Daily Blague

Since it's the end of the week, and if you haven't read the current issue of The New Yorker, you're probably never going to, let me propose a brief roundup of its interesting collection of nonfiction features. Perhaps you'll change you rmind. (Only one is available online, but there is also an online interview with author William Finnegan.)

First, Anthony Grafton, author of a delightful book on footnotes, assesses, in "Reading Ratzinger," the thinking of the former cardinal, by going through the catalogue of one hundred thirty items written by the Pope held by Princeton's Theological Seminary. As a graduate student, Ratzinger learned how Augustine and Bonaventure both learned important points of orthodoxy in confrontations with heretics. I must say that Mr Grafton seems a bit dazzled. One paragraphs ends with the theologian's conclusion that "The true Church could not be founded on the exclusion of others"; the next reports that Ratzinger has "recently approved the exclusion from the Eucharist of Catholic politicians who defend abortion rights." It may be that the first is an instance of exclusion from the Church, not the Eucharist, but that is a distinction without much of a difference. I came across nothing, in any case, that excited my respect for the Pope's critical thinking. Mr Grafton leaves us with the implicit conclusion that, however brilliant, Benedict XVI is not a genuine intellectual at all. 

As the organ and liturgy drown out the weaker voices of liberal critics, as the searchlight of orthodoxy retrospectively reveals the errors of [liberation theologian] Leonardo Boff and other dissidents, the Pope and the magisterium - the centralized authority of Roman Catholic wisdom - have no need to look outside for enlightenment.

That was my understanding to begin with.

Everyone seems to be thinking that nomination of John G Roberts to take Sandra Day O'Connors seat on the Supreme Court was timed to distract attention from the Rove-Plame simmer. But how about Seymour M Hersh's piece, "Getting Out the Vote," on how we may have poured millions into influencing the Iraqi elections in January? To be sure, this is not one of Mr Hersh's strongest stories, and because it can be argued that "everybody else was doing the same thing" (bringing contra-democratic forces to bear on the voting), any outrage is bound to be anemic. But I think there's enough substance to the report to add one more log to the "we don't practice what we preach" pyre for the eventual immolation of the Bush Administration. Whatever else Mr Hersh's piece leaves you with, you will groan with the fear that our intelligence services have not really curbed their taste for proaction.

As if to compensate for the discouragement of the preceding, be sure to read William Finnegan's review of the New York Police Department's anti-terrorism forces, "The Terrorism Beat." Sounds like the last thing you'd like to read? Well it's not. Even if that honor didn't belong to the next piece, Mr Finnegan's account of the serious and effective-sounding overhaul that the city's approach to terrorism has undergone since Mayor Bloomberg appointed Raymond W Kelly to serve a second term as Police Commissioner. (Mr Kelly served for a year under David Dinkins.) From two dozen officers prior to 9/11, the force has grown to about a thousand, in a Police Force ten times that size. Operating in the vacuum created on the one hand by a CIA and an FBI disgraced by intelligence lapses, and on the other by the disgraceful failure of the federal government to take any meaningful action to protect New York City, the Mayor and his Commissioner took their own initiative. From drawing on the city's large population of immigrants who can speak the languages of the Middle East - or, as it is referred to here, "Western Asia" - to establishing humming control centers that coordinate tireless detective work, to posting officers in key foreign cities - not to help with investigations but to learn from them - to the deployment of Hercules squads at the hint of danger, the city's response to terrorist threat bristles with zeal and, so far, manifest competence.

Endless vigilance, no victory; success means nothing happens.

Every day without an event is its own success. I could not resist gloating at the implications of the following:

Hardening the target: that's the term of art for the overarching goal of local counterterror work. It can help to know what's happening thousands of miles away, but a densely layered system of municipal defense is a terrorism deterrent of a special type. It says, basically, Try another town.

The next, and final article is all about the comeback, in modern medicine, of leeches. Anybody with even a smattering of historical study under her belt knows that leeches were the bane of pre-modern medicine, often making patients worse rather than better. But according to John Colapinto, writing in "Bloodsuckers," ever since the discovery, in 1884, of the first natural anti-coagulant substance ever discovered, in the saliva of Hirudo medicinalis, the leech has enjoyed scientific, if not medical, interest. The medical interest kicked in in 1985, when a Boston surgeon had to cope somehow with a child's outer ear that he had successfully reattached, only to watch it darken with congested blood. A mad and surreptitious scramble for leeches saved the day, and, ever since, leeches have been the handmaidens (and the handymen - they're hermaphroditic) of microsurgery. They bring an incomparable array of complex wonder drugs to the healing of re-connected veins and healing joints. (They may even be approved for the treatment of osteoarthritic knees - just in time for me!)

If there's a word for the little sketches that adorn the texts of articles in The New Yorkers - and I'm not talking about the "drawings" that have only recently been recognized by the magazine as "cartoons," a word shunned under previous régimes - I don't know what it is, but in this week's issue, they're all by the same hand, and they all depict whimsical engines of self-propelled aviation.