• 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.}
Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol have been making the rounds on television dismissing Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders as a "demagogue," which has got many conservatives abroad disgruntled and confused. Wilders, who was denied entry to the United Kingdom last year by the ever-fatuous (now sacked) Home Secretary Jacqui Smith on the grounds of his being a hate-figure and someone whose arrival might incite Muslims violence, has been idealized -- one hesitates to use the term "martyred" in this context -- by those on the right who see him as a platinum-dyed Cassandra of our time. Is Wilders not a minority voice challenging the suicidal Western passivity toward the "Islamization" of Europe? Are there not double standards in place which bar him, a mere speaker, essayist and documentarian, from travel to London whilst admitting radical imams who preach the murder of Jews, Christians and apostates and back up their preachings with material aid to jihadists?
There is merit to much of the right's defense of Wilders, but only up to a point. A fair summation of his willy-nilly politics is offered by this profile at the Swiss-German newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (in an admittedly rough English translation):
His opinions do not arrange themselves into the left-right schema. The self-declared admirer of Ariel Sharon and Margaret Thatcher is opposed to big banks, the liberalization of the labor market and increasing the retirement age. He wants to close the borders... and is in agreement with the Social Democrats that the Netherlands has done enough in Afghanistan. At the same time, he constantly insists on the universal validity of human rights, especially for women and homosexuals. Dutch culture must be protected from foreign influences. Subsidies for the welfare [state] and culture, however, should be abolished. Pensioners, animals, disabled persons and the police should receive more state funding.
A gay-friendly feminist isolationist who applauds free-market principles and the war on terror as waged by others in the Levant. This sounds like a postmodernist's retelling of A Pilgrim's Progress. But Wilders has also called for the banning of the Koran, a view I've heard euphemistically described as "provocative" but is more accurately described as idiotic and totalitarian. Here is where Krauthammer and Kristol have their well-founded grievances.
It is impossible to believe in the notion of Muslim-run democracy without also believing in Muslims who do not adhere to the orthodox tenets of their faith, much less the Salafist and Wahhabist renditions of it. Clearly sixty percent of adult Iraqis have demonstrated that they are quite comfortable with terrestrial legislation and the electoral process, a statistic that, according to Wilders' theological-political interpretation, is simply impossible. Also, neoconservatives shouldn't be the only ones to point out that it is inadvisable in a cold war against a toxic ideology that must be fought intellectually and culturally to advocate for the censorship of that ideology's core literature. Would Richard Pipes or Robert Conquest or George Kennan have ever suggested banning the Communist Manifesto or Lenin's State and Revolution? Of course they wouldn't. They'd have also apprehended that the Velvet Revolution and the Solidarity movement could not have been successful without the participation of socialists, trade unionists and variegated intellectuals who still found something worth salvaging in Marxism even after seventy years of failed Marxist experimentation.
The "Wilders phenomenon," as NZZ calls it, has been best expressed in Switzerland's recent decision, undertaken by plebiscite, to prohibit the further construction of minarets, those architecturally optional adornments which function as call-to-prayer towers on some mosques. While Switzerland has hundreds of mosques at present, it has only four minarets, making this constitutionally amended rule both otiose and harmful at the same time: it does nothing to stop Islamism but everything to alienate law-abiding Swiss Muslims. There's also a sad irony in the fact that this referendum was the joint yield of the Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union, or as I prefer to call them, the only xenophobic parties in Europe that must express themselves quadrilingually. Try stumping for bourgeois cultural "unity" in German, Italian, French and Romansche.
I don't blame Ayaan Hirsi Ali for never wanting to see a minaret again in her life. And I don't blame Wilders for worrying that his homeland is becoming a playground for messianic butchers whose mantra is, as the great Wole Soyinka aptly phrased, "I'm right, you're dead." (For what's it worth, I also agree with Soyinka that England is the cynosure for Islamic radicalization, much more so than Yemen or Nigeria or Pakistan.) But a distinction must be drawn between liberal necessity and illiberal excess. Wilders has thrown in his lot with excess. And while his travel schedule should be as promiscuous as he likes, his allies and apologists might be a bit more discriminating.
When Vladimir Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher for his manuscript about an European pedophile loving and lurking his way through 1950's suburban America, he found one slightly encouraging respondent who suggested a slight tweak of the plot for purposes of marketability. Why not change Lolita "into a 12-year-old lad and have him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, 'realistic' sentences ('He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess.)"?
Every time some mid-ranking celebrity is caught with underage pornography on his computer (Pete Townshend just "researching" a memoir, Charlie Sheen driven to sexually confused distraction by the ruthless cunning of Denise Richards, the principal from Ferris Bueller's Day Off too unemployable to bother with damage control at all) or a hitherto unknown congressman is made to do some explaining to the wife and constituents, I cackle to think what might have been of transgressive postwar literature were it not for the artistic resolve of one Russian genius.
Rep. Eric Massa would have us believe that heterosexual 50-year-old Navy veterans like to tickle younger men in their employ. He would also like us to think that "groping" is something that can be done playfully but chastely. Look up "groping" in the dictionary.
Then there is this from those long, quiet nights at sea:
Clarke says that Massa's roommate, Tom Maxfield, was also assaulted. "Tom lived on upper bunk," Clarke say. "When you're on ship, you're almost exhausted 24-7. So a lot of times you sleep with your uniform on. Tom and Massa shared a stateroom together. Massa climbed up on the top of his bunk, which is hard to do--you never crawl up on somebody else's bunk. He wakes up to Massa undoing his pants trying to snorkel him." Ron Moss also confirmed hearing this story from Maxfield. Maxfield did not return calls and messages left for him--I'll update if he does.
And I'll eat my sock if that poor man comes forward or goes shallow diving in front of news cameras in the near future.
Massa's strongest defense is that he recently resigned from Congress not because of an Ethics Committee investigation into his rumored sexual harassment of male staffers but because of White House pressure against his opposition to the Democrats' health care plan--pressure exerted most memorably, he claims, by a nude Rahm Emanuel in the House of Representatives' gym shower. (Massa's strongest defense is still not any more hetero-erotic than any of the ethics charges against him.)
What is extraordinary -- and also extraordinarily unacknowledged in our narrative-driven, salacious press -- is how so much of the Obama's political career has hinged on sex lives of others, particularly the timing of their public exposure. He won his Senate seat in Illinois in 2004 because the Republican candidate Jack Ryan's ex-wife -- the woman who played "Seven of Nine" on Star Trek: Voyager -- chose an election year to say that Ryan used to take her to "a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling," forcing him coyly out of the race and allowing the entry of the always entertaining Alan Keyes. Had John Edwards' extramarital relationship and reproduction with Rielle Hunter been reported in outlets other than The National Enquirer before the Iowa caucuses in 2008, Hillary Clinton might well have found herself the recipient of Edwards' substantial votes in that harbinger contest and, quite possibly, the eventual Democratic nominee for president.
Now it is left to disgraced New York governor, himself the subject of sexual and criminal allegations and another reluctant antagonist of the president, to appoint Massa's replacement. Will it be someone more amenable to health care reform, or will a hapless and justifiably nihilistic David Paterson repay the party that disowned him by tapping another conservative blue dog Democrat who could jeopardize the biggest piece of social legislation introduced in a generation?
"Follow the money" is so passe. To see where political corruption begins and whence America's next loss of innocence is coming, follow the blacklight.
Anyone who has kept up with politics lately is no doubt aware that certain intellectual attitudes and habits recur no matter what the subject under discussion. The rise of the Internet has democratized what was once the purview of the professional opinion journalist, policy analyst, or historian and thus made certain tendencies in the debate over domestic and international politics into full-blown categories of bad thinking. By my count, there are five main varieties of these without which there would be far fewer cable news channels, blogs, documentary filmmakers, and entries on The New York Times bestsellers list for non-fiction. All varieties are subject to overlap.
Tragic Manicheanism. The metaphysical battle between good and evil has many engaged spectators, some of whom are so chronically assured of evil's triumph that they appear to subconsciously root for it. This is the religious concept of original sin in political grammar. The tragic Manichean believes that everything one's own government or society does is bad and that all those who oppose it are axiomatically good. A very childlike worldview, it nonetheless caters to a large swath of people who believe that passion is a valid substitute for evidence.
The recently deceased historian Howard Zinn made tragic Manicheanism his academic legacy and personal fortune when he published A People's History of the United States, a bestselling volume on the occluded history of the republic written on behalf of its tired, poor, and systematically duped. As Michael Kazin, a leftist critic, has pointed out: "U.S. history for Zinn was... a painful narrative about ordinary folks who kept struggling to achieve equality, democracy, and a tolerant society, yet somehow were always defeated by a tiny band of rulers whose wiles match their greed."
Abolition, suffrage, civil rights, the welfare state are thus stray clearings of social justice in an otherwise uninterrupted vale of oppression. Zinn made no genuine attempt to explain why the underdogs--who represent 99 percent of the American population by his own estimation--have worn their servitude with shrugging acceptance, other than to say that they're easily "distracted" by wars and periods of patriotic fervor. This was no improvement on the Marxian notion of false consciousness. How could it be since Zinn's hero-victims transcend the narrow category of class to include anyone who's ever got a raw deal in the past 235 years?
The problem for the tragic Manichean is that, in the eternal struggle for the dominion of heaven, arguing that some angels quite like what the demons have done with interest rates and constitutional amendments is an unspeakable blasphemy.
Given that Rep. Ron Paul is now the dubious recipient of a CPAC straw poll for White House hopefuls, this essay by David Harsanyi at Reason magazine would appear to be a definitive libertarian rebuke of a crackpot fringe figure on the American right who has managed to capture the hot minds of so many graveyard shift AM disc jockeys and von Misesian economists:
Paul isn't a traditional conservative. His obsession with long-decided monetary policy and isolationism are not his only half-baked crusades. Paul's newsletters of the '80s and '90s were filled with anti-Semitic and racist rants, proving his slumming in the ugliest corners of conspiracyland today is no mistake.
Let us be clear: Paul is the honorary chairman of a group called Campaign for Liberty, whose website carries dossiers on "The History of Satanic World Banking" (any guess to what ethno-religious minority are the designated Satanists?), "The Bolshevik-Zionist Axis"and "Was Hitler was an Illuminati agent?" There's also a rich trove of 9/11 conspiracism and claims that the Rothschild family assassinated Presidents Lincoln, Garfield and Kennedy. For more on this delightful website, consult the excellent anti-racist blogger Adam Holland.
As Jamie Kirchick of the New Republic exposed during the 2008 primaries, there is hardly a lunatic cause to which the Congressman has not, in some way and at some time in his political career, had his name attached. And yet Paul's defenders have included Andrew Sullivan and Geoffrey Wheatcroft, both eccentric Brits and self-proclaimed conservatives.
Some have downplayed the significance of the CPAC straw poll by pointing out that it was the result of a voter turnout of a mere 30% of 10,000. But this just means that the unhinged and sinister elements are the most "mobilized."
William F. Buckley's finest hour was cleaving the John Birch Society -- still, I'm sorry to say, a prominent invitee at these CPAC confabs -- from the mainstream of the conservative movement. We have reached another crucial crossroads in extremist politics, yet there is nary a Buckley in sight.
Found any magazine of literary or cultural value that is explicitly inflected by the dialect of the tribe and you risk running into the same uneasy joke, time and again. "It's like a Jewish Slate," I once informed an editor at Slate by way of describing the nature and form of my old start-up haunt Jewcy. "So you mean just another Slate" came the reply I might have expected.
Where once ethnicity was a subtle or implicit characteristic of the highbrow publication (Partisan Review, Dissent), now it's simply bad manners to put out a new journal of criticism that doesn't claim to answer to a higher authority than Conde Nast.
I kid, but only a little. Here's Abe Socher, editor-in-chief of the already remarkable Jewish Review of Books, in his inaugural editorial:
This is an especially good time to launch a Jewish magazine of ideas and criticism. Perhaps it has always been a good time: the history of Jewish thought over the last two hundred years could be charted through a dozen periodicals in a half-dozen languages. But we live at a moment in which more Jewish books, and books of particular Jewish interest, are being published than ever before. Of the making of such books, it seems, there is no end. But of real criticism, considered judgment rendered in graceful, accessible prose, there is something of a scarcity.
The problem is not a lack of interesting Jewish writers, thinkers, or scholars. There are, to begin with, dozens of journals of Jewish Studies, for the most part geared to specialized academic work. Such scholarship is necessary and often important. But it does not suffice for understanding what it means to be a Jew in the modern world, or what Jewish texts and ideas might have to contribute to the larger discussion of important issues--religious, philosophical, political, ethical, literary--of the day. Then there are the newspapers, magazines, and websites that make it their full- or part-time business to report on Jewish culture. Here, with noble exceptions, the pressure of timeliness and the constraints of space combine to restrict the full, measured consideration that Jewish books and issues, in the widest sense, deserve.
Any endeavor that can meld art criticism of R. Crumb with a learned discussion of Israeli settlements is off to a good start. I also like the aura of assumed interest that most of the pieces in this maiden issue adopt. There's no attempt to talk down to the reader with my-bubbe-made-a-kishke folksiness, or titillate him with his own demographic inclusiveness. "Hey, did you know J.D. Salinger was Jewish?" Nor, I sincerely hope, will Mosaic patrimony be used as a moral standard for celebrating or scandalizing those who meet or fall short of it: "How does one quarter of Madeleine Albright live with itself?"
These are the vices of a niche magazine uncomfortable with its own mandate.
Until two weeks ago, Gita Sahgal led Amnesty International's gender-affairs unit and was considered an exemplar of human-rights activism. Now she's suspended from her job and in need of an attorney willing to confront a venerable nongovernmental organization that is celebrated by the likes of Bono and Al Pacino.
What happened? Ms. Sahgal tried to get her Amnesty colleagues to cease their partnership with Moazzam Begg, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who is, as Ms. Sahgal rightly describes him, "Britain's most famous supporter of the Taliban."
Mr. Begg is a British citizen who was captured in Pakistan in 2001 as an enemy combatant and sent to Guantanamo. He was released without charge in 2005. Mr. Begg claims he was tortured and threatened with execution. He has since become a minor celebrity in the Western human-rights community.
He is currently the director of Cageprisoners, a group that bills itself as an organization that exists "solely to raise awareness of the plight of prisoners . . . held as part of the War On Terror." Amnesty describes Cageprisoners as a "leading human rights organization." Yet one of its senior members, Asim Qureshi, spoke at a 2006 London rally sponsored by extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, which promotes the idea of a renascent Islamic caliphate. Mr. Qureshi took the occasion to glorify terrorism in Iraq, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Kashmir.
Mr. Begg does not hide his own Islamist convictions. In his memoir, "Enemy Combatant," he recalls his interrogation at Guantanamo, in which he credits his emigration to Afghanistan to his desire "to live in an Islamic state--one that was free from the corruption and despotism of the rest of the Muslim world." The Taliban, Mr. Begg insists in his book, were "better than anything Afghanistan has had in the past twenty-five years." Elsewhere he has cited and sold the works of the "charismatic scholar" Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, erstwhile mentor to Osama bin Laden.
Note to those following the Sahgal affair. I interviewed her for this piece and, as far as I can tell, she discloses original information about her internal criticisms of Begg and how these were received prior to her going public with them:
Especially galling for Ms. Sahgal is the fact that she only accepted her job after insisting to Widney Brown, senior director of International Law and Policy at Amnesty, that she be allowed to address the Begg alliance.
"I told her, 'If you don't give me the power to clean up this Begg situation, I won't take on the gender affairs assignment. Widney encouraged me to write a memo on it and even came past my office late one night while I was writing to discuss it. There was no internal resistance against this. So I was promoted with full support. Then, when the Sunday Times story broke, everything I uncovered was deemed 'innuendo.'"
Facing the beginning of a long period opposition that would culminate with a pick-ax lodged in his skull, Leon Trotsky is said to have remarked to his comrade Victor Serge, "Sometimes you end up like Lenin, and sometimes like Leibknecht." The leader of the Red Army is not today known for his ludic folk wisdom yet his communist in-joke captured a sentiment common to radicals of the twentieth-century; that of being both hopeful and pessimistic at the same time, morale and morbidity competing on any emotional stock exchange that runs from 1917 to 1989. Sometimes it's difficult enough to understand the world, changing it seems an unfathomable fantasy.
No journal of opinion has better embodied this manic-depressive outlook better than New Left Review, which celebrated its fiftieth year in print in 2010. Stefan Collini at the Guardian reflects on the curious lifespan of a "little magazine" of enormous influence that has outlived all other comers (Ramparts is obituarized in book-length form) principally by undergoing a vital transformation from fiery organ of the revolutionary vanguard into a cooler platform for sober--if often soporific--assessments of political and cultural realities. That change happened ten years ago exactly and it is more accurate to call the 40th anniversary of NLR the real milestone. As Collini writes:
Over the years, NLR had shown a proper regard for Gramsci's celebrated motto "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will", but many readers thought Anderson's 2000 editorial overdid the pessimism and gave precious little nourishment to the optimism. A French critic, in a reproach that must have stung the famously nonparochial and francophile Anderson, accused him of viewing things too narrowly from one side of la Manche: various forms of resistance, it was suggested, were much more visible in France, while others felt that forms of protest elsewhere in the world were similarly being undervalued. But, a decade on, Anderson's pessimism on this score scarcely seems exaggerated: in so far as the imperium of neoliberalism is being curbed, which is not far, it does not appear to be primarily the outcome of organised and politically effective opposition.
The 2000 editorial in question, written by Perry Anderson, NLR's most gifted editor (and likely its main financier), sounded a note that socialism was dead as a viable alternative to capitalism because there were no viable alternatives to it. "The only starting-point for a realistic Left today is a lucid registration of historical defeat," Anderson pronounced grandly, leading to the frisson in Left Bank corridors. But his point was elsewhere well taken among many old comrades who, if not quite ready to make the transition to the right, had at least conceded the futility of fighting the same battles in the same outmoded grammar.
The debunking of Stalinism--the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 being the New Left's original charter--had proceeded apace with a worldwide economic evolution that this graying contingent was less equipped to anticipate much less fit into inductive "systems" of thought. Underestimating Thatcher's appeal as both a reactionary and revolutionary gave way to a dismissal of the hybridized juggernaut of the "Third Way," wherein free-market policies donned the softer vestments of social democracy. The Blair-Clinton program proved triumphant throughout Europe. The vogue intellectuals confined themselves to the specialized quarters of the academy where they were straightjacketed by the impenetrable jargon of postmodernism that, even amongst its finer spokesmen, never hovered far above self-parody. As Anderson phrased it, another gravedigger of radical promise was the current state of leftist writing that would "leave Marx or Morris speechless." The scintillating Hegelian of Rheinische Zeitung had come to dust as prophet and sage and Judith Butler was surely no replacement. Most dispiriting for those who once found time for Plekhanov and disarmament rallies was that the designated interpreter of the New World Order was not a proper member of the intelligentsia at all but a vulgate columnist for the New York Times.
Anderson's sorrowful acknowledgment of these losses quietly coincided with an announced rethink in publishing strategy. The January-February issue of NLR, his editorial stated, would mark the first installment of an aesthetically redesigned journal that took a proper accounting of these seismic shifts:
Its general approach, I believe, should be an uncompromising realism. Uncompromising in both senses: refusing any accommodation with the ruling system, and rejecting every piety and euphemism that would understate its power. No sterile maximalism follows. The journal should always be in sympathy with strivings for a better life, no matter how modest their scope. But it can support any local movements or limited reforms, without pretending that they alter the nature of the system. What it cannot--or should not--do is either lend credence to illusions that the system is moving in a steadily progressive direction, or sustain conformist myths that it urgently needs to be shielded from reactionary forces: attitudes on display, to take two recent examples, in the rallying to Princess and President by the bien-pensant left, as if the British monarchy needed to be more popular or the American Presidency more protected. Hysteria of this kind should be sharply attacked.
Of such scolding sobriety is a kind of left-wing cultural conservatism fashioned, although that was not the conjuncture Anderson wished to pursue at the time. Yet if refusing to cushion monarchy or the executive branch are the full extent of today's barricade struggles--even the implosion of the credit market and the global recession was greeted by the NLF masthead as a mere hiccup in the continued dominance of market capitalism--then the left could really do no other than objectively accommodate with the center and center-right elements.
Indeed, since Anderson's essay was published, there have been some telling areas of congruence between the elder statesmen of the soixante-huitard tradition and the complicated right, even if most have occurred outside the pages of NLF itself. September 11 happened, for one thing, and while the subsequent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were roundly condemned in the magazine using all the hoary mental categories of "imperialism" and national "resistance"--categories one would have assumed shelved by Anderson's prescription--the study given to neoconservative thinking in other left-wing quarters has yielded at least as much sophistication as lunacy. See the work of Paul Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Kazin, Michael Walzer, Oliver Kamm, Nick Cohen and others.
Alexander Cockburn's climate change skepticism, which puts him comically out of sorts with the editors and readers of his Nation column (who must think a medieval warm period is when tempers are raised at the Palin household) is well-cited among the Telegraph-bound monitors of the University of East Anglia. Many progressives dissatisfied with the Obama administration for its perpetuation of Bush-era war policies unwittingly or complacently echo the isolationist tones of Pat Buchanan's American Conservative. Meanwhile, Nat Hentoff--a First Amendment absolutist by any definition--describes the new Democratic president as the most dangerous yet to our republic.
Other micro examples exist. Standpoint magazine's celebratory judgment of Tariq Ali's writings on his native Pakistan see daylight despite Ali's routine hosannas to Hezbollah and Hamas--those fetid zephyrs in the "radical winds of change"-- that appear in the pages of... New Left Review. The cooperation between uneasy left-liberal opponents of "anti-Zionism" and more reflexive conservative cheerleaders of Israel is another little-explored zone of ideological fusion.
Would that NLF fulfilled the terms of its renascent manifesto and addressed some of these ironies...
President Obama can be credited for having been the first American leader to meet with members of the Other Russia opposition, including Gary Kasparov and former Deputy Prime Minister Boris Nemtsov, co-author of the definitive white paper on the Putin regime. That event, small but significant in itself, took place last July during Obama's two-day summit in Moscow, at which the much-sensationalized topic of a "reset" on U.S.-Russian relations culminated in the following decisions:
1. In the interest of prompting Russian cooperation on further UN sanctions against Iran and the halting of its nuclear weapons program, the United States would abandon its proposed missile defense shield in Poland and the Czech Republic and refrain from publicly criticizing Russia's authoritarian domestic policies and human rights abuses;
2. Both countries would initiate negotiations toward a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT);
3. Russia agreed to let U.S. military planes to transport troops and weapons in its skies toward Afghanistan without incurring transit charges;
4. A bilateral presidential commission would be created to accelerate the pace of U.S.-Russian engagement on a host of issues ranging from civil society, culture, arms control, agriculture, education, and science and technology.
Six months have passed since the United States set about offering inducements to good behavior to its former Cold War antagonist, and it's worth assessing the progress that's been made thus far.
Read more...
"Through no wish of my own I have become the protagonist of a Jamesian problem. Do you ever read any Henry James, Mr. Schultz?"
"You know I don't have the time for reading."
"You don't have to read much of him. All his stories are about the same thing--American innocence and European experience."
"Thinks he can outsmart us, does he?"
"James was the innocent American."
"Well, I've no time for guys running down their own folks."
"Oh, he doesn't run them down. The stories are all tragedies one way or another."
"Well, I ain't got the time for tragedies neither. Take an end of this casket. We've only half-an-hour before the pastor arrives."
-- The Loved One
I am about embark on a trans-Atlantic adventure in part to see if my Anglophilia withstands actual Anglos at close proximity. "You don't understand," said my expat friend Ben, who's lived in New York for five years. "You like the ones you meet here fine, but we're the ones that got away." Maybe. But then I've also liked, at distance, the ones who chose not to get away and rather made a point of pride of the fact. Both Amises (one who alighted in Tennessee--of all places--for an academic stint and one who called America, borrowing a line from Bellow, "the moronic inferno"), at least three Waughs, a Larkin (who said that the United States was two cities interrupted by "vast deserts of bigotry"), a Stoppard, a Bennett, and only the one Powell (who pronounced it "pole.")
But from Paine to Dickens, there have been Brits who've toured our humble little experiment in exceptionalism and found much of interest and comfort but not quite enough to keep them from returning home. To this category we must now add Stephen Fry who, like his great mentor and on-screen embodiment, has nothing to declare to Customs except his genius:
"Stephen Fry in America" is an outgrowth of a six-part BBC miniseries of the same name, and organization of the book is closely related to the show. Through nine months of filming, on and off, he at least sets foot in all 50 states, and often navigates American waters. He works a lobster boat off Eastport, Maine; sails off Newport, R.I. in an America's Cup winning vessel; canoes the Mississippi River; tours a nuclear submarine in Connecticut; ferries across Lake Champlain to New York; and swims with dolphins off Florida.
He also descends into a West Virginia coal mine, ascends in a hot-air balloon over North Carolina, goes hunting with plaid-wearing weekend warriors in upstate New York, canvasses New Hampshire with presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and does turning doughnuts on a Texas beach in his trademark London big black cab.
The coal mine was an act of all too obvious homage:
Then I had to open a new vein, or lode, which with a silver drill I brilliantly performed, amidst unanimous applause. The silver drill was presented to me and the lode named "The Oscar." I had hoped that in their simple grand way they would have offered me shares in "The Oscar," but in their artless untutored fashion they did not. Only the silver drill remains as a memory of my night at Leadville.
If you believe, as I do, that with the retirement of Daniel Patrick Moynihan from the U.S. Senate the brightest flame in government was snuffed, you might also marvel at how the seat that once belonged to the distinguished gentleman from New York has been eyed and picked over by only the least worthy successors. Clinton, Kennedy, Gillibrand -- two beneficiaries of their own surnames with a shared sense of entitlement the size of the Hudson River, and one gubernatorial appointment who has so far made cheerful consensus and a perfect NRA rating the fresh face of New York exceptionalism.
To this sad assembly it seemed natural, not to say foreordained, that Harold Ford, Jr., a former representative from Tennessee and lately an MSNBC news analyst, Merrill Lynch executive, and Democratic Leadership Council chairman, should announce his membership.
If you read closely Ford's extensive interview with Michael Barbaro of the New York Times this month -- no easy feat in itself -- then you came away with the following understanding of the prospective legislator:
1. Even though he donated to Kristen Gillibrand's campaign two days after she'd been appointed senator in 2008, and did so solely at the request of an unnamed mutual friend, Ford sees no contradiction in opposing her now or in mildly assailing her legitimacy as unelected.
2. Most of Ford's time in Manhattan has been spent being driven from his home to the MSNBC studio on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue -- except when it's too cold and difficult to hail a cab; then he takes the subway.
3. Ford took a guided tour of the five boroughs with Sir Harold Evans and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, and because their helicopter landed in Staten Island, he can safely say he's been there.
4. Ford's appreciation of New York football is limited to the time he's spent at either team's home venue as the invited guest of the respective owners of the Jets and Giants (the Jets win by that metric).
5. Ditto baseball (the Yanks take it).
6. Ford became a supporter of gay marriage because of the political pressure he faced as an opponent of it.
Just as your mandible begins its slow ascent back into place, Ford outdoes himself as a shameless carpetbagger in yet another hometown newspaper, the Daily News, announcing that he's a regular Joe Chardonnay, chauffeured to work only once a week, and on strict network executive orders. Oh, and he "loves the smell of New York," a claim that not even the Tammany princeling Al Smith, who professed to be educated at the fish markets of Fulton Street, ever hazarded.
As the blogger Adam Holland reminded me recently, there are other, more sobering reasons why Gotham doesn't need Ford.
Perhaps uninhibited by a victory they seldom thought possible, liberals wasted no time at all, upon the election of Barack Obama, in writing the obituaries for their vanquished opponent ideology. Numerous claims that the U.S. was now a "center left" nation were speciously advanced in print, but none so boldly as Sam Tanenhaus's essay in the New Republic, unambiguously titled, "Conservatism is Dead," which actually began with a dialectical observation about the past that subsequent paragraphs seemed to foreclose for the future: "In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism, defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory." How true.
Although Tanenhaus's analysis was historically rooted, his conclusion was premature in the extreme. He argued that, having forsaken the meliorist principles of Burke and Disraeli, American conservatism had transformed itself into a Marxist-style all-or-nothing warrior politics, abetted by intellectuals and at the mercy of "revanchist" impulses, chiefly being suspicion of big government, resentment of cultural "elites" and an unwavering faith in laissez-faire capitalist dogma. These impulses, said Tanenhaus, culminated in the presidency of George W. Bush but now, definitely with the election of a Hyde Park liberal and the dual failure of trying to transport democracy to Babylon and Milton Friedman to Wall Street, depleted themselves as electoral forces.
That was one year ago, before town hall meetings, "tea parties," Glenn Beck, Going Rogue and countless other examples of demagogic affronts to what Tenenahus, borrowing from Whittaker Chambers, termed the "Beaconsfield position" of classical conservatism, named for Disraeli's earldom. (Queen Victoria's favorite prime minister, it should be noted, inaugurated more social reforms favorable to the industrial working class than his Whig rival Gladstone ever could or that Marx and Engels were prepared to stomach from an arriviste Tory.)
Scott Brown is closer to the Beaconsfield position than he is to the "movement" politics of the Tea Party, however much the latter faction chose to ignore this glaring discrepancy. Indeed, no Republican who spoke as effusively of the late Ted Kennedy as Brown did at his victory celebration on Tuesday night could ever truly be mistaken for second coming of Sarah Palin. And yet, is there any doubt that revanchist impulses helped this unknown state legislator dislodge a 50-year partisan hold on a Senate seat in one of the "bluest" states in the union?
Timothy Noah of Slate points to one irony of the Massachusetts upset that was unforeseen by the liberal establishment: Fifty-six percent of those polled by Rasmussen Tuesday said that healthcare was their top priority while fifty percent of the same sample pool professed to want no healthcare bill at all over the one now in consideration in Washington. Even if these voters are misinformed as to what is in the Washington bill, they can afford to be as the recipients of a popular statewide health plan, carpentered by former Massachusetts governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney (another centrist Republican), which has served as a tacit model for ObamaCare and which the senator-elect is said to support.
Was it hubris or stupidity, then, that caused Democratic establishment to pin the hopes of its most ambitious piece of domestic legislation on a regional electorate it presumed to have the interests of the entire nation in mind? The only conclusion that can be drawn from Brown's victory is that healthcare was not an overriding concern for most Americans until it was turned into a controversy that begat a political liability. The president has compounded the problem by going back on his word to make the debate over a sweeping social reform transparent (broadcast live on C-Span) rather than occlusive. He has also intimated that voters hostile to his plan need only wait until it's implemented, with or without their consent, before appreciating its full effects. ("We are the ones we've been waiting for, except those of us too dumb to wait.")
The special election also reflects a justifiable animus against Democratic vices. No voter in Massachusetts wished to listen to John Kerry, spousal heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune worth an estimated $750 million, sound off about Brown's five residences, two of which are adjacent condominiums in a low-income neighborhood. Nor did any constituent want to be treated as if a special election were no more meaningful than a game of touch football at Hyannisport, and that campaigning out in the cold quite was too uncomfortable for the designated heir of the party apparatus.
Of such incidents are revanchist impulses rekindled.
In this illuminating profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Tony Judt seeks and indulges no sentimentality about his terminal condition (he suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease, diagnosed about a year ago, which has all but incapacitated him). A life of the mind can be hindered but not stopped by wheelchairs and breathing mechanisms, and I found myself coming away with admiration for how Judt still seems only to care about social democracy and European intellectual history despite his debilitation. As a chronicler of the latter subject, he has attained a level of mastery that even his strongest detractors must concede.
Judt's undoubted masterpiece is Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, a book whose continental scope is belied by its incredible attention to the telling national detail. I learned a great deal about Central European Stalinism from Postwar, and it's a rare achievement for an encyclopedic history to allow a reader to breeze through 900 pages of Displaced Persons camps, Romanian Central Committee purges, and nationalized healthcare schemes, only to leave him only desiring more. The book arrived on the heels of a couple of intriguing volumes on French socialism and the twilight of intellectuals in the face of Soviet tyranny. Indeed, had Judt confined himself, at the apex of his justly earned celebrity, to what knew best -- the menacing shapes of political fevers in the second half of the twentieth century -- his legacy would be that of a hawk-eyed archivist of heady but purposeful debates, the Isaiah Berlin of Special Collections. But it is perhaps inevitable that one who had made a life's study of engage intellectuals should risk becoming a lesser specimen oneself.
Judt is the most popular stateside proponent of the so-called one-state solution in the Middle East, which is to say a fully democratic, secular country in which Arabs and Jews get along just fine, no matter what the demographic or parliamentary split. Whether you regard this project as a fairy tale out of Scheherazade or an anti-Zionist feint intended to eliminate the Jewish state altogether, may depend on how closely you parse this paragraph:
Judt was born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family of Marxist anti-Communists. They lived in London's East End, a historically Jewish section of the city. "Anti-Semitism at a low, polite, cultural level was still perfectly acceptable," Judt recalls. Fearing that their teenage son was too socially withdrawn, his parents, in 1963, sent him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel. Judt became a committed Zionist. "I was the ideal convert," he says. A leader in left-wing Zionist youth movements, he even delivered a keynote address at a large Zionist conference in Paris when he was only 16 years old. (A smoker at the time, he seized the opportunity to denounce smoking by Jewish adolescents as a "bourgeois deviation.") In 1967, a few weeks after the Six-Day War, Judt volunteered as a translator for the Israel Defense Forces on the Golan Heights. He was surprised to find that many of the young Israeli officers he worked with were "right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views"; others, he says, "were just dumb idiots with guns." Israel, he came to believe, "had turned from a sort of narrow-minded pioneer society into a rather smug, superior, conquering society."
Unless this is poorly rendered by the article's author, who happens to be my friend Evan Goldstein, Judt appears be saying that a few rough run-ins with obnoxious sabras disillusioned him of the merits of Ben-Gurion's project, a plaint that, even in nostalgia, belongs more to an Evelyn Waugh reactionary than to an ivory tower social democrat. Let me inquire, then: were he today to spend a few hour in Gaza talking to Hamas militants about topics as diverse as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the proper attire and educational prospects for Muslim women, would Judt be prompted into a re-evaluation of his current integrationist model for peace in the Middle East?
I think I can say with confidence that he would not, but not because that would make him politically inconsistent. There's a whole narrative at stake here. Like many sound thinkers distracted by the din of the Levant, Judt has turned his attention to a complicated and well-populated field, been found wanting in his analysis by those who've been at it longer and know more than he, and come away feeling martyred for his trouble. It's a familiar story in which Judt seems to think himself an original protagonist
"The Shahid of Washington Square" was how Leon Wieseltier not long ago described Judt's narcissistic agonies when, in 2006, the Polish consulate of New York decided to disinvite him from a speaking engagement because, as its diplomat said at the time, Judt's views on Israel didn't quite mesh with those of the Polish government. It wasn't that simple; it never is when it comes to Israel, and dark motives were apprehended by the Voltaireans of the New York Review of Books, who would sooner die than give up the right to RSVP.
Odd, though, that Judt should have seen in this otherwise forgettable episode the dark hand of conspiratorial Semitic censorship: the elegant, Kundera-esque theme of Postwar, after all, was how Europe was only able to reinvent itself in the aftermath of the Second World War by "forgetting" its shameful participation in it. Poland, much like Germany, has maintained a soft spot for Israel for reasons rooted to ethics as much as to international relations. If Judt had been snubbed by anything, it wasn't the Anti-Defamation League; it was his own thesis.
His decline on matters of political economy has been steady ever since. To what pasted-together philippic against the legitimacy of Jewish statehood has Judt not lent his imprimatur? His warm appraisal of the Mearsheimer-Walt school of foreign policy, which argues that the United States will invade Iraq on Ariel Sharon's say-so--was that really a function of his intimate knowledge of Aipac lobbying efforts in Washington, or is it a way of sketching a tenuous line between the personal and the political? Judt may think Shlomo Sand's book on the "myth" of Jewish peoplehood is a vital contribution to ethnography and Sorelian illusion, but chances are that, as Jeffrey Goldberg put it, this volume will go the way of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe for being yet another stale entry in the anti-Zionist's bibliograhic answer to Leon Uris. (Anita Shapira and Hillel Halkin have dealt with the substance of the book, here and here.)
Elsewhere in the landscape of current affairs, Judt has proved equally coarse and unreliable. 2006 was clearly his annus horribilis, the year he published "Bush's Useful Idiots" in the London Review of Books. Here, Judt reveled in making lists of dissidents and intellectuals he thought scandalized by their shared belief that removing a genocidal totalitarian was both wise and necessary:
In Europe, Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish intellectual resistance to Communism, has become an outspoken admirer of the embarrassingly Islamophobic Oriana Fallaci; Vaclav Havel has joined the DC-based Committee on the Present Danger (a recycled Cold War-era organisation dedicated to rooting out Communists, now pledged to fighting the threat posed by global radical Islamist and fascist terrorist movements); Andre Glucksmann in Paris contributes agitated essays to Le Figaro (most recently on 8 August) lambasting "universal Jihad", Iranian "lust for power" and radical Islam's strategy of "green subversion". All three enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq.
Might the first two men, having grown up bullied by commissars and secret police, be expected to harbor natural sympathies with those living under the same conditions in a warmer climate? And before George W. Bush became president, what does Judt suppose Michnik, Havel and Glucksmann thought of Iraqi Ba'athism and the sanity of its continuance? As Goldstein notes, the rebuttal to this lame J'accuse of non-interventionist purity was authored by Todd Gitlin and Bruce Ackerman, both leftists opposed to the Iraq war, who called Judt's essay "nonsense on stilts." But no matter. Facts in the London Review of Books can be promiscuous as the commissioned prose:
But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in "Islamo-fascism", Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant -- and comfortable -- with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms.
I still eagerly await Peter Beinart's forthcoming memoir: Against the Grain: My Youth as a Trotskyist Revolutionist. And as for Berman, Kronstadt wasn't even his Kronstadt: he subscribed to an anarchism derived from the decidedly anti-Bolshevik Peter Kropotkin and best embodied in organized form by the IWW.
How curious that a fellow historian of the left would be so poorly conversant -- and comfortable -- with the manifold divisions of a radical tradition. Then again, you would expect the founder of the Remarque Institute to be able to draw the most basic distinctions between soldiers and the societies they inhabit, wouldn't you?
I can't claim immunity to the lure of assessing popular culture through an ideological lens, but sometimes the sort of case studies that might inspire book-length exegeses by David Foster Wallace can seem dull and pointless. Consider the brouhaha over James Cameron's visually impressive but substantively void film Avatar, which, after making $1 billion internationally in three weeks, has got some U.S. conservatives grumbling as to its supposed theme of anti-Americanism. The fictionalized Mark van Doren in Quiz Show put this kind of failure of cultural proportion best when told about his son's duplicitous intellectual sportsmanship on NBC: "That's like trying to plagiarize a comic strip."
Not that science fiction can't be both wondrous and intelligent. Robert Conquest is a scholar and practitioner of the genre, and his handle on twentieth-century politics, he might insist, deeply influenced both leisurely pursuits. But as far as sci-fi parables go, Avatar is no 2001: A Space Odyssey, nor, come to that, does it contain any sophisticated or Strangelovean quotient of political commentary relevant for our time.
The film concerns 10-foot cat people inhabiting an enchanted but perilous jungle planet and the human-run private enterprise looking to mine that planet, at the expense of its indigenous population, for an expensive element with untold industrial uses. For this, Cameron is said to dilate pessimistically on the Iraq war in particular ("No Fur for Unobtainium!") and Pax Americana in general. Are those Blackwater mercenaries cutting down ancient animist plantlife before setting their helicopter gunships on the ill-equipped feline subalterns? Before one tries to locate the Saddam Hussein of the Na'vi, it is worth mentioning that phrases like "shock and awe" occasionally pop out of Cameron's CGI imaginarium, already rendered in some theatres in the third dimension, which is exactly two more than the film's dialogue. Indeed, carping about Cameron's politics is like guessing at what George Lucas had in mind about the philosophy of Leo Strauss in the last Star Wars fiasco. Conservatives would do better to discuss the merits of a relevant and important film like The Hurt Locker lest they give some earnest counter-critics, like Slate's Tom Shone, reason to await the Goldstone Report on Avatar. Here's Shone:
Cameron has an uncanny feel for asymmetrical fights: It's what gives his films such a vicelike grip on the national unconscious and makes him a useful filmmaker to have around right now. If I were on the right, I'd be celebrating the director for his keen-eyed, conservative critique of Wilsonian foreign adventurism. Yes, its regrettable that the pivot point of the final battle hinges on the incursion of a deity, no less, but I also learned some interesting stuff about how to subdue any huge flame-colored dragons I see flying around the skies: You attack from above, where he least expects it. "Tarouk is the biggest, baddest boy in the sky," Jake Sully informs us. "He never gets attacked." With yet another airplane bomber in American custody, it would seem we cannot get enough of that lesson.
This is one way to put it. Another way would be to say that middlebrow entertainment is in over its head again, as is Shone when it comes to contemporary politics. (Wilsonian foreign adventurism typically does not mean genocide at the hands of private contractors). I'm also not sure how the abortive attack of Christmas Day, coming as it did more than nine years after air travel entered a state of permanent bureaucratic siege, represents anything other a near-miss victory for Islamist nihilism.
Now the real question is this: Did the Na'vi bring it all on themselves for making a pact with the devil?
The Onion once ran a headline: "Neighbors Remember Serial Killer as Serial Killer." In its own grimly hilarious way, this counters so much of the stupidity with which an international media now wonders how a seemingly polite graduate student from Nigeria could become the unsuccessful mass murderer Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
In fact, the would-be bomber spent years as a blissfully unmolested radical in training - not in the deserts of Yemen but on the cosmopolitan streets of London.
Here is Malcolm Grant, provost of University College London, where Abdulmutallab studied mechanical engineering and business finance from 2005 to 2008 - and where, for about a year, he also acted as president of the school's Islamic Society:
"The events of Christmas Day came as a complete shock to the UCL community.... [H]is tutors observed no aberrant behavioural issues. The same picture is painted by his fellow students - here was an ordinary student."
Either Grant has no idea what goes on at his own school, or British standards for "aberrant behavioral issues" are today remarkably low.
One of Abdulmutallab's accomplishments as Islamic Society president was to coordinate a so-called "War on Terror Week" - a five-day series of conferences in 2007 at which only the most well known anti-American and pro-jihad figures were invited to speak. These included Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist who was captured by the Taliban in 2001. Having emerged as a "fierce critic of the west," as the Guardian phrased it, who defended future Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's bombing of three Jordanian hotels in 2005, Ridley now draws a salary from Press TV, the English-language channel that is owned and operated by the Iranian regime.
The summary of White House review of the abortive Christmas Day massacre of a planeful of Detroit-bound travelers leaves no room for debate as to accountability. The main points are:
1. Although Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was cited in the Terrorist Identities Datamark Environment (TIDE), he was not placed on the Terrorist Screening Database's watchlist--which would have prevented him from boarding a U.S.-bound aircraft--because he did not "meet the minimum derogatory standard to watchlist." This was due to a failure by National Counterterrorism Center and Central Intelligence Agency personnel to "correlate" all the available derogatory data on Abdulmutallab;
2. An initial search that would have identified the U.S. visa-holding Abdulmutallab with the man his father indicated to the CIA had been "radicalized" was the result of a misspelling of Abdulmutallab's name;
3. Nobody in the U.S. intelligence community seems to have appreciated the potential of Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
"Failure to connect the dots," "systemic failure," "the buck stops with me" -- such are the phrases produced by the president today to explain the second major act of terrorism -- excuse me, "foreign contingency operation" -- to occur within U.S. borders since his inauguration. As bureaucratic and euphemistic as these phrases are, they certainly beat his earlier non sequitur that Yemen, the country where Abdulmutallab is said to have first thrilled to jihadism, is a poor and backward nation, the implication being that the son of one of the wealthiest Nigerians was driven to set his crotch alight by poverty.
At a press conference a few minutes ago, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano actually managed to say that had Abdulmutallab landed in Michigan, well, then, we'd have surely nabbed him.
I have an op-ed in Monday's Daily News showing how the Underpants Bomber ought to have raised eyebrows while president of the Islamic Society at University College London. Never mind that M15, much like our own valiant CIA, had the goods on him yet failed to impede his itinerary....
Reading Roger Cohen in the New York Times is an edifying experience because it teaches how to make a persuasive argument for foreign policy without even realizing what that argument is. In his latest attempt to arrogate to himself wisdom and prescience on all matters Persian, the unembarrassable columnist suggests that not only are Iranians "weary" of cataclysmic events in their own country and suspicious of the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that what they really need instead of revolution is a shepherding reformist similar to Ayatollah Sistani, the primus inter pares of Iraq's Shiite clerisy:
It is time for Iran to look West to the holy Shiite cities in Iraq, Najaf and Karbala, places from which Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani exercises precisely the kind of moral authority and suasion -- without direct executive authority -- that Montazeri favored for Iran.
How, exactly, a nation of dissidents and students who every week risk murder or imprisonment to chant "Death to Khamenei" or "Death to Russia" is tired of "tumult," Cohen does not deign to say. But the real gem in this observation is the implication that Sistani's easily exercised moral authority and suasion was itself the result of some kind of Baathist perestroika. Weary of tumult, indeed!
He allows no chance that the current Iranian convulsion was seeded or accelerated by the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein, an action that Cohen previously supported and then turned against with the same manic-depressive vehemence he has exhibited in his Iran analysis. Having formerly held that Khamenei was rationale and capable of being "engaged" by the West on a host of questions including the nuclear, now our man in Tehran depicts the theocracy as only slightly less brutish and intractable as the American neoconservatives campaigning for its elimination. But had Cohen had things his way, any Iranian glance westward would offer no solace or instruction for how to proceed with a Shiite thaw. Prior to 2003, Sistani was under house arrest and his mosque was closed for worship. Any liberal political opinions he then entertained, such as his exhortation for women to vote or his belief in a separation of mosque and state, were kept to himself for fear of imprisonment or death at the hands of a regime that truly did earn the title totalitarian. There is no reason to believe that these circumstances would be any different now without the liberating effects of revolution.
Just in time for the New Year, might Roger Cohen be the Patient Zero pundit of a dawning pandemic--a pro-war-turned-anti-war-turned-unintentional pro-war theorist? If not, then what he does seem to advocate without any irony or sense of self-amusement is a new law of geopolitical spacetime reserved for the New York Times opinion page, one in which major historical occurrences are only as spontaneous as a columnist's need for them to be and logical consistency is another name for hawkish conspiracy.
For a more significant and impressive about-face on Iran in light of recent events, see Ray Takeyh's commentary in the Washington Post. A twilight of policy intellectuals surely commences when the man who was previously the Obama administration's most forceful voice for engagement ends up sounding like a seder conversation from Andrew Sullivan's darkest nightmare:
Even if the regime accommodates international concerns about its nuclear program, the United States must stand firm in its support for human rights and economic pressure against the Revolutionary Guards and other organs of repression. And Tehran's clerical rulers should know that in no uncertain terms. Reagan had no compunction about denouncing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" while concluding arms control treaties with the Kremlin. The Islamic Republic, like the Soviet Union, is a transient phenomenon. America's embrace of individual sovereignty will place it on the right side of history as the fortunes of history inevitably change.
As of 1977, the platform of the right-wing Likud Party in Israel was quite clear on the matter of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank: "The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judaea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty."
It would be understating the case to say that this policy has been quietly subject to revision and attrition over the past decade. Beginning in 1998 with the Wye River Memorandum, which saw a first-term Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hand over most of Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank, to the then-nascent Palestinian Authority, and continuing into 2005 when Ariel Sharon brought off his unilateral disengagement plan from Gaza, dismantling the very settlements he had once encouraged, the establishment right in Israel has, through fits of ideological bluster and resignation, adopted a pragmatic position on the occupied territories, however difficult it may be for some to acknowledge the fact.
Last June, Netanyahu, now in his second administration, announced his acceptance of the two-state solution. Though grudging, overdue, and more or less forced by President Obama's Cairo address a month earlier, the speech Netanyahu gave at Bar-Ilan University stood in marked contrast to the grumblings of a finance minister who not long before resigned from Sharon's cabinet over the Gaza withdrawal. He's also removed a record number of outposts and checkpoints in the West Bank, lending his tacit support to the enormous material strides made by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, another U.S-educated economist and in many ways Netanyahu's natural interlocutor -- if only Fayyad were entitled to deal.
"It may take years, or even decades, for Democrats to relearn the lessons we thought, naively, they had learned for good under Clinton. But one day, Joe Lieberman's warnings in this campaign will look prophetic. And the principles he has espoused will once again guide the Democratic Party. It will be the work of this magazine, to whatever small degree possible, to hasten that day."
My, how things change. The above assessment, made amidst the Democratic primary in 2004, appeared in the pages of The New Republic, a serious liberal publication that for the last decade has spent half of its time taking bold positions and the other half begging apology for them. The editorial TNR ran endorsing Lieberman for the nomination was likely authored by the magazine's now former editor Peter Beinart, egghead par excellence of liberal interventionism, who believed in the Connecticut senator when the latter was a reliable yellow dog Democrat who happened to be an Orthodox Jew with a streak of moralism running through his social attitudes. But now that the serene party canine has transformed into a disruptive mangy mutt--the spoiler of healthcare reform--it's not a campaign of challenge that Lieberman's erstwhile defenders at the magazine have waged against him but rather a war of vilification, where even the Jewish Question need not be spared. Here is TNR's Jonathan Chait, a writer of some talent, desperately trying to account for what went wrong with Joe:
I think one answer here is that Lieberman isn't actually all that smart. He speaks, and seems to think, exclusively in terms of generalities and broad statements of principle. But there's little evidence that he's a sharp or clear thinker, and certainly no evidence that he knows or cares about the details of health care reform. At one point during the 2000 recount, the Gore campaign explained to Lieberman why lowering standards for military ballots would be totally unfair and illegal, and Lieberman proceeded to go on television and subvert the campaign's position. Gore loyalists interpreted this as a sellout, but perhaps the more plausible explanation was that Lieberman -- who, after all, badly wanted to be vice-President -- just didn't understand the details of the Gore position well enough to defend it. The guy was taken apart by Dick Cheney in the 2000 veep debate.
I suspect that Lieberman is the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of a cultural stereotype that Jews are smart and good with numbers. Trust me, it's not true. If Senator Smith from Idaho was angering Democrats by spewing uninformed platitudes, most liberals would deride him as an idiot. With Lieberman, we all suspect it's part of a plan. I think he just has no idea what he's talking about and doesn't care to learn. Lieberman thinks about politics in terms of broad ideological labels. He's the heroic centrist voice pushing legislation to the center. No, Lieberman doesn't have any particular sense of what the Medicare buy-in option would do to the national debt. If the liberals like it, then he figures it's big government and he should oppose it. I think it's basically that simple.
"I never liked him anyway"--the refrain of sullen apparatchiks faced with retrospectively excusing their inability to predict future heresy--competes with "He was never a substantial member" for bad faith memoir writing. If this is how the American left chooses to cannibalize itself, it's going to be easy laughs for conservatives all the way into 2010. Yet it hardly speaks well of Chait's own candlepower that he's taken to arguing such a non-kosher plaint against Jewish intelligence and numeracy in a sheet owned and operated by Martin Peretz; also one that features Steven Pinker bearing out some of this "cultural stereotype" with sociobiological research on endogamous genetic groups. But this is shul politics. The broader consideration is what, exactly, Lieberman's Judaism has to do with his take on socialized medicine?
A fashion is now vaguely discernible. Another migratory fowl from the TNR aviary, Lee Siegel, who hitherto has been an incisive critic of the Obama administration, uses the same methods of intra-tribal bullying from his new perch at the Daily Beast. Siegel's beef amounts to this: Lieberman justifies his financially motivated positions (oppose Iran to appease the "Israel lobby," oppose healthcare reform to keep the insurance industry money pouring in) as the outcroppings of Jewish messianism--he's right because he thinks God is on his side. Thus, the Torah portion equivalent of evangelical hubris. Here's Siegel:
Let me be appear [sic] to be even more vulgar. What makes Jews cringe about Lieberman's sanctimonious opposition to the only clause in the health-care bill that actually is worth [sic] the name "reform" is that, to be blunt, it is so close to an anti-Semitic caricature. Lieberman is greedy, arrogant, venal, and vindictive. He recalls the New Testament's vicious caricature of the ancient Jewish Pharisees--who were, in reality, rational, charitable and humane.
Goodness. This barely literate emission is curious for several reasons, the most obvious being the Freudian. Siegel, too, is guilty of venality, arrogance and vindictiveness of an admittedly more ridiculous variety: masquerading as a fan of his own blogged musings on culture at TNR, taunting non-fans, and doing so under the pompous handle "sprezzatura." He was sacked suspended for making a fool of himself. I have no idea if the cringing this episode induced in his fellow Jews was of a piece with rootless cosmopolitan embarrassment or the product of 3,000 year-old tradition, nor do I much care. However, if I wished to appear to be vulgar, I might add that Siegel's farce of self-congratulation had much in common with the kind of perfected liberal Hebraism he seems to prefer, that embodied by Rabbi Michael Lerner, who once wrote pseudonymously to his own magazine Tikkun about how wonderful Rabbi Michael Lerner was. Though really, what would be the purpose of pointing that out?
Portraying Lieberman as the Fagin of Congress might be one way to endear oneself to the "Fast for Gaza" contingent on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One can hardly be counted a left-wing intellectual these days without indicating that one isn't the sort of Jew anti-Semites think of when they make their category indictments or draw up their hook-nosed caricatures. But does Siegel, who moonlights as a literary critic, not quite grasp the reactionary nature of this historical criticism? This is the same language with which Philip Roth was lambasted in the 1960's by the American Reform establishment for the crime of writing comic fiction; the same demented logic that had the Commentary crowd depict Hannah Arendt's thesis of the banality of evil as not just incoherent but the culmination of a decadent assimilationist tendency in Central Europe. Semiticist was Dwight Macdonald's withering term for this inquisitorial style, which he associated with the right and yet which has only grown more deranged and exhibitionist as it's become a commodity traded on "progressive" (typically anti-Zionist) exchanges. No, it's not enough to oppose a contrarian legislator or call him out for mercenary motives or moral depravity, clearly the purview of Gentile politicians alone. He must be dismissed as the idiot who disproves the rule about Jewish genius, if not characterized as ripe fruit for Der Sturmer.
Who knew the Medicare buy-in was worthy of such High Holy Day psychosis?
The president accepted his Nobel Peace Prize last week on the grounds that in some case it is necessary to go to war to preserve the peace, a nice act of philosophical jujitsu that, had it been tried by George W. Bush, would have met with charges of sinister doublespeak. But Barack Obama's undeserved award, coming as it did when the country he leads is mired in two "hot" conflicts in the Middle East and a protracted "cold" one against the ideology of jihad, was only further scandalized by the fact that December 10 is Human Rights Day -- the anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which has served for over half a century as modernity's most comprehensive, most translated, and most ignored covenant on civilization. That this doctrine has been consistently flouted and scorned by world tyrannies is the fault of no one commander in chief, and yet, just a year into his term in office, Obama has already proved a busted flush on human rights from China to Sudan to Iran.
In October, the Dalai Lama -- who ought to rightly be seen as a greater political dissident than "spiritual leader" -- was given the first Lantos Human Rights Prize, named for the late Rep. Tom Lantos of California, who first invited the Dalai Lama to Congress in 1987. The expectation was that the most prominent voice for Tibetan independence would be granted an audience with the leader of the free world. Ah, but Obama's trip to China was forthcoming and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had already sowed the Nixonian field by publicly declaring that Chinese human rights were secondary to global economic considerations. So lest Communist recrimination interfere with American realpolitik, His Holiness was asked to wait it out a spell until bilateral relations faded from the headlines.
"Now, you might perhaps feel," wrote Martin Amis well over a decade ago, "that having one girlfriend is happenstance, having two girlfriends is coincidence, but having three girlfriends is enemy action." By this logic, Tiger Woods stands a one-man Stalingrad of faithless chutzpah. How many girlfriends is the golfer up to now? A baker's dozen or so at last count. Though Amis was referring to Philip Larkin, of whom it may be said without disparagement to poetic legacy or overindulgence in political correctness, was a man less than sound on matters of race and far more adept than Woods at keeping his ladies away from one another. This was the same article in which Amis had to call that unreliable mistress, historical context, to his defense by way of explaining Larkin's bigotry: "I am a racist; I am not as racist as my parents; my children will not be as racist as I am."
It's a progression of enlightenment that John McWhorter appreciates in the New Republic:
To wit, what we have seen lately is a golfer who has turned out to be a philanderer. What we are not seeing is a Black Athlete who has turned out to be a philanderer. There isn't anything meaningfully "black" about Woods' "transgressions," nor is there anything about what he has done that corresponds to any racial "narratives" that the usual dutiful suspects are typically trotted out to "remind" us of on a regular basis.
Without patting myself on the back, I can admit that I only lately considered the counter-narrative which McWhorter spends the rest of this piece rebutting, confined as it has been to a few black websites and magazines. As far as the mainstream tabloids and shameless non-tabloids ("Click here for all of Slate's Tiger Woods coverage") are concerned, they haven't reported even a trace of innuendo or bad faith on the part of those many "disappointed" fans who'd like to interpret a minor handicap on the green as a nonexistent shortcoming in their hero's private life. Perhaps the sheer quantity of Woods' paramours ("Look, there's another one behind the sofa!") was enough to preempt any malicious mutterings about race and promiscuity in this case. Or maybe athletes as a category--see under Namath and Chamberlain--have cynically yet multiculturally inured us to this form of misbehavior. But McWhorter's point is well taken: tolerance can be measured as much by a negative reaction to vice as it can by a positive reaction to virtue. This is progress, all right. Just don't tell poor Mrs. Woods that....
My girlfriend and I were walking around our West Village neighborhood the other night when we spotted a nativity scene erected outside a local church. The baby Jesus was missing from the display and I wondered aloud if it might have been stolen. (So often are these holiday tableaux stripped or vandalized around the country that many infant Nazarenes now apparently come swaddled in GPS tracking systems.) "No, you idiot," my beloved, a lapsed Methodist, responded. "He hasn't been born yet."
My error was less the result of a calendar mix-up than a lifelong disregard for religious ritual and iconography -- an attitude more humdrum than humbug. The product of a mixed marriage between a Catholic and a Jew (both agnostics), yet exposed to the odd Christmas tree or menorah, I've happily entered adulthood without baptism or bar mitzvah. John Stuart Mill wrote that he never really abandoned religion but rather grew up, thanks to his skeptical father, in a "negative state" to it -- a condition that more or less describes my own experience, although I should admit that my negativity has only increased in this demoralizing decade.
I consider myself an ally of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and I attribute not the slightest merit to the argument that these "new atheists" (really old atheists with new royalties) are themselves inverted religious extremists. Both Hitchens and Dawkins have indulged in boyhood nostalgia for the elegance of Protestant evensong; Harris has profited from Buddhist meditation; and Hirsi Ali, whom the historian Ian Buruma shamefully denigrated as an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," can bring herself, in her memoir Infidel, to appreciate the beauty and awe of the Golden Mosque of Saudi Arabia. The equivalent of such "fundamentalist" generosity would be Osama bin Laden's concession that the fossil record has its charms, too.
I bring this up both to affirm my secular bona fides and to pick a fight with my fellow atheists on aesthetic and strategic grounds.
Sam Leith, writing in the respectable magazine Prospect, has a fun analysis of the latest trans-Atlantic craze for vampires and zombies. To understand bloodsucking and brain-munching, he says, you need to know your Marx:
Vampires are monsters of the right; zombies are monsters of the left. Vampires are toffs; zombies are proles. Vampires are individualists; zombies are the mindless, nameless, faceless mob.Vampires are about hierarchies, tradition, bloodlines. They have mittel-European honorifics, live in castles, dress up and have manners. Vampires are the blood-and-soil nationalists of the undead world. Literally. Kipping in the soil of their native land is, in most versions of the myth, vital to vampiric survival.
Allowances made for the noticeable drop in occult quality since the Romantic Age, there's some merit to this argument. The grandfather of the zombie film, George Romero, is seen as a left-wing social satirist whose Night of the Living Dead cult classic was a schlock-and-gore parable about the 60's. The sequels had motives, too. Dawn of the Dead was a joke at the expense of 70's strip-mall consumerism, Day of the Dead was a commentary on the military-industrial complex, and the latest zombie installment, Land of the Dead, was an examination of class conflict, with a miscast Dennis Hopper trading in his Easy Rider hog for corporate domination. Or so claims Romero's Wikipedia entry.
The "hot or not" test here is to inquire how Brecht or Nabokov might have handled such subject matter. Zombies are echt-Brecht, I think we can all agree, while vampires--my sin, my soul--are way more Vlad's speed. But as with all trivial pop culture theories, Leith's has its wrinkles. After all, the first modern "vampire" (if we use the term loosely, although some did literally) was Lord Byron, a blue-blood with the best of them but also a radical revolutionary. Additionally, though this doesn't necessarily contradict Leith, if you consult (ahem) the following exegesis of the HBO series True Blood, you'll note that vampires have more in common with a subtle mythopoetic form of anti-Semitism, purview of the right and the left:
Any talk of glowering immortals stomping the earth in a state of High Romantic sturm und drang always puts me in mind of a different allegory -- that of the Wandering Jew. Perhaps you're familiar with this apocalyptic, anti-Semitic myth, which tells of a Jewish shopkeeper who, upon seeing cross-carrying Christ pause on his way to Golgotha, mocks the rebel rebbe: "Go on quicker, Jesus! Go on quicker! Why dost Thou loiter?" For his insolence, the merchant is admonished by Christ: "I shall stand and rest, but thou shalt go on till the last day," an incantation that condemns him to an eternity on earth. The inspiration for this fable of Hebraiophobic comeuppance derives from vague mutterings in the Gospel of Matthew as to the presence of those who "shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."
[...]
Elsewhere in literature the image or palimpsest of the Wanderer has been "reclaimed" to self-aggrandizing effect, anticipating today's sexy cool of angsty or amoral immortals. Benjamin Disraeli, England's first and only Jewish prime minister, was equally assailed and envied in his time as a sinister "magician," the Tory arriviste whose outsize ambition resulted in his owning the exclusive attention of one the most influential monarchs in history. Disraeli winkingly satirized himself-not to say his popular reputation-in the fictional character of Sidonia, a behind-the-scenes power broker who appears in three of the parliamentarian's late novels: Sybil, Tancred, and Coningsby, in which he plays a major role. As Adam Kirsch points out in his recent, brilliant biography of Disraeli, Sidonia is the uncanny archetype for every post-Protocols "international Jewish mastermind." He physically mirrors his creator in Iberian pallor, with an "impressive brow, and dark eyes of great intelligence." Despite having the ear of every European diplomat, a bank account capable of rescuing gross national products (a task that often falls to him), and a sexual demeanor to parody Orientalist stereotype, Sidonia is afflicted with an acute disorder: "He might have discovered that perpetual spring of happiness in the sensibility of the heart. But this was a sealed fountain to Sidonia. In his organization there was a peculiarity, perhaps a great deficiency. He was a man without affections." From Dracula to Barnabas Collins, vampires have warned their swooning prey not to get too attached....
The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, was sharing his vision for the future. "The key requirement for a Palestinian state," he began, speaking on a cellular telephone from his office in Ramallah. Then the line went dead, a dropped call. "You'll have to excuse," he said when he rang back. "We have a lot of competing cellular networks here, and sometimes our signals get crossed."
He could just as easily have been talking about his political fortunes. A Western-trained economist praised by many in Israel and the United States, Fayyad has emerged in recent years as an unlikely Arab visionary--the "Ben Gurion of Palestine," as Israeli President Shimon Peres recently called him. To hear most observers tell it, Fayyad governs like the Michael Bloomberg of Palestine--managerially, with seemingly little interest in politics over policy. But his ability to implement his vision is being hindered by old-guard interests on both sides of the Green Line, the demarcation that separates Israel from the West Bank. It's one of those paradoxical realities of the Middle East that the heralded technocrat of Palestine has no democratic legitimacy but serves entirely at the pleasure of P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas, who appointed Fayyad to his position. Abbas last month announced his intention to resign as the Palestinian Authority president, citing Israeli intransigence on the peace process. If Abbas--Fayyad's constituency of one--leaves, many observers of the region agree, that could create a power vacuum in the P.A. and lead to a third intifada, unraveling all of what Fayyad's administration has accomplished. But, until then, his leadership provides what seems to be Palestinians' best hope for a more functional future, and the prime minister seems unfazed that progress is being held hostage to factionalism. "We have competing ideologies and concepts," Fayyad said. "But there are two ways of doing things: to sit on our hands and do nothing until we figure it out by talking, or to get on with it and act in a manner that's consistent with a shared, broader outlook. I prefer to get on with it."
And so he has. By all accounts, in the two years since Fayyad was named prime minister, the West Bank has been transformed from a besieged and impoverished bantustan into a rough sketch of what a functioning Palestinian state might look like--if it ever comes to fruition. In August, Fayyad laid out the most ambitious, bottom-up plan ever devised for Palestinian nationalism, "de facto statehood," which is spoken of respectfully even by Israeli officials who oppose it (and most do). Meanwhile, Fayyad's homegrown critics say his proposal conforms a little too nicely to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's own designs for the occupied territories. He's still combating cynical and entrenched PLO interests, held over from the Arafat era, who don't like transparent government. He's also jockeying to reunify Gaza and the West Bank, two regions separated in the midst of an internecine civil war in 2006 and now governed, respectively, by the Islamist party Hamas and the secular party Fatah.
A man apart and an agent of change in a territory with a 40-year status quo, Fayyad has, unsurprisingly, accrued enemies and skeptics, though his biggest cheerleaders are Americans. "He's a real revolutionary," said Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic (and a Tablet Magazine contributor). "He's done more to improve the quality of life in the West Bank than anyone else." Indeed, concrete progress been made so rapidly under "Fayyadism"--New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's term for the prime minister's ultra-pragmatic style of governance--that one former Bush administration official asked not to be identified for this article because "I don't want to make Salam's life more difficult by having someone like me praise him."
Switzerland's decision Sunday to adopt a referendum banning the construction of minarets - the tall spires with variously adorned tops that accouter some mosques - is hard to see as anything other than an act of bigotry against Muslims.
Ostensibly sold to voters as a weapon against Islamism, an all-too-real political phenomenon in Europe, this new law in fact makes no distinction between religion and ideology, instead choosing to alienate the primary victims of Islamic fundamentalism and the best allies of Western liberals - moderate Muslims.
The minaret ban also marks the first instance in which a European constitution has had to be revised for purposes of civil architecture. Take that, Osama.
As ever, context is important. The referendum was the brainchild of the Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union, which must be the only xenophobic parties on the Continent to express themselves quadrilingually. The populist right in Switzerland may position itself as anti-immigrant, but it will inevitably confront an electorate consisting of German, Italian, French and Romansche communities - muddy terrain indeed in which to launch a war of bourgeois cultural purity.
Despite assurances from the Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf that the referendum, passed by 57.5% of voters, "reflects fears among the population of Islamic fundamentalist tendencies," the posters lobbying for the ban were not so much Islamophobic (a meaningless term) as they were Islamoridiculous. In one, a veiled woman stands athwart a Swiss flag dotted with missile-shaped minarets, as if Katyusha rockets were being launched from call-to-prayer towers in Montreux. (Though there are hundreds of mosques in Switzerland at present, there are only four minarets, a statistic that makes the new law as pointless as it is provocative.)
Another poster features a trio of white sheep booting their one black cohort off the flag. If this is a metaphor for anti-jihadism, it's too euphemistic to be taken seriously. If this is racist propaganda, it's too inclusive to work, evoking a cliché description of an obnoxious or unruly family member rather than an enemy alien.
The Swiss minaret proscription has been likened to the French government's decision to "oppose" the burka, the head-to-toe garment worn by many Muslim women by choice or, as is more likely the case, by male coercion. It is a false analogy.
For starters, France has so far passed no law prohibiting the burka; a National Assembly inquiry was inaugurated in late June, and its findings may or may not lead to actual legislation. But there is also the fact that classical Islam carries no justification for the burka, which predates the religion itself, appears nowhere in the Koran, and is rightly seen by many modern Muslims as a theologically improvised form of sexual slavery (the idea is to keep women under wraps and men away from temptation). There is nothing anti-social or oppressive about minarets, which occupy a place in the Islamic tradition tantamount to basilicas in Christianity or bimahs in Judaism.
No doubt Europe has been too quiescent toward homegrown confessional threats: See, for instance, the British government's persistent indulgence of imams and Islamic "charities" and "inter-faith" groups that espouse the tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood or Jamma'at Islami, the Pakistani terror cabal, and promote anti-Semitism, homophobia and the mass murder of civilians. But the sensible alternative to runaway multiculturalism is not reactionary exclusion.
Passing laws that target Muslims for being Muslims is not part of any clash of civilizations, it is a failure of one.
Reuel Marc Gerecht has nicely demonstrated that the massacre perpetrated by Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan (and when, I wonder, will the Fort Hood gunman be stripped of his martial honoric?) could have been easily avoided had U.S. authorities conducted themselves more like the French: "A concern for not giving offense to Muslims would never prevent the French internal-security service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST), which deploys a large number of Muslim officers, from aggressively trying to pre-empt terrorism." Known to the FBI in advance, in other words, was the fact that Hasan was correspondent with a radical Yemen-based imam who sympathizes with Osama bin Laden and computes a metaphysical kill calculus with respect to American soliders serving overseas, whose mounting deaths, we were first led to believe, first impelled the cracked but conscientious Hasan to rampage. (That a man so badly in need of headrest should find cranial solace on Salafist prayer mats was first dismissed as coincidence by news commentators.) Known, too, was that an eagerness not to give offense to the peaceful Muslim population in this country was at the heart of law enforcement malaise, which led to yet another gruesome and demoralizing Islamist attack on American soil.
So to Robert Wright's tortured logic--that U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan "create" men willing to slay and die for Allah and that by ending these wars we will end the casualties of jihad at home--we already have the simple rebuttal that those casualties can be ended by having the government do its job, make good on its information, and round up potential or aspiring jihadists before they commit mass murder. Have we learned nothing since George Tenet's legendary remark that the 9/11 hijackers had better not be those shady characters milling about flight schools in Florida? No, rather the mode of surveillance and preemption continues to be a page out of the grimly hilarious Onion satire, "Neighbors Remember Serial Killer as Serial Killer."
But Wright makes an even more telling observation:
One reason killing terrorists can spread terrorism is that various technologies -- notably the Internet and increasingly pervasive video -- help emotionally powerful messages reach receptive audiences. When American wars kill lots of Muslims, inevitably including some civilians, incendiary images magically find their way to the people who will be most inflamed by them.
Of what war can this not be said to be the case? From the maid of Saragossa in the Napoleonic conquest of Spain (the technology then was the human mouth and poetry) to the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit in Israel to those many bodybags in the Baghdad morgue, incendiary images always manage to reach the people "who will be most inflamed" by them. That's why they're called incendiary. And that's why the word propaganda exists and why the stuff itself requires no magic for delivery. Or does Wright mean to say that Muslims are so much more sensitive to this age-old concept that they rule out confrontation at all costs? If so, then what Wright is arguing for is cultural exceptionalism and political correctness as the guiding tenets in the war on terror-- or the war on the "terrorist meme" as he clunkingly calls it--the very tenets that allowed Hasan to scheme with impunity in the first place.
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.}
