From November 1968.

The lines most cited in Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech were those about evil: “Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince Al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism–it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.” These lines won approbation from both liberals and conservatives. Former Clinton aide Bill Galston praised them as an example of “Obama’s moral realism.” According to neoconservative Bob Kagan Obama didn’t “shy away from the Manichaean distinctions that drive self-described realists (and Europeans) crazy.” . . . I am not a self-described realist, and I am a Chicagoan by birth, yet I don’t care for these lines. While I don’t object to the idea of just war, and have supported the various wars that Obama cited in his speech, and wouldn’t balk at calling Al Qaeda or Hitler evil, I think Obama ventured onto dangerous terrain by invoking the existence of evil as a justification for war. That kind of argument suggests neither moral realism nor prudent idealism, but the crusade-like, messianic foreign policy–pitting good against evil–that got the country into so much trouble during the last administration. –“Speak No Evil: The problem with Obama’s much-lauded Nobel speech,” John B. Budis, The New Republic

From an early age, I have missed the point of things. I noticed this first when the entire class at school seemed to understand that Animal Farm was about something other than animals. I alone sat there believing otherwise. I simply couldn’t see who or what the book was about if not about farm animals. I had enjoyed it for that. Now, the teacher and every other boy seemed to think it was really about Stalin or Communism or something. I looked at it again, but I still couldn’t quite work it out….And allegory. I never got the point of allegory. If it was a choice between algebra and allegory, I knew whose side I was on. When I picked up Moby-Dick, I liked it because it was about hunting whales. And oh dear I just couldn’t concentrate when everyone began to explain, all at the one time, that the whale was a symbol or something, that it stood for… I cannot remember what. –“Missing the Point,” Colm Toibin, London Review of Books

Jon Stewart, host of the satirical programme The Daily Show, recently poked fun at a similar suggestion from a congressman that the web was freeing the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran: “What, we could have liberated them over the internet? Why did we send an army when we could do it the same way we buy shoes?” Unfortunately, critical voices like his are rare. The majority of the media, so cranky when reporting the internet’s impact on their industry, keep producing tear-jerking examples of the marriage of political protest and social media. And what a list it is: Burmese monks defying an evil junta with digital cameras; Filipino teenagers using SMS to create a “textual revolution;” Egyptian activists using encryption to hide from the all-seeing-eye of the Mukhabarat; even Brazilian ecologists using Google maps to show deforestation in the Amazon delta. And did I mention Moldova, China and Iran? These cyber-dissidents, we are told, now take their struggles online, swapping leaflets for Twitter updates and ditching fax machines for iPhones. –“How Dictators Watch Us On the Web,” Evgeny Morozov, Prospect

On December 13, George McGovern published an opinion piece, “With Obama’s Strategy, Afghanistan Looks Like Another Vietnam,” in the Washington Post. He wrote:

I am astounded at the Obama Administration’s decision to escalate the equally mistaken war in Afghanistan, and as I listen to our talented young president explain why he is adding 30,000 troops– beyond the 21,000 he had added already– I can only think: another Vietnam. I hope I am incorrect, but history tells me otherwise.

Joe Klein promptly replied, in his “Swampland” blog at Time, in a piece entitled “McGovern on Afghanistan”:

George McGovern was a world war II hero, a principled politician and absolutely right about the foolishness of the war in Vietnam. He is thoroughly wrong about Afghanistan, though. As President Obama painstakingly explained in his West Point speech, Vietnam is a false–indeed, a facile–anology [sic]. The war in Vietnam was based on lies–the Tonkin Gulf incident–and a false premise, the notion that Vietnam would be the next domino to fall in a communist campaign to conquer Asia. (The total wrongness of this theory was soon demonstrated by the China-Soviet split and subsequent, tacit U.S.-China alliance against the Soviets–as well as a thousand years of tension between the Vietnamese and the Chinese.)

Here’s McGovern’s reply to Klein, emailed to me today. It’s worth a careful read:

The reporter Joe Klein deserves a response to his critique of my objection to President Obama’s decision to send another 30,000 troops to Afghanistan. With the 21,000 the President ordered there earlier plus the 50,000 sent by President Bush, we now have over 100,000 troops assigned to Afghanistan and another 50,000 mercenaries.

I had stated that our growing Afghan involvement reminds me of the Vietnam tragedy. Mr. Klein contends “Afghanistan is different.” I agree that there are differences between the two situations, but there are worrisome similarities.

In each case we have assumed that the complicated political, ideological, ethnic, and nationalistic cross purposes can be straightened out by American troops. It has further been assumed in both Vietnam and Afghanistan that their problems are primarily the responsibility of the US with only token support from other countries.

The people of Afghanistan have occupied a strip of mountainous territory in Central Asia for many centuries. If they are unable to resolve their internal conflicts, how likely is it that even the best soldiers from our distant land can put things aright?

If our country which we all love is to become the world’s policeman, where will we recruit enough troops? Some of our regular army and reservists have been fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for nearly a decade– longer than WWI and WWII combined. There is a limit to what even superb soldiers like ours can withstand. If we are to play the role of a global police force we should all be involved and that means we should restore the draft and pay higher taxes. We can’t keep using the same soldiers war after war while borrowing money from the Chinese.

Mr. Klein expresses grave concern about tensions and dangers in Pakistan if we were to “abandon the region” by bringing our troops home from Afghanistan.

I am not advocating that we abandon any region of the world (indeed I have long favored normalization of relations including trade and travel with Cuba as I did with China long before that happened). We have competent, fully staffed embassies in Afghanistan, Pakistan and India to help us keep informed of developments in these countries and to pursue our interests. We also maintain economic aid missions in these countries. We are not abandoning a country simply because we don’t have our army there doing battle.

One final point: Even if Mr. Klein were right in calling for us to continue waging war in Afghanistan, we can’t afford it. Thanks to the two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan we’ve built a national debt of 12 trillion dollars. We’re also in the middle of a serious recession. Not a good time for another deepening war.

Bernard DeVoto on the Sad State of Paring Knives (as featured in Julie & Julia)

From “The Paring Knife at the Crossroads,” by Bernard DeVoto in the April 1939 Harper’s Magazine

For it is quite true that in some goods there is no longer any such thing as quality. I buy a new pocket knife before going to the country every summer, for instance–I have to buy a new one. It has been years since I had one that would keep an edge, and stainless steel, which most of them are made of nowadays, won’t even take an edge. The interesting thing is that stainless steel rusts before the summer is over too, when other steel objects carried in the pocket don’t rust. The same conditions hold for kitchen cutlery. It is practically all made of stainless steel now, which means that it is practically all no good. At approximately twice the price you paid ten years ago you can get a good butcher knife, but you can’t get a good paring knife at any price. True, you can get a paring knife for a nickel and a butcher knife for a quarter, as you couldn’t in grandmother’s time–but grandmother wouldn’t have bought them at any price. They are beautiful of course: the handle is bright green and the blade has been streamlined, air-resistance being a great problem in the kitchen; but they will not cut.

Read the rest of “The Paring Knife at the Crossroads” for free, or read the follow-up from July 1939–“Unrest in the Kitchen” (also free)…

From June 1923.

From the Web

Hardly anyone noticed this summer when former president Jimmy Carter explained why he had decided to leave the Baptist Church. However “painful and difficult,” wrote Carter in an essay that appeared in the Guardian, his break with the denomination to which he had belonged for sixty years had begun to seem like the only possible response to past opinions expressed and codified by the Southern Baptist Convention. “It was an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully selected Bible verses and claiming that Eve was created second to Adam and responsible for original sin, ordained that women must be ‘subservient’ to their husbands and prohibited from serving as deacons, pastors, or chaplains in the military service. This was in conflict with my belief—confirmed in the holy scriptures—that we are all equal in the eyes of God.” –“The Original Sin,” Francine Prose, Lapham’s Quarterly

U.S. military personnel in Iraq discovered the problem late last year when they apprehended a Shiite militant whose laptop contained files of intercepted drone video feeds. In July, the U.S. military found pirated drone video feeds on other militant laptops, leading some officials to conclude that militant groups trained and funded by Iran were regularly intercepting feeds. In the summer 2009 incident, the military found “days and days and hours and hours of proof” that the feeds were being intercepted and shared with multiple extremist groups, the person said. “It is part of their kit now.” –“Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones: $26 Software Is Used to Breach Key Weapons in Iraq; Iranian Backing Suspected,” Siobhan Gorman, Yochi J. Dreazen, and August Cole, the Wall Street Journal

Remember the most convulsive, brain-ripping climax you ever had? The one that left you with “I could die happy now” satiety? Sexbots will electrocute our flesh with climaxes twice as gigantic because they’ll be more desirable, patient, eager, and altruistic than their meat-bag competition, plus they’ll be uploaded with supreme sex-skills from millennia of erotic manuals, archives and academic experiments, and their anatomy will feature sexplosive devices. Sexbots will heighten our ecstasy until we have frothy, shrieking, bug-eyed, amnesia-inducing orgasms. They’ll offer us split-tongued cunnilingus, open-throat fellatio, deliriously gentle kissing, transcendent nipple tweaking, g-spot massage & prostate milking dexterity, plus 2,000 varieties of coital rhythm with scented lubes– this will all be ours when the Sexbots arrive. –“Sexbots Will Give Us Longevity Orgasm,” Hank Hyena, h+ Magazine

From June 1923.

Observers of financial services saw unbelievable prosperity and apparently immense value added. Yet two years later the whole industry was bankrupt. A simple reason underlies this: any industry that pays out in cash colossal accounting profits that are largely imaginary will go bust quickly. Not only has the industry– and by extension societies that depend on it– been spending money that is no longer there, it has been giving away money that it only imagined it had in the first place. Worse, it seems to want to do it all again. What were the sources of this imaginary wealth? First, spreads on credit that took no account of default probabilities (bankers have been doing this for centuries, but not on this scale). Second, unrealised mark-to-market profits on the trading book, especially in illiquid instruments. Third, profits conjured up by taking the net present value of streams of income stretching into the future, on derivative issuance for example. In the last two of these the bank was not receiving any income, merely “booking revenues.” How could they pay this non-existent wealth out in cash to their employees? Because they had no measure of cash flow to tell them they were idiots, and because everyone else was doing it. Paying out 50 per cent of revenues to staff had become the rule, even when the “revenues” did not actually consist of money. –“Innumerate Bankers Were Ripe for a Reckoning,” Martin Taylor, Financial Times (via)

I guess I would use my son’s word: cool. It was cool to work in the White House. All the internal investigations are over with, no finding of wrongdoing, no finding that I misled Congress. (Editor’s note: A 2008 Department of Justice investigation was referred to a federal prosecutor and remains ongoing.) So I’m gratified by that, but I’m certainly not surprised by it. But anyway, it creates impressions. And yeah, it takes some time to work through that. And that’s what I’m trying to do now. Sometimes that can be a little bit discouraging, quite frankly, given that you’re looking at partner in a major firm, Harvard Law School graduate, general counsel to a governor, counselor to the president, secretary of state, state supreme court justice, attorney general of the United States. I’m proud of that record. I don’t believe my life’s work should be solely defined by four years in the White House and two years as attorney general. –“Alberto Gonzales: What I’ve learned,” interview by John H. Richardson, Esquire

In other words, Woods has been presented as the embodiment of bourgeois virtues: dedication, hard work, single-mindedness… The current scandal has disrupted, if not shattered, this image of perfect control. Scandals that aren’t out of tune with a celebrity’s image are often surprisingly easy to bounce back from: after images of Kate Moss snorting coke surfaced, her bookings fell, but, over time, they went up. Revelations that Michael Jordan had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars gambling barely dented his appeal, since the story reinforced the image of him as a fierce competitor. But scandals that conflict with a person’s public image can wreak havoc. And it’s hard to think of a scandal that’s more discordant with an image of focus and discipline than this one. Woods’s alleged cavorting with Vegas waitresses and celebrity groupies, his woeful “sexts” and voice mails, his driving his S.U.V. into a tree: all these things make him look weak and discombobulated. Some have speculated, optimistically, that this may humanize the Tiger. But that’s exactly the problem: what was so amazing about Woods was precisely that he wasn’t like the rest of us—that he wasn’t weak or distracted. –“Branded a Cheat,” James Surowiecki, The New Yorker

From April 1968.

Thank God for partisan gerrymandering. I owe my many terms as your member of Congress to the fact that our beloved district is rigged. After the 2000 Census, members of my party in the state Legislature drew the borders of my district to avoid the neighborhoods of people likely to vote against me, with limbs going out to rope in likely voters. The district goes down the highway, veers away at a right angle, wriggles through a parking lot and down an alley, flares out to take in an apartment complex and then shrinks again to avoid a suburb. Some people think the district looks like a boa constrictor that swallowed a porcupine. Others think it looks like Bart Simpson squashed by a steamroller. I think it’s beautiful. I’m writing you now, my dear constituents, because, after the 2010 Census, my friends in the state Legislature, if they retain the majority, have promised to redraw the lines of our beloved district to give me an even safer seat, if that can be imagined. Some of you will be assigned by the Legislature to other newly gerrymandered districts. Not that I’ll notice. Unless you’ve given me more than $10,000, I wouldn’t know you from Adam.–“Dear Nobodies: a congressman writes to his constituents: ‘Thank God for gerrymandering,’” Salon

It is fitting that the hidden costs of fame should be exacted from Mr. Woods almost precisely 50 years after the publication of a book, “Celebrity Register,” that presented a new picture of social standing in modern America, one in which talent and achievement had been subordinated to publicity. In order to record this transformation, the project’s editor-in-chief, Cleveland Amory, put a team of 20 researchers and writers to work, and four years later they fashioned a colossal volume; its 864 oversize pages were divided into two columns of names, each with a photo and a mailing address (usually a home address)— 2,240 celebrities in all, beginning with the baseball slugger Hank Aaron and ending with the ballet dancer Vera Zorina. “The word ‘Celebrity,’ in our present ‘Celebrity Society’ covers a multitude of sins,” Mr. Amory wrote in a prefatory note. “It does not mean, for example, accomplishment in the sense of true or lasting worth— rather it often means simply accomplishment in the sense of popular, or highly publicized, temporary success.” –Sam Tanenhaus, The New York Times

In a city as sprawling and as proud of its architectural grandeur as Chicago, such an emphasis on size seemed only fitting. Everything surrounding my father’s office was big, and the men working with him rested in that shadow. The office was on the second floor of a two-storey building, just around the corner from a fast-food Greek takeout restaurant and a strip mall better suited to the suburbs, and yet less than a quarter of a mile away stood the Sears Tower and a dozen other skyscrapers whose shadows were literally cast over the office and road every afternoon. Size was paramount in a city like that, and if the immigrant men working with my father had to share only one word in common, it would have certainly been ‘big’. What else could they say about the city they now found themselves in and about their dreams, and all the things that threatened to derail them, except that they were big?–“Big Money,” Dinaw Mengistu, Granta