Questioning His Patriotism

IowaHawk brings us a guest editorial by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi who would like to remind us, on the 4th of July, to stop questioning the patriotism of others.

Reign Supreme

Amy Welborn's blog has a moderately interesting thread going today about the supreme court and constitutional law, which was touched off by Bishop Skylstad's letter to President Bush about the current Supreme Court vacancy.

I watched the news about this a bit from out hotel room on Friday night (right after O'Connor sent her letter of resignation) and I hope to have a good deal more content coming soon on the coming SCOTUS nomination fight -- as I'm sure it will be.

As seen in the the linked thread, the conflict won't be as simple as liberal vs. conservative, since there are rather more sides (even just to the pro-life question) than that. For instance, we will see at least rhetorical if not political friction between hard core originalists and hard core pro-lifers. A certain segment of the pro-life movement feels that since judicial fiat is how abortion was legalized, we might as well ban it by judicial fiat as well. They would like to see a reversal of Roe v. Wade that outright bans abortion by finding protection for unborn life in the constitution (generally sighting "penumbras and emanations" of the 14th amendment.) Strict originalists, on the other hand, (such as justice Scalia) would like someday to see Roe v. Wade struck down on the grounds that the constitution is currently silent on abortion, and regulation of abortion thus reverted to the states.

I think a state by state war would actually be best for the pro-life movement, both because it would result in a number of separate solutions to the abortion problem (and thus a chance for one state to learn from another) and also because it would present small, achievable objectives. Within a decade or two we would have abortion states and life state and ones that were fuzzy in between (not unlike the slave vs. free states before the civil war) and population/demographic trends would have a chance to re-align the balance of power in the House (at least) based on the relative populations of those states.

More to come.

Terror Blitz

Lots of good writing at National Review, both from the British writers and American about the attacks today in London.

Also watch The Belmont Club, which always has good analysis on the war on terror.

All prayers for the victims.

Landscape with Evil

Blogging while vacationing has proved more difficult than I had hoped, but here's a morsel to keep the top post from getting too old:

The folks over at Refracted Light sent me a link to their newest post, a piece on Michael O'Brien's Landscape With Dragons. I've always been leary of "Christian Ratings" sites, but Refracted Light is definately a good one, understanding the difference between stories in which bad things happen and stories that push corrupted worldviews.

I have yet to finish Landscape With Dragons, though I've started it a couple times. It seemed to me that O'Brien had some very real insights, while at the same time suffering from the difficulty with being far too simplistic in his interpretation of symbols. (Speaking of books in which dragons aren't utterly evil and dangerous, what does O'Brien make of Tokein's Farmer Giles of Ham?)

Context for a Mystery

Last night and today MrsDarwin and I threw the two kids in the car and did the 18 hour drive from Austin to Cincinnatti pretty close to straight through, leaving at 8pm and arriving at 3:45pm the following day. It was actually a surprising good way to cover the territory. (We've come to hate flying, because the cost is so high and dealing with toddlers in airports and airplanes these days is a nightmare.)

To stay awake and pass the time, we picked up a couple of books on CD from the library, the first we listened to being a mystery novel: A Place of Hiding by Elizabeth George, author of the Inspector Lindley mysteries that we've watched occasionally on PBS's Mystery.

Now, George is not a bad writer as far as prose style and plot construction, but the problem for me with Place of Hiding was that all of the main characters seemed fundamentally un-likeble, as well as personally disfunctional. This had the peculiar effect of making the solution to the mystery totally unsatisfying. One didn't care that the killer was found, because one didn't like the victim a bit. There was little satisfaction in discovering the motives of the perpetrator because they were so venal and capricious as to be both unguessable and uninvolving. The detectives, the other suspects, the family of the victim, none of them were people one could like very much.

The result was that it seemed appropriate that a murder should take place in this setting, with these people, and there was no sense of satisfaction of the restoration of order in seeing the crime solved and things 'put back to right' as the saying goes. They had not been right in the first place, so why put the back?

It occurred to me that my favorite mysteries (Sayers tops the list, Agatha Christie also gets space plus Chesterton and Conan Doyle of course plus Chesterton as a not-quite-genre add on) all follow a basic theme or restoring order. Some, like Murder Must Advertise actually bring the murderer back to a moral understanding of the universe, others like Gaudy Night and Unnatural Death involve the uncovery and purging of a disordered element from what should be an ordered community.

However, if the moral and social realm presented is one in which it seems totally appropriate to murder one's fellow man, where is the interest in solving the crime? All that's left is a procedural, not a mystery.

Ratzinger on the End of Europe

Last year then Cardinal Ratzinger wrote an article called "If Europe Hates Itself" for Communion and Liberation. Here's a key quote:

There is a strange lack of desire for a future. Children, who are the future, are seen as a threat for the present; the idea is that they take something away from our life. They are not felt as a hope, but rather as a limitation of the present. We are forced to make comparisons with the Roman Empire at the time of its decline: it still worked as a great historical framework, but in practice it was already living off those who would dissolve it, since it had no more vital energy.

One of the subjects I've been wrestling with for a while is what the desire not to have children (on the part of individual couples and society as a whole) means in re why people think we are here on this earth. Biologically speaking, the only reason we exist is to have offspring which in turn survive long enough to produce offspring. Personally and spiritually, there is clearly much more to the human person than evolutionary reproductive success. There are circumstances when a person quite rightly chooses that marriage and childbearing are not his or he personal vocation. Nor is the personhood or worth of those unable to have children diminished.

Yet personally opting not to have children despite living in the married state simply because one does not want them seems to involve a redefinition of the human person, and not a good one. I'm not there yet, but Ratzinger's article is definitely good food for thought.

The Land of the Wolves

Stanley Kurtz over at The Corner points to this article about the return of wolves to vast regions of Europe. As the depopulation crisis deepens in Europe, tiny farms and villages have been deserted and the land is reverting to a natural state. Two new packs of wolves have formed in Germany, and a third is likely to split off and head toward Berlin.

--I had a great desire to write some scathingly brilliant commentary upon this subject; it should have been all too easy with such an evocative metaphor as wolves descending upon Berlin. But, gentle readers, we are leaving on vacation tomorrow (blogging will henceforth be "light", as they say, for the next week) and there are a million things to do. I did not want to deprive you of this insightful article, though, so please read it, even without the benefit of my scintillating intellect.