Or should it be com­mu­ta­tion watch?  At any rate, my pre­dic­tion that the (almost) former Pres­i­dent would not leave the White House until he had signed papers for him­self and a few friends seems to have been wrong.  As was widely reported, today he com­muted the sen­tences of two border patrol agents who shot an unarmed Mex­i­can drug smug­gler at the Texas border in 2005.  But so far, no sig­na­tures for Scooter or Wolfie or Dick or Rums­feld or himself.  Of course, if a stack like this came through, it would likely include a few more names (Yoo? Adding­ton? Gon­za­lez?), and it prob­a­bly wouldn’t happen until the last minute, while everyone’s busy lis­ten­ing to the (almost) Pres­i­dent give his inau­gu­ra­tion speech.  The sus­pense is killing me.

The Guardian reported last week that a fight has broken out between Terry Eagle­ton and Martin Amis, who now are both teach­ing at Man­ches­ter Uni­ver­sity. In a new intro­duc­tion to his primer Ide­ol­ogy, Eagle­ton attacks Amis’s views on Islam, coming within a hair’s breadth of call­ing Amis a racist for “The Age of Horrorism,” a three-​part essay Amis pub­lished last year in the Observer. The Guardian has now pub­lished Eagleton’s response to the latest arti­cle, as well as Amis’s letter respond­ing to the response.

When Amis’s essay first showed up, I wrote an essay respond­ing to it. A much-​shortened ver­sion was pub­lished by a U. of Chicago email broad­sheet called Sight­ings. Since the sub­ject has come up again, I thought I’d post the orig­i­nal ver­sion in its entirety below. (Warn­ing: it’s long.)

(Photo by Stuart Price.)

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The Seduc­tion of Reasons

“Courage, sir” is the basic pre­req­ui­site of seri­ous moral thought, and for good reason.