Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

High lonesome

"Lonely Together," my review of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick (W. W. Norton) and Loneliness as a Way of Life by Thomas Dumm (Harvard University Press), appears in the 31 October 2008 books section of The National (Abu Dhabi, U.A.E.).

The campaign in posters

Having missed by about an hour a chance to buy Shepard Fairey's newest Obama poster, I fell down the Google rabbit hole and stumbled into an entire unsuspected world of Obama poster art. The definitive blog seems to be the Obama Art Report, with daily news of auctions, donations, and free downloads. If, however, you'd prefer a Continental synopsis of the scene, a French-writing blogger named Jeremie has culled what he considers the fifty best Obama posters at Visual Evasion, complete with click-through links to the designers, who, in the case of, say, The Match Factory, are still selling the posters and sending the proceeds to the Obama campaign (in their case, to the Nebraska Obama campaign). It was by clicking on one of Visual Evasion's links that I discovered that from now until the election, you can download a poster a day at 30 Reasons, whose number one reason was the very funny poster at left by Chaz Maviyane-Davies. 

 

If you'd prefer to make your own poster, using specially designed pro-Obama letters, try visiting Spelling Change, where you can also make T-shirts and bumper stickers. 

Alternately, you can make a poster by downloading and printing out someone else's. If you download all the pieces of Larry Roibal's poster, which at the molecular level consists of his ballpoint-pen cursive transcription of phrases from Obama's policy proposals, assemble them, and photograph yourself next to them, he'll post the picture on his blog. 

Some charming posters were commissioned by the Obama campaign for their voter-registration and voter-protection project, Vote for Change. Artist Cody Hudson has posted a few, and you can find a couple of others scattered in the open-to-all-comers site Design for Obama, which has the good, the bad, and the unofficial, all of which can be voted on. I was kind of taken with the Newyorkiness (Loisadaness?) of art teacher Robt Seda-Schreiber's Baby Got Hope, below. And last but not least, there are still a few all-typography posters for sale on the Obama-Biden campaign's own website, in the purchase of which you kill two birds with one click. 

Catching Up #3

• For Undercurrent, A. S. Hamrah praises the film criticism of Manny Farber, who was also a painter:

  Asked whether his painting and his criticism had things in common, he answered, "The brutal fact is that they're exactly the same thing." He did not accept the idea there was a difference between artists and critics. ("I get a laugh from artists who ridicule critics as parasites or artists manqués—such a horrible joke.") In fact, his prose equals the subjects he wrote about and often surpasses them. While this may be true of some film critics writing today, saying their prose equals the subjects they write about is not a compliment.

• Who's finer: the Temptations or the Four Tops? At Moistworks, Sean Howe answers by imagining the romance and disappointment of a couple named Bill and Liz:

  Tonight, he puts on "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" and starts singing along, and before long is thinking about the ridiculousness of the idea that begging Liz would do any good at all. As if life was anything like a Motown song. And at the part where Ruffin sings about a crying man being "half a man, with no sense of pride," Bill can't sing along anymore. Ruffin is hitting way too many high notes to be nearly as upset as he claims, and Bill begins to get furious at the record. It feels like some kind of cruel facsimile of pain. The way the other four Temptations buoy Ruffin at every turn, he's not alone, not by a long shot; his buddies have his back, and he's still dancing. Bill thinks that maybe The Big Chill had it right, and that "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" is simply a way to make doing the dishes more enjoyable. He tries not to think about how he is now older than the Kevin Kline and Glenn Close characters.

• For the London Review of Books, Mark Greif parses the disingenuous chic of the television series Mad Men (subscription required):

  Beneath the Now We Know Better is a whiff of Doesn’t That Look Good. The drinking, the cigarettes, the opportunity to slap your children! The actresses are beautiful, the Brilliantine in the men’s hair catches the light, and everyone and everything is photographed as if in stills for a fashion spread. The show’s ‘1950s’ is a strange period that seems to stretch from the end of World War Two to 1960, the year the action begins. The less you think about the plot the more you are free to luxuriate in the low sofas and Eames chairs, the gunmetal desks and geometric ceiling tiles and shiny IBM typewriters. Not to mention the lush costuming: party dresses, skinny brown ties, angora cardigans, vivid blue suits and ruffled peignoirs, captured in the pure dark hues and wide lighting ranges that Technicolor never committed to film.

  Sooner or later, though, unless you watch the whole series with the sound off, you will have to face up to the story.

• In an essay commissioned for my boyfriend Peter Terzian's forthcoming anthology Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums that Changed Their Lives and pre-printed in the November 2008 Harper's, John Jeremiah Sullivan remembers calling up legendary blues savant John Fahey for help in deciphering lyrics:

  A front-desk attendant agreed to put a call through to Fahey's room. From subsequent reading, I gather that at this time Fahey was making the weekly rent by scavenging and reselling rare classical-music LPs, for which he must have developed an extraordinary eye, the profit margins being almost imperceptible. I pictured him prone on the bed, gray-bearded and possibly naked, his overabundant corpus spread out like something that only got up to eat: that’s how interviewers discovered him, in the few profiles I’d read. He was hampered at this point by decades of addiction and the bad heart that would kill him two years later, but even before all that he’d been famously cranky, so it was strange to find him ramblingly familiar from the moment he picked up the phone. A friend of his to whom I later described this conversation said, "Of course he was nice—you didn’t want to talk about him."

  Fahey asked for fifteen minutes to get his "beatbox" hooked up and locate the tape with the song on it. I called him back at the appointed time.

  "Man," he said, "I can't tell what she’s saying there. It's definitely not 'boutonniere.'"

  "No guesses?"

  "Nah."

  We switched to another mystery word, a couple of verses on: Wiley sings, "My mother told me, just before she died/Lord, [precious?] daughter, don’t you be so wild."

  "Shit, I don’t have any fucking idea," Fahey said. "It doesn't really matter, anyway. They always just said any old shit.

Implausibility

Has Milan Kundera been wrongly accused? On 18 October 2008, the New York Times published a second article about the recent discovery of a 1950 police memo that suggests that the Czech novelist may have given information to the police that led to the arrest and 14-year imprisonment of Miroslav Dvořáček, a Czech who was working undercover for a Western intelligence agency. The new Times article, by Dan Bilefsky, describes a further wrinkle in the case:

The mystery became even murkier this week when Zdeněk Pešat, a literary historian and former member of the Communist Party, told the Czech news agency CTK that Mr. Dlask had told him years before that he had reported Mr. Dvořáček to the secret police, most likely because he wanted to prevent his girlfriend from being punished.

As is noted in both the Times article and the original report in Respekt by Adam Hradilek that revealed the existence of the police memo, Miroslav Dlask is not a new character in the drama. He was a close friend of Kundera's at the time that Dvořáček was betrayed, when the two were in film school together. I related the somewhat byzantine story in an earlier post, but here's a recapitulation: While on an undercover mission in Prague in 1950, Dvořáček by chance ran into a childhood friend named Iva Militká, whose ex-boyfriend Miroslav Juppa was working undercover with Dvořáček. Dvořáček asked Militká to hold onto a suitcase and promised to come by her dorm and pick it up later that day. Naively, Militká told her then-boyfriend Dlask about the mysterious visitor and asked him to stay away that evening, explaining that Dvořáček would probably want to spend the night. Someone seems to have passed the information along to the authorities. When Dvořáček showed up to claim his suitcase, the police were waiting for him.

Militká told Respekt that she had nightmares about Dvořáček for years afterward, and Respekt reports that Dvořáček himself seems to have believed her guilty of turning him in up until the time of a stroke he suffered earlier this year, which apparently has rendered him incapable of communicating. Dlask and Militká went on to marry, and according to Militká, Dlask admitted to her that he told Kundera about Dvořáček but refused to say more (Dlask died in the 1990s). And it is Milan Kundera's name that appears on the recently discovered 1950 police report as the informant. The memo is careful to specify that Kundera was bringing third-hand information:

Today at 4pm, there arrived at this police station the student Milan K u n d e r a , born 1 April 1929 in Brno, residing in Prague district 8 in the student dormitory on King Jiří VI St., and he gave the information that in this dormitory there lives a student Iva M i l i t k á , who communicated to the student Dlask, of the same dormitory, that on this day she met in the Klárov neighborhood of Prague with a certain acquaintance Miroslav Dvořáček. The latter, it is said, gave her the custody of 1 briefcase, saying that he would come for it in the course of the afternoon of 14 March 1950. On the basis of this declaration, constable Rosický together with constable Hanton went to the place in question, where they conducted an inspection of the briefcase . . .

Fans and friends of Kundera have naturally wished to find a way to explain the memo away. In the Czech press, almost no one has tried to argue that the memo is a forgery. As Petr Třešňák writes, "To forge a half-century-old police typescript with the appropriate diction, stamps, and knowledge of the context of the case is a feat few could pull off." Zdeněk Pešat's new testimony opens another possibility: Maybe it was Dlask who informed on Dvořáček, and Kundera's name appears on the police memo in error. Or maybe Dlask informed on Dvořáček while impersonating Kundera.

Here, for the record, is a translation of the public statement that Pešat released to the Czech press:

When I read in Tuesday's Lidové noviny about the developments in the "informer" scandal surrounding Milan Kundera and saw the name Miroslav Dlask and a photograph of Iva Militká, an incident from the spring of 1950 came to mind.

At that time I was in the third year of the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University in Prague and a member of the school's Communist Party council. Miroslav Dlask turned to me with the communication that his girlfriend (and future wife) Iva had met with a former comrade, whom she knew to have fled to the West and to have returned apparently illegally. Dlask told me that he had notified security. He felt that he had to inform his local party organization about it. And because we had studied aesthetics together and since he knew me better than any other member of the school Communist Party council, he told me. I assumed that Dlask wanted to protect his girlfriend from the possibility, which could have become a reality, that it was disclosed that she had had contact with an emigrant or even perhaps an agent provocateur from State Security forces. To this communication I in no way reacted, and I spoke of it with no one.

I did not meet with Dlask after college and I put it out of my mind. I am a seriously and incurably ill person, in essence a bedridden patient dependent on a respirator. For this reason I am incapable of meeting with anyone and must refuse any interview. Yesterday, after reading the newspaper, I told my wife about the incident with Dlask. We agreed that I would write out everything I knew about these things, and that's what I have done.

Asked about Pešat's statement, the editors of Respekt insist that they stand by their story. Of course, it's possible that Kundera told the local police department about Dvořáček, and that Dlask told their school's party official about him. It's easy to reconcile Pešat's memory with the police memo by imagining that Dlask told Pešat something along the lines of "We took care of this," meaning that he and Kundera did, and that Pešat either didn't hear Kundera's name or forgot about it later. And Pešat's statement doesn't help at all in explaining how Kundera's name showed up in police records. Indeed, when asked to explain it by the Czech news service CTK the next day (in an interview conducted despite his illness), Pešat merely said that he had received a phone call from Kundera that morning and that Kundera was fighting the allegation and rejected it.

Hradilek and others have raised the possibility that Dlask was jealous of Dvořáček, and turned him in (or arranged to have him turned in) to remove a romantic rival. This possibility, too, fails to exonerate Kundera, unless one also supposes that Dlask impersonated Kundera at the police station. But if Dlask wanted his nose clean so badly that he was willing to impersonate Kundera to the police, then why did he tell Pešat in person? And if Dlask wanted his nose clean, isn't the likelier explanation that he asked his friend Kundera to take the story to the police for him?

Another line of exoneration is the hypothesis that Kundera did turn Dvořáček in, but that he thought Dvořáček was merely a "suspicious person," and had no idea he might be an undercover agent. "Kundera as the foreman of his dormitory was responsible," writes Lidové noviny, explaining a theory put forward by Jiří Pernes of the Institute for Contemporary History. "If Dlask informed him of a foreigner in the dormitory, then he notified the police. At that time, it probably didn't even occur to him that because of this, Dvořáček could receive years in prison. It was for him an episode, and so it's possible he doesn't even remember it." It's an ingenious explanation but not in my opinion a persuasive one. In the police memo, Kundera, or an informer going by his name, relays Militká's statement that Dvořáček "had allegedly run off from the army and perhaps had been living in Germany, where he had immigrated illegally." Whoever turned Dvořáček in knew that Dvořáček was going to be in big trouble.

A number of Czech commenters have complained that Hradilek oughtn't to have published his article until he found corroborating documents. But what if there's only one document, and it's this one? It may be that this is all the evidence historians will get.

Catching Up #2

• Liz Brown reviews a new biography of Emily Post for the Los Angeles Times: "Claridge tracks Emily's rise from vivacious debutante to poised but neglected society wife and mother against the backdrop of the Gilded Age, deftly tucking in such capsule anecdotes as the déclassé Vanderbilts vying for high-society acceptance and instructions for preparing terrapin, which includes a directive one isn't likely to forget: 'Remove the skin from the feet.' "

• Interviewed about his forthcoming book How to Live, Henry Alford admits to thinking, as he accompanied his mother to buy a Chiquita banana costume, “I bet Joan Didion doesn't do this kind of research.” Bonus: On his new blog, Henry deconstructs Louise Bourgeois's love of spirals.

• At Slate, Christine Kenneally reviews Henry Hitchings's history of English (which I reviewed not long ago for the now-defunct New York Sun) along with books on English by John McWhorter, Mark Abley, David Crystal, Roy Blount Jr., and Ammon Shea: "It's hard to resist the urge to pick a particular kind of animal as the perfect emblem for English. McWhorter says it's a dolphin among deer. He calls German, Dutch, Yiddish, Danish, and other close English relatives antelopes, springbok, and kudu. English has evolved so far away from the basic language body plan, he says, that it swims underwater and echolocates."

Strike three

Three moments in Wednesday night's debate struck me as crucial.

#1. Obama described McCain's pettiness:

OBAMA: . . . And, now, I think the American people are less interested in our hurt feelings during the course of the campaign than addressing the issues that matter to them so deeply.

But McCain seemed unable to leave his narcissistic injuries behind.

#2. Obama stood up for women's right to equal pay for equal work:

OBAMA: . . . Senator McCain and I disagreed recently when the Supreme Court made it more difficult for a woman named Lilly Ledbetter to press her claim for pay discrimination.

For years, she had been getting paid less than a man had been paid for doing the exact same job. And when she brought a suit, saying equal pay for equal work, the judges said, well, you know, it's taken you too long to bring this lawsuit, even though she didn't know about it until fairly recently.

We tried to overturn it in the Senate. I supported that effort to provide better guidance to the courts; John McCain opposed it.

I think that it's important for judges to understand that if a woman is out there trying to raise a family, trying to support her family, and is being treated unfairly, then the court has to stand up, if nobody else will. And that's the kind of judge that I want.

SCHIEFFER: Time's up.

MCCAIN: Obviously, that law waved the statute of limitations, which you could have gone back 20 or 30 years. It was a trial lawyer's dream.

This seemed a massive failure of political acumen on McCain's part. I don't think many women voters will be pleased to learn that for McCain, the principle of equal pay for equal work runs a very distant second to the integrity of the statute of limitations.

#3. Obama stood up for unions:

McCAIN: . . . But let me give you another example of a free trade agreement that Senator Obama opposes. Right now, because of previous agreements, some made by President Clinton, the goods and products that we send to Colombia, which is our largest agricultural importer of our products, is -- there's a billion dollars that we -- our businesses have paid so far in order to get our goods in there.

Because of previous agreements, their goods and products come into our country for free. So Senator Obama, who has never traveled south of our border, opposes the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. The same country that's helping us try to stop the flow of drugs into our country that's killing young Americans.

And also the country that just freed three Americans that will help us create jobs in America because they will be a market for our goods and products without having to pay -- without us having to pay the billions of dollars -- the billion dollars and more that we've already paid.

Free trade with Colombia is something that's a no-brainer. But maybe you ought to travel down there and visit them and maybe you could understand it a lot better.

OBAMA: Let me respond. Actually, I understand it pretty well. The history in Colombia right now is that labor leaders have been targeted for assassination on a fairly consistent basis and there have not been prosecutions.

And what I have said, because the free trade -- the trade agreement itself does have labor and environmental protections, but we have to stand for human rights and we have to make sure that violence isn't being perpetrated against workers who are just trying to organize for their rights, which is why, for example, I supported the Peruvian Free Trade Agreement which was a well-structured agreement.

But I think that the important point is we've got to have a president who understands the benefits of free trade but also is going to enforce unfair trade agreements and is going to stand up to other countries.

McCain's complaint here is so incoherent as to be nearly incomprehensible, but he seems to be saying that America had nothing to lose from a free trade agreement with Colombia, as far as tariffs are concerned, and owed Colombia such an agreement because it's an ally of ours. Obama, however, points out that America would lose something: a principled stand on human rights. According to Human Rights Watch, over four hundred labor leaders have been assassinated in Colombia during the six years of Alvaro Uribe's administration, and almost none of the murderers have been brought to justice. And by pointing this out, and by standing up for labor leaders in Colombia, Obama showed his solidarity with union members in America. I suspect this may have been the moment he won their votes. Protectionism is ultimately self-defeating, but it is not specious to object to a free-trade agreement for shifting jobs from countries where workers have civil rights to ones where they don't. Obama demonstrated that he knows when the unions have a point and that he's willing to recognize it publicly. The white working class is said to be the last remaining demographic that Obama needs but is not yet sure of (cf. this great article by George Packer), but if union members were listening, at this moment Obama showed them where he stands.

Kundera and forgetting

"The author is transformed into a figure in a novel," writes Martin M. Šimečka, commenting on the revelation that in 1950 Milan Kundera—then a film student, later a world-famous novelist—visited his local police station and informed on Miroslav Dvořáček, a young Czech pilot working undercover in Prague for a Western intelligence agency. After Kundera tipped off the police, Dvořáček was arrested and eventually served fourteen years laboring as a prisoner in a uranium mine, according to a report by Adam Hradilek of the Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes published in the Czech journal Respekt. Rachel Donadio has a concise account in today's New York Times. Kundera has denied the charge outright, calling it "a total lie" and suggesting that it's an attempt at an "author assassination" timed to coincide with the Frankfurt Book Fair. The headline of the lead story in today's Lidové noviny: "Is Kundera Lying about his Past?" The newspaper writes that "Milan Kundera affirms that he did not betray the spy Miroslav Dvořáček to the police, but it's difficult to explain the existence of the police record any other way." An online follow-up article in Respekt by Petr Třešňák considers the possibilities for reconciling the typescript that incriminates Kundera with his protestations of innocence. Might a friend of Kundera's have stolen his citizen's identity card and impersonated Kundera while denouncing the spy? Given that Czechoslovakia at the time was a morbidly hysterical police state, running show trials and torturing prisoners, it's unlikely anyone would have taken such a pointless risk.

The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes has posted an English-language biography of Dvořáček, along with links to documents relating to him in security archives, including the police memo that names Kundera as the informer.

To some American readers it may come as a surprise that Kundera was once a true believer in Communism. In the West, he's been able to suppress that epoch in his biography, as I explained in "Kundera Is Elsewhere," one of two articles that I wrote about Kundera for Lingua Franca in October 1999:

In the mid-1980s, the dissident Milan Jungmann accused Kundera of having misled Westerners about the extent of his Communist past—of having "turned his biography into kitsch for uninitiated foreign readers." "Half of my life I spent as a relatively unknown Czech intellectual," Kundera had told Philip Roth in 1984. Nonsense, Jungmann countered. In fact, Kundera's name was "a household word" in the 1950s and 1960s. "He was the best-known spokesman of a wave undermining the borders between socialist and world culture," Jungmann wrote. Kundera's poetry, articles, speeches, and plays were eagerly anticipated and widely acclaimed. He won the Klement Gottwald State Prize in 1963 and taught for years in the tony Prague film school that launched the Czech New Wave. In The Joke, Kundera would mock the propaganda surrounding the Stalinist culture hero Julius Fučík, a communist journalist executed by the Nazis. But as Derek Sayer notes in his indispensable history The Coasts of Bohemia (Princeton, 1998), in 1955 Kundera was still so much a part of that culture that one of his own poems portrayed Fučík as a sort of Marxist Christ.

In Kundera's defense, the literary critic Jan Trefulka pointed out last summer in Lidové noviny that "The political loosening of the 1960s did not happen of its own accord." A longtime friend of Václav Havel's, Trefulka, too, was a communist before the Russian invasion turned him into an impeccably credentialed dissident. The Prague Spring owed much to intellectuals of Kundera's and Trefulka's ilk, who laid the groundwork for liberalization inside the Party.

These fierce disputes about Kundera's artistic and political past have been little reported in the West, and here, too, one senses the power of translation's almost invisible hand. The Russian invasion forcibly changed Kundera from a Czech writer into an international writer, whose books were read mainly in foreign languages. Thanks to circumstance and copyright law, Kundera was given an opportunity that most mature artists can only dream about: He was able to decide which of his works he wanted the world to judge him by. Defensibly enough, he has quarantined his early socialism-tinged work. Hard as it is for Czechs to read Kundera's late, capitalist novels, it is much harder for Westerners to read his early, communist poetry and essays. The Czechs, as a result, know a Kundera even more muddied, human, and self-contradictory than the rest of the world knows.

Paradigm shift

In 1928, when Lytton Strachey wrote Elizabeth and Essex, the English-speaking world agreed that torture was an atrocity. When, therefore, Strachey narrated the complicity of Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, in the judicial torture of Queen Elizabeth's personal physician, Ruy Lopez, a Portuguese Jew, Strachey had some explaining to do. Essex was the hero of Strachey's book, and so Strachey had to persuade his readers at least to understand Essex's complicity, even if he could not hope to persuade them to forgive it. In Strachey's telling, Essex is a man of feeling. "One can understand, perhaps, the intellectuals and the politicians," Strachey wrote, "but Essex! Generous, strong, in the flush of manhood, is it possible that he failed to realise that what he was doing was, to say the least of it, unfair?"

Today, of course, a mind accustomed to the idea of torture no longer seems archaic. It's instead the need to explain such a mind that has become historical. As a curiosity, then, here's Strachey's attempt to explain the Renaissance mind to readers whose sensibility had been shaped by the Enlightenment:

The true principles of criminal jurisprudence have only come to be recognised, with gradually increasing completeness, during the last two centuries. . . . No human creature can ever hope to be truly just; but there are degrees in mortal fallibility, and for countless ages the justice of mankind was the sport of fear, folly, and superstition. In the England of Elizabeth there was a particular influence at work which, in certain crucial cases, turned the administration of justice into a mockery. It was virtually impossible for anyone accused of High Treason—the gravest offence known to the law—to be acquitted. The reason for this was plain; but it was a reason not of justice but expediency. Upon the life of Elizabeth hung the whole structure of the State. . . . Her own personal fearlessness added to the peril. She refused, she said, to mistrust the love of her subjects; she was singularly free of access; and she appeared in public with a totally inadequate guard. In such a situation, only one course of action seemed to be possible: every other consideration must be subordinated to the supreme necessity of preserving the Queen's life. . . . It was futile to talk of justice; for justice involves, by its very nature, uncertainty; and the Government could take no risks. The old saw was reversed; it was better that ten innocent men should suffer than that one guilty man should escape. To arouse suspicion became in itself a crime.

Having explained why torture seemed plausible to Elizabethans, Strachey then explained why it was nonetheless dysfunctional and corrupting.

It was in the collection of evidence that the mingled atrocity and absurdity of the system became most obvious. Not only was the fabric of a case often built up on the allegations of the hired creatures of the Government, but the existence of the rack gave a preposterous twist to the words of every witness. Torture was constantly used; but whether, in any particular instance, it was used or not, the consequences were identical. The threat of it, the hint of it, the mere knowledge in the mind of a witness that it might at any moment be applied to him—those were differences merely of degree; always, the fatal compulsion was there, inextricably confusing truth and falsehood. What shred of credibility could adhere to testimony obtained in such circumstances—from a man, in prison, alone, suddenly confronted by a group of hostile and skilful examiners, plied with leading questions, and terrified by the imminent possibility of extreme physical pain? Who could disentangle among his statements the parts of veracity and fear, the desire to placate his questioners, the instinct to incriminate others, the impulse to avoid, by some random affirmation, the dislocation of an arm or a leg? Only one thing was plain about such evidence: it would always be possible to give to it whatever interpretation the prosecutors might desire. The Government could prove anything.

Strachey's final insight concerned torture's effect on the political judgment of its users.

It was, of course, an essential feature of the system that those who worked it should not have realised its implications. Torture was regarded as an unpleasant necessity; evidence obtained under it might possibly, in certain cases, be considered of dubious value; but no one dreamt that the judicial procedure of which it formed a part was necessarily without any value at all. . . . Judges, as well as prisoners, were victims of the rack.

It would take a lot of explaining, in other words, before our great-grandparents would be able to recognize the America we live in.

Mule deaths of late

The Onion this week reprints its issue of 6 October 1783, including such articles as "Thousands More Teeth Lost," "Rural Quaker Scandalized by Intricate Furniture Pattern," "Citizens Now Free to Practise Any Form of Protestantism They Want," and "Mule-Deaths of Late." If, like me, you are the sort who laughs at such things as the Donald Barthelme story "An Hesitation on the Bank of the Delaware," in which a soldier warns George Washington, "But, General, unless we launch the boats pretty shortly, the attack will lose the element of furprife," you will probably appreciate the humor.

The overhead projector strikes back

Last night, during the second presidential debate, John McCain accused Barack Obama of voting for a $3 million earmark for an "overhead projector" for a planetarium in Chicago. "My friends," said McCain, "do we need to spend that kind of money?"

Today the planetarium has defended itself. In a statement on its website, the Adler Planetarium explains that the equipment they wanted to replace is a Zeiss Mark VI projector, not an overhead projector, and the planetarium didn't receive a new one, because the funding effort failed. The existing projector is forty years old, "is only the Adler's second in seventy-eight years of operation," and the manfacturer no longer makes parts for it. Moreover, "the Adler has never received an earmark as a result of Senator Obama's efforts," though they have received some federal support thanks to others, and they aren't bashful about it, because they think science education is a worthwhile cause.