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.