Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 268

Seriously Strange

by Jessie Roberts

A half-century after its release, Eric Schlosser revisits Dr. Strangelove. He notes that “Kubrick’s original intention was to do a straight, serious movie,” but the director “gagged on the idea of a straight version” once he began working on the screenplay:

Pauline Kael wrote that “‘Dr. Strangelove’ was clearly intended as a cautionary movie: it meant to jolt us awake to the dangers of the bomb by showing us the insanity of the course we were pursuing. But artists’ warnings about war and the dangers of total annihilation never tell us how we are supposed to regain control, and ‘Dr. Strangelove,’ chortling over madness, did not indicate any possibilities for sanity.” In the same vein, Susan Sontag asserted that, in future decades, “the display of negative thinking” in the movie would seem “facile.” And Sontag wrote that “Dr. Strangelove is nihilism for the masses, a philistine nihilism.”

I find both of these sets of remarks strange. Why should a popular artist have any obligation to propose “sane” solutions to an intolerable situation?

Surely it’s enough to expose with overwhelming comic energy the contradictions and paradoxes of “mutual assured destruction.” Sane actions are the business of scientists, the military, and Presidents, a few of whom may have been roused to act by this movie. (When Ronald Reagan entered the White House, he wanted to see the war room. This gives one pause. But, later, working with Mikhail Gorbachev, he brought about a partial reduction of nuclear weapons by both sides.) And Sontag’s distaste for “Strangelove” feels off. It’s actually a “cheerful film,” she says. Well, yes, that’s the point of the joke. The movie teases the many Americans acquiescing in a mad logic. At the end, Strangelove leaping out of his chair, and General Turgidson warning of a “mine-shaft gap” with the Soviet Union, are continuing their assertion of high acumen. For them, the game of “strategy” just continues. Sontag wanted a serious film, but I don’t see how anyone could miss, under all the buffoonery and juvenile joking, a furious sense of outrage.

Waitlisted To Death At The VA, Ctd

by Chris Bodenner

A reader cautions:

Before heating up the tar and getting the feathers that weren’t used during the IRS “scandal”, can we wait and see what the IG report comes back with? Hopefully it will be more professional than the IRS hit job. I rather suspect that many of the problems are due to the soaring number of vets between Iraq/Afghanistan and the aging Vietnam era vets and a Congress that is intent on reducing federal spending. I seem to remember that some of the Bush war critics said that we would be paying trillions in veterans care over the next few decades. I guess the GOP will just put it on the credit card like they did the actual combat.

Another looks to the root of the problem:

Just why are wait times so long at some VA locations? Seems obvious, but I don’t hear any of the outraged people in Congress saying it: the VA is surely under resourced. The lists are almost certainly the result of how things are often done in the government: some high-ranking person removed from day-to-day reality sets an unrealistic performance measure (often based on politics). Underlings are then put in the situation where there is no way to meet the performance measure, so they cheat in order to not be reprimanded, demoted, or fired. As a federal employee myself, I know things sometimes end up working this way. I’m not saying the creation of the secret wait lists was right or justified, but I can certainly see how it happened.

Another goes in depth with his personal experience:

I am a physician who has done disability exams for the VA. I felt compelled to help after I watched Jon Stewart discuss the problem on the Daily Show. He berated the VA for the backlog and for being so out-of-date as to use paper documents.

I have to say it was quite an eye-opener to work on VA disability cases.

There is a very good reason why the charts are paper: they date back to World War II! In recent decades, notes from the VA system are in a good database, where information is categorized and easily accessed by type of visit, radiology report, lab report, consultation, etc. But go back not too many years ago and many if not most of the records are hand-written. It can be like taking a tour through a medical museum. Service records from active duty time-periods are usually quick notes scrawled by sometimes remote military medical personnel. Veterans also add to their files notes from their private physicians and non-military / non-VA hospitals, as well as testimonials from family, employers, and fellow servicemembers, and those notes are all paper-based. One veteran could easily have six bankers boxes full of file folders that I was supposed to quickly sort through to find relevant information. The Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) tries to flag the important information, but the flags most frequently were not sufficient.

Somewhat of a solution is to scan all of the paper documents and put them in a database. The VBA is in the process of doing that. I have to say, though, that I dreaded getting the scanned records because all you see on the computer is that there are batches and batches of scanned documents that you have to look through. Doctor scrawl from 1963 on a scanned page is not an easy source from which to glean information. The nominal organization of the file folders is lost in the scanning as well. It’s just 80 or 90 pages at a time of unknown documents that you have to scroll through in hopes of finding the information you need. I even had to get a special computer mouse because my hand would ache by the end of the day from scrolling. It was very difficult to feel I was doing justice. I rarely processed the cases as fast as the VA’s goal, and yet I usually wondered if there was something relevant in all those papers that I had not seen.

Most veterans clearly need the disability benefits and I was glad to do my part in helping them, but there are also a not insignificant number who game the system. Some file appeal after appeal after appeal, doing their best to tie any condition they currently have with something that happened while they were in the service, in hopes of getting listed as 100% disabled. Each appeal represents an additional stack of documents that must be reviewed and questions that must be answered. People who misuse the system can make the work discouraging.

It was also quite interesting to me to learn what “service connected” means. Veterans can claim disability benefits for any medical condition that was caused by or incurred during active military service. So if you are on active duty and develop an ovarian cyst or acne or a thyroid problem or high blood pressure, you can claim a service connection for those medical conditions and collect disability benefits for not only for those particular problems, but also for any secondary problems that develop as a result. All requiring more exams, document review, and charting. I would say that far fewer than half of the disability claims I saw were for combat-related injuries. Furthermore, veterans get re-examined with more paperwork when they claim an increase in level of disability, or when the VBA thinks they may have become less disabled.

This is all to say that the problem of processing disability claims is much more complicated than it seems from the outside. It wore me down.

Update from my mother, a retired Army colonel with 26 years of active duty in the Nurse Corps:

After retirement, I was a case manager at a major military medical center in the early 2000s, when our military was fully engaged with Iraq and Afghanistan. My role was to help navigate returning vets through the process of disability evaluation for either a return to active duty or a release back to reserve status (reserve also includes National Guard). I also volunteered at a major VA hospital on the West Coast, working the social workers who labored every day to help veterans struggling with re-entry into our society.

From my perspective, all of your readers’ comments are spot on. The VA is woefully underfunded for its mission. The documentation requirements and the process of determining disability is extremely difficult to navigate. The pressure against the VA staff to “make the numbers look good” is very strong (though not unique to the VA of course). The volume of needy vets is staggering. On and on.

The whole issue of service connection for disability also needs to be addressed. Combat vets get more money than ever before, and not all of it is justified. For example, we really need to look at why a female soldier who loses her uterus because of fibroids unrelated to active duty needs 20% disability pay – for the rest of her life.

So I agree to wait for the Inspector General Report. The IG is still respected in the military and VA system. But more generally, if the US wants to fight wars, we need to understand the cost after the wars are over. From the beginning of both Iraq and Afghanistan, I was concerned that the public was not realize that the tail of these wars would be very long and extremely costly. We are just now living that reality.

The Original Kids’ Picture Book

Charles McNamara leafs through the Orbis Sensualium Pictus (aka The World of Things Obvious to the Senses drawn in Pictures), the mid-17th century work by John Comenius considered by many “to be the first picture book dedicated to the education of young children”:

Originally published in 1658 in Latin and German, the Orbis — with its 150 pictures showing everyday activities like brewing beer, tending gardens, and slaughtering animals — is immediately familiar as an ancestor of today’s children’s literature. This approach centered on the visual was a breakthrough in education for the young, as was the decision to teach the vernacular in addition to Latin. Unlike treatises on education and grammatical handbooks, it is aimed directly at the young and attempts to engage on their level. The Orbis was hugely popular. At one point it was the most used textbook in Europe for elementary education, and according to one account it was translated into “most European and some of the Oriental languages.”

In spite of its title, the book delves into the abstract:

After thirty-five chapters on theology, elements, plants, and animals, Comenius finally introduces man.

He again opts for the Biblical account and addresses Adam and Eve before more immediate topics like “The Outward Parts of a Man,” where we learn that women have “two Dugs, with Nipples” and that below the stomach we find “the Groyn and the privities.” The anatomical terminology is vast, including words for each finger and for a number of bones in the body. But amid instruction on the corporeal and familiar, Comenius again injects the abstract and invisible into his picture book with Chapter 43, a discussion of “The Soul of Man.” A dotted outline of a human, opening his arms as if to welcome the students’ gaze, stands at the top of the page. Despite this illustration, Comenius’ discussion of the soul is not dumbed down for children. He lays out the categories of souls for his young students: the “Vegetative” soul of plants, the “Sensitive” soul of animals, and the “Rational” soul of man.

(Image of “The Soul” from the 1705 English edition of Orbis Sensualium Pictus via The Public Domain Review)

Spanning The Spiritual Distance

Reviewing The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor, Popova highlights the faith-focused exchanges between the Catholic writer and an anonymous correspondent:

In July of 1955, when she was thirty, O’Connor received a letter from a young woman, initially unknown to her, who later chose to remain anonymous upon the publication of the letters. Both hungry for conversation and intrigued by the woman’s intensity of conviction, the author felt compelled to reply, and so began a nine-year epistolary friendship that continued until O’Connor’s death in 1964 from complications due to lupus. The letters to “A.” are among the most extraordinary in the collection, exploring with remarkable dignity and dimensionality matters of faith and religion, the difference between the two, and the role of spirituality in O’Connor’s writing and her personhood.

From O’Connor’s first letter to the woman:

I am very pleased to have your letter. Perhaps it is even more startling to me to find someone who recognizes my work for what I try to make it than it is for you to find a God-conscious writer near at hand. The distance is 87 miles but I feel the spiritual distance is shorter.

I write the way I do because (not though) I am a Catholic. This is a fact and nothing covers it like the bald statement. However, I am a Catholic peculiarly possessed of the modern consciousness, that thing Jung describes as unhistorical, solitary, and guilty. To possess this within the Church is to bear a burden, the necessary burden for the conscious Catholic. It’s to feel the contemporary situation at the ultimate level. I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

Previous Dish on O’Connor here, here, and here.

The View From Your Window

Jaffa, Israel, 7.09 pm

Quote For The Day

“This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men—go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers of families—re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body. The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is already plow’d and manured; others may not know it, but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches—and shall master all attachment,” – Walt Whitman, Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass.

Doing War With The Devil

Reporting on a recent Vatican-sanctioned convention on exorcism, Anthony Faiola finds that Pope Francis’s “teachings on Satan are already regarded as the most old school of any pope since at least Paul VI”:

Largely under the radar, theologians and Vatican insiders say, Francis has not only dwelled far more on Satan in sermons and speeches than his recent predecessors have, but also sought to rekindle the Devil’s image as a supernatural entity with the forces­ of evil at his beck and call.

Last year, for instance, Francis laid hands on a man in a wheelchair who claimed to be possessed by demons, in what many saw as an impromptu act of cleansing. A few months later, he praised a group long viewed by some as the crazy uncles of the Roman Catholic Church — the International Association of Exorcists — for “helping people who suffer and are in need of liberation.”

“ ‘But Father, how old-fashioned you are to speak about the Devil in the 21st century,’ ” Francis, quoting those who have noted his frequent mentions of the Devil, said last month while presiding over Mass at the Vatican’s chapel in St. Martha’s House. He warned those gathered on that chilly morning to be vigilant and not be fooled by the hidden face of Satan in the modern world. “Look out because the Devil is present,” he said.

As part of his research, Faiola was given permission to witness an exorcism. In an interview, he describes what he saw:

When we walked into the room, the priest was consoling [the woman undergoing exorcism] in the corner of this converted kitchen where all sorts of images of Mary and Jesus Christ were strung up. I didn’t get the feeling that the woman was uneasy because of our presence there. There were a couple of other observers in the room who were somehow associated with the priest and three helpers with him that day. It’s a bit surreal: At one moment he’s chanting in Latin, and the helpers are saying rounds of Ave Maria, so you’ve got an odd vocalization happening in the room.

The woman was quiet for five minutes before there were any signs of metamorphosis. Then she started grunting, burping, coughing up phlegm, and her characteristics became more what you would expect in a movie. He started making the sign of a cross, and she was physically repelled from his touch. She was obviously made uncomfortable by any religious gestures. That’s when the drama really escalated: The priest asked, “What is your name?” calling the demons out. Making it answer questions is supposed to be a sign of the devil’s submission to the priest’s authority. He got the name Asmodeus. In the world of exorcism, there is only one Satan but many lesser demons.

The priest asks several really arcane questions. His voice starts escalating, his gestures become more dramatic and reach some sort of a climax. She looked like she was ready to vomit. Gradually she regressed and came out of her trancelike state. The whole thing took about 40 minutes.

Sophia Deboick puts Francis’s comments – and the resurgent interest in exorcisms – in context:

In recent decades, the church has been surprisingly vocal on the issue. In 1975, the former Roman Inquisition published a study called Christian Faith and Demonology, with the aim of making the reality of the devil clear. Three years earlier, Pope Paul VI – surely a man of the modern age, given his 1968 encyclical prompted by the contraceptive pill and the miniskirt – said evil “is a living spiritual being, perverted and corrupting” and certainly not “a conceptual and imaginary personification of the unknown causes of our ills”. Just last Tuesday, Francis himself put great emphasis on the role of the devil when speaking of the protomartyr Saint Stephen, saying that the “struggle between God and the devil” was apparent in the persecution of the church’s people. For the hierarchy, the devil is not to be forgotten nor softened into a metaphor. … The devil continues to be as useful for the modern church as he has been in the past, when he bolstered the case for the burning of heretics. The concept now provides a dramatic way to underscore the dangers of a godless society.

(Image: Ary Scheffer’s The Temptation of Christ, 1854, via Wikimedia Commons)

A Serious House No Longer, Ctd

Jonathan Eig describes how Andrew Berlin, owner of minor league baseball team the South Bend Silver Hawks, converted a dilapidated synagogue on Coveleski Stadium grounds into a ballpark gift shop:

When Berlin bought the team, he held a meeting with members of the Jewish community and proposed moving the perimeter of the stadium to enclose the synagogue. The team needed a new gift shop, and it seemed a shame to waste such a beautiful old building. He had already pledged to spend $2.5 million of his own money on ballpark improvements. Now, he said, he would spend an additional million dollars on the synagogue’s restoration. The city of South Bend transferred ownership to Berlin.

“It wasn’t exactly what we had hoped for,” said David Piser, president of the Michiana Jewish Historical Society and one of the last Sons of Israel congregants. A Jewish museum would have been preferable, but Piser feared that the building might be knocked down if no use for it was found. Ultimately, everyone agreed that a gift-shop synagogue was better than no synagogue at all.

At one point in the discussions, Berlin proposed painting a target on the synagogue’s roof to encourage Silver Hawks batters to hit home runs. The idea was not received warmly by Piser or by some of the other Jewish community leaders. Today, the roof of the building is covered with an ad for Toyota.

Previous Dish on deconsecrated churches here.

A Surreal Short

Colin Marshall spotlights the above old-and-improved version of Un Chien Andalou, the classic 1929 short by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. He insists Filmoteca Española’s restoration is “not quite like those you’ve seen before, whether in a film studies class, on late-night television, or in some corner or another of the internet”:

Video artist and blogging cinephile Blake Williams had that impression, finding what he calls “a markedly different version of this classic than what I came to know on Youtube.” The film “plays in ‘actual time’, slowing down the hyper, 16 minutes cut to a more deliberately paced 21+ minutes” with visuals “less contrast-blown than any version I have seen, not to mention that it is no longer heavily cropped. The score, too, is different, dropping the now iconic tango back-and-forth with Wagner.” If you’ve long since grown used to all the images in Un Chien Andalou‘s once-shocking procession — the dragging piano, the ants in the palm, the rotting donkeys, the immortal eyeball slice — prepare to feel at least surprised by them once again. Though they have become much cleaner, they’ve also become no less troubling for it.

Starting With Sex

And other advice from Maïa Mazaurette, a French sex columnist:

[H]ow would you describe the French attitude toward sex?

I can only compare it to the countries I’ve lived in — Germany, and now Denmark, and I’ve made some trips to the U.S. I’d say the main difference is that in France we’re so straightforward. We don’t have these dating rituals; we just start with sex! And then, if the sex was good enough or we feel connected somehow, then we would try to build a relationship.

So you always have sex on the first date, then?

Absolutely! But it’s not even an issue because there is no date. There is just first sex. You think someone is attractive, you give it a try. I think it really makes sense. (Of course I say that, because I’m French, right?) But if you don’t have sex first, you build up too much pressure. You start thinking, I have seen this guy for four or five restaurants, or however you do it in the U.S., and what if it fails? If you get sex out the way first, then you can only have good surprises.

I never dated an American guy, but even with Danish and German guys, there were so many dates and it was taking so much time. At some point I just felt like, Ahhh! Stop it, are you going to kiss me? Are we going to your place? My place? Do something! I felt like I was investing a lot of time in something that might not be worth it anyway.

It’s interesting to me that France is a predominantly Catholic nation, and yet the culture is so sexually free.

Yes, but we don’t connect sex with ethics or morality or values in general, you know? There have been many studies about how French people don’t care about the sex life of our president, or if a person is unfaithful. It’s absolutely not a problem for me. Now, if my boyfriend and I have an agreement, that’s important. But I actually see a lot of my friends who are a bit older than me, maybe 40 or 45, who are always renegotiating the boundaries of their relationship. And a lot of them are okay with being unfaithful, as long as you don’t say it. It’s actually quite old-fashioned, as if we’re in the Victorian era, and your husband or your wife is the person you share children, a house, and money with, but for passion or a bit of adventure, you go elsewhere. The couple is not the place for adventure. It’s the place where you want to feel safe and watch Game of Thrones.