The Republic of T.

It’s been a long time since I blogged about Katrina or it’s aftermath. But I was reminded of it by the steady stream of Katrina-related headlines I’ve been reading lately. You know, the steady drumbeat of actual news that barely breaks through the din surrounding stories of missing white women, or pregnant one’s for that matter.

They may get drowned out, or passed over as news readers turn the page or click the next, more interesting link, but if you put them together, stand back and take a good look, you can’t help but get the big picture. It’s not pretty, but I think the picture is one of conservatism’s finest hour, depending on how you look at it.

When Bush described Iraq as a “catastrophic success,” William Saletan defined the term; “If it gets worse, we must be winning.” When you apply the same notion to domestic disasters like Katrina, the definition might be more like, “If things get worse, the policies are working.” The worse it gets, the bigger a success it is for conservative philosophy. It’s just that the rest of us don’t, and can’t, see it that way.
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I’d been reading the headlines about the Saudi woman who was raped, and then sentenced to 90 lashes. But I didn’t read any of the articles, until I came across a headline saying that she’d been “pardoned,” apparently for the “crime of sitting in a car with her ex-boyfriend, who was also raped. The ex was also sentenced to 90 lashes for either (a) being raped or (b) sitting in car with his girlfriend. But at the moment there’s no word of his fate. Now, he may have threatened to shame her by distributing some old pictures. That warrants some kind of punishment, if true, but it hardly warrants 90 lashes. Or rape.

As I was catching up on my blog reading, I came across Timothy’s response, over at Box Turtle Bulletin, to something Mike Huckabee said about homosexuality.

“Let’s understand what sin means — sin means missing the mark,” he responded. “Missing the mark can mean missing the mark in any area. We’ve all missed the mark. … How we miss the mark is less important than we all miss the mark. The mark is that we have marriage — men and women, they marry, they create children, and they train their replacements and you have a future generation then that creates their replacements and trains them. That’s the mark. If we didn’t have that as the ideal, we wouldn’t have a civilization that was able to perpetuate.”

Timothy’s response was basically, “He can’t really mean that.”

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I meant to post a response to Arianna Huffington’s post, titled “Fear of Faith”, when it was originally posted, but an already busy life suddenly got busier, and now two weeks later I find myself sitting in New Jersey—sleep deprived, and so busy making bottles and changing diapers that I still haven’t posted a response.

Not that I need to. Arianna’s readers’ have taken her to task for having posted stuff like this.

So for many the price of escaping from the prison of damnation-drenched religious conventions has been to lose touch with the spiritual truths from which they originally sprang. When that happens, our new reality is the fear-filled and barren terrain of sterile secular humanism. It’s a false world in which the spiritual either gets taken over by fanatical fundamentalism or explained away by psychoanalysis as the residue of a damaged childhood. Indeed, one of Freud’s most famous books about religion is entitled The Future of an Illusion.

Without faith in a higher order and the existence of something outside ourselves and our everyday lives, life can become emotionally unbearable and filled with fear. And this anxiety, even if we’re not aware of it, will surface in other parts of our lives. Bernard Levin described it as “the gnawing feeling that ultimate reality lies elsewhere, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, sensed just beyond the light cast by the campfire, heard in the slow movement of a Mozart quartet, seen in the eyes of Rembrandt’s last self-portraits, felt in the sudden stab of discovery in reading or seeing a Shakespeare play thought familiar in every line.”

Leaving aside trotting out the rather tired right wing harping about “sterile secular humanism,” I think Arianna misses the point. It is not faith that some of us are afraid of. Nor does a lack of faith cause most of much in the way of fear. (After all, hell does not yawn before us, and paranoia over being left behind in the Rapture isn’t a problem.)

What we fear is not faith, but—and with good reason—the faithful. One look at the presidential race, and the field of leading candidates, bears that out.

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I’ve been meaning to post about Mitt Romney’s speech, but I’ve had other matters to deal with—like trying to get enough sleep to at least give the appearance of something close to human when we venture out as a family. And I still may comment on it, but something else occurred to me as I read about the little fight Romney and Huckabee seem to have picked with one another, over questions about Romney’s faith.

Oddly enough, David Kuo’s post was what got me thinking about it.

I’m sorry but I am really confused about all of this. Since when is asking a question about someone’s religion attacking it?? This is bizarre.

There are a thousand ways to attack someone’s religion - but asking questions about it is not one of them. If it were then every single person who asks questions about Christianity would be a religious bigot.

Kou didn’t mean for that to be funny, I’m sure, but I laughed when I read it. Then it took me a few minutes to figure out why it was so funny to me.

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So the C.I.A. probably has more torture video and we heard a long time ago that that the Pentagon has video of children being raped at Abu Ghraib. Reporter Seymour Hersh said of those tapes “the worst is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking.” Tell me again why these and other videos shouldn’t be released for public viewing. Tell me again why we shouldn’t see all the “war porn” our tax dollars have paid for. (And that Democrats voted should continue paying for.)

Nancy Pelosi says Republicans want a long, drawn-out war. So why do the Democrats seem to be taking every opportunity to give it to them? Why, when the speaker says that “American people’s voices were so - and still are - so strong in this regard” and that the was was “a catastrophic mistake,” has the Democratic majority in Congress apparently done so little to bring it to a speedy conclusion?

Next time you take one of those funny little blog quizzes, take a good look at the code before you copy and paste it on to your blog. You might be inviting spam.

Maybe it’s me, but it’s kind of sad when it’s actually news that a city had a weekend when nobody got shot.

Mental illness isn’t a crime, but the way we treat — or don’t treat — the mentally ill is. Or should be. I wrote earlier that the Hillary’s hostage taker was ordered to undergo evaluation, which led me to make the following joke.

In fact, if you need — really need — inpatient mental health care, you’re unlikely to be able to get it, or at least get enough of it, because whatever can’t be treated in 10 days or so, isn’t going to be treated period. Not unless you kill someone, or at least take a few hostages.

But it turns out that committing a crime isn’t necessarily a ticket to getting mental health care. In fact, if you’re incarcerated — probably as a result of untreated mental illness — it can be a virtual guarantee that you won’t get the mental health care that you desperately need. In some cases, it can even be a death sentence.

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So is my outer adult. And that, according to Desmond Morris, is because part of me never really grew up.

DESMOND MORRIS, who became a bestselling author by applying zoology to explain human behaviour, has now utilised the techniques to put forward an explanation for homosexuality.

In his latest book, The Naked Man, he concludes that men are “made gay” because they retain infantile or juvenile characteristics into adulthood – a phenomenon known as neoteny.

According to this theory, gay men also tend to be more inventive and creative than heterosexuals because they are more likely to retain the mental agility and playfulness of childhood.

“Gays have in general made a disproportionately greater contribution to life than nongays,” said Morris, who is also a noted artist. “The creative gay has very much advanced Planet Earth.”

“The playfulness of childhood is continued with certain people into adulthood. This is very much a positive. Adult playfulness means that certain people, often a fairly large proportion of them gay, are more inventive and curious than heterosexuals.”

Desmond, with all due respect, grow up.

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No sooner did I post about the Clinton hostage crisis than the Omaha mall shooting happened, and right away there were questions about the mental health of the gunman.

“As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” A sign bearing these severe but hopeful words marks the entrance to Cooper Village, a residential treatment facility for teenagers along the rural northern edge of Omaha.

…Robert A. Hawkins, as a ward of the State of Nebraska, received extensive care at Cooper — private psychotherapy, family therapy, drug counseling — from 2003 to 2005.

It was his longest stop in a five-year journey through a maze of juvenile-services programs that began when he was 13 and was charged with making homicidal threats toward his stepmother.

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I’m working on a post about the Omaha mall shooting, but don’t want to wait until it’s finished to say that if I hear the shooter described as “depressed” one more time, I’m likely to snap. Depression makes you not want to get out of bed, or not want to leave the house. It doesn’t make you want to climb to top of a clock tower or the third floor of a shopping mall and start shooting people. I don’t know what does make one do that —psychosis? paranoia?—but it’s not depression. Stuff like that gives depression a bad name.