MAILBAG: Rock; Hitch + Vatican; Miguel Estrada; “High Noon”; religion in New York; mysticism and Christianity; working mothers; and Scalia. Soon I will post separate mailbags on feminist books and rock’n’roll conservatism. As always, I am in plain text (though I don’t think I have any replies in this one) and my readers are in bold.

Rock: An anonymous reader writes: [T]he blues is not about despair. It’s about melancholy and resignation. The latter is the opposite of despair, in a way. Despair wrecks (objects, others, and finally the self); resignation accepts. If it didn’t, surely black Americans would have died of grief long before they found their freedom?

Do you know the John Lee Hooker song called “The Fog”?

…Can’t resist pointing out that my SERIOUS musical friends all tell me that the complex rhythms of American popular music are actually too simple and repetitive for them. But I can never quite agree with this; think they’re missing some subtlety. I once found a critic’s comment (perhaps banal to those more knowledgeable than I am) saying that the European musical tradition aimed to make the voice as pure and accurate as a musical instrument; the American tradition (under its African influence) aimed to make instruments as supple and expressive as the human voice.

One point you may never have noticed: Canadian popular music differs from that of the US in that it never had a significant African influence until the 1950s (with the exception of jazz). Our dominant tradition in popular music is Celtic. What we have is what American music would be, minus the influence of African rhythms and vocal styles.

Hitchens testifying at the Vatican against Mother Theresa’s canonization: Dave Lull writes: He wrote about it (not on the web): Vanity Fair, Oct 2001 i494 p166(4) “The Devil and Mother Teresa.” (role of devil’s advocate during the canonization of Mother Teresa), Christopher Hitchens.

Abstract: Issues concerning the investigation of Mother Teresa by the Catholic church before she could be granted sainthood by Pope John Paul II after her death in 1997.

Estrada. The Talking Dog writes: Good call on my fellow Brooklynite Senator Chuck Schumer; he is being an intellectually dishonest doberman– though I tend to think you overestimate the voters of my beloved Empire State by saying that if he out and out said “I’m going to trash ALL of George W. Bush’s nominees until he sends me one I like,” it would cost him votes. I think it would HELP him here in the State that elected you know who as its junior senator!

My problem with Estrada is more basic and personal: this guy was supposedly in my college class (dear old Columbia ’83 […]). Anyway– despite the fact that I supposedly spent three years in the same college with the guy– and I saw his picture here: I am absolutely unable to place him. I don’t think he REALLY went to Columbia College at ALL (which is f***ed up– because let me tell you,

being in Columbia’s last all-male class is not something you’d ordinarily make up!)

Besides– if this guy was really as rabid-ass a conservative as he claims to be (vetting judicial clerk nominees on politics, for God’s sake!) [I thought the whole point was that he claimed he didn’t do that.–ed.], then I would have known him for sure (as I was one of perhaps 8 members of Columbia ’83 who were not to the left of, oh, Mark Rudd; I have moved left over time, on my theory that if you’re not a liberal at 21, you have no heart, and if you ARE a liberal at 39 you have no money). Unless, of course, Estrada is a situational conservative– in which case he surely can’t be trusted with life tenure on the D.C. Circuit either!!!

So– regardless of Chuck Schumer’s disingenuous “double bind” bullshit question (the correct answer would have been “I’m sorry senator, could you repeat the question,” followed by, “No, I still didn’t get all of it–could you break it down for me? Harvard Law wasn’t as good when I went there as when YOU went there.” This would have brought down the house (and cemented his nomination)), there are serious issues about Estrada’s credibility (i.e., just where DID you go to college– and if you went to Columbia, why doesn’t Farber know who you are?)

But having a sense of humor vs. NOT having a sense of humor is why I am here (an associate at an 8 lawyer firm in Manhattan, albeit with a cool blog […]) and Miguel is a kick-ass partner at Gibson Dunn in Washington, and is up for the DC Circuit (well, the last part is because he is probably one of, oh, 3 or 4 guys with Spanish surnames and kick-ass legal credentials who seem to be THAT conservative). But I can resent him anyway.

High Noon. Rodney Welch writes: I didn’t read the City Paper review of “High Noon,” but I assume when they refer to the “liberal cliches” they’re referring to the fact that it was made in the McCarthy Era, when liberals (most of them Democratic, I’d guess) were the only ones standing up to Tail Gunner Joe. Will Kane is somewhat in the mold of how Hollywood viewed liberalism, as more or less being equated with peaceful, live and let live decency. (Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird is another example.) It’s interesting to compare the movie with “On the Waterfront” — they were made just two years apart, both had a theme of loner versus an evil that had cowed the rest of society, both were influenced by Cold War politics, and yet the directors were at diametrically opposite political perspectives. Fred Zinneman’s bogeyman was McCarthy; Elia Kazan’s was Stalin.

Jonah vs. Clinton + Enron: Ed Graham: I think Jonah had tongue firmly in cheek — he was taking a shot at all those who were happy to ascribe every excess of the 80s to the “Reagan era of greed.”

Similarly, Rand Simberg: You wrote, quoting Jonah Goldberg, “…That’s what the era of Clinton-greed brought us…”

And then castigated him for blaming the greed on Clinton.

I think you missed his point. The comment was tongue in cheek–a dig at the fact that Bill and Hillary got into office by (among other lies) calling the Reagan eighties the “decade of greed.” I suspect that if you asked Jonah, he would tell you that neither president actually caused their respective “decades of greed,” but that demogoguery is cheap.

David Klinghoffer on religion in NYC: John W. Brewer: I agree with your points re DC and furthermore with the overall proposition that his take is idiosyncratic to the point of being bizarre. By considering Manhattan “secular” he seems to mean no more and no less than “I didn’t know or run into very many white evangelical Protestants when I lived there. I run into more of them in Seattle.” Once you discount Catholics, Jews, and non-whites (groups which are not inherently 100% secular, at a minimum), you have very few people left to work with in New York. The percentage of the NYC population which is “white Protestant” (with “Protestant” understood purely as a statement about ethnicity/ancestry rather than current faith or practice […]) is, I think, something like 6-8%, and I doubt the Manhattan percentage is dramatically higher than the citywide average. The comparable figure is something in excess of 50% nationwide. Not only is the nonwhite (perhaps technically “non-Anglo,” given the Census Bureau reminder that Hispanics can be “of any race”) population much larger in N.Y. in percentage terms, but something north of 75% of the white population is Jewish, Roman Catholic (at least “culturally”) or “other” (Greek, Armenian, etc.). By contrast, I would expect that 75%+ of the Seattle-area white population is “culturally” Protestant. I would tend to doubt that the percentage of actual believers/ regular churchgoers among the Seattle-area cultural-white-Protestant population is higher than the equivalent percentage in Manhattan (at least as adjusted for age & marital status), but there’s simply a dramatically smaller population, by an order of magnitude, to draw from.

Now, it is true that the population of actual churchgoers among the c-w-P population in Manhattan is notably more mainline and less evangelical/fundamentalist/Pentecostal than with the country as a whole, and perhaps Seattle. For better or worse, mainliners are less likely than fundies to be outwardly demonstrative in the way Klinghoffer identifies. […] However, it’s not that nonmainline Protestants don’t exist in NYC, they just tend to be black or, increasingly, Hispanic.

It may be significant in all sorts of ways that the religious/ethnic mix of NYC is dramatically at variance with that of the country as a whole (the religious/ethnic mix of New Amsterdam was different from the rest of the East Coast way back when), but that’s not “secularism.” Anyone who lived anywhere in the world other than Brooklyn (including in Israel) would be struck by how many observant orthodox Jews actually live in Manhattan. It’s not not just the ones who commute in from the outer boroughs, but the ones I see from my window every Saturday as they walk to and from the synogogue at 94th & Lexington. The fact that Klinghoffer apparently doesn’t count these people as affecting the secular tone of the place is just weird, and says something about him and his own relationship with Judaism rather than something about Manhattan. (So Manhattan also has more secular Jews than anywhere else. We have more of everything. Someone else can address whether practicing Roman

Catholics are simply a low-class outer borough phenomenon with no relevance to Manhattan.)

Oh, and not only do I read the Bible on the subway (admittedly a practice disproportionately practiced by black women), I have been known to say the office from the Book of Common Prayer (in a low but audible voice, complete with appropriate head-bobbing, crossing myself and the like) while riding the subway at rush hour. People look on impassively, without eye contact. They’ve seen weirder. This is New York.

And Avram Grumer: I noticed that Klinghoffer kept talking about “Manhattan,” as if one island with about a fifth of New York City’s population were the whole city. I wonder if he knows that Brooklyn’s nickname is “The City of Homes and Churches.”

Mysticism and Christianity: Lynn Gazis-Sax: FWIW, I tend to think of the meaning of the word mysticism in terms closer to your definition than Brink’s (though I suspect there is probably no shortage of people who use the word in terms closer to Brink’s definition). Just a few things that struck me:

[Quoting Eve:] “I wonder if there is some lack of awareness of mystical elements in Catholicism (which I displayed in my earlier posts on this subject…) because many of the practices and language de-emphasized by misguided ‘spirit of Vatican II’ types were more obviously mystical: traditional devotions like the rosary, an understanding of the Mass and transubstantiation, talk of submission in Christ, talk of God’s otherness. But a lot of that stuff is being revived, thank God!”

I’ve always thought that, if I ever were a Catholic, I’d be a “spirit of Vatican II” Catholic. I like the National Catholic Reporter, some of the things that bother me most about the Catholic Church (e.g. lack of ordination of women and its views on birth control) seem to be things that lots of “spirit of Vatican II” Catholics also disagree with, etc. But I’d have to say that the mystical aspects of Catholicism are, from my point of view, part of what’s positive in the Church; I’d hate for the “spirit of Vatican II” to mean sloughing all that off.

[Quoting Eve again:] “Well, I’d say Gnosticism is all around us, cf. Harold Bloom’s intriguing studies of ‘the American religion,’ but hey.”



Very much all around us among liberal Quakers. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way (taking something I don’t like about the liberal side of Quakerism and calling it Gnostic as a way of expressing what I dislike about it). I mean it in the sense that, among the more liberal Quakers (as opposed to the more evangelical ones), there are people who would, for example, read Elaine Pagels, and feel that her relatively positive take on Gnosticism expresses the kind of faith that they value. (I’m ambivalent — I

find Elaine Pagels interesting, but, despite any flaws in the choices the Church took, I still see value in an incarnational view of Christianity, which Gnosticism lacks.)

Working mothers: Jendi Reiter: Your exchange with Lisa Powell on working mothers is more nuanced than most, but what’s usually ignored in this debate is that it’s a delicate balance between too much and too little parental attention. It’s unhealthy for a relationship when one person sacrifices her outside interests or commitments to focus wholly on the other person. This is true whether it’s a marriage or a parent-child relationship. The right balance will be different for each family. Especially when the child grows older, it can be a major burden for him to feel that he is his mother’s sole “mission in life.” As a general rule, our families should take priority over our jobs, but it’s a big leap to say that therefore mothers shouldn’t have jobs at all unless financial need compels them.

And Scalia: A different anonymous reader writes: I think that Scalia’s rule-based notions of jurisprudence do have more than the paltry, grudging moral content that you ascribe to them. That case would depend on the kinds of “natural law” arguments posited by, among others, John Finnis, who argued that neutral, rule-based systems of justice faciliate reciprocity and cooperation, and hence contribute to the formation of a “flourishing” community capable of effective coordinated planning (on an individual basis). Finnis reasoned that such planning is moral in an important sense because, as I’m sure the poor bastards who have lived in Afghanistan for the last 20 years can also testisfy, it is an essential prerequisite for the fullest realization of friendship, community, pursuit of knowledge and the like.

This is a “baseline” morality to be sure, but nothing to sniff at–and, in our far-flung heterogeneous society, may yeild far more of a net moral outcome than a possibly arbitrary system in which federal judges legislate their own version of morality (these are lawyers we are talking about(!)) under the guise constitutional or statutory legal interpretation.