Year-end shorts (well, perhaps not short shorts)

Radioactive Muslims: To my utter relief, I'm still capable of outrage. This story of our government monitoring radiation levels at mosques, homes, businesses, and office buildings associated with Muslims—almost all U.S. citizens, for what that's worth—was the stimulus I needed.

I'm all for monitoring any location that is linked to a credible threat, whatever the religion of its owners. That's what courts, judges, and warrants are for. Any time frame beyond the very first half-day after receiving the credible threat gives the monitors time to get a warrant. Any delay after that is blatantly illegal. If we Quakers finally succeed in living in apostolic power and shaking the countryside for ten miles around, as George Fox challenged us to, I expect that we too would be subjects of urgent monitoring, but after that first tremor, there better be a warrant.

In this present case, why were warrants not obtained? Since the agencies involved refuse to comment on this specific situation, perhaps we'll never know. The U.S. News story says, "Officials also reject any notion that the program specifically has targeted Muslims. 'We categorically do not target places of worship or entities solely based on ethnicity or religious affiliation,' says one. 'Our investigations are intelligence driven and based on a criminal predicate.'" Is it possible that this many locations were each fingered in some kind of "criminal predicate"? Or, as seems more likely to me, the investigators were perhaps acting on a suspicion or rumor or disinformation campaign involving Muslims in general and nobody in particular. How long can civil liberties survive when such repeated monitoring of whole religions and ethnic groups without judicial oversight can be carried out on government say-so?

On the other hand, now that we do know something of what happened, what would have been the proper response of the government to rumors or allegations of terrorists' nuclear intentions? One thing I'm sure of: somehow, the system of checks and balances must be involved.

Thank God that some of those government officers have consciences. Because of that golden thread of idealism—because some have the courage to risk demotion and perhaps worse—what is hidden in darkness gets forced out into the light. Sadly, I'm not betting we've seen everything. And if we citizens and our legislators do not impose political consequences on an administration so hell-bent on doing whatever it wants, there will be more. Jefferson's line, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance," is often used to justify a strong military, but its application is far wider. It takes aim at any form of laziness or passivity that surrenders the public arena to the arrogant.

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2006: The Year of the Boy? Arthur O. Roberts, Quaker philosopher and poet, has just published his reflections for January 2006, hopefully to be available soon on this section of the Northwest Yearly Meeting Web site. [UPDATE: It's there now.] (If you're not familiar with his monthly reflections, enjoy browsing awhile.)

While you're waiting for the full essay, here's a representative excerpt. After citing a number of statistics from our yearly meeting and George Fox University, almost all indicating a spread of ten percent or more between male minorities and female majorities, Arthur says:

Certain public educators over the past decade have expressed concern about boys’ education. They note a pattern of higher drop-out rates, more trouble-making, lower academic performance. diminishing enrollment in colleges, etc. It’s a touchy subject, however, and has elicited some strident feminist reaction, especially to charges of “feminization” of curriculum and pedagogy. Feminist scholars insist gender bias persists favorable to boys, not to girls. (See rebuttal at www.drheller.com/jan95.html). Three decades’ worth of social effort makes it difficult to overcome a mind-set about females requiring special efforts to rectify disparities. It’s hardly “politically correct” to posit a male group needing special attention. . . . But in respect to education, at least, it seems logically compelling.

I was immediately reminded of a sorely-missed friend and collaborator of mine, the late Betsy Moen, who died twelve years ago in Madurai, India, while doing research on gender patterns in activist leadership. In the late 1980's, she and Oswald Murray and I led a Right Sharing of World Resources study tour in Jamaica. While there, Betsy gave a talk at a seminar organized by Geoff Brown at the University of the West Indies, and the next day she summarized her talk on a Jamaican Broadcasting morning television interview show.

Her talk was entitled, "Why Target Women?" She explained why women were "targeted" in much contemporary economic development work—resources devoted to women were far more likely to benefit the whole family, according to credible research, whereas men tended to spend additional resources on themselves.

However, after describing the efficacy of targeting women in development work, Betsy asked a powerful question: what are the assumptions and consequences of this strategy for men? Are men just a problem to be bypassed, or are they themselves worthy of attention? Clearly, the old development methods of transferring more money and power to men don't work, but is neglect the only other option? Have we assumed that men cannot be educated to be responsible fathers, productive economic partners, collaborative leaders?

Betsy's point: while in any given class, women may be more exploited than men, still men are exploited, too; and, equally with women, they need to open their eyes. Most of all, we should not be "targeting" people, as if they were mere subjects, fair game for our development theories; we should be targeting systems.

So ... Arthur's queries about paying more attention to the education and development of boys make sense to me. To give focused attention to the special needs of boys is not to reverse the drive toward equality, it is to examine reality and expose oppressive systems. However, I do have one caution: if the attention toward male brain research and boys' unique development patterns becomes just another trendy grant magnet, rather than an honest approach to an understudied subject, both boys and girls will lose.

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The Return, again. Earlier this year I wrote about Andrei Zvyagintsev's amazing film, The Return. Now that we're paying attention to boys, with Arthur Roberts's encouragement, I wanted to report the lively discussion we had in our TV room recently when a friend of mine came over to our house and saw this movie with our family. Rather than describe the exact discussion we had, I'd like to encourage you to rent or borrow the film yourself and watch it in a group. What does it say about boys, about fathers, about their relationships? What myths of manhood are evident, and (here's where our discussion got lively) which of those myths actually have some health to them? Are the apparent exaggerations of masculinity in the film peculiar to Russia, or are they more universal? (Are they even exaggerations?!) Is it riskier to exaggerate masculinity or to marginalize it? Are these our only choices?

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Righteous links: If you read Russian, you might enjoy this article about our new Friends International Library trilingual version of Lighting Candles in the Dark, entitled Power of Goodness. ~~ Has President Bush himself fallen victim to sophisticated pattern analysis of his communications? Read this. ~~ The wonderful urban monastics at 24-7prayer.com have started a new program, Living Generously, an international evangelical program that has a lot in common with our own Right Sharing of World Resources. ~~ One of the best essays to emerge from our waiting and waiting and waiting for the return of our Christian Peacemaker Teams hostages in Iraq: Gene Stoltzfus's examination of the culture of terrorism.

Friday/Saturday update: More links. Direct link to Arthur's "Year of the Boy" article. ~~ The grass is always greener, and the power more plentiful: the view across the Russian-Ukrainian border. ~~ Frank Decker on "When 'Christian' Does not Translate" (pdf) in Mission Frontiers, September-October 2005. ~~ And Anita David's eloquent message, "Our Day," from Baghdad, on Electronic Iraq.

Turning out the rude, debauched spirits

Quaker sources for writing Christmas prose are a bit thin, but about ten years ago I wrote a skit for Christmas worship at First Friends Meeting (Richmond, Indiana) based on these words from George Fox:

We must not have Christ Jesus, the Lord of Life, put any more in the stable amongst the horses and asses, but he must now have the best chamber, the heart, and the rude, debauched spirit must be turned out. Therefore let him reign, whose right it is, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, by which Holy Ghost you call him Lord, in which Holy Ghost you pray, and by which Holy Ghost you have comfort and fellowship with the Son and with the Father. Therefore know the triumph in the Seed, which is first and last, the beginning and ending, the top and cornerstone.

I've long since lost the script, but a couple with a newborn baby played the Holy Family, and at the start of the scene they were in our stable. A group of our meeting's children confronted the rude, debauched spirits occupying the "best chamber" of our simple set. Various adults played the spirits of greed, idolatry, violence, and elitism; the children firmly took charge of this unsavory quartet and led them out of the chamber. They then went to the stable and escorted Jesus and his parents into the chamber.

Since arriving in Portland, I've been part of a number of public social exorcisms, naming these same rude spirits and commanding them to depart from the places we've claimed for Christ. Once we performed a flagwashing ceremony, taking a U.S. flag that had been smeared with the words violence, war, arrogance, greed, inequality, injustice. During the liturgy, the flag was literally washed and displayed again in its clean form.

This Christmas, we see many rude spirits roaming our beautiful world, wreaking havoc in the lives of millions of people. Some of them are financed by our tax dollars. Some of them operate in Christian sheep's clothing. The task of evangelism (continuing the work of inviting Jesus into human hearts) goes hand in hand with the task of evicting the idols.

It's not just a matter of identifying the spirits animating the corrupt practices of politicians and leaders; those rude spirits seek to divert each of us, too. But when our meetings are operating with a good, mutually respectful division of labor, then we have elders and companions who help us with the struggle to stay honest and repentant about our own demons. We are not required to be perfect before we (at least those with prophetic calling) follow the lead of the biblical prophets, George Fox, the children of First Friends, and our worldwide brothers and sisters in ejecting the rude, debauched spirits who seek to define and confine our realities.

The political arena is only one dimension of the struggle to reclaim the heart, and perhaps it isn't even the most important one. In fact, it is very important to remember that politics are an elaboration of behaviors and interactions also found among animals, and that many political boundaries and definitions that we take for granted, and that seem so real (roles, offices, governments, states, nations) are all in our heads. Nevertheless, those behaviors coerce, exploit, and kill; we must take our observations and use them, not be frozen by them.

This past week has been full of complex signs of the struggle. These links are a tiny fraction of what could be listed:

• The White House Web site includes the transcript of this week's press briefing, with fascinating exchanges on two crucial questions: (1) which branch of government does President Bush wish to dispose of, and (2) "I want to know why we're still there killing people, when we went in by mistake." The almost childlike simplicity of that second question reminds me of someone getting ready to eject a rude, debauched spirit. (Dan Froomkin in his Washington Post column, adds some perspective to this briefing, and goes on to mention the growing currency of the official method provided for ejection: impeachment.)
• This past week, maverick libertarian and Soviet-era dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, not exactly a romantic or a liberal mouthpiece, felt it necessary to remind Americans on the moral contamination that threatens any government using torture. (Many thanks to Street Corner Society for this link.)
• Anne Applebaum, whose highly-recommended book on the Soviet slave-labor camps also qualifies her as a non-sentimentalist, weighed in as well: See her Washington Post column, "Hollow Rhetoric on 'Rule of Law'."
• One final item from that newspaper: "Spy Court Judge quits in protest."

All of these developments are part of a struggle that could, at least in the short term, go either way, that won't permit us to rest on the sidelines, and that is part of a much larger perspective—reaching into our own individual hearts, not letting vindictiveness or evidentiary convenience (i.e., lies) claim territory that is Christ's. While some of us work on these specific concerns, we in the Lamb's War are also claiming territory in our own lives and families and communities where we practice giving Jesus the best chamber. (My favorite example, or metaphor, albeit not a universal one, is seeing the marriage bedroom as the Garden of Eden.)

At times in the past few years I've had the feelings that Bob Ramsey expressed so eloquently a couple of days ago. Seems like these rude, debauched spirits keep popping up. As we pick ourselves up for another round, it's important to remember that the Lamb's War is fought with prayer and love, and we're not alone.



In connection with spying on citizens, the use of special methods of interrogation, the secret transfers of detainees, and other matters, President Bush and his advocates have claimed his right to a wartime deference from Congress, the courts, and the Constitution. Here's the wall of reality that he is only now starting to hit: He has not earned that right to wartime deference. In times of genuine emergency, a trusted leader is given the benefit of the doubt. Today, given what we know (and cannot pretend not to know), the "trust me" defense no longer works.



Many western observers of Russia are highly concerned about the proposed new regulations of non-governmental organizations and their funding. Russian Blog provides a refreshing balance in this post, and then quoting Mary Dejevsky in this post. Also, I received a letter from a Russian journalist, who (while agreeing with some of my own concerns) pointed out, "Still to my knowledge funding of political activities by foreigners is also prohibited under the US law." Exactly. Other countries must measure up to our ideals, but our realities are sometimes different; and of course the "trust me" presidency makes even those imperfect ideals optional in this indefinite "war."

I've been reading Stephen M. Walt's Taming American Power, particularly on the theme of the USA's consistent efforts to consolidate its military and economic domination of the world. For me, this puts President Putin in perspective. Putin's attempts to maximize his own influence in Russia within all the space and all the vectors open to him are simply the same behavior within Russia that American leaders attempt worldwide. And the motive (at its best) is the same: to deal with the world's (or Russia's) chaos and unpredictability from the strongest possible vantage point.

Each situation is supposedly equipped with checks and balances. Putin can go far in taking up all the power that his system makes available to him, and he is in a pretty strong position with respect to the formal limits on his executive power. He is also a master of electoral politics, including the dirty tricks I associate with the Cook County, Illinois, of my growing-up years. However, the Russian people will continue to build their lives, discuss important ideas, strenuously protest governmental incompetence (witness the Beslan aftermath), circulate among friends of their choice, and cultivate dynamic entrepreneurship, almost without reference to anything Putin does. And if he goes too far, he will lose his legitimacy and add to Russia's chaos, when most of the evidence I've seen (not all) suggests that this is the last thing he wants.

As with any powerful but not omnipotent leader dealing simultaneously with a huge number of challenges, Putin must balance a range of factors, sometimes without much time for reflection—the pressures exerted and favors demanded by his allies, the pressures exerted by his opponents, the capriciousness of the bureaucracy, his own ideals, ethics, and vision for the country, his own appetites and the temptations of power, etc. Time will tell how successful he is in this balancing act.

I wish all governments, including Russia's, would understand that regulation should focus specifically on the abuse to be prevented, rather than a whole universe of activities that might involve abuse. Instead of registering, monitoring, and taxing every organization in the country, as some fear will happen in Russia, why not focus directly on better tax regulations, or spending on political activity, or foreign funding? However, Americans who are upset about limitations on their NGOs' branches in Russia should take a moment to think about the tax regulations, audit requirements, and other regulations faced by our own nonprofits. (I won't even touch on the Quaker and likeminded groups who find their activities monitored by the FBI.) Also consider whether our government grants the freedoms we expect in Russia to organizations here whose funding originates abroad. We try to teach Russians the basics of democratic citizenship; maybe we should invite Russian organizations with Russian funding to come and teach us community-building, the best of collectivism, and cultural literacy. What suspicions and obstacles would such Russian-funded organizations face here?

Meanwhile back at the (Crawford TX) ranch, we have a president who cannot miss a chance to undercut the checks and balances of our system. As Anne Applebaum says, this is not a season for us to lecture the rest of the world on democracy. Of course, pointed questions are always in season, as long as they point both ways.



From Baghdad, Maxine writes,

Dearest friends-

During this time of waiting for news about my friends who are kidnapped, I can't help but think about Mary and Joseph.

It must have been an agonizing thing for them to make a trip from Nazareth to Bethlehem when Mary was near her time of giving birth. I can't help but wonder if they were angry at having to make such a difficult journey to comply with the orders of an illegal occupier in their country. I know I would have been. And then to get to Bethlehem and be told that there was no place to stay would have added fuel to the fire.

But somehow, I suspect that all of that anger vanished when Jesus was born. Who has attended a birth and not realized that everything else pales in comparison to the joy of new life? The miracle of every birth bathes the world in a cleansing light.

I feel like I need a new outlook. After two years of living in Iraq, I find myself discouraged and angry about the situation. And every helicopter that flies over (like one just did) reminds me that two and a half years after the fall of Saddam there is still an occupying force from my own country here, one that has no stated intentions of leaving anytime soon.

Did Mary and Joseph feel the same way? Were they angry at the Romans? Were they worried for the future of their child who would be born into such a situation? I suspect their feelings were similar to what many Iraqis feel every single day.

I'm waiting for the re-birth of my colleagues, and anticipating a new view of the world through this miracle.

In hopeful waiting-
Maxine

All of me

Hello from Atlanta. A couple of Sundays ago, back in Portland, at Reedwood Friends Church, we sang a chorus that went more or less like this:

I want to be a servant, Lord
Please take all of me
I want to be a servant, Lord
Please take all of me.
All of me, please take all of me.
I want to be a servant, Lord
Please take all of me.

I want to be a witness, Lord, etc.
I want to be a sacrifice, etc.

Barry Frisby, our pastor for children, also gave a wonderful sermon in which he retold the whole story of Jesus's birth, starting with the Annunciation, and asked the kids in the meeting room to keep score of which parts were wonderful and which were messy.

When programmed meetings and Protestant congregations in general get into the full swing of Advent and Christmas programming, it feels very hard for a prophetic word to wedge its way in. For one thing, a lot of the church culture is riding on the glow of Christmas, the cuteness of kids, the familiar warmth of all the Advent paraphernalia, all of which has undoubted community-building power. But on this particular Sunday, this particular chorus, and this particular sermon, gave my spirit a nudge to stand up during open worship and speak.

The opening was there, but that didn't make speaking easy. What struck me about the chorus (I said) was how little it matched my life. I should rather sing

I'd like to have the reputation of being a servant, Lord,
Please take 10% of me.

Musically, the chorus (as originally written!) swings very nicely. I could usually sing it, with at least an aspirational spin, quite enthusiastically. But as I told Friends that Sunday, the Christian Peacemaker Team members in Baghdad were not 10% servants or witnesses, and now they were certainly not 10% hostages. Their commitment as servants was 100%. We do not yet know what level of sacrifice will be required, and I would rather pray than speculate. [Wikipedia link updated in 2021]

The honesty of Barry's sermon added a dimension to the message for which I was an instrument. "God with us" was not and is not a pious tableau or an improving Sunday school story. It was messy as well as wonderful. And so is being a servant, a witness, a sacrifice. How I want to be these things 100%, how I want to keep God at the very center of my life (as Deborah Haines challenged us and me in a never-to-be-forgotten Pendle Hill Monday night lecture 28 years ago) ... and how often I settle for a respectable 10%.

I will never sing that chorus with the same mindless gusto again. I will sing it, just differently.

Come and spy on us. Do you have mixed feelings about the protests against government spying on churches? I don't like the abuse of power any more than the next Quaker, but if we truly avoid objectifying human beings, we should not see the government spy as any less of a human than the ambulatory mixed bags of motives that the rest of us are.

In fact, should not the person who represents the FBI or CIA or terrorism task force have every right to hear the glorious good news of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, as we understand it? If our peace witness has integrity—if prophetic expression and nonviolent direct action are truly aspects of evangelism—should we not eagerly welcome those least likely to have already enlisted in the Lamb's War?

Planning for prayer-based civil disobedience and other direct confrontations with evil may be another matter entirely. The three scholars whom Herod asked to report back after their visit to Jesus (Matthew 2:1-12) were warned in a dream to disobey Herod and go home by another route. There may be times when we too need to avoid Herod and confine our counsels to those with equal commitment to prayer and mutual accountability. But in all other cases, I think we should focus more on the integrity of our evangelism (including its components of radical discipleship) than on worrying about who might be listening. We have no right to assume that anyone is beyond the reach of the Holy Spirit.

Borrowed time

Ever since the Christian Peacemakers were kidnapped, I have felt as if I'm in a slightly different dimension. Time is slower. Perspectives have changed: some things are closer, some are farther away. Eternity seems closer, yesterday's imperatives have faded.

After a few days of near-constant surveillance of the World Wide Web for news of our CPT hostages, I've had to back away in favor of a more continuous stream of prayer. I've caught myself offering Lenten-style bargains with God: here's what I'll give up if you'll just preserve those men, if you'll just end the episode with no loss of life.

Other sites and weblogs have done a marvelous job of compiling links to make it easier to stay informed. Here I will just list two pages that somehow had a healing effect on me without either encouraging denial or lapsing into romanticism:

• Iraq Dispatches, Dahr Jamail.


• Amanda.

Before I represent myself as some kind of detached, peaceful, contemplative adept, I should admit that I've kept the little BBC pop-up news bulletin utility loaded on the computer I use for my work every day. When it goes off with its dramatic bulletin music, I jump in my seat.

One more Web site. Olympic View Friends Church in Tacoma, Washington, USA, has a podcast page on its Web site. CPT Hebron/Baghdad member Matt Chander and Northwest Yearly Meeting's peace education coordinator, Kayla Edin, spoke recently and the recording is linked to that page.

I had been wondering how the Taizé community in France was faring since the death of its founder Brother Roger. I was glad to see an update: in a recent Books and Culture post on the Christianity Today Web site, Otto Selles of Calvin College's program in Grenoble, France, described a Calvin visit to Taizé.

Not surprisingly, Otto Selles had an urgent question of his own for the Brothers, one that resonates even more on the larger world stage:

"I broke into the discussion to ask the question that had been bothering me since my arrival in France. How could one explain Brother Roger's murder, which occurred in the Church of Reconciliation? 'He was a figure of peace,' Brother Pedro answered. 'Evil cannot resist goodness.'"

Perhaps evil cannot resist goodness, but evil does put up a fight.

Christianity Today's site also includes Cindy Crosby's intriguing conversation with Anne Rice, best known for books that are, shall we say, not in total alignment with the Christian Booksellers Association market. The article is entitled, "Interview with a Penitent." She expresses an unequivocal Christian faith: Referring to her new novel, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, she says: "I'm not offering agnostic explanations. He is real. He worked miracles. He is the Son of God!"

Anne Rice's faith is probably not in strict conformity with some conservatives' preferred Christian celebrity-conversion script. According to the article, "Rice's own website, www.annerice.com, is a platform for everything from impassioned updates on the needs of post-hurricane New Orleans to Democratic politics and her views on controversial issues (her son, Christopher, also a novelist, is homosexual, and Anne is 'an advocate for Christian and Jewish gays and their right to worship and to take the sacraments').

"To Christians who disagree with her views, Rice says, 'Christians have been arguing with each other for 2,000 years. ... What I hope for is that we can love one another, no matter how much we disagree; that we can embrace one another, no matter how tough the arguing becomes. ... If we love, we can overcome much of what divides us as people.'"

You mean we can both love and argue? The newly penitent novelist may be catching heat from some segments of her public, but it's clear she's never been a denominational bureaucrat. (Just kidding.) (No I'm not. Within three months of my becoming general secretary of FUM, one of its member yearly meetings left.) (Yes I am.) (No ... well, to be continued!)

You always hurt the ones you love: I have been thinking about another Rice, namely Condoleeza, her European journey, and her reported assignment to tell Europeans to "back off" from their fastidious doubts regarding detainees and extrajudicial transfers. For example, this New York Times coverage (Joel Brinkley, 12-5-05):

She made an effort to frame the debate as one over the effectiveness of terror enforcement and not over the propriety of holding suspects indefinitely in secret prisons.

"We consider the captured members of Al Qaeda and its allies to be unlawful combatants who may be held, in accordance with the law of war, to keep them from killing innocents," she said. "We must bring terrorists to justice wherever possible."

The European nations must decide, she added, whether they "wish to work with us to prevent terrorist attacks against their own country or other countries."

Apparently the European nations are not expected to ask us to decide whether we wish to work with them to prevent terrorist attacks on our country or other countries. Arrogance has become as natural as breathing. This is a juicy example of the American "my way or the highway" foreign policy that Richard Florida cites as destructive to our own best interests. (See relevant section at end of this post.)

Maybe this talent for unreflective arrogance is also what explains our rhetorical pistol-whippings of our friends and allies over their doubts about our messianic foreign policy, even as we kiss up to authoritarian regimes whenever it is convenient. Do we want bases in nations of the former Soviet Union? If so, their crackdowns on dissenters and religious minorities are suavely overlooked. Do we have a disastrous proportion of our national prestige invested in a horribly distorting war in Iraq? Then maybe it makes sense to downplay apartheid in Israel, religious repression in Saudi Arabia, and a few election awkwardnesses in Egypt.

Rice talks about "bringing terrorists to justice." When does justice mean "justice" and when does it mean "smackdown or worse, on our terms" or a particularly gruesome variation on "good enough for government work"? Today the Law Lords of the U.K. decided that evidence gained through torture, by whatever route received, by whomever or wherever inflicted, is inadmissible in any British court—not because of idealism but of the utter realism of knowing, as one of the Law Lords put it, that if we give one concession to the use of torture, it will spread like a virus. There is never ever a case when we can entrust fallible human human with absolute unchecked power over other human beings. Never.

Why Russians don't smile. At last, some thoughts on an ancient puzzle: Why the lack of ready American-style smiles on Russian faces? Thank goodness for Konstantin at Russian Blog, who bases his explanation on Russian culture's peasant-village roots.

When you live in Siberia in a small rural commune you should be very distrustful of every stranger. Moreover – strangers should feel immediately that you are hostile towards them. Only when a stranger proves beyond doubt that (1) he wants to belong to the commune, (2) he accepts all laws and traditions of this particular commune, (3) he can be trusted; only then he is accepted. And an accepted member of the commune enjoys so much trust, friendliness, openheartedness and sincerity that is very surprising to Europeans and who think that Russian openness is over the top.

It is not for me to judge the validity of Konstantin's thesis, but it does not entirely conflict the explanation in Alexander Elder's 1998 book Rubles to Dollars, if you stretch things a bit and grant that in some ways the Iron Curtain turned Russia into one huge village:

After seventy years of "breeding the New Soviet Man," little wonder that there are quite a few specimens still walking around. You know you've run into one of them when you encounter dull laziness or unprovoked rudeness and suspicion. Modern Russian slang for this is sovok—derived from Soviet, meaning a leftover of the old system. Those traits are rapidly becoming less common, to the point where a Moscow financial weekly named Kapital instituted a "sovok award" for readers who sent in examples of such encounters. Still the low-grade sovok is more widespread than Russians like to think.

Many Russians consider openness and trust, the qualities we value so highly in the US, as silly and childish. [Remember, this book was written before 9/11 and the Patriot Act.] In the old repressive society a trusting person was a fool. To this day in Russia you keep running into secretiveness and suspicion, even duplicity inherited from the communist years. When you sense those traits in a person do not waste your time trying to build mutual trust, American style. People who viscerally and illogically mistrust you have been damaged—leave them alone. In general, you'll find younger people more Western in this regard.

The repressive Soviet regime burrowed deep into people's lives. The KGB informers watched everyone, and the system punished deviants. People were fired from jobs for listening to jazz and sent to labor camps for telling politically incorrect jokes. You always had to watch yourself—always on guard, ready for trouble. It was better to maintain an impassive face. A person who looked upbeat was more likely to come under suspicion. "What are you smiling about—you have more than others?" was a common refrain.

After years of living under such pressure, many Soviets acquired a sullen, suspicious look. It became indelibly impressed on their faces; it showed in their posture—tense shoulders, rigid neck, and perpetually darting eyes. The look became so ingrained that even today I often recognize people from the Soviet Union on the streets of America. I see them from half a block away. Even if they have lived here for years and wear Western clothes, you can't miss that tense and hypervigilant look.

The stiff Soviet look has begun to fade in recent years, especially among the young. Russians not only dress better, their body language is changing. It used to be that only foreigners held their heads high or smiled riding Moscow's palatial subway. Many Russians today look very Western; they carry themselves as free people, in a manner that would look perfectly normal in New York, Paris, or London.

Seven years after Elder's book was published, the number of sovoks is probably much lower.

Although Elder himself is Russian, I can't help feeling a twinge of regret at the sovok stereotype. (The context of his book is important: he's urging Americans to invest in Russia, and trying to help investors assess risks and benefits. His advice to a psychologist or evangelist might be very different.) Konstantin's references to "over the top" openness, extravagant hospitality, and limitless generosity once a friendship has been established, are absolutely true.

Aside from "village" explanations, differences in personal security and affluence, and the sometimes bizarre American need to be liked, the final answer to the smile gap between Americans and Russians might simply lie in a few percentage points' difference in the proportion of introverts and extroverts. My guess is that there are more introverts in Russia. And as an introvert myself, I feel quite normal there. Of course, Russians might have a different assessment. Something along the lines of "all the same, he smiles all the time for no reason. Can he really be normal?" (Он не, так сказать, "наш".)

Define 'reckless'

A New York Times story (November 29) included the following assessment: "A human rights advocate in Baghdad, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Christian Peacemaker Teams have acted with reckless disregard for their own safety by moving unprotected through communities generally hostile to the foreign presence. The rights advocate said the group's representatives were entering mosques in predominantly Sunni neighborhoods to offer their services in helping find missing family members, were accompanying families fleeing to the border, and were trying to organize prison visits for relatives of inmates."

Does anyone else see a disconnect between the first and the second sentence of this quotation?

Everything we have heard from participants in the Christian Peacemaker Teams demonstrates that their "disregard for their own safety" was anything but reckless. (If I understand correctly, "reck-less" means "without reckoning.") For a beautiful example of the documented reckoning of the CPTers, see Jim Loney's reflection, "A tale of two fathers," in the CPT archives. Jim is one of those still being held at this time.

My interpretation of their reckoning: There is no true community and no true security outside the realm of love.