A.J. DiCintio: Get Thee From That Nunnery

Judith Miller has parted ways with her employer of 28 years, a company which purports to publish "an independent newspaper, entirely fearless, free of ulterior influence and unselfishly devoted to the public welfare" but one which she brilliantly describes as the "convent of The New York Times, a convent with its own theology and its own catechism."

How right Ms. Miller was to declare herself a "free woman" by escaping a perverse convent whose High Priest condemned her as a fallen nun for an "entanglement" with Lewis Libby and whose Mother Superior dutifully followed his example by degrading her as a woman who exhibits a "tropism toward powerful men" while demeaning her stint in jail as "a career rehabilitation project."

Having left behind a puritanical convent whose members turned on her ostensibly because they deemed her derelict in her duties but in reality because they decided that she is a free thinking heretic who rejects the injunction of the convent's catechism which insist upon politics uber alles, Ms. Miller looks to the future with the following words: "In my future writing, I intend to call attention to the internal and external threats to our country's freedoms - Al Qaeda and other forms of religious extremism, conventional and W.M.D. terrorism, and growing government secrecy in the name of national security - subjects that have long defined my work." In the important work she hopes to accomplish, we ought to wish her well. We ought also help lift her spirits by reminding her of how good she will feel far from the maddened crowd who worship the rotten theology she wisely escaped.

How much happier you will feel, Ms. Miller, when you are far removed from "toast and tea" hypocrites who plume themselves as believing in the goals of the United Nations but stood, hand in loving hand, with megalomaniac France to oppose military action to repel Iraq's invasion of UN member Kuwait; to force an end to Slobodan Milosevic's reign of "massacres, persecutions [and] other inhumane acts" (including institutionalized rape); and to put an end to Saddam Hussein, mocker of 16 UN Resolutions, mass murderer, developer and user of WMD's, and friend to terrorists.

From know-nothing ostriches whose support for do-nothing policies brought so much "peace" to places such as Rwanda, the Balkans, and Sudan that they feel smug in spewing hate against any person who opposes placing America's security into the hands of oil-for-food-stealing, American-hating frauds who would bring that same "peace" to our shores.

From incestuous ideologues so steadfast in their devotion to the love of politics at any price that not even the sight of thousands of Americans or a million Africans slaughtered by death-loving fascists deters them from chanting the mantra "give peace a chance."

From dogmatic hate-and-oppose, oppose-and-hate Liberals who cowardly and falsely proclaim themselves "Centrists" while they superciliously mock Middle American values as they thumb the "egalitarian" New Yorker in search of just the right $50,000 necklace or peruse the "proletarian-loving" New York Times in a quest for the perfect multi-million dollar second home.

And how much cleaner you will feel far removed from the dirty air exhaled by self-anointed elites who dismiss a Judge Roberts or a Bill O'Reilly (whose best selling books merit not a single Times review) as standing out of the American mainstream but rave about Michael Moore as "a credit to the Republic" and gush over Fahrenheit 9/11 as his "most powerful and disciplined film to date."

If after all this you still need an occasional emotional and intellectual pick-me-up, Ms. Miller, you can muse upon the story of another New Yorker whose life was transformed when he left a "convent" (New York City) to journey to New Orleans in 1848. Powerfully moved by the variety and vitality of the working people he met along the way; the goodness flourishing in a vast, varied, free land; and evils such as slavery from which he did not turn his face, Walt Whitman's voyage motivated him to transform himself from an insipidly stylish man-about-town to a great poet who celebrated ordinary Americans in his work, singing "The Female equally with the male . . .Of life immense in passion, pulse, and power. . .under the laws divine."

Unlike Whitman, you are not in need of a transformation regarding substance or style. But like him, you will be revitalized by the freshness of life outside the convent, a freshness that will allow you to sing as the poet did, "[I] breathe the air but leave plenty after me." May that revitalization be your true reward for removing yourself from an unholy communion with those who will betray any friend or deny any principle if either gets in the way of their worshipping politics as religion and politicians as gods.