Hawks and Other Birdbrains

I'm interested in George Packer, Liberal Hawk, saying this:

You don’t have to be a neocon to sympathize with the seriousness of the project under consideration. Kristol’s essays of forty years ago, set in the context of social breakdown and the ongoing spectacle of left-wing lunacy, make the move of liberal-minded intellectuals to the right entirely understandable and, in some ways, justifiable. If nothing else, their migration was more interesting than anything going on in liberal circles, for there’s nothing like dismantling an orthodoxy to bring out the liveliest prose. Compared with the defenses of liberalism written in those years, the intellectual energy and fearlessness are indisputably on the side of the neoconservatives.

The "ongoing spectacle of left-wing lunacy" is supposed to be Altamont or something. One notes in passing that the Hell's Angels weren't Leninists. But honestly, the left-wing of the sixties, as distinct from "liberal-minded intellectuals" and the Democratic Party, counted among its radical claims the notion that black people were not sub-human, women not property, consensual sex not criminal nor even especially objectionable, and war . . . how did the phrase go? Bad for children and other living things? These are not, plainly put, especially troubling notions. They are, more tellingly, correct. While left-wing lunacy attempted to dismantle Jim Crow and convince America that the only sure thing that could result from killing a couple of million Asians was a couple of million dead Asians, Kristol's fellow soi-disant left-leaning intellectuals were hyperventilating about Negroes. Insofar as Kristol et al. did not believe--at least not at first--that Social Security was Communism and Roosevelt one of the Elders of Zion, you could have called them Liberal, but they were always firmly on the side of the American state and American expansionism, and when the antiwar left finally realized that the Democratic Party was not interested in ending the war on Vietnam and began protesting in earnest, it was hardly a great transmigration of souls that transported a few militant Jewish warmongers from putative left to nominal right.

Wanna See?

The U.S. has emerged from eight years of dyslexia. It has now revealed how dangerously words were manipulated and is learning again to speak a language the world can understand.

-Rodger Cohen

Yeah, uh, no. The dyslexic is not willfully opaque. He is not intentionally obfuscatory, not deliberately vague, not purposefully contradictory, not directedly incoherent. His disorder makes the manipulation of language on the page more difficult. He is not prone to elaborate fits of syntactical imagination.

Today is my birthday and I intend to go home, get stoned, and fuck, but let me just say this about that: language didn't fail us. It hasn't got the capacity. Blaming torture on language is like blaming your sore thumb on the hammer. The tool is not responsible for the failure of its wielder. Legal briefs did not fall from the sky and impel through force of sui generis argumentation the torture of prisoners, or the launching of wars, or any of our many other sins of commission. It was not "flawed legal reasoning" that led to invading other nations, murdering civilians, and abusing captives. It was, rather, the imperative to invade nations, murder civilians, and torture people that necessitated such reasoning.

Feedia

Is it my imagination, or does the "firestorm" consist of one Bush campaign manager and one Bush press secretary? I mean, Barack Obama is certainly a bloodthirsty monster. I wouldn't take that away from him, Lord knows, but I hardly think he deserves headlines screaming Controversy! every time some greasepaint hack takes a potshot.

Diagnosis

Listen. As a nation, we arrogate to ourselves the right to send flying robots over any country in the world and murder people, to topple governments, to impose economic blockades on entire nations of millions of people, and the great moral flap is slapping around some prisoners? Now I am not saying that torture is anything but abhorrent, wholly morally repulsive, but fuck you, America. The so-called debate over torture has preempted the already under-argued, under-reported actuality: that as we bicker about "enhanced interrogation techniques" and whether or not Barack Obama is a good guy for releasing them or a bad guy for not sending a bunch of spook hacks to jail, we are all over the world, killing the fuck out of people and blowing that shit up. The idea that our interrogations are a unique moral stain is cracked and insane. Waterboarding is not the disease, merely one observable symptom of a deeper and more pernicious pathology.

Educate and Punish

Safford v. Redding is as good an argument as any against universal public education. It shows with humiliating clarity how schools become arms of the Prohibitory state. A public school is a prison for children. Upon entrance, they are categorically deprived of their rights. Rights under the first, second, fourth, and fifth amendments are thoroughly abrogated. Students' speech is censored; they aren't free to assemble; a Swiss Army knife merits explusion; they may be deprived of property, searched without cause, evidence, or provocation. Read the transcript of the Redding arguments and ask yourself when was the last time outside of a prison or jail environment you heard continual references to "contraband."

Any student may be punished, singled out, stripped, humiliated, deprived of rights and privileges, or forced to perform labor based on administrative whim. We have a word for that sort of institution. Prison.

Some More Thoughts on Young Girls' Vaginas

Consider the logic of it. On the one hand, schoolchildren are so extremely vulnerable, so easily damaged, so fragile, suggestible, damageable, flimsy, and corruptible that we cannot even allow them to be exposed to aspirin or cough drops. On the other, hauling a child in front of adults, compelling her to strip, and forcing her to behave in a thoroughly degrading manner is no big deal, mere embarrassment; she'll get over it; kids are resilient. Has there ever been any society, ever, in the history of the world, that has devoted so much of its genius to the production of such thoroughly incomprehensible and inconsistent standards, such nonsensical cultural attitudes? It's like our one true native art.

Tchaikovsky Tuesday

This is just really, really fucking good. Eugene Onegin, the finale, with Dmitri Hvorostovsky and Renee Fleming.

Reading, Writing, Ritalin

"This is where you have to look at the totality of the circumstances in the case," says Matthew Wright, lawyer for the school district.

When asked whether such an extensive search made sense for a pill that is the equivalent of two Advil, Wright says school officials cannot have known these were the only pills.

"With hindsight and with calm reflection, we can look back and say, 'OK, what kind of danger really was there on campus?'" Wright says. "But when you're on the ground making on-the-spot decisions, you don't have that luxury. School administrators are not pharmacologically trained in being able to assess the relative dangers any one drug might present, but what they are charged with is to make sure that students are kept safe from such threats of danger."

-Morning Edition on NPR

I like this line of argument and plan to use it at work. "Well, boss, with hindsight and calm reflection I should not have have pulled the fire alarm and started throwing elderly trustees out the window, but I was on the ground making on-the-spot decisions, and I didn't have that luxury."

I am not on principle opposed to the idea that the exigencies of certain circumstances dictate that we respond without long reflection. Situational ethics and all that. From time to time, all of us are called to act within the constraints of a too short time frame, or on imperfect or incomplete information. And all of us act all the time without the benefit of hindsight, which is a tautology, but a useful one.

As an attorney arguing that exigent circumstances forced more precipitous action than was desirable in retrospect, however, it is best not to craft an argument that makes your clients sound like monstrous, ignorant dumbasses. Arguing that school officials, for instance, have an unfettered right to search any student's body and person at any time and with any degree of invasiveness because they have no fucking idea what it is they're looking for nor reason to believe that the student in question possesses this ineffable quantity seems to me like a loser, even given your Scalias and such.

Shouldn't we be astonished at just how thoroughly the language of safety, security, and control have overtaken the language of teaching and instruction in the mouths of pedagogues? Schools are drug-free zones, where students are protected from violence, where bullying is not tolerated, one strike and you're out, etc. etc. Whatever happened to the three Rs?

UPDATE: Aaaaaand nevermind. Drugsrbad. Thanks.

The Party of the 2nd Part Warrants that She Will, On Full Execution of this Agreement, Remove Herself from the PREMISES, and Relocate to A NUNNERY

Sure, there's plenty that's risible, infuriatingly wrong, goofy, tendentious, and just plain bonkers in this namby explication of conservative opposition to same-sex marriage. ("There is precedent for this, as in the way Henry VIII threatened the churches in England after his divorce from Catherine of Aragon." That's sure to wow 'em at the Supreme Court.) No sense going into it all. Let us pause, however, to admire just what a magnificent dickhead you've got to be to propose:

Marriage established a mechanism for the training and upbringing of children and provided for the disposition of familial assets in ways that protected the property rights of those who had a share in creating the assets in the first place.

Over two millennia society has concluded that the best way to do that is a sanctioned relationship between a man and a woman

Tell it to the serfs, brother. For most of those two millennia, the bulk of humanity had no property rights or assets. I mean, no peasant farmer in Aquitaine circa 1001 was bitching about the penalty for early withdrawal from his 403(b), you know?

This is the most hilarious thing about what we now call conservativism. It proposes itself as a traditionalist bulwark of institutions against the tidal encroachment of The Now and yet views the values and mores of past societies with all the fidelity, respect, and verisimilitude of A Knight's Tale.

Light of My Life, Fire of My Loins

Yo, someone should explain to the WaPo that senior school officials as senior administrators have a fiduciary relationship to their organizations that makes them legally responsible and liable when their shit is breakin' the law, breakin' the law, especially when they themselves directed the school to do so.

Also, just for shits, how fucking tawdry and prurient is it to take to the nation's second major editorial page to argue for the dire necessity of stripping thirteen-year-old girls?

Masked Ball

The news that two "key prisoners from al Qaeda" were subjected to water torture seven thousand billion times to no evident, discernible, independently verifiable, measurable, substantive, meaningful, or even vengefully satisfying end is not news exactly, but it does reveal a black clot of inefficacy threatening to burst the little black heart of the Terror War Torture Regime Empire. At least since the documented atrocities of the Inquisition and on through the glory days of 20th-century Communism, torture has at very least proved itself a fine method for extracting false confessions, preferably the sort that can later be repeated publicly, bolstering the claim that this or that Goldstein truly is an enemy of the state. Our tortures and torturers on the other hand can't even manage that; at best, they claim that one man gave up another of more or less equal rank, station, danger, etc. As debased, perverted, and violent as Americans and America are, we retain a moral priggishness that delays and prevents the full public airing of what we do; we cheer fictional depictions of torture (yeah, Jack, get 'im) even as we deny that we'd ever torture anyone. Even those who really, really want to break out the thumbscrews and iron maidens can't get themselves into gear, and the pro-torture (or pro-more-torture) advocates endlessly consume their own tails, arguing that we should torture more, and more often, because after all we do not torture.

Optimist that I am, I'm tempted to write that our bottomless capacity for hypocritical self-deception on these points may yet save us, that the whole brutal regime may yet collapse beneath the weight of its own solipsistic ridiculousness. A third term for George might have done the trick, but alas, the Constitution. Instead, "[Mr. Obama has] repeatedly suggested that he opposes Congressional proposals for a 'truth commission' to examine Bush administration counterterrorism programs, including interrogation and warrantless eavesdropping," even as he and his surrogates signal that they will move to end the so-called worst abuses of the Bush administration, i.e. drive our more brutal practices back under ground, treat them with the appropriate circumspection--in the words of a recent commenter here, "have the decency to lie to us."

The other day my own brother suggested to me that he didn't so much mind if terrorists were tortured, even if we didn't "get anything out of them." Well, I said, how do you know they're terrorists? Cynic that I am, I wasn't surprised when his long pause confirmed what I'd known before asking, that he'd never considered the question before. He recovered, haltingly suggesting that they'd had a military-style court martial to adjudicate questions of guilt or innocence, that there had been at least some process to determine who these people are, what they have done. Point of fact: "Abu Zubaydah has been described as a Qaeda operative." Emphasis mine. In other words, even our "key priosoners" aren't necessarily who they are.