John Holbo

Glenn Fleishman tags me with one of these silly little things. Alright, then. Five things most people don’t know about me.

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I’ll be at the MLA this year – will I see you there? – delivering a paper that is basically a major rewrite of my inaugural Valve post about the crisis in humanities publishing. (Other bloggers you know are on the same panel.) Here’s a bit from the old post: [click to continue…]

Homecoming is, for me, always an invitation to unnatural acts – specifically, reading the Wall Street Journal editorial page. (Hey. Dad’s a subscriber.) For example, this Bret Stephens piece (Dec. 12), “Honor Killing” [maybe a web link, but I’m not seeing it]:

Alexis de Tocqueville observed that in America morals count for a lot while honor counts for relatively little. Reading the lamentable report of the Iraq Study Group, it shows.

The operative word in the ISG report is “should,” which is what grammarians call a defective verb. The report easily contains more than a 100 shoulds, varying tonally from hectoring to plaintive to nitpicking …

By contrast the word “honor” appears just once: “We also honour the many Iraqis who have sacrificed on behalf of their country,” writes ISG co-chairman James Baker and Lee Hamilton, who also put in a kind word for our Coalition allies.

But honor isn’t simply a sentimental verb. It is a decisive principle of action in all foreign policy, never more so than in the honor-obsessed Middle East. It is not about good intentions, wisdom or virtue, but about appearances and perception. “Honor acts solely for the public eye,” wrote Tocqueville. In practice, it means standing by one’s friends and defying one’s enemies, whatever the price. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War Richard Nixon ordered the military resupply of Israel in its hour of need not because he was sympathetic to Jews – he wasn’t – but because he understood that the U.S. could not be seen to let a client down. Nine months later, he was accorded a ticker-tape parade through the streets of Cairo.

Then Stephens accuses the authors of the report of failing ‘the test of honor’ by conceding, with their first sentence, that “the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating.” Then it actually gets worse. (And, obviously, we could back up and point out that there are problems with reducing honor to ‘help your friends, hurt your enemies’. This confusion, I’ll wager, has more than a little to do with the man’s bizarre allergy to ‘should’, in a document that is supposed to recommend a course of action.) But let’s go back to the Tocqueville quote. It’s actually interesting to read how the quoted passage continues: [click to continue…]

Belle and I are preparing to fly home to the old country. A while back some of you asked about good comics for kids. It so happens I have a couple fine choices I am preparing to dispense on the long plane flight: Owly comics, by Andy Runton. At the author’s site you can preview lots of stuff. It’s very charming and suitable for anyone over the age of 2. No words. Just pictures of worms and birds and the occasional squirrel. So, for example, over a 10 page spread, Owly rescues Wormy from drowning in a puddle and nurses him back to health. Then the two set off to find Wormy’s parents. (That from The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer. You can preview it.) Here’s an amazon link.

Did you know?

On April 2, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany despite considerable public opposition. Just a few months after the United States entered the war, Secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo, called the public mood a “delirium”. Sauerkraut became liberty cabbage, German Shepards became Alsatians and the city of Syracuse banned pinochle, a German card game. The press published calls for mass hangings of “disloyal German-Americans” and some clergymen compared Germans to cholera germs that must be annihilated. Despite this, naturalized Germans collected relief funds for the Red Cross and served in the U.S. Army.

They banned pinochle? (Wikipedia informs me it is etymologically derived from the German Binokel.) ‘Liberty cabbage’ puts that whole ‘freedom fries’ episode in perspective. At least we aren’t getting any dumber. I wonder whether some shrewd entrepreneur marketed pinochle decks under the badass tempting slogan ‘banned in Syracuse!’

Josh Marshall links to a Michael Novak piece in the Standard – a piece that is surely the apotheosis of Green Lantern foreign policy (well, until next week); complete with vulnerability to the hideous yellow streak that is the MSM.

It begins … horribly:

Today, the purpose of war is sharply political, not military; psychological, not physical. The main purpose of war is to dominate the way the enemy imagines and thinks about the war.

Read those two sentence again.

Other bits (in which our author is pretending to speak in the voice of an Islamist terrorist/insurgent, but I think he’s just being bashful):

The weaker political will yielded to the stronger will …

Yet, as always, will followed storyline. First comes narrative, then the acts that give it flesh in history …

In such wars … whichever party maintains the stronger will, along the most durable storyline, always wins …

I really don’t know what to say. War is a continuation of punditry by other means? Have I got that right? It’s looking increasingly like sheer intellectual inconsistency on the part of the neocons and warbloggers that they have not marched on – and levitated by force of will – the New York Times building. What’s stopping them?

For background reading I suppose you could try Mailer’s Armies of the Night [amazon]. But, frankly, it isn’t silly enough. Looney Tunes Golden Collection (vols. 1-3) are 50% off. A very good deal. And you can get all of season 1 of Robot Chicken for an astonishing $8.99. I’ve never watched Robot Chicken. Is it funny?

Shopping with a 5-year old on one arm, 2-year old on the other, saw a sale VCD of “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas”, snagged it (don’t ask with what appendage). When we got home I was surprised to discover it was a minimal 1992 production, with Walter Matthau narrating. Walter Matthau as Cindy Lou Who is a hoot. Animation-wise, it’s just barely. Mostly just shots of the original Seuss illustrations with eyes that roll and horns that toot and a cut-out grinch who creeps along to a snow-crunching sound. (But done tastefully and appreciatively, as cut-out grinches go.) It comes packaged with a similarly minimal “If I Ran The Zoo” narrated by some kid who does sound as though he gets Gerald McGrew’s motivation. I sort of like this style. Camera-crawls over a kid’s book, with good voice-over. There’s a lot to love in the plain old Seuss drawings. Of course, it’s a bit hard to keep Karloff out of the back of your head. But I think my scaredy 5-year old and 2-year old might not be quite ready for the classic 1966 version – superior though it unquestionably is. Walter Matthau completists can get this strange version from Amazon. (I mean if you are that sort of person, you’ve already watched A New Leaf to death and are ready to turn over a new leaf. If they’d gotten Elaine May to be Cindy, that would have been funny.)

iTunes coughed up a thing and I think to myself: what is this? Mötley Crüe? Turns out to be Soul Asylum. Which, back in 1993, still sounded to me like, you know, they were related to the Replacements or something. Alt-rock, y’know. Then next another thing I don’t immediately recognize and I’m thinking: this sounds like Wham! But it turned out to be Aztec Camera – “Everybody is Number One”, from their Love album. Which, back in 1987 sounded to me, like, I dunno, alt-rock.

And then Belle finally went and signed us up for the iTunes store and downloaded the greatest song ever, which we’ve been missing for 6 years in Singapore. And do you know what the greatest song in the world is: that’s right, it’s Todd Rundgren, “Couldn’t I just tell you”. Greatest. Power pop. Ever. Plus it has the cool/fool rhyme. You really can’t go wrong with that.

I’m lying. In between Soul Asylum and Aztec Camera iTunes coughed up an MP3 of this Delta ad in ebonics (don’t know how that got in there), which was disorienting.

There are some just terrible videos of Rundgren singing his greatest song on YouTube. Here, for instance. But there’s an absolutely fabulous video of him singing “Hello it’s me” on some variety show. He’s got butterfly wings glued to his eyebrows as he sits at the white piano. Elton John would blush. But “Hello it’s me” just isn’t that good, frankly.

There’s a neat Nazz video as well. “Open My Eyes”. Very “The President’s Analyst”. Did you know that the bass player for the Nazz, Carson Van Osten, gave up bass-playing to be a cartoonist for Disney? You can see some of his work here, at a blog I read not infrequently.

Speaking of butterfly wings … (Oh, I’ll try to get to that tomorrow.)

In response to my complaints about Trevino, Hilzoy went and procured an actual historian to comment on the Phillipines Insurrection and – generally – on the advantages and disadvantages of such things for national life. I take the key sentence to be:

Once the indigenous resistance was stronger – more politically conscious, better armed and trained – this unspoken calculus no longer applied. Instead, the "home field advantage" came back into play. No longer could small numbers of well-armed foreigners dominate much larger numbers of "natives" on their home soil, as they had been able to do during the 19th century.

I have nothing to add, except that Lemuel Pitkin – I loved A Cool Million, too – requests that I tell you what comics to read.

I’ll start by completing my Green Lantern Geopolitics thoughts. (See also here.) It seems to me that what Matthew has forgotten to mention is that the Lantern in question is obviously Guy Gardner. We missed Guy Gardner appreciation week at Dave’s Long Box – just keep scrolling down below the Stiltman stuff – down, down – and election day ‘whose side is your superhero on?’ stuff. He has a nice essence of Guy frame. Before that he did a ‘what is Guy saying?’ caption contest. One of the entries seemed particularly Green Lantern Geopolitics relevant:

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I’ve been rereading my favorite William Empson book – see this Valve post – and noticed something new. There’s a really lively remembrance of Orwell, “Orwell at the BBC”. (Empson knew him there during the war. They alternated being Burmese desk editors even.) But this isn’t about that. Empson reports what may be the earliest case of ‘scratching‘, in the turntablistic sense. Or ‘hiccing’, as Empson renders it. This would be before ’43:

I chiefly remember two young disc jockeys who put on a very saucy turn with two gramophones and two copies of a record by Churchill; the familiar voice was made to leave out all the negatives, ending with ‘we will (hic) surrender.’

It’s not quite clear how elaborate the performance was – did they have a crossfader? why two copies of the same album? – but taking out the ‘nots’ in Churchill’s speech on a 40’s-era gramophone sounds rather scratchologically deft. Anyway, ’43 was earlier than Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, which wikipedia cites as among the earliest examples.

There are some good Orwell anecdotes in the piece. [click to continue…]

A couple days ago Matthew Yglesias took time out from thinking about tough issues to note that WW I was really, really a terrible thing. Jim Henley commented:

The fascinating thing about recent American "conservatism" is how many Republican commentators have tried to rehabilitate WWI as a noble cause. It was when Tacitus made that argument that I first really understood that he was insane. I’ve since seen it from others.

On cue, Instapundit linked to this, by Trevino (a.k.a. Tactitus):

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On my stack of yet-unread 2006 politics books – Thomas Edsall’s Building Red America [amazon]. I cannot help but think events have somewhat overtaken it, though I still plan to read it. (I took particular satisfaction in that NY Times graphic – with the blue and the babyblue and the pink and the red. Red for anywhere that got painted red. And, of course, there was no need to open that can of paint. So it sat there, lonely in the legend.) What politics books do you say will survive the season, in terms of relevance?

I have a semi-scholarly interest in this question because I’m trying – I’ve been trying – to write about the relationship between liberalism, as it gets discussed in political philosophy; and liberalism, in the Democratic party sense. Obviously it is anything but a simple relationship, and I just indicated it in the most approximate fashion, but who has discussed it well? Who has written well about the point where the rubber of liberal political theory meets the road of liberal politics (if indeed there is such a point.) One problem with political philosophy is, of course, the perennial suspicion that its abstractions make it be … well, not about anything. (I don’t really mean it. You know what I mean.) On the other hand, the books about partisan politics – typically journalistic – don’t have a long shelf-life. What books do a good job of splitting the difference in a happy way? Relevant, and they stay that way.

Our own Looking For A Fight – Is There A Republican War On Science? [amazon] is a prime example. Will it still matter in a year? Well, I’ll take this opportunity to report that we have so far sold a grand total of, like, 16 copies. And there were about 110 downloads of the free book. That’s sort of an interesting result. Not wonderful, not terrible. It’s a good sign that paper sales are more than 10% of total distribution, even with free PDF. It means people do value the paper. (More titles coming soon!) One rather curious thing that making the book has caused me to notice: on the Amazon page there are presently 14 new and used copies for sale from third party sellers, including some marked up to $26.79 (from someplace called Best Dictionaries). Amazon is selling it for $11. I’m used to sort of seeing that stuff down the page on any given Amazon page, but in this case I am reasonably certain those copies don’t actually exist. A few could be author copies or sold copies that were promptly resold. But presumably for the most part these sellers have just generated these offers in some automated fashion and marked up the price more than %100. If someone orders it, then they’ll buy a copy from Parlor and simply resell it. It’s like the old Calvin & Hobbes strip where Calvin is sitting at his lemonade stand, suspended between grim and glum. The sign says: lemonade $20. And there are little unsold cups, waiting. “I’ve just got to sell one.” An interesting business model. Of course, in a sense it’s perfectly rational. Find the idiot who doesn’t comparison shop. (Is there a person who always buys from Best Dictionaries?)

Most humorous wikivandalism ever. (via Dave Moles.)

Perhaps one shouldn’t laugh at such things. It encourages bad behavior. For example, here’s vandalism more genuinely annoying and not creative or delightful in the least. Will Baude emails to inform that somehow Crescat Sententia lost their domain to some search engine optimization outfit. Which then offered to sell it back at an extravagant mark-up. Crescat Sententia has declined their offer and moved here. From org to net. Update bookmarks accordingly, and do not favor the old address with your custom, if possible. Apparently for a while the lovely SEO people were hosting a cache of an old page in the hopes of disguising what had happened. Naughty, naughty.

UPDATE: In defense of wikipedia be it noted that the vandalism only lived for 38 minutes before being reverted. Hmmm, there’s a good idea for a story. An eccentric treasure-hunter is sent off on a months-long quest for a lost tribe in South America, on the unfortunate evidential basis of a vandalized wikipedia page he read in the 12 minutes between when it was posted and reverted by the ever-watchful editors. Of course it turns out that, quite by coincidence, everything the vandalized page said was true. The vandal himself is somehow ensnared in the plot and ends up sacrificed to a giant snake.

UPDATE 2: It’s coming to me, as in a dream. It turns out wikipedia itself is an elaborate plot concocted by the Knights Templar, together with the greatest of their hashhashim enemies, one al-Whikid (!). To ‘hide their greatest treasures in plain sight’, they conspire to create wikipedia. During the Middle Ages it was maintained by monks on scrolls. A specific pattern of reversion edits constitutes … a map! So there is an esoteric as well as an exoteric wiki. Fortunately, Nicholas Cage stumbles on the aforementioned vandalized page. It contains a jpeg of a map to a tribe. The map is part of the true map, but the vandal was just using it as likely mash-up material. So the film will be like National Treasure meets Hackers meets The Da Vinci Code (‘don’t I know you?’). There will be a scene in which the true wiki is surreptitiously handed off in a USB thumb-drive shaped like Quark‘s head.

UPDATE 3: The vandal is played by Steve Buscemi. (Because he and Cage had chemistry in Con Air.)

UPDATE 4: And Ed Harris plays an earnest wikipedia command editor, thus reprising his stern, steady role in Apollo 13. When the Knights realize their plan has failed they attempt to sabotage the entire wiki, reverted every single page to stuff about Buffy the Vampire Slayer Firefly. In the wikipedia command room all the editors (buzz cuts, thin black ties, pocket protectors) are frantically scribbling their corrections to the erroneous Buffy Firefly posts on paper. Harris: “with all due respect, sir, I believe this will be our finest edit.”

UPDATE 5: Who do you think would win in a fight between Wikipedia and Aquaman?

Damnit, Crooked Timber should have some sort of nail-biting election material up. (Journalism is the second-hand on the clock of history – basest material, never runs true. What’s a blog without posts that will be obsolete in 6 hours?) Anyway, Hugh Hewitt has a post up with the title ‘exit polls more than 6 pts biased towards Dems‘. There isn’t any explanation. The whole post reads ‘and possibly worse’. I suppose the point could be: exit polls skew Dem, but how could you know – yet – that they skew 6 pts? I take it there is a bit of a comic over-reaching for the term ‘bias’ here. If the Dems win, the election was ‘biased’!

UPDATE: Scott Kaufman has a good, Onionesque report. “Emails obtained by the Associated Press indicate that top Republican officials now believe that the margin of victory will be too high to rig the results. “A four or five percent margin, we can handle,” said one GOP official. “But eight or higher? That’s asking the implausible.”

UPDATE the 2nd: Hewitt is reaching for a silver lining and coming up with … at least the Soviet Union has collapsed. (That’s worth cheering about.) So: three cheers!