True.

Wolcott has been casting casting his fine eye at advance review copies of Dinesh D'lightful D'licious D'lovely D'Souza's newest tome: The Enemy at Home: How the Saatchi Collection, Internet Porn, and Nancy Pelosi's Love of Jello Shots Drove Osama to Justifiable Homicide. James pulls a doozy of a quotation in which D'Souza locates responsibility for the horrors of abu Ghraib in "the sexual immodesty of liberal America." Then some blub and blab: He doooes declare: If some liberal professor and his boffo barbarella concubine saw fit to gather the harem and film themselves licking ass like a bunch of Templars in some Soho loft, why, we'd all be hissing Guiliani for trying to censor the fucker. Wolcott locates the Soho loft bit as two decades out of date, and boy howdy ain't that the truth. On my last trip into, uh, "The City," the only people I saw in Soho were either tourists trying to figure out just how the fuck you're supposed to shop in that ludicrous Prada store (Answer: You're not) or else harried young mothers with double-strollers and a bluetooth pinned to their ear, whose idea of kinky sex is just having sex, between bedtimes, soccer games, and Mr. I-Swear-I'm-Gonna-Make-Partner-And-Then-Things'll-Change with his 70-hour weeks. Visiting New York with D'Souza must be like visitng with my grandmother: $35 runny eggs at brunch at the Oak Room and a fabulous post-show line for cheesecake at Lindy's.

At this point, I'm tempted to go into some boilerplate about consent versus lack thereof. I'm tempted to say that if it's your thing to get branded with hot irons, have spikes driven into your eyeballs, or hell, have glowsticks shoved up your ass, sign the consent form and away we go. Instead, though, I feel compelled to point out that it is not the sexually liberated who principally commit horrible sex crimes, but the sexually repressed, and that despite the girls of Sex and the City, D'Souza's likely research source, it is not immodesty that characterizes "liberal" sex, but relative honesty. "Must be into anal" may not win a man many dates (thanks, Neddie), but by god, it certainly improves the post-coital environment if you cover that bit in advance.

Such thoughts greatly damper the fall-of-man philosophizing that passes for thought in this great, amber-wheated land of ours, but for a fellow born in Mumbai, in the heart of Kama Sutra Kountry, he certainly takes a hollow view of human sensuality. I know that the good lord commands us to use our penises only for pissin and knockin girls up, but is it really exaltant of the human being to define the male as a baster and the female as a fleshy incubator? (D'Souza, perhaps, would answer yes, being of the opinion that the great liberal fallacy is its belief in the Goodness of Man. No Rousseau, he.) Anyway, what happened at abu Ghraib was not a key party, to pick an anachronism D'Souza might understand (perhaps he has read Updike, eh), nor a night at Plato's, but an example of American soldiers beating up a bunch of helpless Iraqis, stripping them, setting the dogs on them, and piling them on top of each other for some more beating and humiliating. That is not, perhaps, so romantic as libertine complicity in al Qaeda's plotting, although it has that distinct old advantage of being true.

Kill Democrats. Eat Republicans.

Via Neddie Jingo!, you can survey the panoplic (okay: the realatively meager) selection of postes and ripostes vis-à-vis the burning question: Progressive Blogger, Progressive Blogger, whereforth art thou, Progressive Blogger?

BlueGirl says, basically, why preach to the choir when we can all sing, and Neddie says, "Well, I tried to help a Democrat, but they're all just so godawful stupid and they run such lousy campaigns . . ." He says this more politely, being a man of tender refinements.

Leave it then to IOZ to tell this Watson fellow to take a fucking hike. I've had it up to and well above here with liberals telling me I ought to hold my nose and vote for the War Party, but Weaker! so that Charlie Rangle can investigate George Bush and Joe Biden can get more face time and Ned Lamont, dear god, should he win, can blink once and relax those cheeks (you know the ones whereof I speak) a smidge. If the war spins even further into the sanginous, Dantean depths of total failure and despair, I see no reason why poor Nancy Pelosi should be blamed, and if this president or the next sees lightning and hears the voice from the burning bush and brings the boys back home, I don't want people operating under any illusions that it was Democratic cajones that did it, when quite cleary such eventuality, pace Murtha, will be no better or worse than the final, inexorable end to an enterprise now firmly entrenched as the archetypal exemplar of "doomed from the start." Over-the-horizon force my ass. Run away, gents; make like Lot and don't look back.

Democratic victory is not going to rescue America from America. One need only listen to the candidates grasp at the same bread-and-butter pieties of Patriotism, Security, and Constitution to know that. "Tax relief for the middle class" doesn't sell me. I am not an incrementalist. "Tougher and smarter on security" sells me even less. Why should I waste my beautiful mind, as Bar Bush put it, on the selection of the less egregious users of euphemism, when I know already that they will roll on issues of significance and spend their time hawking bastardized medical subsidies and pledging to keep social security as it is, was, and ever shall be. I haven't heard a Democrat mention our habeasless nation in weeks; it slipped from their minds as quickly as it slipped from the minds of the public upon receipt of that great gift: knoweldge that Mark Foley may well have slipped something else somewhere scandalous.

Democrats are as committed to the idolatrous War on Terror as Republicans. I know it comforts their rank-and-file supporters to believe that they subscribe to such euphonious fluff only insofar as it makes them appear "strong on defense," just as it comforts them to believe that once they acquire office they will all uncross their fingers, unlock the doors of the gulag, put away the culture war, and go about the business of maintaining a Democratic majority, amen. They are soft, weak, foolish, pipsqueaks reaping nothing they sowed, but only the unavoidable devolution of the other passel of assholes now so gluttonously fatted at the government teat.

What disgusts me is the sense of entitlement, the whining protest that third party voters, or independent voters, or non-voters who despise the dauphin and all his days are commiting some sort of treason by failing to give Democrats their support. Voting, dears, is an affirmative act; it is not Pascal's wager. No votes belong to you. You get what you earn. When a Democrat stands up and says "The war on terror is a scam," I will vote for him. When a Democrat stands up and casts a vote against the latest military appropriations in order to halt this carnage, I will vote for him. Otherwise, shut up, Watson, he explained. My blog belongs to no motherfucking one but me.

Mein Führer, I Can Valk!

TURGIDSON: Strangelove. What kind of a name is that? That ain't no kraut name, is it, Stainsy?

STAINS: He changed it when he became a citizen. It used to be Merkwurkdigliebe.

TURGIDSON: Hmm. A kraut, by any other name, huh, Stainsy?

Yesterday we caught Martin Peretz longing for the halcyon days of MAD. Today we catch that most Strangelovian of Washintonians, Charles Krauthammer, who obliges us with the hair, the wheelchair, and the genocidal lunacy, though not, to my knowledge, with the black-gloved, unreconstructed Nazi right hand.

We are in an era far more complicated than Kennedy's because his great crisis occurred before the age of terrorism. The world of 1962 was still technologically and ideologically primitive: Miniaturized nuclear weaponry had not yet been invented, nor had modern international terrorism.

In 1962 the Pony Express took a week to cross the plains and wars were fought, gentleman-like, with muskets and bayonets, unlike our Future-is-Now! epoch of personal jet-packs, positronic brains, and eyeball-sized fusion bombs. What is ideological primitivity, I ask you? And what, dear readers, is this talk of inventing international terrorism, as if Doc Edison and the boys at Menlo happened upon it while testing resistor filaments for electric light. ("Gentlemen! What it lacks in luminosity, it makes up for with hijacking! In spades, I tell ya!")

Well, it all has to do with North Korea, male potency, the mineshaft gap, the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men are concerned.

KRAUTHAMMER: Automaticity of this kind concentrates the mind.

DESADESKI: No sir. It is not a thing a sane man would do. The doomsday machine is designed to to trigger itself automatically.

By which, of course, I mean, it all has to do with Iran. I've ready plenty of the Kraut, but even I was unprepared for the juke, juke, cut to the hole that sent this rehtorical Barry Sanders careening for and endzone painted with a bright "Bomb Iran, motherfuckers, and now!"

One rogue country is tolerable because it can be held accountable. Two rogue countries guarantees undeterrable and therefore inevitable nuclear terrorism.

This is a math with which I'm unfamiliar, I confess, although I did study calculus. We are surrounded by madness. Nero may have enjoyed the burning of Rome, but at least he didn't light the fucker on fire himself.

TNR

In Kushner's Angels in America, one of the characters (Belize? I can't recall) says of they dying Roy Cohn that he perfectly represents America: "Terminal, crazy, and mean." But for Martin Peretz's seemingly tenacious foothold on this moral coil, I'd say he's getting maddeningly close to Cohn territory, minus, of course, the actual authority. Whereas compatriot Norman Podhertz married a Decter and convinced himself that he, with she, like the rest of the fag-displaced Fire Island vacanciers et vacanciennes, represented high-moral Anglo-Saxonia at its toast-point and glass-of-port finest, Peretz married a Singer and convinced himself, like Cohn, that the well-dressed goyim whose world and manners he so admired considered him nothing so much as a smart-alek, over-locquacious kike. His writing and his magazine strive for that Cohnesque snarl. It comes off more an indigestive purr, but such is the life of intellectual combat. We do not choose our animal guide; it chooses us.

Anyway, I was drawn into TNR today by my reminder that, yes, the world is mad, which is to say the "Daily Update," whose subject line was, I absolutely swear to Jesus, Buddha, and the whole truckload of prohets from Indochine to Iberia, "Is Bush Truman's Heir?" You mean, is Bush a cowboy-booted know-nothing whose ambitious, nuke-happy courtiers have steered his administration to squeeze ever available millimeter of executive power while launching a sustained assault on the basic principles of liberty under the guise of enemies without, enemies within? Actually, judging by the précis, the question is what do you (you, you Democrat) do when a Republican steals "your" "principles," defined here as a bottomless, Wilsonian desire to spread the gospel of Democracy by sword and song and hook and crook, indeed with the sort of alacritous prosyletizing of the faith to the infidels that would make your basic Mahomettan devil proud.

Since I do not pay money to read these things, however, I rolled over, as has become my habit, to Marin Peretz's blog, The Spine, in which he indulges his twin obsessions: Muslim cabbies and Al Sharpton. Al Sharpton, it seems, has leant some sort of vague support to Ned Lamont, the Democratic Senate candidate from the great state of Lieberman, and because Lamont has not strode onto the dais with a Mosaic burning behind his eyes, cast his staff upon the ground, and brought down the thundering wrath of the heavens with a full-throated "Sambo, begone!" Peretz judges that Lamont may be hopelessly under the thumb of the Angry Colored Folks Caucus. He does Lamont a favor by naming a series of acceptable blacks. Elsewhere he mocks Kofi Annan for having the temerity to pass in front of a camera while smiling at the opera, then capers over to the new UN SecGen here, complaining . . . well, I'm not certain what he's complaining, but I am certain that he's engaging in the old once-Cold-Warrior hobby of pretending that the bipolar, nuclear-tipped world was just a grand old time for all, a global game of Battleship, mere checkers in the park:

But the world was a less dangerous place [in 1974]. The big players were the U.S. and the Soviet Union, reasonable powers with much to lose. Iran is an apocalyptic place, and Korea a reckless one. And, as we see, Iraq is a country where each side has no limits to how many people on the other side it will murder.

Well. Then. Indeed.

Vic Dave Hanson's Amazing Technicolor Dreamplan

Victor "Sparta without the Queer" Davis Hanson identifies a "multifaceted" and "six-pronged approach" to defeating Terror, or Iraq, or both, perhaps. Happily, victory in such struggle will extend not only to the Barbary Persians of Assyria, or whomever, but also to such fellow-travelers as Michael Moore, the shambling, baseball-capped creator of agitprop infotainment, and Noam Chomsky, a hyper-rational, left-libertarian critic of imperialism, the former best known for his early documentary Osama and Me: A Humorous Look at How The Great Satan Occupied the Land of the Prohpet, Peace Be upon Him, the latter best known for public make-out sessions with Hugo Chavez at Bungalow 8 and his famous populist rabble-rousing, typified by such oratorical flights as:

The theory of generative grammar, both particular and universal, points to a conceptual lacuna in psychological theory that I believe is worth mentioning.

Against such enemies, how might a small, frugal people stand firm?

"Some people," the saying goes, "thrive on misery." Victor Davis Hanson is hardly an influence on policy-making, but he so typifies the modern, conservative Chicken Little, for whom the falling sky has become a sort of infinitely receding disaster which can never be grasped but must always be pursued. They loop the dog track, these aging white warriors, their double-pleated pant-suits bunched above their thin socks, their ties slightly askew, their jackets flapping behind them, their former-smokers' lungs rattling, their wingtips sliding in the mud, a ballet of animal physicality in pursuit of the stuffed rabbit of Total Victory as it whips ahead of them on its mechanical track.

We ask: What psychosis, what damage to the soul impels these men to pursue this fanciful war against this fantastical enemy, throwing words against the wall and hoping that someone will come to the door and, thus roused, join the parade to the apocalypse? And answer: a sense of generational failure. These people really believe the pallaver about Greatest Generations, though my own grandfather and any living veteran I ever met scoffed at the title: "I was drafted; I went; I got lucky; I came home." Heroism is a quality principally imagined by the war-hungry non-combattant, who reads his Classical history (badly, but still) and imagines that the field of battle elevates a man, that there's clarity in blood. War is and always has been a miserable affair for everyone involved, and glory is the cosmetic surgery performed by the poets and propogandists on its stinking, bloody visage, in order to keep it palatable for the folks back home who, after all, have to foot the bill for their emperor's adventurism.

Vic D. Hanson et al. thought they were really going to have it out with the USSR. And there were indeed moments of high drama. Yet they never forgave Vietnam for its bloody banality: no great battles; no flags raised over enemy capitals; no Tolkeinian charges across plains 'neath the ringing music of the trumpets. Just a deadly slog through one paddy after the next, gains made and erased. What they wanted was the glory they imagined in their fathers, the most cheaply Freudian sort of jealousy. But Indochina was a bust. Then the Wall came down and they thought, "Perhaps those crazy Eastern Euros can take the sledgehammers to the whole edifice." Alas, no. The Soviet Union neither fell nor really crumbled. It just stopped. It ground to a rusty halt. A model trian left in the rain. An old Chevette. A broken tractor. Then no great Republic rose in its place, but a loony, alcoholic democracy that collapsed quickly into sclerotic thievocracy, with a balding, belly-kissing screw-job strongman at the helm and a lot of gangster billionaires who act more like rappers than lords and comissars.

Now Vic Dave and the New Old Kids on the Block are getting long in the tooth, and a sorry senescence spent reminiscing about non-wars in which they did not fight beckons, and they fear that Yeatsian future, the paltry-thinged, tattered-coat-upon-a-stick-ian future, shuffling around while their children and grandchildren adapt, as people do, to a more multipolar world, which is not, par contre all the blather now spouted in this terrible epoch, more dangerous or more deadly: merely different.

Not Us. Not Anyone.

Gregory Djerejian's politics, needless to say, are not my own, but I respect a man who'll stand foursquare against the gale of his past errors and say not only, "I was wrong," but, "Here is how," and, "Here is why." He's written an excellent post on a subject much favored by the ol' Preacher of Ecclesiastes: Vanity.

Still, though I consider it an excellent summation, I take issue with an error at the heart of it, because it's a self-begetting error which, unless recognized, will show a straight road to be a loop:

But I digress, as we were speaking of vanity, meaning really a decadent self-satisfaction, an arrogant refusal to admit mistakes, a bloated sense of American exceptionalism. The irony is, what other country can assume a responsible mantle of world leadership at this turbulent time, if not us? Certainly not China, or the EU, or Russia, or anyone else.

Perhaps the world doesn't need a leader.

Perhaps seeking after such title is itself the source of our doom, eh?

Be not righteous over much; neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?

-Ecc. 7:16

Said My God! They Killed Them All

Brother, that's some culture of life you got going there. Kevin Drum runs the numbers and it comes out "that coalition forces have killed 186,000 Iraqis in the 39 months between the invasion and the period when the study was done. That's about 4,700 per month — and the numbers are on a steady upward trend." How do you like that Pottery Barn, Powell?

The Times throws in a little more contention, and the tone is mitigatory, even exculpatory. "Donald Berry, chairman of biostatistics at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, was even more troubled by the study, which he said had 'a tone of accuracy that’s just inappropriate.'" Which, if nothing else, reminds me of one more immortal Strangelovian exchange:

TURGIDSON: The duty officer asked General Ripper to confirm the fact the he had issued the go code and he said, "Yes gentlemen, they are on their way in and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them, otherwise we will be totally destroyed by red retaliation. My boys will give you the best kind of start, fourteen hundred megatons worth, and you sure as hell won't stop them now. So let's get going. There's no other choice. God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all." Then he hung up. We're still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.

MUFFLEY: There's nothing to figure out General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.

TURGIDSON: Well, I'd like to hold off judgment on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.

Which is to say maybe we've killed 90,000 Iraqis, maybe 200,000. Maybe the total deaths have topped 600,000, maybe they're hovering at half that. Again to General Turgidson:

Mr. President, we are rapidly approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves as human beings and for the life of our nation. Now, the truth is not always a pleasant thing, but it is necessary now make a choice, to choose between two admittedly regrettable, but nevertheless, distinguishable post-war environments: one where you got twenty million people killed, and the other where you got a hundred and fifty million people killed.

And while, indeed, Who is IOZ? also hates to judge before all the facts are in, there's a wee hint of sociopathy creeping into our casual discussions of the statistical methodology used to gauge the staggering, stunning, criminal, extraordinary, unbelievable Iraqi death toll for which our invasion, however the fuck you slice the motherfucker, was the proximate cause. When defending the merits of my own society, admittedly not a pasttime I often engage, I don't want to find myself pointing out that, in fact, we are only killing one thousand Iraqis a month, certainly not five, and that, as Frost said, makes all the diff-er-ence. Likewise, although I've strenuously disputed our adoption of the attacks of 9-11-01 as a kind of catch-all casus belli, I increasingly find myself shrugging at the death of nearly three thousand of my countrymen, not because I do not find them tragic--I do--but because I find them insignificant. A pinprick. A month of traffic accidents. Al Qaeda killed three thousand Americans. We have killed at least thirty times that many Iraqis, in a Carolian looking-glass war against a people who had nothing to do with those attacks in the first place. Which is perhaps to say that the game is up, the cards are down, and lord help us, maybe after a long history of Indians massacred, Phillipines invaded, dirty wars funded, maybe, at long last, we deserve exactly what we get.

All such aside, the Times article also includes the following down-player of a paragraph:

Violent deaths have soared since the American invasion, but the rise is in part a matter of spotty statistical history. Under Saddam Hussein, the state had a monopoly on killing, and the deaths of thousands of Iraqi Shiites and Kurds that it caused were never counted.

Exculpation, as I said. Also doubtful about the monopoly bit. There must've been at least a couple of murders in Iraq before the war. Here though, is a question: Is this a legitimate complaint? Is not the entire article about a statistical study undertaken because the deaths of thousands of Iraqis, once again, were never counted? And are not being counted. And probably never will be counted. Doesn't the claim here--that Saddam killed lots and lots of people and never bothered to count 'em--reflect precisely the policy of the American occupation regime, which, by the way, has probably killed even more?

Increasingly it appears that In Re: The Matter of the United States Invading Iraq and Deposing its Brutal Dictator, we have embarked on the path of a man who, upon discovering that his sadistic neighbor beats his wife and chains his kids to the radiator, goes in with a shotgun, takes out Dictator Dad, the twin girls, the dog, and the goldfish, then pats the brain-spattered wifey on the head and tells her, "He's not gonna hurt you any more."

There's Always Madagascar

Via Gregory Djerjian at The Belgravia Dispatch, I see that David Frum is still kicking, if not precisely alive. This is deep, reptile-brain stuff, heart-beats and legs kicking, mouth producing autonomous bullshit even as the higher functions go gray in the CAT scan.

Djerjian hits the high points, by which I mean the low points (a nuclear Japan as a deterrent to a nuke-seaking Iran!). He also tell an unintentional truth:

Countries like North Korea and Iran seek nuclear weapons because they imagine that those weapons will enhance their security and power.

Also, people put locks on their doors in order to lock them. The entropy of an isolated system not at equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value. That which does not kill you makes you stronger. Live long and prosper. Veni, vedi, vici.

The word to note in that sentence of Frum's peroration is "imagine." Remove it and its attendants and you arrive at:

Countries like North Korea and Iran seek nuclear weapons because those weapons will enhance their security and power.

And that's clearly true. What's more, Frum never makes the case, because he can't, that these so-called rogue states have any extraterritorial ambitions, though he, like the rest of the American establishment, insists on labelling them "aggressive," in a manner more or less reminiscent of his party's insistence on labelling Terri Schiavo "alive." It's fairly clear that they do not, in fact, harbor such ambitions, or if they do, they recognize the logistical, financial, and military impediments thereto. We should certainly take the pronouncements of the Iranian president with the requisite handful of salt, but it is true, as he's claimed, that it's been a very long time since a Persian has initiated a war of conquest or otherwise. It's likely also true, as he's claimed, that if Iran really wanted to make trouble in Iraq, they'd really be making trouble in Iraq. Meanwhile, who, precisely, is North Korea aggressing against, other than itself? One can hardly accuse a bulimic of assault and battery for the act of self-emaciation. There is, at present, only one nation on earth proposing that its now-manifested destiny must be infinitely reapplied by every other people in the world, and that nation is ours. Accusing the nation you're about to invade of provocation even as you put your own tanks on their borders is nothing new, of course, but let us at least choose a better Goebbels than the milquetoast David Frum, whose best polemical effort so far--the Axis of Evil bit--merely plagiarised the title of a past enemy alliance and sexed it up with off-assonated alliteration of the sort that works if you are Emily Dickinson but if not, not.

To be fair, you must admire the blowsy off-handedness with which Frum advocates a policy of deliberately provoking a crisis of millions of Korean refugees flooding into China. Perhaps we ought to aid them in their timetables. Run the trains. The "transport" if you will. I'm sure there is a solution. Final or no.

Most Profound Man in Iraq

Most Profound Man in Iraq - an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines (searching for Syrians) if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied "Yes, you."

From an anonymous marine's letter home. Good morning, Vietnam.

"The exchange continues in which Foley and the teen both appear to describe having sexual orgasms."

That. This.

I'm just sayin.

A computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills.

The Last Man wrote for this weekend's New York Times Magazine, ostensibly about the penchant for secrecy and classification in government circles, indirectly about the American habit of feeling a raindrop and crying that the sky is falling. Fukuyama has been magesterially wrong about plenty in the past, so I commend him for writing something that makes so much goddamn sense, even if several decades late and a bazillion dollars short. Unlike the visibile majority of not-so-mea-culpizers fleeing the fast-sinking U.S.S. Greater Middle East, Fukuyama is taking baby steps in the direction of recognizing that what occured, and what continues to occur, in Iraq and everywhere else touched by the malarial bite of American foreign policy hasn't grown as a result of errors of execution but of errant premises. That remains a leap too far for most elected Democrats and aspirant elected Democrats, alas, who continue to believe that projecting schoolyard bellicosity is the ticket to electoral victory, even as they free themselves finally to call for some kind of withdrawal from the "incompetent" Iraqi adventure.

Yet every time I hear that the administration lied to us or misled us into war, I ask myself if the utterer of the phrase, which implication is that a slightly more advanced program in nuclear or biological weapons would have justified the invasion of Iraq, believes that the outcomes of the invasion would have been different. Supposing that the Iraqi government and military were five years or a decade closer to a bomb than they were, would any other facts of the invasion and occupation be fundamentally altered? The unthought implication of the "we were lied to" dodge is that the awful outcomes we now experience would be supportable had the plot turned slightly differently in the opening pages. Would John Kerry have turned against the war, would Joe Biden, or any other prominent Democrat (and a few Republicans) if a stash of sarin, a crate of botulin, a pre-test warhead or two had been located buried somewhere in a bunker? Absent the easy rhetorical cover of now-proven presidential dishonesty, would these mavericks of ours now make the self-similar claims that the enterprise is doomed, and probably was from the start? The strong indicators all point to no.

It points to a dramatic idiocy at the heart of American foreign policy as espoused by either party and as discussed in the so-called mainstream, a river wide as the ol' Mississip in my estimation, which includes all those pseudo-ideological media that flatter themselves "the partisan press." E.B. White wrote an essay at the height of both the arms race and the disarmament race (such as it was) called "Unity," in which he said--in paraphrase--that disarmament was an immense crock of shit, and that should the world rid itself of weapons, there might be a moment or two of peace before someone somewhere picked up a stick or stone and set off to brain his enemy. Peace, he said, wouldn't even be the word for it.

Most people think of peace as a state of Nothing Bad Happening or Nothing Much Happening. Yet if peace is to overtake us and make us the gift of serenity and well-being, it will have to be the state of Something Good Happening.

To believe that such can be achieved by depriving our enemies of the instrumental means of warmaking, or by (unlikely) renouncing them ourselves, is a fallacy that must be overturned before anything good is going to happen.

So far, though, criticism of the Emperor appears focused on his failure to prevent North Korea from building a bomb and failure to find one in Iraq. But the failure lies in a longer and older problem of American policy. North Korea built a bomb because it was prudent to build a bomb. It was deterrent. That sort of imperative predates the invasion of Iraq, by the way. It reflects a rational response by a neo-Communist state to the unipolar post-Soviet world. It reflects the rational response of an entrenched leadership class desperate to preserve its own power and influence. It reflects the rational response of the economically weak half of the Korean peninsula confronting an American ally to its South. That isn't to say that it's desirable for North Korea to have a bomb; the consequences will probably be poor for everyone, especially if Japan continues to move in its more nationalistic, less pacificistic direction. Nonetheless, the desire to build a bomb, and the execution of that project, didn't spring from a vacuum, and despite some gloating that Bill Clinton once achieved some version of success via the Agreed Framework, it seems to me that nothing he or anyone has done mitigates the basic fact that there is one nation in the world with an array of thousands of usuable hydrogen weapons and a policy of making demands.

Blasphemers

George W. Bush believes in a simplistic doctrine of Good and Evil. The Manichees did not. Theirs was a subtle, synecretic faith with a quite elaborate cosmology and cosmogony. It's bad enough that "Manichean" gets hurled around as an accusation of moral simpletonism by bloggers who don't know anything about it, least of all that the foundation of their epithetic use of the word derives from the polemical denunciations of Augustine following his conversion, hardly a documentarian account of the faith. It's worse that they throw the old gnostics against the wall of Bush, as if gnosis has anything to do with him at all.

This has been your daily defense of an extinct faith.