View From Nowhere

Timothy Egan has a column up at the NY Times comparing the candidates to junk food. Here’s just a bit:

More empty calories: Scott Walker, the governor whose foreign policy experience is limited to breakfast at the old International House of Pancakes, threatens to start at least two wars upon taking office. He promises to use military action if necessary to coax Iran into doing what he wants it to do. He also wants to pick a fight with Russia, sending weapons to Ukraine and erecting a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic.

Walker’s home state of Wisconsin ranks 35th in private sector job creation. But New Jersey is worse, suffering nine credit downgrades and ranking near the bottom in job growth. Even the governor of the state, Chris Christie, would not rise to Jersey’s defense after fellow candidates described Atlantic City as something akin to Baghdad on a hangover.

Those governors want to apply their ruinous models to the rest of the country. In the same vein, a failed former chief executive officer, Carly Fiorina, having fired 30,000 employees and driven her company’s stock price into the ground, feels more qualified than ever to be president. She’s never held elective office and rarely voted while living in California. A junk comeback.

But what about the Dems? All the Dem candidates, like them or not, are offering real policy proposals for real problems. But Egan — and I like Egan — can’t bring himself to step out of the View From Nowhere and declare that dictates we must see both sides as just as bad.

Finally, to the Democrats. A 73-year-old socialist, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, is getting lots of attention because Hillary Clinton’s email story is boring, by Clinton scandal standards. When a noisy intruder, an African-American, jumped to the podium and refused to let Sanders speak, it was widely interpreted as a big problem for the candidate and race relations.

Wrong. The censor with the mouth was, it turns out, a self-described “extremist Christian,” from a family that once backed Sarah Palin. Some members of Black Lives Matter distanced themselves from her.

How did this stunt become a thing among the national press corps? Junk media. Sadly, the sugar high goes two ways.

Yes, if you take the time to parse this he’s admitting that the problem is with media reporting, not Dem candidates, but the quick impression is that the Dem candidates don’t have anything to offer either. Of the two front-runners, one is just an old socialist and the other is bogged down in a boring email scandal.

These Are the Jokes, Folks

Actual headline at Christian Science Monitor: Is Donald Trump the Next Ronald Reagan?

In the “you can’t make this up” department: Jim Bob Duggar Wants To Counsel Sexual Abuse Victims, Pitches New Reality Show

In the “karma’s a bitch” department: Arizona ‘Patriot’ Militia Busted By Feds In Plot To Steal Drugs From Bogus Cartel

Here’s the punch line: Jeb! is now arguing that his brother’s Iraq mission was accomplished.

More Lives That Matter

The United States has among the highest rates of infant and maternal mortality in the developed world. Worse, according to official statistics, the rate of maternal mortality in the U.S. has shot up in recent years, even as the rate is going down just about everywhere else

(Maternal mortality rate refers to the number of women who die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth per 100,000 pregnancies/births. Infant mortality rate refers to the number of infants per 1,000 births who die between birth and their first birthday.)

Maternal mortality has jumped from 7.2 in 1987 to 18.5 in 2013; I understand the U.S. is roughly tied with Iran and Hungary in the maternal mortality department. And keep in mind that those numbers are averages; some states are not that bad, and some are worse.

However, a recent article in Scientific American argues that the maternal mortality rate really isn’t going up; it’s always been that bad, and we just didn’t know it.

Until relatively recently most states relied on a death certificate form that was created in 1989. A newer version of the form, released in 2003, added a dedicated question asking whether the person who died was currently or recently pregnant—effectively creating a flag for capturing maternal mortality. Specifically, this recently introduced question asks if the woman was pregnant within the past year, at the time of death or within 42 days of death.

The addition of this question means that the apparent increase in maternal mortality in the U.S. “is almost certainly not a real increase. It’s better detection from the new certificates,” says Robert Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch with the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. “The numbers are going up but it’s most likely not because women are more likely to die,” he contends.

In other words, maybe the problem isn’t getting worse; it’s just that the way we used to collect data camouflaged how bad things were before. That’s so … not a relief. However, other researchers quoted in the same article think there is an increase that can’t be entirely accounted for by the change in data collection.

Also:

One aspect of maternal mortality that has not changed over the years is the extent to which it varies by race. The risk of maternal mortality has remained about three to four times higher among black women than white women during the past six decades. Since 1999 maternal mortality has climbed among both black and white women—potentially due to those changes in death certificates and also how deaths are now coded in the U.S. using the ICD-10. Yet even with the cross-race increases in deaths related to pregnancy, in 2007 the maternal mortality rate for black women was still nearly three times higher than the rate for white women.

Researchers have shown that black women are not inherently more likely to have underlying pregnancy complications. Indeed, one national study that looked at five major common causes of maternal death and injury that collectively account for more than a quarter of all pregnancy-related deaths found that black women did not have a significantly higher prevalence than white women of those conditions—preeclampsia, eclampsia, obstetric hemorrhage, placental abruption and placenta previa. Yet black women were two to three times more likely to die than white women with the same complication.

Increased poverty and stress are an obvious reason why black mothers are at increased risk, IMO, but the medical science guys who look at this stuff aren’t persuaded that’s the entire story.

Whatever the cause, the data tell us that a lot of women die in the U.S. who would have lived had they gone through pregnancy and childbirth in any of about 50 other countries, including Estonia and Qatar. And a disproportionate number of those women are African American, and nobody knows why.

There are huge differences from state to state, for that matter. Maine has a maternal mortality rate of 1.2, according to data aggregated from the Center for Disease Control. Michigan has a rate of 21.0. The District of Columbia is even worse — 38.2. We’re in Third World territory with that number.

Similarly, the United States lags behind most of the developed world in infant mortality, and a disproportionate number of those infants also are African American. Conservatives for years have dismissed the data with claims that these are mere reporting anomalies. If an extremely premature infant dies immediately after birth, for example, it’s usually counted in the infant mortality data in the U.S. but would not be counted as such in some other countries.

An article in the Washington Post from September, 2014 blows that argument out of the water

Despite healthcare spending levels that are significantly higher than any other country in the world, a baby born in the U.S. is less likely to see his first birthday than one born in Hungary, Poland or Slovakia. Or in Belarus. Or in Cuba, for that matter. …

… One factor, according to the paper: “Extremely preterm births recorded in some places may be considered a miscarriage or still birth in other countries. Since survival before 22 weeks or under 500 grams is very rare, categorizing these births as live births will inflate reported infant mortality rates (which are reported as a share of live births).”

Oster and her colleagues found that this reporting difference accounts for up to 40 percent of the U.S. infant mortality disadvantage relative to Austria and Finland. This is somewhat heartening.

But what about that other 60 percent?

“Most striking,” they write, “the US has similar neonatal mortality but a substantial disadvantage in postneonatal mortality” compared to Austria and Finland. In other words, mortality rates among infants in their first days and weeks of life are similar across all three countries. But as infants get older, a mortality gap opens between the U.S. and the other countries, and widens considerably.

See the chart in the article. We’re not losing newborns as much as we are losing infants from one to 12 months old, and the gap widens as the infants get older. It appears many babies are dying in the U.S. who would have lived if they’d been born in Finland. And the biggest factor seems to be income; in the U.S., babies born into poor families die a lot more often than babies born into wealthy families. There also are big discrepancies from one state to another.

The U.S. rate of 6.1 infant deaths per 1,000 live births masks considerable state-level variation. If Alabama were a country, its rate of 8.7 infant deaths per 1,000 would place it slightly behind Lebanon in the world rankings. Mississippi, with its 9.6 deaths, would be somewhere between Botswana and Bahrain.

Needless to say, a disproportionate number of those poor families are African American. I couldn’t find raw numbers, so I don’t know how many African American women and babies die what must be preventable deaths in the U.S. every year. Maybe someone else can find that number. I don’t know how many White, Native American, Asian American and Latina women and their babies die, either. In 2013 about 800 women of all races died of complications of pregnancy and childbirth in the U.S., and if you have the data and can do math better than I can perhaps you can figure it out. I found no raw numbers of babies who die before their first birthday, just the rates.

The bottom line, though, is that access to health care, including reproductive health care, is a life and death issue for American women. And our lack of attention to this problem is a national disgrace. Yet instead of addressing it we’ve been manipulated into a phony controversy about Planned Parenthood. Really disgusting.

Republican Identity Politics

One of the many baffling things about modern Republicans is that they claim to hate “identity politics” even when “identity politics” seems to be the only game they know how to play.

For example, in today’s New York Times we read that Carly Fiorina has emerged as the Republican answer to charges they are waging a “war on women.” And that’s because … she’s a woman? I’m guessing.

I actually went to Fiorina’s campaign website to find out where she stands on women’s issues. Um, she doesn’t say. Taxes? Health care? Social Security? Nope. She brags about all the good things she did for Hewlitt Packard and tells us she’s a problem solver.

I had to google for more. Here’s what I learned — she wants to shut down the government to force defunding of Planned Parenthood. She also wants Roe v. Wade to be overturned. She pays lip service to “equal pay for equal work,” but she blames the pay gap on unions and government bureaucracies.

She’s fighting for the patriarchy, in other words. But she’s supposed to be proof that there’s no war on women because of her identity.

(There are no policy proposals on Donald Trump’s website, either, but the campaign store is open. Get your Trump for President T-shirts now!
For the record, there are some detailed policy proposals on Hillary Clinton’s website, but you have to doggedly fight through several layers of appeals for donations to get to them. I’ll save you the trouble and link to one of her issues pages. Jeb! has some serious policy stuff on his website, but it’s not organized in any coherent way. All I learned from Scott Walker’s website is that he has adopted “Reform. Growth. Safety.” as his campaign slogan. He might as well add “Yawn.”)

And then there’s Dr. Ben Carson, who has surged to the second spot after The Donald in some polls. WTF, you say?  I continue to stumble into the opinion that Carson can attract at least enough of the “black vote” to win. Frank Rich wrote,

Simply put: If an African-American raises his hand to run for president as a Republican, he (they’ve all been men) will instantly be cheered on as a serious contender by conservative grandees, few or no questions asked. He is guaranteed editorials like the one in the Journal, accolades from powerful talk-show hosts (Carson would make “a superb president,” says Mark Levin), and credulous profiles like the one Fred Barnes contributed to The Weekly Standard last month. Barnes’s piece regurgitated spin from Carson’s political circle, typified by his neophyte campaign chief Terry Giles, a criminal litigator whose clients have included Richard Pryor, Enron’s Kenneth Lay, and an estate-seeking son of Anna Nicole Smith’s elderly final husband. “If nominated, can Carson beat Hillary Clinton or another Democrat?” Barnes asked–and then answered the question himself: “Yes, he can.” How? By winning 17 percent of the black vote in swing states–a theoretical percentage offered by a co-founder of the Draft Carson movement.

In other words, Carson is being taken seriously primarily because of his race. His stands on issues are boilerplate wingnut; he’s not offering anything original or detailed. He has no prior experience in elected office. Were he not black, we wouldn’t be hearing about him now.

Could Carson attract that 17 percent of the black vote? Note that Carson blames the unrest in Ferguson and elsewhere on a loss of values in the black community. Carson said that African Americans needed to return to “family and faith,” which were “the values and principles that got black people through slavery and segregation and Jim Crowism.”

African Americans didn’t elect me to speak for them, but I sense they’re not in the mood to just “get through” things these days. But considering that many Republicans still believe President Obama got into the White House only because he is black, it shouldn’t surprise us that they think any black candidate ought to be able to do the same.

Marco Rubio was once touted as the candidate who could bring Latino voters back to the GOP. I don’t think anyone is saying that now. Jeb Bush actually is ahead of Rubio among Cuban Americans. Unfortunately for Rubio, in order to remain a Republican candidate in good standing he has to be against immigration reform.

At one point in time Rubio, who’s own family’s story begins with illegal immigration and avoided deportation, championed the idea of a “pathway to citizenship”. His party, on the other hand, did not. As a result, he abandoned his heritage, he abandoned the cause, and came out against his own legislation. What’s even worse, he began to speak publicly against immigrants and activist groups such as the Dreamers; the very groups he once fought for. Why? Because his political aspirations meant more to him than actually doing something with the power he had in office to forge the same path that had been allotted him by his grandfather becoming a citizen.

Rubio’s stumping in Iowa and across the nation almost entirely in Spanish is, quite frankly, a slap in the face to the intelligence of Latino Americans. The GOP’s hope is that he will beguile voters with the “we’re so alike” rhetoric and shared stories of heritage that they will not notice that his platform is set against their best interests. Rubio’s hope is that his story and promises of working with white people to gain their trust so real immigration work can begin will buy him his seat on the 2016 ticket and ultimately begin his road to the presidency or vice-presidency. Will he ever revisit immigration in a meaningful way? It’s doubtful. The GOP is staunchly against real immigration reform. And Rubio is now in lock step with the party line.

Vote for me because I’m Latino!

Jeb! is promising immigration reform, which may be why he’s slightly ahead of Rubio among Cuban Americans. But that’s also a big reason he’s not catching fire with the white male base.

And of course the foundation of all Republican identity politics is the assumption that white maleness is the default norm. In the minds of the base, to speak about policies that are intended to benefit any demographic other than white male is “identity politics.” But they don’t grasp that “white male” is an identity too.

More than just philosophical contempt, the GOP has staked out a position that to talk about policies from the standpoint of how they impact the lives of women, people of color or LGBTQ people is cynical pandering rather than an essential way to understand the impact of policies that matter to real people’s lives.

In other words, what appeals to White Men is good for America. Addressing to any other group or class is just pandering.

On the other hand, young white men, especially urban ones, don’t always seem to get the program. Remember “Hipster Guy“? The Hipster drove around in an Audi spouting empty rhetoric about people needing jobs, and “I’m a Republican because my friends need a paycheck, not an empty promise.” It was embarrassing, for the GOP. Hilarious for the rest of us.

But my point is that Republicans seem to have reached the point that identity politics is about all they’ve got. So we’ve got the rich belligerent dude with no policy proposals leading the pack.

Misfires

From the Guardian:

A group of young black men were incorrectly arrested on suspicion of firearm possession during a protest in Ferguson, Missouri, as a group of white militiamen, armed with rifles and wearing body armour and camouflage, claimed they had been granted permission to walk through the protests by police officers. …

… On Monday night, a group of at least three black men who were standing by a car next to a hair salon on West Florissant Avenue were arrested after a phalanx of St Louis County police surged towards them, using pepper spray and batons. A spokesman for the police department told the Guardian by email on Tuesday that officers had received information “that the occupants or folks near that vehicle were possibly armed with handguns”.

But the spokesman later confirmed that none of those arrested during the swoop were in possession of any weapons.

The treatment of these suspects, who were wrestled to the ground and placed in plastic flexicuffs, came in seemingly stark contrast to a group of white militiamen, who arrived at the protest at around 1am, after the arrests occurred, carrying loaded M-15 rifles with several magazine cartridges strapped across their body armour.

So, yes, white guys from out of town are allowed to strut around with assault rifles while black men are wrestled to the ground and handcuffed in their own neighborhood on suspicion that they might be armed. We’re not looking at equal treatment under the law, I don’t think. If Ferguson residents took to calling themselves a militia and marched around visibly armed to the teeth, would the cops leave them alone? Um, probably not. For the record, Ferguson police say the Oath Keepers did not have permission to patrol the streets with guns. But neither were they arrested.

Lots of other people have been arrested in Saint Louis County in the past few days, including:

The philosopher Cornel West was among those arrested, as were prominent Black Lives Matter protesters DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie, according to reports. The Reverends Renita Lamkin and Osagyefo Sekou were also reportedly arrested. Rev. Lamkin, an African Methodist Episcopal church pastor, and Rev. Sekou, a pastor from the First Baptist Church in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, have been prominent figures in protests in Ferguson since Michael Brown was shot by police officer Darren Wilson last August.

They were arrested while standing on the steps of the federal courthouse, which usually isn’t a criminal act. The federal courthouse I know of is near downtown St. Louis, not in Ferguson, so I assume these activists can’t be said to have been instigating riots in Ferguson by standing on steps.

Since I live in a Buddhist temple with no television I don’t always know what’s going on on the tube. But it seems to me we’re not hearing as much about these events as we should be hearing.

There’s lots of bickering about #BlackLivesMatter on the web, but it’s all about Bernie Sanders. I personally think #BLM badly violated my Bigger Asshole rule by hijacking and taking over a couple of Sanders events. The fact that you can find thousands of discussion threads on #BLM and Bernie and practically nothing about Cornel West being arrested for standing on the steps of a federal courthouse rather proves my point. Stupid protesting is worse for your cause than not protesting at all. We’re just pissing each other off and having the wrong conversation.

Charles Pierce:

What happened in Seattle was an embarrassment to the tradition of public protest.  It was a hysterical piece of performance art that accomplished absolutely nothing toward whatever goals its performers sought to achieve. Rage is not an excuse. Frustration is not an excuse. This was a simple act of public vandalism, aimed (again) at the wrong target. I have been to a bunch of rallies already in this godforsaken campaign. If the two principals here had tried this at any Republican rally; if they had tried it at any rally for any candidate of the party that largely has supported the militarized state of American policing, that more than any other political institution has worked to create the climate of The Other by which Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin are thugs while the people who killed them are blameless victims; if they had tried this at a Republican rally, they’d have been hauled off in handcuffs within five minutes, if they were allowed into the hall at all. This is taking advantage of the openness of a campaign that is overwhelmingly sympathetic to your goals, instead of bringing your fight to the politicians who actively oppose you, because it’s easier to do. Consider me unimpressed by the courage involved. I feel absolutely no compunction about saying that this “action” was stupid and counterproductive. It was loud and spectacular and it accomplished nothing good.

After days of people asking why #BlackLivesMatter was targeting Bernie Sanders — and sometimes Martin O’Malley– and not Hillary Clinton, finally some BLM activists talked to Hillary Clinton. That’s right; they sat down and talked to her. What a concept. Oliver Willis, however, was not impressed.

Representatives of the Black Lives Matters movement met with Hillary Clinton, and if you actually thought this movement was about stopping black people from being killed and reforming criminal justice issues with minorities, you should not only be disappointed but disgusted. …

…All along I’ve been worried that #BlackLivesMatter was some sort of millennial-flavored angst, a generation once again letting its feelings cloud out everything else. I’ve hoped that wasn’t the case. I hoped that what we’ve been seeing is about getting actual change to happen, the sausage making boring stuff that past movements – women’s rights, minority rights, gay rights – got done that have made America a better country now than it used to be.

Perhaps this exchange has been mis-characterized. God, I hope so. Because if this is accurate, if its about feelings and notions and not laws and rules and policies, the movement is doomed.

I’m seeing all kinds of wild rationalizations why Bernie Sanders was targeted and not the Republicans or Hillary Clinton. None of those rationalizations make sense. Avedon Carol wrote (on Oliver Willlis’s blog):

The Clintons pushed all those horrible Tough On Crime policies in the ’90s that massively increased incarceration of black people.

Bernie Sanders is one of very few people who objected to those policies at the time and has never stopped objecting to them. Contrary to the press (and BLM) narrative, he didn’t add racial issues to his speeches, he was saying that stuff all along.

My impression is that there’s a lot of pent-up rage against white liberals who don’t always “get it” or come through when needed, and Bernie Sanders’s supporters — who do sometimes come across as way too ebulliently giddy about Their Guy than is emotionally healthy — push their buttons. But effective demonstrating has to be more disciplined than that.

See also: A woman of color and Washington state senator expresses huge ambivalence about Seattle.

Senator Chuck Schmendrick

I’m sure you heard that last week Sen. Schumer announced he would not support the Iran deal and would even vote to override a veto. Today I learned that MoveOn announced it would withhold money from Schumer and any other Dem who nixed the deal, to the tune of $8.3 million.

“We thought Schumer and the Democratic party had learned this lesson a decade ago after the war of choice in Iraq,” said Nick Berning, MoveOn’s communications director. “We want to demonstrate to those who haven’t made their decision yet there will be substantial political consequences for those who want to take us to war.”

Also:

The National Iranian American Council, which also supports the Iran nuclear deal, took Schumer to task by comparing his diplomatic stances to former President George W. Bush. “He states that he is opposing the deal because Iran will retain ‘its nuclear and non-nuclear power,’” said Jamal Abadi of the NIAC. “These demands make the Bush Administration’s aversions to negotiations seem pragmatic in comparison. In what negotiated outcome would Iran have relinquished not just its nuclear power, but its non-nuclear power?”

Oh, yeah … good point.

Chuckles wants us to think he spent a lot of time studying the agreement and considering what it might do before he decided to vote against it. This is a vote of conscience, he says. At Foreign Policy, Jeffrey Lewis says the Senator didn’t study it hard enough. Of Schumer’s written statement opposing the deal, Lewis says, “Schumer’s missive came across a bit like your crazy uncle who gets his opinions from talk radio and wants to set you straight at Thanksgiving.” Lewis goes on to explain all the details the Senator got wrong.

However, Schumer doesn’t seem to be twisting arms to get other senators to vote his way. Many suspect the Dems have the votes to protect the deal without Schumer’s vote, so Chuck was let off the hook and could vote to appease the Israeli lobby. However, MoveOn, Credo and other progressive groups are campaigning to prevent Chuck from taking over as Majority (we hope) Leader once Harry Reid steps down.

The Anniversary

Today is the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the Hiroshima bomb. The New Yorker is republishing John Hersey’s essay Hiroshima, which originally appeared in the August 31, 1946 issue. The essay centers on six Hiroshima residents who survived the blast, giving us as intimate a view of the devastation as language can provide. Recommended.

Salon is running an essay arguing that America has never owned up to Hiroshima. The author, Christian Appy, argues that the bomb was unnecessary and was dropped purely as an act of cruelty. Appy is a historian, although the body of his published work is on Vietnam, not World War II. I’m not a historian, but I have some familiarity with the sources he cites as well as some he didn’t cite. The phrase “cherry-picked” comes to mind; I’ll come back to this in a bit.

In Rethinking Religion I have a section on “moral clarity,” defined as “a state of mind achieved by staking a fixed position on a presumed moral high ground and then ignoring the details of human life that fog the view.” My primary example of “moral clarifying” are the anti-abortion activists who argue incessantly for the sacredness and rights of the fetus while barely mentioning the woman carrying the fetus in her body.

Appy, and many other liberals, try to pull something like that with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They stake the moral high ground that dropping the bomb was absolutely evil, and then revise history six ways from Sunday to “prove” that the men who chose to drop it were just evil and callous and had some nefarious end other than the stated one, which was to end the war quickly and avoid a ground invasion of Japan.

I do not know if the bomb was militarily “necessary” or a better or worse option than the ground invasion. I don’t think anyone can know such a thing for certain. You can find all kinds of arguments made later, by both generals and historians, for both options. What I do sincerely believe is that the men who were faced with making the decision did not have the “benefit” of moral clarity. Based on the information at hand and recent events in the war, there was no “good” option in front of those men that would clearly have avoided a massive loss of life, including Japanese civilian lives. Many liberals today fervently want to believe otherwise, but I think that’s revisionism.

Yesterday I read arguments that Japan was just about to surrender, anyway (not according to any history I’ve read). I read arguments that the Japanese people could just have been starved until they surrendered. I fail to see why that would be a more moral option, especially considering the loss of life probably would have been even higher.  One genius commenting on Appy’s article was absolutely certain the bomb was dropped to intimidate the U.S.S.R., whom the commenter imagined was about to come to the aid of Japan. Why the U.S.S.R. might have done that I can’t imagine; the U.S.S.R. still needed the Allies, and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05), in which Japan pretty much handed Russia its ass, had not yet passed from memory. Another  theory was that the bomb was about the Cold War, and was dropped as a warning to the U.S.S.R. But the Cold War hadn’t really begun yet and wasn’t really on anyone’s radar in 1945, I don’t think.

If we’re discussing the morality of something, there’s an understandable human tendency to want to find oneself on the side of the angels, whatever that might be. The knee-jerk tendency of some is to cite Japanese atrocities committed in World War II to argue that Japan “deserved” Hiroshima, but I reject that as a moral argument. It’s not up to us to judge what other people, especially civilians, “deserve.”

The knee-jerk tendency of others is to seize the moral high ground by deriding the decision itself, to portray the dropping of the Bomb as utterly evil, unnecessary, and proof of the moral depravity of the U.S. government and military.  This position allows one no end of indulgent self-righteousness while appearing to be “smart” about what that sneaky government really is up to. But that’s a post-Vietnam view of things.

So why was the bomb dropped? By June 1945 the U.S. had made elaborate plans for a ground invasion of Japan, fortified by blockades and bombardments. Several invasion scenarios were on the table. The Joint War Plans Committee prepared casualty estimates for each. The Committee emphasized that any number they might give could be wildly off. Appy cited one of these estimates, 40,000 killed. That was a lowball; the Committee also said that the deaths could total as many as 220,000 if the Allied troops were forced to seize all of the island of Kyushu and the Tokyo plain. The staffs of generals MacArthur and Nimitz also prepared death estimates in the quarter million range. Appy doesn’t mention that.

Soon after these estimates were provided military intelligence learned it had drastically underestimated the number of Japanese troops on Kyushu, the island chosen for the initial invasion. The invasion plans had assumed there were 300,000 Japanese troops on Kyushu that June; on August 2, an MIS report stated there were at least 534,000 troops on Kyushu, and possibly more. [source]

Put another way — by the first week in August, the estimated total of Japanese army and naval combat troops on Kyushu alone was more than six times what it had been on Okinawa. Note that the combined death toll of Allied and Japanese troops and civilians on Okinawa is still disputed, but could have been as high as 240,000. Nearly a quarter of a million. Most of those casualties were civilians, many of whom committed suicide.

By the first week in August, the old casualty estimates had been pretty much tossed out the window. Appy doesn’t mention that.

President Truman said after the war that Gen. George Marshall had told him an invasion would cost “at a minimum one quarter of a million casualties and might cost as much as a million.” Truman may have been making excuses for himself, but the quarter million number was consistent with other estimates.

Meanwhile, the bomb itself was an unknown factor. From what I’ve read, for example, pretty much everyone underestimated the danger from fallout. We’ve had 70 years of living with nuclear weapons as a fact, and of watching movies and reading novels in which humankind destroyed itself with thermonuclear weapons. The Bomb has had 70 years to take its place in our collective subconscious as the mythical One Forbidden Thing; the thing that must never be done. But in 1945, nuclear weapons weren’t unthinkable yet.

So, knowing only what Harry Truman knew in August 1945, looking only at the options he had in front of him, what do you do?

I’m not sure there was a “right” decision. There was no clear, easy out. Any decision made would have resulted in unbearable loss of life. I think it’s entirely possible that if the bombs had never been dropped, today we’d be complaining that America has never apologized for the bloodbaths on Kyushu and Honshu, and if Truman had just dropped the bomb much of that could have been avoided. We’ll never know, of course. It’s also foolish to assume that if the U.S. had never developed the Bomb there’d be no nuclear stockpiles today.

My larger point, though, is that if we’re going to own up to something, we need to own up to how difficult a decision that was to make. Real-time, real-world moral decisions often are very, very difficult. Often, “moral clarity” is achievable only if we close our eyes to most of the facts. Often there’s no “good” solution. This is how it is. It’s childish to assume everything sorts itself into good and evil, and we can just choose good and remain pure.

It’s also estimated that the incendiary bombs dropped on Japan by B-29s could have resulted in as many as 200,000 civilian deaths, and many people were burned alive. Yet, somehow, we’re never asked to don sackcloth and ashes about those deaths, even though they seem just as terrible to me. This speaks to the unique place the atomic bomb occupies in our collective subconscious, I think.

For the record, the official estimates of killed and wounded in Hiroshima (150,000) and Nagasaki (75,000) are no doubt conservative and may have exceeded the loss of life from firebombing. But we don’t know for certain.

But to my mind, arguing about the morality of the bomb is the wrong argument. We should be thinking about the morality of killing, by any means, as an instrument of policy, period. That would be the better way to remember Hiroshima.

Will Evangelicals Rediscover Religion?

Our ongoing public arguments about religion suffer badly from the fact that few of the arguers have a clue what religion actually is. This is true of the crusading atheists, who define “religion” as “knee-jerk obedience to literal interpretations of scripture while believing in imaginary sky fairies.” Yes, some religious people are like that, but that doesn’t define “religion” per se any more than the platypus defines “animals.”

A big part of the problem with our definitions of religion stems from the fact that most of us have had a very narrow exposure to religion. This is doubly true in the U.S., in spite of the fact that we may be living in the most religiously diverse nation in human history. Somehow, in mass media and in the public hive mind, the default definition of “religion” is “conservative evangelical Christianity.”

Emma Green writes in The Atlantic,

Evangelical Christianity has long had a stranglehold on how Americans imagine public faith. Vague invocations of “religion”—whether it’s “religion vs. science” or “religious freedom”—usually really mean “conservative, Protestant, evangelical Christianity,” and this assumption inevitably frames debates about American belief. For the other three-quarters of the population—Catholics, Jews, other Protestants, Muslims, Hindus, secular Americans, Buddhists, Wiccans, etc.—this can be infuriating. For some evangelicals, it’s a sign of success, a linguistic triumph of the culture wars.

Author Green will probably catch some flack for leaving out atheists. But atheists often are part of the problem, since so many of them have bought into evangelical hegemony.

For example, consider the alleged conflict between “religion” and evolution. Once on a web forum I mentioned that a large majority of mainline Protestants accept evolution theory, which according to Pew they do, and was promptly slammed by a chorus of atheists, who coughed up data relating to evangelicals. When I explained that the “mainline” Protestants were the older denominations that are not considered evangelical, they didn’t believe me.

A meme about Pope Francis accepting evolution, and how this is going to signal the end of religion as we know it, pops up about once a week in my Facebook feed. But the fact is the Catholic Church never denounced evolution, and back in 1950 Pope Pius XII issued an encyclical saying there is no direct conflict between evolution science and Christianity.

The rabbinic tradition of Judaism also accepts evolution, and there’s no conflict I can see between evolution and Asian religious tradition. Islamic views vary widely. Some Muslims are on the same page with most mainline Protestants and Catholics, which is that they accept the science but believe God is still the ultimate cause. Others are more like conservative evangelicals and believe in creationism.

So, to be accurate, the conflict is not between “religion” and evolution. It’s between Christian conservative evangelicalism and conservative Islam, on one side, and evolution on the other. And leave the rest of religion out of it. But try to explain that to an atheist in self-righteous “I worship at the altar of open-mindedness and reason” mode. Just try.

Emma Green’s article is a profile of Russell Moore, who is the head of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. And apparently Moore has had it with evangelical hegemony, too. Green quotes Moore:

“Most Americans agreed on certain traditional values: monogamous marriage, the nuclear family, the right to life, the good of prayer and church attendance, free enterprise, a strong military, and the basic goodness of the American way of life. The argument was that this consensus represented the real America.” Presumably, everyone else—gays, divorcees, pacifists, socialists—lived outside the “real America.”

If such a “real America” ever existed in more than Leave It to Beaver re-runs, it certainly doesn’t exist now. Gay marriage is legal. Church attendance is down. Most TV shows are less about happy homes than the hectic, diverse tumble of American family life; the cultural preoccupation with perfectionist conservatism has largely come to an end.

Some see this as a loosely defined form of “secularization.” These are the people, Moore said, who approach him after church and ask, fearfully, whether Christianity is dying. “Behind that question is an assumption that Christianity is a sub-culture of American life,” he told me. “I think what is dying is cultural, nominal Christianity, and I don’t think we should panic about that. I think we should see that as an act of God’s grace.”

The assumption that evangelicals own American culture and politics has ended. This is good for minority groups, for other Christians, and for those who are still searching. But the radicalness of Moore, who by right of inheritance should be America’s Culture Warrior in Chief, is that he thinks it’s good for evangelicals, too.

This fascinates me, because a big problem with American evangelicalism is that it forgot about religion some time back. At some point, conservative evangelicalism became not just a subculture of American life; it came to be so wired into political conservatism as to be indistinguishable. As a result, “culture warriors” like Ann Coulter could write a book about how liberals hate God (Godless: The Church of Liberalism, 2006), claiming that liberals reject God and revile all religious people.  And she could do the usual television talk-show circuit to promote this book without ever being challenged how often she goes to church, or even if she belongs to one. Political conservatives in America are assumed to be members in good standing of the conservative evangelical tribe, by default, unless they are Catholic or Jewish. No further effort is required. Likewise, liberals can never be members, no matter how pious they may be. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

Green continues,

Like any good Southern Baptist preacher, Moore knows how to unleash some spiritual whoop-ass, though that probably wouldn’t be his preferred choice of words. The straitlaced, suit-wearing preacher from Biloxi, Mississippi, included a whole passage in his book about how much he hates tattoos; he is studiously polite and clean-cut. Yet he rails against people who merely perform their Christianity, who assume that following Jesus is the same as being a “shiny, happy Republican.”

In the Bible Belt in particular, “Christianity became a totem to secure a happy marriage, a successful career, well-behaved children–all that, and eternal life, too,” he writes. “Such a Christianity doesn’t have a Galilean accent, but rather the studied clip of a telemarketer.”

I assume Moore is still a cultural conservative, and someone with whom I would disagree about many things; the difference is that he appreciates religion as religion. And what is that? It has been many things through the ages, but to think of it merely as a supernatural belief system, or a calcified relic of Iron Age metaphysics, is to miss it. Until modern times, anyway, religion was not a system of propositions about the physical world one was required to accept. Through most of human history, religion was a commitment to a way of living, usually one that promised some sort of transcendence of the limited self. Karen Armstrong said,

“Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.” [The Spiral Staircase]

In other words, religion is something you do, not something you are, or believe, or something to adopt as part of your tribal identity. And as something you do, it should not necessarily be easy, or be a socially enforced norm. And it’s that last part that’s hard for conservatives to accept. And for more on this, please see Rethinking Religion: Finding a Place for Religion in a Modern, Tolerant, Progressive, Peaceful and Science-Affirming World.

Back to the Atlantic article:

“There was a larger mentality that came along with the last generation of evangelical political activism that assumed that we represent the real America in ways that turned out not only not to be true, but turned out to be damaging to the larger mission of the church,” Moore told me.It may be more effective to package Christianity in terms of God and country and tradition, rather than sin and Christ and blood, but in Moore’s eyes, it’s less authentic. As he wrote in his book, “We were never given a mission to promote ‘values’ in the first place, but to speak instead of sin and of righteousness and judgement, of Christ and his kingdom.”

It’s a lot easier to package Christianity in terms of God and country and tradition, but it never seems to occur to these religious people that the faithful in other countries also package Christianity in terms of their country and tradition.

The worst thing that can happen to religion, IMO, is to become entangled with ethnic and national identities, and thereby with politics. That’s where religious violence comes from; it’s the confluence of ethnic and racial bigotries and political power with conservative religion that drives the worst of what is called “religious” violence.

Moore is making an argument for embracing Christian strangeness. “Our message will be seen as increasingly freakish to American culture,” he writes. “Let’s embrace the freakishness, knowing that such freakishness is the power of God unto salvation.”

I interpret this to mean that Moore rejects the idea that Southern Baptists must fight to make sure the larger culture reflects Southern Baptist views, and instead learn to accept that they will be at odds with cultural and social norms in America. Granted, this might be seen as a self-pitying whine on Moore’s part, but by separating Christianity from social convention, it can become more authentically religious. It can become something that people make a personal commitment to doing, rather than something one attaches to because it’s conventional.

Skipping a bunch of stuff to the end:

This is not an assimilated, salable Christianity. If anything, it troubles the anodyne, dog-whistle-y “values” rhetoric that Moore rejects. It calls for politicians to be committed to living out Christianity beyond the breath it takes to utter “God bless America.” It goes against “a certain cultural moment in American life which sees Christianity as a mood, rather than a life-changing truth,” like the Willie Nelson concert where the singer seamlessly transitions from “Whiskey River” to “Amazing Grace.” And inevitably, it undermines Bible Belt identity, which has long depended on pairing God with guns and Republican politics. Not to worry, Moore says: “The Bible Belt was no Promised Land.”

Perhaps this moment of evangelical clarity could also be a moment of clarity for other kinds of American Christians. Conservative Protestants have longed crowed about the decline of mainline Christianity, citing shrinking attendance as a sign of tepid faith. Then again, “American Christianity” has so often been used as a shorthand for evangelical Protestantism; if the faith is delineated in terms of conservative “values,” it’s a little unclear what it means to be a progressive Christian. If evangelicals embrace their weirdness, perhaps progressive Christians will embrace a similar cultural moment.

The progressive Christians I know are clear about the difference between them and the conservative evangelicals, but it might make it easier for others to appreciate the difference.

At the other end of the scale, see Andy Schlafly, son of Phyllis. Andy — who is such a dweeb he appeared on the Colbert Report without realizing he was being mocked — is running a “conservative Bible project” to revise English translations of the Bible to make them more conservative. He’s finding too many translations with “liberal” words like “comrade.” He also doesn’t find enough anti-abortion language and wants the new translation to emphasize “free market” principles.

Schlafly is quite certain these changes reflect the “original intent” of the author, and the stuff he doesn’t like obviously are errors created by those nefarious liberals. Indeed, one of his reasons for revising the translations is that “the ensuing debate would flesh out — and stop — the infiltration of churches by liberals pretending to be Christian.” In other words, liberals can’t be Christians in Andy’s World.

And be clear, this is not a re-translation. He’s not calling on scholars to review the source material. He’s calling for conservative volunteers to rewrite the Bible to make it more perfectly reflect their ideology.

Any of the great Abrahamic theologians or rabbis of history would have called Schlafly out as a heretic for doing this. The very idea of any mortal man assuming to know “original intent” was unthinkable once upon a time, and would have been recognized as the sin of Pride, on steroids. But the inversion of Christianity from religion to political/cultural ideology is pretty much complete with Schlafly.