...The paradox is that although war is waning in the classic configuration of brigades fighting an enemy on foreign shores, we are not rid of its specter, burdens, threats, costs and restrictions. What should we make of wartime that has the appearance of peacetime?

Mary Dudziak’s new book, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences, is a crucial document. Dudziak, a legal historian at the University of Southern California, argues that we are experiencing “not a time without war, but instead a time in which war does not bother everyday Americans.” Her smooth foray into legal and political history reveals that in not just the past decade but the past century, wartime has become a more or less permanent feature of the American experience, though we fail to recognize it. She doesn’t say so explicitly, but we are experiencing a reverse Orwellian situation, in which the state, rather than elevating war to perpetuate itself, obscures war to perpetuate itself.

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HOUSTON IS SAFER TODAY:

...Think about what you’re putting on the air. There’s no law that requires you to accommodate the police every time they want to flex their muscles on the evening news. In one of the videos linked above, the news team shoves a camera into a woman’s face as she’s stepping into the wagon. The reporter then shouts questions at the woman—this just after the reporter points out the possibility that the woman she’s humiliating and zooming in on may be a sex slave.

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THE BEST FAKE FOREIGN-POLICY TWITTER FEEDS. Via DrunkenPredator, who gets a spot on the list!

ULTIMATE MARVEL TEAM-UP! Via PES and... maybe WAWIV?

A federal court today ruled (read the court's decision) that Louisiana’s government-imposed monopoly on casket sales in the state is unconstitutional, closing the lid on the economic protection scheme and resurrecting an opportunity for local monks to provide for themselves by creating and selling their handmade caskets. The monks of Saint Joseph Abbey of Saint Benedict, La., and the Institute for Justice, which represents the order in court, had filed suit to fight Louisiana’s government-imposed casket cartel.

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SOME SAY THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES. I SAY BARACK OBAMA IS HOT! This may, of course, be merely a selection effect (as opposed to a selection effect which nonetheless says something important), but it seems to me that I'm much more likely to run across liberals who really like Democratic politicians and feel proud of them or protective of them, and conservatives who really dislike Republican politicians and hold their noses in the voting booth.

If I'm right about this, what should I make of it? A lot of op-ed types seem to take any expressed conservative disillusionment with the overall GOP field as a sign of weakness or bad conscience--even the right-wingers know they're wrong! I tend to view it in the exact opposite light. I generally take this divergence as an indictment of liberals (detainees? what detainees?) but I do realize that my tendency toward political despair is at least partly the result of my own incompetence in forming political judgments. If I talk about explicitly political issues on the blog you can be sure I really, really mean what I say (e.g. on marriage, or torture) because most of what I've learned since I started the blog in 2002 is how often I have nothing of value to contribute.

In turn, this has made me really viscerally aware of how much our political judgments rely on personal trust (since the amount of knowledge we would need to amass to be respectable wonks, combined with the amount of political philosophy we'd need to do to sort through and assess that knowledge, is simply astounding), which I think has made me more personally negative toward both politicians and people who "like" politicians or have favorite politicians. You can like things about people who are politicians (I like Michelle Bachmann's commitment to foster parenting) without feeling any warm fuzziness about their public service or business acumen or whatever Little Father mishegoss we're supposed to accept.

WHAT SHE SAID: "I SMOKE BECAUSE I'M HOPING FOR AN EARLY DEATH/AND I NEED TO CLING TO SOMETHING...." Out of all the songs on Meat Is Murder this is probably the one with the soundest political philosophy. It is anti-rationalist and it acknowledges that if someone does things you wouldn't do, she probably doesn't do them for the reasons you think she does. A surprisingly rare insight.

In an extension of my previous post about evo-psych fear of praising gender, I'd like to add that in general the reasons professors come up with for the things we do don't match up very well to our real reasons for doing them. A political philosophy based on rationalism will a) always place experts over subjects, placing those who can articulate their desires in contemporary jargon over those who insist on speaking like poor people or weirdos; and b) always turn mere experts into Pharisees, who believe that because they lead the lives their culture supports they are morally-equipped to tell the rest of us who we are. Or, as the current "nudge" political-philosophy fad would have it, they're equipped to structure our incentives.

Don't expect them to thank or forgive you.

DC VIGIL FOR VICTIMS OF THE WAR ON DRUGS. Organized by GW Students for a Sensible Drug Policy, it looks like; tomorrow, 6/17, 8 - 9 pm in Lafayette Park.

"SHAPING THE STORY." Via... DLB maybe?

IN THE FUTURE EVERYONE WILL BE A NATIONAL SECURITY THREAT FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES.

"WE LIKE LISTENING": The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum or, in its American titles, A Girl in Love or Never Read the Comments! SPOILERS, obviously.

Katharina Blum lives in West Germany, and it's Carnival so everyone is loosened-up and in costume. She is generally considered quite prudish, but goes to a party and ends up taking a young man home. He's a terrorist of some unspecified Red hue.

The next morning the cops invade her home. The moment in which the lady cop balances herself by putting her hand on Katharina's naked buttock is especially harsh, almost defining the word "objectification"; and I'll also call your gendered attention to the moment which provokes it, when a male cop is startled by accidental gunfire and he responds to his embarrassment by yelling at Katharina to put on clothes instead of her robe. She is interrogated. Over the course of the next however-many days, she is interrogated (they note that she pays for her own coffee) and newspaper reporters collude in the destruction of her reputation. Her divorce, her parentage, her aunt's life are all dragged through the mud. The press explicitly works hand-in-glove with the government. (“Front-page story” appears to be an Englishism, as Schadenfreude is a Germanicism.)

Katharina's life has its shaming elements, as whose life doesn't?, and those elements are deployed for political gain. This isn't subtle; the "reporters" blatantly lie, and Katharina is excoriated for preferring money to virtue by people who are quite obviously choosing cash over kindness. This is a morality tale about the cruelties inherent in our reality-TV morality tales.

I'm also struck, of course, by how opportunistic we are in our uses of culturally-sanctioned hatred. Katharina's accusers rely on misogyny for exactly the same reason that Sarah Palin's and Hillary Clinton's accusers so often rely on it (and Paris Hilton's or Snooki's, really, while we're here--this isn't about politics so much as it is about publicly-acceptable scapegoatesses): because they can. Play by my rules and I won't call in the referee.

There's so much else to talk about: There's the role of photography in shaping our notion of "truth"; there's the vomit in the toilet of the first cell to which Katharina is led and her pathetic feminine attempt to clean it up. (I think this is somewhat echoed in her insistence in cleaning and caring for her mother's body after death. There's the same association of femininity with vulnerability and shame, and yet also with care and cleaning.) There's Katharina's aunt's reliance on the guest/host relationship in the face of the overwhelming twentieth-century state-vs.-individual bulldozing. There's Katharina's driving, “mostly when it rains and when I'm alone”; the interrogator's viciously dry invocation of scarcity economics ("Perhaps we can learn how to own an apartment"). Surrealism: The stain on the door (echoes of Barton Fink) which Katharina opens to find spies putting on their costumes of sheiks and whores. Carnival gives all kinds of opportunities, to all kinds of maskers. An undeclared life: her unexplained miles on the meter. The ladies' room as the place where alliances might be formed. This is a really intensely-observed movie.

Power is so attentive to the cruelties of detail. Detail gives us our facial features, our humanity, and it's so often the small brutal detail by which we attempt to remove that humanity from others. Power creates its own narratives the same way everyone else does, through the thousand little choices of where to turn the light and where to throw a shadow by which a person is made into a persona. The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum is as much an indictment of art as anything in Shakespeare. And then there's the anonymous letter-writer, telling her, "Learn to pray again." Absolutely horrible, and absolutely what would happen.

The smash-cut from “We live in a free country!” to the tabloid Joan-Jett-reformatory photos of Katharina is pretty classic. Libertarians often argue that culture will take over from government in sanctioning wrong behavior. I wonder how many of them really want the punishments of internet culture, from which there is no escape. (I know the counterarguments, of which the strongest is that the culture which shapes the non-legal punishments inevitably shapes the legal—government is in no way an escape hatch from the problems of culture, and in many ways compounds those problems, especially due to civil servants' elite status relative to the people they regulate. But I wish more libertarians argued that the government is like a market with guns, whereas corporations are merely markets vying for guns. Or, in other words, Tim Carney for President in 2014!)

“You're divorced. You have no ties.” This is spoken by an interrogator, and is patently false, as it is always false. Divorce is not rewind. Most obviously when there are children; but even when there are not, divorce is never control-Z.

The absolute betrayal on her face, the iron control and the broken trust, is just shattering when she realizes that the priests only let her come to their sanctuary in order to make her conciliate her ex-husband. Again she's forced to recognize that everyone wants to use her new vulnerability to their own ends.

And then the final scene, a speech in favor of the freedom of the press, is over-the-top villainous. All my sympathies are engaged, and yet I can't help but think, Do you really WANT to cut off the branch you're perched on? I don't know, I suppose you could argue that the greatest virtue of unshakable freedom of the press (which has happened where, ever?) is that other artists can point out the destructive effects of the press without calling for censorship.

THE REAL WORLD: CHINESE GULAG. Last night we stumbled upon the Laogai Research Foundation's Laogai Museum, a very quick walk north from Dupont Circle. LRF was founded by Harry Wu, the fearless man who exposed the Chinese gulag system. We're visiting the museum soon, and if you're in DC, you should too. I'll tell you more about it once we've been inside.

(Post title is because of the bizarre coincidence that the museum is housed in the former Real World: DC rowhouse.)

SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS: A slightly edited email from a friend, who has traveled extensively in the Middle East and has studied the region (and who noted that these are "random disorganized thoughts," but I thought they were worth posting):

Random thoughts on the ongoing political-economic revolution in Egypt, some my own and others from Egyptian friends - of course things are happening very fast so all this could change:

1. If you have not been watching al-Jazeera English, you ought to give it a shot - their coverage is far better and more interesting than any of the American channels (where the analysis quite frankly borders on the bizarre) - live stream is here: http://english.aljazeera.net/watch_now/

2. The police were defeated by the sheer number of protesters last week, which nobody predicted, not even the organizers of the original "day of wrath" on 1/25/11. Of course the organizers hit a nerve when they chose Police Day as their day of protest, since hatred of the police has reached new heights since the Khaled Saeed episode last summer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_Mohamed_Saeed and http://www.facebook.com/elshaheeed.co.uk

3. Nobody fears the 1.7-million strong police anymore after what happened in Tunisia. Tunisians showed Arabs everywhere that the secret police can be defeated, and Egyptians did that on the second massive day of protests, last Friday. The police then disappeared and were replaced by the army. There were lots of thoughts as to why the police withdrew from the streets: they allegedly ran out of tear gas because there were just too many protesters, some were going over to the protesters' side, and it was a regime plot to demonstrate what would happen if there was nobody to maintain security. And indeed, Cairo and other cities were chaotic, but much of the chaos was instigated by plainclothes policemen with police id cards found when they were arrested. Regime thugs also tried to loot the National Museum and burn cars in downtown Cairo. Some others tried to attack random homes to instill fear that would reduce the number of people out on the streets (since they'd want to protect their homes) - this failed too (see below). But the most important thing here is the absence of fear: the people know they can defeat one of the most corrupt and brutal police forces in the world (ranked by Amnesty Int'l as the worst in the world in use of torture).

4. The army is divided. The generals close to Mubarak are career officers and regime loyalists. They gave the orders to enforce the curfew, which proved impossible given the sheer numbers of people on the streets. The soldiers on the ground are conscripts and thus basically like the protesters, and lots of fraternization is taking place between the two sides - tea, sweets, flowers, giving children rides in tanks, etc. They've been told to enforce the curfew, are refusing to obey orders, and also refusing to mutiny. So in the army there is something of a standoff.

5. The Presidential Guard will probably show up tomorrow (today, by the time most of you read this) when the people march from Tahrir Square to the Presidential Palace. Naturally this force is loyal to Mubarak, and may open fire, but any massacre will only increase popular fury at the Pharaoh. Conversely, any concession on his part will be interpreted as a sign of weakness. He is finished - all these appointments of new ministers and a VP are just shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. The people know they can win, and it is only a matter of time, especially since the army has announced it will not fire on protesters.

6. The Muslim Brotherhood is definitely present on the streets, but it is not a leading force at all. A "Group of Ten" has formed in Tahrir Square to coordinate and includes only one from the MB. In any case, the organization is not extremist and its leadership is far closer to Erdogan than to Khomeini. So Egypt will not become Iran, as things are going now. Usually Muslim Brotherhood protests could get about 200K-300K Egyptians on the streets in all of Egypt. The current protests are far, far larger than this, suggesting that normally apolitical people who wouldn't stand for another extremist dictatorship are out marching (a thoroughly apolitical grandmother of a friend of mine went out to march in Alexandria). The Brotherhood will almost certainly be part of a new government, but it will be better for America to deal with it than to be seen as opposing the will of the people (again).

7. Lots of people say the Egyptians aren't ready for democracy and can't govern themselves, etc. This is totally absurd and even if it were true, Mubarak has failed abysmally at governing Egypt. In the last few days, the people organized neighborhood militias to guard against criminals and police thugs (this happened in Tunis as well), appointed a temporary parliament in Tahrir, guarded the National Museum and Library in Alexandria against fire and looting, directed traffic, and - most amazingly for anyone who's ever been to Egypt - actually cleaned the streets and organized garbage collection. In short, this is not Iraq post-Saddam. People know what needs to be done and are doing it.

8. The attempted shutdown of the internet and al-Jazeera was the regime's big mistake and an implicit acknowledgement of its lack of moral authority among the people. The word will always get out. In fact it pushed people onto the streets because there was no other way to find out what was happening. Even now, information is getting out electronically. The government cannot win this battle.

9. The best thing for the US to do is continue to offer messages of support for the protesters, endorse their rights, push Mubarak to step down, and otherwise stay out of the way. We should have used all our covert strength and will to push Mubarak out sometime over the last ten years, but I guess nobody thinks outside the box anymore in Langley. In the end we have far more to gain by supporting the Egyptian people and maintaining a legitimate democratic government than by supporting a hated and incompetent kleptocracy.

"BEYOND BARS."

WHIGS FOR LONGER SKIRTS: A randomly-generated PAC and/or front group name!

Via DLB, who got the gemlike "Sinister Gentlemen for Liberty."

If anything, the twentieth century has been marked by the apotheosis of the state, including liberal states.
--Paul W. Kahn, Putting Liberalism in Its Place

"FIFTEEN TO LIFE": I see someone put my old Crisis magazine piece on fixing the criminal justice system online. This is really not the piece I would write today but I think there are still some good things in it....

FASCINATING STUFF. The commenters offer a few more possible explanations, including at least one in which the causal arrow runs the other way.

SAUL ALINSKY'S LITTLE PLATOONS: A fascinating piece from Jesse Walker. Summary: "Critics of the expiring activist group [ACORN] say it was driven by the vision of Saul Alinsky. If only that were true." But there's lots more inside.

They sentenced me to twenty years of blogwatch
For trying to change the system from within...

Camassia: More on The Last Station.

MarriageDebate is just a cornucopia, people. "Are Sperm Donors Really Anonymous Anymore?"; "Would Your Boyfriend Be Pleased By Your Surprise Fetus?"; Can a court tell a parent what religion his child will be?; Catholic girls (and Canadian schoolteachers) gone wild; Yale administration promotes sincerist sex; and whether major economic shifts are leading women to redefine "marriage material." And much, much more. As always, send me links if you've got 'em....

The Rat is back to frequent, linkalicious blogging! Opera, lit, meta-cannoli and much more.

"Why There Is No Jewish Narnia." Really intriguing, though I'm way too far from being a Tolkein or Narnia fan to address its claims. I'd be interested in others' reactions. Two recent novels, Lev Grossman's The Magicians and Hagar Yanai's Ha-Mayim she-bein ha-olamot (The Water Between the Worlds), are reviewed as part of a longer and more speculative essay. Plus the piece is worth it just for the rabbinic description of the fate of Leviathan! Via Arts & Letters Daily.

"Weaponizing Mozart," and other present-tense dystopias from the place that was England.

To Save a Thousand Souls, a new book for men discerning a vocation to the priesthood, has excerpts posted here. The book aims to answer "frequently asked questions" with clear examples and stories. Via Mark Shea.

Stanley Fish asks, "Are there secular reasons?" He says no, but--kinda like what I did when I addressed the same question here and here--he equivocates on how a fully-secular philosophy might proceed. What are the possible objects for the philosopher's eros, the nuptial meaning of the mind, in a fully secular worldview? I dunno, because I've never done it, but I welcome your thoughts. Anyway, here is a bit of Fish, fishifying:

...Once the world is no longer assumed to be informed by some presiding meaning or spirit (associated either with a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle) and is instead thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves” there is no way, says Smith, to look at it and answer normative questions, questions like “what are we supposed to do?” and “at the behest of who or what are we to do it?” ...

Nevertheless, Smith observes, the self-impoverished discourse of secular reason does in fact produce judgments, formulate and defend agendas, and speak in a normative vocabulary. How is this managed? By “smuggling,” Smith answers.

. . . the secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anyway — but only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.

The notions we must smuggle in, according to Smith, include “notions about a purposive cosmos, or a teleological nature stocked with Aristotelian ‘final causes’ or a providential design,” all banished from secular discourse because they stipulate truth and value in advance rather than waiting for them to be revealed by the outcomes of rational calculation. But if secular discourse needs notions like these to have a direction — to even get started — “we have little choice except to smuggle [them] into the conversations — to introduce them incognito under some sort of secular disguise.”

And how do we do that? Well, one way is to invoke secular concepts like freedom and equality — concepts sufficiently general to escape the taint of partisan or religious affiliation — and claim that your argument follows from them. But, Smith points out (following Peter Westen and others), freedom and equality — and we might add justice, fairness and impartiality — are empty abstractions. Nothing follows from them until we have answered questions like “fairness in relation to what standard?” or “equality with respect to what measures?” — for only then will they have content enough to guide deliberation.

more (and yet more of me here, a familiar link to longtime readers)

And this Peter Steinfels column from 2006 makes some good, basic points in crisp language:

But otherwise, Mr. Saletan's approach emphasizes making pregnancies intended and presumably wanted. The Democrats for Life approach emphasizes making pregnancies wanted, whether intended or not. Mr. Saletan emphasizes making any abortion choice unnecessary. Democrats for Life emphasizes making it what the group would consider a genuine choice. And at a very practical level, which is the level of political reality, the two approaches would finance very different and in many respects adversarial networks of organizations and ideology.

It is at this point that the ambiguity remaining in Mr. Saletan's use of ''bad'' cannot be avoided. Is abortion bad like hurricanes or cancer, or is it bad like persecution or child abuse?

whole thing

WORDS HAVE MEANING: Victor Morton's review of "Police, Adjective" gets the philosophical and theological heft of the movie. But I honestly wasn't perturbed by the "Long Attention-Span Theater" nature of the first 90% of scenes--partly because Morton's review had made me expect a climax, partly bc the tension between everyday tedium and extraordinary suspense is part of the point of the movie, and partly bc the main actor is just so great. Morton says there's too much film where he just slurps soup; I remember thinking that I could watch this specific hangdog working-class antihero slurp soup for hours without getting tired.

For me, the basic experience of the movie was: DEADENINGLY RAW HUMAN EXPERIENCE which is somehow still compelling to watch... do that for a really long time, and often it's funny but every time it's funny it's also cruel. The punctuation of laughter is used really well. ...and then suddenly HOLY CRAP DISTILLED SCENE OF POWER AND HUMILIATION AND (a)THEOLOGY.

So put up with any boredom in the first part--you really need it--because this Jack-in-the-Box coil really is winding up to something shocking and cruel and theologically grisly.

It's playing at the E Street Cinema.