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BOOKS:
• 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.}
• Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven {A sorely forgotten modern classic. Leven has since swapped the galley for the camera, directing such keepers as Don Juan Demarco and The Legend of Bagger Vance. Satan has relapsed.}
• 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 Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, by E.W. {Nasty, brutish and short, in short form.}
• 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.}
• Saul Bellow: Novels 1944-1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March, [Library of Congress Hardcover Edition] {Look: it's his world, we all just live in it.}
• 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?"}
• The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, by James Wood {The bling to Dale Peck's blah.}
• 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.}
• The Persian Mirror: The Elusive Face of Iran, by Elaine Sciolino {For those with short odds on the next war of choice.}
• 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 Chicago Manual of Style, by the University of Chicago Press Staff {and the ghost of Allan Bloom.}
• 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.}
• Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, by the Unicorns {Morbid, tinny, wildly innovative and beautiful.}
• Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn't usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}
• Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}
• The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it�s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}
• The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}
• The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}
• No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}
• The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}
FILMS & TV:
• Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}
• Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}
• Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}
• The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}
• Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}
• Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}
• Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}
• The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}
• Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modeled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}
• Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}
• Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}
• The Office - The Complete Collection (First And Second Series Plus Special) {Creator, writer, director and star Rick Gervais used to manage Suede and now this. That's enough laurels for one lifetime. He can die now.}
• Arrested Development - Season One {To think that Teen Wolf Too was just a glimpse of Jason Bateman's potential.}
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 Last Thursday, Phyllis Chesler and I hosted a party for my friend and editor Alan Johnson of Democratiya. We had planned to make it a fundraiser for the journal, but it wound up becoming the kind of literary/political salon New York used to be famous for hosting. Paul Berman, Ibn Warraq, Fred Siegel, Sol Stern, Austin Dacey and others were there. Phyllis has a nice write-up of the affair (though she flatters me only slightly too much) on her PJM blog:
Alan came in with Paul Berman-I said the gathering was glittering. Professor Berman's book, Terror and Liberalism, is a hugely important work and his incisive and wide-ranging mind takes no prisoners. Paul, who currently teaches at New York University, and I have met before but this evening he reminded me of no one so much as Pete Seeger-or of a 1950s style kibbutznik, in his jeans and open shirt.
Also gathered were: The-man-who-knows-almost-everything-and-is-willing-to-tell-you: My equally dear friend, History Professor and author Fred Seigel and his Professor wife Jan Rosenberg. Fred, Jan, and I all raised our sons in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, at the same time and they will always feel like family.
Professors Nahma Sandrow (Yiddishist, retired Professor and all-round lovely soul) and her husband, Bill Meyers, a true Renaissance man (playwright and photographer extraordinaire) also came-an honor indeed, since they are grieving the loss of their wonderful son. They brought their son Isaac's fiancée, Margot, (whose last name I can't recall: Margot, please forgive me), a lustrous young poet.
And, my dear friend Ibn Warraq, the author of Defending The West, came shyly in and stood most of the time, rather quietly. Even I could not get him to say much-not that there was any lull in the conversation. He brought his comrade-in-arms, Austin Dacey, philosopher and secularist who works with the Center for Inquiry, and who co-ordinated the first Islamic Dissident Conference in a very impressive fashion.
Nick Denton's invited me back to do high culture, which seems like an awful thing for high culture, doesn't it?
Here's where you can find my stuff.
 New @ NY Sun:
"When intellectuals can do nothing else they start a magazine." So spoke Irving Howe about his decision to launch Dissent in 1954. The dean of New York social democracy was drawing on reserves of nostalgia for Partisan Review, the literary journal founded 20 years earlier that had changed the way politically engaged intellectuals wrote for a general audience.
All smart sheets trace a lineage back to PR or one of its many offspring publications, and Daniel Johnson, the editor-in-chief of Standpoint, the new center-right British monthly devoted to culture and politics, is openly indebted to the American tradition of highbrow magazine publishing. In a phone interview, he ticks off a list of mentors and encouragers long enough to sound like he's giving an Oscar acceptance speech; among them, Neal Kozodoy of Commentary, Roger Kimball of the New Criterion, and Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun. "I wanted to emulate this very rich, very vibrant spectrum of magazines in America," he said. "I wanted to combine the best of these magazines, which represent a particular camp or orientation, and to have their arguments take place in our pages."
Standpoint's starkest model is Encounter, the brilliant Cold war journal edited by Irving Kristol and Stephen Spender that dealt in Anglo-American themes and survived the not-so-minor scandal of being secretly funded by the CIA for part of its tenure. "We're open to their calls," Mr. Johnson laughs, before answering my next question: Standpoint is put out by the Social Affairs Unit, a registered charity, and its main financier is Britain's largest shipping magnate Alan Bekhor.
This splendid and handsomely designed addition to the glossy firmament is committed to the upkeep of the special relationship, and it isn't tentative about using words like "civilization" as a rapier against the new ideological menace posed by radical Islam and its fellow travelers and apologists. "Since 9/11 and the Iraq war," Mr. Johnson tells me, "the transatlantic bridge had to some extent frayed. There were terrible tensions and misunderstandings and actual lies. One of the many functions of Standpoint is to rebuild that bridge, without which the West really is in big trouble." Enlisting the poetry of Robert Conquest is surely one way to fashion a rampart. So too is having an advisory board that attests to such heady cosmopolitan ambition: V.S. Naipaul, David Hockney, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Tom Stoppard are all godparents of Standpoint, which can claim, too, a proud genealogical heritage: Mr. Johnson is the son of acclaimed historian Paul Johnson, and the names Louis Amis, Alexander Hitchens, and Daisy Waugh dot the masthead, belonging to the families you think they do.
Read more...
 New @ PJM:
In his seven years as mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg has been the recipient of an almost uninterrupted spate of good publicity.
It's about all his legacy will amount to, and it is not an accident. His entire political career has been designed, down to the carefully released rumors about his presidential ambition, as an experiment in governance through public relations. Barack Obama loves him, John McCain loves him, Time magazine loves him, 70% of New Yorkers loves him, and yet if I stopped writing right here to ask what, exactly, Bloomberg has ever accomplished, not many people could come up with an intelligible answer. They might mutter something vague about "education reform" without being able to explain its manic-depressive vicissitudes, or cite any concrete evidence of its success. Crime? That's been down since the days of Giuliani, and anyone might have been able to maintain an already successful law enforcement program.
Behind the po-faced façade of a competent but bland CEO of America's toughest metropolis lurks a breathtakingly calculated mediocrity, a man who silences his critics with cash and is then the first to tell you just how popular he is.
It's worth remembering that Bloomberg, a fired Salomon Brothers partner who parlayed his $10 million severance package into a financial software empire, was a registered Democrat before he decided to enter public life in a year that seemed friendly to Republicans. In 2001, the year he ran as Giuliani's successor, Bloomberg donated $705,000 to the New York State GOP, its largest single-donor windfall since Nelson Rockefeller, and followed up that noticeable gift with another $500,000 a year later, ostensibly to ensure the re-election of Gov. George Pataki, but clearly also to ensure party loyalty.
Read more...
 New @ TNC:
My friend Jamie Kirchick published an op-ed in the New York Sun yesterday pointing out the cretinous rhetoric (and rhetoric is all it amounts to) of the U.N. with respect to Robert Mugabe:
"The Security Council regrets that the campaign of violence and the restrictions on the political opposition have made it impossible for a free and fair election to take place on 27 June," the proclamation read. A regret is something you send on nice stationary when you can't make a wedding. It hardly evokes the sentiment of free people toward the animalistic brutality the Harare junta has taken against the people of Zimbabwe. The strongest verb in U.N. nomenclature -- the one that the Security Council ought to have used -- is "demand." The Council should have demanded an end to the amputations, live burnings, and gunpoint executions that have now become an every day occurrence in Zimbabwe.
Damn right. However, Jamie believes that a military intervention is the only option for Zimbabwe now that the legitimately elected opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has been bullied out of participating in the run-off election, which is really just a second chance for Zimbabweans to vote for Mugabe lest they require a third and fourth. Jamie knows far more about this wretched and luckless country than I do but I find Paul Wolfowitz's argument in the Wall Street Journal more compelling. He says that a swelling chorus of criticism by individual countries -- including those in Africa -- is or will be enough to force the Harare regime to recognize its people's right to self-determination:
The international community should commit - as publicly and urgently as possible - to provide substantial support if Mugabe relinquishes power. Even if Mr. Tsvangirai were to become president tomorrow he would still face a daunting set of problems: restoring an economy in which hyperinflation has effectively destroyed the currency and unemployment is a staggering 70%; getting emergency food aid to millions who are at risk of starvation and disease; promoting reconciliation after the terrible violence; and undoing Mugabe's damaging policies, without engendering a violent backlash.
The international community should also say it will move rapidly to remove the burden of debts accumulated by the Mugabe regime and not force a new government to spend many months and precious human resources on the issue (as Liberia was forced to do to deal with the debts of Samuel Doe).
Given the strength and ruthlessness of the regime, change will not come easily. Nevertheless, developing a concrete vision for the future would help to rally the people of Zimbabwe around a long-term effort to achieve a peaceful transition. It would give Mr. Tsvangirai important negotiating leverage. And it could attract disaffected members of the regime.
Two questions that must be asked of a dictatorship before committing to a policy of its removal by a foreign military are as follows: Does the country have a strong political opposition with enough popular support to topple -- if only with outside encouragement -- the criminal regime peaceably or by use of its own forces? Is the international community prepared to isolate the regime and rob it of its usual band of accomplices?
That there was even an election with an alternative candidate on the ballot makes Zimbabwe different from Iraq. There is still the chance that inducements to leave office quietly will have their effect on Mugabe, who has had an embarrassing spotlight trained on him for months and only because of his myriad human rights abuses ("But I don't even sponsor Islamic terrorists!" must be among his pathetic final thoughts in office). And although the prospect of seeing a murderous tyrant "retire" in lush surroundings in South Africa, which is an inducement Wolfowitz commends, should not sit well with any person of conscience, one can't really envision an international military invasion further galvanizing neighboring African countries against Mugabe. This is one case in which pointing a finger, screaming at the top of your lungs, and letting a growing scandal do its nasty work may yet produce the right result.
Read more...
 New @ TNC:
If Martin Amis can be described as a worshipper of any sort, then his deity is language. One either finds his religion observed cloyingly or reaffirmingly. I'm in the latter category, which these days is the minority category. The man who declared war against cliche and once opened an essay with the sentence "Expect a lot from the next sentence" has me wishing I wouldn't let him down by yanking a familiar Auden gobbet off the shelf. But there's really no other apposite quotation than the great poet's memorial on W.B. Yeats, particularly the stanzas he later excised from the poem:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
Martin Amis needs no pardon because his views are not as noxious as Kipling's (at his worst) or Claudel's (at his best). In fact, they are solidly in the liberal Enlightenment camp, which would seem boring today if these views weren't so radical. This has not stopped a certain semi-literate faction of p.c. ideologues from calling Amis a racist. Its evidence? In an interview he gave in 2006, he said the following:
There is a definite urge - don't you have it? - to say, "The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order".
'Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.'
I have an urge sometimes to cheat on my taxes. I am not a tax defaulter. If you are Terry Eagleton, not only would you claim that that's exactly what I am, but you would then point to a confession signed by me explaining my own guilt. It was Eagleton who, in a sloppy and lazy introduction to the updated edition of his book Ideology (a perfect concatenation of circumstances), accused Amis of putting down the foregoing in an "essay" and doing so as a matter of policy prescription. As even a non-literary critic will have ascertained, Amis was a) talking and not writing, b) insinuating his remarks as a "definite urge" and not an arrived-at conclusion, much less a morally defensible one.
Totalitarianism starts with a butchery of language, and it is worth noting that Eagleton's most memorable recent contribution to the genre of the essay was to compare the martyrdom of Rosa Luxemburg to that of Mohammed Atta. I find this perfectly amenable to his commissar tendency of falsification and hysterical denunciation. (Graham Greene's Frankenstein hybrid of Catholicism and Marxism may have been "problematic," as the tortured young students in an Eagleton seminar would no doubt phrase it, but at least Greene managed to produce some good novels.)
I bring this up because Eagleton's lying seems to have worked. In a new article addressing Ian McEwan's defense of his friend Amis, the Telegraph journalist Nicole Martin makes the same reheated and philistine mistake:
In an essay written the day before the fifth anniversary of the bombing of New York's Twin Towers, the novelist suggested "strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan", preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down the road, deportation.
Which at least proves the old assumption that reporters don't bother to read the subject material -- in this case spectral -- about which they aim to report.
Read more...
New @ NY Sun:
Encounter Books, the conservative publishing house run by Roger Kimball, will no longer send review copies to the New York Times. In an amusing and much-discussed item posted to the company's Encounter Intelligence Web log, Mr. Kimball explained that the Times has "studiously" ignored almost all of his titles, and so if it plans to review any in the future, it will have to buy them like any other reader.
In a phone interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Kimball said he doesn't think his decision will jeopardize the financial health of his company; if anything, it might serve as a "wake-up call" to Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhaus, whom Mr. Kimball describes as a "moderate left-wing opportunist" responsible for perpetuating the "travesty" that has become of a once justly celebrated organ of cultural criticism. The Times is now a clearinghouse of "press releases emanating from the p.c. seats of established opinion" and "metrosexual lifestyle stuff," Mr. Kimball said. (Mr. Tanenhaus did not return The Sun's phone call for comment.)
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 New @ TNC:
One can be very lucky in one's political opponents. Geoffrey Wheatcroft may be an ardent foe of Tony Blair and a blushing admirer of Ron Paul and, as one of his compatriots likes to phrase it, a "bleeding Tory" to boot, but he is always worth reading on pretty much anything. (His Times piece on the origins of Israel and the intellectual distinctions among 20th century Zionists was one of the finest specimens of its type.) So it was with great pleasure that I just finished his short but potent essay in the New York Review of Books on the cult of Winston Churchill. Actually, "cult" is going too far because two of the authors under discussion in this collective review are admirers of the Last Lion -- John Lukacs and Lynne Olson. The first provides a book-length exegesis and commentary on Churchill's "Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat" speech, the inaugural address he delivered as prime minister on May 13, 1940, just three days after the Nazis entered France. The second writes of the "troublesome young men," or rebel Tories (not so bleeding after all) who undercut Chamberlain in Parliament by voting against him and thereby faciliated Churchill's ascendancy, not to say bore minority witness to an event that in hindsight has made them all look delphic.
But the other two authors under review are the real trouble: Nicholson Baker and Pat Buchanan, both of whom argue against the legitimacy, necessity, and "goodness" of World War II and believe either that a cosmos of moral equivalence existed between the Allies and the Axis powers (this is Baker's pacifist claim in the bestselling Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II and the End of Civilization), or that Hitler was more victim than aggressor and was only cajoled into exterminating six million Jews because Churchill and Roosevelt decided to challenge him and did so, moreover, by joining with Stalinist Russia (this is Buchanan's isolationist and Spenglerian claim in Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost the Empire and the West Lost the World).
A blog post is not the medium for addressing the many and deep historiographical and moral failings of either thesis, nor can a single essay do full justice to the task. Wheatcroft is more restrained in his criticism of Baker and Buchanan than others have been (see especially Anne Applebaum's excellent review of Human Smoke in the New Republic, which does us the added favor of comparing Baker's style to that of bloggers and the online populist storehouse of knowledge known as Wikipedia). Though one observation bears reprinting:
Whether or not one follows Buchanan's apocalyptic vision of the West in terminal decline--like other conservatives, he doesn't seem to have noticed that communism has been routed--it is of course true that World War II led to the cold war and the forty-year subjection of Eastern Europe. But then much of what he is saying was said more concisely by A.J.P. Taylor long ago, in a throwaway line glossing the very speech that is Lukacs's main text, and the one phrase "victory at all costs." Taylor writes:
This was exactly what the opponents of Churchill had feared, and even he hardly foresaw all that was involved. Victory, even if this meant placing the British empire in pawn to the United States; victory, even if it meant Soviet domination of Europe; victory at all costs.
Here was the nub of the problem. To defeat Hitler meant paying a very heavy political price, and meant waging war, when there seemed no other way in 1940-1941, with methods which would have seemed atrocious not long before. "At all costs" for Churchill also meant the ruthless bombing of German and Japanese cities and the killing of their civilian inhabitants. Nothing is more chilling in Human Smoke than Churchill's language about this, especially since, as Baker puts it, Churchill saw bombing in pedagogic terms:
Let them have a good dose where it will hurt them most.... It is time that the Germans should be made to suffer in their own homelands and cities.... The burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs [will bring home their errors] in a most effective way.
Why, it might almost be Hillary Clinton threatening "to totally obliterate" a distant country.
I can recall Robert Conquest noting the grim irony of the cancellation of the war charter after Poland was not so much handed to Stalin on a platter as it was simply left there for him to take. But then, Conquest, like A.J.P. Taylor from the opposing ideological direction, has more than earned the right to point this out without sounding feverish or like he was peddling the kind of agenda one can download off the Internet. As for Wheatcroft, "chilling" is the right word -- not euphemistic or hyperbolic -- to describe Churchill's comment. Yet his bloody-mindedness fails to rattle the humanist instinct quite as much as it might otherwise have done when one realizes that these words were spoken after London had been subjected to a year of brutal aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe, which killed approximately 43,000 British civilians. Here were the English being made to suffer in their own homeland and city and by a regime that largely kept score on the basis of how many innocents and noncombatants could be vaporized.
Though Wheatcroft doesn't mention it, the prelude to Churchill's dark prescription was that he should like to mete out "the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us," which is certainly "pedagogic" in one way but also less calculated in another. It is vengeful. However much war policy should not be determined by so low a motive, who among history's crop of statesmen or wartime leaders would be expected not to want to hit back just as hard, if not harder, than they have been hit? And would we desire any such person to be even remotely in reach of the reins of power (Wheatcroft's joke at Hillary Clinton's expense is also at his own since her maid of Saragossa militancy still allowed her to nearly get away with earning her party's nomination.)
Nicholson Baker is a pacifist and therefore believes war is never justified. His principles have made his tract tone-deaf, voulu, and slightly creepy -- but also, in its way, harmless. Even the untutored student of World War II can decide for himself, according to the in situ examples he provides, just how much there really was to choose between Hitler and Churchill. Baker's is the kind of sham argument, in other words, that doesn't improve by collecting evidence "out of context."
But Buchanan's cards are all showing, and they have been for years. He's made it his life's work to undo the established wisdom of the climactic event of the twentieth century and to offer this "alternative" history of the hot war against totalitarianism from the perspective of the lonely little America Firster who has been as hounded and excluded from the great debate as Germany was at Versailles in 1919. He'll find he's still got his work cut out for him. Some things are true and right even if every schoolboy has been taught to believe they are, and history to the defeated revisionists may say alas, but cannot help or pardon.
 New @ Slate:
Science traffics in the great unknowns, admitting that it has far more to learn than it has to teach. That hasn't stopped some from attempting to enlist it in the defense of religion. The pope puts out an encyclical trying to split the difference between evolution and the Book of Genesis. Intelligent design makes a mockery of both the method of induction and metaphysics. And scientists who use deistic language to describe the infinite mysteries of the cosmos are made out to be water-carriers for ancient dogmas--perhaps none more so than Albert Einstein. He's been a genius well worth stealing. The nimbus-domed father of relativity was, throughout most of the 20th century, held up as the most impressive example of a rationalist who left the door open a crack for the divine presence.
Yet a recently unearthed letter should cool any further desire to conscript him as a believer. In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein wrote a letter to Jewish philosopher Eric Gutkind that was sold at auction for $404,000. It's easy to see why Richard Dawkins was a losing high-level bidder for this extraordinary document:
Read more...
New @ TNC:
Sunt lachrymae rerum, says the poet. And the sudden and horribly premature passing of Tim Russert has been an occasion of many tears indeed. Everyone in journalism, from every pocket of partisanship, has turned out to mourn the death of this astute and knowledgeable pundit, who seemed too good for the medium of television by which most of America got to know him.
David Remnick writes: "Russert was no radical. He wanted the zing of confrontation but was always careful to withdraw at a certain point, the better not to cross the line between tough and hostile in the viewer's eyes. There were limits to his approach, and blogs both liberal and conservative sometimes purveyed the notion that he was nothing more than a cozy role-player in the Beltway drama. That notion was deeply unfair. His preparation insured that a politician could not drift long in a mental comfort zone. After one particularly contentious Sunday session, John McCain recalled that he told Russert, "I hadn't had so much fun since my last interrogation in prison camp." That expression of grudging admiration may well have been McCain's clever means of D.C. ingratiation, but one can guess it's not one he would have thought to extend to most of Russert's network and cable colleagues."
Noam Schreiber explains Russert's talent for making the banal platform dynamic: "Without the chance at some drama, the viewers wouldn't tune in (at least not in the same numbers). Russert's ingenious solution to this problem: The gotcha. The delicious possibility of seeing a secretary of state or joint chiefs chairman get that shifty-eyed, busted-for-filching-the-homeroom-Jolly-Rancher-stash look when they contradicted an earlier pronouncement kept us watching week after week. But the questioning was rarely so probing or aggressive or unpredictable that a reasonably agile guest couldn't study his way to a passing grade."
Joe Klein reminds us of Tim's senatorial boss, whose retirement from national politics was certainly a more noteworthy event than the election of his successor: "Tim did me a lifetime favor by introducing me to his boss, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in 1978. Moynihan became a mentor and inspiration to me, and gave me a graduate education in all things New York. Tim's favorite Moynihan story was about the time he had to pick up Pat at the Pierre Hotel in New York to take him to a dinner. Tim arrived at the hotel and heard the distinctive laugh, "Ah-ah-ah-ah-AH!" from inside the room. "Ah-ah-ah-ah-AH!" Just peals of laughter. Russert paused a minute, uncertain about bothering the boss. "Ah-ah-ah-Ah-AHH!" Finally, he knocked. "Moyns came to the door in his underwear," Tim recalled. "He'd been watching The Honeymooners.""
And Christopher Hitchens has a newish anecdote about Russert's up-to-the-millisecond fact-checking: "Not very long ago I was sitting opposite him in the studio during a break, and wanted to check some abstruse detail about the campaign. Out flashed his Blackberry and before the music came on for the next segment he had the relevant information for me and was asking someone to help print it out. I was impressed, not so much by his digital mastery, but by the amazing speed with which he could "access" anything that was germane to politics. Hard work was his secret: hard work and a certain commitment to honesty."
New @ TNC:
Deep sea divers have uncovered an extraordinary find at the bottom of one of the Great Lakes: the HMS Ontario, a 22-gun British sloop that sank in 1780 after seeing action in the American Revolution. From the BBC:
They claim HMS Ontario is the oldest confirmed shipwreck and the only fully-intact British warship to have ever been found in the North American Great Lakes.
[...]
Official records quoted by the team of explorers show HMS Ontario went down on 31 October 1780 with a garrison of 60 British soldiers and a crew of about 40, mostly Canadians. There could also have been up to 30 American prisoners of war on board
It's the only fully intact warship of its age to be discovered in the Great Lakes, owing, say shipwreck experts, to the extreme frigidity and absence of light in its submerged port of the last two centuries. Though the Ontario has been designated a war grave, there are no plans to remove it from the water (and it's worth noting the finders are keeping quiet as to which lake it resides in, and the exact coordinates), probably because that can't be done without compromising the integrity of the wreckage. A shame, then, to have a memorial at which only a handful of trained divers -- and maybe a material-starved James Cameron -- can ever pay homage. (That there were 30 Yanks on board makes it as much an American treasure as a British one.)
 New @ TNC:
If all goes according to plan, the new British literary journal Standpoint will become the Encounter of the new millennium. It's off to a good start. Out of a welter of linkable material in its debut issue, I've selected this group interview with Simon Sebag Montefiore (Stalin biographer), and Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Mao biographers) because I've an amateur interest in huge 20th century imagos that made psychopathic gods, and what they say about the past has eminent bearing on the future. Here's SSM:
If you talk to people, not just old people but young people, of Putin's generation, for example, and younger, they see Stalin as the most successful Russian leader. This is a quote from a Putin-endorsed textbook which says "Stalin was the most successful Russian leader of the 20th century" -- which of course is undeniably true if you measure power in the same way that you'd measure Genghis Khan as a great success in the old-fashioned way that people used before the 20th century, before we introduced moral measurements for such matters. And the textbook also says that Stalin had to use terror just to make sure that the bureaucracy and the elite obeyed orders. The empire he left, stretching from Berlin to Mongolia, was larger than any tsar's. And so I think Stalin, this Georgian who wasn't even Russian, will end up being "Stalin the Great" in Russian textbooks. I thought it would take 50 years but it's happening now.
And Felix Dzerzhinsky's name still adorns the offices of the FSB (successor agency of the KGB), and there has never been a Truth and Reconciliation Committee established to drum into the Russian soul the high crimes of Stalinism.
 New @ New Criterion:
Friend of TNC James Wolcott has a characteristically hilarious essay in Vanity Fair on the "man crush," a bipartisan and media-propagated phenomenon that has grown straight men going weak in the knees for each other. No need to slap the other guy on the back when you hug him anymore the way you cough when you... well, never mind. Not since Rove fell for a young Bush in a bomber jacket, Chris Matthews discovered Cary Grant in every tie-wearing politico on television, and Clooney worked one too many heist movies with Pitt has the non-sexual male-on-male attraction been quite so pervasive and accepted. Yet the most interesting species of the man crush is the literary one,
by which I don't mean the classic acolyte relationship (such as Alec Wilkinson's beautifully rendered My Mentor: A Young Writer's Friendship with William Maxwell), but the yearning-from-afar expressed in Nicholson Baker's U and I, the hilarious, astute account of Baker's moth-fluttering fixation with the deceptively offhand mastery and distinction of John Updike. His ass-scratching ignorance of much of Updike's work is no impediment to wanting to enter his orbit, and a pang of envy strikes when Baker runs into prizewinning novelist Tim O'Brien at the 125th-anniversary party for The Atlantic, where O'Brien tells him he sometimes plays golf with Updike. Baker is majorly miffed. "I was of course very hurt that out of all the youngish writers living in the Boston area, Updike had chosen Tim O'Brien and not me as his golfing partner. It didn't matter that I hadn't written a book that had won a National Book Award, hadn't written a book of any kind, and didn't know how to golf: still, I felt strongly that Updike should have asked me and not Tim O'Brien." In those sentences one hears the peevish whimper of a Man Crush platonically cockblocked.
Let's hope Baker's infatuation with historical revisionism is weaker than his Rabbit, Run vapors. But in point of fact, the literary man-crush long predates our confessional and metrosexual culture. Kipling had it bad for Twain (you should read about the day he actually met him in the flesh). K. Amis's correspondence with Larkin was a monument to the requited sort. And even our brave correspondent has elsewhere seemed pretty taken with Norman Mailer (who broke his heart) and Gore Vidal (who may still yet). Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Today's the last time Slate's Today's Blog column will run. It's being discontinued due to the proliferation of blog roundup search engines like Technorati and Memeorandum and Google. (My competition was an algorithm, and that'll be my epitaph if I die tomorrow.) Sad. I enjoyed covering the roiling vortex of madness, stupidity, and insight that was the political blogosphere, and I think I did it the longest of any other contributor to this largely synthetic feature -- I started writing it in late 2005. That also makes it one of the longest jobs I've ever had.
I'll miss working with my editor Rachael Larimore, whose wit and humor were almost as much of a weekly boon as the paycheck. (Speaking of, who's hiring?) Never has the double entendre or suggestive phrase been as carefully assessed for its actionable content.
I even remember my first correction: referring to the Book of Revelations, which certainly seemed the proper title because weren't there more than one of them?
 New @ New Criterion:
Bruce Bawer has written a very elegant tribute to Vaclav Havel at Pajamas Media:
In 1978 Havel wrote a long essay that would have an extraordinary impact and that should be required reading in Western schools. "The Power of the Powerless" explained on a profound human level why Communist tyranny should be resisted with all one's heart and mind and soul. It wasn't a dry political treatise -- it was a work of deep thought and feeling that accomplished the apparently impossible: it enabled many Eastern Europeans to look with fresh eyes at the oppression that they had long taken for granted as the way of the world. And in doing so, it persuaded them to abandon their meek passivity and stand up for their liberties. Only on a very few occasions in history has a writer attained a unique insight into his society and expressed it in words that moved mountains; Havel is one such writer. His essay took Eastern Europe by storm. Solidarity member Zbigniew Bujak later said that it came along at a time when he and many of his fellow Polish activists felt dispirited and had decided that it was pointless to challenge their Communist masters. "The Power of the Powerless" changed that. It articulated, in words that touched them to the core, the spiritual need to resist oppression. "Reading it," explained Bujak, "gave us the theoretical underpinnings for our activity. It maintained our spirits; we did not give up, and a year later -- in August 1980 -- it became clear that the party apparatus and the factory management were afraid of us." Of the spectacular successes of Solidarity in Poland and of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, Bujak said, "I see in them an astonishing fulfillment of the prophecies and knowledge contained in Havel's essay."
"The Power of the Powerless" itself represents a kind of off-stage character in Tom Stoppard's latest play Rock n' Roll, which is about the 60's, the Prague Spring and lost illusions. One of the central arguments that takes place between two Czechs -- Jan and Ferdinand -- mirrors the one Havel was having at the same time with Milan Kundera, right after the Soviet invasion of their country. It took the spectacle of dissolute and anarchic longhairs being jailed simply for listening to Western rock to convince Havel that dissent can take the form of a concert as easily as it can that of a manifesto. Whereas in England and America the counterculture may have been besotted with hedonism, in Eastern Europe it did not come cheap at all. Jan has studied at Cambridge and returned home to the sight of Soviet tanks parked on Wenceslas Square. At first he's equable about the situation, as the real crackdown on freedom of speech and the press has yet to commence and, as he puts it, his mum's still all right. Jan just wants to be left alone to play the Stones and Beach Boys in peace; he could care less about Havel and the other "tossers," all just a bunch of self-appointed spokesmen of the "official" opposition who traffick in "moral exhibitionism." Ferdinand is one of the tossers -- an intellectual-dissident with petitions to peddle and theories to propound. When Ivan Jirous, the artistic director of the Plastic People of the Universe, is arrested for insulting a police officer, Jan's explanation of why this is as important as any earnest manifesto licenses the moral climax of the play, and it prefigures the conclusions Havel would later come to in "The Power of the Powerless," which was not a repudiation of his former beliefs but a revision of them:
"Policemen love dissidents, like the Inquisition loved heretics. Heretics give meaning to the defenders of the faith. Nobody cares more than a heretic. Your friend Havel cares so much he writes a long letter to Husak. It makes no odds where it's a love letter or a protest letter. It means they're playing on the same board. So Husak can relax, he's made the rules, it's his game. The population plays the other way, by agreeing to be bribed by places at university, or an easy ride at work...they care enough to keep their thoughts to themselves, their haircuts give nothing away. But the Plastics don't care at all. They're unbribable. They're coming from somewhere else, from where the Muses come from. They're not heretics. They're pagans."
They are the opposite, in other words, of the greengrocer in Havel's allegory, who hangs Communist propaganda from his store window not because he believes a word of it but because the "post-totalitarian" system (Havel's term) commands him to collude in a Big Lie. That something as simple and unpredictable as music and its affectless adherents has broken the spell scares the regime more than anything. Culture and freedom are renewed by not giving a damn.
Stoppard is a master observer of the ironies of history, and it's paricularly charming that he, with his Czech lineage and near-miss confrontation with the hell that Jan and Ferdinand experienced, would be the one to observe how the soixante-huitards came to dust on either side of the Iron Curtain. He recently penned an editorial for the Times of London saying that he didn't much care for the 60's as it played out in bedsits and street theatre in Piccadilly Circus, where "fascist" was a byword for a mounted policeman, and "censorship" meant having one's antiwar polemic edited or rejected by the local newspaper. As one of his other characters in Rock n' Roll phrases it:
It was like opening the wrong door in a highly specialized brothel. To this day there are men in public life who can't look me in the eye because I knew them when they went about dressed like gigantic five-year-olds at a society wedding...exchanging bogus wisdom derived from misunderstood Eastern religions.
The fifties was the last time liberty opened up as you left your youth behind you. After that, young people started off with more liberty than they knew what to do with...but -regrettably--confused it with sexual liberation and the freedom to get high...so it all went to waste.
And this is spoken by Max, an aging Communist professor at Cambridge.
 New @ PJM:
You've got a better chance of being Barack Obama's running mate than Hillary Clinton has.
Why does the fantasy of a so-called "dream ticket" still persist at this late hour? Either the press is insulting our intelligence again, or it is has now taken to insulting Obama's. He would have to be a fool and a masochist to make a deal with the woman who would have stopped at nothing to prevent him from enjoying the victory he now should be savoring but can't because she's preventing him from doing that, too.
On a day that saw the first African-American candidate for president clinch a major party nomination, all anyone could talk about was the chutzpah of his erstwhile rival. In the face of actual defeat, Clinton promised to stick around until she could "catch her breath," which really meant catching all the good headlines. "She's Still Here" ran the title of Maureen Dowd's well-cited New York Times column (prompting many of us to realize for the first time in a while that Maureen Dowd was still here, too).
 New @ PJM:
All is not well within the ranks of Al Qaeda, or so the media tells us.
Three major articles have appeared in the last week heralding a fracture at the theoretical-philosophical level of jihadism, which not only bodes well for the war on terror, but may signify a coming dam-break in the Islamic civil war. Of the three, the most interesting is a lengthy profile of Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, or "Dr. Fadl," written by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker. (The other two ran in the New Republic and the Washington Post). Wright is the author of The Looming Tower, the best book on Al Qaeda and the gore-soaked path to 9/11, and so may be said to know quite a lot about our enemies, their tactics, and their changing states of mind.
As for Dr. Fadl, he was formerly Bin Laden's philosopher-in-chief, and therefore not someone whose new opinions can be easily dismissed as those of a crackpot heretic. And what new opinions they are! Last year, Fadl began publishing excerpts of a tract called Rationalizing Jihad, a sort of Islamist Goodbye to All That, castigating Al Qaeda for its violent ways, its self-arrogation of religious authority, and - it's almost impossible to write this in earnest - its fundamental discourtesy to infidels. Among the saner judgments one will find in the book are the following:
"There is nothing that invokes the anger of God and His wrath like the unwarranted spilling of blood and wrecking of property."
"There is no such thing in Islam as the ends justifying the means."
"God permitted peace treaties and cease-fires with the infidels, either in exchange for money or without it--all of this in order to protect Muslims, in contrast with those who push them into peril."
"There is nothing in Sharia about killing Jews and Nazarenes, referred to by some as the Crusaders."
"You cannot decide who is a Muslim or who is an unbeliever or who should be killed based on the color of his skin or hair or the language he speaks or because he wears Western fashion."
"I say it is not honorable to reside with people--even if they were nonbelievers and not part of a treaty, if they gave you permission to enter their homes and live with them, and if they gave you security for yourself and your money, and if they gave you the opportunity to work or study, or they granted you political asylum with a decent life and other acts of kindness--and then betray them through killing and destruction. This was not in the manners and practices of the Prophet."
Let aside whether or not Fadl's humane interpretations of the Koran and Hadith withstand scrutiny, his citation of political asylum or visas as a way of underscoring the warm welcome Europe and America offers emigrant Muslims, or whether or not this text is even his own. (He has been incarcerated in Egypt's Tora prison for the last two years, and so the natural suspicion among his usual readership is that he was coerced into lending his imprimatur to this about-face.) Fadl had formerly been the architect for takfir, the practice of determining who is and is not a "true" Muslim, which has been taken up with such lethal prejudice by Al Qaeda and its affiliates around the world (see Zarqawi's old proclamations against the Shia of Iraq). So for such a theoretician to publicly renounce his most well known theory is indeed significant.
Though the real charm in Wright's story is why Fadl authored Rationalizing Jihad: His first and most influential literary "masterpiece" had been molested by the vulgar pen of one Ayman al-Zawahiri, the "number two" of Al Qaeda.
Both men had been medical students together in Egypt in the late 1960's, when they happened upon a fashionable new course of theocratic revolution. Fadl was the brains of the operation, as well as the hands (he was the more gifted surgeon), while Zawahiri provided the public relations and messianic zeal needed to recruit what was, at first, a local gang of jihadists set upon bringing down the Sadat regime.
The organization they established, Al Jihad, played a part in the Egyptian president's assassination, and since then, the two haven't been able to agree on much of anything. Fadl went into seclusion as a kind of hidden private practitioner, and Zawahiri became famous in a cave in Afghanistan. But it was the latter's meddling with The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge - not to mention his presumptuous re-titling of the book Guide to the Path of Righteousness for Jihad and Belief - that appears to have turned his erstwhile comrade against him. Apart from being amusing in itself (what price the self-sacrificing "bravery" of suicide bombing if the big bad terrorists can't even handle being edited?) it shows that heaven-minded emirs suffer from the earthly vice of amour propre.
However, the Fadl-Zawahiri argument is noteworthy in telling historical way, too. If it carries on - and judging by Zawahiri's defensive posture in the wake of Fadl's latest salvo, it probably will - their debate recapitulates one of the key philosophical ruptures that occurred in the 19th century within the Russian intelligentsia, a rupture that similarly began with an arcane literary feud, but altered the course of human events in ways we are still dealing with. The victor in that dispute planted all the seeds from which the diseased saplings of Bolshevism eventually emerged, but that there was even an alternative suggests that, as with any ideological struggle, things might have turned out differently.
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