Having been out of town for Thanksgiving, I am late posting my monthly column for the Albuquerque Tribune. It appeared Thrusday, Nov. 25, Thanksgiving, under the headline above. What follows is the sub-head and the column.
(Thus far I have received one angry and one complimentary email.)
A.A.
Meet Linda Chavez (no, not that one),a nun who's dismayed by election's narrow 'values'
By Arthur Alpert
At Thanksgiving the media’s still gobbling about how "moral" or
"Christian" values voters re-elected the President. No evidence, but
faith-based journalism doesn’t need facts. And culture war sells.
So TV and the newspapers are promoting a "Mad Max" America - the good
guys, wielding the Cross and Star of David, advancing on secular hordes.
Hogwash. But since I’m a card-carrying secular myself, I call Linda
Chavez for counsel.
(No, not that Linda Chavez. Not the New Mexico-born columnist who wrote
here recently that real Americans voted for President Bush. The other 56
million of us? Probably terrorists.)
No, I refer to another Linda Chavez, a native and Sister of Charity and
my Christian values guru.
At age four, Linda told her parents she would be a teacher. Linda did
teach for 40 years, including 20 at Albuquerque’s St. Pius High School.
In 1994, she created SET for Health New Mexico. She retired as boss two
years ago but still works there.
Over bowls of chile stew (Linda, green, red for me), I asked her
reaction to the idea Christian values decided the election.
"Crying," she said.
Meaning the Christian right doesn’t grasp Christianity? "I may have a
limited world view," she said, "but no." She continued, "I want to say.
‘Who is your God?’ Where did they miss it?"
Miss what? The essence, Linda said She cites two Jewish injunctions:
"Love God with your whole heart…" and "Love your neighbor as yourself,"
and the Beatitudes: "Blessed are the poor in spirit. "Blessed are the
meek. Blessed are the peacemakers. Hello?"
(I understood her "Hello?" to mean optional war on Iraq ain’t
peacemaking.)
"I’m not saying [living them] is easy…," Linda said, but the Beatitudes
are where Christians start.
She suspects "moral values" translates into homosexuality -"We
shouldn’t put people down for something they can’t help" - and abortion.
Sister Linda is pro-life but worries when fervent opponents of abortion
don’t object to killing in war or on Death Row, too.
I told her Bob Jones III, of Bob Jones University, advised President
Bush that "(liberals) despise you because they despise your Christ."
"My God is not a condemning God. If we use Jesus as a model and I hope I
do, we will be slow to judge others. I have a hard time deciding for you
what is right."
Clearly Linda’s Judeo- Christian values - kindness, justice, love - are
not Bob Jones’ values.
As we pay the check, Linda recalls Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin’s view
that humans aren’t fully evolved. Yeah, I respond, and at this stage,
fear drives us, not love.
Later, thinking about the Bob Joneses, I figure they strike out because
they’re afraid and feel threatened. Which scares me. Still, they’re a
minority (a Zogby poll says religious moderates and progressives
constitute 54% of voters), so there’s no need to panic.
We must fight those who’d undermine the very Constitution that protects
their religion from government. (Oh Lord, they really know not what they
do.) Beyond that, I’ll try tolerance, hoping that rationality will
overcome, over time. I’ll even look for common ground.
Yes, Sister Linda and I might invite Bob Jones III to talk turkey. Tell
him that we, too, hate the use of sex to sell products. And we feel
beleaguered by rotten values.
Of course, Sister Linda will have to ask old Bob, "What would Jesus do?"
Alpert is a semi-retired newsman living in Albuquerque. Email him at
Arthur Alpert@swcp.com. His column runs the fourth Thursday of the month
in Insight & Opinion.
A three-paragraph story datelined Kabul tells us "U.S. Raids Suspected Al-Qaida Compounds."
Gee, from reading the papers I was under the impression we had won the war in Afghanistan. Not only that, but democracy there was alive and well, after their elections.
The press's willingness to buy the Administration's fictions did not begin and end with the NY Times' incompetence in buying and re-selling White House falsehoods about WMD and ties between Saddam and Osama.
(If you want to know more about Afghanistan, I recommend "Imperial Hubris," by Anonymous, the CIA operative and bin Laden expert who recently resigned from the agency and may now be identified as Michael Scheur.)
As Americans become more divided, more partisan, more angry at each other,
we more often charge that the press is biased. That may sometimes be true, but I keep on bumping into other reasons for inferior journalism, like ignorance.
Take this morning's AP story from Columbusa, Ga., headlined "Miltary School Site of Protest" on page 3 of the Albuquerque Journal.
Demonstrators, we learn, were protesting a US military school "whose graduates they claim later committed civil rights abuses including murder."
That was in the first paragraph. About six down, we learn that "SOA Watch and other critics allege the school's graduates have committed murder, rape and torture..." etc.
And so it goes. In this pretty long story, the reporter never tells us if the charges are true. Now that might be acceptable if we were dealing with crimes perpetrated yesterday.
But the School of the Americas (since renamed) goes way back. to the 70s, It was a huge story when in 1989, six Jesuit priests and two bystanders were murdered in El Salvador. My memory is, to put it kindly, vague, but I remember SOA being tied to the rapes of American-born nuns in Latin America, also a long time ago.
So how come we are still writing, 15 years later, "critics say" and "alleged."
Are the facts here unknown? Unknowable.
I wonder if the reporter tried to learn them. Did he Google SOA? Or read one of the many books on right-wing violence against Roman Catholic and other social reformers in Latin American dictatorships toward the end of the 20th Century?
Whatever the reason, this story is ignorant and a reminder that we live in the age of faith-based journalism. Faith, you remember, is what Aquinas - in his proof of God's existence - said we need to make a leap of. Yes, it replaces knowledge.
At least Aquinas tried to reason his way to God, using information and logic. Today's newspeople often don't make an effort to find the facts, no less the truth.
I have just finished reading "Imperial Hubris," by Anonymous. The subtitle:
"Why the West is Losing the War on Terror."
The author, a CIA expert in Afghanistan, South Asia and terrorism, argues that we don’t have a clue.
It’s an Islamic insurgency, not terrorism. It’s not about Western freedom, it’s about defending Islam, as bin Laden keeps telling us. He and most Muslims see us attacking Islam when we "export" democracy (and separation of church and state); when we support Israel and "corrupt" Arab regimes; when we back Russia, India and China against their Muslim populations.
Further, he says, we are fighting badly. We need to use not just military, but political means. And where we do use guns, the aim is to kill, nothing less.
Anonymous says we should have warred on bin Laden and the Taliban Sept. 12, 2001, not six months later; that letting al Qaeda escape and regroup was criminal and our efforts to create a democratic Afghanistan will fail.
The war on Iraq? Bin Laden, he says, prayed for it.
Anonymous calls for a fierce military response to a "worldwide Islamic jihad" and a rethinking of our politics. Under the last rubric - learning to act independently of any coalition, freeing ourselves of dependence on Middle Eastern oil (he favors more domestic drilling and research on alternative fuels) and reappraising our ties to Israel.
That’s a summary of the ideas. But Anonymous doesn't write with phony objectivity. He lets us know what he feels and concludes. Like his disgust - that's the word - with our civilian leadership since Reagan. And his anger at the leaders of the intelligence community and the military. And his dismissal of the FBI, which he considers useless.
Why am I telling you all this? Because despite my reading of daily newspapers, weekly news magazines and monthly opinion journals, much in the book was new to me.
Which may tell you something about the state of journalism.
PS Anonymous is Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit. James Risen has a story in the New York Times today that will tell you more about him.
Today I read and re-read an Associated Press analysis of what to expect in business in the second Bush term and came away thinking about something called "world view."
Consider this paragraph:
"Industry analysts say that with Bush in the White House and Republicans increasing their control of Congress, government price controls for prescription medicines won’t be on the table. The free market system, where demand drives price, will continue, said Barbara Ryan, a pharmaceutical analyst and managing director at Deutsche Bank Securities."
Oh? We have a free market system in pharmaceuticals? Demand drives the price of prescriptions?
I doubt even a right-wing economist would endorse that flight of fancy.
A free market means competition, choices, price differentials. But our drug manufacturers enjoy monopolies.
Fact is, we have price controls, the industry’s rather than government’s.
Okay, was the reporter biased? I doubt it. He or she probably relied on expert sources, industry analysts like Barbara Ryan. This reflect our times. We live in the era of reliance on authority, after all. In the 60s, more Americans and more reporters were skeptical.
Also, today’s reporters swim in a "free market" sea, whereas reporters in the 60s grew up in an economy that gave lip service, at least, to government regulation aimed at protecting the citizenry from laissez-faire capitalism.
Reporters in the 60s also read more than today’s; anybody born after 1955 has grown up in a visual age. If there are advantages that accrue from absorbing pictures, they lie in feeling and sensation, not retained factual information, certainly not traditional logic.
Back to the AP story – in a schematic summarizing the outlook in several industries, the "Pharmaceutical" capsule reads this way:
"Drug makers would benefit from less government price controls on prescription drugs…"
Less price controls? That’s not English. Less price "control" -singular - would work. Or "fewer"price controls.
Do I nit-pick? No. Poor English is another product of visual learning.
In sum, today’s journalism reflects our society – its reliance on faith in authority rather than skepticism thereof, its common assumptions about the way the economy works and its reliance on video rather than reading.
Which adds up to a world view.
Not bias.