I heard a very sad report on the BBC over the weekend. Their correspondent visited a Vermont family that backed the Iraq War foursquare. They had lost a son in the fighting, and the young soldier's mother said she hoped Americans didn't forget what our troops were sacrificing so that America could still live free.

This is heartbreaking. We're not asking young men and women to die in Iraq to protect American liberty. But this grieving mother needs to believe that so her son will have died in some greater cause. When I contemplate the possibility that my brother-in-law might die in Iraq -- a member of his unit was killed last week by an IED -- I can't hold on to the thought for more than half a second, not only because it's so painful for obvious reasons, but because I can't see the moral justification for it. I mean no offense to you who do, and God knows the courage of those young men and women is unquestionable. It's those who sent them to Iraq in the first place I question, and I don't see why we have to pretend the war is about American liberty to justify the decisions those leaders (with our support, it must be said) have made.

Anyway, Spengler's column this week is not about the war, but it is about the narratives we impose onto grim and difficult social and political situations to avoid having to see painful truths. Here's the lede:

What causes the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to imagine that "the government gives [young black men] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, [and] passes a three strikes law" to incarcerate them? It is the same kind of unbearable grief that still causes white Southerners to believe that their ancestors fought the Civil War for a noble cause? It is too humiliating to think that the miscreants had it coming.

...and here's the conclusion:

It is horrific to die young, and humiliating to die for the wrong reason. Living with the humiliation is the beginning of recovery. But Wright and his congregation cannot bear the horror and humiliation any more than the average white Southerner, who after a few Bourbons will tell you, "The South shall rise again!"

Americans need a higher threshold for horror. Tragedies sometimes must play themselves out, and the losers must be allowed to lose. Whole peoples can go bad, and sometimes it is necessary to prevent them from doing evil by winnowing their ranks. It is just as perverse to excuse Wright's paranoid outbursts as it is to perpetuate the self-consoling myth of the gallant slave-holding South. America will be on the right track when it celebrates Sherman instead of 50 Cent.

I guaran-damn-tee you readers that there's plenty to discuss, and to argue over, between those paragraphs. As ever, read the whole thing.

I was thinking what a foolish blunder it was for Bush to have pushed for NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. Just how long do we think we can poke the Russian bear and get away with it? Does Bush really think that the American people would be willing to send soldiers to carry out a shooting war with Russia over Ukraine? (Well, maybe they would: after all, these are other people's sons and daughters). Then I read Bill Lind's piece about how past Balkan and Eastern European history plays into the current situation, and this ceased to be for me something to be merely annoyed at. Read it yourself, and see if you don't think that the US foreign policy establishment, on a bipartisan basis, is stumbling into a wider war. Excerpt:

Never content to see a fire without pouring gasoline on it, the Bush administration promptly recognized the new “state” of Kosovo, as did some forgetful European countries. Russia, which may remember history too well, responded by announcing its support for Serbia. Within a week, Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence and the Great Powers’ response to it had set the stage for a classic 19th-century Balkan crisis. A few old fogies may recall that the last such crisis, in the summer of 1914, led to a certain amount of unpleasantness, not entirely contained within Balkan boundaries.

[snip]

Here we come to that fateful tendency of Balkan history to spill over. The question, as always in Balkan crises, is what will Russia do?

When NATO bombed Serbia in the 1990s, Russia was too weak to respond. That is no longer the case. The Russian economy is doing well, flush with petrodollars. Russia’s military, while still somewhat ragged, is in far better condition now than it was then. Most critically, the boozy, corrupt Yeltsin has been replaced by the new Man of Steel, Vladimir Putin. The results of the recent Russian presidential election, where Putin’s handpicked successor won with 70 percent of the vote, show that he has the Russian people behind him.

Russia’s relationship to events in the Balkans in fact serves as a barometer of her strength. When Russia is weak, she has to stand by helplessly as her Balkan friends—Serbia heads the list—are defeated and she is humiliated. When she is strong, and when her government wants to look strong at home as well as abroad, she brooks no such treatment. More than once, events in the Balkans have led Russia to go to war.

At this point the ghost of 1914 rises, not as wisps of vapor but like Il Commendatore. Can Washington see it? Probably not. In the middle of the Clinton administration’s Balkan war, I asked an American four-star general who was in most of the key meetings, “Don’t our people know the history of this region?” He replied, “They know the history, but they don’t think it applies to them.” Nothing blinds like hubris.

Here is how events might play out on a 1914 model...

Read the whole thing.

As Larison points out, historically blind adventurism of this sort is bipartisan. And Steve Chapman says that while the presidential candidates would no doubt handle Iraq differently, the song otherwise remains the same:

But it's worth remembering what helped to get us into Iraq: a bipartisan consensus on foreign policy that favors U.S. military intervention abroad whenever we may be able to accomplish something that looks appealing. That was our national approach under the past three presidents, and it's a safe bet it will be our approach under the next one.

Reuters reports on the scandal at the Vienna cathedral museum involving the artist Hrdlicka's homoerotic Jesus art. The good news is Cdl. Schoenborn ordered the Last-Supper-as-gay-orgy canvas removed. The bad news is what he left up:

The museum's director defends both Hrdlicka's work and his decision to host the artist's controversial versions of biblical imagery in a museum tied to the Catholic Church.

"We think Hrdlicka is entitled to represent people in this carnal, drastic way," Bernhard Boehler said in his small museum office, across the street from Vienna's imposing St. Stephan's Cathedral.

He said the museum never intended to offend people but that art should be allowed to provoke a debate.

"I don't see any blasphemy here," he said, gesturing at a Crucifixion picture showing a soldier simultaneously beating Jesus and holding his genitals. "People can imagine what they want to."

What kind of wastrel can look at a depiction of a Roman soldier masturbating the crucified Christ and not see blasphemy? More to the point: what kind of self-respecting cardinal archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church can decline to give someone with such a perverse point of view the sack?

Then again, maybe they do things differently in Austria:

Curator Martina Judt said the exhibition was meant to prompt this kind of balanced reaction. The museum wanted to show that controversial works inspired by religious imagery can be discussed without taboo.

"People have said the Catholic Church has become a lot more liberal," she said. "But in the end, the reactions show this perhaps isn't the case."

Yes, clearly Catholics offended by the cathedral museum depicting the Son of God and the saints as orgiastic homosexuals shows that the reactionary spirit of Pius IX is firmly in control of the poor old hidebound Catholic Church. Lord, have mercy. How breathtakingly deep the rot has set in there.

Gen. David Petraeus to Capitol Hill today. I find the whole spectacle hard to contemplate watching. We're going to keep troop levels at 160K for the rest of the year, hoping that something will turn up. Did any of us think last year when the surge was announced that it would not be a surge, but a permanent deployment of extra troops? And I wonder what's got to happen for the US to walk away? We keep setting benchmarks the Iraqis fail to meet, and then we forgive them and recommit ourselves. We keep talking about how well the training of Iraqi forces is going, but we've spent $22 billion on that project so far, and the best we can do is field a bunch of badly led soldiers who get their butts kicked at Basra. What an amazing day it is when Frank Rich -- Frank Rich! -- is one of the more sensible commentators on the Iraq debacle.

I hope somebody bothers to put to the general Andy Bacevich's questions:

1. General Petraeus, in the spring of 2003, on your first tour of duty in Iraq, you remarked to a reporter, “Tell me how this ends.” You are now on your third tour and the war is in its sixth year. Please tell us how this war ends.

2. In addition, please provide an approximation of when it will end. With the war costing the United States $3 billion per week and 30 to 40 American lives per month, how many more years (or decades) will elapse before one of your successors is able to report that the mission in Iraq has been accomplished?

3. Members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have openly expressed their concern that the Army and Marine Corps are badly overstretched. How much longer can our ground forces sustain these demands and what actions would you propose to alleviate the pressure?

I was out in the front yard yesterday talking to Esperanza, my neighbor. She's got two granddaughters in the military, both about to deploy to Iraq. One had a baby in November, but she and her husband (also military) are both headed to Iraq this week; Esperanza's other daughter flew to Germany to pick the newborn up.

"I don't understand why we're still doing this," she told me. "Those people aren't going to live in freedom like we know it. How long do you think this thing is going to go on?"

A long time, I said. We agreed that most Americans don't really care, except in a notional sense, because they don't know anybody fighting over there. Sorry, but I'm really down about this, and by this point tired of hearing the bullsh*t about "defining moments" and how we're just about to turn the corner. If the success of the surge depends on the good will of Muqtada al-Sadr, nothing is settled.

My friend Wick Allison, a magazine publisher here in Dallas and formerly a publisher of National Review, read this op-ed in the Dallas Morning News today, by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, and hit the ceiling. I completely concur with his views, and encourage you to read the whole post. Excerpt:

Really, this has gotten to be too much. This is a party — my GOP — that wouldn’t even raise taxes to pay for a war. It is locked in an ideological mind-set whose chief attribute is recklessness. It stands against everything that conservatism once stood for: pragmatism, prudence, and the idea of safeguarding our country’s patrimony to future generations. (And, beloved Senator, what have you done today about Medicare and Social Security, besides, of course, voting to expand its costs?)

Amen!

The Republicans really do seem to think they can mouth the same no-tax bromides incessantly, and voters will respond. I'm sick of it. Sick of it. I'd be willing to pay higher taxes if I thought the national interest depended on it. But see, you can't even trust our government with the money it has. The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is the Dems will tax us to blow our money, and the Republicans will just put the shopping spree on a credit card.

From Hillary Clinton today:

The violent clashes in Tibet and the failure of the Chinese government to use its full leverage with Sudan to stop the genocide in Darfur are opportunities for Presidential leadership. These events underscore why I believe the Bush administration has been wrong to downplay human rights in its policy towards China. At this time, and in light of recent events, I believe President Bush should not plan on attending the opening ceremonies in Beijing, absent major changes by the Chinese government.

Oh, if only we could return to the halcyon days of the Clinton administration, when Beijing knew it had a president in the White House it couldn't push around. In those days, we'd get newspaper stories like this commentary from 1997:

Satellite photos now reveal that a state-owned Chinese company deliberately deceived Washington officials in 1994 when it claimed it was importing American machine tools for civilian purposes. Instead, it diverted them illegally to a missile factory.

This should come as no surprise. The Clinton Administration's penchant for putting trade above national security has convinced China that even the greatest outrages will go unpunished.

And this NYT piece from 1998:

The report, whose existence has been secret, prompted a criminal investigation of the companies, which officials said was undermined this year when Mr. Clinton approved Loral's export to China of the same information about guidance systems. Loral's chairman was the largest personal donor to the Democratic Party last year.

An examination of the Administration's handling of the case, based on interviews with Administration officials and industry executives, illustrates the competing forces that buffet Mr. Clinton on China policy. In this instance, the President's desire to limit the spread of missile technology was balanced against the commercial interests of powerful American businesses, many of which were White House allies and substantial supporters of the Democratic Party.

''From the Chinese point of view, this was the key case study on how the Administration would operate on contentious issues,'' an Administration expert on China said. The message, the official added, was that Administration policy on issues like the spread of weapons and human rights abuses ''could be reversed by corporations.''

Or -- and this is choice -- this 1994 dispatch on a Human Rights Watch report:

Human Rights Watch, which this year expanded its organization to new bases in Europe and Central Asia, and also opened an office to scrutinize the United Nations, is sharp in its criticism of the Clinton Administration, specifically Commerce Secretary Ron Brown.

Under Mr. Brown, the report said, American delegations have been "hawking trade and investment deals while relegating human rights to the ineffectual realm of private diplomacy."

"The Administration's position on India exemplified the shift," Human Rights Watch said. "Its refreshing but short-lived public criticism of Indian abuses in Kashmir was replaced by the eager promotion of an 'emerging market' where public discussion of human rights was taboo."

Does Hillary Clinton fault her husband for being too soft on human rights in his dealings with China and other nations? If not, why have the Bush administration's policies been worse than the Clinton administration's? Somebody should ask her. I generally agree with her about boycotting the opening ceremonies, but she has absolutely no grounds on which to criticize the Bush Administration.

A couple of readers have had some fun in a thread below teasing me for going to Starbucks the other day, instead of to a mom-and-pop coffee shop. The reason why is because Starbucks was right next door to the Mexican restaurant I just came out of, and the only mom-and-pop coffee shop I know of was miles away. I actually don't care much for Starbucks coffee -- it's too burned for my taste -- but don't feel guilty about buying from Starbucks under those circumstances.

Still, the controversy raises an interesting question: what happens when the chain option is far better than mom-and-pop? I can't think of a better case than what happened eight years ago on Court Street in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn, where we lived at the time. Cobble Hill has a big stay-at-home mom culture. Moms out and about with their strollers need places to meet and socialize between errands. But the one good coffee shop in the neighborhood back then was Java Jim's (not its real name, but I can't remember the actual name of the place), a quirky, independently owned coffee shop on Court Street. We went there a couple of times, but quit. Why? Java Jim wore his politics on his sleeve, and made sure you knew that you were drinking coffee in an achingly p.c. atmosphere. Well, that was no biggie (this is New York, after all), but his real sin was to be anti-children. He made it quite clear that strollers annoyed him. Which was his right, certainly, but you're sending a lot of the neighborhood business away if that's your attitude.

Came the news one day that Starbucks wanted to open a store down the street. Man, you would have thought the Antichrist was setting up a reading room in downtown Colorado Springs or something. Java Jim went berserk. He started a campaign to support your local coffee shop against the evil corporate hegemon. But you know, I didn't feel sorry for Java Jim. He had a terrible attitude. When Starbucks did open, it quickly became a neighborhood fave for moms with strollers, who appreciated the fact that the staff there was friendly, and welcomed them and their children. I started going there to write, even though I wasn't fond of the coffee (I usually got tea), because the staff was nice, and the vibe was truly communal. Java Jim went out of business eventually, and as far as I could tell, was unmourned.

The thing is, that neighborhood is ideologically biased toward the Java Jims of the world -- we certainly were -- and heaven knows nobody goes to Starbucks for the inexpensive coffee. People went to Starbucks mostly because of the customer service, and the fact that it fulfilled a need for a "third place" far better than the competition. (As I recall, there was a bakery between Java Jim's and Starbucks on the same street, but it didn't attract the same mom-and-stroller crowd mostly because its chairs were really uncomfortable.)

Anyway, I'd like to see what you all think about the conditions under which it's okay for someone who believes in supporting mom-and-pop stores to choose the big chain store over the locally owned alternative.

Two more weeks left to go in Orthodox Lent, and I'm hitting the wall. Sick of fasting, and my prayer life has cratered. Last night, though, I got a major boost by watching the Russian film Ostrov, which means "The Island" in English.

The film opens during the second World War. Two Russians operating a tugboat are captured by Nazi soldiers on patrol. One of the Russians, terrified, gives the captain up to the Nazis, and ends up being forced to shoot him to save his own life. The Nazis blow up the Russian tugboat, thinking they've managed in doing so to kill the survivor. But they didn't: we see him wash ashore, and several cassocked Orthodox monks rushing to the shore to retrieve his unconscious body.

The second scene opens in their monastery in 1976. It is an interminably bleak place. The same man who washed ashore is still living there, and shoveling coal for the monastery. He's living in intense poverty, sleeping on a pile of coal and praying constantly. He's become a priest -- Father Anatoly -- and is still living in torment over having killed his shipmate over three decades ago. He has also become a staretz -- an Orthodox elder gifted with unusual spiritual insight (think the Elder Zosima in "The Brothers Karamazov") and even clairvoyance (think of Padre Pio in the West). He is also a "fool for Christ," a figure known particularly to Orthodox Christians; a holy fool is someone who lives to all appearances a life that makes no sense by ordinary standards (think of St. Francis of Assisi taking off all his clothes in public to show how he was turning his back on his life of wealth), but which in some mysterious way participates in the Divine Life, and manifests God's plan.

Father Anatoly, as he's called, resists calls from his brother monks to come in off the coal pile, and live normally with them. He is a sign of contradiction. As we follow his story, though, we learn more about him -- is he insane, or a saint? -- and begin to understand what God might be doing in him and through him. Obviously I won't tell you how the film ends, but by the end, we come to understand that God has His reasons that we cannot fathom, but which may become clear to us in an extraordinary way, as we see the surprising fruits of Fr. Anatoly's penitential life.

The only other film I've seen that was as powerful spiritually in the same way as this was the staggering 1996 film "Breaking the Waves," which was about a different kind of holy fool, and is significantly less Orthodox (and orthodox) than "Ostrov" (it's also got nudity and sexual situations; my recommending it is a deeply Catholic Christian film on EWTN caused a huge uproar, I found out). Still, both films are invitations to consider how God intervenes in our lives via what Kierkegaard called "the teleological suspension of the ethical." The original holy fool must have been Abraham, taking his son Isaac for sacrifice at God's request. It is to my mind the most bizarre story in the Bible (which takes some doing, admittedly).

On the Dallas Morning News blog the other day, I posted an image of a new Absolut Vodka ad running in Mexico, that shows about half the western United States back in Mexican hands. The caption: "In an Absolut world" -- meaning, in a perfect world, Mexico would still control what it used to in the US.

My comment was simply that I've always preferred Grey Goose vodka myself.

A big back-and-forth ensued in the comboxes over whether or not Absolut should be boycotted, whether yanquis were overreacting, etc. Whichever side you come down on, there are a couple of lessons in this.

For one, there's no such thing as ads that stay confined to one country, not with the Internet. Pre-Internet, this ad would have only been seen by Mexicans, its intended market. Absolut wouldn't have had to have worried about offending Americans. Not anymore.

Secondly, the reason this ad offends some Americans is more or less the same reason it is attractive to some Mexicans: a sense of grievance and anxiety over territory. If this ad had run 40 years ago, Americans would have been able to laugh it off. Not so much anymore, not with illegal immigration and the Mexification of much of the US Southwest -- which, as the ad indicates, was historically part of Mexico. The ad plays to crude nationalism, but in the Internet era, that can cut both ways. An ad for the Mexican market that depends in some sense on putative Mexican customers' latent hostility to the United States to sell them stuff inevitably will harm the same product's image in the United States, because it associates the brand negatively with American customers' fears.

And: it's easy to laugh at those fears if you aren't living in the Southwest.

Daniel Larison reflects on how cultural symbols and the anxieties attending them, matters that look silly to outsiders, look very different to people whose emotions and imaginations are engaged by the controversies those symbols (e.g., a vodka ad playing to Mexican nationalism and anti-Americanism) represent. Here he links the ad controversy to the current dispute over the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, whose name is hotly resented by the Greeks:

This reminds me of a recent discussion I was having about Greece and FYROM. Someone said that Westerners probably find Balkan disputes about names and ancient territorial claims to be “petty.” This is probably true, but it is mostly a function of not understanding the history behind the controversy. Had Greeks not waged the Macedonian Struggle in one form or another for the better part of seventy years, the dispute over what to call the former Yugoslav republic would probably have been resolved, but because of the explicitly irredentist and separatist aspects of “Macedonian” identity over the last century it is very difficult for many Greeks to accept Skopje’s claim to the name. In that conversation, I noted that we have our own controversies about “merely” symbolic things as well. Of course, people tend to call them “merely” symbolic when the symbols belong to someone else and they don’t understand the significance of the symbols, especially not at a visceral level.

Now would be a good time for a vodka martini, n'est-ce pas? Viva Grey Goose!

UPDATE: Absolut has apologized.

Found wisdom from the side of a Starbucks cup yesterday:

Beware of turning into the enemy you most fear. All it takes is to lash out violently at someone who has done you grievous harm, proclaiming that only your pain matters in this world. More than against that person's body, you will then, at that moment, be committing a crime against your own imagination.

-Ariel Dorfman (novelist, playwright, essayist)

How different would our approaches to the world be if, whatever our faith our our politics, we worked to see that our pain isn't the only pain that matters in the world? This is so hard to do -- especially when it makes you literally vulnerable, or requires accepting injustice with humility.