April 2009 Archives

By releasing the torture memos and then rebuffing calls for an independent truth commission, the president is doing much worse than cementing a reputation for compromise: He's siding with the rightwingnuts and with all the Congressional pols -- Republicans and some Democrats -- who want to bury the past. Does Barack Obama truly believe that "looking forward" without laying blame will erase what happened during the Bullshitter-in-Chief's regime? Does he really want to become known as the Eraser-in-Chief?

In another context, he might find it worth reading Benjamin Schwartz's article in the current Atlantic, describing how the Nazis established the genocide of the Jews as a pervasive "open secret" so that all Germans would be made complicit. Then, as long as I'm on the subject, he might read Nick Bravin's article in the current Foreign Policy, describing how Lithuania's chief war crimes prosecutor has -- tragically and absurdly -- targeted Jewish Holocaust survivors as war criminals. And finally he might want to hear Mandy Patinkin sing the Yiddish song Oyfn pripetchik, accompanied by images to remind him of history's worst war crime -- because he apparently needs that kind of reminding.

Postscript: April 25 -- From Josh Brown's point of view:
PPS: May 15 -- To release pictures of detainees being tortured like this one will "further inflame anti-American opinion" and put U.S. troops at greater risk, says Mr. Obama, who is fast becoming the Eraser-in-Chief. But ordering more drone attacks that kill indiscriminately -- including this strike in Afghanistan -- won't? Americans who voted for him believed he would spare the bullshit. Sadly, he is proving them wrong. I recall Paul Krugman saying way back before the Bullshitter-in-Chief was returned to power in 2004 that if "regime change" comes he hoped the next administration would "throw open the records" and not be "too magnanimous" to the BananaRepublicans. Five years later regime change has come, but that hope fades with each passing day.

In London The Guardian posted its obit Sunday at 9 p.m., which means it went live in New York at 4 p.m. But this morning's print edition of The New York Times makes no mention of Ballard's death.

OK, print is slow -- but not that slow. And how come there's no obit on the NYT Web site either? Not even a link as of 8:50 a.m. ET this morning on its obit page, which looked like this. (Screen grab, right).

It's not as if the news was The Guardian's alone. Or that Ballard was unimportant. Here's the lede from the obit in The Times of London:

Pinteresque, Dickensian, Shakespearean. Not many writers are so distinctive and influential that their name becomes an adjective in its own right. J. G. Ballard, who died yesterday morning after a long battle with cancer at the age of 78, was one of them.

It goes on to cite the dictionary definition of "Ballardian" as especially suggestive of "dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments."

I heard about Ballard's death from a friend via email at 7:10 p.m. ET on Sunday. And another friend at realitystudio.org let me know at 8:29 pm ET: "There's already a thread on the RS forum."

The Telegraph's obit was posted Sunday at the equivalent of 4:53 p.m. ET. The BBC had an obit posted at the equivalent of 5:19 p.m. ET. And Yahoo posted the AP obit at 11:40 pm ET.

There were other postings, too, like Michael Moorcock's, which was probably the earliest, or the blogpost at REsearch and the one at Ballardian. Even the Los Angeles Times has posted an obit and, what's more, an appreciation. So somebody was asleep at my paper of record.

(Crossposted at Huffpo)

Postscript: April 21 -- This morning's NY Times carried a well-made Ballard obit, describing him as "a writer of dystopian, literary fiction whose novels and short stories of a contemporary society in insidious thrall to technology, the media and relentless progress both expanded and defied the genre of science fiction."

Bravo for that. It's nice to know the editors were not too busy celebrating the paper's five Pulitzer Prizes to overlook the news of his death. It would have been nicer, though, had they acknowledged his importance by playing it on the Web site's obit page above Doc Blanchard's. Ballard is likely to be remembered in the historical record long after "a Heisman Trophy winner [who] teamed up with Glenn Davis on the unbeaten Army teams of the mid-1940s," no matter how "storied [that] backfield pairing" was.

Meanwhile, Michael Moorcock has posted a striking tribute to Ballard, who was a close friend of his for 50 years. It is heartfelt and revealing, and offers personal history as well as literary context.

This is my twitter to the world
That never twittered me --
The inane things of daily life
Deserve obscurity.

Incessant streams of messages --
They come in starts and fits --
What one's eating, whom one's dating --
A universe of twits!

-- Leon Freilich
(He's our Calvin Trillin.)

Postscript: June 15 -- Looks like Emily made a bad guess ... see "Iran's Twitter Revolution." "I was also wrong about YouTube a few years ago," she says.

All the Hemingways I saw were going for stratospheric prices. Well, not exactly going. More like asking. If I remember correctly, a signed presentation copy of the rare Paris edition of in our time had a price tag of $465,000. Signed firsts of Ulysses by James Joyce and Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot didn't come cheap either. We're talking six figures of course. But I wasn't in the market to buy.

I had dropped into the New York Antiquarian Book Fair at the Park Avenue Armory to speak with Ken Lopez about my signed books. He concentrates on "modern firsts" of mid-20th-century authors, and especially the Beats. Over the years I've acquired a few shelves of signed books by authors I met as a journalist or knew as a friend: Nelson Algren, Norman Mailer, Studs Terkel, John Cheever, James Michener, Mary Hemingway, Gay Talese, Paul Theroux, Jules Feiffer, Emmett Williams, et al.

It was my association copies of William Burroughs firsts that I most wanted to ask him about. Lopez is noted among book collectors for championing association copies and the stories that go with them. In the wider world he made a splash three years ago when he brokered the sale of a private archive of Burroughs papers to the New York Public Library, reportedly for $1 million. The good news is he liked what I showed him, and he let me video some of the books he had on display. (Click the photo for the video, or watch below.)

Does the Council on Foreign Relations Depredations merit another name change, i.e. the Council on Foreign Federal Depredations? To judge by Patricia Cohen's report on its recent conference about the Great Depression, I think so.

She writes that New Deal critics like the author and syndicated columnist Amity Shlaes, a senior fellow at the council who helped organize the conference, regard Roosevelt as "a well-meaning but misguided dupe," although they "credit him with some [italics added] important innovations, like restoring confidence in banks and establishing social insurance."

Most of Roosevelt's "mucking about in the economy," as Cohen summarized their argument, "not only prolonged the Depression but also exacerbated it."

We've all heard about this, uhm, theory. It's been so loudly bruited of late -- not only at the council's posh headquarters on Manhattan's Upper East Side but by rightwingnuts everywhere -- that even the penguins at the Central Park Zoo can repeat it.

Unemployment remained high throughout the decade until World War II, Ms. Shlaes told conference attendees, because the uncertainty created by Roosevelt's continual tinkering paralyzed private investors. ...

Many of the economists who were invited to speak were similarly skeptical of the New Deal, even if they disagreed on the Depression's causes. ...

Anna Schwartz, who collaborated with Milton Friedman on a classic study of the Depression, and the Nobel Prize winner Robert E. Lucas Jr. argued that the idea of stimulating the economy with federal spending is a fairy tale.

Did the council present an opposing point of view? Non-panelists were able to question the rightwingnuts. But, as Cohen noted, "To Roosevelt's defenders, the speaker list seemed stacked with attackers."

...from Hassan Sabbah:

Listen to my last words, anywhere!
Listen all you boards, governments, syndicates, nations of the world,
And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory,
To take what is not yours ...

I bear no sick words junk words love words forgive words from Jesus
I have not come to explain or tidy up
What am I doing over here with the workers, the gooks, the apes, the
dogs, the errand boys, the human animals?
Why don't I come over with the board and drink Coca-Cola and make it?
"Now for God's sake, do not let that Coca-Cola thing out!"
Thing is right, Mr Whoever is responsible for that whodunnit!
Explain how the blood and bones and brains of a hundred million
more or less gooks went down the drain in green piss!
So you on the boards could use bodies and minds and souls that
were not yours, are not yours, and never will be yours.
You want Hassan Sabbah to explain that? To tidy that up?
You have the wrong name and the wrong number!
Mr Luce Getty Lee Rockefeller
"Don't let them see us, don't tell them what we are doing!"
Are these the words of the all-powerful boards and syndicates of
the earth?
...

"Don't let them see us! Don't tell them what we are doing!"
"Don't let us pay"
Are these the words of the all-powerful boards, syndicates,
cartels of the earth?
The great banking families of the world
French, English, American?
Like Burroughs, that proud American name?
Proud of what exactly? Would you all like to see exactly what
Burroughs has to be proud of?
The Mayan Caper, the centipede hype,
Short time racket, the heavy metal gimmick?
All right, Mister Burroughs, who bears my name and my words buried
all the way
For all to see, in Times Square, in Picadilly,
Play it all, play it all, play it all back!
Pay it all, pay it all, pay it all back!
...

"Don't let them see us! Don't tell them what we are doing!"
Are these the words of the great nations, the all-powerful boards
and syndicates of the earth?
These are the words of liars and cowards and collaboraters and
traitors,
Collaborators with insect people,
With any people anywhere who offer you a body forever, to shit
forever.
For this you have sold your sons forever,
The ground under unborn feet forever!
Traitors to all souls everywhere!
You on the boards, who want others to pay for you,
With your deals to take what is not yours!

Thus has the ghost of Hassan Sabbah returned to haunt you. And that's not the end of it. For the rest of us, "no one is excluded."

(Crossposted at HuffPo)