Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 46

Mental Health Break

Sit and watch the snow fall up:

The Military Dysfunctional Complex

In a must-read Atlantic cover story, Fallows biopsies America’s public, political and economic understanding of its military:

Outsiders treat [the US military] both too reverently and too cavalierly, as if regarding its members as heroes makes up for committing them to unending, unwinnable missions and denying them anything like the political mindshare we give to other major public undertakings, from medical care to public education to environmental rules. The tone and level of public debate on those issues is hardly encouraging. But for democracies, messy debates are less damaging in the long run than letting important functions run on autopilot, as our military essentially does now. A chickenhawk nation is more likely to keep going to war, and to keep losing, than one that wrestles with long-term questions of effectiveness.

An essential point about military spending:

America’s distance from the military makes the country too willing to go to war, and too callous about the damage warfare inflicts. This distance also means that we spend too much money on the military and we spend it stupidly, thereby shortchanging many of the functions that make the most difference to the welfare of the troops and their success in combat. We buy weapons that have less to do with battlefield realities than with our unending faith that advanced technology will ensure victory, and with the economic interests and political influence of contractors. This leaves us with expensive and delicate high-tech white elephants, while unglamorous but essential tools, from infantry rifles to armored personnel carriers, too often fail our troops.

He estimates that overall national security will cost more than a trillion dollars this year, noting that “the United States will spend about 50 percent more on the military this year than its average through the Cold War and Vietnam War.” And the political will to combat such excess remains highly unlikely:

A man who worked for decades overseeing Pentagon contracts told me this past summer, “The system is based on lies and self-interest, purely toward the end of keeping money moving.” What kept the system running, he said, was that “the services get their budgets, the contractors get their deals, the congressmen get jobs in their districts, and no one who’s not part of the deal bothers to find out what is going on.”

The View From Your Window

Paris, France, 10.35 am

Quote For The Day

“The word ‘should’ is the worst thing that ever happened to the left. ‘Should’ has become a virus in the contemporary left, a word that is more effective at defeating left-wing resistance than any right-wing argument ever could be. It seems like every day I read fellow leftists telling me what they should and shouldn’t have to do, rather than what they are compelled by injustice to do. ‘Feminists should not have to teach people the importance of feminism; it’s their responsibility to educate themselves.’ Perhaps it is. But they won’t educate themselves. No one will make the world a just place but us. That’s why there is such a thing as feminism. The struggle exists precisely because the world does not fix itself and its people do not educate themselves. That’s such a basic statement of political principles it frightens me that it has to be said at all,” – Freddie DeBoer.

Will The FDA Ever Get Over Its Hemo-phobia? Ctd

The new #FDA blood donation policy is a step forward, but it is still a lifetime ban for many gay Americans & still discriminatory.

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) December 24, 2014

After dropping hints earlier this month that it was reconsidering its longstanding ban on blood donations by gay men, the FDA adopted a new policy last week, easing the lifetime ban but still requiring men to abstain from sex with other men for an entire year before being eligible to donate. Mark Joseph Stern is unsatisfied:

This is, no doubt, a step forward. But it’s a very small one. The one-year deferral policy is still rooted in an outdated, insulting vision of gay men as diseased, promiscuous lechers. A gay man in a decades-long monogamous relationship with his husband will be forbidden from donating blood. So, too, will any gay or bisexual man who consistently practices safe sex. Meanwhile, straight people who routinely have sex with multiple opposite-sex partners—whether or not they use condoms—face no deferral at all. A straight man can donate blood the morning after participating in an unprotected, anonymous orgy. A married gay man cannot donate blood at all.

Adam Chandler adds:

“I predict blood donation drops because it’s way less embarrassing to lie about being gay than to lie about being celibate,” one observer remarked. It’s a great line, but also highlights the complexity and the absurdity of a policy that is already based on a wayward honor system of sorts.

As many have noted, the new policy conforms with that of a number of countries including the United Kingdom, Sweden, Australia, and Japan, all of which use the one-year ban.

Nevertheless, as Elaine Teng pointed out, the one-year deferral puts gay or bisexual men on the same donor pool as “heterosexuals who have had sex with someone who is HIV-positive, and heterosexuals who have had sex with a sex worker.” In other words, the standard for gay identity is equal to action for heterosexuals.

Scott Shackford weighs in:

Current HIV tests can detect the virus now with just an 11-day window for incubation. So a permanent ban preventing gay and bisexual men from donating blood is overkill. But even the one-year ban seems extreme, given the science. AIDS awareness group Gay Men’s Health Crisis calls the new policy useless and essentially a “lifetime ban” for most gay men. But this one-year ban matches the rules for other countries like the United Kingdom and Canada. According to one study, letting gay men who aren’t getting laid donate blood would add 317,000 pints to the blood supply in the United States annually.

So I’m working on my script treatment for a gay “indie” romantic comedy about two lonely men who meet while donating blood and have to get over whatever personality quirks have been keeping them from getting some action. Steal my idea and you’ll be the one needing blood donations.

The View From Your Window

Safed, Israel, 6.45 am

What Is Religious Faith?

by Dish Staff

In an interview, John Caputo – a philosopher whose work explores the connections between postmodernism and Christian theology – distinguishes it from mere “belief”:

Faith is a form of life and so it also has a specific form. I wouldn’t say that faith is more general; I would say it is deeper. It gets expressed in a specific form like liturgy. It is an exercise of the whole person: affective, bodily, performative. It is making the truth.

If we didn’t have the specific historical religious traditions, we would be much the poorer for it. Without Christianity, we wouldn’t have the memory of Jesus. We wouldn’t have the books of the New Testament. You need these concrete, historical traditions that are the bearers of ancient stories and are cut to fit to various cultures. But I don’t want to absolutize them or freeze-frame them. I don’t think of one religion being true at the expense of another in a zero-sum game. I am not saying that if you burrow deeply enough under each religious tradition, you will find they are all the same. They are quite different. They are as different as the cultures and the languages out of which they come. There is an irreducible multiplicity.

This is one of the hallmarks of postmodernity: you can’t boil everything down to one common thing. There are many ways of doing the truth. There can’t be one true religion any more than there can be one true language. The truth of religion is not the truth of a certain body of assertions. It is not about a core set of agreements. That’s not relativism, and it is not saying that there is nothing true in religion. It is saying that religious truth is not like the truth of mathematics. It is a different sort that is deeply woven together with a form of life.

When The Bell Really Tolls

A short film from writer Randall Hayes and animator Anton Bogaty explains just what happens when we die:

(Hat tip: Maria Popova)

A Short Story For Saturday

This weekend’s short story, James Joyce’s “The Dead,” is the last story in his imperishable collection, Dubliners. It takes place around this time of year, making it one of the truly great stories to read during the holidays. Here’s how it begins:

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’ dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.

It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils that were grown up enough and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too. Never once had it fallen flat.

Read the rest here. Check out our previous SSFSs here.

A Poem From The Year

“Hunger for Something” by Chase Twichell:

Sometimes I long to be the woodpile,

cut-apart trees soon to be smoke,

or even the smoke itself,

sinewy ghost of ash and air, going

wherever I want to, at least for a while.

Neither inside nor out,

neither lost nor home, no longer

a shape or a name, I’d pass through

all the broken windows of the world.

It’s not a wish for consciousness to end.

It’s not the appetite an army has

for its own emptying heart,

but a hunger to stand now and then

alone on the death-grounds,

where the dogs of the self are feeding.

Please consider supporting the work of The Poetry Society of America here.

(From Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been © 1998, 2010 by Chase Twichell. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. Photo by Nick Harris)