A Dark Chapter in American History

Jane Mayer's swift and thorough takedown of Marc A. Thiessen's Courting Disaster, a new book that tries to defend the Bush Administration's use of torture, includes this trenchant point, among many others:

Tellingly, Thiessen does not address the many false confessions given by detainees under torturous pressure, some of which have led the U.S. tragically astray. Nowhere in this book, for instance, does the name Ibn Sheikh al-Libi appear. In 2002, the C.I.A., under an expanded policy of extraordinary rendition, turned Libi over to Egypt to be brutalized. Under duress, Libi falsely linked Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s alleged biochemical-weapons program, in Iraq. In February, 2003, former Secretary of State Colin Powell gave an influential speech in which he made the case for going to war against Iraq and prominently cited this evidence.

Talk about an epic fail.

Mayer ends, however, with a criticism of Obama:

The publication of “Courting Disaster” suggests that Obama’s avowed determination “to look forward, not back” has laid the recent past open to partisan reinterpretation. By holding no one accountable for past abuse, and by convening no commission on what did and didn’t protect the country, President Obama has left the telling of this dark chapter in American history to those who most want to whitewash it.

Nevertheless, I can imagine why Obama didn't convene a commission. Doing so would be an expenditure of political capital to further discredit an abandoned policy that has already been amply investigated, perhaps most effectively by Mayer herself. I'm not sure that a government commission would prevent partisan reinterpretation now or prevent more torture from happening in some distant future.

Pushing in the Other Direction

From an interesting NY Times article that analyzes the meaning of the new health care bill:

For all the political and economic uncertainties about health reform, at least one thing seems clear: The bill that President Obama signed on Tuesday is the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.

Over most of that period, government policy and market forces have been moving in the same direction, both increasing inequality. The pretax incomes of the wealthy have soared since the late 1970s, while their tax rates have fallen more than rates for the middle class and poor.

Nearly every major aspect of the health bill pushes in the other direction. This fact helps explain why Mr. Obama was willing to spend so much political capital on the issue, even though it did not appear to be his top priority as a presidential candidate. Beyond the health reform’s effect on the medical system, it is the centerpiece of his deliberate effort to end what historians have called the age of Reagan....

The bill is the most sweeping piece of federal legislation since Medicare was passed in 1965. It aims to smooth out one of the roughest edges in American society — the inability of many people to afford medical care after they lose a job or get sick. And it would do so in large measure by taxing the rich.

This is the real reason that Republicans were so outraged about the bill. They argue that this legislation is socialism, that it's un-American to provide medical care to the less-well-off by taking money from the well-off. Some nutjobs around my school even argue, seemingly counterintuitively, that it's un-Christian to do so—since it forces individuals to give to charity, an act that should be chosen freely.

Such criticisms are grounded in a central misconception (and perhaps a willful one) about the nature of our society and our economy. Republicans love to talk about the free market, as if it's simply a state of nature that government interferes with at its peril.

But in fact the "free market" is a human construction that has evolved over centuries and is constantly being tweaked and manipulated by human beings. The invention of money, the system of lending, the Federal Reserve bank—all of these types of things are specific human inventions that have been designed to engineer an economy. There's no such thing as the "free market." There's just a series of rules and practices that have been set up to encourage individuals and corporations to make exchanges in order to provide our society with what it wants and needs. And those rules and practices are constantly being refined and adapted.

At various points in our history, the government has stepped in to refine the rules of our economy when the wealthy get too powerful. The most stark instance of such an intervention, as I discussed here, was when the government abolished slavery, thus taking away much Southern wealth and delivering it to former slaves.

Southerners, some of whom didn't even own slaves, considered this transfer of wealth to be tyranny. John Wilkes Booth, after shooting Abraham Lincoln, referred to him as a tyrant. Plenty of Tea Party types these days are calling Obama a tyrant.

It wasn't tyranny, though. Our society, through its elected leaders, made a decision to shape our economy this way—guided as well, perhaps, by moral principles. And we've made other choices over the decades: child labor laws, public schools, Medicare, tax breaks for homebuyers. The recent Supreme Court decision about corporations and campaign contributions was a decision that affects the economy as well.

The "free market" is constantly being shaped and re-shaped. Politics is mostly about how it will be shaped. Contrary to the ridiculous demagoguery of the Republicans in the final hours of the health care debate, all that's happened here, really, is American politics as it was designed to operate: after years of leaders who chose to shape the economy to concentrate wealth toward the top, the American public elected a group of leaders (Obama most powerfully) who wanted to tip things back the other way.

Adventures at QT (5)

Yesterday I was putting lids on sodas at QT. At the fountain were several teenaged boys.

"Should I get a Suicide?" I heard one of them ask the group.

I turned around. "What's a Suicide?"

"That's when you mix all the sodas together."

"It's awesome," chimed in another of the boys.

I Googled it, and sure enough, the Suicide is an established part of fountain soda culture. Here's a demonstration:

Wade School

Wade School was built in 1929, named for Festus J. Wade, a prominent St. Louis banker. It was designed by famed architect Robert Milligan. In 1995, it was renamed the Meda P. Washington Education Center. It's on Vandeventer, in between Shaw and Kingshighway.

This building is in my neighborhood, and in an alternate universe—one in which it was still used as an elementary school, and in which every school in the district was a solid educational environment—it would be where my kids go to school. They could walk there in about ten minutes.

I'm not really complaining. The SLPS school that my daughter attends is only a five-minute drive from our house, and it's a great place.

But Meda P. Washington, nee Wade, does have a place in my heart. My grandma worked here as a school secretary decades ago. And I taught my wife to drive a stick shift in the parking lot.

It's a handsome building, part of St. Louis's rich heritage of educational architecture, yet also a reminder of the often sundered connection between our built environment and our lives in this city.

A Different Tradition Altogether

Christopher Benfey's piece on Raymond Carver makes a number of points similar to those I made here and here. But it also adds this very nice insight:

[Lish] thought that Carver was in the tradition of Hemingway, that he was a “minimalist” of some kind, an artist of radical abbreviation; in short, a writer of “short stories.” Lish certainly “improved” Carver’s stories by the standards of that tradition, giving them extra point, concision, suggestiveness, and climax.

But in fact, as we can now see from the original versions of his stories in this important Library of America volume, Carver was part of a different tradition altogether—the tradition of orally based storytellers such as Mark Twain and Sherwood Anderson. One could even argue that the abbreviations of the “short story,” as taught at Iowa and elsewhere, are fundamentally opposed to the oral nature of the kind of storytelling that Carver was practicing.

Ralph as Obama

I'm teaching Lord of the Flies right now to my freshmen. Yesterday we talked about the scene in which Jack and his hunters let the fire go out. They miss a chance at rescue because they're busy killing their first pig.

Afterward, when Ralph, the elected chief of the boys on the island, accuses Jack of dereliction of duty, Jack apologizes. His Cheneyesque apology draws a positive response from members of his own party:

The buzz from the hunters was one of admiration at this handsome behavior. Clearly they were of the opinion that Jack had done the decent thing, had put himself in the right by his generous apology and Ralph, obscurely, in the wrong.

One of my freshmen asked, "Why do they side with Jack? Can't they see that Ralph is right?"

Ralph is right, of course, that the first priority of the boys on the island should be keeping the fire going as a signal to possible rescuers, and that the second priority should be building shelters. But the lure of the hunt is too great, especially in comparison with the drudgery and labor of fire-tending and shelter-building. The kids don't understand the truth of the situation, so they get caught up in political theater.

I thought of this today as I read George Packer's fine New Yorker article (subscription required) about Obama's first year. Packer quotes a congressional senior aide who suggests that part of Obama's difficulties have stemmed from his disinclination to play simplistic, flashy political games like Jack's, and his desire to think long-term about what's best for the nation.

"One of the problems with this Administration is it has tried to have a grownup, sophisticated conversation with the public.... The country doesn't want to have the conversation he wants to have."

DFW's Copy of Suttree

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin has acquired David Foster Wallace's papers. Here you can look at some books from Wallace's library, along with the notes he's scribbled into the first page.

Check out Wallace's copy of Suttree (he's drawn fangs, mustache, and glasses on Cormac McCarthy's face) at the bottom of the list.

I would consider driving down to Texas if I could flip through the rest of Wallace's copy of this book. Anybody wanna go with me?

Tendencies That Deserve to Be Ignored

Sasha Frere-Jones's nice piece on Bill Withers points out the amazing fact that "Ain't No Sunshine" was the first song Withers ever wrote, and makes these perceptive observations about that song as well:

Withers says that he is an untrained musician, and his songs bear him out, not because they lack sophistication but because they ignore tendencies that deserve to be ignored more often. “Ain’t No Sunshine” is a two-minute song with only three verses, a bridge that repeats two words twenty-six times—“I know”—and no chorus to speak of.

Stoicism and Optimism

From an interesting Richard Rodriguez piece about Cesar Chavez:

If you would understand the tension between Mexico and the United States that is playing out along our mutual border, you must understand the psychic tension between Mexican stoicism— if that is a rich enough word for it— and American optimism. On the one side, Mexican peasants are tantalized by the American possibility of change. On the other side, the tyranny of American optimism has driven Americans to neurosis and depression— when the dream is elusive or less meaningful than the myth promised. This constitutes the great irony of the Mexican-American border: American sadness has transformed the drug lords of Mexico into billionaires, even as the peasants of Mexico scramble through the darkness to find the American dream.

Evolution of an Urban Landscape (Charlotte)

Via Dotage (it's best if you make it full screen, with sound):

Adventures at QT (4)

Today I was at the soda fountain (I've fallen off the wagon), and this guy was scanning the various drink offerings, obviously frustrated and hurried. He had a full 32-oz. cup of cola in one hand and an empty one in the other.

"What are you looking for?" I asked him.

"Some kind of fruit juice, something that's not soda," he said.

I looked with him for a moment. "Here's peach tea," I said. "But I guess that's not really juice. Strawberry Fanta?"

"Yeah, I guess he'll like that," he said and started to fill the empty cup.

"Who are you getting it for?" I asked.

"My son," he said. "He's four, and if he gets too much sugar, you know, he gets kind of hyper."

"Yeah," I said.

"And we're on our way to church, so we don't want him to get too wound up." He finished filling the 32-oz. cup for his four-year-old.

"Well, good luck," I said, as he went to put lids on his drinks.

"Thanks. We'll need it," he said, laughing.

Knowledge We Don't Know What to Do With

This passage, from Larissa MacFarquhar's profile of Paul Krugman, seems very suggestive, even profoundly so, about how we sometimes dismiss obvious and fundamental ideas because they're not couched as we want or expect them to be:

Later on, Krugman became interested in economic geography, in the related question of why there were regional specialties—why, in the United States, for instance, were cars produced in Detroit, carpets in Dalton, Georgia, jewelry in Providence, and chips in Silicon Valley? Again, the answer turned out to be history and accident. Once an industry started up in one place, for whatever reason (the carpet industry in Dalton appears to have its origin in a local teen-ager who in 1895 made a tufted bedspread as a wedding present), local workers became trained in its methods, skilled workers from elsewhere moved there, and related businesses sprang up close by. Then, as more skilled labor became available, the industry could grow and benefit from economies of scale. Soon, as long as it didn’t cost too much to transport the industry’s products, the advantages of the place would be such that it would be impractical for someone to open up a similar business anywhere else. Many economists found the idea that economic geography could be so arbitrary “deeply disturbing and troubling,” Krugman wrote, but he found it exciting.

Again, as in his trade theory, it was not so much his idea that was significant as the translation of the idea into mathematical language. “I explained this basic idea”—of economic geography—“to a non-economist friend,” Krugman wrote, “who replied in some dismay, ‘Isn’t that pretty obvious?’ And of course it is.” Yet, because it had not been well modelled, the idea had been disregarded by economists for years. Krugman began to realize that in the previous few decades economic knowledge that had not been translated into models had been effectively lost, because economists didn’t know what to do with it. His friend Craig Murphy, a political scientist at Wellesley, had a collection of antique maps of Africa, and he told Krugman that a similar thing had happened in cartography. Sixteenth-century maps of Africa were misleading in all kinds of ways, but they contained quite a bit of information about the continent’s interior—the River Niger, Timbuktu. Two centuries later, mapmaking had become much more accurate, but the interior of Africa had become a blank. As standards for what counted as a mappable fact rose, knowledge that didn’t meet those standards—secondhand travellers’ reports, guesses hazarded without compasses or sextants—was discarded and lost. Eventually, the higher standards paid off—by the nineteenth century the maps were filled in again—but for a while the sharpening of technique caused loss as well as gain.

A Quick Fling

At Larry Dark's Story Prize blog, an interview with Wells Tower, whose fine collection of stories is one of the finalists for this year's prize. An interesting excerpt:

What do you like about the short story form? Is it the form that comes most naturally to you as a writer?

I respect the form for cutting us so little slack. Readers often approach a short story suspiciously.They know they're being asked to embark on a brief relationship, one that won't give them days or weeks of enagement, as a novel does. A "Why should I care about you? This is just a quick fling" sort of deal, which leaves us with the challenge of devising stories that matter much, and quickly, without contrivances or bad emotional syrups. You can't waste time or language in a short story. I like that rigor. Keeps you honest.

Before the Arch

Michael Allen's post about a new exhibit at the Old Courthouse features a sobering reminder of the architectural cost of St. Louis' trademark Arch and its grounds:

The nation's only urban national park, the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial with the stunning Gateway Arch by Eero Saarinen, has long been haunted by a shadow architectural history. To make way for one of the world's most full-realized modernist landscapes, St. Louis wrecked forty blocks of historic riverfront buildings. The significance of these buildings in American architectural history was such that in 1939, eminent architectural critic and historian Siegfried Gideon came to St. Louis to deliver a lecture on the doomed buildings. Gideon not only spoke about the unparalleled mass of cast-iron facades and storefronts found on the riverfront, he implored the city to change course and preserve the riverfront's commercial buildings.

Sins of the Fathers

From Arnold Rampersad's biography of Ralph Ellison, a couple disturbing snippets about American literary giants:

William Faulkner, quoted in Life, asserted that he was ready to shoot blacks in the street, if necessary, to save the Old South. (324)

Ernest [Hemingway] never cared much for American Negroes. When the integrated Brooklyn Dodgers visited Cuba, he invited the white players to his home, Finca Vigia, but quietly barred their black teammates. (410)

Jackpot

From an interesting post about James Baldwin:

A journalist once asked James Baldwin if being poor, black, and gay had made him feel disadvantaged as a young writer. “No,” Baldwin replied, “I thought I had hit the jackpot. It was so outrageous, you had to find a way to use it.”

Rebels Without a Clue

From a brilliant James Surowiecki piece about the incoherence of the current populist wave:

The failure of free markets during the financial crisis might have led people to think that the government should be more involved in the economy. Instead, the percentage of Americans who think government is trying to do too much is higher than it’s been since the late nineties. Health-care reform offers a case study in this. The bills passed by Congress, whatever their flaws, would do things that voters overwhelmingly say they support: extend coverage to the uninsured, ban the worst practices of insurers, and guarantee insurance for people who lose their jobs. Yet more voters now oppose the bills than support them, with many saying that the government is overreaching. And, while voters routinely say that the rising cost of health care is a problem, it is the bills’ cost-control provisions—including a tax on expensive insurance plans and rules to restrain Medicare spending—that have proved especially unpopular. On top of this, many people are just annoyed with the whole process: a survey of voters who supported Obama in 2008 but voted for Scott Brown in the recent Massachusetts Senate race found that forty-one per cent of those who opposed health-care reform weren’t sure whether reform went too far or not far enough. In short, they don’t know why they’re against reform; they just are.

Fundamentally Tragic

I'm currently reading Arnold Rampersad's 2007 biography of Ralph Ellison, and enjoying it quite a bit. So I was interested to read this Stanley Crouch piece about the recently published manuscript, over 1100 pages long, of Ellison's unfinished second novel.

Here's a particularly scintillating passage from Crouch:

Ellison’s trouble is obvious in what we have before us now. He knew much too much and was much too conscious of what he wanted his novel to do and achieve. He could neither bunt nor swing for a base hit. Only a grand slam would do, bases loaded and the ball leaving the enclosed field on the way to a landing in the parking lot, where it would be lost under the uncountable cars covering almost every inch of the asphalt. Whenever that did not happen to his satisfaction, Ellison sullenly returned to the bench and brooded until his inspiration brought him back to the plate. That seems to have been his tragedy.

Ellison appears to have wanted his piece of the crown worn only by two novelists before him, Melville and Faulkner....

Ralph Ellison may well have been up to the challenge that Faulkner threw down because his experience was broad enough to create a reasonable distrust of the academy, although he became, as an inarguably splendid intellectual, a symbol of the academy at its best. He knew how to put historical facts together with lasting ideas and the new conceptions of modern life that were continually changing while adhering to deathless, classical concerns.

Ellison was suspicious of the right and the left, the capitalists and the Marxists, the corporations and the workers, the whites and the non-whites, the rich and the poor, the religious and the atheists, and every other human variation. He was aware of how often those of any persuasion had been wrong as long as the day goes on. This meant that the Ellison vision was fundamentally tragic.

Restoring Carver's Voice

I'm about 90 percent through with Raymond Carver's Collected Stories now, and I've found that the most enjoyable part of reading the volume has been comparing Beginners, Carver's original manuscript version of What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, with the published version as heavily edited by Gordon Lish.

In this post, I wrote some early thoughts on the differences between these two versions. Here at The Millions you can read my comparisons after having finished both collections.

The Hills That He Called Home

I like this, from an article about Cornish, N.H., the town where J. D. Salinger moved when he was 34 years old:

Here Mr. Salinger was just Jerry, a quiet man who arrived early to church suppers, nodded hello while buying a newspaper at the general store and wrote a thank-you note to the fire department after it extinguished a blaze and helped save his papers and writings.

Despite his reputation, Mr. Salinger “was not a recluse,” said Nancy Norwalk, a librarian at the Philip Read Memorial Library in Plainfield, which Mr. Salinger would frequent. “He was a towns- person.”

And last week, after his death, his neighbors would not talk about him, reflecting what one called “the code of the hills.”