This just in: Fox lies

Well I sure don't remember hearing anything about this. Who knew that there's a legal basis for "news" companies just making shit up? Fox did!

more reaction "shocks"

More on the Shock Troops controversy. On the one hand, it's frustrating to go through the hyper-analysis exercise every time the right wing hears something it doesn't like (see Crooked Timber's "One Endless Rathergate", and Jon Swift's comprehensive roundup of winger crybabiness).

On another hand, such controversies occasion really interesting bits of writing, like this one from a semiotics professor who sees in "Thomas"s prose style a poseur type of wanna-be bad boy who evidently infests MFA programs.

And some of the comments on threads like these are just gold. It's an amazing new world when there is so much expertise on so many subjects available for exchange.

One former military guy expresses what's been my take all along (without the real-world cred to back it up, but hey, I read a lot):

Having spent 22 years in the Army, I can say with some emphasis that there is almost nothing that most privates, and NOTHING that some privates, won't do, including incredibly stupid, hitting-self-in-head-with-hammer type of things. So the idea that this stuff didn't happen because "they wouldn't do it"? don't make me laugh.

And remember, you're talking about a bunch of 19-year-old guys with guns in a pretty much broken down Third World country. If your squad leader/PSG/1SG are weak, bored, stupid or distracted? Let the fun begin!

Tillman's diary

Pat Tillman's death is still in the news.

But here's another interesting detail: He kept a diary. And his diary was destroyed after his death. That's evidence alone that something was fishy. And it almost gets you to believe the conspiracies that he was killed on purpose... if not by Bush's many minions (which I doubt), then by someone in his unit who did something he didn't want made known. We may never know, which is exactly how they wanted it.

For some reason this makes me feel even worse than when I heard of his death in the first place. I guess because I never would have met him, and so he as a person is somewhat disembodied. But a book he would have published, or had published after his death, is far more real to me. I've read so many war diaries, autobiographies, veterans' novels, etc ... so losing this one is like one of those never existed. Would this have been another All Quiet on the Western Front? A Jarhead? Catch 22? Slaughterhouse Five? Adventures of a Simpleton? The world will never know.

"Shock Troops", "Scott Thomas", and war reporting comtroversies

So TNR publishes a piece called "Shock Troops" by a "Scott Thomas", who writes about all the terrible things he and his buddies did over in Iraq. Another entry in the 'war is hell' genre, with a heavy dose of self-reflection on the implications for one's morality, sanity, etc. (Point #1: this is a great bit of soldier storytelling, whether fiction, semifiction, or nonfiction is hard to tell.)

Needless to say, the warbloggers are not pleased. They call it a made-up hack job whose purpose s to smear the troops. Now the "Thomas" has revealed himself as Scott Thomas Beauchamp, real soldier and aspiring writer, they find other ways to ignore reality. That's what they do best. (Point #2: the story is the latest exhibit of the right blogosphere's descent into cultural combat straight out of Weimar.)

Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings has the best piece I've read on the controversy surrounding the story. He connects it to a video he saw once of college students abusing baboons they were supposed to be experimenting on:

I saw not only cruelty to animals, but also a profound failure on the part of the professors who should have been there to prevent this sort of thing from happening. .... [A]nyone who puts a student in a morally dangerous situation like this has an obligation to try to see that they get out of it without moral injury. But no one did that for these students. They were left to find their way on their own. And that's just wrong.

(Point #3: the story itself, whether true or not, reflects the condition of the military as designed by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Lack of leadership at the top creates atrocities at the bottom.)

(Link to the original story itself will have to wait until TNR gets its shit sorted out with my subscription. Starting to hate their customer service as much as their increasing illiberalism.)

primate sexual culture

First, an article about bonobos in the New Yorker. Are they really the swingin' orgy chimps they've become famous to be?

Second, Broadsheet entry on how some chimps have been eating black plums as a type of contraception. Or maybe not - can't really tell if they are eating them for other medicinal purposes, or as a planned strategy for limiting births.

Can assign both of these in reading packet week 1/2 - origins of primate culture.

China's "Manufactured Landscapes"

I saw a review of this a while ago but forgot to link. A new photography book and film survey China's landscapes of manufacturing: junk-yards of electronics goods, vast factories like human beehives. Could be a good last-week or China-week assignment. Digby reviews here.

Hitler art

Article from Die Zeit (bad translation here; or maybe it was just a clunkily written article) about current totalitarian chic in German art and letters.

Talks a lot about artist Jonathan Messe, who decorated an exhibit of his once with a photo of Adolf above his own, labeled "Vater". (current exhibition in Frankfurt's Schirn Kunsthalle here.) Not very impressive to my mind... it's like he saw "Seven" and decided to throw a bunch of shit together to shock people without actually meaning anything.

More interesting is Christian Kracht, whose new work of fiction Metan "deals with primates, the atom bomb, white people and a secret power." Some kind of centuries-spanning conspiracy theory about a force (metan) that wants to control the world. Could be interesting to check out... of course, many reviews have panned it. Parody at best, Quatsch at worst seems to be the consensus.

The Jock/Nerd Theory of History

Bryan Caplan at Econolog asks whether the welfare state is actually a device for preventing jocks from being left behind.

history of farting

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, this article explains farting (or, farting humor as a public performance) in the middle ages as a conversation about the limitations of the body. Neat:

[F]arts are a kind of language. They are inherently social in a way that defecation is not. They tend to take your companions by surprise. Furthermore, farts are an occasion for self-examination, for questioning the extent of our freedom and the nature of self-mastery. We can't help farting; it is a question of need. So part of what the Middle Ages wrestled with when people were talking about farts was this constant reminder of the needs of the body. Farting carries this reminder that the body behaves on its own, and there is nothing you can do about it. It reminds us that our bodily freedom is limited.

Hat tip Sullivan.

homo commie faggot not so faggoty after all

Their defection to the Soviets was explained by their homosexuality. But newly released info shows that they weren't gay after all. This story from Seattle Weekly ("The Worst Scandal in NSA History Was Blamed on Cold War Defectors' Homosexuality," July 18 2007) reveals the new background and gives a very interesting biography of the pair. The closing line is classic:

Ultimately, the queerest things about Martin and Mitchell were their political, not sexual, acts. "Were they living today," quips author Bamford, "[they] would probably defect all over again."

Seven New Wonders

OK, so the contest is over and they've announced. The list is pretty good I guess. But Brazil's stupid Jesus statue is one of them, instead of Stonehenge, which should by any definition be a "wonder" -- how it was made is one of the greatest mysteries of the world. I shouldn't be upset as it's all just a publicity stun anyway, but how a 35m statue built in the 1930s is anything special as opposed to TONS and TONS of stone moved hundreds of miles MILLENIA before it's thought possible to do so... well, that's a wonder.

are we really so illiterate?

I guess I shouldn't be surprised at this, but here we go:

1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.

42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.

80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.

70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.

57 percent of new books are not read to completion.

70 percent of books published do not earn back their advance.

70 percent of the books published do not make a profit.

But no matter! It doesn't matter if only the 20 people in your specialty read it, as long as it gets published and gets you tenure...

Bismark's great-great- gay grandson dead

Obit from the Telegraph, money quote courtesy of Sullivan, who was a contemporary of his at Oxford:

The great-great-grandson of Prince Otto, Germany's Iron Chancellor and architect of the modern German state, the young von Bismarck showed early promise as a brilliant scholar, but led an exotic life of gilded aimlessness that attracted the attention of the gossip columns from the moment he arrived in Oxford in 1983 and hosted a dinner at which the severed heads of two pigs were placed at either end of the table.

When not clad in the lederhosen of his homeland, he cultivated an air of sophisticated complexity by appearing in women's clothes, set off by lipstick and fishnet stockings.