Charles_Jaco's Blog

In a follow-up to the last post about the Internet and growing American illiteracy, you might enjoy the following from George Mason University professor Rick Shenkman, founder of the History News Network and author of  Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter:

 I do not wish to engage in a debate about the Iraq War. But the thought of planting a largely Christian army in the middle of the Muslim Middle East over the opposition of most countries in the region, when put as I have just put it, sounds daft. Why did it not ring bells of alarm to Americans in 2003 and after, especially as it became clear that our troops would be staying a long time and that no quick victory was possible? It did not because the administration saw to it that the issue was framed differently. We weren’t planting an army. We were spreading God’s miraculous gift of freedom to a benighted people very much in need of America’s missionary help. It was the triumph of myth over logic.

Why were Americans so susceptible to myth? Foreign policy specialists don't usually spend a lot of time reflecting on this question. They should. It's the key to what often goes wrong when foreign policy issues become the subject of public debate.

The answer is, I'm afraid, simple. Myths count more than facts in these debates because Americans don't know many facts and don't care to take the time to learn them. Unlike subjects with which they have first-hand experience--think gas prices--matters related to foreign countries are both exotic and incomprehensible to most Americans. This leaves them sitting ducks for wily pols who want to take advantage of their ignorance by playing on fear and patriotism.

The extent of Americans' ignorance is underestimated. To take one example that will give you an idea of the vast ignorance with which policy makers must come to terms: A majority of Americans do not know that it was their own country which dropped the atomic bomb.

Not all is grim. On the positive side, Americans did not make wholly irrational demands of their leaders after 9/11. American Muslims were not rounded up and sent to concentration camps after 9/11 (as Japanese-Americans were after Pearl Harbor). Mosques were not closed down. Nuclear weapons were not employed against our perceived enemies. And nobody was lynched. Given what has happened in American history any one of these responses or all of them might have been anticipated. That none occurred and that nothing like them occurred is worth noting.

But polls indicate that a significant segment of the American public was susceptible to wild conspiracy theories. A Scripps-Howard poll in 2006 found that 36 percent believe that it is “very likely” or “somewhat likely” that U.S. officials either allowed the attack to take place or were involved it.

Americans do not have a monopoly on conspiracy thinking. Nineteen percent of Germans said in a 2004 poll that 9/11 was the work of the CIA and Israel’s Mossad. The French turned Thierry Meyssan’s book The Appalling Fraud into a best-seller, despite the absence of evidence for its chief and crazy claim: that the Pentagon attacked itself on 9/11 with a cruise missile. Millions of Muslims around the world persist in believing that Jews were given advance warning of the attack on the World Trade Center.

But instead of the thoughtful debate we should by rights have had in this country, we settled for slogans:

• We must fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here
  
• The Global War on Terror (GWOT)
  
• Mission Accomplished
  
• You are either with us or with the terrorists
  
• The axis of evil

To be sure the public eventually turned against Mr. Bush's war in Iraq. The one thing the public usually gets is success and failure. And Mr. Bush's war has been a spectacular failure when judged against all of the many measures by which he has asked us to judge it.

As we head into the fall campaign and listen to the debates about the war we should keep in mind the limits of public opinion. If we don't begin to address the problem of gross public ignorance there will be more Iraqs.

One poll finding we should all keep in mind is this, as I have been reminding HNN readers the past few weeks. Even after the 9/11 Commission reported that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11 attack 50 percent of the country persisted in believing there was. The implications of this are mind boggling.

...or has it just speeded-up the process of dumbing down America?  Some thoughts in this book review from the Los Angeles Times:

'The Dumbest Generation' by Mark Bauerlein How dumb are we? Thanks to the Internet, dumb and dumber, this author writes. By Lee Drutman, Special to The Times
July 5, 2008

In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!

Such is the kind of recklessly distracted impatience that makes Mark Bauerlein fear for his country. "As of 2008," the 49-year-old professor of English at Emory University writes in "The Dumbest Generation," "the intellectual future of the United States looks dim."

The way Bauerlein sees it, something new and disastrous has happened to America's youth with the arrival of the instant gratification go-go-go digital age. The result is, essentially, a collective loss of context and history, a neglect of "enduring ideas and conflicts." Survey after painstakingly recounted survey reveals what most of us already suspect: that America's youth know virtually nothing about history and politics. And no wonder. They have developed a "brazen disregard of books and reading."

Things were not supposed to be this way. After all, "never have the opportunities for education, learning, political action, and cultural activity been greater," writes Bauerlein, a former director of Research and Analysis at the National Endowment for the Arts. But somehow, he contends, the much-ballyhooed advances of this brave new world have not only failed to materialize -- they've actually made us dumber.

The problem is that instead of using the Web to learn about the wide world, young people instead mostly use it to gossip about each other and follow pop culture, relentlessly keeping up with the ever-shifting lingua franca of being cool in school. The two most popular websites by far among students are Facebook and MySpace. "Social life is a powerful temptation," Bauerlein explains, "and most teenagers feel the pain of missing out."

This ceaseless pipeline of peer-to-peer activity is worrisome, he argues, not only because it crowds out the more serious stuff but also because it strengthens what he calls the "pull of immaturity." Instead of connecting them with parents, teachers and other adult figures, "[t]he web . . . encourages more horizontal modeling, more raillery and mimicry of people the same age." When Bauerlein tells an audience of college students, "You are six times more likely to know who the latest American Idol is than you are to know who the speaker of the U.S. House is," a voice in the crowd tells him: " 'American Idol' IS more important."

Bauerlein also frets about the nature of the Internet itself, where people "seek out what they already hope to find, and they want it fast and free, with a minimum of effort." In entering a world where nobody ever has to stick with anything that bores or challenges them, "going online habituates them to juvenile mental habits."

And all this feeds on itself. Increasingly disconnected from the "adult" world of tradition, culture, history, context and the ability to sit down for more than five minutes with a book, today's digital generation is becoming insulated in its own stultifying cocoon of bad spelling, civic illiteracy and endless postings that hopelessly confuse triviality with transcendence. Two-thirds of U.S. undergraduates now score above average on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, up 30% since 1982, he reports.

At fault is not just technology but also a newly indulgent attitude among parents, educators and other mentors, who, Bauerlein argues, lack the courage to risk "being labeled a curmudgeon and a reactionary."

But is he? The natural (and anticipated) response would indeed be to dismiss him as your archetypal cranky old professor who just can't understand why "kids these days" don't find Shakespeare as timeless as he always has. Such alarmism ignores the context and history he accuses the youth of lacking -- the fact that mass ignorance and apathy have always been widespread in anti-intellectual America, especially among the youth. Maybe something is different this time. But, of course. Something is different every time.

The book's ultimate doomsday scenario -- of a dull and self-absorbed new generation of citizens falling prey to demagoguery and brazen power grabs -- seems at once overblown (witness, for example, this election season's youth reengagement in politics) and also yesterday's news (haven't we always been perilously close to this, if not already suffering from it?). But amid the sometimes annoyingly frantic warning bells that ding throughout "The Dumbest Generation," there are also some keen insights into how the new digital world really is changing the way young people engage with information and the obstacles they face in integrating any of it meaningfully. These are insights that educators, parents and other adults ignore at their peril.

Lee Drutman is co-author of "The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy."

The Dumbest GenerationHow the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, or Don't Trust Anyone Under 30 Mark Bauerlein

 

Forget border insecurity and depressed wages. The real reason immigration (illegal and otherwise) will be one of the hottest issues in the 2008 election is summed up in five simple words by commentator, former presidential candidate, and sometimes white nationalist Pat Buchanan:  "White America is in flight."

 

The phenominon of Scared White People (or acronymically, SWP) is nothing new.  The Know Nothing movement of the 1840's was founded by native-born Protestants angry over Catholic immigration from Ireland and Germany. A hundred years later, white flight almost emptied out cities like St. Louis. And now, terrified of brown people speaking Spanish, the intellectual heirs of the Know Nothings are falling all over themselves with proposals to seal the borders, make English the official language,  and deny housing and jobs to illegals.

 

As homosexuals were to the 2004 election, so Mexicans will be to 2008. Allegedly concerned about the "devaluation" of marriage and the demise of civilized society, anti-gay marrriage amendments and referenda in 2004 created an issue that brought social conservatives to the polls in vast numbers. Fear of immigrants will probably do the same in 2008 in states like Missouri, where a constitutional amendment to make English the state's official language will be on the November, 2008 ballot.

 

The fascinating trend here is that the SWP movement often isn't exactly sure what it's scared of. All its members know is that America is changing and they don't like it. The latest statistics to give them shivers were Census Bureau figures showing that four states--Texas, California, New Mexico, and Hawaii--now have populations where white non-Hispanics are the minority, a trend that will overtake all of the United States by 2050.

 

Instead of figuring out how to deal with and embrace the future, SWP want to retreat to 1950. Expect the politics of fear to push a lot of buttons--and turn out a lot of voters--in 2008.

Random thoughts this week on Iraq:

 

• The New York Times publishes this article, detailing how the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq has recruited a whole new generation of suicide jihadis and has radicalized young men who previously were worried about girls and soccer, not suicide and jihad. It's a must-read for anyone who wants to know why things are going so badly.

 

• Tim Lomparis, political scientist, Vietnam veteran, and military analyst extrordinaire said during our seminar together at SLU a few weeks ago that withdrawing from Iraq suddenly would create chaos, instability, and pulverize the world's oil supplies. He said it more succinctly to the San Francisco Chronicle:

 Timothy Lomperis, a former military intelligence officer now at St. Louis  University, contends that leaving Iraq would only mean having to return again with 500,000 troops.

"The idea that we can redeploy away from the cities and let Baghdad turn into a swirling vortex of chaos and that any kind of negotiated solution is then possible is utterly naive," Lomperis said. "By 'redeploying' we will have created a Somalia, with the big difference that neighboring powers will be drawn into it like a whirlpool, with 50 percent of the oil on the world market, and bring our economy to its knees."

That is the chief argument to stay -- made many times before the Iraq Study Group, which still embraced a gradual, partial withdrawal.

 

• If you live by the sports metaphor, you die by it, too. Rep. John Shimkus (R)-Illinois, a West Point graduate and deep thinker on long-term strategic affairs, used a baseball simile about Iraq and got pounded for it. Read a newspaper account here, and take a look at the congressman's appearance on Fox 2 here.

 

• The first GOP debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library produced some disagreement on social issues, and as you'll read here, almost total agreement on staying the course in Iraq.

 

• Operation Rat Trap in Iraq has been going after top leaders of al Qaeda. Helped by Sunni tribal chiefs who are sick of the religious fundamentalists, it seems to be going well so far.

 

• And Rep. Lacy Clay (D)-Missouri, wants to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney for lying about the reasons we invaded Iraq in the first place.

 

        There are St. Louis baseball fans of a certain age (translation: over 65) who will swear up, down, and sideways that the Cardinals never threatened to go on strike to protest Jackie Robinson's integration of the major leagues in 1947. But do some online searching and there it is, big as brass, from the New York Herald Tribune of May 8, 1947.   It's best summed up by this entry from the Encyclopaedia Brittanica:

"Some Dodger teammates openly protested against having to play with an African American, while players on opposing teams deliberately pitched balls at Robinson's head and spiked him with their shoes in deliberately rough slides into bases. Not everyone in baseball was unsupportive of Robinson. When players on the St. Louis Cardinals team threatened to strike if Robinson took the field, commissioner Ford Frick quashed the strike, countering that any player who did so would be suspended from baseball."

I include this not only because we're approaching the 60th anniversary of the strike story, reported by legendary sportswriter Stanley Woodward, but because it serves as a reminder of how foggy we can all get when we swear our allegiance to and define big parts of our lives by a professional sports team.

A number of media outlets (including Fox 2) have been lambasted by some fans (which in this case is, literally, short for fanatics) demanding that newspapers, radio, TV, and online news sources stop reporting about the death of pitcher Josh Hancock.  Like Bill Maher says when he skewers the White House "I couldn't make this stuff up, folks."

Hancock was reported by eyewitnesses to be visibly intoxicated the night of the crash. Managers at Mike Shannon's  offered to get him a cab or give him a ride. He was overheard saying he'd been ripped by Tony LaRussa for staying out drinking and being late for a game. The night before that game, Hancock was involved in a wreck. In Sauget. At 5:30 a.m.

Ahem. None of this is to imply Josh Hancock was anything but a stand-up guy in the clubhouse. He apparently signed autographs for kids. His teammates thought the world of him.  But it appears he died as the result of drunk driving. We're lucky no one else was killed. So where is the problem in all of this?

The answer is hidden deep inside the minds of people who identify so completely with a multi-million dollar business--in this case, the Cardinals--that their judgement is impaired.

On the next edition of The Jaco Report (Saturday April 21 at 6:30pm and Sunday April 22 at 8:30am), we look at both the changing climate, and the changing political climate around a new proposed toll bridge downtown.

 

This weekend is Earth Day, which started out a few decades ago as a celebration of the Earth's diversity, and since then has morphed into something more urgent. Our guest to talk about global warming, climate change, and its potentially catastrophic effects over the next few decades, is Dr.William Dannevik, head of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at St. Louis University. Dr. Dannevik started out professionally as a physicist, helping design nuclear weapons at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory. His speciality now is climate change and climate modeling.

 

His point is fairly straightfoward: there is no longer any scientific debate about climate change. The only debate now is how much human beings have to do with it, and how fast the climate is changing.  The roadblocks to getting this across are twofold: the "flat earthers," people who refuse to believe global warming is real, and those who stand to make money from continuing the pollution that adds to global warming.

 

 Next, we talk about how the demand by Missouri that a new bridge over the Mississippi River be a privately owned and operated toll bridge is apparently dead. We look at the politics and big money decisions surrounding any new bridge, and talk with Rep. Russ Carnahan, congressman from Missouri's Third Congressional District and member of the House Transportation Committee.

 

 

A moment of full disclosure--I own three guns. When I lived in Florida, I had a license to carry a concealed weapon, but then, even house plants and stem cells in Florida are armed. I've fired everything from M-16's and AK-47s to MAC-10's, Uzis, and a .50 caliber sniper rifle capable of punching a hole in an engine block at half-a-mile.

 

Having said that, I've always believed there are too many handguns in this country and it's much too easy to get them. Assault rifles--semi-automatic weapons with a large ammunition capacity--are also too easy to get. I wish the NRA convention were still in St. Louis, so I could go down to the America's Center and listen to one of their perky blonde spokeswomen say--once again--that guns don't kill people, that people kill people.

 

The part about the people killing other people is true. But it's awfully hard to kill as many with a knife or a tire iron. I'm currently working on a series of pieces about urban violence, and am looking at where all the illegal guns on the streets come from. One things for sure--at some point, each and every one of those weapons started life as a legally manufactured handgun.

 

Where did the shooter at Virginia Tech get his guns? And what was he doing with them at school? Without this shooting, we would never have had a chance to know, since the NRA helped pushed through federal legislation, called the Tiahrt Amendment, making it practically impossible to trace illegal guns before there's a shooting.

 

I hope NRA officials sleep easy tonight. I won't.

 

Update:

Well, it  seems part of the NRA was still in town after all. Tne NRA Board, including luminaries like Motor City Madman Ted Nugent and Former Congressman Bob Barr, hung around an extra day to meet in St. Louis. Not only did they not have any comment, their meeting was apparently swathed in extra security, including a protective force composed of former Secret Service agents.

 

FBI sources are tellng ABC News and National Public Radio that the gunman, a student from Fairfax County, Virginia, may have been able to fire off so many rounds because he was possibly carrying high capacity ammunition clips. Those ammo clips became widely available when Congress refused to renew a federal ban on assault weapons.

 

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, a hawk, a conservative, and a staunch supporter of President Bush and the Iraq War, apparently draws the line when it come to America's love of guns. Howard has attacked the U.S. "gun culture", and congratulated himself for the Australian government's policy of buying guns from private owners.

 

And a Virginia Tech student and gun enthusiast tells ABC News that he wishes someone in the vicinity of the shooter had been carrying a concealed weapon so the gunman could have been killed early on. He also says he's been mistaken for the killer because he's of Asian heritage and because his personal website is loaded with references to guns and pictures of him with weapons.

This Sunday, April 15th, The Jaco Report looks at the National Rifle Association convention here in St. Louis, and at whether the NRA's anti-gun control stance is at least indirectly responsible for the upsurge in gun violence in America's cities.

 

A group of ministers affiliated with the St. Louis Clergy Coalition  claims that the NRA's campaign against gun control and gun tracing leads top more illegal guns on the streets, which has led to an upsurge in gun violence in St. Louis. The NRA replies that the spike in violence has more to do with local police not arresting criminals, local prosecutors not being tough enough, and local judges being too lenient.

 

Si is there a correlation between illegal guns on the streets and the NRA's positions. A group called Mayors Against Illegal Guns thinks so. The group, which includes St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, has campaigned to allow cities to share data on illegal guns, hoping it will help them pinpoint exactly where the illegal guns originate. But that sort of information sharing is currently illegal under a federal law passed in 2004 at the urging of the NRA.

 

Watch The Jaco Report on Sunday, April 15th, at 8:30am, on Fox 2, and give us your opinion.

Major League Baseball has started running a game of the week on Fox 2 every Saturday at 3pm. This means The Jaco Report will (probably) be starting around 6:30pm, and usually later than that, rather than our normal 5:30pm air time. This will last at least through mid-September.

 

What this means for viewers is that the Saturday evening show will usually be a good deal shorter than our normal half-hour, and at a later time, through the baseball season,. But not to worry. The full half-hour Jaco Report will now also air Sunday mornings on Fox 2 at 8:30am, leading into Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace at 9am.

 

This weekend's show promises to be a good one. We start with Sgt. Kevin Ahlbrand of the St. Louis Police Officer's Association debating with Zaki Buruti of the St. Louis African People's Organization about the lack of a verdict in the case of Kevin Johnson, who admitted killing Kirkwood police officer William McEntee in July, 2005. African American jurors all voted to convict Johnson of second-degree murder, while most white jurors opted for first-degree murder. The jury ended up hopelessly deadlocked. We look at differences in perception between the black and white communities when it comes to court cases involving police.

 

Then, we're joined by Dr. Stephen Patterson of the Eden Theological Seminary in Webster Groves, talking about the (often) controversial topic of the historical Jesus. For decades, Dr. Patterson has specialized in researching what we know--and don't know--about the actual existence of Yeshua bar Yusef, whom we know as Jesus of Nazereth.

 

Again, if our programs are cut a little short by baseball, we promise to air them in their entirety every Sunday morning at 8:30am.

Courtesy: Paula Scher/New York Times

 

 

A number of bloggers have disagreed with my position on the Iraq invasion and occupation, as noted in several previous posts. Agree or disagree, I'd like to invite one and all to join me, St. Louis University Professor Tim Lomparis, and Harry Levins of the Post-Dispatch for a forum on Iraq.

 

It's Wednesday April 11th at 4 p.m. at the Busch Student Center on the SLU campus, and is part of a week-long series of events focused on international affairs. Details about the week can be found here, and information about the Iraq seminar is here. 

 

My position is that the United States got into the Iraq quagmire in the first place because of a profound ignorance of international affairs (and especially the Middle East and terrorism) on the part of both the American public and the neo-conservatives in the Bush Administration. Events like these at SLU go a long way toward increasing our knowledge about the rest of the world. That, in turn, strengthens our national security.

If you look at a St. Louis Public School and see both a place where your kids are educated and a place where you can get a job, then you're probably opposed to the looming state takeover of the city's schools. The state's largest school district has 6,000 employees and a $350 million budget, both of which are powerful inducements to resist change.

 

What does this have to do with a child's education? Nothing, unless that child happens to live in a household that depends on a paycheck from the city's schools. That child is likely to be African-American, and likely to live in a household with an income under $50,000 a year. Those issues--class, race, and jobs--have a lot to do with the fractures splitting the School Board and the school district.

 

The two goals of earning a living and getting your child an education usually work together. But in some cases, as with the public schools in St. Louis, they are diametrically opposed. A few years ago, we saw several examples of that, when custodial, food service, and gardening workers were laid off, and several schools were closed. The protests didn't come from those who felt the layoffs would impact children, but rather, from unions and community groups worried about the loss of jobs in neighborhoods where jobs are hard to come by.

 

The same dynamic is at work again in the battle over who controls the schools. On The Jaco Report of March 17th, we talked to Missouri State Senator Jeff Smith about a plan to shake things up by giving teachers the chance to earn merit pay. Smith and State Representative T.D. El-Amin are co-sponsoring a proposal that could let teachers earn twice their current salaries. There must be, and there is, a catch. Teachers could earn the money by being judged as "highly qualified". Who would judge them? School administrators, parents, and students, among others. It would be a voluntary program, and teachers signing up for it would also lose tenure, meaning they could earn extra cash, all right, but they could also be fired.

 

The teacher's union, not surprisingly, is totally opposed to the idea. Union President Mary Armstrong was remarkably frank with me in an interview, saying "I'm not going to sit here and tell you my primary concern isn't about the jobs of our members. Of course it is. That's what I'm paid to do. But we think what's best for our teachers will also be best for our students."

 

Dr. Robert Archibald, the head of the Missouri Historical Society who's retiring from the School Board--and who favors a state takeover--told me "As long as a lot of people look at our schools as a source of income rather than a source of knowledge for our children, then this district will remain in deep trouble."

 

These are tough economic times for working people. But there's something faintly obscene about putting an adult's paycheck ahead of a kid's education.

The town only had 18 families who weren't born in the United States.  But just four years later, it was jammed with 6,000 of them. The warnings of the anti-immigration lobby proved correct. Within two decades, over 60 per-cent of the town was foreign born. The immigrants even jammed through an ordinance requiring that all city documents be printed in English and in their native language.

 

The town was St. Louis, and the immigrants were Germans. Were they illegal immigrants or were they legal immigrants? The answer is--they were both. Except for the very few years when the Alien and Sedition Acts were law in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, there essentially were no immigration restrictions between the American Revolution and the 1890's. The Germans were always discriminated against, but it reached a fever pitch around the time of World War I, when German language classes were outlawed in Missouri's public schools, Berlin Avenue's name was changed to Pershing Avenue, and the St. Louis Germans began to refer to themselves as the St. Louis "Dutch". What they really meant was "Deutsch", which means "German", but the Anglos took it to mean "natives of Holland," and it was enough to keep the native-born  from burning down German-owned businesses.

 

A few decades later, the Italians began arriving in St. Louis. To the Anglos--and even to the assimilated Germans--the Italians weren't exactly white people.  As early as the 1880's, the Federal government had begun to respond to complaints about non-whites coming to the U.S. by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act.  In  1907, a Federal commission concluded that immigration to the United States had shifted from northern and western Europe to southern and eastern Europe. That meant more, um, swarthy people--Italians, Greeks, etc.--were arriving. So Congress began passing restrictive immigration laws to try and stem the tide of non-northern Europeans.

 

The point of all this is simple. Most of the people who are doing most of the complaining about Mexicans and other illegal aliens in towns like Valley Park are themselves descended from illegal aliens. My family first showed up on this continent in 1650, and there wasn't a whole lot in the way of Native American immigration control to keep us out.  The Germans who populate this region so thickly also waltzed in due to the lack of laws keeping them out.

 

In American history, from then until now, just about the only time laws were proposed to restrict immigration were when natives began fretting about too many non-white people arriving. Many Americans now, of course, deny any such attitude exists. The new anti-immigration activists say the campaign against illegal aliens is simply one of shoring up national security and the national economy. Those are strong arguments, to be sure. But just be certain that while you're making them, you're not self-righteous about how your ancestors landed here legally. Chances are they didn't.

 

 

 

 

The joke (which was barely funny, even back then)  goes back to my high school days, and is probably older than that.---"Did'ja hear Easter's been cancelled? They found the body!"

 

Well, maybe they have and maybe they haven't. Film director James Cameron and his colleagues at the Discovery Channel put together a documentary that aired March 4th, claiming that containers full of bones found buried in Jerusalem are those of Jesus of Nazereth, his wife Mary Magdelene, their children, and other family members.  The film's detractors call it "porno archeology", and argue that only the skimpiest of evidence to support the conclusion is presented. The film's supporters say this is the first archeological evidence that Jesus son of Joseph ever really existed.

 

As a non-Christian, I don't have a dog in this fight. But I do find it fascinating that a TV documentary challenging the foundation of Christianity--that Jesus actually and physically rose from the dead--has aroused nothing more than sniping from archeologists and theologans. It was Saint Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians who famously wrote "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain." You would figure based on that alone that Christians everywhere would be threatening Cameron with death, desmemberment, and eternal damnation.

 

No such thing, even from literalist, fundamentalist Christians. Compare that with the reaction in the Muslim world to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, or to the Danish cartoons lampooning Mohammed. Fatwas--death sentences--were issued against both the novelist and the cartoonists. Rushdie essentially went into hiding for a few years. So what does this tell us?

 

It tells you that debate, discourse, criticism, and heresy are handled a lot better in Christianity than in Islam. And that's mostly because the West went through the Enlightenment, and the Islamic world didn't. The Enlightenment's freedom of expression and freedom of thought based in science and rationality counterbalances religious thought in the West nicely.

 

In my mind, this in no way implies that Christianity is superior to Islam, or that Judiasm is superior to Hinduism, or that anyone's spiritual beliefs trump anyone else's. Like I said, this is purely a spectator sport for me. The American experiment was founded upon freedom of superstition. You are free to believe absolutely anything you want, nonsense or not, as long as you don't jam it down someone else's throat.

 

It's not one religion that's superior to another. Rather, it's one civil society that's superior to another. Skeptics of Christianity are (mostly)  free to say anything at all without threat of death or violence. Skeptics of Islam are (mostly) running the risk of trouble if they criticise too loudly. And for that, we can thank all those 18th century agnostics, Deists, and athiests who gave us the Enlightenment.

 

 

The mainstream media fell all over itself supporting the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Journalists in Iraq continue to be injured and killed at an almost record rate. And yet the media continue to be criticized, mostly by partisans who support the invasion and occupation.

 

The latest came on the Saturday March 10 edition of The Jaco Report. It's no secret that I believe that the invasion and occupation of Iraq is the most disasterous blunder in the history of American foreign policy. But since a lazy mind is a mind that's never challenged, I interviewed Missouri Senator Kit Bond and Missouri National Guard Major Harry Chakides. Both support the war, and both think that the American public has turned against the war because of one-sided media presentations.Senator Bond is one of the 28 members of the U.S. Senate who still say they would still vote to invade Iraq today, even knowing what we know now. Major Chakides is with the Missouri Guard's 220th Engineer Company.

 

The tactic of playing Beat the Press because you don't like the news is a tactic that goes back to the days of Vice President Spiro Agnew. Agnew was incensed that Vietnam was going badly, and decided to blame the debacle on that gosh-darned media not getting with the program.

 

So what is the news from Iraq? The news is that the U.S. is stuck in the middle of a civil war between Shia and Sunni. Our real enemy, the Sunnis in al Qaeda, have set up operations in Iraq thanks to the invasion. The Shiite militias are fighting each other, as well as fighting Shiite groups coming into Iraq from Iran. And the American public has soured on Iraq because of the facts, not because of media spin.