Posts in November, 2006
Rumsfeld on a stairway to heaven
November 9, 2006 7 comments
So, farewell then, Donald Rumsfeld, who is “stepping down”. Does that mean, to recall Bush’s 2004 campaign formula, that the Iraqis are stepping up? This kind of stepping must be performed in a carefully choreographed sequence, somewhat like synchronized swimming, in order to preserve the mean altitude of actors in the system, which is critical for our sense of geopolitical neatness. Perhaps Rumsfeld passed Robert Gates, coming in the opposite direction, exactly halfway down the stairway. If so, I hope the two men took the opportunity to perform an insouciant stair-based dance number, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swing Time.
Presumably, after he has finished stepping down, it will be a relief to Rumsfeld that he no longer has to stand for eight to ten hours a day [pdf]. It must have been trying to remain erect for that long.
“Steps down” as a euphemism for “resigns” or “is fired” is part of the metaphor of verticality in talk about power. You reach “high office” and then “step down” from it afterwards, if you manage not to “fall” or get “pushed”. (I suppose the “corridors of power” must be steeply sloped.) If it were not from a high place, stepping down might have darker connotations, like Orpheus’s descent into Hades. At least Rumsfeld appears to have learned from that myth the importance of not looking back.
Stepping back (without turning around), of course, is a different matter. It is the mark of a strategist. Rumsfeld has liked to tell others, for instance, to “step back and look at it”, of a tricky situation. Journalists have their noses pressed up against the details and are in danger of becoming permanently cross-eyed. A certain distance is necessary for a full appreciation of the truth.
Happily, now that some distance has been imposed on Rumsfeld himself, he will be in a position to improve his viewpoint further by adding a horizontal component to his vertical displacement, as per his recent advice:
You ought to just back off, take a look at it, relax, understand that it’s complicated, it’s difficult.
After stepping down and backing off, travelling down and away to a far vantage point, Rumsfeld might this time be unable to resist one last glance back. Perhaps it will be a cause of some comfort, or even relaxation. Espying Bush, Cheney and Rice huddled atop the distant peak, Rumsfeld will be able to blot them out with one raised thumb.
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The unbearable lightness of civil liberties
November 7, 2006 4 comments
The Guardian reports that Tony Blair:
insisted yesterday that the national identity card scheme should go ahead as a question of ‘modernity’, not civil liberties [...] he did not think ‘the civil liberties argument carries much weight’.
Now, it cannot be that even Blair thinks modernity is a recommendation in and of itself. That would be like saying in 1945 that the use of nuclear weapons was simply a question of modernity. It is true that Blair’s language in the past has often intimated a vacant admiration for what is new, regardless of its other qualities, and that this attitude is encoded in his addiction to the words “modernisation”, “reform”, and so on. (It is arguable that the term “progressive”, especially in US politics, functions in a similar way. Democrats may be pleased to call themselves “progressives”, but of course “progress” is only a good thing if it is progress towards a goal that everyone agrees is the right goal. Otherwise “progressive” is emptied of any particular non-partisan meaning, and simply comes to denote “devoted to our own policies”.) . . . continued »
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Axis of evil redux
November 6, 2006 4 comments
Much dark hilarity is ensuing after Vanity Fair’s article featuring prominent administration advisers turning their backs on George W. Bush. One of them is speechwriter David Frum, who offers this sorrowful analysis:
I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.
Famously, or notoriously, Frum was responsible for the phrase “axis of evil” as a rhetorical lasso for Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. What might it mean to complain that, although Bush “said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas”? Well, the idea behind the dizzying masterstroke “axis of evil” was that these three countries were apparently, despite all appearances and fact, allied in an axis, like the Nazis and their chums, drawing up evil plans for world domination etc. And what did Bush do with this “idea”? He only invaded one of the countries. And that is the root of maybe everything. Like, duh. Hello, Mr President? You were supposed to invade Iran and North Korea too . . . continued »
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What Tony gave George
November 4, 2006 9 comments
I learn that among the gifts presented by Tony Blair to George W. Bush has been a washbag, with “GWB embossed in gold”. Never let it be said that Tony does not have a finely tuned sense of symbolic irony, alluding as he no doubt was to Macbeth Act V scene i:
Out, damned spot! out, I say! – One; two; why, then ’tis
time to do’t ; – Hell is murky! – Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier,
and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call
our power to account? . . .
Here’s the smell of the blood still: all the perfumes
of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.
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The secret of developing messages
November 3, 2006 3 comments
To resume after my short blog holiday (or, if you will, blogiday): a miscellany. A graphic was leaked from US Central Command that showed Iraq sliding along an “Index of Civil Conflict”. At far left is bucolic green “peace”. Right now, Iraq is hovering perilously close to bright-red “chaos”.
Peace vs chaos is an unusual binary opposition. After all, the normal opposite of peace is war, but then this war has been an unarguably noble pursuit, so we must find another name for the bad thing on the right-hand end. Chaos! Well, the conventional opposite of chaos is not peace but order. Yet there is no shortage in the historical record of orderly torture, say, or orderly killing. In fact, isn’t peace by its nature refreshingly chaotic? That seemed to be Donald Rumsfeld’s theory when he instructed us that “Freedom’s untidy”.
But enough quibbling. One important indicator of a slide towards chaos, according to this graphic, is that “Political/religious leaders increase public hostile rhetoric”. The NYT report explains that this “can be measured by listening to sermons at mosques and to important Shiite and Sunni leaders”. But why stretch your ears that far afield? George W. Bush has for many years now indulged not only in hostile rhetoric at public venues, but, as public hostile rhetoric may also denote, in rhetoric that is actually hostile to the public, insofar as it takes them for cretins.
In entirely unrelated news, millions of dollars of federal money is going to target unmarried adults up to the age of 29 in sexual “abstinence programs”.
Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens appeared in a radio interview and confessed in passing:
I’m very hapless about statistics.
Let us gratefully accept this as a contrite retraction of Hitchens’s ham-fisted lunge at the, er, statistics in the recent Lancet report.
Bjorn Lomborg, the “sceptical” non-environmentalist, offered some eccentric opinions about the Stern report on global warming:
Mr. Stern sees increasing hurricane damage in the U.S. as a powerful argument for carbon controls. However, hurricane damage is increasing predominantly because there are more people with more goods to be damaged, settling in ever more risky habitats. Even if global warming does significantly increase the power of hurricanes, it is estimated that 95% to 98% of the increased damage will be due to demographics.
Hard to be sure, but I think this means that it’s people’s own stupid fault for living in New Orleans. D’oh!
The Pentagon set up a new unit, as the BBC reports, to “‘develop messages’ for the 24-hour news cycle and [...] ‘correct the record’”. I like the notion of developing messages. Clearly it’s not just making shit up. There must already be a “message” there before it can be “developed”. That message is no doubt rigorously reality-based. But maybe here there is a nod to the technical idea of development in music, in which you can indeed just make shit up – you just need to make it appear to flow organically from what is there already.
Lastly, Tom DeLay bravely stood up for forced partial drowning:
“I don’t think water boarding is torture,” DeLay said. “My definition of torture is you physically harm someone by cutting them, by cutting their fingers, sticking things in their eyes, sticking their fingers in electric sockets. Water boarding is a frightening experience. But the person does not have physical damage.”
Cutting their fingers. Sticking things in their eyes. There is a lurid specificity to DeLay’s fantasies of torture, isn’t there? Probably we should make allowances for public hostile rhetoric, as long as it involves dreaming up imaginative ways to deal harm to “them”.
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