why dave bergman is neat

senate luminary (cough, cough) joe biden (as in 'biden his time till he can lose another presidential primary') offered this nugget of golden wisdom on the senate's recent non-decision on john bolton:

"The vote we're about to take is not, is not about John Bolton, the vote is about taking a stand," Biden said.

mark steyn chimes in (pun intended) on the pop music fiasco at gitmo. i include the first three paragraphs, the third mostly because i, in fact, got a gal in kalamazoo.

Been following the latest horrifying stories from what Amnesty International calls the “gulag of our time”? John Kass of The Chicago Tribune was outraged by the news that records by Christina Aguilera had been played at Guantanamo at full volume in order to soften up detainees. He thought they should have used “Dance, Ballerina, Dance” by Vaughn Monroe, over and over and over.

Well, readers had plenty of suggestions of their own, and so the Tribune’s website put together a list of “Interro-Tunes” — the most effective songs for aural intimidation, mood music for jolting your jihadi. A lot were the usual suspects - like the Captain and Tennille’s blamelessly goofy “Muskrat Love”, which, as I recall, put the Queen to sleep at a White House gala, though the Duke of Edinburgh sat agog all the way to the end. Someone suggested Bob Dylan’s “Everybody Must Get Stoned”, which even on a single hearing sounds like it’s being played over and over. I don’t know what Mr Kass has against “Ballerina”, which is very pleasant in the Nat “King” Cole version. But he seems to think one burst of “Dance, ballerina, dance/And do your pirouette in rhythm with your aching heart” will have the Islamists howling for the off-switch and singing like canaries to the Feds. Who knows? I sang “Ballerina” myself once on the radio long ago, and, if it will discombobulate the inmates, I’m willing to dust off my arrangement and fly down to Guantanamo, if necessary dressed liked Christina Aguilera. If they want an encore, I’ll do my special culturally sensitive version of that Stevie Wonder classic, “My Sharia Amour”.

By now, one or two readers may be frothing indignantly, “That’s not funny! Bush’s torture camp at Guantanamo is the gulag of our time, if not of all time.” But that’s the point. The world divides into those who feel the atrocities at Gitmo “must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others” (in the widely quoted words of Senator Dick Durbin), and the rest of us, for whom the more we hear the specifics of the “atrocities” the funnier they are. They bear the same relation to the gulags (15-30 million dead), the Nazi camps (nine million dead) and the killing fields of Cambodia (two million dead) as Mel Brooks‚ “Springtime For Hitler” does to the original. Nobody complained at Auschwitz that the guards were playing the 78s of The Merry Widow (the Fuhrer’s favorite operetta) with the volume knob too high. When that old KGB hand Yuri Andropov succeeded Brezhnev as the big guy in the Kremlin, he was reported in the western press to be a big Glenn Miller fan. But to the best of my knowledge no-one suggested he was in the basement of the Lubyanka torturing the inmates with “I Got A Gal In Kalamazoo”.

(Lv M.)

well, that was awesome. perhaps the best game i've seen the pistons play this go-around.

yesterday i mentioned a little something about sen. dick durbin and his long, strange trip into the ethereal regions of hyperbole and, well, lying. i gather he doesn't intend to apologize. for this ridiculous move, he will perhaps come under some fire in the US.

but al jazeera sure loves it!

so he's got that going for him.

which is nice.

(LvM.)

UPDATE: thanks to DMac over at CV for the link! i don't know how classical values readers will think the seeg and the '84 tigers stack up to things classically- or values-oriented, but i'm willing to keep an open mind if you are. and be sure to check out DMac's pun in the title to his post--i know i can always count on dennis for a good pun.

and by the way--the tigers just finished SWEEPING the san diego padres, their opponent in the 1984 world series. go tigers!

the pistons looked in the first two games of the NBA finals like george w. bush in the first couple presidential debates last year. but last night they came to play.

it was sweet!

ben wallace, following two games of struggling, sported the fierce fro last night and TORE IT UP, and after the game he was asked about it:

Q: Did your wife choose to let the afro fly tonight?

Wallace: Yep. That’s what she said. She said let your hair down and go out there and play some basketball, or else you can’t eat.

ha! that's awesome!

given that i too have rather long hair with some fro potential and a cool wife-to-be, i can only hope that the lovely lady will help pull me out of a slump in similar fashion.

also, here's a game. see how many instances of words with
'-believable' or '-believably' you can find in this post-game exchange with coach larry brown.

Q. What changed tonight from the first two games?

COACH LARRY BROWN: Well, I think we figured out how hard we have to play. You know, their energy has been incredible, and I don't think we realized we were in the Finals against a great team that's unbelievably well coached. I really believe Ben started us off, he gets a dunk and a three point play and a steal and he had
five blocks in the first quarter. I think that really gave us a lift.

And then, you know, just before the end of the third quarter we got an unbelievable run, McDyess and Lindsey, and from then on, we just played at an unbelievably high level.

You know, it's one game. Now that game is over. I think our guys have unbelievable respect for them and realize it's going to take our very best to make this a competitive series.

ok. let's see how you did!

Q. What changed tonight from the first two games?

COACH LARRY BROWN: Well, I think we figured out how hard we have to play. You know, their energy has been incredible, and I don't think we realized we were in the Finals against a great team that's unbelievably well coached. I really believe Ben started us off, he gets a dunk and a three point play and a steal and he had five blocks in the first quarter. I think that really gave us a lift.

And then, you know, just before the end of the third quarter we got an unbelievable run, McDyess and Lindsey, and from then on, we just played at an unbelievably high level.

You know, it's one game. Now that game is over. I think our guys have unbelievable respect for them and realize it's going to take our very best to make this a competitive series.

UPDATE: more here--apparently this isn't the first time chanda has threatened to send ben to bed with no supper:

"She does it all the time," he said Wednesday. "She locked me in the closet once, too. ... It is what it is: a partnership. She gives the speech, I get the win. ... I guess we're even."

the whole article is worth reading.

ANOTHER UPDATE: ok, here's one more. it's good too.

sen. dick durbin apparently has come completely unhinged. recently he castigated american treatment of prisoners, comparing the captors to nazis, soviets, and pol pot. can you guess why? any conjectures as to what heinous acts the evil americans were engaging in?

you guessed it! they played with climate control via the air conditioner and made detainees listen to RAP MUSIC!!!

AHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

here are durbin's own words, stranger, indeed, than fiction.

On one occasion, the air conditioning had been turned down so far and the temperature was so cold in the room, that the barefooted detainee was shaking with cold. ..... On another occasion, the [air conditioner] had been turned off, making the temperature in the unventilated room well over 100 degrees. The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his hair out throughout the night. On another occasion, not only was the temperature unbearably hot, but extremely loud rap music was being played in the room, and had been since the day before, with the detainee chained hand and foot in the fetal position on the tile floor.

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

somebody get me dick durbin on the phone. i don't even HAVE air conditioning, and my apartment has been scorching for the last several days. perhaps he could pol pot-ize my landlord on the senate floor and get the whole nation aware of my own private gulag, and i'll finally see some relief. i'll even let him know that last year the people across the street used to play REALLY LOUD MUSIC WITH IMPUNITY!!!

that should get him on my side.

p.s. you can read more from durbin's remarks here (LvAT.)

watching the pistons the last two games has been like a protracted exercise in self-immolation.

i find watching the news to be a similar experience; it just doesn't last as long.

so in case you live in an underground tunnel, michael jackson was acquitted on all counts today. i was a little off on my prediction--i guessed that he would get convicted of providing alcohol to a minor to, you know, show they mean business in california, and that he would be free and clear on all the others.

but that prediction was still closer than the outcome i forecast for game 2 of the NBA finals. c'est la vie.

and another story you might not have heard (move to edge of seats now)--katie holmes has decided to convert to scientology because of the beliefs of her new flame, tom 'yes, i WILL jump on that couch, oprah' cruise. she was a catholic up to this point, but it seems that tom must have been enough to compel her to change allegiance from mater ecclesia to father hubbard.

so that's the up-to-date news for the minute.

feeling burned?

i don't enjoy seeing the pistons get demolished.

but i DO enjoy reading mark steyn (LvM).

Issue 110 / May 2005
The English Hitchens
Despite his US citizenship, Christopher Hitchens should be considered the finest English critic of his generation-- of the literary, not just political, type.
by David Herman.
Love, Poverty and War by Christopher Hitchens(Atlantic Books, £14.99)

With the publication of his fifth collection of essays, it is time to acknowledge that Christopher Hitchens, as well as an exceptional political polemicist, is also one of the best literary and cultural critics of the past 20 years. Put his introduction to the late Saul Bellow's Augie March next to Martin Amis's and there is no doubt which cuts closer to the centre of Bellow's achievement. Compare Hitchens's essay on Michael Ignatieff's Isaiah Berlin biography with any other review, and Hitchens's hatchet job is easily the best. As the politically correct brigade denounced Larkin and Kingsley Amis, Wodehouse and Waugh, Hitchens fought a lonely battle on behalf of a very English, mid-20th-century canon. It is time to take Christopher Hitchens seriously.There have been three turning points in Hitchens's career. First, in the early 1980s he moved to America. The US was where the action was. Occasional pieces on Michael Foot and the SDP showed what everyone knew—late 20th-century Britain was small beer. It was also a smart move for someone who wanted to evolve from political journalism to cultural and literary essays. He found a niche in the serious magazine culture of the east coast, and since 1989 he has produced hundreds of essays and reviews, ranging from Contragate and Clinton to Waugh; from Wodehouse to Princess Diana and Mother Teresa. The new collection contains some of Hitchens's best work: on Kipling and Proust, on David Irving and the sickness of JFK. Hitchens is at his best where culture meets politics, in reviews of Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost, Don DeLillo's Libra and Gore Vidal's memoir, Palimpsest. The second turning point came in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Many people assume that Hitchens's break with the left came over 9/11. That was a bitter falling out, part of a larger split within the Anglo-American left intelligentsia. But signs of the break are apparent earlier: over Salman Rushdie and the fatwa in 1989, then Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s. Hitchens's cause was always the same: secular, humanitarian, democratic. With Edward Said he co-edited a book on Palestinian rights, on Start the Week he called for the return to Greece of the Elgin Marbles, in the Nation he stood up for the victims of US policy in central America and of Panzerkommunismus in central Europe. When it came to Rushdie, then Bosnia and Kosovo, Hitchens saw them as the same issue. In Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001) he called the defence of Bosnia-Herzegovina "a civilisation question." At the end of the book he writes, "The next phase or epoch is already discernible; it is the fight to extend the concept of universal human rights, and to match the 'globalisation' of production by the globalisation of a common standard for justice and ethics." The pieces on the fatwa against Rushdie had the same tone: it was "the chance to defend civilisation's essential principle." The context, however, was new: "Muslim societies are undergoing a general crisis of adaptation to modernity and to the 'West.'" For Hitchens, long-time critic of Duarte, Noriega and Abu Nidal, Bin Laden and Saddam were just two more who preferred torture and murder to democracy and life. The third turning point brings us to what will endure in Love, Poverty and War. At some point in the 1990s, Hitchens found his literary voice. The political polemics began to give way to substantial literary essays. Perhaps it was to do with the move to Vanity Fair and the literary pieces he began to write for the New York Review of Books and, more recently, the Atlantic Monthly. Perhaps it was part of a revulsion against the politics of the 1990s and part of the fallout with the left. There were early signs of this new voice in the essays he wrote when he first came to America in the early 1980s, on Brideshead Revisited, Orwell and Paul Scott (collected in Prepared for the Worst, 1989). First, there is the question of Englishness. Hitchens is quick to criticise those who write about Orwell too much in terms of his Englishness, but there is no doubt that his own canon wears an old school tie. From the essays on Kipling and Wilde to Orwell, Wodehouse and Waugh, and then Powell, Fleming, Scott and Greene, the English writers Hitchens values most are posh, often funny, and very English. English—with a twist of abroad. Orwell and Greene travelled widely, Kipling and Scott were the great chroniclers of empire in India, Wodehouse and Wilde died abroad.All of this speaks to Hitchens and it is no coincidence that he too went to public school (Leys, Cambridge), Oxford (Balliol) and has lived abroad for 20 years. Like his father and grandfather, he has travelled the world. "I came," he writes in Letters to a Young Contrarian, "of a naval and military family with a long tradition of service to the empire… My grandfather had served in India in the first world war, my father had been posted on British overseas 'possessions' as far distant as the coastal enclaves of China, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Falkland Islands."It is not hard to see an interesting doubleness here. The radical whose father and grandfather were servants of empire. In Love, Poverty and War, an essay on Trotsky comes between essays on Kipling and Huxley. That duality, the leftist immersed in mid-20th century Englishness, brings us closer to the centre of Hitchens's work. In Brideshead, where others see only snobbery and an elegiacal hymn to lost privilege, Hitchens sees mourning for the dead of the first world war. In every essay on Kipling, including the new one here, he tries to unravel the poet of empire and jingoism, "the beery sentimentality," from the dark sense of personal and national loss. In all these writers, Hitchens sees complexity, contradiction and "the idea of a double life." Orwell/Blair, of course, is a classic case of this English doubleness, but the richest account is found in his essay of the early 1990s on Larkin. When Tom Paulin, Terry Eagleton and others rushed to bury Larkin under accusations of racism, sexism and worse, Hitchens dug deeper and found, both in the life and the poetry, more complexity and interest. The essay that confirms Hitchens as a major critic is his introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of Augie March. It is a brave choice. After all, Bellow was Martin Amis's literary father, as surely as Amis is Hitchens's literary brother (the same knowing Oxford drawl, the laugh-out-loud humour). Amis's fiction has been haunted for years by the idea of sibling rivalry. It is there at the heart of Success and The Information. It is worth wondering whether Amis's real rival is not McEwan, Rushdie or Barnes, but Hitchens—the best non-fiction writer of the lot.The piece on Bellow is a tour de force. He understands the importance of Henry James's nasty account of the lower east side ("the torture rooms of the living idiom") for two generations of Jewish-American writers. "One triumph of Augie March," he writes, "is that it takes Yiddishkeit out of 'the torture rooms,' and out of the ghetto, and helps make it an indissoluble and inseparable element in the great American tongue." Hitchens sees how Augie March is a personal breakthrough for Bellow after Dangling Man and The Victim, "the age of his own uncertainty." It is the novel where Bellow finds his own voice as a writer. As with Proust and Wodehouse, "the essential matter… is the language and the style," an idea which stands at the centre of Hitchens's criticism.There are many references in Love, Poverty and War to solidarities, to roots and belonging: his father and grandfather, his English literary canon, a 200-year tradition of fellow contrarians, and friends and comrades today from Sarajevo to Central America. Yet there is something solitary in Hitchens, with his quirky English heroes—too white, too male and too posh for these times. When academics praise modernism, postmodernism and postcolonialism, Hitchens praises Kipling, Bellow and Lucky Jim. He's always been suspicious of false solidarities. He has no time for political parties, Democrats or Republicans, Labour or Conservative. He ridiculed Reagan but disliked Kennedy and Clinton more. He had no time for Thatcher, but no one on the left has heaped such scorn on Kinnock, Hattersley, Callaghan and Foot. "Weimar without the sex," was his verdict on the Callaghan years.For Hitchens, the heroes stopped a while ago. Orwell died just after Hitchens was born; Victor Serge just before. His essay on Havana begins in a drink shop on Calle Empedrado, "where Ernest Hemingway used to absorb his mojito thirst quencher… before moving on to the nearby Florida restaurant." There he comes across an inscription in the visitors' book, "Viva Cuba Libre!" by Salvador Allende, written on 28th June 1961. Hitchens was staying in the Hotel Nacional where Graham Greene's Wormold survived a poisoning plot in Our Man in Havana. There is a strong sense of coming after—after Hemingway, Allende and Greene; after modernism (Borges, Proust and Joyce); after the iconic figures of the 20th century (Churchill, Castro, JFK).In Love, Poverty and War there are no major writers after Borges, no great statesmen after Castro. As he travels along Route 66, he remembers what Woody Guthrie sang, what Steinbeck wrote. Today little is left. Even his beloved English writers, starting with Kipling and Wilde, finish with Greene, Powell and Scott. Perhaps the last was Kingsley Amis. Though he writes with passion about Rushdie, and refers fondly to Amis fils, McEwan and Barnes, it is not the same. Here, and elsewhere, Hitchens is a son writing about the age of fathers.Perhaps it has something to do with growing up in Britain immediately after the war, after the loss of empire. This elegiac sense sets Love, Poverty and War apart from the earlier collections. But it is different in another way, too. Here there is less Anglo-American politics, more big literary pieces. Hitchens, you feel, is on the move, drawing away from the littleness of today's politicians and celebrity culture, towards the great writers of the early and mid-20th century. If that is where he finally pitches his tent, he might end up as the best literary and cultural critic of his generation.

Edward N. Luttwak
25 May 2005
The good in barbed wire
a review of:

BARBED WIRE An ecology of modernity
by Reviel Netz
267pp. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. $24.95; distributed in the UK by Eurospan. £17.50. 0 8195 6719 1


Barbed wire is important in my life – the cattle ranch I run in the BolivianAmazon could not exist without it. In Britain as in other advanced countries, it is mostly fences of thin unbarbed wire enlivened by a low-voltage current that keep cattle from wandering off, but in the Bolivian Amazon they have no electrical supply to transform down, and in any case the cost, over many perimeter miles, would be prohibitive and the upkeep quite impossible. Ours is a wonderful land of lush savannahs and virgin forest, but it is just not valuable enough to be demarcated by anything more expensive than strands of barbed wire held up by wooden posts driven into the ground. Invented and patented by Joseph F. Glidden in 1874, an immediate success in mass production by 1876, barbed wire, first of iron and then steel, did much to transform the American West, before doing the same in other prairie lands from Argentina to Australia. Actually, cheap fencing transformed the primordial business of cattle-raising itself. Solid wooden fences or even stone walls can be economical enough for intensive animal husbandry, in which milk and traction as well as meat are obtained by constant labour in stable and field to feed herbivores without the pastures they would otherwise need. Often the animals are tethered or just guarded, without any fences or walls. But in large-scale raising on the prairie or savannah, if there are no fences then the cattle must be herded, and that requires constant vigilance to resist the herbivore instinct of drifting off to feed – and also constant motion. As the animals eat up the vegetation where they are gathered, the entire herd must be kept moving to find more. That is what still happens in the African savannah of the cattle herdsmen, and what was done in the American West as in other New World prairies, until barbed wire arrived to make ranching possible. One material difference between ranging in open country and ranching is that less labour is needed, because there is less need for vigilance within the fence. Another measurable difference is that cattle can do more feeding to put on weight, instead of losing weight when driven from place to place. But the increased productivity of ranching as opposed to ranging is actually of an entirely different order. African herders must be warriors to protect their cattle from their like as well as from the waning number of animal predators, but chiefly to maintain their reputation for violence which in turn assures their claim to the successive pastures they must have through the seasons. It was almost the same for the ranging cowboys of the American West, and while their own warrior culture was somewhat less picturesque than that of the Nuer or Turkana, it too was replete with the wasted energies of endemic conflict over land, water and sometimes even the cattle itself. Ranchers are not cream puffs either, but they can use their energies more productively because in most places – including the Bolivian Amazon for all its wild remoteness – their fences are property lines secured by the apparatus of the law, which itself can function far more easily among property-owning ranchers than among warrior nomads and rangers. Skills too are different. African herdsmen notoriously love their cattle to perdition but their expertise is all in the finding of pasture and water in semi-arid lands, as well as in hunting and war, and they are not much good at increasing fertility, and hardly try to improve breeds. It was the same in the American West, where the inception of today’s highly elaborate cattle-raising expertise that makes red meat excessively cheap had to await the stability of ranching, and the replacement of the intrepid ranger by the more productive cowboy. Barbed wire is important therefore, and the story of how it was so quickly produced by automatic machines on the largest scale, efficiently distributed to customers necessarily remote from urban centres, marketed globally almost immediately, and finally used to change landscapes and societies, is certainly very interesting. But for all this, the reader will have to turn to Henry D. and Frances T. McCallum’s The Wire That Fenced the West rather than the work at hand, in spite of its enthusiastic dust-jacket encomia from Noam Chomsky (“a deeply disturbing picture of how the modern world evolved”), Paul F. Starrs (“beautifully grim”) and Lori Gruen, for whom the book is all about “structures of power and violence”. The reason is that Reviel Netz, the author of Barbed Wire: An ecology of modernity, prefers to write of other things. For Netz, the raising of cattle is not about producing meat and hides from lands usually too marginal to yield arable crops, but rather an expression of the urge to exercise power: “What is control over animals? This has two senses, a human gain, and an animal deprivation”. To tell the truth, I had never even pondered this grave question, let alone imagined how profound the answer could be. While that is the acquisitive purpose of barbed wire, for Professor Netz it is equally – and perhaps even more – a perversely disinterested expression of the urge to inflict pain, “the simple and unchanging equation of flesh and iron”, another majestic phrase, though I am not sure if equation is quite the right word. But if that is our ulterior motive, then those of us who rely on barbed- wire fencing for our jollies are condemned to be disappointed, because cattle does not keep running into it, suffering bloody injury and pain for us to gloat over, but instead invisibly learns at the youngest age to avoid the barbs by simply staying clear of the fence. Fortunately we still have branding, “a major component of the culture of the West” and of the South too, because in Bolivia we also brand our cattle. Until Netz explained why we do it – to enjoy the pain of “applying the iron until – and well after – the flesh of the animal literally burns”, I had always thought that we brand our cattle because they cannot carry notarized title deeds anymore than they can read off-limits signs. Incidentally, I have never myself encountered a rancher who expensively indulges in the sadistic pleasure of deeply burning the flesh of his own hoofed capital, opening the way for deadly infection; the branding I know is a quick thrust of the hot iron onto the skin, which is not penetrated at all, and no flesh burns. We finally learn who is really behind all these perversities, when branding is “usefully compared with the Indian correlate”: Euro-American men, of course, as Professor Netz calls us. “Indians marked bison by tail-tying: that is, the tails of killed bison were tied to make a claim to their carcass. Crucially, we see that for the Indians, the bison became property only after its killing.” We on the other hand commodify cattle “even while alive”. There you have it, and Netz smoothly takes us to the inevitable next step: “Once again a comparison is called for: we are reminded of the practice of branding runaway slaves, as punishment and as a practical measure of making sure that slaves – that particular kind of commodity – would not revert to their natural free state. In short, in the late 1860s, as Texans finally desisted from the branding of slaves, they applied themselves with ever greater enthusiasm to the branding of cows.”Texans? Why introduce Texans all of a sudden, instead of cowboys or cattlemen? It seems that for Professor Netz in the epoch of Bush II, Texans are an even more cruel sub-species of the sadistic race of Euro-American men (and it is men, of course). As for the “enthusiasm”, branding too is hard work, and I for one have yet to find the vaqueros who will do it for free, for the pleasure of it. By this point in the text some trivial errors occur, readily explained by a brilliantly distinguished academic career that has understandably precluded much personal experience in handling cattle. Professor Netz writes, for example, that “moving cows over long distances is a fairly simple task. The mounted humans who controlled the herds – frightening them all the way to Chicago . . .”. Actually, it is exhausting work to lead cattle over any distance at all without causing drastic weight loss – even for us in Bolivia when we walk our steer to the market, in spite of far more abundant grass and water than Texas or even the upper Midwest ever offered, at the rate of less than nine miles a day to cover a mere 200 kilometres, instead of several times that distance to reach Chicago. Used as we are to seeing our beautiful Nelor cattle grazing contentedly in a slow ambling drift across the pastures, it is distressing to drive them even at the calmest pace for the shortest distances; they are so obviously tense and unhappy, and of course they lose weight with each unwanted step. As for “frightening them all the way to Chicago”, that is sheer nonsense: nothing is left of cattle stampeded a few days, let alone all the way to Chicago. Unfortunately, his trivial error makes it impossible for Netz to understand the difference between ranging and ranching that he thinks he is explaining.All this and more besides (horses are “surrounded by the tools of violence”) occurs in the first part of a book that proceeds to examine at greater length the cruelty of barbed wire against humans. He starts with the battlefield – another realm of experience that Netz cannot stoop to comprehend. He writes that barbed wire outranks the machine gun in stopping power, evidently not knowing that infantry can walk over any amount of barbed wire if it is not over-watched by adequate covering fires, and need not waste time cutting through the wires one by one. Nowadays well-equipped troops have light-alloy runners for this, as other purposes, but in my day, our sergeants trained us to cross rolls of barbed wire by simply stepping over the backs of prone comrades, who were protected well enough from injury from the barbs by the thick wool of their British battle dress – because the flexible rolls gave way of course. Perhaps because the material is rather directly derived from standard sources, no such gross errors emerge in the still larger part of the book devoted to the evils of the barbed wire of the prison camps, and worse, of Boer War British South Africa, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (Guantanamo no doubt awaits a second edition). It is reassuring if not exactly startling to read that Professor Netz disapproves of prison camps, concentration camps and extermination camps, that he is not an enthusiast of either the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, while being properly disapproving of all imperialisms of course. But it does seem unfair to make barbed wire the protagonist of these stories as opposed to the people who employed barbed wire along with even more consequential artefacts such as guns. After all, atrocities as extensive as the Warsaw Ghetto with its walled perimeter had no need of barbed wire, any more than the various grim fortresses and islands in which so many were imprisoned, tortured and killed without being fenced in. There is no need to go on. Enough of the text has been quoted to identify the highly successful procedures employed by Reviel Netz, which can easily be imitated – and perhaps should be by as many authors as possible, to finally explode the entire genre. First, take an artefact, anything at all. Avoid the too obviously deplorable machine gun or atom bomb. Take something seemingly innocuous, say shoelaces. Explore the inherent if studiously unacknowledged ulterior purposes of that “grim” artefact within “the structures of power and violence”. Shoelaces after all perfectly express the Euro-American urge to bind, control, constrain and yes, painfully constrict. Compare and contrast the easy comfort of the laceless moccasins of the Indian – so often massacred by booted and tightly laced Euro-Americans, as one can usefully recall at this point. Refer to the elegantly pointy and gracefully upturned silk shoes of the Orient, which have no need of laces of course because they so naturally fit the human foot – avoiding any trace of Orientalism, of course. It is all right to write in a manner unfriendly or even openly contemptuous of entire populations as Professor Netz does with his Texans at every turn (“ready to kill. . . they fought for Texan slavery against Mexico”), but only if the opprobrium is always aimed at you-know-who, and never at the pigmented. Clinch the argument by evoking the joys of walking on the beach in bare and uncommodified feet, and finally overcome any possible doubt by reminding the reader of the central role of high-laced boots in sadistic imagery. That finally unmasks shoelaces for what they really are – not primarily a way of keeping shoes from falling off one’s feet, but instruments of pain, just like the barbed wire that I have been buying all these years not to keep the cattle in, as I imagined, but to torture it, as Professor Netz points out. The rest is easy: the British could hardly have rounded up Boer wives and children without shoelaces to keep their boots on, any more than the very ordinary men in various Nazi uniforms could have done such extraordinary things so industriously, and not even Stalin could have kept the Gulag going with guards in unlaced Indian moccasins, or elegantly pointy, gracefully upturned, oriental shoes.

"We don't want nobody to get on the bandwagon now," Wallace said, serving as playful Team Megaphone. "The only ones that believe in us are the ones that go to The Palace every night. I don't want people coming out of the woodwork to say, 'Hey, I'm a Detroit fan, I've been with them all season.' We don't want none of that."

it looks (or, rather, feels) like the 3 Hs have returned to this neck of the woods for the summer: hazy, hot, and humid. i heard that it's supposed to get up to 96 today. i think it was already 75 at 9 a.m. this morning. i guess it serves me right for complaining it wasn't warm enough in recent weeks.

on my way to school this morning, i caught most of 'sultans of swing'. mark knopfler's guitar-playing on that song is so SMOOTH. he even makes the AC/DC-type licks at the end sound as laid-back and chill as...as...i don't know, other mark knopfler songs.

in other news, it turns out howard dean is not very bright. (LvM.)

finally, the tigers scored an 8-4 victory over the dodgers last night.

yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes! yes!

so the tigers won the sixth game out of seven tonight against the first-place baltimore orioles. i suppose i could provide a link to some sort of post-game report.

anyway.

ok, fine. i will. here. happy?

this win brings them up to .500. according to the article linked above, this is the first time since september 8, 2000, that they have been at .500 this late in the season.

in other news, jerry seinfeld was just talking about plato and the platonic relationship in the episode called 'the stake out' (season 1, episode 3).

i think i reached a point of existential despair while watching the pistons tonight.

on the other hand, while i was driving home after school today classic rock 102.9 MGK played a track off of live bullet during the 5:00 attitude adjustment. 'katmandu'--there seems to me to be an allusion to shakespeare in it. any guesses?

'you've been through all of f. scott fitzgerald's books; you're very well read, it's well known'.

that's what the other bob just said on the stereo.

almost time for seinfeld.

love and cookies.

UPDATE: not that the heat needed much extra help to win last night, but i think they definitely got it from the officials. the always-verbose rasheed wallace had this to say, supported by larry brown:

"You had to see that. It was just so blatant," Wallace said of the officiating. "I am going to find out who knows about basketball by reading your stories and seeing your reports tomorrow.

"We are going to win Game 6 because there will be good people out there reffing. They (the NBA) want a Game 7 'cause there's no other series. Y'all can't see that, then you're crazy."

Brown, who picked up a technical foul, stuck up for Wallace.

"He didn't get to play," Brown said. "I mean, three offensive fouls, that's tough. I don't know how he could've played in a game like that. He fouls out in 22 minutes in Game 4 and he's got five fouls tonight -- it's hard."

i think they're right; the officiating was dismal last night, though i don't know if the outcome would have been different had the officiating been. at any rate, it means damon jones should stop his whining, especially since he says he's not crying about the officiating while he's, well, crying about the officating:

Perhaps the officials overheard Damon Jones mini-rant after the Heat shootaround Thursday.

Jones, discussing the Pistons' defense particularly on Dwyane Wade, felt the officials might have forgotten some of the new rules emphasis.

"Everyone says they (Pistons) are a great defensive team, which they are," Jones said. "But there were rules changes put in at the start of the year that don't allow the defender to impede the offensive man's progress. And just watching the game over and over again, they're doing some impeding of his progress.

"Is that being called? Am I am sitting here, crying about officiating? Never. But at some point in time, something is going to have to be done about that. Because he's been aggressive all year long, all playoff long, and him not getting to free throw line as frequent as he's done all year is a problem."

Note to Jones: Wade shot 10 free throws in Game 4. He has shot 40 free throws in the four games. He shot eight free throws in 27 minutes Thursday.

The referees are blowing the whistle, thank you.