Short News and Commentary
By Kevin Hasson, Marilyn Penn, Thomas Rickeman, Dave Cloud, Juliana Geran Pilon, and David Schaefer

PUBLIC FAITH

Zach’s first-grade teacher gave him the big news: “Tomorrow you’re going to read in front of the whole class for the first time. Your reward is that you get to read from your favorite book.” So the next morning Zach brought in his favorite book—his Beginner’s Bible—and announced that the story he had chosen to read to the class was the story of Jacob and Esau.

 

But his teacher forbade Zach from reciting that story, or anything else from the Beginner’s Bible. He couldn’t read it aloud, she said. He had to read it to her separately and in private. The Bible, Beginner’s or otherwise, has no place in public schools.

 

Zach was crushed. His mom, an artist who understands the importance of free­dom of expression, was angry. She retained my public-interest law firm and we went to war. Soon, Zach became a poster child for religious expression in pub­lic. His story was all over the nation­al media. The U.S. Court of Appeals heard his case three times. The case finally settled when we got word that the U.S. Department of Education was issuing new regulations that would cut off federal funding to any school district that suppressed a child’s religious expressions in a sim­ilar way in the future. Zach had cap­tured people’s imaginations.

 

Zach’s predicament is typical of something that happens with less fanfare every day in this country: a public schoolteacher, a city council member, a judge, or someone else in authority assumes that religious expres­sion is proper only in private, and tries to squelch it in public.

 

“All right,” they say, “if you need to search for the true and the good, you just search away at home, and leave the rest of us out of it. Why do you have to do it in the streets and frighten the horses?”

 

The answer: Because it’s only natural. Religious liberty may begin with the freedom to seek, but it doesn’t end there. We aren’t a race of hermits, searching grimly for truth and goodness with eyes glued to the ground, ignoring others. We are born with a desire for community. We naturally form families, gather in clans, display our arts, and commemorate the great events of life with rituals. An important part of that is expressing what we believe religiously. Just as the other quintessentially personal aspects of our lives—from birth to marriage to death—have cultural dimensions, so does our faith. That’s why we spend generations building cathedrals, for example. Our natural inclination has always been to express our beliefs openly and within our community. We simply can’t live happily without a public culture that reflects and expresses the full scope of our humanity, including our spiritual thirst. In short, we don’t believe alone because we don’t live alone.

 

“Well, then, at least leave the govern­ment out of it,” is the fallback of the religious censors. “There are plenty of houses of worship to host nativity scenes and menorahs and so forth. Why do we need courthouse steps? After all, not everyone celebrates Hanukah or Christmas.”

 

No, of course they don’t. In a plural­istic society there’s nothing that every­one celebrates. Only some people cel­ebrate St. Patrick’s Day, for example, yet Anglophiles don’t sue to block the parade or forbid the mayor to wear green. European-Americans don’t try to enjoin Black History Month. Why not?

 

Because they would be laughed out of court. Everyone knows that these events are commemorations, not power-grabs.

 

It’s the same with Christmas and Hanukah and Easter. People should know that the mayor can celebrate those, too, without igniting another Saint Bar­tholomew’s Night. Indeed, he or she should celebrate them. Whatever surface appeal the leave-the-government-out-of-it argu­ment may have, things aren’t that simple. It’s impossible for the government to be silent on religion because silence itself speaks volumes.

 

The government is a major force in culture. It proclaims holidays, it runs a comprehensive public school system that purports to teach children what they need to know about everything from literature to sex, it underwrites arts of its choosing, it provides public universities that are major venues for performance and display as well as education.

 

These are cultural forces of seismic proportions. For the government to play such a ubiquitous role while never mentioning our spiritual dimension is implicitly saying that religion is at best unimportant, and at worst a shameful aspect of our lives. When the govern­ment acknowledges that we human beings have a spiritual thirst, and allows us to slake it in common, it is doing as it ought to do. Every petty bureaucrat who bans the Easter Bunny from his little bailiwick, on the other hand, is a menace.

 

Religious expression, drawn from all of our traditions, belongs in our society—not because of some theory of relativism, or an undifferentiated enthusiasm for diversity, but out of respect for our human nature. The government must surely be neutral on the question of who God is. But it just as surely should stop pretending there is no impulse to worship.

 

—Kevin Hasson, author of The Right to Be Wrong, heads the Becket Fund.

BLUNT IS BEAUTIFUL

Did you know that the term “secretary” is being replaced by the awkward phrase “administrative support staff”? Some committee decided that secretaries would be enriched by becoming ASSes. Think of all the ripple effects. On National Secretary’s Day we’ll be told: You have a great ASS so Take your ASS to lunch or Give your ASS the day off.

 

This is just one example among many of over-embellished titles. We’ve got baristas (coffee servers), building super­intendents (handymen and janitors), and marketing associates (salesmen) to name a few. Nursery schools are early childhood education centers, the garbage dump is the landfill, and the toilet is the commode. Reluctant to let things be what they are, we have taken to dressing them up in names and words implying tremendous significance (NITWITS).

 

Most of this has been caused by a mistaken notion that blunt clarity may be offensive. And being offensive has replaced criminality as the most anti-social behavior one can display. Now that most criminals are victims of rac­ism, economic deprivation, parental abuse, educational mismanagement, addictive behavior, the capitalist plot to create a pool of downtrodden wage slaves, or simple neurological misfiring, society’s real villains are people who throw chardonnay bottles in the regular trash or call their ASS a secretary.

 

But as our language becomes more ornate, our behavior has become more crude. People go to work in flip flops. They say tremendously affected things while wearing navel rings and child-sized tank tops. Airplanes are filled with guests (passengers) clad in warm-up suits (pajamas) shouting into their cell­phones. Having abandoned dress codes, formerly elegant restaurants feel like luncheonettes. To confuse matters fur­ther, my neighborhood luncheonette dubs itself the Three Guys Restaurant, a bit of word inflation that increases prices by 30 percent. (My nephew took to call­ing it Les Trois Hommes.)

 

Everyday experiences are now “awe­some.” Ordinary people on reality shows are now stars. Yet art reviews and college course catalogs now feature some of the most bombastic and pretentious prose ever constructed. Take away the jargon and you’ll find no substance under­neath. So here’s my plainspoken conclu­sion: NITWITS, as illustrated by ASS, lead not only to a degradation of lan­guage but also to a corruption of thought and action. To restore order, we need to defy each corruption of rational usage, militantly—DECORUM.

 

—Marilyn Penn is an independent prose stylist living in Manhattan.

 

 

PLEASE SPRAY THE IGN AND MTV BUILDINGS FIRST

California’s IGN Entertainment and an “urban designer” named Marc Ecko have recently produced a video game that celebrates graffiti “artists” for vandalizing buildings, trains, and walls with their “tags.” Last summer, New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and Queens councilman Peter Vallone teamed up to try to stop Ecko from holding a street per­formance of his new game with replicas of New York subway cars as targets. They were overruled by a judge, and the show went on. Public officials fear the game will inspire real-life kids to imitate the stealthy defacings of its protagonist. A big-screen spin-off of the game is reportedly under development at MTV Films.

 

 

YEAR OF THE SENATOR?

Senators have typically made weak candidates for President (see “Governors and Generals Rule” by Christopher DeMuth in TAE’s January/February 2004 issue). So 2008 could turn out to be an unusual election. If, say, John McCain, George Allen, or Sam Brownback ends up pitted against Hillary Clinton or John Kerry, it would be the first time in U.S. history to feature two members of the Senate running opposite one another. And if a senator of either party won, that would mark only the fourth time someone leapt from the upper cham­ber to the White House. JFK was the last, nearly a half century ago.

—Thomas Rickeman

 

MOTOWN BLUES

Time for a quiz about car manufacturing in America. True or false?

 

• Far fewer cars are made in America today than in the 1960s, the heyday of American auto production.

• Pay at Japanese-owned car plants in America is a small fraction of that at the UAW-controlled American manufacturers.

• Foreign car manufacturers located here do not pay health care benefits to workers.

• The foreign car manufacturers have no retirement benefits for workers.

• None of the design work for foreign carmakers is done in the U.S.

 

If you said false to all of the above, go to the head of the class. Hard as it may be to believe, car manufacturing in the U.S. is thriving. As Eric Noble of Car Lab puts it, “The domestic auto industry is as healthy as it has ever been. The names on the plants are just changing.”

 

Auto plants managed by Japanese companies are on the rise. Jobs at these plants are often criticized as non-union and low paying. Half right. The jobs aren’t unionized, but the pay is only a few dollars less than UAW members make. The foreign carmakers have good health care plans, though not as gold-plated as UAW workers are accustomed to. They also get solid retirement ben­efits. Workers at Toyota have a defined-contribution plan that provides a lump sum at retirement based on years of ser­vice. Nissan has a 401(k) matching plan. The UAW has a sweetheart deal with GM, Ford, and Chrysler, but it will be useless if those companies go broke.

 

Do foreign manufacturers build cars here, but keep the design and other cre­ative work at home? No. Firms like Toy­ota, Nissan, and Hyundai have large U.S. design and research operations.

 

Have foreign manufacturers imper­illed safe jobs? No. Ford and GM would still be shedding workers even without local competition. Like most industries, car manufacturing is becoming more efficient. It took Ford, Chrysler, and GM at least 24 hours to assemble a car in 1999; today the time is around 20 hours.

 

Ford, GM, and Chrysler workers need to adjust from being divas to voices in the choir. Just singing the blues won’t make anyone better off.

—Dave Cloud is a frequent contributor to TAEmag.com.

 

A DEADLY PEACE

In response to the killing of thousands of Christians in Darfur by a genocidal Islamic regime, the United Nations acted as only the U.N. can. The Security Council passed five resolutions in less than two years—sending inspectors, imposing sanctions, and creating a peacekeeping mission. Twice each week, U.N. officials in Sudan issue an up-to-date report on the situation.

 

In all this, the United States has been a team player. Eschewing the unilateral action that earned so much European scorn in the Balkans, Iraq, and else­where, the U.S. has joined in multiparty, multinational negotiations, and given sanctions, inspectors, and peacekeepers a chance to work. The U.S. has exhibited the diplomatic patience of a saint, not once threatening the Sudanese with “serious consequences,” let alone force.

 

Now, after three years of turmoil, the genocide in Darfur is finally nearing an end. The reason? There is no one left to kill. At this point it’s estimated that 500,000 innocent civilians have been finished off in Sudan, and 2.5 million more terrorized, raped, or displaced.

 

Add those miserable souls to the long list of victims of U.N. impotence and peace-at-any-cost cowardice: 1.7 million lives extinguished in Cambodia; 300,000 murdered by Saddam in 1991; 800,000 dead in Rwanda; 10,000 or more per­ished in the Balkans. And the lesson we’re supposed to draw from this is that “War is never the answer?”

 

 

PRAGMATIC IDEALISM

From remarks by journalist Robert Kaplan at the American Enterprise Institute:

I think the moral purpose of our current foreign policy should be to extend the boundaries of civil society, wherever and however it can, on a moderate basis, given our limitations, etc. But we shouldn’t become too legalistic about what constitutes civil society. For instance, it doesn’t necessarily mean free elections overnight in China. It doesn’t mean saying to King Abdullah of Jordan that unless he becomes a constitutional monarch—stripped of all power—within six months, then the U.S. is going to stop its friendship with him…. We have a lot of these murky, in-between situations, so we can’t become too legalistic….

 

If you talk to a major in the U.S. Army or Marines working with new Iraqi governance councils around the country, here’s what he’ll tell you: “We work with the new councils. We try to strengthen them. But the fact is that tribal elders—sheiks—often have the real control. They can bring in a ran­dom carjacker we’re having trouble with. The town council hasn’t been around long enough to have that kind of authority, so we will often go behind the backs of the town council to work with old-fashioned leadership.” I don’t believe that this makes these majors anti-democratic. They’re just trying to work with the situation.

 

I would call myself a moderate conser­vative…who would agree with those army majors—that these things take time.

 

 

HOPE BEYOND THE HATRED

In the little town of Jedwabne, nestled in the heart of Poland, all the Jewish inhab­itants—mainly old people, women, and children—were rounded up and burned alive by a group of German policemen and Polish townsfolk on July 10, 1941. No one knows exactly how many Jews were killed, but the best guess is around 300. And no one knows the precise cir­cumstances of the attack. How many local Poles versus German security forces were involved in the atrocity? Most important, who initiated the mas­sacre, and what were the motivations of the killers?

 

In 2001, New York University professor Jan Tomasz Gross, an expatriate Polish Jew, published a book called Neighbors that characterized the massacre as not just another Nazi atrocity but the product of a spontaneous pogrom of innocent Jews by their Polish Christian neighbors. Though there were wide­spread reports of cordial relations among Christians and Jews in Jedwabne prior to the Nazi occupation of 1939, Gross argued that deep-seated Polish anti-Semitism lurked just beneath the surface, and proved fierce enough to motivate genocide when the opportunity arose.

 

Western journalists, particularly in the United States, immediately adopted Gross’s interpretation unquestioningly, as did most of Poland’s intelligentsia. Not so former University of Virginia historian Marek Chodakiewicz, now academic dean at the Institute of World Politics, who decided to investigate the crime for himself. He hunted every available primary source, many previ­ously unpublished, including recently released communist-era archives in Ger­many, Poland, and Russia (which, scan­dalously, have hardly been touched by most left-leaning Western scholars).

 

The evidence fails to support Gross’s claim that the massacre in Jedwabne was exclusively the work of Polish Christians, Chodakiewicz concludes. There is no question that many Polish peasants were anti-Semitic. But murder is another story. His research indicates that Polish collabo­rators did carry out German orders in planning and executing the massacre, but that most of the Polish conscripts were coerced into participating in the crime.

 

Both Jews and Poles suffered enor­mously at the hands of German Nazis, and then the Soviet communists. While precise numbers are not avail­able, we know that Poland had 36 mil­lion citizens in 1938; eight years later, that number had dwindled to 24 mil­lion. Between 6 and 7 million of those missing from the country were dead, including more than 3 million Jews and over 2 million Christians.

 

This horrible suffering helped trans­form Poles of all backgrounds, setting the stage for today’s democratic Poland. The newly uncovered facts about Jed­wabne should bring Poles even closer.

—Juliana Geran Pilon is a board member of the Institute for Human Rights based in Auschwitz, Poland.

 

 

THEY COULD ALWAYS GO INTO EDUCATION

Over half of students graduating from four-year colleges in the U.S. lack the literacy to deal with such “real-life” tasks as understanding newspaper editorials, comparing credit-card offers, or summarizing the results of a survey. Nor do they have the math skills needed to balance their checkbooks, according to a new study funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts.

—David Schaefer