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New York Times columnist Frank Rich watched the ’round-the-clock coverage of the papal funeral and saw A Culture of Death, Not Life:

Mortality — the more graphic, the merrier — is the biggest thing going in America. Between Terri Schiavo and the pope, we’ve feasted on decomposing bodies for almost a solid month now. The carefully edited, three-year-old video loops of Ms. Schiavo may have been worthless as medical evidence but as necro-porn their ubiquity rivaled that of TV’s top entertainment franchise, the all-forensics-all-the-time “CSI.” To help us visualize the dying John Paul, another Fox star, Geraldo Rivera, brought on Dr. Michael Baden, the go-to cadaver expert from the JonBenet Ramsey, Chandra Levy and Laci Peterson mediathons, to contrast His Holiness’s cortex with Ms. Schiavo’s.

…

What’s disturbing about this spectacle is not so much its tastelessness; America will always have a fatal attraction to sideshows. What’s unsettling is the nastier agenda that lies far less than six feet under the surface. Once the culture of death at its most virulent intersects with politicians in power, it starts to inflict damage on the living.

When those leaders, led by the Bush brothers, wallow in this culture, they do a bait-and-switch and claim to be upholding John Paul’s vision of a “culture of life.” This has to be one of the biggest shams of all time. Yes, these politicians oppose abortion, but the number of abortions has in fact been going down steadily in America under both Republican and Democratic presidents since 1990 — some 40 percent in all. The same cannot be said of American infant fatalities, AIDS cases and war casualties — all up in the George W. Bush years. Meanwhile, potentially lifesaving phenomena like condom-conscious sex education and federally run stem-cell research are in shackles.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, on the beauty of a flower:

I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree. And he says, “You see, as I, as an artist, can see how beautiful this is, but you, as a scientist, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty.

First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people, and to me, too. I believe, although I may not be quite as refined esthetically as he is, that I can appreciate the beauty of the flower.

At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean, it’s not just beauty at this dimension — one centimeter — there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure.

Also the processes — the fact that the colors in the flower are evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting — it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this esthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it esthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which a science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

That was from a 1981 interview on the BBC program Horizon. The interview was broadcast in the United States in 1983, on the PBS science program Nova. That’s where I saw it. It’s hard to pick one favorite Feynman story, but I do enjoy the first chapter of his memoir, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! The story is called “He Fixes Radios By Thinking!”

With science under attack from religious zealots, Feynman’s worldview is a breath of fresh air.

Two days after terrorists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Jerry Falwell said God allowed the attacks “to give us probably what we deserve.” He said, “The ACLU’s got to take a lot of blame for this,” and went on to assign blame to People for the American Way, federal courts, feminists, gays and abortion rights supporters, “all of them who tried to secularize America.” (Listen to him here.)

Today, Falwell is in serious condition at Lynchburg General Hospital. The Washington Post reports that doctors have upgraded him from critical to “serious but stable.” We must hope that he recovers, so he can tell us why God is punishing him.

That, religious right, is what a low blow feels like.

Saudi columnist Dr. Sulaiman Al Hattlan, on the PBS program Frontline:

I think the whole culture of education in Saudi Arabia gave people dangerous tools—tools to teach people how to hate, tools of hatreds, tools of anger—not tools of understanding the reality of the world.

That sounds a lot like Fox News.

Soon, we will read or hear that Terri Schiavo is dead.

When the news does come, I think I will shed a few tears. I’ll feel a sense of loss, even though I never met Mrs. Schiavo, and the sad news will not be sudden or surprising. I don’t think I will be alone in shedding tears. We humans—most of us, anyway—are just wired that way. We can’t be aware of the suffering of another person without suffering a little bit, ourselves.

I think that’s why I’ve been half-blind with rage this week, when politicians, like vampires, thought there might be some profit to be gained from this family’s misery—“a great political issue,” in the words of a memo for Republican senators.

President Bush, who presided over the executions of 152 prisoners as governor of Texas, suddenly declared that “it is always wise to err on the side of life.”

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay publicly vilified Schiavo’s husband, told the Family Research Council that the real issue was “more than just Terri Schiavo,” and complained about “attacks against the conservative moment, against me and against many others.”

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a cardiologist before he became a politician with presidential ambitions, looked at a videotape of Mrs. Schiavo recorded several years ago and declared that the neurologists who were actually treating her had mis-diagnosed the case. Either Frist is one hell of a doctor, or he’s a very poor excuse for a man.

There will be many tears when Terri Schiavo dies. The vampires will move on to their next target. Sadly, tears alone won’t be enough to wash away this stain.

(From cNet’s news.com.com🙂

[Federal Elections Commissioner] Bradley Smith says that the freewheeling days of political blogging and online punditry are over.

In just a few months, he warns, bloggers and news organizations could risk the wrath of the federal government if they improperly link to a campaign’s Web site. Even forwarding a political candidate’s press release to a mailing list, depending on the details, could be punished by fines.

So I guess I’d better just keep my big mouth shut.

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen writes about Auschwitz:

Here is my fear. Because we cannot understand Auschwitz, because it is an immense bump in the road in our belief in a good God — “a just God,” the president said in his inaugural address — we will let it slip from memory, remembered maybe like some statue in the town square that memorializes something or other, maybe a war, maybe a man. Reminders will seem like nagging, and when the survivors are finally gone (they have been an incredibly hardy lot) so, too, will be the obligation to remember. Ah, what a relief!

Then, bit by bit, Auschwitz will fade, becoming something that happened in the last century to people who some may insist had it coming anyway — Jews and commies and Gypsies and homosexuals . . . mostly. For most people, it may become — it is already becoming — too dense a historic burden, a hideously heavy truth about who we can be, not just who we would like to be. Prince Harry just chucked it all. Someday, I fear, so shall we all and then — as it has in Rwanda and at Srebrenica — it will happen again.

Tony Blair:

If America wants the rest of the world to be part of the agenda it has set, it must be part of their agenda, too.

Reminds me of a joke that’s making the rounds — something to offend everyone:

Last month a worldwide survey was conducted by the UN. The only question asked was:

“Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage in the rest of the world?”

The survey was a huge failure…

In Africa they didn’t know what ‘food’ meant.
In Eastern Europe they didn’t know what ‘honest’ meant.
In Western Europe they didn’t know what ‘shortage’ meant.
In China they didn’t know what ‘opinion’ meant.
In the Middle East they didn’t know what ‘solution’ meant.
In South America they didn’t know what ‘please’ meant.
And in the USA they didn’t know what ‘the rest of the world’ meant.

From the Daily Show:

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison on the Senate floor:

I don’t think that rehashing potential mistakes that people might think have been made in the war on terrorism, specifically in Iraq, are something that should be brought up as a reason to vote against Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State.

Jon Stewart:

Hear, hear! People should not be held responsible for the things they’ve done!

You know, I’ve said this over and over again: you cannot, in today’s world, judge a book by its contents.

From Numeralist:

The Bush administration will request about $80 billion more for this year’s costs of fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The request would push the total so far for those wars and for U.S. efforts against terrorism elsewhere in the world to more than $280 billion since 9/11. That would be nearly half the $613 billion the United States spent for WWI or the $623 billion for the Vietnam War. (All costs in 2005 dollars)

And the Pentagon plans to maintain current troop levels in Iraq at least through the end of 2006:

The Army’s current plan is to keep about 120,000 soldiers in Iraq through 2006, roughly the same number that are fighting there now, a senior operations officer said Monday.

After George W. Bush delivered his second inaugural address, conservative columnist David Brooks said, on the PBS News Hour, that the speech ensured that Bush would not go down in history as a mediocre president. If the Iraqi elections bring stability and civility to that nation, Bush will be remembered for the Wilsonian idealism of that speech, and the two-fisted pragmatism that managed to spread democracy at the point of a gun. On the other hand, if Iraq continues to spiral into chaos, turning more and more nations against the United States, history will number the Bush presidency among the worst of the worst.

Two days later, I received this message in email:

When have you ever seen so many people have to explain that the Inauguration Speech of a President of the United States did not mean what it said?

Sure enough, the day after the inauguration, White House officials tried to tone down Bush’s bold pledge of “ending tyranny in our world.” As reported in the Washington Post two days after the speech:

White House officials said yesterday that President Bush’s soaring inaugural address, in which he declared the goal of ending tyranny around the world, represents no significant shift in U.S. foreign policy

Daniel Froomkin suggests that the White House has a loose affiliation with reality:

… now comes word from the White House that Bush wasn’t actually setting out a new agenda at all. He was simply describing what his approach has been all along.

And that has invited additional concerns, among them that revisionism may be pushing aside reality-checking in the Bush White House.

E. J. Dionne thinks Bush is inviting cynicism at home and around the world:

Bush’s Freedom Shuffle — he’s an idealist on Thursday and a realist on Friday — may come as a relief to the many foreign policy specialists allergic to grand visions. A majority of Americans will be pleased with the elder Bush’s reassurance that the speech does not mean “newly asserted military forces.”

But the Freedom Shuffle is a terrible mistake for Bush, because the greatest barrier to Bush’s success in his second term is the intense cynicism he has inspired about his motives.

Personally, I think the Bush people heard David Brooks’ comments about the eventual verdict of history. They thought about the prospects in Iraq, and in the other places where Bush has staked his reputation, and the nation’s. I think they’re trying now to salvage “mediocrity.”

Update: On a lighter note, Hanna Rosin imagines the day-after revisions of some other bold statements:

“No one needs to go turning over their inheritance to the meek tomorrow morning. This is a generational process, not the work of a couple of years.”

— Jesus, circa A.D. 33

“ ‘Liberty’ or ‘death’ were just the two choices I happened to mention, but of course there are others.”

— Patrick Henry, 1775

“Well, it wasn’t really a dream. More like a daydream.”

— Martin Luther King Jr., 1963

Andy Ihnatko writes about Johnny Carson.

When the time comes for me to explain to my nieces and nephews why Johnny was so terrific, I think I’m going to pull out that tape of the Letterman show and then I’ll ask them what a man needs to accomplish in a lifetime to receive in that sort of welcome.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., on the PBS program NOW:

[Polluters] make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market.

…

Nature enriches us. When we destroy nature we diminish ourselves. We impoverish our children.

…

Good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It’s a way of loading the cost of our generation’s prosperity onto the backs of our children.

If we treat the planet as it it were a business in liquidation—convert our national resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution-based prosperity—we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy, but our children are going to pay for our joy ride.

Via Daily Kos: here are the numbers on the first four years of George W. Bush.

One additional Inauguration Day number: This darkness will continue for 1461 more days. Whether there is light and hope at the end of that time depends upon us.

As the country starts four more years on the wrong track, Paul Simon‘s sad song about the Statue of Liberty sailing away to sea seems appropriate:

Many’s the time I’ve been mistaken
And many times confused
Yes, and I’ve often felt forsaken
And certainly misused
Oh, but I’m alright, I’m alright
I’m just weary to my bones
Still, you don’t expect to be
Bright and bon vivant
So far away from home, so far away from home

I don’t know a soul who’s not been battered
I don’t have a friend who feels at ease
I don’t know a dream that’s not been shattered
Or driven to its knees
Oh, but it’s alright, it’s alright
For we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
Road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

And I dreamed I was dying
I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly
And looking back down at me
Smiled reassuringly
And I dreamed I was flying
And high up above my eyes could clearly see
The Statue of Liberty
Sailing away to sea
And I dreamed I was flying

We come on the ship they call the Mayflower
We come on the ship that sailed the moon
We come in the age’s most uncertain hours
And sing an American tune
Oh, and it’s alright, it’s alright, it’s alright
You can’t be forever blessed
Still, tomorrow’s going to be another working day
And I’m trying to get some rest
That’s all, I’m trying to get some rest