• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}
• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}
• The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}
• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}
• Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}
• Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}
• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}
• Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}
• The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}
• The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}
• Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}
• Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}
• The War Against Cliche and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}
• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}
• The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliche. And get a dictionary.}
• The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}
• Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}
• Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}
• Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}
• The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children�s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}
• The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}
• Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}
• Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}
• My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}
ALBUMS:
• You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}
• Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}
• Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}
• Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}
• Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}
• Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}
• Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}
• These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}
• SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}
• The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}
• It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}
• Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn't usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}
• Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}
• The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it�s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}
• The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}
• The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}
• No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}
• The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}
FILMS & TV:
• Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}
• Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}
• Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}
• The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}
• Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}
• Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}
• Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}
• The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}
• Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modeled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}
• Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}
• Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}
The term "civil union" has acquired special meaning in the United States as the alternative legal code allowing same-sex couples to enjoy the social and economic advantages of marriage. But in Israel, it connotes something simpler: the right for any couple, gay or straight, to wed without the approval of the Chief Rabbinate, an Orthodox governing body that still determines the only legally acceptable form of wedlock in the Jewish state. At present there are about 300,000 Reform Jews, secularists, "illegitimate" converts, and non-native Israelis who can't obtain a recognized marriage in Israel. If you ask most close observers of the debate, their battle is a decidedly agonized one.
Early in June, a bill that would have authorized civil unions, cosponsored by a host of Kadima and Labor representatives, was defeated in the Knesset due largely to a turnabout by Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu. The party--whose largest voting bloc is made up of immigrants from the former Soviet Union and their first-generation children, many of whom the rabbinate does not consider halachically Jewish--had campaigned in this year's national election on the promise of delivering a civil union bill. But, once in power, Lieberman changed his position to dovetail with that of the Orthodox and Haredi parties--including Shas, Agudat Yisrael and Bayit Yehudi--that make up Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition government. (Calls and emails to the Yisrael Beiteinu Jerusalem headquarters went unanswered.)
These are dark times for American conservatives. When they aren't issuing recriminations at one another for the loss of the White House, they're resorting to increasingly desperate tactics against the new president. Obama's international allure, many on the right insist, is at odds with his duty to uphold and defend strictly American interests; his cosmopolitan background--though itself the embodiment of our national dream--is little more than affirmative action at the world-historical level. Conservatives have looked on in amazement as a man fluent in identity politics and skilled at promoting his outsider status for insider gain has ascended to the highest public office on earth. This is odd given that one the founders of modern conservatism was himself an ethnic minority with an exotic last name, who governed a predominant culture as if to the manor born, undercutting bigotry and innuendo with the ironic put-down instead of the throbbing vein. If the GOP wants a model for future political leadership, it should revisit the career of Benjamin Disraeli.
What made Britain's first and only Jewish prime minister so prescient? Adam Kirsch, fresh off his absorbing biography of Disraeli, observed that what his subject and Obama have most in common is literary origin. Both men used their writing as a "laboratory" in which to test to the same question that would mark their political careers: "is it possible to genuinely belong to, and even lead, a society that shuns people like you?" Yet while Obama is no doubt the elegant yield of an evolved zeitgeist, it remains to be seen if he can precipitate the next stage in that zeitgeist's evolution. Disraeli's great virtue was to understand that the world of the 19th century, of which he was that paradoxical oddity--a romantic conservative, a baptized Jew--was changing under the dual engines of industrial capitalism and colonial expansion, and that the Tories must also change or perish. Rather than remain fixed in some curmudgeonly idyll for a feudal past, responsive only to cooked-up resentments against so-called "elites" (he proudly was one), he fashioned a pragmatic materialism that set about to answer what Thomas Carlyle called the "condition-of-England question." Acting out of a mixture of principle and expediency, Disraeli pioneered the Third Way, avant la lettre.
So where have I been, what have I been doing? I might tweet this (as Stephen Colbert would say, "I have twatted"), but then what would be the point of having a blog?
The ever-bookish online journal Nextbook -- my new journalistic home, once considered the Jewish New York Review of Books (if that's not redundant) -- has relaunched as Tablet Magazine. You can see the swank new site here. And there's even a video of how it got made here. Editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse's welcome letter here. And of particular non-institutional interest should be Adam Kirsch on Gertrude Himmelfarb and Daniel Deronda, Allison Hoffman on microfinancing in the ultra-Orthodox community, and me on why some conservative critiques of Obama's big speech in Cairo were wrong.
An ex-Communist acquaintance of mine has a very loose -- most would say inadequate -- standard for determining whether or not someone has atoned for the sin of Stalinism. The standard is admitting to a single crime committed by the Soviet dictator, and admitting it in no uncertain terms. This is the giveaway confession, says my recovering Red, of the wound-down ideologue, who likely hasn't realized just how liberated his captive mind has become. By this standard, Nikita Khrushchev qualifies as primus inter pares of anti-Stalinists despite the fact that that he was no democrat or humanitarian, but rather a decades-long loyal functionary of the dead man he repudiated.
"Gaudy butterfly in a drab chrysalis" is how the historian Perry Anderson described the supposedly bumbling Ukrainian peasant who initiated the period of Soviet "thaw," which more refractory apparatchiks then refroze after his fall. If this striking metaphor seems a mite too generous -- what extravagant lepidopteron occupied Budapest in 1956, or ordered the "arrest" of Vasily Grossman's epic masterpiece Life and Fate? -- then it is necessary to recall just how momentous Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" at the 20th Party Congress was that same year. Speaking in a closed session, the transcript of which eventually made its way into the international press, Khrushchev deplored Stalin's "personality cult" as a gross perversion of Marxism-Leninism; he highlighted lethal mistakes the Generalissimus had made during World War II (such as killing off the people best able to fight it); he acknowledged the use of torture ("Beat, beat, and beat again" was Stalin's dictum) as the central means of obtaining confessions from Old Bolsheviks; and he hinted at the true origins of the notorious murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934, an event that raised the curtain on the Great Terror and consolidated Stalin's power.
One would think, then, that Khrushchev should hold pride of place in the annals of Russian history as a brave reformer. Not so in a country where Stalin is now ranked the third greatest national hero, and all the civics textbooks under Putinshchina treat the gulag as an unpleasant curio that doesn't compare to industrialization schemes and defeating fascists. Not only Khrushchev has come in for reprehension: his family has, too. In a highly absorbing essay for the Abu Dhabi-published newspaper The National, Peter Savodnik surveys the controversy surrounding Leonid Khrushchev, the premier's son, who died under mysterious circumstances in World War II and is now the subject of a neo-Brezhnevite smear campaign. Was the pilot Leonid shot down by Nazis or captured by them and turned into a traitor? And why does the record of one famous son's fate matter beyond the murky defamation precincts of Russia's murkier legal system?
The quixotic legal struggle to clear Leonid Khrushchev's name may seem a minor footnote, a historical irony that pits the heirs of one supreme leader against the power of another. But it represents precisely the kind of self-criticism that Russia has spent the better part of the past decade running away from. This process, which began under Gorbachev and petered out under Yeltsin before being aggressively opposed under Putin, is a precondition for any liberalisation. At its heart, at the core of the much-needed Russian conversation about Russia - Stalin, the meaning of the Gulag, the purges, the centuries-old tension pitting Westerniser against Slavophile - is Nikita Khrushchev. It was Khrushchev who embodied the Soviet dream, the rise of the peasant-worker to the highest echelons of the Soviet superstructure, and, at the same time, it was Khrushchev who gave voice to the contradictions, the inequities and iniquities of the system, who symbolises this double consciousness of contemporary Russia.
In December 2006, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), an international group established in 1971 and representing 57 countries, hosted an emergency summit in Mecca. The event became infamous after two angry imams from Denmark presented a dossier of cartoons published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten that mocked the Prophet Mohammed. In the ensuing uproar, Muslims murdered several people in Europe and torched the Danish embassy in Beirut.
But the cartoon episode wasn't the summit's starkest example of Muslim outrage over free speech. The most critical decision that the OIC made in Mecca was to adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward perceived insults to Islam. In its "Ten-Year Programme of Action," the OIC announced that it would create an "observatory" to monitor acts of "Islamophobia." It would also "endeavor to have the United Nations adopt an international resolution to counter Islamophobia, and call upon all States to enact laws to counter it, including deterrent punishments"--essentially the goal of its nonbinding UN resolution on "combating defamation of religions," which the UN's General Assembly adopted in March 2008. And it would "participate and coordinate effectively in all regional and international forums, in order to protect and promote the collective interests of the Muslim Ummah, including UN reform [and] expanding the Security Council membership."
The goal was simple: to infiltrate and weaken secular democratic covenants and institutions from within, in a manner reminiscent of revolutionary Marxist groups' "entryism" into the British Labour Party in the seventies and eighties. The OIC's plan for implementing its Islamist agenda hasn't succeeded on all fronts, of course. But it has succeeded spectacularly on one: the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Now that the Obama administration has redoubled its military focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan, it is worth remembering that Iraq is by no means a completed or "won" war. One hundred and forty-two thousand coalition troops are still deployed, mainly in a peacekeeping capacity.
It's true that overall violence has remained low since the surge. However, the current Iraqi government, which just concluded a successful provincial election, operates today on what can only be described as a temporary truce agreement among various sectarian parties, and the future of this fragile country is by no means certain. In six weeks, the U.S. will begin an estimated sixteen-month withdrawal of combat forces from Iraq, so the conversation turns, albeit at a much more muted level than before, to the subject of exit strategies.
Dissent magazine is hosting a written symposium on this question, and one submission by a participant who has long devoted himself to the Iraq war and its bloody aftermath is a necessary read. Brendan O'Leary is an international constitutional adviser to the Kurdistan National Assembly and Government (KRG), who, having matured in the cask of Northern Ireland, is an expert on federalism and ethno-religious power sharing arrangements in post-colonial societies.
(To get a sense of O'Leary's cogence in years past, read his brilliant rebuttal to the Baker-Hamilton report on Iraq.)
This is Gertrude Himmelfarb in a brief but clever essay at Standpoint on the preference for the second-best (in terms of thinkers, their thoughts, and their politics) over the best:
Leo Strauss once observed that in the 19th century, Germany's politics were "a mess" while its thinkers were "first-class". England's politics, on the other hand, were "fine", and its thinkers "second-class". The implication (which Strauss did not have to spell out to his disciples) was clear: there may be an inverse relationship between philosophy and politics. Grand philosophies of the Germanic order - abstract, systematic, comprehensive, engaging all aspects of nature, aspiring to create a whole that would subsume all contingencies and rationally construct (or reconstruct) the world - such philosophies were not only irrelevant to the mundane affairs of social and political life but also fatally distracting and disruptive. Conversely, the modest philosophies favoured by the English (a German philosopher might say of Mill, as Churchill said of Clement Attlee, that he had much to be modest about) were attuned to a culture that was practical and prudent and thus conducive to a polity that was humane and responsible.
Of course, the preeminent historian of 19th-century England would side with an unglamorous prudence against Romantic perfectionism. It is worth noting, however, that her intellectual lodestone in this essay is none other than Alexis de Tocqueville, a non-French Frenchman if ever there was one, who first glimpsed the scuffed genius of American society for what it was, even if his continental heirs have lately had a hard time doing the same.
Himmelfarb's last sentence in that paragraph was echoed by Robert Conquest, who once pointed out the telling statistic that if one took all of the recorded casualties of the notorious Peterloo Massacre of 1819 -- an incitement to radicalism like none other in the country -- one would find that they didn't amount to a single day's butcher's bill at the barricades of revolutionary Paris. This was for good reason. The "law-and-liberty" tradition, though less sexy (and bloody) in its reliance on empiricism and organic modes of association, was a distinctly Anglophone invention, which is why all major upheavals of the post-Enlightenment English period were parliamentary in nature. Although even Albion was by no means immune to the lures of utopianism, as Conquest was quick to add:
The "Western" culture has always implied the absence of absolutes, disbelief in perfect political wisdom, in readily predictable futures. But the avoidance of the extreme, ideologized way of thinking does not in itself save the political entity concerned from a milder, but still potentially dangerous, form of the affliction. And these less malignant varieties have to some extent taken hold--with uncritical devotion to various quick-fix solutions by humans and their states to the problems facing them. As in the medical usage we speak of "-itis" in a real ailment and "-osis" in merely a morbid condition, we might speak of "ideitis" in the totalitarian countries and "ideosis" in certain Western cases.
The Russian intelligentsia who influenced or became Bolsheviks were themselves pro-Western (with particular affinities toward Germany and France), and so one appreciates the built-in escape clause of this observation. However, the -itis/-osis dichotomy is rather brilliant, and it reflects something the late (and much misunderstood) Samuel Huntington said about the United States. Our political fever dreams are rare and short, but they do have the ability to initiate incremental or gradual changes in a deeply conservative culture. It was therefore much more difficult for this country's lasting institutions to be overhauled dramatically, or eradicated entirely, in moments of what might be called punctuated societal equilibrium. What Huntington called them, in fact, was "creedal passion periods" (the Communist tendency of the 1930's, the antiwar movement of the 1960's, etc.), which would flare up during times of national trauma, but then give way again to historic consensus.
This is second-best-ism at its best, which is one of the reasons I think rumors of the coming century of American declinism are wildly exaggerated.
Being not yet a parent myself, I humbly beg your indulgence to comment on a subject that is all about self-indulgence. I speak of the vogue for the wised-up, exhibitionist parenting memoir that chronicles the sickly-sweet misadventures of the Hipster Dad, or the Bad Mommy, for either of whom every Prospect Park walkup pleases, and only junior himself is vile. Actually, the curious little bundle inspires a mixture of competitive emotions, ranging from joy to fear to anxiety to infanticidal loathing, all of which can only gain coherence and catharsis, we are led to believe, in the narrative form.
Yes, they fuck you up, your mum and dad, and they only mean to these days because the advances are so big. Ann Hulbert at Slate surveys the latest crop of look-at-me parenting books, and concludes (more or less) that the fathers' are funny and insightful while the mothers' are all over the place:
These are not diaries of mad housewives, furious at men and eager to fly the coop [Good to get that cleared up at the start. --ed]. They are diaries of medicated mothers, professionally diagnosed with "badness"--bipolar disorder in Waldman's case and postpartum depression in Armstrong's--yet doing their endlessly guilty, giddy best to deal in the down-and-dirty trenches and share it with the rest of us, all without betraying a hint of humorlessness. And, ideally, without hurting the kids: "I always share what I'm writing with them," Waldman tells us. "I check in to make sure they're not uncomfortable and don't feel exposed." Armstrong slips in Hallmark-style notes to baby Leta as she develops--"What a great month, little one. We are having so much fun together. ..." Years from now, it seems safe to say that big Leta and Waldman's brood, looking back, won't feel particularly violated. But I can't imagine they'll consider their mothers liberated, either.
Maimonides had it that giving to charity was no act of beneficence if you sought or took credit for it. A working single mother without a blog or timely child support payments makes the kind of sacrifice these mommies at once mistrust and envy in their self-consciousness. With all this meta-parenting, one wonders when the real thing gets done. And can you really raise a child without a "hint of humorlessness" without expecting the result to be John Wayne Gacy?
"I always share what I'm writing with them." That's nice, but they didn't ask to be your editors (or your children, for that matter), and I doubt even sensitive Michael Chabon has enough authorial empathy to want to know every maternal or anti-maternal thought that passes through your head. ("If we were on safari, and a lion was bearing down on Michael, which of the brood would I toss the beast's way to spare my sultry husband?")
"The babe that weeps the rod beneath," sang Blake, "Writes Revenge! in realms of death." I know of no innocence augured by this latest fashion for disgorging everything there possibly is to know about a fetus's progression into young adulthood, but as for the babe that will someday read about his every case of diaper rash and the existential turmoil that attended it, his supple revenge will likely be a memoir of his very own. Won't that be fun.
There has got to be by now a subgenre of literary journalism classifiable as "Orwell pornography" and devoted to every inch of his domestic existence. How many times the collected word count of Shakespeare have gone to deciphering whether the Bard wrote his own stuff, sat for some enigmatic portrait, or loved whichever sex? But his life was so long ago that the mystery entices precisely because we'll never quite know the truth (save for the fact that he did indeed write his own stuff, thank you very much, Justice Stevens).
In Orwell's case, however, the clock need only be rewound sixty years, and thanks to correspondence, memoirs and living eyewitness accounts, we have been able to cobble together an adequate picture of what it was like to be the moral genius of the twentieth century. Orwell's maxim was that good prose is clear as a window-pane, a corollary of which is that in order to write anything readable one must efface one's personality. But it doesn't seem as if he had any self-effacement to do, or not much anyway. So much of Orwell's life was dedicated to drudgery and the anxiety about further drudgery--as was so much of his work. (See the essays "Why I Write," "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," and even "A Nice Cup of Tea," which catechized an English ritual in terms that only a cognitive behavioral psychologist should ever appreciate.)
Robert McCrumb recounts the long, sad process of Orwell's composition of his masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, which took place on the Scottish island of Jura, in a house belonging to his editor at the Observer, David Astor. It was here that Orwell succumbed to tuberculosis after a constitution-weakening boating mishap with his young son Richard in frigid temperature:
A few days later, writing to Astor from Hairmyres hospital, East Kilbride, Lanarkshire, he admitted: "I still feel deadly sick," and conceded that, when illness struck after the Corryvreckan whirlpool incident, "like a fool I decided not to go to a doctor - I wanted to get on with the book I was writing." In 1947 there was no cure for TB - doctors prescribed fresh air and a regular diet - but there was a new, experimental drug on the market, streptomycin. Astor arranged for a shipment to Hairmyres from the US.
Richard Blair believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. "It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff," Orwell told his publisher. "It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works."
As he prepared to leave hospital Orwell received the letter from his publisher which, in hindsight, would be another nail in his coffin. "It really is rather important," wrote Warburg to his star author, "from the point of view of your literary career to get it [the new novel] by the end of the year and indeed earlier if possible."
Just when he should have been convalescing Orwell was back at Barnhill, deep into the revision of his manuscript, promising Warburg to deliver it in "early December", and coping with "filthy weather" on autumnal Jura. Early in October he confided to Astor: "I have got so used to writing in bed that I think I prefer it, though of course it's awkward to type there. I am just struggling with the last stages of this bloody book [which is] about the possible state of affairs if the atomic war isn't conclusive."
"A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection," wrote Nabokov, satirizing Marx and the "law" of historical inevitability. Sometimes toothaches and drizzles prove useful. I now find it impossible to imagine that what Orwell put poor Winston Smith through in Room 101 and the unrecorded dungeons of Oceania was not in some way extrapolated from his own physical ruin. "Cadaverous" is how McCrumb describes the writer even in modest health, who, despite a preoccupation with the Last Man of Europe (an early possible title for Nineteen Eighty-Four), dreamt up the quintessential nightmare of a world gone mad looking and feeling like one of Eliot's hollow men.
Roxana Saberi, the Iranian-American journalist sentenced to eight years of jail by the mullahs for the crime of embodying everything after the hyphen in that description of her, has been released from her cell, but not from her state of jeopardy. According to the Associated Press:
Iran's intelligence chief insists American journalist Roxana Saberi is guilty because an appeals court did not acquit her of spying charges even though it reduced her prison sentence to a two-year suspended sentence.
Iranian state TV has quoted Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejehi as saying Wednesday Saberi's release from jail doesn't mean she hasn't violated any laws.
Saberi, imprisoned on espionage charges in Iran for four months, was freed Monday and reunited with her parents. The 32-year-old dual Iranian-American citizen was originally sentenced to eight years in prison in a short, closed-door trial.
Saberi's lawyer revealed Tuesday that she was convicted of spying for the U.S. in part because she had a copy of a confidential Iranian report on the U.S. war in Iraq.
So she can be tossed back into Evin Prison (the Lubyanka of Tehran) at any time before her expected departure from the country next week. News of Saberi's release was greeted by some with perhaps undue optimism that the Obama administration's make-nice approach to dictatorial regimes was working. However, it is worth recalling that a few years ago Haleh Esfandiari, another Iranian-American (this one a scholar at the Brookings Institution) was similarly locked up when she arrived back home to visit her aged mother. A prodigious letter-writing and human rights and blogging campaign -- of which I was proud to be a part -- put pressure on her jailers, and Esfandiari, too, was eventually let go. (She's now back in the U.S.)
If there is a positive political takeaway from Saberi's homecoming it is that the state now has harder time of disappearing or killing its citizens with impunity. A societal amnesia toward the individual is becoming impossible in the age of the coaxial cable. This is not to oversell the liberating potential of technology, which also has the ability to enslave, but it is a nice irony that assorted riffraff desiring mankind's return to the seventh century are being undermined and hobbled by the twenty-first.
My friend Adam LeBor has just written his first work of fiction, a political thriller set at the end of World War II and titled The Budapest Protocol. Rather like the Valkyrie plot to assassinate Hitler and restore Tom Cruise's career, LeBor's book is rooted in historical fact. However, his expose in the Daily Mail explaining the warp and woof of this Nazi conspiracy is more intriguing because the conspiracy actually succeeded:
The three-page, closely typed [Red House Report], marked 'Secret', copied to British officials and sent by air pouch to Cordell Hull, the US Secretary of State, detailed how the industrialists were to work with the Nazi Party to rebuild Germany's economy by sending money through Switzerland.
They would set up a network of secret front companies abroad. They would wait until conditions were right. And then they would take over Germany again.
The industrialists included representatives of Volkswagen, Krupp and Messerschmitt. Officials from the Navy and Ministry of Armaments were also at the meeting and, with incredible foresight, they decided together that the Fourth German Reich, unlike its predecessor, would be an economic rather than a military empire - but not just German.
Hannah Arendt coined the term "fascist international" and presciently observed that a chauvinist hyper-nationalism is not mutually exclusive from what we would now toothlessly call "globalism" (see the phenomenon of pan-Arab nationalism, for instance, which declares itself a seeming contradiction in terms but shakes out rather coherently). LeBor's argument is that it is impossible to conceive of the European Union -- in form if not ideology -- without examining a quiet but shrewd 1944 plan for resuscitating the Reich in the aftermath of certain military defeat. A mass pardon of Nazi industrialists, such as Alfried Krupp and Friedrich Flick, preceded the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Commission, of which they then took extreme advantage. Hermann Abs, a prominent board member of Deutsche Bank, which "Aryanized" Jewish-owned Austrian and Czechoslovak banks beginning in 1937, later was put in charge of administering Marshall Aid. LeBor writes:
Crucially, Abs was also a member of the European League for Economic Co-operation, an elite intellectual pressure group set up in 1946. The league was dedicated to the establishment of a common market, the precursor of the European Union.
Its members included industrialists and financiers and it developed policies that are strikingly familiar today - on monetary integration and common transport, energy and welfare systems.
When Konrad Adenauer, the first Chancellor of West Germany, took power in 1949, Abs was his most important financial adviser.
Behind the scenes Abs was working hard for Deutsche Bank to be allowed to reconstitute itself after decentralisation. In 1957 he succeeded and he returned to his former employer.
And the main economic theorist of renascent industrial Germany, Ludwig Erhard, became Adenauer's first postwar economics minister before ascending to the chancellory himself.
LeBor's conclusion is as dark as they come: "[T]he German economic miracle - so vital to the idea of a new Europe - was built on mass murder. The number of slave and forced labourers who died while employed by German companies in the Nazi era was 2,700,000."
Though well served on the silver screen, Bible dramas have never found a willing audience on the small one, unless you count Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, which most people have watched only on television. A 1999 miniseries about the life of Jesus got good reviews from critics but failed to generate much interest from viewers, perhaps because it avoided controversy (despite the tantalizing possibilities of Gary Oldman portraying Pontius Pilate). What a shame, then, that NBC's terrific new drama Kings, a modern reimagining of the story of David, has struggled with low ratings and rumors of early cancellation, as if to fulfill some dire prophecy about God and prime time.
Much of the appeal of Kings lies in its source material. The English critic Duff Cooper once remarked that the biblical David must have been based on a real person, because what nation would ever invent such a compromised hero? Warrior, poet, musician, brigand, politician, tyrant, Lothario, polygamist, paterfamilias--Tony Soprano had nothing on the King of Israel. And though the series bears only a superficial plot resemblance to the Book of Samuel, it remains essentially true to its complicated moral spirit.
Kings is set not in the biblical Israel but in Shiloh, a fictional twenty-first-century, Manhattan-like kingdom. In the series premiere, the city has just been consolidated and assured of its sovereignty after the "unification wars" with neighboring Gath, here a synecdoche for all the lands of the Philistines. King Silas Benjamin (meant to evoke the biblical Saul, descendant of the Benjaminites), played with the perfect mixture of charisma and gravitas by Ian MacShane, credits providence for this hard-won accomplishment in his inaugural speech, despite being told by his handlers (likely with the latest New York Times bestsellers list in mind) that "God is not popular these days." Meanwhile, in the suburb of Port Prosperity, a young David Shepherd watches the inauguration ceremony with his family--minus his father, killed in battle--when the king's own prelate, Reverend Samuels, drives up to the house with a car in need of repair. David obliges, whereupon Samuels "anoints" him by casually touching his forehead, thereby creating an air of election around an unprepossessing provincial mechanic.
John Gross's spirited review of a new book out entitled, Blokes: The Bad Boys of British Literature, reminded me of the first time I came across the pithy Anglo term denoting "a male who believes in his own spirit and is willing to do almost anything to see that it doesn't die." I was fourteen and it was a purchase of British socialist troubadour Billy Bragg's album, "William Bloke," a play on the name of his favorite poet and homegrown radical, whose poem "Jerusalem" Bragg continues to want to see made the official national anthem of England. (He also wants to see the House of Lords abolished, a prospect that strikes this foreign observer as rather appealing given the system of peerage-for-service exacerbated by Tony Blair and the fact that today's electorally unaccountable members welcome Islamist totalitarians to the same shores they threaten to line with religious rioters should an eccentric and xenophobic Dutch filmmaker dare to alight.)
A bloke, in contemporary parlance, is a guy's guy, someone you want to have a beer with, crack bawdy jokes with, go cruising for girls with--the actor Vince Vaughn, namely. (Interestingly enough, Bragg's other album is "Bloke on Bloke," which unintentionally prefigured the cinematic vogue for what's now called the "bromance" comedy, about two male friends who do everything but have sex with each other; Wedding Crashers being little more than Bouvard et Pécuchet overstuffed with canape and taffeta.)
But, according to the book's author David Castronovo, the term also represents a distinct literary phenomenon, beginning in the mid-50's among (mostly) working-class British writers who matured in the cask of a postwar, post-imperial state riven by class consciousness and the "scholarship-or-nothing" fork in its education system. Known commonly as the "Angry Young Men," Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, John Osborne and Kenneth Tynan conducted careful investigations into the nature of masculinity, femininity, and heterosexual "ree-lay-shun-ships" (as Larkin put it), without which collective toil it's simply impossible to imagine the advent of Maxim magazine or the "lad lit" of Nick Hornby, who infuses his work, unfortunately, with the sort of sentimentalism the forebears would have loathed.
Gross is more exacting than Castronovo in his use of "bloke":
Much of the trouble lies in Mr. Castronovo's use (or misuse) of the word "bloke" itself. It is a term with a strong distinctive flavor, which often gets in the way of what he wants it to mean. It also has an interesting history. While nowadays thought of as almost exclusively British, it was once widely used in America as well. According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, it was still current in the earlier decades of the 20th century. Among other sources, the Dictionary cites Damon Runyon and the song "Minnie the Moocher." ("She messed around wid a bloke called Smokey.") On both sides of the Atlantic the word's primary meaning was simply "man." But in Britain it has also acquired a more positive connotation. A British bloke is sometimes just a man but frequently (to quote a leading dictionary of British slang) "a decent, down-to-earth, unpretentious man."
Perhaps no writer of stature, if only by dint of having exceptional gifts, qualifies as a bloke in this second sense. Certainly the members of Mr. Castronovo's chosen quartet don't. They were difficult, aggressive and self-centered: They cultivated a number of blokish tastes but also remained stubbornly literary, remote in many of their interests from the general mass of men and women. "Lucky Jim" is far more a campus novel than a study of the condition of England. Jimmy Porter, in "Look Back in Anger," may have persuaded Tynan that he was the herald of a bright new revolutionary dawn; but in retrospect he seems more like a shrill little one-man show, peddling nothing but his own localized will to power.
It's worth keeping in mind that the expression "down-to-earth" was coined by P.G. Wodehouse, grandfather to the bloke literary movement without qualifying as a bona fide bloke himself (he was sexless in both life and comedy). And while Gross is correct to indicate that having an artistic bent seems to nullify inclusion in the category, Amis nonetheless stands apart as the most bloke-ish of the bunch. Larkin used to mildly rebuke his best friend for being an "enemy of books," or, at any rate, the ones not written by Dick Francis. And although the King's English was unsurpassed, and he could be venomous about the abuses of language or style, he took a curmudgeonly pride in playing the role of folksy anti-intellectual, a creature subsistent exclusively on the senses and basic good sense. That's pretentious in its way, too, but what began as a posture evolved into Amis's genuine nature, one which could drive those who had to live with him or read him into paroxsyms of either politically correct outrage or belly-laughter.
Come to think, that might actually serve as a fair acid test for contemporary blokedom.
I once took a job right out of college at the Queens Museum of Art, about two weeks too late. A fortnight prior to my arrival, the son of Alger Hiss had given a talk at the museum about his poor, martyred father and, judging by the internal press clippings of the event, nary a skeptical question was put to fils about pere's standing today in the annals of communist historiography--at least among those who respect the truth more than liberal piety. Roosevelt's man at Dumbarton Oaks and Yalta was framed, you see, the first in a long line of McCarthy's victims broken by a lying reactionary element (and never mind that Hiss's trial and imprisonment occurred when the scrofulous senator from Wisconsin was still a freshman best known for unhorsing Robert LaFollette). Hiss was certainly more charismatic and handsome than brooding, portly Whittaker Chambers, but he was also a Soviet spy, and a lousy one at that. He'd have gladly done more to aid the Stalinist cause on American soil, however much his naive zealousness would have simultaneously jeopardized it: His biggest blunder as a liaison between the "underground" cell administered by Colonel Bykov and the State Department was offering to donate his personal car for above-ground party use. A big no-no that would surely have had him liquidated if he were a man of greater importance.
But I digress. Defenders of the fellow traveling faith are nowhere thicker in number and sensibility than in the pages of The Nation magazine, and so I don't know why I was even mildly surprised to find, on page 36 of the current issue, the following advertisement:
MEMORIAL SERVICE
Philip Agee
1935-2008
Sunday, May 3, 2009
12 noon
Marjorie S. Deane
Little Theater
Westside Y
5 W. 63rd Street
New York, NY 10023
Bernie Dwyer's 2007 film of
Philip's last interview will be shown.
Messages from friends are welcome.
mwulf@blhny.com
Agee, of course, was the CIA agent who not only broke with the spy organization in the mid-70's, but then published a book in Britain, Inside the Company, naming names of all his former associates, many of whom were still deployed overseas as secret agents (and many of whom were no doubt captured and killed as a result of this expose). But despite Agee's defection to Castro's Cuba, for which he toiled with the same serf-like devotion he had formerly exhibited in his wet work, he always maintained that he had not switched superpower sides in the Cold War and fed information directly to the Soviets. This was a falsehood.
According to The Mitrokhin File, the definitive history of the KGB's activities in Europe and the Third World, Agee did in fact approach Oleg Kalugin, the head of the FCD's Counter-Intelligence Directorate, in 1973 in Mexico City. Agee offered, according to Kalugin, "'reams of information about CIA operations." But the Russian was too suspicious of such a bounty and declined to accept. Then,
Agee then went to the Cubans, who welcomed him with open arms...The Cubans shared Agee's information with us. But as I sat in my office in Moscow reading reports about the growing revelations coming from Agee, I cursed our officers for turning away such a prize.
You may think, as I do, that the CIA has been a moral and strategic liability for this country since its inception. You may also think it no more than a matter of journalistic freedom of information to write an insider's tell-all about the national security establishment. (For what it's worth, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, passed in 1982 as a pretext to go after Agee legally, was lately used in the ludicrous prosecutions of Judith Miller and Scooter Libby, both of whom, shall we say, are not in good odor at The Nation. But the only principled leftist there I could find to dismiss the "Plamegate" controversy as utterly beside the point was Alexander Cockburn, who welcomed the outing of CIA agents and who remembered fondly the day Agee walked into the London offices of New Left Review with his hot little manuscript.) Very well. But actively providing the KGB with sensitive U.S. intelligence was an act of treason, plain and simple. Yet this is the man for whom a "memorial service" (Agee died in Havana in 2008) is now being held on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, with the commercial and ideological consent of one of the oldest liberal weeklies in America.
Martin Amis somewhere writes that readers were always shocked to discover that Vladimir Nabokov was not, in his personal life, a nymphet-obsessed lurker of park benches who shot kittens and poisoned the elderly in his spare time. In fact, he was a lovely and meticulous butterfly specialist whose own happy family (consisting of wife and son) was unlike all other happy families in that its patriarch was a literary genius. Why should this be so startling? Because the notion that madness and talent -- especially the kind of talent that gives us a book like Lolita -- are inextricable from each other is a long-standing one and has, it would seem, some justification in evolutionary psychology. Here's Roger Dobson in the Independent:
Creative minds in all kinds of areas, from science to poetry, and mathematics to humour, may have traits associated with psychosis. Such traits may allow the unusual and sometimes bizarre thought processes associated with mental illness to fuel creativity. The theory is based on the idea that there is no clear dividing line between the healthy and the mentally ill. Rather, there is a continuum, with some people having psychotic traits without having the debilitating symptoms.
Most advanced math departments look like homeless shelters for a reason. And I doubt even his trusted friends would have relied on Lord Byron, who feared going insane his entire adult life, to feed their dogs while they were away on vacation. Einstein comes closest in the popular imagination to refuting the rule that all intellectual giants are cracked, but even in his dealings with his ex-wife and children the father of relativity could exhibit a subhuman disregard, cold but also a bit "off." How far down the long slide must we travel until we reach Hannibal Lecter?
Indeed, there does seem to be a vaguely understood Darwinian utility in letting the gloomy and morbid and nutso space to roam free amid the species. About four per cent of the population is said to be some type of conscienceless sociopath, ranging from the sort who can't quite "connect" emotionally with others to the sort who invent identities for themselves and set about the slow, systematic destruction of anyone they perceive as threats. (See Martha Stout's illuminating and chilling volume The Sociopath Next Door.) It hardly helps that most of these empathy-empty creatures are quite charming.
Popular culture has taken this theory to lower depths in the form of the clever Showtime series Dexter, which features a brilliant blood spatter analyst working for the Miami Police Department, who moonlights as a psychopathic serial killer. His adopted father realized this morbid fact early on and decided to harness it, and so now Dexter murders bad guys exclusively. He's what you might call a high-functioning lunatic, performing a valuable clean-up service that no one else wants to perform, or can, really. The audience is supposed to feel seedy about admiring such a tenebrous figure, and yet the sexy ad campaign for Dexter -- which would provoke post-Nietzschean heart murmurs in Allan Bloom -- testifies to an enduring fascination with the criminal and amoral and ultra-violent. The illicit thrill experienced by sane people rooting for a madman guarantees that madman's perpetuity in the genome.
Barack Obama's savviest public relations move as a candidate was when he told an interviewer, shortly before the election, that the conventional time lapse for measuring an infant presidency -- the first 100 days -- would be insufficient given the amount of work the new administration would have to do. Instead, Obama said, we had better wait until the first 1,000 days to make a fair assessment. This struck me as very reasonable at the time, and also uncharacteristic of the man who often gloried in raising expectations to celestial impossibility. Nevertheless, we have a fondness for revisiting stale political metrics, and so now that that 100 day mark has arrived, it is worth inquiring how the president has done. Since his greatest perceived weakness as a candidate was foreign policy, it is interesting to note that this is precisely the area in which Obama has impressed many of his former critics. For instance, I doubt very much that the average reader of Commentary would have expected to see, on November 5, an observation like the following being made on the journal's blog a few months later:
It is, of course, premature to conclude that Obama's foreign policy is essentially the third term of the Bush administration. There could be big discontinuities later on; they just haven't appeared yet. That hasn't been obvious because of Obama's symbolic moves such as apologizing for alleged American misdeeds and shaking hands with Hugo Chavez. I don't mean to suggest that symbolism isn't important. It is. But substance is even more important, and on that score I think Obama deserves a solid passing grade on foreign policy for his first 100 Days.
The emphasis is mine, but the sentiment belongs to Max Boot, an adviser to the man who was supposed to be heir to George Bush's "third term." Though Boot is not alone among hawks and interventionists in offering a favorable assessment of the new president. At a March 31 conference on Afghanistan organized and hosted by the new neoconservative think tank the Foreign Policy Initiative, the president, although absent, was the subject of what Robert Kagan called a "love fest." Praising Obama's commitment to dispatch 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan as "gutsy and correct" and "one of the most important decisions he makes in his presidency," the author of The Return of History and the End of Dreams added:
I think that one of the really important aspects of the President's decision is that it definitely -- he is definitely saying "no" to pulling back. If anything, he has clearly deepened and strengthened America's commitment to a difficult conflict in a far-off part of the world of which the American people know little.
It's May in about ten hours and you know what that means -- the end of the cruelest month in the calendar, the start of the summer blockbuster season. First up for frittering away your stimulus packet is a film about a hairy foreigner with a terrific immune system, strong bones, and indestructible claws (interestingly enough, this is also the description of an aged Irish uncle of mine). Hugh Jackman embodies Wolverine in what promises by its very title to be the first in a long line of prequels to the immensely popular X-Men series. Lord knows Jackman can use all the career assistance he can get after last appearing in a critically and commercially reviled epic about Crocodile Dundee at the Moulin Rouge in World War II. Or something.
Grady Hendrix at Slate recounts the long, overwrought origins of the primal scream mutant, and makes the rather obvious point that characters such as Wolverine are thinly disguised social archetypes:
The genius of Chris Claremont was that he made mutants a generic stand-in for all minorities and made Wolverine their Malcolm X. Black, gay, disabled, and Jewish readers could project their own experiences onto the trials and tribulations of the X-Men, but so could misunderstood teenagers, nerds (who only started being cool once the 2000 X-Men movie raked in big bucks), fat kids, skinny kids, kids with braces, kids with glasses, and anyone who ever felt persecuted (read: everyone). Wolverine refused to apologize for his identity, he refused to compromise, he refused to hide.
Except that, with the possible exception of Elton John, people who feel persecuted don't get to fly around in supersonic jets and wear yellow spandex. That said, I think Hendrix's point here about feral furball exceptionalism is little more than the beneficiary of a news peg because the real mutant of interest in the X-Men catalogue is the bad guy, Magneto. I have no idea what his authentic comic book provenance is, but in the movies Magneto, who has the eminently Wolverine-susceptible power of being able to manipulate metal, is a Holocaust survivor turned militant mutant nationalist seeking enfranchisement for his genetically outre brethren by any means necessary. In other words, he's the Vladimir Jabotinsky of the X-Men, or a reason for Caryl Churchill to feel relevant.
The Jewish subtheme of comic books is of course very well explored in our culture now that hardly anybody reads books without pictures in them. And you can easily see Lower East Side wish fulfillment of the 1930's made manifest in this distinctly American form of mythology. In Michael Chabon's excellent novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the two Jewish cousins who write and art comics for a living get into a witty discussion about the Semitic tropes of their trade: "What, they're all Jewish, superheros," one tells the other. "Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself." (As it happens, a different uncle of mine -- this one on my father's side, now long dead -- changed his name from Weiss to Kent when he married a rich West Coast heiress.)
Then again, as Ben Plotinsky recently elaborated in a fascinating essay for City Journal, the latterday Superman, envisioned by Bryan Singer, who also directed the first two X-Men installments, is played as an altogether different kind of nice Jewish boy:
In one scene, as Superman floats above the Earth, we hear his alien father in a voiceover. Human beings "can be a great people," Jor-El says. "They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all--their capacity for good--I have sent them you, my only son." The line, of course, echoes John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son." When Marlon Brando first spoke it in Superman (1978), it was the earlier movie's only explicit Christian reference.
The recent installment not only resurrects the line; it piles on further biblical allusions. "You wrote that the world doesn't need a savior," Superman himself tells Lois, "but every day I hear people crying for one." Isaiah 19:20: "When they cry to the Lord because of oppressors, he will send them a savior." Later, as Superman tries to save the world from Luthor, the villain plunges a Kryptonite dagger into his side. John 19:34: "One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear." And then, after saving the day by hurling Luthor's death machine--a rapidly expanding new continent that threatens to destroy the United States--into outer space, a poisoned and exhausted Superman plummets to earth, his arms outspread at right angles to his body and legs, a crucified figure lacking only a cross. He remains in a coma until his son (Lois Lane is the unwed mother in this updated Superman: don't ask) restores him to life. He leaves his hospital room empty until a nurse discovers it, just as Mary and Mary Magdalene find Jesus's empty tomb.
I'm sure this won't be the last time I apologize to the president:
The Defense Department twice asked Obama for permission to use military force to rescue Capt. Richard Phillips from a lifeboat off the Somali coast. Obama first gave permission around 8 p.m. Friday, and upgraded it at 9:20 a.m. Saturday. Officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations said the second order was to encompass more military personnel and equipment that arrived in the Indian Ocean to engage the pirates.
It was still a failure of leadership to keep completely mums about Phillips' plight -- would it have really sent "mixed signals" to the pirates to express concern for his safety and denounce his abduction? -- but this is gratifying indeed. (And if it's later disclosed that this attribution of credit was the invention of Rahm Emanuel looking to cash in on "looking presidential," then I'll be back here to point that out, as well.)
However, if this brief but illustrative episode is an indication that gone are the days when the White House withheld from authorizing deadly force due to lawyerly compunction (as it did when a convoy likely carrying Mullah Omar sped out of Afghanistan in 2001), then Obama may prove to be a more capable commander-in-chief than many conservatives originally thought. He seems to have already won over Fred Kagan and Bill Kristol on his Afghan strategy.
The U.S. Navy, originally financed by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson for the purpose of defeating the Barbary pirates, claims another victory against terrorism on the high seas:
The captain of an American cargo ship held hostage by armed Somali pirates was rescued on Sunday by United States Navy personnel, who killed three his captors, government and shipping officials said.
Three of the four captors were killed; the fourth jumped into the drink and suffered once he saw what he up against.
"You're no James Bond," a dissolute Tom Hanks tells a portly and bewhiskered Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson's War. "And you're no Thomas Jefferson, either. Let's call it even."
We could use more of both, one feels, now that our chief executive, said to be cooler than 007 by the actor currently incarnating him on screen, has been caught bowing before the Wahhabist sovereign of Saudi Arabia, keeping absolutely silent about the high seas kidnapping of an American by Somali pirates, but giving ample photo time to the Washington Post for a story on his family's new dog, Bo. (The three-page online version concludes informatively: "Staff writers Howard Kurtz and Rob Pegoraro contributed to this report.")
The adorably floppy and piebald Bo is a Portuguese Water Dog, which may mean he's the most equipt in the Obama administration to go save Capt. Richard Phillips, now floating in a covered lifeboat in the middle of the Indian Ocean after valiantly offering himself as hostage to the pirates who raided the Maersk Alabama (his sacrifice allowed the crew to repel the pirates from the ship). Richards is surrounded in his adrift prison by four armed men, who previously wanted $2 million, but will now apparently settle for an easy getaway. One would think that this imperiled citizen's heroism would be enough to get some word of encouragement from the leader of the free world. Instead:
The president himself has yet to speak publicly about the incident near the Horn of Africa. He brushed off a reporter's question Thursday. Instead he has let his top surrogates do the talking, although their comments have been brief, perhaps mindful that their words could influence the sensitive negotiations with the hostage-taking pirates.
Also, negotiations between the U.S. and the pirates have broken down.
In other news, Bo likes his tummy scratched, except around the stitched area where he was just neutered (can someone get Kurtz a fact-check on the Portguese word for "ouch"?).
Yes, according David Samuels in what is probably the smartest and most cool-headed essay yet written on the subject:
The key fact of the American-Israeli alliance that most commentators seem eager to elide is that Israel is America's leading ally in the Middle East because it is the most powerful country in the Middle East. Critics of the American-Israeli relationship love to conflate American support for Israel before 1967 with America's support since then by citing statistics for tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military credits and aid given to Israel "since 1948," when the Jewish State was founded. In fact, Israel's rise to becoming a regional superpower was accomplished without any significant help from United States. Israel's surreptitious program to build nuclear weapons was accomplished with the aid of the British and the French, who joined with Israel to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt's rabble-rousing President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and who were then forced to give it back by Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Israeli air force pilots who destroyed the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces on the ground flew French-made Mystère jets--not American-made F-4 Phantoms. The U.S. Congress did not appropriate a single penny to help Israel accommodate an overwhelming influx of Holocaust survivors and poor Jewish refugees from Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, and other Arab countries until 1973--25 years after the founding of the state.
To which litany Samuels might have added that in 1981 Ronald Reagan proceeded with the sale of five surveillance aircraft to... Saudi Arabia. The so-called AWACS affair saw pro-Israeli lobbyists pitted against the White House for Congressional approval of supplying one Israel's dogged enemies with military equipment -- a battle that the pro-Israel lobbyists somehow managed to lose. (But what are facts against the suasive subtleties of what Samuels rightly calls "dim-witted theories about an all-powerful Jewish conspiracy"?)
The analysis on offer here would do Machiavelli proud (I mean no disrespect in describing it that way), and Samuels' main point is that, as in any traditional client-patron relationship, what is made public and what is concealed depends on either side's correlated -- but by no means identical -- national interest. It's in the American national interest to pretend to act as a restraining force on Israeli belligerence, while it's in the Israeli national interest to pretend to heed this force. A pas de deux -- or folie a deux, as is often the case -- ensues in which the patron estimates the client as only good as its ability to "project destabilizing power throughout the region" and offer territorial concessions as bargaining chips to keep the relationship relevant and justifiable to the rest of the world (see formerly the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza, or still the Golan Heights and the West Bank).
Part of the elegance of Samuels' theory is that it also explains the Bush administration's failure to stop Iran's centrifugal dreams militarily, despite an approval rating that could not have gone lower if it had, a rather convenient flight path from right next door, and a sworn commitment not to leave this grave concern to the next administration (which it has done).
Israel is perfectly poised to do the deed. It has the overwhelming popular domestic support to protect itself from a threatening neighbor. It knows that no charm offensive is going to improve its image in the world, especially now that it's elected an eccentric and overstocked right-wing government and has heard and seen, post-Gaza, that anti-Semitism is once more "understandable" in Europe (to quote British playwright Ken Loach). No other Arab state wants the mullahs to have the bomb, and if we use the term "state" loosely, this includes the Palestinian Authority, or at least the reasonable Fatah-led sections of it. (A vaporized Jerusalem is a vaporized Ramallah, unless the hidden imam turns to be Dr. Manhattan of the Watchmen.) A nuclear Iran means that of all of Israel's outward attention will be diverted from the subject of the Occupied Territories, whereas, as Samuels puts it, eliminating the former keeps the attention firmly on the latter. (One notes that the Netanyahu government can easily downplay Palestinian statehood while up-playing Persian WMD.) Israel's intelligence is much better than ours, and its pilots have got the experience and know-how when it comes to waging preemptive strikes on reactors, so much so that the present writer was not long informed (by an Israeli who would know) of just how far along a reactor could be before being bombed with no threat of radiation fallout to the surrounding civilian population.
But Samuels' most important point is also his most cynical one. In the event that Israel struck Iran's bomb program and effectively eliminated it, a display of overwhelming conventional military force -- the inevitability of which is the only leverage against a therefore not-so-likely Iranian counterattack -- would signal Israel's primacy in the Levant again after two bad, consecutive wars (one a humiliating catastrophe in Lebanon, the other a Pyrrhic victory in Gaza). Buffeting Iran means hitting Hamas and Hezbollah where they cash their checks; in effect, taking the war to the Soviets instead of to its marginal but rebarbative guerrilla proxies. It also means destroying the illusion of Iran as a real counterweight to Israel's supremacy. (A country that, as one of my friends puts it, has the conventional military force of the Rhode Island National Guard is easily shown to be a paper tiger.) Last but not least, Israel's authority in global chancelleries would be more or less the equivalent of what it was in the wake of the Six-Day War.
The proposition can be stated negatively, too. If Israel tries and fails, what does it lose? The world still hates it. The Iranians still want to see it "wiped off the map, or "erased from the pages of time" (in either translation, upsetting most Israelis' weekend plans). The Iranians get a bomb they would have got anyway. The Palestinians still suffer. Its client state relationship with the U.S. is just as fraught as it would have been had it done nothing.
When Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six-Day War, retired to teaching at the staff college, he would propose problems to his students with the injunction, "And I want no Jewish solutions here." "What he meant," as Geoffrey Wheatcroft has written, "was that he wanted his battles, in the field or on the sand table, won through daring, dash and ferocity, rather than through the traditional Jewish virtues of subtlety, cunning and patience."
If Samuels is to be believed, Israel will exercise both options on the nettlesome Iranian problem.
A brisk little essay by Jim Holt in the New York TImes tells of the ease with which verse can be burned into one's cortex:
[T]he key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits. I knock a couple of new lines into my head each morning before breakfast, hooking them onto what I've already got. At the moment, I'm 22 lines into Tennyson's "Ulysses," with 48 lines to go. It will take me about a month to learn the whole thing at this leisurely pace, but in the end I'll be the possessor of a nice big piece of poetical real estate, one that I will always be able to revisit and roam about in.
The trick that worked for me -- and unlike Holt, a Baby Boomer, I wasn't instructed to memorize poems in high school, and so had to rely on my own devices to figure out how to do it -- is to actually type the lines out, two by two at a time, in a Word document. So:
The piers are pummeled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
The piers are pummeled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
It may take about ten repetitions before a couplet is committed to memory, but as you gain experience, they'll come faster than that. (Pay attention to punctuation, too, as this will come in handy for rhythm later.) Each time you learn another set of lines, you retype the ones you already learned to put the whole lot of them together. By some weird hand-eye osmosis, this technique usually works, and once learned, it's extraordinarily easy to retain a poem. (If you forget some of it, a brief glance over the text is all that's required for a refresh.)
You may think that mechanically transcribing poems robs them of their musicality and thus defeats the whole point of knowing them by heart. You're right; but the object at first is to learn them. Musicality comes upon successful recitation.
Or perhaps Mel Gibson. After posting to his blog an unflattering photograph of Larry Summers, Sullivan fielded a reader's email that helpfully instructed him to compare the image of the NEC chair to a figure in this Hieronymous Bosch painting.
"See if you can find him," Sullivan invites, if only because the Where's Waldo? supplement in Der Sturmer was a broken link.
Now, I could understand Sullivan's failure to recognize a reference to the Dearborn Independent when it was made -- unfairly, I thought -- to suggest that he suffered from less-than-philo-Semitic tendencies. A British expat who has not made a study of American anti-Semitism may be forgiven much of its esoterica. But to claim innocence about a daubed medieval atrocity like the one above is to take Borat at face value on the Jewish Question.
And that this association between a black hatted moneylender (who actually more resembles Marlon Brando) and Obama's top economic adviser should be made on the day that Sullivan's faith commemorates the crucifixion of the main character in the painting is sickening, even by blogorrheaic standards.
UPDATE: Evidently, I wasn't the only one struck by the tastelessness of Sullivan's post. Another reader mailed in to point out the obvious, to which Sullivan replied:
Oy. In my survey of Getty photos for the Face Of The Day, I thought that one of Summers was a gripping and surprising portrait. Then a reader emailed me the Bosch and I too was struck by the similarity. I can see now why you might see things the way you did. But it was in no way intended. I'm sorry if anyone was offended. I'll try and be more conscious of these things in future.
Leaving aside the unctuousness of that oy, I'm afraid this doesn't do to explain how a Harvard- and Oxford-educated journalist could fail to see what any junior school student could see. There's no wiggle room for interpretation here. Israel and its organized defenders and critics do not factor, and unless a thermal scan of the Bosch canvas reveals the word "neocon" to have been feverishly scrawled beneath the oils, I fail to see how anyone professing to be an intellectual cannot have been "conscious" of the intent of this notorious rendering of the long march to Calvary.
As it happens, I'm in the midst of an essay on Benjamin Disraeli, and I've noticed that one of the more admirable aspects of this eminent Victorian's career was his ability to deflect instances of Jew-baiting with wit and irony, virtues that scandalized the vices of his haters more than any call for tolerance -- a term meaningless at the time -- could have done. (During his fifth campaign for parliament, Disraeli's radical opponent taunted him with flamboyantly pretending not to know how to say his exotic name: "Mr. Disraeli--I hope I pronounce his name right." Came the fleet-footed reply: "Colonel Perronet Thompson--I hope I pronounce his name right." I'll take such a clever fuse-snuffing to the earnest alarmism of the Anti-Defamation League most days.) And yet, Dizzy's milieu was one in which cultural anti-Semitism, still inexorably tied to snobbery, had yet to give way to the full-blown political variety for which the 20th century is rightly lamented.
Others may find Sullivan's apology plausible and be on their merry way. Allowing even that the disappearance of his cogency and toughmindedness has been a cause of speculation for some time, his blunder seems indicative of a broader and more worrisome phenomenon.
It was enough for Juan Cole to strike the original name for his proposed lobby of neo-isolationism ("America First") once he discovered it had been used already. There was no hue and cry from the Jews over that grimly hilarious lapse because, well, only bloggers take Cole's insights seriously, and he copped to the ever-cited charge against him -- ignorance -- by revising his original blog post without affixing a mea culpa or correction to it. (Martin Kramer points out that Cole's academically sound m.o. is to commit some howler of fact or analysis, get called out on it, then cover up his mistake on his site, curiously titled Informed Comment, through the coarse art of "retro-editing.") But that only raises the question: What is a so-called progressive scholar of Middle Eastern history doing writing or talking about anything other than the scansion of Persian poetry if he doesn't know who the hell Charles Lindbergh was? (The America First movement was recently the subject of a much-discussed Philip Roth novel and can't quite be counted as the sort of esoterica I alluded to earlier.)
I think this actually represents the next stage in sophistical anti-Semitism, beyond even the obsessive and giveaway form of anti-Zionism to which John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Charles Freeman, Michael Scheuer, and plenty more succumb in the name of "realism" (while of course endorsing the brute "facts on the ground" in Bosnia, Saudi Arabia and China). A kind of historical amnesia married to political autism now persists among shabbier members of the intelligentsia, who breezily traffic in all the familar tropes of Jew-hatred, but then claim to have had no cognizance of them. Rather like one of those proverbial monkeys tapping away at a typewriter and unintentionally hitting upon a diary entry by Wagner, they would have us believe that blind coincidence was all that was involved in their noxious recalls. And maybe it is, but that only raises a further question of how they became members of the intelligentsia in the first place without having grappled with one of the oldest and most toxic questions of modernity.
Internet discourse is a race for the lowest common denominator. That we'll have to accept. But language, even produced in an overcaffeinated fug while still in one's pajamas, can alter the way a person thinks and perceives -- oh, what's that phrase again? -- "what's in front of one's nose." It seems to have done just that, at much too great an expense, to a once noble mind.
In February, the Pakistani Army and the Taliban signed a truce that, in effect, granted the latter an unencumbered right to impose Sharia law on Swat, formerly a tourist-friendly region of Pakistan located about an hour away from Islamabad. The stated aim of this marriage of convenience (and cynicism) was to drive a wedge between the more reactionary jihadist element and the so-called "moderate" exponents of Islamism. What this deal amounted to was an acquiescence to barbarism, and it didn't take long before the fetid yield was apparent to all. According to the New York Times, days after the truce was signed, "a member of a prominent anti-Taliban family returned to his mountain village, having received assurances from the government that it was safe. He was promptly kidnapped by the Taliban, tortured and murdered."
Hundreds of thousands of Swat residents have fled since the Taliban gained de facto -- and now de jure -- control over key parts of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). This means that Pakistan is not just faced with the problem of an Islamist statelet metastasizing within its own borders; it also faces a mounting internal refugee crisis. Seventy percent of Swat is today governed by a self-appointed clerisy that has instituted a total ban on music, alcohol, female education, and non-Islamic literature. Despite reassurances from Taliban leader Muhammed Molana Izzat Khan -- who must have been laughing as he made them -- that Sharia law would not equal the dispensation of Islamic justice, all evidence to date has contradicted this quaint prognosis.
His first week on the job and the new Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is all smiles, reaffirming his commitment to a lack of commitment to a two-state solution."Those who think that through concessions they will gain respect and peace are wrong," Lieberman told the New York Times. "It is the other way around; it will lead to more wars."
One of the strangely unremarked aspects of Lieberman's ascendancy is that he has a vested interest in ensuring settlements in the West Bank aren't dismantled anytime soon. He lives in one. But that raises an interesting question: Assuming that by some miracle of geopolitics a Palestinian state did emerge on Netanyahu's watch, would that make the foreign minister for Israel from... another country? How would that go down amongst a constituency that wants Israelis to swear upon loyalty oaths?
Since (late) 2004, satisfying your jones for political and cultural commentary, day-old scoops and late-breaking marginalia, and whatever else finagles its way into the cyber-planetary potluck...
• Civil Disobedience on the Web By Michael Weiss {British bloggers stand up to threats of libel lawsuits., originally published in Slate.}
• Spray-Fire Atonement By Michael Weiss {How cognitive behavioral psychology can help High Holy Day Jews who repent too much., originally published in Slate.}
• Mutiny on the Manifesto By Michael Weiss {Spineless scalawags are sabotaging the most promising leftist doctrine in decades. Don't let them., originally published in Jewcy.}
• Rise of the Faux-cialists By Michael Weiss {Three poseurs who would have Marx spinning in his grave (plus their real-deal counterparts), originally published in Jewcy.}
• Stepson of the Time By Michael Weiss {A reconsideration of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, originally published in The New Criterion.}
• The Surge Can Work By Michael Weiss {Everyone's wrong about the president's new war plan, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Kibitz on Pure Reason By Michael Weiss {The author of Betraying Spinoza on rationalism, passion, and great 17th-century hair, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Brainwashing's Nemesis By Michael Weiss {How Rick Ross became a cult buster extraordinaire, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Whiz Kid of Warfare By Michael Weiss {How Noah Shachtman has revolutionized military reporting, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Blacklist The Left Could Use By Michael Weiss {Meet the Christopher Hitchens of postpunk, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Is Marriage the New Dating? By Michael Weiss {A divorcee, a young married, and a singleton debate wedded bliss, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Jewish Jihad for Jesus By Michael Weiss {Why converts are leading the evangelical movement, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Tribal Threads By Michael Weiss {The designer of Gytha Mander on the holy land, holsters, and honeys, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Some Kind of Republican By Michael Weiss {The real legacy of John Hughes, published in Slate.}
