Confabulation

Confabulation It is the fabrication or distortion of memory about oneself or the world, a belief in the fantastic, maybe even the demonstrably untrue, usually without conscious intent to deceive. Donald Trump's slander of Jersey City Muslims cheering the fall of the twin towers on 911 is an example. I'll leave it to others to speculate whether Mr. Trump actually believes he saw film clips of Muslims cheering, I have no doubt that many in his audience sincerely believe they did. I'm old enough to know that memory plays tricks. I grew up in a small town that had, and still has, an annual peach festival. One year the festival included a concert featuring a gospel quartet called the Blackwood Brothers. It was held in a hanger at the municipal airport. The singers arrived in a private DC3, still in use as a passenger airliner at the time and a novelty for our town. They offered airplane rides for those interested and a number of people took them up on it. The DC3 has a tail wheel, which means it's center of gravity is behind the main landing gear. On landing it has a tendency to turn and go tail first down the runway. That's called a ground loop. The pilot has to be alert to prevent it and that pilot lost control on one of the landings. As the airplane turned one wing touched the ground. The airplane flipped over and caught fire. The passengers were trapped inside and burned to death. I'm pretty sure I didn't witness the crash but I did see the smoldering wreckage later and heard people talking about what had happened. I have a vivid memory of the actual crash and can hear the passengers screaming in pain. I also have an inordinate fear of fire. It terrifies me in the way some people are terrified of heights, or spiders. Confabulation can have damaging effects, intentional or not. It can also be used. Joseph Goebbels, the master Nazi propagandist, understood that. He wasn't the only one and Jews have been its victims for centuries. The blood libel, the lie that Jews sacrifice non-Jewish children in their rituals and drink their blood, has been a feature of anti semitism at least since medieval times. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a Czarist forgery from the nineteenth century purporting to document a Jewish plot to control the world is still widely circulated, and widely believed. Clear minded people know none of it is true. We also know racism was not a factor in most of the incidents fueling the Black Lives Matter movement. But racial relations are worse than they have been in decades. One campus rape story after another has been debunked yet the myth of an epidemic has persisted to the point where basic rules of due process are being suspended. To be accused is to be convicted. As in my case, confabulation often begins with an element of reality. There is no question the 911 atrocities were carried out by men who were at least nominally Muslim. There is also no question that many Muslins, including more than a few American Muslims find the barbaric message from ISIS (I prefer the term Daesh) to be an attractive one. But Mr. Trump's Jersey City libel perpetuates the myth that all or most Muslims are cheering them on. There are a number of reputable fact checking web sites. Snopes may be the best known. They researched the Trump claim. There were rumors of Muslims cheering at the time and some documentation of cheers in the Middle East, but none in Jersey City. It is sheer confabulation and it ought to be quashed.

What do Muslims Think

Where are the Muslim voices condemning the slaughter of innocents by ISIS and other groups in the name of Islam? They are there, there are a lot of them, and they are loud but they are having trouble being heard. The news program I usually watch has covered the massacre in Paris extensively and featured numerous "experts" on terrorism trying to answer the questions, who are these people and why are they doing this? No expert I have seen has been Muslim. None have blamed Islam either though they don't shrink from the term "Islamic radicals." I would like to hear from Muslims. I understand why they don't like to refer to terrorists as Islamic but let them explain why. Why is this not Islamic? Why is it not in keeping with the passages from the Koran so often quoted by those who would condemn Islam as a violent faith? I think I know why but I would like to hear it from them. They are more than ready to speak up. They are on Facebook. They are issuing statements. Get them on television. Question them about it. Why? For four years I attended a Catholic Bible Study class at the University of Dallas. We went through every book. Some of it I found disturbing, none more than the book of Joshua, a book Catholics share with Protestants. I was warned at the beginning not to interpret passages from scripture literally. At least since Vatican II the Church has taught that scripture must be read in the context of all of scripture, when, why, and for whom it was written, in light of church teaching, and of what different meaning it might have today. Joshua's campaigns in the Promised Land were as brutal as anything any conquering army ever did. Did that justify the wanton slaughter of Muslims and Jews by medieval crusaders? They thought so. Almost all Christians today would say no. That is not the faith we share. There is no question the crusaders were Christians. At least one of them is a saint, Saint Louis, King of France, leader of the Seventh Crusade, and a man who believed the only way to talk to a Muslim or a Jew was at the point of a lance. Something like that is going on in the Muslim world today. The radicals may be a minority but there are a lot of them and like the crusaders they believe they are defending the faith. Some of them, like Saint Louis, are genuinely devout. And as in the Christian Bible, they can find support for it in their scripture if they look for it. Some of them truly believe that, as with Joshua, God has taken the field and will lead them to victory. That doesn't mean they are right. The Muslims I know say they are wrong. They are acutely aware that most of the victims are Muslim but regardless of faith it is always wrong to shed innocent blood. We need a serious dialog about it. Every horrific incident that makes the headlines reinforces the view that Muslims represent a dangerous segment of our population. I would like to think that view is wrong but I'm afraid it is not. It is affecting our national sense of charity and justice. Two governors have announced that Syrian refugees are not welcome in their states for fear that terrorists will be among them. That fear is likely to spread. This has been spiraling out of control for some time now and appears likely to continue. We heed to hear from Muslims what they think about it and, more important, what they think we should do about it.

Environmental Priorities

Call me a denier if you like. I don't believe man made carbon dioxide emissions represent a serious threat to the planet. On the contrary, more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a net benefit because of its effect on plant growth. I do believe the earth is a warmer place than it was a hundred years ago, though not warmer than eighteen years ago, or than in the days when Rome was in its ascendency. Whether the world will be warmer or cooler a hundred years from now is a matter of some conjecture but we should be prepared for it either way. Here is my problem. If we pursue draconian measures to discontinue the use of fossil fuels, measures that even their advocates concede will have minuscule effects on climate change, mankind will certainly be less prosperous in the future and less able to deal with changes in the climate that will surely occur. We will have passed on an opportunity never before seen, a chance to eliminate extreme poverty. If we need to build dikes to ward off rising sea levels we will not have the where-with-all to do it It is the poverty issue that bothers me most. In the U.S. the EPA is implementing regulations designed to drive up the cost of energy, increase the number of citizens classed as poor, and further reduce disposable incomes for those least able to afford higher fuel bills. For those of us who live in Texas a return to the days of summers without air conditioning is not a happy thought It gets worse. President Obama has disapproved the Keystone XL pipeline to transport Canadian oil to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries, oil that will be shipped instead by rail, or by sea to Asia. It is a purely symbolic gesture to prepare him for a coming international conference in Paris where he will urge the rest of the world to follow suit. He will commit to a level of funding for the third world he and the world know the congress will not approve. If we spent a fraction of the political and economic capital he will propose, we could rebuild the electric grid in India and supply power to advance that country's move into the realm of the middle class. In the process millions of lives would be spared death from respiratory ailments caused by indoor cooking fires fueled with dung I am not a scientist but I know what the scientific method is and the climate models predicting catastrophic global warming aren't it. When a hypothesis proves wrong, a scientist changes his hypothesis. He does not fall back on the half truths, wild exaggerations, and outright fabrications that drive climate change alarm. That alone is enough to produce the healthy skepticism so many people have toward the argument. I would also argue, though Pope Francis would disagree, that a more prosperous planet would be a cleaner one. England is certainly a cleaner place than during the early days of the industrial revolution. The United States is cleaner than it was in my youth when many people heated their homes with coal. We can thank natural gas pipelines for much of that. And we are seeing the Chinese pay a lot more attention to their own smog problems, an issue much closer to them than carbon dioxide is likely to be any time in the near future. I would like to see us focused on projects with measurable benefits, projects we can actually do. We have made enormous progress in recent decades in reducing extreme global poverty. Why is that? How can we expedite the process? We are moving backward in the United States. How can we turn that around? And why don't we clean up the dead zone at the mouth of the Mis