the shackled bookshelf
We’ve been unaccountably bad about staying on top of the flood of disaster lit pertaining to America’s various wars ( on crime, on terrorism, on drugs, on warming), but here are a few to busy you in your dungeon.
The Eight O’Clock Ferry From the Windward Side
Clive Stafford Smith’s strangely charming memoir of his days defending detainees at the Guantanamo Bay gulag affably meanders into a boots-on-ground critique of pro-torture theory. Without ever fully defusing the logic of the “ticking bomb” rationale for torture, Smith reminds us in a civil, almost bemused way that this argument has little relevance to the reality of the cases he has seen. In the safety vs. justice debate, Smith’s argument amounts to: “You say our safety will be bought by torturing a bunch of people arrested at random for bounty? Does that mean that if I whomp your manroot with a mallet, you’ll come up with the unified field theory?”
The Dark Side
With the cheerful perversity of a forensic entomologist, Jane Mayer dissects the Bush administration’s dark materials. You can get a taste of her journalistic mojo and glee from her July 14th Harper’s interview. The main thrust of her epee skewers the illegality as well as the inefficacy of “The Program” (as the fasces of Cheney’s sadistic interrogation policies are known). Mayer busts the users and dares to speak their names. A staff reporter for the New Yorker since 1995, she has been filing regular reports on the war on terror since ’03, and a number of her pieces can be found on their site:
The Search for Osama — The Dark Sites — Outsourcing Torture — and more.
and don’t forget these two:
>Get Your War On
Without an inside track or an investigator’s skills, Rees cuts to the war’s quick. He’s clear-eyed, profane and funny. His computer-graphic everybodies, like us, find themselves sinking in quicksand; we know better than to struggle; but that doesn’t mean that we can’t complain. David Rees rocks.
Self-loathing for Beginners
by Lynn Phillips
(If you’re going to do it, do it right.)
Self-Loathing for Beginners is a wickedly funny guide to appreciating self-loathing properly done. Whatever your current level of self-loathing expertise, SL4B‘s quizzes, lists, and sidebars will help you to style your self-loathing to succeed in fashion, show business, interpersonal relationships and art. And that is great news, because maximizing your self-loathing is a trend you’ll hate yourself if you miss.
