The Dish

Allow me a vent. So yesterday, I woke up back in DC trying to start a new regimen, by going into the Atlantic offices early, rather than blogging from home in the morning. We got back over the weekend and the place is a bit of a wreck with unpacking, wedding gifts, a mountain of unwanted mail, etc. First thing: a water-main broke over night and there’s no water in the shower. Second: I remember that my bike was stolen the last week I was in DC, and so I have to cab it. Third: I left my keys in Ptown and couldn’t access the exercise room and shower at the office. Fourth: I left my cell-phone in my apartment. Fifth: I couldn’t find Obama’s press-guy’s phone number and I need an interview soon. Sixth: leaving the office around eight, I get home to walk the dogs while Aaron is in class for the evening with his cell off, and find that the spare keys are not where we hide them. A friend had used them to get in the apartment while we were away and had forgotten to put them back in the right place. Seventh: it’s about 100 percent humidity, the beagles are baying on the other side of the door, and I can’t find my husband. Sometimes, days just compound themselves. Aaron did get home around 11, by which time I was blearily watching Anderson at a friend’s apartment. Oh, and my friend’s air-conditioning was bust.

I feel better now.

A funny photographic exhibit by Andy Freeberg is currently at the Danziger Projects Gallery in NYC. It’s of those men and women who guard the entrance to art galleries. Or rather the tops of their heads.

A reader looks back:

Something I have wanted to ask you for a long time, brought up by your reference to not having kept your head after 9/11: have you read the very short book Prisons We Choose To Live Inside, by Doris Lessing? It is very much like a personal letter to her readers, on the subject of how – I remember that from her own experience she mentions wars and revolutionary fervor – people do tend to get swept away in a particular kind of dangerous surge.

Just thought it would resonate.

I realize that it’s no consolation – but even people who in one way or another can say that they did not lose their footing were operating in, and were affected by, a sanity context that was not normal. That’s how it was for me. I am uncertain that the diffidence in pressing one’s suspicions or thoughts under the circumstances was much more well-grounded or less culpable than a public living-in-the-illusion, really.

Perhaps the greatest weapon of terrorism is simply the impact that terror has – and ineluctably has – on the human mind and judgment. When we think of how understandably traumatized most of us were after 9/11, we can perhaps better understand why so many Iraqis – traumatized each day and night for decades by Saddam – are even now reeling from their own psychic traumas. To ask them to leave that past behind, like a cell-phone in a cab, is to ask the impossible. Paranoia, hatred, bitterness, revenge, panic: all these are very human responses to what they went through and have not begun to process. Which was why instilling order immediately upon liberation was so important. And why our refusal to do that has led to the current abyss. Human – all too human.

It is a recurrent theme. A reader finds an anecdote in Peter Manso’s book on Norman Mailer:

"[Podhoretz] came over to me. I’m paraphrasing but it was about five sentences in a row, to the effect: ‘Ginsberg, you really have some talent…if you’d only get rid of those friends of yours like Burroughs and Kerouac…"

"To my eternal shame, I lost my temper…I started screaming at him, ‘You big dumb fuckhead! You idiot! You don’t know anything about anything!’"

"Now, true to his particular nature, Podhoretz thought I was going to get violent, because that’s all he thinks about … Podhoretz yelled, ‘He’s going to get violent.’ and Mailer came over and took my arm, so I had to reassure him I wasn’t going to hit anybody…"

There were many, many good reasons for some liberals to renounce the left-liberalism of the late 1960s and 1970s. And when I think of neoconservatives in the best sense, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell spring to mind (although Bell would disdain the term, I think). But Podhoretz, more than most neocons, seems drawn to the thrill of violence, as fanatics of the far left and far right often are. Podhoretz, of course, has partaken in the violent fantasies of both extremes in his own lifetime. And I have come to realize these past few years that I was blind to this streak among some neocons, their actual love of war, and hegemony, their suppressed desire to strike back at their perceived enemies – blacks, Arabs, liberals – sometimes literally. In that context, their support for torture makes more sense, doesn’t it?

Zallherr, Albania, 2.30 pm.

Their money quotes at the hearings today can be viewed here and here. Both strike exactly the right tone in front of Petraeus and Crocker. And both, I fear, are dead-on in their brutal criticism of the non-strategy we have in the Middle East.

Juan Cole’s sobering take on what the next few years will probably bring is well worth digesting. Money quote:

As for Iraq itself, the best hope for the Dems may be that Gen. Petraeus actually succeeds, over the next year, in significantly reducing ethnic tensions. It is a slim reed to hold onto, as they recognize.

But from the moment Bush went into Iraq, Americans were screwed. And that includes the Democratic Party, which is being set up to take the fall.

I’m a severe skeptic on the likelihood of anything that looks like success in Iraq. But I don’t think career public servants such as Ryan Crocker and David Petraeus are acting as partisan Republicans in their Iraq efforts. I think they both are sincere, experienced men attempting to retrieve what they can for America from Bush’s catastrophe. They may as well try, since the Democrats can’t over-rule Bush and get the troops out, anyway. If the troops are there, they may as well at least be deployed intelligently, which is what Gen. Petraeus is doing. I wish them well in their Herculean labors. Because if they fail, I have a sinking feeling that we are all going down with them, including the next Democratic president. And their success is a long shot.

What online social networking has wrought.

A test-case of the online encyclopedia’s lightning speed of news – and editing.