Blogcritics Author: Steven Hart

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Fond Thoughts For The Da Vinci Code

Steven Hart — Tue, 23 May 2006 06:54:24 EDT

I tried to read The Da Vinci Code, really I did. I mean, who could say no to a thriller incorporating blasphemy, sacrilege, conspiratorial theories about Catholic doctrine multiple murders, and art criticism? But after a couple of tries, it always ran out of steam around page 20 or so. I had to admit I was licked. Acres of dull, expository dialogue written with all the flair of a fortune-cookie message do that to me. If I've ever read a worse-written book than The Da Vinci Code, I can only assume the memory is buried under multiple layers of psychological scar tissue, a trauma to be recovered only through years of hypnotic therapy that I will never have. It's one thing to be puzzled about how a book could become a bestseller; it's another to put a book down wondering how it even got published.But now that the movie is out and breaking the bank worldwide, I've grown rather fond of The Da Vinci Code, if only because it has the fundies and the wingers in such a tizzy: The battle is radicalizing. Big Love and The Da Vinci Code are far more direct and brazen attacks on tradition than we might have anticipated just a few years ago. Conservatives are the targets, and Hollywood is aiming and shooting repeatedly. Give credit to Tom Hanks, by the way. As producer of Big Love and star of The Da Vinci Code, he is clearly one of the captains of the not-so-secret conspiracy.Whoa! Stanley Kurtz (quoted via Andrew Sullivan) writes almost as badly as Dan Brown and may even exceed him at devising rat's nest plotlines of tangled conspiracies. To the Christianist hysterics -- the ones who screech about persecution because the eagle on the national seal hasn't been replaced with a 3-D image of Jesus -- The Da Vinci Code is the latest and most insidious attack on religion from the left. How long before Pat Robertson starts calling on God to lob a few lightning bolts at Dan Brown and Ron Howard?I think lefties should do everything possible to encourage this hysteria. If MoveOn.org could endorse a claptrap film like The Day After Tomorrow, then let it take the lead in sponsoring weekly bus trips to local cineplexes just to bump up the box office for The Da Vinci Code and see if we can knock The Passion of the Christ out of the Top 10 moneymakers chart. Now that's a culture war I can really get behind!

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.

Why There Won't Be A Democratic Landslide in November

Steven Hart — Fri, 19 May 2006 12:38:34 EDT

Bush's poll numbers are in the toilet, the war is a disaster (Iraq now, Afghanistan soon), the GOP is sodden with corruption and scandal, so obviously conditions are ripe for a Democratic landslide in November -- right?As my answer, let me cite a recent statement by the GOP's ace sleaze-weasel, Karl Rove: "We're going to be fine in November." Rove's got it right.As I see it, there are two ways to start a landslide: either you push things until they start rolling, or you make a noise so loud that something on the verge of collapsing actually shakes loose and starts tumbling.I don't see the Democratic Party leadership doing much pushing, and they sure aren't making much noise. All I hear is the mild cheeping of Nancy Pelosi assuring Tim Russert that the Democrats would never dream of doing something so gauche as censure or impeach a president who lied the country into an unnecessary war.I'd love to see a political leader give Russert a disgusted look and say, "Gee, Lil' Russ, just because you've forgotten how to do your job doesn't mean everyone else has to." I'd also love to see a political party that honors fighters like Russ Feingold and tells a mingy appeaser like Hillary Clinton to give all that money she's raised to somebody who'll put it to good use, and then go wind-surfing with John Kerry. But I guess we'll have to wait for some other political party to come along before that happens.We've been down this primrose path before, you know. Once again, the Democratic leadership thinks all its candidates have to do is stand around looking smart while the Republicans sink of their own weight. When the polls are with the Republicans, the Democrats sit tight for fear of offending someone. When the polls are against the Republicans, the Democrats sit tight for fear of re-energizing the Republican base. And when Republicans win the election, they sit tight and make delusional noises about bipartisanship. They read stories about rebellion in the Republican ranks and figure they can just wait for the GOP to kill itself off, then walk back into the White House and start airing out the rooms.But the Republicans don't do "sitting tight," and fights over the soul of the GOP get settled pretty quickly. Just ask Arlen Specter. Last week he was supposed to be the only thing standing between us and a dictatorship. The latest revelations about Bush's domestic spying operation had him on the warpath. This week he rolled over and begged for the party leadership to rub his tummy, the way a fat, spayed cur always will.They also don't worry too much about polls. They know that their task is simply to keep their heads above water during the election, that's it. Once they're back in power, they can go back to doing whatever they like and to hell with the Zogby polls. They might even make Tom DeLay chairman of the RNC just to give their Fox News lickspittles something to coo and squeal about.So I'm here to tell you that unless something major happens, don't expect any tectonic shifts in power come November. If the Democrats were in the real estate business, they'd tell their clients to buy houses on mountain tops and then sit there waiting for the winds of change to erode them down into beachfront property. I'm always open to being pleasantly surprised. But I'm not holding my breath.

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.

Minamata 50 Years Later

Steven Hart — Fri, 12 May 2006 18:07:05 EDT

It began with the cats. In the mid-1950s, dozens of pet cats that roamed freely through the Japanese fishing town of Minamata started acting strangely. They yowled in their ragged cat voices and ran in circles. After a time, they began throwing themselves off jetties to drown in Minamata Bay. No one could understand what was going on.Not long after that, some people in the town started trembling and walking oddly, looking dazed, and often shouting incomprehensibly as they stumbled through the town. Some suffered interludes of blurred vision and dizziness; others fell into convulsions on the street and lapsed into comas. "Minamata Disease," as it became known, eventually affected thousands of people, many of them babies born with crippling deformities.The first four deaths from Minamata disease were officially reported on May 1, 1956, beginning a decades-long battle to discover what turned out to be a manmade scourge. There were two industries on that remote southern island of Kyushu: fishing and a petrochemical factory run by the powerful Chisso Corp. Since 1941, Chisso had been making vinyl chloride at the plant and dumping mercury-contaminated sludge into Minamata Bay where the mercury found its way into the fish and, eventually, the people.It took another four years and a riot by fishermen at the Kyushu plant to awaken the Japanese press to what was going on, and then decades of legal and political action to bring Chisso to account. The wrangling and buck-passing continue to this day, even as a ceremony to mark the 50th anniversary of that first report was recently held, with prime minister Junichiro Koizumi present to offer apologies on behalf of the government for not acting quickly enough to stop the spread of the disease.America and much of the rest of the world didn't know about what was going on until 1972, when the great photographer W. Eugene Smith and his wife published Minamata, a book-length photoessay about the human and environmental toll wrought by Chisso's pollution. Smith was equally legendary for the probing human quality of his work, his thorny integrity about the way it was presented, and his willingness to take insane risks to get a picture. In 1945, while chronicling front-line fighting on Okinawa, Smith suffered facial and hand injuries from a Japanese shell fragment that required years of treatment. The Great War correspondent Ernie Pyle, who was with Smith on Okinawa, predicted that Smith's idealism would either break him or kill him. Pyle's prophecy came true during the Minamata project: after being threatened several times, Smith was attacked by hired thugs who grabbed him by the legs and swung him into a concrete wall. The injuries contributed to Smith's early death in 1978 -- hastened by years of alcohol and drug abuse, as well as destitution brought on by his refusal to allow commercial magazines to mess with his images.I was barely into my teens when Minamata was published, and I can still feel its impact across the years. The image that has stayed with me is the one that came to embody the Minamata tragedy for the entire world: "Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath." It shows a young girl, her body twisted and wrenched by mercury poisoning in the womb, being washed in a stand-up bath. The terrible damage done to the girl's body and the infinite tenderness with which her mother bathes her are captured magnificently by a great journalist whose work helped alert the world to a great crime.

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.

Ted Hughes Gets An Appropriate Memorial

Steven Hart — Sun, 7 May 2006 10:46:56 EDT

Time to buy a pair of Wellies and book a flight to England. The Ted Hughes Poetry Trail has just been dedicated in Devon, in southwest England, and it sounds like just the sort of memorial any writer would want.This memorial to one of the English language's finest and fiercest poets (who moved to Devon in 1961 and lived there until his death in 1998) consists of a trail marked with posts, each dedicated to one of Hughes' poems. One of the stops along the trail is dedicated to "The Thought-Fox," which ranks just behind Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead" on my All-Time Favorite Poems list.The poem describes the process of literary creation with the precision and economy of a great watercolor, and as with all of Hughes's best poems, it can leave you feeling that a ghost has crossed through the room and trailed its fingers along your back as it passed:I imagine this midnight moment's forest: Something else is alive Besides the clock's loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move.I was introduced to Hughes's work through, of all things, the lyrics printed on the back cover of Paul Simon's album Still Crazy After All These Years, which offered a few lines from Crow as the epigraph to "My Little Town." That was a reckless move on Simon's part - "My Little Town" (the occasion for the first of his money-spinning reunions with Art Garfunkel) is one of his tritest songs, and those few lines of Ted Hughes annihilated just about every word of Simon's album. Until then, I'd only vaguely known of Hughes as the husband of Sylvia Plath, one of the original Womens Studies Martyrs, but I quickly tracked down Crow and Hawk in the Rain and from then on I was hooked.How appropriate to use a nature trail to memorialize a poet whose work was so fully grounded in the natural world. Hughes's feeling for the English landscape was such that he requested his name be placed on a memorial stone in a remote area of Dartmoor, between the sources of the rivers Teign, Dart, Taw and East Okement.Maybe I'll remember something more later on, but right now the closest comparison I can think of for this memorial would be the series of plaques along the streets of Dublin that mark Leo Bloom's small-time epic journey on June 16, as described in James Joyce's Ulysses.Maybe that's a bad comparison - Joyce hated Dublin with some of the same green rancor Frank Sinatra reserved for Hoboken. Hughes, on the other hand, not only loved the English countryside, he was for several years the poet laureate of Old Blighty, in which capacity he would compose private poems to be sent to the Queen. (Of all the privileges of royalty, that sounds like one of the most enviable.) Looks like Devon has found a perfect way to return the favor.

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.

Si Se Puede: Amnesty For The Immigrants

Steven Hart — Thu, 4 May 2006 13:38:33 EDT

Not far from where I work is the Central Jersey burg of New Brunswick, which was still being called "Little Newark" during my bright college days in the 1970s. It didn't get that name because it had a great neighborhood for Portuguese restaurants, either. The only thing that kept the city breathing was the continuing presence of Rutgers University and, most crucially, Johnson & Johnson, which gave the city planners a nucleus to build around when redevelopment efforts began in earnest during the 1980s.Much of that redevelopment was a study in low comedy. The main drag, George Street, was designated a pedestrian plaza, and the city spent a fortune tearing up the asphalt and laying down attractive brickwork. Only after it was done did the city realize that city traffic had nowhere to go without George Street, so it was reopened to vehicular traffic and the brick pavement promptly collapsed under the weight.Stories like that played out over and over again as the city poured money into the downtown area. Don't get me started on the Ferren Parking Deck and the upstairs space that state senator John Lynch's wife tried to use for various business ventures like Club New York and the Hungry I restaurant, all of which fell to Earth faster and harder than a spent Saturn rocket booster. Only now, after about a quarter century, have the efforts really begun to pay off.I'm not here to slag redevelopment - New Brunswick needed resuscitation. But while all kinds of public-private efforts were made to revitalize the city's downtown, a more natural kind of revitalization was taking place less than a mile from George Street.All along the French Street corridor, just south of the Robert Wood Johnson medical multiplex, Latino immigrants -- mostly Mexican -- have been turning a former war zone into a thriving community. My gourmand friends regularly head down there every Saturday to buy handmade tamales from a woman who sells them from the back door of her kitchen. There are a score of good, cheap Mexican joints serving the best and most authentic food you'll find in New Jersey. Cinco de Mayo gets to be a little bigger deal each year.The area has its problems, notably gang activity - I catch glimpses of Latin Kings iconography here and there, and I have no doubt the clashes between American-born nortenos and fresh arrivals from the old country get as nasty here as they do in Salinas and other Latin-intensive regions.But I also see families, and a sense of life and vitality along a street that used to be bare and threatening. I'm sorry to see the formerly hot music bars like the Roxy go by the boards, but that's what happens to scenes - they get hot and they burn out. What's happening here now feels organic and permanent. In another decade or so, I can easily imagine the area becoming a tourist attraction.And I'll bet a significant percentage of the people living here are illegals. And I for one couldn't care less. To put it even more bluntly, I don't give a shit.Even some of my more fair-minded and liberal acquaintances betray a slightly weird streak of nativism when the topic of amnesty for illegals comes up. "You wanna reward people for breaking the law?" they ask, and I say, "If the law was written by WASPs to discriminate against dark-skinned people, then frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn who breaks it.""But there's no room for everyone who wants to come into America. We have to draw the line somewhere," they cry, and I say, pointing to New Brunswick, "They're here now and they're already making a contribution." I'm not interested in creating a guest-worker caste of second-class citizens just like they have in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. I don't care if they don't know how to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner."They fought their way to get here because they wanted something better, which is the exact same reason my relatives wanted to come here. And if they didn't come through Ellis Island to get chalk marks put on their backs and their names anglicized, all I can say is, Big fucking deal.You wanna build a wall along the southern border? Fine, but make sure it gets built behind the Minutemen. And as soon as it's done, chuck Michelle Malkin, Lou Dobbs, Hugh Hewitt and Pat Buchanan over the top, along with every over winger hysteric who promotes fantasies about al-Qaeda recruits wading across the Rio Grande. Ditto for any redneck who makes cracks today about the "wetback walkout."One of the glories of America is that it was not founded as a homeland for a particular religious or ethnic group. It was founded on an idea, and if you like the idea and want to live it, that makes you an American. The illegals now living in New Brunswick are more in touch with that principle than any of the hatemongers frothing away on the cable shows, and the country that can acknowledge them and welcome them will feel a lot more like the real America than the gnarled, desiccated wasteland of the mind Lou Dobbs and his buddies would like to see.

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.

Wit vs. Humor: Why Stephen Colbert's Performance Was Masterful

Steven Hart — Wed, 3 May 2006 14:35:07 EDT

Even though Stephen Colbert is being showered with well-deserved praise for his masterful performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner, I think something crucial needs to be emphasized -- the sheer nerve of it. Imagine if Jonathan Swift had gone into the king's court and read A Modest Proposal aloud to the assembled nobles ("Are you suggesting we are cannibals, Dr. Swift?") and you get the idea.It's one thing to march into the lion's den and yank a fistful of hairs from his mane. It's quite another to march into a den full of people who think they're lions and rub their noses in the fact that they're nothing more than fat, spayed tabby cats who are less interested in exposing the powerful than they are in curling up by their feet.That's what Stephen Colbert did at the White House Correspondents Dinner, and for his perfidy he will now be subject to their endless mewling and kitty-kat clawing. Even if he loses his nerve and backtracks with an apology -- something I don't think for a second he would actually do -- he will always be their target. After all, the eunuchs of the court were often the most devious and vengeful of the players surrounding the king.Uberblogger Matt Drudge is arching his back and hissing that Colbert's ratings aren't as high as the Faux News evening lineup -- a pretty sad line of attack, but there will be others. The master narrative now taking shape around that scalding evening is that Colbert the professional comedian got hardly any laughs, while Bush and his doppelganger rocked the house with boffo guffaws. Of course he did! This is, after all, the same crowd that whooped and chuckled a couple of years ago as Bush showed slides and pretended to look for weapons of mass destruction under the furniture. Their laughter is a badge of dishonor. Courting their praise was never Colbert's goal.In his book Paradigms Lost, John Simon points out that humor and wit are nearly polar opposites. Humor is inclusive: it invites everyone to join in on the laugh and feel like one of the crowd. Wit is exclusive: it addresses itself only to those who are in the know, and if the other people in the room feel uncomfortable because they don't get it -- hey, that's a bonus. Colbert's performance was a display of wit at its most lethally cutting. He went into a room with the most powerful man in the world and his courtiers, and he excluded them from the land of the free and the home of the brave.If the White House courtiers had an ounce of self-respect, they'd all book a flight to Alaska, find a good-sized ice floe and shove themselves out into the ocean. Instead, they'll just go about their routines. They may walk funny for a little while, after the way they've been used, but after six years of covering the Bush administration, they're probably accustomed to that kind of thing.

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.

Another Turning Point in Iraq

Steven Hart — Tue, 2 May 2006 15:59:43 EDT

We already know that the invasion of Iraq has turned a land once governed by a toothless secular dictatorship into a lawless training ground where jihadis can hone their skills in operations against U.S. soldiers. But now it turns out that American street gangs, taking advantage of the lower recruitment standards made necessary by Bush's abuse of the military, are getting their members enlisted in order to capitalize on their military training and connections when they return to their neighborhoods. As the Chicago Sun-Times reports:The Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings and Vice Lords were born decades ago in Chicago's most violent neighborhoods. Now, their gang graffiti is showing up 6,400 miles away in one of the world's most dangerous neighborhoods - Iraq. Armored vehicles, concrete barricades and bathroom walls all have served as canvasses for their spray-painted gang art. At Camp Cedar II, about 185 miles southeast of Baghdad, a guard shack was recently defaced with "GDN" for Gangster Disciple Nation, along with the gang's six-pointed star and the word "Chitown," a soldier who photographed it said.... Of paramount concern is whether gang-affiliated soldiers' training will make them deadly urban warriors when they return to civilian life and if some are using their access to military equipment to supply gangs at home, said Barfield and other experts.I tell you, this Iraq war idea has been a winner all around. We remove one of Iran's most bitter enemies and replace him with a nascent Muslim theocracy wedded to Tehran. We give radical Islamist groups a once-in-a-lifetime recruitment tool and a training area for their terrorists. We give already violent American street gangs the training they need to turn city streets into free-fire zones. And we spend ourselves into the poorhouse doing it. Brilliant!There's an old ethnic joke: How do you set an ethnic up with a small business? You give him a big business, and then you wait.Here's the 21st century version: How do you make George W. Bush the ruler of a Third World nation?Put him in charge of a superpower, and then wait.

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.

I Got Your War On Christianity Right Here

Steven Hart — Mon, 1 May 2006 10:38:26 EDT

For all the whining about the "war on Christians" we hear from the fundie set, can you even imagine this show airing on American television? The Root of All Evil? is a two-part series airing in the U.K. on Channel 4 in which Richard Dawkins, the internationally known biologist and evolutionary theorist (his 1976 book The Selfish Gene was a worldwide best seller) delivers a thoroughly reasoned polemic against religion. Not a comparative study -- a full-out attack on faith itself.The show's website notes that, though religions preach morality, peace and hope, in fact, says Dawkins, they bring intolerance, violence and destruction. The growth of extreme fundamentalism in so many religions across the world not only endangers humanity but, he argues, is in conflict with the trend over thousands of years of history for humanity to progress -- to become more enlightened and more tolerant.A provocative thesis, but not a crazy one. The historic record certainly bears him out. So why can't Dawkins get a platform on American television?If Pat Robertson can go on television and call upon God to redirect hurricanes and bump off Supreme Court justices, and if presidential candidates have to kiss Jerry Falwell's ring to bolster their chances of getting elected, then why shouldn't religion be subject to criticism in mainstream venues? If archbishops can threaten people with excommunication if they vote for pro-choice candidates, while creationists work around the clock to dumb down our schools, then why shouldn't religion be given the same level of skepticism as any other aspect of public life?When a head case like Fred Phelps uses his church as a platform to attack gays and pickets the funerals of soldiers killed in Iraq (like Robertson and Falwell, Phelps believes every bad thing that happens to Americans shows God's wrath over our tolerance of homosexuality), we often hear the defense that they do not represent "true" Christianity. But how do we determine what is meant by "true" Christianity unless we are ready to examine it with a cold, skeptical eye? And will the answer to that question mean anything unless it is given by people who are ready to infuriate a great many believers?Interesting questions. Unfortunately, I don't expect to see any of them even dealt with, much less answered, on American television.

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.

CD Review: Bruce Springsteen, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions - Poguetry in Motion

Steven Hart — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:30:31 EDT

Jersey boy Bruce Springsteen's new disc, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, is the best Pogues record I've ever heard. I mean that as a compliment, too -- I play If I Should Fall From Grace With God a lot more than I play Born to Run, and We Shall Overcome has that same perfect mix of folk directness and rock and roll energy -- all it needs is a few pennywhistles and you'd swear you were listening to "Fairytale of New York." On a couple of tunes, Springsteen even tries out a growly Irish accent that makes him sound like Shane MacGowan, only a Shane MacGowan who isn't about to puke into the bass drum and pass out dangling by his shirt collar from the mike stand.If you thought Springsteen doing an album of folk standards was going to sound like compulsory chapel and a side order of wheat germ with broccoli, then disabuse yourself of that notion immediately. This is a fun record. I bought it in Hoboken, put it in the Alpine on Observer Highway and was singing along full blast by the time I got to the Pulaski Skyway. The mix of accordion, banjo and fiddle is too infectious to believe, and everybody on the record clearly had a whale of a time - a joy they put across most effectively.This is the New Year's Eve celebration you always wanted to be invited to, the bar where juke box has nothing but great songs and everybody sings along, and the house party that gets rolling early and doesn't let up until the morning paper hits the front door. If a record can get me to sit still for "John Henry" again, you know it's got to be good.

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.

How Dare You be Intolerant of My Tolerance for Your Intolerance About Tolerance!

Steven Hart — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 08:27:14 EDT

In one of the comments fields at the science blog Pharyngula, I came across this little gem from somebody styling himself nate-dogg: I just so happened to see Bill Maher in concert last night. He was talking about the religious right and said something like, "They tell me I don't respect their religion. Well, I don't. But I don't have to. I tolerate it, which is all that's required of me as an American. It'd be nice if they'd return the favor." The comment comes in response to P.Z. Myers' takedown of this piece about atheists in Raw Story. I don't have the time or inclination to say anything about it right now. But Maher's remark gets at something that I really like about America, and points up something that I find really tiresome about the way Amy Sullivan and other theorists from the pews are always berating the left for not "respecting" religion.About 20 minutes south of where I live is a big Islamic center, right off Route One, near a burrito joint. About 10 minutes north is a Pepto Bismol-colored Hindu temple covered with intricate panels, right across from a high school. Along the way to either one, I pass churches and synagogues. I have yet to see any Buddhist temples, but that's okay - I saw a couple in the Yellow Pages a little while ago, so I know they're around.A secular society makes it possible for all these religions and denominations to go about their business without worrying about what I think - or, for that matter, what anybody else outside their faith thinks. Bill O'Reilly can bloviate all he likes about how "secularists" are wrecking the country, but the fact of the matter is that by leaving government out of religion, America allows all religions to flourish.I like living in a country where Diwali, Ramadan, Christmas and Hannukah all have room to be celebrated or ignored. That's a big part of what America is about, and a big part of the reason why Republicans, when they made their unholy alliance with the religious right, forfeited a large measure of their claim to be true patriots. When Jerry Falwell and his ilk screech about Christians being persecuted, what they really mean is that Christians (that is, their relatively small sect within Christianity) can't call all the shots. Well, they shouldn't call all the shots - no religion should.Describing the early pagan phase of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wrote that "the various modes of worship which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful . . . Toleration produced not only a mutual indulgence, but even religious concord."That sounds like a good formula for any society to follow - especially ours.

Steven Hart is a freelance writer based in New Jersey. He blogs about politics and popular culture at The Opinion Mill. He also blogs about writing and more personal matters at StevenHartSite.