Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton

In a radio interview, Tracy Kidder, who’s written quite a few good books and at least one important one, advocated for a sort of Maxwell’s demon approach to book reading. He claimed to divide books into two main categories: books in which he has interest and books in which he does not. He went on to say that he hadn’t read James Frey’s memoir (wherein Frey fabricated some of the details of his battle with addiction)—but simply because trusted friends had told him it wasn’t a good book. The truth or falsehood of the details mattered little to him.

I myself know people who will read only “nonfiction,” and libraries and bookstores oblige the bold fantasy of such a label by neatly dividing and labeling their physical spaces so when patrons and customers tilt their heads sideways to scan titles, they know for sure which they’ll pluck from the shelf: sober edification or mere diversion. Have you noticed the lack of a truth section? That would be too bold for any secular institution.

I myself am reading a book of putative American history “nonfiction” right now (and, no, it’s not Team of Rivals). It’s Ron Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, the first Treasury Secretary of the United States and as apposite a personage as there probably is at the close of 2008. The amount of effort that must’ve gone into making such a book makes one’s knees weak. Combing through the writings just of Hamilton, who was prolific even by torrential 18^th century standards, must’ve cost Chernow a few pairs of glasses. Add to this the fact that Hamilton’s friends and enemies also wrote as if paid by the word, generating a staggering amount of yellowed, hand-written, and microfiched Hamiltonalia, not to mention the ensuing 200 years of commentaries and biographies—one shudders. Wringing the pertinent tidbits from this Himalaya of materials and organizing them into an actually readable (and it is) relevant and necessary (meaning it provides something previous bios did not) narrative-style 731 page biography deserves praise, and many have heaped it. The NY Times declared it one of the ten best books of 2004. The WS Journal reacted like a schoolgirl to the Beatles.

But aside from the hope for praise and awards, this must have been a case where the subject’s terawatt-grade energy sustained the writer. Basically, there is nothing Hamilton didn’t do. Soldier, political philosopher, duelist, attorney, constant cause celébrè, author, pseudonymous author, Treasury Secretary, Wizard of Oz to two presidents, father to eight, founder of the modern US economy, etc, etc. When raising an army for a possible confrontation with the French, Hamilton begged Washington to come out of retirement to lead it, then designed the uniform the old Mount Vernonian would wear—right down to the color of the epaulets and the length of the boots. He never stopped working and, in a rare and stunning coincidence that made him perfect for his moment, his intellect and ambition matched his energy.

Most people know all this, and Chernow has to do more than rehash all this. Nonfiction has an argumentative burden which is different, slightly, from the burdens of fiction. Fiction’s burden is to not undermine the creation of the fictional world—sometimes called the dreamscape. My old teacher said you have to plunge a reader down into that rabbit hole and not let them out till the end. Fiction fails when readers look up and see sky. Nonfiction, on the other hand, has to make claims and support them. When it comes to Chernow’s Hamilton, the argument is fairly simple: this was an amazing cat who made a variety of mistakes, some big and some small.

Something has been bothering me about this book for a long time and I finally found a sentence which renders plainly explicit the problem I have with this book. In a chapter titled “The Reign of Witches,” wherein is discussed the most disastrous legislative acts passed by the young country, Chernow writes: “Unfortunately, […] Hamilton supported the Alien and Sedition Acts” (572, emphasis mine).

I’m not a political or financial historian, nor am I a biographer or even an avid reader of biographies. What I am, however, is a teacher of rhetoric, and therefore feel qualified to discuss the problem with that word I emphasized and how it explains the whole “problem” of the reading this text. The rhetorical structure of the book prevents it from being what I would call truthful–at least in the way it, as do all books labeled non-fiction, pretends to be. Chernow achieves “balance” by plainly stating, in places, that Hamilton made a “grave error in judgment” or a “mistake he’d soon regret.” But if the portrait overall is sympathetic, the effect of these transgressions on the reader’s imagination is minimized. I suppose it’s the historian’s job to take a position, but it strikes me what a different thing it is to say, “He was a good guy who made some mistakes,” compared to, “He was a bad guy who had some good qualities.”

So that word, “unfortunately” prompts one to ask: unfortunately for whom?  Certainly unfortunate for a biographer attempting to situate Hamilton in the most flattering light possible.

Let me get more specific. Hamilton’s energy was directed toward establishing a particular kind of country – one centered in New York and based on banking and credit and trade, and once he established this, his subsequent machinations focused on preserving this structure by quashing internal rebellions and raising an army to fight the French or anyone else who seized US ships or refused to trade equitably. Chernow unblinkingly supports these activities, and helps his reader see that the Alien and Sedition Acts were just instances of Hamilton extending his reach a bit too far to achieve his desired ends. Does reading this biography in 2008 force one to question whether Hamilton’s relative success against Jefferson and his Republican brethren was a boon for the country? In other words, can we question the ends in addition to the means?

Chernow’s lens forces the reader to see all events a certain way. For example, Aaron Burr pulled the old bait and switch when he created the Manhattan Company, which morphed from a utility company into a bank (which would compete with Hamilton’s creations: the Bank of New York and the local branch of the Bank of the United States) almost before its charter’s ink had dried. (btw-doesn’t this morphing seem a lot like Enron?). You see, Hamilton was in favor of banking and credit, but not competition. As Chernow puts it: “Hamilton opposed the vogue for state banks that proliferated in the 1790s, less from narrow political motives than from a fear that competition among banks would dilute credit standards and invite imprudent lending practices as bankers vied for clients” (586).

Hamilton, of course, had in mind the preservation of the system he’d created. Noble enough, seemingly. But the fact is that banks run by Federalists had the means to shape the credit landscape in such a way as to favor Federalist causes and starve Republican ones. No Republican bank charter would pass the legislature, so Burr elected to weasel his way in through the back door. Sometimes that’s the only door.

Even if I grant, with respect to the sentence quoted above, that Chernow can decipher which motivated Hamilton more, the base angels or the pure ones, I have to take issue with the contention that Hamilton’s desire for control over credit is such a noble one. He certainly understood what credit standards were best for his vision of the country’s economy, but it’s not beyond contention that his vision was most worthy of such monopolaic power.

But I hope it’s clear I’m not really trying to bash Chernow here so much as the deleterious effects of taxonomy when it comes to the good old printed page.  My overall point is that nonfiction is just as fictional as fiction, insofar as it requires of the reader the capacity to understand the nature of the world being created by the text. If a reader of nonfiction lets down her guard because of where she found it in the library, she has poorly served herself.

Alexander Hamilton does have a striking literary parallel. Both were New Yorkers with sketchy backgrounds, looked good in uniforms, achieved success in the world of finance, and died violent deaths. Recall, however, that Nick Carraway tells us Gatsby’s story, and is what’s termed an “unreliable” narrator. His emotional attachment to the characters, the fact that he is a character, compels a reader to regard all he relates with circumspection. The unreliability and subjectivity are what grant the tale its richness and power, which is a discussion for another day. The point here is that Chernow is no more reliable than Carraway, which is not to say that he’s a bad biographer.  He’s actually very good. What does follow, however, is that the book on Hamilton and the book on Gatsby have more in common than might be thought, and deserve to sit more closely together on the shelves of our minds.

 

Already There

One of the difficulties of diagnosing contemporary US culture is that we lack perspective. Here’s a helpful ichthyological fable I heard somewhere: Two young little fish are swimming around and they come across a big older fish who asks, “How’s the water, boys?” The little guys are unsure of how to respond and they swim on away from the big fish, befuddled. Then one little fish says to the other, “What’s water?”

I’m aware that stone-age people probably didn’t sit around the campfire discussing what their “culture” was and whether it was any good. Also, one of the major problems of our culture might be that we’re individually self-absorbed and -important enough to spend time explaining its collective characteristics and wondering whether these characteristics are admirable or stupid or inevitable or embarrassing or all of those.

I can quickly respond to such objections, then move to my more important point. 1) We are not stone-age folks, 2) our culture has spent a good deal of $ educating us and perhaps introspection is the price of the ticket, 3) plenty of empirical data suggest that our popular culture is unique in its scope, ubiquity, and velocity, and 4) many “counter” voices (in literature, film, and other arts) suggest that our culture more often retards life than fosters it – it offers not purpose but diversion, individuality and loneliness instead of connection and collective meaning.

One vector to attend to is our culture promising much more ecstatic fun than it can ever possibly deliver. This broken covenant, the world’s cruel gift to those of us born after around 1960, makes it awfully difficult to flourish as individuals. Here in the US there seems to have been made for us, sometime in the not too distant past, a Faustian pact—you’ll be endlessly entertained and all it costs is your soul. Which is why those little fish probably have all the right in the world to tell that older fish exactly how the water feels—whenever they figure it out what water is.

It used to be you could sell your soul for rock and roll, now they don’t even bother asking, for we have nothing left to give. The devil has left the rock arena, and the toothy corporate confidence man has taken his spot. I’m referring now to Motley Crue’s 2009 “Saints of Los Angeles Tour,” which begins February 2^nd right here in San Diego (buy tickets), is brought to you (I shit you not) by American Express. But first back up.

In the 1980s, Motley Crue made news by putting out top-selling albums and going on the road as a travelling circus act, playing music and finding time to abuse drugs and alcohol, urinate on fans, beat up concierges, exploit women, and etc. A Rabelaisian romp through the back alleys of our country is what it was, several metaphysical worlds away from button-down Reaganomic officialdom. They were an anti-everything, f the world dervish that gave full throat to and foregrounded, and thereby caricatured, the excesses of US pleasure-driven culture. They served as our soul’s conscience. Whatever line they crossed, they could say, and be correct: “You want us. You need us.”

Aside from being “brought to you by” American Express, the venues the sinister rockers will play on this ‘09 tour include Cox Arena (right on San Diego State University’s campus), Quest Center, Alliant Energy Center, Wells Fargo Arena, Bi-Lo Center, Scotiabank Place, Mohegan Sun Arena, and Verizon Wireless Arena. The thing to notice, and why this is the “water” that’s tough to see, is that this isn’t really selling out at all; it’s just what happens. Absurd commercialism is no longer odious; worse, it’s not even funny.

We no longer need Motley Crue; nor do we want them. But they need us. They’re reborn, Phoenixly sober, and now they too genuflect before the great true God who demands nothing, knowing that voluntary fealty is inevitable and forged of far greater stuff. Their smiles have the sheen of snake oil, not the real mischief.

Have you ever worried about something for a long time then realized it already happened? Is that the worst kind of nightmare? Vu déjà? Instead of “I been there before,” (what Huck Finn said in the middle of the 19^th century), the 21^st century American picaros ask: “What did you expect?”

 

Using the Broad Authority He’s Been Granted

Secretary Paulson, in written remarks delivered orally today, advocating a policy of “give away money first and ask questions later”:

“And to adequately reform our system, we must make sure we fully understand the nature of the problem which will not be possible until we are confident it is behind us.”

The implication in October, recall, was that “the market,” and life as we know it, would collapse if action wasn’t immediately taken. There was no time for deliberation because disaster was imminent.

If your small child, the analogy might go, was standing on the tracks in front of an oncoming train, absently nibbling her lower lip and oblivious to the danger at hand, would you call your spouse and discuss whether you had, as a parenting unit, set appropriate boundaries and sufficiently inculcated the dangers of standing in the way of moving vehicles, particularly those that can’t possibly swerve or stop in a timely fashion?

You’d do no such thing and waste no such time. Same for any child, right? Even ones you don’t personally know. You wouldn’t take time to speculate on how she got there; you’d move her to safety, then ask questions.

I submit that this is no child we’re saving, Mr. Paulson. It’s an already plummeting stock market, a prostitute masquerading as a maiden, a foundering economy, a boy who cries wolf, a overvalued credit-default-swap.  And there is no oncoming train. You would have all of us pile on the tracks in front of the train to save the child, and assess the mess when the smoke clears.

I understand I may be ignorant—perhaps more so than I even know. And my voice may be puny. Nevertheless, I hereby deny your statement. I do not accept it as necessary and proper. And I suspect I am not alone. I shall pursue those peaceful means I choose to express this to the wider world. One lonely citizen shaking his fist at a monument is not protected, in my view, by any first amendment. I don’t believe such a right is in your power, or anyone earthly else’s, to grant.

 

Christening a New Fallacy

If you’re a teacher of rhetoric, as I am, one of the skills you’d like your students to have is the ability to identify an argumentative fallacy so they can critique other arguments and also avoid fallacies in their own writing. There’s a standard list of fallacies you can use, and our culture seems to specialize in a few of them. It’s easy, for example, to show a youtube clip of Bill O’Reilly committing the ad hominem fallacy, or of the Shrub perpetrating a guilt by association fallacy (which he can do without evidence even of association). The consequences of such fallacies are dire—in some cases they lead to protracted, deadly, trillion dollar wars.

Others include begging the question, slippery slope, and hasty generalization. They all serve to divert the reader or listener’s attention away from the issue and make them focus on something else. Begging the question calls your attention to syntax; a slippery slope has you fearing what’s next; a hasty generalization lets you revel in the comfort of simple things.

In doing some tv-watching, strictly for research purposes, last night, I identified a new fallacy, and it seems to me the most pervasive one on cable TV news, but it rears its head regularly on NPR, talk radio, and even the New York Times.

I’d like to call it the donk-e-phant fallacy, in honor of the mascots for our two major political parties. As implied above, journalists commit this fallacy with frightening frequency by “reporting” an issue by: a) naming the issue b)explaining what the Republicans say about it and c) explaining what the Democrats say about it. b) and c) are sometimes reversed. The donk-e-phant fallacy precludes the idea that there might be some real investigating to do with respect to the issue and it also renders the journalist impotent—he or she can’t possibly point out that one group or the other is being disingenuous, deceptive, or is just plain wrong.

This would all be silly fun if the donk-e-phant fallacy didn’t lead to disastrous compromises such as the bailout, where both sides got what they wanted: increased spending combined with tax cuts. This policy stew only seems like compromise, and the fallacy helps it masquerade as such. Hopefully, it makes us sick enough to revisit some long-lasting problems.

Even though it’s against my very nature, I count myself among the hopefuls and quixotics who believe miscegenation has brought us a man who demands—deriving respect by commanding it—that we be better and neither support nor fall for the news outlets who perpetrate and perpetuate these fallacies.

 

Why Cormac McCarthy’s Novels Shouldn’t be Made into Films (or, at least, why the books are better)

While reading prose fiction, occasionally you encounter depictions of physical actions, performed by outsized characters, that come across as so richly visual that it’s natural to wonder whether this piece of prose fiction should in fact be a film or would be better as a film, seen on a giant screen instead of the printed page. And when you find yourself doing that sort of wondering, you start to think that the sort of novel that relies on descriptions of actions without any sort of highly stylized or over-determined prose or some other kinds of post-modern pyrotechnics is not much of a novel because film and other visual media have sufficiently invaded everyone’s consciousness and saddled the novel with severe limitations—chief among them modernism’s concern with newness and postmodernism’s concern with self-awareness.

What’s a novelist to do but remove and edit out any scenes that seem even somewhat “filmy” for fear of someone suggesting that their novel would “make a great movie”?

C. McCarthy’s one novelist who’s certainly been accused of writing novels that would look great on the silver screen. But to wish to see the movie is to wish for an inferior experience. I think I can prove this by considering just two details from his novel All the Pretty Horses.

The first: early in the novel, just after they ran away from home, Lacey Rawlins, protagonist John Grady Cole’s co-conspirator, squatted down to gut a rabbit he’d shot, then “rose and wiped the blade on his trouserleg and folded shut the knife.”

This is nice fiction; it accurately demonstrates, via a simply and perfectly described action, that Rawlins is probably accustomed to guts on his knife, and that he knows, without even thinking about it, that dirty pants for a clean blade is always a good trade.

The second detail I’ll mention is the sort most prose fiction writers would waterboard their grandmothers for.

While describing John Grady Cole waiting in a theatre’s lobby during intermission, McCarthy writes: “He’d turned up one leg of his jeans into a small cuff and from time to time he leaned and tipped into this receptacle the soft white ash of his cigarette.”

It tells so much. Cole’s not exactly the theatre-going type, but if he must go, he respects the mores of high culture by refusing to soil their nice carpeting. He’s not going dress up like some goddam stuffed shirt just to see a few people prance around on a raised platform, but he’s certainly not interested in making an ass of himself. He’s a cowboy, but he’s not the type who wears a ten-gallon hat to a Paris café and screams at the waiter to bring more ketchup for his freedom fries. This simple action also demonstrates his resourcefulness and his ability to adapt and make himself comfortable in any circumstance, even though he’s probably most comfortable on a horse’s back far, far from the theatre, in the wilderness roping cattle. Of course, important parts of this character resonate deeply with Americans, for whom cowboys are the archetypal version of, say, UAW members compelled to live in a world that, blown by the breezes of globalization and technological advances, passed them by. So there’s something sadly romantic about this character, and it’s captured in this detail.

Indeed, as the novel moves along, you begin to realize just how perfect this simple action described Cole, the cigarette smoking, coffee drinking, basically no-family-having, hard working, about-horse-knowing, quick thinking, plain speaking, chess playing, good Spanish having, sir-and-ma’am saying runaway cowboy tough son of a bitch.

There are three reasons why these two details, particularly the second one, are better in the book than in any movie: elapsed time, noise, and point of view.

Time: you can stop reading and ruminate on a detail and tease out all its various possible significations and resonances. The DVD pause button doesn’t work, because the medium of film gives you everything, vulnerablizes you, and prevents you from doing that sort of thinking while couch-ridden. While reading, even if you stop, you’re still reading and making images–you’re not forced to so abruptly change mental gears.

Noise: if it were film, could we hear Rawlins wipe the knife or Cole flick the ash? Would music play or horses neigh in the background? Would we hear the murmurs of theatergoers and the clink of intermission wine glasses? No filmmaker, even of the sparsest school, with all these possibilities at her command, can turn them down. These simple actions would be accompanied by noise, and the noise would lessen their effectiveness, I submit, because their simplicity and unadorned-ness is part of their point.

Point of view: what camera angle would the auteur employ? What lighting? How much of Grady’s body would we see? How long would the shot be, before switching to another camera? The mere fact of the presence of the lens, it’s overwhelming eye-ness, forces the director to make so many choices that, again, the details depicted so simply by McCarthy become cluttered by so much other stuff. And always the viewer must stand behind the lens, voyeur-like, watching.

Only in prose fiction can these simple actions come to us immaculate, unburdened by perspective, noise, and the passing of time. And these simple actions need to be immaculate for the text to retain its incredible power. Especially if you’re examining the extent to which beauty inheres in simplicity, which I think McCarthy is. Especially if you’re depicting the beauty of lives stripped down to their essentials, which he certainly is.

Perhaps film can do justice to these themes in its own way, but in the case of All the Pretty Horses, eliminate all the baggage, like the cowboy who needs only his horse and his hat, and read it.

 

Fighting Fire With Arson: A Response to Yale Professor Robert J. Schiller’s misguided but not unexpected piece on the housing bubble, titled “Infectious Exuberance” and appearing in the July/August 2008 Atlantic.

Shiller believes our two recent “epidemics of financial optimism” (the dot-com and real estate bubbles) could be followed by a more disastrous financial epidemic if “irrational pessimism and mistrust” manage to spread from the lips and fingertips of sourpuss chicken-little financial pundits to the wider population. According to the author this third epidemic is easily avoided, not by increasing government regulation or allowing banks to fail, but rather by subsidizing financial advice for low- and middle-income Americans, nurturing a real estate futures market, and (though he doesn’t mention it because it goes without saying) keeping your chin up.

Perhaps one can’t fault a guy arguing for the expansion of opportunities for those in his own line of work, since government-sponsored financial advice would certainly create a need for more financial advisors, analysts, and endowed economics professorships. In fact, pretty soon here I’ll be doing the same thing: arguing for expansion, with respect to my profession. But first, a question: instead of teaching low- and middle-income Americans the intricacies of ARMs and mortgage interest tax deductions so they can navigate those murky waters and avoid financial mistakes, why not teach them Jack London, Henry David Thoreau, and Henry Miller so they might tell the next realtor who tries to sell them stainless steel appliances to fuck off?

To clarify myself, I’d like to write discuss two relevant experiences: one short and sad and the other meted out over the last few years. In order to qualify to purchase a townhouse via a city program for middle-income earners, I attended an 8-hour homebuyer’s course with fellow middle-income and some low-wage earners. We went over monthly budgets, credit reports, closing costs, and etc. Right in the middle of examining an amortization table, one of my classmates happened to raise his hand and mention something about the granite countertops in the condo he was renting. The classroom, which had been somber in the way only math classes tend to be, started to buzz. Hands shot up. We discussed the various virtues of granite countertops and enumerated the ways in which tile and Formica were wholly unacceptable. A sweet woman sitting next to me had been clueless the entire class because she didn’t speak English, but a knowing smile crept over her face during that conversation.

The other experience is teaching reading and writing courses to college students for the past few years. The broad goals include exposing them to the patterns, power, and beauty of written language and honing skills for use in participating in communities and attending to their experiences instead of standing beside them. For my students’ attention, I compete with cell phones, Facebook, and cable television. Instead of competing with those sorts of activities, I try to help put them in perspective.

My house-buying course experience has me believing courses on financial responsibility will never out-message an entire industry bent on fostering idol worship. My teaching convinces me we shouldn’t try.

Recall Shiller’s other recommendation: growing the real estate derivatives market. Add a layer of abstraction to a market already too far removed from what it’s really about—shelter and the arrangements of family life and communities. Just what the idols demand: more people on tv and the internet screaming about rising real estate futures—more noise that generates buzz and excitement that then must be combated by additional financial responsibility courses.

Shiller’s suggestions are akin to the firefighter’s union hiring arsonists to act as lobbyists for increased funding. The casualties that result: unfortunate, but the price one must pay for the growth of the union. And we all must cheer the mighty firemen who defend the charred neighborhoods.

The so-called housing bubble came about because the government and the private sector worked in concert—by making money cheap, encouraging debt and housing turnover, inventing and marketing unsound financial strategies, and fostering an infantile human relationship with natural resources—to create a landlust resulting ultimately in environmental and economic disaster. In the end, the poor have no homes, the rich bigger ones, and the landscape has been so definitively altered that the changes seem inevitable and just (keep your eyes on this website for a long-form piece on this last point).

Luckily for the ones with the big houses, nonsense beguiles and distracts the masses. Educating them about the nonsense further marginalizes real education and helps no one but those who generate the distractions. By “real” education, I mean that which offers access to those people and ideas that put diversions in their proper place.

 

What does it take to cause agony in another human being?

Last night, I turned away from the HBO miniseries Elizabeth. A man had attempted to kill the queen and he was being stretched on the rack in a creepy, dark, moist, windowless and hell-like torturing dungeon. The putative and apparent goal of the torture was to extract “information” from the man, who had been acting, it was believed, on behalf of the Spanish Cath-o-licks.

One thing I did notice before turning away were the several bureaucrats busying themselves in the background of the cozy torture cave. Their activities were unclear but they must’ve been filling out torture-related paperwork or reviewing reports on new devices or even mixing the perfect hydrochloric acid solution.

On reflection, the presence and demeanor of these Elizabethan-era office workers is in a lot of ways more offensive than the mere torture of a would-be queen killer (with whom, by the way, the audience is given every (clumsy) opportunity to sympathize, since he appears crazed just before he kills the queen, has a sort of boyish benevolent face and reddish light-brown hair, seems genuinely scared when he’s caught, and appears to be completely without the ability to deceive. He’s depicted, in other words, as an innocent pawn–the very sort of person who, if tortured, could and might give up the names of those more important persons who forced or asked him to assassinate her majesty).

While being stretched, the attempted murderer alternately screamed and whimpered. After threat of more torture, he offered the man overseeing his interrogation (one of the queen’s counselors) some “information.” What did he say? The scene cut just as he began to whisper answers to the questions being posed.

Did he tell the truth? In other words, did torture work?

A torturer has the capacity (or the need) to dehumanize the torturee. Dehumanization/objectification is typically the first step in all varieties of abuse.

When it comes to abuse, torture might be considered a special case. With torture there’s a putative immediate purpose beyond the mere satisfaction or gratification of the torturer. The person being tortured at Guantanamo, for example, might have information Homeland Security wants. Of course, humans can offer false information, can choose to withhold satisfaction from the torturer, can put pain in perspective, can imagine their heavenly rewards. Humans can transcend pain – which is not to say necessarily that they can conquer it, but that they remain human while enduring pain. Perhaps, they become more human in their suffering.

Is this not evident to torturers? Particularly to torturers whose goal is obtaining information?

A person being tortured is not a black box that opens when the correct button’s pressed. Like our gray matter, human consciousnesses are reticulated. The motivation for any utterance–a confession, “the naming of names,” or the location of a secret stash of U-235–is often multivalent. And this must be evident during torture – particularly torture of someone who is pious and humble, though even those qualities are likely unnecessary.

Remember when Iago was trying to determine his own motives for torturing Othello?

I hate the Moor: And it is thought abroad, that ‘twixt my sheets
He has done my office: I know not if’t be true;
But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
Will do as if for surety.

And do you remember what Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in the margins of his copy of the play: “the motive hunting of motiveless malignity.”

Iago’s torture of Othello is more honest than the torture conducted by the US government on behalf of its citizens. Motive and method, for Iago, are clearly aligned; there is no subterfuge because Iago cannot even fool himself.

Can those saying they torture on behalf of the safety of the US citizenry be fooling themselves? Torture’s effect is terror, and that’s also its goal.

Iago’s speaking to the ether – and to an audience of theatergoers content to sit on their hands and watch as the play unfolds toward its inevitable calamitous ending. Pity and fear are their just desserts.

Was there a radical in the audience the night you went? One who tried to match wits with Shakespeare’s greatest villain and deter him from his appointed devilish task?

Say one member of the audience did climb to the stage and strap Iago to the rack and stretch his conniving limbs until forcing him to admit what traps he’d set for Othello and why. This would be a very a different play indeed, but here’s what the hero would be able to squeeze out of Iago:
Demand me nothing: what you know, you know:
From this time forth, I will never speak word.

We would learn no “information” other than that Iago – stretched to the limits of his joints, screaming and defiant – far more resembled a human being that we ever thought.

But wait. Who is the play’s new hero? It is the long and muscled arm of the CIA technical interrogation division? Or is Iago that arm, bound by its own fingers, choked by the possibility of itself?

To turn away from the tv is no great sin is it? Who am I denying by doing so?

But really, the bureaucrats were too much. It’s too tough a truth that clock-punching and attending to quotidian details is necessary and inevitable despite all else that’s going on.

February 22, 2008