Peter Lee writes in The Asia Times on the dispute over the Senkaku Islands:

Judging from the Asahi article, Prime Minister Naoto Kan was not pleased that his term had begun with a major diplomatic dust-up courtesy of Maehara and his patron, Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) secretary general Katsuya Okada.

Okada and Maehara are the two most powerful proponents of a strong US alliance within the traditionally leftist and non-aligned DPJ.

If Lee’s account is right, what we have here is an instance of an overzealous cabinet minister in an allied government creating a major incident out of a manageable, minor episode. What is more, we see that the minister was doing it to pull the U.S. into the dispute and solidify the U.S.-Japanese alliance by creating the false impression that Japan was responding to reckless Chinese actions. Of course, the alliance wouldn’t have needed nearly so much solidifying if Washington had forced the new DPJ government to abide by a wildly unpopular Okinawa basing agreement that brought down PM Hatoyama.

Beyond the recklessness of the Japanese foreign minister, Lee argues that it has been the administration’s increased focus on East Asia (“the return to Asia”) that has encouraged U.S. allies in the region to become more combative in their relations with China. That may or may not be the case, but it certainly sounds plausible that the perception of greater U.S. involvement in a region would encourage allies to take a harder line on territorial disputes with their neighbors. We have certainly seen how unflinching U.S. support can lead reckless leaders in allied countries to take more aggressive actions on the assumption that the U.S. will back them in a crisis. As it turned out in the case of Georgia, there was an unrealistic expectation of U.S. backing that came from taking Bush’s rhetoric too seriously, and it proved disastrous for Georgia. Fortunately, it seems that PM Kan has done enough to defuse the crisis for the moment.

Additionally, according to Lee, the entire claim that China declared the South China Sea to be a “core interest” may have been a significant exaggeration of China’s position or simply an invention of a position that the Chinese government has not taken. If that’s true, and China hasn’t claimed the South China Sea as a “core interest,” it is possible that the entire framing of recent Chinese actions has been completely wrong. That would make the alarmists warning about Chinese military ambitions even more woefully wrong than they already were, and it would make a big difference in assessing the reasonableness of U.S. guarantees to Southeast Asian nations that America will guard against a Chinese claim that China may not have made. Like delusional fears of Russian “expansionism” two years ago, the alarms about aggressive Chinese claims may be false ones that are being sounded to rationalize greater American involvement in regions where it is not needed.

I recommend reading all of Lee’s column. He is certainly making sense when he writes the following:

The fine lines between spin, self-delusion, and lazy disregard for geopolitical realities seem to be blurring, at least in the foreign affairs quadrant of the Western media.

That would be pretty much par for the course, but that’s no reason why the rest of us have to go along with it.

It is interesting how uncomfortable the word assassination makes supporters of the President’s supposed power to order the assassination of U.S. citizens. It’s actually not that different from the contortions defenders of torture engaged in to avoid admitting that they were defending torture. Aggressive interrogation methods? Well, sure, that was all right, but torture is clearly wrong. The same meaningless distinction seems to be at work here. As long as we don’t call the assassination of U.S. citizens assassination or execution, but refer to it in some other way, it becomes a bit easier to rationalize and defend.

For years, Israeli targeted killings of militant leaders in Palestine have been referred to as assassinations, and no one has any objections to calling them that because this is what they are and because the people targeted in these assassination attacks are usually members of terrorist groups. Indeed, the bulk of Andrew’s response to Glenn Greenwald is that Al-Awlaki is a member of a terrorist group and is therefore a legitimate target, but he refuses to call killing him an assassination when that is the only thing we could possibly call it. When the U.S. government targets Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders for execution by drone strike, these are sometimes called “decapitation” strikes, which isn’t quite the same as calling it an assassination. Nonetheless, a decapitation strike achieves the purpose of assassination, which is typically to eliminate a high political/military leader to try to throw a government or army or organization into chaos.

The trouble for supporters of this outrageous power-grab is that the word assassination deservedly has strong negative associations. Once they start saying, “Yes, we believe the President has the authority to assassinate U.S. citizens under certain circumstances,” they start to sound rather callous and seem to show serious disregard for the rule of law. Assassination is usually something that fanatics or ideologues do to those in power, so it is a little strange when it is applied to the actions of governments against individuals, but assassination is a tactic that can be used by states or by individuals. It doesn’t cease being an assassination if it is ordered by the government, and it doesn’t cease being an assassination if it is done to someone who belongs to a terrorist group. Al-Awlaki may be everything the government claims that he is, just as Padilla might have been, but that doesn’t eliminate the protections afforded by citizenship. However, even if al-Awlaki’s treason did negate his legal protections as a citizen, the government would still be assassinating him if it had him killed. If supporters of this outrageous power-grab are uneasy about calling it by its proper name, perhaps they should reconsider whether they actually want to support it.

I was saddened to learn of the passing of Joseph Sobran. Mr. Sobran was a favorite columnist of mine, and not simply because I generally agreed with him. He was an outstanding writer, as even most of his critics would agree. Some of his most memorable work was on his study and appreciation of Shakespeare, including the book he authored on the identity of Shakespeare. I was fortunate to have exchanged a few messages with him earlier this decade when Sobran’s was still in operation. In my dealings with him, Mr. Sobran was cordial, thoughtful and very generous with his words of encouragement and advice. May God grant rest to the soul of His servant.

I just don’t think that a Republican can convincingly oppose the president using talking-point platitudes. ~John Bolton, explaining why he is considering a presidential bid.

I think in the last two years, President Obama has deliberately, consciously downplayed the threats that the United States faces in the world. I don’t think he’s interested in national security….I don’t think he fundamentally believes that it is his job to advance American interests. ~John Bolton, offering up talking-point platitudes.

When I first heard murmurings about a possible Bolton run, I thought it had to be some sort of inside joke that made sense only to people at AEI. Personally, I would find a Bolton for President campaign very entertaining. Just imagine the spectacle at the primary debates as Bolton keeps trying to out-hawk everyone on stage. He could provide some of the major candidates with a perfect foil to show that they aren’t reckless and belligerent, or the other candidates will get into an escalating shouting match with him as they try to prove that they are far more gung-ho and aggressive than he is. It could really liven up what promise to be otherwise very dull events.

Obviously, Bolton has no illusions that he will be competitive as a candidate. He says he wouldn’t run a “typical” campaign, which means that he probably wouldn’t bother meeting with people in primary states to ask for their votes, but it wouldn’t matter if he did. Nothing could be more uninteresting to most primary voters of either party in the coming decade than a single-issue candidacy focused on the idea that the U.S. needs to be more activist and aggressive in the world. Iraq and Afghanistan are going to leave the public so sick of foreign entanglements for the next ten years that Bolton’s message will be very unpopular. Bolton is contemplating a run as a way of promoting his particular brand of hawkish foreign policy and forcing the major contenders to grapple with the issues he wants them to pay attention to, and as far as it goes it doesn’t matter very much.

What I do find interesting is Bolton’s apparent perception of the likely Republican field. It seems that he regards the likely contenders as being so unequal to the task of facing off against Obama on national security issues that he thinks it might be necessary to launch a protest candidacy as a way of bringing them up to speed. What I find amusing about all of this is that Bolton isn’t going to be critiquing Obama with anything more than “talking-point platitudes,” either, and there is really no need for Bolton to represent the interests of hawkish interventionists, since almost every likely Republican contender embraces Bolton’s worldview more or less completely.

Bolton’s latest remarks are much more amusing because they happen to have come out the day after a Robert Kagan column claiming that the main problems that Kagan and Bolton have had with Obama’s foreign policy are disappearing. Most of Kagan’s argument is horribly misleading to the extent that he simply invents the difference between the first year and a half of Obama’s foreign policy and the administration’s recent statements and decisions, but the more that the Kagans of the world are satisfied with the direction of Obama’s foreign policy the more ridiculous Bolton’s protests appear.

Will Wilkinson is making things more complicated than they need to be. Trying to understand the marketing slogan “mama grizzlies,” he writes:

Ms Fiorina’s education, executive experience, and vast wealth places her among the elite of the elite of America’s elite elite. But “the elite” are the bogey of salt-of-the-earth “real” Americans, and elitism is the great sin against God-fearing, flag-bedecked authenticity. Ms Fiorina is so far from the prototype of red-state authenticity, she might as well be from Jupiter or France. So, in order to get a boost from the tea party movement’s populist wave, it seems the most must be made of any connection, however, tenuous, to populist conservative ideals of womanhood. Apparently marrying into a couple of daughters is enough to qualify the former HP chief a “mama”.

One thing that does unite Fiorina and Palin together is that they are both women who held significant executive positions and didn’t do their jobs very well. Fiorina was fired by the board of HP thanks to a record of mismanagement and presiding over the collapse of HP’s stock price, and Palin quit halfway through her term after having done little aside from antagonize energy interests with a massive tax increase. In other words, the things that are supposed to make them credible candidates show us why they are not credible, and so there has to be a diversion into biography politics to give them something to say.

One could say that the “mama grizzly” slogan is designed to distract attention from the glaring problem that at least some of said “grizzlies” are pursuing political positions for which they are not very well qualified. Palin cannot run on her record, and Fiorina shouldn’t be able to, either, since their records would prove that they shouldn’t be entrusted with important executive positions, and so some other way to make them appealing has to be found. The solution is even sillier than the usual politician’s claim that he is doing this or that “for the children.” As it turns out, Palin’s solution is simply to say that her preferred candidates love their own children and want to protect them, as if that were meritorious instead of instinctive.

In Fiorina’s case, the “mama grizzly” conceit was above all a way for Palin to justify supporting Fiorina as an “acceptable” alternative to Campbell when there was still a chance that Campbell might win the primary.

Andrew:

But I do believe we are at war; and that killing those who wish to kill us before they can do so is not the equivalent of “assassination”.

There are a few reasons why I find this to be a horribly cavalier and misguided reaction. This administration is making a claim as broad, absurd and offensive as the Bush administration did when it claimed the authority to declare anyone, including U.S. citizens, enemy combatants. The objection that this power is only going to be used against “those who wish to kill us” trusts that the government is never going to abuse its power and that the government is never going to make a mistake. One of the main reasons why we have due process is the assumption that governments routinely abuse their power and frequently make mistakes. Has the last decade of American history already vanished from our memories?

Consider how many people were wrongfully rounded up and detained at Guantanamo for years, and then suppose that they were all U.S. citizens, and further suppose that instead of being illegally detained they had all been killed by government forces (after all, they were “terrorists”!). According to this administration, not only would the government be within its rights to kill all those people (because they were “those who wish to kill us”), but that for the sake of national security there can be no oversight, no review and no accountability for the decision to kill them. These are the tactics of military governments, dictatorships and colonial empires. If we adopt those tactics, or acquiesce in them because “we are at war,” we will be embracing the legacy of those regimes. The Anti-Imperialists feared over a hundred years ago that empire would corrupt the republican nature of our government, and it certainly has, but it is rare that we have such a stark, clear view of just how much corruption there has been.

The trouble with an open-ended, extra-legal “war on terror” (or whatever euphemism people care to give it nowadays) is that there is no end to the “emergency” to which these extraordinary power-grabs are supposedly necessary responses. Not only will every President from now on claim to have the authority to kill citizens arbitrarily if they are deemed enemies, but in an open-ended “war” that spans the entire globe in which “battlefields” can be declared by government fiat there are absolutely no guarantees that this power will not be turned against political opponents and government critics at home or against Americans living overseas. Indeed, it is probably only a matter of time before this happens–all in the name of self-defense and national security, of course.

We should also be clear about the meaning of the words we’re using. Assassination is a method of warfare. The first people referred to in European languages as assassins were waging war against their enemies. Assassination was the asymmetric warfare of its time in the middle ages. Now it is used more often by more powerful, technologically advanced military powers, but the tactic is basically the same. The U.S. government and other allied governments have long reserved the right to assassinate individuals they deem to be national security threats. It’s just that up until now those individuals have happened to be foreign nationals. The only way one can correctly describe what the government claims it has the right to do to al-Awlaki is assassination. This is the same thing the government claims it has every right to do to all of those people in western Pakistan targeted by drone strikes, and it is the same thing the Israeli government claimed it has the right to do when it launches strikes aimed at killing a particular Palestinian leader. Up until recently, people may have believed that this power would never be directed against anyone with U.S. citizenship. If so, they were wrong. Now there are those who think that it will never be wrongfully used against American citizens. They are bound to be wrong, because there is no way that using power in such an unaccountable, extra-legal way will not be done wrongfully at some point. Indeed, I am doubtful that there can ever be a “right” way to use power to kill someone arbitrarily.

P.S. Andrew wrote in the next line:

My concern has always been with the power to detain without due process and torture, not the regrettable necessity of killing the enemy in a hot and dangerous war.

Obviously, this doesn’t make any sense. It’s only a “regrettable necessity” if the person is, in fact, “the enemy,” and in most cases we’re going to be taking the government’s word for it that its targets are actually legitimate targets. If we assume that the government should be constrained by due process when it detains suspected terrorists who aren’t citizens, why wouldn’t it also need to be constrained by due process before having citizens suspected of terrorism executed? As wrong as illegal detention is, and as abhorrent as torture is, neither is so final and irreversible as death. There can be no legal recourse or remedy that would do the citizen any good if the decision to kill him was made in error, and surely we don’t believe that intelligence reports are now so reliable that there is no possibility of misidentifying someone.

Via Andrew, Reihan:

Of the potential Republican candidates on offer, DeMint comes closest to filling the Palin vacuum.

Assuming DeMint decided to run, It could happen. Then again, if DeMint’s insurgent-backing campaign succeeds in November by sending a number of Tea Party-aligned Senators to Washington he will have also succeeded in making himself somewhat obsolete. What do I mean by this? Right now, DeMint stands out for being a particularly outspoken Senate Republican who has been successfully fighting against the NRSC and the minority leader during primary season, and he has a lot of credibility with activists because of this. The more successful DeMint is in promoting Tea Party candidates, the weaker the rationale for a possible presidential candidacy becomes. A DeMint run would make a lot more sense if the GOP were not already mostly falling in line with DeMint and DeMint’s preferred candidates. The more friendly to the Tea Party movement that elected Republicans becomes, the less need there is for a Jim DeMint to run for the nomination. Once the establishment incumbents have all been routed or cowed and once most of the presidential contenders have jumped on the Tea Party bandwagon, there is not much to distinguish DeMint in the eyes of primary voters.

It is possible that his recent maneuvers to block last-minute legislation in this session will not be perceived as striking a blow for good government, but viewed instead as the sort of insider manipulation that DeMint’s allies claim to loathe. Perhaps activists won’t mind as long as DeMint keeps breaching Senate protocols and annoying his colleagues. DeMint’s take-no-prisoners approach satisfies his supporters, but he is making a lot of enemies along the way.

A significant test for DeMint is the outcome of the Alaska Senate race. He has thrown his weight behind Miller more than just about anyone else other than Palin. Murkowski’s write-in bid evidently has significant support across the state, which suggests that there may be a rather low ceiling of support for DeMint’s preferred kind of candidate in one of the more overwhelmingly Republican states in the country. Between Murkowski and McAdams, 58% of Alaskans say they want someone other than Miller, so they are rejecting the kind of politics that Miller and DeMint represent. If that happening in Alaska, why won’t it happen in the rest of the country?

Miller’s candidacy is a test of the notion that most voters abhor earmarks and federal spending, and the contrast with his opponents could not be more clear. He is running against two candidates who have no reservations about requesting federal funds for Alaska. To drive home the point, Murkowski has wrapped herself in the mantle of Ted Stevens. Even if you want to argue that Alaska is unrepresentative and more heavily dependent on federal funds than most states, the reality is that most voters across the country do not respond well to anti-spending appeals. Anti-spending appeals are supposed to be at the heart of what DeMint and Tea Party candidates want. Regardless of what it means for DeMint, Miller’s possible loss in Alaska has a sobering lesson for everyone on the right promoting the fantasy that the public is eager to reward budget-cutters with political office.

Taken together, all these maps show a Democratic Party shrinking back to its bicoastal base and a Republican Party expanding to take in most of the vast expanse of the continent. ~Michael Barone

Via Weigel

If that is what the election results are, it might be worth talking about, but this seems to be another installment in Barone’s year-long series of columns overhyping Republican chances in order to maximize disappointment with the actual outcome. I honestly don’t understand the need to make declarations about the “vast expanse” supposedly dominated by the GOP or predict the “single greatest pushback in American history” (Rubio), especially when the people making these declarations have fundamentally misunderstood the public mood. Barone remains convinced that the election represents a coherent ideological repudiation of specific pieces of legislation. As he says:

Moreover, as the political turnaround of the last 22 months has shown, voters stand ready to punish a party that passes bills they hate or fails to stay true to stands they love.

As troubling as it may be for political pundits and activists to hear, most voters aren’t terribly interested in any of that, and that is definitely not the main thing that concerns most of them this year. Weigel gets this right:

Basically all horse race columns could be replaced by the phrase “voters want jobs and are angry that they can’t get them.”

Barone exaggerates the extent of Republican revival in an important way when he contrasts the current political map as he sees it with the presidential election results in 2008. If the “vast expanse” seems to be hospitable to the GOP, this is partly a result of the smaller electorate during the midterms that would be more inclined to vote Republican than the much larger electorate during presidential years. Over the last year Barone has practically made an artform out of ignoring structural and demographic changes in the country while fixating on ephemera.

Earlier this month, Peter Beinart reminded us of the demographic problem the GOP faces in the future:

Similarly, the Tea Party is today garnering all the headlines, but the rising demographic force in today’s politics is not aging white conservatives, but Hispanics and Millennials, two rapidly growing portions of the electorate that are uncomfortable with any right-leaning ideology at all, let alone the right-wing purism of Palin and company.

One doesn’t have to believe that Palin represents “right-wing purism” to acknowledge that she and her party are disliked by large majorities in both of the groups Beinart mentions.

The new estimates on House apportionment derived from early Census numbers do show that core Republican states are gaining a net of six seats and Electoral College votes, but what this masks is the effect new migration will have on voting patterns in these states. Northeastern and Rust Belt states continue to lose population, and mostly Southern and Sun Belt states keep gaining. While this gives traditionally Republican areas more weight in the coming decade, it is also changing the composition of state electorates that can make reliably Republican states less reliable. Colorado used to be a fairly reliable state for the GOP in presidential elections, but it has become more competitive and went for Obama by nine points last time. New Mexico used to be classed among “swing states,” but gave Obama a fourteen-point margin of victory and turned the traditionally Republican NM-01 House seat centered around Albuquerque into a likely Democratic one. It now appears that even in a bad year for Democrats NM-01 will remain in their column, and this was a seat that had never been Democratic until it flipped in 2008. Even if the Republicans win the House, which I still doubt will happen, that is one of the seats that they have lost for a long period of time, and should they gain the majority thanks mainly to economic discontent they will represent fewer states and districts in Congress than they did at the start of the decade. Over time, it is the GOP that has been losing ground, and Barone is doing them no favors by telling them flattering stories about how they are once again dominant.

Our culture is more concerned with not offending our enemies today. We have a culture, if somebody attacks us, a growing percentage of our country wants to ask, “What did we do to cause this? It’s our fault.” Somehow they’ve been told and they’ve bought into the notion that America is hated deservedly. So this Spanish stuff that you see in this ad, this is just an outgrowth of America thinking it’s guilty of being so big and such a superpower that we have to reach out, we have to be nice to the people that we’ve oppressed or made angry. ~Rush Limbaugh

Via David Sessions

What struck me when I read Limbaugh’s statement was not his remark about American culture being “under assault from within.” After all, this is more or less what Lowry and Ponnuru claimed about Obama seven months ago when they attempted to describe his “assault on American identity. What interested me was the way that Limbaugh immediately took a Spanish-language ad during a football game and turned it into a symbol of criticizing U.S. hegemony in the world. When you and I hear about this ad, we might have one of a number of reactions. I would dismiss it as typical corporate promotion of the cult of diversity, but for Limbaugh it was a product of a “blame America first” mentality and somehow related to arguments about blowback. The ad was instantly symbol of something insidious for Limbaugh, as if it were part of Obama’s “apology tour” that Limbaugh and people like him have invented out of thin air. Implicit in the connection Limbaugh made is that “our enemies” are everywhere and are even now among us (perhaps on the New York Jets’ starting roster!), and that the main problem in America is that there are too many people unwilling to resist them. This is the usual foolish alarmism that we are all used to by now, and it is tempting to point and laugh and then move on.

Instead of dismissing the appeal to a “distinctive American culture” that Limbaugh makes, I want to make plain that believing that a distinctive American culture exists shouldn’t have to have anything to do with the Americanism and hegemonism Limbaugh is offering here. One of the things I find grimly amusing about Limbaugh’s invocation of a “distinctive American culture” is that he is an enthusiast for the global reach of both American power and American popular culture and commerce. All of these have contributed to the steady erosion of differences between American culture and cultures elsewhere, and they have hastened the homogenization of distinctive American regional and local cultures into a mass culture that is remarkable mostly for how little it stands out from the mass cultures of other countries. When Limbaugh talks about a “distinctive American culture,” all that he is really referring to is America’s superpower status and a certain brash, arrogant disdain for other nations. A random Spanish-language ad raises the alarm because it hints at a failure to show the proper disdain and an unwillingness to assert American preeminence. My guess is that Limbaugh’s reaction to the ad has almost nothing to do with questions of assimilation, immigration or culture, and has almost everything to do with a certain mindless sort of American self-congratulation that Limbaugh would applaud no matter what language was used to express it.

Is it really a “shocker” that many Americans are poorly informed about religion? J.D. at Democracy in America thought so, and he went on to say this:

Still, as Steven Prothero, a professor of religion at Boston University, writes, it is very odd that “those who think religion is a con know more about it than those who think it is God’s gift to humanity.”

No, it isn’t “very odd.” It isn’t odd at all. Let’s think about this. First of all, many of the people who think “religion is a con” are surprisingly obsessed with the subject, and some of them spend an inordinate amount of time railing against it. It seems reasonable that they would pick up at least some superficial knowledge of the details, if only as a means for making fun of religious beliefs in great detail. Most believers don’t think “religion” is God’s gift to humanity. They will probably say that they regard the religion they profess to be God’s gift, and for the most part will be indifferent to or uninterested in the others.

Some of the more interesting findings concern what Americans don’t know about their own religions’ teachings. The 45% of American Catholics who don’t know Catholic Eucharistic teaching sounds surprisingly high, but then you consider the state of the American Catholic Church, the preoccupations of many American Catholic bishops, and the extent to which American Catholics have become fully Americanized and to some extent Protestantized in their cultural and religious habits and it doesn’t seem surprising at all. After all, how are these Catholics going to know these teachings if many of their hierarchs and priests aren’t teaching them on a regular basis? Along the same lines, the minority of Protestants that cannot identify Martin Luther as the first major Reformed theologian doesn’t really surprise me. How many Protestant chuches put that much of an emphasis on church history? How central to modern Protestant religious practice is knowledge about the early Reformers? My impression is that it is not particularly important. These results don’t tell us as much as some people seem to think that they do.

The farther afield into world religions one goes, the more one is going to find that Americans are no more knowledgeable about the religions of the rest of the world than they are about anything else in the rest of the world. A nation that cannot locate Iraq on a map is not a nation that is going to know the religious demographics of Asian countries about which they know even less than Iraq. I’m not excusing the ignorance, but I also don’t assume that the fact that most Americans regularly attend church has any relationship to whether or not they can recognize Hindu deities. Being religious and having extensive academic religious knowledge are very, very different things, and religion professors should be among the first to know and to emphasize this.

The Pew survey report does contain these crucial points:

Data from the survey indicate that educational attainment – how much schooling an individual has completed – is the single best predictor of religious knowledge. College graduates get nearly eight more questions right on average than do people with a high school education or less. Having taken a religion course in college is also strongly associated with higher religious knowledge.

Other factors linked with religious knowledge include reading Scripture at least once a week and talking about religion with friends and family. People who say they frequently talk about religion with friends and family get an average of roughly two more questions right than those who say they rarely or never discuss religion. People with the highest levels of religious commitment – those who say that they attend worship services at least once a week and that religion is very important in their lives – generally demonstrate higher levels of religious knowledge than those with medium or low religious commitment.

Put another way, people who have spent more time finding out about religion, pay more attention to religion and take a greater interest in religion are better informed about religion. That isn’t exactly breaking news. We would presumably find similar gaps in knowledge about politics between politically engaged and politically apathetic citizens, and the same would go for pretty much every other subject.

This discussion interests me because I came to Christianity from a thoroughly secular background by way of a fairly extensive self-education in religious texts of all sorts. Viewed one way, I was extremely well-informed about world religions by the time I was 20. As I look at it now, I was still stunningly ignorant of the most important Truth of all. By the time I was a sophomore in college, I am fairly sure I could have answered all of these questions correctly, but what would that have shown? It showed that I was a religion major and had read many books. That’s all very well, but that knowledge didn’t mean that I understood anything that really mattered.