Eric The Blue

All service is noble

The morning paper brought news of another local killed in Iraq.  Gregory B. Rundell, a 2004 graduate of North St. Paul High School, was hit by sniper fire Wednesday while on guard duty in Taji, Iraq.  According to his mother, Rundell joined the Army "because it was good training to be a police officer."  He was 21.

The last New York Review includes an article, "The Volunteer Army: Who Fights and Why?" by Michael Massing, who visited Fort Drum, near Watertown, New York, to speak with enlisted men and women and try to answer the question posed in his title.  It happens that the first soldier described in his article, Jason Thomas Adams, 25, of Brooklyn, New York, had joined when, trying to hold down two jobs while studying to be a police officer at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice, he found himself in debt, with a pregnant wife, no health insurance, and a military brother who told him about "the Army's many benefits," including the health plan, Tricare.  He met with a recruiter and signed up.  Massing had heard from the Pentagon's head of personnel policy that the most common reason for enlisting named by new soldiers was "service to country," so he asked Davis whether a desire to serve in the wake of 9/11 had had an impact.  Davis "said flatly that it had had nothing to do with his decision."

No health insurance.  No means for pursuing a college education.  A low-paying job--Colby Buzzell, author of My War: Killing Time in Iraq, had worked as a flower deliverer, valet parker, bike messenger, busboy, carpet cutter, car washer, and data entry clerk by the time he joined the Army at age 26--with no prospects for advancement, or no job at all.  A desire to see the world and have adventures.  And, in the cases of Jason Thomas Adams, from Brooklyn, and Gregory B. Rundell, from North St. Paul, the seemingly reasonable, modest goal of becoming a cop.  In Massing's interviews with the Army's 10th Mountain Division stationed at Fort Drum, it is this dead-end social background that again and again is the principal impetus for "volunteering":

"I didn't want to work a minimum wage job, from paycheck to paycheck," went a sample comment from Shawn Miesowitz, a twenty-nine-year-old specialist from Merced, California, with a wife and four-year-old daughter.  "And I wanted to get us out of Merced.  There was only one thing there--to get into trouble."

"I joined the Army because I couldn't go to college," said a twenty-four-year-old Haitian immigrant.  "I was working as a garage inspector at the Miami airport for $9.25 an hour.  I want to be an electrical engineer.  I'm trying to save all I can."

"I thought it would look good on my resume," said Joel Malin, a twenty-two-year-old assistant chaplain.  After graduating from college, he told me, he had hoped to join a music ministry, but the churches he had approached felt that he was too young.  So he joined the military.  Having recently married, Malin found the health plan an added boon.  "The military," he told me, "is a very good landing pad for people who don't know what they want to do."

As a young graduate of Yale College, George W. Bush seems to have been one of those "who don't know what they want to do," but that is not why he landed in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.  Yet there is a common motif to the accounts of men and women of the Army's 10th Mountain Division and the record of Bush's military service.  Massing kept hearing from the enlisted men and women about how the Army's great benefits package had persuaded them to join, and Bush, under fire for being scarce when he was supposed to be fulfilling his Air Guard duties, released a document showing he had visited a military dentist during the time his service record was otherwise perfectly sketchy.

Iraq: a look back

That the American war in Iraq has been characterized by arrogance, mendacity, and incompetence is beyond dispute.  Exhibit A.  Exhibit B.

Hendrik Hertzberg summarizes John McCain's relationship with the Iraq debacle in the context of the train wreck that is "The Straight Talk Express":

He plumped for lobbying reform but has lobbyists running his campaign.  He opposed enacting Bush's tax cuts for the rich but supports extending them indefinitely.  He supported a "patients' bill of rights" but refuses to treat health care as itself a right.  He voted against banning same-sex marriage in the Constitution but favors banning it state by state.  He once disdained the likes of Reverend Jerry Falwell (who blamed AIDS on God's alleged hatred of a "society that tolerates homosexuals") but now embraces the likes of Reverend John Hagee (who called the Roman Catholic Church "the great whore").  He was for starting the Iraq war but against the way it was being fought; now he's for the way it's being fought but against discussing whether it should have been started.

Touche, but he might have mentioned too, at the very least, McCain's evolving position on immigration reform.

By following the Hertzberg link, you will see that he is on his way to taking up the subject of Condoleezza Rice, who, he notes, seems immune to the opprobrium that has attached to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Gonzales, and the rest of the boys.  Why is that?  As Russell Baker points out, she has plainly failed.  In the Frontline documentary (Exhibit A above) it is revealed that, in the run-up to the war, Colin Powell, the secretary of state, had to contact Rice to secure an audience with the president.  In the realm of theory it should have been the task of the national security advisor to make sure that the president heard a variety of views, including especially those diverging from his own.  But Rice seems to have regarded it as her job to keep the boy-man from being exposed to anything that might upset him.  That she was an academic whose area of expertise was the Soviet Union shows how forward-looking the new Bush administration was in 2000. 

These guys (and gal) were not up to the job.

The atheists are coming!

Actually, they are already here.  The convergence of the atheist-elite on Minneapolis has already been the occasion for some amusing contretemps at our favorite tourist destination, the Mall of America: read about it here at the blog of one of the principals. 

I think some of the local faithful regard the timing of the convention, over Easter weekend, as a deliberately provocative gesture.  But probably it is more likely that this is a slow week for hotels and convention centers and that the atheists, having nothing else to do on a liturgically significant weekend, were able to swing a good deal.

Personally, I have been shoveling snow and watching basketball on television.  Then this morning, to mark the holiday but mainly for the hell of it, I read the various passion narratives in the gospels and was reminded of a phrase--"the synoptic problem"--that had played a part in the long-ago of my educational past.  The phrase refers to the fact that the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke tell the same story, in the same way, with mostly the same details, right down to the very same words.  This suggests a literary relationship between the gospel texts that New Testament scholarship has attempted to unravel.  I don't know how things may have changed, but back in the day the favored theory was that Mark was composed first, and that the authors of Matthew and Luke used--often just copied--the earlier gospel in producing their own.

From this premise there developed the interpretive strategy of comparing carefully the differences between the synoptic gospels, on the theory that the particular concerns and viewpoints of the various authors would be revealed in their abridgements, addenda, insertions, and other assorted divergences from the main source.  Reading the passion narratives side by side, for instance, one notices that Matthew 27:41-44 matches, nearly word for word, Mark 15:31-32, but that the author of Luke incorporates this same material into a considerably longer account (see Luke 23:35-43).  The extra language all has to do with the soldiers who mock Jesus and the criminals who are crucified with him.  Both groups are merely mentioned in Matthew and Mark; Luke enlarges, emphasizing the mocking contempt of the soldiers and the righteousness of one of the criminals who, at the conclusion of this special Lukan material, receives from Jesus the promise of a place in Paradise.

Patterns emerge when the divergences are collected and examined, and one concerns the evident interest of the author of Luke in criminals, outcasts, and others scorned by the conventionally religious.  Almost all of Mark is found in either Matthew or Luke, or both, but it is the uniquely Lukan material that contains, for example, the famous parables of the good Samaritan (Luke 10:29-37) and the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32), both of which involve the elevation of a despised individual over those with superior religious credentials.  That Luke's passion narrative should include Jesus' blessing of one of the criminals with whom he was crucified is of a piece with parables found only in Luke.

I don't expect the convening atheists to spend their Easter reading the Bible but it occurs to me that they might have some fun if they did.  For the fruits of biblical scholarship are something of an embarrassment to their antagonists in the culture wars, who of course regard the entire Bible as the inerrant and infallible word of God dictated to different secretaries by the Almighty himself.  Subjecting the gospels to the same kind of rigorous examination used to explicate other ancient texts is too much like an antenuptial agreement.  The devotion of the true believer requires adoration, not scrutiny that tends to point toward human authors and editors rather than a transcript from the Hand of God.

Back to the basketball games.

Obama on race

Barack Obama's speech on race is leading the news shows today.  Since presidential campaigns strive to make us feel good about the candidate and our country, straight talk on this subject is forbidden.  Obama, however, has walked up to the edge of the water and extended his toe.  As Michael Tomasky points out, Obama, when he came today to speak of the Constitution, did not mention the "genius" of that document, but instead called it "unfinished," adding further that it allowed for the continuation of the slave trade for another twenty years. Of course the Constitution made other allowances for the peculiar institution of chattel slavery.  Article 4, Section 2, provided that, in the event of a slave escaping to freedom in a northern state, she or he "shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom Service or Labour may be due."  And, most notorious, "the three-fifths compromise" of Article 1, Section 2, provided that, for purposes of determining representation in the Congress, every five slaves would count as three persons.  In this was way slaves, who could not vote and had no political rights whatever, could nevertheless boost the political clout of the slave-holding states: more slave owners would sit in the Congress and vote against the interest of the slaves whom they were purportedly "representing" in a three-fifths sort of way.  The text of the Constitution is here.

But this is not a pleasant part of our history to contemplate and does not therefore aid in the effort to be attractive to white voters.  That Obama at least did not invoke all the usual platitudes is a kind of progress.

In the circles in which I move, populated mainly by white men who care who wins ball games, race seems rarely to be thought about outside the context of African Americans behaving badly--and then it is introduced as an explanatory tool.  Many of my friends have a dim view of Bill Clinton but there is no racial aspect to what they take to be his crimes and misdemeanors.  If, however, some black guy does not run out a two-hopper to shortstop--well, he should be happier to be in the major leagues, because if he wasn't he'd probably. . . .

You get the idea.  Suddenly race has something to do with it.  These guys aren't interested in what Barack Obama has to say on the subject--but, then, they weren't going to vote for him in any case.

Iraq & "truthiness"

Stephen Colbert has coined the term "truthiness" to denote statements that the speaker would like to believe are true, notwithstanding the fact that the evidence for the claim is limited to the speaker's own picture preference.  As the war in Iraq comes up to a couple of milestones--five years duration and 4000 American deaths--it is worthwhile trying to set the record straight on some "truthy" utterances.

This morning, for example, Sen. John Kyl, Republican from Arizona, interviewed by Scott Simon on NPR, said it was "unfair" for Democrats to be beating up Republicans over the vote for war, since "all the Democratic leaders" voted for the resolution authorizing the invasion.  And he mentioned specifically Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.  He did not mention that the resolutions authorizing war were opposed by many Democrats in both the Senate and House.  In the Senate, the vote for the resolution was 77-23, with Lincoln Chafee, Republican of Rhode Island, joining 22 Democrats, including Edward Kennedy, Patrick Leahy (chairman of the judiciary committee), Carl Levin (chairman of the armed services committee), and Bob Graham (chairman of the intelligence committee) in opposition.  The vote in the House was closer: 296-133.  Of the 133 voting nay, 126 were Democrats, among them Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, John Conyers, Charles Rangel, David Bonior, and John Dingell.

Everyone who at the time represented me in the Congress--Martin Sabo, Mark Dayton, and Paul Wellstone--voted against the war resolution.

Send Kyl an email complaining about his truthiness.  While you're at it, let him know that opposing the war in Iraq, and criticizing the incompetent strategy with which it has been waged, is not analogous to carping about details of the D-Day invasion, as he outrageously stated in the NPR nterview.

Godfathers and contrarians

I should say, as a kind of postscript to my last post, that there are contrarian opinions of The Godfather.  Said Judith Crist, upon the release of Part II in 1974:

The immorality lies in his presentation of murderers as delightful family men--the criminal is the salt of the earth--and to our shame we rub it into the wounds of our Watergate-world morality and even ask for more.

And Stanley Kauffmann:

They have put padding in Brando's cheeks and dirtied his teeth, he speaks hoarsely and moves stiffly, and these combined mechanics are hailed as great acting. . . .  Like star, like film, the keynote is inflation.  The Godfather was made from a big bestseller, a lot of money was spent on it, and it runs over three hours.  Therefore it's important.

In the last month of his life Edmund Wilson wrote in his journal:

Two movies: Godfather and French Connection, bang bang.

The first two are from Halliwell's Film and Video Guide (1997).  Except for the allusion to Watergate, Crist's opinion might be applied to the tragedies of Shakespeare; and inasmuch as "inflated" is the way jealousy pronounces "great," the same goes for Kauffmann.  Wilson's review does not take account of numerous garrotings.

Godfathers and gargoyles

My wife and I have spent the past two nights watching The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, aired on successive evenings on AMC.  Since the movies were (as is said) "edited for tv," one could perhaps say we did not really see The Godfather, in which Sonny, worrying about what might go wrong in a scheme to plant a handgun in the men's room at Louis' family restaurant in the Bronx, says he doesn't want his brother coming out of the toilet with only his dick, not only his stick, in his hands.  But I don't want to complain about the gift of two evenings' free entertainment.

One of many great scenes, I think, is the one in which Carlo and Connie fight.  It starts out in the way these scenes always do in the movies, the shouting and the breaking of dishes, but then he starts whipping her with his belt, and the camera follows as she moves through the house, he in pursuit and occasionally landing another blow.  They arrive in the master bedroom and she makes for the master bath, which she enters, trying to slam the door behind her, but she isn't far enough ahead and, as the camera stays behind in the entrance to the bedroom, he bulls through the door.  For a moment, the scene is held, and you can hear but not see the beating that continues to be administered in the bath.  The only thing to look at is the bed, perfectly made, with a stuffed animal lying prettily over the pillows like a gargoyle.

This scene, we learn, has been staged.  Connie, predictably, calls home, and Sonny, too enraged to think straight, jumps in his car alone and heads to her house.  There is a tollbooth along the way and there the assassins are waiting.  There is a fusillade of bullets and he is hit countless times as he falls from his car.  Though the tv version omitted it, one of the hitmen approaches the dead body and, for good measure, shoots the corpse in the head at point blank range, pauses, kicks the head, walks away.  Then the camera pans away and you see the car that Tom Hagen had dispatched approaching, too late to help, and a roadside billboard for Florida oranges.  The effect is like that of the breakfast jingle, "mixed ready to begin the morning right," in Robert Frost's "Design."

With justice Pauline Kael called The Godfather "[a] wide, startlingly vivid view of a Mafia dynasty, in which organized crime becomes an obscene nightmare image of American free enterprise."  The nightmare is highlighted by these small, carefully placed, subtly emphasized, luridly smiling gargoyles.  Top o' the morning!

The best line relating to the Spitzer affair. . .

. . . goes to Joy, on The View, who imagined Sen. Craig perusing The New York Times over breakfast and thinking to himself: Sex in a hotel room, there's a concept.

Guns

On Minnesota Public Radio's Midmorning show this morning, the topic was guns, and one of the guests was Eric Thompson, an online gun dealer whose customers have included Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, and Steven Kazmierczak, who last month shot and killed five students in a geology classroom at Northern Illinois University.  Host Kerri Miller, employing the bland, earnest, above-the-fray tone preferred on public radio, declared that her intention was to discuss "new thinking" on the gun issue, and to explore the possibility of compromise among those fair-minded persons not at the "extremes" of the debate.  Thompson, who has not exactly been disabled by remorse over the mass murders committed by his customers, seems to me an odd choice to advance this goal.  His solution to gun violence on college campuses is for more students and professors to carry guns.

I remember an episode of the "All in the Family" television series, aired in the immediate aftermath of a spate of airline hijackings in the 1970s, in which Archie Bunker announced to his son-in-law, the "Meathead," that the best way to address the problem would be to hand out loaded pistols to all passengers as they boarded the plane.  Who would try to hijack a plane, knowing that every passenger, pilot, and stewardess was packing?  So I don't think Thompson's views represent anything like "new thinking."  Thirty-five years ago, however, they were mocked in "All in the Family," while today Midmorning solemnly suggests that they are a specimen of "new thinking" that moderate people, though not of course the lunatic fringe, might want to endorse.

Readings

On baby duty in the very early morning hours, I soothed daughter no. 2, or at least held and swayed her till she had cried herself out, and then, weighing the relative attractions of a return to bed and the prospect of a few hours to myself in a quiet house, settled into the March 20 issue of The New York Review of Books.  My opinion of this publication is the opposite of the one expressed by Camille Paglia over at Salon; when it arrives in the mail, I linger on the table of contents, in the manner of a 6-year-old fondling wrapped presents, before tearing into it.  The top attractions of March 20, in my estimation, were Michael Tomasky on the Democratic side of the presidential campaign, Nicholson Baker on Wikipedia, Jason Epstein on In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto, H. Allen Orr on J. Craig Venter and genomics, Oliver Sacks on a memoir (A Journey Round My Skull) about a brain tumor, and Jeff Madrick on the problem of income security in old age.  All recommended.  I think my favorite was the article about food and eating.  Epstein quotes author Michael Pollan's "deceptively simple" advice:  "Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants."  Pollan, you see, does not regard many staples of the American diet, purchased at fast food restaurants or plucked from the inner aisles of grocery stores, as "food."  Epstein elaborates:

avoid all foods packaged with long lists of ingredients, especially those whose names cannot be pronounced.  For example, the list of ingredients in Sara Lee's Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White [sic] Bread occupies half a page of Pollan's book and includes beside the omnipresent high-fructose corn syrup such wonders as ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, azodicarbonamide, and guar gum ["sic" in original].

In a  book I own, What to Eat, nutritionist Marion Nestle advises: "Move more, eat less, but eat more fruits and vegetables."  The advice of people who look into these things seems to be of a piece, and if more of us followed it, perhaps what Epstein calls the "symbiosis of the American food and pharmaceutical industries" would abate.  Compared to 1960, Americans now spend, on average, about half as much of their incomes on food but three times more on health care.  What we are eating is creating demand for prescription drugs.

By the time the rest of the house was stirring I had made it to the advertisements in the back.  These too are interesting.

Bored, married white male, six foot four inches, slim 190, active mid-seventies, highly educated, NS, seeks petite, very skinny, bright, middle-aged female for long-term romance.  Northern Queens.

Hmmm.  Not a mensch, probably, but who can't take encouragement from a display of such ruddy optimism in a man of 75?  And, speaking of men in their mid-seventies:

I'm 75.  A retired lawyer who has completed over 400 pages of a book (?), why the question mark?  It's another stinking memoir that I'd like to convert into a farce, parody or satire.  I need help from an elegant writer possessed of a fine Italian hand who has plenty of time and patience.  Reward: personal satisfaction in being a Good Samaritan and a fat fee.

His prestigious career stands revealed as farce but he still seems to be in good spirits.

Game show probability

Problem no. 186 at mathproblem.info concerns a realistic dilemma in game show probability that inveterate geeks, such as myself, may find interesting.  Here is the way host Michael Shackleford puts it:

On a game show there are three doors.  Behind one door is a new car and behind the other two are goats.  Every time the game is played the contestant picks a door.  Then the host will open one of the other two doors and always reveals a goat.  Then the host gives the player the option to switch to the other unopened door.  Should the player switch?

As in so many of these problems, I suspect the wrong choice is psychologically alluring.  The player's chance of winning is doubled by switching, though adopting this strategy means opening oneself to the emotional travail of abandoning the right answer.  Think of it like this.  Let the car be behind door one.  A third of the time, the player will have chosen door one, and in those cases she trades away from the right answer and loses.  If, however, she has chosen door two or three--a two-thirds probability--the detail about the host always revealing a goat means she can only switch to the winning door. 

In other words: player chooses door two (or three), host reveals that a goat is behind door three (or two).  If at this point the player switches to door one, she'll lose all the times she otherwise would have won (one-third) but will win all the times she otherwise would have lost (two-thirds).

The same logic applies to a multitude of "shell game" problems.   

Night cafes

When my wife and I started dating, I lived in a small "garden-level" apartment.  It was crowded with books and CDs, and felt like home to me, but she hated it.  She hated nothing more than the bare walls.  "I can't believe you don't have any art," she said, emphasizing art.  So we went to a store and I bought some prints, which she had framed.  Along with some of her photographs, they now hang on the walls of our house.  The largest is Hopper's Nighthawks and the second largest is van Gogh's Night Cafe.

Though it seems impossible, I don't remember being aware, on the evening I made these purchases, that the pictures are related in subject and theme.  Both depict glaringly lit night cafes.  There is no door to the outside visible in either one.  The people look trapped and hunched over, so oppressive is the light.  Van Gogh's, in particular, is redolent of death.  The pool table is like a coffin about to be lowered into the shadowy grave.  The faceless priest in white vestments stands to the side.  It is not hard to guess what a Freudian would make of the arrangement, on the table, of cue stick and billiard balls.

The clock in van Gogh's picture shows the time--a few minutes past midnight.  Judging by the deserted street and darkened windows, it might be later in Hopper's.  If memory serves, I first saw Nighthawks on the cover of an American literature anthology I used in college, and the picture puts me in mind of Hemingway:  "The Killers" and "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place."  The latter begins, "It was late and every one had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the shadow the leaves of the trees made against the electric light."  Here in one sentence are the essential elements of the picture:  lateness, darkness, and artificial light.  The story, very brief, ends when the old man, who has been drinking, walks from one night spot to another, less pleasant one.  As he walks he recites the Lord's Prayer, substituting nada, the Spanish word for "nothing," for most of the nouns.  He arrives at his destination "and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine."  (Two of them in Hopper's picture.)  Writing of this story John Berryman suggested that the lateness applies not only to the time of day but also to a tradition--the Christian tradition.  Where does religion take you?  A crummy night spot, with an unpolished bar and gleaming coffee machine.  The picture is infused with the same cold despair.

I kind of wish these pictures did not appeal to me so much but, like film noir, they do.