That was Eve Fairbanks describing in The New Republic Gen. David Petraeus at yesterday’s Senate appearance.
Ms. Fairbanks was talking about the verbal pantomimic performances of the senators as well as Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, and the, ultimately, meaninglessness of the whole exercise:
But of all the posturers, Petraeus and Crocker were the worst. Their mode of self-protection was linguistic: Working in concert, they tried to brand this phase of the Iraq war with two specific words, “fragile” and “reversible.” “Such inflection points underscore the fragility of the situation in Iraq,” said Crocker. “Like so much else, Iraq’s economy is fragile … I must underscore, however, that these gains are fragile and reversible … Progress is real, though still fragile …” “The progress made since last spring is fragile and reversible,” Petraeus echoed. “Fragile and reversible,” snorted California Democrat Barbara Boxer, after the two were all done. “Those are terms of art.”
She was right. “Fragile” and “reversible” were consciously, artfully crafted words, meant to evoke a military and political situation so precariously balanced it cannot be touched. (If a hospital patient’s condition was described as “fragile,” would you try to move him?) It’s a Catch-22, as Fred Kaplan puts it: “If things in Iraq get worse, we can’t cut back, lest things get worse still; if things get better, we can’t cut back, lest we risk reversing all our gains.”
I had a favorite Petraeus line from the hearing, which contained no mention of “fragile” or “reversible,” but, I think, best revealed his real state of mind. “It is very easy to dislike where we are and be frustrated by it,” he told a red-faced George Voinovich, “but we are where we are.”
We are where we are, it is what it is: Call it the joyless Panglossianism of Iraq, in which we dislike the state of things simultaneously believe it represents the best of all possible worlds. Our imaginations become so captured by the disaster that could happen if we dramatically alter the way things are that we start just drifting along, aggressively preferring the status quo. It’s an attitude that seems to infect even the most ambitious Iraq fixers in the end, and made Petraeus and Crocker shadows of the confident men that appeared before Congress in September.
Perhaps more than anything else, Petraeus and Crocker’s performance reminded me of this exchange from Waiting for Godot:
ESTRAGON: I sometimes wonder if we wouldn’t have been better off alone, each one for himself. …
VLADIMIR (without anger): It’s not certain.
ESTRAGON: No, nothing is certain.Who can break the hold of this attitude?
Check out this story from The New York Times, circa 1916, about legendary Suffragette icon and former Rep. Jeannette Rankin, R-Mont., the first woman ever elected to Congress.
On the other hand, the language is not nearly as shocking as you find in the paper’s coverage of race.
The candidate herself spoke to NPR in an interview about Iraq and the primary election.
In light of our recent posts regarding the racial overtones of the Vogue magazine’s recent cover on LeBron James and Gisele Bundchen, The New Republic magazine has weighed in with an edition with the above illustration.
I cannot, for the life of me, figure out what that cover illustrates in this TNR issue. The issue has a vaguely environmental theme. But is this how one illustrate environmental issues? It’s truly a head-scratching cover.
I can’t and I won’t say anything.
Alfa Romeo 8C Spider
A long time ago, despite being a virtually homeless and starving college student, I decided to go test drive an Alfa Romeo Quad. The car’s $20,000-ish sticker price was way beyond anything I could have afforded, had I food in my belly and a place to live. This was in St. Louis, Mo., and the salesman was suspicious (I had driven up in a blue but mostly rusty 1969 Ford Mustang convertible) but he handed me the car keys anyway.
(It looked something like this)
I swear the car purred and jumped as I made to put the key in the ignition. I cannot describe the sensation that pulsed through my body as I sat in the plush leather of this red thing. The sensation went to my head, giddy I would not be driving off the lot in that monster.
For years, the Alfa Romeos (especially the Quads) were my favorite cars. Even when declining sales forced them to abandon the North American market. The car has, apparently, seen a resurgence in Europe in recent years and is ready to try our shores once again.
I’m older now, with a family so I won’t be buying a sports car anything soon, if ever. So, it is small consolation that Fiat, the new owners of Alfa Romeo, has chosen as their re-entry vehicle the 8C Spider. The base price of this model (a 450-horsepower V-8 coupe head turner) is $200,000.
Talk about inflation!
but I once saw homeless people mocking John DeLorean as he walked along 5th Avenue in Manhattan.
(Photo by Mark Rabiner for The New York Times) Lauren J. Reilly and her 1981 DeLorean DMC-12.
This story in The New York Times reminded me of DeLorean:
Auto Ego
Ask Me About My Flux Capacitor by RICHARD S. CHANG, April 6, 2008
*Lauren J. Reilly*
Manhattan
Occupation: Advertising producer
Car: 1981 DeLorean DMC-12
Date Acquired: 2004
THINGS happen when you own a DeLorean, the sports car turned ultimate time machine in the “Back to the Future” films.
The car was larger than life. Its creator, John Z. DeLorean, was a self-promoting swinger in tailored suits who dated models and Hollywood starlets. He was caught in an F.B.I. sting with 55 pounds of cocaine, which the authorities said he planned to sell to prevent the collapse of his company. Though he was acquitted, the trial further cemented his name and his car as irresistible emblems of pop culture.
“Having a DeLorean is like 5 percent being a rock star,” said Lauren J. Reilly, a bubbly 31-year-old producer at the Deutsch advertising agency who owns a 1981 DeLorean DMC-12 — the only model DeLorean built (and for just two years).
It was an unseasonably warm winter Sunday when Ms. Reilly drove her DeLorean in a several-block radius around Midtown Manhattan, where she lives and keeps her car. Tourists were out in full force, convening at every street corner with directionless awe. In front of Radio City Music Hall, a tall man in a black raincoat stared at the DeLorean, eyes squinting, as he strode up the block. In Times Square, a cluster of red-faced teenagers pointed, bursting into a fit of giggles.
Ms. Reilly expressed some disappointment. Usually, she said, passers-by are hard-charging the car with their cameras set on rapid fire. But not today; she settled for points and stares.
Read More
Stuart Noble in The Agonist, one of my favorite blogs, did a post last week that I only became aware of this morning (I usually visit daily but . . .). It’s on the LeBron James Vogue magazine cover that I first blogged about a couple of weeks ago. It is very well done. He drew on more sources and wrote a very good post.
Feministe and Jezebel have posted thought-provoking pieces. And Bag News Notes, another one of my absolute favorite blogs, unbeknownst to me, had also already weighed in.
I am not sure if this changes anything, but it is available at Vogue. Here is the Vogue story. Other images in the package:
Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps and model Caroline Trentini.
Rollerboarder Shaun White and model Daria Werbowy.
Model Raquel Zimmermann and Olympic discuss thrower Jared Rome.
Model Doutzen Kroes and Olympic speed skater Apollo Anton Ohno
The image below came from the comments section on the post.
Here’s how the commenter, Zuma, described how the image came about:
when lisa and i first got together, she told me about a book by john tigges that she liked, ‘monster’, so i drew an illo of it for her. the monster’s love for the female protagonist was about providing, hence i named the drawing provide. it was one of extremely few such files i did not color. god knows why. i just knew there was an unusual amount of factors at play in the piece.
Noble had this to say about that image:
Thanks for the observation
It’s an interesting sketch but I don’t think the emotion of your image resembles at all the negative cultural heritage which I argue the LeBron image represents.
stuart noble April 2, 2008 – 2:27am
Patrick Boivin is a French Canadian autodidact director. He started by drawing comic books 15 years ago, and quickly discovered that it was faster to tell a story with video. He gradually became a moviemaker . . . the palimpsest copped this movie from his YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/PatrickBoivin).
I will post more in the future, if I have his permission.
For most of what you can see on his channel, he did the light, the camera, the directing, the editing and the special effects . . . For some of them, he also made the sound and the music.