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The elusive Conscience of Modern Republicanism

I just learned from the Byron York that 1) "Republicans are again arguing among themselves" about impeachment, and 2) "the GOP base is infuriated with Obama, particularly his abuse of executive power." These can be taken as two key points of York's Washington Examiner column, which is but one of the many Consciences of Modern Republicanism. And neither point has the least element of reality about it.

Most Republicans pols are not "arguing" about impeachment, as York maintains. In fact nearly all Republican pols, in public and private, have noted impeachment's utter political insanity, and that's scarcely an argument. It's more of an observation akin to noting the sky is blue.

York's second misinformation entry is even better, the one about the GOP base being "infuriated with Obama, particularly his abuse of executive power." If Jay Leno were to stop on the street 100 infuriated GOPers and ask them what they're infuriated about, I'd wager one, maybe two at the outside, would mutter something vague about Obamacare. The others would give that teenage-girl-behind-the-fast-food-counter look--the rather uncomprehending one of transcendent indifference to the substance of your request. No doubt they'd confirm their fury. They just wouldn't know why they're furious.

And there, I think, lies the real Conscience of Modern Republicanism.

 

Our exceptional immunity from war's horror

Sullivan, in an excellent piece on blogging's liberation from editorial strictures, points to what he calls a "great reflection" by the NYT's David Carr on the instantaneousness of social media and modern war. Here's Carr's wrap up:

So now that war comes to us in real time, do we feel helpless or empowered? Do we care more, or will the ubiquity of images and information desensitize us to the point where human suffering loses meaning when it is part of a scroll that includes a video of your niece twerking?...

As war becomes a more remote, mechanized activity, posts and images from the target area have significant value. When a trigger gets pulled or bombs explode, real people are often on the wrong end of it. And bearing witness to the consequences gives meaning to what we see.

Doubtless meaning is given. But in going back to Carr's question of helplessness or empowerment, the latter is hard for me to see. Empowered how? In "caring more" because we witness the utter powerlessness of war's innocent victims? But I'm not sure a sense of helplessness is the alternative experience of most Americans, either. Nor is it desensitization.

My guess, a kind of negligence? A negligence of the world, born of our received wisdom that we are an exceptionalist nation--one immune from the barbarity of hegemonic aggression, religious strife and ethnic slaughter? It is said that we lost this confidence of secure isolation after 9/11, but that was also said after Pearl Harbor. Once again, it didn't take us long to regain it. We have, since the horrifying adventurism of Bush-Cheney, returned, it seems, to Fortress America.

Yes we feel for Palestinian children, but let's face it: they're of a peculiar, dark-skinned species of a violent religion and even more violent emotions, against whom peace-loving Israelis must--tragic though it is--hurl mortar shells and tank ordnance and payloads from F-16s. That's the way war is, just as that's the way much of the world is--of which we're not really a part. It's wretched, it's heartbreaking, it's damned distressing--but now on to that video of a twerking niece. Because we can.

 

Polarization? Or madness?

Milbank has a heartrending piece on Republican pols' inhuman, inhumane, unconscionable policy of denying Medicaid's expansion into the state of North Carolina, with predictable consequences: needless deaths and deprivations. North Carolina's mean-spirited Republican politics may be a grim reality, but it's also a metaphor for the malevolence of contemporary conservatism. Once blue--in 2008--the state has since excelled at an anti-Obama ruthlessness that astonishes; it is literally willing to kill its citizens to prove both an ideological point and its immovable opposition to the White House Pretender. Others have joined N.C. in this ignominious crusade.

Question: Is it proper to call opposition to N.C. et al's determined program of rank inhumanity mere "polarization"? The term seems awfully mild in the face of deliberate murder--which is what N.C.'s and other GOP states' refusal of Medicaid expansion is. It is a premeditated killing; there was never any doubt that lives would be needlessly lost because of Republicans' deranged hostility to Medicaid's expansion through Obamacare, and yet Republicans have proceeded to block it. Because of cost? No. The feds pick up nearly the entire tab, after a few years of in fact picking up the entire tab. Because of unworkability? No. It's working just fine elsewhere. Because of criminal malice? Bingo.

To stand polar-opposite to that sort of political malignancy is nonetheless not what I'd call polarization. I'd call it human decency. One side has it, and the other does not. Polarization occurs when, say, one side favors more inexcusable tax cuts for plutocrats and the other side philosophically opposes the absurdity of such cuts. Polarization does not occur when one side favors the murder of its fellow citizens, and the other side, ahem, objects.

 

My bewilderment over the NYT's marijuana hubbub

I've been surprised by the controversy stirred by the NYT editorial board's official endorsement of American liberty. Sunday's "Repeal Prohibition, Again," in which the Grey Lady declared that "the federal government should repeal the ban on marijuana," is one of those evidently derring-do opinion pieces which strikes me as bold only after the controversy erupts. I have since seen the Times' opinion page editor, Andrew Rosenthal, in two cable interviews, defending his board's call for radical moderation, and on Sunday I thrilled to David Brooks' belting out of "Ya Got Trouble"--in River City--on "Meet the Press." Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey, a former Drug Tsar, has had to be sedated.

I understand none of it--neither the need for defense nor all the hand-wringing. Or perhaps I should say sure I understand it, but I still don't get it. It's controversial for Establishment Journalism to embrace American freedom and denounce an authoritarian tyranny that has ruined thousands of lives for tens of years? Reefer madness is somehow more egregious, more grotesque, than despotic insanity?

My libertarian opinion is nothing personal. I don't smoke pot. The few times I tried it I only found myself unpleasantly hammered, groping for the edge of any stationary object, and waiting for the disagreeable fog to lift. Four, maybe five attempts (I'm a bit slow) at participatory delight were, for me, enough. My opinion is, rather, philosophical. I find the prospect of a bunch of congressional Billy Sundays legislating what I can put in my body offensive, repellent, and frankly unAmerican. If my pursuit of happiness entails deadening my brain on the wings of tetrahydrocannabinol for a few hours, well, the righteously sober should just have to learn to live with it. I'm not too crazy about some of their behavior, either--namely, their allegiance to obscurantism, but I don't advocate the criminalization of ignorance.

Speaking of national crimes, it's a common misconception that our first Prohibition caused an explosion of boozing. It did not. America's alcohol consumption did in fact decline in the 1920s. The one explosion it did cause was that of organized crime, which of course our second Prohibition has caused as well. Hence the cost of enforcing unmedicated American virtue has---twice--been that of reckless authoritarianism and rampant thuggery.    

The drug war has been a comprehensive failure. I'm somewhat confident that the decriminalization of all substances will someday come about, with the humane, civilized treatment of their abuse taking brutish criminalization's place. And yet after all these decades of noted failure, the NYT editorial board makes a controversial splash over mere marijuana? I don't get it.

 

A bad day for the blame-Obama crowd

We must now all do what we can to help keep Lindsey Graham's spirits up, since ...

the United States and Europe put aside their differences and agreed on Monday to sharply escalate economic sanctions against Russia....

"[Europeans] agreed on the importance of coordinated sanctions measures on Russia for its continued transfer of arms, equipment and fighters in eastern Ukraine, including since the crash, and to press Russia to end its efforts to destabilize the country and instead choose a diplomatic path to resolving the crisis," Antony J. Blinken, Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters.

"Agonizing delays" were expected in such a U.S.-European diplomatic accord, but of course Russia's role in the barbaric downing of MH-17 expedited this almost inescapable moment in transatlantic history. Putin seems to have something of the contemporary tea partier in him, by which I only mean that he's splendidly demonstrating a suicidal knack for overreach. At work is little more than the Bully Syndrome--Russian-style.

Still, Sen. Graham and friends have for weeks been demanding that President Obama negotiate the sanctions announced today, as though the White House has been somehow reluctant to do just that. The material arrival of these added sanctions will no doubt politically dispirit the neoconservative crowd, although the NY Times report permits them some comfort: "In some cases, the Europeans may actually leapfrog beyond what the United States has done, forcing Washington to try to catch up."

See? Obama is still "weak." Perhaps that will boost Lindsey's spirits.

 

Palin TV, the latest in malevolent entertainment

Hermann Goering was perhaps a trifle extreme when he testified at his Nuremberg trial that opposition voices were an unnecessary and tedious nuisance, thus, assuming one has the power and all the right answers--which of course Goering believed the National Socialists did--off with their heads. What's the problem? he asked in genuine puzzlement. Why all the grimacing?

Nearly 20 years later, the brilliant Herbert Marcuse was nearly as extreme when, in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, he argued that modern media were irresponsibly offering nitwitted, right-wing oppositionists too many forums for the lazy-minded to follow. Marcuse did not exactly recommend summary executions, although an admirer of the ACLU's belief that the best way to battle hateful speech is through more speech he most clearly was not.

Such extremism indeed seems unacceptably extreme until one reads that Sarah Palin is "starting her own online channel"--her "latest broadside against news outlets she has long accused of unfair coverage."

I'm joking, OK? I'm just joking. But come on, you've got to admit, Hermann and Herbert each had a point. 

 

Paul Ryan's poverty plan, as a dodge

Ezra Klein and Paul Krugman have an illuminating exchange. Klein asks, "Why should anyone trust Paul Ryan’s poverty plan?" Krugman answers, "That’s easy: nobody should. This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions."

Klein does go on at remarkable length answering his own question--"Ryan's budgets and his poverty plan aren't merely different. They're flatly contradictory," etc., etc.--but Krugman's assessment possesses the twin and superior merits of brevity and deeper truth. Ryan is untrustworthy, because he's a "con man." Simple as that. The "real question," proceeds Krugman, "is why so many people in the news media still want to find reasons to praise" him. 

Of course, the answer has been clear for years: people are still trying [here Krugman quotes himself from 2012] "to slot Ryan into a role someone is supposed to be playing in their political play, that of the thoughtful, serious conservative wonk."

E.J. Dionne makes a related point: "There is such a hunger for something other than partisanship that the temptation is to praise the new Ryan for being better than the old Ryan and to leave it at that."

Dionne, like Klein, digs into the reasons why he distrusts Ryan's poverty plan. But it seems to me that something much larger is missing from liberals' assorted criticisms of the Wisconsin congressman's plan. And what's missing is the answer to this: What's the general, political philosophy behind it? We already know that Ryan's plan is contradictory; we know that Ryan has more than a touch of the con artist in him (he is, after all, not only a politician, but a modern Republican politician); and we all know that Ryan is hostile to the notion of federal guarantees to the poor. But does Ryan honestly see any positive role for any government at any level when it comes to lifting people out of poverty?

I realize that's a naïve question to ask. For starters, Ryan's admiration of Ayn Rand already indirectly answers it. What's more troubling is my realization of just how naïve it's become to believe in asking fundamental questions about a politician's fundamental beliefs. The electorate at large cares little about some technocratic debate regarding the funding mechanisms of, say, food stamps. That same electorate would take rather unkindly, however, to a politician who is philosophically hostile to even the concept of them.

Nonetheless, such primal questions rarely seem to get asked; and on those few occasions they are asked, politicians are even more rarely pressed for an unambiguous answer. What I'm driving at is that the electorate becomes dazed into inattentiveness by policy particulars it doesn't much care about, while grand philosophical differences between the major parties--which the electorate does care about--go unstressed by political analysts. This leads to the electorate's both-parties-are-squabbling-fuck-ups mentality.

Perhaps if we got back to the basics.

 

Hillary's appearance on GPS--an appearance only

I had to cattle-prod myself back to consciousness after watching Fareed Zakaria's GPS interview of Hillary Clinton yesterday. I recall being more exhilarated as a college freshman by a Biology 101 lecture on the scourge of livestock bacteria--scientific Latin nomenclature and all.

I can't say why, for sure, but I was expecting Hillary to actually say something during the 40-minute one-on-one. I suppose I anticipated some precision as well as meaning in her language because of the political press' general criticism (from afar) of her lullaby presidential campaign--which, unquestionably, is in progress. So to speak.

What did we get instead? On Ukraine, Hillary declared that the United States and Europe must cooperate against Russia's nefarious scheming. Her "advice" to President Obama went no farther than that. On Israel's endless turmoil-production by West Bank settlements, she insisted Israel should just stop it but failed to suggest how the U.S. might compel the little hegemon to do that.

We as a guiding nation should also "tell our story" to the world better and more convincingly, she said; as to what she was talking about here, my guess is as good as yours, or even hers. Finally, Hillary conceded that the monstrosity of her Iraq war vote taught her to be more "skeptical" and "cautious" about accepting at face value the easily discernible mendacity of any chickenhawk warmongers at the helm.

Fareed, as I recall, nodded in thoughtful agreement.

It was at that point I braced, in a kind of paradoxical shocked stupor, for the cattle prod. 

It occurs to me that Hillary Clinton is already being interviewed not as a candidate for president, but as president. Nothing else explains the Beltway media's revolting kid-glove treatment of a politician who has nothing to say.

 

Kerry's sanity invites--what else?--a threat

The accelerating impossibility of John Kerry's mission of sanity in the Gazan obscenity was vividly outlined yesterday by Haaretz's diplomatic correspondent, Barak Ravid, who blasted the secretary of state for having come from "a parallel universe." Why the harshness? Here's Mr. Ravid's chief objection to Kerry's cease-fire proposal late last week, followed by a kind of Israeli il bacio della morte:

The document placed Israel and Hamas on the same level, as if the first is not a primary U.S. ally and as if the second isn't a terror group which overtook part of the Palestinian Authority in a military coup and fired thousands of rockets at Israel.... If this failed diplomatic attempt leads Israel to escalate its operation in Gaza, the American secretary of state will be one of those responsible for every additional drop of blood that is spilled.

This is not some idle rant by a lone, dissociative blogger. It is the official, as well as emotional, position of the Israeli government. It seems that Kerry, as a third-party broker, is to approach cease-fire negotiations between the combatants as the overtly preconceived voice of Israeli domination and Palestinians' abject deference. Such is the prefiguration that the Israeli government demands--whose starting point dwells in a universe that's not even parallel to the known, pragmatic one of diplomacy. And should Kerry not play Israel's puppet, then Israeli atrocities are on his head. This is our "ally" speaking.

No wonder, then, that a morning NYT story cites President Obama's "mounting impatience" with Prime Minister Netanyahu. As in its initial, nuclear-program talks with Iran, the U.S. seeks only a non-belligerent spell in which both sides may "[pursue] a more lasting agreement."

Nothing could be more reasonable, it seems to me. But of course in the insanity of the Levant it only compels "senior Israeli officials [to express] great anger regarding Kerry's proposal."

 

Palin Inc.'s sickness, and Rooseveltian hope

It took me only 24 hours to exchange this official portrait of Our Lady of Terrestrial Buffoonery ...

... for the more dignified, informal profile you now see in the upper right.

Palin's visage (some readers have, no doubt, mistaken it for a caricature) happened to comport with yesterday's theme of Republican clown cars and a party strategy of litigate but don't legislate, which is as breathtakingly shallow in the short term as it is politically fatal in the longer one. Thus, as a site feature, I meant for Palin's portrait to be only temporary; I had no intention of it haunting this page for more than a few hours.

But, after posting it--again, purely for yesterday's thematic reasons--I got to wondering if its permanence might be advisable. It definitely makes a representative statement about pseudoconservatism's Thirty Years War on America: its bee-hived buffoonery, its grotesque assaults on Reason and history and science and macroeconomics and good taste and human decency, its universal cluelessness mistaking itself for a fighting awareness, that sort of thing.

Indeed, Sarah Palin embodies the essential spirit of contemporary American politics--a poisonous obsession with the absolute lowest common denominators, and the darker angels who accompany them. So why not enshrine the blitheringly cretinous harpy in this site's honored upper-right spot not for merely a day, but for weeks, months, years, however long her symbolic corrosiveness endures? This was my thinking.

I have, however, reconsidered, as you can see. In Mr. Roosevelt's personification of Lincoln's better angels he also personified America's deeper, more enduring, and far more sublime spirit. I don't mean this in an "exceptionalist" way; we are, after all, but an amalgamation of the globe's other exceptional peoples. What I do mean, simply, is that FDR's spiritual American sublimity positively radiated. He was imbued with a profoundly progressive heart ruled by a steady, conservative mind; he saw brilliance where others saw only darkness; he embraced misfortune as opportunity; he was that rare patrician of true working-class empathy; he was American pragmatism itself; and in any fight, domestic or foreign, he was the tough, brawling, streetwise pol you damn well wanted on your side.

And I'd rather be reminded of that every day than of the pseudoconservative sickness that pervades. The latter's assault on America may now be 30 years long, but in our more than two-century-old story, so to speak, it's quite temporary.

 

The clown car needs to man up

Timothy Egan, a Beltway observer whose sound judgment is evidenced by his critiquing the circus from the sanity-preserving distance of the Pacific Northwest, condenses House Republicans' latest thumb-sucking insult to the Republic: "They will not legislate. But they will litigate."

Egan calls their suing of President Obama for doing his job the fulfillment of a "logical position." They are do-nothing clowns, so why not do nothing clownishly? Egan does not, however, say that Republicans' lawsuit is the apotheosis of a logical position--the fright-wigged, horn-honking, red-nosed pursuit of yet another comically calamitous "I" stunt.

Political junkdom is eager for House Republicans to get on with the show, but clown-shepherd John Boehner has been a Capitol party pooper in stopping short. Some may deplore the speaker for, say, sabotaging the economy or perpetuating a shadowy underclass, but we who revel in the squalid zaniness of The People's House scoff at such Dudley Do-Right antipathies. We just want the GOP's goddamn show to go on, since that's the surest way to shut it down.

One compensating comfort of Republicans' lawsuit is that it's nearly as popular as impeachment, which is to say, it's a joke. Fifty-seven percent of Americans oppose the lawsuit, says a CNN poll, while even more--about two thirds--oppose impeachment, which, as noted, the gavel-wielding party pooper insists is no part of Republicans' act. But that position is illogical. If the president of the United States is violating the law and abusing the constitution, indisputably it is the House's constitutional obligation to move for impeachment. Mere litigiousness is unAmerican.  

Thus if I were a tea partier, or for that matter a Democratic activist, I would attend every August, town-hall GOP gathering I could, demanding to know what all this weak-sister lawsuit shit is about. Are Republicans no longer committed to the radiant, Palinesque rectitude of Constitutional Conservatism? If Obama is no felon he is at the very least an insufferable misdemeanant who deserves removal from office, just as John Madison prescribed when he penned Article I, Section 2 of our beloved founding document before famously riding through Salem in 1763 to warn of the coming of those nasty Bluecoats.

 

Kerry looked as though another dog had died

John Kerry looked understandably solemn as he briefly addressed reporters in Cairo about Israel's rejection of his cease-fire proposal, although he attempted some optimism. He'll continue striving for a truce, he said, with more than a tinge of desperation, if not despair. And who can blame him?  

The Palestinian death toll topped 800 as the conflict reached its 18th day. On the Israeli side, at least 32 soldiers, two Israeli civilians and a Thai guest worker have been killed.... [In addition] thousands of Palestinians clashed with Israeli security forces late Thursday and well into Friday morning at the Qalandia checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank.

On Netanyahu's part, this simply cannot be sustained. Such is the ultimate failing of Netanyahu's strategy. Kerry, I'd wager, will soon begin to reflect--publicly--President Obama's frustration with an incorrigible ally, and what little diplomatic support Netanyahu now has will recede. Without the U.S., the Israeli prime minister has nothing in the long run; we sustain him, and therefore his confrontational strategy is, to repeat, unsustainable without us. Obama is wary of bold, impetuous, spontaneous moves in foreign affairs, but I suspect he's carefully planning some hardcore spontaneity if Kerry's negotiations proceed unproductively. Along with the world, Obama, as his recent comments suggest, has just about had enough of Netanyahu's arrogance.

What's more, the Israeli P.M. cannot sustain himself politically; certainly not--once again--in the long run. No great empire, let alone a tiny nation, can suffer infinite war and international condemnation and expect to survive politically on the domestic front. At some point a peace faction will begin laying out the real "hard choices" to which its Palestinian relations must submit. When that will come, who knows. But history dictates its inevitable arrival.

Netanyahu isn't winning. He's sliding into infamy and strategic failure. Someday, and that day may be soon, both Obama and peace-loving Israelis--the majority--will say, Enough. 

 

For Krauthammer, a new low

In four words, Charles Krauthammer has hit a new low.

His latest explores, at length, the inner intellectual and psychiatric workings of Barack Obama, as only a former psychiatrist with no clinical sessions to work from could do. Has Obama "checked out. Given up" on foreign policy? asks Krauthammer. No, he answers. He'll "give him more credit" than that. No, Obama has instead descended into the folly of Wilsonian idealism, diagnoses Krauthammer--an idealism in which the president "disdains realpolitik because he believes that, in the end, such primitive 19th-century notions as conquest are self-defeating."

This by itself is nearly the new low. A neoconservative rebuking Obama for his disdain of realpolitik--a meditation that is both colossally wrongheaded and stupendously hypocritical. 

So, how could Krauthammer top that? How could he reduce himself even more? Hit an even lower low? By suggesting what "a real U.S. president" would do (in this case, about Ukraine, some of which, as is always the case with neocon criticism, Obama is already doing). That's how.

A real U.S. president. Does this not cater to the vilest prejudices of the ultraconservative base? A real U.S. president--not some "colored" man with Middle Eastern religious proclivities and of Gandhi-esque pacifism and domestic Hitlerian pretensions. That's what we need, a real president who would do what real, white, Judeo-Christian men do, such as invade the wrong country and slaughter tens of thousands of innocents and bankrupt the republic while doing it.

Would a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist not appreciate what he was actually writing when he wrote "a real U.S. president"? I think not. I give Harvard Medical School's psychiatry department more credit than that.

 

"I am a recent convert to your blog"

Early this morning I opened a newborn reader's very complimentary email sent overnight, and though complimentary, it has had me a bit rattled.  

I am a recent convert to your blog. I believe I discovered you through Sullivan's blog itself [my site is linked in The Dish's blog list, and Sullivan is kind and ecumenical enough to link to some of my posts], and I'm so glad that I did. Yours is a fantastic, in my view, combination of wit, irreverence, and sound political commentary with a much-appreciated added element of really getting deep into history; something that I feel like most of the best blogs out there today sadly lack. Please keep it up, Sir....

My best guess is that your blog is to you something of a labor of love given that you don't get too many comments. A shame. I think you're on the short list of the best.

The reader is correct; mine is a labor of love, although in a few months or so (the email reminded me of this) I'll probably need to pursue my lifelong dream of flipping burgers for Big Boy, since labors of love do not, as they say, feed the bulldog, who in my little family happens to be a beautiful sophomore who enjoys eating three times a day. Labors of love are profoundly unsustainable. What really rattles me, however, is why this labor of love garners so few readers--on average a thousand a day; do the financial math--when so many of those readers also seem to love it. For some time I've expected the coming of legions of likeminded readers with likeminded tastes in (mostly political) blogging, yet breakout, I think they call it, is proving itself quite improbable, if not impossible.  

Why is this so? I can't say for sure, but I have my suspicions. First, I'm not a hardcore partisan and on occasion I criticize President Obama, which devastates the stats. One critical word one day results in a critical plummeting of readership the next. There's a self-harming cause and effect in play that's undeniable. But, a political blog that only panders for numbers is a political blog I'd rather not write. If honesty is costly, then so be it. At least I'll go down with some self-respect. I realize the Zig Ziglars of the blogosphere would find this incredibly stupid--"the customer is always right"--but my big mouth seems to be congenitally unshrinkable. So sue me, as the object of my occasional criticism has put it.      

And then there's Twitter, whose growing prominence seems to have taken a toll on blog readership. Why invest time in even 400 words when one can thrill to the high poetry of 140 characters? I'll cut this particular suspicion short. It's just too damned depressing. Perhaps I should develop just "Twit," which would unburden readers by limiting its literary potential to only 40 characters. 

Mostly, though, I stink at self-promotion. Always have. I lack the Chris Matthews gene. In past, assorted endeavors I have succeeded in promoting others, but when it comes to promoting myself, I just stink. There's no more accurate way to assess my attempts.

Hence the point of all this sorryass wallowing in speculation: I could use a bit of help. I'm not yet prepared to cash this site in, and new readers such as the very kind, complimentary fellow who emailed last night only encourage my belief that the site indeed has a future. So, maybe, spread the word? Forward a link now and then? Just whatever tactics you can think of. Your choice. Because remember, my promotional ideas--which at any rate are somewhat on the absent side--stink.

 

God, Jews, Palestinians, and ultimate existentialism

As I understand it, the Jewish counterpart to Muslims' "Allahu Akbar"--God is great--is "Elohim gadol." In their native tongues, both sides worship the same guiding greatness, as, in all tongues, do Christians. Mohammad, after all, while still a prophet on earth, once attended a heavenly tea with Abraham, Moses, and Jesus. This suggests that religious differences are temporally artificial--differences, that is, worth killing each other for. Yet over the centuries of human strife, religionists have not been content merely with slaughtering believers--known as infidels and heretics--in another religion of the selfsame worship. They have instead waged the internecine butchery of sectarianism--Sunnis murdering Shiites, Shiites murdering Sunnis, Catholics and Protestants hacking one another to pieces, while, although this lies outside sectarianism, everybody was killing the Jews.

Perhaps you can understand, then, why organized world religions hold little appeal for me. Strike that. They hold no appeal whatsoever, even though I'm a namby-pamby agnostic of Taoist intimations who therefore doesn't deny the possibility of some sort of prime being. It's all immensely and insuperably unknowable, of course, but I do know this (I think): If a god there be, She's screaming not religious doctrine at us, but philosophical existentialism. For God's sake can't you figure this stuff out on your own? I can hear Him cry, as It shakes Its cosmic head in disbelief at how utterly slow on the comprehending uptake we are.

This moment of modest reflection was brought to me by the NYT's Roger Cohen, who observes in his latest:

The demands of this reconstituted Hamas become the demands of the Palestinian people. Abbas is marginalized. This is not a strategic victory for Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, pursues a status-quo strategy that keeps Palestinians divided and Israel dominant. The price of the strategy is periodic violence.... An oppressed people will rise up. That is in the nature of things.

Nobody is going away. The peoples of the Holy Land are condemned to each other. Without that realization, any truce ... will only be a way station to the next round of slaughter.

Oppressed people will rise up. That's a secular fact. The peoples of the Holy Land are condemned to each other. That's another terrestrial fact. And that another mere truce is but an invitation to another round of mass human slaughter is an inescapable truism fit for a stone tablet. God's greatness, then, which Muslims and Jews both acclaim, seems pronounced in its non-religious transcendence: You peoples have got to sort this out on your own--and for your own sake, not mine.