Author: Dish Staff

The History Of French Self-Hatred

by Dish Staff

Alexander Stille describes Éric Zemmour’s book, Le Suicide Français, as “a wildly over-the-top broadside condemnation of everything that has happened in the past fifty years, such as birth control, abortion, student protests, sexual liberation, women’s rights, gay rights, immigration from Africa, American consumer capitalism, left-wing intellectualism, the European Union”:

In Zemmour’s view, both the traditional French left and right (really, everyone but the French far right) have, through a mixture of blindness and cowardice, allowed for the dismantling of a national edifice based on paternal authority. It is highly revealing that Zemmour uses the term “virilité,” or virility, some twenty-three times in his five-hundred page book, suggesting a certain fixation.

The popular success of “Le Suicide Français” is in keeping with a well-established tradition: it takes its place on a long shelf of books that have declared the decline or death of France.

As early as 1783, as Sean M. Quinlan notes, in “The Great Nation in Decline,” the French began to churn out tracts like one which laments that “a flagging, weak and less vivacious generation has replaced, without succeeding, that brilliant [Frankish] race, those men of combat and hunting, whose bodies were more robust, cleaner and of greater height than those of today’s civilized peoples.” The French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, in 1871, set off a spate of self-flagellation, with writers decrying a declining birth rate, an inferior education system, and moral bankruptcy. Although nostalgists like Zemmour consider the late nineteenth century a golden age, when France emerged as an imperial power and a center of cultural greatness, his counterparts in that period saw a cesspool of effeminacy and decline. One of the big books of 1892 was “Degeneration,” whose author, Max Nordau, was Hungarian but lived most of his life in Paris. He excoriates Émile Zola and writes that the Impressionists can only be understood in terms of “hysteria and degeneracy.”

Stille tries to put things in perspective:

France is no longer an empire, but it is a prosperous medium-sized country with an extremely high standard of living. It is no longer the world’s cultural center, but it has far more influence than most societies. France remains among the top twenty countries by virtually all measures of the World Bank’s Human Development Index. Life expectancy in France has increased from fifty to nearly eighty-two years in the past century, even as France’s global role has shrunk. Aging population, declining birth rates, slower growth, a more skeptical attitude toward authority, and greater gender equality—those are all typical of advanced, post-industrial societies, not unique to France.

How The CIA Won The Beltway Battle … Till Now

by Scott Horton

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[SPECIAL GUEST POST BY SCOTT HORTON]

There’s a simple, foundational question behind the publication of today’s report on CIA torture: Are the people and Congress entitled to know about these programs and the legacy they have left behind? The conflict between the right of a democracy to know what’s being done in its name and the necessary secrecy of intelligence services is what’s really being tested right now. And looking back on the struggle between the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the CIA over the report due to be released today tells us a lot about the state of play.

On this score, the report is likely to document, without highlighting, an embarrassing failure of oversight during the period from 2002-2006, when the core programs were in effect. That failure is almost certainly a combination of misdirection and misinformation from the CIA to SSCI, a desire by the White House not to share certain information, and a failure by the SSCI itself to probe with sufficient determination to find the facts. But the report should help us weigh these considerations.

The history of the production of the SSCI report already suggests very strongly that the CIA has been far more skillful player in the struggle than the Senate. In her now-famous speech on the Senate floor, Dianne Feinstein set out many of the historical steps. These make clear that from the outset to the last stages, the CIA has played a subtle and effective game of slow-down designed to stretch the process out. It has been fighting for time, and taking the view that every week of delay is a victory. Some of the tactics used included:

• Insisting on internal review prior to disclosure to SSCI, and then hiring outside contractors (who would not otherwise have had access to the documents) to do the review;
• Raising claims of privilege and relevance to disclosures;
• Insisting that review occur in CIA offices, using equipment that was owned and provided by the CIA;
• “Disappearing” documents once they had been provided;
• Bringing accusations of security breaches by SSCI staff;
• Requesting a Department of Justice probe of their allegations;
• Demanding aggressive redactions from the text of the report designed to make the report itself incomprehensible.

These tactics were successful at least in that they slowed down the report by several years.

In my mind, it is utterly unsurprising that the CIA would reach to these tactics—that is precisely the conduct I would expect from officers loyal to their institution, who are struggling to avoid disclosure of information which they believe will prove harmful to the institution’s interests. What is truly surprising is the indulgent, understanding posture of Senator Feinstein and her staff, who gave ground to the CIA on point after point, in derogation of the Senate’s rights and powers. Perhaps Feinstein thought that being deferential would help her with the CIA. If so, that was exceedingly naïve.

Chalk this up, then, as a huge win for the agency over its overseers. The CIA demonstrated a mastery of the politics of the Washington Beltway that far outstripped its investigators. So far at least it has only won them time—but it has gotten them close to their mark. Another week of delay and the report could have been buried for ever.

The final gambit in the delay game was the claim that American personnel abroad may face danger as a result of the disclosures. But the SSCI report is not likely to make entirely new disclosures on the key points. These disclosures occurred in a steady trickle from April 2004 through early 2009. The use of torture and the creation of black sites did indeed have consequences abroad for the United States—it fueled recruitment for terrorist groups on one hand, it helped inspire the Arab Spring and the cries of “dignity” that accompanied it on the other. In any event, it greatly complicated U.S. operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and other theaters of operation. However, the consequences that the SSCI will have for U.S. personnel are likely to be different. It is likely to have consequences precisely for the persons who are today heard most loudly objecting to its release: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Michael Hayden and Jose Rodriguez. Their reputations will be tarnished further, and, no doubt, demands for accountability will be renewed. And there are plenty of U.S. citizens, and U.S. intelligence officers, who reckon that a very good thing.

[THIS WAS A SPECIAL GUEST POST BY SCOTT HORTON]

(Photo: CIA director John Brennan testifies before a full committee hearing during his nomination hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, on February 7, 2013. By Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)

The Best Of The Dish Today

by Dish Staff

Andrew is still on his speech circuit in California, so he’s not able to wrap up the Dish tonight. But if you missed his longer posts, Andrew, above all, laid into the president and various members of his administration for covering up alleged torture at Gitmo. He also took aim at the NYT’s sponsored content guru, Meredith Kopit Levienat, for spreading more “re-purposed bovine waste”, and then blasted Roger Cohen for playing the Godwin card with ISIS. But Andrew himself caught shit from readers over his incessant whining about NYC. More importantly, another reader shared a long and heartbreaking story of child abuse – a post that’s already getting a lot of feedback from readers, so stay tuned for followups.

Many of today’s posts were updated with your emails – read them all here.  You can always leave your unfiltered comments at our Facebook page and @sullydish. 21 more readers became subscribers today. You can join them here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. One writes:

I finally subscribed. Despite some gripes, your coverage of Obama’s war on ISIS finally did it. Excellent debate.

(If I may put in a small gripe/request on the side: can we please do without horse-race speculation of the “Hillary vs X” type until we actually have declared candidates? Please? Honestly don’t give a hoot about hypotheticals. It’s just noise. Let’s focus on actual events.)

Much more Dish in the morning.

Quote For The Day

by Dish Staff

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“Up the coast a few miles north, in a lava reef under the cliffs, there are a lot of rock pools. You can visit them when the tide is out. Each pool is separate and different, and you can, if you are fanciful, give them names, such as George, Charlotte, Kenny, Mrs. Strunk. Just as George and the others are thought of, for convenience, as individual identities, so you may think of a rock pool as an entity; though, of course, it is not. The waters of its consciousness – so to speak – are swarming with hunted anxieties, grim-jawed greeds, dartingly vivid intuitions, old crusty-shelled rock-gripping obstinacies, deep-down sparkling undiscovered secrets, ominous protean organisms motioning mysteriously, perhaps warningly, toward the surface light. How can such a variety of creatures coexist at all? Because they have to. The rocks of the pool hold their world together. And, throughout the day of the ebb tide, they know no other.

But that long day ends at last; yields to the nighttime of the flood. And, just as the waters of the ocean come flooding, darkening over the pools, so over George and the others in sleep come the waters of that other ocean – that consciousness which is no one in particular but which contains everyone and everything, past, present and future, and extends unbroken beyond the uttermost stars. We may surely suppose that, in the darkness of the full flood, some of these creatures are lifted from their pools to drift far out over the deep waters. But do they ever bring back, when the daytime of the ebb returns, any kind of catch with them? Can they tell us, in any manner, about their journey? Is there, indeed, anything for them to tell – except that the waters of the ocean are not really other than the waters of the pool?” – Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man.

(Photo by Flickr user tico_24)

Cancer Is Not A “Battle”

by Dish Staff

Not for Jenny Diski, who recoils from cancer clichés after receiving a diagnosis that gives her two to three years to live:

One thing I state as soon as we’re out of the door: ‘Under no circumstances is anyone to say that I lost a battle with cancer. Or that I bore it bravely. I am not fighting, losing, winning or bearing.’ I will not personify the cancer cells inside me in any form. I reject all metaphors of attack or enmity in the midst, and will have nothing whatever to do with any notion of desert, punishment, fairness or unfairness, or any kind of moral causality. But I sense that I can’t avoid the cancer clichés simply by rejecting them. Rejection is conditioned by and reinforces the existence of the thing I want to avoid. I choose how to respond and behave, but a choice between doing this or that, being this or that, really isn’t freedom of action, it’s just picking one’s way through an already drawn flow chart. They still sit there, to be taken or left, the flashing neon markers on the road that I would like to think isn’t there for me to be travelling down.

I am appalled at the thought, suddenly, that someone at some point is going to tell me I am on a journey. I try but I can’t think of a single aspect of having cancer, start to finish, that isn’t an act in a pantomime in which my participation is guaranteed however I believe I choose to play each scene. I have been given this role. (There, see? Instant victim.) I have no choice but to perform and to be embarrassed to death.

Ebola: A Survivor’s Tale

by Dish Staff

Kent Brantly, the doctor who caught the virus in Liberia and recovered after receiving an experimental treatment in the US, shares his experience as a caregiver and then patient:

During my own care, I often thought about the patients I had treated. Ebola is a humiliating disease that strips you of your dignity. You are removed from family and put into isolation where you cannot even see the faces of those caring for you due to the protective suits–you can only see their eyes. You have uncontrollable diarrhea and it is embarrassing. You have to rely on others to clean you up. That is why we tried our best to treat patients like our own family. Through our protective gear we spoke to each patient, calling them by name and touching them. We wanted them to know they were valuable, that they were loved, and that we were there to serve them.

Brantly, a missionary, went on to receive treatment at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta:

I finally cried for the first time when I saw my family members through a window and spoke to them over the intercom. I had not been sure I would ever see them again. When I finally recovered, the nurses excitedly helped me leave the isolation room, and I held my wife in my arms for the first time in a month.

Even when I was facing death, I remained full of faith. I did not want to be faithful to God all the way up to serving in Liberia for ten months, only to give up at the end because I was sick. Though we cannot return to Liberia right now, it is clear we have been given a new platform for helping the people of Liberia.

Recent Dish on the ebola crisis here.

Indian Mascot Nation

by Dish Staff

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As the movement to change the Washington Redskins’ name continues to grow – the Secretary of the Interior just weighed in on the matter – Hayley Munguia found that a surprising number of high schools have similarly named mascots:

Terry Borning, the proprietor of MascotDB, has kept a database of the nation’s mascots since 2006. He gathers his data from a variety of sources, including state high school athletic associations, websites and local newspapers. Borning’s database doesn’t have every high school, college and pro team in the country, but it does have 42,624 of them. Looking at MascotDB is as close as we can get to understanding how prevalent Native American team names and mascots are across the country. …

I searched the database and found 2,129 sports teams that reference Braves, Chiefs, Indians, Orangemen, Raiders, Redmen, Reds, Redskins, Savages, Squaws, Tribe and Warriors, as well as tribe names such as Apaches, Arapahoe, Aztecs, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Chinooks, Chippewas, Choctaws, Comanches, Eskimos, Mohawks, Mohicans, Seminoles, Sioux and Utes. (Not all teams with the names “Raiders” and “Warriors” are referencing Native Americans, but we spot-checked 20 schools with each name and a majority of each did.) Some 92 percent of those 2,129 team names belong to high schools (the rest were college, semi-pro, pro and amateur league teams). Of all the active high schools in the database, 8.2 percent have Native American team names.

The Science Of Truthiness

by Dish Staff

Katy Waldman delves into it:

Truthiness is “truth that comes from the gut, not books,” Colbert said in 2005. … Scientists who study the phenomenon now also use the term. It humorously captures how, as cognitive psychologist Eryn Newman put it, “smart, sophisticated people” can go awry on questions of fact. Newman, who works out of the University of California – Irvine, recently uncovered an unsettling precondition for truthiness: The less effort it takes to process a factual claim, the more accurate it seems. When we fluidly and frictionlessly absorb a piece of information, one that perhaps snaps neatly onto our existing belief structures, we are filled with a sense of comfort, familiarity, and trust. The information strikes us as credible, and we are more likely to affirm it – whether or not we should.

This Magic Moment

by Dish Staff

Lev Grossman declares that the fantasy genre has “become one of the great pillars of popular culture and, increasingly, the way we tell stories now,” pointing to examples like Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones. The explanation he offers for this:

If my generation is remembered for anything, it will be as the last one that remembers the world before the Internet. You can’t compare what we’ve gone through to WWI, because that would be insane, but it’s not a trivial thing either. Lewis and Tolkien saw the physical world remade around them. The changes we’ve seen have been largely invisible but still radical: they happened in the sphere of information and communication and simulation and ubiquitous computation.

Which is why it makes sense that so much of the 20th century was preoccupied with science fiction, a genre that, among other things, grapples with the presence of technology in our lives, our minds, and our bodies, and with how our tools change the world and how they change us. Those issues are of paramount, urgent importance right now. But a countervailing movement is happening too: we’re also turning to fantasy. It’s counterintuitive, because fantasy is so often set in pre-industrial landscapes where technology is notable for its absence, but it must have something we need. We’re using it to ask questions. We like to celebrate this world, our new world, as a paradise of connectedness, a networked utopia, but is it possible that on some level we feel as disconnected from it as Lewis and Tolkien did from theirs?

Grossman’s takeaway:

God knows, characters in fantasy worlds aren’t always happy: if anything the ambient levels of misery in Westeros are probably significantly higher than those in the real world. But they’re not distracted. They’re not disconnected. The world they live in isn’t alien to them, it’s a reflection of the worlds inside them, and they feel like an intimate part of it. In the real world we’re busy staring at our phones as global warming gradually renders the world we’re ignoring uninhabitable. Fantasy holds out the possibility that there’s another way to live.