Via Corey Robin’s powerful stab at Hitchens, I come to this George Steiner quote:

The simple yet appalling fact is that we have very little solid evidence that literary studies do very much to enrich or stabilize moral perception, that they humanize. We have little proof that a tradition of literary studies in fact makes a man more humane. What is worse — a certain body of evidence points the other way. When barbarism came to twentieth-century Europe, the arts faculties in more than one university offered very little moral resistance, and this is not a trivial or local accident. In a disturbing number of cases the literary imagination gave servile or ecstatic welcome to political bestiality. That bestiality was at times enforced and refined by individuals educated in the culture of traditional humanism. Knowledge of Goethe, a delight in the poetry of Rilke, seemed no bar to personal and institutionalized sadism. Literary values and the most utmost of hideous inhumanity could coexist in the same community, in the same individual sensibility…

Language and Silence ordered.

I’ve written a piece on Christopher Hitchens over at The American Interest. Hitchens was a writer I greatly admired, yet whose stances always left me feeling unsatisfied. I’ve tried to figure out what it is that bugged me.

A friend wrote, “Now I really want to read an obituary for someone you don’t like.”

Tyler Cowen gives us probably the pithiest write-up of the German standpoint on the Eurozone mess I’ve seen to date, a very useful reminder of how German concerns are trying to force the peripheral countries to accede to a harsher down-side than they might otherwise be ready for.

Consider the DeLong post from yesterday in this light. The ECB (which the Germans are preventing from acting) is the Fed, and the peripheral countries are Morgan Stanley. Using Bagehot’s rule (as paraphrased by DeLong), the ECB should be the lender of last resort, but it should only be bailing at a penalty rate. What could such a “penalty rate” mean in the European context? It only sensibly maps to some sort of loss of national sovereignty among the peripheral countries in the immediate future.

The reason I have so little faith in this working out is that I don’t see many countries agreeing to these kinds of terms. Indeed, it’s the central reason I’ve always been a Euroskeptic. Since WWII, European leaders have underestimated the importance of national feelings, always to their detriment. Until now, however, it hadn’t been an error of much consequence.

Brad DeLong, commenting on Felix Salmon’s post, which was cited by someone else the other day as being a useful upbraiding of dithering Eurocrats:

In the fall of 2008, counting the Fed and the Treasury together, a peak of 90% of Morgan Stanley’s equity—the capital of the firm genuinely at risk—was U.S. government money. That money was genuinely at risk: had Morgan Stanley’s assets taken another dive in value and blown through the private-sector’s minimal equity cushion, it would have been taxpayers whose money would have been used to pay off the firm’s more senior liabilities. “Fully collateralized” the loans may have been, but had anything impaired that collateral there was no way on God’s Green Earth Morgan Stanley—or any of the other banks—could have come up with the money to make the government whole.

When you contribute equity capital, and when things turn out well, you deserve an equity return. When you don’t take equity—when you accept the risks but give the return to somebody else—you aren’t acting as a good agent for your principals, the taxpayers.

Thus I do not understand why officials from the Fed and the Treasury keep telling me that the U.S. couldn’t or shouldn’t have profited immensely from its TARP and other loans to banks. Somebody owns that equity value right now. It’s not the government. But when the chips were down it was the government that bore the risk. That’s what a lender of last resort does.

That’s why Bagehot’s rule is to lend freely but at a penalty rate. The bankers should not profit from the fact that they were over leveraged, and compelled the government to act as a lender of last resort.

DeLong’s been super-useful of late. His vituperative arguments against the Austrian fetish for intrinsic value (goldbuggery) [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] have been delightful, as was this broadside against Nozick.

I do wish his site’s permalink structure wasn’t quite so opaque and broken-seeming.

Pundits either have poor memories or they don’t understand how to draw proper parallels. How did the threat of ground invasion topple Milosevic? It didn’t. It may have caused him to withdraw from Kosovo, but even if this threat played an outside role in his decision, he certainly didn’t step down for more than a year—and only then when he lost an election. So even if the parallel was valid, all we could conclude is that the threat of ground troops would guarantee that Qaddafi agree to partitioning his country. If that’s what Mr. Hirsh means, well then let’s talk about that—is it worth potentially putting our soldiers’ lives on the line to partition a north African country.

The way this reasoning is both muddled and ahistorical… you really can’t get a more textbook example of mission creep if you tried.

Ahmed Rashid sketches out how negotiations with the Taliban may proceed in the coming months.

File this one in the “here’s why we don’t argue on the grounds of inconsistency when we criticize humanitarian intervention” file. Has Mr. Abrams not seen what is coming of our Lybian excursion?

The latest issue of The National Interest features a somewhat strangely disjointed profile of Samantha Power.

Two highlights. First, a personality trait worth noting:

She produces a morality play rather than a conventional history. In a sense, Power, you could argue, is addicted to hero worship, beginning with Raphael Lemkin and ending with Obama. In fact, in her acknowledgments, she observes that she offered “whatever help I could to Barack Obama, the person whose rigor and compassion bear the closest resemblance to Sergio’s that I have ever seen.”

Second: Did you know that a young Walter Lippmann drafted Wilson’s 14 Points? That explains a whole lot.

I think I’ll be trying to use this space as more of a sketchpad from now on—a place for taking quick stabs at ideas which don’t quite qualify for essay-length treatment elsewhere.

After countless listens to P.J. Harvey’s latest in preparing my brief review, one of the minor things that struck me is her seemingly throwaway uses of “mouth” in two of the songs: the lovely mouth of Bobby in the title track, and the rotten mouth of the craggy mountains in “On Battleship Hill.” It all reminds me of some conversation or other I had with my friend (and writer) Maria Robinson on how intimate and sexual the image of the mouth is.

Some notes along these lines:

• It is said prostitutes will not kiss their johns.

• Bill Burroughs wrote a lovely routine into Naked Lunch about a talking asshole which would have crying jags because “it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth.”

• Who can forget this sparkling gem of 1970s culture?

I also can’t help but notice that when Ms. Harvey speaks or sings, her mouth has a tendency to sag down towards the lower-right. It could be that a lifetime awareness of such a quirk attunes one to the power of mouth-imagery.