Thursday, November 25, 2004

Giving Thanks, 2004 Edition

Your Curmudgeon has done one of these pieces every year for a while now. Someone has to post more than the usual boilerplate, if only to keep the blog-addicts from killing their entire extended families before the sweet potato casserole with marshmallows hits the table. But this year, I’m feeling about 5% more sarcastic than last, so strap yourselves in securely and wait for our captain to turn off the No Snorking light.

(snork n: A jolt of uncontrollable laughter that coincides with a gasp of outrage. Considered hazardous to one’s digestion and social standing.)

I give thanks that my Herculean strength and galactic intellect overcome all difficulties with but trivial effort. This leaves me with lots of time to adopt stray puppies and kittens, to lecture others on their innumerable and perfectly obvious inadequacies, and to write trashy fantasy novels.

I give thanks for the Curmudgeon’s Significant Other, who’s never seen a pair of shoes she didn’t like, refuses to believe that no one ever calls here whom I care to talk to, and regularly moves all the utensils around in their drawers so that setting the table for dinner will remain a never-ending source of excitement and adventure.

I give thanks that the C.S.O. tolerates my impish side, to wit: my insouciant laughter in the face of all-but-certain death, my habit of doing the Times crossword puzzle in Crayola Burnt Sienna, my tendency to wave my enormous genitals in the faces of DMV bureaucrats, and my persistent belief that I can get just one more coffee mug into the dishwasher, so we shouldn’t run it yet.

I give thanks for my millions of readers and their unstinting praise and support. You who frequent Eternity Road are jewels among men. You certainly know genius when you see it. But please, guys, I must have told you a thousand times already: small bills only!

I give thanks that 60 million of my countrymen were wise enough to return President Bush to office, and that a hefty fraction of the 56 million who were less wise are vociferous in their conviction that we did it because we’re too stupid to know better.

I give thanks for my Long Island homeland, where the beaches are beautiful, the tax rates are extortionate, the zoning boards have delusions of Mao and Stalin, the streets resemble a leprous teenager’s acne, and the schools teach eco-fascism, radical feminism, advanced techniques in sodomy, moral relativism, and hostility to Christianity for a mere $18,000 per student per year.

I give thanks for my employer, who compensates me lavishly for designing laboratories in which to test kinder, gentler weapons of mass destruction. I’d like to see those weapons deployed against a better selection of targets than in the past, but I suppose those suggestions should go to another department.

I give thanks for the change of seasons, which bring such delights as basement floods, 100 percent humidity, plagues of dandelions and gypsy moths, and road-paralyzing snowfalls, with soothing regularity.

I give thanks for heavy-duty power tools, such as the ones I just bought at the C.S.O.’s insistence, the ones my remodeling contractor claims he brought to the site with him, and the ones my neighbor to the east says he never borrowed but returned long ago.

I give special thanks that that neighbor to the east has gone from mowing his lawn once every three hours to mowing it once every three months. It’s taken quite a lot of pressure off.

While we’re on the subject of neighbors, I give thanks for my neighbor to the north, for his, ah, influence in the disposal industry, for my neighbor to the south, who at 87 years of age still knows absolutely everything about everyone within five miles of the Fortress of Crankitude and will share her knowledge without even being asked, and my neighbor to the west, for not being there.

I give thanks for Roosevelt Field Shopping Mall, which is at once a pleasant diversion with which to fill a few unallocated weekend hours and a perfect demonstration of why one doesn’t want to live too close to New York City.

I give thanks for Sears Hardware Outlets, which have always, with absolute reliability, just sold the last unit of whatever it was I needed.

I give thanks for Best Buy Corp., because whenever the C.S.O. starts carping about wanting a new television, I can drop her there, say, “pick one,” and come back in a week or so to collect her, still undecided.

I give special thanks for Rubbermaid Corp.—get your minds out of the gutters, boys—for selling all-vinyl, customer-assembled sheds that only take 2000 hours to erect and afterward show perfect and evenhanded hospitality to a large variety of vermin.

I give thanks for the efforts of my former co-contributors at the Palace of Reason: Adam J. Bernay, Rafe Brox, Michelle Buckman, Elysian Hunter, David Huntwork, Ed Mick, Liz Pavek, and others I’m not sober enough to recall at the moment. You made it worthwhile for six years, guys. Thanks for all of it.

I give thanks for the lightly compensated fiction writers who participated in the Palace’s fiction-publishing period. Some of those stories are among my favorites, and likely will remain so. May your ventures in the forbidding world of hardcopy commercial fiction publishing be crowned with every success.

As regards that experiment in Web fiction, I must also give thanks for the services of Pat D’Artagnan—no, it’s not her real name and never was—who for more than a year evaluated and edited the stories we published, for no compensation other than her printing and Internet expenses. Recently, Pat retired, for real this time. She says she gets a lot more enjoyment out of her reading now that she no longer does it with a death grip on a blue pencil.

I give thanks that more people don’t know the appropriate uses of the ellipsis and the hyphen.

I give special thanks for Connie Du Toit, the architect of Eternity Road, without whose expertise in PHP scripting and Expression Engine configuration your humble Curmudgeon would be voiceless on the most important communications medium of all time, the World Wide Web. Don’t blush, Connie; you’ve earned it.

While we’re on the subject, I give thanks for pMachine Hosting, which offers excellent Web hosting services at a moderate rate. I’d have paid three times as much for the same service at the Palace’s host.

I give thanks for my three dogs and five cats, who, strangely enough, appear to love me just as much as I love them. They say an animal can’t feel the special bond of affinity and desire for union we humans call love. They’re self-deluded fools. Tell them so at your convenience, and tell them I said so.

I give thanks that I’m an incurable old softy who still cries at romantic movies, Christmas songs, Bible stories, and the attempts of earnest prepubescents to act or sing. I cry over utility bills and tax assessments too, but that’s another subject.

I give thanks for my absurd sense of humor and my gift of laughter, which I’ve enjoyed greatly for 52 years and have been told I ought to share with others more often than has been my habit.

I give thanks that despite a half-century of insane risk-taking and physical overextension that would fell an elephant, I’m still able to get around without assistance, and have no chronic problems worse than my inability to suffer fools.

Not what you expected from your normally serious Curmudgeon? We all have our styles, and our moods. When you sit down to dinner, as far as possible from the pearl onions in cream sauce, you’ll do it your own way. But be sure to do it.

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

Priorities 101

From Kathleen Parker’s column of today:

This season Republicans hold all the cards with their man in the White House and a majority in both houses of Congress, and they’re wasting no time spending political capital.

You couldn’t charge them with betrayal, exactly. We expect politicians to act like politicians. But during wartime, when the country is split wide open, transcending partisanship for the greater goodwill would be a noble gesture as well as a deft political move.

As one Democrat friend said: “Those of us who got behind the president because of the war are quickly reminded of why we’re Democrats.”

This is extraordinarily foolish: shortsighted and internally contradictory at once. It’s not worthy of Miss Parker, and I hope she’ll see that for herself.

The country voted GOP politicians into the Oval Office and both houses of Congress—a dramatic display of support for the Republican agenda. What else could it have meant? And why would the president and his GOP colleagues in Congress interpret it any other way—particularly when the Democrats have more or less explicitly advanced the much less defensible thesis that it’s their preferences that should dominate, despite their minority?

If eschewing Republican priorities, and the priorities of the Republican base, is mandatory during wartime for the sake of national harmony, why wouldn’t the very same stricture apply to the Democrats? Not only don’t they ever back down from their agenda; they vilify anyone who dares to breathe a word of criticism of it:

• To lower tax rates is to favor the rich.
• To trim the rates of increase of various social programs, many of them useless and some far worse, is to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.
• To oppose unrestricted abortion on demand, paid for by the State, is to oppress women.
• To oppose preferential treatment for their mascot groups is racism.
• To oppose State funding for arts and artists that people don’t patronize voluntarily is censorship.
• To oppose the dilution and outright destruction of important social institutions for the benefit of a 3% minority that doesn’t qualify for them is homophobia.
• To oppose fascistic regulation of all business and commerce by a gaggle of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats is to have no regard for the consumer’s welfare.

It doesn’t fly, Miss Parker. Democrats who supported President Bush for his wartime leadership and direction got exactly what they voted for. Not your best column.

The Edge

Over at Let’s Try Freedom, Robert Hayes sketches out the case for ours being an age of Republican ascendancy:

The Republican coalition consists of four basic ideological groups, with some overlap.  There are businesspeople and entrepreneurs whose fixed idea is “taxes should be low”.  There are cultural and religious conservatives whose fixed idea is “our religious traditions are good and fine, and we don’t need to abandon them”.  There are culture of life proponents whose fixed idea is “killing babies is wrong, and we should stop doing it.” And (increasingly post-9/11) there are strong-state militarists whose fixed idea is “if there are Muslims who want to die for Allah, we should help them with that project”.

[...snip...]

You only have to believe a few things to be a Republican, and the party goes out of its way to be inclusive about the other things. There are a lot of areas where the party has a position, but only a few of them are non-negotiable.  Even some of the things that part of our coalition believes have been deemed recommended-but-optional:  “you’re pro-choice, Governor Schwarzenegger?  Well, we disagree, but your position on taxes and killing Al-Qaeda make you A-OK in our book.”

Contrast to the Democrats, where heresy on any one of a vast and sometimes bewildering array of fatwas is enough to get you pushed to the margins, or drummed out of the party entirely.

The Republicans have a big recruiting advantage here, and it’s only going to get stronger as time goes on.  The Democrats are frantic for votes, so they can’t afford to ditch any part of their porcupine coalition, no matter how many people one particular barb keeps stabbing.  And everyone in the coalition is tightly married to their one personal hobby-horse, so there’s no way to get them to agree to mellow out for a while, as the Republicans have successfully done with the anti-abortion lobby.  NARAL isn’t going to chill out, and neither is NOW or NEA or ANSWER.

All Republicans have to do is have fidelity towards our core principles (even the ones we honor more in the breach) and govern with reasonable competence (which is harder than it sounds), and continue to work like twenty demons every election cycle.  We can watch our numbers get better, year after year.  And the screams coming out of left field will get more entertaining as they see power slipping forever from their grasp.

This is spot-on. Your Curmudgeon only hopes that these overt Republican positions are matched by the actual performances-in-power of those Republicans we elevate to seats in Congress or the Oval Office. It hasn’t always been that way, you know.

“But We Could Use The Money To Meet Human Needs!”

It’s incredible what Congress will do in its never-ending quest for spending cuts:

Congress has eliminated the financing of research supported by President Bush into a new generation of nuclear weapons, including investigations into low-yield atomic bombs and an earth-penetrating warhead that could destroy weapons bunkers deep underground.

The Bush administration called in 2002 for exploring new nuclear weapons that could deter a wide range of threats, including possible development of a warhead that could go after hardened, deeply buried targets, or lower-power bombs that could be used to destroy chemical or biological stockpiles without contaminating a wide area.

But research on those programs was dropped from the $388 billion government-wide spending bill adopted Saturday, a rare instance in which the Republican-controlled Congress has gone against the president.

Over at Beyond Salvage, Robin Jones comments most incisively on this bit of lunacy:

Why do the whores in Congress insist on endangering all Americans? Smaller nukes would certainly send a message to Muslim countires that should they push us, we’re prepared to nuke tactical targets. There is no doubt in my mind that the day is coming, and probably soon, when we have to nuke some of them. What Congress has done is make sure that lots more innocents there will die.

Exactly.

Your Curmudgeon has written before on how the development of high-precision weapons with well-delimited damage radii has reduced the carnage attendant to war. Precision-targeted, low-yield A-bombs capable of burrowing into the earth to find and destroy buried targets are such weapons—and to the extent that we fail to develop them, we increase the probability that when (not “if") another major terrorist attack strikes an American target, the White House will be forced to choose between impotent hand-wringing and incinerating an entire Middle Eastern city. If the White House is still standing, that is.

Tuesday, November 23, 2004

For Those Who Missed The Point Of The Piece Just Below This One

"Choice” is a shibboleth-word of the Left. They proclaim “choice” to be an absolute good, unquestionable by us lesser mortals, but only when applied to certain things. Those things are:

• Abortion,
• Promiscuity,
• Homosexuality.

(That misstates the left-liberal position just a tad. They regard homosexuality as an inescapable fate that arises from one’s genes. But if you were to choose to be a homosexual, rest assured that left-liberals would back your choice to the hilt.)

Just yesterday, Congress passed an end-of year spending bill. It included a number of block grants to be distributed to private and semi-private organizations in certain fields, including medicine. One of the provisions of the bill decreed that no organization that refuses to perform or facilitate abortions shall be refused participation in those block grants, so long as it qualifies for inclusion in all the required ways. Nor may it be otherwise penalized.

Hearken to a couple of prominent Democrats on this “controversial” rider:

“Roe v. Wade is the law of the land, but Republicans are gutting it step by step.”—House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

“A terrible, egregious abuse of power.”—Senator Diane Feinstein

Hm. Let’s see, now. A Catholic hospital doing exemplary pro bono work in a poor district, but which refuses to perform or facilitate abortions, may therefore partake of a federal block grant that funds medical services to the indigent. How is this a violation of anyone’s “right”—pardon me, please—to an abortion? How does it abuse the powers of the federal government in a new way—that is, a way not already covered by its departure from the enumerated powers in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States?

A right must be something one could secure for oneself in the absence of forcible interference from others. If it’s not, it’s a demand for the involuntary submission of others to one’s demands for service—a form of slavery—and if you can work out a rationale for how that could possibly be a right, you’re a better man than I.

No one has a right to demand that another, who considers abortion to be a form of murder, perform one anyway.

No one has a right to demand that a pregnancy counseling center deny a mother-to-be a sonogram of her baby—yes, this has also been demanded by the Left—simply because it reduces the likelihood that the mother will then seek an abortion.

Those demands amount to an assertion that those who promote abortion have a right to interfere forcibly in the choices of other free Americans. What does that do to their claim that they support “freedom of choice”—?

It’s been said many times that “No” is the freest word in any language. If this nation has forgotten that it was founded on individual liberty, then it has severed its own roots, and will soon take its place in the dustbin of history alongside all the other political constructs that proclaimed “freedom” to be a mere bagatelle to be sacrificed to some overarching vision of the “greater good.”

Your Curmudgeon doesn’t think so, but you can place your own bets.

Let Me See If I’ve Got This “Choice” Business Straight

If I’ve comprehended the matter correctly:

• Choice is good.
• Abortion is a choice.
• Therefore abortion is good.
• Sonograms are also a choice.
• But a sonogram that reveals that her fetus has recognizably human features from very early in gestation might influence a woman away from choosing to abort that fetus.
• Therefore sonograms are bad.
• Therefore choice is bad.

Hm, there appears to be a crossed wire in there somewhere. Let’s try again:

• Choice is good.
• Abortion is a choice.
• Therefore abortion is good.
• Providing or declining to provide some defined service (e.g., assassination for hire) is also a choice.
• But declining to provide abortion-related services, by implying disapproval of abortion, might influence a woman away from choosing to abort her fetus.
• Therefore declining to provide abortion-related services is bad.
• Therefore choice is bad.

Damn! Messed it up again. One more time:

• Choice is good.
• To support the arts is a choice.
• Therefore to support the arts is good.
• Choosing what sort of art to support with one’s money is also a choice (duh).
• But choosing not to support photographers who shoot men with bullwhips up their posteriors or crucifixes in glasses of urine, or performers who display their naked, chocolate-and-sprouts-covered bodies to an audience, or artists who surround drawings of the Blessed Virgin with pornographic photos and clumps of elephant dung might suggest that some forms of art are more worthy of support than others.
• Therefore choosing not to support those artists is bad.
• Therefore choice is bad.

I feel certain that if I just keep trying, I’ll get the hang of this some day…

Fly The Affordable Skies

Curiously, a single day after this tirade, Matt Towery gives us this difference of opinion with a reader over airline travel:

In response to my suggestion that the airlines should price seats based on the cost per passenger and a standard mark up, what used to be Business 101, [a reader] wrote: “If the airlines raised their fares to compensate for the costs of operations and the fares were marked up for a profit, those airlines would lose the business of the less-frequent traveler and those unwilling to pay outrageous prices.”

So let me get this straight: Airlines can’t price in order to make a profit because those who don’t travel much or who don’t want to pay their fair share wouldn’t be able to fly? Wow. Well, let’s just redistribute the wealth and completely capture the “people who want other people to pay for them” demographic.

While Towery is entitled to a good laugh over the assumption imbedded in his reader’s comments, air travel, especially under current conditions, is an industry whose economic dynamic is worth a close look.

Air travel was once deemed a luxury. Only persons who had plenty of loot and were disinclined to take the train boarded an airliner. Though a decline in fares did widen the customer base somewhat, the real accelerator for commercial flight was the rise of continental and intercontinental business travel.

Like many other business decisions, the decision whether to collide physically or just exchange snotty memos is heavily influenced by costs. When corporate tax rates are high, deductibility enters the equations. Business travel has always been considered a deductible business expense. That greatly lowers the effective cost of stuffing a New York design engineer into a pressurized metal tube and firing him through the clouds to inspect a widget being incorporated into a jukebox by a manufacturer in Des Moines.

With the explosion of business air travel, prices dropped considerably, and the passenger capacity of new aircraft increased as well. That brought air travel for discretionary purposes—particularly vacations—into the realm of affordability for the ordinary citizen. But limiting factors beyond the control of the airlines have clamped further price movement in this area. One is the discouraging influence on air travel of recent federal regulations. Another is fear of flying, which was amplified by the events of Black Tuesday, September 11, 2001. But most important of all is the availability of airports.

At this time, commercial airports and air traffic control are government monopolies. There are arguments to the effect that it can’t be any other way, and arguments that airway privatization would work just fine and has been unfairly dismissed without having been tried. Let all of that pass for now. The salient fact is that airliners land at commercial airports under government control, and governments have been largely disinclined to build or expand airport facilities for more than twenty years. Therefore, the logical response to demand that would permit further downward price movement—build more planes and fly more routes—has been blocked.

Intensified regulations, increased airport landing fees, and increased federal taxes on air travel have put upward pressure on airline fares these past few years. However, neither those influences nor fear of flying has damped business air travel; American companies have exhibited a possibly temporary inelasticity toward airfare prices and air travel annoyances. (When a Fortune 1000 CEO allows a minimum-wage magnetometer operator to paw through his underwear and manhandle his laptop without comment, you can be sure that the need to get somewhere has trumped all other considerations.) Because the great bulk of air travel is business-related, it’s this effect that dominates all considerations of price.

Certain factors could alter the picture. The availability of alternatives to a good or service will first press its price downward, and thereafter will curb dramatic price fluctuations in it. Appealing alternatives to business travel are beginning to appear. For example, videoconferencing is much more satisfactory and much less costly than it once was, with still further improvements in technology and affordability yet to come. Many business meetings currently held “live” could be conducted in this fashion. For another, prompt courier services are capable of substituting for much business travel, particularly now that the major vendors are offering various sorts of security guarantees. It’s possible that these and other alternatives to business air travel will alter the balances in favor of discretionary travelers—that the family flying away on vacation will become the standard customer to whom the airlines would henceforth cater. But this is speculation.

For the moment, he who’s unsatisfied with airline fares will simply have to blame the traveling businessman: the very same figure who, by his multiplicity and the frequency of his peregrinations, made relatively cheap air travel available in the first place.

Let’s Get Sensible, Fellas

What?

Exactly why is this necessary?

SHARM EL-SHEIKH, Egypt (Reuters) - Members of the Quartet of Middle East peace mediators urged Israel Tuesday to ease restrictions on Palestinians ahead of January elections to choose a successor to late President Yasser Arafat.

The group comprising the United States, the European Union, Russia and the United Nations agreed to help the Palestinian Authority pay for the elections, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told reporters.

Annan was speaking after a high-level meeting of the Quartet in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, where they are attending an international conference on Iraq.

“If...people are going to campaign and move around to vote some of the restrictions will have to be lifted and we are hopeful that that will be done,” Annan said.

Israeli troops maintain tight control on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, using a network of checkpoints to restrict travel between cities and from rural areas to cities.

My word. Is there no one in the world of international diplomacy with any sense?

Of course, simply having Kofi Annan endorse an idea puts 2.5 strikes against it, but even if we overlook that, there remains the utter blindness of the proposal to the most promising feature of the situation—the very feature being decried: Israel’s network of checkpoints and restrictions.

What, after all, constitutes an election?

• People flock to specific, well-defined polling places designated by the government.
• Once there, they affirm their franchise to government officials.
• They then cast ballots, which are taken into the custody of the government.
• The ballots are counted and the winner(s) announced.

In case no one else has noticed, the Israeli government still maintains sovereignty over the Palestinian zones in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It guarantees their borders, and in recent months has strained to protect public order there, albeit against fierce resistance. In fact, the only reliable force for order in the region is the Israeli Defense Force, a condition exacerbated by the recent demise of Yasser Arafat. Were the Palestinians to get what Kofi Annan seeks—the withdrawal of the IDF from the Palestinian zones—the elections would resemble a gang war, a contest in intimidation and can-you-top-this thuggery.

Make the Israeli checkpoints the polling places. Add to them: have IDF troops enter the more populous areas in strength and supervise all the balloting. In fact, have IDF forces provide convoy and bodyguard services to any candidate who wants to stump for any office the Palestinians will be voting to fill.

It’s simply wrong to allow Palestinians waving AK-47s to control the elections, when there’s a surfeit of Israelis with Uzis who’d do a much better job. It would be far less costly, near term or long, to put the elections in Israeli hands than to allow traditional Palestinian brutality and power-mongering to prevail. If experience is a guide, the Palestinians (and the rest of the world) might have to live with the results of these elections for a long, long time.

Monday, November 22, 2004

Clarity: An Example

From Meyrav Wurmser of the Hudson Institute:

The Bush administration, which remains committed to a vision of a free and democratic Middle East, must be certain not to legitimize oppression by endorsing Palestinian elections now. In the process of building a free and democratic society, elections are the last — not the first — step. Elections should come after limits on governmental institutions are in place and the basic freedoms of individuals have been guaranteed. Western recognition of this masquerade of freedom would only serve to strengthen the undemocratic nature of Palestinian society.

That’s penetration for you. Read the whole thing.

Hatred And Damnation

Jeff Jacoby is an underappreciated columnist. Few others of the Punditocracy are willing to tackle contentious yet fundamental questions, such as the one he touches on in his essay of today:

Is hatred of others always a sin? Are we obliged to love every human being, even those who do great evil or behave with unspeakable cruelty? Must we believe, as one reader wrote to me last week, that “God loves even the bad people”—even the very worst people—and that we must strive to do the same?

[...snip...]

Of course, if hatred—even hatred of a Hitler or an Arafat—is a sin, then love—even love of such a monster—must be a moral duty. And that is indeed what many Christians believe.

[...snip...]

Jewish tradition holds, with Ecclesiastes, that there is a time to love *and* a time to hate. The Hebrew Bible enjoins us to love our neighbor (Leviticus 19:18) and to love the stranger (Deuteronomy 10:19), but that love has its limits. We are not expected to love savage thugs or to ask God’s mercy on them. On the contrary, we loathe the unrepentantly cruel because we believe God loathes them too.

This is piercing stuff. It calls into focus the very heart of the Dichotomy of Mortality—what it means to be with God, in contrast to what it means to be a mortal man still alive upon the mortal plane—and illuminates the most important division between the Judaic and Christian faiths. To resolve the conflict, it requires us to admit to some uncertainties, and to accept certain bounds, that chafe at many consciences and souls.

---

Certain things are denied to us on this side of the veil: freedom from toil and pain, certainty about what’s to come, an electric razor that actually cuts hair rather than merely bludgeoning it into whimpering submission, and so forth. Men must come to terms with these things to live as men. It’s rather different for God.

Mortals must deal with the conditions of mortality. Those conditions include time-binding, from which we get cause and effect, and the consequences of moral choice. Whatever we might believe about an afterlife and the qualifications attached to it, we live in this world, and must cope with it as best we can.

Judaic theology is very tentative on the subject of an afterlife. There may be one, and there may not; the rabbis are divided, as are the Torah and the Kabbalah. But no people has ever been more practical than the Jews about the necessities of this life: “If someone comes to kill you, rise and kill him first.” (From the Talmud) He who will not act to secure that which is right and necessary in this world will be deprived of the only existence of which we can really be sure—the existence upon which Judaic thought is premised.

Christian thought is premised on a bifurcated afterlife, and a rather dramatic fork between the possibilities. Down one path lies nearness to God and a state of eternal bliss. Down the other lies a permanent separation from God and the torment of unending remorse. We think we know what sort of conduct will lead down those paths, but we cannot be sure. It’s a matter of faith, intelligent interpretation of the clues written into natural law, and reflection on the teachings of Christ.

Notably, the stories of the Old Testament often involve the exercise of Divine wrath directly upon persons in this world, whereas the stories of the New Testament are devoid of such incidents. The cleavage is not accidental. The classical-era Jews saw God as operating in this world because they preferred not to speculate about a second “life” after death. The Christian departure set this world apart and reserved Divine judgment for the life to come. (Some radical Christian theologians have put forth the proposition that God condemns no one; rather, that the evil man, once possessed of the perfect clarity available only after death has separated him from time, damns himself: that is, he turns away from God of his own will. However, this view is not widely shared.)

The Christian doctrine of love for one’s enemies flows from that same difference in premises. One may condemn the doer of evil deeds in this life—one may even pray for his death in the name of justice or the well-being of others—but one may not pray that he fails to repent in time to save his soul. That would be to ask that he be rendered permanently less than a man on this side of the veil, while the rest of us still have the latitude to repent and make amends for our sins. It would arrogate to ourselves a privilege that God has even denied Himself: the privilege of coercing men’s minds and negating their free wills.

All the same, the Jews, in their practicality, did and do have the right of it as regards one’s conduct in this world. It is indisputably moral—nay, it is obligatory—to wield whatever force we can muster in the defense of innocent life, of human freedom, and of the conditions called “rights” that make a temporal existence bearable.

---

The Judaic concept and the Christian concept are not necessarily at odds. One must understand the theological virtue of love properly to see why this is so.

The theological virtues of faith, hope, and love are ultimately a single premise, an attitude toward the next life and how our conduct in this one bears on it. Christians believe in the next life. They hope to attain the glorious possibility it offers, and to avoid the descent into eternal remorse it threatens. Christian love is not a blind, uncritical acceptance of all other men and their deeds regardless of their moral weight or consequences; it is the desire that all men be united in eternal bliss and the nearness of God when they’ve passed from the temporal world.

In keeping with the premise that a man’s mind is free, and that he chooses his path into the next life just as he chooses his path in this one, Christian doctrine maintains that any man, however horrible his crimes, can be saved while he yet lives, even though he must be punished in this world for the evil he’s done here. If it were otherwise, priests and ministers would not trouble themselves over the souls of the condemned.

It is permissible, therefore, for the Christian to condemn evil deeds done in this realm, and to seek retribution from those who commit them. It is not permissible for him to wish, hope, or pray that an evildoer shall remain evil and unrepentant to the end of his life. Temporal evil is bounded by time, by the lives and memories of the afflicted, and by the ability of survivors to survive, rise, and flourish once again. Eternal separation from God is quite a different thing.

---

When Christ commanded His disciples to “love your enemies” and “do good even unto them that persecute you,” He was speaking to a specific group of people about their conduct in a specific time and place: the Judea of two thousand years ago. His explicit separation of faith from politics and the acts of political authority, first articulated in the “render unto Caesar” incident and made emphatic by His rescue of Mary Magdalene, had already made it clear that He saw a proper role in the world for temporally based justice, and a separate role for faith, hope, and love in their theological senses. But first-century Judea, the time and place God selected for Christ’s ministry and our redemption, had characteristics that compelled a particular approach to the introduction of the Christian idea, especially since the culmination of Christ’s story was to be His torture and death in expiation for Man’s sins.

First-century Judea:

• Politically restive though nominally Roman-ruled;
• Populated by a mystically inclined yet quarrelsome and difficult people;
• Among whom existed several factions that sought levers with which to throw off the Roman yoke and several others that saw Roman hegemony as useful to their own aggrandizement and power;
• United in a monotheistic religion with strong moral and ethical struts;
• But which had been co-opted by a priesthood that made the religion a political and social gateway, to emphasize the class divisions among its adherents;

...was the first time and place in which the Christian message could be heard and accepted by any substantial number of people. But there were important constraints on the promulgation of that message. One of those was that the Christians had to hold themselves apart from all the surrounding conflicts, most especially the factional violence that was frequent in the region. It was imperative that Christ and His disciples not become part of those squabbles in any degree; to participate in them would have caused Christianity to be seen as just one more political-religious faction struggling for ascendancy over its competitors.

The Dichotomy of Mortality, that embeds us in a realm in which temporal justice and retribution must not be shortchanged while pointing us toward a second existence in which these things are of no more weight (having been looked after by God Himself), cannot be accepted as consistent with the rest of Christian belief without first understanding the Judean context in which Christ taught, and which constrained the behavior of His disciples.

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Theological hatred, like theological love, requires more thought than the visceral temporal emotion that bears the same name. Temporal hatred is easy to feel, and easy to explain. Theological hatred is a state blessedly few Christians are afflicted by, with good reason: it involves a self-deification that nearly all of us would recognize at once as insupportable.

Theological hatred is the desire to deny all things to one’s enemy forever. It’s not bounded by the enemy’s death or satisfactory retribution against him, as temporal hatred is. Its extent is unlimited. It pursues its object all the way down Eternity Road. It would deny him even the surcease of nonexistence, were that state available. It’s a desire to inflict suffering and remorse raised to an infinite power.

Of course that’s forbidden to mortal men! It’s inconceivable that even God could entertain such a desire, but we lesser ones, partial by nature and incapable as individuals of even mildly protracted effort—say, concentration on some defined task for a mere century or two—couldn’t even conceive of undertaking such a campaign of destruction. The one thing we might do in that direction is to pray that God deny salvation to a repentant sinner for his previous deeds.

It’s not a hard stricture to observe, frankly. But in pondering the thing, and fitting it into the mosaic of Christian doctrine that spreads from the premise of redemption and the possibility of eternal life near to God, we acquire a better understanding of many things. Not least of these is how slight we are, and how little God has asked of us in exchange for a reward beyond all imagining.