Angelina's crusade Angelina Jolie, in a Washington Post editorial,
supports the International Criminal Court and wants to see more trials of the killers in Darfur and their sponsors. She also wants us to act to prevent further slaughter.

"What the worst people in the world fear most is justice," she declares. "That's what we should deliver."

We should 'deliver' justice, she says, and her diction is well suited to her purpose, if not to reality. It is assertive and muscular, while still suggesting a measured and objective response. Yet her choice of metaphor reveals a grave flaw in her conception. Whether one delivers something, whether a package or a message, the object of the delivery has already been formed or shaped here, and one delivers it by sending it there. We may be right to pride ourselves on our system of justice, but that does not make it a portable entity.

Sure, the ICC should hold a trial when, by accident, luck or politics they actually find themselves in custody of a killer. But since they have no police force and spotty jurisdiction, such rare marvels cannot be offered as predictable consequences for international law-breaking. This is not unjust, but neither is it real justice. It is merely an occasional chance for retribution.

Real justice would require not just the accidental justice of the ICC, but also the creation of a domestic system of justice in Darfur, which would in turn require stability and the return of law. Jolie recognizes this when she calls for airstrikes, military intervention or sanctions. Of these, only military intervention could conceivably establish stability, and there is no reason to believe even it would. Jolie joins President Bush here in making plans to invade a country without a plan for the occupation.

What would tempt liberals like Jolie into urging another foolhardy military action? Only a mistaken belief that there can be a moral requirement to act in the absence of any practical means to do so.

Foreign policy should be guided not by moral compunction, but by pragmatic interests. Doing something is not preferable to doing nothing when we cannot think of anything useful to do. If we don’t know how to run Darfur—and we don’t—there is no moral reason to try.

Justice cannot simply be delivered, but must grow from the ground up. I feel sorry for the people of Darfur, but until someone shows me how we can help without the risk of making things worse, I will refuse any moral calls to action.

If contemplating this gives you moral pangs, I suggest reminding yourself that humility was once considered a moral virtue.

Labels: Foreign policy, Morality

  ¶ 4:42 PM 0 Comments

  Opportunity cost Sorry for the lapse in posts, but I just survived three days of the worst state-mandated teacher training ever. By the end it was impoverished enough to be classified as a variant of the Brezhnev-era Soviet economy: we stopped pretending to work and the instructor didn’t pretend to care.

So I found myself sitting around with three other teachers just talking. Three of us are guys, and one is a woman—a tall, svelte, Nordic-jawed strawberry blond in her thirties. She reviewed the male movie stars she fantasized about during the boring training lectures, and then complained that there are no eligible single guys around. We guys were all instinctively doubtful of this claim, and one of us made some sort of gesture in the direction of implying that we ourselves were not dogmeat. She had to point out to us that we are all married. Oh yeah.

It may have been insensitive of her position to forget that we were married, and therefore tragically unavailable, but I think my collegue was reaching for a kind of point. Had she found any of us before our wives did, with her looks, there is no question that she could have had us. So we can fairly assume she has overlooked any number of guys with overall ratings akin to ours. I think this dulled our sympathy.

It is probably hard for her now, with fewer unmarried male cohorts. But everyone has to make a choice. Our wives made a sacrifice: they deferred gratification. At the age they were when they found us, and in the state they found us in, our worth was not exactly backed by gold. It was like the floating currency of a minor nation, perhaps one lead by a man who likes to award himself medals in elaborate ceremonies.

I’m not willing to make a strong claim as to our worth now, even as we earn stable incomes, father their children, reap the benefits of psychological therapy and are capable, after years of their tutelage, of dressing ourselves. Monogamy is a bitch, and the initial investment is made blind.

I shared this with my wife, and she suggested that nobody could get married if they didn’t go into it blind. The whole truth of it would be too terrible to bear, she says, so you have to do it when you are young and stupid, or made stupid by love. If you wait so long that you smarten up, it becomes more difficult.  ¶ 8:58 AM 1 Comments

  Solid In my previous post, I used the word “solid” to describe a 2 X 4. I didn't mean by this that somehow plywood isn't solid, but that a 2 X 4 has a kind of iconic, essential quality. If the game "Clue" had, as one of its murder weapons, a piece of wood, this piece of wood would be a 2 X 4. A 2 X 4 would have embodied the kind of clarity that the prosecution would desperately seek throughout the trial.

The first witness was a police officer called by the prosecution to establish the provenance of the piece of wood. He recalled visiting Mr. Meza in the hospital and photographing the wound on Mr. Meza's head, which required 13 stitches. From there he went to the warehouse where Mr. Meza sustained his injury, interviewed a Mr. Segura, and recovered the stick, wet with blood. Later, Mr. Segura would testify to having given him two pieces of wood, but the officer said nothing of this.

“What did you do with the stick?” the defense asked, on cross examination.
“I put it in a paper sack,” replied the officer.
“You put a piece of evidence wet with blood in a paper sack?”
“Yes.”
“Is this what you were trained to do with wet evidence?”
“Yes.”
“Nobody ever suggested that you should put it in a plastic bag so that the wet stuff would stay wet?”
“No.”

Of course, the defense attorney batted that one around mercilessly, and went on to extract the fact that when the officer had submitted the item to the evidence cage, he had checked a box to get fingerprinting but not the one to test for blood.

”You handed them a stick wet with blood, you saw a box for a blood test, and you didn't check the box?”
“Yes.”
“Why not?”
“I figured it was blood.”

We got to see the stick, of course, the prosecution waving it around confidently. It had a brown stain in the corner that didn't look particularly like blood. It looked more like mohagany wood stain.

All this would not end up making a great deal of material difference, since both the witnesses, including Mr. Saucedo, would testify that Mr. Saucedo struck Mr. Meza with a stick that looked pretty much like the one entered into evidence as People's Exhibit #3.  ¶ 9:23 AM 0 Comments

  Stick I've had jury duty for the last four days. I actually ended up on a jury, the second I've served on. We have now returned a verdict, so I am free to discuss the case. The defendent, Mr. Saucedo, was accused of striking a Mr. Meza on the head with what the judge initially described as a board. When he said “board,” I imagined a length of dimensional lumber—a solid piece of wood with the grain flowing lengthwise and sold by its cross-sectional dimensions, such as 2 X 4, 2 X 6, etc. The wood offered as People's Exhibit 3, though, turned out to be a strip of half-inch Baltic Birch plywood, about three inches wide by two feet long. After viewing it the judge, both lawyers and the witnesses started calling it a “a piece of wood” or a “stick.” "Piece of wood" is vague and clumsy. “Stick,” while more evocative of the size and weight of this particular piece than “board,” inaccurately suggests a small branch pulled from a tree. Plywood is not merely pulled from a tree. It is a laminated product manufactured by peeling sixteenth-inch thick slices of wood from around the trunk of a tree, and gluing them together in successive layers, alternating the grain for rigidity, to produce a laminated sheet which can be sold as a 4 X 8 foot or other standard size sheet. (Baltic Birch, as it happpens, is a European import, and is sold as a 5 X 5 sheet. It is usually used for constructing the sides of drawers.)

Nobody wants to get hit in the head with a 3 inch by 2 foot strip of half inch Baltic Birch laminate, but as the trial went along, I felt that we had to struggle to maintain our interest in a way that we wouldn't had there been a nice solid 2 X 4 involved.

More on the trial soon.  ¶ 8:52 AM 0 Comments

  Pushing furniture My wife has a habit of pushing furniture that sits against the wall up against the wall. Sideboards, beds, dressers—she believes all these should touch the wall. I believe they should sit about a third to three quarters of an inch from the wall, depending on the size of the object. Objects need to breathe, I tell her.

Stanley Fish, in his blog on the NYTimes today, (subscription only), recounts hearing Diane Rehm interview Colm Toibin about his short story collection “Mothers and Sons.” Stanley Fish is first annoyed when Toibin is cool to the callers on the radio show, most of whom want to tell stories, sometimes punctuated with tears, about how he helped them get through their own psychological traumas. On consideration, though, and after Toibin talks about his desire to craft a beautiful sentence, Fish believes he understands. The craft of writing is self-referential and self-validating, he says, so to talk about its therapeutic effects is to debase it. It is pure craft, and for the writer it is only about the pure joy of creating it.

If writing is only about crafting beautiful sentences, it must be about making judgements like the one my wife and I dispute. My wife and I disagree on a question of form, of the formal relationships between object and space. Who is right: me or my wife? Well, we can have a long, happy marriage pushing the furniture back and forth and never resolve the question. But in literary writing, the sentence has a final form. A judgement has to be made, and it needs a basis. What could the basis be? The autonomous will of the author who pronounces it finished? The taste of select readers? Some sort of mystical truth?

I think the basis for judgement must be in all the stuff that Fish wants to exclude. The judgement about which sentence will be most beautiful in a particular piece finds its basis in other writing, in history, in politics, in ethics, in morality and in the contingencies of what the writer lives and desires.

Colm Toibin is perfectly right to avoid discussing his work as therapy, but not exactly because he would contaminate himself if he embraced the effect it has had on some of his readers. He is right because he already said his bit, in the writing. If his craft in the writing is of such demanding subtlety, I'd suggest, it is because he believes the themes he treats require it. After all that joyful, painstaking effort, why would he want to muck it up by treating the same themes carelessly on the radio?  ¶ 11:04 AM 0 Comments

  I know what to say In "I didn't know what to say," below, I suggest that the collective will of teachers effected change, not argument, facts, reason, persuasion, etc. To better illuminate the principle I take from this, consider the opposite situation: a case in which reason & facts all point one direction, and it makes no difference at all.

Consider my arguments, way below, that two specific aspects of the circumcision debates cannot be reasonably argued. I believe that within our notion of reason, I am right about this. I also seriously doubt that anyone will notice, or care. Even were my ideas to gain wide circulation, people would continue to argue pointlessly about the same points I've demonstrated to be pointless.

If this sounds too self-aggrandizing, consider a different issue that I think has been resolved at the level of reason, as explained in this article in Salon. The article cites a two year old plan by a couple of Yale academics to end the corruption inherent in private campaign financing. I have been leery of campaign finance reform, because I believe that big money will always find a way around it, and I tend to suspect that campaign finance reform will end up just making things worse. Reading this proposal, though, I am convinced that big money could not find any way around it. Their proposal is constitutional and reasonably cheap. It also doesn't stand a chance. Like efforts to reform the electoral college, it will sit around gathering dust, and be pulled out every few years as a kind of curiousity. “Hey, look at this!” we say. “This could fix everything!” And in the same breath, we say, as though instinctively, “Too bad it will never happen.”

My point here is that knowing what to say is not as important as I once thought, because one can not know what to say and still impose a will, and one can know exactly what to say and find the ability worthless except as a parlour game.  ¶ 4:14 PM 0 Comments

  Jumping and barking I am sitting in my kitchen looking out my back window. My dog Kona is barking intently at a live oak tree.

The tree is rooted in my neighbor's yard, but a few large branches hang far out over my yard. My neighbor's house is an orchard house—one of the houses that was here since the thirties. The land my house was built on was once citrus orchard land, and the owner of the orchard house would have been the owner of the orchard. In the fifties, the value of housing eclipsed the value of orchard land, and this owner must have sold the orchard to a developer, because the contemporary ranch styling of my house matches that of others which ring the orchard house and stretch to the east. The tract is also linked by a cinderblock wall, the concrete of which has a distinctive salmon color. If the wall ever needs repairs, I do not think I will be able to find cinderblock to match.

The salmon colored wall stands between my dog and the base of the live oak tree, just a couple feet from the wall on the other side. Every day, squirrels stroll out the branches of the live oak to gather the nuts, and my dog Kona barks at them. Sometimes she jumps, her squat dachshund legs carrying her only a foot or so into the air. She does not know that the squirrels interest her because although she is a mutt she is clearly a hound, and her ancestors were bred to chase small game. She does not know how to catch these squirrels, because she never sees them except high overhead. I don't think she knows that on the other side of the wall, the tree meets the ground, and that on occasion, the squirrel does the same.  ¶ 1:26 PM 0 Comments

  I didn't know what to say People who know me will be surprised to learn that the only time a newspaper ever called me for my opinion about something, I didn't know what to say.

I was working at Fremont High School in LA, and we had been assigned a bad principal. We were trying to get rid of her, and by this time the situation had escalated to the point that we had picketed outside of graduation.

My problem was trying to explain what was wrong with her. She came to the school after already having been marked as a lemon at her other school, and it was understood that her political backer on the board had lost her seat, so we assumed she was being dumped on us to either break her, break us, or both. She certainly didn't want to be at our school, and had made that clear. But I couldn't tell the newspaper any of that, because it was only gossip.

What I had to go on was my own experience with her, which was frustrating, but by itself not convincingly damning. I had approached her as the chair of the English department, full of zeal about creating classroom libraries to support student reading for pleasure. She had welcomed me by confiding her own partisan enthusiasm for this very approach. I left the meeting convinced she was completely on my side, and would champion me and my ideas against all those who doubted the power of reading. Then months dragged by, and I would send her increasingly plaintive memos, but she ignored them and me. Eventually, we got our books, but by that time I was done with her.

Looking at it objectively, though, the evidence seemed equivocal. We hadn't had classroom libraries before, so even though she dragged her feet, the fact that we had them now seemed to weigh in her favor. How could this story support her ouster?

I thought I owed this reporter a sound and rigorous argument, backed up with facts, and I worried that I didn't have one.

I realize now that I didn't need one. All I needed was the fact that all the teachers opposed her. Other teachers had become alienated from her in much the way I had. We had already made that clear, which is why the reporter was calling me. The burden was on the principal. How could she lead a school if the teachers wouldn't follow?

I now realize why I couldn't understand this. As a verbal person with control issues, I have always relished the notion that political power and decision-making are about marshaling facts and arguments and deploying them persuasively. It plays to my strengths and addresses my fears.

In this case, though, power flowed simply from the collective will of teachers to stand up and say we didn't want her. We did not stand in need of supporting facts, reasons, and arguments. The fact of our consensus was sufficient. Indeed, it proved to be so: I talked to the reporter for an hour and couldn't quite explain myself, but the principal was out within six months.

We teachers mattered. Our opinions had an overwhelming weight irrespective of how we came to them. In the last analysis, I didn't trust myself and I didn't trust my fellow teachers. I didn't feel right trying to convince a reporter because regardless of the facts, I couldn't convince myself that we counted.  ¶ 8:31 AM 0 Comments

  Writing for Robert Parker When I wrote the entry titled "The first paragraph," I had just gotten a piece accepted by a literary review, and I was worrying that literary writing had become too academic, in the sense of becoming a craft produced by trained members of a collective academy.

Now I think a big part of the problem is the nature of the audience for an amateur writer. It's hard to imagine anyone reading a lit review who isn't either an agent thumbing through looking for someone to puff, or another writer appraising the competition. Everything devolves to craft, because one despairs of engaging such savvy readers in any way other than by demonstrating mastery with the well-worn tools of the trade.

A victory in these conditions is less than completely satisfying. It just feels like you've managed to briefly impress the jaded. Writing for a lit review is like playing a football game in a stadium emptied of everyone except for a couple dozen sportswriters and a few players from other teams.

Perhaps it's not the academic form of literary writing that bothers me, but the audience available to an amateur.

At the same time, a writer's awareness of this audience encourages a certain approach to writing. It leads us to see ourselves as wine-makers instead of football players. A wine-maker would hardly resent the chance to create wine only for a select group of wine-tasters and fellow vintners.

As it happens, I enjoy wine more than I like football, but as a writer I'd rather be a football player than a wine-maker. I don't need my readers to fill a stadium, but I'd prefer a less specialized audience.  ¶ 9:12 PM 0 Comments

  A clear shot In the AP today, you can read this sentence: “Maj. Gen. William Caldwell told reporters that the investigations into the crashes of three Army and one private helicopters are incomplete but ‘it does appear they were all the result of some kind of anti-Iraqi ground fire that did bring those helicopters down.’”

If you read the news from Iraq less studiously than I do, you might be puzzled by the phrase “anti-Iraqi ground fire.” Ground fire is directed from the ground at targets in the air. A casual observer of the Iraq situation would assume almost every non-American on the ground to be Iraqi, and almost everyone in the air to be American. The casual observer would be right. So how could fire directed from the ground to the air be “anti-Iraqi?”

According to both the NIE and to Defense Secretary Gates, there are now four wars in Iraq. There is Sunni/Shia sectarian conflict, Shia on Shia internal violence, the old Sunni insurgency and widespread anarchic criminality. This being the case, it is difficult to name the enemy. President Bush just calls them “the terrorists” or “those who hate freedom,” but the armed forces have chosen the term “anti-Iraqi forces.”

The problem with this is that the vast majority of anti-Iraqis turn out to be Iraqi.

To get the proper sense of it, one has to imagine something like a Platonic concept of Iraq—a theoretical abstraction of what a true Iraq should be, rather than the unfortunate and temporary tangible manifestation of Iraq that we only think we see. This true Iraq exists only in the spirit realm: it is democratic, friendly to the US, and a model of moderation amidst the petty autocracies and seething fundamentalisms around it.

It is against this true Iraq that the anti-Iraqis train their anti-aircraft weapons. Their aim is true, for what more precise embodiment of the as-yet intangible spirit of the true Iraq exists than that of the American eagle hovering above it?

Labels: Iraq

  ¶ 8:18 AM 0 Comments