Leon Wieseltier writes this in The New Republic:

‘The thing I fear most is fear.” This was Montaigne, in an early essay, many centuries before Roosevelt. “It exceeds all other disorders in intensity.” He was endorsing an ancient fear of fear, according to which it is a disgrace, and the most formidable enemy of reason, and therefore an impediment to self-control, and to thoughtful action. The mastery of fear, in this tradition, is one of the signs of the attainment of wisdom.

“I am being a little bookish,” he says, “but I heard echoes of this deligitimation of fear in Barack Obama’s speech on national security at the National Archives.” This is in fact the least bookish paragraph in the piece. Wieseltier is a smart and well-read man, and his prose screams it at you like a little child demanding attention. (Incidentally, the sentence he quotes from the early essay “Of Fear” was from a revised section written much later in Montaigne’s life.)

Wieseltier continues:

[Obama] always referred to fear derisively–”all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight”; “we will be ill-served by … fear-mongering” and by words that “are calculated to scare people rather than educate them,” and so on. He warned against “fodder for 30-second commercials” and “direct mail pieces … designed to frighten the population.”

These quotes are devoid of context, and basically serve as fodder for the argument that since the days of FDR, fear has gotten a bad rap. Sometimes fear is good; it describes our attachments and it can be motivating. All well and good and perfectly fair, except that the quotes are devoid of context. Take the first snippet, originally lodged in this paragraph:

Unfortunately, faced with an uncertain threat, our government made a series of hasty decisions. I believe that many of these decisions were motivated by a sincere desire to protect the American people. But I also believe that all too often our government made decisions based on fear rather than foresight; that all too often our government trimmed facts and evidence to fit ideological predispositions.

Obama wasn’t saying (or implying, as Wieseltier implies) that fear is bad. He was saying that allowing fear to cloud your judgement and using it to manipulate people is bad. Hardly controversial.

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Snippet number two belonged to this argument about detention policy:

And we will be ill-served by some of the fear-mongering that emerges whenever we discuss this issue. Listening to the recent debate, I’ve heard words that, frankly, are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country.

If you’ve been looking for the argument that fear is bad, you won’t find it. Again, the President is saying (a bit more stiltedly than usual) that using fear to manipulate people is bad. Indeed he was far too polite about it. He could have said that challenging someone’s patriotism and gravely intoning the threat of a mushroom cloud or a terrorist attack for the sake of one’s own political gain is a base and and selfish and cowardly thing to do. In any case, what that paragraph is asking for is informed deliberation, as the word “educate” makes perfectly clear.

Near the end of his essay, high on his horse, Wieseltier proclaims gravely that “It is cruel to shame people for their fears, because their fears are measures of their attachments. A life with nothing to lose is a serene and hollow life.” Deep stuff, but apropos of nothing except the author’s own musings. The moral debate over detention policy, and anti-terrorism policy in general, is a question of protecting life while adhering to our values. It’s a debate motivated entirely by fear – fear of doing one and not the other. This seems obvious. Nevertheless, while the rest of us run around trying to digest the issue in all its complexity, Wieseltier stands solemnly still, staring at a tree.

-Greg Waldmann

Benny Morris, the Israeli historian, has recently written a new book about Israel and Palestine, but this one’s about the future, not the past. In the New York Times, Jeffrey Goldberg reviews One State, Two States

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and summarizes:

Morris…argues that Arab rejectionism is so profound a force that only the terminally obtuse could believe that Palestinians will ever acquiesce to a state complrised solely of the West Bank and Gaza.

Morris is a fascinating case: he’s a historian of conflict that hasn’t ended, and one he’s lived through his entire life. He’s considered the first of Israel’s “new historians,” who emerged in the late 1980’s in the midst of the first intifada to challenge the myths of Israel’s founding. But failure of the peace process and the second intifada that followed in 2000 led Morris to a radical about face – to a morbid view of the future of his country and a black view of its Palestinian counterparts.

You can actually see the change in the last chapter he tacked onto Righteous Victims when it came out in paperback in 2001, while the second intifada raged. Righteous Victims is still the best overall history of the conflict, but that last chapter should be read as the work of a different man. Editorializing also creeps into 1948, his excellent and mostly straightforward history of the first Arab-Israeli war, which I reviewed last year. Now he writes without the constraints of a historical perspective, and Goldberg rightly dismantles Morris’ new book and his “almost irretrievably dark vision of Israel’s future as a Jewish-majority state.”

Israel has just elected the right-wing Benjamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister, and he’s appointed the militant Avigdor Lieberman as his foreign minister. The terrorist group Hamas controls Gaza while the weak and corrupt Palestinian Authority dithers in the West Bank. Morris might be too close to the conflict to judge soundly, but his cynicism is understandable.

-Greg Waldmann

Barack Obama may have disavowed torture, but George Bush still retains his ability to sully the presidency and the country. The latest episode concerns another group of photos that depict abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. The President agreed to release the photos last month, after the ACLU won a victory in the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. But after a review, Obama has reversed course and decided not to release the photos, lest they “further inflame anti-American opinion” and endanger American troops in the field. Another court fight is inevitable.

During his campaign, Obama stated repeatedly that Bush’s torture policy was a boon to terrorist recruitment – in other words, American soldiers were killed because of it (you can’t state things so blunty on national television). He promised not only an end to torture but transparency as well. Now he finds himself caught between the logic of national security and the imperatives of moral government. In order to insulate himself, Obama may have the Justice Department appeal the Second Circuit decision. His alternative is unpalatable. Obama could use the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act to classify the photos as a danger to national security, something he doesn’t want to do because it will cost him with his own party, and the photos might be released by the Supreme Court anyway. There’ll be a court fight in either case, but if Obama hews strictly to legal proceedings – which are carried out by subordinates – he can save some face whatever the outcome.

The bureaucratized torture of our recent past Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp’s Adventure hd is hurting us in other ways, not least of which is (perhaps ironically) knowledge of the past itself. Remember the 9/11 Commission Report, the product of a distinguished panel of old Washington hands, the one that sold hundreds of thousands of copies and graces the classrooms of colleges around the country? Fully one quarter of its footnotes refer to prisoners who underwent “enhanced interrogation.”

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And it appears that torture played its part in bringing us to Iraq as well. Lawrence Wilkerson reports

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What I have learned is that as the administration authorized harsh interrogation in April and May of 2002–well before the Justice Department had rendered any legal opinion–its principal priority for intelligence was not aimed at pre-empting another terrorist attack on the U.S. but discovering a smoking gun linking Iraq and al-Qa’ida.

So furious was this effort that on one particular detainee, even when the interrogation team had reported to Cheney’s office that their detainee “was compliant” (meaning the team recommended no more torture), the VP’s office ordered them to continue the enhanced methods.

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The detainee had not revealed any al-Qa’ida-Baghdad contacts yet. This ceased only after Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, under waterboarding in Egypt, “revealed” such contacts. Of course later we learned that al-Libi revealed these contacts only to get the torture to stop.

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There in fact were no such contacts. (Incidentally, al-Libi just “committed suicide” in Libya. Interestingly, several U.S. lawyers working with tortured detainees were attempting to get the Libyan government to allow them to interview al-Libi….)

Your tax dollars at work. So our current President is tying himself in knots working at cross purposes – trying to keep American soldiers safe and trying to bring America out of the cloud of opprobrium it’s been in for the last eight years. Our supposedly definitive investigation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is partly based on an official atrocity. Likewise our casus belli for invading Iraq. Meanwhile, not one official responsible for torture policy has been taken to court, and torture-rationalizer extraordinaire John Yoo writes a column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, a decision the Inquirer’s idiot publisher defends by citing the happenstance of geography: “What I liked about John Yoo is he’s a Philadelphian. He went to Episcopal Academy, where I went to school.” Different strokes, I suppose.

-Greg Waldmann

If only more people read book reviews! It’s not just self-interest talking here; if everyone read the New York Review of Books, or say, Open Letters Monthly, they might avoid the chaff and spend their valuable time on something…valuable. Suppose you wanted to read about the most successful people in the world. What are the factors that make them so? Millions who want an answer to this question turn to Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, who seems to think that scientists are wasting their time with things like sample size and error control. As Sue M. Halpern of the NYRB Sicko dvdrip puts it

any statistician will tell you, you can’t learn anything about populations from an n of 1. It’s not a sample, it’s an amusement.

OLM’s Peter A. Coclanis has a middle initial too, and he comes to a similar conclusion:

Auden was on to something with his admonition in “Under Which Lyre” that “Thou shalt not sit with statisticians nor commit a social science,” but he never had to deal with Malcolm Gladwell. And even Auden, I think, would have appreciated the general concept of representativeness and understood that data is not the plural of anecdote.

Now, let’s say you want to learn about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. If you wanted an overall history, and you happened to be asking, my vote would be for Benny Morris’ Righteous Victims. But maybe you want something more specific. It just so happens that Professor Morris has a more recent book about the first Arab-Israeli war, called, appropriately enough, 1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War. Gershom Gorenberg reviews it in the NYRB Evan Almighty move :

The conflagration of 1948 was the war that began all Arab–Israeli wars. This will not be the last history of it, and not only because new papers will come to light, perhaps from still-sealed Arab archives. If the story is retold after peace—by Benny Morris or someone else—the facts and the motives will necessarily look different. It might be easier to see both Jews and Arabs with greater sympathy, as human beings caught in a storm. In the meantime, Morris has Karas: The Prophecy full movie indeed served the purpose of reconciliation, by making a fuller picture of what happened in 1948 part of Israeli memory. For that he deserves gratitude.

I wrote much the same thing last year:

Eden Log film Benny Morris’ greatest success in this book is in challenging the conventional mythology of both sides and laying out a mostly even-handed account of the first Arab-Israeli war, but a definitive history of Israel’s founding has still not been written. Such a history would include documents that are presumably still locked up somewhere in the capitals of Israel’s neighbors. That history’s narrative would give equal attention to both sides of the story. But that history hasn’t been written yet because the conflict is still ongoing, and the feelings are still are too intense. In the meantime, Morris’ books, including this one, are among the best we have.

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Most people who read don’t read book reviews, or they get them from (shudder) the Amazon.com comments field. They shouldn’t! I don’t mean to say that we critics are infallible, but we are here to help. We read books and we write about them. In fact, we don’t do much else with our time. So take advantage! Or, to take a cue from Mr. Gladwell, NYRB + OLM = good book recommendation.

-Greg Waldmann Hobgoblins 2

Pennsylvania’s Republican Senator, Arlen Specter, defected to the Democrats this week. Slate’s David Greenberg has a good article on the implications:

Historically, Specter’s move is best understood as the signal event in the next stage of what the journalist Ronald Brownstein has called “The Great Sorting Out”—a gradual but massive sorting of voters and elected officials that has brought their partisan affiliation into close alignment with their ideology. In The Second Civil War (2007), Brownstein showed how over the last four decades “conservatives” have increasingly become Republicans and “liberals” increasingly Democratic—turning these once-motley coalitions into relatively uniform ideological vehicles.

I reviewed Brownstein’s book a while ago, and it’s excellent background reading for the “sorting out” taking place today. The Democrats, despite increasing party discipline, have maintained much of their “big tent” inclusiveness. But Republicans have become almost monolithic, and they’re hemorrhaging moderates, from losses in the 2008 elections and the internecine battle for control of the party that followed. Specter is just the latest. Greenberg thinks that “the GOP cannot afford to lose more wheel horses like Arlen Specter, lest it become the fringe party, confined to the Deep South and interior West.”

I’m not so sure. If Al Franken is confirmed as Minnesota’s second Senator (and this seems likely), the Democrats will have a filibuster-proof majority to push their agenda through the Senate. From there, much will depend on events. If the economy improves and the “war on terror” goes well, the GOP will be forced to liberalize or wither away. But if things go badly, the Democrats will be held responsible and the American electorate may veer towards their alternative. And that will be the far-right, ultra-religious rump of the Republican Party.

-Greg Waldmann

Some days, it just doesn’t pay to get up in the morning. Today seemed inoffensive enough: clear blue sky, calm air, night’s crispness slowly yielding to the gentle warmth of early spring. But when I did my usual first tour through the day’s required reading, stopping (as all right-thinking people should) at Scott Esposito’s Conversational Reading, the day’s spiral into madness began.

There I learned that Random House is hurrying to print thousands more copies of Joseph O’Neill’s novel Netherland

Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! trailer The Squid and the Whale film because President Obama made an offhand mention that it was on his reading list. The President is a self-described indefatigable reader, and this is a source of deeply personal reassurance after eight years of an administration that openly derided intelligence, favored ‘guts’ over brains, and declared ‘the jury still out’ on the reality of evolution. But surely the leader of the free world (and no mean shakes as an author in his own right, as Greg Waldmann has reported here) could find better, more worthwhile books to occupy his meager free time than a labored and misguided piece of wet wash like Netherland

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(some of you will no doubt recall that I micro-dismissed it months ago here Hercules divx )? Richard Evans’ The Third Reich at War, perhaps? The new biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt? Ariana Franklin’s scintillating new historical mystery, Grave Goods?

But no. Instead, President Obama will be reading a gimmicky novel about cricket, and the publisher will be scambling to keep up with soaring demand. I’m not shooting the messenger – I don’t blame Scott Esposito, who, after all, wrote a charming essay for Open Letters here. But still, having read his report of madness in the Oval Office, I find myself echoing the sentiments of a wise old hack: I shoulda stood in bed.

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Today, Russia only uses violence to suppress political dissent as a last resort, though when it comes down to it they’re not squeamish about doing so. The preferred methods are much more Orwellian. Television is almost entirely state-owned or state-approved. It’s the same with newspapers. Bureaucracy, surveillance and arrests stymie human rights organizations and political parties. If murder is necessary (and as a result of the state’s overwhelming reach, it rarely is), the job is left to third parties.

Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev plan to make obedience even less of a question for their successors. In the April 30 New York Review of Books, Orlando Figes details the newest focus of their efforts – school textbooks. The newest school textbook on Russian history was commissioned by former-President Putin himself, and he issued instructions that give a good idea of how he sees himself and his country:

Stalin—good (strengthened vertical power but no private property); Khrushchev—bad (weakened vertical power); Brezhnev—good (for the same reasons as Stalin); Gorbachev and Yeltsin—bad (destroyed the country but under Yeltsin there was private property); Putin—the best ruler (strengthened vertical power and private property.

Russian foreign and domestic policy is vastly different from the Soviet Union, but in an effort to legitimize its power monopoly, the government is re-glorifying its authoritarian past (aside from the 1990s, what else is there, really?). The Russian population seems to be buying it. I review Edward Lucas’ The New Cold War in our forthcoming issue, and here’s a snippet:

Russian nationalism cannot be underestimated, and Putin milks and moulds this pride with a sickeningly nostalgiac official mythology. Putin infamously called the collapse of the USSR the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” and Russia’s government – through state-controlled TV broadcasts, newpapers, textbooks, and creepy Nazi youth-like organizations – is reglorifying its Soviet and czarist past. Here… the Russian people are mostly in agreement: recent polls placed Stalin and several of the more brutal czars in the pantheon of Russia’s greatest leaders.

-Greg Waldmann

Turner & Hooch release Despite being one of the most formidable literary journals currently in publication, The New York Review of Books also engages in an encouraging amount of truly superb straight-up journalism, the kind of lengthy and often searing watchdog investigating of which Pulitzer Prizes are made. The 9 April issue features just such an article, by Mark Danner, in which he probes the darkest chapter of what he calls “the dark moral epic of the Bush administration”: torture.

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The International Committee of the Red Cross has issued a very short pamphlet reporting on the United States’ treatment of fourteen “high value” prisoners captured in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks and held incommunicado for years. The report makes it clear these men were routinely tortured, and the outrage in Danner’s essay is all the more palpable for being so tightly controlled:

Guided by the President and his closest advisers, the United States transformed itself from a country that, officially at least, condemned torture to a country that practiced it. And this fateful decision, however much we may want it to, will not go away, any more than the fourteen “high-value detainees,” tortured and thus unprosecutable, will go away.

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In December of 2008 Open Letters Political Editor Greg Waldmann faced this same topic in a review of Jane Meyer’s The Dark Side The Brothers Bloom . Needless to say, the CIA featured prominently in that essay as well:

The CIA dusted off its own body of research on torture, much of which came straight from Stalin’s Russia; during the Cold War their researchers had been fascinated by the KGB’s ability to produce false confessions. The irony never dawned on them.

The two natural visceral impulses associated with all this are contradictory. On the one hand, it’s natural to want to forget all about it – stop the abuses, close the “black sites” that feature so malevolently in Danner’s piece and Waldmann’s, put the whole dark matter behind us all as a nation. On the other hand, it’s natural to want a punitive and very public redress for the government officials who did these things and claimed to do them in our name. Information will be they key in either case. Read Danner’s article; read Waldmann’s – then decide in your own heart.

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Greg’s talents have propelled him up the Open Letters’ masthead, enlisting as a writer in 2007, he was commissioned Politics Editor in 2008, and is now visiting the front lines of both web design and cover photography. He answers a few of our questions about this month’s cover image, the postcard rack, below:

OL: What a fun pic, Greg–Where did you snap it? and with what kind of camera?

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Greg: August film Thanks! I took it on the Seine in Paris, about two years ago, with a Canon digital SLR that is now, unfortunately, broken. There are dozens of mini-bazaars along the river’s walls, and they sell everything from used books to sculpture to postcards; they’re perfect fodder for photographers. Paris in general is a street photographer’s dream.

OL: I love the way the color photos own that lower corner. Did you snap a lot of different photos before you found that color scheme, or did you luck into a fortuitous arrangement?

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I took only two. The first was your typical touristy snapshot: bad angle, wrong lens and wrong shutter speed. Afterward, as I was perusing the postcards, I thought the display had more potential. So switched to a wide-angle lens, set the aperture wide open, and took another shot. The image you see is about a 75% crop, which I made for a few reasons: so the shot would be more symmetrical; so I’d get the color pattern you noticed; and to cut out all the pornographic postcards that made up half the right side of the picture! In fact, if you look at the postcard in the top right…

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OL: There’s both a found art and a collage aspect to the picture … you seem to have a love for images that comment on reality as they capture it, that foreground the artificial or intellectual aspect of photography, rather than “reality as mirror.” Do you think that emphasis is reflected in the sort of art you care for in your non-snapping life?

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Greg: I agree with you about my preferences, and you put it more succinctly than I ever could! People overestimate photography’s connection to reality. I think it’s a very personal art. It’s strange, but in my non-snapping life, my tastes run the opposite way. In painting, my favorites are what you might call generic: Rembrandt, Titian, Botticelli, the impressionists and their offshoots. I dislike atonal music, and I’ve had a tough time warming up to postmodern poetry. But I must say that your wonderful essay on appreciating modern art

has led me to reconsider, and I try to keep an open mind!

OL: When do you like to take pictures? What are your favorite things to take pictures of? Or do you refuse to define yourself in such terms?

Greg: In general, I like to set out on a trip or just a walk with the intention of taking pictures. It’s a “getting into the zone” sort of thing. Still, you never know when you’ll happen upon something, so it always helps to have a camera with you at all times. My kit is rather bulky and my budget doesn’t allow for a more compact carry-around, so I bring it along whenever I can. Street photography suits me best and landscapes are fun, too. I’d like to try my hand at more portraiture. I just need to get my camera fixed!

Showdown in Little Tokyo dvd The New Republic has a quartet of articles on what may be the death knell of print newspapers and journalism as we know it. A page 1 editorial blames a coarsening national attitude towards the press for accelerating the decline:

Just as the press has been slammed by the tides of technology, it has been hit hard by the political culture. The master narratives of both the right and left have come to include the same villan: the hypocritical biased elite media. And their combined grouching has helped foment the anti-media backlash.

Elsewhere, Joe Mathews laments the decline of investigative journalism in his old paper, the Los Angeles Times:

You can count up the journalists who have left the profession and are out of work, but much of the carnage of the ongoing media industry can’t be measured or seen: corruption undiscovered, events not witnessed, tips about problems that never reach anyone’s ears because those ears have left the newsroom…Today’s Times carries plenty of fine news stories…But there are few stories that show deep digging, that took more than a few days to put together.

This new paradigm, the shearing off of investigative reporters and editorial staff, may be glimpsed in microcosm in Gabriel Sherman’s piece on Politico

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, the upstart website that got several of last year’s biggest scoops:

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’ and the Post’s investment in enterprise journalism. “Why does someone have to go off and write their thesis paper while they do it?”

Finally, and most depressingly, Paul Starr turns in a huge essay Closing the Ring hd on the death of the newspapers, and what he sees as the coming era of corruption. The problems are manifold:

[Warren] Buffett’s law of the newspaper jungle, the “survival of the fattest,” favored a broad conceptin of the purview of the newspaper, attentive to a wide variety of human interests. Now the incentives are working in the opposite direction, pushing newspapers toward a more constricted view of their role…

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The predominant response in the industry to rising financial pressures has been to concentrate editorial resources close to home…the number of American newspaper correspondents abroad dropped 30 percent between 2002 and 2006…it cannot be a good thing that at a time when America’s economic and security interests are so entangled with the rest of the world, America’s news media are withdrawing from it.

So far the internet hasn’t generated the revenue to make up for the discrepancy abroad, or locally, where government at the federal, state and local level has seen a decline in assigned reporters across the country. For some background on the internet era turn to Greg Waldmann’s review of Andrew Keen’s sloppy The Cult of the Amateur, from our September 2007 issue. Then read our latest issue, where we continue our efforts to attend “to a wide variety of human interests.”