Will ‘It’ Finally Be Revealed? Wired

Jeffrey Isaac: Doing Things with Words

In the weeks, months, and years ahead, it is important that each of us is very clear about what we are doing with our words. We will be pressed to make declarative statements. And such statements will have their place. But it is just as important to remember that the qualifications, and the questions, and the ambivalences have their place. We need to make sure that they have their place in our individual minds. And, even more important, we need to make sure that they have their place in our public culture. The struggle against terrorism is a struggle on behalf of security and of life. But it is also a struggle on behalf of freedom and democracy. Right now the defense of our democracy requires us to be attentive to the things we do with weapons. But above all, democracy requires us to be supremely attentive to the things we do with words.

Brainstorming for Peace:

Campus Activists Reconsider Their Slogans

: “Between sloganeering and flag-waving, I wonder what’s left sometimes.” The American Prospect

Another reader comments on Safire:

A libertarian is a conservative who’s been wiretapped. Safire has had a

strong libertarian streak at least since he found that Kissinger was

snooping on him, but if you look back, you can find a number of attacks on

police and intelligence excess, and he did a marvelous piece about his

revulsion at the Republican Party in 1992 when Pat & Pat were calling

shots. He’s looked worse in recent years because he’s deranged on the

subject of the Clintons, but so is Christopher Hitchens over on the other side.

I think in retrospect I hadn’t given Safire enough credit, and hadn’t followed his exploits carefully enough, and was tarring him with a broad brush as an unnuanced “conservative”, or I wouldn’t’ve been so surprised at his recent outrage… Thanks to all who wrote to point this out to me, compassionately.

jerrykindall pointed to this Interview with Neil Gaiman from January magazine. As usual, Neverwhere is glossed over or ignored. I’ll go out on a limb here and say I enjoyed it more than American Gods, its inventive, tight control as opposed to the sprawl of the latter.

I was surprised to find there have been claims, which I hadn’t previously heard, that Harry Potter was derivative of some of his work:

What was it of yours they were accusing her of stealing from you?

My character Tim Hunter from Books of Magic who came out in 1990 was a small dark-haired boy with big round spectacles — a 12-year-old English boy — who has the potential to be the most powerful wizard in the world and has a little barn owl.

So there were commonalties, for sure.

Well, yes and as I finally, pissed off, pointed out to an English reviewer who tried to start this again, I said: Look, all of the things that they actually have in common are such incredibly obvious, surface things that, had she actually been stealing, they were the things that would be first to be changed.

I had actually pondered less trivial parallels between Potter and Neverwhere when I read it several months ago — the notion of the unrecognized commingling of the magical and mundane Londons, as in Diagon Alley or Platform 9 3/4, and specifically the way one walks through seemingly solid walls to cross between worlds.

A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist, Swedish cultural historian and author of Exterminate All the Brutes.

Sven Lindqvist is one of Sweden´s most innovative writers, fast building a cult following for his unorthodox, fiercely moral works of cultural history. Desert Divers and Exterminate All the Brutes exposed the depths of European imperialism and racism in Africa; now Lindqvist turns his clear inquisitive eye on aerial bombing, and the profound and terrible effects of its aftermath on the 20th century.

Drawing on a rich range of sources, from popular fiction, to first hand accounts by the victims and perpetrators of bombing, from official government documents, to his own personal experiences as a child, parent and grandparent, Lindqvist unearths the fascinating history of the development of air power. He exposes the racist assumptions underlying colonial bombing campaigns in North Africa, and France and England’s use of bombing to subdue postwar independence movements; and he probes the psychology of Bomber Harris. He sets out the recipe for napalm, and the science of smart bombs, and he asks some uncomfortable questions: did bombs ever produce the expected results? Is bombing civilians a war crime, and if so why have the laws of war and international justice proved so impotent? Why can´t the truth about Hiroshima be told in the Air and Space museum in Washington?

Lindqvist has constructed the book in an ingenious way: as a sort of labyrinth in which the reader is offered a number of paths through a century of war. This makes for a fascinating reading experience, allowing us to grasp the chaos of history, and the way in which different narratives attempt to make sense of it.

” This book is a labyrinth with twenty-two entrances and no exit. Each entrance opens into a narrative or an argument, which you then follow by going from text to text according to the instruction To + the number of the section where the narrative is continued. So from entrance 1 you proceed to section 166 and continue reading section by section until you come to 173, where another To takes you back to entrance 2.

In order to move through time, you also have to move through the book, often forwards, but sometimes backwards. Wherever you are in the text, events and thoughts from that same period surround you, but they belong to narratives other than the one you happen to be following. That’s the intention. That way the text emerges as what it is-one of many possible paths through the chaos of history.

So welcome to the labyrinth! Follow the threads, put together the horrifying puzzle and, once you have seen my century, build one of your own from other pieces.”

Grenade factory in backyard annoys neighbors. Ananova

The Belligerent Bunch: Rabid Journalists and Pundits Push Bush to Extremes

By calling for Bush to step up the war effort, curtail civil liberties, consider torture and imagine the deaths of tens of millions of Muslims, these writers and TV personalities have dominated the intellectual debate. By grossly distorting the positions of critics, they have helped to give Bush a free ride and undermine healthy discourse. This pundit group has upped the ante for the Bush administration, either pushing it further to the right, or providing it with cover to keep pushing the envelope. No matter how far the Bush administration goes in expanding security power and remaking the international landscape, the war boys will still be calling for more. AlterNet [via Blowback]