In Jerusalem

I am certain, however, that those responsible for the murder of millions of Germans will never be brought to justice.

-Adolph Eichmann, in the notes for his memoirs

American liberals, when making the case for George W. Bush's deficient character, used to point to one especially grotesque episode where he mocked a woman about to be executed and laughed at her plight. This was supposed to represent a sort of vicious insouciance and brazen cruelty. Even if he believed the woman deserved to die, the polite response would have been to lament the regrettable necessity of the act, the sometimes unkind exigencies of justice. That he instead derided her and laughed at her and treated the legal killing of a human being with frat-house humor was seen, rightly, as evidence of a major missing slice of humanity, a sort of exuberantly violent and inhuman automation where a soul ought to reside.

If his psycopathic committment to killing people hadn't already convinced you that Barack Obama shared this particular quality of being a vacant, blood-driven monster whose outward appearance as one of our own kind is no more than an act of ingeious fakery, then you may wish to consider his response to the torture of Bradley Manning, which he treats with the blithe indifference of a busy manager signing off on some subordinate's expense report. Yeah, he assured me everything was copasetic. It's all good.

Here is a fine opportunity to engage in a little free and painless magnanimity, to make vague noises about according decent treatment even to one's enemies, to blather a bit about America's committment to the humane treatment of all God's precious children, to give the poor kid some boxer shorts and a couple of books to read, and to throw that paltry bone to his supporters in the Democratic faction, who would immediately beatify him as better-than-Cheney, and he passed on it. He said, no, we're going to go right on torturing this person, who has not been convicted of any crime, lest he commit suicide before we are able to consign him for the rest of his life to the tortures we are already visiting upon him. Here, then, is a man who considers torturing a kid barely past his youth for an alleged crime whose principal result to-date has been an acute case of The Embarrassments, more important, more pressing, and more necessary than the public maintenance of his own image as a moderate reformer and as a conciliator. I find that interesting indeed.

What this episode reveals is that the most salient aspect of Barack Obama's character is that he is an asshole of the worst order. He does not delight in cruelty like his predecessor, but is grossly indifferent to it. The Ts have all been crossed. Proper procedures followed? Yes. Fine. Let's move on. I have been assured.

Jawboning an Ass

You know, what I really like about heaven is that no one ever meets their crazy Aunt Alice, and no one ever meets, say, Moses' in-law Hobab or, like, the Eunuch from Ethiopia in Acts.

Anyway, so this kid goes to heaven, and he meets, you know, Jesus and Samson. And Samson is all like, yo, so, like, the time I fucking killed my brides entire family and then destroyed the agricultural product of her entire nation owing entirely to a situation that I myself was the cause of? Like, that was rad.

Falling Faintly and Faintly Falling

As Thursday’s session wound down, one attendee, Laurie Jagh, who works for a nonprofit group and lives in the Northern Virginia suburbs, home to a large Muslim population, said she was left with one overarching impression.

“I was struck,” she said, “by how divided we are as a country.”

-The Times

As surely as a guy with an MFA and a worn copy of Dubliners, the Times can be counted on to shoehorn a shopworn epiphany into the last paragraph of a story, usually with some grossly infelicitous turn of phrase that desperately lacks the poetry necessary to excuse it for its general lack of sense. Here, it's that overarching impression, and friends, I axe you, how does something so vaporous as mere impression achieve such a plainly architectural feat? Would you call something an ineffable certainty? A diaphanous absolute? And, in true hack fashion, the subsequent revelation is utterly banal. Is it even possible to find a story in the Times in which some reporter-manqué does not sound the alarm about our society's faults and subductions? I wonder.

What is of course terrifying is not how "divided" we are, but how dully unanimous, how narrow our range of opinions, how uniform our predilections and preferences, how politely agreeable we are. The linked story tells the tale of Rep. King (R - Patriot Games) and his House Muslim American Activities Committee hearings, but what strikes me is not the Salem atmosphere, not the deep divisions that divide us deeply, you know, as a people, but the weepily panegyrical attitude toward America, the platitudinous march of self-praise around the hearing room, the competition of every witness and congresscreature to reassure himself and her peers that he just fucking loves fucking America so fucking goddamn much, fuck yeah, America. Keith Ellison weeping over a Muslim "first responder"--and please, can we strike that inelegant neologism from the lexicon, pretty please?--set the tawdry tone--"he was an American . . . who died to help other Americans" . . . oh, god, really? Well, it's a good thing they were all other Americans, right? What if they'd been Canadians? Uruguayans? Uh, Belgians? He was a brave kid, and he died in attack on a building in America, but you know, none of this actually testifies to the inherently nationalistic quality of his character. He was a human bean helpin other human beans.

To be fair, eventhewashingtonpost sez, "plenty of drama, little substance." Even that may be an overstatement. Some folks feel that we are successfully indoctrinating our children with love of country; others feel we could more successfully indoctrinate our children with love of country; no one, and I mean fucking no one, suggested that one good way to stop Muslim youth of any nationality from taking up arms against this shining beacon of civilization, this citadel of justice and virtue, this greatest nation in the country, would be for America to stop killing so many goddamn Muslims and to stop occupying, for years and years, Muslim countries.

Frapper

I don't really know what the import of this is, but insofar as it appears to be making things really difficult and uncomfortable for the rest of the "Western" powers, it is France at its finest.

A Sigh of Relief at NPR

I called General McPeak to get his take on a no-fly zone, and he was deliciously blunt:

“I can’t imagine an easier military problem,” he said. “If we can’t impose a no-fly zone over a not even third-rate military power like Libya, then we ought to take a hell of a lot of our military budget and spend it on something usable.”

-reported by Kristof in the Times

Oh, god, I love it when they tell the truth and don't even know that they're telling the truth.

A Distant Episode

Afghanistan has nearly 30 million people. How can an American force of roughly 100,000 secure them all? The question tends to bring perplexed looks, or even grimaces, meaning — politely and carefully — take that question upstairs.

Again, the generals have an answer. The Afghan military and police are growing, and in a few years could be roughly three times the size of the NATO forces, they say.

But the escalating numerical projections, which have grown each year as the United States has deepened its involvement in the war, have yet to undo these forces’ reputation for poor initiative, corruption, marginal skills and an enduring dependency on foreign supervision for everything from resupply and fire support to actions that should be routine, like standing post.

Many American officers, year in and year out, describe a persistent trait visible to anyone who visits almost any line unit for an extended time. Afghan units are supposed to be preparing to take over security. Yet they are often unwilling to set out on independent patrols, beyond trips back and forth between their own positions, or to the bazaar. They remain largely a tag-along force.

-The Times

So the "strategy" basically is to train a native army to occupy their own country. Okay, well, it worked for the Brits, for a time, in a different albeit nearby country in a different albeit not-really-so-long-past age. But the natives prove untrainable; or, um, they move to their own mysterious agenda. I love that little detail, "or to the bazaar." "The generals" remain uncomprehending. Don't these people want to build a military occupation of their own country?

You read things like this, and you start to wonder, like Starbuck, if the leviathan isn't just a dumb brute after all.

Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika

This body of research suggests the French enlightenment view of human nature, which emphasized individualism and reason, was wrong. The British enlightenment, which emphasized social sentiments, was more accurate about who we are. It suggests we are not divided creatures. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.

-David Brooks

Well, now, these are curious characterizations to say the least, but what's really silly is that he sort of just arbitrarily selects two somewhat distinct philosophical modes from 18th-century Europe and says, well, basically, one or the other's gotta be right.

You Mean, Coitus?

Now on the other hand, when Ross Douthat does know what he's supposed to say about a subject, the results are as cute and funny-looking as a little boy in a suit and tie; adorable, and yet, obviously, wrong. An insignificant change in the self-reported sexual activity of American youth presages a return to an era that never existed! Douthat is right that "social conservatives" aren't America's natural party of pessimists, but shit, they clearly constitute a natural party of fantasists; their intellectual ancestry less Edmund Burke than T.H. White; their natural geography less Middle America than Middle Earth.