My life in books

C. L. Polk’s marvellous fantasy novel Witchmark is many things all at once, and does them all well. It is a mystery, a delicate, hesitant love story, a story about recovery from battlefield trauma, a political thriller set in a world approximating post-WWI England, and a few other important things besides.

It is brilliant, and bittersweet, and horrifying, and every kind of emotional roller-coaster there is, and it is one of the best damn books I’ve ever read in a long time.

And the write-up on Goodreads says it’s volume one of the Kingston Cycle, so there are more stories coming in this world!

Africa. For people of European heritage, it is a word that calls up many images. It’s the Dark Continent, the home of primitive and violent tribes, a lace where civilisation has come lately and reluctantly, a place if hunger and disease , of poverty and violence, of natural disasters. On our television and computer screens, we see nothing but ethnic and religious warfare, squalor and corruption, starving children and AIDS victims.

For centuries, Africa has been mythologised, exploited, altered and interfered with. It has had its very truth eroded under the weight of erasures, self-serving constructions of inferiority and otherness and outright lies, suffered the effects of Europe’s grimy, grasping, violent fingers on its peoples and its histories, its lands and waters and everything that is on or in them.

I don’t know much about Africa. I know something about its great kingdoms and trade empires which flourished while Europeans were still grunting in huts. I know a little more about how those Europeans and their special gifts for making weapons and telling lies, colonised these ancient civilisations, stole the riches of their lands, the labour of their peoples, and the memories of their past. I know very little about modern Africa, about the ways in which a history of coloialism and exploitation has left it reeling from centuries of violence, its peoples still suffering from the generations of trauma, with those cold and greedy white fingers still trying to strangle any attempts on the part of those peoples to reinvent themselves, the legacy of colonislism still alive and looming over an entire continent.

It is in an attempt to understand a little more of these things that I turn to Chinua Achebe’s personal narrative, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra.

The Biafran War, also known as the Nigerian Civil War, happened in my lifetime, but I did not know much about it at the time. Since then, I’d learned a little more. And since - though you would hardly know it from the world media - there is conflict again in what once, briefly, was Biafra, it seemed a good time to learn more about the issues that have resulted in so much pain and death in this one part of Africa.

Achibe is a master of context. He situates Nigeria in the context of colonial history, himself in the context of his birthplace, heritage and time, his art in the context of both Igbo artistic traditions and the renaissance of African literature in order to tell the story of Nigeria, and Biafra, as he experienced it, and wrote about it.

The first part of the narrative focuses on Achebe’s youth, his education, and his early career in broadcasting, up to hs publication of one of the great classics of African literature, Things Fall Apart. He speaks with appreciation of the quality of education available to him and the other young men and women of his generation, at both Christian mission schools and secondary schools established by the government, which was then under British control. At the same time, he reflects on the opportunities he had to learn about the traditional culture and religion of his people, the Igbo. He presents his sense of self and identity as coming from a crossroads, shaped by both the European, Christian tradition of the British missionaries and government officials, and by the Igbo traditions of his people’s past. Positioning his personal history within the history of his generation, he says:

“It has often been said that my generation was a very lucky one. And I agree. My luck was actually quite extraordinary. And it began quite early. The pace of change in Nigeria from the 1940s was incredible. I am not just talking about the rate of development, with villages transforming into towns, or the coming of modern comforts, such as electricity or running water or modes of transportation, but more of a sense that we were standing figuratively and literally at the dawn of a new era.

My generation was summoned, as it were, to bear witness to two remarkable transitions—the first the aforementioned impressive economic, social, and political transformation of Nigeria into a midrange country, at least by third world standards. But, more profoundly, barely two decades later we were thrust into the throes of perhaps Nigeria’s greatest twentieth-century moment—our elevation from a colonized country to an independent nation.”

Achebe begins his historical account in pre-independence Nigeria, under the colonial administration of the British Empire. While the transition occurred relatively smoothly, as British administrators left their positions to return home and educated Nigerians took their place, the new country was born in corruption, the first elections rigged to deliver a victory to a previously agreed-on candidate, chosen by the powerful Northern People’s Congress party. Achebe suggests that, given its birth in corruption, it was inevitable that corruption remained a problem for the newly independent country:

“Within six years of this tragic colonial manipulation Nigeria was a cesspool of corruption and misrule. Public servants helped themselves freely to the nation’s wealth. Elections were blatantly rigged. The subsequent national census was outrageously stage-managed; judges and magistrates were manipulated by the politicians in power. The politicians themselves were pawns of foreign business interests.

The social malaise in Nigerian society was political corruption. The structure of the country was such that there was an inbuilt power struggle among the ethnic groups, and of course those who were in power wanted to stay in power. The easiest and simplest way to retain it, even in a limited area, was to appeal to tribal sentiments, so they were egregiously exploited in the 1950s and 1960s.”

Nigeria was at particular risk of conflict between peoples: the country was formed from a colonial administration district that brought together into one region the homelands of multiple African nations, some of whom had been traditional rivals. In addition to the three main groups - Hausa/Fulani, Yoruba, and Igbo - there were a number of smaller ethnic communities - Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, Itsekiri, Isang, Urhobo, Anang, and Efik - many of them ancient nation-states in their own right.

Achebe, like most Nigerians living in what once, briefly, was Biafra, is Igbo. His analysis of why the Igbo are resented by other Nigerians may be biased, I cannot tell. But he does point out that members of the educated, professional classes in Nigeria of the 1960s were disproportionately Igbo. This resentment, he argues, was at the root of a wave of anti-Igbo violence which followed on the January 1966 military coup in which the prime minister and a number of senior government officiated were killed. The instigators of this coup were soon deposed by the leader of another faction within the military, who in turn was assassinated by a faction of officers from Northern Nigeria. Some of those involved in the first two actions were Igbo. Achebe describes the violence:

“Looking back, the naively idealistic coup of January 15, 1966, proved a terrible disaster. It was interpreted with plausibility as a plot by the ambitious Igbo of the East to take control of Nigeria from the Hausa/Fulani North. Six months later, I watched horrified as Northern officers carried out a revenge coup in which they killed Igbo officers and men in large numbers. If it had ended there, the matter might have been seen as a very tragic interlude in nation building, a horrendous tit for tat. But the Northerners turned on Igbo civilians living in the North and unleashed waves of brutal massacres that Colin Legum of The Observer (UK) was the first to describe as a pogrom. Thirty thousand civilian men, women, and children were slaughtered, hundreds of thousands were wounded, maimed, and violated, their homes and property looted and burned—and no one asked any questions.”

Achebe argues that it was this large scale massacre of ethnic Igbo people, following on the political instability resulting from the series of military coups, that made the Biafran war inevitable. His narrative of the war - 30 months of fighting from the declaration of Biafra as an independent state to the flight of Biafran national leader Ojukwu and the surrender of the remaining officials of the Biafran military and state - is both historical and personal. He talks about the battles, the conditions, the attempts to gain international aid and support, but he also talks about how the war affected his own family as they fled from one part of the country to another, trying to avoid the Nigerian army, struggling to survive. He talks about the blockade of humanitarian aid to the civilian population, the massive death toll among the children of Biafra due to malnutrition and starvation. He examines the question of whether the actions of federalist Nigeria during the war constituted an attempt at genocide.

And he talks frankly about the aftermath of the war, not just on the Eastern region that was Biafra, but on the political and economic development of reunified Nigeria. His assessment of Nigerian politics is not a positive one:

“That road to a remedy of Nigeria’s political problems will not come easily. The key, as I see it, lies in the manner in which the leadership of the country is selected. When I refer to leadership I am really talking about leaders at every level of government and sphere of society, from the local government council and governors right up to the presidency. What I am calling for is for Nigeria to develop a version of campaign election and campaign finance reform, so that the country can transform its political system from the grassroots level right through to the national party structures at the federal level.

Nigerians will have to find a way to do away with the present system of godfatherism—an archaic, corrupt practice in which individuals with lots of money and time to spare (many of them half-baked, poorly educated thugs) sponsor their chosen candidates and push them right through to the desired political position, bribing, threatening, and, on occasion, murdering any opposition in the process. We will have to make sure that the electoral body overseeing elections is run by widely respected and competent officials chosen by a nonpartisan group free of governmental influence or interference. Finally, we have to find a way to open up the political process to every Nigerian citizen. Today we have a system where only those individuals with the means of capital and who can both pay the exorbitant application fee and fund a political campaign can vie for the presidency. It would not surprise any close observer to discover that in this inane system, the same unsavory characters who have destroyed the country and looted the treasury and the nation blind are the ones able to run for the presidency!

The question of choice in selecting a leader in Nigeria is often an academic exercise, due to the election rigging, violence, and intimidation of the general public, particularly by those in power, but also by those with the means—the rich and influential. There is also the unpleasant factor of the violence associated with partisan politics that is often designed to keep balanced, well-educated, fair-minded Nigerians away. So it can be said that the masses—the followership we are concerned about—don’t really have a choice of leadership, because there’s not a true democratic process.”

Achebe sees some hope for Nigeria, in its youth, who he believes are tired of the corruption and anarchy around them. But he does not see change coming quickly or easily. This book is not just a memoir of Biafra, it is a lament for a country that could be great, but has not risen to the challenge of modern statehood.

More novelettes from 1942 pulp magazines.

Isaac Asimov’s “Runaround” is one of the Mike Donovan Robot stories, in which a robot acts strangely and Donovan has to figure out why, and how to fix the problem. Both error and solution usually involve some bizarre circumstances that impacts on the way the robot resolves the tensions between the famous Three Laws of Robotics, and this story falls perfectly into the pattern. A robot with a deliberately heightened sense of self preservation is given a casually worded order to do something that would endanger him. In this case, the two a mathematically balanced, causing the robot to run in circles around the location he was ordered to, while singing Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Kind of amusing, standard Asimov robot story.

1942 was the year in which Isaac Asimov published the first of the stories that would eventually become his iconic Foundation series. “Foundation” is the origin story, which gives us the basic background to the series, and covers the first “Seldon crisis” - how will Terminus, the remote and relatively isolated home of the First Foundation and the Encyclopedists, hold into its independence as the Empire crumbles? It really was one of the most ambitious concepts of its time, even granting that lots of writers were creating lengthy and complex histories for their fictional universes, from Heinlein to “Doc” Smith. Just one month after “Foundation” appeared in print, the second story dealing with the next Seldon crisis, was published as “Bridle and Saddle.”

1942 also saw the publication of Asimov’s “Friar of the Black Flame,” in which an Earth ruled by the reptilian Llhasinu from Vega are driven from Earth and destroyed by a battle force drawn from all the human worlds. It’s fairly standard milsf, but what makes the story interesting is that it mentions Trantor as one of the human worlds, establishing it as part of the backhistory of the Foundation series.

Alfred Bester’s “The Push of a Finger” is a story of the sort we now associate with the “butterfly effect” - the idea that a butterfly’s wings flapping could a tornado on the other side of the world - though of course it predates that formulation. In a future society where the prime principle is stability, a machine is developed capable of calculating the future - and it predicts the end of the universe in a catastrophic scientific experiment in only a thousand years. The pronosticators use the machine to track back to the one moment that, if changed, can prevent the disaster. There’s a surprise plot twist, of course, which the modern reader will immediately deduce because we’ve seen it too many times, but the story is well told and, I expect, was fairly new and original back in 1942.

Lester del Rey’s novelette “My Name Is Legion” is an example of the “time loop” story, in which the subject is caught in the same sequence of time, looping through the same events. In this story, it’s a defeated Hitler trapped in the loop by a scientist bent on revenge for the deaths if his Jewish wife and children, and it is a particularly nasty loop with an all-too-appropriate end built into it. Quite an effective story.

“Though Poppies Grow,” also by del Rey, is the most powerful of all the war-themed anti-fascism stories I’ve read in the past few weeks, and there have been quite a few of those, what with the US being at war in 1942. In this story, the ghost of the Unknown Soldier from WWI is called forth from his tomb, acting out the promise from the famous poem - “If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.” The writing in this novelette is so evocative, so well-honed, as del Rey follows the young soldier, confused, knowing only that he has a mission, wandering through the streets of Washington, touching people as he passes in various ways. At first he does not know he is dead, a ghost, but slowly as it dawns on him, he is overwhelmed, until at last, he is led to understand his role is to remind these who waver, or are complacent, that there can be no compromise with fascism, with tyranny, with hatred. The story is exquisitely told, the character made so real you can feel his struggle to understand, the message as important today as it was in 1942.

A story in a completely different vein, del Rey’s Lunar Landing s about a mission to the moon, sent in the (faint) hope of rescuing three men from the first lunar voyage. The crew of the Moth - five men and two women - encounter serious problems in landing themselves, and their search for the first ship becomes even more important because they hope to cannibalise it for parts they’ll need to get home themselves. But very little goes as planned in this mission, beginning with the first surprise, plant and animal life adapted for survival on the moon. As I’ve noted elsewhere, del Rey’s style, like Heinlein’s, has aged well. His characters are quite fully and realistically developed, and the two women in the story are intelligent, brave and have lived lives of their own - they have relationships with men, but are not defined solely by them.

Ross Rocklynne’s “Jackdaw” portrays the bewilderment of an alien species on discovering a world where only one living being remains, alone on a planet whose cities, roads and farms have been destroyed by massive bombardment. When the lone survivor dies in a suicide attack on their craft, they are bewildered, but despite their best attempts, the end of the species and the actions of its last member remain incomprehensible to a species that cannot envision war.

“QRM—Interplanetary” by George O. Smith is a cautionary tale of what can happen when you put a businessman whose only focus, and area of expertise, is cost-cutting, in charge of a facility that depends on scientific and engineering excellence to function. QRM, we are told, is the shortwave code for man-made interference in radio transmission. The story takes place in a communications relay station on an asteroid whose orbit is positioned such as to ensure radio transmission between Earth and Mars at all points of both planets’ orbits. The man-made interference is a new Director who knows nothing about either the technical aspects of communication, nor the intricacies of life in an artificially sustained environment. The consequences of his policies, while humorously described, are disastrous. Eventually, the proper order is restored, but not before his decisions come close to killing everyone on the station.

1942 was the date of E. Mayne Hull’s first published work, a haunting novelette called “The Flight That Failed.” Set during the war, it’s the story of a time traveller who tries to avert the destruction of a plane crossing the Atlantic with a secret cargo that will change the course of the history he knows if it gets through.

Fredric Brown’s “The Star Mouse” is a rather poignant tale about a mouse who is shot into space in a small experimental rocket built by your standard eccentric tinkering scientist. Mitkey, as he’s been called by the professor, and his rocket come to the attention of a civilisation of very small people living on an asteroid that happens to be passing near earth. Concerned about potential threats from humans, they explore Mitkey’s memories to find our what they can about human civilisation - but doing this involves giving Mitkey intelligence equal to that of humans. Mitkey goes home again, but alas, the boost in IQ doesn’t last. Still, he survives, is reunited with his mate, and the professor provides him with lots of cheese.

In Jane Rice’ “Pobby” a writer of horror starts a new story - his idea is to tell a gruesome tale of a poor farmer named Pobby who finds a strange seed, plants and waters it, hoping that it might grow into a rare flower that will make him some money, only to be eaten by it once it flowers. As he starts to write his installments for magazine publication, however, someone named Pobby, who looks and talks like the character he’s writing about, appears to various of his friends, saying he needs to find the writer and get him to stop making him grow the flower, because he doesn’t want to die. Finally, Pobby and the writer meet face to face, but the writer persists in following his story - until he finds himself in a writers block just before the final scene. Frustrated, he travels to the lace where he has set Pobby’s farm, finding the town much as he’s written it, with characters he’s mentioned, and Pobby’s farm, where he discovers the cause of his block - Pobby, out of desperation, has written his own ending to the story. An interesting exploration of the conceit that characters can take on a life of their own.

“The Magicians’ Dinner,” also by Jane Rice, is a comic ghost story about a young bride, married to a magician, who tries to handle a dinner for forty in their first home, when she’s never cooked before. Fortunately for her, her family’s long-dead cook decides to return from the other side to save her firmer employers’ daughter’s bacon, so to speak. The tale is told in first person, the narrator is rather self-depreciating and quite engaging and likable, so that the story comes across as light-hearted and sweet. We will pass over the class issues and the trope of the help who care more for the families of their employers than they can for their own, and some if the annoyingly sexist assumptions about how marriages between men and women should work.

In Rice’s “The Elixir,” the narrative voice is again a somewhat unconventional woman, a out-spoken, accident-prone, unmarried writer of mystery novels. In this light-hearted time travel yarn, Amy Parrish’s equally unconventional neighbour, Clare Holloway, throws a Halloween party and Amy decides to attend as a witch. While waiting for the party to get started, Amy mixes up a batch of punch, tossing in liquor, ice cream, and halloween candy, while reciting some off-the-cuff doggerel, and ends up in Salem during the witch hunts. Much strangeness ensues, but all ends well, with Amy back in her own time, wondering if everything happened as she recalls it, or if she was just drunk silly and hallucinating. Having read several of Rice’s stories now, I must say that I am quite delighted with her descriptive style, which is both unique and very apt, and her mastery of tone. It’s a pity that her work is not remembered nearly as well as that of other writers of this era.

The Internet informs me that Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan is the first piece of Canadian fiction to deal with the experience of Japanese-Canadians in the internment camps during and after WWII. It's certainly the first book I've read that deals with this dark and painful period of Canadian history.

It is necessarily a dark and painful book, about silence and loss. The protagonist is Naomi Nakane, a middle-aged Alberta schoolteacher who has, like her Uncle and his wife, whom Naomi calls Obasan, tried to put her war experiences behind them, but who, like them, is indelibly marked by those experiences. At first, Naomi's family narrative has large holes: she speaks of her Uncle, his wife, and an aunt Emily, but no one else. The reader imagines that the internment camps are somehow responsible for these lacunae, but does not know how.

But then, when Uncle dies, Naomi returns to the home where she spent her adolescence, cared for by the childless Uncle and Obasan. While she is there, she begins to unravel her family's history, uncover the truth behind long-unmentioned secrets, and break the silence. A family photograph from before the war, taken on the occasion of her brother's birth, shows us the shape of her family before the war, before confiscation, before internment, before relocation: grandparents, the Nakane and Kato families; her grandfather Nakane's older son, Uncle, and his wife Obasan; her father; her mother; her mother's sister, Emily Kato; her brother Stephen. Prosperous people, the Nakanes are shipbuilders, the sea and ships are in their souls.

Aunt Emily, the unmarried sister of Naomi's absent mother, is the only member if the family who speaks of the past. In fact, she is an agitator, an activist, who attends conferences and tries to tell the world what was done to her people. Naomi recalls Aunt Emily talking to her about the vicious racism endured by Japanese-Canadians during and after the war with Imperial Japan.

"The American Japanese were interned as we were in Canada, and sent off to concentration camps, but their property wasn’t liquidated as ours was. And look how quickly the communities reestablished themselves in Los Angeles and San Francisco. We weren’t allowed to return to the West Coast like that. We’ve never recovered from the dispersal policy. But of course that was the government’s whole idea—to make sure we’d never be visible again. Official racism was blatant in Canada. The Americans have a Bill of Rights, right? We don’t.”

And again, "...They took away the land, the stores, the businesses, the boats, the houses—everything. Broke up our families, told us who we could see, where we could live, what we could do, what time we could leave our houses, censored our letters, exiled us for no crime. They took our livelihood—”

Emily is the lightning rod, while Naomi, Uncle and Obasan are silent. The key to unraveling one part of the past, for Naomi and for the reader, lies in Emily's collection of documents, and a journal, given to Naomi to read. In the journal, begun in 1941, Emily records the path of destruction of West Coast Japanese communities from month to month, as first unnaturalised Japanese men are rounded up and sent to work camps, cars and boats and radios are confiscated, and on and on until all those of Japanese heritage, even those full citizens born in Canada, are forced to relocate away from the coast.

In flashbacks, Naomi remembers as a child remembers, her comfortable home and close-knit family taken from her step by step. Her mother travels to Japan to see her ailing mother and is caught there by the outbreak of war; she will never see her mother again, and for decades, Naomi will know nothing of her fate. Grandparents, summering on the coast, are swept up into a filthy internment camp. Cousins, uncles, fathers, family friends are taken away to work camps as far off as Ontario, leaving only women, children, and a few old men, most 'relocated' away from the coast, to camps and 'ghost towns', some lucky enough to find refuge with friends in other provinces. Naomi, her brother Stephen, and Obasan are sent to live in a decrepit shack in Slocum. After the war ends, Uncle, freed from the labour camps, and her father, debilitated by tuberculosis, join them. But then the family is torn apart once more as 'suitable' Japanese survivors of the camps and ghost towns are sent further from the coast - "eastern relocation" as agricultural workers and other labourers - while "unsuitable" survivors like her father are held where they are to await their fate. Uncle, Obasan and Naomi are relocated, forced labourers on a Alberta beet farm; she will never see her father again.

But Obasan is not just about the injustices visited on a people, and the silence that has surrounded those injustices in the national narrative. It is about trauma, both personal and institutional, and how we deal - or don't deal - with it. In Naomi's life, abuse comes in different forms, and abusers are also both personal and institutional. In the end, Obasan is a wrenching novel about a family torn apart by war, politics and racism, the terrible cost in lives, and the price paid by the survivors.

Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje

Anil Tissera, the focal character in Michael Ondaatje’s award-winning novel Anil’s Ghost, is a Sri Lanka born, Western educated forensic anthropologist returning to her homeland after years of living and working abraod. As the representative of a human rights organisation invited by the Sri Lankan government, under pressure from the West, to investigate allegations of organised campaigns of disappearance and murder, Anil has seven weeks in which to uncover as much as she can of the truth of these charges. Working with her is the government’s appointed liaison, Sri Lankan archaeologist Sarath Diyasena – someone who may or may not share her desire to reveal the truth, or her belief that there is a truth to be revelaed.

Anil knows that seven weeks is not enough time to conduct a full investigation, to build a clear picture of the patterns of violence, to establish a clear case. But she clings to an axiom passed down to her from her teachers: “One village can speak for many villages. One victim can speak for many victims.” Anil finds the trail that will lead to her one victim in a shard of bone found among the remains from Sarath’s most recent excavation, a shard that is impossibly new, hidden among other bone fragments dating from the Sixth century.

As Anil, with Sarath’s help, painstakingly traces this shard of bone back to a name of a man who has disappeared, so does Ondaatje – Sri Lankan born, educated, and settled in the West, like his central character – slowly uncover through the lives and memories of Anil, Sarath, the people in their own pasts and the people they encounter during their search, the multiple and complex layers of meaning in Sri Lanka’s tragic, war-torn present and its rich traditions and history. Running through the many strands woven into this novel are repeating themes of truth, discovery, memory, deception, concealment, and identity.

This is a moving, complex narrative that speaks powerfully of the horrors and survivals of a specific time and place as well as the vulnerability and fragility of identity and the human condition.

Abu Ghraib: The Politics of Torture

A collection of essays written in 2004, following the release in print and over the Internet of the horrifyingly iconic photographs of tortured Iraqi prisoners and their torturers in Abu Ghraib; authors include Barabara Ehrenreich, Meron Benvenisti, Mark Danner, David Levi Strauss, Richard Grossinger, John Gray, David Matlin, Charles Stein and Brooke Warner.

There's a lot to consider in these early responses to the full-scale confirmation of what almost everyone on the Left believed was happening, and almost everyone else didn't want to think about. There's also a lot to think about when one considers that, two years later, after the trials and the court-martials and all the public finger-pointing and denying, it's almost certainly still happening.

The essays that directly address the experiences of the known victims of torture, and that investigate the philosophies and pragmatics that lead to an acceptance of the use of torture, are harrowing and enraging. They explode the myth of the "few bad apples" - as if anyone actually believed that in the first place.

Of particular interest is "Abu Ghraib: The Surround" by David Matlin, which places the torture of military prisoners within the greater context of the "normalization of prison and its economics" in the United States. Matlin notes that over the past 20 years, the prison population of the US has quadrupled (from 582,000 in 1980 to more than 2.1 million in 2000) and questions the relationship between a domestic culture of punitive cruelty and a military culture of torture and abuse.

Also of interest is Barbara Ehrenreich's essay, "Feminism's Assumptions Upended," which discusses the involvement of women - from Pfc Lynndie England to Brigadier General Janis Karpinsky and Major General Barbara Fast - in the atrocities of Abu Ghraib (and other military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, let's not forget the prisons from which no photos have emerged). Ehrenreich argues that this marks the death-knell of the strain of feminism that posits women as inherently less violent and more "moral" than men.

What we have learned from Abu Ghraib, once and for all, is that a uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. This doesn't mean that gender equality isn't worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. If we believe in democracy, then we believe in a woman's right to do and achieve whatever men can do and achieve, even the bad things. It's just that gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world.

In an early attempt to explore the possible implications of the revelation of the use of Torture at Abu Ghraib, Mark Danner closes his essay "The Logic of Torture" by looking at what comes next, after the first responses.

Over the next weeks and months, Americans will decide how to confront what their fellow citizens did at Abu Ghraib, and what they go on doing at Bagram and Guantanamo and other secret prisons. By their actions they will decide whether they will begin to close the growing difference between what Americans say they are and what they actually do. Iraqis and others around the world will be watching to see whether all the torture will be stopped and whether those truly responsible for it, military and civilian, will be punished. This is, after all, as our President never tires of saying, a war of ideas. Now, as the photographs of Abu Ghraib make clear, it has also become a struggle over what, if anything, really does represent America.

Two years later, it's not looking much better.