It may be obvious: Will, earlier, quoted an article quoting Helen Vendler:

“If you make people promise to burn your manuscripts” — as Kafka and (by legend) Virgil did — “they should,” Vendler insisted.

There are, in fact, two different ways to spell the name. The poet, most likely, would have preferred Publius Vergilius Maro, but we're not there to check. The two predominant ways are "VErgil" and "VIrgil." The reasons are many: one suggests that Vergil's fourth Eclogue (the Messianic) struck such a chord with Medieval clerics that they ascribed something magical to the Roman poet, making his name itself into a "wand" (wand=virga, in Latin). Others say that the i-variant comes from his apparent sexual reclusivity and homosexual preferences (thus, virgo=virgin, or "maiden" which was another nickname he had: "Parthenias").

The point still stands: Vergil or Virgil? I've been rapped on the knuckles for spelling it the latter, but chided for insisting on the former. And clearly, in an article about authorial preference, how interesting to see the name spelled with an "i".

This, of course, begs the question: what would Helen Vendler write?

This post over at Balkin's place by Scott Horton has me the wee-est bit riled this morning. People have tried to make the point I'm going to make in the comments there, but the discussion has degenerated, so I will write here instead. Here, at least , I can be sure my views will get top billing, and people who want to call me names will get consigned to the comments.

Horton's premise, in short, is that Pearl Harbor day is a good day to remember that important struggles can be won in ways consistent with American values. That, he says, was World War II - "The Greatest Generation upheld our nation's ideals when it went to war. It understood the value of those ideals as weapons. It won the war. And then it did some real magic. By treating our adversaries as human beings, by showing them dignity and respect, our grandfathers' generation created a new world in the rubble of the Second World War." But what's happening today, in Horton's view, is a betrayal of those values. As he puts it, "Let's assume the unthinkable: that America had embraced Mr. Bush's "Program" in the Second World War; that German, Italian and Japanese fighters had been waterboarded, subjected to the cold cell and techniques like "long time standing." Do any of you think for even a second that these nations would have been our allies and friends in the following generations?"

The problem with this pleasant sounding paean to WWII, of course, is that Horton's historical claim is flatly, objectively, absurd in the context of what we did to the Germans and the Japanese in WWII. We didn't just slaughter their armies, though we did do that. Rather, our presidents ordered the destruction of entire cities through firebombing and nuclear war, with the professed, if shrouded, intent to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians (that is to say, ordered with classic malice). Only after that wholescale annihilation of our opponents did we lope in to dispense "mercy." Only after we left entire nations in smouldering ruin did we recognize anyone's "dignity and respect." An America acting today in the way that FDR's America acted in WWII would have razed Iraq, and then tried to rebuild the country on that self-created tabula rasa. That, I think, is not quite what Horton has in mind. And whatever tortures we've inflicted on civilian innocents (and I do not doubt that people have been tortured, though whether we have ordered it or not I can't say), all of them in a giant ball of infamous brutality cannot match even one of our terrible evenings over Dresden. Perhaps torture is uniquely bad, and that's the distinction. But, to me, it's hard to argue with thousands of German children burned to a char, orJapanese ones dying of cancer.

The above objections to Horton's point do not justify anything happening today. There is a separate moral case against the way we are conducting the war on terror. There are multiple utilitarian, for a lack of a better word, arguments against that same war. I am conflicted on those issues. And I equally don't mean to condemn either FDR or Truman. Indeed, I have always defended their actions in WWII, although the work of defending what we did is morally complex.

My point, rather, is that of all the possible positions one can have on the interplay between WWII and today, Horton has picked the one indefensible one. One can plausibly believe, for example, that both WWII and our methods in Iraq are unjustified as divergences from true, American, values. Or, one can argue that our brutality in WWII was justified, and our lesser brutality in Iraq unjustified, because the stakes in the former were so high, and the costs of failure so grievous. Or, one can equally plausibly say that both are justified, in some kind of "war is horrible" calculus; that, perhaps, morality stops at the trench's edge. The one position one cannot hold, however, is that WWII represented some sort of moral ideal, from which we have now departed. That position requires nothing short of deliberate historical obfuscation, an unwillingness to look frankly at what we, as a democratic people, authorized just fifty years ago. As such, I don't understand how someone of Horton's place can profess such an argument, and if so, how he can square the points I have made above. As is obvious from what I've written, I don't think he can.