The 2,000th US military death in Iraq

The New Neo Posted on by

Back during Vietnam, one of the features of that war was the body count. The US military issued a running estimate of the number of enemy combat deaths, which was considered by some to be bloodthirsty, exaggerated, and a misplaced measurement of the progress of the war. Criticism was so intense that in recent years the military has stopped the practice, although others have taken it up for their own (and often suspect) reasons.

The body count of American dead in the Iraq war goes on, however. It is based on statistics supplied by the US military–apparently it’s still okay to count our dead. The recent publicity given to the 2,000 American death can seem to give off an aura of ghoulish celebration clothed in solemn mourning, just in time for Halloween.

I’m not saying the MSM’s emphasis on this body count doesn’t contain an element of sincere sympathy for the sorrows of the families of the fallen, at least in some instances. But I believe that, all too often, observations such as the following one highlighted approvingly by Dymphna–from a commenter on her blog writing on the death of #2000–are quite correct:

I’ve been thinking about the cries that he is being victimized by the left–and how ignoble a title “Victim” to bestow upon a warrior. Instead, he is, with his family, a warrior whose service goes beyond merely his life, and includes bearing the weight of fools.

In honor of the 2000th death and all the other US military deaths–and lives–in Iraq and elsewhere, I thought I’d recycle a portion of a post I wrote around Memorial Day on the subject of the liberal attitude towards the military. Here is the excerpt:

It’s not my impression that liberals/leftists necessarily even focus on the courage of the military. It’s my impression, from talking to liberals/leftists and reading what they write, that many primarily see the military (as I wrote previously) as either bloodthirsty–or, much more commonly and condescendingly, as unintelligent lower- or working-class pawns of a cowardly and exploitative ruling class (thus, the “chickenhawk” accusation against that ruling class, especially towards those who didn’t serve, or whose service is deemed inadequate)…

In my experience, liberals don’t necessarily even think very often in terms of concepts such as physical courage–it’s an old-fashioned word for an old-fashioned value. They think in terms of the values of kindness and/or tolerance and/or intelligence, which they feel that they themselves demonstrate. Or, if they do think of courage and admire it, it is more often the courage to speak out, or to stand up for a cause (to “speak truth to power,” for example).

Remember the old slogan, “Better Red than dead?” The people who said it meant it. And they weren’t all Communists, not by any means. They were people who believed that almost nothing–no abstraction, anyway, including freedom–was worth fighting for in the physical sense, and especially not worth dying for. Therefore anyone who does believe in fighting for something so abstract must be deluded in some way, or oppressed in some way, or both…

I also think that the template for the liberal/leftist view of the military was set during Vietnam, when the draft was one of the main ways to enter the service…People whose attitudes towards military service were based on that era are sometimes unable to understand the changes that have been wrought by the all-volunteer military. They continue to see those in the service as victims, although now they are not seen as victims of the draft, but as victims of coercion and class via economic incentives for joining the military, and/or as victims of the self-serving lies of politicians. It stands to reason that the class interpretation would be especially common on the left, since it fits in quite nicely with a socialist or Marxist viewpoint. And, if the enlistee is viewed as a pawn of economic circumstances, and his/her motivation is seen as economic, then it’s easier to circumvent the whole topic of personal courage.

This idea of the dead soldier as victim, rather than courageous hero, is often cited by the left for propaganda purposes against the administration and those “ruling classes.” Here’s a recent and very typical example of this type of thinking (found here in comment #80–supposedly it’s taken from Michael Moore’s website, but I looked and couldn’t find it there, so I can’t swear it’s a proper attribution):

Bush and the Crime Cabal in power sent 26 more soldiers to their graves this week and 26 more families to lives of living hell. 26 more lives and families devastated and destroyed for absolutely nothing. We will see the hypocritical mobsters of the state at their events today and tomorrow spewing filth from their mouths, such as: “Freedom isn’t Free,” and “We must stay the course in Iraq to honor the sacrifices of the fallen…Then the morons who killed our children will happily go back to their homes and have a nice Memorial Day dinner secure in the fact that their children will never die in a war and their children will have nice, wealthy, long lives because of the incredible riches this misadventure in Iraq has brought their fathers and mothers.

Then there is the idea of those who serve in the military as the “other.” Here’s an interesting article from the LA Times that discusses the change of heart a father experienced when his son, a Marine, went to Iraq. The father had never served in the military himself, and seemed to have never even considered what might motivate someone to serve. He writes:

Before my son unexpectedly volunteered for the Marines, I was busy writing my novels and raising my family, and giving little thought to the men and women who guard us…

But later, when his son returns from combat, the father writes:

I found myself praying and crying for all the fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, husbands and wives of those who were not coming home. For the first time in my life, I was weeping for strangers…. Before my son went to war I never would have shed tears for them. My son humbled me. My son connected me to my country. He taught me that our men and women in uniform are not the “other.”

Prior to his son going to war, this man was almost dissociative in his ability to tune out the military. They simply did not exist for him as people–or, if they did, they were the “other.” What he means by that I’m not sure–were they the “other” in his eyes because of perceived class differences, personality differences, or merely a failure of imagination on his part? One might say he seems to lack the ability to put himself in someone else’s shoes–and yet it turns out he is an author, and a novelist! Very perplexing indeed.

I can only conclude that people like the author, Frank Schaeffer, are operating with blinders on. The motivations of people in the military are not understood by them, and they are not curious about those motivations. Schaeffer’s change of heart occurred for one simple reason: a military man finally became “real” to him, because that man was his son. He could no longer regard this particular Marine as the “other,” because he knew him and loved him, and that ended up humanizing all military personnel in his eyes.

Miered no more

The New Neo Posted on by

I have to say that this news comes a relief.

I was looking forward to the hearings out of curiosity. Honestly, I wanted to see Ms. Miers wow everyone with her vast knowledge of constitutional law and her keen and articulate intelligence. Just as honestly, I wasn’t at all sure whether her hearing would be a triumph, a train wreck, or something in between. I cannot imagine her performing to the satisfaction of her critics, even if she did have the requisite intellectual chops–which is still unknown and will remain unknown forever–under such an intense and harsh spotlight.

I’m glad it turned out this way, and that she finally did what seems to be the right thing for all concerned. Now, on with the dog and pony show of the next nomination. Will Bush be a contrarian and make another pick that will have people up in arms? Or will he be a good boy and play ball with the right? And will whatever he does staunch the bleeding and end the feeding frenzy?

Nuclear bunker busters busted; meanwhile, Iran thumps its chest

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember those nuclear bumper busters from the Kerry-Bush debates of ’04? They reminded me a bit of Quemoy and Matsu in the Nixon-Kennedy debates of 1960: a big fuss made at the time, but then virtually forgotten.

Well, it’s a mystery as to exactly why, but development of these nuclear bunker busters has been scrapped, at least for now:

The move to remove the funding comes at the request of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which has been the driving force behind the bunker buster. It is unclear why the chief proponent of the funding withdrew its request.

The folks in Utah, where the testing would probably have taken place, are very happy–which is understandable. NIMBY takes on a whole new meaning when it’s the testing of nuclear weapons in one’s backyard.

I’m wondering about the decision, though, in light of this other news of the day–the announcement by Iran’s President that Israel should be “wiped off the map” (via Roger Simon). Wasn’t it to combat Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, which seems to involve underground storage, that such nuclear bunker busters were being developed? I can only hope that the reversal on the program represents a decision by scientists and strategists that conventional weaponry would work just as well with fewer dangers, rather than a decision that the program doesn’t have the political clout to be funded. I would certainly prefer conventional weapons to nuclear ones myself, if the former can be effective.

There are a few other interesting details in the article about Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s statement. Notice, for example, those who have spoken against it. One of them is Ebrahim Yazdi, a former Iranian foreign minister who said that Ahmadinejad’s remarks hurt Iran:

“Such comments provoke the international community against us. It’s not to Iran’s interests at all. It’s harmful to Iran to make such a statement,” he said.

So, if I get this straight, it’s another case of “nothing wrong with the remarks themselves but shhhh!, quiet about it! Let’s keep it in the family; no need to get the international community onto us.”

Lovely.

As for that international community, there are were other, and better, responses, some from surprising quarters:

In Madrid, Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos summoned Iran’s ambassador to protest Ahmadinejad’s comments. Moratinos said he rejected the remarks in the strongest possible terms.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Baptiste Mattei also condemned the remarks “with the utmost firmness.”

Of course, words are cheap. But they’re better than nothing. Would that they were followed with meaningful actions.

Lost in translation: the girl from Ipanema

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently made the acquaintance of yargb, yet another really great blog. That is, Yet Another Really Great Blog.

It’s a group blog (which makes me a bit envious, since it means each blogger can take it easy sometimes) composed of some of the most articulate and well-known commenters around the blogosphere.

This post at yargb–about the fate of the real Girl from Ipanema–caught my eye (via Dymphna at Gates of Vienna). Her fifteen minutes of fame were all too brief (the Girl’s, that is, not Dymphna’s).

But I’m bringing up the song for another reason. A couple of days ago we had a discussion about poetry, and whether its recent incarnation speaks to most people these days. As the back-and-forth in the comments section got going, quite a few people ventured the idea that song lyrics have taken over where poetry left off about fifty years ago.

Well, I happen to know a little bit about the lyrics of “The Girl from Ipanema.” Even though I don’t speak Portuguese myself, I am close to someone who does, and he once gave me a recitation and translation of the original Portuguese lyrics to the song. And I have to say I was blown away, not only by their loveliness (you could recite the phone book in Portuguese to me and I’d think it was lovely), but by the depth of the Portuguese version compared to the relative shallowness of the English translation-which-is-not-a-translation (can’t resist those water metaphors).

It turns out that the author of the Portuguese words to the song, Vinicius de Moraes, was a man who quite handily bridged the poetry/lyrics gap. He was a well-known poet and popular lyricist, as well as a diplomat (!) who was at one time vice-consul to Los Angeles (no, I kid you not, so if things had worked out differently we might have had “The Girl from Santa Monica”).

Here are all the words: first, the familiar English version most of us know; then, the original Portuguese lyrics; and lastly, a literal translation into English of those Portuguese lyrics. I wish the popular English version had followed them more closely–but then, if it had, would it have been as popular?

Tall and tan
and young and lovely
the girl from Ipanema
goes walking
and when she passes
each one she passes
goes ahhh

When she walks
she’s like a samba
that swings so cool
and sways so gently
that when she passes
each one she passes
goes ahhh

Oh, but he watches so sadly
How can he tell her he loves her
Yes, he would give his heart gladly
but each day when she walks to the sea
she looks straight ahead not at he

Tall and tan
and young and lovely
the girl from Ipanema
goes walking
and when she passes
he smiles but she doesn’t see
she just doesn’t see

Olha que coisa mais linda,
mais cheia de graé§a
é‰ ela menina
que vem que passa
Num doce balané§o
caminho do mar

Moé§a do corpo dourado
do sol de Ipanema
O seu balané§ado
é mais que um poema
é‰ a coisa mais linda
que eu jé¡ vi passar

Ah, porque estou té£o sozinho
Ah, porque tudo e té£o triste
Ah, a beleza que existe
A beleza que né£o é sé³ minha
que também passa sozinha

Ah, se ela soubesse
que quando ela passa
O mundo sorrindo
se enche de graé§a
E fica mais lindo
por causa do amor

Look at this thing, most lovely
most graceful
It’s her, the girl
that comes, that passes
with a sweet swinging
walking to the sea

Girl of the golden body
from the sun of Ipanema
Your swaying
is more than a poem
It’s a thing more beautiful
than I have ever seen pass by

Ah, why am I so alone
Ah, why is everything so sad
The beauty that exists
The beauty that is not mine alone
that also passes by on its own

Ah, if she only knew
that when she passes
the world smiles
fills itself with grace
and remains more beautiful
because of love

There’s more: here’s a discussion comparing the legend of the writing of this song to the supposedly true story of its origins (I have no way to evaluate the veracity of any of this).

And here’s an interesting comparison of the two versions, along with a link to the Getz/Gilberto rendition.

It depends what the meaning of “friend” is

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote about the UN being implicated by its own computer.

Now it seems that the reprehensible George Galloway may have slipped up in his Senate testimony last May. Pity.

And in the future I, for one, will pay particular attention whenever Belmont Club asks us to pay particular attention to something. Why? See what the amazingly prescient Wretchard wrote back in May about the questions Coleman and Levin were asking of Galloway during the Senate hearings.

The UN: hoist by its own computers

The New Neo Posted on by

You gotta love it: a computer error reveals another shabby UN action, this time a coverup of the explosive allegations of a connection between Syrian President Assad’s family and associates, and Hariri’s assassination in Lebanon:

The United Nations withheld some of the most damaging allegations against Syria in its report on the murder of Rafik Hariri, the former Lebanese Prime Minister, it emerged yesterday. The names of the brother of Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, and other members of his inner circle, were dropped from the report that was sent to the Security Council.

The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by UN officials on Thursday night allowed recipients to track editing changes.

Isn’t the modern age wonderful?

I know those editing programs. I’ve done some free-lance editing, and have been required at times to track my changes. It’s a nifty little thing where your edits show up in blue or red or whatever color you happen to choose. When you send the document, there’s a version that looks normal, and then with one magical click the removed material suddenly appears–usually with a strikeout line though it–and the additions leap into color. Very helpful for the top editor to see what you’ve done and how you’ve done it, without having to perform a laborious line-by-line comparison.

But computers are such funny things–one little click of the mouse and you can make the Mother of All Errors. You can send an e-mail to the wrong person–to spouse instead of lover, to boss instead of friend. Or, in this case, the wrong version of an e-mail to the wrong person. Big trouble in either case, private or public.

Or sometimes your computer just takes over, and ups and does it all for you. Mine once went on a rampage and sent copies of what was, thankfully, a fairly innocuous and even boring e-mail of mine out to four or five randomly selected people from my address box, including someone with whom I’d had only business dealings. I apologized for my computer’s wild ways, but unfortunately it kept happening over and over every few days, to the point where the business person asked me to stop harassing her, and I had call in some sort of computer doctor to advise me on how to fix the glitch.

So I can feel the UN’s pain–not! It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of scoundrels, in my opinion. The UN’s long long record of kissing up to tyrants, of anti-Semitism cloaked as anti-Zionism, and of rampant corruption, has made me deeply distrust nearly everything they do. So this coverup of the possible Assad connection is not a surprise, and the computer faux pas gives me no end of satisfaction.

Even Senators get lucky sometimes

The New Neo Posted on by

Somehow I missed the following tidbit from a couple of days ago, so perhaps you did, too.

New Hampshire’s Republican Senator Judd Gregg, known as a staunch fiscal conservative and chair of the Senate Budget Committee, has won a not inconsiderable amount (to the mind of this fiscal moderate, anyway) in the Powerball lottery.

Gregg won $853,492, which is hardly chump change, although far from the $340 million grand prize. And, since he’s from New Hampshire, a state without income taxes, he gets to keep 75% of it. Some guys live right:

Gregg already is a millionaire, according to personal financial records that senators are required to file annually.

His latest filing, which documents his financial records for the calendar year of 2004, shows that Gregg has assets between $2,697,000 and $9,430,000, mostly in an extensive stock and real estate portfolio.

After hearing the lottery news, Sen. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, the top Democrat on the Budget Committee, quipped the money should be used to pay down the federal deficit.

Senator Conrad beat me to the punch.

How does Gregg actually plan to spend the money? Some will go to charity, and much of the rest to his wife. Sounds about right to me.

I can’t recall any other celebrity or public figure winning a substantial lottery prize before. Can anyone help me out on this?

It surprises me a bit that the relatively wealthy, such as Gregg, might play the lottery, too. Although, why not? When you buy a lottery ticket some say you’re basically throwing away your money, and they are mathematically correct in terms of probability. But they are ignoring the vagaries of the human heart; for most people, a lottery ticket is a ticket to a dream. And I guess even fiscally conservative Republican Senators can dream.

Testing

The New Neo Posted on by

I just published a huge post, but it’s not showing up on my computer, although it’s recorded as having been published. So this is a test, to see whether there’s a problem.

[ADDENDUM: It worked! Suddenly they both appeared. A little Blogger trick I once learned when faced with a similar glitch.]

Judging Harriet

The New Neo Posted on by

Methinks I hear the fat lady singing for Ms. Miers, and it’s an ugly sound–a cross between a squawk, a whine, a groan, and a croak.

I don’t believe we have any real way of knowing whether Ms. Miers is as competent and meritorious as Bush has alleged, or as incompetent and mediocre as nearly everyone else is saying. But I, for one, am willing to wait to actually hear the lady speak for herself before I make a final judgment (in other words, TTLB: I am neutral on the Miers nomination).

There’s certainly much to criticize about this nomination–particularly, IMHO, Miers’s closeness to the President (although the argument could also be made that this means he knows her likely judicial philosophy). But I’ve been surprised at how much of the recent criticism, especially in the blogosphere, has focused on her writing ability as demonstrated in her answers to the Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire.

Now, I’m not able to give a learned discourse on just how grievously Miers may have erred in claiming that the Equal Protection clause has a proportional representation requirement (a little? a lot? not at all?), but I’m able to speak with more conviction about her writing ability.

First, there’s spelling and grammar: I hadn’t been aware until now that Ms. Miers was applying for a job as proofreader. I’ve done some editing here and there and, believe me, proofreading is a highly overrated (although extremely necessary) skill that doesn’t say much one way or the other about intelligence and/or reasoning ability.

Those who state that committing a few typos and grammatical errors is a failure of precision and carefulness are quite correct. But it’s a failure of precision and carefulness that’s irrelevant and immaterial (to coin a legal phrase), and this heated criticism represents a repellent phenomenon I’ve never witnessed before and never care to witness again: a grammatical feeding frenzy.

Another criticism of Miers’s responses is their brevity–in particular, her answer to the only substantive question, the final one, which deals with her views on judicial activism. For example, James Joyner of Outside the Beltway criticized its shortness.

I decided, just for fun, to compare the length of Ms. Miers’s answer to that of John Roberts. As far as I know, I’m the first in the blogosphere to actually do this mindbogglingly difficult piece of research, which involves the arduous task of going to the PDF file of Miers’s questionnaire and the PDF file of Roberts’s questionnaire and actually counting the pages in each answer. Well, the font’s a bit different, so it’s hard to compare exactly, but Roberts’s answer to the question appears to be shorter than that of Ms. Miers by a full page.

Do I care that it’s shorter? Nope, I’ve never felt that length had much to do with evaluating the worth of a piece of writing. But if people are going to criticize Ms. Miers for not writing a long enough answer, how can they ignore the fact that hers is longer than Roberts’s?

Then I read her answer. Not quickly, but slowly. And what did I find when I actually read it? I found it a bit dry, straightforward, relatively uninspired–but it seemed intelligent. Yes, you heard me right–it seemed intelligent (and, by the way, indicative of a constructionist approach, as far as I can see). Was it markedly erudite? Not especially. Was it eloquent? No. Was it clear and intelligible? Perfectly. Was it going to set the world on fire with the extremity of its brilliance? No.

And then I went back to that other questionnaire filled out by someone who actually had set the world on fire (metaphorically speaking, that is) with the extremity of his brilliance in his Senate hearings: John Roberts.

And what did I find? Is his answer to the same question well-written? It’s competent enough. The style is more formal and conventionally academic than Ms. Miers’s, a bit more ornate. Is it clear? Sure. Does he actually say anything much different than Ms. Miers’s does? No. Does the answer demonstrate his genius? No. It was a decent response, nothing more (by the way, I’m not cutting and pasting any examples here because the files are in read-only format. So you’ll have to take a look yourself: Miers’s answer begins on page 55 of her questionnaire, and Roberts’s begins on page 66 of his.)

In fact, I think Miers’s essay has more content as well as length. I went through both essays writing down a summary of the major thoughts in each paragraph (I’ll spare you a copy of that, dear readers). The Committee’s judicial activism question isn’t framed in a way that opens itself up to groundbreaking thinking, so you’ll pardon me if I say that, IMHO, Roberts’s answer wasn’t all that different from a regurgitation of the first few days of an undergraduate ConLaw course (the phrase Joyner used to describe Miers’s answer).

To those who have criticized Miers’s answer so heavily, I’d love to see them compare and contrast it with Roberts’s answer, and explain in what ways his is so clearly superior to hers. It’s definitely possible that there are some legal niceties I’m missing here. But I haven’t even seen a single attempt at a comparison. Why not?

It seems to me that the nature of the question itself, and the need to give an answer sufficiently vague as to not leave oneself open for criticism, dictate that any possible answer will be rather mediocre. In fact, I’d be surprised if the answer of any candidate so far has been especially wonderful .

Let me make it perfectly clear: I don’t care. I don’t care that Roberts’s answer is pretty pedestrian, and rather short. I think he’ll make an excellent justice, perhaps even a stellar one. But Ms. Miers’s answer to this question–the only “substantive” one in the entire document–actually shows a bit more imagination than that of Roberts. She makes the interesting–to me, at least–point that she has experience in all three branches of government: judicial (in her clerkship to Judge Estes), legislative (in her position on the Dallas City Council), and executive (as President Bush’s counsel)–and that therefore she has firsthand personal experience of how the three branches of government interact, and what roles each has in relation to the judiciary and to each other. It’s a decent point, and it’s an argument from experience.

Oh, and I found a couple of punctuation errors in Mr. Roberts’s questionnaire: a comma or two that I see as problems, and one improper use of the dash. And no doubt someone looking at this post of mine can find a couple of similar mistakes too, even though I’ve tried to proofread it carefully. Do you really care? I don’t–although, of course, I’d prefer all these documents to be absolutely perfect.

I don’t mean to say that Ms. Miers is smarter or would be a better justice than Mr. Roberts; there’s no indication that that’s true. I also believe she’s far from the best nominee possible for the position. But can we not wait to hear how she thinks and reasons during her Senate hearings? We learned a great deal about Mr. Roberts this way. What’s the all-fired hurry to condemn her? Surely there will be enough time to do this after her hearings, if she is indeed the fool so many say she is.

Oh, and another thing. Please read “Remote Control” by Stuart Taylor, Jr., a piece that appeared in the September 2005 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. It’s an eloquent plea for appointing a justice with real-world rather than just ivory-tower or academic experience (suggesting, specifically, a person who “has argued big-time commercial lawsuits”). One can almost hear it as a plea for a justice like Ms. Miers, although author Taylor now says he doesn’t support her for the job.

Mr. Taylor recently wrote that the closeness of Ms. Miers’s relationship to the President, and her position as his advocate, is especially troubling:

Might she shy away from casting votes that could cause Bush political embarrassment? Or even ask herself, “What would the president want me to do?”… A few presidential cronies have, of course, turned out to be notable justices. They include Robert Jackson, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter, all appointed by President Franklin Roosevelt. But each of them had been a legal or political giant of independent stature ”“ as attorney general, U.S. senator, and Harvard Law School dean [sic: he was a professor at HLS], respectively ”“ before taking the bench.

Good point. It’s the closeness of her relationship with the President coupled with her lack of extraordinary independent stature that should give one pause.

But to give pause is not to reject outright. It seems that Taylor is with me; he’s still willing to give Ms. Miers a final chance to prove herself:

The Senate should reject any Supreme Court nominee ”“ especially one close to the president ”“ who has not proven herself to have extraordinary ability and independence of judgment unskewed by loyalty. The woman who once called Bush the most brilliant man she had ever met has not met this burden of proof during her first 60 years. Unless she can do so in the next few weeks, she should be treated with respect, praised for her character and accomplishments, and voted down.

Ms. Miers needs to show her independence and keen intelligence in the hearings. If so, she should be approved; if not, rejected.

And lastly, while waiting to hear what she has to say and how she acquits herself, you might want to read this Washington Post profile of Miers, written before the feeding frenzy really got going.

A fallen fall

The New Neo Posted on by

Fall is ordinarily my favorite season. I love it when the air starts getting that snappy crispness. Then some time in late September I see the first few patches of startling red in the maples. Each day after that a new tree turns red, and then the oranges and yellows appear, and the whole thing builds to that glorious symphony of natural beauty we call fall.

It doesn’t hurt that the sky is often powerfully blue, the grass still green, and the weather good for almost any activity, including just walking around and savoring it all. Here in New England we drink it in, trying to store the sensations to help us get through the long hard winter.

I don’t want to gloat, but while you may see these images on a calendar, we see them all around us:


My favorite is the lowly sumac, a weed that grows freely and doesn’t look like much in summer but turns into a shimmering glow of superbly and subtly mixed colors come fall:


But don’t worry; I’m not gloating any more, and there’s no cause for envy of New Englanders this year. Fall has been more or less a bust. A combination of factors, especially the rain and lack of sunlight, seems to have caused the worst fall in my memory, and I’ve lived in New England almost continually since 1969 (here’s a bulletin-board discussion of the sorrowful situation from a bunch of leaf-peeping photographers. And here’s the science of the whole turning-colors thing, from the US National Arboretum.)

Some trees do have a bit of tepid color, with mostly shriveled or mottled leaves. Many trees still sport green leaves, a thing ordinarily unheard-of at this time of year. Another bunch went from green to brown without passing through a colorful stage. Added to that, it feels as though we live in Seattle-on-the-Atlantic: rain and gloom, day after gray day.

Makes a person grumpy.

The poetry you know and the poetry you don’t know

The New Neo Posted on by

Some of you who’ve read this blog for a while may recall that I like poetry, and that as a child my school assignments included memorizing a lot of poetry.

And so it is that often when I’m thinking about a subject—even a political one—a poem or line of poetry comes to mind. It happened the other day with, of all things, Saddam Hussein’s trial and the poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath. And it just happened again with a comment to my nepotism post.

When I was composing that comment, I had to look up Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” I hadn’t read it in decades, and I was struck by the fact that in this single poem there are at least three famous lines–lines that have become, to a greater or lesser extant, part of the buzzing hum of sayings—cliches, really—that swirl in our heads and have become part of our popular knowledge base whether we’re aware of them or not.

Often, we haven’t a clue as to where these sayings come from or why we know them. But many come from poetry, even if we don’t know the poems any more.

Here are the lines (or, in one case, phrases) from Gray’s Elegy that I’ve tagged as famous. You may not know all of them, but I bet you know at least one, even if you detest poetry and have never read the poem:

The short and simple annals of the Poor.

The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

Far from the madding crowd‘s ignoble strife,

The same is true for Shakespeare, Robert Burns, countless other poets—their words have seeped into our culture and become so much a part of our language that they are almost indistinguishable from proverbs such as a stitch in time saves nine; waste not, want not.

As I was musing about this, it struck me that this fact is no longer true of recent poetry. Gone are the memorable and quotable phrases that become well-known—unless, of course, you count parodies such as the “who blew up da owl?” jokes at LGF and elsewhere, making fun (and rightly so) of the erstwhile poet laureate of New Jersey, Amiri Baraka.

Who can recall a single line from a poem written in the last fifty years that has become commonly known? And, lest you think the lack is just because it takes time for these things to catch on and percolate, who can nominate a line of recent poetry that you imagine has even a chance of living on for future generations?

One of the last poets who wrote such things may have been Frost, and perhaps Eliot. Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in; I took the one less traveled by; Not with a bang but a whimper; April is the cruelest month—there are quite a few.

But as I rack my brain trying to think of a more recent example of a memorable poetry line that has seeped into the public consciousness, all I can come up with is the first line of Ginsberg’s “Howl” (so far I can’t find the text online, so there’s no link to the full poem itself): I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness… As it serendipitously turns out, the poem was first declaimed by Ginsberg almost precisely fifty years ago: on Oct. 7, 1955, to be exact.

Practically everyone knows the line; almost no one has read the poem (have you? I haven’t). Ginsberg was somewhat of a one-trick pony, as far as I know–that line caught fire, but not much of anything else he wrote ever did, although he remained a celebrity for most of his life. It’s also odd that the line tends to be misquoted as “I have seen the best minds of my generation…” and, in that misquotation, is often used for the purpose of parody (see this for examples).

So perhaps we can date the death of the poetic quote as household word–and to poetry itself as having any sort of deep importance to most people outside of the narrow range of literary academia or a few stalwart diehards such as myself—to its swan song fifty years ago, Ginsberg’s “Howl.” If any of you can think of a truly famous line of recent poetry other than outrageous travesties such as Baraka’s, I request that you hereby submit them. And by “recent,” I mean within the last fifty years.

(And by the way, if anyone has in mind the vaguely famous line from “The Gift Outright” by Frost, recited at John Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural—“The land was ours before we were the land’s—no dice. The poem was actually written in 1942.)

Dinner party politics and how to avoid them

The New Neo Posted on by

I think I’m making progress.

A year or two ago, when I would go to a party and the inevitable comments would come up, apropos of nothing–Bush is evil, Michael Moore’s movie is the repository of Speaking Truth to Power, those Swift Vets are a pack of Republican lying scum and vicious attack dogs, etc. etc. etc.; I would turn red in the face and have to leave and go cool off.

And now? Now when I go to a party and the inevitable comments come up, apropos of nothing–Bush is evil, we are a pack of murdering marauders in Iraq, Abu Ghraib was the equivalent of the political killings and imprisonments in Iran under the mullahs, etc. etc. etc.; I turn red in the face and have to leave and go cool off.

You don’t see the difference, you say? Well, here’s the difference:

(a) The comments no longer surprise me.
(b) I no longer get quite as red in the face, and my cooloff period is shorter.
(c) When I return, I don’t try to argue with or convince anyone (i.e., I’ve given up on logic and facts, and have accepted that this is the way it is with certain people).
(d) The intensity of my need to talk about these things is somewhat mitigated by the fact that we’re no longer facing the possible election of John Kerry.
(e) The intensity of my need to talk about these things is somewhat mitigated by the fact that I have a blog.

All in all, I consider that progress. You may not. But at least it makes get-togethers a bit easier for me.

One thing it does drive home when it happens again–as it did last night–is that most intelligent liberal people still consider what they read in the MSM to be the simple, unadorned, basic Truth. And not just to Power.

[ADDENDUM: Oops! Sorry I failed to make myself clear. I’d alluded to this before, in my “about me” section, but from responses in the comments section I can see that, obviously, I need to say it again and say it clearly: I’m fully out of the political closet, perhaps even obnoxiously so. At last night’s get-together, everyone present knew full well exactly how I feel. I’ve had it out with all of them many times, and I’ve given up.

I’ve also spoken up with strangers, and I find that if there is a certain level of reasonableness to their comments, we can have a conversation. If they’re way over the top, I know at the outset–from bitter and repeated experience–it will be fruitless. Sometimes I don’t speak up then, and sometimes I just say a sentence of disagreement and move on.

Rest assured though, I’m one of the more vocal people on this issue. It’s cost me a lot of grief and I’ve gotten a lot of flak for it, and I soldier on–just not again and again with the same people.

And please don’t tell me to make new friends! Or rather, you can tell me, but my answer is that I like these people and enjoy their presence. They just turn into Jekyl-Hyde dimwits when politics rears its ugly head.]