“This nation was founded on the principle that the government must never choose between religions or favor one over another. The World Trade Center site will forever hold a special place in our city, in our hearts. But we would be untrue to the best part of ourselves and who we are as New Yorkers and Americans if we said no to a mosque in lower Manhattan.
“Let us not forget that Muslims were among those murdered on 9/11, and that our Muslim neighbors grieved with us as New Yorkers and as Americans. We would betray our values and play into our enemies’ hands if we were to treat Muslims differently than anyone else. In fact, to cave to popular sentiment would be to hand a victory to the terrorists, and we should not stand for that.
“For that reason, I believe that this is an important test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetimes, as important a test. And it is critically important that we get it right.
His speech has shown up many places, this transcription is on Salon. It’s really worth reading in it’s entirety.
There is a good posting on the Real Climate blog about the IPCC AR4 blow back that is happening. I think this gets to the heart of it:
To those familiar with the science and the IPCC’s work, the current
media discussion is in large part simply absurd and surreal.
Journalists who have never even peeked into the IPCC report are now
outraged that one wrong number appears on page 493 of Volume 2. We’ve
met TV teams coming to film a report on the IPCC reports’ errors, who
were astonished when they held one of the heavy volumes in hand, having
never even seen it. They told us frankly that they had no way to make
their own judgment; they could only report what they were being told
about it. And there are well-organized lobby forces
with proper PR skills that make sure these journalists are being told
the “right” story. That explains why some media stories about what is
supposedly said in the IPCC reports can easily be falsified simply by
opening the report and reading. Unfortunately, as a broad-based
volunteer effort with only minimal organizational structure the IPCC is
not in a good position to rapidly counter misinformation.
We like to say new media is allowing us all to be journalists. But it’s
probably more accurate to say it lets us all be anchors. Sure, the
Internet also allows people with local knowledge or serious expertise
to speak directly and be picked up by a wider audience, but it doesn’t
fundamentally do a whole lot to increase the population of those people.
And I love his proof point of Palin as the main example
That makes Palin the perfect post-postmodern politician, in a way: A
totally self-contained text, a signifier with no referent. You don’t
really need to know anything to love her or to hate her, because she’s not about
anything except… Sarah Palin. Obligingly, she places no demands on
either her supporters or her detractors, because what they decide to
think of her is all they need to know to decide what to think of her.
At the center of her media narrative is… the media’s narrative about
her, bouncing down an infinite corridor of mirrors. If Jorge Luis
Borges had a talk show on a cable channel run by M.C. Escher, it would
look like CNN right now. Welcome aboard the Goodship Palin, now sailing
from the desert of the real.
The last bit of media that was playing as we came in for approach to JFK from Berlin was an episode of Mad Men. This was an original configuration 767, so there was just the big central screens in coach, and everyone was watching the same thing. Neither Susan nor I we watching with head phones, but from time to time we’d see the pictures going by. At some point the family was out for a picnic, and they “cleaned up” by throwing their beer can into the woods, and just flipping everything off their blanket and onto the ground.
I turned to Susan and said “ah, the 50s, how amusing you were”. Her response was “…or horrifying”. 50 years ago communing with nature meant throwing you trash on the ground. It took a generation to realize that trash isn’t taken away by magical fairies. It just remains, and leaches into the ground water, and causes all manner of problems for generations down the road. It makes for a good TV moment because the entire audience understands how egregious the act was. 2 generations will do that. When you are in the middle of a change, it’s a lot harder to see that perspective.
They didn’t even have cucumbers
Our trip to Europe was primarily for Clemens wedding, in Berlin. (We got there via Switzerland, but that’s a different story). The wedding was small (by US standards), with about 50-60 people there, but the mix was amazing. Americans, Germans, and Turks, all with quite interesting backgrounds, and all great people. It was my first time to Berlin, and I realized how lacking my history was, so crammed a bit out of the guide book and asked some questions of the folks there. For Clemens, who grew up in the city, I got some great responses at times that showed how matter of fact the second big moment in history for me was (the first being the challenger explosion). “What’s up with that tower.” “So there was this wall around the city…”
On the last night of the trip we went out to dinner with a student from Susan’s MFA program who is a German native, and living in Berlin now. At some point the whole unification question came up and she started retelling her remembrances from childhood. The one thing she remembered most was how the news kept saying “They didn’t even have cucumbers” of the East Germans, when trying to show how bad off they were. This wasn’t actually true, in East Germany they had food when it was in season. So no tomatoes or cucumbers in January, when they are shipped in from Argentina, picked green, and taste like styrofoam. But this was the height of the 80s. Western civilization’s peak got symbolized with any thing, any time you want it. Much like the beer can in the woods, it doesn’t matter the impact, or the quality. So when unification happened, one of the much lauded benefits was this any time culture.
We’re hopefully starting to leave that wastefulness behind. In another generation I think we’ll see tomatoes in January no less quaint than throwing our garbage out the car window. Food miles do matter, both for flavor and for impact to the world around us. Once we got home we had friends over and had some fresh farm tomatoes with mozzarella, basil, and balsamic vinegar. Amazing flavor. Yes, we don’t do this in January, but once you’ve tasted what a tomato is actually supposed to taste like, you wouldn’t want to either.
John Hodgman was the headliner at the White House Correspondent’s dinner last night, and the intertubes have his speech up already. It’s classic Hodgman, both humorous and meaningful. Check it out on the ‘tube.
