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Getting kissed windy by Congress.  Despite the usual windy indignation from Democrats at the confirmation hearings today, it's pretty much a done deal that Alberto Gonzales is going to be confirmed by the US Senate.  Now this is a picture of our federal government out of control, I think. Not just of the impotence of our elected officials in taking a stand against a terrible choice for US Attorney General, but of their inability to take the high road in these proceedings. Gonzales may personally abhor torture, but that didn't stop him from recommending it to the president, making it the top-down standard for our military and intelligence behavior in Afghanistan and Iraq, and giving the Bush administration the impression that the president is, if not above the law, surely beyond the reach of law. That much is clear from a reading of his January 25, 2002 Memorandum for the President [.pdf].

It is not a morally sensible defense to say that an asymmetrical war, like the so-called war on terrorism, requires standards totally different from those agreed upon in the Geneva Conventions, for then the standards can simply become what is egoistically prudent, what is utilitarian, what can achieve the short-term ends, regardless of the humanity of the situation. Why regardless of the humanity of the situation? Because war always takes away the faces of its soldiers and replaces them with labels of emotion and statistics, where death on one side is not just better than death on another but actually a good to be sought and extolled. Because a step to the side of the Geneva Conventions is really a stride of superiority, a real swagger, and we know that the Bush administration doesn't need much incentive to take America into the neverland of arrogant supremacy. First the United Nations is irrelevant, so now the Geneva Conventions are irrelevant? Sure, it's true that torture never yields righteous information, but this is just a matter of practice, of utility, of strategy. While war takes people and makes them into body-counting, gotta-support-the-troops abstractions, each act of torture inverts that into a symbol of the ugliest misanthropy. Surely the conventions are there at least to remind us that we are human, that we still mourn, that we can, when the battle is won or lost, look at our enemies without total loss of face.

I am no longer maintaining imagine the quaker as a mirror for this weblog and have asked for all who link to the erstwhile mirror site at imagine the quaker to update their URL references. Living needs to be simpler and I must do my part.

My new web portal, Radical Christian Information [radicalchristian.info] is up and working at last, and I'm submitting to the search engines and soliciting submissions and URL recommendations.

After watching the format behavior of the site's HTML tables under a variety of browsers, I'm rethinking my plans to move its format to 100% CSS. Tables have been unjustly maligned, I think. (Oh, excuse the pun.)

Oh, we spent our tithe at the race track.  Last Monday, in response to the Bush administration's initial pledge of $15 million to help Asian nations hit by the devastating tsunami, Jan Egeland, UN undersecretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, called the gift stingy and complained about the level of assistance by Western nations in general. The initial US gift of $15 million was mostly channeled through the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, plus logistical support for aid efforts; on Tuesday, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) added $20 million for the earthquake relief, bringing the aid subtotal to $35 million, still less than the cost for the forthcoming presidential inauguration. On Friday President Bush announced that US aid would reach at least $350 million, and Secretary of State Colin Powell said more US aid could be likely.

It is not necessarily the place of the US federal government to give away American tax money to other countries, whatever the reason, but the US routinely does that in the form of economic aid. That's at least what USAID is for. Historically and commonly our government also steps forward in circumstances of great humanitarian need, sometimes in concert with assistance from American charities and NGOs, sometimes not. What hinders the US government here from being the leader in giving to this tsunami relief in southern Asia is that we are just too steeped in debt to do much more. In fact, we have to borrow in order to give away that $350 million in relief, because there is nothing in the bank to cover it. Promises, maybe, but the money isn't there: we're spending it in the Middle East.

This event should push the scales from our eyes and make us see that we simply squander our resources when we chase supremacy through military might, preventing us from helping—rather than hurting—when the world looks to us for a genuinely human response to sudden misery. Perhaps this is what keeps us from helping in Uganda, Darfur, Haiti ... the list is too long.

Hmm, I just discovered that my 1999 review of Caught in Between, by the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, is featured at the UCC Palestine Solidarity Campaign at University College Cork, Ireland. The group has affiliation with the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign. I hope this doesn't mean that I'll be swept up in the Patriot Act II, or will find my name on a no-fly list.

I found (and still find) Riah Abu El-Assal's book an enthralling, sometimes poignant, and often exasperating tale of several identities in crisis, and less a book about the Episcopal church and far more a book about the Arab-Palestinian search for identity and the increasing isolation of the Christian community in Israel today. And the perspective is compelling, written as such by a Palestinian Arab Christian in Israel. Riah has been priest of the parish in Nazareth for over 30 years; this is where he was born and where, as a child, he drank from Mary's Well. Even apart from intervals of travel, Palestine is his home. His ethnic identity is Arab, his mother tongue is Arabic, his faith is Christian, but he is also an Israeli citizen.