Bobby Jindal has already announced that he's running to replace David Vitter in the Louisiana 1st Congressional District (Vitter is running for the Senate seat that John Breaux's retiring from).

Now a sad former staple of state politics has thrown his hat away from that same race:

Imprisoned former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke says he is leaning against running for Congress in November after he gets out of prison.

"I'm going to say that I'm probably not going to run," Duke said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from prison in Texas. "I have not made any final decision, but I've gotten lots of really fine letters suggesting that I do run because they are so disappointed by the way the Republican Party is going."

I've become interested in the story of the Berkeley Fulbrights-- the state department has agreed to review their applications even though they arrived late because FedEx simply failed to pick them up.

This story rings a particular note with me because I had similar FedEx woes when applying for a scholarship last fall; I asked FedEx to do a next-day delivery, but the driver insisted that he had been unable to find anybody in the building (the building being an administrative building at the University of Chicago). This is even more suspect because one of the advisors swears he was standing in the hallway at 2:43 P.M., when FedEx claims to have been there.

[I called them to clear up the matter-- luckily I had left a day to spare. But because they put a "special attention" notice on my envelope it was pulled from normal circulation and forgot to go out on the truck the next day.]

Tenacity is a great virtue. Modern mythology is replete with stories about the person who just worked harder and stuck to the job and made everything come out in the end. Conventional wisdom says that if you just work hard enough, after all, things will come through for you. Stick to the job when the going gets rough and you'll make it through, happier, wiser and better.

I'm here to tell you why I'm in favor of giving up.

"Giving up." It's not something that people normally advise you to do. In fact, there's some arenas where many people think that giving up is weak and wrong, if not immoral. Here's a few examples.

• Giving up on a PhD program.

  For those of you who haven't been in a PhD program--I can speak particularly for science PhD programs (not an engineering one, where "leaving with a Masters" doesn't seem to be stigmatized)--there's a certain expectation, particularly at the more prestigious universities. The expectation is that if you leave before you get hooded, you're a failure and you couldn't hack it. Just stick it out, everyone advises you, because at the end of the tunnel you will have a piece of paper that will mean more to you than anything else.
  

• Giving up on a marriage.

  The standard appears to be that as long as you (and/or your children) are not being abused, a divorce is a failure. If you get a divorce for any other reason, you are turning your back on family (which should be your primary objective). Your marriage failed. And so did you. If you're lucky, your family will forgive you. Or impute the failure to your ex. Maybe someone later will overlook the fact that you're soiled goods. They'll think that now, maybe you've matured enough to marry. Something like that.
  

• Giving up on an income stream

  Asserting this one is more problematic because our culture tends to idolize people who give up their tie-wearing jobs and go do something more romantic. But our culture tends to idolize these people when they are not our husbands or wives, our daughters or sons, or our cousins. Close acquaintance is about all we can countenance. Anyone else.
  

• Giving up on a political statement.

  Take note: one of the ways to attack candidates for office is to pull out a ten-year old quote saying "Oh, but didn't you used to believe blah blah blah about chickens?" It's wishy-washy to change your mind.
  

Sometimes, giving up really is nothing more than failure. Other times it's not. The tighter you close your grasp, sometimes, the more opportunities slip through your fingers. Sometimes those opportunities go by when you're not paying attention, when you're so busy not giving up on what you're doing now that you can't reach out and grab the moment when it passes.

You commit yourself to a course of action with incomplete information. You don't know who you'll become. You don't know what you'll get. You don't know what you won't be able to get any longer because of your commitment. And so, sometimes, you find that what you can get out of your current commitments is far far less than what you put in.

The difference between tenacity and obstinacy is opportunity cost.

I know, I know. That sounds cold and calculating. It's not. You can't put numbers on the chances that slip through your fingers. When your husband tells you he doesn't want you go to graduate school--he doesn't want you working more than part-time for the rest of your life--you can't put numbers on the lost options that slip away. You can't quantify the worth of your freedom any more than you can determine the price of working with an advisor you dislike on a research project you can't stand with collaborators you never talk to. There are no columns to add, no benefits and disadvantages that you can weigh in anything other than the most vague and unqualified sense.

And yet when you get to the point where your choices wall you in, where you feel that your options diminish to nothing because you can't change your mind, where you rush in lock-step to a drummer that you begin to hate towards a goal that you no longer care about, it is time to reevaluate. Stop walking, look around. Examine the walls around you. Are they good? Are they worthy? Do they deserve to be there?

Sometimes, the act of recognizing that you have choices will be enough to calm your claustrophobia. But if the walls loom and the future looks unappealing--give up.

Let go.

And reach for the things you really want with both hands.

As penance for selecting Roethke's The Waking last time, Michael Oliver offers up a new poem-- Paul Muldoon's Milkweed and Monarch.

It's not bad-- I don't know how I missed it during my investigation of Muldoon. That said, there's a limit to how much lyricism you can work into a poem that rhymes palaver with samovar with savour and gherkin with Oregon. And while the poem isn't a villanelle, it definitely bears a pleasant resemblance (as Ice and Wittgenstein do).

As I've mentioned before, Muldoon occasionally opts for shock over sublimity. There's nothing wrong with this choice, and I think his gift with words usully makes up for his strange choices of them. Still, my mind is stuck on the "little pickled gherkin," rather than the milkweed and the monarchs. Maybe that was the point.

Amanda asks below:

At least in discussions, torture is seen as significantly more OK when it prevents deaths at home, of civilians, than when it prevents the war-time deaths of soldiers. Why? . . . I don't see that there's a moral difference in the two situations — the terrorist on domestic soil who wants to kill civilians at home, and the former civilians who will be killed by enemy soldiers according to the laws of war.

Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries, by A.E. Housman:

These, in the day when heaven was falling,

The hour when earth's foundations fled,

Followed their mercenary calling

And took their wages and are dead.


Their shoulders held the sky suspended;

They stood, and earth's foundations stay;

What God abandoned, these defended,

And saved the sum of things for pay.

Hugh MacDiarmid's reply:

It is a God-damned lie to say that these

Saved, or knew, anything worth any man's pride.

They were professional murderers and they took

Their blood money and their impious risks and died.

In spite of all their kind some elements of worth

With difficulty persist here and there on earth.

Under the Third Geneva Convention, POWs receive a long list of rights designed to protect their persons and ensure that they are humanely treated. They "must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation" (Art. 13); the only question they have to answer is name, rank, and serial number (Art. 17); there are specific guarantees of food, clothing, and medical care (Art. 25-32); they can send and recieve mail (Art. 71). It doesn't matter that the POWs the American are holding may have information about enemy troop movements — surprise attacks that may end in the deaths of thousands of soldiers — or bombing raids on civilian cities, such as London. The Americans running the camp can't lay a finger of torture on the POWs. Ask nicely, and deliver the Red Cross package anyway (Art. 72).

But when we discuss torture in Israel (the ticking bomb scenario expands) or potential torture to prevent terrorism in America, the justification pops up: this torture is a necessary evil to prevent the deaths of innocent people. Or, if you're speaking in America, the reply comes: "Well, this is a land in which we are fortunate enough not to have our busses, coffee shops, and malls blow up on a weekly or monthly basis. It's one thing to oppose torture today, but if you lived under such daily fear, you'd change your mind, too, and start supporting it."

At least in discussions, torture is seen as significantly more OK when it prevents deaths at home, of civilians, than when it prevents the war-time deaths of soldiers. Why?

Necessary reaction to living in a culture of daily fear for your life?
— Do civilians in a country with a high incident of terrorist bombings fear death, expect death to come to them or those near them, more than soldiers on the battlefield do?
Necessary to prevent innocent deaths?
— If you draft the civilians and send them to another country as part of a regiment, do they lose their status as innocents? Do we value a soldier's life differently from a barrista's or a bus driver's?
Torture is necessary to prevent more deaths?
— A similiar question as above. Torturing POWs would probably give you information about troop movements and strategy that would prevent further deaths, at least of your soldiers. But it's not seen as a viable choice. Preventing those deaths can't, by this law, come at the cost of torturing POWs.
For the security of the state?
— Lose a war, and you might see the security of your state tremendously threatened.

I don't see that there''s a moral difference in the two situations — the terrorist on domestic soil who wants to kill civilians at home, and the former civilians who will be killed by enemy soldiers according to the laws of war.

I do note a practical difference. Terrorists often aim to die in action. Hurting them in captivity can lead to information about future strikes, which may then be difused, but a threat of causing physical pain to one captive Hezbollah member isn't going to cause great grief to the leader of the organization (who might well have had plans for that person's death in action). The leader is really only going to take the most notice when the tactics, such a suicide bombing, quit working. There's less of an opportunity for direct tit-for-tat bargaining. With POWs, you can agree: we won't torture your guys if you won't torture ours, but once you start, we're on. Because we want our soldiers to be protected when they become POWs, we agree to let all soldies be protected.

Is torture any more indispensable to the security of the state and the necessary interest of the public when what we fear is domestic terrorism rather than troop deaths?

In the comments to this post, Steve at Begging to Differ points out yet another example in which fiction nonetheless "gets it wrong".

Even though there is not an actual human being identified by the same "Han Solo" tag as the character in Star Wars IV, Han Solo most definitely shot first in the Cantina. All other reports are lies.

(Via Gnostical Turpitude): I see that the New Yorker is reviewing Simon Blackburn's Lust (quite favorably). Among much more, the author writes:

(T)he Japanese . . . know a thing or two (perhaps more, even, than St. Augustine or Dr. Martha Nussbaum) about the senses.

Why is it that people feel compelled to accuse Ashcroft of not understanding "privacy" rather than, say, understanding perfectly well, but disagreeing about what should be private?

UPDATE: As you can see below, Ampersand has responded (the expression of "disdain"). I remain unmoved by this technique myself, but it's nice to have an explanation, and I suspect I'm not Amp's target demographic.