If you get a chance, pick up this week's New Yorker. It's really, really, really good. The Malcolm Gladwell piece on Power Laws furnished this post for me, and Joan Acocella's article on Mary Magdalene and Peter Hessler's recounting of a matchmaker experience in China are both superb, if a bit less bloggable. And I want to highlight this graf from Jeffrey Goldberg's profile of Bush-speechwriter Michael Gerson:
“The President can't imagine that someone who is President of the United States could not have faith, because he derives so much from it,” Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, said. “I can see him struggle with other world leaders who don't appear to be grounded in some faith,” he said. He added, “The President doesn't care what faith it is, as long as it's faith.”
That's a deeply disturbing factoid. Bush, after all, isn't traipsing around the world calling for testimonials, but meeting with fellow heads of state to discuss world affairs. It's not clear where religion would figure into the conversation. Moreover, the emphasis on faith as a general character trait rather than Christianity as a foundational world view is even less explicable. If Bush believed so deeply in Jesus Christ and an intelligible God that he couldn't relate to those without the same worldview, that would be parochial and worrying, but understandable. Simply lacking comfort with those who haven't decided to trust in a higher force, however, belies a real insecurity with the very concepts of self-determination and free will, not to mention a fear of making decisions unaided.
Much attention is given to Bush's snap judgment making -- he lacks, it's said, the fuzziness and indeterminacy of Clinton. But that trait becomes a whole lot less laudable if Bush is simply shoving the onus onto his religion, and resisting the intellectual and moral responsibility for his own choices.
