Buy This Book

Mike Scalise alerts me to the fact that Other Latitudes, the first book of poetry by Brian Brodeur, is now available for you to purchase.  I haven’t read everything in the collection, but having read Brian’s stuff before (and having been in a workshop with him) I’m pretty excited about this book.  Rather than butcher a description of the work based on ill-formed notions of the manuscript, I’ll let the ever articulate Eric Pankey explain it:

Reading Brian Brodeur, I am reminded of St. Augustine’s assertion that “To blame the fault of a creature is to praise its essential nature.” In the lyric narratives of his debut collection, Other Latitudes, which is urgent, evocative, and, at times, disturbing, Brodeur shows us that the wide expanse of the heart is rife with flaw and error and in showing us its flaw, praises it. Human relationships—the tragic and the comedic—are his subject and he testifies to their essential vitality and complexity with a capacious wit, a quick intelligence, and an enduring generosity.

And if that isn’t enough to sell you on it, Mike Scalise has more pithy take:

The best way I can describe Brodeur’s work is that it’s compulsively readable.

There you go, the essential quality for any book of poetry: it’s interesting.  So put the boring stuff down and read this instead.  You didn’t really want to read that other stuff anyway.

When Worlds Collide

There aren’t many instances where I get to write about the meeting of the literary and political worlds, but TPM’s book discussion of Philip Gourevitch’s Standard Operating Procedure is one of them.  Gourevitch has his feet in both worlds as both the editor of The Paris Review and a journalist who wrote an excellent book on the Rwandan genocide, and makes him well suited to flesh out the varied stories and narrative strains the make up the abuses at Abu Ghraib .

What makes this book discussion more interesting than the usual fare is the inclusion of poet/memoirist Mary Karr (of The Liars Club fame) as part of the discussion and that fellow poet/memiorist Nick Flynn shows up in the comments section to chastise Gourevitch for not including more Iraqi voices in his account.  Gourevitch responds that part of the reason for not explicitly including the words of those Iraqi’s tortured at Abu Ghraib was his focus on the events as a particularly American story–that the abuses at Abu Ghraib, as Gourevitch  argues, were not inevitable, and were the result of tacit (and sometimes explicit) support of American officials. This is a story about the policy of torture.

Flynn’s concern is common one among writers: who to include and how to tell the story without distorting the truth or privileging one narrative over another.  But it is, I think, a secondary concern here, and one too focused on the (laudable) goal of including voices that were silenced or otherwise appropriated in the media swarm that followed Abu Ghraib.  SOP‘s major contribution seems to be the way it examines how the decisions and policy of the Bush administration translated to actions at Abu Ghraib, as Matt Steinglass observes :

What’s really powerful about this story is that it’s one of the best stories I’ve ever seen for examining the way that policy decisions translate into events. Think, for instance, of Jane Mayer’s amazing article for The New Yorker on Alberto Mora. The hardest thing to do in journalism is to draw connections between complex and fuzzy management and policy decisions, bureaucratic political maneuvering and the adoption of one or another document as official policy, and the consequences such documents and management tactics have for the accomplishment of an organization’s mission. The reporting that’s been done on how abuses at Abu Ghraib (and Bagram and Guantanamo) stemmed from the evolution of US torture policy has been probably the best, most gripping organizational reporting I’ve read.

I’m calling this one for Gourevitch because (as Karr also notes) a book that widens the narrative scope to all accounts is a different, though important, book.

Also in torture reporting: Spencer Ackerman goes to the Amnesty Guantanamo protest in DC and talks with former army chaplin CPT. James Lee, who was arrested, and eventually released, for suscpision of espionage.

Richard Cohen and the Amazing Disappering Bottom Line

Supposedly, everyone has a bottom line, an absolute limit past which we won’t go. First principles, perhaps, which can’t be compromised, or a sense of fairness that compels you to fight for certain ends. Richard Cohen has looked at both presidential candidates and finds that a bottom line is what separates them:

But here is the difference between McCain and Obama — and Obama had better pay attention. McCain is a known commodity. It’s not just that he’s been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to those of his Republican base. It’s also — and more important — that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over. This — not just his candor and nonstop verbosity on the Straight Talk Express — is what commends him to so many journalists.

Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don’t know what they are.

Cohen doesn’t actually say what that bottom line is, but it’s useful to know that McCain has a bottom line.  But Obama–not sure yet.  Except, wait:

McCain has a bottom line. Obama just moved his.

Obama just moved his–indeterminate–bottom line.  Oh, and Cohen admits that both candidates have changed their position on things, but this represents a bottom line change on Obama’s part, even though we don’t know if Obama has a bottom line.  Argumentative prestidigitation abounds.  Watch Cohen work but–ah!–not too closely becuase you’ll miss that the premise of Cohen’s argument–woosh!–has disappered!  Bottom lines comes and go in a puff magic smoke.  Thanks folks, Cohen will be back on the Post Op-Ed pages next week.

P.S. Publis at Obsdian Wings nominates this for Worst Op-Ed of 2008

Memo to Obama

In his latest article, Fareed Zakaria proposes some things Senator Obama should say about Iraq.  Key excerpts:

All today’s gains could disappear when American troops leave—and they will have to leave one day. The disagreement I have with the Bush administration is that it seems to believe that time will magically make these gains endure. It won’t. Without political progress, once the United States reduces its forces, the old mistrust and the old militias will rise up again. Only genuine political power-sharing will create a government and an Army that are seen as national and not sectarian. And that, in turn, is the only path to make Iraq viable without a large American military presence.[...]

[...]My objective remains to end American combat involvement in Iraq and to do so expeditiously. At some point we are going to have to take off the training wheels in Iraq. I believe that we must have a serious plan that defines when that point is reached. If we define success as an Iraq that looks like France or Holland, we will have to stay indefinitely, continue spending $10 billion a month and keep 140,000 troops in combat. And that is neither acceptable nor sustainable. We will have to accept as success a muddy middle ground—an Iraq that is a functioning, federal democracy with a central government and an army able to tackle the bulk of challenges they face.

Defining what victory looks like is the key policy metric here.  Any politician who won’t tell you what victory looks like (or what sort of state–roughly–Iraq should be when we leave) is asking for us to spend lives and resources based on vaguely defined goals like “security” and “stability”¹.  Loosely defined terms do not a foreign policy make.

¹ Or your personal (but not publicly defined!) concept of an ideal democratic state. Your actual Iraqi democratic results may vary.

Someone Get John Cain On the Phone…

Because apparently the definitive album of the 1980s is Van Halen’s 1984.  Really? As a fan of The Police and someone old enough to remember when Michael Jackson was almost bigger than Jesus, I object. I understand that the criteria isn’t the best album of the decade, but I’m thinking something a lot more New Wave as the definitive sound of the 80s.

John Cain, the internets needs your music wisdom!

Race & Media Matters

I kept hearing yesterday from some pundits and journalists that Obama’s Father’s Day speech was directed at “white, working class people”.  Whether or not that was true (or that white working class people were politically symapthetic to his calls for absentee African-American men to step up to their role as fathers) it struck me as both an extraordinarily dumb concern on the part of white people and an unexceptional speech to be giving in a black church.  Not surprisingly, Ta-Nehisi Coates is all over this:

But reporters need to stop acting like this dude is the only civilized black man in the world. I just came from the beautiful Real Men Cook event here in Harlem. This thing has been going for almost twenty years now, celebrating fathers who are doing right, and serving as rebuke (if I may) to the ones that are ghost. We don’t need Barack Obama to tell us to be fathers, though I’m glad he’s doing it. We need reporters to actively engage the people they claim to cover.[...]

But when this stuff is reported, it’s written as if it’s the first time anyone’s said this. The basic rule seems to be among white media–if we haven’t heard it, it didn’t happen.

Also, if white people are sitting around waiting for a series of “Sister Souljah” moments from Obama to prove his American values bona fides then I hope they’re kept waiting.  It’s a disingenuous and uniformed notion (“Oh, all those black folk who don’t have fathers! Won’t anybody do something?!”) as if, as Coates says, Obama was the first to raise the issue or white people are honestly waiting for someone to wag their finger at another racial or ethnic group so they can make up their mind on who to vote for.

Damn

Tim Russert Dies at 58.

There isn’t anything more to say except heartfelt condolences.

Allow Me

In order to alleviate any suggestion of concern trolling on Matt Zeitlin’s part, I’m going to take a shot at why this Naomi Klein piece on Obama’s economic advisers is such a mess. Klein’s continued obsession with Milton Friedman as a symbol of everything that is wrong with anything approaching a market solution causes her to not only flatten distinction between economists, but also miss a growing consensus among liberal economists that more has to be done to ensure social welfare and address inequality. First here’s what Klein has to say about Jason Furman:

Furman, a leading disciple of Rubin, was chosen to head the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project, the think tank Rubin helped found to argue for reforming, rather than abandoning, the free-trade agenda.

In contrast to the Furman/Rubin position, Klein approvingly cites two economists:

The news is not all bad. Furman claims he will be drawing on the expertise of two Keynesian economists: Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute and James Galbraith, son of Friedman’s nemesis John Kenneth Galbraith.

So let’s turn it over to James Galbraith:

In a Washington Post essay published late last year, on the eve of the Democrats’ ascension to the majority, Senators Byron Dorgan and Sherrod Brown articulated a trade policy that typifies the consensus view of the party’s labor-liberal wing. They criticize “free trade,” call for strong labor and environmental standards in future trade agreements, and argue for aggressive policies to open foreign markets to American goods. Their critique reflects a genuine anger, and the concerns their piece embodies deserve to be met. Their program is populist, nationalist, muscular, and in tune with the mood of the Democratic base.

But it is not reality-based. As policy, it would not achieve the senators’ basic objective — namely, more jobs at higher wages in the United States. As politics, the danger is not that it will fail but that it might succeed. And then, progressives in power will repeat the pattern that conservatives set in 1981, pushing a program based on high expectations and illusions that ends in confusion, reversals, defeats, and an eventual lapse into incoherence and disrepute.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Klein’s anti-trade rhetoric. But what does the Rubin/Summers (and Furman, by implication) wing of economic centrists (part of Klein’s nasty Friedmanite cabal) think about the current economic situation? Here’s Larry Summers:

The domestic component of a strategy to promote healthy globalisation must rely on strengthening efforts to reduce inequality and insecurity. The international component must focus on the interests of working people in all countries, in addition to the current emphasis on the priorities of global ­corporations. [...]

While labour standards arguments have at times been invoked as a cover for protectionism, and this must be avoided, it is entirely appropriate that US policymakers seek to ensure that greater global integration does not become an excuse for eroding labour rights.

Let’s be clear: the “Wall Street” and “Main Street” sides of economic policy (represented by Robert Rubin and Robert Reich during the Clinton years, respectively) are closer now than ever before.  Naomi Klein’s picture of the global economy is a caricature, and one that fellow critics of the Washington Consensus reject.  Anti-market screeds might be a winner for populist-minded voters, anxious about their financial security and the turn in the American economy, but it won’t make for good economic policy.  There are people out there who are gripped with by a Friedmanesque “free-market-in-all-things” ideology, but economists like Furman and Goolsebee aren’t among them.  The truly problematic ideology is Klein’s own.

Young Blogger’s Media Domination Continues Apace

Matt Zeitlin has just joined a very formidable looking (and well designed) group blog called Pushback, part of Campus Progress Action.  And if Dylan Matthews is right (and I suspect he is) Pushback is also part of a very successful model for progressive activism developed by the Center for American Progress.

I’ve heard some complaints (mainly from the 40+ demographic and old-guard liberals) that young people don’t seem as politically active, at least when it comes to things like showing up to anti-war protest marches.  Part of the answer, as Pushback bloggers demonstrate, is that activism has moved elsewhere.  I also think that a large percentage of my generation feels that they can engage with the status-quo political order and affect change through traditional channels that baby boomers never felt were open to them.

Does That Make Libertarians Chaotic Neutral?

Tybalt christens this response to Alberta Law School post about a speaking engagement at a Canadian Libertarian Party conference the comment of the year:

Bring your twenty-sided dice!

I’d find this a funny non sequitur if it weren’t for this aside in a recent post by George Mason’s Bryan Caplan:

One of Milton Friedman’s most famous lines: “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.” He said it in a 1999 ISIL interview, and I’ve heard it quoted dozens of times. It even inspired me to write a Champions scenario, “The Law of Unintended Consequences.” (Want to play it? Email me for an invitation to Capla-Con, July 12&13!)

I hadn’t realized there was some sort of connection between libertarianism and role playing games (I had realized, however, that there is a strong correlation between blogging, comic books, wonkishness, and role playing games, insofar as I am representative of this trend).

And while I’m on the subject of D&D geekery, I might as well point out an interesting post by Tim Burke about the new 4th Edition D&D which was supposed to have integrated a new set of online tools, but has yet to actually make those tools available (and likely won’t for some time).

Also, this comment by Tybalt himself is pretty good:

I only find it believable because right now I find myself about 5 minutes of bullshit away from a half-hour rant about “whitey” myself… and I’m white.

And Yet the Democrats Aren’t Perennial Winners

I have to admit, not knowing statistics very well, this Op-Ed by Neil Degrasse Tyson made me nervous:

If the general election were held today, Mr. Obama would win 252 electoral votes as the Democratic nominee, while Mrs. Clinton would win 295. In other words, Barack Obama is losing to John McCain, and Hillary Clinton is beating him.

But, oh trickiness, the numbers take some turn in the light of historical context (it has graphs and everything):

As you can see, polls this early are in many cases not even close to the outcome.

I’m sure that Dr. Tyson means well, and I’m a big fan of Nova, but, really, he should talk with some political scientists before glibly writing about politics and concluding, “The political analysts need to take it from here.” We’ve taken it pretty far already, dude! Tyson has every right to speculate about politics–I wouldn’t claim that you need some sort of political science affiliation as a “union card” to do political science research–but it would make sense to ask around a bit, right?

(Hat tip: The Monkey Cage)

I’ve Got a Lot of Friends and We’ve Got a Lot of Makeup

This Vulture post about a spate of recent and upcoming movies in which white actors don bronzer (dubbed “The Summer of Brownface”) includes several strained inclusions/conclusions.  Although it does beggar understanding that Mena Suvari is a white actress playing a role based on a real life black woman, there really isn’t anything that crazy about Adam Sandler playing an Israeli (except that the movie will be a goofy, hummus obsessed dud) because he is, in fact Semitic.  “Israeli” is a nationality (one that happens to correspond both  to a state and a religion).  If Sandler is crossing some kind of ethnic boundary then so would Golda Meir.

The standard used to attack Fred Armistead is likewise confusing:

And when Fauxbama raised some eyebrows, SNL was quick to use Fred Armisen’s own “exotic” background (Venezuelan-Japanese) as a shield. No ethnic vaudeville here, just good-natured biracial-on-biracial ribbing! In other words, nobody involved is willing to say that what they’re doing is, in fact, what they’re doing — and, as a direct result, everyone ends up looking a little ashamed.

Perhaps there’ll be less hemming and hawing if cross-race casting ever becomes a two-way street (the stultifying White Girls notwithstanding, the only such performance that readily comes to mind is Jeffrey Wright as a Latino in Shaft).

Would Idov have preferred that Kennan Thompson play Obama because Thompson is black (though not biracial)?  It’s important that Obama self-identifies as black (and, I would argue, that many Americans would regard him as such even if he didn’t) but seems less important for the person portraying him (and what about Darryl Hammond playing Jesse Jackson for the past decade).  Why does Wright playing a Latino make it more of a two-way street but Armistead playing Obama not?  And I’m surprised Idov could only think of two examples of cross-race casting the other way, forgetting Dave Chappell’s hilarious “Racial Draft” (among others) and Eddie Murphy’s classic “White Like Me” (from which the title of this post is taken).

The more important argument seems to be “why aren’t there more non-white actors getting roles” (or being shut-out) rather than pretending context and the somewhat fluid and constructed nature of racial categories is an excuse “more sickening, in a way, then outright minstrelsy”.

Who Will Want to Watch “Watchmen”? (Part II)

[Part I can be found here.]

And now the parts which I think are going to prove hardest to translate and suggest that this movie will miss the mark after all:

1. The politics are Cold War era and something of a mess:

And I mean “a mess” in the best way possible. Mike is exactly right when he says that “Moore is uniquely difficult to adapt”. Part of this is because Moore plays with a lot with overlapping themes, history, and ideas and draws connections between them that aren’t conducive to a straightforward narrative (From Hell has a 40 page Appendix commenting on different images, symbols, and references in the book. Trying to fit of that into a common movie adaptation only allowed for the suggestion of connections and a reductive atmosphere of “this is all a complex conspiracy”).

Watchmen was as much a work about what the political moment felt like (the rise of Reganism/Thatcherism of the 80s) as it was an exploration of political themes like imperialism and nuclear proliferation. If you look at other works around the same time (like Jamie Delano‘s Hellblazer or Frank Miller’s The Dark Night Returns) you’d think that Regan and Thatcher were releasing demonic hordes to suck the life from the poor and usher in a new age of crypto-fascism¹. That’s harder to convey some 20 years later, and current political turmoil helps only insofar as current generations are familiar with a certain amount of distrust of government. What drives much of the book is the sense that a conflict between two superpowers (the US and USSR) was inevitable, made all the more real by the Regan administrations aggressive rhetoric and the threat that our technology would slip out of our control, leading to a Dr.Strangelove like disaster. I think a lot of that fear was overblown, but it did make for a really great alternate history. It’s less certain that it’ll make for a great movie backdrop.

Works of art aren’t usually programmatic in their politics, nor easily reducible to some kind of political framework (“You see? it’s all a parable about the dangers of single payer healthcare“). That’s why I can see some of the politics being downplayed and acting as a kind of atmospheric–a kind of anxious environment the characters live in as part of a kind of “dystopian” alternate America. None of these are inherently bad, but from Mike has said about V for Vendetta (and the complex nature of Watchmen) we might easily be treated to heaping spoonful political gobbledygook.

2. A movie about superheroes that uses movie superheroes as fodder is something different:

This is the downside of my “Nite Owl looks badass” argument, and one which Mike does a succinct job of laying out:

Furthermore, movie-Batman doesn’t lend himself to the same sort of affectionate tweaking as comic-Batman, because he basically makes sense. Not a lot of sense, but a lot more than comic-Batman. He’s not fighting crime in fetish gear, he’s wearing body armor. He doesn’t drive around in a limousine with little bat wings glued to its ass, he drives a super-maneuverable armored assault vehicle. It makes for more convincing cinema, but it’s not the sort of material from which you derive Nite Owl, and I suspect it quite fundamentally can’t be. The feeling just isn’t right.

There isn’t the same sort of reality/comic book absurdity dichotomy on screen, where directors have fundamentally taken a realistic approach. If Watchmen used cinematic elements to make its world seem more realistic, then a movie can’t break that distinction because it’s already gone. Part of this difficulty falls under the category of “Trying to make a ‘realistic’ superhero movie in post-Watchmen world”. In some ways, every superhero movie has already been influenced by Watchmen (culminating in the family-friendly version of Watchmen, The Incredibles, and the new Hancock movie). I don’t want to belabor the deconstruction of superheros point too much, but much of what gives Watchmen its impact for comic book reader can’t be transported to the big screen. Again, that doesn’t mean that whatever sort of comment on superhero movies Zack Synder makes is bound to ring false, just that it’s that much harder to tweak the genre without merely recapitulating a lot of what’s come before.

3. It’s rumored to clock in at between 2 1/2 and 3 hours:

Perhaps you saw this one coming. Yes, I said this was a good thing before, but in full recognition of the different medium we’re dealing with, 2 1/2 hours might come to seem like a long time to sit through multiple character arcs that fail to come together in a satisfying way. Put another way: Sure, comic book nerds like myself might have the tolerance for it, but does that mean that it will be a good movie? We shall see.

___________________________________________

¹ Whatever you think of Regan and Thatcher, it wasn’t that bad. Also, I’m being a bit literal with some of the metaphors Delano and Miller employed (e.g. demons as yuppies looking to make a quick infernal dollar), but I think they were expressing a kind of political sentiment that felt a group from the fringe had just swept into office around the globe.

Bad Ideas About Jerusalem

Via Matt Yglesias, Obama’s speech to AIPAC included this wrongheaded line:

Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.

Not only is this unrealistic, it’s moving backwards. Every plan for a two state solution since the Clinton Parameters has included some kind of split in sovereignty for Jerusalem. If facts on the ground had changed radically that would be one thing. But they haven’t. So it’s an idea that remains divorced from reality, as Gershom Gorenberg observes:

In most respects, Jerusalem is already a divided city, and recognizing this politically is the key to precisely the kind of agreement that Obama says he’d like to reach. Alas. “Yes, We Can” pander to Aipac.

UPDATE:

Obama’s people clarify that his comment doesn’t preclude Palestinian sovereignty :

“Two principles should apply to any outcome,” which the adviser gave as: “Jerusalem remains Israel’s capital and it’s not going to be divided by barbed wire and checkpoints as it was in 1948-1967.”

He refused, however, to rule out other configurations, such as the city also serving as the capital of a Palestinian state or Palestinian sovereignty over Arab neighborhoods.

“Beyond those principles, all other aspects are for the two parties to agree at final status negotiations,” the Obama adviser said.

(H/T Byron York at The Corner)

Liberals and the Free Market

Will Wilkinson wrote a much linked to piece the other day that argues a real “liberaltarianism” wouldn’t look too different than the writings of Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and James Buchanan, which are not too far afield from the political commitments of “welfare liberals” (my term).  He concludes by saying:

So that’s where I’m at. An old-fashioned market liberal who thinks Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan get it right, and who thinks Rawlsian welfare liberals should be able to recognize themselves in these thinkers.

For the most part, I think this is true, especially since both libertarians and liberals have reached a kind of intellectual rapprochement; liberals have come to accept Hayek’s insights about decentralization (as Matt Zeitlin pointed out) and libertarians like Wilkinson recognize that not every welfare state will descend into totalitarianism, based on the observation that many European countries with large welfare states didn’t actually descend into totalitarianism.

But I think part of what keeps me in the “liberal” column economically (besides particular moral and political commitments) is something this response Larry Summers gave in an interview:

[...]there are two kinds of offsetting errors that in a way lead me to be dismissive of people’s analysis.  One is the motive analysis that assumes that whatever the market produces will be for the best, that denies, if you like, that the phenomenon of a wasteful bank run where a healthy institution is felled by lack of confidence and that somebody needs to do something to coordinate to produce a better outcome.  The kind of analysis that denies that as a possibility and simply believes as an ideological matter that if you interfere in the market it will be worse.  I don’t find those types of analyses helpful.  I suppose the other type of analysis that I don’t find to be helpful are ones that commit the opposite error.  Something bad happened.  Therefore, the government should have a plan to stop it, and if only we had a better government the problem would not have taken place.

I believe markets can and do fail or that they produce outcomes that we’d rather not have (as Tyler Cowen has pointed out, its sometimes sad when we have markets in everything).  But they’re more efficient and often more neutral than any sort of directed institution or order that we could develop, which would come with its own host of attendant problems. But when it comes to policy, I have no a priori feelings about a market or government answer.