September 11

Eight years later.

2,974 dead.

Khalid Sheikh Muhammad still not tried.

Osama bin Laden still loose.

Damn.

Romanticism and capitalism

It's a little odd, after ten years of marriage, to peruse one's bookshelves in vain for the Library of America volume of Whitman that you know you got for (temporarily) subscribing (along with their Emerson and Thoreau, which you find sitting snug in their slipcovers) ... and suddenly remembering that, for reasons of alleged fairness that you can't quite recall in detail, you gave that LOA volume to your ex-girlfriend in the post-breakup allocation of worldly goods, a fact that had slipped your mind for a good decade.

It also tells you how little time you spend reading Whitman.

Anyway, Amazon to the rescue, and I was reading back through "Song of Myself," which seems like a love poem to the entire country. But not *quite* the whole country. Walt does not seem to have much love for the merchant class.

He takes it as self-evidently absurd that one should "cipher and show me to a cent, /
Exactly the value of one and exactly the value of two, and which is ahead." Buying and selling, dollars and cents, do not figure much. There are a great many people working, and presumably selling those goods and services, but I don't find much love for merchants per se.

This would make for an amusingly indignant post at the Volokh blog or somesuch, but it occurs to me that, assuming we can infer any antipathy from this omission in "Song of Myself" (and I am much too ignorant of Whitman's poetic corpus to make any broader generalization), the omission is a meaningful one.

If anything's clear from "Song," it's that Whitman allows exactly one person to place a value upon himself, and that person is Walt Whitman. The Romantic poet's self is intrinsically valuable.

Whereas it's fundamental to capitalism that the value of something is its exchange value, what someone else will give you for it. Value is external to the object.

Hence, alienation. Marx was a Romantic economist in this respect.

Now, we can get one more turn of the screw here, if we notice that there are two very important words in "Song," one of which is "I" and the second, "you"; much of the intimacy and power of the poem comes from this insistence upon "you." "I" and "you" are the first and last words of the poem, surely by design, and "you" indeed does not take long to appear in the first lines:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

* * *

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

There in the first verse we find the rejection of ownership/property -- "I" and "you" are deconstructed all throughout "Song of Myself" as a fundamentally flawed distinction which, nonetheless, pervades and haunts the poem. It does not seem too much to suppose that Whitman cares very much indeed what value "you" places upon "I"; indeed, by his own terms, they ought to be identical, and any difference is outside his philosophy.

Desert island books, as it were

So you've got a lot of time on your hands. Whatcha gonna read? Tom Ricks reports:

The three most popular books at Guantanamo's library for detainees reportedly are:

1. The Harry Potter novels
2. Miguel Cervantes's Don Quixote
3. Barack Obama's Dreams From My Father

I don't know what this means.

It would be helpful to have a list of the books available for comparison's sake. And I presume the absence of the Qur'an is due to its being available to prisoners in their cells.

(Why is it, btw, that we so often fall into calling the prisoners "detainees"? Is Gitmo not a prison? Is the implication that one becomes a prisoner only after being convicted and sentenced?)

Another one bites the dust

TBA is always amused when politicians who drum up support by extolling moral virtues find themselves caught out behaving badly.

We rarely find something *this* droll:

Michael Duvall is a conservative Republican state representative from Orange County, California. While waiting for the start of a legislative hearing in July, the 54-year-old married father of two and family values champion began describing, for the benefit of a colleague seated next to him, his ongoing affairs with two different women. In very graphic detail.

For instance:

She wears little eye-patch underwear. So, the other day she came here with her underwear, Thursday. And so, we had made love Wednesday--a lot! And so she'll, she's all, 'I am going up and down the stairs, and you're dripping out of me!' So messy!

Makes Mark Sanford seem downright reticent. Not to mention, prudent:

Duvall's sophomoric braggadocio, of course, was picked up by the microphone in front of him, and wound up on a tape for the legislature's in-house TV station.

But isn't it wrong to pry into the doings of consenting adults? Apparently not:

As the OC Weekly reports, Duvall has "blasted" efforts to promote gay marriage, and got a 100 percent score from the Capitol Resource Institute, which describes its mission as to "educate, advocate, protect, and defend family-friendly policies in the California state legislature". In March, a spokeswoman for the group called Duvall "a consistent trooper for the conservative causes," adding that "for the last two years, he has voted time and time again to protect and preserve family values in California."

He has resigned, doubtless to pursue other skirts, er, "interests."

"A class of yeowls arose."

I've seen the dumb-lines-from-student-papers bit done before, but it's worth revisiting now and again:

During the Middle Ages, everybody was middle aged. Church and state were co-operatic. Middle Evil society was made up of monks, lords, and surfs. It is unfortunate that we do not have a medivel European laid out on a table before us, ready for dissection. After a revival of infantile commerce slowly creeped into Europe, merchants appeared. Some were sitters and some were drifters. They roamed from town to town exposing themselves and organized big fairies in the countryside. Mideval people were violent. Murder during this period was nothing. Everybody killed someone. England fought numerously for land in France and ended up wining and losing. The Crusades were a series of military expaditions made by Christians seeking to free the holy land (the “Home Town” of Christ) from the Islams.

In the 1400 hundreds most Englishmen were perpendicular. A class of yeowls arose. Finally, Europe caught the Black Death. The bubonic plague is a social disease in the sense that it can be transmitted by intercourse and other etceteras. It was spread from port to port by inflected rats. Victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. The plague also helped the emergance of the English language as the national language of England, France and Italy.

The merchants sound like Cathars.

... The funniest thing a student of mine ever did, back in my salad days as a TA trying to teach Comp 102, was to write a paper on Mary Gaitskill's "Secretary" (a first-person narrative) in which he failed to use quotation marks, or any other device, to set off text from the story. Haven't the paper or the story in front of me, but the effect was rather like this:

The girl in this story is completely crazy in her sex life. I went home and masturbated, thinking about my boss spanking me. This shows how crazy she is.

Wondering whether to give it a D or an F, I gave it to my fellow TA/roommate, who burst into laughter on the first page. From which I inferred The Laugh Test: if your essay makes people laugh at you (and such was not your evident purpose), it's an F.

Cf. "Waldheimer's Disease"

General Richard Myers, who headed the Joint Chiefs of Staff while America began to practice torture as official policy, has written a memoir. Happily, the NYRB gave a copy to Philippe Sands, who had already written about Myers in Torture Team. Sands finds that Myers is not terribly interested in candor:

Myers writes that he supported the Geneva Conventions, arguing that they should apply to the Taliban although they should not get prisoner of war (POW) status. But he also held that "the Geneva Conventions did not apply to al-Qaida." According to Myers this view was shared "by most everybody involved in the discussions."

In fact, the Justice Department decided that the Geneva Conventions did not apply either to the Taliban or to al-Qaeda, and it is not true that either Myers's view or that of the Justice Department was shared by most everybody. Colin Powell's State Department, for example, expressed a contrary opinion. Nor were the views of General Myers and the Justice Department shared by senior military lawyers with knowledge and experience of the Geneva accords. These lawyers were cut out of the decision-making process—a fact on which Myers is silent. The view that Geneva rights did not apply was later rejected by the majority of justices on the Supreme Court: in June 2006 they ruled that all detainees at Guantánamo--Taliban, al-Qaeda, and everyone else--had the minimum rights set forth in Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. It was this decision, unmentioned by General Myers, that caused the collapse of the Bush administration's policies on the treatment of detainees and opened the way to potential criminal liability for abusive interrogations.

Against this background it is surprising that the words "Common Article 3" do not appear anywhere in Myers's book. Common Article 3 makes it clear that there are no legal black holes: it establishes a rule of general application for prisoners captured in an armed military conflict to the effect that no detainee (whether captured in uniform or not) can be treated cruelly or tortured or subjected to outrages against human dignity, in any circumstances.

* * *

Myers does not mention that documents proposing the new interrogation techniques arrived on his desk in late October 2002, from General James T. Hill, the commander of US Southern Command, based in Miami. In an article published in May 2008, I described how Haynes had personally intervened to stop the review process that was initiated by then Captain, now Rear Admiral Jane Dalton, Myers's counsel at the Joint Chiefs, after Myers had passed the documents on to her. During testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in the summer of 2008, Dalton confirmed the accuracy of my piece, but went much further, revealing that she had initiated a "broadbased legal review," sending out General Hill's memo to the various branches of the military.

The responses came quickly. "All of the [four armed] services expressed concerns about the techniques that were listed in the memo," she said. "So, the next step, then, was to proceed with a larger general and policy review, which is what I intended to do."

That never happened: she was told to stop the review. "Exactly how you were told," asked Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, "was it in writing, or was it verbal?" It was not in writing. "The best of my recollection as to how this occurred is that the Chairman [General Myers] called me aside and indicated to me that Mr. Haynes did not want this broadbased review to take place," Dalton said, referring to a brief meeting with Myers. "He called me aside and said, ‘Mr. Haynes does not want this process to proceed.'"

By then serious concerns about interrogation techniques had been expressed by representatives of the four armed services, which were communicated promptly and without ambiguity. The Air Force thought some of the techniques "may constitute criminal conduct," including "torture." The Office of the Army Judge Advocate General thought that many of the techniques violated the provisions against torture and inhumane treatment of the International Criminal Court, warning that the Category II and Category III techniques "will not read well in either The New York Times or The Cairo Times." The Marine Corps said the proposed plan was legally insufficient and "would expose our service members to possible prosecution." The chief legal adviser to the DoD's Criminal Investigation Task Force believed some techniques "may subject service members to punitive articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice." The Navy wanted more detailed interagency legal and policy review.

In the face of such clear opposition to the proposed techniques from each of the armed services, one would have expected General Myers to adopt a firm position. There is no evidence that he did so. It might also be expected that General Myers would explain why he seems to have caved in without a fight. Nowhere does he do this or express regret that it was during his chairmanship that the US military embraced cruelty as an official policy, apparently for the first time since 1863.

Sands also notes some interesting silences by Douglas Feith (no surprise) and by Jack Goldsmith, whose book The Terror Presidency was critical of Addington and others but which was scarcely a tell-all memoir:

Another approach is partial silence, the mode adopted by Jack Goldsmith in a skillfully written but partial account of his time as head of the Office of Legal Counsel, from October 2003 to July 2004. He glosses over his earlier period assisting the Bush administration, from September 2002 when Haynes appointed him as his "Special Counsel" and provided him with "an endless stream of fascinating legal problems," including "Guantánamo detentions." Again, Goldsmith makes no mention of al-Qahtani or Haynes's role in securing Pentagon endorsement for the use of torture in military interrogations, despite the fact that it occurred at the very time he served under Haynes.

Sands notes that Goldsmith supported Haynes's appointment to the federal bench, a nomination which thankfully failed to succeed.

(The "Waldheimer's" joke, which betrays TBA's age I guess, refers to the mental disorder of not being able to remember that you were a Nazi.)

Monday cat-god blogging

You can buy at Target for $4.99 a costume which no normal cat will consent to wear:I had thought that Simon would embrace his African heritage and traditional divinity, but apparently, not so much.

Friday kid blogging

Q. proudly sports his Oxford bookstore shirt, rather than that lazy-ass Jackson bookstore's colors ...This shot inspired by his new interest in photography: "Take a picture, Mommy!"

(N.b. his coaster, a/k/a Space Case by the Marshall bros., whose location is evidently still known; perhaps it won't be the latest missing children's book for which I have to pay $25 to the library. They should name a room after me.)

Gonzales "doesn't recall what he said on Tuesday"

The post title is stolen from Emptywheel, because it can't be improved upon. On Tuesday, the Moonie Times reported:

Former U.S. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales on Tuesday defended the decision of his current successor, Eric H. Holder Jr., to investigate alleged prisoner abuse by CIA interrogators over President Obama's desire to look forward.

"As chief prosecutor of the United States, he should make the decision on his own, based on the facts, then inform the White House," said Mr. Gonzales, who was appointed to the post by President George W. Bush in 2005 and resigned in 2007.

Mr. Gonzales also said Bush administration lawyers clearly defined what interrogation techniques were legal and the few who went beyond the rules should be investigated, despite the so-called chilling effect it might have on future intelligence-gathering.

"We worked very hard to establish ground rules and parameters about how to deal with terrorists," he said. "And if people go beyond that, I think it is legitimate to question and examine that conduct to ensure people are held accountable for their actions, even if it's action in prosecuting the war on terror."

That was published on Sept. 1. Today:

On Thursday, in a follow-up interview with The Times, Gonzales said despite reports that he supports Holder’s probe, “I don’t support the investigation by the department because this is a matter that has already been reviewed thoroughly and because I believe that another investigation is going to harm our intelligence gathering capabilities and that’s a concern that’s shared by career intelligence officials and so for those reasons I respectfully disagree with the decision.”

Regarding his earlier comments, Gonzales said he was not endorsing the investigations, simply Holder’s right to conduct the probe. He said, “It’s an endorsement of his right to exercise his discretion,” adding, “I’m just saying I would have exercised my discretion in a different manner, given the information I have.”

Oh, for a copy of Gonzales's phone log between those two dates.

... Okay, so it can be improved upon: Monday, not Tuesday.

Whitehouse to Torture Team: Sue me ... come on, I dare ya?

Is Sheldon Whitehouse fishing for a defamation suit?

The judicial branch (which, under Marbury v. Madison, has the ultimate duty to determine "what the law is") has determined that waterboarding is torture (see U.S. v. Lee, decided in 1984 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit). The Bush administration has admitted to waterboarding captives. The corpus delicti of that crime exists. For there to be investigation now is unexceptional.

The only exceptional thing is the parties involved: the former vice president of the United States, his counsel David Addington, Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) lawyer John Yoo and their private contractors Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, psychologists who designed the torture program. But in America, high office does not put one outside the law. Indeed, it borders on unethical for a prosecutor to refuse to investigate the corpus delicti of a crime because of concern as to where the evidence may lead.

This comes close to Whitehouse's daring them to sue him. It gets better:

Looking only at the evidence that has become public so far, is there a viable theory of criminal liability arising out of this corpus delicti, the torture of America's captives?

There is substantial evidence of legal malpractice by lawyer Yoo. His opinions were even withdrawn under the Bush administration, and they are the subject of an unprecedented internal investigation by the Department of Justice. For one thing, the precise case on point was overlooked. The analysis is bad enough that it could be a sham. Investigation would reveal whether this was the result of incompetence, ideology or instruction.

There is substantial evidence of a back channel between Addington and Yoo. It is not yet clear what information or instructions passed along that back channel. It does appear to have sidelined regular chains of reporting, including the attorney general. Investigation would determine whether this was communication or conspiracy.

There is substantial public evidence of exceptional access provided to the private contractors. They were allowed to repeatedly interrupt and ultimately compromise one of the most productive interrogations in our fight against terrorism. As contractors, they were outside the military and government chains of command and reporting and thus were potentially a means of direct secret access between the White House and the torture chamber. Investigation would reveal whether this was abused.

Read the whole thing -- it's remarkable to see something so straightforward and informed from a sitting U.S. senator (the article made me check whether Whitehouse is still in office).

Wouldn't Whitehouse love for Yoo, Jessen, or Mitchell (Cheney and Addington surely are too savvy) to sue him, and then plead truth as a defense? Remember how Oscar Wilde ended up in jail.

Crumby Bible

Bookforum reviews R. Crumb's comic of the unabridged book of Genesis:

Unlike these bowdlerized versions, Crumb’s doesn’t hide the fact that the holy book is filled with stories of incest (Abraham marrying his half sister, Sarah; Lot being seduced by his daughter), frenzied bloodlust (God’s various acts of mass murder, the terrible slaughter of a village after a young boy seduces Jacob’s daughter, Dinah), and general unsavory behavior (the theme of fraternal violence that runs from the story of Cain and Abel to the concluding saga of Joseph and his spiteful siblings). Images can cut deeper than words, especially when those images are executed by so psychologically alert an artist as Crumb. It’s one thing to read about the daughters of Lot seducing their father in a desperate attempt to repopulate their tribe after the destruction of Sodom; it’s quite another to see Crumb’s depiction of the sodden Lot, his eyes in a daze, straddled by a zaftig Amazon who looks vaguely troubled by her reproductive mission.

I would be curious to see what Jack Miles (author of the very worthwhile God: A Biography) thinks of Crumb's version.

Wowzers.

I don't know who William Logan is, but his review of Louise Glück’s new book is one of the meanest things I've seen in a long time.

“A Village Life” is a subversive departure for a poet used to meaning more than she can say. All these years that Glück has been writing her stark, emaciated verse, there has been an inner short-story writer itching to break out. (The publicity optimistically refers to the new style as “novel­istic”; but there is no novel here, only patches of long-windedness.) * * *


Perhaps I’m not the only reader who finds Glück hilarious, in a ghoulish way — like a stand-up vampire. * * *

It's good to see a poet old enough to draw Social Security making new contracts with the language. Unfortunately, Glück doesn’t yet have control of these long measures — the lines are slack, the fictions drowsy and the moments of heightened attention like oases in a broad desert (the poems don’t argue, they merely accumulate). Without the energies of her short lines and sharply drawn moods, she turns out to have an imagination almost as conventional as anyone else’s.

Glück is still a poet of sensibility more than sense, which means that the mortal pressure of her verse exceeds her ability to make memorable phrases. * * *

Glück remains our great poet of annihilation and disgust, our demigoddess of depression. At her discomforting best, she reminds me of no poet more than Rilke, who was also a case of nerves and who also lived close to the old myths. Though her comments about him have been hedged, of all the Americans now writing Glück is the closest to being his secret mythographer. Her silences fall at times like moral resistance, and the most striking lines of her chatter are as haunting as an elegy for herself.

Not just catty mean, but your-entire-career-has-been-a-bathetic-waste-of-paper mean.

Stevens no longer to hang on?

The tea leaves suggest that Justice Stevens may be getting close to hanging up his robes:

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has hired fewer law clerks than usual, generating speculation that the leader of the court's liberals will retire next year.

If Stevens does step down, he would give President Barack Obama his second high court opening in two years. Obama chose Justice Sonia Sotomayor for the court when Justice David Souter announced his retirement in May.

Souter's failure to hire clerks was the first signal that he was contemplating leaving the court.

Stevens, 89, joined the court in 1975 and is the second-oldest justice in the court's history, after Oliver Wendell Holmes. He is the seventh-longest-serving justice, with more than 33 years and eight months on the court.

In response to a question from The Associated Press, Stevens confirmed through a court spokeswoman Tuesday that he has hired only one clerk for the term that begins in October 2010. He is among several justices who typically have hired all four clerks for the following year by now. Information about this advance hiring is not released by the court but is regularly published by some legal blogs.

(H/t LGM.)

... Despite the demise of Air America, "Hang On, Stevens" can still be heard (or its lyrics perused) here.

Beep boop beep!

Sometimes Tyler Durden, or the blogger kinda named after him, sparkles:

Jayde Nicole issued a statement through a representative last night saying she was attacked from behind (editors note - *tee-hee*) Thursday night in a West Hollywood bar by ‘Girls Gone Wild’ founder Joe Francis, who then punched her, pulled her hair, threw her to the ground and kicked her. But that silver-tongued devil has an answer for everything.

Francis maintains Nicole poured a drink on him that night, and, in turning around, he may have grabbed her hair.
He told E! News Friday that, after security had helped him get outside, it was an unprovoked (Brody) Jenner who hit him in the face.

Well there you go. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve turned around and inadvertently pulled some woman to the ground by her hair. Because I’m a robot with magnetic snapping claws for hands, and women are made of metal. “Beep boop beep.” That was me calculating a complex task. Joe must be the same way. His explanation makes a lot of sense if you think about it.

Oh, absolutely.

September 1

The 70th anniversary of Hitler's invasion of Poland, which became the Second World War on September 3, 1939, when the British and French ultimata expired.

Brad DeLong memorializes the anniversary with Auden's "September 1, 1939," which I suppose is inevitable but which I have never particularly admired, in contrast with this reader. I do not think that this --

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

-- either wears well 70 years later, or carries any moral sense whatsoever. The Germans invaded Poland because of the evil done to them? Huh?

And I do not quite understand what this verse is even saying:

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

What follows the colon -- is it the vain competitive excuse, or is it Auden's commentary on the vain competitive excuses? It seems clear that we ourselves bear guilt for "Imperialism's face" -- okay, got it, but what did that have to do with September 1, 1939 -- and "the international wrong," which is like some right-winger's parody of Liberal Guilt.

These lines do not show Auden's having progressed much beyond his notorious line about "the necessary murder" for which Orwell scalded him.

That said, let's give the poem credit for some of its better lines:

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

... Carried my Auden-trashin' to the DeLong thread, where the interested may see what response it engendereth.

... Silbey has a good post up on September 1.