Kafka at GTMO

“(H)e realized at once that he shouldn’t have spoken out loud and that by doing so he had, in a sense, acknowledge the stranger’s right to oversee his actions.” This quote from The Trial epitomizes the catch-22 that counsel for GTMO detainees now find themselves in with respect to WikiLeaks documents. “Anyone surfing the Internet this week is free to read leaked documents about the prisoners held by the American military at Guantánamo…. Except, that is, for the lawyers who represent the prisoners,” reads Scott Shane’s front-page Times piece (“Detainees’ Lawyers Can’t Click on Leaked Documents,” NYT, 4/26/11). Kafka couldn’t have written a better line in his famed novel, in which The Law itself is both a pervasive, unseen force and the main element of the parable “Before the Law,” a significant element of the novel. But before we jump up and down with self-congratulatory outrage at the absurdities of “the system,” we might consider another point raised in the penultimate graph of the Times piece, which lays out the problems that the Justice Department is faced with. Summarizing the thinking of Peter Spiro, a law professor at Temple, Shane notes, “The law is clear: only a document that is properly declassified loses its protections. And if the government ruled that classified documents disclosed to the public were automatically declassified, that would simply create a more powerful incentive for disgruntled employees to leak.” Even Kafka might have thrown up hand hands in the face of this anti-parable.

Syriously

“We’re talking about a country whose economy is the size of Pittsburgh’s,” Times reporter David Sanger quotes an official, “who spoke on the condition of anonymity,” as saying about Syria (“U.S. Faces a Challenge in Trying to Punish Syria,” NYT, 4/26/11). “There are things you can do to amp up the volume,” the official goes on to say about the effectiveness of U.S. sanctions, “but the financial impact is slim.” Sanger compares the difficulty of U.S. relations with Syria to similar impasses with North Korea and Myanmar. Where do sanctions work? What wealthy societies have succumbed to sanctions in order to preserve their hegemony? Human rights abuses in China have intermittently been addressed in summit conferences, but who is going to relinquish market share to make a statement against an economic giant? If we embargo China’s microprocessors, they’ll always find someone else willing to buy them. So you don’t attack the strong, since there’s no real way to make them weak, and you can’t threaten the weak, since the result is nil. Our embargo of Cuba has gone on for decades and has merely made a poor country poorer. Nietzsche said that what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger. All the resistance in the world is like a weight pulling a muscle taut. So what to do? We end up as children back in the playground, frightened of the big kids and powerless to do anything to the little squirts, who realize that their power lies in their weakness.

Midday Quiz Show on Barbershop Flatscreen

Here are some questions posed to contestants on a midday television quiz show: What is the name of the Greek runner who ran the first marathon? What is the show that the man who blackmailed David Letterman worked for before he worked for David Letterman, and what company was it owned by? What is the name of the song that has the line “here is my handle/here is my spout?” What animal has an exoskeleton identified with chitin? What famous actor published a book called My Life? Quiz shows are not what they were back in the days of payola, when a famed Columbia academic named Charles Van Doren appeared on a show called Twenty One (and later confessed to the U.S. Congress that he had been given the answers ahead of time) and masters of ceremonies for other shows on both radio and TV were iconic figures like Eddie Cantor and Jack Paar. The top questions today are likely to be rewarded not with $64,000 (as in the old $64,000 Question) but with $1,000,000, and the stage set for the above-mentioned midday show has a futuristic cast that makes it hard to tell if the cheering audience is a digital creation or real. There is an almost mawkish familiarity between the host, a would-be Simon Cowell who skates on the thin ice between news anchoring and method acting, and his guests, who seem to be chosen for their lack of distinction in anything. There aren’t too many Columbia classics scholars in the bullpen for this 15 minutes of fame. It’s hard to imagine where the contestants for today’s shows come from. The two who appear on this show seem clueless and filled with that hopeless eagerness that compels them to give the old college try and constantly embrace the host. A heavyset platinum blond describes herself as a PhD candidate and walks away with a pittance after getting practically nothing right. The rules of the show are simple. You can take your winnings at any time or you can risk almost everything by going for increasingly bigger stakes. At one point a young man who precedes the blond is nine questions away from the million-dollar question, which may not seem like much unless you don’t know much about anything. 

Atomized

According to a recent Times obit, Evelyn Einstein, the granddaughter of Albert Einstein who purportedly was adopted by Einstein’s son Hans Albert and his wife Frieda, “had been told as a child that she was actually the child of Albert Einstein and a ballet dancer…” (“Evelyn Einstein Dies at 70; Shaped by a Link to Fame,” NYT, 4/18/11). Einstein had a strange life according to the Times obit. She was fluent in many tongues. She was a protestor against HUAC, and studied at Berkeley. Despite “a master’s in medieval literature…she worked as a dogcatcher, a cult deprogrammer and a police officer.” Some women complain about being sex objects. Einstein’s problem seemed to be her name, which one would assume had an aphrodisiac effect on certain scientists and intellectuals. “Ms. Einstein,” the Times reported, “was married for 13 years to Grover Krantz, an anthropology professor at Washington State University, who became known for trying to prove the existence of Bigfoot.” Perhaps her most noteworthy act in a life that, according to the Times, even included “a period of homelessness,” was research that led to the unearthing of a trove of Einstein’s correspondences concerning his relationships with women. Einstein was revealed in some of these as being far from the quirky and ethereal genius with messed-up hair. “You will expect no affection from me,” the Times quoted one letter as saying, “You must leave my bedroom or study at once without protesting when I ask you to.” Energy is equal to mass times the square of the speed of light was Einstein’s great equation, but Evelyn, like her grandfather, seemed to have trouble finding a unified theory.

Easter

Why is Easter coming so exceptionally late this year? (Last year Easter was on April 4th, this year it’s the 24th. In 2012, it will be April 8th; in 2013, March 31st; and in 2014, it will go back to April 20th.) Jason DeRusha of WCCO-TV provided an explanation. "The simple answer about when Easter happens is that it’s always the Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox.... The process dates to the fourth century, when people around the world were celebrating the rebirth of Christ on different dates. The Council of Nicea wanted to get everyone in line. They set an official ecclesiastical equinox on March 21. Then they looked for the first full moon. But the full moon can fall on two different dates, depending on where you live. So in 1583, Christoph Clavius came up with a calculation to standardize the Paschal Full moon. Easter falls on the next Sunday." But what is even more fascinating is the way religions reflect archetypal yearnings that follow a seasonal, diurnal or biological cycle. Passover, the date of which is always 15 days after Rosh Chodesh (the full moon) in the month of Nissan, which also came later than usual this year on the Gregorian calendar, celebrates freedom from bondage, while Easter represents resurrection (Davinci’s "Last Supper" may actually depict a seder). Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Confucianism all partake of festivities that reflect the cycles of birth and death. In the winter months, when the earth is further from the sun, gestation takes place, but later, when the cycle changes, the days grow longer and we begin to bask in the warmth of the sun’s radiation, there is rebirth. Like the confused and weary lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we are given a chance to live again.

A Painful Case

Wednesday's Times front-page story, “Ohio CountyLosing Its Young to Painkillers’ Grip,” illustrates a sad and strangely futuristic trend through the description of a single, painful case. The first thing that grabs you about the piece is the arresting headline. Alcohol and drugs are not uncommon news items, but it’s less common to talk about painkillers. Soma was the fictional drug that helped people flee a harsh reality in Brave New World (1932). But the very real OxyContin has become all the rage in Portsmouth, in Ohio’s Scioto County, where it’s taken not for the physical pain for which it’s normally prescribed but apparently to cure the pain of living. The Times piece tells the story of Nina Mannering: “In January 2010, Ms. Mannering was killed less than a mile from her parents’ house. A man broke into the house where she was staying with a 65-year-old veteran who had access to prescriptions and shot them both, looking for pills, the police said. She was 29. Her daughter, who was 8 at the time, watched.” The Times describes the Mannerings as occupying a deceptively “pretty hollow” where “11 houses on their country road were dealing the drug (including a woman in her 70s called Granny)....” Nina’s brother Chad eventually became an addict and the parents ultimately exhausted their savings “on legal fees and rehab programs.” The way Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise describes the story is very different from your ordinary shoot ‘em up, crack and cocaine tale. “Judy Mannering,” she writes, “discovered her daughter’s body at dusk, bathed in the light of a flickering, soundless television.” This telling of Nina Mannering’s demise reads less like a murder scene than like an account of someone who became overly sedated at a funeral.

Facts Among the Flowers

“Facts Amongst the Flowers” is the title of Mary Beard’s review of Leonardo de Arrizabalaga y Prado’s The Emperor Elagabalus (TLS, 2/25/11). The illustration for the piece is Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting “Roses of Heliogabalus” from 1888. In it, Alma-Tadema depicts the perversity of the little-known emperor as he watches guests at a lavish banquet suffocate from the rose pedals he’s lavished on them. The reproduction is an uncharacteristically dramatic graphic element in the otherwise staid photo editing of the TLS. But it’s fitting for the review of a book about a creature of excess whose deeds, while not coming under the purview of First Century historians like Tacitus and Suetonius, still, according to Beard, give one pause for thought. “Did he really serve 600 ostrich brains all in one meal?” writes Beard, “Or raise a laugh by feeding his less distinguished guests with wooden models of the food that was being eaten at high table? (At least it would have been better than dying under the flower pedals.) Also implausible are many of his reported political and religious schemes, from his putative establishment of a senate for women to his mass campaign of child sacrifice. By comparison with all this, Nero’s murder of his mother and Caligula’s threats to make his favorite horse a consul hardly raise an eyebrow.” Beard points out that while Elagabalus makes a cameo appearance in The Pirates of Penzance, invoking the lyric, “I quote in elegiacs the crimes of Heliogabalus,” he’s otherwise featured in the Augustan History, one of the prime repositories for information on “The third century AD, with its baffling succession of short-lived emperors, repeated coups and mutinies….” Whether apocryphal or not, what’s most astonishing about Elagabalus’s crimes is that they were committed by the time he was 18, at which time he was purportedly “murdered in a palace coup, instigated by his grandmother and the Praetorian Guard….”