Posted Saturday, April 19
Lunch lady tardblog blues

So you know how it goes. It's late. Wife and kid are out of town (honey, come home soon.) You've already read the Volokh Conspiracy from cover to cover. (Doesn't it sound like it should be a Robert Ludlum novel? And shouldn't someone write a simple program for generating Ludlum titles?)

What now? You've had a beer, maybe even two. Oh, sure. Under the circumstances you could break down like Alexander: no new worlds to conquer. But you're too much of a man for that. You start ... entering unusual Boolean combinations into google. And - hocuscadabra, abracapocus (as a wise man once said) - you link and click and link and type and click and find yourself here. But this entry broke my heart: lunch lady gets the smack down.

She looks at the lunch lady and, in between crying fits, tells her that her mom spent her last ten dollars on scratch tickets, and none of them were winners.

Sometimes you feel that reality is just a bull in the china shop of life.
Posted Friday, April 18
Agent Smith and Elrond

A few days ago Lileks bleated:

Had a small well-duh moment today while reading Entertainment Weekly; the cover story concerned the next Matrix movie, and had a nice picture of Agent Smith ... The interview with Agent Smith noted that he had roles in the two big geek movies of our times - the Matrix and LOTR. Of course! He was the head elf, the father of Liv Tyler. Never made the connection, but I never really liked the guy. Now I know why. Subconsciously I heard him say, through clenched teeth: Well Mr. Aragon, you will not marry... my daughter. The time ... of men ... is over.

When I first heard Hugo Weaving was going to be Elrond, months before Fellowship was released, I was with a fellow LOTR/Matrix fanatic. We turned to each other and said in unison: 'the council thinks I am wasting my timewithyou, Mr. ...Baggins. But I believe you will do the right thing.' Well, OK. I exaggerate. That's what I said. My friend said: 'One of these hobbits has a future, Mr. Baggins. The other ... does not.'

I thought Weaving was going to be a great Elrond. Not so much because of The Matrix but because I had seen him in The Interview, a 1998 Australian thriller. Sort of The Usual Suspects meets Glengarry Glen Ross. Weaving plays a murder suspect (maybe he's guilty? maybe he's just pitiful and weird?) who gets grilled by the police. For two hours. That's the movie. It's tremendous. And Weaving looked ... vaguely fey, like an angry, dangerous elf at bay.
See what I mean?

Of course, nothing to compare with his fairy-tale role in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. So I had confidence the brick-like Agent Smith - who always fights with his chest square to his opponent: a nice trademark style, but more dwarf than elf - would manage to morph himself into something suitable.

There is a crucial juncture in The Interview when Weaving's face just ... transforms. Physiognomic quicksilver running. Day and night. Good and evil. It's practically a special effect. There aren't many actors who could do it one tenth as well. Think Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects or Donald Sutherland in The Eye of the Needle. (Haven't seen it? Rent it. Rent it for the scene in which the man eats soup with an air of looming menace.) It's a weird talent: to be able to traverse so much psychological distance in a single bound and be believable - from hapless sadsack or friendly goof to menacing villain or savage beast. It creates a sense of depth, not in the sense of complexity, but in the trap-door, rollercoaster sense that, after seeing that, the ground might drop away beneath your feet at any moment. To watch someone who can do this trick before your eyes is breathtakingly exciting.

Weaving's capacity to thrill in this way is really the thing that makes the Matrix great. (Yes, yes, there are lots of great things about it But Weaving is the actor who contributes most.)

Keanu Reeves is good, but only because his one note - looking around at everyone and everything like a slightly stunned bird of prey that just cracked into a window it didn't see - is the note he is supposed to hit over and over. (Is it the case that all great action stars - who are never great actors - are great because they manage to luck into perfect vehicles for their sheer belovedness by the camera, plus the one other thing they can do? Harrison Ford is always frantic, so he was Indiana Jones and good in, say, Frantic. Schwarzenegger is the terminator, so he was good in The Terminator.)

As I was saying: Agent Smith basically provides the range in The Matrix, the highs and lows. He's the affectless robot who occasionally erupts and, always - fascinatingly - threatens to erupt. Oddly, that's enough.

And yet - I've been working round to this point - I don't really think Weaving managed to make a memorable Elrond. Maybe a few extra years added just a touch too much fleshy solidity to the face (I myself look less like an elf than I did five years ago.) But I think mostly it wasn't Weaving's fault. The only serious flaw in Fellowship was that Jackson couldn't figure out what to do with the council scene. And maybe the problem was just insoluble. (Similar problem with the latest Star Wars installments. Is anything more boring than a room full of jawboning Jedi? To watch is to be awed as first-rate actors are afflicted with the elementary question: what do I do with my arms and legs?)

In a way the problem is built into the source material (Tolkien's, anyway; not sure whether Lucas has an excuse.) In an essay entitled "Beowulf: the Monster and the Critics", Tolkien remarks that the poem is 'more like masonry than music' and therefore is frequently misunderstood. It is part of the structure of Beowulf - a feature not a bug - to 'lack steady advance'.

The poem was not meant to advance, steadily or unsteadily. It is essentially a balance, an opposition of ends and beginnings. In its simplest terms it is a contrasted description of two moments in a great life, rising and setting; an elaboration of the ancient and intensely moving contrast between youth and age, first achievement and final death.

I don't know whether this is true of Beowulf but it is true of The Lord of the Rings. Not that the narrative doesn't advance. It does (although Tolkien's progress is surprisingly stately, if you ever bother to clock him.) But what raises Tolkien above the ranks of his mediocre imitators is his architectonic sense and solemnity. Elrond isn't a potent figure because of anything he does but because of what he is, where he stands, in the long arc of the history of Middle Earth. The council scene, in the book, isn't interesting because of any psychological event or negotation that transpires there. It's a solemn tableau.

Of course, Peter Jackson has - of necessity - taken the architectonic masonry of LOTR and made it flow as music of pure action. (There is a reason these things are called 'movies'.) But the council scene stumped him. There wasn't anything remotely action-worthy here. And the dialogue limped by design. (It's wooden, you say? That's because it's supposed to seem like an ancient carving in wood.)

So Hugo Weaving, the guy with the power to bring affectless aliens to sudden, flashing life, did not turn out to be the guy for the job. Jackson needed the guy with the power to take living characters and transform them into frozen statuary that is still entrancing to look at. I'm not sure who could have done it.

It would be funny to do a parady of the council scene as (oh, say) David Mamet might have written it.

Borimir (whining): "We need the good ring, the Glengarry ring, the ring of power."

Elrond (telling it like it is): "First prize is: you save Middle Earth. Second prize is: this set of elven blades. Third prize is: you're a Nazgul."

Hugo Weaving would have been a good Elrond for a scene like that.
Posted Thursday, April 17
All will be compelled to bow down before me voluntarily

Jacob Levy's magnum blogus on political theory and political philosophy is good. Let me select a somewhat loose thread and pull:

Nozick had a funny but thoughtful recurring riff about "coercive" and "non-coercive" argumentation, the difference between making arguments that seem, if they succeed, to require assent in the listener and making those that are suggestive or inviting or provoking rather than compelling. We ordinarily mean it as a compliment about an argument if we describe it as a "compelling" one. Nozick asked us to think about that a bit more, most memorably with his image of the perfect philosophers' argument, on the "coercive" model, being the one that was so definitively correct that it would set up sympathetic vibrations in the listener's brain and physically force agreement.

This Nozick riff is indeed recurring and funny. I've always found it especially funny, however, that the man was scooped by Steve Martin (yes, that Steve Martin) in "The Boring Leading the Bored", from Cruel Shoes:

"Well, I never!" said Mrs. Watkins. The meeting of the College Council on Metaphysics then applauded her and stood up cheering. Of course, some of the old-school existentialists humbugged it, but nevertheless, the response was overwhelmingly positive. Then Mrs. Jenkins shouted over the crowd, "That woman never ceases to amaze me." The logicians and semanticists gloated and looked anxiously over to the metaphysicians to see their reaction to the carefully planted "never ceases" insertion. Mrs. Jenkins obviously had been working for the logicians to arouse insurrection among the three or four Zeno partisans. But suddently Dr. Walker, who had been a recluse professor for almost twenty years, stood up. With the crowd instantly silenced by his commanding and unexpected rising, he uttered something so incredibly unutterable, so impossible, so unsolvable, that this mass of philosophy started heaving right and left and dying on the spot, blood bursting from their ears in an astounding death agony.

Well, OK. It's not quite the same point. But it is related. There is an axis of freedom and an axis of compulsion, at whose (0, 0) Cartesian origin point resides the perfect philosophical argument. Plato knew it. Kant knew it. And Dostoyevsky's Underground Man knew it when he dreamt a dream of the whole world 'compelled to bow down before me voluntarily'.

And Wittgenstein knew it when he delivered his notorious "Lecture on Ethics", in which the following notorious remark appears: "It seems to me obvious that nothing we could ever thing or say should be the thing. . . I can only describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man could write a book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy all the other books in the world."

Ethical theorists divide, most fundamentally, between those who regard this remark by Wittgenstein as an infantile touch of decrepit-romantic verbal showiness and those (like me) who say the man spoke only the truth, nothing more or less.

Some think the perfect philosophy would make you a perfectly free utter slave. Others think it would just blow up your head. The former are rationalists, the latter romantics.

Steve Martin majored in philosophy and studied Wittgenstein. This isn't just a coincidence.
Posted Thursday, April 17
Bumming Lionel Trilling nostalgia monkey

So I submitted this essay to Partisan Review about a month ago. I guess that settles that.

Ah, well. Some other journal will get to be the lucky one. Still, I'm sort of bummed, and not just for egotistical reasons. End of an era. I know, I know. Edith Kurzweil wasn't cutting the mustard. (We've all said that to ourselves at some point or other, if only after a few drinks.) I'm a big Lionel Trilling nostalgia monkey, you see.

Those were. The. Days. Now I'm never going to have published in Partisan Review. Thread to the past snaps. Crap.
Posted Wednesday, April 16
Do the brave deserve the fair? Discuss.

Mark Kleiman posts on what he takes to be a somewhat peculiar/metaphorical usage of 'tyranny' by Pascal.

Tyranny consists in the desire of universal power beyond its scope. There are different assemblies of the strong, the fair, the sensible, the pious, in which each one rules at home, not elsewhere.

And sometimes they meet, and the strong and the fair foolishly fight as to who shall be master, for their mastery is of different kinds. They do not understand one another, and their fault is the desire to rule everywhere. Nothing can effect this, not even might, which is of no use in the kingdom of the wise, and is only mistress of external actions.

So these expressions are false and tyrannical: "I am fair, therefore I must be feared. I am strong, therefore I must be loved." Tyranny is the wish to have in one way what can only be had in another. We render different duties to different merits; the duty of love to the pleasant; the duty of fear to the strong; duty of belief to the learned. We must render these duties; it is unjust to refuse them, and unjust to ask others.

And so it is false and tyrannical to say, "He is not strong, therefore I will not esteem him; he is not able, therefore I will not fear him."

Kieran Healy points out this usage squares with the familiar likes of 'the tyranny of the market'. Jacob Levy paraphrases Walzer on tyranny to similar effect: the tyrant is the ruler who seeks to use the powers of rulership in order to gain goods that are properly distributed according to something other than power, i.e. love, divine grace, honors, and the property of others.

An alternative explanation is that Pascal was more sensitive to Greek etymology than we tend to be today. In ancient Greek tyrannoi were not tyrants, in our modern sense, but usurpers. You are a tyrant if you seize power illegitimately, i.e. by means of a military coup. (How else?) And then, just possibly, you go on to rule well and wisely, with a light, liberal touch. The meaning of the term concerns only one's rout to power, not one's manner of wielding it. (Of course, given that those who stage military coups tend to be of a certain temperament, it is no mystery why the meaning of the term has shifted as it has: a downward arc, very like that of your average military dictatorship.)

All this fits with what Pascal says. He is primarily concerned with a sort of unconstitutional usurpation - to have in one way what can only be had in another. And the fact that, originally, 'tyrant' was only mildly pejorative - almost a flat, descriptive term like 'king' or 'president' - suggests Pascal may not have quite intended his term to have the alarming impact on us that it certainly does have. We misread him as saying: it's an awful, awful thing if I am loved because I am strong, or feared because I am fair. I think he is strictly saying: this is a technically illegimate arrangement.

Finally, 'the tyranny of the market' fits equally with the ancient sense of tyranny as with the modern. Folks who get exercised about globalization are worried both that the market is no legitimate ruler and that it rules with an iron fist. And the Walzer paraphrase does much the same work. So we have, as it were, a natural rediscovery of the original, Greek sense of the term.
Posted Tuesday, April 15
The Road to Damascus?

The Syrian foreign minister, Farouk Al-Sharaa, in his sole news conference since the war began, expressed bewilderment this weekend over what, exactly, Washington wanted from its barrage of threats against his country.

I'm with you there, Farouk.

The slope didn't look all that slippery.

Beware of hawks, wearing greased skis?
Posted Monday, April 14
My So-Called Form of Life

From Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (§293):

Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle. - Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing. - But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language? - If so if would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty. - No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.

And now the tale can be told.

Tonight I feel like a man divided through by the beetle in him. Miss you, honey. Kiss the kid and tell her I love her.
Posted Sunday, April 13
I Sing of Armchairs and the Man

Jeff Jarvis notes that Matthew Parris has written a distinctly weird column. Let me add a bit of background: he wrote a weird one a couple months ago. And I quote:

They say the Devil has all the best tunes and were I a hawk on Iraq I might complain that the doves are enjoying a similar advantage. Our doveish tunes are on every lip. Our case slips easily from the tongue. The hawks’ argument is tricky to articulate and their motives easy to decry. Their frustrated attempts at explanation lead them into tangles that approach black comedy.

A high (or low) point in this farce arrived for me earlier this week while shaving. I was listening to the Foreign Secretary being interviewed on the Today programme. He suggested that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had been found. A surprised interviewer protested that this was surely not the case. Aha! spluttered the Foreign Secretary, and was that not precisely the point? “The Iraqis have been found to be hiding them.”

Rumsfeld’s Fork: Saddam must show what he has or be indicted for hiding it.

The logic is cracked, of course, unless the undeclared major premise (that the weapons are there) is made explicit.

Occam’s Razor: do not multiply reportage of auto-depilatory acts beyond necessity.

More substantively: it is silly to accuse Blair and Straw of enthymemic pussyfooting. Right or wrong, their belief in the existence of Iraqi WMD has been explicit; it has not been covertly shuffled about like. . . well, like Iraqi WMD.

And is silly of Parris to focus on logic – of all things – when he himself promptly admits the premise and (so far as I can tell) admits Blair and Straw have maintained it (otherwise how does Parris know they, like he, accept it?)

What if the undeclared major premise is true? What if the weaponry is there, just as Washington and London believed all along?

I happen to think it might be.

This one-sentence paragraph is offered with all the breathless flourish of a rabbit pulled out of a hat. Astound your friends! Incant the mystic words: ‘I think Saddam Hussein might have WMD.’ (If that works: get yourself some less dumb friends.) In fact, Parris has simply gotten around to mentioning that he doesn’t believe his own editorial's initial premise: dovish arguments seem straightforward, hawkish one’s torturous.

Having executed this about-face (let’s hope the man does use a safety razor, at least while the radio is on) Parris proceeds on the assumption that dovish arguments appear torturous, hawkish ones straightforward. He warns against the danger – this is quite a good line, I must admit – of doves appearing “like the admiral who gave 12 reasons for not firing a salute, the twelfth of which was that he had no powder.” His catalogue of collapsible reasons is good as well:

1) Don’t kid yourself that Saddam might really have nothing to hide. Of course [!] he does. He’s a mass-murderer and an international gangster: a bad man running a wicked Goverment; the British Prime Minister and the US President are good men running good Governments.

2) Don’t hide behind the UN. The organisation may in the end be browbeaten into “authorising” an attack. If it really is your judgment that an attack would be morally wrong or practically hazardous, how could UN endorsement make it wise?

3) Don’t count on France, Germany or Russia to maintain their opposition to war. They may just be holding out for improved offers.

4) Don’t attach yourself to predictions about the military outcome. If the Pentagon thinks an invasion could easily succeed, the Pentagon may be right.

5) Don’t become an instant pundit on internal Iraqi politics, and how Shias, Kurds and Sunnis will be at each other’s throats when Saddam falls. You do not know that.

6) Don’t assume that moderate Arab opinion will be outraged. Moderate Arab opinion likes winners. America may be the winner.

7) Don’t get tangled up in conspiracy theories about oil. It is insulting to many principled and intelligent people in the British and US administrations to say that this can be understood as an oil-grabbing plot. Besides, you drive a car, don’t you? Is the security of our oil supplies not a consideration in foreign policy?

Don’t, in summary, dress up moral doubt in the garb of wordlywise punditry.

But where is the moral sticking point behind all these sham-pragmatic fall-backs, according to Parris?

I am not afraid that this war will fail. I am afraid that it will succeed.

I am afraid that it will prove to be the first in an indefinite series of American interventions. I am afraid that it is the beginning of a new empire: an empire that I am afraid Britain may have little choice but to join.

Parris is the admiral whose objection to firing a salute is that he may be asked to fire another salute.

But that, of all things, can’t be the final objection to saluting.

But that’s the end of that editorial. Let’s move up to yesterday’s.

Today there is only one hegemon, the United States of America; but there is no less a need than existed during the Cold War for a wary defensiveness towards the appetite, the pretensions and the dreams of a great and unchallenged power. If the US eagle is to be contained, collective action is needed by the smaller mammals.

An underspecified ecological scenario. Eagles aren’t mammals, so where are the bigger mammals in all this. Oh, never mind. On we go:

Not all will sign up: some will throw in their lot with the great power and hope for protection and, whenever the eagle dines, for scraps from the feast. But those who choose to stay outside the American cage will need to unite, however loosely, for their own protection. They will have to keep their wits about them.

OK, there’s this evil … um, eagle (yeah). And he’s, um … catching all the little furry forest creatures and keeping them in a … a cage (yeah!) And everyone knows he’s going to eat them. So a few of their friends - pretty much the cutest, scrappiest bunnies and squirrels and hedgehogs in the whole forest - band together (this part writes itself, where they keep their wits about them, contending not only with the eagle but also his quisling bunny and squirrel and hedgehog minions); and they free their furry friends. And that will make a fine Disney movie, but I thought we were talking about international relations here.

Right. So it’s cage or be caged, my furry little oh-so non-egg-laying friends. Exactly why would that be?

Yesterday the leaders of Russia, Germany and France met in St Petersburg to talk about the future. They carried with them worries about America shared by many other nations, large and small: Canada, China, New Zealand, Sweden, India, South Africa ... I could make a list that included most of the rest of the world. That meeting, and others to come, could mark the beginnings of some sense of commonality between those civilised nations that have not chosen to fly with the great eagle, and some sense of the need for collective action in clipping its wings. To call this “The US versus the Rest of the World” oversimplifies, but conveys the spirit. To put it more modestly, those nations that do not choose to take Washington’s whip are going to need to coordinate their positions and keep in touch. The balance of power needs rebalancing. For want of a better term, I shall call the grouping of which Russia, Germany and France now form a putative core, the Rest of the World.

Excuuuuse me. I asked a question. It’s cage or be caged. But why? I am willing to grant that a scowling, wing-clipped eagle in a cage is a fine way to end a Disney movie. (But if the bad guy is going to whip the little bunnies in their cages, our G-rating is out the window.) And, anyway: what does that have to do with international relations?

There is a strong chance that by the end of this summer Iraq will be subdued, and the armchair warriors on both sides of the Atlantic will be able to claim success for their strategy. As I have argued for three months now, success is, on balance, the likelihood; and a more frightening prospect than failure. As America grows more confident of its muscle and command, it will be clashing again and again, not just with old enemies but with former friends — over trade, the environment, “pre-emptive” defence, regime change, international law, extradition ... the list is speculative, but let us speculate.

And he does. But no. Let us not speculate.

Let us, instead, give up. We have to lose in Iraq because it would ... damage the environment if we won? I’m tired. I don’t know why Parris thinks these things and, since he won’t tell me, I am reduced to speculations … along other lines. Why this obsessive – almost wishful – determination to make out the United States as a great heavy bully itching to squash friend as well as foe, for no apparent reason?

A paragraph from a recent,Guardian review of Parris’ autobiography:

A mere six pages into his autobiography, Matthew Parris, sketchwriter extraordinaire, stakes his claim to being one of the weirdest men I have ever read about. 'From the earliest age, I have enjoyed being sat on,' he writes. 'I would try to worm my way under the cushions of a sofa, wait for someone to sit down, and savour the sensation of being pinned to the under-springs and almost crushed beneath the weight of the adult above.'

Subdued by armchair warriors indeed.