Culture and Stuff

by hilzoy

For several days now, I’ve been meaning to write about the Judiciary Committee’s hearings on the NSA domestic surveillance program. I read the transcripts. A lot of it was incredibly dull — much duller than I had expected — since Gonzales seemed to stick remorselessly to a few single rules:

(a) When asked about the legal justification for the actual NSA program, repeat things the administration has already said.

(b) When asked any question about the legal justification for anything other than the actual NSA program, refuse to answer on the grounds that you have not done the requisite constitutional analysis. Do this even if the question involves a straightforward application of principles you have already enunciated.

(c) When asked any factual question, do not answer, on the grounds that it is an “operational detail”, regardless of whether or not this description is even remotely plausible.

On the whole, that made for some pretty dull testimony. However, there were some interesting and alarming bits sprinkled here and there, and I wanted to write both about them and about the administration’s truly alarming view of presidential power. Fortunately, Glenn Greenwald has written a great post about the latter topic. Below the fold, I’ll copy some of it (though you should read the whole thing), and then use a few bits of Gonzales’ testimony to illustrate.

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An overlong deposition and an unexpected Friday night spent alone in San Francisco.  It’s OK.  It’s what attorneys do sometimes. 

This is an open thread.  There’s more after the break, if you’ve got time to kill.

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by hilzoy

Kevin Drum warned me not to click this link, but silly me had to go ahead and click it anyways. When I did, I found one of the stupidest columns of all time. In it, David Gelernter wonders why students now are so much more career-minded than when he was in college. He thinks he’s figured it out:

“Why the big change between now and then? Many reasons. But there’s one particular reason that students seem reluctant (some even scared) to talk or think about. In those long-ago days, more college women used to plan on staying home to rear children. Those women had other goals than careers in mind, by definition. They saw learning as worth having for its own sake; otherwise why bother with a college education, if you weren’t planning on a big-deal career? (…)

In the days when many college-trained women stayed home to rear children, the nation as a whole devoted a significant fraction of all its college-trained worker-hours to childrearing. This necessarily affected society’s attitude toward money and careers. A society that applauds a highly educated woman’s decision to rear children instead of making money obviously believes that, under some circumstances, childrearing is more important than moneymaking. No one thought women were incapable of earning money if they wanted or needed to: Childrearing versus moneymaking was a genuine choice. (…)

But all that changed with feminism’s decision to champion the powerful and successful working woman. Nowadays, feminists and many liberals are delighted when women make careers in large corporations, which are still the road to riches and power in this country. (…)

In many ways, life today is a lot easier than it was in 1960. But don’t kid yourselves. The age that rated childrearing higher than money-grubbing and intellectual exploration higher than career preparation had it exactly right. We might come to miss what we had then, but we are never going back; no nation has ever sacrificed wealth for intangible spiritual satisfactions.

In some important ways, this society has made a tragic but probably inevitable (and certainly irreversible) mistake. Crying about it is senseless. Denying it is cowardly.”

Despite the scary, scary nature of this topic, I’m going to brave my deepest innermost fears and discuss it. A veritable Profile in Courage, that’s me — at least until I get around to disagreeing with Gelernter, at which point I will magically transform myself into a coward. (I’ve been drinking Polyjuice Potion again.)

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What you got?

Nothing.  What you got?

Someone pointed me to a transcript of Cyrus’ speech at the start of The Warriors.

That’s hot.  The Warriors are totally in fashion.

People don’t say "that’s hot" anymore.  In fact, I’m pretty sure that they never did.

Well, that sucks. 

Tell me about it.  Anyway, what are you doin’ this weekend?

This.  Pray for my survival.  And for a time under three hours.

Will do.

(This is your multiple personality open thread.)

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Not to be confused with this post, in which various alternatives to abstinence are explored in far too much detail.

I’ve had a bit more time to read, lately, now that the computer is whole again, and the receiver is sent off to the shop for rescusitation, and that there’s enough room in the garage for the wife’s car.  Going back as far as vacation, I’ve read:

Atlas Shrugged: Although I still resonate with some of the values in this book, I haven’t ever really found it to be representative of anything resembling real life, in my experience.  I’ve always found Ms. Rand’s notion of sex, for instance, to be quite different from anything that seems natural to me.  Plus, I’ve never really had that killer urge to bring my competition to its knees, or to take the wife by force.  Still, her ideas as regards excellence are worthy of attention.  For those of you who pinged me because I said I don’t know what Objectivism is, there’s a couple of sides to that: I do know what Rand says Objectivism is, and up to a point I think it’s got value.  The extrapolation from first principles to implementation (as postulated in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead), though, isn’t anything resembling a straight line.  So to me, there’s a gap between first principles and principles Rand derives from first principles, and I don’t understand how that derivation works.  Another thing: I’ve read this book several times over the last three decades or so, and it seems I’m just now noticing the plague of punctuation errors in it.  I’m wondering, for the Gary Farbers out there, if this is simply poor editing or if usage has changed that much since its publication.

Zodiac, by Neal Stephenson.  Damn, for a book that he wrote seventeen years ago, this kicks ass.  It lacks the arid wit of his later offerings, and it also lacks a great deal of the humorous parenthetical commentary, but if you’ve already read Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age and The Baroque Cycle and Snow Crash, then this is well worth your time.  And at just over three hundred pages, it’s low risk, timewise.  The plot is basically related to toxic-waste dumping in Boston Harbor, with emphasis on dioxins and related compounds.  Good technical background on the aforementioned toxic waste; could be completely wrong but it at least it’s plausible.

In the Beginning…was the Command Line, by Neal Stephenson.  This is nonfiction, and is an essay of sorts on computers, with emphasis on Mac vs PC.  Stephenson doesn’t favor one over the other so much as note that both Apple and Microsoft successfully market to people’s desire to have made the Right Choice; they’re both selling image, not substance.  He spends some time on UNIX and Linux in comparison, but I’m not sure he’s really wrapped the whole issue up as well as he could.  Linux still has some software gaps that it needs to fill in order to dominate the world (as it should), and Stephenson failed (IMO) to consider this as a serious shortcoming.  Still, for a book that’s now six years old, very insightful.

Vitals, by Greg Bear.  Bear writes what I consider to be "hard" science fiction; Darwin’s Radio and Darwin’s Children are primarily books about how evolutional jumps may occur; this book begins being about turning off the ageing "feature", and takes an abrupt turn into influencing the population by introducing carefully engineered (in a low-tech sense) bacteria into their bodies.  It’s fiction, but it scared the hell out of me in much the same way as The Hot Zone did.  In this book, Bear’s main character is a rather unlikeable fellow who you wind up siding with because of the problems he’s beset with.  The ending is deliberately (I think) ambiguous, which could be thought-provoking or a setup for a sequel.  Either way, a good read.

Memoir from Antproof Case, by Mark Helprin.  So far, the best book I’ve read this decade.  I hated this book, starting out.  The protagonist is not someone you’d have any emotional connection to at all: eighty years old, living in Brazil and a fugitive from…something.  And in more than one respect, a raving lunatic: he cannot abide the smell of coffee, and at times takes rather excessive measures to keep even the smell of it away from him.  He is, by all appearances, someone that few readers could care about.  By about a third of the way through, I was thoroughly hooked, and by the end I was enchanted.  Helprin has, in this book, demonstrated a talent for connecting the reader to beauty and emotion, rather than simply doing a workmanlike job of describing it.  And of course by the end, the protagonist winds up looking like someone you’d want to have known.  I recommend this book to everyone.  I recall being similarly enchanted by A Winter’s Tale when it came out a couple of decades ago; now I’m going to have to go back and read it again.  And I’m going to have to clear out a section for Helprin on my bookshelf, permanently.

in the night room by Peter Straub.  Straub has written a number of books whose protagonist is Timothy Underhill; this is the latest.  This is another variation on the theme of laying ghosts to rest, and Straub’s made a fairly lengthy and successful career from that theme.  Good read.  Not his best effort, but not everything can be.  My favorite book by Straub is Mystery, which is very good indeed.

The War of the Flowers by Tad Williams.  Interesting, but not nearly his best effort.  For that, look to the Memory, Sorrow and Thorn trilogy beginning with The Dragonbone Chair.

I’ve also seen a few movies: Primer, The Machinist, and The Jacket.

Primer lost me, and I’m going to have to see it again.  There’s a great deal of conversation that got lost at normal volume levels that were absolutely key to understanding what the hell was going on.  This is a very interesting movie even disregarding plot, though: the budget was reportedly $7000.  If you can imagine a group of guys building a time machine in a home garage, the result is plausibly much more like this than the multi-million-dollar special effects Hollywood seems to gravitate toward.  There’s some unresolved paradoxes/overlaps here that I probably didn’t get because they were explained in a conversation I missed.  This film relies more on character interactions for story background than on imagery; the cinematography is absolutely spartan (not to be confused with low quality, though).

The Machinist was hands-down the most captivating of this trio.  I’ve got to ‘fess up, though, that Christian Bale was at least as gripping as the plot and characters:  Bale lost what’s got to be 60 or 80 lbs for this role, and the question of what’s eating this guy, literally, that he’s lost this much weight is distracting to the point that you almost cannot pay attention to the clues provided along the way.  Bale is anguish embodied, without actually expressing it overtly.  Hackneyed phrases like "gut-wrenching" spring to mind, not because of graphic visual imagery, but because of the stark emotional impact.  If you haven’t already seen this, go see it.  Very good supporting performances by Jennifer Jason Leigh and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, but Bale’s the show here.

The Jacket was a wonderful movie for exactly as long as you can accept that time travel is possible via drugs.  It goes without saying, then, that there’s a major problem with the storyline.  Performances from Adrien Brody and the always wonderful Jennifer Jason Leigh take this from thumbs-down to a recommend, if you don’t have more pressing things to do.  I enjoyed it during; it’s the thinking-about-it-afterward part that downgraded it.

Music-wise, I’ve been listening to 12 Girls Band, which is a group of Chinese women that do a mix of Asian and Western classical and popular music, arranged for Chinese instruments.  Very interesting and also quite pleasant.  Their arrangement of Coldplay’s Clocks led me to decide to buy that disk, only to discover that it’d been sitting on my shelf, long ago purchased but still wrapped.  So I’ve been listening to A Rush of Blood to the Head quite a bit, and liking it a lot.

Of course, this is an open thread.  I’d appreciate the opinions of others on the above selections, as well as recommendations for further reading, viewing and listening.

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by Charles

Joseph Edward Duncan III, the previously convicted sex offender who was arrested for kidnapping two young children (and murdering one of them) and suspected of bludgeoning to death their mother, older brother and mother’s boyfriend, had a weblog according to this report by Associated Press.

Convicted sex offender Joseph Edward Duncan III spent months on the Internet documenting his internal struggle over right vs. wrong. Then, four days before two Idaho children he is accused of kidnapping disappeared, he wrote: "The demons have taken over."

It was one of the last entries in Duncan’s Weblog before the 42-year-old North Dakota man was arrested and charged this week with two kidnapping counts. Authorities believe he took 9-year-old Dylan Groene and 8-year-old Shasta Groene from their Idaho home shortly before their 13-year-old brother, mother and her boyfriend were bludgeoned to death May 16. Police say Duncan also is a suspect in the killings.

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by hilzoy

The New York Times published a truly dumb article yesterday; and since it’s in my field, I thought I’d write about it. First, an excerpt:

“Although packaged with the glint of modernity, this theory actually draws from something old and wintry – the harsh remedies proposed by John Calvin, predestination’s No. 1 guy. According to Calvin, our fate is determined at first creation. Similar to this, the articles of gene-ism would have us believe that our medical fate is sealed by the genes we receive at conception. Seem a bit grim?

Maybe not. Our unquestioning acceptance of the gene as prime mover has certain distinct – and ultramodern – advantages. Consider: you are no longer responsible for anything. Sound familiar? Once it was the devil. Now it is the gene that made you do it. You are officially off the hook. It isn’t your fault at all. It’s your faulty genes.

It gets even better. Not only is it not your fault, but you actually are a victim, a victim of your own toxic gene pool.

In the Age of Genetics, you no longer have to try to cut out smoking or think twice about gobbling that candy bar in your desk drawer. And forget jogging on a cold morning.

The die was cast long ago, from the moment the parental sperm and egg first integrated their spiraling nucleotides. The resulting package of chromosomes has programmed every step of your life. So sit back, relax and leave the driving to someone else.

But one problem remains: this new world order is at sharp odds with an older theism, that blame can and must be assigned in every human transaction. We have built a vast judicial-industrial complex that offers lawsuits for every need, satisfying varied urges like the wish for fairness or revenge, for getting rich quick or simply getting your due.

This all-blame all-the-time approach applies to much more than determining culpability should a neighbor trip on your lawn and break an arm. It also says that people are responsible for their own health – and illness. It is your fault if you develop cancer or a heart attack because you didn’t eat, think or breathe right. You have allowed the corrosive effect of unresolved anger or stress or poor self-esteem to undermine your health. So if you are sick or miserable or both, it’s your own darned fault.

No wonder we fled.”

It’s amazing: an article that is wrong in almost every particular. Where to begin?

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Whether out of pretentiousness, or familiarity, or simply because of the shame that comes from reading and re-reading of a War in Iraq that neither we nor our government seems prepared to win — whether for some or all of those things, I find myself reading again Pericles’s Funeral Oration.*  And noting, dutifully, mark-by-mark, the myriad ways that we latter-day Hellenes do not live up to it.  (We scarcely even try.)

Yet, masochistic and unlearnt, I read it yet again.

. . . . Our form of government does not enter into rivalry with the institutions of others. Our government does not copy our neighbors’, but is an example to them. It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few. But while there exists equal justice to all and alike in their private disputes, the claim of excellence is also recognized; and when a citizen is in any way distinguished, he is preferred to the public service, not as a matter of privilege, but as the reward of merit. Neither is poverty an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition. There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant. While we are thus unconstrained in our private business, a spirit of reverence pervades our public acts; we are prevented from doing wrong by respect for the authorities and for the laws, having a particular regard to those which are ordained for the protection of the injured as well as those unwritten laws which bring upon the transgressor of them the reprobation of the general sentiment.

And we have not forgotten to provide for our weary spirits many relaxations from toil; we have regular games and sacrifices throughout the year; our homes are beautiful and elegant; and the delight which we daily feel in all these things helps to banish sorrow. Because of the greatness of our city the fruits of the whole earth flow in upon us; so that we enjoy the goods of other countries as freely as our own.

…. Our city is thrown open to the world, though and we never expel a foreigner and prevent him from seeing or learning anything of which the secret if revealed to an enemy might profit him. We rely not upon management or trickery, but upon our own hearts and hands. And in the matter of education, whereas they from early youth are always undergoing laborious exercises which are to make them brave, we live at ease, and yet are equally ready to face the perils which they face. ….

If then we prefer to meet danger with a light heart but without laborious training, and with a courage which is gained by habit and not enforced by law, are we not greatly the better for it? Since we do not anticipate the pain, although, when the hour comes, we can be as brave as those who never allow themselves to rest; thus our city is equally admirable in peace and in war. For we are lovers of the beautiful in our tastes and our strength lies, in our opinion, not in deliberation and discussion, but that knowledge which is gained by discussion preparatory to action. For we have a peculiar power of thinking before we act, and of acting, too, whereas other men are courageous from ignorance but hesitate upon reflection. ….

This is your pretentious open thread.

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If they could make a film out of the Lord of the Rings triology (and the 7 books of The Chronicles of Narnia), what’s so bleeding hard about condensing Joyce’s Ulysses into a 2-hour movie? I mean, it’s only all of life in one day. Well, apparently someone has. Behold Bloom.

Bloom opens in Belfast at the Queen’s Film Theatre this week to coincide with Bloomsday the 16 June anniversary of central character Leopold Bloom’s epic walk around Dublin.

The fictional anniversary is marked every year by fans who wander the Irish capital’s streets imitating the events which take place in the book.

Bloom reflects the adult themes which scandalised Joyce’s critics

Bloom stars Stephen Rea and Angeline Ball as Leopold and Molly Bloom.

Their performances reflect the taboo subjects that shocked the censor first time around including fantasy sex, sado-masochism and transvestism.

Stephen Rea thinks the adult themes will attract audiences although he says there is more to the production than just the bawdiness: "I certainly am attracted to it though it’s very boring to do it."

"People still feel it (Ulysses) is a bit highbrow for them. It’s not, it’s a big emotional, warm story.

"If you want to get a taste of what is actually a great work of literature you should see this movie."

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It seems totally barbaric to me, and the Front Line piece on it has moments that are incredibly difficult to watch (including the story of one young woman who either hanged herself or was murdered by her "husband’s" family), but the practice of kidnapping brides in Kyrgyzstan is a very complex cultural institution that stunningly often ends in very happy marriages.

I’ve asked "Bambino" (aka my partner) about it, and his response is similar to that of many of the Kyrgyz people interviewed in the Front Line segment: a knowing smile, a blush, and a heartfelt insistence that to most Kyrgyz people it’s not as bad as it must appear to outsiders. It’s simply "cultural."

There are no ready facts on how long ago the practice started, but given that the traditional method was to capture one’s bride while riding a horse, the mastery of which became a cultural staple after Genghis Khan invaded this part of the world, it stands to reason the Mongolian invaders introduced this tradition via their conquests. I don’t want to speculate too much about the psychology of it, but there is a bit of nationalistic pride in the voices of those who explain it, even the women.

Bambino explains that he sees it more or less as an elopement. Often a young couple discuss and plan a kidnapping as a means of cutting through the woman’s family’s disapproval of her choice. In fact, Bambino’s mother arranged to be kidnapped by his father for this very reason.

Other times, however, a shy young man decides to kidnap a woman he doesn’t actually know and is too busy working on the farm or simply too self-conscious to get to know. The number of these women who eventually concede (or are simply worn down by the nagging of the "groom’s" family and give in) to marry is amazing to me. Even more amazing though, as the Front Line segment shows, is how many of them months and years later seem really, truly happy in their marriages, suggesting that the "resistance" they put up while being coerced into the marriage is a bit of cultural theater as well. Perhaps, if one is expecting to be kidnapped, it’s rather exciting to be coy, I don’t know. It’s totally foreign to me.

The practice was outlawed during the days of the Soviet Union, but it still happened frequently (as Bambino’s mother can attest). It was again outlawed by the Kyrgyz government in 1994, but, again, that’s had very little impact.

Now, rather than use horses, a young man and his friends will use a car to kidnap the woman he’s interested in. If the young man doesn’t have a car, they hire a taxi for the day. All this assistance in the illegal act seems to be openly, even proudly, discussed. Once a woman (or girl, as if sometimes the case) is taken to the "groom’s" parents’ home, the "bride’s" family is contacted and told of the kidnapping. If the woman’s family strongly objects or if the woman simply will not concede, she will be set free, but there’s a cultural price to be paid for such disobedience, as the "groom’s" family curses the woman and spreads lies about her.

Something about the whole thing seems oddly back-country Irish to me. My ex grew up on a farm in County Clare and described similarly sheepish attitudes toward simply asking women to date among many Irish men (an extraordinary number of men from that area never marry).* In fact, there are other parallels between Kyrgyz and Irish culture that I’m recognizing, but I’ll save those for another post. I mention it now simply to suggest that although kidnapping seems barbaric to me, given how many of those marriages turn into very happy stories, it’s far less tragic than the loneliness the Irish culture breeds.

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In part to remind myself that most of the blather over the judicial nomination wars is just that — blather — I’ve been re-reading Roger K. Newman‘s remarkable biography of Justice Hugo Black.  Justice Black, as some may know, nearly had his 1937 nomination to the Supreme Court derailed by rumors that he had been a member of the KKK (rumors that were, in fact, true). 

But the story of how a former Klansman became one of the great Supreme Court Justices of all time is old hat.  What strikes my fancy today is a gem hidden in the book’s footnotes regarding the Roosevelt administration’s apparent obliviousness to (then, Senator) Black’s past in the Klan.  (The more things change ….)  As the dirt on Black came out, a reporter expressed shock to Joe Kennedy that Black had not informed FDR tha the had been a Klansman (p. 251): 

Kennedy’s reply (cleaned up for publication) was "If Marlene Dietrich asked you to make love to her, would you tell her you weren’t much good at making love?"

(Another gem:  Right after Justice Black was confirmed, a reporter remarked to Mrs. Black about a large family gathering that the Black’s had held over the holidays.  "Yes.  Quite a gathering of the clan," she said before realizing.)

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by Edward

Generally, I find most overtly political art too obvious and the motives of those making it far too suspect. Literally within two weeks of 9/11, we received proposals in the gallery for exhibitions dealing with the attacks. As the months went on, the proposals increased. I recall at the time thinking, I’m not even sure I know how I feel about any of this, I can’t imagine any artist could have taken the time to sort out how they feel and then processed that through a rigorous process. Obviously it’s silly to put a time frame on it, but I did have a sense that an artist would need longer to deal seriously with what they felt about 9/11. At least longer than two weeks.

Even by the time Eric Fischl’s controversial sculpture "Tumbling Woman" was removed from the Rockefeller Center’s Lower Concourse (well over a year after the attacks), it was apparent that even if artists knew how they felt about the attacks, the public was not yet ready to deal with it.

But that raises the question of whether an artist should wait until the public is ready to deal with the content of what they feel compelled to make. Perhaps the best political art forces people to realize what’s happening in hopes of changing it before it’s too late. But that doesn’t seem to be the case here, where nothing was going to change what happened on 9/11, and images of burning towers and such simply struck me as exploitative and/or crass.

That’s perhaps why I’m suspect of the artwork coming out of Iraq, where what I’d normally consider rather minor artists (in terms of the world stage) are making headlines with images that reference the abuses at Abu Ghraib:

The subjects in each of Nasir Thamer’s works are trapped behind bars, real or painted. Since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the trauma of the occupation has seeped even into Iraq’s artistic production.

"I used to paint scenes of traditional Iraqi life, Arab doors, mosques and letters from the Koran," says the 47-year-old artist. "This is a radical change for me but you just can’t escape reality."

One of his paintings depicts an Iraqi child running away from a US Apache combat helicopter towards his mother. The corner of the canvas where the woman was painted is ripped out, revealing black bars in the structure of the frame.

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–Edward

You may recall that lately I’ve been obsessed with the life of Alexander the Great, reading every biography of him I can lay my hands on. And I’m looking forward to seeing this exhibition at the Onassis Cultural Center. As cold-blooded conquerors go, Alexander was a hottie (see this image of Ghengis Khan for comparison). But his monomaniacal quest for glory saw Alexander lose his way, dragging his increasingly opportunistic and foreign forces around the known world, simply because it was there and he wanted it. None of the Greek idealists who set out with him on his conquest would recognize their leader (let alone his vision) by the end of his life.

I couldn’t help but think of the Macedonian emperor when I read the story in today’s NYTimes about Guggenheim Director Thomas Krens’ imperialist designs. Despite the growing criticism and high-profile resignations, Krens keeps pushing further into exotic territory (with plans for possible Guggenheim satellites in Singapore, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, and Guadalajara) and bringing on board members who share his hunger for expansion:

Today’s board is driven by leading members of New York’s real estate world who share Mr. Krens’s dreams of empire building. Besides [new chairman, William L. Mack, a real estate developer], one of five trustees who joined the board two years ago, they include Stephen M. Ross, founder and chief executive of the Related Companies, and Robert C. Baker, the chairman and chief executive of Purchase, a New York-based national realty and development corporation. [President, Jennifer Stockman] is president of Stockman & Associates, consultants specializing in technology.

Just like Alexander though, whose empire collapsed with a stunning expediency after his passing because he had too few true believers in key positions and had spread them too far apart, Krens is possibly building a global network of museums no one will be interested in defending after they’re constructed (no true believers in Peggy’s original vision, anyway).

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Flowers, bees, infant joy: enough of these happy subjects! It’s time for a bracing dose of stern Edwardian moralizing. Time to stiffen our backbones, roll up our sleeves, and reread Kipling, for whom I have an unaccountable soft spot.

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