Eric The Blue

Darkness visible

Jane Mayer has written a new book, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, and, while I have not read it, the interviews she has been giving to discuss its contents are, even to someone who regards the Bush administration as an organized criminal element, shocking. Google "Jane Mayer on You Tube" and treat yourself to the recommended daily allowance of revulsion, squared.  Or just click here to go to a three-part interview up at the blog of The Progressive Book Club.

One aspect of Mayer's indictment concerns the evident fact that torture does not work.  Our failure to assess realistically the nature of the threat posed by Iraq may be attributed in part to the way in which our "intelligence" incorporated "information" received from men who, broken and humiliated by the conditions of their imprisonment, were ready to say anything they thought their captors might want to hear.  In many cases, these informants knew nothing and were guilty of nothing.  American officials at Guantanamo estimated that half the prisoners were innocent.  Yet they were--many still are--incarcerated without trial for years. When it was revealed to the Bush administration that half the Guantanamo detainees were there by mistake, David Addington, the vice-president's chief advisor (Mayer's reporting indicates the Office of the Vice-President was the power hub of the Bush White House), said: "There will be no review.  The president has determined that they are all enemy combatants.  We are not going to revisit it."

There was no reason to go to war.  Even if the sources of our intelligence had been comparatively good, there was no reason to rely on it.  Remember that in 2003, during the weeks before the invasion, Iraq had allowed United Nations weapons inspectors into the country.  Are we to believe that our intelligence agencies could do better than trained professionals conducting on-site inspections inside Iraq?  But of course the inability of the weapons inspectors to find any dangerous weapons was regarded by the Bushies  as evidence of the inspectors' incompetence.  Strutting and preening on his stage at the Pentagon briefing room, Donald Rumsfeld insisted that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," and, after the invasion, when weapons still could not be found, he "explained": "We know where they are.  They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, north and south somewhat."

The American people very nearly elected George Bush in 2000.  Still, they deserved better.

I'm thinking, I'm thinking!

Besides making their own outlandish contributions to the work product of the right-wing blogosphere, the Powerline philosophers link promiscuously to the effusions of their fellow travellers.  I consequently found myself reading the other day this nutty column by Charles Krauthammer.  Now, as if to goad me to comment, my hometown daily gave it prominent display today on its editorial page.  Okay, here goes.

To be fair to Krauthammer, he doesn't say anything crazy until the third paragraph, wherein he attributes the demise of the Soviet Union to the policies of President Reagan.  Just because a million people have pointed out that this is like giving the rooster credit for the rising sun doesn't prove Krauthammer is wrong.  But there is wisdom in crowds.  For forty years we hear from Krauthammer & Co. about the depravity of the Soviet system and then, when it finally collapses beneath the considerable burden of its own accrued dead weight, it is somehow on account of something Reagan did?  No, it's on account of something the Soviets did.  If you must give credit to one American, try George Kennan.

As Krauthammer proceeds one forms the impression that he is surprised to detect evidence of an ego in someone running for president.  "There's nothing new about narcissism in politics," he allows, attempting to achieve an inoculation before posing this stumper (he is referring to Barack Obama): "has there ever been a presidential nominee with a wider gap between his estimation of himself and the sum total of his lifetime achievements?"

Well.  Now.  Let.  Me.  Think.

Notes on the presidential horse race

Midsummer '08, where is the presidential race?  Is it true that Obama can "expand the map"?

I don't know the answers, but last Sunday, while pedaling a stationary bike in front of some TVs at the health club, I came to the conclusion that I can read polls and perform arithmetic with the best of the talking-head experts.  For example, on The Chris Mathews Show, Howard Fineman opined that, notwithstanding all the speculation about Obama's chances of breaking through in Dixie and the mountain West, "the math" was for him still "very difficult" without Ohio.  That's not the way it looks to me.

In 2004, John Kerry won nineteen states (and the District of Columbia), with 252 electoral votes.  The most recent state polls indicate that Obama is ahead everywhere Kerry won.  If he stays ahead in those states, he still needs to win 18 more electoral votes.  Of course Ohio would do it. But take another look at the map.  It shows 255 electoral votes at least "leaning" toward Obama (the Kerry states plus Iowa minus New Hampshire) and 120 more in the "toss up" category.  Unless things change substantially, it appears that McCain has to win, in addition to Florida and Ohio, all but one or two of the other states that are currently too close to place, however tentatively, in one column or the other. 

On the available evidence, the map has expanded.  An Obama victory does not depend upon his prevailing in Ohio (where he looks to be, at the moment, slightly ahead).  While arguing that Obama really needs Ohio, Fineman allowed that he was likely to win both Iowa and New Mexico, two states Kerry lost.  The Kerry states plus Iowa and New Mexico would put Obama at 264 electoral votes. Ohio would put him over the top--but so would Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, or Colorado.  At present, he appears to be, if anything, slightly ahead in both Virginia and Colorado.

The above optimistic analysis depends upon Obama defending successfully big states, especially Pennsylvania and Michigan, that Kerry won by small margins.  If he can't do that, the discussion is probably moot:  losing Pennsylvania and Michigan means the whole thing has gotten away from him and he loses Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado, too.  But I am an optimist, and it seems to me at least as likely that the whole thing gets away from McCain.  I think Obama has a better chance in Indiana than McCain does in either Pennsylvania or Michigan.  A recent Rasmussen poll of 500 likely voters in Montana showed Obama up five points.  Georgia is home to well over 2 million African Americans, more than a quarter of the state's population, and a white guy named Bob Barr. 

The map has expanded and Obama is ahead.  And why not?  The Republicans have been in the White House for the last eight years.  For most of that time, there has been a Republican majority in both the House and Senate.  They have been derelict in their stewardship.  Their domestic policy has been reckless and irresponisble, and their foreign policy has been even more reckless and irresponsible.  "It's time for a change" is more than a slogan--it's the reasonable conclusion of the electorate.

Advice for professors; a contrarian view on a Christian hero

Happily sunk in Edmund Wilson, I came yesterday to the review, in Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties, of Aldous Huxley's Time Must Have a Stop.  As a college freshman, I was assigned to read Time Must Have a Stop, but I can't remember a thing about it.  Nor did anything in Wilson's review sound remotely familiar.  How can you know your eyes passed over the print on the page of a book with a certain title if, thirty-some years later, you can't name a single character or describe, even vaguely, the plot or theme?

The answer to this question has to do, I think, with a common pedagogical error.  (I have an obvious interest in attributing my deficiencies to my teachers.)  The course for which I read Huxley was called "Philosophical Ideas in Literature," and it was taught by the Kierkegaard scholar Howard Hong during the January "interim" term at St. Olaf College in 1977.  In that one month, we were expected to read The Stranger by Camus, Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevski, Brand and Peer Gynt by Ibsen, Brave New World and Time Must Have a Stop by Huxley, Darkness at Noon by Koestler, and Melville's Moby Dick.  The only ones I have any memory of are Stranger, Brothers, and Moby Dick, and I'm reasonably sure it's because I've read these again, at leisure, in the case of Moby Dick several times, over the intervening years.

It is possible that Dr. Hong's pedagogical intent was to force us freshmen to be exposed, however superficially, to these works.  One looks for excuses, because it is so obvious that the reading load was, for a month's time, absurd.  It would be hard just to turn that many pages in thirty days.  It seems reasonable to assume we were supposed to think about what we were reading, but there was no time for that.  These professors tend to forget over how long a period of time their own understanding of a certain book develops.  In the end, their ambitious syllabi succeed mainly in making thoughtlessness mandatory. 

According to Wilson, I didn't miss much with the Huxley, who now that I think of it does seem out of place there with Melville and Dostoevski.  Probably he was a particular favorite of Dr. Hong's.  I don't think that much of his Kierkegaard, either:  he seems to function as a life vest for intellectually vain Protestants who, somewhat sheepish about the Sunday-school version of their faith, might feel obliged to drop it altogether if Kierkegaard had not infused it with some racy desperation.  On the other hand, if he'd never written a thing, we probably wouldn't have Therapy, a wonderful comic novel by David Lodge in which the main character conceives an intense interest in Kierkegaard's philosophy and biography. 

Speaking of Kierkegaard's biography, it seems to me that of a disturbed person.  All the weird business with the girlfriend, Regine Olsen--not a good sign.  According to John Updike (who holds Kierkegaard in the highest regard), his sexual experience, unless he died a virgin, was limited to a single visit to a brothel--see Updike's review of "The Seducer's Diary" printed in More Matter.  In a New Yorker review of a Kierkegaard biography, Updike mentions the theory, "raised in the far reaches of Kierkegaard studies," that the philosopher suffered from a severely curved penis that made sexual relations impossible.  Whatever the source of all the anguish, it seems very likely that Miss Olsen was fortunate to have lived her life at a safe remove. 

In a letter to a friend the Russian writer Chekhov remarked, "My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and absolute freedom--freedom from violence and falsehood, no matter how the last two manifest themselves."  In significant respects Kierkegaard represents the antithesis of the Chekhovian ideal.

The reality-based community pipes up

Okay, I admit it, I've been googling words and phrases in an effort to get referred to my own blog.  As a result I've learned that Mark Thoma, an economist at the University of Oregon who blogs at Economist's View, came across the same bit of economic wingnuttery that I lampooned here. 

Thoma's take on the contribution of the Powerline philosophers to tax burdens in the US?  "I can't believe this is put forth as serious analysis." 

Depend upon it, Sir.  You can't make fun of these guys, because they've already said the things you'd say they said in order to make them ridiculous.

Savage southwest

My wife and I recently rented--and watched, which is something we often neglect to do with the movies we rent--"The Savages," featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney as siblings in midlife who share, besides their DNA and household of origin, disordered lives, an interest in theater, and a father who is a bad memory until, sliding into geriatric oblivion, he begins dabbling with his feces in far off Arizona.  It's written and directed by Tamara Jenkins and seems to me a meritorious departure from a thousand movies that are explained only by: figure out what they like, serve it up. 

Read, if you're interested, the New York Times's favorable review here.  It doesn't mention what was, in my opinion, the best part of the movie--its evocation, when the two principals travel to Sun City, Arizona for some reconnaisance work, of the prevailing climate in sun-baked American retirement communities.  The perfect rows of boulevard trees pruned into geometrical shapes, the golf carts with an American flag waving above a rear tire, the tidy "lawns" of crushed rock shimmering in the heat--I experienced, on account of my visits to my parents' winter home in a suburb adjoining Sun City, the thrill of recognition.

Even before my dad retired, I'd had a foretaste. A golfing friend has a timeshare near Naples, Florida, so I've been down the fairways framed by screened-in swimming pools the size of a bath tub and seen lurking therein the local fauna, wrinkled and tanned, lazing like sea lions before drying off in time for a trip in the Buick to an early supper at one of the cheap chains that for miles line the commercial routes.  In the last year of his life Edmund Wilson travelled to Naples and, in his journal, deployed the descriptive phrase "sunlit hell."  It hasn't improved, and the retirement communities of greater Phoenix are a dehumidified equivalent.  I think the peculiarly oppressive ambience of these places has to do with the way in which a determined perkiness--"CARD PARTY IN THE COMMUNITY ROOM TONITE!--accents the fact that the population is living posthumously. 

The plot of "The Savages" requires the camera to go to Sun City and, though only a small part of the movie, it shows truly what may there be seen.

Of Aristotle, tax burdens, and yet another power outage

Scott Johnson, one of the Powerline philosophers, is upset.  The top one per cent of income earners in the U.S. pay way more than their share of federal income tax.  He seems to think you can look it up.  In 1994, the top one per cent of income earners reported 13% of adjusted gross income, and paid almost a quarter of all income tax.  And, whines Johnson, things are getting worse: over 40% of the tax burden will fall on the top one per cent this year, and the bottom half will pay just 3%,

What an outrage!  No wonder Aristotle would demur.  (Johnson finds in Aristotle's political philosophy a cryptic attack on the progressive income tax.)

Here's a concept that I guess doesn't come up in the works of Aristotle:  a tax burden is not a number, it's what you have to do without on account of your obligation to pay tax.  In another recent post, Johnson approvingly quotes "the Limbaugh platform," which calls for a 17% flat tax.  So you see, whether you play in the NBA or work in a nursing home as a licensed practical nurse, your tax burden should be the same--"17."

Let's try out some numbers.  Suppose your income is ten million dollars.  You'd pay your 17 and be left with $8.3 million.  If, on the other hand, your income is $30,000, you'd pay your 17 and be left with $24,900.  After a few years of this, the one taxpayer can easily arrange things so that his two kids never have to work, while the two kids of the other taxpayer probably do not get enough to eat today. 

But deep thinkers who have studied Aristotle understand that such considerations are irrelevant.  The topic is tax fairness, and as any Gradgrind can see, the rich are paying so much that the poor get off scot-free!  

Midmorning annoyance

I'm home from work this week. The plan is for me to provide the mindless grunt work, in support of my wife's intellectual contributions, for a home landscaping project.  Of course we're running behind with laying in suplies, so this morning I found myself lolling with a second cup of coffee and growing annoyed while listening to Midmorning on MPR.

The show had to do with "the changing electoral landscape," and the part that got under my skin concerned the discussion of the electoral college, which, in the view of two of the three guest "experts," has served our country well "except for once a century."  The allusion here of course is to the fact that once every hundred years or so--most recently, eight years ago--the winner of the national popular vote has lost the presidential election in the electoral college.  The guests didn't explain what the upside to the electoral college might be.  If the president were elected the same way as senators and representatives and governors and state legislators and mayors and city council members and school boards and church councils, then we would have a system that would serve us well without having to worry about the occasional "exception."  Once one admits that a split decision between the electoral college and the national popular vote does not "serve us well," the question arises:  Why put up with it?

And it's not as if the possibility of a split decision, with the consequent question of legitimacy, is the only bad feature of the electoral college.  Its method is profoundly undemocratic.  As if to reinforce the effect of the Senate, in which every state receives two votes regardless of population, your vote for president counts more if you live in a small state.  Worse, the all-or-nothing allocation of a state's electoral votes disenfranchises over forty per cent of all voters.  That is because, if the candidate you vote for loses your state, you might as well not have voted. Since in recent history more than half of the fifty states have not been competitive, millions of people from coast to coast know on election eve, if they are realistic, that there is no reason for them to vote.

What can be said in defense of such a terrible system?  On the show this morning, someone called in and made the point that, as candidates have finite resources, they would never campaign in a state like Utah if the winner of the popular vote became president.  He must have been confused or had something in mind that he didn't express.  They don't campaign in Utah now.  They don't campaign in California or Texas or New York, either.

As I've said before, the National Popular Vote plan deserves your support. 

Freedland on Hitchens

When trying to decide whether to take someone seriously, it can be useful to ask yourself what would count as a positive proof against their argument--not in your mind but in theirs.  Suppose it is impossible to conceive of any event or observation or new evidence that would cause the person to sigh, "Ah, well then, I guess I was wrong."  Then they aren't really saying anything and may be ignored.  For if anything is really being asserted, then the opposite of it is being denied, and the occurrence of the opposite would cause them to recant.

With that we come to the case of Christopher Hitchens and his support for the war in Iraq.  What would it take to make him admit he was wrong?  Jonathan Freedland, writing in the current New York Review, points out just how ludicrously determined Hitchens is not to yield.  Since the chief reason advanced for going to war concerned Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, you might think the fact that there were no such weapons, and that the UN inspectors who had been allowed into Iraq before the war could have verified this fact had they been permitted by the Bush administration to continue their work, might count for something.  But, no. "Thanks to the intervention," Hitchens has argued, "Saddam Hussein has been verifiably disarmed, and a full accounting of his concealment and acquisition programs is being conducted.  Where is the objection to that?"

Freedland dismisses with derision the "logic" of this case in a memorable sentence:  "For Hitchens, invasion was the only way to establish the nonexistence of weapons whose existence was the chief justification for the invasion." 

Freedland points out that, in trying to account for Hitchens's views on the Iraq war, his critics have often turned to psychology.  It isn't hard to understand why.  The arguments he puts forward are ludicrous, so it has to be something other than the merits of the case.  There is, as Freedland also suggests, something in Hitchens of the clever schoolboy eager to display his powers by snubbing the cub scouts who are not so daring and smart as he.  In this endeavor the aggressive sparkle of his prose is his ally and also his betrayer.  Look at me!  See how smart I am! 

The great success of the Iraq war is so well disguised that only geniuses can perceive it.

  

Grown-ups

While working on my last post, I remembered that, during the 2006 Senate campaign in Virginia, Democrat Jim Webb was attacked by George Allen, the Republican incumbent, for having written novels meant for adult readers.  I've now tracked down some of the details. Read all about it here.

The criticism leveled at Webb for the realistic manner in which he depicts, in his fiction, the deeds performed by men in a combat zone is of a piece with the ban on cameras at Dover Air Force Base, where the coffins of the war dead are unloaded.   There is a beautiful mythology surrounding war.  It envelopes in a misty halo Our Troops, their devotion and sacrifice and manifold gallantries.  Nothing is permitted to intrude upon the fantasy.  That it occurs to President Bush to connect his absence from the golf links to the experience of the men and women he has sent to war must be attributed mainly to his callow self.  But the unreality that has been ceaselessly promoted by his closest advisors plays its part. 

Lynne Cheney, too, seems unaware of how ridiculous she sounds.  "His novels are full of sexually explicit references to incest," she says, holding her nose, of Webb's books.  Apparently George Allen is to be preferred not only to Jim Webb but also to Sophocles.  These are the grown-ups?  Is she pandering to dopes or is she one herself?  Lynne Cheney is fortunate that her scribblings about lesbian love are out of print.  They wouldn't look like much next to the world according to Jim Webb.