November 2003 Archives

I think I sometimes appear more pessimistic than I really am. Here are some of this week’s reasons for hope.

• Being in touch with Jorj & Sue and Barb and Tobi because of these writings (could the “Lost Generation”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000147.php be muddling towards a new coalesence?)

• A small flurry of recent talks and pamphlets about rediscovering traditional Quakerism: Marty Grundy’s 2002 lecture Quaker Treasure: Discovering The Basis For Unity Among Friends, Paul Lacey’s The Authority Of Our Meetings Is The Power Of God , and Lloyd Lee Wilson’s “Wrestling With Our Faith Tradition”:http://www.ncymc.org/journal/ncymcjournal3.pdf (PDF)

• Tony P. saying he was grieved that Julie has left the Society of Friends and caring enough to talk to her. Thank you.

• A flyer I saw this weekend, written by PYM Religious Education staff. It was a list of what they thought they should be doing and it was really pretty good (why don’t they’d print this in PYM News , it’s much better than their boilerplate entries this issue). Even more I hope the work does take a move in that direction.

• Thomas Hamm’s The Quakers in America, which just came in yesterday. It’s perhaps a little too introductory but we need a good introduction and Hamm’s the one to write it. His book on Orthodox Friends, Transformation of American Quakerism is amazingly well researched and essential reading for any involved Friend who wants to understand who we are. He’s working on a companion history on the Hicksites, which is very much needed.

Today’s the day when U.S. customers can switch their cell phone provider but keep their number.

I'm intrigued by a new page on the War Resister League's site named "Current Commentary":www.warresisters.org/commentary.htm. The current content isn't terribly exciting -- a collection of presumably-unpublished letters to the _New York Times_ -- but it would be exciting to see WRL's take on current events. I've missed David McReynold's once ubiquitous emails and suspect people would be willing to look to WRL again for commentary on current events,

The U.S. war against iraq just gets stranger every day. One of the key people behind the war told a London audience that week that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone," explaining that "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing." Perle is one of the key players behind the scenes at the Pentagon. Although he's recently resigned from an important advisory, group, he was one of a handful of military analysists who spent the Clinton Administration arguing for a second war in iraq. So what's up? Perle isn't an official White House spokesperson and doesn't represent official Bush Administration policy. Is he just talking on his own behalf, perhaps to get headlines? Or does he represent a position well represented inside the White House, that the President of the United States should intervene when international law is inefficient? This follows a New York Times report that the military doesn't _really_ think there are many "outside institgators in iraq":http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/19/international/middleeast/19iraq.html and that the bombings really are homegrown resistance to the U.S. invasion. Check out "Daily Kos's":http://www.dailykos.com/story/2003/11/20/65113/597 post on all this, with it's extensive reader commentary. "Thoughts on the eve of the Apocalypse":http://b-c.blogspot.com/2003_11_01_b-c_archive.html#106937251455211736 blog also gives some good context.

It's time to explain why I call this site "The Quaker Ranter" and to talk about my home, the liberal branch of Quakers. Non-Quakers can be forgiven for thinking that I mean this to be a place where I, Martin Kelley, "rant," i.e., where I "utter or express with extravagance." That may be the result (smile), but it's not what I mean and it's not the real purpose behind this site.

I guess folks might wonder why the son of the Quaker Ranter is getting baptized in a Roman Catholic church…

On November 1, Theo was freed from sin.

Julie & Theo getting ready at home. Julie, Theo & Maia waiting in church lobby. Theo memorizing his lines before the big event (all Nov. 1).

Theo, freed of sin: Godmothers Becky & Jess, Father Pasley, Theo & the parents.

Everyone wants to hold Theo. Susan, Tom and Patty get their turn.

Below: Theo smiling in chair, Nov. 8

And for those readers of Martin Kelley Quaker Ranter wondering why his son is getting baptized, see Are Catholics More Quaker?

More on the "myth that is 'Private Jessica'":www.guardian.co.uk/iraq/Story/0,2763,1081207,00.html, a media creation born of propaganda and racism. I feel sad for the real Jessica Lynch caught up in all this. elsewhere Paul Krugman point out how the Bush Administration isn't "supporting the troops":http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/11/opinion/11KRUG.html, "But I also suspect that a government of, by and for the economic elite is having trouble overcoming its basic lack of empathy with the working-class men and women who make up our armed forces."

In the Bruderhof magazine, an "interview with actor Martin Sheen":www.bruderhof.com/articles/sheen.htm?source=DailyDig. It's a profile that focuses not only on his acting fame or activist causes but on his religious faith and how it underpins the rest of his life. Read, for instance, Sheen on civil disobedience: bq. It is one of the only tools that is available to us where you can express a deeply personal, deeply moral opinion and be held accountable. You have to be prepared for the consequences. I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it. Sheen's radical Catholic faith is not a superficial confession that provides him with a place to go on Sunday morning, and it's not passive identity from which to do political organizing. Rather, it's a relationship with God and truth that demands witness and sacrifice and suffering. It's the faith of someone who has personally gone through the depths of spiritual hedonism, and who has watched his country become the "most confused, warped, addicted society," and who has found only God left standing: bq. God has not abandoned us. I don't know what other force to appeal to other than almighty God, I really don't. I could quote him for hours, but read the interview.

A site called “Tame the MONSTER”:www.tamethemonster.org recently added Nonviolence.org to their blogroll (which is how I stumbled on them via “Technorati”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/links.html?sub=anywheren1&url=http://www.nonviolence.org/). From what I can make out it’s two twenty-something Lutherans in Texas who were radicalized by 9/11. Interesting stuff. My favorite part is the “Why did you create this site?” answer in their FAQ:

bq. We felt called. Yep, by God. The reality in the US is that many people want to get involved with global justice campaigns, but few people know how. Personally, we know just how difficult it can be to find meaningful ways to make a difference. We wanted to make it easier for others! We believe that God calls each of us to a lifestyle of justice and love for our neighbors.

From Johann Christoph Arnold, a "provocative argument that a military draft might not be a bad idea":www.nonviolence.org/articles/1003-arnold.php. "Deciding which side to stand on is one of life’s most vital skills. It forces you to test your own convictions, to assess your personal integrity and your character as an individual." It's a pretty drastic wish. I don't really wish it on today's youngins' (I'm not sure Arnold is quite convinced either). But I will give a snippet of my own personal story, since it's kind of appropriate to the issue: when I was a senior in high school my father desperately wanted me to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. I went on interviews and even took the first physical. The pressure to join was sort of akin to the pressure young people of earlier generations have faced with a military draft (except more personal, as I was essentially living with the chair of the draft Martin Kelley board). I was forced to really think hard about what I believed. I had to reconcile my romaticism about the navy with my gut instincts that fighting was never a real solution. My father's pressure made me realize I was a pacifist. With my decision to forego the Naval Academy made, I started asking myself what other ramifications followed from my peace stance. Almost twenty years, here's Nonviolence.org. Arnold's argument, right or wrong, does reflect my story: bq. A draft would present every young person with a choice between two paths, both of which require courage: either to heed the call of military duty and be rushed off to war, or to say, “No, I will give my life in the service of peace.”

I am so tired of “phone war tax resistance”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000194.php. I have a fondness for the aging hippies of NWTRCC & WRL but I thought they’d given up this dead horse by now. Well, at least they’re not “resurrecting the ‘Doomsday Clock’”:http://www.friendsjournal.org/contents/2002/07july/feature.html.

Update, 12/8/03: Robert Randall, an old friend from NWTRCC, is the first to comment on the Dead Horses post. “See his response”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000216.php

I originally titled this entry "Why the peace movement is doomed," but maybe that's too strong a charge. Still, it's hard to see how the coterie of small mainstream groups (and the older activists in charge) expect to attract new people when they keep recycling old campaigns that are ridiculous and borderline-irrelevant. A small coalition is calling for a new "campaign of anti-war phone tax resistance":www.hanguponwar.org. A lot of U.S. war tax resisters have loved protesting the "phone war tax" over the years. Some history, from the new site: a tax on phone use was first used to fund the Spanish-American war back in 1898 and special war-related phone taxes came and went for forty years. The only problem is that it was a good funding stream, a tax the U.S. Congress didn't want to give up. So the phone tax has been "authorized and reauthorized the Second World War":http://www.hanguponwar.org/history.htm. If I'm reading the site's history right, there's been a continuous phone tax since 1932(!) and it's all gone into the general budget. Like all taxes, a good chunk of it has funded military action, but it's no different percentage than any other tax. Like all taxes, we've needed this many taxes because the U.S. is a very militarized country and it has gone up and down in relation to military spending. But even Congress hasn't bothered to think of it as war-related for many years now. I'd be embarrased to try to tell some eighteen year old born in 1985 that this tax has some special war significance just because did during the Vietnam War. Back in the sixties, a bunch of radical pacifists jumped on the phone tax resistance and haven't been able to let go in all this time. So why this clinging to phone taxes as a way of protesting war? I assume everyone likes it is because it's safe. For those reasons it's also entirely symbolic and almost completely meaningless. Can't we come up with new tactics? When will we be able to leave the Vietnam War to the historians and just move on? Many people think the old-line peace movement is a bunch of aging hippies; with campaigns like this, we kinda prove them right. "Let's brainstorm some new actions!":http://www.nonviolence.org/comment/index.php?c=10

From Canadian Mennonites comes “BuyNothingChristmas.org”:http://www.buynothingchristmas.org/

The most exagerrated story of the iraq War has to be that of Private Jessica Lynch's capture, torture and rescue. Now "Lynch is criticizing the official U.S. propaganda about her ordeal":www.nytimes.com/2003/11/07/national/07LYNC.html?ex=1068872400&. Lynch has apparently felt "hurt and ashamed" by the misleading accounts of her heroism. So will the idiots over at "Instapundit":http://www.instapundit.com/archives/012398.php and "National Review":http://www.nationalreview.com/ponnuru/ponnuru040303.asp now stop repeating the debunked stories. Will they apologize to Lynch? For those interested, here's some "Nonviolence.org articles on Lynch":http://www.nonviolence.org/mt/mt-search.cgi?IncludeBlogs=1&IncludeBlogs=2&IncludeBlogs=3&IncludeBlogs=4&IncludeBlogs=5&IncludeBlogs=6&search=lynch.

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Next on my list to read: Spencer Burke’s “Making Sense of Church”:http://www.makingsenseofchurch.com/. Spencer is the co-founder of “TheOoze”:http://www.theooze.com/ (which recently added a link to this site!) and this is his distillation of the Emergent Church movement. Jordan Cooper gave it a “very positive review”:www.jordoncooper.com/20031101_archives.html#106817797834830046 today, which convinces me to read it.

For anyone keeping track, my current reading is:

• Robert E. Webber’s The Younger Evangelicals (“read my initial take”:http://www.nonviolence.org/martink/archives/000136.php) and
• Paul Lacey’s pamphlet …The Authority of Our Meetings Is the Power of God, which I’m reading on “Kenneth Sutton’s recommendation”:http://kenneth.typepad.com/blog/2003/10/theauthorityo.html. I’m only half-way through but it’s surprisingly good so far.

Quaker story of the day: Julie & I went to a lawyer’s office to do wills, etc. He’s the same person who handled her grandfather’s estate so they know each other pretty well. He had made sure the language said that we declare rather than swear, remembering our Quaker scruples on the terminology. When we said we were having difficulties with Friends (and that Julie had left completely), he was surprised and asked why: “I thought with Quakers you can believe anything you want, right?” Honestly, that’s true for most Meetings. I’ve heard the same thing said many times in Quaker Meetings. Someday when I have time I’ll have to post about all the reasons I named this site “Martin Kelley Ranter.”

There are new reports that the "iraqi government was suing for peace":http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/06/politics/06INTe.html?ex=1383454800&en=15070e5de808c497&ei=5007&partner=USeRLAND back in March even as U.S. troops gathered at it's borders. "There's a discussion on this on the NV Board":www.nonviolence.org/comment/viewtopic.php?t=4873. The report paints a picture of a frightened iraqi leaders willing to capitulate to almost any U.S. demand. Saddam Hussein claimed to be willing to let thousands of FBI agents confirm the non-existance of weapons of mass destruction and apparently also agreed to hold open elections within two years. Now, I don't think Saddam Hussein ever negotiated any agreement in good faith. His goal was to hold on to power at whatever cost to the iraqi people. Last winter, the iraqi strategy was to give just enough concessions to the international community to delay war until the summer season made invasion more difficult. It's quite possible these entrieties were just another delaying tactic. But maybe not. Saddam Hussein and his government might really have been scared enough by the invasion army camped at their border that real change could have happened. What if U.S. leaders had called his bluff and sent in thousands of inspectors? Dictators are usually overthrown after years of steady opposition attains critical mass, at which point their regime ends with a surprising suddeness. Could the threat of war been the added pressure that would have topped Saddam? I have my doubts, but it's a possibility, one which the Bush Administration was sadly not interested in pursuing.

One of the many quizzes cluttering the internet these days: “Which of Henry VIII’s wives are you?”:www.spookbot.com/quiz. Should I be worried that both my mother and wife come out as Henry’s first, Catarina of Aragon?

Thanks to “Kenneth Sutton”:http://kenneth.typepad.com aka “Anna of Cleves”:http://kenneth.typepad.com/blog/2003/04/whichof_henry.html for first alerting me to this quiz.

In the current issue of _Fellowship_ magazine, Paul Rogat Loeb says it's a time for peace activists to be "Reclaiming Hope":www.forusa.org/Fellowship/Sept-Oct-03/Loeb.html. Talking to a peace movement that feels demoralized and beaten, he writes: bq. This response [of despair] risks creating a self-fulfilling prophecy—but a movement that may still be our best hope to transform America should not be allowed to dissipate in resignation. We did well, and we got it right. I've always thought Paul can be a little overly-optimistic about future movements springing up, but he makes some good points here. A peace movement as as large and vocal as the current one has effects in Washington that no governmental leader will ever admit to. The planning and execution of the war was certainly affected by the rising tide of opposition; the Bush Administration's hawks have certainly been watching the public opinion polls to see how far and how fast they could push their unilateral war agenda before the protests mushroom even larger. Paul does a good job looking at the war from the long perspective. It can take decades to fundamentally change the balance of power and the policies of the U.S. war machine. Wars almost always brew for decades before the first shots are fired. bq. The roots of the iraq war go back decades, from the "Southern Strategy" that handed the Republicans so much political power to the US role in bringing Saddam Hussein and his Baathist party to power to begin with. These roots won't be instantly untangled. If we look only at the past few months, we didn't win what we'd hoped. We ran out of time to stop the war. But we were never in this simply to stop a single war.

For those asleep for the past two years, the _New York Times Magazine_ has a long article by David Rieff, "Blueprint for a Mess":www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02iraq.html, that looks at ongoing problems with the U.S. occupation of iraq: bq. Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly. The article looks at the ideological roots of the post-war plan of occupation. A number of key decisions were made in the Pentagon's war room with little input from the State Department. Much of the planning revolved around Ahmad Chalabi, the two-bit, self-proclaimed iraqi opposition party leader during the last decade of Saddam Hussein's reign. Chalabi spent most of the 90s in London and Washington, where he became the darling of the Republican policy hawks who were also sidelined from political power. Together Chalabi and Washington figures like Donald Rumsfeld spent the 90s hatching up war plans if they ever took power again. Unfortunately Rumsfeld's plans didn't have the widespread support of the U.S. diplomatic and military establishment and Chalabi has had virtually no support inside iraq. But the conversations and decisions between the token iraqi opposition and the out-of-power Republican hawks has driven the occupation: bq. The lack of security and order on the ground in iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war. Rieff is pessimistic but he backs up his claims. The article is long but it's a must-read. The postwar occupations of iraq and Afghanistan will almost certainly be the defining foreign policy issue of this generation, and pacifists must look beyond ideology and rhetoric to understand what's happening in iraq.