The bottom line is that the Human Brain is capable of
compartmentalizing. Just for example, we Americans believe that we
are Peace Makers who love democracy, and yet we decry Socialism. Many
of us proudly proclaim our independent thinking, while accepting
without question the words of an invisible all powerful God.
It goes on and on. But far and away the contradiction that will get
us is our desire to mimic the life style of the Super Rich, while
proclaiming our love of Mother Earth.
Carl Jarvis
On 8/20/18, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Mondoweiss
'How do you still call yourself a Catholic?' Lehrer asks
Philip Weiss on August 19, 2018
Bill Kristol, at Rightweb
Two days ago on WNYC, the very thoughtful host Brian Lehrer responded to
the bombshell sexual abuse revelations about 1000 victims in the Catholic
Church in Pennsylvania by asking Catholics to call in and explain why they
were still Catholic.
How do you still call yourself a Catholic? Or, How do you still go to
church? I don't mean this in a snarky way at all or an anti-Catholic way.
I'm not a Catholic, I'm not trying to pry anyone out of their religion. But
I'm just curious how you deal with it? If you stay identified, if you stay
involved, if the institution is this rotten and this hypocritical with
respect to the values of doing unto others that Jesus and God are supposed
to stand for, how do you still call yourself a Catholic? And how does this
new set of revelations land with you? Are you feeling them emotionally with
any new disgust or is it all kind of baked in for you with all that had
already become known over the last 20 years?
These are excellent questions, and natural responses. Among the callers was
someone who said he concentrates on the good works his parish does,
including among the Hispanics; another who said that more investigations
should follow, but the sacrament of the Eucharist is still central to his
life; and someone else who said she's an ex-Catholic because the church
takes no responsibility for all the damage it's caused, and priests should
be allowed to marry.
But charity begins at home; and my marvel about Lehrer's moral scrutiny is
that it is absent when it comes to two other establishments with which he
has much stronger identification: 1, the Jewish congregations that have
supported Israel and that invite AIPAC to the pulpit even after yet anther
massacre in Gaza, and 2, the foreign policy establishment that gave us the
Iraq war.
As to the Jewish establishment, it is common to hear young Jews and
anti-Zionist Jews expressing Lehrer's disgust, and saying they want nothing
to do with the formal Jewish religion in the United States, so long as the
official bodies are supporting Israel thru thick and thin. Jewish Voice for
Peace created a rabbinical council so as to give dissenting Jews a place to
maintain their faith. And IfNotNow has encouraged a revival of Jewish
religious song/ritual in a non-Zionist context. All because of the moral
black hole that Israel represents. If he were fair, Brian Lehrer would have
a number of these Jewish dissenters on to ask them how they reconciled
faithfulness with the human rights atrocities of the Jewish state. I don't
think he's ever had a Jewish anti-Zionist on his show. Lehrer might as well
be Fox News when it comes to Israel.
Then there's the foreign policy establishment that gave us the Iraq war.
Fifteen years on after the greatest foreign-policy mistake of the last
generation or two, and many of those who supported the war still have
prominent positions in the formation of policy/ideas, and get invited on to
Lehrer's show and others to opine. In fact, supporting the Iraq war
actually
seems to be a credential for success in that field. And not to have
supported the Iraq war exposes a person to the scorn that it did back in
2003, when George Packer wrote us off in The New Yorker as a bunch of
hippies and conspiracy theorists milling in the streets.
There has been no antiwar dividend to speak of. Those who backed this
extremely costly and harmful mistake are still in very powerful positions,
throughout the media. Tom Friedman and Bill Kristol have never been called
to account fully for their blunder; Kristol gets to go on Ari Melber's show
on MSNBC, and on Brian Lehrer's show too.
The little shriving that war supporters have done has been woefully
incomplete and performative (the new word for lip-service). I'm thinking of
Peter Beinart, or the forum that Jake Weisberg convened at Slate years ago,
in which war supporters got to rationalize everything they'd predicted
wrong.
Tony Judt famously called these writers the "useful idiots" of George
Bush's
war, and Tucker Carlson still calls them out on Fox, but the liberal cables
stay away from the issue. Yet everyone knows these people f***ed up, and
some day they will be held to account.
David Bromwich comments on the norms of the "unipolar press" in "The
American Breakdown," a Trump-zeitgeist piece in the London Review of Books:
[T]he geopolitical common sense of Putin's comment on Ukraine and Crimea -
'I do not want to be welcomed in Sevastopol by Nato sailors' - is almost
inscrutable to the unipolar press that in 2003 overwhelmingly endorsed the
Iraq War. From the New York Times and the New Yorker to CNN and MSNBC,
nothing has changed in the mentality of the people who arrived at that
verdict 15 years ago; and the next Democratic president, if there is one,
will be under pressure to mount continuous threats against a nuclear power
the Democrats have gone back to calling an adversary.
To anyone who remembers the Cold War (1947-89), the reversal of roles is
astonishing. Throughout the earlier period, it was Republicans who embraced
the idea of open conflict with Russia, and Democrats who acquiesced in the
arms race but tried to calm things down.
Branko Marcetic in In These Times singles out one of these unrepentant
hawks, Jonathan Chait, over Chait's lament that the left is skeptical of
the
Russia influence story.
Chait, like many other pundits, has been caught up in nationalistic,
pro-war
fervor before. After September 11, he urged Democrats to "maintain their
unity behind the war on terrorism and give Bush all the funding for it he
needs." He accused the Left of "looking for reasons" to oppose the
Afghanistan invasion, and argued that "humanitarianism . requires more
American fighting, not less." In a now-infamous2002 column, he argued that
"Saddam has provided strong evidence that he will not allow anything to
deter him from pursuing weapons of mass destruction," that a war against
him
would deter future dictators, and that alternatives to military action in
Iraq had "failed for more than a decade." He asserted that it's "difficult
to imagine that deposing Saddam will not greatly improve the living
conditions and human rights of the Iraqi people," and as late as May 2003,
mocked the idea that Saddam had no WMDs, even arguing that their absence
"proves that inspections could never have worked." Chait was, of course,
disastrously wrong.
Chait's catastrophic misjudgement and subsequent events in Iraq didn't
appear to prompt any soul searching. Three years into the invasion, Chait
argued that Bush simply "mismanaged" the war. Five years after that, he
backed NATO intervention in Libya, with similarly disastrous consequences.
Chait unifies these two establishments. A few years back he said on a J
Street panel that the liberal Israel lobby group should have a big tent but
that it must not include anti-Zionists like me, a red line that J Street
has
observed.
The rightness of supporting Israel and having supported the Iraq war are
still articles of faith inside the liberal foreign policy establishment.
The
Roman Catholic moment will happen, I'm sure of it, but the priests will
have
to be doddering. For now, too many careers would be hurt by any real
examination.
