Eric The Blue

John Hinderaker boycotts the world

John Hinderaker, who at the time called himself Rocket Man, in August of 2004:

My tolerance for dumb-ass celebrities who want to tell me how to vote has dwindled down to zero. Springsteen (whom I once admired) is off my iPod. The Chicks, who are excellent musicians and superb live performers, are banned. To my knowledge, I've never listened to Pearl Jam, so their stupidity doesn't pose a challenge.

And then, of course, there are movies. Ben Affleck has been traveling around with John Kerry, lending his penetrating political analyses to the Democrat [sic] cause.

Isn't that sweet?

My point, I guess, is that I'm done with these guys. If I'm listening to the radio and a song by the Chicks or Springsteen comes on, I'm changing the channel. If Ben Affleck is in a movie, I'm not going. Period.

And, a few days ago:

Years ago, I attended many more cultural events than I do now. During the 1980s, I was a season ticket holder at Minneapolis' Guthrie Theater. Over time, I became deeply offended by the fact that no matter what the play, whoever put the program together would find a way to work in an attack on the Reagan administration. The last straw was when I went to King Lear at the Guthrie. It was an excellent production, but my enjoyment of it was ruined by the fact that the program was turned into an anti-Reagan tirade. I wasn't even much of a conservative at the time, but the inappropriateness of the whole thing was too much for me.

I didn't "boo loudly," as Glenn suggests; I just quit going. I wonder how many millions of conservative and mainstream Americans have stopped supporting cultural organizations because of this sort of wanton left-wing politicization.

Prospects are dim for Rocket Man.  His world is narrowing, the availabe options declining toward zero.  Soon he may not be able to leave his subdivision.  He'll place himself under house arrest and watch Fox News sixteen hours a day.

John Updike, 1932-2009

"One of Augustine's 'fair and fit,'" wrote Elizabeth Hardwick in her essay "Citizen Updike."  It did seem to come easily to him, the Rabbit tetralogy for example, wherein "there are no staccato notations; it unwinds and unwinds, scene after scene, a long flow of attention and feeling."  Yes, yes: I remember luxuriating in its pages for weeks, and the joy I felt contemplating the fact that, at some time of my choosing, I could read it all again.  His "picked up pieces" of criticism, a sufficient reason to subscribe to The New Yorker beginning in the Eisenhower administration, would alone have been a considerable contribution to literature. "Fill the room with your intelligence" the trial lawyer is advised. Updike filled fifty books with his.

Coleman flails away, looks more ridiculous

I'm going to reproduce an article in yesterday's Star Tribune newspaper, including the wildly inapt headline.  Here's the whole thing:

Norm Coleman reaches out to Franken on absentee ballots

Norm Coleman sent his U.S. Senate opponent a "Dear Al" letter on Saturday, asking him to "join forces" and agree that 12,000 ballots that may have been wrongly excluded from the November election results be examined.

"If you feel that tactically you cannot join this effort," the Republican told DFLer Al Franken, "we would at least ask that your campaign does nothing to block this suit from moving forward or makes any public statements which could be construed as standing in the way of this suit moving forward."

The Franken campaign could not be reached for comment.

Coleman legal spokesman Ben Ginsberg held a conference call with reporters on Saturday and the two-page letter was then e-mailed to news outlets. 

The letter came after a three-judge panel Friday denied Coleman's bid to conduct a wide new inspection of ballots for evidence that many were improperly counted or wrongly rejected during the recount.

A trial on Coleman's challenge of the recount that put Franken ahead by 225 votes is scheduled to begin Monday.

In the web edition of the paper, a commenter begins the job of deconstruction:

This makes it look like a magnanimous gesture by Coleman.  A more accurate headline would be Coleman Asks Franken To Support His Bid To Count Select Groups Of Properly Rejected Ballots.  Anything else is just quoting Coleman's press release.  Sorry, but facts are facts, and the fact that all of these ballots have been reviewed two or three times should appear in paragraph one or two of this story.

To which I would add that this absurd letter should be understood in the context of Coleman, trailing now by more votes than he previously was contesting, "casting a wider net."  Minn. Stat. Sec. 203B.12 is the applicable statute and it describes how election judges are to mark as "accepted" envelopes holding returned absentee ballots that meet the following four criteria:

(1) the voter's name and address on the return envelope are the same as the information provided on the absentee ballot application;

(2) the voter's signature on the return envelope is the genuine signature of the individual who made the application for ballots and the certificate has been completed as prescribed in the directions for casting an absentee ballot, except that if a person other than the voter applied for the absentee ballot under applicable Minnesota Rules, the signature is not required to match;

(3) the voter is registered and eligible to vote in the precinct or has included a properly completed voter registration application in the return envelope; and

(4) the voter has not already voted at that election, either in person or by absentee ballot.

There is no other reason for rejecting an absentee ballot.

During the recount phase, the Minnesota Supreme Court directed local election officials to identify wrongly rejected ballots--that is, ballots that were rejected despite meeting the above four criteria--so that those that the campaigns agreed had been wrongly rejected could be opened and counted.  When this process was complete, about 900 additional ballots had been added to the tally, and Franken's lead had grown from about 50 to 225--a margin that could not be overcome even if all the issues Coleman had so far raised were resolved in his favor.  His campaign therefore is now on an expedition trying to find more issues and ballots.

That is more background for the spot-on remarks of the online commentator.  The election officials already have performed the task of identifying wrongly rejected ballots.  The 12,000 additional ballots that are now the subject of Coleman's unctuous letter were, in the view of local officials performing the duties assigned to them by Minnesota law, correctly rejected: they did not meet at least one of the four standards.  Of course Coleman wants at least some of them counted anyway, because he is behind, and will lose unless something changes.  But this suit is on the face of it a loser.  To achieve the election result he wants, Coleman is seeking a judicial decision overturning Minnesota election law.  What he needs is new rules and only a judge can provide them.  A Republican, he's against "judicial activism," but any port in a storm.

Material, martial thoughts

In "Morris, Excerpted," I quoted the Israeli historian Benny Morris, who, in Righteous Victims, his survey of the Zionist-Arab conflict in Palestine, describes how victory in the six-day war of 1967 loosed within Israeli society ever stronger currents of "fundamentalist messianism" and "primal nationalistic greed."  Herewith a few comments.

1. You sometimes hear someone say that Israel "has no partner for peace."  The difficulty of achieving a settlement is perhaps illustrated by nothing so much as the fact that, while this does not give the Palestinians too little credit, it gives Israel rather too much.  A settlement means a Palestinian state in Gaza and on the West Bank, and this latter means, in turn, the uprooting of tens of thousands of "messianic," "nationalistic" Jewish settlers.  It isn't at all clear that the government of Israel could deliver.  It has shown no inclination even to try.  Though the settlements are the single greatest impediment to peace over which the Israeli government in theory could exercise control, it has done nothing.  As Morris points out, the fundamentalist messianism and greedy nationalism are not confined to the settler movement.

2. Americans are in the competition, but probably Israelis are the people on earth most habituated to the idea that their national enterprises, including the military ones, are favored by God.  Regarding the outcome of the six-day war, however, the obvious explanations have nothing to do with theology, everything to do with military science.  Compared to the ragtag foe, Israel had a clear advantage in every military department that mattered, including preeminently air power.  It's sort of amusing to imagine Talmudic enthusiasts discerning the hand of God, His will that the land of Israel belong to the Jews, in the activities of such men as Ariel Sharon and Moshe Dayan.  Probably the religious scholars with heads full of messianic dreams have considered from every theological angle why God should have acted with so much more efficiency against the Arabs than He did against the Nazis.  Sharon and Dayan might point out that the Nazis had a better army, and a better air force.

3. Whom the gods would defeat they first permit to "win" a war.

Morris, excerpted

I have been progressing, even more slowly than I projected here, through Benny Morris's Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001.  I can't just sit for hours in coffee-shops, as in the pre-Amanda era, and, besides, the book presents some difficulties for this general reader.  The dramatis personae is interminable, the individual names sometimes hard to fix in the mind on account of their foreign-ness, and the index is not always very helpful.  There is an acronym soup of organizations that frequently has me paging backward, trying to identify it by locating the first occurrence in the text.  Also, Morris's writing is mainly colorless, which, given the charged emotions attaching to his subject matter, may be a deliberate strategy.  The result, however, is that you have to be careful not to drowse through sentences that say much, in few words, on important subjects--such as the following paragraphs from his analysis of the political and psychological aftermath of the six-day war:

Nevertheless, the war had opened the way for a possible solution: The Israelis at last had something they could give the Arabs in exchange for peace, and the Arabs gradually would come round.  But the war also unleashed currents within Israeli society that militated against yielding occupied territory and against compromise.  Expansionism, fueled by fundamentalist messianism and primal nationalistic greed, took hold of a growing minority, both religious and secular, getting its cue, and eventually creeping support, from the government itself.

"There is nothing so dreadful as a great victory, except of course a great defeat," historian Walter Laqueur has written.  Jewish settlements in the West Bank began, in effect, in Jerusalem and its environs during the first days after the guns fell silent.  On June 14, Allon proposed to the cabinet that Israel immediately begin to reconstruct and settle the Jewish Quarter of the Old City, and to surround Arab East Jerusalem with a ring of new Jewish neighborhoods.  The aim was to turn all of Jerusalem into an inalienable part of Israel.  "If we don't [start doing] it in a day or two, we never will," he said.

The Jewish Quarter was actually inhabited by Arab families who had moved in after the Jews were expelled in 1948.  Allon proposed that the Arabs be evicted; he was backed by Dayan, the cabinet approved, and about three hundred families were removed.  The eviction, Lior was to write, "passed without violence and in a pleasant enough atmosphere."  What he meant was that the shock of the war and the fear of the Jews were such that the inhabitants were submissive and frightened and readily packed up and left when ordered out.

Churlish thoughts on Inauguration Day

To expand on the claim that Barack Obama has joined the rest of the American political establishment in Israel's amen corner, here is what I take to be a representative statement by him.  The occasion was a visit to Israel last July.  He was asked, while in Sderot, a town in southern Israel within the range of rockets fired from Gaza, whether he would negotiate with Hamas.  He answered:

I don't think any country would find it acceptable to have missiles raining down on the heads of their citizens.  The first job of any nation state is to protect its citizens.  And so I can assure you that if--I don't even care if I was a politician--if somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that.  And I would expect Israelis to do the same thing.

Though he did not exactly answer the question, I guess we are to take that as a No.  But what interests me is that, whether it is reflexive or planned beforehand, he is eager to show that he is on Israel's side--so eager that his Harvard Law syntax momentarily deserts him.  He expects Israelis to defend themselves and their children.  Of course he knows that Palestinians, too, have children, but he does not mention them.  Have the disparate civilian body counts of the two sides made no impression on him?  Does he expect Israel to "protect its citizens" and the Palestinians just to die?  Does he think the Palestinians have any cause for complaint?  The illegal 40-year occupation?  The settlements?  The restrictions on travel and the humiliations suffered at checkpoints?  Seeing (at least) two sides of every question is supposed to be one of his strengths.  On these questions, however, he just jumps into Israel's shoes. 

Which, returning to where I began, is what all American politicians have always done.  How's it working?

Queen Noor speaks

Check out Queen Noor, widow of King Hussein of Jordan, saying what needs to be said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." It's shocking to see people talking sense in a segment on American television addressing Israel's actions in Gaza.  As Glenn Greenwald  points out, Barack Obama has joined the rest of the American political establishment in Israel's amen corner.  Maybe it requires a queen, a celebrity, and an attractive woman, all in one skin, to say that, leaving to one side dead Palestinian civilians, what Israel is doing is bad for Israel.

Art History

This essay by Andrew Butterfield in The New York Review--where, unfortunately, it rests behind a subscriber wall--has sent me scurrying back to H.W. Janson's History of Art, which I acquired now more than thirty years ago for an art history course I took in college.  When it comes down from the shelf it is not usually to consult the portions I was obliged to study in order to satisfy a liberal arts "distribution requirement," but Butterfield on Mantegna and Bellini sounded just familiar enough to make me nostalgic for some of the sweet miseries of my youth.  It is funny the things you remember.  In the literature sent to prospective students, this college had quotations from students talking about their favorite classes, and one about this particular art history course I ended up taking has stayed with me.  "A ninety minute visual feast twice a week," the student raved.  But I thought it was a colossal bore.  All those crucifixions and madonnas with child and the angel making the big announcement to Mary--who cares?  Hardly any of it aroused any sensation in me, unless dull indifference counts. 

I find now that for once it is not necessary to withdraw a youthful, contrarion view.  I wonder whether the artists themselves felt much.  Religion was ascendant, so working on commission you inevitably were assigned religious subjects, and you turned them out, "great works" if you were one of the gifted ones.  People who know about these things can appreciate the brilliance and the technical mastery but it makes me feel nothing and I can believe the artist's heart was not in it.  Maybe you need more religious feeling than I have.  Being able to take pleasure in these works could be a gift, like an ear for music.  If so, I don't have it.

I say all that in order to highlight one stunning exception, the crucifixion painted in about 1510 by the artist known to us as Grunewald on the outermost panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece.  Of the entire work Janson says it "overwhelms us with something like the power of the Sistine Ceiling," and of The Crucifixion in particular he says it is "probably the most impressive ever painted."  The deep religious feeling (if an outsider may speak of it) arises, I think, from the austerity.  In a story by Flannery O'Connor the protagonist, O.E. Parker, determines to have Christ tattooed on his back.  He pages through the tattoo artist's book, back to front, past The Good Shepherd and Forbid Them Not and The Smiling Jesus and Jesus The Physician's Friend until he comes to "the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes."  My experience with The History of Art is a little like Parker's with the tattoo artist's book of templates.

A thousand crucifixions and in only this one does the cross appear as an instrument of torture.  Nietzsche, in a passage on the remoteness of Christianity, noted the absurdity of "the form of a cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and the ignominy of the cross."

Funeral

Yesterday I went to the funeral of my friend Tim Walmann.  He was just 42.  He died of a heart attack last Thursday morning.

It was very sad to see his family gathering at the back of the church before proceeding, at the start of the service, down the center aisle.  His wife was first and she carried the urn holding Tim's remains.  Then his brother, his kids, the young children of his kids, and, looking frail and defeated, his parents.  The officiating minister, a woman, did her best, but I have to say that the consolations of the Christian religion seem to me quite threadbare and only added to my desolation.  Does anyone really believe it?  To make extra money, Tim vended at professional sports events, and the minister envisioned him "selling beer to all the saints in heaven."  Sure.

I have an anthology of American literature that reprints the following poem by Philip Pain, a Puritan boy lost at sea in 1668 when he was perhaps 16:

Scarce do I pass a day, but that I hear
Some one or other's dead; and to my ear
Me thinks it is no news; but oh, did I
Think deeply on it, what it is to die,
My pulses all would beat, I should not be
Drown'd in this deluge of security.

"What do we do," asks the editor in a brief headnote, "about a writer who wrote one memorable poem?"  I'm glad he printed it, for the figure of a teenager bracing himself fortifies me.

"Coleman is casting wider net for votes"

"Coleman is casting wider net for votes" declares the headline at the top of page one of yesterday's Minneapolis newspaper.  It isn't hard to understand why that would be.  He's behind by 225, and the issues his attorneys had heretofore raised would, if they were all resolved in Coleman's favor, leave Franken still ahead.  So they're looking for more.  His legal team's method is to request from local election officials thousands of pages of documents, which, if produced, they will no doubt mine in an effort to uncover something--anything--that can be used in their election contest.  What they got is not enough.

The Star Tribune article quotes Scott Johnson, one of the Power Line philosophers, on the alleged ineptitude of Coleman's lawyers.  Power Line has itself, however, been all over the place on the recount.  On December 30, John Hinderaker summarized the maneuverings up to that point before concluding:

One way to look at the situation is as follows: most likely, Coleman is "ahead" currently by around 80 votes (assuming that he eventually wins the duplicate vote issue). So, unless Franken gains a net of 80 votes or more on the absentee ballots, Coleman is likely to win the election contest.

That would have been one way to look at it.  Franken, however, gained not 80 but 180 votes when the wrongly rejected absentee ballots were added to the tally, causing Scott Johnson to write, on January 3:

I wonder whether Senator Coleman may now choose not to file an election contest following the declaration of Franken as the winner of the recount on Monday. . . .  My guess is that [Franken's 225-vote lead] will give rise to some sober rethinking on the part of Senator Coleman, whose only recourse is an election contest.

Turns out that it was Hinderaker who had been "rethinking."  On December 30, with Franken ahead by 40 to 50 votes, he concerned himself with the 130 ballots from heavily Democratic precincts that, according to Coleman, had been counted twice; on January 5, with Franken's lead now somewhat north of 130, he turned his attention to "highly legitimate issues surrounding the election which have not yet been addressed by any body."  These highly legitimate and unaddressed issues included, in addition to a now insufficient number of allegedly twice-counted ballots, 654 more absentee ballots that had been rejected on election day.  By January 6, Johnson, extolling Hinderaker's "lucid exposition of the issues still at play," was no longer speaking of "sober rethinking" in the Coleman camp.

Hinderaker's argument is lucid only in the sense that it's easy to see how weak it is.  By his own account of the State Supreme Court's ruling--

On December 18, the Minnesota Supreme Court ordered the state's county election officials to "identify for the candidates' review those previously rejected absentee ballot envelopes that were not rejected on any of the four bases stated in [Minnesota statutes]." That process is now apparently complete, and the counties have identified 1,346 such ballots. They are conventionally referred to as the "wrongly rejected" absentee ballots.

The Supreme Court further ordered the campaigns to try to agree on which of these ballots were, indeed, rejected in error. As to all ballots where such agreement is reached by the county and both campaigns, the votes will be tallied as part of the recount process. As to any ballots where a dispute remains, the dispute will be resolved in the election contest that presumably will follow the recount.

--the 654 ballots have been addressed.  The Supreme Court held that election officials are to identify for the candidates' review wrongly rejected absentee ballots, which ballots would then be opened and counted when the two sides, inspecting them one at a time, agree that the vote should count.  That happened, and Franken's lead surged to 225.  The 654 votes Hinderaker is talking about were not identified by election officials. They were identified by the Coleman campaign.  According to the Star Tribune article, local officials, striving to be fair to Coleman, have gone back and reviewed again the ballots he wants counted, and determined again that all were correctly rejected. 

What is the chance that the judges hearing the election contest will overturn a process prescribed by the Supreme Court and then scrupulously executed by election officials?  Not even the Power LIne boys were pursuing this line of attack--until Coleman's deficit grew beyond the number that could be overcome if all his other claims were accepted.

There's one other thing you don't learn at Power Line.  On the morning after the election, Coleman appeared in public, claimed victory, expressed his confidence in the election system, and indicated that Franken, to spare taxpayers some dollars, should forgo the recount provided for in state law.  He was asked whether, if he were in Franken's place, he'd take his own advice.  He answered that he would, because the time for healing had arrived.

Letter to the editor

The editors of the Star Tribune seem to regard Mitch Pearlstein, head thinker at the Center of the American Experiment think tank, as one of the bright lights among local conservatives.  So what does he have to say?  Judging by his latest headlining contribution to the editorial page, mainly portentous questions beginning "What will it take"--as in, for example, "What will it take to reinstitutionalize marriage in many parts of this country?"

The swollen "reinstitutionalize" at the load-bearing part of the sentence is one of Mitch's calling cards.   He's taken a five syllable adjective and added an engine and a caboose to make a seven syllable verb that doesn't mean anything.  It's the same technique employed by the authors of college themes trying to disguise the fact that they have nothing to say.  And neither does Mitch.

Nevertheless, he drones on: "Whatever one thinks about Bush administration policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, the remarkable--some might argue, miraculous--fact is the American homeland has been safe for more than seven years, ever since 9/11."  One attack like that in the history of the world and it's a "miracle" there weren't a half dozen during Bush's time in office!  No wonder he attributes his own views to unnamed phantoms.  And why won't he say what he thinks about Bush administration policy in Iraq?

The mincing syntax, the preening diction--you can't ignore them, because it's all there is.

What will it take for the Star Tribune to flick a switch and turn off this dim bulb?  Even I, an inveterate bleeding heart, have to believe there's a wingnut in town who could make a case.

Claiborne Pell

Claiborne Pell, Democratic senator from Rhode Island from 1961 to 1997, died Thursday at age 90.  The obituaries duly note that he is responsible for Pell Grants, for co-sponsoring legislation creating the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities, for his ardent opposition to the Vietnam War and consistent support for labor and environmental concerns, and, generally, for championing liberal causes in the US Senate for 36 years.  Sometimes called Wellborn Pell on account of his rich father, the deferential Pell was a formidable vote-getter in blue-collar Rhode Island: in six senate campaigns, he received an average of 64% of the vote.

Many of the obituaries mention Pell's "quirkines," often in connection with his wardrobe of ill-fitting tweed suits, which he sometimes wore while jogging.  He also had a keen interest in paranormal phenomena and, according to Martin Gardner, who devotes a chapter to Pell in Did Adam and Eve Have Navels? Debunking Pseudoscience, was unrivaled among Washington politicians  "in combinging ignorance of science with extreme gullibility toward the performances of psychics."  Pell was a great fan of the discredited mentalist Uri Geller (see the nearly iconic video from The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson below), served on the advisory board of the International Association of Near Death Studies, promoted government research on paranormal phenomena, and for years employed on his Senate staff the crackpot Cecil B. Scott Jones, who is best known for his work on UFOs entitled Phoenix in the Labyrinth.

There is a tradition of slanting the truth about the recently deceased that perhaps explains the recurrences of "quirky" and "eccentric" in obituaries of Pell.  Regarding the paranormal, he was a dope.  Regarding his jogging attire, he was a quirky eccentric.  In nearly every other regard, he was a mensch, and his passing may remind us of the way good and bad qualities mix in us all.  At Salon, the comment section appended to his obituary is filled with thank-yous from recipients of Pell Grants who say they owe their college educations to him.

Reading in the new year

The indispensable James Wolcott--he's in my blog roll to the right--links in his latest post to Sara Roy's report on conditions in Gaza before Israeli war planes began another killing spree on December 27.  Today, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni denied there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.  Roy makes clear that the blockade of Gaza had precipitated a humanitarian crisis there before Operation Cast Lead began making corpses in clumps.  She marshals her evidence with a seeming dispassionate air before concluding, passionately:

How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be next.

Follow the link above and read the whole thing. It's awful to think that things are now much worse.

Wolcott also links to his own review, in the same issue of London Review of Books as Roy's article appears, of John Updike's The Widows of Eastwick.  Which man, reviewer or reviewee, has the greater command of written English, the more coruscating prose style?  Wolcott I think is something of a showman, and sometimes seems to be calling attention to his own flourishes, while Updike's prose never betrays a trace of effort.  Maybe it's like arguing about two pretty girls, one of whom is wearing a shorter skirt.  I like them both and recommend Wolcott's review, but be careful: it's a little like looking directly at the sun.