McCain

One of the tiresome tasks for left-leaning political activists in the next few years (particularly in 2007 & 2008) will be battling the mythology that McCain has built up around himself as a maverick, an honest man, the type of Republican who might do a good job governing. As the disaster that has been the Bush administration becomes ever-more apparent, a lot of conservatives will (indeed, many already are) crying "Do-over!" They'll say that Bush wasn't really a conservative (true in a sense, but he is a fairly good representative of today's conservative movement, so it's not true in any sense that matters much in practical political terms); and try to push McCain forward as a substitute -- basically trying to undo the mistake that they made in letting Bush slime his way to his 2000 primary victory in South Carolina (and, hence, the nation).

Now, I don't want to push this point too far: McCain would certainly have been better than Bush. But he is a slightly spruced-up version of an essentially destructive thing, a movement conservative politician; and he will be bad, too. "Not quite as bad" simply should not be the reining standard here. Sure, McCain is doing very good work these days opposing making torture official U.S. policy (which shows how low we've gotten), and probably would have run the Iraq war more competently and perhaps even sold it in a less mendacious fashion. But he still would have invaded -- the primary mistake here. And it is important to remember that on literally thousands of other issues, Bush has been terrible -- and on many McCain would have been more or less the same, and on most he would have been almost even if not quite as bad.

McCain is Bush lite. Bush spruced up, given a bath and a new, cheap suit. And we need to do better than that. Much, much better than that.

Most of all, however, we need to work on combating McCain's undeserved reputation for honesty and straight-shooting. (Never forget that Bush got himself that reputation for long enough to win two elections with it.) McCain destroyed -- or should have destroyed -- that reputation in 2004 when he supported Bush. There was, simply, not honest way to do that (unless one was an open theocrat, or an open give-money-to-the-rich-and- the-rest-of-us-go-to-hell proponent). Bush's destructive policies, his murderous incompetence, his fundamental mendacity, were all clear by then. To support him was to support them. To talk endlessly about how terribly the war in Iraq was being run, and then go on to support Bush as if none of those things were true (and to oppose Kerry who -- never forget -- was promising a more competently run war, not an end to it) was to put political partisanship (and, in McCain's case, political ambition) ahead of any notion of what was good for the country. (The point here is not merely that he supported Bush, but that he supported Bush with full knowledge of the damage Bush was doing to the country. The former was merely stupid or crazy; the latter is what is malevolent.)

It was unforgivable. And it should not be forgiven.

(Not that his support for Bush was the only evidence of his willingness to be just another dishonest politician. There's plenty of other evidence for it. But with the disaster he supported running (and ruining) the country, it is perhaps the most pertinent point.)

All this by way of introducing the following version of what I've been saying here, which is from a long, impassioned and righteous (if rather rambling) blog post (via):

Yes, there is a difference between the McCain/Hagel Repubs and the neo-con/White House Iraq Group lunatics. But it's also good to remember: no matter what he does from here on out, McCain stood by the president, a man (and his machine) who smeared him viciously on the 2000 campaign trail, and then, at the GOP convention four years later, campaigned for him when we were well on to this disastrous course. And thinking men -- of which McCain is surely one -- knew the neo-cons were exploiting 9/11 for their hideous misadventure in Iraq, and knew this was an administration that would not allow photos of the dead. Etc. etc. etc. Every man who stood by Bush should be forced to answer for it.

Amen! Well-spoken. And the fact that the blogger who wrote those words was John Cusack -- yes, I mean that it was that John Cusack -- is, really, just icing on the cake.

Shorter John McCain:


'Nuff said.

Other Oubapian Works

Okay, maybe I was exaggerating when I wrote about the number of Oubapian works that there are. Derik Badman, in a post to the Oubapo-America message board, gently upbraids me:

There a few Oubapian works not in the 4 Oupuses (Oupi?). I should have a review of Trondheim and Menu's "Moins de quartre secondes a vivre" up at some point. Trondheim's Mister O is constrained, as is Ayroles "Jean qui rit Jean qui pleur". [Links added.]

And while these works are French in origin, I don't really have that excuse, since the latter two are, in fact, wordless. (I've even read Mister O!)

Derik goes on to mention a work which, while not by a member of the Oubapo, is (based on the description in his review) certainly under a Oubapian-style constraint, NogegoN by Luc & Francois Schuiten. He says of it that "It's technically well done but also a bit soulless, lacking in expressive emotion. All in all a very interesting example of a formally constrained comics work." And his review certainly makes it sound quite interesting.

For that matter, there's also some work in English which Derik didn't mention but which he might well have. For example, there's Kenneth Koch's The Art of the Possible: Comics Mainly Without Pictures, which I am only slightly familiar with, but which is certainly 'Oubapian' in spirit. (Derik's review of it is here.) In fact, one of Matt Madden's Exercises is a homage to Koch's book, so I really ought to have thought of it.

And while I have no reason to think he's ever heard of the Oubapo (though of course he might well have), a great deal of Alan Moore's work is formally inventive in ways which are Oubapian in spirit, from many of the chapters in V for Vendetta to much of his recent ABC work (particularly many different issues of Promethea, and his Eisner-award-nominated "How Things Work Out" from Tomorrow Stories #2).

And having mentioned all those, I suppose people will bombard me with questions about omitting all sorts of other people and books (Chris Ware? Art Speigleman? Will Eisner?), to say nothing of a large number of shorter Oubapian works. So I'd better quit while I'm behind, surrender, and say: I was wrong.

But while I am clearly guilty of intemperate phrasing -- chalk it up to extreme (but, I think, warranted) enthusiasm -- I think I was also getting at something. I'm not quite sure how to phrase it -- first self-consciously Oubapian masterpiece in English, perhaps? But Matt Madden has done something extraordinary, not only due to the quality of the work -- although because of that too, most importantly -- but because it is pathbreaking as well. So even if there are works I forgot, and others I am ignorant of, I nevertheless renew my suggestion that you check out Madden's new book.

99 Ways to Tell a Story is Out Now Too

'Tis the season: I just received my copy of another Oulipian book, Matt Madden's 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. Actually, this book is not Oulipian but Oubapian: the Oubapo is to comics/graphic novels what the Oulipo is to text-only literature. Oubapo-America is an (unofficial, I believe) spin-off of the French group, and Matt Madden is one of its founders.


Madden's new book consists of variations on a theme, so it is fitting that it itself is a variation on a theme -- in this case, a theme by Raymond Queneau. Raymond Queneau (years before he co-founded the Oulipo) wrote a book called Exercices de Style. This involved 99 versions of a simple story, transformed in various ways: told in different tenses, different styles, made into a sonnet, told as a lipogram, retold in various slangs, etc. The link above is to a French text -- and I haven't checked systematically, but it looks like it's the entirety of the original book. (Queneau's book was translated into English by Barbara Wright.) Nabokov called it "one of the greatest stories in French literature."

Madden, essentially, did the same thing in comic form: took an incredibly simple tale, and did 99 variations (well, if you count the template) on it. The result is, actually, utterly spectacular. It may sound dull, but it actually makes enthralling reading.

I've actually been familiar with the project for some time. Madden has been posting a rotating series of samples on his web site for a while now. (Click over to get a sense of the project.) And he also included some versions by guest artists. The guest artists versions aren't included in the book, so even if you buy (or have bought) a copy (which you should -- it's just wonderful) you should check them out, because they're terrific too. I like them all, but some of my favorites are those by King, Palm, McKenna, Motley, Tanioc, Trahan (a flash animation!) and, above all, Pierre Menard's, whose contribution is so much better than Madden's original...

Inspired by this, I did a few myself, which Matt (if I may switch to the familiar form) was kind enough to host on his site. You should go read his samples first or mine won't make any sense (besides, they're so much better than mine!), but once you've done that, mine are here: there's one using (my own) photographs for the art, and four others using various images by other people: a cento (which I did before Madden did his own version, so I wasn't just copying him), a version which was also a solution to the Silent Running exercise (which will make no sense to you unless you go look at other people's solutions first); and two which were "reductions" of Madden's own exercises (a time-honored Oulipian technique): one systematically taking the first panel from the first, the second from the second, etc -- a version which was based on the original ordering, now altered, so that the current version is (alas) simply random, and one whimsically choosing some of my favorite panels (although I should emphasize that this was done when I'd only seen about a third of them -- I'd definitely do it differently now!)

So one might say that I am biased in the project's favor. But really I think it simply means I loved it based only a small sample -- loved it enough to try my hand at it (albeit in a small way). Nothing biased me towards it before I saw the site for the first time! It's just that I had already been won over before it was printed on dead trees.

Other people who have reviewed it have liked it too. All the reviews I've seen have been positive. (Although it occurs to me that if you're the sort of person who will read the book at all, you'll like it -- it's very well done -- while anyone who wouldn't like this sort of book just won't read (and therefore, hopefully, review) it.) Anyway, reviews have been published by the Complete Review and Derik Badman. Interviews with Madden can be found at MadInkBeard and Bookslut.

Oulipo has, by now, developed a small cannon of books written by its members, inspired by its method or simply in sympathy with its style. And there are a few acknowledged masterpieces among them -- of which the first, I think, was Queneau's Exercises in Style. Oubapo, to this point, has published far fewer books -- there are four official anthologies, and that's about it. (Its members have done many, but fairly few, so far as I know, have been deliberately done according to Oubapian techniques -- though there are a few, of course). This should all be taken with a lot of salt, since my French is pretty rudimentary, and it may well be that there's a lot of good stuff that hasn't been translated into English, or even sold on this side of the pond. (Update: And in fact I did some word-eating on this point here.) Nevertheless, I would make a distinction between collective anthologies and single works; and, given that, I think it's fair to say that -- so far as I know, and certainly in English -- Matt Madden has produced the first Oubapian masterpiece, the first book where the Oubapo can really strut its stuff in the way that the Oulipo has in a number of volumes. It's an extraordinary book, and everyone with any interest in comics, style, constraint or, hell, just sheer artistic playfulness should check it out.


One minor downside: I do think the decision to sell 99 Ways as, essentially, a writing textbook was... unfortunate. I can't blame the publisher: if that's how they think it will sell, then it makes sense for them to sell it that way, I guess. But it doesn't seem to me to be the book's strongest point -- and it means that other aspects will be overlooked. I suppose I'm just lamenting that that is how they thought the book would sell.

So far, in fact, everyone seems to share this lament. Ninth Art says* that "the cover... is so bland it could belong to a maths textbook. It barely hints at the fun of Madden's creation, and certainly wouldn't be the sort of thing that would urge me to pick up the title." Matt Chaney says that 99 Ways "has a strange blurb on the cover that makes it sound like some sort of touchy-feely how-to book... Well, maybe -- it certainly shows that there are no limits on how many ways a story can be conceived and structured, and that each choice changes the emphasis and effect. But there's much more here than a guide to digesting the artist within..." The Complete Review put the point this way:

It also has an off-putting cover -- all the more so with the odd sales-pitch on the front cover, advertising it as: "An exploration of storytelling that will amuse and delight you, and inspire your own creative work -- your novel, your comic, even your film." ... There might be something to this... but certainly this isn't anywhere near the top of the list of aspects of this book that make it so commendable. But you can't really blame the publisher: selling it as a graphic version of a Queneau idea certainly won't attract the mass of book buyers -- but selling it like this, indeed, possibly even stocking it in the self-help section (or at least the writers/artists/filmmakers how-to section) will certainly make for better sales. It goes for (almost) all books, but even more so for this one: don't judge it by its cover -- or the publicity material.

Note the "might be something to this" echoing the "well, maybe" of Chaney's comment.

Anyway, while this lament is widespread, it also is -- when push comes to shove -- unimportant. What's inside is what matters. It's a pity, but c'est la publishing business, I suppose. Don't let it put you off.

---

* In the spirit of honesty, Ninth Art also says the only other negative thing I've seen anyone say about the book, which is that Madden's art isn't always up to the project. (I disagree, but didn't want you think I'm hiding anything...)

The meat is the whole deal!

Just 'cause.

The New Edition of the Oulipo Compendium is Out

The Oulipo Compendium -- the best one-volume introduction to the French literary group the Oulipo and various related works and ideas -- which has been out of print for several years now, is back in print. It's been promised for some time, but I know it's really out since I received my copy today. The Oulipo Compendium is a wonderful book, a true joy, and I commend it to any of you interested in (quirky and experimental) literature. Below is a very brief explanation of what the Oulipo is, some information on the book, and links to online excerpts from the book.

The Ou-whatsis?

The Oulipo (an acronym of their full name, "Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle", which translates as "Workshop for Potential Literature") is a French literary group founded in 1960 by writer Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais; noteworthy members have included Italo Calvino, Georges Perec and Harry Mathews (the only American in the group and one its primary ambassadors to the English-speaking world). It is dedicated to the study of literary constraints and new literary techniques. Reviews of many Oulipian works can be found here. There seems to be fairly few good English-language introductory web sites on the Oulipo, but the wikipedia entry is a good place to start. If you read French, the group's official web home is here.

Information on the Book:

The new edition is being published jointly by Atlas Press in the UK and Make Now Press in the US. The latter's web site is, unfortunately, still listing the book as "coming soon" with the price and ISBN unavailable. (Those at least I can help with: it's $36, and the ISBN is 0974355437.) Make Now seems to be a rather new, rather small press, and they are clearly a bit behind in their web presence. Atlas Press is an older, more established small press -- they published the first edition in 1998 -- and their web site is up and running. (And if your order from them before November 27, it's only £15 (although shipping from the UK is steep.)) Thus far the UK edition (ISBN 1900565188) seems to be available, while the US edition is not -- it's not listed on the US amazon.com, for instance. (I got mine from an ebay auction offered by one of the people associated with Make Now Press -- I don't know why they auctioned off one copy but haven't yet started selling others.) Still, given that the US edition has been printed (and there's no question mine is the US edition, not the UK one), I can only presume that it too will be available in short order.

(Update: The U.S. publisher says in the comments: "The web site will be up and running in no time. You can not order the book from Atlas because they will direct you to me, As I hold the US/Canada sales rights.... The books are still on the sea, a week away from getting to me for sale.") (Further Update: The web site for Make Now Press has been updated, and you can now buy the new edition of the Oulipo Compendium from them directly (scroll down); it's unclear if it is being sold anywhere else.)

There are informative reviews of the first edition by James Sallis, Warren Motte and the Complete Review; the third of these is the most comprehensive, and has links to more reviews and resources. A brief interview with the Alastair Brochie, one of the editors of the book (and one of the editors of Atlas Press) describing the new edition is here; the gist (from the "directions for use" in the new edition) is that "the factual parts (such as membership and bibliographies)" have been updated, while the "literary contents" are the same as in the first edition.

Selections, Excerpts and Included Texts Available Online:

While the book is wonderful, and I encourage you all to buy a copy, a generous number of selections, excerpts and included texts are online in various places. Here are some links.

There was a web site associated with the first edition (www.oulipocompendium.com) which has online the introduction as well as a handful of abridged versions of some of the literature entries, including: N+7, Definitional Literature, Elementary Morality, Eye-Rhyme, Larding, Lipogram, Measures, Perverb, Poetic Redundancy, Rhetorical Repetition, Slenderizing, Univocalism. (A table of contents for these is here.) These are probably the best introduction to the tone and feel of the Compendium: if you like these, you'll probably enjoy the book.

The first item in the Compendium is Stanley Chapman's translation of Raymond Queneau's "Cent mille milliards de poèmes" ("A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems"); this is available online here, as are other translations by Bev Rowe (this site also has the French), an anonymous translator (another site with the French) and yet another anonymous translator. Of these versions, I think that Bev Rowe's site has the best layout/introduction to the concept, though Chapman's translation was approved by Queneau so might be preferred for that reason. This site only has the French text, but contains a good brief description of the work.

Ian Monk, a British member of the Oulipo, has a page of his Oulipian Writings online. Several of these are included in the Compendium, including his univocal translation of George Perec's "What a Man!" and his brief univocal essay, "Perec's Letterless Texts", which discusses three of Perec's works -- including La Disparition, a novel written entirely without the letter e, "The Exeter Text" a univocalism in e (which has been translated by Monk himself) and "What a Man!". This essay is a virtuoso performance; my favorite bit is where he quotes from La Disparition, transforming a passage which was a lipogram in e to a passage which is a univocalism in e. To give you a bit of the flavor, here is that passage in three forms:

On acquitta Rosa sous l'acclamation du public qui, par moult bravos bruyants, montra son approbation. Glupf s'avoua vaincu, mais jura qu'il aurait son tour, qu'un jour on allait voit qui commandait, qu'il vous foutrait tout ça à Auschwitz sitôt q'il aurait l'occasion.

(Georges Perec, La Disparition p. 294)

So, to a standing ovation, with a host of "hurrahs" and "bravos" and "attababys" from an approving public, Rosa is found not guilty. Poor Glupf admits to loosing -- promising, though, that only a fight and not a war is lost, that a day will dawn, a day on which Rosa will find out who is truly in command, a day on which Auschwitz will turn up its gas -- and strolls out whistling a military march.

(Trans. Gilbert Adair, A Void, p. 269)

Endless fevered cheers met Nell when she'd been freed. Glepf knew he'd been bested. He nevertheless yelled he'd be revenged. The bleeders'd see he led them. Whenever he felt he held the pretext, he'd see her sentenced then penned between Bergen-Belsen's cells.

(Univocalized by Ian Monk)

Also of note on Monk's site, although not in the Compendium, is "On G. Adair's A Void", Monk's lipogrammatic review of Gilbert Adair's lipogrammatic translation of Perec's lipogrammatic novel -- a basically negative review, which critiques it for insufficient accuracy (a critique which I can't judge, not knowing enough French, but which Monk makes a good case for.) Monk's English review was, in its turn, translated into lipogrammatic French here.

The Oulipo Papers:

One thing I am excited about is the announcement, in the new edition of the Compendium, of a series entitled the "Oulipo Papers". These will, apparently, be translations of various installments of the Oulipo's in-house pamphlet series, the Biblithèque oulipienne. These are limited edition pamphlets containing essays, poems, stories, etc, by members of the group. The French versions are collected and republished in facsimile editions, but so far English translations have been limited. Excerpts from some are translated in the Compendium. Atlas Press (the UK publisher of the Compendium) has also put out two volumes of translations, the Oulipo Laboratory, which contains a sample of six, and Winter Journeys*, which collect a series of variations on a short story by Georges Perec that various members of the Oulipo did which were published in the BO. But otherwise they've not been available. (I'm lucky insofar as the Cornell library subscribes to the series, and so has many (of the later ones) in their pamphlet form; but my French isn't really up to reading them (although a handful are actually in English, and I've read those.)) Details about the project are few; it's just mentioned briefly in the new edition (and here), but otherwise nothing seems to be released, not even on Atlas Press's web site. Still, something to look forward to!

* Perec's original story is online here; but the Atlas Press volume contains nine other stories by other members of the Oulipo too. Note that only the Atlas Press edition has the other stories: the Penguin Classics edition (which is called The Winter Journey, in the singular) contains just Perec's short story.

A Few (of Other People's) Thoughts on France

I must admit that I don't know much about the current riots in France, and therefore don't have anything to say about them other than generic expressions of horror. But here are a few things that other people have said which strike me as sensible.

To understand what is going on in France requires keeping two or more contradictory thoughts in one’s head at the same time. The rioters are not freedom fighters, revolutionaries, or community activists. The chief instigators are the hoodlum elements that have long plagued these poor suburbs, making the lives of their own neighbors insecure and miserable. On the weekends, they plague public transportation, sometimes attacking passengers and otherwise making a nuisance of themselves. On the other hand, there are no hoodlum gangs in the wealthy districts of western Paris. When a young man has no job and no money, being a hoodlum and/or a drug dealer is pretty much all that is left as a vocation. So while the torching of cars, schools, and businesses is unacceptable and inexcusable, it is easily understandable.

-- Michael Balter (via)

The French youth who are burning automobiles are as French as Jennifer Lopez and Christopher Walken are American... The US brings 10 million immigrants every decade and one in 10 Americans is now foreign-born. Their children, born and bred here, have never known another home. All US citizens are Americans, including the present governor of California. "The immigrant" is always a political category.... A lot of the persons living in the urban outer cities (a better translation of cite than "suburb") are from subsaharan Africa. And there are lots of Eastern European immigrants. The riots were sparked by the deaths of African youths, not Muslims. Singling out the persons of Muslim heritage is just a form of bigotry. Moreover, French youth of European heritage rioted quite extensively in 1968. As they had in 1789. Rioting in the streets is not a foreign custom. It has a French genealogy and context. The young people from North African societies such as Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia are mostly only nominal Muslims. They frequently do not speak much Arabic, and don't have "proper" French, either. They frequently do not know much about Islam and most of them certainly don't practice it.... Beur culture can be compared a bit to hip-hop as a form of urban expression of marginality and self-assertion in a racist society. It is mostly secular.... The kind of riots we are seeing in France also have occurred in US cities (they sent Detroit into a tailspin from 1967). They are always produced by racial segregation, racist discrimination, spectacular unemployment, and lack of access to the mainstream economy.... The French do not have Jim Crow laws, but de facto residential segregation is a widespread and intractable problem.... The problem is economic and having to do with economic and residential exclusionism, not with an "unassimilable" "immigrant" minority.... On the other hand, would it be possible for the French Muslim youth to be pushed toward religious extremism if the French government does not address the underlying problems.... The solution? Recognizing that "Frenchness" is not monochrome, that France is a tapestry of cultures and always has been, and that sometimes some threads of the tapestry need some extra attention if it is not to fray and come apart.

-- Juan Cole (via)

France's approach to multiculturalism and race is essentially that of Ward Connerly you simply make it officially not exist. A couple years back Connerly pushed for a ballot measure in California which would've made it illegal for the state government, in most cases, to make any racial classifications by race. While I'm not entirely unsymapthetic to the notion that such classification systems are problematic for various reasons, the alternative is simply having no information at all about race. This is France's system. This is the conservative approach to race and society. This is what they've spent the last week mocking.

-- Atrios

Don’t believe Fox News. France is not on the verge of a civil war, and what is happening in my country is not a jihad. The riots in the French “banlieues” are nevertheless very serious: they are one of the most serious social crises of the last 60 years. And they signal the death of our century-old “integration model,” one of the pillars of the modern French Republic.... The French have always cherished their model of integration, considered as an idealistic and almost mystical process. Its aim was generous: any immigrant, once he or she acquires French citizenship, becomes a citizen absolutely equal to any other. The “République Française” would proudly integrate her immigrants without any problems, thanks to her secular schools, her national institutions, her universal values... But during the riots of the past 13 days, Frenchmen have been confronted with the failures of this model, have watched it go up in flames... Most [rioters] are not immigrants themselves: they are French citizens, born in France, sometimes even born to parents who were born in France themselves. But they have not been integrated at all. Living in grim ghettos, without jobs, coping daily with discrimination and racism, they feel like they were abandoned by their country.... A national debate is now beginning. I’m pretty sure that “affirmative action” will soon be at the core of this debate... But my fear is that this debate will not go very far because of the deep conservatism of the French political elite.... I’m afraid that there will be only one beneficiary of the sad events of November 2005 : the sinister extreme right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. Yes, indeed, the Republic faces a moment of truth.

-- Pascal Riche

I have not been surprised by this tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion that is engulfing France. It is the result of thirty years of government neglect: of the failure of the French political classes -- of both right and left -- to make any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black populations into the larger French economy and culture; and of the deep-seated, searing, soul-destroying racism that the unemployed and profoundly alienated young of the ghettos face every day of their lives, both from the police, and when trying to find a job or decent housing... France's other immigrant workers were warehoused in huge, high-rise low-income housing ghettos -- known as "cités" (Americans would say "the projects") -- specially built for them, and deliberately placed out of sight in the suburbs around most of France's major urban agglomerations, so that their darker-skinned inhabitants wouldn't pollute the center cities of Paris, Lyon, Toulouse, Lille, Nice and the others of white France's urban centers, today encircled by flame... these high-rise human warehouses in the isolated suburbs are today run-down, dilapidated, sinister places, with broken elevators that remain unrepaired, heating systems left dysfunctional in winter, dirt and dog-shit in the hallways, broken windows, and few commercial amenities -- shopping for basic necessities is often quite limited and difficult, while entertainment and recreational facilities for youth are truncated and totally inadequate when they're not non-existent. Both apartments and schools are over-crowded... the current rebellion has little to do with Islamic fundamentalism. It is the anguished scream of a lost generation in search of an identity, children caught between two cultures and belonging to neither -- a rebellion of kids who, born in France and often speaking little Arabic, don't know the country where their parents were born, but who feel excuded, marginalized and invisible in the country in which they live.... "Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would "karcherise" the ghettos of "la racaille"-- words the U.S. press, with glaring inadequaxcy, has translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum." But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French... To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights.... And a majority of the country, empoisoned even more by racism after the violence of the last ten days, seems willing to accept more and more repression: a poll released last night on France 2 public TV shows that 57% of the French support Nicolas Sarkozy's hard-line approach to the ghetto youths' rebellion, now spreading right across France... the barely-concealed racism of Sarko's demagogy may be working with the white electorate -- but it won't stop the violence, it will only increase it. And the violence will only further increase the racism among the French whose skins are white. So it is inevitable that what the French refer to as the "social fracture" will only get worse.

-- Doug Ireland (via)

The prevailing opinion appears to be that the problem with the young French North Africans rioting in towns like Clichy-sur-Bois is that "they have not integrated into French society", or possibly that "French society has not been able to integrate them", depending on which cote of the rue you're looking from. What utter rot. These young men have got a political grievance, and they're expressing it by setting fire to things and smashing them up. What could be more stereotypically, characteristically French than that? Presumably they're setting fire to cars because they don't have any sheep and the nearest McDonalds is miles away. "French society is threatened by anarchy and lawlessness". I mean really. Everyone would do well to remember that this is France we're talking about, not Sweden or perhaps Canada. In forthcoming weeks, I shall be applying similar analytical techniques to topics like "root and branch corruption is threatening the essence of Italian democracy" and "Muslim immigrants cannot fit into British society because they are insular, bigoted and sexually repressed".

-- D-Squared
(via)

So we're still looking at a society with no affirmative action, where taboos on quotas and tokenism is much stronger than in America. This is, simply put, a recipe for having your social institutions regarded as illegitimate. Talk about inequality and economic deprivation obviously explains some of what's going on, but only a little. America is way more inegalitarian (and yes, Virginia, offers less social mobility) than France, and French poor people are better provided-for than are our poor people. People have complaints everywhere, but they usually don't turn violent unless they regard the institutions they're supposed to listen to as illegitimate, which is exactly what happens when you see such a large minority population so rigorously underrepresented in the ranks of the elite. The American military made this point pretty explicitly in the latest round of affirmative action litigation. Their enlisted soldiers are disproportionately black (whites are represented about evenly, Asians and people who didn't specify a race seem to be underrepresented) and the Army feels -- probably correctly -- that this means they need a healthy proportion of African-American officers to make things run smoothly.

-- Matt Yglesias

I've edited each of these down (only a bit with Atrios); read the linked entries for their full views. Let's hope the violence ends soon -- and that (contrary to the pessimism of several of the above) solutions to the underlying problems are found.

Update: Quotes added.

James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction: a Google Tale

Note: I am no longer keeping this post up to date. For an up-to-date list of James Fenimore Cooper Prize winners, see here.

So this semester I'm teaching a seminar on Historical Fiction, and one of the books we're reading is Tim O'Brien's extraordinary work The Things They Carried.* This being the age of the internet and all, one of the things I did was to google Tim O'Brien and see what information was out there. Now, in O'Brien's standard author bio is the note that his later book, In the Lake of the Woods, "won the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the society of American Historians"; one of the sites I hit mentioned that it was a prize for best historical novel. Now I was really interested: in preparing the course I had, of course, googled "historical novel" (see above re: age of the internet) but had never seen a page listing the winners. What was this prize? Who had won it?

Well, information is not ample, at least online. (And with all due respect towards those who worry that starting every search with google is destroying scholarship, I think we can all agree that at least some information is best kept online -- prize winners being a perfectly good example, I would have to say.) The prize is given by the Society of American Historians -- who don't seem to have a web page of their own, at least not one prominent in the googleverse. (Update: Since remedied) (It's not one of the major organizations for historians (which, in the U.S., are the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, for historians of America and historians in America respectively.)) They give four prizes, of which the James Fenimore Cooper Prize is one. But if you google "James Fenimore Cooper Prize" you get mostly sites citing O'Brien's standard author bio! Heck, a Lexis/Nexis search for the last two years brings up precisely one reference (in this review; the reviewer calls the prize "undervalued" -- which I would have to say is probably an understatement.)

I began to wonder if the prize existed, but no, a few other places do mention it. The basic information is that the prize is for best historical novel and is given biennially. This site reports: "A prize of $2500 is given biennially for an historical novel on an American theme that "significantly advances the historical imagination." Publishers may submit novels published in 2003 or 2004 by January 31. There is no entry fee. Send an SASE or email for an application and complete guidelines." (See link for contact info.)

And one page even gives a complete listing for winners of the prize -- a listing on the personal page of one Larry Schwartz, the collection management librarian at Minnesota State University's Livingston Lord Library (he maintains a listing of prize-winning fiction the library has.) But even that page had a low google rank for the search "James Fenimore Cooper Prize". Way to get your prize recognized guys! So, in the interest of promoting this prize, I will repeat the information here.

James Fenimore Cooper Prize for Best Historical Fiction
Given by the Society of American Historians

1993 Shaman by Noah Gordon
1995 In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O'Brien
1997 The Cattle Killing by John Edgar Wideman
1999 Gain by Richard Powers
2001 A Dangerous Friend by Ward Just
Bone by Bone by Peter Matthiessen
2003 Paradise Alley by Kevin Baker
2005 The Plot Against America, Philip Roth

Update: I have heard an unconfirmed report that Thomas Mullen's novel The Last Town on Earth won the prize -- presumably for 2007? -- but can't find confirmation anywhere on line, even on the author's own web site, so I can't vouch for this.

(The link in each case is independent confirmation of the prize. Just to prove that Larry Schwartz and Tim O'Brien didn't cook this up in their back yard one evening.)

The information here seems to suggest that the 2005 award (covering the years 2003-2004) should have been given already; but I haven't found out who the winner is. If anyone knows, email me, and I'll put in an update. Now updated.

-----
* The most useful site on The Things They Carried, incidentally, was an index prepared by the 2001-2002 Advanced Placement Literature class at Carmel High School in Mundelein, Il; I haven't used it extensively, but I've looked a few things up in it and it seems really good. Click on the title for the link.

The Invasion of Grenada

From Stewart O'Nan's anthology The Vietnam Reader: the Definitive Collection of American Fiction and Nonfiction on the War (which is a very good collection, although "definitive" is probably overstating it; it collects basically fiction/nonfiction/poetry from after the war by Americans, which is very good in the range which it covers, but which of course leaves a lot of gaps for (say) teaching purposes -- no Vietnamese viewpoints (frustratingly hard to find in anthologies generally), few contemporary documents, whether government documents, journalism, etc.) comes the following poem (from p. 679):

The Invasion of Grenada

I didn't want a monument,
not even one as sober as that
vast black wall of broken lives.
I didn't want a postage stamp.
I didn't want a road beside the Delaware
River with a sign proclaiming:
"Vietnam Veterans Memorial Highway."

What I wanted was a simple recognition
of the limits of our power as a nation
to inflict our will on others.
What I wanted was an understanding
that the world is neither black-and-white
nor ours.

What I wanted
was an end to monuments.

-- W. D. Ehrhart, 1984

What struck me most (should I add, "of course"?) was the second stanza: such a wonderful indictment of the currently reigning rationale for the war in Iraq. (I stress "currently reigning rationale" since I think it's crucial to remember that when we went to war the reason that was overwhelmingly stressed by the government (as opposed to the occasional pundit) was the dire threat from Iraq's WMDs; and that it is only after this became utterly unsupportable that the 'bring democracy and freedom' rationale, which until then had been distinctly tertiary, was brought forward as the reason for the war.) Even more apt against Iraq, I have to say, then against our Great Glorious War against Grenada.

So I thought it would share it with you.

Fall Back

In just under two hours, we're all supposed to set our clocks back one hour, so that it will suddenly and mysteriously be just under one hour from now. Time travel is as easy as the flick of a dial, eh?

If you're wondering why we do this, the go-to person seems to be one Michael Downing, who about sixth months ago (just in time for the previous clock change) published a book called Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time. I haven't read his book yet (it's the middle of the night and for some reason all the bookstores and libraries in Ithaca are closed... maybe we can do something about that, eh?) but reviews of his book which summarize his findings can be found here, here and here. The answer turns out to be rather more of a mess than one would think or than commonly-held theories have it (there's no hard proof it saves energy, the Government did mandate it during WW1 (and WW2) but rescinded those laws once the wars ended, and farmers were the practice's strongest foes). Based on what he says in this radio interview, it sounds like it was tied in with the establishment of standard time (time zones rather than each locale setting time by the sun), which was motivated by the railroads in the late Nineteenth Century but only mandated by the Government during WW1. Somehow daylight savings time got slipped in there. Despite opposition from farmers and others, it had its constituencies (e.g. major league baseball, who liked the extra time for games).

It still seems to be a point of some contention, incidentally. There is an advocacy site here against instituting daylight saving time in Queensland, Australia; and there is a petition here to end it altogether in the U.S. -- or, rather, to end it in half the country and make it permanent in the other half, thereby creating a two-time zone U.S. rather than a four-time zone one. Not quite the same thing I suppose.

Interestingly, Googling around about this I found out that, starting in 2007, Daylight Saving Time has been extended so that it will start on the second Sunday in March and not end until the first Sunday in November. All part of Dick Chaney's glorious energy bill. It was earlier extended (from the last Sunday in April to the first) by Ronald Reagan. Guess those Republicans just love daylight.

And if you follow all those links you, like I, can spend the 'extra' hour from this fall learning about why you have it in the first place.

This idea [standardized time zones] was first advanced and fought for by Sandford Fleming of Canada and Charles F. Dowd of the United States. I mention them chiefly because like so many benefactors of mankind they have been rewarded by total obscurity.

--Isaac Asimov, “The Times of Our Lives” (in Science, Numbers and I)

Rosa Parks, 1913 - 2005

A great American hero died today. Rest in peace.

(image source)

Update (Weds 10/26): Via Facing South, Paul Loeb captures the important way in which Rosa Parks' achievement is misremembered in this country:

[The] familiar rendition of [Rosa Parks'] story... stripped the Montgomery, Ala., boycott of its most important context. Before refusing to give up her bus seat, Parks had spent 12 years helping lead the local NAACP chapter. The summer before, Parks had attended a 10-day training session at Tennessee's labor and civil rights organizing school, the Highlander Center, where she'd met an older generation of civil rights activists and discussed the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision banning ''separate but equal'' schools.
In other words, Parks didn't come out of nowhere. She didn't single- handedly give birth to the civil rights efforts. Instead, she was part of an existing movement for change at a time when success was far from certain. This in no way diminishes the power and historical importance of her refusal to give up her seat. But it does remind us that this tremendously consequential act might never have taken place without the humble and frustrating work that she and others did earlier on. It reminds us that her initial step of getting involved was just as courageous and critical as the fabled moment when she refused to move to the back of the bus.

This is a crucial point, ill-remembered today. The Civil Rights Movement was, above all, the work of local people (to borrow the title of John Dittmer's wonderful book on the subject), not simply famous heroes. Heroism requires preparation, organization, and work. If we remember only the myth of a single act of defiance, we loose the key to what made change possible in the first place. Rosa Parks was a great American hero. But she never would have become that if she hadn't, first, been a dedicated activist working in the trenches; nor would her heroism have had the effects it did without the subsequent mobilization of the entire African American community of Montgomery. We should remember that. (Read Loeb's entire piece. There is also more on this subject in this Daily Kos diary.)

(The myth is important too, of course. Via Pandagon, Sarah Vowell has these thoughts on the misuses of the myth. She read a later version of the piece on the radio show This American Life; you can listen to that here (it's the last ten minutes or so of the show.))

Article Recommendation

Matt Yglesias hardly needs linkage from me; not only is he one of the stars of the left-leaning blogosphere, but Atrios already linked to this article for Pete's sake (and had some good things to add to it, too, though you should read Matt's piece first). But Matt Ygelsias's latest article in collaboration with Sam Rosenfeld, about the current argument of liberal hawks that the problem with the Iraq war was that it was incompetently executed, is simply superb, and gets at why many of us opposed this !@#$% war in the first place, even knowing full well that Saddam Hussein was a monster.

After slicing & dicing the liberal hawks, Yglesias has George Will for desert here. But eat the main meal first: it's the important bit.

Update: Not that I agree with everything they say; in particular, I'm sure their criteria for when interventions will and won't work can be debated and improved on. Still a must-read though.

New (Sports) Blog

My cousin, David Stassen, has started a sports-commentary blog. David's the second member of the family to blog, after me (so far as I know, anyway). You can find his blog here: http://sportsjerk.blogspot.com/. I don't really know anything about sports (save for a bit or two that goes along with studying American history, and isn't really what people talk about when they talk about sports (to paraphrase Raymond Carver)), but if you're interested in that sort of thing I urge you to check it out.

I should have known that there was a sports side to the blogosphere -- it's a huge area of interest for an enormous number of people. But I just never thought about it (despite noticing the occasional sports-related post on other blogs I frequent). It's sort of mind-boggling to think that, for any area of human interest, there's probably a blog or two (if not many more) devoted to it.

(On other matters, light posting is likely to continue for at least another few weeks, alas. Other areas of life are trumping this one at the moment.)

Quote of the Day (A November Guest Arrives Early)

One of my favorite poems has taken on early relevance today, at least here in Cloudy Ithaca. Here it is in full:

My November Guest

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.

-- Robert Frost, 1915

Indictments and Politics

In today's LA Times, Jonathan Chait starts his column with a point that is three-quarters correct. He writes:

WHEN A POLITICIAN is enmeshed in scandal, it usually has little to do with the regular way he conducts himself in office. Despite all the heroic attempts by President Clinton's critics to make promiscuity or lying a metaphor for his presidency, most of what he did had little to do with bedding interns.
The same goes for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's alleged insider trading or Karl Rove's alleged uncovering of a clandestine CIA officer. Frist or Rove may be bad people, but these alleged crimes are not an outgrowth of their everyday behavior.
The indictment of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) is another matter entirely. It's hard to imagine how DeLay could function without at least coming very close to breaking the law. His indictment is an indictment of the whole way the Republican Party operates. The central theme of DeLay's tenure has been to break down barriers to greater corporate influence in American politics.

This final point -- that DeLay's illegal acts are not essential, not accidental to his political style and success -- is the main one that Chait is making, and he is, of course, correct: DeLay is part of a nexus of corruption that has turned the Republicans into little more than a vehicle for corporate welfare and political corruption -- one of its central remaining tenets (unlike, say, reducing the size of Government, which their recent record has turned into a joke, and which DeLay recently declared a finished project). Chait is also right that Clinton and Frist's scandals have little to do with their political records.

But he's wrong about Rove. Rove's crime is precisely "an outgrowth of [his] everyday behavior." Rove's stock-in-trade has been reprehensible, irrelevant character assassination, an attempt to distract from policies and stir up his base (can you say "Swift Boat"?). Of course, he usually doesn't do something illegal (as opposed to merely immoral) while doing this -- so far as we know. He almost certainly doesn't usually destroy key assets in America's defense against terrorism while making (irrelevant) attacks on his clients' critics' character. But the basic act -- sleazy character assassination -- is a direct outgrowth of what Rove has done, the essential ingredient of his success. Further, as others have argued, his so-called genius is, in large measure, a willingness to ignore ethical boundaries -- which can lead to practical success, albeit of a noxious sort.

DeLay's indictment reveals a corruption at the heart of the Republican congress (and since I haven't had a chance to say it yet, can I just say: Hurrah!); and it is essential that Democrats make this connection. But Rove's actions -- which, now that Judy has decided to sing will hopefully lead to his imminent indictment -- are essential to Bush's political success: sleaziness employed to distract from disastrous policies that would otherwise be unpopular. If and when that indictment comes, we need to make that connection as well.

Other Reasons I Love Firefly (Part One)

Other reasons, you say? Was there a previous post in the series? No. It's just that if I were to list the main reasons I love the show, they'd be some version of the obvious ones, the reasons why I'd recommend the series to anyone (or, really, any fiction to anyone): it's superbly written, wonderfully acted, with nine characters who grab you and won't let you go -- subtle and insightful, graceful and humorous, exciting and fun. It jumps from humor to horror to action to drama and back, often in a sentence. In other words, it's just great fiction, in the form of great television. That's why you should watch it, if you haven't.

But there are other reasons I love it too -- idiosyncratic reasons. These aren't the reasons I'd push it on anyone. They're just small things or particular twists that add to my particular love for it. Without the wonderful writing, acting, characters and stories, they wouldn't mean anything. But on top of a great show, they're a marvelous garnish.

Some of them are more substantial, some less. I'd hoped to start with some of the more substantial ones -- but I think I won't get around to it before Serenity opens. So instead I'll start with a minor, but extremely delicious, reason I life Firefly: the Chinese.

The future history of Firefly imagines that the U.S. and China formed an alliance and colonized space. Thus the future is bilingual -- including all nine of the main characters, no matter how little education they have ("If I wanted schooling, I'd have gone to school.") Chinese writing is all over -- signs, the name of the ship, art in the captain's cabin. A danger message the ship broadcasts in one episode is given in both English and Chinese. It's not that a big deal is made of it; the world created by this alliance is simply bilingual -- being bilingual is just standard in the culture (which is historically quite reasonable, actually: many cultures have had a wide degree of bilingual; America's monolingual nature is arguably the exception rather than the rule).

And the characters speak Chinese -- regularly, in the show. This Chinese tends to be phrases that the viewer can not understand without any interruption of understanding (it's not subtitled) -- thus the most frequent uses are curses, ranging from the simple (哎呀, "damn") to the absurd (大象爆炸式的拉肚子, "the explosive diarrhea of an elephant"). Besides these, the Chinese phrases are things like "thank you" (谢谢) or "little sister" (妹妹) -- stuff you can easily 明白 from context, even if you don't know a single word of Chinese. (Though if you're curious, all the Chinese used in Firefly, visual and oral, is translated here.)

Now, since none of the actors really spoke Chinese, they speak it pretty badly -- even I can hear that sometimes, and I don't speak a word of Chinese! (Well, one word: 谢谢.) It's possible that anyone who actually knew Chinese would be driven crazy by this -- possibly even to the point of finding the show unwatchable. Though certainly some fans of the show on the net know Chinese; but then, those who hated it and turned it off are unlikely to hang out on Firefly sites! (Strangely enough, though, in the Serenity comics (a three-part series comprising a single story which takes place in the six-month gap between the final episode of Firefly and the start of the film Serenity) the characters appear to speak it perfectly. The benefits of having letterers do it rather than actors, I suppose!)

The show also, to its credit, tries to mix a Chinese aesthetic with a western one ("western" in two senses: broadly in the sense of Western Civilization, but specifically in the sense of the old U.S. West, as the show is envisioned as a space western (a notion which, before I'd watched it, turned me off -- it seemed utterly silly, the sort of thing mocked decades ago in print SF -- but which Whedon makes work very well.)) This is noticeable in the visuals of the show -- costumes and sets -- as well as the show's music, for example. The show tries to be deeply bicultural, albeit extrapolated into the future and mixed with other things as well. And it does pretty well, I think.

But what I love is the use of the language. It's spread to Firefly fandom, unsurprisingly, so that (e.g.) the Firefly podcast, The Signal, has a regular feature "How to Speak Chinese" translating bits of Chinese used on the show. The advertisements for Serenity all have Chinese in them, so I'm hopeful that this will not get discarded in the film (although none of the snipets of dialogue from the trailer have any Chinese in them -- but I'm betting that they thought this would scare off audiences and omitted these deliberately.)

Why do I like this? Well, I'm a language geek, who -- despite an utter lack of any aptitude for them -- loves languages. And in particular I've for some time been fascinated and enticed by Chinese. I think the script is beautiful, the language fascinating and wonderful -- and likely to be increasingly important. So while, as a language geek, I'd probably think it was neat to have any language routinely used in the show (for instance, I always liked that Red Dwarf takes place on a bilingual ship which uses English and Esperanto -- although that's all in background signs; the characters don't generally speak it, although in one episode one tries to learn some, with hilarious results), the fact that Firefly uses Chinese in particular just warms my heart. I just love it. I like when the characters use it; I like seeing it in the background. I like having an excuse to learn little scraps of the language. I like the idea of a bilingual future, and that it's an English/Chinese one. I like seeing Chinese on Firefly websites, using it on message boards and in emails to Firefly fans without an additional excuse. I've loved having an excuse to include some Chinese in one of my posts on this website. It's just cool -- and one of the other reasons that I love Firefly.

Haven't been attempting much recently...

...and I don't know when that'll change: I'm in for sort of a hard fall, for various reasons.

I still hope to complete some of my posts about Other Things I Like About Firefly before Serenity comes out on Friday. But it looks like I may not. (Update: Except that, of course, writing this little non-post inspired me to do at least one. Funny how that works.)

In the meantime, though, following the lead of Lance Mannion, I've decided to meme myself. Here's the meme:

1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to).
3. Find the fifth sentence (or closest to).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

Well, if I've counted properly, my 23rd post was When A New Planet Swims Into His Ken, and it's fifth sentence (not counting the epigraph) was "This is apparently because the announcement was premature -- their hands were forced since someone had hacked their website and would, they feared, preempt the announcement." Just for clarity's sake, the post was about the discovery of the tenth planet, and the fourth sentence was "Details seem sketchy so far."

And that's all I have for now.

One Thing I (Already) Dislike About Serenity

As I said in my previous post, I haven't written too much here about Katrina because I have been, for the most part, too heartsick to do so. Still am.

So instead I will turn to a happier topic: a movie I'm looking forward to. The movie in question is Serenity; it is the movie which is based upon -- continues the story of -- the wonderful, sadly-aborted TV series created by Joss Whedon, Firefly. So to celebrate the forthcoming resurrection of this tale in a new medium, I will start a series of posts about what I liked about Firefly.

(In case anyone out there hasn't heard of it, Firefly was a TV series produced by Joss Whedon, executive producer of those other wonderful series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. Only 14 episodes were made before the show was canceled -- and they were run out of order, so the show was never really given a chance. But it sold very well as a set of DVDs, so now a movie of the show, called Serenity, is coming out on September 30 -- watch for it! And if you haven't seen the show, check it out.)

But before I begin that series, let me list something I don't like about Serenity.

Now, I should make clear that I haven't actually seen the movie yet -- primarily because it isn't being released in the U.S. until September 30. That isn't quite decisive, actually -- there have been an unusual number of pre-screenings of the film, so I know people who've seen it; but none of those pre-screenings, for some reason, were held in the teeming metropolis of Ithaca, New York. So I haven't seen the film.

But yes, I already have a complaint:

It's too short.

Don't get me wrong. I'm delighted that Universal gave Whedon a chance to make a film of Firefly -- that that story, those characters, that universe will continue. I'll list some of the reasons why I am glad in forthcoming posts on this topic. And I'm fairly sure, given the reactions I've heard about to the pre-screenings of the film, both from friends and on the web, that I'll love the film. It sounds terrific.

But damnit, I don't want to see a film of Firefly. I want to see the next season of Firefly -- better yet, six more seasons. This is not simply irritation that I'll get two hours of entertainment rather than twenty-two, or a hundred and thirty-two. It's also that, frankly, I think the basic story involved would be a lot better as a TV show. Joss Whedon has said that what gets sacrificed in a film is character moments; in many ways, this is obvious. TV does slow development of character very well, just by the nature of its structure. A lot of facts about these characters, a lot of dangling plot threads and outstanding questions, would be wonderful answered slowly, over the course of many episodes. Whereas in a film -- or even a series of films -- they will be answered with a bang, if at all. The universe is so complex, the characters so rich, that it really ought to have been a TV show -- no surprise, since after all it was designed as one.

One example -- not even one example, since it is the basic structural fact that gets to the heart of the matter. In the 'making-of' feature that's in the DVD set, Joss Whedon talks about expanding the number of characters from five to nine, because a deeper and more complex ensemble would be better for TV. And so it would; but if he'd started out to make a film, I'd bet he'd have stuck with five. Again, don't get me wrong: I wouldn't want to sacrifice any of the nine. (For that matter, my vague impression is that Book has a small roll in the movie -- which I for one will be sorry about if I'm right.) But nine characters are simply too many for a movie to handle well. The only way you'd do it is if the movie was based on a pre-existing source -- such as Lord of the Rings (which never would have been made in anything like its actual form if it were an original movie: apart from the number of characters, which would have unquestionably been cut, can you imagine them bothering with the sizes of the hobbits? Or creating a CGI character with such a big role (given the technology of the time)? And so forth.) Or Firefly. Oh, it's not impossible: original film scripts (i.e. not based on anything else) with that many characters have been made. Gosford Park comes to mind, which had a lot more. But it's difficult, especially in an action movie, which is what Serenity appears to be. (Whedon originally intended Firefly to be mostly a drama.) So while I'm glad the pre-existing show forced his hand on the number of characters, it doesn't quite fit the medium.

I expect that I'll have to eat these words in a few weeks, at least to some extent, since I expect, as I said, to love the film. And I have sky-high hopes that Whedon will, in fact, manage to deal well with so many characters, such a complex place. But I suspect that on some level, no matter how great the film is, I think I'll always be sorry that it didn't stay on the air as a TV show.

Enough griping: the next installment will list some of the other reasons I like Firefly. (Huh? Other reasons? You haven't listed any yet! -- Stay tuned, Noble Readers: the answers to that question will come soon.)

Four Years Ago

Four years ago our country was attacked.

At this juncture, I find it hard to separate out my feelings about that monstrous crime from my feelings about the hideous uses to which our so-called government has put it, rhetorically, since it occurred -- waving it around like a bloody shirt to justify unrelated wars, attack political opponents and all manner of other things. The horror of the murdered innocents is primary, of course, but I also feel a horror at what my country has become since -- a country which tortures as a matter of policy, a country ever-less free, a country which even today is hosting a revolting spectacle that Matt Yglesias properly described by invoking Milan Kundera's notion of "totalitarian kitsch".

One of the standard complaints about Bush is that he passed up a tremendous opportunity to unite the country: if instead of exploiting the murders for cheap partisan gain he had endeavored to unite the country -- had asked for shared sacrifices, put aside crude partisanship, and so forth -- what good he could have done! If he had finished the war against Al-Queada rather than draining resources from it to fight an unrelated, long-desired war against Iraq, how much safer we might be! If he had, in short, reacted with greatness -- truly acted as if 9/11 had changed everything instead of simply saying it did while acting as if it had changed nothing... But, of course, he did none of those things: merely one of a thousand sins each in itself sufficient to confine him to hell, should such a place exist.

But I must admit that I put forward that criticism (unlike all the others) only half-heartedly: for I never believed it. Most liberal bloggers will tell of how, in the days following 9/11, they put aside their disdain for George Bush, put their trust in him, hoped for his success. Well, I didn't. Oh, I hoped for America's success: in the war against Afghanistan, in tracking down those who sought to do us harm, in limited the proliferation of weapons that they might do it with, in securing the homeland, as we quickly learned to call it. But not Bush. I already felt that he was utterly untrustworthy: viciously and pettily partisan, utterly incompetent, mixing cronyism and ideology in noxious combination. Rather than wish him well, I mostly feared for us that we were stuck with such a man at such a time.

Well, I have since been borne out: alas that I was! If the disaster that was Bush was clear on 9/11, it was utterly evident by November 2004 to anyone who bothered to look -- and may have become outright inarguable given Bush's criminally negligent handling of Katrina, and what it has revealed about our readiness to safeguard our citizens in the event of another terrorist attack (a readiness that was, let us never forget, the key element in Bush's reelection pitch). I have not written much about Katrina since the early days because -- frankly -- I am too heartsickened by the dead, too infuriated by the appalling response at every level. A thousand fine pieces have been written, but I will not bother to link to them here; I can't bear it. Most of you will have seen most of them anyway, I suspect.

In the first day or two after Katrina hit, there were a few calls, even from some normally level-headed leftists, not to "politicize" the situation. These calls were quickly discarded by all except Bush mouthpieces, as it quickly became evident that the situation was entirely political: the lack of preparation, the lack of response -- these are political matters. (Only those who see the political as petty -- only those, ultimately, who do not see it for what it is -- could fail to see that this life or death situation, like most, was and is political. Politics is about the most serious stuff imaginable: life and death, hope and despair, right and wrong, freedom and fear. Nothing is ever too important for politics: politics is about human life, which is as important as things get on this earth.) The calls to be non-political, now, are simply the Bush administrations weaselly way of trying to avoid responsibility for the nightmare they abetted -- indeed, for the nightmare abetted by twenty-five years of a poisonous rhetoric and philosophy which spoke ill of all government. And the left saw this, this time -- very quickly. Because, I think, of how Bush had handled 9/11 in the previous just-shy-of four years.

But in truth I wish that the left had reacted with as much furry and skepticism after 9/11. Uplifting it would not have been: but the country would have been better for it. Politics, ultimately, is not about inspiration but about policy: about what governments do. (To which inspiration may be key, of course. But it's instrumental.) If we had reacted with skepticism and not blind-faith, perhaps the patriot act would have been read by the congress before it was voted on; perhaps the tortures in the American gulag would have been met with fiercer resistance; perhaps the struggle against nuclear proliferation would have counted for more than scoring half-assed political points; perhaps the battle against Al-Queada would not have been shelved in pursuit of another. (In this last regard, let me recommend today's NYT magazine cover article by Mark Danner, who points out -- not in these words -- that while some have said we needed to invade Iraq when we did so that we fought Saddam on our terms and not his, what we ended up doing was fighting Osama on his terms -- terms that have led us to be loosing in the fight that most matters.) Most of all, if we had not had not abandoned skepticism for blind-faith in a faithless fool, perhaps we would have monitored matters, to ensure that our homeland defenses -- against any terror, man-made or natural -- were adequate and not neglected. Perhaps the people of New Orleans and elsewhere would have been treated as they deserved to be. Perhaps more of them would now be alive.

It is hard to properly commemorate the dead of four years ago when the bodies are still being drawn from the rubble of a newly ruined city -- rushing to find them before they can be devoured by wild animals. But ultimately, if they are utterly disconnected in their root cause, they are alike in the utter disaster of the government's response -- albeit a disaster that in one case took four years to see, and in another was evident within hours. Perhaps if we remember this -- and act on it -- we can struggle to make sure that when the next disaster comes (for disasters are unavoidable; only our responses to them are within our control), we are readier to meet it.

The dead of 9/11; the dead of Katrina. Rest in peace.

Great Minds Think Alike

A new meme is born. It has what Henry Kissinger once reportedly called the "additional advantage" of being true.

Jeffry Dubner:

These are the things, if nothing else, that government is here for. Liberals, who believe that good government can improve the our lot in life -- as Noam said, that "a robust, efficient government can mitigate, if not completely eliminate, much of the chaos and nastiness in the world" -- recognize that nothing but a powerful, central, active, federal government can do these things. Liberals identify the things that government needs to do and then find ways to fund them. Conservatives, on the other hand, think the government should be shrunk and stripped of power at all opportunities, and that taxes shouldn't be raised for all but the most obvious of social goods (if those). Even at a time when our nation is supposed to be at the highest level of disaster preparedness in history (and has the resources to), the governing conservatives didn't take steps essential to being ready for any massive disaster. If one good thing comes out of this tragedy, it will be the repudiation for decades of the idea that people who don't believe in government have any place running the government.

Kevin Drum:

FEMA was downsized and partially privatized because modern Republican leaders think that's the right thing to do with federal agencies. Budgets were limited for levee construction and first responder training because Republicans have other priorities. The federal government was slow to respond to Katrina because conservatives believe states should take the lead in looking out for their own needs. George Bush talks endlessly to the cameras about the private sector helping to rebuild the Gulf Coast because that's the kind thing conservatives believe in.
Liberals, by contrast, believe in a robust role for the federal government. We believe in sharing risk nationwide for local disasters. We believe that only the federal government is big enough to coordinate relief on the scale needed by an event like Katrina, and that strong, well managed agencies like FEMA should take the lead role in making this happen.
Both of these governing philosophies are defensible, but too often they seem like nothing more than opposing sides in an intellectual game. Katrina demonstrates otherwise. It's what happens when a drowning city runs smack into a conservative
movement that believes in drowning the federal government in a bathtub.

Tom Tomorrow:

I guess this is what you get when you elect leaders ideologically committed to the notion that government isn't good for anything.

Kos:

We have two competing world views in American politics. The first says that government cannot help people. That government must be as small as possible, and exists only to provide security from external enemies. The other says that government can be a force for good and can help make people's lives better.
This week, we are seeing the effects of the lack of government. The American people are seeing what happens when the worldview is dominant. We've talked about the two disasters -- the hurrican itself, which was unavoidable, and the response to the hurricane and lack of leadership, which was.
We are seeing a third disaster -- the conservative world view itself, crashing and burning as reality meets ideology. Where government programs are slashed in the name of Norquist's drownable government, only to see an entire major city wiped off the face of the map as a result.

Matt Yglesias:

Liberals think there should be taxes, and that the revenue thereby raised should be spent on projects that will be useful. The GOP thinks there should be no taxes, programs should be funded if powerful interest groups want them to be funded, and the American military should mainly be used to conquer medium-sized countries that aren't threatening the United States. The result, naturally, is that useful programs wind up underfunded -- and that has consequences.

(and earlier:)

They say there are no atheists in foxholes. Similarly, there are no libertarians in the aftermath of a giant, city-wide flood. Private charities have a huge role to play in these situations, but so does the government, not least to provide coordination.

Ezra Klein:

Government is failing. They're doing it obviously. And reporters and citizens alike are smart enough to extrapolate that if they failed here, they could do it again during a crisis that their hometown. Bush is discrediting small government conservatism by not mobilizing the private sector and he's highlighting the need for an effective big government to pick up the slack.

Rob Salkowitz:

It’s moments like this when you need a party in power that actually believes in the affirmative power of government to help its citizens, rather than the party that sees government’s role as protecting the property of the well-off from the predations of the underclass. It’s when the true ugly soul of American conservatism is borne out for what it is: a rationalization of selfishness and the hysterical denial of community. America is about to see what happens when the government is staffed by people appointed to their jobs precisely for their disdain for the whole notion of policy in the public interest. It’s won’t be pretty.

Lamentations

Alas!
Lonely sits the city
Once great with people!
She that was great among nations
Is become like a widow;
The princess among states
Is become a thrall.
Bitterly she weeps in the night,
Her cheek wet with tears.
There is none to comfort her
Of all her friends...

All her inhabitants sigh
As they search for bread;
They have bartered their treasures for food,
To keep themselves alive. --
See, O Lord, and behold,
How abject I have become! ...

Her gates have sunk into the ground,
He has smashed her bars to bits...

My eyes are spent with tears,
My heart is in tumult,
My being melts away
Over the ruin of my poor people,
As babes and sucklings languish
In the squares of the city.
They keep asking their mothers,
"Where is bread and wine?"
As they languish like battle-wounded
In the squares of the town,
As their life runs out
In their mothers' bosoms....

My eyes shall flow without cease,
Without respite.

(1:1-2, 12; 2:9, 11-12; 3:49)