Steven Jonas

"Angels and Demons" is the second film to be made from one of Dan Brown's books on various aspects of the history of the Roman Catholic Church and the impact of that history on its present role and structure. The first of course was the wildly successful film "The DaVinci Code," based on the wildly successful book of the same name. Having been a life-long action-adventure-historical novel reader (I started reading the historical novels of Howard Fast, which had plenty of action in them, when I was nine), I think that Brown is good at his craft. He does keep you on the edge of your seat and has a real knack at keeping you guessing about heroes and villains. He has obviously done a huge amount of research about both art history and the history of the Roman Catholic Church. So he does have a huge treasure-trove of facts about both at his command. He liberally shares that research with his readers, while making it very clear from his fanciful plotting that he is writing a novel, not a history book.

One only need look at his hero, symbologist Robert Langdon. I am a reasonably well-educated person, but frankly before I saw "The DaVinci Code," I had never heard of symbology. In fact, when I saw the movie I thought Brown had made up that occupation. He didn't, but he most surely did invent a person who, without a whip and skills at the martial arts, has much in common with Indiana Jones. So much so that in "Angels and Demons" at the Vatican's call, he is off to Rome within 20 minutes of being invited to deal with an emerging emergency. A Harvard professor who hops out of a swimming pool where he is doing laps and then barely has time to dry off before he flies off (apparently without bothering to pack for such a trip)? Once at The Vatican, he becomes not only a practicing symbologist, but also a kind of super-detective trying to figure who the bad guys are. He has got to be a fictional character.

So it's a fictional story about the Catholic Church. The Vatican didn't much like "The DaVinci Code," apparently because of its strong implication that Jesus Christ was not only not celibate, but also was actually married to Mary Magdalene and had one or more children with her. If Jesus Christ was an actual historical person (and there is a good deal of debate about that one), and Mary Magdalene was his wife (and there is some debate about that) and they had one or more children who themselves had children and then on down through human history since then there have been offspring, that creates certain problems for the Church.

For months, the torture debate has been focused to a significant extent on the issue of whether it "works" or not for eliciting useful intelligence from captured military operatives, quasi-military operatives, suspected terrorists, or people caught in some "anti-terrorist" dragnet who might well have nothing to do with the activity. Virtually every expert on gaining useful intelligence from captured operatives "from the other side," whatever their particular classification might be, has said that it doesn't. One must note that there are a handful of non-experts in addition to Cheney who think that torture does "work."

The list includes the well-known GOP shill (so The New York Times said in a May 9 editorial) and MSNBC morning talk-show host Joe Scarborough and the prominent Christian-Rightist Gary Bauer. Bauer stands in favor of the use of torture along with a number of other Christian Rightists for whom that fact that Christ himself was tortured to death by the Romans (who used crucifixion to punish their enemies over a period of centuries) seems not to be of import.

Of course there was never any reason to think that the torture techniques put together by Dick Cheney and his staff and specifically approved for use by President Bush (so Cheney has told us, quite publicly) would "work," in terms of gaining useful intelligence. After all, the techniques specified for use, as we know in (literally) painful detail from the post hoc memo written by "Judge" Bybee, were, as almost everyone knows, drawn from a torture program used on captured U.S. servicemen by the Chinese People's Liberation Army in North Korea over 50 years ago. It is also well-known that these techniques were specifically designed to elicit false confessions, not useful intelligence, from the U.S. POWs. On that level, it was successful.

Dick Cheney, John Boehner, Porter Goss, Condi "We were terrified" Rice, Fox "News" Channel, Savagely O'RHannibaugh. They are all telling us that "they," meaning the Cheney-lead decision-makers on torture, made us safe. By using torture that is. After all, they say, they were no attacks after 9/11. And so there weren't. That justifies the use of torture, or anything else for that matter, I suppose. After all, at one time relatively early in the Iraq War, but at the time when things started to go not so well in Anbar Province, O'Reilly said "nuke 'em." Hey, why not? The end justifies the means, doesn't it?

But hey, isn't that what the anti-Commies used to hang the Commies with, especially Stalin? "They are so awful. You know, for them, the end always justifies the means. That such shows how low they will go. Why even to the use of torture and the Gulag to accomplish their ends. Well, that's what the Commies are," the Cheney-types would say (and worse). But hey again, you know, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. The GOP is never consistent (well, hardly ever). It thus becomes obvious that when some accuse them of having small minds the accusers are being just totally unfair. But that's another question.

Oh those "tea parties." They just go to show you how much publicity you can get for a cause that troubles not very many people when you've got a powerful Privatized Ministry of Propaganda behind you. And boy, was the Fox "News" Channel there for several weeks running up to the event. They ran both paid and unpaid ads for it incessantly. The main line? The Republican mantra that has been tried-and-true since the time it first worked in the battle over "Prop. 13" in California in 1977. That was the one that slashed funding for education in California under the guise of "cutting your taxes."

No one mentioned what the reductions in state and local revenue would do to education in the state nor the fact that the bulk of the cuts would go to businesses, not individuals. But it did solve the problem that the so-called "small government" Republicans (that is small government for anything smacking of national domestic spending, not small government for matters ranging from freedom of religious belief as to when life begins to supporting a mountainous military-industrial complex) had. Goldwater had found that he couldn't run against specific programs. But when his successors discovered running "against taxes," away they went.

George W. Bush left us many toxic messes on the policy side. They have been reviewed endlessly by many others and myself. What he left us on the political process side, the current GOP, may prove be even more toxic in the future. Many analysts say that this Party is "searching for its identity." That is not true. It has an identity, put firmly in place by Karl Rove and his political puppet George W. Bush.

First of all, the GOP has become the only major political party in the non-Muslim world for which a principal plank is homophobia. The "anti-gay marriage" theme sung again and again is just a symbol for the promotion of hatred of the identity group that the German Nazis, once gaining power, went after with a vengeance even before they went after the Jews. And they get away with it. Part of the fault for this lies at the feet of the Democrats, who out of fear for being "labeled" (who knows what, like devoted to the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment?), continue to let them do it unchallenged. Part of it also lies at the feet of the gay and lesbian community that numbers among some its wealthiest members Republicans, who simply will not allow it to raise as an issue the fact that the GOP runs on homophobia.

Second, the GOP has become the party that would deny of the freedom of religious belief as to when life begins. And gets away with it. Part of the fault likewise lies at the feet of the Democratic Party that continues to fall back on the half-measure of "protecting Roe v. Wade." Part of the fault also lies with the "pro-choice" movement itself, which a) has only fairly recently moved to make abortion-rights a political as well as a legal issue, b) continues to frame the issue in terms of a "woman's right to choose," nothing broader, c) has only half-heartedly and relatively lately made abortion the health issue that it truly is, and d) has never attacked the Republicans on the fact that a central platform plank of theirs is the criminalization of the belief that life beings at the time of viability, for everyone, regardless of gender. The criminalization of a religious belief. A major plank of a major party's platform. Imagine that!

Political commentators and analysts are not always right. Nevertheless, in my readings of many of them over time, I have rarely found one who admitted it when they were wrong. However, I was surely wrong about Barack Obama when I first started to take him even somewhat seriously as a potential Presidential candidate back in the fall of 2007. At the time, I wrote ("The Presidential Election, 2008: Democratic Considerations," The Political Junkies.net):

"The Democratic candidates have major differences on policy. . . . As they have done in the past, the center-right Democratic Leadership Council is this time around running what in Standard-Breed (trotters and pacers) horse racing terminology is known as an "entry." In these races, one owner can enter two horses and bettors can bet both as if they were one. If either horse wins, places, or shows, the bettor collects. In 2004 the DLC entry was John Edwards and Richard Gephardt. . . . Neither won, of course, but the DLC was able to project the perennial loser Bob Shrum into the Kerry Campaign and we all know what happened. . . This time the DLC has an entry as well . . . Clinton and Obama. They don't like each other much, and each does indeed want to be President. But their central philosophy is much the same and many of their policies are rather similar too."

Oh yeah. How wrong could one be?

When I was a boy, back in the 40s and 50s, when the Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus came to my hometown, New York City, every April, it was a big deal. The circus trains would pull into the Sunnyside Yards in Queens and unload their cargo. Then a huge parade was organized, going from the Yards, through the Queens-Midtown tunnel, across 35th Street to 8th Avenue, then north on 8th to the old Madison Square Garden, which occupied the full block between 8th and 9th Avenues, 49th and 50th Streets. (That Garden was the third building in New York City to have the same name. The first two had actually been located on Madison Square at 26th Street. The present Garden, the fourth, is at 32nd St. and 7th Ave.)

George W. Bush apparently really believes in the "alternate realities" that he presented to our nation and the world over and over again during his Presidency. Bush was a uniter, not a divider; Saddam really did have weapons of mass destruction (until it was absolutely proven otherwise); cutting taxes for the rich really would boost the economy; as president, he really did have all of those powers that Dick Cheney, Richard Addington, and John Yoo pretended to find for him in the Constitution; abolishing Social Security really would benefit everyone whose Social Security was thereby abolished as well as the country as a whole; he really did as president have the authority to say "I'll follow this Act of Congress but not that one, at my own discretion;" he could, on his own authority, abrogate treaties if his White House Legal Counsel thought they were "quaint;" Saddam really did buy "yellow cake" in Niger. And George Bush really is an undereducated, both ignorant and dumb, person. No, he was not a secret voracious reader, as "Turdblossom," otherwise known as Karl Rove, was so fond of telling us. There were never any references to such readings except on the occasions that such were written into speeches for him. But he probably thought that he was, given that Rove told the world he that was. That fit right into his alternate reality.

Poor Ann Coulter. Here she was, invited back to the 2009 American Conservative (sic) Union's annual Conservative Political Action Committee's (CPAC) conference after a one-year exclusion. She got a featured Saturday slot, but was she featured? Ah, no. I could not find the text of her remarks despite diligent searching with Google. There were plenty of videos of her talk, but who has time for that? Then one would have to type out the juicy quotes oneself, instead of just cutting-and-pasting them.

The GOP is indeed terrified of Obama; it is now becoming patently obvious. In the debate over the (first) stimulus package and especially in the aftermath of its passage, they could barely talk about the real issues themselves. (And there surely were some real ones, about stimulus, not tax cuts, to talk about. This was evidenced by some-to-much unhappiness about in various progressive to left-wing quarters.) All GOPers could do was moan and groan about "the failure of bipartisanship" that was, of course, all the President's fault.

McCain's crocodile tears, for example, were so voluminous that one became concerned that the poor old guy might be biting them. Once again, as is their wont, Republicans cried about process, while leaving the substance, what their policies of the last eight years have done to the country, and what needs to be differently to fix the mess, virtually unmentioned by them. Unfortunately for the nation, their wailing not only predictably was echoed evermore loudly in the Republican Scream Machine, but also dominated the discussion in the mainstream media. They discussed the supposed "failure of bipartisanship," Obama's fault of course, much more than they did the real problems, and how we are going to solve them in ways that can work.