The Holy Spirit makes you burn books

Someone placed a Christian "devotional" booklet under my windshield while I was at work today. The concept seems to be that every day you're supposed to read a specific bible passage and read the accompanying exegesis in the booklet.

In principle, I don't see anything wrong with this. I'm all for exercises that encourage people to read carefully and grapple with difficult texts -- even if those texts happen to be biblical. The problem lies in the values espoused by the booklet. Take this example for August 25, a rumination on John 7:38 (NIV):

One of the dangers in seeking to be filled with the Holy Spirit, is that we can reduce it to an "experience" rather than releasing it to accomplish great things for God. If there's an infilling, there must be an outflowing! Every time someone in the New Testament was filled with the Holy Spirit, things happened. Amazing healings took place. They had book burnings in the town square. Idol makers and pornographers went out of business. They didn't just celebrate in church, they took it to the streets. There must be an outflow!

Conscious Blurbing in the NYT Book Review?

When book reviewers are writing their reviews, do most of them consciously compose a "blurb" sentence in hopes that it will appear on the back of later editions of the book? That's probably an unanswerable question, but lately when I'm browsing the NYT Book Review it seems like the blurb sentences are jumping out more frequently. These two from today just reek of carefully-crafted blurbiness:

From James Glanz's review of Patrick Cockburn's book on Moktada al-Sadr:

"Muqtada" will immediately become one of a small handful of books that are required reading for anyone who wants to unravel the meaning of events in Iraq five years into the war."

From Josef Joffe's review of Fareed Zakaria's new book The Post-American World:

This is a relentlessly intelligent book that eschews simple-minded projections from crisis to collapse.

I'm sure this has been going on ever since publishers started using book reviews in their marketing. The question is what the reviewers get out of it -- especially since blurbs often aren't attributed to the actual writer, but the publication in which they appeared.

Happy Halloween!

We're taking a break. But we'll be back. In the meantime, get in the spirit of the season and meditate on this, this and this.

Luxury Living: Cheesecake Factory Style

I wish you, dear readers, could live in the Raleigh-Durham metropolitan TV viewing area. This is because we have a pretty amazing commercial airing right now for the Westin Raleigh Soleil Center. Some woman begins speaking, in pretty much the most ridiculous voice you have ever heard, dripping with some sort of faux-rich upper-class accent that literally sounds like some bad caricature on Saturday Night Live. I don't know what the exact script of the commercial is, but Rich Lady is selling condos at the new high rise tower to be built next to a mall in Raleigh. The word "luxury" is emphasized, and maybe a few amenities are mentioned, and then "luxury" is sprinkled in again four or five more times, in case you haven't yet figured out that this place is the most diamond-encrusted, prestige-bestowing address east of the Mississippi river.

First of all, let me point out that this new high rise is advertised as being located in "Midtown Raleigh." Midtown Raleigh? Raleigh has a newly growing downtown, with an increasing handful of decent places to go out. But let's be honest here. Just the term "midtown" implies a downtown so burgeoning that it has actually spilled out of its boundaries and necessitates a new neighborhood to accommodate all the amazing places to see and things to do. This is certainly not the case in Raleigh. And furthermore, the Westin's own map of attractions close to the new Soleil Center lists only two, one of which is a Cheesecake Factory. The other one is a mall. In which, I should add, is the Cheesecake Factory. So, it's not particularly fair to list them as two separate attractions.

So the question is, why the desire to paint this new residence as the pinnacle of prestigious living? Raleigh is a nice town. It's not a luxurious town. Raleigh is a mid-sized city. It is neither an urban megastar like New York, Tokyo, or London, nor a high-priced resort-y place like Miami Beach or Bali. It is middle America. When did we get this idea that we need a life of luxury across the street from the Cheesecake Factory?

No one is content with Levittown anymore. What was once the American dream is now considered shabby, embarrassing even -- have you seen how small those places are? The spirit of Levittown has won out. Cheap, mass-produced housing built on unused farmland dominates our housing stock. But in comparison to what people contented themselves with in the 1950s, a new emphasis has been placed on luxury for every homeowner. Whether it's a new home in a newly-plowed cornfield outside a growing exurb, or a condo by the Cheesecake Factory in "midtown Raleigh", everyone has to have something one step above what they had before. Whirlpool tub? Standard. Media room? Of course. Increased use of fossil fuels? Part of the package.

The Soleil Center is making a nod to curbing its own excess by including a green roof and apparently some trees in the parking lot. But as a born-and-raised papist, I can say that our attitude about luxury and environmental excess is eminently Catholic. You can indulge in whatever you'd like as long as you go to confession at the end of the week. John Mayer is going light green. Paris Hilton has installed energy-saving light bulbs. You can own what you'd like as long as you make some feeble attempt at "conservation": go ahead and drive that SUV around all week, but make sure you throw the old newspapers and empty water bottles in the recycling bin on Wednesday.

Paris Hilton and her legions of perfume-selling, department-store-fashion-line-promulgating celebutante types can go "light green" all they want, but it doesn't discount the major role that they (and the retailers and condo developers and auto-industry tycoons) have had in selling the idea of Cheap Luxury. Luxury for Everyone. You can be middle class and luxurious. You can be energy-gobbling and earth-saving. Because all of us deserve to have it all.

Reading Cover's "Violence and the Word"

Yesterday I began re-reading Robert Cover's "Violence and the Word" -- perhaps one of the most-read law review articles ever published. One needn't be a lawyer to appreciate Cover's profound thesis that "[l]egal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death." An excerpt:

That one's ability to construct interpersonal realities is destroyed by death is obvious, but in this case, what is true of death is true of pain also, for pain destroys, among other things, language itself. Elaine Scarry's brilliant analysis of pain makes this point:

[F]or the person, in pain, so incontestably and unnegotiably present is it that "having pain" may come to be thought of as the most vibrant example of what it is to "have certainty," while for the other person it is so elusive that hearing about pain may exist as the primary model of what it is "to have doubt." Thus pain comes unshareably into our midst as at once that which cannot be denied and that which cannot be confirmed. Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unshareability, and it ensures this unshareability in part through its resistance to language . . . Prolonged pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.

The deliberate infliction of pain in order to destroy the victim's normative world and capacity to create shared realities we call torture. The interrogation that is part of torture, Scarry points out, is rarely designed to elicit information. More commonly, the torturer's interrogation is designed to demonstrate the end of the normative world of the victim -- the end of what the victim values, the end of the bonds that constitute the community in which the values are grounded. Scarry thus concludes that "in compelling confession, the torturers compel the prisoner to record and objectify the fact that intense pain is world-destroying." That is why torturers almost always require betrayal -- a demonstration that the victim's intangible normative world has been crushed by the material reality of pain and its extension, fear. The torturer and victim do end up creating their own terrible "world," but this world derives its meaning from being imposed upon the ashes of another. The logic of that world is complete domination, though the objective may never be realized.

Whenever the normative world of a community survives fear, pain, and death in their more extreme forms, that very survival is understood to be literally miraculous both by those who have experienced and by those who vividly imagine or recreate the suffering. Thus, of the suffering of sainted Catholic martyrs it was written:

We must include also . . . the deeds of the saints in which their triumph blazed forth through the many forms of torture that they underwent and their marvelous confession of the faith. For what Catholic can doubt that they suffered more than is possible for human beings to bear, and did not endure this by their own strength, but by the grace and help of God?

And Jews, each year on Yom Kippur, remember --

Rabbi Akiba . . . chose to continue teaching in spite of the decree [of the Romans forbidding it]. When they led him to the executioner, it was time for reciting the Sh'ma. With iron combs they scraped away his skin as he recited Sh'ma Yisrael, freely accepting the yoke of God's Kingship. "Even now?" his disciples asked He replied: "All my life I have been troubled by a verse: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul,' which means even if He take your life. I often wondered if I would ever fulfill that obligation. And now I can." He left the world while uttering, "The Lord is One."

Martyrdom, for all its strangeness to the secular world of contemporary American Law, is a proper starting place for understanding the nature of legal interpretation. Precisely because it is so extreme a phenomenon, martyrdom helps us see what is present in lesser degree whenever interpretation is joined with the practice of violent domination. Martyrs insist in the face of overwhelming force that if there is to be continuing life, it will not be on the terms of the tyrant's law. Law is the projection of an imagined future upon reality. Martyrs require that any future they possess will be on the terms of the law to which they are committed (God's law). And the miracle of the suffering of the martyrs is their insistence on the law to which they are committed, even in the face of world-destroying pain. Their triumph -- which may well be partly imaginary -- is the imagined triumph of the normative universe -- of Torah, Nomos, -- over the material world of death and pain. Martyrdom is an extreme form of resistance to domination. As such it reminds us that the normative world-building which constitutes "Law" is never just a mental or spiritual act. A legal world is built only to the extent that there are commitments that place bodies on the line. The torture of the martyr is an extreme and repulsive form of the organized violence of institutions. It reminds us that the interpretive commitments of officials are realized, indeed, in the flesh. As long as that is so, the interpretive commitments of a community which resists official law must also be realized in the fresh, even if it be the flesh of its own adherents.

The whole thing is here.

Matthew 6:5-6

Having realized it's been more than eight years since I last read the Bible, I decided to reacquaint myself with the first part of the Gospel of Matthew last night. I picked Matthew because I liked Pier Paolo Passolini's film version:



As is frequently noted in reference to Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo, Passolini was a communist, atheist and homosexual who nevertheless saw substantial power, beauty and revolutionary potential in Matthew's gospel. Maybe it's just close-mindedness on my part. Maybe I just need to finish the whole thing -- or study it some more. But I wasn't much more impressed than I was when I read Matthew in college.

That said, I was struck by a handful of verses, especially Matthew 6:5-6

5 And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.

6 But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

I was previously aware of these verses, but I must have ignored their contemporary significance. Everyone -- every American especially -- should know Matthew 6:5-6. The alleged Savior's position on public displays of piety are worth remembering at a time when it is considered perfectly respectable to claim that most American social and cultural problems could be solved by re-instituting teacher-led prayer in public schools; when every major presidential candidate competes for prayerful photo ops; and when companies often encourage religious employees to "share their faith" with their co-workers.

To be sure, no verse could possibly match the sublimity of 2 Kings 2:23-24, but what could?

Our post-privacy future, brought to you by ...

Yeah, The Vanity Website is rapidly deteriorating into "The Blog Where Mr. WD Comments On Articles In The New York Times" but... whatever.

If Richard Rorty is correct, the next time someone manages to kill a bunch of people in the United States, there'll be a huge clamor for more government surveillance -- probably something pretty similar to what the Chinese are already working on:

SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

The company providing all the new technology is China Public Security Technology.

Incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks — Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong — helped raise the money.

...

“We have a very good relationship with U.S. companies like I.B.M., Cisco, H.P., Dell,” said Robin Huang, the chief operating officer of China Public Security. “All of these U.S. companies work with us to build our system together.”

The article, of course, provides comforting language suggesting that government surveillance is mostly a Chinese problem and that no Western government would ever attempt to institute a similar system. For the time being, that's probably true -- until something else blows up.

A savvy entrepreneur can find opportunity anywhere -- even in the wake mass incineration. No doubt our hip, tech-savvy friends at I.B.M., Cisco and Hewlett-Packard will be there -- the lessons they learned in China firmly in mind -- to establish the technological infrastructure for a Great Surveillance Society.

Oh well, I'm sure that if we elect a Democratic president, there's nothing to worry about.