Saint W?

W's mommy and poppy were horrified when W went pentacostal (not postal) on them during the his crisis of boozing and snorting cocaine. The elder Bushes were nominal (and proper) Episcopalians and W engaged in Bible study and small group prayer in response to Laura Bush's threat to leave him if the substance abuse continued. W is feted now by the Religious Right as some sort of saintly presence in the White House. Like so much associated with W, reality is not equivalent to image. The macho act that the Republicans eat up is belied by W's cowardice. Ditto for the pious behavior of W. He discovered that the Religious Right ate up piety like the secular Right ate up macho. So, we have a pious cowboy (with a foul mouth) in charge. If this is (fair & balanced) hypocrisy, so be it.

[x The New Republic Online]
WHY W. DOESN'T GO TO CHURCH: Empty Pew
by Amy Sullivan

Most Americans are aware that George W. Bush is a religious man. He is, after all, the man who presided over a religious revival of sorts at the Republican National Convention. He is the man who has pioneered what could be called cardio-diplomacy, judging world leaders--and, at times, entire nations--by their "hearts." He is the subject of at least four spiritual hagiographies currently in bookstores, and one religious documentary ("George W. Bush: Faith in the White House"). Most famously, Americans know him as the man who, when asked to cite the philosopher who had the greatest influence on him, named Jesus Christ.

What most--including many of the president's fiercest supporters--don't know, however, is that Bush doesn't go to church. Sure, when he weekends at Camp David, Bush spends Sunday morning with the compound's chaplain. And, every so often, he drops in on the little Episcopal church across Lafayette Park from the White House. But the president who has staked much of his domestic agenda on the argument that religious communities hold the key to solving social problems doesn't belong to a congregation.

It should be a politically intriguing story. Bush is one of the most explicitly religious politicians in American history. Both of his presidential campaigns have used religion to appeal emotionally to voters. The entire philosophy behind his signature slogan, "compassionate conservatism," rests on the belief that religious communities have a unique ability to tend to the nation's social ills. And yet, after the flood of coverage around Bush's first--and only--visit to a neighborhood church during inauguration weekend in Washington, D.C., no one has bothered to report on the president's whereabouts on Sunday mornings.

Around Washington, D.C., it's considered bad form to point out that Bush doesn't regularly attend church. "You don't have to go to church to be a good religious person," argue his defenders. And they're right. They have made much political hay, however, over polls that indicate Democratic voters attend church less frequently than Republicans, so even the most brazen feel compelled to offer explanations for Bush's absence from church membership rolls.

The first excuse conservatives provide is that Bush can't possibly be expected to have time to go to church, what with being leader of the free world and all. Yet, during Jimmy Carter's four years in the White House, he found time not only to attend a Baptist church in the Washington, D.C., area, but to teach Sunday school there as well. For a presidential delegator like Bush--who has freed up enough time to spend approximately one-third of his presidency on vacation--finding a few hours for church should be a snap.

But, even if Bush had the time for church services, supporters protest, the security precautions necessary for a presidential visit would drive congregants away. This is the exact same argument the Reagan White House trotted out to explain why the patron saint of the religious right hardly ever attended church from 1981 to 1989. Bomb-sniffing dogs, metal detectors, and security personnel, so the theory goes, would pose an onerous burden for the average church. "The president wants to avoid the sort of major weekly disruption that would be caused if he went to church," says David Aikman, author of A Man of Faith: The Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush.

As it happens, I attended Foundry United Methodist Church for several years during the late '90s when the Clintons were members there. The only imposition was the extra ten seconds it took to walk through a metal detector. Parishioners did not leave the church in droves; on the contrary, many were pleasantly surprised to find that the Clintons played an active role in church life, particularly while Chelsea was involved in the choir and youth group.

If time and security aren't the reasons, what excuse does that leave? The very fact that the president doesn't attend church, some leading conservatives insist, is proof of what a good Christian he is. Unlike certain past presidents they could name but won't--ahem, cough, Bill Clinton--Bush doesn't feel the need to prove his religiosity. "This president has not made an issue of where he goes to church," says Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. "I find it refreshing that we don't have a president coming out of church with a large Bible under his arm." Conservatives relish this opportunity for a little gratuitous Clinton-bashing. In private, however, they admit the explanation doesn't hold up. "I really don't get it," one prominent Bush partisan told me. "There's no reason why the president couldn't find a church around here if he wanted to."

In truth, Bush probably doesn't spend Sunday morning watching "Meet the Press" or wrestling with The New York Times crossword puzzle. He no doubt observes the Sabbath in his own way, as do millions of Americans who identify themselves as religious but don't attend church. Bush has been shaped by a "small-group" mentality, emphasizing a one-on-one relationship with God over the experience of Christian fellowship in a community.

Or it could be that Bush's faith, while sincere, is not terribly deep. Aikman, who had significant access to Bush confidantes while writing his book, has said that he "could not get from anybody a sort of credo of what [Bush] believes." Nevertheless, Aikman pressed on by "intuit[ing]" Bush's faith and presenting as evidence of the president's deep spiritual commitment his fondness for carrots and jogging (apparently a response to the scriptural admonition to treat the body as a temple for God) and the politeness of White House staffers ("though manners are not specifically connected to George W.'s personal religious faith, it was as though the discipline he brought to his own life of prayer and Bible study filtered down into the work habits of everyone who worked with him").

It shouldn't really matter. A president's religious habits often reveal far less about his faith than the decisions he makes. But, more than any other president, Bush has staked his political reputation on being a devout man of faith. The implied and often explicit responsibility for one another that undergirds congregational life is at the heart of Bush's faith-based policy agenda. The fact that he isn't himself a member of a congregation should be relevant.

It's not as if political reporters have ignored the church-going habits of Bush's opponent. During the "John Kerry Wafer Watch," they have done everything short of inspect the senator's molars for evidence of any unswallowed Host. Hyperbole? A recent Kerry campaign pool report included this observation: "Both Mr. and Mrs. received communion, taking the host from the priests in their hands (others took direct to mouth). They spent ample time on the kneeler."

When Bush moved to Washington in early 2001, many religious observers bandied about the question of which church the incoming president would attend. Four years later, the answer is hidden in plain sight: The emperor has no church.

Amy Sullivan is an editor of The Washington Monthly.

Copyright © 2004, The New Republic

Black Humor In Baghdad

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is my favorite WWII novel. Lieutenant Milo Minderbinder is the ultimate black humor character in wartime. Milo corners the Egyptian cotton market by embezzling from the Army Air Corps. The world cotton price spikes and Minderbinder (wonderful name, too) is left with Egyptian warehouses filled with worthless cotton. The inventive Milo finds a use for the cotton. At the mess hall, Yossarian and the other airmen eat a meal and spit out the first bites. Minderbinder has instructed the cooks to use cotton as filler in the food. Milo says, "I can't sell the cotton. We have to eat it." In the midst of this nuttiness, men are dying. Similarly, Dan Neil—the automotive writer for the Los Angeles Times—went to Iraq to write about Humvees and other vehicles in combat. The backdrop for his reportage is filled with snipers, car bombs, and mortar attacks. In the midst of chaos, Dan Neil finds humor. If this is (fair & balanced) grotesquery, so be it.

[x LATimes]
We're Not on the Pacific Coast Highway Anymore, Toto
By Dan Neil

Two kinds of people arrive at Baghdad International Airport. One group walks out of the terminal and is met by bull-necked men wearing body armor, fingerless gloves, Oakley sunglasses and extremely cool guns. These are personal security specialists — though I like to think of them as death generalists — who warily escort their new charges to enormous, armored Chevy Suburbans parked only a few feet from the terminal. The White Zone is for liberators only.

The bodyguards form a phalanx around the new arrivals, to avoid — in the argot of the profession — leaving the "package" out in the open.

The second group steps blinking and squinting into the scalding sunlight of central Iraq to be met by, well, nobody.

These are Iraqis, foreign aid workers, journalists and other low-value targets — which isn't to say they aren't worth attacking. It's just that they aren't worth guarding.

At this moment visitors become aware of, become a part of, Baghdad's caste system of the protected and the unprotected, the powerful and the powerless.

For them — and me — the trip into Baghdad begins on a dusty, bullet-riddled bus with a smashed windshield being propped up with a large wooden board.

Veteran passengers, I note, put their luggage against the windows to shield themselves from snipers. As I wedge my Andiamo against the glass I wonder, just how ballistic is "Ballistic Cordura" fabric?

This is the moment when all of Baghdad's unescorted, naked-in-the-wind visitors ask themselves, "What am I doing here?" I am not a war correspondent. I am The Times' automotive writer, whose previous exposure to risk amounted to driving fast in a Ferrari.

I have come to Baghdad, believe it or not, to write about the automotive war — the Humvees and armored personnel carriers, the convoys and suicide car bombs.

It seemed like such a clever idea for a story, back in Los Angeles. The bus — to which some refer, in all seriousness, as the "courtesy" bus — takes me to Checkpoint One at the airport perimeter, along a two-mile route of blast walls, revetments and concrete guard towers that mark the fence line of Camp Victory, the U.S. military base on the airport property. Along the way, the bus wends through chicanes of Jersey barriers and through fields of pavement ruptured by mortar fire.

The bus drops passengers off in a fenced-in parking lot, a couple of acres of sand scoured out of a thorny plain, where they can meet their transportation into the city itself. The 15-foot concrete walls thwarting snipers end here. Now it gets dangerous. Let the cringing begin.

The Matar Saddam Al-Duwali highway connecting the airport to the city is one of the most reliably hazardous roads in the country, plagued with sniper fire, car bombs and "improvised explosive devices," known by everyone here as IEDs — though, in my adrenaline-fueled jocularity I call them IUDs and recount to my Iraqi driver the Food and Drug Administration's heroic battle against them.

I get no love.

I tell him I am interested in the technology of car bombs. I've never seen a car bomb, I say, but I once owned a Ford Pinto.

Baghdad is a tough room.

The shoulders of the highway are bruised black-and-blue in places where car bombs have exploded or convoys have been attacked and vehicles burned. Here and there, the fused remains of a burned-out civilian car have been pushed off the road. Military vehicles are quickly removed. Black banners eulogizing the dead hang from blast walls, near graffiti calling down the wrath of Allah on the infidels.

Well, honestly, that's only what I, in my paranoid state, think it says. It could say "Baghdad High School Rocks! Go Scorpions!" OK, I admit it. I'm scared. There is nothing, absolutely nothing funny about the death and misery crowding the streets of Baghdad, no jibe to turn away the waste of life and wealth.

I made up a little song.

Baghdad, Baghdad,
It's a hell of a town.
The Tigris is up
Saddam's statue is down.
And people go around
Blowing holes in the ground.
Baghdad, Baghdad!
It's a hell of a TOWWWN!

I'm humming this to myself as we drive into the central city. At several points along the road we are passed by white armored Suburbans and Toyota Land Cruisers, each crammed with Western contractors. My driver slows down to put some distance between us. What gives?

It turns out the big SUVs are targets. The insurgents know that key figures in the occupation — technical and military contractors, embassy people, Iraqi politicians — travel in hardened cars, almost exclusively SUVs. A military bomb-squad expert I talk to later calls them "IED magnets."

Ironically then, the safest vehicles on the road are not the bunkers on wheels but tatty, nondescript vehicles like the beater Mercedes I'm riding in, flying below the jihadi radar.

It just seems like one more way we have got it wrong in Iraq. If I were a poor Iraqi taxi driver, trying to nurse my orange-and-white Volkswagen taxi a few more miles for a few more dinars, I too might despise the shiny new Suburbans. I too might want to penetrate their armor of impunity.

And, wait … there is a place where simply driving an SUV is a life-threatening event? Where the suburban steamrollers are even more hated than in Santa Monica?

Could this be an unholy alliance between Abu Musab Zaqarwi and Arianna Huffington?

OK, now that's funny.

Dan Neil writes "Rumble Seat," The Los Angeles Times' column on cars.

Copyright © 2004 Los Angeles Times