Dad Always Liked You Best!

Recently another commenter under a Bart Ehrman video on YouTube told me irritably to read Henri Nouwen's book on the parable of the prodigal son. I don't know what he thought it would prove. The question, if I remember right, was whether Jesus thought that sin had to be atoned for through sacrifice. Ehrman thinks not, and that the material in the gospels which teaches atonement is a later accretion to Jesus' actual teaching. I'm not persuaded, for reasons I'll try to go into some other time, but I kept Nouwen in mind because a gay evangelical Christian article I read a couple of years ago mentioned him as a conciliatory voice on homosexuality and the church. I'd also picked up somewhere indications that Nouwen himself was gay, though closeted. Wikipedia assures us that he never did anything, though.

I didn't try to track down Nouwen's book right away, but one day I was rereading an article by one of my favorite New Testament scholars, Dennis Nineham, rebutting a critique of his work by another scholar.

... Edwards accuses me of ignoring the parable of the prodigal son as evidence for the meaning of Jesus' teaching.  In arguing that the connotations of the word 'father' were different in the time of Jesus from what they are now - a contention with which he seems to agree in his essay on John Bowden - I have, he says, ignored the evidence of the parable.  He must know that a plausible case has recently been made out for questioning whether the parable goes back to Jesus. (See John Drury, The Parables of the Gospels, 1985, which also gives grounds whether the parable of the good Samaritan goes back to Jesus - a question relevant to [Edwards'] p. 194. This book was reviewed by Edwards.)  In any case this is of all parables one of the hardest to interpret; Professor C. F. Evans, for example, has listed a number of conflicting interpretations.  Even if the one Edwards seems implicitly to choose is the right one, it by no means follows that the 'glimpse of home life' it affords is 'typical', or that the teaching of the parable, so interpreted, is 'not untypical' of the teaching of Jesus.  These are simply ipse dixits.*

At this point, let me admit that a plausible case can be made for questioning whether any individual parable goes back to Jesus, though the reverse is also true. Since the person who commended Nouwen's book to me was commenting under a video by a critical scholar who doesn't assume that everything in the gospels goes back to Jesus, however, I think it's fair to bring up the question. Just pointing to one parable that only one of the four gospels contains doesn't settle anything.  That there are numerous conflicting interpretations is also normal in the field; I suspect the other commenter didn't know this and assumed that there could be no question about what the parable means.  Anyway, Nineham's remarks nudged me to find a copy of Nouwen's The Return of the Prodigal Sun and read it.

The parable of the prodigal son is in Luke 15:11-32.  Briefly, a wealthy man's younger son asked to be given his share of his inheritance so he could go and seek his fortune.  Granted his wish, he went away "to a distant country," where he fell into dissipation, drinking and partying with loose women. When his money ran out he had to work tending swine.  Finally he resolved to go home and beg his father to take him in. His father welcomed him and ordered a celebration. His older brother was working in the fields, and no one bothered to tell him of his brother's return.  When he came in he complained, and his father tried to reassure him: "Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.  But we had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found."  The end.

Now on to Henri Nouwen (1932-1996), a Dutch-born Roman Catholic priest.  I didn't dig deeply into his biography, just looked over his Wikipedia page, so I don't know how he became a celebrity cleric.  He wrote numerous books and traveled widely, taught at Harvard, Yale, the University of Notre Dame. If you're curious, you can find YouTube videos of his rather overwrought preaching style.

The Return of the Prodigal Son, published in 1992, is an odd book. In particular Nouwen focuses more on Rembrandt's painting of that name than on Luke's text. Someone showed him a print of the painting and he became obsessed with it. Eventually in the 1980s he was able to travel to the Soviet Union and see the original in the Hermitage there. Ordinarily tourists weren't supposed to dawdle in front of the painting, but thanks to some personal connections he was allowed to spend several hours looking at it, even getting a chair to sit in.  At this point I began to get annoyed with Nouwen's poor-little-me shtick, as if he was just a nobody who got a special privilege because of his purity of spirit, which the Hermitage guards generously detected. In fact he was a celebrity with an avid support network. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

It's a theme that runs through the book.  The Wikipedia article says that he "was known to suffer from loneliness and a need for interpersonal connection, which he wrote about openly."  Not surprising that it was "known," then, but most people need interpersonal connection.  At one point he writes, "I am the prodigal son every time I search for unconditional love where it cannot be found."  I can't take this very seriously, since he reports many people who gave him unconditional love. It seems to me that Nouwen was one of those people who suffer from what one wise writer called a spiritual vitamin deficiency, and who rebuff the kindness and love they are offered; but it's never enough. I sympathize with him, and recognize that his reactions were out of his conscious control, but the constant whining got tiresome as I read the book.**

Much of Nouwen's discussion of the parable centers around his struggle to make Luke's version agree with Rembrandt's. The painting shows the prodigal on his knees in his father's embrace, while a man who seems to be his brother looks on with displeasure. (There's ongoing debate among art historians and critics about who the different figures in the painting are supposed to represent. Is one woman who looks on impassively supposed to be the mother, for example?)  According to Luke, as I mentioned, the brother was at work in the fields when he showed up, and in fact the father saw the youth coming "while he was still far off," so he ran out to embrace and kiss him. Of course it's not unusual to shift things around when adapting a written story to a visual mode, but Nouwen seems very puzzled by it.  He seems to think that if he tries hard enough he can resolve the differences, but also that the painting takes precedence over Luke's original.

Nouwen seems determined to wring every drop of meaning he can from the parable, on every level, which is a traditional Catholic approach to Scripture.  The most obvious, I think, is the idea that Man has wandered wickedly away from his loving Father in order to wallow in sin, but God is waiting to welcome us back and kill the fatted calf for us if only we'll give up our selfish pride. The idea that God is actively looking for us, like a shepherd looking for a lost sheep, turns up elsewhere in the gospels. Nouwen seems much more interested in individual psychology, though: his obsession with finding unconditional love, his personal reluctance to be enfolded in the Father's embrace, and of course trying to join Luke's story with Rembrandt's painting. The most interesting part of The Return of the Prodigal Son for me was Nouwen's move from the prodigal's perspective to his father's to the elder brother's. I don't think Luke had that possibility in mind, but it's a fair approach.

The elder brother is the fly in the parable's ointment, not just for Nouwen but for most Christian interpreters.  If the point was just that God sits up waiting for us to return to him, it would be simple, but Luke complicates it.  It seems to me that the brother has a valid complaint: not only did his father take him for granted, not showing his love for him, but when the prodigal came home, the father forgot to tell him to hurry in and join the celebration: he let him go on working dutifully in the fields. (Nouwen only notices this as a discrepancy between Luke's version and Rembrandt's.) If he hadn't come back at all, would the father have noticed? Nouwen brushes aside the brother's complaint, as the father does. I don't think it's reading too much into the parable to guess that the prodigal was always the favorite.  In a human father, this would be all-too-human, but since the father represents God, he shouldn't get off as easily: he's neglecting those who love him for those who don't.  There's a parable in Matthew of a wealthy man hiring day laborers, who pays those who worked least the same as those who worked all day.  When those who worked more complain, the boss reminds them that he's the boss and he can do what he likes.  The first will be last, and the last will be first!  True enough, but it's not just or fair, and as even some Christian interpreters have pointed out, good luck with hiring workers tomorrow morning, buddy!

So one of the standard Christian readings of the parable of the prodigal son is that the elder brother represents Israel and the younger brother represents the gentiles who are being grafted into the Kingdom by Christ.  But this also implies that God has deliberately neglected his faithful people, fretting for centuries over the ones who got away. It fits with other of Jesus' reported teachings, such as that as a physician he was needed by the sick, not the healthy. But I thought that the Jews, far from being healthy, were the sickest, a bunch of wicked hypocrites, and therefore needed him at least as much. For Nouwen, as for Christian interpreters generally, it seems that the elder brother should have shut up and accepted his second-best status, grateful that his loving father didn't have him thrown onto the trash heap along with the other sinners.

The strangest of Nouwen's excursions is his claim that

I am touching here the mystery that Jesus himself became the prodigal son for our sake. He left the house of his heavenly Father, came to a foreign country, gave away all that he had, and returned through his cross to his Father’s home. All of this he did, not as a rebellious son, but as the obedient son, sent out to bring home all the lost children of God.

I have no idea where Nouwen got this "mystery."  Jesus in Christian mythology and theology was the willing agent of his Father, not a rebel. But this bit of wackery reminded me that the Jesus of the gospels was a rebellious son to his earthly parents. When, as a boy, he stayed behind in the Temple after Passover (Luke 2:41-52) and his parents found him discussing Torah with the "doctors," Mary told him "Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you."  He retorted that obviously he was "about my Father's business."  That was a slap in their faces.  According to the gospels he continued to reject those who'd raised this cuckoo in their nest, and to teach his followers to hate their parents (Luke 14:26).

Which makes me wonder how this theme relates to the prodigal son. I remember one Christian scholar who speculated that Jesus got his teaching about a loving Heavenly Father from the loving example of Joseph. I speculate that Jesus rejected his parents and invented a loving Heavenly Father who sighed to press him to his bosom and would make him feel as special as he wanted to feel. When he said to call no man father, only your father in heaven, I think he meant it.  Maybe his birth parents weren't so loving - we'll never know.  But sentimental fantasies about his upbringing just don't fit with the stories the gospels tell. (For what it's worth, Nouwen admits that his own earthly father was kind and supportive.)

To recap, the commenter who told me to read Nouwen did so under a Bart Ehrman video where Ehrman rejected the doctrine of atoning sacrifice and assumed that Jesus did too. The prodigal son was relevant because no sacrifice was required (what about the fatted calf, though?), just repentance. Ehrman has gone on to claim that Jesus "hated" atonement.  I wouldn't make too much of this myself.  After all, the gospels also show Jesus forgiving sins without demanding repentance (Mark 2:5ff), and some of the calls for repentance may well be later additions, just as the talk about atonement may be. While Nouwen's interpretations aren't without interest, they don't settle anything, especially since they spring from his personal hangups.

* David Edwards et al., Tradition and Truth: The Challenge of England's Radical Theologians 1962-1989 (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), p. 298. Ipse dixit, by the way, is Latin for "he said it himself," meaning "an assertion made but not proved."

** As another very wise man once said, "Perhaps what you need ... is a good facial."

Gay Christians Still Say the Darnedest Things!

I still haven't seen the documentary 1946, and I think I'll have to, because it's clearly having an effect on gay Christians, whether or not they've seen it.  As I've mentioned before, the film is about the 1946 Revised Standard Version of the Bible and its translators' decision to use the word "homosexuals" in a list of sinners found in 1 Corinthians 6:9. It was the first time that word had appeared in an English translation of the Bible, and the filmmakers apparently present that decision as the cause of antigay bigotry in English-speaking Christendom forever after.  

It was changed in later editions, but it happens that I have a copy of the 1946 edition and can confirm that the word "homosexuals" is indeed there. The 1989 New Revised Standard Version replaced it with "male prostitutes [and] sodomites," which doesn't seem much of an improvement to me, not reassuring to young Homo-Americans anxious about their eternal destiny. In 2021 the Updated Edition chose "male prostitutes" and "men who engage in illicit sex," adding footnotes to both acknowledging that the meaning of the Greek is "uncertain." If you're wondering how one word ("homosexuals") became three or more, look for my discussion of Robin Scroggs's The New Testament and Homosexuality in this post.

Lately I've been seeing allusions to 1946 in video reels and comments on them on Facebook. I don't think the people involved have seen the movie or even know its name; what they know is that something momentous related to LBGTQ and the Bible happened in 1946. One commenter, for example, wrote that the word "abomination" wasn't even in the Bible until 1946. They evidently were thinking of Leviticus 18:22, which calls sex between males an abomination (that is, hateful) to Yahweh. That translation choice appears in the Authorized Version of 1611, known as the King James Version, so the RSV translators had nothing to do with it. One video maker remarked that all the biblical references to sex between males had been altered somehow in 1946. I'm not completely sure about this one, because some of that guy's videos are intended satirically, but I think he was serious that time.

So it looks like I'll be collecting more gay-Christian folklore clustering vaguely around the year 1946. It's another example of oral tradition and its effect on information -- misinformation, rather.  What's different from other cases I've encountered is that this is relatively new, springing up in the past year. I don't blame it on the Internet, because the tendency predates the Internet and social media by decades.  

Frothers on Parade

Wins by democratic socialists in last week's primary elections inspired quite a frenzy among centrist Democrats as well as MAGA. The influence of Second Wave feminism makes me reluctant to call it hysteria, because of the word's etymology, but I think relatively few people know that anymore, so what the hell, I'm going with Merriam-Webster's simple definition: "a state in which your emotions (such as fear) are so strong that you behave in an uncontrolled way."

I thought much of the panic over Zohran Mamdani's election as Mayor of New York City had subsided, though it still rages in comments on Twitter and other social media. he's a communist he's a radical islamist terrorist he was behind the 9/11 attacks he's an antisemite he's going to round up all the Jews and impose sharia law etc. it wasn't just Twitter or Facebook randos who lost it, it was also politicians and party leaders -- the kind of people who we're told are the adults in the room were squalling like toddlers.

When some candidates Mamdani endorsed won in the primaries last week the frothing broke out anew.  Mamdani had forced these communist third-worldists on the voters, as though the voters had no choice but to do his bidding. Mamdani is certainly popular in some circles, but he doesn't have the kind of clout Donald Trump, say, has. And he only endorsed three candidates.  Other lefty candidates won elsewhere without Mamdani's support, though I suppose his sinister third-world tentacles reached out to force them on the voters there too.

And, of course, these were primaries.  As some of the frothers pointed out correctly, turnout in New York City was around 9 percent. The general elections are in November.  I've also seen a lot of people celebrating prematurely, but that's normal. No one thinks they're the adults in the room. It seems likely that some of these candidates will win the general, since they're in safely blue districts, but it remains to be seen. One Dem jeered, "If Socialists want to impress Democrats, go to North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, etc, and flip some seats."  I liked the person who replied, "centrists love to be like 'when are you socialists going to win regions and states that we centrists currently also don’t win'".

One reason I make myself keep this blog going is that it's useful to be able to look back in time a little.  When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated a Democratic incumbent in 2018, establishment Democratic reaction was like what I saw last week: how dare she go after an incumbent, she's helping Trump, and so on.  But she won the general and is still in office eight years later despite Democrat-backed attempts to primary her. And then the same establishment, including Nancy Pelsoi, primaried Ed Markey a year later, apparently because he'd become too friendly with Ocasio-Cortez and the other insurgent lefties known as the Squad.

Then, today, the Supreme Court rejected Donald Trump's assault on birthright citizenship.  The MAGA right predictably went bonkers.  This hysteria isn't a partisan thing, and it's good to remember that.

P.S. Just after I posted this and before I went to bed last night, I saw that two more entrenched Democratic incumbents were defeated in Tuesday's Colorado primary by candidates to their left, apparently without help from Zohran Mamdani.  But another Colorado Democratic incumbent defeated a progressive challenger.  That's no surprise, there will be losses as well as victories.  But there are some satisfying moments to savor, as in an item I saw this afternoon.  One of those incumbents posted a video of herself berating a voter last March  ""If ... the only issue that you care about is this issue, then you should not vote for me"-- the issue being Israel's atrocities in Gaza.  Ah yes, that move worked so well for Kamala Harris in 2024.  

I wouldn't assume that Gaza was the only issue that voter cares about.  Last week a self-identified "liberal progressive" and best selling author posted: "As a liberal progressive, I would be fine with the party moving left if these wins were about Medicare for all, reproductive rights, universal childcare, taxing billionaires, and creating affordable housing, But they weren’t." The winners in question are mostly Democratic Socialists, so they have the same wish list this person said she has. Mamdani, for a prominent example, campaigned on much more than Gaza, but his position on Israel obsessed centrist Democrats and the corporate media. The same seems to be true of these other challengers.  But it's also true that unbending support for Israel's crimes and the suppression of dissent about them in the US, not to mention their dependency on AIPAC money, are hurting the incumbents. 

One senior Democrat, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said he would argue that Mamdani "is the leader of the Democratic Party right now."  I think that's obviously absurd at this moment, but "rising star" feels about right, and Mamdani isn't the only one.  I've been wondering who will fill Bernie Sanders's shoes when he leaves office; suddenly there seem to be contenders.

Moderation in the Age of Faith; or, So Many Heretics, So Few Inquisitors

When the historian Carlo Ginzburg died last week, I decided to look at his early book The Cheese and the Worms.  I'm not sure when I'll read the whole thing, but I was gobsmacked by something in the translators' foreword.

Furthermore, while moral justice was impossible in a context where the Catholic Church felt, together with virtually all other secular and religious authorities on both sides of the Alps, that it had the right, even the duty, to persecute those who differed in their religious beliefs, legal justice in sixteenth-century terms was dispensed by the Roman Inquisition. It was not a drumhead court, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible. Capricious and arbitrary decisions, misuse of authority, and wanton abuse of human rights were not tolerated. Rome watched over the provincial tribunals, enforced the observance of what was, for the times, an essentially moderate code of law, and maintained, to the extent that a consensus existed, uniformity of practice.

This didn't reassure me.  They conceded that moral justice was impossible in that historical and cultural context, but insisted that the persecution of those who differed in their religious beliefs could be done without capricious and arbitrary decisions, misuse of authority, or abuse of human rights.  This was "an essentially moderate code of law" because people were persecuted uniformly. The Nazis made similar claims, with as much validity; or if that's too extreme for you, so did Dante for his Hell, or the architects of the US invasion of Vietnam.

Then, just a couple of paragraphs later, the translators added:

A permanent and indispensable member of every inquisitorial court was the notary (or a cleric deputized to assume this function), who transcribed in writing as the legal manuals required “not only all the defendant’s responses and any statements he might make, but also what he might utter during the torture, even his sighs, his cries, his laments and tears” (E. Masini, Sacro Arsenale [Genoa, 1621], p. 123).

"During the torture."  Well!  As long as the torture was transcribed by a notary or a properly deputized substitute, the procedure was "not a drumhead court, a chamber of horrors, or a judicial labyrinth from which escape was impossible."  This technocratic amorality is impressive, and what's more, I don't understand why the translators felt it necessary to write this apologia for it in the second half of the twentieth century.

I then opened my copy of Norman Cohn's The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, a revised edition published in 1970. The book is widely acclaimed and often cited. I read it long ago, in the 1980s, and I'd been meaning to find a passage that made a very strong impression on me back then. It's mainly about the Brothers of the Free Spirit, a movement that spread over much of Europe for more than a century despite the Inquisition's determined campaign to wipe it out.  I found the passage I wanted more easily than I expected:

Brussels continued to harbour Brethren of the Free Spirit. In 1410 the Bishop of Cambrai appointed two inquisitors to extirpate what was still called ‘Bloemardinne’s heresy’; but they found themselves helpless in the face of the popular enthusiasm. Songs were sung after them in the streets and attempts were even made upon their lives.

Songs were sung after them in the streets!  Attempts were even made on their lives!  This demonstrated to Cohn how wicked the Free Spirit were, and how gullible the masses were to fall for their evil teachings, which Cohn presented as the precursors of later Communism and Marxism. (As usual, he neglected to notice that those teachings had their origin in the New Testament.) When The Pursuit of the Millennium was first published in 1957, Nazism was still fresh in adults' memories, the Cold War was in full swing, and Cohn's contemporaries were sure that Elvis Presley's hips were sucking modern youth into the same mass insanity. What I thought when I read it was that it was entirely reasonable and to be expected that torturers and murderers whose methods would later be used by Stalin and the Third Reich would encounter popular resistance when they swaggered into town.  

This long section of Cohn's book consists largely of a litany of heretics who were burned alive by the Inquisition. Here are a couple of examples out of many.

During eighteen months’ imprisonment Marguerite steadfastly refused to purchase absolution by recantation. In 1310 her book was condemned by a committee of theologians; and she herself was excommunicated and sentenced to death by burning. This woman seems to have had many followers, for some months after her death Clement V was bidding the inquisition at Langres to proceed with vigour against the heretics who were multiplying there so rapidly that they were becoming a grave danger to the faith....

The heretics of Cologne had found a remarkable leader in a certain Walter, who came from Holland and who had already been active as a missionary at Mainz. This man was a preacher of great eloquence and persuasiveness; and he wrote various tracts in German which circulated secretly amongst his followers. In the end he was caught; and having refused under the worst tortures to betray his associates or to recant he was burnt. According to one source Walter was an apostate priest, and the head of a large secret group which was captured by a ruse in 1325 or 1327. As many as fifty Brethren of the Free Spirit are said to have been executed on that occasion, some by burning and some by drowning in the Rhine.

But not to worry, a notary or a deputized clerk was no doubt present to record everything Marguerite and Walter said under torture, so everything was done decently and in order.

One more anecdote. These heretics didn't just worry the Roman Catholics, the Protestants agreed that they must be eliminated. 

To counter these activities, the French Protestant community in Strasbourg sent one of their ministers to Tournai, where however he was caught by the Catholic authorities and burnt.

You see, the Inquisition didn't discriminate: all mortal threats to the Christian faith must be extirpated. And I imagine that if the Free Spirit had acquired enough institutional power, they'd have returned the favor.  It was out of this context, and the religious wars that followed, that freedom of religion became an ideal and a founding principle of the American republic. As Ginzburg's translators say, such freedom wasn't a virtue in Europe before that; Catholics and Protestants agreed that it was their duty to punish those who held different religious beliefs. At most each side wanted toleration for itself.

I suppose I should reread The Pursuit of the Millennium and, if possible, Cohn's 1975 book on the struggle against European witchcraft, Europe's Inner Demons.  As I recall, Cohn was as confused about that issue as most academics were at the time - were the witches mentally ill, or were they really worshipping the Devil? it didn't occur to them that if anyone was mentally ill, it might have been the Inquisitors. As far as I remember only the maverick psychiatrist Thomas Szasz made that suggestion.  Not that I think so either: the medicalization of evil is not an improvement on treating it as a sin. As Hugh Trevor-Roper said in his essay on the European witch-craze, the complex demonology that gave the witch-hunters an ideology for their campaign was a triumph of Reason comparable to Aquinas' philosophical work. (Remember: Garbage In, Gospel Out!)  But that's for another day.

The Smell of Burning Cities in the Morning

Look, I know that President Trump has been a bit of a disappointment, but you have to remember that the perfect is the enemy of the good.  If you demand that the President pass all your purity tests, you'll never have a President at all.  Politics is a messy business, and you have to be realistic. Better let the grownups in the room handle this.

... I hope no one reading this will think that I'm being anything but bitterly sarcastic. The mainstream reaction to Trump's memorandum of understanding with Iran hasn't been surprising.  Many of the commentators, in government and in the punditocracy, don't seem to understand what a memorandum of understanding is, and like Schumer, they're lying wildly about the details that were leaked before the text was released. As far as I can tell, the $300 billion for reconstruction is supposed to come from a multinational group that doesn't include the US. Of course it's possible that, like many numbers Trump has talked about that supposedly won't cost US taxpayers anything, the multinational group is a mirage, but Schumer and his ilk seem so far to be misrepresenting it. It's hard to know, given a choice between Trump and the Congressional Democratic leadership, who is lying, but it would be foolish to trust Schumer.

For one thing, similar lies are flying about sanctions relief and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. None of that is taxpayers' money.  The frozen assets belong to Iran, and should have been released many years ago, but both US parties have refused to do it.  The same panicky yelling about Iran's "nuclear program," which is a dogwhistle for "nuclear weapons program," is false too. Iran has the right under international law and the Non-Proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes.  So why believe these guys on the $300 billion?  One can't trust the Iranian government either, but so far they have been somewhat more truthful than the US and Israelis.

As numerous, mostly left-wing commentators have pointed out, the loser in a war normally does and should pay reparations.  Israel, as joint aggressor, should pay reparations to Iran too, but that's never going to happen, and the US should take responsibility for its criminal aggression for once. The words "lose" and "defeat" are, to my mind, not exact here. The US hasn't been defeated as I understand the word.  Our cities haven't been bombed, our leaders haven't been carted off to trial and imprisonment in Iran, and Iranian troops don't occupy American soil.  The same is true of Israel, where similar caterwauling is going on.  US jingoes will always refuse to admit that this country has ever been the aggressor, and if US critics mean by "lose" that the US failed to achieve its objectives, it's fair to rub the jingoes' noses in it.  There's a lot of squalling about Trump's "bad deal."  Maybe it is, but it could be so much worse.

I meant to write this post a couple of days ago, and worried that the situation would fall apart before I got started.  That it hasn't collapsed yet says something about Trump's determination to get out of the mess he's mired in, even as Israel continues killing Lebanese and undermining the ceasefire. On Thursday morning NPR had a fairly good interview with a former Lebanese ambassador to Jordan. For some reason, they didn't post a transcript, just a summary with a few quotations; it's worth listening to the whole thing. By contrast, a Friday morning interview with Richard Haass, a "veteran diplomat ...who served in both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations," and who criticized the memorandum from the right, got a full transcript.  Host Leila Fadel pushed back gently, but let him run on.

By Israeli standards, of course, "ceasefire" means only that the other guys have to stop shooting; Israel will continue its atrocities.  As Avedon Carol noted yesterday, "Not sure where we are in any given minute with the Iran ceasefire deal, during which, as usual, Israel has not done any ceasing to fire, and then complained that Lebanon broke the ceasefire by killing four IDF soldiers who were invading their country at the time. I'm reminded of all the definitions of chutzpah when Hezbollah is called 'terrorists' for defending their own country against invaders."

But our elites will never admit that the US is in the wrong, and Trump's fans are trying to pin the MoU on JD Vance -- anybody but Trump, who to be fair is mainly concerned with his optics rather than substance, as usual.  As I've indicated, the MoU looks much better than anything I'd have expected from this administration, and could be a reasonable beginning. For that reason, it will probably fail, because of Israel and the rest of our government.

Alone and Palely Loitering

Before I start picking on Barry Walters's Mighty Real: A History of LGBTQ Music 1969-2000 (Viking, 2026), I want to stress its virtues. Walters is a longtime music journalist, and he's actively covered most of the period he wrote about in his book, interviewing many of the artists and attending their performances. The book is long -- almost 500 pages total -- and will probably come as a revelation even to many gay people who lived through those years, let alone the young. I'm ten years older than Walters and began reading the pop/rock press in the late 60s, so I was familiar with most of the music and musicians in the book, though some details were new to me. That won't be true for most of its audience, and none of my criticisms here should dissuade anyone from reading Mighty Real. It's a good read, and you'll almost certainly learn a lot.

What bothered me was the book's overall tone.  Part of this is because of the era: there were almost no openly gay pop musicians in 1969, though some were almost out, such as Little Richard, and a lot of innuendo and code got past industry censors. Broadcast radio was the main outlet for recorded music in those days, and Walters does a good job with this aspect of his subject. Double entendre and innuendo were rampant, not only in radio but in TV and the movies. In addition to that, song lyrics contain a lot of ambiguity by their nature: if the singer addresses "you," the listener can identify himself or herself regardless of the songwriter's intention.  One example out of many Walters gives early on (xiv):

Some songs are unintentionally queer, like the Partridge Family’s 1970 smash “I Think I Love You.” Although it was released on a label run by a gay man, Bell Records’ president Larry Uttal, it launched a fictional family rock group designed for mass consumption via a TV sitcom. That show begat the early ’70s’ defining teen idol, David Cassidy. But once you consider “I Think I Love You” as an LGBTQ song, it’s hard to hear it any other way.... Against all odds, this bubblegum ditty sums up the first step to coming out in an accidental but oddly articulate nutshell, depicting both the angst and the elation of going public with private truths.

I see his point, but I think he has it backwards in a symptomatic way. Fear of rejection, confession of what might be unrequited love for fear of being mocked, the joy of finding out that one's affection is returned after all -- these aren't specifically LGBTQ feelings or experiences. Rather than symptoms of our difference, they're evidence that we're not so different from straight people after all - at least not for these reasons.  I admit that I was in my thirties myself before it dawned on me that when I suffered from failed love, it wasn't because I'm queer (I was actually over that by then) or a neurotic loser, I was participating in the human condition. I've pointed out before that alienation is a majority if not universal experience, especially among adolescents.

I'm not denying that gay kids are still isolated, alienated, or endangered. Of course they are. What I'm saying is that rather than glamorizing those experiences by treating them as inherent to the LGBTQ experience, we should universalize them, and try to find ways to make them less damaging and painful.  This is a theme that runs through Mighty Real, and it bothered me. If you read it, see what you think.

As time went on, some musicians tried to move beyond innuendo and coding to expressing themselves openly. They encountered a great deal of resistance, not just from bigoted fans but from the people who ran the music industry itself and from the music press - and also their own closeted selves. As a result, gay fans worked themselves into ecstasy over every real or imagined dropped hairpin (as queens of my generation called such hints). Walters traces numerous examples of these, acknowledging that the practice is now called "queer-baiting," dangling the possibility that a given star or wannabe might be That Way to excite the fans, then pulling it back. It's hard to say when it's a cynical strategy orchestrated by agents and PR people and when it's really testing the waters by a gay performer, but it becomes less and less tolerable as time goes on.  Walters is too generous to his icons and divas for my liking, tripping lightly over Madonna and Sandra Bernhard gamboling on late-night TV, dropping the name of a lesbian bar they'd gone to without explaining what was really going on.  Maybe he doesn't know; that's the point.

I'm certainly sympathetic to performers who fear hurting their careers by coming out, especially forty and fifty years ago. I'm less sympathetic as Walters's history moves toward the twenty-first century and numerous stars have come out successfully. I also think more credit, indeed celebration, should go to those performers who came out early on, and less to those who went public reluctantly and resentfully, attacking unnamed activists and extremists who supposedly pressured them to stop lying and hiding. There's less opprobrium directed at industry people, from record label bosses (some of them gay) to management and pop critics, who pushed performers to go on lying and hiding.  Ricky Martin said it well when he came out, and uniquely as far as I know:

Many people told me: "Ricky it's not important", "it's not worth it", "all the years you've worked and everything you've built will collapse", "many people in the world are not ready to accept your truth, your reality, your nature". Because all this advice came from people who I love dearly, I decided to move on with my life not sharing with the world my entire truth. Allowing myself to be seduced by fear and insecurity became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sabotage. Today I take full responsibility for my decisions and my actions.

This was in 2010, outside the official scope of Walters's history, though he jumps ahead from time to time. He doesn't mention Martin.

The most obnoxious example of queer-baiting Walters mentions to my mind, though he doesn't call it that, is Diana Ross's 1980 hit "I'm Coming Out."  I remember the gleeful squees that resounded in my local gay bar when the first time the DJ played it. Walters describes the song's origin:

In recent years, [Nile] Rodgers revealed this indispensable hit’s inspiration. “One particular night I went to a club, the Gilded Grape, and I happened to notice at least six or seven Diana Ross impersonators. So I went outside to call Bernard and said, “You know, Diana Ross is revered by the gay community. If we wrote a song called ‘I’m Coming Out’ for Diana Ross, it would have the same power as James Brown’s ‘Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud.''

Wow, really?  I think a more accurate analogy would be if a white singer had recorded "Say It Loud -- I'm Black and I'm Proud."  And it gets worse.

Ross reportedly had no idea she was singing anything queer. To her, “I’m Coming Out” was about busting free from Motown’s formulaic confines. Miss Ross’s concert opener for the next several decades, it features a commanding yet funky horn fanfare befitting a Black queen. The song also functions as a women’s lib anthem. Even its unconventional vocal curves and melodic curls suggest bold yet nuanced feminine assertion. Because Rodgers understood that Ross had always disclosed emotions in her music that LGBTQ people couldn’t speak in the mainstream, he knew the singer could once again be a conduit for her audience’s aspirations. If they couldn’t come out in real life, they could get a taste of that emancipation on the dancefloor. 

Nah, I'm good. I don't think I ever encountered a gay person who believed that Ross was really coming out in that song; they were just excited that she had deigned to recognize their existence. And it turns out that nobody told her she was doing even that. Noblesse oblige has never done much for me. I don't want a taste of emancipation on the dance floor, I want emancipation outside and everywhere. Walters does too, but like many of us he's too grateful for any crumb of affirmation he can get, be it a song the singer doesn't even understand or a male singer's suggestive butt wiggle onstage.

“Dave Gahan has become an accomplished bum wiggler,” Neil Tennant once wrote before he and fellow Pet Shop Boy Chris Lowe made a thing out of standing still.

I'm not the only old gay person who misses the anger that drove Gay Liberation in the early 70s and Queer Nation in the 90s.  This weekend I finally got around to reading Armistead Maupin's memoir Logical Family, which among other things is a reminder of how human-hearted that anger can be. Walters pays tribute in Mighty Real to Vito Russo, the activist and chronicler of gay cinema whose righteous anger inspired me in the 70s and after. So Walters wasn't influenced by gay anger; everybody is different. But it's conspicuously absent from Mighty Real, and it bothers me that so many younger gay people are still more excited by straight allies and codes and double entendres than by openness.

What to do, though?  As I've said before, not all gay songs have to wear it on their sleeves.  Not all heterosexual songs do either, and as Walters admits, many song lyrics can be heard or understood as straight or gay.  I've been thinking about this while mulling over this post. The folk revivalists of the 50s and 60s and the old singers they learned from were often cavalier about song lyrics; singing a song from a woman's point of view was no big deal for male singers, and vice versa. Sometimes it mattered, sometimes it didn't.  But when I hear a song I like, such as Joni Mitchell's "Michael from Mountains," I want to sing it myself, and I see no reason why I should change the lyrics to heterosexualize it.  Sometimes, as with Peggy Seeger's "I'm Gonna Be an Engineer," changing the narrator's sex would change the meaning of  the song, so I leave it as written.  I soon found out that many gay men really disliked it when I sang songs addressed to men.  I think that's one reason why they made a drag anthem, "I Am What I Am," a hit only when it was recorded by a disco diva; my fellow gay men may enjoy playing with gender in some prescribed ways, but in other ways they're as rigid as many straight men. That's their hangup, and fifty-odd years after Stonewall they can get over themselves.

Now that radio has lost its primacy for promoting pop music, and many musicians are less reliant on major labels to distribute it, there's less reason except maybe habit to keep LGBTQ music closeted. I'm out of touch with the industry, I admit. Maybe Walters or someone else will follow the story past 2000. One thing I find encouraging: musical theater isn't my thing, but YouTube has brought me numerous videos from Broadway fundraisers in which stage performers sing standards with the sexes ... adjusted.  Sometimes they're too campy for my taste, but then the whole genre is campy.  I enjoy them.  There is hope; do this more often, people.

The Mock President

What with numerous prominent Democrats attacking Trump from the right on Iran, I shouldn't have been surprised by NPR's commentary this morning.  The perky A Martinez had a nice chat with White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and then NPR's Token Hoosier Steve Inskeep spoke to a seeming AI chatbot who supposedly was an assistant secretary of state during the Biden administration.

GAVITO: I think on one hand, it indicates that progress is actually being made, and I tend to think that that is true here. The only way to end this conflict is through a diplomatic resolution, and those take time. I think it's important to remember that the JCPOA - the agreement over Iran's nuclear deal - took over two years to negotiate. I think at the same time, though, this may continue to suggest that there is within the Trump administration a fundamental misunderstanding of the Iranian regime and its adherence - continued adherence - to its ideological red lines because it doesn't believe it's lost this war and it doesn't think it has to compromise...

I think he's inching towards progress. I think it's important to note that. But those last 5% of the negotiations are always the hardest. And I think that that's the moment that we're in right now...

Long term, there is certainly something in it. The Abraham Accords were a very positive development. That being said, I think that this is somewhat of an own goal. Saudi Arabia has been crystal clear that absent a pathway to statehood for the Palestinians, it will not normalize. And so President Trump has essentially laid something on the table that has eroded his chance of success.

What really startled me, howver, was this incoherent question from Inskeep:

What does it do to the United States when Iranians are able to mock our president and accuse him of manipulating the stock market, which does, in fact, move up and down with everything he says?

Why shouldn't Iranians mock our president?  For those who care about ranking, Trump is probably the most mockable US president to date, and we've had some doozies. He freely mocks other heads of state, so why shouldn't he be fair game as well?  It's perhaps somewhat painful that Iranians were able to mock him so cleverly and effectively.  That surprised a lot of people, including me, and nobody can fairly say Trump doesn't have it coming.

I suppose it's some kind of progress that NPR can speak openly about Trump's "whiplash diplomacy," but in both of these segments it would easy to forget that Trump (and therefore the US) is, along with Israel, the aggressor in this war. They're very concerned that Iran should submit to Trump and Netanyahu, should maintain a ceasefire, and should compromise (read: surrender) with its attackers. The question for NPR, as for the rest of the corporate media, is whether Iran can be trusted to keep its commitments, while pretending that the US and Israel can be trusted to keep theirs. This isn't a new stance, of course, but it seems that they're sticking to it as it becomes increasingly obvious that it's untenable.

Bloggiversary

Today is the nineteenth anniversary of this blog. It seems worth noting, even if I haven't been that assiduous lately; many other blogs have not lasted as long.  I have a new draft for something more substantial in the pipeline, however.

If You Come at the King, You'd Best Not Miss

I almost -- that's ALMOST -- felt a little sorry for Donald Trump after he was safely out of office in 2021.  One factor that hurt him seriously was not his doing and out of his control, namely the COVID pandemic.  This time around, he's done the things that have undercut his popularity, and he has no one to blame but himself.  If he hadn't started a war with Iran, his popularity would have sagged anyway, but the spreading effects of that war, from gas prices in particular to inflation in general, have made things worse for him.  Not, you understand, that I care, let alone sympathize; he should be in jail instead of the White House, and every reverse he suffers is fine with me.

I'm not optimistic, though. I think there's a good chance that the Republicans will lose control of Congress in November, and there is backlash evident at all levels of government.  But I don't expect that the Democrats will get the veto-proof supermajority they'd need to impeach and convict him. Even if he were removed from office, JD Vance would take his place, and the Democrats who've collaborated with Trump would be all too happy to work with Vance. Maybe a wave of Democratic insurgents could knock Chuck Schumer out of his leadership position, which could help, but it would depend on who replaced him. It will take an immense effort to undo the damage Trump and his gang have done, and there will be fierce opposition to any such effort from wealthy and powerful people who may not like Trump all that much but are happy to benefit from his policies, and will continue to back them and politicians who support them.  The non-elite people I know and talk to don't know much of what he's done, and aren't any more interested in informing themselves than they ever were. 

Meanwhile, centrist news media are blundering along at their usual level of incompetence, even if you leave aside the overt and explicit moves by far-right billionaires to make them worse. NPR continues to waste time on "what we can expect" and false equivalence.  Today, for example, Morning Edition ran two items on Secretary of State Marco Rubio's mission to meet with Pope Leo. The reporter referred to a "spat" (twice!) between Trump and the Pope, as if it were personal on both sides instead of springing from Trump's usual fury at anyone who criticizes him; they even acknowledged that Popes have objected to wars before in the same terms without setting off an international crisis, if this is one instead of another Trump tantrum.  In the second, they talked to a former US Ambassador to the Holy See, who bloviated without saying anything of substance. That's the kind of commentator NPR likes.  (I'll add some details later, when the transcripts are posted.)

More liberal outlets have exaggerated how much Trump has been affected by the obstacles he has encountered.  Some like to say that he has been "humiliated," which to the extent that it's true means little.  He responds to "humilation" by lashing out, and as long as he's in office he has to power to do more than merely humiliate his enemies.  A popular question in these precincts is whether Trump's MAGA coalition is "starting to crack."  Maybe so, maybe not, but it is still holding together overall.  One or two Congressional Republicans have voted with Democrats against Trump's actions, but they've been balanced by Democrats who voted for Trump.  The resistance by some Indiana State senators to Trump's call for redistricting was brave and noble, but most of those Republicans were successfully primaried by MAGA agents this week.  So far the coalition is intact, and while Trump is behaving ridiculously in every public statement he makes, he hasn't suffered any real consequences yet.  Get back to me when that changes.

Let Your Yes Be Yes, and Your No Be No

Just a brief addition to yesterday's post.  On Sunday, Doonesbury's "Say What?" department posted this nugget from Sean Hannity:

This was supposed to be an outrageous idea.  My "say what?" reaction wss "Wait, doesn't the Pope get questioned?" I don't follow Vatican news, but what I remember are a lot of stories where Pope Francis had told reporters something that was taken to be highly liberal and inclusive, like pets going to Heaven, or that homosexuals have a right to be part of the family, or that in some lost video interview he'd endorsed civil unions for same-sex couples. In that last case it turned out that before he became Pope he offered to accept such unions in Argentina as a bargaining chip to stave off legal same-sex marriage. He failed to do so, but his fans (even non-Catholics) were ready to celebrate him as an ally anyway.  When he said we have a right to be part of the family, he immediately added "That does not mean approving of homosexual acts, not in the least."

As I wrote on this topic before, "many people scour Francis's statements for what they 'hint' or may  'imply' or 'suggest,' as if he were the Delphic Oracle and no one has any business pressing him to make himself clear.  Part of the problem of course is that even when he is reasonably clear, they still overinterpret him to suit their own fantasies.  Maybe that's it: if they got him to clarify, they wouldn't like what he'd tell them."

I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that a Pope, like any other head of state, should have to face hard questions. While Hannity is technically correct that Donald Trump "takes questions all the time," Trump doesn't usually answer them: he lies, distracts, wanders off the subject, blusters; and if a reporter presses him, he turns nasty.  But then, the media don't know how to ask intelligent hard questions, and I don't believe Hannity would be any different.  Even secular US reporters would be too busy bowing and scraping and calling him "Your Holiness" to do their job properly. (I just thought of the time some US gay male activists were permitted to ask the Dalai Lama to clarify his position on homosexuality.  They were all Buddhists, if memory serves, and too thrilled at being in the Presence to push very hard; the DL was also less than forthcoming, and of course there was also the language barrier.  Yet the DL is much less pompous than most high-level holy men.  I should do a post on that encounter soon.)

I don't know, maybe Garry Trudeau, the creator of Doonesbury, is a Catholic too. But the reaction to Hannity's suggestion was just another example of the weird authoritarianism that's common among American liberals, the idea that commoners shouldn't get above ourselves when we're allowed to be in the same space as royalty.

The title of this post comes from Matthew 5:37, which I think is good advice, even though Jesus himself liked to dodge hard questions like "What is your authority to say these things?" or "Should we pay tribute to Caesar?" Pope Leo likes to quote the Bible at times, but he also gets rather woolly at others. But it would be rude to quote Matthew 5:37 to him - who do I think I am, anyway?

Yahweh Sabaoth Would Like a Word

While I was reading right-wing Christians fuming that the Pope should stay out of politics, it occurred to me that such people usually insist that separation of church and state is not in the Constitution, and that we need more voices of faith in the public square.  It wouldn't be fair to say that they've changed their minds, exactly, because the inconsistency would never occur to them.  They want what they want, and that's all that matters.

Still, it's clear that Trump's antics have made them uneasy, especially the Catholics among them. I happened on a Facebook comment thread this afternoon where the contradictions were heightened: I've been a Catholic all my life, but Pope Leo isn't my Pope!  He's a Communist and should be minding his own business! ... and so on.  I don't know how representative these people are. It does seem that there are some deep divisions among Roman Catholics at all levels, from the laity up to reactionary clergy.  Some of the latter have been disciplined.  They forget that the Church is not a democracy, it's a hierarchy.

On the other hand, liberals and even leftists -- Catholic and non-Catholic, theist and non-theist -- are reveling in that hierarchy, though they're confused about it too. Celebrity right-wing Catholics like J.D. Vance are being mocked for daring to criticize the Pope, especially when they're recent converts like Vance.  And it is funny that Vance would be so unself-conscious about it.  Luckily for him, he's not likely to have a date with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and even if he does he's not going to be tortured or executed. As the 19th-centurhy composer Hector Berlioz wrote, "Now that She [i.e., the Church] has ceased to inculcate the burning of heretics, Her creeds are charming."  I suppose Vance is aware of this somewhere in what's left of his mind.  I suppose his liberal mockers are too, but it feels to me like they actually believe that a mere layman has no business disagreeing with the head of 1.2 billion Catholics.  It's nicely summed up in this meme:

(If you'd like to see a buttload of baboon screeching and feces-throwing, here's the thread where I found the meme.)  If you think that religion is just a matter of book-learning, this makes sense.  But it isn't, and believers will be the first to insist that it isn't when it suits them. Of course the Roman Catholic Church has a lot of intellectual capital built up over two thousand years, and as a subject of that church, who joined it as an adult, Vance know that and should at least pretend to respect it.  It's his problem, not mine.

Derek Guy, whose timeline inspired that meme and that screeching, had a much more measured take.

Truly remarkable how many people have told the Pope, in some way or another, to "shut up and dribble." Or corrected him on the Bible, despite their thin education on theology. Or told him to stay out of US affairs, despite him being a US citizen. The hubris is amazing.

It's not just the Pope. I would never dream of correcting an Imam or a Harvard law professor about their fields of study using some bullshit I read using ChatGPT. Some people lack an appreciation for the depth of their own ignorance because they don't have expertise in anything.

I agree to an extent; after all, the same people who are telling Leo to shut up are telling him to defer to the political wisdom of Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio - a bunch of clowns who have no wisdom at all, whose incompetence is plain to see every day. Or they tell him to focus on morality instead of politics, as if they were mutually irrelevant spheres, as if an illegal war and terror against civilians had nothing to do with morality.  And, as Derek mentions, Leo is an American citizen, though he doesn't need to be one to criticize the US or any other country. He's also a head of state, of the Vatican City, and as such is a politician as well as a cleric.

I'm an atheist, though, and while I'll acknowledge Leo's learning, I'm not bound to defer to it.  His claims about his god and war are simply absurd.  The Bible contains many instances where Yahweh orders war, orders the massacre of entire populations and the enslavement of others.  But Leo doesn't care about that any more than Trump cares about his own falsehood.  He's laying down doctrine on his authority. (He's not declaring it ex cathedra, so he's not even claiming to be infallible - not that he would be.)  But only Catholics are bound by his authority.  Derek's reference to Harvard law professors is unfortunate too, since prominent Harvard law professors have made wildly false claims about the law.  I'm thinking, for example, of Obama's "Ultimately, I am confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress."

Nor do I feel any obligation, or even temptation, to defer to Leo's positions on homosexuality, abortion, contraception, women in the clergy, or other matters. I know that the Pope, or any other learned Catholic, can churn up a flurry of learned arguments to support those positions; I don't care.  These are not matters to be settled by scholastic discourse, and the justifications for them change as the church's positions change. Think of slavery, which the church not only used to justify but practiced.

Another response to Vance's insubordination has been some version of this:

QuoProQuid is a queer Catholic game designer whose posts I read regularly.  Mason Mennenga is a nice liberal Christian whose posts I see only intermittently.  His picture of lifelong Latin American Catholics is as much of a caricature as his picture of adult American converts. Most of not all of the worst right-wing Latin American dictators were lifelong Catholics; it didn't keep them from killing and raping and torturing - nor did it keep previous Popes (and American presidents) from being good buddies with them.  

I'm glad that Leo is opposing Trump and the war, but that means he's on my side (and the side of many other non-Catholics), not that I'm on his.  It's certainly a PR problem for Trump, and will further erode his already slipping support.  His base will stand fanatically firm, but not everyone who voted for him is in his base. I'm not indignant, as many atheists are, that Trump is attacking "an American Pope," as NPR's anchor people keep putting it - his nationality makes no more difference than his religion.  These details make it harder for Trump's insults to land. I don't mind Vance's insubordination against his religious superior, only that his criticisms are so inept; but who would expect any better from him?  Leo's low-key delivery of his criticism is pleasant too, but I don't make the liberal mistake of confusing moderation of tone with moderation of content.

The flip-flopping works both ways, as usual.  The same liberals who cheer Leo's denunciation of war were mostly silent when Obama bombed wedding parties and turned Libya into a slave market.  Many of them supported George W. Bush's wars too, and many embraced Israeli atrocities until they began to hurt their own chances of election or re-election.  The quality of mainstream discussion on these matters is, as usual, abysmal; and getting worse.

Theater of the Absurd

CECILY.
I have never met any really wicked person before. I feel rather frightened. I am so afraid he will look just like every one else.

[Enter Algernon, very gay and debonair.] He does!

[The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde] 

We live in interesting times, don't we?  It has been entertaining to watch the fuss over Pope Leo's opposition to war and the MAGA Right's fury over it, with JD Vance (a Roman Catholic convert) and other Trump toadies joining Trump in his outrage at Leo.  It's been less entertaining to see various non-MAGA non-Catholics cheering Leo on, expressing their outrage that anyone should dare to oppose the Holy Father.

Then, during the night, Trump posted another incoherent rant against Leo on his social media platform, adding an AI-generated image of himself in conventional Jesus robes, laying hands on a sick bedridden man who could be Uncle Sam or possibly Jeffrey Epstein.  Someone deleted the image soon afterward, but by then it had been copied and gone viral.  Trump later told reporters that he thought the image showed him as a doctor, and he was paying tribute to the Red Cross.

Naturally, many in Trump's base rallied to defend him, saying that obviously the image didn't depict him as Jesus, but it seems that he'd finally managed to upset a good number of his fans. The word "blasphemy" was flung around.  Trump's advisor Laura Loomer pointed out correctly that the US doesn't have blasphemy laws, advising Trump's critics to move to an Islamic country where the charge would have legal consequences. Nice try, but numerous Christian countries also have laws against blasphemy.

Still, it's been weird watching religious liberals and even atheists, like Friendly Atheist Hemant Mehta, in a snit over Trump's "blasphemy."  It doesn't seem that they're just pointing out Trump's hypocrisy.  Many of them seem to be sincerely outraged by his cloaking himself in religious imagery, as they are by his daring to speak harshly to the leader of a billion Catholics.

I approve of Leo's stance in this case, but since he's still the head of an antigay hate group, it's not because I recognize his moral authority.  This declaration of his, for example, is as laughable as anything Trump has spewed online: 

Brothers and sisters, this is our God: Jesus, King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war. He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them, saying: "Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood" (Is 1:15). 

(Offer not good during the Crusades, the Spanish Armada sailing to England, or the Spanish invasion of the New World.)

I also support Leo's refusal to be cowed by Trump's ranting against him.  He's one of the few European heads of state who hasn't tried to make nice with Trump, hasn't offered him a shiny gold trinket to appease him.

Anybody has the right to disagree with, criticize, or protest a Pope or a President.  It's depressing, indeed infuriating, to see so many people who aren't Catholic or even theists demanding that Trump respect the Pontiff's autoritah. I must say, though, I wonder what is going through Melania Trump's mind today. She's a Catholic, though she married Trump in an Episcopal ceremony. Coming so soon after her tirade against Jeffrey Epstein, today's circus must be putting some strain on her determination to stand by her man.

All Animal Farm Adaptations Are Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others

I've been hearing about Andy Serkis's animated version of George Orwell's satirical fable Animal Farm for some time now.  Apparently it's been in development for a long time, but the time is now fulfilled, and the release is at hand.  I barely remember the two previous versions (from 1954 and 1999), except that they were pretty bad, toning down the book's anti-capitalist assumption.  I say "assumption" rather than "message," because the story takes for granted that capitalism (represented by the human farmers) is evil.  The remarkable thing about its mainstream reception is that its anti-communist fans completely missed that assumption.

So I didn't expect much from this new adaptation.  The occasional reports I saw didn't say much about its fidelity to the original.  But this weekend the Algorithm recommended a story about it from Deseret News, a Latter-Day-Saints newspaper.  It was even more clueless about Animal Farm than the book's Cold War boosters:

In the final scene of George Orwell’s 1945 satirical novella “Animal Farm,” animal workers watch through a window as their ruling pigs and the human farmers drunkenly play cards, and they can no longer tell them apart. The moment is grim and impactful.

The image exposes the cracks beneath Marxism’s utopian promise. 

... The upcoming animated adaptation of “Animal Farm,” directed by “Lord of the Rings” actor Andy Serkis, transforms Orwell’s sharp critique of communism into a lighthearted, family-friendly story — and casts capitalism as the villain.

Wait, what?  Capitalism is the villain in the original tale, but I can't remember encountering such blatant denial about that before.  It's not the only villain, of course: Napoleon and the other pigs, who happily embrace greed and ultimately become indistinguishable from their human neighbors, are also villains, but is it really so hard to grasp that there's more than one group of bad guys involved?  If Orwell thought capitalism benign, that final scene would be the happy ending this article's writer claims Serkis imposed on his version.  Nobody makes that mistake - everybody knows the outcome is bad - but it seems to be almost impossible to recognize why it's bad.  Similarly, the writer of an introduction to a print edition of Animal Farm (I think it was Malcolm Muggeridge) wrote that already in 1946, when the book was first published, "it was becoming brutally clear that wartime hopes of peacetime cooperation between the West and Russia had been dangerously naive."  Orwell coined a word for this sort of ideological self-discipline in his later novel Nineteen Eighty-Four: "doublethink."

I learned from the Deseret article that Serkis invented a new human character who seduced Napoleon into embracing sinful luxury; also that [SPOILER ALERT] when Napoleon first stands on his hind legs, "flatulence erupts, amusing the kids and reminding adults how low Serkis will go to get a laugh" according to Variety. Well, kids and not a few adults love fart jokes, so I suppose this is what Serkis meant when he said he'd tried to make the film more "family-friendly."

Deseret quoted "One commenter [who] criticized Hollywood, writing, “Hollywood is incapable of critiquing anything other than capitalism.”  Have any of these people ever read Animal Farm?  Do they know anything about Orwell and his politics?  As I said earlier, he didn't explicitly "critique" capitalism in the story, he took for granted that it was exploitative and generally immoral. I think I can safely skip watching this film.

Swing Battuh Battuh Battuh, Swing

 

This sort of slop isn't the product of partisan thinking. It's a product of not being able to think at all.  When news outlets assign sports reporters who see everything through the lens of elite corporate sports to cover serious news, this is what you get.

I'd already heard NPR's Scott Simon and Franco Ordoñez do a more restrained version of the same thing on Weekend Edition today:

ORDOÑEZ: ... And again, as you noted, it comes as American and Iranian teams are meeting in Pakistan for peace talks led by the vice president, Vance. You know, they kicked off this morning between the U.S., Iran and Pakistan, which of course is serving as host and intermediary for the talks.

SIMON: To state the obvious, I suppose, this seems like a huge test for Vice President Vance.

ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, very much so. I mean, perhaps the most significant of his political career. I mean, it'll be a defining factor as he looks ahead to a, you know, possible run for the White House himself. 

But there is no joy in Mudville, mighty JD has struck out.  Does this mean he'll be sent back to the minors, or will he just be benched for awhile?

 

An Elephant's Faithful, One Hundred Percent

Some people are still trying to defend liberal / centrist Democrats for being angry that Trump didn't annihilate Iran. You know, they didn't really want the war, they were just angry because he didn't have a plan.  Trump never has a plan; he's always just winging it, he can't remember what he said from one end of a sentence to the other, and he just expects everyone else to have the same convenient amnesia.

But not having a plan is not these Democrats' main complaint.  The core is that Iran hasn't been crushed yet.  As Senator Shaheen complained, "Iran still has 50% of their missile capacity. They still have enriched uranium. And they still control the Strait of Hormuz. The President had no credible strategy going into this war, and it's clear he still doesn't have one to accomplish the goals he set out." What does one have to do with the other?  Under international law, Iran has the right of self-defense (hence the missiles), and also the right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes (despite all the bipartisan alarmism, there is no evidence that Iran has enriched uranium for weapons).

Senator Chuck Schumer used the same talking points: "Iran still has its nuclear stockpile. Its nuclear ambitions are still unchecked, if not accelerated". Because Trump pulled the US out of the JCPOA, and Biden didn't rejoin it, Iran is no longer bound or "checked" by the limitations it imposed. Its leaders may well have decided that getting nuclear weapons for self-defense, like so many other countries, is a good idea (though to repeat, there still is no evidence that they were doing so). Nor does the US have any right under international law to bomb Iran to make it  comply with our imperial demands.

As one online weirdo put it, "if i was a prominent democrat politician i would be saying stuff like 'Israel is fucking up your amazing peace & ceasefire deal on purpose mr. president! they think you're a sucker, show them who's boss!' instead of like 'He didn't even nuke iran lol. Is he gay??' but whatever [i guess]" It's true, as Senator Chris Murphy complained, that Trump is incompetent - but so is the Democratic leadership.  This is an old complaint of mine, going back at least to the Obama years, that these cute, supposedly media-savvy solons -- at least they have hired media-savvy staff -- are so tin-eared, so clueless, so unprepared.  Obama was consistently surprised that the Republicans wouldn't play nice, and instead of thinking creatively about how to stymie them, he would just let them have their way.

But like, you know, "by backing down, Trump also, you know, risked damaging his own credibility."  I mean, the President promised to wipe out Iran, and it looks really bad if he doesn't keep his promise.  It's not that these people want war, though they do, it's that a promise is a promise and America's word is its bond.

I suddenly remembered the biblical book of Jonah, because we atheist leftists can quote scripture to our purpose.  Everybody knows about Jonah being swallowed by a big fish and then being vomited up onto dry land, but how many remember the context?  Briefly, Jonah was a prophet, which was a thing in those days, and Yahweh told him to go to the non-Israelite city of Nineveh and threaten it with destruction if it didn't repent.  Jonah ran away, because if the Ninevites repented the prophecy would be falsified, and in the course of his flight he ended up in the belly of the great fish, which brought him to Nineveh and spewed him out.  So Jonah went in and proclaimed, "Yet thirty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"

The King of Nineveh heard, and commanded general repentance, so Yahweh changed his mind and didn't destroy Nineveh.  Jonah was very upset by this.  He left the city and built himself a booth in whose shadow he sulked.  Yahweh caused a gourd plant to grow up overnight and give him some shade, then made it wither and made Jonah uncomfortable.  Drama queen that he was, he said he wanted to die.

And God said to Jonah, Doest thou well to be angry for the gourd? And he said, I do well to be angry, even unto death. Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle? 

This is obviously out of character for Yahweh, who would ordinarily be perfectly happy to kill 120,000 heathen children plus adults and "also much cattle," so you know this story is a fable.  But it's a good one, and its point is relevant today.  Don't worry, I'm not getting religion.  But I'll use any material that is pertinent.  

Peace In Our Time?

When I went to bed last night, the stories of the announced ceasefire with Iran were already starting to fray. By this morning, it was clear that Israel had not been consulted on the deal and was continuing to bomb Lebanon. US and Iranian media acknowledged conflicting understandings of the terms, with Trump claiming that the Strait of Hormuz had been opened and Iran saying that it wasn't, yet.  Trump thought that Iran would give up its missiles, Iran didn't agree.  And so on.  It was reported that JD Vance was going to participate in negotiations, but at one point the White House said he wasn't, for security reasons.  As with the war, disentangling the confusion and lies was an uphill struggle.

Today on NPR's Morning Edition, their White House Correspondent Franco Ordoñez told their resident Hoosier Steve Inskeep:

It's, of course, never a bad thing to kind of avoid the dire scenario that Trump was describing. But by backing down, Trump also, you know, risked damaging his own credibility. I mean, he's likely to face some criticism, even more so now that, you know, he has a reputation of backing down from some of his most flattening rhetoric.

Donald Trump has no credibility to begin with. Anyone who believes what he says (and NPR still gives him credence most of the time) discredits himself immediately.

Unfortunately, though, Ordoñez was correct that Trump is facing criticism.  Jon Schwarz wrote on Twitter that "There's a very real chance the 2028 Democratic presidential nominee will attack Trump for the Iran war — from the right, because he didn't 'finish the job'". He linked to a Democratic Senator from New Hampshire, Jeanne Shaheen, who'd complained "Iran still has 50% of their missile capacity. They still have enriched uranium. And they still control the Strait of Hormuz. The President had no credible strategy going into this war, and it's clear he still doesn't have one to accomplish the goals he set out."

Senator Chris Murphy, D-CT, also was upset: 

It appears Trump just agreed to give Iran control of the Strait of Hormuz, a history-changing win for Iran. The level of incompetence is both stunning and heartbreaking. What on earth is happening?

Iran already had control of the Strait of Hormuz. The US has no claim on it. But Murphy, like some other Democrats, supports Trump's illegal war; he only wants it to be run "competently."  The most pressing need is not to prolong the war, but to end it. The US and Israel are the aggressors, and they have already done enormous harm to human lives, not to mention the world economy.

I have a special contempt for Murphy, since he posted in 2020 that Trump had interfered with his plan to overthrow the government of Venezuela and install a crooked US collaborator:

Then, it got real embarrassing. In April 2019, we tried to organize a kind of coup, but it became a debacle. Everyone who told us they’d rally to Guaido got cold feet and the plan failed publicly and spectacularly, making America look foolish and weak.

Notice the words I put in boldface: "a kind of coup."  Murphy bragged in public that he'd conspired to stage a coup in another nation, which has to be some kind of violation of international and other law.  He suffered no consequences for this, of course.  Now he wants to prolong a war that should, in a halfway sane world, put its perpetrators in the Hague for crimes against humanity.  The US isn't entitled to demand concessions from its victims. Yes, Trump is incompetent and stupid, but refraining from destroying another country, however clumsily he's doing it, should be supported rather than undermined.  Yes, the Iranian regime is evil, but so is Chris Murphy, and so are the other pols and pundits who like Trump's war but think they should be in charge of it.

P.S. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has weighed in, using talking points like Shaheen's:

"Iran still has its nuclear stockpile. Its nuclear ambitions are still unchecked, if not accelerated…The nations at the world are furious at Trump: the Asians, the Europeans, even the Middle Eastern allies."

These people want Trump's war, and they want it to be more murderous and more destructive.

But We Think the Price Is Worth It

 

As I write this, it appears that the world may have dodged a bullet: Trump has put off his threat to wipe out Iran.  But no one should suppose that he won't change his mind in a week or two, and the reports I've seen so far don't say that Israel has agreed to pause its aggression against Iran. (Or Lebanon.  Or Gaza. Or the Occupied Territories.) Any ceasefire will just give the US and Israel time to arm themselves for further atrocities.

I haven't written about this war before, largely because it's just too depressing.  I'm not alone in this: many commentators I respect have been reduced to sputtering outrage at Trump's conduct.  Doug Henwood, for example, mostly posts one- or two-word grunts on Twitter/X, like "Gross," "Disgusting," "Shameful," "Ugh," etc. over reposts of other people's material. Some do better, but after awhile it comes down to detailing how Trump's a deranged criminal.

It's better than the corporate media's fondness for pussyfooting around.  The political scientist Corey Robin quoted the New York Times on Facebook this evening: "One big question: Experts say Trump’s threatened attacks could be unlawful. It comes down to: What defines a civilian target?"  Later he added, "The New York Times has been hemming and hawing for days about whether killing civilians is a war crime or not. What if civilians are surrounded by 'military-age males?' What if a power grid upon which civilians and hospitals depend has a 'dual use' for military purposes? So complicated, so nuanced, so grey an area. But now comes the prospect of imposing a toll on the Strait of Hormuz. And what is the NYT headline? "How Tolls in the Strait of Hormuz Would Undercut International Law'".

NPR has been about the same.  The other day one of their talking heads fretted about the effectiveness of a ceasefire: would Iran respect it?  He didn't wonder whether the US or Israel would "respect" it; maybe because the answer is so obviously No.

I don't know what it would take to stop Trump and Netanyahu. With one or two honorable exceptions, the mainstream Congressional Democrats have been busy complaining that Trump didn't ask their permission before he went to war. Of course they would have given him that permission, so what difference would it make?  Many of them have wanted to destroy Iran for years.  They might pretend to distinguish between Iranian citizens and "the Regime," but they're willing to sacrifice Iranian lives in a good cause.

In another Facebook post, Corey Robin spelled out parallels between Trump's war and George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq.

1. A hard-right Republican president comes to power denouncing the more "internationalist" and "establishment" Republicans and Democrats who see the United States as policeman to the world. (Don't forget, this was one of Bush's promises when he ran in 2000: he wouldn't do nation-building, he wouldn't be the world's cop, he would be "humble," he would have a narrow view of US national interest.)

 

2. A small group of influencers—neocons in Bush's case; the Israelis, in Trump's case—make the case for war to the president on two logically incompatible grounds: a) the enemy regime is poised to be so militarily powerful, that if the US waits any longer, the enemy will be able to land a devastating blow against it; b) destroying the enemy regime militarily will be staggeringly easy.

 

3. Top-level US intelligence and military officials say that this advice is nonsense, totally lacking in evidence. Additionally, they repeatedly ask, what if you are able to destroy the regime, what comes next? How are you going to run the country?

 

4. Eager to destroy an enemy that has been a thorn in the side of the US for decades, the president ignores the intelligence and military establishment, displays scant concern about what comes next, and takes the country to war. 

 

5. Republicans and conservatives scratch their heads. How did a president who came into office promising not to be the world's policeman wind up taking the country to war.

 

Structurally, the two important features to focus on are these: 1) the distinction between a radical right and moderate establishment right in the Republican Party is nonsense; 2) Congress and both parties have long abandoned their role in limiting the power of the president when it comes to war.

One of the most depressing things about this is that, twenty years later, there are still pundits and politicians who defend Dubya's war.  Even if Trump's war were to end now, the long-term consequences, especially for the Iranian people and other civilians killed or hurt or displaced, will continue indefinitely, because neither Trump nor his successor will have any interest in cleaning up after it, and since there have so far been very few US casualties, most Americans will happily sink into lethargy and amnesia.