Hardcore Commies, Rogue Whales, and Others

Two important items to note this morning:

First, via Maggie Howell, who informed me that "it's spreading" -- this time, to Sea World. The conspiracy is beginning to sound like a job for General Ripper:

Do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake? Children's ice cream!...You know when fluoridation began?...1946. 1946, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works.

Second, lest we remove our eyes from the ball, and lose, as Ripper warns against, "the entire base, and its personnel, through carelessness," it's best to remember that the constitutional crisis of our lawless President is still with us, and things will not be right again here in "The Homeland," no matter how terrrifying the terrorist conspiracy of marine wildlife may become, until the President himself, as he is so fond of threatening to do to others, is "brought to justice." A.L. has the details.

Terrorist, or Tourist Attraction?

The Newest Threat to Our Existence: The Sea Lion

A few years ago, America's Finest News source reported a disturbing development from the animal kingdom. The headline ran as follows:

Dolphins Evolve Opposable Thumbs:
'Oh, Shit,' Says Humanity

Here were the details:

It is unknown what precipitated the dolphins' sudden development of opposable thumbs. Some dolphin behaviorists believe that the gentle marine mammal, pushed to the brink by humanity's reckless pollution and exploitation of the sea, tapped into some previously unmined mental powers to spontaneously generate a thumb-like appendage. However, given that 95 percent of the world's dolphin experts have committed suicide since learning of the development, the full story may never be known.

"You must believe, sleek ocean masters, that many of us homo sapiens weep with shame and disgust over the degradation to which our species has subjected our All-Mother, the Great World-Sea," read the suicide note of Dr. Richard Morse, a Brisbane, Australia, delphinologist and regular contributor to Marine Mammal Science. "If you are reading this, I estimate that it is the day we know as August 31, 2000. Please be decent and kind masters to our poor ape-race. Oh, God, I'm so sorry about the tracking collars."

"Scientists once wondered whether dolphins, with their remarkably advanced social and language structures, are actually smarter than we are," said Aoki, ushering reporters out of the laboratory he claimed "will either be a smoking hole or a zoo exhibit in the coming Dolphin Age."

"Well, we're not wondering anymore."

Christmas-hating terrorist supporters (and/or viewers of the film, The Matrix) have long understood that the human being is like an infection, a virus which the planet's immune system has been trying to destroy for millennia. Now, as years of earthquakes, tsunamis, outbreaks of various hemorrhagic fevers, and even global warming have failed to rid the infected globe of what Edith Wharton has called the "huge human buffoonery," some of Earth's partisans seem to be, like the jihadist hordes trying to destroy our way of life, getting organized. As the AP reports:

Tourists flock to Fisherman's Wharf for the seafood and the stunning views of San Francisco Bay, but for many visitors, the real stars are the dozens of playful, whiskered sea lions that lounge by the water's edge, gulping down fish.

Now a series of sea-lion attacks on people in recent months has led experts to warn that the animals are not as cute and cuddly as they appear.

"People should understand these animals are out there not to attack people or humans. But they're out there to survive for themselves," said Jim Oswald, a spokesman for the Marine Mammal Center across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

In the most frightening of the recent episodes, a rogue sea lion bit 14 swimmers this month and chased 10 more out of the water at San Francisco's Aquatic Park, a sheltered lagoon near the bay. At least one victim suffered puncture wounds.

Some scientists speculate that the animals' aggressive behavior is being caused by eating fish contaminated by toxic algae, or by a shortage of food off the coast. But wildlife experts say even healthy sea lions are best left alone.

In Southern California in June, a sea lion charged several people on Manhattan Beach and bit a man before waddling into the water and swimming away. In Berkeley, a woman was hospitalized last spring after a sea lion took a chunk out of her leg.

Last year, a group of sea lions took over a Newport Beach marina and caused a vintage 50-foot yacht to capsize when they boarded it. And a lifeguard in Santa Barbara was bitten three times while swimming off El Capitan State Beach.

In Alaska, a huge sea lion jumped onto a fisherman's boat in 2004, knocked him overboard and pulled him underwater; he escaped without serious injury.

The liberal media can spin this any which way they want, but anyone interested in winning the War on Terror, or, for that matter, anyone who's ever seen The Birds, knows what is at stake here. Call them cuddly and "non-violent" as much as they like, the passage above reveals a coordinated, al-Qaeda-style series of attacks against American targets, and a concerted effort to destroy our way of life. So, when some "San Francisco liberal" comes up to you, complaining about seals' rights or "civil liberties," refresh her memory with the fighting words of Pat Roberts: "You don't have civil liberties when you're dead."

The war on sea lions? It's on.

Ending the Iraq War

Political update:

I don't want to distract your attention from Maggie Howell's excellent guest post, which is just below, but we've just received an interesting new political "action item." Senator Boxer released a statement today, in which she expressed her support for legislation calling for the withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. If, like me, you think this sounds like a good idea, please go to her website and sign the petition.

If you don't, you probably want to be redirected to some other site.

Jeremiad

Guest Post by Maggie Howell

"History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

-- James Joyce, Ulysses

I like to tell people when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma.

-- George W. Bush

The quick defense from Downing Street that followed Tony Blair’s agreement with the assessment of Iraq as a “disaster” comes as no surprise. What is more interesting about that, and a general increase in official frustration over what Condoleezza Rice recently termed a lack of “magic bullets” in Iraq, is their contribution to an atmosphere of outcry, in which public appeasement is increasingly hard to secure. British papers were quick to snag Blair’s slip and demand a long-sought apology for his support of the war, and the results of America’s November elections indicate once and for all that the majority is not pleased.

How honestly a nation chooses to address past mistakes becomes a question of serious consequence in American abolitionist literature, a movement uniform in its denouncement of American hypocrisy. Critics of that period – ordinary citizens, former slaves, orators, publishers, politicians, etc. – shared the perception that the country had made a mockery of its own ideals and severed itself from the rest of the world. Prolonged irresolution of the debate, exacerbated by setbacks like the Fugitive Slave Act, caused frustration to peak after several decades without legal progress. Frederick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech in 1852 famously railed against this delay, delivering the familiar accusation that “all your religious parade and solemnity, are to [the slave] mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy – a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Today, most will naturally associate 19th century America with those atrocities. However, in An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), Lydia Maria Child reminds us that history wasn’t always so concrete, that there was a time when some were struggling to divert that association from ever being made:

Considering we live in the nineteenth century, it is indeed a strange state of society where the father sells his child, and the brother puts his sister up at auction! Yet these things are often practised in our republic.

There was an intense shame in being a citizen of an anachronistic country so enthralled by its own myth that the irony of its practices made it “the most pungent satire for other nations.” But, more to our purposes, Child had the foresight to analyze the repercussions of those years. She intended to address her incredulity to an audience beyond 1833, guided by a fear for America’s image in posterity. Lambasting the Constitutional decision to postpone abolition of the slave trade until 1808, she warns:

We began our career of freedom by granting a twenty years’ lease of iniquity – twenty years of allowed invasion of other men’s rights – twenty years of bloodshed, violence, and fraud! And this will be told in our annals – this will be heard of to the end of time!

Predicting the continued prevalence of the mistakes of that era, and the national handicaps that would follow, Child persisted in writing almost apologetically to future generations. Her work was crafted as an active appeal, but was certainly meant to survive as one more in an increasingly substantial collection of proofs of protest – a body of literature to aggressively indicate to successors that many were outraged, even if nothing could be immediately done to counteract the enormity of the problem.

But the call for reform was not limited to legally powerless women and escaped slaves, nor was Child’s technique lost on more traditionally influential abolitionists. One of the most outspoken and historically notable opponents of slavery, Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, often employed the same method of asking his contemporaries to consider the ramifications of allowing slavery to continue:

Already the muster has begun. The strife is no longer local, but national. Even now, while I speak, portents hang on all the arches of the horizon threatening to darken the broad land, which already yawns with the mutterings of civil war. The fury of the propagandists of Slavery, and the calm determination of their opponents, are now diffused from the distant Territory over widespread communities, and the whole country, in all its extent marshalling hostile divisions, and foreshadowing a strife which, unless happily averted by the triumph of Freedom, will become war fratricidal, parricidal war with an accumulated wickedness beyond the wickedness of any war in human annals; justly provoking the avenging judgment of Providence and the avenging pen of history.

A warning of this extremity is the defining characteristic of the jeremiad text in literature and public discourse. The feature that typically separates the American jeremiad from those of other nations is that it allows for a period of repudiation, during which the nation might quickly recognize and work through its flaws in order to make the crucial social changes that would prevent its destruction. Douglass was another who frequently demanded an effort to decontaminate the nation:

We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake, The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.

The Biblical magnitude of these ultimatums was of course meant to disturb as many as possible into an awareness of mass stupidity and neglect – to gather the popular opinion that was necessary for affecting a saving change.

Despite the pride they take in their religiosity, the key figures of the Bush administration have no tolerance for such “prophesizing.” Positing negative outlooks of the future in the 21st century is actually heretical for its interference with existing “efforts.” Blair’s remark, or non-remark, was presented as such a shock because by now we’ve figured out the official method of publicizing Iraq is to forecast a sunny conclusion while prolonging the present for as long as possible – presumably to avoid widespread realization that such a conclusion does not exist. One of the most reprehensible summaries of this was Bush’s infamous (and repeated) remark in September that “when the final history is written on Iraq, it will look like just a comma” – the reason for this being that the Iraqis’ “strong will for democracy” will somehow materialize into a pleasant denouement, forgiving and forgetful of the costs. During a session of the APEC CEO Summit in Vietnam last weekend, Condoleezza Rice fashioned a more diplomatic arrangement of the same farcical optimism:

I'll just make you the following wager. At some point in time, if we do our work well…some Secretary of State will stand someplace in the world and say, "How could it ever have been thought that the Iraqi people weren't capable of democracy? How could anyone have ever questioned that freedom and liberty would reign in the Middle East?" Because after all, the desire to be free, the desire to live a better life, the desire to live in prosperity, is a universal desire. And that's why throughout history, things that one day seemed impossible, several years later seem to have been inevitable.

That there is actually very little official regard for the realistic future – whether that means the future stability of Iraq; the concern in the jeremiad for future judgments of America, or those potential future catastrophes that could conceivably arise from those judgments – has been made clear by an unending series of less flattering realities, including the recent reassurances that diplomacy with Syria and Iran is impossible, as well as the constitutional sacrifices inherent in the Military Commissions Act. The results of the midterm elections forced some very shifty suggestions that officials are ready to explore new ideas, but from a forum that puts no stake in the idea of the “nightmare of history,” there will be no apologies.

Public and political courage in assigning or accepting culpability for global and domestic crimes accumulated during the Bush administration remains to be measured. Speculation continues over the route Democrats will take in January. The opinion that calls for moderation in seeking subpoenas advocates that attitude for the sake of political propriety – how best to be welcomed; how to function and behave admirably. Senator Biden, though straightforward in his belief that Rumsfeld was “dead wrong on Iraq and as long as he was in charge of the military, there was no possibility of a change in policy in Iraq,” recently called the proposal to subject the former Secretary of Defense to a hearing “looking backward,” and proudly positioned himself among those in “the ‘action plan’ department.”

In a suggestively short chapter of Moby-Dick, “The Hyena,” Melville provides an alternative to the jeremiad’s cautionary resolution. Rather than bothering oneself with the source or destination of the moment, it is proposed that

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing.

The witness – Ishmael, in this case – might maintain enough skepticism to ask preliminary questions regarding the situation (“Queequeg, my fine friend does this sort of thing often happen?” – “I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman’s discretion?”), but ultimately adopts the “desperado philosophy.” The Democratic Party that dominated the midterms by vocalizing the travesties of the Iraq war (and was even more extensively welcomed by exit poll results expressing disgust with internal corruption) now faces its own strategic uncertainty; it has thus far occasionally threatened to fall short of thoroughly investigating the behavior that made the disaster possible, “so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but part of a general joke.” A proponent of the Melvillean resolution is one who has lost some of the sense that caused the initial backlash against the “cool, collected dive at death and destruction,” and is instead satisfied to secure individual death, “like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.” This is clearly not the same call for accountability that provoked Sumner to proclaim that

To overthrow this Usurpation is now the special, importunate duty of Congress, admitting of no hesitation or postponement. To this end it must lift itself from the cabals of candidates, the machinations of party, and the low level of vulgar strife. It must turn from that Slave Oligarchy which now controls the Republic, and refuse to be its tool.

At a time when mainstream publications are softening the return of a Democratic majority with front page assurances that they will not be “Your Daddy’s Democrats,” and that the new dynamic says more for the center than the left, it might be best to return to Douglass for a final thought on where a newly awakened country encounters its greatest obstacles when dealing with its mistakes:

Anti-slavery is no longer a thing to be prevented. The time for prevention is past. This is a great gain…The present will be looked to by after coming generations, as the age of anti-slavery literature – when supply on the gallop could not keep pace with the ever-growing demand…when conservative lyceums and other American literary associations began first to select their orators for distinguished occasions from the ranks of previously despised abolitionists. If the anti-slavery movement shall fail now, it will not be from outward opposition, but from inward decay.

Friday Reading: Questions of Travel

Travelling is a fool's paradise. Our first journeys discover to us the indifference of places. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

-- Emerson, Self-Reliance

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands.
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

-- Yeats, "The Song of Wandering Aengus"

I remember, some time ago in Vermont, I saw a sheep grazing on the grass, with his head stuck through a square of wire fencing. Behind him lay an immensity of green, open fields entirely at his disposal, and yet, like the cliche that he was, he couldn't help preferring the grass on the other side.

I was chatting with a student today about the passage above. This is a passage that gives many a bit of trouble. Emerson's assessment of traveling at first glance seems a bit cynical and restraining, insistent as it is on the well-worn notion that wherever you go, there you are.

There are, however, two ways of dealing with this truism: with cynicism, lamenting the inescapability of the self, the curse, as it is, of being. C.P. Cavafy offers us a gloomy rendition of this sentiment:

You said: "I'll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.

How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I've spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally."
You won't find a new country, won't find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You'll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road.
Now that you've wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you've destroyed it everywhere in the world.

While this may be depressing, I don't think, even here, that the alternative is recommended -- the alternative being a kind of renunciation of movement, a surrender to futility, a descent into the realm of, say, Dostoevsky's "Underground Man." Hamlet, complaining of "the prison" that is Denmark, offers us, perhaps surprisingly, another option:

Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there is nothing
either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me
it is a prison.

If "thinking makes it so," the lines seem to suggest, one may at least learn to think differently. Elsewhere, Hamlet says:

I could be bounded in a nut shell and count
myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I
have bad dreams.

Though bad dreams are, generally speaking, involuntary, they are just another way of "thinking it so." Emerson's admonition against traveling is similar. He is far from recommending the cloistered life. He does not issue a fatwa against travel, but rather proposes a methodology for traveling rightly -- and this is, I think, the second possible approach to the truism. He writes:

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Emerson warns here against traveling as a collector of dead relics, as a lifeless conoisseur, a maker of catalogs. This is the man who "travels to be amused," to go, in the false hopes of Cavafy's traveler, of finding "another city better than this one." Rejecting the notion of a city better than this one, however, is not to reject the benefits of novelty and difference. To travel is to experience, as it is to stay at home. These experiences are, so long as we keep in view the fact that our valuations of each are a matter of "thinking it so," only different in the details. The gathering of details is also indispensible for Emerson, as he recommends in "The American Scholar" a great deal of learning, both from nature and books, experience and history. But on their own, without the active intervention of the self-reliant consciousness, without using these details to create new forms, new details of our own, in speech, in writing, or in action, then they become nothing more than a catalog, a ledger of deeds already done, experiences had by others. The new city will not be "better" than the old, but it will have been a city that we've been to -- and our arrival and our departure, if we come and go as "sovereigns" and not "valets," affects not only ourselves, but the places themselves that we visit, in the same way as T.S. Eliot suggests that each new addition to the literary canon is not only affected by it, but affects fundamentally the entire structure of which it has just become a part. Each new addition to the world makes the world new. The city may be not better for our arrival, but we can nonetheless say "we were here," and add a new statement, a new meaning to our collective vocabulary. As Emerson says about language: "Every word was once a poem. Every new relation is a new word"; and thus the syllogism can complete itself.

So Emerson, unlike Thornton Melon, does not say to us: "Don't go!" Instead he reminds us to "go alone," reminds us that the intoxication of displacement is only an illusion. Unless we make of the experience something of our own, we are simply borrowing or stealing from others -- taking instead of making our metaphors. The city itself in Cavafy's poem is, of course, only a metaphor, and Emerson's talk of travel is likewise figurative. Elizabeth Bishop, the American poet who perhaps never felt at home, whether at home or abroad, examined this problem in a poem of her own, one which I always like to measure against the compact darkness of Cavafy. While Cavafy ends his poem with a grim declaration, Bishop ends hers with rhetorical questions, questions that imply, to my mind, answers not only ambiguous, but affirmative. I'll leave off with her leaving off:

But surely it would have been a pity
not to have seen the trees along this road,
really exaggerated in their beauty,
not to have seen them gesturing
like noble pantomimists, robed in pink.
--Not to have had to stop for gas and heard
the sad, two-noted, wooden tune
of disparate wooden clogs
carelessly clacking over
a grease-stained filling-station floor.
(In another country the clogs would all be tested.
Each pair there would have identical pitch.)
--A pity not to have heard
the other, less primitive music of the fat brown bird
who sings above the broken gasoline pump
in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:
three towers, five silver crosses.
--Yes, a pity not to have pondered,
blurr'dly and inconclusively,
on what connection can exist for centuries
between the crudest wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden footwear
and, careful and finicky,
the whittled fantasies of wooden cages.
--Never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds' cages.
--And never to have had to listen to rain
so much like politicians' speeches:
two hours of unrelenting oratory
and then a sudden golden silence
in which the traveller takes a notebook, writes:

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

The (truly) Grand Old Party

The whites, too, by nature, were the shrewder race. A man with some evil design, would not he be likely to speak well of that stupidity which was blind to his depravity, and malign that intelligence from which it might not be hidden?

-- Melville, Benito Cereno

The passage is one of Captain Delano's many erroneous conjectures as to what is going on before his eyes. Unwilling and unable to believe that a group of African slaves could organize a rebellion and control a Spanish vessel, Delano goes one by one through his theories, each one more convoluted and less probable than the last, but each designed to somehow maintain for him his impression of his own superiority, and the superiority of his race.

The Republican Party, that shrewd, white race, is once again showing what Spenser might have called its deformed nether regions. It must be pathological. After being wiped out in the polls, the final nail in the coffin delivered by Jim Webb in Virginia, whose principal qualities are his opposition to the war and the fact that he is not George Allen, they still can't help simply being a bunch of racist assholes. To wit: they have now re-installed the Grand Master of them all, the segregationist Trent Lott, in a leadership position. This is a man who, after publicly lamenting the 1948 defeat of the virulently racist Strom Thurmond in the race for the presidency, went on BET and, with a straight face, said he voted against the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday because, wait for it:

I'm not sure we in America, certainly not white America and the people in the South, fully understood who this man was; the impact he was having on the fabric of this country.

Presumably he also didn't know much about the events of June 21, 1964, in the town of Philadelphia, Missippi, when he advised Ronald Reagan to kick off his campaign there with a speech about "States' Rights."

In short, the Republican party just voted for, to borrow a phrase from Chinua Achebe, "a thoroughgoing racist." Senator Macaca is out, but we just can't seem to shake Mr. Lott. When will these people ever grow up?

Blue

If I were to "really" post today, it would surely have far more to do with the return of the repressed, the violence underlying benevolent imperialism, and the (Henry) Jamesian obsession with the preposition, for anyone to either read or give a damn. Thus, I will leave you with a link. In a story at Salon today, there is, finally, a sensible response to those blockhead "strategists" (James Carville) who insist that the Democrats are still in trouble because they're still losing the South. After the 2004 election debacle, some of my readers will recall a rather large email discussion group, entitled "Anti-dialectic," which conisted for the most part of a good deal of handwringing and disagreement as to what "the left" ought to do to regain some relevance. This article, I think, goes a long way to putting that debate to bed. Considering the built-in disadvantages to the left, which I've written about below, and considering that despite these, Democrats decisively defeated the opposition last week, perhaps the answer is simple: just be what you are, since it's what "the people" (meaning at least a solid majority) already want. The solid southern voting bloc is the antiquated, backwards thing of the past. Let them figure it out.

Set You Down This

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

-- Hamlet

Everybody realizes that it's something that will affect the rest of our lives.

-- U.S. Army Captain, Killed in Fallujah, November 13, 2004

Two years ago this Monday, the man you see above was shot dead in Fallujah by insurgents as he entered a house. He died on the floor of the kitchen. For today, I will just direct your attention to the comments on yesterday's post, by someone who knows a thing or two about the sickening business of Iraq. A tale told by idiots indeed. That man, and hundreds of thousands of others, deserved better. We can do little here but try to preserve some elements of the stories -- and so we do.

I also draw your attention to the Columbia Journalism Review, which now has an oral history of the war, from interviews with journalists, complete with stunning photo galleries, from one of which I took the image you see above.

Friday Reading: The Matter of our Men

I think the human race needs to think more about killing...

-- Robert S. McNamara

Man is matter.

-- Joseph Heller, Catch-22

I suppose McNamara, who by his own admission, along with his old friend General Curtis LeMay, perpetrated war crimes on the vastest of scales, ought to know about such things. Having been deeply involved in the firebombing of Japanese cities, the atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the senseless eradication of both poor Americans and Vietnamese in that more recent conflict, McNamara's conscience bears a good deal of weight -- and it is surely due in some part to this heaviness that such a man can offer, toward the end of his life, such a concise and pointed assessment.

But I don't want to talk about McNamara today. Instead, to recognize the holiday, to honor the veterans, especially the thirty thousand newly wounded in the ongoing atrocity that is the "Iraq War," I present you with this poem:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

The poem is Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." I'm no expert in the poetry of warfare, but this is one that has always stuck with me. The whole thing is spare and unnerving, but I have special feelings for the first and last lines. From his mother's sleep, he says, he "fell into the state." The physical act of falling is evocative enough, but this construction haunts through association. We're all perhaps well enough aware of our collectively "fallen" state, a notion that takes different guises but is not dissimilar in content across the fields of religion, ancient philosophy, the literature of Kafka, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and even basic, intuitive common sense. It is no innovation to suggest we might fall into an abstraction like a State; but there is something in the cold, calculated, political nature of the word itself -- the state -- that sets this one apart. In the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, we fall from grace, from Paradise through knowledge to death. Lacan has us falling, quite literally, into the symbolic. For Kafka we are always already fallen. These are all abstractions -- but the state, especially in the context of the visceral corporeality that follows, becomes an unsettlingly embodied machine, an abstraction backed up with the amoral violence from which it arose and on which it subsists. This is a state that indeed reduces its men to matter. The final line, in which the matter of the man is hosed away like so much excrement on a shoe, seems to me among the most compact iterations of the biophysical reality described in the epigraph from Heller. The epigraph itself is, I believe, the most compact iteration of all.

Next year, hopefully we'll have a more celabratory poem to celebrate the occasion. If I didn't firmly believe that God was the most insidious invention of the Devil, I would pray to him to get our men and women the hell out of there, and leave us more veterans to honor, and less grisly matter to ignore, or wash away.

The Governor of California on the Midterm Elections

So however you cut it, this midterm proves that the Iraq war is at least more popular than Bill Clinton was.

-- Ann Coulter, November 8, 2006

Warlord Guru Guy: Conan! What is best in life?

Conan: To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

-- John Milius & Oliver Stone, Conan the Barbarian, 1982

Thomas Paine on the Midterm Elections

Posted by Maggie Howell:

Universal empire is the prerogative of a writer. His concerns are with all mankind, and though he cannot command their obedience, he can assign them their duty. The Republic of Letters is more ancient than monarchy, and of far higher character in the world than the vassal court of Britain; he that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to "Defender of the Faith," than George the Third.

As a military man your lordship may hold out the sword of war, and call it the "ultima ratio regum": the last reason of kings; we in return can show you the sword of justice, and call it "the best scourge of tyrants." The first of these two may threaten, or even frighten for a while, and cast a sickly languor over an insulted people, but reason will soon recover the debauch, and restore them again to tranquil fortitude. Your lordship, I find, has now commenced author, and published a proclamation; I have published a Crisis. As they stand, they are the antipodes of each other; both cannot rise at once, and one of them must descend; and so quick is the revolution of things, that your lordship's performance, I see, has already fallen many degrees from its first place, and is now just visible on the edge of the political horizon.

It is surprising to what a pitch of infatuation, blind folly and obstinacy will carry mankind, and your lordship's drowsy proclamation is a proof that it does not even quit them in their sleep. Perhaps you thought America too was taking a nap, and therefore chose, like Satan to Eve, to whisper the delusion softly, lest you should awaken her. This continent, sir, is too extensive to sleep all at once, and too
watchful, even in its slumbers, not to startle at the unhallowed foot of an invader.

-- Thomas Paine, The American Crisis, No. II (1777)

Alexander Hamilton on the Midterm Elections

Would they not fear that citizens, not less tenacious than conscious of their rights, would flock from the remote extremes of their respective States to the places of election, to overthrow their tyrants, and to substitute men who would be disposed to avenge the violated majesty of the people?

-- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, No. 60

Ovid on the Midterm Elections

And then by trekking through remote and distant
byways, through fearful forests and rough rocks,
he came at last to where the Gorgon lived.
And everywhere, in fields, along the roads,
he witnessed the sad forms of men and beasts
no more themselves, but changed now into stone,
misfortunates, who'd glimpsed Medusa once.

He too had once looked upon her image,
but it had been reflected in the shield
of bronze our hero bore in his left hand;
and while sleep held Medusa and her snakes,
he struck her head off...

-- Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book IV

Overthrowing the Government

Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time and place, but is the centre of things.

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Apologies to my dedicated readers for the lack of "new content" lately. The academic calendar, for both JPL and myself, has been a bit "full"; hopefully we'll be back to a more regular posting schedule within a week or so.

In the meantime, just a few thoughts on Election Day, about the inherent injustice of the voting system itself. As many are aware (cf. 2000), the Electoral College system allows for the strange situation of losing the popular vote and winning the presidency anyway. This throwback to the "States Rights" world of the early federalist system, is obviously antiquated, and the 2000 election demonstrated its absurdity. In a similar vein, the system of disproportionate Senate representation is perhaps equally, or even more, troubling, especially in light of what's happened during the last six years of single-party rule.

By the numbers, the set-up of the Senate (as well as the often insidious (cf. Tom DeLay) redistricting for the House) makes it more difficult for Democrats to win control than it is for Republicans. According to this study by Columbia University, a statistical advantage of at least two percentage points is built in to the system, requiring Democrats to average a popular victory of 52% to have an even chance of winning. Here are the conclusions:

It's not easy being a Democrat. After their stunning loss of both houses of Congress in 1994, the Democrats have averaged over 50% of the vote in Congressional races in every year except 2002, yet they have not regained control of the House. The same is true with the Senate: in the last three elections (during which 100 senators were elected), Democratic candidates have earned three million more votes than Republican candidates, yet they are outnumbered by Republicans in the Senate as well. 2006 is looking better for the Democrats, but our calculations show that they need to average at least 52% of the vote (which is more than either party has received since 1992) to have an even chance of taking control of the House of Representatives.

This situation more or less guarantees that the makeup of the Congress, to say nothing of the executive branch, is not representative at all. As the editors of the New Republic write today, such conditions make it impossible to achieve an old style "wipeout," whereby the government actually is overthrown by the voters. Instead, we can expect only modest gains, which will leave the Democrats without the "clear mandate" that they probably actually have:

In the olden days of politics, electoral wipeouts were great spectacles to behold. When Democrats or Republicans slipped on the political banana peel, they would tumble, arms flailing like Chevy Chase, into congressional defeat. In the 1894 election, Democrats squandered 125 seats; in 1922, Republicans endured a loss of 77 seats. This year, for the first time in over a decade, there's talk of a wipeout. But this wipeout, should it occur, would entail Republicans losing a mere 30 seats--and only in the unlikely event that every Bible-beating, gun-toting rural district breaks in the Democrats' direction.

When we wax nostalgic for the bygone era of true electoral catastrophes, it's not just out of a hunger for more enjoyable political theater. We're pining for elections that reflect public will. And such an outcome is not likely this year. Take a look at recent opinion surveys, such as the one Newsweek released on October 28. Democrats have run up double-digit advantages on major issues from Iraq to the economy. When voters are presented with a generic congressional ballot, Democrats win 53-39. But there's simply no way that this will translate.

What to do? As Emerson noted, it is a difficult thing to contemplate overturning the systems that have been consecrated by usage and time, and there is a kind of understandable terror at the prospect of fundamental reform. But the times require it, and we would do well to remember his words of encouragement:

There is no virtue which is final; all are initial. The virtues of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

There is nothing in the system that is sacred -- especially when it is patently, quantifiably unjust. But there is nothing to be done about this today, except vote. Regardless of what TNR has to say, a thirty seat swing is possible and desirable, and a victory in the Senate is not impossible. And a transition of one or both of the houses, by whatever margins, will clearly be a reflection of the will of the majority, and serve as both affront and reprimand to the squalid mediocrity of our time -- even if, like everything else here in Bush-land, the numbers don't exactly correspond to reality.