Returning the favor: Martin Rocks!.

From the BBC:

"But viewers across the Arab world are not watching the news with their usual sad resignation - with events proceeding beyond their control or the control of their political leaders.

"Look, the Iraqis are fighting back," says Khalid proudly, as a news item reports on how four US marines have been killed by a suicide car bombing in southern Iraq.

Khalid, a Palestinian living comfortably in a well-to-do district of the Jordanian capital, sums up the feeling of many Arabs that - in Iraq - the US might finally be paying for years of "double standards" in its Middle East policy.

"The Americans thought they were going to be greeted by celebrations and ululating women as they walked into Basra," Khalid says."

---What else could anyone have expcted? From Pollack on down, the hawks spoke of Iraq as if it were an island in the middle of nowhere; as if the situation in the west bank had nothing to do with any of this. It was always an absurd conceit. Mark Kleiman still misses the point. His response to news of the return of the old schisms in the administration is to treat it if it were a fight over who gets the credit [blame] when the damn thing's over. But it's not just a fight about decisions in the past, it's about decisions in the future. I do not want this country invading Iran.---

"But what they don't realise is that people hate and fear them even more than they may hate or fear Saddam Hussein."

"I'm sorry, but the chick got in the way"
Do these kids know or even care what they're fighting for? According to Anthony Swofford, they don't.

What I liked, if that's the word for it, about Swofford's piece on Sunday is that the language described his tiredness. The sadness mixed in with the bullshit and bravado was enough to give the discription of amorality some other value than as data. He was a paid killer, and he knows what that meant, and that a lack of hypocrisy in itself is not enough for a killer who wants to be a writer. That sadness is what I described in my first post on Swofford, when I assumed he didn't have it, as the difference between the killer who knows both sides of the coin, and the killer that doesn't - as the difference between urban thugs and suburban fascists.
I still don't know on which side Swofford falls or, perhaps, fell, but it seems pretty clear which side Eric Schrumpf is on. So am I really supposed to care whether he gets killed or not?

"We dropped a few civilians," Sergeant Schrumpf said, "but what do you do?"
I don't know son. I don't know.

Baghdad is in flames.
Rummy is in trouble.
And so far they've found NOTHING.
Wounded British soldiers condemn US pilot:
"He had absolutely no regard for human life. I believe he was a cowboy. There were four or five that I noticed earlier and this one had broken off and was on his own when he attacked us. He'd just gone out on a jolly."

"I've had enough of being fired at from all directions, I just want to go home".

Pray for your King.

The Times has an interesting article on the demographic of armed forces. A conservative officer corps, and a working class majority for the rest. The last time we had a force that represented a broad spectrum of America's youth was the last time we fought a war the idea of which was worth defending. Nobody now on active duty has ever fought in such a war.
We need a draft with no college deferment. NYTimes

"I once addressed a group of recruiters and asked them, would you prefer to have your advertising budget tripled or see Chelsea Clinton joining the Army — and they all said Chelsea Clinton joining the Army," he said. "That would be the signal that America was serious about joining the military. Imagine Jenna Bush joining the military — that would be the signal thing saying, this is a cause worth dying for."

There is no such cause right now, but we have a corps of professional soldiers many of whom seem not to know what the fuck they are talking about.

I was not raised to follow orders and do not know what to say to those who were. But I have no respect for those who claim we should always question authority. That too assumes that it rests somewhere else. I don't submit blindly to authority or question it cheaply, because I was raised to be authority, and therefore to understand the responsibility.

The tragedy of this country, and of the greed that drives it, is that in the class of those who follow orders there are many democratic and egalitarian communities, fragile, based in a life that is hard, by American standards, but which is nonetheless living and real. But one step above and that community evaporates and is replaced with an ideology of individual freedom. This non-community includes white house hawks as well as liberals. It's the Libertarian's dream, and my nightmare. I'm as sick of bourgeois self indulgence as my father- a minor hero of the east coast antiwar movement [that's Vietnam war, children]- was sick of hippies. And whether they send the lower class off to war or merely lecture them about why they should oppose it, the condescension is the same. The lower classes don't think its their responsibility to think about these things. [This is the same thing Marx complained about in the British] They just want to be left alone. But they can't have that either.

This is two blocks from my house. The two groups live side by side. Which one has what little respect I can muster? The one that's going to lose.

I've been thinking again over the last few days about why I've always been more comfortable with and had more respect for working class blacks than for poor whites. The simplest answer is that I grew up with one and not the other. But lower middle class whites lived with the assumption that they should be better off than they were because of their race. They had pretensions to authority. Their insecurity meant the kids couldn't back down. To back down meant humiliation. It was an inflexible code; to a large degree it still is. White kids, the boys at least, couldn't laugh at themselves, could find no easy humor in their lives, because they were being laughed at already, by other whites. But for a black kid on the street, as an old girlfriend pointed out to me years ago, life was and is always about backing down, and knowing when and how to do it. What expectations did they have? In the streets the stakes are real.

I'd known this all my life but the first time I thought about it, rather than merely taking it for granted was a few years after I moved to New York. I was walking through a subway station at night, though a large open section, between one staircase and another. The only other person around was a black kid, late teenager, walking in the opposite direction, coming out of the staircase I was heading towards and towards the one I'd just left. We saw each other immediately. The moment I saw him I switched without thinking into the sway -not swagger- that I'd learned as a child but hadn't felt myself do in a while. I was nervous but it felt good. I hunched my shoulders and head slightly forward and down, and looked as I walked alternately ahead and at the ground. He was doing roughly the same thing; we were still about 30 feet apart. As we got closer nothing changed, the same sway, eyes down and up, walking to pass or meet in the middle of the room. We were both tense, and still nobody else was anywhere nearby. At about 6 feet away I looked up at him and nodded, without smiling or even realizing that I had done it.

He returned the nod. I had just backed down, as I realized I was always going to do, but I had shown him respect without fear, and he had shown me respect in return. Neither of us had known the intent of the other, and we still didn't. But I had told him two things: one, that whatever my earlier thoughts I did not want trouble now; and two, that I could defend myself. I felt no anger from him or towards him before and none after.

I haven't read Jarhead and I probably won't, but I want to take back some my comments about Anthony Swofford. Maybe Swofford started out being the kind of asshole I remember, but that's not what he describes in his piece in the Times Magazine today. He treats the press with the contempt it deserves, and violence (and the contempt) with all the homoerotic overtones it requires. But his violence is the violence of survival and nothing else. Everything else is a shrug. Maybe it's only war -Swofford is writing about 1991- but it's also true that times have changed. The races are mixing and so is their anger. Eminem makes the case obvious enough. In a very real sense it's sad, but perhaps now when angry white kids call each other nigger, it's because they know that's all they are. Integration is going well at the bottom of the ladder.

[But does that mean the white kids are becoming more like the black ones or the other way around? What does in mean that they listen to Ja Rule and hear and understand the same things? As kids have told me, the streets are a lot harder than they used to be. The life is colder and a lot more dangerous.]

I've never thought of myself in any way as black, only a white man of some sort who grew up in a black neighborhood. It's a part of my past, and given the stupidity of most comments around the issue of race these days, an important one.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/29/opinion/29ROTH.html
"Moreover, diversity fails to deliver even when all else is equal. When we controlled for other demographic and institutional factors like the respondent's race, gender, economic background and religion, or an institution's public or private status, selectivity and whether it offers an ethnic or racial studies program, the results were surprising. A higher level of diversity is associated with somewhat less educational satisfaction and worse race relations among students."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-2519545,00.html
"The 21st century reality is that you want your students to be exposed to the best thinking from around the world,'' Bristow said. ``You also want your students to have faculty members from different backgrounds.''

I made a similar comment about Mark Klieman's post. (March 25th.) Results derived from purely logical mechanisms do no more than reflect the data put into them. In statistics, as they say, if shit goes in shit comes out. So now we know there's less racial tension on a segregated campus. I am impressed.

I grew up in a largely segregated city in a predominately black and lower middle class section of an integrated neighborhood. I was one of only 2 white kids of my age on the surrounding blocks. Most of the families had less money than my parents did, and there was a good deal of poverty. What this means is that I did not grow up nervous around blacks, I grew up nervous about what my neighbors were nervous about: working class whites. Its always amused me how Alterman is constantly trying to make his bones with the working class machismo that terrified me, and my brother, when we were young. I don't want to think about what my childhood would have been like if I had grown up closer to it then I did.
I know what many black men see when they look at a white cop. I grew up knowing it.

"Donald Rumsfeld, the US defense secretary, delivered a stark warning to Syria yesterday, accusing it of failing to stop cross-border sales of military equipment, including night-vision goggles, to the Iraqi army.

Mr. Rumsfeld called the shipments "hostile acts" and threatened to "hold the Syrian government accountable", but refused to say whether he meant military action.

He also struck out at Iran for letting state-sponsored anti-Saddam militants flood into Iraq, interfering in the coalition's war plans."
Syria

Times Editorial
"None of that, however, justifies providing Iraqis with means of killing Americans. This goes beyond political calculation, and beyond pique. Mr. Putin must understand that if Russian arms are reaching Iraq by any route, and are putting American men and women in harm's way, it is simply not enough to declare that he is not responsible, or to pretend it is not happening. Many Americans may share the Russian objections to this war, but no Americans will tolerate or forgive having an American tank blown up by a Russian missile."

If we are engaged in an illegal war, then the UN sanctions no longer apply, and moralizing by anyone is silly.


Everything gets coopted by our need for consensus, and our politics and our democracy is dumbed down to the point of irrelevance. As the ground shifts beneath our feet, is there no principle that doesn't shift it's subject?


Does it make sense to ask anyone about this war who has not heard the name Mohammad Mossadegh? It should be the first question on any poll. Are the soldiers who have invaded Iraq and who may end up in Iran or Syria all dupes? Have none of them had the opportunity, in the richest nation on earth, to learn anything about history, our own or that of Europe or the Middle East? Who is responsible for the education of the officer corps? How long until I can say, and say in public, that I no longer support their actions?


Fixed Ideas.
Again and finally I want to say that the problem of Scalia et al. is not one of legal but moral philosophy. Someone who wants to do a study should do one of historicism in a wider context. This is an important issue in all intellectual history. The question of how we interpret or even if we can understand works of art produced hundreds of years ago, of how we should perform Mozart or Bach all center around these same questions. Should Bach be played on the piano, an instrument that is wonderfully appropriate for his works even though it didn't exist in his lifetime? These debates have been central to art history and musicology as long as they have been argued in law. They begin with the Bible, which means they have no beginning.
It's is useless to debate Scalia. What needs to be done is to train the next generation of his adversaries and to do it in a way that they understand the history and implications of their arguments.

The questions are the same for Scalia as for everyone else. What is the principle at stake? If due process is the end to be achieved, and is considered just in itself, is it permissible to execute a prisoner who had a fair trial but may in fact, for reasons unknown at the time, be innocent? If a war is just then that makes the killing of a number of civilians just as well. Perfection is impossible.
Is Bach still Bach, played on the piano? Are you still a Jew if you eat bacon?
If we need language to communicate, and language needs consistency, what is the impact of the incessant transformation of nouns into verbs? Is it rendering our language unsubtle?

Interpretation is an inevitable fact of life. Questions about it's limits are raised in every field, because freedom is not the same as anarchy. At some point the thing being interpreted can be 'interpreted' away entirely. You can not use slavery to protect freedom. Or can you? An Army is based on a servitude similar to monarchy and even closer to fascism. We have used them in the past to protect our freedom. Are we doing so now? No.
I wrote this in December: "What does it mean when Antonin Scalia says 'The Constitution as I interpret it, is dead'? He's given away the game." And he has.

Legal and philosophical arguments are rhetorical, and they follow a natural progression. An argument against the death penalty for example, may be no less logical a thousand years ago than it is now, but it did not fit in well with the nature of society as a whole. Democracy may have been equally as superior, but it did not fit in well either. Years ago I wrote a paper, still unpublished, on politics and art and -among other things- the banality of the Salon paintings of mid 19th century France. I argued that they were on the whole 'objectively' bad, and that was a new phenomenon in art. In as sense, they were bad because they were examples of a sort of argument the artists themselves didn't believe in. The works were hypocritical, images laughably claiming to be chaste were prurient, as Rumsfeld's claims to morality are absurd.
There is a time and a place where barbarism and violence is a form of justice. And such cultures can produce great beauty. But as I said:
"What is it when one tries to remove from history language that in a sense has already been written? If monarchism was once considered just, and was superseded by democracy, can one replace monarchism on its pedestal without doing damage to language itself. What does it mean to be so reactionary in a democratic state?"
Here is my post on Fascism and Kitsch.
Here's the end of it:
" Why did the history of monarchy produce so much art of lasting value and fascism produce none? Why is fascist art considered kitsch? Is it only that we can not judge; the crimes are so great and so recent? I don't think so.
What I think we could say is that fascism, unlike monarchism, [and therefore barbarism] is a violent order where the perpetuators have the same understanding as the victims; the only difference being in the psychological state of the perpetrators themselves."

In other words the killers are hypocrites, trying to justify their barbarity with modern morality. They are criminals because they are trying to hide the fact that's what they themselves think. Fascists are moralizing liars. Barbarians would not need to do either.

Legal argument comes from a mix of art and logic. The process is one of describing the present. of describing in language what is the state of things. If the process is valued as a thing in itself -as Scalia says he does, but which by ignoring precedent he in fact denies- then the result is a description in current language of our current sense of justice. When the argument sounds good, when it flows easily off the tongue and into the mind without cheapening either, it is good.
But just when that is the case is up to some interpretation.

That last one (below) is a bit of a draft. I'll come back to it.
s.e./d.g.

I took out a post. My anger should not get in the way.

Every day I've been getting more and more hits from Google with this search topic: "Harlan Ullman Jew"
It's sad.

1: http://www.crosswalk.com/news/1192574.html

2: Agonist.org has a lot right now, none of it good for our government.

3: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=391157

From NWB
"My final comment on this subject: none of this matters. There are many ways to make soup; quibbling about recipes during a famine seems pointless. I'll continue here regardless. The audience is more important than the design."
Same link as before. I'm not at home and I try not to memorize code.

I stand amazed at this country and its people. Should I be happy that they are now worried about a war the meaning and implications of which they previously ignored?

"I WANT MY AL-JAZEERA!"

"Banned on Wall Street and wiped off the Internet, Arab news channel al-Jazeera defended its controversial coverage of the Iraq war on Wednesday and demanded the United States come to its aid in the name of a free press."

http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=focusIraqNews&storyID=2454990

Things are changing at NoWarBlog:
http://www.nowarblog.org/archives/001175.html#001175.
My comments are there but I think Max misses the point. I'm surprised. I thought this should be clear to anyone in an academic field, or from an academic background. But economists are planners, seeing empiricism as an adjunct to rationalism when it should be the other way 'round.

Pakistan, India, North Korea.

American intellectuals tend to speak and write as if they do not have conflicted priorities; as though admitting this would be accepting the presence of a sin. But since we all have such conflicts, the end result is that their writing and speech sound not clear and strong but thin.

When we all start to think like this it will be a tragedy.

For the vast majority of the people on the planet 'happiness' is irrelevant. You will ask someone if they are happy and he or she won't even know what you mean. Happiness is individual and therefore the product of a specific sort of social organization.

A group of poor people living together, but removed from outsiders, are much happier than a group of poor people with a rich man in their midst.

Is a rich man happier because he pays someone to wipe the shit stains off the toilet?
It's logical to assume he thinks he is. But am I therefore supposed to approve of his happiness?

The 'bureaucratization of concern' in the social sciences drains the subtlety from everything. It's shocking to anyone who enjoys the world we live in -a world of lived desire that in any event we cannot escape - to see others try to reason their way out of it.
Significance is relative. It took Wittgenstein his entire life to figure that out. And in the end he only came up with a logical argument for Proust, replacing a cookie with an ice cream cone.
(I'll explain later. And besides I could be wrong)

An example of simple and sincere nationalism that most Americans can understand. From: The Independent.