New Quaker Notebook

War is news. A cardinal rule of writing for the stage is to be sure that the script contains conflict, any conflict, because the interplay of discordant dramatic language depicts the human condition at a pivot, at a critical moment before any resolution can be achieved. The end. Applause. So that in part is what drives the Hollywood action flick—conflict, well, that and blowing stuff up. So wars should be the ultimate in action films. And apparently they are. Wars have spawned thousands of films on conflict, from every imaginable angle. If we get tired of WWII, there's always Vietnam, or the Civil War, or the Alamo, or the American war for independence (which we celebrate each July 4th by blowing stuff up); if these get stale (at least until a new cycle, like yo-yos and marbles), there's every other war fought throughout the history of civilization. Anyone remember Troy?

It's also very good for journalists, or what passes for journalism these days. We tend to forget that the mainline news outlets are multinational corporations with bottom lines to care about and shareholders to satisfy—well, that and bread and circuses. It shouldn't be too much of a surprise, then, that the following conversations took place right after the London bombings. Here's the shorter report over at the Democracy Now! news desk:

During their coverage of the breaking news events yesterday, several FOX News hosts or reporters made comments that are raising some eyebrows. The network's Washington Managing Editor Brit Hume told host Shepard Smith, that when he heard about the London bombings, he saw it as an investment opportunity:

"I mean, my first thought when I heard—just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, 'Hmmm, time to buy.' Others may have thought that as well."

Meanwhile, one of the network's anchors, Brian Kilmeade, said the attacks worked to the Western world's advantage and he blasted the international gathering at the G8 for focusing on global warming and African aid instead of terrorism. Here is some of what he said right after Tony Blair spoke yesterday. This is FOX anchor Brian Kilmeade talking to another FOX's Paul Varney:

KILMEADE: And that was the first time since 9-11 when they should know, and they do know now, that terrorism should be Number 1. But it's important for them all to be together. I think that works to our advantage, in the Western world's advantage, for people to experience something like this together, just 500 miles from where the attacks have happened."

VARNEY: It puts the Number 1 issue right back on the front burner right at the point where all these world leaders are meeting. It takes global warming off the front burner. It takes African aid off the front burner. It sticks terrorism and the fight on the war on terror, right up front all over again.

KILMEADE: Yeah.

In all of this Christians need to ask themselves again and again, How do I bear witness to the gospel through my actions and my choices? One means is to act without at the same time being manipulated by competing sources of information, for we can't speak truth to any conflict if the situations are clouded by room-clearing gases of deception, expelled there by the hot engines of commerce, themselves running on motives springing from the hearts of covetous and grasping people.

On the day of the bombing I received a moving email from Andy Alexis-Baker over at Jesus Radicals. Unlike the reporters at FOX, Andy was left with a different take on the circumstance:

The explosions in London today bring up 9-11 to my mind and how the media really created this "event" by broadcasting it live to every home around the globe in real time. I was in NYC on that day, I saw the smoke and flames, and smelled the horrible smell over our city, and it was not like the media broadcast it.

9-11 would not have been possible a hundred years ago, not because there were not airplanes, but because information was passed along very differently, more personably, with effect. Today however there are people who know that the media is a powerful tool, a propaganda tool so there are able to do things like coordinate bombs, and blow up airplanes in order to spark a media "event." The State is willing to capitalize on this "event" for their own power as well.

I wonder if the most nonviolent thing we could do, the thing we could do to resist war in our day the most, is to turn off the televisions, unplug them, and simply get rid of them. The information passed through them is too overwhelming, unrelated to our everyday lives and creates a world that is essentially violent.

Yes ... I think the most nonviolent thing we could do, the best thing to resist war, is not to demonstrate in Washington this fall as UFPJ [United for Peace and Justice] and those anti-war groups want (another media "event"), but to do the opposite ... unplug.

Medical malpractice, coffee is bad for you. Former Missouri insurance commissioner Jay Angoff's new study on "Falling Claims and Rising Premiums in the Medical Malpractice Insurance Industry,"[1] which he conducted for the Center for Justice and Democracy, was released yesterday and finds that the 15 largest malpractice insurers have actually taken in 120.2% of their premium dollars while at the same time paying out only about 5% more in claims during the same period (2000-2004); one company, a subsidiary of AIG, increased its premiums by 2200%, but in claims payed out only 14 cents on the dollar. Some malpractice insurers substantially increased their premiums while their claims payments and projected future claims payments were decreasing, says the study.

Shocking? Yes—but no. It's shocking because it contradicts the prevailing wisdom that medical malpractice claims are to blame for the rising cost of physician and hospital care. It's not shocking because those who have worked in these twin industries (medicine and insurance) can pretty much tell you that medical malpractice claims have historically been so small in the aggregate as to have a negligible impact on insurance premiums, that premium rates are tied more to the New York Stock Exchange than to any group of civil actions. I know that tort reform was made a big issue in the last presidential election, some not-nice things were said during the campaign about vice-presidential candidate John Edwards (a trial attorney), and putting caps on claims was the mantra for fixing what ails the rising cost of medical care in the US. In fact, it became GOP propaganda that the malpractice claim was an endemic evil in America. It didn't help that an earlier 2003 study by the respected Weiss Ratings also concluded that there is no real causal connection between claims, caps, and premium rates.[2]

This really isn't a Republican vs Democrat issue. There are many of us—thousands, maybe millions—who think that the stink is coming from both sides of the aisle. The blame for this can't just be the hot political gas that circulates around the issue of tort reform, or the corporate interests that keep this swirling mass going, but really the way we're getting any of our credible information. I liken it to the ridiculous efforts of our mainline media to report some basic facts about coffee. They could never get it right. When it comes to science reporting, whether it's the hard or the social sciences, they get disoriented, bewildered. I can't tell you how many years (really decades) went by with one news report after another talking to two separate choirs. It was good for you, it was bad for you. Decaffeinated coffee was good for you—no, wait, that too is bad. I finally stopped paying attention to the reports and took my mother's advise and now drink my coffee in moderation. I think the latest information has it that drinking coffee in moderation is okay.

Liars, like beautiful things, are where you find them. Some things lose their beauty under inspection.

Oh, well, Bush says Oh, well, Bush says. The original strategy that sought to contain global terrorism by luring the terrorists to their death in Iraq apparently isn't working (as if it ever did). The deadly bomb attacks in London today should never have happened and that they took place suggests—like the war on drugs, like the war on hunger, like the war on poverty, like any other "war" on the fallen human condition—that the original strategy is all wrong.

I thought I might have something more to say,[1] but these words by President Bush sum up the absurdity of the violent circle the Busheviks have drawn in the sand:

"The war on terror goes on," said Mr. Bush. "I was most impressed by the resolve of all the leaders in the room. Their resolve is as strong as my resolve. And that is, we will not yield to these people, will not yield to the terrorists." [Voice of America, July 7, 2005]

"The war on terror goes on. The resolve of our nation is still being tested. And in the face of danger we are showing our character. Three years after the attack on our country, Americans remain strong and resolute, patient in a just cause, and confident of the victory to come." [President's Radio Address, September 11, 2004][2]

1. Perhaps I'm repeating myself. See my April 4, 2004 blog on the likeness between the "war on terror" and the "war on drugs"—both of which we just keep winning and winning. Could we expect more from wars against the wrong enemies?
2. And it gets creepy. Condoleeza Rice (then National Security Advisor) also used this language in 2003: "It was just a reminder ... that the war on terrorism goes on," she told reporters at the Washington Foreign Press Center after the terrorist bombings in Chechnya and in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. See American Forces Press Service, May 14, 2003. But then the President also said in 2003 that audiotaped messages from Osama Bin Laden confirm that "the war on terror goes on." See Aljazeera.net English, October 19, 2003; CBC News, October 20, 2003. And then there's the sudden, weird affection for the word "resolve." Bush is resolved, the American people are resolved, the British people are resolved, Tony Blair is resolved: "We are united in our resolve to confront and defeat this terrorism...." [Voice of America, July 7, 2005] "When they try to divide our people or weaken our resolve, we will not be divided and our resolve will hold firm." [TVNZ, July 8, 2005].

Hall of mirrors. As attracted as I am to the political aims of the new Christian Alliance for Progress, I can't help but feel that it's really a mirror image of the aggressive right-leaning Christian Coalition of America®. From that refractory angle, then, it seems to be on the same battlefield as Tony Perkins' Family Research Council, James Dobson's Focus on the Family, D. James Kennedy's Reclaim America, Alan Keyes' Renew America, as well as groups such as Redeem America, Redo America, Repent America, Restore America, and Revive America. They all have their own list of American "values" and their list of Christian "values," and they stuff these valued ingredients into their Osterizers and hope that what pours out is a Pilgrim.

Then there are the antipodal Free State Project and ChristianExodus.org. The libertarian Free State Project is "an agreement among 20,000 pro-liberty activists to move to New Hampshire, where they will exert the fullest practical effort toward the creation of a society in which the maximum role of government is the protection of life, liberty, and property." ChristianExodus.org is "moving thousands of Christians to South Carolina to reestablish constitutionally limited government founded upon Christian principles."[1]

Remember that Jesus said: "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place." [John 18:36] It doesn't matter how many Pilgrims get poured out of these modern alembics—there is nothing you or I can do to transform the United States into God's Kingdom. We are called to be citizens of his Kingdom, surely, but that Kingdom is not any worldly nation or empire, nor will we get it with our "careful observation" [Luke 17:20]. We also shouldn't go around trying to pull up the weeds God has said to leave until his harvest.[2]

1. They do not share the same goal as my friends at Antipas Ministries, now working their ministry within Canada (out of the Beast and via a modern aliya).
2. See Matt 13:24-30. Compare also Vernard Eller's comment on tares and wheat in his Christian Anarchy (Eerdmans, 1987), p. 203.

The politics of independence. Christians value many things, and many of these things are valued because our Lord wanted them for us as sojourners on this earth and as ambassadors of the kingdom. One such value is peace. Peace, surely, is both a process and a goal, but we should never conflate peace qua Christian value with the political process or political goal of peace. In other words, the politics of peace should not itself be a Christian endeavor. As Christians, we may work to resolve issues nonviolently and through peaceful means, but we do so because Christ requires this of us. It is not our place to say that this is required therefore of all people.

We may argue that the peace process and the goal of peace have cognitive antecedents that make peace intellectually persuasive, or at least emotionally compelling. Such therefore is the work of all non-Christian (and all non-religious) peacemakers, as they seek to convince warring nations and truculent peoples to lay aside their weapons and cultivate relationships in different soil, on foundations other than suspicion, threats, trespass, fighting, and the cycle of violence thereon. Such, too, are the rhetorical labors of social progressives who bring to the debate the tablets of psychosocial science, volumes of history's lessons, and the future pleasures of human probability. This is made even easier by our social nature itself—for who is against peace? Surely everyone of us loves peace. We may not know how to get it or, having gotten it, how to keep it. Peacemakers can help us toward that end, using whatever strategems may be effective.

The politics of peace has its own logic, like the politics of poverty and economic justice. When the Busheviks proclaim that the peace process requires the selfless sacrifice of 1,700 American lives, the deaths of 100,000 Iraqi women and children, and the continuing slaughter of the opposition in Iraq, we may want to argue that this is a detestable means to an honorable end, but such is the inexorable logic in the politics of peace. Mahatma Gandhi ... Martin Luther King, Jr. ... The Dalai Lama ... Pope John Paul II ... Albert Schweitzer ... Sister Dorothy Stang ... Mother Teresa ... John Woolman—long is the list of people who have labored for peace. Some have been Christians, some have been people of other faiths, some were called because peace is also a human value. Peace being a desirable end, no Christian ought to say that we may get to this through any means whatsoever, if the process itself requires that we throw aside other ends that our Lord values for us. When Christians try to get to peace through the politics of peace, they get confused and deluded into thinking that this must be the same as the theology of peace. Christian dominionists make this mistake. Christ, however, did not.