Itinerary
New York City will be laboring beneath a weather front for a few days, according to forecasts. It was supposed to rain yesterday, and it did, a little, in the evening. I wore my rainy-day shoes to the Metropolitan Museum, but I didn't need them. Walking home, I got soaked from within. It wasn't very hot, nor was it very humid, and there was an intermittent breeze, but it was hot and humid and still enough to generate a good sweat.
At the museum, Ms NOLA and I saw a lot of things in passing, as one necessarily does if one begins with lunch in the basement cafeteria, but we made it a point to see the tribute to Susan Sontag's critical work, On Photography, and we also went up onto the Roof Garden. Ms NOLA hadn't seen the very various installations of Cai Guo-Qiang that decorate the garden this summer; if she had, I'd have cautioned us away from what turned out to be an elevator bottleneck with lots of cross passengers. (Only one of the elevators was working.) The photographs in the Sontag show were among the most celebrated images in the history of the medium, which makes it a real shame that the museum didn't work up a small catalogue. Like the catalogue that the museum didn't prepare to accompany the Kara Walker show (still on exhibit), this needn't have been an expensive production, but something more like a book.
At the Sontag, it occurred to me that the boy in the famous Diane Arbus image - you know, the kid in the plastic boater and the bow tie, wearing "Bomb Hanoi" and "Support Our Troops" buttons, the guy who is still my image of Crazy Conservatism - must have been about my age, or even younger. (The fact took so long to register, because, without those buttons, you'd take picture to be much older than 1967.) I wondered what might have become of him, and what he's up to these days, if he's still alive.
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Summer Hours - running around town (but often no further than the Met - with Ms NOLA on Friday afternoons - will require some changes in the schedule around here, for those of you who are aware of a schedule. Most notably, I will see my Friday Movies on Monday (unless Ms NOLA is busy). Secondly, and more permanently, my review of The New York Times Book Review will appear on Wednesdays. Working on the review on Monday and Tuesday will give some structure to the beginning of the week, always a tricky time for me (I have a tendency toward inertia on Monday; does anybody else?), and of course I'll get my weekends back.
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Édouard, at Sale Bête, has the patience to scroll through all the comments to an entry by Kevin Drum at Political Animal, among which he finds one that truly gives me pause. The entry, and most of the commenters, are firmly opposed to the torture of prisoners. In comes someone who styles himself "Freedom Phukher," who makes the following terse comment:
This is why you losers lose! You want to be right, while a near majority (+Diebold) just want to feel macho and potent!
"Near majority" aside, I believe that this is true of a great many Americans. I suspect that it is an unconscious wish for many, or at any rate one that's sufficiently surreptitious to square with "Christianity." But I pause to consider the delusion of "macho and potent" in the context of torture. What's macho and potent about fighting someone who can't fight back? True potency stops the moment someone is constrained, and this is something that all good men understand. "Macho and potent" means "evil" here - but then FP implies exactly that.
