Al Jazeera plays tape of American hostage

Terrorists struck an American convoy in Baghdad today, destroying a fuel truck and at least one other vehicle.

Terrorists also set off a vehicle bomb on the main road to Baghdad’s international airport, right in the middle of traffic. In Kirkuk, nine Iraqi policemen attempting to disarm a bomb were killed when it exploded. Others were injured.

On al-Jazeera today, this video:

This is American Jeffrey Ake, a civilian contractor working in Iraq who was kidnaped Monday while working on a water plant near Baghdad.

Although no sound was broadcast with the footage, al-Jazeera said that Mr Ake, from Indiana, had pleaded with Washington to “open a dialogue with the Iraqi resistance” to save his life. He had also called for American forces to pull out of Iraq.

Shortly afterwards, Scott McClellan, President Bush’s press secretary, said that there would be no negotiations with the kidnappers.

The video message was the first time that militants have used an American hostage to call for a dialogue with Washington. In the past they have merely set conditions for the release of prisoners or a US withdrawal, then beheaded their captives when US officials refused to meet their demands.

The fact that the terrorists called for “dialogue” may bode well for Mr. Ake because I can imagine he may released as a gesture of goodwill and carrying a message. But I’d have to say that his release seems a very small possibility.

OTOH, I think that the invitation to dialogue is a sure sign by al Qaeda that they are losing in Iraq and know it.

The Nigerians have “moved northeast.” Via email:

Dear Sir,

NOT FOR THIRD PARTY (CONFIDENTIAL PLEASE)
AND I WANT YOU TO UNDERSTAND THAT THIS IS
NOT A HOAX MAIL, IT IS REAL THAT NEEDS URGENT ATTENTION.

With a very desperate need for assistance, I have summed up courage to contact you. I am an army sergeant. From 4th Infantry Division Association Fort Hood Chapter of the 4th Association Fort Hood TX. now serving with the third infantry contingent mission station one in Iraq; I actually found your contact particulars in a business journal.

I m seeking your experience and assistance to evacuate the sum of $18.5Million United Sates Dollars to USA or any other safe country. This is no stolen funds, and there are no risks involved.

SOURCE OF FUNDS:
During the third month of the raid here in Iraq, Myself and a few other soldiers while conducting a routine search in a location near one of Saddam.s old palaces, uncovered large sums of money buried in barrels with piles of weapons and ammunitions which we believed must have been part of Saddam’s hidden treasure.

It’s signed “Sergeant Andy Rowland.” I’m sure you can mentally fill in the rest of the scam. I know this is legitimate because HE USES ALL CAPITALS TO EMPHASIZE HIS POINT.

For some reason, Vanderbilt folks think they have a keen sports rivalry with the University of Tennessee at Knoxville (where Glenn Reynolds teaches law). This belief is doubtless a source of much amusement to the Vols, since they have two programs of national rank, football and women’s basketball, while Vanderbilt has no such programs. (Baseball may one day be nationally competitive at Vandy, though.) For football, the Vols consider Florida or Georgia much more their rivals than Vanderbilt, the perennial bottom-feeder of the SEC (heck the country!)

But that didn’t stop one of my Vanderbilt professors from telling this joke several years ago:

Question: Tennessee’s fullback, wide receiver and left linebacker are in the same car. Who is driving?

Answer: a Knoxville police officer!

You know what they say - the more things change, the more they stay the same:

The list of Vols arrested or cited since the end of February 2004 grew to 11 yesterday when defensive end Robert Ayers and linebacker Jerod Mayo were charged with aggravated assault stemming from a March 5 brawl at a fraternity party at the University Center on campus.

Vols coach Phil Fulmer is very upset about this and has apologized “to the UT community, University President John Petersen, Vols Athletics Director Mike Hamilton and the UT fans… .” The situation is so bad that sportswriter David Climer wondered whether the producer of the upcoming remake of The Longest Yard “ever considered using [UT’s] Orange & White Game this weekend as a backdrop.”

My question is this: why did Fulmer apologize? Does the dean of student life apologize for every UT kid picked up for D&D on weekends? Does the chair of the English department apologize when a senior majoring in literature is arrested for shoplifting? No, you say? Proves my point. Yes, Fulmer recruited these yardbirds and brought them to the university, but he’s not their mother. They are legal adults. Fulmer is not responsible for their conduct.

There is a mythos about college sports by which we imagine that these “amateur” athletes are supposed to be of pure character and serve as models for impressionable young boys or girls. Why, I don’t know. College football at UT’s level is certainly not an amateur endeavor and not even Fulmer really treats it as such. His players are professional players in every respect but semantically. Fulmer knows this and Fulmer is one of the most competitive, needs-to-win coaches in the game today. As the cited article made clear, his real concern is only about how these incidents affect the team’s ability to win. He knows better than anyone that a bid to the BCS championship bowl will give instant amnesia about police blotters to the fans, alumni, faculty and student body of the school.

I don’t think Fulmer’s protestations of being upset are insincere or only a charade; he does care about his players. But I don’t think he has to apologize for them. They are grown men - or are supposed to be, anyway - and they need to speak for themselves.

Not long before the turn of the millennium, I wondered whether America was on the verge of a third Great Awakening. In the only sermon I preached about the then-impending new millennium, I used the movie, “The Truman Show” as a metaphor for America nearing the end of 1999:

Its premise was that a baby boy named Truman Burbank was adopted by a television corporation. A huge domed set was constructed over Truman’s hometown of Sea Haven and the surrounding coast lands. Truman’s friends and family – everyone he meets, in fact – are actors, all conspiring to keep Truman from knowing the truth.. He lives under the unblinking gaze of five thousand hidden TV cameras. Truman’s every moment is broadcast live to the whole world. The Truman Show is the most popular TV show ever.

But occasionally disorder creeps into Truman’s scripted world. One day as he is getting into his car, an object falls from the dome’s high ceiling and smashes into the pavement nearby. Truman picks it up. It is a spotlight marked, “Sirius.” A couple of times former cast members break into the set and cry out to Truman that his world is a fake before the on-set police hustle them away. Once, Truman breaks from his usual daily routine and discovers stage hands pushing set designs around.

Finally, Truman realizes that there is a beyond, away from Sea Haven. He steals a boat and sails toward the horizon, which he literally runs into. That’s it, on the cover of your bulletins. And that’s Truman, about to see for himself that there is another “there” out there, through that open door.

I think that most clergy like me had some high hopes that America would be religiously revived and for awhile after Jan. 1, 2000, we were encouraged because worship attendance did rise. Alas, it was temporary, just as the rise after 9/11 turned out to be.

Which leads me to Glenn Reynold’s observation about a potential Great Awakening on TCS:

Are we in the midst of a religious revival that will change the face of America, and the world? Some people on the Right hope so, while many people on the Left fear so. I suspect, however, that the trend will be less dramatic than either the hopeful or the fearful believe.

If recent history is any indication, he’s right. Glenn, though, is less concerned in his essay with the state of people’s souls than their politics. Despite the grinding away at gaining political power by the Christian Right (or so they are accused, anyway, by the Christian Left) and the breathless fears of columnists like Jack Kelly, Glenn is skeptical that folks like Christian dominionists I wrote about yesterday will ever become politically significant, observing,

In fact, the traditional American attitude toward religion—and especially religion in politics—might be summed up this way: “Religious, but not too much.” ...

The decline of the Left as a political force in America coincided precisely with its shift from a politics of individual freedom to that of tut-tutting politically-correct nanny-statism. I suspect that if the religious Right decides to emulate the Left in this regard, its influence will evaporate in similar fashion.

Religious, yes. But not too much.

I think that’s about right. In 2002 I wrote an essay I called, “Bourgeoisophobia, Mather, Franklin and Lincoln,” sprung from David Brooks’ Weekly Standard piece, ” “Among the Bourgeoisophobes: Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate America and Israel.” I postulated that the philosophies of Puritan leader Cotton Mather and early-American success guru Benjamin Franklin form a dialectic tension within American culture that is not yet resolved today, but that some lessening of the tension may be gained by studying the political philosophy of Abraham Lincoln - which seems especially relevant in the time of the GWOT since it too was born of war.

The Puritan ethic and intense religion were the source of their industriousness, but contained the seeds of their own dissolution. “Religion brought forth prosperity,” Mather wrote, “and the daughter destroyed the mother.” Mather complained of conformist preachers who goaded their complacent congregations to amass wealth as an outward symbol of inward grace. With the experiment in the New World not even two hundred years old, Mather wrote that the whole enterprise was already undermined. He observed of Americans, “There is danger lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness.”

The Franklin Succession

The ideal of America as the Land of Opportunity was a true ideal. In Europe, labor was plentiful but status depended on land ownership. In America, land was plentiful and cheap, but skilled labor was scarce. From the earliest days, skilled workers commanded high wages and soon became major landowners. From the beginning, the American dream always had a substantial material base. Equality, freedom, and individual rights were important, but America’s main promise was improvement in one’s economic condition. The working political philosophy, which survives to this day, was that democracy really meant something only when it was accompanied by widespread opportunity to participate in economic abundance.

(This emphasis on material achievement, writes James Nuechterlein, has always been the serpent in the garden of American civilization. “Always there has been the fear that the material drive would overwhelm the idealistic vision, that prosperity was becoming not one goal but the ultimate end of American life. Americans have, in their self–critical moments, regularly invoked the biblical judgment on those who gain the whole world but lose their own souls.”

Benjamin Franklin has been called the patron saint of material success. Franklin secularized the American dream. The Puritans saw themselves as citizens of a City on a Hill, showing the world, like Jerusalem of old, the pure and correct worship of God in both church and society. Led by Franklin, American thinkers in the 1700s threw out this vision of heavenly inheritance for one of a secular city.

So Glenn’s thought that Americans want religion, but not too much, seems about right. The prospect of theocracy of any kind (or any other extremism) will find more than a very temporary foothold in American politics is dim, indeed. But fearmongering about it - like she did - always pays off, at least in the short run, and makes for great fundraising fodder.

Update: The fact that Americans are among both the most prosperous and the most religious in the world seems tangentially relevant.