The Other as Image: Vertigo and the Reflection of Desire

“Courage also destroys giddiness at abysses; and where does man not stand at an abyss? Is seeing itself not—seeing abysses?”
-Nietzsche

“Obsessions are the demons of a world without faith.”
-E.M Cioran

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), the desiring gaze, the gaze that dreams not only of power but also salvation, transforms and reshapes that which it sees. The film shows a kind of seeing that is not seeing. The protagonist suffers not because of what he does not see, but because what he sees is not real, as it is only the reflection of his desires. The Other is literally created, given an identity, through seeing it, while the actual identity of the Other is destroyed. When the protagonist of Vertigo sees a woman, he engages only with her image, and so she exists only as an image. The desiring gaze, in particular, creates the object of the desire, and therefore eliminates the actual object by replacing it with the object that corresponds to its desire. Vertigo is a movie about seeing; and about a certain kind of blindness as well.

James Stewart plays Scottie, a retired detective. He is asked to follow the wife, named Madeleine, of a rich and powerful friend, Gavin, who believes she has been possessed by a dead woman from the past. Gavin claims she becomes like “someone I didn’t know. She even walked a different way.” Scottie decides to take the job, and begins to follow her everywhere she goes. Unknown to Scottie, the whole story is a lie, and Madeleine is being impersonated by Judy (Kim Novak) so that Gavin can murder his wife by faking her suicide.

So Scottie follows Madeleine, always watching but never seen in return, on her errands and wanderings. Hitchcock provides many point of view shots for Scottie, and Madeleine is almost always seen from behind or in profile. There is not one single shot in the film from Madeleine/Judy’s point of view. Aside from being adorned with Hitchcock’s usual objects of fascination (blonde hair and grey suits), Madeleine never speaks. She is a silent, moving image of desire for Scottie. Hitchcock even goes so far as to associate her visually with a woman in a painting, the dead woman she is supposedly possessed by, Carlotta Valdez. In the early portions of the film she exists only as an image.

Interestingly, there is another woman in Scottie’s life: Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes). Scotty rarely looks at Midge when he talks to her, yet she is clearly infatuated with him. When Scottie enters her apartment and asks her questions regarding his case, she complains that he never says anything like “you look wonderful.” In fact, he never comments on her appearance at all. Midge asks Scottie jealously, “Is she pretty?” Scottie’s watching of Madeleine is in marked contrast to his inability to “see” Midge.

When Madeleine attempts suicide by jumping into the ocean, and Scotty saves her, it appears on the surface that she becomes a real person at last, or at least something more than an image. When Scottie emerges with Madeleine from the water, he takes her home, and not to her husband. When she awakes, nude and in Scottie’s bed, she says her first words in the movie, almost fifty minutes in. Nothing she says will matter, however, since Scottie has already constructed her identity for her. And even though he has touched her before (and removed her clothes) the first true contact he has with Madeleine, accidentally touching her hand when reaching for a cup, is a shock to Scottie. For him, the image of his desire has come to life. So begins the romance.

While Scottie finally makes contact with the woman he has been following, she isn’t Madeleine. In fact, Madeleine ceases to exist at this point, both literally and figuratively. When Scottie fishes her out of the sea, and emerges with her in his arms, he has produced the corporeal object that corresponds to his desires. Not coincidentally, it is at this point that Judy begins to truly pretend to be Madeleine, as she acts as if she is falling in love with him. The complexity of the situation deepens, however, as Judy begins to fall in love with Scotty for real.

For the first time viewer of Vertigo, the story up to this point seems much like a fairly conventional (if adulterous) romance/ghost story. The truth, clear at the end of the film, is that Scottie has been tricked, and has fallen for an illusion. As if he is trapped in a movie (as, indeed, he is) Scottie participates in a situation where nothing is real, and no one is who they pretend to be. His love for Madeleine is directed toward a woman who does not really exist, and he is still only in love with an image.

When the trap springs, and “Madeleine” dies, Scottie is distraught to the point of being catatonic. He is a fallen man, tossed out of paradise, and he begins to rebuild his life, but he retains the memory of this imaginary woman who represents a perfect love. In a famous dream sequence Scottie falls through a grave to his death. To add to the religious metaphors, Scottie is accused by a judge of being negligent and responsible for Madeleine’s death. The rest of the film takes place after the fall, and Scottie is saddled with guilt for Madeleine’s death.

Initially, Scottie is easily reminded of Madeleine. He sees glimpses of her everywhere. His gaze is once again reconstructing his desires; he is seeing what he wants to see. A blonde woman in a grey suit excites his imagination, as he thinks for a moment that Madeleine has come back from the dead. After several more false starts, Scottie sees Judy, the woman who pretended to be Madeleine, on a sidewalk. She is clad in garish colors, with dark hair and a misguided hair style. She is, alas, imperfect, and Hitchcock toys with his audience when he provokes us to think that Ms. Novak doesn’t look as she should. (It is a well documented fact that Hitchcock insisted that Novak not wear a bra in these scenes. The numerous mentions of bras and corsets throughout the film, contrasted with Judy’s choice to not wear a bra, make for a subtle feminist commentary in the film.) Scottie is, of course, unaware of her real identity, but he sees Madeleine in Judy, and he pursues her doggedly. When he looks at her, he doesn’t see Judy, he sees Madeleine, and the subsequent transformations he forces her through are actually a dramatization after the fact, as the real transformation already occurred when he looked at her the first time. Judy asks him, “Do I really look like her?” For Scottie, looking like her is enough to be her.

Scottie is still haunted by bad dreams, reenacting again and again Madeleine’s death. Judy, for her part, is also haunted by memories of love. She gazes longingly at her grey suit in the closet, obviously wishing to put it on again. She writes a letter and confesses to the whole charade, but she tears it up and resolves to continue to let Scottie believe Madeleine existed so that he might begin to love her as she really is. She responds to the perfection he sees in her, and she sacrifices her identity for his love, for her own desires. Hitchcock, no feminist, doesn’t see Judy as the victim, and those who claim Vertigo as a feminist text might want to consider that she is the woman as betrayer in the tradition of Eve. She creates the initial lie, and she surrenders to the next one partially in order to bask in the perfection that Scottie sees in her. She too fails to see, if only momentarily.

After a period of rather prosaic and dispirited courting, Scottie begins to transform Judy into Madeleine, or, at least, into the image of Madeleine. Since Madeleine was only an image to begin with, he effectively recreates her. He buys her the grey suit, and dies her hair blonde. Judy initially resists his attempts to remake her. Distraught, she says she knows that she reminds him of Madeleine, but “not even that very much.” Judy, too, has fallen from the ideal romance portrayed at the beginning of the film. Her motivation to change for Scottie is not only in response to his love, but in order to regain the imagined perfection of their initial courtship. She is more conflicted than Scottie perhaps, because some part of her wants to hold on to reality, and she desires for him to love her as she really is. At one point she accuses him of not wanting to touch her. Scottie denies it, but he looks away from her as well. It becomes clear at this point that Scottie cannot accept real love, precisely because it is real, and imperfect. He cannot touch it, or look at it, because he dreams of perfection, and reality only gives rise to despair for him. Finally, she gives in, and says, “If I let you change me…will you love me?” After the makeover, in an astonishing scene, Judy emerges from the bathroom as an exact copy of Madeleine (therefore as Madeleine), bathed in green light. When Scottie kisses her the camera rotates and transports him to the mission where Madeleine died. This is his only and only moment of redemption, and it is an illusion.

Judy’s lie is discovered when she puts on a piece of jewelry identical to the jewelry worn by Carlotta in the painting, and Scottie recognizes it. In highly ironic fashion, Judy is found out only because she goes too far in becoming Madeleine, in becoming the image. Scottie, so willing to accept the lie before, begins to see Madeleine as the image she is when Judy puts on the necklace. In an effort to exorcise the past, Scottie takes Judy to the mission where Madeleine died to reenact her death.

Why Scottie makes Judy do this is perhaps the crucial point of the film. He all but pushes her off the tower himself, something Jimmy Stewart would never be allowed to do, but the meaning is clear: he means to kill her in order to maker her transformation into Madeleine complete. The necklace punctures the illusion, but Scottie persists in following through to the end. She has to die in order to finally be Madeleine, since Judy’s actual existence can only be imperfect, no matter how exact a counterfeit she is. That she is actually killed by blind chance in the form of a nun, a representative of God, only heightens the tragedy. Scottie’s dreams of perfection necessarily entail despair, because perfection can only exist as the image, and can never exist in reality. When Madeleine threatens to become real she must be destroyed. If she lives, with Scottie knowing the truth, then the illusion will be destroyed, and Scottie will see. So when Judy is found out he has to kill her in order to make her transformation complete.

The pessimist philosopher Schopenhauer shunned the romantic music of Beethoven. Much like the music of Beethoven, Bernard Herrmann’s beautiful swirling score for Vertigo embodies dramatic romance and obsession. Schopenhauer argued that the Will to life in men, represented by conflict and heartache, leads inevitably to disaster, because it only finds existence in constant war with itself. Man is doomed to conflict because that is his nature. The only cure, he felt, was to retire from the Will, and to engage in what he called a will-less knowing. The best way to do this was through the quiet contemplation of precise and orderly music, such as Bach, or, in some cases, Mozart. Midge tells Scottie, after Madeleine’s death, that “Mozart’s the boy for you.” At the beginning of the film, in Midge’s apartment, Scottie turns off in disgust music that sounds like the epitome of what Schopenhauer described. Scottie is a tragic character because he is driven by forces outside his control, represented by Herrmann’s score. His doom is his inability to subdue his passion. The subject of Vertigo is the very romance of the movies themselves, and of the power of the images they present. The face of a woman on screen is perfect precisely because it offers the audience nothing but the image, and we are free to imagine it as perfect. As André Bazin wrote, “The cinema substitutes for our gaze a world that corresponds to our desires.”

The great tragedy of Vertigo is not that Scottie painfully attempts to recreate perfection, it’s that the perfection itself was always a lie. Scottie’s final lonely moments show a man bereft of all hope. Atop the bell tower, gazing down on Judy’s body, he suggestively turns his palms outward. Besides representing a gesture of final resignation, it also suggests that even to the end Scottie cannot touch the perfection he searches for. One would like to claim that now Scottie can see, but it’s unclear whether this is the case. Perhaps the death of Judy allows his illusions to persist, as they must for him to even go on living. Before the recent restoration, the film was to end immediately after the Universal logo, with Herrmann’s score finally ending with a sinister version of the romantic main theme of the film. The lights in the theater were then to come on, and the audience would then walk out of the theater, as if waking from a dream.

William Butler Yeats - Meru

Civilisation is hooped together, brought
Under a rule, under the semblance of peace
By manifold illusion; but man's life is thought,
And he, despite his terror, cannot cease
Ravening through century after century,
Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come
Into the desolation of reality:
Egypt and Greece, good-bye, and good-bye, Rome!
Hermits upon Mount Meru or Everest,
Caverned in night under the drifted snow,
Or where that snow and winter's dreadful blast
Beat down upon their naked bodies, know
That day bring round the night, that before dawn
His glory and his monuments are gone.

Spirited Away

We live in an age of images, but they often fail to reach their potential. In the middle ages you could write about God, but you couldn't show Him. Now we can show Him, but instead we settle for shallow reflections of our own desires. Watch MTV for a few minutes at any time, and you will see the degradation of the image that goes on every day. We are losing the ability to see beauty.

Spirited Away, (a title that is a miracle of Japanese to English translation, surely better than either language could do on its own) is a movie that reminds me of why I love movies, and why the image is the most powerful form of expression we have. Using animation, it creates a world impossible in real life, and stands as a testament to the wonderful and mysterious potential of human imagination. Almost surrealistic in its depictions, the film presents the fantastic so often it becomes almost a matter of course, though it never loses its magic. A train runs along the the expanse of the ocean, lights come on fitfully as darkness begins to fall, and wind creates waves in a field of grass. I can think of no other image in the film that can express the beauty of the whole than the emotional climax. Falling through the sky, the heroine's tears of happiness fall up. And why shouldn't they.

Ok, this is a new idea. An experiment to see what happens. I go through my cd collection and pick three random cds. Then I try my best to remember what context those cds have for me. What associations and moods do I recall when I see or hear them? I will try to avoid reviewing the music. I will just stick to context. This will be a kind of stream of consciousness thing.

The Avalanches - Since I Left You
Christmas 2001. Miserable weather: cold, dark all day. The kind of weather I loved in Texas. I had set up my cd player in my room and I was making a determined effort to listen to all my cds. Lying in bed a lot. Drifting in and out of consciousness; the repetitive music always lulling. Warm orange artificial light; darkness outside, the distressing shortness of the days. Feeling distant and lonely. Not talking much.

Bjork - Post
Feeling very tired. Listened to often at night with headphones on; falling asleep to it. Gray, drab days. Drunk, laughing with friends, sleeping on an uncomfortable couch. Downloading music at Tim's place. Eating mexican food and feeling sick all day. Mood swings. the dull roar of a hangover headache. kind of happy. rain.

Nirvana - In Utero
After football. 5 o'clock. Tired, dried sweat and dirt all over. relieved to be free for the day; searching for a release. very bright, hot weather. eating snacks at home; ruining dinner. nervous about the game that week. that odd, beautiful feeling that only comes after extreme physical exertion. happy but unsatisfied.

JULY 9: all eyes will be on Iran.

Two interesting new articles in Slate. The first, Fighting Africa's Saddam, is about the increasingly tense situation in Zimbabwe, and concludes with these startling words:

An op-ed in the opposition Daily News compared Mugabe's rule to the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. Titled, "Violent regimes leave no option but war," the commentary said the coalition invasion of Iraq was "desperately needed ... for the good of the people" in order to remove "a heinous regime." It continued, "That is certainly the case I would put for removing the present regime in Zimbabwe." Britain's Independent reported that there is a new catchphrase among Zimbabwe's unemployed youth: "Mr. Bush, when are you coming to liberate us?"

The rest of the article is about strikes and walk-outs against the government. There is hope yet for that country. It's funny, though, how people who have experienced tyranny first hand seem to see the war in Iraq quite differently than many in the west do. I have jokingly said that the army should stop in Zimbabwe on the way home after the war. I don't think it is necessary, but our government needs to do everything short of outright conflict to help these movements around the world. Especially in Iran.

The second article, Lay off Chalabi, by Hitchens ends with some interesting thoughts as well:

Thus, in the first few days of the vile colonial occupation, we have seen the green flag of Shiite populism and the red banner and hammer and sickle raised under the aegis of the U.S. Marine Corps. It could be that the full news of what has happened in Khomeini's former Iran and in the former Soviet bloc has not completely penetrated Iraqi society. Clearly, history's ironies have not exhausted themselves. But I mention this for a reason. What if one-tenth of the energy of the anti-war movement was now diverted to helping the secular and democratic forces in Iraq and Kurdistan? To giving assistance to a free press, helping to sponsor political prisoners and searches for the missing, providing money and materials for human rights and women's groups? Maybe a few of the human shields and witnesses for peace could return and pitch in with the reconstruction? I know a few such volunteers, chiefly medical ones, but not many when compared to the amazing expenditure of time and effort that went on postponing the liberation. It's just a thought. Maybe something will come of it.

I think he is being intentionally naive. Their enemy is America. (jeez I sound like a right-winger there, so be it.)

At the beginning of every summer, I like to create an ambitious list of books I plan to read. Here is what I have so far, and it's roughly in the order I plan to read them:

Straw Dogs by John Gray (should only take a few days)
The World as Will and Representation by Arthur Schopenhauer
Basic Writings of Nietzsche by, uh, Nietzsche
Platform by Michel Houellebecq
Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy by Richard Posner

Ok, is that a great reading list or what! Now, judging by last year, I should enough time to read at least 2-3 more books, perhaps 4-5 if I really get on a reading kick. Now is your chance to shape my consciousness by suggesting books I should read. If no one responds I will just read Ulysses. Yikes.

Out of the Past

The always-good Charles Taylor looks at our constantly changing film culture. It's an excellent artice. It also attempts to address why people so often laugh at old movies.

The swooniest, silliest moment I've seen in movies in the past few years, equal to any of the melodramatic ludicrousness Hollywood ever produced, is the moment in "The English Patient" where Ralph Fiennes carries Kristin Scott-Thomas' corpse from that cave, the music swelling while her scarf billows in the wind. Were a similar moment, shot in black-and-white, to be shown to a contemporary audience, it's likely the theater would break out into hooting. And while the suffering of a drama queen like Joan Crawford is a guaranteed pants-wetter today (and in many of her films, it should be), nobody dares to connect Crawford's brand of showy masochism to Isabelle Huppert in "The Piano Teacher," a performance where the masochism of a Crawford movie is made literal, and all the juice that might make it enjoyable is drained away. (It's the only performance I've ever seen that might be described as drab flamboyance.) And nobody talks about Meryl Streep, who I think gave the worst performance of her career in "The Hours," in the same terms. A Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation that showed a middle-aged white man tearing up over a drawing from a poor African child would be immediately (and rightly) treated as sap. But nobody gags at the same thing in "About Schmidt."

I have to admit, I often laugh at old movies. I'm not entirely sure why, because it's certainly not because I feel superior to them. But even though I will laugh at the silliness, I am no less willing to embrace the power and emotion of those films. I mean, heck, one of my favorite movies is Written on the Wind, a movie sure to generate howls of laughter from a modern audience, as it did from me. But I was still moved and shaken by it. But maybe I am peculiar that way. Humor never turns off my brain, and I am quite willing to reflect and laugh at the same time. Taylor, I think, comes close to identifying the real problem:

You do have to make allowances for people to get over the reinforced notion that classic Hollywood stuck rigidly to safe, proper notions that never challenged the audience.

Good movie watchers always give the film the benefit of the doubt. You've got to take the makers as real people, with free will and reflective minds. This is the problem with too much literary criticism as well. Melville may have been a middle class white American male, but he was also a person, with a mind that could judge and relflect on its own, apart from the society that molded it. Taylor finds a wonderful quote from Jean Renoir, something that reflects some of my own recent thoughts about the movies:

"There is no realism in American films. No realism, but something much better, great truth."

The Dangers of Democracy

More Fareed, this time on Salon. It's funny how me and Tim basically agreed to all these premises a long time ago, yet neither of us are "intellectual pin-ups." In fact, it could be argued that a bunch of racist white landowners had these ideas way back in 1776. Go figure. Here are some good quotes if you don't want to read the whole thing:

Freedom, Zakaria argues, comes not from politicians' slavish obeisance to the whims of The People, divined hourly by pollsters. It comes from an intricate architecture of liberty that includes an independent judiciary, constitutional guarantees of minority rights, a free press, autonomous universities and strong civic institutions.

In America, all of these institutions have been under consistent attack for the last 40 years from populists of the left and right seeking to strip power from loathed elites and return it to the masses. "The deregulation of democracy has ... gone too far," Zakaria writes.

Another:

Zakaria's book is in part a defense of elites, of expertise and leadership over poll-driven pandering. It's a rejection of John Dewey's claim that, "The cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy."

Being someone who never really trusted Democracy, I am very much seduced by these ideas. It has been argued (persuasively I think) that the most important branch of government is not Congress but the Supreme Court, precisely because they are not subject to "democratic whims." Sometimes the best governments protect the people against themselves, and then against itself. To wit:

When thinking about the American Constitution [Madison] said very famously in "Federalist No. 51" that when constructing a government, you have to do two things. First, the government has to control the governed, and then it has to control itself.

What do we push for, if not more democracy?

They should be pushing for human rights. More than anything else, the ability to protect individual rights is going to lay the groundwork for liberal democracy. How do you protect them? Most effectively through a court system, through laws that guarantee human rights. The other stealth method of political reform is economic reform. Economic reform has the effect over time of producing political reform because it creates the need for the rule of law, a cleaner and more responsive administration, and most importantly a middle class that presses the government for a greater political voice.

A bit of devil's advocacy: I'm an essentially a relativist. ("Essentially" meaning that I'm really not one at all.) How do we decide on and define objectively what "human rights" are? One could argue that Western style democracy arose out of Christian ideas about individuality. Therefore, it could be said that "rights" are basically something unique to our culture. I don't think I agree with that, but it is tough to argue against it. The pragmatist in me wants to say that whatever improves peoples' lives is a good thing. And rights often happen to do just that. Islamic culture may want saria, but I'll be damned if that really improves their lives in any practical sense.

And finally, Fareed on the hype:

After the book is done, I will very happily retreat back to the position of being a writer whose public persona is shaped by his own voice. I've found it unsettling to be constructed by other people, but I don't think that there's any danger of my becoming any kind of a mass phenomenon. Let's not kid ourselves.

You should read it all, there is a lot of good stuff.

If you take a look at The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa you will find some interestnig similarities to the painting by Caravaggio below. Notice the posture, and notice even more the aggresive motion of the angel. If I was a feminist scholar alarms would be going off in my head. (At least Caravaggio doesn't resort to phallic imagery!) Here is a smaller picture, but take a look at the link to get the full impact of one of the greatest sculptures ever made.

THEME POST: The Annunciation

I haven't done this since I started, so I thought I would take another shot at it. It is basically just an attempt to find artistic "memes" in history. (Meme:an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture. Coined by the increasingly annoying Richard Dawkins in his landmark book The Selfish Gene, which should be required high school reading, especially in Kansas.)

On with the annunciation, the moment Mary is told of the child she is carrying. Notice the similarities.

By Botticelli

By Leonardo Da Vinci (a painting that has always fascinated me, thought I cannot explain why. I am just mesmerized by it.)

I have no idea who did this one

Another anonymous

One more by El Greco, which is cool, but huge. So here is the link.

Blade Runner

I always liked the movie. It's gorgeous, and the music is great. Being pretty much a formalist as far as film is concerned, I never ask for more than that. But more is always welcome. The common complaint about Blade Runner is that is it emotionless, and barren of humanity. I think these observations mistake the superficial trappings of humanity for the human essense itself.

The film is populated with "replicants," copies of humans, and the film keeps the number of actual human characters to a minimum, with Harrison Ford occupying an ambiguous middle ground. All replicants have a 4 year expiration date. At that point they will die, and nothing can stop this from happening. In short, they experience mortality because they come to understand, through logic, that their death is certain. "What's the problem?" asks one character. "Death," is the reply of lead replicant Roy. At another point the object of the replicants' quest is made clear, "I need more time!" As if time made any difference. It is obvious to us in the audience that the quest for more time is a fruitless one, and it is precisely this tragic knowledge that makes Roy human, even more than his mortality.

For a while I thought the key to Roy's humanity was his mortality. But that seems inadequate now. I think, of course, of 2001, and HAL's dying laments. Perhaps, I think, it is not the knowledge of death but the tragic quest for life that makes us human. Perhaps to be human means to defiantly live in the shadow of death, and to triumph over it, if only momentarily (for that is all we have: moments). "I have seen things," Roy says before he dies. "I am here," he means. And, perhaps in that past tense of the future that embodies our predicament with uncanny precision, "I was here."

Hitchens again, on the post-war reconstruction. I was going to quote it, but you really should read it all.

The mind of a dictator: Saddam's Art

Fareed Zakaria explains why he is a conservative:

Zakaria became a conservative, he says, from observing the Indian state. “People often say, ‘How could you, living in India, end up a Reaganite?’ Well, the answer is, live in India. There are two things that people don’t understand. One is the degree to which a highly regulated economy produces masses of corruption because it empowers bureaucrats. It just has to be seen to be believed.

“The second,” he continues, “is that you are very quickly inured to the charms of pre-industrial village life. Whenever someone says the word community, I want to reach for an oxygen mask.”

Also note that the article spreads a meme that I started: Fareed should work in the government.

Now I know that I have called the administration "radical," but little did I know they were Trotskyists!. (Christopher Hitchens has observed that only a Stalinist would say "Trotskyite".)

The connection is not as tenuous as you might think. A number of commentators—Ian Buruma for one, Michael Lind for another—have recently observed that the architects of the Iraq war, and several of its most articulate supporters, seem transfixed by Trotsky's idea of a "permanent revolution," orchestrated on a very large scale. Yesterday it was decadent capitalist democracies that looked on the brink of transformation. Today it is the billion people held captive by "fascist" tyrants in the Middle East. In both instances the agent of change is an idea—the idea of oppositionism.

I am too tired to really write about this now, but I liked this section of John Gray's Straw Dogs:

In his novel Nostromo, Joseph Conrad wrote: ‘Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions.’

For those for whom life means action, the world is a stage on which to enact their dreams. Over the past few hundred years, religion has waned, but we have not become less obsessed with imprinting a human meaning on things. A thin secular idealism has become the dominant attitude to life. The world has come to be seen as something to be remade in our own image. The idea that the aim of life is not action but contemplation has almost disappeared.

Those who struggle to change the world see themselves as noble, even tragic figures. Yet most of those who work for world betterment are not rebels against the scheme of things. They seek consolation for a truth they are too weak to bear. At bottom, their faith that the world can be transformed by human will is a denial of their own mortality.

I have been thinking a lot about Hamlet lately. Hamlet's inability to act, to avenge his father, to make things right (whatever that is) is a symptom of his certain knowledge of mortality. He cannot maintain the illusion that we must maintain in order make our lives possible. He knows he will die, as certainly as his father did. As Nietzche said, Hamlet's problem isn' t that he thinks to much. It's that he thinks to well. Some people seem to think that "to be or not to be" is left as an unanswered question, or that it is answered in the affirmative. In fact, Hamlet answers it quite explicity:

There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

"It" is, of course, his death. If not now, then later. If not later, then now. It is certain. Hamlet's mysterious and inhuman ability to "let be" is a direct result of his certain knowledge of his mortality. And so there you have the greatest work in all of Western thought; and there you have paralysis.

Caravaggio - The Conversion of St. Paul

It's a frightening painting, really. Caravaggio painted a world of skin, veins, and blood. No other painter captures the sordid physicality of man, and no other painter uses sexual desire (the sin of the flesh) so vividly as the essence of mortality. Bodies are flaccid and meaty. Faces leer.

Yet this one is a little different. Paul's experience is perhaps most easily described as rapture. But consider that word for a moment. Note the uneasy proximity to "rape." Find the source of light in the painting and you will see that it comes from above, it dominates the scene, it is the primary actor. It's hard not to see the event as a violation, a invasion of the body by the spirit. Perhaps this is the mortification spoken of in Catholic doctrine. I have never had this feeling, but the painting suggests to a powerful extent that Paul's rapture is as much a product of a sudden realization that he is a flimsy, mortal thing, as it is a result of the light from God. To take it even futher: for me, the painting imagines that the pivotal moment of spiritual awakening is a result of the knowledge of death.

Finally!

Big Boi, who is joined in OutKast by Andre 3000 (Andre Benjamin), saw what he felt was half-hearted U.S. bombing raids on Iraq in the 1990s as an analogy for a lack of dedication among many artists in the music business.

So there you have it. A great mystery for me is solved.

Perhaps the most famous literature professor in the United States, Harold Bloom, donates his personal library to a small Catholic college.

Harold Bloom has always railed against what he calls "the school of resentment," Marxist, feminist, Afrocentric and deconstructionist scholars who, he says, deny the aesthetic and spiritual values inherent in great literature. So when it came time for Mr. Bloom, 72, to choose a place to donate his immense personal library and his archives, he bypassed several larger prominent universities that in his opinion house those very practitioners of resentment in favor of a small, relatively unknown Catholic college in Colchester, Vt.

Christopher Hitchens decides to emerge from his war time bunker with words we should remember:

In the coming days, we shall see even more scenes of prisons bursting open and mass graves and torture centres being exposed to the light. We shall hear stories that will make us cry, as well as celebrate.

We shall also need to give the inspectors more time! Then the long and tedious task of rebuilding Iraq can begin, and will be subjected to cynical criticism at every turn – by the people whose attitude would have made the liberation impossible in the first place.

But nothing can erase the memory of Baghdad’s dawn.

No matter what happens in the future, Wednesday will stand as one of those wonderful moments in human history for the simple reason that it was a spontaneous explosion of hope for a people who never had it before.

Have questions about the Kurds? Tim sends these answers.

Still more proof that we live in the best of all possible worlds: the sea cucumber.

What Makes The Sundays So Good?


It's a difficult question for me to answer. A great melody is almost impossible to describe. But more than anything else it is the voice. Harriet Wheeler is blessed with a tone that is technically magnificent and emotionally direct. Even better, her voice is pure yet sexy, pleasant yet bracing, distant yet engaging. She has that rare and mysterious ability to bring a song to life, something you will be hard pressed to find on American Idol. She sings clearly but I have no idea what the words are to any Sundays song. I can't get past the voice. On their underrated second album Blind, she inhabits a sub-Cocteau Twins world of chiming and swirling guitars, and manages to match them with her undulating voice. Unlike most pop music, the songs on that album are composed of floating hooks and fleeting moments, and the chorus is often so understated as to go unnoticed.

For Wolfowitz, a Vision May Be Realized

This article is long but well worth reading.

Snow was general all over Ireland

Before I started school here in Kentucky, I had never witnessed the snow at night. Light, from sources both natural and artificial, illuminates the flakes, creating millions of glowing stars as they fall to earth, and the ghostly view makes one introspective. Life seems so fragile in those moments. Everything seems to be slipping slowly away, and it's all you can do to capture that beauty in your heart before it's gone forever.

James Joyce's The Dead captures a moment such as this. The entire story seems to build to a moment of such astonishing purity and beauty that it must be among the greatest passages in all of literature. The subject is transience, and the sorrow in life when we find that we grow old, and that things must pass away in time. We are haunted by memories, and by the lives and deeds of those that are no more. The dead live like ghosts among us, within us.

The air of the room chilled his shoulders. He stretched himself cautiously along under the sheets and lay down beside his wife. One by one, they were all becoming shades. Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover's eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live.

Generous tears filled Gabriel's eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself, which these dead had one time reared and lived in, was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Economics is often referred to as the "dismal science" but article like this one make it seem like a lot of fun. The point here is basically that nothing is ever as good as you think it will be, as a basic law of economics. Kind of depressing! Many great moments, but I liked this part best:

The reason there are wars in the first place is that one side or the other is overconfident. After all, if everyone agreed on the expected outcome, there would be no need to fight the war—we could just jump to the conclusion. My ex-colleague Paul Krugman used to argue that World War II was fought inefficiently. The British bombed the Germans and the Germans bombed the British; think how much airplane fuel they could have saved by agreeing that each side would bomb itself instead. Better yet, they could both have agreed to act as if they'd been bombed and forgone the actual bombing altogether.

William Saletan, clearly moved by the days events (aren't we all?), writes War or Killing? and concludes it with this:

Simply put, the number of innocent people who are dead because we ousted Saddam is dwarfed by the number of innocent people who are dead because we didn't. The use of American force is on one side of the ledger, and mass killing is on the other. Trends in military and media technology make this dilemma increasingly likely where belligerent murderers rule. You can keep your hands clean, or you can keep many more people alive. It's up to you.

Well, yeah. Saletan isn't usually this confrontational though, and I hope this isn't a symptom of larger willingness to go to war because it seems so easy (easy as of right now, things will get tough over the summer). As this sinks in around the Arab world there is no telling what will happen.

Let's not let her down.

A while back I linked to an article that shed some light on the philosophical premises behind administration policy. Here is much more of the same, with a veritable reading list to choose from. How Books Have Shaped U.S. Policy

Indeed Mr. Bush, whose father was accused of lacking the "vision thing," presides over an administration that is driven in high degree by big and often abstract theories: theories that promote a "moral" (some might say moralistic) approach to foreign policy; an unembarrassed embrace of power; a detestation of relativistic thinking; and an often Manichaean view of the world that, like the president's language, manages to be darkly Hobbesian and willfully optimistic at the same time.

Making it. A long but very entertaining article about journalists trying to get into Iraq. Many great moments but this is the best:

He told us that before the first war, the best way to bribe Iraqi officials was to offer them chocolate ice cream and bananas. "Even Saddam loves bananas," said Najeef. "If you gave bananas to Saddam, he'd probably let you [have relations with] him."

Lists

Even though I will endlessly complain about lists of greatest such-and-such, I actually think list-making is a good thing for the most part. Especially if they are personal. I think it's best to have a good idea what my favorite films are, but I try to make sure the list stays as flexible as possible. In the below list I think only the top 4 or so have really been there for a long time. These are the ten movies I am currently carrying around in my head:

Vertigo
2001: a space odyssey
8 1/2
Seven Samurai
L'avventura
Stalker
A.I. Artificial Intelligence
In the Mood for Love
The Thin Red Line (just added!)
The Searchers

If you want to email me your favorite films I will post them and then do an analysis of your taste!

The following is the result of my attempt to write an entire paper in one day. So hopefully that explains the poor writing and often striking laziness! Only strength of will can prevent me from revising it. Pray for me.

The Other in American War Films

At no other time is the representation of an Other more imperative to a culture than during war. Whenever cultures or civilizations mobilize to inflict violence upon one another with the aim of power or survival, internal difference is naturally the first casualty. One need not resort to citing totalitarian or aggressive nations in order to prove this point. While hardly morally equivalent to Nazi death camps, the American internment of Japanese citizens during World War 2 offers a sobering example of the universal tendency of cultures to expel difference when under threat. An important priority of any war film is to define the other side of the conflict. Whether pro-war, anti-war, or neutral, the war film signifies its meanings largely through the representation of the other and the historical and political context it provides to the conflict at hand.

Director Terrence Malick provides a context of a different sort when he opens The Thin Red Line (1998) with an image of the Serpent. A shot of a crocodile, submerging itself under water, gives way to an image of the floor of a jungle with shafts of sunlight breaking through the thick foliage overhead. A voice asks “What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself?” It is clear from the opening montage of the film that Malick intends to address these questions by presenting the duality of nature with the oppositional images of the crocodile, a mindless killing machine, a representation of death, and the trees of the jungle, which represent life. This opposition is slightly reductive, however, as the trees themselves are choked with vines. The Thin Red Line doesn’t simply juxtapose the forces of death and destruction with those of life, but instead the film presents rich contradictions, where death and life are bound to each other inexorably.

The narrative of the film tells the story of the battle of Guadalcanal during World War 2. Malick intentionally avoids placing the battle in historical context (an important victory for American forces in the Pacific) in order to detach the fighting from historical, and hence political, meaning. No dates are given, and only the slightest attention is shown to the wider conflict. Anyone ignorant of the source material for the film (James Jones’ novel of the same title) wouldn’t have the slightest clue what the American forces are fighting for. Malick’s historical vagueness can be contrasted with Steven Spielberg’s use of the subtitle “June 6, 1944” before his depiction of the D-Day invasion in Saving Private Ryan (1998). That date carries enormous meaning for the audience, and it serves to place the ensuing action in a definitive context. The lack of historical markers in The Thin Red Line indicate that Malick is attempting to avoid the inherently political meanings of the war film. Even the climactic battle of the film emerges from a fog which obscures any larger picture of the surroundings. The battle, like the film, is self contained.

In keeping with the dehistoricized and depoliticized nature of the narrative, the Japanese forces in the conflict are never portrayed as less than human. However, with one important exception, they still represent the Other for the American soldiers. In addition to the Japanese forces on the island, the film depicts a second Other in the form of the native inhabitants of the island. After the opening montage several shots appear of native children swimming in gorgeous blue water. These images dissolve to introduce Private Witt. There no explanation given for his presence among them, and only later is it revealed that he is AWOL. The film draws upon a strong tradition of presenting island natives in a utopian paradise, but Malick isn’t simply rebuking civilization with images of a peaceful Other. Instead, much like Melville’s Typee, he examines the seemingly peaceful utopia of the natives in order to throw light on what Melville called “the mystery of iniquity.” As noted before, it would be a mistake to give in to the critical impulse to simplify the film by placing every element into oppositional categories. Malick, just like Melville before him, is asking whether man is fundamentally good or evil, and he consistently complicates every image. Private Witt, symbolically born in this island paradise, is possessed of a powerful innocence throughout the film. Nevertheless, he confesses his fear of death and longing for immortality, meaning that he too is a fallen man. Images of Witt happily cavorting with the natives are contrasted with these morose thoughts and images that place him at a distance from the happy natives. The natives themselves are made more complex when Witt asks a native woman why the children don’t fight. She replies that they sometimes do. When the American cruiser arrives to take Witt away to the battle, a young native boy idly kicks at a dog. Later, human skulls are found in one of the huts.

Why initially confusing, the tireless complexity of the film serves to isolate good and evil, utopia and the fallen world, as forces in their own right. Throughout the film these forces are often contained in and expressed through the same things: Nature, Private Witt, the natives, Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn), and even Colonel Tall (Nick Nolte). After Witt is captured again, he is placed in an isolated cell, cut off from the other prisoners, yet he says “I love Charlie Company. They’re my people.”

All notions of utopia, illusory or otherwise, disappear when the film arrives at Guadalcanal. After the anti-climactic beach landing, the new strangeness of the Other is expressed when a soldier saying “They got fish that live in trees” is juxtaposed with an image of a native holding a machete. From this point until the end of the film all Others are presented as potentially hostile. Also, at this point the Japanese become the principle Other, while the natives are reduced to a strange unknown, which emphasizes the isolation of the Americans. Even nature menaces them, hiding potential dangers.

Significantly, the Japanese forces are not glimpsed for some time. As the wounded come back from battle, Private Witt muses, “Maybe all men got one big soul…one big self” and he continues later by noting that “everyone looking for salvation by themself. Each like a coal, drawing from fire.” The film’s representation of the other, divorced from historical or political meaning, takes on a tragic awareness of the isolation implied in the loss of innocence. At this point in the film Malick does not attempt to humanize to any significant extent the Japanese because he wants them to remain an unreachable, unknowable Other. The Japanese are non-existent in this portion of the film because it is concerned with the isolation of the Americans.

When the Japanese finally do appear it is at the point of conflict between the soldiers and the Other. In fact, the very first point of view shot for the Japanese is over the barrel of a gun, and even then they are not seen. The effect of this shot is to make the gun itself into the Japanese soldier. From our point of view in the audience all the Japanese represent at this point is conflict and death. In the first large battle of the film, no Japanese soldiers are seen at all, as they are only represented by bullets and explosions. There is perhaps no other scene in the film which so powerfully evokes the idea of a hostile Other, and it is notable that this is only accomplished by eliminating the Other’s actual presence.

Saving Private Ryan offers a similar depiction of the Other in its opening scenes, while its aims are much more conventional. The film takes great pains to create identification between the (presumably American) viewer and the characters. The film borrows from already powerful emotions when it shows an aging American walking through the rows of crosses at Normandy. Soon the film cuts to a beach, and the subtitle “June 6, 1944” appears, placing the film firmly in a specific historical context. All of the preceding gives the ensuing violence meaning and purpose. By doing this, Spielberg effectively brings the film down to earth, and away from the philosophical abstractions of the Malick film. Saving Private Ryan was hailed as the most historically accurate depiction of combat ever, and part of the reason for this response is the film’s declaration of itself as history exemplified by the informative subtitles and the fierce identification with the heroes. Saving Private Ryan is a self consciously conventional war film with ironic pretensions to historical accuracy. It is difficult to separate these elements and determine their meaning, but it is clear that when taken together the film presents the conventional World War 2 film (with extra violence for “realism”) as history.

Having fully defined the Same and placed it in a supposedly objective historical context, the film moves on to the battle and the Other. Once again, soldiers are seemingly slaughtered by bullets and explosions from nowhere. Spielberg employs almost the exact same point of view shot as Malick, but this time from behind a German machine gun. The portions of the Germans we do see (hands, arms) are blacked out. Like their Japanese counterparts, the Germans in Saving Private Ryan are defined as weapons. The meaning of this, however, is slightly different. Because a concrete historical context is explicit in the film the Other in Saving Private Ryan represents an actual Other, rather than the abstracted Other in The Thin Red Line. The implication is simple: the Germans are the bad guys, we are the good guys.

Other events in the film depict how the other is defined in close quarters. After a captured German soldier begins to talk rapidly in German an American soldier tells him to “shut up with that filthy pig-latin.” No subtitles are provided, therefore making the audience identify with the American soldier who cannot understand. One soldier, however, is able to translate the German, and tries to convince the others to spare the life of the prisoner. The prisoner begs for his life by shouting American catchphrases and even attempting to sing the national anthem. They eventually let him go in an affirmation of basic humanity. The prisoner returns again after the climactic battle, and is shot by the formerly sympathetic translator, who in the meantime, through the horror of war and the need for survival, has finally become able to think of the German as an Other. This portion of the narrative is perhaps the most powerful aspect of the film because it dramatizes how the Other is created in war time by the basic drive to protect one’s own and survive.

While The Thin Red Line defines the Other in a philosophical context by removing both historical and political context from the narrative, Saving Private Ryan attempts to define the Other in a strong historical context (thus implicitly political). Apocalypse Now (1979, dir. Coppola) falls somewhere in between. While the film uses classic literature (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) and a surreal tone to make a philosophical point about war, it sets the narrative in a concrete time and place. It is clear Apocalypse Now is very much about the Vietnam War.

While there are a number of different Others in the film, the two most striking examples are both American commanders. Sergeant Kilgore (Robert Duvall) is portrayed as a death defying monster, unable or unwilling to notice the death and destruction around him long enough to take his mind off surfing and casual amusements. Kurtz (Marlon Brando), on the other hand, is a more sophisticated personality. He, as a highly trained and educated soldier, represents all the best of Western civilization. He also, perhaps paradoxically, represents the darkness (as Conrad called it) that is at the heart of civilization. The implication of the film is that civilization is a fragile thing at best, and an illusion at worst. On top of this, Apocalypse Now depicts the Vietnam War as a colonial nightmare, where Western imperialists are sucked into a moral vacuum where winning becomes the only objective.

The deaths of 18 soldiers in 1993 in Somalia, as depicted in Black Hawk Down evoked strong memories of the madness of Vietnam for many Americans. The film opens with a quote from Plato: “Only the dead have seen the end of war” and continues to offer a similarly bleak view of war. Soldiers refer to the native Somalis as “skinnies” and seem incredulous when one professes to caring about them. Clearly the film, as much as the actual event, represents the clash between idealism and grim reality. The irony becomes thick when soldiers whose intentions were to help feed and protect Somalis are forced to kill hundreds of them in a desperate fight for survival.

One scene in particular examines the American view of the Other at this point in history. A captured American soldier is asked by a Somali whether he thinks “We will put down our weapons, and adopt American Democracy?” The question is clearly rhetorical, and the general disillusion that the film presents answers it firmly in the negative. The intervention in Somalia was an attempt to make the Other into the Same. The crushing failure of the operation, like the quote from Plato, gives rise to a profound pessimism regarding America’s ability to enforce peace by remaking the world in its image. This film, like The Thin Red Line, presents a fallen world where the existence of the Other leads to inevitably to conflict.

Near the end of The Thin Red Line, Private Witt diverts the attention of Japanese soldiers to ensure the escape of his fellow scouts. Eventually he is surrounded on all sides. One Japanese soldier steps forward and shouts something at Witt, who does not understand. No translation is provided. He shouts again, with increasing hostility, and Witt still does not move. The emotional power of the scene is overwhelming because the sense of an unbridgeable divide between the two men is palpable. They are merely feet apart but they can never connect, each is isolated from the other. When Witt makes a move he is shot dead, and Malick returns him to the blue waters from where he came.

Joan Walsh tackles the difficult question "How to think about this war if you're against it."

It seems pretty obvious to me that we crossed the point of no return some time ago. Cries for an immediate halt to the war are morally irresponsible, for surely we would leave thousands of dissenters to be butchered yet again by Saddam. (Although I am starting to wonder whether that sort of thing even bothers anti-West Lefties with their condescending attitudes toward much of the third world. I call this the "I'm against Saddam, but..." crowd.)

Furthermore, any "victory" for Iraq would be a disaster for the entire world, not just Iraq. Ideologues and politicians may decide it is in their interest to play moral "gotcha" in order to capitalize on whatever they percieve the situation to be at the present moment, but most people probably feel a quick U.S. victory would be something to cheer for. Here is the money-quote from Walsh:

So what do opponents of the war, and the president's policy in prosecuting it, do now? I can't support Kucinich's call to stop the fighting immediately; it would only let Saddam's regime come in and crush those who've risen up against him, and submit the country to further terror and chaos. On the other hand, I think Rumsfeld's sneering insistence that a cease-fire is completely off the table is frightening: Should the battle of Baghdad bog down, should there be a reasonable chance to resume diplomatic efforts to remove Saddam Hussein, why wouldn't we stop the killing and talk about it? Democrats should be ready to call for that if there's evidence there's still a diplomatic solution to this tragedy.

Her liberalism, while honest and admirable, is getting the best of her here. What would a cease-fire entail? Would any agreement that leaves the Ba'ath establishment intact be even remotely acceptable? When Rumsfeld says a cease-fire is off the table, I don't think he means it in the terms of the complete and unconditional surrender of the regime, which is the only morally viable option.

How do we know the world exists outside our own minds?

Here is what Kant says: I am conscious of my existence as determined in time. All time-determination presupposes something persistent in perception. This persistent thing, however, cannot be something in me, since my own existence in time can first be determined only through this persistent thing. Thus the perception of this persistent thing is possible only through a thing outside me and not through the mere representation of a thing outside me. Consequently, the determination of my existence in time is possible only by means of the existence of actual things that I perceive outside myself. Now consciousness in time is necessarily combined with the consciousness of the possibility of this time-determination: Therefore it is also necessarily combined with the existence of the things outside me, as the condition of time-determination; i.e., the consciousness of my own existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me.

Got it?

Yet another humiliating defeat in Iraq.

Democracy, Whiskey, and Sexy

What, the man was asked, did he hope to see now that the Baath Party had been driven from power in his town? What would the Americans bring?

"Democracy," the man said, his voice rising to lift each word to greater prominence. "Whiskey. And sexy!"

Does the red cross have a pornography and alcohol task force?

Sorry to post again on the same subject but I couldn't pass this up:

Great Quotes by E.m. Cioran to Inspire and Motivate You to Achieve Your Dreams!

I don't even know where to begin. Now, you may be wondering "How does a good person like me deal with evil in the world?" Well, fear not, here is your answer:

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

How do we deal with oppression?

Tyranny destroys or strengthens the individual; freedom enervates him, until he becomes no more than a puppet. Man has more chances of saving himself by hell than by paradise.

All I can say is: Hallmark beware.

Tim brought my attention to this article about presidential candidates and their favorite books. This part in particular concerns my personal favorite novel:

Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey took the opposite approach, tackling the book question headfirst when he sought the 1992 Democratic nomination. Kerrey readily offered that his favorite book was Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a novel that depicted the aimless existence of a soldier-turned-stockbroker named Binx Bolling. His answer may have revealed too much. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd pounced, claiming Kerrey's confession would worry voters, given that Percy's work was an "anthem of alienation" about a war veteran "out of touch with the rest of America." As The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert later put it, with 20/20 hindsight, "Here was a man proposing himself as the next leader of the free world while apparently identifying with a character who, to all outward appearances, seems to have completely lost his sense of direction." Ouch.

You can tell from that paragraph that The Moviegoer is my kind of book. Not only that, it is something I have quite a bit of emotional attachment to. So if Kerrey feels the same he must be a lot like me, and I would never, ever, let myself be president. The man shows poor judgement.

If I wasn't limited to novels, I would rather say The Tragic Sense of Life or, of course, The Trouble With Being Born. I would love to see what the press would do with that. (The negative customer review for the Cioran in that link is actually a pretty good description, though he seems to miss (some of) the point. "Unfixability", is, I think, an unfortunate choice of words for Cioran because it implies that something is broken. Cioran doesn't buy into the conservative myth that the "old times" were better. Nevertheless, "Nietzsche without the optimism" is a blurb Cioran would wholeheartedly endorse.

More proof that we live in the best of all possible worlds.

The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld


Happenings
You're going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don't happen.

It doesn't seem to bother people, they don't—
It's printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.

Everyone's so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story's there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven't happened.

All I can tell you is,
It hasn't happened.
It's going to happen.

—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing

While I can't stop laughing when reading these poems some are actually pretty good. Rumsfeld has literally turned press conference B.S. into an art form. Glass Box, in particular, has an oddness to it that is compelling.