People v. Bandersnatch
Monday, June 30th, 2008
Political life has never been short on absurdity. It doesn’t usually get quite this explicit, though. The AP reports today that the DC Circuit Court’s recent ruling on Guantanamo quoted from Lewis Carroll (he of Alice in Wonderland), who knew a thing or three about absurdity.*
According to the AP story:
As for the reliability of the evidence, the court writes, “The government insists that the statements made in the documents are reliable because the State and Defense Departments would not have put them in intelligence documents were that not the case,” the court wrote. “This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true.”
The judges compared the argument to the Bellman’s nonsense in “The Hunting of the Snark,” in which a crew hunts for a creature that is never defined. The Bellman, the ship’s leader, led his men across the ocean, guided by a map that was just a blank piece of paper. He rallied and reassured his crew simply by repeating himself. “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true,” the Bellman says. (more…)
Checked my Yahoo account today, and thought for a minute I was reading some descendent of Lewis Carroll, or maybe Hugo Ball. Spam seems to be Yahoo’s bread and butter, judging by the amount of it that clogs my inbox every time I log in, but lately it’s taken on an almost poetic, musique concrete quality. The Ali Zapatas and Zenobia Q Titmouses of the world have given us some real gems, reprinted here as poetry (n.b. the typos are theirs, not mine):