2007 Can Kiss My Ass

Today is the last day of what almost everyone I talk to agrees was a shitty year. Congressional Democrats flopped like a third rate palooka, while Republicans continued their spectacular display of hypocrisy. Stoopid words were added to the English Language while stoopider ones were removed. Some good music got released; also, some shitty music. And some good musicians did some stoopid things, while some old musicians reclaimed their thrones for good or ill. The housing market took a dive, along with the rest of the economy, but don’t worry, folks, it’s still not a recession. (Whew!) Well, as Randy Newman observed, “The end of an empire is messy at best, and this one’s ending like all the rest.”

Happy New Year.

Drunken Santa

UPDATE: Happy birthday to Shane MacGowan. Here's "Fairytale of New York," starring Matt Dillon as a cop.

Happy Zappadan!

This is from a show called "The Cutting Edge." (Oddly enough, on a show called "The Cutting Edge," you are evidently not allowed to use the word "masturbation." ) BTW, I realize BDM is dangerously close to becoming a music blog.

So sue me.

[Swiped from Blue Gal by way of C&L]

Greg Kot's Top Ten Albums of 2007

In case you never heard of him, Greg Kot is the Chicago Tribune's pop music critic. He is also half of the duo -- with Chicago Sun-Times music critic, Jim DeRogatis -- that brings us the weekly public radio gem known as Sound Opinions.

Cheap Trick & John Lennon -- I'm Losing You

Rick Nielson and Bun E. Carlos of Cheap Trick join Tony Levin to back John Lennon on this song. This was the original version of this song -- one of several recorded with this lineup for Double Fantasy -- but rumor has it that Yoko thought it was too hard rock so Lennon re-recorded the songs with different musicians. Frequent Cheap Trick collaborator, Jack Douglas was at the controls.

From Red Ice Creations:

Scientists on Acid: The Story Behind “Changing Images of Man”
From: skilluminati.com

Sometimes it can take months for the meaning of a sentence to really sink in. It's been months since we got a PDF copy of the legendary "Changing Images of Man" document from Stanford Research Institute, and having read it through several times I feel safe saying the book exceeded my expectations. However, unpacking all the information -- especially in terms of its connections with contemporary events, then and now -- has proven to be a much larger, longer task. Consider the "alternative methodology" behind the project itself:

First, we attempted to identify and assess the plausibility of a truly vast number of future possibilities for society. We next followed a method of analysis that determined which sequences of possible futures (that is, which "alternate future histories") appeared to be the most plausible in light of human history and to most usefully serve the needs of policy research and development. Lastly, we derived a variety of policy implications, some of which dealt with how best to continue this type of inquiry.

Without the context, without knowing these people and how they work and what they talked about, it's difficult to really decipher a paragraph as apparently clear as that one. What was the "method of analysis" in the second step? They never say, but take note of the term they use in quotes: "alternate future histories."

Let me quote from Jim Keith's excellent book Mind Control, World Control, from Chapter 12, which discusses the spread of LSD and the role of OSS/CIA agent Al Hubbard:

One associate of Hubbard's was New World Order theorist Willis Harman at the Stanford Research Institute. SRI had earlier recieved grants from the US Army to research chemical incapacitants. When visited by a representative of the underground press at SRI, Harman told the man, "There's a war going on between your side and mine. And my side is not going to lose."

For the record, that "representative of the underground press" was Michael Rossman of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. Anyways, according to Keith, Willis Harman hired Al Hubbard in 1968 as a "Special Investigative Agent." It's worth noting that according to Todd Brendan Fahey's classic article on Hubbard, The Original Captain Trips, Hubbard was (at least officially) hired as a security guard. It was Fahey's article that abruptly came back to me today, especially the following lines:

Hubbard was specifically assigned to the Alternative Futures Project, which performed future-oriented strategic planning for corporations and government agencies. Harman and Hubbard shared a goal "to provide the [LSD] experience to political and intellectual leaders around the world." Harman acknowledges that "Al's job was to run the special sessions for us."

Well, Boy Howdy. Of course, this is decades ago, and juxtaposed quotes are proof of nothing. But there's that weird term again, this time slightly different: "the Alternative Futures Project." When you look for a formal program by that name, you're led not to the Stanford Research Institute, but the University of Illinois, where Charles Osgood and Stuart Umpleby wrote a report entitled "A Computer-based Exploration of Alternative Futures for Mankind 2000." The report was included in the book Mankind 2000, which is full of rather disturbing quotes like this one:

"In the organization of a civilization of the future we anticipate that the individualistically-oriented man will become an anachronism. Indeed, he will be viewed as a threat to the group organization as well as to his fellow man. Hence, as stated, he in all likelihood will have few individual expectations. While such a picture may not be pleasant to comtemplate, when viewed with our present orientation and value judgement, we would be amiss to deal with unrealistic imagries that would blind us to future reality."

This kind of stuff could almost be comic relief. After all, a computer program about the future had a lot of time and money invested in it, and when they ran the program, it said the future would be a lot like a computer program. If you're not familiar with the phrase garbage in, garbage out, now is a good time to get familiar. What keeps this material from being funny is the line that comes right after the quote above, which sounds more or less exactly like the conclusion of Changing Images of Man:

The new world of the closed, automatic system will necessitate a radical change in the political, technologic, and social thinking. All too often, however, we remain bound by the conventional tenets and wisdom of past generations. The cyber-cultural revolution is changing all this.

The Alternative Futures project at the University of Illinois was funded by the same people who paid for SRI's work: the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Kettering was big on "the vision thing" during the 60s and 70s -- they were looking everywhere to get an edge on futurism, putting a lot of money in very "out there" places

....and for what it's worth, the folks at SRI were very much out there. "Changing Images" co-author O.W. Markley left behind a very curious paper entitled "Visionary Futures" that outlines some other SRI "alternative methodologies" -- including "channeled material in the book Seth Speaks, by Jane Roberts (1972)." This is the same SRI who employed top Scientologists, Hal Puthoff and Ingo Swann, to develop their Remote Viewing program. That doesn't mean they're jackasses or something -- it means that SRI gets paid, very well, for being very much out there. It's what people depend on them for, then and now.

Channeled material, after all, is mainstream today. (Witness the bestseller success of the "Conversations with God" series.) Everyone gets weird -- hell, tomorrow we'll take a look at Zbigniew Brzezinski's hippie youth, just to prove it. Don't think for a second just because these people are gobbling LSD means they're down for the cause -- or even remotely sympathetic. Anyone exploring Changing Images of Man should bear Willis Harman's words in mind:

"There's a war going on between your side and mine. And my side is not going to lose."

So did Al Hubbard run LSD visionary sessions for the SRI staff involved with Changing Images of Man? I have no idea, only clues -- after all, Hubbard was hired the same year that the Changing Images project started: 1968. Until further documentation comes out -- or someone feels like speaking up -- there's no way of knowing.

For Further DiggingTake a look at the Erowid "Characters" page -- a valuable name base of psychedelic history. We also provide a PDF photoscan of "Changing Images of Man" for interested researchers: (30 mb PDF File) - (Visit the original article at skilluminati.com to download the pdf.)

Rush in Rio

TUNNG -- Bullets

Here's Your Hat & Coat -- What's Your Hurry?

According to a new study conducted at the request of the Canadian government, peer-to-peer file sharing actually increases record sales. Researchers found that for every CD downloaded, the guilty parties purchase o.44 CDs.

What, then, accounts for the sharp decline in CD sales over the last seven years? Well, in this interview with the hosts of Sound Opinions (it's show #104), the study's co-author, Birgitte Andersen, speculates that it is a semantic argument. Music sales, she suggests, haven't declined, CD sales have. Many music consumers (god, I hate that word) are downloading music legitimately from sites like Itunes, rather than purchasing them the old fashioned way at record shops. Large labels foolishly devoted to an obsolete business model are cleverly manipulating the wording in order to blame teh interwebs for their own shortsightedness. Sony, Virgin, Warner Bros., Capitol, et al. are pining hopelessly for the old days of radio stations and retailers during an era of satellite radio, online podcasting and self-produced releases. Moreover, the sharp improvement in home recording technology combined with online distribution strategies has resulted in an epidemic of tiny, ultra-indie labels that don't register on the RIAA's radar. While it's true that things are bad for the aforementioned recording industry behemoths, things are great for the many, many niche labels that have emerged over the last decade or so.

Labels like this. And this. And this.

Like turn-of-the-century carriage makers who couldn't adapt to the changing times, big labels are actually trying to outlaw a new technology that they failed to anticipate, and there's only one thing for us to say:

Buh-bye, dickhead.

I Will Let You Know When I Am Not Terrified Anymore

A Positive Outlook Is Overrated
by Barbara Held
Listen Now [5 min 32 sec] add to playlist

Barbara Held is a professor of psychology and social studies at Bowdoin College, and the author of Stop Smiling, Start Kvetching. Trained as a clinical psychologist, she practiced therapy for many years. Held lives with her husband on the coast of Maine.

“I believe that there is no one right way to cope with all the pain of living. ... If we are prevented from coping in our own way, be it 'positive' or 'negative,' we function less well.”

All Things Considered, October 22, 2007 · Many Americans insist that everyone have a positive attitude, even when the going gets rough. From the self-help bookshelves to the Complaint-Free World Movement, the power of positive thinking is touted now more than ever as the way to be happy, healthy, wealthy and wise.
The problem is that this demand for good cheer brings with it a one-two punch for those of us who cannot cope in that way: First you feel bad about whatever's getting you down, then you feel guilty or defective if you can't smile and look on the bright side. And I'm not even sure there always is a bright side to look on.
I believe that there is no one right way to cope with all of the pain of living. As an academic psychologist, I know that people have different temperaments, and if we are prevented from coping in our own way, be it "positive" or "negative," we function less well.
As a psychotherapist, I know that sometimes a lot of what people need when faced with adversity is permission to feel crummy for a while, to realize that feeling bad is not automatically the same as being mentally ill. Some of my one-session "cures" have come from reminding people that life can be difficult, and it's OK if we're not happy all of the time.
This last point first became apparent to me in 1986. I came down with the flu accompanied by searing headaches that lasted for weeks afterward. Eventually a neurologist told me that a strain of flu that winter had left many people with viral meningitis. He reassured me that I would make a full recovery, but I was left traumatized by the weeks of undiagnosed pain. I really thought I had a brain tumor or schizophrenia. Being a psychologist didn't help; I was an emotional wreck.
Fortunately it happened that my next-door neighbor was a brilliant psychiatrist, Aldo Llorente from Cuba. I asked him, "Aldo, am I a schizophrenic?"
"Professor," he pronounced, "you are a mess, but you are not a mentally ill mess. You are just terrified."
I told Aldo that two of my friends insisted that I cheer up. I tried to be cheerful for a week, but that only increased my distress. Aldo told me, "You say to them: 'Friends, I would like to be more cheerful, but right now I am too terrified to be cheerful. So I will let you know when I am not terrified anymore.'"
The moment I delivered Aldo's message, I felt better. Aldo had made it OK for me to cope in my own way, to recover at my own pace, to be my own mess of a self. That is when I began to realize that I had been tyrannized by the idea that everyone must always have a positive attitude.
Having flourished in my own authentically kvetchy way, I believe that we would be better off if we let everyone be themselves — positive, negative or even somewhere in-between.

Independently produced for All Things Considered by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

Rewriting Reagan's Racist Southern Strategy

From E&P:

New Shot Fired in 'NYT' Op-Ed 'War' Over Reagan and Racism

By Greg Mitchell Published: November 18, 2007 9:50 AM ET

NEW YORK The battleground had been silent for a few days, but conflict resumed today with another shot fired on The New York Times' Op-Ed page -- over the unlikely subject of a 27-year-old statement by Ronald Reagan in a Mississippi town named Neshoba.

Lou Cannon, the longtime Washington Post reporter and Reagan biographer, appears today, defending the former president, and taking the side of columnist David Brooks against his colleagues Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert, who have been squabbling about it for days-- with no names being mentioned, of course. Cannon doesn't refer to any of them either, but merely explains why he is there by writing, "One myth that is enjoying a revival in a year when Republican presidential candidates are comparing themselves to Ronald Reagan, their iconic hero, is the notion that Mr. Reagan defeated President Jimmy Carter in 1980 by a coded appeal to white-supremacist voters."

He adds: "The mythology of Neshoba is wrong in two distinct ways. First, Ronald Reagan was not a racist. Second, his Neshoba speech was not an effective symbolic appeal to white voters. Instead, it was a political misstep that cost him support." But Krugman, in a kind of pre-emptive strike, had declared on his blog earlier this week that online critics who had attacked him for allegedly accusing Reagan of racism, were being willfully misleading. He denied suggesting that Reagan was a racist -- but that doesn't mean he did not "deliberately" appeal to racists in that famous 1980 quote. And others will surely now challenge Cannon's charge that the statement did not win Reagan any votes.

To review: Krugman kicked it off with a Sept. 27 column on the Republicans’ continuing problems in attracting minority voters. “Republican politicians ... understand quite well that the G.O.P.’s national success since the 1970s owes everything to the partisan switch of Southern whites,” he declared. “Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism.”

Then came this kicker, as Krugman charged that GOP godfather, Ronald Reagan, who “began his political career by campaigning against California’s Fair Housing Act, started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states’ rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered.”

Brooks took awhile, but fired back on Nov. 9, opening his column: “Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale. “The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white racists that he was on their side. The speech is taken as proof that the Republican majority was built on racism.“The truth,” Brook explained, “is more complicated.” He claimed that Reagan had actually attempted to court black votes right after the 1980 convention. Brooks then offered as an excuse for the Mississippi trip: the Reagan campaign “was famously disorganized,” and he was forced to go when locals promised he would be there. When he got there he gave a “short and cheerful” speech: “The use of the phrase ‘states’ rights’ didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.”

Brooks concluded: “You can look back on this history in many ways. It’s callous, at least, to use the phrase ‘states’ rights’ in any context in Philadelphia. Reagan could have done something wonderful if he’d mentioned civil rights at the fair. He didn’t. ...“Still, the agitprop version of this week — that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion.”

Then he smashed Krugman: “But still the slur spreads. It’s spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence. It posits that there was a master conspiracy to play on the alleged Klan-like prejudices of American voters, when there is no evidence of that conspiracy. And, of course, in a partisan age there are always people eager to believe this stuff.”

Krugman, no fool, knew Brooks was referring to him and hit back with a post on his www.nytimes.com Web page: “So there’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that 'I believe in states’ rights,' he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

“Indeed, you do really have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.”

He then recalled other Reagan “race-baiting” whoppers and added: “Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been ‘humiliating to the South,’ he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.

“In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.

“And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.

“Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.”

Oh, then there was the fact that “Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday.”

No word of reply from Brooks, so far, but now Bob Herbert pushed the envelope with an angry column on Wednesday which started, “Let’s set the record straight on Ronald Reagan’s campaign kickoff in 1980.”

He charged: “Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, ‘I believe in states’ rights.’

“Reagan apologists have every right to be ashamed of that appearance by their hero, but they have no right to change the meaning of it, which was unmistakable. Commentators have been trying of late to put this appearance by Reagan into a racially benign context.

“That won’t wash. Reagan may have been blessed with a Hollywood smile and an avuncular delivery, but he was elbow deep in the same old race-baiting Southern strategy of Goldwater and Nixon.

“Everybody watching the 1980 campaign knew what Reagan was signaling at the fair. Whites and blacks, Democrats and Republicans — they all knew. The news media knew. The race haters and the people appalled by racial hatred knew. And Reagan knew. ...

“Throughout his career, Reagan was wrong, insensitive and mean-spirited on civil rights and other issues important to black people. There is no way for the scribes of today to clean up that dismal record. ...

“Ronald Reagan was an absolute master at the use of symbolism. It was one of the primary keys to his political success.

“The suggestion that the Gipper didn’t know exactly what message he was telegraphing in Neshoba County in 1980 is woefully wrong-headed. Wishful thinking would be the kindest way to characterize it.”

Brooks has been silent since then, but now Cannon has responded in his Op-Ed, which recalls Reagan's civil rights record, leaving out the negatives listed above. He does admit in passing that "Mr. Reagan was understandably anathema in the black community not because of his personal views but because of his consistent opposition to federal civil rights legislation, most notably the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965."

Like Brooks, he attributes the Neshoba "blunder" to poor staff work, even though this candidate was far from a political neophyte, having served two terms as governor of California and run for president previously.One expects Krugman and/or Herbert will keep this flame burning for at least another few days.

*Greg Mitchell's new blog:http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/
Greg MItchell (gmitchell@editorandpublisher.com) is editor. A collection of his columns on Iraq and the media will be pubished in March.

UPDATE: Krugman fires the latest salvo here. [H/T: Wege]

Declare This An Emergency

Horror Camp

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Source: Imperial War Museum (H/T: Banksy)

Abortion is Biblical

by Brian Elroy McKinley

One sided. That's the abortion stance of most Christians -- one sided. We hear the Christian Coalition speak against abortion. We hear Focus on the Family tell Republican candidates it will not support them unless they state their opposition to abortion. We hear Operation Rescue's Christian members praying God will turn back the clock and make abortion illegal again. Over and over we are bombarded with the "Christian" perspective that abortion is outright wrong, no exceptions.
With all these groups chanting the same mantra, there must be some pretty overwhelming biblical evidence of abortion's evil, right?
Wrong. In reality there is merely overwhelming evidence that most people don't take time to read their own Bibles. People will listen to their pastors and to Christian radio broadcasters. They will skim through easy-to-read pamphlets and perhaps look up the one or two verses printed therein, but they don't actually read their Bibles and make up their own minds on issues such as abortion. They merely listen to others who quote a verse to support a view they heard from someone else. By definition, most Christians, rather than reading for themselves, follow the beliefs of a Culture of Christianity -- and many of the Culture's beliefs are based on one or two verses of the Bible, often taken out of context.
This is most definitely the case when it comes to abortion. Ask most anti-abortion Christians to support their view, and they'll give you a couple of verses. One, quite obviously, is the Commandment against murder. But that begs the question of whether or not abortion is murder, which begs the question of whether or not a fetus is the same as a full-term human person. To support their beliefs, these Christians point to one of three bible verses that refer to God working in the womb. The first is found in Psalms:
"For Thou didst form my inward parts; Thou didst weave me in my mother's womb. I will give thanks to Thee, for Thou art fearfully wonderful (later texts were changed to read "for I am fearfully and wonderfully made"); wonderful are Thy works, and my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from Thee, when I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth. Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance; and in Thy book they were all written, the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was not one of them."
Psalm 139:13-16

Although this passage does make the point that God was involved in the creation of this particular human being, it does not state that during the creation the fetus is indeed a person. According to Genesis, God was involved in the creation of every living thing, and yet that doesn't make every living thing a full human person. In other words, just because God was involved in its creation, it does not mean terminating it is the same as murder. It's only murder if a full human person is destroyed.
But even if we agreed to interpret these verses the same way that anti-abortion Christians do, we still have a hard time arguing that the Bible supports an anti-abortion point of view. If anything, as we will soon see, abortion is biblical.
Anytime we take one or two verses out of their context and quote them as doctrine, we place ourselves in jeopardy of being contradicted by other verses. Similarly, some verses that make perfect sense while standing alone take on a different feel when seen in the greater context in which they were written. And we can do some rather bizarre things to the Scriptures when we take disparate verses from the same context and use them as stand-alone doctrinal statements. Some prime examples of this come from the same book of the Bible as our last quote. Consider these verses that claim that God has abandoned us:
"Why dost Thou stand afar off, O Lord? Why dost Thou hide Thyself in times of trouble?"
Psalm 10:1
"How long, O Lord? Wilt Thou forget me forever? How long wilt Thou hide Thy face from me?"
Psalm 13:1
"O God, Thou hast rejected us. Thou hast broken us; Thou hast been angry; O, restore us."
Psalm 60:1

Not only can we use out-of-context verses to support that God doesn't care for us anymore, we can even use them to show how we can ask God to do horrible and vile things to people we consider our enemies. In this example, King David even wanted God to cause harm to the innocent children of his enemy:
"Let his days be few; let another take his office. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his children wander about and beg; and let them seek sustenance far from their ruined homes. Let the creditor seize all that he has; and let strangers plunder the product of his labor. Let there be none to extend lovingkindness to him, nor any to be gracious to his fatherless children."
Psalm 109:8-12

Are we indeed to interpret that God, speaking through David in these Psalms, is saying we have been abandoned by God and that when wronged we can ask God to cause our enemies to die and cause our enemies' children to wander hungry and homeless? Indeed, it would seem the case.
But rather than interpret that God is with us as a fetus, but forgets us as adults, and yet will allow us to plead for the death of our enemies, we need to look at the greater context in which all these verses are found: songs.
Called Psalms, these are the songs of King David, a man of great faith who was also greatly tormented. He was a man of passions. He loved God, lusted for another man's wife, and murdered him to get her. He marveled at nature and at his own existence. All his great swings in emotion are recorded in the songs he wrote, and we can read them today in the Book of Psalms. What we cannot do is take one song, or one stanza of a song, and proclaim that it is indeed to be taken literally while taking other stanzas from David's songs and claim they should not be taken literally.
Yet that is exactly what anti-abortion Christians are asking us to do. They use those few verses from the Psalms to support their dogma that abortion is wrong. They proclaim those verses as holy writ and the other verses as poetry that we should not be following. Clearly, this is a perfect example of taking verses out of context. And it leads us to only one conclusion: if we cannot trust that God wants to kill our enemies and abandon us, we must also conclude that we cannot trust that God has defined the fetus as being a person.
For indeed, if we allow that kind of thinking we could also make an argument that God is willing to maul children to death if they make fun of a bald guy who just happens to be in God's favor. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. In the book of Second Kings, our hero, the Prophet Elisha, who was quite bald, so it seems, was taunted by a group of young boys. Elisha's response was bitter and cruel:
"...as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, 'Go up, you baldhead; go up you baldhead!' When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number."
2 Kings 2:22-24

Did God kill those forty-two kids for making fun of a bald prophet? We can certainly make an argument for that if we use the anti-abortionists' kind of thinking.
Likewise we can also use the anti-abortionists' methods to establish that God approves of pornography, as seen in these following verses by Solomon as he pondered the female body:
"How beautiful are your feet in sandals, O prince's daughter! The curves of your hips are like jewels, the work of the hands of an artist. Your navel is like a round goblet which never lacks for mixed wine; your belly is like a heap of wheat fenced about with lilies. Your two breasts are like two fawns, twins of a gazelle."
"Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters. I said 'I will climb the palm tree, I will take hold of its fruit stalks.' Oh, may your breasts be like clusters of the vine, and the fragrance of your breath like apples, and your mouth like the best wine."
Song of Solomon 7:1-3,7-9

Pretty steamy stuff. Taken by itself, it would appear God is indeed promoting a written form of pornography. But just like Psalm 139:13-16, we cannot take it by itself. Instead we must take it within the context it was written.
The same is true with the other two verses used by anti-abortion Christians to defend their cause. From the book of Jeremiah, these Crusaders are fond of quoting the phrase, "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee," from the first chapter. But they never quote the entire passage, which changes the meaning considerably:
"Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the Lord. Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth. See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant."
Jeremiah 1:4-10

This is a special event -- the birth of a prophet. God brought the prophet Jeremiah into the world for a divine purpose, and because of that, God was planning Jeremiah's life "before" he was even conceived. God was preparing him to do miraculous things, such as speak on behalf of God while still a child and setting him up as an overseer of nations and kingdoms. But the anti-abortionists simply overlook this on their way to claiming that the one phrase they quote proves God sees us as individual people while still in the womb. God saw Jeremiah in that way, but to claim it applies to all of us is akin to saying that we were all prepared as children to speak for God, and that God has placed all of us "over the nations and over the kingdoms" of the world. In essence, to claim this verse applies to anyone other than Jeremiah is to claim that we are all God's divine prophets. We are not; therefore, we cannot apply these verses to our own lives.
Another problem in this passage is the phrase, "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee." In Psalm 139:13-16 the anti-abortionists claim that because God was active in the creation of King David in his mother's womb that we must conclude the fetus is recognized by God as being a person. But here we see God stating that he knew Jeremiah "before" he was formed in the womb. By anti-abortionist logic, we would have to conclude that we are a human person even before conception. Since this is a ridiculous notion, we must, therefore, conclude that the anti-abortionist is interpreting these verses incorrectly.
The last verse most often quoted by anti-abortion Christians relates the story of Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, while both were pregnant. When they meet, the pre-born John the Baptist leaps in his mother's womb at Mary's salutation. Let's read the original:
"And Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Juda; And entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth. And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:"
Luke 1:39-41

As much as the anti-abortion lobby would like this to mean that all fetuses are sentient persons because one is recorded as knowing Mary's words and then leapt inside the womb, the logic is as flawed as the Isaiah misquote. Again we have a miraculous event. Again we have a divine prophet whom God had ordained since before he was conceived. And this time it's even more miraculous, because the gestating John the Baptist is reacting to the approach of Mary, who at the time was pregnant with Jesus. Unless we believe all of us are chosen before birth to be the divine prophet ordained by God to herald the arrival of Christ on earth, then we cannot claim this passage refers to us. And indeed, it does not. While gestating fetuses are known to move and kick as their nervous systems and muscles are under construction, only divinely-inspired babies understand the spoken words of the mother of Jesus and can leap in recognition.
The point to all this is simple: we cannot take the verses we like and interpret them to support what we want to support. And, more to the point, we cannot simply accept what some Christian leaders proclaim as being God's word on a given subject without carefully reading the full text of the book and taking into consideration the entire context. We cannot, as we have shown, simply interpret those few verses from Psalms, Isaiah, and Luke as a reason to be against abortion. And, as we will see in a moment, there are still other verses -- if interpreted in the sloppy manner demonstrated by anti-abortion Christians -- in the Bible that could easily lead us to argue that indeed God, at times, supports abortion. Let's take a look.
In the full context of Ecclesiastes, King Solomon makes the point that much of life is futile. Over and over he writes that if life is good then we should be thankful. But when life is not good, Solomon makes some interesting statements:
"If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years, however many they be, but his soul is not satisfied with good things, and he does not even have a proper burial, then I say, `Better the miscarriage than he, for it comes in futility and goes into obscurity; and its name is covered in obscurity. It never sees the sun and it never knows anything; it is better off than he.'"
Ecclesiastes 6:3-5

Clearly there is a quality of life issue being put forth in the Scriptures. And in this case, Solomon makes the point that it is sometimes better to end a pregnancy prematurely than to allow it to continue into a miserable life. This is made even more clear in these following verses:
"Then I looked again at all the acts of oppression which were being done under the sun. And behold I saw the tears of the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them; and on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no one to comfort them. So I congratulated the dead who are already dead more than the living who are still living. But better off than both of them is the one who has never existed, who has never seen the evil activity that is done under the sun."
Ecclesiastes 4:1-3

Here we have an argument for both euthanasia and abortion. When quality of life is at stake, Solomon seems to make the argument that ending a painful life or ending what will be a painful existence is preferable. Now remember, we're not talking about David's songs here. We're reading the words of the man to whom God gave the world's greatest wisdom.
And Solomon was not alone in this argument. Consider the words of Job, a man of great faith and wealth, when his life fell upon the hardest of times:
"And Job said, 'Let the day perish on which I was to be born, and the night which said, "a boy is conceived." May that day be darkness; let not God above care for it, nor light shine on it.'"
"Why did I not die at birth, come forth from my womb and expire? Why did the knees receive me, and why the breasts, that I should suck? For now I would have lain down and been quiet; I would have slept then, I would have been at rest, with kings and with counselors of the earth, who rebuilt ruins for themselves; or with princes who had gold, who were filling their houses with silver,. Or like the miscarriage which is discarded, I would not be, as infants that never saw light. There the wicked cease from raging, and there the weary are at rest. The prisoners are at ease together; they do not hear the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there, and the slave is free from his master."
Job 3:2-4,11-19

And again a few chapters later Job reiterates the greater grace he would have known if his life had been terminated as a fetus:
"Why then hast Thou brought me out of the womb? Would that I had died and no eye had seen me! I should have been as though I had not been, carried from womb to tomb."
Job 10:18-19

Clearly there is a strong argument here that the quality of a life is as important if not more important than the act of being born. Indeed, we could claim that the Bible supports ending a pregnancy in the face of a life without quality. And, if I wanted to be bold, I could claim that this interpretation is in fact a biblical mandate to support the use of abortion as a way to improve our quality of life. And taking these verses to their extreme, I could claim that abortion is not just a good idea, it is a sacrament.
Actually, I will stop short of making that claim. In fact, I will stop short of making the claim that the Bible condemns or supports abortion at all. It does neither. The condemning and supporting comes not from the words of the Bible but from leaders within our Culture of Christianity who use verses out of context -- the same way I just did to support abortion -- to support their views against abortion. The condemning and the supporting comes not from the Scriptures but from average Christians who take the easy way out, accepting one or two verses of the Bible as proof that their leaders are speaking the gospel truth. The condemning and supporting comes not from God but from those who do not take the time to read the Bible, in its own context, and decide for themselves the meanings therein.
For indeed, there is one passage in the Bible that deals specifically with the act of causing a woman to abort a pregnancy. And the penalty for causing the abortion is not what many would lead us to believe:
"And if men struggle and strike a woman with child so that she has a miscarriage, yet there is no further injury, he shall be fined as the woman's husband may demand of him, and he shall pay as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise."
Exodus 21:22-25
This is a very illuminating passage. In it we find a woman losing her child by being stuck by men who are fighting. Rather than it being a capital offense, however, it is relegated to a civil matter, with the father-to-be taking the participants to court for a settlement. But, as we read on, if the woman is killed, a "life for a life," then the men who killed her shall be killed. Some have claimed that the life for a life part is talking about the baby. But from reading the context we can see this is not true. It also states a tooth for a tooth and a burn for a burn. Babies don't have teeth when they are born, and it is highly unlikely a baby will be burned during birth. It is pretty clear that this part refers to the mother. Thus we can see that if the baby is lost, it does not require a death sentence -- it is not considered murder. But if the woman is lost, it is considered murder and is punished by death.
It's important to note that some anti-abortion lobbyists want to convince us the baby in this passage survived the miscarriage. They point to the more "politically-correct" translation they find in the New International Version of the Bible. There it translates the term "miscarriage" into "gives birth prematurely" (the actual words in Hebrew translate "she lose her offspring"). While this may give them the warm and fuzzy notion that this verse might actually support their cause if maybe the child survived, it is wishful thinking at best. In our modern era of miracle medicine only 60% of all premature births survive. Three thousand years ago, when this passage was written, they did not have modern technology to keep a preemie alive. In fact, at that time, more than half of all live births died before their first birthday. In a world like that, a premature birth was a death sentence.
Others have looked to the actual Hebrew words, themselves, to try and refute these verses. They note that the word "yalad" is used in verse 22 to describe the untimely birth, and that yalad is also used in other places to describe a live birth. They then go on to say other places in the Bible use the words "nefel" and "shakol" to describe a miscarriage. Therefore, the argument goes, the baby in Exodus 21:22 must have been born alive. It's easy to see how a novice might make this mistake, but a closer look at the words in question reveal the flaw in this argument.
The word yalad is a verb that describes the process of something coming out - the departing of the fetus. Since it is describing the process, and not the result, it could be used to describe either a live birth or a miscarriage. Shakol which shows up in Hosea 9:14, is also a verb, but its meaning is to make a woman barren. Now a barren woman certainly might miscarry, but with this understanding of the word, it's clear why the writer of Exodus would not have used it since this miscarriage was caused by an accident, not by barrenness. And the word nefel is not even a verb. It's a noun. True, as a noun it is the term for a miscarried fetus, but the writer wasn't using a noun. He was using a verb to describe the coming out of the fetus. Thus, if I were describing a man falling to his death, I would use the verb "to fall" which can be used for both those who die and those who survive a fall, but to describe the man himself I would use the word the "fatality." So we can see that while a novice might mistake a verb for a noun and come to the wrong conclusions about the original Hebrew words used in the Exodus passage, a more careful look proves that the words only describe the action of losing the fetus, not the fetus itself. And that being the case, we can't use the Hebrew translations to determine if the fetus was alive or not when it came out - so we are forced to accept that in all certainly, considering the medical knowledge at the time, the preemie died. This makes it even more clear that the "tooth for a tooth" passage refers only to the mother, not to the miscarried fetus.
What has been so clearly demonstrated by the passage in Exodus - the fact that God does not consider a fetus a human person - can also be seen in a variety of other Bible verses. In Leviticus 27:6 a monetary value was placed on children, but not until they reached one month old (any younger had no value). Likewise, in Numbers 3:15 a census was commanded, but the Jews were told only to count those one month old and above - anything less, particularly a fetus, was not counted as a human person. In Ezekiel 37:8-10 we watch as God re-animates dead bones into living soldiers, but the passage makes the interesting note that they were not alive as persons until their first breath. Likewise, in Genesis 2:7, Adam had a human form and a vibrant new body but he only becomes a fully-alive human person after God makes him breathe. And in the same book, in Genesis 38:24, we read about a pregnant woman condemned to death by burning. Though the leaders of Israel knew the woman was carrying a fetus, this was not taken into consideration. If indeed the Jews, and the God who instructed them, believed the fetus to be an equal human person to the mother, then why would they let the fetus die for the mother's crimes? The truth is simple. A fetus is not a human person, and its destruction is not a murder. Period.
It is time to stop the one-sided view of abortion being proclaimed by Christian leaders. These leaders do not -- despite their claims -- have a biblical mandate for their theologies. It is time to stop preaching that the Bible contains an undeniable doctrine against abortion. It is time to stop the anger and hatred being heaped on abortion doctors and upon women who have abortions, especially when it's done in the name of a God who has not written such condemnations in his Bible. It is time to stop, because the act of making a judgment against people in God's name, when God is not behind the judging, is nothing short of claiming that our own beliefs are more important than God's. We must stop, because if we don't, then indeed the very type of theological argument being used against abortion can be turned around and used to proclaim that abortion is biblical.

Elephant Talk

Damn VHS.

Working Class Warrior

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Working Class Warrior, also known as a blue-collar Democrat. You believe that the little guy is getting screwed by conservative greed-mongers and corporate criminals, and you’re not going to take it anymore.

Take the quiz at http://www.fightconservatives.com/Inside-the-Book/What-Breed-of-Liberal-Are-You.html

H/T: Wege

Ken Nordine & DJ Food -- Aging Young Rebel

Come On, People

NBC Meet the Press Netcast

One of These Things Is Not Like the Other

From the Star Tribune:

It's easy to tell if Ann Coulter is defaming someone: Her lips are moving.
By Nick Coleman, Star Tribune
Last update: October 13, 2007 – 4:14 PM
It's easy to tell if Ann Coulter is defaming someone: Her lips are moving.
Coulter was on a cable TV show Thursday, saying that Christians (apparently, she includes herself among their number) are "perfected" Jews, and that America would be better if we were all Christians.
I suggest that the public affairs office at the University of St. Thomas immediately issue a new press release: "St. Thomas Bans Ann Coulter; Unexplained Computer Glitch Led to Mistaken Banning of Most Reverend Desmond Tutu."
Here's what a St. Thomas flak could say: "Ann Coulter is a foul-mouthed font of hate speech and bigotry. We have no idea how on Earth we accidentally confused her with a Nobel Peace Prize Winner and Man of God who presided over the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa. But there will be a thorough check of our hardware and software systems before we ban anyone else."
Computer error is the only possible explanation for the decision to ban Tutu from St. Thomas after having permitted the Coultergeist to speak on campus just two years ago.
I was present for Coulter's mud-slinging, during which she called Democrats traitors, suggested they should be executed, mocked Muslims, praised right-wing demagogue Sen. Joseph McCarthy (oblivious to the fact she was speaking on a campus that launched the career of liberal antiwar Sen. Eugene McCarthy) and threatened dissenting students with ejection, sending a bouncer into the balcony to shut up the few who dared to jeer.
Coulter's performance led the president of St. Thomas, the Rev. Dennis Dease, to condemn "hateful speech" that "goes against" college principles and "contributes to the growing dark side of our culture -- a disrespect for persons and their sincerely held beliefs."
Yes. The same Dennis Dease who uninvited Tutu, then reversed himself. The invitation has been re-extended now, but the damage has been done.
To be fair to Dease and his university, we should remember that St. Thomas has a long and proud history of openness. When Jews were not welcome at many private schools and anti-Semitism was openly preached in Minnesota, St. Thomas supported Jewish educators. In those days, Catholics and Jews both were discriminated against, and it is natural and good that St. Thomas is still on guard.
St. Thomas, like most other colleges, is a center of debate in many struggles, and it is no surprise that it might be stampeded into banning Tutu. No surprise. Just disappointment.
Tutu's criticisms of Israel seem no different than criticisms from former President Jimmy Carter and many Jews, both in Israel and in the United States. But Tutu can speak for himself, and if he has said things that appear to be anti-Semitic, he can be asked to explain himself, or to apologize. At least with Tutu, the Anglican cleric who has praised the contributions Jews made to the fight against apartheid that helped free his country from racial government, you can expect to hear thoughtful answers.
With Ann Coulter, you can expect only head slaps.
She was paid $50,000 by a right-wing foundation to spew hatred on Minnesota campuses in 2005, including at St. Thomas, and she took the money and ran. No apologies offered. Now, with her latest foul remarks on CNBC, she at least has provided St. Thomas with a little bit of help.
By making it clear what real anti-Semitism looks like.
Criticizing Israel does not make you anti-Semitic. And supporting Israel doesn't mean you are not anti-Semitic.
Maybe you only want to "perfect" Jews by converting all of them to Christianity.
I still like what the head of St. Olaf College said after Coulter dumped her garbage here.
What a college wants, said St. Olaf's president, Christopher Thomforde, is "an intersection between faithfulness and respect, along with intelligent critique and analysis. The issues are highly complicated, and to just sort of incite people is not helpful."
By that Lutheran standard, there is no comparison between Desmond Tutu and Ann Coulter. Knowing which to invite, and which to shun, should be easy:
One is a philosopher. The other is a fool.

The Shock Doctrine

Justice At Last

At last, billionaires like Richard Branson are getting a little justice.

Kinky - Sister Twisted

CUBS WIN

As I mentioned last November, things seem to be looking up for the Dems, er, Cubs. (I keep getting those two confused.) Here's hoping they don't pull their customary crash-n-burn.

The Greatest Misallocation of Resources in the History of the World

We Need Another Mort Sahl

From American Masters:

"Will Rogers...used to come out with a newspaper and pretend he was a yokel criticizing the intellectuals who ran the government. I come out with a newspaper and pretend I’m an intellectual making fun of the yokels running the government."

In his trademark V-neck sweater, with the day’s newspaper tucked under his arm, Mort Sahl has satirized -- and entertained -- presidents from Eisenhower to Clinton. He revolutionized the world of stand-up comedy with a fresh combination of political awareness, fearless criticism of the government, and a willingness to draw on personal experience. His refusal to play favorites with the political community made him the center of intense controversy, and his involvement with John F. Kennedy nearly cost him his career. But through it all, Mort Sahl has remained an unflinching critic of American politics, and he has never backed away from his beliefs.
Born in Montreal, Canada in 1927 Mort Sahl attended the University of Southern California. It was there that he began to work as a stand-up comic on stages throughout Los Angeles. In late 1953, at the urging of a friend, Sahl went to San Francisco to try his hand at the big time. There, Enrico Banducci, owner of THE HUNGRY I, a popular nightclub, hired him to fill in for a singer. To conquer his initial nervousness, he adapted a machine-gun, non-stop delivery that earned him the nickname "Rebel Without a Pause." While most comedians of the 1940s and 1950s were delivering stock jokes about wives and mothers-in-law, he turned to the newspapers for material. "The audience didn’t know what to make of me," Sahl said, "Here was this strange face, speaking a strange language, in a strange dialect, with strange ideas."
The political climate of the 1950s was ripe for comic satire. President Eisenhower, the McCarthy hearings, the Cold War, and the beginning of the atomic age all presented themselves as targets for Sahl’s bipartisan barbs. His unbridled critiques of the House Un-American Activities Committee brought strong criticism and even violent threats. Through it all he continued to work, putting out several comedy albums and performing frequently on THE TONIGHT SHOW and THE STEVE ALLEN SHOW. He also took roles in a number of movies. Pioneering stand-up comedy in a circuit of night clubs that presented primarily jazz music, he adopted much of the jazz aesthetic. Sahl cites jazz pianist and bandleader Stan Kenton as his most important performing influence: "Stan, of course, was a great artist, but he was a voice of defiance, and he always did it on his own terms."
In August of 1960, TIME magazine pictured Sahl on its cover and called him "the patriarch of a new school of comedians," including in that group such stand-up legends as Lenny Bruce and Jonathan Winters. The year before, Sahl was hired to contribute jokes to John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign speeches, but once Kennedy was in office, Sahl returned to his policy of making jokes about the incumbent. Kennedy’s father Joseph Kennedy put pressure on Sahl to cease his criticism, even going so far as to threaten to silence Sahl.
Following Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Sahl volunteered to assist in the investigation being conducted by New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison, which eventually concluded that the assassination was sanctioned by the CIA. During the investigation, Sahl began to openly criticize the findings of the Warren Report, which said that Oswald had acted alone. Once again, Sahl met with hostility from the press. Many questioned the professional wisdom of Sahl’s devotion to the assassination issue—some even suggested that he had lost his sense of humor.
Though the early 1960s would be his time of greatest fame, he enjoyed renewed popularity during the Watergate scandal, and since then has made frequent appearances both in person and on television. In the 1980s he delighted audiences with his parodies of Reagan and Bush on Broadway. Today Mort Sahl remains an inspiration to humorists and social critics everywhere. Of his deep integrity, journalist John Hart said, "Mort Sahl doesn’t tell jokes so much as he tells the truth."

More here.

Listen to Terry Gross interview Sahl on Fresh Air.

I have three dollars in the bank. I don't get paid 'til a week from Friday. I just got a disconnection notice from the electric company. The landlord just left a message on my voicemail because I still owe him for September rent, and it's almost October. We have a one-party system. I feel like screaming "FUCK YOU" at everyone I meet.

More Ammo for the Godless

Liberal academia's Darwinist hoax just keeps getting more and more elaborate (wink) :

A tickling find: Feathers on velociraptors
September 20, 2007 – 9:52 PM
Velociraptor, the terrifying predator made famous in the movie Jurassic Park, appears to have had feathers in real life.
A close study of a velociraptor forearm found in Mongolia shows the presence of quill knobs, bumps on the bone where the feathers anchor, researchers report in today's edition of the journal Science.
Dinosaurs are believed to be ancestors to modern birds.
"This is something we'd long suspected, but no one had been able to prove," said Alan Turner, lead author on the study.
The velociraptor studied was about 3 feet tall and 30 pounds. (Their size was exaggerated in the movie.) It had short forelimbs, indicating it would not have been able to fly, even though it had feathers.
The feathers may have been used for show, to shield nests, for temperature control or to help it maneuver while running, researchers said.
ASSOCIATED PRESS

More here. And here. And here.

Let George Carlin Set You Straight

Analyzing Authoritarianism

From The Chronicle Review:

Freud and Anna
By MARK EDMUNDSON
Why publish a book about Sigmund Freud in 2007, a time when many people — perhaps most — think that Freud is passé?

Even a reasonably sympathetic observer is likely to believe that what's best in Freud's work has already been absorbed into the culture. Everyone, this line of thinking runs, now knows what Freud knew about dreams, about the unconscious, about the centrality of sex in human life, about jokes and slips of the tongue, and about a half a dozen or so other consequential matters. Then, of course, there's what his critics think of as the bad side of Freud: Contemporary psychologists dismiss him as insufficiently scientific; feminists denounce him as the ultimate patriarch. So why bother now with Sigmund Freud?
The Death of Sigmund Freud began as a book about death and dying. I wanted to understand what it might mean to die a good death — a good secular death. From what I knew of Freud's last days, when he was dying of cancer, he had done exactly that. In fact, as I studied his life, I found that to the end he was tough, brave, and resolutely secular. His final public act was to publish his most controversial book, Moses and Monotheism. "Quite a worthy exit," he said of the volume, and it was. So I began writing about Freud's heroic demise.
But the true subject of a book is often about 20 degrees away from the author's original intention, and so it was here. As I studied Freud's old age and his late work, I came to see that the problems he encountered were in many ways still ours. Both religious fundamentalism and political tyranny threatened Freud in old age, and in quite immediate ways. Freud worked on his Moses book under the shadow of the repressive Roman Catholic Church of Austria, which surely would have moved to suppress the book if he had tried to publish it in Vienna. When he was 81 years old, Nazi Germany invaded Austria and threatened Freud and his family with death.
But Freud did more than experience tyranny. In a series of remarkably prescient books and essays, he also wrote about it. Totem and Taboo, Group Psychology, Future of an Illusion, and a number of other works all analyze how and why authority goes bad and becomes oppressive. It occurred to me as I reread those works that, at best, culture had assimilated only half of Freud's thinking, the half that, broadly speaking, deals with eros. Freud the analyst of sex was something we all knew about. But there was a second phase of Freud's work, little read, that bears strongly on our own crises in politics and religion. Freud was, I came to believe, something of an expert on how and why authority goes bad.
The complicating factor was that Freud sometimes trafficked in oppressive authority himself. In writing as in life, he could be bullying, intolerant, overbearing — though never to what one could call a pathological degree. Feminists were right, I concluded, to say that Freud was patriarchal, and right, too, to say that patriarchy might be the great malaise of our times — in politics and in religion, particularly. But reading Freud, I concluded something else, too. Patriarch that he may have been, Freud nonetheless lived and wrote in a way that allows us to understand our own attraction to oppressive power — and perhaps even to do something about it.
The excerpt that follows tells the story of a crisis in Freud's relationship with his daughter Anna, which reveals something about Freud's capacity for love and his drive for authority.

By 1938, the year that the Nazis invaded Vienna and put Sigmund Freud and his family in mortal danger, Freud's feelings for his daughter Anna were at their height. Anna had become not only the great comfort of his old age, but also his hope for the future. What Freud wanted was not to live on and on; he was tired and very ill: He had been struggling with cancer of the jaw for 15 years. What Freud wanted was to die assured that the psychoanalytic movement that he had founded and the knowledge that he believed he had uncovered and organized would live on through time. Freud was obsessed with the continuity of his work, and lately he had come to see that Anna was the one who could do the most to ensure it. In Freud's old age, Anna meant everything to him. March 22, 1938, the day that the Nazis came for her, was surely the worst single day of Sigmund Freud's life.
Freud had not always held his youngest child in high esteem. Anna had never been pretty, at least according to Freud, and she was not precocious; as a girl, she was dutiful, thoughtful, and thorough, with a capacity for hard work not unlike her father's. Over time, though, Freud came to see that what Anna lacked in quickness of understanding, she made up for in depth. She immersed herself in his work and his world — when she was still a girl she attended the seminars Freud held for his disciples in his apartment at Berggasse 19, sitting quietly in a room blue with cigar smoke — and became as well versed in her father's thought as any of his followers. Anna's relation to Freud's vision was never creative. She took it all in; she learned its terms by heart; but it never seems to have occurred to Anna that her father's thinking required revision or even much development.
Freud's authority with Anna was absolute; he had established it early in her life, in part by psychoanalyzing her himself. Looking back on the psychoanalysis, Anna said that her father never permitted her to indulge in halfway measures. He compelled her to offer the whole truth about everything, including her erotic life. It seems that she shared with him accounts of her sexual fantasies and of her initial forays into masturbation, and that Freud took it all in with characteristic equanimity. Anna emerged from the analysis grateful to her father and more committed to him than ever. From that time on, Freud's attitude toward his daughter was protective in the extreme, especially when sex was the issue. Even as Anna reached her 20s and began to attract men, including one of Freud's disciples, the devoted womanizer Ernest Jones, Freud continually proclaimed that she was too young and not at all ready to leave the family. Once, during the period of Anna's analysis, when she had gone off on vacation and left her mother and father, Freud, writing to the Russian psychoanalyst Lou Andreas Salomé, said, "I have long felt sorry for [Anna] for still being at home with us old folks, ... but on the other hand, if she really were to go away, I should feel myself as deprived as I [would] now if I had to give up smoking!"
By 1938, Anna had virtually displaced Freud's wife, Martha, in his life of feeling. Anna took care of him: She got his medicine; she helped him remove and clean the prosthesis installed on the right side of his jaw, where the cancer had done its damage — they called the device "the Monster." And Anna sustained her father intellectually as well, for he talked his ideas over with her as much as he did with anyone. He sought her comfort, yes, but he also sought her intellectual advice. Anna had become Freud's great stay against the world.
For at least 30 years, Freud had wanted inheritors, younger men (it would preferably be men) who could devote themselves to him and carry on his legacy. So he began to gather around him talented younger thinkers like Karl Abraham and Sándor Ferenczi and Carl Jung. He seated them at a table with himself at the head, like a monarch surrounded by his knights. In time he gave some of them rings to seal the fellowship. He called them his sons.
Over time, though, it became clear that Freud could not bear much of any intellectual disagreement from his followers. The story goes that once when a disciple disputed a point with him during a seminar, Freud tried to quash him. "But," the disciple replied, "a dwarf sitting on the shoulders of a giant can see farther than the giant." Freud took this in. He gestured once with his cigar, then again. "Fine," the founder replied, "but a louse sitting on the head of an astronomer, what can he see?"
Carl Jung, whom Freud for a while called "the crown prince" without terribly much irony, was creative, excessively so. He was intrigued by astrology and alchemy; he was a visionary and a mystic, and he impressed Freud and disturbed him in about equal measure. To break with Jung, as Freud did beginning around 1912, and over time to begin to look to Anna as the guardian of the legacy, was a great shift. In making it, Freud chose caution over imagination, continuity over creative disjunction. Freud loved Anna for herself; he passionately wanted her happiness: That much is certain. But he also loved her as a guarantor of the only kind of immortality that Freud, who famously called himself a "godless Jew," could believe in. Anna Freud was the critical link in the chain that might help make psychoanalysis live on, perhaps for all time.
Part of Freud's genius lay in knowing that to be a genius was not enough. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, from whose work Freud had — to put it generously — borrowed, had also developed brilliant interpretations of life. But both had left academia early; neither had founded a school or created disciples in significant numbers. Freud did not intend to make the same mistakes.
On Tuesday, March 22, a few days after the Germans invaded Austria, the Gestapo came to Berggasse 19 and took Anna. They seemed persuaded that the International Psychoanalytical Association was a front for an antifascist political movement. Surely the person they most wanted to arrest and question was Freud. Anna told them that it was not possible for her father to leave the apartment building, because he was ill and too frail to manage the stairs. She was willing to go in his place and to answer any questions the Gestapo might have about the association. Before she left with them, Max Schur, Freud's personal physician, handed Anna some Veronal, a poison that would have allowed her to kill herself if the Nazis decided to torture her. Freud did not know about the Veronal, and if he did he would no doubt have been enraged at Schur. But mostly he was furious at the Nazis. All over Vienna, Jews were disappearing; some were being killed, many taken off to the concentration camp at Dachau.
No one now knows for certain what Anna said or did not say in her encounter with the Nazis. But she had observed her father well over the years, and he had provided her, just as he had provided himself, with something close to a perfect cover story to use in this kind of emergency. When the officers asked her if her father was political or subversive, or if any of his ideas might be an affront to the Reich, Anna had a whole grammar and vocabulary of response at her disposal. This language of exculpation was both radically misleading and absolutely true, for Freud had a way of talking about himself and his work that was designed for public consumption.
My father, Anna might have said, has always involved himself with science. He has labored for years in as close to laboratory conditions as he could find in order to draw valid conclusions about the dynamics of human behavior. He has tried to write up those conclusions in dispassionate, clear language. Some of the conclusions, to be sure, are provisional, but, as he himself has said many times, he is waiting for further developments in biochemistry to confirm, or perhaps to modify, what he has learned.
As to day-to-day politics, they hardly interest my father at all. He reads the newspaper as others do; he follows events. But he is far too old and he is far too sick to be a rabble-rousing Austrian nationalist. When the Great War came, in 1914, he dutifully sent his sons off to fight. He hoped for their safety and he hoped for the victory of Austria-Hungary and of its ally, Germany.
Granted my father is a Jew, as I, of course, am myself. But Papa's commitment to Judaism has never consisted of much more than going to the B'nai B'rith every couple of weeks and playing a spirited game of Tarock with other old men. He is not a Zionist, and he is no Jewish rebel. And as his writings will show you, should you chance to read them, he is anything but a Communist. True, my father will never deny his Jewish heritage. He is above all things an honest man. When he is healthy, he leads a regular life: breakfast and his patients; dinner, his walk, his beard trim, his paper, more patients; supper with the family, then work, work, late into the night.
My father has worked ceaselessly his whole life, and over time this work, which is, as I say, of an impeccably scientific nature, has won him many admirers and many friends, some of whom do not lack influence in the world. He is an aged, peaceful, and overall harmless man, but, with all respect due, one would not lightly disturb the tranquility of what are surely his final years.
At home, waiting for his daughter, Freud paced the floor and smoked. He did not speak; he was too distressed to utter a word; he knew that nothing he could possibly say there in the front room of Berggasse 19, with his family around him, could be any actual help. But surely during those bad hours, Freud thought a great deal. Anna was so much to him: Could he live in the world without her any longer than old Lear could after he lost Cordelia?
At Nazi headquarters, Anna was no doubt telling the most blandly respectable story she could about her father — but she might have been thinking other things as well. She might have been thinking more candidly about the bearing her father's work and character actually had on the Nazis, for that, in fact, was considerable.
My father, she might have thought, as the dull questions came and came again, knows you better than you know yourself. A string of books and essays proves as much: "On Narcissism," Group Psychology, Future of an Illusion, Totem and Taboo. For years he has been writing about the hunger for the leader — your Hitler, your half-monster, half-clown — and all the others who've come before and all who will come later in his image. He knows why you need the leader the way you do. He understands how the leader brings oneness to a psyche — and a state — at odds with itself. He knows how the inner life is divided — ego battling id, prohibition battling desire, in incessant civil war — and how painful that division can be. The great man shows the people how to indulge their worst and most forbidden desires — and then to congratulate themselves for doing so. Now in Germany and Austria it is no crime to persecute the Jews. This is no longer forbidden: Rather, it is patriotic; it is heroic. Under the leader, inner conflict relaxes, people become unified. All of their energies flow in the same direction: They become intoxicated; get high, and stay that way.
In a certain way, my father sympathizes with this need. He knows that the hunger for the leader is not alien or exceptional, but all too human. All of the fiery joy you felt when you saw your Führer ride in state through Vienna — the apotheosis of the will — my father understood. You are nothing new and wonderfully rebellious, as you imagine, but part of the endless recurrence of the same sad hunger for Truth, the Center, the Leader, and the Law. By understanding as much and making it plain for all who care to see it, my father is the one who has perhaps brought something into the world that is new.
But it might also have occurred to Anna that her father's knowledge about the dynamics of a certain sort of authority arose from his own attraction to it. He was no dictator, no brute — far from it. But surely he was in his way a Victorian patriarch. (Ask Jung — ask any of his former disciples — ask a woman, a daughter, who had been compared to a cigar.) Yet he was a patriarch like no other. He was a patriarch who lived and wrote, in that great string of books and essays on authority and its mysteries, to bring patriarchy to an end.
It's possible that there was some intervention on Anna's behalf. There may have been help from the American Embassy. Anna remembered a phone call that seemed to change the atmosphere. In all likelihood, though, it was Anna herself who worked her way out of the Nazi trap: More and more, the Nazis were coming to realize how little the world cared about what was happening in Austria, and how much they could do as they pleased. In significant matters. they were becoming ever freer to make up their own minds.
At home Freud paced up and down in his living room and, forgetting his doctors' injunction against smoking, pried his aching jaw open and inserted one cigar after another. He walked and walked, smoked and smoked. At noon he could not eat. He did not acknowledge anyone. There was no way for Freud to express all of the things that Anna — daughter, disciple, nurse, colleague, confidante — meant to him. When Anna finally walked in the door, early that evening, exhausted from her ordeal, the restrained Freud did something, we're told, that almost no one had ever seen him do. Sigmund Freud showed emotion. The great stoic may even have wept.

Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is author of The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days, published this month by Bloomsbury.