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As the election nears, Amendment E (J.A.I.L.) is starting to pop up a bit more frequently on the editorial pages. Here’s a look a few recent mentions.
First, as local residents know, the Argus Leader began running its election positions and endorsements. It didn’t use many column inches on Amendment E but it was to the point. Headlined “Reject blatant proposal for revenge,” the editorial said:
Constitutional Amendment E – the measure promoted to hold judges accountable – is nothing more than a proposal for revenge, a path to anarchy and chaos.
* * *
This measure would allow special grand juries to ignore all [existing laws and procedures], allowing even prison inmates – criminals – to go after the judges and juries in their cases.
It is wrong. It turns on its head everything we in South Dakota know is right.
In today’s Washington Post, Andrew Cohen, its legal columnist and the chief legal analyst for CBS News, was equally blunt in an op-ed piece:
Speaking of senseless, welcome to South Dakota, where supporters of Amendment E hope a new day will soon dawn where citizens will be able to turn the table upon judges and punish jurists over unpopular decisions. …. Amendment E, as in Error, means that a group of citizens who don’t like a judge’s decision — remember, judges when interpreting the Bill of Rights are the only checks against the tyranny of the majority — can take their revenge….. There is nothing subtle about it Amendment E: (sic) vehemently anti-judiciary forces want to diminish the authority of the courts and to destroy the independence of the judiciary. And the worst part? They seem to be winning, if recent polls in South Dakota are accurate. Just imagine what the passage of Amendment E would mean to the practice of law, and the legal system itself, in South Dakota. Just imagine what will happen when the inmates are allowed to run the asylum.
Last week, the Watertown Public Opinion not only urged a “no” vote, it took on the poll the J.A.I.L.ers tout to claim overwhelming support for the measure. After noting the poll was distributed to media in the state by the South Dakota Newspaper Association after Amendment E backers paid for that service, the newspaper said it was “an understatement” to call the poll question “misleading.”
We’d hazard to guess that 99 percent of the people,when asked, “do you love motherhood and apple pie?” would respond with a “yes.” And we’d bet too that most people would agree that a judge found guilty of misconduct not once but three times shouldn’t be on the bench.
So ask the right question if you’re an Amendment E supporter to get the answer (“yes”) you want. That’s what has happened here. A misleading question has resulted in misleading results. There has been a failure of sorts on different levels. First, the question shouldn’t have been asked as it was, we think, and, second, mass distributing misleading information isn’t something we’d expect from our professional news association in South Dakota.
While I continue to believe media coverage of Amendment E and its ramification has been sparse, it will hopefully pick up in the coming weeks. At least the media not only appear to have been paying attention, they see through the smokescreens and representations that form the basis of the J.A.I.L. campaign.
Half of the American people never read a newspaper. Half never vote for President. One hopes it is the same half.
Gore Vidal
Joy: Stampede hockey begins!
Sadness: Joss Whedon announces the Firefly universe is at an end. (Via Big Dumb Object.)
Wonder: Hello from Mars. (Via Kottke.org Remaindered Links.)
Misery: Which is worse, the condition or the cure?
Pleasure: Being interviewed by NPR’s Nina Totenberg (along with PP) about J.A.I.L. (and waiting until the end to tell her what a big fan I am.)
Heartbreak: Click on the map. (Via Rolling Stone National Affairs Daily.)
The redemptive power of suffering is, in my experience at least, vastly overrated.
Mary Doria Russell, Children of God
Run a Google search for “the historical Jesus” and you end up with more than 650,000 results. But the search for a historical Jesus itself isn’t anything new. In fact, not only did it start in the 18th Century, but Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer published his classic work, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, in 1906.
If anything, popular interest in Christianity’s origins has grown over the last several years with the success and attendant news coverage of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. The title of James D. Tabor’s nonfiction work, The Jesus Dynasty, would make it seem yet another entry in the market based on the premise that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and produced offspring. Tabor’s work, however, is a serious exploration of the so-called historical Jesus and the origins and development of what we now call Christianity.
The Jesus Dynasty does contains some assertions that will attract attention and even be considered heresy. For example, Tabor not only postulates that Jesus was fathered by a man but also that his mother, Mary, was married more than once. But these are not the main points of the book, merely factors Tabor uses to develop his theme.
Tabor points to history, the Christian canon, works that were excluded from the Bible and archaeological evidence to advance a theory that is, at bottom, quite simple and not wholly unique. According to Tabor, Jesus was a follower of John the Baptist and together they founded a Messianic movement. This was not the type of messiah as Jesus is viewed today. Rather, John (who Tabor calls John the Baptizer) and Jesus were messiahs in the sense that John, representing the priestly line descended from Aaron, and Jesus, representing the royal line descended from David, were destined to bring to Judaism “God’s kingdom on Earth.” Tabor argues that prior to his death, Jesus entrusted control of the movement to his brother, James, and that for decades thereafter James and other brothers of Jesus led the movement. That is the dynasty –? the leadership of this movement were all descendants of Mary.
Similarly, Tabor, the chair of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, asserts that Jesus was not establishing a new religion. Instead, Jesus was a Jew whose Messianic Movement was an apocalyptic one in which the kingdom of God would be realized on earth if Israel repented and fully embraced the Torah and the prophets. This kingdom would be one in which the earth would be filled with the knowledge of God. Thus, Jesus’ message was attempting to teach the moral, spiritual and ethical principles that would enable the realization of that kingdom.
How, then, did the “Jesus Dynasty” and its principles become what is now known as Christianity? Tabor says those ideas came from Saint Paul. Although Jesus designated his brother as his successor, Paul managed to gain popular control and converted John the Baptizer into a follower rather than a leader and Jesus from a man to the son of God. Tabor points out how the gospels and other literature of the time reflect this change and how his theories are far more consistent with 1st Century ideas and thought than what is accepted today.
Tabor makes a well-reasoned and credible, although not always compelling, case. If anything, he suffers the same hindrances as others seeking the historical Jesus. There is certainly no definitive information and, thus, conclusions must be based on personal analysis of particular parts of the puzzle. Plainly, others can –? and do –? reach different conclusions looking at the identical evidence or by emphasizing other evidence. And this is where The Jesus Dynasty tends to suffer. Tabor tends to make definitive statements when, in fact, he is expressing his opinion.
For example, he writes, “By the time he was thirty years old [Jesus] had begun to formulate a plan that he believed would lead to the complete overthrow of all that Rome and its Jewish sympathizers and supporters represented[.]” Similarly, Tabor later notes that in traveling to Capernaum in northern Galilee prior to Passover in 27 A.D., “Jesus definitely had something strategic in mind.” While Tabor can muster evidence to support these positions, it is impossible for him to definitively state that Jesus formulated a plan or that anything he did was a strategic move. Yet these are just two of many instances of Tabor asserting his hypotheses as fact. While that may make the book readable, it cannot help but undercut trust in whether other statements are ones of fact or theory.
Still, The Jesus Dynasty is a highly readable exploration of not only Christian origins but also life in the 1st century and Jewish tradition and customs. In fact, when Tabor takes the reader to various archeological sites, you can understand the excitement he expresses about being there. It is rare that an alternative exploration of Christian history and its original thought comes in such a non-polemic and entertaining package.
[H]istory, by its very nature, is an open process of inquiry that cannot be bound by the dogmas of faith.
James D. Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty
No wonder my TBR pile and wish lists keep growing and growing.
John Scalzi is auctioning a bound copy of the manuscript of his novel, The Last Colony, slated for release in May 2007. Proceeds will go to a book endowment fund at the Minneapolis Public Library and the higher the bid, the more additional goodies you get.
Speaking of authors, there is a fundraising drive for Robert Anton Wilson, the author of The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a work that has almost a cult-like following. I’ll admit that I have never made it much more than halfway through the first book, though. (There is also an update here.)
And speaking of conspiracies, in their own inimitable style Penn & Teller say to the 9/11 conspiracy theorists: Bullshit! (Via TCS Daily.)
Kevin at Collected Miscellany has thoughts very similar to mine on books and blogs.
I note with sadness that NYT political correspondent Ron Apple has died. Back in the day, he was the yin to Hunter Thompson’s yang in my pantheon of journalism heroes.
And while I’m not a huge NHL fan, the season’s first televised game of the Buffalo Sabres at the defending champion Carolina Hurricanes is a must see given the fact the teams have, respectively, former Stampede players Thomas Vanek and Chad LaRose.
How can you hear your soul if everyone is talking?
Mary Doria Russell, Children of God
When Time magazine reporter Michael Weisskopf went to Iraq to do a cover story on the U.S. soldier as Time‘s “Person of the Year” for 2003, he came back with the story of a lifetime. Problem is, it wasn’t the cover story. It was a story that came from losing his right hand to a grenade.
As the first reporter wounded in a war ever afforded the privilege of being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Weisskopf was in a unique position to view and truly understand the care and treatment provided battlefield amputees. From that position, he brings us Blood Brothers, the story of soldiers treated on Ward 57 of the hospital, the amputee ward.
Weisskopf was in a Humvee on patrol with the First Armored Division in a district of northwest Baghdad on December 10, 2003. He heard a clanking sound, thinking it was just one of the rocks youth tended to throw at the Humvees. He looked down, saw a small dark oval, picked it up and began to toss it over the side of the vehicle. “I may as well have plucked volcanic lava from a crater,” he recalls. “I could feel the flesh of my palm liquefying.”
Thus starts Weisskopf’s journey into a world of pain, medicine, rehabilitation and courage. At Walter Reed, he comes to know a variety of soldiers who have lost one or both hands, arms, feet or legs or any combination of them. Weisskopf tells the stories of three of them as much as his own. He takes us through not only his own experiences, but the medical, rehabilitative and personal trials and tribulations of a variety of Ward 57’s patients, focusing in particular on Pete Damon, Luis Rodriguez and Bobby Isaacs even after their discharge from the hospital. None of them are alone or particularly unique. By the time Weisskopf was injured, the Iraq War had produced twice the rate of amputations of every war of the 20th century, except Vietnam, for which there were no good statistics.
I soon discovered that I shared something with those soldiers [on Ward 57] larger than the differences in our biographies. We were men struggling for an identity. The psychological scars of amputation ran deeper than those from conventional wounds of war. The blasts took away something deeply personal. None of us felt like the man who had gone to Iraq. We possessed the same minds; they just resided in different bodies.
If is not difficult to see how their identities were affected. Weisskopf was a journalist who had lost his writing hand. “I never gave much thought to how a hand worked until I lost one,” he says. How would he type? How would he take notes?
Damon was a National Guard helicopter mechanic and had played lead guitar in a local rock band. He lost both hands when the rim exploded on a tire he was inflating on a Black Hawk helicopter. Weighing as heavily on him was the fact that while he survived the explosion, it killed another mechanic standing nearby.
Isaacs, a car buff, lost both his legs below the knee when a roadside bomb exploded near his Humvee in Mosul hours before Weisskopf’s injury. He barely survived long enough to make it to the combat hospital. When Isaacs rises from his wheelchair and stands, albeit wobbly, before the congregation of his hometown fundamentalist church some 18 months later, he is wearing a black bracelet. Inscribed on it is the name of his squad leader, killed in the explosion that took Isaacs’ legs
Rodriguez had dreamed of being a combat medic since he was young. He not only became an Army medic in 1990, he headed his own platoon of medics in the 101st Airborne Division. Like the others, an IED took out the Humvee he was in, blowing off his right leg at the knee and taking two fingers from his left hand. Because the injury meant Rodriguez could no longer be a combat medic, it “severed more than a limb. It dismantled Rod’s identity.”
In addition to telling their stories and his, Weisskopf also gives the reader insight into the care and concern that comes from those who care for the injured. As Weisskopf is being taken by helicopter from the aid station to the nearest combat hospital, he was shivering uncontrollably. A medic put his jacket on Weisskopf. When that didn’t stop the shaking, the medic “lay on top of and warmed me with his body heat.”
When Isaacs came out of his initial surgery in the combat hospital, he had lost more than half his blood volume. An announcement went out over the public address system seeking A-positive blood. Within two minutes, nearly 50 hospital staffers were lined up at the trauma tent offering their blood. The medical unit’s chief nurse, a lieutenant colonel, pulled rank. She went to the front of the line.
Yet Weisskopf talks about more than the emotional and physical toll of treating amputees and learning to live as one. He struggles with other issues beyond simply his injury. Often pressing in on him is the question of whether he knew the object was a grenade when he picked it up. He is haunted through most of the book wondering if he performed the heroic act attributed to him or simply a stupid one.
His other struggle comes from his profession. As a journalist, he is uncomfortable being part of the story rather than covering it. It leads him to believe that the practice of embedding reporters with military units is not worth the cost. He ultimately feels that the only thing that he learned from being embedded was “what it meant to be wounded in action.” Yet, to Weisskopf, that also meant that “I crossed the line from observer to participant.
While it is understandable why a journalist would be uncomfortable crossing that line, there is a distinctive benefit in this case. Weisskopf’s experience made him uniquely qualified to tell the story of Ward 57 and a glimpse of the lives of those who have the misfortune of becoming its patients.
When it comes to Blood Brothers, where you stand on the war is totally irrelevant. Those who oppose it may see the book as a tale of what happens to men and women sent to an ill-advised war. Those who support the war may see the book as an indelible tale of sacrifice by our soldiers. In either case, it is a story of courage and determination, not only by those wounded but by their families and those who provide medical care to them.
The dead never pick up their trophies.
Michael Weisskopf, Blood Brothers
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