bookofdays

Jesus goes to court - in Rome

I break a blogfast, and look what happens. But when I saw this headline, and the story that goes with it, I couldn't resist.  Leave it to elderly Roman men to decide that another, an Italian judge, should take up this theological question. On the basis of anti-fraud legislation, at that.

An Italian court is tackling Jesus -- and whether the Roman Catholic Church may be breaking the law by teaching that he existed 2,000 years ago.

The case pits against each other two men in their 70s, who are from the same central Italian town and even went to the same seminary school in their teenage years.
The defendant, Enrico Righi, went on to become a priest writing for the parish newspaper. The plaintiff, Luigi Cascioli, became a vocal atheist who, after years of legal wrangling, is set to get his day in court later this month.

"I started this lawsuit because I wanted to deal the final blow against the Church, the bearer of obscurantism and regression," Cascioli told Reuters.

Cascioli says Righi, and by extension the whole Church, broke two Italian laws. The first is "Abuso di Credulita Popolare" (Abuse of Popular Belief) meant to protect people against being swindled or conned. The second crime, he says, is "Sostituzione di Persona", or impersonation.

Abuso di Credulita Popolare" (Abuse of Popular Belief).  I love that. Think of all our current Washington follies, let alone intelligent design, that could be brought under this statute. (I wonder howi it would sit with the First Amendment, though).

"The Church constructed Christ upon the personality of John of Gamala," Cascioli claimed, referring to the 1st century Jew who fought against the Roman army.

A court in Viterbo will hear from Righi, who has yet to be indicted, at a January 27 preliminary hearing meant to determine whether the case has enough merit to go forward.

"In my book, The Fable of Christ, I present proof Jesus did not exist as a historic figure. He must now refute this by showing proof of Christ's existence," Cascioli said.

Speaking to Reuters, Righi, 76, sounded frustrated by the case and baffled as to why Cascioli -- who, like him, came from the town of Bagnoregio -- singled him out in his crusade against the Church.

"We're both from Bagnoregio, both of us. We were in seminary together. Then he took a different path and we didn't see each other anymore," Righi said.

"Since I'm a priest, and I write in the parish newspaper, he is now suing me because I 'trick' the people."

Righi claims there is plenty of evidence to support the existence of Jesus, including historical texts.

He also claims that justice is on his side. The judge presiding over the hearing has tried, repeatedly, to dismiss the case -- prompting appeals from Cascioli.

"Cascioli says he didn't exist. And I said that he did," he said. "The judge will to decide if Christ exists or not."

Even Cascioli admits that the odds are against him, especially in Roman Catholic Italy.

"It would take a miracle to win," he joked.

If I were Cascioli, I'd ask for a change of venue.
 

satyagraha in NOLA

Mahatma Gandhi and MLK would both be proud of what they've done in the Ninth Ward. Not the government - the people standing in front of bulldozers.

When I 've taught introductory composition to community college students, I often insisted on either beginning or ending with an examination of Martin Luther King's "Three Ways of Meeting Oppression." It was in the text as an example of structured argument, one that examined both acquiescence and violence before asserting

The third way open to oppressed people in their quest for freedom is the way         of nonviolent resistance. Like the synthesis in Hegelian philosophy, the principle of nonviolent resistance seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites acquiescence and violence while avoiding the extremes and immoralities of both. The nonviolent resister agrees with the person who acquiesces  that one should not be physically aggressive toward his opponent; but he balances the equation by agreeing with the person of violence that evil must be resisted. He avoids the nonresistance of the former and the         violent resistance of the latter. With nonviolent resistance, no individual or group need submit to any wrong, nor need anyone resort to violence  in order to right a wrong.      

I was then often tasked with explaining what King (and I) meant by "nonviolent resistance." Did he mean boycotts? Walking around with a sign? I sometimes, even before they hit the news, cited "peace teams" like the Christian Peacemaker Teams, who place their physical bodies between armies and civilians; much of the coverage, since four CPT workerx were taken hostage, has the same kind of incomprehension as my students expressed about King. And talking about Gandhi and satyagraha, actual resistance in this country, about civil rights workers battered by police in Montgomery, just felt like a history lesson.

If I were teaching this spring, I'd start with that essay, and I would have  this example to point to: Ninth Ward residents putting their bodies between their homes and the bulldozers.

on a magic carpet (bomb) ride

I know, it's been forever: I'm reporting simultaneously for two different pieces, one about domestic violence in New York's immigrant communities and one, called informally "The Things They Carry," about a prototypical new veteran I've been following around. And I write this about to head into a meeitng of the Veterans Advisory Board of the NY City Council.

But knowing Seymour Hersh's new piece was hitting today, I had to read it right away, and deliver some of the most disturbing bits to you. And of course, in the time I took to put this together, Jehanne was already giving a more plangent frame to it all.

Everyone who, unlike TV-resistant me,  watched Wolf Blitzer last night already knows Hersh's harshest: that when the inevitable troop withdrawals happen, they'll be replaced by an escalated air war, right on Vietnam-Not-So-Lite Schedule: The Return of Carpet Bombing.

In the battle for the city, more than seven hundred Americans were killed or wounded; U.S. officials did not release estimates of civilian dead, but press reports at the time told of women and children killed in the bombardments.

In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased. Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border. As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war.

The insurgency operates mainly in crowded urban areas, and Air Force warplanes rely on sophisticated, laser-guided bombs to avoid civilian casualties. These bombs home in on targets that must be “painted,” or illuminated, by laser beams directed by ground units. “The pilot doesn’t identify the target as seen in the pre-brief”—the instructions provided before takeoff—a former high-level intelligence official told me. “The guy with the laser is the targeteer. Not the pilot. Often you get a ‘hot-read’ ”—from a military unit on the ground—“and you drop your bombs with no communication with the guys on the ground. You don’t want to break radio silence. The people on the ground are calling in targets that the pilots can’t verify.” He added, “And we’re going to turn this process over to the Iraqis?

burning down the House

Q. Do you have any recollection about anything that he said?
A. Oh, yeah, he said they had been into an argument and he slapped her and she fell and hit her
head and it killed her and he didn’t mean for it to happen.
Q. Was he intoxicated?
A. He was drinking real heavily, yeah.
Q. Was he emotional?
A. Very.
Q. All right. How very is very?
A. Well, he was crying and just all to pieces.
Q. All right. How long had he been there before he told you about this incident?
A. Maybe 10 or 15 minutes, not real long.
Q. Did he say what they were arguing about?
A. He had wanted to go to a dance or something or another and was wanting to go somewhere
else. That is what they got into an argument over.
Q. What did you do when you heard Little Hube say he hit his wife and she died?
A. I freaked out and run him off.
Q. You freaked out?
A. I freaked out and ran him off.
Q. Okay. After the party did you tell anybody about this?
A. Not that night. The next day I went to Union County and tried to talk to some law people
and —
Q. Would they listen to you?
A. Went to Union County to the Sheriff’s Department. I tried to speak to the Sheriff but he was
real busy. He sent me to a deputy. The deputy told me to go upstairs to the courtroom and
talk to this guy. I can’t remember his name. I never did really get to talk to anybody.
Q. Tried to tell them?
A. Yeah.
Q. Did you talk to your mother about it?
A. A little later on there wasn’t a whole lot said about it, but she was the one that took me to the courthouse.
Q. Your mother went with you to the courthouse that day?
A. She drove me. I didn’t have a vehicle.
Q. Did you know Carolyn Muncey?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. Are you aware of whether or not Little Hube had ever abused her or beat on her?
A. She was constantly with black eyes and busted mouth.

Testimony of Kathy Parker, Nashville resident, testifying to a federal district court in Tennessed on behalf of Paul House, who is on death row for Carolyn Muncey's murder.

Is  this a Supreme Court preview, or an episode of CSI?

Well, it's House v. Bell, which turns out to be both.

Not that I've ever seen that show, actually, but I thought I'd be wrestling more with precedents than with blood spatters, missing or planted evidence, semen-stained jeans, or a theory that an entire rape-murder can be committed, in a rural area without a car, inside of 50 minutes. I didn't know that Paul Gregory House, who has been on death row since 1986, has multiple sclerosis -  of the most advanced kind, which may kill him before anyone tries to strap him down for the lethal injection or gas chamber.

It's all about the DNA, of course.
It's all about the revolution in our thinking about the death penalty thanks to the careful work of attorneys, all around the country, who have re-opened investigations that were done sloppily, or ineffectively presented, the first time.

And it's all about politics. Paul Gregory House was 2/3 of the way to exoneration when 8 of 15 appeals court judges declared he was probably innocent and he deserved a new trial. But a year later, when they could have made it official, four of those 8 judges, appointed by Democrats, had been replaced  by George Bush. Their replacements said no, he still hadn't established reasonable doubt - despite DNA evidence, despite eyewitnesses, despite affidavits that shot down, or at least seriously questioned, the forensic evidence offered by the prosecution.

And it's all about the word "no."

Specifically the "no" in the following paragraph from Sandra Day O'Connor:

a petitioner must show that, in light of the new evidence, it is more likely than not that no reasonable juror would have found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The focus on actual innocence means that a district court is not bound by the admissibility rules that would govern at trial, but may consider the probative force of relevant evidence that was either wrongly excluded or unavailable at trial. The district court must make a probabilistic determination about what reasonable, properly instructed jurors would do, and it is presumed that a reasonable juror would consider fairly all of the evidence presented and would conscientiously obey the trial court's instructions requiring proof beyond a reasonable doubt.

Schlup v. Delo, the 1995 Supreme Court opinion quoted above, offered both hope and frustration to defendants with newly discovered evidence, as it instructs judges to imagine themselves that Platonic "reasonable, properly instructed juror."  In its poetry, it's  also proved a Rorschach blot, taken up by  both sides. And to Judge Dan Boggs, a grizzled veteran of the Sixth Circuit, "no reasonable juror" means exactly that: not a single juror. Basically, the Sixth Circuit panel demanded that every single piece of evidence put out by the prosecution be directly refuted  before it could order a new trial.

Is this all too arcane? Should I get back to the blood?

journalists for universal peace

Well, that was embarrassing.  I don't know how that germ of a post ended up getting published, instead of saved in draft form (my default), but I apologize to anyone who came across it, or saw it when they were checking to see if I'd written anything at all of import.

Those who've already wandered over to my other shop know some of what I've been up to: some of it seem w to fall, fairly directly, into our bailiwick here. Including the cross-post below, from my impression of Prof. Andie Tucher's 2-hour version of her patented intro to the history of American journalism. I'd heard a mini-version at the school's open house in April, where I first heard the anecdote about Joseph Pulitzer's 10-year fight to get Columbia to accept his $2 million, because journalism was so "disreputable." (I loved that story so much I thought of naming this blog "diseputable joe,"; I'd riffed further on the story here, connecting it to Deep Throat.)

The first "news paper," in 1539, reported The Battle of Flanders Field -- and so much else of the history of  the profession has been catalyzed by what happens in war.

Tucher showed us an eighteenth-century American "news sheet" -- a single page looking a little like a cross between the Pennysaver and the Wall Street Journal: four columns across of delicate squares, alternately giving polite advertisements (personals, patent medicines, horses) and  news -- of government actions,  financial markets and military campaigns that might disrupt trade. In other words, as she said "news for elites."  These sheets were also political party organs: one for Democrats and the other for Whigs, with no pretense at objectivity - or even at trying to include a range of voices or ideas.

From that point on, Tucher gave some glimpses of he evolution (?) from those staid documents to the cacophonies of today, focusing in part on how the voice and role of the reporter keeps shifting. And as with so much else, it's been war that catalyzed and/or exemplified these shifts.

Starting with the "penny papers," like the New York Sun, newspapers claiming to appeal to "the common man," reporters wrote not to advance a specific party line but to interest readers -- and the Civil War was the first BIG THING in which all were interested. And a new invention, the telegraph, meant that for the first time correspondents could show up at the battlefield and file their stories back in New York, badgering generals and exposing scandals.

They wrote like other nineteenth-century writers, with their whole hearts and purple prose.  Tucher read to us this famous, quite first-person, quite purple battlefield report from the infant New York Times:

Who can write the history of a battle whose eyes  are immovably fastened upon a central figure of transcendingly  absorbing interest -- the dead body of an oldest born, crushed   by a shell in a position where a battery should never have  been sent, in a building where surgeons dared not to stay….  My pen is heavy.  Oh, you dead, who at Gettysburgh have baptized with your blood the second birth of freedom in America,  how you are to be envied!

--Sam Wilkeson, filing from Gettysburg,   July 4, 1863 

 

"A reporter looking down at his dead son. Where would that  be in today's Times?" Tucher asked. "The op-ed section, right."  The path to the kind of neutral prose preferred by today's "serious" papers a long way off.

fear up

Some of the worse that happened that you don't know about, ok. Videos, there are women there. Some of you may have read they were passing letters, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib which is 30 miles from Baghdad [...]

The women were passing messages saying "Please come and kill me, because of what's happened". Basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys/children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. The worst about all of them is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror it's going to come out.

It's impossible to say to yourself how do we get there? who are we? Who are these people that sent us there?

I'm two weeks past the day I first excerpted this ,from a 2004 speech by Seymour Hersh: two weeks since the guys in power   ignored  the deadline for turning over those images.

What have I  been up to since? Closing out the summer term, on two campuses -- I couldn't have asked for a better group of students, or departments more supportive -- and beginning to prepare for the next step, including starting the previously promised/threatened second blog, Crayons to Chaos. From now on, I'll be posting to both of these  -- though this, below, is likely my last to be quite this huge and discursive. 

Meanwhile, the noise on our favorite subjects has been kind of deafening.

Today alone we have the news that Guantanamo is being downsized, with hundreds of traumatized detainees being shipped home (rendered? it's actually unclear), in what Jeanne points out is a tacit admission that most of them were not the "worst of the worst" as claimed.  And we have the President, from his estate behind the Tumbleweed Curtain, trying to hold on tight to his favorite phrase: " the Global War on Terror. "

Speaking to the august  (??)  American Legislative Exchange Council in Grapevine, Texas,   he stomped on a few graves in order to emphasize it:

"We're at war with an enemy that attacked us on September the 11th, 2001," Mr. Bush said in his address here, to the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group of state legislators. "We're at war against an enemy that, since that day, has continued to kill."

Mr. Bush made a nod to the criticism that "war on terror" was a misleading phrase in the sense that the enemy is not terrorism, but those who used it to achieve their goals. In doing so, he used the word "war," as he did at least 13 other times in his 47-minute speech, most of which was about domestic policy.

Why did he feel the need to do this now?

Because everyone else, from Cheney to  Rumsfeld to various secretaries and under-secretaries, have tried to ditch it. They'd instead fit a longer, klugey-er phrase into their mouths:  “a global struggle against violent extremism.”  Numerous commentators more exalted than I, from George Packer in the New Yorker to Juan Cole to Sidney Blumenthal, have already deconstructed this to great effect, as has Jon Stewart .  Bush, of course, hated it -- perhaps sensing what Packer says so succinctly:

The Administration is admitting that its strategy since September 11th has failed, without really admitting it. The single-minded emphasis on hunting down terrorists has failed (“Hearts and minds are more important than capturing and killing people,” Gregson said). The use of military force as the country’s primary and, at times, only response has failed, and has stretched the Army and the Marines to the breaking point. Unilateralism has failed. “It’s not a military project alone, and the United States cannot do it by itself alone,” Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy and a leading advocate of going it alone with military force, said on his way out the Pentagon door and into private life (good luck, fellas!).

Bush hates hard truths, even when spoken by his own flunkies.

So even when Shrub's resident hawks try to introduce a little reality-based language into their thinking zbout foreign policy, they bow to the master of the big political frame, nonevermind what it does to their efforts to appear sane to the rest of the world. (Fat chance, with Bolton at the U.N., I hear some of you whispering.) No doubt some of this confusion is due to the message-master Rove being a bit preoccupied: the cacophony is a little overwhelming.

But I'm here to say Shrub can have his simplicity. All he needs to do, all they need to do, is -to  just change one consonant. They wouldn't even have to stop minting all the convenient GWOT medals they give folks who serve in both Iraq and Afghanistan, two for the price of one.

Of course, it'd require a little honesty, too.

whose culture of violence?

Apologies for the silence here; in my scattered efforts to finish up one semester and get ready for something completely different, I've now had two complex posts wiped out before I had a chance to save them. within the past 4 days. For now, I will punt to Elendil, whose page should be a stop on your blogroll already and who has much to say about what's already become a succesful part of the new government in Iraq:

Most of the updates have been added to the month of July, as the new Iraqi government shows itself capable of building upon the foundation laid by the US, in the areas of arbitrary detention and torture.

• 22 May 2005: Ali is captured by the Wolf Brigade during Operation Lightning and tortured by application of electricity to his genitals
• 03 July 2005: A story in The Observer builds upon a HRW report from 6 months ago alleging that the new Iraqi govt, particularly the Ministry of Interior's 'Wolf Brigade', is using tortures such as knee-capping detainees with electric drills
• 04 July 2005: A spokesperson for the Iraqi government admits that Ministry of Interior police commandos have tortured Iraqis, but denies that this is government policy, and blames it on an Iraqi "culture of violence"
• 24 July 2005: Sunni official claims he was fired because he spoke against the new Iraqi government, and their role in arbitrary arrest and torture of Sunnis
• 30 July 2005: A Sunni protest against torture is buried in a Reuters report, which was about a suicide bombing.

I'll build on this later tonight, leaving you with this thought: Maybe GWOT isn't such a bad acronym after all.

the legacy of samson

The news this morning of the bombing at Sharm-el-Shaikh  was bracing, if unsurprising in some ways. Still, that resort did feel a refuge during my too-brief time in that part of the world ( I'll post photos if I can later). Fot good solid analysis and a roundup of the commentary, the best come as usual from Billmon.

And today, Monday, Dan of the Christian Science Monitor writes of a "jihadi subculture":

The culture of Islamist suicide bombers is becoming more commonplace, as is the defining of civilians as "enemies."

Even in the wave of Islamist terror attacks that destabilized Egypt for much of the 1990s, suicide bombers weren't used. Now the country has seen two major attacks of this kind in eight months, with the latest death toll now at least 88.

What concerns counterterrorism experts is that tactics that once prompted fierce ideological debates within radical circles -- suicide and attacks on civilians are both classically defined in Islam as sins -- are now more likely to be embraced by young men. A decade or two ago, Muslim males might have been willing to take up a rifle and risk death fighting against the Soviets in the mountains of Afghanistan, but many would have balked at making the ultimate sacrifice or at blowing up civilians in a Moscow train station.

Still, I think it's still not useless to post this excerpt of  my crazy novel. If you ever needed to convince someone that that Islam has been hijacked as firmly as Christianity by its fundamentalists, this might give you a little ammunition.

I still never conceived that a project I've been nurturing for so long would be so fscking timely.

----------------

"While we are bidden to place all our faith and trust in God, the rabbis nevertheless deduce from the language of the Torah itself that we should be active in improving and preserving the health of the body . . .Just as we are prohibited from taking the life of another, we are also prohibited by the Torah from taking our own life, which is God-given, and anyone who commits suicide is deemed a murderer and is not to be buried in a Jewish cemetery."
— Rabbi Eliahu Shalom Ezran,  spiritual leader of Magain David Sephardim Congregation, San Francisco

About suicide, the Holy Qur’an states clearly: ‘Do not kill yourselves, for surely Allah is Compassionate to you’ (Qur’an, 4:29), ‘Do not cast yourselves into destruction by your own hands’ (Qur’an, 2:195) and ‘No soul can die except by God’s permission’ (Qur’an 3:185). An Islamic objection to any form of suicide (rational or irrational) is that the motive which prompts individuals to take their own life is contrary to the divine prerogative over human life….  In theological and philosophical reasoning, suicide has been considered for centuries an unethical act. What is clear is that suicide has remained a religious taboo in the monotheistic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

-- G. Hussein Rassool, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

Jerusalem, of course, one of the few places frequently associated with suicide in the minds of even non-suicides: some will likely think first of headlines about the ill-named “suicide bombers.”
Like the FBI agents who zeroed in on a pair of Muslim teenage girls in New York City and deported them -- in part, for mentioning suicide in an Islamic chat room on the Internet. (They should have hired me as a consultant. Show me, I might have told them, a sixteen-year-old girl who’s not intrigued by suicide and I’ll give you five bucks.)

But I digress: neither of those girls was from anywhere near Jerusalem.

Jerusalem, the tourist brochures assure us, is sacred to three great religions. More  like three branches of a family, drunken cousins in a multi-tiered bloodthirsty dynamic that’s rather Shakespearean, for the number of bodies left on the floor.  Adherents of all three faiths have crossed swords both literally and figuratively for so many generations, some sculpting in white stone the tragedy of Temple Mount, that one can only find ironic that Judaism and Islam share with Christianity (see the Jesus option, above) similar canons 'gainst self-slaughter. They also share the same mirror-image flirtation with martyrdom – and  a not-quite-death-defying obsession with Jerusalem.

The two were paired, Jerusalem and suicide, almost from the beginning, especially in early Jewish writing – the Old Testament, the early Talmud, and those sexy and violent books excluded from the canon as apocrypha – especially the 5 books of Maccabees, some of which I’ll save for the next  guidebook (Special Edition: Masada.)

Of the five suicides in the Old Testament, the first to take place in Jerusalem is also among the most spectacular: Samson, who pulls down the walls of the First Temple, to die together with the same Philistines whose victory had led to the suicide of Saul. Judges 18:30 sings: the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life. Get that? He died so that the Philistines would die too, even if his temple would be destroyed with him, centuries before Islam was born --  millennia before its good name would be smeared with an epidemic of suicide-homicides.

the cup of despair goes on the shelf

What  is Needed After Food

And so beautiful it cracks the bones, especially Jerusalem
With the lustre of her stones, the hurt in her eyes
And our dreams for her children:  a triangle

Beauty, despair, hope...the whole mispocah
Pulling three ways at the same time
Like the people in so many families,

Fighting but joined at the hip, or call it a sandwich,
Despair the filling embraced by the bread of beauty and hope,
Like manna we at every day, sent from above,

While on earth in Jerusalem my friend's husband and son
Relax  from a sabbath meal, like well-fed beasts,
Happily slumped watching the aftermath

Of a game where the Nazareth team has just won
And vaulted from the bottom of their  league
To the top, the players have stripped off their shirts,

Hugging and dancing, circle dancing, belly dancing,
Waving at crowds in the stands to  make them cheer louder,
The coach strips his shirt from his hairy barrel chest,

Climbs a wire fence, wobbles and waves his hips.
When someone asks how he feels about his team
(A mix of Jews, Moslems, and one Nigerian,

He himself is Druze), he punches  the air
And roars, I beat them all! I beat Arafat! And Sharon!
I show them we love each other! We watch a while,

The celebration is still going on when we quit
To go back to the kitchen, where loaves of beauty and hope
Stand on the counter and the cup of despair goes on the shelf,

My friend and I, we don't ask for much, we read Amichai,
We're not messianic, we don't expect utopia, which is anyway
Another name for a smiling prison,

But love is a good idea, why on earth not,
Simple women that we are, simple mothers cleaning up
The kitchen to make one meal ready for the next.

                    -- Alicia Suskin Ostriker

When I started this blog, I said I'd post a poem on any day I couldn't write. I'd fallen away from it, which I now think is an error.   Alicia Suskin Ostriker's name may be familiar to you for her activism on peace and justice issues, but I've admired and taught her poetry for years now, and  was delighted to be able to review her new book for Pleiades. I'll post my thoughts, as I draft the review, in a bit - but for now, let this one be my offering to the morning, amid all our strife and horror.

 

i think that DoD's got a sick sense of humour

Our old friends at the Army Times report that given the stretched and bruised troop strengths we discussed yesterday,  the Pentagon has proposed that  the maximum age for new enlistments be raised to  forty-two.

Either someone's been reading Douglas Adams or listening to too much Depeche Mode-- or both.