Poem of the Day: Musée des Beaux Arts

Musée des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

-- W. H. Auden

For some reason, every online text of the poem I saw lacked a capital at the beginning of the final line; having checked the print version in my copies of both Auden's Collected Poems and his Selected Poems, this seems like a repeated mistake. So I fixed it.

The painting (source):

(click for larger version)

(To be honest, I've never liked the painting nearly as much as the poem. But I guess at the end of the day I'm a word person. (Also, I've never seen the original; perhaps it just doesn't come through in the crappy web reproductions.) Interestingly, according to the painting's wikipedia page's reporting of a scholarly article, recent technical analysis indicates that the extant one seems to be a copy of a Bruegel and not the original work.)

A video of Auden himself reading the poem:

A Brief, Idle Thought on the Problem of the Senate

The justifiable frustration that many liberals feel at the filibuster -- which is allowing the remnant of a failed political movement to hobble the implementation of its political successor's agenda (which will then allow them to claim, disingenuously, that the replacement failed and that they ought to be allowed to try again) -- has from time to time spilled over into frustration with the Senate itself. Thus a thoughtful liberal writer like Henrik Hertzberg offered a "prayer" that "the number of Americans who realize that more of our problems stem from structure (especially the Senate, and most especially the filibuster) than from politicians’ lack of moral fiber will reach the cusp of a tipping point" -- identifying the Senate itself, not its rules, as the problem.

Like the frustration with the filibuster, frustration with the Senate as a whole is quite justifiable: the Senate is, as has been oft-noted, a counter-majoritarian institution, added to the constitution for all sorts of reasons that would never pass muster today, in part as a check upon the part of the country that some founders feared might some day try to limit or even abolish slavery. It's a bit of an embarrassment, and there are solid reasons for arguing that it ought to be abolished.

But can it be? Article 5 of the U. S. Constitution, which governs the amendment process, makes the fact that "that no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate" the one (remaining*) unamendable aspect of the Constitution. Now, you could argue that technically no state would be deprived of equal suffrage in the Senate if the Senate were abolished; all states would have equal suffrage in it, i.e. none. It's an argument I doubt would pass muster, however. (It's unclear who would rule on the issue -- the Supreme Court, perhaps, but in what context? -- but whoever did, it's not an argument that would carry much weight.) Now, I've always read that clause as implying that an amendment changing the structure of (or abolishing) the Senate would be valid if it were unanimously ratified by all the states -- but even assuming this is right, it seems impossible in any practical sense.

So the Senate is a permanent part of our Constitution, until the Sun goes nova?

Well, maybe not. Here's a thought.

Perhaps the Senate couldn't be constitutionally abolished. But could it be constitutionally turned into the equivalent of the House of Lords? That is, made a rubber-stamp body of no real importance?

I don't see why not, legally speaking. (Of course, IANAL.) Presumably a series of amendments could do this. One might take all specialized functions of the senate (e.g. ratification of judges and treaties) and give them instead to the house. Another might ensure that the Senate's vote is a mere formality (e.g. require that, while a majority of the house would be required to pass legislation, any legislation that comes before the Senate can pass with a minority (of 1/3, say), and that they can't decide not to vote on it; alternatively, say that any bill which gets a 60% majority in the house can go to the President with no action by the Senate). A third might redefine the electoral college to give each state the number of votes of its House delegation (with none for the senate). And so forth. That sort of thing.

So here's my question: would this be legal? It would, I suppose, violate the spirit if not the letter of the "unamendable" stipulation -- but not quite as blatantly as simply operating on an "equal in having no suffrage" theory, and it seems that it might well fly. Certainly many sub-parts of such a plan -- e.g. making judges and treaties ratified by the House not the Senate, changing the electoral college, etc. -- are actually quite defensible; perhaps enough of these put together would do the trick.

So could we turn the Senate into the House of Lords?

-- It's an idle thought, of course: passing this would be, practically speaking, nearly as (if not as) difficult as changing the Senate to a simple majoritarian institution, comparable to the House. It would presumably require the states to call a constitutional convention (assuming the Senate is not going to vote itself into being a rubber stamp) for the purpose of amending the constitution in this way, and then get these amendments ratified, etc.

Still, it's an interesting parlor game. Any constitutional scholars in the house who want to weigh in here?

In the meantime, let's get rid of the filibuster, eh?

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* The one other unamendable bit -- the notion that the slave trade couldn't be prohibited before 1808 -- is now moot, since that year has passed.

The Annual Giving of Thanks

Serve the LORD with gladness: come before his presence with singing.... Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his courts with praise: be thankful unto him, and bless his name.

-- Psalm 100:2, 4

ANYA: I love a ritual sacrifice.
BUFFY: It's not really a one of those.
ANYA: To commemorate a past event, you kill and eat an animal. It's a ritual sacrifice. With pie.

-- Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Pangs" by Jane Espenson

As is my personal Thanksgiving tradition, I would like to give thanks to you, Noble Reader, for reading. I am thankful that you have dropped by; I hope you will come back again.

And this year, I am additionally pausing to be thankful that George W. Bush is no longer the President of my country. A good day to remember that, for all the political frustrations and problems of the present moment, despite all my disappointments with and the manifest inadequacies of our current leadership (and they are many), things have been, quite recently, much, much worse. So thank goodness for that.

Have a joyful Thanksgiving, one and all, however (and whether) you celebrate it, and whomever (and however) you give thanks.

Quite a Photograph

I hesitated before (re) posting this, since the views expressed in these signs are not my own (although not entirely divorced from my own either). I wouldn't myself say what these two activists are saying. So I don't want to give the impression that I'm posting this to merely, or simply, agree with it.

But I found the photograph very striking, and couldn't get it out of my head. And I think that the message in these signs points to an aspect of the Israel/Palestine situation which is important and under-recognized, a moral dimension which -- along with others -- must be fully absorbed in any just approach to the situation. So I pass it along, not in complete disagreement, not in complete agreement, but as something worth seeing: an important perspective which (partially, over-simplistically) captures an important aspect of the situation.

So, reposted from Mondoweiss, we have:

(Web site of the woman on the left; web site of the man on the right. Photographer unknown)

Fragment of an Unfinished Blog Post

...I have my own views on the subject, of course. Surprisingly strong opinions, really, given that it's not an issue that's really directly connected to me in any way. But in addition to views on the subject, I also have meta-views on my views on this subject. Which is to say, I am also strongly of the opinion that anyone seeking any information on this topic would be crazy to ask me, and foolish to listen to what I had to say if they heard it. However strongly I may feel about the subject, I am also clearly not someone with a good evidentiary basis for considering the topic, nor someone who is all that interesting or insightful or even reliable on these sorts of matters.

And why would you trust my evaluations on the topic but not on the meta-topic? Either I am trustworthy, in which case my views on the meta-topic should prevent you from considering my views; or I am not, in which case the entire set should be thrown out. (And yes, I do have meta-meta-views that my meta views are reliable.)

All that said: here's what I think on the matter...

Quotes of the Day: Three Links in the Chain of Cultural Transmission

Righteous art thou, O Lord, when I plead with thee: yet let me talk with thee of thy judgments: Wherefore doth the way of the wicked prosper? wherefore are all they happy that deal very treacherously? Do evildoers prosper?
Thou hast planted them, yea, they have taken root: they grow, yea, they bring forth fruit: thou art near in their mouth, and far from their reins.
But thou, O Lord, knowest me: thou hast seen me, and tried mine heart toward thee: pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and prepare them for the day of slaughter.
Jeremiah asks God to drag away his enemies like "sheep for the slaughter."
How long shall the land mourn, and the herbs of every field wither, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein? the beasts are consumed, and the birds; because they said, He shall not see our last end....
Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard, they have trodden my portion under foot, they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness.
They have made it desolate, and being desolate it mourneth unto me; the whole land is made desolate, because no man layeth it to heart.

-- Jeremiah 12:1-4, 10-11 (c. 6th Century B.C.E.)


Justus quidem tu es, Domine, si disputem tecum: verumtamen justa loquar ad te: Quare via impiorum prosperatur? &c.

THOU art indeed just, Lord, if I contend
With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just.
Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must
Disappointment all I endeavour end?
Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend,
How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost
Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust
Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend,
Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes
Now leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again
With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes
Them; birds build—but not I build; no, but strain,
Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes.
Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins (1889)


Hey there mister can you tell me
What happened to the seeds I've sown
Can you give me a reason, sir, as to why they've never grown
They've just blown around from town to town
Back out on these fields
Where they fall from my hand
Back into the dirt of this hard land

Well me and my sister
From Germantown we did ride
We made our bed, sir
From the rock on the mountainside
We been blowin' around from town to town
Lookin' for a place to stand
Where the sun burst through the clouds and fall like a circle
A circle of fire down on this hard land

Now even the rain it don't come 'round
Don't come 'round here no more
And the only sound at night's the wind
Slammin' the back porch door
Yeah it stirs you up like it wants to blow you down
Twistin' and churnin' up the sand
Leavin' all them scarecrows lyin' facedown
In the dirt of this hard land

From a building up on the hill
I can hear a tape deck blastin' "Home on the Range"
I can hear them Bar-M choppers
Sweepin' low across the plains
It's me and you, Frank, we're lookin' for lost cattle
Our hooves twistin' and churnin' up the sand
We're ridin' in the whirlwind searchin' for lost treasure
Way down south of the Rio Grande
We're ridin' 'cross that river in the moonlight
Up onto the banks of this hard land

Hey, Frank, won't you pack your bags
And meet me tonight down at Liberty Hall
Just one kiss from you, my brother
And we'll ride until we fall
Well sleep in the fields
We'll sleep by the rivers
And in the morning we'll make a plan
Well if you can't make it stay hard, stay hungry, stay alive if you can
And meet me in a dream of this hard land

-- Bruce Springsteen (1995)
(video here; just the words don't do justice to this last,
since they were made to be sung...)

Happy to Oblige

The world Parker actually wants... is merely a world in which one can walk down an average city street and not be confronted by a 4-year-old in a "Future Porn Star" T-shirt, a world in which most women do not own stripper poles, a world in which most people do not know that sex-equity experts even exist.

-- Profile of Kathleen Parker (via)

I think Kathleen Parker's in luck. I myself, in a lifetime of walking down city streets, have never see a 4-year-old (nor a child of any age) wearing a "future porn star" T-shirt; despite having not looked into the matter, I feel quite certain that most women do not, in fact, own stripper poles (I don't know of anyone who does); and I had remained blissfully unaware of sex-equity experts until I had the misfortune of reading Kathleen Parker sound off about the concept in the above-linked profile. While I admit that my experience may not be typical, my hunch is that Parker's living in her own little utopia here.

I admit, however, that the second list of demands is slightly more problematic:

[The world Parker actually wants is] a world in which most people don't say "vagina" in polite conversation, vice presidents are expected to know something about the country that elected them, abortion is stigmatized but not illegal, and racial profiling is permitted but not celebrated.

Abortion is -- sadly -- terribly stigmatized in this country, but despite recent efforts by our house of representatives, is not quite yet illegal. So Parker's in luck there. On the other fronts, I don't know. Certainly the current vice president knows something about our country -- as did the previous one, although that "something" did not apparently include anything about its constitution nor its ideals. And while I myself personally have no idea how widely "vagina" is said in polite conversation, I suspect that saying it is (like abortion) sadly stigmatized,* so I think Parker's currently safe there too.

But racial profiling is, I have to inform her, not permitted. And based on the evidence of the above linked-profile, it is, indeed, "celebrated" -- at least by "the most widely syndicated female columnist in the nation," Kathleen Parker. So in one respect she has something still to strive for.

_____________________
* Obligatory quote:

Maude Lebowski: The word itself makes some men uncomfortable. Vagina.
The Dude: Oh yeah?
Maude Lebowski: Yes, they don't like hearing it and find it difficult to say whereas without batting an eye a man will refer to his dick or his rod or his Johnson.
The Dude: Johnson?

-- The Big Lebowski (1998)

Quote of the Day -- Hell, Quote of the !@#$%ing Week

Anyone notice that the president signed a $680 BILLION defense appropriations bill in the midst of our heated debates about $90 billion a year for health care?

-- Chris Hayes (via)

(Translated from the Twitter by your Humble Blogger)

In Days of Yore People Used To Ponder the Deep Philosphical Questions

...communicants in the congregation were asking themselves not only "What must I do to be saved?" but also "Shall I move to Ohio?"

-- Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History
of the Early Republic, 1789 - 1815, p. 605

Wasn't the Whole Point of Letting Lieberman Keep His Committee Chair (&c) So That He'd Caucus With the Democrats on Domestic Legislation?

And now Lieberman is saying he will or might (reports differ somewhat) filibuster the health care bill because of the public option.

When Lieberman ignored the results of his party's primary, and ran as a "Connecticut for Lieberman" candidate against the Democrat, and won, he was allowed to keep his Committee Chair & other perks because we might need his vote some day. (For that matter, most of the establishment democrats (including, to his shame, Obama) failed to campaign for the actual Democrat -- campaigning that might have turned the tide and gotten a real Democrat into this crucial seat -- for the same reason.)

When Lieberman endorsed - and campaigned for - the Republican candidate in the Presidential election, he was allowed to keep his Committee Chair & other perks because we might need his vote some day.

Surely "some day" is now. This is the signature piece of domestic legislation that Obama has been working on, that the Democratic caucus has been working on, that progressives in the U.S. have been struggling for since Harry Truman.

All we need Lieberman to do is not filibuster it. He can vote against it. But we need him to allow a vote by the Senate.

If he won't do that, on this... then it seems to me that there is nothing left to wait for. Toss him out of the caucus. Strip his committee chairmanship and seniority. Do everything you can.

I trust the Democrats to do the right thing here like I trust the Red Sox to prevail in the postseason, but it seems to me this is the time to pull out all the stops. After this, there is nothing left to save the firepower for. (And, if he won't be with us on this -- to this limited extent -- he never will.)

Small Asymmetries are an Essential Element of All Great Works of Art

Both introduced and bade goodnight:
Room
Red balloon
Picture of the cow jumping over the moon
Three bears sitting on chairs
Two kittens
Pair of mittens
Little toy house
Young mouse
Comb
Brush
Bowl full of mush
Quiet old lady whispering "hush"

Bade goodnight but not introduced:
Moon
Light
Clocks
Socks
Nobody
Stars
Air
Noises everywhere

Introduced but not bade goodnight:
Telephone

Quote of the Day

If you’re graduating from college this spring, you’ll be sitting around at the age of thirty-five still suffering from the fact that Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Ben Nelson, and Kent Conrad decided to make the stimulus bill stingier in order to better bolster their credentials as preening centrists.

-- Matt Yglesias, "Graduating During a Recession Has Big, Long-Lasting Negative Consequences"

Refuting the Strongest Argument Against Afghanistan Escalation

Via, Johann Hari makes strong counter-arguments against three basic arguments for Afghanistan escalation. Here is his rebuttal of what he (and I) think is the strongest of the three:

By staying, we are significantly improving Afghan human rights, especially for women. This, for me, is the meatiest argument – and the most depressing. The Taliban are indeed one of the vilest forces in the world, imprisoning women in their homes and torturing them for the "crimes" of showing their faces, expressing their sexuality, or being raped. They keep trying to murder my friend Malalai Joya for the "crime" of being elected to parliament on a platform of treating women like human beings not cattle.

But as she told me last month: "Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords." Outside Kabul, vicious Taliban who enforce sharia law have merely been replaced by vicious warlords who enforce sharia law. "The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women," she said. Any Afghan president – Karzai, or his opponents – will only ever in practice be the mayor of Kabul. Beyond is a sea of warlordism, as evil to women as Mullah Omar. That is not a difference worth fighting and dying for.

Click through to read his answer to the other two arguments, the notions that "We need to deprive al-Qa'ida of military bases in Afghanistan, or they will use them to plot attacks against us," and that withdrawing from Afghanistan will reinvigorate Al-Qaida.

As the ghost in the haunted house says to the stupid people who stay anyway in an uncountable number of horror movies: GET OUT.

Quote of the Day

OZ: Didn't figure you for missing school.
WILLOW: You think I'm boring.
OZ: I'd call that a radical interpretation of the text.

-- Joss Whedon, Doppelgangland (Buffy the Vampire Slayer 3.16)

There is the Potential For Some Seriously !@#$%ed Up Slash Fiction Here

Rule 34 of the internet: "If you can imagine it, there is porn of it."

Rule 34 in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure "...governs the process of discovery, in particular, the production of electronic and tangible evidence as well as the circumstances under which one party to a lawsuit may enter the land of another party for inspection "or other purposes.""

"Other purposes"? Oh my. Anyone for some Rule 34 p0rn?*

(Rule 34 google search brought to you by Gerry Canavan's reminding me of this news about Marge Simpson. GC links to the actual pictures; click through if you're curious. Not that NSFW, really, but definitely NS. Oh, and that link at the head of this paragraph? Goes to the image search. As Scott Eric Kaufman wrote in a different yet equally apt context, "Just remember those are the only eyes God gave you and some images can't be stabbed out of them no matter how hard you try." Sort of covers this whole subject, actually.)

Unrelated postscript: I really wish blogger's spellcheck would recognize the word 'internet'. I mean, really.

___________________
* Of course, going by the former Rule 34, we can deduce that this already exists somewhere. My brain hurts.

Random Question Inspired By My iPod's Shuffle Feature

When John Lennon thrice sings, in "A Day in the Life" (from Sgt. Pepper -- and not any of those fancy re-mixes either, just the good old-fashioned CD release from 1987), "I read the news today, oh boy", how are we to understand those last two words? Is it a simple groan, or is it sarcastic glee? What struck me is how both meanings would fit equally well with the rest of the song -- the worldweary overwhelm of Lennon's newsreading.

Indeed, I can't quite make up my mind whether there is in fact any difference between those two options, or whether something said with sufficiently sarcastic glee might as well be a groan.

Perhaps one way to capture the difference -- if there really is one -- would be two possible punctuations of the line:

I read the news today (oh boy)
I read the news today -- oh boy!

Any thoughts?

Must-read of the Day: Bacevich on Afghanistan

Via Glenn Greenwald, Andrew J. Bacevich writes an op-ed for the Boston Globe about the stakes in Afghanistan:

If the president approves the McChrystal plan he will implicitly:

• Anoint counterinsurgency - protracted campaigns of armed nation-building - as the new American way of war.
• Embrace George W. Bush’s concept of open-ended war as the essential response to violent jihadism (even if the Obama White House has jettisoned the label “global war on terror’’).
• Affirm that military might will remain the principal instrument for exercising American global leadership, as has been the case for decades.

Implementing the McChrystal plan will perpetuate the longstanding fundamentals of US national security policy: maintaining a global military presence, configuring US forces for global power projection, and employing those forces to intervene on a global basis. The McChrystal plan modestly updates these fundamentals to account for the lessons of 9/11 and Iraq, cultural awareness and sensitivity nudging aside advanced technology as the signature of American military power, for example. Yet at its core, the McChrystal plan aims to avert change. Its purpose - despite 9/11 and despite the failures of Iraq - is to preserve the status quo....

If the president assents to McChrystal’s request, he will void his promise of change at least so far as national security policy is concerned.... As the fighting drags on from one year to the next, the engagement of US forces in armed nation-building projects in distant lands will become the new normalcy. Americans of all ages will come to accept war as a perpetual condition, as young Americans already do. That “keeping Americans safe’’ obliges the United States to seek, maintain, and exploit unambiguous military supremacy will become utterly uncontroversial.

I think this puts into words my sense of why I am for deescalation and withdrawal from Afghanistan, as quickly as possible. I don't want the U.S. to be an empire. I want to see us move away from our globe-spanning network of military bases, our quick reliance on the threat of war (and, all too often, on war) as our "number one instrument of diplomacy". I want us not to spend huge sums of money on making weapons. I don't want us engaged in any number of military actions not in response to a direct threat. I want us, in other words, to stand down -- militarily -- unless it's really necessary.

And since no one has articulated why Afghanistan is really necessary -- certainly not from the point of view of American interests, and certainly not in a way consonant with the resources it is taking (and will take) -- we should get out.

Of course, this is a focus on what Afghanistan will mean to us, and to the planet more broadly, and not to the people most directly affected, i.e. those of Afghanistan. This is because I know a fair bit about the U.S., and some about the globe, but very little about Afghanistan. I also think that Americans should make their decisions on these matter on the joint bases of what is best for us, i.e. Americans, and for the planet as a whole, rather than in the interests of any other country -- about which, in any event, we are generally quite ill-equipped to judge. -- Still, I admit that there may be an argument for staying that is made genuinely and convincingly on their behalf -- although given recent politics any such arguments should be, in my view, guilty until proven innocent of being mere pretense for neoconservative (or neoliberal) war mongering and empire building. Imperialists always claim (at least in the modern age) to be acting in the interests of their imperial subjects, but those subjects, oddly enough, rarely see it that way.

So, in the meantime, I'm for trying to wrest America back from its status as an empire and back towards its status as a democratic republic.

Alas, there isn't really a political party that supports this position (the closest you can come is Ron Paul -- and he's odious on lots of other grounds). Our current political debate is more or less divided between insane imperialism (Republicans who want to go to war at the drop of a hat) and sane but still quite imperial imperialism ("centrist" Democrats) -- and Obama is definitely the latter. During the campaign he had mixed messages on this point -- he was able to win because of the space for an anti-Iraq candidate that Hillary Clinton's support of the war had opened up, and the foreign policy people supporting him tended to be Iraq skeptics and otherwise on the somewhat less militaristic side of the spectrum -- but then he brought the hawks on board, appointed Hillary Clinton his Sec of State, and pushed ahead with all the wars and executive power that comes with them. Hoping for much else was fairly far-fetched -- but I hoped for better than we've gotten, and not, I think, for no reason.

Do read the entirety of Bacevich's op-ed. It's a strong articulation of a crucial point -- maybe the crucial point -- in the Afghanistan debate.

Although I must admit I can't bring myself to be as hopeful as Bacevich about there being any possibility other than a decision for more war and the national security state, government of, by and for the military-industrial-political complex. (For more on the "political" angle here, see Greenwald.) I find it almost impossible to imagine the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate choosing anything other than more war -- at the very least, than a continuance of the American empire in all its fetid splendor.

RIP Leila Abu-Saba

Philip Weiss is reporting that Leila Abu-Saba, who blogged at Dove's Eye View, has died (she had been battling cancer for several years). I never got to meet Leila, but she and I exchanged a number of emails -- I'd begun reading her blog at the time of Israel's 2006 war against Lebanon, and she in turn was quite supportive about the various pieces I wrote about the war at the time. I definitely thought of her as a friend, in that odd shadow way that one is friends with people online that we never get to meet.

She was a passionate advocate for peace, and a fine writer. I am terribly sorry to hear of her untimely death, and my thoughts are with her husband and children.

Rest in peace, Leila. Your voice will be greatly missed.

Update: If anyone out there in the ether finds a link to an obituary about Leila, or (particularly) somewhere where I could write a condolence note to her family, I would be very grateful if you would leave a note in the comments. Thanks.

Second Update: Memorial page, at which people can leave memories or condolences, here. Thanks to Julie Feinstein Adams for leaving the web site in comments.

Quotes on the Obama Nobel

"Too tired to work anyway" edition:

• Too long to quote, but I think that Glenn Greenwald has the most balanced, reasonable take.

More briefly:

The especially weird thing about Obama receiving an award for not being GW Bush is that he hasn't actually been doing a very good job of it. As others have pointed out, he's continuing both of Bush's wars, adopting Bush's "surge" tactic for Afghanistan, covering up Bush's torture regime, and continuing Bush's domestic wiretapping.

-- Avram at Making Light

Surely it ought to be a basic criterion for winning a peace prize that you shouldn’t be currently fighting a war, or at the very least that you shouldn’t be increasing your commitment to a war you’re already fighting?

-- D Squared at Crooked Timber

I'd rather Obama had won it after Congress agreed to substantial cuts in greenhouse gases comparable to what Europe is proposing, after he brought Palestinians and Israelis together to accept a two-state solution, after he got the United States out of Afghanistan and reduced the nuclear arm's threat between Pakistan and India, or after he was well on the way to eliminating the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. Any one of these would have been worthy of global praise.... Giving the Peace Prize to the president before any of these goals has been attained only underscores the paradox of Obama at this early stage of his presidency. He has demonstrated mastery in both delivering powerful rhetoric and providing the nation and the world with fresh and important ways of understanding current challenges. But he has not yet delivered. To the contrary, he often seems to hold back from the fight -- temporizing, delaying, or compromising so much that the rhetoric and insight he offers seem strangely disconnected from what he actually does. Yet there's time. He may yet prove to be one of the best presidents this nation has ever had -- worthy not only of the Peace Prize but of every global accolade he could possibly summon. Just not yet.

-- Robert Reich

Some Analysts Warn Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Complicates War Efforts

-- Headline at Fox News Website (via via)

The Nobel Announcement Was Somewhat Unexpected

In keeping with the theme of the day, I found this delightful story at A Tiny Revolution:

Years ago, a rug cleaner in LA got an early-morning phone call from Stockholm to inform him that he'd won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Oops, wrong number. The lucky man ended up on the Tonight Show: "I was surprised. I mean, I know I do a darn good job cleaning carpets. I can tell you which chemicals work best for ketchup stains, red wine spills, etc. But the Nobel Prize? I thought, maybe that's a bit excessive." There was an honest man.

I was trying to figure out if Bernard Chazelle was simply making that up, but a bit of googling turned up this independent version of the story:

In the predawn darkness of 16 October 1987, the phone rang in the Altadena, California, bedroom of Donald Cram, owner of a rug-cleaning business. In a fluting voice, an unknown caller congratulated the sleepy Cram on winning the Nobel Prize. Thinking he recognized the voice of a pal known for practical joking, Cram hung up. But the man with the strange accent called back and insisted that Cram's work on molecular structure had indeed taken science's top honor. That's when the former chemistry major groggily realized that his frustrated caller wanted the Los Angeles area's other Donald Cram, the one who taught at the University of California, (UC) Los Angeles, and had an unlisted phone number. [Link added]

...so perhaps it's true after all.