Splitting the Difference

Freaking News is a great site where Photshop fanatics are asked to create wild and wonderful (and sometimes disgusting and borderline obscene - browse with caution) images that take their cues from something in the news that day. Turtles, Elvis, Osama Bin Laden, Sen. Larry Craig, airplanes - if you can think of it, they probably have a photo gallery on it.

I am utterly impressed by this one - Partial Face Transplants.

Just go look then come back and vote for your favorite.

Anglachel

Pandemonium

Pandas are much cuter in pictures than in person, truth be told. We have a pack of them here in the San Diego Zoo, and they spend most of their time sound asleep. However, we've had the pleasure of seeing them being very active, such as one late night zoo trip where the male was romping around his enclosure and rumbling contendly to himself. Here is a YouTube video (very short) of how quickly these animals can move when the occasion calls for it.

Pandemonium

Anglachel

He's Gay. He's Also a Perv.

I'm rolling my eyes at the whining and kvetching by gay male posters across the blogosphere that somehow dipshit and general pervert Sen. Larry Craig was "set-up" or treated unfairly for soliciting sex in a public restroom.

Look, boys, will you put your dicks back in your pants and grow the fuck up?

1. There is a difference between talking to someone over a drink in a bar and then going to find some cozy place to fuck and shoving your hands and feet into the bathroom stall next door while a stranger is trying to take a dump in peace, OK?
2. No, you DON'T have a right to have sex in a public location. Really. It's called lewd and lacivious behavior. Getting away with it is not the same as having a right.
3. We all know how proud you are of your ability to ejaculate, honest. We understand it feels, really, really, really good. But most of us learned sometime during adolescence and early adulthood that it's juvenile and more than a little pathetic to make jacking off the center of your existence. Your bleating that somehow it is "gay culture" to spend hours wandering around finding stangers for sex in public places makes most of us think "gay culture" is, well, dumb and in need of some change.
4. There is such a thing as public decency. Someone who wanders around shoving his body parts into the next door bathroom stall to get the thrill of jacking off in public is a pervert. It has nothing to do with him being gay (or bi).
5. It's like guys who rub up against women at sporting events or who cop feels on subways - yeah, some chicks get a thrill from it, but most of us just want to give you a swift knee in the nads. Nothing personal. THAT is the root of the revulsion aimed at Craig - he is trying to make someone else satisfy his desires. Don't underestimate how much of the sexual charge is coming from invading another person's boundaries.

While there's a shit load of homophobia surrounding Craig's case, I've got no problem with arresting perverts who solicit sex in public bathrooms. You don't want to get arrested for soliciting? Go to a bar. Don't be hitting on other guys of unknown sexual orientation in an airport bathroom for fuck's sake. Honestly, your pretty little balls won't explode if you don't get them off right then and there.

Promise.

Anglachel

Just Wow

I don't even want to try to describe what is on this site. 100% work safe and incredibly gorgeous:

Student Flotsom and Origami Jetsam

I can't even fold a letter neatly to stick into an envelope...

Anglachel

Fermentation

In my search for goofy things online, I came across this YouTube video of a wide variety of African fauna having a good time consuming a particular bit of African flora.

Party Tree

I could do without the background music, but the whole is a mild chuckle.

Rituals of Justice

Monday and Tuesday, I was called up for jury duty. I was called to a criminal trial, a rather minor one that did not involve violence, as far as I can tell. I didn't get seated, but it was an interesting experience, as it took two days to select the jury. There seems to be some dress code in the legal profession that dictates all female court officials wear a minimum 2" high heel. Every piece of furniture in the courtroom is barcoded, even the ancient wooden stenographer's desk, and there are more computers than I remember from my last stint.

The formality and rituals of the courtroom are fascinating. Jurors can only enter a courtroom when directed to do so. The prosecutor's table is always to the left of the judge, the defendent's always to the right. The attorneys rise and face the jury when we enter or depart, standing just so. There is a great deal of standing just so - rise as the judge enters, stand and face the flag, use only your right hand for an oath, move from one seat to another upon direction, face a certain direction when answering. The questions asked bear no resemblance to TV shows. They are stated calmly, slowly, and (at least for the selection) in the same way. Everyone is Mr. and Ms. , Your Honor and Juror, the People and the Defense. It is reassuring, this structure.

Where else in public life can one find this level of order as a normal matter of daily action? Legislatures, I suspect, places of worship and militaries. Ritual gives form and meaning - it is done this way for the sake of something. In this case, it is for the sake of justice. It is easy to be cynical and deride what you see as nothing more than a sham, window dressing on a fundamentally economically and racially biased system. Cynicism, however, is too easy. It takes nothing to refuse to imbue ritual with meaning, to "go through the motions." It takes little more to imagine the ritual to be the meaning.

What is missing from either stance is the possibility that ritual can draw us outside of ourselves and create the space in which something abstract (justice, equality, liberty) is made concrete and is able to withstand the rush of impermanence. It not only provides form, it provides persistence. Even in conditions where the ritual is hollowed out, as in show trials, the existence of the rituals stands as a rebuke to their misuse.

I suppose there is a point at which the rituals are so fragile that they can no longer serve even that small function, but I think that you are then dealing with a wholly corrupt situation and refoundation is the only cure. Even so, I am glad for the just-so acts of the court. Where else in the passage of human affairs can things like justice find a stable home?

Anglachel

It's All About the Audience

Mark Kleiman is busy making an idiot of himself in public trying to convince the blogosphere that Obama is offering something different and new in foreign policy compared to Hillary Clinton. Kevin Drum points out that he can't really discern any difference, and that, to be kind, Kleiman is projecting. Anyone who reads Kleiman's blog knows he has a deep, visceral hatred of the Clintons and will basically grab at (or invent) any straw to support his position. Supporting a good candidate (Obama) does not make his attacks on Hillary any less incoherent. It is going to be amusing (or appalling) to watch what he does next year when she is the Democratic nominee.

Even so, I think there is a difference between Hillary and Barack on foreign policy, and it is not in the substance of their positions. It is in the audience they are addressing. Targeting your audience is very important in my line of work (Web development) because you can't communicate effectively if you don't know who you are talking to.

In her foreign policy statements, Hillary is addressing the international community and other heads of state. She already speaks like the president. Foreign policy is aimed at the actors within that realm, and is done with diplomacy. She is looking at the long term needs of the nation to repair and restore normal relations after the BushCo disater. I'm not sure she cares if this plays well in Peoria - or Yearly Kos.

In his policy statements, Barack is addressing potential voters. He speaks like a candidate. It is rhetoric intended to gain votes, and does not give much attention to the long term needs. He has calculated that extreme statements now, which raise the ire of other countries, are necessary to secure domestic support, and can be moderated afterwards. It is campaign strategy, not foreign policy. His actual policy, as far as I can suss out, is nearly identical to Hillary's. Please note that nothing I've said here is meant as a criticism. I don't think he can afford to address any other audience at the moment.

What Barack reminds me of at the moment is nothing so much as Bill Clinton in 1992, saying things to please the voters and create a point of distinction between himself and other candidates. Remember Bill's pronouncements about China vs. what actually happened? If Barack is elected (which is an outcome I'm happy with, no matter my criticisms of his campaign), he, too, will walk back his rhetoric. For example, the nuclear option is back on the table simply because it is *always* on the table where the US is concerned.

In short, what we are seeing is the difference between someone who has been immersed in foreign relations for years and someone who has not. Their basic stances are the same, both are obvious improvements over the current Republican insanity, and the people they would call on to run the State Department would probably overlap. Hillary is a stronger candidate than Barack in this area because she has more exposure to foreign policy from a presidential perspective. Only the Big Dog himself and Al Gore can claim more.

Anglachel

No More HotK

(Edited to be less whiny)

With the most recent chapter, Due, I'm done with public posting of Hands of the King.

I've completed my writing, which is a good feeling. I have put in five years of work on this novel; researching Tolkien, interrogating conventions of fanon, trying to think with and against Tolkien's own meta-narrative of politics, religion, and society, developing plot and characterization, and going over and over the work to catch inconsistencies and errors. I think I've managed to do this and write an engaging tale. What I wanted to get from that endeavor, I have received.

I know I have readers on this story. I get between 600 and 800 page views a week on average. However, aside from my two friends Agape and Fergus, HotK readers have basically stopped providing any substantive responses. Only four people besides Agape and Fergus have posted a comment or sent an author email since January this year, and many of those have been private "You have a typo" in nature. The lack of substantive response aggravates me after having done all of that work. It may not be a reasonable reaction, but it is how I feel.

Maybe the story just isn't as good or engaging as it used to be. Whatever the reason, readers don't want to comment, I can't make readers comment, and I have deal with my frustration over that situation. My way to deal with it is to stop creating the situation in the first place. I have said myself in times past that the author's satisfaction with the work has to be with the work itself, and not done for the sake of squees. I'm happy with the story I have written and I'm not going to blackmail for comments.

Anglachel

Excusing Bush by Bashing Clinton

The current dust-up between Clinton and Obama on the most effective method for engaging with flakazoid foreign leaders is, frankly, silly. Both agree that stonewalling is not a viable policy and the real difference appears to be semantic - Obama is mumbling something about laying groundwork then loudly talking about talking, while Clinton is strongly insisting on the groundwork first and won't commmit to a specific mode of engagement beyond that.

This is small beans, people. The key point for both senators is that ostracizing rogue or even obstreperous states is really fucking stupid foreign policy.

Then Matt Yglesias shoots off his mouth how Clinton is just "Bush-lite" for refusing to agree to talks with particular heads of states without conditions or considerations. Hel-fucking-lo? I sure as shit do NOT want the US in any way shape and/or form legitimizing the nutcase running Iran at the current moment. That doesn't mean refusing to engage with *Iran*. That means refusing to walk into a PR trap set up by some anti-Semitic, mysogynistic, dictatorial fucktard who happend to have "won" an utterly bogus election.

You know, like George W. Bush.

Put some different players in this argument and you'll see why Big Media Matt has parked his brain at the door.

What should a country do who thinks there is no way not to engage the US, but who also thinks George W. Bush is a war criminal? You keep diplomatic channels open, you arrange for meetings and talks, and you are very careful not to become PR fodder for the BushCo White House.

In short, Clinton has expressed an extremely intelligent and rational general approach to engagements with states who have loathesome leaders, but where the US has a clear interest in strengthening more advantageous relationships. She has done no more than say that the US will act like every other rational state actor in the world.

To take the most extreme interpretation of Obama's position, declare it brilliant, and then categorically declare Clitnon's stance to be just like Bush and Cheney does violence to serious thinking about foreign policy. It trivializes the rogue behavior of the Bush administration. Matt and the other Clinton-haters of the TAPPED and TPM empires may think this is oh-so-terribly clever (Look! Look! Snicker, giggle, we called Hillary a right-winger! Har-har, we tried to trash her by a false comparison and the neo-Naderite netroots is eating it up! Guffaw, we sure showed Mommy, er, Hillary, er, no, no, BILLARY - heh-heh, yeah, that's it, Billary- who's the got the dick in this debate!) are not paying attention to the ways in which they normalize what is a breathtakingly violent and destructive stance towards the rest of the world.

No. There needs to be a bright and clear line between the criminal activity of the Cheney White House and genuine (if fundamentally trivial) disagreements about legitimate, common-sense diplomatic methods. Not to maintain that distinction excuses their imperial over-reach and their contempt for humanity as such.

Anglachel

Will it Blend?

Continuing my search for the weird and wonderful.

Will this IT infrastructure blend?

Work safe, and loads of fun.

Anglachel

Josh Marshall Nails it

This really cuts to the chase. Why are we in Iraq?

And here we are, again, with the president introducing yet another new new direction in Iraq. Yes, the stakes of 'defeat' in Iraq are very high. And that's why so many people are so upset with this president because the whole thing is quite obviously a disaster and we are going to pay a very big price for it on many levels. And it's his fault. But let's not pretend that these are grave hypotheticals off in the future. They're here. It's a disaster. And we have to deal with it. Not pretend.

People ask what we're doing in Iraq. And you can answer in a hundred ways and in a thousand shades of literalism to metaphor. But at some level we're in Iraq because President Bush wanted a parade. It's not hard to imagine how he must have imagined it. A withdrawal of most American troops from a staunchly allied pro-American Iraq. Waving flags. Heartfelt thanks and vindication for the president who had the guts and character to see it through.

And that's why we stay. Because somehow if he just keeps at it someday he might get his parade. Or rather if he just keeps us there forever he doesn't have to really deal wtih what a disaster he's created and fundamentally what a failure he is.

He wants the parade.

He Wants his Parade - Josh Marshall

Dear Religious Right: Give It Up

Courtesy of the Rude Pundit. NOT WORK SAFE:

How many more fuckin' times are we gonna go through this same pathetic charade with presumptive leaders for the religious right? For moral values supporters? How many more men, for indeed, can anyone name a powerful woman brought down in a sex scandal recently? How many hypocritical Ted Haggards and Newt Gingriches and Mark Foleys and David Vitters, all, all, all men that the religious right counted on to lead them to the promised land of political power, to keep those homosexuals down, to punish Bill Clinton, to make abstinence and anti-abortion policies the rule of the country? How many more men who make a show of deep faith who are just assholes who wanna get their rocks off?

When do we get to act like a nation of grown-ups where we can say, "You know, I don't give a fuck if my candidate likes to have his nutsack stomped by a cross-dressed male hooker in stiletto heels as long as he supports my issues"? And where those issues can be shit like war and education and health care and not bullshit like who's fucking who and for what reasons?

Amen. I am sick of the faux morals (and rampant moralism) of the religious right. Their leaders are some of the biggest perverts in the country, blathering on about their love of Jeezus while they are humping hookers and kids on the side. What's worse are the religious fellow travelers who tut-tut ordinary people's foibels, but won't hold their hypocritical fellows responsible for corrupting the very fabric of their faith.

America is so fucked up. We'll impeach a president over a consual blow job but don't have the balls to do it to one who has gutted rule of law and made us into a nation that condones torture. We are the opposite of a Christian nation.

Anglachel

Red in Tooth and Claw

In my ever expanding search for the weird, I present another "nature is weirder than you think" video from YouTube.

Rabbit and Predator

I can say right up front that the rabbit gets away relatively unscathed, so safe for general viewing. Also funny as hell.

The Plain Truth

The New York Times has finally said the blindingly obvious - the Iraq mess is George W Bush's mess and he has no intention of doing a damn thing about it. This is not news to anyone who has been paying half a mind to the war, of course, but it does stand as an utterly unequivocall statement from an establishment news source that the jig is up. Some choice excerpts:

It is time for the United States to leave Iraq, without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit.

•

Like many Americans, we have put off that conclusion, waiting for a sign that President Bush was seriously trying to dig the United States out of the disaster he created by invading Iraq without sufficient cause, in the face of global opposition, and without a plan to stabilize the country afterward....

It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost....

A majority of Americans reached these conclusions months ago. Even in politically polarized Washington, positions on the war no longer divide entirely on party lines. When Congress returns this week, extricating American troops from the war should be at the top of its agenda.

That conversation must be candid and focused. Americans must be clear that Iraq, and the region around it, could be even bloodier and more chaotic after Americans leave. There could be reprisals against those who worked with American forces, further ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Potentially destabilizing refugee flows could hit Jordan and Syria. Iran and Turkey could be tempted to make power grabs. Perhaps most important, the invasion has created a new stronghold from which terrorist activity could proliferate.

The administration, the Democratic-controlled Congress, the United Nations and America’s allies must try to mitigate those outcomes — and they may fail. But Americans must be equally honest about the fact that keeping troops in Iraq will only make things worse. The nation needs a serious discussion, now, about how to accomplish a withdrawal and meet some of the big challenges that will arise....

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have used demagoguery and fear to quell Americans’ demands for an end to this war. They say withdrawing will create bloodshed and chaos and encourage terrorists. Actually, all of that has already happened — the result of this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.

See? Was that so hard to say? Of course, anyone with two brain cells to rub together predicted this outcome back in 2003, but we can make allowances for slow learners.

Bottom line - Bush and Cheney led the country to war on false pretenses, the mainstream media, very much including the New York Times, launched smear campaigns against any public figure who said "This is not right," and the American public was a great baby, allowing themselves to be manipulated by fear and indulging in revenge fantasies against Saddam Hussein.

People like me have been right all along, we knew it, and we told you idiots what was going to happen. There is NOTHING that has happened in Bush's War that wasn't predicted before the first US soldier was moved into position. If it salves your conscience to say "Oh, if only I had known!" go right ahead. That's how national crimes get cleaned up.

Anyone who voted for Bush in 2004 is a willing accomplice to a war crime.

Anglachel

Knowledge and Democracy

Eric Alterman published a speech given by E. L. Doctorow at a joint meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, The Library of Congress, April 28, 2007. It is angry, beautiful and true in the best Enlightenment sense of demonstrated by facts. Here are key paragraphs:

What does it say about the United States today that this fellowship of the arts, and sciences and philosophy is called to affirm knowledge as a public good? What have we come to when the self-evident has to be argued as if -- five hundred years into the Enlightenment and two hundred and thirty-some years into the life of this republic -- it is a proposition still to be proven? How does it happen that the modernist project that has endowed mankind with the scientific method, the concept of objective evidence, the culture of factuality responsible for the good and extended life we enjoy in the high tech world of our freedom, but more important for the history of our species, the means to whatever verified knowledge we have regarding the nature of life and the origins and laws of the universe ... how does it happen for reason to have been so deflected and empirical truth to have become so vulnerable to unreason?
...

From those fundamentalist leaders who proclaimed 9/11 as our just deserts for our secular humanism, our civil libertarianism, our feminists, our gay and lesbian citizens, our abortion providers, and in so doing honored the foreign killers of nearly three thousand Americans as agents of God's justice ... to the creationists, the biblical literalists, the anti-Darwinian school boards, the right-to-lifer anti-abortionist activists, the shrill media ideologues whose jingoist patriotism and ad hominem ranting serves for public discourse -- all of it in degradation of the thinking mind, all of it in fear of what it knows -- these phenomena are summoned up, and enshrined by the policies of this president. At the same time, he has set the national legislative program to run in reverse as he rescinds, deregulates, dismantles or otherwise degrades enlightened legislation in the public interest, so that in sum we find ourselves living in a social and psychic structure of the ghostly past, with our great national needs -- health care, public education, disaster relief -- going unmet. The president may speak of the nation in idealistic terms but his actions demonstrate that he has no real concept of national community. His America, like that of his sponsors, is a population to be manipulated for the power to be had for the money to be made. He is the subject of jokes and he jokes himself about his clumsiness with words, but his mispronunciations and malapropisms suggest a mind of half-learned language that is eerily compatible with his indifference to truth, his disdain for knowledge as a foundation of a democratic society.

It will take more than the recent congressional elections and revelations of an inveterately corrupt administration to dissolve the miasma of otherworldly weirdness hanging over this land, to recover us from our spiritual disarray, to regain our once clear national sense of ourselves, however illusory, as the last best hope of mankind. With our once upright democratic posture bent and misshapen, what rough beast are we as we slouch toward Bethlehem? What are we become in the hands of this president with his relentless subversion of our right to know -- his unfounded phantasmal justifications for going to war, his signing away of laws passed by Congress that he doesn't like, his unlawful secret surveillance of citizens' phone records, and email, his dicta time and time again in presumption total executive supremacy over the other two branches of government, his insensitivity to the principle of separation of church and state, his obsessive secrecy, his covert policies of torture and extraordinary rendition, where the courtroom testimony of the tortured on the torture they've endured at our hands is disallowed on the grounds that our torture techniques are classified, his embargoing of past presidential papers, and impeding access of documents to investigatory bodies, his use of the justice department to bring indictments or quash them as his party's electoral interests demand ... Knowledge sealed, skewed, sequestered, shouted down, the bearers of knowledge fired or smeared, knowledge edited, sneered at, shredded, and, as in the case of the coffins of our dead military brought home at night, no photography allowed, knowledge spirited away in the dark.

...

Our pluralism cannot be entirely comfortable to someone of evangelical faith. But to the extreme fundamentalist -- that member of the evangelical community militant in his belief, an absolutist intolerant of all forms of belief but his own, all stories but his own. -- our pluralism has to be a profound offense. I speak of the so-called "political base" with which our president has bonded. In our raucous democracy fundamentalist religious belief has organized itself with political acumen to promulgate law that would undermine just those secular humanist principles that encourage it flourish in freedom. Of course there has rarely been a period in our history when God has not been called upon to march. Northern abolitionists and southern slave owners both claimed biblical endorsement. Martin Luther King's civil rights movement drew its strength from prayer and examples of Christian fortitude, while the Ku Klux Klan invoked Jesus as a sponsor of their racism. But there is a crucial difference between these traditional invocations and the politically astute and well funded activists of today's Christian Right who do not call upon their faith to certify their politics as much as they call for a country that certifies their faith.

Fundamentalism really cannot help itself -- it is absolutist and can compromise with nothing, not even democracy.

...

The president has said the war with terrorists will last for decades and is a confrontation between "good and evil." Whether he means the evil of specific terrorist organizations or the culture from which they spring, he vision is necessarily Manichean. There is immense political power in such religiously inspired reductionism. Thus, no matter how he lies about the reason for his invasion of Iraq, or how badly it has gone, bumblingly and tragically ruinous, with so many lives destroyed, and no matter how many thousands of terrorists it has brought into being, to criticize his policy or the architects of it is said to aid the enemy. The president's inner circle of advisers, who conspire in this Manichean world view, have the unnatural vividness of personality of Shakespearean plotters. While the original think tank theorists and proponents of the war have quietly and understandably withdrawn from public view, the vice president and the president's chief policy adviser stand tall -- the first contemptuous of his critics, his denials of reality and obfuscations delivered in the dour tones of unquestionable authority, the second too clever by half, and because he has spent his years developing a theocratic constituency and wearing such blinders as an exclusive concern with party power has attached to him, most clearly has a future in the culture of anti-democracy he has so deviously and unwisely nurtured.

A Manichean politics reduces the relevance of knowledge and degrades the truth which knowledge discovers. The past seven years of American political life are an uncanny cycle we've slipped into, or slid into, that foresees the democratic traditions of this country as too much of a luxury to be maintained. We see, since the last election, the struggle now for the legislative branches to regain some of their constitutional prerogatives. They struggle not only with a recalcitrant president and vice president who impugns their motives but against the precedents of the imperial presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, each of whom added another conservative shock to the principle of separation of powers. Many of the executive practices today -- the blatant cronyism, the political uses of the justice department, the evisceration of regulatory agencies, and so on -- are empowered by these precedents. And so we have marched along from the imperial presidency, through four years of a one-party faux democracy, to plutocracy, to the borders of authoritarianism.

To take the long view, American politics may be seen as the struggle between the idealistic secular democracy of a fearlessly self-renewing America, the metaphysical risks that are the heritage of the enlightenment, and our great resident capacity to be in denial of what is intellectually and morally incumbent upon us to pursue.

Melville in Moby Dick speaks of "reality outracing apprehension." Apprehension in the sense not of fear or disquiet, but of understanding... reality as too much for us to take in, as for example, the white whale is too much for the Pequod and its captain. It may be that our new century is an awesome complex white whale in our quantumized wave/particles and the manipulable stem cells of our biology, ecologically in our planetary crises of nature, technologically in our humanoid molecular computers, sexually in the rising number of our genders, intellectually in the paradoxes of our texts, and so on.

What is more natural than to rely on the saving powers of simplism? Perhaps with our dismal public conduct, so shot through with piety, we are actually engaged in a genetic engineering venture that will make a slower, dumber, more sluggish whale, one that can be harpooned and flensed, tried and boiled to light our candles. A kind of water- wonderworld whale made of racism, nativism, cultural illiteracy, fundamentalist fantasy, and the righteous priorities of wealth.

I summon up the year 1787 when the Constitutional Convention had done its work and the drafted Constitution was sent out to the states for ratification. The public's excitement was palpable. Extended and vigorous statehouse debates echoed through the towns and villages, and as one by one the states voted to ratify, church bells rang, cheers went up from the public houses, and in the major cities the people turned out to parade with a fresh new sense of themselves as a nation. Everyone marched -- tradespeople, workingmen, soldiers, women, and clergy. They had floats in those days too -- most often a wagon-size ship of state called the Union, rolling through the streets with children waving from the scuppers. Philadelphia came up with a float called the New Roof, a dome supported by thirteen pillars and ornamented with stars. It was drawn by ten white horses and at the top was a handsome cupola surmounted by a figure of Plenty bearing her cornucopia. The ratification parades were sacramental -- symbolic venerations, acts of faith. From the beginning, people saw the Constitution as a kind of sacred text for a civil society.

And with good reason: The ordaining voice of the Constitution is scriptural, but in resolutely keeping the authority for its dominion in the public consent, it presents itself as the sacred text of secular humanism.

When the ancient Hebrews broke their covenant they suffered a loss of identity and brought disaster on themselves. Our burden too is covenantal. We may point to our two hundred some years of national survival as an open society, constitutionally sworn to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we may regard ourselves a an exceptionalist, historically self-correcting nation whose democratic values locate us just as surely as our geography....and yet we know at the same time that all through our history we have brutally excluded vast numbers of us from the shelter of the New Roof, we have broken our covenant again and again with a virtuosity verging on damnation and have been saved only by the sacrificial efforts of Constitution-reverencing patriots in and our of government -- presidents, senators, justices, self impoverishing lawyers, abolitionists, muckrakers, third-party candidates, suffragists, union organizers, striking workers, civil rights martyrs.

Because this president's subversion of the Constitution outdoes anything that has gone on before, and as it has created large social constituencies ready to support the flag waving ideals of an incremental fascism, we're called upon to step forward to reaffirm our covenant like these exemplars from the past.

...

To temporize human affairs, to look not up for some applied celestial accreditation, but forward, at ground level, in the endless journey, to resist any authoritarian restrictions on thought, suppression of knowledge that is the public good --- is the essence of our civil religion. ... If we accept it as our own and decide something is right after all in a democracy that is given to a degree of free imaginative expression that few cultures in the world can tolerate, we can hope for the aroused witness, the manifold reportage, the flourishing of knowledge, that will restore us to ourselves, awaken the dulled sense of our people to the public interest that is their interest, and vindicate the genius of the humanist sacred text that embraces us all.

We are called to no less than a new covenant with the true and foundational religion of the United States.

Anglachel