The perfect book for August - or so it would seem. In fact, Tom Lutz demonstrates just how much work serious loafing requires.
This jolly book got a so-so review in the Book Review, and I duly took note in these pages. Mr Lutz got hold of me to tell me that, in his opinion, the review was completely wrong. How could I doubt him?
I am not a philosopher. I do not believe in systems, metaphysical or otherwise, that explain how the world works. If I believe anything, it's that we're far too unintelligent as of yet to be claiming to know how the world works. We're still working on building bridges that don't fall into the Mississippi.
In common parlance, "philosophy" denotes a way of living, an understanding of virtue. My "philosophy" is built on a single concept: decency. I believe, crazy optimist that I am, that everyone who has survived adolescence knows what decency is. I've written two pages about it; if you're interested, you'll find a link to the older page in the newer.
Have you got all day? Here's a very long page about art and art criticism. What's amazing to me is that I seem to know what I'm talking about. I read the page now with a gate-keeper's eyes (to which I'm not entitled, either): what incredible impertinence!
There's one sentence, though, that I really don't understand.
We're wired, sadly perhaps, to distinguish the things that happened before our parents' generations from the things that happened earlier. We seek a richness of detail about what's closest to us.
I think that the first sentence is missing a "not" - "We're not wired." But I'm not sure that the sentence means anything. Every once in a while, I fall into fatuity. If you can figure out what I'm trying to say, let me know.
It was not hard to decide which of this week's stories I wanted to showcase as a Friday Front, but it wasn't clear that I was ever going to get round to writing about it. Yesterday's podcast caused a tremendous upheaval in my already disorganized everyday life. If the equipment had been easy to install and stable once installed, that would have been one thing, but it was neither, and I won't be up to speed for a few weeks. I still don't have a clue about how to make it possible to download podcasts.
¶ Simon Head on Information Technology, in The New York Review of Books.
From Mark Schmitt's Op-Ed piece, "Too Much Information," about the ridiculousness of lengthy policy statements (eg health-care proposals) in electoral politics:
We don’t give our presidents total power to enact policy. They have to work with a Congress made up of people with their own views and constituencies. Does anyone really think that a plan cooked up by a bunch of smart 20-somethings after a couple of all-nighters amid the empty pizza boxes and pressures of a campaign is superior to what could be developed with the full resources of the federal government and open Congressional hearings and debate?
Kevin Baker's warning, in the current Harper's, about the unsuitability of Rudy Giuliani for the White House, ends with a fairly gratuitous basing of the current administration. That is, it's unnecessary to Mr Baker's essay. At the same time, however, it constitutes a magnificent if brief catalogue raisonné of Bush's crimes against civilization, charged with a stark power that, unimaginably, surpasses everything that one has already read and thought.
The worst excesses of the bush regime have stemmed directly from its leader's character - that is, its rampant cronyism; its arrogance and egotism; its peremptory, bullying tone and methods; its refusal to brook criticism from within or without; its frighteningly authoritarian impulses; its need to create enemies as a means of governing; its impulsiveness and naïveté; its outright contempt for the law; and its truly staggering ability to substitute its own versions of what it wishes the world to be for any recognition of objective reality.
As a technical amateur - nobody's paying me to do "this website thingy" - I felt morally obligated to read Simon Keen's somewhat screedish The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. For most of the first half of the book, I thought I was reading a rant. For most of the second half, however, I was persuaded that the anti-authoritarian propensity behind so much "Web 2.0" talk is not only childish but damaging.
Mr Keen's book does not offer much in the way of solutions. Even he cannot conceal the fact that current delivery systems for creative cultural work are moribund. The Internet in general and the Blogosphere in particular have blossomed because established cultural institutions don't know how to reach young people - probably because the people who run them don't really understand computers or the Internet. I hope that Mr Keen's book will come to be regarded as the excellent diagnosis of a crisis that was ultimately contained and corrected.
Shortly after I put down Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton, I came across a something that Fran Lebowitz said about Philip Johnson: "He was very cultivated in a way that probably no American is now." (In the Times.) I realized that I hadn't heard the word "cultivated" in a while, and hadn't thought about what it means, either. And yet how clear it was that I've been cultivating myself since my teens. I was pretty fatuous when I was young, but as I got older and more honest, I pursued only genuine interests. I'm not brilliant If I were, I wouldn't have to work so hard at learning new things (and remembering old ones!)
Cultivation sounds precious today. It certainly takes a lot of time. I thought I would try to argue the case for cultivation as a pleasure, because that is how I've acquired such cultivation as I've achieved.
When it comes to books about current affairs, I bore very easily. I'm willing to put in a lot of thought, but I don't want to be raked over padded-out lists of problèmes du jour. Happily, there is no risk of tedium in Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India. Written by an Oxford-educated reporter at the Financial Time, In Spite of the Gods crackles with wit and understanding. Mr Luce dispenses a boatload of information in a digestible drip, and his chapters are studded with portraits of interesting and notable Indians alike. Perhaps because he's English, Mr Luce writes as though everyone has already had enough of the British Raj, and there is very little about it. For someone my age, who grew up during India's first decade of independence, this account of the ever-more-powerful India makes sense of the great changes that have occurred in India's economic climate since the days of Jawaharlal Nehru.
If I recall correctly, Mr Luce does not once use the term "Subcontinent." I wonder what that's about.
Herewith I tip my hat to Édouard, at Sale Bête, for alerting me to the referenced phrase, which appears at John Rogers's blog, Kung Fu Monkey. Follow the link below to read the entire passage.
Do we on the left have the testicular fortitude to recognize the moment when fruitful stability becomes fatal sclerosis? I ask myself that question every day. So far, dreamlike as it is to say so, we live in fruitful stability. That is not an illusion. But as injustice and irresponsibility mount up, stability petrifies. How do we properly fear the corruption of the Republic when fear itself is so powerfully confusing?
The New Yorker is stuffed with good stuff this week. There's an article about the folly - well, that's what I think it is - of fMRI-based lie detection. There's a neat piece on hedge-fund simulation at bargain prices that I didn't quite catch the first time around. Joan Acocella writes brilliantly about the Waughs. But the indispensable piece is Ken Auletta's "Promises, Promises," an fair-minded report of Rupert Murdoch's courtship of The Dow Jones Company. For a link to the story and my two-cents' worth of Friday Front, click below.
¶ Ken Auletta on the Murdochs and the Bancrofts, in The New Yorker.
A funny cartoon has already appeared in The New Yorker. Man walks into his apartment with a bolt of lightning stuck in his back. Wife reminds him that she warned him against reading "the Hitchens book." The joke, of course, is that the man is still walking. He may have to see a specialist about removing the lightning bolt, and he may even experience some pain. As a killer, however, the lightning bolt is a dud. What the cartoon captures perfectly is the idea that it's not nice to be disrespectful about religion.
Christopher Hitchens is not nice.
What if our economics was humanist instead of "scientific"?
Has anyone ever even talked of a humanist economics?
If not, I claim dibs.
¶ John Lardner on Uchitelle, Bogle, and LeRoy, in The New York Review of Books.
With Memorial Day behind us, I have the empty feeling that nothing is going to change very much on the political front until Labor Day is also behind us. The Democrats may have recaptured Congress last November, but I can think of nothing that has changed since then. The Bush Administration continues to be arrogant and out of touch, and the Iraqi misadventure slogs on. Rudy Giuliani is consolidating his candidacy, while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continue their kabuki. Why, when poll after poll shows that most Americans want an end to the war, does it persist? The other day, I wrote about the problem with polls, but even assuming them to be trustworthy there would still be something missing. What? Paul Krugman put his finger on what's missing in his column on Monday.
Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls show a public utterly disillusioned with Mr. Bush and anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not clear that the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is that the nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering. And that hasn’t happened yet.
Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic.
When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.
And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.
But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to graves at Arlington.
Americans need to be roused to their better selves. Ideally, the Republican Party would act responsibly and stop manipulating anxieties for purely political purposes. Perhaps the Democrats could persuade a plausible presidential nominee to sit this election out and spend the campaign denouncing the fear-mongerers as such.
Not too long ago, I bought a copy of Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, because I thought that Kathleen ought to know how ordinary men behave when there aren't any women around. I ended up reading the book first, and in one captivated day (I did nothing else). I expected a book about the adventures of passing as a man, but that's not what Ms Vincent wrote. As she herself says, passing was the easy part. The hard part was learning how tough life is for most guys. The alleged power and privilege of belonging to the dominant gender seems to be nothing more than smoke; in actuality, men are crippled by stoic homophobia on the one hand and the unrealistic expectations of women on the other. Ms Vincent was very surprised to find where her sympathies lay, and, when she recovered from the experiment, she was very happy to be a woman.
Until yesterday afternoon, I was going to write about Peter Hessler's immensely intriguing article about "The Great Wall of China," which, it should come as no surprise to anyone by now, is a Western construct. There is no "Great Wall." There are walls, here and there, but they are not continuous. What most people think of as "The Great Wall" is properly known as "The Ming Wall," because it was built by that late-medieval dynasty to protect Beijing, where the Ming emperors were installed in the Forbidden City (the Ming carried Chinese xenophobia to new and startling heights).
There is no body of academic scholars anywhere devoted to studying the Ming Wall. It has been left to amateurs, the most eminent of which - unbeknownst to many of the Chinese who also study the wall - is an American, David Spindler. Spindler, in the mid-Nineties was awarded a Master's Degree from Beijing University for his work on an ancient Chinese philosopher, Dong Zhongshu; after that, he went through Harvard Law and then worked for McKinsey & Company in Beijing. Now he just walks the wall. Quixotists will want to know about him. (Mr Hessler's piece is not on-line.)
Then, however, I read Michael Tomasky's piece in the current New York Review.
¶ Michael Tomasky on the Hope for Political Discourse, in The New York Review of Books.
As a rule, I regard David Brooks's presence on the Times's Op-Ed page as something of a Trojan Horse. Instead of Greeks, his column is often full of plausible conservative arguments that upon examination - examination by me, that is - turn out to be more clever than sound.
Today, however, I'm in complete accord. "Wolfowitz's Big Mistake" goes straight to the heart of what's literally maddening about the Bush regime, it's ironclad determination to cooperate only with itself. Mr Brooks points out that even though the World Bank staff is composed primarily of people who vote Democratic, it would have been easy for Paul Wolfowitz to win support, if only he had made nice. But he "forfeited that opportunity by being aloof." Then Mr Brooks goes on to the nature of scandal itself.
The conflict of interest charge is out of proportion to the hubbub. But scandals are like that - they are never about what they purport to be about. The Clarence Thomas scandal wasn't about a hair on a soda can. The Larry Summers scandal wasn't about comments at a conference. Most scandals are pretexts for members of an establishment to destroy people they don't like.
In most scandals, people adjust their standards of rectitude, depending on whether they support or oppose the person at issue. The subjects enemies whip themselves into a fever of theatrical outrage, and the subject's defenders summon up fits of indignation at the lies of the accusers. Scandals are playgrounds for partisans, and everybody gets to play the rose of the junior high school bully, ganging up on whoever seems weakest and most alone.
Although I have very little good to say of the American electorate, I wonder if it isn't scandal-fatigue that has rendered it so inattentive. I myself cannot get worked up about various eminence's awful but entirely incidental misdeeds - not, at least, while genuine problems, such as the debt balloon and the abrasion of our regulatory structures, go utterly unchecked. Is "popular culture" to blame for the normalization of junior high school behavior?
Although I agree with everything that David Brooks has to say today, I don't agree with some of his silences. I suppose I ought to be happy that he doesn't include the very real Alberto Gonzales scandal in his list. In an adjoining essay, "He's Impeachable, You Know," Frank Bowman writes,
The president may yet yield and send Mr Gonzalex packing. If not, Democrats may decide that to impeach Alberto Gonzalez would be politically unwise. But before dismissing the possibility of impeachment, Congress should recognize that the issue here goes deeper than the misbehavior of one man. The real question is whether Republicans and Democrats are prepared to defend the constitutional authority of Congress against the implicit claim of an administration that it can do what it pleases and, when called to account, send an attorney general of the United States to Capitol Hill to commit amnesia on its behalf.
It seems that we are all in agreement about murder: it's wrong. How to punish it may be unclear, but murder has no defenders.
Why then, are we in such disagreement about handguns, which have only one purpose: murder. ("Self-defense" is a delusion. As Adam Gopnik observes in The New Yorker this week, "If having a loaded semi-automatic on hand kept you safe, cops would not be shot as often as they are.) And yet, according a poll reported in today's Times*, 64% of Americans are opposed to a ban on handguns.
Surely there is no stronger evidence of the failure of American, and Democratic Party, leadership. If Americans cannot be persuaded that the civilian possession of handguns is as wrong as murder, then I don't much see the point of democracy in America.
*Not as of this writing online, but appearing on page A22 of the Late Edition.
The news this week has been, to say the least, demoralizing. Everything that I know about the Virginia Tech massacre I know from the Times and from the few Web logs that I've read that have mentioned it. There is really nothing to say that hasn't been said in response to other recent American disasters.
It was fun, sort of, to read the excoriating editorial about the Attorney General, "Gonzalez v Gonzalez," in today's paper. But then it stopped being fun. That such a doofus could rise to a position of eminence is proof that our political culture is both corrupt and demented.
So pardon me while I take refuge in my ivory tower.
¶ Cynthia Ozick on critics; Siddhartha Debs on Roberto Bolaño, in Harper's.
Although I've never listened to Don Imus on the radio, and have no intention tuning in, I believe that NBC's bow to the forces of political correctness is a terrible mistake. Mr Imus may make racist remarks, but the simple fact is that those remarks have an audience. So long as the entertainer's remarks steer clear of the imperative mood, openly urging listeners to act on their prejudices, market forces ought to be allowed to determine whether his show is viable. By acceding to the likes of Al Sharpton, NBC executives are showing that they don't know their own job, which is to keep the airwaves open to a diversity of voices.
This isn't to say that Don Imus oughtn't to be sanctioned. Banishing him from the airwaves for a couple of weeks - I've no problem with that. His fans need a time-out, too. Mr Imus said a bad thing, and he deserves to sit in the nuisance corner for a while. And then he deserves to be forgiven. To drop his show is to brand him with a permanent (or semi-permanent) stigma; it is to withhold forgiveness. And for what? For being rude and insulting. To say what he said about the Rutgers basketball players was uncivil and nasty. But it was not "racist." Quite the opposite! Can't anybody see that the remark was a lame attempt to sound like a bro'? If there's an issue here, it's low-grade Afro-American misogyny.
Don Imus is, on the evidence, a jackass. And so are his listeners. So are all the middle-aged white men who misguidedly cling to their youth by affecting the styles of the young, which they will never really understand. Hurt feelings aside - and I must say that I am very tired of living in the era of Hurt Feelings - Mr Imus's comment was what in the law is called a "harmless error." There was no real damage. To banish the talk-show host from MSNBC - to refuse forgiveness - is both childish and infantilizing. Taking Don Imus off the air is not going to raise anybody's consciousness. He ought to be on the air until, like me, no one listens.
You have to love social science. From the Tierney Lab at the Times:
Similarly, according to the study, a 5-foot-0 guy would need to make $325,000 more than a 6-foot-0 man to be as successful in the online dating market. A 5-foot-4 man would need $229,000; a 5-foot-6 man would need $183,000; a 5-foot-10 man would need $32,000. And if that 6-foot-0 man wanted to do as well as a 6-foot-4 man, he’d need to make $43,000 more.
Is it Valentine's Day? Or is there some other item in the calendar that I'm unaware of and that prompted the editors of the Science Times sections to barrage readers with several feature articles about Topic A?
Yesterday, I had lunch with my francophone friend and fellow carnetier, Édouard, at the Cornelia Street Café. I asked Édouard how he sustained his interest in politics, and he very lucidly explained that he's not so much interested in the wrongdoing of the Bush Administration as he is in the impact that a waspish Blogosphere is having on both Congress and the media ("the media" meaning, very largely, The New York Times). It is certainly true that Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo is a national hero, slugging away at such malefactors as Randy Cunningham and, now, Alberto Gonzales. But the feeling that American politics has altogether gone off the rails dispirits me greatly. If we have a system, it's broken. (My choice-du-jour of culprit is Buckley v Valeo). When I read this morning that the President has just resorted to three recess appointments of conservative clowns who would never be confirmed by today's Senate, I feel more than ever that I'm living in something that ought to be called post-America.
A big donor to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth will be our ambassador to Belgium. A vocal critic of government regulation will head the Office of Management and Budget. Andrew Biggs will be deputy commissioner of the Social Security Agency, whose services he would like to privatize. "All three are extraordinarily bad appointments," opines the Times, "- and all three more reminders of how Mr Bush's claims of wanting to work with Congress's Democratric leadership are just empty words."
Presidential shenanigans, however, are really nothing to worry about, compared with the resistance to doing anything about global warming.
¶ Behind Global Warming: John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.
Surely the greatest difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraqi misadventure is the realignment of the military's symbolism. The armed forces no longer provide a banner that only conservative supporters of the war are likely to wave. "Support the troops" has become profoundly ambiguous, as much an anti-war slogan as pro-. My primary objection to what we're doing in Iraq has always been the outrage of invading a country in order to effect regime change, but my concern for ill-equipped and poorly-trained soldiers is a very close second.
Robert Wright writes today about how growing up on Army bases informed his liberal outlook. ("My Life in the Army.") He also discusses the love that good officers have for their troops - a love that has been constrained by political interference in Iraq.
Sending people into battle isn't something a good person does with detachment. Before the Iraq war, when the Army chief of staff, Gen Eric Shinkseki, testified that the postwar occupation would require hundreds of thousands of troops, he was showing not just prudence but devotion. He didn't want his soldiers needlessly imperiled.
As a reward for his devotion, General Shinseki was disparaged by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld wanted to show how cheap war can be, and now our soldiers are paying the price. I wish some people on the left had a deeper respect for the military, but lately the left isn't where the most consequential disrespect has come from.
The crowning indignity was Abu Ghraib, an outrage that was initiated by civilians high in the Bush administration and has stained the US military's hard-earned honor, strengthening stereotypes that I know are wrong.
In the Vietnam era, I would not have been likely to sympathize with the perpetrators of such an outrage, but now I regard the soldiers who ended up taking the rap at Abu Ghraib to have been no less victimized than the unfortunate prisoners by a situation in which remote corporate interests had placed them.
Abu Ghraib comes up in the Times's Science section as well. Claudia Dreifus interviews Philip G Zimbardo, the social psychologist who devised the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 - only to call it off when a colleague complained to him, "It's terrible what you're doing to those boys." Dr Zimbardo more recently testified on behalf of Sgt Chip Frederick, a soldier who was ultimately sentenced to an eight-year term as a prisoner himself. When asked if his was not, in effect, absolving Sgt Frederick of personal responsibility, Dr Zimbardo explains that
"... human behavior is more influenced by things outside than inside. The "situation" is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training. There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you're not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.
Louis XVI, Benedict XVI... can we arrange a switch? Louis was actually a good old boy who was true, in his way, to his school. Benedict is not so worthy.
The title of Elaine Sciolino's story, "Typical French Town Is Split Over Elections," is misleading. Ms Sciolino's report is all about voters who can't make up their minds about "Sarko, Ségo," or the self-styled Third Way, François Bayrou.
The indecision cuts across class and ethnic lines, uniting workers, merchants, union leaders, students, bureaucrats, the children of immigrants and the unemployed. Even voters who have chosen a candidate confess that their support is shallow at best.
Everyone Ms Sciolino talks to appears to have surrendered to a certain realistic cynicism: none of the candidates, if elected, will fulfill campaign promises.
Has Jacques Chirac's careerism been so corrosive as to undermine the French electorate's faith in representative government? Or does a Yoplait worker, Jean-Pierre Bertin, put his finger on the problem when he says, "France is always complaining. We always complain. But we never take action."
France today is like a guy who's sleeping in. He's very comfortable - oh! so comfortable. He would like to stay where he is forever. Trouble is, he has to pee. Five more minutes, he says. And keeps saying. Until finally he sweeps the bedclothes away and lurches to his feet. He knows that there's no point in going back to bed; that delicious comfort has been lost forever. Life goes on.
France has been dawdling in a bed of bloated public-sector employment and stringent job-protection regulation. It would seem that everyone in France must have a family member who works for the government, or who holds a job thanks only to laws that make it difficult to fire employees. Why, in other words, would anyone outside the functionally excluded pool of magrebin children want to change the system? But the system must be changed - who knows how.
Charles DeGaulle was the last man truly to lead the French, and even the slightest glance at his character and competence makes it painfully clear that there is no one like him on the scene today. French voters are probably going to have to learn to make do without magisterial authorities. They - the voters - are supposed to be the ultimate authorities. They're the ones who will have to decide to get out of bed - who ought to be making that decision now. Democracy goes on.
Rory Stewart is a young British diplomat who is redefining what it means to be a "British diplomat." A former soldier, he is now very much a man of peace, overseeing the reconstruction of civil society in the Kabul region. He was reluctant, he writes in an Op-Ed column today entitled "What We Can Do," "to help re-establish ceramics, woodwork and calligraphy and restore part of the old city of Kabul." But he found that these were objectives in which Afghans were keenly interested, and thriving markets emerged, at least according to him. He modestly asserts that there are many more successful projects running throughout Afghanistan.
My experience suggests that we can continue to protect our soil from terrorist attack, we can undertake projects that prevent more people from becoming disaffected, and we can even do some good. In short, we will be able to do more, not less, than we are now. But working with what is possible requires humility and the courage to compromise.
We will have to focus on projects that Iraqis and Afghans demand, prioritize and set aside moral perfectionism; work with people of whom we don't approve; and choose among lesser evils. We will have to be patient. We should aim to stop illegal opium growth and change the way that Iraqis or Afghans treat their women. But we will not achieve this is the next three years. We may never be able to build a democratic state in Iraq or southern Afghanistan. Trying to do so through a presence based on foreign troops creates insurgency and resentment and can only end in failure.
"You are saying," the politician replies, "that we ought to sit back and do nothing." On the contrary I believe we can do a great deal. But ought implies can. We have no moral obligation to do what we cannot do.
In other words, as has been clear to me since before the Iraqi misadventure was even undertaken, the problem lies not in the Middle East but in arrogant, apparently faith-based ideologues in Washington: the people who agree about "ought" implying "can" but who believe in the moral obligation to undertake the impossible. Especially the impossible. "Bring it on!"
Barry Schwartz in the London Review of Books, writing about Avner Offer's The Challenge of Affluence:
Offer points out how much we care about what he calls 'regard,' how we look to others. Status or regard can be derived from many things: virtues of character, occupation, acts of kindness or charity and of course wealth. In a society in which efforts are concentrated on increasing GDP, and life is oriented toward consumption, wealth becomes an increasingly important yardstick of status, and other things recede into the background. Thus the treadmill: how much wealth is enough? The answer is: more wealth than your neighbours. A rising tide that lifts all boats doesn't change your own relative position; you may be a better car, but you won't get more status. The result is a kind of arms race of wealth acquisition that thrives on inequality but leaves no one better off.
The disgust roused in me by this morning's House & Home story, "The Year Without Toilet Paper," is as visceral as the most rabid homophobe's response to the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Act (a bill that I support). I have an overpowering desire to exterminate (why beat around the bush?) preening and precocious urban environmentalists like Michelle Conlin and Colin Beavan, who ought to be thrown out of their Lower Fifth Avenue building for keeping a composter in their apartment.
Someday, I'm sure, the post-consumer life that the Conlin-Beavans are trying to lead will be forced upon all of us, but I expect an industrial, not a Thoreauvian, solution. That is, we will finally apply our enormously sophisticated technology to the task of minimizing its own impact. What the Conlin-Beavans are doing is a retrograde, autarkic form of playing house.
Those who did not experience the folly of the Sixties seemed doomed to repeat them. "If I was a student," Ms Conlin tells Penelope Green, "I would march against myself." The more telling quote is Mr Beavans.
Like all writers, I'm a megalomaniac," Mr Beavan said cheerfully the other day. "I'm just trying to put that energy to good use."
The far more urgent task is ridding Manhattan, and perhaps the entire Metropolitan Area, of diesel trucks.
It's not something that I'm proud of, but I rarely read the Letters to the Editor in the Times. (Lately, I haven't been looking much at the editorial page itself. I'm in agreement with most of the positions taken by the Times editorial staff, but that's just it: what's new?) Today, however, a passage from a letter from Daniel J Callaghan, of Manchester, New Hampshire, caught my eye.
The administration began this war four years ago with inadequate planning in Iraq and disregard for those who would serve. As a result, the war has become a quagmire in Iraq and more than a million veterans have returned home to face insufficient care and services.
I looked up and saw that Mr Callaghan's was one of six letters gathered under the rubric "On the 4th Anniversary of the War." I read them all and agreed with them all. Ita Hardesty Mason, of Kingston Spring, Tennessee, writes, "We have more enemies now, not friends." Meg Hillert, of Dallas, reminds us that "If America were in Iraq's shoes, we would fight to the death to protect our country, families, and way of life." Cy Shain, of San Francisco, regrets that "We are paying a heavy price for our haste to invade Iraq without having a full appreciation of the fatal consequences and painful complications or our actions." Judy Brewton, of Stamford, Connecticut, lashes out at the President. "From the outset of this falsified war, George W Bush has used America's soldiers cheaply - almost as if they were poker chips."
But if I had to choose only one of these letters to endorse as my own, it would be the one written by Rick Armstrong, of Brooklyn.
Frank Rich reveals that 71 percent of sampled Americans supported the war on March 19, 2003. He also mentions that on March 17, 2003, NBC cut short its news coverage to show "Fear Factor" because it knew that was where the ratings were.
Both of these examples show that in the end, American citizens deserve the blame for this war because politicians respond to perceive voter approval.
The buck stops here.
What exactly is critical thinking? There's a Wikipedia entry that suggests an approach to understanding the matter, but it's written at a fairly high level of abstraction. What it boils down to in my view is a corrective for the natural virtuosity at self-justification that accompanies average-to-superior intelligence. Most of "what stands to reason" generally doesn't, for the simple reason that reason hasn't been applied.
In The New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco reviews six books about the "Scandals of Higher Education." Which is worse, madly skewed admissions policy or the failure to educate the lucky ones who get in?
This week's Friday Front.
Because I never read the paper yesterday, I breezed through it this morning and didn't read Nicholas Wade's "A United Kingdom? Maybe" until Eric pointed to it this afternoon. The article reports findings that the DNA of the English and the Irish doesn't significantly differ. The English aren't a "later" people who forced the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots into the hinterlands. What if there were no Irish or British "people"? As in "race"; as in "nation." What if the Gaelic tongue came to the Atlantic Isles as part of the agricultural division of labor package? Unaccompanied by a handful of farmers from the Continent?
I was reminded of a wonderful little book that I picked up at the National Gallery (DC) bookshop a few years ago. In The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2001, 2003), Patrick Geary more or less explodes the idea pf great throngs of biologically related Huns, Vandals and Visigoths, sweeping out of central Asia and forcing the current occupants of Europe to find somewhere to sweep to. It is a nightmare concocted by Roman historians and Christian annalists as they grappled with the disorders that followed the collapse, very much from within, of the Roman Empire.
As the boundaries between Roman and Barbarian dissolved, what today is called "identity politics" became one means of organizing and motivating followers. New constellations claimed names of "ancient" peoples. Old polities vanished into the melting pot of Gothic, Hunnic, or Frankish lordship. Some were never to reappear. Heterogeneous groups of adventures and defeated enemies agreed to accept a common leader and, in time, a common identity. In other circumstances, opposition leaders, claiming to embody the ancient tradition of a people, might lead their followers to conquest and a new future or else to annihilation.
This is all a reminder that the Europeans who embarked on the Age of Exploration were already exponents of highly developed racism.
A century ago, the United States was not a nation in the traditional sense. Its inhabitants came from all over. Time seems to have clouded that distinction. Americans whose families have occupied this country for four generations or more think of themselves as more "American" than other people. (The same thing happened in the early Nineteenth Century, before the great influx of European immigrants.) I wonder how many kids today are unaware that the United States was not established when Noah's Ark touched dry land.
I've no way of knowing how many North American Pompadourians tuned in to the second and final episode of Jeanne Poisson, Madame de Pompadour on TV5 this evening, but I hope that we'll all connect. It was a preposterous soap opera, not because it was wildly unfaithful to the facts - it wasn't, not wildly - but because it would have bored the Marquise to death. All that royal family contumely! Who knew that the dauphin (Damien Jouillerot, in a supremely unendearing performance) was such a pain in the ass? Until this show was made, he was simply a cipher who predeceased his father, making way for Louis XVI. Now he's someone to detest! In Jeanne Poisson, art and politics take second fiddle to tirades out of The Queen.
Hélène de Fougerolles turns out to be a magnificent Pompadour. You don't think so at first; she's much too easygoing and, in the American sense of the word, fresh. But she ages into the part, so to speak. She does her best with impossible lines and ridiculous, silent-movie situations. She manages to honor the woman she's reincarnating while playing to a gallery of people who have no idea of Pompadour's singularity. The best joke comes at the end, when the credits name the lady's surviving mansions. Dont, as the French say - in their abominable conceit considering it a complete sentence - the official residence of the French Président, Le palais d'Élysée. Imagine old Bushois, dying to get out of a house rebuilt by a woman. I mean young Bushois.
When I say that Charlotte de Turckheim is also fantastic, as Marie Leszczyńska - Louis XV's queen - it's quite as though, what with all these aristocratic names, the very court had come back to life to impersonate itself. Happily, there is Vincent Perez as Louis XV. M Perez is quite above the aristocracy - and abysses below it. I have never seen royalty played with such conviction. An extraordinarily handsome man (as Louis XV certainly was) puts more faith in his God than in his looks - now, that's sincerity! I don't know how M Perez kept a straight face, but perhaps it was remuneration in ducats.
The only thing wrong with Jeanne Poisson is that Joan Crawford isn't in it. Well, she is in it, somewhere, motivating the actors to do their best with ridiculous material. The show a raté les Énarques - precious few genuine locations were made available for filming. Les BCBG decided that the project was beneath them. It was - and their disapproval matters. Jeanne Poisson gives us a Pompadour whose primary legacy was the screwing up of a happy family, and the humiliation of a king who let himself be advised by a woman. I suppose it's not insignificant that TV5 is operated by Le Figaro. They'll let Catherine Deneuve sing the praises of France's second greatest arts patron (Pompadour would have been the first to hail Louis XIV). But when they address her life, she's just a powdered pute.
Which is wrong.
Jenny Diski, one of the great voices of the London Review of Books, reports on Second Life. If you are a regular reader of this site and the host of an avatar at Second Life, the time to speak up is now.
Ms Diski runs a moderately agreeable blog. She doesn't post very often, but when she does, the news is news. How about a red-brick university's taking To The Lighthouse off the syllabus because it's "too difficult"?
You're right. It's my generation that's supposed to be shot. Don't shoot me!
We can't know what we don't know; we can just have a good idea of some matters that have got to be cleared up in a way that will add to what we do know. For the earlier millennia of human history, what was known and knowable was set in stone, and philosophers busied themselves with interpreting it. Ever since the Renaissance, however, we have lived with a bang of increased knowledge that bangs louder and more frequently every year, so that now, for most of us, it is just a staticky hum. Most pessimists will tell you that we still haven't learned anything about the real human mysteries, but there's reason to believe that those have only recently begun to be studied in a meaningful way, through neuroscience. Pat and Paul Churchland are philosophers who have devoted their careers to scrutinizing neuroscientific concepts and applying them to life outside the laboratory. Larissa MacFarquhar profiles them in The New Yorker.
I need a drink. My dopamine levels
need lifting.
Read about the Churchlands at Portico.
Catching up on The Nation, I came upon a passage that had, for me, the effect of a bombshell in reverse: it created order where there had only been disarray. It's Terry Eagleton, reviewing Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Dancing in the Streets.
Sport is one of the most formidable adversaries of the political left, one that offers ordinary people a uniquely powerful alternative to political engagement: cherished traditions, camaraderie, strenuous competition, a glittering pantheon of heroes and heroines, factual erudition, aesthetic appreciation, technical prowess and a good deal more. It is all rather more entrancing that the average cell meeting. The bad news for baseball-loving leftists is that they are going to have to choose.
I try not to write about sports, because I have nothing good to say about the subject. Sometimes I think, grand-inquisitorially, that it's just as well that the circuses keep the hoi polloi distracted, because who knows what mischief they'd get up to if it weren't for Super Bowls. Another inversion: whereas as racists usually get on well with individual members of the despised group by treating them as exceptions, I have no strong feelings about the mass of sports fans out there but am disappointed and hurt whenever a friend tells me that he's just enjoyed a game. My antipathy has grown much worse in the current century, because I am convinced that American sports madness is a sine qua non for the election of types the likes of George W Bush.