Eric The Blue

Netflix: "Life is Beautiful"

Charlie Chaplin's clown goes to a Nazi concentration camp that is not much worse than the rest of the wide world, a place where pluck and intelligence can for a while hold off advancing night.  In the end, the Nazis are defeated, the Americans arrive on the scene, and the clown's wife and kindergarten-aged son, who were also prisoners, survive and are reunited.  If life were like that it would indeed be beautiful. 

An English major muses on biology

Writing in The New York Review, Richard Lewontin takes up a question that interests me: how the slow pace of adaptive evolution cannot keep up with the rapidly changing human world.  Indeed, selection has no chance to operate on traits that do not manifest until after the age of reproduction.  Lewontin uses the example of surfer boys who may be susceptible, in the sixth or seventh decade of life, to aggressive skin cancers.  The surfers who are resistant to skin cancer do not reproduce at different rates.  (They're all alive and potent at 30.)  If you were determined to increase the human life span and were given a lot of time to work with, you should consider outlawing reproduction among people under, say, 35.  If memory serves, Richard Dawkins makes this point in The Selfish Gene.

Along the same line, it is worth observing that the increase in life expectancy is due mainly to losing fewer people along the way.  It is not that the elderly are living longer; it's that the young are.  The most intractable diseases are those of old age--partly on account, probably, of the fact that nature cares for your genes but not for you.  Once your reproductive years have passed, medical science is not aided in its efforts by an elemental force of nature.

Then there are nearly universal and destructive emotions to consider.  If people, no matter how successful and admired (think: Tolstoy), nevertheless feel restless and unhappy, it might be because  in the biological past of our species the well-adjusted, happy ones were not roaming the territory, ejaculating in as many women as possible.  Genes predisposing one toward quiet and contented reflection did not therefore fare very well.  Or, to take up an emotion that seems to have been much on the mind of Will Shakespeare, there is the related case of sexual jealousy.  Othello's killed him before he could procreate, and it is the motivating agent in a lot of the sordid crimes reported in the local news.  So why hasn't evolution rooted out this harmful emotion?  Because in the youthful days of our race, when our character was being formed, the jealous ones were more successful at passing on their genes, and conditions have changed far too quickly for evolution to be of any help.  We're stuck with dangerous and violent impulses that, before the invention of criminal law and birth control, helped our forebears pass on their genes to the next generation.  It seems lke an impossibly long time ago to us but nature has different measures.

Poem for Memorial Day

The English poet Wilfrid Owen was born in 1893 and was killed, in World War I,  a week before the Armistice, at age 25.  He wrote most of the poems for which he is remembered in the 14 months preceding his death.  The following was composed in October, 1917.  The title refers to a line from Horace, which is given in full at the conclusion of the poem and may be translated:  It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind,
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!--An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And floundering like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Recent short readings

In the current New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin profiles the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and captures, in a single sentence, his judicial philosophy: 

In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff.

Okay, "judicial philosophy" is too exalted.  More like his policy preferences.  I recommend the whole article.  It includes Roberts's high-school graduation picture, which, I regret to say, reminds me of my own.

And, in the category of recommended reading not available on the Web, the newsletter from my daughter's school--Burroughs Community School in south Minneapolis--consists mainly of profiles of first-year teachers written by fifth-graders.  Here is a passage from the one devoted to Ms. Kilgore, by Rachel O.:

Before she began working at Burroughs, she was going to school.  She took mostly biochemistry, but then she became interested in reading.

The article on Miss Gilman, an evident polymath who teaches fifth-grade math and language arts in addition to kindergarten art, cruises along in prosaic style--her previous jobs, her hobbies, what she likes about Burroughs--before concluding, abruptly:

Even though her parents are divorced she feels that her family is very close.

The End.  I have a feeling that this detail made an impression on either Isabel B. or Hannah O., the co-authors. 

Update: Oh, I was wrong about the teacher profiles not being available on the Web!  Check them out here.

My many enjoyable activities

When not at work, or t-ball, or swimming lessons, or watching Twins baseball (brutal four-game series this weekend for the local nine in the Bronx), I've been happily sunk in Bleak House.  It's a joy to think that, considering the length of these later, dark novels--Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend, in addition to Bleak House--I have months of acute reading pleasure ahead of me.  Preliminary judgment: it's the sprawl, the great tumble of words and action, the creation of a textured and detailed world, that are the source of my enjoyment.  Some of the things that are often mentioned in paeans to the greatness of Dickens are actually kind of a bore.  I'm not really very interested in criticism of the chancery courts, for instance.  What does it even mean, chancery? 

Moreover, some of the characters--Mrs. Jellyby, I'm thinking of you--are too cartoonish to be enjoyed, except perhaps inasmuch as it is enjoyable to mark the parts that don't measure up.  The unevenness, however, probably contributes to the grand total effect. 

Dick Cheney has penetrated the fog raised by my many enjoyable activities.  I see that torture is permissible because it works and that Rush Limbaugh, not Colin Powell, is the kind of quarterback around whom a retooled Republican party must huddle.  The answer to the first is that terrorism works as well as torture.  I guess law is in abeyance and anything is allowed, so long as it can be said to work.  It seems a strange doctrine for conservatives.

Regarding the second, there is really no answer, only the observation that he is plainly divorced from reality.

Among t-ballers

I am a coach for my stepdaughter's t-ball team.  Our games are on Monday and Wednesday evenings.  So on those two days, having pulled an 8-to-5 and travelled home on the bus among other worn down office workers slumped in their seats, working their Blackberries or scanning The Wall Street Journal, I get to spend a couple of hours with a bunch of 6-year-old ballplayers.  What a relief!  It's depressing, however, to think that the commuters were themselves once bright and voluble boys and girls learning to throw a ball, swing a bat, and run the bases.  One day my Lynnhurst Pirates will be on the bus, too.  It is fortunate, perhaps, that the generations usually lie down in order.  How many mothers, if they had a chance to cast an appraising eye on their 60-year-old offspring, would think it had all been worth it?

Yeats has a poem on the subject, "Among School Children." 

Righteous Victims: Conclusion

I finally made it to the end of Righteous Victims, Benny Morris's account of the Arab-Israeli conflict from 1881 to 2001.  It would benefit from more maps and fewer acronyms but it is probably still the single best survey of the subject. 

On page 583, in the chapter on what is now usually called the first intifada, Morris writes of one violent incident:

On April 6, 1988, a group of fifteen Israeli high school pupils accompanied by three armed adults, all from Eilon Moreh, a major Gush Emunim settlement outside Nablus, went on a hike in the hills several kilometers from their settlement.  The excursion--conceived as if Samaria were wholly Jewish and there were no Intifada--was typical of Gush Emunim behavior during this period.  The group failed to coordinate the hike with the IDF, as required by law.  Near the village of Beita they encountered a group of Arab youngsters, who pelted them with stones.  One of the adults opened fire with his M-16 rifle, killing an Arab youth and wounding an adult.  Scores of Arabs surrounded the group and, in effect, frog-marched them, under threat, into the center of Beita.  There they were stoned again, and the sister of the slain youth threw a large stone at the killer's head.  Badly injured, as he collapsed he let off a long burst from his rifle, accidentally killing one of the Jewish girls.  Two villagers were also killed, and some of the Israeli youngsters were injured in the melee.  A number of Arabs then protected the hikers until IDF troops arrived.

The enraged Israeli Right shouted "pogrom!"  Sharon demanded that the village be razed and called for a mass deportation.  Subsequently about two dozen villagers were arrested and tried for stone-throwing and the IDF demolished thirteen houses.  It later emerged that several of those left homeless had taken no part in the rioting and that one of them had in fact saved hikers from the mob.  Eventually the IDF paid him compensation.  Six villagers were deported to Jordan.

It is not possible to distill, in a couple of paragraphs describing a single incident, 700 pages devoted to a 120-year historical survey.  But a lot of the story is here: the reflexive violence, the stupidity, the accidents and unintended consequences, the thirst for revenge, the poor judgment and blustering over-reactions, death, all of it a great wave rolling over modest acts of human decency and making them seem pitifully small and inconsequential. 

Chekhov

I know I said that upon finishing Righteous Victims I meant to turn my attention to Dickens, but I've been spending my last few coffee breaks with the Norton critical edition of Chekhov's stories.  The short story seems to fit my life, which does not permit long stretches of uninterrupted reading, and you can't really do better than Chekhov.  I highly recommend the Wikipedia article.  Do you find that sometimes, when reading in Wikipedia about something you know about, the article seems very poor?  The  Hemingway entry was like that last time I looked at it.  But the Chekhov article is long, detailed, informative, well written and a pleasure to read.

Yesterday morning I finished "The Lady with the Dog" and Wednesday I'd read "Anna on the Neck."  The former is justly famous.  Nabokov, who was not a Chekhov enthusiast, called it one of the very greatest of short stories, and he'll not be contradicted by me.  The latter reminds me that Flannery O'Connor once wrote a story ("Good Country People") about a character with a wooden leg, which an American really should not do unless she wants readers to think of Captain Ahab.  In the same way, the author of "Anna on the Neck" might have given the young wife another name had he not wanted to remind the reader of another Russian Anna who tortured her husband.  But in Chekhov of course the marital straying is not accompanied by biblical epigraphs, hysteria, and suicide.  If Anna Karenina is streaked with iridescent shades of purplish red, Chekhov is all earth brown and gray.

The rather flat prose of the stories goes with what Mirsky called an "unusually complete rejection of what we may call the heroic values."  Nevertheless a sentence sometimes gleams.  Of the husband in "Anna on the Neck," a rich official who has won a young bride who must marry for money, he writes: "His clean-shaven, round, sharply defined chin looked like the heel of a foot."  Of Gurov's past conquests he writes, in "The Lady with the Dog":

He could remember carefree, good-natured women who were exhilirated by love-making and grateful to him for the happiness he gave them, however short-lived; and there had been others--his wife among them--whose caresses were insincere, affected, hysterical, mixed up with a great deal of quite unnecessary talk, and whose expressions seemed to say that all this was not just lovemaking or passion, but something much more significant; then there had been two or three beautiful, cold women, over whose features flitted a predatory expression, betraying a determination to wring from life more than it could give, women no longer in their first youth, capricious, irrational, despotic, brainless, and when Gurov had cooled to these, their beauty aroused in him nothing but revulsion, and the lace trimming on their underclothes reminded him of fish-scales.

One feels that the official's chin looked like the heel of a foot to his wife, who was repulsed by the thought of being touched by him.  And in the sentence from "The Lady with the Dog," one of Chekhov's longest, this sense of revulsion is strong enough to require the actual word.

"Any idiot can face a crisis," Chekhov once wrote.  "It's this day-to-day living that wears you out."

Defending torture

It seems there is more than one way to defend the Bush administration against charges that it tortured prisoners.

For example, Condoleezza Rice, when challenged by a student at Stanford, denied that any of the "enhanced interrogation techniques," including specifically waterboarding, is torture.  The analysis upon which this claim rests is that the techniques were authorized by the president and therefore cannot be illegal.  Her argument is really no better than that.  The video is accessible via Scott Horton, at Harper's, who is not content to demolish her argument regarding torture.  She has a lot of other curious views, including that the threat posed to the United States by Nazi Germany was pale compared to the one we now face from Al Qaeda.  The maturity of her judgment puts me in mind of my 6-year-old, who always thinks her worst day ever is today.

Meanwhile, Charles Krauthammer, in a column available online here, does not deny that under President Bush the United States tortured prisoners.  But, lo, torture, "an impermissible evil," is sometimes permissible.  The asterisks are two in number.  The first applies to characters on the TV drama "24" but not to the Bush administration, which was operating here on planet earth. Here is asterisk number two:

The second exception to the no-torture rule is the extraction of information from a high-value enemy in possession of high-value information likely to save lives. This case lacks the black-and-white clarity of the ticking time bomb scenario. We know less about the length of the fuse or the nature of the next attack. But we do know the danger is great. (One of the "torture memos" noted that the CIA had warned that terrorist "chatter" had reached pre-9/11 levels.) We know we must act but have no idea where or how -- and we can't know that until we have information. Catch-22. 

It is generous of him to allow that the second asterisk lacks black-and-white clarity.  Yes, life is like that.  You cannot be sure who has high-value information, or when they have divulged what they know, so that it is safe to stop torturing them.  But the lack of black-and-white clarity gives the second asterisk a measure of utile flexibility.  As Dan Fromkin points out, it amounts to the authorization of fishing expeditions with waterboards.  When you consider who, besides the United States, might be permitted to invoke the second permissible exception to the rule against performing impermissible evil, you begin to suspect that Krauthammer, in a round-about way, takes the same view of it as Condoleezza Rice: it is not torture--or, alternatively, it is an instance of permissible torture--because it is the United States that did it. 

David Souter

I should not have been favorably disposed toward David Souter, as he was nominated by Bush pere on the recommendation of Sununu pere, and was quickly attacked by bleeding hearts for being a bloodless intellectual and a bachelor who, living alone in a house cluttered with books and music, could not be expected to have any sympathy for the problems of those Platonic forms of everyday virtue, "ordinary Americans."  I was inclined to consider certain details of the prosecution brief as an assault upon my dignity, and am pleased that Souter, by disappointing his original sponsors and infuriating the foam-flecked mob also known as the Republican rank-and-file, proved a good advertisement for chaste bookworms. 

I hope the new president can find someone even better to replace him.