Music Notes - What have we got for you today? The LA Times talks to Nick Lowe about his durable, protean "What's So Funny 'Bout Peace, Love and Understanding." Newsweek profiles UO Main Man Elvis Costello - bonus points for finding especially angular euphemisms for the "former angry young man of new wave" cliche that is standard to such pieces. And the Observer gives thumbs up to a new Costello Bio, Complicated Shadows, that I have not read. I am still liking The Delivery Man very much. The burn has not set in for it the way it did with When I Was Cruel.
Kerry Ripped by Swift Boat Lesbians for Truth - And
Meanwhile, on the campaign trail, President Bush blasted Army reservists who refused to carry out a convoy supply mission in Iraq last week, saying, "What do they think this is, the Alabama National Guard?"
From The Borowitz Report.
RIP - Anthony Hecht is dead. Michael Dirda has a decent appreciation.
There were years when Hecht was my favorite living poet. The first time I met the man was in a small chain bookstore outlet I managed in an unobtrusively wealthy neighborhood of Washington, DC. I helped a grandfatherly-looking shabbily-dressed gentleman find summer reading list books (for his son, not his grandson), and then the man lay his Visa card on the counter. I stared at it, not speaking.
"Is there something wrong with that?" he asked.
"You're Anthony Hecht," I said.
"Yes, I am."
I rang his sale, estimating the various kinds of fool I had made of myself with my quips about the books on his son's list, and that was that. On later, more public occasions, I saw the version more familiar to those who follow poetry - dapper (often bow-tied), reserved, plum-voiced, a man who could tell you that chickens were the smallest fruit that grows on bushes and you would believe him for that authoritative baritone. In a common genre of memoir/appreciations I now tell you that each time he remembered me, and I imply or state outright that he singled me out as a uniquely welcome face in the crowd of the moment. None of that happened. But I heard him recite Auden's "The Fall of Rome" from memory at a talk one time, which is more than I could have hoped for.
His great subject was political cruelty - "More Light! More Light!" is particularly unsparing - but he tapped yet deeper, colder sources too, as in "The Hill." Though I doubt it goes that way, may it be for him now less like
I saw a piece of ribbon snagged on a hedge,
But no other sign of life. And then I heard
What seemed the crack of a rifle. A hunter, I guessed;
At least I was not alone. But just after that
Came the soft and papery crash
Of a great branch somewhere unseen falling to earth.
And that was all, except for the cold and silence
That promised to last forever, like the hill.
And more like the next lines:
Then prices came through, and fingers, and I was restored
To the sunlight and my friends.
Start with the selection at Plagiarist.com but don't stop there. I am partial to "Third Avenue in Sunlight," but, out of respect for the great themes of his work, must close by calling your attention to a late poem, "The Transparent Man." Excerpt:
It's like a sort of blizzard in the bloodstream,
A deep, severe, unseasonable winter,
Burying everything. The white blood cells
Multiply crazily and storm around,
Out of control. The chemotherapy
Hasn't helped much, and it makes my hair fall out.
I know I look a sight, but I don't care.
I care about fewer things; I'm more selective.
It's got so I can't even bring myself
To read through any of your books these days.
It's partly weariness, and partly the fact
That I seem not to care much about the endings,
How things work out, or whether they even do.
What I do instead is sit here by this window
And look out at the trees across the way.
You wouldn't think that was much, but let me tell you,
It keeps me quite intent and occupied.
Now all the leaves are down, you can see the spare,
Delicate structures of the sycamores,
The fine articulation of the beeches.
I have sat here for days studying them,
And I have only just begun to see
What it is that they resemble. One by one,
They stand there like magnificent enlargements
Of the vascular system of the human brain.
Dept. of Famous Victories - I ran out of Samarra puns months ago, so I'll just note that the unraveling of our latest Samarra victory took even a little less time than I anticipated:
Samarra desertions show challenge of training Iraqi recruitsBAGHDAD, Iraq - At least 300 Iraqi soldiers abandoned their 750-man unit after they were deployed to Samarra earlier this month as part of a U.S.-Iraqi operation to retake the militant-controlled city.
says Jim Michaels of USA Today. And Reuters reports that
SAMARRA, Iraq (Reuters) - At least six civilians were killed and 11 U.S. soldiers wounded in clashes in Samarra Wednesday, a northern Iraqi town the U.S. military said it had pacified following an offensive earlier this month.
I can't help but note that Reuters, perhaps skittish after all the second guessing about what terms they use to refer to various Iraqi insurgent factions, seems to have decided to avoid referring to them at all when grammatically possible. The article is full of US troops having "clashes." Who with? They never say. This war truly is a transforming experience, even turning transitive verbs intransitive.
UPDATE: Damn. Looks like Flit beat me to this one. But I don't make you wade through a bunch of stuff about the Canadian submarine fleet to get to the parts about us.
Happy Birthday to . . . me. But also Kevin Drum, my former boss and my current boss' seven-year-old son. And comic book artist/writer Jim Starlin, if memory serves. Blogging will be light, which may make the blog sad, since it has its own Birthday (Thwee!) Thursday.
FamousBirthdays.Net lists a bunch of other folks who will be getting more attention than I, including Evander Holyfield and John LeCarre.
The Truth Revealed - Obviously we've spent a lot of time since the summer obsessed with the question of what really happened back in the early seventies. Now, at last, Science provides an answer:
The NFL Films tape didn't show the collision and didn't show the ball striking either player. But by slowing the tape, Fetkovich could see that the ball had already rebounded by the time the collision occurred."That's critical," he said, because if the two collided before the ball hit, they would have already exchanged momentum and made the analysis more difficult. But since the ball hit a player before the collision, then only that player's momentum would have been transferred to the ball.
Tatum was running upfield. If the ball hit him, "Tatum would have added a good deal of momentum [to the ball] in the upfield direction," Fetkovich explained, much as a baseball player adds momentum to a baseball by swinging his bat at a pitch.
By contrast, Fuqua was running across and down the field, with his left arm outstretched to catch the ball. If the ball hit him, he likely wouldn't have added any momentum to the ball, both because he was moving roughly in the same direction as the ball and because the ball likely would have hit him in the arm.
So a rebound off of Fuqua would have been, in baseball terms, a bunt.
And there you have it: the very universe declares that the Immaculate Reception was a righteous touchdown, just as those of us from Western Pennsylvania always told you. Go and vote accordingly.
Halfway There - Alan Sullivan allows that, No, Iraq War Phases III and IV haven't made the US safer "Yet," but asserts
But Iraq is. The number dying there in the current unrest is a miniscule fraction of the number who died under Saddam. There were no cameras in Abu Ghraib, then.
I suspect he's doing something here that other hawks have done with numbers - you see claims that Iraqis are better off than they were before the invasion and occupation phases of the war because "Saddam killed 200,000 Iraqis a year" or some such figure, whereas "only [whatever number of Iraqi civilian casualties a particular hawk will concede] have died" since the balloon went up in March 2003.
The problem with this comparison, quantitative or qualitative, is it obscures what Iraq has been like recently - it ascribes to Saddam every dead Iraqi in the Iran-Iraq War, Phase I and II of the war with the US (the Kuwait expulsion and sanctions phases), the Kurdish rebellions during the Iran-Iraq War and the Shi'ite rebellion we instigated at the close of Iraq War Phase I, plus all the police-state murders of political opponents and the lethal thuggery of one of the planet's more violent kleptocracies. For all I know, the 500,000 debunked Iraqi child victims of sanctions are in there somewhere, only on Saddam's ledger rather than ours.
Let's be clear: all of the above are fine reasons for Saddam to burn in hell. But the lifetime average doesn't provide any useful picture of what Iraqi life was like in the latter days of the Baath regime. The big casualty contributors are, as we say, front-loaded. The Iran-Iraq War dead date to the 19807s; the murdered and merely killed from the Anfal campaign to the same decade; the victims of the Shi'ite suppression to 1991. We know that Iraq remained a thugocracy to the end of Saddam's rule. There's considerable uncertainty how efficient a dictatorship it was, but the place was no Belgium. All the same, I recall reading Kanan Makiya himself saying that the Iraq he described in The Republic of Fear was not the same as the Iraq of the turn of the millenium. Things had settled into a level of oppression neither welcome nor unprecedented. Makiya remained a dedicated foe of the regime and a tireless proponent of its overthrow and who can blame him? As an Iraqi, Makiya had no duty to be miserly with American blood and treasure. But I'd very much like to see statistics on things like extra-judicial killings for the last five years of Saddam's regime. It would give a truer picture of what Iraqis are comparing their current experience to than deaths from wars and civil wars amortized across the decades. Have fewer Iraqi civilians died in the 19 monts of invasion, occupation and interim regime than died in the last 19 months of Baathism?
(Or the first 19 months. There's a chance, after all, that we're just getting warmed up. Our "Peace Through Strength and Killing Foreigners" contingent already believes we've killed too few Iraqis; that we need to show them the Iron Fist of Love. If the feared civil war breaks out it will test our hawks' civility most sorely.)
The "amortized oppression" model probably obscures rather than clarifies our understanding of the ordinary Iraqi perspective. It also confuses the distinction between "humanitarian intervention as retribution" (for past sins) and humanitarian intervention as pressing need (from ongoing depredation). My suspicion is that, in terms of continuing slaughter, the Iraq of 2002-3 was far less dire than a number of other hellholes, Sudan and Zimbabwe coming first to mind. The Iraqi people of 2002-3 were at least as badly off as the people of Egypt or Syria or Yemen in terms of civil liberties and state oppression. Vastly worse off? I think it would be hard to make that case.
Cavett Emptor - Gary Farber has a very good, fair-minded and rational analysis of the famous John Kerry-John O'Neill debate on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971. I understand there's some interest in that kind of thing.
Dept. of Ne'er So Well-Express'd - The Putinization of American Life. Pass it on.
The Iron Dream - Another monument in Utopia:
The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
From "Without a Doubt," by Ron Suskind. (Via Yglesias.)