Avdat

A body that TSA screeners would love to pat down

In today's Times-Dispatch, Barton Hinkle tells the story of Aaron Tobey, arrested at the Richmond airport last December for disorderly conduct. When TSA staff directed him to enter one of those see-through screening machines, Tobey yanked his shirt off revealing the text of the fourth amendment penned across his bare chest. This act may or may not be illegal.

Let's set aside the security and civil liberties issues for a moment. It strikes me that both Tobey and his more famous partner in TSA resistance, John "Don't touch my junk" Tyner, are fairly young men and fairly touchy about being touched. Could there be a demographic or cultural issue lurking here?

Maybe. The issue would be Male Insecurity About Body Image.

Of course women have been made to feel insecure about their bodies for a long time. "Your boobs are too small; your hips are too wide; your butt is too big," are just some of the insults, spoken or implied by Barbie dolls, super models and jerk husbands and boyfriends.

But in these more egalitarian times, men too can be made to feel physically inadequate. Just read Men's Health, or it's soft-porn partner Maxim. Listen to the ads on sports talk radio, or play a video game. The not-so-subtle message that these media outlets pitch to young adult men is that even a healthy body will no longer do. You need a washboard stomach. Your chest needs to be large enough to merit its own zip code. Male pattern baldness is a capital offense.

Even the notoriously high young adult male sex drive isn't high enough. You've got to push it into the stratosphere. Here's a Cialis. Now chase it with a red bull and vodka. You need the stamina of a porn star because that's what the ladies expect, don't they?

Only a miniscule few are able to sculpt their bodies and jack up their libidos to meet the new and impossibly high standard. Which leaves the ones who accept the standard as gospel feeling woefully inadequate.

And I wonder if that's not behind some of the pat-down backlash. The bravado in the face of so-called "unreasonable searches and seizures," or "sexual assault" by TSA screeners may be over-compensation for massive insecurity about one's own body.

Young adult heterosexual males need their own version of the It Gets Better campaign. Call it, It Can Get Better: work out less; work at being a better person more; fall in love with someone who's committed to being a better person, and you know what? They won't love your body because it looks like it was chiseled out of granite. They'll love your body because it's yours. And that brings a security that makes the occasional indignities that the human body has to bear--like colonoscopies and airport pat-downs--a bit more bearable.

You can do this even if you never fall in love and mate for life. Seek truth and goodness, and beauty will take care of itself.

Finally, to return to the security and civil liberties issues, we do live in a world where people try to do bad things on airplanes like blow them up, hijack them, and/or crash them. It would appear as though we need security that's equal to the threat.

Now just what is that? I read here and there that a lot of what you experience in an airport is public relations. It's there to make you feel better. Leave it to the government to annoy people in an attempt to make them feel better.

Are see-through imaging machines and aggressive pat downs necessary? As to the latter, the Israelis have been doing it for some time now. Aside from my wife and my doctor, no one has touched me more intimately than a security guard at the Frankfurt, Germany airport before I boarded a flight to Tel Aviv. If I had objected, their attitude would have been, "Fine. If your junk is that precious, don't go to Israel!" And you know what? Terrorists don't do bad things to jets that fly in and out of Tel Aviv.

Long story short, I'd rather get felt up than blown up. Provided that feeling people up is a legitimate technique for keeping bad guys off of airplanes.

Middle East Peace

The most brilliant plan ever for Middle East peace ever comes from this guy commenting at Matt Yglesias' blog. Since most of the Jewish holy sites are on the "wrong side" of the Green Line, and Palestinians claim descent from people who lived by the Mediterranean Sea, he asks, Why can't Israelis and Palestinians just switch countries?

This is awesome. Palestinians get their right to return. Israelis get the Old City, Abraham's tomb and Jacob's Well.

Granted, the Israelis might be a little bit nervous about becoming a land-locked country surrounded by Arab states, but given their overwhelming advantage in nuclear weapons, I'm sure they could negotiate a corridor to a sea port/beach resort on very favorable terms. AND, it coheres with long-standing American policy, which the President reiterated last week, that a peace treaty needs to be negotiated on the basis of the 1967 borders with mutually-agreed upon swaps.

OK, I concede that that's a whole lotta land swappin'. But what's your plan for Middle East peace? How's it not any more DOA than this plan?

This "plan" may strike some as a bit glib and even snarky--too glib and snarky for what is one of the most tragic conflicts of our time. But when the situation is hopeless isn't a little gallows humor in order?

And things do seem hopeless. The President gave a speech last week that broke no new ground, and the Israeli Prime Minister and his minions in the right wing media threw a hissy fit. Today the PM spoke to Congress and denied that Jewish settlers in the West Bank are foreign occupiers. That line got a standing ovation.

I'm trying to imagine some alternative universe in which the Cherokee nation up and moved back to the North Carolina mountains, bulldozed the Biltmore Estate, built a subdivision on the property, and the Cherokee PM, in a speech to a joint session of Congress, denied that the Cherokees were foreign occupiers.

Nope. Can't imagine it.

The Cherokees' return to their ancestral homeland doesn't figure in anyone's end times scenario. I don't think they're even in the Book of Mormon. So Congress won't aid and abet them with violating international law.

Of course, the Palestinians need to make concessions. Hamas needs to bury their awful fantasy of destroying the Jewish state. Dude, Israel ain't going anywhere. They got skyscrapers and everything!

The problem is, what the current Israeli government wants the Palestinians to concede to is some kind of Indian reservation existence under permanent Israeli suzerainty. Actually, it's worse than that. American Indians get to vote for President. But Palestinians will never, ever have any political self-determination if the current Israeli government gets its way. So the Palestinians will never, ever agree to such odious terms which means that for all intents and purposes, the Israeli government stands for the status quo.

And the status quo is unsustainable.

Josh Marshall is right. Peace would be nice, but if Zionism has any future, the two sides have got to "get shed of each other" (as people I grew up with used to say), and pronto. But there is no willingness in the current Israeli government even to think about that, nor is there any willingness in the Congress of Israel's patron to exercise their substantial leverage toward that end.

Nevertheless, things are never hopeless. I grew up in the 70s and 80s when it seemed like the Berlin Wall had stood forever and would stand forever. But then it was gone. And in fact, the Wall wasn't even as old as I am now when it crumbled. So seemingly intractable situations can change.

And people of faith are never without hope. I have said before that much of this conflict is spiritual in nature. These two peoples have hurt each other and been hurt by each other so much that there's very little room in their hearts for even the minimal amount of trust that it takes to make a deal. Much less forgiveness and reconciliation. So as we pray for the peace of Jerusalem, we need to pray for a collective healing of old and deep wounds, so that the leaders on both sides have the spiritual space to make courageous decisions.

Hiroshima and its legacy

Today is the 65th anniversary of the atomic bomb blast over Hiroshima. We should make mention of this event and its legacy.

To be sure, if it weren't for the bomb I might not be here today to make note of its dropping. My dad was on an amphibious ship in the Philippines rehearsing invasion maneuvers when the war ended. The bomb excused him from having to face kamikaze attacks and murderous onshore shelling. He was happy to go home, for any reason.

But that's too nearsighted a view to assess Hiroshima.

(A brief tangent: the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek wrote a review of The Hurt Locker last spring castigating the film and others like it for blinding its viewers to the real horrors of war. That is, despite the movie's "realistic" portrayal of the violence and terror a grunt has to face while doing his daily job, its micro focus actually "serves to obfuscate the key point: the need for a ruthless analysis of what we are doing in our political-military activity and what is at stake." Thus The Hurt Locker, Žižek maintains, is just a gorier version of The Green Berets.)

Perhaps our view of war, warped by the lens of such movies, and by the inability to contemplate what tens of thousands of people killed in one, fell swoop looks like, leads us to privilege the micro history, and fail to take seriously the real issues.

What about the big picture?

Return of the one state solution?

Back when I read Counterpunch, I became a fan of a one state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It seemed the only way to honor the legitimate religious and historical claims of both parties to the land and its sacred sites.

But I soured on it because some of its advocates sounded frankly anti-Semitic. Plus, given the fact that peaceful and prosperous Canada and Belgium have nearly split recently along ethnic and linguistic lines, putting Israelis and Palestinians together in one, happy, multi-ethnic nation-state seemed like a pipe dream.

But I wonder if a two state solution is any more realistic. I think that there are something like 150,000 Israelis living in Jewish settlements in the West Bank. It took the TVA forty years to move only a third of that number for the lakes that they created. Moving that number of people seems like an impossible task, especially given the trauma Israelis experienced over evacuating the paltry sum of settlers from Gaza a few years ago.

Not to be trivial, but this stage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reminds me of season three of Battlestar Galactica. After the attacks and the failed experiment on New Caprica, each side has perpetrated so much evil on the other that reconciliation seems impossible. But given the fact that the  Cylon-Human offspring Hera lives, and that Baltar's sleeping his way through the female Cylon skin jobs, and that the mysterious final five may well be lurking in the fleet, each side's dream of getting shed of the other looks increasingly unlikely.

That's where Israelis and Palestinians are, locked in a death grip that neither party can disengage from. The Cylons and the humans managed to turn that death grip into an embrace. It's easy to do that with a TV show. But as hard as it would be to do in the real world of the Holy Land, it may be the only viable option.

Will the real Yoderians please stand up?

This Craig Carter post and the comments raises the question, If you're a pacifist, are your ethics for you or for everyone else? Some of comments insist that John Howard Yoder's pacifism, although it presupposes a churchly context, does not preclude Christians from strongly censuring state-sponsored violence, especially gratuitous or pre-emptive violence. Carter says that pacifism is not an ethic for nation-states, that commending non-violence to states is naive, and when free church people do so they forsake the Yoderian pacifism that rises out of their thick ecclesiology for the dread "liberal pacifism." The rejoinder is that Carter is not the Yoderian pacifist he claims to be, that he is advocating a two-kingdoms ethic that limits the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

Unfortunately the debate gets hashed out on the fraught terrain of Israel's security and its relationship with Gaza and Iran. Carter's politics are clearly neo-conservative, and I think his critics have the better of him when they point out that it's hard to get from Yoder to Israeli jets bombing Iran's nuclear facilities. But Carter's sidebar indicates that he's moving away from Yoder and really digging Augustine these days. I think it's questionable whether Augustine is a firm foundation for the kind of foreign and domestic policy today's Republican Party stands for, but whatever. It's his journey, not mine.

But I also wonder if a dual ethic for Church and State always amounts to placing the state beyond the reach of Christ's Lordship. We recently took up Church-State issues in my medieval church seminar, which gave me a chance to read a little bit of Bernard of Clairvaux's Treatise on Consideration, which sort of scrambled my categories regarding war and peace, and Church and State.

The setup: A century before Bernard, Peter Damian said that Church and State exist in a non-hierarchical, symbiotic relationship, and if each does their duty well, then each will preserve the other. Then along came Hildebrand, who asserted (in hysterical language) that the Church was morally superior to the State; therefore the Church is entitled to rule as a super-state in Christendom, even to the point of popes deposing kings.

Now Bernard also believed that the Church was morally superior to the State, but for that very reason the Church (read--the Clergy) ought not get involved in secular affairs. It's too sordid a business. But he was no Anabaptist, nor was he a two-kingdoms quietist. He thought that the Church ought to direct the State, but from a distance. Hands that wield the sword are not clean enough to be raised in prayer. But hands that wield the sword need someone to raise clean hands on their behalf, so that the sword executes justice and not tyranny.

It's a dual ethic that doesn't place the state beyond the reach of Christian ethics. But it does so by treating the violence endemic to statecraft not in ethical terms but in terms of holiness and purity. Soldiering or trying cases is like burying the dead or making leather goods was in ancient Israel--absolutely necessary, and defiling. A holy place, attended to by holy persons, is also absolutely necessary. So everybody does their respective job, and God preserves the society. Which gives you what is, from our vantage point, the utterly weird paradox of a man like Bernard, who'd no sooner be a soldier than be a prostitute, and yet who preached a crusade.

Of course this is unworkable for our contemporary context for all kinds of reasons. A major reason is that in a democracy everyone's a citizen, which means that everyone's a potential soldier. If everyone's a potential soldier, it's hard to think about the military in terms of a necessary but necessarily stigmatized social subgroup. The idea that some people need to renounce violence in order to perfect the practitioners of violence is kept alive, I suppose, in the military 's quaint requirement that chaplains not be armed, but nobody else is articulating that kind of non-violence.

So I don't really know why I'm bringing this up, except to say that a dual-ethic hasn't always meant giving the State a moral free pass, and that studying Church History continues to shuffle the theological deck of cards that the contemporary context has dealt me.

Where's the Palestinian Gandhi?

Gershom Gorenberg wonders. Some of the more fascinating paragraphs include:

So why not adopt the strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience, the methods of Gandhi? That question has been asked for years, by moderate Israelis and by Westerners with sympathy for both sides. It comes packed with assumptions. It implies that Israelis accept a civilian death toll like that in Gaza only when they believe it is the unavoidable price of self-defense. It presumes that Israel remains a society whose citizens would not long allow their government to use deadly force against masses of nonviolent demonstrators. And it suggests that if Palestinians succeeded in shedding the image of terrorists and appeared internationally as saints, they would succeed in bringing unbearable Western pressure against Israel.

But even if patronizing, the question remains valid: Sainthood can work. Britain abandoned India; Montgomery's buses were desegregated.

As an Israeli, to imagine [a Palestinian Gandhi or MLK] is disturbing for another reason: This is a fantasy of a political savior who comes from the adversary's side because one's own has no answers. Israeli politics has become a junkyard of broken ideologies. The outgoing government of Ehud Olmert succeeded neither in negotiating peace nor in bringing quiet to the Gazan border with military force. Meanwhile, settlement construction continued, deepening Israel's entanglement in the West Bank. In February's election, a majority of Israelis voted for parties that offered no expectation of an end to the conflict. We have failed to manufacture hope. Let the Palestinians do it.

And,

In a 1978 book, Tin Soldiers on Jerusalem Beach, Israeli psychologist Amia Lieblich described a young Israeli man in a group therapy session. He talks about a recurring dream of being with his parents, before his own birth, in their home in Poland, as German soldiers pound the door. "The knocking is the most frightening sound I have ever heard. You have to kick the door with your nailed boots and rap it with the butt of your gun to get the right blend. .  .  . When I was on a patrol searching for Arab terrorists in an Arab village, I was the one to knock like that on doors." In the dream, he says, "Outside the door I am a man .  .  . I have a rifle and lots of ammunition. I am with my unit, we are together. We are the victors," wearing Gestapo uniforms. He is horrified both by being strong and being the victim. If the whole country could have been put on the couch, it might have spoken like this.

It's well worth your time.

Gaza withdrawal

This is starting to look like some bizarre parody of the Iranians getting shed of the hostages just before Reagan took office.

The war in Gaza

I've been loathe to blog about the war in Gaza because, as I mentioned a day or so ago, if one waits to speak up against violence until after hostilities have commenced, one has waited too long. Not to mention my ignorance. I'd stopped paying attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so I'm not informed about what failed to happen during the recent lull that precipitated this new round of earnest fighting. But this press release from the International Crisis Group provides helpful background and reasonable recommendations for a way forward.

And I'm not really up for fighting the old battle against being labeled an anti-Semite just because one does not endorse Israeli military and foreign policy. But I will reiterate a few points I've made over the years:

• Anti-Semitism is a generalized prejudice against Jews as Jews. It cannot be equated with criticism of Israeli policy. If criticizing the Israeli government amounts to anti-Semitism, then the Hebrew prophets were raging anti-Semites. Not to mention a good number of Israeli Jews, since Israel is a democracy, and democracies have both ruling parties and opposition ones, and it falls to the opposition to, you know, oppose. To criticize.
• Supporting Israel does not mean supporting a neo-conservative vision of Israeli foreign policy that would reserve diplomacy for friends and exalt military force as the first and only resort for dealing with enemies. One ought to be able to have a practical debate about the limits of the efficacy of violence without being subjected to the charge of anti-Semitism. And, if the evidence shows that taking up arms in this instance in this way does not further Israel's long term interests, it would not be supportive of Israel to fail to say so.
• In debating this conflict, we would all do well not not lapse instantaneously into reaching for the most pungent historical metaphor. I'll admit to falling victim to this tendency a bit myself. Much better to stick rather close to the situation at hand, the righteousness of the tactics, the plausibility of the strategy, and the question, "What is the best way forward to peace between Israelis and Palestinians, since these folks are going to be neighbors for the indefinite future, whether each party likes it or not?"
• It goes without saying that indiscriminate attacks on civilians are war crimes, completely unjustifiable, and ought to be vigorously condemned by all civilized people everywhere.

Stuff

You are in a fix, Gentle Reader.  You've been snapping toys together all day; they don't work; the kids are bored stiff, and you're having to peel them off the wall. You're starting to wish that you could go into work tomorrow, but you've already taken it for vacation, and no way is your spouse going to let you get off that easy. No, your parents are coming tomorrow, and you will not be allowed to abandon the bone of your bone and flesh of your flesh to them.

You need a distraction, but the blogosphere is shut down.  Nothing's a-Twittering. Is there a better time for Yours Truly to come out of blogging hibernation?  I ask you.

So here's some random observations:

• You've gotta admire President Bush's cat-like reflexes when that reporter threw a shoe at him. I know that boxing is a sport in the NC Senior Games. Texas too? I think we've found an avocation for the soon-to-be ex-President. The Secret Service might have misgivings, but I think if you put the man in the ring it'd be hard to land a punch on him.
• I didn't go to church last night, and I don't feel a bit guilty about it. At that Casual Dining Chain You've Probably Eaten At Before where I wait tables I closed Tuesday and opened Christmas Eve. And Mrs. Avdat waited up for me Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.  We were beat. And seeing's how I've not only attended but led 14 Christmas Eve services in a row, I felt not the slightest sense of slacking off.
• I'm enjoying being a lay person. Sundays are completely different. Worship is worshipful. In some part this is due to our autistic son being in a good place right now, able to endure everything but the sermon, during which we excuse ourselves and wander about the church for a while. Certainly it has a lot to do with sitting with my family, actually praying instead of leading the congregation in prayer, actually listening for God's Word rather than proclaiming it, and so forth. My afternoon naps are pleasant, not at all like the near-drowning-in-my-own-drool sleep brought on by post-sermonic regret, and exhaustion.
• Why am I so relaxed? I think that, in part, it's due to the fact that this is what I'm supposed to be doing. If you aren't doing what you're supposed to be doing, life is hard, even if you're tolerably good at what you're doing, and well-compensated for it.
• In part, it's due to the fact that being a pastor is an extremely stressful undertaking. 46 Sundays per year (4 off for vacation, 2 for ConEd) for 14 years makes at least 644 opportunities for deciding whether to please God or please man. Odysseus only had to sail between the Scylla and the Charybdis once. Ministers have to thread that needle week after week after week. It's a terrible burden, the true weight of which I'm only now aware of having borne for so long. And there are men and women out there who have borne it much longer and continue to do so.
• Here's an interesting plea for outside intervention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The nature of the corner that the Israelis have painted themselves into is a choice between a perpetual low-grade war against the Palestinians under their authority and civil war within the Jewish state. Barring the sudden emergence of a Lincoln or Sadat on the Israeli political scene, it will take significant American and international pressure on the Israelis to do the right thing for the wrong reason, i.e., not so that the sons of Abraham and Ishmael can live together in perfect harmony, but because the Israeli economy cannot stand the inevitable black eye of having to put down another active intifada.
• A lousy idea to boost the economy: a national sales tax holiday. I've already blogged about the strange allure of what amounts to a 6-8% off sale, although I can't seem to find the link to it. Given that we're in this jam in part because we've been riding a paper profit/conspicuous consumption feedback loop, you'd think that we need a better plan than "Buy stuff you don't need with money you don't have."
• Isn't it great that John McCain isn't going to be President? Can you imagine tacking this economy with a freeze on discretionary spending and a new round of tax cuts for the masters of the universe who threw sand into the gears of the global financial system?

P.S. I have nothing to say about the Rick Warren flap because I never can think of anything substantive to say about symbolic issues.

Psychotherapy by proxy

I can't get Gershom Gorenberg's book on the birth of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza off my mind.  My review is here.  In short, the settlements weren't the result of any government policy.  They happened in the absence of a government policy as politicians, bureaucrats, military officers and citizens acted in an ad hoc manner to colonize the Occupied Territories.  Eventually there was a showdown between the government and the burgeoning settler movement, and the government blinked.

It can be read as a damning indictment of Israeli political cowardice.  But for me it increased my sympathy for the impossible situation Israel finds itself in 41 years after the Six Day War.  Like the Labor governments of Levi Eschol, Golda Meir and Yitzak Rabin, I would rather let things ride, avoid conflict whenever possible, and postpone hard decisions until the last possible minute.  I can see so many sides of an issue that I become paralyzed by its multifaceted allure.  I didn't expect that a work of contemporary Middle Eastern history would become a tool for my own personal self-assessment, but it did.