Slacker Friday

• November 21, 2005 | 11:43 PM ET | Permalink

Not Uniformly Horrible (Well, almost but not quite) … One argument you often heard from liberal hawks before the Iraq invasion was that, "well, we did a nice job in Afghanistan, so what’s so hard about Iraq?” We heard the same thing from those smart liberals, like Jake Weisberg, who wish to argue that Bush can’t possibly be as bad as stupid liberals like yours truly argue. Well, this Washington Post piece on Afghanistan would argue that these liberal hawks/liberal “Bush Ain’t So Bad” types are jes’ whistlin’ Dixie when it comes to Afghanistan, which now betrays all of the symptoms of Bush/Cheney malign neglect.

Still, we are generous folk at Altercation and we’ve decided to do our opponents’ work for them. It is true, as they would have it, that not absolutely everything Bush and his advisers do is uniformly horrible. Here are two pretty decent things of recent times. Really. Let’s all add to the list. It will show how reasonable we are about this fellow whom we’ve frequently proven (not argued, but proven) to be a liar, an incompetent, and an ideological extremist.

1) Ben S. Bernanke appointed as head of the Fed

2) Condi Rice throws away her schedule and negotiates a deal to open up Gaza

(OK, that’s two. See, I’ll bet you thought that was a setup.)

Still, you can’t keep up with the lies, part XVIII here:

“According to the Germans, President Bush mischaracterized Curveball's information when he warned before the war that Iraq had at least seven mobile factories brewing biological poisons. Then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell also misstated Curveball's accounts in his prewar presentation to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003, the Germans said… The White House, for example, ignored evidence gathered by United Nations weapons inspectors shortly before the war that disproved Curveball's account. Bush and his aides issued increasingly dire warnings about Iraq's biological weapons before the war even though intelligence from Curveball had not changed in two years.

At the Central Intelligence Agency, officials embraced Curveball's account even though they could not confirm it or interview him until a year after the invasion. They ignored multiple warnings about his reliability before the war, punished in-house critics who provided proof that he had lied and refused to admit error until May 2004, 14 months after the invasion.”

Congrats to Drogin and Goetz on this report. If only we had gotten this kind of thing when it might have prevented a war.

Some 2,000 U.S. troops dead, 15,000 wounded, tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed, world hates us, and hundreds of billions of dollars wasted…. Thanks again, Ralph.

I realize it’s too much for so strong a war supporter to admit that his arguments have led to a human and strategic catastrophe, but just what is David Brooks smoking when he writes, “Re-enlistment rates are high because most American troops believe they can create a better Iraq.”

Here is a the lead sentence of an article that appeared in his newspaper two days before his false and unsupported assertion was published: “The military is falling far behind in its effort to recruit and re-enlist soldiers for some of the most vital combat positions in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new government report.”

This is consistent with what has been happening ever since the Iraq war began. “Facing its worst enlistment crisis since the all-volunteer army began in 1973, the shortfall in manpower grew so acute that beginning in 2005, the military began accepting new recruits with criminal records and pending criminal charges -- and to offer them enlistment bonuses ranging from $14,400 to $20,000 in addition to as much as $70,000 towards college loan repayments. To retain soldiers already enlisted, the army was forced to offer as much as $150,000 to some soldiers in key areas as a means of retaining them. The Pentagon also asked Congress to lift the age of military recruits to 42, a full six years older than it had been three years earlier. [i][i] Despite all of these inducements, all three services continued to miss their recruiting missions.”

Once again I ask Gail Collins and the rest of the Times op-ed team: Is a Times column considered a license to lie?

Liberal hawks can’t admit they were wrong, part XXVVI: I usually admire Jonathan Chait,  but not here: “I believe that liberals loathe the war because they loathe Bush, rather than vice versa. What they want above all is for Bush to admit he made some huge mistakes in Iraq.”

Now try this:

“What was I thinking? Transforming an Arab, Islamic dictatorship like Iraq with an unstable population make-up and thousands of years of cultural isolation into a democracy, whatever the reason -- and we were consistently lied to about those -- would have been a Herculean and possibly impossible task under any circumstances and with the most enlightened of leaders. To try to do it with virtually the entire world against us and with the likes of these dishonest, incompetent, torture-justifying, ideological extremists running things was the height of folly as I now realize. In any case, I apologize to all my liberal anti-war friends for (occasionally? Consistently? Obliquely?) doubting your motives. You were right. I was wrong. I will never place my trust in these people again.”

The rest of you smart guys have that one for free too.

The scandal continues here. It would have been too  much to expect Kit Seeleye and the Times Business section to really go after Howie Kurtz’s various conflicts of interests and the myriad examples that Mickey Kaus and I have detailed here and elsewhere over the years. And I admit it would have been a lot of work. I am quoted at the end of the piece, only to be pooh-poohed by a journalist from the City Paper in Washington, who can expect a friendly call from Howie soon, with an invitation to lunch sometime no doubt, and maybe the suggestion that he really should be working at the Post… . Still, a phone call or e-mail from Ms. Seeleye to me would have put her on course to at least judge some of the case against Kurtz, instead of ignoring so much of it. And man, does Downie get off easy…

Speaking of me and Howie, look at this from the now infamous Gigot/Tomlinson e-mails:

From Gigot to Tomlinson (Aug. l3, 2004): btw, the Alterman column won't hurt. He's the guy who continually writes that howard kurtz is a right-winger.

From Tomlinson to Gigot (same day): Paul -- oh, I agree. You cannot touch this. But I will try to get someone interesting in laughing at these clowns.

And here is the Nation column that pissed them off:

“It still may call itself investigative journalism -- and so it once was -- but now it's really just a glittering and carefully choreographed waltz in which all the dancers share the unspoken agreement that the one unpardonable faux pas is to ask who's calling the tune.”

Excellent piece by the LAT’s Tim Rutten, here.

Money for Nothing? Is this fair? The Times Sunday Styles section plays this story as famous rock stars cashing in on nouveau riche a**holes with too much money paying for insanely expensive weddings and bar-mitvahs. But could we please make a significant distinction between Paul McCartney, Elton John, and others who to do this kind of thing in order to support charitable causes, and those stars who are just slumming to line their own pockets? The Times did the same thing to Dave Eggers a few years ago. It is a noble thing to separate well-to-do people from their wallets in order to support charitable causes. It is not money-grubbing as the Times so frequently wishes to portray it. (To be fair, this “Today’s Paper’s” description makes the article appear far worse than it is. Here is its entirely indiscriminate description: “Even more venerable acts like the Rolling Stones and Elton John will play a wedding reception if the price is right -- and the guests promise not to tell anyone.” 

And speaking of which, Little Roy is all upset about this McCarthyite attack on the Democrats. Seems to me it’s not nearly as bad as his hysteria about Fifth Column decadent elites in the very same city that had just been attacked. Methinks that Andy deserves his own “Malkin” award permanently tattooed on his forehead; what he certainly does not deserve, particularly since he is getting paid by AOLTimeWarnerCNNETC, is your money, for which I see he is still trolling. Give the money instead to UNICEF to fight AIDS in Africa. (If Andy disagrees, this space is his to make a counter-argument.)

How messed up is our political system? A Republican woman who calls decorated Marines cowards defeats a Democratic soldier who served in Iraq by playing the hyper-patriotism card.

Gore/Obama, 08.

Tramps like Frist, McConnell, Santorum  -- they were born to run away.

Alter-reviews:

Vincent Van Gogh: The Drawings
Catalog of the exhibition by Colta Ives, Susan Alyson Stein, Sjraar van Heughten, and Marije Vellekoop
An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, October 18–December 31, 2005.
Metropolitan Museum of Art/Van Gogh Museum/Yale University Press, 380 pp., $65.00; $45.00 (paper)

I’m not sure I have a lot to add to what Mr. Updike writes here except to note the comparison he makes to the Vermeer exhibition, which was the greatest art exhibition of all time, so crowds are crowds for a reason. In this case, the night I saw the Van Gogh (who was my lifelong favorite painter before I saw the Vermeers and now it’s like no contest), it was comically crowded. And the funny thing about Van Gogh’s drawings is that, while they are terrific, the definition he was able to achieve is awe-inspiring; they are also, in this extremely unlettered (when it comes to art) opinion, besides the point. Every so often the exhibition will include one of his paintings and it just serves to remind that his true genius was his use of color, not his drawing ability. So actually, this catalogue really does the trick, since you can examine the drawings up close without half of New Delhi in your way.

I’m also grateful to my new friends at Yale for publishing Masters of American Comics, which is something I’ve needed for a long time: thoughtful essays about the great comics of the past century, placed in historical context, alongside samples of the work itself. Some of the essays are more cute than informative, alas.

But it really fills a void, at least insofar as I am aware. The exhibition is traveling now, so pay attention.

Finally, I am so far from qualified to review Kabbalah: A Very Short Introduction by Joseph Dan, just published by Oxford, that I won’t even try, but it looks to be a lot more useful for these purposes than say, a Madonna album. PW says it “offers deep history in succinct fashion, resulting in a fascinating and highly readable effort." Of course that guy might not know what he’s talking about either, but I found it highly readable and informative, too. If some smart Kabbalah-ist wants to send in a short review, I’ll print it here.

Correspondence Corner:

Name: Jeff Myhre
Hometown: New York, NY
Dear Eric, I would just like to know why Mr. Bush has decided to Cut and Run in Afghanistan! There are 20,000 Yankee troops there now, and this spring 4,000 are leaving with more out later in the year. With the Taliban still carrying weapons, with the druglords now producing 80% of the world's heroin there and with President Karzai's writ barely making it to the suburbs of Kabul, there is no way the Afghans are standing up so we can stand down. A couple of links to back up this take on the Murtha-like "surrender" in Afghanistan: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/11/16/do1602.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/11/16/ixopinion.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1643584,00.html http://www.kensingtonreview.com/2005D/1118/CutnRun.htm
Sorry, but the American press doesn't seem to have anything on this.

Name: Robert Earle
Hometown: Torrance, CA
Your friend Stupid refers to the Rove Republicans, facetiously (or maybe ironically), as the party willing to do "whatever it takes" in their war on terrorism. But if they really are the ones willing to do "whatever it takes", then why are Osama and Zarqawi still at large? Could it be that "whatever it takes" doesn't work? Maybe someone should ask them.

Name: Alan Breslauer
Hometown: Los Angeles CA
Does it offend you when Paul Gigot sends an email to Ken Tomlinson stating, "I don't know anyone who takes alterman seriously, and all his accusations are years old." Just one of many outrageous and funny things in their released email exchange. Take a look if you have not already. http://opinionjournal.com/editorial/pbs.pdf

Name: Larry
Hometown: Denton, TX
Hi Eric, In your review of Woodward's book, you wrote: "That's too bad, because unfortunately Cheney is nuts." It reminded me of this lyric from a Dylan song: The next day everybody got up Seein' if the clothes were dry. The dogs were barking, a neighbor passed, Mama, of course, she said, "Hi!" "Have you heard the news?" he said, with a grin, "The Vice-President's gone mad!" "Where?" "Downtown." "When?" "Last night." "Hmm, say, that's too bad!" "Well, there's nothin' we can do about it," said the neighbor, "It's just somethin' we're gonna have to forget." "Yes, I guess so," said Ma, Then she asked me if the clothes was still wet.

Donald L Feinberg
Naperville, IL
Apparently putting human rights at the top of his agenda, President Bush tried to promote religious tolerance and freedom in China on Sunday, by attending church services before meeting top leaders. In an object lesson we are all supposed to emulate, in the church's guestbook the President wrote: "May God bless the Christians of China." In his quest to promote religious freedom, Bush clearly prefers that the Christians (4% of the population) of China be blessed, while he feels that the (96% of the population) Chinese of other faiths are not so worthy of God's blessings.

And I had thought the President was an evangelical?  Just four days previously, police in central China arrested 130 members of an underground Christian evangelical group, including three American citizens.  The church members were seized in an afternoon raid in Henan province's Xihua county, in central China, and have been detained at the county jail, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy has reported.

Uh, Mr. Bush?

Mr. Bush also said nothing about the Buddhists - another "tiny" sect in China.  Perhaps he could have asked the Chinese to stop persecuting the Buddhists?

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[i][i]
Page 1A
Soldiers re-enlist beyond U.S. goal
Troops help offset recruiting shortfall
By Dave Moniz
USA TODAY , July 18, 2005

and

Army Boosts Benefits for Recruits Taking High-Demand Jobs
By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 22, 2005; A09
A2005

Pentagon Proposes Rise in Age Limit for Recruits
By DAMIEN CAVE, NYT, July 22, 2205, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/22/politics/22recruit.html?pagewanted=print

November 18, 2005 | 12:53 PM ET | Permalink

Two new columns:  “Why not, Messrs Sulzberger and Keller, rescue the Times by rescuing the news as well?” — "The Lies That Bind," here and Think Again: "The New Rules of the Game," here.

Another day, Another ‘Mission Accomplished’:  "Suicide bombers killed 65 worshippers at two mosques in eastern Iraq on Friday while in Baghdad two car bombs targeted a hotel housing foreign journalists and killed eight Iraqis," reports the AP.

Inadvertent Quote of the Day;  Why we may be in Iraq forever: "As parents of young children and dog owners know, it takes longer to clean up a mess than to make one."  (The White House)

Ideologues, incompetents, crooks and thieves, part XVII:  (I’m sure this guy “has a good heart” and that Bush has “looked into his soul,” so no worries...

A clarification in re Noam Chomsky from the Guardian to which we had previously linked, here.

Bush's War on the Press by John Nichols & Robert W. McChesney (but um, hey, guys, we used that title here).  And congratulations to me on that essay being included in this year’s Best American Political Writing, 2005, here.

Speaking of Dick Cheney’s other best friend, I reviewed Woodward’s first, awful book on the war, here, and wrote a column about his much better one here.

Neocons next target:  Jordan.  In today's IPF Friday, MJ Rosenberg quotes from an editorial in the neoconservative New York Sun, the day after  62 innocent people died in the hotel terror attacks in Amman -- endorsing Israel's annexing of.....Jordan, Yup.  Not just the West Bank but the East Bank, the entire country of Jordan.  At least Doug Feith is no longer at the Pentagon to sell the idea to Cheney and Rumsfeld.  These people are truly mad.  On the other hand, Condi Rice did actually produce the Gaza agreement which is an important step toward an Israeli-Palestinian agreement.  Maybe Rice understands that the neocons who produced the Iraq war are the same folks who pushed the administration into backing Israel's hardliners.  Maybe Bush is pissed and has decided to dump the whole lot of them for getting him into the Iraq quagmire.  And all their "policies" too.  Let 'em work for Netanyahu! Here.

Correspondence Corner

Name: Stupid
Hometown: Chicago
Hey Eric, it’s Stupid to be Machiavellian (again).  Recently ABC published some poll results with generally good news for the Dems.  The public trusts them more than the Republicans to do a better job on nearly every issue, including taxes.  There is only one exception: terrorism.  Presuming Karl Rove has the same information, ask yourself why the Administration fights so hard against Congressional moves to ban torture.  Do they really believe torture is a reliable and vital tool to our intelligence effort, worth the damage caused to our public image, or do they figure that somewhere down the road we’re going to start to see terrorist attacks at home and the public will remember which party is willing to do “whatever it takes”?

Am I saying the left is wrong to protest the Administration’s tolerance for torture?  No, but for every word they say about torture, they should be saying ten about preparedness.  This week CNN ran a report saying there is effectively –nothing– to stop a terrorist from blowing up an airplane:  legions of cargo containers are left unguarded.  Moreover, the Administration, at the behest of the cargo industry, blocked a bipartisan move to address this.  Bet you dollars to donuts that most voters know something about the torture debate and don’t have a clue as to the cargo fiasco.  Where’s a Move-On TV campaign when you need one?  Let’s look where we are: gerrymandering makes winning the House an uphill struggle, the Senate is naturally tilted to the GOP, and remember Osama bin Laden’s “Hey America, I hate Dubya!” October Surprise in the 2004 election?  Those aspen roots aren’t connected on purpose, but they’re still connected...

Name: Jason
Hometown: Germantown, MD
One thing that many people (including one of your respondents) seem not to grasp is the regular jargon of Washington.  What the Robb-Silberman report and the White House Web site both correctly state is that LEGISLATORS (congressional intelligence committees) saw the same intelligence (NIEs) that the President (PDBs) and the senior POLICYMAKERS-i.e. cabinet level administration officials (SEIBs) saw.  The report, in fact, makes it clear that senior policymakers (heads of IC and other cabinet-level agencies) were not presented with evidence of dissent between the intelligence community's analysts.  Also, as the report makes plain, the PDB (president/vice president level) and SEIB (senior executive level-secretary/deputy- and under-secretary level) claims were even more insistent on Iraq nuclear/chem/bio ambitions than were the NIEs that the Congress saw.

Name: Dave
Hometown: Albany, NY
When Dr. Breland and others talk about intelligent design, I'm reminded of Richard Feynman's 1974 commencement address at Caltech.  In explaining the scientific method, he contrasted it with "Cargo Cult Science."  Criticizing pseudo-science, he said:

We really ought to look into theories that don't work, and science that isn't science.  I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science.  In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people.  During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now.  So they've arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land.  They're doing everything right.  The form is perfect.  It looks exactly the way it looked before.  But it doesn't work.  No airplanes land.  So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land.

He went on to explain that what was missing was scientific integrity - doing all one could to enable others to test your theory and possibly prove it wrong.  It's impossible to imagine any proponent of ID displaying that kind of scientific integrity.  You can find his whole speech here.  There's also an excellent discussion of intelligent design, creationism, and science, titled " Intelligent Design Has No Place in the Science Curriculum," here.

• November 17, 2005 | 11:33 AM ET | Permalink

The thing about Bob Woodward is that he long ago ceased to be a journalist.  I’ve pointed out in the past that in bragging in the prefaces of his two books about the war that he received copies of classified notes from NSC meetings, and having the contents of those meetings leaked to him by participants, Woodward is participating in the commission of exactly the kinds of crimes Mr. Fitzgerald is now investigating.  Nobody thought to investigate Woodward because he was so obviously acting as the chosen Bush administration vehicle for getting this information out the way it wanted to see it.  (The only reason the Fitzgerald investigation took place was because of how much the Plame leak pissed off the CIA.)  In any case, Woodward acted as a quasi-official propaganda minister, whose practices were above the law.  Now we know he no longer even thinks of himself as a journalist, nor believes he has any professional or moral obligation to his employer or profession, much less to informing the public of the truth.  No wonder he is the most “successful” journalist in the profession, and really, how depressing.  Here and here are today's developments.

Altercation Book Club:

Edmund Wilson by Eric Rauchway

Lewis M. Dabney, Edmund Wilson:  A Life in Literature, New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.  xiv+642 pp., illustrations, notes, index.  USD 35.00, cloth.

In the 1920s it was easy to believe that the world had entered an American era, when for the first time a civilization that made its home in the New World would dominate the globe -- and we are speaking here of a civilization, mind you, not merely a culture; a real set of defining and superior achievements, not just a way of life.  Never mind that American civilization would win mainly by default, the other great civilizations having blown each other up or fallen into revolution:  the United States stood at the forefront of architecture, art, cinema, commerce, music, and even writing, as its scribblers dispersed themselves to the cafes of war-cheapened Paris and moved into an international eminence.  You could omit mentioning the boodlers and bunglers at the peak of the American political heap, so long as you could point to American preeminence in every field of human endeavor that had a connection to other civilizations in ages past.  The literature of the era was supposed to have been defined by disillusionment, and maybe for the British it was, but not for the Americans: underneath Ernest Hemingway's war-weariness and F. Scott Fitzgerald's glitter-guilt lurks the ill-concealed glee of writers who know they are world-beaters working not only at the top of their form but at the forefront of their craft.

Read those writers now, move along the titles on the shelves, and you watch them fall apart in the 1930s.  The New Deal drove the sharp-eyed journalist H. L. Mencken and the hard-boiled historian Charles Beard something close to crazy.  Hemingway plunged into self-parody.  Fitzgerald cracked up.  Something went wrong; someone had blundered.  Somehow American civilization failed quite to materialize, let alone lead the world into a new era.

Possibly the most painful exhibits of that period are the hitherto businesslike figures who suddenly got it into their heads that the Soviet Union provided the most plausible picture of humanity's future, and who went in big for Uncle Joe's socialist paradise.  It is a sad spectacle to see them sink into the pink, exceeded only by the sad spectacle of their inelegantly wriggling out of it, usually some belated decades later, and too often by turning some other shade of zealot.  You can of course understand it -- capitalism had evidently collapsed, one required an alternative; certainly fascism would not do, and the Soviets -- if one avoided reading the fine print -- seemed to be doing rather well out of their system.  Yes, you can understand it:  but it makes unedifying reading in retrospect, this great wrong turning of people in their otherwise right minds, and it left too many of them permanently addled.

Not so Edmund Wilson, who weathered well a set of bad choices in both public and private life.  The man's political wrong-turning of the thirties was only one of a series of catastrophic mis-steps that included more than the usual allowance of bad marriages and misunderstandings with the IRS.  Even liquor didn't do him in; Lewis Dabney argues that Wilson "the only well-known literary alcoholic of his generation whose work was not compromised by his drinking."  (p. 4)  Wilson maintained a clear view of what mattered in writing, and how good writing carried forward the cause of civilization.

1.  Wilson and the 1920s

Wilson was two kinds of things there aren't many of in evidence anymore:  an old-fashioned Republican principally concerned with individual liberty and a literary critic outside the academy.  He was born the former, and worked hard to become the latter.

Embedded in books, Wilson kept himself aloof from his classmates at Hill School and Princeton, establishing the posture he would preserve into the wild party of literary Manhattan -- aloof, judgmental, without time for small talk or inclination to clubby loyalty.  He went to the Great War as an enlisted man in the ambulance corps.  Like Hemingway he heard something honest in the unadorned language of the fighting and the wounded.

In the 1920s, Wilson discovered booze and sex.  He dealt better with the former than with the latter.  I first read Wilson when I was an undergraduate and taking an interest in these phenomena for myself.  His "fierce protracted drinking" (p. 128) while writing impressed me.  The man had a veritable wooden leg.  Sex, on the other hand, threw him for a loop.  Even as a youth not unconcerned with physical sports, I found his fixation on the flesh a little much.  Dude, I wanted to say, it's just sex.  You don't need to talk about it that much.  Seriously.

But here perhaps the historical sensibility must enter, and Dabney's biography provides a useful aid to this end.  Sex was emphatically not, in the 1920s, just sex, just as booze was not, in the 1920s, just booze.  Both were, in a way they never afterward could be -- perhaps not even in the 1960s -- serious social rebellion.  For not only was booze against the law, as pot later would be, nor did it merely offend those whom Mencken would sum up as the Methodists and the Ku Kluxers.  Booze and pleasurable sex went against the better idea of society that the Great and the Good of the previous generation had promulgated for decades.  Conspicuously virtuous Americans like Jane Addams, Theodore Roosevelt, and John Dewey earnestly tried to  persuade the young that they ought to devote themselves to noble and selfless ideals of community.  In gestures representing his generation's response, Wilson had illicit sex while visiting Addams's Hull House and derided Dewey as John Doughy.  And he drank like a fish.

Yet unlike so many literary New Yorkers of the era (and after) who wasted their wit on drunken flirting and failed repeatedly to write, Wilson preserved the highly useful talent for social ineptitude that kept him at his desk.  Wilson rejected community and championed individualism not as a way to self-satisfaction, but as a larger social purpose in itself.  At least three of his books still clearly argue variations on this theme and are still worth your time; Axel's Castle, The Wound and the Bow, and Patriotic Gore.  In laying out the merits of these books Dabney is at his best, supplying excellent introductions to Wilson's thought.  Dabney is especially good on Patriotic Gore, Wilson's brilliant survey of Civil War literature, in which, Dabney writes, he "wears the toga of the old republic."  (p. 432)

Wilson argued, more or less consistently, that an artist had to proceed from "loose and subjective" concerns to "impersonal" ones.  (p. 123)  Intellectuals had to "identify themselves a little more with the general life of the country."  (p. 144)  Which meant, really, learning "to stand on their own two feet and make sense of commercial society."  (p. 134)

Dabney makes a good case that this interest in the impersonal critic led Wilson to Marx, whom he admired more than Marxism.  Wilson identified Marx with his own "preacher ancestors" and thought of him as "the great secular rabbi of the 19th-century."  Even though, as Dabney writes, "the prophetic role is entwined with a delusive mythology," it still had its definite appeal in the 1930s. (p. 260)

In The Wound and the Bow, Wilson seems to have shed his systematic Marxism while clinging closer to the enthusiasm for outcast prophets that led him to Marx.  This little book is almost certainly the key to understanding Wilson and why he is still worth while.

2.  The Wound and the Bow

Here, Wilson argues that artists are "[t]hose who do not get through life so easily"; that geniuses "stood at an angle to the morality of society and defended their position with stubbornness, [and] have suffered from psychological disorders."  The vulgar version of this idea is a blister on our culture.  It encourages the confusion of hormonal imbalance with the artistic temperament, and is responsible for any number of self-regarding pests who are better known for pitching fits than for painting pictures.  As Lionel Trilling noted, "many people are better off with therapy than with the illusion that their wounds can make them artists."  (p. 270)

But Wilson was striving toward a more specific relationship between "genius and disease," between "superior strength [and] disability."  When he says artists stand at a tangent to the "morality of society," he doesn't mean their society, he means society, period, and he means a particular kind of disability.  He makes this clear in the opening two essays, which take up more than half the book, on Dickens and Kipling.

Dickens is, for Wilson, the good artist who rages against the machine.  As a child he saw his father suffer in debtors' prison and had, himself, to work in a blacking factory.  Caught in the web of credit, he was "crushed by the cruelty of organized society."  Dickens developed his talents to compensate.  Dickensian comedy produced a particular kind of laughter -- "a real escape from institutions."  Dickensian tragedy dramatized the social machinery that had rolling unthinkingly over him.  Dickens understood that "to the ... governing classes the people they govern are not real."  Even when he had become a success and those governing classes wanted to embrace him, Dickens refused, remembering his rejection at their hands.  He was, Wilson noted, "one of the very small group of British intellectuals to whom the opportunity has been offered to be taken up by the governing class and who have actually declined that honor."

By contrast, Kipling was the bad artist who spent his career praising the machinery of society even though it had crushed him too.  Beaten as a child and subject to the most sadistic impulses of English child-rearing, he curried the favor of his abusers.  Despite his real talents, despite the persuasive individuality especially of his character Kim, Kipling betrays the integrity of each and every one of his characters, who "yield themselves unresistingly to being presented as part of a system."  Kipling committed what Wilson regards as the cardinal sin:  he "resisted his own sense of life and discarded his own moral intelligence in favor of the point of view of a dominant political party."  He sacrificed his immeasurable all, his great talent to tell the truth as he saw it, for "the promise of mental security," and became a propagandist for the empire.

It is not merely the infliction of injury that makes a Wilsonian genius, but the realization that the injury necessitates a thoroughgoing rejection of social convention in favor of individual truth.  Like Jonah, the injured can reject this revelation only at their peril; if like Kipling they suck up to the society that hurt them, if they devote their real talents to false and harmful causes, they wind up full of hate, especially for themselves.

The Wilson of The Wound and the Bow, a determined enemy of systems and social machinery, made a lousy Marxist.  He also dealt poorly with all kinds of institutions, including marriage -- his partnership with Mary McCarthy, on which Dabney is as diligent and careful as one could hope, was especially ill-starred -- and of course the US government, which in the latter part of the twentieth century resembled less and less the ideal of his youth.

For a while I was assigning Wilson's 1963 The Cold War and the Income Tax:  A Protest to undergraduates, so they could wrestle with the idea that someone could have opposed the IRS for employing jack-booted thugs (which sounds to them like familiar right-wing rhetoric) while also opposing increases to the defense budget and American stockpiling of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons (which sounds to them like familiar left-wing rhetoric).  We today have a hard time hearing that voice aright, because no major public voice sounds its reckless devotion to individual liberty anymore.  Dabney's biography brings to life the man behind that voice, someone who flourished in a less-institutionalized America, someone who took advantage of the freedom to shoot off his mouth, to make bad decisions, to err; who shed insights like sparks from a Roman candle, and who stuck by an essentially vanished idea once associated with old Republicans:  only individuals know the truth about what they want, and a just society would leave off haranguing them about their values and let them pursue happiness as they know it.

For the book, go here.

Alter-reviews:

DVD: BEYOND THE FRINGE (1963), Acorn Media by Andrew Milner

Four cute, clever young men in matching suits stun their native Great Britain in the early 1960s before  crossing the Atlantic to storm America, forever altering pop culture in the process ... and all this several years before The Beatles.  Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore brought social and political satire to the revue format with Beyond the Fringe, lampooning the Church, higher education, race relations and even nuclear war.  Some of the initial critical raves seem embarrassingly over-the-top today (one review expressed "gratitude that there should be four men living among us today who could come together to provide, for as long as memory holds, an eighth colour to the rainbow"), but that's the kind of effect Beyond the Fringe had.  After this revue and the simultaneous development of Chicago's Second City troupe, watching Lucy Ricardo getting her head stuck in a loving cup or Jerry Lewis wrecking a department store suddenly seemed old hat.

This once-presumed lost kinescope of Beyond the Fringe's closing London performance from 1963 opens with the four offering thoughts on JFK's America (Miller:  "You've got the Republican Party, y'see, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party, and there's the Democratic Party...which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party";  Moore: "I gather the Negroes  are sweeping the country!" Miller: "Yes, so they are -- it's about the only job they can get.") followed by one classic sketch after another -- "Words and Things" skewering deconstructionism before the term had any currency ("Are you, in fact, using 'yes' in its affirmative sense...?").  "The Aftermyth of War," targeting England's stiff-upper-lip response to WWII ("I want you to lay down your life, Perkins.  We need a futile gesture at this stage.") and Shakespeare gets a definitive spoofing in "So That's The Way You Like It."  ("Get thee to Gloucester, Essex.  Do thee to Wessex, Exeter.  Fair Albany to Somerset must eke his route.") Each of the four gets a moment to shine -- Miller as a black African leader in "Black Equals White," Bennett as a clergyman basing a sermon on the Biblical text "My brother Esau is an hairy man but I am a smooth man," Cook introducing his E.L. Wisty character in "Sitting on the Bench" and Moore sending up Beethoven, Weill and Benjamin Britten at the piano.

The disc has a pdf file of the Playbill from the Broadway engagement as well as cast bios, but no other DVD bells and whistles.  Anyone wanting more information should seek out Humphrey Carpenter's definitive history A Great Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s.

Correspondence Corner:

Name: Brian Donohue, M.A.
Hometown: Daily Revolution
A comment on Dr. Breland's observations: if people could understand that when Einstein wrote about god, he was making intrinsically scientific statements from the perspective of a scientist, then we might see this entire teapot-tempest of ID "vs." evolution disappear.  Granted, it takes some intellectual effort and a particular exercising of the imagination to connect with what Einstein really meant when he talked about god, but it's worth the attempt.  In fact, I wrote part of a book about it.  But I'd still recommend any of Brian Greene's published insights over my own.  Let's read what the actual leaders in science are saying about these issues and we might find that this war over what to teach kids is, like Iraq, not really worth fighting.

Name: John R.
Hometown: Pennsylvania
With regards to Dr. Breland's writing on the misconceptions concerning intelligent design, some of the misconceptions seem to stem from the perceived similarities between ID and creationism.  Both hold that the universe and life as we know it could not have occurred on their own, that some outside agent had a hand in their genesis (no pun intended).  The only significant difference that most people tend to see is that ID makes no specific mention of who created it all.  Also, when such folks as Marion "Pat" Robertson proclaim that the expulsion of the Dover, PA school board that had proposed ID was tantamount to a rejection of God, it certainly does not help the case of ID's proponents.  Indeed, even many religious institutions see no inherent contradiction between the word of God and the concept of common descent by natural selection.

Name: Sarah
Hometown:  A suburb of Chicago, IL
I would like to respond to Dr. Michael Breland's letter.  I am a high school biology teacher.  The most important thing I can teach my students about science is that it is based on the scientific method.  You come up with a theory, you test the theory, and either prove or disprove the theory.  My gripe with teaching intelligent design in a science classroom is that there is no way to test it.  We can see through observation and DNA analysis that organisms do change over time in response to their environments.  This is what the theory of evolution says in its most simple form.  This is testable.  Intelligent design says that some of these changes in organisms were so drastic that they could not have happened without some higher being's assistance.  I cannot test this.  I cannot create a God-free room to test this hypothesis.  Therefore, I cannot teach it to my students as science.  While I myself believe that it is possible that God occasionally blows on a chromosome, I admit that this is a matter of faith.  Once again, I can't test it.  My mother honestly believes that the gaps in the evolutionary record are because aliens visited the planet and modified organisms.  I cannot test this either.  From a science standpoint, her theory is as valid as mine.  What I can prove is that evolution happens.  This is what I will teach my students in science class.  Everything else is a matter of faith.

Name: Randy
Hometown: Austin, TX
Hello, One thing that I think that has gone largely unreported in this whole "the war critics saw the same intelligence that we did" debate is that the White House Web site (for some reason which is beyond my ability to fathom) quotes the Robb-Silberman Commission Report where it is states that the legislators WERE NOT SHOWN THE SAME INTELLIGENCE as the White House.  They were only shown the intelligence that supported the administration's case for war, and were not shown the dissenting information that cast doubts about the intelligence that was being pimped by the White House.  Here it is: From the White House web page: 

The Robb-Silberman Commission Reported That The Intelligence In The PDB Was Not "Markedly Different" Than The Intelligence Given To Congress In The NIE. "It was not that the intelligence was markedly different. Rather, it was that the PDBs and SEIBs, with their attention-grabbing headlines and drumbeat of repetition, left an impression of many corroborating reports where in fact there were very few sources. And in other instances, intelligence suggesting the existence of weapons programs was conveyed to senior policymakers, but later information casting doubt upon the validity of that intelligence was not." (Charles S. Robb And Laurence H. Silberman, The Commission On The Intelligence Capabilities Of The United States Regarding Weapons Of Mass Destruction, 3/31/05, Pg. 14)

Name: Samuel Knight
Comments:
One odd thing that's happening on the editorial pages is that they keep hiring right wing nuts despite the fact the public is turning against them.  Jonah Goldberg with the LA Times, Joe Tierney with the NY Times, A. Sullivan with Time magazine, and Hinderaker (sp?) in the Post.  This is NOT market driven.  If you compare the hits, you, Josh Marshall, Kos, just crush any of the people mentioned above.  And it's not to counterbalance all those "liberal" voices.  Will, Krauthammer, Broder, Brooks, etc. are already there.  But as you say in What Liberal Media? the major papers have either internalized the conservative carping completely, or they just think kowtowing to the corporate interest outweighs readership.  The funny thing was that Josh Marshall congratulated Li'l Roy, ignoring the pretty obvious fact that Sullivan was forced to get a corporate savior.

Name: Dennis McLaughlin
Hometown: Germantown, Ohio
Eric,
Thanks for posting the Rocky River Times article on 2004 voter fraud in Ohio.  You should expect to see more on Ohio voter fraud in the coming months.  There were 4 constitutional amendments on our 11/8/05 ballot packaged as Reform Ohio Now.  Based upon polling throughout the campaign I expected 2 of these to pass easily, with the others being close.  All 4 were defeated by a large margin.  It looks like we will have to fight for our democracy in Ohio.  I'm expecting a long, hard struggle ahead.

Name: Rick Gerwin
Comments:
The Blasters broke up in the late 80s.  Dave and Phil Alvin have been doing their separate things since then.  For reasons unknown to me, Phil tours under the Blasters name.  The original group (with Dave and Phil) got together for a reunion tour a year or so ago, but it was never intended as anything more than a short-term gig to promote the Blasters retrospective CD set that was coming out.  You can pretty much assume that any "Blasters" concert you hear about will include only Phil and his new band (which has only one other original Blaster, I think).

• November 16, 2005 | 11:33 AM ET | Permalink

Was the election stolen? I’m beginning to think so, here.

And does it really surprise you that everyone they appoint is either a liar, a crook, an incompetent, a lunatic or all of the above.  Today’s exhibit, Kenneth Tomlinson.

It’s official, Woodward is one of them.  Here might have been a good time to mention it if you cared, sir, about the um, public’s right to know…

The United States of Torture:  We Knew Nothin’, here.  Calling Sergeant Shultz.

These Republicans are taking money out of the pockets of 9/11 rescue workers... for what?  No really.  God, I hope there's a Heaven and Hell, sometimes.

More lies, here:  Document Says Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney Task Force.  It’d be boring, if it weren’t so important.

Blogs vs. Books: On singing the non-tenured blues online

The problem with figuring out whether blogs help or hurt tenure is that in re tenure, unlike say, torture, nobody really knows nothin’.  The process is confidential.  Chicago turned down Dan Drezner who has two masters degrees, a doctorate from Stanford and a Princeton published book.  Well, that’s good, but hardly sufficient.  I have two masters degrees, a doctorate from Stanford, and two Cornell published books and I feel pretty certain I wouldn’t get tenure in history from the University of Chicago.  And it wouldn’t be because of the blog.  Rob Boynton has a lot of intelligent things to say, here.  But I remind everyone.  One massive advantage that academia has over journalism is how much more carefully its conclusions are drawn.  Causality not coincidence needs to be established.  We don’t have it with blogs.  (And so it’s no surprise that people in the blogosphere are jumping to conclusions.)  Here's another view, and here is an example of a first-rate academic blog doing just what academic blogs should do: raising questions for scholar and layman alike about important questions that relate to both simultaneously.  There are many of these and it’d be a shame to lose them.

I sure hope my friend Nick Goldberg, editorial page editor of the LA Times, and Bob Scheer are having a nice time on the Nation cruise…

Quote of the Day:

At various times since 9/11 members of the administration have acted as if catching Osama bin Laden, or changing Social Security, or saving Terri Schiavo, mattered more than any possible other cause.  Creating an Iraqi military actually matters more than almost anything else.  But the people who were intent on the war have lost interest in the only way out.

— James Fallows, "Why Iraq Has No Army," in the December Atlantic.

Quote of the Day, II: 

The Bush Administration must understand that each American has a right to question our policies in Iraq and elsewhere and should not be demonized for disagreeing with them.  Suggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy, nor what this country has stood for, for over 200 years.

—  Chuck Hagel.

Alter-advertisement:  I lost my clerical help, which, typically, is an exploited graduate student who is somewhat media savvy but is willing to do mostly boring work like filing and searching out a few sources and making plane and car reservations and stuff.  The pay is bad but the hours are easy.  Send a resume, but not as an attachment, to please if this is of interest.  (If it turns out you are a talented historical researcher of the kind that Gawker.com finds so hysterical, we can talk about that too, but for now I am covered.)

This just in:  Bruce is on Fresh Air today.

Name: Major Bob Bateman
Dateline: Baghdad, Iraq

Baghdad Within Earshot

The other day an e-mail came in from Lieutenant Colonel Andy, he worked here and just returned home at the end of last month.

First off I can't describe how happy I am that I’m home.  The weather is perfect autumn.  The leaves down here aren't in full color yet (compared to New England) and haven't started to pummel the lawn and fill the gutters.  You know what I first recognized when I was sitting on the couch was how quiet it was.  No A/C, no generators, no talking, no nothing.  I'm not sure if all the generators and A/C have helped but my tinnitus seems to be going strong.

I guess being here I had not noticed the contrast. So this is what Baghdad Within Earshot really sounds like.

The predominant sounds in the areas where I spend the most time are sounds of helicopters and gunfire.  All of these come in different flavors.  There is the light buzzing of a private security helicopter, reputedly Blackwater Security, which buzzes over the city at 50-100 foot altitudes.  There is a pair of these aircraft; they look like McDonald-Douglass 500’s to me, but I am not sure.  They only carry three or four people and are very maneuverable.  Usually you see them whipping by at high-speed, one guy hanging out of the door with a rifle in his lap and his leg dangling in the air as they execute 90-degree high-banking turns every mile or so.  But during the day the majority of the noise comes from the Blackhawks of the Army.

Technically the Blackhawk is the “Utility Helicopter – 60” (UH-60), which is the successor to the Vietnam-era UH-1 “Huey.”  Although it is quieter than the old Hueys, the UH-60 is a much more powerful bird.  It does not make the distinctive “whop-whop-whop” that the old two-bladed Huey did, but its four blades provide far more thrust.  When the Blackhawks pass overhead (and here in Baghdad that is always at low-level) they shake the building with a steady vibration.  Usually you see them in flights of two, though of course several times a day a single-ship flight passes overhead.  You always prefer to see those flights of two.  Two means the aircraft are on a mission carrying people from somewhere to somewhere else.  The only aircraft allowed to fly solo have large red crosses on them.  One aircraft means it is a Medevac flight heading out to a hot LZ to get a severely wounded troop.  With night come the heavy whop-whop-whop of the cargo birds, either 36 passenger Army CH-47s, or the smaller 18 passenger USMC CH-46s, both of which have two propellers.  Given that the CH-47 is literally the size of a Greyhound bus, the fact that a low pass by one of these will rattle your trailer is not surprising at all.  It takes an awful lot of downward thrust to keep that many tons in a hover.

Just about every day you are likely to hear a whining buzzing sound from the sky as well.  It sounds like an ultra-light, or one of those propeller-driven parachute-with-a-lawnchair things you might see at the beach.  It is a UAV, an “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle”, flown by remote control by one of the Army units here in the city.  Because they are so small, and fly pretty high, I can almost never spot the damned things, even in broad daylight.

Then there are the sounds of gunfire.  This comes and goes, but I don't think that there has been a day since I arrived during which I did not hear at least some shooting, near or far.  After a while you can tell what is happening by the sounds alone.  It is, I suppose, like learning a new language.

A single sharp report is an M-4 or M-16A2.  Where I am this is usually fired about 200 yards away, over at the Assassin's Gate.  One round, or sometimes two, is a warning shot.  Nothing to worry about, and indeed I don't even notice this anymore unless I am trying.  A deeper sounding pop is an AK-47.  The weapon fires a bigger bullet and is not designed the way ours are, so the sound is distinctive.  But these are usually, at a minimum, three-to-five shots if they are a "warning."  Then there are the firefights.

Usually those erupt at least half a mile away from me, often on the other side of the river.  Anything up to about 20-30 seconds, even of heavy firing (5-10 weapons going all at once, at nearly automatic fire levels) is usually "panic fire."  First you hear three or four shots, then ten or twenty, then a burst of several weapons for up to half a minute.  The firing climbs, peaks, then ebbs.  You often hear this sort of firing in the wake of a car bomb, when the police and the Iraqi Army arrive on the scene.  They are all, understandably, jittery.  The enemy now tends to use more than one car bomb at once if they want to kill the police.  They set the first bomb off, and then when the police arrive, send in another.  The police are justifiably nervous when they arrive at the scene now, and their sporadic firing reflects that human reaction.  This sort of firing pattern can come and go, in waves, for several minutes, but it's not really a "firefight."  Those are longer, and much louder.

The ambush of an American unit sounds distinctly different.  American weapons sound sharper, of course, but the sudden crashing volume of fire really tips you off that there are Americans in this fight.  There is no slow increase, the response is unified, disciplined and direct. Then, almost as suddenly, the fire ceases.

Of course there are the sounds of mortars whispering overhead, and the strange low-toned warbling whistle of a rocket, let alone their explosions.  But Hollywood does a pretty good job getting those sounds right, so there is no need to describe those in depth.  I have described the thumping feeling-sound of car bombs and suicide-vest bombers before as well.  The odd thing in all of these attacks, I guess, is their sense of timing.  We never seem to get mortared really late at night, or before seven in the morning.   It is like the enemy works banker’s hours.  Instead of hitting us in the cool quiet of pre-dawn, they wait until the sun is well up and the day has begun.

Anyway, that's what it sounds like here. The traffic noise, really, where I am.  Except when they switch out the Bradleys or Abrams over by the gate, but those are sounds for another time.

Baghdad Local:

People often write to me and ask what they might send to support us here.  I generally redirect them, or decline.  We are well provisioned, and what we want (sleep, beer, sex), we cannot have anyway.  But now I do have a request.  A direct plea.  We need school supplies.  Well, we don’t need them, some Iraqi kids do.

In the past some of us in this unit have taken supplies to various schools in the Baghdad area.  One very generous batch came from an Altercation reader as a matter of fact, some months ago.  But it has always been on a haphazard basis and generally only when we can fit it in as an adjunct to a mission we might be doing in the same area.  It has also been dependant upon what happened to come in from various unorganized donations from friends and family back home.  I want to change that.

There is a school nearby, three schools actually, and as with all elements of the Iraqi educational system, they could use help.  We think that the total enrollment is somewhere in the vicinity of one-thousand.  I want to flood this school with all of the pens, paper, notebooks, erasers, chalk, and any other school supply you can think of, as well as any toy you think that kids might want.  The ages range from 6-13, but we think that one of the buildings nearby is a high-school.  Optimally, if there is a benevolent somebody upstairs (FSM anyone?), some Altercation readers are in a position to establish a “sister-school” program as well.

If you are interested in helping you can write to Major Bob at .

Alter-reviews:

I caught a show by the Blasters at B.B. King’s in Times Square. I was expecting both Alvin brothers but it was only Phil. They’re a great band, but to be a transcendent band, they need Dave too, though I guess they’re not getting along again.  Read all about ‘em here and listen before you buy.  I really love “King of California,” here and “County Fair,” here.

On the DVD front, I did not discover the wonderful show, “Home Movies” until they stopped making it but I’m mighty pleased they have been releasing it on DVD.  I just got seasons two and three, here.  The promo material says it “towers as one of the greatest in the history of animated television.”  That’s not completely crazy, though I’m not sure they’re entirely serious.  It is unspeakably clever and you should try season one if you’re unfamiliar. 

Self-styled Pop culture and Beatle historians will want to muse on this new Dick Cavett DVD collection with John and Yoko, which aired, a little weirdly, on September 11, 1971.  It is a time piece to be sure, but they were pretty loose and less regal than Yoko has tried to make them seem in retrospect.  The second appearance is a bit darker.  They are dressed quite conservatively this time, not like sixties radicals, and devote most of their discussion to Yoko’s wrenching attempt to find her daughter and regain some sort of custody, while at the same time fighting J. Edgar Hoover’s politically-inspired deportation attempt.  Then comes a big to-do about their playing “Woman is the Nigger of the World,” which Lennon is eventually allowed to play, though fascinatingly, John quotes Ron Dellums about how most of the people in America are niggers.  It was quite a time, and really interesting to see.  (The beginning of the show is an interview with a cute-but-nutty Shirley McLean.)

John also talks about how much he loves New York, which is nice.  Now would be a good time, I suppose, to mention two new books about the guy.  One is by his ex-wife Cynthia Lennon, called “John” with a forward by Julian Lennon.  It's nice and dignified and not uninteresting, if not exactly literature.  It’s also really sad.  You can read all about it here.  Larry Kane’s "Lennon Revealed," however, here, really bites.  It’s awful in every way.  It’s got a DVD with John and Paul’s final joint interview together.  I enjoyed that.  The rest of it is about as much fun as one of those songs where Yoko never stops screaming.  Cavett’s cutesy questions can be annoying too.

Remember, you can support the musicians of New Orleans by buying this terrific box set particularly if, like me, you missed Sal’s big benefit last night here (I know, I know… lotta help that was…).

Correspondence Corner:

Name: Leila Abu-Saba
Hometown: Oakland CA
I'm a liberal woman whose personal values are pretty far from Arianna's - I've never gone in for makeup, couture or social climbing.  But I totally forgive her.  In fact, I think that makeup -and couture-wearing, social-climbing, brilliant intellectual women are just what we need on the left.  Really.  Just because I don't act like her and wouldn't hang out with her, doesn't mean I think she's "wrong."  She lives in a particular world - the Vanity Fair world - and I'm delighted that she's turned to truth, justice and environmental sanity.  Admittedly, I ignored her for a long time after her conversion, but now that she's got this blog (which I also ignored at first) I am quite impressed.  Regarding her past - what's to forgive?  People can change their minds.  And regarding the marriage to the gay millionaire - you know, who are we to say what someone else's marriage contract should look like?  Everybody gets to make their own choices.  Really it's none of our business.  Go Arianna!  Susan Estrich's criticisms of her mothering were completely uncalled for, anti-feminist, retrograde, and provincial.  Get over yourself!
P.S. - Arianna's right about the sex.

Name: Marilyn
Hometown: Deep South
Kansas, why stop with intelligent design in biology?  I mean, why should ANY high school classes get away without discussing divine inspiration?  Math theories, works of art, scientific discoveries--they can't be merely human, can they?  PE?  Well, the body is the temple.  Chemistry?  Well, water into wine and all that.  As for literature and political science--why, the possibilities are endless.  Why should biology teachers have all the fun interactions with parents, courts, & school boards?

Name: Michael Breland, M.D., Ph.D.
Hometown: Walla Walla, WA
Dear Eric:
I agree with JC Golding's suggestion that churches should cover evolutionary science in their religious studies.  However, the difference is that JC was making the suggestion to show "why teaching pseudo-science creationism in public schools is just ridiculous."  I am making the suggestion because I think it is a good idea.  Obviously this is a Hot Button for huge numbers of people.  However, only through seriously addressing it in a public or more hopefully an academic setting will there ever be any sort of resolution to this conundrum.  I also note that JC Golding implies that intelligent design, a philosophical theory, is the same as creationism, a religious belief.  They are not the same thing, and serious misconceptions continue to arise from assuming this.

• November 15, 2005 | 1:03 AM ET | Permalink

In an otherwise totally excellent argument, The New York Times editors write,

The Bush administration was also alone in making the absurd claim that Iraq was in league with Al Qaeda and somehow connected to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  That was based on two false tales.  One was the supposed trip to Prague by Mohamed Atta, a report that was disputed before the war and came from an unreliable drunk.  The other was that Iraq trained Qaeda members in the use of chemical and biological weapons. Before the war, the Defense Intelligence Agency concluded that this was a deliberate fabrication by an informer.

—Here.

We hate to be a party-pooper.  Really we do.  But we cannot help remembering that this phony meeting was persistently said to be an “undisputed fact” on the page opposite this one by columnist William Safire.  What’s more, the Times, like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, has repeatedly refused to issue a correction on this point, (and I personally hassled the Public Editor about it).  Is a columnist’s job at the Times a license to lie?  If you read the above excellent editorial, and then read this ‘Stupid on Purpose’ David Brooks column, you’d have to conclude it was.  (And if you top it off with this brave column by Public Editor Barney Calame, you’d have to conclude that Bill Keller is saying the job of “critic” at the Times amounts to the same thing.)  Really, I appreciate all the hard work that goes into making that paper great, as well as the Sulzbergers’ all-but unique commitment to good journalism among owners of such institutions, but something is very rotten in Times Square and wishing it away won’t make it go away.

Iraq is spreading terror around the world, here.  We told you so!  (And thanks Ralph.)

Liars, ideologues, and philistines everywhere in our government; here they are causing untold misery in the lives of women and children and pretending it’s science.  (Thanks again, Ralph.)

Credit where it’s due:  Good for Condi, here, for once.

Slate asked a bunch of us to name the most important book we read in college.  Here it is…

Damn!  I was supposed to go home from the Clinton conference —David Greenburg has it here— in a car they provided with Arianna.  They got us a stretch limo with a bar, but the Greek temptress had her own car and driver and we got our signals crossed.  I went home five minutes before her panel ended, and so blew the opportunity to make this midnight meal with Chalabi before the amazing Ms. A flew out for her Nation cruise.  Amazing really.  Read Vanity Fair.  It’s pretty fair and does justice to her many mysteries.  (One thing I’ve noticed about A.H. lately vis-à-vis cocktail party chatter is that liberal men are far more eager to forgive her past than liberal women.  True?  Discuss.)

Lots of lawyers think the suspension of Habeus Corpus is un-American, here.  So do I, of course, but they matter…

This just in from Gallup:  A majority of independents, 58%, believe the United States made a mistake in invading Iraq.  Got that?

Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid.  The Weekly Standard has a cover story by Michael Fumento about what it calls the “Pandemic panic over the avian flu.”  Here.  A long time ago, Fumento made his name in the world with an argument called “The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS.”  Since heterosexual AIDS is now the world’s single biggest problem, and the worst human catastrophe the world has experienced since the Hitler/Stalin/Mao mass murders, if Fumento says this bird flu thing ain’t a problem, believe me, I’m scared.

Congratulations to both Time.com and Little Roy on their deal; to Time, for hiring a blogger who perfectly comports with a magazine whose columnists range from the liberal Democrat-hating Charles Krauthammer all the way to the liberal Democrat hating Joe Klein, (now that that nasty commie Margaret Carlson has been sacked), and that thinks Ann Coulter’s work is mostly accurate.  That gosh-darned liberal media again, huh?  And congrats to Little Roy for keeping the deal secret long enough to bilk his readers by asking for cash when he already knew he had the Time deal in the works.  (Seems like he still is, amazing.)  Give the money to UNICEF to fight AIDS in Africa instead.  Here.

Nice articles on The Band box here ($) and the Bruce box here.

Correspondence Corner:

Name: Lou Schuler
Hometown: Allentown, PA
Hi Eric,
Al Franken also gives an account of the January 2003 meeting between the president and Iraqi exiles.  It starts on page 241 of The Truth (with jokes):  Bush's failure to look reality full in the face extended to even the most basic facts about the country he had chosen to invade. There is one anecdote in particular that I keep coming back to.  David Phillips, a former State Department official, tells the story in his book, Losing Iraq: Inside the Postwar Reconstruction Fiasco.  Phillips was in charge of the Democratic Principles Working Group of the Future of Iraq Project, where he convened a variety of Iraqi exiles to envision how Iraq would be governed after the fall of Saddam.  The most prominent exile in the group was Brandeis professor Kanan Makiya, one of Ahmed Chalabi's chief deputies.  Makiya was the man who had famously told Bush that Americans would be greeted in Iraq with sweets and flowers.  In late January 2003, less than eight weeks before the war began, Phillips wrote: Kanan was invited to watch the Super Bowl at the White House; he told me later that he had to explain to the President of the United States the differences between Arab Shi'a, Arab Sunnis, and Kurds. I talked to David Phillips over breakfast and asked what Makiya had meant by this. Did he mean that Bush didn't understand the fine points of their cultural and religious differences? No. PHILLIPS: What Makiya told me was that he didn't know there was a difference.  That among Iraqis there were Arab Shia, Arab Sunni, and Kurds. ME: He didn't know that there existed those three groups? PHILLIPS: That's right. This is pretty basic. You're going to go to war in a country, you should know who lives there. Franken also includes this footnote to the story: When I emailed Makiya about this, he denied the story.  David Phillips stands by his account.  Is it possible that Phillips was also the source for George Packer?  If not, then we have at least two sources for the same anecdote.

Name: Ben
Hometown: New York, NY
I Googled: sunni shiites bush explain and a Google answers page with the Packer NYT quote was the third result.  Nice job, Matt!

Name: JC Golding
Hometown: Phoenix, AZ
In regards to 'intelligent design,' how about equal time?  Perhaps Kansas (Christian) churches should be required to teach evolutionary science with their religious studies?  Maybe then, it would become a bit more clear to proponents of this why teaching pseudo-scientific creationism in public schools is just ridiculous.

Name: Linda Ginsburg
Hometown: Huntingdon Valley, PA
Hello Eric --
Oy. Every time I see Ron Silver I want to bang my head against the wall.  I have pictures from the first Clinton campaign in 1992 of Silver emceeing a Bill Clinton campaign stop in South Philadelphia (the platform was placed equidistant between Geno's and Pat's.)  And I could understand if he felt a little insecure after 9/11 but he has gone over to the Dark Side completely.  But if he's now squiring Ann Coulter then his punishment is even greater than I would have meted out.

Name: Steve Elworth
Hometown: Brooklyn, NY
I agree with you totally about the significance of Bill Charlap at the present moment.  Though the hat I think that he is filling is that of the magnificent pianist and accompanist, Tommy Flanagan.  Another amazing recent recording of his, is his accompanist role to the wonderful tenor, Scott Hamilton on "Back in New York," which is also Hamilton's best since his CD with Flanagan.  Charlap has also taken over Dick Hyman's gig hosting the great summer jazz fest at the 92nd street Y.  The tribute to the magnificent guitarist Jim Hall was one of the best concerts of this or any year.  The guests include such wonderful musicians as Tom Harrell and Joe Lovano.  Charlap's late father was the song writer, Moose Charlap and yes, he is a nice, Jewish Boy.

Name: John S. Ransom
Hometown: Carlisle, PA
I wonder sometimes if you realize how valuable your work is.  The thing about Rob Reiner -- look, while I'm reading it in its original form in the magazine I am already disagreeing with the author, already thinking that I see some bias in the way the article is being written, but nevertheless I was totally taken in by the Rob Reiner trick; the one that you have exposed.  That is, I went along with the idea that Rob Reiner was maybe an idiot about something specific concerning Bush and Iraq.  But I was wrong!  And I was willing to give that one to them!  I must be more careful, and I thank you again for showing me that you really cannot be too careful these days and simply must not trust one darn fact that's reported as such and take it on faith.  Not one.

• November 14, 2005 | 11:59 AM ET | Permalink

I don’t have the energy to explain everything that’s annoying about Matt Bai’s Sunday Times Magazine article on Hollywood and the war.  It struck me as a near perfect illustration of what I was talking about here, replete with a pullquote from FreeRepublic.com as if those people are not nuts:

The constant refrain that Hollywood is "out of touch" and filled with "political dilettantes" is offered as evidence of the illegitimacy of Hollywood's political participation in a way one never hears about, say, Wall Street, Grosse Pointe or even Silicon Valley.
...
Media machers would have a far stronger case for complaint about the role Hollywood plays in our politics if the very same media outlets weren't begging for each star's latest pronouncement.  As the Irish actor Daniel Day-Lewis notes, "The media are sick and tired of people in my profession giving their opinion, and yet you're asking me my opinion.  And when I give it, you'll say, 'Why doesn't he shut up?'"

Anyway, Bai seems awfully angry at Rob Reiner and company for being righter about the war than most of his colleagues in the mainstream media.  He quotes him, saying,

"To me, the death of people at somebody's hands over the stupidity of this man is astounding!" he shouted at me.  "When I hear that on the weekend of the Super Bowl an Iraqi expatriate was explaining to him the difference between Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites, it makes me want to cry.  I want to cry!"  (Reiner said he recalled hearing this anecdote on cable news or talk radio, though I wasn't able to find any reference to it subsequently.)
— Here.

In fact, Bai (or the Times fact-checkers) could have found the incident described on p.96 of George Packer’s book, Assassin’s Gate.  (A friend adds:  Eric - Matt Bai's negligence is even worse than you note. The bit about the exiles having to explain Sunni-Shia conflict to Bush, which you correctly attribute to George Packer's book, originally appeared in a piece that George wrote for the NY Times Magazine!)

UPDATE:  This just in:  The Packer quote in the Times is:

Bush is a man who has never shown much curiosity about the world. When he met with Makiya and two other Iraqis in January, I was told by someone not present, the exiles spent a good portion of the time explaining to the president that there are two kinds of Arabs in Iraq, Sunnis and Shiites. The very notion of an Iraqi opposition appeared to be new to him. War has turned Bush into a foreign-policy president, but democratizing an Arab country will require a subtlety and sophistication that have been less in evidence than the resolve to fight.

From Dreaming Of Democracy, By GEORGE PACKER (NYT) 7730 words, Published: March 2, 2003

It’s just amazing to me the distance that the MSM will go to try to make it appear as if those in favor of this impossibly idiotic war were right and those of us who understood its foolishness were wrong. 

Our man Tom Tomorrow has something to say about that here.

Meanwhile, the other guys can be a real pain in the ass as well.  Lefty William Arkin fell into a trap set by the likes of Hitchens and others when, in mocking me, he wrote, “Civility  was also the subject of Eric Alterman's 21 November column in The Nation that I read on the plane.  Okay, maybe in a column where you call O'Reilly/Limbaugh/Scarborough toxic and a certain peace group ‘Stalinist android,’ it's tough to make too much of a case that you are being civil,” here.

Hitchens is absolutely right, for once, when he writes, here.

“International ANSWER," the group run by the "Worker's World" party and fronted by Ramsey Clark, which openly supports Kim Jong-il, Fidel Castro, Slobodan Milosevic, and the "resistance" in Afghanistan and Iraq, with Clark himself finding extra time to volunteer as attorney for the génocidaires in Rwanda. Quite a "wide range of progressive political objectives" indeed, if that's the sort of thing you like. However, a dip into any database could have furnished Janofsky with well-researched and well-written articles by David Corn and Marc Cooper—to mention only two radical left journalists—who have exposed "International ANSWER" as a front for (depending on the day of the week) fascism, Stalinism, and jihadism.

So I guess I don’t know what “peace group” Arkin had in mind…

Quote of the Day, Geraldo Rivera on Michael Jackson: “"He's a lot more normal in person. And more normal as a dad than you would ever, ever expect. He's really just a normal person once you get past the packaging."  Here.

Irony: I skipped a friend’s Halloween party, because I don’t like costumes, but stupidly, as it turned out, because I missed the sight of Ron Silver showing up with Ann Coulter on his arm…  And yes, finish the joke about her costume yourselves…

Alter-review:  I’ve been returning over and over to my admiration for Bill Charlap on this site; he’s a kind of mini Wynton Marsalis as both a brilliantly talen