The Casual Blog

The Wall Street Journal is a great newspaper, and its greatest isn’t undermined, by its ultrca onservative opinion pages.  The opinon pages define right wing lunacy so that any child can understand it and keep a safe distance.  It serves as a type of zoo, where the oddities can be confined and observed.

 I ordinarily find the opinion pages overly bitter, and review them only when I’m prepared to deal with a sudden spurt of adrenaline and bile.  Yesterday, though, I saw a piece by Michael Mukasey and Michael Hayden on the American Torture Program, and I just had to have a look.  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123993446103128041.html

The immediate occasion for Mukasy and Hayden to spew was the new Administration’s release of CIA memoranda sitting forth in detail tactics such a hooding, slamming heads against walls, and water boarding used on captives of interest.  Mukasey and Hayen attacked the release of the memos and also attacked those who doubt that their techniques were effective and always applied with appropriate discretion.

Most of the argument was generalized fear mongering of the type that the Bush administration used for eight years to keep the citizenry terrified or at least confused enough to vote Republican.  They remind us of the rare but dramatic events of violence by Al Queda and assure us there will be more if we don’t take drastic measures.  The problem with these arguments is that they contain some truth — not 100 percent, but some.  There are bad guys who will do bad things if we don’t don’t stop them.   But our gentle authors believe we must at all times have at our disposal the tools of torture to stop them.  

They appear to take no account of the Geneva Convention and other international law that makes such activity illegal.  They also appear to have ignored completely the effect that our systematic violations of international law have had on out international standing.   They and their associates in the Bush administration have stained our national honor.  For citizen bystanders like me who failed to protest against the medieval horrors, our moral compass has been compromised.  For those who organized and carried out the tortured program, a part of their soul has been destroyed.

Could the terror program have been worth the huge cost to our country?   Could it have saved so many lives that our moral concerns would seem exaggerated?  We have almost no evidence of such achievements.  Many intelligence professionals contend that torture is unnecessary and ineffective in obtaining useful information.   Hayden and Mukasey say otherwise, but for evidence they cite only with one example:  the case of Abu Zubaydeh, an al Queada operative.  When one first reads their descriptions, it sounds like the torture proved its effectiveness in getting Abu Zubaydeh to give up useful intelligence about high level terrorists.

But Abu Zubaydeh gave up all his useful information before he was subjected to sessions of water boarding and other brutal tortures.  This is explained in a front page story in today’s New York Times.   http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/18/world/middleeast/18zubaydah.html?hp  The torture sessions of Abu Zubaydeh did not result in useful information, because he’d already given up all his useful information. If  the Times is correct,  Mukasey and Hayden have intentionally misled their readers.  Hard to believe that  the CIA and DOJ leaders and defenders of the torture system would do such a thing.

The back page of last Sunday’s Times Book Review had an essay on the experience of memorizing poetry. My own experience is surprisingly similar to that of the author, Jim Holt.  He notes that he is in the process of memorizing Tennyson’s Ulysses.  I already did that one, three months ago.  

My own tastes and efforts overlap at several other points with Holt’s — certainly Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats.  But he seems to have missed Blake and Wordsworth.  I was surprised he didn’t mention Frost and Stevens, which are important elements of my inner library .  On the other hand, he has a strong interest in Robert Browning, who so far hasn’t captured my attention.  No matter.  It’s nice to make contact, even indirectly, with a fellow poetry memorizer.  Most days, it’s a solitary activity.  

So why do it?  For Holt, “it’s all about pleasure.”  I agree, there’s pleasure in it, but that much is true of chocolate cake, and poetry is a more complicated experience.  Even finding a satisfactory definition of a poem is elusive.  Both Donne and Whitman write poetry, but their aspirations, structures, and messages are very different.   It’s challenging to begin constructing a defense of this odd activity when it’s so difficult even to define it’s subject.

Nevertheless, it’s enriching.  The richness at times evokes the experience of music (rhythm, harmony, melody) and of memory.  It refocuses the senses, sometimes on internal sensations, sometimes on the wider world of nature and of human constructions.  Reading great poetry brings life to life.  

To really experience a great poem, it’s necessary to read it many times.  To experience it even more deeply, it should be memorized.  

I first tried memorizing a poem a couple of years ago primarily with the thought that my memory could use more exercise, which was true enough.  I continued with few more poems with the thought that it would be a nice resource to entertain myself if  ever I was trapped on a ski lift or an elevator.  I persisted as I discovered that I felt different and better merging my self with the incredible beauty of great poetry.

Sally mentioned last night how much she was enjoying studying French with the Rosetta Stone program and taking the PADI scuba course on line.  It’s really fun to learn something new, she said.  This is very true.  Exploring new things is almost by definition interesting.  So why focus on poetry?  No reason.  (Just feeling.)

My car is a little island of happiness for me every day.  Every errand, every commute, and every road trip, I think, how beautiful it is, how intelligent, how powerful.  I have had cars that I served me well as transportation pods, and I was grateful to them, but this one is much more than that.   My BMW 335i Montego blue coupe is wonderful.  

Yet I’ve sometimes felt a tiny twinge of a combination of embarrassment and frustration regarding this car.  Not that I think it’s excessive (though I can see that point of view).  Rather, I have never used its full potential, and probably will never do so.  The power (electronically limited top speed is 150 MPH) and the sport tuned suspension is designed for driving that I never get to do.

It was good, then, to take the car to Virginia International Raceway last Thursday for the Porsche Club’s spring event.  The track, out in the country not far from Danville, Virginia, is 3.27 miles of twists, turns, rises, and falls.  There’s grass around most of the outside, and trees beyond that.  It’s an excellent place to drive.

As a novice driver, I was accompanied by an instructor.  Chad Lackey was a friendly, experienced, and very helpful teacher who never got visibly alarmed at my driving.  As I told Chad, I always remember my first teacher of everything, and I’ll definitely always remember him.

The day was drizzly and foggy, but this may have kept us particularly on our toes.  Anyhow, we went.  I was primarily hoping to 1. survive, 2. not hurt the car, and 3. have some fun, and I got those three things done.  I also learned some things about what driving can be about — timing, precision, focus, getting the right line, feeling the changing suspension, sensing the point just inside the danger zone.  Technical driving is a lot more challenging than it looks.  

There was, of course, a bit of fear.  We had to wear helmets, which brought home that this is a serious business.  We were also advised that running off the track in the wet grass is more than normally hazardous.  Cars can flip.  I had a few bursts of fight-or-flight when my back end fish tailed during the rainiest run.

But the adrenaline was mostly pure, strong, and good.  And I felt at last that my car was doing what the brilliant engineers at BMW created it to do.  The car’s potential was not fully realized by me that day; I’m confident it could have done much better with a better driver.  But at least its potential wasn’t completely wasted.  We had a taste of something new.   This could be the start of a new phase of our relationship.

Lots of things are blooming in our neighborhood — pear trees, red buds, cherry trees, forsythia, daffodils, and yesterday I saw  the first azaleas.  The cardinals, chickadees, and titmice are singing loudly.  Today it’s in the mid-sixties.  Definitely spring.

So, it’s time once more to address the game of golf.  This could be the big year.  The one to get over the hump, once and for all.  To never again find that the ratio of fun to frustration is such that it raises dark questions as to one’s ultimate purpose.  To find instead the beauty, the magic, the thrill of the well struck little white ball.  

So, I signed up for lessons at Golf Tec, and went to my first lesson yesterday with Rob G.  The basic idea there appears to be to use as much technology as possible to teach the game.  Lots of cameras, computers, and measurements.  I love gadgets, but I worried at first that this could be mere gimmickry.  Once I was strapped into the various instruments and into my evaluation, I started to believe.  Having clear measurements and clear video of my situation made me understand it better.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that the camera clear showed that I’m still doing some of the bad things I’ve tried hard to stop, e.g. coming over the top.  Rob  G. proposed some drills as homework.  

I did a short session at the Knight’s Play range after the lesson, and found that my new swing thoughts had a significant negative effect on my results.  Not surprising, of course.  It’s hard to learn new things.  I predict the frustration factor will continue to be significant in the near term.  In the long term, there’s always hope.

The death this week of the Seattle Post Intelligencer as a printed newspaper is just the latest of a number of press fatalities, and more are sure to come.  As a former newspaper boy (delivering the Winston-Salem Journal and Sentinel), newspaper writer and editor (the Oberlin Review, Winston-Salem Journal), and lifelong newspaper reader, I’m a newspaper addict.  Although I get most of my newspapers online now, the thought of breakfast without actual newsprint is intolerable.  The Raleigh News & Observer is getting weaker by the month, as personnel and features are dropped and advertisers desert, but it’s an old friend that I’ll stick with till the end.    

This morning the N&O reprinted a column by Nicholas Kristof about the decimation of U.S. daily newspapers and the rise of the internet press.  He pointed out, as is well known, that one side effect of this is that on the web each person serves as his or her own editor, making the content choices that have traditionally be done by professional journalists.  

Kristof focuses on our tendency to gravitate to information sources that spin news according to our political leanings.   It might be Fox News, or it might be the Huffington Post; the important thing is, it’s obviously filtered.  That’s not entirely new, of course; people have preferred papers that accord with their political views ever since there were papers.  But now it’s more possible than ever to filter out disagreeable views.

There’s recent scholarship indicating that the more we talk with those who share our biases, the stronger those biases become.  Liberals talking together get more liberal, and conservatives more conservative. The net of this tendency is to make it harder to communicate with those with opposing views, because the views are harder to understand.

The danger is the threat to critical thinking, in the sense of thinking that critically examines its own premises.  There’s never been much such thinking, and it’s disturbing to think that as we become more and more citizens of the internet, there could be less and less.  

Kristof suggests that a possible solution:  a daily workout in the spirit of a trip to the gym in which we intellectually spar with persons we disagree with.  So Kristof  indicates he may be take up reading the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.  Somewhat in the same spirit, I’ve tried watching Bill O’Reilly, but that probably doesn’t count as a real workout.  He occasionally gets me exercised, but mostly he reminds me of Stephen Colbert.

This morning, the second day of spring, and the first Saturday, I made it to the gym for a swim while it was still dark, and got to Ritter Park just as the sun was coming up.  Ritter has  playground with swings, a ball field, a picnic shelter, and a trail that runs by a creek.  It’s not a remarkable park, but it’s convenient for me.

For the first time in some months I got my binoculars out and scouted for birds.  I saw chickadees, cardinals, robins, tufted titmice, and goldfinches, and heard along with those a red tailed hawk.  Just the usual local birds, but I’m hoping to see migrants in the coming weeks.

This week the NYT reported that a third of the bird species in the U.S. were endangered, threatened, or in serious decline.   http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/20/science/earth/20bird.html?emc=eta1.  Some of the causes are short term, like urban sprawl and logging, and part is probably climate change.  

This is disturbing news.  The broad decline is consistent with my experience.  Each year, there seem to be fewer birds to see.

Still, it’s great to take some time to breathe deeply and listen and look at these amazing creatures.

There’s a new biography of John Cheever by Blake Bailey reviewed in last week’s Economist.  I enjoyed Cheever’s stories years ago, but I doubt I’ll get back to them any time soon, and also doubt I’ll read the biography.  But one of the great things about book reviews is, if you read the review, you don’t have to read the book to get something out of the book.  

This review had a fine little aphorism by Cheever.  Because many of his stories were rather depressing, someone asked him why he bothered to write.  He said, “I write to make sense of my life.”

Torture is not easy to think about, or to talk about.  But we need to do it.  Until we sort through the sordid business of America’s torture policy under George W. Bush, our moral standing will remain compromised.  If we think justice is important, there is no more compelling issue.

Over the past several years, Mark Danner has spoken out powerfully on our torture policy in the New York Review of Books.  He has summarized his most recent piece in today’s NY Times op ed piece “Tales from Torture’s Dark World.”   http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/opinion/15danner.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Danner obtained confidential reports prepared by the Red Cross on the treatment of 14 detainees originally held in CIA black sites and transferred to Gauntanamo, and summarizes them in his latest work.  It’s bad.  Just about everything that could be done to mentally and physically brutalize humans was done.  Isolation, stress positions, extreme cold, starvation, brutal beatings, water boarding — more or less the same medieval tools used by the Spanish Inquisition.  

There is, of course, a reasonable likelihood that the tortured detainees were guilty of serious crimes.  As Danner points out, they probably deserve to be tried and punished.  The great irony of our torture policy is that it makes it unlikely that this will ever happen.  We’ve already seen cases from Guantanamo dismissed because the accused had been tortured.  In these types of cases, torture deprives society of the possibility of rendering justice.   Our most basic constitutional values have been sacrificed.

We do not yet know for certain whether our torture policy obtained vital information that couldn’t have been otherwise obtained.  It’s difficult to believe that any benefit to the national interest justified the sacrifice of our morality and our honor and violations of international law.  Danner believes the effectiveness, or lack of thereof, should be the subject of congressional inquiry.  Likewise, we need more information about the perpetrators of this policy.  It appears that Cheney, Rice, Ashcroft, Tenet, and other senior officials received daily reports on the torture techniques applied to the detainees.  

If there is to be any redemption from these medieval horrors, we need to begin with careful, thoughtful examination of what was done in the name of the war on terror, and a recommitment to the rule of law.

America’s war on drugs has been a catastrophe.  The immediate human cost of criminalizing recreational drug use is staggering, with millions of lives wasted in prisons that are schools for real crime.  The economic costs are also huge.  The war creates a separate off-the-books, criminal economy that is enormously profitable, and the forces of organized crime in turn corrupt the forces of order.

We waste billions of dollars a year on fighting drugs, and we”ve been doing this for decades.  It’s now clear there will be no victory in this war.  We have caused untold misery, and accomplished close to nothing.

This waste and hopelessness of the war on drugs is usually invisible to those not in prison or inner cities, but it’s coming into sharper focus.  Afghanistan is a failed narco state, and Mexico is on the brink of becoming one.  Drug lords have armaments and forces that are more powerful than the police, and are sufficient to battle the federal army.  Mexico had  6,000 drug related killings in 2008, and beheadings and shootings are almost routine.  Corruption of the police is rampant.  The possibility that our southern neighbor will become ungovernable is now real.  This is serious.

Last week The Economist, a reasonably conservative publication, put this issue front and center in its cover story, “How to stop the drug wars.”   http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13237193

The British weekly put the issue simply:  “legalisation is the least bad solution.”  The benefits of legalization are many:  ending the drug gulags, reducing the scope of organized crime, reducing corruption, and saving billions of dollars of public resources.  If we taxed and regulated the recreational drug business, we would have sufficient funds for new programs of education and treatment and resources left for other valuable social programs.

There will be problems, including risks of more addiction.  But we already accept those risks with regulated alcohol and tobacco (a much more dangerous substance than most illegal drugs).  We manage them with public education and medical treatment for addicts.  We ban sales to minors and raise prices to limit consumption.  Europeans have experimented with these approaches, and have shown that they work.

We need to put this issue on the public agenda.  Our drug war is more than a tragedy — it’s a time bomb, and it’s ticking.