Category: The Dish

William Polk’s 1958 article seems appropriate for this week:

If we regard our essential aim in Iraq to have been the preservation of the status quo, as our government statements suggest, then we have lost utterly and completely. But surely we can recognize that this was not in itself an aim, but rather a tactical means toward a larger aim. The Iraqi government under Nuri was no more akin to our political ideals than any other dictatorship. Our reasons for identifying ourselves with it were three: it existed, it was prepared to agree to join our side in the Cold War, and it was able to assure the flow of oil. Other governments could conceivably do the latter as well or better (indeed, the flow of oil has increased since the fall of Nuri’s government); the new government is at least as akin to us ideologically and seems to be a movement which might accomplish many of the sorts of reforms we would advocate; and the new government is not founded on a single, aging personality but is representative of a whole generation of those we may rightly regard as our intellectual foster children.

If we accept these conclusions and act accordingly, we could gain from the Iraqi revolt; if, on the contrary, we continue to treat the new regime with hostility, giving color to reports that we would like to overturn it, we will find ourselves opposed by more able adversaries using our own intellectual weapons against us. And we must face up to the fact that even if we had sent in our Marines, or if King Hussein’s Arab Legion had invaded and conquered Iraq, we would have been forced to come to terms with Iraq’s present rulers, for they are not just individuals but representatives of a new generation and a new class.

Here is a breakdown of the article.

Hemingway on symbolism:

"No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in," says Hemingway. "That kind of symbol sticks out like raisins in raisin bread. Raisin bread is all right, but plain bread is better." He opens two bottles of beer and continues: "I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things. The hardest thing is to make something really true and sometimes truer than true."

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Wilkinson defends art and philosophy majors.

A blog post asks: "Will the Earth be sucked into a tiny black hole in June?"

Matthew Parris explains why he can’t stand the current British prime minister:

What is unforgivable is the empty space in Mr Brown’s head where an idea ought to be. One big idea, one bold, brave, all-consuming purpose, one gripping sense of political direction, would outweigh all the carping criticisms we may have of Brown the man.

But where there should be thought, there is only calculation.

Why else hire Mark Penn?

"I now feel fully vindicated in my suspicion that Obama’s attendance at Wright’s church was entirely political and expedient. No one who has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ — or even moderate respect for other people’s religious views — thinks in these terms about why working class people might believe in God," – Lisa Schiffren, asserting that Obama’s professed and practiced faith is a sham.

Joseph Romm at Grist argues against a massive government project to make solar affordable.

Robert Hass won a Pulitzer this week. His poem Between the Wars:

When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon—
midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote,
read Polish history, and there was a woman
whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid
American sublime—late in the afternoon,
toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening,
the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails.
They were death’s idea of twilight, the whole notes
of a requiem the massed clouds croaked
above the somber fields. Lady of eyelashes,
do you hear me? Whiteness, otter’s body,
coolness of the morning, rubbed amber
and the skin’s salt, do you hear me? This is Poland speaking,
“era of the dawn of freedom,” nineteen twenty-two.

When I ran, it rained. The blackbirds settled
their clannish squabbles in the reeds, and light came up.
First darkening, then light. And then pure fire.
Where does it come from? out of the impure
shining that rises from the soaked odor of the grass,
the levitating, Congregational, meadow-light-at-twilight
light that darkens the heavy-headed blossoms
of wild carrot, out of that, out of nothing
it boils up, pools on the horizon, fissures up,
igniting the undersides of clouds: pink flame,
red flame, vermilion, purple, deeper purple, dark.
You could wring the sourness of the sumac from the air,
the fescue sweetness from the grass, the slightly
maniacal cicadas tuning up to tear the fabric
of the silence into tatters, so that night,
if it wants to, comes as a beggar to the door
at which, if you do not offer milk and barley
to the maimed figure of the god, your well will foul,
your crops will wither in the fields. In the eastern marches
children know the story that the aspen quivers
because it failed to hide the Virgin and the Child
when Herod’s hunters were abroad. Think: night is the god
dressed as the beggar drinking the sweet milk.
Gray beard, thin shanks, the look in the eyes
idiot, unbearable, the wizened mouth agape,
like an infant’s that has cried and sucked and cried
and paused to catch its breath. The pink nubbin
of the nipple glistens. I’ll suckle at that breast,
the one in the song of the muttering illumination
of the fields before the sun goes down, before
the black train crosses the frontier from Prussia
into Poland in the age of the dawn of freedom.
Fifty freight cars from America, full of medicine
and the latest miracle, canned food.
The war is over. There are unburied bones
in the fields at sun-up, skylarks singing,
starved children begging chocolate on the tracks

More here.

A list of supporters. No Jesuits??

An interesting analysis of the voting in states with the highest gun-ownership rates. So far, Obama has beaten Clinton in almost every one.