Hot on the heels of Forrest Gander’s appreciation of Eliot Weinberger’s An Elemental Thing comes this letter* in the new Harper’s:

Eliot Weinberger’s essay “Mandaeans,” which appeared in the May 2007 issue of Harper’s Magazine, contains the following incorrect statements that vilify Mandaeans:

They dislike the Jews, whom they call “an evil nation” founded by the renegade Mandaeans Abraham and Moses, a people “who do not agree on a single utterance,” who circumcise with swords and sprinkle the blood on themselves, whose husbands abandon their wives and lie down with each other.

They say the Christians have secret rites in which they worship a female donkey with three legs.

They dislike the Zoroastrians, who sleep with their mothers and sisters and eat the dead, who take vows of silence and abort their babies.

These allegations are without foundation. Mandaeans hold no such views. Mandaeans do not entertain any hostility toward Jews, Christians, or Zoroastrians. Mandaeans have nothing but goodwill toward Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians.

Nor is it correct to say, as Weinberger does, that “each year they have a ceremony to honor the Egyptians who drowned when the Red Sea closed over them as they pursued Moses and the Jews.” This statement implies that Mandaeans strongly sympathize with a tyrant who was pursuing people who were escaping from slavery. Mandaeans do not hold such views. In fact, the annual commemoration of Nuh relates to those who drowned in Noah’s flood.

Some followers of John the Baptist
via the Internet

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*Subscription required.

a/ Thesis:

I saw a Washington Post headline the other day, “Who’s No. 2? Obama Keeps Everybody Guessing.” No—the “everybody” in that construction is you. Imagine if you were covering the baseball playoffs and you wrote that there was massive speculation about who was going to win. It’s manifestly moronic because you’re writing about a scheduled event that is going to take place on a known timeline. You’re contributing nothing. It’s the opposite of news; any useful public information is entirely missing.

(Chris Lehmann, in an interview with Ken Silverstein at Harper’s)

b/ Proof:

From a letter in next month’s Harper’s by Jay A. Stout, a retired USMC Lt. Colonel, written in response to Ben Metcalf’s “Why I Pay My Taxes”:

Metcalf should consider what he writes more carefully, and leave reflection about taking lives to those of us who have actually done it.

And why not abandon civilian control of the military while we’re at it?

I know: the last thing you need is another excuse to spend more time on the internet. But trust me on this one. Wyatt Mason, one of the very best practical critics working today, has started a blog at Harper’s called Sentences, and it’s going to be good. Here’s how Mason describes the blog’s focus:

Appearing several times a week, Sentences will not patrol the publishing industry, nor other literary blogs. Rather, it will be devoted, for the most part, to things I’ve been reading lately, new and old, and the ideas such reading stimulates.

Particular attention will be paid to the particulars of writing, the pieces and parts upon which the enterprise depends for its effects. General questions, too, about literary endeavor, will crop up, questions I’ll try to address in a useful way. My aim is to make the posts a continuation, if in a different form, of the writing that I’ve been doing in Harper’s and elsewhere for the past few years.

Mason’s profile page at Harper’s has links to much of his previous work. If you don’t know it, check it out.

Today, while cleaning house, I came across a cache of older magazines ripe for recycling and spotted this headline on a copy of the May 2006 Harper’s: “The New Road to Serfdom: An Illustrated Guide to the Coming Real Estate Collapse, by Michael Hudson.” Curious, I looked inside, and sure enough found this item of startling prescience:

With the real estate boom, the great mass of Americans can take on colossal debt today and realize colossal capital gains–and the concomitant rentier life of leisure–tomorrow. If you have the wherewithal to fill out a mortgage application, then you need never work again. What could be more inviting–or, for that matter, more egalitarian?

That’s the pitch, anyway. The reality is that, although home ownership may be wise choice for many people, this particular real estate bubble has been carefully engineered to lure home buyers into circumstances detrimental to their own best interests. The bait is easy money. The trap is a modern equivalent to peonage, a lifetime spent working to pay off debt on an asset of rapidly dwindling value.

Most everyone involved in the real estate bubble thus far has made at least a few dollars. But that is about to change. The bubble will burst, and when it does, the people who thought they would be living the easy life of a landlord will soon find that what they really signed up for was the hard servitude of debt serfdom.

It doesn’t surprise me that this article left no mental trace if and when I came across it two years ago. Its subject and style are so completely of a piece with the the kind of economic articles that one expects from Harper’s that I probably gave it no more heed than I’ve given similar examples from this month’s issue (Wendell Berry’s “Faustian Economics: Hell hath no limits” and Kevin Phillips’s “Numbers Racket: Why the economy is worse than we know”). In fact, if I’ve got one real criticism of the Harper’s editorial approach to policy subjects, it’s this: their authors cry wolf so often that it’s nigh impossible to separate the signals from the noise.

And yet you’ve got to hand it to Hudson: writing two years ago–one full year before anyone had really begun to wonder about the state of the real estate market–he got things exactly right. Check out his website for some of his more recent work.

Scott Horton has a post on the state of the torture debate at his Harper’s blog. Horton argues that we now have actual evidence that the CIA was able to invoke the personal authority of George W. Bush to sanction its use of torture:

This week, a CIA agent, John Kiriakou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, and explained just how the system works. When we want to torture someone (and it is torture he said, no one involved with these techniques would ever think anything different), we have to write it up. The team leader of the torture team proposes what torture techniques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Operations at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hierarchy of the Company. Then the proposal is passed to the Justice Department to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Security Council in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose personal authority is invoked for each and every instance of torture authorized. And, according to Kiriakou as well as others, Bush’s answer is never “no.” He has never found a case where he didn’t find torture was appropriate.

Horton goes on to speculate about how Attorney General Michael Mukasey fits in to the picture:

As I noted previously, there is a strong basis to fear that Mukasey came up through a litmus test under which he was required to do two things: (1) to give his commitment to continue to provide cover for the torture system, and (2) to block any effort to have a meaningful criminal investigation that would disclose the torture system or any of its details. As things now stand, it looks like Mukasey is delivering on these test points.

Here are some excerpts from the transcript of the Kiriakou interview:

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