The Joker working the room

As superhero movies go, The Dark Knight is certainly the best of the bunch — although why Christian Bale’s perfectly normal voice had to descend to a guttural rasp every time he put on his bat helmet escapes me, and one must also assign a few demerit points to the filmmakers for portraying the Russian national ballet as a group of blond and unfeasibly pneumatic ski bunnies. But it’s entertaining and occasionally thoughtful, which is more than one can normally ask of the genre.

The late Heath Ledger, as widely proclaimed, is indeed the best actor in the film. His portrayal of the Joker is far less cartoonish than Jack Nicholson’s own go at it, and Ledger takes the character seriously, giving him a consistency, a style, and a realism wholly absent before. But there are limits to what even Ledger can do: at root the Joker is just a monomaniacal killer, without complex layers of personality or indeed even a personal history (or at least without an immutable one — in the film, the Joker enjoys telling his victims an ever-changing set of stories to explain his mouth-extending facial scars, and perhaps also, though only by implication, his murderous behaviour). He is evil through and through; despite all of the stylistic and physiological versimilitude that Ledger bricks onto his character, the Joker remains nothing more than a comic book villain.

Writer/director Chris Nolan nonetheless is able to use the Joker in an intriguing way, depicting him as bent on unmasking civilized morality as a hypocritical lie, his technique being to create enough fear to cause law-abiding citizens to turn on each other. After severely disfiguring district attorney Harvey Dent, the Joker (amusingly disguised as a red-headed nurse with clown makeup) visits him in his hospital bed to goad him into madness. In the process, he sums up his philosophy: “Those others,” he says, referring to Batman, the mayor, and Commissioner Gordon, “are planners… I am chaos.” There is some irony in this claim, for the Joker is not actually all that effective at causing city-wide chaos: apart from a few desperation-sparked incidents of citizen violence, Gotham suffers no riots, no insurgency, no breakdown of order; the Joker does provoke a mass evacuation, but civil authority does not collapse because of it.

Nolan’s vision of the Joker’s self-appointed role may be based on one of the oldest forms of clowning: that of the court jester, whose status as the most despised and most harmless of the members of the court occasionally enabled him to utter truths to the sovereign which would get anyone else imprisoned for treason. “Jesters do oft prove prophets”, says Regan in Shakespeare’s King Lear.

The Joker, of course, is not a tolerated member of a court, but rather a criminal mastermind who seizes the chance to speak his own “truth” by disrupting normal society. In this sense he is reminiscent of an extreme version of the Situationist International. Guy Debord and his small band of followers believed that modern society was controlled by the “Spectacle”, loosely defined as the dominance of objects (especially consumer products) over normal social life, and as the passivity of citizens in consuming such products. “Situations”, by contrast, were events (either non-violent or violent, often planned but sometimes not) which aimed at disrupting the narrative of Spectacle and at breaking down the false consciousness of the public; such events included the 1968 occupation of the Sorbonne and the ensuing general strike, and (retrospectively) the Watts riots of 1965. Here’s part of Debord’s defense of the violence in Los Angeles, which the Situationists distributed in the United States as an unsigned tract five months after the riots:

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence.

The Watts riots, by the way, were an instance of chaos at a scale that the Joker would have envied. Wrote Debord:

An incident between traffic police and pedestrians developed into two days of spontaneous riots. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. By the third day the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of street fighting to finally bring it under control. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned. Official sources listed 32 dead (including 27 blacks), more than 800 wounded and 3000 arrests.

Yet any similarities between the Joker and the Situationists are methodological only; in aims, they could not be farther apart. Debord concluded his pamphlet by calling for the end of a society dehumanized by commerce: “A revolt against the spectacle - even if limited to a single district such as Watts - calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, a protest of real individuals against their separation from a community that would fulfill their true human and social nature and transcend the spectacle.” Idealistic, perhaps dangerously so, but well-intended. By contrast, the Joker simply enjoys blowing things up, killing people, and provoking the state (and even more so, Batman). He’s a psychopath with a keen sense of theatre, not a revolutionary.

Two rather interesting blogs to let you all know about — both, happily, by fellow Canadians. First, Lee Hamilton’s Platonic Shift is a fun and often thought-provoking blend of commentary on pop culture, science and technology, and Catholicism. And second, Classical Bookworm (discovered via Platonic Shift), a blog written by a British Columbian (and, interestingly, another Catholic) who suffers from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and yet has managed to put together a fascinating site that offers a trove of information and links to such things as online compendiums of Great Books, illuminated manuscripts, and courses in Latin. Oh, and daily blog postings too.

Visit and enjoy.

It used to be said by security analysts, back in the days of the Cold War, that the Soviet Union, though benighted in so many other ways, managed to maintain a highly sophisticated and realistic view of the balance of power across the various geographies over which it was in contention with the United States. The Soviets looked at something they termed the “correlation of forces”, which was comprised of all things that determined relative power: public opinion, political allegiance, economic prosperity, class struggle, and military might. This holistic concept the analysts contrasted unfavourably with what they saw as a Western view too focused on counting tanks; if you wanted to get the full picture of what was going on in a country, in other words, it was often most useful to look at things through Soviet lenses.

In a not-so-strange parallel, it appears that John Bolton — the recess-appointed former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and permanent advocate of missileboat diplomacy — has emerged as a similarly accurate lens on the true direction of U.S. foreign policy. Writes Dr. Gary Sick (of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs) on Tony Karon’s excellent blog Rootless Cosmopolitan:

Unlike many observers and commentators, Bolton has been looking, not at what the US administration says, but what it does. Ever since the congressional elections of 2006, the US has been in the process of a fundamental change in its policy on a number of key issues: the Arab-Israel dispute, the North Korean nuclear issue, and Iran. Since the administration proclaims loudly that its policies have not changed, and since the tough rhetoric of the past dominates the discussion, it is easy to overlook what is actually going on.

Bolton no doubt noticed that Rumsfeld is gone and replaced with Robert Gates, a very different sort of secretary of Defense. He will have observed that the worst of the neocons (including himself) are now writing books and spending more time with families and friends, cheer-leading for more war by writing op-eds from the outside rather than pursuing their strategies in policy meetings in the White House.

He will have seen the gradual shift of the policy center of gravity from Dick Cheney to Rice and Gates. He will have been listening when the Chairman of the JCS and others have said as clearly as they realistically can that the military option, though never renounced as a theoretical possibility, is the least attractive option available to us and in fact is close to impossible given our over-stretch in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In other words, Bolton, as someone whose policies (in my view) are certifiably insane, recognizes real pragmatism and moderation in Washington when he sees it. And he does not like what he sees in this lame duck administration.

The Soviets, and now John Bolton. How is it possible that the most blinkered ideologues can simultaneously be the most clear-sighted, at least with regard to certain specific subjects? I suspect it is because fanatics — particularly aggressive fanatics with a program to impose on others — are more attuned than the rest of us to agents or forces that actually threaten their plans.

I say “actually” because when it comes to all other areas of potential threat, such fanatics are hopelessly lost in a fog of their own making. To the Soviets, traitors and capitalist-sponsored plots were everywhere, and the USSR’s national security apparatus spent much of its resources monitoring, jailing, and murdering members of what was in fact a terrified and passive population. Likewise, to Bolton, the non-NATO world (I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt in defining its limits this way) is a nest of snakes just waiting to deliver a lethal bite to the United States, and the United Nations little more than a speaker’s convention of the same.

Both the Soviets and Bolton were (and are) wrong about these matters. But that’s because, whether they admitted this to themselves or not, the actual threats to their programs did not (and do not) come from such directions. The real enemy of the Soviet Union was not internal subterfuge but rather its obvious external foes, particularly the United States, and it therefore should come as little surprise that in focusing on this threat the Soviet foreign-policy apparatus was as realistic and as comprehensive as it could be. When survival is at stake, ideology often finds itself pushed quietly out of the way.

Likewise, the real threats to Bolton’s neo-con program do not come from Iran, or North Korea, or Hugo Chavez: they come from Washington. Thus while Bolton can afford the luxury of simplistic and unrealistic thinking about foreign “enemies” — indeed his program is premised on such simplistic and unrealistic thinking — he cannot afford for one minute to be unrealistic about the way Washington works, or about the subtle ebbs and flows in the tides of policy-making power. Making his fantasies come true — or rather, making the United States behave as if his fantasies were true — requires him to be, in this one key area, the most realistic observer of them all.

An evil omen — of that there’s no doubt. After Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), hero of Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, shoots and wounds a deer while hunting in the West Texas desert, he comes across a trail of fresh blood crossing at right angles the trail of deer blood that he has set out to follow. Looking through his binoculars, he sees a heavy black fighting dog limping away through the sagebrush. The dog glances back, unaware of Moss’s presence and perhaps looking out for a pursuer, and then continues on.

In medieval folklore, a black dog was one of the forms taken by the devil in his wanderings in the world of men; to the English, a spectral black dog was seen as a portent of death, as were the hounds that took part in the ghostly Wild Hunt of Herne the Hunter. In Goethe’s Faust, somewhat amusingly (to modern minds, at least), Mephisto takes the form of a black poodle, while in the 1976 film The Omen, Gregory Peck’s character is attacked by aggressive Rottweilers in the Etruscan cemetary where he has found the body of the jackal (another important member of this canine mythology) that gave birth to his adopted son and future Antichrist.

(spoiler warning) Yet religious symbolism is not the full extent of No Country’s engagement with higher powers. As other reviewers have observed, the psychopathic hitman Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) seems to embody a force that goes beyond the mundane, perhaps beyond even the human. He is both relentless and remorseless, and is motivated by things at least partly beyond our ken. As professional troubleshooter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) explains to the fugitive Moss, “You don’t understand. You can’t make a deal with him. Even if you gave him the money he’d still kill you. He’s a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that. He’s not like you. He’s not even like me.”

By the end of the film, Moss is dead and the money has been retrieved by its owners - yet Chigurh pays a visit nonetheless on Moss’s wife Carla Jean, because Moss had earlier rejected a deal that Chigurh had offered: to spare his wife in exchange for the money. Keeping her dignity, Carla Jean struggles to understand Chigurh’s reasoning:

CARLA JEAN: … You got no cause to hurt me.
CHIGURH: No. But I gave my word.
CARLA JEAN: You gave your word?
CHIGURH: To your husband.
CARLA JEAN: That don’t make sense. You gave your word to my husband to kill me?
CHIGURH: Your husband had the opportunity to remove you from harm’s way. Instead, he used you to try to save himself.
CARLA JEAN: Not like that. Not like you say.
CHIGURH: What’s done can’t be undone.

It is scenes like this one that has lead reviewers to see Chigurh as a metaphor for God, or Satan, or evil, or the Furies. Even Fate itself: when Chigurh flips a coin for the life of the proprietor of a gas station, he seems to be the agent of the man’s destiny. “You know what date is on this coin?” he asks. “Nineteen fifty-eight. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here. And it’s either heads or tails, and you have to say. Call it.” Later, talking with Wells as he points his shotgun at his chest, he seems more like a philosopher-judge: “Let me ask you something. If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” Wells, seeing his life about to run out, is in no mood for reflection. “Do you have any idea how goddamn crazy you are?”

God, Fate, philosopher-judge. Yet when Chigurh pulls a coin from his pocket, offering to allow Carla Jean’s life or death to hinge on this trivial tool of randomness, the young woman sees through Chigurh’s grand metaphors and points a finger at the human being underneath:

CHIGURH: Call it.
CARLA JEAN: No. I ain’t gonna call it.
CHIGURH: Call it.
CARLA JEAN: The coin don’t have no say. It’s just you.

Chigurh’s response, “I got here the same way the coin did,” seems weak and posed by comparison with Carla Jean’s simple statement of truth and moral accountability. At root, Chigurh’s image — both his fidelity to his obscure but lethal principals and his unsettling ruminations on fate, inevitability, and chance — is nothing more than a vanity. Far from immortal or godlike, in the movie’s penultimate scene Chigurh is hit and severly wounded in a fluke car accident. Could have been anyone. Happened to have been him.

Vanity plays a similar role with No Country’s other male characters. Moss, who is just a welder, believes that he can outwit a drug cartel, a hired assassin, and the police. “Llewelyn would never ask for help. He never thinks he needs any,” Carla Jean tells Sheriff Bell not long before Moss is killed. Carson Wells, a former colonel who served in Vietnam, is certain that he can eliminate the “loose cannon” Chigurh. “He killed three men in a motel in Del Rio yesterday. And two others at that colossal goatfuck out in the desert,” the American businessman who hired Chigurh explains to Wells, whose response is relaxed and confident. “Okay. We can stop that.” But in the end, Chigurh kills Wells without even a fight.

The final and most profound vanity is Sheriff Bell’s. As a lawman with old-time principles, he is appalled at the violence around him, and he spends much of the movie commenting sadly on what he perceives to be a slide into moral anarchy, one he feels he should be able to stop. His pursuit of Moss and his witnessing of Chigurh’s crimes push him into despair and retirement. Yet his visit to his Uncle Ellis, a former policeman crippled in the line of duty, provokes an unexpected lecture about humility. Ellis tells him of his Uncle Mac’s murder in 1909 by seven or eight Indians, “Shot down on his own porch there in Hudspeth County.”

ELLIS: …What you got ain’t nothin’ new. This country is hard on people. Hard and crazy. Got the devil in it yet folks never seem to hold it to account.
BELL: Most don’t.
ELLIS: You’re discouraged.
BELL: I’m… discouraged.
ELLIS: You can’t stop what’s comin. Ain’t all waitin’ on you. …That’s vanity.

You can’t stop what’s comin. Moss couldn’t stop the Mexicans, though he thought he could. Wells couldn’t stop Chigurh, though he thought he could. Chigurh couldn’t stop the truck at the crossroads. And Sherriff Bell couldn’t stop any of this.

As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;
They kill us for their sport.
- William Shakespeare, King Lear

For those of you interested in the rather big question of how concepts like East and West have evolved, and how such abstractions have influenced global history and continue to influence the politics of our day, Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle between East & West is very much worth reading. Here’s a snippet from my recent review of it in the Spectator:

There is much to admire about Pagden’s book. His breadth of knowledge across two and a half millennia of Western (and to a great extent Eastern) history is impressive, and he introduces the reader to a series of fascinating thinkers and travellers: Herodotus, Aelius Aristides, St. Augustine, Constantin-François Volney, John Stuart Mill. He also displays a clear-eyed awareness of how myths are created and sustained. The battle of Lepanto, in which the Venetians and Spanish defeated the Ottoman navy, ‘was hailed far and wide across Europe as a new Actium, a new Salamis,’ he writes. But ‘the analogies were, of course, entirely empty . . . The Spain of Philip II was hardly less despotic than the Ottoman Empire and in many respects was a good deal more so.’ As an intellectual history of Western views of the East, the book is exemplary.

Which is why it is so surprising to find Pagden’s frequently long stretches of good sense undermined by sweeping simplifications…

As you can tell from that last sentence, I do think that despite its many merits the book is far from flawless. In fact, its flaws are one of its most interesting attributes, as they reflect, I believe, the very mentality that leads inevitably to the division of the world into what we think of as a progressive West and a stagnant East.

Read the whole review and let me know if you agree — particularly if you’ve already read the book itself. And for an additional perspective on Pagden’s book, I’d recommend John Gray’s excellent and elegant analysis of it in the March issue of Literary Review.

Fished out of the river Rhone last fall, a bust of Julius Caesar dating from 46 BCE, two years before his death. Oh yes, his death: on that delicate yet never untimely subject let us attend to Brutus once again…

Romans, countrymen, and lovers! hear me for my
cause, and be silent, that you may hear: believe me
for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that
you may believe: censure me in your wisdom, and
awake your senses, that you may the better judge.
If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of
Caesar’s, to him I say, that Brutus’ love to Caesar
was no less than his. If then that friend demand
why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer:
– Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved
Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and
die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live
all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him;
as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was
valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I
slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his
fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his
ambition. Who is here so base that would be a
bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended.
Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman? If
any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so
vile that will not love his country? If any, speak;
for him have I offended. I pause for a reply.

- Julius Caesar (Act III, Scene II), by William Shakespeare

It took me nearly a year to notice this place, despite the fact that it’s located about half a block north of my office. Maybe it’s because I don’t frequently walk north (the GO train lies in the opposite direction); maybe it’s because there’s no glaringly bright signage announcing its presence (if you don’t look directly at the window you’ll miss the quiet little logo — subtitled, ironically enough, “read the fine print”). Maybe it’s because I’m staring at my Blackberry too much.

Whatever the reason, I was happy to find it. Ben McNally Books opened up last fall in the heart of Toronto’s financial district, in brave defiance of the laws of 21st century book retailing economics, which dictate that There Shall Be But One Retailer, Its Scope Shall Be National, and Its Tastes Middlebrow. Ben himself is the former general manager of Nicholas Hoare Books, a quality bookstore of longer standing (it’s part of a three-city chain, in fact) which, while being located in what one must call “downtown Toronto”, is not truly positioned on the spine of Canadian finance as Ben’s shop is — Hoare is several blocks to the east, a culture zone of restaurants, cafes, and galleries which attracts slow-walking browsers just ripe for book buying.

Bay Streeters, by contrast, generally have somewhere to go, fast. Languid walk-ins, therefore, will be rare. What Ben’s store must be hoping to attract instead is that (not insignificant) sub-set of business people who read more than the financial and sports pages, and who will be happy to have a quality bookstore in the heart of the district, staffed by people who can point out not only the latest John Grisham, but also the latest J.M. Coetzee.

Unfortunately, this select group of patrons may not often include me. Because of my limited free time, I have fairly precise, project-related reading needs, and these I’ve found are best served via the search-and-ship magic of Amazon.ca and its peers. However, I shall probably buy something occassionally from Ben’s, if only because a physical bookstore offers a different kind of serendipitous discovery effect than on-line retailers can provide (although with its many suggestion-style features, Amazon can come pretty close these days). For example, while scanning Ben’s shelves I ran across an attractive collection of Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, and came very very close to buying it on a whim. But I didn’t; too many other unread books in my house.

Next time, Ben.

This Gallup poll on the identify of America’s “greatest enemy” got fairly good press coverage when it was released in late March, but there’s a lot of food for thought in it that is worth addressing even if we’re a couple of weeks on from the headlines themselves. First, it’s not shocking to see Iran, America’s multi-decade bête noire, at the head of the list. The U.S. government has done a serviceable job of heightening the perceived threat from that country over the past few years, and the dark hand of Iran is increasingly being pointed to as an explanation for continuing stagnation and violence in Iraq (see Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony to Congress on April 8 and 9). Iran was the first choice of 25% of respondents, a proportion which is certainly high, but nowhere near as high as Iraq’s 2001 market share of 38%.

Ironically, it’s likely that Iran would be hitting similar numbers today if it wasn’t for vote-splitting caused by Iraq’s continued strong showing on the greatest enemies list (Iraq is second, with 22% of the vote). One has to ask: which Iraq are these respondents thinking of? Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, which vanished on April 9, 2003? The Iraq of “al Qaeda” and the Sunni insurgency? Or the Iraq of Nouri Kamel Al-Maliki, whose country has agreed to negotiate a “long-term relationship of cooperation and friendship” with the United States? Iraq was invaded and fully occupied by U.S. troops, its government deposed, jailed, and then reconstructed from the ground up by U.S. administrators and diplomats. Is there no way for a country to get off this list?

Perhaps not; China’s profile is just as long-tenured. Though recently promoted from fourth place to third, its 14% marks a return to China’s pre-9/11 levels when it was “greatest enemy #2″ — and when poor Iran languished in third place with a mere 8% of the vote.

What does having a “greatest enemy” mean, anyway? One conjures up an image of a country marked in black on the map, a nation working assiduously towards the downfall of your own. But few “enemies” today meet this test. Is Iran really working to destroy the United States? Was Serbia an “enemy” of the United States when the U.S. Air Force bombed it for 78 days straight? Is China planning to invade California? To a great extent, most of these “enemies” are at most rivals or competitors for geostrategic influence, or, more commonly, are regional opponents of U.S. policy. As Jonathan Schwartz recently pointed out, the U.S. may consider a country an enemy if it simply develops the capacity to “deter” the use of U.S. military power and is not already safely integrated into the American alliance system. And at a more populist level, Gallup speculates that it may be Chinese economic power that gets China listed consistently as an enemy (since “more Americans [name] China rather than the United States as the world’s leading economic power”) — so it may be that offering Americans cheaper goods is enough to get you on the greatest enemies list. Touchy people, these freedom-lovers.

In hindsight, the Cold War may prove to have been the most politically destructive historical experience ever to visit itself on the American nation, for it seems to have bequeathed modern America with not only a permanent military-industrial complex and a national security state which grows larger and more intrusive with every passing year, but also with an elite mentality that finds the concept of having an ever-present enemy both natural and indeed almost comforting. From a fast-growing nineteenth-century power frankly suspicious of foreign entanglements and jealous of its independence of action, the United States has evolved into a creature with an ego that can only feel validated if it is beset by opponents who, to take a well-worn phrase, “hate us for what we are” - the psychological key, of course, residing in the second half of that phrase.

One bright point in the poll: after reaching a high of 2% in 2005, France must now be breathing a collective sigh of relief at having sunk beneath 0.5%. Pakistan, on the other hand, has now reached 2%, up from 0% in 2001. That country may wish to take some active steps to reduce this percentage rather than waiting for it to decline - à la France - on its own. After all, North Korea was at a near-invisible 2% in 2001, but in only four short years had risen to 22%, a profile that made it America’s co-greatest enemy in 2005 — right up there with, um, occupied Iraq.

“The Flight of Aeneas” (1595), by Peter Brueghel

I can’t remember if it was the late Col. David Hackworth or the late Col. Harry G. Summers Jr. (author of the influential retrospective on the Vietnam War, On Strategy) who made the telling point that any American general in World War II worth his stars would make it his business to know the names and backgrounds of all of the German generals opposing his forces, and that, by contrast, very few American generals in Vietnam knew even the names of the North Vietnamese Army generals opposing them, much less their backgrounds.

So I agree wholeheartedly with Jeet Heer’s contention over on sans everything that as a matter of military strategy, demonizing the enemy is dumb. In that regard, the Greek warrior ethic is indeed of significant utility, as was the chivalric code of medieval Europe which assumed that one’s opponents were fellow Christian combatants who should therefore be taken seriously on the field of battle (and of course whose personal identities and histories would be well known to both sides).

The belief in an aristocratic warrior fellowship based on Christian principles also enabled the evolution of a set of tacit and explicit rules about war that acted as a gentle (and certainly welcome) brake on its ferocity — horrible though wars have been, one should remember that without such rules they would almost always have been worse.

The Greek warrior ethic, in fact, is a case in point. Rather than limiting the goal to victory in combat, the warrior ethic did not blink at the plunder, rape, abduction, and wholesale slaughter that would often ensue after a victory over an enemy city-state. Alexander the Great refrained from this for political reasons — he was trying to conquer the rather extensive Persian empire, and found local support useful — until he finally took the imperial capital Persepolis and let his troops run wild, additionally instructing them to kill every adult male they found.

And though it is true that in The Iliad Homer presents the Trojans as fully-rounded human beings, equal in almost all respects to the Achaeans, the warrior ethic on display in that conflict includes the murder of prisoners and (as described in The Aeneid) the deliberate burning of Troy and the killing or enslaving of most of its inhabitants. All in a day’s work, to the Greeks.

One of the negative dynamics of a warrior ethic, I believe, is that it tends to elevate warriors to a higher status than that of ignoble merchants and artisans and peasants. Though enemy warriors may be respected by an opposing force, the enemy population itself is regarded as little more than victory prize (in the form of plunder and slaves) and as something for warriors to sate their desires on. Chivalry at least had a notional respect for women and innocents, even if this was less acted upon than one could hope for.

It is interesting that in recent decades, the U.S. Army has begun to instill a “warrior ethos” in its troops founded on the following principles:

I will always place the mission first.

I will never accept defeat.

I will never quit.

I will never leave a fallen comrade.

Not frightening-sounding stuff on the face of it, but such indomitable language is reflective of the shift from a conscript army of average citizens to a professional army of “lifer” volunteers — there is a monastic, almost creed-like essence to it, and it’s of a piece with the U.S. military’s increasing proportion of Christian evangelicals. Even the act of referring to troops as “warriors” rather than “soldiers” is something that places far more emphasis on fighting as a matter of personal identity, rather than as a reluctant duty.

I’ll end by recommending Elizabeth Samet’s wonderful new book, Soldiers Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, for some very interesting insights into the modern U.S. officer class and its views on literature and the profession of arms. And speaking of the movie 300, I’m currently reviewing a book on a similar (if much broader) topic: Anthony Pagden’s Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West. I’ll post a link to this review when it comes out in May.

The title sums it up, and in the world we once thought we lived in, nothing more would need to be said. But such is not our world any longer, and a great deal needs to be said, as often as possible. In this cause, the Washington Monthly has performed a great service by devoting a 26-page section (pdf version here) of its latest issue to a simple proposition: that the use of torture by the United States must stop. Its contributors include former congressman Bob Barr, former NSC advisor Rand Beers, terrorism expert Peter Bergen, former president Jimmy Carter, Marine Corps Brig. General (ret.) Steve Cheney, National Association of Evangelicals VP Richard Cizik, former supreme commander of NATO General Wesley Clark, senators Chris Dodd, Carl Levin, Dick Lugar, and Chuck Hagel, former U.S. Navy judge advocate general John Hutson, former Secretary of Defense William Perry, and former presidential special counsel Ted Sorensen. From the introduction:

In the wake of September 11, the United States became a nation that practiced torture. Astonishingly-despite the repudiation of torture by experts and the revelations of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib-we remain one. As we go to press, President George W. Bush stands poised to veto a measure that would end all use of torture by the United States. His move, we suspect, will provoke only limited outcry. What once was shocking is now ordinary.

On paper, the list of practices declared legal by the Department of Justice for use on detainees in Guantanamo Bay and other locations has a somewhat bloodless quality-sleep deprivation, stress positions, forced standing, sensory deprivation, nudity, extremes of heat or cold. But such bland terms mask great suffering. Sleep deprivation eventually leads to hallucinations and psychosis. (Menachem Begin, former prime minister of Israel, experienced sleep deprivation at the hands of the KGB and would later assert that “anyone who has experienced this desire [to sleep] knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.”) Stress positions entail ordeals such as being shackled by the wrists, suspended from the ceiling, with arms spread out and feet barely touching the ground. Forced standing, a technique often used in North Korean prisons, involves remaining erect and completely still, producing an excruciating combination of physical and psychological pain, as ankles swell, blisters erupt on the skin, and, in time, kidneys break down. Sensory deprivation-being deprived of sight, sound, and touch-can produce psychotic symptoms in as little as twenty-four hours. The agony of severe and prolonged exposure to temperature extremes and the humiliation of forced nudity speak for themselves.

And yes, President George Bush did veto the measure, as predicted.