The little mountain

Sometimes, you suspect that modern technology is the enemy of art. Of Art. Neither dance nor theatre can be captured in moving images, whether analog or digital; each requires the real live presence of a real live audience. Recorded music — even in the highest of fidelity — is inferior to live performance. Literature? Perhaps you can read as well from a screen as from a page, though I continue to doubt that you (or anyone) can write fully as well with a computer as with a pencil.

Then along comes Maira Kalman, and you understand that however insufficient a new medium may be for ancient arts, a new medium will eventually enable a real art form.

Please, do yourself a favor. Go visit Tom Jefferson’s place with her. It’s a lovely trip.

Writers

Nothing overtly political today, nothing which wants or claims to lean either left or right, just a few interesting (to me) chunks of prose from good writers. Really good writers.

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Charles Bukowski

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Bukowski and William Wantling corresponded for years before they met. This is from Bukowski’s elegiac “Unpublished Forward to William Wantling’s 7 On Style.”

… he was very much discovered in England and New Zealand—his writing didn’t contain the trickery and the sheen that the larger American poetry audience demands—and things never became easy for him, that’s why he continued to write very well.

I had made it a policy to avoid writers as much as possible; they weaken one another, partying together, gossiping together, bitching together. Almost every writer I’ve met believes that he is immortal and neglected when the fact is that they simply write very badly.

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Ursula LeGuin

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Shared Worlds asked fantasy writers to choose a real-world fantasy cities. This is from LeGuin’s description of Venice.

It isn’t hard to imagine a city that’s built on a marsh in a lagoon, and is slowly but inevitably sinking back into the marsh, but it’s the details that count; and some of the details require an active fantasy. For instance, that all the main streets are water. Sidestreets are narrow and the bridges arched, so no horses, no motorized vehicles. For centuries and centuries all traffic is on foot and by boat; and the boats are special, long, narrow, driven not by oars but by poling, for the canal-streets aren’t very deep. Then they allow motorized boats on the canals, and all of sudden there’s pollution, noise instead of quiet, and also wakes, waves, swamping the streets and plazas, which are already going under water in storms.

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Eduardo Galeano

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The Washington Post published “Scenes from the Life of a South American Literary Legend.” This was my favorite.

The Bolivian town of Llallagua lived from the mine, and in the mine its miners died. Deep in the shafts in the bowels of the mountains, they hunted veins of tin and lost, in a few short years, their lungs and their lives.

I spent some time there and made good friends.

The last night, we were drinking, my friends and I, singing laments and telling bad jokes till just before dawn.

When little time remained before the scream of the siren that would call them to work, my friends fell silent, all of them at once. Then one asked, or pleaded, or ordered: “And now, my brother, tell us about the sea.”

I was speechless.

They insisted: “Tell us. Tell us about the sea.”

It was the most difficult challenge in all my storytelling life. None of these miners would ever know the sea; each was doomed to die young. And I had no choice but to bring them the sea, the sea that was so far away, discovering words that could drench them to the bone.

Remainders of the Day

I watch very little TV; when I do, it’s never the late-night comics. (I do catch Jon Stewart occasionally on U-Tube.) So I’m venturing into the middle of a controversy I didn’t even know about.

I need to stay in more.

It’s the Letterman-Palin flap. Strange to see myself writing this, but on the evidence posted in the Washington Post story, I have to side with Sarah Palin. Those guys were over the line, way over in some instances. Surprising that alpha-male First Dude didn’t call one of them out on it.

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Moderate alcohol intake — say, a glass of red wine with supper every evening — is good for you. Or is it? Some scientists doubt it:

No study, these critics say, has ever proved a causal relationship between moderate drinking and lower risk of death — only that the two often go together. It may be that moderate drinking is just something healthy people tend to do, not something that makes people healthy.

I’ve long been suspicious of scientific studies which propose a causal relationship where the jaundiced eye can see only a correlation. But I assumed all along that this one was golden. Perhaps it is not, but to be on the safe side, I’ll continue my evening libations.

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Bookstores used to be divided into two sections: fiction and non-fiction. On one side of the aisle, novels and stories; on the other side, texts and studies and criticism. In a currently abused word, Books.

Today’s bookstores… Let me try again. Today’s purveyors of reading material are divided into hundreds of sections and sub-sections. What’s on offer in each is “stuff which has been compiled, printed on paper, and bound between covers, hard or soft” in some manner different from stuff in adjacent sections.

Stuff is “books” only in the most technical sense.

Success in the production and marketing of these “books” depends not so much upon research or artistry or literary skill as it does upon that same quality which characterizes all media today: imagination.

Here. I will prove it.

Four years ago, Steven D. Levitt, an economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, a journalist, published a “book” titled Freakonomics.

Watch closely. Imagination coming.

Freakonomics was a best seller, and led to a column in The New York Times for its authors. And it also inspired a wave of new books:

Last summer Obamanomics and Slackonomics appeared. This year Invent-onomics 101 made its debut. And in the fall Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays will hit bookstores.

SOGonomics, anyone?

The Old Lie

I’m writing this for myself. You’re welcome to read it, but don’t feel obligated. It gets long-winded and obscure. Perhaps I’ll return and revise it, but it’s a picture of where I am right now.

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Shortly after 9/11, we knew who and where the culprits were: The leaders of al-Quaeda, holed up in Afghanistan with permission of the Taliban. Understandably, the national blood was up; retaliation was inevitable.

Neither “right,” nor, as it turned out, “defensible.” But “inevitable” it was.

What was wrong with the retaliation, as we carried it out? The same thing that was wrong with our invasion of Iraq, the same thing that is wrong with our ongoing operations now in Afghanistan. We are killing innocent people.

There must be some answer to it, this raining down of death on civilians, this “collateral damage” which totals in the millions today, surely in the billions since military forces discovered how to combine airplanes and gunpowder. I’ve tried for years to wrap my head around it, and can show for the effort little more than empty aspirin boxes.

Does religion help? Can it? I long ago gave up on the Catholic Church for dependable, consistent moral guidance, but I did grow up in it, was educated in it through high school, and kept a tenuous connection to it well into my thirties. Willy-nilly, it is deeply embedded in me, just as it is in all of contemporary Western moral philosophy. So it was a reasonable place to begin research on that invisible line between right and wrong, insofar as war is concerned.

Reasonable, but frustrating.

The Vatican has an extensive and easily-accessed website, with what passes in an ecclesiastical setting for straightforward answers to difficult moral questions. There’s quite a list of sections dealing with the Fifth Commandment: You Shall Not Kill. These two seemed most relevant:

2309 The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:

• the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
• all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
• there must be serious prospects of success;
• the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the “just war” doctrine.

2263 The legitimate defense of persons and societies is not an exception to the prohibition against the murder of the innocent that constitutes intentional killing. “The act of self-defense can have a double effect: the preservation of one’s own life; and the killing of the aggressor. . . . The one is intended, the other is not.”

This last one actually precedes the other; I put it last because it was the most difficult to parse. It means — and I come to this from what follows as much as what went before — that killing someone else in self-defense does not violate the prohibition against murder. It is all right to kill in self-defense.

Of course, there is bickering about that as soon as we get back to that looming terror, “collateral damage.” As much sense as I can make of that comes from an exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books, concerning the death of civilians in Palestine — a very civilized debate between scholars and generals over the use of force — which included this footnote:

According to Michael Walzer, the Double Effect doctrine, derived from Catholic moral theology, holds that when you are attacking a military target (hence a legitimate target), you are not morally blameworthy for collateral damage (the second effect), even if you know with certainty that the attack will cause the damage, so long as you don’t intend the damage and so long as it is not disproportionate to the military value of destroying the target. In Just and Unjust Wars (1977), Walzer proposed a revision of this doctrine, to which the authors refer: that it isn’t enough not to intend the damage, it is morally necessary to intend that the damage not occur, and then to take positive measures, including measures costly to yourself, to avoid or minimize the damage.

If you are interested in hair-splitting over the spilling of innocent blood, that exchange of letters in NYRB, and the articles which precede it, make fascinating if grim reading.

The conclusion I come to is the same one which has been grating on my conscience for at least half a century: War is once in a while inescapable, yet it is always wrong. War, in theological terms, is a sin.

It’s not a startling conclusion, nor is it profound or unique. If you have come this far, grappled this long with my logic and my prose, you deserve a reward. It is this. A couple paragraphs from an essay by Chris Hedges, which reaches the same conclusion with harsher and harder-earned research. His title also is, “War is Sin.” Go read the whole thing.

War exposes the lies we tell ourselves about ourselves. It rips open the hypocrisy of our religions and secular institutions. Those who return from war have learned something which is often incomprehensible to those who have stayed home. We are not a virtuous nation. God and fate have not blessed us above others. Victory is not assured. War is neither glorious nor noble. And we carry within us the capacity for evil we ascribe to those we fight.

War comes wrapped in patriotic slogans, calls for sacrifice, honor and heroism and promises of glory. It comes wrapped in the claims of divine providence. It is what a grateful nation asks of its children. It is what is right and just…. It promises to give us an identity as a warrior, a patriot, as long as we go along with the myth, the one the war-makers need to wage wars and the defense contractors need to increase their profits.

But up close war is a soulless void. War is about barbarity, perversion and pain, an unchecked orgy of death. Human decency and tenderness are crushed. Those who make war work overtime to reduce love to smut, and all human beings become objects, pawns to use or kill…. War, for all its horror, has the power to strip away the trivial and the banal, the empty chatter and foolish obsessions that fill our days. It lets us see, although the cost is tremendous.

The title of the post comes from a Wilfred Owen poem, Dulce et Decorum Est.

Unintended Irony Dept.

John de Nugent, who describes himself as a white “nationist,” commented today on James von Brunn, the deranged old white man who killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum.

The responsible white separatist community condemns this. It makes us look bad.

de Nugent also is white, but is not old and is not visibly deranged. A quick look at his website, however, shows you a man who was born forty years too late, and in the wrong country. He’d have been perfect as a Nazi officer. Intelligent, literate, accomplished, and crazy as a shit-house rat.

The Trashing of the President

My own conviction about the Trashing of Obama comes from everyman’s core of unprovable truths: gut instinct. I read and, as much as necessary to augment my own preconceived notions, listen to the bleating of such luminaries as Gingrich and Limbaugh. Early on, almost immediately, I decided their assault on the President was more racial than political; that is, the motive was political, but the attack itself was and is predominantly racial.

Ouch. Disturbing image: “bleating luminaries.” Sorry.

They were the first major media figures to attack the President personally. Public pipsqueaks like Jonah Goldberg had been doing it all along, of course, but the electorate generally pays little attention to them. When Gingrich and Limbaugh joined the chorus, however, the situation changed. (Whether they were sicced on the President by people like Richard Mellon Scaife, or conspired together to attack him, or followed independent instincts which took them on parallel courses is immaterial just now.)

The first question which comes to mind is this. Why does the American electorate give the tiniest bit of a tinker’s dam about the opinions of two egomaniacal blowhards? Perhaps E J Dionne has has the answer.

A media environment that tilts to the right is obscuring what President Obama stands for and closing off political options that should be part of the public discussion.

Yes, you read that correctly: If you doubt that there is a conservative inclination in the media, consider which arguments you hear regularly and which you don’t. When Rush Limbaugh sneezes or Newt Gingrich tweets, their views ricochet from the Internet to cable television and into the traditional media. It is remarkable how successful they are in setting what passes for the news agenda.

Now that G and L have cleared the way, the pipsqueaks are getting attention as well: their previously-ignored blather has been certified by circulation in newspapers and on TV news shows.

Years ago, I worked in “television news.” The name became an oxymoron. I left.

That is why Frank Gaffney can write, and the Washington Times will print, such drivel as this.

[T]here is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.

(In isolation, there’s nothing wrong with such an accusation; as many of you know, some of my favorite people in the whole goddam world are Muslims. In context however, Gaffney makes this a threat to America.)

That is why Victor Davis Hanson can attack Obama by complaining of racism on the part of his nominee to the Supreme Court.

Most of the furor surrounds statements on race by Sotomayor herself: “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.”

Sotomayor was clear enough. In a broad discussion about sex/race discrimination cases and their history, she stated that judges’ ethnicity and gender make them better or worse at what they do.

If you need help deconstructing bullshit, ThinkProgress has the goods on Gaffney, and hilzoy at Obsidian Wings straightens out the Sotomayor tangle.

I’m not done with this yet. More later.

Hint: It Ain’t Dubya

This isn’t the next post I promised; that will be a follow-up on the Trashing of Obama. Tomorrow, I hope. But in case you need something to lull you to sleep — or more likely, to keep you awake chuckling — here’s part of a recent TV interview. Five points for identifying the questioner, ten for the answerer..

Q: Tim Geithner got laughed at in China last week. Is this even more than you thought was going to be in terms of where the president would take the economy?

A: What’s more than I thought would be is, we’re hearing a lot of good rhetoric.  A lot of this is wrapped in good rhetoric, but we’re not seeing those actions, and this many months into the new administration, quite disappointed, quite frustrated with not seeing those actions to rein in spending, slow down the growth of government. Instead, China’s the complete opposite. It’s expanding at such a large degree that if Americans aren’t paying attention, unfortunately, our country could evolve into something that we do not even recognize, certainly that is so far from what the founders of our country had in mind for us.

Win at least fifty more if you can provide a coherent English translation of the text.

Prejudice: The Fearful Right-wing Weapon

It’s about time to acknowledge that ugly truth which has deformed us for going on four hundred years: we are a bunch of racists. Prejudices galore, in fact, but racism is the dominant — and most debilitating — one right now.

Quote Darrow: it is not so hard to show men that their opinions are wrong, but it is the next thing to impossible to take away their prejudices.

For the most obvious and most immediate (and, I think, most recent) example, here is Media Matters report on a recent commentary by Rush Limbaugh.

Rush aired a sound bite of Newsweek’s Evan Thomas contrasting Reagan’s and Obama’s visions of America in the world, describing Reagan as “parochial” while Obama is above it all, like a “god.” Rush said Reagan was not provincial; he understood America’s greatness and its role in the world for good. Obama, however, sees America’s role in the world as bad. Rush added: “It is offensive to the sensibilities of millions of people to hear a member of the state-run media refer to a half-black, half-white human being with no experience running anything of substance referred to as a god. He may be president of the United States, but he’s not a god.” [emphasis added]

MM notes that “Rush would later on endeavor to explain why Obama’s racial makeup has anything to do with this.” SOG notes that his having mentioned it in the first place in one of his (apparently) ad lib rants, then going back to try and explain it, is itself the explanation.

In an unguarded moment, he let slip what he genuinely meant.

Less blatant, but perhaps more dangerous and surely more devious, are attacks like the one spreading now across the Internet: Obama is an egomaniac. Just look at how often the first person singular shows up in his speeches.

It began, I think, with mid-list columnist Terrence Jeffrey’s piece called “I, Barack Obama.”

Then it was picked up by Stanley Fish in The New York Times.

There’s no mistaking what’s going on in the speech delivered last week. No preliminary niceties; just a rehearsal of Obama’s actions and expectations. Eight “I”’s right off the bat: “Just over two months ago I spoke with you… and I laid out what needed to be done.” “From the beginning I made it clear that I would not put any more tax dollars on the line.” “I refused to let those companies become permanent wards of the state.” “I refused to kick the can down the road. But I also recognized the importance of a viable auto industry.” “I decided then…” (He is really the decider.)

And of course, George Will had to get in his licks at the Washington Post.

“I,” said the president, who is inordinately fond of the first-person singular pronoun, “want to disabuse people of this notion that somehow we enjoy meddling in the private sector.

What might we infer about a man whose style is so instantly given away when we read “inordinately fond” in the lead sentence?

Well. Mark Liberman at Language Log has already done an excellent job of dismantling this libel. In brief, he does the research, counts the words, and find that Obama, in his speeches and in his press conferences, uses the first person singular (I, me, my, myself) less often than did Shrub or Slick Willy.

Read that again. Obama uses the first person singular less often than his predecessors. Yet the nattering and chattering clan finds his pronomination worrisome. I can hear you now, murmuring quietly, “What’s going on here, Old Guy?”

Glad you asked that question, because I have an answer for it, which I will include in the next post, due up later this afternoon.

What do writers do?

They think. Then they write. Then they think some more, and revise what earlier they wrote. Then they ask friends to read the revision, whereupon — with misgivings and doubt — they re-write the revision. Sooner or later, however, they decide, as Maud Newton points out, that

no one else is going to be able to produce the actual words that will make the story work the way you want it to.

Or, as summed up by Katherine Anne Porter,

Simply stated, maybe too simply, it is the writer’s business to have something of his own to say; second, to say it in his own language and style.

60% wrong? Umm, no.

One of the right-wing attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is that the Supreme Court has reversed her lower-court decisions sixty percent of the time.

Wow! Can she really have been wrong that often?

No, of course not. She wrote 380 rulings for the court. Of those, five were accepted for review; of those five, three were reversed. So she was reversed, not on three of five rulings, but on three of 380. Not 60 percent, but 0.8 percent.

Statistics don’t lie. Pundits who cite them do.

Still, how does that stack up? How often are other judges reversed? Well, the newest member of the court, Sam Alito, was reversed 100 percent of the time. (Two appeals, two overturns.) But hiding in the background is the reason for the Supreme Court. SCOTUS does not review, or even consider for review, every lower court ruling. In short, it undertakes for review only cases in which there is a strong probability of reversal.

Sotomayor, upheld forty percent of the time, is well above the norm.

For a clear, sensible appraisal of Sotomayor, read Ellen Goodman making the case for diversity on the Supreme Court.

Justice Scalia, for example, has insisted that his religious background has nothing to do with his legal opinions: “Just as there is no ‘Catholic’ way to cook a hamburger,” he said there is no legal decision spiced by his upbringing. True or self-deceptive? Justice Roberts, described as a “relentless champion of the overdog,” may see himself as the paragon of impartiality. It is only newcomers who are challenged as change agents.

The whole column is here. Read it.

Middle East, Congress, and Donald (not Trump)

President Obama inherited an office full of problems. The most obvious ones are those which most immediately affect us, particularly the interwoven calamities in banking, employment, and government funding. Then there’s health care reform, and the Supreme Court, and global climate change. Still, the one challenge which may eventually define his administration — for better or for worse — is what to do about Israel. Over the past sixty years, that has translated — in Presidential terms — into what to do for Israel. Gideon Levy, who writes for the Israeli newspaper, Ha’aretz, thinks Obama began well in his meeting with Netanyahu, by trying to save Israel from its own folly.

In one moment he changed Washington’s madness and the attitude toward the Israeli occupation….

In a single move he shrank the fear-mongering of Netanyahu and his mouthpieces on Iran to its proper size. In a single move he put the centrifuges of occupation – the real existential threat to Israel – at the top of the agenda. He fended off Netanyahu’s attempts to divert attention from substantial issues, and blocked all efforts to waste more precious time on Iran and impose ridiculous preconditions on the Palestinians. He also blocked all efforts to distract Israel with committees, promises for negotiations, formulas, declarations and empty words. These are Israel’s best tricks and games; anything to evade responsibility for the main issue – the end of the occupation.

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Last November’s election may have provided the most profound Administration change in American history. The change is so arresting and the new guy so charismatic (not a good thing, in the Church of Gop) that we’ve paid little attention to the other new folks in town.

In The Village, as the DC Cloister is coming to be known.

An article at The American Prospect notes that unpaid attention, and offers a look at what it calls The New Kids on the Hill: focus on two of the youngest and most-promising new Congressmen, one from each party.

In Congress, where the median age is 57, Perriello (D) and Schock (R), at 34 and 27 respectively, are touted as rising stars in their parties. Perriello espouses a post-partisan idealism, but his constituency is at the far edge of the Democrats’ big tent, and it’s his task to pursue a progressive agenda without alienating voters who are more exasperated with Republicans than committed to liberalism. Schock, known in Illinois as a pragmatist willing to work with everybody, finds himself on the national stage as the bright face of a party staking its future on obstructing a popular president. He is charged with enlarging — and enlivening — the GOP coalition while at the same time staying true to his Republican district.

Congressional leaders like Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner may be setting the tone, but the newest members of Congress are more responsive to their constituents than those made safe by years of seniority and are therefore more sensitive to changing political dynamics.

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It’s been a joke, and not a very funny one, the French adulation for Jerry Lewis. A man who for decades made the most annoyingly tasteless and humorless comedies in Hollywood, and who in this country won recognition only for his mawkish telethons and his gargantuan girth, has been hailed by French critics as successor to, and perhaps superior to, Charlie Chaplin.

At least, we tell ourselves, at least there are those brusque, no-nonsense pragmatic Germans. For them, the cultural icon — the American cultural icon — is Donald Duck.

Say the secret word and…

Really. I have it (and you can as well, if you click on the link) on no less an authoritative source than The Wall Street Journal (credit Moby)

Germany, the land of Goethe, Thomas Mann and Beethoven, has an unlikely pop culture hero: Donald Duck. Just as the French are obsessed with Jerry Lewis, the Germans see a richness and complexity to the Disney comic that isn’t always immediately evident to people in the cartoon duck’s homeland.

Comics featuring Donald are available at most German newsstands and the national weekly “Micky Maus”—which features the titular mouse, Goofy and, most prominently, Donald Duck—sells an average of 250,000 copies each week, outselling even “Superman.” A lavish 8,000-page German Donald Duck collector’s edition has just come out, and despite the nearly $1,900 price tag, the publisher, Egmont Horizont, says the edition of 3,333 copies is almost completely sold out.

Donald Duck? That second (or even third) banana to Mickey Mouse, that pallid precursor of the delightful Daffy Duck? The Germans adore him? Well, yes. But they do not read the same DD that we do.

Donald Duck’s popularity was helped along by Erika Fuchs, a free spirit in owlish glasses who was tasked with translating the stories. A Ph.D. in art history, Dr. Fuchs had never laid eyes on a comic book before the day an editor handed her a Donald Duck story, but no matter. She had a knack for breathing life into the German version… Her talent was so great she continued to fill speech bubbles for the denizens of Duckburg… until shortly before her death in 2005 at the age of 98.

Ehapa directed Dr. Fuchs to crank up the erudition level of the comics she translated, a task she took seriously. Her interpretations of the comic books often quote (and misquote) from the great classics of German literature, sometimes even inserting political subtexts into the duck tales. Dr. Fuchs both thickens and deepens [the] often sparse dialogues, and the hilariousness of the result may explain why Donald Duck remains the most popular children’s comic in Germany to this day.

Dr. Fuchs’s Donald was no ordinary comic creation. He was a bird of arts and letters, and many Germans credit him with having initiated them into the language of the literary classics. The German comics are peppered with fancy quotations. In one story Donald’s nephews steal famous lines from Friedrich Schiller’s play “William Tell”; Donald garbles a classic Schiller poem, “The Bell,” in another. Other lines are straight out of Goethe, Hölderlin and even Wagner (whose words are put in the mouth of a singing cat). The great books later sounded like old friends when readers encountered them at school. As the German Donald points out, “Reading is educational! We learn so much from the works of our poets and thinkers.”

This Is Indexed

Like everyone else with a computer and too much free time, I regularly check in at a few websites which have nothing to do with news or public affairs or world hunger or professional advancement or the rigors of the writing life. No, they amuse me. Entertain me. Once in a while, shed unexpected light on a neglected dark corner. This Is Indexed is one of them; below, this morning’s offering.

This Is Indexed, May 22, 2009

Looking near the edges

News as interpreted and presented by main stream (including web-based) media tends toward the immediate, the garish, the confrontational. Accuracy and relevance be damned, it’s visceral appeal which builds ratings.

Not to mention literacy, grace, and art.

Still, if you look near the edges, listen at the interstices, you may find stories which enlighten more than they confuse. That is not to say they are cheery, mindless, unaware. They are, in fact, even more realistic, more mindful, more aware than most of the dreck you have to slog through on any channel, at any major web site. Here are a few of my favorites from the past few days.

A long interview with Khaled Hosseini, whose 2003 novel The Kite Runner was made into a successful film. His newest novel, Splendid Suns, is also set in his native Afghanistan. A Mother Jones interviewer asked him how long — if the fighting ended right now — how long would it take for society to flourish again in his homeland.

I would think a generation or two. Virtually every institution of some meaning was destroyed. The fabric of that society was torn. We have millions of people who became uprooted. You have an entire generation who know nothing but warfare and suffering. So it would take a long time for this to turn around. In The Kite Runner, the first 100 pages or so speak about Afghanistan prior to the Soviet war, which many Afghans now view as the golden era.

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My own interest in theatre as theatre, and not simply as a branch of literature, began, I think, when I read Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Can you really do stuff like that on stage, I wondered. You can. Or Stoppard can, anyway. I’ve never seen Arcadia, his major work, but it’s at the top of my list of productions to watch for and get to whenever possible. There’s an extended commentary on Arcadia at The Independent, from which this brief excerpt.

The stale cliché about Stoppard – and about this genre – is that he is a brilliant manipulator of ideas, but with no heart. Yet here – at the core of his best play – is the greatest love story on the British stage for decades. Yes, the characters bond over ideas – but some of the most interesting people in life do just that.

That would be enough to make Arcadia a masterpiece – but it is even more than that. The play stirs the most basic and profound questions humans can ask. How should we live with the knowledge that extinction is certain – not just of ourselves, but of our species?

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And one of the stale clichés from adventure novels, going back to the era when Arcadia begins, is the white explorer who becomes a hero or a god among African natives. It’s always a god, of course, never a goddess, because who could imagine a woman doing that sort of thing? Well, one woman could. It was Suzanne Wenger, who

left her native Austria as a young woman and found her place among the Yoruba of Nigeria. Dubbed “the white priestess of black magic” by the international media, Wenger rose from novice seeker to high priestess of Osun, the spirit-goddess of the waters of life, who represents love and maternity in Yoruba mythology.

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All right, I’ll admit it. Two quite different men gave speeches yesterday, from quite different backgrounds and perspectives, but on the same subject. As is usually the case, the most trenchant commentary, and the most useful coverage, was provided by Jon Stewart. Take a look.

Green added

If this makes no sense — and it may not — I refer you to previous entries in what has accidentally become a series. First was I’m Melting, then That’s What I’m Talking About, then More Water, Less Ice, and most recently, Next Step: Add Green. So here is it, with green added.

Raven Kill, May 19, 2009

Lost in the Fun House?

“Fun House” was the original title for this blog. Glad I backed off: what I had in mind was a wry testament to the John Barth novel. Turns out, however, that all sorts of people have been using the idea for decades. Still, it works for this post, far as I’m concerned.

This first stop in the fun house — let’s call it the Tunnel of Fools — has not been much noted in the MSM so far. After all, those guys (m/f, eoe) have been so deeply invested in the Busherie (cf. Cheney, et al) that they may by now be constitutionally incapable of separating.

The editors at — of all improbable places — Gentlemen’s Quarterly — have published an absolutely delightful hatchet job on Don Rumsfeld, a hacking so wide-spread that several other of the usual suspects get sliced and diced as well. You really ought to read the whole thing, but here’s a tidbit to whet the appetite.

Many of these complaints are long-standing. Over the past three years, several of Bush’s former advisers have described their boss’s worst mistake as keeping Rumsfeld around as long as he did. “Don did not like to play well with other people,” one cabinet official told me—stating a grievance that nearly everyone in the White House seemed to share, except for Bush himself. “There was exasperation,” recalls a senior aide. “‘How much more are we going to have to endure? Why are we keeping this guy?’” Rumsfeld has also received ongoing criticism that his Bush-mandated efforts to modernize America’s Cold War–era military contributed to the early stumbles in Iraq. But in speaking with the former Bush officials, it becomes evident that Rumsfeld impaired administration performance on a host of matters extending well beyond Iraq to impact America’s relations with other nations, the safety of our troops, and the response to Hurricane Katrina.

Even if you don’t read the article, take a few minutes to enjoy the slide show which goes with it: the covers of various Rumsfeldian “Intelligence Updates” with Biblical passages to accompany pictures from the invasion of Iraq.

For a Hall of Mirrors, pop on over to the Torture Annex. After all, if you are not confused about the back-and-forth between Congress and the CIA — about who knew what and when about torture — if you are not confused about it, then you just haven’t been paying attention. It’s a mare’s nest of half-truths, selective omissions, jesuitical evasions, and bullshit.

So okay. Ready to fry your brain and destroy any lingering confidence in government? Read last Friday’s post on the Pelosi/Panetta dust-up, by emptywheeler at firedoglake. You need to read the whole thing.

Panetta is not saying … that the briefers briefed Congress that these techniques had been used. I know this sounds weasely, but until someone says, in plain language, that the CIA told Congress those techniques had already been used on Abu Zubaydah, we should assume that’s not what the notes reflect, because if they did, you can be sure both the briefing list and the public statements would say so. But no one is saying that.

Interesting that three of the very best bloggers — emptywheel, digby, and hilzoy — are women.

After the Torture Annex, spend a few moments in the Middle East Salon. (Several slimy underground channels connect the two.) Prime material at MES comes most often from Juan Cole, who offered this gloomy evaluation of the current Obama-Netanyahu confrontation. I mean, conversation.

….Obama wants to negotiate with Iran regarding its civilian nuclear enrichment research program, but stressed that his patience is not infinite. Netanyahu, of course, wants military action against Iran on a short timetable.

Netanyahu’s hysteria about Iran is a piece of misdirection intended to sidestep the issue of Israel’s own nuclear arsenal. Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty, and allows regular inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency, even if the latter is not completely satisfied with Iran’s transparency. Israel just thumbed its nose at the NPT. Israel would only have the moral high ground in demanding that Iran cease enrichment research if it gave up its own some 150 warheads.

There is, to be sure, more. Much more. On the (to me) most basic and critical issue, Cole offers this further dismal observation.

Netanyahu said he did not want to rule the Palestinians. That is an evasion. If he won’t give them a state, then they remain citizens of no state and inevitably Israel “rules” them in the sense of making the important decisions about how they live their lives. The Likud Party doesn’t want the Palestinians, just their land and resources. That demand is actually what makes the Palestinian issue different and more horrific than other ethnic-national problems in the world.