"Constance shuddered. 'Do you think the poor little thing suffered much?' came another of her futile questions.
"'The indications were all that way,' I said; 'on the other hand, of course, it may have been crying from sheer temper. Children sometimes do.'"
–Saki, Esme
"He lowered his voice and went on, 'Hey – timing really was important for that. A clear getaway afterwards. I got badly caught in Kilburn once telling a Bulgarian short-story writer, actually he was trying to cadge a lift, anyway telling him to fuck off for two or three minutes while the chap driving the open car I was sitting in turned round in the cul-de-sac I hadn't noticed we were at the end of. Amazing how quickly the bloom fades on fuck off, you know. Say it a couple of times running and you've got out of it nearly all of what you're going to get.'
"'And there's not a lot you can go on to later,' said Charlie.
"'Well exactly.'"
–Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils
"DUDE: Walter, you can't do that. These guys're like me, they're pacifists. Smokey was a conscientious objector.
WALTER: You know Dude, I myself dabbled with pacifism at one point. Not in Nam, of course.
DUDE: And you know Smokey has emotional problems!
WALTER: You mean... beyond pacifism?
DUDE: He's fragile, man! He's very fragile!
WALTER: Huh. I did not know that. Well, it's water under the bridge. And we do enter the next round-robin, am I wrong?
DUDE: No, you're not wrong–
WALTER: Am I wrong!
DUDE: You're not wrong, Walter, you're just an asshole."
–Joel and Ethan Coen, The Big Lebowski
Seemed apt, somehow. And whatever our other contentions, I think Josiah, Paul and I can agree that Smokey stepping over the line is not grounds for a just war.
I rarely get to dabble in book criticism, but The Pulse humored me this week with a lengthy review of David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster. It goes a little something like this:
David Foster Wallace simply can’t shut up. If he is the foremost current American practitioner of what Matthew Arnold called “the free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake” (and I submit that he is), brevity is not the soul of his wit. Wallace is known to even his most casual reader as an impresario of footnotes, and Consider the Lobster, his latest collection of essays, is relentlessly digressionary. (A piece on talk radio called “Host” experiments with a hypertext format – first published in The Atlantic with color-coordination – that footnotes the footnotes, and then footnotes the footnotes’ footnotes.) But in Wallace’s work such tangents are not a gimmick so much as a symptom, a mark of a mind roiling with minutiae and contradiction. “How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self?” Wallace wonders in “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” a review of sports memoirs. “How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act?” It does not require much presumption to imagine that Wallace’s internal Iago is silenced only by sleep, if at all.
You can read the rest here. Far better, though, that you pick up a copy of the book, which is a smashing good read. If you live nearby and ask me nicely, I'll even let you borrow my edition.
The following is a response to Josiah's thread on Colby Cosh and Christian Peacemakers, which began as a comment and expanded alarmingly:
Attempting to distinguish between moral and immoral acts of violence is an admirable goal, but the analysis strikes me as overly fine. Violence in any form is going to destroy those it is used upon, and sully those who use it. Try telling a mauled Palestinian child, an Iraqi widow, or even a Dresden survivor that your cause was just, and somehow I doubt they will be moved by the clarity of your moral reasoning. (And these are all causes I agree with.) "Just War" is a charming phrase; so are most oxymorons. As Paul Fussell writes (I've posted this before, but it bears repeating):
"...to survive and prosper in this world you have to do so at someone else's expense or do and undergo things it's not pleasant to face: like, for example, purchasing your life at the cost of the innocents murdered in the aerial bombing of Europe and the final bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And not just the bombings. It's also the unpleasant fact that you are alive and well because you or your representatives killed someone with bullets, shells, bayonets, or knives, if not in Germany, Italy, or Japan, then Korea or Vietnam. You have connived at murder, and you thrive on it, and that fact is too unpleasant to face except rarely."
But – and here, I suspect, is where Paul is going to throw something – there may be times when we have to set aside our own righteousness for the sake of other people's lives and, less nobly perhaps but just as importantly, for the sake of our own life and the lives of those we love. If you deny this unpleasant fact in the abstract, you are rewarded with the admiration of your equally distanced peers. If you deny it in practice, you are too good for this world (as they say) and will meet the apposite fate. So will people you love.
Few of us are likely to face this decision in practice, and we should give thanks every day. But as we examine it in the abstract, we should avoid the conceit that we are being terribly brave, or moral.
That said, we are citizens of the nation whose war machine looms over the world, and we might want to decide what we think of that. Here it might be helpful to make a distinction that the Christian Peacemakers do not bother with: the distinction between peace as a means and peace as an end. Peace as a means may often be effective, and is almost certainly more ethical than the alternative. (Although, to steal from Fussell again, there are no ethicists in the foxholes.) But to value peace as the highest moral end is automatically to denigrate other virtues that we claim to value: liberty, for one, and often human life. To "choose peace" is, in this world, very often to choose tyranny in someone else's house.
I don't mean to suggest that there is some kind of moral calculator we should consult before entering into conflict. I'm merely saying that the closer you look at war the more muddled the picture gets, until the point where it's incredibly tempting to use a concept like pacifism like a pair of windshield wipers and wipe the glass clean. But doing so really only moves the dirt around.
"Kingsley Amis once wrote me, 'The trouble with chaps like that is that they have no taste–I don't mean bad taste, just the mental organ that makes you say This is bloody good or This is piss is simply missing, and they have to orientate themselves by things like "importance" and "seriousness" and "depth" and "originality" and "consensus" (="trend").'"
–Robert Conquest, The Dragons of Expectation
"Ideas insufficiently connected to realities have always been part of the human effort to understand.
"These ideas are, of course, most troublesome when they present themself as virtually indisputable: as idols, or at least icons. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote many years ago, 'Man is a creature who lives not upon bread bread alone, but principally by catchwords.' Part of the problem is that catchwords of current speech or thought are usually supported, offstage, by more complex, superficially impressive wordplay."
–Robert Conquest, The Dragons of Expectation
"Men who aren’t enough like human beings even to hate – what one feels when they loom into view is just an overwhelming lack of interest, the sort of deep disengagement that is often a defense against pain. Against sadness. In fact, the likeliest reason why so many of us care so little about politics is that modern politicians make us sad, hurt us deep down in ways that are hard even to name, much less talk about. It's way easier to roll your eyes and not give a shit. You probably don't want to hear about all this, even."
–David Foster Wallace, "Up, Simba," Consider the Lobster,
My volable review of this terrific book is coming in Wednesday's Pulse. Meanwhile, have a spirited Easter. And be good on Good Friday.
"So we were safe, and to come safe out of a disaster is more gratifying than to come safe out of none at all. Of course, it was a pity about the others, but wouldn't they have felt the same gratification in my place? There is great pleasure in catastrophe that doesn't touch you, and anyone who says there isn't is a liar. Haven't you seen it in the face of a bearer of bad news, and heard it in the unctuous phrases at the church gate after a funeral?"
–George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman
"This song was immensely popular during the summer of 1941. I remember its being rendered at an evening entertainment at a yacht club of the period, sund with impressive emotional effect by a twelve-year-old boy soprano, son of one of the proud members. In his little blue blazer and long white duck trousers, he sang (and there was not a dry eye in the house),
My sister and I recall the dayWe said goodbye and sailed away;
And we think of our friends who had to stay–
But we don't talk about that.
The last line, an oft-repeated refrain in the song, proved a gift to the lewd and coarse young Americans soon to be corralled into the army of the United States. At one southern training camp, the troops distilled the song into a brisk mock-incestuous version, thought comically appropriate to family life in the southern states. The soldiers sang:
My sister and I–But we don't talk about that."
–Paul Fussell, "Writing in Wartime: The Uses of Innocence," Thank God for the Atom Bomb
"He should be interested in everything: the love life of toads, the way tortoises drink and the poor die, the dynamics of anti-Semitism, the differences between Caslon and sans-serif types, the motives impelling ordinary people to read, why books get written at all, the price of food, the reason women do not as a rule become stamp collectors, and the reason shipwrecks and trial scenes are literary staples. The critic should be able, like Orwell, to get an idea of the riches of the New World by noting of Mark Twain's America that the smallest coin then circulating was equivalent not to a British penny but a British shilling."
–Paul Fussell, "George Orwell: The Critic as Honest Man," Thank God for the Atom Bomb
"Some exemplary unpleasant facts are these: that life is short and almost always ends messily; that if you live in the actual world you can't have your own way; that if you do get what you want, it turns out not to be the thing that you wanted; that no one thinks as well of you as you do yourself; and that one or two generations from now you will be forgotten entirely and that the world will go on as if you had never existed. Another is that to survive and prosper in this world you have to do so at someone else's expense or do and undergo things it's not pleasant to face: like, for example, purchasing your life at the cost of the innocents murdered in the aerial bombing of Europe and the final bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And not just the bombings. It's also the unpleasant fact that you are alive and well because you or your representatives killed someone with bullets, shells, bayonets, or knives, if not in Germany, Italy, or Japan, then Korea or Vietnam. You have connived at murder, and you thrive on it, and that fact is too unpleasant to face except rarely."
–Paul Fussell, "A Power of Facing Unpleasant Facts," Thank God for the Atom Bomb
"But I blubbered like an infant, calling on Christ to save me, swearing to reform and crying gentle Jesus meek and mild over and over again. It's a great thing, prayer. Nobody answers, but at least it stops you from thinking."
–George MacDonald Fraser, Flashman
“Kafka’s humor – not only not neurotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane – is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. O’Connor’s bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.
“And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka’s wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance.”
–David Foster Wallace, “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” Consider the Lobster