Last week, inspired by the highly-regrettable religious architecture of Claude Parent, Rod Dreher wrote about his “perverse fascination with ugly churches.” This week, as if by way of counterpoint, Catesby Leigh has a lovely piece about Duncan Stroik, the architect (and Notre Dame professor) behind two new Catholic churches, one in Wisconsin and one at Saint Thomas Aquinas College in California, that actually dare to look like churches — rather than, say, the dreadful Jedi fortresses that pass for cathedrals in Los Angeles and Oakland.

I have fairly reactionary taste in architecture, as the preceding passage no doubt suggests, but like many laypeople of the “why are these buildings so ugly?” school, most of my distaste is focused on the brutalism of the post-war period. (Dreher linked to Theodore Dalrymple’s wonderful essay on Le Corbusier, whose title, “The Architect as Totalitarian,” offers the perfect epitaph for that era.) I can admire, if not necessarily love, many examples of modernism and post-modernism — skyscrapers and museums, theaters and libraries and skyscrapers again. But I have never seen a church or cathedral executed successfully in any of the architectural styles that have prevailed since the 1920s and ’30s. From Italy to San Francisco, the showpiece modern churches tend to succeed as monuments but fail as spaces for prayer and worship; their smaller imitators, scattered across the American suburbs, are almost always blights on whatever religious community is unhappy enough to occupy them. In the end, I suspect that something in the spirit of modern architecture is inherently secular: The forms and tendencies can be appropriate for office buildings, government houses and museums, but churches adopt them at their peril.

If you can’t bear to read the GQ interview itself, just read Hanna Rosin’s take on the Edwards mistress’s religion of the self:

… I read Rielle’s interview and immediately thought of many yoga teachers I’ve met, the acolytes of Marianne Williamson and other devotees of what they call “Eastern” religion. The blossoming New Age/Buddhism lite that populates yoga classes talks about the toxic nature of the Western “ego” (you know, we work too hard, we value ourselves above others, etc.) But then it replaces this ego with something like a supreme inner deity residing in all of us whose dictates can never be ignored … you call it silly but to Rielle it’s so profound—divine, even.

This puts me in mind (though then again, what doesn’t?) of a passage from Chesterton:

Of all conceivable forms of enlightenment the worst is what these people call the Inner Light. Of all horrible religions the most horrible is the worship of the god within. Any one who knows any body knows how it would work; any one who knows any one from the Higher Thought Centre knows how it does work. That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones. Let Jones worship the sun or moon, anything rather than the Inner Light; let Jones worship cats or crocodiles, if he can find any in his street, but not the god within.

Exchange “Jones” for “Rielle” and … well, you get the idea.

Meanwhile, Kerry Howley makes the point that the more interesting woman in the whole mess (“the axis,” as Howley puts it, “around which the Lifetime movie should turn”) is Cheri Young, the wife of Edwards’ adultery-enabling, paternity-claiming memoir-writing aide. What was she thinking? Surely there’s a more interesting GQ interview there …

Obviously the health care endgame has become a pretty ugly business, but having dissented from the liberal anguish over our “broken government” when the threat of the filibuster was forcing supporters of health care reform to count to 60 in the Senate, allow me to dissent as well from the conservative dyspepsia over the Democratic Party’s “unprecedented” use of various parliamentary maneuvers (today, reconciliation; tomorrow, “deem and pass”; the day after that, “blue steel”) to get the House and Senate bills reconciled and through. I think it’s a good thing that the countermajoritarian customs of the Senate, as adapted by the minority for a more ideological age, have made it very difficult to pass a sweeping overhaul of America’s de facto constitution. But I also think it’s appropriate that there exists, for an extremely determined but not-quite-super majority, mechanisms that allow legislators to overcome these hurdles and push a controversial piece of legislation through. “Hard but not absolutely impossible” seems like the right bar to set for a bill of this nature. I wish the Democrats had chosen a different path, but in the end, we live in a republic, not a direct democracy: If our elected representatives can really muster enough votes, within the rules, to pass health care legislation even after everything that’s happened — if they believe that strongly, in other words, that this is absolutely and without question the right policy for America — then they have every right to go for it. It may be their funeral, but it’s certainly their prerogative.

Daniel Larison didn’t much care for my column on Monday. Here’s his retort to my complaint about Hollywood’s simplistic takes on recent U.S. foreign policy:

Yes, the problem might be that we do not have artists capable of rendering contemporary architects of a war of aggression that was based on shoddy intelligence, ideological fervor and deceit in a sufficiently subtle, even-handed manner. If only Hollywood were better at portraying the depth and complexity of people who unleashed hell on a nation of 24 million people out of an absurd fear of a non-existent threat! Life is so unfair to warmongers, is it not?

I’m not asking for a movie extolling the heroism and wisdom of Donald Rumsfeld. I’m asking for a movie that doesn’t pretend that we invaded Iraq — a war supported, if memory serves, by leaders in both parties, a majority of the public and a substantial portion of the American political class — because the neoconservative cabal knew that Saddam Hussein no longer had any weapons of mass destruction, but decided to lie us into the conflict anyway and then rub out the key witnesses to their deception. I don’t think that we gain anything from that kind of story — neither artistic insight, nor historical understanding.

Read more…

From a John Lanchester essay on the prospects for Britain’s economy:

One has to admit that the impact of the recession has been peculiar. The unemployment data might be less bad than expected, but 511,000 people still lost their jobs in the year to December, at the rate of 1400 jobs a day. A British property is repossessed every 11 minutes. It has been both the deepest and the longest downturn since records began. And yet, to be honest, it hasn’t quite felt like it. The recession has been unevenly distributed. The milder downturns of the Tory years seemed harsher and more widespread. Perhaps this is an artefact of a lower pound, which has made the visited parts of Britain seem busier; of the drop in mortgage interest payments, which has put significant wads of cash in many houseowners’ pockets; and of still rising public sector pay. It may also be that because the country is, in absolute terms, richer than it was, we notice the downturn less. We are declining from a much higher base, and that seems to make a subjective difference.

The question is whether this phenomenon — the cushioning effect of modern society’s extraordinary affluence — will ultimately make it easier or harder to achieve a robust recovery. Read more…

Since my column today uses the release of Paul Greengrass’s “Green Zone” as an occasion to complain about how Hollywood can’t seem to capture the complexities and ironies of real-world politics, it seems worthwhile to mention a few recent exceptions to this rule. This will be a short list: Stephen Frears’ “The Queen” is on it, so is Alexander Payne’s “Election” (yes, it takes place in a high school — what’s your point?), and so is the portrait of Baltimore’s mayoral politics on David Simon’s “The Wire.” (The character of Clarence Royce, the compromised incumbent, is a particularly good example of how a storyteller can be fair to a fundamentally unsympathetic figure.) David O. Russell’s great “Three Kings” doesn’t feature any politicians, but it captures the tragic ironies of our involvement in Iraq with more clarity and sensitivity than any of the movies made about the second Gulf War. Neither Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” nor Mike Nichols’ “Primary Colors” are particularly successful movies, but both make a good-faith effort to portray polarizing figures from our recent past in shades of gray, rather than just black and white. (About the rest of Stone’s forays into political subjects, the less said the better.) And one of the reasons so many people praised — and overpraised — the political themes in “The Dark Knight,” I suspect, is that even an attempt at political ambiguity (and in a superhero movie, no less) seemed impressive, given how rarely Hollywood goes in for anything save caricature.

If there’s a high-profile model for how to tell a serious story about contemporary politics without egregious oversimplifying, it’s probably Stephen Soderbergh’s 2000 drug-war film “Traffic.” Read more…

Perhaps inspired by my criticisms of Paul Ryan’s proposed tax reforms, Jonathan Chait has a long post about how Ryan’s roadmap “clarifies the essence of the Republican Party’s approach to domestic policy issues,” which involves “opposition to the downward redistribution of income.” Noting that Ryan has said kind words about Ayn Rand, he writes that “the core of the Randian worldview, as absorbed by the modern GOP, is a belief that the natural market distribution of income is inherently moral, and the central struggle of politics is to free the successful from having the fruits of their superiority redistributed by looters and moochers.” And he argues: “Every major element of Ryan’s plan reflects this commitment …  Ryan would retain some bare-bones subsidies for the poorest, but the overwhelming thrust in every way is to liberate the lucky and successful to enjoy their good fortune without burdening them with any responsibility for the welfare of their fellow citizens.”

This strikes me as an overstatement, to put it mildly. Ryan’s proposed changes to the tax code — his reduction in the highest rates, and his addition of a consumption tax — would shift the tax burden down the income ladder, just as Chait says. But nearly every other major element of the roadmap would make the American welfare state more redistributionist, rather than less so.

Read more…

In the last few days, there have been a series of liberal attacks on the tax proposals in Paul Ryan’s fiscal roadmap. For the most part, they’ve been based on this Tax Policy Center report, which suggests that the Ryan version of the tax code would only raise revenue equal to 16.8 percent of G.D.P., rather than the 19 percent that’s required, under the roadmap’s assumptions, to keep the budget balanced. Here’s the statement Ryan issued in response:

The tax reforms proposed and the rates specified were designed to maintain approximately our historic levels of revenue as a share of GDP, based on consultation with the Treasury Department and tax experts.  If needed, adjustments can be easily made to the specified rates to hit the revenue targets and maximize economic growth.  While minor tweaks can be made, it is clear that we simply cannot chase our unsustainable growth in spending with ever-higher levels of taxes.  The purpose of the Roadmap is to get spending in line with revenue – not the other way around.

This is the right way to look at it overall, I think. What the Ryan roadmap does on taxes is propose a framework — a simplified but still progressive income tax, a consumption tax, and the end of the corporate income tax — that he argues, plausibly, would be more growth-friendly than the current tax code. It’s this structural shift that’s the meat of his proposal, not the specific rates; once you have the structure in place, you could move the rates around to get the amount of revenue you need.

But as you decide how to move them around, the more significant part of the liberal critique comes into play — namely, that as currently designed, the Ryan framework makes the tax code too regressive. Read more…