The Anchoress

Leftist students and professors at La Sapienza in Italy have basically shouted down Pope Benedict VXI, who canceled his plans to talk there, rather than deal with them or give them more airtime. This tendency on the left to silence what they do not agree with is getting pretty troubling.

Gerald at Closed Cafeteria has a translation of the undelivered speech but I would direct you to John Allen’s column, here, where he sounds a little exasperated with the intellectual dishonesty behind the students protests:

In a nutshell, therefore, Benedict is being faulted by the physics professors for quoting somebody else’s words, which his full text suggests he does not completely share. (Readers who remember Regensburg can be forgiven a sense of déjà-vu.)

Read the whole thing and ponder how unwilling the world is becoming to allow anyone to say anything or do anything without immediately accusing them of the worst. It’s not healthy.

Archbishop Charles Chaput is noting it as well. His upcoming book Render Unto Caesar, seems ready to address it, as he lays out in this speech:

George Orwell said that one of the biggest dangers for modern democratic life is dishonest political language. Dishonest language leads to dishonest politics — which then leads to bad public policy and bad law.

Dishonest political language creates untrustworthy narratives, too. For instance:

Remember the two iconic pictures of the Vietnam War - the napalmed little girl running naked and scared, and the Vietcong guy being shot at point-blank range? Neo-neocon researched the stories behind those two powerful images and discovered they did not actually involve America at all…but that’s not the narrative around them.

As I read the article about the photos, I felt a sense of disbelief. I wasn’t quite sure what I was reading was correct. Surely, if this information about both photos were true, I’d have heard about it before this. After all, thirty years had passed.
[...]
The experience was something akin to being married for thirty years, thinking your husband loving and faithful, and then by chance coming across evidence that he’d been living a double life all that time, with a wife and kids in another town. A sense of deep betrayal of a basic trust.

Read her piece - it’s affecting, and important. Dishonest political language.

Of course, some of it is Classic and routine.

Read Daniel Koffler really excellent piece on how political pledges to insure voter rights are limited. The last graph’s a kicker.

John Fund has more in more detail about this issue, and on flexible indignation when it comes to requiring Voter I.D.

Identity politics create narratives that get sticky, as Christopher Hitchens points out.

I don’t even know what sort of narrative this story involves - maybe it’s a narrative in-the-making? Seems to me Hillary’s Health Care Papers would be bigger news.

Some narratives really don’t require a willing suspension of disbelief, though:

About 75% of Baghdad’s neighborhoods are now secure, a dramatic increase from 8% a year ago when President Bush ordered more troops to the capital, U.S. military figures show.

Those narratives actually require more coverage than they get.

John Hawkins has an interview with Jonah Goldberg on his book, Liberal Fascism, which is all about another sort of dishonest political narrative.

Speaking of narratives, Jenna Bush is now a mild-mannered non-meat-eating teacher in the Washington DC public schools. That means she’s working in less-than-prime conditions with kids who are at tremendous disadvantage (the unrepresented people of DC have no one pandering to them, so they get short shrift). Her sister Barbara spent 9 months working at an African AIDS hospital, and lives discreetly. Jenna has written a book about a mother with AIDS, and now she is visiting UNICEF projects, and apparently she flying commercial when she does it.

This is good, admirable stuff, but the reportage is almost nil. Security plays into it, of course, but
do you think before Bush leaves office any network or dead tree news group will take a look at the Bush Twins and see how they’ve grown up during the past 8 years - to see if they have transcended the “drunk party girls” narrative? I’ve always thought that presidential kids deserved a second look - they change so much while their parents are in office. When Dubya took office, his daughters were college students who behaved, well, like most college students. It seems likely they are quite different women, now. People change and grow - movements, situations and stories change. Why don’t narratives?