Quick Hits - What do we have for you tonight? Let's see:

Ginmar reflects on interrogating an innocent man.

My (warning! the following words do not go together!) genial paleo buddy Gene Callahan has started blogging at last.

Dave Trowbridge argues that my identifying the Republican Party as a clear and present danger to constitutional government this morning means that my earlier advice on how libertarians should vote (if that's their thing) must be revised. I disagree. Like Dave, I think George W. Bush needs to suffer the largest possible defeat. But the defeat's best measure is a low vote total for Bush himself, not necessarily a high one for Kerry. Everything Matt and I said last month about how libertarian votes for Kerry himself would be misinterpreted by observers still obtains. If libertarians vote LP, the Repubs have to interpret that as "We alienated the libertarian vote." If libertarians vote Democratic, the Repubs just see more votes going to "the liberal." At that point they retool and offer us torture, an imperial presidency and expanded drug subsidies. Whee.

Jane Galt among others tackles the thorny problem of "positive liberty" in one post and then another. The second contains links to much of the rest of today's writing on the subject. I've never been wild about the term "positive liberty," or the term "negative liberty" for that matter. To the extent that I accept that "positive liberty" is a meaningful concept, if not a meaningful term, I am a negative liberty guy. I also tend to think that, as classically defined, positive liberty requires the existence of negative liberty in a way that negative liberty does not require positive. But read the people who are really into it.

Rose Curtin talks Filth! And promises more. She has what appear to be qualified disagreements with my own argument, and some interesting stuff to say about ownership of sexuality, the agency of the book's female characters and more. She also promises further Filth-blogging, so keep checking back.

Liz Miller's The Three Laws of Adaptations, at Bookslut, is very good. Adaptations as in film adaptations of books, especially geeky ones. (Via Brett.)

The Fish Rots FROM the Head, but the Whole Fish Rots - What is the real import of yesterday's "torture memo" story, in which, to quote from Phil Carter's Intel Dump,

An extremely learned reader of mine wrote to remind me that the U.S. Constitution isn't the only authority which rejects the idea of executive to set aside the law. This idea goes back even further, to the British legal tradition. Ironically, the power now claimed by the Defense Department (and by extension, the White House) was rejected for the King in the late 17th Century.

Partly it's that we've gone straight past "Unamerican" to "Un-constitutional monarchy." So much for the notion of "benevolent hegemony" as conducing to national virtue.

But the big thing is this: President Bush is absolutely responsible for everything that happens in his administration, and to the extent that the Pentagon memo conditioned policy, he is first in line for blame. HOWEVER. President Bush is no one's idea of a legal mind. He may have initiated the project that became the memo, but he didn't draft the thing. High-level government lawyers, most of them undoubtedly political appointees, did that. What that means is that there is systemic corruption in the Republican Party as an institution - "Bush's Willing Torturers" we might call them. These are people that came up with the idea that the Constitutional phrase "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed" meant

authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

They represent a deadly danger to the American system and they are multiple. It's not one guy somewhere, it's a movement. Until the Republican Party roots them out, that Party is the enemy, not just of libertarians, but of anyone who values individual freedom and republican government. From the standpoint of liberty, there can no longer be any justification for preferring the Republicans to the Democrats.

UPDATE: To clarify, this isn't just another Unqualified Offerings anti-torture item. The issue now goes beyond torture to the very structure of American government. Torture is the symptom. The concept that the President is not just himself above the law, but a supralegal authority, is the malady.

Pull the Other One - Haaretz reports that

At the end of a dramatic cabinet meeting Sunday, the government passed Ariel Sharon's revised disengagement plan, by a vote of 14-7, but the decision does not allow for the dismantling of settlements and the prime minister will have to go back to the cabinet when he actually wants to begin the evacuation process.

"Disengagement is on its way," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said after the meeting. "The cabinet has decided that by the end of 2005 Israel intends to leave the Gaza Strip and four settlements in Samaria."

The safest bet you could make is that nothing of the kind will happen. The end of 2005 is dog years away in Middle East time. Like the Road Map, Taba and Oslo before it, the Gaza disengagement is heading for the wastebasket of big mideast plans. If I had any doubts that the whole thing was a show, the Someday Someway timetable (requiring further cabinet approval to actually implement!) confirms it. We can't say what precise combination of timely suicide attacks on one side and targetted killings on the other will scuttle the putative disengagement, but we've been here before.

The real mystery is not just Why these continuing pantomimes? but Why all the drama surrounding these continuing pantomimes?

Any Man's Death - Oh by the way, many people died of Alzheimer's complications this weekend, including a former President of the United States. About Ronald Reagan I think many things. I was a staunch Democrat during most of his incumbency and used to brag that "I voted against Ronald Reagan the maximum number of times allowable by law." I moved from Democratic to Libertarian affiliation without a serious Republican phase between, so unlike many other libertarians I had no Youthful Reagan Worship Syndrome to get over. As politicians go, Reagan was worse than some and better than others; ditto his presidency. He did a lot for the rhetoric of limited government, though less for its actuality. I'll say a few things for and against him:

1) He clearly should have been impeached over the Iran-Contra scandal.

2) It's little noted, but he made a liar out of the man I actually voted for in 1984, Walter Mondale, who famously said, "The President will raise taxes. So will I. The difference is that I'll tell you how."

3) When conservatives try to give Reagan credit for bringing the Soviet Union to its knees, the standard liberal response is that Reagan didn't do it, the Soviet Union inevitably collapsed under its own bureaucratic weight. This is unsatisfactory. True is it almost certainly is, Reagan was the first President with the imagination to actually envision that collapse. I lived through the Cold War and made something of a study of it. Prior to the late 1980s, the smart money, the conventional wisdom, was that the Soviet Union and the Long Twilight Struggle were here to stay. The notion that the USSR would fail to prove a going concern automatically marked one as a fringe personality. (I was not one. I bought the conventional wisdom completely.) Indeed, Reagan was derided for not accepting this obvious fact about the world right up to the last days of his Administration.

4) I remember finding a Paul Slansky book, Reagan's Reign of Error, devoted to Reagan's plentiful misstatements and impromptu gaffes, on the shelf in the bookstore I managed back around 1990. The book itself dated from 1987 or 1988 and included the famous "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" line, to which Slansky appended the humorous comment, "President Reagan proving his irrelevance in Berlin." Oops!

5) Guess we're never going to hear the end of the "time capsule anecdote" now.

But what I wanted to talk about before I got distracted by that Ronald Reagan business was Nancy Reagan. How I hated the bitch. Just despised her. Her little pursed mouth, her high, distracted voice, her too-put-together appearance. And how I have had to change my mind. Not just because her widely-derided "drug policy," Just Say No, shows itself in retrospect to be far more benign than tossing every 37th adult in the clink. But because from all reports her dedication to her husband's care during the last, terrible decade of his life has been nothing short of heroic. Now that ordeal is over, my message to her is, first, "I'm sorry I said all those awful things about you," and second, not Rest in Peace, but Rest in Life. May she find some repose in these late, lonely days.

Hey Kids! Comics Blogs! - The All-New All-Different Howling Curmudgeons is a comic-book group blog. It would be similar to the legendary Four Color Hell, had Four Color Hell actually engaged in comics blogging. It's been in continuous operation since April 24, so it's probably safe to link now.

Women on Filth - What've we got so far, then, re my request for female comics fans to write about Morrison and Weston's The Filth and my own tentative assertion that the appeal of the work is "a guy thing?" Here and there:

An interesting comment thread at Hanging Fire, well worth reading. Among other things, Ginger Stampley finds my take too essentialist and abbandono argues that male and female relations to the muck of existence are more variable and nuanced than I let on. Hanging Fire proprietor Karin L. Kross, comic book reviewer for Bookslut, makes a mental note to reread the book. I look forward to hearing what she thinks. (She favorably reviewed the first two issues in 2002.)

Eve Tushnet, something of an essentialist herself, expresses no opinion of the work but concurs in general with my gender scheme, quoting a couple of paragraphs for explicit agreeement.

Neilalien tips me to an older In Sequence item critiquing The Filth from a different perspective. Representation of villainy is a tricky issue in any medium and any story. Often the aim is an attraction-repulsion complex - we're to understand the evil of the act while also understand the attraction of it to the perpetrator. One thing I don't think is that the "Pornomancer" episode represents a critique of pornography as such, as one of the In Sequence commenters suggests. Something I value in The Filth is that it's an attempt at a sustained understanding of both pornography's benefits and harms. A number of sympathetic characters, not excluding the protagonist, are shown to be porn consumers. At the same time a number of the villains are men who take it too far. Specifically, they cross the boundary from imagination to action and from consent to compulsion. Per Morrison, Tex Porneau is not evil because he's a pornographer. Tex Porneau is evil because he kills and rapes. Only when he crosses the line from paying people to willingly perform on camera to committing sex crimes on film does he become a problem for the Hand.

I also went looking for preexisting reviews of The Filth by women. Johanna Draper Carlson reviewed the first issue only, and only briefly, noting that "it's not for me -- I prefer a strong plot with my crazy ideas and boundary-pushing."

Rose at Peiratikos is still reading the book.

At Sequential Tart, Adrienne Rappaport offered brief, generally favorable reviews of the first three issues. Alas, she thereafter stops writing about the series.

Nothing from Elayne Riggs, Laura "Tegan" Gjovaag or Heidi McDonald, from what I can tell.

What's missing is a Doane/Fiore "The Filth is a thrilling masterpiece" review from any female comics writer. I'd love to claim that this discrepancy is itself telling, but my sample size is far too small. Indeed, one of the reasons I wanted a lot of women's opinions on the book is to avoid forcing any single female reviewer into the "representative woman" niche.

Gaudy Night: The Continuing Series - Me, a few months ago:

Here's a core truth I've noticed about the Real World: people are as outlandish as they can afford to be.

The Rocky Mountain News, yesterday:

GRANBY — A 52-year-old welder nursing a grudge against the town fathers and driving a bulldozer converted into a war machine ripped the heart of this high-country ranching town from its foundations Friday.

Among the structures destroyed or heavily damaged in a relentless 90-minute rampage were Granby's town hall and library, a bank, the town's newspaper, an electric cooperative building, Gambles Store, an excavating business and a house owned by the town's former mayor, as well as a concrete plant adjacent to the business of the man believed responsible for the bizarre assault.

I'll concede that authorities did not stop Heemeyer's rampage by reversing the polarity on his deathdozer. Otherwise, suggestive. (Via die puny humans.)

Support the Troops - Attn: Any Soldier lists the things our men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan can most use, from Under Armour HeatGear t-shirts to - beanie babies. There are unit-specific requests too. (Via Making Light.)

But I'm an Orphan! - Teresa Nielsen Hayden on a cheeky British plagiarist:

A student at the University of Kent who got zapped for plagiarism right before his final exams is suing the university for negligence, on the grounds that he's been cheating in exactly the same way throughout his studies there, and they've never said anything about it.

My first reaction was "Nice try, kid." On second thought, he does have a point. It's not enough of a point, but he has one.

And she's just getting started. Great stuff on the inadequacies of student handbooks, the methods of catching plagiarists and more.

Foods Touch - I don't think political blogger Alex Knapp writes about comics much, but he has a new item on the question of Superman's continuing relevance. Not a lot of detail, but he does demonstrate familiarity with the recent canon.

I Hardly Know Where to Begin - Heaven knows I'm not nearly as anti-liberal as I was, say, three years ago. I've come to appreciate nuances of liberal thought that defy the right wing stereotypes I held rather comfortably. But John Quiggin's most recent post on Crooked Timber brings it all back. It contains so many bad assumptions and begs so many questions, forms such a self-contained and highly-polished sphere of misconception that one can hardly grip it to refute. One can only marvel.

How Do You Spell Chutzpah in Arabic? - From Jim Lobe's column today:

Asked about Tenet's sudden resignation, Chalabi repeated those accusations, telling reporters that the CIA director's role in developing U.S.-Iraq policy has "not been helpful to say the least." Tenet, he added, had provided "erroneous information about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to President Bush, which caused the government much embarrassment at the United Nations and his own country."

Mind you, Lobe suggests the "hero in error" was right in one instance:

Nonetheless, in at least one case, Chalabi's charge about Tenet's own role in faulty WMD evidence appears to have been correct. According to journalist Bob Woodward's new book, Plan of Attack, a critical moment in the run-up to the war occurred when Bush himself expressed doubt that the public would be persuaded by the CIA's evidence of the threat posed by Iraq's WMD.

"From the end of one of the couches in the Oval office, Tenet rose up, threw his arms in the air. 'It's a slam-dunk case!' the DCI said," Woodward reported, adding that Tenet repeated the phrase a second time when Bush asked whether he was confident about the evidence.

Ah, Good Times, Good Times.

Tenet - I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot about George Tenet's resignation over the next few days and weeks, some of which will even be true. I tentatively class Tenet with Colin Powell - men with more sense than the people around them but lacking the guts to go to the mat for their beliefs or walk away when it might have done some good. Note: I'm not saying Tenet did a great job managing American intelligence. But he does seem to have had a better sense of what was coming in Iraq, and a better appreciation of the true scale of the Iraqi threat to the US (minor).

This Is How Bad It's Gotten - From the Guardian:

Band member Mike Devine, from Bristol, said he had been approached by the officer and shown a copy of a text he had sent in April, which contained the words "gun" and "jet airliner".

The 35-year-old, who plays bass in a Clash tribute group called London Calling, had intended to text the lyrics - from the Clash song Tommy Gun - to singer Reg Shaw. Instead, he sent the message to the wrong number.

Avon and Somerset police said a Special Branch officer had visited Mr Devine after the person who received the message, sent on April 30, became concerned about its content and contacted police.

Mr Devine said he had been worried when an officer from the Special Branch confronted him at his office, and added: "I had no idea why they could want to talk to me."

The father of two said the officer had then produced a printout of the text message, which read: "How about this for Tommy Gun? OK - so let's agree about the price and make it one jet airliner for 10 prisoners."

We think we're good societies. Just societies. But we have Clash tribute bands run by thirty-five-year-old fathers. (With offices! we learn later in the article.) I wonder if they mumble the part about how "Phony Beatlemania has bitten the dust." (Come on, Jim, a Clash tribute band necessarily mumbles all the words to ALL the songs!)

In Case You Forgot . . .

So I'm working the night shift here, and periodically stepping outside to try and keep myself awake. And while I'm doing it, I'm looking up at the big, bright moon in the sky, shining over the palm trees and the guard towers. No sooner do I step back inside than I hear the explosions-----BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Mortars, somewhere beyond the fence line. I guess they happen a few times a month--and of course, they're always at night. I imagine one of Sadr's little goons, setting his alarm clock to get up at one or two AM, and plodding out to his yard, digging up the mortar rounds, and then yawning while he aims them in the general direction of the post. And I thought my job sucked.

Ginmar's still writing, and still a must read.

Desire Under the Phlegms - I thought at one point that I'd do a whole review item on Grant Morrison and Chris Weston's newly-collected graphic novel, The Filth, but instead I'll just pick at one aspect of it that's nagged at me. For this site's non-comics-obsessive readership, The Filth is the hefty story of an operative who is part policeman and part garbage collector - his agency, the Hand, functions as something of the world's bureaucratic super ego. "We stop the world's back yard from stinking," as protagonist Slade's colleague Officer Nil puts it. When the world threatens to get too, well, gross, the Hand steps in to enforce Status Q.

The Filth is surreal, paranoid, Dickian, sexually explicit and, absolutely, the least erotic thing I've read in quite some time. It's a superb narrative of an extraordinary man trying his damnedest to hide in his version of an ordinary one. It's a fictive inquiry into, as Prince put it, "this thing called life," especially the conundrum of how we appear to be noble in reason, infinite in faculties, in action like an angel and all that, and at the same time, mired in icky stuff - sweat, piss, jizz and blood, poop, germs, snot, dirt, phlegm, rot et disgusting al.

I'm thinking this is a guy thing.

"Love has pitched his tent," wrote Yeats, anticipating The Filth's themes, "in the place of excrement." But Yeats was a guy too, just like Morrison.

My suspicion is that the ideas Morrison plays with in The Filth have a salience for men, especially young men, that they won't, in general, have for women. My guess is that most women, by the time they reach adulthood, have integrated the dualism of Spirit and "Filth" more completely than most men. They have to. A young woman has experienced monthly vaginal bleeding for at least a decade and anticipates several decades more of it. She either has given birth or has a very good idea what it entails. Social customs being what they are, she's probably cleaned more messes - done more laundry, more dishes, more toilets. Intimate with her mother's life in ways a son is unlikely to be, she is long over any shock at the idea that we are permeable bags of perishable fluids.

I watched my wife give birth and at last it came time for the dreaded e-word. Never comfortable with the idea, I had yet imagined that it would be done with something like an X-acto knife, and was surprised and vaguely nauseated when the OB/GYN pulled out what were basically chrome, sterilized pruning shears. And as the doctor, herself a woman, methodically cut through the perineum, single most wickedly delightful spot on the female body, I was thinking, more or less, "The Precious!" and my wife was thinking, unambiguously, "Oh thank God!" I know because I asked about it afterward. Her response was, of necessity, practical: she needed room to deliver the (bloody, icky) package.

I think men have the privilege of going through youth fairly "self-contained," anatomically. Sheltered. Desire drives them into engagement with "the place of excrement" and it's a shock. Suddenly we really want to "swap spit" and probe orifices and "exchange fluids," but it represents a loss of control and a breach of male autonomy. I can think of two artists, often considered "misogynists," whose horror is not of women at all but of male desire: the poet Philip Larkin and the musician Elvis Costello. (Mind you, in lesser talents what starts as horror of male desire can get offloaded onto women and become misogyny proper.) Women seem to have varying attitudes toward intercourse during menses. Men seem to find it intimidating, at least the first time.

I'm generalizing terribly. I'm not saying women "don't get it" - if anything, I'm trying to avoid saying men get "worked up over nothing." I'm hoping that female comics writers - mostly bloggers, given that this is a blog - will tell me how off-base I may be on their reactions to the book in question and the topic in general. I also wonder if they'd agree with me that the book, for the most part, lacks compelling female characters - women who read more like women than a man's idea of female types. It seems to me that just about every female character in the book, from Agent Nil to Mother Dirt, is either a man's dream or nightmare of women. (The one exception is probably Sharon.) Tim O'Neil famously praised The Filth at the expense of Morrison's superhero comics, but on the matter of female characters specifically, I think practically any of the women in New X-Men were more fully realized than the women of The Filth, even vampy Emma Frost.

Don't get me wrong: I enjoyed The Filth a lot. The art is wonderfully detailed and grungy. Morrison is a great chronicler of goodness - one of the hardest things for a writer to be - and his protagonist, Slade/Greg Feely, is a touchingly good man. I felt for him. I would definitely recommend that you read this book.

Of course, I'm a guy.

Quick Blogwatch - Brooke Oberwetter on the Army's latest stop-loss orders. Tyler Cowen on a Brad Delong health-care proposal. Your chance to vote for me in a contest I deserve to win dammit! Eat, Shoot and Leave THIS! (Okay, not a blog item. Work with me here.) Matthew Yglesias on the Vast Persian Conspiracy. (Also not a blog item. Just be grateful I give you stuff to read.) Micha Ghertner on innovative approaches to teen chastity, which leads you to the indispensible, and not remotely work-safe, TechnicalVirgin.com.

There. That ought to hold the little bastards.

UPDATE: Fixed a typo pointed out by a couple of kind souls.

A Fanboy's Placeholders - The Post Style section's lead story today is a profile of cartoonist Will Eisner.

Meanwhile, Steven Grant attacks my "literature of ethics" thesis regarding superhero comics. Fair's fair, and we'll come back to it, but Steven, bubelah, since you call my claim a "blogmeme," even though its chief vector of transmission has been an essay in a non-blog webzine, how about tossing a link to this here blog in your article? Do it for a fellow former GEnie user, man! I know it was more than 10 years ago, but I even said nice things about Whisper. Meanwhile, Dave Intermittent has some reactions to Steven Grant's reactions. I promise more of my own when I'm not dashing off to work.

Back to Business - A couple of you have written to express relief that there has been so much light-heartedness on this blog lately since, as Chad Orzel put it, "You were starting to scare me for awhile there." Well, it's been fun, but we have to get back to dealing with the imminent collapse of civilization as we know it. Do note that there's an Article Rating module to the side where you can vote on its quality. Excerpt:

In another scene in the movie, Shrek and Donkey need to be rescued from a dungeon where they are chained against the wall. The rescue is conducted by Pinocchio who is asked to lie so his nose will grow long enough for one of the smaller cartoon characters to use it as a bridge to reach Shrek and Donkey. Donkey encourages him to lie about something and suggests he lie about wearing women's underwear. When he denies wearing women's underwear, his nose begins to grow.

But there's much more on this crucial topic.

Haiku U - And now for something completely different. I'm still getting haiku mail. I appreciate it. But instead of continuing haiku talk here, I've opened a comment thread on my LiveJournal for further haiku discussion and disputation. Go! if you want to.

A Different Fanboy's Notes - Nate Bruinooge goes on vacation, reads comics, tells you what he thinks of them. Everything from Blankets to Runaways.

Remember when we used to do that here? We will again, by gum!

Big Time - Time Magazine chose Radley Balko to joust with the food nannies. He took his Big Media money and got himself some guest bloggers for the week. An excellent crew too. Keep an eye on the Agitator. You should anyway.

Endless Summer - Hey, the haiku mail is still coming in! Chad Orzel, showing the social graces that marked him for a career in the sciences, writes

My flippant response to people quibbling about line lengths and syllable counts in English "haiku":

It's a perfectly good haiku,
when written in Japanese,
asshole.

Later,
Chad

Mike "Epoch" Sullivan, who appears to be blogless these days, writes

The best haiku EVER, courtesy of a rather silly web game called "Kingdom of Loathing," is:

Hippopotomus,
Antihippopotomus,
Annihilation!

Ahem. Anyhow.

As someone who studied a fair amount of Japanese, it always bothered me that people got into the whole 5-7-5 thing and did nothing else with haiku -- forgetting the season imagery and the concept of creating a sort of momentary thought, rather than a narrative. Also, it endlessly bothers me that the work "haiku" is treated as two syllables in English while it's three mora (I've never heard the word "onji" before, but maybe it's more commonly used in poetry) in Japanese.

But, since, I've come to feel that the American/English haiku has a valuable place in, well, if not poetry, doggerel. Basically, it's a lot like a limerick: very strict in structure, short, and not restricted in content. But easier to construct, and primarily humorous. It seems to serve a purpose, as long as it's not taken very seriously.

Alan Sullivan sticks up for 5-7-5 on Fresh Bilge (see comments), but he's just wrong. (At least, he overstates the case. I think Epoch has a point that the 5-7-5 structure works as a vessel for self-aware humor.)

More e-mail, this time from David Moles:

In college, I briefly flirted with the idea of trying to write a Shakespearean sonnet in Japanese. Trying to write iambic pentameter in a lanaguage with no stressed syllables is tough. The ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme, in a language where what sound a word ends with depends on its part of speech (and, in the case of a verb, on its tense) was also kind of a problem. I gave up when I decided that if I kept at it I was going to turn into one of those Borges characters who entertains himself by analyzing the effect on chess of removing the queen's rook's pawn, or some equally pointless habit... English-language haiku has always struck me as being the same kind of exercise.

Heh. He said Borges!

One more thing. Mike's e-mail reminds me of an exercise from the first poetry class I ever took: write a "quiet" limerick - one that plays against the expectations of the form. My effort cheats, using an identical where a rhyme should be, but what the hell:

Silent Night

Now the sliding glass doors have rung closed,
and the shoppers are handbagged, and hosed,
and are out at the curbs.
Only muzak disturbs
the hush of the mall when it's closed.