Month: February 2007

Put Sy Hersh’s new piece next to this report from the Sunday Times and start worrying. Dick Cheney is an unhinged and dangerous figure. The damage he has already done to this country’s interests and war effort is already incalculable. But he may not be done yet.

A quick pre-Oscar review. I watched the movie on DVD last night. (I think I’ve officially stopped going to the movies. I can’t stand movie theaters any more or the people who go to them.) Babel was a better movie than "The Queen" and "The Departed," although those two were also better than many Oscar winners in recent years. The reason? Its relentless realism, its contemporary relevance, the originality of a movie much of which is unintelligible (did Gibson start this trend?), and its performances, primarily Rinko Kikuchi’s. The small and large tragedies of human miscommunication in a globalized world – this is one of  the great themes of our time, and it was explored with subtlety, urgency, and depth. It was the first movie depiction of a circuit party that did any justice to the experience (and it was in a straight club in Japan). I doubt it will win – because it’s much too much like last year’s winer, "Crash." But I was expecting some dreary p.c. Pitt/Blanchett vehicle. Man, was I wrong.

A downloadable BBC radio documentary on his life and legacy. Really excellent.

Thus the latest optimism from "an online strategist dedicated to helping Republicans and conservatives achieve dominance in a networked era." In the past week or so, violence seemed indeed to calm down as the various militias took the temperature of the new security initiative. Ruffini celebrates:

U.S. troops have been able to accomplish all of this with just one more brigade in-country, with four more on the way by May. These encouraging early returns show the potential for success when we apply concentrated military force to the security problem.

Much of this, however, seems to have been the result of Shiite passivity, perhaps because the U.S. hasn’t seriously taken on the Shiite militias so far, or because Sadr has taken the opportunity to weed out a few rogue elements, and present himself as a future national leader. Today, after another bombing,

Sadr condemned the plan in a signed statement declaring that it had no hope of success as long as American troops were involved. Read aloud to 1,000 shouting supporters in Sadr City, the large Shiite area near the site of the university blast, the statement called on Iraqi security forces to stop cooperating with the United States military. "There is no good that can come from a security plan controlled by our enemies, the occupiers," said the statement. "If you stay away from them, God will protect you from horror and harm. Make sure your plans are purely Iraqi and not sectarian."

Stay away from them? Is this a sign that a serious clash with the Mahdi army is imminent and that Sadr doesn’t see the benefit of taking the bait? Or does it mean that he is simply urging his supporters to wait until the Americans leave before doing the real "security" work themselves? I wish I knew. Meanwhile, a Qaeda-style suicide bombing took aim at female students at Baghdad university:

About 25 yards to the left of where the explosion hit on the campus, small holes had been dug in a circle around a flower bed. A middle-aged man, Hussain Ali al-Mousawi, a blacksmith who lives across the street from the university, was collecting body parts on a notebook, placing severed fingers and flesh on pages covered with students’ notes on subjects like income brackets. His shirt was covered with blood. He said he had been carrying bodies, and the orange cotton of his right sleeve was soaked bright red.

He walked over the holes that had been dug, and placed shovelfuls of clothing and fingers into the ground.

(Photo: Iraqis gather around the wreckage of a car at the site where a suicide car bomber attacked a checkpoint protecting the home of one of Iraq’s most powerful Shiite leaders, Abdel Aziz Hakim, in Baghdad, late 24 February 2007. By Ali Yussef/AFP/Getty.)

He was right. I was wrong. This clip is impressive.

Yes, so many churches are riven by fools and hypocrites and busy-bodies and indolents. In my own church I am constantly assailed by these things – and there are many times when, sadly, I exemplify them. But the church is still worth joining, living in, sustaining. From a recent homily by Sam Lloyd at the National Cathedral:

St. Paul is saying that to be a Christian means to be part of the church. Most of us weren’t consulted before we were baptized into it, and so we are members whether we like it or not, whether we act on it or not. The church is the embodiment of Christ, the way Christ’s Spirit takes on flesh and blood in the world. You won’t find the God of Jews and Christians primarily on a private walk in the woods, or sitting at home reading a spiritual book, but in events in history such as the freeing of the Hebrews from slavery, in the struggle of a community through time to be faithful to God, and in the life and death of a wandering rabbi named Jesus and the friends he left behind. Paul is saying that Christ is present in the world through you and me in the church.

And since the church is Christ’s flesh and blood, it is the place where God physically touches us. We in the church have been given a meal, a holy book, and each other—all of them tangible channels of God’s love. We need each other so that we can be Christ to each other—in how we learn, pray, and work together. You can be Christ for me, and I for you, as we encourage each other when life is wearing us down, as we seek to raise grace-filled children, as we are struggling to live Christ’s way in these complex times.

(Photo: London’s Westminster Cathedral on Ash Wednesday by Peter McDiarmid/Getty.)

A reader writes:

Your post on the Obama-Clinton war reminds me of David Steinberg’s routine from a 1969 episode of the "Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour":

"On the way to this studio, I saw an old man being mugged by four vicious-looking teenagers. One was Irish, one was Jewish, one was Hispanic, and one was black. And I said to myself: ‘If these four children can learn to work together cooperatively, what may America not be capable of?’"

Indeed. More multi-cultural mud!

Does the phrase I used yesterday make any sense? To wit:

I fear that the weekly magazine is simply defunct in the age of the web. (The New Yorker and the Economist are the exceptions that prove the rule.)

A vigilant reader sends me here:

These days it is often used sweepingly to justify an inconsistency. Those who use it seem to be saying that the existence of a case that doesn’t follow a rule proves the rule applies in all other cases and so is generally correct, notwithstanding the exception. This is nonsense, because the logical implication of finding that something doesn’t follow a rule is that there must be something wrong with the rule. As the old maxim has it, you need find only one white crow to disprove the rule that all crows are black.

For it to make sense, I guess I have to unpack it some more. Somehow, David Remnick’s New Yorker manages to be relevant each week without being exactly weekly. It’s a monthly magazine published weekly, essentially, with some more newsy items thrown in for topicality. The Economist endures as a weekly not simply because it’s so good and perfectly packaged – but because a hefty number of subscribers get their companies to pay for it entirely, or write it off as a business expense. Opinionated reporting is much more vulnerable to the web. Pure opinion almost fatally so, I’d say. I wonder how much longer the op-ed page will last as a viable form.

Our dog, Eddy, resting in the afternoon sun yesterday afternoon. She’s a rescue dog, so we don’t know her pedigree for sure, but we were told by the shelter that she is a mix of beagle and bassett hound. The trendy term for that is, apparently, a bagel. Self-toasting.

Mark Kleiman argues that the question matters:

If alcohol is a drug, then ‘drug use’ is normal, and not all drug use is abuse. That undercuts the entire project of stigmatization underlying much of what passes for ‘drug abuse prevention.’ If smoking cannabis, snorting cocaine, swallowing MDMA (‘ecstasy’), or even injecting heroin, are not different in principle from having a glass of wine, then the moral basis for treating cannabis-smokers, cocaine-snorters, rave-goers, and heroin-injectors as carriers of a deadly plague is called into question, and even suppliers of those drugs might be seen as regulatory violators rather than hostes humani generis (enemies of humankind) the modern incarnation of a legal category that used to cover pirates and slave-traders.

Of course, by any rational standards, alcohol is a drug. What we need is a criterion to distinguish clearly between drugs we allow and drugs we don’t. Our current criterion – alcohol good, nicotine fine, ‘drugs’ bad – is scientifically and socially incoherent.