Road Trip Report

Forthcoming... as soon as Blogger and the local network connection stop misbehaving....

News noted

* Lawyer tries "D&D Defense" (ICV2.com)

* When North Korea Falls (Robert D. Kaplan, in The Atlantic)

* GOP and Man at Yale (Daniel McCarthy, in The American Conservative).

The intellectual dexterity that once distinguished campus conservatives has given way to mindless Republican boosterism.... The time when Young Americans for Freedom wore badges blazoned with the slogan “Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton” has long passed. Now College Republicans parade in shirts proclaiming “George W. Bush Is My Homeboy.”

I'd suggest that this is the result of conservatives' uncontested dominance of all three branches of the government, plus the existence of conservative-blinkered media channels which permit those of a conservative bent to take their positions for granted, as self-evident truths which need no logical or evidentiary justification. The college conservative of 1960 needed to intellectually justify his dissent from many of those around him; the college conservative of today may have grown up getting all his (or her) news from conservative-friendly media mills in which the ideas such as "the free market automatically solves all problems" or "homosexuality is intrinsically wrong" are assumed to be self-evident at such a fundamental level that they need not even be stated, much less defended. Any contrary ideas from college faculty can safely be dismissed as "campus liberalism", and thus need not be taken seriously. And mindless boosterism is really all that is required for the go-along-to-get-along style of networking that rising young stars in business and politics gravitate toward. In fact, a too-intellectual disposition, prone to asking awkward questions and taking inconvenient stands on principle, is not particularly useful when dealing with a dominant establishment of any kind.

Perhaps it's inevitable that every movement which attains dominance thus becomes intellectually lazy.

On the road again

So here I am busily blogging away from the lovely campus of Mizzou U. After a frantic day finishing a contest submission yesterday, went to sleep at 11 pm with alarm set for 2 am to beat Chicago rush hour traffic and get to Mizzou U. and spend the afternoon pestering the good folks at the Western Historical Manuscripts Collection.

Woke up, amazingly.

Driving at 3 am is a somewhat surreal experience, but you don't have to share the road. Not much, anyway. Who are those other people out driving at 3 am, anyway?

Ah, the joys of early morning radio! Learned about the improbable evolution of bees and the discovery of the fossilized head of a prehistoric 9-foot-tall carnivorous Terror-Bird from BBC World Service. Very glad that 9-foot-tall carnivorous Terror Birds are extinct.

Heard Jimmy Swaggart give master class in evangelistic emoting. Good exegesis of story of Hosea, but some overuse of the rhetorical trope of repeating everything three times. Lambasting of homosexuals, psychologists, etc. I don't know where the tirade about not kissing the Pope's big toe came from. Then he's off on some tangent about the perfection of the body that Jesus sacrificed on the cross. He seems really, really interested in the perfection of Jesus's body. Right after ranting about homosexuals. Maybe he needs a psychologist.

And then he's gone (Hallelujah! Can I get an amen!). Replaced by James Dobson discussing pornography in a very earnest voice, and various stations playing Christian rock. If aliens are listening to our radio programs in the early morning, they must think we're very pious. One program had a kids-only Bible trivia call-in show. At 7:30 am.

Other radio alternatives: soybean price report. Extended commercial about genetically pure corn seeds. Oldies station that played "Morning Has Broken" just as eastern sky began to slowly shade into blue somewhere in mid-Illinois.

Also heard the final chapters in the tale of Uhtred, about which more later.

Was immensely amused at driving from Michigan to Missouri by way of Louisiana and Mexico. Perhaps I will also go to Nevada?

Spent afternoon at WHMC. Picked jaw up off of floor after opening first archival folder and seeing original operational data for a defunct railroad that I and another railfan have been trying to reconstruct from scattered scraps of inconsistent data for the last six months. Laughed involuntarily when one of the telegraph flimsies had the words "go to sleep now" scrawled on it in 1926 handwriting. Archival staff member looked at me funny.

Ordered many photocopies. May now be worlds second leading authority on a long-defunct railroad that only two or three people care about.

Got distracted by all kinds of fun index entries about abstruse topics. Those who think that the surreal early-day train trip depicted in Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality is somewhat exaggerated, take note:

Houck's railroads were never model lines, either in construction or equipment.... The road was known locally as the "peavine" because it was so crooked, and sometimes for days at a time there would be no trains, because the one engine and coach would jump the track. IN fact, we were passengers on the train in some instances when this occurrence would take place. At one place just south of Benton Houck had felled two trees and laid them across a small creek, building his track on this structure instead of the regulation trestle. This caused the track to rise up in order to get on the trestle, and we recall the warning which the conductor always gave the passengers: "Look out, she's going to jump!" in order that they might prepare themselves for the sudden change in the level of the roadbed." - Missouri Historical Review, v. 21 (1926-1927), p. 133

Just how firmly the columnist's tongue was planted in his cheek may remain forever unknown.

Accumulated many citations which will keep interlibrary loan department busy busy busy in future weeks.

Paused for a pensive moment and a photograph with one of Mizzou's most famous alumni. But you'll have to wait to see who it was, for the night has come, and Motel 6 awaits with open arms.

Too busy to read?

Six words.

News noted

Put down the Vegemite, and back away slowly!

Making connections (from whole cloth)

A Collision of Prose and Politics (from the Chronicle of Higher Ed.)

A professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia accuses Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, of saying nasty things about the Iranian regime because she's "a prop for American imperialism", "reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India", "the personification of the native informer and colonial agent, polishing her services for an American version of the same project."

His insistence that anyone who fails to sing the praises of current Iranian cultural practices (such as raping teenage girls so that they can beheaded, hanged, or shot the following day without violating a Koranic rule against executing virgins) is therefore a tool of the big bad CIA is no more convincing that the shrieking of the right-wing US pundits that anyone who fails to vote straight-ticket Republican is an "enemy of America".

Believe it or not, some people do observe and comment on matters of culture and literature and yes, even politics, for their own sake, not for the sake of promoting some political faction's nefarious schemes. Pretending that they do so only to serve a political paymaster is a cheap and shoddy rhetorical trick, usually resorted to by people who have some other agenda to promote, but don't have the evidence or the logic to directly criticize the target of their attack. And so they paint an invented connection between that target and some conveniently despised straw man. It's sort of like using Photoshop to insert Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin into a photo of someone you dislike, and then pretending that the obloquy deserved by one should therefore be transferred to the other.

As it happens, Mr. Dabashi's real complaint seems to be Ms. Nafisi's choice of reading matter. Or, as he puts it, "seeking to recycle a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire." (I think I must be missing something. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vladimir Nabokov, sinister propaganda agents of the CIA?)

In other words, she failed to make her students read books in HIS area of academic specialty. Boo hoo. If applied here in the US, his insistence that teaching literature from other cultures amounts to hostile political propaganda would result in, well, the elimination of his own job.

Isn't this a matter better suited for bitch-sessions around the faculty lounge, rather than a purportedly serious publication?

Two views of freedom and God

Islam and the western world have very different definitions of freedom, says Rebecca Bynum in a recent issue of the New English Review.

Freedom : True and False

"Freedom is a word invoked constantly in America as a descriptive term for self-government and the concept of sovereignty of the people...

Less understood is the fact that the mujahadeen are also fighting for freedom, but a freedom very differently defined. According to the Muslim philisopher Sayyid Qutb,

This din [religion] is a universal declaration of the freedom of man from slavery to other men and to his own desires, which is also a form of human servitude. It is a declaration that the sovereignty belongs only to Allah, the Lord of all the worlds. It challenges all such systems based on the sovereignty of man, i.e., where man attempts to usurp the attribute of Divine sovereignty. Any system in which final decisions are refered to human beings, and in which the source of all authority are men, deifies human beings by designating others than Allah as lords over men. (Milestones p. 47)

In Islamic terms, the western concept of political sovereignty resting with the people is a form of idolatry....

One way to look at this is to see it as a contrast between permissive freedom and prescriptive freedom.

In one definition, freedom means the absence of restraints, the ability to choose rightly or wrongly or anywhere in between. In the other, freedom means the ability to live in a certain prescribed way, most particularly the absence of any restraints which would keep one from following that prescribed way and steering others toward it. Thus concepts like Constitutional restrictions against government involvement in religion are good only when they permit Islam to exist in an otherwise hostile environment, but bad when they prevent Islam from dominating an environment over which it has the opportunity to exert control.

Of course, Islam is not the only religious tradition to make this argument. Some occasional readers of this blog will no doubt remember, more clearly than I, the long-running philosophical and theological arguments over whether human beings should have the freedom to choose "wrongly", which consumed so many reams of paper -- and occasionally consumed human lives -- during the European Enlightenment. These arguments continue in some forums to this day.

Another way to see this difference is to see it as a clash of priorities.

The "permissive freedom" worldview places the highest value on individuals' power of making choices, and the benefits that individuals can derive from those choicess. Restrictions on those choices are justified in terms of what effect one person's actions have on another person, not on the basis of obedience to a certain pattern of behavior. Such systems can be either exploitative, in which people with secular authority seek to expand their own freedom and benefits at the expense of others, or egalitarian, in which there's an attempt to establish an set of commonly-accepted rules that protect the freedom of all in the society.

The "prescriptive freedom" worldview, by contrast, places the highest value on obedience, whether or not individuals choose it voluntarily, and whether or not they benefit from it. (There's a secular mode of this worldview, as well as a theistic one, but it's outside the scope of this essay.) Therefore the Islamist Qutb disavows all "system[s] in which final decisions are referred to human beings, and in which the source of all authority [is] men." Note that even the arch-theist does not expect God/Allah to personally and visibly intervene in every controversy. Hence the careful wording which logically steers the reader toward an endorsement of systems run by human beings who attribute their source of authority to some source other than men, i.e., rule by clergy. (In practice, the latter effectively means "rule according to the wishes of the religious faction currently in power" -- but, again, that's outside the scope of this essay.)

Does this mean that all who believe in the western version of permissive freedom are therefore obliged to disavow belief in God or in any sense of right or wrong that has more than temporal (and, hence, temporary) authority? And that anyone who believes, truly believes, in a God with moral standards must advocate theocratic absolutism and seek to compel others' obedience to those moral standards in order to properly honor that God, on pain of being labelled a hypocrite?

Theocrats like Qutb would argue that this is the case.

However, one of the key concepts of post-Enlightenment Christianity is that a belief in permissive freedom in secular government and a belief in a moral God are not mutually contradictory. That the creator's endowment of human beings with free will was not an unfortunate accident, but an intentional part of the design. Obedience to principles of right and wrong is desired, of course, but it's even more important that human beings have the opportunity to accept that obedience without compulsion. Only obedience from a person who could have done otherwise truly honors God. Otherwise, it has no value.

To put this in terms of priorities, obedience to God's will is placed at the top of the list, but the human freedom to make moral and spiritual choices is, itself, part of that will. Thus secular governments are, by God's will, limited to regulating only secular matters. To do more, to compel obedience in religious matters, would be to blasphemously assert an authority which God himself chose not to exert.

If the creator had intended human beings to have no choices other than the right one, there would have been no serpent in the garden of Eden, nor any tree from which humans could pluck the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil.

And thus it is that Christians can endorse both a permissive definition of freedom, in the secular world, and obedience to God. One is necessary in order for the second to have any value.

Recent viewings

The Grudge (2004). A stylish but vacuous horror thriller.

The intro to the film tells us, in typically portentous horror-movie style, the "when someone dies in the grip of a powerful rage... a curse is born. The curse gathers in that place of death. Those who encounter it will be consumed by its fury." Apparently this means that anyone who subsequently comes in contact with the site of the death is doomed to a horrible death at the hands of gray-skinned revenants with 80s-style raccoon-eyes mascara who follow the unfortunate visitor around, materializing and dematerializing at will.

The film does not explain, precisely, why one specific house in Tokyo is afflicted with such revenants as a result of one specific violent death, while the trailer parks of rural slums, the crack-ridden housing projects of the inner city, and other violence-ridden locales remain free of spooky gray-skinned ghosts with raccoon mascara.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is attractive as always, but appears curiously expressionless in her role as the visiting American nurse who is bedevilled by the creepy revenants. This flat affect was highly effective in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where it served alternately as comical irony, in the show's lighter moments, or an indication of her character's growing alienation from the world around her in the later and more "angsty" episodes. It doesn't work so well in a genre which, by definition, is intended to portray terrifying events and provoke a similar, sympathetic emotional response in the viewer.

The director's repertoire of special effects and suspense-building techniques, plus a few genuinely startling visual images, make for some effective jump-inducing moments. But on the whole The Grudge doesn't inspire me to go see its sequel.

The minimalist approach

I am writing to inform you that the position of Reference Librarian (position number) has been filled. Thank you for applying for this position.

Best wishes for success in your future endeavors.

Recent reads

Ghost, by John Ringo.

This is quite simply the most repulsive book I've read in years.

It begins as a standard military action-thriller, with an honorably-discharged military vet stumbling across an apparent kidnapping and getting involved. From shortly after page one, though, the story spins rapidly into a very unpleasant Wackyland. It would be hilariously inept if it weren't so fundamentally revolting.

You see, these unimaginatively stereotyped Middle-Eastern terrorists aren't just kidnapping a cute American co-ed off the streets of a college towns in order to commit garden-variety crimes like rape, murder, or hostage-taking. Oh no. They're kidnapping HUNDREDS of cute American co-eds, then drugging them with sedatives, stripping them naked, occasionally raping them, and packing them in boxes to ship to the Middle East in giant cargo aircraft.

Yup.

No one seems to notice this going on except for Our Hero. Eventually The Authorities are called in, but of course the American military can't do anything about it, despite the woodenly heroic posturing of the author's thinly-disguised Bush and Rumsfeld analogues.

Oh no. This is a job for one man. Our Hero!

And so Our Hero stows away in the wheelwell of the Concubines-R-Us Express, survives depressurization and the subarctic cold of high altitudes, and then sneaks into the terrorist's secret base, where Osama bin Laden and the president of Syria sit around in a glass-walled control room chortling with glee while their bearded minions force all the naked American coeds to sit naked in regimented formation, chained to chairs, while watching other naked American coeds be tortured, disembowelled and dismembered. Yes, the author does mention repeatedly that they are naked. Naked naked naked. He seems to have a thing about naked young girls in chains being tortured and killed.

And so, he informs us, does Our Hero....

Meanwhile, Our Hero slaughters Osama bin Laden, the president of Syria, and several dozen interchangable extras who happened to wander onto the set. Then he hands out guns and ammunition and grenades to the more capable of the naked coeds so that they can run around nakedly shooting at the Evil Terrorists. First, though, he orders them to respond only to the new names that he's giving them. The author, in a rare moment of tenderness, describes how much Our Hero enjoys the sight of blonde "Bambi" bending over (yes, yes, naked) to pick up a box of ammunition.

And then, just when you think it can't possibly get any sillier or more exploitative, Our Hero orders all the women to vote Republican for the rest of their lives in return for being rescued.

As Dave Barry says, I Am Not Making This Up. I'm not that creative.

In due course, the rest of the military catches up to Our Hero and rescues everybody. A happy ending! But wait a minute, we're only a third of the way through the book....

There follows an extended interlude in which we learn that Our Hero has been supplied with a yacht, a mooring berth on the Gulf coast, an extended vacation at the expense of the government, and, oh by the way, a stateroom full of thousands of dollars worth of state-of-the-art weaponry. This is apparently so he'll be handy in case someone tries to do some terrorist stuff in the Gulf of Mexico. In between fishing trips, Our Hero cruises the singles bars along the coast, where he picks up a couple of cute co-eds, one brunette, one blonde. Over the course of several leisurely, descriptive chapters, he introduces them to the joys of sexual slavery. When one of the young cuties calls up her parents before going away for a fun-filled Caribbean holiday of humiliation, exhibitionism, and group sex, her mother cheerfully tells her things like "There is a terrible glory in a good whipping" and expresses an interest in doing a mother-daughter "scene" with her daughter's new "master". The other student's mother responds the same way.

Um, what parent wouldn't?

At a certain point, I must admit that I lost interest in what little plot there was, and started skimming the book solely for the purpose of writing this review. The book consists of alternating "military" sections of sadistic violence, in which dozens of nonentities with Middle Eastern names are introduced only so they can be graphically slaughtered by Our Hero within one page, and lingering "sex" interludes in which young women are introduced only so they can be happily fucked, degraded, and "enslaved" by Our Hero. Most of the women enjoy it immensely, of course, since Our Hero helpfully informs us that over 50% of women secretly desire to be raped and beaten.

In a later chapter, the reader is treated to a pornographically detailed desciption of how Our Hero buys an Eastern European prostitute from her pimp and bludgeons her to a bloody pulp in the course of an evening's indulgence. There's no suggestion there that the woman is enjoying her "exploration of submission". But Our Hero doesn't seem to have time to notice such things, since by morning he's off mowing down Evil Terrorists again. Ho hum, all in a day's work. The book closes with Our Hero bitterly complaining about society's failure to properly appreciate him.

No, I'm not making that up, either.

The author introduces this smorgasbord of pornographic pandering with a heavy-duty quote from George Orwell: "People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." Apparently this is supposed to prepare us to believe that in order to be protected from one set of scary evildoers, we are obliged to approve of the type of "rough man" whom he portrays as his hero. Perhaps if one wanted to find "redeeming social merit"' in the book, one could see the "hero"'s progression from violence while surrounded by naked girls, to consensual sadomasochistic sex, to outright brutalization of prostitutes, as a cautionary tale. But why bother constructing these airy academic theories? Here's what the author has to say about his Great Work, taken from the CD of textfiles that accompanies it:

It is not PC. It is not PG-13. It is not understated. It is a raw, bawdy, kinky, violent, over-the-top story of an ex-SEAL who is approaching life, love and the pursuit of bad-guys with no-holds-barred. James Bond without the bedroom door closing. Dirk Pitt meets Harold Robbins. Jean Auel writes a Mack Bolan book. With details. Kinky, kinky details.

Doesn't sound like a "cautionary" tale or serious social commentary to me. Sounds more like the author is getting his thrills and vicariously fulfilling some psychopathic, misogynistic fantasies. The dedication to his dog "for not getting too upset when I'd make weird hand movements like I was shooting or something" further reinforces this view. Ghost is sadomasochistic porn, pure and simple. And that's the only market for which it would be possible to ever recommend this book.

Recent reads

The Last Pink Bits, by Harry Ritchie. Ritchie, a former literary editor for The Sunday Times, takes the reader along on a madcap, disjointed tour of those far-flung colonial outposts that the British Empire had not yet managed to discard as of 1997.

This includes not only places of strategic importance like Gibraltar and sites of recent military conflict such as the Falkland Islands, but tiny specks of land like Tristan de Cunha, so far from continental shores and oceanic trade routes that its inhabitants' sole contact with the outside world comes from the BBC World Service radio and a twice-a-year supply boat. Fiend might enjoy his description of the Caribbean Turks and Caicos islands, where the local economy seems to be stuck in a perpetual state of slightly seedy, pleasantly lazy bemusement. (Did anything further ever come of the 2004 proposal that Canada annex the islands? A desultory search of GoogleNews doesn't reveal any recent articles on the subject....)

Ritchie is a tourist and a newspaperman, not a historian or anthropologist, so it's no surprise that his portrayal of these tiny outposts and their inhabitants is sometimes arch and frivolous. But he does provide an entertaining, if somewhat shallow, look at life in a collection of places that are completely unknown to most of the world.

Recent reads

A Catskill Eagle, by Robert B. Parker. The 12th installment in the continuing saga of Boston private detective Spenser, published in 1985, opens with a quotation from Henry David Thoreau:

And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he forever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest sweep the mountain eagle is still higher than the other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.

Something a bit darker than the usual private-eye caper is going on here. The Catskill eagle, obviously, is a metaphor for Spenser himself, and he's about to dive into some very dark gorges indeed.

"It was nearly midnight...." (p. 1) Spenser's lost his lover and emotional touchstone, Susan, who has left him to begin a new relationship with a man she met while interning in Washington DC. ("Control has been an issue....") He's still competently "detecting", halfheartedly following embezzlers to their lunch appointments, but without much verve.

When he receives a desperate, pleading letter from Susan, we get to see a hint of what a Spenser with no ethical principles might be like. It's not a pretty sight as Spenser and Hawk leave a trail of intimidation, brutality, and even murder and assassination across the country while searching for her. But through all the carnage, despite even the dangerous idea of the Nieztschian ubermensch that is called up by the "Catskill eagle" quotation, Parker still manages to portray Spenser as being fundamentally good, a paladin of destruction who commits atrocious acts because it's the only way to protect the woman he loves. His usual ethical principles are, if not broken, definitely bent in the process.

It's all a matter of priorities, I suppose. And absolute personal loyalty, once granted, can force even a high-flying ubermensch to dive into some pretty dark gorges.

Recent reads

The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham. This 1951 end-of-the-earth tale is widely considered a classic. I found it disappointing.

Part of the disappointment results from the fact that the author's chosen antagonists, the carnivorous plants known as triffids, are so slow-moving and predictable that the only way he could justify them being a threat to humanity was to introduce an entirely unrelated catastrophe: a mysterious green meteor-shower which inexplicably blinds everybody who views its light. The narrator is one of the few human beings who missed out on seeing the celestial event and thus retained his eyesight.

No, the evil meteor shower isn't explained. Ever.

I suppose there is a moral here about the potential dangers of bioengineered creatures, since it's speculated that the triffids are probably the work of those pesky Russians and their amoral scientists. The conflicts and struggles that our small band of survivors go through as they try to find safe places to live and defend themselves against both the triffids and other groups of survivors, are moderately interesting, somewhat like Terry Nations' unfortunately forgotten television series Survivors. But the buildup is simply so implausible that it's impossible to take the story seriously.

Recent reads

Balshazzar's Serpent, by Jack L. Chalker. Space opera from a long-time master of the craft. It's the first book in a series of three. According to his website and Wikipedia, this series is the last long fiction he completed and published before his death in Feburary of 2005.

Although it's clear from the title that the planet Balshazzar will eventually be centrally important to the story, most of this first volume is devoted to the trials and tribulations of one Doctor Karl Woodward, a spacegoing evangelist, and his missionary crew. Woodward's starship, The Mountain, travels from world to world seeking to spread the word of God. The cultures that his crew of missionaries encounter are scattered fragments of an advanced civilization that has disintegrated due to the mysterious disappearance of all contact with Earth and the rest of its central, governing, industrialized core. Religion is one of the only threads that still binds humanity together, and sometimes it's a mighty thin thread. Occasional unsuccessful missions are expected, and The Mountain and its earnest acolytes go forth well able to defend themselves should the necessity arise.

It's notable to see a Christian evangelist portrayed favorably in a science-fictional setting, although religious themes are secondary to a fairly conventional exploration-and-conflict narrative through most of the story.

As the story opens, Woodward and his crew make contact with a previously uncharted populated world. Tentative first contact leads gradually into suspicion, intrigue, and conflict as it becomes clear that there's more to the planet and its population than is immediately apparent. Most of the book is devoted to plotting the course of this conflict. Occasional hints are dropped about a legendary set of three planets once found by an interstellar scout, but since lost. It should come as no surprise when, near the end of the novel, information regarding the location of the legendary "Three Kings" is discovered, and our intrepid evangelist sets course toward them. Unfortunately, the missionaries' discovery of the lost "Three Kings" system of planets is given short shrift. I presume that their landing on Balshazzar, the most apparently Earthlike of the three, is intended to lead to further adventures and revelations in succeeding volumes.

The plot device of multiple planets in an unusual orbit, each holding some unique hazard or secret, is of course familiar to anyone who's read Chalker's Four Lords of the Diamond series (1981-1983). However, my biggest objection to the book is not the duplication of this plot device, but the fact that the mysteries of Balshazzar -- the "serpent" of the title -- are overshadowed by the long-drawn-out space-opera conflicts that lead up to its discovery. The "serpent" itself, when it finally makes an appearance, is rather underwhelming. As the book ends, a contest of sorts is proposed, with some parallels to Biblical precendent. But there the book ends, and we don't find out anything more about it. Presumably the "serpent" of Balshazzar, and the way that Woodward's missionary crew deal with it and the other hazards of colonization, will be addressed more fully in subsequent volumes.

The story's exciting and competently told, but the bulk of the story is not what the title would lead one to expect, and the ending is weak. Perhaps the book should have been titled Finding Balshazzar, to more accurately reflect the true focus of the narrative.

Fantagraphics responds

... to the washed-up has-been who recently sued them for saying things he didn't like. Text of response here; discussion here.

Riverbend's back!

... with a post discussing the Johns Hopkins/Lancet study on war-related Iraqi deaths. There is great rejoicing on DailyKos and elsewhere as fears for her safety are allayed.

It must be strange -- both exhilarating and intimidating -- to have so many people around the world hanging on one's words while living in the middle of a violently disturbed society in which one's own safety may very well depend on being, and remaining, anonymous. Lapsing into long silences is an understandable response. What would you do, if you were an educated, modern, twenty-something woman in today's Iraq?

Although bright and knowledgeable as ever, it seems to me she sounds a bit weary and depressed. Not only weary of living with the deadly dangers and constant small annoyances of a country wracked by invasion and civil war, but of reading the self-promoting internet pundits who pontificate about the horrors and tragedies taking place in her backyard as dispassionately as they might discuss the weather or the latest stock market reports. And perhaps weary of the stress and responsibility of being regarded as representative of an entire culture.

As Billmon over at the Whiskey Bar points out, many of us on this side of the great divide must look into the mirror of her allusions to internet pundits and see some hint of ourselves. And, in the process, contemplate our own complicity in the crimes of our government.

Perhaps we voted against Bush. Perhaps we've whined and bitched online. Is that enough?

If the November elections on Diebold machines inexplicably yield Republican "victories" despite overwhelming opposition in nonpartisan exit polls, and Bush proclaims this as a "mandate" for yet more disastrous adventures, what will be "enough" then?

It's wonderful to know that Riverbend, whoever she is, has not become a casualty of Bush's cynical war. I hope that one day she will be able to write freely and casually and openly about recipes, or music, or books, or computers, or politics, or whatever takes her fancy, without cause for fear. About family gossip, or friends' escapades, or silly jokes, or some circumstances happier than present ones. Or choose not to write if she prefers, without giving rise to fears that such silence portends disaster.

On justice and atrocity

It's impossible to call this a "good" thing. But it's necessary.

The atrocities described are not something that most of us want to read about or even think about. They sound like the actions of horror-movie psychopaths, but they are in fact the actions of US troops who decided to rape a teenage girl, murder her and her parents and her five-year-old sister, and then mutilate and burn her corpse.

We don't want to think about what it would have been like to be that girl, or to be a friend or relative of hers and know what was done to her and her family. But we have to. Because we paid them, we trained them, we sent them to Iraq, and the friends and neighbors of that girl and her family see them as just one more extension of us.

Some conservative commentators of the "little green football" variety jabber that US soldiers shouldn't be held accountable for raping and murdering civilians. That they should be allowed to rape any "Hadji Girls" they can catch, and gleefully spray machine-gun bullets in all directions at anyone who they can successfully murder, like some sick parody of a violent adolescent power-fantasy. I suggest that such commentators place themselves at the disposal of the nearest hostile military force that behaves in the way they prescribe. The US military is held to a standard of behavior and honorable discipline higher than that of murderous barbarians, just as the US government is held to a standard of Constitutional behavior higher than that of tinpot dictators or totalitarian Communist regimes, and for very similar reasons. When it fails to meet those standards, at Abu Graihb or Guantanamo Bay or anywhere else, it becomes a clear and present danger not only to innocent foreign civilians near its theater of operations, but to all civilized society, including that of the United States.

But even if these psychos are isolated aberrations from a military that mostly adheres to higher standards, it's disgusting to think that they were recruited, trained, and paid with my tax dollars. Not only are their actions in Iraq hideous to contemplate, but like the author of this article, I wonder if we're creating more such creatures to be turned loose on ourselves when they're discharged from military service into civilian society, like Timothy McVeigh.

I'm glad that they're being put on trial, and I'm glad that it's public. For a while after the initial reports surfaced, I feared that the military might try to cover up this atrocity. From the tone of the CNN article, it seems that the evidence against them is strong. The article states that two of the soldiers could face the death penalty. The gallows or the firing squad would be an appropriate fate for the main instigators. Murder is murder. And the same goes for the three soldiers mentioned in connection with a separate case near the bottom of the CNN article, if they're proven guilty, and any other soldier who disgraces the country in like fashion.

The revolting Abu Graibh scandal -- and the possibility that similarly disgusting things are going on in other US facilities -- have badly damaged both America's reputation abroad and America's own sense of itself as a nation with ethical principles. It's possible -- likely -- that these soldiers were encouraged in their twisted sadism by the sense that there are no moral standards for their behavior, that anything goes. The ethical free-fall has to stop somewhere with a resoundingly public example, and this is where it has to stop. The soldiers involved, and any officers who knew of their actions and failed to stop them, or seek disciplinary action against them after the fact, should be made a very public example. If this isn't hitting bottom, then there is no bottom.

RELATED NOTE: Commentary about the way that the way the US media has treated two different murders of two different girls.

This is just what we need...

The Boston Globe reports that leading officials of the Mormon church are actively organizing a network of Mormon business-school alumni and "prominent Mormons" to "help [Mitt] Romney capture the presidency in 2008." Romney is a Mormon, rich, and (surprise, surprise) a Republican who's well known for his anti-homosexual rhetoric. He's also governor of Massachusetts, although the residents of that state seem to feel that he's rather neglecting them lately. (Apparently he has more important things than them on his mind.)

Always taking the side of freedom's enemies, the radical fundamentalists of the religious right have their tentacles everywhere.... oh, I forgot. Only the ACLU is "radical" and has "tentacles". These here are just kindhearted religious folk who want to help the US government show us all the ONE TRUE PATH THAT GOD HAS ORDAINED FOR HIS CHILDREN.

The church claims that its support of Republican Romney's political campaign is neutral and nonpartisan.

It seems unlikely that the Republican-controlled IRS will choose to investigate the Mormon church's tax-exempt status, no matter how blatantly it campaigns for partisan political candidates. After all, it's not as if they were advocating peace on earth, goodwill to men or some other subversive, America-hating treason like that.

Related story: The Houston Chronicle ponders whether evangelical-Christian theocrats will vote for a Mormon theocrat.

An improvement

Thank you for expressing interest in the Public Services Librarian position at (...) University. We received many applications for the position representing candidates with excellent qualifications. After much consideration by our search committee, we selected a candidate with extensive circulation and course reserves management expertise.

This one at least supplies a sensible and non-humiliating reason for their choice.

I wonder. Is there a market for reviewers of rejection letters?

Liberals hate America, yada yada yada.

From the current issue of National Review:

"John Kerry has spent a career taking the side of America's enemies...."
(Investor's Business Daily advertisement, p. 33)

"Always taking the side of America's enemies, the radical lawyers of the ACLU have their tentacles everywhere...." (ibid.)

"Of the making of conspiracies to undermine the political well-being of the United States, it seems, there is to be no end...." (Review of Damon Linker's The Theocons : Secular America Under Siege, p. 53)

When the only argument left to a political party is to shriek over and over again that anyone who disagrees with it HATES AMERICA!!!!, without offering any kind of support for that slander, it's a pretty sure sign that they have no logical or factual arguments left standing. Nothing but hatred, the rolling of eyes, the pounding of shoes on podiums, the spewing of spittle.

Will National Review next inform us that liberals are planning to ritually sacrifice American children to Satan so that they can make matzoh-bread with their blood?