Just a Game

Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we love basketball. We love to play it, and we love to watch other people play it, on TV or in a gymnasium. High school kids, toddlers with a four foot Fisher-Price basket, or the NBA; it doesn’t matter. We love all basketball.

Some people say that basketball as it is played today is too aggressive, too focused on defense, and not focused enough on the art of shooting. But there are just as many people for whom slow, defensive play in basketball is the only moral way of doing things. We at the Blasphemy Blog ask, Why must we make this choice? Why would we want to play only one kind of basketball? They are all beautiful. The important thing is to play basketball if you love basketball, and let everyone else love basketball in their own way.

Basketball is the favorite sport of many different kinds of people, but not the favorite sport of any nation. Both in Atlanta and in Adams County, Indiana, people play it as if there were nothing else to play, but basketball is not the national pastime of the United States and never will be. In Athens, basketball fans fill smoke-filled gyms and beat on bass drums to support their teams, but in Greece at large, as in the rest of Europe, the national pastime is still soccer. Australia produces probably more good basketball players per capita than any other country on earth except the U.S. and Serbia, but no Australian team could draw a tenth as many fans as the Rugby Union Wallabies when the Tri-Nations cup is on the line. Basketball belongs to people, not countries.

Basketball is hard on the knees; all the stopping and swiveling you have to do inevitably does a number on your cartilage. Professional basketball players often get their noses broken, or dislocate their shoulders. And yet, even Manute Bol, one of the most fragile and improbable NBA players ever, still plays in charity games, a laughing forty-something-year-old seven-foot-nine man jacking up three-pointers and shuffling down the court. Basketball hurts, but even when your knees go, you can still take a few shots.

Hemingway was famous for saying that most sports are a hopeless abstraction, because they inevitably involve nothing more than a meaningless action and a ball. The exceptions were auto racing and mountain climbing and boxing. Probably bullfighting, too. Basically, the things you can die at. Hemingway probably did not like basketball. It is very meaningless to run up and down the court again and again, shooting the ball in the basket again and again, and missing half the time. Moreover, basketball’s action is even more meaningless than the action of other sports; in soccer and baseball and hockey and football, scoring points is rarer, and more special. In basketball, if you miss a chance at a shot, you’ll likely get another within a minute’s time, unless the clock runs out. But there will be another game tomorrow, and more chances to take shots at the basket. Basketball is emphatically a game, and is never a matter of life and death.

That is why we love it.

A Suggestion

If the Southern Baptist Convention would like to make it clear that it, as a body, loves sinners even though it hates sin, it should vote against any resolution that might seem to condone the beating-up of gay people. Some members of the SBC are opposed to school anti-bullying programs because such programs work against the condemnation of gays.

We at the Blasphemy Blog do not expect the Southern Baptist Convention, which of course is very big on defined gender roles, to stop condemning homosexuality. But, there is a line here, and the line is the line between hateful speech and hateful action. If the SBC chooses to criticize anti-bullying education in schools on the grounds that it is part of some gay agenda, it's going to seem like the organization wants to make sure bullying is a tool available for those who wish to fight said gay agenda.

We know for a fact that there are many Southern Baptists who have no real problem with their gay neighbors. We also know that there are many Southern Baptists who do have a problem with their gay neighbors, but who consider it up to those same neighbors to answer to God for their proscribed homosexual behavior. These Southern Baptists could do a lot of good by pushing the SBC to say, unequivocally, that bullying is wrong.

Presumably, the ministers offering this resolution don't mean that they would actually approve of gay kids getting beaten up. That would be completely unChristian. Presumably, the ministers object to the collateral implication, in anti-bullying education, that homosexuality is legitimate and normal. All it would take for the anti-bullying education to be okay in the ministers' books, in other words, would be for the programs to teach that, even though gay people are deviant sinners, it's still wrong to beat them up.

So, why don't they just say that, instead of roundly condemning all attempts to prevent bullying? Are we missing something? It's not like the SBC actually thinks bullying is a good idea, is it?

Right?

Unsurprising News of the Day

The new pope does not like the rock and roll.

For God's Sake

Oh, no. This isn’t funny at all.

We try at the Blasphemy Blog to be funny even when discussing serious things, but we’re at an end of our ability to be funny. We are aghast. On the news they’re talking about Senate rules, which are important, but they should be talking about the fact that American soldiers are beating innocent people to death. This is very important.

We are so tired of this. It happened in Iraq, it happened in Cuba, and now it is clear that it happened in Afghanistan. Maybe this is some kind of multi-continental conspiracy to make America look bad in the eyes of the world. But we just don’t think that’s the case. We believe that employees of the United States military, representatives of our nation, did beat a man until his legs could not bend, did then chain him to the ceiling, and did leave him there until he died. We believe this for two reasons.

First, the evidence is sworn testimony of other soldiers who were present at the time. We don’t think that soldiers would lie under oath about other soldiers in this way.

Second, we know that this is the sort of thing that happens when people are in prison. Prisoner abuse by prison guards is common everywhere in the world. This is because prisoners are considered the lowest of the low and rarely have anyone to advocate for them, and often don’t have anyone who even cares what happens to them. Also, being a prison guard is a stressful, low-paying, unrewarding job with little prestige. When you give people who are under stress absolute control over people no one cares about, this is the sort of thing that happens. The solution is to instill discipline in the guards, and to make basic human decency toward even the lowest in society a fundamental goal.

We, as a nation, have not done this in our military prisons. We’ve got to turn this around. Nothing less than our national soul is at stake.

Destiny of Vengeance

On the National Mall today, we saw a panhandler holding a cardboard sign that read:

"Family killed by ninjas. Need money for kung fu lessons."

We thought that this was incongruous, because (we thought) ninjas are Japanese and kung fu is Chinese. Wouldn't it be better for him to learn the Japanese art of karate, the better to counter the karate of the deadly Japanese ninjas? However, a little research revealed that, historically, there were a few Chinese ninjas as well. But still, the odds are that the ninjas who killed this panhandler's family were Japanese. So why would he learn kung fu, unless he was sure that these ninjas were some of the few Chinese ninjas?

But then it occurred to us that we probably don't know squat about the ninja situation on the ground right now. After all, this guy is having to deal with the ninjas of today, not the ninjas of history. In the current geopolitical climate, what with globalization and all, who's to say what country ninjas are going to come from, and what martial art can best be used to defeat them? This is America, where we're free to choose our own destiny. Personally, we would sue for wrongful death, but that's just us.

What She Said

Molly Ivins on government torture:

"What are you going to do about this? It's your country, your money, your government. You own this country, you run it, you are the board of directors. They are doing this in your name. The people we elected to public office do what you want them to. Perhaps you should get in touch with them."

Don't blame us at the Blasphemy Blog, for we voted for John Kerry. This is what we would like to be able to say. Unfortunately, we know that this sort of thing would continue to happen no matter who was elected president. John Kerry, great president though we think he would be, would not have put an end to torture practiced by government entities.

Torture is part of the work of the upstanding American lawman.

This is because most Americans are fairly comfortable with torture in the abstract, if it is used on the bad guys as a way of learning the secret location of the bomb terrorists are going to use to destroy Los Angeles. This last scenario has been ably demonstrated in the fine police documentaries Face/Off and 24.

Wait a second…Face/Off was a movie featuring Nicolas Cage and 24 is a TV show! Those are works of fiction! Well, surely we can come up with a non-fictional example of torture revealing information that saved many lives…hmmm…well, we’ll keep working on it.

We at the Blasphemy Blog readily admit that we were on President Palmer’s side when he ordered his evil corporate drone secretary of defense tortured in order to learn where the bomb was located. But our point is that, it is not right for us to feel that way. That way of thinking is perverse and wrong, and we should work against it. We shouldn’t give in to it.

And we should demand that our elected representatives behave the same way. Cue Molly Ivins. She’s right. Our government is us. We’ve got to start making it act like ourselves again.

Free Poetry

These days, you can't give poetry away. But we are going to try anyway. Check out a new project of the Blasphemy Blog: Poetry for Free.

Sacred Texts and Psychological Warfare

Who would be stupid enough to think that flushing a Koran down the toilet was a good idea?

We don’t know and you don’t know if the interrogators of Camp X-ray actually put a Koran in the toilet as a way eliciting…something (compliance? information?)…from the prisoners there. All we do know is that, thanks to the Abu Ghraib fiasco, it seems like something they would do down there, and that’s going to be good enough to keep the demonstrations going for a few weeks.

But we might be able to make some headway in addressing why such a thing might happen.

Torture as an interrogation technique sometimes takes a physical form, like the way Franco’s secret police used to flog people on the bottoms of their feet, and sometimes takes psychological form, like this alleged flushing of the holy book. It’s easy to see why you’d think that the flogging would make a reluctant detainee talk, but there are significant questions about how flushing the Koran achieves any purpose.

What would the interrogators hope to gain through such an act? Presumably the idea would be to get someone to talk with the promise that if they did talk, the Koran would no longer be so abused. The prisoner would be so eager to protect the Koran from further abuse that he would start to talk.

We at the Blasphemy Blog have a hard time believing that anyone, no matter how devout, would respond to such torture. How deep is any attachment to a document, however holy? Frankly, we suspect that just about any human being would be glad in such a situation that his interrogators were taking it out on pieces of paper, and not him. It’s not that we think it wouldn’t be painful for a Muslim to witness the flushing of the Koran; it’s just that, when compared to physical torture, we think it would be easier to get over. Assuming that these were not valuable antique copies of the Koran, well…our feeling would be, Go ahead, Mr. Interrogator! Throw it in the toilet! I can buy another at Barnes & Noble, not to mention that I have most of it memorized!

If confronted, God forbid, with a similar situation, that is how we at the Blasphemy Blog would feel about the writings we hold dear, such as the Bible, the Bill of Rights, and Daredevil: Born Again. We like having a copy of each on hand, but we’ll endure their destruction with the knowledge that the memory of having read them cannot be erased from our minds.

It seems plausible that the people marching against the desecration of the Koran feel differently (though we at the Blasphemy Blog tend to believe that this is much more a case of religious clerics whipping up anti-American sentiment for political gain). But we’re not talking about them. We’re talking about a detained person, whose primary concern is life and limb. Does such an unfortunate, terrified person really care about a book?

What we are getting at here is the following point: we don’t think it would work. We don’t think putting the Koran in the toilet would cause anyone to reveal secret terrorist information. Especially not if beatings have already been tried.

What’s more, we think the interrogators at Guantanomo knew this. We think they did it, if they did it, because they were frustrated, malicious, or bored. Or possibly all three.

The question is: which would be worse? If they did it as part of a strategy? Or if it happened spontaneously?

That’s another one of those questions that turns the stomach to contemplate.

Here's Hoping

During the American Civil War, it was not uncommon for a whole town’s worth of young men to disappear on the battlefield. This happened because regiments were made up of volunteers from the same city; there was a regiment from Flint, Michigan, that was commanded by Flint’s mayor and whose health was looked after by the town doctor. This was good for morale and cohesion, but led to problems when the regiment, or a company of the regiment, got into a tight spot on a battlefield, and then word would reach home that there simply were no more young men left in certain small towns.

This historical memory came to mind yesterday with reports that a squad made up of Marine reservists from central Ohio has now suffered 100% casualties in the Iraq war. This Marine squad of fourteen soldiers spent last weekend fighting some insurgents holed up in a house in a town called Ubaydi. Then, on Wednesday, the squad’s armored humvee ran hit an improvised explosive device, and that was it. Four dead, ten wounded seriously enough to be evacuated. The squad, in the words of embedded Washington Post reporter Ellen Knickmeyer, simply “ceased to be.”

We’re still a long way from Civil War-level casualties in this war, at least when it comes to American soldiers, but there is something disturbing about the fact that the Marine Corps now has to reorganize because a squad has “ceased to be.” According to the New York Daily News, blue-uniformed Marine officers are fanning out today across central Ohio, to tell family members what has happened.

Today, incidentally, is also the anniversary of the death of the last American soldier in the Civil War. John Jefferson Williams of Portland, Indiana, died on May 13, 1865, in Palmito Ranch, Texas. This was after Appomattox, when the only Confederates still fighting were holdouts in places like Texas. Of course, some argue that the Civil War actually lasted into the twentieth century, and that the Confederates simply became the insurgents of the Ku Klux Klan that terrorized the South for generations.

This is all just to say that it’s not always easy to tell when a war ends, because the death that follows in the wake of a war is often indistinguishable from the death caused by the war itself. For this reason, it’s probably best not to say when a war is over. Really, the only thing to do is hope that no one else dies.

The Unfriendly Skies

We at the Blasphemy Blog don’t know about you, but we would prefer it if airplane pilots kept their pensions. When we put our lives in someone else’s hands, we want that person to be someone with a stake in the future, preferably a good stake. Unfortunately, these days it seems like employees of airlines in the United States are just about the most oppressed and depressed workers out there, next to those poor souls toiling at Wal-Mart. Yesterday, United Airlines revealed to the world that it is going to try to get out of its current financial funk by not paying its workers’ pensions. The government is going to pay some, but not all, of the money.

Now, United Airlines and most of the other major carriers have had a rough few years. We understand that. But the truth of the matter is that the people in charge of these corporations have been stealing money from their own workers. Really. Stealing.

How do they do this? Well, it’s nothing more than accounting fraud, like Enron. The companies just overstate what they think their profits are going to be, and earmark those profits to go into the pension fund. Then, when the profits fail to materialize, they just shrug and say, “Hey, what can you do? We had a bad year.”

You’d think the unions would be able to stop this, by pointing out that the whole point of a pension is that it’s guaranteed money for workers to count on, and threatening to strike if the pension is not guaranteed. You’d think. But unions are weak these days. We’re not quite at the point where Andrew Carnegie can just lock his factory and go on vacation, leaving his striking workers to stew in their grievances, but we’re getting there.

Oh, and incidentally, the court that is allowing United Airlines to do this is a United States Bankruptcy Court. This would be the Court that is now harder for regular people to enter, thanks to the reforms recently enacted by Congress. So, if any of these airline pilots have been counting on their pension money to pay for some surgery they’ve been putting off, and paying for it out of other funds drives them into dire financial straits, it’s going to be harder for them to declare bankruptcy. But to the airlines, the Courts say, "Go ahead. Make the taxpayers pay the pensions. It'll be less money, but what's a few billion dollars between friends?"

All we’re saying is, we’d rather be flying with happier pilots than those guys.

Everyday Life

We at the Blasphemy Blog have just come back from lunch at the White House, and it was an exciting event. All right, we were just sitting at the chess tables in the park in front of the White House, but it was still exciting, because we got evacuated.

Halfway through the lunch, security personnel with guns began sweeping the park, telling everyone to leave, and many, many reporters began streaming out of the White House grounds and across the street with us.

But it turns out to have been no big deal. It was just a small plane accidentally flying into the No-Fly Zone around the District of Columbia. They let us back in after less than ten minutes.

Such is life in our nation’s capital, where this sort of thing happens fairly regularly. Everyone takes it seriously when it happens, but it can no longer be considered anything less than routine. The old woman who sleeps in front of the White House next to her anti-nuclear weapons display now just has a bicycle so she can ride away quickly if she ever has to. Everyone in the nation’s capital is like that woman: going about their business, with only minor alterations.

It makes sense that it should be this way. After all, the markets are open in Baghdad, and Somalia has a thriving telecommunications industry. Foreign companies line up to do business in the Sudan, of all places. There are grave risks, but people calculate the risk, and they move on. Who can really say, in this day and age, whether Mogadishu is safer than the District of Columbia? In some ways, it probably is, in other ways, it isn’t.

This is all just to say that we’re glad it was nothing. We’re glad it was just some pilot with a broken radio. We wish that everyone everywhere could have the relief of knowing it was just a pilot with a broken radio. We want all life everywhere to go on for reasons other than that it apparently has no other choice.

The Abyss Gazes Also

Three years ago, the Blasphemy Blog was in the same room as Franklin Miller, who at the time worked for the National Security Council. His job portfolio included nuclear weapons, and he was in the room to discuss the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator. The United States doesn’t generally build and test new nuclear weapons these days, but some people, including Mr. Miller, thought this “bunker buster” bomb would be a good idea, because it could blow up Osama bin Laden’s bunker even if he were really, really far down underground.

Mr. Miller was big on deterrence theory, which argues for maintenance of strategic influence by, to quote him more or less directly, “holding at risk that which the enemy values.” In Mr. Miller’s eyes, the power of the United States came not from Chairman Mao’s barrel of a gun, but from the threat and the idea of the gun. Mr. Miller argued that the fact that we threatened to use, but did not use, our nuclear weapons made the United States a more moral country than our adversaries, who would certainly use nuclear weapons on us if they had the chance.

This line of reasoning, if you accept that the United States is basically good and that its adversaries are evil, works. But it works only to a point. This is because a threat to use force must be backed by the genuine belief in the minds of one’s adversaries that force will be used. Therefore, deterrence can only be moral to a point.

In order for deterrence to be effective, we have to convince our enemies that we’re just crazy enough to drop the big one. But the only way to convince people we are violent is to be violent. If all we do is talk about being violent, our enemies assume that we don’t really mean it. In order to convince our enemies that we are not really as good as we are, we have to actually not be as good as we are.

This is the unfortunate thing about violence: it uses our best intentions to propagate itself. Do we use it with the best of intentions? Of course we do. But violence, like a virus, uses us as well. It takes on a life of its own. And its intentions are far from noble.

Step One

Today seems as good a day as any to answer the big pacifist Hitler question. If you’re not a pacifist, you may not have been asked this question, but every pacifist knows what we’re talking about: upon learning a person’s pacifistic inclinations, people ask, “But what about Hitler?” What they mean by this is, sure, you don’t want to go to war generally, but don’t you have to, sometimes? Didn’t we all have to go to war to prevent the great evil of Hitler and fascism from remaining in the world?

There are several good pacifist responses to this question.

One World War II conscientious objector said, when asked why he wouldn’t go to war to defeat Hitler’s evil, “If you give me a shot at him, I’ll take it.” But the objector said he did not care to kill other soldiers, who were just pawns of their government.

This argument is flawed, though; looking to the actions of Germans during World War II, we see many common soldiers and citizens participating in war crimes and outright genocide. Hitler did not pull all the levers himself. Therefore, wouldn’t it be morally acceptable to go to war against these people, to stop them from doing this great evil? If it’s all right to shoot Hitler to stop the killing, it’s all right to shoot the police battalion before they can massacre innocent townspeople, too.

A slightly better pacifist argument is to dodge the question by saying, well, it’s not fair to ask us for a solution to Hitler beyond going to war. Hitler was caused by war. His ideology was born out of the humiliation of his country’s military defeat in World War I, and the less-than-conciliatory approach the Allies took in imposing terms on Germany that crippled it economically and wounded its national pride. To have done all that, and then, when Hitler comes to power, to turn to the pacifist and say, “Well? What else can we do?” is a bit like asking your passenger for guidance after you’ve already driven the car off the cliff.

This is closer to the truth, but it’s also nothing more than being able to say, “I told you so.” Surely, we can do better than that.

The answer to the question of how you deal with one murderous dictator is, oddly enough, another murderous dictator. That is, the answer to Hitler is Stalin. We fought that war, which put an end to the systematic killing of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and political dissidents. In that war, our ally was Josef Stalin, who, until he died in 1953, continued his policies of systematically killing…well, anyone he cared to.

But, if they were both evil, wasn’t Stalinism at least a little bit less evil than Nazism? Isn’t that the necessary realist triage of diplomacy and war, taking the lesser of two evils?

We at the Blasphemy Blog consider it a waste of time to debate whether Stalin or Hitler was worse, because such a comparison invites questions no one is capable of answering. Which would you rather be, a Jew in Nazi Germany, or a kulak living under Stalin? Would you rather face the “final solution” or “liquidation as a class?” At some point, evil reaches a critical mass beyond which any added evil makes no difference. We would argue that Stalin and Hitler were both way, way over that line.

All of this, anyway, is beside the point. We defeated Hitler, after he’d already killed millions. Defeating Hitler cost the lives of millions. Then, we didn’t war directly against the Soviet Union, because the specter of nuclear weapons made us hesitate in order to save the lives of millions. So, we didn’t defeat Stalin, and he went on to kill millions.

So there doesn’t seem to be an easy way that the deaths of millions of people in the twentieth century could have been prevented. It seems like, no matter how we tried to do it, millions of people ended up dying. Faced with this dilemma, the pacifist simply decides not to go for a ride in the car along the side of a cliff. The pacifist decides not to kill anyone, ever, just to be on the safe side.

The pacifist offers only a personal solution to the problem of war’s uncertain effects. This is why pacifism is so unsatisfying. The pacifist does not try to save the world; the pacifist tries not to hurt the world. The righteous warrior asks, How can I eliminate the evil of Stalin? and resolves to kill Stalin. The pacifist asks, How can I eliminate the evil of Stalin? and resolves not to be like Stalin.

For the pacifist, that step, not being like Hitler or Stalin, is step one. It is a difficult step. But we want to take it before we take step two, because we know that Stalin and Hitler missed a few steps along the way, and we don’t want to follow their path even a little bit. A pacifist, a wise man once told the Blasphemy Blog, is not a person who is incapable of violence. A pacifist is someone who knows exactly how much violence he or she is capable of.

Science (Fiction) Friday

Time travel is possible. All you have to do is go out in a spaceship, travel near the speed of light for a while, and then come back to earth. Thanks to the theory of relativity, lots more time will have passed for earth than will have passed for you. How does this work? You’re asking the wrong blog. But the point is, scientists have conceived of time travel as possible.

Of course, this is time travel in only one direction, that is, into the future. No one has figured out how you would go back in time yet. It has been imagined, but not conceived. Nevertheless, it might happen someday, which is why some students at MIT have gotten together and planned the first, and only, Time Traveler Convention. That’s right, there will never be a second Time Traveler Convention. Why should there be? If you’re capable of traveling back in time, there’s literally no way you can miss the first one.

Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we love this idea. We love science fiction, and, in our opinion, time travel is the greatest of all science-fictionary themes.

Why? Well, consider the Time Traveler Convention. Assume that, sometime in the future, someone has invented a time machine. They know about the Convention, even though it happened way back in the early 21st Century, so they decide to go. What happens when they arrive in Cambridge, Massachusetts? Well, one possibility is that the traveler can literally never go home again. If, after enjoying some 21st Century party food, the traveler jumps back in the time machine to go back to the future, the future will no longer be the future they originally came from. This is because, by traveling back in time, they made a new future. Because, when the original history books of the future were written, there was no time traveler in Cambridge in 2005. But now, thanks to the traveler’s meddling, there is. The two timelines might be very like each other, but they would still not be the same.

Unless, of course, there is no such thing as an alternate timeline, and the whole record of the past and the present and the future is already written. In that case, the time traveler’s whole life has taken place in a world that contains the record of them having traveled back through time. If that’s the case, it means that the time traveler has grown up knowing that they were going to invent, or at least participate in, time travel. After all, since they already did it, there can be no doubt. How odd that must be, for our friend the time traveler, to go through life knowing that they were destined to travel to Cambridge 2005, because they already did it. Talk about predestination. I bet it makes it hard to study for a math test…I mean, since I already know I’m going to be one of the greatest scientists of all time, do I really need to learn this stuff?

Another possibility is that time is too fragile to handle being folded back on itself, and if anyone travels back in time to go to this convention, reality will collapse under the weight of contradiction. If this is the case, a party in Cambridge, Massachusetts is going to be the focal point for the destruction of reality. (It turns out the Republicans were right all along.)

The first possibility, the multiple timeline possibility, was the one they used in the movie “Back to the Future.” While we love that movie, we prefer the second possibility as a fictional starting point. The idea that someone would grow up knowing their eventual fate strikes us as timeless and weighty. The third possibility, that is, complete disaster, is not without its charms, either. Maybe we can figure out a fourth possibility, if we work on it a while.

You either love this speculation, or it makes your brain hurt. For us here at the Blasphemy Blog, thinking about it is like listening to “Louie, Louie” for the first time…that is, a transcendent experience of the universe in its most basic, beautiful form. Like those three chords, played over and over again, the contemplation of time travel is so useless that it has to be meaningful.

We wish we could be in Cambridge on Saturday. In fact, hopefully, we’re already there.

The Source of Infinite Small Hatreds

When the naked Iraqi man in the hood was having the leash fastened around his neck to be led around by a tiny 20-year-old American woman, what was he thinking? Did he repent and pray to God for forgiveness for whatever crime he had committed? Did he consider himself lucky, knowing that some prisoners at Abu Ghraib did not survive their interrogations? Or did his chest swell with the fear that grows into hate? Did he vow revenge?

We’ll never know. Though his picture has been in newspapers the world over, he remains anonymous. The young woman holding the leash, though, we know her. Lynndie England tried this week to plead guilty to torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib, but the judge, a Colonel Pohl, would not let her do it. He threw out her plea because her lawyers were introducing evidence that seemed to argue she didn’t know right from wrong, because she had a “compliant personality” and was born a “blue baby.” This is the kind of mitigation evidence you would introduce at the sentencing phase in a civilian trial, but Lynndie England’s trial is military. The military justice approach to guilt is different; if you’re guilty, it’s because you did wrong. If you’re not, you didn’t. No middle ground for the psychology. It’s a harsh system, which is probably why the Pentagon wants to use it on terrorists.

Seven months ago, Lynndie England gave birth to a child whose father was her commanding officer at Abu Ghraib. She is now twenty-two years old. Before she went to Iraq, she worked at a Domino’s Pizza. She’s from rural West Virginia, and she looks like she’s from there, too. She is now an unwed mother, and she’s almost certainly going to be dishonorably discharged from the military, whether or not she does any prison time. That dishonorable discharge will affect her ability to get a job. The odds are that she’s going to end up a welfare mother. On top of all this, she now has the kind of notoriety you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy. And she’s going to be back on trial soon.

Lock her up, we say. She’s no victim. When your lover hands you a leash that’s attached to a naked man’s neck, you should know better than to take it, especially if your lover also has a camera. Torturing another human being is a crime. Getting caught on film committing torture just makes you a stupid criminal.

But we do feel some sympathy…it seems odd to call her a criminal; shouldn’t she at least be a “war” criminal? I mean, she was under combat conditions and ended up going over the line, right?

No, that’s not what the government is saying. The official position is that a bunch of unsupervised underlings got out of hand at Abu Ghraib, and the nasty actions captured on film were the result. No war crimes, just adolescent tomfoolery that rises to the level of criminal offenses because people died and because there were pictures. The Army has investigated itself and has determined that, regrettably, it hired some bad people.

Which brings us back to the man with the leash around his neck. If he still lives, what does he think now? Will he forgive us now that we’ve locked up some uncouth but unrepresentative prison guards?

The answer to that, of course, is that we don’t care what he thinks. If we did, more generals and defense department officials would have to resign. In corporate America, if the stock tanks, you fire the CEO. It doesn’t matter if the loss was his fault or not; you need the stockholders to know that you care what they think, and that you’re going to try to do better. So you fire the guy who was in charge when the stock tanked.

But we just reelected the guy who was in charge, because the man with the leash around his neck holds only the tiniest share of stock in America. If he had more than a tiny share, we’d want to reassure him that we’re moving in a different direction. If he had more than a tiny share, we’d want to make sure he kept his investment with us. But his share is too small for us to notice. We’ve got larger concerns than his dignity. Let’s hope he has larger concerns than his revenge.

Small Wonder

We at the Blasphemy Blog are officially excited about nanotechnology. It’s absolutely fascinating to us that, right now, scientists are working on building machines that can push around atoms. How incredibly cool is it going to be when nanotechnology starts to work for real? One scientist recently wrote that nanotechnology is going to cure cancer and end our worries about fossil fuel shortages, and these accomplishments are going to seem minor compared to the other things nanotechnology is going to accomplish. This is probably hyperbole, but it’s working on us.

If any of this actually happens, it’s going to seem like magic, like literal alchemy. Humanity has been manufacturing things for a long time, but “things” are made up of molecules, and we don’t alter those. We fold and cut atoms in huge clumps even in the course of such an incredible transformation as turning an oak tree into a cello. At a molecular level, the tree and the cello look exactly alike. But what if we can get little machines to unwrap those carbon rings and make new shapes out of them? Then you could turn an oak tree into new skin for a burn victim, or a Britney Spears record. It’s all just carbon, after all.

By sending tiny machines inside our cells, we’re going to be able to fight cancer without chemo. We’re going to make computers infinitely faster by creating computer chips that are carved with tinier and tinier little memory groovies. And the factories that produce these machines are going to sit on people’s desks.

These things are also going to be dangerous, as everyone who has ever seen a science fiction movie about nanotechnology knows. But, assuming we don’t use these things to annihilate ourselves, it’s going to be exciting to see.

In addition to initiating a new age of technological wonders, nanotechnology is going to make a lot of people rich. Unfortunately, if you want to make money off of it, you’re going to have to move. That’s because the United States, which has been a leading innovator on cutting-edge science issues since, well, 1776, is not out front when it comes to nanotechnology. The government now invests far, far less than Europe or Japan on technological innovation. According to some reports, it’s no longer a question of whether we can catch up, because we can’t. This ship has sailed. No one knows where the breakthrough is going to happen, but it’s going to be in someplace like Seoul or Helsinki, not the south side of Chicago.

The object lesson here comes from history: we must remember that America was rich before it was powerful. We became rich because there was this huge country here with seemingly infinite resources, so we exploited those resources, got rich, and bought ourselves the most powerful military the world has ever seen. But you only have to look at our old adversaries in Moscow to see what happens to powerful armies after a wealthy phase of a nation passes.

I don’t think it’s a foregone tomorrow, but wealthy phases of nations come from innovations and risks. It’s the nature of great empires, like ours, to become conservative and stop taking innovative risks. Then, when the next big thing comes, the empires lose out. That’s what happened to the empire of Haroun al-Rashid. His empire had once gathered the greatest minds of the world together, in the sciences and the arts, too, and they inaugurated a true age of wonders in a rich country that was known the world over as the best place to be on earth. The capital of that empire, of course, was a place called Baghdad.

So you have to wonder: when the histories are written, what American city will they call our Baghdad?

The Unknowable Power of Prayer

What is the power of prayer? It doesn’t seem like it works to use prayer to ask for things or to request certain outcomes, for a new car or for the Cubs to win the World Series. (Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we have tried both, to no avail.) We do pray for people who are in trouble, but again, not usually with the expectation of a certain outcome. It’s not that we don’t hope that God will cure the sick upon our request; it’s that, deep down, we know that God is not a genie. God does not grant wishes.

And yet, we pray.

Why? And why claim that prayers have power if it’s obvious that praying doesn’t affect outcomes?

Well, one response to this is to deny that prayers are ineffective when it comes to just getting what you want. The way you explain away all the times that people pray for things and don’t get them, according to this argument, is to say that the people praying in those cases were bad people who did not deserve to have their prayers answered. This line of reasoning tends to favor the winners of history, though, because hey, if God thinks you’re a good person, why won’t He answer your prayers, huh? Obviously I’m good because I have everything I want, and if God doesn’t think I’m good why doesn’t he just take away all my goodies?

But this line of reasoning is wrong, because we all know that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people. This isn’t to say that we always understand why, but we know that this happens.

Another way of looking at the power of prayer would be to say that, merely by requesting something of God, you are humbling yourself to God, and this is powerful in and of itself, whether you get what you ask for or not. Submission to God’s power is not necessarily a central tenet of the Christian faith, especially these days, but other faiths certainly regard it as central. The word “muslim,” for example, means “one who submits” in Arabic. Exactly what would make such a submission a positive, powerful action is not clear. Perhaps this submission to the will of a powerful God puts things in perspective and makes us realize the insignificance of our own desires. Then we would be able to see ourselves as part of a community of our fellow human beings.

But where, you might ask, is the power? Does it come from people being united in communal submission to an omnipotent deity? Is there power in mass submission?

We believe in God at the Blasphemy Blog, but we don’t see any particular evidence that submitting to God is what God wants us to do. It’s possible, but given the inherent mystery of God’s nature, who’s to say? We’re inclined to believe that, if prayer has power, and if that power comes from God, it is, like God, mysterious. If we are somehow able to commune with the mysterious entity that created everything out of nothing, this is not going to be the same thing as understanding that communion. Understanding is a whole other thing. We at the Blasphemy Blog have never heard a direct statement, request, or command from God, and we have been listening very diligently.

How frustrating, to be so close to God, to have God all around, and yet not be able to speak to God directly, without worrying that it’s just your own head you’re talking to. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have a customer service-model? It would, it would. It would be nice if the power of prayer was accompanied with a user’s manual, so we would know exactly what our power is. But that is our blessing, and our curse, to be so imbued with powers we do not understand. We have to sit around asking how we did that, without even knowing what it is we did.

Gag Us With a Spoon

Here at the Blasphemy Blog, we’re taking it slow as we recover from a brief illness. We wish the First Lady of the United States would help us out, but alas, it’s not to be: she apparently wants our stomachs to stay upset.

Yes, Laura Bush got up in front of a bunch of famous people at a White House Correspondents’ dinner over the weekend and told some off-color jokes about her life in Washington. Like, she joked about going to see male strippers with Lynne Cheney, and how the President once tried to milk a male horse.

We here at the Blasphemy Blog are definitely Democrats, but we try to be thoughtful and not engage in ad hominem attacks against people “on the other side of the aisle,” as it were. So we want it to be clear: there’s nothing wrong with Laura Bush telling off-color jokes, because blue humor knows no partisan affiliation.

That doesn’t change the fact, however, that our reaction to this news story was one word, and that word was, quote, “Eeeeeww.”

It’s not fair, we know, we know. Republicans should be allowed to make stripper jokes every now and then. It is true that lots of TV conservatives appear to have had their senses of humor surgically removed, but the Blasphemy Blog’s experience is that most people, even people who believe that women should keep their skirts below the knee, like a good stripper joke now and then.

So what keeps us from laughing along with the First Lady? Is our heart so poisoned with partisanship that we cannot appreciate good comedy when we hear it?

Perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps we just need to cool it, and try to enjoy the First Lady’s jokes as jokes, rather than try to interpret them as some kind of attempt to charm the public as her husband sinks in the polls a little bit. Perhaps, if we were to peruse the First Lady’s remarks one more time, we could find the humor and enjoy it without worrying that our lunch would repeat on us. But that would mean reading all those jokes over again. And frankly, given our still-shaky state, we would rather not.