Meta - I confess it. I'm sitting there tonight watching Battlestar Galactica, and it did occur to me that there were a couple of dozen folks around the world thinking, Man, Henley must be flipping right now.
More after I stop flipping.
Who Killed Cock Robin? - So. Anyone interested in who actually killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri? Didn't think so. Discussion seems to moved directly to the politics of the Syrian occupation with barely a pause to consider what may have actually happened. The Lebanese, with the help of the Swiss, are planning an investigation, bless their hearts, but everyone else is focused on the Great Democratic Transformation that is or isn't happening. But isn't there at least a chance that what actually happened will end up affecting the politics of the story, even a little? No? Okay, you're probably right. So let's just speculate for fun. I will tell you who killed Rafiq Hariri and why, with every bit as much chance of being right as the Big Brains, but more chance of admitting in advance that I can't really say for sure. As a bonus, a suddenly prominent political figure makes a crucial appearance.
Before we begin, there is one objection that must be ruled out of bounds: You're engaging in conspiracy theories. When a thousand pound car bomb kills eighteen people, the "lone nut" hypothesis is the crazy option. Any theory that purports to fit the facts, mine or Michael Young's, must be a conspiracy theory. Are we together so far? Good.
The official conspiracy theory is "Syria did it." The fact that the upshot of the assassination has been very bad news for Syria - and predictably bad news - is the most important obstacle. Daniel Pipes' gets around this objection by arguing that Syria is stupid, Charles Paul Freund that it's mere "corruption and recklessness." In other words, Syria was "carrying the idiot ball that week."
Life is stupider than fiction or Paul Wolfowitz would never have told Congress before Gulf War Phase III that Iraq had no history of sectarian strife like there was in the Balkans, and Congress wouldn't have let him get away with it. And as a libertarian, I'm loath to suggest that there is a depth of dumbness governments can not plumb, and as governments go, Syria is worse than most. Still, you can't exactly call the Pipes/Freund argument a slam dunk.
The other argument for the offiicial theory is that Syria's control of Lebanon is so total that no one could have killed Hariri without the Syrians knowing. I'm sorry, I flat don't believe this. Very few authoritarian states have ever attained that level of control. Even Saddam's grip on Iraq was decaying as the 21st century rolled on. Months before the war, the US had special forces roaming the Western Desert, holed up in Baghdad hi-rises and taking meetings with the tribal leaders and Army commanders we ended up successfully buying off in advance of the invasion. Mediterranean culture being what it is, Lebanon's history being so anarchical and Syria in such decay, the notion that not a sparrow falls there without Damascus marking it is implausible. I'm sure Syrian security is officious, overbearing and menacing. I'm sure it's not omnicompetent.
Crap! Out of time! We'll pick up our investigations this evening. In the meantime, please make sure that no one leaves this room.
Take Two - That was fun, but there's a less snarky point to make about Warner's article. Quindlen may actually be "wrong." Warner et al's careerist approach to mothering may be "necessary," to the extent that Warner is showing us how 21st Century American meritocracy reproduces. Warner and her cohort represent the elite of Robert Reich's class of "symbolic analysts." The nice thing about American meritocracy is that you rise in it by dint of intelligence, education and hard work. (Plus social connections, of course. But you rise everywhere partly through social connections. The question is what else the elite brings to the table.) But all those things are broadly heritable, in nature or nurture terms. If you're a meritocrat, you have a real if imperfect chance of passing on your status to your offspring. And just as TVs get bigger and clearer and computers get faster and cheaper, we can expect succeeding generations of symbolic analysts to be smarter, better educated and harder-working than their ancestors. But how do they get that way? Perhaps by dint of inhuman efforts toward that end by their mothers. Essentially, the entry fee into the meritocracy keeps rising and parents have to work harder and harder to ensure their kids can pay it. Their efforts can easily become markers of shared experience that bind tomorrow's class in psychic solidarity - all those kids sitting around Seven Sister and Little Ivy dorm rooms saying "You took elite ballet too? So did I!"
That means that Warner's desired government subsidies can't solve her real problem, which is ensuring that her children have relatively higher status than the bulk of their generational cohort. You can offer tax-funded ballet classes to every Jacob and Caitlin in the country, but there will still be only one "best" ballet class in a given town. Meritocrat moms will still "need" to get into that class, not the ones for the hoi-polloi. Rank Hath Its Privileges, but its duties too.
There's also the fact that, as a country, having your socioeconomic elite marked by brains, education and hard work offers real benefits, even to those of us who aren't in it.
It Gives Me Absolutely No Pleasure to Say This given that she's been one of my bete noires for years, but thank God for Anna Quindlen. Her Newsweek essay, "The Good Enough Mother," is the perfect antidote to the twaddle peddled in its more-discussed companion piece, the excerpt from Judith Warner's Perfect Madness. The obvious point to make about at least the excerpted portion of Warner's book is that, in classic American fashion, she mistakes "the middle class" for people like her. Warner is an upper-middle class striver and moves in that milieu. What she chronicles and exemplifies is simply American workaholism applied to child-rearing. Given the way that journalists find vox pop samples* when writing such articles, you can be sure that the bulk of Warner's "150 mothers across the country" are also from her class. So the ambitious income redistribution that she imagines will solve the problems of women like her and her friends amounts to a bold if imprecisely quantified call for the redistribution of wealth from the upper-class to the upper-middle class. To the barricades, comrades!
But it's sillier than that. In the middle of her article, she explains the virtues of government subventions for the kinds of child care she'd like to see:
I lived in France before moving to Washington, and there, my elder daughter attended two wonderful, affordable, top-quality part-time pre-schools, which were essentially meant to give stay-at-home moms a helping hand. One was run by a neighborhood co-op and the other by a Catholic organization. Government subsidies kept tuition rates low. A sliding scale of fees brought some diversity. Government standards meant that the staffers were all trained in the proper care of young children. My then 18-month-old daughter painted and heard stories and ate cookies for the sum total in fees of about $150 a month. (This solution may be French—but do we have to bash it?)
Pause to suggest that Warner's obsession with "quality" child care is an insistence that child-care facilities are only worthy if they provide an outsourced version of the same non-stop, thoroughgoing "enrichment activities" that Warner and her friends can't forebear. We've had our two children, at various periods, in the care of: each parent at home; two outlets of one corporate center; two different church-based facilities and two neighborhood moms. Some were "better" and some were "worse," but none of them could be fairly called detrimental to our kids, though none of them - and I suspect this is Warner's stumbling block - shortened the path from here to Harvard.
But, remember: Warner's thesis. Political solutions, aka copious piles of other people's money, can salve the psychic wounds of American mothers. So let's cut to the end of her article, where she writes
And I was reminded of the words of a French doctor I'd once seen. I'd come to him about headaches. They were violent. They were constant. And they would prove, over the next few years, to be chronic. He wrote me a prescription for a painkiller. But he looked skeptical as to whether it would really do me much good. "If you keep banging your head against the wall," he said, "you're going to have headaches."
What? You mean despite all that subsidized top-quality pre-school (with "some diversity" - and surely no more was desired), Warner was still unhappy? Still "banging [her] head against the wall?" You don't say.
The print version of the article is especially instructive, with its photo insets of anchorwomen and editors, their plight captions reminding one of a National Geographic photo essay from a refugee camp. And perhaps Geographic should send an anthropologist/photographer team to capture this tribe that confuses class neurosis with political neglect. In the meantime, Warner and her 150 friends should, while waiting in line for a spot in "the right ballet class . . . the best camps, the best coaches and the best piano teachers" carry the hardcopy of Quindlen's essay to read. Excerpt:
So much has been written about how the young people of America seem to stay young longer now, well into the years when their grandparents owned houses and had families. But their grandparents never had a mother calling the teacher to complain about a bad grade. And hair-trigger attention spans may be less a function of PlayStation and more a function of kids who never have a moment's peace. I passed on the weekend roundelay of kiddie-league sports so our three could hang out with one another. I told people I hoped it would cement a bond among them, and it did. But I really wanted to be reading rather than standing on the sidelines pretending my kids were soccer prodigies. Maybe I had three children in the first place so I wouldn't ever have to play board games. In my religion, martyrs die.
Then they should get out of line and get some ice cream.
*Fun fact re this early Offering. I later met someone quoted in the article. He confirmed that the writer had indeed been talking to friends and friends of friends, and that some of the wives' comments did lead to a measure of domestic friction.
I am Walid Jumblatt - It hit me: Jumblatt's sudden love for liberal revolution and American interventionism
"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."
reminds me of nothing so much as my tasteless April Fool's Joke of last year.
Memory Hole - How long does it take to go from raving menace to statesman? A couple of months, apparently. Lebanese Druze leader Walid Jumblatt managed that trick anyway. Just in December, the New York Sun found, to its horror, that Jumblatt was the sort of person accorded respect by - and I am sorry to upset you - France. They're just the sort of people to set up a state visit by a man who
On November, 19, 2003, it was reported that the state department cancelled Mr. Jumblatt's diplomatic visa following revelations that he expressed regret that the deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, was not killed in a missile attack during a visit to Baghdad.More recently, Mr. Jumblatt gave an interview to Al-Sharq Al-Awsat on February 12, 2004, in which he said: "We are all happy when U.S. soldiers are killed [in Iraq] week in and week out. The killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory." The Progressive Socialist Party leader has also said he felt "great joy" at the 2002 destruction of the U.S. Space Shuttle Columbia, because it carried an Israeli astronaut.
The Lebanese MP is also known for espousing conspiracy theories against America. On April 28, 2004, he gave an interview to Al Arabiyya TV, in which he detailed how America was really behind September 11: "Who invented Osama bin Laden?! The Americans, the CIA invented him so they could fight the Soviets in Afghanistan together with some of the Arab regimes. Osama bin Laden is like a ghost, popping up when needed. This is my opinion."
This week, Jumblatt is aces. David Ignatius reports that
"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," explains Jumblatt. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world." Jumblatt says this spark of democratic revolt is spreading. "The Syrian people, the Egyptian people, all say that something is changing. The Berlin Wall has fallen. We can see it."
and his accusations of Syrian guilt in the assassination of Rafiq Hariri are taken as probative.
Simply start saying things useful to the Bush White House and you too can take on gravitas with Gannonite speed. Only spoilsports would pause to wonder if your insights into the murder of Rafiq Hariri or your enthusiasm for democracy were more credible than your shrewd deductions regarding the massacres of September 2001. And the only people who would suggest that, as a politician, anything that comes out of your mouth is calculated to maintain and increase your own power would be people who are just on the other side.
Cockfight - World O'Crap and Tom Maguire go at it over Jeff Gannon and James Guckert. I feel obligated to say more on the topic without annoying hypocrisy, but I think the story has hit a stage where blogs have very little useful to say. The interesting questions now have to do with just how odd Gannon's access was, what involvement he had in the burning of Valerie Plame and whether his job was implicated in sexual blackmail from any direction. Answering those questions involves acquiring facts we don't seem to have. Republican bias will educate your guesses in one direction and Democratic bias in another. Gannon's own testimony seems insufficiently reliable to settle the matter, for all that Howard Kurtz declines to go beyond it. The Gannon news cycle now runs at the speed of FOIA requests and special prosecutor subpoenas.
One of the things I've been wondering is, "If I found out a call girl had managed to get a job as a tame White House correspondent, how differently would I view things?" There are escort bloggers who write at least as well as a lot of journalists (if that's not damning with faint praise), and there's the passage in Wolfe's Book of the Short Sun where Horn/Silk explains to an unhappy young girl that it is only appropriate that everyone use whatever talents they have to get through life. If Gannon simply leveraged some affection or gratitude from a satisfied client into a new, less strenuous line of work, I don't fault him for it. If said client wanted merely to do him a good turn I can't get too worked up about it. It's not morally uncomplicated, because the flip side of that thing is sexual harrassment - the ex(?)-escort is getting jumped ahead of all sorts of people who did not bugger the gatekeeper for cash. The civil law looks askance enough on that kind of thing for many companies to institute fairly strict anti-fraternization policies, or at least get nervous about it. If you and I are sleeping together and you give me a promotion, even though there's no quid pro quo either of us will acknowledge even to ourselves, the less attractive men in the company (that is, the rest of them . . . ) can make the case that they missed out because they weren't loving you up like I was. No company wants to fight that suit.
I don't approve of taking sexual harrassment law that far myself, so I'm not outraged if something like that happened in Gannon's case. Most liberals probably do approve of taking sexual harrassment law that far, though, so unlike Monicagate, they aren't being hypocritical for taking the stances they've taken.
Meanwhile, the Party in Power trades on sexual moralism, especially when it comes to icky man-man stuff. The hypocrisy of functionaries for an anti-gay, sex-dubious party playing Pygmalion with an aging working boy matters, if indeed that's how it happened. That's the kind of thing it will take actual journalism to tell us. Maguire may be right that "sometimes, where there is smoke there are only people throwing smoke grenades." Sometimes. We don't know yet if this is one of those times or not.
Book Notes - Our sole booknote is I'm not going to blog much tonight because I'm deep into the delightful memoir, Swimming to Antarctica, by legendary distance swimmer Lynne Cox. So far she's set two crossing records for the English Channel and one for California's Catalina Channel and nearly died from dysentary trying to complete a Nile River race under repulsive conditions. And soon I'll get to the part where she graduates high school. Nice clean writing. I got the book for my 12-year-old niece, the competitive swimmer in the family, for Christmas and finally was able to borrow it back.
The New Yorker Online offers a 2003 interview with Cox about her most recent achievement, a one-mile Antarctic swim without wetsuit or greasing.
Mandalaspherics! - Radley's got a good column about how blogs aren't really all that and a bag of chips, in which he reiterates his point about how independent the political blogosphere isn't. But I find myself wanting something more meta. We know about blogospheric triumphalism. Radley's column belongs to the growing genre of blogospheric anti-triumphalsim. But the next level, which I hope we will reach soon, is triumphal blogospheric anti-triumphalism, in which a legion of anti-Jarvises proclaim blogospheric anti-triumphalism the most important development in media since the stele. Surely this very item represents a small contribution to that end, but I suppose the phenomenon will have arrived when an outcry of blogospheric anti-triumphalists (BATs?) forces the Emm Ess Emm to restore some legacy media poobah or politician to the phoney-baloney job other bloggers hounded him from.
Or something.
Oh by the Way - Not me. Weird, because Henley is damned uncommon in the US for a proper English name. I've never met a Henley I wasn't related to, and I've never seen the name used fictionally before. My middle initial is "L," if anybody's wondering.
Little Oral Anarchist - Interesting consideration of the relationships among radical feminism, libertarianism and pornography by Micha Ghertner. I don't agree that pornography as such is oppression of women, and I think that Catherine MacKinnon ends up plumping for totalitarian solutions to gender issues because she brings a totalizing mindset to analyzing gender relations. I'm fascinated by Micha's quotation from Johnson and Long that "the state sees and treats everybody—though not in equal degree—the way men see and treat women," but one of its fascinations is that it cuts both ways. If "men" and "women" are less unitary in praxis than in feminist theory, then perhaps "the state" and "everybody" are as well. In other words, the analogy is a kind of anarcho-capitalist doubling down of its original bet on the nature and valence of the state.
Meanwhile, Alina Stefanescu muses on pregnancy as an aggravating factor in murder risk. She quotes, without judgment, NOW President Kim Gandy to the effect that
"Violence in intimate relationships is all about power...There are fewer times when you can have power over a woman than when she's pregnant. She's vulnerable. It's an easier time to threaten her."
which manages to have a good deal of fatuity to it (just what does it mean to say something is "all about power" anyway?) and only a partial account of the problem. The rest of the problem is that pregnancy raises the financial, legal and emotional stakes in any relationship. It's a stressful time for a solid relationship. In the case of a bad one, the only question is How horribly things will go wrong? One of those ways is certainly the man killing the woman.
One of the good things that might come out of the libertarian-conservative divorce is freeing some (mostly male) libertarians to look at feminism with fresh eyes and a less reflexive rejection of feminist theory and scholarship than a lot of us were prone to aforetimes. Feminist prescription may, insofar as it calls for increased state power, be anti-libertarian. Feminist diagnosis need not be.
Sorry Kevin - At some point today I realized that 24 is no more subtly suggesting that torture is unreliable so we shouldn't torture than it is suggesting that car chases and gun battles are unreliable so we shouldn't engage in them. It's just another thing "we" do that sometimes works and sometimes (especially during rising action) doesn't. It's a shame when it doesn't work out, but what does? (Note that Jack's shooting off the kneecap of the mook in Episode One successfully yields information. It's not in time because CTU has committed the unpardonable folly of not having Baueresque gusto.
Meanwhile, Raznor has uncovered several genuine lessons from the show, including
3) Any terrorist plot will be stopped in a few hours, only to have the much bigger plot initiated. This is my theory for the intelligence failure on 9/11. They actually stopped some minor terrorist threat only to find out the real plan involved airplanes. That part probably hasn't been declassified yet.
Obviously, there are more.
Scheming Bitch Blogging - No, not 24 this time. Kevin Drum (who walks right up to the line of violating the sacred oath he had to swear to never link to this site when Washington Monthly hired him to blog) has your 24-blogging today. Kevin thinks that the show is a sly morality play on the "torture doesn't work" theme. It's either that or, taking the show as a fantasia on America's self-image, an object lesson in how the complex of "fear and vaunting" Garet Garrett identified as the characteristic of Empire degenerates into sadomasochistic ritual. The question of which it is makes me genuinely interested in where the show goes next. In addition to wondering how the promised scene of Jack torturing his girlfriend's estranged husband in front of her plays out, I want to see how the character of torture-victim Sarah develops. She was unpleasant before her victimhood and she's unpleasant now, which is dramatically appropriate. I may be imagining it, but the actress who plays her seemed to convey a barely repressed rage as she observed not one but two different terror suspects, against whom there is far stronger evidence, being treated better than her.
But this isn't about 24 and torture. It's about Battlestar Galactica and gender. Something I had to face watching Friday night's episode, which I enjoyed greatly (see Olmsted for some examples of wobbly plotting) is that, while I've lampooned 24 for its parade of "scheming bitches," Battlestar Galactica has them too. Obviously Tricia Helfer's Number Six counts here. But both versions of the Cylon Boomer are running highly sexualized cons on different servicemen. What saves it for me, and keep in mind I'm a man, is that we don't get just scheming bitches. Neither Starbuck nor President Roslin make the scheming bitch list. Diversity! I've got other gender-related thoughts running through my head, but they're not the kind I can get lined up before work.
UPDATE: Of course, BSG's scheming bitches have strange depths to them. There's Number Six's Tielhardian obsession with God, and Boomer's apparent divided loyalties. (Previews for next week suggest we're about to find out how much of that is genuine and how much red herring.)
A Fanboy's Comments on a Fanboy's Links - Speaking of the Hibbs article, this is the part that jumped out at me, for self-interested reasons:
Another observation: People who want Manga seem to only want real Manga – taking American comics and putting them in Manga format does not seem to adding sales. There are 5 manga-format American comics on the list, if I’m remembering everything right: the four Spider-Man related “Marvel Age” books and Michael Chabon’s Escapist v1. All of which, I think, would have appeared on the charts anyway, if they’d been in a more traditional format. Can’t prove it, however.I do know that manga formatting hurts sales in at least my corner of the Direct Market. For example, I’ve yet to sell a single copy of any of the reformatted Elfquest books since they were released – despite having 2-3 people a month coming and asking for Elfquest. They simply don’t like the format. We’ve also seen underwhelming results of things ranging from My Faith in Frankie to Emma Frost and it’s my strong belief that “non standard” formatting isn’t a trick the public seems interested in falling for. It doesn’t track on BookScan either.
Self-interested because RGB Bill and I had pretty well decided to write and draw our always-in-progress graphic novel to a manga format so as not to miss the biggest, newest wave in rackability, despite the fact that I'm not all that fond of the format, myself. I don't mind large-trim manga - Uzumaki or A Contract with God dimensions - they're roughly as big as a lot of prose trade paperbacks. But to little Chobits-size books are smaller than I enjoy. You either lose a lot of detail in the art and a lot of flexibility in panel layout or you cram an unreadable amount of material heedlessly onto the page.
Format matters. Just going from "magazine-size" trim to "large-manga" dimensions means, in practical terms, stepping down from a six-panel grid to four (roughly). Slimming Shrinking down to the smallest manga package probably means two to three panels on most pages. That makes a huge difference right back to the writing stage of the project, since it's the writer's responsibility to pace the action from page to page and give the artist a fighting chance to produce attractive layouts. I've been working on an eight-page short story for Bill as a tune-up for the full graphic novel. Wanting to practice "manga scripting," I worked to describe an average of four panels worth or story per page. Consarn it, I'm gonna go back and up that to six now!
A Fanboy's Links - Brian Hibbs offers his annual analysis of Bookscan's 2004 sales figures for "graphic novels." Well-caveated and astutely considered.
The Comics Reporter finds a mysterious newspaper strip oddity - a covert outbreak of Tourette's Syndrome by The Ghost Who Walks. For what it's worth, it looks to me less like it says "FORCE IT UP YOUR @ASS" than "OR STICK IT UP YOUR @SS." ("FOR STICK IT UP YOUR @SS?") And I think the clues to the target of the cartoonist's ire are probably to be found in the nearly legible letters in the first half of the line above the naughty bits. Part of it looks like "ARHSDA," which means, I gotta say, nothing to me. Any insights?
Also, the international Fantastic Four trailer.
Big Mo and Big Brother II - But wait! There's more!
Last week Joseph Braude argued in The New Republic (motto: Giving Overbearing Paternalism a Bad Name Since 1917!) that "we" should not pressure Egypt's geriatric caudillo, Hosni Mubarak, to democratize because in a democratic Egypt the wrong people would win. Instead, the United States should pressure Mubarak to liberalize civil society now so that liberals can win free elections down the road; that is, when "we" are sure liberals will win.
To foster a semblance of political balance in Egyptian society, political and cultural pressure must first be exerted from the top--a twenty-first century Ataturk-style project to undo the country's decades-long tilt toward Islamism is needed. This means opening Egyptian broadcast media to progressive voices, not just religious clerics and the political establishment. It means advancing a secular humanist agenda through the educational system. It means opening the organs of state, from the judiciary to the executive, to the sort of exchange programs with democratic countries that bore fruit so profoundly in the Ukraine in recent months. The details of the project would best be left to Egypt's liberals themselves, who know better than outsiders what they need to gain ground. But the central question has already been well expressed by Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim, no stranger to the country's prison system himself: "What, Mr. Mubarak, have you done to preserve the popularity of non-Islamist forces in the country?"
This is stupid. It's as if Braude had never learned one of the basic laws of politics: the greatest pressure on authoritarian regimes comes after they have begun to liberalize. It is not a process you can stage-manage. Improving conditions raise expectations which spark new demands which meet new frustrations which ratchet up tensions. You either get seismic change, a great deal of blood or both. See Manila in 1986 (7?), Berlin in 1989, Moscow in 1991, Ukraine in 2004 and Beirut this week for the seismic change; Beijing 1989, the West Bank and Gaza in the late 1990s and Prague in 1968 for the great deal of blood; and Petrograd in 1917, Algeria in the 1950s, India in the 1940s and all too many other places for the both at once. Proposals to gradually liberalize are, like the vision of the "real occupation" of the Palestinian territories that Steven Postrel outlined in letters to this site a couple of years ago, only attempts to put off a day of reckoning. Indeed, I think we're swiftly returning to something very like the late-1990s juncture between Israel and the Palestinians. We will either have peace quickly or war with agonizing leisure.
What Braude offers Egypt is a faux liberalization that would have to end in revolution or repression. (See Kruschev, Nikita, "Thaw.") What excuses the paternalism of real parents is that they actually know more about the world than their offspring. Braude's own naivete is childlike. There's nothing adorable about it.
Big Mo and Big Brother - Lebanese opposition to the Syrian occupation is growing, including a major street demonstration and escalating demands from the opposition. I've been up front about my qualms here, basically the possibility that Syria's thumb has been the only thing keeping the scabs over Lebanon's internal strife from bursting. But my qualms aren't what matters. The Syrian government's views aren't the final word, either. If a critical mass of Lebanese are determined to try to make a go of their society without outside overseers, they deserve that chance. If Lebanese violence were to spill over into Syria, Syria would have legitimate reasons of self-defense to take action. That's assuming you don't believe in expansive notions of "preventive self-defense" that justify using military force against another country based on the simple probability that it could become a threat to you down the line. Absent that, Syria should defend itself from within its own borders. Good advice for everyone. Reader Tomscud writes
On the question of whether Lebanon will once again collapse into civil war if Syria goes: I doubt it. There are too many people who remember exactly what it was like. Twenty years from now, when they're all old codgers sitting around in coffee shops playing backgammon, people might be willing to listen to (and fund, and volunteer for) the hotheads who say "yes, war is bad. But I'll be damned if I let THOSE PEOPLE put one over us!" But for now, anyone who tries to restart the war will be crucified by his own community, which is a contrast from the situation in Iraq, say.
I hope he's right. There are two terrible truths that tell against it. The first is that humans are awesomely, frightfully adaptable. It's our glory and our curse. In Beirut in the 1980s and Sarejevo in the 1990s simply going to the grocery store was worth your life. But people persevered. There's some marvelous writing about this in Tom Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem, actually. It took the shortest of cease fires for someone to flip a table back onto its legs and make it a sidewalk cafe - for a little while. In Sarejevo, I have read, women risked snipers to get their hair done.
We are a damned persistent species. The downside of that is that when so little is truly intolerable, too much will be tolerated for too long.
The other terrible truth is that a lot of humans, especially men, enjoy war. This was even true of World War I, poster child for Bad Stupid Wars. I suspect it will have been true for some Lebanese as well.
Nevertheless, there is such a thing as war-weariness. It may finally be setting in to Lebanon's south. Perhaps it is in Lebanon too. I hope so. And there's a universal desire for self-rule too. The Syrians would be unwise to flout it. I wouldn't spend one American life to drive them out, but I wouldn't advise them to overstay their welcome either. And I hope the Lebanese make a go of it. The country has, for periods of its history, been the jewel of the Mediterranean. With luck and a lot of work, it may be so again.
The Most Exciting Webcast Event Since Coverville came along. Bruce Dene Fleming, photographer, graphic designer and best man at my wedding, has started his own webcast on Webjay, Radio Free Chauncey. Self-consciously eclectic, all-music and no talk, with a new song or two added every day, RFC runs the gamut from country to hip-hop. The two downsides are that Webjay bandwidth can be inconsistent (I had a lot of drops last night, none tonight) and that you don't get whole new shows swapped in, just a gradual accretion of new material. But it's yet another great source of good stuff you either haven't heard before or haven't had pounded into your brain a million times. Just yesterday, Offering Boy and I did a couple of hours of errands in the car. Among five radio stations we heard four different songs twice in that time. Bruce offers one more way to save yourself from such a fate.
NP on Radio Free Chauncey: "Strawberry Sex" by Ken Hirai.