At least a third of my time at Allvoices has been spent writing summaries of developing news stories. Over the course of the last 6 months, I completed over 130 such pieces.
I wrote Italy to Fingerprint Gypsy Population last Thursday afternoon. It's a good example of how I write these kinds of analyses when I feel as though I have a little more room than usual to editorialize.
Along the same lines, I wrote a series of reflections on Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen's 2007 film Jellyfish, which appeared in Zeek today. Nonsensically titled Netanya Fish Fry, the piece addresses recent American attempts to come to grips with contemporary Israeli cinema, and a tendency I detect to try and de-politicize it. Contending that recent narrative experimentation in Israeli filmmaking is in fact it's own political gesture, the article is about Diaspora anxieties about Israel, displaced onto film criticism.
A Shell station adjacent to a U.S. Marine Corps vehicle depot. May 2008.
It was an event that held a little significance for everyone. For Israelis, because of the commitment that the US President reiterated to their security. For Americans, because of the opportunity that their leader took to excoriate their country's opposition in a foreign parliament. And, for Iran, which was once again reminded that, despite how poorly the US is faring in Iraq and Afghanistan, America would still protect Israel from any manner of threat. In other words, it was an exercise in consistency, one that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert duly noted by nearly falling asleep during the President's speech in Jerusalem on Thursday.
Notwithstanding the umbrage taken by the US press to Bush's address to the Knesset, for anyone familiar with the importance that the Republicans have attached to securing Jewish votes in the forthcoming elections, it all made sense. Of course the President would take advantage of such an ideal opportunity. The problem is that, aside from the advantages that Israel most definitely accrued from playing host to the occasion, it had less to do with Israel than it did with the United States, and the failings of the present administration to make any positive achievements in the Middle East during Bush's two terms in office. With the failure of Lebanon's government to contain Hezbollah, one cannot ask for a more timely display designed for domestic consumption during an election year.
As the United States slowly loses Lebanon to Iran, despite the immense investment the Americans made in the Siniora government, once again we have another example of how US intervention in the region has worsened Israel's security. Sandwiched in between an Iranian-supported state in the south, and not one, but now two in the north, Israel's situation, at the end of Bush’s final term in office, is actually worse than it was on 9/11. No wonder Israelis would want the kind of dramatic security guarantees that the US President has offered. No wonder they'd want it specifically from Bush, and that Israel would place so much value on it, too. Given how poorly the Israel Defense Forces have performed in recent years, the need for American reassurance, of the kind that the President reiterated, is that much more important. Its a horrible situation.
Yet, there is also good reason to argue that Thursday's event in Jerusalem had little to do with reaffirming the significance of Israel's security, however flawed America's conception of it might be. Bush's speech, as an editorial in Friday's Haaretz suggested, also signaled the President's willingness to use Israel's conflict with Iran as a way of maintaining control over US Mideast policy after leaving office. To implicate Israeli security requirements with such a possible maneuver can only serve to further damage Israel's long-term interests, not simply because precedent suggests that the US would lose such an engagement against the Iranians. But, as important, because it would implicate Israel's security interests in contravention of America's electoral process.
Americans may not have a clear idea of an effective Mideast policy alternative to that of Bush. Though the Democrats have not exactly offered any compelling options, the amount of energy that Republicans have expended trying to debunk Obama's alleged positions suggests that conservatives fear another emerging policy is surely out there, and that it really is different. For as nebulous as that position might be, the desire for such a policy change is an enormous part of what will motivate millions of Americans to vote Democratic in November's Presidential election. As the Bush administration's failures in the Middle East have repeatedly demonstrated, that's exactly why Israel ought to remain open to whatever alternatives an Obama-led government might have to offer.
Originally published on Allvoices
If you live in the US and need to follow events in the Middle East closely, Mosaic is absolutely indispensable. A thirty-minute long aggregation of regional television news programming broadcast on Link TV, the show is the brainchild of award-winning producer Jamal Dajani.
A Jerusalem native, and a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, I spoke to Dajani about his work on Mosaic for the March issue of Zeek. What transpires is a fascinating conversation about the state of Middle Eastern media today, and its increasing importance for Americans.
If you enjoy this piece, check out Covering the Coverage, and Left of the Middle East. Short excerpts from my book, they cover much of the same topical ground as my conversation with Dajani, but focus on US and otherwise progressive Western news media instead.
It was a hard decision to make, but I had to do so. For the last twelve months, I desisted from doing any freelance work in order to reserve all of my energies for Israel vs Utopia.
Now that the book is in my editors' hands, today, my first article since last March was published by Zeek. And, on Tuesday, I conducted my first formal interview since I spoke to Jimmy Carter in December 2006.
Look forward to reading a conversation about Middle Eastern news media with Link TV's Jamal Dajani in Zeek next month. To call it informative would be an understatement.
It's just about out, and the first reviews for Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, are starting to filter through.
Edited by my former Tikkun colleagues Jo Ellen Green Kaiser and Or Rose, and the Kavod House's Margie Klein, this inspired collection, documenting the new American Jewish social justice movement, is already receiving the recognition that it deserves. According to this week's edition of Publisher's Weekly,
While written for progressive Jews and their communities, anyone struggling with the age-old conundrum of "…but what can I do?" should sample this wonderful buffet of ideas, replete not just with tradition, but with innovative interpretations suited to a 21st-century approach toward social action and reform.
A slimmed down version of "Everything Falls Apart", the first chapter from my forthcoming book, Israel vs Utopia, has a home in Righteous Indignation's Israel section. A representative excerpt, The New Jewish Left, was posted to Mashdown last July.
On Friday morning, at 10 AM Pacific time, together with National Public Radio Iraq correspondent Deborah Amos, and Anna Badheken of The Boston Globe, I'll be a guest on Your Call, hosted by San Francisco NPR affiliate KALW, 91.7 FM.
Covering everything from Middle Eastern media coverage of the recently released National Intelligence Estimate to Iraqi refugees, the Russian elections and Mitt Romney's bid to capture the Republican Presidential nomination, it should be an interesting conversation.
If you're outside the US and want to listen to the show, click here to subscribe to the podcast.
Speaking of Al Jazeera English, if you get the chance, check out Roger Cohen's excellent op-ed on the Qatari broadcaster in today's New York Times.
Discussing the difficulties that the service has had trying to find national distribution from America's cable and satellite providers, the Times' International-Writer-at-Large extols the network's virtues, noting, in reference to the same polarized context invoked in Friday's posting, that Al Jazeera is carried (by Yes) in Israel, where it replaced the BBC last winter.
Incidentally (and much discussed as of late) Al Jazeera English was also slated to replace CNN on Israel's largest cable service, Hot, but was outbid at the last minute by Fox News.
His curiosity piqued by a recent article in Haaretz discussing the relative merits of the New York Times' coverage of Israel, a colleague asked me if I could point him to what I think are the best studies of Western media reporting on the Arab-Israeli conflict. For those who understand the subtext of such inquiries, the editor couldn't have asked a more loaded question. To make such a request in today's environment means that you first have to ask why the question is important, and second, for whom.
Since September 11th, domestic coverage of the Middle East has obviously become more significant. Not just because the attacks on New York and Washington signaled the beginning of a conflict between America and West Asian Islamists. But, also because of how it placed far more editorial requirements on a news media already struggling - and, in the US, largely failing - to meet the complex cultural demands already required of Mideast coverage by the country's Jewish and Muslim Diaspora communities.
US news agencies haven't done the best job of striking this balance yet either. However, there is more English-language, Mideast-based media to rely on than ever before to make up for it. Take for example, Israeli publications like the English edition of Haaretz on the one hand, and Al Jazeera's English broadcasting service on the other, not to mention all of the translated editions of regional sources in between. Americans now have every opportunity to read news that's potentially more informative.
Though "local" is not always a synonym for "better", irrespective of partisanship and the limitations international media inevitably find themselves subject to, in comparison, few domestic sources, including the ethnic press, deliver the same quality goods. Does that mean that American periodicals should hang up their hats? No. Because of this country's obvious ties to the region - economic, cultural, and military, to name a few - US news outlets are morally obligated to continue reporting on the Mideast.
The question is how. Obviously, one answer would be to create content that was complementary with a foreign reporting that is better privileged for information. Another angle would be to concentrate on commissioning work on the numerous ways in which Americans deliberate about their involvement in a particular country's affairs. Thus, you emphasize domestic political discussions at, say the State Department, or, amongst Americans with cultural ties to said state, instead of the other way around.
As many editors at American news periodicals will tell you, the two biggest complaints about Mideast coverage are always that its either anti-Semitic, or similarly compromised by a desire to satisfy special interest groups. The problem with such criticisms is that they're not only frequently incorrect. But, most importantly, that they help divert editorial attention away from very real ethical problems, like learning how to properly tailor international news for a cosmopolitan, multicultural readership - during wartime.
- From my notebook, Nov 1.
A surviving example of early Cana'anite capitalism. Jerusalem, 2007.
Oh No's new American take on Middle Eastern hip-hop is not without similarly single-minded precedents. In terms of actual full-lengths, Mutamassik's 2005 LP, Definitive Works, is of equally subversive significance. For anyone familiar with post-war Egyptian pop, from the sampled string sections to the galloping percussion, the influence of Om Kholtum's band looms large on this Brooklyn DJ's debut album.
Listening to Definitive last weekend, like a lot of records of its kind, I was struck by the ways in which Mutamassik almost plays with Western clichés of oriental music. Particularly the popularity of specific types of orchestral arrangements, and belly dance signifiers popular during the early '60s, when cities like Los Angeles boasted of a number of Arab-themed club bands.
I don't mean to suggest that this album intentionally stakes out a critical position in relation to these long forgotten artists. However, if you're hip to the phenomenon (think guitar-driven mini-orchestras with fez-wearing, Arab-American and Armenian band leaders, not shriners), its hard not to place the new engagement with Mideast music in American hip-hop in relationship to them.
I own a number of out-of-print recordings by several of these groups, but they're hidden somewhere deep inside my office closet. This weekend, I'm going to do some serious excavation work, and slap them straight back onto my turntable. I imagine that I'll find them a bit more ideologically complex than I did before.
One of the most pronounced themes in my book is an expressed concern with the way Israel gets 'constructed' by its proponents in America. Without explicitly specifying it as such, I continually press against the versions of Israel I encounter here, as though there is something alien about them, continuously wondering whether they have anything to do with me, or are merely the stuff of fantasy. I feel oppressed by this experience, oftentimes suffocated, to the point of wondering whether this was the country my family failed to create. As though they were admonishing us, new pioneers have come to conjure something different, something that ignores 'the natives', in much the same way that the original settlers saw Ottoman Palestine as a wild and empty place.
Thus, I was reminded, as I listened to a sixty something New Yorker explain the good he thought Israel had achieved through its seizure of Arab lands in June 1967. The Six Day War improved the lot of American Jewry, he argued, because it completed the process of Jewish integration, helping us secure the truly remarkable level of equality we live with in this country today. Suggesting that the war's fruits outweighed its failings, this gentleman's argument was truly curious, as though he were inferring that it's social achievements in the US were sincerely worth the last four decades worth of displacement and terrorism the occupation has gifted both Israelis and Palestinians. Though I did not ask the guy whether he believed that the occupation ought to continue for said purpose, I still ask myself whether he might believe such.
It is for reasons like these that I am increasingly uneasy about the ways in which fellow progressives tend to rationalize ongoing Diaspora support for the occupation. Traditionally inclined to see such dispositions as being products of a fundamentalist or reactionary approach to Judaism, I am concerned that such arguments have obscured the prevalence of equally common secular positions like these. Specifically, in terms of whether one can ascribe right-wing Diaspora support to the present Israeli status quo on the grounds that it's never-ending violence is the only guarantee of Jewish equality in multiethnic societies. If that is truly the case, no wonder it feels as though Israel is continuously ignored. Because it's not Israel that matters in the end, but the Diaspora.
A War on Terror readymade. Serramonte Petco, October 29th.
Not long after 9/11, my favorite local record store began stocking up on European reissues of Turkish psychedelia from the late sixties and early seventies. Perhaps the third wave of musical imports from the greater Middle East that I can remember being taken up by American hipsters (beginning with their adoption of Ofra Haza in the mid-nineteen eighties,) the timing was entirely appropriate. Amidst the wreckage of the World Trade Center, American music fans were instinctively finding themselves drawn to the sounds of the Islamic equivalent of New York, London, or even San Francisco.
Indeed, if one wants to take a sampling of what makes the music of the eastern Mediterranean so unbelievably great, you can't do any better than listen to what's been coming out of Istanbul over the course of the past fourty years. Thus, I was reminded, as I delighted in the strangely familiar sounds of an American album whose arrangements epitomized what's best about Middle Eastern pop. The second full-length to be issued by Madlib's younger brother, Oh No, Dr No's Oxperiment is the closest thing that one will get to an archetypal Lebanese or Israeli Arab hip-hop record like Clotaire K's Lebanese LP, or DAM's more recent album, Dedication.
Relying exclusively on regional source material, if there is a recording that reflects a Middle East-impacted American zeitgeist, this album is ground zero. Opening with the Turkish fuzz guitar of "Heavy", to the mournful Arabic vocal part of "Down Under" near the it's end, Dr No is an excellent example of how organically Middle Eastern music and American hip-hop speak to each other. As cheesy as that sounds, it's the political metaphor implied by that conversation's fluency that's so crucial. Think back to the pretense of the album's title. It's like a book report about the positive things Americans may have learned from their Iraqi sojourn. Baghdad Calling, anyone?
Tehrangeles has officially been taken over by American members of Hezbollah, and appropriately renamed to reflect the identity of its new, turban-bedecked rulers.
So reported an email from an LA-based Mashdown reader this morning, claiming that he snapped the Hezbollywood picture above as he drove to Canters for a light breakfast.
The subject line: Shi'ite Culture Jamming.
Between the fall of 1999 and the summer of 2001, I spent an untold number of hours capturing field recordings of anti-capitalist demonstrators from around the world. Posted to an assortment of websites ranging from Indymedia to the BBC, once I'd start playing a file, I'd record it in real time to a Phillips 765 CD-R dubbing deck.
The best example of these recordings is a montage I pieced together of a demonstration in front of the IMF HQ in Washington DC, in April 2000. Cut and sequenced manually, and then placed over a heavily edited hip-hop percussion track, the song, What's Your Badge Number?, ended up on the first Elders of Zion record, Dawn Refuses to Rise.
Today, at the request of a listener, a community radio DJ posted the piece to her blog. Click here to read the entry and download the track.
Placing our carry-on baggage on a conveyer belt in order to be scanned, we could see the contents of other peoples’ bags on a black and white video monitor. As a Middle Eastern-looking gentleman in front of us watched his bag go through the x-ray machine, a pistol and several grenade-like objects appeared on the television's screen.
Two Carabinieri carrying submachine guns immediately appeared. Without a word, they took the owner of the bag by the arm and escorted him out of line, while the rest of the flight’s passengers continued through to the gate. Looking up at my father, as though to signal my recognition of what had just transpired, he returned my stare, and silently nodded in reply.
-from a manuscript in progress
The timing of this book's publication couldn't be better. As Israelis and Palestinians resume peace negotiations, its also an opportunity to consider what separation really means, and why there can be no such thing as a total break.
Using Jewish and Arab literature to demonstrate how their respective identities both overlap and inhere in one another, In Spite of Partition makes a compelling case against simple-minded and destructive notions of cultural difference.
If you live in Los Angeles, on October 14th, Gil Hochberg will be speaking about her new book with fellow UCLA professor Saree Makdisi. Click here for more information about the event.
Israeli progressives look to Europe for the ideological and financial support they do not get from the United States. Though liberal American Jewish organizations such as the New Israel Fund are making enormous efforts to redress such deficits, despite their numerous philanthropically funded social assistance, worker training and educational programs, the perception is that when it comes to Israel, Europeans have a monopoly on liberalism.
Just look at the coverage accorded to Israel boycott initiatives by British university instructors to understand why. Whereas the United States is identified by the UK press with Christian Zionists who love Israel to theological death, the United Kingdom is conversely identified by many American and Israeli periodicals as the home of a growing anti-Semitic left, eager to punish Israeli educators in order to protest Israel's treatment of the Palestinians.
This is why the increasing intimacy between Israel and the EU over the course of the past several years has been fascinating. Coming to a head with the large-scale deployment of European peacekeeping forces in Lebanon after 2006’s conflict with Hezbollah, the European commitment of troops came at a time that two of the same countries providing forces were withdrawing from Iraq out of disagreement with US policy.
Excerpted from Israel vs Utopia
Believe it or not, the kibbutz movement is not dead. So argues James Horrox in the October issue of Zeek. Excerpted from a book I am currently editing for AK Press, this young British political analyst shines a new light on Israel's troubled left.
When Benjamin Netanyahu served as Israel's Prime Minister during the late 1990s, I can distinctly recall the physical revulsion I would read into Israeli faces when they would hear of the ties that Bibi had been cultivating with Evangelist Pat Robertson. Told that American Christians were quickly becoming Israel's most devoted Diaspora supporters, I still remember how disappointed even my most politically conservative, Likud-voting friends were to hear about this. Of all people, why them?, everyone seemed to respond. It was as though, in our struggle for recognition and support, even conservatives bemoaned the fact that the only foreigners we could reach out to were people who sincerely hated us.
Granted, there are Israelis who value this 'affection', and see it as a sign of character. But, more often than not, one will find that Israelis of nearly every conceivable conviction, on one level or another, take issue with Americans. Some, for what is perceived to be a provincial approach to Middle Eastern politics, others because they suspect that Israel is a tool for American interests in the region. Though it's hard to imagine Israel's existence without the support of the US, it is equally difficult to stomach the idea that Israelis will learn to indefinitely live with this situation. If we have such ambivalent feelings about our closest ally, what will we think of ourselves if we continue to rely so heavily upon them?
German was the last thing I expected to hear that morning. But, as I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes, I could hear my grandmother screaming, "Raus, Nazis, raus." I didn't know what to think. I imagined that I'd been dreaming, and tried to go back to sleep. But my grandmother wouldn't stop. She was absolutely terrified. Nervous, I looked at my watch. It was only six AM. Finally, I decided to get out of bed and see what was going on. "Yoel," Safta announced as I reached the bottom of the staircase, "Arafat is hiding in the bushes outside. He's wearing an SS uniform, and has a couple of German shepherds with him."
While I was only nine at the time, I was old enough to know that there was something terribly wrong. "Safta, doesn't Arafat live in Beirut?" I remember asking her. "No, mottek, he's the head of the Gestapo, here in Israel," she replied. I started to tremble. I'd begun reading newspapers, and knew that Arafat was leading the Palestinians next door in Lebanon's civil war. "Safta, do you think you could call Abba in London and ask him what we should do?" I asked. "No," she said sternly. "We shouldn't use the phone right now. It would be a dead giveaway. Just go up to your room, lower the shutters, and be quiet."
Sitting behind my closed door, for the next two weeks, the only sound I could hear was that of my eighty- four year old grandmother's mind blasting apart. Speaking to herself incessantly, in Hebrew, German, and sometimes even Arabic, at varying volumes, she'd recount imaginary reports she claimed to have heard on army radio about how the Gestapo had finally returned to Palestine (not Israel) from Lebanon, with the sole purpose of kidnapping Jewish children. Unable to distinguish between the mandate period and independence, it was the first time I'd ever heard the Palestinians described as though they were Nazis.
From an unpublished conversation with a Jewish magazine editor
We have a terrible disjuncture at present, where the critical coverage that we increasingly rely on in this country comes from progressive sources that aren’t as discriminating in their approach to the Middle East as they should be. Being rightly committed to criticizing imperialism and colonialism, they frequently make the mistake of seeing all of the disparate crises afflicting the region as being different versions of the same political problem. It’s like saying that all Jews or Arabs are identical.
Take a look at how the occupation of Iraq has impacted a lot of progressive reporting on Israel: As the occupation has worsened, it has increasingly conditioned a way of covering the country that has assimilated Israel's conflict with the Palestinians with the situation created by the Americans in Iraq. The problem is that if this is the general disposition of the left press in covering the region, it therefore makes it difficult to explain the very real differences that distinguish the Iraqi refugee crisis from the Palestinian, Kurdish, or Armenian refugee crises which preceded it.
The Middle East is a very big place. Even within the space of short distances, such as that which exists between Gaza and Ramallah, the cultural and political distinctions can be extraordinary. The irony is that this is partially a product of territorial divisions first introduced by Europeans to the area. We ought to encourage the journalists we work with to strike a better balance between understanding the Middle Eastern experience of the West with the domestic differences that the outside world seems so oblivious towards.
Give it up for the real thing.
In Walk on Water’s closing scene, we find Eyal walking up to a crib to care for a crying baby, in a house, which, as the camera traces his movements, is one he now shares on a kibbutz with Pia, his new German wife. Axel, however, is never very far away. Sitting down at his laptop with a cup of hot tea after pacifying his newborn child, blanket draped over his shoulders, a domesticated Eyal composes an email to Axel, in which he tells his brother-in-law of a fantasy he had about the two of them defying gravity by walking together across the Sea of Galilee.
Obviously, whatever feelings Eyal held for Axel have not only not gone away, but, more significantly have become a subject of acknowledgement, perhaps even dialogue, between the two men. As welcome as the remarkable changes the former Mossad agent has made to his life appear to certainly be, he is still clearly closeted. Settling down with the blonde haired and blue-eyed granddaughter of a Nazi on a kibbutz may represent a dramatic step forward. Nevertheless, it is Eyal’s unrequited desire for Pia’s brother that represents a yearning for something even greater.
Ideologically speaking, Walk on Water is anything but simple. Could Eyal’s inability to fully come out be a sexual metaphor for a future peace between Palestinians and Israelis that’s correspondingly incomplete? A two state as opposed to a one state solution, where Jews may have made their peace with Europe but not, quite fully, with the Palestinians? Fox is appropriately unclear, as his message should be. Nevertheless, sexual liberation, of the kind that Walk on Water embraces, has profound political corollaries that lie far beyond the liberation of desire.
-From IvU, Chapter 7
Working feverishly on my next to final chapter, here's a brief list of the cultural product I'm presently fretting about:
Film
Walk on Water, directed by Eytan Fox (Israel, 2004/US, 2005)
Paradise Now, directed by Hany Abu-Assad (France/Israel/Palestine, 2005)
Munich, directed by Steven Spielberg (US, 2005)
Books
A Little Piece of Ground, by Elizabeth Laird (Macmillan, 2003/Haymarket, 2006)
Palestine, by Joe Sacco (Fantagraphics, 2001)
Music
Magnetic Storm, Smartut Kahol Lavan (CD-R, Boshet, Israel, 2005)
Discography, Dir Yassin ( LP, Alerta Antifascista, Germany, 2006)
Vote Hezbollah, Muslimgauze (Soleilmoon, 1993)
As we disembarked from our flight, we noticed that the pretty woman in front of us had a rather large caliber, military-issue pistol tucked into the back of her trousers.
Minutes later, we stumbled upon this sign, making us wonder whether "a little too obvious" was the new catchphrase of the security forces. Oakland Airport, August 13th.
A discarded book found on the sidewalk two blocks south, in front of a pretty tough housing project the cops always seem to be raiding. Click on the image for more detail.
The waiters placed each course on the table without touching it, almost as though they feared coming into contact with the surface. Every time I would thank them for bringing us new dishes, or order an additional beverage for my English-speaking wife, their eyes would glance down at me without any trace of emotion, like they wanted our interactions to be as impersonal as possible.
Clearly, something was amiss. I could sense it in the stops and starts in my conversation with our friend, who, having heard that I was journalist, asked me about my work, only to be greeted by my father quietly signaling as though he’d prefer it if I wouldn’t. Obliging, I’d shift gears by pretending to have been surprised by a particularly tasty piece of food.
“In all my years of coming here,” I said, “I’ve never had such good parsley salad.”
- Excerpted from Israel vs Utopia, Chapter 8
Speaking of the golden oldies, in today's Guardian, there's an absolutely terrific article on the continuing relevance of The Clash's 1979 LP, London Calling. Penned by Joe Queenan, this is the kind of exquisitely written, politically-charged music criticism glaringly absent from most US news periodicals.
Part of an ongoing series of articles commemorating the 30th anniversary of the first punk explosion, The Guardian's special focus on '77 contrasts sharply with the near-exclusive emphasis placed on remembering 1967's Summer of Love in the arts sections of numerous American dailies over the past few months.
None of this is to say that similarly high quality, big picture music writing can't be found here. I've worked with countless first class writers for whom this kind of journalism is second nature. The problem is a resistance to commissioning such pieces outside of indie music magazines and alternative weeklies.
The commercial success of Christopher Hitchens' most recent book, God is Not Great, is generating a lot of interest abroad. Many people are asking whether, in the wake of Bush, and his combination of military violence and Evangelical piety, a new secularism is now formally in the making.
From this vantage point, though I absolutely support such an endeavor, I am not so ce
