Neener-neener? Hilary Clinton says of Bush and Iraq: “We should expect him to extricate our country from this before he leaves office.”

While I can see why she doesn't want the next president to inherit Iraq, and it is pleasing to imagine Bush alone having to shoulder the burden of his own disastrous legacy, this is a terribly foolish thing to say.

Whichever option a senator and presidential candidate supports for an exit date—immediate, phased, indefinite, never, etc.—the timing should be based on the need to address a problem of potentially incalculable dimensions, not on the convenience of the next officeholder or a child's notion of just desserts.

Compare the magnitude of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq with the pettiness of this utterance. Is there any hope for a country that combines such grandiose militarism with such vapid leadership?  ¶ 11:19 AM 0 Comments

  The first paragraph I stop blood.

I stop it between rounds for fighters so they can stay in the fight.

Blood ruins some boys. It was that way with Sonny Liston, God rest his soul. Bad as he was, he'd see his own blood and fall apart.

Now, if a literary agent reads this, say, in a literary review like ZYZZYVA, he's going to think, this is a guy I need to send a letter to. And he drops FX Toole's name into the open form letter on his computer, and then he keeps reading first paragraphs all through the journal until he find another good first paragraph. When he's done, he does a mail merge and runs off to the post office. I know this because I read an article in a literary review by a literary agent named Nat Sobel, and he cited this first paragraph as one that caught his eye and led to beaucoup money and success for everyone. Sobel says when he's hunting writers, he only reads the first paragraph of each piece, and suggests that this kind of skimming is industry-standard.

Actually, that FX Toole is smarter than Sobel realizes, because this excerpt Sobel quotes is technically three paragraphs. Toole tricked Sobel into dropping his guard. A bit of advice from a wily old boxing cut man: write short paragraphs.

I think many writers who write literary work want to believe that the form gives them license to do all sorts of creative things that they couldn't do if they were writing sitcoms or motorcycle reviews. Reading Sobel's piece makes me doubt this. The form of literary writing seems to be quite narrowly prescribed. Of course, Nat Sobel isn't the only agent, and there are many literary reviews, but the sum of it is an industry feeding a market for novels. A short story is really like an advertisement for a writer who wants to publish a novel, and the market for novels seems mature enough to know what it wants—maybe after reading that all-important first paragraph.

Many of the writers I feel the most kinship with didn't come up through literary reviews. Spalding Gray, Joan Didion, Garrison Keillor, David Sedaris, David Antin, George Orwell, John Fante—none of these writers wiggled their way through literary journals, and I wouldn't call all of their best work precisely novels. I don't think I can emulate any of their approaches, but I'm hoping to find some way to work that's a bit less of a Kabuki dance and a bit closer to the accidents and contingencies of life.

Maybe I need to become a cut man.  ¶ 9:08 AM 0 Comments

  Teenager grounded from TV? That was written on LA Times newspaper racks, as an advertisement. I had to think it over to figure out what they could mean. I'm still not sure, but I think they mean to offer their paper as an alternate source of entertainment for those facing any sort of television embargo.

This sounds as desperate as Bush asking us to give it one more try. I understand newspapers are having a hard time with circulation, but this ad seems counterproductive to me. You picture a bunch of ad guys sitting around thinking, OK, who might use a newspaper? Well, let's see, it would have to be someone without TV. Power outage? No, too temporary. Who, then. Who?

What's next?

"Hey homeless guy, need insulation for your cardboard house?"  ¶ 1:27 PM 0 Comments

  Amateur writing I'm reading "Death in the Afternoon," Ernest Hemingway's book about bullfighting in Spain. It happens that there were both amateur and professional bullfighters, and Hemingway neatly slices the difference. An amateur, he says, enjoys the event more than the people watching it. Only when the bullfighter can promise that the spectators will enjoy it more than he does would someone have the appropriate economic basis to start selling tickets.

Those of us who write without being paid for it often hesitate to claim our vocation. Hemingway's distinction could be useful here: we are amateur writers, because we apparently enjoy writing our pieces more than our readers enjoy reading them.

Being an amateur writer is a bit pathetic, but it's better than being a bull.  ¶ 3:16 PM 0 Comments

  Morality has nothing to do with it "Isn't this sight enough for the world to stand with us?" An Iraqi blogger named Mohammed wrote these words after the bombing at the gates of al-Mustansiriya University, which killed 70 people, mostly students. He cited accounts by witnesses that cell phones were going off in the pockets of mangled bodies. The callers were their parents, wanting to know if they were OK.

"Who pays the price?" Senator Boxer asked Condoleeza Rice on the floor of the Senate. "I'm not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old and my grandchild is too young. You're not going to pay a particular price ... with an immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families."

Senator Boxer touched off a mini-tempest, with Tony Snow calling her remarks anti-feminist, but while she was arguably trying to poke Rice in her barren womb, she was also trying to do the same thing the Iraqi blogger tried to do: appeal to our sense of morality to sway opinion on the Iraq war. For the blogger, the murder of children at a university should convince nations like France that have stood on the sidelines to step in and save Iraq from fundamentalist Islamic violence. For Boxer, the fact that it is only the military and not the decision-makers which suffer the burden of sacrifice should weigh against a troop escalation.

With due respect to all those who have written seriously over the years about the morality of war, I think we would do best to leave questions of morality aside in looking at Iraq. We are not facing a moral problem in Iraq, but a practical one.

If our problem were a moral one, it would turn on a moral principle. For Mohammed, this would be, "Can we ignore the brutal infliction of violence on fellow human beings?" For Boxer, it might be, "Should we order someone else to make a sacrifice we ourselves will not share?" Since the supposed answers to both of these questions suggest conflicting actions were we to apply them, they might together yield a third moral quandary, "Is it worse to ignore the suffering of others or to attempt to quench it by ordering others to make a sacrifice we ourselves will not share?"

Who really thinks our problems in Iraq turn on answers to questions like these?

From the beginning, our problem in Iraq has been a practical one, not a moral one. There is certainly a moral dimension to the situation, but appreciating this moral dimension is of no real help in solving our problem. When I don't fear being manipulated into a foolish mistake, I'm as ready as anyone to agree that terrorism is bad, tyranny is evil, freedom is good, wars are sometimes justified. But these and other moral truisms, while seemingly of serious concern, are beside the point.

In the run-up to the war, I argued with a war supporter who said we had a moral duty to invade Iraq. He admitted that we didn't know how likely it was that Hussein would use his WMDs (sic) on us. But he said we couldn't afford to take chances, because if WMD's killed thousands, their blood would be on our hands. I told him I couldn't see how this was a moral problem, because the thousands killed might well include us.

It would only be a moral problem if only the lives of others were at stake, in which case he could argue that a moral principle required us to value those other lives as highly as our own. Since we were having the argument in Los Angeles, this was not an issue: we were as likely a target as any, so if I was willing to take the chance, I was taking it with my own life as well as with others' lives.

He then wanted to know why I was willing to take the chance with my own life. I replied that there were risks in invading Iraq as well, so there was no choice that did not involve risk. I chose continued weapons inspections as the best way to manage the risk. It was just a question of weighing one risk against another. Rather stubbornly, I think, he continued to argue for a moral dimension to the problem. Finally, I offered an analogy to firefighting. There are many ways to allocate firefighting money: prevention efforts, equipment, training, recruitment and retention, etc. If I were to argue in favor of more fire safety inspections, and he were to argue in favor of buying more sophisticated fire trucks, would we be having an argument that hinged on morality? After all, other people's lives are at stake!

We would not, because we have no argument about the value of the lives, only about the most practical way to protect them. In the same way, we, as Americans, are not facing a moral conflict in Iraq. We all agree it would be a good thing if Iraq was a decent place to live for its people and an ally to us. The problem is bringing that about.

We are now asking whether that is more likely with us or without us, and exploring the vital corollary questions of what to do if we stay or of how best to leave. It is a difficult discussion with no easy answers, but most everyone agrees it is a question of choosing the least worst option, whichever that is.

We need clarity to sort this question out. We won't get clarity by pumping up our rhetoric with irrelevent talk of morality. We all agree on the relevent points of morality: the problem is that nothing moral can be accomplished by a failed policy. The only important question now is how to limit the extent of our failure, and that is a practical question, not a moral one.

Labels: Foreign policy, Morality

  ¶ 8:11 AM 0 Comments

  Free story idea I don't write fiction, but I had this stray idea for a character, so whoever gets it first can have it. All I know about him is that he's a retired high school English teacher and he buys a ticket for every night of a run of "Death of a Salesman." Each night he sits quietly through the performance until Willy Loman comes into the kitchen and tells his wife, "I slept like a dead one." Then the retired teacher stands up and yells across the theater, "Foreshadowing!"  ¶ 7:23 AM 0 Comments

  The last word on circumcision In yesterday's post, I pointed out that circumcision is the kind of bottomless hot topic that people just cannot stop themselves from arguing about. I claimed that two of the major issues in circumcision cannot be discussed reasonably. This, I think, is why so few of us can avoid trying, and also why the discussions never end. Yesterday, I tried to show that it is senseless to argue about the pain the infant feels. Today, I'd like to end discussion about whether or not circumcision lessens the pleasure of orgasm.

The idea here is that snipping off the foreskin, which is rich in nerve endings, dulls the intensity of sensation. To judge this claim requires that we compare the way an orgasm feels to a circumcised man to the way it feels to an uncircumcised man. This poses a special problem.

By point of contrast, consider a related objection to circumcision, which is that the foreskin serves as a handy lubricated sleeve for the glans. This claim is perfectly amenable to reasoned inquiry, because the evidence needed to judge it is publicly available to both the snipped and the unsnipped. An uncircumcised man can experience the benefits of his foreskin, and imagine what it would be like to forego these benefits. The circumcised man can sample the benefit of other forms of lubrication, and picture the convenience of having this feature built in. Both can weigh this benefit against the cost of routine hygienic maintenance. This is an argument that at least makes sense, and I encourage people to argue about it as much as they like.

No such comparison is possible, however with the claim that an uncircumcised orgasm feels better. It is not enough to merely compare two alternate physical arrangements: we also must consider the brain’s interpretation of sensation. We cannot assume that having fewer nerve endings necessarily means experiencing less pleasure. It may be, for example, that the brain calibrates itself to register sensations based upon the number of nerve endings extant, so that altering the number of endings from days after birth would do nothing to alter the experience of the intensity of pleasure.

As an example of this possibility, consider the eye’s interpretation of color. Take a roll of daylight color slide film, and shoot three photographs without using the flash. Take the first outdoors, the second indoors under incandescent light, and the third indoors under fluorescent light. The first photograph will have what we consider normal color, the second will be yellowish, and the third will be green. This is because each light source has a different color temperature, and the daylight film is balanced for daylight and electronic flash, which share nearly the same color temperature. Our retinas physically register the same differences, but we do not usually see these differences because our brains calibrate for the discrepancies without our even being aware of it.

In the movie "This Is Spinal Tap," Nigel proudly exhibits an amplifier that he has had custom made. He shows the character of the filmmaker the volume knob, and it is marked not up to the usual 10, but to 11. In the dialog that follows, the filmmaker tries to gently question whether the amp is any louder than other amps just because the knob is numbered up to 11. His point is that the volume knob does not measure a specific quantity of volume at each numbered level, but merely represents a proportion of the total volume available on that amp. It may be that there is a baseline minimum of the appropriate type of nerve ending to afford any orgasm at all, and if we physically meet this threshold, the brain affords us a ration of pleasure proportionate to the percentage of our endings that are stimulated. If so, then the uncircumcised who claim they are having a more pleasurable orgasm than their circumcised brethren are making the same mistake as Nigel.

This speculation may be completely untrue, but it is impossible to know, because verifying this would require comparing the private sensation experienced in one person’s brain with the private sensation in another person’s brain.

Suppose I claim to have a higher tolerance of pain than you do. I offer as proof that I went to work with a headache, while you stayed home with one. You suggest that your headache was more painful than mine. I disagree, claiming that mine was more painful than yours. You say that you could not stand up without unendurable pain. I say I couldn’t either, but I was able to endure it because I have higher tolerance for pain. How is this argument to be adjudicated?

Or, try this one, borrowed from the philosopher Wittgenstein: Imagine that we each have a box, and in this box is something we all call a 'beetle.' We all say we know what a beetle is only from looking in our boxes, and we cannot look in each others' boxes. We could each have anything in our boxes. There is no way I could ever know how the contents of my box compares to the contents of your box.

The intensity of pleasure provided by an orgasm is like this 'beetle.' We know it only from looking in our own box, and we cannot look in anyone else's box.

Not even the stories of men circumcised as adults can resolve this problem, even if these men were to be unanimous in their reports. These reports only reveal what it is like to experience sex first as an uncircumcised man, and then as a man circumcised as an adult. This might be a different experience than that of only ever having been the one or the other. It is possible, for example, that the brain trains itself with one experience, and then must re-train itself for the other experience. A re-trained brain might interpret signals differently than a once-trained brain.

Arguing about whether or not circumcised orgasms are less pleasurable than uncircumcised orgasms is pointless. No amount of rational inquiry could resolve the question.  ¶ 8:56 AM 0 Comments

  The second to last word on circumcision The online magazine Salon recently published an excerpt from Neal Pollack’s new book Alternidad. In the excerpt, he recounts a bitter fight within his family over whether his baby son should be circumcised or not. The piece received over 450 responses. Some of them take sides in the family drama, and some of them recycle the various pro and con positions on circumcision. A remarkable number of letters began by expressing dismay that so many people consider circumcision a topic worth discussing, when there are so many more important things to worry about. These letters inevitably proceed, you know, as long as they are posting anyway, to explain why circumcision is obviously either beneficial or horrific.

I will not offer an opinion one way or another, but I would like to show how the intuition that it is frivolous to debate circumcision may be justified logically.

Specifically, I would suggest that it is senseless to argue about two aspects of circumcision. My arguments may require close attention, as they are philosophical in nature, but they have an important benefit over other arguments you’ve heard on the subject. Regardless of what your position is on circumcision, once you’ve read my arguments, you will never have to argue about it again.

One important issue is the question of what value should be placed on the pain the infant feels during the procedure. People who oppose circumcision suggest that this pain must be taken so seriously that only a medical necessity would warrant its infliction. Circumcision supporters do not think pain should be inflicted on infants wantonly, but see the momentary infliction of pain to be a minor cost that is eclipsed by the value they ascribe to the procedure, even in cases when they judge this value to be minimal.

If two people disagree on this issue, there is no sense for them to debate it. The reason is that nobody remembers the pain of infant circumcision, and this fact has a different meaning to different people. This becomes clear when one asks who is experiencing the pain of infant circumcision.

There are many views of selfhood and identity, but many stress the roles of memory or causation in allowing us to assemble the disparate moments of our life into a coherent identity. I am me, I might claim, because I climbed a tree in front of a brick house, cried in bed while wearing headphones, made a classroom full of his students laugh, etc. I remember these things, so they happened to me, and my memory projects this me backward through time, just as my imagination supposes this me will extend forward in time, at least for a while. These experiences also affected me, and I bear evidence of these effects in my psychology and physiology.

The circumcised have no memory of circumcision, and the pain of circumcision leaves no readily identifiable causal effect on them. Even if we suppose some sort of subconscious memory, or the pain has some sort of hidden effect on their post-infant selves, it is not possible to separate the presumed subconscious memory or hidden effect of this pain from the memory or effects of other infant pain, such as that of colic or of childbirth itself.

Those who wish to counter this argument might put forth a theory of identity that doesn’t require memory or causation, or they may simply demand that we embrace the infant in the moment of his suffering as a human, without worrying about whether he’ll remember it in the future. I have nothing to say against these arguments. All I want to do is point out that they routinely make no impact on anyone who doesn’t already agree with them, in the same way that being asked whether the adult remembers the infant pain makes no impression on others.

The situation is comparable to the horror that some people experience when they learn that surgical anesthetic often includes an amnesiac along with a painkiller and a sedative. These people fear the idea of experiencing pain and having no memory of it later. Other people, given the same information, feel that if they will have no memory of having had any pain, then it won’t have mattered. People with different views on this issue generally terminate their conversations about it with disbelief that the other could believe as they do, and then go their separate ways.

Conversations about the morality of abortion that turn on the humanity of the fetus seldom end so amicably, but they share the same result: mutual expressions of disbelief that the other could believe what they claim to believe.

These two arguments share with the argument about infant pain the problem of being conducted across an unbridgeable divide. The opposing viewpoints are grounded in opposing basic, underlying beliefs about the nature of being, beliefs that are themselves located beyond the reach of merely rational inquiry.

Tomorrow, I’ll show how why a second issue central to the circumcision debate is senseless to discuss.  ¶ 5:53 PM 0 Comments

  Margaret Cho overdraws her black account I love Margaret Cho, but I found myself cringing while watching her "Revolution" DVD today. She shifts her voice/gesture/body language rapidly between stock characters, sometimes so rapidly that for a moment you aren't sure who you are hearing. For example, in one moment she straightens her back, opens her eyes wide, and purses her lips, and she is a shocked, prim Asian woman. Or she might spread out her arms, bend her elbows up and her wrists out, extend her thumbs and her first two fingers, thrust out her chest and cock her head to one side to momentarily become a black ghetto chick with attitude.

This is where I think she runs into trouble. This particular characterization, to which she returns again and again, is what a friend of mine would call 'unearned.' Her other various poses as Asians or gays all riff on more fully realized characters she has previously introduced in the body of her work. The black ghetto chick with attitude, though, appears without context. She is just a trope, presumably available to Cho only because she has watched Jerry Springer.

I can see the allure of this role for her, because she can employ it as an inversion of a demure Asian character. But there is a problem with this. When she borrows from our cultural stereotypes to enact a demure Asian, she is simultaneously investing her own created persona back into our cultural conception of the Asian female. She enriches our concept of the Asian female. But she offers no fully realized black woman character in “Revolution,” or anywhere else in her work as far as I remember. She merely helps herself to an alter ego borrowed from black female identity, with all its history and its struggles, without making any concurrent investment back into that same black female identity.  ¶ 9:39 PM 0 Comments

  Oprah's Burden Check out Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post, who is disappointed in Oprah. She is funding a $40 million school for girls in South Africa, and she explains her choice in this quote: "I became so frustrated with visiting inner-city schools that I just stopped going. The sense that you need to learn just isn't there," she said. "If you ask the kids what they want or need, they will say an iPod or some sneakers. In South Africa, they don't ask for money or toys. They ask for uniforms so they can go to school."

Robinson feels she is unfairly slighting inner city youth, whom he reminds us are predominantly black and Hispanic, and counters that if she is complaining that these children are materialistic, then the same is also true of American children and American society as a whole.

What troubled me was not so much Oprah's allegation that inner city kids are materialistic, but her insistence that beneficiaries of her charity be free of this flaw. The cause of this insistence is perfectly clear. Like any philanthropist, she doesn't merely want to help someone: she wants to be part of a narrative. In her case, she wants to feed the hunger for knowledge among the impoverished.

Alas, narratives have their imperatives. This one requires that she dismiss other hungers as vulgar, even such hungers as she herself might otherwise court, such as when lining up advertisers for her media empire.

Having spurned the vanity and philistinism of our domestic poor, she has been forced to extend her search for properly noble paupers in the imperial manner. Away to the dark continent!  ¶ 9:10 AM 0 Comments

  Infant jokes Some suggest that laughter is a kind of nervous response, bubbling out of us when we experience fear despite being in no actual danger. The things we fear in social settings are the perfect catalysts for this, which is why most of our humor is about sex, racism, politics, bodily functions or stupidity—all the things we are anxious about blundering over in social situations.

Even such thin jokes as puns can be explained by this anxiety theory, because puns reveal instabilities in our language. Any joke that depends on shift, imbalance or incongruity is covered, since our brains must be wired to scan for these as possible indications of a threat.

This fear theory of laughter also explains the jokes infants enjoy. My boy is eight now, but I remember the two jokes he liked as an infant, and I am sure they will be familiar to anyone reading this. One of them might be thought of as crude and the other sophisticated, but they both play on situations so primal that we already fear them just weeks from birth.

Both jokes are, of necessity, physical comedy. The crude one goes like this: with baby lying on back, adult nuzzles belly while making growling sounds. "Oh shit," baby thinks, "I'm being eaten by a wolf! Oh, no, it's just Daddy."

My dad kept this joke up until I was ten years old, by which time the basis for the humor had shifted. By then it rested solely on our mutual awareness of the absurd incongruity between my soft, delicate skin and the coarse sandpaper of his unshaven face. He even had a name for this: a schwattermoggle. This, I gather, is German for, "Ha! Watch as I torment a helpless child."

The sophisticated joke also has a name, one you will effortlessly supply as soon as I describe the joke. Adult makes eye contact with baby. Adult suddenly secludes eyes behind hands or natural barrier. Adult reveals eyes again and simultaneously rejoins eye contact.

Baby thinks, "I am joined in the world by others of like consciousness to mine. Oops, no I'm not! I'm alone—alone in a world empty of consciousness other than mine! Oh, wait—the eyes are back again."  ¶ 11:22 AM 0 Comments