All of us who have taught English know the passage from Wordsworth’s The Prelude –
There are in our existence spots of time,
That with distinct pre-eminence retain
A renovating virtue, whence-depressed
By false opinion and contentious thought,
Or aught of heavier or more deadly weight,
In trivial occupations, and the round
Of ordinary intercourse - our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
That’s what he said his writing was about – there do seem to be in our harried existence these damned “spots of time” that “with distinct preeminence retain a renovating virtue” – and that’s what poetry tries to nail down. As a poet he doesn’t want to lose those specific moments of wonder, so he tries to capture each in just the right words. He did well enough at it. Everyone finds the job that fits them, eventually.
But there are also quite distinct “spots in time” that have a whole different sort of preeminence. Those are the “spots” where you realize something else – bad things are happening. That happens in the all too real world, where narcissists and bullies, and odd idealists, vie for power. In our system they cannot easily just seize power – we do have elections and all, even if those elections can be somewhat less than effective, as seems to be the case recently. But the principle holds – those who want power must appeal to us all. They say things. They do have public records – they have done this and that. And there’s no poetry in any of it.
Or maybe there is – maybe you can arrange matters from one spot in time and in a “found art” sort of way see it as a sort of free-verse epic that defines America as a sort of nightmare and comedy. We’re not talking about angry Allen Ginsberg and Howl – “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix” and all that.
Think of something more like William Carlos Williams – just the thing, there for examination, ripe with meaning that really doesn’t need to be explained. It is what it is – fixed in the amber of words. You could, for example, learn a lot about who we are if you just arranged the one-line descriptions from one evening’s television listings as blank verse –
Bizarre occurrences distract investigators as they track a serial killer who struck during an eclipse of the sun.
West convinces Claire to teach the head cheerleader a lesson after she deems Claire too ordinary to join the squad; Suresh faces a moral dilemma.
Sam assumes her role as a bride.
The final four bachelorettes take Brad to their hometowns to meet their families; one woman’s protective faith.
When the city’s former DA is found dead, evidence leads Boulet and Cobb to an upscale brothel; surprising developments and motives…
Celebrities live together in a Hollywood mansion.
Two reporters uncover a supernatural connection to the series of UFO sightings that they are investigating.
While a judge’s (Michael Douglas) anti-drug campaign leads him to his own daughter, a DEA agent (Don Cheadle) targets a trafficker’s wife, and a policeman (Benicio Del Toro) fights corruption.
Two brothers from Harlem take divergent paths upon reaching adulthood.
A young couple goes missing; a young man is shot behind a barbershop.
When there is a murder at a high school reunion, the CSIs investigate and learn that popularity issues from the past played a part.
A reporter is found dead with a newspaper stuffed in her mouth; Earl challenges Grace about her lying.
Hired to tame a rowdy Missouri bar, a Ph.D. bouncer (Patrick Swayze) romances a doctor (Kelly Lynch) and tames the whole town.
That’s who we are – America on the evening of Monday, October 29, 2007. It’s a bit sad – millions sitting in the dark watching this stuff, a collective madness.
And let’s fix in amber “power” in America on the same day, the same spot in time, so we can see their distinct preeminence, and they hardly need comment. They’re just words, floating free – a sort of epic madness.
Rudy Giuliani – “Hillary and Obama are kind of debating whether to invite [Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] to the inauguration or the inaugural ball.”
Andrew Sullivan – “This is literally insane. If he is starting with this kind of unhinged claim, where will he end up?”
David Greenberg on the matter, seeing in Giuliani an approach to government as illiberal, as secretive and as dictatorial as Dick Cheney –
Beyond religious issues, a second conservative trait defined Giuliani’s tenure: his Cheney-esque appetite for executive power. In 1999, for example, he directed (without the City Council’s permission) the police to permanently confiscate the cars of people charged with drunken driving - even if the suspects were later acquitted.
Giuliani’s record on government secrecy, too, is hardly moderate. Liberals today routinely attack President Bush’s refusal to divulge information about his domestic wiretapping program and his 2001 executive order claiming the power to close presidential papers. But they rarely discuss an equally autocratic move that Giuliani made: cutting a deal with the city as he was leaving office to assign control of his mayoral records to his own private company so that he could decide who could see them.
The fanciful notion of Giuliani’s liberalism also omits the piece de resistance of his mayorship: his flagrantly undemocratic bid to stay in office for an extra three months after Sept. 11, 2001. During earlier crises, even World War II, U.S. elections had always managed to proceed normally. But Giuliani maneuvered for weeks to remain mayor after his term-limited exit date. Only as normalcy returned to New York did his power grab fail.
One of the most fundamental questions of the next election is whether the American people are going to endorse the protectorate of extreme executive power that Cheney and Bush have constructed: an executive empowered to over-rule the rule of law, issue signing statements declaring itself the supreme branch of government, to detain any person at will, torture at will, and wage war at will, without Congressional approval, and to do all this on a permanent - not temporary, emergency - basis. With Giuliani, you have one more dictatorial impulse: to refuse to submit even to an election if he deems the crisis too great. Any rule-of-law conservative who believes that liberty is best secured when power is divided knows who not to vote for.
But there is Hillary Clinton as a Halloween scare-figure –
Clinton was the choice of four in 10 men and one-third of women. While a predictable two-thirds of Republicans picked her, she also was the choice of 18 percent of Democrats. Among members of her own party, that made her second only to Giuliani as the scariest costume.
About one-third of independents, nearly half of whites and just over half of conservatives selected her.
Eighteen percent of Democrats? What’s up with that?
Digby on Clinton –
I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but George W. Bush is being disappeared from the presidential campaign and everyone’s running against incumbent Hillary Clinton. Subtly, but relentlessly, the public psyche is being prepared to deny Junior ever existed. And it could work. For many different reasons, most Americans want nothing more than to forget George W. Bush was ever president. So, we see a very odd subliminal narrative taking shape in which the blame for the nation’s failures of the last seven years is being shifted to Clinton (and the “do-nothing” Democratic congress) as if the Codpiece hasn’t been running things since 2000. (Not that the radical wingnuts haven’t always blamed the Clenis for everything, but the disappearing of Bush is a new element.)
I certainly don’t blame the Republicans for trying to do it. It makes sense, since their boy is an epic failure and the original Clinton is still very present in people’s minds. It will be quite a trick to pull off, but I can see the press already helping them do it. (Naturally.)
It’s an interesting phenomenon and one for which I hope the Democratic strategists are prepared. Their underlying theme seems to be, “If you want change, vote Republican!”
Sullivan ran a pro-Clinton email the previous Saturday, so he runs a pro-Obama one –
There are two ways to win an election - present voters with simple arguments that they can accept or have a candidate that reassures them. I am worried that my candidate, Obama, is putting too much faith in the American voter and presenting them with the old academic Democratic arguments about the constitution. But my worry is balanced by the fact that he is the most trustworthy candidate and the American voter, especially those in the Midwest, have an excellent sense for honesty and trustworthiness.
Bill and Hillary have an apt understanding of the American voter; they know that the voters will reject these academic arguments about the constitution. Her challenge, though, is that she lacks the “character” that Barack naturally has. That is the difference between Barack and Hillary and why Republicans who tend to emphasize character are attracted to Barack.
Sullivan –
One of the fundamental reasons I prefer Obama to Clinton is that he still seems like a human being. I’ve watched and listened to him as closely as I can these past few months and he still answers questions as if he genuinely wants to figure out the right answer. She reflexively gives the political response - without even pausing. Everything is calculated. Nothing is real - from her laugh to her finely honed policy positions, designed to attract as many micro-votes as her pollsters can detect. He can still actually weigh the balance between opportunism and idealism in politics; she has long since fused the two in her mind, so that anything that can win her power is, in her mind, good for the rest of us.
We cannot trust her. We can still trust him. He hasn’t been turned into the machine that national politics has turned her into. In the perilous days ahead, we desperately need a president again whom we can trust. He wins that argument. Which is why it is so vital for America that he win this contest against the increasingly ruthless Clinton machine.
And what to do with power once attained? President Ronald Reagan, 1988 –
The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiations of the Convention [Against Torture]. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.
This is a clear stand not just against torture but also against “other inhuman treatment or punishment” as well. Conservatives’ heads explode.
Here’s an unconfirmed report that Donald Rumsfeld was just forced to flee Paris, where he was attending meetings, as he did not want to be arrested for war crimes, specifically authorizing torture, and the kidnapping of people and making them disappear. Arrest was unlikely. Complaints were filed, but the French government is not utterly mad. But he should stay in the United States. Some things are inevitable.
Absolute power can get you in trouble. Francis Fukuyama sees absolute power as the real reason behind America’s foreign policy mess –
The fundamental problem remains the lopsided distribution of power in the international system. Any country in the same position as the US, even a democracy, would be tempted to exercise its hegemonic power with less and less restraint. America’s founding fathers were motivated by a similar belief that unchecked power, even when democratically legitimated, could be dangerous, which is why they created a constitutional system of internally separated powers to limit the executive.
Such a system does not exist on a global scale today, which may explain how America got into such trouble. A smoother international distribution of power, even in a global system that is less than fully democratic, would pose fewer temptations to abandon the prudent exercise of power.
Sullivan says there’s even more to this –
I do think that one of the deeper differences between the traditional right and the neocons is that traditional conservatives are quite happy to see other great powers exert influence in various parts of the world; and are not adamant that the United States must control everything and police everywhere.
That, in itself, reflects the more profound philosophical divide within conservatism: between those who value power over everything, and those that, in the end, are happy to let go and co-exist with other entities.
Just as the neocons cannot tolerate foreign powers exercising influence in the world independently of the United States, so they are intolerant of divided power at home. Traditional conservatives are proud of the way the Founders divided and defused power in the Constitution and quite content to allow other great powers - Europe, Russia, China, for example - exercise influence in various parts of the globe. And the massive over-reach, domestically and abroad, of the Bush-Cheney protectorate has done a great deal to revive the tradition Fukuyama understands well.
But, but – we have a CRISIS! Iran is trying to TAKE OVER THE WORLD!
Michael Hirsh points out that the Bush administration has now taken to blaming Iran for practically everything and it just sems silly –
Today the administration is casting Iran as America’s biggest bogeyman on every front. National missile defense? Once Kim Jong Il of North Korea was identified as the target of this expensive project. No longer. In a speech Tuesday at National Defense University, Bush declared that “the need for missile defense in Europe is urgent” because “Iran is pursuing the technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.” Mideast peace? Never mind that the Palestinians are mixed up in a civil war of their own making and blaming the Israelis. Much of it is really the fault of “Iranian aggression,” as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice declared on Wednesday. “To see Iranian actual penetration now of these more radical elements of the Palestinian terrorist groups is really quite troubling,” she told the House Foreign Affairs Committee. U.S. generals are now routinely trotted out to blame Iranian interference and arms shipments for the continuing Islamist insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, though Tehran plays at best a minor role there.
Kevin Drum personalizes that –
Nothing new here. I had a friend many years ago who was a friendly but obsessive fundamentalist Christian who spent his time searching for signs of the antichrist. For a while during the early Reagan era he was convinced it was Konstantin Chernenko. Then it switched to Moammar Qadafi. Then it was Saddam Hussein. (He actually wrote a book on the subject at that point, which in a weak moment I agreed to read.) We lost touch after that, but my guess is that during the 90s he migrated to Slobodan Milosevic, then Osama bin Laden, then back to Saddam Hussein, and perhaps is now on the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bandwagon.
In a way, he reminds me of America. It’s not enough for us to have countries out there that we don’t like. Even countries that we really don’t like. There always has to be someone who’s basically the antichrist, and whoever it is is responsible for everything. When people who believe stuff like that are dressed in rags and yelling at passersby from street corners, we call them crackpots. When they dress in suits and, say, edit the Weekly Standard, we call them foreign policy analysts. Weird, huh?
Two reporters uncover a supernatural connection to the series of UFO sightings that they are investigating. It’s not that weird.
John Judis comments on the guy who says he will save us from the antichrist – who already said he would save us from aliens in those UFO things – and that would be Mayor Rudy –
The centerpiece of Giuliani’s claim, however, is the suggestion that his approach to fighting crime provides a model for conducting foreign policy. In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, he wrote: “I know from personal experience that when security is reliably established in a troubled part of a city, normal life rapidly reestablishes itself: shops open, people move back in, children start playing ball on the sidewalks again, and soon a decent and law-abiding community returns to life. The same is true in world affairs. Disorder in the world’s bad neighborhoods tends to spread. Tolerating bad behavior breeds more bad behavior.”
This is a foolish analogy. In policing the world, the United States cannot claim to be enforcing its own laws; we lack legitimacy to do so, as we found after invading Iraq. When the NYPD went into poor neighborhoods, it was not an occupying force; when the U.S. military took over Baghdad, it was, and it suffered the consequences. Some of the “neighborhoods” Giuliani wants to clean up, such as Iran, possess their own armies and can call on other “neighborhoods,” such as Russia and China, to deter an attempt to punish them for bad behavior. In short, the world is not New York writ large, and the trade-offs between authority and liberty look very different from the White House than from Gracie Mansion. But these distinctions seem lost on the man who aspires to be the next mayor of the United States.
The world is not New York writ large? Who knew? Matthew Yglesias knew –
Trying to treat the entire world as if it were the sovereign territory of the United States is going to produce catastrophic results. The observation that the world needs forces to try to help bring order to some “bad neighborhoods” has a lot of truth to it, but insofar as that order is brought it’s going to need to be done by institutions and through mechanisms - first and foremost, the UN but also regional groups in their own back yards where appropriate - that are capable of doing so in a reasonably legitimate manner. Just having the President dictate to the rest of the world, however, isn’t going to fly.
But it’s on television. Hired to tame a rowdy Missouri bar, a Ph.D. bouncer (Patrick Swayze) romances a doctor (Kelly Lynch) and tames the whole town.
Actually, you could watch it on television. See this video as explained –
Tonight on The Newshour, Rudy Giuliani’s foreign policy advisor and godfather of neo-conservatism, Norman Podhoretz debated Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria on the question of whether or not to go to war with Iran. It’s perhaps an apt commentary on the rightward, lunatic term of this country’s foreign policy that Fareed is taking what I guess must be called the left (?) in this debate. In any case, I really urge you to give this a look. And note a few things: one is the denigrating tone Podhoretz takes toward Zakaria. It’s curdled and bitter. It jumped out at me and I wonder if it does for you as well. Second are the constant references to Hitler and the Munich agreement. Hitler has become such a throwaway reference or comparison for whatever penny-ante dictator we’re up in arms about at the moment that the reference has been drained of much of its meaning and horror. But with the Munich agreement and how “time is not on our side” and so forth, this is beyond nonsense.
It’s almost an insult to what the world faced in the late 1930s. Germany, industrial powerhouse, with arguably the most powerful army in the world, at the forefront of technology, overawing and invading neighboring countries. Iran, minor economic power, second or third-rate military power, which may get a couple of small nuclear-weapons compared to the couple hundred high-end nuclear warheads in Israel’s arsenal (plus, a robust second strike capacity, as Fareed notes) and then many thousands we have - and our blue water navy, satellites, air force. Please. Time’s running out for us? We’re going to look back on this fifty years ago [sic] and see the non-Podhoretz-loons as the Chamberlains of the day. I don’t know what to say. Just watch.
Or don’t watch. It’s just one spot in time. We may or may not look back on this fifty years from now – but if we do, this one spot in time will be more than curious.
Ah, that other poet –
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
We won’t have to – it is all on record.
