Things To Think About Before We Blow Sh*t Up

James Fallows pointed me to this depressingly smart piece by Stephen M. Walt, up now at the Foreign Policy website.  Walt gives us 10 lessons we should learn from our Iraq fiasco, from number 1 — we lost — through the point Fallows highlights, number 3, in which we learn what happens when the political and media Villages rush to outdo each other in feckless groupthink and morally bankrupt cheerleading folly.*

Me, I’ll  pony up Walt’s conclusion:

Because it is not clear if any U.S. approach would have succeeded at an acceptable cost, the real lesson of Iraq is not to do stupid things like this again.

The U.S. military has many virtues, but it is not good at running other countries. And it is not likely to get much better at it with practice. We have a capital-intensive army that places a premium on firepower, and we are a country whose own unusual, melting-pot history has made us less sensitive to the enduring power of nationalism, ethnicity, and other local forces.

Furthermore, because the United States is basically incredibly secure, it is impossible to sustain public support for long and grinding wars of occupation. Once it becomes clear that we face a lengthy and messy struggle, the American people quite properly begin to ask why we are pouring billions of dollars and thousands of lives into some strategic backwater. And they are right.

So my last lesson is that we shouldn’t spend too much time trying to figure out how to do this sort of thing better, because we’re never going to do it well and it will rarely be vital to our overall security. Instead, we ought to work harder on developing an approach to the world that minimizes the risk of getting ourselves into this kind of war again.

In between Walt’s insistence that we honestly confront our loss in Iraq and this rather pious last hope, this short essay examines many important, depressing truths.  Read the whole thing.  We’ll need to keep reminding selves and others of these desperately hard-won realizations, given that the usual suspects, only to willing to spend somebody else’s blood, are urging us into the next war.

(And yes. I know I’ve posted this tune before. You gonna make something of it?)

*No matter how often I watch the Mustache of Understanding talk about “American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Bagdad,” his faux-macho willingness to send other folks kids to blow up still other folks and their kids makes me mouth vomit.

Image:  Jacob Cornelisz. van Oostsanen, (attr.) Laughing Fool, c. 1500.

Over There

While I have so recently been reminded by our friends in the 101st Chairborne that I’m some arugula-chomping, word-chopping, bubble-bound faux-American, it happens that even folks from my particular corner of Alinskystan talk to people whose daily life is as real as it gets.

Which is to say that one of my friends most often in my thoughts is an infantryman to the bone, decades in uniform, absolutely dedicated to the idea of service and his men.  He’s an enlisted man, on his third tour in the Iraq/Afghanistan long war — and you can take this to the bank:  if you or your child had to hump up some hill where folks sought to do him ill, you’d want my friend there too.  He’s one of nature’s sergeants, I’m trying to say, the kind of guy who knows what he’s doing to some very deep level, and takes the use of that knowledge as an obligation he owes anyone under gaze.

In December, I wrote him a quick note — just a “happy holidays – hope you’re OK” kind of thing.  When I got his reply, I asked for permission to post it here — which I’ve just received.

My friend speaks for himself. I’m not going to gloss it further except to say this:  I’m past tolerating being told by comfortable American Exceptionalists about the necessity of the next war, or the war after that.  My friend and his friends carry the load for all such  Dulce et Decorum posturing.

So.  Notes from Over There:

I am still in Afghanistan in [Deleted] province at an altitude of [Deleted] feet. We have no heat in our bee huts (plywood shacks that sleep six), the temperature at night is in the low teens. They tell us they are working on getting a heater.

It is a tough tour.  We lost six men to an IED three days before Christmas, [not his unit] we worked closely together and I knew them well. We have lost twenty Americans since I arrived. Today I was on an air mission we flew high into the mountains in a heavily Taliban controlled area, luckily we had no trouble. War is a strange thing, going out on missions almost everyday and not knowing if it will be your last day on earth.

We work with the provincial governors and sub governors to build roads, bridges, schools, and give out humanitarian aid, but the leaders steal most of the money and little gets down to the people. I am out in the boonies, we fire artillery all day and night and they rocket us. Soldiers…are killed and wounded almost weekly, the call goes out over the loud speaker all this type or that type of blood report to the aid station. I have carried wounded on to helicopters in the field and carried others off the helicopters back at base. It always makes my eyes water and heart hurt to see their broken bodies. It is surreal. I will finish my tour in [Deleted], I had a short leave home in [Deleted]. It is interesting; we raid villages at night and capture terrorist responsible for the bombings, we caught the ones who killed the Polish the night before last.

I am fine. I am an old soldier, and still tough, I plan missions and lead them and so far, thank God, I have not lost one of my men. The fighting in Ramadi Iraq was more bloody, but this place is no joke either. I will never understand why nations go to war, I know the politics, countries do bad things, but it is so ugly. I now have a collection of faces of men that I knew who have been killed in action that live in my head. I am sorry to write like this but I guess I was feeling philosophical.

I hope you join me in sending every good wish and hope to my friend.  That is all.

Image:  Rembrandt van Rijn, Old Soldier, undated — first half of the seventeenth century.

All the John McCains I Thought I Knew Are Dead.

There is a video that kind of came and went in the flurry of last week’s election noise, the wardrobe that cost three times the median income for a US family and all that.  It’s a French interview with the then young John McCain as a POW.

He’s clearly still hurting — a lot — from his injuries and he struggles to express himself a lot of the time.  He can muster up a little humor:  prisoner’s food “isn’t Paris” and more sense of loss and lonliness.  The passage at the end of the video where he tries to come up with a message for his wife would move anyone with a pulse, even as committed a partisan and McCain ’08 loather as myself.

Watching it, having just turned fifty myself, with, as President Clinton said, the awareness that I now have more yesterdays than tomorrows, and watching my own eight year old son, I was reminded of these lines from a poem I read just a few days ago.

Children vanish.

Adults — specters

of dead children.

(From “Children, Always Dying” by Aaron Zeitlin, translated from the Yiddish by Richard J. Fein in his upcoming collection With Everything We’ve Got:  A personal anthology of Yiddish poetry.)

I do not wish John McCain well at all in his current endeavor.  He has run a scurrilous, disgraceful campaign, putting the country at risk not just with his meretricious selection of Gov. Palin as his running mate, but in the way he has surrendered his candidacy to worst impulses of his party in recent weeks.  He lacks the temperament, the judgment, and even, this blog has argued, the right kind of experience to lead the United States.

But, but, but….

…he was a child once, a young man.  He suffered, and he had then a clarity, brutally enforced, about what does and does not matter.  While I fear for the country for McCain’s actions over the last few months, what saddens me most about his campaign is not the damage he is doing to the rest of us, but  the destruction his pursuit of this prize has done to that younger McCain.

That man died in the birthing of the catastrophically diminished one that we now see.

Here’s the video for those that missed it:

Why understanding e-mail might matter for a President

Lovable Liberal has a very smart post up that drills into Bob Woodward’s new book.  LL focuses on the claimt that the reduction of violence in Iraq derives not from the so-called surge, but from, primus inter pares, a targeted assassination program.

That’s part’s been well covered, of course, but LL makes a deeper argument:    such a campaign requires — as Woodward himself implied (see LL’s post for details) — a major technological effort to extract the intelligence needed to track and fix the intended targets.

If so, and I think LL is himself on target here, then this is a genuine success for an approach to war that emphasizes the use of machines, money and smarts instead of our side’s lives to achieve our ends.

It also — and here I’m going past LL’s argument — provides another reason why John McCain would be a terrible choice for commander in chief right now.

That is: by this time I think even the neaderthal wing of the blogosphere would be forced to concede that McCain is not exactly what you would call a technology-savvy indivdual.  I mean, we’re not talking about a mad lack of gaming skillz, or a peculiar lack of interest in Python coding. E-mail, man, e-mail.  This is someone who as of a month or so ago still had to have his staffers explain that he was “aware of the internet.”

I’m so relieved.

*

Now this stuff got a flurry of attention at the time McCain’s chisel-and-slate approach to modern communications first bubbled to the surface, but Woodward’s story and LL’s gloss point to why this stuff actually matters.

Recall that McCain has famously said that he “knows how to win wars.”

Actually, as this latest story suggests, he does not.

What McCain knows  how to do, at its most charitable, is start wars, and then when they go south, to escalate them in the hopes that enough Americans at risk can correct the errors of the old men who sent the first lot of Americans in harm’s way.

In that McCain is fully embedded in what strategic thinkers now somewhat derisively term “The American Way of War.”

The fact that he has now embraced the simplest end of counter-insurgency and “small-wars” ideas does not correct for the underlying problem that (a) he has no grasp of the historical, political and social context of the conflicts he wants to fight (which is why the “success” of the surge ™ has not actually produced the political outcomes sought, nor the commercial benefits we once sought) as even a few of the more honest of his supporters will now agree….

And that (b): Experience doesn’t help if it’s the wrong experience.

I’m just saying:  you can’t be ready on day one to be Commander in Chief running conflicts in Afghanistan, the Pakistan borderlands, North Korean nukes and all the rest if you can’t send your grandchild a birthday e-mail.  Sometimes it really is that simple.

*reposted because it is (a) right on target and (b) too quantitatively fascinating** not to watch twice.

**40 rods*** to the hogshead is the equivalent of 10.48 feet to the gallon, which may or may not say volumes about McCain’s energy policy.

***It is worth noting (really? –ed.) that a rod is also a pole or a perch.  You heard it here first (or second.)

More Tragedy: Brain and Mind, Iraq Suicides edition.

In this post, published here and over at Cosmic Variance, I looked through the story of Iraq veteran suicides to speculate on the implications of the spread from the neuroscience profession to the public of the idea that what we perceive as mind, as our selves, is actually a phenomenon of our material brains.

That’s an important notion, one taken as a commonplace by just about every neuro researcher I know that will, I still think, have a profound cultural impact, potentially as great as that of the concept of the descent of man from prior forms.

But then this story appears. Another man gone, to remind me and anyone who reads this of fact of tragedy that is the reality, the hard ground of fact and loss.

I have no deeper scientific argument that I want to pursue here, and I am not going to express any of the political thoughts that this story does evoke in me.

This is just a pause, to think about Joseph Patrick Dwyer, and those whose loss should not simply be aggregated into the accumulating totals — both the official count of war dead, and those, like Dwyer who have paid such a terrible price outside the neat categories of conflict caualties.

My deepest sympathy to the family and friends of PFC Dwyer.

Image: Francisco de Goya, “Desastre de la Guerra (Disasters of War)” 1810-11. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Amateurs talk tactics, Professionals study logistics: The Surge, Afghanistan, Bush, McCain edition

The running theme of this blog is the importance of being able to count. Genuinely elementary arithmetic, if actually applied, is the foundation of scientific thinking, and scientific thinking is how we arrive, however imperfectly, at reliable guides to experience in the world.

That said, this post is another in my informal series arguing that because John McCain can’t count, can’t take advantage of the tools of analytical thinking, he is unfit to be President. A corollary of the argument I’m about to make is that the latest news out of our multiply mismanaged foreign wars provides independent support for General Wesley Clark’s argument that Senator McCain’s military career has not given him the experience needed by a President.

What’s the news?

This: the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, yesterday told reporters that the US military has run out of troops, that it cannot dispatch more units to Afghanistan, where the Taliban is on the rise, unless and until the US draws down its forces in Iraq.

What does this have to do with counting, with analytical thinking? Here is John McCain, from his campaign website, on the”success” of what he calls “The McCain Surge” of US troops in Iraq:

Today, our new counterinsurgency campaign is showing signs of success, and John McCain believes we can still prevail in Iraq if Washington politicians exercise resolve not panic.

Remember: Amateurs talk tactics, professionals study logistics (a quote attributed to General Omar Bradley).

Leave aside the question of whether or not the surge is working even in its own limited sphere. (There is, sadly, a very strong argument that its primary accomplishment has been to prop up an unpopular, inept, Iranian-leaning government, leading to a decrease in US power, and an increase in that of our primary regional rival. See Michael Massing’s latest from Baghdad for the depressing details.

(As an aside: I don’t usually link to David Brooks, who I regard as a fact-deprived, innumerate writer, but his column of June 24 illustrates the problem of punditry without a grasp of the details. Massing’s on the ground report demonstrates why just about everything Brooks says is wrong in this particularly empty bit of triumphalism. (Find one actual testable claim in it, and I’ll give you a lollipop.)

Back on track: the question isn’t just whether or not the surge can work in a local sense, but whether it does now or ever did make sense in the context of the larger war in which we were and are engaged.

The answer was and is no — because the ground forces at our disposal were insufficient for the task of fighting in Afghanistan at the level of intensity required even before the surge began, and more or less everyone in a responsible position knew it.

The military equivalent of the green-eyeshade folks knew in in 2004, as Sy Hersh documented way back then, that the diversion of resources to Iraq threatened operations in that first theater of engagement — the one that actually hosted those who did us harm on 9/11, the ones whose presence on the border was disrupting a key ally, which also happened to be a genuinely nuclear armed Muslim-majority state.

They certainly knew in late 2006 that John McCain and the rest of the armchair generals, those daring knights of the keyboard (h/t Ted Williams) who called for winning in Iraq by shoving a brigade here and a battalion there, were talking tactics, and ignoring logistics.

At that moment, Afghanistan was already receiving scant attention. The Taliban and its allies were already resurgent. Pakistan was already spiraling into political turmoil. The war we failed to finish was and is now in danger of being lost — and no professional, no one who understood the hard data of what it takes to keep boots on the ground, had any reason to doubt what would follow a further starving of this campaign to pour more resources down the sump of Iraq.

This isn’t higher math; this is arithmetic.

And what of McCain? He has focused his claim on the Presidency on the assertion that he has more experience than his rival, especially in military matters, which is certainly true. But General Clark raised in public the issue that a lot of folks have wondered about for a long time: what is the impact of that experience on McCain’s judgment and decision-making.

Now, Admiral Mullen has given us the sadly obvious answer: not much good. It helps to be able to count.

Program Notes: Iraq disaster/NY Times does good edition…

Read this on the fate of wounded Iraqi soldiers. (h/t TPM)

Weep, then think.

Two issues related to the themes of this blog come to mind. The first is that this is an example of the kinds of issues that lie behind the broad point I tried to make in this post about why we have alreadly lost whatever was worth “winning” in Iraq.

There, I used the most simple minded of quantitative arguments to assert that the destruction of life in Iraq had already topped the threshold that other experiences — the Civil War, World War I — suggested produced lasting, conflict-perpetuating damage to the societies that suffer them.

Behind the blunt statistics — the fact that 2 percent or more of the Iraqi population have died as a direct or indirect result of the conflict — lie the individual stories that produce their individual quanta of grief, shame and rage. Today’s New York Times article, the well written and wrenching work of Michael Kamber, does what good journalism should do: tell particular stories that provide the specific human experience that drives the larger trend of events.

What does it do to an army to know that it’s wounded are left on the heap? What does it do to a society if the best organized and armed group assumes its polity and its generals are willing to abandon them? Nothing good. If you are looking for places where the seeds of future conflict sprout, this is a good place to start, IMHO.

The second point is the one that should be obvious by now within our public discourse, but strangely isn’t. Kamber writes that “In the United States, the issue of war injuries has revolved almost entirely around the care received by the 30,000 wounded American veterans.” That’s true — but what has been missing from that coverage is the issue that lies at the heart of this account of Iraqi problems: the ongoing cost of caring for the novel populations of wounded soldiers in modern war. It happens for American soldiers more than for Iraqis, I believe, but broadly, more seriously wounded soldiers survive now than did in previous wars due to advances in frontline and later medical care.

As Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz have documented in their insufficiently well publicized studies, the cost of caring for US wounded is going to drain hundreds of billions of dollars from the Treasury for decades.

That cost, of course, is the reason wounded Iraqi vets are receiving such a poor shake; it helps explain at least some of the disgraceful lapses in care US soldiers have endured. It also leads directly to the bigger story that Stiglitz and Bilmes have tried to tell: the true cost of major modern conflict is a disastrous burden for any society to bear.

When they actually added up all the numbers, the indirect cost of the war to the US economy turned out to by conservative reasoning to double the direct costs — on the order of 1.5 trillion dollars over time.

That’s about 11 percent of the total output of the US economy in current dollars — and while that seemingly devastating cut in our wealth is eased by the decades-long schedule over which the money will be fed to the maw of war, ask any economist what compounding does to seemingly small cuts (or gains) in output. Again, nothing good in this case.

This post could go any number of directions from here. One stray thought: all that missing US money could have done a lot of good in taking care of the Iraqis we arguably most need to think well of our presence in their country.

But there is a much more important point to be made than yet one more plaint about tthe venality and corruption of the war here and there: Governments — and empires — fall when the economic cost of maintaining control over resistant or even indifferent satrapies rises too high.

I don’t give long odds for an Iraqi administration that cannot take care of its army; if the kind of indifference Kamber documents in today’s piece persists, I’d bet that power will fragment, flowing to those people and groups that promise and deliver the kind of social web that have so aided Hezbollah and Hamas in their ascents — not a good prospect for all kinds of reasons.

And as for us: whether or not we meet our moral obligation to take care of our own soldiers and those Iraqis who we led into in the conflict we initiated, the American imperial adventure in Iraq has already demonstrably weakened us within a world with rapidly shifting centers of influence, wealth and power. It has done so in all kinds of ways, as Andrew Bacevich expertly and efficiently documents in today’s Boston Globe. (Again, h/t TPM).

One of the most obvious ways that this is taking place, one which is (as Bacevich points out) strangely absent from our politics right now, is that the kind of cold-eyed quantitative analysis provided by the likes of Bilmes and Stiglitz strongly suggests that the Iraq war could be the kind of pure econmic drain that kills empires. Derangement of state finances and overextended military adventures have afflicted empires both old and new.

For a cartoon tour through the controversial history of imperial decline, think the Syracusan fiasco that doomed the Athenian empire, the fate of the Qing dynasty after half a century or more of devastating internal rebellion and sustained external conflict, and then the collapse of the European empires under the weight of the material and moral costs of wars large and small. Go on one step more, and ponder the impact of the twin costs of the mostly cold conflict the Soviets waged to retain control of their western provinces — the Warsaw Pact nations — and the hot one fought and lost in Afghanistan.

The US weathered Vietnam with its global position largely unchanged, perhaps even strengthened, given what happened to its leading rival for power.

The world is different now.  To draw out the political point that I hope is obvious even unstated:  the cost of John McCain’s vision of indefinite war in Iraq  may well turn this conflict into our Somme.  Even if we “win” in Iraq, in the sense that we retain a compliant client in power, basing rights and contractual control of that nation’s oil, we are well on our way to losing the larger and much more important conflict.

How do I know? The fact that we cannot, or will not pay for the proper care of soldiers who fought on our behalf tells me so.

Images:  Francisco Goya, “The Disasters of War (Los Desatres de la Guerra),” plate 56, c. 1810.  Source Wikimedia Commons.

John Singer Sargent “Gassed,” 1918. Location:  Imperial War Museum, London.  (The painting is huge, and no internet reproduction can create the effect of seeing the real thing.  IOW:  Stop in to the IWM if you have the chance.)  Source, Wikimedia Commons.

Thinking Like a Scientist: Surge/John McCain edition

How do scientists think?  Lots of ways, of course, as any human being does, drawing on intuition, visual reasoning, leaps of analogy, hard, slogging calculation, day dreaming…anything that works.

But what distinguishes scientific habits of mind from the everyday interpretation of experience is that there are certain rules scientists learn to follow to transform initial ideas into reliable conclusions.  Among them is the notion of a metric, a standard of measurement that you can use to compare one state of a system with another.  Absent some reliable set of measuring sticks it is impossible to draw more than impression, a feeling out of any observation.  Instead of data, you have anecdotes, and the dangerous license to draw any lesson you want from that absence of solid information.

All of which leads to today’s back-and-forth on the campaign trail.

Much has been made around both the campaigns and the blogosphere about John McCain’s Today interview in which he said that the timing of US troops homecoming from Iraq was “not too important.

The furor has mostly raged around the question of what exactly McCain meant by that eye-popping remark.  But I think that the more important claim McCain made has been missed, and it is, IMHO, the key both to his campaign and to one of the most significant problems with the idea of a McCain presidency.

Just before the “not too important” line, McCain repeated what’s becoming common “wisdom,” that the surge is working.  In his words, he said “anyone who knows the facts on the ground says that” [the surge is working].

In order for McCain to have any hope of winning the presidency, that has to be true — there have to be “facts” throughout the hard ground of Iraq that tell us the surge has been and continues to be effective.

But the phrase “the surge is working” is meaningless without a metric.  Working how?  By what standard?  What does it mean to “work” in the context not just of the facts on the ground, but intended goals of the policy, the baseline metrics established before the surge took place?

In fact, McCain is or ought to be aware that the surge has not worked by those original metrics.

There were two established at the beginning of the policy:  to create a security environment in which normal life could resume;  and with that cessation of violence, to create a  window of opportunity during which the incumbent Maliki government could achieve the political reconciliation that would ensure that improvements in security would outlive the surge.

Of those two, the first, the military goal of quelling violence, was instrumental; the second, more fundamental one of establishing a stable polity, was the essential, ultimate purpose of the surge.

So far, only the military one has been partially achieved; the political one, the one that actually counts, remains a mess — perhaps growing yet worse as the Maliki government’s army has confronted the Sadrist’s political and armed power bases in what has at times verged on a full internecine civil war.

The only way to say that the surge is working as established fact is to ignore the more important of the two metrics and to give the best possible gloss on the ongoing violence in Iraq.

Now — none of this matters in the first order politics of McCain’s statement.  He’s trying to say that a policy he has championed is the right one, and at the same time to make the barely coded claim that his opponent who has yet to visit a Baghdad marketplace in the usual kind of street clothes one wears to go shopping, doesn’t know what’s going on.  All that is going to get lost anyway in the back and forth on the homecoming gaffe.  (I know — Josh Marshall argues that this wasn’t a gaffe, and he’s right.)

But one of the features of an endless campaign is that over time you get a sense of how the candidates competing for the job actually think — how their minds work.

Here McCain is losing the long war. One of the most basic tasks of a leader is to set goals and then recognize whether or not the actions taken to achieve such ends have done so.  You have to set your metrics and pay attention to the data as they are, not as you wish them to be.

If, however, you choose to shift the goalposts so that any outcome is a success — you may have a smile on your face, but you don’t become a president worth having.

PS:  Shame on the Today interviewer who uncritically put to Senator McCain the unqualified claim that the surge is working.

Image:  Ford Maddox Brown “The Proclamation Regarding Weights and Measures 1566 A. D.” Source:  Wikimedia Commons.

What’s Wrong With This Broadcast: NPR Edition

I’m listening to my local NPR station’s broadcast of Scott Simon’s Saturday Morning Edition as I write this, and the host introduced a discussion of the upcoming fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq by talking about casualties: the 3,975 American servicemen and women killed to date, and, as the host put it, Iraqi casualties estimated from some 40,000 to over 100,000.

Apparently Scott simply forgot about two separate studies published in the fifteen months, each of which concluded that excess Iraqi deaths since the American invasion topped half a million. The Johns Hopkins, Lancet group published their result first: they see about 650,000 deaths as the most likely number as of the end of 2006. As discussed in this post below, a later WHO led study led to the number Simon quoted, an estimate of 151,000 Iraqis dead by violence since the start of the war as of late 2007. Though that number is often cited as a definitive refutation of the Hopkins work, the WHO survey identified 151,000 deaths by violence among 400,000 excess deaths total. As a Hopkins researcher pointed out while methodological differences led him to trust the higher number more, the two estimates were in broad agreement.

Simon also ignored another major study suggesting even higher totals: a British independent surveying company’s estimate of over one million deaths. (To paraphrase a famous West End comedy, perhaps NPR’s motto has become “No Data, Please. We’re American.”)

In other words: Simon simply spoke falsely when he introduced histwo guests, Senators James Webb and John Kyl to discuss the current state of the war. The misstatement, to put the kindest gloss on it, framed the subsequent interviews.

That error (see — kind) materiallly affected what came next. By drastically understating the upper bounds to the cost of the war to the Iraqis, he allowed Senator Kyl’s claims of the likelihood of a political and strategic success of the occupation to stand essentially unchallenged. Those claims have to be understood against the background the sectarian devastation that has taken place already. The real question, one that Simon never thought or had the gumption to ask is not “is the surge working?” but “is the reduction of violence of the last several months meaningful?” — given the lack of the political change the surge was supposed to nurture.

All of which is to echo, once again, Brad DeLong’s cri de coeur.  Like he said:  Why, oh why can’t we have a better press corps?

Image: Francisco Goya, Los Desatres de la Guerra, plate 79, captioned “Murio la Verdad” — “The Truth has Died,” c. 1820. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Friday Poetry Break

Warning: just a glancing encounter with science content below, but some value anyway, I hope.

Woke up today to Molly I’s command over at Atrios’s shop: “Read some poetry!”

She’s got class — and a thought to evoke. She sent her readers over to Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.” Consider lines like these:

 That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

Poetry that has consequences was also the theme of a delightful thread a while back evoked by John Wilkens’ memories of Marlowe — and he in turn was prompted by Shelley Batts at her then-blog Retrospectacle.

I’m going to blog a bit about perhaps the most important poem in the history of science in a post this weekend — Lucretius‘ “De Rerum Natura” — “On the Nature of Things.” But it was hard going this morning, and the cogs and gears upstairs just aren’t turning that well yet, so when I hit Auden’s terrifying poem on the sorrow and horror of war, I did not flash on the World War I poets, nor Walt Whitman’s “Come up from the fields, father.“

No — I recalled instead the voice and accent — posh English, Girton-polished — of my mother, now gone and sorely missed, roaring with gusto the lines of one of the most happily belligerent bits of high-class doggerel a more or less proper English poet ever produced: Thomas Love Peacock’s “The War Song of Dinas Vawr.” You have not lived until you hear someone declaiming, with happy bloodthirsty gusto, the opening lines: “The mountain sheep are sweeter/But the valley sheep are fatter;/We therefore deemed in meeter/To carry off the latter….”

Go. Wince. Enjoy yourselves. You have been warned.

Image: “Achilles killing a Trojan prisoner in front of the Etruscan demon of death, Charun.” Source: Wikimedia Commons.”