The recent release of Bush-era “torture memos” occasions an argument to the effect that those responsible for the writing of those memos and the implementation of the procedures described in them must be held to account.  This must be done, less to honor a duty to the past than to establish a precedent for the future:

As a former constitutional law lecturer, Obama should have a firmer grasp of the point of executive accountability. It is not merely to “lay blame,” as he suggests; it is to set boundaries on presidential behavior and to clarify where wrongdoing will be challenged. Presidents, even those who profess honorable intentions, do not get to write their own rules. Congress must set and enforce those boundaries. When Obama suggested that CIA personnel who acted on the legal advice of the Bush administration would not face “retribution,” Illinois’s Jan Schakowsky, chair of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence’s subcommittee on oversight and investigations, offered the only appropriate response. “I don’t want to compare this to Nazi Germany, but we’ve come to almost ridicule the notion that when horrific acts have been committed that people can use the excuse that, Well, I was just following orders,” explained Schakowsky, who has instructed aides to prepare for a torture inquiry. “There should be an open mind of what to do with information that we get from thorough investigations,” she added.

There must also be a proper framework for investigations. Gathering information for the purpose of creating a permanent record is only slightly superior to Obama’s banalities about wanting to “move forward.” Truth commissions that grant immunity to wrongdoers and bipartisan commissions that negotiate their way to redacted reports do not check and balance the executive branch any more than “warnings” punish speeding motorists.

A short piece remarks on the success leading neocons have had in publicizing the view that piracy off the Horn of Africa is a national security threat to the USA.  The Washington Post, for example, the other day tossed off a reference to “ties between al Qaeda and” the group that recently hijacked the Maersk Alabama, ties which appear to be wholly imaginary. 

George Scialabba’s review of two new books on the liberal tradition and its prospects, one by Alan Wolfe, one by Jedidiah Purdy, contains some interesting moments.  Scialabba seems to be on shaky ground here and there- for example, he paraphrases Oscar Wilde’s famous line that “The trouble with socialism is that it takes too many free evenings,” adding the qualification that the socialism he has in mind is “the real kind, not the totalitarian travesty.”  “The real kind” of socialism is not to be confused with what was once known as “actually existing Socialism.”  It would be unfair to Scialabba to compare this distinction to the distinction between the People’s Front of Judaea and the Judaean People’s Front, those splitters.  Still, a different version of the same impulse that drives him to call his favorite idea of socialism “real” and the historical regimes that have adopted that label a “travesty” of that idea may be at work in the more fissiparous corners of the Left.

Scialabba shakes his head at Alan Wolfe’s concern with metaphysical questions about free will and evolution, writing that “Someday our descendants will emerge from the metaphysical mists, shaking their heads and wondering what all that philosophical fuss was about.”  Maybe so, and as recently as the 90s an academic philosopher might have written that sentence.  Not now, though; metaphysics is back, in a big way.  Makes me glad I’m not a philosophy professor, quite frankly; I could never stand that stuff.  My hat’s off to Wolfe, a political sociologist, for grappling seriously with it. 

Purdy’s book gets a much more respectful hearing.  Purdy’s theme is “‘the divorce of civic identity from government’: the displacement of public virtue by personal virtue in American political life and language. The delicate, shifting interplay between public and private, individual and community, freedom and obligation, in our political rhetoric is, for Purdy, the best index of the condition of liberalism.”  Purdy’s narrative of American political ideas begins amid the early Republic, when economic self-sufficiency and the contrast between free men and slaves were the cornerstones of American notions of liberty.  With the rise of mass production, both of these vanished.  Purdy casts Woodrow Wilson as the first leader to grasp the change.  Wilson’s goal was to establish a partnership between the national government and the private citizens who by themselves would be crushed by the massive, impersonal forces industrialization released.  Twentieth century liberalism tried to build on Wilson’s vision, and met with considerable success until:

Ronald Reagan’s “brilliant recasting” of partnership as paternalism. Reagan simply denied that “complex, impersonal systems” often “outstripped individual will and understanding.” The essential conditions of social and economic life had not changed, he insisted; Americans could master them, as always, by “common sense and free choice” if government only got out of the way. This adroit rhetorical reversal set the tone for his successors. Clinton reluctantly and Bush II enthusiastically agreed that government intervention eroded individual autonomy–or, turning Roosevelt on his head, did not protect individualism but hampered it.

A review of Mary Gaitskill‘s Don’t Cry claims that the stories in it mark a decline from her book Veronica.  “Veronica, a novel that appeared four years ago to great acclaim, marks both the summit of Gaitskill’s work to date and the first stages of what looks thus far like decline.”  The review’s conclusion is withering: “It happened to Wordsworth and Conrad, and now it seems to be happening to Mary Gaitskill. The hunger has gone out of her work. Gaitskill was a great poet of youthful suffering. Whether she can reinvent herself as a chronicler of maturity remains to be seen.” 

I’ve been meaning to sit down with Gaitskill’s work for a while now; I admire the way she can turn a sentence.  Frankly, I’ve been a bit put off by her subject matter.  Sado-masochism and sexual violence are two topics I recognize as important, but I never actually have the desire to spend time focused on either of them.  In the matter of SM, I follow Abraham Lincoln and say that for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.  The questions sado-masochistic practice raise about the roles of submission and dominance in our political and economic system and in sexuality in general are important, but depressing.  Sexual violence is an extremely important topic of course, but may well be the single most depressing subject in the universe.  So I’m still putting off reading more Gaitskill.