11.11 11:00

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— Lt.-Col. John McCrae

Morning

Move On Up

[Update: here now.]

The Wire vs. The Wire

Here is a transcript of the date scene, set at Georgia Brown's ("Slapstick," Episode 9 in Season 3):

McNulty: "That’s good food. How’d you know about this place?"

Terry D'Agostino: "It was big when Clinton was in. This and the Red Sage. Now it’s all steakhouses and cigar bars."

"So you live here, but you spend a lot of time in Baltimore, right?"

"I have work up there. And the alumni stuff with St. Mary’s on the Hill. I went to UM Law, so I still have connections there, too. Actually, I grew up in Homeland."

"Yeah?"

[D'Agostino nods head]

McNulty: "Lauraville for me."

"Where’d you go to college?"

"Loyola. Only one year. My girlfriend go pregnant, so…"

"So?"

"So, uh…"

"So you became a cop in Baltimore. How’s that working for you?"

"It’s pretty good. You know, I do a lot of high-end drug stuff. Wiretaps. Prolonged investigations of violent offenders, that kind of stuff. Fact is, there’s not a lot of guys in the department do that kind of thing, you know, it takes a certain…I don’t know, you gotta love it. Thrill of the chase and all that."

McNulty: "So you do what in politics?"

"I do political campaigns."

"You mean like a campaign manager?"

"More of a strategist really. Not so much the day-to-day stuff but the strategy of how a candidate can win. A consultant…of sorts."

"You strategizing for anyone in Baltimore?"

"I shouldn’t say. I mean, he hasn’t officially announced anything yet."

"He any good?"

"Hey, if you’re for him I’ll throw the guy a vote. What the hell."

"Who’d you vote for this time?"

"What, you mean Bush and what’s-his-name?"

"Kerry."

"You didn’t vote for president?"

"I thought about it, yeah, and, you know…Bush seemed way over his head, I know, but he wasn’t gonna win in Maryland, anyhow. Besides, these guys? It doesn’t matter who you got. None of them has a clue what’s really going on. I mean, where I’m working every day? The only way any of these guys is even gonna find West Baltimore is if, I dunno, Air Force One crash-lands into Monroe Street on its way back to Andrews. It just never connects. Not to what I see, anyway."

[D'Agostino looks uncomfortable, starts playing with her food with her fork…long pause]

McNulty: "Hey, that’s just me, though."

[D'Agostino turns head slightly in McNulty’s direction, but doesn’t look at him. Very awkward silence.]

The Chicago Way

Election time was nearing and a Negro Republican precinct captain asked me to help him round up votes. I had no interest in the candidates, but I needed the money. I went from door to door with the precinct captain and discovered that the whole business was one long process of bribery, that people voted for three dollars, for the right to continue their illicit trade in sex or alcohol. On election day I went into the polling booth and drew the curtain behind me and unfolded my ballots. As I stood there the sordid implications of politics flushed through my mind. “Big Bill” Thompson headed the local Republican machine and I knew that he was using the Negro vote to control the city hall; in turn, he was engaged in vast political deals of which the Negro voters, political innocents, had no notion. With my pencil I wrote in a determined scrawl across the face of the ballots:

I Protest This Fraud

I knew that my gesture was futile. But I wanted somebody to know that out of that vast sea of ignorance in the Black Belt there was at least one person who knew the game for what it was. I collected my ten dollars and went home.

--Black Boy, p. 298

Religious Tastes

Today I read:

[I]t seems to me that antiquity's religion is a far better proxy for reality as we know it than many of the other religious fictions I've encountered. To be sure, I don't believe in the Greek gods, but it seems to me that belief in the Greek gods and all they entailed would be far more conducive to happiness than the alternatives.

Today I read (xii):

Buddhist cosmology anticipated what contemporary science has recently discovered. The parallels are impressive. Astronomical time and space, which irrevocably smashed the West's previous worldview, slip into the folds of Buddhist cosmology without a ripple. If we turn from macrocosm to microcosm, from the infinite to the infinitesimal, we find the same uncanny prescience. While the Greeks were positing atoms that were eternal because not composite (a-tomas--indivisible, that which cannot be cut), Buddhists were teaching that everything corporeal is impermanent (anicca) because constituted of dharmas as minuscule in duration as they are in space--remarkably like the fleeting blips that particles register on the scientists' oscilloscopes.

(And, just before that, somebody named Lynn White was quoted, saying: "It may well be that the publication of D. T. Suzuki's first Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927 will seem in future generations as great an intellectual event as William of Moerbeke's Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century or Marsiglio Ficino's of Plato in the fifteenth.")

"in which what is normally forbidden is briefly permissible"

Hans Magnus Enzensberger:

In most democratic countries the campaign season is the time when the gray routine of party politics is transformed into public theater. An election is an exhibition bout, a carnival, a purification rite--a kind of football championship of rhetoric in which pent-up aggressions and suppressed emotions surface. It's an outlet for the frustrations, defeats, and disappointments of everyday politics. And especially when nations feel that their future might be at stake, the election is like a destructive potlach, a national brawl in which what normally is forbidden is briefly permissible: open rivalry, ruthless polarization, the eruption of hatred, dissatisfaction, and ill will.

That's from "Swedish Autumn," in Europe, Europe (p. 4).

Except in the United States of the first decade of our shiny new millennium, "open rivalry, ruthless polarization, the eruption of hatred, dissatisfaction, and ill will" never seems to dissipate. Perhaps it's a function of the permanent campaign. I moved to this country in 2004, so I've lived here now through two elections and the whole space in between, and that's all there ever is, it seems. It was different on my first visit after 9/11, in November of that year. When did things change?

I know enough about Obama not to be particularly hopeful about the conduct of his administration over the next 4 or 8 years, though a McCain administration would almost certainly turn out worse. But at least one can still hope that, with an Obama victory, one's friends and neighbors from the metroprovincial "urban archipelago" and the university towns will recover their sanity, at least for a little while. Even if, up top, the "open rivalry" and "ruthless polarization" continue unabated among the competing factions of the American power elite.

Cavalier Behavior

Gideon Rachman on last night's debate:

I also very much enjoyed Obama’s prissy euphemism for teenage sex - “cavalier behaviour”. I think it could make a good chat-up line: “Darling, could I interest you in a little cavalier behaviour?”

One of the commenters (Lisa-Helene Lawson, on October 16th, 2008 at 3:38 pm), however, finds no amusement in the spectacle. She says that the campaign is

like being stuck in the audience in a tent forced to watch a 3 ring circus, all the while there is a killer torn[a]do whipping up and you and everyone else stuck in the tent are in its path…but the circus performers keep performing their dog and pony tricks even though no one in the audience is laughing.

Which sounds rather like Gideon's response to the first debate:

Anyone who was hoping for some reassurance at this time of financial crisis, will not have got much from tonight’s presidential election debate. I thought the McCain-Obama exchanges on the Wall Street meltdown and the bail-out plan were feeble in the extreme.

We concur on all points.

Descriptional Discrepencies

Glenn Reynolds on the outcome of the election in Canada:

A BIG WIN FOR CANADA'S CONSERVATIVE PARTY.

But the headline in the Financial Times tells rather a different story:

Canada PM loses poll gamble

The Economist goes for a blended product, with a headline proclaiming "No change for Canada," while the article itself begins by stating that

IT IS an emphatic victory, even if the ruling party has failed, again, to secure a majority in parliament.

Economic Apocalyptica

Yves Smith's blog naked capitalism has become my new first stop of the day.

The two most recent posts there are awfully reassuring about the next couple-few years. Dr. Doom is talking about a "Severe Global Recession," while one of Yves' informants, "a well connected international investor not prone to alarm or (normally) the use of capital letters," is saying that "the banking crisis is star[t]ing to bring international shipping to a halt."

The first reader comment on the Roubini post:

I find the contrast between the indubitably terrible condition of the markets, particularly in the credit markets and the shadow banking system, and the seemingly blase reaction of people in the street and ordinary businesses, to be really striking. I've read anecdotes of small businesses failing to get loans, but so far I haven't seen a single picture of an ashen-faced ordinary person that can match the despair of floor traders or the gloomy faces of Paulson and Bush.

All in all, the memorable images of this crisis so far are of foreclosure signs and of people who inhabit that science-fiction like world that we call Wall Street.

And the first reader comment on the shipping shudders post:

Holy Shit

When the folks described by the "contrast" commenter get the holy shits, I wonder what the Onion can do to rise to the level of their best work (the image is here)?

Stanley Kurtz: "Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools"

Stanley Kurtz has a piece up now in The Wall Street Journal's Opinion section about the Obama/Ayers relationship and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. He says that "documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC," and that they "worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda." According to Kurtz, the ultimated goal of this pedagogical agenda was basically to "infus[e] students and their parents with a radical political commitment" in order to "provok[e] resistance to American racism and oppression." Instead of striving to improve educational standards, the point was to foster a radical agenda. Money tended to be given to entities involved in stuff like "political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism" rather than stuff like math and science. The result: "no evidence of educational improvement."

Kurtz surmises that Barack Obama, then "a former community organizer fresh out of law school," couldn't have been chosen as the chairman of the CAC without the approval of Ayers, and he concludes that the real story here is that "[a]s CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle." Whereas "[t]he Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association," the real issue here "isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation," which would be "a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago."

There doesn't seem to be much here that Kurtz didn't already say on Extension 720 with Milt Rosenberg, but this is a platform on a different level and it will be interesting to see whether this develops into a major story in the mainstream press, and how it will be reported if it does.

a poem for the first day of fall

"Beautiful Woman"

The spring

in

her step

has

turned to

fall

--A. R. Ammons

Superman vs. the Hulk?

Long ago, and oh so far away, in a place called January, 2008, Jonah Goldberg and Peter Beinart fed the following thoughts into their webcams:

Peter: I have to say, just the prospect of a McCain-Obama race…I mean, I have to say, that could be one of the greatest races in American history.

Jonah: [laughs]

Peter: I mean, can you imagine an Obama-John McCain race, I mean really, I'd wanna, like, take out my American flag and start waving, I mean…

Jonah: [laughs]

Peter: …the thing would just be…the thing would be unbelievable, and I couldn't think of a more compelling race…for almost any two people out there in American politics today than seeing John McCain go up against Barack Obama.

Jonah: No, for political junkies it's sort of like what comic geeks used to talk about: "Imagine you have Superman fight the Hulk!"

Peter: That's…that's right.

Jonah: You know, it's one of these great sort of matches. I agree and it would, it would…maybe we should do a whole segment on imagining what that race would look like.

Peter: Yeah.

Jonah: I could, I could see getting a little bit sick of the, uh, the you know, 'cause neither of them would get, I mean, the n- where the negativity would surface, eventually I guess it would have to, it'd be interesting to try to figure out.

Peter: Yes.

Jonah: But for a long time it would be like, a lot of, sort of, it would be the Yakov Smirnoff, you know, election of, "what a country!"

Jonah: That would get a bit old after a while, the sort of spirit, you know, if we, if we all work together we can make this the best yearbook ever!

Peter: Uh-huh

Jonah: It [would] start to grate on me.

Peter: Uh-huh

Jonah: No, I agree that would be fun. It'd be nice to feel good about the country. I think…I think that is, that is one of the reasons why a Hillary campaign is so off-putting to a lot of people. They feel like it would be a standard issue nasty campaign, and an Obama race wouldn't.

Answered prayers, folks. Answered prayers. Fast-forward fast-forward fast-forward, we're bearing down on October, and the one comic book superhero "has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck," while the other is "cynically running the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history."

Shapow!

So now Peggy Noonan sees her "beautiful election" entering "its dark phase." And she's wondering aloud whether maybe "we are all making believe this is a life-changing election because we know it's not a life-changing election," that maybe "the presidential election doesn't matter as much as we think," that maybe "[w]hoever wins will govern within more or less the same limits, both domestically and internationally."

Me, I don't know. I do know that politics is the mark that history makes on the present, that "History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, / Guides us by vanities," and that the owl of Minerva's wings unfurl only with the falling of the night. So, although my hunch all along has been that things overall will probably turn out better with an Obama administration for the next four years than with the alternative, and that the outcome of the election in November might possibly maybe even make a significant difference, world-historically speaking, one way or another, a sceptic like me can't have a notion about the matter that amounts to belief that's true and justified.

I usually know what I like, though, and what I don't. And though the blood-sport spectator in me enjoys the show, and the doubter in me knows that how the game is played and who comes out on top might not make much difference, there's a part of me that's more than a little disappointed by the "standard issue nasty campaign" the two camps have gifted us with. It could have been done differently, and very much for the better. But then again, nature is as nature does.

Kiraman Katibin

In Sura Qaf (16-22), it is written:

We indeed created man; and We know what his soul whispers within him, and We are nearer to him than the jugular vein.

When the two angels meet together, sitting one on the right, and one on the left, not a word he utters, but by him is an observer ready.

And death's agony comes in truth; that is what thou wast shunning! And the Trumpet shall be blow; that is the Day of the Threat. And every soul shall come, and with it a driver and a witness. 'Thou wast heedless of this; therefore We have now removed from thee thy covering, and so thy sight today is piercing.’

(The translation is A. J. Arberry's.)

Whether their names are or are not Ateed and Raqeeb, these two angels (or "receptors," "guardians," or "honorable recorders") are known jointly as the Kiraman Katibin. In the fullness of time, their transmogrifications have populated cultural productions as diverse as Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Eminem & Dr. Dre's "Guilty Conscience," Tank Girl, South Park, and--repeatedly--The Simpsons.

And now they're here.