Jack Fear Doesn't Love Me Anymore

'tother day I had a good long ego-surf, as is my occasional wont: like everybody else, I like to know who's quoting me without permission, and what people are saying about me (more about that later)—but there's more to it than that. While my presence on the Web (however modest) means that the vast majority of the 585 references returned by Google are indeed to me, I'm far more interested in the ones that aren't—in those people with whom I, by dumb luck, happen to share a name—in the obscure connections of fate and chance.

These references to these other people with my name are like an alternate-history novel, or past-life regression exercise—a glimpse at alternate selves, lives lived in parallel. A life as a New Zealander, born 1883: I had a brother named George, in that life, which is just exquisite, considering who gave me my name in this one.

And the odd little patterns, and the puzzle of trying to figure out which hits refer to the same people—this one, for instance: my band and I apparently played the 1953 New Year's Eve Ball at Colston Hall in Bristol, England... and many years later, this notice in the newsletter of Trinity School, a C of E secondary school in Teignmouth, Devon:

We were sorry to say farewell to Jack Fear, who retired at Easter after many years teaching woodwind at Trinity. Jack was very much involved with the early days of the Swing Band and he has always been a tremendous ambassador for the School. We wish him a long and happy retirement.

Same guy? I'd like to think so: wild young bebop Turk settles down and becomes a beloved teacher—it's a bit Mr. Holland's Opus, yeah?

Churches, naturally enough, loom large in my lives: my name's on a plaque in St. Agatha's, at Rudmore, Portsmouth, for dying in World War II: and I'm a parishioner at Trinity Church, (that name again!) in Houghton, Michigan, though apparently I actually live in nearby Bootjack, where I inveigh against gun control in letters to the local newspaper. Ahem.

And I'm a registered New Forest Pony breeder, in Norley Wood, Lymington, Hampshire (where my brand number is 1471), as well as a dinosaur-loving under-eight soccer player from Treorchy Rhondda, South Wales.

That should be lives enough for any man.

Meanwhile, back in this one and only life that I'm a-living, I really have no idea what to say to this, over at Pin's blog, the brilliant Batman Doesn't Love Me Anymore...

The arrival of [someone I know offline] on Barbelith is scaring me.... But then that’s an obvious reaction to have, and what’s far less obvious, and far more dumb, is my reaction to Jack Fear’s reaction to him. The good Mr. Fear, amongst other things, hasn’t bitten his head off. He’s possibly made it all a bit red and sore with his scratchyscratchy beard, but he hasn’t bitten it. I don’t get either from him, instead existing in an emotionally stunted state of pinning [sic]. Frankly, Mr. Fear is just one of those shockingly... something people, and I can’t put my finger on it is about him, or why it rankles me so much that Barber’s getting the attention and I’m not.

Reassurances of affection to Pin, who should hardly need them, as I loves all my children equally—and I did sort of name the protagonist of an unfinished novel for him, after all.

Then there's lovely lovely Andrew Wheeler, writing dismissively in the aftermath of my being banned from The V: when my name came up in a thread about lockouts & gaggings, beloved big-time comics writer Gail Simone asked, "Who is Jack Fear?" To which Mr. Wheeler responded...

I think that's the only name he's known by. He's just some guy, not really remarkable...

Is that irony I smell? (Andrew who?)

...although I think he fancies himself as a righteous firebrand of wisdom and anger.

Fair cop.

He was banned for his frankly rather over-the-top attack on Harry Potter fans.

I blame Gillen.

Or rather, that was the stated reason.

Oh.

Ouch.

Wheeler doesn't love me anymore.

Divine Mercy Sunday

See, that's what I'm talking about.

In other news, my one-man social protest—refusing to get a good night's sleep until international tensions have been ratcheted down from near-apocalyptic levels—continues apace, with no end in sight.

Where Time Itself Was Mad And Far Too Strong

I wish Blogger had a feature to allow you to customize the date on your posts. I mean, it does, to an extent—Thursday, April 17 or 4.17.2003 or even 20030417. Had I my druthers, though, today's post would be headed Maundy Thursday.

When I was in academia, the year moved in a slow march—Fall semester, Spring semester—and so the years went, two by two and one by one: Commencement in May felt like New Year's Day. The business cycle is a nervous waltz—three over four. The Moon moves slow and steady, thin to fat and back again.

For five years I served the Church directly, and gave my life over to the rhythms of the liturgical calendar, the feasts and cycles, the forty- and fifty-day blocks that chart her course, and their peculiar poetry marked my days. Shrovetide, Triduum, Eastertide, Ascension Thursday, Pentecost, Corpus Christi... Septuagaesima, Sexuagaesima, Quinquagaesima... Christ The King is when Winter comes a-howlin' in: Assumption marks high high Summer. Advent, Gaudete, Nativity, Innocents, Holy Family, Epiphany, Presentation: my book of days.

The year since I stepped down as choirmaster has passed in a blur. It's been measured by events, rather than mile markers: the birth of our son, our epic trip West, the places we've been and the things that we've done. Internal measures. The external markers—holidays, birthdays, anniversaries—have all caught me unawares this year.

I've torn away the frame of reference I held for half a decade, and have not settled into another. The days are rhythmless, random. Weeks pass and I wonder what the hell I've been doing with this time, this precious time, my one and only life.

Living it, of course, just like always—but living with nothing to measure it against.

A Time To Speak And A Time To Be Silent

Maybe now is the moment to take a piece of kind advice, offered with a sincere heart...

...and just shut up.

No Time To Say "I Told You So"

Though I often do not agree with him, I read Andrew Sullivan every day. I'm a politics junkie, after all, and Sullivan gets the best links. But there's more to it than that: I read Sullivan, a free-market neoconservative and tireless champion of Western culture, whereas I do not read much progressive-slash-liberal commentary.

Why's that? In part because I already know what I think; in part because I can't imagine anything more boring than a roomful of people with whom I unquestioningly agree; and in part because reading dispatches from the other side of the ideological fence flexes my mental muscles, and sharpens my own arguments. When a commentator's stance is poorly argued or based on disinformation (as in the hateful poison-pen columns of Jeff Jacoby, smirking poster-boy for xenophobic sloppy thinking), it points up the flaws in the conservative argument: when it's thoughtfully considered and well-written (most of Sullivan's work), it shows the weaknesses in my own—leading me to rethink, reconsider, develop counter-arguments and stronger positions, which is as it should be: opinions are transitory, and personal politics should be a work-in-progress.

So I have great respect for Sullivan, even as he and I disagree—which is okay: people of good will can look at the same set of facts and arrive at different conclusions, and it's a second-rate intellect indeed that must assume that anyone who fails to agree with him must perforce be either evil or stupid.

Which is why I've found the increasingly shrill and hysterical tone of Sullivan's war writing so distressing and distasteful, even as it culminates in a burst of hooting triumphalism. This is what we used to call "winning ugly."

That said, the man's taking a hiatus this week to get his bearings back, just as reconstruction begins and he could be crowing the loudest: a brief holiday in Selfawaria, then. Bully for him.

...But Time Will Show the Wiser

So what happened? When crunch time came in Iraq, the sort of suicidal prolongation-of-agony that Sandlin talks about simply, against reasonable expectation, failed to happen on any large scale (although we may be seeing its beginnings in Tikrit, where the Ba'ath party faithful who have the most to fear from the inevitable settling-of-accounts are bunkered: but by withdrawing and concentrating itself into a single city even as arrangements to install a civilian administration are being put into place, the Ba'ath party has essentially made itself irrelevant. Tikrit may persist for some time as a war zone inside a pacified country, in practical terms a separate conflict to the wider issues of reconstruction—within Iraq, but not of it).

So how did this come to be? How did Iraq manage to stagger-step outside the patterns of History, which may not exactly repeat itself, but has certainly been known to rhyme? Is this outcome a validation for the Pentagon strategy, that instant cliché "shock and awe," itself an extension of the Powell Doctrine of "overwhelming force"?

Well, yes and no. Overwhelming Allied force was in evidence in WWII also, but was not in itself enough to bring the Axis to heel, not enough to prevent or override the "collective slippage of the sense of objective truth in the face of approaching disaster" that led the fascist powers to continue their war effort long past any point of diminishing returns.

The factor that has made the most difference in this war, I think—the true "overwhelming force" at play—is Information.

This war, more than any previous, even more than Gulf War I, has been mass-communicated. The Internet, which wasn't really a player in Desert Storm, was a primary source of war info this time around, with 24-hour live camera streams, minute-by-minute newsfeed updates, and warblogging from inside Iraq: and of even greater importance, psychologically, al-Jazeera was there to provide reporting that could not be reasonably accused of pro-American bias.

Information is not the same as Truth, of course: but if nothing else the vast flow of raw information coming out of the war zone proved the limits of spin control. You can spin the meaning of the facts, but the facts remain that metric fuckloads of Iraqi military targets were getting blown to bits with minimal losses of Coalition materiel, that lots of Iraqis were dying and lots of Coalition soldiers, well, weren't—in short, that Iraqi victory was in no way just around the corner. Whether you characterized this state of affairs as a liberation of an oppressed people or as an imperialist aggression, as a victory for democracy or as a defeat for pan-Arabism, you had to consider the same set of facts—and those who attempted to deny those facts outright were laughed out of town (even as you had to chuckle at their chutzpah).

This makes me think that perhaps the "dreamy paper war" is finally a thing of the past—that it was unrelenting, ubiquitous media coverage—from hostile, friendly, and neutral sources, all saying the same thing in different ways—that really turned the tide in this war, simply by making it impossible to take refuge in the fantasy of a sudden reversal of fortune.

So yeah, the Fourth Estate won this war, for good or ill.
You know, just to give the filthy journos another reason to feel self-important.

Time Makes Fools Of Us All

Take a break from warblogging, and warblogging becomes irrelevant.

Well, no. But it's funny, almost... with the events of the last week or so, all the stuff I've had sitting on my hard drive no longer seems so damned relevant, does it?

Still, in the interest of fairness (to whom? to myself? yeah, I guess so)—and also because these are some pretty good reads—here's some thoughts on what might have happened....

Liberation Theology...

...by which I mean to say that it seems to be an article of faith, in Administration and neocon circles, that the people of Iraq will lay down their arms and welcome Coalition forces with, if not flowers and open arms, then at least a grudging goodwill—that the Coalition will be greeted as liberators, rather than invaders.

I mean, it only makes sense: whatever the Iraqi people may think of Americans, there's no way that day-to-day life for the average man in the street could possibly be worse under even a US puppet government than under Saddam Hussein. Everybody knows which side their bread's buttered on, right?

Right?
Well...
What would I do, if it were my country that was being "liberated"?

Good question. I've heard it posed and answered by various lefty commentators: a recent Ted Rall screed conceded that although "[m]illions of Americans consider Bush to be a hateful, extremist dimwit who seized power ... in an unconstitutional judicial coup d'état ... even the most passionately anti-Bush Americans would eagerly join their W-loving compatriots to fight any army that invaded the United States in the name of some theoretical 'liberation.' I know I would." Steven Grant says similar: "Is it any great surprise that Iraqis are not surrendering in droves, and seem to resent being invaded, even when we tell them it's for their own good? (I mean, I don't like our President, and I'd be strongly inclined to resist any foreign invasion to remove him from power.)"

I did a little thought experiment: Try to imagine the most benign invader possible, one with a cultural history of being peaceable, level-headed, and benevolent. Imagine the United States being invaded by Canada.

Imagine Canadian troops massed at the Northern borders, bent on liberating us from harsh market-based economics, coming to bring universal health care, arts funding, and poutine to their benighted Southern neighbors. Would I be tossing rose petals before the tanks, or would I be hurling Molotovs and shrieking Die, maple-niggers, die?

Tough call. But consider, too, the inevitability of defeat. It's obvious the Iraqi army is shamefully outgunned and undertrained, and cannot possibly prevail: even delaying tactics are essentially pointless, as the Hussein regime has no real friends in the region who might come to its aid. So the sensible thing is to back the winning horse, right?

You'd think so. Except that History isn't exactly teeming with examples of nations doing the sensible thing. Here's just a brief extract from Lee Sandlin's long and vitally important psychohistory of World War II:

...[B]y some unmistakable point—the autumn of 1942 at the latest—[the Axis powers] should have understood that they'd been wrong and that their prospects for long-term victory were inexorably zeroing out. They still had the economic and military strength to sustain their armies in the field indefinitely, no matter how grim the strategic situation became, but by any rational calculation of the odds, they should have begun hinting through backwater diplomatic channels that they were willing to negotiate a cease-fire. Neither Germany nor Japan ever did so. Not until the last days of the war did either government even begin to consider the possibility of a negotiated settlement—not until they had absolutely nothing left to negotiate with.

But then, that's the point. A rational calculation of the odds is a calculation by the logic of peace. War has a different logic. A kind of vast feyness can infect a military bureaucracy when it's losing a war, a collective slippage of the sense of objective truth in the face of approaching disaster. In the later years of World War II the bureaucracies of the Axis ... gave up any pretense of realism about their situation. Their armies were fighting all over the world with desperate berserker fury, savagely contesting every inch of terrain, hurling countless suicide raids against Allied battalions ... while the bureaucrats behind the lines gradually retreated into a dreamy paper war where they were [perpetually] on the brink of a triumphant reversal of fortune....

Not everybody succumbed to these fantasies. But another, even stronger pressure worked against those who understood how hopeless the situation really was: they knew that defeat meant accountability.... [and that] every additional day the war lasted—no matter how pointless, no matter how phantasmal the hope of victory, no matter how desperate and horrible the conditions on the battlefield—was another day of judgment successfully deferred.

This is the dreadful logic that comes to control a lot of wars. ... The losers prolong their agony as much as possible, because they're convinced the alternative is worse.

Set aside some time and read the rest. It's unmissable.