September 2008 Archives

People had been concerned, back in the fifties and sixties. Movie producers had made films about atomic holocausts and the last families left on earth. Writers wrote about the future, with apocalyptic riots and famines. But when the change came, it hadn't come with riots and revolutions. It came with business phones that weren't answered until the fifteenth ring, with misspelled words in The New Yorker, with new cars that inexplicably lacked a spare tire, with sudden losses of sound on television. Nothing about it would have seemed unusual in 1952, in France.

Michael Halberstam, The Wanting of Levine, (1979)

When F. Scott Fitzgerald remarked that the very rich are different from you and me, Hemingway is famously said to have replied, "Yes, they have more money."

To find out just how much more money, take a peek at Afferent Input.

Thanks to Thomas Nephew for pointing this story out.

Life for most of us,most of the time, requires a suspension of the imagination. As I get ready to board a plane to Michigan in the morning, on my way home in a sense, since it is where I first really developed a social context, I am reflecting on the fear of flying. The reflection is dispassionate if a trifle morbid; it is not as though I am going to have any trouble walking onto the plane later in the morning. Flying does bring up the age-old problem of perception of risk, however. Rationally, one recognizes that about the only safer mode of transportation than flying is probably an elevator. However, the prospect of the final moments of agony in an airline accident, praying for death in the moments before one expires, is unendurable. For me, the horror of an incident like 9/11 is not just the fact that so many died, but that so many who in one moment were conducting their ordinary lives in the twin towers were suddenly faced with the stark choice of imminent incineration or taking the plunge to their deaths by sudden impact hundreds of feet below. One need not multiply examples to reinforce the desirability of death's stealing our lives with a kiss in our beds, in good health, at an advanced age. The fact that for so many of us death is a rape not a seduction is not one to be contemplated lightly or often.

"In running the sleaziest campaign since South Carolina in 2000 and standing by completely debunked lies on national television, it's clear that John McCain would rather lose his integrity than lose an election," Hari Sevugan, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, said in a statement. New York Times.

Okay, so Sarah Palin is not a pig. Last I heard, she claims to be a dog — with lipstick. Washington Post

Wild Man : The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg by Tom Wells

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars
It is a peculiar feeling to read a painstakingly detailed, fully-indexed 604-page biography and get the feeling that the author has simultaneously a pathological aversion to his subject and an irresistible fascination with him. Tom Wells chronicles in depth Daniel Ellsberg's strained relationship with his mother, who died young in a tragic family car crash. He dwells on examples of Ellsberg's self-centeredness, his lasciviousness, his womanizing, his vanity, his procrastination, his social alienation, and the spiraling irrelevance of his later years. Wells even repeatedly seeks to downplay the significance of Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers, the ultra-secret Rand Corporation study of government deception of the public during the Vietnam War that made Ellsberg a household word when he released it to the New York Times.

While I am not one to assume that whistleblowers, much less perhaps the greatest whistleblower of all time, are plaster saints, I am a little put off by the degree of Tom Wells' antipathy toward his subject. To be fair, I have never met Daniel Ellsberg. I do think Ellsberg was tormented by the war, and possibly by his complicity in it. I would not be surprised if he had some personal demons or made some reckless choices. Nevertheless, he remains a man whom I admire intensely, because he did have the courage to stand up and expose the lies of the most powerful government on earth.

Moreover, for all the flaws in this long book, the writing is crisp and there are many moments of intense drama, my favorites being the antics of the Chuck Colson and the White House plumbers on behalf of the troglodytic Richard Nixon and Ellsberg's mad cross country campaign to elude the FBI. In a national game of whack-a-mole, the Department of Justice would secure an injunction against one paper seeking to publish the papers, only to have two more copies pop up in different papers across the country. Among his other accomplishments, Ellsberg's act led directly to the decision in New York Times v. Sullivan that the government could not under the First Amendment impose prior restraints on the press to prevent publication of material, such as the Pentagon Papers, to the release of which it objected.

The final word on this book is that it is a critical biography in a good sense. It thoroughly examines its subject, stripping away myths, scrutinizing flaws. It is hard to believe that there is a wart on its subject that is not put under the magnifying glass. And yet, it also attempts to give us the measure of Ellsberg the man, and I think it succeeds in spite of itself. By that I mean that despite the author's professed low opinion of Ellsberg, and studious attempts at documenting it, I find it hard not to think of Ellsberg as a (flawed) giant of our times. More than can be said, perhaps, of his nemesis, Richard Nixon.

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