E.J. Dionne asks "Does our presidential campaign lack a moral core?"

He purports to delve into the debate:

However you analyze it in electoral terms, the exchange between President Obama and Mitt Romney was most striking as a festival of technocratic mush — dueling studies mashed in with competing statistics. In many ways, the encounter offered voters the worst of all worlds: a great deal of indecipherable wonkery and remarkably little clarity about where each would lead the country.

However you analyze it? Well, I don't even have to check the debate transcript to remember a striking use of the word "moral." Let me get the exact quote from the transcript. Jim Lehrer had just asked "what are the differences between the two of you as to how you would go about tackling the deficit problem in this country?" And Mitt Romney said:

Good. I'm glad you raised that, and it's a -- it's a critical issue. I think it's not just an economic issue, I think it's a moral issue. I think it's, frankly, not moral for my generation to keep spending massively more than we take in, knowing those burdens are going to be passed on to the next generation and they're going to be paying the interest and the principal all their lives. And the amount of debt we're adding, at a trillion a year, is simply not moral.

But Dionne would like you to think of the debate is just a big indecipherable mush. And then the whole rest of his column is about — can you guess? — Nuns on the Bus! Because who's better than nuns "to remind us that our decisions in November have ethical consequences?" I'd say Mitt Romney was better, in his utterly clear statement quoted above, which is in no way "technocratic mush" or "insufferable wonkery," Mr. Dionne. But... hey! Look! Nuns! Nunnnnzzzz!

"Ah, Godspell. How you shaped our ’70s Catholic school childhoods by influencing an entire generation..."

"... of semi-closeted nuns to pick up their guitars and force us to learn half the songbook. Do they still have guitar masses? Or did all those Birkenstock’d nuns finally drop the veil and head off to the Lilith Fair?"

The first paragraph of Tom and Lorenzo's recap of the most recent episode of "Project Runway All Stars."

Are you watching this season? I am. I still can't tell you the names of the 2 people they've got in the Heidi and Tim positions, but they're doing a decent job helping us deal with being deprived of familiar things.

And, as long as I'm rummaging around at Tom and Lorenzo's, check out these stiletto-heeled ice skates.

"The recount for the state Supreme Court race has come to this: Votes from nuns have been thrown out."

Nuns! 

Yes, nuns.

Because the nuns did not follow the rules.

Because canvassers were unable to match the actual ballots to the voter, they took all 24 absentee ballots from the Town of Sumpter and randomly drew 18, which were then set aside and not counted. Of those ballots, Prosser had 14 while Kloppenburg had four.

Unfair to Kloppenburg! You just know all those rule-breaking nuns were Prosserites Prosserans.

"Why portray the king as a cross-dressing homosexual who shoots Protestants dressed as birds in his royal park for fun?"

"Because that's exactly as I saw him," answers Ken Russell, looking back 40 years at his truly outrageous film "The Devils."

Russell's film was adapted from Aldous Huxley's 1952 non-fiction novel The Devils of Loudon, as well as John Whiting's follow-up 1960 play The Devils. They were all inspired by the notorious case of supposed demonic possession in 17th-century France, in which a charismatic Catholic priest, Urbain Grandier, was accused of bewitching nuns. The accusation was trumped up by Richelieu as an excuse to destroy a Protestant stronghold....

Russell mentions he was inspired by one particular line in Huxley's book. "The exorcism of sister Jeanne," wrote Huxley, "was equivalent to rape in a public lavatory." Hence the film's vision of Loudon as a pristine, white-stone city and the convent as clad in white tiles.... Russell recalls the film's final shot: "The girl goes up the hill of broken bricks." The girl (Grandier's recently widowed wife) walks over Loudun's ruins into a landscape in which the only objects are posts topped by carriage wheels, on which Protestant corpses turn in the wind. "Polanski is said to have been inspired by that shot for the last scene of The Pianist," [says Russell's wife  Lisi Tribble].

Russell then suggests The Devils is a religious film that takes inspiration from his own Catholic faith. "It's about the degradation of religious principles," he says. "And about a sinner who becomes a saint."

I had a list of my 5 favorite films that remained the same 5 films for quite a few years, and "The Devils" on the list. What was the rest of the list? Can I remember? "Aguirre the Wrath of God," "My Dinner With Andre," "Mahler," and "It's a Gift." I have had the same 11 films on my Blogger profile list for a long time, maybe going all the way back to 2004. 3 of my old 5 favorites are still on the list. The 2 that are not are Ken Russell films. Ken Russell was really important back in the 1970s and 80s, and I've forgotten about him in the last 20 years. I wonder what sort of impression "The Devils" would make on me now. Or "Mahler." Or all those other fabulous Ken Russell movies we submerged ourselves in, in the isolation chamber of the movie theater.

A few scattered thoughts on the movie "Doubt."

1. For a movie full of nuns and priests, there was damned little religion in it. There were references to "mortal sin," and Bibles and crosses were displayed, but I don't think anyone ever mentioned God or Jesus. In church, at Christmas, the priest was saying "Happy Holidays." Now that was part of his character. He also wanted the Catholic school kids to sing some secular Christmas songs. The head nun had a big problem with that, but somehow managed to voice her disapproval without talking religion.

2. Unfortunately, having fought insomnia all last night, I kept slipping into little naps. Maybe it was all God, Jesus, and Mary when I was snoozing, but I think not.

3. Booger acting. I know many actors go for the tears-streaming-streaming-down face or the single tear welling up and finally dripping slowly down the cheek, but tears are the most pleasant of the bodily fluids. In "Doubt," one character goes for many long minutes with mucus flowing from her nostrils, even taking the path across the lips and into the mouth. It's kind of distracting! Not since "Blair Witch Project" have we seen such booger acting.

4. I kept trying to picture how the play was staged. Now, I've looked it up. From Ben Brantley's 2004 review: "The play unfolds mostly as a series of dialogues, punctuated by two monologues - sermons delivered by Father Flynn to his congregation on the subjects of doubt and gossip." That sounds better than the movie.

5. It wasn't bad. It had a tight script and some nice Streepage.

6. "I don't have an organized religious thing, but I have love in my life."

7. I'm seeing all the well-reviewed year-end movies, and there's an awful lot of wrong-age sex. "Doubt" is about a priest accused of molesting children. "Benjamin Button," with its backwards aging character, had scenes of an old man in love with a young girl and an old woman in love with a toddler. "The Reader" had a 36-year-old woman seducing a 15-year-old boy. "Milk" had a man in his 40s pursuing relationships with much younger (and more fragile) men. "Slumdog Millionaire" shows a young teenage girl being sold for sex. I say that Hollywood is delivering pedophiliac titillation with the deniability of artistic pretension.

8. "Doubt" works as a law movie. There are no lawyers or trials, but the subject of evidence is well-explored. There's an especially good illustration of the way a lie can be used to produce a reaction that constitutes relevant evidence.

9. We had a long discussion of the meaning of the little magnetic dancing ballerina the priest gives the boy.

ADDED: John Podhoretz gets it exactly right. Slightly spoilerish Excerpt"

[Writer-director John Patrick] Shanley's certitude about the lack of certitude in his play demonstrates why it was a mistake to put him at the helm of the movie version, since it proves he is an even worse interpreter of his own work than he is a director of it....

Doubt works not because the story is ambiguous, but because it is not ambiguous. It is, rather, a potent and unforgettable account of systemic injustice.

Podhoretz, like me, is not buying the bogus profundity of snot: "Viola Davis... may win an Oscar for best supporting actress largely because she goes without a tissue for a few minutes."

Consecration to a Life of Virginity of Women Living in the World.

Did you know the Catholic Church has this rite?

Q. Why did you choose to live your life as a consecrated virgin?

A. My love for God consumes me. It is my reason for living. I love serving his people and being a part of the church. It's not that I didn't like the thought of getting married or raising a family -- it was simply that I wanted to give God all of me, that I wanted to devote all my time and energy to prayer, ministry and outreach, and the only way for that to happen was to remain single. With a husband and children, my time and attention would have been divided....

Q. What is the difference between a consecrated virgin and a nun?

A. The consecrated virgin is not bound to a particular community or to follow a designated rule like a specific spirituality. She is able to work in whatever type of career she feels drawn to, and she decides what her prayer life and ministry will look like, usually with the assistance of a spiritual director. She does not take vows of poverty and obedience like the nuns do.

Race and religion, Barack Obama and Clarence Thomas.

It's 3 a.m. ... And Ruth Anne Adams — commenter extraordinaire, historian of the Althouse blog, and Maternal Optimist blogger — is sending me email:

I spent a good bit of time reading the thread and the comments ["Barack Obama responds to the criticism over Jeremiah Wright"]. I kept thinking about Clarence Thomas' description of the nuns who, in the face of a segregated South, instilled in the students that they were all God's children, all worthy in dignity to learn and grow up in God's grace. I just think that there's something to chew on/turn over/mull. How did these two very prominent Black men look at the evil that is America's history with race and see it manifested in their personal religious worship? Clarence Thomas, as you may not know, has returned to full Communion with the Catholic Church. He did a fabulous interview with Raymond Arroyo of EWTN [Program #6, nun talk begins at 5:50 minutes into interview] when his book was published last year and he talked of the bitterness and hatred he could not carry. And I see Pastor Wright fomenting that bitterness and hatred.

In the Catholic Church, there are a few 'out there' parishes and the faithful know where they are. They are magnets for unorthodoxy of all kinds. If I were a politician and gaining some credibility because I called myself Catholic but I was going to these wayward parishes, I would justifiably get lots of flak. If I belonged to a 'Christian' white supremacist church, especially for 20 years, I couldn't wipe away that stink fast enough to become a credible candidate. Why is the reverse not obviously true? Is there a difference with John McCain accepting an endorsement from a daffy Catholic-hating powerful pastor with a brief visit and Barack Obama entrenching himself in his home parish? I think the Anchoress makes some reasonable points, but I think she's too generous to Barack. We're starting to see a pattern of America hatred with those people who are close to Obama. Glints of it appear when Michelle speaks [hey! has she been muzzled?] Most voters can't abide hating America to that extreme.

I bounced these off of you because I remember you simul-blogging Thomas' memoirs in the fall and I suspect you have a good basis to answer these questions that I'm merely musing about.

Glad you're back in Madison! The blog is so different there.

Ruth Anne :)

Thanks! And the blog's different without Ruth Anne in the comments, but I think she — and someone else you've probably missed — will be back in a week or so.

"Giuliani and Race."

The NYT provides access to its archive of articles on Giuliani and race, beginning with Todd S. Purdum's "Giuliani Has Taunt for Dinkins: He's a 'Jesse Jackson Democrat'" (from September 26, 1989, when Giuliani first ran for mayor of NYC).

Responding to his opponent's repeated taunt that he is a ''Ronald Reagan Republican,'' Rudolph W. Giuliani said after an appearance at an Orthodox Jewish private school yesterday that he could just as easily call David N. Dinkins a ''Jesse Jackson Democrat.''

So Dinkins tried to portray Giuliani as too conservative for NYC and Giuliani shot back with a parallel epithet.

Purdum again in 1993: "Rudolph Giuliani and the Color of Politics in New York":

But is Giuliani the right man to save [the city]? Can a hopscotch candidate, a purebred product of the tidy world of St. Joseph's, win and govern a hip-hop city?

Though he is just 49 years old, Giuliani often seems a striking throwback in New York City's anything-goes atmosphere. It's as if his cultural and psychic sensibilites froze about 1961, the year he left the tutelage of the Christian Brothers at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School in Brooklyn. This is a man so square that he started an opera club in high school and still refers to his old high-school classmates as "other youngsters"; so corny that he proposed to his current wife at Disney World; so accepting of authority that he says the nuns and brothers who taught him were right to smack him around, because he often deserved it. He says that he simply "missed" the convulsions of the 60's, that the dilemmas of long hair or inhaling "never came up." Pictures of Abraham Lincoln and Babe Ruth hang on his office wall; David Dinkins displays photographs of Nelson Mandela and Jennifer Capriati.

Giuliani can be so awkward in public -- with hunched shoulders and a tremulous voice -- that his best friends fret constantly that New Yorkers will never know Rudy like they know Rudy. That Giuliani is the warm father who can't imagine spanking his 7-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter, the man who lives in the same Upper East Side building as his elderly mother and who on New Year's Eve dances alone with his wife to Frank Sinatra records in their apartment.

Giuliani's Wonder Bread image carries risks in a polyglot city where no single racial or ethnic group predominates, and no topic will be trickier for him than race.

In sum, he was the squarest guy in the world back then, and that was connected to race.

THE TWIST IN GIULIANI'S nostalgic pitch is that he is making it just as New York stands poised for a new political order, made inevitable by demographic shifts in a city where non-Hispanic whites are no longer a majority. In a profound sense, this son of the 50's is running against history. Even if he wins, he may be the last white man for years to lead his city.

"I've got to get this city to stop thinking in categories, to stop thinking in terms of black and white and Hispanic, and gay and heterosexual, and get us to start thinking about people," Giuliani told a group of working-class Hispanic parents in Sunset Park this spring, in an almost plaintive declaration he makes often. "I've got to get New York to stop thinking about all this symbolism."

While that may sound disingenuous to some, Giuliani is undoubtedly sincere. Far more than Dinkins, he needs to keep overt references to race out of the campaign. Dinkins's race, which helped elect him in the first place as a nonthreatening healer, remains one of his greatest assets. What Giuliani really means is that he must be free to talk about race and ethnicity on his terms, and to attack the Mayor's record, without being seen as racist.

We see that 15 years ago, the NYT portrayed him as a throwback, but the old article shows its age with the assumption that only the old fashioned think about transcending racial divisions. (Or else Barack Obama is a throwback.)

Here's today's front page article on Giuliani and race, "In a Volatile City, a Stern Line on Race and Politics," by Michael Powers:

Mr. Giuliani, aides say, found a city in the early 1990s where most of the departments affecting the lives of black New Yorkers from schools to welfare to public safety were dysfunctional. Too many citizens expected government to coddle them, and too many black leaders, said Peter Powers, one of Mr. Giuliani’s oldest friends and his first deputy mayor, were afraid to work publicly with a white Republican mayor.

Much more in the article, which details a particular time and place -- NYC in the 1990s.

How do the volatile racial politics of that time relate to the current presidential campaign?

Save for immigration, Mr. Giuliani rarely fields questions about race on the campaign trail. Republican voters, who are overwhelmingly white, have clamored to hear about 9/11 and terror....

Well, it seems that the NYT is keen on bringing race forward in the discussion of the 2008 campaign. I doubt if it helps Giuliani to sort through the painful incidents of the 1990s, though it can't hurt to repeat the amazing statistic that he reduced crime by 60 percent.

Religion and mental illness.

The NYT has a long piece on the mentally ill Romanian nun who was killed in a botched attempt at exorcism.

"You can't take the Devil out of people with pills," the 29-year-old priest, Daniel Petre Corogeanu, told a Romanian television station during a four-hour interview taped just before he and the nuns were arrested in June.

Isn't that disturbingly similar to Tom Cruise on the "Today Show"?

All it does is mask the problem, Matt. And if you understand the history of it, it masks the problem. That's what it does. That's all it does. You're not getting to the reason why. There is no such thing as a chemical imbalance.

"Persepolis 2."

I went over to Borders today to have some coffee and read a manuscript but took some time first to browse. That picture on the cover of Premiere magazine of Colin Farrell pretending to be Alexander the Great made me laugh, but--ah!--what is this? The second volume of Marjane Satrapi's beautifully drawn memoir has come out! I take it with me to my table along with my manuscript and my mug of Borders blend coffee. I read the first chapter slowly, savoring the crisply drawn, Bushmilleresque pictures of the feisty Iranian girl starting her new life in Austria, where she soon enough ends up in a boarding school run by nuns. Oh, this is too good! I could read the whole thing right now! I close it up, read half of the manuscript, finish the coffee, and go buy the book, which I will carefully consume in small, picture-gazing doses.

Mysteries. I'm just beginning to explore the mystery of getting an image to appear on this site. I had thought I couldn't do it, but that U.N. flag gave me hope. Please, St. Teresa, help me:



That picture of St. Teresa is from an article in The Economist about scientists studying the brain activity of nuns, using positron-emission tomography and functional magnetic-resonance imaging, to "identify the brain processes underlying the Unio Mystica—the Christian notion of mystical union with God." The scientists have a hypothesis that this mental state has something in common with out-of-body experiences and even phantom limbs and the capacity of mescaline to "inspire feelings of spirituality or closeness to God" in anyone. If they are right, shouldn't we all be entitled, as a matter of religious freedom, to use mescaline?

Only one slope is slippery. Justice Breyer was concerned at oral argument, in Locke v. Davey, about the implications of deciding in favor of the college student who asserted a Free Exercise Right. (See previous post.) But what are the implications of deciding to permit the state to discriminate based on religion as it doles out various benefits?

Justice Scalia ends his opinion with this set of concerns:

Today’s holding is limited to training the clergy, but its logic is readily extendible, and there are plenty of directions to go. What next? Will we deny priests and nuns their prescription-drug benefits on the ground that taxpayers’ freedom of conscience forbids medicating the clergy at public expense? This may seem fanciful, but recall that France has proposed banning religious attire from schools, invoking interests in secularism no less benign than those the Court embraces today. See Sciolino, Chirac Backs Law To Keep Signs of Faith Out of School, N. Y. Times, Dec. 18, 2003, p. A17. When the public’s freedom of conscience is invoked to justify denial of equal treatment, benevolent motives shade into indifference and ultimately into repression.

I'm sure some people will find that odd, coming from Justice Scalia, because he wrote the opinion for the Court in Smith, the case that decided that generally applicable laws are constitutional even if they burden religion. Under that test, a school could have a general rule against wearing any head coverings without violating the Free Exercise Clause. But Scalia advocates neutrality toward religion. The proposed French law he cites is not a neutral law, but a law that targets religion. According to the cited NYT article, Chirac described his law as a frank discrimination against religious expression:

"In all conscience, I believe that the wearing of dress or symbols that conspicuously show religious affiliation should be banned in schools ... The Islamic veil — whatever name we give it — the yarmulke and a cross that is of plainly excessive dimensions: these have no place inside public schools. State schools will remain secular. For that a law is necessary."

So I would let Scalia off the hook about that point. More important is that the majority, by taking a more flexible approach to the Religion Clauses, preserves more ability to decide future cases pragmatically. Scalia's neutrality test is offered as a hard rule, and a hard rule will dictate outcomes, so deciding one case in a particular way will demand that other cases be decided in lock step. Sorry, but the slope is only slippery on one side. Criticize them all you want for being unprincipled, but the majority can stop its descent down the discrimination slope whenever it wants.