[Josef] Ratzinger has said that the real conflict will not come between the Church and Islam, but between the Church and "the radical emancipation of man from God and from the roots of life" that characterizes contemporary Western culture and "leads in the end to the destruction of freedom."
[...]
Ratzinger wants to cleanse the Church of "filthiness", reinforce the doctrinal and moral formation of the clergy, and bring a new missionary campaign. Moves in this direction have already brought a reconciliation with the U.S. administration.
But Cardinal Ratzinger, chief of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is unpopular with large sections of the Church for his antimodernist positions and for methodically persecuting and silencing dissenters.
Don't you hate it when centralist demagogues define "freedom" for you?
We have a little of that kind of irrational, antimodern, missionary, authoritative behavior going on over here in America and, you know what? It doesn't work.
Democracy is the shining light of the evolution of human political ideas. Anyone who wants to live in pretechnological medieval darkness is welcome to, but don't wrap yourselves in centralist rhetoric and drag the rest of us down with you.
Leaning forward in his chair, actor Neil Intraub paused as he prepared to deliver the most dramatic line of his character's epic confession.
"I falsified the financial statements of the company," said Mr. Intraub, reciting a line once spoken by Scott Sullivan, the former chief financial officer of WorldCom Inc. The actor went on for about 2˝ hours, explaining in Mr. Sullivan's own words how the executive had orchestrated the biggest accounting fraud in U.S. history.
Mr. Intraub usually appears in TV commercials and reads his own short stories in a West Village cafe. But in his latest gig, he had a lead role in an off-Broadway drama with a captive audience -- the jury at a civil trial in Manhattan federal court.
The 48-year-old actor got his starring role only when the man he is portraying didn't show up. Mr. Sullivan, who pleaded guilty to charges linked to WorldCom's $11 billion accounting fraud, took the Fifth Amendment in the class-action lawsuit in which WorldCom investors are suing Arthur Andersen LLC, the company's former accounting firm, for not catching the fraud.
When the previous testimony of a witness who isn't available needs to be read, the job usually falls to a lawyer, a paralegal or a court reporter. At the retrial of investment banker Frank Quattrone, for instance, the public prosecutor took on the role of the defendant, reprising testimony from Mr. Quattrone's first trial.
But some lawyers turn to professional actors to breathe life into the testimony. They are less likely to give a stiff reading that will put jurors to sleep. A civil trial of an insurance case now under way in federal court in Los Angeles featured actors reading the depositions of several witnesses who are overseas.
In the case of WorldCom, one member of the investors' legal team, led by Sean Coffey, is married to a student of voice coach David Zema. He lined up Mr. Intraub and Tony Scheinman, who played former WorldCom controller David Myers. Mr. Scheinman's recent gigs include playing Henry VIII in a commercial for the History Channel.
Mr. Intraub jumped at the chance to play a villain -- his first bad guy -- and gave up a vacation to give the performance, which paid about $1,000. His wife, Robyn Stein, hopes that the role leads to others. "I just want him to get a role on 'Law & Order,' " says Ms. Stein.
Oh, what a shabby little culture this is. We've stooped from Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller and Edward Albee to Scott Sullivan in just a couple of generations.
This is one of the cul-de-sacs where the culture war has taken us: from actors giving life to the great thoughts by the leading thinkers, to cheap dramatizations of our loutish corporate courtiers.
Billmon on DeLay and Frist, et al.: "People don't usually think in grand, apocalyptic terms, even when they're doing grand, apocalyptic things. And that's probably as true for a redneck bug catcher from Texas and a genealogy-obsessed doctor from Tennessee as it is for a 13th century Polynesian lumberjack."
