Very Brief Spider-Man 2 Reaction - That . . . was . . . AWESOME!!

Undue Burden - It's not like Eugene Volokh thinks much of me, either, but I've always considered his specialty to be showy moral handwringing on the way to siding with Power anyway. The further you get from standard Republican issues like guns and university speech codes, the more likely he is to arrive, with exquisite regret, at the conclusion that the State, particularly when helmed by George W. Bush, must have its way. Now he has spun out a lengthy imprecation against the Supreme Court's recent detainee ruling on the grounds that our enemies may use our freedoms against us. This is bog-standard Republican authoritarianism, Kaye Grogan but in well-turned prose. It is fitting that a man who, hypothetically you understand, came out as reluctantly pro-torture, has to torture so many elements of his nightmare scenario into place ("It's like World War II! Only not against governments! But the enemies have generals! And we have allies, but they can't hold their own prisoners! Just like World War II! Even though that WAS against governments! And 50,000 prisoners surrender en masse! Even though we're fighting an insurgency! They do it just to fuck with us!")

As Gene Healy has said, there's nothing like a war to separate the men from the boys ideologically. The "pro-liberty" Volokh has been a purveyor of fear for years now. Fear is not so manly, and not so good a ground in which to nourish liberty. I hope Volokh enjoys his federal judgeship. I hope we don't mind it so much.

For a more considered response see Crooked Timber. For funnier, see the Medium Lobster. Even - gasp! - Brad DeLong has gone funny.

Fat Lady Sings - This just in:

Inspired by the early handover of sovereignty in Iraq, President George W. Bush employed the element of surprise once more last night, holding the U.S. presidential election four months early.

The election, about which only top Bush administration officials were notified, went exceedingly well for the president, who carried all fifty states and garnered approximately one hundred percent of the vote.

Mr. Bush's victory speech, which he had originally scheduled for eleven P.M. last night, was at the last minute rescheduled to nine P.M., once again capitalizing on the element of surprise.

In his speech, Mr. Bush admitted that he might have had a more difficult time getting reelected if the American people had actually been notified about the time and date of the voting, but added, "A win's a win, right?"

Mr. Bush's second inauguration is slated to take place on January 20, 2005, but administration officials acknowledged that it could happen "at any time."

"For all I know it has already happened," one aide said.

From the Borowitz Report.

Surprise! - Happy "A Republic if You Can Keep It" Day to our Mesopotamian wards. Mindles H. Dreck makes a plausible argument that keeping to the schedule - okay, the schedule we accelerated in November - is the smartest thing we could do, inevitable problems notwithstanding. From the dovish side, Alan Bock thinks it's a crazy idea, but it just might work.

Oh by the Way - Daniel Drezner points out that, in addition to the headline-grabbing pooh-poohing of any Iraqi role in supporting Al Qaeda, the 9/11 Commission report also finds evidence for official Saudi support of Al Qaeda wanting. Well, shucks.

There are two casualties here, though on my reading, Drezner stresses only one: Iraq War opponents who criticized the Bush administration for going easy on the Saudi Royal Family for pecuniary reasons (that's you, Michael Moore), and Iraq War enthusiasts who are convinced that Saudi Arabia needs to be regime-changed too (that's you, neo-whatever person).

Blowing Up - The actual journalism version of my old blog item about Steve Englehart's prescient 1973 suicide bomber story in Marvel Comics' Avengers series is online at the American Spectator today. And check out the cool "cover" graphic while it's still there.

The article includes quotes from Englehart and a (qualified) defense of suicide tactics, because I understand readers want controversy.

Drat the Luck - How might history have changed if the first World Trade Center bombers weren't so stupid as to try to get their deposit back on the rental truck? That instantly turned them from fearsome killers to figures of fun in the public eye, and likely some official ones too. It invited us to underestimate Al Qaeda, and we did.

Hey, Why Wouldn't That Work for Me?? - Diana Moon writes of David Brooks that

His success is an affront to all decent hardworking people everywhere. This is a guy who has no particular expertise in his field and by dint of a pleasing personality and modest writing skills and tremendous energy has leveraged his way to prominence.

Hey, I'll take that job! Oh right: pleasing personality and tremendous energy required. Shit!

Also, she offers an even-handed assessment of Farenheit 911. (Scroll down. Look for "Farenheit 411" because typos are like that.)

Wars and Rumors of . . . Whatever - On the radar: Worldnet Daily's Joseph Farah reports that Iraqi insurgents used mustard gas in an attack on Baghdad. So far, the story does not seem to have been confirmed by any less Worldnet Dailyish outlets. It is possible, though, that we will soon have evidence that Saddam's Iraq had some World War I-era weapons around. Ooh. As with the single sarin shell that detonated last month, the story, if confirmed, will divide people reliably in twain: those looking for an excuse (retroactive) to invade Iraq will hug the news like a new, rare beanie baby; those holding out for evidence of a genuine Saddamist threat to the United States will yawn. I of course am in the latter camp. If you really want to kill someone, skip the mustard gas and get a gun.

The other "big" "news" is that the INC has a captured document showing that in the mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein offered to let Osama bin Laden broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda from Iraqi soil and explored the possibility of a more extensive operational relationship than that. A US intelligence task force says the document appears to be authentic. It's an interesting bit of history, and it would be a worthwhile starting point for an investigation - if it came to your intelligence shop and you knew nothing else about the history of Iraqi-al Qaeda contacts, you would, as a responsible analyst or officer, go Hm, and start a probe. It dates from a period before bin Laden's "declaration of war" against the US in 1998, though after early attacks since attributed to him. It dates from well before President Bush's "al Qaeda mulligan," which is not often enough remembered, in his famous speech of September 21 2001:

And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

The AQ mulligan was designed to let bygones be bygones with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other countries, conditioned on future behavior. There appears to have been a silent "except Iraq" in the teleprompter text. Cutting that would have saved us a lot of trouble.

Nevertheless, if it were the first thing you saw, it should arouse suspicion and inspire a lot of digging. It's not the first thing we've seen, though. There's been quite a lot of digging. None of it has unearthed persuasive evidence that Iraq helped Al Qaeda attack the United States, either pre-mulligan or post. Everything that turns up is some variant of "we should have lunch sometime," and all of it is old. From the perspective of today or even late 2001, it's like finding old notes in someone's grad school apartment clutter that got passed around about some high school crush. We keep hearing that so-and-so sort of likes so-and-so and is going to ask her out, but we never find the prom corsage, the tux rental slip or the used condoms.

Meanwhile, the new document, if authentic, casts a cold unflattering light on the Mylroie/Woolsey/March Hare thesis that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center attack. To the extent that that bomb was an Al Qaeda operation, the fact that, two or three years later, Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda are still singing "Getting to Know You . . . " tends to disconfirm Iraqi cooperation in that attack.

Bonus Fitness Blog Item - Joyner surveyed reactions to C2, the new lower-sugar Coke drink the other day. I've now had some myself and, absolutely, it's good. Let me clarify: if, like me, your taste buds are not currently sensitized to high-sugar drinks (okay, high corn-juice drinks), it's good. Nice cola taste and sweet enough. Also tried Pepsi Edge, which, like C2, contains half the sweetener of the regular soda. I liked it well enough too, though I think I give the edge - oops - to the Coke product. Of course, I drank both from plastic bottles, and my rule is: Coke from bottles, Pepsi from cans.

Anyway, I enjoyed it. And yet, it's not . . . water. Since giving up sugared beverages at the end of 2002, I've really come to like drinking H₂O, and H₂O keeps your palate clear, among all its other benefits. I had a box of blackberries in the car with my Pepsi Edge, and they were the tartest-tasting blackberries in some time. Bad box, or screwed-up taste buds?

It's possible that I liked it because I'm not used to high-sugar beverages any more, and that the bad reports James collected are from people who are used to the sweet stuff. If they can't enjoy it, then it doesn't work as a step down for them as a regular drink. Meanwhile, if you can handle the aspartame and drink Diet Coke or Pepsi as your beverage of choice, switching to the "low-carb product represents not a substantial drop in calories and simple sugars but a substantial increase.

I'll keep it for special occasions. But I'd rather drink it than regular coke or pepsi.

Jealous of the Rhyme and the Rhyme Routine - I've really been getting back into poetry lately, reading and writing both, which is nice. Poetry and I were estranged for some years. There are various reasons, including politics - I started back in looking for Robinson Jeffers after all - but among them is the fruitful nagging that is Aaron Haspel's God of the Machine. Not that I expect Aaron himself to accrue much reward from my return - as a Wintersian, he's destined to dislike most poetry, surely including most of what I'll write, but art is like that.

Meanwhile, he's got a great new entry on grammar and prescriptivism in same. As for grammatical and usage distinctions I would like to save, they include

o hysterical and hilarious
o agitate and irritate
o the use of "me" and "I" rather than "myself" when appropriate, which is almost every frickin' time someone uses "myself"
o actually, now that I've thought of the last one, I'm way too angry to write any further on this topic!

So, back to poetry. Currently reading Jeffers, William Bronk and William Stafford. On deck, Dana Gioia's Interrogations at Noon and some William Carlos Williams. Also I need to finish the newest Brooks Haxton book. Jeffers and Bronk go together in a way: Jeffers effaces man, then Bronk effaces everything else. I suppose Stafford puts everything back in its place. Stafford and Williams are "let there be commerce between us" poets for me - when I was younger I had no use for them, largely because their injunctions about poetry pissed me off.

By the way, Poetry X has an index of last lines, which is always cool.

Mr. Language Person - At Obsidian Wings, von reminds readers of his campaign to stomp out the idiot phrase "homicide bomber," linguistic vice of Fox News, the White House and the dimmer sorts of warbloggers. While researching what will probably be my last American Spectator article this week, I learned that the substitution is even stupider and more counterproductive than von imagines. The very reason that groups like Hamas refer to suicide bombers as shahids ("martyrs") is to distract from the fact that the bombers killed themselves. Suicide is a sin to Muslims. We ought to not just insist on calling them "suicide bombers," we ought to italicise the "suicide" part - ought to chant it over and over again like Wonkette and "ass fucking". We ought to rub their noses in it.

Even rhetorically, national defense is too important to leave to hawks. They can't even get that right.

A Billion Here, A Billion There - President GW Bush , who has not vetoed a single bill in his first term so far, has increased spending faster than any president since the Richard Nixon-Gerald Ford two-step of the mid-seventies, according to a handy chart from the Independence Institute. That's total spending OR non-defense discretionary spending. Both categories' growth has outpaced growth under Democrat Jimmy Carter and heftily exceeds the spending growth rates of Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican GHW Bush.

As the Institute press release notes

In response, likely Democratic Party challenger John Kerry has maligned alleged spending cuts and called for even higher taxes and spending. The consequence is that we now have two parties competing to see which can grow government profligacy faster.

There is a solution, though: divided government.

Gaudy Night, the Continuing Series - "Genetic mutation turns tot into superboy."

Funtime's Over - One reason why there's been so little comics blogging here lately is because comics have become somewhat depressing. While I notoriously let loose a pro-superhero story meme, at no point have I denied that superhero stories can be bad, indeed, systematically bad. The blatant winding down of "NuMarvel," as talented or interestingly flawed creators put their toys back in the original packaging, has been a downer to experience. I can see it happening in practically every book I've enjoyed. In the case of Mark Waid and Mike Weiringo's Fantastic Four and Grant Morrison's New X-Men, the authors made a metafictional show of it, and those stories gained for the bittersweet resonances. Waid makes Jack Kirby the God of the Marvel Universe, but Waid, and every reader old enough to appreciate what Jack Kirby meant to Marvel, knows how the company treated him and can intuit what Waid is confessing as his recent auctorial handiwork gets literally erased. It's actually a hell of a story. Since then: whatever. Morrison's last New X-Men storyline is less obviously audacious, but by making the whole alternate future arc the subjunctive musings of the Phoenix, Morrison reminds us how the cosmology of corporate comics has deus ex machina built into it. (The machine from which the god steps when summoned runs Microsoft Excel and Oracle Financials.)

Bendis and Maleev's Daredevil counts as especially disappointing. While I disagree with his critics about the virtues of Bendis' dialogue, the recently concluded "King of Hell's Kitchen" arc can only be said to represent a failure of nerve. It's perfectly true that Bendis obfuscates just how Matt Murdock's decision to become "the new Kingpin" differed from what he had always done as a crimefighter anyway. The story is maddeningly vague on what compromises the new course entailed. Worse, it drags in psychology as a tool to tidy up the title's variance from standard. A fatal mistake since superhero stories will bear all the character you want to freight them with but cannot support psychology even a little bit. Beyond that, it's undignified and even pitiable: according to "King," everything that has happened in Daredevil since, in the real world, Bendis took it over, all the monumental decisions, the tribulations and their vanquishings, every hard choice and final resolution Matt Murdock made over the last four years of stories, is nothing but a symptom of the character's mental illness. That Bendis would put this retroactive construction on his own work dismays.

Elsewhere, Robert Morales, who may well have figured out how to write Captain America given time, sweeps off the stage the new girlfriend who was one of the title's chief lively elements, purely so the next writer won't have to deal with writing her out of the action himself. Bruce Jones' Hulk shows less "reset effect" so far. Aspects of the current Iron Man arc are enjoyable, but he's swapped strong if oversexed female supporting characters for negligible oversexed female supporting characters; and while we've all figured out by now that "the leader" of Home Base is The Leader, it would be nice if he'd come out and say this at some point.

Ironically, the bright spot on my Marvel pull list is the much-suspected Whedon-Cassaday Astonishing X-Men. This despite the awful new costumes (especially Cyclops' frogman suit). The dialogue is inconsistent, but the characters are strong and Whedon is actually pulling something of a magic act here: he plays up putting Grant Morrison's toys back in the box (look! costumes! superheroics!), but it's one of those trick boxes like magicians use. When he opens it back up, they won't be there at all. The plot thread about the doctor who claims to have found a "cure" for the mutant gene strikes me as eminently in the spirit of Morrison's New X-Men run. I'm no longer just willing to give this title a try, I'm hooked.

So, overall, a trough. Corporate comics will give you efflorescences of glory. But sooner or later every Marvel or DC Renaissance ends. It's time to pour out a 40 on the grave of NuMarvel, but there's no point in being bitter. We simply save our dollars and hope to catch the next wave.

A Fanboy's Quotes come from Neilalien:

So, are superhero readers arrested adolescents who fantasize about wielding power, or do they desire to submit to power? - It's not that the snob camp can't make up its mind between the two - it's that the snob camp will embrace any and all theories that pee in their straw man's Cheerios.

Oh, I said quotes, plural. So add

So where is your Fascist Line To Cross on that continuum? And where do you put different comic books on that continuum and in relation to where your Line is? What makes an action fascist? How do you define fascism? See what fun interesting discussions happen when you start examining superhero comic book literature seriously? Maybe capes aren't fascist, they're just well-suited for discussing fascism.

That's enough quoting. But there's plenty more great stuff in the same item.

Original Sin - I was corresponding with Diana Moon the other week about how the real problem in American politics is less The Neocons than "national greatness conservatism." It's an interesting question whether there's a one-to-one relationship between neoconservatives and national greatness adherants. Are there any neocons who would abjure the central precepts of "national greatness?" I'm pretty sure there are national greatness conservatives who don't properly qualify as neocons - Exhibit A being Vice President Dick Cheney.

Anyway, Gene Healy has dug up an apposite quote from Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes. It dates from 1997:

It was exciting to follow and write about ... Every press conference, I watched. Desert Storm was all I thought about or talked about. My stories concentrated on President Bush's heroic role in the war. As best I recall, he wasn't in a funk, not even for a single fleeting moment.

The Republican Party has been taken over by people who, like Barnes, consider war a tonic for the national soul. For them the atrocities of September 11, 2001, were not just a calamity. They were an opportunity. They are not to be trusted with the nation's defense because they are not trying to defend it. They're trying to purge the place.

Grrr! - Public Service Savings Days at Borders! Ironically, my libertarian principles require that I affirm their right to hold such a sale if they choose! Aaaaaaaaaaaugh! Borders - is - lying! But - if they are - lying - then they are - telling the truth! But if - !

Beats the Hell Out of Halliburton Day - Buffalo, NY celebrates the fortieth anniversary of the spicy chicken wing. And they're sending the "wing king" on

a four-city tour to promote the festival, and the rest of the region's assets.

"We're going to use this great icon to promote Buffalo tourism," Geiger said, as dozens lined up for free wings in the city's Niagara Square.

[ . . . ]

The wing tour includes stops in Pittsburgh and Erie, Pa., and Cleveland and Columbus, Ohio.

I suppose that, Pittsburgh excepted, Buffalo could look like an "up" destination from the perspective of those tour stops.

Waitaminute, free wings? I am so there.

My Life and Roleplaying - New 20' x 20' Room contributor Vincent Baker has the coolest "How I got into roleplaying games" story I have ever seen or expect to see.

This is Sports Center with Unqualified Offerings - So Good triumphed over Evil in the NBA Finals, but I noticed one aspect of that triumph that's worth printing.

I have a neighbor who works for the Journal and is pretty plugged in. He tells me that when rebounding machine Ben Wallace was with the Washington Wizards, he used to have a buddy, after practices, just throw the ball off the backboard so he could study how it bounced and practice chasing it. This is why, as my neighbor points out, it was stupid of the Wizards to get rid of Ben Wallace.

Sorry, I had to take a sob break there. Anyway, cut to Game 5 of the Finals and what I realized. You know that first foul shot of two that's dead whether it goes in or misses? In most games, the miss hits the floor and maybe someone sticks a hand out and gets it after a bounce or two, or maybe the ref gets it. And you know how the Lakers, especially Shaq, kept missing foul shots? Ben Wallace went and got every one of those balls. In the air. No matter how far up the lane it bounced or how far toward the opposite side of the aisle, Ben Wallace hopped out there and grabbed it. Not showy. Very businesslike, but he got them all and got them before they hit the ground.

I daresay this has something to do with why he got 22 rebounds in earnest that night, and something to do with why the Pistards scattered the Lakers like a bunch of old marbles.

Anonymous Admirer - Let's face it. I'm temperamentally inclined to like anyone who writes a book called Imperial Hubris and calls Woodrow Wilson a "bloody-handed fantasist." He certainly does sound apocalyptic, though, as quoted by Spencer Ackerman. All that stuff about how

Killing in large numbers is not enough to defeat our Muslim foes. With killing must come a Sherman-like razing of infrastructure. Roads and irrigation systems; bridges, power plants, and crops in the field; fertilizer plants and grain mills--all these and more will need to be destroyed to deny the enemy its support base. ... [S]uch actions will yield large civilian casualties, displaced populations, and refugee flows.

is not peacenik talk. Still, I wonder if the quotations, generous as they are, are completely in context. Our Author concludes the passage above with

Again, this sort of bloody-mindedness is neither admirable nor desirable, but it will remain America's only option so long as she stands by her failed policies toward the Muslim world.

Which suggests that the "Jacksonian" Sherman-style march through the Muslim Middle East is Anon's idea of the dire alternative to reconfiguring our policies. Puzzling out the excerpts, which is all I've got so far, and the interview with Spencer Ackerman linked above and Kevin Drum's e-mail interview with Ackerman, I get the impression that, if Anonymous sounds bloody-minded, it's because he's so pessimistic about the country's ability and willingness to change its policies. (Viz. Tacitus, who wants to lash the US to an Israeli-Kurdish mast and ride things out. His wry conclusion that riding things out "seems to be our core plan anyway" is hard to gainsay.) Anon's plans boil down to "reconsider" the nature of the US relationship to Israel and do something about our dependence on foreign oil. The latter is simply nowhere so easy technologically or economically as people like to pretend. The former would involve getting people like John McCain and Andrew Sullivan to realize that Israel is a whole separate country and not part of the United States, and it's considered impolite to bring that up.

So, he's gloomy. And that creeps out Matthew Yglesias. I think we need to separate Anonymous the analyst of our Road to Today from Anonymous the Advisor on our Road from Here. The latter writes "America is in a war for survival. Not survival in terms of protecting territory, but in terms of keeping the ability to live as we want, not as we must...." I still wonder about that. I put some credence in the Healy Theory:

My suspicion is that there really aren't a whole lot of Islamic radicals in-country who want to kill themselves to kill Americans. No other explanation fits the available data anywhere near as well.

This doesn't mean there's no danger, by any means. Islamist terrorists remain a threat to kill small, medium or even large numbers of Americans if they can find further "multipliers" like the exploding jet fuel times molten steel times gravity formula of not quite three years ago. And some group of them may obtain a real WMD - a nuke or subclass of weaponized germs - likely via the still-insecure ex-Soviet arsenal. It's stupid, as Gene says, to pursue policies that increase the number of Muslims who want to devote their lives to doing us harm or winking at those who want to do us harm. That kind of thing takes brainpower, so don't maximize the number of brains devoted to it.

But for the time being, I remain more in Gene's camp than Anonymous' when it comes to the scope of the threat we face. And I understand why Matt worries about Anon's bloody-mindedness. Diana Moon has been concerned for some time that some hawks are establishing an exterminationist rhetoric. As quoted, Anonymous' prescriptions could serve that program.

War is Harmful to . . . PROFITS and Other Living Things per the USA Today. Some of it you can chalk up to excuse-making, but not all.

TTFN - Father's Day'd out. Tomorrow we'll have some stuff about some stuff, including the NBA Finals and the nature of poetry. I'm working on another article too, so duty calls.

As a reminder, fitness blogging appears damned regularly on my LiveJournal. Actually, very little BUT fitness blogging appears on my LiveJournal. This week, equivocal praise for KFC's roast chicken strips meal, shilling for AquaJogger flotation belts and a Maryland running store testimonial. If you keep wondering, How is Jim's marathon training program coming anyway? it's where you find out.

Better Angels - Diana wonders "Why is Jim being so soft on Hitchens?" Hey, you know me, Loyal Reader - I just can't stay mad at people. Heck, if Glenn Reynolds himself suddenly slapped himself on the forehead and said, "Hey! How did I, a libertarian, succumb to a freaking cult of personality for a politician? And George W. Bush, yet?" I'd want to drive to Tennessee and give him a big ol' hug. That's just the kind of sweet guy I am. The thing about the latest Hitchens column that's disarming is that it is forthright about what has gone on there at the beginning:

I

In a recent public debate, so I was told, an American officer referred to the Abu Ghraib scandal as a "moral Chernobyl." You might think that this was overstating matters, even if in one important sense-because Chernobyl was morally an accident, albeit in some ways a "systemic" one - it is actually understating them.

But get ready. It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe ("I'm outraged more by the outrage") have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see. And one linguistic reform is in any case already much overdue. The silly word "abuse" will have to be dropped. No law or treaty forbids "abuse," but many conventions and statutes, including our own and the ones we have urged other nations to sign, do punish torture - which is what we are talking about here at a bare minimum.

Sometimes people remember what they used to know, and Hitchens knew that that torture and rape and murder of the helpless were always wrong. Not just wrong when Saddam did them; not just wrong when someone did them more often than we do, not just wrong when the US government decides to use it as an excuse for a war, not just wrong when We Decide. Always. Wrong.

I have hopes for this guy.

This gets into my hierarchy of values right now. The War has been the most important thing for some time. However, it is being superceded by the explicit threat to constitutional government contained in the recently-unearthed Pentagon and DOJ memos, and the clear and present danger to our national soul that is our progressive transformation into a torture state. Let me be clear: The War is the source of the other dangers. It's classic Hayek: the state intervention that necessitates further state intervention. However, the threats of untrammelled Presidential power and acceptance of torture are so great and so immediate that I will happily accept the aid of war supporters in opposing them. At some point we'll need to have a talk about how you could have thought things would go otherwise, but in the meantime, to the barricades, dude.

Happy Happy Web - Absolutely nothing about the Alzheimer's of the republic in this item! Instead there's

o Corporate rock hack of the week: Nickelback's first hit and most recent hit in a single MP3 at Nintendorks, one coming out the left speaker and one the right. Can you tell them apart? (Via costello-l.)

o I'm not so into Neal Stephenson, but Nate is, and he has a bigass review of The Confusion.

o More Outsourcing: Brooke has added some temporary guest bloggers to Obernews. Less Brooke makes me sad, but I already want Adrienne Aldredge to get her own blog when her guest stint is over.

o Speaking of guest bloggers, Josh Marshall has hired Spencer Ackerman from TNR and Daniel Drezner wants a guest blogger. I guess you're nobody now unless you've had one and been one too. Hey, I hosted the Talking Dog for a week once while his site was down. I just didn't go anywhere.

o An item on Aaron Haspel's Killing Puppies for the Sake of Art has me pondering, once again, the annoying question of how to define poetry. It bugs me that the other art forms don't seem to have the problem of being impossible to define except in terms of merit - you can come up with definitions of the novel or dance that don't make the bad novel or bad dance a contradiction in terms. But according to a lot of definitions of poetry, there are no bad poems, only non-poems.

The other problem is definitions that are too vague to be useful, like Stafford's "A poem is any piece of writing that demands a certain kind of attention." No doubt! And what kind would that be, sir? Oh that's right, you went and died without really saying. And Stafford is not to be trusted anyway. I remain convinced that, in the guise of a genial sage, he spent decades trying to fool the competition with spectacularly false advice about how to write poems.

I find myself returning to a tentative definition Henry Taylor offered some years ago: poetry is a piece of writing you either remember verbatim or feel uncomfortable not doing so. We might paraphrase this as "Poetry is writing that has no satisfactory paraphrase." At first blush, this seems as normative as anything else, but I'm not sure it needs to be. I can think of two legendarily awful poems, Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" and Mary Oliver's excresence about the stillborn kitten, that are pathetically bad, but that I would want to quote exactly in any discussion of their awfulness.

Finally, it occurs to me that many of the problems of defining poetry go right away if you simply declare that the "prose poem" is a delusion. It's not that short prose effusions don't exist. They can even be a legitimate art form. (I am partial to "The Solution" by Sharon Olds.) But we don't have to agree that they are "poetry." Here's a limit case. We know that booklength narrative poems can exist and have been written (or composed, pre-writing) for thousands of years. Could there be a booklength narrative prose poem? How would you tell it from a novel? Most likely by waving hands at it and saying it took the top of your head off or something.

Now is the Time - Useful Anne Applebaum column in the Post this morning:

To understand the magnitude of what may have gone on in America's secret prisons, you don't need special security clearance or inside information. Anyone who wants to connect the dots can do it. To see what I mean, review the content of a few items now easily found on the Internet.

And she does. All stuff you've seen, but useful to have it collected in such a prominent place. Along the way to her conclusion, she can't avoid one of those absurd constructions that comes of treating official institutions as if they were somehow entities rather than collections of variously self-interested actors, to wit:

But without political support, the military alone will be unable to push further, to uncover who, exactly, gave the military its orders . . .

Her conclusion is important:

Voters have some items of information available to them, as listed above. Voters -- ultimately the most important source of pressure on democratic politicians -- can petition their congressmen, their senators and their president for more. If they don't, the elections will be held, the subject will change. Without a real national debate, without congressional approval, without much discussion of what torture actually means and why it has so long been illegal at home and abroad, a few secret committees will have changed the character of this country.

Indeed, if the voters can't move the politicians, and the politicians aren't courageous enough to act alone, we may wake up one morning and discover that torture has always been legal after all.

Here we must change the word "can't" in the last sentence to either don't or won't. I am coming to have real concerns whether we as a people retain enough republican virtue to insist that the country remain true to itself. On one level, when Christopher Hitchens argues, in his latest column, that we're all to blame for the torture our government has been engaging in, it sounds like a cheap attempt to deflect blame from his warhawk buddies. But on another level, I think Hitchens is sincere, and also correct. Since September 11, 2001, this country has faced not an existential threat, but an essential one: who will we have the courage to be? Lately, abetted by an administration gone mad with vainglory, we have begun to fail that test. We take it as our right to commit the abuses we condemn in others. Worse, we take it as our right to transgress ourselves, and continue to condemn those who trespass likewise. I myself have been too willing to simply observe and record. This morning I will start making those calls Applebaum enjoins me to make. Please do likewise.

Leisure Reading - For you I dug up Stuart Taylor's Mumia article from 1995, "Guilty and Framed." There's also an article from a year later that's worth reading. Taylor's thesis is contained in the title of his first article, with the further wrinkle that, as he writes in the second one, "if he did, it was closer to manslaughter than to cold-blooded murder." Taylor is completely free of hippie-dippie Mumia fandom, and clearly expected to reach different conclusions than he ended up reaching.

Tortured Readings - Eve Tushnet finds an interesting-looking Stuart Taylor essay on the 2002 DOJ memo. I haven't had a chance to read it yet. In the excerpt Eve posts, he is kinder than other commentators to the sections construing the meaning of torture, but just as hard on the commander-in-chief clause that ate the constitution parts. I don't think the kind parts will prove justiifed, but have no doubt it's worth reading. Taylor is the moderately conservative legal analyst who famously concluded that Mumia Abu Jamal really had gotten jobbed, if I recall correctly.

Meanwhile, the Medium Lobster slips down a slope:

Imagine there is some weapon of mass destruction planted by terrorists in the heart of a city, ready to go off - a "ticking bomb," if you will. Would it be wrong to torture a terrorist to find the location of such a device and save the millions of lives at risk? Hardly. Now, what if instead of torturing a terrorist, interrogators had to torture a confederate of that terrorist - some associate who would know where the terrorist was so they could locate that ticking bomb? Is that dirtying of our hands such a high price to ask in the goal to protect millions? I think not. Now, what if instead of a terrorist's comrade, interrogators have a terrorist's relative or neighbor? Is it still justified to go as far to save innocent lives? I should hope so! And what if that terrorist has a lot of relatives and neighbors - hundreds, even? Would it be wrong to grant blanket authority to torture hundreds of prisoners knowing full well that any of them could have the crucial information required to save a city? Certainly not! And what if the threat we're faced with is not a bomb at all but an even more pernicious threat - a rogue nation with the potential capability to someday construct that bomb? Would it not be America's right - no, her duty - to invade that country, occupy it, and set up a system of torture-like interrogations to rid that country of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction once and for all? Absolutely!

Indeed, the most unsettling question being raised by these latest news items is not the issue of torture itself, but the question of whether America will be strong enough to use that torture to defeat the enemies of life and liberty. The Medium Lobster can only hope that this great nation will retain its nerve.

It's like Goldy and Bronzy, only made of Iron.

Nostalgie de la Boo-Boo - Martin Rowson of the Independent is ticked that cartoonists won't keep their comics in the toy box where he put them. Yeah, I'm only linking this because I wanted to use the title. Via Hanging Fire.

Tortured Readings - Katherine R at Obsidian Wings, who has been coming at the subject from every angle since when US complicity in torture was a matter for sidebars of back pages.

The 2002 DOJ Office of Legal Counsel Memo and Michael Froomkin's exegesis. (Via everybody and her sister.)

The Road to Surfdom offers a Call and Response. (Quick, who said, "Today, on the United Nations International Day in Support of Victims of Torture, the United States declares its strong solidarity with torture victims across the world. Torture anywhere is an affront to human dignity everywhere.")

Kieran Healy on a demurral. I can't say I'm surprised.

Robinson Jeffers tries to cheer you all up.

I've Been There. Literally. - I mean the progressive Vermont school Ignat Solzhenitzyn talked about in the Sunday Times:

In 1980, Ignat was an 8-year-old transplanted to Vermont by his father, the famous chronicler of Siberia's gulags. As Ignat tells the story, on the morning after the presidential election he got a taste of American political re-education at the progressive private school he and his brothers attended.

In response to the Reagan victory, the school's flag was lowered to half-staff, and the morning assembly was devoted to what today would be called grief counseling. The headmaster mourned "what America would become once the dark night of fascism descended under the B-movie actor," recalled Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who is now the music director of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. "At one point he interrupted himself to inquire if anyone present did not share his gloomy view of the Reagan victory."

The only students to raise their hands were Ignat and his two brothers, Yermolai and Stephan. After a stony silence, he recalled, they were sent outside, without their coats, to meditate on the error of their ways underneath the lowered flag.

I visited said school in 1978 at the invite of a teacher there who used to teach at my high school. I remember the Solzhenitsyn boys were there - I saw one though I didn't really meet him. From what I saw of the place, Ignat's story is plausible, though it happened two years later.

The Pussification of the Western Male - Some of us, anyway, if we write for NRO. As usual, the Administration's supporters systematically stoke fear. The ticking bomb scenario makes an appearance. Our enemies are scary bad men and the world is dark and cold. We have the right, nay, the duty, to empty our revolvers into the darkness as we piss ourselves.

Arthur Silber puts our present pass down to worship of the State. He's close, but there's one further level. Our real god is Perfect Safety, whom we have elevated in our pantheon above its divine siblings Freedom and Dignity. The State is Perfect Safety's high priest. It preaches from the altar and whispers in the agora that it will bring the blessings of the god if we but bend the knee now and do the spastic dance of the flails when the oracles are propitious. The high priest is not innocent in this, but unless we remove the god to a humbler altar we shall remain under his sway.

Blog in Haste . . . - I sure remember a lot of crowing a couple of months ago when the State Department released figures showing that, worldwide, 2003 featured fewer major terrorist incidents worldwide than any year since, I don't know, Victor Davis Hanson BC or something. Oops. Anyway, I wasn't impressed then and I'm not overly-impressed by the reversal. Even in the brief glory days when comment thread commandos were hailing the glory, I figured that 2004 already looked like it would reverse any momentary downward trend. But beyond that, the definition of terrorism has proven elastic when it comes to official figures.

Fitness Blogging Reminder - All the action is over on my LiveJournal now, including injury reports and eating to win.

On the Radar - These stories about Iraqi "WMD components" shipped out of Iraq as scrap metal "before, during and after" the invasion phase of the war are frustratingly vague. The much-linked World Tribune story is, well, the World Tribune. It's not impossible that such an outlet could come up with a legitimate scoop - heaven forfend we had to rely on exclusively establishment sources for our information - but the kindest thing one can say about the World Trib is that it's not the sort of media organ that settles an issue. (Unless you're a cheap epistemological date.) Leaving aside the World Trib's reputation or lack thereof, the internals of the story are . . . weird. Consider the lede:

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

If you parse that sentence like we learned in school before the Democratic Party ruined American education in the let-it-all-hang-out sixties, it says, among other things:

|Saddam Hussein| |shipped weapons of mass destruction components| . . . |after the US-led war against Iraq in 2003.|

Clearly we have a compelling answer to the question What can Brown do for you? here. ("He is the spider-hole that sits at the center of a web of shipping and receiving!")

Okay, so the anonymous WT scribe can't write. But his bad grammar serves, whether by accident or design, to confuse the issue. If we turn to establishment reporting on the story, we continue to find some blurring. Warren Hoge of the New York Times writes

Mr. Perricos accompanied his briefing with a report showing satellite photos of a fully built-up missile site near Baghdad in May 2003 and the same site denuded in February 2004.

His spokesman, Ewen Buchanan, said that items removed from the site included fermenters, a freeze drier, distillation columns, parts of missiles and a reactor vessel - all tools suitable for making biological or chemical weapons.

"It raises the question of what happened to the dual-use equipment, where is it now and what is it being used for," Mr. Buchanan said.

Let's consider some things. By May 2003, you may recall, "major combat operations [were] over." So whatever was there was there, and US troops were, in theory, in control of Iraq. What we are not looking at in this example is Saddam Hussein shipping his WMDs out of Iraq before the war. We're not looking at Saddam Hussein doing shit. Rather, the site gets dismantled over a period of some months during the US occupation, including during those times when US search teams were still seriously trying to find Iraqi special weapons programs.

Let's note some further blurring, because it gets at an important distinction we've talked about before here. The "items removed from the site" were "suitable for making biological or chemical weapons." This is not at all the same thing as saying that is what the Iraqi regime was doing with them. The things listed are, per Buchanan, dual-use equipment, stuff that could be used to make gas or weaponized germs, but also "legitimate" military materiel or civilian goods. A lot of things are "dual-use." It would be impossible to have a modern military or economy without all kinds of dual use equipment. Want to make fertilizer or pharmaceuticals? You'll need some "dual use" equipment. Want to make rocket fuel or hydrogen balloons? Likewise.

Which gets to the distinction that came up when we found the one old sarin shell last month - what counts as evidence of an Iraqi threat to the US and what might do as a legalistic excuse for an invasion you wanted to undertake anyway. In this case, the dual use stuff, outside Iraq, lying around scrap yards and wherever else, represents a threat, however small, to the United States. It doesn't represent evidence that Iraq had working WMD programs or even "related program activities."

More from Hoge:

Another photo showed an engine from a banned SA-2 surface-to-air missile that had been tagged by the United Nations in Iraq in 1996 and recently discovered in a scrap yard in Rotterdam, the port city in the Netherlands.

The report said that workers there had told inspectors from the monitoring commission and the International Atomic Energy Agency that as many as 12 such engines may have passed through the yard in January and February this year and that additional items made of stainless steel and other corrosion-resistant metal alloys with the inscriptions "Iraq" and "Baghdad" had been observed since November 2003.

"This is only a snapshot," Mr. Buchanan said. Two inspectors, he said, acting on information from the Netherlands, went to scrap yards in Jordan last week and found 20 more such engines in addition to tagged processing equipment such as chemical reactors, heat exchangers and a solid propellent mixing bowl.

The reference to tagging indicates that this is stuff UNMOVIC found and marked, not items the Saddam regime successfully concealed from the inspectors. Absent evidence to the contrary, we know that UNMOVIC-tagged items were segregated from regular stock and, presumably, disabled.

The actual specifics reported indicate that the story is not "Saddam snuck his WMDs out of Iraq!" but "The US occupation has exercised poor control of dual-use and previously-identified banned equipment." The story is larded up with non-nutritious details like "stainless steel and other corrosion-resistant metal alloys." Had we declared, at some point I missed, that Iraq was to be forbidden modern metallurgy? If not, this is meaningless. Someone has put dry ice on the stage so the props will look spookier. Otherwise someone will notice that "surface-to-air missiles" may be banned items, but since the United States is not itself in the air, it's not remotely a threat to the country. Even Israel, sometimes mistaken for the United States, is a country that exists on the ground rather than cloud-borne. We're not talking about surface-to-surface missiles that could rain gas on Tel Aviv or Ankara. We're talking about things that are designed to defend your own airspace.

All of which is to say that there's enough to the current stories to make one worry what the heck we've been doing since we took custody of Mesopotamia, but not enough to prove that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was any more of a threat to the United States or anyone else than you thought they were before. If Iraq scared you, there's nothing here to make you less scared. If you were made of sterner stuff, you may rest unperturbed.

See also the AP reporting, which substantially resembles that of the NYT but somewhat less shifty with its categories.

Poetry Saturday - (I wrote this one for my friend Frederick Pollack, but I'm reprinting it here in honor of Matthew Yglesias and his family. Please spare a thought for them this weekend.)

An Attempt at Consolation
     - for Frederick Pollack

It is not like anything to them, I know,
but the virtuous dead become our better selves.
It is embarrassing, this being heaven,
but there they are, our memories, more, our habits,
a posture that becomes our posture, like
"the brother in your spine" dance teachers speak of.
A mother in my wife's case. For your wife, now,
a father. And we are partly whom our wives have made,
so he survives in you as she in me.
One day we'll speak and it will be them speaking.

©1998, 2004 Jim Henley

Next, Unqualified Dog Gets Her Own Blog - Sometimes I like to be a more normal kind of blogger. To that end, I'll link the dog vocabulary story everyone else is linking.

Torture State: a Redundancy

There are many ways to attempt to justify torture, and there are many colorable arguments that (in appropriate circumstances) torture may be justified. Perhaps not winning arguments, but colorable ones. The DoD memorandum, however, makes an argument that is so weak, so contrary to the Constitution and our way of life, and so, well, evil, that no learned American lawyer can make it and remain true to her oath to defend the U.S. Constitution.

From von at Obsidian Wings.

Now, the larger point: That such an argument (as advanced by the President's lawyers) got made at all, and finds its defenders, is why the sensible libertarian is a peacenik in the first place. Say, rather, sensible citizen. Ironically, as the Administration's argument gets better, this becomes more true. To the extent that the claim that the Commander-in-Chief clause lets the President override the authority of the other branches of government in time of war has any force, it is a reason to avoid wars in the first place. I think the Commander-in-Chief clause has been stretched like the elastic on your old underpants for decades at least, but the stretchers have gotten away with it. The only way to maintain a free society in the face of incipient dictatorial powers that flow from warmaking is a mass presumption against war. This does not mean you never fight them, but it does mean hoary old ideas like war as a last resort. Because if war maximizes presidential power, and presidents are flawed (human), and self-selected for ambition (politicians), then presidents have an incentive to start wars and perpetuate them. Causes will be trotted out to serve war, when it should be the opposite. So distrust causes. Make them prove it past the last shred of doubt before you sign on next time.

If you're given the option.

We Must Suffer Them All Again - How do you say "kulak" in Shona?

JOHANNESBURG, June 8 - Zimbabwe's land minister said Tuesday that the government intended to nationalize all farmland that it had not already confiscated under a contentious program of land seizures begun four years ago.

The minister, John Nkomo, said the government planned to take control of remaining farmland, abolishing all deeds, and turn it back to farmers under 99-year leases. Leases on wildlife conservancies would be limited to 25 years, he said, because that land is considered more valuable than farmland.

"Ultimately, all land shall be resettled as state property,'' Mr. Nkomo was quoted as saying Tuesday in the government-controlled newspaper The Herald. "It will now be the state which will enable the utilization of the land for national prosperity."

That should work out great. Reported by Michael Wines in the New York Times (laexaminer/laexaminer), via The Marginal Revolution.

Why do I dismiss such a calamity with brief snark? Because if I think about it too much I'll go mad with grief!

Consoling Thought of the Week - Ray Charles on our money. ALL our money.

Reading Room - Got a cold or sinus infection. Going to drink the Green Death Flavor liquid and hit the sack. For your reading pleasure, try

The English Bill of Rights of 1689 followed by

the recently-unearthed "torture memo."

Finish off with Kevin Drum's chronology. As Kevin puts it:

But surely I'm not the only one who finds it disturbing that the topic of torture came up almost immediately after 9/11 and continued to be a subject of conversation on such a regular basis after that?

No, you're not. Again, we are not just talking about torture any more. As Leonard Dickens noted some time ago, torture is the telltale. What we're talking about now is whether the President is the Alpha and Omega of the law.

Quick Hits - What do we have for you tonight? Let's see:

Ginmar reflects on interrogating an innocent man.

My (warning! the following words do not go together!) genial paleo buddy Gene Callahan has started blogging at last.

Dave Trowbridge argues that my identifying the Republican Party as a clear and present danger to constitutional government this morning means that my earlier advice on how libertarians should vote (if that's their thing) must be revised. I disagree. Like Dave, I think George W. Bush needs to suffer the largest possible defeat. But the defeat's best measure is a low vote total for Bush himself, not necessarily a high one for Kerry. Everything Matt and I said last month about how libertarian votes for Kerry himself would be misinterpreted by observers still obtains. If libertarians vote LP, the Repubs have to interpret that as "We alienated the libertarian vote." If libertarians vote Democratic, the Repubs just see more votes going to "the liberal." At that point they retool and offer us torture, an imperial presidency and expanded drug subsidies. Whee.

Jane Galt among others tackles the thorny problem of "positive liberty" in one post and then another. The second contains links to much of the rest of today's writing on the subject. I've never been wild about the term "positive liberty," or the term "negative liberty" for that matter. To the extent that I accept that "positive liberty" is a meaningful concept, if not a meaningful term, I am a negative liberty guy. I also tend to think that, as classically defined, positive liberty requires the existence of negative liberty in a way that negative liberty does not require positive. But read the people who are really into it.

Rose Curtin talks Filth! And promises more. She has what appear to be qualified disagreements with my own argument, and some interesting stuff to say about ownership of sexuality, the agency of the book's female characters and more. She also promises further Filth-blogging, so keep checking back.

Liz Miller's The Three Laws of Adaptations, at Bookslut, is very good. Adaptations as in film adaptations of books, especially geeky ones. (Via Brett.)

The Fish Rots FROM the Head, but the Whole Fish Rots - What is the real import of yesterday's "torture memo" story, in which, to quote from Phil Carter's Intel Dump,

An extremely learned reader of mine wrote to remind me that the U.S. Constitution isn't the only authority which rejects the idea of executive to set aside the law. This idea goes back even further, to the British legal tradition. Ironically, the power now claimed by the Defense Department (and by extension, the White House) was rejected for the King in the late 17th Century.

Partly it's that we've gone straight past "Unamerican" to "Un-constitutional monarchy." So much for the notion of "benevolent hegemony" as conducing to national virtue.

But the big thing is this: President Bush is absolutely responsible for everything that happens in his administration, and to the extent that the Pentagon memo conditioned policy, he is first in line for blame. HOWEVER. President Bush is no one's idea of a legal mind. He may have initiated the project that became the memo, but he didn't draft the thing. High-level government lawyers, most of them undoubtedly political appointees, did that. What that means is that there is systemic corruption in the Republican Party as an institution - "Bush's Willing Torturers" we might call them. These are people that came up with the idea that the Constitutional phrase "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" meant

authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

They represent a deadly danger to the American system and they are multiple. It's not one guy somewhere, it's a movement. Until the Republican Party roots them out, that Party is the enemy, not just of libertarians, but of anyone who values individual freedom and republican government. From the standpoint of liberty, there can no longer be any justification for preferring the Republicans to the Democrats.

UPDATE: To clarify, this isn't just another Unqualified Offerings anti-torture item. The issue now goes beyond torture to the very structure of American government. Torture is the symptom. The concept that the President is not just himself above the law, but a supralegal authority, is the malady.

Pull the Other One - Haaretz reports that

At the end of a dramatic cabinet meeting Sunday, the government passed Ariel Sharon's revised disengagement plan, by a vote of 14-7, but the decision does not allow for the dismantling of settlements and the prime minister will have to go back to the cabinet when he actually wants to begin the evacuation process.

"Disengagement is on its way," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said after the meeting. "The cabinet has decided that by the end of 2005 Israel intends to leave the Gaza Strip and four settlements in Samaria."

The safest bet you could make is that nothing of the kind will happen. The end of 2005 is dog years away in Middle East time. Like the Road Map, Taba and Oslo before it, the Gaza disengagement is heading for the wastebasket of big mideast plans. If I had any doubts that the whole thing was a show, the Someday Someway timetable (requiring further cabinet approval to actually implement!) confirms it. We can't say what precise combination of timely suicide attacks on one side and targetted killings on the other will scuttle the putative disengagement, but we've been here before.

The real mystery is not just Why these continuing pantomimes? but Why all the drama surrounding these continuing pantomimes?

Any Man's Death - Oh by the way, many people died of Alzheimer's complications this weekend, including a former President of the United States. About Ronald Reagan I think many things. I was a staunch Democrat during most of his incumbency and used to brag that "I voted against Ronald Reagan the maximum number of times allowable by law." I moved from Democratic to Libertarian affiliation without a serious Republican phase between, so unlike many other libertarians I had no Youthful Reagan Worship Syndrome to get over. As politicians go, Reagan was worse than some and better than others; ditto his presidency. He did a lot for the rhetoric of limited government, though less for its actuality. I'll say a few things for and against him:

1) He clearly should have been impeached over the Iran-Contra scandal.

2) It's little noted, but he made a liar out of the man I actually voted for in 1984, Walter Mondale, who famously said, "The President will raise taxes. So will I. The difference is that I'll tell you how."

3) When conservatives try to give Reagan credit for bringing the Soviet Union to its knees, the standard liberal response is that Reagan didn't do it, the Soviet Union inevitably collapsed under its own bureaucratic weight. This is unsatisfactory. True is it almost certainly is, Reagan was the first President with the imagination to actually envision that collapse. I lived through the Cold War and made something of a study of it. Prior to the late 1980s, the smart money, the conventional wisdom, was that the Soviet Union and the Long Twilight Struggle were here to stay. The notion that the USSR would fail to prove a going concern automatically marked one as a fringe personality. (I was not one. I bought the conventional wisdom completely.) Indeed, Reagan was derided for not accepting this obvious fact about the world right up to the last days of his Administration.

4) I remember finding a Paul Slansky book, Reagan's Reign of Error, devoted to Reagan's plentiful misstatements and impromptu gaffes, on the shelf in the bookstore I managed back around 1990. The book itself dated from 1987 or 1988 and included the famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" line, to which Slansky appended the humorous comment, "President Reagan proving his irrelevance in Berlin." Oops!

5) Guess we're never going to hear the end of the "time capsule anecdote" now.

But what I wanted to talk about before I got distracted by that Ronald Reagan business was Nancy Reagan. How I hated the bitch. Just despised her. Her little pursed mouth, her high, distracted voice, her too-put-together appearance. And how I have had to change my mind. Not just because her widely-derided "drug policy," Just Say No, shows itself in retrospect to be far more benign than tossing every 37th adult in the clink. But because from all reports her dedication to her husband's care during the last, terrible decade of his life has been nothing short of heroic. Now that ordeal is over, my message to her is, first, "I'm sorry I said all those awful things about you," and second, not Rest in Peace, but Rest in Life. May she find some repose in these late, lonely days.

Hey Kids! Comics Blogs! - The All-New All-Different Howling Curmudgeons is a comic-book group blog. It would be similar to the legendary Four Color Hell, had Four Color Hell actually engaged in comics blogging. It's been in continuous operation since April 24, so it's probably safe to link now.

Women on Filth - What've we got so far, then, re my request for female comics fans to write about Morrison and Weston's The Filth and my own tentative assertion that the appeal of the work is "a guy thing?" Here and there:

An interesting comment thread at Hanging Fire, well worth reading. Among other things, Ginger Stampley finds my take too essentialist and abbandono argues that male and female relations to the muck of existence are more variable and nuanced than I let on. Hanging Fire proprietor Karin L. Kross, comic book reviewer for Bookslut, makes a mental note to reread the book. I look forward to hearing what she thinks. (She favorably reviewed the first two issues in 2002.)

Eve Tushnet, something of an essentialist herself, expresses no opinion of the work but concurs in general with my gender scheme, quoting a couple of paragraphs for explicit agreeement.

Neilalien tips me to an older In Sequence item critiquing The Filth from a different perspective. Representation of villainy is a tricky issue in any medium and any story. Often the aim is an attraction-repulsion complex - we're to understand the evil of the act while also understand the attraction of it to the perpetrator. One thing I don't think is that the "Pornomancer" episode represents a critique of pornography as such, as one of the In Sequence commenters suggests. Something I value in The Filth is that it's an attempt at a sustained understanding of both pornography's benefits and harms. A number of sympathetic characters, not excluding the protagonist, are shown to be porn consumers. At the same time a number of the villains are men who take it too far. Specifically, they cross the boundary from imagination to action and from consent to compulsion. Per Morrison, Tex Porneau is not evil because he's a pornographer. Tex Porneau is evil because he kills and rapes. Only when he crosses the line from paying people to willingly perform on camera to committing sex crimes on film does he become a problem for the Hand.

I also went looking for preexisting reviews of The Filth by women. Johanna Draper Carlson reviewed the first issue only, and only briefly, noting that "it's not for me -- I prefer a strong plot with my crazy ideas and boundary-pushing."

Rose at Peiratikos is still reading the book.

At Sequential Tart, Adrienne Rappaport offered brief, generally favorable reviews of the first three issues. Alas, she thereafter stops writing about the series.

Nothing from Elayne Riggs, Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag or Heidi McDonald, from what I can tell.

What's missing is a Doane/Fiore "The Filth is a thrilling masterpiece" review from any female comics writer. I'd love to claim that this discrepancy is itself telling, but my sample size is far too small. Indeed, one of the reasons I wanted a lot of women's opinions on the book is to avoid forcing any single female reviewer into the "representative woman" niche.

Gaudy Night: The Continuing Series - Me, a few months ago:

Here's a core truth I've noticed about the Real World: people are as outlandish as they can afford to be.

The Rocky Mountain News, yesterday:

GRANBY — A 52-year-old welder nursing a grudge against the town fathers and driving a bulldozer converted into a war machine ripped the heart of this high-country ranching town from its foundations Friday.

Among the structures destroyed or heavily damaged in a relentless 90-minute rampage were Granby's town hall and library, a bank, the town's newspaper, an electric cooperative building, Gambles Store, an excavating business and a house owned by the town's former mayor, as well as a concrete plant adjacent to the business of the man believed responsible for the bizarre assault.

I'll concede that authorities did not stop Heemeyer's rampage by reversing the polarity on his deathdozer. Otherwise, suggestive. (Via die puny humans.)

Support the Troops - Attn: Any Soldier lists the things our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan can most use, from Under Armour HeatGear t-shirts to - beanie babies. There are unit-specific requests too. (Via Making Light.)

But I'm an Orphan! - Teresa Nielsen Hayden on a cheeky British plagiarist:

A student at the University of Kent who got zapped for plagiarism right before his final exams is suing the university for negligence, on the grounds that he's been cheating in exactly the same way throughout his studies there, and they've never said anything about it.

My first reaction was "Nice try, kid." On second thought, he does have a point. It's not enough of a point, but he has one.

And she's just getting started. Great stuff on the inadequacies of student handbooks, the methods of catching plagiarists and more.

Foods Touch - I don't think political blogger Alex Knapp writes about comics much, but he has a new item on the question of Superman's continuing relevance. Not a lot of detail, but he does demonstrate familiarity with the recent canon.

I Hardly Know Where to Begin - Heaven knows I'm not nearly as anti-liberal as I was, say, three years ago. I've come to appreciate nuances of liberal thought that defy the right wing stereotypes I held rather comfortably. But John Quiggin's most recent post on Crooked Timber brings it all back. It contains so many bad assumptions and begs so many questions, forms such a self-contained and highly-polished sphere of misconception that one can hardly grip it to refute. One can only marvel.

How Do You Spell Chutzpah in Arabic? - From Jim Lobe's column today:

Asked about Tenet's sudden resignation, Chalabi repeated those accusations, telling reporters that the CIA director's role in developing U.S.-Iraq policy has "not been helpful to say the least." Tenet, he added, had provided "erroneous information about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to President Bush, which caused the government much embarrassment at the United Nations and his own country."

Mind you, Lobe suggests the "hero in error" was right in one instance:

Nonetheless, in at least one case, Chalabi's charge about Tenet's own role in faulty WMD evidence appears to have been correct. According to journalist Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack, a critical moment in the run-up to the war occurred when Bush himself expressed doubt that the public would be persuaded by the CIA's evidence of the threat posed by Iraq's WMD.

"From the end of one of the couches in the Oval office, Tenet rose up, threw his arms in the air. 'It's a slam-dunk case!' the DCI said," Woodward reported, adding that Tenet repeated the phrase a second time when Bush asked whether he was confident about the evidence.

Ah, Good Times, Good Times.

Tenet - I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about George Tenet's resignation over the next few days and weeks, some of which will even be true. I tentatively class Tenet with Colin Powell - men with more sense than the people around them but lacking the guts to go to the mat for their beliefs or walk away when it might have done some good. Note: I'm not saying Tenet did a great job managing American intelligence. But he does seem to have had a better sense of what was coming in Iraq, and a better appreciation of the true scale of the Iraqi threat to the US (minor).

This Is How Bad It's Gotten - From the Guardian:

Band member Mike Devine, from Bristol, said he had been approached by the officer and shown a copy of a text he had sent in April, which contained the words "gun" and "jet airliner".

The 35-year-old, who plays bass in a Clash tribute group called London Calling, had intended to text the lyrics - from the Clash song Tommy Gun - to singer Reg Shaw. Instead, he sent the message to the wrong number.

Avon and Somerset police said a Special Branch officer had visited Mr Devine after the person who received the message, sent on April 30, became concerned about its content and contacted police.

Mr Devine said he had been worried when an officer from the Special Branch confronted him at his office, and added: "I had no idea why they could want to talk to me."

The father of two said the officer had then produced a printout of the text message, which read: "How about this for Tommy Gun? OK - so let's agree about the price and make it one jet airliner for 10 prisoners."

We think we're good societies. Just societies. But we have Clash tribute bands run by thirty-five-year-old fathers. (With offices! we learn later in the article.) I wonder if they mumble the part about how "Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust." (Come on, Jim, a Clash tribute band necessarily mumbles all the words to ALL the songs!)

In Case You Forgot . . .

So I'm working the night shift here, and periodically stepping outside to try and keep myself awake. And while I'm doing it, I'm looking up at the big, bright moon in the sky, shining over the palm trees and the guard towers. No sooner do I step back inside than I hear the explosions-----BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Mortars, somewhere beyond the fence line. I guess they happen a few times a month--and of course, they're always at night. I imagine one of Sadr's little goons, setting his alarm clock to get up at one or two AM, and plodding out to his yard, digging up the mortar rounds, and then yawning while he aims them in the general direction of the post. And I thought my job sucked.

Ginmar's still writing, and still a must read.

Desire Under the Phlegms - I thought at one point that I'd do a whole review item on Grant Morrison and Chris Weston's newly-collected graphic novel, The Filth, but instead I'll just pick at one aspect of it that's nagged at me. For this site's non-comics-obsessive readership, The Filth is the hefty story of an operative who is part policeman and part garbage collector - his agency, the Hand, functions as something of the world's bureaucratic super ego. "We stop the world's back yard from stinking," as protagonist Slade's colleague Officer Nil puts it. When the world threatens to get too, well, gross, the Hand steps in to enforce Status Q.

The Filth is surreal, paranoid, Dickian, sexually explicit and, absolutely, the least erotic thing I've read in quite some time. It's a superb narrative of an extraordinary man trying his damnedest to hide in his version of an ordinary one. It's a fictive inquiry into, as Prince put it, "this thing called life," especially the conundrum of how we appear to be noble in reason, infinite in faculties, in action like an angel and all that, and at the same time, mired in icky stuff - sweat, piss, jizz and blood, poop, germs, snot, dirt, phlegm, rot et disgusting al.

I'm thinking this is a guy thing.

"Love has pitched his tent," wrote Yeats, anticipating The Filth's themes, "in the place of excrement." But Yeats was a guy too, just like Morrison.

My suspicion is that the ideas Morrison plays with in The Filth have a salience for men, especially young men, that they won't, in general, have for women. My guess is that most women, by the time they reach adulthood, have integrated the dualism of Spirit and "Filth" more completely than most men. They have to. A young woman has experienced monthly vaginal bleeding for at least a decade and anticipates several decades more of it. She either has given birth or has a very good idea what it entails. Social customs being what they are, she's probably cleaned more messes - done more laundry, more dishes, more toilets. Intimate with her mother's life in ways a son is unlikely to be, she is long over any shock at the idea that we are permeable bags of perishable fluids.

I watched my wife give birth and at last it came time for the dreaded e-word. Never comfortable with the idea, I had yet imagined that it would be done with something like an X-acto knife, and was surprised and vaguely nauseated when the OB/GYN pulled out what were basically chrome, sterilized pruning shears. And as the doctor, herself a woman, methodically cut through the perineum, single most wickedly delightful spot on the female body, I was thinking, more or less, "The Precious!" and my wife was thinking, unambiguously, "Oh thank God!" I know because I asked about it afterward. Her response was, of necessity, practical: she needed room to deliver the (bloody, icky) package.

I think men have the privilege of going through youth fairly "self-contained," anatomically. Sheltered. Desire drives them into engagement with "the place of excrement" and it's a shock. Suddenly we really want to "swap spit" and probe orifices and "exchange fluids," but it represents a loss of control and a breach of male autonomy. I can think of two artists, often considered "misogynists," whose horror is not of women at all but of male desire: the poet Philip Larkin and the musician Elvis Costello. (Mind you, in lesser talents what starts as horror of male desire can get offloaded onto women and become misogyny proper.) Women seem to have varying attitudes toward intercourse during menses. Men seem to find it intimidating, at least the first time.

I'm generalizing terribly. I'm not saying women "don't get it" - if anything, I'm trying to avoid saying men get "worked up over nothing." I'm hoping that female comics writers - mostly bloggers, given that this is a blog - will tell me how off-base I may be on their reactions to the book in question and the topic in general. I also wonder if they'd agree with me that the book, for the most part, lacks compelling female characters - women who read more like women than a man's idea of female types. It seems to me that just about every female character in the book, from Agent Nil to Mother Dirt, is either a man's dream or nightmare of women. (The one exception is probably Sharon.) Tim O'Neil famously praised The Filth at the expense of Morrison's superhero comics, but on the matter of female characters specifically, I think practically any of the women in New X-Men were more fully realized than the women of The Filth, even vampy Emma Frost.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed The Filth a lot. The art is wonderfully detailed and grungy. Morrison is a great chronicler of goodness - one of the hardest things for a writer to be - and his protagonist, Slade/Greg Feely, is a touchingly good man. I felt for him. I would definitely recommend that you read this book.

Of course, I'm a guy.

Quick Blogwatch - Brooke Oberwetter on the Army's latest stop-loss orders. Tyler Cowen on a Brad Delong health-care proposal. Your chance to vote for me in a contest I deserve to win dammit! Eat, Shoot and Leave THIS! (Okay, not a blog item. Work with me here.) Matthew Yglesias on the Vast Persian Conspiracy. (Also not a blog item. Just be grateful I give you stuff to read.) Micha Ghertner on innovative approaches to teen chastity, which leads you to the indispensible, and not remotely work-safe, TechnicalVirgin.com.

There. That ought to hold the little bastards.

UPDATE: Fixed a typo pointed out by a couple of kind souls.

A Fanboy's Placeholders - The Post Style section's lead story today is a profile of cartoonist Will Eisner.

Meanwhile, Steven Grant attacks my "literature of ethics" thesis regarding superhero comics. Fair's fair, and we'll come back to it, but Steven, bubelah, since you call my claim a "blogmeme," even though its chief vector of transmission has been an essay in a non-blog webzine, how about tossing a link to this here blog in your article? Do it for a fellow former GEnie user, man! I know it was more than 10 years ago, but I even said nice things about Whisper. Meanwhile, Dave Intermittent has some reactions to Steven Grant's reactions. I promise more of my own when I'm not dashing off to work.

Back to Business - A couple of you have written to express relief that there has been so much light-heartedness on this blog lately since, as Chad Orzel put it, "You were starting to scare me for awhile there." Well, it's been fun, but we have to get back to dealing with the imminent collapse of civilization as we know it. Do note that there's an Article Rating module to the side where you can vote on its quality. Excerpt:

In another scene in the movie, Shrek and Donkey need to be rescued from a dungeon where they are chained against the wall. The rescue is conducted by Pinocchio who is asked to lie so his nose will grow long enough for one of the smaller cartoon characters to use it as a bridge to reach Shrek and Donkey. Donkey encourages him to lie about something and suggests he lie about wearing women's underwear. When he denies wearing women's underwear, his nose begins to grow.

But there's much more on this crucial topic.

Haiku U - And now for something completely different. I'm still getting haiku mail. I appreciate it. But instead of continuing haiku talk here, I've opened a comment thread on my LiveJournal for further haiku discussion and disputation. Go! if you want to.

A Different Fanboy's Notes - Nate Bruinooge goes on vacation, reads comics, tells you what he thinks of them. Everything from Blankets to Runaways.

Remember when we used to do that here? We will again, by gum!

Big Time - Time Magazine chose Radley Balko to joust with the food nannies. He took his Big Media money and got himself some guest bloggers for the week. An excellent crew too. Keep an eye on the Agitator. You should anyway.

Endless Summer - Hey, the haiku mail is still coming in! Chad Orzel, showing the social graces that marked him for a career in the sciences, writes

My flippant response to people quibbling about line lengths and syllable counts in English "haiku":

It's a perfectly good haiku,
when written in Japanese,
asshole.

Later,
Chad

Mike "Epoch" Sullivan, who appears to be blogless these days, writes

The best haiku EVER, courtesy of a rather silly web game called "Kingdom of Loathing," is:

Hippopotomus,
Antihippopotomus,
Annihilation!

Ahem. Anyhow.

As someone who studied a fair amount of Japanese, it always bothered me that people got into the whole 5-7-5 thing and did nothing else with haiku -- forgetting the season imagery and the concept of creating a sort of momentary thought, rather than a narrative. Also, it endlessly bothers me that the work "haiku" is treated as two syllables in English while it's three mora (I've never heard the word "onji" before, but maybe it's more commonly used in poetry) in Japanese.

But, since, I've come to feel that the American/English haiku has a valuable place in, well, if not poetry, doggerel. Basically, it's a lot like a limerick: very strict in structure, short, and not restricted in content. But easier to construct, and primarily humorous. It seems to serve a purpose, as long as it's not taken very seriously.

Alan Sullivan sticks up for 5-7-5 on Fresh Bilge (see comments), but he's just wrong. (At least, he overstates the case. I think Epoch has a point that the 5-7-5 structure works as a vessel for self-aware humor.)

More e-mail, this time from David Moles:

In college, I briefly flirted with the idea of trying to write a Shakespearean sonnet in Japanese. Trying to write iambic pentameter in a lanaguage with no stressed syllables is tough. The ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme, in a language where what sound a word ends with depends on its part of speech (and, in the case of a verb, on its tense) was also kind of a problem. I gave up when I decided that if I kept at it I was going to turn into one of those Borges characters who entertains himself by analyzing the effect on chess of removing the queen's rook's pawn, or some equally pointless habit... English-language haiku has always struck me as being the same kind of exercise.

Heh. He said Borges!

One more thing. Mike's e-mail reminds me of an exercise from the first poetry class I ever took: write a "quiet" limerick - one that plays against the expectations of the form. My effort cheats, using an identical where a rhyme should be, but what the hell:

Silent Night

Now the sliding glass doors have rung closed,
and the shoppers are handbagged, and hosed,
and are out at the curbs.
Only muzak disturbs
the hush of the mall when it's closed.

Go Pistards! - This morning I e-mailed my favorite hoosier, Radley Balko, to apologize for switching my allegiance from the Indiana Pacers to the Detroit Pistons for what I considered sound reasons. With Evil back in the NBA Finals after their Game 6 defeat of Minnesota, the overriding imperative of Stopping Evil meant wanting the Eastern Conference champ to go into the Finals as rested as possible. That meant the Pistons needed to win tonight. And they did! Had Indiana won Game Five, I'd have rooted for them instead.

As a bittersweet bonus, rooting for this edition of the Pistons is sorta almost like rooting for the Washington Wizards, as explained by Michael Wilbon last week. In some alternate universe where the DC franchise makes the right moves at every turn rather than the wrong, substantially the same guys would be wearing Wizards teal and - what's that other color, tan? into the championship series.

Anyway, since Detroit has a whole bunch of baskets they never got around to using against Indiana, they should be in great shape against the Forces of Darkness.