Not that bin Laden—his son, Omar, one of the terrorist’s nineteen children. He wants to dispel the myth that all Muslims are terrorists and become “an ambassador for peace.”

Fine.

Step one: Cough up the old man. We’re not buying that he doesn’t have email: EVERYONE HAS EMAIL. How else does he pay his VISA bill?

Step two: Get a haircut and turn down that damn rock and roll music.

Step three: Your wife has been married five times? You may want to keep one eye open for al-Qaeda and the other open for a good food-taster.

In other bioethics news…

A group of scientists in California is reporting that they have successfully created human clones. The AP story and NBC video are here. The paper, in the journal Stem Cells, is here.

Earlier this fall, the Connecticut Catholic bishops decided to comply with a state law requiring all hospitals to administer the morning after pill–Plan B. In a daily article for our homepage, Michael Augros wrote an open letter to the bishops asking them to reconsider. Augros, a professor of philosophy at the Center for Higher Studies in Thornwood, New York, pointed to scientific studies that suggested the active drug in Plan B–levonorgestrel–could function not only as a contraceptive, but as an abortifacient. He wrote to the bishops:

Your statement that “the administration of Plan B pills in this instance [in Catholic hospitals and to victims of rape and after a pregnancy test] cannot be judged to be the commission of an abortion because of such doubt about how Plan B pills and similar drugs work and because of the current impossibility of knowing from the ovulation test whether a new life is present” is puzzling to me. That is, I wonder how the matter can be as doubtful as you suggest. Is there really any doubt that Plan B is at least believed by medical experts and lawmakers to act in what Catholics must consider an abortifacient mode if it acts after fertilization but prior to implantation?

The new issue of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly may help explain the doubt to Augros. Writing in the Winter 2007 issue, Rev. Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco, O.P., professor of biology at Providence College, and an expert pro-life Catholic bioethicist, concludes his article, “Is Plan B an Abortifacient? A Critical Look at the Scientific Evidence” (sub req), with this:

Studies published in the past few months provide mounting evidence that levonorgestrel has little or no effect on post-fertilization events. In other words, given the limitations of scientific certitude, they suggest that Plan B, when administered once, is not an abortifacient. These human studies correlate well with earlier findings in rodents and monkeys that convincingly showed that the postcoital administration of levonorgestrel in amounts several times higher than typical doses given to women does not interfere with the post-fertilization processes required for mammalian embryo implantation. The evidence also addresses what until now has been a nagging, unanswerable question for pharmacologists: Why would levonorgestrel, a progesterone agonist that mimics the effect of progesterone, prevent implantation, when progesterone produced from the corpus luteum immediately after ovulation actually promotes implantation by converting the endometrium to decidua? Answer: It does not.

But what about the manufacturer’s label? Much has been made about the claim made by Barr Pharmaceuticals that Plan B “may also prevent fertilization of a released egg (joining of sperm and egg) or attachment of a fertilized egg to the uterus (implantation).” Labels mean nothing without the scientific data to back up their claims.

I doubt that this article is the definitive last word on the issue, but you should give the entire article a read. If you’re not a subscriber to the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, you should be.

Film at eleven.

Outrageous! Next thing you know they’ll be telling us that spaghetti really comes from China, or that french fries come from Belgium, or that Catherinie d’Medici’s Florentine chefs are really the inventors of French cuisine! Or worse: That the fortunes in fortune cookies don’t really come true, but are made up willy-nilly by some guy in a paper hat!

Revisionist jackanapes . . .

I’m registered to vote in Belmont, the small suburb of Boston, and since I will be in New York on primary day, February 5, I requested an absentee ballot, which arrived today. On the left is a simple column with the usual suspects, where I get to select my “presidential preference.” McCain, Huckabee, Romney, no surprises here. On the right is the column for the town’s Republican committee. Firenze, Speller, Leone, Romney . . . wait a minute. Mitt Romney?

He’s running for town committee, too? Turns out the answer is yes. And not just Mitt. Ann, Taggart, and Jennifer Romney are all listed on the ballot as well. I can vote nearly half the Romney family into public office this primary season.

Actually, these seem to be party positions rather than public ones, though the ballot isn’t clear on this at all. Regardless, my vote could help make both my town’s Republican committee and my country run by Romneys!

Seriously, who is going to pose any competition for Mitt Romney in Belmont, Massachusetts? Do Walter A. and Marlene A. Flewelling of 120 Bright Road have the experience, financial clout, and hand-shaking capabilities of our former governor? Can Huckabee or McCain move in under the radar and say they live on Chilton Street? Never mind that for town committee you can vote for “not more than Thirty-Five” of the, um, thirty-five candidates on the ballot. Even if Romney doesn’t carry the day at the Republican National Convention, his backers can take comfort knowing that he stands a pretty good chance to win a seat on Belmont’s Town Committee. Unless, of course, Dorothy Boyle on Watson Road gets her smear campaign rolling in time.

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed down recently a free-speech decision that is raising some eyebrows and might be of interest to readers. Of particular interest, perhaps, is the fact that the majority opinion in the case, Berger v. City of Seattle, was written by Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain, one of the nation’s most distinguished judges and the author of a fine essay in First Things on the Supreme Court’s religious-freedom doctrines.

The case involves a package of regulations enacted by the city to control speech, picketing, and other expressive activities in the downtown “Seattle Center.” “Each year,” the court reported, “the Seattle Center’s theaters, arenas, museums, exhibition halls, conference rooms, outdoor stadiums, and restaurants attract nearly ten million visitors.

The court’s opinion upheld the city’s regulations in the face of a First Amendment challenge brought by a street performer. The relevant doctrines in this area—dealing with, for example, the distinction between “content based” and “content neutral” regulations—are not especially accessible to normal people (i.e., non-lawyers), and Judge O’Scannlain’s analysis is both dense and rigorous. One particular aspect of the case, though—namely, the court’s validation of a rule against “speech activities” within thirty feet of “any captive audience”—seems troubling.

Pretty much everyone agrees that the government has more regulatory leeway when it is managing so-called “public forums”—parks and government buildings, for example—than when it is legislating generally. Still, there are good reasons to worry about the notion that the government can enforce amorphous and floating no-speech zones around people in public parks who just happen to be waiting in line. (For more along these lines, see this post, by free-speech expert Prof. Eugene Volokh, here.)

Even assuming that so-called “captive audiences” ought to have veto power over free speech, in public places, which they find annoying, it seems quite a stretch to say that a Seattle resident who elects to go see a movie, or sit down for a cup of coffee, is really “captive.”

Free speech, as we all know, has costs; its exercise can be annoying, even harmful. Reasonable people can and do believe that in some contexts—the home, or perhaps in a crowded subway car—captive-audience concerns might justify greater regulation of unwanted speech. But Seattle’s law seems to reach too far, and its validation could prompt other jurisdictions to find other creative ways to push unpopular views out of the public square.

[Edited to strikethrough “and parks,” a misleading phrase]

Fair enough, Jody, but I did make the distinction between the inchoate form and the finished work, and also the role an artist’s oeuvre might play in granting a special status even to unfinished work. (As for the title: How else am I going to get those RSS feeder readers to click?)

As for the note cards themselves: Are they a collection of random lines, narrative arcs, snatches of dialogues, or do we have chunks of fully rendered prose, which in and of themselves would be of historical value?

I am sympathetic to the late writer’s wish to determine what is or is not fit for publication, especially since, as you point out, unfinished work is, well, unfinished, and was never in the “public domain” to begin with. But if it was that simple, why is the son having such a hard time of it?

I think your metaphor, of colorizing film or tearing down buildings, will not work for Nabokov’s unpublished, unfinished work, Anthony. Even your title of “burning books” doesn’t quite catch it, for the text from Nabokov isn’t yet a book.

In other words, this isn’t destroying a work the author already released to public view. The question is rather whether Nabokov’s son should obey his father’s wishes and destroy the file cards that sketched something the artist did not think ready or appropriate. Admittedly, such wishes are sometimes refused. Would I be happier if Virgil’s dying request that his friends destroy the manuscript of the Aeneid had not been overridden by the emperor? No. But in this case, we are not talking about the artist’s masterwork. I think filial piety ought to reach at least far enough to say that a great and intensely self-conscious artist such as Nabokov probably had a better understanding of the shape of his work and career than his heirs do.

Ron Rosenbaum is an acquaintance of many of us here in New York, and I’ve written him to say I think the novelist’s wishes should be followed.

Slate’s Ron Rosenbaum has this about his interaction with Dmitri Nabokov, son of the late writer Vladimir Nabokov. It seems that Dmitri was instructed by his father to burn the latter’s index-carded notes for a work entitled The Original of Laura. Dmitri, quite naturally, has had difficulty coming to a decision as to whether to honor his father’s dying wishes. Is sitting in a safe deposit box the outline for another Lolita, Pale Fire, Invitation to a Beheading, or The Defense? It now seems that a decision as to the notes’ fate is imminent.

While reading this, I couldn’t help but think of other great writers/thinkers who either tried to burn their own books or asked others to burn their books: Nikolai Gogol and Franz Kafka, to name just two. I sincerely doubt Nabokov wanted his notecards destroyed as some eleventh-hour act of penance, as in the case of Gogol (and even there motive is squirrelly), so one can only assume that the issue was one of proprietary control: Either he didn’t want someone publishing what was unfinished and thereby no one’s business, or he didn’t want someone trying to write his own novel based on Nabokov’s notes. In either case, as Rosenbaum asks, who owns a work of art? And what if that “art” is in inchoate form?

I remember having a related discussion in graduate school, when Ted Turner starting “colorizing” classic films. The great one, Orson Welles, fearing Citizen Kane was next, famously exploded: “Keep Ted Turner and his damned crayolas away from my movie!” But if Welles did not “own” the film, and Turner “owned” the library in which Kane reposed—was it legally Turner’s to mar? And if so, is there nevertheless a higher standard that should supersede legal ownership? If one owns a building formally declared a “landmark,” what you can and cannot do to the structure is very strictly controlled. Should there be the equivalent with works of art declared “classics”? (And what about preliminary drafts of a work by an artist or author whose other works have already achieve classic status?)

As many have heard, the former papal Master of Ceremonies (the man who organizes and runs the masses at which the pope presides) Archbishop Piero Marini has just published a book, in English, called A Challenging Reform: Realizing the Vision of the Liturgical Renewal, 1963-1975. The book recounts Marini’s time and service on the committees dealing with the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council. While First Things hopes to review Marini’s book in a future issue, I found an interview he did with John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter on the occasion of the book’s publication worthy of comment. Allen asks the Archbishop about his book’s concern “about the current liturgical direction of the church, warning of a return to a ‘pre-conciliar mindset.’” Marini says that we should always be concerned about upholding the faith of the Bible and the Fathers in every age. Then the interview begins to address this “nostalgia:”

That said, I have to add that today I’m a bit more concerned than in the past, because I see a certain nostalgia for the past. What concerns me in particular is that this nostalgia seems especially strong among some young priests. How is it possible to be nostalgic for an era they didn’t experience? I actually remember this period. From the age of six until I was 23, in other words for 18 years, I lived with the Mass of Pius V. I grew up in this rite, and I was formed by it. I saw the necessity of the changes of Vatican II, and personally I don’t have any nostalgia for this older rite, because it was the same rite that had to be adapted to changing times. I don’t see any step backward, any loss. I’m always surprised to see young people who feel this nostalgia for something they never lived with. ‘Nostalgia for what?’ I find myself asking.

John Allen: How do you explain this nostalgia?

In part, I suppose, because implementation of the liturgy of the council has been difficult. It’s true that many times there were exaggerations, which happened for the most part in a time when we could say there was disorder in the church. This was the period of great debates over new Eucharistic prayers, private adaptations, and so on. The danger today, on the other hand, is a ‘neo-ritualism,’ meaning a sort of exhaustion that one sees in many priests who celebrate the rite almost as if it’s a magical formula rather than a real participation of life. I see, therefore, a certain separation between celebration and life. Obviously, this separation can induce nostalgia for the past, for a time when everything was easier . . . when we used a language that no one understood, the rites were often incomprehensible, there were signs of the Cross everywhere, and so on. There wasn’t the same expectation that liturgy should speak to life. If one doesn’t insist on the link, it’s easy to see the liturgy more in terms of theatre. I believe this, to some extent, is the basis of the nostalgia we see today.

Archbishop Marini wonders why so many, especially so many young people, have nostalgia for an era that many of them never saw. I’ve heard his arguments before too. Young people today didn’t live in the fifties. We didn’t hear Masses mumbled by a priest in a language we never understood. We never saw how the church of that decade was driving people away from the faith and how the reforms of Vatican II brought the liturgy back to relevance for the changing times.

All this is true, of course. Those of us with more traditional liturgical tastes never did live in the fifties, and certainly there were reforms that needed to be made; I am grateful to have more Scripture read and to hear the Eucharistic prayer when it is said.

The problem, as many have noted, is that changes made in the name of reform have turned the beauty of the Church into spiritual drivel. The language of the Mass is debased. It’s as if the powers that be did not believe that the laity could handle the full beauty of the Roman Rite and the full power of its theological messages, and so brought the mass down to their level the way one condescends to a child. The architecture, the vestments, the rituals, the whole Mass became more banal and mundane. The plenitude of Scripture and Tradition was not truly passed down, and relevance replaced reverence with unfortunate consequences.

We young people who see this state of affairs long for richness. We are not content with the milk that we find served, to paraphrase the Apostle Paul; we seek solid food for our souls, a Mass with power and glory. We don’t want rituals mumbled so that no one can understand it, or any of the other real faults that Archbishop Marini or others find with Catholicism before 1963. We don’t want to worship in a museum or a theater. We want the fullness of our aesthetic patrimony alive and vibrant in our own time.

I don’t see any nostalgia among the young people I know. We are grateful for some of the Council’s reforms, but we do not want to realize the so-called improvements that came afterward. It is understandable that those of an older generation who understand themselves to be the agents of progress are frustrated that young people, who are usually thought to champions of progress, are not enthusiastic about their project. But these older progressives will remember that the young are forever flouting the objections of their forebears to embrace something new–or, in this case, to reinvigorate something old. And so I must respectfully disagree with Archbishop Marini. What he sees is not nostalgia. What he sees is ressourcement.

Over on the New York Times’ City Room website, there’s an interesting story about a man who was forced to undergo a rectal examination back in 2003.

Receiving a head injury at a Manhattan construction, he was taken to New York-Presbyterian Hospital and given eight stitches on his scalp. He was, he claims, then told he needed a rectal examination “to determine whether he had a spinal-cord injury. He adamantly objected to the procedure, he said, but was held down as he begged, ‘Please don’t do that.’” He resisted, freed one of his hands, and whacked a doctor—for which, once the treatment was complete, he was arrested, hauled into court in his hospital gown, and “booked on a misdemeanor assault charge.”

The case raises some interesting legal and bioethical questions. It’s hung around in the court system since 2003, primarily because judges have refused the hospital’s many attempts to have the case dismissed as a nuisance suit. As well they ought, for the hospital is caught on the horns of a dilemma: If the staff thought the man was mentally incompetent—too confused from his head injury to understand what he was doing by refusing the examination—then he was mentally incompetent to be accused of battery. But if he was sufficiently in control of himself to be criminally liable for hitting the doctor, then he was sufficiently in control of himself to refuse treatment.

There is another interesting feature, however, for the case fits what has been the media’s narrative for some time now: The great risk in American medicine is that you will be given unwanted medical care—kept alive despite against your wishes, entubed and encased as a vegetable, incapable of pulling the plug.

That narrative was born in the fight for legal euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, and it has, in the years since, become something like a rogue storyline—a play in search of actors, a narrative hungrily seeking examples. In truth, American medicine these days is much more likely to deny you treatment, resist heroic measures, and pressure you to pull the plug. Newspapers reports such things when they happen, but the events lack the narrative that the opposite medical problem has, and so they never quite rise to the level of national concern.

Curiously, in accounts of treatment abroad—of medical conditions in countries with socialized medicine—the American media has generally been a little more willing to indulge a storyline of scarcity, denial of treatment, and forced exit. But in domestic reports, as far as I can tell, the narrative remains the old, out-of-date tale of compelled treatment and patients forced to medical care.