links for 2007-11-11

• The Supply-Side Crackpots Strike Back - TNR
• Man in the news: Robert Rubin - FT.com
• A Life of Picasso - Book Review - New York Times
• Is a Flying Car About to Take Off? - New York Times
• What Does the Present Owe the Future? - New York Times Blog
• Science-based approach in poverty fight - MIT News Office
• Human clones: New U.N. analysis lays out world's choices - EurekAlert
• I Give This One to Herbert - Tom Bozzo
• The Fed's policy space is not one-dimensional - Interfluidity
• Labor's New Recruits - washingtonpost.com - David S. Broder
• Torture, torture, torture - Crooked Timber

Comments

[ken melvin]

Good and well said the both. I've little doubt psychology is being employed by the candidates of both parties and the parties, but while the dem's usage often seems amateurish and comical, the rethug is much more centralized, more sophisticated, more Orwellian, more sinister, ...

[robertdfeinman]

The recently launched site openleft.com has a continuing series of postings by Paul Rosenberg in which he tries to deal with matters from a psychological perspective.

He combines various psychological theories (his latest is based upon Robert Kegan) with various bits of demographic data that he has been analyzing for a number of years.

Others on the site are focusing on Dems who support Bush even though they are in Dem leaning districts. It's the first site I've seen which wants to elect "better" Dems, not just replace Republicans.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/12/09/books/mailer-huck.html

December 9, 1984

Huckleberry Finn, Alive at 100
By NORMAN MAILER

Is there a sweeter tonic for the doldrums than old reviews of great novels? In 19th-century Russia, ''Anna Karenina'' was received with the following: ''Vronsky's passion for his horse runs parallel to his passion for Anna'' . . . ''Sentimental rubbish'' . . . ''Show me one page,'' says The Odessa Courier, ''that contains an idea.'' ''Moby-Dick'' was incinerated: ''Graphic descriptions of a dreariness such as we do not remember to have met with before in marine literature'' . . . ''Sheer moonstruck lunacy'' . . . ''Sad stuff. Mr. Melville's Quakers are wretched dolts and drivellers and his mad captain is a monstrous bore.''

By this measure, ''Huckleberry Finn'' (published 100 years ago this week in London and two months later in America) gets off lightly. The Springfield Republican judged it to be no worse than ''a gross trifling with every fine feeling. . . . Mr. Clemens has no reliable sense of propriety,'' and the public library in Concord, Mass., was confident enough to ban it: ''the veriest trash.'' The Boston Transcript reported that ''other members of the Library Committee characterize the work as rough, coarse, and inelegant, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.''

All the same, the novel was not too unpleasantly regarded. There were no large critical hurrahs but the reviews were, on the whole, friendly. A good tale, went the consensus. There was no sense that a great American novel had landed on the literary world of 1885. The critical climate could hardly anticipate T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway's encomiums 50 years later. In the preface to an English edition, Eliot would speak of ''a master piece. . . . Twain's genius is completely realized,'' and Ernest went further. In ''Green Hills of Africa,'' after disposing of Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau, and paying off Henry James and Stephen Crane with a friendly nod, he proceeded to declare, ''All modern American literture comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.' . . . It's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.''

Hemingway, with his nonpareil gift for nosing out the perfect vin du pays for an ineluctable afternoon, was nonetheless more like other novelists in one dire respect: he was never at a loss to advance himself with his literary judgments. Assessing the writing of others, he used the working author's rule of thumb: if I give this book a good mark, does it help appreciation of my work? Obviously, ''Huckleberry Finn'' has passed the test.

A SUSPICION immediately arises. Mark Twain is doing the kind of writing only Hemingway can do better. Evidently, we must take a look. May I say it helps to have read ''Huckleberry Finn'' so long ago that it feels brand-new on picking it up again. Perhaps I was 11 when I saw it last, maybe 13, but now I only remember that I came to it after ''Tom Sawyer'' and was disappointed. I couldn't really follow ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.'' The character of Tom Sawyer whom I had liked so much in the first book was altered, and did not seem nice any more. Huckleberry Finn was altogether beyond me. Later, I recollect being surprised by the high regard nearly everyone who taught American Lit. lavished upon the text, but that didn't bring me back to it. Obviously, I was waiting for an assignment from The New York Times.

Let me offer assurances. It may have been worth the wait. I suppose I am the 10-millionth reader to say that ''Huckleberry Finn'' is an extraordinary work. Indeed, for all I know, it is a great novel. Flawed, quirky, uneven, not above taking cheap shots and cashing far too many checks (it is rarely above milking its humor) - all the same, what a book we have here! I had the most curious sense of excitement. After a while, I understood my peculiar frame of attention. The book was so up-to- date! I was not reading a classic author so much as looking at a new work sent to me in galleys by a publisher. It was as if it had arrived with one of those rare letters which says, ''We won't make this claim often but do think we have an extraordinary first novel to send out.'' So it was like reading ''From Here to Eternity'' in galleys, back in 1950, or ''Lie Down in Darkness,'' ''Catch-22,'' or ''The World According to Garp'' (which reads like a fabulous first novel). You kept being alternately delighted, surprised, annoyed, competitive, critical and finally excited. A new writer had moved onto the block. He could be a potential friend or enemy but he most certainly was talented.

That was how it felt to read ''Huckleberry Finn'' a second time. I kept resisting the context until I finally surrendered. One always does surrender sooner or later to a book with a strong magnetic field. I felt as if I held the work of a young writer about 30 or 35, a prodigiously talented fellow from the Midwest, from Missouri probably, who had had the audacity to write a historical novel about the Mississippi as it might have been a century and a half ago, and this young writer had managed to give us a circus of fictional virtuosities. In nearly every chapter new and remarkable characters bounded out from the printed page as if it were a tarmac on which they could perform their leaps. The author's confidence seemed so complete that he could deal with every kind of man or woman God ever gave to the middle of America. Jail-house drunks like Huck Finn's father take their bow, full of the raunchy violence that even gets into the smell of clothing. Gentlemen and river rats, young, attractive girls full of grit and ''sand,'' and strong old ladies with aphorisms clicking like knitting needles, fools and confidence men - what a cornucopia of rabble and gentry inhabit the author's river banks.

It would be superb stuff if only the writer did not keep giving away the fact that he was a modern young American working in 1984. His anachronisms were not so much in the historical facts - those seemed accurate enough - but the point of view was too contemporary. The scenes might succeed - say it again, this young writer was talented! - but he kept betraying his literary influences. The author of ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' had obviously been taught a lot by such major writers as Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos and John Steinbeck; he had certainly lifted from Faulkner and the mad tone Faulkner could achieve when writing about maniacal men feuding in deep swamps; he had also absorbed much of what Vonnegut and Heller could teach about the resilience of irony. If he had a surer feel for the picaresque than Saul Bellow in ''Augie March,'' still he felt derivative of that work. In places one could swear he had memorized ''The Catcher in the Rye,'' and he probably dipped into ''Deliverance'' and ''Why Are We in Vietnam?'' He might even have studied the mannerisms of movie stars. You could feel traces of John Wayne, Victor McLaglen and Burt Reynolds in his pages. The author had doubtless digested many a Hollywood comedy on small-town life. His instinct for life in hamlets on the Mississippi before the Civil War was as sharp as it was farcical, and couldn't be more commercial.

No matter. With talent as large as this, one could forgive the obvious eye for success. Many a large talent has to go through large borrowings in order to find his own style, and a lust for popular success while dangerous to serious writing is not necessarily fatal. Yes, one could accept the pilferings from other writers, given the scope of this work, the brilliance of the concept - to catch rural America by a trip on a raft down a great river! One could even marvel uneasily at the depth of the instinct for fiction in the author. With the boy Huckleberry Finn, this new novelist had managed to give us a character of no comfortable, measurable dimension. It is easy for characters in modern novels to seem more vivid than figures in the classics but, even so, Huckleberry Finn appeared to be more alive than Don Quixote and Julian Sorel, as naturally near to his own mind as we are to ours. But how often does a hero who is so absolutely natural on the page also succeed in acquiring convincing moral stature as his adventures develop?

It is to be repeated. In the attractive grip of this talent, one is ready to forgive the author of ''Huckleberry Finn'' for every influence he has so promiscuously absorbed. He has made such fertile use of his borrowings. One could even cheer his appearance on our jaded literary scene if not for the single transgression that goes too far. These are passages that do more than borrow an author's style - they copy it! Influence is mental, but theft is physical. Who can declare to a certainty that a large part of the prose in ''Huckleberry Finn'' is not lifted directly from Hemingway? We know that we are not reading Ernest only because the author, obviously fearful that his tone is getting too near, is careful to sprinkle his text with ''a-clutterings'' and ''warn'ts'' and ''anywheres'' and ''t'others.'' But we have read Hemingway - and so we see through it - we know we are reading pure Hemingway disguised:

''We cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim . . . then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee-deep and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywheres . . . the first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line - that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black anymore . . . by and by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water and the east reddens up and the river.''

Up to now I have conveyed, I expect, the pleasure of reading this book today. It is the finest compliment I can offer. We use an unspoken standard of relative judgment on picking up a classic. Secretly, we expect less reward from it than from a good contemporary novel. The average intelligent modern reader would probably, under torture, admit that ''Heartburn'' was more fun to read, minute for minute, than ''Madame Bovary,'' and maybe one even learned more. That is not to say that the first will be superior to the second a hundred years from now but that a classic novel is like a fine horse carrying an exorbitant impost. Classics suffer by their distance from our day-to-day gossip. The mark of how good ''Huckleberry Finn'' has to be is that one can compare it to a number of our best modern American novels and it stands up page for page, awkward here, sensational there - absolutely the equal of one of those rare incredible first novels that come along once or twice in a decade. So I have spoken of it as kin to a first novel because it is so young and so fresh and so all-out silly in some of the chances it takes and even wins. A wiser older novelist would never play that far out when the work was already well along and so neatly in hand. But Twain does.

For the sake of literary propriety, let me not, however, lose sight of the actual context. ''The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' is a novel of the 19th century and its grand claims to literary magnitude are also to be remarked upon. So I will say that the first measure of a great novel may be that it presents - like a human of palpable charisma - an all-but-visible aura. Few works of literature can be so luminous without the presence of some majestic symbol. In ''Huckleberry Finn'' we are presented (given the possible exception of Anna Livia Plurabelle) with the best river ever to flow through a novel, our own Mississippi, and in the voyage down those waters of Huck Finn and a runaway slave on their raft, we are held in the thrall of the river. Larger than a character, the river is a manifest presence, a demiurge to support the man and the boy, a deity to betray them, feed them, all but drown them, fling them apart, float them back together. The river winds like a fugue through the marrow of the true narrative which is nothing less than the ongoing relation between Huck and the runaway slave, this Nigger Jim whose name embodies the very stuff of the slave system itself - his name is not Jim but Nigger Jim. The growth of love and knowledge between the runaway white and the runaway black is a relation equal to the relation of the men to the river for it is also full of betrayal and nourishment, separation and return. So it manages to touch that last fine nerve of the heart where compassion and irony speak to one another and thereby give a good turn to our most protected emotions.

READING ''Huckleberry Finn'' one comes to realize all over again that the near- burned-out, throttled, hate-filled dying affair between whites and blacks is still our great national love affair, and woe to us if it ends in detestation and mutual misery. Riding the current of this novel, we are back in that happy time when the love affair was new and all seemed possible. How rich is the recollection of that emotion! What else is greatness but the indestructible wealth it leaves in the mind's recollection after hope has soured and passions are spent? It is always the hope of democracy that our wealth will be there to spend again, and the ongoing treasure of ''Huckleberry Finn'' is that it frees us to think of democracy and its sublime, terrifying premise: let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings. Mark Twain, whole embodiment of that democratic human, understood the premise in every turn of his pen, and how he tested it, how he twisted and tantalized and tested it until we are weak all over again with our love for the idea.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/reviews/mailer-dead.html

May 9, 1948

The Dusty Answer of Modern War
By DAVID DEMPSEY

THE NAKED AND THE DEAD
By Norman Mailer

Perhaps Mr. Mailer should not be damned for attempting to reduce by frontal assault what better writers have failed to win by infiltration. "The Naked and the Dead"--the story of an imaginary battle in the Pacific--trumpets his dusty answer to the brutality of modern war. Undoubtedly the most ambitious novel to be written about the recent conflict, it is also the most ruthlessly honest and in scope an integrity compares favorably with the best that followed World War I. Even in its repetitiousness, wordiness, and overanalysis of motive, it is a commanding performance by a young man of 25 whose gifts are impressive and whose failures are a matter of reach rather than grasp.

"The Naked and the Dead" is an enormously long novel, washed up by the choppy waters of disillusionment, leaving nothing to the imagination. It is a saturation bombardment with every target hit at least three times. It is virtually a Kinsey Report on the sexual behavior of the GI. Its style is an almost pure Army billingsgate that will offend many readers, although in no sense is it exaggerated: Mr. Mailer's soldiers are real persons, speaking the vernacular of human bitterness and agony. It gives off a skyglow that is quite faithful to the spectrum of battle, and exposes the blood, if not always the guts, of war. Yet for all its virtuosity, its deafening emotional cannonades, it is primarily a series of brilliant skirmishes; the central objective is never taken.

For one thing, we are not quite sure what the objective is. Mr. Mailer obviously doesn't like war, or the people who fight it, but this is hardly an original theme. He tries very hard to show that much of its unpleasantness comes from the nature of the participants, and that their nature, in turn, is warped by the circumstances inevitable in the conditions of war and the climate of a military organization. But not entirely.

The generation that grew to manhood on the eve of the last war was not ideally suited to saving the world for democracy. It had been blighted by depression. Its minorities--two of the characters are Jewish, one a Mexican- America--had not yet been assimilated fully into the national dream. Even the dominant groups represented competing sectional and economic interests. In peace, the differences are adjustable. In war, Mr. Mailer believes, they become intensified, for the system gives men unprecedented degrees of power. How the GI--in his less virtuous moments--got the way he did, is the subject of this novel.

The battle is seen through the eyes of a single platoon, plus a major and a general. For the author's clinical purposes, they are an exposed nerve, exhibiting the whole shock of battle. A fighting unit, the men are nevertheless a collection of individuals. Each is studied, in crisply written flashbacks, as the product of a certain environment. If there is any doubt that Mr. Mailer is a perceptive, skillful writer, these vignettes will dispel it. By contrast, the main narrative is often sluggish; too much of the boredom of war is translated literally; the nexus between the characters' pasts and their battle existence is sometimes thin. The general, furthermore, on whom so much of the story's motivation depends, is clearly an over-intellectualized version of a Fascist, neither convincing nor typical.

These are faults, but they detract little from the book's overall power. The scene in which Gallagher continues to get letters from his dead wife--written before she died in childbirth but delivered for a month after he had been notified; the death of Wilson, among the most lingering in all war literature; the pointless, sadistic effort on the part of Platoon Sgt. Crofts to get his men to scale a mountain--these are moments which deeply touch the heart of war. They are a triumph of realism, but without the compassion which gives final authority in the realm of human conduct. "The Naked and the Dead" is not a great book, but indisputably it bears witness to a new and significant talent among American novelists.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/04/reviews/mailer-armies.html

May 5, 1968

The Trouble He's Seen
By ALFRED KAZIN

THE ARMIES OF NIGHT
By Norman Mailer

Twenty years ago this week, when Norman Mailer published "The Naked and the Dead," became famous and rich and pleased everybody, even old novelists on their way out, it looked as if a safe type were off to a traditional career. The novel was "the best of the American World War II novels"; it was on the side of Lieutenant Hearn, the young American progressive, and made a villain of epicene, Fascist-minded General Cummings; its characters made a comprehensible "cross-section of American society," from Goldstein to Gallagher: The text was clearly indebted to many models--Dos Passos for narrative rhythm, Farrell for tough city background, Hemingway for nuance.

"The Naked and the Dead" is as intensely readable as it was in 1948, and still the only one of Mailer's novels that continually reads like a novel that is stable in conception, that doesn't become an exhibition or a Quest. There is a particular visual concentration behind its best scenes that was to reappear in everything he wrote later, a force of mind that had enabled this literary draftee out of Brooklyn and Harvard, in the Army often a clerk, to absorb other people's hardships and battles into himself. But what is most striking about it now is its intellectual discipleship. It could have been called "Main Currents in American Thought--A Novel." "The best of American World War II novels" is no great praise, for that war didn't produce any new forms. The novelists were competing with the reporters on their own ground, and amidst the mountains of gritty documentaries. Mailer's novel in fact pleased because it was more intelligent and better written, and so was more recognizable.

"Barbary Shore" (1951) was not just a "disappointment"; it showed that Mailer was not interested in being an "acceptable" novelist, that in his moody indignation with the moral failure of Socialism in Russia and the growth of authoritarian state power in the U.S.A., he was willing to throw a novel away in order to express political agony. He portrayed a struggle to the death between an ex-Bolshevik not yet ready to betray his dream of Socialism and an F.B.I. agent ready to betray anything. This dark, sad testament of a book, only distractedly a novel, was riddled with the intimations of a tie-up between the ex-Left and the Government's intelligence service. This (then) fantasy, one of many in Mailer's busy mind, nevertheless frightened him, demanded a solution, a reaffirmation of Socialism in Trotsky's terms. The author was stridently a moralist, disturbed by the lack of expected sequences. Faith seemed more important than fiction.

The author of "Barbary Shore" was still the nice Jewish boy from Harvard and very much a disciple--this time of the French radical, Jean Malaquais. But around the time Mailer had such trouble completing "The Deer Park" (1955) to his satisfaction, there appeared the toughie who hated the nice Jewish boy--and began talking about himself in public, with a bravado plainly designed to throw off anything that might soften him up in his opposition to America's cancer- breeding repressions. There was a new wife, a new Mailer and a new ideology--sexual courage, truth to the buried instincts. It looked as if Sade had displaced Marx, Wilhelm Reich had displaced Jean Malaquais. But the immediate crisis in this search for the politics and religion of sex, for solutions that would connect sex back to revelation, sex with the hidden message circuits of the mind that lead to God, was that Mailer never did like what he had finally made of "The Deer Park." Several publishers turned it down, he became obsessed with the book, and has been writing about it or dramatizing it ever since.

Mailer was now living "the crisis of the novel." He thought constantly about writing novels, saw everyone as a possible character, made grandiose announcements of a whole series of novels. But he was so sensitive to politics, power and society in America, so engrossed in the search for solutions and revelations that the moralist and the "celebrity" left little time to the novelist. He now made a feat of writing books quickly, as if hurling "An American Dream" month by month into Esquire and turning all his powers of mimicry into the "Why Are We in Vietnam?" would finally earn him self-approval as a novelist. Both are certainly brilliant performances; but in the first you are always aware of Mailer's favorite fantasies, in the second of his pride in a linguistic tour de force.

Still, a significant reason for Mailer's impatience has also been his acute sense of the national crisis, his particular gift for detecting political deteriorarion--and his professional feeling that the American scene at this time may be too thorny a subject to be left to journalists. It is the coalescence of American disorder (always an obsession of Mailer's) with all the self-confidence he feels as a novelist during reportage that has produced "Armies of the Night," his extraordinary personal tract on the unprecedented demonstration of Oct. 21-23, 1967, when thousands of the New Left attempted to "march on the Pentagon," fell into some brief but bloody skirmishes with armed guards, and a thousand people were arrested--among them, Norman Mailer.

Of course Mailer presents this book as his nonfiction novel--he simply cannot stop dreaming about himself as a novelist. But it is a fact that only a born novelist could have written a piece of history so intelligent, mischievous, penetrating and alive, so vivid with crowds, the great stage that is American democracy, the Washington streets and bridges, the Lincoln Memorial, the women, students, hippies, Negroes and assorted intellectuals for peace, the M.P.'s and United States marshals, the American Nazis chanting "We want dead Reds."

The book cracks open the hard nut of American authority at the center, the uncertainty of our power--and, above all, the bad conscience that now afflicts so many Americans. "Armies of the Night" is a peculiarly appropriate and timely contribution to this moment of the national dramas, and among other things, it shows Mailer relieved of his vexing dualities, able to bring all his interests, concerns and actually quite traditional loyalties to equal focus. The form of this diary-essay-tract-sermon grew out of the many simultaneous happenings in Washington that weekend, out of the self-confidence which for writers is style, out of his fascination with power in American and his fear of it, out of his American self-dramatizing and his honest fear for his country....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/mailer-time.html

May 10, 1998

The Time of Our Time
By NORMAN MAILER

1929
Boxing with Hemingway

Talking to Callaghan one day, Fitzgerald referred to Hemingway's ability as a boxer, and remarked that while Hemingway was probably not good enough to be heavyweight champion of the world, he was undoubtedly as good as Young Stribling, the light-heavyweight champion. "Look, Scott," said Callaghan, "Ernest is an amateur. I'm an amateur. All this talk is ridiculous." Unconvinced, Fitzgerald asked to come along to the gym at the American Club and watch Hemingway and Callaghan box. But Callaghan has let the reader in earlier on one small point. Hemingway, four inches taller and forty pounds heavier than Callaghan, "may have thought about boxing, dreamed about it, consorted with old fighters and hung around gyms," but Callaghan "had done more actual boxing with men who could box a little and weren't just taking exercise or fooling around."

So on an historic afternoon in June in Paris in 1929, Hemingway and Callaghan boxed a few rounds, with Fitzgerald serving as timekeeper. The second round went on for a long time. Both men began to get tired, Hemingway got careless. Callaghan caught him a good punch and dropped Hemingway on his back. At the next instant Fitzgerald cried out, "Oh, my God! I let the round go four minutes."

"All right, Scott," Ernest said. "If you want to see me getting the shit knocked out of me, just say so. Only don't say you made a mistake."

According to Callaghan's estimate, Scott never recovered from that moment. One believes it. For months later, a cruel and wildly inaccurate story about this episode appeared in the Herald Tribune book section. It was followed by a cable sent collect to Callaghan by Fitzgerald at Hemingway's insistence. "HAVE SEEN STORY IN HERALD TRIBUNE. ERNEST AND I AWAIT YOUR CORRECTION. SCOTT FITZGERALD."

Since Callaghan had already written such a letter to the paper, none of the three men could ever forgive each other.

The story offers a fine clue to the logic of Hemingway's mind, and tempts the prediction that there will be no definitive biography of Hemingway until the nature of his personal torture is better comprehended. It is possible Hemingway lived every day of his life in the style of the suicide. What a great dread is that. It is the dread that sits in the silences of his short declarative sentences. At any instant, by any failure in magic, by a mean defeat, or by a moment of cowardice, Hemingway could be thrust back again into the agonizing demands of his courage. For the life of his talent must have depended on living in a psychic terrain where one must either be brave beyond one's limit, or sicken closer into a bad illness, or, indeed, by the ultimate logic of the suicide, must advance the hour in which one would make another reconnaissance into one's death.

That may be why Hemingway turned in such fury on Fitzgerald. To be knocked down by a smaller man could only imprison him further into the dread he was forever trying to avoid. Each time his physical vanity suffered a defeat, he would be forced to embark on a new existential gamble with his life. So he would naturally think of Fitzgerald's little error as an act of treachery, for the result of that extra minute in the second round could only be a new bout of anxiety that would drive his instinct into ever more dangerous situations. Most men find their profoundest passion in looking for a way to escape their private and secret torture. It is not likely that Hemingway was a brave man who sought danger for the sake of the sensations it provided him. What is more likely the truth of his long odyssey is that he struggled with his cowardice and against a secret lust to suicide all of his life, that his inner landscape was a nightmare, and he spent his nights wrestling with the gods. It may even be that the final judgment on his work may come to the notion that what he failed to do was tragic, but what he accomplished was heroic, for it is possible he carried a weight of anxiety within him from day to day that would have suffocated any man smaller than himself. There are two kinds of brave men: those who are brave by the grace of nature, and those who are brave by an act of will. It is the merit of Callaghan's long anecdote that the second condition is suggested to be Hemingway's own.

[anne]

Let me make it perfectly clear that whether I agree or argue with Bob Herbert, and I do both and heatedly, I think Herbert a treasure of American idealism and a constant inspiration and Brad DeLong was shamefully wrong in the manner of criticism of Herbert and I have told DeLong just this in no uncertain terms. Suggesting the uselessness of an American idealist, an American who has so long written for peace was beyond conscience.

[anne]

http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/opinion/08herbert.html

March 8, 2007

Lift the Curtain
By BOB HERBERT

Neglect, incompetence, indifference, lies.

Why in the world is anyone surprised that the Bush administration has not been taking good care of wounded and disabled American troops?

Real-life human needs have never been a priority of this administration. The evidence is everywhere — from the mind-bending encounter with the apocalypse in Baghdad, to the ruined residential neighborhoods in New Orleans, to the anxious families in homes across America who are offering tearful goodbyes to loved ones heading off to yet another pointless tour in Iraq.

The trial and conviction of Scooter Libby opened the window wide on the twisted values and priorities of the hawkish operation in the vice president's office. No worry about the troops there.

And President Bush has always given the impression that he is more interested in riding his bicycle at the ranch in Texas than in taking care of his life and death responsibilities around the world.

That whistling sound you hear is the wind blowing across the emptiness of the administration's moral landscape.

U.S. troops have been treated like trash since the beginning of Mr. Bush's catastrophic adventure in Iraq. Have we already forgotten that soldier from the Tennessee National Guard who dared to ask Donald Rumsfeld why the troops had to go scrounging in landfills for "hillbilly armor" — scrap metal — to protect their vehicles from roadside bombs?

Fellow soldiers cheered when the question was raised, and others asked why they were being sent into combat with antiquated equipment. The defense secretary was not amused. "You go to war with the Army you have," he callously replied, "not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time." ...

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/opinion/l12herbert.html

Is This 'Supporting the Troops'?

To the Editor:

My 20-year-old son is nearing the end of his first deployment to Iraq with the United States Marines. Only a few days ago, we learned that he received a commendation for initiative and bravery for pulling wounded and dead Iraqi soldiers out of a bus hit by a roadside bomb during a recent midnight convoy.

Specifically, he was recognized for "tirelessly moving multiple wounded Iraqis to the casualty collection point and loading them on the medivac helicopters ... and also volunteering to help collect the dead and ensuring that they were evaluated."

It's bad enough that my son is risking his life fighting a war that was waged on lies and deception. How infinitely more galling it is to realize that his value to the Bush administration wouldn't even merit decent care at Walter Reed if he were wounded or disabled.

Bob Herbert is right about the troops being shortchanged: it's something I never thought that America would do either.

My son has been commended for extending a degree of professionalism, respect and devotion to duty in aiding wounded Iraqi soldiers that the United States government doesn't extend to its own troops.

The horror, the horror.

Donna J. Anton
Hayle, England, March 8, 2007

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/23/opinion/23herbert.html?hp

October 23, 2007

The Long, Dark Night
By BOB HERBERT

Nashville

I was making small talk with Dan and Sharon Brodrick in a waiting area filled with anxious-looking patients on the first floor of St. Thomas Hospital. Mrs. Brodrick seemed tired, but she managed a smile. Her husband, a former truck driver who is now an ordained minister, was the talkative one.

"We found out five days after her 56th birthday," he said. "How's that for a happy birthday?"

While maintaining a pleasant facade for the outside world, the Brodricks, married 37 years and still deeply in love, are spinning toward the abyss.

"We're in big trouble," said Mr. Brodrick.

Mrs. Brodrick learned last May that she had cancer of the duodenum, and it had already spread to her liver and pancreas. Not only is the prognosis grim, but the medical expenses will soon leave the couple destitute. Mrs. Brodrick has no health insurance.

The emotional toll has been nearly as devastating as the physical. Mrs. Brodrick told her husband that she wasn't ready to leave him. "I don't want to die," she said. When he told her they had to cling to their faith in God, she replied, "I know that God can take care of this. But how's he going to do it?"

The American Cancer Society has been campaigning to raise awareness of the desperate plight of people trying to deal with cancer without health insurance. I offer Dan and Sharon Brodrick as Exhibit A.

The Brodricks never had much money, but they raised two boys and managed to buy a modest home in Gainesboro, a rural town about 90 miles east of here. Dan Brodrick severely damaged his back in an accident at work several years ago and is disabled. His wife has suffered from a variety of illnesses.

But by carefully managing their meager income, they have lived in reasonable comfort. "With a little bit of savings," said Mr. Brodrick, "and with what I've been drawing in disability, we figured we'd be all right."

But the absence of health insurance for Mrs. Brodrick left a gaping hole in their financial plan, and they knew it. She had been covered by her husband's health insurance while he was driving a truck. But that coverage ended when he was forced to retire.

"We tried to buy insurance for her," said Mr. Brodrick. "We applied to dozens of companies. But they wouldn't touch her because she already had health problems."

Without insurance, Mrs. Brodrick received treatment for her various ailments under a special program for uninsured patients at St. Thomas. But the cancer diagnosis was an entirely different story, a step for the Brodricks into a realm of dizzying, unrelieved horror.

First came the biopsy, accompanied by reassuring comments from doctors. Then came word that the tumor was indeed malignant. That was followed by surgery.

"They opened her up, and then they closed her right up again," said Mr. Brodrick.

Not only had the cancer metastasized, it was moving very aggressively. Various estimates were given, each one shorter than the last, about how long Mrs. Brodrick might live.

While his wife was being prepped for chemo, Mr. Brodrick sat in the corner of another room and spoke about what it was like to have one's life all but literally blown apart.

"It tears you down," he said. "You'd like to fight this with your bare hands, but you can't. We've been married 37 years Sept. 2, and when I think about it, it was the quickest 37 years I've ever seen go by in my life. It went by in a flash. And we have leaned on each other that whole time."

The hospital is not billing the Brodricks for its costs. "But," said Mr. Brodrick, "I've still got to pay the doctors' bills and pay for the drugs. And the drugs are very expensive."

He reeled off a long list of charges that are coming at him like machine-gun fire, bills that he cannot afford to pay....

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/06/books/06kaku.html?hp

November 6, 2007

More on the Career of the Genius Who Boldly Compared Himself to God
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

A LIFE OF PICASSO
Volume Three, 1917-1932.
By John Richardson.

Talking about his own highly eclectic, highly protean style, Picasso once said to his mistress Françoise Gilot: "Of course if you note all the different shapes, sizes and colors of models he works from, you can understand his confusion. He doesn't know what he wants. No wonder his style is so ambiguous. It's like God's. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just keeps on trying other things. The same with this sculptor. First he works from nature; then he tries abstraction. Finally he winds up lying around caressing his models."

The comparison to God, like the use of the third person, was deliberate, of course. As John Richardson reminds us in the third installment of his magisterial and definitive biography, Picasso not only worshiped the gods Dionysius, Priapus and Mithra (the god of light and wisdom), but also regarded himself as their confrère — an artist so prodigally talented, so daring and so virtuosic that he could reinvent the universe. He was a Nietzschean shaman who regarded art as a mysterious, magical force, offering the possibility of exorcism and transfiguration; a chameleon who effortlessly moved back and forth between Cubism and classicism, irony and sentimentality, cruelty and tenderness; a wily, self-mythologizing sorcerer who inhaled history, ideas and a cornucopia of styles with fierce, promiscuous abandon — all toward the end of exploding conventional ways of looking at the world and remaking that world anew.

In "A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years," Mr. Richardson takes up the story of the Minotaur of Modernism where he left off, a decade ago, in Volume 2, with Picasso's growing interest in classicism. This volume, dealing with the years 1917-32, lacks the great drama of the preceding volume, which chronicled the crucial development of Cubism — a movement, in Mr. Richardson's view, that would nourish all of the artist's later achievements and propel "every major modernist movement" that followed in the decades to come.

This book, in contrast, deals with Picasso's midcareer forays into a variety of styles — from his reworking of the masters of the past (including the Greeks and Romans, Ingres, Corot, Chardin and Renoir) to his growing interest in sculpture to his experiments with the radical deconstruction of the human body. Mr. Richardson sketches out the competitive dialogue that Picasso carried on for years with Matisse, charts Picasso's transit from bohemia to the bourgeoisie and maps the myriad intramural spats and schisms that fractured the avant-garde, all the while conjuring the heady, incestuous world of artists (including Ernest Hemingway and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, none of whom Picasso much liked), patrons and socialites that Picasso frequented in 1920s France.

Although this all makes for a more discursive and at times less focused narrative than that of Volume 2, "The Triumphant Years," like its predecessors, is informed by Mr. Richardson's consummate knowledge of Picasso's work — his intimate understanding of the artist's temperament and endlessly inventive styles, his expansive vocabulary of myths and motifs and, most important, the mysterious nature of the alchemy by which he transformed his own experiences and emotions into art. So incisive and revealing are Mr. Richardson's commentaries on individual Picasso paintings and sculptures that the reader's one serious complaint about this book is that photos of individual works discussed are not always included in this volume or do not appear on the same page on which they are so artfully deconstructed. Mr. Richardson leaves us not only with a deep appreciation of Picasso's Promethean ambition and prodigious fecundity, but also with a shrewd understanding of his tumultuous, subversive and often disturbing art.

Mr. Richardson's Picasso is not the destructive, misanthropic egomaniac portrayed in the Merchant-Ivory film "Surviving Picasso" or the heroic hipster artist depicted in Norman Mailer's "Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man." ...