Ben A. Ben H. Doug Later
     
 

I have heard a lot about the infamous snowpenis, but I had never seen a picture. Someone told me that the Crimson took the picture off their website in response to complaints by the feminist hyperactivist community. You've got to hand it to those Harvard kids, they don't do anything halfway. The LMDC should heed their efforts. The snowpenis -- extended to 1,000 feet or so -- could be just the thing for the WTC site.

The article mentions that members of the crew-team sculpted the snow-organ. In that case, it's really more of a self-portrait. [2/27/03 16:13]
 
   
Thanks to Dao for passing on this Crimson article from some Harvard list-serv. You'll think the photo is the point, but do read the whole article for a nostalgic dose of campus feminist-speak, including Amy Keel '04's claim that "As a feminist, pornography is degrading to women and creates a violent atmosphere." I'd say I've got an enormous dangling modifier there, but oh boy, think of the trouble I'd be in ...
[2/27/03 12:59]
 
 

The future of the WTC site has generated plenty of controversy already, but I think the conflict will soon come to a head. The "tinker-toy design" you mentioned is one of two finalists. Apparently, Governor Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg have let drop that they prefer Daniel Liebskind's giant tower. The LMDC voted for Think!'s "latticework" creation. How the final decision will be made -- and what role the guy who has the strongest contractual claim to making the decision, Larry Silverstein, will play -- is very unclear.

I don't find either of the the proposals particularly attractive. Urban gigantism disconcerts me. Among New Yorkers, such a view may mark me as unusual, but as you guys know I live here without taking much joy in my surroundings. I would submit, though, that the ultimate fate of the WTC would argue against building enormous, totemic structures; some people will surely protest that choosing *not* to build on a monumental scale constitutes "surrender" to the terrorists. Those people should not that both proposals leave the vast bulk of their structures empty, which if not surrunder (by their lights), is at least appeasement.

The architechts so far have provoked more debate than their creations. Think!'s Rafael Vinoly has come under fire for his work under the military government in his native Argentina back in the 70s and 80s. Libeskind has made rather uncharitable comments about his competitor's design. It may be that many more people feel a deep enough emotional connection to the site that they feel the need to comment than have any capacity or desire to engage in amateur architectural criticism.

My own architecturally ignorant feeling is that the original WTC design constituted a neighborhood-killing mistake. It cut itself off from the surrounding streets, offered a brutal, windswept plaza as its welcome mat, soared impractically high, and featured rather dingy interior office space. On purely rational grounds, it would make sense to replace this ill-conceived complex with its opposite. Unfortunately, the symbolic importance of the reconstruction decision has forced planners to come up with a grand gesture, which by its very nature is very likely to commit the same sins as its predecessor. [2/26/03 19:46]
 
   
Hey, sorry for paucity of posts. I wish I could say it's due to excessive busyness but, alas, I haven't been doing jack. Kind of in an energy trough here. I'll try to think of something to talk about ... how about that tinkertoy design bullshit for the world trade center? What's up with that? [2/26/03 17:30]
 
 
Ben, I am with you there. But I think that American cinema has done a creditable job with war epics, too. The problem with G & G is that its makers conceived of what should have been a simple war movie as High Art. Incidentally, I would pay good money to see a Whit Stillman-direct version of Daredevil... [2/24/03 10:38]
 
 
Re: Gods and Generals

Ben, seeking High Art from Hollywood is like buying pate at 7-11. You need to play to the strengths of American culture. In cuisine, this means seeking highly refined sugars; in film, this entails movies featuring super-powers, car-chases, vengeful cops, or Whit Stillman. Daredevil had three of the four, and not even Colin Farrell channeling an amphetamine soaked Al Pachino could tarnish the experience. Try it, you’ll like it! [2/24/03 09:47]
   
 
Baltimore in the Crosshairs Again!

Maybe it's just that Doug's comments have made me more sensitive to the juxtaposition of Charm City and terrorism, but then again perhaps this week's NYT Magazine proves Doug's point. In an article about the costs of securing the U.S. against terrorist threats, the author takes a boat ride with a police chief who shows her the vulnerability of the waterfront of his city. The police honcho suggests that if he were a terrorist, he would ram a boat packed with explosives into the touristy harborside promenade that the city is so proud of. It would be at least 48 hours, he claims, before the tide would start flushing bodies out from under the pier. The littoral Urban Festival Market he's talking about is none other than Baltimore's Inner Harbor complex. Stock up on duct tape, Marylanders!

Also in this Sunday's NY Times, a breathtakingly obnoxious Op-Ed from Regis Debray. At first I got all riled up, but I think that anyone who was so convinced of the success of the coming Revolution that he went traipsing around the jungle with Che can be ignored peremptorily. In the U.S., I'll admit, we go easy on former Weathermen terrorists the law catches up with. In France, they make such people "special advisors to PResident Mitterand on Latin American affairs." That would be sort of like taking someone from the Lord's Resistance Army and making him special advisor on East African affairs. [2/24/03 07:49]
 
 
Speaking of reviews of bad cultural product, I went to see Gods and Generals yesterday night. The unfortunate theater-goer can usually trace with some confidence the reason why the movie he finds himself watching is bad. Sometimes, a rotten concept stinks up the cinema – an Eddie Murphy vampire movie, now who approved that? Other times, some specific aspect of the execution dooms the film: inapposite casting, leaden writing, aimless directing. Yet every so often, a movie achieves a truly impressive intensity and purity of badness, yet the viewer cannot easily chalk it up to any one or two of the usual culprits. Viewing such a film produces a rather disconcerting effect, as you grope for the cause of your nausea. It is like opening the refrigerator to an overpowering stench you can’t place; you check the milk and it’s fresh, the cheese sports no mold, and as you rummage through the rest of the contents to no avail, you’re overcome with a powerful unease. Is something burning? Did something die behind the refrigerator?

Gods and Generals, the adaption of Jeff Shaara’s Civil War novel of the same name, stinks in just such a total, diffuse, and maddening way. Is it the concept? No, Shaara’s book has won great acclaim and treats an interesting topic. Is it the casting? No, the screen is covered with actors of great renown. Likewise, the director, Ronald Maxwell, is responsible for the much-praised mini-series, Gettysburg. I think the best way to explain this badness is to say that this movie suffers from monumental self-indulgence.

Take, for example, the simple matter of the movie’s length. Four bloody (literally and cussedly) hours long! So long, that somewhere along the line, a solitary sane person on the filmmaker’s team realized that 21st century American bladders would give out long before Stonewall Jackson does and insisted on an intermission. Shaara’s book isn’t short and the Civil War isn’t a simple affair of simple characters. It would be entirely understandable for its film version to run on the long side. But it’s not long for that reason; it’s indulgently long. The plot skips all over the place, lurches from character to character, and leaves the viewer without the context that one would expect from a film of half this one’s length. Gods and Generals starts with Robert E. Lee visiting someone (I’m guessing he’s the Secretary of War, but the movie doesn’t give much assistance in identifying him) who says, no kidding, “Let me get straight to the point. The President has authorized me to give you command of the army being raised to put down this recent rebellion in the Southern States.” We see fighting at Manassas, Fredrickburg and Wilderness, but we learn nothing about their connection. Characters appear and disappear without explanation. But then, Maxwell delivers up long, seemingly pointless set pieces: a drawing room full of Confederate generals singing Christmas carols, Stonewall Jackson alone contemplating the battlefield early in the morning. The result is a movie both too short and too long. Indulgence.

The movie has no dialog, but damn if it isn’t a talkie. Characters alternate between exposition and declamation. The former, I suppose, serves as makeshift narrative integument, but, alas, fails. It is as subtle as a high school film strip minus the beeps. The latter aims to make it a lofty, artistic, “movie of ideas.” It also fails. Much of the declamation justifies the Southern cause; a certain amount is given over to making sure each character gets to utter familiar famous quotes attributed to him in real life – these Barlett’s nuggets couldn’t fit in less naturally if they were dubbed at double volume with digital reverb; another significant portion to Stonewall Jackson’s theological musings, a sort of cornpone Calvinism. He’s quite fond of the petition, “thy will be done.” He carries around a Bible and reads from it frequently. The film depicts him as a great and ruthless military leader. One of his declamations argues for the proposition that the Confederates must pull out the “black flag” and give no quarter to the “invaders.” But he is also kind to children and animals. He growls orders in battle, but when talking to his wife and to children he growls only very softly. This is meant to signify that he is a Man of Contradictions. We see how his faith leads him to accept that God has already decided his fate and therefore allows him to fight without fear of death. Hence his Stonewall reputation. Unfortunately, on the screen rather than steadfast, he comes off as merely abstracted; a glassy-eyed jihadi-for-Jesus on dope.

Despite a few scenes given over to northern characters, Gods and Generals unapologetically depicts the war from a Southern perspective. Today’s touchiness about race makes such a perspective a difficult proposition. There’s the matter of how to portray black slaves; Gods and Generals takes the earthy nobility route, but it’s hard to blame it for its false notes on that score. When it comes to race, you can’t win. And of course, the film must somehow cope with the fact that its protagonists are, at some level, fighting to perpetuate chattel slavery. I can think of a couple of ways to come at this: a frank racist approach (Gone With the Wind, for example), a political deflection approach (explaining the war in terms of competing notions, dating back to the Founders, of the balance between central and local government power), or a complete dodge, emphasizing the valor and other martial values of the men who fought on the Southern side, skirting the cause for which they fought. Gods and Generals comes closest to the third approach, but its wordy style doesn’t allow the issue to be dodged easily. We hear from Jackon, Lee, Longstreet, and half dozen other Confederate grandees that they owe, “no greater duty that to their home,” meaning their home states. Whence that duty arises goes unexplained, but believe me, unexplained in more words than you could have imagined possible. Duty to the most devolved level of political authority claiming legitimate monopoly of force on that territory in which you were born strikes me as a fairly arbitrary concept. For the southerners of Gods and Generals it is a kind of first principle, the high dignity of which derives from frequent repetition in hypotactic sentences delivered in stentorian stage style. The worldview of Gods and Generals tends toward the Romantic. We should admire the gentlemen of the South for fighting with tenacity for their most deeply held beliefs, even, or maybe especially, if those beliefs are themselves crackpot axioms. The war might well have erupted over which end one should crack open an egg on. Again, indulgent – and dishonest to boot. Romantic, too, is the film’s frequent decent into bathos. We see Jackson cry upon learning of the death from fever of a moppet, Irish immigrants fighting on the Confederate side blubbering like, well, moviegoers, as they realize they must fire into an advancing Irish brigade of the Union Army, and death scenes more shamelessly protracted that any made since the age of silent film. The film did not fail entirely in its tearjerking aims: I laughed so hard I cried.

Is Gods and General southern propaganda? Well, Ted Turner did finance a good portion of the movie’s budget. Crazy Ted’s bipolarism extends to the political sphere, where counterpoised to his manic whale-saving, buffalo-commons, CNN leftism he harbors a deep-seated Southern chauvisism. Please indulge a brief aside here: isn’t it ironic that man who settled a substantial fortune on the would-be world government of the UN nurtures a 150 year old grudge over the American central government's infringement on the southern states' sovereignty? But on the evidence of Shaara’s books and Maxwell's previous Civil War epic, Gettysburg, I am inclined to believe it is not intended as southern propaganda. Rather, Gods and Generals started out with a goal of making an effort to understand a much-maligned southern side and somewhere along the line became so impressed with its own fair-mindedness that it slipped from understanding to sympathy. An indulgent self-righteousness ends up showing union men talking about “darkies” and Jackon praying with his black cook and telling him that he hopes God’s plan includes the CSA government offering black slaves their freedom, thereby, “cementing an everlasting friendship between our races.” The union men – they’re the racists! It feels a bit like watching protesters carrying signs proclaiming “Sharon = Hitler.” The smug and self-righteous pride themselves on seeing the deepest reality, the more inalterably opposed to the obvious, the deeper.

I am not a Civil War buff by any means, but I can tell that Gods and Generals strives for detailed period authenticity. This is probably a good marketing strategy. Civil War enthusiasts belong to the same genus as Trekies (although Trekism is probably a bit more practical; we are much more likely to battle in space with photons than ever again fight across a meadow with single-shot rifles). They like to dress up as their heroes, love to stock up on little chestnuts of trivia, and set great store in whether their films show the same loving attention to minute detail as they do. Whether Gods and Generals succeeds on that score, I cannot say, but I trust that if it has failed, we will hear about it in a thousand chat rooms. The speechifying, though, is not a good sign. The declamations are an infelicitous mixture of Lincolnesque plangent archaism and jarring anachronism. Jackson, Lee and their fellow celluloid Virginians speak with what purports to be an authentic accent, although it varies quite a between actors. Again, I cannot opine on whether Virginians really spoke that way; although if they did, I believe that this alone would have been sufficient casus belli. When they aren’t orating, the actors spend a lot of time (as the song says) looking away, wistfully, dewy-eyed and about to burst with some unspecified complex mixture of emotion. At least that’s what the look means to convey, although for several of the actors, it looks more like they chewed some particularly funny-tasting scenery and now suffer from the onset of indigestion.

Matters aren’t helped by another stab at period authenticity, elaborate facial hair. In addition to fighting off the Yankees, the Rebs had to contend with a simulataneous attack of chin-eating beavers. That’s what it looked like anyway. Except for the guys with wispier version, who I imagine in their rude field accommodations may have gotten dust-bunnies stuck to their faces.

A last bit of indulgence, small but maddening: the cameos. Ted Turner’s grinning mug shows up among the Army of Northern Virginia leadership as they take in a troupe performing a song-and-dance routine celebrating “the bonny blue flag” and “Southern rights – hoorah!” Need I mention that the film indulges in presenting the whole song start to finish? More maddeningly, Senator Robert Byrd gives a turn as rebel general. I note that some scenes were filmed on location in West Virginia, probably with some sort of government support, in keeping with the masterly fusion of home-state pork-barreling and self-aggrandizement that has left West Virginia dotted with eponymous federally-funded bridges, buildings and parks. Byrd, the Cicero of the Senate and its one-time majority leader, holds the highest governmental position of any Klaxon of the Klan. Did it occur to him that it was perhaps infelicitous symbolism for him to show up on screen in Confederate regalia? Maybe he figured the “darkies” wouldn’t recognize his face under its baroque false facial hair. This senator can style himself a secessionist without fear of media scrutiny. Trent Lott nearly got run out of D.C. on a rail for too effusively praising Strom Thurmond upon his retirement. As Stonewall Jackson might say, the plans of the Almighty are to man a mystery; but if divine providence should choose that a preening bigot should enjoy fame and a place in our highest political body, then Thy will be done.

Now, Doug, you’ve often asked that we counterbalance our denunciations with some counterbalancing positive. I’ve thought about this and I will try to accord with your wishes. The twelve-minute intermission gave me the opportunity to buy a treat I’d never experienced before: a Chipwich studded with M&Ms. It was delicious.
[2/23/03 02:51]
 
 
The worst books inspire the best reviews [2/22/03 16:08]
   
 
A last word on weasels, gorillas, and diplomatic language.

I can’t deny the ugliness of much American anti-French sentiment. To take a recent example, it’s hard to see anything productive about Brit Hume (Fair and Balalnced!) introducing Dominique de Villepin to the Fox News audience as a “smooth talking pretty-boy.” This kind of casual contempt bars cooperation and, if ingrained into the thinking of our leaders, results in stupid, short-sighted policy. The New York Post doesn’t represent the angels of our better nature.

With that as preface, I am reminded of remark of Heather McDonald that “police-civilian relations are a two way street.” Her point: Although police are rightly held to a higher standard, they are not the only agents playing a causal role. Loud-mouth taunting by civilians figure prominently in the run up to many ugly confrontations.

If we cast the current Administration in the roll of the bullying sheriff, there are surely many candidates for the role of provoking street punk. (Indeed, I think I saw a bunch of them marching just moments ago…). The American right cherishes a deep detestation for international institutions, continental Europe, and France in particular. This loathing may be unfortunate, but alas, it’s by no means irrational not. Durbin did happen, and it wasn’t an aberration. Rather, most international institutions seem to keep racialist leftism of the most crude kind barely concealed behind exquisitely tailored hand-stitched jackets. I must be, by upbringing, and by instinct, among the most Francophile Bush voters on the planet. But do I think French policy aims to support American in peacefully disarming Iraq? No, I do not.
[2/18/03 11:40]
   
 

Guess the emergency EU summit didn't go so well for poor M. Chirac. Did you guys see if his outburst at the closing press conference? He threw a fit, menacing the pro-American accession candidates in a not-so-well-veiled manner that their stance on Iraq, at variance with France's, might jeopardize their chances at accession. As if. The empty threat only reveals how badly the debate is going for the French position. So much for subtle French diplomacy! Who's the unilateralist now, mon cheri? The poor French! They thought a growing EU would mean growing French influence, as the immature joiners gratefully lined up behind astute French diplomacy. Sacre bleu! The provincials have their own ideas! We're in favor of mulilateralism, so long as it means all sides following the French one. [2/17/03 20:45]
 
 
Do you really think WMD is *merely* a pretext for invading Iraq? From what I've read, the Bush Administration considered Iraq a situation in need of addressing even before 9/11. That event gave broader importance to Iraq in the context of Total Middle East Reconstruction, but the original problem (admittedly, one that we didn't have to see to on any sort of fixed timetable) of Saddam's continued pursuit of WMD, progress on getting nuclear tech, and ongoing oppression of the IRaqi people remained. Sanctions were falling apart and Saddam's diversion of oil-for-food money left the U.S. shouldering the blame for the privation suffered by ordinary Iraqis. The status quo (pre-9/11) was not a stable equilibrium.

It is equally true that in addition to its direct importance, WMD provides the U.S. with a pretext for an Iraqi invasion that serves wider goals. So let's say we openly declared this in the U.N.. How do you think that body would react? How do you think the French and Germans would react? I think it's obvious why we need the pretext. The corrupt regimes of the Middle East aren't going to vote for their own extinction. The French aren't going to cede their last sphere of influence outside West Africa. The WMD card is one that U.N. and the French and the Germans would have a harder time countering, because it is a goal that they had in prior resolutions endorsed. The French and the Germans aren't worried because they don't know what we are out to do in the MIddle East. I suspect they know exactly what our plans are. We've probably told them privately; but even if we haven't, they can guess. The reason they are worried is because they prefer the status quo. European oil majors would rather not compete with Americans in a post-embargo, democratic Iran. The Quai d'Orsay's Arabists don't want to lose their influence in Syria and Lebanon. And, yes, they also feel more vulnerable to the counterattack from the old Middle Eastern order, what with the successful demographic invasion of Araby and North Africa into their countries.

As for the "gorillas" of Durban, I stand by that characterization, and I think that our government's less colorful vituperation was entirely appropriate. These people make it no secret that they would like me and people of my ethnic background gone. That's not a proper topic for diplomatic discussion. And I think the fact that the culture of their regions (Africa and the Middle East) are the only in the world to have passed through the technological and economic revolutions of the 20th Century with a sustained retrogression in standards of living, productivity, and political development marks them as uniquely unqualified to pronounce on any issues of global importance, possibly unfit for self-rule, and likely inferior in some sort of generationally transmissible way. We owe their views on how civilization should be run no deference or respect. [2/17/03 14:34]
 
 
OK, Doug, it would ordinarily be fair to mock New Yorkers (and Washingtonians, while you're at it) for breaking into a wild panic at the first sign of frozen precipitation. However, today, a little bit of panic might not be entirely out of line. An honest-to-goodness blizzard -- not the 3-inches of wet slop, WeatherCenterChasersCenter7's wiseacre meteorologist has gotten into the habit of referring to as a blizzard, but the real thing -- has enveloped the city. For the past 18 hours, swirling snow has cut visibility out my window down to about 2 or 3 blocks. It's also very cold out, so we've been covered by the sort of dry snow that blows around like sand and forms huge drifts. Now, knowing me, you probably expect me to take the opportunity to tap out another screed against New York. Well, forgive me for confounding you. The morning after a huge snowfall like this one leaves New York almost peaceful. The few cars on the road have their tires muffled by the snow, leaving the streets blissfully quiet. Why can't we put a layer of sand down on the street during the summer to achieve the same effect? For a few hours, all the sidewalk filth is concealed by pure, white drifts. It's New York mediated through a sort of sensory deprivation (the cold, I would suppose, has suppressed the odor of rotting garbage, but I can't say for sure since I can't smell really). Most of the stores are closed. The exception, of course, is the Chinese restaurant business. Egg drop soup continues to be dispensed with enthusiasm. The average employee of these establishments has arrived too recently to have been infected with WeatherCenterStormChasersCenter7's hair-trigger response to the threat of excess precipitation. That, and several generations of toughening through Long Marches, Great Leaps Forward, leave a blizzard a less-than-redoubtable obstacle.

Luckily, New Yorkers should have adequate provisions to outlast the blizzard, given our leaders' urging that we stock up on food and water as part of our modern-day "duck-and-cover" exercise, the "cover-and-duct (tape)." [2/17/03 14:12]
 
   
FOX NEWS ALERT ... Mysterious white powder shuts down NYC ... No claims of responsibility yet for cold airborne substance ... stay tuned for updates ... [2/17/03 13:36]
 
   
Guys, you may be right to suspect that ICC and Kyoto negotiators would detect your contempt for them, even if you tried to conceal it. However, many people are able to negotiate without contempt -- not only without calling their counterparties "weasels" and "gorillas", but without even thinking of them thus! -- and if the U.S. had some of them representing it, maybe there would be a significant boost in the world's cooperation with us.

Would the Old Europeans be clamoring to fight at our sides if we'd been more "multilateral" in 2001-2002? I think you guys are right that they would not. There are many reasons why not, but the main one is that Europeans rightly see "WMD disarmament" as a mere pretext for invading Iraq. They think the whole weapons inspection thing is a charade, a game -- "but hey, if America won't tell us what it's really trying to accomplish, then all we can go on is whether or not Saddam is playing the game right. And he is! So how can we attack?"

U.S. demands for Iraqi disarmament are a pretext -- but for what? Oil interests? No, not so much for oil as for the massive Mideast reconstruction Ben H. referred to earlier. By and large, I am for this reconstruction, especially if it includes a serious attempt to fix the Palestine problem. But does Bush come clean about this plan, does he tell the Europeans honestly what it is he wants them to sanction? No, he just strikes a Sledge Hammer pose and says, "Trust me -- I know what I'm doing." [2/17/03 10:58]
 
 
In the short-term, Ben, you're right. We cannot forego military force in re-ordering the Middle East. However, that process will be an ongoing one. If we reduce our consumption of oil, we will reduce our vulnerability at the least, and at best we may accelerate the transition. [2/17/03 08:49]
 
 
As I understand it, Ben H., you argue that because Russia doesn't desperately need oil profits to buy off mullahs, Russian production will be less adversely effected by a putative 5 million bpd drop in demand. Or to put it another way, for Iran and the Sauds, oil profits secure the regime, thus making them exquisitely sensitive to drops n demand no matter what advantage they maintain in costs of production. This seeems reasonable enough to me, but I think we're talking at cross-purposes. I don't deny the US can put huge pressure on the gulf states by lowering demand for oil. And if anyone proposes a a gas-tax to pin the externalities of consumption on J Lo's Escalade-driving ass, I'll vote for it. I doubt, however, that any mix of conservation and new energy schemes can subsitute for American arms continuing to secure stability in the Mid East.

[2/16/03 19:04]
   
 
Fair enough, maybe we should have given the dreamy utopians of Kyoto, the Kellog-Briandist professional naifs of the ICC Conference, and the blood-libelist gorillas of Durban a few more pats on the head. I happen to doubt that genteel condescension would have gone over much better than steadfast opposition, but it probably wouldn't have gone over much worse. Ultimately, these people want the CO2 caps, their prosecutions of American GIs, and the extermination of the Jews, and however genial our thwarting of those aims, it still will provoke resentment.

As for the gasoline tax, you should not underestimate the genius of capitalism. If gas costs $3 or $4 bucks a gallon, all sorts of fuel-saving technologies now derided as cost-ineffective will come into broader use. The lure of savings will call forth the inchoate contraptions of a thousand inventive minds into production. The energy intensity of U.S. GDP has fallen dramatically since the 1970s, and, the present temporary oil spike notwithstanding, the real price of oil has never reached the lofty Carterite peaks of the 70s again. What's more, if we tax gasoline more steeply but commit to overall revenue-neutrality, we will shift the tax burden from positive externality behaviors (lower taxes on labor, lower marginal income taxes) to a negative externality good. That will undoubtedly help the long-run growth and productivity of the U.S. economy. Neither should you underestimate the fragility of the equilibrium in the oil market. A few million barrels a day of supply disruption in an overall market of around, what, 100mm barrels a day has caused the price to shoot up over 50%. The same can happen in reverse. Some will argue that since Persian Gulf lifting costs are at the very low end of the global range, it will be the production that suffers least from a permanent drop in oil prices. I have argued (and put money on the line in accordance with this argument) that in looking at oil-dependent economies, lifting cost does not fully capture the situation these economies face. Sure, it costs Aramco very little to pump a barrel of oil out of the Arabian sands. However, how much does it cost per barrel for the Saudis to buy social peace. And in a country with a growing population and virtually zero human resources is that "social lifting cost" going to go up or down? The Russians, on the other hand, may need to spend $1-2/bbl more to lift crude, but buying social peace in Russia is cheap and getting cheaper in the context of a shrinking population and growing non-oil economy. I submit that the Saudis and the Iranians will be the FIRST to feel the pinch. [2/16/03 16:22]
 
 
I feel ill-placed to criticize the adminstration's diplomacy in ignorance of theconsultations held, evidence given, or compromises offered. But as I've said before, universal hatred serves as good evidence of poor diplomacy. But truly, could it have been otherwise?

With hindsight, it seems clear Bush should have built good will by engaging -- or at least rebuffing less contemptuously -- the various multi-lateralist fol-di-rol (ICC, Kyoto, Durban) that plagued the adminsitration's first year. Well, if there's a lesson learned here, it should be the value of storing up nuts for the winter. The administration didn't invest in glad-handling, and when a global crisis struck, bien pensant opinion had already cast Bush as an arrogant cowboy evangelist. A dreadful error, to be sure.

It is less obvious, however, that absent this error the governments of France and Germany, much less 70% of the population of Europe, would support an American-led invasion of Iraq. Rather, I think we'd be witnessing much the same obstructionism at the UN, and similar parades in Western capitals. Let's just stipulate: the adminstration's alientaion of allies represents a needless disaster. But really, I can't fathom the considerations that would convert Joschka Fischer into even a passive supporter of Bush administration policy. The man is a Bader-Meinhoff groupie, for heaven's sake!

Tactically, I basically agree with the blueprint layed out by Ben H. We can wall up North Korea, make our problem China's problem, and wait for collapse. That's about it. I fail to see the value of Franco-German support in this enterprise.

I am less hopeful that a 100%, or indeed a 400% gas tax could in the next 40 years render the strategic situation in the Persian Gulf a matter of indifference. We can bash SUVs all day and all night -- indeed, I loathe them --but getting fleet gas millage up to a 50 mpg average won't alter the reliance of the world economy on gulf oil. Nor will Bush's helium-driven anti-gravity boots, alas. [2/16/03 13:33]
   
 
DO you honestly think this administration hasn't tried to convince the French (let's face it, the Schroeder administration is a political walking dead, and even if it enjoyed wholeheared support, Germany's position doesn't especially matter) of the wisdom of our position? It is only upon recognizing the inexpugnable intransigence of Chirac's administration that our own has shifted to a strategy of delegitimizing France as a representative of broader Europe. Note, however, that said strategy hardly strikes me as disingenuous. Far more EU and NATO countries support the U.S. position than oppose it.

As to the question of timing an attack on Iraq and dealing with North Korea, you should not underestimate the stickiness of the situation we find ourselves in. In some respects, the U.S. finds itself a prisoner of mobilization schedules; the North Koreans have shrewdly availed themselves of our constraints by re-starting Yongbyon just when the U.S. had nearly gotten the requisite manpower and hardware in place in the gulf. We all know that the Clinton-slimmed military, while greatly enhanced in quality over the last decade, doesn't have the mass to comfortably oust Saddam and contain a North Korean response to a bombing or assault on Yongbyon. However, simply switching gears to containment of Saddam and assault on North Korea demands a very costly and impractical re-shuffling of limited resources. We can't keep a couple hundred thousand troops sitting around the Arabian peninsula forever; we can't keep Turkey's teetering economy afloat forever (and without a TUrkish northern front, our task gets a lot harder). It is precisely the North Korea challenge that has intensified the U.S. administration's impatience to get the show on the road. THe clock is ticking in North Korea, and we are ready to go in Iraq. Let pull the trigger on the shot we have all lined up, so we can turn, aim and fire at our other adversary (or at least credibly threaten to do so) in time. And let's be honest: do you think French opposition to an attack at present in Iraq arises from a commitment to deal with North Korea first? Please.

We should note that it is in part thanks to the nuanced, sophisicated, beloved-by-Euroleft Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton that we currently face a nuclear-armed North Korea. If you doubt the wisdom of dealing with Saddam Hussein firmly, look what appeasement has wrought on the Korean peninsula.

And what exactly should we do in North Korea? We owe the South Koreans due consideration of their opinion (unlike the French in the case of Iraq), since Seoul will bear the brunt of the North Korea response to our gambit. The South Koreans remain implacably opposed to an attack. And what of the possibility that the North Koreans have managed to ready their 3-stage ballistic missile to carry a nuclear, chemical or biological warhead? North Korea represents an infinitely knottier problem than Iraq, one which the U.S. administration will need time to unravel. It also strikes me as a situation much more susceptible to a containment strategy. Granted, the President Roh has not been a vocal supporter of an augmented U.S. presence in South Korea, but we face in that country nowhere near the fanatical opposition of the Saudi clerisy or Turkish lumpenproletariat to basing of substantial U.S. forces. We have no plans to remake North Asia the way we have plans to roll back the autocracies of the Middle East (and believe me, based on the stuff I've heard through work, that's the plan).

North Korea, on the other hand, may be closer to collapse than we suppose. Of course, the regime's demise has been predicted many times before. That doesn't mean that it will never happen. A bank I deal with has an analyst on staff who has periodically visited North Korea over the last half-decade. He recently returned from a short visit and painted a very grim picture of the situation, even in the context of recent North Korean conditions. The WFP estimates that the country's caloric deficit will reach an unprecedented 25% of total minimum requirements. And most of the WFP's member countries have refused to participate in relief this year due to continued diversion of donated resources to the military. The North Korean power infrastructure is in shambles. The country relies on coal for most of its electricity generation. However, the power shortages have become so acute that it can't reliably run the pumps required for deep subsurface mining; coal production drops, in a vicious circle. This guy reported that several of the Kim-cult showcases in the capital were for the first time he's seen left unlit and closed. The brinksmanship we witness arises from the increasingly desperate straits of the regime.

Meanwhile, the risks we face in waiting don't strike me as unreasonably high, at least compared with an immediate attack. North Korea already has nukes for some time. It has shown no willingness to use them. We worry, rightly, that North Korea will produce more weapons-grade fissile material and perhaps sell a bomb to another rogue state or non-state actor. However, in the immediate term, this is a state that is easily physically contained. We can see what ships and planes are coming and going and we can interdict if necessary. Having relied on patient diplomacy and pseudo-containment while Dear Leader took his coutry from merely a two million man army loonocracy to a member of the ICBM nuclear club, it seems odd that we would invade headlong at the prospect of NK going from two nukes to four. Meanwhile, facing the prospect of a Japan pushed into remilitarization, I suspect the Chinese will come around and help give the regime a push. Given the fact that Security Council member China actually *borders* North Korea; our ally South Korea's capital is within *artillery range* of the DMZ, we owe them a heck of a lot more consideration than we owe the French or Germans on Iraq; their relation to the target being not one of propiniquity but merely commercial importance. To find venality, look not across the Atlantic to Washington, but train your eyes closer to home.

That said, I think there is one huge blindspot in the U.S. administration's policy. No, it's not the "future of multilateralism." The UN long ago decayed into burlesque house for gaudy little dictatorships. NATO is a alliance without an enemy, unless you count the fifth column within it. We have a lot more interests in common the adversary it was designed to contain, Russia, than with France, that on-again-off-again participant that can't seem to decide whether it wants to preserve or destroy NATO. NATO has been a zombie since 1990.

The blindspot, as Doug's dashboard indicator alludes to, is energy policy. It would be a heck of a lot easier, and probably more effective, to hike the gasoline tax 100% (and make compensatory cuts in, say, the SocSec payroll tax) than to permanently garrison the Middle East and build a domestic anti-terrorist Leviathan to defend against the consequences of our foreign policy. However, our economy would take time to adapt to even a draconian relative price shift. A gas tax is not going to spare us the need to remove the nasty regimes that have entrenched themselves in the region and build the apparatus of their tyranny with oil revenues. Let's deal with that first -- now! -- and then we can debate energy policy.

Hey, guys, today the big "peace march" will take place just a couple of blocks uptown from my apartment. THe papers say that among the foreign policy luminaries that will address the crowd will be the actor Danny Glover. An excellent choice, since the character he gleefully portrayed in the Lethal Weapon series (the series that has bought him his Hollywood jetset peace activist lifestyle) brilliantly depicts how diplomacy, subtle persuasion, and patient containment best serves to subdue the bad guys.

I may head up there later for some good 'ole fashioned protester-baiting. With 8000 cops around, I should be well-protected. I'll test the pacifist credentials of the peaceniks with pro-Bush and pro-Israel chants. We'll see if they try to contain me or aim for regime-change. My last time out, at a Free Mumia and Leonard Pelletier march on 3rd ave last summer, it took me about 30 seconds to get people to break away from the march and glower at me as i hung out next to a cop. "The damned red indian is a heap big murderer!" was all it took. DOug, do you remember the Mass Avenue candlelight march at the outset of the last Gulf War? We hung an American (or was it Israeli) flag out the window of Wig as the protesters filed by, singing "Give Peace a Chance." One, upon seeing our flag (and, ok, I admit it, maybe my middle finger, too), peeled away from the march, screamed at us ("the draft starts tomorrow!" -- hardly, when you think about it, an expression of principles pacifism, but probably a more honest account of his true misgivings about the war), picked up some ice and hurled it at us. Good times... [2/15/03 12:10]
 
   
Yet another project I'd do if not for my laziness: building and marketing the "SUV Dashboard Compass" -- See where you're driving the world! (tm)

A simple plastic box you affix to your Canyonero's dashboard. On the box, a compass rose along each of whose points is an LED scale. LEDs light up along the northern point according to how many Alaskan acres drilling has spoiled. Along the eastern point according to how many US troops are stationed in the Mideast. Along the southern point by the smog alert level in LA. And along the western point according to the high-water mark in Tuvalu, which risings seas from melting polar ice threaten to render uninhabitable.

And, why not, in the center of the compass, a shining rose whose changing colors reflect the current U.S. Terror Alert Level. [2/15/03 10:49]
 
   
Wishful Thinking

I can't be the first person to have noticed that when Americans' fears turn to the nuclear terrorism that their government makes more likely every day, the hypothetical target they always mention is ... Baltimore! Lileks did it yesterday; I've seen in a bunch of other places I can't remember. When I wrote a rather thoughtless post on my old weblog about nuclear terrorism, I used San Francisco, but maybe only because I hadn't read or seen The Sum Of All Fears, which is where the Nuked Baltimore meme seems to have originated. Ah yes. "Imagine our glory, Hassan, when we glimpse between the writhing limbs of our allotted virgins the surface of faraway earth cleansed of the infidel scourge of Ravens Stadium! How often have I dreamed of a day when, Inshallah, no more Chesapeake Crab Cakes would ever be served!"

Get real. They're going to nuke New York. (If they nuke anything, that is.) I don't say this to feed the mild Fox-News-terror-alert psychosis that seems so widespread back home; I think everyone should relax; if it happens it happens, and instant incineration doesn't sound like such a bad way to go, all things considered. No, I just want people to stop kidding themselves about the worst-case scenario. [2/15/03 04:27]
 
   
Childish Thinking

Fun's fun, guys, but this (i.e. this administration) has gotten out of hand. It's called "diplomacy" for a reason. I am the last person to laud Old Europe as morally perfect, but look, every person you deal with, every country you deal with, has personality quirks, major or minor, that you have to acknowledge. You can deal with the quirks positively, e.g. by making the French believe Saddam's ouster would further their beloved international order, or negatively, by calling them weasels. If the administration and its boosters didn't routinely choose the latter kind of option, the world would be better in ways too numerous to list, but here's one: our (unalienated) allies' troops could contain Saddam for a while, while we went after North Korea. Bush leaves nuke factories alone while redoubling the anger of those almost mad enough to buy them and use them on us. His unwisdom is shocking. His administration's combination of childishness, venality, and fear is shocking.

Eminem: "If I had one wish / I would ask for a big enough ass for the whole world to kiss."

Great line for a rap song!

Equally great as a U.S. foreign policy? Stay tuned!

[2/15/03 03:53]
 
 
The photo of the weasel story is a classic, too. The heads of the German and French representatives to the Council have been replaced with weasel-faces. [2/14/03 16:11]
 
 
NY Post, World's Greatest Tabloid

First sentence of cover story:

Weasel so-called allies France and Germany will hear fresh evidence today of Iraqi stonewalling, at an 11th-hour showdown with the United States in the U.N. Security Council.

[2/14/03 16:06]
   
     
   
Here is the rebuttal of all those scurrilous things you guys say about Jimmy Carter. (And here is the explanation, such as it is.) [2/13/03 04:03]
 
   
Three great French things.

1. Notre Dame Cathedral. One of the few consolations of winter in Paris is that trees no longer obscure the view of Notre Dame. Seen from the quays, it's basically the most wonderful thing ever.

2. Fresh camembert. Got a totally unyellowed one at the supermarket the other day. Yes!

3. Hollandaise sauce. I made this for the first time on Monday and it was unfathomably good. Also unfathomably bad for you, but another great thing about it is that, unless you keep clarified butter around, it's too time-consuming to make regularly, and too perishable to make in large batches. [2/12/03 09:26]
 
 

Third World Moments

Just back from a couple of days in Ecuador (with two days of decompression on the way back). The country that gave us the phrase "Banana Republic" continues to live up to the designation. Visiting such an abject example of third world failure can be fun precisely because its rulers fail even to learn how to ape the investor friendly jive that the slightly more capable governments of their neighbors excel at. I thought I'd share with you a few of the more amusing third world moments of the trip.

To get a sense of how the business community feels about the new government of former coup-leader Col. Lucio Gutierrez, we went to talk to a former government oil company executive, who also happens to be (surprise, surprise) the cousin of the exiled former President Abdala "El Loco" Bucaram. This humble former public servant lives in a gigantic walled compound on one of Quito's high hills. An small army of maids hovered about Mr. Bucaram, as the 400lb oligarch puffed away on a cigar. They looked like little brown satellites orbiting a gelatinous planet. FOr an hour he railed against the indigenous movement (which is for the first time in 500 years a part of the government), the new president, and his ministers. He made a rather convoluted argument that seemed to imply that the corruption of the last few administrations was actually good for the country. Well, for a few people...

Next, I got to get a close look at one of Bucaram's damned indians. We stopped by the foreign ministry to see the the Minister, Nina Pacari, a leader in the indigenous people's party. After spending 40 minutes waiting in her anteroom on a broken-down furniture set that looked like it came from Versailles by way of Sears Robuck and then a tag sale, the minister received us. She was wearing a sort of sarape, knotted at the bosom, a coarse homespun white blouse embroidered with some kind of indian design, and purple felt slippers. Her hair was done up in a long braid, most of which was covered by a long multi-colored cloth sleeve. In short, she look like she stepped off a corner of Harvard Square, where she had been performing with one of those Andean flute bands. The answers to half our questions started off with, "we indigenous people have a saying..." I'm sure Robert Zoellick will enjoy negotiating FTAA with her.

Later, we paid a visit to the president of the Congress. To get to his suite of offices, you have to pass through a large, unfurnished anteroom at the end of a long corridor. The room was absolutely packed. Each of these people, I discovered, was waiting around in the hopes of an audience with the president of Congress or one of his entourage. Some came to petition for jobs, some for contracts, others for pensions. Apparently, many of them had been waiting their all day, as evidenced by the near riot we caused when we cut through the throng to get to our appointment. Luckily, we had a complement of shiny-booted military officers accompanying us. Who exactly these decorated gentlemen were, I have no idea. And they had no more clue as to our identity as we did to theirs. Seeing a group of briefcase-toting white people entering the Congress, these sharp-eyed warriors figured we had to be important and so volunteered themselves as our escort. On the way out, we went down the wrong elevator and found ourselves before the floor of legislature. The floor itself was in no way out of the ordinary. The wall behind the rostrum, however, was covered with a patchwork of murals. Most depicted highly stylized naked people in various scenes of suffering, Guernica by way of a flea market. In the middle of all this appeared a black square upon which a large, fanged skull, capped with a German WWII helment had been painted. Above the skull, in lurid colors were written the letters "C-I-A." Interestingly, Ecuador is probably one of the few countries in Latin America that the United States has entirely refrained from meddling with. From the look of things, they'd be better off if we had. [2/9/03 22:32]
 
 

Doug, did you really think M*A*S*H was funny? Before I had enough sense to find the politics disturbing, I concluded that the show was dreadfully unfunny. Later, I saw the movie, which offers (if it is possible) fewer laughs and more straw-man polemics.

[2/9/03 21:49]
 
 
I also adored M*A*S*H as a kid, and my reappraisal of it in high school constituted one of my first major re-evaluation of values. I should note that my problems with M*A*S*H aren’t solely, or even primarily, political. Many characters offered up as objects for uncritical admiration (Hawkeye, in particular) are self-satisfied jerks, and a winking, adolescent irony is everywhere exalted over sincerity.

As for the politics, M*A*S*H* suffers from a ubiquitous problem, namely the difficulty of describing war in art – or at all – without degenerating into polemic. Mere reportage inevitably produces an anti-war statement – it tells a story of a man living in conditions of discomfort, fear, and squalor conspiring to kill someone he does not know and against whom he bears no personal grievance. The only way to render this state of affairs conceivable is to designate a villain or to cite an atrocity; thus, to initiate a counter-polemic. M*A*SH* belongs squarely in the first camp. It presents a war, and its horrors, without referencing in any way the events puporting to justify the conflict. As a result, one leaves the 4077th thinking that it sure does seem crazy to be in Korea, fighting for some damn hill. And indeed, if war just means bad food, uncongenial living, and the 10% risk of violent death, it sure would make good sense to wear a dress to get the hell back to Cleveland. If instead, the stakes include the subjugation of 20 million people to a Stalinist tyranny of predictable brutality, Corporal Klinger’s antics appear less amusing.
[2/8/03 21:09]
   
     
   
Hey Ben, did you really think M*A*S*H was treasonous? I watched it regularly as a kid, and although politically unsophisticated back then, I thought it was as benign as "Three's Company". And very funny, too. Is there some particular incident or episode that you hold against it? [2/6/03 11:51]
 
     
 
Deb says: HaRDWORKINg [2/5/03 09:58]
   
     
   
That clue could probably be condensed:

Industrious witch traps Ronald Dworkin (11) [2/4/03 10:50]
 
   
No tallowed seine of fries can ward, no doubt,
Who once has set his tryst with In-N-Out.

Nobody got liFELONg. I'll give you this other one although it's not an and-lit. Starts with "H":

Industrious witch barding head of Ronald Dworkin (11)
[2/4/03 09:20]
 
     
 
Fuck you, Cpt. B.J. Hunnicut

I just finished The Aquariums of Pyongyang, one of the only available narratives we have from a survivor of the North Korean gulag. In many ways, it’s the same old story of Stalinist lies. A wealthy Korean family living in Japan, lured back to the fatherland by the promise of building a new utopia, finds instead a fractured and dismal state. Shipped to the a work camp on remote pretexts, the family lives for ten years on the knife-edge of starvation, laboring in rags in the freezing cold. The narrator, Kang Chol-Hwan, enters the camp at the age of nine, and it becomes his entire world. After his family’s release a decade later, he escapes North Korea and makes his way to the south, where he now lives, surrounded by freedom and prosperity.

The atrocity narrative has become common, so much so that the merely bestial pales by comparison to the truly demoniacal. Reading reports of Saddam’s torture chambers, the Rwandan genocide, or passages from Primo Levi makes one oddly insensitive to the horrors of “mere” forced labor and starvation. Kang offers individual atrocities – children crushed by a collapsing mine, a boy beaten and left to die in a septic tank – but overall he’s quite blunt about his captors: they starved him, they forced him to work beyond a child’s endurance, they beat him savagely. All together, the North Korean regime created a slow-motion slaughterhouse in which many, many inmates perished pointlessly from cold, disease, and weariness. But Kang does not report a Buchenwald, not death and humiliation for its own sake, not an evil beyond human imagination. No, it was just brutal Stalinism, with a strong overlay of Confucianism, ethnic prejudice, and fantastical leader worship of Kim Il Sung.

To me, that’s enough. The famous satellite picture of the Korean penninsula at night – the South ablaze with light and progress, the North as dark as it would have been in 1503 – is enough to justify more than what we did, and more than what we do. Thus it is with particular disgust that I note Mike Farrell – BJ Hunnicut of the execrable series M*A*S*H – at the forefront of the celebrity anti-war efforts. He’s a citizen, and entitled to his opinion to be sure. First amendment, yada, yada. But he also was a co-star in a long-running propaganda effort denigrating one of the most wholesome, heroic, and ultimately effective humanitarian interventions the world has ever seen. And now, with Saddam pinning the people of Iraq under his blood-stained boot, Farrell won’t even countenance a strong push to dislodge him. Perhaps next Hollywood can solicit advice on race relations from D.W. Griffith.
[2/3/03 21:20]
   
     
   
Ben H., you couldn't be any righter about the shuttle program.

I'm back in Paris, where it's 2:35 in the jetlag, and i'm struggling to stay awake. The perennially gray sky doesn't help. I should probably do work, since I did much less than I intended while in California (specifically, none), but on the other hand I'm not in ideal coding form. Twice now I've forgotten doing something ten seconds earlier, and been surprised to see it already done. So instead, I give you

Tristero Burger

You guys know, and other readers may know, of "In-N-Out Burger", a privately-held fast food chain with a large (arguably "cult") following in southern California. That sanctimonious Fast Food Nation book I mentioned singles out In-N-Out as a good restaurant, for reasons I won't go into. Ben A., you no doubt recall betting me and Dao, three years ago almost to the day, that you would go up to their drive-in window and order a burger "animal style". This phrase does not appear anywhere on any menu, nor on any advertising, so we figured you were making some kind of absurdist bluff. Yet you pulled up, rolled down the window, and said with total aplomb, "One animal style burger, fries, and a coke" -- and the voice on the other end was unfazed. The order was filled, and what it was filled with was ... incredible. Of course I can't reveal it.
On this trip it was my turn to show off my knowledge of What Animal Style Taste Entails.

I think we've had this conversation before, but I wonder how much of In-N-Out's success is due to its "secret" menu, which makes its customers feel like an elite clientele (unlike the gluttonous rabble at McDonald's). And I wonder if the ploy could work in other industries. Probably not; burgers are one of the few things people buy made-to-order on a regular basis. Video games have "secret levels", and re-released albums have "bonus tracks", but it's not really the same thing. [2/3/03 10:08]
 
 
Can we now at last put an end to the space shuttle program? 115 missions, 2 catastrophic failures, several hundred million dollars cost per laumch -- it's a White Elephant that occasionally decides to rear up and go crashing into the bush. Meanwhile, a Russian space program staffed by half-soused guys paid a hundred bucks a month has managed to keep Soyuzes chugging back and forth from space with masking tape, bailing wire, and the odd $20mm from eccentric millionaires looking for the ultimate thrill ride. America loves complex technology, and on that score a winged shuttlecraft has cinematic appeal that a big, dumb rocket can't match. But in this case, the old Soviet obsession with scale and brute force has achieved much better results.

Prepare to hear politicians' eulogies about how the unfortunate crew died in the cause of exploration or the cause of science. Exploration? I think by now we pretty much know what the lower-orbit zone around our planet is all about. For science? True, after every mission we hear about the myriad scientific experiments that have taken place aboard the craft. However, I get the impression that most of these experiments have been dreamed up to justify having a space-borne laboratory -- like the ant-farm of the Simpons' episode. Let's see how beans grow in zero gravity. Let's see if Heinz ketchup comes out of the bottle more easily in space. No, they didn't die in the cause of exploration or the cause of science, though they bravely subjected themselves to great danger. They died in the cause of keeping alive an ill-conceived Cold War boondoggle. Enough already. [2/1/03 14:07]
 
 
Bring Back Tevye!

Lieberman presents a problem. We don't really have a Jewish stereotype circling in the popular culture these days. The shadow of the holocaust, has, I suspect hindered the dissemination of the the kind of broad ethnic generalizations in which Hollywood delights. American Indians, for example are deep, spiritual and transcend our crass western consumerism -- everybody knows that. Jews? Nothing.

What this means is, there's a unfilled niche. Lieberman prominence's could tag our entire race with the reputation for lugubrious piety. With the Woody Allen as the alternative representative, I suppose I should be grateful.

Addendum

MISTIA is an acronym:

More
In
Sadness
Than
In
Anger

[1/31/03 09:53]
   
     
   
Don't know what "MISTIA" means, but Dao's parents' house is just off of Ernest Fulsom Drive. I think that should be Lieberman's nickname. [1/30/03 21:38]
 
     
 
Crank Superhighway

Those anti-gravity boots may be more important than we ever imagined!

[1/29/03 20:24]
   
 
I read an early excerpt from Schlosser in the New Yorker, and found it a treasure trove of nifty nuggets. One anecdote: a visit to International Foods and Flavors, where scientists fool Schlosser into mistaking a scent-impregnated dipstick for a mouth-watering hamburger. So I respond to the screed that essay became more in sadness than in anger (some wag commented that 'MISTIA' should be an official Washington abbreviation, or at least a useful shorthand for Joe Lieberman).

So here's the sadness. Bashing America for corporate subsidies is all well and good. They exist. They're bad. They hurt us all. But it's kind of like attacking police corruption in Minneapolis, isn't it? Yes, we subsidize our farmers, but by world standards of corporate coddling, Archers Daniels Midland might as well be a corner nail salon.

I know there are some who believe that once the People learn of the imperfections of the market, Nader/Laduke will reign from Zion in joy. Wrong. Graft and inefficiency riddle every institution in our fallen world. Conservatives look foolish when they claim that companies behave as if torn from the pages of Atlas Shrugged. But firing that straw man won't suffice to make the case against capitalism.


[1/29/03 19:55]
   
     
   
Oh yeah. I read "Fast Food Nation" on the plane. Skip it if possible. There were some interesting nuggets (Willard Scott invented Ronald McDonald; carmine, the red coloring used in much strawberry yogurt and elsewhere, comes from crushed insects). Otherwise it was a diffuse anti-corporate screed written for NPR listeners who are already convinced. I thought the core claim of the book, if you jettisoned all the extraneous crap, was that America runs on corporate welfare rather than the vaunted free market. I also think there's a lot of truth to that claim, and that it's a serious problem. But the author, like so many sanctimonious NPR types (actually he's an Atlantic Monthly writer, according to the jacket), fails to maintain his pose of objectivity. He writes as though the mere mentioning of Reagan will conjure dark clouds in the reader's mind.

In the continuing interest of balance, here's an anti-corporate work that succeeds at seeming objective, and on a whole bunch of other levels too: "The Navigators", a recent British movie about railway privatization. Should be required viewing for all would-be left-wing finger-waggers, at the very least. [1/29/03 19:03]
 
   
Hey -- you'll never guess where I am (unless I already told you). Orange County, California. (Spending the lunar new year with Dao's family.) Of course I'm not as obsessed now with the Golden State as I was six years ago, but still, it's January and it's 75 and sunny. Drove down to greater San Diego to see my aunt and uncle yesterday; brought back a lot of memories of Irvine/La Jolla round trips. Had some of the endemic fish tacos. My uncle Arvydas is one of the funniest people on earth. He said something at dinner that had me crying with laughter. Unfortunately you sort of had to be there (the punch line was "ascorbic").

Lifelong prisoner! (5)

What else. Basically just eating a lot of fantastic Vietnamese food here, c/o Dao's mom. I had some other stuff to say but I can't remember. Possibly a rebuttal to you guys' Bush apologies. It all boils down to "fuck that fucking fuck", though, so it's just as well. [1/29/03 18:52]
 
     
 
National Greatness

The GOP is now the party of moral interventionism. Ten billion for HIV and a pledge to liberate the Iraqi people -- it's hard to climb down from that.

With that as background I can stomach the bogus stimulus and, heaven help us, government investment into hydrogen-powered cars and clean-burning anti-gravity boots. [1/29/03 11:17]
   
 
EMPIRE

French meddling in Ivory Coast -- without sanction of the UN Security Council or any other multilateral body -- continues. Our Africa contacts tell us that the "peace deal" was brokered only through the disbursement of quite liberal French bribes. The deal has garnered virtually no popular support in Abidjian, where there has been rioting and attacks on French interests in the city (including the embassy). The funny thing is that there have been calls in the press there for the U.S. to intervene and save Ivory Coast from the French! [1/28/03 12:05]
 
 

I believe that French and German opposition to an invasion of Iraq is entirely cynical. However, I am willing to admit the possibility that I have misjudged our European friends. As a trader, I see every day how the market acts as a sort of truth serum. JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, et. al. may profess complete confidence that Brazil will pay its debt, but the C-bond's precipitous fall reveals otherwise. I say let the Europeans prove their good faith by putting their money where their mouth is.

The U.S. will forswear an attack on Iraq if France and Germnay agree to indemnify up to some specified sum -- say $50BB -- the U.S. against the possibility of Iraqi aggression against its neighbors, Iraqi sponsorship of terrorism against the U.S., or any of a set of specified events. Lloyd's of London or a similar organization can serve as calculation agent. The French tresor and German FinMin can fund their security for the indemnity by selling credit-linked notes to their bond-buying public. The notes will pay interest and return principal if none of the "Iraq events" takes place, but principal will be forfeited to the extent an indemnity must be paid. Then we sit back and see where these bonds trade. If the French and German elites truly believe Iraq poses no threat, they should willingly hold the bonds at a very low yield. And if the bonds cannot be placed, or they trade down to 70 cents on the euro, well, M. Chirac and Herr Schroeder will have some explaining to do.

[1/27/03 07:55]
 
   
New theory on why Condi Rice thinks plagiarism should be punished by violent death. She needs the French to acquiesce to our obliteration of Iraq's regime, but the French just shrug at said regime's murder, torture, rape etc. etc. So what would gall the Gauls enough to get them on board? Why, proof of Iraq's literary crimes! I disagree with Rice's choice in drumming up charges of plagiarism, however. It would have been much more effective to write in the Times, "The CIA has overheard Saddam questioning the originality of Rimbaud's imagery." Better yet: "At a recent diplomatic dinner, Saddam called his Beaujolais 'vin de merde'." Imagine Dominique de Villepin reading that ... why, he'd transform into a towering, fuming Gandalf-like figure: "THIS ... SHALL NOT ... PASS!!!" [1/24/03 12:55]
 
     
 
Another author to add to the must read list: Caitlin Flanagan of the Atlantic. [1/23/03 20:47]
   
 
I disagree on the personalization issue. We can take it too far. If we identify Saddam as our primary target, how will we respond if Saddam resigns in favor of some other Baathist thug. An Iraq ruled by another fascist obsessed with WMD threatens us just the same. And won't we have a very difficult time mobilizing a coalition in that case? We should be criticizing "the Iraqi regime" or "the Baathist regime."

An interesting story just came across the wire. Wolfowitz is speaking and he has accused Iraq of attempting to blackmail weapons inspectors (at various times since the Gulf War). Tie this to another weird story that hit the tape a couple of days ago. Scott Ritter was busted in Florida trying to pick up a 14-year old girl he met on the internet. Ritter was at one time a strident critic of Iraqi deception and the excessive permissiveness of the sanctions. Suddenly though, he switched his position, claiming that Iraq's WMD program had effectively been defanged and that the ongoing sanctions were excessively punitive. Do you think Iraqi intelligence found out about his, uh, mentoring activities and blackmailed him? [1/23/03 14:49]
 
 
Doug, you're absolutely right. The administration exercised much greater care in rhetoric distinguishing "the Taliban" from "Afghanistan." [1/23/03 13:42]
   
     
   
And I thought Harvard was tough on plagiarism! Here's Condi Rice explaining why her equivalent of the Ad Board is going to expunge (from the face of the earth) Iraq's rulers:

"Iraq's declaration even resorted to unabashed plagiarism, with lengthy passages of United Nations reports copied word-for-word (or edited to remove any criticism of Iraq) and presented as original text."

I guess we can debate whether the punishment fits this crime, but here's one thing that seems clearly wrong with the Bush posse's rhetoric: the vilification of "Iraq" rather than "Saddam's regime". Shouldn't the Bush posse pose consistently as a friend of "Iraq" and "the good people of Iraq", whom it will "liberate" from the Tikriti "usurper"? Am I missing something? [1/23/03 10:39]
 
 
Doug's mention of Orwell and language clicked with something I read today. When the press these days describes some policy as "Orwellian" or redolent of "Big Brother", it almost always refers to the implementation of some technology to root out terrorists which may have as a collateral effect the erosion of citizens' privacy. Rarely does it refer to instances of Newspeak -- probably because it is republican administrations which trade off privacy for security, while liberals contort words to mean their opposites. Listen to what Hilary Clinton said in a speech criticizing the Bush position on the U of M affirmative action case.

"We are reminded oce again by the events of the last year that there are those who don't understand Dr. King's dream and legacy... Yes, we want to be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. BUt what makes up character? If we don't take race as part of character, then we are kidding ourselves."

Take a minute to catch your breath. Raceblindness is racism. Hilary's MLK asks not to be judged by the color of his skin, but the content of his character, which, by the way, is largely his race. Which is the color of his skin. To say this at an event held in honor of MLK day takes shamelessness to a degree that up to now only her husband had approached.

On the topic of the Gratz case, people on the Bush side of the argument have touted so-called "race-neutral" means of achieving diversity, most prominently the Texas and Florida policies that guarantee a slot at a state school to any student ranking in the top X% of his high school class. Hilary-ites retort that such a policy only works in the case of highly segregated school systems. That's true, but in fact that's a virtue of the policy. Affirmative action is not self-limiting, in the sense that it offers no insight as to when "past discrimination" has been remedied. The Texas/Florida program naturally loses effect when school systems integrate fully. To the extent there is still segregation, students in minority schools have an easier time getting into college. When the segregation wanes, the X% rule no longer has a racial overlay.


[1/21/03 22:25]
 
 
One of my favorite anecdotes of the Giuliani years is his handling of the ferret issue. As you may remember, Giuliani, high-handedly, and for no good reason, banned the possession of ferrets as pets. Why ever? Cynics might imagine he hoped to piss off the left-wing, south-of-Bleecker hipster demographic. If so, it worked, and soon after Giuliani found himself on talk radio, defending his decree against an irate ferret-owner. Rudy’s response merits quoting in full: “There is something deranged about you. I know you feel insulted by that, but I am being honest with you. This excessive concern with little weasels is a sickness.”

That’s right, a sitting mayor, on the record, calling a constituent a deluded loon. You don’t see that too often in American politics. That striking anecdote was included in an excellent survey of Giuliani’s tenure by Michael Grunwald, entitled, appropriately “Cruel to be Kind.”

As this anecdote suggests, there was a lot not to like about Giuliani: He was autocratic, vain, abrupt, and unlikable. In the Rudy hagiography after September 11, it’s hard to remember just how disliked he was, and how maniacal some of his causes appeared (the banning of pushcarts, for example). I mean honestly, why ban ferrets? It’s just inflammatory and idiotic.

But then, this is also the man who, basically single-handedly, demonstrated that New York could be governed. If you read David Letterman top ten lists from the 80s, you’ll see that New York serves as a punch line, a shorthand for blight, decay, vulgarity and crime. No more. That’s what Giuliani wrought, and as Grunwald notes, it wasn’t by being nice. Indeed, Grunwald argues that it was precisely Rudy’s vices – stubbornness, vindictiveness, lack of empathy -- that enabled this miraculous transformation.

Why do I mention this? It’s a minor aside of yours, Doug, that you are not sure you support an invasion of Iraq, absent an overhaul of the entire Bush foreign policy. Well, I tend to agree with you: Bush people display boundless arrogance, and needlessly insult allies. I can’t listen to Richard Perle speak without gnashing my teeth, and I agree with the man.

But Saddam Hussein is not on the world’s agenda because of Richard Perle’s conciliatory attitude or Donald Rumsfeld’s commitment to nation building. No, when Saddam is deposed, we will have bullying, stubborn, ally-alienating hawks to thank. And it will have been worth it.
[1/21/03 20:38]
   
 
A certain type of mind admits little distinction between the right behavior and the behavior that gets the best result. In this harmonious world, the market runs with perfect efficiency, virtue secures rewards other than itself, and a kind word succeeds where tantrums fail. Whether these beliefs are right or wrong does not depend on the basic organization of the universe, but rather on how we behave. It sounds obvious, but virtue is rewarded only if most people choose to reward it. Every time an airline gate agent placates a foot-stamping, scowling traveler at the expense of his polite fellow, incentives tilt ever so slightly toward behavior sure to produce a less pleasant world. Sure, the golden rule is important, but I submit a more important corollary: treat best those others who behave the way you want everyone to behave.

I bring this up because my burgeoning “management” duties have demonstrated to me the baleful consequences of employing people who flout my golden corollary. Many of the back office staffers I deal with on a daily basis perform their duties as though they had been recruited from the U.S. postal service. They wield their one rubber stamp with punctiliousness but with an utter ignorance of their place in the broader scheme of the organization, a total lack of curiosity about the operation they support. The predictable result: error, inefficiency, and mounting frustration. As a novice manager, I at first reacted thoughtfully rather than viscerally. Though frustrated, I tried patiently to understand the sources of repeated errors and to suggest to the blunderer – who at bottom only has to carry out a few tasks -- how the problem might be avoided in the future. In the harmonious world, patience and courtesy would meet with attention redoubled efforts.

Since you know as well as I do the nature of the world we inhabit, you should have little trouble predicting the outcome of my tactics. To them, my courtesy only relegated my requests to the bottom of the queue. If you asked them how they prefer to be treated, I am certain they would choose my way rather than the brusquer way of other managers at the same firm. And yet, their revealed preference traduces their stated one. If they can’t follow the golden corollary, then I cannot follow the golden rule. After a particularly headache-inducing snafu this week, I decided that if they could act like post office workers, so could I. Except that unlike them, I would not imitate 20-year fiftieth-percentile-ranking employees, but rather the sort of disgruntled one who reports for duty with a shotgun in his mailbag.

I called up, bellowed and mewled, declaring that I was going to strangle someone that very afternoon, the only question being whose neck got wrung. A neck had better be produced or whoever’s happened to be closest at hand would do. When a suitable victim was delivered up to me, I got the desk on the line and proceeded to browbeat and humiliate him. “Up here, we all have to do tons of things, know the details of 50 different countries’ markets. You have to do one goddamn thing. I am the fox and you are the hedge-hog. Who ever heard of a hedge-hog that can’t even dig?”

So what happened? Instant attention. Meetings to try to improve our satisfaction. Reshuffling of assignments. And people who showed that fear motivates them best. Now they are sure to receive generous helpings of it. It isn’t the environment that I or they want, but it's the only one their revealed preferences allow.
[1/18/03 19:49]
 
   
BTW, on the anti-war march issue, don't get the impression that I support an attack on Iraq (without a total overhaul of the Bush foreign policy). It's just that, as a wise man once said, "At times one remains faithful to a cause only because its opponents do not cease to be insipid." [1/18/03 17:21]
 
   
Another positive comment about a contemporary writer. Below I decried some failed attempts at piquant word-juxtaposition. Myers' article shared some successful attempts at this by Nabakov, and my favorite blogger (guess who) came up with another one a few days ago. Lamenting his microwave frozen-fish meal, he mentioned its "brackish parsley." This is perfect because the word "brackish" most commonly modifies "water", so we subconsciously feel the parsley decaying in a stagnant pool. "Brackish" also calls to mind "bracken", a type of fern that you'd never eat.

On the same general topic, I just re-read Orwell's Politics and the English Language". If you haven't read it recently, I highly recommend that you do so now. [1/18/03 16:05]
 
     
 

Will the End, Not the Means! Will the End, not the Means!
repeat [1/18/03 10:21]
   
     
   
Anti-war demonstration today in Paris. The slogan: "No to war against Iraq, Yes to a world of justice, peace and democracy!"

Future demonstrations to be held by the same groups:

No to medicine, yes to health!
No to police, yes to domestic tranquillity!
No to taxes, yes to big government!
No to work, yes to wealth!
[1/18/03 07:39]
 
   
French cheeses are like tropical frogs in that the really poisonously foul-tasting ones usually advertise that fact with bright colorations or distinctive markings. If a cheese is covered in a layer of blue mold, or girdled by chives, that's its way of saying "stay away". But you can't let the lack of such signs convince you that a cheese is harmless. Yesterday I bought some Pont-L'Eveque, a bland-looking square that's common even in supermarkets. I remembered getting some at the supermarket and not liking it, but since I couldn't remember what it tasted like, and I happened yesterday to be at a good cheese store, I figured I might try a better instance of it. It turns out to be similar in texture, and somewhat also in taste, to reblochon, a very common cheese that we like a lot (and is on the stinkier end of the cheeses we buy). The main differences are that Pont-L'Eveque has a thicker, gummier crust on it, and has an added nasty ammonia taste. In fact it sort of tastes like you swirled reblochon around in a mop bucket. Won't buy it again.

Now, in the spirit of "two positive comments for every negative one", two really good cheeses: Saint Nectaire, also stinky and reblochon-like, but yummy, and Chaource, a very mild, almost fluffy cheese, sort of like very fresh camembert but better. I've noticed that camembert has two states: the early state, where it's white in color, mild in taste, and has a slightly fluffy/crumbly texture, and the late state (after a few days in the fridge), where it turns yellowish, stinkier, and smooth/brie-like in texture. (The yellowness moves from the outside in.) I should probably discuss this with a French person; I don't know how one is "supposed" to value these two states. Maybe you're supposed to wait until camembert turns yellow. All I know is that I adore the white state and hate the yellow. I made the mistake last week of buying a camembert from the supermarket from a nearly empty refrigerated shelf -- it had clearly been a while since the last shipment, so the remaining camembert had sat so long there that it had already turned yellow. Yuck.

This reminds me that I left my negative comments on Richard Powers unbalanced. So here are two good recent novels: "Uncle Petros And Goldbach's Conjecture", which might from its title sound like a Powers book, but is the exact opposite -- concise, unpretentious, empathetic, with characters you actually care about. (The same person who gave me that other Powers book gave me this one.) And "When We Were Orphans", by that Ishiguro guy, was good too. [1/18/03 07:26]
 
 

Chavez update:

El Comandante came to New York yesterday to speak at the GA and met with Kofi The Appeaser. In front of the U.N. audience he expressed his willingness to accept early elections convoked by constitutional means, by which he meant the fairly onerous process of calling a constitutional convention which in turn would change the election calendar. The Carterite crowd crowed that Chavez had showed pragmatism and flexibility. The local opposition, on the other hand, remonstrated that six months might pass before Chavez's sincerity could be tested, and that the evidence of prior behavior demonstrates the likelihood of equivocation.

Chavez returned to Caracas last night. This morning the National Guard seized a warehouse belonging to Panamco, the largest bottler of Coca-Cola in Latin America. The officer in charge of the operation proclaimed his troops were seizing the contents of the warehouse "for the benefit of the people." The people can look forward to free Coke and bottled water courtesy of the Bolivarian Revolution. Hours this bold step in revolutionary thirst-quenching, Chavez announced preparations to take over private television stations he has accused of "coup-mongering."

The U.S. has joined with Brazil, Spain, and a few other countries to form a "Friends of Venezuela" mediating effort. When will the international community admit that Chavez is not a bona fide negotiating partner? [1/17/03 16:18]
 
 
War, I Hear, Brings Karmic Retribution

“All of North Korea is a gulag,” said one senior U.S. official, noting that as many as 2 million people have died of starvation while Kim has amassed the world’s largest collection of Daffy Duck cartoons. [1/17/03 13:34]
   
 
Ben H, you've often blamed T.S. Eliot for spawning a whole generation of horrendous blank-versifiers. And it's true. Spectacular, rule-breaking innovation often causes a kind of cargo-cultism. Less gifted artists mistake the transgression for the talent.

Can there be any doubt that Nabakov plays the Eliot role for the emotionally arid, game-playing novelist set? Look, it's an acrostic! Backwards! In Finnish! That simultaneously recapitulates Morphy's flawed pawn structure in his 1858 loss to Harwitz!

Disclaimer: I love Nabakov. But he did tend to follies of this kind. (And with the exception of Pnin his work is not damp with sentiment). I seek not to slam him, but to suggest a source of the Modern Novel Problem. Also, I think Nabakov-fixation is underrepresented in weblogs, especially vis-a-vis Paul Krugman-fixation. [1/14/03 19:24]
   
 

I think what you note about "emotional aridity" qualifying as only a minor flaw is key. Perhaps novel-writing has succumbed to the same sort of "science-envy" as criticism. A great novel, in this view, is the one that plays the most elaborate word game, has the most labrynthine structure, or uses the most abstruse diction. To traffic in mere emotion is beneath the great scientific mind and so, too, must it be beneath the great authorial mind. This affliction has blighted not only fiction writers and critics. Take a discipline like economics. Broad, naturalistic work like that of, say, Charles Kindleberger has been displaced by the bewildering, abstract mathematical models of Ken Rogoff or Stan Fisher.

[1/14/03 16:49]
 
   
Unconstructive ranting -- and on a topic we've already beaten to death!

A New Yorker critic just reviewed the latest novel by Richard Powers, calling him a "lavishly gifted" writer. I lavishly re-gifted the only Powers novel I owned, The Gold Bug Variations, having been unable to stomach its pretentiousness for more than two pages. I once got through 20 pages of someone else's copy of Galatea 2.2, an earlier book, when I was in grad school and my system was more accustomed to digesting this kind of stuff. Although Myers did not mention him (in the Atlantic article, anyway), this guy is the single worst perpetrator I know of the sins he catalogs.

Sven Birkerts, in his review, starts by mentioning The Gold Bug Variations, which, "[i]f somewhat emotionally arid", was "brawny with ambition, auguring more honors and prizes for Powers, already a MacArthur Fellow." In today's Serious Literary World, emotional aridity is a minor flaw. A knack and a need for understanding people, for empathizing with them, is not something that can be taught in an MFA program or acquired through hard work. Hence not anything that editors and critics and jury members will be able to attain. So screw it. Let's make the critera of quality (1) tangledness, (2) library research, and (3) adherence to our hieratic style. These things we can all excel at, if we only put in enough effort. Anybody can be "brawny with ambition". What's that you were saying, Ben H., about the ascendancy of the "A" for effort? There are such things as misguided effort, botched experiments, and failed ambition.

Now to use Myers' trick and rant about samples of Powers' new book ... that Birkerts cites approvingly.

First off, the book is called "The Time of Our Singing". I suppose it would be a category error to say of a book title that it has its author's Restoration Hardware nickel-plated backscratcher stuck up its ass, yet that seems somehow to be the case for this title. Powers seems to have deliberately chosen a title that sounds translated from French. Ooh la la. MacArthur Fellows do not call their books "Singing Time" or "Time to Sing" or "When We Sang". "The Time of Our Singing". Christ. (More evidence for this French-translation-effect to follow.)

Birkerts writes of Powers' new protagonist, "For David, caught in the toils of the theoretical, 'race is only real if you freeze time. ... We all move along a curve that will break down and rebuild us all.'" Race is only real if you freeze time. Vapidity is only apparent if you freeze single sentences and examine them closely. This was an excellent point that Myers made -- Serious Writers' brawny prose is made to push you onwards, faster and faster, leaving you no time to stop and see if it makes any sense. Now I can hear Dao, who disapproves of my web-log screeds on many legitimate grounds, scolding me for assuming that no previous or subsequent sentence clarifies Powers' gnosticism about race. But no, honey, this is pure nonsense; read it again: "Race is only real if you freeze time". And then read: "We all move along a curve that will break down and rebuild us all." We all write sentences that will mean nil and win prestigious awards. (Writing Serious Novels is actually akin to the astrologer's art: you have to say things that sound definite but are unfalsifiable. "Your day will have annoyances, but you can turn them into delights!" "Our curve will break down, but rebuild us all!") And keep in mind that I am only re-quoting what Birkerts found good enough to quote.

Or try this: "We discharged the first verse [of music], but when we reached the double bar, Jonah, shooting me a larcenous glance, pressed on through the end of the song. That tune's second verse scans like a battered reverse translation, impossible to phrase inside the melody that works so brilliantly with the first stanza." Okay, what is a "larcenous glance"? There is a fine line, to paraphrase Spinal Tap, between piquant word-juxtapositions and nonsense, and Powers has crossed it. And what is a "battered reverse translation"? How can a translation be battered? Talk about category errors. I even have difficulty grasping what Powers means by a "reverse translation", although it's clearly something very Intellectual. Maybe it's when you're writing in your own language while imagining that you are writing in an exotic foreign language and only translating into your own, leaving in the battered telltale tics and satisfying stiltednesses of translations. "The Time of Our Singing." Powers has risen to the top of my bitch-slap list. [1/14/03 14:38]
 
 
That article had my blood boiling. I didn't even think to consider how the author might fail to give due consideration to the hood's victims. Instead, I was insensate with rage that he and "Lolli" and "Lolli" and a collection of other men could have baby after baby on my dime. I can accept that fellow citizens who have run into trouble or suffered from bad luck have some claim on my resources. However, to allow them to create new claimants strikes me as sort of like having bank deposit insurance in the absence of being able to intervene the bank when it becomes insolvent.

Of course, neither your reaction, Ben, nor my reaction was what the author was after. What sort of response do you think the article aimed at? Typically, such pieces follow a "non-violent" offender locked up under draconian drug laws and the implication is that we should decriminalize drugs. In this case, the convict blew somebody's head off (granted, by accident, but in the middle of robbery) and had a long record of violent behavior. Showing the collateral damage of incarceration can hardly persuade that the guy should not be in prison. However, I'll accept the author's premise that a man's incarceration has a deleterious effect on his "wife" (I put that in quotes since in the social milieu described in the article, all conjugal relations appear to be entirely informal) and his bastards. I therefore conclude: 1) we must make every effort to prevent young thugs and their female admirers from having children 2) to the extent they have children, those children should be taken away.


[1/14/03 07:14]
 
 
When the Man of the House is in The Big House
Ok, so call me a heartless, reactionary bastard, but my first thought on first seeing this article in the Times Magazine was: “ I wonder if we learn anything about his victims.”

To my suprise, the answer is yes. “Leon” accidentally killed one of his running partners, Pee Wee, and we get some detail about that. The prison guard he wounded in a riot, the seemingly countless men he mugged? Not a whisper.

We can all lament that this man has made a ruin of his life, and inflicted thereby terrible hardships on his children and their mother. But I wish the Times could spare a little sympathy for his other victims – those on the receiving end of his crimes.

[1/13/03 18:52]
   
     
   
Am I the only one worried that William Safire is going a little dotty? Just look at his latest NY Times Op/Ed piece ...

As the Mother of All Phony Wars prepares to give birth, Israelis are pacing like nervous fathers. Memories of scuds, gas masks, and basement shelters haunt them from the last Gulf War. But they'd breathe easier if they knew the secret defense plans their government is preparing.

I called Ariel Sharon yesterday to discuss his election troubles, when he dropped this bombshell: "The U.S. government has agreed to provide us 200 Taliban cave-diggers currently interned at Guantanamo Bay, in order to build hardened shelters for the entire Israeli population."

When I suggested that time was too short for such plans, the Prime Minister scoffed. "Mitzna said the same thing, and you know what I told him?"

"That he was a dreary derider of ditch-digging?"

"Good one, Bill, that's what I should have said."

"Hey Ari, I've got your new campaign slogan: With Ariel and Taliban, we'll live long and Prospero!"

"Ha! Put that into Hebrew and I'm as good as re-elected."

I gave it a shot despite my rusty Hebrew: "Ari-Ari Mo-Mary, Arafat's a fo-fairy, bomb-borne beri-beri, Ari!

"Oy, stop it Bill, you're killing me!"

"Hang on, Ari, there's a call on the other line. Hello? Henry! Speaking of secret plans. What can I do for you?"

Kissinger cut right to the chase: important news from one of his clients in Pyongyang, one so compromising that Kissinger resigned the 9/11 inquiry chairmanship rather than reveal him. A NoKo bigwig? Let's just say he's a bon vivant with hundreds of concubines, yet Nodong.

"He's got a message for the administration, Bill, and he needs you to send it. He'll mothball the plants if they send him 100 crates of Dom Perignon, the complete episodes of South Park on DVD, and Anna Nicole Smith."

"Consider it sent, Henry. Anything else?"

"Vell, there is one thing ... this Norma Loquendi you always mention. Is she attached?"

"Henry, if being a sly dog was a crime, they'd have you in the Hague!"

The confluence of these two crises, Iraq and North Korea, understandably make us seek the advice of those who have weathered similar trouble. It was in this spirit that I turned down the lights and got out my ouija board. I asked my great and unjustly persecuted mentor if his own experiences could suggest any strategies for me. The letters came back: R-E-T-I-R-E.

Nixon was being cryptic, as dead people are wont to be, yet I believe I have understood his message: "retire" is French for "shoot again", which means that our European allies must be persuaded to join the Iraq effort, freeing up U.S. forces to deal with Korea. Richard Nixon, in death as in life, a fount of wise counsel.

And Friedman thinks he's connected!


[1/13/03 18:06]
 
 

The "I am humbled to receive this award" schtick is one of the more annoying examples of backwardsism, but I don't think that in general it represents a new phenomenon, nor is it just about claiming the mantle of the underdog. People have always recognized that if you zig when the world zags, you can expect a little extra attention. An audience appreciates a twist.

How about the idea that if you do a good deed because it just feels like the right thing, you haven't done anything praise worthy; it's only praiseworthy if you didn't want to do it but did it anyway?

How about "the meek shall inherit the earth"? THe meek, I mean, jeez look around, those swaggering Romans pretty much control the compass of the known world, and not through their meekness.

How about, "I may be the First Citizen, but i am just a servant of the Republic." If so, you're the first servant I've heard of to get the master suite in the palace.

One really shining exception to sports underdoggery: Muhammad Ali. "I am the greatest!" Thank you, Mr. Clay, for telling it like it was. Or maybe he simply recognized that backwardsism had become the normal idiom, and he zagged against the ziggers by reverting to Old Testament boastfulness.

As for the writers desperate clutching for the mantle of underdog, do you think it perhaps has something to do with the relative devaluation of result in favor of effort? Give Johnny an "A" for his report, after all he comes from such a bad home, and Timmy's report, while a lot better, is what we'd expect of the child of professors. People find it difficult to disentangle aesthetic judgment from moral judgement. And effort coincides with the moral scale, while result lines up better with the aesthetic scale. BUt many people find it uncomfortable to judge Thing A better than Thing B when Thing B's creator has struggled mightily against a hostile environment while Thing A's author is a toff who could lay claim to every sort of encouragement. [1/12/03 11:59]
 
   
And another thing!

Whenever an American receives an award before an audience, he reflexively says "It is so humbling to receive this award." What the hell does that mean? The definition of "award" is a confirmation of your superiority to other people; the definition of "humbling" is confirmation that you are not superior to other people. "I am ennobled by this award" -- that's what a prizewinner whose mouth is not on autopilot ought to say. To say the opposite of this -- the opposite of the truth -- may have been clever the first time it was tried, probably by some Dionysus festival champ in 400 B.C. Here's my reconstruction. The problem with publicly receiving an award is that it's unseemly to gloat. And anything you can say about the award while on stage will tend to sound like gloating. So someone had the (initially) brilliant idea of turning the whole situation around and claiming that the award actually caused him pangs of humility: "Receiving this award makes me, for the first time, think of myself in the company of its past recipients, and next to them I see the poverty of my abilities." Clever, very clever, and possibly even honest. But this little trick got tiresome after the hundredth iteration (ca. 340 B.C.). And it became criminally tiresome when its parroters stopped bothering even to suggest the counterintuitive mechanism that turned their honor into humbling. Imagine the vacant stare you'd receive from an Oscar winner if you asked him to explain how it is that his violently coveted statuette makes him feel humble.
[1/11/03 10:06]
 
     
 
Everyone's an Underdog

In 1965, Lionel Trilling wrote of the emergence among intellectuals of an adversary culture. Artists, he argued, were socialized to be anti-social -- paradoxically rendering a counter-cultural stance culturally predominant.

Little did he know the adversarial stance would grow from an elite affectation to the universal self-conception. No one, no matter how fortunately placed, seems immune to the lures of adversary consciousness. A few years back, Natalie Angier wrote a cover story for the Times magazine about how the difficulties facing her as an atheist in America. I remember thinking: is this a joke? Angier after all, does slave as an executive assistant at Wall Mart headquarters in Harrison Arkansas. No, she's a Pulitzer-prize winning science writer for the New York Times. Oh the troubles and travails she must suffer -- murmurs at the water cooler after missing midnight mass with Anna Quindlan, cut dead by E.O. Wilson after he saw her eating a ham and swiss on Simchat Torah. Like a fish out of water, poor poppet.

We've long passed the point of parody here. Advertisers enjoin us constantly to fight the man by purchasing mass marketed consumables. (Thomas Frank has a cute term for this: 'antinomian advertising'). Even conservatives -- self-conscious defenders of the mainstream -- obsess over outsider status in the press and academy.

My favorite example: Scottie Pippen, interviewed after *another* Bulls? Championship, said "no one believed we could do this." Hello! You were playing with the basketball messiah, you were the league's flagship franchise: everyone thought you could do this! That's why you were prohibitive favorites!

I don't know why it is that American need to see themselves as underdogs. When did this start? Did Athenian Olympians talk this way, or only Socrates? But if a teammate of Michael Jordan doesn't feel part of it, the concept of mainstream has lost its meaning. Like James Lileks, I too have a dream interview: "It's great to win the championship. We were, after all, highly favored. And I think Vegas had it right -- we had superior talent, and should beat guys like that."

Amen Corner

Before I jar the tone, Doug, I'd like to endorse/affirm your comments on Les Miserables. Not that I've read it, but I?m enjoying the same 19th century novel epiphany with War and Peace right now. The true loadstone: imposing a burden, but irresistible compelling. Next: Anna Karenina, again!
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Ben A. Ben H. Doug Earlier