The flap is over a decision made by the Scottish government to allow terminally ill Abdel Basset Al-Megrahi, better known as the Lockerbie bomber, to spend his last days with his family in Libya. Al-Megrahi went home to a warm welcome. This caused some hard feelings. As Eric Margolis put it: "A huge international furor erupted that was rich in hypocrisy and double standards." The United States was the source of much of the furor, not to mention much of the hypocrisy and many of the double standards.

The Boycott Scotland website was not thrown together by a bunch of illiterates. It’s an impressive-looking collection of opinion, fact, and news items stitched together by a thread of righteous anger. On the face of it, the campaigners have a self-evident point. Why should a terrorist imprisoned for blowing up a plane with 270 souls aboard be released on compassionate or any other grounds? Wasn’t this decision a slap in the face to the families of the deceased? Wasn’t it insensitive?

The questions are valid. But there are several realities the boycott neglects to consider. One is that those who have poked their noses into the Al-Megrahi affair, including both Scottish and American relatives of the Lockerbie victims, investigators close to the case, and well-informed observers like Eric Margolis, tend to report a smell of rat. Al-Megrahi has consistently maintained his innocence, claiming he was framed. And many contend that pressure for a conviction from the U.S. and British governments had more to do with the man’s sentencing than did solid evidence.

Another point to consider is that whether Al-Megrahi was innocent or guilty, whether the Scottish government made an indefensible decision or a noble one, who in the end should the good citizens of the world not boycott? Why, pray tell, should anyone buy an Israeli orange, or a Moroccan olive, or a Honduran shirt, or Azeri gas, or Brazilian beef, or Saudi oil, or Japanese sushi? Where should consumer indignation begin or end? Where is the spotless state? And in the hierarchy of spotted states, does Scotland really belong in the top tier?

The boycotters charge that the British government engineered Al-Megrahi’s release as part of a deal for oil. I wouldn’t doubt it, but I wonder… Has the United States government ever sponsored a shady deal or acted "insensitively" towards other (lesser) players on the world stage in the interests of oil? Surely not. And yet, what if, just hypothetically, the United States itself should somehow stray from the moral high road long enough to say, start an unnecessary war in the interests of oil, or rig an election, or shoot down a civilian airliner and refuse to apologize, or… Sorry, I have a hard time getting indignant about recent decisions made by the Scots, and a hard time understanding why the boycotters do not insist that the world stop drinking Kentucky bourbon.

I run some more Old Pulteney over the back of my tongue, well aware that I am regarded by the boycott campaigners as one of those vermin who reflexively hates America. I admit that I do not fly a flag on the Fourth, or care who wins the Olympics, or believe an American soul is more valuable than a North Korean soul. I’m not interested in singing God Bless America during the seventh inning stretch, or contributing money or children to my government’s bloody wars, or gloating over the misfortunes of foreigners, or insisting that Mr. Al-Megrahi’s dying at home be construed as a slap in the face.

The Boycott Scotlanders can think what they want, but I am not an America-hater. My country and I don’t drool over each other, but we have an understanding. If, on the other hand, the boycotters were to accuse me of being an unrepentant Scot-lover, I’d welcome the charge. Yes, some of my best friends are Scots… I am a haggis-eating, malt-sipping, McKewan’s-swilling, Kelman-reading, Celtic-supporting, Munro-climbing, Gordan-Brown-tolerant wretch.

Scotland, in my opinion, is a credit to the planet. My unqualified enthusiasm may be due to the fact that I have never stayed long enough to grow to despise the weather, or have my car windows smashed by a late-night celebrant in Govan. But there’s no place I’d rather be. The Western Isles, Glasgow, the Highlands, Orkney, the Lowlands — fantastic places, fantastic people. As for government, it has always impressed me that the Scottish government, as far as seems possible, is in the business of doing things for people; whereas the general impression of the American government, at home or abroad, is that it is in the business of doing things to people.

It seems likely that common sense will prevail. Most Americans I talk to have never heard of the boycott, and most Scots seem to support the remarks of the Scottish first minister: "Many, many things appear in the blogosphere. What we are talking about is in the real world, and in the real world the relationship between Scotland and the United States is strong and enduring." If you feel like boycotting Scotland, I encourage you to boycott your heart out. If, on the other hand, you’re inclined to boycott the boycott, you could do worse than Old Pulteney.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

John Liechty Archives

Mark Twain’s take on the situation is typically arch: "Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired." Yes, we’ve come up with Lao Tzu, Bach, Rumi, St. Francis, Etta James, Una Muno, Maimonides, Shackleton, and Shakespeare. But then there’s the B List: Jim Jones, Stalin, Idi Amin, Barry Manilow, Judas Iscariot, Donald Rumsfeld… A case for human preeminence can be made, but with the B List allowed as evidence, it cannot be won.

And yes, there’s the Our-Brain-Is-Bigger-Than-Yours argument, which our species so often manages to make sound like a schoolyard taunt. But I don’t see what it really has to do with anything. By big-brain logic, why shouldn’t the apex of creation award go to the elephant for its trunk, or the chameleon for its tongue, or the cockroach for its resilience, or the ant for its abundance, or the mandrill for its backside? Big brains are fine, I guess, but does having one really make the experience of life vastly superior to that of, say, a green turtle or a head louse or an indigo bunting?

"Of course it does!" reflexively growl all but eight of the 6.6 billion Homo sapiens currently subdividing, as inequitably as can be gotten away with, the crust of this planet. Upon which we must trot out Mark Twain again: "God’s noblest work? Man. Who found it out? Man."

The notion of human exceptionalism is closely related to its sub-strain, the notion of national exceptionalism, boiling down in our case to: "God’s noblest nation? America. Who found it out? America." Are we special? Undeniably. Ben Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, Sojourner Truth, Edward Hopper, Marilyn Monroe… Point Reyes, the Golden Gate Bridge, the 1968 Tigers, the Chrysler Building… But enough lists. Are we different? Yes. Are we unique? In many ways, yes. But are we extra-special? Are we extra-extra-special? Are we immeasurably better than the French? Are we, in the Clinton Administration word, indispensable? That’s what the zealous proponent of American exceptionalism wants to hear. Not just that we’re special — that we’re specialer than anyone else in history. Our special is bigger than your special.

"The United States does not torture," a now-discarded President assured us in 2005. We knew it wasn’t true, we knew that the Bush government was very possibly torturing someone even as the denial was spoken. But we nodded our heads anyway, because overriding whatever else we knew was the fond notion that we’re special. Torture is something the evildoers do. We might indulge in a little "water-boarding" or "walling" now and then, but that’s different and as government lawyers went to a lot of trouble to discover, legal too. It could result in kidney failure or insanity or death, but it wasn’t the crude stuff the bad guys practice. How could it be? "America does not torture," a fresh President declared in February of this year, declining to note that we pay client states to do it for us. Masters of what Orwell termed doublethink, we pretend not to notice.

A few days ago, Stephen Green of Midland, Texas, was sentenced to life imprisonment for the 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl, Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi. Green also killed the girl’s mother, father, and five-year-old sister, disgracing himself, the uniform he wore, and one would have thought his country. Yet one of the attorneys on the case found occasion to doublethink glory from disgrace: "This trial represents some of the most important principles of our Constitution and our democracy in action. The decision of how justice would be best served was left to the people."

Ah, a special ending, after all. The Will of the People! Democracy in Action! Justice Served! While it may be worth applauding that a war criminal has been tried and is going to prison, let’s recall that a number of war criminals are still at large. (The most high profile among them are busy with their memoirs.) And let’s at least acknowledge that our principles had as much to do with sending Stephen Green to Iraq as with sending him to prison — and plenty to do with sending Abeer al-Janabi, and how many like her, to an early grave. The Iraq War has been a sordid business from day one. Where was Democracy in Action when the serpent was hatched?

Through it all, a tone-deaf choir of American exceptionalists has remained center stage, like preschoolers chanting that venerable lyric: "I am special, I am special. Look at me! Look at me!" The tune has long ceased to entertain the ears of the world, and is even starting to grate on domestic ears. The choir is uncommonly persistent, but perhaps it is time to expand the repertoire or retreat to the wings.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

John Liechty Archives

Both losses irritated me, not so much because of the missing money as because of the fact that my own negligence and stupidity were primary factors. All in all, the second rip-off irritated me more. The robbery of money from my house was, so to speak, a good honest crime. Somebody went to the trouble of watching the bank, tailing me home, and crawling through my window. For his enterprise, the thief ended up with a wad of what had recently been mine. Who knows, maybe he repented and sent the money to UNICEF. Maybe he used the windfall to go to seminary, or study ethics or post-modern semiotics, or anything to make the world a better place. I hope so. On the other hand, my thief likely just went off on a colossal bender. That’s what I would have done. One way or another, the cash got spent.

The latest theft was less straightforward, and I am not evolved enough to understand it. You need a PhD in economics or years of government service to really grasp money-melting. What embarrasses me most about the disappeared funds is that "investing" was never my idea. I understand money in cigar boxes and gold bangles on wrists. But I allowed myself to be steered against my instincts. What did the investments mean? I never knew. For a while it looked like I was making money by doing nothing. I suppose I was supposed to feel good about that, but I didn’t. It didn’t make sense. Spreadsheets started coming in the mail, but they didn’t make sense either, as I never learned to read them. Meanwhile that figure — my net worth — kept going up. It gave no real pleasure, it was just a number, but by God it kept going up. Then one day I opened an envelope to find that my fiscal boner had, as we used to say in junior high, popped.

My dictionary defines economy as: "Careful, thrifty management of resources, such as money, materials, or labor." That strikes me as all anyone could possibly need to know on the topic. But there are several additional points on Economy that I think I understand, and I will belabor them all. One is Chapter One of Walden. I admire the way Thoreau knows where every penny went. Economy, he says, is simply a matter of attending to basic needs — Food, Shelter, Clothing, Fuel — as well as a constant matter of attending to the concept of Enough. The total expenditure for his first year at Walden Pond came to $61.99 3/4. (He made most of it back.) Thoreau clearly cherished that quarter cent short of $62. "I can live on board nails," was his comment to the skeptics. "If they cannot understand that, they cannot understand much that I have to say." If we understood living on board nails, we might be less disposed to understand living on bailouts.

Another literary lesson in economics simple enough for me to grasp is the famous precept of Dickens’ Mr. Micawber: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." In other words, don’t spend more than you have…. This is not, in the overextended cliché of the age, rocket science. And yet it is a concept beyond the walnut brain of the stegosaurus we refer to as government, which feeds on war, debt and waste, result misery.

And finally, a practical lesson in economy that has stayed with me over the years. When I was 15, I was invited to catch chickens by a friend. His great-uncle and mine, a man who made Thoreau look like a wastrel, was running the operation. We showed up well after dark on a hot July night, and were released among the fowl. The broiler-house was appropriately broiling. And the smell was unique. S__t stinks, of course, but stink is not a pungent enough verb for what chickens do. We sweated and gasped through swirling feathers and dust until the last bird was on the truck.

When at last I went crawling up to my great-uncle, embraced his shins, and kissed his feet, I was under the impression that I deserved to be made rich. The great-uncle reluctantly peeled three limp dollars off a roll and let me have them. He said I’d worked somewhere in the vicinity of an hour, and I’m sure he was right. I went away from there understanding something about economy. Those were three dollars I did not spend lightly, nor did I let anyone steal them.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

John Liechty Archives

Huckleberry Finn usually offends those prone to offense for either "religious" or "racial" reasons. Foley’s main gripe involves the latter. Twain’s novel hosts a character called Nigger Jim, and according to Foley, now that "Barack Obama is president-elect of the United States, novels that use the u2018N-word’ repeatedly need to go." (Note the English teacher’s dubious placement of the adverb.) Poor Mark Twain. If he’d only had the prescience to call his character N-word Jim, the tender buds of America could carry on reading. That Twain may have named his character in accordance with a reality he was endeavoring to depict… That Twain’s character may appear "ignorant, inarticulate, and uneducated" because Twain legitimately chose to depict a man who appeared ignorant, inarticulate, and uneducated… (Incidentally, Jim is uneducated but no one who’s understood Huck Finn would dare call him ignorant or inarticulate.)… That Twain may have said: "Our Civil War was a blot on our history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls…" But the obvious is not good enough for Foley, who grieves that many of his students "never get past the demeaning word Huck uses to refer to his friend."

"This is particularly true, of course, of African American students," Foley wrote in a comment to a Seattle paper. "With few exceptions, all the black students in my classes have appeared very uncomfortable when I’ve discussed these matters…" Allow me to wonder a moment at Foley’s language. Consider first the use of "of course." Why do Foley’s African American students, "of course," appear "very uncomfortable?" Here it must be revealed that Foley is an educationist of pallor, or whatever the appropriate expression is for a white teacher, and that he works at a "largely white suburban high school." Might not Foley’s "of course" indicate a certain bias? Might not much of the "discomfort" stem from Foley himself? Might there be reason to find more racist attitude in Foley’s few comments than in the thousands of pages of intelligent English Mark Twain left to the world? As for intelligent English, what to make of Foley’s phrase: "With few exceptions, all the black students in my class…?" If there were "few exceptions," then in fact there were some, yet all the blacks in Foley’s class seemed (of course) uncomfortable… Well, to echo Mr. Twain, the logic is one too many on me. I worry for Foley, as I worry for anyone in the teaching profession, myself included, that he may be ignorant, inarticulate, and educated.

But let’s leave Foley to his syllabus for now and turn to Mark Twain, who may or may not have said: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." One of the first things to consider about Twain is that he was an equal opportunity offender. He had often witty, sometimes angry, always unvarnished things to say about Government, Science, Religion, Education, Greed, Piety, War, Language… Among those who might have found occasion to take offense (but who far more often found occasion to laugh) were the rich, poor, middle-class, Mormons, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, beggars, plutocrats, pundits, whites, blacks, conservatives, liberals, Germans, Irish, English, Native Americans, prudes, politicians, patriots, cannibals, missionaries, imperialists, children, lawyers, Sunday school teachers, educators, policemen, yokels, sophisticates, soldiers… Hardly anyone got off the hook, least of all Twain himself.

If Mark Twain was racist, it was not a specific race but the human race itself he professed to be down on. "Often it seems such a pity Noah and his party did not miss the boat," he observed. Or: "Concerning the difference between man and the jackass, some observers hold that there isn’t any. But this wrongs the jackass." Twain didn’t actually believe or intend such comments to be offensive, for as he himself admitted: "There isn’t any way to libel the human race." What burned Twain up was that smug, back-slapping, self-congratulatory nonsense we all submit to at one time or another regarding our perceived superiority — our superior intelligence, superior morality, superior species, superior education, superior genes, superior religion, superior flag. Twain simply wanted to remind us of our place. Not some of us — all of us. Not some races or religions or nationalities — all of them.

Mark Twain was a master storyteller, essayist, parodist, humorist, and fabulist. His range of interest in the people and world around him was remarkable. His depictions of human nature may be unparalleled in American fiction. Twain is sometimes pegged a sour old cynic, often as not by those who haven’t read him. Yet for all his fulminating, ("Damn these human beings; if I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag.") those who read Twain generally conclude that he enjoyed human beings immensely.

On one count I am sympathetic to Teacher Foley’s frustration with Huck Finn — Foley is weary of dealing with parents who come in to complain. But I can not be sympathetic to his proposed solution — to replace Huckleberry Finn with Lonesome Dove. Lonesome Dove is a fine book and Larry McMurtry a fine writer, but one does not scrap one of the greatest novels in American literature because it causes discomfort. That Huck Finn remains a discomfiting book is in fact one of the highest compliments that can be paid it.

In his inauguration speech, Barack Obama noted that America is a young country but that the time has come to put away childish things. The new President has proven himself able to discuss race and religion in an intelligent, forthright, adult fashion. I suspect our high school students, whatever their race or religion, can manage that too. I suspect they are grown up enough to handle Huckleberry Finn, N-word and all, provided the same can be said for their parents and teachers.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

John Liechty Archives

Not only is history 48 hours off — today’s paper declares that the new U.S. President has just four years to save the world. We’ve had 60 now to settle a conflict over a small patch of the world called Palestine and haven’t hit square one as yet, but never mind, these are hopeful times. If we can’t manage a few acres in 60 years, why not save the whole planet in four? Once he’s bailed out America’s Bushed reputation and Bushed economy, no doubt President Obama will see to the cosmos. Perhaps he’ll even find an occasion to achieve something substantial in Palestine. By then lunch will be free, pigs will fly, and the Cubs will prevail.

In case you think four years to save a planet might be journalistic hyperbole, consider that the ancient Maya calculated the end of the Fifth Sun, i.e., Dire Apocalypse, to fall on 23 December 2012, four years away. Why the Fifth Sun couldn’t have waited till Christmas is beyond me, but no matter — we’ll have the gift exchange early. Then again, today’s paper and the ancient Maya might be wrong, in which case the planet (and history) will stagger on a while longer. I hope they do. In fact, I’m betting that they do. I’m not particularly optimistic about Homo sapiens’ staggering-on capacity but have a hunch the planet, older and wiser than Homo sapiens, will carry on whether Obama saves it or not.

Hyperbole seems to be a handy way to get attention in this inattentive, information-saturated age. Certainly there are signs of hyperbole fatigue. "Hmm," we say; "Four years to save the planet… Any more coffee?" Hyperbole, nonetheless, is a time-tested rhetorical device, as George Bush’s speechwriters are well aware. Consider the following from the Anti-Messiah’s "farewell address" to the nation:

1. Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship and a sworn enemy of America to an Arab democracy at the heart of the Middle East and a friend of the United States.

That is what the President said. Run through a dehyperbolizer, what emerges is: Iraq has gone from a brutal dictatorship and sworn enemy of America to a brutal "democracy" and "friend" of the United States. Tens of thousands of people are dead. Hundreds of thousands are displaced. Millions have suffered terribly. Billions of tax dollars are wasted. It is now believed, and with reason, that Iraq under Saddam was in many respects better off than Iraq after Bush.

2. …Around the world, America is promoting human liberty, human rights and human dignity. We’re standing with dissidents and young democracies…

Around the world, the American government is promoting what it perceives as its own interests. Liberty, rights, and dignity play second fiddle at home or abroad. We stand on dissidents as commonly as we stand with them.

3. While our country is safer than it was seven years ago, the greatest threat to our people remains another terrorist attack. Our enemies are patient, and determined to strike again. America did nothing to seek or deserve this conflict…

Whether our country is safer than it was seven years ago is a toss-up. The greatest threat to our people remains inept leadership, greed, corruption, malaise, ignorance, environmental degradation… fortunately the prospect of another terrorist attack helps us ignore the herd of elephants in the room. Remember when I kept promising to smoke the terrorists out and bring ‘em back dead or alive, and made brassy remarks like bring ‘em on and mission accomplished? What I really meant was: our enemies are patient and determined to strike again. America did nothing to seek or deserve this conflict? I thank my speechwriters for selecting "seek or deserve" instead of "incite or provoke." Or "prevent." Or "outsmart."

4. I’ve often spoken to you about good and evil, and this has made some uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two of them there can be no compromise.

There’s white hats and black. We wear the white ones. They wear the black ones. We’ll let you know who "they" are in the unlikely event of ambiguity.

5. Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere.

Murdering the innocent to advance an ideology is wrong every time, everywhere… Unless you’re conducting a War on Terror, and the innocent are members of wedding parties, children, civilians, prisoners… that’s collateral damage. Or unless your ideology happens to fall under our umbrella, in which case you have the right to "defend yourself" by systematically starving and killing a people mistreated and marginalized for 60 years, and vandalizing what little of their property you haven’t already confiscated.

These are just five statements from Bush’s farewell open to dehyperbolization. There remain, as Mark Twain might have put it, several others. In his last press conference the President allowed that he’s made tough decisions and that things haven’t always gone as planned, but concluded that all in all it’s been "fun." Possibly. One suspects that many people, now that Israel has momentarily suspended the blood-letting it calls Operation Cast Lead, are in a mood to cast leather. It might be fun to see a mountain of shoes, say five or six billion of them, cover a certain ranch in Texas — but perhaps I hyperbolize.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

John Liechty Archives

DIGG THIS

Once upon a time there lived an emperor who had three sons. The emperor was getting old, and began grooming a replacement. He soon concluded that one of the sons, a simpleton called Clever Jorg, could never succeed him. Jorg spent his days at the local tavern amusing the barmaids. He was a happy-go-lucky sort, less industrious than his brothers. But since fairy tale protocol requires that the happy-go-lucky simpleton get the throne/princess in the end, Clever Jorg wound up wearing ermine.

Some of the peasants laughed when they heard Jorg was going to run the show. "At least this might be entertaining," they said. Others did not laugh. "At best this might be catastrophic," they thought.

In a loud travesty of efficiency called National Elections, Jorg claimed the throne with the help of Veep, his huntsman. Fairy tale protocol requires that huntsmen either be conniving consorts of Darkness, or good-hearted fellows at bottom who spare the princess instead of shooting her as ordered. Veep was of the former. When he wasn’t on a date with the Dark Side, he was off on canned hunts, gunning for small birds and occasionally old friends.

One day out of nowhere, a twisted dragon flew brazenly to the heart of empire, toasting some of its most cherished monuments and toasting itself in the process. A number of largely expendable peasants died too. More troubling was the fact that the dragon had cut so close to the knuckle, endangering the lives of the indispensable, driving Veep himself into a dragon-proof chamber deep underground. Most troubling of all was the fact that the empire had been made to look vulnerable and clumsy.

"How the heck did that thing get past the Guards?" Jorg demanded privately, as the smoke cleared. A great deal of peasant gold was extracted annually to prevent just such snafus from happening. The Guards were supposed to be state of the art. The emperor dimly remembered having glanced at a report called "Twisted Dragon Plans to Attack Seat of Empire," but decided not to bring that up.

Several of Clever Jorg’s advisors suggested that the dragon had sprung from a vindictive breed known as Blowback, and that its visit had been a fairly predictable consequence of imperial shenanigans. "Stuff that," said Jorg. "That will never do. We can’t play that on Main Street." Main Street was where the peasants lived. "What do you say, Veep?"

The huntsman’s lip curled. "This malignant worm had nothing to do with Us," he said. "It is purely an agent of Them. It smacks of an eastern breed called Jihad, and its motive is simple — it hates our freedoms. We must take bold action. We must destroy the evildoers before they destroy us. You must become a war emperor."

"Now you’re talkin’" said Clever Jorg. Word reached Main Street, and fear spread throughout the realm. The peasants were encouraged to go shopping.

After a while it became hard to remember that the attack of the twisted worm had been a catastrophe. For Clever Jorg it began to feel more like a windfall. In fact, he was on something of a roll. War emperorship suited him.

One day Veep pulled Jorg aside. "Unfinished business," he winked, "in Messopotamia. Lotsa oil, broken defenses, rotten leadership… We’re talking maidens throwing flowers. We’re talking cakewalk. We’re talking the world’s biggest embassy. We’re talking good for the economy, yours and mine at any rate."

"Bring it on!" said Clever Jorg, and the peasants supported him, offering up more of their expendable children and gold. Some people asked whether it was right to make war on a broke-down country that hadn’t made war on you, so the emperor patiently explained the Clever Jorg Policy. A few continued to murmur. "But isn’t that like chopping off someone’s arm in case they might hit you someday? Where do you draw the line?" The emperor impatiently savaged their patriotism.

The emperor’s War Vizier, a jolly dwarf by the name of Rumsfeldstiltskin, directed a monumental military victory against Taliban, a former friend turned vile ogre, and against Taliban’s barbarous pets, the dragons of Tora Bora. He then turned his sights on Sodom Insane, another former friend turned ogre, and directed a monumental military victory in Messopotamia. "Mission Accomplished!" cried Clever Jorg. "Let’s do Persia!"

A short time later, as these monumental military victories unraveled to such an extent that even the distracted gaze of Main Street began to take notice, Rumsfeldstiltskin grew less jolly, and took to skulking on the sidelines with his friend Veep. "Stuff happens," he sniffed. Bombing wedding parties and torturing prisoners provided consolation for a time, but eventually things just got weird and Rumsfeldstiltskin threw in the towel.

Then one day the emperor called the peasants together. He had a grave announcement. "Remember all that gold you’ve been encouraged to drop in the imperial casinos? Well, due to greed and mismanagement of proportions incomprehensible to all of us here in the Palace, the casinos have gone bust. Your gold has turned to lead. It’s some kind of bizarre alchemy."

The peasants were shocked and awed. "How do we get our gold back?" many wondered aloud.

"Trust us," said Clever Jorg, indispensably. "We can fix it." His huntsman, meanwhile, was spotted leading the princess away into the deep, dark forest.

The End.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

John Liechty Archives

DIGG THIS

True! Nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The Conventions had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them… I heard all things in heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?

Far from driving me mad, the Conventions compel me to declare my willingness to occupy the highest office of the greatest nation in the history of planet Earth. I am called from obscurity to serve Country First, as indicated by the little stars-and-stripes pin on my lapel. Friends, I humbly accept the call. Allow me to mention how genuinely, how uniquely, how inexpressibly more than the next guy I love America. At the same time, allow me to stress how genuinely, how uniquely, how inexpressibly just like the next guy I nonetheless remain. Yes, friends, I confess it — I am ordinary. I’m no elitist.

Mother used to get me up for a bowl of gruel at 4:00 a.m. Once I’d done my homework on the back of our only coal shovel, I’d blow out the candle, draw daddy’s gun down from the rack and drill a moose before dawn. I don’t recall how many houses we owned back then, but we were far too poor for a knife, so I’d field dress the beast with my teeth, then trot off for school. Mama’s Irish blood inspired me never to take any crap from bullies along the way, and by God I learned to be a fighter. If Jesus ever calls me to take on foreign riffraff (and I have a hunch he will), let me repeat, I’m a fighter. I’ve also been called a maverick from time to time. It’s nearly impossible to convey in words the extent to which Corrupt Corporate Washington is shaking in its boots at the prospect of my election. Friends, I am the voice of Change.

Grandpa marched in Patton’s army. And while I would be the last to suggest that it indicates my superior fitness to lead this superior nation, allow me to note that I myself am a War Hero. I hesitate to bring it up. Have I mentioned what a rambunctious maverick I’m regarded as? Yes, Mama’d wake me at 3:00 a.m., which may well be the reason I’ve remained so ordinary while still developing the extraordinary qualities needed to lead. I’ve run stuff and organized and legislated and loved God and played point guard on my high school basketball team, and Patton marched in Grandpa’s army, and hell yes I’d nuke Iran, and open the door for Armageddon if it makes Israel happy, and I’m developing a sudden passion for Georgian democracy, and my heart bleeds openly this time around for the city of New Orleans, and this isn’t about me it’s about you, and my son Airstrip is off to war and my daughter Formica is testing my commitment to Family Values, and here’s to victory in Iraq, and don’t forget that despite my extraordinary love for God and Country, I’m just as ordinary as y’all, and if I’ve left anything out, let me conclude with the deep and maverick thought that’s just galloped into my head…. Gawd Bless America!

The Conventions had sharpened my senses, not dulled or destroyed them. How then am I mad?

PS: On October 3, 1847 Edgar Allan Poe was found delirious and “in great distress” on the streets of Baltimore. Four days later he was dead. His death is generally linked to the circumstance that October 3, 1847 was election day in Baltimore. There is good evidence to support the theory that Poe was a victim of “cooping” — a practice whereby political gangs kidnapped vulnerable bystanders, cooped them up, got them drunk, and bullied them round the polling stations to vote over and over again for a corrupt candidate. It is very possible that Poe, whose mental and physical health was fragile, was literally killed by someone’s greed for votes.

The crude tactics of 1847 are still with us, face-lifted and plasticized perhaps like so many of the politicians who employ them, yet indicative of that same underlying greed for votes. The Democratic Party has conducted itself with relative dignity. This is not necessarily a compliment — relative to today’s average high-profile Republican, an earwig attains nobility.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

John Liechty Archives

DIGG THIS

"Hope is necessary in every condition," said Samuel Johnson. Most people would agree. It hardly seems sensible to contradict the man who termed patriotism "the last refuge of a scoundrel" and a tavern chair "the throne of human felicity." Yet throughout my life I have felt generally wary towards hope and have often doubted its wisdom, and even sometimes its necessity.

This "negative" attitude can in part be blamed on Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, which I found compelling as a teenager. Camus talked about learning to live "without appeal" — hope was a distracter, a dilutor, a sop, distorting any clear comprehension of reality. Camus was not advocating despair — he was simply convinced that hope was illusory, and therefore inadvisable. Not only was hope a waste of time, it was an instrument of avoidable cruelty, "the worst of evils" according to Nietzsche, "for it prolongs the torments of man."

I still think Camus’ notions make good sense, and still treasure the opening lines of Woody Allen’s parody, My Speech to the Graduates, which begins: "More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." I always feel peculiarly at ease reading those words. There are worse things to do with existential angst than laugh.

As someone constitutionally disposed to Camus’ absurdity of hope and Woody Allen’s farcicality of hope, I was predictably Not Hopeful when I opened Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope this summer. I assumed it would court the warm, fuzzy, nausea-inducing sentiments of the politician venturing to speak "from the heart." But Obama’s book does not turn one’s stomach or even raise one’s hackles unduly. Proposed solutions to problems can sometimes sound sketchy, improbable, too good to be true. And Obama is a bit too willing to praise and defend military intervention. While critical of the current Iraq War, he seems charmed by the last one, and expresses no misgivings about the war in Afghanistan. Support for military "solutions" may be the standard tune in American politics, but it is disappointing to hear Obama swell the chorus so readily.

All in all though, The Audacity of Hope is written by a man who sounds articulate, capable, intelligent, conscientious, considerate, and genuinely committed to a politics beyond the narrow interests of himself or his party. Americans ought to feel, if not hopeful, at least grateful that Barack Obama is in the running.

"He who despairs over an event is a coward, but he who holds hope for the human condition is a fool," Camus wrote in The Rebel. Obama is neither a coward nor a fool — and I don’t think Gore Vidal’s shrewd one-liner has been lost on him: "It is not too wise ever to be too optimistic when it comes to the human race." Obama’s brand of hope is not stupid or blind… yet. It seems to fall within the healthy scope of Dr. Johnson’s "necessary."

However, let us recall that it is the nature of politics to turn vital things impotent and necessary things pointless. Politics is the mill that grinds spirit to letter. Hope’s a pleasant enough starter but if it’s all Obama’s got cooking, better tighten your belt. As Francis Bacon observed, "Hope is a good breakfast, but it is a bad supper." Or as the wonderfully pragmatic Ben Franklin put it, "He that lives upon hope will die fasting." A hungry public feels drawn to hope, but it will take more than cotton candy to fill our stomachs.

Anyway, it’s down to Obama or McCain. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

John Liechty Archives

DIGG THIS

"How Can Barack Obama Win Keys to the White House?" wonders the headline of a 23 April piece in The Times: "Karl Rove Offers a Few Tips." Rove seems concerned that the Obama campaign may be going astray, and has selflessly gone out on a public limb to try to help. There’s nothing like a compassionate conservative.

Here is a Rove shortlist of Obama shortcomings:

1. Obama is "frail." This is worrisome, and should Obama "win the keys" to the White House, we will miss the robust exemplars that have vitalized that sanctum of Democracy for the last eight years. Rummy the Wrestler, Cheney the Huntsman, Condi the Cold Warrior…. But topping the list, Dubya the Pilot. Who can forget his leather jacket and firmly-cupped crotch as he stood so unfraily on the deck of that aircraft carrier back when he’d won the Iraq War?
2. Obama is out of touch… "tone deaf" to the concerns of ordinary Americans. Likewise worrisome. We’ll surely miss the perfect pitch that has distinguished the Bush Administration. God knows if Obama would have been in touch enough to start a war as beneficial as Bush’s to the economy, safety, reputation, and general wellbeing of the ordinary American.
3. Obama is elitist. His mother was an anthropologist. He’s appealing to a voter base that resembles "George McGovern’s coalition of college students and white wine sippers." If there’s one thing I hate it’s an elitist president. Washington, Adams, Jefferson — just regular guys. Not one had an anthropologist mother, not one was attracted to George McGovern, and I submit that to a man they drank red wine in virile gulps, not sissy sips. As for Dubya, he’s regular as regular gets. In fact, if there’s one American president who can be said to have achieved office exclusively on his own merits and not because he’s somebody’s son, it’s surely Dubya. "God bless the child that’s got his own," as Billie Holiday put it.
4. Obama does not meet Karl Rove’s impeccable standards of political hygiene. Rove recommends that Obama stop attacking McCain and Clinton, because this is "corrosive of his fundamental message about representing a new kind of politics." Some might view this as a classic case of the pot calling the kettle a utensil of color. Personally, I accept it as a classic sample of Rovian rectitude. There is no one in the world more distressed by political mudslinging than Karl Rove, and I wish Obama would cut it out.
5. Obama is exploiting his person of colorhood. "Mr. Rove," says The Times, "suggested that race, far from hurting Mr. Obama probably works in his favour by attracting white voters who regard the prospect of a black president as a u2018hopeful thing.’" Yes, probably. I suspect that pale-skinned voters will turn out in droves to vote for a dark-skinned president because the idea will have filled them with an irrepressible sense of hope. Thanks to race, Obama’s essentially a shoe-in. If Clinton and McCain opt to conduct the remainder of their campaigns in black-face, who can blame them? Obama shouldn’t have all the advantages.

The Times goes on to say that Rove’s scorn became "almost palpable" when noting that Obama has developed a habit of "parsing." That really burns me up too, almost palpably. The last thing we need in American politics is a Parsee. So what can Obama do?

Obviously he must stop parsing as soon as possible. More time in the weight room and on steroids might help overcome the frailty problem. A leather jacket and plucky codpiece couldn’t hurt. If Obama is wise, he will become more attuned to ordinary Americans. The Bush Administration will be a tough act to follow in that department — few administrations in American history have shown such grasp for the ordinary.

Now that Obama has distanced himself from Jeremiah Wright, he needs to go after his mother, and all the other liberal anthropologist types who bedevil our proud nation. He needs to drink red wine like a man and take a swipe at George McGovern. At the same time, he should refrain from criticizing other candidates because that sort of thing is especially hurtful to people of Karl Rove’s tender moral complexion. Finally, Obama needs to become white, and cease once and for all his crafty exploitation of the "race issue."

And then, naturally, Barack Obama will need to thank the compassionate conservative formerly known as Bush’s Brain for his tips on running a more principled campaign.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

John Liechty Archives

DIGG THIS

With what a Japanese student of mine called "national erections" around the corner, I find myself in a familiar state of bewilderment. First, I can’t drop the notion that a nation that’s produced Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Edison, Billie Holiday and Billy Wilder, Miles Davis and Miles Standish, Al Kaline, Dorothy Day, Cole Porter, Sacagawea, Ben Franklin, Merle Haggard, Marilyn Monroe, and Winslow Homer might just be expected to scrape up a presidential nominee whose level of intellect, character, and competence surpasses that of the Decider Guy we’ve enjoyed over the last eight, or has it been eighty, years. Is this so much to expect?

My bewilderment also stems from a learning disorder common to many Americans. I know that there is something out there called an Election Process. I know that it is long, costly, and sneaky. I know that people with political hair and plastic faces and ideas every bit as compelling as reruns of wretched made-for-TV dramas tend to "emerge" from it. Yet I do not know how the Process actually works. This is partly my own fault. If I worked at it harder, I’d likely be able to explain a caucus, a primary, or an electoral college. The fact of the matter is — I have only a foggy idea what they are, and doubt that I’m alone in the fog.

The question that seems to concern most people is not how but whether the Election Process works. The last Emergence has not been widely regarded as a sign that it does, in spite of the fact that Decider Guy has just re-declared the ongoing Iraq adventure a success. It follows that his overall reign may be termed a success too, but while we’re at it, let’s throw in the Battle of Little Big Horn, flight of Icarus, voyage of the Titanic, and 1919 World Series. Bob Dylan’s "There’s no success like failure" could serve as one of the kinder epitaphs on the tomb of the Bush administration.

As for the President’s personal epitaph (once his mortal journey of golf, fundraisers, and brush clearing at taxpayer expense is run), I have recently come across an inspired possibility in Alistair Cooke’s America. The BBC series is somewhat dated but well worthwhile, as are the Letters from America. Cooke’s friendship with and reflections on H. L. Mencken are fascinating. After being informed that President Coolidge was dead, it was probably Mencken (the comment is attributed to Dorothy Parker as well) who asked, "How did they know?" And it was definitely Mencken who wrote Coolidge this epitaph: "He had no ideas and was not a nuisance." The line is readily adaptable to the current fruit of the Election Process. "He had no ideas and was a nuisance."

Meanwhile, two candidates with political hair and plastic faces are emerging in the showdown to become Decider Guy’s successor. I will mention no names, but one of these candidates seems old enough to rule Cuba, the other ambitious enough to rule anything in sight. I heartily endorse either, on the principle that when I endorse a candidate, that candidate has no more hope of being elected than Fritz the Cat. There remains a third possibility — a candidate who’s shown consistent signs of courage, intelligence, eloquence, and that rarest of traits in a politician, dignity. Again, I will name no names. I do not endorse him because I have no wish to jinx his chances. If the world were given a vote, he’d be in on a landslide. But it’s America doing the voting, and it remains to be seen if we’ve got the smarts to override our taste for plastic.

"Remember," advises a character in Chetan Bhagat’s novel One Night @ The Call Center: "A 35-year-old American brain and IQ is the same as a 10-year-old Indian’s brain… Americans are dumb, just accept it." One hopes, without an extravagant degree of optimism, that the national erections show otherwise.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

DIGG THIS

I am one of those backward backwoods miscreants who finds it less possible to believe in Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens put together than in God, so what I’m about to say will not endear me to the camp of atheism chic those two seem to be scout-mastering. Nor will it win a warm welcome into the camp of the believers. In other words, I’m about to venture into that no-man’s-land called Opinions on Religion, from which few emerge unscathed and most emerge unloved.

A favorite secularist target is the notion common to many religious groups that they, and they alone, possess a sacred text and that it, and it alone, is literally the Last Word on the Matter, no matter the matter. One of the chapters in Christopher Hitchens’ bestseller God Is Not Great is called "The Nightmare of the Old Testament." It follows the standard attack run: If the Old Testament is so sacred, why is it so often incoherent, irrational, and irrelevant? That word “nightmare” may provoke certain believers to sputter, overheat, wipe the foam from their mouths, and clamor for Hitchens’ scalp now and an eternal soul-roast later — I think it would be better (not to mention less satisfying to the Hitchenses of the world) to react with a shrug of indifference, or to partially concede the point. The Old Testament is something of a nightmare, particularly if readers insist on drawing a literal interpretation of all it says. And after all, nightmarishness isn’t the worst that can be said about a book. Nineteen-Eighty-Four, Macbeth, Crime and Punishment, The Divine Comedy, Heart of Darkness… a lot of great books are nightmares. Might not the Old Testament be in that league?

Not according to "The Bible’s Literary Sins" (13/8/07 Guardian Unlimited), written in the dismissive, condescending, cocksure tone atheists like for picking at holy writ. Not only is the Bible not a sacred book, Sam Jordison decides — it is not even a good book in the literary sense. Jordison finds the Old Testament particularly wanting, though he grants it a "few passages of extraordinary beauty." Song of Solomon, regarded as some kind of groovy early Semitic version of The Kama Sutra, is described as "a blast." Jordison doesn’t bother with enduring Old Testament stories like those woven around Samson, Samuel, Noah, David, Jonah, or Joseph. He doesn’t mention the majestic account of creation in Genesis, the poetry of the Psalms, the eloquence of the Prophets, the beauty of Ecclesiastes, the complexity of Job — none of these is blast enough for a spot on his miniature list of Old Testament literary qualifiers.

I’m afraid there’s more wisdom and more literature in half a page of Ecclesiastes than in "The Bible’s Literary Sins" added to all 40 gazillion copies of The Da Vinci Code sold to date. That said, I also fear that the phrase Mark Twain applied to the Book of Mormon is equally applicable to parts of the Old Testament. They are "chloroform in print" to all but the most dogged readers. "I disliked reading the book of Numbers," Gandhi wrote in his autobiography. I admire his gift for understatement. A book like Numbers is handy if you’re curious about ritual slaughter or codes of cleanliness, but on the whole it is slow going. As a juvenile reader, I found only two outlets for relief. One was the reference heading "Balaam’s Ass Speaks," which could be counted on to amuse certain of my peers. The other was Numbers 25:1: "While Israel dwelt in Shittim the people began to play the harlot with the daughters of Moab." I wondered whether Shittim had subdivisions, like East Shittim, West Shittim, or Deep Shittim, and was often kept from sleep by speculations on the daughters of Moab.

Later, I became less bored than troubled by some of the stories in Numbers. The Rebellion of Korah (Numbers 15—17), for example, relates how an Israelite is found in the wilderness gathering firewood on the Sabbath, taken into custody, and brought back to camp. Moses consults the Lord, and relays His orders: "Take the man out of camp and stone him." The sentence is carried out, but a person named Korah calls on 250 "well-known men chosen from the assembly." These confront Moses and the priests: "You have gone too far! For all the congregation are holy, every one of them… why then do you exalt yourselves?" Moses reacts angrily, and says that God will settle the matter come morning. Come morning, Korah and company are swallowed up into the earth, sent down "alive into Sheol." Yet the murmurs persist: "You have killed the people of the Lord." Moses and Aaron issue another warning. God sends a plague that kills 14,700 more people of the Lord. The murmuring stops.

A literalist will read the Rebellion of Korah as proof that God’s mysterious will is meant to be obeyed, a harsh lesson in the virtues of conformity. Korah had it coming; Moses and the priests are the heroes of the story. They did what they had to, and the death of some 15,000 souls was worth it to ensure that nobody went gathering firewood on the Sabbath again, and that nobody challenged authority the way Korah and company had. I can’t help thinking of Madeleine Albright’s statement that the hundreds of thousands of deaths attributed to the years of sanctions against Iraq were "worth it." But my point is that I no longer find reading the Bible worth it if one is expected to suspend the kind of critical, moral, literary, intuitional, or intellectual judgment one would feel a duty to use with any other demanding text. If the Bible is a great book, it deserves to be read as a great book. And like all great books, it holds much of its meaning between the lines.

Read between the lines, the Rebellion of Korah turns from a morally repulsive story to a morally instructive one. A bunch of pious busybodies spot some poor old devil out gathering firewood on the Sabbath, and turn him in. Under pressure from a priestly elite and inflexible elements in the tribe, Moses makes a spiritually weak but politically expedient decision — apply the full letter of the law, and attribute the move to the demands of a "higher Father." The fall-guy is taken out and stoned. Korah, disgusted by what has happened, discovers that others in the congregation are too. These men accuse Moses and the priests of abusing their positions. Those in power vow to crush what they regard as a rebellion, and condone if not initiate a bloody purge.

The Dawkins-Hitchens camp would likely mock such a reading inasmuch as it finds relevance in the kind of text atheism chic insists is nonsensical and nightmarish. On the other side of the river, literalists would likely howl that such a reading ignores what the Bible really says, that it lends an over-subjective interpretation to words that mean just precisely what they say, and that I will ultimately be joining Hitchens at the eternal barbecue reserved for our sort. Apart from the horrifying prospect of eternity with Christopher Hitchens, that might not be so bad. Korah and those 250 dissidents might be there, and the old fellow Moses had stoned, and Mark Twain, and presumably the daughters of Moab…. Like Twain always said: “Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.”

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

DIGG THIS

The book and play reviews of Dorothy Parker are written with such a masterly sense of style and wit that it is impossible not to like them, no matter what they actually say. What they actually say is pretty damn good too. I wouldn’t want to have been on the receiving end of a thumbs-downer — you’d have little choice but to stagger away doubled over from metaphoric brickbats to the gut, and look for a place to curl up and whimper. One of my favorite pieces of (brick) batting practice is Mark Twain’s The Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper. Let’s just say that Twain finds several. And that I’ve always been relieved to look at the pieces of ID in my wallet and confirm that none of them reads James Fenimore Cooper. Well, Dorothy Parker is like Mark Twain and Groucho Marx together on a bender. In one of her reviews, Mrs. Parker admits to a "congenital lowness of brow." That admission was tongue-in-cheek. Mine is real — congenital beetleness of brow is more like it. In short, I’m no more qualified to opine about art than Newt Gingerich or your Uncle Elmer. But opine I’m about to.

State Britain is the name of an exhibition recently (15 January—27 August 2007) shown at Tate Britain, Millbank, London. The work has received a great deal of attention, filling a central gallery of the museum where people anticipating Turners, Blakes, Constables, and Bacons have found themselves confronted (if not affronted) by this 40-meter long "sculpture." A sign warned that visitors might find some of State Britain’s images "distressing" — an odd advisory inasmuch as no such signs were posted to brace one for the potential distress of a Francis Bacon or a William Blake. But then, such advisories are growing familiar in State Britain. On the way to the museum, one is bound to notice that many of the fence posts bear a neat message for drunks, vandals, thieves, terrorists, kids, generic interlopers, and ultimately you: PAINTED WITH NON-CLIMB PAINT. Indolent though I am, such messages rile my inner climber.

Until the night of 23 May 2006, visitors to London would have seen the display that was to become State Britain in its raw state, stretched along Parliament Square. That was where a protestor against the sanctions on Iraq, and then the war, had installed himself in June 2001. His name was Brian Haw. Mr. Haw came to be a thorn in the side of the state, which in 2005 passed the "Serious Organized Crime and Police Act," in no small part to remove or at least relieve the distress of his presence. Section 132 of the new law authorized the police to come and haul off most of the posters, teddy bears, paintings, photographs, banners, letters, and other protest debris that had accumulated around Mr. Haw over the years. Haw was democratically allowed to retain a two by three meter patch of pavement, and God bless him, he’s still on it.

Before the raid, artist Mark Wallinger photographed Haw’s "eyesore" — then spent a year meticulously reproducing it right down to the last smudge and smear. He enlisted Tate Britain to exhibit his recreation, which he called State Britain. It is especially fitting that State Britain should have appeared at Tate Britain, as Section 138 of the Serious Organized Crime and Police Act (and God bless the British: who else would come up with such a name?) decrees that unauthorized demonstrations may not occur at any point within a circle having a radius of one mile and Parliament Square at its center. Wallinger was keen to note that the perimeter of the state’s circle ran smack through the Tate, rendering half of State Britain technically illegal. (Some of Wallinger’s critics contend that this coincidence is less astonishing than was claimed — that in fact the Tate sits outside the boundary line.) Whatever the case, the effect remained powerful, forcing visitors to State Britain to consider the absurdity of stepping in and out of legality as they moved through the building. Wallinger had taped a boundary line all through the museum. His exhibit had real presence, and even seemed to lend a fresh power to the Turners, Blakes, Constables, and Bacons. In other words, Wallinger’s art more than met what ought to be a basic condition — it did not waste one’s time. It made one, at the very least, consider.

In an article in The American Spectator (July/August 2007) called u2018Art, Beauty and Judgment,’ Roger Scruton asserts that there is such a thing as taste in art, no matter how thoroughly current trends may conspire to make one believe that there isn’t — that it does matter how a piece of art makes one feel, that it does matter whether a piece of art is ultimately uplifting, demeaning, or just plain insignificant. Scruton considers the legendary example of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal attached to the museum wall, entitled Fountain, and often as not accompanied by a paragraph or two of text telling the viewer why it is legendary. The joke may have been clever back when u2018What is art?’ was a fresh and loaded question. Scruton finds the joke "downright stupid" today, when the question u2018What is art?’ tends to be as tired a cliché as the phrase tired cliché. I’ve wandered past enough copies of Duchamp’s pisser over the years to agree with Scruton that maybe its moment has passed, though I have to confess that to an inveterate drinker of beer the work retains a certain appeal. But as I’ve already said, I’m not an ideal judge. I once spent a good deal of time looking at a thermostat-like object attached to a wall of the Chicago Art Institute, then realized that it was a thermostat. I think that’s what art critics call an epiphany. Anyway, for what it’s worth, I thought State Britain was worth the trouble. There were You Lie Kids Die Bliar posters, and pictures of bloodied children, and peace signs, and Bush, Blair, and Brown dipping their hands Pontius Pilate-like in basins of blood, and verses from the Bible, and all the unsubtle accusatory moralizing one might have expected. But there were humor, artistry, and intelligence as well. Perhaps the only truly distressing thing about State Britain was that it was not a mile away on Parliament Square where it belonged.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

DIGG THIS

Americans are notoriously good at moving on, which tends to amount to turning our backs on the messes we’ve made, and averting our noses from the stench of what our government likes to call foreign policy. Currently that government is taking pains to assure us that the mess in Iraq is improving, and hinting heavily that we lend our attention to the fresh hydra’s head of Iran. Time to move on. The President’s troop "surge" is doing the trick, Eden is just around the corner, the war really was the grand idea it was always billed to be. The decider, our war President, our own little Churchill, the brush-clearing virtuoso of the age is back on the case, ready to lead us to glory in Iran. Tempting as it is to think that the best thing for America to do at this point is bomb the Persians, let’s turn our eyes and noses back to Iraq for a moment. There’s enough rot there to turn the stomach of a blind man devoid of a sense of smell.

1. America’s good intentions, if it ever had them, are meaningless. Its motives have never been clear to either side. Why did we do it — from a burning desire to liberate the Iraqi people, a burning desire to burn oil, or just a tacky impulse to trash a place because we could? Americans and Iraqis alike go on wondering whether the planners of this war were primarily ignorant or primarily evil. Many of the war’s boosters have been playing the good intentions card, meanwhile. (If only we’d known then what we know today… Jonah Goldberg, Richard Perle, et al.) Whatever the reasons given for things not working out, they warrant that we meant well. Did we? "O Lord, deliver me from the man of excellent intention and impure heart," T.S. Eliot wrote, "for the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked." In the excellent Night Draws Near, Anthony Shadid notes that even those Iraqis who trusted our intentions and welcomed our war were soon left pondering whether the ensuing calamity was the result of "malicious inattention or inattentive malice." Was the wreckage deliberate? Were the architects of the invasion primarily stupid or primarily wicked? The questions won’t go away and there have been no satisfactory answers.

2. The U.S. government’s evident lack of concern for the Iraqi people is matched by its evident lack of concern for the American people. Are the Iraqi people better off after two American wars and the years of sanctions? Are the American people better off after the two wars waged on Iraq? Since the invasion, millions of Iraqis have fled their homes if not their country, and a recent study estimates that 1.2 million have been killed. Most Iraqis despised Saddam Hussein; it is hard to imagine an event that could make many of them nostalgic for the Saddam years. The occupation of Iraq has been such an event. To Americans, the war has brought debt, grief, and an inevitable sense of shame, whether we acknowledge it or not. It is hard to imagine an event that might make one nostalgic for the Vietnam years. The Iraq War is such an event.

3. The Bush Administration seems to be banking on a sequel to September 11, turning a national catastrophe into its golden calf. One would have thought that after the events of that day, the overwhelming response of a responsible government would be to do everything in its power to ensure that such events would not happen again. Why is it that one cannot shake the feeling that this government viewed September 11 as more of an opportunity than a tragedy? Why is it that one cannot shake the feeling that Bushworld’s response to that day has done more to ensure a repeat performance than to prevent one? Iraq had nothing to do with the last September 11. It might have something to do with the next one. The folly of occupation has helped see to that.

4. Inaction WAS an option. The Iraq War didn’t have to happen. Our leaders made it happen. There were plenty of informed, intelligent objections to the decision to go into Iraq. The Administration didn’t listen and didn’t so much as try. Bushworld insisted that action (meaning of course violent action) was the only way to solve a problem like Saddam. Even Jesus, the President’s favorite philosopher, couldn’t gain his ear, let alone Lao Tzu, who said: "The Way takes no action, but leaves nothing undone…. To conquer the world, accomplish nothing; if you must accomplish something the world remains beyond conquest…. He who acts, spoils; He who grasps, loses." The right kind of inaction was an option for Bush all along. All along he insisted on the wrong kind of action.

5. The United States made war on a country that couldn’t fight back, that posed less of a military threat to it than Cuba. Make that Andorra. There was "nothing truly epic" about America’s quick advance and entry into Baghdad notes Shadid, quoting Anthony C. Zinni’s analogy: "Ohio State beat Slippery Rock sixty-two to nothing. No s__t." Our war President was clearly banking on a flag-waving quickie, as his premature "Mission Accomplished" ejaculation made clear. The Administration got its sixty-two to nothing rout all right; then it got something more. Had it listened to military men like Anthony Zinni or Eric Shinseki, and made a few post-game plans, or not insisted on playing the ill-starred match in the first place…. But it didn’t listen. The romp was fun for a few weeks, less fun four years later.

6. Washington’s interest in democracy is mainly in its resilience as a catchword. Similarly, it approves of freedom when this seems to serve the narrow political agenda referred to by our leaders as the national interest. Beyond that, it distrusts freedom or outright despises it. When countries whose affairs our leaders have fiddled with in the name of democracy vote for someone they don’t like, they fiddle further. When people we fiddle with in the name of freedom say or think things we don’t like, we fiddle further. Rome burns, meanwhile, as surely as Iraq.

7. The war’s architects perpetually knew best. They have yet to make a mistake. They seem incapable of shame. The best Donald Rumsfeld could manage in response to the plundering of Baghdad while American troops looked on was the infamous: "Stuff happens. Freedom is messy." And while Rumsfeld seemed distressed when the Abu Ghreib scandal broke, the distress was clearly more in response to the fact that it broke than to the fact that it occurred. The war’s sponsors didn’t do shame. Nor did they ever bother much to try to understand the people they’d selected to be the enemy. True, they came to a series of superficial conclusions of the "Aggression is All the Arabs Understand" stripe, but they were remarkably, consistently ignorant of the people they’d pledged to liberate, and remarkably, consistently unconcerned about their ignorance.

8. Bushworld has turned lying from an occasional piece of political craftwork into an institutional torrent of cheap assembly-line fabrication. The Iraq War rests on a series of cheap, deliberate, bald-faced lies. Even the Administration’s occasional flirtations with truth haven’t come over well. As Blake said, "A truth that’s told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent." Is it any wonder this government is so often accused of running a rigged game?

9. The "privileges" our leaders have shown such passion to acquire are indicative. Since September 11, the Bush League’s wish-list has read: "Please, can we do preemptive strikes? Ignore the Geneva Conventions? Intimidate and mislead the press? Use nukes, just little ones? Torture? Spy? Fire people who aren’t as compassionately conservative as we are? Promote people who are, however incompetent? Invade and occupy other countries? Spend your money digging ourselves into a hole? Please, pretty please?"

10. The Administration has done for religion what the people it terms Islamo-fascists have done for it. The President’s suggestion that the Iraq War is the fruit of collaborations with a "Higher Father" or "Favorite Philosopher" deserve to be greeted with skepticism, if not nausea. "I’ve got God’s shoulder to cry on, and I cry a lot," Bush has recently been quoted as saying. "I’ll bet I’ve shed more tears than you can count." It’s a safe bet that we all (including God) have shed more tears than the President can count.

11. The preeminence some of our leaders boast of feels more like decadence. There’s a smell of decay about America, and the occupation of Iraq has made it sharper. If we’re really the brightest and best and freest and finest people on the planet, we’ll give off talking about it and start proving it. Keeping this putrescent administration out of Iran would be a worthy start.

12. Washington casts the blame for what is in large part its own irresponsible, provocative behavior at everyone’s feet but its own. Our leaders are models of decency, tirelessly promoting peace, democracy, freedom, and economic growth. That they in fact end up promoting an indecent amount of ill will and bad faith is exclusively the fault of the Chinese, the French, the Arabs, Islam, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Osama, Fidel, Old Europe, the Rogue States, the Axis of Evil, the liberal press, Satan, and sometimes Canada.

Saddam Hussein was a despicable leader, and dislodging him by force perhaps seemed an honestly noble pursuit to some, an idealistic effort to "tackle a darkness." However, it does not appear to have been a wise pursuit, or an efficient one. And in all too many respects, it does not appear to have been an honest or noble one. What were America’s intentions? To liberate or to conquer? The words of Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are depressingly relevant: "They [the colonial presence in the Belgian Congo] were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force — nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others. They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind — as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."

Robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, men going at it blind? It is disheartening to consider to what extent the "They" in this passage sounds like the "Us" in Iraq. But Americans better consider it as their President attempts to move on to Iran. If America’s motives in Iraq have been unclear from the start, one thing is sure: the Iraq War is "not a pretty thing if you look into it too much." This is not the time to be debating whether "the surge" is working or not. It is not the time to be debating whether we should be attacking another country or not. It is a time to be acknowledging that the Iraq Project was a failure before it started, to end it as quickly and graciously as possible, and to forbid an Iran Project from following suit. It is a time to consider the words of T.S. Eliot in East Coker: "The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility." That is the best we can move on to at this point. But another thing is sure: there is no reason under the sun to expect our government to help us get there. We’d better help ourselves.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

DIGG THIS

One of the high points of summer was a meal in Morocco, where four of us went through a kilo of meat (cut off a haunch by the butcher, ground, and handed over to a grill-man who turned it into kebabs), two loaves of fresh bread, a pot of mint tea, and a large salad. The bill came to fourteen dollars for the best food I’d tasted in three weeks on the road, and the salad was among the best I’ve ever eaten. The clamor and smoke of buses pulling into and out of the crossroads where this nameless restaurant was situated, the stench of the toilet, the battered enamel-ware on the battered card tables, the cats doing tenacious figure-eights round our ankles, the horror of watching one’s food prepared by a man who had forgotten to put on a hairnet or latex gloves, and who may even have neglected to read his Health and Safety bible, and the presence of a fly (accompanied by several cousins) might have distracted some from the excellence of the fare.

But I have not exaggerated that excellence. Our tomato and onion salad, dressed with salt, pepper, cumin, vinegar, and oil had the kind of flavor that in this day and age one tends to forget ever existed. The food columnist Waverly Root observed many years ago that the taste of a true tomato was becoming as unfamiliar to most of us in the last quarter of the 20th century as the taste of ambrosia. The Moroccan salad proved his point. The taste was fresh, full, startling enough to fill an old cynic with something like optimism. "So that’s a tomato!" I thought. I’d nearly forgotten that tomatoes are meant to be intensely flavorful — not mere vehicles for a color approximating red.

Compare this to the salad I ran across a few weeks later at a bus stop in northern England. It was a smallish salad in a faux-basketry plastic bowl bound with cling film, resting on ice. The time was 2:00 a.m., the "Comfort Centre" was nearly deserted, and it seems safe to say that the salad in question had spent several hours if not most of a day resting. It featured iceberg lettuce, that blandest of greens. There were several pale orange wedges of tomato, and droppings of the shredded yellow plastic hilariously nicknamed "mozzarella" by wags in the food industry. By way of exotica there were a few rusty-looking sprouts, a little cress, and something purplish and frilly. There was half a boiled egg that may or may not have been the salmonella homeland it appeared to be. Delirious with boredom and hunger, I actually considered eating the thing until I saw its eight-pound price tag. Delirious or not, it seemed out of the question to pay sixteen dollars for one of the potentially worst salads in the world when two weeks earlier three people and I had eaten one of the best, along with an excellent meal, for fourteen. Though a food-service professional must have made it in accordance with Health and Safety gospel, and added a pinch of cesium or whatever they use to keep iceberg lettuce "fresh," I resisted the salad’s allures and got back on the bus.

I am not trying to suggest that Moroccan food is uniformly superior to British food, or that the homeliness of a relatively poor country outperforms the sophistication of a relatively rich one. There are any number of performances one would rather experience in Britain than in Morocco; it would take many paragraphs to describe the badness of Moroccan beer beside the goodness of British beer, for instance. It simply seems odd to me that it is just about next to impossible to get a decent salad in the "developed world" when a hole-in-the-wall in the "un- or underdeveloped world" can produce not merely a decent salad, but an extraordinary one. Britons to whom I told this tale of two salads were unanimously unsurprised, and declared that even if you spent 150 pounds ($300) in London, you’d be unlikely to get a meal as good as that Moroccan one.

I kvetched about this state of affairs into August, then let it drop until a friend loaned me a book by J. Maarten Troost called The Sex Lives of Cannibals. The book is better than the title, a wonderfully written, funny account of the two years Troost spent with his wife in the South Sea atolls of Kiribati. On the way there the couple had a layover on Majuro, one of the Marshall Islands, a place that has been blessed with a windfall (or perhaps it should be called a fallout) of U.S. "aid" — our government’s way of saying thanks for years of nuclear weapons tests and the Kwajalein military base. Troost notes that aid money has introduced "new afflictions" to the Marshallese — namely hypertension, diabetes, and high blood pressure. He describes the atoll’s road as "one long traffic jam and alongside it were the fattest people I had ever seen, wan and listless, munching through family-sized packets of Cheetos…" Majuro was "built with the ambition of a strip mall, a place for America to traffic trifles to a people who in a generation exchanged three thousand years of history and culture for spangled rubbish and lite beer." "There was money on Majuro," Troost concedes, "but the overwhelming sense was one of poverty."

That got me pondering those salads again. Then I read Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone, a book that spotlights the wretched irony of how the self-trumpeting greatest/richest/bestest country in the world has managed to dump a tsunami of misery on a country that already had its share, and refer to the process as liberation. The good folks at Halliburton run the cafeteria in Baghdad’s Green Zone — a cafeteria described as "all about meeting American needs for high-calorie, high-fat comfort food." Halliburton ships everything in, from Cheetos to bottled water, and one can imagine how cost-efficiently they manage it. No Iraqis work in the kitchen. No Americans work there either, at least not in the "menial" posts. Those are staffed by Indians and Pakistanis trained in the culinary mysteries of deep fat and freedom fries. They have learned to make Halliburton salads too, which doubtlessly cost even more and taste even blander than their Comfort Centre counterparts. As Chandrasekaran notes: "None of the succulent tomatoes or the crisp cucumbers grown in Iraq made it to the salad bar." Halliburton’s renowned instinct for "profits" could not allow such a sensible thing to happen.

There’s something wrong when a rich country can’t figure out how to make or appreciate a decent salad — more so when choice ingredients are close at hand. What’s wrong in my opinion is the persisting assumption that such a country is rich. On the contrary, such a country seems frankly impoverished. For all the money spent there, Chandrasekaran’s description of life in America’s bubble fortress, the Green Zone, leaves one with that same "overwhelming sense of poverty" Troost felt in the Americanized Marshall Islands. Impoverished leadership, impoverished values, impoverished judgment, impoverished intellect, impoverished attitudes, impoverished motivations, impoverished notions of patriotism…. Halliburton grub seems about right for a clientele whose impoverished grip on reality still tends to allow that the invasion of Iraq was a grand idea.

William Blake began his poem Holy Thursday with a series of questions:

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery?…
And so many children poor?

He ended it with a ringing answer that must have confused some of his compatriots, certain as they were that they were living in the greatest, richest, bestest nation on the planet. "It is a land of poverty!" Blake wrote. One wonders what his verdict would be on 21st century America. As what’s left of the Bush government contemplates the bombing of Iran, we may yet witness just how bankrupt our rich and fruitful land has become. For all the talk of democracy and freedom, it is not clear whether we remember any more about the way they are supposed to taste than we do of the tomato.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

DIGG THIS

I know just enough about cricket to believe those who say it’s an idiosyncratic, subtle, perpetually fascinating sport. My conversion is based on a day last January at Newlands in Capetown, where South Africa was hosting India in a five-day test match. I was fortunate to be seated between two cricket aficionados, one Indian and one South African, and to be well-supplied with cold Castle Beer, which unlike stadium beer in the States could be had for less than a gold brick per glass. My inclination to like the sport rose steadily right up to and beyond the time the players broke for tea. Yes, cricket is a game where you break for tea. The match we were watching was in its third day, and was expected to continue another two. "Who’s going to win?" I asked. "Probably nobody," shrugged my Indian friend. Nobody??? This struck me as aggressively un-American. If Dick Cheney decides one of his corporate friends needs to bomb cricket pitches in the service of freedom, it won’t come as too great a surprise. In any case, cricket is a game that can go on most of a week, and for all that end in a draw.

There is talk, not surprisingly, of streamlining the game, and a faster, more dynamic one-day version of cricket (in which there is always a winner) has in fact been gaining popularity. "Less boring, less time-consuming, more convenient," say its advocates. Perhaps. I would like nothing better than to lay down half a page of anachronistic, reactionary grousing at this point, but will only say: Fine, go ahead and fix what wasn’t broke on two conditions. First, call it cricket lite or cricket castrato if you like, but don’t call it cricket. And second, at least consider the possibility that the game itself is not to blame for being too long or too boring; rather our attention spans are too short, the pace of our lives too frenetic, and our cult of Convenience too consuming to encourage our appreciation of just about anything we consider “demanding" (which is just about everything). In short, we have become too boring for cricket, not the other way round.

A sinner who likes five-day cricket might be expected to like Moby-Dick too, and I’ve just read it a third time through. The first was in high school (largely clueless), the second in graduate school (largely joyless). This time was the charm, as third times are said to be. D.H. Lawrence was right. Moby-Dick takes you on "a wonderful, wonderful voyage" and is "a surpassingly beautiful book," "one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world." Lawrence calls Melville a "deep great artist." At the same time he calls him a "solemn ass," and grumbles at a style he variously considers "clownish, clumsy, sententious, amateurish, and spurious." Yet for all that, it is obvious that Lawrence would rather die than change a word of Moby-Dick, whatever the inconvenient demands it made on him as a reader.

Times have changed. The news recently carried a story about Orion Publishing’s plans to introduce a series of gelded classics, one of which will be Moby-Dick. "We realized that because the books were so long we were never going to read them," Malcolm Edwards, deputy CEO at Orion, explains. Thus, books like Anna Karenina, David Copperfield, and Moby-Dick are to have words, sentences, paragraphs, and sometimes entire chapters snipped away to make them 30—40% less "long, slow, and repetitive." "Moby-Dick must have been difficult in 1850 — in 2007 it’s nigh-on impossible to make your way through it. But with our 350-page version the story and the characters emerge." Oh? Is this to suggest that the story and characters don’t emerge in the 750-page version — that the Orion gelding is a step up from Melville’s stallion?

Too much "padding" in Moby-Dick say the folks at Orion Publishing. It’s possibly not so much their problem as ours. We’ve become a people with time and inclination to follow the Paris Hilton "story," but not enough of either to be inconvenienced by the "nigh-on impossible" likes of Melville’s. One-day cricket and a 350-page Moby-Dick is all we’re up for, apparently. Maybe we deserve castrated classics but the artists who gave birth to them don’t. And there are other objections to the cutting:

1. Orion claims its selected classics are "sympathetically edited" down to 300 or 400 pages. But don’t readers do this sort of sympathetic editing anyway? Don’t a reader’s eyes and mind zero in on the meat of a book and trim away the fat naturally? Besides, what’s wrong with "padding"? I happen to want to watch the full tennis match, not the 15-minute Euro-Sport reduction that just shows the "interesting" bits. Who decides what’s interesting? If it’s a question of Moby-Dick, I’d rather decide than have Orion’s editors, no matter how sympathetic, do it for me. Would they take away Melville’s chapter called "Chowder," for instance, or the one called "Ambergris"? They might, and if they did, it would be a crying shame.
2. Orion says: "We realize life is too short to read all the books you want to read…" Of course this is true. I have never read War and Peace or Anna Karenina, and possibly never will, though I aspire to get it right someday. Yet just as Orion says, life may be too short. And even if I beat death to the Tolstoys, there will still be Finnegan’s Wake and a thousand others. The Orion approach suggests that if only War and Peace and Anna Karenina were shorter, I’d have time to read them before the funeral, and a neutered Finnegan’s Wake to boot. I see it another way. It is not the fault of time or death if I don’t read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, or Finnegan’s Wake. And it is certainly not Tolstoy’s or Joyce’s fault either. It’s nobody’s fault, or possibly it’s my fault, for wasting such a large chunk of life on crossword puzzles, cricket, and Castle Beer. I think of Edward Abbey in Desert Solitaire, when he objects to the asphalting of wilderness in national park areas to allow elderly and/or tenderfoot visitors access to the most remote places. If they didn’t have the wherewithal or interest to get to those places when they were young or physically capable, contends Abbey, that’s too bad, but that’s how it is. They missed it. They need not be accommodated at the expense of the very wilderness they have belatedly come to see, but cannot properly experience through a Winnebago window in any event. It may sound harsh, but I think Abbey’s view is sensible. And if death gets to me before I get to Anna Karenina, tough. That’s the breaks. I’d have missed it. Better to accept that reality than try to cheat time by reading face-lifted versions, in my opinion.
3. Orion says: "We are trying to make these books convenient for readers…." The word grates. Literature simply is not convenient. It is challenging, demanding, mind-altering, sometimes life-altering. Orion goes on, apparently to reassure people like me: "….but it’s not as if we’re withdrawing the original versions. They are still there if you want to read them." That’s some consolation, but how long will they be there? How far will the tampering go? How out of touch will the readership become? In Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and many of his stories, Ray Bradbury foresees a time when books will be burned, or changed, or "corrected" — when Poe and Shakespeare will have the soul cut out of them. It is a frightening and sad thought, and frightening and sad as well to consider how prophetic Fahrenheit 451 has already shown itself to be. While Orion’s decision to cut the classics is hardly a fulfillment of Bradbury prophecy, one wonders if it might not be a nod in that direction, a nudge towards a time when our greatest authors will not be given enough consideration to keep their books as they were written. The classics, Orion counters, are not "religious icons," after all. Changing them isn’t a sacrilege. I’m not so sure I agree.
4. It boils down to a question of respect for an author and his or her work. "Of course [the whale in Moby-Dick] is a symbol," Lawrence wrote. "Of what? I doubt if even Melville knew exactly. That’s the best of it." This is a wonderful, respectful reading of a wonderful book. If even Melville didn’t know just what it all meant, how will the sympathetic editors at Orion? I cannot imagine Melville being pleased to learn that the "padding" would one day be pulled from a work he put so much of his soul into. "No great and enduring volume can ever be writ on the flea, though many there be who have tried it," Melville remarks in Moby-Dick. One wonders what will be left of lines like that when 30—40% of the whale has been taken out.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

DIGG THIS

Frank Waters (1902—1995), the writer and ethnologist, attended Colorado College but left shortly before taking a degree — very shortly. According to the account in his autobiographical novel, he was just an exam away. But the snow had begun thudding the windowpanes with a sound "like moths," and Waters was overcome with an urgency, a mystical summons to get up and leave the examination room. He answered it. (One wonders how his academic advisor received the news.) The young man put some gear together, got a horse, and went down to Mexico. In the process, he was granted something far more precious than a diploma.

Stories of individuals who outfox the hounds of "education" and bolt free into the mysterious uninstitutionalized terrain of Education are fairly familiar. There’s Faulkner, flunking freshman English, boozing his way out of a job at the campus post office and then out of academia altogether, taking a night job at a power plant, and writing things his bewildered English teachers would presently be finding on the syllabus. There’s Bob Dylan, fiddling around at the University of Minnesota a semester or two, borrowing a rare set of Woody Guthrie records (in the sense that Huck Finn borrowed things), and lighting out for New York City, where he learned more in a few months than most people learn in a lifetime.

In reality, a formal education can be far less important than the informal one taking shape inside us. Academic hurdles mean very little in themselves. Those who contend otherwise may define themselves by their degrees or look down on those who lack formal education, considering themselves a cut or two above. Yet, they are rarely able to disconfirm Will Rogers: "There is nothing so stupid as an educated man, if you get him off the thing he was educated in."

Real education is difficult to attain in an academic setting alone. If you have ever taught or studied Kerouac’s On the Road, for example, you will know that it is impossible not to look out the window at some point, and consider the futility of trying to grasp in a classroom what could better be grasped in a boxcar. "In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice — in practice, there is." Yogi Berra’s distinction is tonic to those who squat in books, starved of what William Carlos Williams called "the thing itself." Students of Drivers’ Ed can appreciate the vast difference between correctly answering a multiple-choice question on the distance one ought to maintain between oneself and the car ahead, and getting in a car and actually maintaining it. As Thoreau remarked: "To my astonishment, I was informed on leaving college that I had studied navigation! Why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it."

"Real education must ultimately be limited to men who insist on knowing. The rest is mere sheep-herding." Ezra Pound may sound irascibly elitist to some, but sounds sensible to those who’ve noticed considerable bleating in the field. The stuff that goes on in a classroom has at least as much chance of snuffing the imagination and paralyzing the mind as it does of bringing them to life. As a teacher, I confess I recognize more truth than exaggeration in Oscar Wilde’s line: "Everyone who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching." As a sometime teacher of literature, I wince at Gore Vidal’s recent acidity: "If you want to meet someone who really hates literature, just talk to an academic." The remark stings because all too often it’s all too true. Literature teachers who don’t love literature? Educationists indifferent to teaching? You’re likely to find one in a school near you, very possibly with an eye on Administration.

Is it really a teacher’s first duty to seek out fresh opportunities to do "PD" (professional development or pathetic drivel, depending on your perspective), to attend conferences and keep a file of little certificates to confirm it, to serve on mind-numbing committees, and to perpetually pad a CV with every last grain of the professional dust one’s been kicking up? There is a proliferating breed of educationist, in fact, who understands a teacher’s duty as little else. You may recognize the species as Benchmark Man (Benchmark Person, if you like). Benchmark Man lives to measure, to test, to grade, to make rubrics, to tweak syllabi, to do further research… Within his hive of activity, little time is found for reflection or intuition or love of learning, or even reading, beyond the blanched utilitarian verbiage that constitutes his "field." Benchmark Man lusts after "quantifiable units," unconcerned by John Zerzan’s observation that "the urge to measure involves a deformed kind of knowledge that seeks control of its object, not understanding." Benchmark Man considers himself a professional whose qualifications exempt him from Albert Einstein’s admonition: "Many of the things you can count, don’t count. Many of the things you can’t count, really count." Poor Einstein obviously could have profited from a dose of PD.

Real education seems to be a personal, indefinable, unquantifiable thing that doesn’t require the trappings of a grand institution. Emily Dickinson learned more looking through her bedroom window than contemporary flocks of degree-earning mutton learn gaping for four years into the most sophisticated learning tools ever contrived. Dickinson described her "occupation" thus: "The spreading wide of narrow hands to gather Paradise." Preparation for such an occupation was not necessarily on offer at Mt. Holyoke Female Seminary, and it is not hard to understand why Dickinson’s stay there was brief. No one has left a more succinct recipe for what matters. Dickinson calls the vital ingredient "revery," imagination, the thing so prone to be missing in canned "education."

To make a prairie, it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

In 1922, a few years before Frank Waters left with his horse for Mexico, Langston Hughes left Columbia University to go wash dishes on a ship. He took a bundle of books along, only to toss all but one (Leaves of Grass) overboard as his ship was leaving port. One can imagine Hughes standing at the rail, turning to the poem about the student who grows restless during a formal lecture on astronomy. "How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick," Whitman’s student persona says:

Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

One imagines Hughes himself looking up at the stars, and the feeling of relief and gratitude welling up in him to know an Education lay ahead.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

DIGG THIS

Perhaps the Global War on Terror would not seem such a mutant if it had emerged spontaneously, and not by Caesarian delivery under a government whose steps to nourish terrorism have proven as convincing as its steps to eliminate it. But then, campaigns of the GWOT sort are doomed from the start to mutate into meaningless slogans fronting motivations and realities far removed from those declared. Thus, there are wars on terror, drugs, waste, children left behind, poverty, and corruption — and in their wake, reinvigorated strains of corruption, poverty, children left behind, waste, drugs, and terror.

Inasmuch as our wars on abstractions tend to backfire, why don’t we exploit the tendency? One wonders why it has never occurred to Those Who Know Best to decree a war on peace, prosperity, or freedom, in a backhand effort to promote peace, prosperity, and freedom. Had the Bush Government, for instance, declared War on Democracy and gone into Iraq for the express purpose of Enslaving the Iraqi People, with a declared aim to trigger a New Dawn of Totalitarianism across the Middle East…. Who knows, Iraq might actually have become the democratic haven some of the masterminds behind its Liberation said they were yearning for all along.

gwx = x (Government Wars on Whatever lead to more of Whatever): the unfortunate equation is rarely proven wrong. Apart from a measure of good intentions and genuine concern, government is such a tangle of hidden motives, base intentions, false fronts, forked tongues, hypocrisy, greed, self-interest, self-promotion, inefficiency, ineptitude, cynicism, and general rascality that it is a wonder the equation is ever proven wrong. It would be wonderful to believe, as I grew up believing, that governments are largely composed of the Good and the Wise — people who selflessly channel their thought, spirit, and energies into Making the World a Better Place. I am still enough of a child to believe that now and then such individuals really do venture into government, and that their good will and sense of responsibility really do matter.

Such innocence, however, is frequently undercut by experience. Years ago, some friends and I were just getting comfortable on an isolated stretch of beach north of Rabat, Morocco. It was nearly midnight, the tent and moon were up, the meat was grilling, the bottle was open, the silence was sublime, and then a horn started to honk, persistently. Aware of only one car in the area (ours), we went off to investigate.

Our car had been appropriated by four grinning, smoking gendarmes, one of whom was still trying the horn. The rest of the story is predictable, and I’ll try to make it short. We were asked (told) to pack up and follow our rescuers to a police station, where we sat through hours of questioning and paperwork. We were released after paying for the services of a phantom tow truck. The truck, the police said, had had to turn back once notified that the rogue car’s owners had materialized, and 200 dirhams ($20) was needed to compensate the inconvenience and emotional anguish borne by the driver.

The claim may have been true, though it sounded about as sincere as the parting words of the policeman who saw us off, the horn-honker. "You’re very lucky," he said, with a look that failed somehow to enlist one’s sense of good fortune. "Imagine what might have happened if we hadn’t come along." (The gendarmes had spent a lot of time insisting that the remote beach we’d chosen was a magnet for thieves. This claim too may have been true, though it didn’t sound or feel true. Our chances of getting hit by thieves that night were on par with our chances of getting hit by meteorites. True, the car was broken into and a fair chunk of our money had vanished — but servants of the state had arranged these losses on our behalf.)

If my friends and I were painfully aware of the fleecing we’d endured, we were at least grateful for a free illustration of the way governments sometimes operate. The worst, like mobsters, offer protection (often to cover threats of their own devising), and collect their cut. Every so often, a War on Racketeering is declared to give the public something to chew on.

How strange that the architects of the War on Terror seem more closely aligned to the bad guys than to the people whose security they bill as their top priority. A Dick Cheney has more in common with a Saddam Hussein than with either the Iraqi people he claims to be liberating or the American people he claims to be protecting. Birds of a feather, mobster elements understand each other, look after each other, and occasionally bump each other off. We slip our protection money into plain envelopes, meanwhile, and hope our homes, livelihoods, and loved ones escape the turf wars and drive-by shootings. Whether it goes by democracy, autocracy or theocracy, government by extortion is dismally familiar worldwide.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

DIGG THIS

Slaughter-House-Five
opens with a recommendation to anyone considering an antiwar book
that they try an anti-glacier book instead. Same effect, same futility.
In spite of the odds, Kurt Vonnegut then proceeds to finish one
of the best antiwar books of the 20th century. If Slaughter-House-Five
is an exercise in futility, it's a damned fine one. Hayden Carruth's
poem On Being Asked to Write a Poem against the War in Vietnam
is in the same vein. "Well I have [written many antiwar poems]…"
the poet begins, but for all the toil and angst and emotional investment,
in the end:

…not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered
throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now
and then
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.

Again, if this
is an exercise in futility, it's a damned fine one.

The Bush Administration's
exercises in futility, in contrast, are damned demeaning. The idea,
I guess, was to drop a few bombs, kill bad men with beards, eliminate
terrorism (if not Evil altogether), and get on with the business
of being the Greatest Country in the World. The mission, sporadically
"accomplished" in fantasy, remains unaccomplished in fact.
Nobody likes us all that much (though our world reputation remains
u2018great' in a sense, ranging from Great Satan to Great Debtor to
Great Goofball), nobody trusts us all that much, and nobody really
respects us all that much. It didn't have to be this way. But thanks
in large part to Bush-league military adventures, it is.

The war in
Afghanistan, the one commonly regarded as the good one, has looked
steadily less good to the point that it isn't mentioned much anymore.
The one in Iraq may still read like a success story to a handful
of Likudo-fascists, but looks like a stinking meshugaas to the rest
of the planet. You'd think that two strikes down, the Bush-leaguers
would contemplate guarding the plate awhile — but no, as we wait
for the next pitch, the third base coach (who in the world is he,
anyway — an Al Qaeda mole? Beelzebub? A tobacco-chewing Machiavelli?
Someone with a PhD in baseball???) is still sending swing-for-the-fence
signals, Bush-code for war.

Now that calm
has been so effectively established in Afghanistan and Iraq, talk
of moving the good work to Iran is in the air. Those who doubt that
even Bush-league management could be capable of anything so stupid,
should consider the words of Rummy's pinch-hitter, Robert Gates,
who in early February declared: "We are not planning for a
war with Iran." The statement would be immensely reassuring
on the lips of some, but such lips tend not to work in the Bush
Administration, which has now lied its way through a dazzling six
years in office.

A few weeks
ago, Oman received a visit from one of the Administration's most
distinguished liars. The Vice-president's few hours in the country
were marked by monumental traffic snarls and a pervasive smell of
sulfur. Genuine statesmen presumably go abroad with at least a hope
and a prayer for peace in their hearts. Cheney goes with a hope
and a prayer for war in his gall bladder (the heart being unsuited
to a bilious agenda), to squeeze concessions of the u2018Please can
our fighter planes take off from your glorious land, say yes or
expect to be crudely snubbed' sort. Countries Cheney ought to be
engaging in open diplomatic discussion, such as Iran and Syria,
are meanwhile treated with dismissive contempt. As Seymour Hersh's
The Redirection makes clear, Bush policy prefers now to deal
with the Middle East's "centers of moderation" — that
is, puppet regimes like those of Saudi Arabia or Egypt, corrupt
enough to stomach its Plans for the region. In contrast to this
"arc of moderation" (the phrase is a particularly noisome
Blairite dropping), the Bad Barts of the region (Syria/Iran/Hezbollah)
"have made their choice and their choice is to destabilize"
(a particularly noisome Condoleezza dropping, on behalf of that
venerable old champion of Middle Eastern stability, the American
government). Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

"Dominion
of the world from end to end is worth less than a drip of blood
upon the earth," wrote the great Persian poet Saadi of Shiraz.
The designers of the Great Iraq Liberation Scam had little use for
that perspective. They may yet come round to it the hard way, or
let the rest of us come round to it the hard way, while they go
right on insisting that their failures are in fact successes. Lao
Tzu said: "Those who would take over the earth and bend it
to their will never, I notice, succeed." Saying it may not
have made any more difference than writing an anti-glacier book
or an antiwar poem, or observing that a war with Iran would be ignoble,
unnecessary, ineffective, and possibly insane. But Lao Tzu said
it anyway, and thank God for that. Some exercises in futility are
better than others.

March
17, 2007

John
Liechty [send him mail]
currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

DIGG THIS

Whatever else the Bush Administration has done to/for America, it must be given credit for building vocabulary. "Hubris" used to be one of those $250 an ounce words — it’s cheaper than bologna now. Every third word is hubris — hubris sticks to Bushworld like a tick. Type "hubristic" into Google and find mid-page "Bush’s Hubristic World View." And there are a thousand other ways to get there. "Smirking," for instance, yields "George W. Bush: Smirking Arrogance. Hubris?"

"Petulant" is another word one rarely got to hear pre-Bush. Googling it will take you to "Our Petulant President," four lines down. For those partial to the word "squander," George W. Bush has been an answer to prayer. Squander proliferates. On Google, it brings "How to Squander Moral Capital," page one, starring Dubya. And of course, the word "incompetent" is enjoying a run it hasn’t seen since the Harding Disaster. It appears by the shovelful in the average article on Bush. Even the Neo-cons have started dumping it on, blaming their own harebrained lunacies on Bush incompetence. Googling "incompetent" fetches "The President as Incompetent Liar," line one, page one.

"Liar," incidentally, will take you to "Tony Blair — Biography," line one, page one, part of the official 10 Downing Street website. This may or may not be coincidence bordering on the miraculous. "Lying" is the word to use in case you’re interested in purchasing a "Dishonest Dubya Lying Action Figure Doll." "Arrogant" directs you to Fareed Zakaria’s "The Arrogant Empire" in Newsweek. "Ignorant" brings a Slate article called "Bush the Ignorant Liar."

Disappointingly, none of these words succeeds in dredging up the vice-president, who seems to be lying low these days as opposed to lying brazenly as he did in the flush times. Feeling lonesome for Dick, I ventured "dirty tricks." "Government by Dirty Tricks" mentioned the VP but was not exclusively devoted to him. The serendipitous notion to enter "Go F* Yourself," however, yielded a satisfying six out of ten sites with Cheney’s name preeminent.

In an admittedly smallish attempt to be fair, I tried some kinder, gentler search words: kind, gentle, intelligent, competent, decent, honest…. No Bush, no cronies. I tried "God-fearing," but found only "German Leader Slams u2018God-fearing’ Bush." Poor Dubya. Either he’s broadly misunderestimated or he’s been sending out some exceedingly bad vibes.

If we must thank the Administration for giving words like "petulant" a chance, we must also reproach it for working overtime to kill off endangered words like "democracy" and "freedom." By 1941, George Orwell had already identified these words as abused to the point of losing their meaning. Bushworld has abused them to the point that people today find them less meaningful than "Awesome!" and "Let’s Roll!" "Freedom" was used so freely in the President’s Second Inaugural Address that Freedom Fatigue Syndrome support groups sprang up coast to coast, and a particularly virulent form of FFS now plagues Iraq. Yet if you type "freedom" into Google, it bears no Bush. "Tyranny," on the other hand, yields "How Tyranny Came to America," a text bountiful in Bush. Go figure. Try "democracy." Nary a Dubya. Try "fascism" and bingo: "George W. Bush and the Fourteen Points of Fascism."

Not that such a trawl proves much. What people conclude about a public figure is often unfair and unrealistic, a far cry from the gods’ truth. I once believed that I (or most any other cretin under the sun) could out-lead the likes of our leaders. Such thoughts ended around the time I stopped thinking I’d be a better parent than the likes of my parents, i.e., around the time I had children of my own. There is no sense in getting too high and mighty in one’s condemnation of a leader, unless one has tried leadership on for size. Leadership is a peculiar thing. To what extent do we really need it? Is good leadership even possible within our corrupted systems? And assuming that we really need it and that it is possible, to what extent do we really desire it to be good? "The people," Thoreau wrote, "must have some complicated machinery or other, and hear its din, to satisfy the idea of government which they have." These words uncomfortably remind us that George W. Bush is less the fault of George W. Bush than of those who conspired or consented to need him.

The Old Testament account on the origins of political leadership is instructive. Samuel was a born leader. He lacked flamboyance perhaps, but he did his job conscientiously and capably. When Samuel got old he appointed his sons judges, but they soon "turned aside after gain; they took bribes and perverted justice." People started clamoring for a king, Samuel reluctantly gave in, it’s been downhill ever since. If the prophets are to be trusted (and experience suggests that they are), the string of kings that went on to rule Israel was 99.9% crap of the most disappointing sort. Occasionally there was a star like David. Yet even he was no Samuel. Bill Clinton looks like a celibate saint beside the philandering depravities of David, whose tailors spent a good deal of time fitting him out in sackcloth and ash (a fashion it might be right for contemporary leaders to emulate, even though politicized repentance is about as nauseating as politicized rectitude).

To some degree, one can understand why Bush told the fellow who challenged his policies at a church picnic in 2001: "Who cares what you think?" Similarly, who cares what the menials and cranks who post things on Google think? Who cares what the world thinks? One can almost understand it. On the other hand, Bush’s question is disturbing, and really does seem to sum up a pronounced attitude in the man and his administration. If one believed that it marked a principled objection to the pursuit of "the bubble reputation," or some principled resolve to go against the grain, one would feel a duty and a compulsion to applaud. Unfortunately, falling from the lips of Bushworld, "Who cares what you think?" smacks more of dismissive arrogance than of principle.

So where are we left? Inasmuch as they don’t make ‘em like Samuel anymore, it may be best to say with Thoreau: "…To speak practically and as a citizen, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government." Let us at least hope, if it is not too much to ask, for a day when wisdom/statecraft/decency/intelligence/ integrity raise an American president’s name to page one of Google, and arrogant/ ignorant/warmongering schlemiel/reckless petulant ignoramus do not.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

DIGG THIS

"We all have to be humble and recognize that people — even our leaders — have feet of clay," the Reverend Richard Cizik, VP of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals, announced a few days back. Even our leaders? What an audacious thought! "So we love. And we forgive," Cizik added. One has little doubt that the mega-flock of Ted Haggard’s Colorado Springs mega-fold will spend the coming months in a paroxysm of loving and forgiving. Hats off to them, even though I tend to feel it might be more efficient to get a case of beer, reread Elmer Gantry, and start looking around for a fresh shepherd.

As the follies of clay-footed leaders go, Haggard’s do not seem all that troublesome. He’s told lies and failed to practice what he preached — but such behavior has become as familiar as flies round a latrine. If you want to be shockingly deviant in Washington D.C., for instance, your best bet is to go around telling the truth and practicing what you preach. Even Haggard’s "sexually immoral conduct" seems a bit moral by Washington standards. Rent-boys? Drugs? Ho hum. Surely Haggard could have managed worse (or better, depending on your point of view).

He might have lied his country into one of the most foolhardy wars ever schemed into existence. He might have thrown away billions of dollars of other people’s money, and thousands of lives and limbs belonging to other people’s children. He might have played a central role in bringing death to hundreds of thousands and disruption and destruction to millions in order to indulge a personal fantasy about taking out Doctor Evil. He might have declared the "right" to wage pre-emptive war and endorsed the "right" to torture out of one side of his mouth while This Country Does Not Torture was coming out the other. He might have resurrected the spectre of a nuclear arms race. He might have bullied his public into a state of political paralysis, while alienating an astonishing share of the rest of the world. He might have stained an already bespattered election process and spat on an already bespittled Constitution. He might have treated one of the most traumatic events in the history of his nation as an occasion to advance a crass political agenda. But Ted Haggard did none of these things — beside the clay-footed calamities of the Bush Administration, his dabbling in drugs and prostitution looks like community service. At least the pastor’s mistakes led to an immediate dismissal, and a frank apology. "I am a deceiver and a liar," Haggard said. In contrast, presidential mistakes seem to bring consequences down on everyone save their perpetrator.

One wonders whether President Bush and Pastor Ted are still holding their weekly moral-compass-synchronizing chats on the phone. If not, it is comforting to reflect that the President doesn’t really need Ted Haggard, as he enjoys direct access to both Higher Father and Favorite Philosopher Son. It is less comforting to recall the cartoon published a few years ago in The Spectator, depicting Satan holding a telephone receiver to his mouth, hellfire and imps in the background. "Hello, George?" Satan says, with evident satisfaction. "It’s God again."

The same day we were reading of Ted Haggard’s dismissal, we were reading as well that Saddam Hussein’s verdict had been delivered, and that he is to be hanged. President Bush openly hoped for as much when the trial began, and according to the New York Times is "trumpeting" the verdict to "rally support" now that the trial is ended. This seems to be a week for audacious thoughts; several have crossed my mind. One involves a central teaching of the President’s favourite philosopher: "You have heard that it was said, u2018An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, u2018Do not resist one who is evil…." It’s a pity the President didn’t philosophize a little longer over such words before unleashing more evil on Iraq and its people than Saddam had yet found practical to manage unassisted. "Love your enemies," Jesus said. "….For if you love those who love you, what reward have you?" The first modestly audacious thought of the week is a twofold proposal: a) that the mega-Christians of Colorado Springs try loving and forgiving Saddam Hussein according to the precepts of their master — Ted Haggard is too easy; and b) that the megalomaniac Christian in the White House either refrain from gloating in public over the death sentence of an enemy, or find a favorite philosopher whose teachings are not patently and passionately against violence and revenge.

Saddam is accused of signing execution orders on at least 148 "enemies of the state," and of other horrible, vindictive, sadistic crimes against humanity. These include "acts of murder, forcible deportation, wrongful imprisonment, torture, enforced disappearance, and other inhumane acts," according to the LA Times. Are we not fortunate to have a leader whose moral compass is so unswervingly infallible that it has kept him above such dirt? One wonders. The question leads to the other audacious thought of the week. And much of the world is wondering it openly, crudely. If Saddam and a few henchmen are to swing for crimes against their nation, will there be any rope left over for the Bush Administration? The President may regard the hanging of this despot as a "milestone" for the Iraqi people. One suspects that the Iraqi people (minus the half a million, give or take, that Bush’s war has subtracted) may come to see it as a vindication of little beyond the Czech proverb: "The big thieves hang the little ones."

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

DIGG THIS

Teachers in grade school sometimes stooped to a call for essays on the theme, "What I Did This Summer Vacation." We’d crank out a stack of hackneyed response and another year of public education was officially underway. There must be a zillion better topics. And yet, although I have worked my way down the neck and well into the shoulders of a bottle of Islay malt (which generally shakes the cranky muse snoring at the base of my skull), there seems to be nothing to say apart from… What I Did This Summer Vacation.

For one thing, I spent two months staying away from politics — no news, no computer, no furrowed brow. It felt good, even though it’s impossible to get around Mourid Barghouti’s remark that, "Staying away from politics is also politics." Vacation started with my family and me flying from Muscat to Chicago. I am always a little nervous flying to the Great Satan. My wife is not precisely an Islamo-fascist, but she is an Arab, and I have an Axis of Evil visa lurking in my passport. The customs guy at O’Hare, however, was a model of civility. "God Bless the Great Satan!" I thought, and we went to look for our luggage.

Lots of good things happened in America, from a family reunion in Iowa to a visit with friends in Colorado. But I would like to propose a particular toast to Alamo Car Rental. Their people were impeccably polite and helpful. In no time we were on the road in a Chevrolet Nondescript, which ran fine and didn’t use much gas. Two weeks later I elected to take the Nondescript on an all-nighter from Colorado back to Chicago in order to savor the smaller national roads at night. At two in the morning somewhere outside McCook, Nebraska the Nondescript encountered a raccoon. In the old days, back when I was driving a 1968 Dodge Polaris, for example, the score for car-coon encounters was unfailingly Car 1, Roadkill 0.

The score this time was nil-nil. The martyred coon had taken out the Nondescript’s toy radiator, and before long the temperature light went on. I pulled over, turned the motor off, and sat in pitch darkness listening to rain on the roof and the Islamo-fascist growling of my wife, who has never understood the wisdom of all-nighters. Once the motor had a chance to cool, I drove on another ten minutes until the temperature light reappeared. I pulled over, turned the motor off, waited half an hour, drove on, pulled over. This pattern was repeated until we reached a crossroads town and checked into a motel just in time for breakfast.

"Now for the hard part," I thought, and called Alamo. I was having paranoid visions of police reports, photographs, forms, forensic analyses of coon hair… "Hmh!" the woman on the other end said in a mildly interested tone once I’d got the story out. "Durn coon. We’ll send another car just as soon as we can." And they did, and there wasn’t any hassle. The notion might draw some stiff resistance from Those Who Know Better, but it occurs to me that there would be certain advantages to excising the federal wart on the eastern lip of the nation, moving the capital to Kansas, and giving any reputable car rental agency a crack at running the republic. Whatever, here’s to Alamo!

We attended Fourth of July fireworks in Chicago with friends and flew to London, where I got right to work on the Piss Artist Special, an ongoing piece of performance art, the self-guided tour of the city I’ve been trying to perfect for a number of years now. To do the PAS, you need a plastic bag for sandwiches, a bottle of water, and a pocket size London A-Z. You also need 20 pounds. Buy a one-day bus pass and board the first double-decker you see. Avoid the constipated entrails of London — no Big Ben, Houses of Parliament, Oxford Street, or Madame Tussaud’s. Go to places like Canada Water, Hounslow, Harrow, Brixton, Peckham, Honour Oak, St. John’s Wood, Sunbury, Hammersmith, Harlesden, Wapping, Spitalfields, Highgate, Shepherd’s Bush, Twickenham, Wandsworth, Woolwich, Battersea… Sit up top in the front, soak in the city, and let intuition determine whether to ride to the end of the line, hop out, change buses, walk, visit a museum, and how and where to invest your remaining 17 pounds (the bus pass will have set you back three).

There are a few pubs in London market areas that open at dawn. The PAS MAL (full name: Piss Artist Special — Meandering About London) is thus likely to lead you to Southwark or Smithfield for an early investment opportunity. But if you care to hold on, the first pint of the tour can wait until 11:00 a.m., standard opening hours. Whatever route you choose, your money should fetch 7 pints at today’s prices, enough to return to base with a renewed sense of the goodness of life. It was a PAS MAL that brought to my attention a sign that read: "Dogs Will Be Allowed on This Bus at Driver’s Discretion." These words are not remarkable in allowing four-legged animals on buses, given the British cult of the dog. What is remarkable is the expectation that a two-legged animal should have discretion, and should be granted the freedom to use it. This is nothing less than a sign of hope, literally, that the human race might yet muster enough horse sense to make it to 2010 without going extinct.

I’m skipping a lot of things to get to the best part of my summer vacation — two weeks on St. Kilda, the tiny group of westernmost Hebridean islands, just visible from Harris on a clear day. There is evidence of human habitation on St. Kilda from at least 3,000 B.C. In 1930, the last islanders were evacuated by the British government. Maintaining a human community in that remote place had become untenable for a variety of reasons, but the story in a nutshell is the familiar one — Those Who Knew Better seemed almost to resent the existence of a group of people who didn’t fit their idea of progress. In 1697 the St. Kildans (population 180) were described as a happy, resourceful, prosperous, self-sufficient community. A few hundred years of attention (much of it well-intended) from missionaries, politicians, philanthropists, tourists, and educators brought an end to that. By 1930, there were 36 impoverished, dispirited, and increasingly dependent St. Kildans left for the government to transport to the Scottish mainland. Some of the younger evacuees adapted fairly well to the new life. Most didn’t. Many sickened and died. The older people longed to return to their island. (For anyone interested, there are two superb books on the subject: Charles Maclean’s St. Kilda, Island on the Edge of the World and Tom Steel’s The Life and Death of St. Kilda.)

I was able to stay on St. Kilda thanks to the Scottish National Trust, which organizes work and archaeological parties during the summer months. My party consisted of 12 people from a wide variety of backgrounds who shared a fascination for the place. There was plenty to be fascinated about — the natural beauty, the colonies of seabirds, the camaraderie, the food (including fresh crab legs, herring, and mackerel), the work, the walks… Perhaps the best feature was the sense of isolation. It used to take "eight strong men" from 18 to 24 hours to row to St. Kilda — a crossing that was unpredictable, treacherous, and rarely attempted. Today the trip from Harris takes a little under three hours by boat, but you still feel like you’ve reached the edge of the world.

The time came, of course, when we had to leave. On the ferry from Harris to Skye, I happened to glance up at a TV screen and see a vaguely familiar tomato-hued creature sound-biting at a camera, loosing a shrill blast of idiot wind the likes of which two weeks of fresh air can make a person forget ever existed. "Hezzbowluh," he was saying. "Hezzbowluh started it." Eleven a.m. had struck, and my work party mate Paul and I were at the ferry bar engaging a pint of ale. "Good God," I said. "It’s G.W. Bush."

"And a right bloody berk, too," said Paul, ordering another round to insulate our re-entry into what SKY News kept assuring us was the brave new real world. A few days later I waded into the thick of that reality at Heathrow Airport, where a terror plot was reportedly in the process of being thwarted. My flight, like just about everyone else’s, was cancelled. I was fortunate to have a place to go for the night, and to have no pressing obligations. The SKY News moral was: u2018This is how the world has to be now. Get used to it. And three cheers for the global war on terror.’ Forty-eight hours later I at last boarded a flight out of Heathrow, dutifully holding a transparent bag containing only a wallet and passport — a security measure ordained not by British Air, whose people clearly considered it a waste of time, but by Those Who Know Better. No horse sense required.

A line from E.E. Cummings keeps coming around. "There’s a hell of a good universe next door," he wrote. "Let’s go." I suspect the people first drawn to the remoteness of St. Kilda many thousands of years ago had something like that in mind, in a literal way. I suspect that many people today, in those interludes when the idiot wind lets up a little, have something like that in mind in a metaphoric way. Maybe it’s time to take Cummings up on the invitation, turn our backs one by one on the tacky version of reality scripted and manipulated by the extremists (be their names Rumsfeld or bin Laden) who seem so confident they have all the answers. Maybe it’s time to light out for the territories to the best of our instincts and abilities. Or maybe I’ve just done too many Piss Artist Specials.

John Liechty [send him mail] currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

The glorious
invasion had taken place but the Mesopotamian worm was already hinting
at an inglorious turn when Mark Steyn wrote a piece for The Spectator
that joined the ball of sour (sauer?) Krauthammer in my craw. u2018Iraq
Has Never had it so Good' it was called. u201CThe glass is at least
5/8 full, and by any objective measure Iraq is immeasurably improved,u201D
Steyn wrote. The more-than-half-full-glass chestnut was immeasurably
desiccated — we'd been instructed to eat it more than 73,000 times
already by the Wolfowitz/Cheney/Rummy/Condi/Bush league. But Steyn
was not content with a lone chestnut — he produced others. There
was the Saddam Is Gone chestnut and the Prewar Potable Water Supply
Is Up chestnut. There was the Improved Healthcare and Child Immunization
chestnut and the mandatory u201CSchool Attendance in Iraq is 10 Percent
Higher Than a Year Agou201D chestnut. (Oh blithesome young scholars
in Halliburton-crafted classrooms affectionately painted by altruistic
troops!) After the chestnut-fest, u201CIraq Has Never Had it so Goodu201D
went on to assert that if you weren't partial to chestnut, it was
doubtlessly because you were an u201Carmchair insurgent.u201D Any criticism
of the war was unfounded and cowardly and obtuse. u201CIn Iraq itself,u201D
Steyn declared, u201Conly 15 percent of the population want the immediate
removal of coalition troops.u201D This comment is particularly intriguing
set beside today's information that more than 50% of coalition troops
want the immediate removal of coalition troops.

Steyn finds
it unseemly that Syria should be run by the son of a former president,
so his article arranged time to heap scorn on u201CBoyu201D (Bachir) Assad.
This seems somewhat rich, whatever Boy Assad's shortcomings, given
the fact that Steyn has been shining the Princeling of Shortcomings'
shoes for the last six years, yet has never seen fit to address
his master as u201CBoyu201D Bush. As young adults on the world stage go,
few seem more Puckish than Dubya. Long ago it was said of Father
Bush that he was born on third base and thought he'd hit a triple.
Boy Bush, born in the corporate boxes behind home plate and positive
he'd hit a grand slam, takes the cake.

Or perhaps
it would be more fitting to say that Princeling takes the u201Cicingu201D
on the cake, which is what Daniel Pipes has recently termed everything
that's befallen Iraq since the demise of the Hitler of the Middle
East (Yet lo! A replacement Hitler riseth even as I write).
u201CWhat is the biggest lesson you have learned from the Iraq War?u201D
Pipes was asked, to which he responded: u201CThe ingratitude of the
Iraqis for the extraordinary favor we gave them — to release them
from the bondage of Saddam Hussein's tyranny.u201D This gracious remark
is from an interview printed in early April of this year, but brought
back memories of Pipes complaining only a few weeks into the invasion
that the ingrate Iraqis didn't u201Cdeserveu201D democracy.

Apart from
their mutual partiality towards Israel and mutual insistence that
they are conservative, not u201Cneou201D-conservative (a breed of rogue
they insist is fictitious), and mutual faith in the rightness of
American might, the most prominent feather these three birds hold
in common is their capacity to sneer. Krauthammer's disdain for
the u201CArab streetu201D has given him years of op-ed joy. The latest Steyn
article to challenge the craw referred glibly to u201Cbarbarous
Islamist sewer statesu201D and Islam's u201Cinstitutional contempt for others.u201D
Steyn is a fine one to preach about contempt, institutional or otherwise
— he's an expert at it. But it is no use at all saying these things.
Steyn may be 5/8 full of shoe-shine, but the balance is largely
arrogance, chutzpah, and craftiness. No logic can check
that infallible jaw — it brays rain or shine. (This said, Steyn
is the best of the bunch — often witty, often articulate, and yes,
often right. Nevertheless, he holds a special place in my spleen.)

Krauthammer,
Steyn, and Pipes, like the administrations they serve, always know
better — still it is instructive to hear them beside alternate (God
forbid!) fonts of wisdom.  Job 12:5 says: u201CIn the thought of
one who is at ease, there is contempt for misfortune.u201D You can believe
that, or you can believe that u201CIraq has never had it so goodu201D. Ecclesiastes
10:8 says: u201CHe who digs a pit will fall into it; and a serpent will
bite him who breaks through a wall.u201D You can believe that, or you
can believe that what's happened in Iraq since the removal of Saddam
is u201Cicing.u201D Lao Tzu says: u201CWhen a nation falls to chaos then loyalty
and patriotism are born.u201D You can believe that, or you can shed
a red, white, and blue tear over inflated rhetoric like, u201CThe American
people, in Congress assembled, have given President Bush the authority
to use force to disarm Saddam Hussein.u201D Leaning toward Lao Tzu,
you might go on to speculate that the chaos in Iraq is a reflection
or projection or complement of chaos in the United States. Such
a thought is not unpatriotic — it's common sense and it bears serious
consideration. Perhaps the proof of its legitimacy is in the contempt
it draws from the school of armchair patriotism. At any rate, it
is now 2006, and the friends of Chaos are itching to announce that
the American people (in Congress assembled) have decided to nuke
Iran.

April
13, 2006

John
Liechty [send him mail]
currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

Public opinion
"will bear a great deal of nonsense," Emerson sighed.
Robert Peel called it a "compound of folly, weakness, prejudice,
wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy, and newspaper paragraphs."
"The public," sniffed Edith Sitwell, "will believe
anything so long as it isn't true." In contrast, Napoleon recommended
public opinion as "the thermometer a monarch should constantly
consult." Lincoln
believed that whatever its defects, it held "a strong underlying
sense of justice," and Lao Tzu noted that honorable leaders
naturally gain popular support. ("Fail to honor people, they
fail to honor you.") It seems that public opinion is something
to treat with suspicion and regard at the same time.

The fortunes
of the Bush Administration, in terms of public opinion, are firmly
linked to the misfortunes of the nation it was elected (sort of)
to lead. Back in the bonanza days of September 11 when Administration
popularity was soaring, a "jocular" Donald Rumsfeld was
whisking about in the public eye with the energy of Squealer in
Orwell's Animal
Farm, arranging chummy press conferences and producing detailed
diagrams of terrorist cave complexes that appeared to rival our
own mountain burrow, NORAD, in sophistication…. Life was very Goodness
Gracious Golly Gee at the time, and it didn't really much matter
to most people that the sophisticated cave complexes (apart from
NORAD) didn't exist, or that Jessica Lynch wasn't heroically rescued,
or that Saddam Hussein didn't arrange the September 11 attacks,
or that Pat Tillman was shot in the back by his own team.

The mood today
is less goodnessly graciously jolly. Rummy still makes the odd rum
declaration (e.g., Iraq's civil war is Iraq's problem), but the
chummy times are over. His tag-team partner doesn't have much to
say either — the Vice President's approval rating is reckoned to
be around 23 percent. The figure may at first seem low. Yet given
Cheney's record of conflict-of-interest type eyebrow-raisers, inept
judgments, zest for wars that other people get to fight, and the
recent bid for the Elmer Fudd Cup, the figure of 23% approval is,
as Hendrick Hertzberg notes (New Yorker, 3/13/06) "shockingly
high."

Hertzberg's
remark begs the question — just what would it take to shave those
last 23 percentage points to nil? The following recommendations
are said to have been leaked by an undisclosed source close to "Curveball":

How Dick
Cheney Can Still Attain a 0% Public Approval Rating Before It's
Too Late

[Deduct a percentage
point per item unless otherwise indicated.]

1. Replace
   the little flag pin on lapel with a Halliburton logo.

2. Publish
   Rumbuck Mountain, a manly sequel to Mrs. Cheney's novel
   of the American frontier.

3. Say something
   that sounded honest.

4. Go on
   Oprah and reveal a 666 branded on scalp. (While this might seem
   dramatically damaging to ratings, Administration apologists
   would insist the mark be read 999 and call for an invasion of
   France. Deduct one percentage point only.)

5. Act humble,
   e.g., say, "I may have been wrong on certain occasions."
   (A seemingly mild statement, but so shockingly out of character
   that three percentage points must be deducted.)

6. Tell the
   American public to go asterisk itself. (Approval rating hits
   15 percent.)

7. Agree
   to pepper eligible volunteers with birdshot at taxpayer expense.
   (One percentage point only. Some of the peppered would object;
   most would apologize for the trouble they'd caused.)

8. Appear
   in half-time act and "accidentally" expose nipple.
   (Deduct four points, and allow four months for the press to
   cover nothing else. Ten percent approval.)

9. Order
   a preemptive strike on Pittsburgh.

10. Submit
    to Congress that coinage henceforth read "In Dog We Trust."

11. Declare
    candidacy for 2008 presidential nomination. (Deduct six.)

12. Appear
    in grainy film called Rumbuck Rumpus Room, featuring
    raucous dress-up session with Tom DeLay, Bill Clinton, and a
    goat.

13. Look straight
    at the camera and say: "I did not have relations with that
    nanny."

And with that,
history will have been made. Zero % approval, a figure few public
figures have approached, let alone attained. It would be interesting
to know what the Vice President would say, and how many asterisks
he would need. But at this point, literally no one would be listening,
apart perhaps from a goat in a leather hoop-skirt.

March
14, 2006

John
Liechty [send him mail]
currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

Mora concludes
that in giving torture the nod, a group of "enormously hardworking,
patriotic individuals" inadvertently trashed American values.
They meant well, even as they were taking a truncheon to the
soul of the country they loved. As the Billie Holiday song
says: "Love will make you do things that you know is wrong." 
Yet it seems charitable to ascribe the misdeeds of Rumsfeld,
Cheney, and their lawyers to misguided patriotism. Too often their
love of country has resembled the self-interest Goneril and Regan
tried to pass off as filial love in King
Lear. The Rumsfeld-Cheneys may have trumpeted their devotion
to America after September 11, but their actions have suggested a
devotion primarily to power — country has played second
fiddle.

And what of
"hardworking"? A favorite suggestion of the Cheney-Rumsfeld
school of public servantdom is that if only the cream of government
were not subjected to the vinegar of rules, laws, and regulations,
the governed could be blessed more regularly with its uncurdled
goodness. Much of the hard work, meanwhile, goes into arranging
for the governed to know less and less about what the cream
is up to. One can sympathize to some extent. Government officials,
like anyone else who is expected to do a good job, should be
granted sufficient privacy to work as freely and creatively as possible.
An urge to bend the rules or waive them altogether
is understandable when it is a matter of enabling good work to be
done better.

The good work
the Bush Administration is so eager to be left to its own devices
to do better is not readily apparent, however. Preemptive attacks?
Unimaginable debt? Crass manipulation of public and press? A steady
stream of inept comments, inane stunts, and insane war? Occupation?
Torture? Another song lyric comes to mind, Bob Dylan's "To
live outside the law you must be honest." Some people, Jesus
Christ for example, have managed it and others from Thoreau to Hunter
S. Thompson have given it a good run for the money. One is not convinced,
however, that the Rumsfeld-Cheney type is temperamentally suited
to live outside the law, much as it may yearn to. "Honest"
is not the word that springs to mind when considering the architects
of Carte Blanche Guys “policy."

Whether they
are or are not the well-meaning, hard-working, but misguided patriots
Mora says they are, one thing is now clear — they've dirtied
their hands and ours, not merely with the usual day-to-day grime
of politics but with the abhorrent scum of torture. ("We do
not torture," the President declared last November — an assurance
scholars of Bush-tongue duly parsed as a resounding confirmation
that we do.) How do you wash the scum off? How do you refute
the charge that the moral stink of torture competes with the moral
stink of September 11 itself — the very stink we declared war on?
(Lately we have been advised to settle in for the Long Stink.) The
perverse "vision" of a degenerate band of zealots
has been foolishly magnified by the perverse "vision"
of its adversaries, prompting many these days to wonder: with adversaries
like these, why would a bin Laden need allies?

One of the
most powerful books ever written on the question of torture is South
African J.M. Coetzee's Waiting
for the Barbarians. The novel involves a provincial official
known simply as The Magistrate, who turns a blind eye when Colonel
Joll arrives from the capital. Joll is one of "the new men
of Empire…who believes in fresh starts, new chapters, clean pages."
Sound familiar? And like so many of our Neo-conservative men of
Empire, he can enthusiastically wrap what's left of his heart around
torture. The Magistrate comes to regret his initial complicity with
Joll's methods. "I should never have opened the gates to people
who assert that there are higher considerations than those of decency,"
he reflects. Ashamed, he takes a stand, and is brutally tortured
himself. But in the book's climax when the discredited Joll is driven
out, The Magistrate leans into his carriage and has the last word:
"The crime that is latent in us we must inflict on ourselves,”
he tells Joll. “Not on others."

Such messages
may be lost on the Gonerils and Regans, Cheneys and Rumsfelds, bin
Ladens and al-Zawahiris. Their ideologies allow no possibility that
they themselves might be in the wrong. They seem unaware of
or indifferent to "the crime that is latent within
us." They are unashamed of torture and unashamed to torture,
to take it out on others. They are ashamed of nothing, and may go
to their graves convinced they have nothing to be ashamed of. We
should be grateful, meanwhile, for people like Alberto J. Mora.
He may not have won the ear of his superiors, but he outranked
them in decency, for whatever it’s worth. Like Cordelia, he
had a heart, and his love for his country may one day ring truer
than that of his twisted sisters.  

February
27, 2006

John
Liechty [send him mail]
currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

It has indeed
been a challenge to distinguish truth from propaganda this already
old-feeling young century — the Bush team has had a busy five years
at the siege engines. As the President keeps reminding us (over
and over and over): "It's hard work." So much truth/propaganda
to lob, so little time. The 2000 election, Enron, Halliburton, the
Carlyle Group, September 11, weapons of mass destruction, war, Mission
Accomplished, more war, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Falluja, Katrina,
wire-taps, corruption – to date the public has enjoyed a virtual
blizzard of truth on such developments, and can expect three more
years of snow.

The suggestion
that truth and propaganda are the same thing, at least in the President's
line of work, is an interesting one. People in other lines of work,
the pitiable suckers living out there in reality land, or reality
TV land, or wherever it is that "the people" hang out,
tend to be stuck with less interesting, more conventional language
boundaries. Truth, says the dictionary, refers to things that are
true (not a difficult notion to grasp in most lines of work). Propaganda,
in contrast, refers to "ideas or statements that may be false
or exaggerated and that are used in order to gain support for a
political leader, party, etc." If the President had heeded
a dictionary, his sentence could not have stood. It would have been
obliged to read either u2018For the truth to sink in you gotta catapult
the truth'; or u2018For the propaganda to sink in you gotta catapult
the propaganda.'

Let's allow
that politics necessitates some degree of coupling between truth
and propaganda, and that a forked tongue is standard equipment among
catapult operators. That granted, if you were responsible for pitching
truth/propaganda to (at) the public and beyond, how would you go
about it? Colin Powell, concerned about America's image in the Middle
East, suggested that what we really need is a good "re-branding,"
and Madison Avenue types were enlisted to tackle it. The Pentagon
opted for people like Christian Bailey, a young Briton offering
"tailored intelligence services" for "government
clients faced with intelligence challenges." Characteristically
faced with one, the Pentagon paid Bailey a million dollars to plant
rosy stretchers in the freshly liberated Iraqi press. Bailey was
ultimately exposed. There was a tendency among readers to smell
rat instead of rose.

Those in charge
of forking out truth/propaganda seem surprised to discover that
the audience (the forked-over) can generally round up enough collective
brain cells to differentiate between the two. On the heels of September
11, the government decided to publish "Hi" Magazine. "Hi"
was intended to win youthful Middle Eastern hearts and minds with
pages devoted to the glossier joys of American democracy. Alas,
nobody read "Hi," which has just been dumped. It cost
roughly 15 million dollars to get "Hi" off the ground
and nosedive it back again. Who could have known it wouldn't fly?
Just about anybody, really. Truth/propaganda of whatever flavor
still trips little flashing LIAR lights in the minds of most people,
who tend to dislike being treated like chumps. Governments might
consider throwing an occasional information straightball (not to
mention refraining from striking wildly at information supplied
by goofballs like "Curveball"); the standard forkballs
are no longer finding the plate.

Noam Chomsky
recently noted that if the U.S. government is truly interested in
reducing the threat of terror, there is a straightforward and obvious
step to be taken: to "stop acting in ways that — predictably
— enhance the threat." In other words, to stop acting in ways
that leave so many people stumped as to who the bad guys are. A
few weeks ago at least 18 Pakistani civilians were collaterally
damaged by a CIA drone in an attempt to remove a terrorist who wasn't
there. Put another way, 18 human beings minding their own business
were murdered in a terror strike devised and delivered by a group
claiming to be passionately opposed to terror. What can be said
to the families, friends, and neighbors of the dead? Sorry? It was
a mistake? Here's a check worth 18 souls? But the Bush league doesn't
do sorrow, and has yet to acknowledge a mistake — perhaps this compassionately
conservative administration will yet find it in itself to send the
Pakistanis some back issues of "Hi."

The United
States government doesn't need a facelift, re-branding, or cosmetic
makeover to solve its image problem. It needs to start acting like
it really believes in the freedom and democracy it can't stop talking
about. It could stop talking, meanwhile, about the hearts and minds
out there to be won as if they were scalps or votes, and start behaving
responsibly and intelligently enough to suggest that it has a functioning
heart and mind of its own. Instead, it "kind of catapults the
propaganda" in ongoing devotion to what it considers its own
interests, and takes the liberty of calling ours.

February
3, 2006

John
Liechty [send him mail]
currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

There's no escaping Us/Them games. We play them every day. They
doubtlessly contribute to prudence, but can also contribute to paranoia
and distortion. I remember my first visit to New York City. I was
a teenager who'd rarely been anywhere more cosmopolitan than Toledo,
Ohio. Yet I knew exactly what They would be like. I'd been as well-briefed
on New Yorkers as New Yorkers had been briefed on yokels from the
hinterlands. Thus, I knew they were abrasive and smug and archly
indifferent to the world beyond their city. They were ruthlessly
materialistic. Alas, the New Yorkers I encountered were all tolerably
civil and some remarkably so. Nobody snapped at me, snubbed me,
or ripped me off. Maybe it had just been a slow day in the fast
city.

Americans who recall the paranoia of the Cold War may easily smile
at Allen Ginsberg's lines:

America
it's them bad Russians.

Them
Russians and them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.

The Russia
wants to eat us alive. The Russia's power mad. She wants to
take our cars from out our garages.

But at the time, there was little smiling. And if you suggested
that the average Russian citizen might just possibly be a human
being with needs and aspirations kindred to your own, it was a matter
of seconds before someone pounced with a stern rejoinder that you
wouldn't be talking that way when they were beating and raping a
path to your door. In the end, however, the Russia let us down.

This is not to say that the They Teams are composed of saints —
just that they are not composed of undiluted devils. The despot
once billed as the Hitler of the Middle East is by no accounts an
angel. But he's been a disappointing devil and an inadequate Hitler.
Saddam's fabulous hoard of WMDs was just that. The nuclear weapons
poised to strike London in 45 minutes weren't there either, and
the Blair government knew they weren't even as it was saying they
were. According to George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein was "stiffing
the world," but the world still seems perplexed as to which
of the two has played lead stiff on the world stage. If the They
Team is accused of lying, torture, aggression, and self-delusion,
the We Team has shown a pronounced taste for them too. Meanwhile,
the predicted tide of post-liberation gratitude is not just still
out, but very possibly never coming in, as unreal as the instant
triumph prematurely consummated in the president's Mission Accomplished
moment. As Thanksgiving 2005 approaches, freedom in Iraq remains
messy enough that this year's presidential rubber turkey carving
moment appears unlikely.

The Bush administration and its media frog pond ascribe as much
blame as possible to Them. It is difficult to read the Charles Krauthammer/Max
Boot/Mark Steyn/ and (deceptively) kinder gentler Thomas Friedman
bunch without picking up a subtext expressed less eloquently by
dimmer bulbs of the Anne Coulter/Franklin Graham wattage: America
it's them bad Arabs. With September 11, it was an easy sell. The
subsequent lies and incompetence have made it less so, along with
the steady loss of lives, resources, and opportunities. Still the
croaking continues. What is it about them Arabs? (Note: Them Arabs
may include traces of Persians and Pashtuns, or if necessary, the
French.) What is it with their "bloody borders"? What
do they want? Why don't they write their Congressmen? Why is brute
force the only language they understand? Why don't they Just Say
Democracy? And what is it about their religion that makes them so,
well, so Them?

The other side has a counter-pond devoted to perpetual croaking
about the Great Satan and its subsidiaries. It's them bad Americans/Israelis
has become a default echo throughout the Arab world and much of
the rest. Which side has the greater claim to innocence? Probably
neither. The question of who is most to blame is practically beyond
resolution. Perhaps a better hope lies in the world beyond the frog
ponds, beyond Us and Them, in the world of real freedom where most
human beings carry on with their lives as We, if given the half
a chance the average government (and God, don't they tend to be
average!) seems so reluctant to encourage.

Now and then we get glimpses of that world. I lived in Morocco during
the first Gulf War, and was uncomfortably aware of my nationality
the night an American "bunker-busting" bomb killed hundreds
of civilians seeking shelter beneath Baghdad. A friend came by wanting
to go to the public bath. I was hesitant. It seemed like a good
night for an American to stay in; but in the end, we decided to
go. The bath wasn't busy, and I was relieved to find that we were
ignored by the handful of people inside. Then a local fruit seller
showed up, one of the most devout people in the area, a man known
to everyone as Haj Brahim. I didn't know what he might say, or what
we might say, or if there was anything to say given the tense atmosphere,
but he had spotted us and was coming our way. Apart from "Salaam
aleikum," he said nothing. What Haj Brahim did was another
matter. He took his bath mitt and a pail of hot water and gently
scrubbed first my friend's back, then mine, a gesture of everyday
courtesy that we were not expecting that particular day. I had entered
the bath wondering what They might do. I came out impressed by what
We had done. We people, acting like people in spite of, not because
of the actions of our governments.

I have spent nearly 20 years in the Arab world; conduct such as
Haj Brahim's has been the rule, not the exception. I have naturally
encountered bigotry and ignorance there too (plenty of it my own),
but my overall impression of Arab people is one of fundamental decency.
I've spent nearly 30 years in the U.S. and have similar feelings
about American people, an overall impression of fundamental decency
no matter what the papers say. In the early 1980s I found myself
hitchhiking through the southern states. I had never been in the
south before, and assumed that my chances were about 50-50 of getting
clobbered by the same strain of Them that had clobbered Jack Nicholson
in Easy Rider. Thus, I felt uneasy when I saw a man beckoning me
from the door of a crossroads grocery in the southern Alabama town
where I'd been fishing for a ride. "Hey, boy! Get in here!"
he said. I looked to see if there were any boys around. The man
was big and fat, like every red-neck sheriff in every half-wit film
I'd seen about the south. He wore bib overalls and chewed tobacco.
A card-carrying member of Them Southerners. "Yeah, you! Get
in here!" he called. Expecting to have it kicked out of me
shortly, I got my s__t together and crossed the road. "Here,"
the man said from behind the counter, and handed me something wrapped
in wax paper. "You looked hungry." It was a pork chop
sandwich, and he was right, I needed a decent meal. I don't know
what to say about people like this.

"They
don't know how good we are," the President observed in the
wake of September 11. The words made more sense than most Bush speech
samples, but he might have added: "And we don't know how good
they are. We must not forget that if we are to achieve anything
close to an effective response to terrorism." It would have
been humanly possible, and it need not have sounded weak or foolish.
Lao Tzu said: "I find good people good, and I find bad people
good if I am good enough." In the wake of September 11, the
administration wasn't good enough to resist demonizing its enemy,
which is part of what I think Lao Tzu meant by finding "bad
people good." It wasn't big enough to propose or practice a
measured and intelligent restraint. It was not dignified enough
to insist on a concerted, determined, patient bid for justice that
would take care not to punish and all too often kill the innocent
and vulnerable. But then, Lao Tzu was not the president's favorite
philosopher and he and his Jesus-spirited friends were eager to
get bombs away in Afghanistan, and already drooling at the thought
of war in Iraq. Shock and awe has made a lot of noise. Whether it's
done a lot a good is less obvious. It seems to me that we (all of
us) have been left not knowing how good we are, or how free from
fear and stupidity we could be. The average government is none too
eager to help us find out.

November
5, 2005

John
Liechty [send him mail]
currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

There
were two essential courses to take the morning after. One was to
seek out and confront the faux Tuareg, and demand the money back.
I elected, however, to confront the mirror, admit that I'd been
an ass, jettison my "malachite", and attempt to engage
the new day less gullibly.

The
American public, say the papers, is finally awakening to the fact
that it's been sold a genuine malachite war by, shall we say, a
band of Roving Bushmen (and one Bushwoman) swathed in red, white
and blue-dyed fabric. And the public has opted to greet the morning
after (the many mornings after, actually) with a cry of, "We
were deceived!" It was tempting at first to join the round
of righteous indignation. I emailed a friend in Scotland something
to the tune of: u2018At last we're waking up!' with a hint of pride
at our capacity to get to the bottom of things. Better late than
never, the truth will out, and so forth and so on. His reply sobered
me up considerably:

"I
don't know if I would give the American public so much credit,"
he wrote. "It's only six months since they re-elected Bush
despite clear evidence at that time that he misled them. The only
change now is that they don't like the fact that it is clear that
the war is being lost. If the war against the insurgents was being
won, they would still be supporting Bush. It's not about principles,
it's about feelings. Feel good (bombing from 40,000 feet/ Saddam
toppled) = President Good. Feel bad (marines returning in body bags,
insurgents dominant) = President Bad. The public have a responsibility.
They can't support an action in 2003, continue to justify it in
2004, but then blame Bush in 2005 when it doesn't work out. He would
not have been able to act without high approval ratings. He would
not have been able to act if the American public had thought about
what it was being told. He would not have been able to act if the
public had learned anything from Vietnam."

There's
a lot of truth to these words. It is rather pleasant and not very
challenging to pin jackass ears on the president – he normally takes
care of that unassisted, in any case. But a look in the mirror might
confirm something we'd rather not acknowledge – a jackass public
braying "We were deceived" in much the same fashion it
was not too long ago braying for a war that smelled phonier than
an anchovy claiming to be a cheese enchilada. Yes, the Roving Bushpersons
lied and bullied and exaggerated and misled and distorted and manipulated
and deceived. Just business, as far as they were concerned. By neo-con
principles (of a sort), the public is too dumb to deserve the truth
in the first place. Unfortunately, we lived down to their cynicism
as much as we lived up to our responsibility. We bought a gimcrack
war for considerably more than ten dollars, and will be paying installments
indefinitely. Our leaders should be blamed and, whether they have
the faculty for it or not, they should be ashamed. At the same time,
the American public has to share the blame and shame for this foolishness,
not just ascribe it.

July
4, 2005

John
Liechty [send him mail]
currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

Tariq
Ramadan must have had that cold blade to the stomach lining sensation
when he was told last July that his freshly stamped visa to the
United States had been freshly revoked, without explanation. If
he had been a liar and cheat of Ahmed Challabi stature, his visa
would assuredly have remained valid. But Ramadan was an academic
headed for the University of Notre Dame, where he had been appointed
a post as professor of religion, conflict, and peace-building. His
visa was yanked under the Patriot Act.

“Ah,”
one will reflexively think. “There must have been some rhyme and
reason to it.” No doubt. But there is strong doubt that the rhyme
and reason for revoking Ramadan’s visa goes far beyond paranoia,
bigotry, and the persistent tradition of bureaucratic insanity that
has tainted the visa business for years. The chances are 99 out
of a hundred that Ramadan is guilty of nothing more than being Muslim.
Yet, there is that 1% chance that he might be an Al Qaeda operative
who’d cleverly wormed his way into the Peace Studies Program at
Notre Dame. Mother Teresa, for that matter, might have been a transvestite.
Donald Rumsfeld might be an undercover Mennonite theologian, and
you or I might be alien spores intent on colonizing planet Earth.
There are infinite possibilities as to what one might in fact be.
Common sense bids us reject the more ludicrous.

One
would like to think that ludicrous decision-making is the exception
in America’s consular section. Tariq Ramadan’s experience calls
to mind the recent high profile turning away of singer Cat Stevens,
and of Ibrahim Ferrer, the guitarist denied entry to the U.S. given
his highly suspicious motive of intending to accept a Grammy Award.
Who knows what havoc the 76 year old Cuban might have unleashed
had he been granted a visa? Decades back the visa people advertised
their potential for insanity by refusing entry to novelists Graham
Greene and the Nobel Prize winning Gabriel Garcia Marquez –
something about an all night revel with Fidel Castro rendering them
unfit to enter the Land of the Free. Increasingly, even visitors
to the U.S. granted visas have been saying to hell with it; for
example, Indian-born Canadian novelist Rohinton Mistry, who’s decided
the indignities he’s encountered traveling while brown at U.S. airports
are simply not worth the trouble.

For
every high profile indignity there are many times that number incurred
on just plain people. I’ve taught overseas for years and could tell
a thousand stories about people like Farah, one of my favorite sixth
graders at an American embassy school long before September 11 “changed
everything." Farah was so excited about her upcoming trip to the
States. And then one day, so humiliated. It turned out that children
with Libyan fathers, even well-connected, intelligent, and respected
Libyan fathers, did not merit a two-week vacation in Florida. I
could tell you about Toki, an outstanding student and devout Christian
whose integrity is beyond reproach. That is of course, my opinion,
but it is an opinion based on two years of close contact. Toki had
everything ready – his acceptance letter from the University of
Missouri, his money, his positive attitude, even his luggage. Then
he was denied a visa. He’d been guilty of that most nefarious of
consular section crimes – existing while Nigerian. A less resourceful
person would have given up, but Toki immediately began looking elsewhere.
At the last minute, he was accepted at a college and granted a visa
to Canada, where he is doing exceedingly well in his studies. Canada
has Toki’s gratitude and good will, his potential, and not least
his tuition money. That the University of Missouri and America were
not allowed to reap these windfalls seems to me not just bad business
and bad hospitality, but little short of insane.

The
most recent and perhaps most ludicrous of my visa tales involves
a British citizen (entirely Caucasian, apolitical, and secular,
for the record) from that not particularly terrorist hotbed of Torquay
in southwest England. Andrew had been living and working in Morocco
for upwards of twenty years. That last detail is apparently what
prompted the customs people in New York City not to allow my old
friend and former colleague to pollute U.S. soil last summer. It
didn’t matter that Andrew had been in the U.S. each of the prior
eight summers working at a camp in upstate New York. It didn’t matter
that he had spent a year coaching soccer at a liberal arts college
in Indiana. It didn’t matter that he has worked as a physical education
instructor for nearly two decades at an International American School
or that a fair proportion of his students are U.S. embassy children.
It didn’t matter that under any gauge conceivable Andrew bears as
much resemblance to a terrorist as Shirley Temple. It didn’t matter
that Andrew admires (or used to at any rate) America. In New York
City last summer he was told to get on a plane, go back to Morocco
or Torquay or whatever un-American sounding place he claimed he
hailed from, and not bother to reapply for a U.S. visa for another
ten years. No explanations given.

I
have a fairly personal reason for contesting the sanity of some
of the people assigned to letting the good guys in and keeping the
bad guys out. Many years ago I married an alien – not the mantis-featured
variety that frequents Roswell, New Mexico, but a Moroccan. At first,
I’d fancied she was a human being – it was only after a visit
to the U.S. embassy in Rabat that I became fully aware of her alien
status. We’d gone there to apply for a tourist visa to the States.
It seemed routine. My wife had been to the U.S. half a dozen times
before marrying me, a red-blooded (sort of) American. She had a
master’s degree from Indiana University where she’d gone on a Fulbright
Scholarship. She’d led groups of students to the States on white-bread
programs like The Experiment in International Living. She’d visited
the States as a tourist on several occasions, spoke fluent English,
had a long-term job contract binding her to Morocco. Well, to make
a long story short, she was not granted a tourist visa. The consul
who made the decision was arrogant, oblivious, irrational, mendacious,
condescending, and endowed with an unusually porcine set of jowls
(not, God forbid, that I am holding a grudge 15 odd years later).
I had to go to the States alone that summer, and spend most of it
trying to persuade my family that the alien was not really the insidious
creature her visa rejection hinted at. My feelings about the world’s
greatest democracy have never been quite the same since.

There
are many fine and qualified people working in American embassies
and in American customs. It is not my intention to say there are
not. And being a consul or border official is not an easy job. It
is not my intention to say that it is. It is merely my intention
to suggest that a degree of horse-sense and a modicum of discernment
might be a useful pair of qualities to insist upon when the state
department goes about filling consular posts. Meanwhile, we may
as well expand our stock of venal and incompetent border official
stereotypes to include not only indolent Mexicans, leering Turks,
grease-palmed Africans, inflexible Germans, chauvinistic Frenchmen,
and the entire host of lesser nationalities to make room for clueless,
bigoted, and questionably sane Americans as well. It seems only
fair. We may be thankful that clueless, bigoted, and questionably
sane American bureaucrats are not yet the norm. But with the Patriot
Act on their side, and an administration supporting a clueless,
bigoted and questionably sane war, who’s to say they may not become
so?

January
1, 2005

John
Liechty [send him mail]
currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.

To: All
Agents, "Operation Don't Know How Good We Are"
From: Luci

Dear
Friends in D.C.:

In
light of the recent hiccups of scandal in the "liberation of
the Iraqi people," (the phrase still sends me, nice work Wolfie)
I thought I'd better drop a line. Hold your heads high gang, just
one of those things. George: Brilliant
move, blaming the trailer trash and the bad apples. Love it! "This
isn't the America I know…?" Had me in stitches, bravo! Bring
on the pesky under-classes. They came in handy back when you had
them burning huts and shooting up villages in southeast Asia –
we can use them again. "Not the America I know." George,
you crack me up. Maybe I should make you Governor of Texas again,
let you get on with signing execution orders on a little more trailer
trash, huh? Just joking. You're right where I want you.

Dick!
Hang in, man! "Rummy's the best defense secretary ever, let
him do his job," you said the other day. We can count on the
American people to trust your judgment, Dick. After all, you're
the oracle who foresaw a flower-shower from grateful Iraqis lining
the cakewalk to Baghdad, a fun war of "weeks, not months."
Keep stringing them along, Dick. Chin up. No shame.

Those
American people! Aren't they something? Still backing their "war
president"! Like taking candy from a baby. Now and then they
get a little cantankerous. I didn't at all care for the opinion
piece in the New York Times (generally I'm very pleased with the
opinion pieces in the New York Times) by Luc Sante (sounds like
some craven Frenchman to me – Brent or somebody might want to look
into trashing his reputation ASAP) comparing those photos from Abu
Ghraib to the photos of lynchings. I'm afraid he got it exactly
right (and like you, nothing disgusts me more than the plain truth).
People standing there like trophy hunters next to a "gutted
buck or a 10-foot marlin," is how he put it. Of course it's
about elitist nationalism, or as I prefer to call it, your preeminence.
So? Is that a problem? Let me remind you team, you're the cream
of the species. The end of history. The city on the hill. The best,
the brightest, the rightest, the richest, the rootinest-tootinest.
And that authorizes you to kill anybody in the way. Or degrade them.
Humiliate them. Torture them. So what. Like manifest destiny, preeminence
steamrolls the losers. Tough.

Admired
the distinction you made, Rummy, between "abuse" and "torture."
My faith in you, in all of you, is unshaken. Heads up, think positive.
Forget the hiccups, let's look at accomplishments. We're still doing
a tremendous job with civilian deaths. Kids, women, journalists,
wedding parties, villagers sleeping. Who the hell cares? Don't know
how many cuz we don't count 'em! And we continue to do well with
non-civilian deaths, that is, with the people who officially deserve
to die, like those 100,000 sorry sods stuck in the desert and "carbonized"
during Gulf War I in a mere 100 hours of what you unironically referred
to at the time as combat. How many tens of thousands more have since
bought it in Afghanistan, how many in Gulf War II? We've taken significant
strides in not knowing and not caring, and I'm mighty pleased about
that. The paper today claims that up to 90% of the prisoners in
Abu Ghraib were there "by mistake" and at least 30% of
the prisoners in Guantanamo are there by mistake. What can I say?
Those numbers do us proud. "They don't know how good we are."
Remember that one, George? Agent Osama uses the same line. Don't
know how we'd get by without your sense of humor. Guess we'll just
have to keep u2018em waiting a while longer!

Well,
gotta go. Got discord to sow, tongues to fork, hearts to freeze,
souls to torment. But I know I can continue to count on you to lighten
my load. Keep up the good work. You're on the side of the [fallen]
angels. Dubya? Loveya! And love that war on terror! In case the
rubes continue to ask who's behind it, let's keep using "Jesus"
as our cover, can't seem to wear that one out.

See
y'all in hell!
~ Luci(fer)

May
24, 2004

John
Liechty [send him mail]
currently teaches in Muscat, Oman.