Henry

Should the US academy be trying harder to meet the needs of the intelligence services? That’s the question underlying David Glenn’s fascinating article in this week’s Chronicle. His piece analyzes the debates surrounding a new program in which CIA analysts are sent back to university to acquire specialized training in the social sciences. On the one hand, the program’s defenders point to the urgent need for a better understanding of the cultures and languages of the Middle East and Central Asia. On the other, critics argue that this could lead to CIA monitoring of what is taught in universities, to difficulties for US academic researchers abroad (who might be perceived as spooks in disguise), and to positive harm for those being studied in the foreign countries in question.
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My various thoughts on l’affaire Volokh are superannuated by now, but at least I can give a relevant reading recommendation. Terry Bisson’s short story, “The Old Rugged Cross,” was first published in Patrick Nielsen Hayden’s Starlight 3 anthology. It’s a re-imagining of Dismas, which speaks directly to punishment as spectacle and the desire to inflict as much torment as possible on the condemned. To say more would be to weaken its impact. I don’t think the story is online anywhere, or I’d link to it.

“n+1” magazine, which sent out its second issue a few days ago, is really very good indeed. It’s a nice mixture of politics and literature – a deliberate antidote in 248 pages to both the self-congratulatory coyness of McSweeneys and the ghastly sincerity of the Believer. The stand-out article in the current issue is Elif Batuman’s piece on Isaac Babel, which is shot through with small fragments of genius. It combines a finely judged assessment of Babel’s work, which makes you want to run out and read him (if, like me, you haven’t done so yet), with an exquisite and devastatingly funny deconstruction of the Babel industry in academia. I suspect that I’d get even more from it if I’d already read Babel’s stories. I especially liked this short passage on cultural identity and alienation (n.b. that Batuman’s point goes far beyond Jewish identity politics – the Irish have a more highly developed, if less historically justified, version of the same trope).

Tolstoy observed, “Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” and he was right: surely everyone on this earth, vale of tears that it is, is entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering. But in the end, I am too deeply invested in the idea that literature can render comprehensible another family’s unhappiness. For this reason, I once became impatient with a colleague I met at a conference in New York, who was insisting that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov’s “specifically Jewish alienation.”

“Indeed,” I finally said, “as a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew.”

He nodded. “So you see the problem.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t available on the WWW; you’ll have to go to your bookstore and buy yourself a copy of the magazine (or become a subscriber) if you want to read it – I’d recommend the latter if possible (it’s really a great little magazine).

After several days in limbo, we appear to be back in business. Crooked Timber now has its own dedicated server, which should mean that we don’t run into the same problem again in future. Kieran, who is our resident guru for all things technical, has rejigged the setup, and installed a plugin which should reduce server load substantially in the future. We are grateful to you all for your patience – we owe a particular debt of thanks to the CT readers who generously donated money to help us get back up. Between those donations (which have been applied exclusively to CT’s running costs) and our own resources, we are now on a pretty good footing. In retrospect, this is something which had probably been in the offing for a while. We now have quite a large readership, which we’re extremely grateful for, but which also means that we now have rather greater technical needs than we did when we began this enterprise back in 2003. Again, thank you all.

David Horowitz meets the Cultural Revolution, with Billmon presiding. Via Michael Froomkin.

I was writing a post about Eugene Volokh’s defence of the “deliberate infliction of pain, “slow throttling,” and “cruel vengeance” when I saw that Chris had beaten me to the punch. I find the argument that the justice system should be used as a means to inflict cruelty in order to satisfy victims’ – and society’s – desire for vengeance rather appalling. It’s a return to the idea that the animating ideal of justice should be vengeance and public display rather than the correction and dissuasion of wrongdoing. Which is not to say that the modern idea of justice doesn’t have its own, more abstract cruelties, as Michel Foucault and Michael Ignatieff have pointed out – but the claim that the justice system sometimes needs to inflict pain for the purpose of inflicting pain is something which we should have gotten rid of a couple of centuries ago. At least Eugene is being honest here. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suspect that most of the nonsensical defences of torture that we see, invoking ticking bombs and the like, are so many insincere public justifications of an underlying desire to torture the terrorists not to get information, but because they’re terrorists (and if a few innocents get caught up in the system, you can’t make an omelette &c &c). But that Eugene’s defence is sincere doesn’t mean that it’s not repugnant to a set of minimal liberal commitments that are shared by many leftists, classical liberals, Burkean conservatives and others.

I’m about to jump on a plane to Europe, after jumping off a plane from Hawaii yesterday, but couldn’t resist blogging this aside from a recent Scott McLemee column.

bq. At one point, they [‘Chairman Bob’ Avakian and his philosopher sidekick] note that the slogan “Serve the People,” made famous by the little red book, could be used — with very different intentions, of course — at a McDonald’s training institute. This is, on reflection, something like Hegel’s critique of the formalism of Kant’s ethics. Only, you know, different.

Chairman Bob is stealing a riff here from Damon Knight’s famous short story “To Serve Man,” which was made into an even more famous Twilight Zone episode. I imagine that Chairman Bob’s version is more laboured and less funny than the original: “Don’t get on the ship. The book, To Serve Man, IT’S A COOKBOOK!” has to rank as one of the best closing lines of all time.

Via Armed Liberal, I see that George W. Bush appears to be on the verge of taking action to signal emphatically to Sinn Fein that they are _personae non gratae_, unless they get rid of the hard men in the IRA. I’d noted in a previous post that there was a political controversy over whether Sinn Fein would be specifically singled out for exclusion from the St. Patrick’s Day party in the White House, or whether instead all political parties would be disinvited from the party, so as to make the snub less pointed. Now, according to the _Times_ it appears that no political party is going to get an invitation to the reception – but that the relatives of a recent victim of the IRA will be invited to the White House instead. If the _Times_ is right on this (the story seems to have some legs, but rightwing British papers are frequently unreliable sources on Northern Ireland politics), the Bush administration is sending about as clear and unambiguous a signal as one could possibly hope for. Interestingly, the signals from the North seem to suggest that Sinn Fein and the IRA recognize that they’re in real political trouble – not only because of the frost in their relations with the Irish, British and US governments, but also, more importantly, because of protests from natural constituency in the Catholic working class communities in Northern Ireland (where the murder in question has been highly controversial). For the first time in my memory, there’s a serious internal challenge to the IRA’s ability to control its own community, and to the frequently brutal actions of its hard men. Getting rid of them would be a considerable step forward for democratic politics in the North.

I was pretty sure that I was on the right side of the betting odds when I predicted a few days ago that the FEC was going to have to start thinking about how blogs fit into the current regulatory system, but I didn’t expect to be proved right this quickly. Stephen Bainbridge has more.

there’s something a little Borgesian about this mathematical anecdote from ‘Mind of Winter’ (found via Chad Orzel).

bq. … Zygmund posed Calderón a question and the puzzled Calderón replied that the answer was contained in Zygmund’s own book Trigonometric Series. Zygmund disagreed: what transpired was that Calderón only ever read the statements of the results, preferring to give his own reasoning and proofs… . One of these proofs gave a highly original answer to Zygmund’s question. This originality was to be the hallmark of Calderón’s work in the years to follow.

Over at _Inside Higher Ed_, Scott McLemee has some interesting reflections on Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, a late nineteenth century writer who got a lot of attention from literary scholars, including Henry Louis Gates, because she was identified as African-American, but now turns out to have been white. While there are some academic politics here that are worth exploring, Scott focuses on the more interesting aesthetic question: how it is that an author of very considerable mediocrity may become interesting because of her racial background. When Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins was black, the relentless whiteness of her fictional characters was significant and important, but when she became white again, it turns out to be hundrum and uninformative, a rather banal product of the racial prejudices of its time.[1] Scott has some fun with the earnest efforts of literary theorists to read racial complexities into a text which simply doesn’t support them, contrasting Kelley-Hawkins with another, far more interesting-sounding African-American writer from the same period who does actually engage with the ironies and paradoxes of fluid racial identity. But even though the alchemy of race may not be able to produce gold from dross, the body of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins scholarship may still have some worth. We can consider it as an imaginative exercise, along the lines of the literary critics of Borges’ Tlön, who

bq. often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works – the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say – attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres…

Re-imagining a dull white religious novelist of the late nineteenth century as a conflicted black woman is less ambitious, certainly, but still not entirely without merit.

fn1. Which, as Scott points out in his conclusion, are themselves worth studying, but surely not the same thing.

While doing some research a couple of weeks ago for a course I’m teaching, I came across this interesting Brookings Institution book chapter of how US election law affects political activities on the Internet. Reading between the lines, it appears to me that the Federal Election Commission has been strenuously trying to avoid getting sucked into the quagmire of regulating political conduct on the Internet – but that it is, sooner or later, going to have to start engaging in rulemaking. Trevor Potter and Kirk L. Jowers, the authors of the chapter don’t really discuss how, or whether, election law should apply to blogs. There are some fascinating questions here for future regulation and lawmaking. Should there be disclosure requirements for blogs (like the two blogs authored by paid advisers to the Thune senatorial campaign in South Dakota) that are intimately linked to a political campaign? Should blogging that is expressly aimed at supporting the election of a particular candidate be treated as a political contribution, or as volunteer activity? Should the kinds of restriction that apply to coordination between 527s and political campaigns be extended to prominent political blogs?

I note that I’m not an expert in electoral law. Still, I feel fairly confident in making two predictions. First: that these activities _will_ be regulated. As political blogs become a more established part of the political landscape, they will increasingly be treated as another means of political expression, advocacy and fundraising – and the current regulatory regime will, one way or another, be extended to cover them. The only question is how the balance between free political speech and the need to regulate organized political activities is struck. Second, that whatever regulations are promulgated will prove awkward and uncomfortable for bloggers on both sides of the ideological spectrum. Bloggers have gotten used to operating in a relatively freewheeling environment – as they get absorbed into the existing political system, this is going to change.

Update: Luis Villa points in comments to this very interesting take on how the FEC _should_ evolve from Howard Dean’s former election coordinator, Zephyr Teachout.

Two slightly worrying posts that suggest to me that the linked economy of the blogosphere might be more fragile than we would like. First, Brad DeLong gives us an economist’s take on Technorati’s recent difficulties.
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As Dan Drezner and I noted in our Foreign Policy article, the blogosphere is surprisingly bad at providing information on politics outside the US. Ethan Zuckerman’s research provides evidence that the blogosphere’s interests track those of traditional media, and that in some ways it does a worse job than traditional media in covering world politics. Some argue that right wing blogs do a better job than left wing ones in taking account of international politics – I doubt that it’s true. With a few prominent exceptions (such as Greg Djerejian’s Belgravia Dispatch), right wing blogs, like most of their left wing equivalents, tend to focus almost exclusively on prominent stories that support their domestic political preferences.

Which is a long-winded way of saying that blogs like the newly created UN Dispatch can fill an unmet need, giving us a take on the UN that isn’t limited to cheap gotchas about corruption and sex scandals. It’s being run by Peter Daou, whose Daou report has just moved to Salon, and it looks to be a very interesting and useful resource. _UN Dispatch_ is run out of Ted Turner’s UN Foundation, so it can be expected to take a broadly pro-UN line – but on first glance, it appears to be rather stronger on actual factual information about the strengths and weaknesses of the UN than any of the other blogs opining on UN-related issues. One that I’ll be reading.