Ol' Weepy

Sure, a day after you've spent two hours discussing your own mother's deteriorating mental condition with her doctor is not exactly the time you want to be making fun of some elderly gent's embarrassing public breakdown, but so help me the first thing that crossed my mind was "You'd better be crying for the rest of us and not yourself there, old man." And the second was, "Of all the families in the United States of America, how did this one become a dynasty?"

Matters were not helped when the Bush family biographer, whose name I've forgotten, noted on Olbermann that Jeb was considered the intellect of the family. Athough this was mitigated a bit later when he noted that the Bush name was now so radioactive that "[Jeb Jr.] won't be able to run for dog catcher."

Happy Birthday

Wallace Maynard Cox
December 6, 1924--February 15, 1973

Small Wonder He Features So Prominently in The Waste Land

It's Mistah Stanley Kurtz, the incredible human linkage-feedback loop, via Roy, and if there's a Presidential Medal of Freedom awaiting the to-this-point badly misused neck of John Bolton, shouldn't there be one for a man who has made it possible for thousands of his fellow citizens to avoid reading Kathryn Jean Lopez? I ask as a humble, tax-paying citizen.

I already took up too much space in Roy's comments, but I still have more to say about this:

Take the congressional example I gave (an example Marshall has not addressed): Democratic Congressman Charles Rangel’s plan to restart the draft. Rangel’s plan is making news right now, but he first introduced it about a year before the last presidential election. Rangel and the Democrats hoped to raise the specter of a draft as a way of undercutting public support for the war, for the Republicans, and for President Bush....

My point is that this kind of political strategy, and the larger dovish sensibility behind it, puts constraints on our military policy in Iraq and beyond. That, in fact, is the purpose of these proposals. They are a kind of political shot across the bow, designed to warn Republicans that the war on terror is going to have to be fought without a larger military. Even if the president had tried to expand the military on a strictly volunteer basis, Rangel would have pointed to the danger that enough recruits might not be found. So just by raising the prospect of a larger military, the Republicans would have fed dovish claims that a draft was on the way.

Okay, okay, this is so counter-rational that even responding to it on its own terms would risk what scientists call "Brain bubbles", so I'd like to jump right to the basis of the argument that Kurtz earlier linked to himself making, namely, that the administration--for whatever reason, Rumsfeld Doctrine or Dirty-Hippie-Based Panic Attack--stinted on the number of troops sent to Iraq.

Let us suppose, reader, that you are in charge of the invasion of Iraq set for March, 2003, and it is the early stages of the planning, say June of 1999. Okay, that was unfair; I don't think the invasion was set much before August. To avoid arguments let's make it January, 2002. And let's say you sincerely believe, as everyone did back then, that Saddam Hussein has a WMD program wish-list planning event scheduled at which he's finally going to decide on a napkin and dinner mint color scheme, which makes it something like an imminent threat without the imminence. You have decided that this linchpin of the Clash of Civilizations requires such a commitment that the US must abandon its treaty commitments, forsake its standing in the international community, and, frankly, its common sense the last vestiges of its common sense the pretense of Bush administration competence and mental stability. Throwing caution to the breezes you decide to call every last US serviceman home from Bosnia, Germany, Japan, Korea, Okinawa, Italy, Great Britain, and elsewhere. Keenly ignoring the fact (you are a Republican, remember) that most of the personnel thus obtained are winguts and data reduction clerks* and not trained and equipped combat forces, you add every last boot to your Planned Invasion Force Tote Board.

Congratulations! You now have a force of roughly 380,000 mostly untrained and unequipped men and women, many of them belonging to branches of the service which do not, as a rule, do much on solid ground except decompress. This motley gets you to approximately 1.09 times the generally accepted minimum amount required to actively occupy the country for, say, one year, assuming you had a plan to do so, which you don't because somebody's dog ate it.

Oh, by the way, on the off chance that that little hairdresser who runs North Korea, Kim Something, decides he wants to invade the South while you're otherwise occupied, you now have a Reserve Readiness force of 100,000. This is, in fact, an actual combat-ready force (at least it was in 2002). Its two major drawbacks are 1) its location is the US of A, not Korea, and 2) current military thinking, dating at least to the perfection of the internal combustion engine, holds that we need at least four times that number to respond adequately.


As we have mentioned here, and could, were we Professor Kurtz, link to again and again and again, there is one reason we invaded Iraq with 150,000 troops, and that reason has nothing whatever to do with any Rumsfeld Doctrine. We invaded on a political timetable, period, and we did so with what troops were available. We could not have developed a sufficient occupying force in less than two years' time, minimum, assuming a vigorous conscription program begun at the very time Rangel was proposing one. And that assumes that, alongside all the other problems a conscription army presents, we could have trained people that fast. Five years is probably more like it. Five years would be enough time to try to raise the levels of an all-volunteer army as well. Of course, both of these programs would have suffered from a big problem, bigger even than not facing Saddam's imminent threat imminently, bigger perhaps even than having to wait out the election cycle the whole thing was designed to influence in the first place:

We would have had to pay for it ahead of time.

What's the answer to that, Professor Kurtz? What Democratic dirty trick or Woodstock Nation hangover caused the administration to try to run the war off the books? Was there a danger that Democratic operatives would spread the ugly rumor that we had to pay for the thing? (Let's remember, reader--oh, I forgot, you're no longer in charge of the planning. Relax. The Big Idea was to keep the war off budget until the return from summer recess in '03, by which time it was supposed to be over.) For that matter, why'd we wait until October 2002 to get Congressional authorization, when we knew all along that he had those WMDs (since we kept the receipts. Wish I knew who said that.)?

Hey, while we're at it, Stan, let's remember that at the same time your bunch were making rumbling noises about Syria and Iran.

Our only real options were to invade with 150,000 troops, a level sustainable only until the winter of 2004 under optimal conditions, and that by an unprecedented use of the Reserve and National Guard, or to obtain the necessary 200,000-300,000 troops by forming a broad international coalition, which would have meant giving UN sanctions another twelve months to create doubt in a misled US public's mind of the imminence of (We Never Said "imminent") that imminent threat. And it would have meant waiting until spring 2004 at least, dissipating the time alloted to $30 million victory parades back home before the elections.

So, bullshit, Professor Kurtz. It was neither the Bush Wehrmacht's blitzkrieg theories (Guderian, at least, had the good sense to have territory-securing infantry following the tanks), nor the defeat-loving Democrats, nor any combination which resulted in our Iraq fiasco. It was the incompetence and the hubris of small men, and the larger hubris of a larger party, and their political wet dreams, which includes--and still does, somehow, in some quarters--that it could reverse the outcome of Vietnam and silence its critics forever. So much so that it couldn't be bothered to look at any inconvenient facts, before, during, or after.



*Frank Zappa, Billy the Mountain, August, 1971

Happy Birthday

Friedrich Anton Christian Lang
December 5, 1890--August 2, 1976

Log, Meet Mote Another Log

Frank Rich, "Has He Started Talking to the Walls?", NY Times Op-Ed, December 4

When news organizations, politicians and bloggers had their own civil war about the proper usage of that designation last week, it was highly instructive--but about America, not Iraq. The intensity of the squabble showed the corrosive effect the president's subversion of language has had on our larger culture. Iraq arguably passed beyond civil war months ago into what might more accurately be termed ethnic cleansing or chaos. That we were fighting over "civil war" at this late date was a reminder that wittingly or not, we have all taken to following Mr. Bush's lead in retreating from English as we once knew it.

I can't disagree with anything he says, including what's left behind the Wall of Selectness, but it's still a bit like a guy who arrives 20 minutes before the dinner is supposed to end lecturing others on etiquette. Didn't the New York Times have something to do with that retreat from English, specifically in regards to Iraq? Maybe I'm disremembering. There's been quite a lot to wade through of late.

Hey, Presidents, like all politicians, lie. So too do reporters. The thing is, though, they're not supposed to lie about matters of utmost national seriousness just so they can get invited to the right parties. That isn't something George Bush invented. It isn't something Judy Miller invented, either, though she raised it to previously unsuspected heights. If you want to talk about the origins of the non-consensual forcible public sodomy upon the English language you go straight to the Nixon administration [mouthing the words of Timesman Bill Safir(e)], Roe v. Wade, and the birth of Happy Talk, Faux Balance news that's coursed through journalistic veins in place of ink for a generation now.

America's a two-part question now, Frank. Can it figure out how it fucked up so badly in the world (we have a partial answer to that by now: at least a third of our fellow citizens cannot understand a simple declarative sentence anymore unless it condemns the political party they vote against)? And does it have the will to correct the wildly erroneous but cherished notions that brought it to that point in the first place?

A month after an election which at least threw a large percentage of the bums responsible for the current version of this malaise on its collective ear and we're still talking about the foibles of a President who's been a lame-duck for nearly two years now, and we're debating why some people can't seem to understand how wrong they are? Maybe it's because they've been told for thirty-some years now that their opinions, no matter how wrong, how ill-conceived, or how unpopular, were just as good as any other opinion.

Bush isn't responsible for that. He's just the pimple on the forehead it broke out in, the one everybody walked around trying to be too polite to stare at. We rewrote the history of the Vietnam War, Frank, just so the gang at the Corner could imagine forty years later that it was all the fault of dirty hippies. We decided that Ronald Reagan, the Butcher of People's Park, was A Nice Guy, then that he was too enfeebled to be bothered obeying the law of the land, then we put him on Mount Rushmore. We don't even need to get to George W., who was so clearly out of his league in the 2000 campaign that there's no excuse for anyone having followed him anywhere in the first place, let alone for blaming his addled pate six years later for where we all wound up.

Happy Birthday

Nino Rota
December 3, 1911--April 10, 1979

Sermonette

Peggy Noonan, "Grace Under Pressure:
Difficult times call for less-contentious politics." OJ, December 1

We're going to need grace. We are going to need a great outbreak of grace to navigate the next difficult months.

The cynical middle-aged guy I sometimes talk to mentioned that there are two times you hear calls for civility in politics: immediately after Republicans have finished sliming someone, and then again after they've fucked things up as his replacement.

And the cynical middle-aged guy turns to me and says, "Remember the backhand slaps at Clinton in Bush's first inaugural address? Remember that it took him nearly two months--and the exhaustion of the news cycle--to allow as how Air Force One hadn't been trashed, and that meanwhile the six weeks' tubthumping about Vandalgate, Giftgate, and Pardongate, all led by his press secretary, all complete bullshit, got a "we're putting that behind us. My administration is all about being positive? Remember? Republicans deserve exactly the same Grace they exhibit."

I am thinking about getting him a hack license.

Much has been strained. We were all concussed by 9/11--we reeled--and came down where we came down. For the administration, extreme events prompted radical thinking. American exceptionalism was yesterday. They would be universalists, their operating style at once dreamy and aggressive: All men want the same thing, and we're giving it to them whether they want it or not. Now the dreamers hope to be saved by men--James Baker, Vernon Jordan--they once dismissed as cynics.

Reading Peggers this AM I was suddenly reminded of what Mailer said in The White Negro, something about how actual Negroes, because they'd been forced to suppress the tiniest emotional response for generations for fear of being unexpectedly gifted with a new necktie, had achieved a curious reversal: their deepest thoughts played on the surface, while their surface emotions remained buried. And after the last couple weeks of viewing or listening to reporters playing Ring Around the Rosy with the corpse of US politics--breathlessly awaiting the withered foregone conclusion that is the Baker-Hamilton commission, reporting one-time President George W. Bush's pre-response as though the man still has a gauntlet to throw down, trying to inflate the House Majority Leader vote into something big enough to qualify as a story--it occurred to me that Nooners is the Hipster Reporter. She can't help blurting out her deepest fears as everyday banter. Angels, or the Elect, or a guy in a big white hat are always coming to her rescue. But all the surface stuff, like "George W. is a bonehead", "all that Reaganaut stuff has been reduced to ashes while I stood by and cheered", or "despite my faith, my brain still feels like there's something crawling around in there", all those things remain out of sight though, unfortunately for Peggy, far from hidden.

Happy Birthday

Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III
December 1, 1940--December 10, 2005

Sold A Quart Of Blood And Bought A Half A Pint Of Scotch

Indy Star:

Wasting little time after learning its site developer beat back a rezoning challenge, the gourmet organic grocer said it has signed a lease to open its first Indianapolis store at 86th Street and Keystone Avenue.

That "rezoning challenge" there was an attempt by neighbors to beat back the proposed bulldozing of the last thirteen wooded acres within a mile of the place (more if you discount the nearby White River floodplain on which the city is rapidly issuing building permits) so what the Star calls the "earthy, yet upscale" retailer can build a 60,000 sq. ft. store.

Which store will be an enormous benefit to local nature lovers who don't want to drive the mile and a quarter to Wild Oats, or 2-1/2 miles to Trader Joe's, or the four miles to that place in the Village whose name I refuse to remember since they installed four self-service checkout lines two weeks after they opened. And it'll be just the other side of the overpass from Saks, Crate & Barrel, and the new Nordstrom, so you can get you couture and your cuisine while it's haute.

There's a good two miles of solid asphalt in either direction from that site. Just five miles away, ten blocks south of the 465/I-69 exchange, the only southern exit from the development insanity that is the town of Fishers, there's an entire three-block shopping center that's been distressed for several years, but sits in the same $80K annual household income bullseye. They're just beginning to revitalize it. The neighbors would have killed for it. They would even have paid earthy yet upscale mark-ups.

But that wouldn't have been as much fun as knocking down trees, I guess.

Go To Hell

This:

"Atheists Agonistes," by Richard Shweder, NY Times November 27

is what I'd been working on when my wife's blasted civic-mindedness interrupted. The logic had already been demolished by PZ and his commenters; I'd like to take a different tack. Namely, just where th' fuck did these numbers come from?

Books dictated or co-written by God sell quite well among the 2.1 billion self-declared Christians and 1.3 billion self-declared Muslims of the world.

There are 2.1 billion self-declared Christians and 1.3 billion self-declared Muslims? To whom did they declare themselves?

A quibble? Perhaps, but if nothing else it's a sloppy way for an anthropologist to conduct himself, and "self-declared" carries an undeniable weight that the more accurate "claimed by the religion industry" does not.

And then it's one of those quibbles where belatedly asking the question leads us to a hidden lake of unknown depth we were supposed to cross dry-shod. Who is a Christian? If I'm supposed to acknowledge a system of thought strictly on the number of its adherents I think I can reasonably demand something like an accurate accounting first.

Damned if that water hasn't started turning murky. We can be reasonably certain that the Gallup numbers which get trotted out in support of America's Christianity, Sincere Monotheism, Regular Church Attendance and Habit of Tithing are inflated, the latter two, at least, by a factor of 2 or greater. So what about the rest? When Barna looks a little closer, as opposed to relying on "self-description", the argument begins to get a little odd:

• 9% of Americans meet the criteria to be called Evangelical; 14% of Americans do not follow any organized religion. 10% are atheist or agnostic. 10% follow some religion other than Christianity. (So who gets all the press?)

• 36% of Americans qualify as "Born Again" but not Evangelical. 50% of Southern adults do.

• Roughly 40% of adults never attend church.

• The fastest growing religion in the US is Wicca. The biggest trend in Christianity is the shift of aging Boomers toward born-again Christianity.

• 52% of Americans say they believe the Bible is inerrant truth.

• 58% describe themselves as "skeptical".

And this doesn't begin to approach the doctrinal differences which account for eight divisions of Christianity in the world or 2000 Protestant denominations in the USA alone.

If due respect requires atheists to help foot the bill for C.B. Demillesque Ten Commandment momuments aren't they at least permitted to wonder aloud if it'll be the Protestant, Catholic, or Jewish versions? Or if we need all three? Whose version of the Virgin Birth are they supposed to respect? Whose concept of heaven? Shouldn't we at least ask that all Baptists believe the same thing before we ask non-believers to pay homage?

Back in the last century they used to tell us about something called the esoteric/exoteric function of small groups, that is, that they have collections of narratives about themselves (generally positive) and about The Others (usually negative) which serve to increase group coherence. I haven't checked in a while, but I'm guessing it still works that way, and that this:

Instead of waging intellectual battles over the existence of god(s), those of us who live in secular society might profit by being slower to judge others and by trying very hard to understand how it is possible for John Locke and our many atheist friends to continue to gaze at each other in such a state of mutual misunderstanding.

amounts to a call for non-believers to accept the by-laws of those Christian sects which have to scream the loudest to keep their flock intact. Atheism, on the other hand, is not generally a team sport.

Frankly, if you hang around with "ordinary" Americans, as opposed to taking the occasional faculty dinner at the U. of Chicago, you'll discover that a big reason why over half of American Protestants aren't in the Born Again/Evangelical demo is they actively reject religious extremism. The rational, secular, pluralist cabal which so bedevils the religious right isn't atheist; it's mainstream America, outside Dixie.

Addendum: I didn't engage Shweder's argument, which, as I say, was handled quite nicely by PZ's bunch, but I would like to add that as much damage is done the literalist position by books from within the Christian tradition (e.g. Robin Lane Fox, The Unauthorized Version) as by anything Richard Dawkins has to say.

I Should Have Taken The Other Car. Its Radio Is Broken.

My Poor Wife got called for jury duty yesterday, and since I was available to ferry her and avoid parking fees I did so, and scheduled that responsibility around some household chores and finishing a post which isn't this one. The phone rang a scant hour and a half later. She was free (she had a personal connection to the case she was called for, and they kicked her back to the pool, where she was told she could go home). So I drove back downtown and saw my schedule disrupted enough that I tossed it out altogether and went Christmas shopping.

I had stuck the new Yo La Tengo CD in my sweatshirt pocket, or at least I thought I had, until I opened it at the end of the block and learned the actual CD, the part with the music on it, was back on the turntable at home. So I switched on NPR in time for Terry Gross to tell me her guest would be our old friend Ariel Levy, the author of Female Chauvinist Pigs, now in paperback. For someone whose ideas are so ill-formed, Levy is remarkably poorly-spoken. That may be unfair; she was extemporizing on radio, after all, and it's not her medium. Still, as if the early holiday shopping traffic wasn't maddening enough (following two rush-hour-esque trips downtown and back) Levy has her lubricated and latex-safe finger poised just close enough to the rim of truth to be excruciating without any promise of a payoff. People's Exhibit A:

When I was doing this research I was constantly struck by all (the accomplishments of feminism) that I take for granted.

And B:

We've sort of reduced [sex] down to implants, polyester underpants*, and Brazilian bikini waxes, all these things that can be bought and sold. And it strikes me that once you make sex not about weird complicated things and you make it about that...stuff...then it's just another thing to buy and sell.

Well, yes, if I can put it so simply. Is there any possibility we can start connecting the dots sometime in the near future?

Let us take the first comment first. I do not and cannot understand this. Levy is in her early 30s. She buttressed that comment with a note that pre-feminism women could not get checking accounts without a husband or father co-signing, let alone access to safe and legal contraception or abortions. She says this as though we are to accept it as the most natural thing in the world that any thirty-year-old would be completely ignorant of the world as it existed fifteen years before her birth without a specialized course of study. Someone my height and coloring might suggest that this is, instead, a measure of the sheer lack of intellectual curiosity in American life, and if we need some way to understand Wildness and the Girls Who Go There it would be a more fruitful place to start.

Let us pause for a couple pieces of salient information. Levy describes her parents as 60s vintage boho feminists, which makes her former cluelessness about the entire history of her own gender in her own country prior to her own giving a shit that much more mysterious. The second is her admission that she sees "raunch culture" as a reaction to the "PC tightness that was big in the 80s and early 90s".

So I'm listening to this, and it's really difficult to decide what qualifies as Thought and what is simply rearranging scraps of newspaper found on the floor of your cage. "PC tightness"? I don't understand how a label convinces you to stop thinking about something, and I'm fairly convinced, having lived through it, that the war on so-called political correctness was in full swing by that time, as evinced by the very existence of the term. In other words, even had one found oneself in a college hotbed of PC in the 80s or early 90s one needn't have felt windlashed and helpless. (Levy, by the way, reports the opposite: she was even tempted to throw away her leg razor for a time.)

So we wind up with the same old conundrum. If you were delusional to some extent in those days, why should your testimony be trusted now?

Which brings us to implants and underpants and bikini waxing, and the real puzzlement to me: what is it that's so difficult to understand here? Yes, indeedy, the reduction of sex to a plastic commodity costs us a great deal, and it saddles a following generation with Paris and Brittany disease one can only hope they'll be able to climb up out of right side up. But it is the abiding faith in Consumerism which is the problem, not some generational response to torments of PC humorlessness. If a 32-year-old who's published a book on the subject is only recently aware of the accomplishments of mid-20th century Feminism, I have my doubts that drunken nubiles are flashing their tits at the camera as an act of political defiance.


* This one is news to me. Sic transit.

Who Left the Ouzo Unlocked?

David Brooks, "The Education of Robert Kennedy", New York Times, November 27

Summary: After his brother's cranium exploded in public, Bobby Kennedy reportedly found surcease in Edith Hamilton's lightly regarded version of Greek Classics Illustrated. If you find three different ways to say this it will fill up a Times Op-Ed column. And if you throw in a wholly gratuitous reference to Winston Churchill, the most casual 5% of your readers might imagine you had a point.

Question from the floor: If Brooks and his ilk are so enamored of the Dead Kennedys and ML King, how is it they never saw fit to emulate them in the slightest? When it could have made a difference they threw in with Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand.

On the other hand: "Classical scholars often scorn Hamilton because she wrote in a breathless 'all the glory that was Greece' mode, but her book changed Robert Kennedy's life." Y'know, passive-aggressiveness is not all that attractive in a supposed pundit in the the first place, and Brooks really manages to take it to a You Wanna Trip Him In The Hallway While He's Got An Armload Of Books level. Supposing that classical scholars have nothing better to do than feel superior to 70-year-old popularizations of their subject matter, I'm guessin' they could find a lot more to be critical of than Hamilton's prose stylings.

Brooks didn't even have to mention this--we're talking about Bobby Kennedy's tastes, not his own--or he might have stated it as simple fact. Hamilton wasn't working as a scholar. She wrote popular books on scholarly subjects. There was more than a hint of fust about her books back when Bobby read The Greek Way. But Brooks means to uncork that Bowtied Right manqué classicism, and so is required to blame everything he doesn't like about contemporary scholarship on a few arbitrary eggheads.

The Money: "And the lesson, of course, is about the need to step outside your own immediate experience into the past, to learn about problems that never change, and bring back some of that inheritance. The leaders who founded the country [and who appear here, in the penultimate sentence, for the first time -ed.] were steeped in the classics, Kennedy found them in crisis, and today's students are lucky if they stumble on them by happenstance."

Funny thing about that. I happen to do volunteer work in the public schools, and in these parts, at least, the math and language requirements are double what they were thirty years ago when I was in school, and probably twenty some years ago when Brooks was. I am, frankly, astonished at the work load placed on kids and I sometimes wonder how I would have reacted, being that I was always more interested in what I found than what they were trying to teach me, and the pace back then allowed me to indulge that. These workloads are mandated by public officials tasked with--or taking an immense amateur interest in--"improving" education. They are, in these parts, largely Republican and/or disproportionately solicitous of Republican chamber-of-commerce type concerns, and there seems to be very little demand for an entire section of Aeschylus on the graduation qualifying exam.

Then again, Indianapolis parents now have the opportunity to send their students to a charter school with a classics-based curriculum, or, baring that, of buying a copy of Mythology for a buck fifty at Half Price Books and having their kids read it. Though that takes all of the fun out of being a scold.