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Insights
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Contributed by Wyatt Mason
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This week, I've been reading essays by French Writer Henry de Montherlant. I admit to a comprehensive ignorance of his body of work, but find the collection into which I've dipped-an out-of-print Pléiade edition of his Essais-compelling: conversational, clear, rich in reference and wit. I'll try to translate a little piece of what I liked in the coming weeks, because there's pretty much nothing of his available in English online, with the exception of a largely unexceptional (though exceptionally self-regarding) essay on Henri Matisse. . . .
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Contributed by George Michelsen Foy
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"Come to Bombay. You can act in movies, no problem." A number of Bollywood insiders I spoke to all told me the same thing. Although it had the ring of the too-good-to-be-true, I had long wanted to better understand the Hindi film industry, and through it India, so I allowed myself to be seduced by the promise. In so doing, I was succumbing to the fantasy created by the movies that a celebrity might exist under our daily guise, that a role in a film can reveal and confirm this extraordinary self. My industry contacts also assured me that I had one crucial advantage over the thousands of would-be actors surging yearly to the city with the same dreams: unlike almost all of them, I was white, a Westerner-a gora, in the local parlance. . . .
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Contributed by Scott Horton
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For years, lawyers representing Guantánamo detainees have dreaded getting notice from the District Court in Washington that their case had been assigned to Judge Richard J. Leon. A conservative Republican appointed to the bench by George W. Bush in 2002, Judge Leon was seen as an almost reflexive supporter of the Bush Administration's positions with respect to Guantánamo. But today things changed. Leon took up the habeas corpus petitions of six Guantánamo detainees on remand from the Supreme Court following its landmark decision in Boumediene-a decision in which the Court had reversed Judge Leon. In his opinion for the Court, Judge Kennedy had stressed that the system crafted by the Bush Administration was "fraught with grave risk of injustice" because it allowed the government to detain people indefinitely without any showing of evidence to back its claims that the detainees were combatants who posed a risk to the United States. And as Judge Leon rendered his decision in a packed courtroom, Kennedy's core thesis was fully vindicated. The Leon decision is very straightforward: either the government has evidence that the persons held are combatants and there is a risk that they will battle the United States if released, or it does not. In this case, Judge Leon found that in five of six cases, the Bush Administration had no meaningful or corroborated evidence to sustain its claims. Rendering his decision, Judge Leon admonished the Bush Administration lawyers against taking appeals and further protracting the injustice visited upon the five petitioners whose freedom he ordered. "Seven years is enough!" he said, with a fixed gaze directed at the Justice Department lawyers. . . .
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Contributed by Scott Horton
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Reports are circulating this week that President-Elect Obama has interviewed Defense Secretary Robert Gates with a view towards inviting him to stay on in the Obama cabinet. This provides an opportunity to gauge Gates's performance as secretary of defense for two years. In the eyes of many, the position of secretary of defense is the most powerful post in government after the presidency. The "secdef" commands resources that, in monetary terms alone ($439.3 billion in 2007), dwarf those of any other agency of the federal government-indeed, U.S. defense spending accounts for half or more of the total defense spending on the planet and a still larger portion of the spending on intelligence gathering. The secretary's authority over the uniformed personnel and civilians who work for him is strong, owing to military discipline and a rigorous command-authority culture. Like no other figure in the cabinet, the secretary of defense carries the nation's national security and defense burdens. Making the office of secretary a spoil of political victory, thus, is dangerous. . . .
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Contributed by Wyatt Mason
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"Brother Francis Gerard of Utah might never have discovered the blessed documents, had it not been for the pilgrim with girded loins who appeared during that young novice's Lenten fast in the desert." I have read this sentence a number of times since I found a copy of the book it initiates, a novel called A Canticle for Leibowitz, by the gas-station pump where I filled up this morning. Perhaps it is, in part, a function of the disorientation that claims me when paying less than two dollars a gallon, but I find myself disturbingly attracted to this sentence, as if to a leering stranger at a low-lit bar. I am compelled by it in complicated ways. . . .
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