Eric The Blue

Iraq

What to make of the claim, made by John McCain and other Republicans, that the United States is "succeeding" and "winning" in Iraq?

The claim is unconnected from anything that was said by Iraq war supporters when they were making their case in the months preceding the invasion.  Then, the argument was all about the stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons the Iraqi regime was said to possess, together with its nuclear weapons program, which according to those favoring the invasion was very close to being able to produce a nuclear weapon.  In a nationally televised speech delivered in October of 2002, in Cincinnati, Ohio, President Bush declared:

If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today--and we do--does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?

And, later in the same speech, which was all about the threat posed by Iraq's weapons:

Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof--the smoking gun--that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

We now know that what President Bush said we "knew" was false: Saddam Hussein in fact did not possess "dangerous weapons" with which he could attack us or our allies, and he did not possess anything resembling a viable nuclear weapons program, either.  It therefore appears to me that, five years later, we have suffered well over 30,000 military casualties, nearly 4000 fatalities, and spent something like half a trillion dollars, to defend against a threat that did not exist.

Paul Wolfowitz famously asserted that "for bureaucratic reasons" the administration settled on Iraq's weapons as the centerpiece of its case for war, so it might be objected that one should not regard the centerpiece as the whole argument.  But this is arranging things in a way that makes it impossible to hold the administration responsible for any outcome, no matter how miserable.  The case for war highlighted Iraq's weapons.  But there were no weapons.  Well, there were other reasons, besides the weapons, that "for bureaucratic reasons" were left in the background of the administration's brief.  How does one argue against this shifting ground?  Iraq had no weapons, no collaborative relationship with al Qaeda, and no culpability for 9/11.  Despite very considerable American investments of blood and treasure, no stable, democratic government has been created in Iraq.  What would constitute failure?

It is true that Saddam Hussein is gone.  That shouldn't be very much of a surprise.  Iraq was a fourth-rate power and the United States has the strongest military ever assembled.  The architects of the Iraq war never claimed that the goal was removing Saddam, a relatively easy task.  Rather, Saddam had to go so that he would not have access to dangerous weapons (which he did not have before we invaded), and so that a democratic government friendly to the United States could be created in the Arab world (which has not happened).

The claim that we are "succeeding" in Iraq, that we are going to "win," has to do, I guess, with the lower levels of killing and chaos that have characterized the months since the "surge" strategy was implemented.  But less chaos is not an end in itself, not a definition of "victory in Iraq."  The stated purpose of the "surge" was to create sufficient order for the Iraqi government to assert itself and gain control of the situation.  That hasn't happened.  To be persuaded of what is being claimed today by Iraq war supporters, it is necessary to forget all they have said in the past.  There is no hope of attaining the ends advertised during the run-up to war.  Our "success" is occurring against the backdrop of our monumental failure.

Edmund Wilson and Arthur Darby Nock

I passed an enjoyable evening last night holding my 3-week-old in one arm while employing the other to burrow around in the 900 pages of Edmund Wilson's The Sixties, which I had checked out of the library in order to track down the details of the incident I described in "Chapman on Emerson," posted on February 17.  The name of the Harvard professor that stuck in my mind, you might recall, was Arthur Darby Vance.  My first move, therefore, was to check the index for a reference to that name.  Nothing.  I was almost resigned to trying to locate in the sprawl of The Sixties this single incident when I spied the 32-page "Biographical Notes" at the end of the volume.  Starting with the A's, I began going through these notes, trying to match the brief biographical descriptions of people referred to in the journal with the characteristics of the mis-remembered Arthur Darby Vance.  My progress was retarded by curiosity about what Wilson might have said about people whose alphabetized names came before "Arthur Darby Nock (1902-1963): Classicist and professor of the history of religion at Harvard."  These forays never failed to be rewarding.  For example, I have for years been a subscriber to The New Yorker, and have enjoyed among many other things Roger Angell's baseball writing.  So, upon coming in the Biographical Notes to

Roger Angell (1920-- ): Writer on baseball and fiction editor at The New Yorker.  Son of Katharine S. White.

I found in the index the single reference to him and was soon reading, with relish, on page 437:

[Brendan Gill] was told by Roger Angell, Katharine's son by her first husband, that he had met his mother for lunch and she had greeted him triumphantly with "I've just found blood in my urine!"  Roger hadn't known how to reply and had simply said, "What shall we have?"--Her letter of condolence to Jean Stafford after Joe Liebling's death is probably the prize of all the White stories.  After expressing her sympathy and sorrow, she went on to say that she and Andy had also been ill--"I have a rash all around my rectum."

Anyway, concerning Arthur Darby Nock, classicist, professor of the history of religion, and the learned,  eccentric celibate who was evidently God's gift to Harvard raconteurs: the index gave two references, several hundred pages apart, which, taken together, show that Wilson's memory was as imperfect as mine.  The first (pp. 184-90) is Wilson's fond, ruminative recollections on the occasion of Nock's death, in 1963.  Here is the part that relates to the anecdote I tried to relate in "Chapman on Emerson":

When he was at our house, we had been joking about the stories told about him--"All of these untrue!" he exclaimed.  When some naval officers had arrived at his rooms--the house during the last war having been taken over by the navy--they are supposed to have found him sitting on the floor in a state of partial undress studying a classical manuscript.  One of the officers said, "Jesus Christ!" and Nock is supposed to have corrected him: "Arthur Darby Nock."

Nock's other appearance in The Sixties is about five years and 560 pages later.  Wilson's earlier recollection has been forgotten and the details have changed.

[Richard Pipes] says that a sure social resource at Harvard, when other topics fail momentarily, is stories about Arthur Nock.  I couldn't remember having heard any of these.  His maid is supposed to have entered his rooms and found him stark naked standing on his head.  She exclaimed, "Oh, my God," and he said, "No, Arthur Darby Nock."

On the theory that I had conflated the Nock stories with Wilson's opposition to the Vietnam war, a recurring theme in The Sixties, I looked up "Vietnam" in the index and began reading the referenced pages.  My efforts were again repaid--for example, by this:

In the course of the after-dinner conversation, the war in Vietnam came up, and the businessman took a line like John Gaus's.  Dorothea Straus said she did not want to talk about it because she felt too strongly about it.  The businessman told her that her attitude was due to the fact that she was Jewish.  Dwight Macdonald came out on her side with his usual pugnacity and vehemence.  He said that he was an old anarchist, and that only an old anarchist could understand how to deal with this problem.  The businessman threatened to punch him in the jaw; but, as Roger said, "more moderate counsels prevailed."  Later Roger asked Dwight how, as a pacifistic anarchist, he would have dealt with the situation if the man had punched him in the jaw.  Dwight said, "I'd have fallen down."

The very considerable pleasures of Edmund Wilson's journals are, I think, of a kind with those afforded The LIfe of Johnson, which were admirably summarized by Samuel Holt Monk of the University of Minnesota.  The reader is proffered vicarious membership in a society of men, says Monk,

who have experienced broadly, read widely, observed and reflected on their observations, whose ideas are constantly brought to the test of experience, and whose experience is habitually transmuted into ideas.  The book is as large as life and as human as its central character.

Power outage, take n

At Power Line, one of John Hinderaker's recent exercises in unconscious self satire concerns a Washington Post article on the dumbing down of America.  Hinderaker is sanguine about the fact that one in five poll respondents says that the sun revolves around the earth.  It's shocking, sure, but he's "observed that you can ask virtually any question in a survey, and ten to twenty  percent of respondents will give you an off-the-wall answer."  He proceeds to advance the "pimping the questioner" defense, which is followed by the "distracted mother defense."  There is, however, one thing that really frosts him: the roughly half of all Americans who are in favor of price controls.  It's the worst thing a government can do, short of hauling citizens out of bed and executing them.  (I swear I am not making it up, but if you don't believe me, the link is above.)

So it is understandable that a mother with a crying infant on her hip might tell a survey taker that the sun revolves around the earth but woe to her if she should perform a harried speech act expressing support for price controls while loading her groceries!

Lurking beneath the surface of this absurd post is the reason that Republicans are always whining about "the elites."  Smart people aren't buying what they're selling and, in the smart people demographic, that is a problem.  But there are other demographics to go after, and one thing ignorant people like to hear is that they know better than "the elites."

Hinderaker, by the way, thinks evolution is "pseudo-science," and that Darwin was motivated only by "hostility to religion."  Honest. 

The beat goes on

I've mentioned before how turnout in Democratic caucuses and primaries is surpassing, by wide margins, the turnout on the Republican side: in New Hampshire, for instance, there were something like 22% more voters in the Democratic primary, and in Iowa Democratic caucus goers outnumbered their Republican counterparts by 2-to-1.  That trend has continued.  Iowa and New Hampshire seemed portentous to me because, in the two elections of George W. Bush, they qualify as two of the three actual "swing states," each having gone once for Bush and once for his opponent.  (Gore carried Iowa while Kerry prevailed in New Hampshire; New Mexico, like Iowa, fell into Bush's column after being carried by Gore; the other 47, and the District Columbia, all were either for Bush or against him both times.)  Now, in Virginia, a state last carried by a Democratic presidential candidate in 1964, about 980,000 people voted in the February 12 Democratic primary, compared to around 488,000 in the Republican primary.  Another way to look at it:  Hillary Clinton, who finished a distant second to Barack Obama on the Democratic side, outpolled the Republican winner, John McCain, by more than 100,000 ballots.  The Virginia results are here.

To try and determine what significance these results may have for the outcome of the general election, I've gone back and looked at the comparative turnouts in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2000, the last time there was not an incumbent seeking reelection.  (I hate suggesting Bush was "reelected" in 2004, since I deny he was "elected," in the ordinary sense of that word, in 2000, but as they say in "The Sopranos": "Whaddya gonna do?")  In New Hampshire, the Republican turnout was about half again as large as the Democratic turnout.  The story in Iowa was essentially the same.  So in the primary election season of 2000 Republicans outpolled Democrats, by around 50%, in both Iowa and New Hampshire.  Those two states, like the country as a whole, then split almost right down the middle in the general election.  It remains to be seen what will happen in 2008, after the number of Democratic voters swelled dramatically in the primary season, so that the Republican advantage in caucus and primary turnout was reversed, but I think it is an under reported encouraging sign for the Dems.

I don't know much, but I bet people in the McCain campaign are compiling lists of states possessing at least 270 electoral votes that he might have a decent shot at winning.  How many of those lists include neither Iowa nor New Hampshire?  How many don't include Iowa or New Hampshire or Virginia?  As they say in the trade, the Republican map is shrinking.   

Chapman on Emerson

I got for Christmas the first of two volumes in the Library of America series given over to Edmund Wilson.  It includes The Triple Thinkers, The Wound and the Bow, Classics and Commercials, and a few uncollected essays.  Rather than rooting around in the 900 pages, I'm reading it straight through, and the other day, in a coffee shop, I came to the essay in The Triple Thinkers on John Jay Chapman and elicited a couple sidelong glances from fellow caffeineators when I suddenly burst out laughing.  Chapman was an admirer of Emerson, whom I consider a colossal bore, but his tart observations were not restricted to subjects he held in low regard.  Of Emerson he once wrote (I'm quoting Wilson quoting Chapman):

If an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an Italian opera than he would by reading Emerson's volumes.  He would learn from the Italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin.

Though few would think to describe Wilson as a humorist, I can think of other times, especially in his journals, that he has made me laugh aloud.  I think it was in the last journal, reviewed here by Frank Kermode, covering the last dozen years of his life, that Wilson told the story of an academic--a Harvard professor, I think (I don't own the volume and so cannot right now track down the details)--who  practiced yoga and protested the Vietnam war.  Let us say his name was Arthur Darby Vance.  His dissenting activities had attracted the attention of the authorities, and one day a couple of beefy cops came to pay him a visit.  The nude Vance, however, was burning incense and meditating when the lawmen arrived, and so did not respond to their progressively louder requests that he admit them.  Eventually they burst through the door without invitation and found him, sitting naked and cross-legged on the floor, humming amid the burning incense.  "Jesus Christ!" exclaimed one of the cops. The subject then spoke for the first time.  "No," he said, "Arthur Darby Vance."

I promise to go to the library and supply the details in a later post. 

Free associating

"The Median Isn't the Message," Stephen Jay Gould's essay that describes the way in which bad medical news overpowered, but only for a few moments, his rational habits of mind, recalled for me a similar episode in the life of physicist Richard Feynman.  While working on the Manhattan Project, his wife Arline, who had tuberculosis, died in a sanatorium in Albuquerke.  Having received a phone call at Los Alamos informing him that the end was near, Feynman made the trip in a borrowed car, and, according to biographer James Gleick, sat in Arline's room, listening to her labored breathing, noting her attempts to swallow, and "tried to think of the science of it, the individual cells starved for air, the heart unable to pump."  After Arline had died, he noticed that the small clock in the room had stopped at 9:21 p.m.--the exact time of her death.  This is the kind of "mystical" event that people love, and those overcome with grief are especially susceptible to the tendency to elevate such occurences into the canon of nonsense.  Not Feynman, who, notwithstanding his grief, worked out a theory:  the clock was weak--he had had to repair it more than once--and a nurse, making notes for the death certificate in the dimly lit room, had picked it up in order to record the time of death.  The small upset must have been enough to stop the clock again.

The philosopher who complained that people "have a thirst for things that are against reason, and they do not want to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it" would have found, in Richard Feynman, a welcome antidote.  For those who may conclude, from the case of the grieving clock, that Feynman was a "bloodless intellectual," I'd recommend the selection of his letters, Pefectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track, collected and edited by his daughter, Michelle.   

Of medians, means & misleading political discourse

While working on my last post, about right-skewed distributions, I thought again of an article that Norm Coleman, who represents my person but not my views in the U.S. Senate, once wrote for the Minneapolis newspaper.  It really annoyed me and maybe I can now exorcise it at last.

(I've tried to link to Coleman's article, but it is too old to be available at the newspaper's website.  I can't find it at Coleman's site, either.  At the time, I wrote a letter to the editor that cited June 1, 2003, as the publication date.  The details I refer to below are from my letter.)

The article concerned the Bush tax cut that was then being debated.  In urging support, Coleman referred repeatedly to how much taxpayers would save, "on average."  He asserted, for instance: "Taxpayers will receive, on average, a tax cut of $1,126."  I don't doubt that the arithmetic was done and that the ratio of tax savings to taxpayers equalled $1,126.  But, as opponents tirelessly pointed out, the savings accrued mainly to the wealthy.  Bush himself would have saved $44,500 on his 2001 return if the "reform" he was proposing had then been law.  That's more than a lot of hard working people earn in a year, but it is still peanuts compared to the $600,000 that, according to Financial Times, would have been the windfall received by John Snow, who at the time was Bush's Secretary of the Treasury. 

Coleman's formulation was meant to seduce the average Joe into thinking he'd get something like the "average" saving.  But it is the fantastic savings accruing to the very rich that made the "average" (mean) saving as high as $1,126.  More than half of all taxpayers received less than half of Coleman's "average" saving.  In this case, the median was the message--unless your goal was to deceive. 

Stephen Jay Gould and the right-skewed distribution

An article by Richard Lewontin in the current New York Review, on the life and work of Stephen Jay Gould, concludes with the observation that "[w]hat was most extraordinary about him, however, was the unresisting ease with which he faced his own imminent extinction."  This may remind those of us who have treasured Gould's popular science writings of one of his most personal personal essays, "The Median Isn't the Message," on, of all things, probability and statistics.

Gould's serious health troubles began in 1982, when he was diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma.  In the essay he relates how, after surgery, he asked the oncologist where he might find the best technical literature on his disease, a rare cancer linked to asbestos exposure.  He was told that "the medical literature contained nothing really worth reading." 

Soon as he could walk, Gould was punching "mesothelioma" into a search program at the medical library of Harvard University, where he taught.  The basic information was discouraging and probably shed light on the reticence of his usually frank oncologist: the disease "was incurable, with a median mortality of only eight months after discovery."  He was of course crushed--until, after a few minutes, his mind began to work again.

"Median mortality of eight months after discovery," Gould realized, did not necessarily mean he would probably be dead inside of one year.  It only meant that, of all the people receiving his diagnosis, half were dead eight months later.  What about the half that weren't?  To illustrate his line of optimistic--and, in this case, clear--thinking, consider the statement that the median income of a certain population is $50,000 per year.  That means that half of all people in the population earn less than $50,000.  It says nothing about the actual incomes of the other half.  For both income and period of survival, zero is necessarily a lower limit, so one is justified in saying, for example, that half of all people diagnosed with Gould's disease survive for from zero to eight months.  But there is no upper limit.  A median mortality of eight months after discovery does not preclude the possibility that those surviving for more than eight months live relatively normal lives for years (just as a median income of $50,000 does not preclude the possibility that, of those in the upper half of the distribution, most earn several times $50,000).

When graphed, income and survival periods after mesothelioma is discovered have generally the same shape.  They are right-skewed, which is to say that they rise very steeply close to the vertical axis and, having reached a peak a bit to the left of the median, gradually taper off and approach the horizontal axis, with decreasing slope, as one proceeds farther and farther away from zero.  The message, one might say, is not the median, but the difference between the median and the mean.

Gould's mesothelioma had been detected early, and he enjoyed access to superior medical care.  He made a full recovery and lived until May 20, 2002, when he died of a different cancer.  The median mortality for mesothelioma is eight months but he survived for almost twenty years.

 

Tolstoy and the family, part two

In his History of Russian Literature, D.S. Mirsky credits Tolstoy's marriage, in 1862, a couple of years before he undertook the composition of War and Peace, with the sudden transformation of his female characters into complex, full-bodied beings.  "There can be no doubt," writes Mirsky, "that it was his increased knowledge of feminine nature, due to marriage, that enabled Tolstoy to annex this new province of psychological experience."  It isn't clear to me how intimacy with "feminine nature" could have such an effect.  His wife was only a single template, and there is tension, if not a contradiction, between the concept of "feminine nature" and the copiously detailed, God's-plenty procession of humanity that, in the mainstream of Tolstoy criticism, is the chief glory of his achievement.

The difficulty might be resolved by adopting the grand view of Tolstoy's greatness while quibbling over details, biographical and otherwise, that may or may not account for some aspect of his genius.  But suppose one rejects the grand view in order to emphasize contrary details?  Is it really such a stretch to suggest that his female characters seem less like "people we know" and more like idealized "types"?  Perhaps my experience is limited but I do not know a single woman who reminds me of Natasha or her long-suffering cousin Sonia.  Princess Mary comes to War and Peace by way of the template for homely, pious girls who, without scheming, win a good man--a fairy tale.  Possibly I am the only reader of Anna Karenina annoyed by the ceaseless application to Kitty Scherbatskaya of such phrases as "dovelike purity," "her loving, truthful face," "the expression on her sweet face," "the same look of innocent truthfulness," and so on.  When Kitty is going into labor, Tolstoy writes:

"Nothing," she said, coming from behind the partition with a lighted candle in her hand.  "I didn't feel well," she added, with a particularly sweet and meaning smile.

That Tolstoy found it necessary to write "particularly" may persuade skeptics that I am not exaggerating.  The relentless accumulation of sweet and meaning smiles and dear truthful looks cannot delineate a human being.  What is delineated?

     It was only afterward that he remembered that bated breath and realized what was going on in her dear, sweet soul when, while lying motionless at his side, she was awaiting the greatest moment in a woman's life.

An absurdly idealized abstraction of what Mirsky, in his mode of earnest praise, calls "feminine nature."

Around a hundred pages before Kitty goes into labor her sister, Dolly, is traveling by coach to visit Anna.  Removed for a few hours from her household teeming with young children, she examines her life from every side and finds that her thoughts are "strange to her."  Views such as those narrated as the midwife is summoned at the Levin home are subjected to withering scrutiny.  The travail of childbirth, reflects Dolly, is not the real curse of Eve.  It's the torture of pregnancy, the disfigurement, and the sore nipples.  And in the end what is it all for?  Her thoughts are colored by the death of her last baby, a boy who had died of croup.  Those that survive, she predicts with cold realism, will be "unfortunate, badly brought-up and beggared children."  The best that can be hoped for is that they will avoid being ne'er-do-wells.  For this outcome, she is spending her life either pregnant or nursing, nipples sore, body disfigured, never a moment to think her own thoughts, a torment to others, including her carousing husband, who is repulsed by her.  This sets off a reverie about an affair and a "new life."  She wonders whether it is still possible, whether her looks are gone, and feels inclined to study herself in a small mirror she carries in her handbag.  But, afraid she might look ridiculous should the coachman by chance turn his head, she represses the impulse, and the coach soon arrives at its destination.

I said in my last post that the later of the "paired scenes" seemed always superior.  I should have said that it is the scene in a less major key.  In Anna Karenina the finest things happen when the principals--Anna and Vronsky, Levin and Kitty--are off the stage.  The unproposed proposal on the mushroom hunt and Dolly's travel thoughts are just two examples.  The grand tapestry of the main story works mainly to bring out the details.

 

Tolstoy and the family

Of the novels I've read, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is probably my favorite. 

Lionel Trilling claimed that the critic, in accounting for Tolstoy's greatness, is reduced to pointing:  this scene and that one, and this and this and this, also this.  To which I'd add (though I'm sure that someone else already has) that some of the scenes seem "paired," by which I mean that a similar circumstance, interview, or stream of thought recurs, the second seeming to balance the first.  The same general situation, in other words, is re-presented, in an altogether different light, and, as I tend to think that the second is truer and finer than the first, it pleases me to think that Tolstoy was correcting himself as he went along.

In Anna Karenina, for instance, Levin's halting and finally successful courtship of Kitty has its counterpart in Koznyshev's later failure to propose to Varenka on a mushroom hunt.  Of course the Levin-Kitty story is a very much more prominent strand in the novel, but, as a representation of life, it seems to me flawed.  The engagement comes too quickly and easily and without resolution of the obstacles Levin himself comprehended.  Remember that he has proposed to Kitty, been rejected, and, pride wounded, retreated to his country estate.  Now, with Vronsky out of Kitty's life, is he to limp back to Moscow and claim the prize due the runner-up?  He argues to himself the implausibility of this, and has at least persuaded me.  But then, without benefit of a single subsequent interview with Kitty, or any personal contact whatsoever, he is one evening invited to supper at her house, unhesitatingly accepts, is filled with emotion upon seeing her, shyly renews his offer, and receives the answer he'd hoped for.  Even allowing for different courtship customs, I don't believe it, and the more charming the scene becomes the harder it is not to cringe.  What reason is there to believe that Kitty is the kind of girl who would comprehend the letter game in which the bruised feelings are repaired and the difficult questions asked and answered?  Here is how I account for the passage: Tolstoy, in order to advance the narrative while indulging his penchant for creating scenes of great portent and lift, conveniently ignores a fully rendered, wholly convincing aspect of the selfsame narrative.  The pieces don't fit together.

When, however, Levin's half-brother Koznyshev determines to propose to Varenka on the mushroom hunt, events unfold in less magical fashion.  Varenka expects the proposal and, though nervous about the interview, is ready happily to accept.  Koznyshev understands all this but is nevertheless unable to force the moment to its crisis.  Varenka is in a way an unwitting saboteur, for when Koznyshev approaches, she out of nervousness fills an awkward silence with a remark about where mushrooms are apt to grow.  That is all it takes to put off Koznyshev.  The conversation slides back into the trivial and he lacks the willl to force the matter both know is at hand.  When the moment has passed Varenka, simultaneously relieved and disappointed, realizes that she and Koznyshev will never marry.  Perhaps the scene was meant to be contrasted to the happy one in which Levin, the Tolstoy figure in the novel, succeeds with Kitty, but I cannot read it without feeling that a certain implausibility is being corrected.  One doesn't want to see two decent, attractive people fail to fall satisfactorily into each others' arms on account of a nervous remark uttered by one of them at the wrong moment.  Yet there it is.

I've been thinking of Anna Karenina since our daughter was born last Sunday.  The novel is largely about marriage and the family and includes another set of paired scenes, related to parenthood, that will be the subject of my next post.