Eric The Blue

Jeremiah Wright

My wife is watching "The Daily Show."  I just heard Jon Stewart say that Jeremiah Wright has been dominating cable news shows like a missing white girl. 

At Salon, Joan Walsh reports on polls showing that President Bush is hurting John McCain more than Reverend Wright is hurting Barack Obama.  You have to say, though, that McCain has shown a more velvety touch.  Instead of "throwing Bush under the bus," he goes to the White House, receives his blessing, and mentions twenty times in four minutes how full the president's schedule is certain to be during the upcoming campaign.

Maybe, when the Democrats have a nominee, McCain will have to answer for voting against making Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday, and for sucking up to the bigots in South Carolina who insisted on flying the Confederate flag above their statehouse, and for the really miserable record of his party on race relations--yes, what do you think attracted Strom Thurmond to "the party of LIncoln"? 

Maybe, but maybe not.

Now Colbert is on.  He plays a bunch of clips of Sean Hannity asking, with rhetorical incredulity, how Obama could have remained in Wright's church "for twenty years."  Steven agrees wholeheartedly, though notes that, with regard to Roman Catholicism, which has a problem with pedophile priests, parishoners should of course sit tight in the pews while the Church, by some mysterious process that isn't meant to be understood by them, works things out. 

Republican redux

The 2008 presidential election campaign will likely hinge on the war in Iraq and the domestic economy.  John McCain seems determined to be wrong about both. 

Five years into the Iraq war, the reason for the invasion is still a work in progress.  There were no weapons of mass destruction.  There is no prospect of "transforming the MIddle East" by establishing a western-style democracy, friendly to the U.S., in Baghdad.  Asked directly whether the war has made us safer, General Petraeus declines to say it has.  More than 4000 of our soldiers have been killed, more than 30,000 others wounded, many of those maimed for life, and we have spent something like $500 billion.  Our stature on the international stage has been diminished.  The war is clearly a colossal blunder, yet McCain supports it still.

On the economy, McCain, despite his reputation as a "maverick," toes the Republican line.  This means that, no matter the question, the answer is tax cuts.  In the Senate, McCain voted against the Bush tax cuts, but now he wants to make them permanent.  We've been down this path before.  After twelve years of Reagan-Bush had left the American economy in shambles, Bill Clinton was elected president and proposed an economic stimulus and deficit reduction package that included a tax hike on high earners.  Not a single Republican in either the House or Senate voted for it.  They had a lot of chicken-little predictions about what the dire consequences would be if the bill passed.  Unemployment would spike upward.  The stock market would slump.  Inflation would rear its ugly head.  People would be talking about the misery index again.  Democrats, however, were in the majority in the House, where the bill passed narrowly without a single Republican vote.  In the Senate, Vice-President Gore broke a tie.  Clinton signed the bill into law, and none of the Republican predictions came true.  In fact the Clinton years were characterized by an almost unprecedented economic expansion.  Republicans turned their attention from economics to the president's sex life.

Then came Bush again.  The tax-cut orthodoxy was back in vogue, and Democrats were ineffectual in their opposition.  In the way of tax policy, Bush has gotten everything he wanted.  So where are we after almost eight years of it?  The budget is back in deficit.  Consumer confidence is as low as it has been for a generation.  Economists debate whether we are in a recession, or only headed into one.  The housing sector is in a deep funk and homes are being foreclosed at record rates.  McCain's answer is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent. 

When Republicans are called fundamentalist, the context is usually religious, but the rigidity and tunnel vision apply across the board.  They don't care what works.  They have a creed.   

Wingnut

Michael Gerson, evangelical Christian and former Bush speech writer turned syndicated columnist, declares in his most recent effort that the Roman Catholic Church is "indispensable" because "it is the main defender of reason in the modern world."

Not even Catholics would agree.  They understand that their Church is bonkers and routinely ignore its teachings, especially on subjects relating to sexuality and reproduction.  I recently wrote about some of the fruits of the Church's vaunted reasoning powers (see "Popery," from Apil 21).  To women who don't want children, or don't want more children than they already have, the Church says:  You must not have an abortion or even use contraceptive devices.  To women who want children but are unable to conceive, the Church says:  You must not avail yourself of artificial insemination or any other reproductive therapy but, instead, regard your barrenness as an opportunity to share in the suffering of Christ.

Check-mate.  It is more like gratuitous cruelty than reason.  The prohibition of contraception is really quite shocking and a significant block to reducing the load of human suffering in the world.  When you try to comprehend the line of thought, what you come up against is nothing better than "This is so, because it is written" or "The Church teaches."  These naked appeals to authority are the antithesis of reason. 

The septuagenarian virgins responsible for these contributions to human thought are fit objects for contempt.  Maybe Gerson meant to say that, by the standards that prevail in the rest of American Christendom, the teachings of the Catholic Church are not particularly unreasonable.   I'd grant him that. 

Cruel April

April is National Poetry Month.  Why April?  I guess they wanted it to be during the school year, and February was already Black History Month, and March already Women's History Month, so April was the next available month for a PR campaign. 

The most famous poetic reference to April is probably the opening line to Eliot's The Wasteland--"April is the cruellest month"--which has the deliberate effect of undercutting a lot of swooning ideas about spring time and poetry.  It's not my field, but I suspect the statistics on suicide and hospitalizations for depression might bear out the truth of Eliot's assertion.  People see the world in bloom, every pulse quickening--except their own, and the contrast is crushing. 

Anyway, in honor of National Poetry Month, here's another poem, this one by Robert Frost, having to do with spring.  It's called "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Popery

The visit of the pope, and all the fawning journalistic accounts of his every word and genuflection, have had on me the effect of an emetic.  At Ground Zero, in lower Manhattan, he, like the Administration of George W. Bush, benefitted from the way in which the aura of hushed reverence surrounding anything associated with 9/11 tends to shut down thought.  He pronounced solemn words, cast his blessing to the four corners of the compass, and, the talismanic qualities of the 9/11 backdrop substituting admirably for soaring architecture and stained glass, basked in the worshipful approbation of the assemblage.  As our "war president" knows, he could have announced that the square root of sixteen is six and no one would have objected.

The pope's message, with the feel-good banalities elided, was that American Catholics need to return to "a more disciplined faith."  By "more disciplined faith" we may assume he was referring, however obliquely, to teachings regarding sexuality and reproduction, such as those promulgated in Instruction on Respect for Human LIfe in Its Origin and on the Dignity of Procreation: Replies to Certain Questions of the Day, issued in 1987 over the signature of then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger in his capacity as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the position he held before being elevated to the papacy.  The instruction of this document may be accurately and succinctly summarized as follows.  Catholic couples who are fertile but don't want children, or don't want more children, must not avail themselves of contraception; couples who are not fertile but want children must not avail themselves of surrogate mothers, artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization, or any reproductive method other than sexual intercourse.

So it is no wonder that the emphasis was on the feel-good banalities.  Amazingly, the pope even got good reviews for addressing the sexual abuse scandal in the American Church, despite the fact that he did not address it in any way that mattered: he met with victims and spoke talking points.  Is it the vestments and funny hat?  Who would take him seriously if he got to dress conventionally?

Why did we invade Iraq?

Why did the United States invade Iraq in 2003? 

It could not have been to protect ourselves and our allies from the Iraqi regime's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, its nuclear weapons program that was on the verge of being able to produce a mushroom cloud, and its unmanned aerial drones that were capable of delivering these weapons to distant targets.  None of these things existed, but, more to the point, once everyone knew that they they did not exist, and this fact was acknowledged even by the Bush Administration, which had led the country to war on the confident claim that they did exist, there was no detectable anger directed against the sources of the faulty intelligence.  Instead, George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  Colin Powell, who harangued the United Nations regarding his various conclusive proofs that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction ("there can be no doubt"), said he was "disappointed" to learn that in fact Iraq had not possessed any such weapons.  We have now been at war for more than four years, have suffered around 40,000 casaulties, more than 4000 fatalities, witnessed the erosion of our reputation on the geopolitical stage, and spent more than half a trillion dollars.  (I won't say how many Iraqis have been killed:  no one knows for sure, partly because the Administration isn't interested.)  If the people who brought us to war had done so on the belief that Iraq's weapons indeed posed an imminent threat to the United States and its interests, then they would  be more than "disappointed" about the false beliefs that set them on a catastrophic course--and Powell's "disappointment" is the strongest reaction we know about.

I think it is hard to overstate the duplicity of Team Bush regarding Iraq.  What they now call bad "intelligence" was more like a branch of the White House's public relations effort.  It was not a case of independent intelligence analysis driving policy.  The policy had been set and it was the job of the "intelligence" agencies to produce "analysis" to support the policy.  As the Downing Street memo had it, "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."  When there turned out to be no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Team Bush naturally blamed the faulty intelligence, but there were really no consequences or recriminations for what was, if the Administration's account is credited, a monumental error.  That would make sense if the Administration knew that the work product of the intelligence agencies had been corrupted by the pressures it had itself exerted.  Absent knowledge that the intelligence had been corrupted, there is no way to understand the equanimity with which the Administration received news that it had launched a war for reasons that were all grounded in error.

If Iraq's weapons were the reason for going to war, then the fact that there were no weapons means the war is a mistake.  But of course the Administration insists that the war is not a mistake, that we are "making significant progress" and are going to "win."  Its efforts to finesse this paradox have been notably lame.  For example, in a Pentagon transcript of an interview with Vanity Fair, Paul Wolfowitz said: "The truth is that for reasons that have a lot to do with the U.S. government bureaucracy, we settled on the one issue that everyone could agree on which was weapons of mass destruction as the core reason."  The graceless expression is intellectually incoherent.  What we are looking for is the real reason.  That is what the weapons were until there turned out to be none.  Then the weapons became the "core reason," with the suggestion that there were many other reasons championed by diverse people who, while unable to agree with each other on this rationale and that one, were, generally, in full agreement about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.  So we went to war for some combination of reasons, different ones held by different officials, none of them wholly agreeing with one another, which were not put forward in the debate leading up to the war on account of the divergence of opinion on every possible rationale except for the weapons--which, as we now know, were phastasmal?  This is how the world's greatest democracy arrives at a decision to make war?

Taking Wolfowitz at his word, we are back to our original question.   

The Administration's problem, I think, is that any forthright reason it might submit for having gone to war in Iraq would naturally be measured against what we have so far accomplished there with our very considerable investment of blood and treasure.  For obvious reasons, that is not an activity the Administration wants to encourage.  Meanwhile, the reality-based community is free to make conjectures, since the people who know have nothing sensible to say.  I subscribe to the Oedipal complex theory advanced by Hendrik Hertzberg:

. . . Bush II is just a twerp.  He's a bundle of resentment.  He's never had any real interest in political ideology.  It's all an Oedipal drama.  And ultimately that's how it will be understood.  I don't think it's comprehensible in any other way.  His dad raised taxes, so he's not going to raise taxes.  Dad didn't go to Baghdad, so he's going to Baghdad.  Dad hated Rumsfeld so he made Rumsfeld secretary of defense.

It will be criticized as a specimen of what the wingnuts call Bush Derangement Syndrome, but that is why they are the wingnuts.  If the invasion of Iraq is comprehensible some other way, let them set it out.  Hertzberg's Oedipal-drama theory takes account of the known facts, which, again, is more than can be said for anything emanating from Bush, his various spokespeople, or any of the Administration's defenders in the blogosphere.

Actuarial

Reviewing Day, a new novel by A.L. Kennedy about an R.A.F. tailgunner in World War II, David Lodge notes that a tour of duty for British airmen consisted of 30 missions, and that the survival rate for a single raid was around 95%.  (On any single mission, there was a 1-in-20 chance of being killed.)  Part of the way Day works apparently concerns the psychological effects on the individual airmen as their number of missions flown mounted--morale would start high, on account of patriotism and ignorance, then descend rapidly to a "crack-up point" in the low teens, which, if survived, would usually be followed by a slight upward trend until, in the low-twenties, it would irrecoverably plunge, the "bomber crews' preoccupation with their own chances of survival tend[ing] to dissipate the chivalric spirit in which they had volunteered" (in the words of Len Deighton, in Bomber, quoted by Lodge).

What exactly were their chances of survival?  Well, if there is a 95% chance of something happening (like surviving a bombing raid), the chance of it happening thirty times in a row is given by 0.95 to the thirtieth power, which is slightly under 0.22.  So your chance of surviving a tour of duty was about the same as that of a light-hitting utility infielder delivering a base hit.  Brutal.  The plot of Day is probably not very plausible, actuarially speaking, for the likelihood of an individual airman even reaching "the crack-up point," around the twelfth mission, is barely better than fifty-fifty.  To be true to life, the novel would have to fizzle out, exhausted by death, before it could reach the high pitch planned by the literary author.

Morality on steroids

Was it on NPR's Morning Edition that I recently heard the sportswriter John Feinstein hyperventilating on baseball's steroid scandal?  No, I think it was on The Colbert Report, where the satiric take on "the news" produces an arguably superior journalistic product.  Wherever, he was talking loud and fast, gesturing crazily if I could see him--come to think of it, maybe he was on Morning Edition, for I cannot remember checking his lips for flecks of froth, which I certainly would have done had the interview been on TV.  The interviewer was having no trouble eliciting from Feinstein strong opinions about the characters of Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens, the moral turpitude associated with their deeds, their lying and cheating ways, all true, probably, though reading about the Mitchell Report I was struck by the preponderance of names which would never start an argument concering asterisks or worthiness for the Hall of Fame--the Manny Alexanders and Chad Allens and Rick Ankiels and Bells (David and Mike) and Marvin Benards and Gary Bennett Jrs. and Larry Bigbies, to name all eight pictured in the first row of this alphabetical rogues gallery from the New York Times.

Here's the deal: the drugs work, performance is enhanced, and the likelihood of getting caught has been slim.  Moreover, if you want to play baseball for a living, the major leagues is the only place to do it:  our casino economy, which heaps riches upon the top graduates of top law schools, leaving the rest to burrow in suburban subdivisions alongside nurses and sales reps, applies with an even more ferocious vengeance at the borders between triple-A and the show.  Roger Angell takes it from there:

If we fans need an image to connect us to the departing era, I would pass up the tarnished Clemens or the unpleasant Bonds and, looking back five years, focus, rather, on some imagined Class AAA infielder who has just been called up to a major-league team as a midseason defensive replacement.  He doesn't have to carry his bags anymore, but at twenty-seven he's a gloveman with a lifetime .269 average who will now be looking at world-famous sliders and heat.  Sitting a couple of lockers away there's a celebrated but tired-looking shortstop in his late thirties, with two gated-community houses, a nanny, a nutritionist, a trainer, a motivational coach, two lawyers, a divorced wife, three foreign-marque cars, an agent, two chefs, and a part-time veterinarian on his payroll.  Our rookie may be competing against this icon for a steady job next spring, but for that to happen he'll need two additional base hits a week, starting right now.  The word "Help!" floats into his head, perhaps from not far away.

Alert and forceful at 87, Angell provides the peripheral vision and humane comprehension that amount to a tacit rebuke of the moralizing, gesticulating crowds.  Even among big-leaguers, the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

"Significant progress"

What with all the "turning points" and "defining moments" strewn along our path of glory in Iraq, it should come as no surprise that a lot of "significant progress" has been made.  War Room has the executive summary:

• White House press secretary Scott McClellan on Oct. 27, 2003: "In the north and south [of Iraq], we have made significant progress."
• President Bush on Nov. 13, 2004: "Fighting together, our forces [in Iraq] have made significant progress in the last several days."
• President Bush on June 28, 2005: "In the past year, we have made significant progress [in Iraq]."
• Vice President Cheney on Oct. 19, 2006: "We've made significant progress [in Iraq]."
• President Bush on Feb. 23, 2007: "I think we have made significant progress in Iraq."

War Room reports, further, that googling "significant progress" Iraq site:whitehouse.gov yields endless occurrences of "significant progress" in official White House pronouncements on Iraq.  When the subject is Iraq, the White House reflex is "significant progress."  If it hasn't been the subject of a Tom Tomorrow cartoon yet, it should be: one of his grave, set-jawed Republicans repeating this mindless stock phrase SIGNIFICANT PROGRESS as his female counterpart solemnly nods her adoring agreement from behind one of his shoulders.

Five years full of defining moments, turning points, and significant progress in Iraq.  Who says government can't get things done?

Turning points in Iraq: another power outage

On the occasion, weekend before last, of the temporary lull in a post-surge uptick in violence in Iraq, Powerline's John Hinderaker wrote, beneath the heading "SADR SAYS UNCLE":

This episode might prove to be, as President Bush suggested, a defining moment in Iraq's post-war history. . . .  The fact that Iraqi soldiers took the lead in rooting out Sadr's militia may demonstrate to Iraqis that Maliki's government represents all Iraqis, not just the Shia.

The offensive against al-Sadr's Mahdi Army is thus the latest in the long line of "defining moments" and "turning points" in the colossal blunder that is America's war in Iraq.  An abbreviated list would include the toppling in Baghdad of the statue of Saddam Hussein (9 April 2003), President Bush's triumphant speech under the "Mission Accomplished" banner on the USS Abraham Lincoln off the coast of California (1 May 2003), the killing of Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay by U.S. forces (22 July 2003), the capture of Saddam himself (13 December 2003), the transfer of "sovereignty" to an Iraqi interim government (28 June 2004), the Iraqi elections for a national assembly (30 January 2005), the declaration by Vice President Cheney that the Iraqi insurgency is "in its last throes" (30 May 2005), the ratification of a new Iraqi constitution (15 October 2005), the election of a new Iraqi national assembly (15 December 2005), the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi by U.S. forces (7 June 2006), the hanging of Saddam Hussein (30 December 2006), the announcement by President Bush of a troop "surge" in Iraq (10 January 2007), the elevation of General David Petraeus to the high command of U.S. forces in Iraq (10 February 2007), the stroll through a Baghdad market by John McCain (1 April 2007), the prediction by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) that political reconciliation in Iraq is likely "within weeks" (7 September 2007), the upbeat assessment by General Petraeus regarding the effect of the "surge" in testimony before a congressional committee (11 September 2007), the display by General Petraeus of charts showing that violence in Iraq has declined by 60% over the past six months (6 December 2007), and, now, al-Sadr calls it quits (30 March 2008).

Even Hinderaker doesn't seem to believe it anymore--note the weaseling "may" and "might." To the reality-based community, the activities of the Madhi Army, and the Iraqi government's crackdown on it, look more like sources of dangerous political instability--what the "surge" was meant to repair--than any positive "defining moment."

I should say that I don't always disagree with Hinderaker.  On 2 February 2004 he wrote:

One of the most powerful forces in human affairs is wishful thinking.  Its impact is incalculable.

Indeed.

Theodore Roethke

Brad Leithauser's review (subscription required), in the NYRB, of Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-1963, includes the following unknown (to me) poem:

My lizard, my lively writher,
May your limbs never wither,
May the eyes in your face
Survive the green ice
Of envy's mean gaze;
May you live out your life
Without hate, without grief,
And your hair ever blaze,
In the sun, in the sun,
When I am undone,
When I am no one.

Of the poem's 54 words, 44 have one syllable, and the other ten have two.  Look at the last three lines.  Fifteen words, twelve of which have three or fewer letters.  As the poem follows its brief course the language becomes more severely spare until, toward the end, the very simplest words are repeated in rhymes and near rhymes--"when," "when," "sun," "sun," "undone" and "one."  Something about the last two lines, the brevity and simplicity and the way they only almost rhyme, expresses what the poem is about without saying the words:  dissolution, sorrow, resignation, and love.  A nursery tale for adults.

We learn from Leithauser that Roethke, at age 44, married a woman, 27, a former student of his, and that the marriage "seemed to save him."  So there is an autobiographical angle to consider, too.  I married a 25-year-old when I was 48, which may account partly for my warm response, but it is Leithauser who says "Wish for a Young Wife" is one of the most haunting short love poems he knows. The praise seems to me if anything too tame.  Here is Shakespeare in a poem on a related theme. The praise due Roethke is that his is just as good. 

Favorite Republican

"Eric, do you have a favorite Republican?"  That is what the Republicans in my life would like to know.  Probably they are rounding out their rosters of the untrustworthy and would like one guy without a D after his name.  But who?  Eric will know.

Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb.  Here is a meaty profile.  Here he expresses appropriate exasperation with the familiar, unctuous pieties of Joe Lieberman.  Here the similarly oily formulations of Condoleezza Rice are subjected to similarly blunt deconstruction.  He has made the choice to be a Republican, so all cannot be sweetness and light, but it's another favorable sign for Hagel that he has elicited sneers from the Powerline philosophers--not that any sensible person with a sufficiently high profile can't achieve the same status.