The Dish

It’s Charles Simic, which makes some of us very happy. Here’s a 2005 interview with Simic from the Paris Review. Money quote:

INTERVIEWER: "All I have is a voice," Auden wrote in "September 1, 1939," "To undo the folded lie." Of course he then later disowned this poem . . . But it seems to me your poems are often motivated by the desire to "undo folded lies," or at least to expose the various complexities that politicians and pundits attempt to disguise from us.

SIMIC: Let’s hope so. Poetry in my view is a defense of the individual against all the forces arrayed against him. Every religion, every ideology and orthodoxy of thought and manner wants to reeducate him and make him into something else. To sing from the same sheet is the ideal. A true patriot doesn’t think for himself, they’ll tell you. I realize that there’s a long tradition in poetry of not speaking truth to power and, in fact, of being its groveling apologist. I just don’t have it in me.

A new social science experiment:

Participants are brought in, have an EEG cap put on their head to measure electrical activity in the brain, and then they are told to watch a series of faces appearing on the screen.

Some of the faces are White, some Black and some Asian….

Afterwards the participants are shown bar graphs supposedly interpreting measurements of the electrical activity in their brains. These indicate that while the participants reacted positively and neutrally to White and Asian faces, they reacted negatively to Black faces. The ‘results’ seem to show that our liberal participants are somewhat racist – whether consciously or unconsciously.

These graphs are, of course, just made up.

Bloomberg vs TPM.

Pretty soon, breast-feeding will be compulsory. And don’t miss the A-Train.

Appropriate, when you come to think about it. From the wonderful blog, "Strange Maps."

Obama’s getting good news lately from the early primary states.

Greg Djerejian does the most thorough, persuasive and unsettling job yet.

My take on the TNR Scott Beauchamp story is here.

This, I guess, is what happens when your country falls apart:

Large areas in the western parts of Baghdad were without running water on Thursday, in 120-degree summer heat. Officials blamed their inability to keep the water-purification and pumping stations going for the electricity shortages.

Many Baghdad residents complain that they have water for only a few hours a day, and sometimes no electricity at all.

Bob Gates has some choice words in the same report:

"We probably all underestimated the depth of the mistrust and how difficult it would be for these guys to come together on legislation, which, let’s face it, is not some kind of secondary issue."

Well, not all of us under-estimated it. And it surely seems a secondary issue as far as Bush is concerned. He keeps pitching Iraq as a military battle against al Qaeda, when it is obviously, primarily, a civil war we have no political solution to. More discouraging, it seems to me that even Gates – a sane and sensible man – is becoming resigned to an indefinite occupation of Iraq. Washington’s caution about leaving a war zone is understandable, of course. But it does not make the decision to stay grinding through an irrecoverable civil conflict any less foolish.

Decrepit bridges are not a new story. Here’s an Atlantic archived piece from 1994 with the scary map above. The red and blue counties are the danger zones. The essay prophetically notes:

The percentage of structurally deficient bridges should increase in the next ten years, in large part because tens of thousands of bridges built on the interstate highways during the boom years following the Second World War will soon be in need of major repairs. The Secretary of Transportation estimates that federal, state, and local governments will need to increase their yearly funding by almost 40 percent to meet the surging need for bridge rehabilitation.