Disturbing Google search of the week: Someone came here looking for "David Schwimmer in white socks being tickled."

My little sister was once asked out on a date by a male Starbucks barista. Perhaps it's the female ones that are more notable...

The Ninth Circuit won't reconsider its infamous pledge of allegiance decision.

Well, I had planned this long post about the crossing picket lines, classes, and the strike, but Iris beat me to it.

Here's my take:

(1) Holding classes off campus is definitely not neutral, despite this claim, in an email from a professor, about moving classes.

My decision to move classes off campus was made because I believe based on my experience that it is the best educational interests of all of the students and it should not be misinterpreted as a gesture of support for or against anyone's positions in the current labor negotiations.

Moving class off campus places a burden on neutral or pro-administration students and facilitates the desired actions of pro-union students. One example: this email from a "point person":

3. Please try to arrive EARLY so as to minimize settling in time.

4. Try to bring SURGE PROTECTORS and EXTENSION CHORDS, so that we can have as many power sources as we need. Be aware that there will be WIRES on the floor.

5. Just in case: will someone with a GOOD BATTERY volunteer to take notes to be distributed to students who do not have power sources? Email me if you are willing to do so.

These are, plain and simple, burdens. And they make off-campus classes decidedly not neutral.

(2) Going to class is not crossing the picket line. As I understand strikes, the point is to demonstrate, by not working, that the work is far more valuable to the administration/management than the admin/man is claiming it is. How does going to class in the building where classes are usually held undermine this statement? Not sure. Replacing the work with scabs--now that is "crossing the picket line." I suppose one attenuated argument could be that our attendance "uses" the scabs. Not only is that attenuated, however, but it doesn't hold much water when you look more closely. How does "using" the scabs undermine the union cause? I suppose it might if the union's purpose is to shut down the school simply for the sake of shutting down the school. But that is not, as I understand it, the reason for a strike. And it shouldn't be--that isn't using the strike to demonstrate anything. Rather, that is simply showing the power of the mob. And if that's what's going on, well, that's just plain wrong. This country was designed to be governed by reasonable majorities, not cowed into action by the tyranny of the majority.

(3) Crossing the picket line is not a show of support for the administration. I am simply saying I want to go to class. I can't think of why this would be true. I suppose there is again, the attenuated argument that I am "using" the scabs. But that is far from saying that I think the administration is right. Perhaps it is insulting to the picketers for me to go about my business when they are sacrificing their wages. That I can understand. But that is not support for the administration. It is staying neutral. (Nor do I wish to insult people--but if staying neutral means being insulting, I'm not sure what to do.) The problem is that the union is making neutrality the same thing as support for the administration. That is simply fallacious logic.

Today's Yale Daily News op-ed says that there is no such thing as neutrality. Fine, but why? The Daily does not answer that question.

Put simply, undergraduates will not be able to occupy a neutral ground because we do not exist in a bubble on campus. We may have had nothing to do with events leading up to the strike. But as the recipients of workers' services and of the education that may well be disrupted, we play an implicitly central role in the situation.

But that is a normative argument. What if I don't buy it? Tell me instead why going to class is, as a positive matter, not neutral.

For more information on the strike, check out Yale's position and the union's position.

Two Georgia state lawmakers want to ban "South Pacific" and other theatrical works "offensive to Southern tradition," reports The Columbus Ledger-Enquirer:

Rep. David C. Jones of Sylvester and Sen. John Sheppard of Ashburn said in a written statement they would ask the next legislature for a bill to prevent the showing of "theatricals which have an underlying philosophy inspired by Moscow."

Jones said the play "justifies intermarriage of different races" which "produces half breeds which are not conducive to the higher type of society... We in the South are a proud people and have pure blood lines. We want to keep it that way."

In a somewhat related note, I found this site (via Eve Tushnet) that lets people tell what they love about each of the 50 states. Go say something nice about The Peach State, because these guys sure aren't doing her any favors.

Speaking of cosmetic, a friend from the South complained to me yesterday about how chapped her hands get in the winter. Mine used to chap until they cracked and bled, until a dermatologist friend told me the best solution. A lot of people use lotion, but the dermatologist said that water-based lotions actually dry the skin out as they evaporate. They are in that sense, and from the manufacturers' perspective, a perfect product: one whose use perpetuates your need for it. It's as if they could make beer from salted peanuts. The solution is to use mineral oil. Dab it on your skin with cotton balls, massage it in, and use a tissue to take off the excess. It doesn't evaporate and seals the moisture in. Plus, the generic drugstore brand is fine, so for three or four bucks you'll have soft, supple skin all through the trying cold months.

As for the crossing-the-picket-line debate at Yale Law School, if a student's attending class in the law school building constitutes crossing the picket line, then doesn't attending class at an off-campus location as well? The students cannot in either case be considered scabs since they won't be doing the striking workers' work. So whatever it is that students who support the workers think they shouldn't be doing by going into the building--keeping the law school functioning normally despite a strike--they'll simply be doing off site. You might wonder if it wouldn't help the workers more by going into the building and putting demands on the staff in order to show the administration how much the school relies on the workers. But that is not how people seem to be reasoning in this situation. In an ungenerous light, having class off campus, or watching videotapes of classes held in the building, just seems like the work of upper middle class sympathizers who don't really want to sacrifice anything. Cosmetic. Here's a suggestion: if having class off campus is in essence crossing the picket line, wouldn't it be more efficient to hold classes in their usual locations in the law school and have all the striking workers picket at a single off-site location?

Dahlia Lithwick comments on the racial ugliness surrounding the Estrada nomination:

[T]he worst feature of this confirmation is the backbiting among Hispanic-Americans, who can't make up their minds whether it's more important to get a certified Hispanic judge onto the bench — regardless of his views or ideology — or to make sure that their Hispanic judge meets some idealized standard of authentic Hispanicness (preferably demonstrated by mentoring Hispanic children and rising up out of squalor). As the debate grows uglier, it's now becoming a contest among Mexicans, Cubans, and Hondurans about who — to paraphrase Snow White — is the most Hispanic of them all.

Lithwick notes astutely that the claim that Estrada's relatively privileged upbringing makes him "not Hispanic enough" cuts against the claim that race is always a good proxy for diversity.

Quote of the Day:
"There is more difference within the sexes than between them."
~ Ivy Compton-Burnett

Song of the Day:
Jimmy Eat World, "Sweetness"

Happy Birthday:
Mario Andretti
Frank Gehry
Linus Pauling
Bugsy Siegel
Dean Smith

Bashman reports that the Estrada cloture vote has been scheduled for next week. Also, the Fox News article he's picked up says that DoJ turned over Estrada's memos. Like Bashman, I wonder if that's true or if the Fox News reporter committed a big blunder...

Yale braces for a labor strike. Questions of the moment: Is going to class actually crossing the picket line? Is crossing the picket line, as a student, a show of support for the administration?

China Watch:

Never taken as seriously as they need to be taken . . .

Until now, only the United States and Russia have put people in orbit. Assuming the Shenzhou 5 succeeds, China will become the world's third spacefaring nation. There will be astronauts, cosmonauts-and taikonauts. This event, in turn, will mark China's emergence as a major space power, a prospect that is at once admirable and worrisome.

....

The fact that China will put people in orbit does not in itself represent that threat. The Shenzhou 5 may be nothing more than an exercise in regime-boosting nationalism that actually diverts resources away from more menacing applications, such as space mines and anti-satellite lasers. Yet the orbiter does demonstrate an impressive technical capability with undeniable military potential. Civilians run NASA, but generals are in charge of China's space program. The United States must take their foray into space seriously-and also look for the hidden opportunities it provides.

....

The Pentagon is already planning for space warfare. On Thursday, the largest space-oriented war game yet held was launched at Schriever Air Force Base in Colorado. (It concludes this Friday.) The scenario, set in the year 2017, has the blue team (the United States) squaring off against the red team, which is defined as a ''credible space opponent.'' During the Cold War, the red team was always based on the Soviet Union, even though officials would never say so publicly. Now the red team has a new model. And judging from the sketchy descriptions released to the public, it's China.

Why is it that they are never on anyone's radar? How do they continue to convince people that they aren't anything to worry about?

Quare blasts Segway. I agree.

China Watch:

Fidel Castro emerges from Cuba, shocked to find world has changed.

Fred Rogers was one of the last good things in children's television. He will be missed. This is a fascinating little tribute to the ultimate "nice guy."

Tim Schnabel has a nice post about the death of Fred Rogers.

Two couples — one black, one white — are trying to conceive, using the same fertility clinic. Mrs. A., the white woman, undergoes treatment and gives birth to twins, who, it turns out, do not particularly resemble her husband. They are in fact the biological children of Mr. B, the black man.

This is a real case. An English court just awarded custody of the twins to Mr. and Mrs. A. The ruling leaves the door open for Mr. A. to legally adopt them, which could terminate Mr. B.'s right to play any part in their upbringing.

For their part, the black couple, who have been trying for more than a decade to have their own children, without success, thanked the white couple for their "sensitivity and understanding," but said in a statement that they needed "time to reflect on where the judgment leaves them."

A gracious statement, given the pain they must be feeling.

The British government has recently toughened regulations on the country's fertility clinics. Now there must be two witnesses for every step in each procedure.

The article also mentions a similar case:

[I]n New York in 1999, a 40-year-old white woman gave birth to two babies — one black, and one white — after fertility treatment. It was determined that one of the embryos with which she had been implanted was produced with the eggs and sperm of another couple. She agreed to give the black infant to its biological parents.

Amazing stories. I wonder if those children, who shared a womb, will ever see each other again.

Quote of the Day:
"This was what we Japanese called the 'onion life' – peeling away a layer at a time and crying all the while."
~ Arthur Golden, Memoirs of a Geisha

Song of the Day:
Sixwire, "Look at Me Now"

Happy Birthday:
Lee Atwater
Hugo Black
Constantine the Great
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Ralph Nader
Arthur Schlesinger
John Steinbeck
Elizabeth Taylor

A reader sends in yet another use for duct tape! (These are prettier.)

This Newsweek cover story on black women would be unremarkable if it weren't so atrociously written. Good grief.

In other news, I recently let my last two magazine subscriptions run out. I just wasn't reading them thoroughly enough to justify the expense. There's so much good stuff online for free.

Of course, I still get the best one. It's a quasi-gift for my mother, so it arrives there and she gets to peruse it first.

Katie Roiphe asks whether The Quiet American is anti-American. Our own Alan Dale has addressed that question at great length here.

Here's an article about the business of book reviewing, which apparently requires only the most casual of encounters between reviewer and object being reviewed. Said Sidney Smith: "I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so."

Nevada is considering a special tax on prostitutes. People are complaining, for various reasons:

"What are the girls going to do?" asked Geoff Arnold, president of the Nevada Brothel Association. "Have a calculator in the room? The girls aren't the best at math."

I just searched in vain for the Nevada Brothel Association website.

The Arizona Republic reports that the number the Environmental Protection Agency lists as its toll-free line for information on hazardous-substance releases is actually a chat sevice called Intimate Encounters featuring "girls waiting right now to talk to you."

The EPA spokeswoman was "aghast" when a reporter informed her of this.

Quote of the Day:
"A thick skin is a gift from God."
~ Konrad Adenauer

Song of the Day:
Madonna, "Crazy for You"

Happy Birthday:
Johnny Cash
Fats Domino
Jackie Gleason
Victor Hugo
Robert Novak
Robert Taft

Movie Review

At the beginning of Pedro Almodóvar's Spanish film Talk to Her two men are seated next to each other at a performance of Pina Bausch's Café Müller, a modern dance piece from 1978 set to music by Purcell in which two women in slips move quickly but with somnambulistic helplessness across a café set while a man pushes chairs out of their paths. (The movie ends at a performance of Bausch's 1986 work Masurca Fogo.) Benigno notices that Marco is moved to tears by the performance, which turns out to be symbolic of the movie's own story.

Benigno is a nurse assigned full-time to the care of Alicia, a young dancer who has been in a coma for four years. Benigno seems gay, but is actually a virgin who became obsessed with Alicia before her accident; by luck he's ended up with the job which includes intimate care to keep Alicia's skin and muscles and eyes, etc., from deteriorating. (He learned these spa skills while taking care of his own inert mother.) As he works on Alicia he talks to her as casually as if she were awake and listening with total absorption. He tells her about the Bausch performance, which he attended because she would have been interested, about the silent movies he goes to because she loved them, about Marco, though we're not exactly sure why.

Marco is a middle-aged journalist who sees Lydia, a female bullfighter, on a talk show, and asks to be assigned to interview her. His entrée is that she's plainly desperate about being dumped by a male fellow bullfighter. Marco gets more than an interview, however, after he kills a snake in Lydia's kitchen. It brings them together but also puts a space between them because it reminds Marco of a similar situation with his ex-girlfriend of ten years (whom he got off drugs by taking her back to her parents who then refused to let her see him anymore). Marco weeps at the memory, which Lydia registers. At the ex's wedding Marco feels ready to commit to Lydia; she doesn't get a chance to tell him she's back with her own ex before she's gored by a bull later that day and put in a coma, ending up on the same hospital floor as Alicia. The two men become friends, though Marco is resistant to the idea that there's any point in talking to a comatose woman.

Up to a point Benigno the virgin seems to have the ideal relationship. His chatting while tending to Alicia, who remains totally silent and passive, is so much less messy than even the brief relationship between Marco and Lydia, with all its stormily confused sexual symbols--snakes, bulls and bullfighting, tears. One night Benigno tells Alicia all about a silent movie he went to called The Shrinking Lover (a stylistically sensational fake on Almodóvar's part). In this movie a female scientist develops a potion for weight control; before she can test it, however, her portly male lover drinks it down to prove that he takes her seriously. Unfortunately it makes him shrink until he can fit in her purse, and other places. At the end of the excerpts we see, after the scientist has rescued him from his domineering mother and taken him into her bed, the tiny lover climbs up on her breasts and then down to her vagina where he experimentally sticks his arm in before heading on in for good. For Benigno and Alicia it seems the mess can be contained in a work of art.

Up to this point the movie appears to be a work of comic irony about heterosexual relationships. Benigno, whose name implies good intentions, comes off as an ideal lover if you don't like drama. In a crazy way, he and Alicia are lucky. But Benigno has his issues as well, it turns out, and isn't quite as harmless as we thought. The movie quickly brings us out of the suspended fantasy world in which we were amused by the conceit of Benigno's devotion to Alicia with a page stolen from the great romantic ironist Heinrich von Kleist's 1810 novella The Marquise of O. Harmless Benigno harms Alicia, though to her ultimate benefit. Almodóvar doesn't switch gears in an abrupt manner or with didactic intent; he just subtly reminds us that movies are movies and what we're seeing isn't (though of course it is). There's no way around the mess in human relationships; our drives don't permit it.

Talk to Her is a superbly crafted movie, both more particular and more elliptical in its storytelling than almost all American dramas. It makes something like The Hours, or worse, Far from Heaven, look very clodhopping indeed. The way those movies exemplify their themes, they're like used textbooks covered with highlighter. Almodóvar's integration of dance and music (including a haunting live performance by the Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso of the song Cucurrucucú paloma) and design and movies has become extremely fluent since he burst on the international scene with his bad-boy lunacies in the '80s. But I have to say, it's the naughty poofter who made What Have I Done to Deserve This?, Matador (with Antonio Banderas as the pathetic, immature rapist), Law of Desire, and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown that many of us fell in love with. Those explosive comedies were so distinctive because they seemed to place no limit on Almodóvar's access to his subconscious and yet they weren't interior, hushed, private. He gave parties in his head and everybody came. But his style was so marked that he had a legitimate fear of imitating himself and so struck out in other directions. A decade before Todd Haynes tried to put some dramatic fiber into a Douglas Sirk movie in Far from Heaven, Almodóvar tried it. He hasn't become earnest, going for settled prestigious "big" subjects in the manner of American entertainers like Steven Spielberg and Jonathan Demme (and George Stevens before them) who decide it's time to win some awards. But he does lay out his themes in a slightly too-skillful manner.

Talk to Her does have some very funny-irreverent moments--in addition to that wild silent movie, which echoes the heterosexual bad boy Bertrand Blier's 1976 sci-fi sex war comedy Calmos, there's a little discussion about whom missionaries in Africa rape nowadays--but altogether it's a very placid, controlled movie about the inevitability of emotional torment in relationships. Even a stunning overhead shot of the sleek back of a charging bull is a thing of beauty for our contemplation. Is it because the characters aren't gay? Maybe aesthetic detachment would come less easily to Almodóvar if he were making a movie about drives he shares. (And between Benigno's sexual immaturity, the dominant mothers, the reversion to the womb fantasy, Almodóvar by implication invokes many of the psychiatric tropes about homosexuality.) All the same, it's easy to recommend Talk to Her but I hope it would lead people back to Almodóvar's early work to see what he was like when he was less constrained by his own skill as a moviemaker.

Quote of the Day:
"Live as you will have wished to have lived when you are dying."
~ Christian Furchtegott Gellert

Song of the Day:
Color Me Badd, "All 4 Love"

Happy Birthday:
Sean Astin
George Harrison
Zeppo Marx
Sally Jessy Raphael
Pierre Auguste Renoir

From the Hotline's "Last Call" today:

SHOT...: "More than 186,000 people have signed the Mirror's anti-war petition" -- London Daily Mirror Web site (2/24).

...CHASER: "More than 390,000 people wrote 'Jedi' on their 2001 census form" -- Reuters report on Star Wars fans and the British census (2/13).

Richard Posner, who clerked for Justice William Brennan, had the occasion to observe Justice William O. Douglas up close and personal. At the time, Posner thought Douglas was "the most charismatic judge (well, the only charismatic judge) on the Court," but it was a bad sort of charisma -- Douglas was so sadistic his own clerks referred to him behind his back as "shithead." Posner has a fun review in The New Republic of a new biography of Douglas; you can tell he got a big kick out of the "gamy bits" in the book:

Little did I know that this elderly gentleman (he was sixty-four when I was a law clerk) was having sex with his soon-to-be third wife in his Supreme Court office, that he was being stalked by his justifiably suspicious soon-to-be ex-wife, and that on one occasion he had to hide the wife-to-be in his closet in order to prevent the current wife from discovering her.

Posner describes Douglas as "[r]ude, ice-cold, hot-tempered, ungrateful, foul-mouthed, self-absorbed, and devoured by ambition," but he notes that "[o]ne can be a bad person and a good judge, just as one can be a good person and a bad judge."

The Captain is back, and posting up a storm on Bruce Springsteen, misspelled celebrity porn, and more.

Saturday Night Live kicked off this weekend's show with a Hardball parody:

"Chris Matthews": "In the last week, millions of Americans have gathered to protest the impending war with Iraq. Listen, protesters, I've got news for you. Bush is ignoring France, Germany, China and Russia -- He's definitely not going to listen to some white kid with dreadlocks banging on his frat buddy's bongo drums ... Can anything stop this red, white and blue freight train, or is Baghdad about to have more craters than Edward James Almos' face?"
"Matthews" to French Foreign Minister "Dominique De Villepin": "Inspector Clouseau, your thoughts?"
"De Villepin": "Chris, France does not oppose this war because we are pro-Iraq. We oppose it because we are anti-America. I mean, let's face it, you guys are ridiculous. You are loud, greedy, bloodthirsty, boorish. You're a bunch of fat, oil-guzzling ham faces."
"Matthews": "That's big talk from a country whose only contributions to world culture in the last 50 years are Gerard Depardieu and that horny skunk."

Sorry I missed it.

George Will says that in Europe today, anti-Americanism is the new anti-Semitism:

From medieval times until 1945, Jews often were considered the embodiment of sinister forces, the focus of discontents, the all-purpose explanation of disappointments. Now America is all those things.... The demonstrators simultaneously express respect for the United Nations' resolutions and loathing for America, the only nation that can enforce the resolutions. This moral infantilism -- willing an end while opposing the only means to that end -- reveals that the demonstrators believe the means are more objectionable than the end is desirable.

He also makes the point that all this talk about anti-Semitism being the socialism of fools is "confusing, because socialism is the socialism of fools."

Howard Bashman notes that today is the 200th anniversary of Marbury v. Madison.

Tim Schnabel has a report on his weekend at the Federalist Society's annual national student symposium, including Judge Kozinski singing a parody of "Strangers in the Night."

Quote of the Day:
"I'm a man more dined against than dining."
~ Maurice Bowra

Song of the Day:
R.E.M., "Everybody Hurts"

Happy Birthday:
Barry Bostwick
Alex Gordon
Winslow Homer
Alain Prost

Punditwatch is up, and he's tough on the anti-war celebrities who were all over the political shows this morning:

When the questioning gets tough, "peace" advocates change the subject. Someone else in the world is as bad as Saddam, a war will cost too much, or a war will spawn new terrorist attacks.

He also reports that pundits seemed to have a renewed enthusiasm for Gephardt's candidacy.

In honor of one of the birthday boys, here's a site that posts the diaries of Samuel Pepys in blog form, one entry per day.

Quote of the Day:
"Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash."
~ Winston Churchill

Song of the Day:
The Spice Girls, "2 Become 1"

Happy Birthday:
W.E.B. Du Bois
Peter Fonda
Samuel Pepys
Meyer Rothschild

A snow-sculpture of a phallus in Harvard Yard was smashed soon after its, er... erection last week.

Here, one of the penis-bashers explains why she did it:

It was perfectly within my rights to take down this object which was incredibly offensive to me. As a student of Harvard University, neither I, nor any other woman, should have to see this obscene and grossly inappropriate thing on my way to class. No one should have to be subjected to an erect penis without his or her express permission or consent.

"Oh, please," says Andrew Sullivan. "Is the Washington Monument safe?"

This article describing a visit to IKEA headquarters in Sweden reminded me of one of my few provincial-American beefs about Europe. One of IKEA's designers tells the author that while most of IKEA's products are uniform worldwide, "Americans do get bigger couches, bigger glasses, and softer beds."

Okay, so we Americans are big softies and like comfy sofas. But what's wrong with drinking a lot of fluids? Or, more to the point, why do Europeans drink so little, especially with meals? When I was a student in England, the dining hall had these little shot-glass-like cups for water with dinner that we refilled from pitchers on the tables, and the Americans were always fighting each other for the last drops of water halfway through the meal. Ice is also hard to come by.

Someone once explained to me that Europeans drink less with meals because they drink between meals. Maybe, but I still doubt they consume as the same amount of fluids as your typical American. Even their canned and bottled drinks generally come in slightly smaller sizes than in America. And I drink a lot between meals, too -- but I still like a large, cold beverage with my food.

So, what's the deal? Do they drink less because they eat less? Is it because they drink more beer and wine? Is it just a matter of what they're used to? Is either way healthier? I wish someone would explain this to me. In the meantime, I'm going to continue to keep my water and Diet Dr. Pepper consumption at kidney-overdrive levels -- and pack a nice big water bottle the next time I go to Europe.

The WP has this review of what it calls "the worst novel ever published in the English language." The plot -- remember, it's a novel -- centers around the Bush tax cut and a secret giant parade honoring the wealthiest people in America, who march in order of their net worth.

Howard Mortman is pro-SUV following last week's big snowstorm:

The New York Daily News noted this sign at a weekend anti-war rally: "If war is inevitable, start drafting SUV drivers now." Perhaps. But first, encourage them to keep volunteering to save lives when it snows.

Link via InstaPundit.

Quote of the Day:
"The dark is light enough."
~ Christopher Fry

Song of the Day:
Soul 4 Real, "Candy Rain"

Happy Birthday:
Frederic Chopin
Julius Erving
Ted Kennedy
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Arthur Schopenhauer
George Washington

Movie Review

David Brooks wrote in The Weekly Standard on 6 April 2002 that much of the European reaction to the American response to September 11 "has been straight out of Graham Greene's novel The Quiet American," and went on to paraphrase European criticism of the U.S.: "They will go marching off as they always do, naively confident of themselves, yet inevitably unaware of the harm they shall do." The reference is to Greene's Alden Pyle, an American government secret operative in Vietnam whose support for a political leader who commits a terrorist bombing causes Thomas Fowler, an apolitical British journalist, to conspire in Pyle's murder by Communists in order to prevent Pyle from innocently causing more harm. And Phillip Noyce's current movie version, starring Michael Caine as Fowler and Brendan Fraser as Pyle, has been reviewed in this country as prophetic of the inevitable disaster of the American involvement in Vietnam. The novel was criticized in America upon its publication in 1955 for being anti-American, but a little digging into Greene's biography raises the surprisingly slippery question to what degree and in what way Greene intended this condemnation of American foreign activity.

Part I: Culture

To begin with the most obvious anti-American element: the word "quiet" in the title should be italicized because the point is that the American Pyle isn't your typical, brash, noisy, moronic American. The son of a professor, Harvard-educated, and intensely idealistic about his undercover work to set up an indigenous Third Force to battle both the fading French colonialists and the Communist Vietminh, he's nevertheless so inexperienced he's more dangerous than his stupid, obnoxious countrymen. (Fowler thinks of him: "[Y]ou can't blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.") Pyle is as good as this country can produce and yet it comes across as a form of redemptive political engagement for Fowler to conspire in his murder.

Fowler's motive is mixed, to be sure, grounded in Pyle's forthright, gallant competition for Fowler's teenaged Vietnamese mistress Phuong. Fowler is married to a Catholic woman who won't give him a divorce, whereas Pyle wants to do the honorable thing by Phuong. But that doesn't make the anti-Americanism an inaccurate statement of Greene's feelings, it just gives its voicing a personal motive in the story. What Fowler says about Americans feels grounded in Old World snobbery, especially against crusading Americans like Henry Luce whose Life magazine sponsored Greene's first trip to Vietnam. Greene gives Fowler, his alter ego as detached-but-aroused journalist in Indochina, swipes at American culture of the kind that Europeans often take to be devastating: we have air-conditioned lavatories; women's lunch clubs that play Canasta; grocery stores where the celery comes wrapped in cellophane. Fowler refers to our "sterilised world," so different from the real world of "rumpled sheets and the sweat of sex," and wonders if American women take deodorants to bed with them. Even the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the French, is blamed on us--it may not be our fault that it's "ill-designed" but it is we who have rendered it "meaningless."

Nowadays this level of critique can be summed up in one word--"McDonald's"--or even the initial "Mc." And though Greene makes Fowler self-conscious enough to be aware that sexual rivalry with Pyle had made him a "bore" on the subject of America, that just means he's talking about it more than his auditors care to hear, not that he's wrong. After all, Greene called his American Pyle for the connotation with hemorrhoids--Americans give Greene a pain in the ass. Hearing about the awfulness of American culture from an English screenwriter of this era is especially odd seeing as so many of the interesting English movies, of all genres--The Stars Look Down, Odd Man Out, Outcast of the Islands, The Man in the White Suit, The Belles of St. Trinians, Room at the Top, I'm All Right, Jack, Look Back in Anger, The Entertainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, The L-Shaped Room--were peeling back the aristo-colonial-high-literary veneer of British movies to expose the full range of their dysfunctional society.

I suppose it's the price Americans pay for having come from behind, for offering opportunities to a world of immigrants and having developed unprecedented general wealth, not to mention having invented an internationally triumphant popular culture. And it's not as if there's no connection between American materialism and what we stand for politically. The protections of property are not merely coincident with American freedom; as Milton Friedman has pointed out, one makes the other possible. The promise of rewards to ingenuity and freedom of thought, speech, and enterprise go hand in hand, and the more that opportunity is evenly distributed the more social value is created overall. Usually social value takes the form that ordinary people, not cultural mavens, want. What can you do? They want it. It's because all and sundry have been able to come here and prosper under such protections, as they could not in their homelands, that we have our great, big, expanding-but-stable, tacky-comfortable middle class. Why do you never hear of people risking their lives at sea in overcrowded boats to get into Vietnam or Cuba? (Isn't it also fair to wonder why there are so many Europeans in American graduate school programs?) It isn't that there aren't plenty of ludicrous aspects of American culture. What's irritating is the smug assumption that all Americans are blind to them, and that those aspects are indicative of a bigger American bullying soullessness--we're not just a bunch of plastic soldiers, but soldiers in the cause of plastic.

The question of snobbery about American culture is especially relevant here because Greene was not only a popular screenwriter but an interesting movie critic, and a certain amount of high-browism can improve anyone's view of movies. It can discipline readers' minds to have a critic put pop artists on a continuum with literary and visual artists. At the movies, the lights go down and larger-than-life beauties fill the screen and act with an abandon and a remoteness from consequences that's utterly seductive. We're susceptible to this fantasy world in highly erotic, personal ways; almost all sex and violence in movies are inescapably pornographic at some level. That's fine, as far as it goes, but you want a movie critic who instinctively gets the appeal of pop and yet has a resistant mind. In Greene's 1939 novel The Confidential Agent, an agent for the Spanish Republican government takes a British industrialist's daughter to a movie theater to see a musical, which Greene describes in this passage:

They sat for nearly three hours in a kind of palace—gold-winged figures, deep carpets, and an endless supply of refreshments carried round by girls got up to kill: these places had been less luxurious when he was last in London. It was a musical play full of curious sacrifice and suffering: a starving producer and a blonde girl who had made good. She had her name up in neon lights on Piccadilly, but she flung up her part and came back to Broadway to save him. She put up the money—secretly—for a new production and the glamour of her name gave it success. It was a revue all written in no time and the cast was packed with starving talent. Everybody made a lot of money; everybody's name went up in neon lights—the producer's too: the girl's of course, was there from the first. There was a lot of suffering—gelatine tears pouring down the big blonde features—and a lot of happiness. It was curious and pathetic; everybody behaved nobly and made a lot of money. It was as if some code of faith and morality had been lost for centuries, and the world was trying to reconstruct it from the unreliable evidence of folk memories and subconscious desires—and perhaps some hieroglyphics upon stone.

Greene sets down the intelligent critic's double feeling of awe and disdain for mass entertainment as exquisitely as anyone ever has. (I think he was wrong descriptively in writing that Shirley Temple coqueted with "dimpled depravity" to appeal to "middle-aged men and clergymen," in an infamous review over which he lost a libel suit--if any star ever pointed up the American audience's taste for amateurishness, it was Temple--but I still understand his desire to defile what she represents.)

But it's one thing to let your disdain for mass entertainment push you to write better than average screenplays, and another to write popular fiction, as Greene did, and think that you're accomplishing more. When G.L. Arnold reviewed The Quiet American in the January 1956 issue of the British periodical Twentieth Century, he wrote that Fowler

exists only by virtue of his descent from a long line of 'tough' characters in modern American fiction…. Put [him] down in Hollywood, and you have the ideal part for Humphrey Bogart, down to the cynical wisecracks about women and the verbal fencing with the police. The final joke then is on Mr. Greene, for if the Americanization of the English novel has reached the point where even a Yankee-hating character like Fowler can only be presented in terms of the hard-boiled school of American fiction, the literary war has really been won by the Americans, however much this result may be concealed by Greene-Fowler's sarcastic comments on their manners, morals and ideals.

To get one central issue out of the way: Greene is almost always referred to as a Catholic novelist, and given credit for depicting minds struggling with evil--not just countering its activities in the outside world but, more importantly, writhing with it internally. Fowler, though not a Catholic, is the tormented character in The Quiet American, sensitive to the evil Pyle represents while still aware of his own unsavory motives in wanting to kill Pyle to keep Phuong, and also in what's unsavory about keeping her. Some of Fowler's ruminations are succulently morbid. This also means that Fowler is the only developed novelistic character in the story; Pyle and Phuong are both political-allegorical types. (And anyone who wants to give Greene credit for political insight should read the colonialist-tourist generalizations about the passive Phuong again: "To take an Annamite to bed with you is like taking a bird: they twitter and sing on your pillow." The movie alters this as much as it can by making her more proactive sexually.)

You want to keep in mind that Greene converted to Catholicism as an adult, in part to get his first wife to marry him. At times, then, it can seem perverse for an adult convert to make a literary reputation out of being a bad Catholic, but then you can also say that conversion was a way of bringing his fascination with evil into recognized, solid confines. As for the literary results, Orwell wrote of Greene's 1948 novel The Heart of the Matter that Greene "appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class night club, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only, since the others, the non-Catholics, are too ignorant to be held guilty, like the beasts that perish."

Considering its derivation from pop fiction and movies, Greene's writing is better than it needed to be. Though it may be due only to the cosmopolitan glamor of a cultivated disillusionment, good Greene is more piquant than mediocre Hemingway. But The Quiet American is not Greene at his best. Fowler's weirdly passive torment is well done, for what it is, but the story itself is melodrama. It's ironic melodrama in the sense that the courtly, idealistic American is the villain and the opium-smoking, lying-and-cheating man who kills a friend in part so that he may get his girlfriend back is the unlikely hero, saved from political indifference by his vices, but melodrama nonetheless. (It is also, as Greene biographer Michael Shelden shows, a recycling of Greene's early novel Rumour at Nightfall, which he had suppressed, and in part a rehash of his screenplay for The Third Man, but even if it were brand-spanking new the irony would be tinny.)

Noyce's movie is clumsy in a way Greene never would be--for instance, showing Pyle obstructing medical relief for a dying man in order to get a photograph of his agony that he may use as propaganda. (The photographs that appeared in Life that Greene "reproduces" in the text were taken by an independent Vietnamese photographer.) But the movie just points up the basic melodramatic structure. If The Quiet American were not in essence a trashy suspense story then Greene could have focused on Fowler's awareness of Pyle's ingenuously composite personality and dispensed with the murder and detection. Think how much Henry James, Greene's "model of excellence" according to Shelden, got out of the dawning perception of corruption in The Ambassadors simply by having Chad and Madame de Vionnet boat into Lambert Strether's idyllic landscape.

The question is, then, in light of the fact that the book is conventional entertainment, however high-grade, and putting aside the anti-Americanism that's attributable to snobbery, how seriously do we take the political implications of the American as terrorist?

Part II: Politics

In his review of the book in the May 1956 issue of Commentary, Philip Rahv seconded Arnold's perception that the book is essentially detective fiction, and Noyce's movie makes this even clearer, with a closeup of the telltale dogpaw print in cement, etc. Consequently, Rahv didn't think it was worthwhile to get worked up about the political posturing in the book. Diana Trilling responded to Rahv's review in the July 1956 issue by calling the book an example of the kind of neutralism in world affairs that often masked pro-Communism. Rahv answered that it was only a book, and that the opinions of Fowler, the first-person narrator, couldn't be directly attributed to Greene. But if, like Rahv, you think the book is second-rate as a literary matter, then how are you to understand the political payload, which is delivered all the more cleanly?

Greene's actions and statements, on the surface, certainly bore Trilling out. It may seem unfair to judge a book by external events, but in 1948 George Orwell characterized Greene as "a mild Left with faint CP leanings," and went on, "If you look at books like A Gun for Sale, England Made Me, The Confidential Agent and others, you will see that there is the usual left-wing scenery. The bad men are millionaires, armaments manufacturers etc and the good man is sometimes a Communist…. According to Rayner Heppenstall, Greene somewhat reluctantly supported Franco during the Spanish civil war, but The Confidential Agent is written from the other point of view." (Noyce's movie certainly invites us to interpret the story in terms of events outside it, by tacking on a series of news stories under Fowler's byline about America in Vietnam in the '60s, and movie critics have obligingly hailed Greene for his prescience.) Greene spent the rest of his public career bolstering the view that he was a sincere leftist: by taking a tour conducted by East German guards of the freshly-erected Berlin Wall after which he, as Shelden puts it, "criticised the materialistic people who went over the wall simply for the freedom of being able to buy more consumer goods"; by having a well-publicized private chat with Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez in 1983; by concluding a 1987 speech in Moscow with the sentiment, "I even have a dream, Mr. General Secretary, that perhaps one day before I die, I shall know that there is an Ambassador of the Soviet Union giving good advice at the Vatican"; and perhaps most infamously by announcing in his 4 September 1967 letter to The Times (London), "If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States I would certainly choose the Soviet Union." (As a matter of record, he lived in neither the USSR or the US, but preferred Anacapri in Granada, Antibes in Provence, and later Vevey.)

But before getting too worked up, it's necessary to point out that Shelden, writing after Greene's death and with the benefit of a 1993 briefing by the British Cabinet Office about Greene's work for the Secret Intelligence Service ("SIS"), suggests that Greene may well have been a double agent in his capacity as the public radical, using his anti-American works and statements to gain access to Communist countries for intelligence purposes. (His friend Evelyn Waugh wrote in a 5 September 1960 letter, "He is a great one for practical jokes. I think also he is secret agent on our side and all his buttering up of the Russians is 'cover'.") Everyone knows that Greene worked for the SIS during World War II; Shelden presents evidence that he worked for it until the 1980s and that his trips to Vietnam were paid for in part by the SIS. (Remember, however, that his turnaround on the question of Spain occurred by 1939, before he went to work for the SIS.)

It gets more confusing. Shelden's description of Greene's presence in Prague during the revolution of 1948, which Greene dishonestly claimed came about by chance, makes Greene sound less like Fowler and more like Pyle using his health relief mission for a cover: "He could pretend to be a harmless author, not a spy, and could easily be forgiven for wandering the streets in search of local colour or of some curious literary connection which only he could appreciate. And there were publishers who wanted to see him, writers who wanted to discuss their works with him, admiring Catholics who wanted him to sign books. With so many reasonable excuses available, he could go almost anywhere and talk his way out of a tight spot." Greene doesn't come off as much more successful than Pyle, either, and far less idealistic, though he managed not to get himself killed over a girl. The overall assessment of his spying work is that he was "amateurish but useful," a "dilettante," and certainly interested in having his expenses paid after being flown all over the world. As another SIS officer stated: "Despite the money he makes out of making the great British public worry about its soul, he is extremely mercenary."

This raises the possibility that Greene had reason to identify to some degree with both Fowler and Pyle, and yet reception of the book and of Noyce's movie have not reflected that. For instance, the book was very well reviewed in Pravda, and the website dealmemo.com reports of the making of the movie, "The script has clearly struck the right note with the communist authorities in Vietnam, who gave approval [for location filming] on the grounds that 'it condemns the manoeuvres of hostile forces and foreign aggressors against the Vietnamese people'." It seems certain that Greene at the very least enjoyed the mystery and gamesmanship of his life undercover in plain sight.

His usefulness as a spy is another question. How much intelligence could he gather from a chat with a dictator? And could it possibly offset the prestige lent to them and their regimes by his books and public statements? Did he enjoy cloak-and-daggering in the world's hot spots, with occasional access to kahunas, so much that having his name become associated with shameless political pandering was worth it? Oddly, this can't have much effect on our interpretation of The Quiet American: if Greene were working as a double agent as its author that would only confirm his intention to make it pro-Communist if it were to work effectively as bait. In any case, the question of his intelligence activities speaks only to his personal motives; the political meaning of the book is something apart.

In the melodrama of The Quiet American Pyle is the villain because he's complicit in the death of civilian non-combatants, including a child, as a result of a terrorist bombing by the Third Force that he supports. Fowler sneers at the concept of finding a nationalist Third Force, though Jeff McMurdo in the online Front Page Magazine has shown that there was an indigenous ideological basis for it much earlier in the century. One of the things that makes the Americans especially bad in this instance in the book is that they warned other Americans to stay out of the area of the bombing. Greene's sympathetic, painstaking biographer Norman Sherry has shown that General Thé could easily have perpetrated the bombing without American help, and further that the charge that Americans were forewarned is untrue. (The latter is on a par with the claim that Jews knew not to show up for work in the World Trade Center buildings on September 11.) In the context of his handling of this evidence, it's interesting to know that when Greene covered a British campaign against Communist rebels in Malaya in 1950, according to Shelden, he made "no attempt to question the savage tactics of the British troops." Greene's article in Life includes a photo of a dead rebel being carried over a pole like game.

But is this political choice to rest on the swapping of atrocity photos? On this basis you couldn't back the American alliance with the Soviet Union during the Second World War, not after the purges, the assassination of Trotsky, the murder in Washington, D.C. of Walter Krivitsky, the abduction from Manhattan of Juliet Stuart Poyntz, the massacre in the Katyn Forest.

And if we're going to look at The Quiet American with our vision improved by hindsight, how on earth would a terrorist bombing send us into the arms of the Vietnamese Communists? The year the book was published Ho Chi Minh instituted radical land reforms in the north, hauling land owners before "people's tribunals" and executing or sending thousands to forced labor camps. In Casualties of War, an exposé of the kidnap-rape-murder of a Vietnamese girl by American soldiers and so hardly a patriotic whitewash, New Yorker journalist Daniel Lang wrote that the Vietnamese "constantly reported rapes and kidnappings by the Vietcong; in fact, the Vietcong committed these crimes so indiscriminately that the victims were sometimes their own sympathizers." And let's not forget the reeducation camps. At this point you shouldn't have to say it, but whatever you can tot up against the American involvement in Vietnam, and there's plenty, we were not on the wrong side of the conflict.

Supposedly in America we don't believe that the end justifies the means. But ends and means can be evaluated separately. The critique of how America conducts foreign policy is not the objectionable form of anti-Americanism here, as Diana Trilling wrote in 1956: "Europeans, no less than Americans, have the entire right, even the duty, honestly and openly to challenge our country on the many manifest errors in its activities abroad.…" But she properly won't give in to the "reluctance, not only sharply to distinguish between fair and unfair attack upon America, but also to confront and combat whatever bad political intention may inform the attack." It isn't Greene's intention in writing The Quiet American that is subject to attack--whether that intention was duplicitous, frivolous, or deluded--but the conclusion it seems inevitable to draw from the work itself.

So the melodrama in The Quiet American answers only half the question. If you think it means you can't support the US involvement that's one half. But I don't see how this can push you toward the Communists, who everywhere oppress their own citizens with barbarous police state enforcement. If you put the melodrama Greene concocted around the murky bombing aside, you have the fundamental political choice of the 20th century. The Americans are at worst naive, misguided. Anyone who supports the Communists as the lesser evil in Vietnam, or elsewhere, should be made to acknowledge that they're signing off on the other half of the question as well.

In his 1987 memoirs Out of Step, Sidney Hook, the greatest American polemicist of the anti-Communist left, nailed the pro-Communist rhetorical maneuver of assessing the Soviet Union in terms of its ideals and the United States in terms of its reality. But the half-argument that has been taken to be the message of The Quiet American goes farther. It reminds me of the statements of Theodore Hall, the youngest of the physicists who gave nuclear weapon secrets to the Soviets. Hall justified himself in this way: "Maybe the course of history, if unchanged, could have led to atomic war in the past 50 years--for example the bomb might have been dropped on China in 1949 or the early 1950s. Well, if I helped to prevent that, I accept the charge." By all rights, he should at the same time have to accept responsibility for the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and China's domination of East Asia, not to mention the havoc they wrought on their own populations, which Communist nuclear capability made possible. (See Ronald Radosh's 20 October 1997 Wall Street Journal review of Bombshell, the book in which Hall's comments appear, for a principled reaction.) People who are opposed to the American involvement in Vietnam should figure out what that means they're for. If not the Communists, then what? Though the characters in the book The Quiet American are meant to be types, there's no satisfactory political discussion. In their dialogue in the watch tower Fowler is given all the snappy comebacks, which Pyle can't answer, though they are answerable. Maybe it doesn't matter if, like Greene, you see the Vietnamese as eternal peasants who every now and then produce an irresistible erotic pet.

To be fair to the movie's fans, they have praised it mostly for Michael Caine's performance. He is a great actor, but the material isn't very well shaped for him to get at what's interesting about the character. Fowler is the first-person narrator of the book and so most of his best material is internal monologue. That's a downside to the book's resemblance to detective fiction that doesn't serve the movie very well. The movie can turn only so much of it into voice-over or dialogue; the rest we have to guess at. You can admire the way Caine can change complexion with self-loathing and be amazed how, by the end of the movie, his eyeballs look as if they've been hardboiled in a cauldron and then reinserted in the sockets. But the movie feels more like an illustration of the complexly simplistic book than a dramatization. The question is an illustration of what? dramatization of what? Greene was such a murky character and covered his tracks so well we may never know what he intended but we can hear plainly enough what he said. I can't let it go without objecting.

Chronicle columnist Faran Krentcil examines a growing trend at Duke University: the Low Maintenance Woman.

"Seriously," sighs the girl, pulling on her Pumas. "The BC walkway is not a runway, and my art history class is hardly Vogue headquarters. But every time I walk into East Duke, these girls stare like I'm another species.... Sometimes I let those stupid girls with their stupid handbags get to me, and it actually sucks."

I considered myself a moderate in the Maintenance department when I was at Duke, but everything's relative, and there's no denying that Duke females tend toward fashion-plateness. Some people blame the school's southern location; I think it's more because the student body is full of people who went to fancy prep schools but didn't get into Harvard and thus are both wealthy and dreadfully insecure.

The worst part of the year was the spring, when one had to haul out the skimpy sundresses and clunky sandals or risk social humiliation.

It's been refreshing to find myself at Yale, where a wholesome crunchiness prevails among the undergrad females and we law school women just dress like... ourselves. I'm glad more Duke women are feeling free to do that.

Virginia Hefferman examines "the love affair between TV viewers and the editing staff of The Bachelorette." She thinks the editors were trying all along to trick us:

Some will say that Trista did sleep with the stuffed Shamu that Ryan had given her, fit awkwardly into Charlie's arms, and seemed to be having sex, often, with Ryan. But the clearest case to be made for why Trista would choose Ryan was that the show had gone so far out of its way to make it seem as if she wouldn't.

I agree; you could tell the show was heavily edited. But you have to wonder how they massaged things like the visits with Trista's family. Charlie's seemed to go so much better:

Both Trista's mother and her stepmother expressed, right off, a giddily erotic preference for Charlie. Trista's father, too, liked Charlie's bluff nature and sentimental fondness for the stock market. Ryan's florid soulfulness, by contrast, freaked everybody out.... Then, the father was achingly evasive when Ryan asked him for permission to marry his daughter.... On Wednesday night, Ryan spoke softly about how nervous he was. He seemed hopeless, desperate. Charlie, bronzed and wetly coiffed, showboated: "Trista has her mind made up on who she's going to choose, and I truly in my heart believe that it is myself."

Kate's favorite line! Meanwhile, Salon wonders if there's any oxygen reaching Ryan's brain.

Okay, there will be no more posting from me about The Bachelorette.

Slate's Marc Fisher says liberals already have an answer to Rush Limbaugh & Co. It's Howard Stern and the other shock jocks:

No, Stern and Don Geronimo and Tom Leykis have no interest whatsoever in having Dick Gephardt on the show, at least not unless he's going to remove his pants. And no, they would say, there's no politics on their shows.... But... their daily diet of searingly intimate conversation with callers hits many of those hot-button issues, and they do it almost unfailingly from a left-libertarian perspective—they are classic social liberals.

Fisher is responding to those wealthy Chicagoans and their $10 million donation to start up a liberal radio operation.

Oh well, he says, "It's always fun to watch millionaires flush their riches away."

The Atlantic reports on "Sex Week at Yale." I hadn't even heard of this.

Here's ex-Senator and current presidential candidate Carol Mosley-Braun this week, in response to a question on C-SPAN:

I don't remember what I majored in in college ... I hate to guess, I'm gonna guess it was political science, but I'm not sure, it might have been history. I'll check, I hadn't thought of that one.

Maybe college was just too recent for me, but I can't imagine forgetting what my major was.

Quote of the Day:
"They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea."
~ Francis Bacon

Song of the Day:
Mono, "Life in Mono"

Happy Birthday:
W.H. Auden
Erma Bombeck
John Henry Newman

It seems the recent military recruiting controversy at YLS is not the first time the on-campus interview program has come under fire.

In 1997, in First Things, Richard John Neuhaus criticized YLS's decision to exclude the Christian Legal Society from on-campus recruiting because CLS wanted to hire only Christian lawyers.

Here, Dean Kronman responds, with a rejoinder from Neuhaus. I think Kronman has the better of the argument, and he frames the issue quite nicely:

The difficulty in this case arises because the Law School’s on-campus interviewing process straddles the line between its internal life (which the School is free to arrange as it chooses) and the life of other organizations -- of the employers participating in the process -- whose governing norms the School has no power, or desire, to challenge.

The difference between that situation and the current one, of course, is that CLS couldn't use massive amounts of federal funding as a bargaining chip -- which is what the U.S. military is doing.

Neuhaus is coming to speak at YLS next week on what role -- if any -- religion should play in shaping law.

This article is the last straw. I officially want a cat.

I shared Kate's queasiness about The Bachelorette at first, but I ended up teary last night when Trista told Ryan that when she looks at him "I see smiles and laughter, I see babies and grandbabies, I see comfort and safety. I see me in a white dress and I see it with you." (Oh, my -- I'm misting up again just reading that.) She definitely made the right choice. (You go, girl!)

In fact, last night was very good all around.

Movie Quote of the Day:
"I'm not gay!"
"What was Streisand's eighth album?"
"Uh, 'Color Me Barbra.'"
"Stud!"
"Everyone knows that!"
"Everyone where? The Little Gay-bar on the Prairie?"
~ In and Out

Song of the Day:
Nirvana, "Heart-Shaped Box"

Happy Birthday:
Ansel Adams
Robert Altman
Charles Barkley
Kurt Cobain
Patty Hearst
Roger Penske
Sidney Poitier
Gloria Vanderbilt

The Bachelorette

Loved it. Well, I felt sick up until the very end. It was like watching a car wreck, in slow motion. It seemed, the whole way, that Trista would pick Charlie. I have, of course, been cheering for Ryan for several weeks now. It was just horrible, since it seemed like Ryan was walking right into certain heart break and it was so clear that he had fallen completely for Trista. I felt the worst when Charlie walked in on his way to his final meeting with Trista and he said that he was looking forward to falling in love with Trista and raising a family. Ryan was already in love. I did have a flash of hope, though, when Trista told Chris, the host, that she was looking forward to it all ending because she would have a chance finally to tell her chosen man everything she'd been unable to tell him for the few weeks. This was promising because Trista had been so reticent with Ryan and so forthcoming with Charlie.

Anyway. Yay.

We are adding Green Gourd to our blogroll. He's got some thoughtful sports posts, and as we know, without sports, there'd be no "next year." Seriously. As I've posted before, one of the reasons I love sports is the eternal hope (except when your team gets contracted, I suppose).

Our friends over at Jens n Frens posted something that even my own low brow self would not post.

Speaking of Jens and low brow, we got a google hit for "Jens Breasts." Nice. We have Steve and Dean Jens to thank for half of that.

Urban snow removal. Deathly boring. (Sorry, inside joke)

Blogger's been down all day for me.

This article by Stanley K. Ridgley in National Review slams my alma mater for its University Writing Course, which Duke requires all freshmen to take.

Like every Duke grad of the past decade or so, I can testify to UWC's utter worthlessness. My own instructor -- a hapless first-year English grad student named Joe, if I recall correctly -- wasn't as bad as the radical Marxist types this piece depicts, but the class was a complete waste of time.

Ridgley blames the infamous Stanley Fish, then head of English at Duke, for "destroying the English Department with his dubious and expensive radical faculty hires and recruitment of substandard graduate students steeped in bizarre postmodernist theory."

By my freshman year, Fish had been forced out of English and was head of Duke Press. I worked for the editor of one of Duke's scientific journals, a very conservative and curmudgeonly man who loathed Fish and hated the fact that Fish was now technically his boss. The one time they were introduced, my boss called him "evil" and refused to shake his hand. Ah, the politics of academia.

Quote of the Day:
"In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it's modern architecture."
~ Nancy Banks-Smith

Song of the Day:
Atlantic Star, "Masterpiece"

Happy Birthday:
Nicholas Copernicus
Carson McCullers
Smokey Robinson
Amy Tan

The Washington Post has a stunningly sensible editorial on the Estrada nomination:

The arguments against Mr. Estrada's confirmation range from the unpersuasive to the offensive. He lacks judicial experience, his critics say -- though only three current members of the court had been judges before their nominations. He is too young -- though he is about the same age as Judge Harry T. Edwards was when he was appointed and several years older than Kenneth W. Starr was when he was nominated. Mr. Estrada stonewalled the Judiciary Committee by refusing to answer questions -- though his answers were similar in nature to those of previous nominees, including many nominated by Democratic presidents. The administration refused to turn over his Justice Department memos -- though no reasonable Congress ought to be seeking such material, as a letter from all living former solicitors general attests. He is not a real Hispanic and, by the way, he was nominated only because he is Hispanic -- two arguments as repugnant as they are incoherent. Underlying it all is the fact that Democrats don't want to put a conservative on the court.

Exactly. The editorial is titled "Just Vote."

The Michigan Review held an "Affirmative Action Bake Sale" earlier this week to protest the University of Michigan's admissions policy. The Review charged $1 per bagel for students of European, Asian, and Middle Eastern descent but only 80 cents for African-American, Hispanic and Native American students.

There was also a counter-protest. Sounds like things are getting rather ugly up there.

From The Onion: "Pizza Hut Introduces New Meat Sympathizer's Pizza."

A picture of the Axis of Weasels (via Volokh).

Volokh also points us to the pi search page, which allows you to search for your name (or any word) in the digits of pi. Malcolm isn't there, but Lily is.

There's an interesting review of The Emporer of Scent by Chander Burr in the WP. The book is about the history of perfume and the mystery of how our sense of smell operates:

The dominant theory of how we smell is based on molecular shape. Molecules come floating into our nostrils, and receptors identify them based on their physical nature and our brain says, "Aha! Cinnamon." The problem, Burr writes, is that if shape is the explanation for smell, then smell does the impossible. To explain, he points to other processes.... The [digestive system] can recognize shapes instantly, but only a limited number of them. [The immune system] can recognize a limitless range of molecular shapes, but only after a period of time. Yet we can instantly smell something that we've never encountered before, something that our ancestors never knew, something for which evolution never prepared us. Smell is both instantaneous and limitless.

Check out the book here.

Dallas Cowboys, New York Yankees, Tiger Woods

Greengourd has an excellent post about the costs and benefits of rooting for underdogs as opposed to favorites (or dynasties). Some thoughts on this forthcoming, but I've got to switch computers...

Green's got some great points, but I'd like to add one. I think that dynasties (as opposed to favorites) do present the potential for much more excitement if they pull off the win. Consider, for instance, Tiger's bid for the Grand Slam (that he did not get) or his bid for the Tiger Slam (that he did get). There are two reasons for this: (1) Dynasty does not always mean favorite. One can cheer for a dynasty even though that person or team is not favored to win. (2) There is an added element of excitement to a dynastic win. That excitement is similar to the excitement over record-breaking. We're not simply cheering for the "favorite," if indeed the dynastic team/player is the favorite, but for the possibility of seeing something extra, something superhuman. If Tiger is the favorite in the tournament, his win may not result in as much excitement as an underdog win. However, If Tiger is the favorite and he laps the field twice (like he did in the Masters in 1997), that is more than simply the favorite doing what he was favored to do. That is something special, something extra, something superhuman. And that is why I cheer for Tiger.

In the Chicago Tribune (reg. req'd), Leonard Pitts calls for some perspective:

I haven't hit the hardware store yet, but I imagine the scene -- especially in Washington and New York -- is not unlike that in Florida whenever a hurricane takes aim at the peninsula. Plywood sheets take on almost totemic importance and you'd knock down your own grandmother for the last package of D batteries.

It brings to mind memories of childhood in the nuclear age, when the Commies had The Bomb and we were terrified they would use it. If I recall correctly, it was on the last Friday of every month that we students in the Los Angeles Unified School District heard the air raid siren signaling the "drop drill." At the sound, you were supposed to fall to your knees under your desk, head down, hands clasped behind your neck.

This was supposed to protect you in the event of nuclear attack. Of course, the only benefit to be gained from crouching on your knees during a nuclear strike is that it leaves you in a better position to kiss your fanny goodbye.

. . .

History is a wheel that is constantly turning, always revolving through cycles of setback and advance, poverty and prosperity, war and peace. Nothing is forever. Ask the Romans.

We find ourselves delivered into jittery days, an anxious era where things we once took for granted are suddenly up for grabs. . . .

. . .

But we've been here before. Take it from a veteran of many drop drills. We've made our lives here before. Come safely through here before.

How true.

Now don't get me wrong, I think that this elevated awareness is an important thing. Panic, not necessary. Awareness, necessary. As my mother frequently argues, Americans have lived under the blanket of homeland peace for so long that we have become complacent. Those who continue to believe that these alerts are unnecessary--conjured up political scare tactics--live under a delusion. Most every other country in the world understands how unsafe the world truly is. By virtue of our relative geographical isolation, we have been spared that harsh reality. This doesn't mean we can't go on with our lives--I certainly am and I believe we should. Like Pitts, I try to look at the bigger picture. Not only is Pitts right that we have been here before, but America is still, in relative terms, quite safe. We don't need to have weekly air raid preparations like they do in many other countries. But, again, Pitts's call for perspective should not be a green light to keep our heads buried in the sand. The world is not a safe place. This is true. It is a truth that much of the world lives with every hour of every day. The lesson is neither duct tape and plastic sheeting, nor government war-mongering, but simply that Americans must understand this truth. We must internalize it.

Update: Dean Jens says, "If we let our awareness of reality become enervating, we're in real trouble, but if we allow it to open options for us because the ones we were previously willing to accept are off the table, it will help us mitigate the risks that we will never be able to eliminate."

Movie Recommendation

If you've never seen a '30s musical choreographed by the legendary Busby Berkeley, you can catch two of them tonight on TCM: Gold Diggers of 1933 and Gold Diggers of 1935. They're both about putting on a show, which is to say they're about nothing except getting from one insane dance number to another. Berkeley wasn't the kind of choreographer interested in the expressiveness of dancers alone or in pairs. He's at the opposite end of the spectrum from Fred Astaire and Hermes Pan, the choreographer with whom Astaire mapped out the Fred-and-Ginger routines, bringing the lady in only when the two men were done. During World War I, Berkeley served as a field artillery lieutenant and this was more important to his style of choreography than his theatrical heritage. His signature style is to arrange and move dancers in huge groups, militarily, architectonically. He would have them form shapes, a giant violin and bow, for instance, or, more peculiarly, two rollers pressing out a sheet of metal. (He's the dance director of the age of mechanical reproduction.) Or he would famously put the camera directly overhead and have the dancers perform kaleidoscopic movements. Sometimes the regimented tappers will come at the camera as if the point of a musical number were to stomp on the audience's skulls. These movies are backstage musicals, so his production numbers ostensibly take place on a stage--generally people don't just burst into song. But his numbers are often too big to take place on any stage. It isn't just that there are too many dancers and the sets are too extensive, or that it's hard to imagine how a theater audience could see the overhead shots, but he'll cut away to scenes taking place outside the theater. The jaw-dropping, sinister "Lullaby of Broadway" number from 1935, in which Manhattan Baby is danced to death by the chorus, is, to my mind, the furthest reach of Berkeley's kitschy, parade ground genius.

These movies are usually cited as examples of the Depression audience's desire for escapist entertainment, but that's right only up to a point. In Berkeley's '30s movies the dancers are always desperate for work, often literally hungry, and in Gold Diggers of 1933 there's even a tribute to the "forgotten man," the doughboy who fought for his country but by 1933 couldn't find work. (It's in the vein of the great pop lament "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," but as "dazzling" as it is sobering.) In addition, the rivalries among the chorus girls and pressures on the production team are in the same realistic vein as the musical theater scenes in Dreiser's Sister Carrie, even if the realization of them is cornier. These two Gold Diggers movies straddle the strict enforcement dating from 1 July 1934 of the self-imposed 1930 Production Code that shut down sexual frankness and innuendo in Hollywood movies. The first movie is racier, living up to the Gold Diggers title, and the second one is more screwball, featuring an eccentric foreign choreographer intersecting in a resort hotel with a domineering rich widow and her frisky children. (The second one also shows you what Titanic's Gloria Stuart looked like when she was Kate Winslet's age.) Taken together the movies are a weird mixture of daringness and coyness, and the musical numbers have to be seen to be believed. If your parents were in college in the '60s they probably took drugs and went to midnight showings of Busby Berkeley movies. But you can start watching these movies straight and end up feeling stoned.

Quote of the Day:
"The people of Crete unfortunately make more history than they can consume locally."
~ Saki

Song of the Day:
Aerosmith, "Pink"

Happy Birthday:
Helen Gurley Brown
Matt Dillon
Milos Forman
Toni Morrison
Yoko Ono
Charles Schwab
Andres Segovia
Cybill Shepherd
John Travolta
Vanna White

I've been cited in a federal appellate opinion! Well, a law review article I wrote was quoted in a federal appellate opinion. Exciting. But disconcerting. But exciting. Ah!

Movie Recommendation

If you're snowed in with your tv and looking for a movie, the commercial-free pick tonight would be Blake Edwards's original Pink Panther from 1964, showing on TCM. It's the first movie starring Peter Sellers as the bumbling Inspector Clouseau, and by far the best--the only one made with a reasonably sophisticated adult audience in mind. It's not the most Clouseau for your money, but that's because the movie has a large cast of thieves, including Capucine as Clouseau's adulterous wife, and an appetizing victim in Claudia Cardinale. Capucine is probably now the least well known of the '60s clothes-horse stars (Audrey Hepburn, Catherine Deneuve, et al.). God, could she wear clothes, and as a bonus she's that rare beauty who isn't afraid of physical comedy. Plus, her cuckolding of Clouseau adds another, spikier dimension to his obliviousness. Cardinale never could act but sipping champagne on a tiger skin rug she gives you an idea of just about everything that youth and beauty with nothing else to recommend them can do for pop entertainment. There's also David Niven, one of the only movie stars capable of wearing a velvet smoking jacket and ascot without looking a total fool, in his semi-self-parodying phase, and the young Robert Wagner, whose looks, like Alain Delon's, were saved by a straightforward virility from too-prettiness. This means, of course, that the movie has an international cast, which usually indicates that the actors have been chosen for cross-marketability rather than how well they work for the script, but in this case Edwards reduces the jewel heist plot to buffoonery, so it doesn't really matter. The movie works by falling apart, which is why Sellers as Clouseau is able to dominate. (In addition to the fact that he has the only real talent among the actors.) It takes the suspense of a heist movie and turns it into comic tumult, which is so relaxing because you don't engage emotionally in the story. It elicits a different kind of amorality from the glamorous jewel thief pictures of the '30s in which you want the thief-hero to get away with the goods, or the semi-realistic heist pictures of the '50s in which you wince as fate lays its heavy hand on the thieves one by one; watching The Pink Panther you don't care how it turns out as long as the frivolous pleasure keeps coming. Cardinale's champagne goes straight to your head.

Today's WSJ offering from Peggy Noonan mentions an appropriate headline for the past week: "Michael Jackson Admits Plastic Surgery; France Unconvinced."

The storm appears to be at its peak outside. All my classes have been cancelled. I have freshly laundered flannel sheets. Time for a nap.

A review of Richard Dawkins's new book calls Dawkins an "Evangelical athiest."

Got up at 7:45 today to see if classes were cancelled. There was no notice on the YLS website. So I trudged to school in the snow, noticing that there were very few people out and about.

I got to class. Classroom dark and empty. No sign on the door.

Came downstairs to check e-mail. Message from professor, sent ten minutes before class was supposed to start, cancelling class and apologizing because he didn't know till this morning that "individual professors are the only ones who can cancel classes."

I don't know whose fault this is, but I am not amused.

Now I have to venture outdoors again, and risk becoming lost or disoriented.

I am in class, which strikes me as very very wrong in light of this from the National Weather Service:

SNOW WILL BECOME HEAVIER AS THE DAY PROGRESSES. OCCASIONAL BLIZZARD CONDITIONS ARE EXPECTED AS WINDS WILL GUST BETWEEN 35 AND 40 MPH AT TIMES. THIS WILL PRODUCE WHITEOUT CONDITIONS WHICH WILL MAKE DRIVING EXTREMELY DANGEROUS IF NOT IMPOSSIBLE. TOTAL SNOWFALL AMOUNTS BY THE TIME THIS STORM HEADS OUT TO SEA LATE TONIGHT SHOULD RANGE FOR THE MOST PART BETWEEN 1 1/2 AND 2 FEET.

THOSE VENTURING OUTDOORS MAY BECOME LOST OR DISORIENTED SO PERSONS IN THE WARNING AREA ARE ADVISED TO STAY INDOORS.

At least the rest of my classes have been cancelled.

The Washington Post website has been almost entirely taken over by snowstorm-related coverage. It appears that I might be missing the biggest snowstorm in my hometown since 1922.

This article calls it "in a day of unending snow globe enchantment... [an] Ansel Adams-like tableaux of black and white, eerily silent, with groves of trees bowed earthward under a thick topping of meringue."

My parents are, I'm sure, happily snowed in on the farm. It'll be a while till the neighboring farmer comes to plow them out. Snowstorms are so much fun there; one of my best childhood memories of snow is of my grandfather having to rescue me from amidst a huge snow drift outside the farmhouse when I was about 10. He laughed and laughed.

We are waiting anxiously for things to get under way here in New Haven. So far we have seen nary a flake.

UPDATE, 1:00 AM: Kate reports that it has started snowing.

An article on duct tape in the NYT reveals that there is a grade of tape called "nuclear" for use in power plants.

Speaking of duct tape, it has happier uses.

Quote of the Day:
"The best there ever was. The best there ever will be."
~ Inscription on Michael Jordan statute outside the United Center

Song of the Day:
Sarah McLachlan & Jewel, "Song for a Winter's Night"

Happy Birthday:
Red Barber
Hal Holbrook
Michael Jordan
Florence King
Huey Newton

On the much lighter side, Tiger Woods, who has returned to competitive play for the first time since his knee surgery in December 2002, is pouring it on in the last round of the Buick Invite. He is dominance personified. And, unlike people who hate to root for sports dynasties, I am cheering for Tiger to add yet another victory to his belt. Why can't we embrace the privilege of watching and experiencing greatness? Why must we always tear down? Why do we love to hate the best? In related news, Duke won last night.

Talked to my mother this morning; she reported that snow is falling thick and fast in Virginia (read the WP story here). The Kitchen Cabinet is hoping that southern Connecticut will be similarly scathed come tomorrow. No school! No school!

Nothing falling from the sky yet, though. I'm going out for a walk while I still can.

That Washingtonian piece skewering Maureen Dowd is finally online.

A professor at the U.S. Naval Academy has a piece in the Washington Post about his experience on the Academy's admissions board.

The Academy uses race as a criteria in its admissions decisions, and this leads to predictable controversy about "how black" or "how Hispanic" a candidate must be to qualify for preferential treatment. This professor felt like the people around him were talking in code: "When we say 'Hispanic,' do we really mean 'brown-colored and poorly educated'?"

Being in publishing myself, this move by leading scientific journals is quite interesting.

Punditwatch is up, with Tim Russert asking Condi Rice the question of the day: "What up with the French?"

A reader complains about my including Eva Braun on the Happy Birthday list several days ago. He asks, "Do you do the same for Stalin's mistress and others similarly situated?"

I'm sure most of our readers understand that The Kitchen Cabinet does not endorse the actions, viewpoints, or associations of everyone on the Happy Birthday list on any given day. "Happy Birthday" is just our way of telling you whose birthday it is. You really need not read any more into it than that.

Quote of the Day:
"This book fills a much-needed gap."
~ Moses Hadas

Song of the Day:
Billy Joel, "And So It Goes"

Happy Birthday:
Sonny Bono
LeVar Burton
George Kennan
John McEnroe

A friend of ours has this charming way of expressing when she's had it up to here with something. She says she's "done" with it. "I'm so done with people who bash SUV-drivers!" she said the other day. "So DONE!" I like the way this phrase expresses exasperation and dismissal all at once. It says, "You have exhausted my patience with your foolishness; I'm just not taking you seriously any more."

I have lately been feeling so done with Yale Law School. I'm finding myself on the "wrong side" of the two biggest issues of the day -- war with Iraq and the threatened strike at Yale -- and holding my tongue in the face of all the banality and empty posturing is exhausting.

Here we have Professor Balkin accusing George W. Bush of "stubbornness, tunnel vision, narrowmindedness, over-aggressiveness, belligerence, and hubris." Oh, and he also stands for "greater and greater tax cuts for the rich." It's standard liberal-academic stuff: Bush isn't articulate and pensive like me; ergo he's narrow-minded and aggressive. He's a Republican, so the goal of his presidency is to screw the poor. Etc., etc.

It seems that the biggest reason for Balkin's opposition to the war is that he just doesn't like or trust Bush -- at least, he doesn't spend much time explaining why the Europeans are right and Bush is wrong. Okay, so maybe Bush is moron and the French are very sophisticated. That doesn't tell me a thing about whether it's in America's national interest to remove Saddam Hussein. Or is it belligerent and hubristic to use terms like "national interest?"

You'll probably hear a lot more about the strike at Yale on The Kitchen Cabinet in the next few weeks. If you care, you can get background from the Yale Daily News. Suffice it to say that the clerical and custodial unions are threatening a strike in March, and if this happens we will have to cross picket lines to enter the law school building. Several professors will attempt to show solidarity with the strikers by holding classes off-campus. Many of my classmates are vowing not to enter the building at any time during the strike.

The assumption around school tends to be that everybody wants to support the unions. I don't know much about the underlying reasons for the strike (nor, I hasten to add, does anyone else -- the pro-union position is merely reflexive in most cases), but what if I just want to go to class like a normal person? I am, after all, paying a rather large amount of money for the privilege. Furthermore, how does my presence or absence in the law school building help or hurt the union cause? As long as I'm not pitching in to help run the dining hall or bag up trash, isn't walking into the building a pretty neutral act?

But apparently there's no such thing as neutrality. One must take a position, however ill-informed and meaningless.

A few more months till I'm out of here for real, but I'm already feeling so done.

Separated at Birth

More for the separated at birth files:

(1) Duke freshman Shavlik Randolph and A Few Good Men's James Marshall?

(2) Ben Affleck and Ed Burns?

Been coming down with something, so my posting is slow.

A great blogger Valentine.

Quote of the Day:
"State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the State, am the people.'"
~ Nietzsche

Song of the Day:
Nat King Cole, "L.O.V.E."

Happy Birthday:
Galileo
Susan B. Anthony
Andrew Barber
John Barrymore
Matt Groening
Cyrus McCormick
Jane Seymour
Charles Tiffany

Movie Review

In Roman Polanski's The Pianist, the story of how the Polish-Jewish classical pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman survived the Nazi occupation of his country, we see any number of scenes familiar from other Holocaust movies: the swift, random executions of civilians; the confused deportees who believe that the Nazis wouldn't exterminate a slave labor force; a recitation of Shylock's "If they prick us do we not bleed?" speech. What's different is that Szpilman and his family are more sophisticated than the average protagonists of this kind of movie. Anti-Nazi movies of the '40s, such as The Mortal Storm and Hitler's Children, featured educated victims, but they were presented in a very high-minded way, as allegorical representations of the free-thinking love of liberty. Szpilman and his family have a lived-in family culture of sophistication; early on, before they've been driven from their large, bourgeois apartment into a room in the ghetto, they can even see the black humor of the situation. The sense of humor disappears but we can see that it's because the increasingly restrictive and barbaric racial laws are impinging on extremely refined nerves. When Wladyslaw steps out with a cellist he's attracted to, he can't take her anywhere, to a restaurant, to the park, they can't even sit on a bench, so they just stand, and he carries on both sides of the conversation in a helpless mockery of the dilemma. Adrien Brody as Wladyslaw has a masculine confidence that is more delicate than you've ever seen in a movie. He's at his finest in this flirtation because you see a full-bodied character responding to the process of dehumanization.

Of course, herded around half-starved and then locked in the ghetto, Wladyslaw and his family can't maintain the cultivation that makes them distinctive. And this means that the movie goes into more familiar territory--penury, uncertainty, and terror in the ghetto, and then the transports to promised "resettlement," which is just a panic-calming euphemism for a trip to the Treblinka extermination camp. There's fresh material here in the emphasis on what it means to try to make money in a dead zone economy: Wladyslaw and his brother trying to sell their library off to other Jews with no better source of income than they have. An exchange of money in this setting is like stirring stagnant water. And then something truly unusual happens when a member of the Jewish police force does Wladyslaw a favor by grabbing him out of the transport line, separating him from his family just before they get into the cattle car, and enabling him to scurry back into Warsaw to find such safety as he can.

He ends up in a work detail, relatively well fed and trusted enough that he's able to help smuggle weapons in preparation for the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. But before the uprising he makes a decision to go into hiding, and this is where the movie becomes less familiar but also more frustrating. Polish patriots whom Wladyslaw knew from his days as a classical pianist on Polish radio stash him in various flats where they bring him food when they can. It's an extraordinary situation--it takes six or seven people to keep one half-dead Jew alive. What's frustrating is that the movie sequesters itself with Wladyslaw in his timeless, utterly passive hiding places. We don't have a clear idea of why these people help him, or how much activity it takes to supply him with the meager food they are able to. Wladyslaw happens to be in flats that look out on the Ghetto uprising and later on partisan attacks on the German police headquarters and army hospital but the movie has retreated into a peculiarly objective stance by this point. Wladyslaw's situation is extraordinary but what's happening on screen doesn't really feel so extraordinary. There's almost no emphasis, no point of view. Critics have singled out Wladyslaw's silently playing the piano, moving his fingers with concert hall precision a few inches above the keyboard, in the first flat in which he hides, as a great moment, but isn't that just a version of Helene Weigel's silent scream as Mother Courage? Even if it's a great moment, it's only a moment. (The only scene that gripped me imaginatively was when Wladyslaw pulled a little boy out of a basement window--an unsettling birth into death.) Overwhelmingly, the movie just follows Wladyslaw's random survival, as if Polanski had become infected by the condition of his character who, without identity papers that would enable him to go out and forage on his own behalf, and except in emergencies, has to sit and wait and see if he'll survive. Toward the middle the movie feels as if it's shutting down with Wladyslaw's underfed brain.

This problem may arise from the fact that the movie is based on the historical Szpilman's memoirs (written in 1946 but suppressed by the Communist government and unpublished until 1998). Maybe Polanski and the screenwriter Ronald Harwood felt some duty to present one thing after another as it happened. If so, it's a problem shared with Steven Spielberg's Catch Me If You Can, about the real-life teenaged conman Frank Abagnale, Jr. who pretended to be an airline pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer as a short-cut to the good life. Both these movies feel as if their stories actually happened in the way we see, but by the same stroke lack shape as movie experiences. In Catch Me If You Can you recognize how Frank, Jr. picked up his spiel from his father, a World War II veteran who experienced the jump in class of that generation of working boys. A lot of men of that era felt that you could be whatever you could convince other people you were--"salesman" was the great universal type even if you were a lawyer or a doctor. It ties in to Melville's insight into the American outlook in The Confidence Man, in which he connects our religious views to our free marketeering. But this remains no more than a potential theme in the movie, which just lays out one con job after another, and then resolves things by bringing in a surrogate father to get Frank, Jr. on a more productive track.

Okay, Steven Spielberg isn't Melville, and he's not Roman Polanski, either. It's unthinkable that Spielberg would have focused on a cosmopolitan figure like Szpilman in a Holocaust movie. And you may be grateful that Polanski doesn't take the historical data and give it suspense movie rhythms as Spielberg did in Schindler's List. But I became highly aware of what Polanski's own form of passivity was missing out on toward the end when Wladyslaw has entered a destroyed house and found an institutional-sized can of pickles. He has the can but no opener, and though what ensues should be a transcendently comic scene of bottom-scraping survival--a Nazi officer discovers Wladyslaw just as gets the can open by using fireplace utensils--it's listlessly shot. The officer feeds him, has him play the piano, informs him of the Russians' imminent arrival, and gives him his topcoat. The topcoat almost gets Wladyslaw shot once the Polish army arrives, and that irony, too, just passes by in the unrushed, cold blue stream of the movie. The movie is far more attentive to its chilly, drained-of-blood look than to the context and weight of Wladyslaw's experience. (Does the sun never shine in Poland?) And though Wladyslaw survives, Adrien Brody's performance can't. One man hollows out from starvation much like another.

At the end of the movie, we get a title telling us what that Wladyslaw lived in Warsaw until his death in 2000 at the age of 88, and then it tells us what happened to that German officer. This confirmed my feeling that the moviemakers had lost, or never developed, a sense of the shape of the story. What human on earth (barring anti-Semites) would not want to know what happened to the rest of the Szpilmans? Of course, we know, but pairing Wladyslaw and the German officer in this way suggests that there was something about their interaction that is especially significant and what we see on screen just cannot be made to support that. Their relationship doesn't even disturb the standard melodramatic movie hatred we have of Nazis, as we realize when liberated Jewish workers revile Nazi prisoners-of-war. Wladyslaw Szpilman's mightily-but-precariously engineered survival is material for a great movie, but Polanski hasn't made it. Maybe, because of his own horrific experiences as a Jew inside Nazi-occupied Poland, he respects the material too much to dramatize it effectively. During World War II anti-Nazi American movies were overly shaped by the political struggle; they were short-term melodramas. Now Holocaust movies look at the universal picture, with Jews becoming symbols of human vulnerability. As a result, these movies tend to strain for significance, as if individual stories couldn't justify a movie's probing these horrors, and maybe that's right. Polanski's movie doesn't suffer from such strain, but perhaps it doesn't strain enough. He turns his work into a conduit for Szpilman's survival and no more, as if narrative effort were inevitably the same as vulgarity or sentimentality.

I just returned home from doing some errands and found the most beautiful flowers in my apartment! Hmmm... In related news, I will not be posting any more today, for reasons having to do with my Valentine.

I hope everyone has a great day.

Quote of the Day:
"Real love stories never have endings."
~ Richard Bach

Song of the Day:
Martina McBride, "Valentine"

Happy Birthday:
Jack Benny
Carl Bernstein
Frederick Douglass
Hugh Downs
Jimmy Hoffa
Thomas Malthus
Paul Tsongas

Dennis Miller had what I think are some real words of wisdom about the Democrats' '04 field on Donahue last night:

On the Reverend Al Sharpton: "I would have tried to get the words 'Tawana Brawley' out in between the 'P' and the 'T' in Sharpton. I think it's necessary you don't even finish the name Sharpton if you don't remind people about the Tawana Brawley scene. And I also think that this would degenerate -- to preempt Tom Wolfe's phrase, it would be the bonfire of the inanities when Al Sharpton runs for president."

On Senator Joe Lieberman: "Well, I've said this publicly before. I don't think like Lieberman. I think he has almost done more great things than any man I've seen in the last few years on the public stage, almost. He almost decries quotas. He almost marched on Pennsylvania Avenue and gave Bill Clinton a piece of his mind.... I just hope he misses it by that much -- that much -- just to remind Joe Lieberman that, periodically, great men let the other foot fall, even if it's a mistaken step. They periodically let the other foot fall."

On ex-Vermont Governor Howard Dean: "I admired how he stood by -- or how she stood by her man during Watergate. But other than, that I don't know much about him."

On Senator John Edwards: "I've got enough litigation in my life. I don't need us serving papers on despots! Hussein, consider yourself served!"

Well said, especially about Lieberman.

This looks like a great vocabulary test, although I haven't taken it yet (it's long).

And if you've got even more time on your hands, check out these Professor Quotes. There are some YLS characters in the mix...

Another Catch Me If You Can story, right here on the Yale campus. This guy has managed to fool people at both Yale and Harvard into thinking he was an undergrad there.

The Yale Daily News even published op-ed columns by the imposter.

I can attest that he was attempting to worm his way into the law school as well. He showed up last fall on the mailing list of a student organization I'm involved with but failed to attend two social events, giving odd excuses both times. A friend of mine who's the leader of another student group mentioned that they also had the same elusive "mystery member," and we joked that maybe he didn't exist. Little did we know we could have cracked the case way back then.

Quote of the Day:
"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music he hears, however measured or far away."
~ Henry David Thoreau

Song of the Day:
Jennifer Lopez, "Jenny from the Block"

Happy Birthday:
Stockard Channing
Mike Krzyzewski
Peter Garbriel

Movie Review

In As Good As It Gets Jack Nicholson plays a cantankerous, obsessive-compulsive writer who says just what he thinks about minorities, women, gays, and lap dogs. At the beginning the movie gets mileage out of the hard stylization of his irredeemable character, and at the end out of his redemption. In order to turn him into a nice guy, a romantic hero no less, the movie violates the peculiar character it started out with, and the whole proceeding is just impossibly corny. First it assumes a connection between the protagonist's mental illness and bigotry and then it cures him with love: as Hollywood as it gets.

In About Schmidt director Alexander Payne and his co-writer Jim Taylor play absolutely straight with us. Schmidt, the mid-level insurance executive from Omaha played by Jack Nicholson, has lived his life in an utterly unimaginative way--going to work 9 to 5, coming home to his wife and daughter in the suburbs, watching TV, buying a Winnebago for his retirement. We first see Schmidt sitting semi-comatose while his best friend makes a speech at his retirement party--his response is to go sit alone in the bar, and this is before he even realizes how his friend betrayed him. Schmidt also seems never to have told anyone about the million tiny ways his wife drives him crazy, until he has retired and begins writing long letters, full of description, confessions, advice, to little Ndugu, an African child he's "adopted" through an international aid program he responds to while watching TV. The running joke of the movie is how Schmidt pours out all his jumbled feelings in these letters to a starving, illiterate child half a world away. When his wife dies, Schmidt's easy life is disrupted and then, when going through her effects, he finds out that as much as he felt he knew her too well he didn't know her well enough. Schmidt's vague sense of deadness breaks out as a full-blown need to make his life right, and with only his daughter left in his world he focuses his attention on persuading her not to marry the waterbed salesman she's engaged to. The problem is he can't convincingly express to her why he feels it's a mistake and he certainly has no vision of a different, better life to offer in its place.

About Schmidt puts its central character in a horrifying position: having lived his life in a routine manner, he's incapable of transcendence when he feels an overwhelming need for it. All he can do is get in the Winnebago and drive around, waiting until his daughter will let him come to Denver for her wedding so he can talk her out of it. He has disparaged his wife's Hummel figurines, the pukey little Germanic tchotchkes of plump children (originally designed by a nun), but then in desperation uses them to make a little altar on the top of the Winnebago when he needs contact with her after death. In the morning, he groggily gets up to move on and forgets them on the roof--we watch them randomly slide off as he continues driving nowhere.

I loved About Schmidt, but not because it's a faithful version of Louis Begley's 1996 source work. Telling his story with far more realistic detail, Begley, a Jew who lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, emigrated to America with his parents, became a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York, and published his first work of fiction in his mid-50s, blends novelistic sympathy with irony. Begley's Schmidt is, like his creator, a partner at a New York law firm, but is an old school East Coaster, with lots of money, property, connections. The book is about the mounting tension between him and his daughter when she gets engaged to his own Jewish protégé at the firm, and you can feel the cosmopolitan delight Begley takes in the unhysterical delineation of Schmidt's anti-Semitism, a "sophisticated" holdover from the passing white-shoe law firm culture. The irony also resides in a lingering awareness that we can't say what kind of story it is we're living. As Begley writes of Schmidt toward the end, "Inside his house, wherever he turned, he felt mocked: [his daughter's] presence and [his daughter's] absence, like twin masks of Comedy and Tragedy in some allegory he was unable to decipher." But the Schmidt of the book shares Begley's command of irony. Payne and Taylor's movie is a work of total irony, which, as a narrative genre, engages benighted protagonists who fall short of the ideal in parodies of romance action. Don Quixote, for example, is an ironic protagonist, engaged in a parody of Amadis de Gaul that effectively destroys that tradition of storytelling. (For the fullest understanding of the various narrative genres, see the great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye's 1957 work Anatomy of Criticism.) Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt is like a parody of Art Carney in Paul Mazursky's Harry & Tonto, an old man who symbolically takes to the road to reconnect with life. Schmidt is marginally aware of something beyond the limitations that now press in on him, but he can't articulate the problem and no one else appears to be aware of it. Schmidt has made for himself a world in which revelation is impossible; the movie shapes for comedy its insistence that you can't live a low-watt life and then suddenly turn into a beacon when you want illumination.

There's a clear connection between Schmidt and the angry characters Nicholson played in Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, Chinatown, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in the '70s, and a clear difference. When Nicholson was young his outbursts expressed our disgust with hypocrisy and we went with him even though we knew his telling people off couldn't save him or anyone else. But at the end of a life we expect more than reactive anger, we expect the old man's view, informed by his experience, to authoritatively add up to something, and Schmidt just doesn't have a clue what that should be. Schmidt periodically threatens to turn into the young Jack Nicholson, but then can't quite focus on the point or his emotion. So the climactic scene in which he's tempted to launch a rant at his daughter's wedding party and instead says the conventional nice things is horrible not only because he chooses to remain blocked but because we know that if he had let it out it wouldn't have done any good. It's rare for a flamboyant star like Nicholson to play against type in a way that conveys the meaning of the piece. It was an amazing act of trust on the part of an established star for a young director.

The movie is less snappy than Payne and Taylor's Citizen Ruth and Election, both of which are wonderfully funny works of total irony that focus on younger characters. In About Schmidt the rhythm of the scenes is more exploratory, I think because it's about someone at the other end of life. It's as funny, but you laugh with a growing sense of dread because it makes you feel what it's like to realize it's too late to help yourself. I don't understand why people have complained that the movie makes fun of or condescends to the characters. That's how irony works. Irony presents a vision of the world in which all heroism is hollow; this can't in itself be a decisive complaint. There are no heroes in Madame Bovary or Lolita. Or in Chicago, though critics don't seem to have any trouble with that. The amoral cast of Chicago are all as guilty as you think and even more corrupt, but they're fantasy figures, more remote than a middle-class midwesterner. Is that it: are the suburban anybodies of About Schmidt hitting closer to home? Couldn't that discomfort be a sign of its effectiveness? What good is a warning if you don't feel it?

Quote of the Day:
"Dignity exists not in possessing honors, but in deserving them."
~ Aristotle

Song of the Day:
Edwin McCain, "I Could Not Ask for More"

Happy Birthday:
Laurie Barber
Judy Blume
Charles Darwin
Jonathan Durham
Arsenio Hall
Abraham Lincoln
Lily Malcolm
Cotton Mather
Christina Ricci
Bill Russell
Arlen Specter

After last night's episode, Slate wonders what's up Joe Millionaire's sleeve:

But Paul [the butler] also said something else. He confirmed the rumor, set forth on Television Without Pity and other TV rialtos, that the concluding episode of Joe Millionaire will contain a twist. Another twist. Evan is not just a construction worker who's been lying to his dates about his net worth. Fox has also been lying to us about something.

People have said that Zora has been onto the ruse all along. That Evan is gay. That Zora and Evan are brother and sister. That Sarah and Zora know his secret and are conspiring against him.

Brother and sister? Yes, that would be quite a twist.

Even Rudy Giuliani is backing Miguel Estrada's nomination to the D.C. Circuit. And How Appealing continues to follow general developments in the Estrada story.

From Page Six: Chelsea Clinton spotted with Bachelorette reject... and Jennifer Lopez fires Ben Affleck's personal assistant because "she's a woman." But maybe J-Lo's right to be paranoid; apparently Affleck's last assistant ended up engaged to Matt Damon.

Ron Ziegler has died of a heart attack at age 63. Watergate buffs will remember him as perhaps Nixon's most loyal aide. He was fortunate that loyalty didn't put him in prison.

Ziegler's most famous statement as press secretary: "This is the operative statement. The others are inoperative." He was also the one who called Watergate "a third-rate burglary."

Jonah Goldberg is the proud father of brand-new baby Lucy. The new dad writes that she's "a nice pinkish hue with Churchillian cheek bones."

And tangentially related to parenthood, my thoughts below about men in dark blazers cause Quare to reflect on simultaneously baking bread and writing books about philosophy. Tim Schnabel also has a thoughtful post.

Everyone else has posted something serious, so here's something lighter:

Ozark County Circuit Judge John Moody told Adams it was fine for Jesus Christ to be his chief counsel, but no one — including Constance — could speak for him in the courtroom unless a lawful attorney.

Even Jesus has to pass the bar to practice law.

Movie Review

The movie version of Michael Cunningham's The Hours, adapted by David Hare and directed by Stephen Daldry, preserves the book's structure, intertwining the stories of three women across time: Virginia Woolf in 1923, living in the suburbs as she starts writing Mrs. Dalloway while her husband Leonard runs the Hogarth Press and tries to keep her from descending into madness again; Laura Brown, a pregnant housewife in Los Angeles in 1951, reading Mrs. Dalloway and contemplating suicide while her young son looks on; and Clarissa Vaughan, an open lesbian in Manhattan in 2001 who, like Mrs. Dalloway, is giving a party, for an AIDS-afflicted poet who was once her lover and whose friendship means more to her than her own longterm relationship. The tricky editing back and forth among the periods (a technique in movies that derives from D.W. Griffith's 1916 masterpiece Intolerance, and so harks back to the beginning of feature filmmaking) is at times a little obvious but keeps the movies from being dull. Unfortunately nothing makes the movie very interesting.

Like the book, the movie combines Woolf's own interest in the accumulation of culture over time (Orlando (1928), The Years (1937), Between the Acts (1941)) and the sense in Mrs. Dalloway that the meaning of life, whatever it may turn out to be, is immanent in the acts of daily living. What's striking in The Hours, however, is how miserable the three women are. The problem with that is that the movie seems overprepared to interpret their unhappiness but doesn't really dramatize it fully enough for the interpretation to mean much to us. I take the key scene in the movie to be the confrontation between Virginia and Leonard after she has slipped out of the house, hoping to catch a train to London, and Leonard has come after her to take her back home. She says she feels trapped in their dull life in the suburbs and he says he brought her away from the city for her own good, seeing as London had contributed to her previous round of insanity. But we see nothing of that previous life in London so we can't respond to the points they make as they argue. The movie seems, in some vague feminist way, to take Virginia's side, with her outburst about the doctors telling her what her interests are, but who knows. Mary Tyrone hated doctors, too, after all. Virginia says she would choose death over the country, and then offers what I think the movie intends as a bit of wisdom, "You can't find peace by avoiding life." But they've been arguing about avoiding London, not life. How does moving to the country and arguing with your husband and the servants while writing a novel constitute avoidance of life? Hare's script is actually more explicit than the novel in serving up themes, but they don't arise from what we see. We see a husband and wife tangling over whether to live in the city or the country; it may be literary gods at loggerheads but it has no more impact than as a highbrow version of Green Acres.

Likewise, in the contemporary section we need to see the past relationship between Clarissa and her gay male poet and to compare it to her current relationship with her girlfriend. In the 1951 section we need to see what happens afterwards, what Laura Brown found after she abandoned her family. She tells us she became a librarian, as if her misery stemmed from not getting to read enough rather than from unexpressed lesbianism. Was leaving her husband and children a painful but smart thing for her to do, or did her numbness follow her like a tail? The only material developed enough to have dramatic impact is the sequence of Virginia trying to manage her servants. It comes straight from the book, which also had an interesting, indirect, gay-versus-queer faceoff between Clarissa and a friend of her daughter's but which has been cut from the movie. There's a lot of busy storytelling here, and yet the important parts seem outside of the narrative frame.

Nicole Kidman, with a putty-colored fake nose, plays Virginia Woolf, and she seems both brisk and distracted, so desperate to catch her inspiration on paper that she neglects the household, Leonard, herself--all the living that she wants to extol in her novel. That's the second problem with the misery of the three women; the movie doesn't seem fully aware of the irony of it. It's as if Septimus Warren Smith had somehow infected Mrs. Dalloway. We get the exhortation to live, but it doesn't really seem possible, like something these women could manage. It doesn't help that the women's performances are as stylistically hemmed in as the characters are pre-interpreted. Kidman gives a consistent performance, but maybe too consistent, keying the character to the gesture of pointing her chin down and then looking back up at another character. As deliberate style that's nothing compared to Streep. In her first scene buying flowers her speech is so mannered she sounds like she's parodying her own character. It's the same routine she used in the desperate-for-high-style comedy She-Devil where it killed what should have been easy comedy; here it verges on unintentional comedy. She calms down later but there's very little to bring out; merely seeming human isn't that much of an achievement. Poor Julianne Moore, stuck playing another sad, sad '50s suburban housewife. In Far from Heaven she at least had her Clairol-commercial coloring; in The Hours she's as drab as she is depressed. Moore has won praise for these preserved-in-aspic performances, but I can't believe they're making audiences fall in love with her, waiting impatiently for her next picture.

The movie has been received reverentially and the reviews read like high school book reports, trying to find the deep theme and impress the teacher. But there's just too much clever self-consciousness, Virginia Woolf's ideas and techniques sprayed onto new material as if from an atomizer. For all its intentness, the movie was easy to escape from. In one scene Streep is listening to Jessye Norman sing "Beim Schlafengehen," one of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs; Jeff Daniels arrives and she turns the music off. What follows is Streep's best moment in the movie, but it can't compensate us for Norman's singing. If I had been at home I would have turned the music back on and the movie off.

I spent part of the evening with some Federalists at a debate between some of the right-leaning groups on campus. It was in one of the undergraduate college common rooms, and looking around at one point I had the weird feeling of being stuck in the wrong decade. It was snowing outside (New Haven is beautiful at the moment, with snow on top of snow), and here I was in this warm, glowing room, surrounded by wood paneling and lots of men. Men wearing... dark blazers. It could have been 1953.

I have no objection, per se, to men in dark blazers. But being surrounded by a vast sea of them (I was one of a tiny number of women in the room) gave me one more occasion to reflect on how self-conscious about my gender I can be. I didn't speak up during the debate (essentially, a dorm-room-type bull session, but with people taking turns speaking and calling each other "the gentleman"), but I couldn't help but feel that, if I did talk, many in the room would be sizing me up as an outsider, someone not like them — so different in an important respect, in fact, that I could never really be a part of what was going on.

I'll readily admit that I tend to make the blanket assumption, contrary to good sense and experience, that any man who would show up at that debate tonight is a man who wants to oppress me. No matter how well these men talk the talk, a small part of me believes — wants to believe — that underneath everything they're thinking how much better it all was before this co-education nonsense, back when women wore skirts and knew how to make a decent pie crust. It's not fair of me, I know. But it makes me prickly: "I know some of you are dying to chain me to a stove — I just don't know which of you!" And I can understand how, rightly or wrongly, some women's sense of this is so strong that their entire politics is basically a reaction to it.

I am not one of those women. It would have been very difficult to grow up in my family and labor under any sort of delusion of women as the inferior sex. It wasn't that the females were high-powered career women — most were teachers if they worked at all, and the men brought home the bacon (literally, in my grandfather's case). But, as I'm sure is the case in many families, we kids grew up with a sense that women did the really important stuff. It wasn't just that the women were incredible cooks, gardeners and seamstresses (Martha Stewart has nothing on my mother); it was also that the intellectual, cultural and religious life of the family revolved around them — would not exist without them, really. I was well into my teens before I seriously wrapped my mind around the fact that some men believe women are not their intellectual equals. (Ironically, it took matriculation at an elite law school to chip away at the confidence in myself as a woman that I gained from the example of my conservative mother and aunts — but that's another story.)

So if even I get defensive upon finding myself in the midst of a bunch of dark-blazer-wearing, right-leaning men, I can understand why it would drive some women crazy. I'm still not going to run out and join my feminist sisters on the barricades, but at times like tonight I almost understand why they think they have to be there.

Quote of the Day:
"If we all did the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves."
~ Thomas Edison

Song of the Day:
Christina Aguilera, "Dirrty"

Happy Birthday:
Lloyd Bensten
Tom Haught
Thomas Edison
Leslie Nielsen
Mary Quant
Burt Reynolds
Carlee Ann Wiles Vaughn

Straight talk

Following up on our brief exchange, Lesley at Plum Crazy has identified what she means by big government. It turns out she actually isn't in the more spending=big government camp. Now we can have a conversation.

In related news, Eric at Antidotal emails in to expand the big government conversation with this:

If I gauge their philosophical position correctly, shouldn't libertarianism be most concerned with the extent of non-consensual interference of government (or any other agent) in the affairs of the individual? In the same way that the cost of government doesn't necessarily correlate with the size of government (although it can frequently serve as a decent proxy), I would argue that the size of government doesn't necessarily correlate with the extent of its interference in the sphere of the individual.

An excellent point. I guess I am now at fault for failing to define "big." In my arguments that spending does not necessarily correlate to size, I've meant two things: (1) decreased spending may not mean that the actual size (number of government workers, say) of government is smaller (this was the "shadow" government argument); and (2) decreased spending may not mean smaller government because "big" or "small" government probably means something closer to government bureaucracy (hence, I made the comparison between one fighter jet and 1000 handouts).

Jonathan Zimmerman at the Christian Science Monitor bridges the gap between the "basic skills" camp of educators and the wholistic learning camp of educators.

At their root, our battles over reading and math aren't about reading and math at all; instead, they involve competing conceptions of human nature and development. One side thinks children develop naturally, while the other believes that learning must be imposed upon their natures.

He suggests that

Your best teachers combined old and new approaches, requiring you to memorize as well as to analyze. They taught you some words by sounding them out, and others from their place in stories; they taught some math operations by rote, and others by induction.

I agree, to an extent. I think what Zimmerman fails to include in his calculus is that different students learn in different ways. The idea of visual versus aural learners is a very real thing. Some students do take better to applied examples, while others do better with abstract rules--case in point, word problems versus regular old math problems. I don't think this takes away from Zimmerman's point--I just think it is an element of the teaching process that is as important, if not more important, than an abstract consideration of teaching methods in and of themselves.

Mickey Kaus diagnoses John Kerry's problem as "comically transparent calculating opportunism." I think Al Gore suffers from the same malady.

If you're going to be a calculating opportunist, you've gotta be very, very subtle.

Maybe this will get that annoying "Dell dude" off the airwaves.

A new book reveals that George Bush I gave Barbara Bush "love cues" in a note pleading with her to be more amorous on camera during his presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis.

"Sweetie," the note said, "please look at how Mike and Kitty do it. Try to be closer in, more -- well, er, romantic -- on camera. I am practicing the loving look and the creeping hand. Yours for better TV and more demonstrative affection, your sweetie-pie, coo-coo. Love ya, GB."

And people wonder why political marriages are often so dreadful.

After an excellent weekend (one of the wins was over that evil school up North), Yale men's basketball is still in the hunt. Next weekend is the big weekend, though, when we play Penn and Princeton (both still undefeated) and Brown (also undefeated) plays Penn and Princeton.

Not sure what Dean is talking about...

Alias . . .

Missed the show last night, so ... shhh. We have it on tape and will watch it later this week. There is still stuff to say:

(1) A radio personality was talking about Jennifer Garner (in light of Daredevil, which opens Friday). She said: "That girl can cry." True. She is one of the few actresses who can really cry. The host went on to say that when Garner cries, you really do feel sad. This made me think of the post-Superbowl episode when Jack called Sidney and told her he had been compromised. Damn, that girl can cry.

(2) Our fellow Alias fanatic, Eric over at Antidotal, writes in:

I was thinking along the same lines regarding Sydney and Vaughn hooking up, since unresolved sexual tension is often so much more delicious, but I'm betting (from what I've seen of this week's promo) that they'll decide to split up because their relationship is too much of a liability.

Interesting. I like it! He also says:

Vaughn isn't field-trained? I wasn't entirely sure about that, although I think I vaguely remember an episode where someone mentioned something to this effect.

Yeah... We've had other people ask us that, too. This is definitely true. More from Eric:

Lena Olin is only contracted for 18 episodes this year, so if you're an Irina fan, you'll have to get used to doing without her for a bit.

That explains where she's been. They should at least mention that she's still in the holding cell... Finally:

I think it would be hilarious if evil Francie were actually Will--who could stop the force of the show's two most annoying characters merged into one?

Indeed. For the record, I don't like evil Francie at all.

(3) More on Alias later this week when I finally watch yesterday's episode. Also, maybe a review of Daredevil after I see it this coming weekend.

Quote of the Day:
"The great and almost only comfort about being a woman is that one can always pretend to be more stupid than one is and no one is surprised."
~ Freya Stark

Song of the Day:
Martina McBride, "Wrong Again"

Happy Birthday:
Berthold Brecht
Boris Pasternak
Leontyne Price

Reading my posts . . . in their entirety

Too often I have had other bloggers respond to my posts and it becomes clear that they haven't read the post completely. The most recent offender: Plum Crazy. In this post, Plum Crazy takes issue with two points:

(1) She writes:

The Kitchen Cabinet points to a post of mine and basically says I'm confusing my terms. However, I'd like Kate to point out to me where I said the Democrats were the party of smaller government or that the Republicans were the party of bigger government. All I can remember saying is that the Republicans were not the party of small government. That doesn't mean I think the Democrats are.

....

If someone wants to take issue with my assessment that the main difference between the two major parties is which areas of our lives they wish to control and what they choose to spend on, please do. But please get your terms straight. I am not saying that the Republicans are worse than the Democrats.

My response? I never said Plum Crazy said Democrats were the "party of smaller government." Take another look at my post. My post is primarily in response to Steve Verdon's post, in which Steve Verdon talks about Clinton being in favor of smaller government and libertarians bailing on the Republican Party. I then refer to Plum Crazy as an example of someone who is building on Verdon's point general point about Bush and the current Republican party being in favor of big government. My point to which she refers, then, was not in response to her, but to Verdon's point about Democrats and small government. The point I made was:

I also wonder where libertarians go if they leave the Republican Party. Even if the Democrats spend less and spending less means smaller government (two big "if"s), aren't there still more fundamentally anti-libertarian aspects to the Democratic Party than to the Republican Party?

As one can well see, this is a direct reference to Verdon's point, which was:

And Republicans wonder why the libertarian wing of the Republican party has left.

Plum Crazy had nothing to do with it.

(2) She writes:

As for the Cato Report, it may not say anything about big government. I don't find myself limited to the specific terms used in a report or article in forming my opinions. The article about the Russians giving Kofi Annan a statue of a bear on a tightrope doesn't mention a mouse on a wheel either. So what? I do not characterize the Republicans as not being the party of small government, despite their claims to the contrary, solely on that report. The data in it further confirms my belief, but it is not the root cause of it. The root cause of that belief is actions taken by Republican administrations through the years.

Fine. I don't dispute that. Look again at my post. My post was entirely, 100%, about the definition of big government. I was pointing out the fact that people, like Plum Crazy and Verdon, seem to assume that more spending equals big government, and I was trying to show that that may not be true. This is why I said

I just think we should get our terms straight before we start bandying about "big" government.

And I noted that the Cato Report did not say anything about big government to show that it is possible to say "more spending" without saying "big government." I think Plum Crazy is being perfectly logical in equating the two. My only point was that people should be clear that that is what they mean because it is not a given that more spending means bigger government.

Quote of the Day:
"Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough."
~ Mark Twain

Song of the Day:
Dido, "Take My Hand"

Happy Birthday:
Joe Pesci
Dean Rusk
Arnold Schonberg
Alice Walker

Tim Schnabel wonders how I choose the Song of the Day. His first guess is closest; many are from my mp3 collection. And yes, often the song has some special significance, even if most people wouldn't get it — but sometimes it's just whatever's running through my head at the moment.

I'm always looking for good songs and quotes, so if you have any suggestions, send them to me. Also birthdays — your own or anyone else's. (Because nothing says "Happy Birthday" like a mention on The Kitchen Cabinet...)

Eric Alterman insists there's no such thing as "the liberal media." I started giggling at the part where he claims that "the only ideological commentator on [ABC's This Week] is the hard-line conservative George Will," and, well — it's just downhill from there.

Alterman can't be unaware that the host of This Week has worked for both Dick Gephardt and Bill Clinton. His indignant recitation of all the conservative voices dominating the media is meaningless once you realize that he's defining everyone to the right of Joe Klein as a fire-breathing right-winger. And everyone to the left of that is, of course, just a "moderate." So all Alterman's piece really establishes is that the media is to the right of Eric Alterman. Yawn.

Good stuff in Slate: Jodi Kantor calls last Sunday's episode of Alias "a cruel, disorienting watch—like seeing The Sound of Music suddenly morph into Schindler's List." Julia Turner says the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals isn't so special. And Virginia Heffernan calls ABC's Michael Jackson interview a "prosecution."

Movie Quote of the Day:
"Why don't we start with your childhood?"
"It was terrible, just like everybody else's."
"All of it?"
"None of it, really. But, I mean, who wants to admit you've had a happy childhood?"
~ A Chorus Line

Song of the Day:
The Four Seasons, "Walk Like A Man"

Happy Birthday:
Martin Buber
James Dean
Jack Lemmon
Graham O'Donaghue
William T. Sherman
Jules Verne

This Boston Phoenix article claims that Al Gore beat Bill Bradley in the 2000 New Hampshire primary thanks to a traffic jam purposely created by Gore operatives:

As late as 3 p.m. that day, Gore operatives had access to exit polls showing the vice-president being defeated by Bradley. They also learned that while Democratic voters were voting in large numbers for Gore, independents, many of them upscale suburban voters, were voting for Bradley's sophisticated brand of liberalism. Knowing that Bradley's strength came from tony tech havens such as Bedford, the Gore team organized a caravan to clog highway I-93 with traffic so as to discourage potential Bradley voters from getting to the polls. (Michael Whouley, a chief Gore strategist, recounted the Gore team's Election Day field efforts at a Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics symposium.... He knocked down the rumor that they considered overturning an 18-wheeler to clog up traffic.) The caravan — spoken of with awe by operatives who worked on the campaign — had the desired effect. It was harder for Bradley voters to get the polls.

The Hotline has reaction from New Hampshire Democratic chair Kathy Sullivan: "All I can say is, if this is true, it's outrageous. It should never have happened. No one should try to make it difficult for anyone to vote. That's just plain wrong, and there's no place for that in either party. I don't get it. I just don't get it. I read the story and I just sat here shaking my head."

And the New York Sun has an editorial on the subject.

It'll be interesting to see how much play this gets.

Winter wonderland.

The best kind of snow is the kind you weren't expecting and wake up to find all over the place.

Yesterday students at Yale Law School protested the newly aggressive enforcement of Congress's 1996 Solomon Amendment, which cuts off federal funding to universities that apply their policies against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to military recruitment. The Solomon Amendment plainly and weirdly contradicts Congress's own 1993 "Don't ask, don't tell policy," a stupid compromise in the battle for open participation by gay men and women in the military that enshrines hypocrisy. In order to avoid the funding cutoff, Yale Law School has suspended its refusal to let the Judge Advocate General Corps (JAG) participate in the fall interview program because JAG representatives refuse to sign a nondiscrimination agreement. Yale Law School Professor Kenji Yoshino's 13 October 2002 editorial for the Hartford Courant shrewdly uses the current national crisis as leverage in his argument against the ban on gays in the military, but his focus is necessarily limited to the time frame of the crisis. I would go further and say that the ban on gays in the military is always inefficient in keeping potentially the best people out of the service and is repugnant in principle to a free people.

And yet … I found the form of the protest itself unsettling. Students lined up by a huge rainbow flag with gags made of camouflage material to symbolize the human cost of "Don't ask, don't tell." What troubles me is the dramatization, really the affectation, of powerlessness among students at an elite law school. These men and women will soon be clerking in the federal court system and working as prosecutors and public defenders across the country, in many of the administrative agencies of the federal government, in all the top corporate firms in the biggest cities, in law schools and foundations and legal service organizations. Why would people who will have enormous influence from the inside of major governmental, legal, financial, and educational institutions resort to this '60s-leftover, street theater form of protest? Surely the protest could have taken some more adult form, for instance, one that took advantage of the connections these people have already made in these institutions.

It's sort of a sidenote, but I'd be curious to know the attitudes of the protesting students toward the actions of the U.S. military. They seem to be protesting now on behalf of open inclusion of gays and lesbians in the military; if it were achieved would they then protest against the integrated military when it acted in the world, say, by liberating Iraq from Saddam Hussein? Or is their goal simply to get Yale to enforce its nondiscrimination policy so that the military will not be able to recruit at the Law School?

An article in New York magazine examines the phenomenon of hasbians -- women who used to date women but now date men.

It's like a junior year abroad to Gay World.... Lots of girls at Brown, Berkeley, Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Yale go there but don't stay there.

"Gay World?"

Quote of the Day:
"Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything."
~ Evelyn Waugh

Song of the Day:
Patsy Cline, "Crazy"

Happy Birthday:
Charles Dickens
Sinclair Lewis
Sir Thomas More
Laura Ingalls Wilder

Dean Jens responds to my part of my post on big government. Which is bigger government, the fighter jet or the 1000 handouts?:

The fighter jet is, for "shadow government" reasons you give earlier. A proper accounting finds the Boeing employees, and even the steel mill employees (on a pro-rated basis), part of the former program.

Fair point, but that's not what I meant by "shadow" government. The shadow government is government work being done on a contract basis. For instance, rather than staffing EPA with a ton of scientists, the experiments and tests are contracted out. This allows the appearance of downsizing, though nothing has really decreased. Dean has taken "shadow" to mean the web effects of government work--thus, he includes work that is twice or three times removed. My definition of shadow government is not about including "removed" work, but about including work that is outside the "actual" government, but being paid for by the government to take the place of "actual" government work.

As for my larger point, Dean doesn't dispute that greater spending may not mean bigger government, but he thinks it is a "good metric." That's great. My only point was that we need to be aware that we are making certain assumptions when we say more spending = "bigger" government and that we should be more explicit about what we mean by "big" government--which Dean acknowledges. I'm not, however, entirely sure whether Dean actually defines "big" government. Despite my comments about "shadow" government workers, I don't necessarily subscribe to the belief that big government means more workers. It is possible that big government simply means that the government has its fingers in more pies--that it regulates more industries, for instance, even though it doesn't have much personnel or spend much money.

Random assortment o' stuff, because I got up late and am headed out the door:

-- The Washington Times reports that Democratic Senator John Breaux will support Bush D.C. Circuit Court nominee Miguel Estrada. And How Appealing is all over the general Estrada developments.

-- Another House member from the great state of North Carolina has opened mouth and inserted foot. Here we have Sue Myrick, discussing domestic terrorism, saying "Look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country." The Council on American-Islamic Relations is not amused.

-- The Top 15 Dr. Seuss pick-up lines.

-- Bruce Willis: "Will somebody please tell me why Ted Kennedy is still running around Washington? Tell him to get a real job!"

-- And finally, though you wouldn't know it from North Carolina point guard Raymond Felton's assertion that "I controlled the game offensively," in fact Good beat Evil last night, 83-74. And all is right with the world.

Law prof Eric Muller has several posts on what he is calling "Coblegate":

Folks, this is the guy running the show on homeland security in the House of Representatives. The guy who will have oversight over how well Tom Ridge's new department is balancing national security with individual liberties.

If he's not already doing so, Dennis Hastert should be looking for a new Chairman for Judiciary's Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

There's lots more...

Movies on TV

After midnight tonight Turner Classic Movies, hands down the best way to catch up on older American movies on TV (they always show letterbox versions, for example), is showing ZouZou and Princess Tam Tam, the two movies that Josephine Baker, the most sensational of African-American expatriates, made in France in the 1930s. As movies they could be better but they give you a glimpse of Baker's act, and it was something. Her performing style will come as a surprise for anyone who knows her from photos or her wonderful recordings. The most famous photos emphasize her sleek '20s showgirl glamour--spitcurls, feathers, pearls and rhinestones, with a hint of the exotic. Only the ones in which she's wearing her famous skirt of bananas suggest her humor. As for her singing, she had the ideal voice for a caged bird. Twittering in schoolgirl French, she manages to be both plaintive and irrepressible. The songs are the more appealing for Americans to the extent they feel nostalgia for pre-WWII Europe. Which isn't to say the songs don't have punch: in one called "Si j'étais blanche" ("If I were white") she sings about the effects of racism and points out the irony of white Parisians sunning themselves at Juan-les-Pins on the French Riviera in order to darken their skin. (Her recordings are widely available and make great background music for quiet parties--someone always gets hypnotized by it.) As a performer Baker could be elegant but it wasn't her only mode. She sang like a golden canary but had a goofy, rabbity face and will suddenly turn into an eccentric dancer (a now-defunct genre of show dancing whose best-known practitioner is probably Ray Bolger, the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz), sticking her butt out and flapping her legs like an ostrich attempting the Charleston. You have to see her move to get that she was the African-American equivalent of Fanny Brice (the Ziegfeld comedienne Barbra Streisand played in Funny Girl). Baker was the toast of Paris in the jazz age but her vitality was essentially American--comic despite, or maybe because of, her struggles. (The very short version: she was the daughter of a St. Louis washerwoman and had trouble breaking into show business in the U.S. because her skin was considered too dark even for the chorus line of an all-black revue.) Baker dolled herself up like a Folies Bergère fantasy of African royalty but Americans will recognize her as one of us most when she starts cutting up the way people do in home movies.

In a response to Bush's State of the Union address, the Human Rights Campaign sent a letter in which the group "applauded the president's request that Congress triple spending to fight AIDS in Africa, while expressing deep concern that Bush failed to speak on the continuing domestic crisis." And yet I wonder if his proposal to combat AIDS in Africa wasn't a way of addressing the gay electorate in the U.S. If so, it was coded speech, and it's not hard to imagine that he would choose to speak in code in order to avoid riling the far right. But, to be fair, gay voters are so entrenched on the left end of the spectrum that a Republican can't have much reason to court them. (Andrew Sullivan has a recent article about the scattershot far-left agenda of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.) Looking at this fact solely in terms of political strategy, it doesn't seem very shrewd. Quite apart from all the reasons an individual has for maintaining independence itself, wouldn't gays have more leverage if their votes could be won by either party? Wouldn't an auction for their votes more likely gain them concessions?

Googlewhacking!

Just discovered this tremendously addicting way to pass the time. The gist is that you try to put two search terms into google that will return only one result. You cannot use quotation marks. If you are successful, the top right hand corner of the blue google search bar will read "Results 1-1 of 1." The rules also dictate that your words must be in dictionary.com. The blue google search bar will indicate if this is true by underlining your two search terms, which appear in the top left hand corner. The first one I found took a few minutes. It was "alimony microburst." I registered it into "The Whack Stack."

Big Government (big guh-vern-ment) n. Abbr. big gov., big govt.

Via Instapundit, we find Steve Verndon talking about the libertarian critique of Bush's budget.

President Bush is the biggest spending President in decades.

. . . .

Smaller government? Please, this President is about bigger government. After seeing this I have to wonder about people who claim that libertarians are nothing more than conservatives. . . . Hell, looking at the data above Clinton was more in favor of smaller government than Bush is now. And Republicans wonder why the libertarian wing of the Republican party has left. Gee, maybe because the Republican party talks the talk of smaller government, but can't walk the walk.

The thing is, more spending does not necessarily a bigger government make. Before we start accusing Bush of being "big government," let's define what we mean by big government. Recent academic literature on big government has noted that Clinton's answer to calls for smaller government was downsizing of government personnel. It turns out that much of the reduction in government size (defined by personnel and spending on government projects and agencies) turns up balanced by an increase in spending dedicated to and manpower used by private contractors. Why should outsourcing be considered a reduction in the size of government when these are still, strictly speaking, programs authorized and traceable to the government? In the academic world, this outsourced government has come to be known as a "shadow" government.

The Volokh Conspiracy and Plum Crazy also pick up Verndon's post. Plum Crazy gives this comment:

That's like saying you're about dieting and going out and eating a hot fudge sundae or three every night. Yeah, it's a lot like small government. Using some new definition of the word small with which we were previously unfamiliar.

Well, let's see. Which of the following is a bigger government?

Government A: Budget size of $25. Spends it on 25 separate projects, each of which costs $0.50 to acquire and $0.50 to staff. Result is 25 projects with an overhead of 25 people.

Government B: Budget size of $50. Spends it on 2 projects, each of which costs $24 to acquire and $1 to staff with two people (at the same rate Government A pays, $0.50 per person). Result is 2 projects with an overhead of 4 people. (A more expensive project, mind you, does not mean that it is larger. One fighter jet costs much more than 1000 handouts. Which is "bigger" government?)

Let me point out that I'm not saying I disagree. I just think we should get our terms straight before we start bandying about "big" government. The Cato report that everyone is citing says nothing about "big government," just about increased spending.

I also wonder where libertarians go if they leave the Republican Party. Even if the Democrats spend less and spending less means smaller government (two big "if"s), aren't there still more fundamentally anti-libertarian aspects to the Democratic Party than to the Republican Party? Maybe Lily can fill us in on that one.

The Bachelorette

Just watched a tape delay of the show (I was watching the Duke-UNC game) and discovered, much to my delight, that Russ got cut. Trista finally saw through to his creepy, neurotic side and got up the nerve to cut him. Before the rose ceremony, Trista said that she could no longer be guided by a fear of hurting someone. Thank goodness. I had predicted Ryan would get cut, but only because I thought Trista would continue to be a slave to her worry about hurting Russ. This is fantastic. Russ's overnight went so poorly that the rose ceremony was a complete snore.

Unfortunately, Ryan will get his heart broken in two weeks, when Trista chooses Charlie. The problem, I think, is that Ryan (who is not falling in love, but "submersed" in it) is too mellow for Trista. He is what she will want in twenty or thirty years. Fortunately for Ryan, the love letters will come pouring in.

Quote of the Day:
"Let us beware that while they preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination over all the peoples of the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.... I urge you to beware the temptation.... to ignore the facts of history and the aggressive impulses of any evil empire, to simply call the arms race a giant misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the struggle between right and wrong, good and evil."
~ Ronald Reagan

Song of the Day:
Bob Marley, "Stir It Up"

Happy Birthday:
Eva Braun
Tom Brokaw
Aaron Burr
Natalie Cole
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Bob Marley
Christopher Marlowe
Ronald Reagan
Babe Ruth

Interesting profile in the California Lawyer of Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt, widely regarded as one of the most liberal judges in the country and referred to here as the "chief justice of the Warren Court in exile." Here's Reinhardt on the Ninth Circuit's high reversal rate at the Supremes:

Reinhardt insists that his detractors have it all wrong. "The fact that a court is reversed doesn't mean that it's wrong or that it didn't follow the law," he contends. "The Supreme Court changes the law regularly. And this Supreme Court -- which is the most activist Court there has ever been -- is constantly changing the law. So if you really are faithful to the law, you're likely to get reversed because it [the Court] has cut back on rights."

But interestingly, Reinhardt's vision of himself as faithful interpreter of the law is contradicted in the article even by people generally sympathetic to him.

The piece also talks about the friendship between Reinhardt and his colleague Alex Kozinski, a right-leaning judge on the Ninth Circuit:

Trying to explain his odd-couple friendship with Reinhardt, Kozinski says, "We're both secular Jews who grew up in different parts of the world. The fact that he's really smart is a big plus for me. I understand where he's coming from, although he doesn't always understand where I'm coming from. He seems surprised to find a smart Jew who isn't a liberal."

Both Kozinski and Reinhardt are coming to YLS this spring for a debate -- an event many of us are looking forward to.

Thanks to GreenGourd's Garden for the link.

The Conspiracy reports: Congressman says that the Japanese internment was good. Congressman Coble's argument is that the internment protected the interned. I don't think anyone has ever taken this argument seriously. The way to protect people is to prosecute those who harm people, not to quarantine those we want to protect. If this argument holds, we would be in favor of stripping the liberties of the innocent and letting the wrongdoers go free.

Quare's mother has started an interesting book review blog of mostly "contemporary" books. Perhaps Alan and she will have some dialogue. I am far too low brow for "book reviews." (link via, who else, Quare)

Have you signed yet?

I was accosted on my way into the dining hall today. "Have you signed yet?" "Hey! Have you signed yet?" They were trying to get me to sign a petition. Now, that effort in itself is of course not objectionable. My beef, however, is with the expectation. "Have you signed, yet?" YET. When I exhibited confusion, I was asked, "Aren't you a law student?" Oh. So that makes it okay. It's okay to assume that all law students will want to sign the petition. Obviously so, since we as a body are, of course, of one unimaginative mind. Sua sponte has had very similar experiences and felt unable to walk away.

The weekly blog roundup, Carnival of the Vanities, is in its 20th week, on tour at Plum Crazy.

Why is this night different from all other nights? Because of this.

As for this unfortunate situation... I hope it gets worse tonight.

Movie Review/Book Corner

If you missed writer-director Douglas McGrath's recent movie version of Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39) you didn't miss much, whereas if you did see it you would have missed a lot--some of the characters, many of the subplots, and most of the scope of the novel. Law students have generally read his great, semi-experimental work Bleak House, which is considered of special interest to them because of the lawsuit Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, which lasts so long that by time it's decided the money being fought over has been spent in legal fees. But an awareness of the workings of legal relations and social institutions and how individuals get chewed up by them, especially the poor and more especially poor children, inform all of Dickens's books. Dickens had spent time in his teens working as a law clerk (more menial than what we mean by the term) and a courtroom stenographer and later a reporter covering Parliament (click here for biographical and related information, and here). Nicholas Nickleby, for instance, includes a subplot involving a dressmaker whose dissipated husband sells the firm's accounts receivable at a discount to Nicholas's evil usurer uncle Ralph in order to pay his debts. Since a married woman's property belonged to her husband under the law (before the Married Women's Property Acts of 1882 and 1893), the dressmaker has to sell the bankrupt firm to her assistant, i.e., to render herself propertyless, in order to protect herself from her husband's profligacy. This subplot is just one example of what didn't make the cut in the simplified movie.

At the same time, people overstate the importance of social critique in Dickens, certainly in Nicholas Nickleby, which is a panorama of English society viewed through the lens of vice and virtue. The villainous characters embody the seven deadly sins prismatically--that is, they each embody more than one and each sin comes in chromatic variations. (It's a Crayola 64 box of deadly sins.) But Dickens purposely pushes beyond theatrical melodrama so his lens is not simplistically polarized. The good characters, too, have their failings, most importantly Nicholas with his wrath, which at times makes bad situations worse. (The movie shows Nicholas's hotheadedness only as a defensive strength, a virtue, which reverses the meaning of the book.) This makes him more interesting than the helpless boy heroes of Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. And though Nicholas has to be taught to manage his anger, this doesn't mean that Dickens doesn't identify with him. When Nicholas can't say what he honestly thinks, to the Squeerses because of his position as their employee, or to the Crummleses out of consideration for their feelings, he still manages to convey what he thinks, but in a way that is all the funnier for the indirection--he's a conduit for Dickens's driest wit. (As is his uncle, whose open malice makes it lacerating; hypocrisy is not among Ralph's vices.) The novel gives you the whole range of Dickens's humor, from bons mots to nutty conceits to grotesque irony, while at the same time conveying the gravest universal sense of the pitfalls of vice. (In the movie only Juliet Stevenson as Mrs. Squeers gets all this, bringing out the inky intensity of Dickens's malevolent characters, outrageously given over to themselves.)

Edmund Wilson, in his seminal 1940 Atlantic Monthly article (reprinted as "Dickens: The Two Scrooges" and amazingly available online), said that Dickens had created "the largest and most varied world" of any English writer since Shakespeare. In Nicholas Nickleby, which depicts society as the imperfect product of a humanity corrupted by its own failings, the comparison might be better made to Dante. In this view the central image of the novel would be the reference to Hans Holbein's triumphantly creepy Dance of Death, a series of woodcuts first published in 1538 that shows a catalogue of social characters (including much of the cast of Nicholas Nickleby: the Duke, the Gentleman, the Miser, the Merchant, the New-Married Lady, the Husbandman, the Gamesters, the Drunkards, the Child, the Idiot Fool, the Beggar) in typical activities, with skeletal death either present but unperceived, or grabbing their cloaks at the mortal stroke. (Dickens bought a complete set a few years after the publication of Nicholas Nickleby.) Among other things, the dance of death sets all human social distinctions at nought, which is about as Dickensian as you can get. Dickens's interest in this motif points up the continuity between the realist novel, barely a century old when Dickens was writing Nicholas Nickleby, and medieval allegorical romance. Nicholas Nickleby moralizes in the older genre--scans the panorama of the contemporary world and finds blind humanity stumbling in the direction of its vices. It's a work on the order, if not quite the scale, of Dante. That is to say it's visionary, and more remarkable for being a comic vision that all the same encompasses the worst things that humans can do to each other. The movie insanely leaves Arthur Gride out by eliding him with Sir Mulberry Hawk, and eliminating Hawk's duel with his own protegé: in one act of false economy it removes the most baleful deed in the book and the darkest defilement Dickens could imagine.

Unlike Dante, Dickens doesn't take us into the underworld--considering what he thinks of London he scarcely needs to--but in any case his main concern is with the suffering of souls in this life. But there's something bigger in this. When Nicholas confronts his uncle Ralph at the moment when the latter's fortunes turn, he exults, "[Y]our schemes are known to man, and overthrown by Heaven"; when Ralph curses him, Nicholas has the last word, "Whence will curses come at your command?" The second statement, phrased as a rhetorical question, is quite startling in an explicitly Christian writer. The two statements taken together imply that in Dickens Heaven's power relative to Hell's is far greater than it is usually thought to be. Dickens thinks of good as supernatural in its curative power, whereas corruption is merely human and thus overmatched. What better news could a visionary offer? No wonder he's eternally popular! This is another point the movie misses, by leaving out the destruction of the infernal boys school Dotheboys Hall. The movie is symmetrical at any rate: it cuts off the top as well as the bottom of Dickens's moral picture.

Because of the Marxist tinge of Anglo-American literary criticism of the past 70 years, this whole question has been overlooked in favor of social critique, which is certainly present. (Marx is an especially tempting secondary source for Dickens because Marx lived in London from 1849 until his death and his observation of the English industrial economy went into Das Kapital, which he wrote there. The two men's outlooks, however, are not at all the same.) But whereas human effort can amend social institutions, it can only baffle but not eradicate vice. What could human activism do about the soul of the old miser Arthur Gride who, having paid Mr. Bray's debts to Ralph Nickleby on condition that Bray convince his 18-year-old daughter Madeline to marry him, in this passage selects a suit to be married in:

'The bottle-green,' said old Arthur; 'the bottle-green was a famous suit to wear, and I bought it very cheap at a pawnbroker's, and there was--he, he, he!--a tarnished shilling in the waistcoat pocket. To think that the pawnbroker shouldn't have known there was a shilling in it! I knew it! I felt it when I was examining the quality. Oh, what a dull dog of a pawnbroker! It was a lucky suit too, this bottle-green. The very day I put it on first, old Lord Mallowford was burnt to death in his bed, and all the post-obits [debts secured by expectation of inheritance] fell in. I'll be married in the bottle-green, Peg.'

Gride can't repent or reform, but the virtuous can block his actions. They do so out of what Dickens takes to be a natural desire to help the helpless. This ties the book to the 18th century novel of sensibility, in which the highest human faculty was held to be sympathy for other people, shown by the shedding of tears. The good men in Nicholas Nickleby are among the cryingest in English letters, but they don't just cry, they take the weak and mistreated under their wings, give them employment, enable them to carry themselves in the world with dignity. In Nicholas Nickleby vice is outmaneuvered by industrious charity and so you don't feel that it's incongruous to laugh at the book as hard as you do. My favorite passage of all is wacky in that English way that connects Dickens to Gilbert & Sullivan to the Ealing Studio comedies of the '40s and '50s to Monty Python. It is the showman Mr. Crummles's genealogy of his draught pony, which self-parodically extends Dickens's startling, vivid view of virtue and vice to the animal kingdom:

'Many and many is the circuit this pony has gone,' said Mr. Crummles, flicking him skilfully on the eyelid for old acquaintance' sake. 'He is quite one of us. His mother was on the stage.'

'Was she?' rejoined Nicholas.

'She ate apple-pie at a circus for upwards of fourteen years,' said the manager; 'fired pistols, and went to bed in a nightcap; and, in short, took the low comedy entirely. His father was a dancer.'

'Was he at all distinguished?'

'Not very,' said the manager. 'He was rather a low sort of pony. The fact is, he had been originally jobbed out by the day, and he never quite got over his old habits. He was clever in melodrama too, but too broad--too broad. When the mother died, he took the port-wine business.'

'The port-wine business!' cried Nicholas.

'Drinking port-wine with the clown,' said the manager; 'but he was greedy, and one night bit off the bowl of the glass, and choked himself, so his vulgarity was the death of him at last.'

If you haven't read Bleak House, do so. If you have, keep going.

Sex in Primetime

The NYT also has a very long article on the increasing amount of sexuality during primetime television.

Two-thirds of all shows from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. have some sexual content, ranging from talk about sex to depictions of sexual behavior. Four years ago Kaiser found the figure was about half that.

. . . .

The Kaiser study underscores what most viewers know intuitively: there is more sex on television than ever before. The reasons are obvious: sex sells, and the fevered competition between channels keeps pushing the limits. As the boundaries expand, viewers become increasingly inured to material that they not so long ago considered taboo.

Hmm... fair enough. But I think we can point to a single catalyst: reality tv.

Truth in Headlines

Everyone's favorite newspaper, the NY Times, is running an article titled, "NASA was Told in 1990 About Vulnerable Tiles." Call me paranoid about the Times, but this sounds accusatory. And it could very well be and it could very well be warranted--that is, until one reads the article. The first page actually does throw about some accusations:

the research does not appear to be widely understood in NASA. Yesterday afternoon, Maj. Gen. Michael C. Kostelnik, the deputy associate administrator for the space station and the shuttle — who oversees safety issues — was asked whether the tiles around the wheel wells were considered a particular safety issue.

"Not really that I'm aware of," he said. He described the protective tiles, which shed heat as the orbiter re-enters the atmosphere, as "a very robust system."

General Kostelnik joined the agency only last year.

Deeper into the article (very close to the end), though, one finds this:

NASA, the researchers say, took the warnings seriously.

"They did a lot of the things we suggested," Dr. Fischbeck said. "Mainly, they inspected the tiles in a different fashion. We said all tiles are not created equal in terms of risk. And so they started to inspect the ones in the most critical areas first."

Oh. So maybe a more accurate headline might be: "NASA was Told About Vulnerable Tiles in 1990; Made Changes in Response."

More pandering by the Times? No...

Somewhat fittingly, I have, on a blog called The Kitchen Cabinet, begun an extended discussion about the location of water faucets.

Yale-Harvard is the only true rivalry.

I also was confused by the Vennochi column in The Globe. I think it's a Boston thing.

Quote of the Day:
"Animated by excellence, informed by tradition and stoked by proximity, Duke versus North Carolina stands as the one rivalry all other rivalries secretly wish to be."
~ Sports Illustrated

Song of the Day:
"Fight Blue Devils, Fight"

Happy Birthday:
Hank Aaron
Barbara Hershey
Robert Peel
Roger Staubach
Adlai Stevenson

Joan Vennochi of The Boston Globe seems strangely troubled by the fact that John Kerry isn't really Irish.

According to The Fog of Warre, YLS Republicans may be starting a blog...

UPDATE: A glitch. Well, maybe that's for the best if they're aspiring to be like HLS's Ex Parte. Everytime I hear about Ex Parte, I think of Bramwell's Korematsu post.

Particularly funny stuff from Craig Kilborn last night:

Yesterday was Groundhog Day. The producers of "Joe Millionaire" came out of their offices, and that means six more weeks of whores.... Kathie Lee Gifford's poodle was eaten by a coyote. There's no joke there, I just thought America could use some good news.... A "Bachelorette" contestant was arrested at the airport and charged with cocaine possession. Airport security says they got suspicious when they saw Whitney Houston waiting for him at the terminal with a single rose.... Democrats were quick to point out that President Bush's budget creates a 2.2 billion dollar deficit. The White House quickly responded with "Hey, look over there -- it's Saddam Hussein!"

Sorry. Don't mind me.

The Chicago Tribune (reg. req'd) is running an op-ed today on the trend in playing judicial "gotcha" at Senate confirmation hearings:

Judicial nominations in the post-Bork era often descend into a game of "gotcha." It requires finding anything the appointee has ever said or done that is halfway controversial, blowing it far out of proportion, and using it to depict him or her as a rabid zealot or a conscious agent of evil.

The thing is, this really shouldn't come as any surprise. Legal thinking and strategy is very much the pursuit of mini-"gotchas." We focus on detail and minutiae, and pick at formalities. Oftentimes, the task is to find a small fissure in a legal argument or logical progression, and make it appear as though it is a gaping crack. See, for example, Professor Balkin's blog, where he engages in exactly such an approach. The law professor's approach in general is much more subtle than simply "gotcha!" but Socratic parries and ripostes, while more sophisticated perhaps, are essentially the same thing.

Would you know this was an Onion article if I didn't tell you it was?

Eugene finally speaks up on why the Volokhs have become a Horde. His reasonings are very similar to the reasons we considered before our recent expansion.

Woke up this morning wondering why cold water faucets are on the right and hot water faucets are on the left.

My own gut theory is that this is some right-handed bias that has become "codified" by tradition. Here is an explanation:

Cold water faucet handles already occupied the right--because most people are right-handed--before people had running hot water.

What I found more interesting in search for an answer is that the right-side cold water faucets have been literally codified. Here is an "Act relating to Water Faucets" from Kentucky.

Water faucets installed in a public restroom after the effective date of this Act shall be installed in a uniform manner so that, if there are two (2) or more faucets for a sink, the hot water faucet is on the left and the cold water faucet is on the right of the sink. . . . The same standards set out in subsection (1) shall apply to water faucets installed in private residences after the effective date of this Act unless the homeowner requests otherwise.

Odd.

UPDATE: Steve Jens suggests that this convention is good for when "you come across some foreign, unlabeled faucets, [since] you'd prefer not to have to ask someone or test which is which -- it's handy that you automatically know." Interesting. This assumes that the convention is international. Is it? This website seems to suggest it might not be. I don't remember what the faucets were like in England...

It's almost Valentine's Day and if you were thinking of buying sweets for your sweet you couldn't do better than to get a box of artisanal chocolates from Garrison Confections. Andrew Shotts, formerly the pastry chef at La Côte Basque and The Russian Tea Room, is the genius behind these bonbons, which are simultaneously the subtlest and most intense I have ever tasted. They always offer 12 flavors but change them four times a year, with the seasons, in boxes of 12 for $15 and of 24 for $30. They also have a Valentine's Day special, with flavors named after "legendary lovers"; the concept may be a little too Jackie Collins but the candy won't be. You can order by telephone, but it's more fun to go up to the kitchen at 119 West 23rd Street, Suite 1003 in Manhattan, to see the man himself in his habitat and glimpse a bit of the process.

Quote of the Day:
"Trust the train, Mademoiselle, for it is le bon Dieu who drives it."
~ "Hercule Poirot," The Mystery of the Blue Train

Song of the Day:
Brooks and Dunn, "Rock My World (Little Country Girl)"

Happy Birthday:
Alice Cooper
Betty Friedan
Charles Lindbergh
Rosa Parks
Dan Quayle
Bertrand Wicholas (1/2)

John Jenkins of Paladin's Pad e-mails about the great recommendation controversy:

Regarding the professor at Texas Tech, your description of what he is doing and why is a little short. He's refusing to write letters of recommendation based upon whether or not the student is willing to admit belief in the theory of evolution, irrespective of the student's knowledge of evolution. If he were to make the reverse statement, that he would be unwilling to offer letters of recommendation for those who did not believe creationism, he would be vilified.

Yes, he would be vilified, and rightly so. That's because evolution and creationism very properly don't have equal status in the scientific community. The claims of some creationists to the contrary, we're not talking about two competing but equally plausible accounts of how we got here. It's science versus a worldview that rejects science.

I'm not saying that all biology professors should set the same conditions for writing recommendations that this professor has. But I think he's entirely justified in his refusal to recommend people for graduate study who are, in his reasoned estimation, not equipped to be good scientists.

Eugene Volokh has much more on this controversy.

Lobster Liberators.

This is the first I've ever heard of animal rights groups attacking seafood distributors (from Chicago Tribune reg. req'd). I've always thought lobsters and other non-mammal seafood was relatively uncontroversial.

McDonald's

A magnet for bizarre lawsuits. Here's the latest one.

This reminds me of a very funny SNL spoof:

Announcer: McDonald's new Big N' Tasty! It's what you crave! The Big N' Tasty is a juicy quarter-pound all-beef patty, served with crisp lettuce and tomato on a sesame seed bun!

Jive Voice: Can you taste it?

Announcer: Mmm-hmm! Big and tasty!

Voiceover: In response to pending legal action, the McDonald's Corporation would like to present the following statement:

[ statements over SUPER ]

"The Big N' Tasty Sandwich is food."

"Scientific studies suggest that excessive consumption of food may cause weight gain. In other words, if you stuff your greasy pie hole non-stop, you’re probably going to pork up."

"The McDonald's Corporation had previously believed that this was obvious to all but very small children and morons. Since children and morons are valued customers of McDonald's Corporation, we would like to point out other potential risks that could be associated with the Big N' Tasty."

"The Big N' Tasty is intended to be eaten. Complications may arise from shoving the Big N' Tasty up your nose. Dropping the Big N' Tasty from extremely tall buildings may cause the Big N' Tasty to achieve sufficient terminal velocity, to injure innocent people below."

There's lots more...

Movie Reviews by Alan Dale:

The Last King of Scotland

Flags of Our Fathers

Infamous

The Departed

Ask the Dust

Shortbus

The Loved One (book/film)

World Trade Center

The Break-Up
Friends With Money

Nacho Libre

The Great New Wonderful

Mikey and Nicky

The Devil Wears Prada

The Proposition

The Heartbreak Kid
The Graduate

United 93
Bloody Sunday

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days
The Prisoner
Guilty of Treason

16 Blocks

Fateless
Life Is Beautiful
Naked Among Wolves
Kapò

Syriana
Munich

Zelig
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Melinda and Melinda
Match Point

Brokeback Mountain

Pride & Prejudice
Oliver Twist
Knife in the Water

Capote
Walk the Line

Sarah Silverman: Jesus Is Magic

North Country

Good Night, and Good Luck.

Flightplan
The Lady Vanishes
Proof

Separate Lies

Tony Takitani

The Constant Gardener
Lord of War

March of the Penguins
Grizzly Man

Happy Endings

The Beat That My Heart Skipped

Mysterious Skin

House of Sand and Fog
Crash

The Milky Way

Palindromes
Viridiana

Oldboy
Sin City

The Upside of Anger

Downfall

Fear and Trembling

Nobody Knows

Million Dollar Baby

Finding Neverland

Ray
Kinsey
The Aviator

Hotel Rwanda

Bad Education

Beyond the Sea

House of Flying Daggers

Vera Drake

Sideways
We Don't Live Here Anymore

I ♥ Huckabees

Laws of Attraction
The Forgotten

The Raspberry Reich

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
Napoleon Dynamite
Shaun of the Dead
Wimbledon
Hero
A Dirty Shame

Vile Bodies (book)
Bright Young Things

Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle
The Manchurian Candidate
Collateral

The Village

Maria Full of Grace

De-Lovely

Before Sunset

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

The Day After Tomorrow

The Saddest Music in the World

I'm Not Scared

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

50 First Dates
The Big Bounce
Starsky & Hutch
The Dreamers
Against the Ropes
Secret Window
Intermission
Ripley's Game

The Passion of the Christ

Miracle
The Company

Cold Mountain

Monster

Big Fish

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

The Lord of the Rings

The Cooler
21 Grams

Elephant

Bad Santa

Elf
The Station Agent

Shattered Glass

Wonderland

In the Cut

Kill Bill, Vol. 1

Mystic River

Intolerable Cruelty
Out of Time

Under the Tuscan Sun

Lost in Translation

American Splendor

Dirty Pretty Things

Swimming Pool

Man on the Train

28 Days Later

Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle

Dark Blue

Hollywood Homicide

The Italian Job

Bruce Almighty

Long Day's Journey into Night (theater/movie review)

Down with Love

A Mighty Wind

Better Luck Tomorrow

X2

The Man Without a Past

Confidence

Anger Management

The Good Thief

Phone Booth

Laurel Canyon

Spider

View from the Top

Gone With the Wind

High Noon and Shane

Talk to Her

The Quiet American

Busby Berkeley (choreographer)

The Pink Panther

The Pianist

About Schmidt

The Hours

Josephine Baker (actress)

Nicholas Nickleby (book)

The Recruit

Frida

Another good article about Google, this one from the Boston Globe.

A biology professor at Texas Tech University refuses to write letters of recommendation for postgraduate studies for students who do not believe in evolution. He explains this requirement on his website.

An NYT article on this begins this way:

A biology professor who insists that his students accept the tenets of human evolution has found himself the subject of Justice Department scrutiny.

But that's not quite right, is it? The professor isn't refusing to teach students who don't believe in evolution; he's refusing to recommend them for graduate study in biomedical sciences because in his opinion they will not make good scientists. Surely that's his right.

Were one only to read blogs and live on the Internet, one might think that my sense about the difference between Columbia and Challenger was incorrect. The blogosphere continues to mourn, as does the nation according to the Internet. My experience in the real world, however, seems quite different. Maybe it's just that I was younger during the Challenger disaster. Maybe the world seemed more affected because I was in elementary school and the Challenger had had McAuliffe aboard--that is, my world, which was primarily school and teachers, was more intimately affected. Dunno--it just seems like the world here has moved on far more quickly and been far less deeply affected than before.

I'm still sad. But we have tried to blog some different things to help move life along--as it always must.

China watch:

Speaking of the CIA, it looks like they are branching out.

Alias...

A few theories and remarks after last night's episode:
(1) Maybe evil Francie was morphed from Will! Have we seen him? I think not.
(2) I so thought that the first Ethan Hawke character (the one the CIA rescued) was the evil one. I mean, his explanations had Sloan written all over them--dead fiance, pressures of living double lives...
(3) I asked this last week and I'll ask it again: Where's Irina?
(4) Okay--what happened to the fact that Vaughn is not field trained?
(5) Lily was just saying a few weeks ago that she wanted Sidney and Vaughn to get together so they could be a spy couple. Looks like she got her wish. I wonder if they lost some viewers because that tension is gone...
(6) Ethan Hawke and now Christian Slater? Who's next? Johnny Depp?

John Grisham's latest novel, The King of Torts, is a brief against what's popularly known as ambulance-chasing. A Washington Post reviewer thinks it's one-sided:

Grisham's view of the tort lawyers is summed up by an honest old lawyer: "Class actions are a fraud, at least the way you and your pals handle them. Mass torts are a scam, a consumer rip-off, a lottery driven by greed that will one day harm all of us."... Insofar as a bestselling novel can have an impact on political opinion, "The King of Torts" is a propaganda victory for the White House, the corporations, the insurance companies and all those who want to see legislation that caps jury verdicts and otherwise discourages class actions.

The book-buying public doesn't seem to mind. The novel is currently #2 on Amazon's best-seller list.

Movie Review

A confusing plot isn't a knock against a CIA movie like The Recruit, it's a prerequisite and in any case doesn't prevent enjoyment. The 26-year-old Irish actor Colin Farrell plays an MIT computer wiz recruited by Al Pacino to be something called a NOC. It doesn't matter whether NOCs exist--the plot derives from medieval romance and is related to Merlin's training of young Arthur, or Trevrizent's training of Parzival, or, for that matter, Harry Potter's being taken under the wing of Hagrid, including the mysterious disruptions in the relationships of the young protagonists and their powerful parents. The advantage in The Recruit is that the hero is old enough to be sexually active; he has a competitive/cooperative relationship with Bridget Moynahan as his love interest both at school and in the field. Sex comes off as the most dangerous weapon in the CIA's mindgame arsenal.

Colin Farrell, the latest commonwealth import into American movies, is the best reason to see the movie. (He's not as memorable as my freaky favorite, Guy Pearce, of L.A. Confidential and Memento, but then the part hardly allows for it.) As you could guess, the fact that the character is on the brink of being unacceptable for the CIA is what makes him perfect for the CIA. He has to be an edgy risk-taker, someone on the verge of losing control, competitive, angry, hurting. Almost all young male stars end up playing a schematic action role like this--lots of characteristics but really no character--but I can't think of any who could play it straight as Farrell does and be as interesting. He doesn't try to camp it up, he inhabits it, giving us all the pent-up frustration, the passion, the longing, etc., in simple, unselfconscious bursts. He's essentially a good boy with the brooding push of a bad boy, which enables him to be earnest without being dull. He's especially good taunting another trainee while bluffing during a card game, and he's always convincingly into the love scenes. Altogether he's perfect as a kid who is able to stay centered while events and his own emotionality make his head spin. Keeping an eye on Farrell, not hard in itself, enables you to fly right past the details that don't make sense (the holder of a security pass sneaking around CIA offices during working hours instead of just going in at night) and the hokey inaction suspense techniques (waiting for computer programs to download, the updated version of the old favorite of rummaging through file cabinets).

What's the movie's view of the CIA? The only explicit statement is when Farrell says to Pacino early on that the CIA was sleeping on the job when we needed them most, i.e., right before September 11. But the assumption underlying this criticism is that the CIA's reason for existing is alert defense not imperialist mayhem. It is also to say that the CIA has not been active enough in the world. Overall, the script and Farrell's performance then pink up the Agency's image, making spycraft seem like glamorous work for brainy-and-intuitive, athletic, hot young guys and girls. Black Hawk Down was a graphic combat picture that actually seemed like it could recruit for the military because the downside, the risk of injury and death, is what ennobles soldiering. The fact that your failure can put not only yourself but your operation mates, and your country, at risk, is what makes it a personal test of the kind that makes people want to step up to the plate. The downside with the CIA is more complex, in part because the secretiveness is so Byzantine that the operative himself may not be sure what he's really up to, whether it's good or evil or "just" a test. (Plus you're warned from the get-go that your successes will remain anonymous.) But in The Recruit evil within the CIA isn't treated as endemic to the institution; it's personal, even if a by-product of CIA operations. These comments just derive from my sensitivity to rote anti-Americanism. The movie is entirely about individuals within the institution not the institution itself.

Quote of the Day:
"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise – surprise and fear… fear and surprise… our two weapons are fear and surprise – and ruthless efficiency… our three weapons are fear and surprise and ruthless efficiency and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope… our four… no… Amongst our weapons – amongst our weaponry – are such elements as fear, surprise… I'll come in again."
~ Monty Python's Flying Circus

Song of the Day:
Enrique Iglesias, "Don't Turn Out the Lights"

Happy Birthday:
Jason Barclay
Morgan Fairchild
Horace Greeley
Felix Mendelssohn
James Michener
Gertrude Stein

Gregg Easterbrook says we must end the space shuttle program.

Superb column by Tom Friedman in today's NYT on the roots of European opposition to war:

"Power corrupts, but so does weakness," said Josef Joffe, editor of Germany's Die Zeit newspaper. "And absolute weakness corrupts absolutely. We are now living through the most critical watershed of the postwar period, with enormous moral and strategic issues at stake, and the only answer many Europeans offer is to constrain and contain American power. So by default they end up on the side of Saddam, in an intellectually corrupt position."

Friedman, who was just at Davos, writes that "Europe's cynicism and insecurity, masquerading as moral superiority, is insufferable."

The New York Times uses yesterday's Duke-Connecticut women's basketball game as an excuse to sing the praises of Title IX.

Quote of the Day:
"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."
~ Evelyn Waugh

Song of the Day:
Martina McBride, "Independence Day"

Happy Birthday:
Garth Brooks
Farrah Fawcett
James Joyce
Ayn Rand

Is this the end of the space program?

This question will be blogged endlessly, I'm sure, but I have something different to add. Part of the problem today is the relatively low profile the space program has assumed. Back in 1986, space was still a big deal. I remember making a model of Columbia out of manilla folders. I was quite proud of it. In the seventeen years since, space exploration just hasn't held the public fancy. And now, thrust back into the limelight, the question will be: What have you been doing that makes you worthwhile? It will be hard to explain that though much of the space program now involves contract experiments, the scientific experiments that take place in space are invaluable. Perhaps it is important to think about the following when we consider the Columbia accident: NASA has never lost an astronaut in space. I have the feeling that there is a significant difference to the public psyche between losing an astronaut here on Earth (or in its atmosphere) and losing an astronaut in space. They are some wicked smart people there at NASA--they've done a good job so far, let's not stop them now.

Volokh has gone black and white for the day. It is indeed a dark day.

Here is a transcript of President Bush's remarks this afternoon.

I didn't see him deliver it, but I like it. And I wonder if whoever wrote it was looking at Ronald Reagan's remarks after the Challenger explosion. Reagan's speech ended this way:

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honoured us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and "slipped the surly bonds of earth" to "touch the face of God."

The two speeches are very similar. Peggy Noonan wrote Reagan's, and there's a chapter about Challenger in her first book. The speech, unlike many of her speeches, survived the staffing process nearly intact:

It went almost as written. The staffing process had no time to make it bad. The worst edit -- which Ben [Elliot, head of speechwriting] fought off -- in fact it was the worst edit I received in all my time in the White House -- was from a pudgy young NSC mover who told me to change the quote at the end from "touch the face of God" to "reach out and touch someone -- touch the face of God." He felt this was eloquent. He'd heard it in a commercial. I took it to Ben and said, I'll kill, I'll kill, I'll kill him if this gets through. Ben, alarmed, assured me he would explain if pressed that you don't really change a quotation from a poem in this manner.

The speech turned out to be one of the most famous of Reagan's presidency.

Will people remember today the way they remember January 28, 1986? I doubt it. The flavor of the day just doesn't seem the same. And I cannot fault people for that--our country has suffered far greater tragedies in the seventeen years that have passed. I hope, though, that we do not let this diminished grief carryover into diminished respect (for both the astronauts and for the space program). In particular, let us not be so jaded as to not regard this as a national tragedy. Let us not be so foolish as to let this affect our need for a space program. And let us not be so rash and so superficial as to lay reckless and ridiculous blame. Instapundit reports early such reactions (a Canadian reporter blaming "American arrogance"). The words of ModerateLeft are so eloquent that the naysayers and the hotheads do not even deserve the response:

If it is arrogant to risk our lives for the possibility of a better future for all mankind, we are arrogant.

Mankind is arrogant. We believe foolish things--that we may one day cure cancer, that we may one day develop new forms of energy, that we may one day walk on Mars. We believe these foolish things, and we dedicate ourselves to achieving them. How ridiculous. How arrogant.

And people die for these things. And people are injured for life. The astronauts of Apollo 1, and the Challenger, and now, sadly, the Columbia have died for the arrogant belief that we can be more than we are, that we can walk on the moon, that we can touch the stars.

. . . .

So call us arrogant for building the space shuttle. Call the men and woman who gave their lives today arrogant for believing they could fly to space and return to tell about it. But don't call us wrong. For this arrogance defines humanity. And I would rather our species be arrogant than afraid.

Indeed.

I will take the day to honor those who helped us believe that there is something bigger than ourselves, understand that our horizons reach farther than we can comprehend, and see how small the world truly is.

UPDATE: My worst fears realized: conspiracy theories and shuttle debris on E-bay.

Does it sound to anybody else like John Lott is just a little... strange? Now it's come out that he's got a phony identity out there defending him on Internet discussion boards. (Via InstaPundit.)

The NYT reports on a war of words heating up between Duke students and UConn women's basketball coach Geno Auriemma over tonight's much-anticipated game:

The Cameron Crazies have been known to be merciless in riding opponents to the point of distraction. Auriemma should expect the same treatment... the Crazies have discovered that Auriemma's given name is Luigi, a name they have heard he doesn't like. He's going to hear it a lot Saturday night.

I am not a huge fan of women's basketball, but as someone says in the article, "in general, the Duke students have been excited about every kind of sport." I'll watch a croquet match if it's between Duke and a hated opponent, and UConn is right up there. The game is at 7:00 on espn2.

Jack Balkin reports on the Roe v. Wade conference he organized here at YLS yesterday.

Tense days make you snap at little things (and I'm typing while listening to coverage of the horrific shuttle Columbia disaster), but I'm tired of hearing people arguing about whether UN inspectors have found the "smoking gun" in Iraq. This is how I understand the metaphor: you hear a shot and run into a room to find a corpse bleeding from a bullethole and a person standing over the corpse holding a smoking gun. You've come in so soon after the crime was committed that the physical evidence is still in the murderer's hands emitting proof of his guilt. You haven't prevented the crime, you've simply seen physical evidence in a context that establishes his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. This does not apply to the weapons inspections in Iraq. According to Hans Blix's report (27 January 2003), "Inspection is not a game of 'catch as catch can'. Rather, as I noted, it is a process of verification for the purpose of creating confidence. It is not built upon the premise of trust. Rather, it is designed to lead to trust, if there is both openness to the inspectors and action to present them with items to destroy or credible evidence about the absence of any such items." This means that UN Resolution 1441 puts the burden of proof on Iraq to establish compliance with the disarmament required by the 1991 truce. This further means that inspectors are not looking for a smoking gun, but merely a loaded one, which, as Blix notes, was found: "The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions." Waiting until we have a smoking gun would mean waiting until Saddam has used one of these chemical weapons he's been hiding, though it's conceivable that even then appeasers would find some reason to oppose the use of military force. The difference between a loaded gun and a smoking gun is the difference between September 1938 and September 1939. The British seem to have learned from history even if the French haven't.

Closer to home: What is the point of Red Velvet cake? I've tried it several times in Manhattan, and even made one for Christmas from a recipe I got off the internet, and it just tasted red. You put two full bottles of red food coloring in--does that prevent it from having taste? Or is it that you couldn't put enough cocoa in to give it flavor without muddying the color? The buttermilk added nothing to the flavor that I could tell. This is important.

Happy New Year. It is the year of the ram. The Ram, not the goat, or the sheep. Google today (only!) has a picture of ram.

Quote of the Day:
"I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand."
~ Confucius

Song of the Day:
The Vapors, "Turning Japanese"

Happy Birthday:
Clark Gable
Langston Hughes
Boris Yeltsin