Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 93

Face Of The Day

A man grooms his mini poodle after competition at the 2014 China International Pet Show in Beijing on November 17, 2014. The China International Pet Show (CIPS) will take place from November 17 to 20. By Wang Zhao/AFP/Getty Images.

A reader writes regarding Friday’s FOTD:

While I know you posted that white tiger with the best of intentions, I wish you might have accompanied it with some education about the white tiger, which occur in nature, but which zoos usually acquire by breeding a father white tiger to his female white tiger offspring – resulting in a wide variety of health issues that plague these animals throughout their lives. White tigers may seem exotic, but they are actually a representation of animal cruelty. Here is a link with some more information.

The Perils Of Political Poetry

David Wojahn considers them:

If you set out simply to write a poem of social criticism or invective, the results are almost invariably going to be mere agitprop. And that problem afflicts much of the work of even some of our greatest poets of invective—Neruda and Brecht come to mind. Finding a way to blend the personal and the social is a complex and tricky imaginative problem—you have to ask yourself what right you have to address an injustice you yourself have probably not experienced; you have to find a form that allows the personal and the political to commingle in a way that seems effortless and serendipitous; you can’t rely on the same old lefty pieties any more than you can rely on the equivalent pieties that make for a poetic period style. But one of the principal functions of poetry is to preserve and protect human dignity, and if you are sufficiently loyal to that function you find a way to navigate through all the pitfalls, both pitfalls of inadequate craft and of fuzzy political thinking.

How Wojahn describes writing one of his own political poems, “For the Honorable Wayne LaPierre, President, National Rifle Association,” which borrows from Dante and places the gun-rights activist in the seventh circle of Hell:

It’s interesting that Dante seems again and again to encounter his contemporaries in hell and purgatory—people he knew in Florence, often his political adversaries. It’s an incredibly clever way to get back at the people who he felt wronged by. A few years back, I came across a very smug and self-satisfied interview with LaPierre, given right after the Supreme Court had declared the DC handgun ban unconstitutional. It occurred to me that LaPierre was exactly the sort of reprobate Dante placed in the furthest circles of inferno. In one of the rings of Circle Seven he situates “the violent against their neighbors,” and that label seemed to me to aptly fit people like LaPierre and George Zimmerman. To try to re-describe and contemporize Dante’s punishments while still being faithful to his spirit was an exciting challenge, and I think having to focus on that helped me to avoid making the poem simply a diatribe against the NRA.

Why Your Screenplay Needs A Rewrite

Walt Hickey found a way to quantify the most common problems facing screenwriters:

The Black List offers aspiring screenwriters the chance to have their work evaluated by professional script-readers who work within the industry.1 The readers are drawn from agencies and studios. When scripts are rated highly, the site promotes the screenplays to potential buyers. As a result, The Black List has thousands of script evaluations — grades based on plot, premise, characters, setting and dialogue — from dozens of genres. I asked for a look at those reviews, and they sent over an anonymized record of 4,655 evaluations of 2,784 scripts by 2,221 writers, submitted from March to July of this year. When a script is evaluated, the reader assigns any number of genres to it — from simple drama to prehistoric fantasy — and we can use these to uncover different trends.

First-time writers tend to go one of two ways, said Kate Hagen, a former reader who now oversees the hundred or so readers at The Black List. They write a deeply personal, pseudo-autobiographical screenplay about nothing in particular. “Everybody basically writes that script at first,” Hagen said. “You have to get it out of your system.” Or they swing for the fences and go in the opposite direction, thinking, “I’m going to write a $200 million science fiction movie,” and plan an entire universe and mythology. Those scripts, Hagen said, tend to fail for entirely different reasons.

Quote For The Day

“In the case of Frank Conroy’s ‘essay,’ Celebrity Cruises is trying to position an ad in such a way that we come to it with the lowered guard and leading chin we reserve for coming to an essay, for something that is art (or that is at least trying to be art). An ad that pretends to be art is – at absolute best – like somebody who smiles at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s insidious is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real substance, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair,” – David Foster Wallace, eighteen years ago, on “sponsored content.”

Back then, an essay sponsored by a cruise line was a rare excrescence. But this excrescence is now the business model for almost all online journalism. It is the business model for the New York Times!

Greece Is Growing

Finally:

Greece’s crisis-stricken economy has returned to growth following six years of recession, official data showed Friday, marking an end to one of the steepest and longest economic contractions in postwar European history.

But Matt O’Brien warns that “Greece’s comeback, like its collapse, will be nasty, brutish, and long”:

Greece’s depression … is still nowhere near done. You can see that easily enough in the chart above, which I’ve modified from The Economist. It compares Greece the past few years with what used to be the gold standard of economic catastrophe: the U.S. during the Great Depression. Now, Greece’s economy fell marginally less than America’s did back then — around 27 percent at its worst — but the biggest difference between the two is the slope of the recovery. The U.S., as you can see, rocketed back once FDR devalued the dollar and started spending more. Only the double whammy of premature fiscal and monetarytightening knocked it off track in 1937.

Greece, though, has gotten nothing but fiscal and monetary tightening.

The View From Your Window

Toronto, Ontario, 3.54 pm

Prepared For The Worst

Chris Morgan surveys the “severe and fatalistic” aphorisms of the the neglected Colombian writer Nicolás Gómez Dávila, which he believes exemplify the reactionary, rather than conservative, approach to politics:

Conservatism’s appeal has always rested in its professed unwillingness to compromise in pursuit of its causes. A reactionary distinguishes himself or herself from the movement conservative by being committed and uncompromising to a degree that discomforts the latter. The conservative embraces democracy to the extent that the conservative can direct it in reaching his or her goals. The reactionary merely resigns him or herself to its existence. “I am an aristocrat,” said early 19th-century Virginia congressman John Randolph of Roanoke, “I love liberty, I hate equality.”

If conservatives are characterized by nostalgia, reactionaries are characterized by decadence. Conservatives build networks and speak in sound bites; reactionaries build mausoleums and speak in epitaphs. Reactionaries are aesthetic rather than practical thinkers. They play alongside, if not across, the border of tragedy and fatalism. Civil debate is meaningless to the side that has already lost.

“If the reactionary concedes the fruitlessness of his principles and the uselessness of his censures,” Gómez Dávila wrote in his essay “The Authentic Reactionary,” “it is not because the spectacle of human confusion suffices for him. The reactionary does not refrain from taking action because the risk frightens him, but rather because he judges that the forces of society are at the moment rushing headlong toward a goal that he disdains.”

Getting Back To Jesus

In the midst of reminding the Church that it “exists for one reason only — to carry the story of Jesus forward in history,” James Carroll laments how that story has been obscured and distorted over time, especially “the way in which the full and permanent Jewishness of Jesus was forgotten, so much so that his story is told in the Gospels themselves as a story of Jesus against the Jews, as if he were not one of them”:

Imagined as a zealot who attacked the Temple, Jesus, on the contrary, surely revered the Temple, along with his fellow Jews. If, as scholars assume, he caused a disturbance there, it was almost certainly in defense of the place, not in opposition to it. The narrative denouement of this conflicted misremembering occurred in the 20th century, when the anti-Semitism of Nazism laid bare the ultimate meaning of the church’s religious anti-Judaism.

The horrified reckoning after the Holocaust was the beginning of the Christian reform that remains the church’s unfinished moral imperative to this day. Most emphatically, that reform must be centered in a critical rereading of the Gospel texts, so that the misremembered anti-Jewish Jesus can give way to the man as he was, and to the God whom he makes present in the lives of all who cannot stop seeing more than is before their eyes.

Such retrieval of the centrality of Jesus can restore a long-lost simplicity of faith, which makes Catholic identity — or the faith of any other church — only a means to a larger communion not just with fellow Jesus people, but with humans everywhere. All dogmas, ordinances and accretions of tradition must be measured against the example of the man who, acting wholly as a son of Israel, eschewed power, exuded kindness, pointed to one whom he called Father, and invited those bent over in the shadowy back to come forward to his table.

(Image: El Greco’s Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, London version, circa 1600, via Wikimedia Commons)

Yglesias Award Nominee

“In my experience, the people who see their lives as part of a great drama tend to be the most liberated of all. That doesn’t mean individual chapters aren’t difficult and painful and confounding. But if you believe that your story has an Author and direction, that there is purpose even in suffering and that brokenness in our lives is ultimately repaired, it allows us to live less out of fear and more out of trust. That is true of us as individuals, and it’s true of us as citizens.

‘We used to be the home team,’ one person of the Christian faith said to me. ‘Now we’re the away team.’ The challenge facing Christians in America is to remain deeply engaged in public matters even as they hold more lightly to the things of this world; to rest in our faith without becoming passive because of it; to react to the loss of influence not with a clenched fist but with equanimity and calm confidence; and to show how a life of faith can transform lives in ways that are characterized by joy and grace. How all this plays out in individual cases isn’t always clear and certainly isn’t easy. Some circumstances are more challenging than others. But it is something worth aiming for.

Engaging the culture in a very different manner than Christians have–persuading others rather than stridently condemning them–may eventually lead to greater influence. But whether it does or not isn’t really what is most important. Being faithful is. And part of being faithful is knowing that God is present in our midst even now; that anxiety and hysteria are inappropriate for people who are children of the King, as a pastor friend of mine recently told me; and that hope casts out fear,” – Pete Wehner. (Awards glossary here.)

The Prophet With 40 Wives

Laurie Goodstein traces how, over the past year, the Mormon church has quietly posted essays on its website that deal with some of the more controversial aspects of its history, from the ban on blacks in the priesthood to the origins of the Book of Mormon. These include four essays on polygamy, and one of the latest officially admits that Joseph Smith had up to 40 wives:

The essay on “plural marriage” in the early days of the Mormon movement in Ohio and Illinois says polygamy was commanded by God, revealed to Smith and accepted by him and his followers only very reluctantly. Abraham and other Old Testament patriarchs had multiple wives, and Smith preached that his church was the “restoration” of the early, true Christian church.

Most of Smith’s wives were between the ages of 20 and 40, the essay says, but he married Helen Mar Kimball, a daughter of two close friends, “several months before her 15th birthday.” A footnote says that according to “careful estimates,” Smith had 30 to 40 wives. The biggest bombshell for some in the essays is that Smith married women who were already married, some to men who were Smith’s friends and followers.

Marcotte applauds the attention given to the women involved:

The picture that accompanies Goodstein’s story—a statue of Smith gazing into the eyes of Emma, his first wife, that stands in the Temple Square in Salt Lake City—drives home how much the other 30-plus women in Smith’s life—including one who was just 14, and some who were still married to other men—have largely been ignored.

In that context, the lengthy essay posted at the Latter-day Saints website detailing Smith’s erratic history of coming up with varied reasons to marry more and more women feels surprisingly frank, particularly the details of how polygamy affected Emma, who married Smith before he had the revelation that God wanted him to be with all the ladies. “Plural marriage was difficult for all involved,” the essay reads. “For Joseph Smith’s wife Emma, it was an excruciating ordeal.” Indeed, quite a bit of emphasis is put on how confusing and miserable polygamy made many of its participants, including the men (though I remain skeptical that so many men would stick with the practice if it didn’t have some upsides).

Michael Peppard explains why this transparency is coming now:

Undoubtedly the past few years have been a “Mormon moment” in the United States. With high-profile public figures like Mitt Romney and Harry Reid, not to mention approximately fifteen members of Congress and counting, the previously persecuted religion has ascended to the upper tier of political power. Only Jews are more “overrepresented” in Congress, when measured as a ratio of seats to overall population (both religions claim about 1.7% of the population).

And with popular culture showing both fascination with and a kind of begrudging respect for Mormonism’s peculiarities—the Book of Mormon on Broadway; Big Love on HBO—the early 21st century is shaping up to be a period of mainstreaming for the LDS church. The “Information Age” catalyzed by the internet may also play a role.

And Elizabeth Dias looks ahead to the debates these admissions could start:

The Church may be talking about Smith’s marriages more openly, but the conversation will lead to topics far more complex than just polygamy. The disclosures raise deeper questions about how faith works. The essay explains that God sanctioned Smith’s polygamy for only a time. That prompts questions about who God is, how God acts, how humanity should respond to the divine, how divine revelation happens, and why it changes. That’s all on top of the particular revelation about polygamy itself. As the essay itself concludes, “The challenge of introducing a principle as controversial as plural marriage is almost impossible to overstate.”