This week Har­vard Uni­ver­sity Press is pub­lish­ing The Heart of William James, a selec­tion of essays edited by my friend Bob Richard­son. Bob is the author of a tril­ogy of tremen­dous biographies—on Thoreau, Emer­son, and James—and to cel­e­brate the pub­li­ca­tion of this new book he’s got a guest post up at The Second Pass today on James’s “war against war.” Here’s a bit from the start:

By 1910, James was against war itself. His notion of a “war against war,” as he puts it, had been build­ing for at least a decade. His posi­tion, unusual still today among peace advo­cates, rec­og­nizes that war is a deeply attrac­tive thing for many of us, and that we do not in fact want peace—at least not entirely. He wrote before D.H. Lawrence observed that “the essen­tial Amer­i­can is hard, iso­late, stoic, and a killer.” And long before Simone Weil’s “The Iliad, or, the Poem of Force,” James noted that “the Iliad is one long recital of how Diomedes, and Ajax, Sarpe­don and Hector killed.” It is the great­est strength of James’ argu­ment that he seri­ously rec­og­nizes the grip war has on us and will con­tinue to have. Rather than say we all love peace, let’s not fight, James instead tries to har­ness the war-​spirit and turn it against itself. We will have to kill war.

While you’re over there, be sure to check out the rest of TSP’s William James week. Good stuff.

Unexpected news for poetry fans, from the Wash­ing­ton Post’s big spy story:

Soon, on the grounds of the former St. Eliz­a­beths mental hos­pi­tal in Ana­cos­tia, a $3.4 bil­lion show­case of secu­rity will rise from the crum­bling brick wards. The new head­quar­ters will be the largest gov­ern­ment com­plex built since the Pen­ta­gon, a major land­mark in the alter­na­tive geog­ra­phy of Top Secret Amer­ica and four times as big as Lib­erty Crossing.

From The National:

The con­tents of a secretly recorded video threaten to gravely embar­rass not only Ben­jamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime min­is­ter but also the US admin­is­tra­tion of Barack Obama.

…

On a visit to a home in the set­tle­ment of Ofra in the West Bank [nine years ago] to pay con­do­lences to the family of a man killed in a Pales­tin­ian shoot­ing attack, [Netanyahu] makes a series of unguarded admis­sions about his first period as prime min­is­ter, from 1996 to 1999.

Seated on a sofa in the house, he tells the family that he deceived the US pres­i­dent of the time, Bill Clin­ton, into believ­ing he was help­ing imple­ment the Oslo accords, the US-​sponsored peace process between Israel and the Pales­tini­ans, by making minor with­drawals from the West Bank while actu­ally entrench­ing the occu­pa­tion. He boasts that he thereby destroyed the Oslo process.

He dis­misses the US as “easily moved to the right direc­tion” and calls high levels of pop­u­lar Amer­i­can sup­port for Israel “absurd”.

…Read More…

From Yves Smith, quot­ing Martin Wolf quot­ing Raghu­ram Rajan, a number that should sur­prise even those who have never doubted capitalism’s ten­dency to take money from the hands of the many and put it in the pock­ets of the few:

If you have any doubts about how easy it is for some­one who works hard in the US to get ahead, con­sider this fac­toid from Martin Wolf’s latest com­ment in the Finan­cial Times, on Raghu­ram Rajan’s new book (see Satya­jit Das’ review here:

Thus, Prof Rajan notes that “of every dollar of real income growth that was gen­er­ated between 1976 and 2007, 58 cents went to the top 1 per cent of households”.

Once again I find occa­sion to drag out the hearsay results of an unsource­able poll that found that 20% of Amer­i­cans believed that their income put them in the top 1% of earn­ers, with another 20% believ­ing they would make it to the top 1% in their life­times. The reason I cling so des­per­ately to this sec­ond­hand sta­tis­tic is that it’s the only way I can explain to myself why we don’t have a cred­i­ble polit­i­cal move­ment that would seek to reclaim even half of what the top 1% makes for the other 99% of Amer­i­cans.