Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

The 9/11 index

I am now about halfway through The 9/11 Commission Report. It represents the triumph of the footnote. No scholar could fail to envy the fastidiousness and real-world coolness of the sourcing, or the casual way that various bits of misinformation are obliterated. For example, on the alternate name of the Manila air bombing, which was planned in 1994 but never executed (p. 147): "KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] also says bojinka is not Serbo-Croatian for 'big bang,' as has been widely reported, but rather a nonsense word he adopted after hearing it on the front lines in Afghanistan" (p. 488, n. 7).

But the report also represents the absence of the index. You can't turn to the back and look up, say,

Pakistan, complicity of

allows Bin Laden to return to Afghanistan, 64
probably warns Bin Laden of upcoming missile attacks by U.S., 117
called "rogue state" by NSC, 124
hosts Al Qaeda training in Karachi, 157

You have to read the text (or failing that, download the whole PDF and search for keywords, but I haven't tried that yet). And so, in the confidence that few people will, the Bush administration is adopting the strategy of patting the report on the head and pretending that it says what they'd like it to have said. Like me, Cheney says that he has read about half the report. It is consoling that someone in the executive branch is reading it. I don't think there's much chance that Bush will. Consider this entry in the as-yet-unwritten index:

daily intelligence briefings

Clinton is "voracious reader" and annotater of, 200
Bush, "by contrast," prefers "face-to-face briefings," 200

Cheney is now claiming that the 9/11 report justifies his administration's decision to go to war in Iraq. So let me do a little more indexing:

Iraq, links to Bin Laden of

Bin Laden proposes to retake Kuwait from Iraq in August 1990, 57
Bin Laden supports anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraq in early 1990s, 61
Bin Laden asks Iraq to host training camps and is refused in 1994-95, 61
meetings between Bin Laden and Iraqi officials in 1998, 66
U.S. attorney accuses Bin Laden of collaborating with Iraq in manufacture of chemical weapons in Sudan in November 1998, then drops charge from indictment, 128; cf. 61, 116
Bin Laden is invited to Iraq but doesn't go in August 1999, 66, 134
Bin Laden follower Mohamed Atta considers Sadddam "an American stooge," 161

And that, so far, is it. The definitive statement in the report remains: "But to date we have seen no evidence that these or the earlier contacts ever developed into a collaborative operational relationship. Nor have we seen evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States" (66). The collusion of Yemen (156, 192), the United Arab Emirates (137), Iran (169), Pakistan (see above), and Sudan (passim) are much more impressive.

The contrast of the Bush administration's alacrity with the Clinton administration's wish to be certain that it had correctly identified the perpetrator of the Cole bombing and the East African embassy bombings before retaliating is instructive. As are the differing accounts of the briefing that departing President Clinton gave to incoming President Bush in 2001. Clinton recalls telling Bush that "One of the great regrets of my presidency is that I didn't get him [Bin Ladin] for you, because I tried to" and emphasizing the al Qaeda threat. Bush doesn't remember that Clinton said anything about al Qaeda. According to the 9/11 report, "Bush recalled that Clinton had emphasized other issues such as North Korea and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process" (199). The discrepancy hardly matters, in the end; Bush would go on to bungle those subjects, too.

Caveat blogtor

It turns out that Saul Bellow warned aspiring bloggers against themselves in 1964:

You must be out of your mind to write to the Times like this! There are milllions of bitter Voltairean types whose souls are filled with angry satire and who keep looking for the keenest, most poisonous word. You could send in a poem instead, you nitwit. Why should you be more right out of sheer distraction than they are out of organization?

Banvard

A few months ago I ran into my friend Paul Collins, who was in town in connection with his fascinating, moving memoir of his son's autism, Not Even Wrong, and I rashly told him that I'd stumbled across an illustration of Banvard's panorama that I'd email to him. Paul wrote about the rise and precipitous fall of John Banvard and his three-mile painting of the Mississippi in an early issue of McSweeney's and in his first book, Banvard's Folly.

I say "rashly," because when I went back to my desk to check my notes, I couldn't find it. Months later, thanks to lucky rummaging, here it is. It's from the New York Atlas of 9 January 1853. The three figures in Renaissance costume beneath the Gothic arches may look like actors in costume on a stage, but in fact they're part of a painting that's unrolling from one hidden cylinder and rolling up on another.

Shootdown

Just read the first chapter of the 9/11 Commission Report, which is pretty unputdownable. Full of things I didn't know. For instance, just five minutes before American 11 crashed into the North Tower, passengers in coach were still "under the impression that there was a routine medical emergency in first class" (6). The probable twentieth hijacker wasn't Zacarias Moussaoui but someone stopped by an immigration officer in Orlando in August (11). As recently as May 2003, NORAD was wildly exaggerating the advance notice it had received of the hijackings; the embarrassing truth is that they scrambled fighter planes because three-quarters of an hour after American 11 crashed, they believed it was still airborne and headed toward Washington, D.C. (34).

And on page 41, though the phrasing is diplomatic, the commission seems to have caught Bush and Cheney out in a lie. Cheney and Bush recall that in a telephone call that took place shortly after Cheney reached a shelter conference room, Bush "authorized the shootdown of hijacked aircraft" (40). Rice and a military aide remember a call that would correspond to the one Bush and Cheney describe. But as the commission delicately notes,

Among the sources that reflect other important events of that morning, there is no documentary evidence for this call, but the relevant sources are incomplete. Others nearby who were taking notes, such as the Vice President's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, who sat next to him, and Mrs. Cheney, did not note a call between the President and Vice President immediately after the Vice President entered the conference room (41).

The timing of the purported call is wrong, too. Based on other evidence, the commission estimates that Cheney entered the shelter conference room at 9:58 am. Between 10:10 am and 10:18, a military aide told Cheney (erroneously, as it happens) that United 93 was 80 miles, then 60 miles away from Washington. Cheney replied to these alerts by twice issuing the order to shoot down the incoming airliner. White House Deputy Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten then "suggested that the Vice President get in touch with the President and confirm the engage order." This call, documented by Scooter Libby's notes, the White House's telephone log, and by notes kept by Ari Fleischer while on board Air Force One with Bush, took place between 10:18 am and 10:20 am.

It's possible that there was a call between Bush and Cheney "sometime before 10:10 and 10:15," as the commission politely estimates (40). But if so, why did it go undocumented? To put it another way, how likely is it that the call issuing the order would go undocumented and the later call confirming the order would be documented by three different notetakers? It seems far more likely that Cheney authorized the shootdown on his own, and Bush backed him up on it after the fact. The only perplexity is why they would have felt the need to camouflage this chain of command.

The Prince

I am losing the battle to keep Louis Napoleon out of my book, which I thought had nothing to do with him. Part of the trouble is that he keeps reminding me of George W. Bush. You know: lesser, largely overlooked scion of a political dynasty; early adulthood on the bottle; represents himself before taking power as the nurturing variant of the law-and-order ideology; not exactly elected; afterwards, empire. But the metempsychotic possibilities are beginning to be uncanny.

Consider the impression that Louis Napoleon made on the National Assembly of France in the fall of 1848. The New York Herald of 27 October 1848 reprints a description from the London Chronicle. At the time, every democrat in France was afraid that Louis Napoleon would stage a coup. They had tried to exclude him from the assembly, but the strategy backfired; five different counties elected him as their representative, in protest. Now the assembly was considering an amendment that would exclude from the presidency "the members of all the families which had at any time reigned in France." Louis Napoleon was the only serious contender the amendment would have inhibited. His parliamentary enemies were once again making a martyr of him---handing him another grand political opportunity.

He seems, however, to have flubbed it. But what's interesting to me is how he flubbed it.

Prince Louis Napoleon, in directing his steps towards the tribune, showed that he was overwhelmed with his position. On his arrival there, he had some difficulty in commencing at all, and at length he came out, in a hesitating and unconnected manner, with the following words:---

Citizens---I do not come before you to speak against the amendment; certainly I have been sufficiently rewarded in recovering all my rights as a citizen to entertain any other ambition. Neither do I come here to make any complaint against the calumnies of which I have been the object. It is in the name of the 300,000 electors who have twice honored me with their suffrages that I disavow the appellation of pretender, which is constantly brought forward against me.

At this point the Prince stopped, hesitated, and appeared inclined to go on, but at length he descended from the tribune, apparently greatly disconcerted, and amidst marks of great astonishment on the part of a portion of the members, and of annoyance on the part of others. The German accent, the confusion, the vagueness and inanity of the words spoken, the absence of all the qualities of a popular orator, had done their work. . . . He has more damaged his cause by this short attempt to speak than by all the past follies of his life. . . . M. Anthony Thouret rose, and in a tone of contempt which was not even disguised, he said that after the few short words they had heard, he was quite satisfied that his fears from the pretender were exaggerated, and that his amendment was needless, and that he therefore withdrew it. The observation was received with loud plaudits from all sides of the Assembly. . . . The Dˆbats says that the words spoken by the oratorical novice produced a marvelous effefct, for that they set those who most feared him quite at their ease.

In other words, the democrats found his accent so hickish, his syntax so garbled, and his style so rhetorically impoverished that they congratulated themselves and misunderestimated him. Note that whatever the democrats may have thought of the speech, it procured for Louis Napoleon exactly what he wanted: the defeat of the amendment excluding him from the presidency. And his enemies let their guard down.

Also found in books (and lost from them)

This will risk being a little pretentious, and will be exceedingly nerdy, but here goes. When I read, I have a habit of writing down any words I have to look up, usually on an old postcard I've repurposed as a bookmark. The postcard-bookmark then gets recycled and years later, I find it stashed in some other book altogether and find myself wondering what book the words came from.

For example, some time after I acquired a postcard dated 22 September 1999, I did not know the definitions of the following: morion, galliot, cope, pentimento, cassowary, tontine, and houding. Hope I haven't just typed the launch code to anything. And, um, I still don't know what more than a few of those mean. My self-improvement scheme doesn't include writing out the definitions. I have a guess about what book this list is from, but I'm not sure.

Here's another: taw, oast, drugget, bullace, sprigged, medlar, sago, and topee. I checked my guess about which book this is from, and my guess is wrong.

Okay, and going back to ancient history---the years immediately following college---I used to keep the same lists in a journal. In this virtuous era, I wrote out definitions. Very early on, I also recorded what books the lists were from. So I can say that spiles, telemark, troll, christy, and khud are from a collection of Hemingway stories. Or maybe the khud is from somewhere else. There are no guarantees as to the single-volume integrity of these lists.

I didn't keep to the discipline of writing down the book titles for long. Nonetheless, I'm pretty sure that the very short list esurient, intercrural comes from Richard Ellman's biography of James Joyce, because I still vividly recall the moment of looking up intercrural, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone who remembers the word "in context," as the vocabulary drillmasters advise.

But I have no idea where this list came from: divot, clepsydra, lentisk, mastic, lictor, and terebinth. A lot of gummy trees, evidently.

Or this one: rennet, mortise, imbrication, lanai, cantilever, cataplexy, quaquaversal, etui, and fescue. For years I hoped to be able to use imbrication in print somewhere, but the postcolonials got to it first and ruined it.

If any of these look familiar, feel free to hazard an identification.

Between the lines

To add to the list of odd items found in books, as chronicled so far by Alex Ross and Our Girl in Chicago, my best find was at the 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library. In the pages of a 19th-century belletrist, I found a bookmark dating from World War II with detailed instructions on how to save lard. Once you had a nice potfull, you were supposed to turn it in at a local collection center. (Obedient dupe of the system that I am, I returned it with the book to the shelves, an act of improvident good-citizenship I regretted almost immediately. I've requested the title again several times since, but the library has so many copies that they've never sent back the same one.)

My next best find was at an estate sale held in a Catholic church in Philadelphia in the mid-1990s. Somewhat incongruously, the deceased had been a collector of early 20th-century books on sexuality. I skipped the ones in German, which was most of them, but I snatched up the 1922 edition of Huysmans's Against the Grain. On the inside front cover, the owner had written, very neatly, "First edition in English. Translation completed." He had pasted in his own translations, typed onto onionskin paper, of passages that the American publisher had found too naughty to include.

Dog intel

I used to think I had figured out the dog brain: Dogs have an associative memory but not a historical one. For example, if dogs hear the jingle of the leash, they know to expect a walk. They recognize people after years of absence, because they are reminded at once of the fondness (or anxiety) they once felt with them. But although they're very good at these associations and remember them a long time, they can't put them in any chronological order. Few dogs like to be on a leash, but if you praise a dog lavishly every time you put the leash on, they submit happily, because no matter how many times it happens, they never really figure out that the state "being on a leash" always follows the event "putting on a leash."

My killer example for this was my dog's response one day to a neighbor she loved more than anyone else in the world (and who is still, I suspect, my dog's favorite person, even though the neighbor has lived on the other coast for the last few years). Returning from a walk, my dog and I saw the neighbor leaving our building. My dog greeted her with enthusiasm and then looked longingly at her over her shoulder as she walked away. Moments later, inside the building, we passed my neighbor's apartment on the second floor, and my dog hurled herself against the door, hoping to find her friend inside. She had recognized my neighbor; she had just said good-bye to her with impressive wistfulness; and she expected her to be waiting inside the apartment we had just seen her leave.

Excellent associative memory, no historical memory. But there's a problem with my model. Whenever we take a trip, the infallible sign by which my dog recognizes that a car is in her future is my red dop kit. Its unzipping sends her into frantic and somewhat maddening barks of joy. If my theory were correct, the unzipping of this dop kit would arouse her when I unpack after a trip just as much as it does when I pack before one. But it doesn't. After a trip, she listens equably, as if she remembers quite clearly that we've just come home. Even if half an hour has elapsed between our return home and the unzipping, she isn't fazed. Is this evidence of a historical memory? Has she remembered a sequence? Or is my original theory correct, and she's picking up a signal, ineffable to me but obvious to her, that overrides the signal of the unzipped dop kit? Such a signal would indicate "This is the unpacking pattern; no rides in the car are associated with it." I haven't been able to isolate the signal, however, and I have a strong incentive to; packing would be quieter if I knew how to trigger it.

The illustration above is from yet another advertisement for a Newfoundland in 19th-century newspaper, the Tribune of 31 January 1849. It's not meant to look like a Newfoundland; it's just the standard icon for dogs in classified ads. The ad reads "CALIFORNIA.---A large Newfoundland DOG for sale cheap. Inquire at the Bird store, 5 John-st." In other words, someone was off to prospect for gold and had decided not to bring his dog.

I saw the worst appetites of my generation

I feel tempted to say something rude, or gauche, or at any rate frowned upon in sophisticated media circles. On the heels of having, through inattentive planning, dined at an Applebee's, I feel like howling in despair over American culture. I know it's green of me to be shocked by an Applebee's, but I'd never eaten in one before, and I wasn't prepared for an environment so thoroughly corrupt. There; I've begun to sound the wrong note, to write in the disallowed tone.

Maybe I had been put off my feed by reading in the morning paper that six months after the discovery of an American mad cow, the government had only just got around to requesting that cow brains and cow spinal matter be left out of lip gloss and moisturizers. Or maybe it was the unfortunate coincidence last week of the National Archives and Records Administration's vow to preserve all U.S. military service records in perpetuity and the Pentagon's admission that the microfilm of Bush's National Guard paystubs had been destroyed (the paper originals, which would not have been so fragile, were no doubt trashed decades ago). Or maybe it was the report from the National Endowment for the Arts on Thursday, according to which the decline in literary reading by Americans has accelerated so precipitously that in the year ending in 2002, roughly the same percentage of American adults attempted to read a novel, short story, poem, or play as were incapable, because of illiteracy, of doing so even if they had wanted to. About 45%. (Note that if 45% tried and 45% couldn't have tried, then there's not a lot of statistical room for change of this trend through mere will power. Campaigns of exhortation won't do much. The culture has shifted, and reading for pleasure is now a minority taste, which will continue to retreat.)

So Applebee's. Blaring televisions were broadcasting the World Series of Poker, sponsored in part by Levitra. That is, an erectile dysfunction drug, which recent history suggests will be used for the most part recreationally, was paying for the glamorization of gambling, an addictive behavior which functions in our country, thanks to the pusillanimity and venality of thousands of state-level politicians, as a regressive tax, and these messages, accompanied by Top 40 radio, were rendering intimate conversation all but impossible. If you weren't on speaking terms with your family, this was a wonderful place to eat. Our table display included an ad for bottled water, for sale at $1.49, in which was mounted a sample bottle, in case anyone was having trouble with the concept. Good luck to the vegetarian---or to anyone who doesn't like to eat animals pumped full of antibiotics, snipped of their beaks, and raised in boxes---in search of a salad without slices of fried chicken in it.

It was a wretched environment, and I felt sour. And I felt sour about feeling sour. I needn't have eaten there, of course, in the larger scheme of things. (In a small town, however, there aren't many alternatives to these big-box restaurants these days.) It's nonetheless dismaying to experience an environment engineered down to the last detail to take advantage of weakness---of the human wish to take a pill rather than change a life, whether the pill be for what the eighteenth century called a cockstand or for diseases like diabetes and high cholesterol that have proliferated because of overweight, which is worsened by consuming the food and drink served in such places. Some have warned that because of obesity the young today may be the first generation in American history to die off before their parents. And now the NEA report suggests that they will read fewer books than their parents in each of the years they do manage to complete.

I expect there will be a lot of worldly acceptance in the next few weeks of the new statistics about literacy, if much attention is paid to them at all, and rants like this one are not very worldly. I know that the link between visual-media supremacy and the structure of restaurants like Applebee's is tenuous, but there is a link: distraction displaces attention. I don't mean to sound like a supercilious shit: I know that not everyone eating in Applebee's is as sloppy as the designers of it hope. But individual will power and self-discipline only go so far; no one really wants to be left outside of group life. In such an environment, eventually you'll forget that it's hazardous to the common weal for people to think they can opt out of worrying about the quality of the water. Eventually you'll drink the high-fructose corn syrup, and the "metabolic shunting" of your insulin system will not be the only shunting you will suffer.