And the Beat Goes On

Patrick McHenry (R-NC) on the bicycle:



OMG, $1 millllllllion dollars to cyclists. And lord knows there's nothing so injudicious as that in the ideal GOP budget. Not that McHenry's taking a principled stand against earmarks that benefit only his own congressional district or anything shady like that.

HT.

Lolita, the Great American Novel?

I hate that phrase: Great American Novel. It's no different than any other attempt to apply abosolute superlatives to art of any sort, and as such it's an intrinsically silly exercise. That's not to say it isn't fun, though.

So who are the usual suspects, generally? Gatsby, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn? Maybe we should throw Roth's Great American Novel out of respect for his hubris?

I submit, and I'm sure a Google search would reveal that I'm not the first, that it's eminent emigre Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov's brilliant novel, his third composed in the English Language, Lolita.

I haven't read the book in four or five years, have not in any way been prompted to consider it as a candidate, but damn if it didn't just pop into my head, as I contemplate my own incipient project, that the answer is obvious.

What does Lolita have that justifies the brazen compliment / epithet? Let's consider, shall we?:

We'll begin, out of respect for the author, by noting that it is a celebration of the language, a travelogue if you will of what Nabokov characterized, in precisely this connection, as his "love affair with the English language." That's a healthy start, but of course every author cited above would have confessed to a love of the language, so that's not enough.

What else? Well, the book, textually, contextually, and philosophically seriously games this nation's paradoxical obsession with the prurient, its persistent inner conflict between its baser urges and its puritanical origins, its embarrassed celebration (ongoing) of sex and violence and its latent guilt over its pleasure in same. These factors take it somewhere Gatsby never aspired to reach, somewhere Melville wouldn't have dared to go. Both of those books principally concerned themselves with American striving. And of course striving is a critical ingredient in American-ness, to be sure, but it is only one ingredient, and there are many.

Next (and I recognize this point is debatable, but I'm not a scholar and don't have to deal with peer review), Lolita, better than any of the other novels named, explores quietly the nature of the sort of immigration that forged this nation. Not the refugee aspect so much -- although Nabokov was that, in at least some sense -- but the aspirational sense of it -- give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses -- coming to this nation not to escape appalling oppression or genocide, but merely for capital-O Opportunity, an open-endedness that is peculiarly our heritage, if somewhat more in word, in mythos, than in fact.

Then of course there's the veneration of youth to the point of pathology. Everyone loves their children -- there's nothing peculiar about that. But the celebration of youth, the veneration of it, the singular terror at the thought of aging and the ludicrous lengths we go to forestall and deny it, these things are American, and long before this country succumbed utterly to youth's thrall Nabokov wrote about with brilliant clarity. The book, notwithstanding its censors' protests to the contrary, was no defense or rationalization of pedophilia of any sort -- rather, it was a metaphor for a deep unsettledness most of us share with the thought of aging. And the cycle that reflects is self-perpetuating -- we are terrified of aging because we are all too familiar with our own discomfiture at people aging around us. Reification, to leverage a scholarly sort of term.

Finally, at least among encompassing aspects of the work, there is the on-the-road aspect. No country so celebrates its spaciousness as this country does, and of course in the past hundred years this has manifested in a perverse obsession with the automobile. In this regard as well, Nabokov's sense of this place was ahead of its time. Of course, the road novel aspects of Lolita (and couldn't one argue that his was the first true road novel?) reflects more than mere transience, itself a hallowed American tradition. It reflects precisely the aspirational facet so critical to this culture's sense of itself, the idea of escape and reinvention, which I won't dwell on since it's the subject of too much thought already -- it's become a truism of sorts, and I won't pursue it here.

Then there are more fragmentary aspects of the work that further qualify it for the ridiculous title: the celebrity culture emblematized by Quilty; pop culture refracted through the prism of Dolores, a teeny-bopper entirely in the sway of commercial pop impulses, submerged in the tropes of pop culture that now bombard our children with frightening force and persistence; the preternatural obsession with the One Who Got Away, and so on.

So there -- the case is made and I've persuaded myself. If any novel composed in the English language deserves the title Great American Novel, it is Lolita, by V.V. Nabokov, Russian emigre extraordinaire (by way, of course, of France), who saw us ever so much more astutely than we see ourselves.

Leaders of the New School

There has been much said about Jean Rohe's commencement speech at the New School, which preceded John McCain's by-all-accounts canned stump speech, the same he delivered at Falwell's Liberty University and Columbia University this graduation season.

Ms. Rohe was born in 1984, when I was dressing in layered rugby shirts and jean jackets with the collars high, which makes her 22 now. Rather than relying on the brief media accounts, I strongly urge anyone who is interested to read Rohe's post-mortem comments and the full text of her talk at The Huffington Post. And when you're done, scroll down a bit to read the petty, inarticulate comments of Mark Salter, McCain's pit bull (they begin: "I am employed by Senator McCain . . .").

Ask yourself whether Salter would be an improvement over Karl Rove. Armand thinks not.

(Without getting into the partisan politics of it all, I think it's an insult when any politician delivers a transparent campaign speech at a commencement. If you can't drop your own ambitions for a little while and speak from the heart (and not from the focus group) to a new group of graduates, go find the nearest American Legion hall and leave commencement duties to someone with something interesting to say and the nerve to say it.)

UPDATE: Majikthise has more.

Your Tax Dollars at Work -- The White House Propaganda Machine

First, I just want to say this is absolutely positively my last overtly political post until I come up with something creative to write. Lest I set a bad habit, I need to impose some discipline.

In general, the story of the White House paying off supposedly independent commentators to shill for White House pet projects is getting sort of old. Frank Rich, however, points to why the story is still important, still very much alive, and how White House Press Gaggle Member and would-be gay prostitute "Jeff Gannon," about whom I've written before, is tied to the Armstrong Williams ($240K to shill for NCLB) and the others.

The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news packages and the Armstrong Williams contract was siphoned through the same huge public relations firm, Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the funds through subcontractors. A new report by Congressional Democrats finds that Ketchum has received $97 million of the administration's total $250 million PR kitty, of which the Williams and Ryan-Garcia scams would account for only a fraction. We have yet to learn precisely where the rest of it ended up.

I remind everyone that, in broad strokes, it is illegal to use federal funds to generate propaganda supporting government policies. And this administration has been reprimanded time and again for running afoul of the spirit, if not the leter, of the law (it has done both).

Remember that your tax dollars have been used to pay for one-sided commentary in support of the policies of a president who claims his win, by just a few percentage points, constitutes a true mandate. What if he hadn't had the federal treasury at his fingertips and had to find real newspeople to speak in favor of his most misguided policies? Think that might have erased his margin of victory? I certainly wonder.

And of course, the more incendiary question: which closeted White House staffer set up "Gannon," of all people, to be the Press Gaggle toady?

UPDATE: A propos my last question, 2PoliticalJunkies chimes in with "What Did The Hooker Know And When Did He Know It?," referencing DailyKos's discussion of evidence suggesting "Gannon" knew about, and leaked, "Shock and Awe" hours before it began. (I know, I know, but it's just an 'update.' I'm a lawyer. It's a loophole the size of a Ford Expedition.)

Bob Novak and the Get Out of Jail Free Card?

There continues to be an awful lot of discussion of why, if the Times Judith Miller, who never wrote about Valerie Plame's identity, and Time's Matthew Cooper, who didn't break the story, both face 18 months in prison, Bob Novak, who broke the whole story has never been reported even to have appeared within a mile of the Plame leak grand jury.

The PG's Tony Norman expresses some of the confusion many of us feel, and expresses well the exasperation of most everyone who has followed this story, especially those of us with serious First Amendment concerns about the pending imprisonment of Miller and Cooper to begin with.

Congressional investigations were threatened and a grand jury convened. In the perverse logic of the nation's capital, subpoenas were sent to reporters who merely sat on the information Novak published. While Miller and Cooper face serious jail time for upholding the principle of source confidentiality, Novak continues perfecting his million-dollar scowl on "Crossfire."

It's worth emphasizing that Novak may well have been called to testify, may have appeared, and may have "sung like a canary," in the words of Slate "Explainer" Daniel Engber. As Engber does a good job explaining, grand juries historically have been confidential, and their secrets are often better protected than other political secrets. This is important, and there's nothing wrong with it.

But as far as I'm concerned, where Miller and Cooper go so should go Novak, unless he has, indeed, disclosed the name of the administration official who leaked the story, in which case perhaps Novak deserves a deal provided the official is removed from his office and given the same prison term I would have gotten if I'd disclosed the identity of a clandestine operative overseas in violation of federal law.

Class Action -- Reform or Emasculation

As some of you surely have noted, I've done an abysmal job of steering this blog away from the politics that threaten to swamp it in due proportion to the degree to which politics threatens to swamp the blog's author. The AP provides an adequate baseline discussion of what the House did today, in decisively approving pending legislation purporting to streamline and centralize the class action process in the federal courts.

The gist of the legislation is that class action lawsuits that used to be subject to the jurisdiction of courts in virtually any state in which an injured party resides, an injury occurs, or a corporate defendant is located, now will have to be brought in already overwhelmed federal courts. Aside from clogging up the system, this will also have the effect of diminishing the frequency and volume of class action rewards, as federal courts have proven far less sympathetic than many state courts to sweeping multi-state litigation.

Needless to say, not everyone's happy, and some people are seeing through the anti-class action attorney rhetoric, which is the same red herring here that it is in most contexts. Speaking of which, this account of what's in store:

"Today we will attempt to pre-empt state class action," said Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich. "Next month we will take up a bankruptcy bill that massively tilts the playing field in favor of credit card companies and against ordinary consumers and workers alike. On deck are equally one-sided medical malpractice bills and asbestos bills that both cap damages and eliminate liability to protect some of the most egregious wrongdoing in America."

Now I could do this at much greater length, could provide any number of sources of discussion on this point, but I don't want to belabor what I see as a couple of simple points I can just gloss over at a common-sense level, each corresponding to a stated rationale for this supposedly ground-breaking reform (italicized descriptions of rationales taken from the same AP article, though they are surely available in any complete article).

1. The president has described class-action suits as often frivolous . . .

Really? How often? Which kinds? And what, precisely, do we consider to be frivolous? How easily we forget Ralph Nader's industry-shaking exposure of the Ford Pinto scandal. How easily we forget the atrocious case highlighted in A Civil Action (which, those familiar with the story will recall, ended with a relatively paltry award). If regulation is insufficient, and the one strong tool consumers have is vitiated or effectively eliminated, how can the people keep corporations in line?

2. [B]usinesses complain that state judges and juries have been too generous to plaintiffs.

Which is to say, if I'm not mistaken, that businesses don't like the jury system. So, when it comes to things like political speech, businesses want to be treated like individuals, but when it comes to being held culpable for misconduct, juries are, what, unqualified? Isn't that the task of corporate defense lawyers -- to make sure juries understand why this egregious suit is being brought against their blameless corporation in violation of all that is good and decent in the world. Oh, wait, what? Your army of $300/hour attorneys can't convince 12 perfectly honorable citizens in Mississippi of that fact? Could that be because it isn't true? Just maybe? Here's my feeling: if a jury can hold a criminal defendant's life in its hands, then I think it can handle doling out an award for a class of people collectively injured by knowing corporate misconduct. Call me crazy . . .

3. Bush: "This bill is an important step forward in our efforts to reform the litigation system and to continue creating jobs and growing our economy . . ."

Reforming the litigation system? In the literal re-forming sense, sure: this is profession-changing stuff. Creating jobs? What, because corporations are going to keep so much more of their money that they'll shower it on new employees? That they'll break ground in entirely new industries? Why has this recovery been mostly jobless? Because corporations are reaping the benefits of enhanced productivity, and because when they don't have to, they choose not to hire more people. Growing our economy? This is zero sum stuff. Either businesses spend that money or lawyers and consumers do. Few corporations are going out of business due to this stuff. Costs may be passed on to consumers, but a few million dollars here and there to attorneys from multi-billion dollar corporations is not breaking the bank. And to the extent serious costs are passed on, it's where corporations have had to change the way they did business. Like, for example, shielding gas tanks to prevent explosions that kill these same consumers. Keeping corporations honest in some industries quite literally saves lives. How's that for the economy?

4. Bush, the GOP and the business community [. . .]have criticized what they see as a litigation crisis that enables lawyers to reap huge profits while businesses and consumers are stuck with the bill.

It stands to reason that our supposedly free-market MBA president would want to redistribute wealth from attorneys to MBA's, doesn't it? Seriously, what they're referring to here is the concern that class action lawyers' clients "get only small sums or coupons giving them discounts for products of the company they just sued," while the attorneys rake in multi-million dollar fees. Indeed, this is often the case.

Many of us have received such coupons over the years, and they are pretty trivial on an individual level. But return to my earlier point regarding corporate culpability. Again the analogy: to an American citizen who lives and breathes, his freedom is his most prized possession. When he commits a crime against an individual or the community, he loses that freedom. Unless he's a corporate executive. Meanwhile, to a corporation qua entity, its bottom line is its most prized possession. All hail the almighty shareholder, right? Well then doesn't it make sense that it is by dipping into its coffers when it steps out of line that we most effectively punish a corporation? Of course. Practically speaking, it's the only way.

That's what class action lawsuits are and have always been about. So yeah, it's relatively unimportant to me that a few years back I received as compensation for years of billing misconduct a coupon good for about $20 of Verizon-sold hardware. But if everyone who received one of those coupons redeemed it, what do you suppose that would cost Verizon? Millions, of course. And yes, the attorneys in that case surely reaped millions. They also probably worked for years and years on that case, like most others. And last I checked, a lawyer's time is pretty expensive. Moreover, if there isn't that financial incentive, lawyers won't take these cases. And if they don't take these cases, consumers have to rely on regulatory bodies to protect them, which these days is pretty cold comfort.

I don't participate in opt-in class actions because I care about what I might get. Rather, I opt in because in so doing, the corporate defendant is forced to justify its conduct. If it has a fair case, and good attorneys, it will convince the jury. And if it doesn't, then it pays. Lawyers make some money, I make virtually nothing, but of crucial importance is the price paid by the corporation. That's what's important. And I guarantee that with a sufficient payout, corporations will wake up and take notice, and change conduct to avoid future liability. And such changes almost invariably favor consumers in the long run.

Lawyers are not the problem here. Neither are juries. It's just another example of corporations doing what they must -- aiming to milk the market for every penny it can get. Corporate political donations to politicians and fees paid to lobbying firms are loss leaders -- and today they have been handsomely rewarded, to the detriment of consumers, who will suffer far more than the lawyers will under the yoke of this corporate-friendly legislation.

Winter Is Cancelled; Come Back Next Year

No one can feing surprise that the brinksmanship in which the NHL owners and players engaged resulted, finally, in the the cancellation of the entire 2004-05 NHL season. But that doesn't make it any less depressing for those of us who actually help to put money in the coffers of NHL owners.

The above-linked article doesn't reflect comments made by an NHL spokesman and broadcast on NPR last night, which suggested an irrational truculence. The Times article quotes the final decisive discrepancy as being about $6.5M per team. That is, the players had accepted a salary cap, one not linked to revenue as the owners originally proposed, and the owners came around as well. But the final cap offer by the union was $49M per team, while the owners refused to go above $42.5M per team. On NPR last evening, a representative of the owners observed that the $6.5M difference per team amounted to a nearly $200M difference between the sides when multiplied across 30 teams.

That math is all fine and good, and I'll even grant that such a cap would tend to draw even those teams with the lowest payrolls up to meet it. This would, of course, have the salutary effect of creating parity, except perhaps for the Rangers, who haven't been able to win lately spending twice the cap on players' salaries. And parity might improve turnout and thus revenue. But my biggest problem was with the spokesman's observation that the $200M gap approached the amount of money allegedly lost by owners in the past couple of NHL seasons. What makes no sense about this is that a $200M gap between the sides could have occurred after any degree of compromising, and any consequent lowering of the bar. If, instead of $42.5M vs. $49M, the sides had bound up over $22.5M and $29M, the gap between the sides still would have been nearly $200M, which still would have resembled the alleged losses of the owners en masse, but of course the owners would have gained $20M per team in concessions in moving down to that level.

I'm no accountant, and there are many numbers in play here of which I know nothing. But comparing the $200M gap between the sides to an utterly irrelevant number and then suggesting that bogus analogy was a decisive factor in canceling a major league sport's entire season over a labor dispute for the first time ever has no explanatory power whatsoever, and can't possibly in any way satisfy the fans that the parties involved in these failed negotiations did everything they could do to reach a compromise and let the players play.

And we have nothing to do but be jealous of the fans of the European teams for which more than half of NHL players are competing this season. It's a shame. It really is.

Text, Subtext, and Pretext

Sorry, this post isn't going to be nearly as sophisticated (or pretentious) as that title implies. But sometimes words just go together. Especially when they have the same roots. Natch.

Anyway, is it possible that the Bush Administration can find another way to piss on the Geneva Convention? Funny you should ask. According to this Los Angeles Times story, the answer is yes, in connection with the Bush administration's effort to bar United States military personnel who were captured and tortured during Desert Storm from collecting damages from Iraq for their injuries.

What's interesting about the story is what's left out -- a motive distinct from the administration's cover story (that Iraq needs whatever money it has). I would submit that there's another reason, related to the administration's flat refusal to affiliate the United States with any international criminal court. Because even if, as a matter of policy, we don't consider turnabout to be fair play, it can still provide a compelling public narrative. We didn't like the idea of an international criminal court, because by any rational international law that had any teeth whatsoever, there would be more than a small probability that American officers and perhaps even policy makers would ultimately be named as defendants. Imagine Cheney or Kissinger at the defense table. That's what they imagined, too, and that's why we wanted no part with it.

To that same end, what do you think happens once a precedent is set that wrongfully tortured individuals (if there is any other kind), combatants even, can seek monetary relief in an appropriate jurisdiction. Hel-lo McFly, anybody in there? Yeah, exactly. That's what we're really afraid of.

But even absent the subtext I suggest is at work here, just look at the face of it: the Bush administration arguing that it needn't abide yet another aspect of the Geneva Convention, and saying, in no uncertain terms, tortured American soldiers are entitled to nothing, except perhaps the thanks of a grateful nation. Just when you think it can get no more surreal . . . .

(Hat tip, tonypierce.)

UPDATE: And in keeping with the subject of obscene and perverse conduct, it's about to get a whooooooole lot more expensive to lose a couple of buttons at the wrong time.

Explosion in Iran

So sad that as much as I love my country, I don't trust my country. Or rather, I don't trust my government just now. But then again, maybe this was Poland -- don't forget Poland!

UPDATE: To be clear, it now appears to have been nothing. I'm not backing away from the above; I still blame my government for pushing me to where I assume the absolute worst. And now, we return you to your regularly scheduled broadcast.

UPDATE 2: Evidently, I'm not the only one. On the unrelated topic of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, Josh Marshall, who usually sources his assertions meticulously, confesses a simple gut-level doubt about the administration's assertions regarding the event. Quoth he:

[I]t is more than a little unfortunate that I at least find it hard to take at face value anything this administration says about the probable perpetrators. And again, I say that not with any particular knowledge of this situation, but simply on the basis of the track record and the region of the world

Oh. My. God.

Seriously folks, if you never read a word of my poetry or my long-winded vignettes, if you dismiss most of my political pieces as short-winded and derivative, if you find my commonplaces to be largely pointless, and if -- in short -- you never visit this site again, I ask only one favor: please o please o please check out the story of the male escort who would be, or rather was, a white house correspondent for a bogus media outlet -- and at that, one who got to ask more questions of press secretary Scott McLellan and even the Prez than the average bear. For some almost certainly preposterous reason, the mainstream media isn't touching the most sordid aspects of this imbroglio, but they're going to have too soon, because it's all over the blogosphere.

UPDATE: Man oh man it gets worse. Gannon was in the White House Press Briefing Room before his supposed news organization even existed. Hat tip, Armand.

Retraining?

CNN reports:

NEWARK, New Jersey (AP) -- A security screener at Newark Liberty International Airport failed to spot a butcher knife in a passenger's pocketbook and was removed from the post for retraining, officials said.

Two questions:

1. When did they start calling the airport voted most likely to be the closest to Moon's childhood home Newark Liberty?

2. Am I the only one who finds the "removed . . . for retraining" language a bit Orwellian?

When Is a Plan Not a Plan?

Evidently, when it's part of the residue of a Democrat administration. This Times article pretty well confirms as a fib Condoleeza Rice's claim in a March 2004 Washington Post Op-Ed piece that "No Al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration."

Nice of the Times, by the bye, to remind its readers of Condi's claim in graf 16 of the article, deep in the page 12 continuation. For that matter, nice of the Times to make this article a small headline below the fold on "Take Out the Trash" Saturday.

Further refuting her claim is the Times characterization of the January 2001 Richard Clarke memo in question:

The 13-page proposal presented to Dr. Rice by her top counterterrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke, laid out ways to step up the fight against Al Qaeda, focusing on Osama bin Laden's headquarters in Afghanistan. The ideas included giving "massive support" to anti-Taliban groups "to keep Islamic extremist fighters tied down;" destroying terrorist training camps "while classes are in session" and then sending in teams to gather intelligence on terrorist cells; deploying armed drone aircraft against known terrorists; more aggressively tracking Qaeda money; and accelerating the F.B.I.'s translation and analysis of material from surveillance of suspected terrorists in American cities.

If this isn't an "al Qaeda plan," what is? Please bear in mind that at 13 pages this plan was about eight pages longer than the President has signaled he is willing to read.

Science v. Religion, cont'd

This is a lively discussion, so I'd like to keep it on the front page. Joe Kearns, in response to my initial post on this topic, writes in part:

To teach science as if it were Truth is a violation of the spirit of science, which is always aware of its unanswered questions. The teaching of the "time plus chance" paradigm of Darwinism as "received fact" leads the young non-scientist to believe what ain't so...that "scientists believe" this answers all the origin questions. They do not. There is a real problem with the paradigm, and that problem raises a real question whether we live in a "closed system" (the a-theistic view) or an "open system" (the someone/something else is out there messin with us view.) You might find it interesting to note that Francis Crick, along with several other atheistic scientists, believe in "panspermia", the idea that life evolved outside our planet and was planted here, precisely because of problems with the paradigm like those pointed out by Behe. To say with the authority of a teacher or a textbook, "science has found no need for a creator in its explanations of the world" is a religious statement, and simply untrue to boot.

Can we really interpret the 1st Amendment to disallow the discussion whether a creator exists? Especially when our scientists are haveing precisely that debate?

First, I want to reemphasize that while in the abstract, I am hard-pressed to mount a compelling argument for denying children in public school access to this debate, if not for purposes of hinting at some metaphysical truth than perhaps as an object lesson in the nature of scientific inquiry, I am still troubled by the evidence I see of what actually happens when such an endeavor comes to be. I also should acknowledge my limitations in this discussion, insofar as my knowledge of what various school systems have been doing is restricted to what I read in newspapers and the blogosphere. I wouldn't bet my whole stack of chips on either of their myriad recommendations. Furthermore, I have to object gently to Kearns' implicitly instrumentalist approach to the First Amendment. I have worked for a number of judges, at the state and federal level. I submit that most judges, notwithstanding their leanings, would express grave concern about couching the interpretation of the Bill of Rights strictly in terms of what result a given interpretation may or may not have, the Right's empirically incoherent alarums about an "activist judiciary" notwithstanding. None of which means there isn't a legitimate question there; it's merely an objection to loose terminology in a tight area of law: to frame it circularly and yet I think accurately, we will interpret the First Amendment precisely as we should, based not on whether the Framers' short-sightedness engendered an amendment ill-equipped to accommodate the teleological debates of future centuries, but on what the amendment says (about the discovery of which, debate will ever rage, but should never reduce to "because this interpretation would cause this, it simply must be the wrong interpretation," such normative judgments having only a modest role in American jurisprudence), mindful that if it proves problematic enough it can be changed through the democratic process (although I wouldn't hold my breath until that happens). Of course, this hardly means that the First Amendment's implications for public education are clear or settled; neither is true, as evidenced by the ongoing debate.

Kearns and I agree that problems with, or limitations of Darwinian theory ought to be openly acknowledged. Legitimate alternatives warrant exploration. I feel the same way about the teaching of history. That I may have arrived at certain conclusions about the reasons for this or that event, or the intrinsic worth of this or that decision and outcome, I wouldn't deny our children access to as much historical data as possible so that they might form their own opinions. This is the nature of critical inquiry, and it ought to be the essence of our children's education. Sadly, it is not; the ability to think critically is being sundered to various ideogically loaded sacred cows and market imperatives. This bodes poorly for all sides of the debate: neither will Darwin nor ID be viewed with the sort of jaundiced skepticism that I think all claims to Fundamental Truth ought to be.

It's misleading, however, to claim that scientists simply do not believe Darwin works as a theory -- though I will readily grant that an assertion that a given theoretical framework obviates the explanatory need for a designer qua deity is, in some limited sense, a religous claim and ought to be evaluated on the same terms as any other religious claims. Natural selection as a complete theory retains its accomplished, articulate bevy of advocates. The late Stephen Gould comes to mind. That Hawking continues to struggle against the idea of a theological explanation does not discredit him per se -- most would agree he is among the most brilliant scientists the world has known. It's unfair to ascribe to him a truculence, as though even were his explorations to lead him ineluctably to a deistic explanation he would reject it as part of some conspiracy-of-one to mislead the world. Furthermore, we find more than just ID or Frick's "panspermia" proffered up as theoretical constructs to help us get from there to here. Robert Wright's Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, while focusing on the past few tens of thousands of years of human development, posits various constructs for understanding a sort of directedness to evolution that requires no designer or creator. Granted, Wright does not attempt to account for the early leaps of complexity that Behe identifies as the biggest problems for NS, but it still might inform the debate. Kurzweil's work on machine intelligence and perhaps spirituality (his word) also might bear on the topic. And I'm confident that there are others.

The problem -- and the source of my reflexive concern vis-a-vis education -- is that it's wrongheaded to treat NS and ID (taking two dominant examples and letting them stand in for the larger spectrum of accounts) as mutually inconsistent. As I understand Behe's ID, it wouldn't supplant NS. Rather, it takes the fossil record and the evidence of widespread and sweeping natural adaptation as granted. The principle issue is that there is a gap in the NS account, and ID offers an explanation at least as credible as any other. As I began to note earlier, I don't thnk this is how the situation is seen among those teachers, administrators, and parents who are most outspoken in their determination to see ID in the classroom. For those NS-is-just-a-theory types, ID does or ought to supplant Darwin's account as the superior account -- not for its ability to address small problems in an exhaustively documented, verified, and predictive theory but for its suggestion of something wholly outside that theory. That's not Behe's ID, and it's not one that I think is defensible in public education.

The idea of truth is, of course, problematic in the sciences. But as far as theories go, NS has tremendous evidentiary support in its broad strokes -- indeed, I question whether many biological theories are more irrefutable at the general level. Whether some designer interceded early in the process, or whether the initial building blocks came from some extraterrestrial source (which to my mind is the same thing, because if this stuff was too complicated to occur here as posited by NS, it also would have been too complicated to occur spontaneously elsewhere, thus, no matter how long the consequent regress, even Frick's account ultimately requires some first step in establishing complexity somewhere -- in a word, a designer), is irrelevant to whether NS is just another theory when its explanatory power is so robust and its empirical underpinnings so widespread and well understood. If there's a gap somewhere along the way, students should know about it. But that's very different than saying students should be taught that NS theory is merely on a par with others that are less thoroughly validated by such voluminous evidence. That is why I previously said I believed NS is the Alpha and the Omega: should any of these alternative theories go so far as, or be presented as going so far as, to cast into doubt the basic principles of NS, I think they have left the realm of science and broken decisively toward religion (or metaphysics, if you prefer). And it's there that the First Amendment as it has been consistently interpreted comes into play.

Which leads me to qualify an overstatement I made earlier: perhaps it is not impossible to present ID as one possible solution to a fairly fine-grained problem with NS. Maybe that particular (Behe-ian) presentation of ID is entirely acceptable under the First Amendment. I still hold that we would have to be ever vigilant with regard to the individual treatments of the issue by the many educators who have indicated their willingness to use the chalkboard as a pulpit.

And now if you'll excuse me, my brain hurts.

"Wear Your Own Fur"

I lack the energy to get worked up about fur-as-accessory. The truth is, there's a food chain on this planet, we're at the top of it, and we can be as indulgent with that power as other organisms are. Granted, we are blessed as a species with the (putative) ability to take the long view, and so you will find me arguing strenuously, at least occasionally, that responsible stewardship of this planet requires restraint, the devising of sensible empirically justifiable solutions (reality-based, anyone?) to problems of biodiversity, and so on. Cruelty, though? -- we all die, every last one of us, every creature, all of us. And none of us really gets to choose when, either. Why should a chinchilla be granted a natural death when such isn't guaranteed to anyone else?

I should jump in here and note that I've been a vegetarian since childhood. I should also note that I eat eggs, dairy, and seafood, though this wasn't always the case. And no, I don't think seafood is really any different than beef, from a moral point of view, though dairy and eggs trouble me less (insofar as I favor on policy grounds if no others the preservation of abortion rights). My vegetarianism, all of this is to say, is not morally based but more a matter of early childhood habit and a subsequent filling in of blanks regarding the health benefits of staying as far away from red meat as is humanly possible.

All of that said, I do have a less principled objection to the wearing of fur: I think it crude.

Today, I was standing on the corner when a woman walked by in a hip-length brindle fur coat that seemed to me unusually shaggy. Perhaps it was fox; regardless, it was significantly longer fur than that found on most fur coats I see or have seen. It was also undoubtedly real. You simply can't simulate that sheen, that fine coloring and movement.

And that's what got me: this fur, of unusual length, was being blown on this woman's back in ripples like those that course through grain fields, brindle waves of grain. And as I stared, the downtown foot and automobile and bicycle traffic melted away, the noise faded, and for just a moment I was looking at some animal's pelt. I was troubled, troubled terribly, that this woman should wear something so utterly not of her -- so obviosly of another (formerly) living thing -- as though it were her(s). Worse than crude, it was an affront to the natural order, though, again, not specifically due to any cruelty visited upon animals in connection with their inevitable deaths.

It was an odd response, in light of my fairly steady conviction that pretty much every animal on this earth kills other animals, and we're really no different, nor need we be. I do not object to hunters who eat their kill, and I do not object to meat eaters who are prepared to kill what they eat (of course, I don't expect anyone to actually do so on a daily basis, but it's the sort of bluff an honest carnivore ought to be prepared to call, and that is a conviction grounded on moral principles). I think sport hunters are wasteful and obnoxious, and I think there's a disingenuousness in enjoying the spoils of a task one finds too unpleasant to perform, but my responses even to these phenomena are fairly moderate, at least up to the point where such behavior threatens extinction, which, while sometimes inevitable, is nothing we need to actively encourage by self-consciously destructive behavior.

Just the same, while we are not outside the food chain, we are nevertheless beings fundamentally more sentient than most or all of those that we kill. I believe our knowledge of mortality burdens us with a responsibility to consider the gravity of our actions and their consequences both in micro- and macrocosm.

How this woman would react if she were confronted, say at a zoo, by a fox possessed of a coat like her own. Would she coo, involuntarily or calculatedly for the benefit of her children or grandchildren, at how cute he was? Would she compliment his coat. Would it even dawn on her that her coat is comprised of bits and pieces of several such pelts, carefully matched after being relieved of the still-warm flesh of their original owners. Given the choice, would she prefer to kill the animals herself, or pay the thousands of dollars she or somebody else paid someone else to do it?

Maybe what irked me today is that I tend to dislike most manifestations of ostentation. Or maybe it's that mink coats, for example, resemble the coat of no animal I regularly encounter. Today's coat, however, was noticeably canine. It shivered and bowed in the breeze in roving crescents just like an attentive husky's might as he stood on stiff forepaws in a pine forest, nose held high, sniffing the breeze for a trace of dog, of a felled carcass transformed to carrion, or of nothing at all but the robust and variegated scent of the world itself.

"In the Case of Science vs. Nature . . . "

The title, perhaps, is a bit misleading, but it makes me giggle. In any event, this post at Dialogical Coffee House led me to this article at ReasonOnline, which in turn led me to the Times Op-Ed that engendered this latest round in the ongoing debate.

The Times piece, by Michael J. Behe, a professor of biological science at Lehigh University, aims to dispel what he argues are popular mis-associations of so-called "Intelligent Design" theory with those who would have public schools reject Darwin's natural selection as, at best, "just a theory," if not omitting to mention it entirely (sadly, something plenty of people in this country would prefer, as the most recent spate of attempts to do just that plainly illustrates). He speaks to the premises on which Intelligent Design is based, and emphasizes that these principles are not (or should not be) in themselves objectionable to scientists of an Enlightenment / scientific method bent.

In Reason, Ronald Bailey takes issue with Behe -- particularly, Behe's founding the notion of intelligent design on the premise that "there are no research studies indicating that Darwinian processes can make molecular machines of the complexity we find in the cell." Behe's claim is that these molecular machines, or in some cases the cellular machines in which they function are irreducibly complex, and that absent some sort of intelligent design -- which, to be fair, he at least concedes might not be a deity but rather something in nature (a claim the coherence of which exceeds my grasp just now, and one that Bailey explicitly rejects and DCH commenter, Joe Kearns, implicitly rejects, but let's grant it for argument's sake) -- they could not have arrived at their levels of complexity since to remove any one component of the cellular / molecular mechanism would bring the organism's life to a screeching halt. If these irreducible cellular machines were not made of whole cloth, all at once, then they would never have come into being, is the proposition that Bailey ascribes, I think correctly, to Behe. Bailey is, in some sense, quibbling with Behe's attempt to distinguish his ID theory from a purely dogmatic creationist account, and perhaps suggesting that it's a trojan horse.

As a good, the-first-amendment-can-never-be-strong-enough liberal, I'm wary of Behe's arguments for precisely this reason. After all, glazed with a patina of Enlightenment science, religion can become palatable, or rather it can become difficult to persuasively resist by those who recognize it for what it is. It is difficult rationally to object that Darwinism is the Alpha and Omega of life on earth, although that's what ID attempts to do. Darwinism is the best account offered yet, in my opinion and (more importantly) in the opinion of many people smarter than I. But so was Newton's account of mechanics until Einstein came along. And Einstein, for that matter, roundly rejected much of quantum theory that has now been verified or at least appears to be true.

Nevertheless, I fear that this aspect of Bailey's critique is unfair. I'll confess that the phrase Intelligent Design recalls to mind those religious network shows that attempt to mathematically square the prodigious evidence in support of Darwinism with the biblical math favored by their particular Christian denominations to pinpoint a date for the first day of Creation. And I feel like Behe's account clarified some things for me. Moreover, I'm not unfamiliar with Behe's (stated) orientation toward this issue. One of my physics teachers in college, a man who could carry a full tenure-track load in advanced physics and still attend law school at night (which, by the way, makes for an awful professor, since on more than one occasion he used his fastidiously tidy law school notebooks and study methods to illustrate why our note-taking and organizational skills as well as our study (non-)habits were abysmal, and largely to blame for our fate, one and all, as failures at grasping all things electromagnetic), and who was surely in virtue of his background of a devoutly logical inclination, was quite comfortable on one occasion opining -- with a hand-wave and in an astonishingly curt and cursory way -- "Natural selection doesn't get us here from there. Something's missing."

Brian at the Dialogical Coffee House, meanwhile, focuses on two paragraphs in Bailey's piece, in the first of which Bailey asks why ID shouldn't be acknowledged side by side with natural selection as a competing scientific account of life's terrestrial lineage. In virtue of this debate, my answer is less certain than it was, although the second Bailey point Brian highlights has something to do with my feeling that the scientific basis for ID is in some sense beside the point. Bailey observes, "Intelligent design theorists and their claims to scientific legitimacy aside, the only reason the vast majority of people who want intelligent design taught in high school want it is because they believe it will undercut the corrosive effects of evolutionary biology on the religious beliefs of their children." The obverse of this proposition, however, and one Bailey only implicitly acknowledges much earlier in his piece, is that the only reason the areligious or otherly religious would have it kept out of school is their fear that it is a trojan horse in the belly of which it bears scripture, as the Leviathan did Noah.

I should tip my hat on this point to Joe Kearns for his similar comment at DCH. And a propos, Kearns also writes that

[t]he "irreducible complexity" problem pointed out by Behe is philosophically and practically insurmountable, and would deep-six the whole [NS] edifice EXCEPT that there is no god-less alternative theory. Intelligent design is promising because, though it involves a Designer, it does not rely upon any revelation or authoritative knowledge about that Designer, but works outward from the world-as-found, from the material of the world. It therefore avoids the issues of "whose revelation?" In my opinion, this is why you actually find more believers in the science faculties than in the humanities faculties in the secular academy. The physicists are finding themselved forced, by the facts, to consider the existence of God as a compelling inference. ID is the same process, occurring in Biology.

The question, I suppose, is whether both sides are simply doing their respective jobs in pushing against each other from the extreme perimeters of the positions they defend, locked in battle over radically opposed ideas that do not represent the more moderate views of many of the people in whose name such battle is done to much fanfare and distraction (sound familiar)? Should both sides behave, as they have behaved, like lawyers, testing the extremes in hopes that the final result will incrementally favor their clients in direct proportion to the zealousness of their advocacy? When it comes to teaching our children, is an adversarial approach to curricula development appropriate?

I suppose that while my intention here has been more exegetical than critical, I am intrigued by Kearn's choice of words regarding "the existence of God as a compelling inference" (my emphasis). Is that all any scientific conclusion is, "a compelling inference"? I suppose there's a level of brute epistemological truth to this, but when, as Bailey notes, even the Pope grants a certain legitimacy to natural selection (I'm taking Bailey's word for this), I'm not sure that the ID argument for God is as compelling as the NS argument for Darwin's account of evolution, much as Kearns is unconvinced by Bailey's ascription to others the critique that if ID can be taught so should be astrology, phrenology, etc. (oddly, Bailey throws psychoanalysis in there with water-witching; while psychoanalysis may not lay claim to the sort of scientific validity that special relativity does, I don't think I'd file it with a list of debunked quackery that might as well include alchemy for all its validity). But then at the end of the day if it's only a matter of competing likelihoods -- to be reductive, say, Darwin's account is 65% likely to be true and ID's 22% likely to be true -- how do we decide which likelihood prevails, or at what level of likelihood we draw the line (after all, to the extent the teaching of ID is linked to religious creation, how do we draw the line as to which creation stories (and there are probably more of those in the world than there are discrete ethnicities, faiths, etc.) between what we should teach and what we shouldn't.

Which leads me to again don my lawyer hat, and speak to this from a (necessarily abstract) First-Amendment point of view (caveat: I'm woefully underqualified to do so, but hopefully more qualified than at least some of you): If we grant Kearns' point that ID favors no specific religion's creation story, but instead simply posits some designer based on the evidence of the "world-as-found," as he elegantly describes it, does that protect it from First-Amendment scrutiny? Should it? Perhaps. To the extent any one religion's account is barred by First Amendment jurisprudence (and, at least for now, it mostly is), one shouldn't be able to do an end-run by simply taking the specific references to a particular God or source of scripture out of the story. If no proponent of ID can escape the inference of some designer qua deity, than ID has no place in the schools. Why? Because the First Amendment doesn't bar reference to Christianity or Judaism or Islam, per se; rather, it precludes the presentation of scriptural material in public classrooms generally.

On the other hand, public-school history books certainly account for the role of religion in the formation of the modern world, and the religious framework for certain works of art also can be acknowledged and addressed for their contextual relevance. Which might be the saving grace for ID in the schools: the reason those other accounts are permissible, is because they're not scriptural in nature, in no material way construable as proselytizing, but are, as already dubbed, exegetical, contextual. Similarly, one might understand the likely religious overtones of any presentation of ID as incidental precisely because they don't favor any particular creation story's designer. And this is where Behe makes a convincing case: I have trouble seeing, either from a legal or a moral position, how in itself the teaching of ID would be problematic assuming it would be presented as a school of thought that challenges natural selection's most controversial assumptions and argues from the scientific material that undergirds the work of the Behes of the world, as opposed to the naked dogma of, say, a Falwell's account, or, for that matter, the Old Testament's account.

Which brings me back to where I started: Behe presents a fairly persuasive case that ID as understood by its more sophisticated advocates and researchers may well not be terribly religious (in the sense of denominational) in itself. Unfortunately, Bailey also is correct that this issue, rightly or wrongly, has become another battleground for the left and right (by and large), and thus in practice is heavily politicized. The problem is that not only do ID's avatars in many cases have ulterior motives; I think many of those administrators who line up in support of it are no different in their ends, are no more likely to read Behe's scientific defense of ID as a legitimate theory than their leftward opponents. And if battle necessarily pits those sides against each other (yet again) on the text of the Establishment Clause, and ejects from that field those people who make the scientific cases pro and con, well then the goal has to be to minimize the damage either by finding independently minded scientists to provide the ID account and ensure that individual teachers don't stray (an impossible task), or by omitting it altogether. It appears to me that the courts have reached a similar conclusion, though perhaps not by such a tortured path: faced with cases like this, of great moment to the social fabric and with profound First-Amendment implications, judges are hard-pressed to disregard entirely what will really happen in the schools in the event of one or another ruling. And I think that, more than anything else, is why the ID advocates are faring poorly in the courts. I probably agree with this outcome, but more as a pragmatist than as a dyed in the wool lefty.

UPDATE: I realize the title quote is wrongly stated. But I don't want to mess with the permalink. It should read, "In the Case of Science vs. Religion," or something like that. It's a Simpsons quote (of course). Anyone who wants to correct me feel free.

UPDATE 2: This discussion continues here.

Here We Go Again

Condi banging the drum on Iran.

There are almost too many scary quotes in this article to pick any one, but here's a particularly ominous one-two punch:

"The message that we are giving to Iran: We do have diplomatic means at our disposal, we are doing this bilaterally as well as multilaterally, and I believe that a diplomatic solution is in our grasp, if we can have unity of purpose, unity of message with the Iranians and if the Iranians understand that the international community is quite serious about it living up to its obligations."

The IAEA has the authority to refer Iran to the Security Council, but the group's board of governors has refrained from doing so in seven meetings on the topic in the past two years.

So, let me get this straight: We claim to have diplomatic means at our disposal, but those means have largely proven ineffective in the past few months (I'm sure that has nothing to do with the diplomatic capital we've squandered since 9-11, and the Europeans concomitant refusal to play ball (although can you blame them when last time they tried to play we picked up the ball and went home?)). And of course one word no one could use with any credibility to describe Bush 43's foreign policy is "patient." Moreover, she adds, "the next steps are in the offing . . . And I think everybody understands what the 'next steps' mean."

Bring it on, right? Isn't that what the man once said?

Sorry if the combination of these things, especially when so blatantly lumped together by the toothless CNN, sounds so alarmingly like the run-up to Iraq I don't even know where to begin, except, perhaps, at Arlington National Cemetary, which could end up a whole lot fuller if someone (Congress? Hello?) or something (a sudden infusion of common sense in the Bush administration?) doesn't derail this runaway train soon.

The State of the Union Address

Lies Lies Lies. And I haven't even read the thing. Last night, instead of watching the Not Neceessarily the State of My Union, Moon drank. And drank. And drank some more. Which, Moon feels, resulted in the most agreeable State of the Union evening since the Clinton era, when a talented orator delivered a plausible speech based on verifiable premises and presented sensible policy ideas with panache. I can't, or won't, get too caught up in this, but everything I heard this morning said what we already know:

Social security is not in crisis -- and even if it were, privatization is no solution.

A balky, functional election, even one that exceeded expectations, does not amount to a flourishing, or even a promising, democracy in Iraq.

Iran, not an ally, is not nearly as scary as a number of our allies, Pakistan in particular. And banging the drum against Iran and Syria accomplishes nothing except to alienate important middle-eastern sovereignties (insofar as we even recognize such a thing) and to reveal the unaccountable hawkishness of the Bush administration.

Which, by the way, it'd be best if we just overlooked, what with all the credible and independent commentators who assure us that Bush's plans make sense.

Moon is really fairly moderate, having once comfortably thought of himself as a Clinton Democrat, but every day, as the GOP spirals deeper and deeper into its little lockstep routine these guys make more and more sense.

(I'd like to track down and add a bunch more links, but increasingly I feel as though it's a waste of my time.)

With My Lawyer Hat on . . .

. . . just for a moment (and forgive me), I'd like to venture that I am fully in agreement with the Washington Post's Editorial noting that during the confirmation process Attorney General nominee Alberto R. Gonzalez failed to unequivocally distance himself from the defense of torture ascribed to him, and arguing accordingly that the Senate ought not confirm him. To the extent the Editorial doesn't speak for itself, see further elucidation along the same lines from the NewDonkey. Money quote:

If you believe, as I do and I hope you do, that the war on terror is an ideological war in which perceptions of American values and good intentions are in the long run as important as military assets, then confirming the Poster Boy for Torture as Attorney General provides a propaganda victory for Islamic Jihadism that's potentially just as damaging as those images from Abu Ghraib. Moreover, Gonzales's confirmation will also reinforce the already dangerous impression that the United States will only obey those rules we get to set ourselves, an impression the administration finds ways to strengthen nearly every day.

A man sworn to uphold the law must believe in, and honor the law. Gonzalez has conclusively proven himself more pawn than paragon, more politician than advocate, and hence an unqualified and ill-suited candidate for the prosecutor-in-chief for these United States of America.