From the Department of Almost But Not Quite

1 In recent weeks, Ed and his readers at the Dizzies have been discussing the persistence in literature of the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of the snake that eats its own tail, a metaphor for circularity and infinity. I remembered that discussion late Wednesday night as I was reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and came across the following scene, which finds Luna Lovegood leading Harry into Ravenclaw's common room:

[Luna] knocked once [on the eagle-shaped door knocker], and in the silence it sounded to Harry like a cannon blast. At once the beak of the eagle opened, but instead of a bird's call, a soft, musical voice said, "Which came first, the phoenix or the flame?"

"Hmm . . . What do you think, Harry?" said Luna, looking thoughtful.

"What? Isn't there just a password?"

"Oh no, you've got to answer a question," said Luna.

"What if you get it wrong?"

"Well, you have to wait for somebody who gets it right," said Luna. "That way you learn, you see?"

"Yeah . . .Trouble is, we can't really afford to wait for anyone else, Luna."

"No, I see what you mean," said Luna seriously. "Well then, I think the answer is that a circle has no beginning."

"Well reasoned," said the voice, and the door swung open.

The phoenix or the flame? The head or the tail of the snake? An ouroboros in Harry Potter, almost . . . but not quite.

2 On the train and around the city the past week, I've seen dozens and dozen of people reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. But I've also seen, just today, people reading Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, A Prayer for Owen Meany, Colleen McCullough's Fortune's Favorites, Anna Karenina, Walden, Michael Connelly's The Lincoln Lawyer, Gregory Maguire's Wicked, The Turn of the Screw, and, as seems to be the case any time I get on the train, The Kite Runner.

So almost everyone's reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows . . . but not quite.

3 In the introduction to his fascinating City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2006), Vic Gatrell writes about a gentlewoman named Lady Worsley:

In 1782, nearly a dozen prints circulated in fashionable London that were not at all designed to trump her high standing and connections. Costing a shilling plain or two shillings coloured and exhibited in printshop windows, they were bought by the great if not the good in malice and delight.

In one, by the up-and-coming caricaturist, James Gillray, entitled Sir Richard Worse-than-sly, Exposing his Wifes Bottom--O Fye!, a man hoists another man on to his shoulders to allow the latter to peep through a bathhouse window at the naked Lady Worsley as she washes herself demurely. In bluff military fashion, the peeping man remarks to the other below: 'Charming view of the back settlements, Sr Richard.' 'Good lack! my lady,' her attending maid exclaims in alarm, 'the captn will see all for nothing.'

The print illustrated a scene that had been revealed during a suit Sir Richard Worsley filed against the captain referred to in the print, Captain Bissett, for "criminal conversation" with Lady Worsley. According to Gatrell:

The court heard that while Worsley was quartered in the military camp at Cox's Heath, Lady Worsley had often used the nearby bathhouse at Maidstone. On one occasion her husband had tapped on the bathhouse door, saying 'Bissett is going to get up to look at you.' Hoist Bissett up to the window Worsley duly did, for him to gaze on her nakedness.

Perhaps needless to say, given this revelation the court found Worsley's suit less than convincing and awarded him only a single shilling in damages for the adultery.

The story is similar to the famous tale told by Herodotus about Candaules, King of Lydia, and his friend Gyges:

Now this Candaules became enamoured of his own wife and therefore thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world. One of the members of his personal guard, Gyges the son of Dascylus, was an especial favourite of his, and Candaules use to discuss his most important concerns with him; in particular, he used to keep praising his wife's appearance, because he thought she was so beautiful. Candaules was destined to come to a bad end, and so after a while he said to Gyges, 'Gyges, I don't think you believe what I tell you about my wife's looks--and it's true that people trust their ears less than their eyes--so I want you to find a way to see her naked.'

The proposal made Gyges extremely uncomfortable, but Candaules was his king, so he allowed Candaules to hide him in the queen's bedroom. A painting of the scene, below, features in Anthony Powell's Temporary Kings; his characters encounter the painting in Venice, which allows Powell to use the tale to highlight a pair of his favorite topics, sex and power.


{"Candaules, King of Lydia, Shews his Wife by Stealth to Gyges, One of his Ministers, As She Goes to Bed" by William Etty}

The queen discovered Gyges in her chambers and, ashamed, told him,

Gyges, there are now two paths before you: I can leave it up to you which one you choose to take. Either you can kill Candaules and have me and the kingdom of Lydia for your own, or you must die yourself right now, so that you will never again do exactly what Candaules wants you to do and see what you should not see. Yes, either her or you must die--either the one whose idea this was or the one who saw me naked when he had no right to do so.

Gyges was horrified, but he realized he was trapped. He opted for killing Candaules (for which the queen already had a suspiciously well-developed plan), took the throne, and reigned as King of Lydia for thirty-eight years.

The result of the revelation of Sir Richard and Lady Worsley's immodesty, on the other hand, was of much less consequence: public embarrassment, the creation and sale of a variety of satirical prints that they surely knew were hidden in the sideboards and bedsteads of their supposed friends, and the revelation, according to Horace Walpole, that Lady Worsley had "enjoyed the favours of thirty-four young men of the first quality."

The story of the Worsleys is almost an analogue for the story of Candaules and Gyges . . . but not quite.

4 I'll end with a passage I read on the train on the way home today, from Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, in which Tolstoy is writing about Tsar Nikolai I.


{Portrait by Franz Kruger of Emperor Nicholas I of Russia, 1852}

The constant, clear, vile blatancy of the flattery of those around him had brought him to the point where he no longer saw his contradictions, no longer adapted his actions and words to reality, logic, or even to simple good sense, but was absolutely certain that all his instructions, no matter how senseless, unjust and mutually incompatible, became entirely sensible, just and mutually compatible simply because it was he that gave them.

I have to confess that it's only wishful thinking that lands this passage in the Department of Almost But Not Quite.


Sadly, there's no not quite about it: put that passage in one of Ron Suskind's books about the Bush administration and you'd never think it the slightest bit out of place.

Independence Day

These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.

When Thomas Paine wrote those sentences to open his pamphlet The American Crisis in December of 1776, the prospects for the rebellious American colonies looked bleak. Mere weeks before, General Washington and his Contintental Army, smarting from a string of defeats in New York and New Jersey, had been driven across the Delaware River, leaving much of New England undefended. New York City had fallen to the British. As the ragged Contintental Army entered winter quarters, the men and women who had risked their lives and livelihoods on the prospect of independence were deeply--and quite rightly--worried.

Legend has it that Paine's pamphlet was read to the army in camp that bitter December, lifting their flagging spirits. An enemy of Paine, James Cheetham, said that the reading "rallied and reanimated" both the army and the public. It's important of course to not give too much credit to mere words--Washington's spectacular successes at Trenton and Princeton following his daring crossing of the Delaware River later that month surely did more to reinvigorate public support for the war. But Paine's words--elegant yet straightforward, like all his prose--were powerful at the time, and they have served for more than two hundred years as both an emblem of the bravery and determination that animated our founders and a reminder of the duty we all still have to ensure that their democratic experiment continues to succeed.

But while those opening lines are familiar, there is an aspect of The American Crisis that is less remarked upon these days, yet seems essential. While the pamphlet was intended as a rallying cry, and Paine did put a good face on the dire situation, he at the same time didn't hesitate to explain, in detail, the calamities that had recently befallen the Contintentals. He told of the retreat, lamented the losses and failures, and openly wondered about the future.

At a time when we as a nation are just beginning to emerge from a period in which our leaders--with the help of the mainstream media--made every effort to shame and demonize anyone who spoke honestly about our military failures in Iraq, Paine's essential straightforwardness is a refreshing reminder that truth and openness should be bedrock American virtues. Despite a real existential crisis--not overhyped threats of terror, but an actual, devastating war whose outcome was clearly in doubt--Paine knew better than to sacrifice those virtues. Would that we had leaders of the same caliber today.

I'll close this Independence Day post with Paine, too, a few lines from Common Sense. Published in the summer of 1776, Common Sense saw Paine, with the thoroughness and brutality of a street fighter, laying waste to the pro-reconciliation arguments of Loyalists and waverers--and leaving the colonists no reasonable choice but to support the war that was already underway. Under Paine's assault, the whole concept of hereditary monarchy is revealed as unreasonable, illogical, and unacceptable, and while from our vantage that may seem obvious, it's important to remember that the more egalitarian and democratic world we live in was made possible, in part, by those very words--and by the words and actions of Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, and the officers and enlisted men of the Continental Army.

Given the revelations of recent months about the Bush administration's thorough corruption of the previously honorable Department of Justice--and especially Bush's craven action this week in commuting the sentence of Scooter Libby--I think you'll understand why I chose the following passage.

From Common Sense:

But where says some is the King of America? I'll tell you Friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Britain. Yet that we may not appear to be defective even in earthly honors, let a day be solemnly set apart for proclaiming the charter; let it be brought forth placed on the divine law, the word of God; let a crown be placed thereon, by which the world may know, that so far as we approve as monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.

In the face of Bush and Cheney's depradations, our job as citizens is to fight for the rule of law. Only by doing that will we enure that America will see the better days appropriate to the descendants of Paine and the Revolutionary generation.

A return to Abraham Lincoln, about whom one can never read enough

From "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" (1865), by Walt Whitman:

O how shall I warble myself for the dead one there I loved?
And how shall I deck my soul for the large sweet soul that has gone?
And what shall my perfume be for the grave of him I love?

Sea-winds blown from the east and west,
Blown from the Eastern sea and blown from the Western sea, till there on the prairies meeting,
These and with these and the breath of my chant,
I'll perfume the grave of him I love.

My post last week on dreams featured a pair of dreams attributed to Abraham Lincoln that supposedly foretold his death, which led a friend to admit to having been obsessed with Lincoln as a girl. In particular, she was fascinated with the better-known of the dreams I wrote about, the one known as Lincoln's Dream. She says:

i came to lincoln's dream when i was about six and a half--very shortly after i could read books with chapters--my precocious childhood obsession was politics, elections, and presidents, paired with the moody irish catholic fascination with the supernatural. i used to drape a comforter over my head (and body) to leave my room at night so that lincoln wouldn't recognize me as one of the living. the neighborhood kids and i would stage plays in our garage and yell out, "who is dead in the white house?" this lent itself, of course, to a healthy adult fascination with spiritualism as the product of the hybrid forms of 'experimental' 'feminine' consciousness available in the 19th century & many attempted postmodern sonnet sequences on the life of mary todd lincoln.

Yes, I suppose that is where an obsession with Lincoln's dream is likely to lead a smart and book-loving young woman, isn't it?

Meanwhile, in searching out accounts of Lincoln's Dream, I came across a poem called "Lincoln's Dream" by Dan Chiasson that in the New Yorker this spring, 142 years to the week after Lincoln's assassination. It jumbles Lincoln and Chiasson and all of us up in a vertiginous reminder of mortality--while simultaneously replicating the air of the uncanny that the dreaming Lincoln seemingly felt as he wandered the mourning White House. It's worth a trip to the New Yorker's site.

And then there's Walt Whitman, whose pen was busy in the weeks following Lincoln's death:

This Dust Was Once the Man

This dust was once the Man,
Gentle, plain, just and resolute--under whose cautious hand,
Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age,
Was saved the Union of These States.

It's easy (especially living in Illinois) to get overly wrapped up in and impressed by Lincoln, to allow oneself to be gobsmacked by his moral seriousnes, his dedication, his determination, and his preternatural deftness at reading people and situations. As Ulysses Grant, no mean leader of men himself (his presidency aside), said, "I have no doubt that Lincoln will be seen as the conspicuous figure of the war. He was indisputably the greatest man I ever knew."

Yet much as I admire him, I know of course that Lincoln was far from perfect--and I know that remembering that no person or leader can or will be perfect is essential to avoiding the short-circuiting of thought that is a first step on the road to totalitarianism. Analyses of Lincoln's shortcomings--his questionable stances on civil liberties and the prospects of America's freed slaves, for example--are worthy and important.

But for today, as we approach yet another Independence Day with that dishonest, callous, dismal wreck of a man battened down in the White House, I need a reminder that real leaders, truly good men, once walked those same halls. So for today I'll stay with the Lincoln of grade school, the Lincoln who saved the Union, the Lincoln who in his Second Inaugural had the temerity--unthinkable in our current political climate--to suggest that our view of right may be clouded.

We may not know, in his construction, that we understand the will of God, that we do the right thing or are on the right side. But that by no means lessens our responsibility to hew to what we believe to be the correct path, no matter the obstacles, at the same time as it increases our awareness of our responsibility to always recall the humanity that we share with even our fiercest opponents. Bush's blustering attempts to claim the mantle of such stalwart leaders as Lincoln and Churchill are perpetually belied by the complete absence of any of the compassion, humanity, or humility that ring through Lincoln's words:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Caesar and the Romans

Reading the excellent new Caesar: Life of a Colossus (2006), by Adrian Goldsworthy, I was reminded of Cato the Elder, who ended each speech in the Roman Senate, no matter its topic, with "Moreover I advise that Carthage must be destroyed." Some days I feel that I should end every post, no matter its topic, with "Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now."

Goldsworthy is best known as a military historian, and his accounts of Caesar's campaigns and feats of generalship are detailed, clear, and always interesting. Caesar's confidence, inventiveness, and willingness to try unusual tactics put me in the mind of Ulysses Grant (though without Grant's crucial willingness to invest trusted subordinates with great freedom and power (and yes, I realize I'm drawing the line of influence in the wrong direction)). Caesar himself remains, necessarily, something of a cipher: he is, as expected, smart, canny, and ferociously ambitious, and he inspires great loyalty in his soldiers, but he is also at various times brutal, merciful, egalitarian, authoritarian, friendly, and cold. The gaps in historical knowledge, along with the uncertain motivations of those of his near-contemporaries whose writings have reached us, force those contradictions to remain unresolved and Caesar, thus, to remain a complicated figure.

Throughout the book, Goldsworthy draws on Cicero, to whose copious writings we trace so much of our knowledge of the period, and who is one of the most perpetually interesting Romans. Brilliant and ambitious, and with a deep understanding of human nature and the uses of power, he is forever building and maintaining alliances, like a man who lives in the shadow of an enormous dike and knows the dangers of inattention. But his principles are only as strong as his backers, and in his craven willingness to blow with the prevailing winds, to change in whatever way is needed to preserve himself, his power, and his image as a statesman, he reminded me of no one so much as Joe Lieberman. Cicero at least lived in a time in which to fail to make self-preservation a priority might mean one's life; all Lieberman gets out of the deal is an occasional kiss from the Derelict in Chief and a ready chair on the Sunday morning blowhard shows.

Goldsworthy also does well with what is, for me, the most important job of the Roman historian: relating the detailed anecdotes that make the individual Roman leaders, and their ridiculously dramatic lives and deaths. For example, here's how he tells of the gruesome end of Cato the Younger, who, defeated by Caesar in the Civil War, found himself with the choice to flee, surrender, or commit suicide. Retiring to his room,

He complained when he noticed that his son and servants had removed his sword, and insisted that they return it, but then went back to his reading. His choice of work was significant, Plato's Phaedo, a discussion on the immortality of the soul, but throughout his life he had pursued the study of philosophy. Finally, without warning, he stopped reading, took up his sword and stabbed himself in the stomach. Teh wound was bad, but not immediately mortal, and once they heard the commotion his son and slaves rushed to him. A doctor was brought and Cato's wound cleansed and bound up. However, he had never lacked determination or courage, and once they had gone the forty-eight-year-old tore open the stitches and began ripping out his own entrails. he was dead before they could restrain him. When Casear heard the news he said that he bitterly begrudged the opportunity of pardoning his most determined opponent, but to a great extent Cato had acted out of a desire to avoid his enemy's mercy.

Of such detail, a remarkable amount of which has come down to us through the millennia, are the attractions of Roman history woven. Its mix of personalities and events makes it inexhaustible; the more I read about the classical world, the more easily I understand early curricula that focused on it to the exclusion of all else. At the very least, you'd never be bored.

Bush and Torture Explained

From Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons (1960)

ALICE MORE: (Exasperated, pointing after RICH) While you talk, he’s gone!

MORE: And go he should, if he was the Devil himself, until he broke the law.

ROPER: So now you’d give the Devil benefit of law!

MORE: Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

ROPER: I’d cut down every law in England to do that!

MORE: (Roused and excited) Oh? (Advances on ROPER) And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you—where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? (He leaves him) This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast—man’s laws, not God’s—and if you cut them down—and you’re just the man to do it—d’you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? (Quietly) Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake.

I picked up A Man for All Seasons about a month ago when I was thinking about George Bush’s stubborn insistence that he be allowed to authorize torture. His recent admission that the secret CIA torture centers we heard about last year do exist brought it back to the front of my mind. So while I was running along the lakefront today, I tried to lay out what I think are the reasons why torture is so important to George Bush.

I found myself thinking in outline form for clarity’s sake, so that’s how I wrote. I apologize if my organization leaves something to be desired; I also apologize for the extreme length of the post—I’ll certainly understand if you don’t feel like slogging through it all. But for those of you who do, I’d really like to know what you think. Have I missed anything? Misunderstood anything? Mischaracterized anything?

Reasons that George Bush is so adamant that he be allowed to authorize torture

I. He believes that torture works and therefore is necessary

A. Because he’s utterly incurious, so he’s never looked into the matter on his own, and he never seeks out dissenting viewpoints. Therefore, he’s never learned of the conclusion of many who’ve studied the issue—including the British army, which made use of torture throughout its imperial heyday and even as recently as the 1980s in Northern Ireland—that torture is ineffective. The information you gain is less, and of a lesser quality, than what is gained through more nuanced interrogation techniques.

B. Because like a dismaying number of conservatives (and, to be fair, Americans in general), his worldview is largely shaped by action movies and popular culture. In action movies, torture works. And, in action movies, the “ticking time bomb” scenario—that favorite crutch of torture apologists, where a grinning bad guy in custody knows the location of a bomb about to go off—occurs fairly frequently, whereas in real life such a situation is extremely rare.

II. He dislikes being opposed in anything

A. Because his understanding of government is so limited and his sense of entitlement so overdeveloped that he really believes that, as President, he should be able to do what he wants.

B. Because his stubbornness very quickly comes into play, and his first response to opposition of any kind is to want even more what he’s being told he can’t have.

III. He supports torture because it seems like a tough-minded choice, and it thereby makes him feel tough

A. Because while Bush sometimes says that he’ll “do whatever it takes,” use any tool at hand, to make Americans safer, he is of course lying. He’s not going to suspend all air travel or make everyone who boards a commuter train endure a patdown and a scan. Those measures might make America safer, but at too high a cost. The cost of torture being nearly invisible, torture is to him an available tool. Deciding to support torture allows him to think of himself as someone who will do whatever it takes.
1. The fact that there’s opposition only makes him feel more like the clear-eyed, tough-minded straight-shooter that he and so many Republicans like to think he is. And that very sense of tough-mindedness resonates all the more for him because of the dichotomy it allows him to imagine between his approach and what he sees as the squeamish approach of the other side, who he believes aren’t willing to look at the facts and make the hard choices.
2. The more he is opposed, the tougher he feels for having made his decision, and therefore the more squeamish the opposition seems, and therefore the tougher he feels. Like so many other pathological aspects of the Bush administration, it’s self-reinforcing.

B. The position that a tough-minded approach to fighting terrorism must consider torture within bounds is easy to argue in an ill-informed, barstool manner. As we’ve seen from his interviews and press conferences, that’s the level of Bush’s argumentative skills at their best—and such a context is exactly the sort that leads a person to feel that taking unpopular positions makes him tough.

IV. He supports torture because he actually has no qualms about it in practice [I think this is the biggie, actually.]

A. Because he’s given astonishingly little thought (I imagine on the order of about ten minutes, total) to what life for people who aren’t Americans—or, more specifically, for Iraqis and Afghans—is like. Therefore, he has no real sense that some of the people his men pick up could be innocent bystanders.
1. He doesn’t understand the physical dangers and the psychological pressures of living in a war zone. He doesn’t understand why even an Iraqi who is firmly pro-American might not want to tell everything he knows about the activities of his neighbors. He doesn’t even begin to understand that an occupying army, whatever its intentions, breeds resentment, which in turn kills cooperation. Those who fail to cooperate must have something to hide.
2. In fact, I really believe that way down deep in his subconscious, he believes that pretty much anyone over there is a little guilty. After all, if you’re not a bad guy, why would you live in a war zone? In this, I don’t think he’s alone—and I think that subconscious judgment is one of the complex of reasons why Iraqi civilian casualties are largely shrugged off over here. This also jibes with the position of Bush and other right-wingers following Hurricane Katrina: surely anyone who remained in the city was suspect. After all, why ride out a deadly hurricane if you’re not socially suspect in some way?

B. Because he doesn’t actually believe that most people are innocent until proven guilty, and the guilty, by their guilt, have forfeited the right to any real concern.
1. Therefore, if his men—and by extension, in this case, all Marines, CIA officers, G-men, and Army privates are his men—pick someone up, that’s because the person is guilty. This applies both within the United States and without.
2. With regard to Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, because he is deeply incurious and ill-informed, he has never thought about the difficulties facing an occupying army that doesn’t speak the language, has an unclear mission, and is on edge because it’s in constant danger. Therefore he has no idea of the sorts of mistakes that such a situation breeds, and he continues to assume that anyone rounded up is, by definition, guilty.

C. Because he doesn’t believe that anyone has inherent human or legislated legal rights.
1. Therefore expedience is all when making decisions about matters of, as he sees it, life and death. It’s not even that expedience trumps human rights—there’s not even a contest.
2. This, I think, is where Bush is most clearly a totalitarian at heart. Rights are given, not inherent, and they can and should be taken away from enemies of the state. And it’s not too hard for me to imagine a nightmare situation where that category grows and grows, as it does in any totalitarian state, and suddenly Bush is calmly ordering people like John Kerry or Bill Clinton or John McCain to be tortured. I’m not saying we’re anywhere near that point—it’s a full-on sci-fi dystopia away—but I can picture it, because it’s at the far end of a continuum on which Bush has demonstrated that he is willing to rest comfortably.
3. He believes that those of us who do believe in inherent human rights and legislated legal rights are either just saying so to score political points, are actively anti-American and oppose his goals, or are so befogged by legalistic book-learning that we’re unable to see the real dangers before us. He has absolutely no understanding of the actual roots of a principled stand on this issue in opposition to him; he doesn’t believe a principled stand on this issue is even possible.

D. Because he is so incurious and ill-informed, he has no idea how horrible the act of torture is.
1. In this, he’s not alone; I imagine that very few members of our government have ever read accounts by torture survivors or former torturers. I think that’s a minuscule but real part of the reason that opposition to Bush’s torture policies has been so tepid. These people simply have no idea how horrid, brutal, and repugnant the physical acts of torture are. Despite the fact that nearly everyone breaks under torture, I would bet that most congressmen, if pressed, would say they think they’d hold up pretty well.
2. This lack of knowledge also helps to fuel points I and III, above. Because he is ill-informed, he can continue to feel tough (thinking that he’d be able to take it) and to believe that the information gained from torture is of great value (because, again, he doesn’t understand that eventually nearly everyone breaks and starts saying whatever they think the torturer wants to hear).

V. He believes his administration’s propaganda.

A. Because he is ill-informed, incurious, and not very smart (and because, as in I:B above, he learns from movies), he believes those who oppose us are evil. As he said the other day, the situation is as simple as “They believe the opposite of what we believe.”
1. Therefore, actual fighting against those who oppose us is really the only solution. To negotiate or compromise with evil is, de facto, to lose.
2. Therefore, any protestations of innocence or claims that the goals you impute to your enemy are not, in fact, their goals, are lies. Torture is a way to get past those lies.

B. Because he is actively hostile to complexity, he believes that we are inherently good.
1. Therefore, our actions should be judged both more leniently than Bush’s political opponents seem to want to judge them and they should be judged based on the intentions that underlie them, not on their actuality.
2. Therefore, not only may we condone torture, we must condone torture. To do less is to take a chance that the cause of the good might lose. In a Manichean battle, moral niceties must be discarded.

VI. He listens to and trusts Cheney

A. Who believes in torture. I think all of the above arguments would apply to Cheney if you replaced “ill-informed” and “incurious” with “calculating and Machiavellian” and “openly hostile to new information.”

B. Who actively reinforces points II and III. He tells Bush that he should be able to do anything he wants, and he tells him he’s a tough son of a bitch for making the hard decisions and sticking to his guns.

The fact that we have spent the past three years debating the ethics of torture is to the great shame of America. The fact that our President stood resolutely on the immoral side of the issue and was reelected is to the even greater shame of America. A hundred years on our hands and knees with the bleach won’t even begin to lessen this stain on our nation’s honor.

Labor Day weekend notes

A type of blog post that I tend to really enjoy, but which I don’t make myself very often because it feels lazy, is a notes post. But all week I’ve been accumulating little bits of stuff that really don’t have a place other than in a notes column, so here you go.

1) Thinking back to my post from earlier this week about progressivism and certainty, I keep imagining a slogan built from my thoughts: “Vote Democrat. We’re the party of Job.” Or “Vote Democrat. We won’t pretend to know, but we’ll give it our best shot.”

The Republican ads, of course, would be along the lines of, “The Democrats promise to give you boils and kill your family and your livestock. It happened to Job, and it’ll happen to you.”

2) Speaking of politics, I assume you noticed that about ten days ago, the White House released George W. Bush’s reading list for the summer. His reading of The Stranger, which enormous-headed White House flack Tony Snow discussed with the media, got most of the attention—which isn’t unreasonable, because based on the limited evidence at hand I’m actually willing to believe Bush actually read it.

As for the other books on the list, though? I call bullshit. He’s got some good John D. MacDonald detective novels on there, and I’m willing to believe he’s read, say, two of them. There are a couple of Flashman novels, and I’ll give him one. But has he really read Kai Bird and Martin Sherman’s biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus? (Would he even be able to give a four-sentence explanation of who Oppenheimer is?) Or Ronald White’s very serious book about Lincoln’s Second Inaugural? Could he possibly have read Rory Stewart’s book about walking across Afghanistan? And, if so, did he learn anything about the complexity that underlies his black-and-white statements about peoples and nations?

The main reason I call bullshit, though? He’s got 48 books on his summer reading list. Now, I know that our Derelict in Chief takes a lot of time off. But I, a fast reader who spends my non-work time doing little else, get through, at most, 110 books a year. Yet I’m supposed to believe that the President of the United States—whose lack of dedication to his job is surely counterbalanced in this case by his evident stupidity—can find time to read 48 books in a summer?

These people reflexively lie about every single damn thing. If they tell you you’re alive and well, you probably ought to go ahead and stagger to the morgue.

3) Someone who’s honest about not reading? Cincinnati Reds outfielder Adam Dunn, who claims to have read only two books since high school: Buzz Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights and a young adult novel called The Summer of the Monkeys. Give me dumb and honest any day, especially if it comes with prodigious home run power.

4) Thinking about the morgue reminds me that the best thing I read this week was a short story by Will McIntosh called “Followed,” in the most recent issue of a journal called Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, which is a product of Small Beer Press (best known as Kelly Link’s publisher). “Followed” is a zombie story, and like all good zombie stories, it’s a also a commentary on contemporary society—but it’s the sharpest I’ve ever come across. In the world McIntosh has created, people are followed around by reanimated corpses whose deaths they have caused, directly or indirectly, through their grotesque overconsumption.

She came wandering down the sidewalk like any other corpse, her herky-jerky walk unmistakable among the fluid strides of the living. . . . Strange how most TV shows depicted the world as corpseless. Nary a corpse to be seen on the sitcoms, cop shows, interactives—all those people, walking the streets, working, and not one of the followed by a corpse.

“Followed” is well worth the price of the journal itself. You can order it here.

5) Speaking of reanimation, I know I'm not the first to suggest this, but don’t you think it would be fun to bring Borges back and show him the Wikipedia? As my friend Bob pointed out the other night, the author of “Tlön Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” would surely thrill to the fact that the entries for Kashyyk and Tattoine outstrip, in length and detail, the entries for, say, Saturn and Neptune.

He would also, surely, appreciate that empty feeling you get at the end of an evening spent in the byways of the Web, wandering, and not necessarily ever finding what you started out looking for:

Unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough, by a similarly disproportionate depression. The certainty that some bookshelf in some hexagon contained precious books, yet that those precious books were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable.

6) Something else I think Borges would have appreciated is the literary hoax recently perpetrated by an anonymous enemy of English writer A. N. Wilson. Wilson, many of whose books I love, but who seems to be a monstrous prick (His memoir of his friendship with Iris Murdoch and John Bayley is the most mean-spirited and petty book I’ve ever read.) was suckered into including in his recent biography of poet John Betjeman a letter that was a complete forgery.

The forgery came to light when its unknown author (suspected to be the author of another recent Betjeman biography), who had supplied the letter to Wilson under the name of Eve de Harben (an anagram of "Ever been had?") wrote to the Sunday Times of London, revealing that the letter was a forgery . . . and that the initial letters of each of the sentences of the missive, taken in order, spelled out “A. N. Wilson is a shit."

Nearly as much fun, for me, was that the letter refers to Anthony Powell:

Anthony Powell has written to me, and mentions you admiringly. Some of his comments about the Army are v. funny. He's somebody I'd like to know better when the war is over. I find his letters funnier than his books.

7) And, on the topic of things that don’t exist, my friend and former co-worker Erin says:

I tried to post a comment to your blog but it wouldn't let me! I dreamed a few nights ago that I wrote a book called Scurry and that I had to approve the cover design (a b/w photo of a fully dressed woman sitting at the tide line of a Scottish-looking beach) while talking on a cell phone and driving in traffic. What’s with all the book dreams?

All I could tell Erin was that if she’ll actually publish Scurry, I’ll write about it here.

8) Boswell, in his London Journal, records some advice that we bloggers should probably take to heart:

I read [Lord Erskine] a little of [my journal] this evening. To be sure it is very carelessly wrote, which he freely took notice, and said it might become a habit to me to write in that manner, so that I would learn a mere slatternly style. He advised me to take more pains upon it, and to render it useful by being a good method to practice writing: to turn periods and render myself ready at different kinds of expression. He is very right. I shall be more attentive for the future, and rather give a little neatly done than good deal slovenly.

9) And, finally, since my book-laden return from Portland (and Powell’s) in early July, I’ve only bought four books. Well, unless you count the four Hard Case Crime books that came in the mail. Or the couple of New York Review Books that a friend sent me. Or the mystery novel my dad lent me.

Regardless, I’ve made progress. For the first time in several years, I’ve got fewer unread books in the house than I did two months ago.

It’s important, in these late-summer days, to enjoy small victories. Enjoy the holiday.

Gratitude

From George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (2005)

Richard Perle asked me rhetorically, “What would be accomplished by having patrols up and down the highway? The point of our presence there, it seems to me, is not to make sure that the highways are open all the time. That isn’t how this is going to be won, in my view. This is going to be won when we have a flow of intelligence that identifies the guys we’re fighting.”

Unless you had an ideological stake in it, this controversy didn’t survive your first contact with Iraqi reality. There weren’t enough troops to patrol the road between Baghdad International Airport and the city center so that visitors didn’t have to take their lives into their hands upon arrival. There weren’t enough troops in the city streets to act as a deterrent to someone who wanted to steal a car or shoot up a convoy or assassinate an official. There weren’t enough troops to guard a fraction of the million tons of munitions which were left lying around in dumps all over Iraq that were being steadily looted by insurgents. There weren’t enough troops to provide a token presence along Iraq’s borders with Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, which might dissuade some jihadis and intelligence agents from infiltrating across. There weren’t enough troops to prevent militias from gaining control of entire provinces. There weren’t enough troops on the major highways to keep bandits and insurgents from terrorizing the truckers carrying essential goods, such as reconstruction materials, or even food for the Green Zone. There weren’t enough troops to allow CPA officials to do their jobs.

Perhaps the connection between patrolling highways and winning the war was too abstract for those supporters of administration policy who never went to Iraq, and for a few who did. It shouldn’t have been that hard. Why would Iraqis join the American effort when their personal safety, or even a minimum of public order in their country, couldn’t possibly be upheld by the occupying forces?

Now, three years later, the situation is much, much worse. And while all sane people are deeply frustrated by the situation, until this week we hadn’t gotten any indication that our Derelict in Chief felt any of that frustration. Now, however, we know: he’s just as frustrated as we are . . . but he’s frustrated about something else:

President Bush made clear in a private meeting this week that he was concerned about the lack of progress in Iraq and frustrated that the new Iraqi government — and the Iraqi people — had not shown greater public support for the American mission, participants in the meeting said Tuesday. . . . More generally, the participants said, the president expressed frustration that Iraqis had not come to appreciate the sacrifices the United States had made in Iraq, and was puzzled as to how a recent anti-American rally in support of Hezbollah in Baghdad could draw such a large crowd. “I do think he was frustrated about why 10,000 Shiites would go into the streets and demonstrate against the United States,” said another person who attended.

Those ungrateful Iraqis. But maybe he’s got a point. Maybe the Iraqis should thank us—for not somehow screwing up this war and occupation even more. Hell, I’m almost to the point of being grateful for every day that Bush doesn’t decide to nuke someone.

Oh, but I should give the Derelict in Chief his due. From later in the New York Times story:

Participants said Mr. Bush appeared serious and engaged during the lunch, which lasted more than 90 minutes.

He was serious and engaged! He did his job for 90 whole minutes! And don’t forget: it’s August, when by right he should be on vacation! That brush isn't going to clear itself, you know.

Now don’t you feel more grateful?

Bush + Iraq = Quagmire

I’ve been reading George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq (2005), which is about as infuriating a book as I’ve ever read. Packer begins by making a surprisingly strong case that the invasion of Iraq might have been justifiable simply on humanitarian grounds, and that it might, with careful planning, lots of luck, and clear-eyed realism, have been possible to prosecute successfully. It was an extremely long shot, and even Packer's case at its strongest doesn't convince me. But it was possible.

However, Packer follows that case with example after example of how the Bush administration, through its fecklessness, hubris, and incompetence, managed instead to more or less guarantee failure, with all the death, destruction, and instability that has accompanied it. Packer’s been everywhere, it seems, and talked to everyone—former Baathists, Defense Department officials, U.S. Army Captains on patrol, and ordinary Iraqis. Many of the ordinary Iraqis and most of the U.S. soldiers come across as real heroes—working incredibly hard in terrible conditions to attempt to rein in chaos, improve the country, and stay alive.

By the end of The Assassins’ Gate, it’s hard not to conclude that the Bush administration has failed on nearly every front. I started with what I thought was the lowest possible opinion of the administration; what I’ve learned reminds me that Brad DeLong has yet to be proved wrong when he says, “The Bush administration is worse than you think, even after you’ve taken into account that the Bush administration is always worse than you think.”

All of which has me thinking about a particular word—here’s The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary’s take on it:

Treason: 1 The action of betraying a person, etc., betrayal of trust, treachery. 2 Law Violation by a subject of allegiance to the sovereign or the State, esp. by attempting or plotting to kill or overthrow the Government. Formerly also high treason 3 An act or kind of treason. Now rare.

Hmm. That doesn’t seem quite right. I don’t think anyone in the Bush administration is actually trying to overthrow the government,; in fact, I’m sure they think they’re working on behalf of the government. They’re just disastrously, criminally incompetent.

That gives me an idea. How about:

Dereliction 1 The state of being abandoned or forsaken, dilapidation, neglect. 2 The act of deliberate abandonment. Now rare exc. Law, of a chattel or movable. 3 Failure, cessation; esp. sudden failure of the bodily or mental powers. 4 Reprehensible abandonment; wilful neglect. Chiefly in dereliction of duty.

Here’s just one of the countless examples. I could almost have picked this at random—seriously. See what you think:

By the end of the summer [of 2003, Paul] Bremer understood the extent of the problem and its political urgency. He went to Washington and let the White House know that Iraq was going to cost America tens of billions of dollars. Iraqi oil money and seized assets wouldn’t come close to covering it. The reassuring forecasts of Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz went into the dustbin of history.

President Bush broke the news to the country on September 7, 2003, and Congress quickly passed an $87 billion appropriation bill that included $18.4 billion for Iraq’s reconstruction. Much of the money was earmarked for the huge infrastructure projects—power plants, water and sewage treatment, telecommunications—that only large multinationals could carry out. . . . By August 2004, ten months after the appropriation, only $400 million of the $18.4 billion—barely two percent—had been spent. By the time Iraqi subcontractors saw any of the money, all but a small fraction had been lopped off in overhead, security (as much as 40 percent of any contract), corruption, and profits. The CPA kept promising Iraqis that the spigot was about to be turned on and the country was going to be flooded with lifesaving cash that would put tens of thousands of people to work. It never happened.

Part of the problem lay in the business-as-usual attitude back in Washington. Rumsfeld, still technically in charge of the postwar, set the tone: In mid-September, just a few days after Bush’s televised speech, the defense secretary said, “I don’t believe it’s our job to reconstruct the country. The Iraqi people will have to reconstruct that country over a period of time. “ He even offered the Iraqi people a reconstruction plan of sorts: “Tourism is going to be something important in that country as soon as the security situation is resolved, and I think that will be resolved as soon as the Iraqis take over more and more responsibility for their own government.”

Let's look at "Dereliction," sense four again:

4 Reprehensible abandonment; wilful neglect. Chiefly in dereliction of duty.

I think we have our winner. It’s time to jail Donald Rumsfeld on a charge of dereliction of duty and criminal negligence.

But let’s not forget his bosses, who through all of this have found no reason to fire—or even publically reprimand—him.

Impeach George W. Bush. Impeach Richard Cheney. Do it now.

Lessons of history

Often as it's quoted, I think George Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" isn't quite sufficient to describe the current situation. Not as pithy, but more apt for right now would be, "Those who cannot remember the past are—along with everyone else in the entire world—condemned to repeat it."

There are, after all, many of us who remember the past; many of us have even taken the trouble to learn about events that transpired before we were born. But because the Bush Administration and its enablers actively refuse to learn any lessons from past mistakes (or, god forbid, past successes)—and because the Purported Opposition Party for some reason can't decide that it's a good idea to point out to the world that the Lunatic War-mongering Incompetence Party is, in fact, lunatic, war-mongering, and incompetent—we're all stuck repeating history.

Those of us who are lucky are repeating history, that is. The unlucky are being killed by bombs.

Along those lines, this post is about one historical tradition that doesn't ever seem to go out of style with military or civilian leaders: underestimating the fighting ability of the men on the other side.

From Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 (1587)

SPY
An hundred horsemen of my company,
Scouting abroad upon these champian plains,
Have viewed the army of the Scythians,
Which make reports it far exceeds the king’s.

MEANDER
Suppose they be in number infinite,
Yet being void of martial discipline,
All running headlong after greedy spoils
And more regarding gain than victory,
Like to the cruel brothers of the earth
Sprung of the teeth of dragons venomous,
Their careless swords shall lance their fellows’ throats
And make us triumph in their overthrow.

MYCETES
Was there such brethren, sweet Meander, say,
That sprung of teeth of dragons venomous?

MEANDER
So poets say, my lord.

MYCETES
And ’tis a pretty toy to be a poet..
Well, well, Meander, thou art deeply read, and having thee I have a jewel sure.
Go on, my lord, and give your charge, I say,
Thy wit will make us conquerors today.

From Justin Marozzi’s Tamerlane (2004)

Fighting was in [the Tatars’] blood. Famed for their skill as archers, they charged across the steppe on horseback, raining down arrows upon their enemies. [In the words of a contemporary account,] “They were archers who by the shooting of an arrow would bring down a hawk from the hollow of the ether, and on dark nights with a thrust of their spearheads would cast out a fish from the bottom of the sea; who thought the day of the battle the wedding night and considered the pricks of lances the kisses of fair maidens.”

From George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate (2005)

It wasn’t the job of the uniformed services simply to salute their civilian leaders and march off to war. Franks, who was known to rule by fear, and his staff also had an obligation to the men and women under their command. Yet they never seemed to ask themselves what would happen if Rumsfeld was wrong—what might happen to their troops once they were in Iraq, without the necessary forces and protection, if things did not go according to plan. Plan A was that the Iraqi government would be quickly decapitated, security would be turned over to remnants of the Iraqi police and army, international troops would soon arrive, and most American forces would leave within a few months. There was no plan B.

From John Nagl’s Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (2002)

The patience and willingness to suffer over a long period in order to achieve ardently desired revolutionary goals have led one observer of the phenomenon to observe, “Insurgents start with nothing but a cause and grow to strength, while the counter-insurgents start with everything but a cause and gradually decline in strength and grow to weakness.”

From James T. Patterson’s Grand Expectations (1996)

In Korea . . . the war went badly for the United States and its UN allies in the first few weeks. MacArthur had been optimistic; like many Americans he had a low opinion of Asian soldiers, and he thought the United States could clean things up quickly. But he had done a poor job of preparing his occupation forces in Japan. The troops who were rushed from Japan to Korea . . . were poorly equipped and out of shape. Colonel John “Mike” Michaelis, a regimental commander, complained that many of the soldiers did not even know how to care for their weapons. “They’d spent a lot of time listening to lectures on the differences between communism and Americanism and not enough time crawling on their bellies on maneuvers with live ammunition singing over them.” . . . If conditions had been better, the troops might have had a little time, once in [Korea], to train more intensely. But they were rushed to the front lines. There they were torn up by the well-planned North Korean advance.

From George Packer’s The Assassin’s Gate (2005)

Rumsfeld looked upon anarchy and saw the early stages of democracy. In his view and that of others in the administration, but above all the president, freedom was the absence of constraint. Freedom existed in divinely endowed human nature, not in man-made institutions and laws. Remove a thirty-five-year-old tyranny and democracy will grow in its place, because people everywhere want to be free. There was no contingency for psychological demolition. What had been left out of the planning were the Iraqis themselves.

. . . .

Cheney didn’t believe that the postwar planning would matter in the end, anyway. Like the president, Cheney maintained an almost mystical confidence in American military power and an utter incuriosity about the details of its human consequences.

MEANDER
Then, noble soldiers, to entrap these thieves,
That live confounded in disordered troops,
If wealth or riches may prevail with them,
We have our camels laden all with gold
Which you that be but common soldiers
Shall fling in every corner of the field,
And while the base-born Tartars take it up,
You, fighting more for honour than for gold,
Shall massacre those greedy-minded slaves;
And when their scattered army is subdued
And you march on their slaughtered carcasses,
Share equally the gold that bought their lives
And live like gentlemen in Persia.
Strike up the drum, and march courageously!
Fortune herself doth sit upon our crests.

MYCETES
He tells you true, my masters, so he does.
Drums, why sound ye not when Meander speaks?

[Strike drums]

On monarchs, in spirit if not in fact

From William Hazlitt’s “On the Spirit of Monarchy,” published in The Liberal, 1823, collected in The Pleasure of Hating (2005)

We make kings of common men, and are proud of our own handy-work. We take a child from his birth, and we agree, when he grows up to be a man, to heap the highest honours of the state upon him, and to pay the most devoted homage to his will. Is there any thing in the person, “any mark, any likelihood,” to warrant this sovereign awe and dread? No: he may be little better than an idiot, little short of a madman, and yet he is no less qualified for king.

From an an interview the German newspaper Bild am Sonntag conducted with George W. Bush on May 7, 2006, Bush's response to the question, "What was the most wonderful moment in your terms of being President so far?"

The best moment was—you know, I've had a lot of great moments. I don't know, it's hard to characterize the great moments. They've all been busy moments, by the way. I would say the best moment was when I caught a seven-and-a-half pound large mouth bass on my lake. (Laughter.)

From William Hazlitt’s “On the Spirit of Monarchy”

There is a cant among court-sycophants of calling all those who are opposed to them “the rabble,” “fellows,” “miscreants,” &c. . . . Whatever is opposed to power, they think despicable; whatever suffers oppression, they think deserves it. They are ever ready to side with the strong, to insult and trample on the weak.

From the New York Times, December 20, 2005

Mr. Bush strongly hinted that the government was beginning a leak investigation into how the existence of the program was disclosed. It was first revealed in an article published on the New York Times Web site on Thursday night, though some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists had been omitted.

From William Hazlitt’s “On the Spirit of Monarchy”

The worthlessness of the object does not diminish but irritate the propensity to admire. It serves to pamper our imagination equally, and does not provoke our envy. All we want is to aggrandize our own vain-glory at second hand; and the less of real superiority or excellence there is in the person we fix upon as our proxy in this dramatic exhibition, the more easily can we change places with him, and fancy ourselves as good as he.

From Hardball, May 1, 2003, collected at MediaMatters.org

CHRIS MATTHEWS: The president there—look at this guy! We're watching him. He looks like he flew the plane. He only flew it as a passenger, but he's flown—

PAT CADDELL: He looks like a fighter pilot.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: He looks for real. What is it about the commander in chief role, the hat that he does wear, that makes him—I mean, he seems like—he didn't fight in a war, but he looks like he does.

From William Hazlitt’s “On the Spirit of Monarchy”

The more absurd the fiction, the louder was the noise made to hide it—the more mischievous its tendency, the more did it excite all the frenzy of the passions. . . . There was nothing so odious or contemptible but it found a sanctuary in the more odious and contemptible perversity of human nature. The barbarous Gods of antiquity reigned in contempt of their worshippers!

From USA Today, October 1, 2005

[Bush’s] sunny presentation of the situation in Iraq is part of a renewed push by the administration to win support for the war effort from an increasingly reluctant American public.

It conflicts with the news from Iraq and some assessments from top commanders.

From William Hazlitt’s “On the Spirit of Monarchy”

Really, that men born to a throne should employ the brief span of their existence here in doing all the mischief in their power, in levying cruel wars and undermining the liberties of the world, to prove to themselves and others that their pride and passions are of more consequence than the welfare of mankind at large, would seem a little astonishing, but that the fact is so.

From Time, May 1, 2006

Presidential advisers believe that by putting pressure on Iran, Bush may be able to rehabilitate himself on national security, a core strength that has been compromised by a discouraging outlook in Iraq. "In the face of the Iranian menace, the Democrats will lose," said a Republican frequently consulted by the White House. However, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll this April 8-11, found that 54% of respondents did not trust Bush to "make the right decision about whether we should go to war with Iran."

Presidents and dissent

From Candice Millard's River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey:

When [Roosevelt's] train pulled into Chile's capital, Santiago, in late November [1913], he was greeted by a crowd that at first seemed to mirror the friendly masses that had welcomed him to Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. But the moment he leapt from his Pullman to the train-station floor, with the triumphal strains of the American and Chilean national anthems echoing around him, his welcoming party suddenly transformed into an angry protest rally. "The human multitude, showing marked hostility, shouted with all their might vivas!--to Mexico and Colombia, and Down with the Yankee Imperialism!" a journalist for Lima's West Coast Leader excitedly reported.

The Chilean government went to great lengths to shield Roosevelt from the demonstrations, even buying and destroying newspapers that covered anti-Roosevelt rallies, but their guest had no desire to hide from any assult on himself or his country. On the contrary, he took every opportunity to face down his attackers, ready to explain in no uncertain terms why he was right and they were wrong. At a state reception welcoming him to Chile, he vigorously debated Marchial Martinez, a former Chilean ambassador to the United States, about the continuted relevance of the Monroe Doctrine. Days later, in an electrifiying speech, he gave an impassioned, utterly unapologetic defense of the Panama Canal.

And that was when Roosevelt was a private citizen, no longer president. Not quite the same as George Bush's scripted press conferences and talks before hand-picked, pre-screened audiences.

This passage also reminds us that not much has changed: an American president could today go to South America and hear that same chant, and he'd still deserve it.

Back to Admiral Nelson

The main idea threaded through all of Nicolson's Seize the Fire is that Nelson was a pivotal figure in the transition from the 18th-century culture of sensibility, deference, and acceptance of one's position in society to the first flowerings of Romanticism and its celebration of the individual, the unbridled, and the immediate. It's the difference between Aeneas, a warrior within a system and society, and Achilles, a force of pure rage and individual motivation; at the level of personality, it's Bingley versus Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. Nelson, Nicolson argues, though at the head of a disciplined, organized force working as a part of society to protect English commerce, was at the same time a decentralizing bringer of brilliant near-chaos in his tactics, his management of his men, and his own person. The argument is well-supported--one of the best aspects of Seize the Fire is Nicolson's frequent reference to the diaries and letters of individuals great and small--and fairly convincing, though Nelson seems so multi-faceted and complex that he could easily be tricked out in several other, competing theories.

But that's not really what I keep coming back to when I think about Seize the Fire. Rather, it's the press-gangs, and the difference between the officers and the men, between the above- and below-decks life. Nicolson points out several instances which suggest that a change was at the time slowly taking place in how the lower classes were regarded by the upper: not quite imbued by their masters with fully human feelings yet--and certainly not yet worthy of the full, human consideration that fellow officers deserved--but, as the tremendous risks taken by officers and men at Trafalgar to rescue their opposite numbers during an enormous post-battle storm show, their lives weren't entirely, as in past wars, to be thrown away wantonly.

It reminds me of the most interesting moment of ethical thought in The Once and Future King (a book that is full of questions about ethical leadership, friendship, and love), when a young King Arthur decides to bring home the true cost of war to both his men and the opposition. He orders his knights to change tactics: they are not simply to hack at the hapless peasants forced into the front lines, as the knights on the other side will be doing; rather, they are to take the battle directly to the opposing knights, which results, predictably, in much greater casualties among those whom the opposing king considers to be actual people. War, it turns out, is hell. Maybe, just maybe, it shouldn't be waged in such cavalier fashion.

I keep thinking about that, and, in a corollary, about the changes wrought over time in the forces that we, as a society, are willing to allow others to bring to bear on people they have in their power. At the time of Nelson, the press-gang, which would sweep lower-class men off the streets and deposit them on ships bound for the open seas, wherein they would be exposed to mortal danger and sickness, paid poorly and infrequently, and whipped brutally for such offenses as drunkenness and insubordination--was considered an acceptable way to staff His Majesty's fleet. At the time, it was also generally considered acceptable for people to hold certain types of other people as slaves. Women had few rights. And so on--the examples of inhumanity that long ago were considered acceptable are innumerable.

And from a slightly different angle, our attitudes have changed even very recently. More than 50,000 Americans--and at least 1.5 million Vietnamese--died in the Vietnam War before mainstream America began to vigorously argue that we needed to end it. With the Iraq War, we've nearly reached that point as a nation with far, far fewer dead--and all despite the absence of a draft, meaning that the vast majority of Americans are out of any personal danger. Are we, as a nation, getting less cavalier about the lives we're willing to throw away in war? Are we beginning to see the essential humanity--the irreplaceable individuals--behind each KIA?

It's the progressive impulse at work: forever attempt to enlarge the circle of those considered fully eligible to participate in human life, and therefore in the protections we as a society afford, in theory, to all humans--protections from coercion, from danger to life and limb, from oppression. The poor, women, gays, non-WASPs--all these and more are slowly brought into the community of those considered normal, ordinary, acceptable--human. And it's exactly that widening, that growth of inclusion, that conservatism has always fought, and is still fighting, against. Even as recently as the 1970s, Samuel Alito thought the admission of women to Princeton was worth fighting against. It's a principle of inclusion versus a principle of denial, progress against stasis, humanity against inhumanity.

Simultaneously, we aim to tighten the circle of what is acceptable to do to another human, to limit what force can be brought to bear on a person, with the aim of eliminating dehumanizing, brutal treatments that are fundamentally based on arguing that someone is outside that circle of humanity. Practices that would have been considered acceptable mere generations ago--from Jim Crow laws to Japanese-American internment camps to forced sterilization of the developmentally disabled--are considered beyond the pale now.

And it's those two components, the simultaneous widening of one circle and tightening of another, that work together to force actual improvements in human relations in the world. A press-gang is a mind-boggling concept now, slavery even more so. The idea of throwing away lives like Europe did on the Western Front in World War I is sickening. It's important to sometimes remember that, for everything that's clearly going wrong in the world, we have in the past several centuries radically altered our world's conception of who is human and what rights they should be accorded. Tremendous good has been done.

We've obviously still got a long way to go. George Bush can admit, off-hand, that more than 30,000 Iraqis have died because of our war, and most of America responds with a "Ho-hum." Our pundits think the efficacy and acceptability of torture are worthy topics for discussion. African genocide barely gets noticed here.

But that's the idea of progressivism in a nutshell: we don't ever get to give up or decide we're done. Humanity can always be better. It's our job to keep nudging it in the right direction.

For Thanksgiving

The title essay in Edmund Morgan's collection of (mostly) writings from the New York Review of Books, The Genuine Article, is about George Washington. Morgan, like many, has clearly grappled with Washington for a lifetime, yet he still admits to uncertainties about what it was that gave Washington the aura of greatness that nearly all his contemporaries attested to. In a period of eloquent writers and inventive, brilliant thinkers, he was neither. As a general, he lost nearly every battle he commanded. As president, he provoked serious opposition and left as his primary legacy his refusal to seek a third term.

Yet it seems that few who look into his life come away unimpressed. The most perceptive and interesting bit of "The Genuine Article" presents a convincing semi-explanation of Washington's appeal

Washington seems to have been born with a thirst for public respect of a special kind. He wanted nothing more than honor, and he had identified its ingredients so clearly that he knew he would miss getting it if he showed himself wanting it as badly as he did. He wished to be honored by deserving it. If his neighbors placed a high value on graceful ballroom dancing or fine horsemanship, he wanted not simply to have the reputation but to be the most greaceful dancer and the finest horseman. If they honored physical courage, he would give them courage, leading Virginia's militia against the French when he was only twenty-two. In the contest with England, he found the larger cause he needed to gain larger honor and deliberately placed himself in a position to win it by command of the Continental Army. In the end, his own successful quest won him the prestige to honor the cause that had honored him. . . . Washington continually sought to make nature imitate art, to make his life conform to the perfection of character and conduct that was his ideal.

Take a moment and compare that approach to that of our current president. Do you think the 18th-century Karl Rove, powdered wig and all, would have suggested that he step down voluntarily after two terms?

Morgan's whole book is interesting and worth reading, a here-and-there tour through early American history, a type of book I find particularly pleasant, wherein a smart author reads through all sorts of very specialized books and picks out the best parts on our behalf.

Have a good Thanksgiving. Don't forget to thank Tisquantum!