Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

M. vs. W.

Like every other liberal in America, I am trying to figure out what I think of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11. I went to see it last night after having read Christopher Hitchens's long denunciation in Slate, and so my expectations were low. So low, in fact, that it exceeded them, and I found myself saddled with a wish to sort out why and how.

There is a lot of outrage and bluster in Hitchens, who thinks the movie is worse than "a piece of crap." But after you cut away Hitchens's vitriol and scenery-chewing, there remain in his piece several important challenges to Moore on matters of fact. One of the most damaging, I think, concerns the members of the Bin Laden family who were granted permission to fly out of the United States on 13 September 2001, when commercial airlines were still grounded. Moore insinuates that the permission came from the White House as a reward for years of subsidies and favors that the Bin Laden family had granted to the Bush family and its friends. But Hitchens notes that on 25 May 2004 Richard Clarke contradicted earlier testimony to the 9/11 commission and asserted, "I take responsibility for it. I don't think it was a mistake, and I'd do it again."

Since Clarke is currently a hero of the anti-Bush left for calling the Bush administration neglectful of the Al Qaeda threat before 9/11, his assertion effectively kiboshes use of the anecdote as partisan ammunition in the style that Moore is attempting. But whether the decision was Clarke's or George W. Bush's, it still seems odd to me. And here, I think, is why I liked Moore's movie more than I expected to: Even when he bungles the details of his reporting, he exposes in visual, accessible form aspects of the story that may seem to be business-as-usual to old foreign-policy hands but will be upsetting to mainstream America.

Clarke's defense seems to be that the FBI vetted the Bin Laden family members, and therefore, he believes, "It's very funny that people on the Hill are now trying to second-guess the FBI investigation." To anyone outside the intelligence community and inside-Washington circles where the pull of the Saudis is evidently common knowledge and it is gauche to wonder at it, this won't quite fly. Two days after the terrorist attack, the intelligence community had enough time on its hands to give a special pass to Bin Laden's relatives? The issue isn't whether they should have been kept in the country indefinitely against their will, but why they had enough clout to fly in airplanes when ordinary American citizens could not.

Hitchens writes that "Either the Saudis run U.S. policy (through family ties or overwhelming economic interest), or they do not." But is the middle rigorously excluded? Isn't it possible that the U.S. might have demanded more cooperation in the investigation of Bin Laden's support system in Saudi Arabia and yet omitted to, because it would have inconvenienced too many friendships at high levels?

Hitchens lands another blow when he points out that Saudi Arabia opposed the changes of regime in Afghanistan and Iraq and that Bush has thus acted against their will in both wars. Moore's simple-minded conspiracy falls to the ground. But here too, even though Moore gets the story wrong, he puts on the screen a miasma that will disturb many. No, Bush probably didn't go to war against Iraq in order to please the Saudis, or to distract people from his family's involvement with them. But can anyone really believe that it wouldn't be corrupting for two generations of an American family to trade political influence and connections in Washington for investments from an oil-rich family in highly undemocratic Saudi Arabia? Wouldn't such a history have inculcated such habits as disregarding the welfare of the mere citizens of Arab nations, putting family loyalty ahead of political principles, and cynically trading political favors for financial ones? The scene in Moore's movie of a younger George W. Bush boasting that he plans to make a tidy profit out of his access to his presidential father's network is old news, but it's still morally wretched. Moore suggests that the younger Bush's first business enterprise, such as it was, was funded by Saudi money. If so, then for his entire adult life the president has thought of the Arab crescent as a place where there is money to be made, if you know the right people and don't ask the wrong questions.

Finally, I agree with Hitchens that Moore paints an absurdly rosy picture of pre-invasion Iraq (smiling children on playgrounds) and irresponsibly implies that, as Hitchens puts it, "Saddam Hussein was no problem." Hitchens points out that "the 30-year record of Baathist war crimes and repression and aggression is not mentioned once." True. But I couldn't really share Hitchens's indignation over the omission. Will there really be anyone in the audience unaware of the other side of this question? I, for one, was persuaded by it in early 2003, so much so that I came to believe that our preemptive war was justified. I read in full Colin Powell's testimony before the United Nations about the evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, and I decided that if you couldn't believe Colin Powell, who could you believe? It felt, at the time, almost treasonous to imagine that Saddam was a problem that could wait, and it feels therefore something like a catharsis to hear Moore's "certainty" that it could have. It turns out, of course, that almost nothing Powell said that day to the United Nations was true---that he allowed himself to be played by the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz team in exchange for some notional continued influence in American foreign policy.

Moore's "certainty" isn't history. A history would have to capture the awful doubt that everyone seemed to be in at the time, including the sense that in order to think straight, you had to disentangle yourself first from a reflexive liberal mistrust of power and then from a conservative psychological blackmail, whose essence was, Do you want to be strong or weak? Do you want to live in a world you believe in, or one where you never trust anyone in power? Saddam was a political evil, and if he could be removed quickly and efficiently, why shouldn't we? There was no a priori reason not to. There were only as-yet-unrealized a posteriori reasons. The objections were varieties of prudence, which always feels like a low kind of reasoning to intellectuals. They were mostly matters of information hygiene---what Clausewitz would have called the fog of war. How sure were we that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and was linked to Al Qaeda? Because if we weren't sure, and we waged a preemptive war, then the moral calculus would shift dramatically if, say, it didn't turn out to be as bloodless and easy a campaign as predicted. We would have squandered about a century of good will. We wouldn't be able to say that we'd had no choice, that it was an honest mistake. In Afghanistan, perhaps, we had no choice. But in Iraq we had one.

From the rest of Hitchens's objections I demur. Moore does not contradict himself when he portrays the homeland defense policies as both alarmist and ineffective. There was a well-reported article in The New Republic by Michael Crowley making the same case in March. Nor is it inconsistent of Moore to point out that there is socioeconomic inequity in recruiting our soldiers mostly from the working class and to argue that "not enough troops were sent to garrison Afghanistan and Iraq." Moore is simply echoing the (now apparently discarded) Powell doctrine: to undertake a military campaign half-heartedly or with inadequate force is to put American soldiers at risk unnecessarily, and society owes them more consideration. It is clearly untrue that Moore believes "parents can 'send' their children" into the military, as Hitchens claims. If Moore thought so, why would he spend so much screentime interviewing high school-age teenagers in Flint about their assessment of the pros and cons of a military career? And I don't think it was "stupid" of Moore to ask members of Congress whether they would urge their children to enlist. A friend of mine was serving in Iraq last year, and my knowledge of that changed the way I thought about the war. It made it difficult to talk about the war with liberal friends with whom I usually agree about everything, and I think it has made my disillusionment now more severe. Remember the article in the New York Times reporting that a son of Doris Kearns Goodwin had enlisted? The hook seemed to be, Look! Someone from a nice bourgeois family is at risk! The shame is that it was rare to find such cases, and the war would have been debated very differently if it hadn't been. Of Bush's segue on the golf course from a discussion of terrorism to quipping "Now watch this drive," Hitchens writes, "Well, that's what you get if you catch the president on a golf course." I can't agree. I think it reveals an attitude never before seen in a president, a humor that depends on a strange erasure of the consequence of the world. And it's harder than Hitchens admits to get one's mind around the footage of Bush in an elementary school in Florida on the morning of September 11, idly following along in a children's reading lesson after he has been told that the World Trade Center has been struck. I think everyone else in the country, and probably world, dropped whatever they were doing the moment they heard the news, in a natural human wish to know more. Bush was able to suppress that response. But of all people on the planet, he was probably the one in whom that curiosity would have been most appropriate. It suggests that he has a fearsome level of self-discipline. I don't think we are watching mere haplessness in that scene. But it is discipline in the service of a worldview that I do not understand.

Not guilty

I'm finally getting around to reading Timothy J. Gilfoyle's City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920, which I should have read ages ago. So far, the census of brothels is impressively synoptic, and the writing is lively. It opens, unfortunately, with a misunderstanding.

Gilfoyle writes that in 1857 William Berrian, a preacher in Trinity Church, confessed to his congregation that "during a ministry of more than fifty years I have not been in a house of ill-fame more than ten times!" (18). These do seem to be the words that Reverend Berrian spoke, as reported by the diarist George Templeton Strong. Gilfoyle thinks that Berrian was admitting to fornication. "So commonplace and central was prostitution to metropolitan life that even the philanderings of a prominent minister hardly shocked New York," he writes.

I'm afraid Gilfoyle has made the classic anthropologist's mistake: he hasn't realized the natives were joking. As Gilfoyle himself observes, the diarist Strong wasn't ruffled by the confession, and that should have been his first clue, because Strong was not a libertine. Furthermore, Strong writes that Berrian's sermon was "without anything to offend propriety, real or conventional" (2:318). If it wasn't an offense against even conventional propriety, let alone real propriety, for clergymen to hire prostitutes, then why had there been such uproar in the 1840s over Bishop Onderdonk, who was merely alleged to have fondled a few married women?

I suspect Berrian was playing rhetorically on the legal convention according to which proof of a brothel visit constituted proof of adultery in a divorce trial. By the suspicious codes of the secular world, his visits might have seemed sinful. But he meant just what he said: he had visited brothels fewer than ten times.

And from a rigorously Christian point of view, he should have visited them much more often. The rest of Strong's diary entry makes this clear. "One would think the haunts of fallen women . . . exactly the place for a clergyman to work," Strong reported. "But I suppose fear of misconstruction, honest self-distrust sometimes, a thousand conventionalities and respectabilities always, keep the door close tight." Jesus welcomed tax collectors and harlots into the kingdom of heaven, after all. Berrian meant to urge charity in spite of suspicion. His "confession" was just a mock-outrageous hook, designed to focus his congregants' attention, and Gilfoyle fell into exactly the misconstruction that the minister was sending up.

Bitten

I'm sorry to be linking to something that isn't online, but I can't help myself, and you kids should get out more, anyway. There's been a lot of foofaraw lately about who's the worst critic of his generation. But the best critic of her generation, until further notice, is Terry Castle. Her article in the London Review of Books on lesbian seductress Mercedes de Acosta made me laugh more in twenty minutes than I have in the past month. The only thing in recent memory that compares to it is her essay on Patricia Highsmith in The New Republic, which I pressed on friends until they tired of me. How can you resist someone who writes like this:

The great thing about vampires, after all, was that they really cared about you. They were interested in you personally! So much so in fact that they would rise up out of their coffins, wamble over long distances (all the way from Transylvania) and sneak into your very own bedroom just to suck the blood out of you. It was weird but peculiarly gratifying.

It's in the choice of the word wamble that you know you are looking at genius.

Lebsock's Murder in Virginia and Alexander's Race Man

My review of Suzanne Lebsock's A Murder in Virginia: Southern Justice on Trial and Ann Field Alexander's Race Man: The Rise and Fall of the "Fighting Editor" John Mitchell Jr. will appear in the 15 July 2004 issue of the New York Review of Books.

Props

Gina Gionfriddo's article on mourning Elliott Smith, published in the June 2004 issue of The Believer, is open-ended, well observed, emotionally vulnerable---a lovely essay on fandom, embarrassment, and falling in love with music. It's hard to write about such things without seeming either insular or (much worse) condescending, and she pulls it off.

Derivative of n+1

If you've ever wondered why blogrolls are so long, all you need to do is quietly weed out the items in your blogroll that aren't in fact blogs, haven't changed in months, and are not edited by your boyfriend. Within twenty-four hours, you get email like this:

I was just about to write you a note thanking you for linking to us, until I went to your site and saw that you un-linked! Traitor!

Evidently the young turks behind the new literary journal n+1 have finished their first issue, which will soon be printed, and are consequently greedy of press. Subscribe, because they are as talented as they are ambitious. You want to be in on the ground floor. You don't want to be fishing around on ebay for back issues later, in a desperate attempt to repair the holes in your collection. And you don't want to be on their bad side. (I certainly don't, anyway. The links of everyone, whether quiet or petulant, have been restored.)

Decemberists' show

We saw the Decemberists last night at the Bowery Ballroom. They rock. They played "Sixteen Military Wives," a new song, which proves that in addition to outsider-figures-in-historical-periods rock, they are masters at contemporary-political-protest rock. Are there any angry/ironic rock songs about the Iraq war one quarter as good? (Are there any other ones at all?) It's my most fervent wish right now that they release it as a single in time for the election. (My next-most-fervent wish is that they accompany it with a B-side about Louis Napoleon, child of a famous political dynasty who spent his youth drinking and brawling and of whom little was expected, whose 1851 coup was facilitated by the deliberately created but misleading impression that he would be almost liberal or at least, well, compassionately conservative, but in fact led France into a few dozen years of imperialism.)

Immemorial

In a juxtaposition in the report in this morning's New York Times of a news conference that Bush gave yesterday, was there a comment on Bush and Reagan's legacy? The Times reported thus:

Despite the continuing tensions, Mr. Bush appeared relaxed and at times almost ebullient as he took questions for 40 minutes, ranging from reflections on Ronald Reagan's presidency to the failure so far to find banned weapons in Iraq.

When the subject turned to the treatment of prisoners, Mr. Bush said he could not remember whether he had seen secret Pentagon and Justice Department legal opinions that concluded he had broad authority to determine what techniques could be used to interrogate unlawful combatants seized in Afghanistan.

Remembering, not remembering . . . Until this week's snow of obituaries, I wouldn't have associated Reagan with a line such as "Tear down this wall." The phrase most closely linked to him in my memory was, rather, "I have no recollection of that." Perhaps it was natural for Bush to move in conversation from recalling Reagan to not recalling the memos justifying torture.

He admits to being an attentive student of Reagan's style. Famously, in two interviews that he granted to the Tower commission in January and February 1987, Reagan said that he "had no recollection" of telling his national security adviser Robert C. McFarlane in July 1985 to go ahead with a proposed arms-for-hostages deal in Iran. Asked whether he had approved the shipment of arms from Israel to Iran in August 1985 before or after the fact, Reagan wrote to the commission that "Try as I might, I cannot recall anything whatsoever." Nor could he recall signing a 2 January 1986 order authorizing covert action, though he did recall signing a later version of the same order (New York Times, 28 February 1987). In February 1990, during the trial of John Poindexter, Reagan testified 124 times that he did not recall details of the Iran-contra scandal (UPI, 23 February 1990).

Autism, literacy, and natural selection

I stayed up past my bedtime last night, engrossed in Paul Colllins's Not Even Wrong, which intercuts a memoir of his discovery of his son's autism with a history of the condition. Collins is kind of a historical magpie. He puts into his book everything from the story of Peter the Wild Boy---found in the woods of Hamelin, Germany, in the eighteenth century and adopted by George I of England---to the nastiness and imposture of Bruno Bettelheim.

Some of the bright, shiny facts collected by Collins started me on a speculation. Autism comes in different levels of severity, and it seems to be heritable. In the 1943 article where he first described autism, Hans Asperger noted that "We have been able to discern related incipient traits in the parents or relatives in every single case" (p. 90). Collins inventories proto-autistic traits in himself, his wife, and their parents: enthusiastic list-making, fascination with texts and systems, attention so narrow that it causes "selective hearing." He talks to researchers who have found a high incidence of autism in the children of engineers. When he gives a talk at Microsoft, Collins is surprised that many in the audience seem to be playing with their laptops instead of listening to him. It turns out they are listening to him but prefer to do it via the company's internal webcast.

All this set me wondering. There's been a lot of concern recently that the incidence of autism seems to be rising. Some have put the blame on the mercury-based preservatives in vaccines given to children, but a government panel last week found no link. (Collins hasn't mentiioned this yet, but like I said, I'm only halfway through.) What if the cause is something else entirely? What if it's assortative mating?

In other words, what if the premium that the information economy puts on cognitive skills and the advent of the two-career marriage has created a new situation, in which people with mild proto-autistic behaviors are more likely than ever to find each other and wed? This is a bit wacky as a hypothesis, because I'm suggesting more or less that the mind is evolving, observably, in response to extremely new conditions. But assortative mating is a powerful force. And actually, the premium on literacy (and the behaviors that enhance it, such as intense focus and comfort with solitude) has been in place for several centuries now.

College, in this light, would be a breeding ground for autism, because it encourages people who score well on standardized tests to socialize and mate with one another. So would places like Silicon Valley, Seattle, and the Greater Boston area, because the computer industry brings together people with proto-autistic traits in unprecedented concentrations.

I also wonder, sometimes, whether a high rate of depression in the modern world might be a side effect of a premium on literacy. Humans weren't originally built to sit still for long periods of time while paying close attention to inanimate objects. They were built to pay close attention while pursuing their four-legged dinner, or while conversing with other humans. Some evolutionary psychologists think that depression was originally designed as a "shutdown" mode to detach a person from a task that looked as if it would be unsuccessful. What if it turned out to have an unforeseen second use in a literate world, because it made a person willing to sit still at length, in isolation? It could be that the genetic innovation that would isolate this boon from the other traits associated with depression (dysphoria, suicidal ideation, etc.) hasn't yet arrived, and we're stuck with a situation where people who like to read are also people prone to depression. Of course, it could be that the human temperament hasn't changed at all, but that when humans are encouraged to sit still for long periods, they become prone to depression. (I think there's a paper to be written by some enterprising experimental psychologist on the relation between webpage-loading time and perception of self-esteem. Between two people, a delay in response is usually perceived as a slight, and a human who's browsing the internet must, at some precognitive level, perceive its responsiveness to him as a measure of his social status.)