You Call That the Ding an Sich? You Call THAT the DING AN SICH???? - By way of slagging Wordsworth for narcissism, Aaron Haspel praises Hardy and Dickinson for looking at nature and seeing something other than themselves. Okay, they sort of do. But both of them inveterately moralize landscapes (spy human symbols in them), which is among the commonest and most understandable poetic vices. After all, chances are that most of us want our poets to do this most of the time. We'd do it ourselves except poets are ever so much better at it.
If you want to get away from that sort of thing, you go to Frost, who recognizes the temptation and spends much of his time relentlessly demoralizing his surroundings. That's the whole point of "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," to teach us "not to believe the phoebes wept." If he weakens ("What but design of darkness to appall?") he immediately slaps himself across the face again ("If design govern in a thing so small."). Even in his comparative juvenilia ("The Vantage Point") he lampoons the poet's relentless hunt for human significance in nature:
My breathing shakes the bluet like a breeze, I smell the earth, I smell the bruisèd plant,
I look into the crater of the ant.
Frost was a relentless skeptic who, during his time in London, got himself disinvited from Yeats' salons by snickering at some anecdote involving leprechauns. He even twits - Thomas Hardy. Hardy wrote (on "31 December 1900") "The Darkling Thrush," in which the poor bird has to bear quite a lot of significance indeed:
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.So little cause for carollings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessèd Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Here is a bird with a soul, as fanciful a creature as ever an aged Irish spinster related to Mr. Yeats. And just over forty-one years later, Frost lets Hardy have it:
Come In
As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music -- hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went --
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.
Hardy's "Thrush" - composition deliberately though surely fancifully dated so precisely by the author - is taken to symbolize the hope of the new century. One Great War done and another on the way and that hope looks, in hindsight, premature. Frost's is surely an "answer poem" to Hardy's, and the immediate inclination is to read it as an answer poem in kind, full of symbols of lost hope. The sunlight "that had died in the west," the "pillared dark" - it's Spenglerian as it gets, right? And in light of Frost's staunch opposition to the prospect of US entry into the Second Great War, the ending reads like an isolationist fable: "NO. I was out for STARS!" (And stripes, presumably.) TTFN, Old Europe! "I would not come in," not having been "asked." ("Come In" first appeared in the February 1941 Atlantic Monthly.)
But that's not it either. Because Frost's real answer to Hardy is on another level entirely. This thrush is relentlessly a bird. Its song is "almost" like a call, and that's it. Almost. The bird being a bird means the poet is just a poet, not the United States at all. A man in the presence of a whole composition of putative objective correlatives for melancholy, feeling that pull ("to come in / To the dark and lament") and reminding himself that the so-called objective correlative is not objective at all - it's stuff we put there. He wouldn't go "even if asked," he insists, but the point is, I hadn't been.
Silly Thomas Hardy, Frost says. Did you really think it was about you? Frost sacrifices his own political allegory to make the larger point. He's the only poet I know whose poems really do deconstruct themselves, by design. No, not Ashbery. Ashbery's poems ship deconstructed from the factory. They're the poetical equivalent of pre-faded jeans. It is, vis a vis poststructuralist criticism, Stockholm Syndrome poetry. Frost's poems are like the magician's boxes that look solid and colorful when you first see them, but keep opening out until even the bottom has fallen away. They are the magician too.
(Postscript: That same thrush makes an uncredited appearance in my own "The Subject Was Bric-a-Brac," published here last month, as "some bird" whose "song is stubbornly its own." He keeps finding work. Rather, we keep finding work for him.)
A Reminder - Just because Michael Ledeen writes yet another breathless screed full of dubious to ridiculous reasons to conquer Iran with troops we don't have mere days after his close associate Ahmad Chalabi's organization becomes the target of an Iran-centric spy probe, it is not proof positive that Ledeen is himself an Iranian agent. He may not be. There is no reason to conclude without reservation at this time that Michael Ledeen's working relationship with Iranian intelligence officers has continued uninterrupted since the 1980s or been renewed since that time. While it is true that, reasoning paradoxically, we should immediately suspect Ledeen of having betrayed his country to the Mullahs or being duped into furthering their agenda, he is still an American citizen until such time as the executive branch sees fit to unilaterally revoke that status, and he is entitled to the presumption of innocence until such time as the executive branch decides that he is not. Furthermore, pace Trent Lott, Ledeen should not be rendered to a friendly if heavy-handed foreign government or consigned to a "special access program" so that any information he does have about any Iranian agenda he does serve can be tortured out of him. We are the United States of America and we don't do that sort of thing, not even to staunch defenders of close associates credibly accused of working hand-in-glove with a known terror-supporting country. No matter how many lives might be saved.
Follow-Up - The Army corroborates some aspects of Spc. Sean Baker's story and denies others:
The U.S. Army has confirmed the story of a former Kentucky National Guardsman who claims he was beaten by other soldiers.Spc. Sean Baker told a Lexington, Ky., television station that he was severely beaten by U.S. soldiers at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay in January 2003, WLKY NewsChannel 32 reported.
He said he was ordered to wear a prison uniform for a training exercise.
The Army said Baker was injured during the training session, but added that he suffered only minor injuries.
A spokeswoman said Baker's medical discharge last month was unrelated to those injuries, but she wouldn't elaborate, WLKY reported.
The Scotsman has more details, including the first interview I've seen with another soldier from Baker's unit.
De, as they say, veloping. According to the Scotsman there's a brain scan out there. Be interesting to see it.
Trouble with Liberals - The Poor Man has a where are they now item contrasting Tom Delay on Nancy Pelosi now with Tom Delay on the Kosovo War then. These kinds of things come up - Atrios has a minor sideline in such things. There's a valid point there, but I'm never sure it's the one the posters are making. Delay was within his rights back then, Pelosi is within her rights now and Delay is a big fat hypocrite. But it always feels like the liberal bloggers are going for the double whammy with these: somehow the Republican is supposed to have been wrong both times - now, for hypocrisy, and back then for criticizing the Dear Leader's Balkan crusade. And having lived through 1999, I remember Dems then playing the Delay Now card, tut tutting about conservative war critics giving comfort to our enemies and so on.
NB: Despite what you may have heard, the Poor Man is still funny.
The Media Really Does Suck - I suspect that much of what the military high command tried to tell us about the "wedding party assault" of last week is a crock. But there's no excuse for the egregious misquoting identified by Iraq Now. (Via Obsidian Wings.)
29,996 Liters to Go - Well, I'll be. It really was Sarin in last week's artillery shell.
In battle, such shells would have to be fired in great numbers to effect a large body of troops.
I wonder if we could do some kind of weapons buy-back program, where we swap Sarin-filled artillery shells for the real explosives that kill our troops when they blow up.
Knock the Vote - Jacob Levy and Matt discuss the possibilities of a libertarian revolt against the Republican Party this fall - that is, libertarians actually voting for the Libertarian candidate.
Matt thinks libertarians voting Libertarian is actually a good idea, and I like his reasoning:
The case for the LP is that no one really knows how many small-l libertarians are out there, other than that there are some of them, and they are usually aligned with the GOP. So how many anti-war, small government types are out there? 2 million, 4 million, who knows? It would be in their interests to be counted.If those people go for Kerry and Kerry wins, the GOP will probably conclude that it ought to move left. If those people stay home and Kerry wins, the GOP will probably conclude that it needs more traditional base-mobilizing techniques like gay-bashing. If they vote Libertarian and Kerry wins, though, the GOP just might conclude that it needs to do something to attract their votes.
That strikes me as sound. I am, most days, in Dump Bush mode. I hold no brief for John Kerry, but I do support the idea of electoral punishment, and for reasons detailed at nauseating length on this site over the last two years, I believe the President has come to merit same. Quite apart from the war, the double-barrelled "enemy combatant" holding (any non-citizen can be declared an "enemy combatant" without rights and held without review, and any citizen can have his citizenship revoked without appeal) demands punishment. It is enough to outweigh my one reason for wanting Bush to continue in office. (I won't keep you in suspense: I think the Iraq War is an inevitable failure in the making. Part of me wants Bush and his team holding the bag for that failure so there can be no later weaseling about how We had it under control but weren't allowed to finish the job!)
So, how should libertarians vote if getting rid of the Bush Administration is the overriding goal? Depends.
Remember, the national popular vote doesn't matter. So the first question to ask is, Is my state competitive, or is the victory of either major-party candidate a foregone conclusion?
The libertarian in a non-competitive state should vote Libertarian. Even if you don't like the Party, and there are no end of reasons to dislike it, the Party can't actually screw anything up because the Party can't get its Presidential candidate elected. But if the Party makes a good electoral showing, it concentrates Republican minds.
For the libertarian in a competitive state, I suggest that the next question is, Who did you vote for in the last election? More generally, who normally gets your vote, all other things being equal?
If you voted for Bush last time, vote Libertarian this time. You cost the Republicans your vote without having to, you know, smear your thumb grease along the Democratic portion of the touch screen.
If you voted for Nader or Buchanan or some non-Libertarian third-party candidate, vote Libertarian this time. Matt is right.
If you voted for Gore, send me a detailed e-mail explaining what the hell you were thinking. But hey, you might as well vote Democratic again. You're used to it.
If you voted Libertarian last time, AND you live in a competitive state, AND untrammelled executive power to strip any citizen of his constitutional protections at any time bothers you AND, more importantly, the idea that a President goes out of his way to assert and defend such a power bothers you, that is, if you are a libertarian, well, maybe you really . . . should . . . vote . . . for . . . Teresa's husband. Isn't she a hoot, anyway? Don't you think she'd make a more entertaining First Lady than Laura Bush? (Not that I have anything against Laura Bush.)
An aside. Matt also writes
the libertarians I know are all hyper-rational individualists who look on the whole "voting" thing as crude, superstitious behavior roughly on a par with reading tarot cards as a means of political action.
Now I bet I know all the libertarians Matt knows, and while some of them definitely agree with the "Don't Vote, You'll Only Encourage Them" principle, not all of them do. I confess to having voted in every Presidential election since 1980. I'm pretty sure I wrote in a neighbor's name in 1996 or 2000, but I did vote. And I'm sure I wrote a friend in for Maryland Attorney General one time. We couldn't have done worse.
Spider Hole of Redemption - At the American Prospect website, Matthew Yglesias points out that, well, Crazy Howard turned out to be right about the capture of Saddam Hussein not making Americans safer. Matt:
But why bring this up today? Just to brag? Well, yes, to brag a little, but for a more important reason as well. We seem to be repeating the very same sort of mistake that led so many to believe that Hussein's capture would lead to a significant improvement in the security situation. Just as taking the Hussein family out of play did nothing to dim the tide of Sunni rebelliousness, neither will achieving the current tactical goal of eliminating al-Sadr do much to end the Sadrist movement. One important fact little mentioned in the media is that the movement's leader -- Muqtada's father -- had already been killed several years ago by Hussein himself. Nevertheless, the movement persisted, a symbol of deep Shia disaffection from the Baath regime.
Now They Tell Us, the Continuing Story - The New York Times gets introspective:
Some critics of our coverage during that time have focused blame on individual reporters. Our examination, however, indicates that the problem was more complicated. Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all.
I shouldn't be bitter, should I? The editors provide a useful online appendix to the editorial - an annotated set of links to the paper's prewar coverage. I can't decide whether their cowardly for protecting Judith Miller specifically or commendable for not hanging her out to dry while letting themselves off easy.
Get It Over With - You can register for the upcoming draft online, and better. (Via the Agitator.)
Left as an Exercise for the Reader - Interesting story from the Associated Press:
Baker was a member of the Kentucky National Guard from 1989 through 1997 and re-enlisted after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.In the interview, Baker said that as part of the training drill, he was given an orange detainee jumpsuit to wear and turned over to four soldiers. Baker said the soldiers beat and choked him, stopping when they saw he was wearing parts of an Army uniform.
Baker said he has undergone numerous treatments, but still has medical problems.
Attempts by The Associated Press to reach Baker by telephone Monday were not successful.
The incident, if it happened, took place at Guantanamo Bay.
Meanwhile:
A US Army sergeant who gave an insider's view of Abu Ghraib prison to the media has lost his security clearance and been disciplined by the military for speaking out, he said today.Sergeant Samuel Provance said soldiers he served with in Iraq were treating him as a pariah, but that he would not change a thing if given a second chance.
"My soldiers who were at Abu Ghraib are so scared now they're not even talking to me any more - I'm like a villain, but would I do it again? Of course I would, because I stand behind what I said," Provance said in a telephone interview from Heidelberg, Germany, where his military intelligence unit is based.
"I knew what was being reported was not true."
Provance, 30, is with the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion, a unit of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which has been implicated in the alleged abuse at Abu Ghraib. The scandal broke after photographs were made public of US soldiers abusing prisoners, sparking worldwide outrage.
From the rabidly anti-Coalition, defeatist Daily Telegraph. NB: Fifth Corps has a plausible rejoinder:
"The last word I got is that he was given an order not to talk with anyone about the case while the investigation was ongoing, and if any type of action was levied against him, it would be a result of him not obeying that order," said Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Gainer. "It could compromise the whole investigation by putting out information and maybe influencing others."
This has the disadvantage of being both true (so far as we know) and a temptation to great mischief on the part of the Army because it is true.
He's Got a Little List - General Zinni has a Top 10, of all things, list of Iraq War mistakes. Number 1 is basically Had the Iraq War in the first place, with nine more flowing from that. Actually, 1-3 all fit under the rubric of "had the war in the first place." Number four (didn't internationalize the effort) begs the question of just how much further it could have been internationalized. It's not clear whether Five ("We underestimated the task") is better classed as mistake or malfeasance. I think it depends on what you mean by "we." 7 and 8 are similarly attributable to his problem three ("false rationale"). The famous lack of planning and insufficient troops on the ground make the most sense considered as components of a strategy to downplay the human and financial cost and level of effort in advance. Plus, as we are learning, we only have so many troops to go around.
Still, Zinni's list isn't bad, and he does get the big thing right.
Brood X sounds like a cross between vivisected monkeys and a transporter malfunction on Star Trek. Out my the window of my second-floor office stand the boughs of a huge tree, and I can see the cicadas flitting dozen on dozen from leaf to leaf and branch to branch. It makes my face itch.
L'Audace! Toujours L'Audace! - David Corn's report from a recent AEI conference suffers a bit by trying to generalize from a single paper to neoconhood as a whole, but I suspect there are a lot of Best and Brightest Mark II guys who not only want to "stay the course" but add some extra laps - sprinting. Good summary of recent second thoughts by mainstream Republicans at the beginning:
Columnist George Will has questioned Bush's inability - or unwillingness - to reconsider the mission in Iraq. Representative Henry Hyde, a leading Republican, complained, "It would be foolish, not to say ruinously arrogant, to believe that we can determine the future of Iraq." And Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the Intelligence Committee, declared that Bush's vision may be unrealistic and unwise: "We need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts, a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy, by force if necessary."
Took you long enough, you guys.
Annals of Special Pleading - Michael Ledeen gets out his Ouija board and blames America first in the Chalabi Affair. This behavior is consistent with the theory that Ledeen is himself an Iranian catspaw and has been since the 1980s, but I'm sure there are alternate explanations that fit the facts too. Choosing among the instances of special pleading and misdirection in Ledeen's pettifoggery is difficult, but let's simply apply his own principle. Ledeen tells us that
1. Chalabi couldn't be an Iranian spy because he's spent so much time openly visiting Tehran.
2. The way to tell what's really going on is by "reasoning paradoxically."
Gee, the two assertions look kind of funny sitting right next to each other, don't they? Maybe this is why Ledeen puts so much space between them, and why he adds the bit about how "He went to Tehran all the time, in part because the State Department and CIA refused to support him . . . " Well, that's all the excuse anyone should need.
Dismantling the rest of Ledeen's twaddle is left as an exercise for the reader. But it's also worth noting that James Jesus Angleton, Ledeen's posthumous adviser in these matters, died in disgrace after nearly wrecking the CIA and ruining many lives.
It's All Connected! - During the height of the Gary Condit-Chandra Levy scandal, the Onion did a "Man on the Street" feature in which one vox pop asked, "What is it with Democratic politicians and these intern Jewesses?" More seriously, we might ask "What is it with these Republican defense ideologues making fools of the country at the hands of Iran?"
The accusation on the table is that Ahmad Chalabi personally handed Iranian intelligence classified American secrets so dangerous that "it could get Americans killed." It's also alleged that one of Chalabi's right-hand men is on Iranian intelligence's payroll. CBS asks, quite reasonably, Okay, who in the US government gave Chalabi such secret information in the first place?
The thing is, we've been here before. A few weeks ago, after Post columnist David Ignatius wrote a mild mea culpa about his support for the Iraq war, I e-mailed him to ask (paraphrasing, because the original is on a different machine):
My question is, How did you forget so much that you used to know? Your first novel, Agents of Innocence, was brilliant at, among other things, showing how a coterie of Republican hard-cases stumbled over their own naivete and arrogance in the Middle East. Our Iraq policy wasn't just made by the same sort of people. It was made, in many cases, by the exact same people.
Look at the names that have moved in and out of the War on Terror, either on the field of play or cheering from the sidelines: Elliott Abrams, John Poindexter, Michael Ledeen, Oliver North - all men who, had they the merest sense of shame, would have found themselves a job in a small-town title insurance office and stayed as far from the spotlight as possible after 1987, all men that any self-respecting administration would shun like drunk drivers who left the prom queen smeared along a guardrail one awful Spring.
And yet they have jobs either making or influencing policy.
Seventeen years ago, Oliver North sat before the Joint Committee and bombastically declared that "This country has enemies, Senator." Well, North was in a position to know after all - he'd been consorting with them for several years. At the very time the Islamic Republic of Iran was torturing American government agents in captivity in Beirut, Oliver North was running a program to get that country's military machine up and running again, and doing it in a way that, at any moment it chose, Iran could make the United States look like fools.
The more things change, baby.
And at that hearing, one of North's biggest apologists, chief exponent of the Why do we gotta talk about this stuff? line of defense among the Representatives on the committee, was Congressman Michael DeWine of Ohio, lately famous for firing an aide who published a sex-oriented blog under a pseudonym. As Mrs. Offering put it in conversation yesterday, the first rule of working on the Hill is "Don't embarrass your boss." This makes sense, but DeWine has, like most Congressmen, embarrassed himself so many times over that one wonders why he hasn't long since taken to conducting his entire life under a pseudonym. Faced with rank and arguably criminal incompetence in the preservation of the country's national security, Michael DeWine wanted to let bygones be bygones. Faced with a woman who simply gave as good as she got in the sex-charged culture endemic to legislature at all levels of American government, DeWine at last finds something he can't overlook.
Ye Gods.
Will Congressman DeWine be among those demanding to know the details of Ahmad Chalabi's relations with Republican bureaucrats and defense "intellectuals," and through him, their possible relations with Iranian intelligence? I doubt it. But I'd like to know. Isn't blowhard Michael Ledeen, for instance, just the sort of arrogant fool a foreign intelligence service would regard as the perfect mark? Aren't Ledeen's endless screeds demanding that the US topple the Iranian government the perfect cover for a witting or unwitting agent of influence? Where do the allegiances of (continuing!) Ledeen pal Manuchir Ghorbanifar really lie, and what damage has Douglas Feith done to the country by getting himself mixed up with the man? Are the Iranians crazy, for bringing US troops to their very borders, or crazy smart, having figured out just what a ten-division army bogged down in a sour occupation can and can't do to them? Inquiring minds want to know, and will be found nowhere near the offices of Michael DeWine.