Promised review catch-up

 This is one I picked up just on spec and it has proved to be one of the best reads so far this year: Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible  by Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet. You may read a very long interview with the two authors/editors there. As Kevin Holtsberry’s review on BlogCritic says, the book is hard to describe, but it works brilliantly for me.

In its most basic form it is a series of essays alternated with stories from life on the road in search of the weird underside of spirituality in America. The road stories are told by the web site’s founding editors Peter Manseau and Jeff Sharlet. The essays are told by a variety of writers but are a loose attempt to recreate scripture for the modern world. These essays take on various books of the Bible but from sort of angry, modern, heretical perspective. It is as if the authors approach the Bible not as divine revelation but cultural and historical literature to be deconstructed and reinvented. Instead of the traditional Christian “what is God trying to tell me”, they ask “what does this say about humanity?” The result is a sort of religious and literary anthropology. The perspective isn’t exactly hostile but neither is it particularly sympathetic either. It has a certain cynical fascination; interested in exploring the ideas but ultimately rejecting the traditional answers.

When it works it can be quite interesting…

Creeping Commonwealth takeover?

Look sometime tomorrow at tonight’s 7.30 Report. See also Tas hospital takeover an election stunt: Rudd.

Not just about Dr Haneef: some terrorism and civil liberties questions

Years ago when The Red Dragon became the secretary of the South Coast branch of the Communist Party she rang me in Glebe to warn me that ASIO was listening to her conversations, including of course any she had with me. She knew her phone was bugged because one night a voice cut into one of her conversations thus: “Hey Fred (or whoever), would you take this one? I want to take a leak…” Subsequently she often apologised to the bug for how boring her phone calls were, mostly about Bridge and recipes, since the Dragon was an avid Bridge player and had done a cordon bleu course. “As if I would plot revolution over the phone,” she said.

I doubt ASIO bothers with the Dragon nowadays, but she still cannot enter the USA.

Today, as Lexcen points out in his comment on Jim Belshaw’s Haneef case…, things are different. For a start we have at our disposal rather more channels of communication than we had in the 1980s, and while extremist Muslim terrorism did exist it had not come home to us as it has this century. My concern, and I think Jim’s also, is the degree to which we sacrifice our own liberties in the interests, or perceived interests, of security, or in other words how far we compromise what we are meant to be defending.

Last night SBS ran the PBS Frontline documentary Spying on the Home Front which raised such issues very dramatically.