Steve Reads

One other thought about language, inspired by The Dark Side. Mayer tries her best, but it’s hard to avoid using language that the government tells us to use. We should no more use the word “terrorist” when describing someone stuck in Guantánamo than we should use the word “murderer” to describe someone awaiting trial. In fact, we have less reason to do so than in the case of the suspected murderer, because at least under the U.S. justice system we have some hope that the process works. The “process” for trying suspected terrorists, such as it is, gives us no guarantee that we’ll discover the truth about the suspects’ guilt or innocence. It gives suspected terrorists no access to counsel and no access to the evidence used against them. The process allows them to be tortured before convicting them.

In some ways this is a corollary to Daniel Davies’s timeless maxim: “Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance.” The corollary is that truly guilty suspects can be convicted on the basis of real evidence.

The U.S. criminal-justice system may have many flaws, but it seems to work reasonably well as a means for discovering the truth. The Bill of Rights helps. The exclusionary rule helps. Until shown that some other process is a better tool for finding the truth, we should accept a criminal trial, before a jury of our peers, as the gold standard.

In the absence of that standard, a word like “terrorist” should be taken for what it is: an abuse of language designed to close off debate and deflect people from the flimsy evidence sitting behind that judgment.

I wish there were some way I could describe this book without using the word “shame,” but it’s impossible. This book is about our national shame. These are not words that I choose lightly: before approximately 2001 I had never felt shame for my country. When reading The Dark Side, that emotion is unavoidable. It is the most painful book I have read in a long time, possibly ever. (Lolita is a competitor. Another description for another time.) I was in tears by one point and had to put it down on several occasions.

But it is an absolutely necessary book to read, to own, and to reread. If we know anything at all about the Bush administration’s torture hobby, it’s because of a few journalists like Jane Mayer and Sy Hersh. While the rest of the media and Congress lay down before the Bush administration, these brave reporters were out making us proud. Own it to reward Mayer, and reread it every year or so to remind yourself that it could happen again.

It almost certainly will happen again. This is the heartbreaking conclusion that I took away from The Dark Side. At the moment, the only thing keeping us from torturing suspected terrorists is that our president told his government not to. A future president could just as easily issue a stroke of the pen in the other direction, and we’d be torturing again. The next time we do it, the CIA will take care not to leave as many traces around — just as presidents since Nixon know not to turn on the tape recorder.

Indeed, Mayer’s book strongly suggests — without saying so — that she’s only scratched the surface. At least a handful of prisoners died on the CIA’s watch, their names apparently lost to history forever. Think of the horror in that: your neighbor or mine, his life wiped from the world’s memory, his family terrified about what may have happened to him. He lies in a mass grave somewhere, dumped there casually by a soldier who will forget his name as quickly as history does. At least half of the responsibility that we can bring to a book like The Dark Side is to rescue these poor human beings from anoymity. Mayer inspires a ritual: saying something out loud like “His name is Ahmed. He had two beautiful children. He was tortured and killed because we elected George W. Bush.”

I want to focus on the disappearances. Navy SEALs, for instance, tortured Manadel al-Jamadi to death sometime between midnight on November 4, 2003 and 5 a.m. that same day. The CIA snatched Khaled el-Masri from Macedonia, tortured him for months without telling Masri’s family of his disappearance, then let him go. These men, and literally countless others like them, were guilty of no crime. Their lives were either destroyed or ended on the U.S. government’s watch.

I don’t fully understand the self-interested logic that drove the torturers to keep such meticulous records, but they did; if anything, the law seems to have helped us toward a full accounting of our government’s torture. The CIA knew that it might be in legal jeopardy, so CIA officers were in constant contact with Langley to ask whether they could step up their prisoner abuse: is one slap all right? How about one slap after forcing the prisoner to go without sleep for 48 hours? How about a slap plus sleep denial plus forcing him to stand for eight hours straight? (Apparently forced standing is agony.) The CIA agents were sadists, but they apparently also were eager to cover their asses. The threat of prosecution drove them to document their bosses’ approval.

The bosses, all the way up, approved. Addington, Cheney, and even Bush received intimate details of how particular suspects were being questioned. Most members of the executive branch seemed eager to please Cheney and Addington, or to give George Bush the big score against terrorists that he wanted. The ass-kissing went all the way up to CIA director George Tenet and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Everything I’ve read suggests that Gonzales was gutless and deferred in everything to Addington. I wonder whether Gonzales sleeps well at night, or whether the dream of a rifle butt smashing an anonymous prisoner’s skull over and over wakes him with a scream.

It was the rare government lawyer who said no. Jack Goldsmith did, as did Goldsmith’s mentor James Comey. What saved the U.S. government just a little bit was that Goldsmith — as head of the Office of Legal Counsel — had intestinal fortitude that no one else, including Goldsmith’s own boss, had. Goldsmith could (barely, it must be noted) stand up to Addington; Gonzales could not.

In short, what seems to have kept our government from torturing whomever it pleased were the actions of a few people — Jane Mayer, Jack Goldsmith, James Comey — while everywhere else it was night. We can’t expect these people to always be there for us. It’s not just that “the price of democracy is constant vigilance”; the price of democracy is that we rely on a few people to guard us while we sleep, armed only with pen and paper. And we have no reason to believe that they’ll always be there. The Dark Side, by its own shining example, is not encouraging.

This book has seriously made me reconsider my life. When I die, do I want to be known as someone who could get an algorithm’s running time down to log n, or as someone who helped stop torture? It’s that kind of book, because Mayer is that kind of author.

A note on language: The unfortunate effect of discussing torture as much as we must is that words lose their power. The word “torture” itself feels deflated by now, as does even a more-vivid phrase like “waterboarding.” Even if you call waterboarding something more harrowing, like “simulated drowning”, the words are stripped of force through use. Reading a book like Mayer’s is important because it overcomes this dulling. In a less-skilled author’s hands, a few hundred pages describing government-sanctioned torture would weaken the force of the word “torture” still more. Mayer manages to leave the word sharp, and the reader’s wounds raw, while telling a gripping, heartrending story.

I’d like to close with Malcolm Nance’s description of waterboarding in The Dark Side. Nance subjected hundreds of soldiers to waterboarding as part of their training and underwent it himself. Again, we tend to call waterboarding “simulated drowning”; Nance says of this, “It’s not simulated anything. It’s slow-motion suffocation with enough time to contemplate the inevitability of blackout and expiration — usually the person goes into hysterics on the board. … You can feel every drop. Every drop. You start to panic. And as you panic, you start gasping, and as you gasp, your gag reflex is overriden by water. And then you start to choke, and then you start to drown more. Because the water doesn’t stop until the interrogator wants to ask you a question.”

By far the least interesting part of this fascinating book, it seems to me, is its ostensible purpose. The title more or less says it all: financial models don’t merely describe the world around them; they play an active part in shaping that world. The shorthand for this concept is “performativity”: MacKenzie wants to argue that financial models are “performative.” (Ungainly as that word is, MacKenzie steps to the next level when he gives us “counterperformativity.”)

In the economic world outside of finance, this is straightforward enough. If you spend enough time imagining that humans are rational actors who only look out for their own self-interest, for instance, and the theorems furthermore say that you should be a rational actor who only looks out for his own self-interest, you will — suprise of surprises — probably find yourself acting purely self-interested.

This is easy enough as an intuitive proposition. To really argue it, you’d need some data. The data would need to show that the model somehow creates the greed, or that people become greedy faster than they otherwise would have. You’d then be required to show that the causality doesn’t run in the other direction: it’s not that greedy people are just drawn to this model, but that they become greedy. Something like this.

Perhaps my tone suggests what I think about this, namely that it doesn’t interest me very much. And so it goes for the bits — and thankfully they are just bits — about performativity in An Engine, Not A Camera. The finance markets are a good place to look for data: there’s a lot of extremely high-quality stock-price data, at one-day resolution or lower, for the last few decades. And there happen to be a couple models — the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the Black-Scholes option-pricing formula — that are in wide use. Conditions couldn’t be more ripe for testing some hypotheses.

One fundamental concept sitting underneath Black-Scholes is that opportunities for riskless profit don’t persist; that is, there are no arbitrage opportunities. In order to determine the rational price for a stock option, we construct a riskless portfolio on the basis of that option. Since it’s riskless, and since there are no arbitrage opportunities, our riskless portfolio must fetch the same price as any other riskless asset. (Treasury bonds with the same duration as the option are often taken to be riskless assets.)

If we want to show that financial models have a hand in shaping the financial world, we could show that Black-Scholes actually helped to destroy arbitrage opportunities. This is a straightforward enough exercise; it’s an exercise that plays a central role in the fall of Long-Term Capital Management. There the story was pretty clear-cut: a hedge fund (and its imitators) sought and destroyed arbitrage opportunities so successfully that there were none left to find. In a perfectly efficient market, Long-Term Capital is broke. And so it was.

In that sense, financial models are performative. But there’s also (wait for it) “counterperformativity,” in which the model is self-negating. Index funds are a good example here. Index funds are an idea that basically sprang out of the Capital Asset Pricing Model, in which the market’s own volatility is the baseline against which stock volatilities are measured (this measure of volatility is known as “beta”). Whenever a stock gets added to the S&P 500, that stock’s price rises more than it rationally should. The reason is that index funds are required to buy that stock automatically now that it’s part of the index. So index funds are a built-in source of arbitrage that wouldn’t have existed without CAPM. (One might wonder why arbitrageurs, knowing this ahead of time, wouldn’t swoop in and bid away the irrationality. I don’t know the answer offhand, but I suspect that index funds’ sheer size is part of the answer: stock purchases that large need larger short sales than arbitrageurs are prepared to conduct. Plus there are more restraints on short sales than on purchases.)

Like I said, I don’t think much of this is very interesting. To me, MacKenzie’s book functions much better as a history and semi-technical explanation of modern finance. Read it as history, rather than as sociology or philosophy.

Among other fun technical details in MacKenzie’s book, I’d single out the Cox-Rubinstein model. It’s a simplified model of option pricing, which leads to the Black-Scholes model in the limit as prices are allowed to change continuously. And it’s an elegant piece of work.

The natural next steps after An Engine, Not A Camera are more formal works on option pricing and stochastic processes. We’d want to learn about martingales, Brownian motion, stochastic differential equations; and generalizations of Black-Scholes that allow for credit constraints, legal limitations on short-selling, discontinuous price changes, corporate dividends, and heavier-tailed price distributions. I’m going to be diving into Grimmett and Stirzaker in the near future.

If future generations want a single volume that captures the madness of the Bush presidency, they should pick up Angler and race through it like I did. The broad arc of the story probably isn’t mysterious to anyone reading this review: Dick Cheney controlled most White House policy for at least the first six years of the Bush administration. The details — how, exactly, Cheney managed this trick — are what we really need to know, and here Gellman shines. As a chief of staff for Gerald Ford, Cheney learned exactly how information flows into and out of the Oval Office. In that role, he viewed himself as an impartial referee, making sure that the president heard all voices — even the ones that displeased the chief of staff. The chief of staff’s goal — the goal of the whole Executive Office of the President — was, in Cheney’s words, “orderly paper flow” and avoiding “by the way decisions”: decisions must not be ad hoc, and must receive buy-in from all affected parties. As vice president, on the other hand, he had his own policy preferences to push. He pushed them mercilessly and with endless cunning. One episode — delivered by Gellman with remarkable dramatic pacing — shows Cheney’s gifts in all their unfortunate glory. As Gellman describes it,

In less than an hour, the document traversed a West Wing circuit that gave its words the power of command. It changed hands four times, with emphatic instructions to bypass staff review. Cheney’s days of “orderly paper flow,” of shunning “by the way decisions,” were long behind him. …

Bush was standing, ready to depart, when Bowen arrived in the Oval Office. Addington’s words were now bound in a blue portfolio, embossed with the presidential seal. Bush reached for the folder and turned to the last page. Bowen held it open. Bush pulled out a Sharpie from his breast pocket and signed …

Colin Powell had the television going in his office. He picked up the phone to Pierre Prosper.

“What the hell just happened?” he asked.

Cheney’s bureaucratic power came, in no small part, from having tentacles in every Executive Branch agency. When the Bush-Gore case was making its excruciating, chad-laden path through the U.S. and Florida Supreme Courts, Cheney was hard at work building a staff in case Bush was elected. It was during this period that he hired his friends and hired those who would help keep the vice president’s fingers in every little pie. By the time he reached the vice presidency, it seems like not much of an exaggeration to say that Cheney was the Executive Branch. Not only that, but he maintained an office in Congress — violating centuries of precedent — from which he could monitor the legislative branch. When LBJ tried to stick around his old Senatorial haunts, upon assuming the vice presidency in 1961, the Democratic leadership froze him out.

Perhaps the most astonishing part of Gellman’s book, viewed in retrospect, comes at the very beginning. Cheney himself ran the vetting process for vice-presidential running mates. He required from each candidate a mountain of background information: medical history, criminal history, financial history, and sexual history — anything at all that might embarrass the president if it came to light. Gellman strongly suggests, however, that Cheney was quietly laying the groundwork for his own candidacy throughout this background check, and — here we laugh to avoid crying — never subjected himself to his own background check. At the end of the process, Cheney could have blackmailed more or less anyone who stood in his way.

Gellman suggests, without really saying so, that this potential blackmail kept a lot of senators and representatives from stepping forward to resist the Bush administration on its most contentious policies — torture, the war in Iraq, tax cuts for the wealthy, etc.

Here’s where my interest in the Cheney vice presidency steps outside of the frame that Gellman has created for us. He published Angler in 2008, when the Bush administration’s reputation was at its nadir, and history’s spotlight was starting to focus on the Republicans and Democrats who enabled this disastrous presidency. Is it any wonder that Gellman found lots of people willing to provide excuses for their own inaction? For all its many charms, Angler reminds me to some degree of books like Bob Woodward’s The Brethren. In The Brethren, we see Supreme Court justices portrayed as lovable innocents in the hands of their good-naturedly scowling clerks. These clerks, at the time Woodward interviewed them, were looking for their next jobs. It’s no surprise that they were hoping to portray themselves in the best possible light.

That’s really a tiny cavil; Angler is a marvelous book. If anything, it suggests that we need a biography of David Addington, Cheney’s omnipresent hectoring lawyer and chief of staff. He is the alpha male, it seems, pressing the doctrine of the unitary executive as far as it would go. It went far indeed. (Seems as though Jack Goldsmith’s The Terror Presidency might be the microscope on Addington that I want.)

I’d recommend that everyone read this book right now, then ask whether we really want Obama to let all these people off without prosecution.

Dear web-form creators:

If you add one line of code to your form processing, you can delete spaces. In Perl it would be something like

$form_entry =~ s#\s##g;

to delete whitespace of all kinds. That’s it.

Now that I have performed this valuable public service for you, I expect to never again be asked to enter a number without spaces.

Love and kisses,
Steve Laniel

It’s part of our continuing shame as a nation that anyone at all has to bother responding to Charles Krauthammer. It is the Washington Post’s continuing shame that they still employ him. And now a number of fine-hearted liberal folks feel like they must pull their old, rusty blunderbusses out of their musty linen closets, fire a dispirited shot or two Krauthammer’s way, and return the gun to the closet with a sigh.

One of the nice things about the end of newspapers, I suspect, is that someone like Krauthammer will not be able to continue a career solely because he’s affiliated with a larger institution like the Post. In a world of blogs, where people seek out your material specifically, Krauthammer will live or die on his own. Which isn’t to say that it will all be champagne and roses when the revolution comes: Krugman will probably do just fine as a standalone blogger, but so will Tom Friedman (about which: new Matt Taibbi piece, you guys). There’s no justice in that.

Maybe the dear Mr. Ezra Klein has to carry on the fight against Krauthammer and Bill Kristol and whomever else, but maybe Klein’s children — or his children’s children — will know a world in which douchebaggery doesn’t draw a six-figure annual paycheck. Let us all dream.

Quick question for anyone out there to contribute to: can you suggest any books on relations between Muslims and Jews prior to decolonialization? I’m interested in the Ottoman Empire in particular. Actually, I’m interested in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution more broadly, and in broader ethnic relations within the Ottoman Empire.

Following Gellner’s Nations and Nationalism (one of a few books I regretfully neglected to review last year) and Hobsbawm’s multi-century history of the world after the French and Industrial revolutions, I know that part of the answer will be as follows: people who view themselves as members of a distinct ethnicity, largely marked out by its language, are an inevitable outcome of industrialization. Industrialization means that a son needn’t perform the same job that his father did, and it means that capitalists require a stream of workers who can be adapted to rapid technological change. Hence centralized education to provide a common base of knowledge to feed industry. From this centralized education comes a centralized language, a centralized culture and so forth.

The particular accidents of how this nation formed with this language, and not some other way, weren’t (if memory serves) part of Gellner’s story. Within this set of accidents, we’d have to ask why Britain couldn’t stanch Indian nationalism. “Because there was already a longstanding culture there” is nearly circular, though not quite. “Because capital and labor were never mobile between England and India” seems like it might get at a good part of the truth.

Capital and labor probably were mobile among parts of the Ottoman Empire. But my sense is that the Ottomans never really centralized their language or culture, for whatever reason; David Fromkin says somewhere near the start of A Peace To End All Peace that the Ottoman Empire wouldn’t be a nation by any definition that a 21st-century Westerner would be prepared to accept, and not just because it was a heterogeneous collection of peoples with no shared heritage; it was that the Ottoman government was really just a loose floating power that kept its subjects in weak orbit.

Maybe a shorter way of getting at what I want is: can someone recommend a good history of Zionism prior to about 1700? The notion that Jews should have a distinct homeland seems obvious to us since the Holocaust, but I’d have to bet that it’s an idea which couldn’t have grabbed hold before the Industrial Revolution.

I’m inaugurating a new blog today — nay, a new social mission. The blog is DrinkingBoston.com. As I envision it, the blog will serve three main purposes:

• To give people an excuse to get out and socialize, under cover of high-minded cocktail journalism.
• To meet the city’s best bartenders.
• To discover parts of the city that we don’t normally explore. I already have plans to check out the Ashmont Grill, for instance, which is approximately five miles south of where I ever have occasion to go on the Red Line.

The mission, the blog design, the subtitle and the authorial voice are all open for negotiation at this point. What I envision at the moment is something like this:

1. We go (where “we” also includes “you,” should “you” choose to come along — which I hope “you” will).
2. We drink.
3. We laugh. More generally, merriment is had.
4. We return home. Those who want to write a review of a given bar, a given bartender, or a given drink do so.
5. Next week, GOTO 1.

We had our first drinking excursion this past Thursday, to Eastern Standard in Kenmore Square. In alphabetical order, agents Angoff, Cook, King, Laniel, and Oliver were present.

So began the drinking. Long may it reign.

If you want to add yourself to the DrinkingBoston mailing list, feel free.

Utterly captivating. Relentlessly funny. Sympathetic to its subjects. Alive with brilliant detail. Patient. Sympathetic to a modern reader’s stereotypes, yet at pains to dispose of them gently. Probing. Sweeping. The superlatives fly fast and furious with this book. It is quite simply a joy to devour.

We start right in with possibly the book’s most humorous contention — and certainly its most controversial — namely that Queen Victoria was not the daughter of George III. The royal family’s long history of porphyria ends with George, and its history of haemophilia starts with her. The genetics make both events quite unlikely, if Victoria actually descended from her legitimate father. The royals clearly know how to address the problems of inbreeding.

The next 600 pages take us kaleidoscopically through Victoria’s 19th century. There is, of course, the 19th century that we’re all aware of — the 1800’s London of chimney sweeps and grinding poverty. But Wilson is too much the serious student of art to leave it at that. If it is any one thing — and it is, in fact, many things — The Victorians is a paean to the poor, brilliant soul of John Ruskin. Wilson’s sympathy toward Ruskin, and toward all his subjects, is alive here:

The Gray family discovered that summer … that [their daughter's] marriage was unconsummated. On her wedding night, Ruskin (who was completely ignorant of sexual matters) had been unable to consummate — ‘he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was’, Effie afterwards recalled. …

Gladstone said that if one had known all three parties as well as he had done — Ruskin, [Ruskin's wife's lover] Millais, Effie — one would be unable to blame any of them. Let this be our line. …

Gladstone and his foil, Disraeli, stand astride this story like colossi. They’re central to the fate of Britain’s poor. As Gladstone’s views toward Ireland change, Home Rule comes to look possible. Parnell — charismatic, a dynamic leader, so much of a part of James Joyce’s Ireland — comes on the scene and nearly brings freedom to his people. Only then do the Irish people discover that Parnell has been carrying on an illicit liaison with the married Kitty O’Shea. The Irish people will tolerate many things, but they will not tolerate adultery. His political life was over, and with it any hopes for Irish peace within the next century and more. Parnell’s downfall may have been strategically timed, suggests Wilson:

Given the willingness of Salisbury’s government to make political capital out of the Dilke divorce, and the Pigott forgeries, one does wonder whether they made it worth Captain O’Shea’s while to destroy Parnell. After all, O’Shea had been totally complicit for ten years. Three of his wife’s children were Parnell’s.

I smirked at Wilson’s little jabs of the knife here — just as I smiled when, on the subject of Sherlock Holmes, Wilson wrote that “It seems entirely apt that by far the greatest Victorian of the later part of the Queen’s reign should be a character in fiction.” (It’s not clear whether Wilson counts Lloyd George as a Victorian. This is the Lloyd George whom Keynes described as “this extraordinary figure of our time, this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity.”)

Wilson’s storytelling brings us the wars — the endless wars of mounting brutality. There’s the Paris Commune, with its tens of thousands of dead. There’s the Boer War, which brought the term “concentration camp” into being. The same age that gave us rapid technological advance and the end of the slave trade also brought on the horrors of colonialism (starting with the Irish famine) and wars of increasing bloodshed.

These wars, this colonialism, are alive with us now in the Middle East, in Ireland, in India and Pakistan and South Africa and Zimbabwe and Zambia (formerly Southern and Northern Rhodesia, respectively, both named after Cecil Rhodes). Wilson’s great accomplishment is to bring this history into our present in bright, glorious detail.