Paper heart
This rainy evening and this lovely trailer and glimpses of Toronto have me very excited for August and Paper Heart.
I would like for Maira Kalman to paint my walls and ceilings
Another new post at And the Pursuit of Happiness. More and more, Maira Kalman’s painted blog is the most brilliant thing I’ve seen in some time.
Half the distance is worse than standing still
Via @dwf and posted here, an excellent statement from Keith Olbermann on torture accountability in the US, coming out of Thursday’s release of the OLC memos. (full transcript)
One line from Olbermann’s statement sticks out: “We ‘moved forward’ with Watergate and junior members of the Ford administration realized how little was ultimately at risk. They grew up to be Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney” (emphasis added).
That’s the thing – if political officials know impunity is the end result, however grave their actions – and they learn this as they move up the path of political power, the abuses become greater, the hubris stronger, the will to blindly do unspeakable things easy. What they call “just following orders” when they’re starting out becomes “just acting on advice” when they’re in command. Morality in culpability is gone, replaced by “how can I get out of this mess unscathed, damned if people have suffered from my actions or orders?”
A fine example of this lost morality? Yesterday Former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and Former US Attorney General Michael Mukasey penned a piece for the WSJ calling Obama’s decision to release the torture memos “unsound as a matter of policy” whose “effect will be to invite the kind of institutional timidity and fear of recrimination that weakened intelligence gathering in the past”. These statements (these men) are the product of this blind political power, the ability to couch immorality in technicality. Their ends justify the means, because awesome intelligence comes from torture … or in more sterile terms “interrogation techniques”. Reassigning blame lets them play with their grandkids without the weight of wrongdoing on their shoulders.
And now the President dispenses wishy-washy platitudes on the torture memos we well-know (or hope) he doesn’t believe, that the most poetic statement can’t make pretty. Like Olbermann said – Prosecute, Mr. President. Set precedent. Even if nothing comes of it, make it known that evil acts will be scrutinized, that it’s a time for reflection and retribution.
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Edited to add a compilation of the FOX News reactions that I just watched. I shouldn’t even bother, but every comment makes me incredulous. Wait for the closing shot with Gretchen Carlson: “You don’t go into these techniques just willy-nilly … That’s the way that it’s been described – that they just automatically waterboard people. No. There was a reason behind all of this. There was a philosophy in the way that they handled these things.”
To the beloved and deplored memory
“To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings—the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward—I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work as it stands has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more careful re-examination, which they are now never destined to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom.”
John Stuart Mill’s dedication to his wife, Harriet Taylor, in On Liberty, 1859
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