Factor

This peculiar word "freedom" -- with hundreds of definitions -- has been debased in the coinage of communications. It might be helpful to go back to the original derivation of the word -- a dozen language roots with a common ancestry: always it springs from words that mean "peace" and "love." Strangely enough, the word "liberty" traced back to its roots meant "growing up" or "maturing" or "taking responsibility." And therein lies the whole story -- we can have peace and brotherly love by accepting our responsibility to preserve freedom here where it has known its longest run in six thousand years of recorded history.

Ronald Reagan on the second to last page of Where's the Rest of Me?

If damage is done to the nation, it is almost impossible to rectify; the bad drives out the good.

Same author, same place.

Was Jesus Anti-Semitic?

Last week I heard a piece on national public radio about Mel Gibson's new movie, The Passion. The film is about the end of Jesus's life. Gibson produced the film himself, and one theme of the piece was the trouble Gibson will have in finding a distributor for a movie like this. Scorcese's The Last Temptation of Christ came to mind as a near comparison: that one generated a lot of mail, as well as protests outside of theaters. Not good for ticket sales.

I don't even remember why The Last Temptation of Christ drew so much opposition. It had to do with Christ's temptation: a vision of connubial normalcy with Mary Magdalene while Jesus suffered on the cross. In fact, a lot of the film's opponents hadn't seen the movie, but they had heard it was controversial. The grounds for expecting that The Passion will similarly draw criticism seem to be that Jesus was a controversial figure. Well, there's more than that. Apparently the film shows without flinching the cruelty inflicted on Jesus during his last hours. Scourging and crucifixion are not easy images to handle. The other reason for expecting controversy stems from the charge of anti-semitism. The story of Jesus's passion can't be told without encountering this bugbear.

So here are a couple of arguments: First, if Catholics called Jews Christ-killers centuries after the fact, should that affect the way we tell the story of Jesus's trial and execution as it occurred? Later generations of Jews bear no more responsibility for Jesus's death than do Germans who were born after 1945 bear responibility for the Holocaust. Here's what we know about Jesus's trial and execution from the gospel accounts: The authorities who brought Jesus to trial were Jewish. These authorities acted in their capacity as Jewish elders when they brought charges against Jesus. The charge they brought against Jesus was blasphemy, because he claimed to be the son of God. They condemned him when they found him guilty of this accusation.

So, how can you tell this story without sounding anti-semitic? If Catholics later used the Jewishness of Jesus' accusers to persecute Jews, does that make any reference to the Jewishness of Jesus' accusers an anti-semitic act? How can a wacky Christ-killer argument cooked up to justify horrible acts be used to repress an accurate re-telling of Jesus' story now?

The interesting thing is that the gospels themselves don't refer to the Jewishness of Jesus' accuser, because Jesus and the elders who wanted to be rid of him were all Jews. Religion and religious authority were certainly relevant to the confrontation between Jesus and the elders, but Jewishness per se had nothing to do with it. This was a tempest entirely within the Jewish community. That's why Pilate wanted to wash his hands of it.

I suppose it's possible to re-tell the story now without reference to Judaism, but we're looking back on the events from 2,000 years now, and we're altogether too aware of who these people are, and of the consequences of what happened then. The only way to sidestep the anti-semitic baggage is to imagine what the confrontation between Jesus and the elders was like back then.

That brings me to the question at the beginning of this article. Was Jesus anti-semitic? You say, "How could he be?," and you would be right. How could Jesus be anti-semitic? Yet he could not have worded his public attacks on the elders more strongly. They rightly saw him as a threat to their authority. He called them a brood of vipers. He never said anything in their favor. He made a point of attacking them whenever he could. To put it briefly, Jesus couldn't stand them, and they feared him.

I asked that question at the beginning to make this point: to say that Jesus was anti-semitic because he attacked the elders is about as logical as saying that Mel Gibson's movie is anti-semitic because it accurately portrays the actions of the elders in response to Jesus' attacks. What should a storyteller like Gibson do: act as if Jesus' accusers weren't Jewish. Should the storyteller act as if religion weren't relevant, and that Jesus' claim to be the messiah wasn't a central issue in this confrontation? How could you tell this story without raising these issues, which were so important to Jews at the time?

I need to make some extra observations here, some remarks not directly related to the radio piece on The Passion, and not directly related to this issue of anti-semitism when we re-tell the story of Jesus' trial and execution so long after it happened. I've wondered why Jesus reacted so vehemently to the elders. Why did he attack them so relentlessly. Well, thinking about so-called strongmen gave me some insight here. Hussein is the strongman we've been most preoccupied with of late. But think of this phenomenon of strongmen through history and through time: Machiavelli's princes, Don Corleone, the neighborhood strongment in City of Joy or Bronx Tale. Kingship in the middle ages shows the phenomenon on a broad scale. We can see this pattern of political organization in small neighborhoods, and, really, over whole empires. The Roman emperors had charisma, money, bravery, ruthlessness. To quite an extent, their power rested on intimidation: people's fear of what would happen if they crossed the ruler. The ruler has to have control of the means of force and a willingness to use these means.

Now, I think that the elders in Jerusalem when Jesus lived were strongmen of this sort. They ruled by intimidation. They did what they had to do to protect and widen their power. They were dishonest, ruthless (as their execution of Jesus showed), wealthy, and respected. They were respected the way Don Corleone wanted to be respected. Because their power was recognized and sanctioned, they didn't have to use violence much to keep the people under them from breaking the rules. People respected and feared them too much to think of that. Then Jesus comes along, telling people they can reinterpret the old laws, and telling people without mistake that they should overthrow the authority of the elders. Jesus fearlessly made this case: take your church and all political authority back from the strongmen. The elders who rule the church are no more than hypocrites: people who think too well of themselves and who think a lot about preserving their privileges. If they were everyday hypocrites, though, I'm not sure Jesus would have attacked them so strongly. He attacked them the way he did because they oppressed people: they built their positions of privilege at other people's exense.

That's enough for tonight. I'm getting tired. Some day you should put these and other writings into your book, I Tell You.

When I was a teacher, race was on my list of topics to stay away from in class. Too touchy, too easy to be misunderstood, too risky for a junior faculty member who wanted to get tenure! I figured only black men and women could talk honestly about race and not get into trouble. Now that I'm out of academics, I can actually think freely. So in a book I wrote after I didn't have to worry about tenure any more, I wrote a chapter on race and states' rights. It turned out to be a good piece, and no one has attacked me for it yet.

Yesterday I picked up a black gentleman I've been working with at the railway station. He has family in both the United States and St. Thomas. He just graduated this spring with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering. He had just taken his seat in the passenger side of the station wagon when I saw a big, kind of mean looking guy with a frown on his face striding toward the car. He came from the station house, where my friend had just been. I could tell he didn't intend to be polite. I thought he was going to tell me to get out of the parking space I was in. Instead, he looked hard at my friend and said:

"Next time I'll be happy if you flush the toilet."

"I did flush the toilet," my friend replied.

"No you didn't. I can tell because when the toilet flushes the water in the sink goes down."

With that he turned around and walked back to the station house.

Now, my first reaction to this exchange was to think about who might be right in this quick dispute. The fellow from the station certainly seemed sure of himself. Later on that day I reflected that who was right didn't matter. I asked, "Would someone have followed me all the way out to the parking lot and said something like that to me?" I've had people be rude to me before, but about flushing the toilet?

Nope, I had to see that this enforcement effort was part of the treatment blacks get when they travel to the white suburbs. I've heard so many stories about the small indignities black people experience when they deal with whites who regard them as intruders. Bad experiences with the police get publicized, but this instance reminds me that these uncomfortable encounters unfold in many settings. "If I have to let you use my facilities," the fellow thinks, "I'm going to find some way to let you know that I don't like it." Nope, I don't think I would have received a warning about flushing the toilet from someone who didn't see the water in the sink go down. Who even watches for something like that unless he wants to find a reason to get the guy? He might as well have added, "I didn't even check the toilet itself, because what I really wanted to do was let you know you're not welcome here."

Next time, Breaker Morant.