Intertextual Sunday Goats (from Ireland)

John Behan, The Goat

The Goat's Path

The crooked paths go every way
Upon the hill — they wind about
Through the heather in and out
Of the quiet sunniness.
And there the goats, day after day,
Stray in sunny quietness,
Cropping here and cropping there,
As they pause and turn and pass,
Now a bit of heather spray,
Now a mouthful of the grass.

In the deeper sunniness,
In the place where nothing stirs,
Quietly in quietness,
In the quiet of the furze,
For a time they come and lie
Staring on the roving sky.

If you approach they run away,
They leap and stare, away they bound,
With a sudden angry sound,
To the sunny quietude;
Crouching down where nothing stirs
In the silence of the furze,
Couching down again to brood
In the sunny solitude.

If I were as wise as they
I would stray apart and brood,
I would beat a hidden way
Through he quiet heather spray
To a sunny solitude;
And should you come I'd run away,
I would make an angry sound,
I would stare and turn and bound
To the deeper quietude,
To the place where nothing stirs
In the silence of the furze.

In that airy quietness
I would think as long as they;
Through the quiet sunniness
I would stray away to brood
By a hidden beaten way
In a sunny solitude.

I would think until I found
Something I can never find,
Something lying on the ground,
In the bottom of my mind.

-- James Stephens

The Goat of Slieve Donard

I saw an old white goat on the slope of Slieve Donard,
Nibbling daintily at the herb leaves that grow in the crevasses,
And I thought of James Stephens -
He wrote of an old white goat within my remembering,
Seven years ago I read -
Now it comes back
Full of the dreaming black beautiful crags.
I shall drink of the white goat's milk,
The old white goat of Slieve Donard,
Slieve Donard where the herbs of wisdom grow,
The herbs of the Secret of Life that the old white goat has nibbled,
And I shall live longer than Methuselah,
Brother to no man.

-- Patrick Kavanagh

What We're Really Talking About

Punishment, then, will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process. This has several consequences: it leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters that of abstract consciousness; its effectiveness is seen as resulting from its inevitability, not from its visible intensity; it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime; the exemplary mechanics of punishment changes its mechanisms. As a result, justice no longer takes public responsibility for the violence that is bound up with its practice.

-- Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish

As I mentioned yesterday, Dick Cheney, giving one of his "interviews" to one of his radical right-wing radio friends, spoke rather cavalierly about the practice of "waterboarding." Here is the transcript:

Q: I've heard from a lot of listeners -- that's what we do for a living, talk to good folks in the Heartland every day -- and I've talked to as many who want an increased military presence in Iraq as want us out, which seems to be the larger debate, at least coming from the left -- cut and run, get out of there. One fax said, when you talk to the Vice President, ask him when shock and awe is coming back to Iraq. Let's finish the job once and for all.

And terrorist interrogations and that debate is another example. And I've had people call and say, please, let the Vice President know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives. Again, this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I do agree. And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the nation. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided us with enormously valuable information about how many there are, about how they plan, what their training processes are and so forth, we've learned a lot. We need to be able to continue that.

The Congress recently voted on this question of military commissions and our authority to continue the interrogation program. It passed both Houses, fortunately. The President signed it into law, but the fact is 177 Democrats in the House -- or excuse me, 162 Democrats in the House voted against it, and 32 out of 44 senators -- Democratic senators voted against it. We wouldn't have that authority today if they were in charge. That's a very important issue in this campaign.

Are we going to allow the executive branch to have the authority granted and authorized by the Congress to be able to continue to collect the intelligence we need to defend the nation.

Q: Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the Vice President "for torture." We don't torture. That's not what we're involved in. We live up to our obligations in international treaties that we're party to and so forth. But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust interrogation program without torture, and we need to be able to do that.

And thanks to the leadership of the President now, and the action of the Congress, we have that authority, and we are able to continue to program.

Well, that's some hard hitting journalism. Fortunately, these remarks have caused what the Times calls "a furor," even though the White House continues to deny that he meant anything by it:

Mr. Snow, who spent much of his day dealing with questions about the comments, told reporters that none of them related to interrogation techniques, which are classified. “I’m telling you what the vice president’s view is, which is it wasn’t about waterboarding. Period,” he said.

The exchanges grew testy at times, especially when Mr. Snow said Mr. Cheney is not someone who slips up. One reporter noted that the vice president had once used a profanity on the Senate floor, and also shot a friend in the face during a hunting accident last February.

OK, so, that's funny. But none of the rest of it is -- especially if we look again at some of the descriptive language in the article. As I noted yesterday, waterboarding has nothing to do with "dunking," which something schoolchildren do to one another in swimming pools:

Waterboarding is actually not a dunk in the water, but rather, covering a subject’s face with a constantly soaked cloth to make breathing difficult.

Are you having trouble visualizing that? Is this language that evokes an image that "shocks the conscience," or even troubles it? Does the practice it describes seem terrifying to you?

I don't think so. Please take a few minutes to watch the following video, and you tell me how we should describe it.



In the epigraph to this post, Foucault is tracing the historical progression of punishment from a concentration on the body, and the spectacle of public torture and execution, to the secretive, invisible punishments of the modern prison, designed more to target the soul than the body. As with all other things, the Bush administration is a retrograde chapter in such a history, returning quite unabashedly to a fascination with the bodies of our prisoners. And this violence, this obsession with the corporal, is not accompanied by the slightest hint of shame. Foucault writes that the violence of the modern state is no longer glorious, but something to be tolerated:

If it too strikes, if it too kills, it is not as a glorification of its strength, but as an element of itself that it is obliged to tolerate, that it finds difficult to account for. The apportioning of blame is redistributed: in punishment-as-spectacle a confused horror spread from the scaffold; it enveloped both executioner and condemned; and, although it was always ready to invert the shame inflicted on the victim into pity or glory, it often turned the legal violence of the executioner into shame.

Unlike this scenario, wherein the executioner is tainted by the shame he is meant to dispense, those who traffic in torture today do so with impunity, flippancy, and in the name of patriotism -- and then they deny doing it after all. While the state now seems willing to do virtually anything, it is entirely unwilling to come out and say so. It's actions are entirely shameless, but somehow they seem so ashamed. That torture, including waterboarding, has become standard interrogation practice, is obvious to anyone existing outside the persistent vegetative state. It is out in the open for all to see, and, paradoxically, as it is enveloped in a shroud of silence, for all to deny. "We don't torture," says the Vice President. Well then, what are we doing?

Euphemism

You smell that? Do you smell that? Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. When it was all over I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' dink body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... victory.

-- Apocalypse Now, 1979

You hear that Mr. Anderson?... That is the sound of inevitability...

-- The Matrix, 1999

I don't choose these epigraphs as examples of euphemism, but of irony in general. As we know, that smell he was smelling was the smell of defeat; and the entire plot of The Matrix is about the human conquest over inevitability. I also think both speak, the former with irony and the latter without, to Mr. Bush's little adventure in "Arabia."

But my particular purpose today is to address three specific euphemisms pertaining to the war:

1) The Roadside Bomb, or I.E.D.: As I've mentioned before, such terminology is highly misleading. It is understandable that the military should refer to things in this way. As professional soldiers they deal in acronyms and dispassionate labels. But for those of us over here, sitting comfortably and either cheering or jeering the conflict from our collective armchair, I think it's important to understand what these things really mean. I can't recommend these recent Frontline episodes enough, if only for the fact that this war, which is generally only televised in the most sanitary way imaginable -- where are the corpses? -- is displayed in all its horrifying ugliness in these programs. Explosion after explosion, roadside, improvised, suicide, and car bombs, destroying Humvees, tanks, lines of police recruits, innocent passers-by, journalists, hotels, and anything else. The violence is beyond description. Each of these "roadside" detonations sends a shock through the civilian spine. To my mind, roadside bomb sounds like an annoyance, a nuisance, a thing that might be defused, or blow out a tire. But soon enough these bombs will drive our casualty figures above three thousand dead, thirty thousand wounded, and countless Iraqi civilians, police officers, cabinet members, and others. A friend of mine was riding in a Humvee in Iraq when one of these exploded next to the vehicle. The boy next to him was blown to bits in an instant, reduced to matter in a second, and my friend suffered the collapse of bone structure in his face. The element of chance could hardly be illustrated more clearly, and my friend, literally inches away, was spared, though he has been left with scarring as a permanent mememto mori.

I only bring this up because I know that despite the attention I pay to all this, until I watched these endless streams of videos from Frontline, I had no conception of the reality of the violence. I knew it was horrific, I knew I would never last a minute in such a situation -- but I do not believe we can honestly form our opinions, whatever they may be, about this business without confronting, each day, the visceral, actual, quantifiable level of the violence of modern warfare. There are those in the administration and the neoconservative punditocracy who speak so cavalierly about the use of nuclear weapons that we can only assume they are as out of touch with the laws of physics as we all are with the realities of the roadside bomb -- a bomb that might more rightly be called, if we should be honest with ourselves, a weapon itself of mass destruction. Just look at the numbers -- they don't lie.

In the film adaptation of Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger, a black-ops team "paints" the target -- the home of a Columbian drug lord -- which will be destroyed by a laser-guided bomb, dropped from thousands of feet above by an F-18. The explosion is immense, destroying the compound and killing dozens of men, women, children. This is the kind of explosion one can see routinely on the streets of Iraq, and each one takes with it anyone and anything unfortunate enough to be within fifty yards of it. In the film, upon detonation, Willem Dafoe boldly deploys the technique of the euphemism, confirming to the pilot the success of their coordinated action: "Circular error probable zero," he says. "Impact with high-order detonation. Have a nice day." This breezy dismissal is offered with some irony. If one must participate in the semantic polishing of the realities of violence, then one should at least do it like that.

2) "Made to feel that he is drowning...": I'm no expert on torture, though I've been reading up on it lately. The euphemism here is created by the use of the present participle. From what I understand, the reason the victim of waterboarding is "made to feel that he is drowning" is that he is drowning. This terminology seems to forget the fact that a man underwater with no access to oxygen is, by definition, always drowning, until he is drowned. The practice is not "dunking," as Dick Cheney explained it on the radio the other day. It consists of strapping a man to an inclined board, so his feet are elevated above his head, and then pouring a stream of water over his face so the water enters the nasal cavity and induces the "feeling of drowning." Maybe it's just me, but last I checked, having one's breathing passages filled up with water was what it meant to be drowning.

3) The Tactical Nuclear Weapon: As I mentioned above, the use of nuclear weapons has become a popular recommendation for securing "victory" against "the enemy." It seems to me that anyone familiar with the basic physics of atomic explosions, and/or anyone who ever read anything, including a simple chart with facts and figures, about the impact, both instantaneous and over time, of the bombs our country detonated over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, should understand that this formulation is no simple euphemism, but an outright contradiction in terms.

Perhaps the incessant explosions of this seemingly endless war really do constitute the sound of inevitability. Perhaps it is inevitable that our differences will forever be "settled" by eliminating those with whom we differ. Perhaps it is not in our power to change this. But it is in our power to change the way we discuss it, to confront the ugly truth about ourselves with ugly and honest language appropriate to it.

Sunday Goat: Rudyard Kipling

By the Hoof of the Wild Goat uptossed
From the cliff where she lay in the Sun
Fell the Stone
To the Tarn where the daylight is lost,
So she fell from the light of the Sun
And alone!

Now the fall was ordained from the first
With the Goat and the Cliff and the Tarn,
But the Stone
Knows only her life is accursed
As she sinks from the light of the Sun
And alone!

Oh Thou Who hast builded the World,
Oh Thou Who hast lighted the Sun,
Oh Thou Who hast darkened the Tarn,
Judge Thou
The sin of the Stone that was hurled
By the goat from the light of the Sun,
As she sinks in the mire of the Tarn,
Even now--even now--even now!

Future Perfect

It is only man, so far as we can conceive, who has the means of altering his world by resort to "if"-clauses, who can generate such clauses as: "if Caesar had not gone to the Capitol that day." It seems to me that this fantastic, formally incommensurable "grammatology" of verb-futures, of subjunctives and optatives proved indispensable to the survival, to the evolution of the "language-animal" confronted, as we were and are, by the scandal, by the incomprehensibility of individual death. There is an acute sense in which every human use of the future tense verb "to be" is a negation, however limited, of mortality. Even as every use of an "if"-sentence tells of a refusal of the brute inevitability, of the despotism of the fact. "Shall," "will," and "if," circling in intricate fields of semantic force around a hidden centre or nucleus of potentiality, are the pass-words to hope.

-- George Steiner, Grammars of Creation

Confident and unafraid, we labor on -- not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.

-- John F. Kennedy, Commencement Address
American University, 1963

Hope and fear contain the specters of one another in the forms of hypothetical successes and failures. Steiner writes that the two "are as indivisible from each other as they are from grammar. Hope encloses a fear of unfulfillment. Fear has in it a mustard-seed of hope, the intimation of overcoming." This entanglement holds true in thought and speech as well as in action. Any time we speak, constatively or perfomatively, we admit the presence of this two-headed monster: we hope to be understood and fear that we will not; we hope our proposals we be accepted, and fear they will be denied; we believe our marriage vows declare their own immutability, but always fear the dissolution of our bonds. Hope might be embodied in the Christ of Revelation, who assures us he is the alpha and the omega. As Steiner says, "The future tense of the verb inhabits nearly every saying of Jesus." We find the fear in the form of Cassandra, the prophetess of Troy, whose warnings were cursed to be unheeded. Freud understood, in his analysis of dreams and literary production, that in these realms we traffick routinely in fears and desires; desire for attainment, fulfillment, or plenitude; the fear of failure, inadequacy, and death.

Political rhetoric finds its daily bread in the future tense. We see it in campaign slogans, political speeches, and even the names of our military operations. Consider the latest "strategery" for subduing Baghdad, the policy of clear and hold, otherwise known as "Operation Forward Together." In Israel, the party whose tragic decline mirrors, perhaps, that of its founder: Kadima, meaning forward. Our current President is inordinately fond of the future tense, unfortunately to the detriment of the Present one. His ignorance of the past tense is well-established. As Maggie Howell has pointed out below, the President's fetish for the future tense is ever on display:

The war is not over -- and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious. If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. We are in a war that will set the course for this new century -- and determine the destiny of millions across the world.

The President, like all Presidents, likes to talk about "our children." He also likes to talk about "destiny," which others have described as fate. I suppose the difference, if I might make a broad and possibly facile claim, is that destiny tends to sound a lot more positive -- at least a lot more Christian. Destiny, destination: a place we want to go. From fate we get notiong but fatal, fatality, fatalist -- none of which, I imagine, does well in the focus groups.

Fatality sounds like mortality, which is precisely the opposite of what the salesmen are selling. One wonders what policy would look like if that word carried a little more weight. Freud put it bluntly:

If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons -- becomes inorganic once again -- then we shall be compelled to say that 'the aim of all life is death'...

Camus perhaps more so:

Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux: c'est le suicide.

(There is but one philosophical question of any real seriousness: that is suicide.)

Borges once imagined a world in which the future tense was irrelevant, incoherent -- as was the past tense. He does so by eliminating the connections between time and space, and therefore removing the concepts of movement or change via causation:

It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time. Spinoza ascribes to his inexhaustible divinity the attributes of extension and thought; no one in Tlön would understand the juxtaposition of the first (which is typical only of certain states) and the second - which is a perfect synonym of the cosmos. In other words, they do not conceive that the spatial persists in time. The perception of a cloud of smoke on the horizon and then of the burning field and then of the half-extinguished cigarette that produced the blaze is considered an example of association of ideas.

This monism or complete idealism invalidates all science. If we explain (or judge) a fact, we connect it with another; such linking, in Tlön, is a later state of the subject which cannot affect or illuminate the previous state. Every mental state is irreducible: there mere fact of naming it - i.e., of classifying it - implies a falsification. From which it can be deduced that there are no sciences on Tlön, not even reasoning. The paradoxical truth is that they do exist, and in almost uncountable number. The same thing happens with philosophies as happens with nouns in the northern hemisphere. The fact that every philosophy is by definition a dialectical game, a Philosophie des Als Ob, has caused them to multiply. There is an abundance of incredible systems of pleasing design or sensational type. The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature. They know that a system is nothing more than the subordination of all aspects of the universe to any one such aspect. Even the phrase "all aspects" is rejectable, for it supposes the impossible addition of the present and of all past moments. Neither is it licit to use the plural "past moments," since it supposes another operation... One of the schools of Tlön goes so far as to negate time: it reasons that the present is indefinite, that the future has no reality other than as a present memory. Another school declares that all time has already transpired and that our life is only the crepuscular and no doubt falsified an mutilated memory or reflection of an irrecoverable process.

Borges's ironic purpose here is to be entirely contradictory -- since it is clear that the study of "psychology" in the world of "Tlon" runs absolutely counter to all of our pedestrian experience. We believe in causality, and are always trapped between our regrets or nostalgia about the past, and our fears or desires for the future -- as Derrida put it in his treatise on painting, trapped between memory and anticipation.

Our subject today is really just the latter of these: anticipation in all its forms. The GOP has, for the past several years, monopolized and capitalized upon the rhetoric of fear, while dressing it up for the camera in the garb of some kind of hope. This strategy has led them, this week, to what one might consider a new low, releasing a campaign advertisement written by Zawahiri and bin Laden, "an advertisement featuring Al Qaeda leaders threatening harm to the United States amid dark footage of explosions, fires, and terrorists in action." Bush and Cheney prattle on and on about the imminent threats to our existence. I've written enough about his already, so I will simply offer up an example of an alternative. If we cannot release ourselves from our covenant with the future tense, perhaps we could at least adopt it to our best purposes, hitch it to our better natures. It has been done before:

What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children - not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women - not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

The endless war the neocons advocate is, of course, dressed up in the language of peace -- but this language is transparently inadequate, proffering hope while immediately quashing the means to achieve the hoped for result. One reason for this is that the method is exclusive. The President claims to want to bring freedom and democracy to others -- but does so not out of altruism but out self-interest, and enforces this interest with the barrel of a gun: "a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war." When Bush says we "fight them over there" so we don't have to "fight them over here," he reveals his true purpose, and commits what Emerson called blasphemy:

Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a particular commodity—anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action.

Beyond praying for a "particular commodity," the policy of remaking the Middle East in our own image fails to recognize the problem of irreducible difference. As Borges noted that Spinoza noted: "all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger." These longings can never, of course, be realized. The stone withers and the tiger dies, and both become the earth upon which a traveller may later come along to tread -- like Whitman says:

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,

If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

As representative men and women have known since the beginnings of language, all things, as Emerson says of language itself, are "fluxional." But it is a kind of hubris to enforce a change to which the subject is inherently resistant. As Derrida has noted, it is folly to attempt to efface difference. Kennedy understood this as well:

So, let us not be blind to our differences - But let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

We are all mortal. Can anyone imagine such a phrase being utterred in a public, political space today? That we are all mortal is, as Steiner understands, the fact that generates the future tense in the first place. This fact is no mean or unfortunate thing, but rather a liberating one -- it is a good fact, like all facts, and like all times; as Emerson says, in a bold deployment of the if-clause:

This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

Guest Blogger -- Maggie Howell: "The Profound"

In search of Wit these lose their common Sense,
And then turn Criticks in their own Defence.

-- Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism

Creating an atmosphere of discord and confusion is of obvious appeal to anyone desperate to maintain power; a style that does so proudly might be of particular interest to the Bush administration. Reckless and selfish visibility at the expense of respectability is the spirit of The Art of Sinking in Poetry (Peri Bathous), Alexander Pope’s faux treatise detailing the craft of bad poetry, which, “(thank our stars), tho it is somewhat muddy, flows in much greater abundance” than its truthful counterpart. The destination here is the Bathos, or the “profund”: “the Bottom, the End, the Central Point, the non plus ultra of Modern Poesie!” It’s difficult to imagine any of the Bush rhetoricians prioritizing Neoclassical criticism; nonetheless, the prevalence of "bathetic" elements in American political discourse gives our situation the appearance of having been artfully plunged into an epic mess.

Amplification – thoughts so inclusive they’re devoid of substance – is one of the major techniques Pope, anticipating Orwell, describes in outlining the “Study of the Abuse of Speech.” Improper use of figures of speech aim to help the author “to say nothing in the usual way, but (if possible) in the direct contrary.” The main types are the Variegating/Confusing, The Magnifying (which will never occur “without clouding it at the same time”), and The Diminishing. None of this is outrageous in the Bathos, because subject matter is formulated under the assumption that the masses – the audience – are idiots, and, frankly, are comfortable being lackeys:

We see the unprejudiced Minds of Children delight only in such Productions, and in such Images, as our true modern Writers set before them. I have observ’d how fast the general Taste is returning to this first Simplicity and Innocence; and if the Intent of all Poetry be to divert and instruct, certainly that Kind which diverts and instructs the greatest Number, is to be preferr’d.

Today, the climate of disinterest seems to affirm the success of this. Consequently, an infantile public policy has been adopted to “produce tranquility of mind,” precisely as Pope instructs. As children, after all, we prefer those “emollients and opiates” that remind us of the golden days before terrorism, of safe commutes and peace of mind – luxuries we can expect to rediscover upon “victory.” This administration is aware of its “happy and antinatural way of thinking;” but, recognizing the political problems here, prefers to go about degrading things under the more heroic guise of sublimity, the opposite of profundity.

It isn’t quite convincing. Longinus, in his On Sublimity (Peri Hupsous), the inspiration for Pope’s work, suggests that the truly sublime is spectacular precisely because it is met during an overwhelmingly powerful encounter with reality. Awe and terror affect us most profoundly in proximity, as witnessed events that “show up above the figures, and overshadow and eclipse their artifice.” This is not the kind of hazard we face day-to-day, though we’re told to expect it. Pope writes that the Genius of the Profund “must studiously avoid, detest, and turn his Head from all the Ideas, Ways, and Workings of that pestilent Foe to Wit and Destroyer of fine Figures, which is known by the Name of Common Sense.” Pope knows the power at the bottom can’t be reached by bothering with intelligent representations. Nature is boring; it is “obvious, therefore not astonishing or peculiar.” Instead, the public is barraged with mere sketches of enemies and promises of threats, taught to fear virtually everything, resulting in an insulting amount of apocalyptic reminders that

the war is not over -- and it will not be over until either we or the extremists emerge victorious. If we do not defeat these enemies now, we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons. We are in a war that will set the course for this new century -- and determine the destiny of millions across the world.

Granted, to most this doesn’t sound pleasant. What does sound pretty good is what happens if we cooperate. Once the entire world sees the light and agrees to be “with us” rather than “against us,” there will, presumably, be victory and euphoria. On that day, Bush tells us, “the clouds of war will part.” Compared to the only other possible outcome – “a radical Islamic empire where women are prisoners in their homes, men are beaten for missing prayer meetings, and terrorists have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and other civilized nations” – this is indeed a pleasant vision.

Needless to say, in the Bathos, details aren’t important. Evidently, a paradise without terrorism is perfectly feasible. Presidential speeches don’t require plans and don’t bother with pesky specifics. Metaphors are conveniently obscure and sound nice, too. All we need to know is that, someday, if we just trust the administration, the Middle East will “leave the desert of despotism for the fertile gardens of liberty.” Pope notes this same follow-the-leader strategy, in which the poet

is to mingle Bits of the most various or discordant kinds, Landscape, History, Portraits, Animals and connect them with a great deal of Flourishing, by Heads or Tails, as it shall please his Imagination, and contribute to his principal End, which is to glare by strong Oppositions of Colours, and surprize by Contrariety of Images…His Design ought to be like a Labyrinth, out of which nobody can get you clear but himself.

That “Contrariety of Images” is at its best when the contrast is most extreme, so Pope’s image of the nadir is a state of fear created by utterly unrecognizable elements. The author descends, indiscriminately collecting and maiming any objects out of their natural state and beyond all recognition, into “clouds” of nonsense and vulgarity. Hyperbole skews observation, and authors simply “take things in a lump, without stopping at minute Considerations.” All the public really knows is limited to press releases, radio addresses or exclusive interviews, and usually only amounts to a reminder that this alleged “evil” is

thrown into panic at the sight of an old man pulling the election lever, girls enrolling in schools, or families worshiping God in their own traditions. They know that given a choice, people will choose freedom over their extremist ideology. So their answer is to deny people this choice by raging against the forces of freedom and moderation.

Anything is game for bastardization. A few televised speeches can effectively link Islam and fascism in the American collective conscious. One of the only forms of imitation allowed for in the Bathos is one that is achieved “when we force to our own Purposes the Thoughts of others.” An inverted (and probably even more effective) example of this is when Bush takes it upon himself to assign the Middle East a dialogue, forcing to his own purposes what are perhaps not the thoughts of others:

From Kabul to Baghdad to Beirut, there are brave men and women risking their lives each day for the same freedoms that we enjoy. And they have one question for us: Do we have the confidence to do in the Middle East what our fathers and grandfathers accomplished in Europe and Asia?

Invention is vital for the profund. Sustaining the rhetoric of the so-called War on Terror, “the Author’s Pencil, like the Wand of Circe, turns all into Monsters at a Stroke.” The terrorist “enemy” – existing in forms human, technological, chemical, biological, national, racial; or any combination thereof – is made to be so incapacitating, so frightening, that even if we were somehow allowed to, we would be incapable of identifying, much less understanding it. No details are given that would flesh out its purported immensity. Instead, there is an effort to “mix Truth and Fiction, in order to join the Credible with the Surprizing.”

This isn’t to say reality doesn’t matter; indeed, it’s too powerful to allow. True imitation would be too revealing. To the ecstasy of incumbent politico-poets, arriving at the Bathos actually relies on discouraging public feedback. The political trend in 2006, similar to the poetic trend of 1727, is to avoid clarity, “for Obscurity bestows a Cast of the Wonderful, and throws an oracular Dignity upon a Piece which hath no meaning.” The amount of rhetorical waste we have to sort through makes criticism challenging. If the image of an adversary is not extreme, we can examine it, and it would not be politically useful – a serious blow to the end aim of the profund poets: “Profit or Gain.” As a result, particulars of the “conflicts” facing America are usually glazed over in favor of grotesque immensities and absolutisms. Everything is a target and all remains on the table for suspicions, “For Choice and Distinction are not only a Curb to the Spirit, and limit the Descriptive Faculty, but also lessen the Book, which is frequently of the worst consequence of all to our Author.” Self-interest explains why the poets in Washington, “unassisted with an habitual, nay laborious Peculiarity of thinking, could arrive at Images so wonderfully low and unaccountable.” Faced with fantastic threats, as Longinus observes, “our natural instinct is, in all such cases, to attend to the stronger influence, so that we are diverted from the demonstration to the astonishment caused by visualization, which by its very brilliance conceals the factual aspect.” The abuse to actuality intensifies, and even the methods by which we are misinformed become tools to “facilitate and enforce our Descent” into Pope’s Bathos:

forasmuch as it is sometimes needful to excite the Passions of our Antagonist in the Polemic way, the true Students in the Low have constantly taken their Methods from Low-Life, where they observ’d, that to move Anger, use is made of Scolding and railing; to move Love, of Bawdry; to beget Favour and Friendship, of gross Flattery; and to produce Fear, by calumniating an Adversary with Crimes obnoxious to the State. As for Shame, it is a silly Passion, of which as our Authors are incapable themselves, so they would not produce it in others.

Because the profund is a conglomerate of “Monsters,” any empathic instinct in the audience is effectively killed. Separation and alienation are the only outcomes we can look forward to at this level. Longinus notes the important difference that in the presence of sublimity we would ideally

ask ourselves whether any particular example does not give a show of grandeur which, for all its accidental trappings, will, when dissected, prove vain and hollow, the kind of thing which it does a man more honour to despise than to admire.

For all its grandeur, the sublime always “contains much food for reflection,” and is connected to reality, to its audience, to history and the future. The authors aspiring to please with the sublime will consult the works of their predescessors in order to create “the reproduction of good character,” and habitually reconsider and edit the verses intended for the public. The profund poet will “read Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden, for the contrary End, to bury their Gold in his own Dunghil.” The ultimate consideration of the sublime is “the further thought: ‘How will posterity take what I am writing?’” Those seeking the Bathos prefer to be disconnected from anything that isn’t an immediate obstacle to their success, therefore the idea of posterity is “chimerical.” The sublime “depends on elevation, whereas amplification involves extension; sublimity exists often in a single thought, amplification cannot exist without a certain quantity and superfluity.”

The current state of profundity promotes distance, ignorance and lack of analysis, and the reigning poets continue to write stanzas accordingly.

-- Maggie Howell, Boston University

Et tu, Wesley?

Such and so finely bolted didst thou seem;
And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot
To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
With some suspicion. I will weep for thee;
For this revolt of thine, methinks, is like
Another fall of man.

-- Shakespeare, Henry V

As longtime readers and associates will know, I have long maintained that Wesley Snipes is, pound for pound, our finest American actor. The news today breaks our heart, and seems to us, indeed, another fall of man. Perhaps Mr. Snipes will go out with a flourish, a Blade of glory, as it were, like the one hero I would truly have loved to have seen him portray. Picture it:

Soft you. A word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service, and they know't.
No more of that. I pray you, in your letters,
When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
Speak of me as I am. nothing extenuate,
Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak
Of one that loved not wisely but too well;
Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
Perplex'd in the extreme; of one whose hand,
Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdued eyes,
Albeit unused to the melting mood,
Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
Their medicinal gum. Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog
And smote him, thus.

Saving Ned Lamont

So, despite the fact that the above picture says all you need to know about Lieberman, Lamont is apparently chunking it. Arianna Huffington has a suggestion: Write his concession speech now, so he can feel like he's already lost, and therefore will no longer be beholden to his craven campaign staff. She has invited suggestions in the comments section, to which I encourage you to contribute. My contribution wasn't a "concession," but rather an announcement:

Ned Lamont says:

Ladies and Gentlemen, today I have fired my entire campaign staff. Under their cautious, focus-group driven strategy, I've watched our numbers dwindle, when all indicators show that the majority of Connecticut's voters, like a majority of Americans, believe what I believe, and reject what my opponent believes.

I ran because I believe the war in Iraq constitutes an ongoing criminal enterprise, sold to the American people under false pretenses, and prosecuted at an unacceptable and ghastly cost in human lives and American dollars; because I believe the Bush administration, facilitated by my opponent, has, in the name of this criminal enterprise, driven legistlation through the congress that is antithetical to everything we stand for as Americans. As citizens of Connecticut, one of the states that founded this union, you and I must now categorically reject the policies for which Joe Lieberman and George Bush now stand: the illegal prosecution of an illegal war; the illegal warrantless wiretapping of American citizens; the illegal indefinite detention of citizens and foreigners, without a right to a fair trial, without the right to challenge their detention. For five years, Bush and Lieberman have tried to turn this country into something we hardly recognize -- a country that engages in unprovoked elective warfare; a country that proves its corruption and incompetence on the world stage, as evidenced by Bush's failure to secure or rebuild the country he decided to destroy in our names and with our tax dollars; a country that demonstrates contempt for the rule of law, contempt for the principles espoused by the founding fathers, and contempt for the basic moral principles we all, as citizens of Connecticut and the United States hold dear -- not just as talking points, but as central aspects of our identity.

From here on in, we will not be conducting any focus groups; we will not spend our nights poring over statistics, polls, and analysis; because we know full well, as we demonstrated together in the primary, that what the citizens of Connecticut want is a change -- we want an end to Lieberman's madness.

My campaign staff, as you know, felt "madness," as a polemical term, was a "non-starter." Thus, from now on, in the interests of what Emerson dared to call the truth, we entrust all speech-writing and public relations duties to the staff of Tragos. With their help, and, most of all, with your help, together we'll build a new platform from the resources of that which we all share, the limitless potential of the immeasurable mind.

Petition for Gore in '08!

Here are two petitions that you can sign to help draft Al Gore for the 2008 presidential election:

Draft Gore; and
Al Gore for President Draft Petition (sponsored by The Gore Portal).

UPDATE:
You can pledge your vote (or your support) to Al at Support Al Gore.

Gore

The vice of our leading parties in this country...is, that they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying of some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth.

-- Emerson

Anonymous Liberal wrote a post yesterday making the case for Barak Obama to run in 2008. This post generated a good deal of coversation and disagreement in the comments section, and I mentioned there that I would publish this post today as a response. It is my view, and has been since the summer at least, that the only viable candidate at this crucial juncture is Al Gore. Below, I've outlined some of the more abstract reasons why I think so. To me, the concrete reasons -- his experience, intelligence, international and domestic reputation, and general level of competence -- speak for themselves. I'm interested to hear any and all comments on this. The Tragos endorsement (at least part one), is as follows:

A September poll showed 37% of Democrats supporting Hillary Clinton for President, with 20% voting for Al Gore. Hopefully this only reflects the fact that Gore is not yet actually running for President. The most interesting number is the 86% who supported a higher minimum wage. This is a democratic position, and this extremely high number is yet another indicator that, in reality, a large majority of Americans actually support democratic positions on the issues. (I might suggest that Giuliani's frontrunner status for the GOP suggests the same thing.) Unfortunately, as Paul Waldman pointed out in the Globe, and as Anonymous Liberal emphasized, we don't always vote according to the issues -- indeed, recent election results have shown that, for better or for worse, Americans tend to vote on personality and presence, the strength with which one expresses her convictions, not necessarily the content of the convictions themselves.

With this in mind, I am going to make a claim that may seem counterintuitive: even on the personality issue, we need to go with Gore.

Even to those who once ridiculed him, it is becoming clear that his personality is as compelling as his policy points. Many pundits and voters and various other fools decided he was dull, wonkish, no fun -- in short, not a guy with whom we might want to share a beer. Now, leaving aside the horrific prospect of spending a night in a bar with George W. Bush, I will just, for the record, categorically reject this proposition, as I did then. Gore has always been funny, imaginative, coherent, and driven by what Emerson would call the "moral sentiment." Just because the i-Pod generation and the soundbite television media can't process a sophisticated, and occasionally dry and self-effacing sense of humor, doesn't mean we should allow their errors to determine our perceptions. Gore not only has a robust and compelling personality, but he also has the power of the narrative on his side. If he chooses to do so, he will bring to this election the story of a country wronged by its rulers in the same way he was wronged by the 2000 "election." Along with the narrative of the comeback, in the style of any number of your favorite martial arts films (or, say, Star Wars), Gore clearly occupies the high ground on the issues: he's always been way out in front on the environmental issue, and he has been vigorously, eloquently against the war from the very beginning. Along with his sound ideas, Gore brings to the table an internationally credible reputation, and a lengthy record of experience developing and implementing policy both foreign and domestic, and has the historical perspective and the intellectual wherewithal to command the attention of a world which has, rightly, stopped paying attention to America.

Gore: Knows how to locate Viet Nam on a map.

Those of us determined to elect a government with any chance of undoing the damage inflicted upon ourselves and the world by this renegade regime called the Bush-Cheney administration would do well to focus on this reality: Gore is the most serious candidate we have. We need a man of his stature, his wisdom, his capabilities, and his experience to re-establish the seriousness and credibility of our nation abroad, and begin to address the major problems of inequality at home, and climate change worldwide. I am all for Russell Feingold, and I even have a good deal of respect for John Edwards, in his principled dedication to the issue of fighting poverty. A.L. has made the case for Obama, who has some compelling attributes, but seems to me a premature candidate (although I think it would be politically interesting to put him on the ticket with Gore). Looking, though, at the "big picture," I believe we need a Gore presidency to restore our lost center of gravity, a presidency to pave the way for future administrations of the likes of Feingold and other genuine progressives.

I completely reject Hillary Clinton as a candidate. I believe she is far too tainted by the evils of politics as usual. She comes across as someone driven by personal ambitions (which makes her no different from any other politico, but we don't need any old politico), rather than a genuine concern for public service and the public good. Gore, as a reluctant candidate, called back to service by a nation that needs him, can, and I believe he will, stand above the normal unpleasantness. He has the opportunity, not least because I believe he is a man relatively at peace with the world, to come to the campaign with nothing to lose, and therefore no reason to stray from the principles which make him the most attractive candidate in the first place; and we have the opportunity, if we recognize it, to do something principled with this election, rather than simply expedient. A vote for Gore, in my view, is an Emersonian vote -- one that rejects the momentary fury and the appearance of pragmatism in favor of a longer, broader, and more ethical view to the future. As Emerson says:

If there is any period one would desire to be born in—is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and hope; when the historic glories of the old can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.

Minderbindering

The world's fastest land animal? The cheetah.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran, former Baghdad Chief for the Washington Post, just gave a talk about Iraq at the Harvard Book Store. Here's just a taste of the luscious goodness (or, should we say, the horrifying surrealism) of his new book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City. Witness the U.S. Army, attempting to "secure" Uday Hussein's "menagerie":

As I stepped out of the Republican Palace, Lieutenant Peppers called after me. "Hey, you want to see the animals?"

We headed to a neighboring palace in a humvee, driving along the banks of the Tigris where, just two days earlier, Peppers's battalion had fought against soldiers from Saddam's Special Republican Guard. When we arrived, Peppers led the way through knee-high weeds to a fenced enclosure. "Let's see," he said. "We have seven lions, two cheetahs, and one brown bear." The adorable lions were not quite cubs, but not yet full grown. (Before the war, I heard that Uday, Saddam's elder son, would drive around Baghdad in a Rolls-Royce with lion cubs on his lap.) The bear cowered in the shade. The temperature was already in the nineties -- and it was only April. I wondered how he'd survive the summer. And the cheetahs...where were they? I called out to Peppers. He couldn't see them, either. Alarmed, he grabbed his radio and summoned his men from the Humvee. "Be ready with your guns," he barked. "We may have two cheetahs on the loose."

A dozen soldiers swooped around Uday's menagerie, switching off the safeties on their M16 rifles. Then we saw the two spotted adolescent cheetahs skulking out of a small shed inside the enclosure. Everyone chuckled. Rifles were clicked back into safe mode and slung over shoulders.

When the soldiers had arrived at the palace, the animals appeared to be dying of hunger and thirst. The groundskeepers who fed them had apparently fled. The soldiers brought the animals water but they didn't know what to do for food. Then one sergeant found a bunch of sheep in a pen, and he tossed one into the enclosure. It was mealtime.

But the supply of sheep was running low. A conversation about the Geneva Conventions ensued. What obligation does an occupying military power have to care for animals? Nobody knew. Peppers didn't want the animals to starve. He figured he could sneak some military rations to them for a few days, until help arrived. He'd heard that hundreds of American civilians were coming to run the country.

"They'll have the answers," he said.

A discussion about the Geneva Conventions -- how quaint. Milo Minderbinder couldn't have done much better than that -- except he would have bought the rations from the Marine Corps at 5 cents a can, and sold them to the cheetahs for a profit at 3 cents a can.

Sunday Goat: Aaron Fogel

Van Gogh, Cottage and Woman with Goat, 1885.

The best kind of Sunday Goat is the goat that speaks for itself. Thus, I offer you this poem, without comment, for your Sunday ruminations. It is by Aaron Fogel, one of our own here at Boston University.

The Goat
by Aaron Fogel

If you are a goat, do you believe

What people tell you about

Goats, and eat

Tin cans?

There’s no goat that foolish.

Or is there?

The goat of the universe believed

What people told him about universes

And came into existence.

Bang! How naive can you get?

Even the scapegoat is not as naive

As (God help him) the universe that

Agreed to exist.

A word to the wise: Don’t eat tin cans.

Don’t listen. Don’t exist.

Snakes

The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better. The great man will not be prudent in the popular sense; all his prudence will be so much deduction from his grandeur. But it behoves each to see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what god he devotes it; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be prudent still; if to a great trust, he can well spare his mule and panniers who has a winged chariot instead. Geoffrey draws on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may be safer from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it seems to me that with every precaution you take against such an evil you put yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose that the highest prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too sudden a rushing from the centre to the verge of our orbit? Think how many times we shall fall back into pitiful calculations before we take up our rest in the great sentiment, or make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides, your bravest sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and the low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy as well as you. “Blessed be nothing” and “The worse things are, the better they are” are proverbs which express the transcendentalism of common life.

-- Emerson, "Circles"

I've used the central part of this selection from Emerson on several occasions, but it seems to me to never run dry, given our current situation. The image above accompanies Francis Fukuyama's essay from the Times Book Review, which I should think would be required reading. I re-cite the Emerson passage and draw your attention to the article because Fukuyama has affirmed something many of us have been feeling for some time now, which is that the terrorist threat has been exaggerated; and, even if it has not, we've been placed, willingly or not, in its thrall, as our government passes abhorrent legislation and sends our armed forces off to fight senseless battles overseas, all in the name of nothing more than physical safety.

Fukuyama reminds us that we have always exaggerated threats, have always indulged in a kind of collective paranoia about the enemy or the Other. The image illustrates his central examples: the Nazis, the Communists, and now, the Terrorists. The Bush administration and the right-wing noise machine have repeatedly conflated the current "conflict" with World War II, comparing anyone living east of Istanbul to the cast of Triumph of the Will. I think it's fair to say that any idiot should know that, however numerous and dangerous "The Terrorists" may be, they constitute nothing like the threat of the Third Reich, to say nothing of a nuclear armed, expansionist totalitarian state like the Soviet Union. Fukuyama authoritatively states this obvious point:

While the nihilistic murder of nearly 3,000 Americans on American soil was unprecedented, the fact remains that both the actual and perceived threat of the late 1940’s was much more acute than the one presented by Islamist terrorism today. The Communists controlled a huge nation-state — the Soviet Union — and conquered half of Europe. In 1949 they came to power in the most populous country in the world. The awesome destructive power of nuclear weapons was new; experts at the time confidently predicted that many states would acquire them in short order and that future wars would be nuclear. Americans lived in the shadow not of the destruction of a single city, but of their entire society. And the enemy had agents who could potentially penetrate the country’s most elite institutions, something few jihadists can aspire to do today.

True enough? One wouldn't think so by the corrupt rhetoric emanating from Washington, which consists of a single message: be afraid. The Terrorists are out there, coming to kill you -- and any number of un-American policies and criminal enterprises have been justified by this entirely hollow proposition. The "War on Terror," in all its various forms, constitutes nothing more, in fact, than one large, organized, criminal enterprise, in defiance of international and domestic law, the laws of war, the laws of reason. Fukuyama points out that the culture of fear spawns a culture of secrecy, which naturally spawns a culture of corruption. The secrecy state began, he says, with the Cold War, and the intelligence community's insistence on secrecy created a population that was simply out of touch with the facts; and it is a basic premise, which we supposedly understand as Americans, that an uninformed public cannot, by definition, be a functioning democracy. As Aristotle knew, in ignorance we are simply not capable of acting as moral agents. When the government has a monopoly on information, then, our agency is effectively stripped.

If the warrantless wiretapping "program" had not been revealed by the New York Times, it would have continued unabated, in secret, without our knowledge, and the President and his henchmen would have been allowed to continue this patently criminal practice without any sort of accountability to the voters. The "program" continues today, of course, and Congress wants to legalize it -- even though they still don't know what it is. Perhaps this is a sign that we really have entered a "new age," where none of this matters any more. Or maybe we have always been a nation of fear, and maybe our sole purpose has always been to clear the world of obstacles so as not to be bothered. Perhaps we like wearing our boots so much that we don't really care if it stands as a symbol of our fear of snakes, and prevents us from touching the world with our own feet. Fear, as Emerson says, is what allows us to mistake paranoia for prudence -- and Bush and company have surely been offering the one while pretending to the other.

Fukuyama, at any rate, believes there is nothing new in any of this, that the world did not, in fact, change fundamentally on 9/11, but simply offered another occasion for "the eternal return of the same," just another face on the poster to feed our collective hysteria.

The Factinista

There has of late been a great deal of criticism, particularly from the Bush administration, the Pentagon, and the Iraqi government, of a recent study of "mortality after the 2003 invasion of Iraq" published in The Lancet, a highly respected British medical journal. But in a recent post on the Guardian blog, "Comment is Free," Daniel Davies explains why "the numbers do add up." Davies makes it very clear that the main point of the study is not to provide a precise death toll but to warrant qualitative conclusions about the effects of the Iraq war.

First, don't concentrate on the number 600,000 (or 655,000, depending on where you read). This is a point estimate of the number of excess Iraqi deaths - it's basically equal to the change in the death rate since the invasion, multiplied by the population of Iraq, multiplied by three-and-a-quarter years. Point estimates are almost never the important results of statistical studies and I wish the statistics profession would stop printing them as headlines.

The question that this study was set up to answer was: as a result of the invasion, have things got better or worse in Iraq? And if they have got worse, have they got a little bit worse or a lot worse. Point estimates are only interesting in so far as they demonstrate or dramatise the answer to this question.

The results speak for themselves. There was a sample of 12,801 individuals in 1,849 households, in 47 geographical locations. That is a big sample, not a small one. The opinion polls from Mori and such which measure political support use a sample size of about 2,000 individuals, and they have a margin of error of +/- 3%. If Margaret Beckett looks at the Labour party's rating in the polls, she presumably considers this to be reasonably reliable, so she should not contribute to public ignorance by allowing her department to disparage "small samples extrapolated to the whole country". The Iraq Body Count website and the Iraqi government statistics are not better measures than the survey results, because one of the things we know about war zones is that casualties are under-reported, usually by a factor of more than five.

And the results were shocking. In the 18 months before the invasion, the sample reported 82 deaths, two of them from violence. In the 39 months since the invasion, the sample households had seen 547 deaths, 300 of them from violence. The death rate expressed as deaths per 1,000 per year had gone up from 5.5 to 13.3.

Talk of confidence intervals becomes frankly irrelevant at this point. If you want to pick a figure for the precise number of excess deaths, then (1.33% - 0.55%) x 26,000,000 x 3.25 = 659,000 is as good as any, multiplying out the difference between the death rates by the population of Iraq and the time since the invasion. But we're interested in the qualitative conclusion here.

That qualitative conclusion is this: things have got worse, and they have got a lot worse, not a little bit worse. Whatever detailed criticisms one might make of the methodology of the study (and I have searched assiduously for the last two years, with the assistance of a lot of partisans of the Iraq war who have tried to pick holes in the study, and not found any), the numbers are too big. If you go out and ask 12,000 people whether a family member has died and get reports of 300 deaths from violence, then that is not consistent with there being only 60,000 deaths from violence in a country of 26 million. It is not even nearly consistent.

All right, so Davies isn't a statistician by trade. But here are favorable comments on the Lancet article by professional statisticians:

"Given the conditions (in Iraq), it's actually quite a remarkable effort," said Steve Heeringa, director of the statistical design group at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

"I can't imagine them doing much more in a much more rigorous fashion."

He said the study made "minor departures" from the standards generally used in national surveys for choosing what households to interview. Whether those departures, brought on by wartime conditions in Iraq, introduced a bias in the results is impossible to measure from the data alone, he said.

Frank Harrell Jr., chair of the biostatistics department at Vanderbilt University, called the study design solid and said it included "rigorous, well-justified analysis of the data."

And Richard Brennan, head of health programs at the New York-Based International Rescue Committee, said the study's survey approach was typical.

"This is the most practical and appropriate methodology for sampling that we have in humanitarian conflict zones," said Brennan, whose group has conducted similar projects in Kosovo, Uganda and Congo.

"While the results of this survey may startle people, it's hard to argue with the methodology at this point."

Donald Berry, chairman of the statistics department at the University of Texas' M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said he believes the study was done "in a reasonable way." But he said the range of uncertainty given for the estimates was much too narrow, because of potential statistical biases in the survey.

While it is impossible to calculate a better range that accounts for that, he said, it would not be surprising if the low end dropped about four-fold to 100,000 deaths. A wider range of uncertainty would make the 655,000 figure less meaningful, he said.

Fair enough. Maybe it's only 100,000 deaths at the low end. A mere 100,000 deaths, if such a locution is morally permissible in these circumstances. But again the main point is not to deliver an accurate death toll, rather to make it clear that in fact things have gotten much, much worse in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. As if this wasn't already clear enough, we now have sound statistical evidence for this conclusion. And yet, Bush:

"I don't consider it a credible report," Bush said Wednesday.

Neither does Gen. George W. Casey, the top American military commander in Iraq.

"That 650,000 number seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen," Casey said. "I've not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don't give it that much credibility at all."

And neither does Michael E. O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, which also tracks Iraqi deaths.

"I do not believe the new numbers. I think they're way off," he said.

Other research methods on the ground, like body counts, forensic analysis and taking eyewitness reports, have produced numbers only about one-tenth as high, he said. "I have a hard time seeing how all the direct evidence could be that far off ... therefore I think the survey data is probably what's wrong."

Of course, none of these comments are unexpected. But at the same time it never fails to astonish me how, when dealing with, say, information from an apparently highly reliable source about something as serious as the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilians, the president of the United States allows himself the luxury of being dismissive, and the political cost is nil. What underlies this is perhaps the equally astonishing fact that Americans at large are tremendously suspicious of science.
Then again, we're Americans -- so, as Steven Colbert once said to President Bush, "We're not brainiacs on the nerd patrol. We're not members of the factinista. We go straight from the gut, right sir? That's where the truth lies, right down here in the gut. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. I know some of you are going to say 'I did look it up, and that's not true.' That's 'cause you looked it up in a book."

The American Scholar

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.

-- Emerson, The American Scholar

This is something I've wanted to write about it since it hit the news last week, but I've only gotten to it today, spurred on by a good post on this matter by Marty Lederman. What happened is this: Congress passed an entirely reasonable law, establishing minimum qualifications for nominees for the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As usual, the President decided to issue a signing statement, essentially declaring his intention to ignore the law. (For the late Thorstein Veblen's comments on the FEMA hiring procedures, see the post below.) Here are the criteria established by Congress:

(A) a demonstrated ability in and knowledge of emergency management and homeland security; and

(B) not less than 5 years of executive leadership and management experience in the public or private sector.

The President, apparently, feels these restrictions are too stringent, and would unduly limit the candidate pool. Here is Lederman:

According to the President, this provision apparently transgresses the Appointments Clause because it "purports to limit" -- purports to limit! -- "the qualifications of the pool of persons from whom the President may select the appointee in a manner that rules out a large portion of those persons best qualified by experience and knowledge to fill the office." Accordingly, "[t]he executive branch shall construe [the qualification] in a manner consistent with the Appointments Clause of the Constitution."

This is simply mind-boggling.

Mind-boggling indeed. I won't go into all the reasons for the mind-bogglingness of it (Lederman has handled this already). Instead, what occurred to me was that such a test ought to be established for the office of the Presidency. The Presidency, like the jobs of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, head football coach at Notre Dame, and even the mind-numbing copywriting jobs I used to do back in the days of the New Economy, are not entry level jobs, and we would surely all have been better off with someone who could at least have passed a basic U.S. Civics class, or be able to identify China on a map.

But that's all just conjecture -- but conjecture that led me to another thought. A couple of weeks ago, Jeff Jacoby wrote an alarmist column (which I linked to, in a post designed (surely unsuccessfully, for laughs) about the "Dumbing Down of Democracy," in which he lamented the results of a study by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which supposedly revealed the startling fact that Americans don't know much about American history. Regardless of how true the statement probably is (did anybody doubt it?), there are some things about this that deserve closer scrutiny.

First of all, since this news comes to us from the likes of Jacoby, the study is at least vaguely scented, if not reeking, with "agenda." Just have a look at his conclusion about some of the schools that did badly (among them: Yale, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, etc.):

For as much as $40,000 a year, students enrolled at such schools can count on a lavish exposure to every reigning value of politically-correct liberalism, from diversity to secularism to gay rights to global warming. But they stand an excellent chance of leaving at the end of four years knowing even less about America's history and civic institutions than they did when they arrived.

Leaving aside the possibility (which Jacoby obviously leaves to the side) that diversity, secularism, gay rights, and global warming might have something to do with American civic life, we might only say this: there are more things to be learned at college than are dreamt of in the conservative philosophy. The poor, put-upon students at these liberal-elite universities, it just so happens, are not forced to choose between "Civic Literacy" (meaning, by the way, American Civic Literacy, but we'll leave that for a moment) and whatever this supposed leftist agenda is all about. Jacoby, when he says such things, sounds a lot like an adherent to the school of David Horowitz (this site has to be seen to be believed -- look at the articles! Look at the ads!), whose wild delusions of persecution have led him to spearhead the movement to invent this evil conspiracy of liberal academics. While I suppose it's possible that there is a course dedicated to "global warming" at Johns Hopkins, it probably falls within some department with a less liberal-sounding name, like -- I don't know -- "science"? I know from personal experience, and any idiot should know from being alive in America -- at least any idiot who wants to criticize academia -- that Johns Hopkins has been routinely turning out many of the top scientists and medical doctors in the world. Its hosptial, medical school, and graduate research departments are world renowned. And, as apparently the Jeff Jacobys of the world fail to understand, when one is majoring in molecular biology and biochemistry, or studying to learn how to cure cancer, or save the lives of soldiers through surgery, or any of that other irrelevant stuff that doctors do, there simply isn't much time left over to fixate on the names of the battles in the Civil War.

How about Yale? I can also tell you from personal experience (and plenty of people can surely vouch for this one as well) that there is a great deal of important learning and scholarship going on there, despite what you might assume from looking at some prominent graduates. But not everyone there is studying U.S. History or Political Science. If you surveyed those people, I imagine you would be rather impressed with the results. And if you surveyed the English department, you might be impressed with what they know about literature, philosophy, intellectual history.

I don't disagree with the basic premise of Jacoby's argument: We would probably be better off as a democracy with better "literacy" concerning what democracy means, where it comes from, and what has happened here in America over the years. I'm sure nobody disputes this. But it seems to me the basics of American History and Government should be taught earlier than college, no matter what. The curriculum of a single year of AP U.S. History, if taught with any rigor at all, would get you a pretty high score on the test.

But that is also more or less besides the point I'd like to make, which we can get at by looking at some of the specifics of the test itself. Looking over the categories, it is not surprising to find particularly low scores on questions involving the market economy, budgetary issues, etc. These are surely more specialized (and, they involve math, which would be a problem for some of us in the other departments). Jacoby gets riled about the names and dates of battles. That is fair enough, and, like I said, knowledge is good, and we ought to have more of it and distribute it around. But what struck me are the following: only 25% could answer correctly questions concerning Plato's Republic; only 24.9% on classical thought; 22.5% on the nature of society; 14.4% on traditional just war criteria; and, most distressing of all, 19% seem to understand the notion of the public good. These last two are the most troubling to me. I wish, like anyone in academics, like anyone anywhere, that we could muster a voting population with a command of the facts and theories of life in the world. But as much as I'd like our students to distinguish between Gettysburg and Yorktown, King George and George W. Bush (though there's not much to distinguish there), I'll take a population any day that understands just war theory and the notion of the public good. If you know these things, you'll name fewer battles for the next generation to remember.

At any rate, surely we should expect our leaders to score highly -- in all categories, but these last two in particular. My guess is that if you gave them the test, they'd flunk it too. The President at least, with his seemingly endless list of indefensible acts (this last signing statement being just a drop in the bucket), has demonstrated that he knows nothing -- neither history, nor civics, nor just war theory, nor anything about what it means to strive for the public good.

The Global War on Terror and Its Discontents

Szell: Is it safe?... Is it safe?

Babe: You're talking to me?

Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: Is what safe?

Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: I don't know what you mean. I can't tell you something's safe or not, unless I know specifically what you're talking about.

Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: Tell me what the "it" refers to.

Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.

Szell: Is it safe?

Babe: No. It's not safe, it's... very dangerous, be careful.

You'll perhaps remember the above dialogue from Marathon Man