We citizens, we who are under threat, can take--must take--responsibility for the safety of ourselves and our fellow citizens. Jim Henley provided a memorable phrase, "a pack, not a herd", to encapsulate the attitude that we must cultivate in these difficult times. Mr Henley's aphorism was directed at the authorities, those who have been given the most responsibility for our society's safety. He asks--and we require--that they involve us in our own defense. We will all be safer with an involved and engaged citizenry.

The clam diggers returned today to the rich flats around Boston's Logan Airport. After the events of 9/11, the diggers were not allowed into the 500-foot exclusion zone around the airport. But the State Legislature passed an exemption for the diggers this August. Today was their first day back. And not everyone in authority is pleased.

Scott Leblanc, an AP reporter who has been on top of the Massport story, wrote today,

Massport officials frowned at the exemption, calling it a ''less than ideal scenario in terms of securing the airport perimeter.''

But Mr Leblanc also quotes clam digger Chester McDonald, who tells it like it is.

MacDonald said the clammers will make the airport more secure, not less.

''Who knows this waterfront better than us?'' He said. ''Anyone we see who doesn't belong here, we call the police.''

I fear that the diggers may not be back on the flats long. The rocket attacks in Kenya yesterday have heightened fears in the US that such attack may take place here and airport security forces will be doing their utmost to demonstrate that they are on the job--even if that means an over-reaction.

It should be obvious that the airport is much safer if these good people are out there in the flats. A small, tight-knit community, they all know each other. Any stranger would be identified immediately and any threat could be dealt with more swiftly. We need to keep these people, and the millions like them around this country, in place, on the front lines, and prepared.

There has been a recent rush to tar Harvard with the brush of censorship and there have been bold cries that the old school is restricting the freedom of speech. But which Harvard? Who, precisely, at Harvard is engaging in practices inimical to free speech?

Certainly not the English Department. Poet Tom Paulin was reinvited to speak at the university through a unanimous vote of the faculty (with two abstentions).

Certainly not a vigorous part of the Law Faculty. They (there's at least one and he might have the strength of ten) have been quite vocal in their opposition to a speech code proposed by the Law School's Committee on Healthy Diversity (what is up with that name? are they kidding?).

Certainly not the group calling for the university's divestment from Israel. They are rather openly advocating a position which is unpopular with, at the very least, the university's President. (Some form of debate rages.)

Certainly not the students editing and writing for the Harbus. They have not buckled under to the administration and continue to respond with integrity.

So who, precisely, at Harvard is suppressing speech?

From the chattering commentary and the nattering nabobs you would arrive at the convenient conclusion that it was the faculty, either directly or through sins of silence. You would hear how Harvard, stately old Harvard, had been captured by a faculty run amuck, a faculty consisting of wild-eyed stalinists and postmodernists itching to bring back the gulag. Failing in that grand design, they will content themselves by shutting out any expression or opinion not in conformity to their doctrinaire order.

However, in each of the cited cases it has been figures in the university administration fighting the good fight against the free exercise of speech. Perhaps some students or staff have helped the administration to see that their interests lie in this direction, but the administrators are the ones making the decisions and taking the stands to stop the pernicious flood of controversial speech. And, except in the case of the Harbus cartoon where the students involved don't need the help, faculty members are leading the way in defense of the much tattered ideal.

Why is there a concerted effort right now to make out Harvard as a monolith, as a single-party state, as the avatar and leader of the "academic left" and its follies? Why the effort to equate Harvard with its faculty alone, reducing that eminent and varied body to a single-note, stony-faced caricature?

Just follow the Yale blue trail . . .

But also why Balzac would love it.

It's really quite simple, it's all about the narrative. I want one. I want one with tension, unpredictable and curious, or I want to laugh at life's folly. I don't want fate's cold repetition.

The show certainly succeeds at something, but I'm not sure I like the terms it has set for itself under which it is successful. We're supposed to view each hour-long show as one story, from crime to courtroom, with an ensemble cast of heroic, if possibly flawed, police and lawyers all working together courageously, if perhaps imperfectly, to drive the plot towards it final destination of the punishment of social evil. Rather like any cop show since Hill Street Blues. Its conceit is its two sections, one of police work and one of prosecution.

In order to get to the second half-hour, in order to justify the show's two part structure, the cops have to capture a criminal. There is no drama in this, no chance that our heroes' flaws might hinder the easy and inevitable progression of suspect to indictment to trial. There is no chance that something missed in the previous weeks' episodes could lead to further tension. The police always get their man.

The second half-hour is only marginally better, with all the possibilities our legal system affords for putting up barriers in the path of justice. Will our steely-jawed protagonists with their flashing eyes and careful hair convince the common twelve, or will a theatrical and cunning defense attorney game the system and get the court to set the guilty free? Since guilt has largely been established in the first half of the show, the tension in the second half is not in the trial's assumption of innocence and proofs to the contrary. What tension there is lies in the working of the system itself, the tricks and games, the tics and bargains of a byzantine legal code and a capricious justice.

I am not impressed. Political or bureaucratic infighting can make fascinating drama if the characters are compelling, if the characters grow and change and what has come before affects what comes after. Stringing together two half-hours of foregone conclusions is not a recipe for continuing chacterization and any chance for drama is lost. After all, every television viewer knows that a half-hour show is supposed to be comedy.

Others are free to differ.

D-Squared Digest is one of the best sites of personal commentary on the net. In my lofty opinion, he's the finest prose stylist in the blogworld. No one else makes economics or his own discontent so engaging.

I'd like to riff off a very minor bit from a longer and fascinating piece about utility. [The permalink may or may not take you to the right post. The title of the post is "Why Formula One this year is going to suck, and other philosophical topics" -- ed.]

"... basically, the thing which makes boring sports more interesting is that you watch ... the complete psychological destruction of a human being."

DSD says this is why he likes to watch darts or snooker rather than something more athletic. However, 'psychological destruction' is, to my mind, at the heart of all sport. And it is one of the reasons I enjoy American professional football as much as I do.

DSD mentions the fact that once a sportsman or woman begins to lose or play badly they continue to lose because of feedback. In an individual event it is almost impossible to arrest this feedback. In team sports, management of the feedback is crucial to victory, downward spirals can be arrested, and once losing a team can still recover. Managing a team's psychological health is as much a part of top play as the players themselves performing the required feats.

Football is the team sport with the highest demands on teamwork and total trust in your teammates. A team's morale in football is more important to victory than any individual's talent. Any wedge in a team's psychic health can be devastating.

At the professional level, as at the highest level of darts, and in contrast to college, the physical gifts of the players across all the teams are so close that only the sharpest mental edge makes any difference. Watching, week to week, the ways in which coaching staffs interact with the players, players with each other, and the players responding to the fans, all in the service of maintaining some semblance of mental health, is continually fascinating to me.

I've been finishing a paper for work. There is something about the act of "finishing" that drives me a little bit crazy, that makes the thought of writing toward any other purpose seem futile. These thoughts here at De Spectaculis can be half-formed (a word I far prefer to ill-formed, thank you). They can be worked over, responding to reader feedback, or to time, or to changing circumstances. A paper (a case study in this case) for a project is something else altogether, something that, once finished, will exist in that form forever. Which is the more terrifying?

Once again, as always, a warm bed sorely tempted us to forgo one of this planet's singular pleasures. But the battle against sleepy comfort was won; the warm dark did not hold us back from the cold, but rich contemplation of our neighborhood in space. The city and square below our rooftop perch tossed fitfully in anticipation of the onrushing dawn, but our eyes were drawn up and out, hoping for an explosion of wonder similar to last year's.

It was not what we had hoped for, but perhaps it was even better.

As we slouched low in our chairs, necks craned not uncomfortably, the sky thickened from black to leaden; the pale pinpricks of the stars dimmed and most became obscured; the city lights, leaping into the night sky, rebounded and fell back. Black night became purple and the Leonids, so brilliant in anticipation, so brilliant from our vantage last year, were lost.

So we turned our attention from the royal swell of night to the rising tide of dawn.

To the southeast, Boston's two towers, Prudential and Hancock, catch and hold between them swift steel blows of cloud, ripping stripes in the distant blue and letting a slow yellow rise up through the tears. The Hancock building is, as it is every morning and evening, a mirrored gnomon on the terminator between night and day. One side, facing away from the sun, is still a stark portal into night, while the other captures the morning's spark within its deep blue and nutures it into a blaze that seems to catch the sky itself alight and not the other way around.

Swinging north along the city's spine, past the bunched and huddled towers of the Financial District, the Zakim Bridge straddles the dawn at this time of year. Brightness swims up the sky, pursued by waves of orange, outlining the Zakim's monumental wishbones, and flowing over the city to mingle with the tiger stripes of racing cloud. The imminent birth of the sun is announced by a roiling crimson, caught for a moment in the Bridge's net, then bursting forth to flood the sky with blood. The Hancock is now a crimson banner, calling the city awake to the daily struggle.

We had no view this morning of night's black depths, punctured here and there by briefly twinkling motes of stardust. We had no cause to wonder today at the cosmic metaphor of the meteor shower, how above and below share the mingling of horror and beauty. Instead, we received our own Earth's eternal dancing answer to the darkness, as our planet spins like a dervish to the music of sunrise, and calls us up from slumber to do the day's glorious work.

The sun, lifting my spirit with it, rose.

[I have got to scan some of my pictures.]

What I wrote after last year’s show:

I've climbed out of a warm, cozy bed before to go out and stand or sit in the frigid air, getting a crick in my neck and all for nothing--maybe two or three pale trails, snuffed quickly. No meteor shower has ever lived up to the hype, but I always promise myself I'll keep looking. Last night I set the alarm to pull my wife and myself from slumber around 3:00. When we woke it was a team effort to actually drag our sleepy selves into wakefulness.

It was the meteor shower of my dreams. Blazing trails of light, again and again, stars fell around us. At first, laughter and gasps of wonder. But as the morning wore towards dawn and the light kept coming down like dew, we settled into speechless awe and I felt myself lifted, reoriented. No longer a shivering monkey at the bottom of a gravity well looking up; a citizen of the galaxy, at peace, looking out at my backyard.

[CalPundit comments well upon this too.]

Your opponents are just as smart and talented as you are. That's why you haven't secured ultimate victory yet. Therefore, you should always operate under the assumption that this is the case, even, perhaps especially, when it seems as though they have committed a serious blunder. If you fail to remember this simple rule, you will fall into traps and only succeed in demonstrating that they are, in fact, smarter than you are.

Kathryn Lopez has hurt her credibility with me. I now know her to be not only a sloppy reader, but also intellectually classless as she fails to admit her misreading. I have only admiration for Martha Burk that this cleverly laid trap should have at last sprung, removing at least one adversary from the fray, in a manner of speaking.

The ongoing discussion of Ms Burk's article intrigues me. Why is this issue not over and done with? What happened here? What continues to happen here? The Martha Burk contretemps has given us an opportunity to rehearse one of the more playful dance steps in the waltz between the left and right. It goes something like this:

An article or a statement, a poor piece of rhetoric, of more or less humorous hostility appears, often, though not always, in a journal or magazine catering to a particular political position, striking a pose that is a remote, and perhaps absurd, development of those in fashion.

The piece, and its deviance from the norm, is noticed by a roundhead from the 'other' side. In her surprise, feigned or no, she turns to her friends to point out the ugly duckling. In discussing it she presents the piece to her allies and friends as an accurate statement of what the other side says 'in private'.

Defenders of our pretty piece then join the conversation, offering upon their honor that the article or statement in question is meant to represent humor. They go on to suggest that any eye which failed to see the explicit signs and marks of humorous intent is not a very careful eye and perhaps is failing of vision in other ways as well.

The castigators, no longer denying the humor, charge then that if one of their own had presented such a piece, that worthy would have been veritably flayed alive for such indiscretion. Examples are provided, some spurious, some not. No one mentions that this very process is about flaying the presenter of the piece. Instead, accusations of humorlessness versus using a double-standard begin to fly like spittle.

Finally, the defenders agree that the pitiful piece is not a very good representative of humor and, perhaps, was in poor taste to begin with, but that does not lessen the fact that the other side needs a sense of humor. The castigators finally ackowledge that the piece was in fact funny, but that does not allow the other side to get away with their tricks. It all ends, everyone goes home friendly, everyone is still primed to jump down each other's throats.

Presented like that, without judgement, it seems that both sides are being silly. Certainly, the raising up of the issue to a catastrophic level, one where civility itself is in peril if not civilization, is. But each of the above points are just tactics. It doesn't matter whether an argument is a good one, or has any truth on its side. All that matters is that you make an argument and that you follow the pattern to its conclusion.

What happened here? Ms Burk publishes a satire on reproduction in our time, clearly marking it as such with reference to the pre-eminent bloody-minded satire in the English language. She publishes it, however, in a magazine where a certain attitude towards reproduction--and all rights attendant upon it--is prevalent. It is not surprising then, that someone stumbling upon this particular piece, someone who does not share the political assumptions of the magazine, while at the same time entertaining certain assumptions of her own about those who do, should at first misconstrue its meaning and intent. The piece merely confirmed what Ms Lopez knew to be the true, male-hating, inner thoughts of the Ms. reading set.

Who can blame her for trumpeting from the rooftops (from the blogdepths) that she has found a smoking gun, whose existence means we need never pay attention to Ms Burk on anything again? Well, actually, all of us can blame Ms Lopez for failing to read carefully enough, for failing to accord to her opponents a level of intelligence equal to her own.

Bloggers are familiar with the courageous Iranian students, demonstrating for their freedoms.

Students in Sudan, at the University of Kartoum, have recently begun protesting. This is unusual and intriguing. We'll have to see where this goes.

There are many scourges beating upon the backs of the greater and suffering part of humankind, but none that has so much quiet cost as the agony of an unwanted child. Who can truly bear the forlorn thought of so many helpless innocents, abandoned and alone in their misery? The brutal killing of these children that takes place every day is unforgivable. But the other option, bringing a child into a cold world is not justice. It too is a crime.

Let us also spare a thought for the young woman, deprived of her naive right to a full life and a full pursuit of her happiness. Who can know the anguish of her heart as she cowers in the darkness of an impossible choice? Who could bear the soft cries of the infant slain? Who could bear the tragic cost of the ungrateful years of unloving? Sadly, society pays the price. The unloved and unwanted populate our prisons and leave a legacy of pain in their wake.

There is a solution. We have had it in our hands for some time, but only now, at our hour of desperate need, is it clear how to use this gift.

It is possible, very easily, to remove and preserve all of a female child's eggs. All of the eggs that would travel the path of potential birth over her whole life are present in the infant. All the potential unloved or murdered children of her posterity could be preserved until a child was wanted, until the mother's love unconditional was unleashed.

It is also now quite routine to fertilize eggs outside of a woman's body and to reimplant them into their natural environment so that a woman may fulfill her destined role as a mother. This process is so simple, so easy that expanding its benefits to all women, including the pre-implant screening of the developing fetus for defects, only makes perfect sense.

Combining these two technologies, technologies that we already possess, we could forever end the terrible crime of the unwanted and their murder, just as we could also end the daily crisis of the unloved child, the poor waif eternally waiting for a simple smile.

Girlchildren would have their eggs removed in a relatively painless procedure at any time in their first eight years. However, it is recommended that parents have this done soon after her birth before they take her home from the hospital as this reduces the trauma, much as with the circumcision of boychildren.

The eggs would be carefully frozen so that the child, now grown could exercise her motherhood. Centers for the Preservation of Fertility will house the rows of shining freezers containing the host of the unborn. Careful record keeping, perhaps tagged to each woman's individual DNA, will assure her that she can reclaim her eggs and her birthright as a loving mother at any time.

The time to put this proposal into action is now. Let us forever eliminate the unwanted and unloved and remove an awful plague from the prospect of humankind. Future generations will thank us.

With appreciation to Martha Burk for the inspiration. Thanks are also due to Porphyrogenitus, Glenn Reynolds and Armed Liberal.

The bright, soothing neon of perfect never-ending nights. The bright, scathing, spotlight sun of our broken dreams. Los Angeles never fades in the American imagination. It's just repackaged and sold again and again.

Fastlane, appearing tonight on a Fox channel almost near enough to touch, shimmers like a mirage with the life-blood of one fantastic LA.

First, you cannot listen to television. You must watch it. Fastlane knows that it only lives in your eye. It shines with glamour, conjouring up Hollywood's magic, lingering over pretty girls and hot cars, while the words, often unintelligible, often confusing, always strange, wash over and around you, doing just enough to move you on to the next scene without too much dissonance.

Second, Fastlane, like all our imaginary LAs, turns everything around, trying to disorient you, trying to take you to the edge of the West as though no one has ever been that beautiful and mysterious before.

Two cops, one black and one white, go undercover for an hour every week to investigate sexy crimes with all the toys you'd ever need to pose in the criminal highlife. Two cops, one white and one black, playing at race, still stereotypes but playing the game of inversion, playing with all the expectations of color television taught you, playing the game of opposites attract, playing the game of partners.

Fastlane desires to disorient. If the partners black and white are also sometimes white and black, the old and crusty police sargeant is also a shapely young woman. If race can be treated as pop culture divorced from the history of your skin, partnership can be courtship by any other name, and being alone can be the perfect marriage constantly threatened by the adultery of other relationships. If being undercover is wearing a mask, then under the covers with a lover is wearing another, and where does it end?

Furthermore, indoors is better than outdoors, safer, cooler. Inside, in the chill, air-conditoned, perfectly processed buildings, only your insides, your heart or your pride, the soft things, can be hurt.

Outside, in the unfiltered air, perhaps on the shore of a trackless ocean or by the side of a road in a trackless desert or scurrying among the shanties on the city's edge, but always under the merciless sun, people have hard, brittle bodies which can be hurt, cna be broken. Everybody can see you clearly in the day, can see how badly you act your role, can cut your image with violence or barbed words. Murder isn't for the dark, its not something that should happen offstage. Killing takes its place under the spotlight of day, its your curtain call, your most important moment.

Third, hedging their bets by hewing to the conventions of television, the conventions of cops and robbers, the conventions of an hour, Fastlane never escapes escapism. Everything is too perfectly airbrushed and coiffed, the framing device of the "candy store" offers too many temptations, the endless supply of cheap starlets encourages waste. No moment is unsullied by inappropriate humor. Like everything in LA, Fastlane veers wildly away from a collision with the serious or the heartfelt, turns the corner on two wheels, and races into the sunset of irrelevance. It sure is pretty.

Last, Fastlane could be a perfect postmodern noir, spinning off existential questions about the multiple self, forcing the viewers to look inward even though our gaze is captured by the shiny, happy surfaces. It could be everything Raymond Chandler tried to capture about America and tried to warn us about. Fastlane should be a tragedy, every episode leaving you shaken at several levels, fractured in your loyalties, desperately reclaiming your moral core. Can you remain complicit with the darkness at the heart of life, living in the shadows, living at night, never living? Or does honor, whether among thieves or police, insist on the spotlight and the sun and the embrace of death and, finally, perhaps, of life? Fastlane is not that show.

Fastlane is what it is, a television show, and like so many others, it's also about television's failures. One Los Angeles of the imagination offers us empty dreams, but they're no worse than the empty dreams of any other place, and they're often a sight for sore eyes.

I can't explain the show any better than this. Watch it. Once

Martial’s Law of International Political Conferences

The chance that any international political meeting will result in substance is inversely proportional to the shopping available in the city where the meeting is being held.

No meetings in Paris ever accomplish anything. By contrast, meetings held in Dayton, Ohio work out just fine. There is something to be said for locking people in a room—or holding talks in a boring place—until agreement is reached.

There is a conference being held in Brussels this week on the future of Iraq just in case, on the off chance, Saddam Hussein were to leave office and a new government needs to be formed. The delegates will wrangle and they will argue and, finally, if the various factions can manage to stop showing off for their constituents and their patrons, they will arrive at a framework for a transitional administration.

Brussels is one of my least favorite cities in all the world. I don’t find it pretty; its museums are second rate; and the people are in a bad temper because they’ve been living with both the European Union and NATO for far too long. This is a city whose singular icon and tourist attraction is a fountain with a statue of a boy pissing. (In its defense, you had one of the best breakfasts of your life in a hole in the wall bakery recommended by a very nice local man. You rave about it whenever someone brings in croissants. -- ed.)

Brussels is also, alas, not a city where people can hammer out an agreement on Iraq’s future. The shopping is excellent, the dance clubs quite good (particularly the West and Central African ones), and the brothels legendary. And then there’s the ambrosial beer. There is simply too much to do in Brussels in order to have a good working conference. The meetings will start late in the mornings and people will be tired, if not hung over. The sessions after lunch will have to be postponed for naptime.

Still, at the end of the meeting, a document will be produced. It will contain all the necessary ingredients so that the participants can stand around having their photographs taken and giving interviews to CNN calling the meetings a success. That document will be worth precisely the amount of the paper it is printed on and no more for one week. After a week its value drops. Someone will begin telling their constituents that the document screws them. A second person will accuse the first of sabotage and insist that not only should they be cast out of the coalition, but their constituents should also be screwed. And so it will go, to the embarrassment of everybody involved.

(In fact, the embarrassment has already begun.)

Why were the talks on Afghanistan last year so successful? They were held outside of Bonn, not the most stimulating city in its own right, in Petersberg. Petersberg is, I believe, an old castle. It is now a state owned, and very grand, conference center. It is several winding miles outside of Bonn, on a promontory and surrounded by forest. The participants at that conference were, in effect, locked in a room together. They were told that no cars would be allowed to depart “for security reasons”, but that anyone who wanted to leave was free to walk—with the cameras of the world capturing every humiliating step.

You may recall that one delegate, Haji Abdul Qadir, did walk out of the meetings. When he realized that the threat about walking was real, he took a pleasant stroll around the gardens and returned refreshed and invigorated to the negotiating table a few hours later. (Sadly, Mr Qadir was assassinated in July of this year.)

For obvious reasons, Bonn cannot be used for the Iraq meetings—another important meeting is already scheduled for the next week. Well, that and Gerhard Schroeder is in George Bush’s doghouse.

Does anyone have a nice conference room in a boring place that they’d like to contribute to the cause of peace in our time?

N.B. It is almost impossible to find any interesting information about brothels in Brussels on the web, thus no link. There is plenty of EU commissioned commentary and handwringing on human trafficking—which actually makes my point about Brussels.

"If you want special illumination, look upon the human face: See clearly within laughter the Essence of Ultimate Truth."
Rumi

In the Ideas section of this Sunday's Boston Globe, Jefferson Chase asks ("Critique of Pure Comedy") if a lack of a sense of humor is a root cause of terror. He covers a lot of ground very quickly in this brief article, beginning to suggest the outlines of a critique of the humorless, starting with the hoary Left. However, he strays away from this towards a criticism of Islam through an elegant and bitingly funny piece of irony when he asks, "But can fun really be the crux of a clash of civilizations? Is it worth thinking about humor as the largely metaphoric war on terrorism threatens to prompt a decidedly literal one in the Middle East?"

Failing to provide balance through his selection of quotes and citations, in fact quite clearly suggesting that Islam does not have much of a sense of humor, Chase in fact misses his--and humor's--target. He mentions the critical use of humor to puncture puffed up authority and express dissent, again suggesting that Islam fails to self-criticize, failing to acknowledge that the Islamic tradition offers the world a rich legacy of critical humor, being, in fact, the source of one of the greatest collections of jokes and stories. Mullah Nasrudin, and the stories told about his homely adventures against pretension, are a treasure for the world. (Nasrudin is something of a holy fool, acting outside convention, demonstrating just how arbitrary convention and the authority that sustains it can be. His stories are often compared to koans, offering many interpretations of increasing spiritual depth. There are several sites on the web where you can follow the Mullah's winding path.)

The true focus of critical humor is sober authority, authority that makes a demand of seriousness, that insists that its legitimacy cannot be questioned, even in jest. The serious consider themselves essential and their concerns vital. Any question, any quip, is equivalent to the denial of legitimacy, either of the person or of the message. The humorless insist upon a certain gravity in order to confirm that they should be taken seriously. The humorless confuse their legitimacy with the sound of all of us not laughing. This is why the humorless are dangerous. This is why laughter must be encouraged.

Chase comes full circle in his article, coming back around to the Left, offering advice on using humor to focus their dissent rather than allowing themselves to be the butt. But his true target once again goes unnamed. Chase wants there to be a challenge--a humorous one, at least in part--to the current US Administration and its policy of pursuing war.

The fact that the current US Administration feels the need to puff itself up, to insist upon seriousness, to use the word 'gravitas', tells us everything we need to know about how they view their own legitimacy.

"Humor cannot be prevented from spreading; it has a way of slipping through the patterns of thought which are imposed upon mankind by habit and design."
Idries Shah, The Sufis

Thursday a desperation post. Friday emptiness. Discipline, dammit.

Friday spent most of the day on trains and in train stations going to the in-laws'. Love the train for the chance to sit and read for several hours with no other option.

Arrived at the in-laws, were offered martinis Nabiscoe style (a family joke that loses in the telling). Raucous onversation ensued. The wine was opened and poured while we prepared dinner and more while we feasted, followed by coffee and tea and after-dinner drinks. And then my wife's aunt arrived and we started all over again. Needless to say, commentary goes by the wayside in some circumstances.

For some reason I find travelling inside the US much more tiring than travelling to other countries.

Martini Nabiscoe

Fill a highball glass to the rim with roughly crushed ice.
Pour in gin until your guest says to stop.
Wave the vermouth bottle over the glasses and shake some of the perspiration off of it.
Garnish with the thre largest olives you can find in the jar.
Drink.
Repeat.

Must . . . publish . . . every day . . .

Tomorrow I'm going to Pennsylvania to visit the in-laws, in particular to attend my brother-in-law's wife's baby shower. That's prosaic.

I was supposed to leave on a trip to Indonesia tomorrow. That's not.

Obviously, I've cancelled that trip. Colleagues there suggested we wait to see what happens over the next month or two. In truth, they were not particularly worried, but they recommended caution. Families here really didn't want us to go. Easy decision.

Why Indonesia? What the hell do I do? Perhaps I should offer something about my person.

Organizations of all types (NGOs both international and local, donors both government and foundation, businesses and corporations both local and multinational) operating in conflict zones or potential conflict zones need to know all about the context. They usually have a lot of information, but don't know how to process or organize it.

That's what I do: conflict context analysis. Using my field's jargon, we call it "Peace and Conflict Impact Analysis" (PCIA--the "Peace" was added after people decided the acronym might not be appropriate. Seriously). I do analysis of contexts and potential impacts on the conflict. I also teach others how to do it. I'd link to some of the tools, but most of the ones available on the web are simply not practical. Don't worry, I'll get around to a fuller discussion someday.

And since I'm not travelling, I really ought to be able to publish something better than this every day.

Where is he going with this "legitimate governing authority" thing?

Toward a Taxonomy of Violence

When civilians are killed by fighters, gunmen, or guerillas, much of the commentary asserts that any assault on civilians is terror and any perpetrator, therefore, must be a terrorist. I find myself feeling very uncomfortable with such blanket statements, feeling as though many justifiable acts of war can be tarred by the same brush.

Indeed, it is upon this very lack of distinction between terror and war that many doves and hawks cleave from one another--all the while agreeing on a basic principle, that violence against civilians is wrong. The doves cry "Hiroshima and Dresden, Melos and Atlanta" and they are not wrong. Civilians were terrorized and did die, many more than in most terror attacks. The hawks scream in frustration, "those examples are different from terror; those are legitimate uses of force; blowing up a bus is illegitimate". And they are not wrong either. There is a type of violence which seems to cross beyond the pale. Terror can be--and must be--differentiated from war and it must be condemned.

Forgive the doves and the hawks, the ones who follow the logic of violence to a relativizing conclusion and the ones who know that some things are more wrong than others in ways that cannot be reduced to sums of bodies. They are not wrong, neither of them.

Another problem also arises, a contention guaranteed to increase heat without light and to confirm the worst prejudices of left and right considering liberty. Every argument about terrorism eventually descends into a disagreement about grievance, liberation, and, finally, revolution. The phrase that typically ends forward progress in all such discussions is "One person's terrorist is another person's freedom fighter". Cultures are indeed different. So are standards as they are applied. If liberty is a cause worth fighting and dying for, and it is, who decides how best to wage that struggle?

Forgive the left and the right, for, despite their differences on justice economic and political, despite their differences on responsibility state and individual, despite their differences on strategy moral and pragmatic, they share a common regard for liberty. They are not wrong, not about liberty, neither of them.

[Forgive your author for painting four portraits so quickly with such broad strokes, enlisting four common terms to stand for positions far more nuanced in the flesh.]

These two acrimonious issues, outlined briefly above, are, I find, at the root of much contemporary disagreement between honorable people of all political stripes.

There is a difference between terror and war, and there is a difference between fighting for terror and for freedom. But the test must be stronger than "I know it when I see it".

These questions have bothered me for several months. How do we define terror in such a way as to preserve reasonable strategies for just war? How do we maintain a moral position where genuine grievances can be fought? How do we separate legitimate uses of force from illegitimate?

A few weeks ago, running a training session for a Swedish government agency, I was struck as though by thunder. A question I always ask when analyzing the context of a conflict is "what are people doing?" One can go a long way by remembering that there is no action without an actor. There is no legitimate force without a legitimate authority to apply it.

The question then is "how do you know what is a legitimate authority?" Once you have that answer, you know who the terrorists are.

Inviting discussion on that question, and given an underlying accord on crucial points, I think some agreement between different positions can be reached, way back at first principles. Perhaps agreement will not extend to policy, nor do I expect such a prodigy, but agreeing upon some terms and their derivation may offer us some solutions to arguments currently too deep to bridge.

Some mornings you just don't want to get out of bed. The sky was grey and low and dripping. The city, usually so crisp and near from our vantage, was gone, lost in the rain. The radio droned on and on about yesterday's stunning Republican success. Dragging myself from the cozy uncomfort of bed, I got up to make the coffee.

[Political Philosophy Note: I am of firm belief that dividing the executive from the legislative is one of the bulwarks of the American system, particularly if they are controlled by different parties. Having the Presidency as well as both the House and Senate in the hands of just one party will leave us, has always left us, with consequences--the bitter legacies of hubris--ranging far into the future.]

Sometimes you just need some distance and detachment. Returning to bed, juggling two cups of coffee, bread, and butter, I nudged my alternately annoyed, despondent, and dreaming wife to full wakefullness. I crawled back under the covers myself, turned off the radio, took a deep sip of the coffee.

"Darling, you be Kang and I'll be Kodos . . ."

As I walked up Prospect Hill this morning, heading to the polls, I thought back upon those brave and foolhardy souls who raised the first American Flag here two-hundred-and-twenty-six years ago. They raised that flag in defiance of convention, in support of a new wisdom, and as a challenge to the reigning concept of sovereignty. Their boldness in planting that standard brought forth the fruit that sustains so many of us and on the first Tuesday of November I am proud to resow the seed of liberty on one of the many hills where its tree flowers.

In the spirit of the polls, I hope to conduct one of my own, beginning today and continuing until next Tuesday. But you have to bear with my need to set the scene.

Sovereignty and legitimacy are much on my mind these days given the world we live in. I have read the philosophers and I have heard the speeches. However, like most of you I live in a world of hard and common work. What do those concepts mean to me when I have dirt under my fingernails?

James Bennett recently wrote of the challenges involved in establishing a connection between international law, as embodied in concepts of national sovereignty, and moral authority, captured in national legal codes. Perhaps the largest challenge to such a project is "because of the lack of a universal moral consensus that is anything but superficial".

This lack of consensus, and the difficulties it raises, is felt by almost everyone thinking about and commenting upon our ever narrowing world. If we must come to grips with it—and most feel we must—how shall we go about it?

Mr Bennett has done us a service by opening up these questions in a public forum. Sovereignty and legitimacy and how they are expressed are far too important to be left to the politicians and statesmen.

In an informal and unpublished poll, taken about four years ago, several humanitarian and development workers in conflict and post-conflict areas were asked one simple question:

How do you know a legitimate authority when you see one?

The question was asked precisely "because of the lack of a universal moral consensus that is anything but superficial". What rights are conferred upon a legitimate authority as opposed to an illegitimate one? And what responsibilities do those of us working in such areas have toward authorities legitimate and illegitimate? How do those rights and responsibilities change with the local concepts of authority? Do the differences in what constitutes legitimate authority change the ways in which organizations needed to do their work?

The results were engaging and surprising and worth waiting for.

If I may ask your indulgence, let us continue the work of thinking through this issue through another informal poll. The question is the same:

How do you know a legitimate authority when you see one?

The question can also be framed operationally as:

What does a legitimate governing authority do or not do?

You can reply in the comments section or directly to me. I think the results will be fascinating. You can certainly take your time thinking about it, you have a week until next Tuesday. Try to make the points general and keep the list short: tell me your three main points.

Please bear in mind that I am not asking what an authority should do or be. I am asking about how you will know it, today, walking around your country and your town, up and down its hills, over its rivers and streams, under its waving flags, breathing in its air on the first Tuesday of November.

Thanks.

Welcome to the first installment of "De Spectaculis". An introduction of some sort is, therefore, in order: forewarned being forearmed.

Your host, Martial, is inconsistent and Janus-faced. Adrift in melancholy, he tends toward exuberance, while in his enthusiasm Martial collapses toward bitterness. An excellent sophist, he can always argue both sides and, unfortunately, is almost always of two minds. In particular, Martial's soul is fired and his blood stirred by war's trumpets and their clarion call. But Martial's gentle heart would prefer nothing else than to sit under the arbor in his garden, with a jug of wine close to hand, and to discourse with his wife about poetry.

De Spectaculis is a child of dark night. Looking forward through mists of dream toward the dawn of the Empire, Martial wonders if he has awoken once more into the nightmare of history or if the fiery glow on the horizon heralds a bright new day. Several questions about the Empire arise at three AM with our insomniac. What path shall we travel to get there? Who will stand forth to lead us? What foolhardy and courageous souls will try to hold the bridge for the old Republic? By what spectacles will the plebeians be distracted and cajoled? How will the elites be distracted and co-opted? These are the quotidian, fascinating details of life in America today.

Someday, all of this that matters so very much to us will be viewed through the sepia shades of nostalgia. The questions of the age will be buried under the easy answers called history and the spiritual truths called myth. But before that day comes the living will, as always, stumble and second-guess, persevere and, perhaps, prevail.

De Spectaculis hopes to capture some of this struggle.

Furthermore, Martial will never, ever refer to himself in the third person ever again. Unless absolutely necessary.