Happy New Year. More to the point, Happy New Decade.

In one respect (and let’s hope it’s not the only one), the teens* promise to be an improvement on the…whatevers (wittily limned by Rebecca Mead in last week’s Comment): we can finally drop the “thousand.”

Last year may have been two thousand nine, but this year, mercifully, is twenty ten. And next year will be twenty eleven. And so on until—well, until the year 3000.

One hundred and one years ago, the year was nineteen nine, or nineteen oh nine. Hardly anyone who wasn’t a clergymen or a senator called it one thousand nine hundred and nine.

In my opinion, the late Stanley Kubrick is the culprit for what we’ve just been through. If his movie had been set a hundred years in the future, everyone would have called it “twenty sixty-eight.” But “2001”? You couldn’t call it “twenty one,” obviously. It wasn’t about Blackjack. And you couldn’t say “twenty oh one”; that would just sound stupid. So it was, as it had to be, “two thousand and one” or, less frequently, “two thousand one.”

It was natural for everybody to call 2000 “two thousand.” Besides the millennial portentousness, there was the fact that “two thousand” has one fewer syllable than “twenty hundred.” But when the big three-zero year was over, I’m convinced, we would have reverted to the usual practice and said “twenty oh one,” “twenty oh two,” and so on. (We’d most likely have avoided “twenty one,” “twenty two,” and so on, to avoid confusion with card games and starter rifles.) But Kubrick’s space odyssey had already conditioned us.**

*On NPR today, I heard the new cycle referred to as “the tweens.” Can’t decide whether this is a clever contraction or a grating annoyance. Leaning toward both, with an emphasis on the latter.

**On the other hand, any price was worth paying to keep the auteur of “Dr. Strangelove” happy.

Here’s an email from James Harrison, a student at Covenant College, an evangelical institution in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, where I was invited for a very pleasant and memorable visit a year ago. James is responding to a recent post of mine in which I made fun of one of this season’s Christianist novelties, a fake Christmas tree embedded with an enormous cross. After his letter, my response.

Hi Mr. Hertzberg—

I figured that you might welcome a comment from one of your evangelical friends regarding your recent blog post, so here goes.

Just to be clear, I don’t take any objection at all to your observation that a CHRIST-mas tree is a ridiculous idea, because in my opinion, you’re absolutely right. Those sorts of things are cringe-worthy, and beg to be parodied.

However, I do think that you’ve slightly misunderstood the significance of the cross as it relates to Christmas. You’re right in your statement that the cross is a universal symbol for Christ’s death. But to assume that the cross has nothing to do with the birth of Christ is groundless.

As the season of advent kicked off last Sunday, I heard a sermon given by my church pastor on—get this—the crucifixion. The sermon was titled “Born To Die.” It was a phenomenal message to hear in light of the traditional thoughts about Christmas which you alluded to on your blog—birth, joyfulness, etc. So I thought I would share some of my notes with you.

Here is the great irony that was preached: God incarnate born, so that by his blood he might provide salvation for us all. A completely perfect being, taking on lowly form, giving up eternity in order to defeat death, in the name of love. I know you’ve heard this story before, but it cannot be stressed enough. Even the Old Testament reveals it in the book of Isaiah, whose words were written 700 years before Christ was born:

“For he grew up before him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground. He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities, upon him was the chastisement that brought peace, and with his stripes we are healed.” —Isaiah 53. 1-5, ESV.

Passages like these are a part of why the Christian faith is offensive and counter cultural, and I can only believe that this was the reason why seeing a CHRIST-mas tree led you to conclude that placing focus on the cross during the season of Christmas wasn’t a “pro-life” expression. That and the fact that CHRIST-mas trees are pretty darn silly.

But still, nothing in the world could be more “pro-life” than the cross itself. It sounds nuts, but it is the very reason for which Christ was born. God, placed in the hands of angry sinners, was stripped naked that we might be clothed. A crown of thorns was placed upon his head, that we might receive crowns of righteousness. And by his stripes, we are healed. There is nothing “just” or “fair” about it, and that’s what makes it so tough to understand at times. But it’s also why we must continually take up the cross—even during the holiday season—as Christ instructed in Luke:

“And he said to all, ‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.’ ” —Luke 9.23-24, ESV.

The cross is a crucial symbol at all times, not just on Good Friday. And as uncomfortable and joy-lacking as it may seem, it is only by the cross we are given ultimate joy.

Thanks Mr. Hertzberg, and Merry Christmas (it’s just as much yours as it is mine)—

James

Dear James,

Thanks for your email, and thanks especially for the spirit in which you wrote it—the Christmas spirit, which in your case, I’ve noticed, seems to be a year-round thing.

Thanks too for reminding me of that passage from Isaiah. I don’t know how it sounds in the original, but in translation it is certainly one of the most beautiful poems in the English language. “A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief”—that is sublime, with or without Handel’s music.

Maybe you remember that when I spoke at Covenant I described my own modest moment of Christian catharsis, which happened before you were born, at the Uffizi gallery, in Florence. I was standing in front of a small painting, about the size of an open laptop and titled (as many such paintings have been titled) “Ecce Homo.” The painting was of the face of Jesus moments before his death, with despairing eyes upturned under the crown of thorns. At that moment I grasped (or thought I grasped—in any case, I certainly felt) one of the mysteries of the Christian religion: the tragic, ecstatic vision of Jesus as at once fully human and fully divine. We can argue about the divinity aspect. But what that painting put across to me with tremendous force was that while Jesus (in the story) may have lived his life with some inkling of his divinity, he died as a man and only a man, with the consciousness of a man and only a man. If he had died as a god with the consciousness of a god, then the sacrifice represented by the moment of his agony and death would have been meaningless.

For me, apprehending that aspect of the Christian narrative was a transporting experience, an oceanic experience. On subsequent visits to the Uffizi, I’ve never been able to find that painting. But the memory of that experience has stayed with me through the decades, along with the respect it implanted in me for the power and dignity of the Jesus story.

Still: to me it remains a story—an epic, a myth, a metaphor. A human creation. Which is not nothing. The oceanic sensation it gave me was real, as real as the similar sensations that music or art or literature or the beauty and majesty of nature have occasionally vouchsafed to me. But that day at the Uffizi told me nothing about the reality—the actual existence—of God or gods or the “supernatural,” a term I don’t understand. (If something exists, isn’t it part of nature? “Supernatural” seems to me an evasion.)

But to get back to today, i.e., Christmas. And the cross. What I am objecting to in the Jesus story is something I object to in certain other religious traditions: human sacrifice. Indeed, the human sacrifice of the crucifixion seems to me to be more objectionable, conceptually at least, than the human sacrifices practiced by, say, the Aztecs (or, for that matter, by tribal Hebrews like Abraham). The Aztecs were people trying to propitiate angry, nasty, bloodthirsty gods. (Abraham, by being willing to cut Isaac’s throat, was doing the same for testy old Yahweh.) But who sacrifices Jesus? Not the Romans—they were just enforcing the law as they saw it. Not the Jews—when they made sacrifices, post-Abraham, they offered up goats and lambs and the like. No, in the story of Jesus, the sacrificer seems to be God himself. He kills his “only begotten” son. And why? In order to propitiate himself, apparently. Somehow, by killing his own son, he causes himself to refrain from condemning or killing everybody else. Well, not everybody else—just those who show the proper appreciation and gratitude for his sacrifice.

But is it really a sacrifice? Doesn’t Jesus turn up rather quickly at the right hand of God? Isn’t he said to be part of God, in some special way that the rest of us are not? He (Jesus) goes through the experience of dying, as every human being must do, but he doesn’t end up dead. So how great is the sacrifice, really? And what is the connection between the sacrifice (the crown of thorns, death on the cross) and the benefit it purchases for believers (the crown of righteousness, eternal life)? If God wants to forgive us our sins, can’t he just forgive us our sins? Does he have to torture and murder his own son first—and then take it back by resurrecting the son and making him an object of worship for millions? For the sacrifice to be real, wouldn’t Jesus have to stay dead? The resurrection is a powerful story, but (if you analyze it logically) doesn’t it make the crucifixion a bit of a sham?

The Jesus story is a compelling story, its incoherence notwithstanding. And I have nothing against people believing it to be “true” (even in some non-metaphorical way) if that is what they wish to believe. (I love Christmas, and I love the Baby Jesus!) In fact, James, there’s only one word in your email that I strongly (if provisionally) object to. It’s the word “only” in your penultimate sentence, where you write, “as uncomfortable and joy-lacking as it may seem, it is only by the cross we are given ultimate joy.”

Or maybe it’s the word “we” I’m objecting to. If by “we” you mean only you and your fellow evangelicals, then—fine. But if by “we” you mean you and your fellow human beings, then please—speak for yourself. There are many paths to ultimate joy, and not all of them involve gods or crucifixions. When “we” start decreeing that it’s our way or the highway, trouble ensues.

But I think you know that. Hence your last line, which I take to mean that Christmas and Passover and Ramadan and Shivarathri—and the Darwin Bicentennial!—are as much yours as mine and as much mine as yours, that all of it is part of our common human inheritance. So Merry Christmas, James, to you and your family from me and mine. What the heck, let’s go further, like Santa Claus: “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

Warmly, Rick

I just saw it, and I have to say: Clint Eastwood is my kind of Republican.

An op-ed column in Monday’s New York Post begins this way:

Perhaps the most common question I’m asked about ObamaCare is: “Will I be able to buy my way out of it?”

The writer, Scott Gottlieb, is identified as a “resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,” a “partner to a firm that invests in health-care companies,” and “a person who spends a lot of time with ordinary working Americans,” except for that last bit.

Chuck Schumer: Defender of Women’s
Rights, Insulter of Actual Woman

That’s the headline over a column at A.O.L.’s Politics Daily by that new (and generally admirable) site’s editor-in-chief, Melinda Henneberger.

Henneberger, like a million other bloggers (or, as of this post, a million and one), was referring to an incident that occurred the other day while a D.C.-New York shuttle flight was boarding. The senior senator from New York took issue with a flight attendant who had ordered him and his seatmate, the junior senator from New York (that would be Kirsten Gillibrand), to turn off their cellphones. It was the senior senator’s contention that the rules permit cellphone use until the cabin door is closed. (Harry Reid was on the line, not that that’s a valid excuse.)

Finally Schumer gave in. However, once the attendant had walked away he was heard to mutter, under his breath, the awful word “Bitch!”—heard not by the attendant, who by then was out of earshot, but by “a House Republican aide who happened to be seated nearby” (and who, as soon as the plane landed and cellphone use was again permitted, hastened to share the glad news with Politico’s Anne Schroeder Mullins).

“You can tell a lot about a man by the way he treats the people who bring him coffee and little bags of pretzels,” Henneberger huffed. She evidently believes that the incident proves that Schumer is a hypocrite and a sexist and that it demonstrates “how much women must be willing to put up with from a self-described ‘tireless advocate for women’s rights.’ ”

Maybe it’s my male obtuseness, but isn’t this overdoing the feminist dudgeon? If the attendant had been a man, I feel certain that Schumer would have muttered “Asshole!” Or, more likely, “Schmuck!”

Question for the studio audience: Is it by definition sexist to use a female-gender-specific epithet when muttering under one’s breath—especially in a situation in which, depending on the sex of the object of one’s ire, one might as readily have used a male-gender-specific epithet or a gender-neutral one?

Moreover, is it really an insult to use a disparaging epithet, gender specific or not, when one is sure that the target of the epithet can’t hear it? Isn’t that more akin to just thinking something nasty than to saying something nasty out loud?

Politico:

Through her office, Gillibrand said Schumer was “polite” with the flight attendant Sunday and “turned off his phone when asked to.”

Henneberger:

Sure, Schumer has said through a spokesman that he regrets the incident—and in the process made a liar out of fellow N.Y. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who was seated near him on the plane and who, before she knew he was copping a plea, put out the word that he’d been “polite” when asked to turn off his phone.

Damn right Schumer “regrets the incident.” (He’s a politician, and a blue-state one to boot.) But there’s no evidence that he was not polite to the attendant, and, therefore, no evidence that Gillibrand was lying when she said he was polite.

I would be astonished if any member of this cast of characters—Schumer, Gillibrand, the flight attendant, Anne Schroeder Mullins, Melinda Henneberger—has not more than once muttered “bitch” (or “asshole,” or “schmuck,” or “prick,” or “douchebag,” or “dickhead”) under his or her breath after a brush with what he or she perceived as officiousness. I certainly have. You have, too, I’ll wager. Who knows? Even that “House Republican aide” might at some point have muttered something unpleasant—perhaps after an encounter with a Big Government bureaucrat or a representative of the Liberal Media. Or a House Democrat Aide.

Eliot Spitzer, Frank Partnoy, and William Black are three ex-prosecutors with one startlingly good idea: before the government sells its eighty-per-cent stake in American International Group, take all of A.I.G.’s internal documents and e-mails and…put them online! Probable result: “a new form of ‘open source’ investigation”:

Once the documents are available for everyone to inspect, a thousand journalistic flowers can bloom, as reporters, victims and angry citizens have a chance to piece together the story.

The Administration, reasonable people seem to agree, saved the economy from catastrophe but went way too easy on the big bankers, most of whom, conveniently, were A.I.G. clients. Making the documents public would be a good way for Obama & co. to begin climbing out of that particular hole.

Obama in Oslo:

I know there’s nothing weak, nothing passive, nothing naïve in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King. But, as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world.

A nonviolent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.

On the other hand, a nonviolent movement along Gandhian lines would have ended the Israeli occupation of the West Bank decades ago.

(H/t: reader Jonothan Cullinane in New Zealand)

Sara Davidson—novelist, “new” journalist, memoirist, feminist, TV writer/producer, quintessential child of the sixties—went to Kabul recently with a group organized by Code Pink and blogged the trip. A sample:

After eight days, our presumptions were turned upside down, splitting us into camps with conflicting opinions. Some still wanted an exit strategy, but one woman who’s spent 40 years in non-violent peace work reversed her lifelong stand, believing the military should stay and more troops might be helpful. “It shocks me to admit this,” she said.

Sara’s straightforward, diary-like account gives a real sense of the strengths and limitations of a visit of this kind. She’s done four installments so far. Worth a read.

Obama is the fourth American President to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The other three got theirs either toward the end of a second term (Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson) or long after leaving the White House (Jimmy Carter). They were honored for specific diplomatic achievements—negotiating the treaty ending the Russo-Japanese War (T.R.), founding the League of Nations (Wilson), and brokering the peace between Israel and Egypt (Carter, though the citation also praised his post-Presidential work). Obama’s prize was awarded for “vision” and “efforts” and “creat[ing] a new climate in international politics.” (The President acknowledged the problem frankly, admitting that he “cannot argue with those” who find him undeserving in comparison both to “giants of history” like “Schweitzer and King, Marshall and Mandela” and to “those who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice.”)

Nevertheless, I suspect that Obama’s Nobel lecture is one of the very few that will be read and quoted for a long time to come. It’s the speech of a man of power—a man, moreover, in the chilly morning of his power, not its sepia twilight. At the same time, it’s the speech of a man schooled in both in the nonviolent political metaphysics of Gandhi and King and in the stereoscopic, reality-based liberalism of Reinhold Niebuhr, with its consciousness of contingency, its tragic sense of history, and its awareness of radical human imperfection. In an e-mail after the speech, the historian and Lincoln biographer William Lee Miller put it this way:

It seemed to me as thoroughly Niebuhrian an utterance as we are likely ever to hear a sitting president utter, not only in defending the sometimes morally justified use of force but also in the reference to the distinct responsibility of a head of state, and of love, justice, and peace in their interconnections. I daresay somebody who worked on this speech—conceivably Obama himself, although how could he find time?—was reading Niebuhr.

(Apparently, Obama found the time to read—and, more remarkably, had the perspicacity to understand—Niebuhr quite some time ago.)

Obama’s rueful recognition of the contrast between his tinny personal résumé and his shiny new gold medal was just the overture to his discussion of a far more consequential and vexing tension. He had to mention it, of course, but he could have steered around the storm, observing it from the outside before moving on to more agreeable matters. He didn’t do that. Instead, he flew directly into the thunderhead:

[T]he most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars.... I am responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land. Some will kill, and some will be killed.

In the magazine’s Comment, on newsstands Monday but already available online, George Packer (who also discerns the “spirit of Niebuhr” in the Oslo speech) writes, referring to the “apparent contradiction” between the blunt, bluntly stated fact of the President’s war-fighting and his receipt of a peace prize, that

instead of disposing of it in a perfunctory gesture, he made it the basis of his address, devoting the first half of the speech to what he called the challenge of “reconciling these two seemingly irreconcilable truths—that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly.” Working out apparent contradictions, reconciling irreconcilables, finding balances, living with paradox—these are the intellectual bread and butter of Obama’s politics. “We can acknowledge that oppression will always be with us, and still strive for justice,” Obama concluded. “We can understand that there will be war, and still strive for peace.” He is the negative-capability President.

Perfect. (If you’ve forgotten what negative capability is, don’t be ashamed to look it up.)

At Oslo, Obama did not make a specific defense of his decision to send more troops (temporarily, he has vowed) to Afghanistan. He did say, “Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms.” And he did say, “The world rallied around America after the 9/11 attacks, and continues to support our efforts in Afghanistan, because of the horror of those senseless attacks and the recognized principle of self-defense.” But he could have said these things just as easily and just as forcefully if he had decided to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan immediately. What he was doing was arguing for the proposition that “force may sometimes be necessary,” that “yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.” He was making an argument—a respectful argument, a civil argument—against the logic of pacifism. He was arguing that while “war itself is never glorious” and that “war at some level is an expression of human folly,” wars must sometimes be fought; moreover, it matters how they are fought. He was arguing that there are times when the ends do indeed justify the means, and that war is not always a slippery slope to unlimited cruelty and barbarism. The argument was at the level of philosophy, not the level of tactics or strategy.

T.R. and Wilson, by the way, also sent thousands of young Americans to distant lands to kill and be killed—and with far less justification than Obama can claim for his attempt to extract a minimally non-disastrous exit for the United States from Afghanistan. If Obama’s selection for a Nobel Peace Prize was ironic and so on, then so was theirs.

You can read the Roosevelt and Wilson peace prize responses at the Nobel site. Wilson’s is wispy verging on nonexistent; having suffered a severe stroke months earlier, he was practically a vegetable by the time of the 1920 Nobel ceremony. A telegram from him—a 250-word statement, as humble as its purported author was (when healthy) arrogant—was read aloud at the ceremony by an American diplomat. It said nothing of note, unless you count truisms like, “In the indefinite course of years before us there will be abundant opportunity for others to distinguish themselves in the crusade against hate and fear and war.”

Roosevelt, by contrast, let ’er rip. Here’s a sample of what the Rough Rider had to say in his Nobel lecture, which he delivered in person in 1910, four years after the prize was announced and more than a year into his tumultuous ex-presidency:

Peace is generally good in itself, but it is never the highest good unless it comes as the handmaid of righteousness; and it becomes a very evil thing if it serves merely as a mask for cowardice and sloth, or as an instrument to further the ends of despotism or anarchy. We despise and abhor the bully, the brawler, the oppressor, whether in private or public life, but we despise no less the coward and the voluptuary. No man is worth calling a man who will not fight rather than submit to infamy or see those that are dear to him suffer wrong. No nation deserves to exist if it permits itself to lose the stern and virile virtues....

Having thumped his chest to his entire satisfaction, Teddy went on to recommend that future international disputes be settled via “treaties of arbitration” (preferably modeled on “the methods adopted in the American Constitution to prevent hostilities between the states”), with the caveat that “there are, of course, states so backward that a civilized community ought not to enter into an arbitration treaty with them.” Perhaps he was thinking of the Philippines, whose people were all too familiar with the stern and virile virtues of the hero of San Juan Hill.

I’m pretty sure that, way back in the nineteen-fifties, I was one of the few teenagers who had his very own subscription to Editor & Publisher, paid for, in my case, with the proceeds of selling New York Times subscriptions to my fellow students at Suffern High School. I loved newspapers to distraction, and I couldn’t get enough of E&P;’s inside dope about the Chicago Daily News, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the San Francisco Call-Bulletin, the Boston Traveler, the Washington Evening Star, and our local New York papers—the Daily Mirror, the World-Telegram & Sun, the Journal-American, the Herald Tribune…

Gone, all gone. And now E&P; is gone, too. It had enjoyed a renaissance of sorts under Greg Mitchell, its editor since 2002, whose smart, often passionate critiques of the press (and of the Bush Administration’s often successful efforts at press manipulation, especially on Iraq) made the magazine something more than a trade journal.

I’ll omit the usual lamentations about the state of the newspaper industry, of which E&P;’s demise is a symptom. I’ll just note, with a sigh, that the mine is so full of dead canaries that it’s getting hard to find the coal face.