Half Revealed

****EDIT: Please note even newer URL. The one previously listed has locked us out, so we had to move yet again. Sorry for any confusion****


We are moved. I am done. Christmas is over. Sleep is marvelous.

Really, it's been the quietest holiday ever. Airline prices were too high to travel to Texas and we went to New York around the 15th. So, Christmas morning was just us, sleeping in, opening presents, and cooking omelettes. The peace is good for setting up house - the new apartment is amazing. We did have a bit of excitement with a pipe breaking late at night in the middle of Pride and Prejudice, but I learned that a hairdryer is a necessary tool for any plumber.

As of today, I will be switching URLs to one that suits my new name. Please update any links to http://danielandwhitney.blogspot.com/. Happy New Year!

Putting together a home isn't easy, especially if you're doing it bits at a time because you're broke. This week I realized our new apartment needed curtains for its new but very large-and-see-through doors. I went to the fabric store to find a cheap but nice solution. An hour later, I emerged in shock. 20 bucks a yard for something I had to make myself wasn't going to work. I even tried the clearance racks, but found nothing.

So I went to the nuclear option. I went to Wal-mart.

For the price of three yards of fabric at the other store, I found two pre-made curtains of gorgeous redness and a matching curtain rod. Capitalism is a beautiful thing.

I'm alive. My posting habits will be interupted, if non-existent, for several weeks. Within less than a month, I have two credits (last PHC credits!) to finish up, Spanish to not fail, and a move to Leesburg to complete.

Why Saddam's trial was fair and the next two months won't be fun for him.

This is the first time I've ever seen R. J. Rushdooney's name on a site other that Doug Phillip's blog (which, by the way, I don't recommend). This from Slate:

If you think about it, though, the impending theocracy thesis was never really sustainable. Books about the Christian right written by ex-evangelicals or secular Jews tend to make two points: 1) Be afraid, be very afraid. And 2) Boy, aren't they weird? The best example of this is Michelle Goldberg's Kingdom Coming. After reading the first couple of chapters of her book, you will rush downstairs and bolt your doors because "something dark is loose," as she puts it. The seed of darkness, Goldberg explains, is R.J. Rushdoony, a Christian nationalist who advocated Christian dominion over America, the idea that pushed the Christian right into politics in the late 1970s.

From there the argument proceeds biblically. Rushdoony begat Jerry Falwell, Falwell begat George W. Bush, and Bush begat your one-way ticket to Canada. There's only one problem with this logic. Have you ever seen Rushdoony, or read a lot of his writing? He looks like the ayatollah. He advocated the death penalty for homosexuals, blasphemers, heretics, people who cursed or hit their parents, and probably Howard Stern. Even some Falwell associates once wrote an open letter calling him "scary." I'd bet a lot of money that any presidential candidate who had kind words for Rushdoony would lose a two-way race to Lenora Fulani.

You gotta love the "begat" sentence. But the author is right. The timeline is there. Those who don't know about Rushdoony should learn. The heritage of evengelical Christianity may be frightening, but being honest helps.

Anywhere I go, the election haunts me. My office, my daily journalism readings, and even my inbox (both electronic and physical) are full of reasons to vote this way or that. Most of it goes in the trash (either electronic or physical). I'm more cynical this year - blame it on watching Wag the Dog this week and talking to too many PHC graduates.

That said, I am enjoying good political analysis. A minor in this stuff is good for something. This morning, I picked up the New Republic (the cover with Bush sporting a halo was too good to pass up) and read Alan Wolfe's review of Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction by David Kuo. These paragraphs caught my eye:

The fact that Kuo saw an equivalence between opposition to slavery and opposition to abortion says volumes about the difficulty that so many evangelicals have in making sharp distinctions. Many evangelicals insist to this day that their campaign against abortion is the moral equivalent of the abolitionist campaign against slavery. Those leaders were evangelicals, too; they point to such figures as Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose father was indeed the leading evangelical preacher of his era. They also sided with the weak against the powerful. They were as uncompromising with respect to their principles as leaders of the religious right are today. Regrettably, some anti-abortion activists resort to violence, but so, after all, did John Brown. Right-wing Republicans today are finishing the business begun by yesterday's social reformers.
Are they really? Equating abortion and slavery is the kind of analogy that appeals to people who prefer sincerity to reality. Let us grant that today's anti-abortion activists are as sincere in their desire to prevent the destruction of fetuses as William Lloyd Garrison was in his desire to abolish the South's peculiar institution. But everything else about the analogy falls apart. Slavery was a social system that trapped its victims through coercion and custom; abortion is the result of a decision made by an individual. People argue about whether a fetus is a full human being; but no one, as Abraham Lincoln liked to point out, disputed whether a slave was. Abortion represents a clash between two goods, the right of personal autonomy and the potential birth of a human being; slavery was evil and represented no good at all. Pro-life activists have every right to mobilize themselves on behalf of their political beliefs, but they do not have the right to claim historical predecessors so different from themselves. True of any contemporary group in general, this is especially true of evangelicals in particular. White Southerners whose favorite politicians appeal to latent Confederate sensibilities are not exactly in the best position to claim the moral mantle of those who understood, quite correctly, that the existence of slavery in the Southern states was a rebuke to every principle for which America stood.

It's an interesting point and one that I'm still chewing on. Kao ultimately came to the belief that abortion was nothing like slavery and was not even murder. But is the analogy faulty in other ways? What does this analogy look like if, unlike what Wolfe says, abortion was a clash between one evil thing (personal autonomy for the sake of personal autonomy) and one beautiful thing (new life)?

I've discovered a new way to torture students. When papers, quizzes, and readings don't seem to do the trick, have them take a three-hour midterm. I haven't taken a test that long since the SAT and that was in 2001.

Life is on pause for a few days as I have my Spanish III midterm on the first. Previous attempts weren't successful, so prayer would be appreciated. I would like to graduate someday.

It's been a crazy few days, and in between work, school, and cleaning up botched plumbing (see below), life goes on.

Sunday = church, lunch with Matt and Jeff at Quiznos while trying to keep the wind from blowing our food away, Christmas shopping at the outlets, and Loudoun Symphony Concert (Mozart, Dvorak, and Rachmaninov, all good music. The pianist was like a child's picture of one. He had a shock of long grey hair and he flopped it around like a puppet when he played. A boy in front of me giggled and I wanted to). The day was complete with a trip to Laura's place, where we enjoyed a hayride through the gorgeous backwoods of Loudoun and a bonfire in the woods. I had forgotten that you could see stars in this county.

Monday = writing, school, spanish. The handyman came over to see why our laundry room floor was always wet. After tearing into the wall between that room and the kitchen, the problem was found. The drainage from the dishwasher and the sink (disposal material, complete with the food of your choice) was flowing directly into the wall. The house reeked of rotten food. I remember the bug problem we were having in that area. I asked him if this would cause maggots to come up the sink, and he said yes. "Then it wasn't my cleaning! Oh, I have to tell Mom!"

Our only other instructions: "Don't use the sink for anything." We had pizza for dinner.

Tuesday = work, finding out we're officially moving (to Leesburg, December 15), and the handyman comes back. He fixes the plumbing and we just wait for the mold and the water to dry up. It's a good thing the food is in the spare bedroom and not in the pantry (also in the laundry room). Instructions are to watch for more leaks and douse in Lysol. Since everything was in a wreck, we declared Asian night by grabbing dinner at the local Panda Express and watching Memoirs of a Geisha.

Now, I'm just paranoid about using the sink. I'm so glad we rent.

I finally figured out what I want to be when I grow up. I want to be a writer, a photographer, and a drummer.

I have the first one down, I'm saving up for the second, and the third, well, I've got the rest of my life to learn.