Pull Out The Sofa Bed

In perhaps the bravest display by a Brit since the RAF held off the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain, two British professors are about to publish the results of their study that concludes that men have higher IQs in general than women, a trend that becomes more pronounced as the respective IQ levels rise.

One must, if nothing else, admire their chutzpah, while at the same time feel a (very) fleeting moment of sadness at the imminent passing of Nancy Hopkins, the MIT prof who was so deeply disturbed by Larry Summer's comparatively innocuous comments that she nearly committed an empowered indiscretion on the rug. I am guessing either a coronary or at least a stroke when Nancy hears about this one.

--Josh

How not to protest a war...

The Sheehan circus is getting crazier and crazier. In a near heroic effort to make the whole episode even more bizarre, Rev. Al Sharpton has announced that he will be joining Cindy Sheehan in Texas.

But anyway, I think now is the time to make sure everyone knows how to think about the war in Iraq. Agree or disagree with how it started, there is a moral obligation (not to mention a very important strategic imperative) to stay in Iraq until it is stable and there is a functioning government.

Recently, the anti-war movement has turned up its pathos. The argument goes something like this: families of people who lose their children have the moral authority to say when we should leave Iraq. Or put another way, when you lose a child in war, you get to direct U.S. foreign policy. This is emotionally attractive, b/c nobody wants to say "no" to a grieving parent. The anti-war crowd counts on this, and uses it as a way to prevent debate.

I think when anyone talks about leaving Iraq, there should be just one criteria: would our leaving make life better or worse for the average Iraqi citizen? That is the only responsible criteria. If you honestly believe that "bringing the troops home" now will make the best future for Iraq, then that is a reasonable thing that we can debate. But the anti-war crowd seems to think that there are only anti-war military families. I have no doubt that Republicans could find a distraught mother who lost a soldier and Iraq and demands that we stay in Iraq until we finish the job - as the only honorable tribute to fallen soldiers.

But an anti-war argument that rests solely on the fact that people die - and mothers cry - is an argument against all wars and not the Iraq war. My guess is that they don't make an explicitly pacifist argument b/c they know it doesn't have mass appeal. Anyway, those are my thoughts before the weekend...

- dane

Pat Robertson is an idiot...but who cares?

For those who haven't heard...A few days ago, Pat Robertson said that he thinks the U.S. should assassinate Venezuela's President cum dictator, b/c it would be "cheaper than war." Obviously there were many people who were upset by this comment, and many more who wanted to be upset by it. But why?

Here's the New York Times's attempt at moral equivalence:

"Mr. Robertson said that on his Christian television network on Monday - explaining that such action would be cheaper than a war - but finally admitted yesterday that he had been wrong. Imagine, for comparison purposes, what the White House would say if a Syrian mullah had gone on Al Jazeera and called for the assassination of the president of the United States."

Yes, imagine if a Muslim leader from the Middle East called for the assassination of the President of the United States (or all Americans everywhere, in bin Laden's words). Wait a minute. That does happen. On a near daily basis. That's the problem with the classic hypothetical moral equivalent - you have to compare 2 things that are actually equivalent.

A few other reasons this is no big deal:

1. There isn't a rash of Evangelical suicide bombers in the world. When Pat Robertson says something like this, nothing happens. When a Muslim cleric says something like this, the result is real and is deadly.

2. What he said was fundamentally true. Assassinations ARE cheaper than war. Imagine if we could have taken out Hitler, Stalin, Saddam, or even Kim Jong Il, without a land war. No civilian casualties. It's kinda hard to believe a liberal didn't come up with this idea.

3. Nobody really takes Pat Robertson seriously. Yes, I'm sure his listeners think he's really cool, but nobody who makes real policy decisions cares what he says.

So yes, Pat Robertson said a stupid thing, and he sounded stupid saying it. I doubt it was the result of a deep philosophical inner debate. The biggest question for me is, why worry about Chavez when there's bigger fish to fry? There are a few people that should be assassinated, but Chavez isn't on my top 5...

- dane

Giving War a Chance...

According to Oxfam, the UN is set to vote on a resolution that commits the UN to a "responsibility to protect" victims from genocide and ethnic cleansing. This is a laudable goal, but one wonders if the resolutions's advocates realize what they are asking for. First, the resolution calls for "action" in cases of genocide. Let's be clear: the only way to stop genocide is with military force. In other words, war. Certainly, this kind of war is as just as war can be. But still it is war, and sons and daughters die just as surely in "humanitarian interventions" as in war. (And humanitarian interventions are often even less popular than regular wars). If this resolution becomes international law, there will suddenly be a legal obligation to fight wars in places like Sudan, Rwanda, and Chechnya. I'm all for it, but does the Oxfam/anti-war crowd really understand what they are asking for?

- dane

Stop The Presses

The New York Times, of all publications, has reported that the AP may be considering trying to gain a broader perspective on Iraq (i.e., reporting on positive developments in Iraq, not just exclusively negative ones as they have a penchant for doing currently). It seems that many in the general public have become puzzled over why they have never heard about many of the wonderful things that are happening in Iraq, as reported by returning soldiers, certain bloggers, and a few intrepid journalists.

Only because I am a faithful reader of Michael Yon’s blog and the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal which has been running a series on all the progress being made in Iraq, am I aware that there is anything positive happening over there at all. Many of those who depend only on the main stream media would probably have very little idea that steps in the right direction are being taken every day in this endeavor (reason one billion to embrace the internet).

--Josh

The World is Flat

I'm currently reading Tom Friedman's latest book, The World is Flat. Here's an interesting quote:


"When I was young, my parents told me to eat my dinner because children in India and China are starving. Now, I tell my daughters to do their homework because children in India and China are starving for your jobs."

Basically, globalization is forcing Americans to do something for which they are very underprepared - compete on the global market. While the U.S. has the best Universities in the world, we have mediocre high schools. This culture of mediocrity is creeping into our colleges too. Its no big secret that you can get through college without studying these days. We need better schools, we need better teachers, and yes, we need better students.

- Dane

Sound and Fury...

Sure, I wish whenever something bad happened in my life the President would stop his schedule to talk to me. Several times. Oh, but it's just me. One person. He doesn't have to talk to anyone else. That's reasonable, isn't it?

Even sadder, is that its so obviously absurd, everyone knows its absurd, but nobody wants to say its absurd because they get personal satisfaction in seeing President Bush in an awkward position. This isn't high-minded debate, its juvenile silliness. Besides, her claim that she just wants to talk to President Bush as a mother of a soldier has long since been drowned out by the opportunistic anti-war activists who are making it a circus.

Getting Better All the Time

A great help to those looking for apartments in major cities, Housingmaps.com melds Google Maps with Craigslist posts, allowing you to see available houses as bubbles on the map. When you click on an individual bubble, up comes info about the house, and a link to the full Craigslist posting.

Sweet.

--Ted

The New Brooklyn

For a while now, we Philadelphia-loving Wissahickon staffers have been adamantly calling Philadelphia the "New New York." The Times, while not willing to go this for, has admitted that Philadelphia may be the "New Brooklyn."

Attracted by a thriving arts and music scene here and a cost of living that is 37 percent lower than New York's, according to city figures, a significant number of youngish artists, musicians, restaurateurs and designers are leaving New York City and heading down the turnpike for the same reasons they once moved to Brooklyn from Manhattan.

The article speaks mainly of real-estate and gentrification, and correctly recognizes that Philadelphia is a great place to live, especially for those of us who don't think a fine city should be sprawling, condescending, and shoe-gazing.

--Ted

The reports of Niger's starving children have been greatly exaggerated...

Don't worry, says Niger's president, we've got everything under control. But immediately after saying there is no famine, he asks that foreign aid be channeled through his government and not directly through charities:

He questioned why of the $45m (£25m) promised to Niger to help it deal with the food crisis, only $2.5m had been received by his government. Mr Barrow said that the WFP was accountable for all its funds to donor governments but pointed out that not all aid money is channelled through the governments of recipient countries.

Um, Mr. Barrow, the reason aid money isn't channeled through the government is b/c we don't want to pay for your summer home in the Swiss Alps.

On Fiction

First things first: you should, all of you, stop at a newsstand and buy The Atlantic's Fiction Issue 2005. It's important, intelligent, and is on newsstands until October. If you're a subscriber, you can read it online. If you're not, you can read a few paragraphs.

The fiction itself is fair to good: no truly bad stories, and a few actual good ones. You'll want to read, in descending order:

Poor Devil, by Charles Baxter (A simple, contemporary, broken-hearted love story.)

Weightlifting for Catholics by Mark Jacobs (Stylistically and thematically the best story in the magazine, although it suffers from a tepid ending.)

The House on Kronenstrasse by Shira Nayman (Interesting stuff--and we should never tire of reading about the Holocaust.)

The true gems, however, are two nonfiction pieces:

Writers and Mentors by Rick Moody is worth the price of the magazine. In the past, I've vilified the creative-writing workshop on this blog; today, I am speechless in the glow of Moody's lucidity. So that you nonsubscribers can get the gist, I am going to post this whole section:

Now, once an audience begins to experience itself as a community with power, it begins to ask certain questions about stories. I'm sure that analogous questions are asked about poems and essays in workshops every day, but I have less experience with those forms. Pardon me, then, if I confine myself to the kinds of questions that are a commonplace of the contemporary fiction workshop.

[NOTE: for some reason, Moody's magical lists are not present in the online version--a terrible mistake by the Atlantic web-squad, I imagine. All the more reason to buy the magazine. Here's a few from my fingertips]

1. Does the story begin effectively?
2. Does the story end effectively?
3. Does the story have a conflict?
4. Are the characters believable?
5. Are the charactes likeable?
6. Is the story dramatic? Does drama help the story move?
7. Is the language in the way?
8. Does the story have a theme?
9. Does the character experience an epiphany?
10. Are you moved?
    

This is just off the top of my head. Many other such questions can be imagined. To the extent that a student comes to expect these questions, or to the extent that he or she writes in expectation of them, the likely product will be stories (or poems or essays) that reduce the chances of innovation, that ratify the workshop as a system, and that ratify the idea of the university but do little for the development of the form or for our language as a whole.

If I had it to do myself, I might instead ask questions like these:

[Again, edited and inserted by me.]

1. Has the writer attempted to eliminate all adverbs?
2. What's wrong with using a few more semicolons?
3. Does this story contain any sentences that you want to remember to your grave?
4. Would Samuel Beckett like this story? Would Virginia Woolf?
5. Does this story answer the question, "Why bother to write?"
6. Can this story save any lives?
   

I am not suggesting, of course, that traditional workshop questions are entirely without merit (though I personally will have no truck with the idea of likeability, which is the hobgoblin of small minds), nor am I suggesting that even quite innovative stories are without conflict or character (although one does recall John Hawkes's famous remark that "the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme"). What I am suggesting is that a workshop structure that becomes oriented toward what is easy to say about a story will, by its very nature, default on its responsibility when faced with two kinds of work: the very good and the very bad. What gets lost, therefore, is what is at the margins of convention, and that is potentially catastrophic, because a literary form is defined in part by the marginal, by what is impossible, by what is grandiose and revolutionary, whether in the good sense or in the bad.

This is insightful stuff, especially since the criticisms in Moody's article are eminently applicable to the stories which follow it in the Atlantic's Fiction Issue. Too often, short stories in contemporary magazies read bland and banal, as if the edges have been rounded off--as if they were written by committee. The problem, I think, is deeper than the shortcomings of the workshop model--but it's certainly not helping.

Also phenomenal is Mary Gordon's Moral Fiction. To sum up: Gordon reminds us that the relationship between morality and fiction is not as tight as we would like to think it is, and that fiction is best when it aims to portray a complicated, irreducible moral vision (think The Brothers Karamazov) not a simple, neatly-packaged moral (think Left Behind: Tribulation Force). Be sure to read this embedded snippet from Saul Bellow.

That's all for now. Happy reading.

--Ted

A Better World?

David Brooks wrote an article in the NY Times pointing to the improvements that have been made in America over the past decades (less drunk driving, less substance abuse, etc..). It is a fascinating article, and is certainly a breath of fresh air for those who only read about injustice. Brooks has wrote articles like this before, and should be commended for reminding us that though world is a hard place to live, and injustice is plentiful, it is certainly a place worth living in.

D.R. Leonard

A Revised Revisionism Concerning the Atomic Bomb

Terrific article here concerning the use of the atomic bomb against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As the article points out, the historical record of the event has been subjected to revisionism in the last twenty years or so, to the point that many modern historians have concluded that the use of the bomb had gratuitous aspects.

This is a subject about which I have deeply ambivalent feelings. It is easy to understand the thinking that led Truman to his fateful decision: an invasion of the Japanese islands would have been a bloodbath of such proportions that all other battles fought during that war would have paled in comparison. War is a brutish, vicious business that often presents dilemmas where the “best” choice turns out to be the least morally cataclysmic one. Many times people in power, unable to engage in the smug moralizing of those without any real responsibility, are forced to make decisions on matters that simply do not have a morally acceptable solution. I think this was the case with Harry Truman.

Yet one of my most cherished beliefs is that civilians should never be targeted as part of a military strategy, and that to do so is to sacrifice all claims to moral superiority and be placed in the company of tyrants and murderers whom history has rightly judged evil. I have always believed that one of the things that sets the U.S. apart is its unwillingness to deliberately target civilians as a matter of military policy; yet Hiroshima and Nagasaki would seem to belie that contention. True, there is no disputing that dropping the bombs saved more lives than they cost, reasoning with which I usually sympathize. But in this case it appears that it was civilians sacrificed to save soldiers; in matters of war it is more acceptable for a soldier to be killed.

So I am not misunderstood, let me say that I am not suggesting soldiers’ lives are not as valuable as civilians’. Not at all. But soldiers understand they may be killed, it is part of the job description; civilians have no such expectations. It is a tenuous distinction, but an important one.

So how many soldiers should be sacrificed for one civilian? That is a gristly calculus I will not pretend to be smart enough to solve. In the end though, what was most important to me about this article, and what allows me to support the dropping of the atomic bombs, was the brief mention of how many noncombatants were dying under Japanese rule. When viewed from that perspective, it is clear Truman’s choice saved more civilian lives than it claimed. It wasn’t a good decision, but a necessary one.

--Josh

New at Filmegeist

Wonka and Wonka

Click here for Adam Woods's take on Wonka, new and old.

The Da Vinci Code

Seems like the filming of the Da Vinci Code is having some problems. The Catholic Church and various Christian groups are upset about the way the book treats Christianity. But this is silly, isn't it? People know the difference between real life and movies, right?

But then you have this quote from Mr. Calley, the Sony executive who bought the movie rights to the book:

"In our society, most societies, we grow up with our religion given to us by our parents," he said. "We're never truly oriented into the history of it, the subtlety of it. The amazing thing about this book is it's provocative: Is it all true? Isn't it true? As a history book it's extraordinary. As an exploration of the evolution of a particular religion, it's extraordinary."

Then this stunner from Ms. Decker, an authoritative real estate agent, "The book kind of explains to the world how the Catholic Church demonized women such as Mary Magdalene, and also have killed millions of women during the Crusades."

Right.

Thank goodness it wasn't a real baby...

This is courtesy of The Wall Street Journal:

"A 13-year-old giant panda gave birth to a cub at San Diego Zoo, but a second baby died in the womb, officials said Wednesday."--Associated Press, Aug. 3

"A cancer-ravaged woman robbed of consciousness by a stroke has given birth after being kept on life support for three months to give her fetus extra time to develop."--Associated Press, Aug. 3

What Are You Doing at Work Today?

Click above, or here, to take a "Life Expectancy Test."

I felt morose while I was taking it, but my expectancy turned out to be 81. I guess because I told them I eat a lot of fruits and vegetables.

Here's to produce.

-- Adam

See Jane make an ass of herself

This is priceless. Jane Fonda will be touring Iraq in a "bus powered by vegetable oil." (Presumably, the airplane she takes to Iraq will be powered by regular oil) Jane Fonda is famous for "posing on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun that fired at American aircraft." Good call, Jane. It should go without saying that you can be against a war without being friends with the Viet Cong - or the Al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq.

Mr. Scott goes to Washington

Lindy Scott, father of Wissahickon editor Steph Scott, is running for Congress in the Ilinois 6th District - a district which is now wide open due to Henry Hyde's impending retirement. Good work Lindy...