Sorry for the low-tech rerouting, but: 

If you reached this page because of a link to a numbered item that is no longer on my main page, you can get to it by adding "#" and the number -- e.g. "#443," to the end of the URL above.

 Was just puttering through the new GAO reports in search of housing news and ran across a report on the use of about $33 million in public funds for something called the "Iraqi National Congress Support Foundation," which seems to have gotten into a dispute with the State Department during the runup to the current war about how the money was to be used. Coverage of this item seems to have been light, but this "Blogiston Post" weblog suggests it may be the tip of some kind of funny iceberg. Now, the said "Blogiston Post" appears to get no more visits per day than I do, and has astrology sites on its blogroll, so approach with caution. But it has some links to more solid sources that could help guide any reader who feels up to parsing this situation further (which, at least at the moment, I don't). Might want to have a look for what it's worth.

 [UPDATE: Oops, on second glance, I was running too-restrictive Google searches to check the extent of coverage. This isn't really new news.]

5/31/04 6:19 p.m.(Link here.)

 Possibly worth watching: The "2010 Census Redistricting Data Program" is already starting up. Gerrymanderers and watchdogs thereof, start your engines.

5/31/04 2:02 p.m.(Link here.)

 Mrs. Sharon Underwood's Letter --

 People who study the spread of Internet memes should take a look at the sudden prominence this weekend of a letter published four years ago in which a Vermont mother, Sharon Underwood, defends her gay son and her own family's idea of Americanism against religious intolerance and the "moral little thugs" who persecuted her own boy from early childhood just for seeming different. It apparently made the rounds of minor media and the gay press some time ago but only this weekend found its way onto Atrios. Hundreds of his commenters are now cheering for it, and some are saying it should be distributed further in public service ads. His "trackbacks" -- always an underestimate of links to an item -- are up to 11. Even by Atrios' standards, this thing is a hit. I wouldn't be surprised if Ms. Underwood became a celebrity soon in the way Tamim Ansary did for his suddenly ubiquitous comment on Afghanistan in 2001.

So, yes, Ms. Underwood wrote a fine letter, and I agree with it, but there's a further question to ask: why in hell does it take a brilliantly crafted piece of motherhood-small-town-honored-veterans-flinty-maxims-god-and-self-improvement propaganda to explain to the great American (or any other) public that abusing people for being different is wrong? Or is even this question wildly optimistic? As an Atrios commenter wrote, "What are the odds your average gay-bashing Vermonter got past the 2nd paragraph?"

Well, as Orwell said in another context entirely, "To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." But that doesn't answer the question. Why?

[UPDATE: Thx to Buck from the BadAttitudes community for suggesting two other blog-indexing pages, which lead to an interesting discovery: searches on the phrase "Sharon Underwood" at Feedster and Technorati get results dramatically different from those I've given above for Daypop. So it looks like the technology of blog indexing still needs work. What's funny is, I bet Google could make a "blog search" function more comprehensive than any of these, but the company seems to have chosen to leave this field to others. So far.]

[P.S. I captioned this item intending a reference that's probably obscure enough to need explaining: it's to "Mrs. Clara Sullivan's Letter," by Malvina Reynolds and Pete Seeger. A nice song except for what I believe to be the World's Worst Political Folk Song Couplet Ever: 

"It was long hours and substandard pay
And then they took our contract away.

5/30/04 4:55 p.m.(Link here.)

 About Those Shores of Santo Domingo --

Why doesn't Houghton Mifflin want to release Adam Hochschild's book until after the election? What could be troublesome about a history of the British abolitionist movement, primarily concerning events two centuries ago?

Well, Hochschild is the author of King Leopold's Ghost and a co-founder of Mother Jones. And there's an excerpt from the new book in the SF Chron this Sunday that offers a few clues. The excerpt, which covers the Haitian revolution, contains pointed comments about colonial wars since the 1790s. Its tales from the era of Toussaint L'Ouverture are also instructive, as where British commander Thomas Maitland writes to his brother: "We have no business on that Island."

The title given to the excerpt is unfortunate -- "Birth of a Nation." But the article shows none of D.W. Griffith's endorsement for white violence. Hochschild squarely treats slavery as the founding crime for a cycle of continuing brutality in which war crimes have been ordinary practice on most of the many sides.

Hmmm. It seems the book was to have been released in October 2004, and that recently became impossible.

Houghton Mifflin said it would never be able to get him on NPR before the election, to which he replied, what about August? No dice. August, it seems, is reserved for beach reading. The day after the November election was also impossible, as readers' thoughts then turn to Christmas...

5/30/04 12:49 p.m. [slight revision 4:22 p.m.](Link here.)

 And maybe Berkeley isn't safe either. I had missed this East Bay Express article: Gene sent it to me from across the country. It finds strange, bad, heavily anti-semitic currents in Middle East activism politics on the UC-Berkeley campus. J&I mainly haven't seen this stuff directly except in a higher incidence of bigotry in places like posters on bulletin boards. But, actually, we were at a party a week ago where someone made a bad comment. The speaker wasn't either an academic or an actvist, but it's true there is a newly permissive mood for hate talk.

Again, what have you done about it?

5/30/04 12:29 p.m.(Link here.)

 San Francisco isn't safe either. Gallery owner Lori Haigh got death threats and a punch in the face when she exhibited art critical of U.S. military torture in Iraq. Fortunately, she has friends who organized to help her stand her ground. Friends who could draw the attention of the SF Chronicle or you wouldn't be reading this.

 But what have you done today for people who are facing the culture thugs alone?

5/30/04 12:52 a.m.(Link here.)

"Romani Ite Domum..."

 We've just been to see the re-release of "The Life of Brian." 

("All I did was say to my wife, 'That piece of halibut was good enough for Jehovah!' ")

("Jehovah! Jehovah! Jehovah!")

("What's so funny about Biggus Dickus?
He's got a wife, you know.
Her name's Incontinentia.
Incontinentia Buttocks!")

("Listen, you don't have to do this -- you don't have to obey orders!"
"But I like orders...")

5/29/04 5:11 p.m.(Link here.)

 New poll: Employed Americans, who get less time off than, for example, Europeans or Australians, usually give back some of their vacation days each year and keep working at least a little even when officially "on vacation." The only way to explain this is intense fear of falling. And according to the poll, it's getting worse.

5/29/04 9:54 a.m.(Link here.)

 Oh dear: Under HUD orders, San Francisco now has a "centralized information technology solution" for inventorying and classifying the homeless.

5/28/04 12:39 p.m.(Link here.)
 

Bad, bad stuff in the SF Chron's two-part series on Sudan. In the second installment today, the only figure seen improving much of anything is Dr. Jan Desmet of Doctors Without Borders.

Crooked Timber has more sites on Sudan via Lance Knobel.

And a while ago I posted some big-picture links elsewhere on Rwanda, Sudan, oil, and news coverage.

I think the world's responsible democracies should intervene in Sudan but I don't know whether or how the current U.S. administration can be trusted to help. I suppose better us than nobody, but the rest of the democracies will be to blame for the consequences if they allow the current U.S. apparatus to intervene alone or as the dominant power in a coalition. Without adult supervision the likes of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Cambone and Graner will, as usual, commit fresh atrocities, grab the natural resources, and place trust in the worst elements of the opposition group brought to power by the intervention. And don't give me that 1946-successful-reconstruction-through-occupation line. The past sometimes is a foreign country after all. We did things differently there. Maybe next year the new administration will begin to get this kind of thing right but I'll worry even then. A ship the size of the United States travels miles and miles and miles before it can be turned at all.

5/28/04 12:19 p.m.(Link here.)
 
 

Mark Morford loses his temper at disposable cleaning products.

Look at the shiny plastic tub of refills you have to buy every month just to keep the goddamn thing stocked before the handle snaps in half and you have to buy a whole new one because it's actually worth about seven cents and is made by disposable factory workers in Malaysia who die of petroleum-related cancer even faster than BushCo can decimate the Clean Air Act. Neat!

 Out of the tobacco wars, a label that unfortunately is worth remembering for use elsewhere: the "hostile archive."

5/27/04 12:55 p.m.(Link here.)

 John Leonard has woken up and written a stemwinder of a valentine to E.L. Doctorow in the New York Review of Books.

Doctorow recently had the honor to be booed at a Hofstra University graduation speech by students who had learned nothing. The university then showed unbelievable cowardice in apologizing, not to Doctorow, but to the students who disrupted his speech.

So it's encouraging, by contrast, to see this tribute from one of the real American intellectuals to another, at this time, in this way. We have a civilized culture in this country and it is alive and well and it can outsing goons who only know how to shout.

5/26/04 3:07 p.m.(Link here.)

Further evidence here of my theory about the tendency toward group weblogging.

5/26/04 2:01 p.m.(Link here.)

 "Fluff, Don't Stuff" -- 

MBC takes on plausible deniability and the Happy Meal

5/25/04 2:51 p.m.(Link here.)

 Bryant Kong of the Stuffed Penguin label sings the poetry of Donald Rumsfeld on a new CD. Per the SF Chronicle:

"I believe Bush and Rumsfeld are trying to sell a war that can't be sold, " says Kong, who describes himself as a political independent.

"A lot of the poems have to do with information and control of information. They're running the war like a public relations campaign, and then they run into trouble when the facts don't match the story that they're trying to sell."

Tiburonia granrojo, featured once before in this space, gets a mention in a phenomenal New Yorker article about giant squid and the men who pursue them. Details over at Horizon.

5/25/04 11:20 a.m.(Link here.)

 Yesterday's Garchik column in the SF Chron: "...The conversation at dinner was brisk and political (is there any conversation these days that's not?)..." And someone in a Thai restaurant said, "I don't know whether to shoot myself or go bowling.'' 

5/24/04 10:55 a.m.(Link here.)

 Jerry Doolittle has been reading 1984. He's picked out a good quote, all right.

Vaguely related to which: we did watch the headlines on hotel TVs these last few days but it took coming home and reading the written news and commentaries to be gutkicked by the evil of it all.

5/24/04 10:54 a.m.(Link here.)

 Henry, who some here may know from Orwell fandom, thinks I was too kind in suggesting Christopher Hitchens could still resume his old status as an independent journalist. I got back from vacation last night and found Henry had written as follows:

Regarding Hitchens...

Ted Rall has a powerful new piece 'Fire the War Pimps: Zero Tolerance for Iraq War Pundits' available on Common Dreams (and no doubt elsewhere) in which he is rather less accommodating (and less charitable) towards CH than you are. We find, for example

> Every time someone was raped at Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Base
> or Gitmo, Tom Friedman and Christopher Hitchens and Bill O'Reilly
> and David Brooks were de facto accomplices.

and

> They should have known better--lots of us did. Or they did know
> better and lied about it. Whether their integrity or their intelligence
> was compromised, they should never again be taken seriously.

Me, I tend to like the old Wobblies slogan: 'We never forget.'

As for the Rall piece, there would be a number of objections to raise in a point-by-point analysis but I think the main problem is the way he suggests it's up to the public to fire news commentators. Like it or not, those folks are privately employed journalists, not elected officials. Nobody can or should shut them up in a democratic society, and the notion of political lobbying to quiet a journalist is just basically disturbing. It's legitimate to answer speech with more speech, possibly even by creating new forums as the Air America folks have done -- but political lobbying to get someone fired is something else again.

Henry, you're entirely welcome to send a reply.

5/18/04 5:01 p.m.(Link here.)

 When Will Hitchens Turn Around?

Last night the comment thread to this Atrios item ("Hitchens Flashback") took an interesting turn. Amid the usual cheerleading, jeering, flaming, etc., there were a few of us who just plain presumed that Christopher Hitchens would soon be waking up. I do believe this. Some time in the next weeks he'll throw over his courtier gig and resume work as an independent journalist. He truly does believe in human rights and secular democratic pluralism, and he must have noticed by now that his Bush Admin. friends aren't taking these goals seriously enough in Iraq, Afghanistan, or for that matter the USA. (Yes, the Bush Admin. isn't the only human rights offender or the worst, but as Dubya's mama shoulda told him, I don't care if everyone else is doing it; we're not everyone else.) If Hitch wants to be the next Orwell he has a lesson to learn: that if you give your love to principles rather than leaders or parties, you'll end up reproaching and offending all the sides in any conflict, including your own. Yes, in a war one does choose sides. But once having chosen, it's lazy to treat your own side as infallible.  (Also via Atrios, Neal Pollack rips Hitchens on similar grounds via "his butler". Unfair but funny.)

Hitchens is one of the great loyal oppositionists and it will be grand to have him back. But the question is, when? One lady said June. I doubt we can be that specific. But, what the hell, I'll take a wild guess: I say the Hitch will have his bow of burning gold back by Orwell's 101st birthday, June 25. Let's see if I'm right.

 [UPDATE: Well, he's not his old free-swinging self yet, but his latest defenses of the Bush brass sound less persuasive -- or less persuaded -- than usual. He's running out of "yah boos." As Ted of Crooked Timber notes with indignation, he's dragging in other issues for misdirection when he should face the torture issue without rhetorical crutches. Still, when he does talk about the torture he's too honest, and too intelligent, to defend the acts involved. The next couple months of his output will be interesting. Best source for them is Peter Kilander's fan site, which I for one will be watching.]

5/17/04 4:46 p.m.(Link here.)

 I don't like the "What Would Orwell Have Thought?" game because we can't know. But anyway this month's news wouldn't have surprised him. In 1927 he resigned in disgust from a well-paid job as a colonial policeman.

5/17/04 3:33 p.m.(Link here.)

 Further proof of what looks like a general tendency toward group weblogs: archy has joined a new weblog, "From the Trenches," that talks news and politics from "a working-class perspective," thus far without sentimentality or political boilerplate. His inaugural post answers the question, "If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" with some better questions, including, "doesn’t high school suggest that heaven favors jerks?"

5/16/04 8:54 p.m.(Link here.)

 "The Simpsons" is the best show on TV. I can't do justice to tonight's episode but this is some of it: the family's troubles begin with Bart mooning the flag by mistake. (Southern gent: "How dare he! That's the flag my grandaddy rebelled against!") Things worsen badly on a right-wing talk show when the host asks, "Why do you hate us?" and Marge snaps, "Well, if 'us' is loud-mouthed talk show hosts, which everybody in this country seems to be, why, yes I do hate America." Not only the Simpson family but the town of Springfield become such butts of hate spam that Springfield defensively changes its name to Libertyville and colors everything red, white and blue, including (imprudently) traffic lights. When Lisa dares to recite the First Amendment in church, it's time for arrest, imprisonment, attempted re-education, escape via family musicale in "Sound of Music" style, a brief interlude in exile (France, where else?), and finally emigration. They sail into New York Harbor on the steamer past the Statue of Liberty, hoping like any other family of refugee immigrants to start a new life in the land of freedom.

Yes, I know, I know, it exaggerates.

That's why they call it satire, all right?

5/16/04 4:55 p.m.(Link here.)

This is unbelievably awful, and de facto segregation is what makes it possible.

5/16/04 1:43 p.m.(Link here.)

 Here's a column claiming linguistic evidence shows segregation between black and white Americans is worse than 100 years ago.

5/15/04 7:49 p.m.(Link here.)

 All these years we've never made an obvious joke about the pollution problems of the South Bay computer industry plus the name of the paper that covers them best. J. now suggests calling it the San Jose Mercury News and Heavy Metals Gazette.

5/15/04 1:39 p.m.(Link here.)

 Sad news on the state of the culture from Leah Garchik at the SF Chron. Business is down 25% in the last three years at the lefty Modern Times bookstore. Owner Michael Rosenthal reports: 

All independent bookstores have suffered because of chains and Amazon.com, but there's a more specific reason. "The kind of information that people would travel to Modern Times from all over the Bay Area to find is now all over the best-seller lists,'' he e-mails. What "used to be available only from gadflies like Chomsky or Cockburn is now coming out from Republican insiders like Richard Clarke. For the first time in our history, our best-selling titles are available at Costco.''

Sales of books on such subjects as health care, AIDS, genetic engineering and feminism have "dried up in the past year; it is as though people are at such an emotional pitch that they have no room for anything else. Cultural theory? Forget it.''

5/14/04 9:54 p.m.(Link here.)
 
 

Energy Shortage Solved:

Hook this generator to Instapundit.

--

So I saw a headline yesterday: "Either Nabokov sparkles or season soon goes dark." Took it for nice vigorous theater criticism. Turned out it was hockey. Sportswriters still have the most fun in journalism.

5/14/04 5:20 p.m.(Link here.)

 OK, here's an item without so much Orwell in it. Well, it's got some Orwell in it. All right, rather a lot, really...

It's about his friend Cyril Connolly, who really was like Brother Mycroft to Orwell's Sherlock Holmes. Round, lazy, sedentary, not given to extremes, yet just as brilliant, and with a family resemblance deep down.

This is from Michael Shelden's Friends of Promise, from an interview Connolly gave to the *New Yorker* during a visit to the U.S. in 1946:

"...'I have a tendency to brood,' he said, lighting a Turkish cigarette. 'I try to escape this horrible business of writing by daydreaming and dozing in the bathtub for hours at a time. Sometimes, I get one adjective from an afternoon in the tub. I go through cycles of distraction. I have a vast store of general knowledge, acquired through such escapist enthusiasms as bridge, chess, old furniture, china, rare books, antiques and travelling ... Right now, I am on fish. Last summer, in Corsica, I concluded that fish are most misunderstood. People only think about eating them. I spent the summer staring at them through goggles, in the Mediterranean. They do everything just right -- play and eat and roam about in pairs and show a great capacity for happiness. This autumn I spent reading about all the fish I'd met in the summer.'..."

5/14/04 1:53 p.m.(Link here.)

 [UPDATE: I've added some clarifying things in brackets.]

 Been looking at this Horowitz "Front Page Magazine" site and discovering just how heavily the crew there are invested in claiming the Orwell brand name for their own school of [right-wing] political invective. A Google search within the "Front Page" website produces over 13,000 results for the plain word "Orwell." That suggests obsession, manipulative self-linking, or both.

Most of these Orwell mentions are ordinary symbolic uses of 1984, but some of the columnists -- notably Stephen Schwartz -- do manage to discuss three or four of Orwell's nine books instead of the usual big two, though without spending much time on Orwell's individualist dislike of success-worship, his egalitarianism, or his disgust at "half-gangster, half-gramophone" political ranting. It's especially strange to see Homage to Catalonia, which Orwell wrote during his most alarmingly leftist period, being very, very selectively invoked by zeal-of-the-convert types [ex-leftists, I mean] who meanwhile throw contempt on egalitarian ideas. These folks also manage to quote selectively from some of Orwell's wartime essays without violating their own party line. It is, after all, the "Front Page" crowd's redeeming feature that they see themselves as antifascist.

The more I look, the more I see what a refreshing exception Jennifer Verner's article really was to the usual selective quotation of Orwell in that place. She was apparently too honest a scholar to avoid remembering how Orwell opposed both fascists and Stalinists on behalf of a better socialism. This uncomfortable fact does crop up elsewhere on "Front Page" a few times, but standard practice there is to accuse all socialists, democratic or otherwise, of being ipso facto totalitarians. For example, a more established columnist on the same site writes of a liberal figure, "...He honestly believes that there is such a thing as democratic socialism. He has not yet figured out that the term itself is an oxymoron...." Presumably some upper manager there will by now have given poor Ms. Verner a talking-to about her left-wing deviationism. But it was nice to see "Front Page" publish that little admission against interest.

Well, the world of literature is too big a place to be dented by a few monomaniacs. Besides which, the more they recommend Orwell, the more they'll get people to actually go and read the fellow's work, and when read in context it speaks for itself.

[P.S. I've been looking over some more of Stephen Schwartz and to be fair, that man is deeply familiar with the dramas of the European '30s and '40s, and in certain moods he sounds like some kind of socialist himself. I simply don't understand how he can advocate such a salad of leftist and hard-right ideas all at once. It's as though different layers of his personality drift across each other without meeting. Part of him is still some kind of overdramatically radical leftist; part of him cheers for both the American establishment and G.W. Bush. Maybe it's one of these cases of extremes meeting. Maybe he just craves the excitement of A Cause. I don't know.]

5/14/04 10:14 a.m.(Link here.)

 Woman reunited with other half of her own skull, no thanks to Medicaid bureaucrats.

5/13/04 2:47 p.m.(Link here.)

 Democratic Congressman Henry Waxman, ranking Democratic member of the House Committee on Government Reform, has already been praised for his website with 237 "misleading statements" from the Bush admin. on Iraq. He also has a nice page up on the Republican politicization of science. In fact the Democratic page of the Government Reform committee may in general be worth watching. The members would appear to be losing patience with the current attempts of the Republicans to convert the national government into an extension of their own party apparatus. That backbone business must be why the Republican web page of the same House committee alludes to the existence of Democrats only through a tiny link labeled "Minority Office" in the far upper right corner.

[UPDATE: I should have credited BadAttitudes for Waxman's Iraq-statements page.]

5/13/04 1:21 p.m.(Link here.)

 Strange de Joel announces:
 
 

I'm a student agitator: I'm studying to be a washing machine part.

5/12/04 10:25 p.m.(Linkhere.)

 I may eventually stop talking about George Orwell and his readers, but not yet, Lord, not yet.

Graeme Burk is one of the gentle kind of Orwell fans who cares about the writing at least as much as the politics. This week he's talking about comic strips, and the author of "The Art of Donald McGill" is quietly looking over Graeme's shoulder with a hoarse chuckle that I think I could recognize although no known recording of the voice exists today.

5/12/04 7:20 p.m.(Link here.)

 There's something grimly reassuring in the idea that photos can still change people's minds. Not too long ago there was a lot of cultural-criticism talk about media images of suffering not causing viewers to respond constructively. See e.g. this Guardian article, published two years ago. I haven't read it through, and from what I saw at quick glance there's a lot that continues relevant. But some photos do change not just individual minds but whole political mindsets.

5/12/04 10:19 a.m.(Link here.)

 "Buck Is Stopped Near White House, Rerouted to Undisclosed Location... Buck being held for questioning, Rumsefeld denies reports of abuse..."

SF Chron cartoonist Don Asmussen outdoes himself.

5/11/04 6:06 p.m.(Link here.)

 Low Crab Diet

I'm too crabby, so here's a word from Joel:

--
 
 

A sign at a lunch counter in the Berkeley student union reads: 

Reduce Your Crabs Here

[UPDATE: Turns out others are ahead of us. Google has 39 results for "low crab diet," of which only a few are unwitting. Oh well.]

--
 
 

At the Berkeley library book sale, I found a Rand-McNally World Atlas, 1970 edition, subtitled "Imperial Edition". The first 20 pages are all about space exploration. In those days, it seemed we could win everything: hearts, minds, planets, and stars.

 A later chapter covered the cultural diversity of humanity, cleverly dividing us up into categories with names like "Caucasoids", "Mongoloids", and "Negroids". The main distinguishing feature of Caucasoids is "wavy hair". People who think about the world in these terms may not be very good at hearts and minds.

5/11/04 3:11 p.m.(Link here.)

 Fun with statistics: MBC has a roundup of questions about the official job growth statistics.

5/11/04 12:59 p.m.(Link here.)

 As long as I'm handing out awards, here's one for People Unclear on the Concept, to LA Times reporter Bob Drogin, for this:

The report also provides new details about the now-notorious Abu Ghraib prison, the focus of the prisoner abuse scandal.

Drogin's article otherwise says things that do unfortunately need saying. Here it is. Do not read while eating.

5/11/04 12:00 p.m.(Link here.)

 There's a discussion going at the Horizon blog that began with the Godot thing I said on Sunday morning. I've added a few thoughts over there: may as well not repeat them here.

5/10/04 3:22 p.m.(Link here.)

 The Past Is Not A Foreign Country:

 They're reopening the Emmett Till investigation.

5/10/04 2:35 p.m.(Link here.)

 Immigrant rights and public health groups are urgently trying to raise public opposition to a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, HR 3722, cynically titled the "Undocumented Alien Emergency Medical Assistance Amendments of 2004." The bill would provide a billion dollars to pay hospitals for care of undocumented immigrants, but at a ghastly moral price: it would force hospitals that accept federal money for the care of an "undocumented alien" patient under the new Medicare bill to demand information about the patient's citizenship status. For "undocumented aliens" (no word on how hospitals are to identify this group in the first place) the bill would tell hospitals to obtain further personal information plus fingerprints or other "identifiers," and would then expect them to denounce their own patients to the immigration authorities. Per the advocacy groups' analyses, the bill would cause people who lack proper papers to avoid medical care and would put doctors under pressure to violate basic requirements of medical ethics.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund has an analysis here. The analysis says additionally:

Under Rohrabacher’s proposal, a hospital would no longer be required to provide care to undocumented immigrants if they could be transported to their country of origin without causing material deterioration of their condition. This applies to women who are in active labor.

If you think about the choice between deportation and appendicitis, this legislation can be seen as drawing civilian public employees into extracting information under torture and possibly the threat of death.

I fear my reaction may be exaggerated -- my language is, anyway, stronger than MALDEF's or that of the American Public Health Association -- but one does tend to get moral vertigo around this kind of bland official audacity because it's very good at making the unspeakable seem normal.

5/9/04 11:09 p.m.(Link here.)

 Was poking through Waiting for Godot this afternoon, avoiding a deadline and looking for something to quote at the current world news. Discovered, as usual, that really good writers are mainly unquotable. Any text that's part of a well-written whole is hard to take out of its original context. It may be applicable elsewhere, but it'll be hard to cut in a way that makes sense outside the original, because every word in the original will depend on every other word.

At the risk of Bulwer/octopody, I'll put it this way: yanking a quote out of a well-constructed whole is like lifting a sirloin out of a well-constructed cow. You can't just lift. The tissues are all connected, so any cut you make is arbitrary, and the sum of the parts won't add up to the whole. It won't, for example, give milk. (Yes, I'd like to thank the Bulwer/Octopus judges for this wonderful award, and of course my long-suffering family, and all the little sensibilities I've crushed along my way to greatness...)

So anyway, I guess I'll just quote the whole damn play.

Here, lookit, folks: MB sez go read Waiting for Godot.

5/9/04 2:10 p.m.(Link here.)

 There should be a Bulwer-Lytton / Fascist Octopus Award for Twisted Editorial Metaphor. Some such recognition is due to Professor Jan Knippers Black, who wrote the following in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

Can it be that the dogs of war who for the past year have seen the United Nations as a fire hydrant see it now as a fire extinguisher?

[UPDATE: Quoted by permission from the proprietor of archy:

Though I like the "dogs of war" metaphor, it still pales by my all time favorite. Jay Hammond, governor of Alaska in the 70s and one of that now extinct breed a moderate/liberal Republican, actually said in one of his state of the state speeches: "the ship of state is breaking new ground." As it turned out, he was right, we were stuck on the rocks and taking on water, but that's not what he meant at the time.

5/9/04 1:49 a.m.(Link here.)

 Ronald Reagan was right: trees do cause pollution. Sort of.

5/8/04 3:08 p.m.(Link here.)

 Arthur Koestler understood a lot about prisons and the slippery slope into torture through "moderate discomfort" and "physical pressure."

Koestler's Darkness at Noon is fiction, just barely. The writer himself had been imprisoned by Hitler and Franco and personally knew victims of the 1930s Soviet purges. Suffering didn't ennoble him either. He was reportedly a rapist and, in several respects, a crank. But, well, people who live to tell hair-raising tales often are warped by their experiences. That doesn't necessarily call their testimony into question. And from something Alan H. just said at the Horizon blog, you can even wonder if, for better or worse, "authoritarian personality" is what carried Koestler through his ordeals.

In Darkness the year is 1937 or '38 -- toward the end of the Moscow show trials. (A sense of the show trials' abjectly false confessions is well given, though in an unfair context, here.)  The place is a Soviet prison, possibly the dreaded Lubyanka.

Near the start of Chapter 2, "The Second Hearing," two interrogators are drinking after work and discussing their approach to the Old Bolshevik protagonist, Rubashov. New-school Comrade Gletkin -- who is himself honored for having resisted wartime torture -- argues for a heavier hand than old-school Comrade Ivanov would prefer.

"When Rubashov capitulates," said Ivanov, "it won't be out of cowardice, but by logic. It is no use trying the hard method with him. He is made out of a certain material which becomes the tougher the more you hammer on it."

"That is just talk," said Gletkin. "Human beings able to resist any amount of physical pressure do not exist. I have never seen one. Experience shows me that the resistance of the human nerve system is limited by Nature."

"I wouldn't like to fall into your hands," said Ivanov smilingly, but with a trace of uneasiness. "Anyhow, you are a living refutation of your own theory."

....

He looked at Ivanov with his expressionless eyes. 'That's only talk, too," he said. "I did not give in because I fainted. If I had stayed conscious another minute, I should have spoken. It is a question of constitution."

...

"Since when have you had this notable constitution theory? After all, during the first years these methods did not exist. At that time we were still full of illusions. Abolition of punishment and of retaliation for crime; sanatoriums with flower gardens for the a-social elements. It's all humbug."

"I don't believe it is," said Gletkin. "You are a cynic. In a hundred years we will have all that. But first we have to get through. The quicker, the better. The only illusion was, to believe the time had already come. When I first was put here, I was also under that illusion. Most of us were -- in fact, the entire apparatus up to the top. We wanted to start at once with the flower gardens. That was a mistake. In a hundred years we will be able to appeal to the criminal's reason and social instincts. To-day we have still to work on his physical constitution, and crush him, physically and mentally, if necessary."

Ivanov wondered whether Gletkin was drunk. But he saw by his quiet expressionless eyes that he was not. Ivanov smiled at him rather vaguely. "In a word, I am the cynic and you are the moralist."

Gletkin said nothing. He sat stiffly on his chair in his starched uniform; his revolver-belt smelled of fresh leather.

"Several years ago," said Gletkin after a while, "a little peasant was brought to me to be cross-examined. It was in the provinces, at the time when we still believed in the flower-garden theory, as you call it. Cross-examinations were conducted in a very gentlemanly way...

...When, instead of beating him, I began to reason with him, to talk to him as an equal and call him 'citizen,' he took me for a half-wit...

...I held strictly to the regulations; it never even occurred to me that there were other methods...."

"The third hearing of my man took place at two o'clock at night; I had previously worked for eighteen hours on end. He had been woken up; he was drunk with sleep and frightened; he betrayed himself. From that time I cross-examined my people chiefly at night...  Once a woman complained that she had been kept standing outside my room the whole night, awaiting her turn. Her legs were shaking and she was completely tired out; in the middle of the hearing she fell asleep. I woke her up; she went on talking, in a sleepy mumbling voice, without fully realizing what she was saying, and fell asleep again. I woke her once more, and she admitted everything and signed the statement without reading it, in order that I should let her sleep...[he tells how the confession denounced her husband].

...That the wife had been kept waiting on her feet the whole night was due to the carelessness of my sergeant; from then onwards I encouraged carelessness of that kind; stubborn cases had to stand upright on one spot for as long as forty-eight hours. After that the wax had melted out of their ears, and one could talk to them..."

...

"My colleagues had similar experiences. It was the only possible way to obtain results. The regulations were observed; not a prisoner was actually touched. But it happened that they had to witness -- so to speak accidentally -- the execution of their fellow prisoners. The effect of such scenes is partly mental, partly physical. Another example: there are showers and baths for reasons of hygiene. That in winter the heating and hot-water pipes did not always function, was due to technical difficulties; and the duration of the baths depended on the attendants. Sometimes, again, the heating and hot-water apparatus functioned all too well; that equally depended on the attendants. They were all old comrades; it was not necessary to give them detailed instructions; they understood what was at stake."

"That'll about do," said Ivanov.

5/7/04 9:08 p.m.(Link here.)

 We saw a parked SUV tonight with the California license plate "8 Bailey." Looks like the driver reads Jonathan Lethem and the state plate censors don't.

5/7/04 4:21 p.m.(Link here.)

 MBC's local Wal-Mart has a hiring freeze on. As he notes, that's an interesting datum about the nature of the alleged economic recovery.

5/6/04 4:25 p.m.(Link here.)

 Oh dear. Antiwar demonstrators outside [Hilary] Clinton's and Schumer's senatorial district offices in New York. I'm against the war too, but between now and November can't they save their disagreement for folks they actually disagree with more?

If the antiwar movement throws its energy into protesting the Democratic convention in Boston and if the convention security operation is as unfair and vicious as the involvement of John Timoney leads one to fear, that could lead to the kind of hell that helps nobody but Republicans.

Having endured the "saturation policing" of the demonstrations as a legal observer during the Los Angeles 2000 Democratic Convention, and having voted for Nader that year (though now I'm for Kerry), I would like to offer a strong word of advice for anyone thinking of protesting during the conventions: hold your protest at home. The conventions are TV events anyway; the convention halls will be basically sound stages. Demonstrating at the physical site of a convention will not get the national media to treat your position fairly. All it will do is create an excuse for overzealous security reactions that in turn will create images of disorder that make demonstrators look bad. And you might get hurt. Not just physically. Emotional injury is a real kind of harm and you are not immune to it. Nobody is.

On the other hand, if you demonstrate in your home town, you'll create a fresh news story of your own in the local media; you'll get the attention of your neighbors by speaking out where they can see you in person; you'll disprove the myth that only urban radicals assemble to petition for redress; and, most practically, you will be a long way away from the dignitaries, so nobody official will have an excuse to hurt you or suspend your free speech rights in the name of protecting the dignitaries. It will just be you and a few friends, on your own median strip or town common, holding a few signs up for your own neighbors to see. If you don't think that gets you enough national attention, take pictures of your hometown demonstration and make them available to the activist website of your choice. Just don't go to Boston or New York to join the circus. Joining the circus will not help anything politically. What will help is standing up for your beliefs, lawfully and with dignity, in your own home town.

Another point: police and fire unions are planning to protest Republican policies during the convention in New York City. The last thing other protesters should do there is create an occasion for conflict with police officers who basically agree with them about the Republicans.

Maybe this is my own shell-shock from 2000 talking, but I've read and thought a lot about protest in the last four years and this is how I feel about it.

5/6/04 10:51 a.m.(Link here.)

 More from Abu Ghraib -- this is no surprise either. Guards who behave like that to prisoners will mistreat each other too. In fact, you have to wonder which happened first.

5/5/04 10:48 p.m.(Link here.)

 Not fascinated by Watergate? Go talk to the Alans about Eminem or Kundera or something.

5/5/04 10:44 p.m.(Link here.)

 Mary McCarthy wrote this in The Mask of State: Watergate Portraits, on John Ehrlichman's appearance before the Senate's investigating commitee in July 1973:
 

...The difference between him and Mitchell came down to the difference between the randy insolence of power and a surly nihilism proceeding from defeat. Mitchell is finished, a gloomy discard, but unless Ehrlichman's energetic confidence was simulated, he has no doubts about his future. He and Haldeman are the future, his outthrust jaw proclaimed; Watergate was a minor interruption. He is a Christian Scientist, which should not be overlooked in estimating his sense of superiority to mere matter in the form of evidence. But he is also a political animal and must estimate that Nixon's decision to tough it out with the Senate Committee and the Special Prosecutor is a winning decision. If the court blocks him and the Congress continues its petty harassment, he can govern by plebiscite, going straight to the nation for a vote of confidence in the Presidency -- yes or no. One could almost see the thought shaped in Ehrlichman's broad skull. Hence his insistence on the President's constitutional power to suspend the Constitution (for that is what his arguments amounted to), which sounded bizarre, nearly crazy, in the setting of the Caucus Room. One watched Senator Ervin follow the elated, voluble reasoning, somber eyes forward, palm to cheek, almost motionless, like a Statue of Desponding Liberty.

Ehrlichman's arrogant sureness of himself, the grandiose doctrine he was enunciating of presidential powers, half-cracked or not, seemed portentous as the week went on. When all the senators rose and raised their right hands to vote Aye on sending the case of the White House subpoenas to the courts to compel Nixon to honor them, the room was completely silent except for the whizzing of the cameras. We were respecting what all felt to be an historic moment -- the kind that used to be painted and hung, in reproduction, in schoolrooms: Washington Crossing the Delaware. It looked as though a collision course had been set, and everyone remembered Ehrlichman's raised right hand as he took the oath on Tuesday with a gesture one newspaper had compared to a fascist salute.

 He lost no opportunity to patronize, bully, and affront the senators, as well as Majority Counsel Dash. The performance seemed carefully deliberated, like his opening statement, the 'high-school civics lesson' which he had evidently rehearsed before a mirror, while shaving perhaps. Yet it did not look, at least to me, as if he were aiming -- over the heads of the Committee and the hostile crowd -- at an unseen TV audience. Nixon's devoted adherents are not watching the hearings anyway, and as a media-conscious man, Ehrlichman must be aware of the national popularity of the show and of Senator Sam [Ervin] as a folk hero. But his behavior with the courteous old legislator was so contumacious that the hearing-room grew turbulent; there was a general incensed feeling that the senators should not take this lying down. I slipped into one of the reveries of the impotent and imagined the Chairman signaling to the sergeants-at-arms: 'Arrest that man.' The sneering devil, like Iago (I daydreamed), would be hustled out, preferably in chains, down to the old prison below the House of Representatives where persons in contempt of Congress used to be held. That was what he deserved, to be kicked back several eras into the antique history of the Republic. Many agreed with the thought....

5/5/04 5:09 p.m.(Link here.)

 More from The Nation about the fragility of the public's archives.

5/4/04 6:02 p.m.(Link here.)

 Fellow Orwell fans Alan Allport and Alan Hogue have a new weblog, Horizon, named as "an affectionate and respectful nod" to Cyril Connolly's old literary magazine. Opening topics include Waugh, British prime ministers and the history of American humor.

 The original Horizon appeared from 1939 through 1949, publishing work by Connolly himself, George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, and other leading intellectuals of WWII-era Britain. Orwell's second wife, Sonia Brownell, was an editor there, and Anthony Powell satirized the magazine office in his Dance to the Music of Time. For further background, see Michael Shelden's Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon and Hilary Spurling's The Girl From the Fiction Department.

 The Alans modestly say they're not out to rival Connolly, but they've already made a good start on an interesting conversation. Go check it out.

5/4/04 3:35 p.m.(Link here.)

This is bad: information for and about women is disappearing from federal websites, and some federal publications useful to women have been delayed without explanation.

5/3/04 1:54 p.m.(Link here.)

 No, this space is not going to become the All Orwell All The Time Channel, but today is World Press Freedom Day, and a group of Australian journalists, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, are presenting their second annual Orwell Awards to a few favorite obscurantists. There seem to be a lot of "Orwell Awards" around the world with all kinds of different ideas behind them, but this one sounds like fun. Don't miss the changing series of well-selected Orwell quotes in the site's left margins and the stylish T-shirts for sale, with donated art by Ralph Steadman, to benefit the International Federation of Journalists' Safety Fund.

5/3/04 11:32 a.m.(Link here.)

 Over the weekend Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly gave us diary excerpts about a day in the life at Abu Ghraib. His point was about the role of a man named Stefanowicz, but something else sounded familiar in this:

There were six of us that had to come in early and conduct long interrogations....I got to take the rest of the day off after our long booth time. This gave us a nice evening after dinner to head to the roof and play a round of golf. Scott Norman, Jeff Mouton, Steve Hattabaugh, Steve Stefanowicz, and I all took turns trying to hit balls over the back wall and onto the highway....

One of my most vivid memories of South America is that of a man with a golf club -- a five-iron, if memory serves -- driving golf balls off a penthouse terrace in Cali, Colombia. He was a tall Britisher, and had what the British call 'a stylish pot' instead of a waistline. Beside him on a small patio table was a long gin-and-tonic, which he refilled from time to time at the nearby bar.

He had a good swing, and each of his shots carried low and long out over the city. Where they fell, neither he nor I nor anyone else on the terrace that day had the vaguest idea. The penthouse, however, was in a residential section on the edge of the Rio Cali, which runs through the middle of town. Somewhere below us, in the narrow streets that are lined by the white adobe blockhouses of the urban peasantry, a strange hail was rattling on the roofs -- golf balls, 'old practice duds,' so the Britisher told me, that were 'hardly worth driving away.'

In the weeks that followed, when I became more aware of the attitude a good many Colombians have towards that nation's Anglo-Saxon population, I was glad nobody had traced the source of those well-hit mashies. Colombians, along with their Venezuelan neighbors, may well be the most violent people on the continent, and a mixture of insult and injury does not rank high as a national dish.

--

It is doubtful that the same man would drive golf balls off a rooftop apartment in the middle of London. But is not [sic] really surprising to see it done in South America. There, where the distance between the rich and the poor is so very great, and where Anglo-Saxons are automatically among the elite, the concept of noblesse oblige is subject to odd interpretations.

The attitude, however, does not go unnoticed; the natives consider it bad form indeed for a foreigner to stand on a rooftop and drive golf balls into their midst. Perhaps they lack sporting blood, or maybe a sense of humor, but the fact is that they resent it, and it is easy to see why they might go to the polls at the next opportunity and vote for the man who promises to rid the nation of 'arrogant gringo imperialists.'

Whether the candidate in question is a fool, a thief, a Communist, or even all three does not matter much when emotions run high -- and few elections south of the Rio Grande are won on the basis of anything but blatant appeals to popular emotion....

It is an odd feeling to return from a year in South America and read a book by some expense-account politician who toured the continent in six weeks and spoke only with presidents, cabinet ministers, and other 'leading figures' like himself. The problems and the issues suddenly become quite clear -- as they never were when you were right there in the midst of them.

Now, looking back on that man with the golf club, it is easy to see him as a fool and a beast. But I recall quite well how normal it seemed at the time, and how surprised I would have been if any of the dozen people on the terrace had jumped up to protest.

 Jennifer Verner, a new contributor to David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine, has also reviewed the Scott Lucas book this week. She says a lot of the things you'd expect to find in such a place, but also -- refreshing surprise -- goes out of her way to rebut the claim that Orwell wasn't a "real" socialist. She writes, quite accurately, "Orwell devoted his life’s work to democratic socialism as he understood it and was shot in the throat defending Republican Spain from Franco." It's nice to see those honorable details recalled, especially in front of an audience whose more traditional conservatives may view them as embarrassing. So thank you, Ms. Verner. 

5/2/04 12:30 p.m.(Link here.)

 Here's yet another review (via A&L Daily) criticizing Scott Lucas for this book of his that criticizes George Orwell on the way to criticizing the current rhetorical use of Orwell by people like Christopher Hitchens who support the Iraq war while Mr. Lucas opposes the said war. This whole daisy-chain of put-downs has been debated furiously at Harry's Place and in various other spots findable through the discussion at Harry's, including a few comments by yours truly. All I want to say here is, I'm sick of seeing Orwell literary discussion supplanted by custody fights over the man's symbolic political legacy. I'm sick of seeing this eloquent but flawed and quirky writer get exploited in "arguments from authority" regardless of political perspective. As the feminist Orwell scholar Daphne Patai noted back in December, "To build one's case by citing Orwell" is to "abdicate the habit of independent thinking for which he was celebrated."

In defense of the writer himself: I think Orwell was a genuine socialist, although Mr. Lucas may disagree; he was a habitual "fugitive from the camp of victory," whatever else Mr. Hitchens may have become; Orwell was not a proto-weblogger behind a desk -- he was an empiricist who wrote best about things he had actually experienced, and no matter what he himself said in places, his subject matter wasn't all directly political. I don't know or entirely care what he would have thought of the current Iraq war if he had lived to see it, though I'm certain that, for example, he disliked torture. What any of us think who now occupy the common age ranges would just be different from the present-day opinions of a man born in 1903 who was on the crankish side even in his own generation. Consider, for example, that Orwell found Gandhi's civil disobedience not only alien but distasteful, and at least once (in "Looking Back on the Spanish War") classed Gandhi as a demagogue alongside Hitler and Stalin. And that's to choose an example apart from Orwell's many bigotries, of which gender snobbery was probably the least offensive.

See the guy as he was, not as you think he ought to have been. Read his work as literature and not as a source of ammunition for your own next polemic. If you want to show respect for the memory of "Saint George," don't get worshipful -- he would have hated it. Shut the damn books and go think for yourself.

5/2/04 12:04 a.m.(Link here.)

 So, OK, I get windy in response to the awful stuff in the newspapers.

"The Betterment of Man is the worst motive for writing. It's the worst...." -- Garrison Keillor.

(with thx to Alan Hogue's blog for the link.)

5/1/04 6:22 p.m.(Link here.)

 It seems a steady pattern regardless of nationality that perpetrators of atrocities document their crimes with photos in which they themselves appear. This doesn't make sense at first: you'd think they would try to pretend such things never happened. Sometimes they even do pretend despite the photos. But there may be an incentive that works the other way: the photos may help the perpetrators attain mutual reassurance through mutual blackmail: "now that we know these photos exist, we are all bound to maintain that what we did was defensible; we are all implicated, so we can't afford to denounce each other." That goes only a little way past the tamer humiliation rituals of fraternity and men's-club initiations. There, the message is: "we have all been shamed in front of each other, so we are bound to present a united front to the outside world." The shared image of shared crime is an old pattern -- think about this week's torture photo disclosures, and the Joe Eszterhas film "Music Box," and the kinds of real photos that film was based on -- the ones from the midnight of the twentieth century.

It's all on a continuum: one atrocity may not be as bad as another but it's possible to find common threads. There's that same silence-and-brotherhood mentality in the swaggering of the California prison guards' unions, which laugh off civil rights complaints and shove astronomical pay increases through the Legislature. Again in the California Youth Authority -- California's special prison system for children -- where a "code of silence" may have protected what are euphemistically called "counselors" from facing prosecution for beating bound and outnumbered youths. And yet in the CYA case, once again, the brutalizers did what they did on camera, probably knowing they were filmed. Maybe they had persuaded themselves they were in the right because the youths "started the fight" -- as though adult public servants were justified in lowering themselves to the moral level of criminal teenagers. At least, yet again, there is documentation, so now public opinion and the FBI can take the evidence seriously even if the California attorney general won't.

Silence and documentation paradoxically become aspects of the same skewed mentality: the group that commits the atrocity creates proof in order to maintain denial among its members. The group members may refuse to say it happened, or they may say it happened but was justified. But sooner or later the photos emerge with the wholesome-looking happy faces posing next to the horrors, and when they do emerge, we all have to look at the problem of evil, like it or not.

I'm not going to link to the photos of torture by American and British soldiers in Iraq. They're easy enough to find. That weird draped and hooded figure, with its Klan and Père Ubu echoes -- I don't want to see it again, nor do I have to. It won't be leaving my head any time soon.

Yes, worse things happened in Abu Ghraib before, but they weren't done by representatives of my own country in the name of implanting democracy.

Just one more thing to say: at Saddam's fall they should have torn down Abu Ghraib brick from brick from brick as the French demolished the Bastille. Form reproduces function.

[Update 5/2: others are calling for the demolition of Abu Ghraib.]

Return to main page