Sunday, December 31, 2006

An embarrassingly predictable opinion.

Cheney hails Ford's pardon of Nixon

"Ford's decision to pardon Richard Nixon, so divisive at the time that it probably cost him the 1976 election, was dealt with squarely in his funeral services by his old chief of staff, Vice President Dick Cheney.

"'It was this man, Gerald R. Ford, who led our republic safely though a crisis that could have turned to catastrophe,' said Cheney, speaking in the Capitol Rotunda where Ford's body rested. 'Gerald Ford was almost alone in understanding that there can be no healing without pardon.'"


With all due respect to Vice-President Cheney (which at this stage is little), the notion that pardoning Nixon served anybody but Nixon himself is, to put it kindly, grotesque. It buried information that the American public deserved and needed to know about the extremes of corruption to which a popularly elected president can sink. It allowed a truly twisted individual to lapse into semi-respectable retirement instead of facing internment in a prison or mental institution, whichever the judge found more suitable. It rendered Nixon's assertion "If the president does it, it's not a crime" into a functional truth. It healed nothing -- unless a thin layer of dirt may be said to "heal" a landfill by masking it. It was a great misfortune for America, no matter how idiotically well-meant the intention, and will forever doom Gerald Ford's legacy as one of mediocrity.

Ford, we are willing to allow, was not a bad man, and perhaps, in a low-key way, might have made a decent administrator if by accident he should have ascended to the office at a different juncture. The unfortunate truth is that he was the wrong man at the wrong time. So be it. Rest in peace.

On a related note, we recently screened the 1984 Robert Altman film Secret Honor, a fictional presentation of an evening alone with Richard M. Nixon. The movie, adapted from a play, has a certain stagey quality, and the filming process (16mm blown up to 35mm) lends a slightly 1970s detective-show look to the photography. That said, Phillip Baker Hall gives one of the most mesmerizing performances we have seen in cinema. His Nixon -- inarticulate, at times raving, frighteningly volatile -- runs the gamut from madly comic to horrifyingly touching. The film blends a great deal of fact with a tiny amount of invention, but so powerful is the result one wonders why the invention was necessary: the facts are insane enough. Conspiracy buffs will enjoy the references to such topical subjects as Bohemian Grove and the future President Goerge H. W. Bush, Nixon buffs will amuse themselves by counting all the bases covered, and no one can fail to be impressed by Mr. Hall's brilliant, repulsive, terrifying conviction, in the greatest tragic role written by our times.


"Now the dogcatcher is king!"
--Secret Honor

"Thou hast seen a farmer's dog bark at a beggar? An the creature run from the cur, there thou mightst behold the great image of authority. A dog's obeyed in office."
--King Lear

Monday, December 25, 2006

No peace for the wicked.

Mikhail Bulgakov's great satirical novel The Master and Margarita never saw print during his lifetime; using Christ and the Devil to mock the corrupt culture of Moscow was perhaps not the wisest gambit for publication under Stalin. Bulgakov did not catch many breaks at all as a writer -- his plays were frequently closed in rehearsal and his best writing was relegated to samizdat. His request to emigrate was met by a personal call from Country Joe himself. (Stalin said no.) He died at 49 of an inherited kidney disease.

Still, it is comforting to think that by now at least, sixty years after his premature passing, his reputation is secure:


"A museum dedicated to a Russian writer condemned by the Orthodox church for his authorship of a "Satanic gospel" has been largely destroyed, an official told AFP...

"The Orthodox church said that the book, not published until 26 years after Bulgakov's death in 1940, was 'the fifth gospel, that of Satan.'

"According to Svetlana Kostina, deputy director of the museum, Alexander Morozov, a bitter critic of Bulgakov's work, which he condemned as Satanic, last Thursday locked himself in the museum, situated on the ground floor of a building and demanded that it be evicted.

"He 'threw many objects out of the window, including valuable illustrations of Bulgakov's works, signed by great Russian artists, not to mention several computers,' she said.

"About half the contents were damaged.

"Morozov had been campaigning for years against the presence of the museum, which looks on to a park where the writer lived and where he placed the action of 'The Master and Margarita.'"


It seems there's no pleasing anybody. Christianity and Stalinism are two seemingly opposing doctrines; it's certainly good to know that everyone can find a common ground.

The source of the trouble, it would seem, are the passages that recreate the Master's novel-within-the-novel about the life of Pontius Pilate. The character of Christ, here called Ha-Nostri, comes across as warm, human, appealing, and strangely real in these sections, which must be the trouble. That and the surreal mayhem the Devil and his associates (watch out for that gun-toting cat) unleash upon the Moscow of the 1920s make for an enormously enjoyable read, even for atheists.

But it would seem that neither the book nor Bulgakov mix well with doctrines. The ironies of this new defilement of his memory are layered too rich for further comment. We like to think it would have made a fine, mordantly funny play -- for the right author:


Pilate said in Greek, "So you intended to destroy the temple building and have incited the people to do so?"

Terror flashed across the prisoner's face... "Never in my life, hegemon, have I intended to destroy the temple. Nor have I ever tried to persuade anyone to do such a senseless thing."

"People of all kinds are streaming into the city for the feast day. Among them there are magicians, seers, astrologers, and murderers," said the Procurator in a monotone. "There are also liars. You, for instance, are a liar. It is clearly written down: 'He incited people to destroy the temple.' Witnesses said so."

"These good people," the prisoner began, and hastily adding, "hegemon," he went on, "are unlearned and have confused everything I have said. I am beginning to fear that this confusion will last a very long time.


--The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov, 1891-1950.

Sunday, December 24, 2006

Church and state and fire.

On the face of it, a classic case of overreaction:


"A man used flammable liquid to light himself on fire, apparently to protest a San Joaquin Valley school district's decision to change the names of winter and spring breaks to Christmas and Easter vacation.

"The man, who was not immediately identified, on Friday also set fire to a Christmas tree, an American flag and a revolutionary flag replica, said Fire Captain Garth Milam."


... and obviously a gentleman not completely sound of mind. (For the record, in case you didn't follow the link, he survived.) The act was clearly inspired by the famous Vietnam-era incidents in which protesters set themselves afire. But while we recommend self-immolation for nobody, in the context of war such actions at least make a certain skewed sense: real lives are being lost, real blood is being shed. Igniting oneself over purely symbolic issues over church and state, the names of holidays for example, smacks of false drama.

But how soon for us all?

Oh yes, we can smell your skepticism from here, sour as old sweat. Only an idiot or a lunatic would go to such extremes, you say -- lost in a flame-colored dream, sucking the rich scent of gas into his lungs as he stares at the sky, only to awaken to find one Garth Milam, a fine name that, frowning as he busily hoses the maniac down.

And yet a fact lost in the slow crumble of George W. Bush, a decline theoretically symbolized by the midterms (but don't get your hopes up, the opposition is only one health emergency away from losing the Senate again, and anyway no matter what the party a politician is just that, no more or less -- damn these long parentheticals) is that our beloved nation of Amerikansas has been for the past six years on the brink of becoming the Khristian equivalent of the future Iraq -- that is to say, a democracy in name but a theocracy in practice.

Conservative America has, from the election of Richard Milhaus Nixon on, roiled in fury over the social evolutions of the 1960s. Liberal America has, like a closeted gay Republican, alternately flirted with those same values and turned away in shame. The term "hippie" has become a cultural joke, evoking a mental image as quaint as the Disco Stu character of The Simpsons -- a peace symbol, granny glasses, waist-length hair, the musky odors of marijuana use, the blunt-edged voice of Tommy Chong.

What has been forgotten on both sides is that those changes occurred for a reason: the terrifying stultification of the 1950s, when Cold War fears made the smallest of fashion choices a political decision, and Elvis Presley's hips looked as dangerous as the hammer and sickle. Coming on top of the unrestrained wartime propaganda of the 1940s, the future, to some, must have looked as endless and flat as the Nebraska skyline.

Faith in God, faith in the flag, faith in Mom and Pop -- pleasant ideas, no? Those of us who attended public schools, think back for a moment, take a moment to remember rising every single morning to say the Pledge of Allegiance, the feeling of our lead-heavy hands pressed to our pectorals, our bleary adolescent eyes trying hard to wander away from that endless, inescapable red-white-blue, mumbling, murmuring, watching with loathing that one bright-eyed moron in the front row, who every day spoke those words with the same chipper reverence -- God how we hated him! The little prick with his shirt buttoned to the Adam's apple. Understand now: he is your leader. He has succeeded, in all his painful simplicity, whereas you, you, you sad-eyed squirming little dissident, where have you gotten, for all your canny doubts? That ass-kissing fool you detested so badly has scored the White House, the Supreme Court, until recently (and perhaps still) the Congress. Where are you, smarter-than?

A terrorist may blow you up; an oppressive culture smothers you, inch by inch, until the boredom and resentment become a tangible poison of the soul. Has anyone asked whether suicide bombers from Islamic theocracies are motivated not only by hatred of their victims, but of subconscious hatred of their own lives, bounded on all sides by fundamentalism, dogma, and a compulsorily simplistic world-view that subconsciously they know to be more complex? Doesn't Heaven sound better than the endless pressure of a vise?

Let us be honest, for once: we are all intelligent enough to sense, no matter how rigid our background, that the concepts of God, Christ, Allah, Muhammed, Heaven, Hell, and all the rest are, well, just a little bit fishy. Likewise, in the depths of our hearts lie doubts as to whether "our country right or wrong" is really and truly always the best policy. And, deep inside, we ALL need a break from these creepy, ugly brain-crushing dogmas, before we blow ourselves up for one side of the issue or another.

Trust us. If our lives and society become anymore boring, homogenized, and depressingly reverent and respectful, we will all be reaching for the matches.

Saturday, December 23, 2006

Against propaganda.

A patently unreliable news story suggests that those calling themselves "optimists" may live longer lives.

"Optimists may enjoy longer lives than people with a dimmer outlook on the future, a long-term study suggests."

They're probably just being optimistic. We submit that we pessimists more correctly comprehend the odds life stacks against us, and so are logically less likely to engage in ostentatious, needlessly dangerous activities such as bungee jumping, skydiving, pole-vaulting and bare-knuckle boxing.

Example: two drivers proceed through a vast and trackless desert; the gasometer hovers just above E. Both see a sign that says "Last chance for gas, 100 MI." The smart pessimist stops, thinks "I assume I will be overcharged," and thus buys the bare minimum of gas required to cover the distance, knowing he is covered whether or not the sign is true. The smart optimist slows, thinks, "I might be overcharged," and then thinks, "My car always says E for a good long while before the gas runs out, and besides, there will most likely be another option at a closer distance." He then drives on, carefree and probably whistling. Ten bucks on whose jolly eyes the vultures will be plucking from their sockets.

But, being pessimists, we must also assume that the study is correct and we will probably die sooner. (It's such a paradox being us.) We wish our opposition well, then: the optimists may settle back for their marginally longer existence: bingo night, loud and brashly cheerful assisted-living attendants, and the blissful ignorance of Must-See TV. Enjoy!

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Authority's nightmares.

The odd story of John Lennon's FBI files, in which the FBI refused release after claiming for 25 years "that an unnamed foreign government secretly provided the information, and releasing the documents could lead to diplomatic, political or economic retaliation against the United States," poses a small riddle. Given the apparently innocuous nature of the information therein, why on earth should the FBI have kicked up such a fuss?

Our three guesses:

1. A rogue John Lennon fan within the agency wished to suppress information he or she saw as being embarrassing to the pop star. Estimated probability: low.

2. Information of genuine sensitivity was once contained in the file, but discreetly removed and shredded before release. Estimated probability: still low but slightly higher.

3. The FBI felt embarrassed at once again exposing their own ridiculous paranoia about the "counterculture," and the many irrelevancies this led them to collect against people better-liked than themselves. Estimated probability: high.

Lennon's mass appeal is arguably the greatest among the many famous people the US government has, over the years, classed as "suspicious" or worthy of surveillance. The FBI, CIA, and the government in general have always found it difficult to admit the superstitious sense of power that they attach to art and pop culture. They've learned from the best in the game: if Stalin couldn't whistle it, it wasn't music, as the saying went -- and therefore dangerous. (Stalin effectively forbade performances of Hamlet for almost fifteen years before his death; the play bugged him for some reason.) Hitler had his "degenerate" modern painters to rail about; Greil Marcus, among others, has found significance in his early denunciation of the Dadaists.

A backbeat, a splatter, a man in black. The nightmares of Authority are full of them, still are. The highest goal of power is the control of the subconscious, something they have never quite attained. In our dreams, for the moment, we remain free.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Doubt, and why it occurs.

After several days of distractions and reorganization here at DHAIP, we returned to our blog with fresh eyes, and experienced a certain sense of bemused puzzlement over our last post, which seemed oddly random in focus, out of nowhere you might even say. Ever on the alert for subconscious tremblings from within, we immediately plunged into self-analysis.

Strange, you may say? Yes, but it's the way we work. If we have a motto here at DHAIP -- we don't but we're suggesting that you pretend -- then that motto would declare: "Trust your subconscious. It always knows when something's wrong."

Why, in other words, did we bring up a six-year-old, barely substantiated minor news item that has significance only to what are generally considered the "fringe element" of conspiracy theorists?

Put simply the story, on some level, bothered us. Before our patient readers begin snorting and scoffing, let us point out that we do not necessarily suggest that anything happened on September 11, 2001 beyond what the "official story" (as it is derogatorily known among the theorists) has to tell us. But for whatever reason we find ourselves, over and over again, drawn to those nagging details, oh you know them all by now, as familiar as the blurred figures in the Zapruder film: the slow response of the air defense, the molten steel, the pancake collapses, the Building 7 conundrum, the strangely uninformative Pentagon security cameras and the oddly small hole, etc, so forth -- you've heard them all. They even made it onto South Park.

But why? It is certainly not difficult to believe that fanatical and determined terrorists should wish to carry out such an act, nor is it difficult to believe that through a combination of luck on their part and poor leadership on ours, that they should by some fluke succeed. And yet, within the body politic, there are a great many people, many of whom seem quite sane, readier to accept a stranger idea: that someone else should wish to perpetrate such a bizarre crime, and then to blame it on the terrorists as justification for Lord-knows-what. The Reichstag fire, as it were.

Now given that 60% of Americans, according to certain polls, believe that the world was created by God less than ten thousand years ago, along with humans in their present form, and that Darwin was just high or something, this fact may not seem very telling. Yet those Biblical beliefs are the stubborn holdover of hundreds of years, millenia even, of religious dogma; they have roots, deep ones. There is no comparable tradition to explain our mass willingness to embrace conspiracy theory -- except that, with atrocities of the scale of the Holocaust still in our visual memory, our cynicism about ourselves as a species is perhaps at an all time high, or low, as you wish.

Hence we have drawn up a list of possible answers to the question of why doubting 9/11 has become so fashionable:

1. Guilt. The sad fact is that our nation has committed some grievous crimes during its relatively short life, generally in the name of freedom and democracy. As part of our past diplomatic chess games, the Cold War most notably, we have supported monsters, overthrown lawful governments, seized the territory of others without recompense, bombed the helpless, and even, despite our recent rhetoric, funded and encouraged a great many terrorists. Like Dorian Gray, we have striven despite these crimes, to see always in the mirror the fresh-faced goodness of our youth. But soul-sickness and hypocrisy catches up, always, and with the arrival of George W. Bush the illusion has rotted too hollow to be maintained. Thus, like a Dostoevsky character, we fantasize our own complicity in our ills, as a form of psychological penance.

2. Boredom. Modern life is boring, let us confess it. Our market-governed media, with all the star-studded entertainment it provides, cannot begin to fill the void of lives that are doomed to be unfulfilled. There is nothing satisfying or fulfilling about working for the corporations most of us work for, by set laws and according to approved paths, except as a sort of game, futile in the extreme, to see how ably we can provide for our retirement and family. Then comes death. A billion books entitled Who Moved My Cheese or Your Path to Effectiveness cannot make such a way of life a matter of intrigue or fascination. The flashiest software cannot disguise the dullness of its function. No video game can provide a thrill great enough to compensate for the emptiness that descends when the game has done. Thus a tragedy in "real life" becomes an object of morbid curiosity, a scab that can be picked at and dwelt on and worried about endlessly. One version is not enough to work with. There must be multiples.

3. Wish-fulfillment. We have always believed that most Americans secretly long for great destruction and worldwide disaster, for both the reasons listed above. Thus they enjoy planning it out in their heads, and see no reason why those with the power to act on their fantasies would not do so.

4. A sense of mass unreality. We're working on this one. It has something to do with the success of the Matrix films, World of Warcraft addiction, and fear of death. We'll present it when it's polished, but you can probably divine the gist.

5. A genuine anomaly. This would mean that something is in fact wrong with the "official story," something which we have all subconsciously sensed but have not as yet put our fingers on. The many and various theories that have evolved, even the most insane and complicated ones, are therefore distorted reflections of some dark, complex truth. Perhaps by studying them we could thus arrive at a realistic shape.

Let us then be truthful. We at DHAIP, after taking an internal poll, will here make a small confession. To our immense surprise, seventy-five percent of us believe that the United States government, and possibly other governments as well, had some prior knowledge of what was to happen. Whether such knowledge was enough to prevent anything, we do not know. In addition:

Thirty percent think that there was specific knowledge not acted upon. Eighteen percent feel that the inaction was deliberate. Six percent believe that there was some sort of active American participation in the attack. And two percent blame Kevin Federline.

Despite all this, we remain committed to neutrality on the topic, and having expressed our private idiosyncracies, we will put them aside, and now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

We apologize for the length of this post, but we felt the need to clear the air -- how fresh it seems now!

Friday, December 08, 2006

Infoflux and conspiracy theory.

(A perhaps unnecessary disclaimer, but safety first: we here at DHAIP make no claims for the truth of that which follows, nor are we attempting to forward any of the agendas mentioned herein. Our motives are those of intellectual curiosity and open debate. We believe that in dealing with sensitive topics such as anti-Semitism, the national perception of September 11, and conspiracy theory, it is better to defuse misconception with openness and inquiry rather than silence. That's the point of all this, in fact...)

Because of the ephemeral nature of the subject, we composed our previous post, regarding Wikipedia and the mutability of information, in something of a hurry, not our usual method by any means. (Our caution is legendary throughout the wide community of scholarly pessimism.) Revisiting it, we find the topic too important not to revisit, and to link with a topic discussed previously on this humble blog, that of conspiracy theory.

We have written in past posts about the nature of the art thereof -- taking our usual hands-off approach. We do not endorse conspiracy theories, since a great many of them (though not all -- we're holding out on Kennedy) are indeed founded in ignorance and bias. But we do admire them aesthetically as their own sort of art form: collages of data, brought together to form a unifying whole. And more: we consider them extremely socially valuable. They flush out quite interesting facts, and if they do not themselves always represent the truth, they serve nicely to illustrate that the truth is a great deal more complex than its keepers would have us believe.

It is in this field that information flux crosses the line from amusing (the "ANUL RASHES" cited in the previous post) to the dangerous.

Let us consider this 2001 story from the Israeli newspaper Haaretz:


"Five Israelis who had worked for a moving company based in New Jersey are being held in U.S. prisons for what the Federal Bureau of Investigation has described as "puzzling behavior" following the terror attack on the World Trade Center in New York last Tuesday. The five are expected to be deported sometime soon...

"The Foreign Ministry said in response that it had been informed by the consulate in New York that the FBI had arrested the five for "puzzling behavior." They are said to have had been caught videotaping the disaster and shouting in what was interpreted as cries of joy and mockery."


On the face of it, it serves as an example of our law enforcement's panicked and repressive reaction to September 11. Assuming the "joy" was in fact genuine, it is a mistake to assume a monolithically shocked response to the events of that day. (One of our staffers recalls a homeless man in Washington DC gleefully shouting: "Somebody smacked America's ass... about time!") And in a free country, one cannot be arrested for emotions, only for actions.

But here is where we run into problems. The story has received wide circulation online, mostly on extreme far-left and far-right sites with dovetailing agendas. Needless to say the Arab press has made much of it. Among the details mentioned on those sites but not in the Haaretz story are the allegations that the five men in question, frequently described as "dancing" as they filmed, were later identified as Mossad agents, and that they were driving a van which contained $4700 cash, two box-cutters, European passports, and highlighted maps of New York City. (Regarding those box-cutters and maps, it is important to note that the men worked for a moving company.)

The sources for this information, repeatedly cited, are ABC news, the Bergen Record (the local New Jersey paper) the Scottish Sunday Herald, and The Forward, a New York-based Jewish daily. The Forward apparently reported that the FBI had identified two of the arrested as Mossad agents, and that the five were held and possibly tortured for months before being released.

As a specifically Jewish publication, The Forward's account is of special interest, since it would seem to counteract the anti-Semitic possibilities inherent in the story. Unfortunately, no doubt alive to the way their reportage could be used, they have removed it from their site.

Less clear is why ABC should. Clicking the provided link tells us this: "You’ve requested an abcnews.com page that does not exist. If you’ve reached this page by selecting a bookmark that worked previously, it’s likely the file moved to a new location because of our recent redesign. Please update your bookmarks."

The same goes for the Bergen Record, although not, as it happens, the Herald, whose account can be seen here.

Thus the potentially reputable American press sources for all this information have vanished, become unfacts. We ask why -- not because we believe that Mossad or Israel were somehow responsible for the tragedy of September 11, nor that they knew of the attacks in advance, as has been postulated by some of the theorists, but because we fear where such a trend -- the removal of uncomfortable information from the public eye -- leads.

If the details about the cash, box-cutters, passports, Mossad, etc., were not mentioned in these accounts, then these missing news stories should be visible, so that they cannot be cited. If they are mentioned, then follow-up reports are clearly required to explain and clarify, so that conspiracy theories can be defused. If these are mistakes, corrections need to be issued. Repression of information serves no one and has the potential for great harm. (And let us not forget that this story contains yet another allegation of torture at the hands of the U.S. government, a topic that clearly requires vigilance.)

What happened on September 11 has had an enormous impact on both America and, through our response, the world. But what is often forgotten is that our perception of the tragedy differs hugely from that of the international community. Noam Chomsky has pointed out that since the rest of the world had not been repeatedly misinformed about a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, a great many saw our actions in Iraq as either incomprehensibly ignorant or unbelievably racist. It is best that we make sure that we are all on the same page. Secrecy and obfuscation do not advance those ends.


"As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his speakwritten corrections to the appropriate copy of the Times and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, with a movement which was as nearly as possible unconscious, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he had made himself, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by flames."
--1984, George Orwell

Thursday, December 07, 2006

Wikipedia flux.

Thank goodness for Wikipedia! After reading this article, and remembering dimly that lead was a fairly harmful substance, we decided to check the facts. The Wikipedia article confirmed the memory, and also, to our joy, provided us with this useful information:

"Pete wentz and ryan ross are hott and they dont asociate with lead. lead is a monster! lead will take your babies!! DONT EAT IT OR ANUL RASHING WILL OCCUR" [sic, all of it]

While we feel reasonably sure that the above passage was not added by a lobbyist for the lead industry, it does point out the basic problem with Wikipedia. We will not link to the article, because by the time you click on such a link the offending sentences may be gone -- and replaced, perhaps, with a few sentences stating that "the effects of lead on human health, long exaggerated, are now thought to be minimal" -- that last unsourced, of course.

For of course that's the problem. Since every piece of information on the site is subject to the curious whims of the last "editor," tomorrow lead may well be the cure for cancer, at least on Wikipedia. So why on earth should we be upset about lead? It's not that we don't trust the EPA to know differently -- it's the public that we worry about, the ones who might conceivably be upset about "potent neurotoxins" hanging around and getting in the way, if they bothered to look it up....

And we'll be damned: during the writing of this brief post, that passage about "ANUL RASHING" has indeed disappeared, like smoke. It has become an unfact.

Everything's fine.

According to the New York Times, the justices of the Supreme Court have become our nation's most prestigious slackers:


"The court has taken about 40 percent fewer cases so far this term than last. It now faces noticeable gaps in its calendar for late winter and early spring. The December shortfall is the result of a pipeline empty of cases granted last term and carried over to this one.

"The number of cases the court decided with signed opinions last term, 69, was the lowest since 1953 and fewer than half the number the court was deciding as recently as the mid-1980s."


The possible reasons, it is said, are many:


"The federal government has been losing fewer cases in the lower courts and so has less reason to appeal. As Congress enacts fewer laws, the justices have fewer statutes to interpret... [another] theory is that the court is so closely divided that neither the liberals nor the conservatives want to risk granting a case in which, at the end of the day, they might not prevail. To grant a case takes four votes, which can be a heartbreaking distance from the five votes it takes to win. Scholars of the court call this risk-averse behavior 'defensive denial.'... there is a built-in “institutional conservatism” in which law clerks are afraid to look overly credulous and so are reluctant to recommend a grant... 'In the post-Bush v. Gore era, the court may be concerned about taking the wrong case and making an unpopular decision....'"


It is curious to see the highest court in Amerikansas sunk into such depths of depression, fear, and apathy. And the malaise is spreading:


"...a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School ... wrote on his blog that constitutional law scholars 'are kind of bored these days.'"


Reports of the Justices sitting around in their underwear, eating Cheetos, and watching reruns of Judge Judy are as yet unconfirmed, but highly credible nonetheless.

Some days two or three of them will dress in their oldest clothes, buy bottles of inexpensive Italian reds, and lay on the grass of the Potomac, laughing, telling jokes, showing each other their newest tattoos, then falling silent... one will rise to skip a stone across the iron-gray water, watch numbly as the ripples subside. They've been appointed for life, you see, reached the highest office of their profession -- now what comes next? Is this all there is? "Do you ever think about eternity?" says Scalia, staring slack-jawed at the sky. Ginsburg laughs; beer comes out her nose; everybody laughs. In the brief mood of jollity Thomas pushes the new boy into the water, but soon mirth subsides and everyone is quiet again.

The faded roar of a distant plane sounds like the echoes of a great bell.

A sense has come over them all lately that their importance has diminished, that maybe their time has ended, and the honor they fought to attain has become something worthless, a treasure too easy to discard. On the wall in the game room hangs a portrait of Andrew Jackson captioned by his famous statement: John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it! The features are peppered by holes: for years they have taken out their aggression with darts. Now his little smirk seems to mock them.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Dave starts to doubt.

Alerted by a sudden profusion of Youtube videos featuring people announcing that they "deny the Holy Spirit," we here at DHAIP, ever on the lookout for an unusual trend, followed a provided link to this:


"In the spirit of Christmas, the Rational Response Squad is giving away 1000 DVDs of The God Who Wasn't There, the hit documentary that the Los Angeles Times calls 'provocative -- to put it mildly.'

"There's only one catch: We want your soul... record a short message dooming yourself to Hell... somewhere in your video you must say this phrase: 'I deny the Holy Spirit.'

"Why? Because, according to the Bible, blaspheming the Holy Spirit is the only completely unforgivable sin... After this, even if you wanted to accept Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal savior, you are shit out of luck. He can't forgive you for this. (Also, Massachusetts and Maryland residents can be jailed for blasphemy. Don't say we didn't warn you.)"


Our hopes that this represented some odd, spontaneous mass uprising melted away -- the promise of obtaining any sort of free merchandise is enough to get most Americans to fornicate with a corpse. One can never have too much stuff, or so we are told.

Still, it does seem that these are high times for atheism in the USA. The activism of Richard Dawkins has made some small pop-culture ripples; the newsweeklies have deigned to devote cover stories to the godless; and one or two celebrities have shyly gone on record with disbelief. As a groundswell it's tiny, but given the still-prevailing unpopularity of atheism (what's to prevent us all from becoming murderers and rapists? shriek the majority, unwittingly revealing the darkness of their daydreams), the surge is worthy of attention nonetheless.

The religious roots of terrorism have something to do with it all, undoubtedly -- was it possible, upon hearing the alleged motivation of the hijackers (oh, you know, the seventy virgins), not to reflect, even for just an instant, on the possible folly of Heaven in general? Is it possible that the eruption of conservatism that followed September 11th, an unthinking, unreasoning retreat, stretching its feelers back toward fascism, was in fact rooted in a crippling negation buried in the events of that day -- that the terrorists, religion-wise, had one-upped us rather badly, and that our collective belief in the power of our faith was rather badly shaken by viewing its own ultimate expression? Americans spoke with disgust and scornful derision at the religious delusions of the attackers, quickly separating the destruction from their own notions of God would or would not want. Yet this God person, whatever his opinion on the issue, still let it happen, and despite our excited anticipation of an Armagedoon to justify the tragedy, Christ yet again failed to reappear.

We have said over and over again, in the face of considerable skepticism, that there is no practical difference between mass psychology and individual psychology. A nation, psychologically speaking, is an organism which is only as complex in its actions as a single human brain. Let us consider the United States as an individual, named Dave. Dave has been brought up in comfortable surroundings, in complacency, with a certain fundamental decency in his outlook, balanced, as in most prosperous people, by an unwillingness to question the source of his good fortune. He puts it down to God's will. Dave is deeply religious, and believes that God made him the most comfortable person there is for two very good reasons: the strength of his devotion, and the goodness of his intentions. He wants others to prosper as well. Why can't those malcontents down the block just be like him?

Dave has some subconscious awareness that the shoes he wears have been made by workers so close to slaves that the term "labor" may be considered a mockery; he has an uncomfortable intuition that the diamond ring he bought for his fiancee was purchased at the cost of the hacked-off limbs of African children. But It's not Dave's to reason why. God has willed that Dave is who he is and has what he has, and God must have His reasons for that. "God works in mysterious ways," as the saying goes -- and that saying is a handy palliative for a troubled conscience.

But Dave is intelligent enough to grasp the contradiction here. He believes his own devotion has bought him God's good graces. But now a display of stronger devotion than his occurs, a hostile display, a fiery self-crucifixion. It threatens the core of his comfort, rattles his conscience, and eats at his sense of identity. One God meets another. Who can truly be certain which one is real? If Dave's God is the true one, to be believed in as an ultimate truth, why can he not imagine himself giving his all? Why can't he imagine what it felt like to fly those planes?

(Note the exchange surrounding Bush's early assertion that the hijackers were "cowards." The comedian Bill Maher pointed out, rather mildly, that whether killers or not, men who gave up their lives for their cause could scarcely be called cowards. This innocuous contradiction of the president's rhetoric prompted press secretary Ari Fleischer to warn that Americans should "watch what they say, watch what they do." In context, a truly dumbfounding, terrifying, and psychologically revealing moment in recent American history -- a moment when the ghost of Stalin seems to hover above our heads.)

A year or so ago the New Yorker published a story containing a striking statement from President Bush, which after much and fruitless search we have given up trying to find -- if by some miracle anyone should know where to find it, please let us know. The gist of the statement, which was a private one reported secondhand by the usual anonymous party, consisted of Bush's doubt about the success of his own War on Terror; the opponents, he said, were "zealots" and ready to give up anything to win, while Americans were quite simply not zealots. In a showdown we would inevitably blink first.

The quote hinted at somewhat more awareness, and intelligence, than Bush chooses to display in public. He perhaps understands Dave a little more than his speeches (or his actions) would let on. There's also a trace of wistfulness to the observation. (One thinks of Strangelove's "Buck" Turgidson: "Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines!") Dave will never be a suicide bomber. The afterlife may well be wonderful, but in this life he has too much to lose. America simply doesn't have enough fire to fight that fire.

Between Bush's messianic edge and the terrorists' impulse to martyrdom, God may be close to going out of fashion. Dave, scarred by disaster, bewildered by the endlessness of the war, dazed from media overload, lies back on the grass to look at the sky. What do I really believe is beyond that, he wonders, maybe for the first time -- and how much should I gamble on a guess?

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

God's minute.

Just because we are atheists does not preclude our having a spiritual side. This strangely moving photograph gave us both joy and pause for thought.

We trust he escaped the Lord's grasp without injury.

(Follow-up to previous post.)

...and anyway, honestly, sometimes the jokes/sad truths simply write themselves.

Not even we can outdo the facts.

The Jurassic man.

This is becoming comical, in a bitter sort of way. We have counted at least fifteen variations on this same headline in the past three weeks:

Bush says Iraq progress too slow.

The air of ponderous discovery in this announcement reminds us of the childhood fact we were all taught about the Apatosaurus -- back when it was Brontosaurus, in fact. (Or was it the Diplodocus? Run fact-check if time. --DH.) Namely, that if you -- having traveled in time back to the Jurassic -- were to step on the tail of the beast, you would be able to escape easily, since the nerve impulses would take several minutes to plod their way to the brain, owing to the length of the animal. In a similar way we imagine an enormously elongated George W. Bush, primaeval swamp-weeds dripping from his jowls, slowly turning his head to peer at a disturbance that began months, years ago, somewhere in the region of his anus.

Now of course the cynic would say that he has only begun to repeat this phrase (to anyone who will still listen), and more, to consider taking some action about it, out of fear brought on by the midterm election results. We say: pooh, cynics! To say that any politician, no matter how poor our opinion of him, would stoop to playing politics with warfare, is just flat-out mean. That's what every one of his supporters said during the lead-up to the war, and since his supporters are good, honorable people, we must of course take what they say very seriously.

So we must adopt the only other explanation that makes sense: the President is prehistorically stupid. (This would also explain his linguistic troubles, since he will only have evolved far enough to be comfortable with reptilian wheezes and moans.) We trust this explanation will please everyone.



(Oh, yes, indeed, this is childish. And, you may say, it's scarcely fair to make fun of a lame duck. Yet for one reason or another there are many Amerikansans who insist upon taking this man and his disastrous policies seriously, insisting on his honesty and his good intentions. Clumsy dinosaur pictures will do little to change this, yet our anger at the monster our time has created has not subsided -- we must blow off steam somehow. Let us have our melancholy chuckle. As pessimists we know that time has crueller tricks for us in store...)

Friday, December 01, 2006

It couldn't happen here.

Milgram lives, apparently.


"Ogborn was told to empty her pockets and surrender her car keys and cell phone, which she did. Then the caller demanded that Summers have Ogborn remove her clothes — even her underwear — leaving her with just a small, dirty apron to cover her naked body.

"Summers says she never second-guessed what she was being asked to do, as she firmly believed the person she was talking to was a police officer. Ogborn says she trusted her manager to do what was right."


As the story gets worse, changing from mere lewdness to outright physical and sexual abuse, the sickness of the caller seems of secondary importance to the trusting stupidity of those transferring the orders:


"'I honestly thought he was a police officer and what I was doing was the right thing,' said Summers. 'I thought I was doing what I was supposed to be doing.'"


McDonald's will undoubtedly escape litigation, since their training manual, for some reason, cautions against bogus police officers conducting strip searches. (Now that's covering all bases.) Nonetheless --


"It turned out that the Panama City Police Department had received several calls about investigations in multiple states for similar incidents. By early 2004, there had been more than 70 cases of hoax phone calls to fast food restaurants, dating as far back as 1994.

"At a McDonald's in Hinesville, Ga., a caller convinced a 55-year-old janitor to do a cavity search of a 19-year-old cashier, while in Fargo, N.D., a manager at a local Burger King strip-searched a 17-year-old female employee."


It might be arguable, if not in a court of law at least on a philosophical level, that corporate culture creates an ethos of compartmentalized obedience in which personal responsibility, the capacity for individual moral choice, and the mental appartus required to question authoirty are gradually eroded in a sort of overriding soul-decay. Based on no statistical evidence and only on our own powers of reasoning, we'll adopt that point of view. Yet the individuals in question must be considered -- are they morally different from us right-thinking types, or secretly just the same?

It is well and good to believe in the essential goodness of our fellow men. It helps reassure us that our country will not turn into Nazi Germany, that authority can be trusted, that we can count on others to help pick up the slack of our own lazy thinking.

Yet we would all do well to consult our training manuals, it seems.

Christian nations.

This rather interesting post that we happened across led to questions in our minds. Whereas we don't know the specific results of such a poll would be for the U.S.A., we could certainly, and gloomily (as is our wont) guess. The UK has for a great deal of its history had church and state rather closely intertwined -- they don't call it the C. of E. for nothing -- whereas the United States was founded in a flourish of Enlightenment-era humanism, all bubbling with piss, vinegar, and Reason. According to tradition and principle this nation should have a corner on the rationalist market, and the British should still be burning witches and Catholics and leeching ill humors out of epileptics.

Where did all this American fundamentalism come from? Were we weakened at some crucial juncture, and then sprung upon by Christ? Or rather, Billy Graham?

All of which forms a rather neat lead-up to this, which we came across and found too bizarre not to present --

Part one.


Part two.


It's a strange pair of Americas on view. Which is the real us?

What they must think of us.

"We hope you might be interested in helping to sell this book to the attention of the American public -- and thus, perhaps, helping to halt totalitarianism."
Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., plugging their new novel 1984 to J. Edgar Hoover, 1949.

We must confess that with each new disclosure of the government's attempts to gather information, we feel a certain thrill of curiosity: how much do they know about us?

Everything we do may very well be seen, and everywhere we go we are likely filmed, and everything we read or watch is probably (certainly) logged -- if that is not precisely true that it might as well be, in terms of any expectations of actual privacy we should have. It has almost become difficult to be shocked by how ready our government has been to follow Orwell -- or in fact precede him, as the FBI files make clear. (Amusingly Orwell's file includes a 1959 clip from an East German newspaper which identifies America as the target of 1984 -- and so we have two parties, standing on opposite sides of a two-faced mirror, both pointing and laughing.)

Most of us, in approaching this understanding, take dubious comfort from the fact that no matter how strange, embarrassing, questionable, or downright appalling our private behavior may be, and in fact is, there will always be somebody worse, and hence only those on the bottom rungs -- criminals -- need worry. With so many to keep under observation, we say to ourselves, that the government will only bother to pass judgment on those who truly deserve it. "He who understands all forgives all," as somebody said -- we can't remember who. And if pride tickles us (who are they to "forgive" me?) at the notion, we swallow it. Modernity is no place for self-respect.

Yet we here at DHAIP cannot feel quite bring ourselves to feel complacent. With all that information being collected, somewhere, it would take true saints not to misuse it, just a little, here and there, to find some sneaky way to alter public opinion, to quell a loudmouthed dissident, to silence a troubling rumor. And there are no saints, not in public office.

How to combat this? Short of storming the Bastille, as it were, burning files in the streets and forcibly reclaiming our private lives, all we can suggest is that everyone reading this should make a point, every so often, of behaving slightly oddly... finding something uncharacteristic, even eccentric, to do, and in public. Buy a controversial book. Watch a banned film. Loudly accuse a DMV employee of fascist sympathies. Take different trains. Make misleading statements to pollsters and television news crews. Take an unmerited sick day and use it to lurk in shady establishments. Cultivate a stutter. Repeatedly and doggedly espouse unpopular opinions. Call random strangers and speak in code. Weep in front of police officers. Giggle uncontrollably during performances of the National Anthem. Make special trips to stare fixedly at public buildings. In short: give them a headache. And you'd better start now; recall for a moment the hysteria that gripped this country following 9/11, the hysteria that was ready and lurking and waiting to leap out and will again, no doubt, you can clearly see that soon enough headaches will be illegal. For the moment, nonsense constitutes our closest acquaintance with freedom.


"One night, I was, as usual, observing the sky with my telescope. I noticed that a sign was hanging on a galaxy one hundred million light years away. On it was written: I SAW YOU. I made a quick calculation: the galaxy's light had taken one hundred million years to reach me, and since they saw up there what was taking place here a hundred million years later, the moment when they had seen me must date back two hundred million years.

"Even before I checked my diary to see what I had been doing that day, I was seized by a ghastly presentiment...."

--Italo Calvino, "The Light-Years"