When it comes to genocide in the twenty-first century, there is no recourse to Marx's overquoted opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire because the notion that the farcical is inextricably linked to the tragic in history has come to represent a truism devoid of any detectable interest. What would have been decidedly of interest, two years ago, in watching "Rwanda in slow-motion" occur again on the African continent was the universal acknowledgement of the fact that the sequel is just as gruesome as the original, and that a moral lesson can't be unlearned.

There is now a perceptible sea change in opinion as to what should be done in Darfur, but it has taken the deaths of 200,000 black Muslims and the wraith-like diaspora of two million more to effect this. The Bush administration, criminally irresponsive in action if not rhetoric, is taking to "mediation" with the former host regime of Osama Bin Laden, who now calls on his fellow holy warriors to swoop to the rescue of his hospitable ex-patrons the better to finish the job of murdering non-Arab Sunnis.

Johann Hari -- apart from mordantly observing that the good news is the murder rate is dropping since there are precious few black Darfurians left to be killed -- has suggested that the sluggishness of the State Department to confront this humanitarian crisis is related to two points of realpolitik, the first only slightly less cretinous in its moral latitude than the second. Here's what the leftist fans of Brent Scowcroft aren't making peep one about since changement de regime has never been floated for General Omar al-Bashir and his Ministry of the Scorched-Earth Interior:

The Bush administration talked tough about Darfur at first, becoming one of the first governments to publicly use the g-word. But at the same time, as the Los Angeles Times has revealed, they were sending jets to Khartoum to fly Sudan’s intelligence chief Salan Abdallah Gosh – the man overseeing the holocaust – to Washington. He was ushered into secret meetings where he was feted as a “close ally??? for sharing some intelligence about al-Quaida and moving towards opening Sudan’s oil fields to US corporations. Ah well, what’s a spot of genocide between friends? The state department has even begun spouting the Sudanese propaganda line that the Janjaweed are “wild out-of-control tribesmen??? not under the control of Khartoum. But how many wild out-of-control tribesmen have helicopter gunships bearing the insignia of the Sudanese army?

Quite. Although a third compunction is over the political advancement of southern Sudan's embattled Christian population, which following Afghanistan and Iraq, has been the most pressing foreign policy concern of this White House -- as well as of evangelicals, if one allows the distinction -- and something not equably jeopardized with a "zero-tolerance" policy on what's happening in the northeast.

Meanwhile, the UN doesn't even have its feckless "blue helmets" on the ground and has left the job of peacekeeping to the undermanned, underfunded and underwhelming African Union.

And as if to revisit recent nightmares in piebald form, while Rwanda and Bosnia repeat themselves in this blighted locus of sharia-backed barbarism, Dayton and Clintonian quietism appear to be repeating themselves in what Osama is hoping will become the next one.

UPDATE: According to the Tapei Times, the peace deal has been agreed on by the Sudanese government. Now we wait and see.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:50 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'd link to this FT interview with Professor Azar Nafisi, but you need a subscription to access it. Luckily, fellow "Euston" signatory DavidP at his blog culls the good bits:

“On the right many people have this Samuel Huntington view of the Islamic world that it should be left to stew in its own barbarity. On the left, people are more respectful but they are equally simplistic. What both sides have in common is a lack of curiosity for what life is really like in countries like Iran. They have both forgotten that human rights are universal.??? [...]

Instead of arguing with the Iranian regime’s ideology, the west should speak directly about the rights of Iran’s people. She concurred: “Don’t tell the Iranian people that we are only interested in you because we don’t trust your regime with nuclear weapons. Tell them we respect your individual rights just as much as we do our own. People in Iran think they have been overlooked or that they are incidental.???

[...]

“America had its chance to help change Iran from within when Mohammed Khatami was president - he wanted a dialogue of civilisations. That was an opening. But the US would not talk to Iran. Now we have Ahmadi-Nejad. So America got its caricature.???

One of the more inspired anecdotes from her gorgeous memoir, Reading Lolita in Tehran has her husband bucking Nafisi up by saying something like, "You're exclusively worried about what the regime has done to you and your students... Do you ever wonder what you have done to the regime? Do you really think it'll be the same at the end your persistent annoyance of it?"

Bang on! (And I like that behind every great woman stands a faithful and encouraging man.) It speaks volumes, too, about the contigent moonlight and self-pity that seaps into the human spirit concurrent with the advent of the totalitarian mindset. Nafisi's doubts characterized a lot of Eastern Europeans' own about how enduring and indelible the legacy of Communism would be after decades of its steady erasure of "memory" and history. Centuries of filigreed culture and poetry and music and literature, all vanished without a trace by a Goliath opposed to truth and beauty? It was Milan Kundera's plaint about the Czech future, and he was proved blissfully wrong.

The mullahs have already failed.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"Long live Trotsky!" written in a letter to his girlfriend was what got Ludvik expelled from the Party and lumped into an outcast army unit in Milan Kundera's first novel The Joke, the title of which refers to that peculiar human phenomenon Nietzsche once described as the epigram on the death of a feeling, and Orwell called a "tiny revolution." In Ludvik's case, the feeling was mutual; the revolution, counter. By puncturing the Soviet regime with its own needle of hysteria from the show trials and terror -- the eidolon of Trotsky -- even someone who wasn't a Trotskyist could instantaneously "become" one by ironically paying homage to that tradition. This is how humor should work: it fleshes out contradictions and takes an absurd argument at face value until its proponents completely lose face. Oscar Wilde was famed for his inversion (sexual and logical and linguistic), but he really was always playing at that other version that begins with the prefix "sub." And what would the Irish exquisite have made of the grim century of modernism that he, above all, prefigured and heralded? For instance:

Two friends are walking down the street. One asks the other "What do you think of Rakosi?" "I can't tell you here," he replies. "Follow me." They disappear down a side street. "Now tell me what you think of Rakosi," says the friend. "No, not here," says the other, leading him into the hallway of an apartment block. "OK here then." "No, not here. It's not safe." They walk down the stairs into the deserted basement of the building. "OK, now you can tell me what you think of our president." "Well," says the other, looking around nervously,"actually I quite like him."

I suppose what follows technically falls under the heading of "Funny National Socialism," but the above anekdot reminds me of one that got told among Jews during the Second World War. It was a variation on an older routine that had its advent during the czarist pogroms of the late 19th century. The provenance of the phrase "Beyond the Pale" seems somehow serendipitous:

Two occupants of the Warsaw ghetto, upon hearing that Hitler will be driving through the place tomorrow at noon, plot to assassinate him. They agree to meet on a rooftop with a smuggled rifle and sharpshoot their quarry. The next day comes and by noon Hitler hasn't arrived. The Jews lie in wait; 12:30 passes, no Hitler. 1 o'clock rolls around, no Hitler. 2 pm and still no sign of the Fuhrer. Finally, one Jew turns to the other and says: "Gee, I hope nothing happened to him."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 10:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

The earnest waves of leftist anti-fascism are easy enough to surf. Think of Billy Bragg's songwriting, which, when it becomes humorous, is usually at the expense of Ole Bignose's difficulties with girls and not with that particularly splenetic blend of race pride and hyper-nationalism he confronts as no laughing matter. Woody Guthrie couldn't see the "lighter side" of the blackshirts either, however, an irony obtrudes at Bill's expense because there is an underexplored reason why, as an English socialist, he can unblinkingly cite as his favorite contemporary writers Roger Scruton, Peter Hitchens and Geoffrey Wheatcroft -- the holy triumvirate, you might say, of Thatcherite Toryism. Wheatcroft is by far the best of this bunch, and there is nothing startling or paradoxical in his esteem for P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh, two conservatives to have lampooned fascism more or less as it came into its own in the 20's and 30's. Wodehouse had the imperishable example of Sir Roderick Spode, leader of the "Black Shorts" ("Footer bags, you mean?" "Yes." "How perfectly foul.") in Code of the Woosters. And in Waugh's ongoing treatment of the subject, we can be sure that the lampooning was more affectionate than explosive -- literally, in some instances. Wiring to The Daily Telegraph, which had commissioned his manic-depressive travel journalism, to give an update on the (false) rumor that an American nurse in Abyssinia had been immolated in Mussolini's mechanized invasion of the country, Waugh wrote with happy calm-down hauteur: "American Nurse Unupblown." (He also openly stumped for the invaders.)

Yet the author of Brideshead Revisited, probably because of his nostalgia and empurpled insistence on being the "Little Englander" to out-sentimentalize them all, was able to spot the aesthetic and ideological congruence that existed in his own day -- and continues to exist in ours -- between the extreme right and the extreme left.

What I mean to say is, should we really be so shocked to find, as Wheatcroft does in a new book about Italian Fascism, that some Mediterranean Jews and some Harlem blacks could be reconciled to a movement that extolled a future of human perfectability, especially as it was helmed by an ex-journalist whose own mentor in socialism, Angelica Balabanov, had previously served as secretary of the Comintern -- the global travel agency of that same perfectability?

It's right there in Scoop:

"I gather it's between the Reds and the Blacks."

"Yes, but it's not quite as easy as that. You see, they are all Negroes. And the Fascists won't be called black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolshevists want to be called black because of their racial pride. So when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white and when the party who call themselves blacks say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I really couldn't tell you. But from your point of view it will be quite simple."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Hannah turns 100 in October of this year, so get used to the references. But a friend and contributor to Snarksmith Noah Phillips called today to say* that this should be the title of United 93, and Ron Rosenbaum more or less makes the same point about all guignol verite films on 9/11.

Could it be that the three films are a symptom of our addiction to fables of redemptive uplift that shield us from the true dimensions of the tragedy? Redemptive uplift: It's the official religion of the media, anyway. There must be a silver lining; it's always darkest before the dawn; the human spirit will triumph over evil; there must be a pony.

That's always been the subtextual spiritual narrative of media catastrophe coverage: terrible human tragedy, but something good always can be found in it to affirm faith and hope and make us feel better. Plucky, ordinary human beings find a way to rise above the disaster. Man must prevail. The human spirit is resilient, unconquerable. Did I mention there must be a pony?

Actually, one of the salient points about the Beamer passenger bloc that took down this plane in a remarkable collective act of self-sacrifice was that it was a bloc and the self-sacrifice was collective. Heroes tend to come, when they come at all, in ones -- that's what makes them heroes, by definition. Yet to have sodality of complete strangers amass spontaneously in a matter of minutes, and with the foreknowledge that what they were about to do would not have them emerge from it alive -- we typically don't see that kind of "uplift" in Hollywood. What might be instanced as counter to this claim? Saving Private Ryan? But those were soldiers doing their duty (which of course doesn't diminish their fortitude and bravery, but wasn't there always a chance they'd complete their mission and go home?) The celluloid of altruistic derring-do is almost always about the singular exception to the rule, whether he be a Schlinder, or (to gently depart from the Spielbergian trope that's developing) an Escalante, or some Harrson Ford etch-a-savior, or even the ostensible messianic one recently depicted by Mel Gibson.

* This is wrong: Noah meant Rosenbaum's piece should have been called that. See his comment and my mea culpa.

I'm not sure, then, that the Flight 93 subgenre is merely some baleful and more queasy variation on a theme.

That said, Rosenbaum cites Martin Amis' absolutely enthralling short story in last week's New Yorker (no link, sadly) called "Last Days of Muhammed Atta," which really should be turned into a coda to the 9/11 Commission Report, the way DeLillo's Libra might have been to the Warren Commission Report.

We're in need of new mental categories as against those devised to deal with twentieth-century totalitarianism. Hitler was a charismatic hyper-rationalist who could only view the past as refracted through some kitsch lens of futurity. Stalin was a yellow-eyed golem, the over-transmitted facsimile of the bureacrat, and therefore the consummate killing machine that calculated tragedy as comedy and comedy as threat.

Where does Bin Laden, and where does Atta, fall in the categories of world-historic pathology ?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 8:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

Bryan Appleyard thinks the BBC news is insubstantial and Katie Couric is the best journalist alive. But it's hard to see anything in his description of British news that doesn't sound like the crap CNN Headline News has on repeat.

I was watching the Paris riots on BBC and waiting for somebody to explain what was going on. I saw lots of shots of people shouting, lots of interviews with people about the violence, but no analysis whatsoever. Exasperated, I turned over to Sky, which, in spite of its mad, bad sets, does at least show some commitment to facts and analysis rather than interminable colour. When it comes to bird flu, of course, the BBC has gone completely insane. One report, after the swan was found, involved getting various foreign correspondents to stand next to cages full of birds and report gravely that, yes, people were very worried.

Furthermore, whole stories are completely wasted because the poor reporters in the field, who frequently have nothing to report because they have just arrived and nobody is talking, are encouraged to resort to time-filling hackery: “Residents in this small, tight-knit community are struggling to come to terms with...??? Yeah, yeah, get on with it. Or, better still, go back to the studio and just tell us the facts and what they mean.

That sounds like every television news story I ever heard. Richard Nixon once remarked that television is to journalism what bumper stickers are to philosophy.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 6:50 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Movable Type just got a little less mobile now that I've pinned the wriggling sansserifed bastards in their place. Apologies for the breakdown in layout (and slow technical support form me).

Posted by Nic Duquette at 6:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The latest Google video you'll watch over and over and over again. Note the crucial head-nodding moment of certitude the part of the puncher, when all other means of getting her point across have been exhausted.

E-mail me with suggestions as to:

1. Where this takes place

2. What the woman said to get socked

3. Whether her final facial expression connotes stoicism or that transient phase of serene contemplation that you're a) in severe pain, and b) about to cry.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

As blogged about on Gothamist and Gawker and here, Ars Nova, my new pied-a-Semit-a-terre in Hell's Kitchen, is hosting a reading/discussion of Hal Niedzviecki's Hello, I'm Special, a trenchant indictment of the so-sub-it's-supra culture of nonconformity as conformity. (I don't understand it either; I'm going because it's Jewcy, and there's free champagne and beer at the door: no, seriously.)

Tonight at 8 and 511 W 54th St. (10th Ave). Prizes for the best imitation of Adbusters's editorial sneer, or Naomi Klein's wild hands-talking.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Yikes. The shoes of J.S. Mill are evidently hard to fill. Guess all those sprawling think-pieces on Karl Rove's removing Iraqi babies from incubators were a tough sell, huh?

Via Wonkette:

From: [redacted] Date: 26 April 2006
To: [redacted]
Subject: Your writing fellowship application

Dear Writing Fellow Applicant,

Many thanks for applying to The American Prospect writing fellowship. The quality of applicants this year was spectacular and any one of you would have made a fine addition to the staff. However, due to changing editorial priorities, we are not selecting a writing fellow for 2006.

I deeply apologize for not letting you know sooner—before you invested so much of your time in the application—but this was a very recent decision of ours. Best of luck in your future endeavors.

Many thanks,
[redacted]
The American Prospect

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

He looks like an oyster shucker on the brink. It must get tiresome planting roadside bombs all day and searching for the Koranic sura with "Kalashnikov" in it. Pretty thankless work, that.

So are we graced by his puddy little mug because he feels like gloating, or because he's getting desperate and knows even the Big Man ain't thrilled with the outsource?

Ah well. At least Sy Hersh's CIA invention theory seems a whole lot nuttier now:

"God almighty has chosen you to conduct holy war in your lands and has opened the doors of paradise to you," he said. "So mujahedeen, don't dare close those doors."

As if Abu Nidal hasn't wedged it open with a few surplus virgins already. Pshaw.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

According to the Wall Street Journal ($$$), Bank of America might create its own system of debit- and credit-card payments. Because, obviously, the Discover card is so popular with consumers and merchants alike.

Bank of America, the nation's second-largest bank by market value, after Citigroup Inc., has more than 41.9 million credit-card accounts, or nearly one in five of the 220.2 million credit cards issued by the top 50 bank issuers in the U.S., according to the Nilson Report, a trade publication. Given that size and scale, Mr. Lewis said in an interview that "it gets into your consciousness" to own a network rather than to rent someone else's.

Bank of America issues its cards primarily through Visa USA Inc., an association of 13,420 member banks that share an infrastructure for nationwide access and reliability, essentially a network to move money between many points. Visa is able to process more than $1 million in transactions each minute and deals with the cardholder, the merchant, the cardholder's bank and the merchant's bank.

Bank of America, which has a seat on Visa's governing board, doesn't disclose what it pays in transaction fees but analysts estimate it to be as much as eight cents per $100 in credit-card spending and six cents per debit-card transaction.

A new processing unit of Bank of America could potentially cut costs for Bank of America substantially and create a new revenue stream from a fifth major U.S. credit card -- in addition to Visa, MasterCard, Discover and American Express...

Mr. Lewis said there would be poetic symmetry in doing so, given that the credit card was pioneered in 1958 by BankAmerica, San Francisco, one of his company's predecessor institutions. The BankAmericard evolved into the Visa network, which included regional banks such as North Carolina National Bank, known as NCNB, the root of the current Bank of America.

"Why not become the old BankAmericard again?" Mr. Lewis said.

America must be the only Western nation with two-party politics but parliamentary consumer debt.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 9:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

The new McClellan is Tony Snow, FOX personality.

Obvious points:
(1) He worked for FOX. Now he's the official presidential propagandist.
(2) There are now two Bush administration officials who will be tagged with "snow job" related headlines. Unlike Treasury secretary John Snow, however, Tony will have to mislead, hedge, elide and bullshit on a daily rather than bimontlhy basis, guaranteeing a tenfold increase in the use of that pun on Slate.

Someone once quipped that satire died when Clinton became president. But it's not true; satire is president.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 8:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes I wonder what kind of tense, petty, PTA-style politics happens at the Bush dinner table, given that the president who notoriously dislikes criticism married a woman who's a red ink-slinging schoolmarm to the marrow. Laura Bush wants to learn ya:

First lady Laura Bush marked National Park Week with a visit to the Charlestown Navy Yard on Tuesday and told children there that America's parks are good way to learn about history and the environment.

Lessons ranged from adorable...

Mrs. Bush talked one-on-one with the students about pollution in parks. She also told the children how caves are made, getting her hands dirty as she demonstrated with Playdough.

...to the meta-dot-com retro-futuristic:

During her visit to the naval yard, Mrs. Bush and the children took a virtual trip to the Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico through a Web page created by a program at Ball State University. The electronic field trip was broadcast live from the Caverns and Charlestown, and children from around the country were able to access it online.

When kids are logging on to watch streaming video of other kids going through a streaming tour of caves, that's one too many layers of buffering for modern technology to justify, in my opinion. But I do see promise in vitual tours of our National Parks. Imagine the convience of richly simulated rafting through the Grand Canyon, done in the convenience of your private holodeck, located right there in your luxury condo atop Yosemite's Half Dome, which we can commercially develop once we capture a good scan.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 8:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Chinese tourists love to visit Herr Doktor's house in Trier, even though it's maintained by German Social Democrats (das ist gut, ya!) who are axiomatically opposed to the kind of statist corporate fascism that defines Beijing's command economy. And the Times needs a new translator of the Intro to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:

An extensively renovated permanent exhibition opened a few months ago, and it contains items that party-line Chinese have found objectionable. One of the opening rooms consists of a screen on which various sayings by Marx and about him are projected in German, French, English and Chinese.

These include such Marxian classics as: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed; it is the opiate of the masses." But there is also a famous line from Germany in 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell. It is: "Marx ist Murx" — Marx is trash.

...sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Every word there counts, including the noun in place of the adjective.

And how embarassing to have muddled the issue further by calling the article "Marx's House Is the Mecca of the Chinese Tourist Class."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:23 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I have a lot of admiration for Tony Judt, as my seriously strained spinal chord can attest from toting his mammouth though excellent (though, from what I hear, often factually iffy) Postwar around the greater metropolitan area. However, when it comes to the contemporary political scene, it's being kind to say that Tony's completely out to lunch. He's also less than consistent in his readiness to flirt with controversy. This is from a recent op-ed in the New York Times about the now-hoarsened hue and cry over Walt-Mearsheimer's "Lobby" thesis. Judt's title pretty much says all: "A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy."

But does pressure to support Israel distort American decisions? That's a matter of judgment. Prominent Israeli leaders and their American supporters pressed very hard for the invasion of Iraq; but the United States would probably be in Iraq today even if there had been no Israel lobby. Is Israel, in Mearsheimer/Walt's words, "a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states?" I think it is; but that too is an issue for legitimate debate.

Fair enough, and true enough. The Perle-Abrams-Feith groupuscule needs no Machiavellian decoder ring to surmise so far as its chief foreign policy interests are concerned. (It's always quite funny to see people point to the infamous "Clean Break" paper -- which argued for an undeviating alignment between the US and Israel and the overthrow of rogue dictators in the Middle East as cause beneficial to both -- as if they'd just uncovered a Dead Sea Scroll of spectral statecraft. It was published, after all. In a journal you can buy and everything.) However, regime change was by no means a case of "three who made a revolution," for reasons both self-evident and tragically reinforced by the unfolding of current events. But now read Judt, three years ago, in his much bruited think-piece on the Jewish state and its discontents, in the New York Review of Books, the highbrow Yank counterpart to its namesake in London:

It is now tacitly conceded by those in a position to know that America's reasons for going to war in Iraq were not necessarily those advertised at the time. For many in the current US administration, a major strategic consideration was the need to destabilize and then reconfigure the Middle East in a manner thought favorable to Israel. This story continues. We are now making belligerent noises toward Syria because Israeli intelligence has assured us that Iraqi weapons have been moved there--a claim for which there is no corroborating evidence from any other source. Syria backs Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad: sworn foes of Israel, to be sure, but hardly a significant international threat. However, Damascus has hitherto been providing the US with critical data on al-Qaida. Like Iran, another longstanding target of Israeli wrath whom we are actively alienating. Syria is more use to the United States as a friend than an enemy. Which war are we fighting?

The implication of the phrase, "those in a position to know," is as clear as the pseudo-rhetorical, "Which war are we fighting?"

Interestingly enough, as Geoffrey Wheatcroft explained in his own riposte to W-S, many saber-rattling Israelis are now having severe second thoughts on Iraq in a way that their putative neocon enablers in the Pentagon and Defense Department are not. Does anyone really believe Ehmud Olmert's thoughts on a "timetable" for withdrawal will gain much attention in Washington, when those of disgruntled and disgusted US generals and ex-Bushies aren't?

Also note the unambiguous "realism" of Judt's Syria plaint... Today this translates as: Why ruffle Bashar's feathers with, say, an investigation into the murder of Rafiq Hariri when it's clear Damascus is home to a few useful idiots who'll feed us the skinny on Binny while remaining safely, comfortably "contained"? Ditto on Pakistan. It also turns out that the most eyebrow-raising claims about Saddam's WMD being spirited into Syria came not from Mossad agents, but from the Baath themselves. Whether by dint of cynical plea bargaining or just self-amused puppeteering, Saddam's own apparatchiks have stated this case to coalition officials. Georges Sada, a former Iraqi general, published his version in book form, and also reiterated its gist to the New York Sun.

As Tony puts it, the story continues... Only, he's trying to rewrite his in the process.

UPDATE: I should have kept re-reading Judt's essay. It gets better:

But I suspect that we are already too late for that. There are too many settlements, too many Jewish settlers, and too many Palestinians, and they all live together, albeit separated by barbed wire and pass laws. Whatever the "road map" says, the real map is the one on the ground, and that, as Israelis say, reflects facts. It may be that over a quarter of a million heavily armed and subsidized Jewish settlers would leave Arab Palestine voluntarily; but no one I know believes it will happen. Many of those settlers will die—and kill— rather than move. The last Israeli politician to shoot Jews in pursuit of state policy was David Ben-Gurion, who forcibly disarmed Begin's illegal Irgun militia in 1948 and integrated it into the new Israel Defense Forces. Ariel Sharon is not Ben-Gurion.[3]

To be fair, here's the foonote:

In 1979, following the peace agreement with Anwar Sadat, Prime Minister Begin and Defense Minister Sharon did indeed instruct the army to close down Jewish settlements in the territory belonging to Egypt. The angry resistance of some of the settlers was overcome with force, though no one was killed. But then the army was facing three thousand extremists, not a quarter of a million, and the land in question was the Sinai Desert, not "biblical Samaria and Judea.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:26 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Hump Day is for wishing Thursday happy hour to arrive already, or for stimulating the old grey matter with Jew-themed doings. If you've got $10 to spend and can wear heavily appareled clothing -- and wear it defiantly -- then come see "angry Canadian" Hal Niedzviecki read from his new book Hello, I'm Special: How Individuality Became The New Conformity at the Ars Nova Theatre @ 511 West 54th St. and 10th Ave.

It's co-sponsored by my new masthead Jewcy: think Heeb without the suck, Suck without the hip-to-be-square pseudonyms, Slate without the goyim. (Though, technically, I am one of those as mom's maiden is McKenna.)

There'll be fun self-promotional games with swag! Heady culture criticism with snark! Special comedic stylings from actual comedic celebrities including... well, here, click this and see.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sully, too! How cool is this?

Reason in Amsterdam, 2006

The Grand Amsterdam Hotel
August 23-26, 2006

With Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of the hit show South Park, Time magazine's Andrew Sullivan, Reason magazine Editor-in-Chief Nick Gillespie, and Reason Senior Editor Jacob Sullum

"South Park conservative" always sounded a bit off: South Park libertarian is more the bullseye. QED, I guess.

But oh, the level of wastedness that'll be attained for three days... Spinoza was born there, maybe I can get Jewcy to flip the bill.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ooh, what punishment your crime doesn't mete out, your success will. A Harvard sophomore wrote a soppy chick-lit novel -- for which, along with its inevitable follow-up, she was paid $500,000 -- and she swiped stuff from another chick in the field. This damned mob of scribbling women* -- it's tough to keep track of who's whom and what's whose anymore.

At one point in "Sloppy Firsts," Ms. McCafferty's heroine unexpectedly encounters her love interest. Ms. McCafferty writes:

"Though I used to see him sometimes at Hope's house, Marcus and I had never, ever acknowledged each other's existence before. So I froze, not knowing whether I should (a) laugh, (b) say something, or (c) ignore him and keep on walking. I chose a brilliant combo of (a) and (b).

" 'Uh, yeah. Ha. Ha. Ha.'

"I turned around and saw that Marcus was smiling at me."

Similarly, Ms. Viswanathan's heroine, Opal, bumps into her love interest, and the two of them spy on one of the school's popular girls.

Ms. Viswanathan writes: "Though I had been to school with him for the last three years, Sean Whalen and I had never acknowledged each other's existence before. I froze, unsure of (a) what he was talking about, or (b) what I was supposed to do about it. I stared at him.

" 'Flatirons,' he said. 'At least seven flatirons for that hair.'

" 'Ha, yeah. Uh, ha. Ha.' I looked at the floor and managed a pathetic combination of laughter and monosyllables, then remembered that the object of our mockery was his former best friend.

"I looked up and saw that Sean was grinning."

The best part is the author of Sloppy Firsts wrote a sequel called Second Helpings, which Harvard must have read as some kind of invitation.

Speaking of Harvard, ever see Quiz Show? Mark Van Doren's line to his ignominous kid re: cheating on 21: "That's like plagiarizing a comic strip." (Before Bergdorf Blondes, the new cure for tired blood.)

But fuck, for half a mil, I'd pilfer you solid gold. I'd even get my protagonista to shoot some tooth back at Marcus/Sean.

*See Hawthorne, Nathaniel.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:24 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't been following this development nearly as much as I should, though it's dominated the blogosphere and covered much of the CIA-cosseting mainstream in some unsightly chicken embryo this week. I will say, however, that the person who hired a woman with the name Mary McCarthy and expected her not to be a troublemaker -- that's the one who deserved to get axed for sheer incompetence.

Hitch holds the media to its own moral standard when it comes to maintaining open channels of communication between itself and Langley, and finds -- mirabile dictu -- this is no standard at all:

...[T]he New York Times rushes to her aid, with a three-hankie story on April 23, moistly titled "Colleagues Say Fired CIA Analyst Played by the Rules." This is only strictly true if she confined her disagreement to official channels, as she did when she wrote to Clinton in 1998. Sadly enough, the same article concedes that McCarthy may have lied and then eventually told the truth about having unauthorized contact with members of the press.

Well! In that case the remedy is clear. A special counsel must be appointed forthwith, to discover whether the CIA has been manipulating the media. All civil servants and all reporters with knowledge must be urged to comply, and to produce their notes or see the inside of a jail. No effort must be spared to discover the leaker. This is, after all, the line sternly proposed by the New York Times and many other media outlets in the matter of the blessed Joseph Wilson and his martyred CIA spouse, Valerie Plame.

[...]

It has long been pretty obvious to me that the official-secrecy faction within the state machinery has received a gigantic fillip from the press witch hunt against Lewis Libby and Karl Rove. What bureaucrat could believe the luck of an editorial campaign to uncover and punish leaking? A campaign that furthermore invokes the most reactionary law against disclosure this century: the Intelligence Identities Protection Act? It was obvious from the first that the press, in taking Wilson and Plame at their own estimation, was fashioning a rod for its own back. I await the squeals that will follow when this rod is applied, which it will be again and again.

So here's a case of a woman about whom the absolute worst can be stated as the following: she had the courage of her convictions to put her job on the line exposing a systematic campaign of human rights erasure on European and American soil. She happened to do something that, by the lights of any decent liberal or small-government conservative or civil libertarian, ought to be considered heroic and anti-bureaucratic, and yet the first to rally to her defense are those who make a virtue of being consistent in their bureaucratic cretinism, like indentured company men Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson. Leaks are now deemed a-okay only when they emanate from the CIA and damage the Bush White House and the prowar State Department. Meanwhile, the most notorious organ of state intelligence is thought of as immune from the corruptions of power (it votes Democratic of late), where it's even thought of anymore as an actual organ of the state, as opposed to some noble fiefdom of truth and opposition, whose very ability to deal in these depends on total anonymity and complete secrecy.

An antique Chinese formulation would label these "interesting times," but you can probably think of another term for them.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 10:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Edward Rothstein of the Times gets the intrigue behind the supposed cabalistic intrigue blisteringly right. (And good for the Times, by the by, for installing a link to a website where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion can be read: this is a few rungs down on the ladder of adulthood from allowing David Irving's books to be published.)

But the really astonishing thing is this: These Jews, in secretly planning to overturn the very forces of liberalism and modernity they have just created are doing just what their anti-Semitic nemeses desire. That is not the only point of agreement. Look at the Jews' approach in "The Protocols." They believe in absolute power. They will brook no opposition. They will use the rights and values of liberalism to undermine it, exploiting its weaknesses. They will be patient and ruthless and unrelenting.

Hitler once said he used similar techniques for similar ends. He did. So do the Islamists. If "The Protocols" has found such resonance among anti-Semites across the world, it is partly because, in its villainous Jews, they see images of what they yearn to be.

Hitler may have loathed Communism, but he envied Stalin in much the same sadomasochistic way: the siege of universal terror was something even the Nazis couldn't achieve to the extent that the Central Committee did. One might even trace the impulse to invade Russia -- Hitler's greatest folly -- to little more than the schoolyard envy of one pathetic little bully toward another.

The same I think applies to those who make Hannibal Lecter's fava beans sucking noises when they hear the name Leo Strauss... They pine for the philosopher's gift of penetrating the estoteric -- out of what they stupidly perceive to be a sinister motive -- if only because this is something they could never do themselves. Their paranoia about his "influence" stems from a fundamental incomprehension of his writing, which, ironically, is all about the real though recondite influence of other writers. Strauss' status is then overinflated and his work cast in a baleful light, and from here it's an easy step to attributing to him every talking point and PowerPoint slide of the Defense Policy Review Board...

Evil is agreeable when it isn't so damned hard is the main valence of this pathology. One of the reasons for the backlash against Arendt's thesis of the "banality" of evil was an occluded awe for the scope of the Nazi project, if not for what that specific project achieved. (A lot of her critics went on to fruitful careers as Greater Israel Zionists who thought, and still think, Hitler had the right idea but the wrong people.) After all, how could mediocrity unbound ever go so far? Surely on some level Eichmann, et al. were supermen... If only we could emulate them to destroy them.

So Jews, in the ancient anti-Semitic framework, have to be given world-historical powers as undifferentiated members of a shadow sect. This is why the PM of Malaysia looks to them as a paradigm for militant Islamists. Makes perfect sense.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:30 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The editor of The Weekly Standard is gung-ho for The Euston Manifesto. Note the amenability to disagreement over Iraq and domestic policy. Far less indigestion in this than in watching myopic twits on the DailyKos left -- who are thought of as real progressives -- make common cause with the likes of Brent Scowcroft:

The signatories of the document are liberals and progressives. They make clear their commitment to domestic and economic policies with which we at The Weekly Standard heartily disagree. But in the fight against tyranny and terror, against secular dictatorships and Islamic jihadism, is it too much to hope that decent liberals and conservatives could make common cause? We think not, and we hope that this clarion call from overseas might contribute to a rebirth of political courage and moral clarity on the American left as well.

Sign it.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:07 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Imagine all the trouble the government could save in prosecuting the boys of Enron if it simply absorbed Enron into the government. Given the way information is presented in Washington these days, with unblinkingly screwy chronology, it could take on itself the full responsibility for corporate malfeasance; hold a Congressional investigation into "What went wrong"; release a commission-hatched report examining the whys and wherefores of robbing energy and communications employees of their pensions. Take up self-criticism and top-down reformism. Begin the national healing process.

You know things are interesting in Russia when even the capitalists revert to gnomic Marxian inversion to account for current events:

"They look not like state business," [Andrei N. Illarionov] said of Gazprom's projects and those of other state-controlled companies, "but the business part of the state."

Super. All they need is industrial housing and swank weekend retreats, and the era of the Eastern command trust will be all set.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Our apologies. Our site's as drunk as we'd like to be. This should be resolved by Sunday.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

CNN has a bunch of reader emails up on their web site regarding the gas prices. This one nearly killed me.

People where is the *&%*&% outrage! Now I could see if our soldiers were over dying in the Middle East and we were getting gas for a 1.20 a galloon [sic], but our boys are dying and we're still paying 3.00 a gallon. I got a gallon of water (which could sustain life for a week) for .69 and spent almost five times that for a galloon of fuel!!
Michael McDermott, Noblesville, Indiana

Everybody has a price, I guess.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 7:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Why does everybody want to hate Big Oil? Maybe those of us who ride the subway everywhere and have heat built into our leases can afford to be sanguine, but for crying out loud, if you're looking for an industry to accuse of price gouging, Big Oil isn't your bully. And yet:

Democrats running for Congress are moving quickly to use the most recent surge in oil and gasoline prices to bash Republicans over energy policy, and more broadly, the direction of the country...

Increasing gasoline prices have put Republicans on the defensive at a time when they are counting on the economy to help offset the myriad other problems they face, starting with the Iraq war.

And yesterday:

New York Sen. Charles Schumer said, "Are they doing this dictated by the laws of supply and demand, or is something else at work?"

Sen. Schumer wants the Federal Trade Commission to investigate if oil companies are fixing gas prices by holding up production. He's getting support in both Houses, including local representative Mike McIntyre.

Something else is at work, Senator. The US Senate, which passed a bad bill changing to green-friendly anti-knock agents without a well-designed phase-in at the time of year gas use starts peaking anyway.

There is no gasoline shortage; there's a driving glut. Construction of new refineries hasn't kept pace with consumption, so even if the price of oil fell there would still be fairly high prices as the economic system determines who gets what our gasoline capacity is able to squeeze out. Everybody wants cheap energy, but nobody wants a refinery or a power plant near their groundwater. The Oil industry isn't making record profits because it's fixing prices, but because regulations have created an artificial cartel by crimping supply. It only costs so much to refine gas, but the free market will pay a lot more than the cost of making it.

In the end, this unnatural shortage of energy might be what finally pushes us to the next phase of energy independence. It's a de facto gasoline tax, which nobody in government has had the balls to call for even though it would be the most effective long-run strategy to destroy the funding of Islamist terror and end global warming. And, frankly, I'd rather see ExxonMobil get the money than the federal government. Instead of wasting that potential tax money on some white elephant that raises whatever ideological hackles you have -- invading Iran, abortion subsidies, a Trans-Gulf bridge from Fort Myers to Galveston -- the windfall goes to some of the most widely held public companies in America. Exxon really isn't such a bad place. Its shares are dispersed across millions of mutual funds and IRAs held by ordinary middle-class people. While many huge companies have been giving their executives pornographic amounts of money, Exxon's top paychecks are merely offensive.** And even though Exxon is now the most profitable company in America, its profit margin is an unspectacular 10.9%. So how its profits be so huge? Because Americans buy so much gasoline. Where are you going, America? Stay home and watch TV with your kids!

**UPDATE: I have been informed that the Exxon chairman got a $400 million retirement package. Oops. That's too much, but it is remarkable that he's been earning less than ten million a year, including options and bonus, when Exxon is the world's largest company and some executives at much smaller operations are making over $1 billion in undeserved options. That is to say, I would upgrade Exxon's executive compensation to "softcore."

Posted by Nic Duquette at 8:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Did you know Larry Bird has a celebrity wine? Do you believe he's actually tasted it?

Larry and beer were always the best of friends... Back in his MVP years in the mid-1980s, he caught me drinking a Molson one night and said, ''I never drink beer that comes in a green bottle. It all goes back to a party one night in college. I picked up the wrong bottle, a green one, and started chugging and didn't know what was happening until that third cigarette butt went down my throat. That was it for me and green bottles."

No, Larry, Heineken is supposed to taste like that.

The wine is a heavy Napa meritage with a rockin' alcohol content, which makes it even less likely Bird has actually had an opinion one way or another on what grapey concoction he's endorsing. As Bill Murray would observe, Larry Bird isn't white; he's blanc.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 8:38 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Given the Tribe's facility with intellectual copyright law, Flickr won't allow me to reproduce the top pixelated shandah here, so you'll just have to click this to see.

Not terribly mordant, I have to say. And the "roof" bit doesn't make sense, given the -- oh, whatever.

In related news, starting Monday I'll be the dialogue/interview editor of Jewcy magazine. "What's jewcy?" you ask. I know, I know, I should die of cansah to make you click again. Just for the record, we don't manufacture these tees:

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Not bad for a Christian Democratic frowts-frau pushing 52. Must be that formidable German engineering you keep hearing about. Though, mein gott, the reaction from the uptight Hun!

"You are rotten to the core," Bild columnist Franz Josef Wagner replied Wednesday in a piece addressed to The Sun.

"We would never print pictures of your queen in support stockings," he said. "We will sweep you away at the World Cup … revenge is sweet, you will weep yet."

A sexually repressed Wagner talking about the sweetness of vengeance, you don't say. I'm so glad Germans' acute sense of guilt has put an end to the perpetutation of unflattering stereotypes.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:28 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Fading fast now that gonads matter to the Maudlin One. From Page Six, slowly regaining its sense of humor:

"I WOULD rather eat my own testicles than re-form the Smiths, and that's saying something for a vegetarian" - Morrissey in Uncut magazine

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:14 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

See if you can't, from this one extracted paragraph of Geoffrey Wheatcroft's latest sally against the British PM, formulate an easy "not so fast" riposte. (The one strophe is all you need since it contains Wheatcroft's whole argument for Blair's bad faith on Iraq.)

He knew that Washington was going to invade in any case, and he believed that "it would be more damaging to long-term world peace and security if the Americans alone defeated Saddam Hussein than if they had international support to do so." So he told one London journalist, telling another that he was worried about an American drift toward unilateralism and that his mission was to embrace Bush so as to "keep the United States in the international system."

At the very least, and taken at face value, this would be a remarkable act of magnanimity coming from one head of state and directed at another, pre-existing "special relationship" or none. "Here, let me help your country retain its diplomatic grace by singing mine up for a risky war which is deeply unpopular in my country and which will imperil my own political career." (Winston Churchill might have dreamed for just such an outpouring of goodwill from FDR; all he got for a spell was the highway robbery of Lend-Lease.)

Does Wheatcroft take such logic -- especially as unfurled before a bullish domestic press -- seriously, let alone as Blair's only desideratum in becoming Washington's chief ally in this matter? And even on the surface of these comments, the unoriginal conclusion he draws -- that the whole British casus belli was little more a poodle-ish catch-up yip to the big dog's alpha bark -- is absurd. If we take as true the assumption that Blair knew the US was going to invade Iraq no matter what the Security Council determined, then this still doesn't mean he wasn't himself wholeheartedly in favor of such an invasion.

As Wheatcroft later acknowledges without much bolstering his thesis, Blair had been jonesing for a confrontation with Saddam since at least 1999. And wanting to keep America within the "international system" hardly constitute a seedy open secret of a motive: indeed, it only undermines Wheatcroft's thinking again because it goes toward Blair's unwillingness to play by whatever rules Bush decreed. The whole UN rigmarole can be summed up by "Let's go a little wobbly, George."

It's to the premier's infinite credit that this war, whatever its faults of execution and whatever its longest and least informed detractors still maintain about it, was initiated legally, covenanted by every accepted statue defining the forfeiture of state sovereignty, and long overdue.

And it's pretty sad that such a talent as Wheatcroft's can produce such silliness attempting to break down the Albion animus on Iraq to ostensibly snow-jobbed Yanks.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

A good cause for the int'l left, and for any "neo-prog" (get down with the new argot, comrade), be he for or against the war. As reported by Labour Friends of Iraq:

The good: "A million trade unionists are on the march throughout Iraq. A network of non-sectarian union federations, professional associations and civil society groups has emerged in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan."

The bad: "The first priority is that the unions should have total independence. Iraqi trade union assets have been frozen by Decree 8750 of 8 August 2005 and by the maintenance of Saddam's ban on public sector unions, the old law 150 passed in 1987. The private sector in Iraq is small and the ban on public sector organisation covers about 80% of the workforce."

The ugly: "Trade union leaders such as Nozad Ismail in Kirkuk are being targeted by terrorists because their support for pluralism and democracy undermines those who seek to foment civil war. Nozad has survived two assassination attempts and is always armed himself."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:38 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I was beginning to wonder nobody thought our stuff was worth remarking upon. Comments will post without a problem now.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 11:10 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Alan Johnson, the founding editor of Democratiya, has a must-read post at CommentIsFree (hat tip: Harry's Place) on cosseting Hu Jintao in the interests of stability, or economic reciprocity, or whatever rubric of magical realism you ascribe to the erasure of human rights as a prerequisite for int'l relations.

I can't help but smile at the idea of collapsing scenery at the "People's" president's White House reception yesterday... Tyranny used to take ample precautions to stay these kinds of gaffes: one thinks of the dressing up of puffy and ruddy prison guards as inmates as the Solovki labor camp for the gullible Maxim Gorky, as chronicled by the same Solzhenitsyn denied his face-time with an American president because Henry Kissinger didn't want to upset the Kremlin. (For all his venality and gruffness, Dick Cheney was one of the few outraged voices of reason in the Ford administration on this scandalous issue, and deserves to be remembered for it.)

Now, in the age of on-demand spontaneity and "reality TV," how much harder it is to drown out the din of dissidence, even at the most voulu and orchestrated media circle-jerks. And consider life's little ironies: a White House that is notorious for not being able to stick to the script and deliver the news smoothly (when it condescends to do so at all) can't help but even unintentionally hit the democracy pellet button, referring to mainland China by the official name of Taiwan!

More, please.

Here's Alan:

We need to elaborate a foreign policy anchored in the spread of freedom without either the reckless promotion of preventive war or cosying up to dictators. Linkage must be established between a regime's domestic conduct and our foreign policy towards it. But the old left-right political model is a very poor guide to this new politics. Some on the "left" are now so consumed by Americophobia (and bedazzled by the promise of fat Chinese contracts) that they are also eager to appease the Chinese dictators. The mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, flew to China and spoke of the 1989 massacre of students and democrats at Tiananmen Square as no different to the protests we have known down the years in Trafalgar Square. The comparison was, of course, grotesque. At Tiananmen Square tanks were used against demonstrators. Over 2000 were killed, according to the Chinese Red Cross (student leaders claim 7,000 died). "There is no such thing as one country with a perfect record," said Livingstone. Can you imagine how the Chinese prison guard taunted his hapless victim with the next days newspapers? So what does it really mean anymore, this business of calling Ken Livingstone "left wing"? The new divide in politics is between those who confront evil and those who appease it. Within those two blocks arguments will rage about what, why, when, how and who. But it is along that fault line that much of politics will run in the future.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:02 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I was sorry to hear today that the most exciting player in baseball is getting busted back to the minors. Adam Stern is the giddy Canadian whose inside-the-park home run and outrageous catches pushed the underdog Canadian team to a humiliating (for us) victory over the USA in the World Baseball Classic. Due to the arcane rules of baseball, the Red Sox had to play him on their major league roster for 17 days this season or lose him to Atlanta. In the first few weeks of the season, Stern has made one breathtaking catch after another. He's also batted .150. Back to AAA for you, Adam.

The steroids story clearly isn't going away anytime soon, which makes me wonder: why does baseball as an industry place so much emphasis on hitting as its moneymaker? Sure, McGuire and Sosa and Bonds put MLB back on the cultural radar after the last strike, but their flagrant use of forbidden performance enhancers has undermined the sport -- it's now a game of moral ambiguity and huge hits. Why build these parks to watch balls keep exiting them? Isn't the game slow enough to watch without base running? It doesn't help that Bonds is a dick and McGuire a crybaby.

If the sport needs anything right now, a 21-year-old unpracticed Canadian outfielder who lays out for outstanding catches seems to be the ticket. It's been a long time since baseball fans got excited about fielding, but Stern throws himself into each catch as if he doesn't care if he breaks every bone he has against the wall to grab the ball. Hopefully, the Red Sox will give aging right fielder Trot Nixon one more year, then promote Stern to his job. Hitting counts, but short of becoming the Harlem Globetrotters all sports teams should be trying to create teams that are fun to watch as well as winning. This March and April, a scrawny outfielder was the best viewing in a sport besotted with power-hitting meatheads.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 7:08 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

He must not die. He might be useful; execution would fulfill his martyr complex; and he's too entertainingly insane not to have a camera installed in his dank, solitary hole of a cell so Fox can edit his isolated antics into a thirty-minute weekly reality show.

As of Tuesday, however, Moussaoui's only expressed regret is that more innocents did not die on Sept. 11. Moussaoui has called victims and their survivors "disgusting" and has said that he hopes they will "suffer more pain." In response to one of his own character witnesses, a Jewish man who befriended him, Moussaoui shouted "Death to the Jew!" The "remorse factor" is not a viable option for the defense team.

Italic emphasis is Dershowitz's; the exclamation point, I assume, was vociferously entered into the court record.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 5:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In the same week someone bearing the surname of Lincoln's worst and rightfully discharged Civil War general was himself jettisoned from the executive, the chorus has grown of armchair chiefs of staff demanding the resignation of the current Secretary of Defense. The most influential of these voices have come from the epaulet-studded, which begs anew the ever-important question of what right the military has to dictate political policy.

Anthony Zinni and the newer additions to the high-profile and frontpage struggle to have Donald Rumsfeld handed his walking papers are fine men indeed, and no one disputes their committment to ensuring the security of the United States and the prosecution of its noble aims abroad. However, their opinions as to whom their civilian boss -- or former civilian boss -- should be presume upon an equally fine distinction between war-makers and warriors. Ultimately, Rumsfeld's fate resides with the president and only with the president. Yet this is the very person who, thanks to a well acknowledged petulant attitude to discouragement or constructive criticism of any kind, will now never accept the secretary's resignation.

The commander-in-chief is said to be much more fed up with the man he took time out of his Easter vacation to defend in his semi-literate way to the media. And as any dime-store psychologist will tell you, Bush has trouble turning on those who exhibit unyielding loyalty -- fealty is apter term -- to him, although he's quite expert at reprehending those who persist in challenging him. So what we now have is a case of a faction of disgruntled underlings vying for the head of one of their own, who consequently stands stoic and isolated and valiant-seeming, ready to accept whatever judgment is passed on him by the one to whom everybody must answer. Does anybody at this point expect an outcome other than the prolongation of the status quo and Rumsfeld's comfortable retirement in 2008?

Those who act as if they'd long ago cracked the Dubya Code, which holds that the president will brook no public outcry over his governance, and then proceed to complain that (shocking!) the president is not brooking any public outcry over his governance -- they have no business wondering why their advice falls on perfectly functioning ears in the White House. If they really wanted Rumsfeld gone, they'd have chosen a smoother, more Bush-amenable tactic than screaming so in every op-ed section of every newspaper in the country.

Then again, "realists" in foreign policy tend to check their own philosophy at Customs, and the man who brought us Abu Ghraib and a feckless counterinsurgency is still employed.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:26 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I'll take any excuse to post nude photos of her Mossiness. But if one thing can be confidently said of Guy Trebay at the NYT, it's that he never frittered away his time in science lab pining for the likes of his past-bad-and-back-to-good quarry in this Thursday's Styles thinkpiece (a contradiction in terms, perhaps, but just wait til after the colon):

If anything, the bubble-gum divinity apotheosized on the basis of a homemade pornography loop, a moronic catchphrase and a mental vacancy cavernous enough for storing yellowcake appears set to enjoy a media half-life about as long as that of a spent plutonium rod.

I don't think yellowcake requires a cavern for storage (it's relatively small core component contraband), and I'm certain that the fact its composed of uranium means it doesn't belong in the same sentence as a spent plutonium rod.

And all this for the prolix equivalent of: "Paris Hilton, Is She a Fuckwit or What?"

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:06 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In yet another broadside against the empty husk of a cliche, "No blood for oil," the Kurdish Regional Government has begun signing into effect oil contracts on its own behalf. Drilling has commenced by a Norwegian company (cue ominous Enemy of the People soundtrack), which has raised a few eyebrows in Baghdad. It's a foregone conclusion that Iraq's oil industry will be mostly decentralized, with some form of province-equable profit sharing scheme in place by 2007, when the issue of Kirkuk is to have a nation-wide referendum...

My own opinion on this feverishly contested territory -- which really is the Iraqi Kashmir and Jerusalem rolled into one, but with the added complication of being the locus of 40% of the country's total oil reserves -- is that the Kurds and Assyrians and Turkomens expelled by Saddam's "Arabization" campaign are entitled to a categorical and federally-blessed Right of Return. This can and should be off-balanced by an economic compensation package for those Arab Iraqis who find themselves inconvenienced by the real estate shuffle and inevitable demographic realignment (the census stats have always been hazy, but most analysts agree Kurds comprised a majority of the region's population.) Those forced to participate as unwilling irredentists in Saddam's ethnic cleansing ought not to be penalized -- anymore than any pawn in the fascist's capricious chess matches over the course of three decades should be -- and should therefore have the option of keeping their Kirkuki citizenship. If their homes are (justly) transferred back to their former owners, then new homes should be provided for the expelled occupants by the state from money made through Kirkuk oil profits.

Anyway, the ever-consultable Kurdistan Observer reprints a London Times story about energy market autonomy in Northern Iraq.

A vote on the proposed Kurdistan Ministry of Natural Resources could come as early as Monday in the Kurdish regional parliament, which is debating a plan to reunify and streamline the two halves of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Kurds and their advocates characterized the proposed regional organ as a slight elevation in status to a Cabinet-level post for the state-owned oil company that manages such matters and dismissed concerns in the capital as overblown.

"Forming a new ministry is an arrangement that will help increase oil production," said Peter Galbraith, a former U.S. diplomat who has advised the Kurds. "If oil production increases in Alaska, it may be that the Alaskans get a major part of the benefits, but Alaska is still part of the U.S."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:36 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The gravel-voiced prince of greyness has a film coming out all about little old his cultish self. Sententious hat tip from Bono? Check. Doleful and soleful tributes from Nick Cave, the Wainwrights (Rufus and Martha) and somebody called Antony? Check. Endorsement of Mel Gibson? Ch-- What the fuck?

Watch the trailer and call me a liar. It's like watching cool expire to see that. (As is well known, Mel's father denied the Chelsea Hotel scene ever happened.)

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When you're reduced to reading Tony Judt's Postwar on the toilet, you know your attention is being overtaxed. It could be due to a variety of things: IBS, office fatigue, problems at home with the wife and kids. Or you have a blog and it's slowly killing you. That's all I'm saying. The rest I defer to Sarah Hepola on:

One morning last month, I woke early, finished a book I'd been reading, and shut down my blog. I had kept the blog for nearly five years, using it as a repository for personal anecdotes, travelogues, and the occasional flight of fiction—all of which I hoped, eventually, might lead to a novel. And then, somewhere between the bedsheets and 6 a.m., I realized something: Blogging wasn't helping me write; it was keeping me from it.

She's onto something. I suspect a growing number of us TypePad brigadeers feel the same way, however much we fight down the obvious implication: We. Must. Stop.

Like the French about Alsace-Lorraine: "Always think of it, never speak of it." Wouldn't be surprised if "Blog-Enders" was the new cyber meme.

That said, I don't have a novel I'm working on and I gladly self-pilfer, consequences be damned.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So what sort of radical heritage to counterpoise to the etiolated liberal one? Oliver Kamm on Paul Berman's latest, in Democratiya:

Fischer was part of the generation of 1968. His political comrades included some who were caught up in the madness of the revolutionary violence of Germany's terrorist Left. There was no suggestion that Fischer had been active in those activities, but in January 2001 Stern magazine published five photographs dating from 1973 that appeared to show a helmeted Fischer beating up a policeman. The political controversy the photographs caused was a slow burner, but eventually became an international issue. Berman's long essay was an attempt – a valiant and successful one – to explain to that international audience the political evolution that had put the student radical of the late 1960s and early 1970s in the foreign ministry three decades later. It is, however, no conventional cautionary tale of an idealist seduced by the attractions of high office. Berman argues that Fischer's unconventional, even startling, action of deploying German troops in the Kosovo War derived in some way from the spirit of 1968. He says: 'The Kosovo War has sometimes been called the Liberals' War, because it was the liberal idealists, more than the conservative realists, who were keen on intervention. But I am not the first to point out that Nato's intervention could just as easily be described as the '68ers' War.'

Kamm on Chomsky after the jump.

Whereas Berman's writings on the debates over the Iraq War are scrupulous in their accurate presentation of a range of views, Chomsky gives no credit at all for a conflicting intellectual case. I recently engaged in an exchange with Chomsky in Prospect magazine (November 2005 and January 2006, with a concluding letter from me in February 2006) in which he took exception to my claim that his political output is dominated by the notion that the US is comparable to Nazi Germany. (Rather extraordinarily, he responded by accusing me of misquoting an example of this notion from his first political book. He demonstrated this by leaving out the sentence I was actually quoting and substituting another. The subtitle of his article was, ironically in the circumstances, 'the world's top public intellectual responds to accusations of dishonesty'.) But in fact this conceit runs through Imperial Ambitions as it does the rest of Chomsky's oeuvre: The United States is invading Iraq. It's as open an act of aggression as there has been in modern history, a major war crime. This is the crime for which the Nazis were hanged at Nuremberg, the act of aggression…. The pretences for the invasion are no more convincing than Hitler's.

You could have plausibly, though not necessarily correctly, argued a prudential case against the Iraq War. You could have argued, against the evidence of the erosion of the policy of containment, that coercive inspections and diplomatic pressure might have tempered a gangster regime and enhanced the prospects for political reform. But to depict Iraq as the victim of 'the crime for which the Nazis were hanged' is to place a casuistical stress on a doctrine of sovereignty that real progressives – men such as Kouchner – have understood as a defence of quietism and reaction. Chomsky is at least consistent. During the Bosnian catastrophe Chomsky was asked by Barsamian in another of these insubstantial volumes of interviews – What Uncle Sam Really Wants, 1994 - whether Serb encampments outside Sarajevo should have been bombed. Chomsky responded with a fantastically tortuous answer that concluded, 'It's not so simple.' Douglas Hurd and John Major themselves could scarcely have come up with a feebler counsel of inaction.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Greenpeace says nuclear power plants aren't as bad as people think. Greenpeace says a particular nuclear power plant is worse than people think.

The US might nuke Iran. The US absolutely won't nuke Iran.

Hiroshima cannot be morally justified on the grounds of saving innocent lives, unless it can be.

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We demand too much from our left-wing men and women of ideas. The one endlessly coinable dichotomy for which the liberal intellectual's liberal intellectual, Isaiah Berlin, will forever be remembered -- the one that divides the cagey if unscrupulous fox from the galumphing but upright hedgehog -- is apt in the present cultural situation only because it is obsolescent. Everybody now knows the big idea as well as all the complicated small ones you can invent. The role of the liberal intellectual has become one of mere clarification and reaffirmation of the fresh-scented little orthodoxies of every blue state denizen. The radical challenge, or the courageous taking-on, of one's audience is demode in the era which presumes to exalt any thinking that is done "outside the box," which also happens to be where fascist dictators are rumored to reside.

Consider the last sage of the published or televised or radio broadcast left you saw give a speech or engage in a political debate: how far did he really go in injecting new discourse -- or even the remotest revolutionary concept -- into the din of rehashed argument and reiterated catchphrase? No matter how supple and nuanced his thinking may have seemed on the page or at first listen, it was still delivering on a promise, catering to expectation with more than a tincture of insecure crowd-pleasing to the performance. And if this isn't true, if the masses really are solidly behind such a wise man, then all the more ennervated and otiose his initial purpose...

I obviously have my own stark exception to this rule sipping his Johnny Walker Black in the wings, but then, I'm as biased in my discipleship as Stephen Metcalf, who pays serious homage to his college mentor Richard Rorty and the Third Way hierophants (the "smart" ones) in this Slate review of Eric Lott's The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual. Lott's grievance is that the ivory tower is now stacked with the doctored bien-pensant, movers and shakers who stump for a non-threatening centrism and make no "sell-out" peeps about participation in the national bourgeois superstructure (that is, if the post-Derridian mess of "theory" even affords room for Marx anymore) as against a violent confrontation with it. Larry Summers' travails notwithstanding -- and there was a stampeding, elephantine antithesis to Lott's conceit; the managerial Keynesian liberal being undone by the woolly activist professoriat -- Disappearanceis a call for less consensus and more polarization on campus and in the agora. A worthy aim, one would think, and Metcalf concedes that it is. Poorly as Lott's volume is written and argued, he touches on an interesting thread in the frayed fabric of progressivism, especially at a moment when Bill Clinton's fiscal policy can be remembered with nostalgia for its conservatism after the drunken-sailor spending of George Bush; namely, what's "Left"?

Lott's book is strictly correct in its temperature-taking—Rorty's influence did help usher in the levelheaded rhetoric of certain prominent boomer intellectuals, notably Paul Berman, whom Lott takes issue with at length, and Louis Menand, whom Lott skips altogether. But Lott is hopelessly clumsy in delivering his diagnosis. He believes that the consensus leftism of the '90s set itself up too explicitly against identity politics and thus wrote off "the way blacks, Latinos, women, queers, and others have transformed utterly the very category and meaning of 'the poor' or 'the left' on behalf of whom they write." To this sentence—with its inverted commas ("the poor," "the left," the graphic equivalent of up-speak), vacuous intensifiers ("utterly," "very"), and tongue-tied syntax ("on behalf of whom they write," instead of "on whose behalf they write")—one cannot be kind. Whatever the demerits of Todd Gitlin, Paul Berman, and Michael Lind, each writes with clarity and fluency, and to take them down, one ought to at least aspire to match their game. This Lott does not do. His tone is neither scholarly, nor sufficiently deft and engaging for the general reader. Like the milieu that generated it, his prose is both knowing and unworldly. Juvenile sneer words (Jefferson is the country's "ur-cracker") share space with stale lit-crit jargon ("subtended"), and all attempts at wit are downright puzzling. "Nixon's Deep Throat told reporters to follow the money; Clinton's deep throats say follow the money shot." Come again?

Paul Berman is really more a social democrat and historian of radicalism. And I think Lott meant "pop shot," but that "come again" was totally unnecessary.

Though Metcalf misses an obvious point in his critique, at least judging from what I assume is a fair precis of Lott's book. What's really more evident in the marketplace of ideas is absence of the radical intellectual, someone who is both read (and rebutted) by serious ideological opponents, and who is appreciated in popular fora for something other than his insanity.

If one were to mourn anything about the decline and fall of Communism at the end of the twentieth century, the signal event that greased the wheels for Third Way non-ideology in the first place, it would be that Marxism was at least a rooted discipline and a centuries-old tradition that, whatever its categorical faults (and they were many) and whatever the moral and philosophical venalities of its practitioners (and they were even more), it had the full weight of radical history behind it. Consequently, Liberals, before and after the Cold War, had to combat antagonists both from the extreme left as well as from the extreme and mainstream right. (Added to which, the predominance of left sectarianism meant that even future liberals made up of reconstructed socialsits and communists had had a rigorous training on the side they eventually opposed, and could opposed with that much more acuity and insight. The same people who will tell you that there's hardly any political diversity in America are ones to talk: they've got absolutely nothing on the parlous nature of agitation of the 30's and 40's, which had bigger fish to fry than the Republican and Democratic parties, let alone Starbucks and Wal-Mart.)

The greatest polemics ever written about World War I and Vietnam -- two "liberal" wars -- emanated from the pens of revolutionaries (or, at minimum, scribbling revolutionists), who wouldn't have given a damn about Ralph Nader's "spoiler" run in 2000 because the electoral system, from Dade to Orange County, begged the fundamental question of the economic basis of the society we live in.

Nowadays, when "radicalism" is defined by the latest excrescence from Noam Chomsky or Naomi Klein or Howard Zinn -- none of whom possesses a positive politics, and none of whom allows a negative one to cohere with any sense of contradiction or history beyond the latest news cycle -- writers like Louis Menand and Rick Hertzberg and Nicholas Kristof have a much easier time of skewering the common enemy, conservatism, without having to adjust their forsenic schema in the least. This leads to laziness of mind, staleness of wit, and -- the worst liberal sin, in my opinion -- a smug, blinkered self-satisfaction. One thinks of Hertzberg's ridiculous cri de couer after the '04 election, when he more or less accused half the country of being slack-jawed yokels voting against their own interests. (Translation: don't expect the people's help helping the people.)

A more recent example, from yet another exponent would be Hertzberg's boss at The New Yorker, David Remnick. The brilliant author of Lenin's Tomb exhibits, in this week's "Talk of the Town," a dangling teardrop for the ozone-depleted atmosphere and the executive might-have-been of Al Gore. If only he weren't bound by the special interests and the all-too-hinged covenants of electability! That facial vegetation and that loose lip are more becoming on him! Why couldn't this Al be our commander-in-chief?

A long and muddy road indeed from the world-historical scabrousness of Pravda to An Inconvenient Truth.

I don't know whether or laugh or cry to witness the unconsciously sad calcification of ideas from this brave and proudly unified middle. It wasn't so long ago when the prospect of the former vice president residing in the White House on September 11, 2001 was considered too grim to even imagine, and not just by national-security Republican types... Now it's all the oppositional brains trusts think about. The future looks dark, filled with civil war in the Middle East and an expanding deficit at home, let's all pine for the halcyon days when we had politicos who invented the internet, didn't just try to win by using it.

It's taken a lousy but revolutionary presidency to galvanize liberal intellectuals, who now demand the status quo ante. Their best endeavors in public advocacy are drafting glowing blurbs -- in "you see! you see!" fashion they really must be desperate not to appreciate the irony of -- for the latest bestselling repudiation of George Bush by betrayed, real conservatives.

I could sure do with a Dwight Macdonald right about now.

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When the hottest comic on the planet walks away from $50 million (a windfall earned for what he'd already accomplished; innovation greenlights, consistency collects) and blames it on the "pressure" of showbiz, curiosity will be the least of his problems. There will be rumors, meretricious presumption, and even -- because everyone from LaRochefoucauld to Morrissey knew that we hate it when our friends become successful, and never let them forget it -- "conspiracy theories." Then comes the Explanation: all one big misunderstanding, you see, the very media that precipated the zero-hour sabbatical then inflated such an event to hysterical proportion and encouraged all the worst chatter about it. This is followed by one of two things: a gradual erosion of attention and influence which culiminates in renewed obscurity (Eddie Murphy is now a famous cartoon donkey), or a full-court press ahead, as if nothing untoward or indecorous had ever happened, status as genius/cultural icon/etc. miraculously unharmed.

Chappelle's Show's third season will be a strained and probably bathetic effort because there are only a few usable segments due to its star's self-willed exile to South Africa, which is about as far away from Comedy Central as you can get. Also, his falling out with co-creator Neal Brennan -- the token white guy in the demimonde of cant-exploding black sketch comedy -- can't be good for business. (The fact that Chappelle is a pious Muslim was one close call for long enough.) Nonetheless, here comes The Explanation courtesy of Esquire, which doesn't want you to read about it without buying. I transcribe, you decide:

Chappelle asks me to turn off the tape recorder. Should he vent, should he be careful? He sparks a cigarette and continues.

Between the first and second seasons, Comedy Central was sold. "There was a lot of new faces. Viacom had acquired the entire asset of Comedy Central. Certain things happened that were strange at the time." Chappelle straightens his back and mimics the voice of an older white executive: "'Dave, we're having a symposium on the n-word, and we wanted you to speak about your use of it. It's just for our information.' And I did it, but afterward I was like, That was real stupid of me. Why the fuck would I explain to a room full of white people why I say the word nigga? Why on earth would I put myself in a position like that? So you go me on a panel, me and all of these, like, Harvard-educated, you know, upper-echelon authors, me, and a rapper. So here I am explaining, and I was real defensive 'cause of what was going on at the show at the time--we had just shot the Niggar Family sketch, and I was at a symposium on the word nigger. So I'm feeling like I'm fighting cenorship. They say, 'We just want to know how far we should go with something like that.' And the subtext of it is, 'Do you want to know, or do you want to tell me something?'

"You have all these Harvard-educated people saying, 'I think the word is reprehensible. and talking about the destructive nature of blah, blah, blah.... You know, pontificating."

Silence. A sigh.

"But the bottom line was, white people own everything, and where can a black person go and be himself or say something that's familiar to him and not have to explain or apologize? Why don't I just take the show to BET--oh, wait a minute, you own that, too, don't you? Same thing happened with the Rick James episode. They gave us the notes and there were like forty-six or some insame number of bleeps that we would've had to put over it. 'Well, Dave, then why don't you go in and explain to them yourself.' So now I'm sitting in a room, again, with some white people, explaining why they say the n-word, and it's a sketch about Rick James, and I don't want to air a sketch with that many bleeps over it; it will render it completely ineffective. Give me another week and I'll just come up with something else. Run a rerun. 'No, we can't run a rerun, we've go ad buy-ins' and blah, blah, blah. Okay, well then, fine, I don't want to do it then. And so then there was a compromise. It was the only episode that aired with a disclaimer. But again, it was a position where I was explaining to white people why the n-word. It's an awful, awful position to put yourself in.

"I'm just saying it's a dilemma. it's something that is unique to us. White people, white artists, are allowed to be individuals. But we always have this greater struggle that we at least have to keep in mind somewhere."

I'll spare you the W.E.B. DuBois quote the author/interviewer then reiterates -- in italics -- to hamfistedly underscore these points, which were made, or acted out, with a subconscious-satiric vehemence Chappelle might envy by Eddie Murphy in his "white makeover" sketch on SNL twenty years ago. Instead of a catered bacchanalia breaking out on a public bus once the last black passenger has alighted, it's a carte blanche written by the corporate brass when the last talented young black provocateur has exited the board room...

Right, Dave. Tell that to Matt and Trey and the Prophet (Praise Be Unto Him).

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:53 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Say this for would-be-Senator Ford: he has a sly wit. I hope.

At the White House briefing Monday, press secretary Scott McClellan pointed to the Wall Street Journal op-ed as evidence that retired generals stand behind the defense secretary.

Also Monday, U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr., a Tennessee Democrat running for his state's Senate seat, suggested replacing Rumsfeld with former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

"Gen. Powell's experience resolving complicated and sensitive national security challenges is needed now more than ever," Ford said in a statement. "He will bring a respect for our military, a willingness to listen, a capacity to admit and correct mistakes and an attention to detail that is absent now in the top job at the Pentagon."

In the same statement, Ford suggested John McCain for DHS, Warren Buffett for Secretary of the Treasury, Dennis Miller for White House Spokesman, Optimus Prime for the Department of Transportation, and was starting to strum that Mermaid Ave track about Jesus for President when he suddenly collapsed from nervous exhaustion.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 6:57 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Want to take out a mountain of junk debt, buy out a major corporation, and strip mine it? You'll need to go somewhere else. Meet the cuddlier, kinder Goldman Sachs.

Goldman Sachs‘ C.E.O. has reportedly ordered an end — with some exceptions — to the firm’s financing of hostile takeovers, a move that suggests the investment bank is not immune to the kinds of conflicts of interest that have snagged its peers.

The Financial Times reported on Tuesday that Henry Paulson told Goldman executives that funding unsolicited takeovers “threatened the bank’s standing with corporate clients, which he said was more important than profits from any single deal.???

Great -- now who's going to rent all these Wilmington, Delaware PO boxes? (More importantly, if backroom buddy-buddy stuff has convinced a major i-bank that it would rather help incompetent executives than high-flying cocaine-invincible raiders, is that good or bad for me? Should we ruin large firms out of negligence, or greed? A conundrum.)

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Clive James once wrote along the lines that if Martin Amis' "war against cliche" could be determined as a sustained struggle for the higher ideals of prose writing, then Flaubert's Madame Bovary ranks, in incipient revolutionary terms, somewhere between the storming of the Bastille and the Tennis Court Oath -- two watershed moments in the bourgeois tradition that the ascetic master of the epater style probably had little time for in his consciousness, which was ever-present and only vaguely historical. He began with rooted contempt for his own society and ended with an artistic sublimity that defied calendar and border. All novelists should be so lucky. And yet Flaubert was as much a decadent confection of the modernity he cannibalized, gobbling up the world around and transforming even the stalest morsel of the ultra-mundane into a permanent delicacy of form and substance. Everyone else just inherits the French recipes.

Now thank God there is James Wood to show us how this is so:

Take the following passage, in which Frédéric Moreau, the hero of "Sentimental Education," wanders through the Latin Quarter, alive to the sights and sounds of Paris: "At the back of deserted cafes, women behind the bars yawned between their untouched bottles; the newspapers lay unopened on the reading-room tables; in the laundresses' workshops the washing quivered in the warm draughts. Every now and then he stopped at a bookseller's stall; an omnibus, coming down the street and grazing the pavement, made him turn round; and when he reached the Luxembourg he retraced his steps." This was published in 1869, but might have appeared in 1969; many, perhaps most, novelists still sound essentially the same. Flaubert scans the streets indifferently, it seems, like a camera. Just as when we watch a film we no longer notice what has been excluded, so we no longer notice what Flaubert chooses not to notice. And we no longer notice that what he has selected is not of course casually scanned but quite savagely chosen, that each detail is almost frozen in its gel of chosenness. How superb and magnificently isolate the details are — the women yawning, the unopened newspapers, the washing quivering in the warm air. Flaubert is the greatest exponent of a technique that is essential to realist narration: the confusing of the habitual with the dynamic. Obviously, the women cannot be yawning for the same length of time as the washing is quivering or the omnibus is coming down the street. Flaubert's details belong to different time-signatures, some instantaneous and some recurrent, yet they are smoothed together as if they are all happening simultaneously.

George Eliot was a nerve specialist, a cataloguer of every actuating impulse and firing synapse of the human condition. She had her own felicities of phrase, and a keen way with the extrinsic observation -- Machiavelli is always "smiling" in Romola, for instance -- but her genius was in the psychology of the individual over the milieu that informs it. Perhaps it's best to blame it on the non-romance rhythms of English more than anything else to say she was never quite capable of this:

It is a pity that Frederick Brown, so scrupulous in other ways, does not discuss a passage of Flaubert's French. A single sentence, from "Madame Bovary," will do. Emma is pregnant, and Charles is stupidly proud of having got her that way: "L'idée d'avoir engendré le délectait." Literally, this is: "The idea of having engendered delighted him." Geoffrey Wall, in his recent Penguin translation, renders it as: "The thought of having impregnated her was delectable to him." This is perfectly respectable, but pity the poor translator. For the English sentence is a wan cousin of the French. Say the French out aloud, and you encounter four "ay" sounds in three of the words — "l'idée," "engendré," "délectait." Wall's version has not the slightest hint of that music. Yet an English sentence that truly tried to sound like the French would probably sound peculiar: "The notion of procreation was a delectation," for instance, sounds like hip-hop — bad hip-hop.

This was what Flaubert meant by rhythm, and indeed page after page of his prose sings with the distinctive "ay" sound of his favorite verb tense, the imperfect (which ends in "ait" or "aient"). The regular, repeating sound of this imperfect verb — which English translates as a verb of habit, as "he would do something" or "he was doing something" — is like a bell tolling the very sound of provincial boredom in "Madame Bovary." Proust said that Flaubert's one great innovation was his use of this verb.

The imperfect in English relies on "-ing" for the equivalent phonetic repetition; an altogether abrupt and unmusical way of conveying the provincial boredom that "ay" sound did. "-Ing" connotes clanguor and event: Emma's death rattle perhaps, but certainly not the desperate housewife cycling that leads up to it.

It might take a linguist to figure out the rest, but Wood is the best in the business for getting us this far.

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Professor Norman Geras -- of Normblog fame, and generally the Mancunian theorist Gandalf to Terry Eagleton's Saruman -- has drafted an excellent and urgent platform for the internationalist left. It's called the Euston Manifesto. It's neither too narrow in its long-term aims (there's ample wiggle room for disagreement over economic and social policy), nor too broad in its inclusiveness (people who make excuses for religious or secular fascism need not apply, not that they'd care to do, anyway.) Some promising signs of debate and polarization in cyberspace over the doc, particularly on the top-notch sites like Harry's Place and Bloggers4Labour.

Woefully under-reported on this side of the Atlantic is just how predominant the rise of these Rosa Luxemblogs (if I may be allowed a polite coinage) are in Britain. They're all edited and regularly perused by committed social democrats who may differ over the legitimacy of the war in Iraq, but who nevertheless argue about this and other things the way everyone should. (Though it should be said that on certain points of principle, like free speech and solidarity with Denmark, they're as uncompromising and cohesive as others are expert in rationalization and the recourse of the ostrich. Being wholly predictable is a laudable trait sometimes.)

Harry's Place in particular was very helpful in Hitchs' anti-Galloway campaign; they contributed their own leaflets to the debate in October, with even greater head-spinning quotes from the MP than I could find.

The full text of the Euston Manifesto is reproduced after the jump. Sign it here.

Also, if you haven't already, be sure to check out the (relatively) new book review Democratiya. All the familiar names -- Paul Berman, Kanan Makiya --are present either on the masthead or just out in front of it, in addition to a few more names you may not yet know, but would profit tremendously from doing. And any journal that reprints old Sidney Hook speeches is surely one to keep bookmarked.

The Euston Manifesto
Wednesday, 29 March 2006

A. Preamble

We are democrats and progressives. We propose here a fresh political alignment. Many of us belong to the Left, but the principles that we set out are not exclusive. We reach out, rather, beyond the socialist Left towards egalitarian liberals and others of unambiguous democratic commitment. Indeed, the reconfiguration of progressive opinion that we aim for involves drawing a line between the forces of the Left that remain true to its authentic values, and currents that have lately shown themselves rather too flexible about these values. It involves making common cause with genuine democrats, whether socialist or not.

The present initiative has its roots in and has found a constituency through the Internet, especially the "blogosphere". It is our perception, however, that this constituency is under-represented elsewhere — in much of the media and the other forums of contemporary political life.

The broad statement of principles that follows is a declaration of intent. It inaugurates a new Website, which will serve as a resource for the current of opinion it hopes to represent and the several foundation blogs and other sites that are behind this call for a progressive realignment.

B. Statement of principles

1) For democracy.
We are committed to democratic norms, procedures and structures — freedom of opinion and assembly, free elections, the separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers, and the separation of state and religion. We value the traditions and institutions, the legacy of good governance, of those countries in which liberal, pluralist democracies have taken hold.

2) No apology for tyranny.
We decline to make excuses for, to indulgently "understand", reactionary regimes and movements for which democracy is a hated enemy — regimes that oppress their own peoples and movements that aspire to do so. We draw a firm line between ourselves and those left-liberal voices today quick to offer an apologetic explanation for such political forces.

3) Human rights for all.
We hold the fundamental human rights codified in the Universal Declaration to be precisely universal, and binding on all states and political movements, indeed on everyone. Violations of these rights are equally to be condemned whoever is responsible for them and regardless of cultural context. We reject the double standards with which much self-proclaimed progressive opinion now operates, finding lesser (though all too real) violations of human rights which are closer to home, or are the responsibility of certain disfavoured governments, more deplorable than other violations that are flagrantly worse. We reject, also, the cultural relativist view according to which these basic human rights are not appropriate for certain nations or peoples.

4) Equality.
We espouse a generally egalitarian politics. We look towards progress in relations between the sexes (until full gender equality is achieved), between different ethnic communities, between those of various religious affiliations and those of none, and between people of diverse sexual orientations — as well as towards broader social and economic equality all round. We leave open, as something on which there are differences of viewpoint amongst us, the question of the best economic forms of this broader equality, but we support the interests of working people everywhere and their right to organize in defence of those interests. Democratic trade unions are the bedrock organizations for the defence of workers' interests and are one of the most important forces for human rights, democracy-promotion and egalitarian internationalism. Labour rights are human rights. The universal adoption of the International Labour Organization Conventions — now routinely ignored by governments across the globe — is a priority for us. We are committed to the defence of the rights of children, and to protecting people from sexual slavery and all forms of institutionalized abuse.

5) Development for freedom.
We stand for global economic development-as-freedom and against structural economic oppression and environmental degradation. The current expansion of global markets and free trade must not be allowed to serve the narrow interests of a small corporate elite in the developed world and their associates in developing countries. The benefits of large-scale development through the expansion of global trade ought to be distributed as widely as possible in order to serve the social and economic interests of workers, farmers and consumers in all countries. Globalization must mean global social integration and a commitment to social justice. We support radical reform of the major institutions of global economic governance (World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, World Bank) to achieve these goals, and we support fair trade, more aid, debt cancellation and the campaign to Make Poverty History. Development can bring growth in life-expectancy and in the enjoyment of life, easing burdensome labour and shortening the working day. It can bring freedom to youth, possibilities of exploration to those of middle years, and security to old age. It enlarges horizons and the opportunities for travel, and helps make strangers into friends. Global development must be pursued in a manner consistent with environmentally sustainable growth.

6) Opposing anti-Americanism.
We reject without qualification the anti-Americanism now infecting so much left-liberal (and some conservative) thinking. This is not a case of seeing the US as a model society. We are aware of its problems and failings. But these are shared in some degree with all of the developed world. The United States of America is a great country and nation. It is the home of a strong democracy with a noble tradition behind it and lasting constitutional and social achievements to its name. Its peoples have produced a vibrant culture that is the pleasure, the source-book and the envy of millions. That US foreign policy has often opposed progressive movements and governments and supported regressive and authoritarian ones does not justify generalized prejudice against either the country or its people.

7) For a two-state solution.
We recognize the right of both the Israeli and the Palestinian peoples to self-determination within the framework of a two-state solution. There can be no reasonable resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that subordinates or eliminates the legitimate rights and interests of one of the sides to the dispute.

8) Against racism.
For liberals and the Left, anti-racism is axiomatic. We oppose every form of racist prejudice and behaviour: the anti-immigrant racism of the far Right; tribal and inter-ethnic racism; racism against people from Muslim countries and those descended from them, particularly under cover of the War on Terror. The recent resurgence of another, very old form of racism, anti-Semitism, is not yet properly acknowledged in left and liberal circles. Some exploit the legitimate grievances of the Palestinian people under occupation by Israel, and conceal prejudice against the Jewish people behind the formula of "anti-Zionism". We oppose this type of racism too, as should go without saying.

9) United against terror.
We are opposed to all forms of terrorism. The deliberate targeting of civilians is a crime under international law and all recognized codes of warfare, and it cannot be justified by the argument that it is done in a cause that is just. Terrorism inspired by Islamist ideology is widespread today. It threatens democratic values and the lives and freedoms of people in many countries. This does not justify prejudice against Muslims, who are its main victims, and amongst whom are to be found some of its most courageous opponents. But, like all terrorism, it is a menace that has to be fought, and not excused.

10) A new internationalism.
We stand for an internationalist politics and the reform of international law — in the interests of global democratization and global development. Humanitarian intervention, when necessary, is not a matter of disregarding sovereignty, but of lodging this properly within the "common life" of all peoples. If in some minimal sense a state protects the common life of its people (if it does not torture, murder and slaughter its own civilians, and meets their most basic needs of life), then its sovereignty is to be respected. But if the state itself violates this common life in appalling ways, its claim to sovereignty is forfeited and there is a duty upon the international community of intervention and rescue. Once a threshold of inhumanity has been crossed, there is a "responsibility to protect".

11) A critical openness.
Drawing the lesson of the disastrous history of left apologetics over the crimes of Stalinism and Maoism, as well as more recent exercises in the same vein (some of the reaction to the crimes of 9/11, the excuse-making for suicide-terrorism, the disgraceful alliances lately set up inside the "anti-war" movement with illiberal theocrats), we reject the notion that there are no opponents on the Left. We reject, similarly, the idea that there can be no opening to ideas and individuals to our right. Leftists who make common cause with, or excuses for, anti-democratic forces should be criticized in clear and forthright terms. Conversely, we pay attention to liberal and conservative voices and ideas if they contribute to strengthening democratic norms and practices and to the battle for human progress.

12) Historical truth.
In connecting to the original humanistic impulses of the movement for human progress, we emphasize the duty which genuine democrats must have to respect for the historical truth. Not only fascists, Holocaust-deniers and the like have tried to obscure the historical record. One of the tragedies of the Left is that its own reputation was massively compromised in this regard by the international Communist movement, and some have still not learned that lesson. Political honesty and straightforwardness are a primary obligation for us.

13) Freedom of ideas.
We uphold the traditional liberal freedom of ideas. It is more than ever necessary today to affirm that, within the usual constraints against defamation, libel and incitement to violence, people must be at liberty to criticize ideas — even whole bodies of ideas — to which others are committed. This includes the freedom to criticize religion: particular religions and religion in general. Respect for others does not entail remaining silent about their beliefs where these are judged to be wanting.

14) Open source.
As part of the free exchange of ideas and in the interests of encouraging joint intellectual endeavour, we support the open development of software and other creative works and oppose the patenting of genes, algorithms and facts of nature. We oppose the retrospective extension of intellectual property laws in the financial interests of corporate copyright holders. The open source model is collective and competitive, collaborative and meritocratic. It is not a theoretical ideal, but a tested reality that has created common goods whose power and robustness have been proved over decades. Indeed, the best collegiate ideals of the scientific research community that gave rise to open source collaboration have served human progress for centuries.

15) A precious heritage.
We reject fear of modernity, fear of freedom, irrationalism, the subordination of women; and we reaffirm the ideas that inspired the great rallying calls of the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century: liberty, equality and solidarity; human rights; the pursuit of happiness. These inspirational ideas were made the inheritance of us all by the social-democratic, egalitarian, feminist and anti-colonial transformations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — by the pursuit of social justice, the provision of welfare, the brotherhood and sisterhood of all men and women. None should be left out, none left behind. We are partisans of these values. But we are not zealots. For we embrace also the values of free enquiry, open dialogue and creative doubt, of care in judgement and a sense of the intractabilities of the world. We stand against all claims to a total — unquestionable or unquestioning — truth.

C. Elaborations

We defend liberal and pluralist democracies against all who make light of the differences between them and totalitarian and other tyrannical regimes. But these democracies have their own deficits and shortcomings. The battle for the development of more democratic institutions and procedures, for further empowering those without influence, without a voice or with few political resources, is a permanent part of the agenda of the Left.

The social and economic foundations on which the liberal democracies have developed are marked by deep inequalities of wealth and income and the survival of unmerited privilege. In turn, global inequalities are a scandal to the moral conscience of humankind. Millions live in terrible poverty. Week in, week out, tens of thousands of people — children in particular — die from preventable illnesses. Inequalities of wealth, both as between individuals and between countries, distribute life chances in an arbitrary way.

These things are a standing indictment against the international community. We on the Left, in keeping with our own traditions, fight for justice and a decent life for everyone. In keeping with those same traditions, we have also to fight against powerful forces of totalitarian-style tyranny that are on the march again. Both battles have to be fought simultaneously. One should not be sacrificed for the other.

We repudiate the way of thinking according to which the events of September 11, 2001 were America's deserved comeuppance, or "understandable" in the light of legitimate grievances resulting from US foreign policy. What was done on that day was an act of mass murder, motivated by odious fundamentalist beliefs and redeemed by nothing whatsoever. No evasive formula can hide that.

The founding supporters of this statement took different views on the military intervention in Iraq, both for and against. We recognize that it was possible reasonably to disagree about the justification for the intervention, the manner in which it was carried through, the planning (or lack of it) for the aftermath, and the prospects for the successful implementation of democratic change. We are, however, united in our view about the reactionary, semi-fascist and murderous character of the Baathist regime in Iraq, and we recognize its overthrow as a liberation of the Iraqi people. We are also united in the view that, since the day on which this occurred, the proper concern of genuine liberals and members of the Left should have been the battle to put in place in Iraq a democratic political order and to rebuild the country's infrastructure, to create after decades of the most brutal oppression a life for Iraqis which those living in democratic countries take for granted — rather than picking through the rubble of the arguments over intervention.

This opposes us not only to those on the Left who have actively spoken in support of the gangs of jihadist and Baathist thugs of the Iraqi so-called resistance, but also to others who manage to find a way of situating themselves between such forces and those trying to bring a new democratic life to the country. We have no truck, either, with the tendency to pay lip service to these ends, while devoting most of one's energy to criticism of political opponents at home (supposedly responsible for every difficulty in Iraq), and observing a tactful silence or near silence about the ugly forces of the Iraqi "insurgency". The many left opponents of regime change in Iraq who have been unable to understand the considerations that led others on the Left to support it, dishing out anathema and excommunication, more lately demanding apology or repentance, betray the democratic values they profess.

Vandalism against synagogues and Jewish graveyards and attacks on Jews themselves are on the increase in Europe. "Anti-Zionism" has now developed to a point where supposed organizations of the Left are willing to entertain openly anti-Semitic speakers and to form alliances with anti-Semitic groups. Amongst educated and affluent people are to be found individuals unembarrassed to claim that the Iraq war was fought on behalf of Jewish interests, or to make other "polite" and subtle allusions to the harmful effect of Jewish influence in international or national politics — remarks of a kind that for more than fifty years after the Holocaust no one would have been able to make without publicly disgracing themselves. We stand against all variants of such bigotry.

The violation of basic human rights standards at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, and by the practice of "rendition", must be roundly condemned for what it is: a departure from universal principles, for the establishment of which the democratic countries themselves, and in particular the United States of America, bear the greater part of the historical credit. But we reject the double standards by which too many on the Left today treat as the worst violations of human rights those perpetrated by the democracies, while being either silent or more muted about infractions that outstrip these by far. This tendency has reached the point that officials speaking for Amnesty International, an organization which commands enormous, worldwide respect because of its invaluable work over several decades, can now make grotesque public comparison of Guantanamo with the Gulag, can assert that the legislative measures taken by the US and other liberal democracies in the War on Terror constitute a greater attack on human rights principles and values than anything we have seen in the last 50 years, and be defended for doing so by certain left and liberal voices.

D. Conclusion

It is vitally important for the future of progressive politics that people of liberal, egalitarian and internationalist outlook should now speak clearly. We must define ourselves against those for whom the entire progressive-democratic agenda has been subordinated to a blanket and simplistic "anti-imperialism" and/or hostility to the current US administration. The values and goals which properly make up that agenda — the values of democracy, human rights, the continuing battle against unjustified privilege and power, solidarity with peoples fighting against tyranny and oppression — are what most enduringly define the shape of any Left worth belonging to.
Notes for media
Solely for legal reasons this document is ©Norman Geras 2006. It will be made available under a Creative Commons licence.
The Euston Manifesto Group

Norman Geras, Emeritus Professor of Politics, Manchester University, normblog;
Damian Counsell, Director, Bioinformatics.Org, PooterGeek;
Alan Johnson, Editor, Democratiya, and Reader in Social Science, Edge Hill;
Shalom Lappin, Professor of Computational Linguistics, King's College London;

Jane Ashworth, Director of Engage;
Dave Bennett;
Brian Brivati, Professor of Modern History, Kingston University;
Adrian Cohen, Unite Against Terror;
Nick Cohen, journalist;
Anthony Cox, Black Triangle;
Neil Denny, Little Atoms;
Paul Evans;
Paul Gamble, Engage;
Eve Garrard, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Professional Ethics, Keele University;
Harry Hatchet, Harry's Place;
David Hirsh, Editor of Engage, Lecturer, Sociology, Goldsmiths College;
Dan Johnson, Muscular Liberals;
Hak Mao, [link];
Gary Kent, Director, Labour Friends Of Iraq (signing in a personal capacity);
Jon Pike, Chair of Engage, Senior Lecturer — Philosophy, Open University;
Simon Pottinger, Unite Against Terror;
Andrew Regan, Bloggers4Labour founder (signing in a personal capacity);
Alexandra Simonon, Managing Editor, Engage;
Richard Sanderson, Little Atoms;
David T, Harry's Place;
Philip Spencer, Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Kingston University;
Will @ A General Theory Of Rubbish
Other signers
Joe Bailey, (Prof.) Head of School of Social Science, Kingston University
Ophelia Benson, Deputy Editor, The Philosophers' Magazine
Paul Berman
Pamela Bone, journalist, Melbourne
Robert Borsley, Professor of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex
Michael Brennan, Department of Sociology, Warwick University
Mitchell Cohen, City University of New York; co-editor of Dissent
Marc Cooper, The Nation
Thomas Cushman, Editor of The Journal of Human Rights
Heather Deegan, Reader in Comparative Politics at Middlesex University
Luke Foley,
Marko Attila Hoare,
Quintin Hoare,
Anthony Julius,
Oliver Kamm, blogger, journalist and author
Sunder Katwala, General Secretary, Fabian Society (in a personal capacity)
Jeffrey Ketland, Edinburgh University
Mary Kreutzer, Austrian political scientist, WADI Austria , and editor of the human rights-journal LIGA
John Lloyd, The Financial Times
Kanan Makiya,
Jim Nolan, barrister, Sydney
Will Parbury, Labour Parliamentary Candidate for Fylde 2005
Thomas Schmidinger, Assistant Lecturer for Political Science (Vienna University), WADI Austria
Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; co-editor of Dissent
Bert Ward, Advisory Editor, Democratiya
Jeff Weintraub, University of Pennysylvania
Francis Wheen, journalist and writer
Sami Zubaida, Emeritus Professor of Politics and Sociology, Birkbeck College, London

Posted by Michael Weiss at 7:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

In other news related to Rule Dentonia, Paul Jared Stern -- disgraced fee-for-service yenta -- has been given the helm at Gawker for the weekend. And to think of the things I'd have gladly sold to hang onto Wonkette for more than a fortnight...

"Only in New York," that chlorocarbonically catacomb-haired Cindy Adams would say, missing the point of these acts of mutual prostitution entirely. This is from the best book ever written about the gossip business:

As the days passed, Mr. Chatterbox's page became almost wholly misleading. With sultanesque caprice Adam would tell his readers of inaccessible eating-houses which were now thee centre of fashion; he drove them to dance in temperance hotels in Bloomsbury. In a paragraph headed "Montparnasse in Belgravia," he announced that the buffet at Sloane Square tube station had become the haunt of the most modern artistic coterie...

As a last resort, on those hopeless afternoons when invention failed and that black misanthropy sttled on him which waits alike on gossip writer and novelist, Adam sometimes found consolation in seizing upon some gentle and self-effacing citizen and transfiguring him with a blaze of notoriety.

You can and should buy Vile Bodies by clicking on the image of it. Or see the movie Stephen Fry made of it called Bright Young Things, which I reviewed for Snark which she was still a wee unlicked cub of cyberspace.

Read my review after the jump...

Sniffing the Exhalation of Their Own Herd: Bright Young Things

Stephen Fry's made an accomplished career for himself as the favored footman of the English Society of the Funny W. Wilde, Wodehouse and now Waugh. The televised and cinematized class comedy has never had it so good than under Fry's witty guidance, and so it's a real pleasure that he chose for his directorial debut Evelyn Waugh's novel secondo, Vile Bodies. (The film's title, Bright Young Things, borrows the book's working title.)

Fry knows his source material thoroughly and, in a way, Waugh's book is the perfect fizzing quinine cocktail for the man who brought Jeeves and Oscar to life to throw back. It's as if everything Fry admires about the literary ethos of Wodehouse and Wilde -- the injunction to do some serious living by living as unseriously as one can -- has been carefully stitched into the hairshirts of notoriety that both writers were forced to bear in their careers. Wodehouse learned how war could effectively wipe the smile off someone's face when he danced to the music of Nazi time; and of course Wilde became the sexual martyr of two centuries when the release of his personal repression extracted the venom of repressiveness in a society that had recently celebrated him.

So too goes the party-stopping gravity in Waugh, who differs, however, from his contemporary and from his predecessor in one very crucial respect. Waugh discovered the killjoy from the moment he put pen to paper. His fiction was never without a moral tonic or saving grace to punctuate all the silliness and espieglerie, as Fry's superficially frothy but deeply solemn film illustrates in ways Waugh's book could not have done. One is reminded of just how unhappily this comic tale ends. The events which bring the gramophone to a screeching halt include the lunatic's death of Agatha Runcible, who was easily the heart and soul -- or, given the universal penchant for substance abuse, nostril and liver -- of the BYTs. In the book, Agatha's demise is mentioned en passant as part of a larger epilogic pastiche, but Fry, perhaps recalling his portrayal of Wilde's saturnine beginning-of-the-end stint as a hard laborer, has Agatha languish longer in the sanatorium before kicking the bucket. Played to the hilt by the wonderful newcomer Fenella Woolgar, Agatha's early pathos as a clueless madcap is given color and depth of humanity in these scenes without making her seem simpering in that Angel-of-Death-cometh way a lesser director might have indulged. And speaking of angels, there's good old Melrose Ape, a shrill banshee of American evangelism who heads up a touring group called the "Angels of the Glad New Day," downy young girls all dressed in white and all straight out of Lewis Carroll's wet dream.

Played by a hilariously marmish Stockard Channing, Mrs. Ape exists to bring a puritanical dudgeon to a hard boozing, coke snorting society party. Not realizing that her cute little entourage would turn out to be more minatory than darling, the hostess of this soiree cuts things short after hearing her guests decried as a bunch of Godless barbarians ("Bright young people is what they call you -- well! One out of three ain't bad, I guess!"). This is a sentiment Waugh, with his creeping Catholicism, can only have shared about his own characters, and herein lies his genius at not burdening his light stuff with moralization. He ventriloquizes rather than sermonizes his judgments through the vessel of this thundering beast of a woman -- an ape, all right. Though her gospel may be Waugh's, the bigger joke comes at the expense of a more loathsome species than the proselytizing zealot: the visiting foreigner with nasty things to say about one's countrymen. Waugh made the glorification of English tradition the counterpoise to his satire of that tradition, if not his whole raison d'ecrire. (And is there anything more traditionally English than trashing Americans?) Fry cleverly inserts a throwaway line in the same vein: the Canadian publishing tycoon Lord Monomark implores a "Mrs. Simpson" to return at once to the States. (It's another credit to the filmmaker that he does not underestimate his audience's grasp of pre-Camilla royal scandal, or try to "update" his movie with modern references.)

In contrast to the other Funny W's who also dabbled in the transatlantic special relationship, Waugh sensed early on that the flute-clinking frivolity that was the Anglo-American Jazz Age, with its shared syncopation and fondness of generational argot, came at too high a cultural price. This was a man who named his first book Decline and Fall, which might have convinced even the least teleologically-minded reader of its author's take on the fin de siecle and what that wheedling infant, the centenary nine, was about to do to God, King and Country. In case the point was missed there, it was surely hammered home in the sequel, where half the bon vivants were disgraced or killed off domestically, and the other half were sent overseas to die on the battlefield. (See also one of his best written books, Put Out More Flags.)

Published in 1930, Vile Bodies was set in a future nearer than Waugh himself knew was imminent. It ominously prefigured the onset of another world war and even more ominously spoke of it in tones redolent of the what-does-it-all-mean intellectual histories now being written about what was then unironically and myopically called the "Great War." Added to the notion of Fergusonian overstretch, of which World War I may have well been the culmination, are more metaphysical adjectives to give shape to the event that produced the machine gun, the tank and the chemical weapon, not to mention the gemini twins of nationalism and internationalism. "Hygenic." "Unifying." "Ethically maturing." Orwell, in his classic essay, "My Country, Right or Left," remembered admonitions by WWI veterans as a schoolboy: War was a "good thing," it "made you tough," "kept you fit." And as if not to let the charnal stench of a globe on fire appear the mere extension of epochal waste that preceded it, we're now told that millions marched into death in 1914 because kaisers and prime ministers needed some way of curing the incipient anomie and slackness of will depleting their empires. Neurosis as a casus belli -- was the twentieth the century of Freud or what?

Waugh was at once luridly attracted to and repulsed by this spiritual clearing-house rationalization for war, the Sword of Honor trilogy being his most obvious evocation of such. It defined his sadomasochistic relationship with modernism, and it surely -- and not unrelatedly -- stoked his fascination with fascism. The kitsch of that ideology could summarily be described as "Everything old is young again." But not quite the same, Waugh might have added, and did do: Bright Young Things is a wistful irony.

The "bodies" in question here might have started out as members of a self-indulgent metropolitan set, but they most likely wound up as something even more vile than that: corpses. Fry taps into this dead serious undercurrent of the text, which is not quite "under" enough to be labeled subtext and which at moments hazards into the realm of sentimentality. By film's end we see a tearful Miles Malpractice, once the gay belle of the ball, lamenting his criminalized homosexuality and fleeing England as a wanted man (not in the way he might have enjoyed, either.) Fry intelligently refuses to let his Edwardian wastrels get away with getting away with it all. Blithe, narcissistic and reckless, but in possession of absolutely no idea how the world will only let them down in the end; this encapsulates our heroes in the fugitive and bubbly Acts I and II of the film, which yield occasionally to foreshadowing of the morose and world-historical Act III. The characters remain developmentally arrested, the movie grows up.

In one memorable scene, a rustic cab driver lectures the protagonist Adam Symes (or Fenwick-Symes as he's actually called and would actually be called in a more "proper" era) on the excesses of the youth generation. What this country could really use is another war, says the gruff prole. Nothing like the "sound of guns and the smell of gas" to clean up the mess of decadence sweeping the land. "It all sounds so disgusting, dunn'it?" "Yes, the sound of gas and smell of gundpower does sound disgusting," replies Adam. In another context this would be a pitch-perfect Wildean riposte. If only this were Half Moon Street. If only Adam were being withering instead of just unaware of the real question -- a question he, and the zeitgeist for which he is spokesman, must perilously answer at a later date.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Like Mike, I'm becoming a Walter Kirn acolyte at the speed of sound. I was pleased, in light of his much-quoted business tract-as-war plan post on Sullivan's page, to see he's actually a connoisseur of the only nonfiction genre more blighted by laziness, cliche and empowerment bullshit than sports coverage. Below the fold is long quotation from a 2004 profile of Warren Buffett in the Atlantic Montly, via Googling. (Sorry to throw so many paragraphs at you, but the writing is excellent and, fuck it, the Atlantic makes you wait long enough.)

Buffett's public image represents a singular cultural accomplishment whose difficulty is hard to overstate. Until Buffett came along, the notion of a folk-hero investor was an oxymoron in America. Before the 1920s, buying and selling corporate securities was regarded by ordinary people as an occult activity practiced by a shadowy elite acting in nobody's interest but its own. This view changed, of course, when a prolonged bull market, widely promoted as unstoppable, started sucking in the Main Street masses. It was a golden moment. Then came the Crash. Suddenly the denizens of Wall Street seemed even more sinister, selfish, and cynical than they had before—an impression that lingered for decades. When the markets recovered a portion of their lost honor in the 1950s and 1960s, ordinary Americans kept their distance, intimidated by a Brahmin hauteur. The leading investment personality of the 1970s, Louis Rukeyser, for more than thirty years the host of TV's Wall Street Week, had the patrician profile of a Founding Father, the flowing hair of a concert pianist, and the clubby nasal voice of a Harvard English professor. He was a true blue blood or a smooth fraud or some of both. What he wasn't was one's neighbor. Identifying with Rukeyser was impossible; this marble bust could only be beheld.

The market's next media star was less pretentious, but his affect and appearance were equally odd. The Street-beating mutual-fund manager Peter Lynch, of Fidelity Investments, had prematurely white hair, a pink complexion, a face and body nearly devoid of flesh, and a nerdy, asexual demeanor that seemed to mark him as a sheltered prodigy who had lived indoors all his life to spare his allergies, and had researched stocks while soaking in the tub. Lynch's message was not dissimilar to Buffett's: buy shares in firms whose products you like and use; don't get the willies when prices drop, or succumb to euphoria when they go up; and turn a deaf ear to tipsters, sharpies, and analysts. But the messenger resembled a friendly alien possessed of uncanny intuitive gifts that seemed normal only to him. Lynch insisted that any earthling could use his methods, but one sensed that he overestimated us. The best bet was to buy into his fund, Magellan—which, by the time most Americans had heard of Lynch, had risen so high that its potential seemed spent. And then, abruptly, Lynch gave up his post and faded inexorably from the public's view, despite Fidelity's decision to send him around as its roving corporate ambassador. He had stopped making money for people, so who cared?

Kirn doesn't quite take his analysis to the next step: the reason Lynch and Buffett became cultural icons (to an extent) is partly because they each were able to write well as well as convey their ideas, instead of packaging together a bundle of anecdotal evidence or hammering the same clumsily formulated phrases relating to one sweet siren of a bad idea. Buffett tends to keep his stories simple and rich in folksy wit, as the rest of Kirn's profile amply demonstrates. (Like Jon Stewart interviewing John McCain, you watch Kirn having to push himself a little bit to be a stronger wordsmith than his subject.) Lynch, on the other hand, favored a more ironic mode laden with self-deprecation and flurorescent puns. Which leads to the obvious question: why is it that the art of the deal and the art of clear communication intersect so little, when they'd seem to be so highly related? If Donald Trump is an iconic wheeler-dealer, why did he so obviously* have to read off a script on a reality show? (*This is my speculation. Maybe he just talks woodenly.)

I suspect many businessmen may be acting on well-trained intuitions they can't articulate, which may give them a natural advantage in that they can't give their hand away if they're selling for too little. After all, it's hard to let important information slip if you would have to struggle to put your strategy into words to begin with. Con: I just made that up. Anybody have any supporting or contradicting evidence for this hypothesis?

Posted by Nic Duquette at 7:30 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Romenesko's off, Paul Jared Stern's answering Gawker's questions (and leaving not much of a slime-covered enigma in his wake), and I have three topics for Slate due in two hours.

We debut a snazzola new snark-format on the day anticlimax became king.

What would it take to get Stefan Beck at The New Criterion to flash his Hilton Kramerian gang sign at the N+1 boys again? Fight! Rumble!

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:45 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Leading with apologies to anybody who prefers their blogs in Peruvian-cascade layout, Snarksmith is nevertheless proud to be using Movable Type blogware as of today. You can look forward to more blogging, better blogging, faster blogging from us, because we won't be spending twenty minutes tinkering with HTML every time we want to post some two-sentence link to some silly video. (Or more accurately, Mike won't have to spend those twenty minutes.)

That said, the layout is still open to suggestions. If you'd like to see improvements anywhere -- or if something just doesn't look right in your browser -- please email me.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 1:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I haven't read Thumbsucker, Up In The Air*, nor have I been following his serialized Slate novel The Unbinding, but Kirn is the blogger par excellence. I half wish he'd double-up with Sullivan (who's wearying with the faith-based commentary, and for whom he's subbing over the next week with some thus-far unimpressive chick), or at least get a site of his very own. E.g.

For Iraq, I blame the managers, of course, but I also blame their reading lists. More than once, while predicting victory, Donald Rumsfeld has used the magic words "Tipping Point." This new pop formula for achieving vast results from relatively limited efforts has turned out to be one disastrous abracadabra. Saddam goes, they all go. We don't need a huge army. Iraq is ready for democracy -- just give it a strategic nudge. The entire Middle East will follow.

Behind every failed war is a failed metaphor (remember The Domino Effect, the Vietnam-era version of The Tipping Point?) that mesmerized its masters into waging it, kept them waging it once they started losing it, and immobilized them with disbelief when it turned back into intellectual smoke. From business-section bestseller to Pentagon battle-plan. Only in America. And it was a phony, decrepit notion to start with, despite being updated for today's executives and cleverly remarketed to every no one who ever dreamed of being a someone by working at home, in his or her spare time. The idea that one straw can break the camel's back, that one well-placed lever can move the world, that one added particle can bring on "critical mass" is the delusion that wears a thousand faces. It's the manic creed of the assassin: fire a single bullet, alter history. The principle rarely works when applied on purpose, but because it quite often works by accident (or seems to have worked, when viewed in retrospect; Henry Ford built his Model T and, presto, freeways!) it never loses its appeal.

What's next? The Freakonomics war? The Six-Sigma attack against Iran? The Blink campaign against global terrorism? Capturing Osama the Warren Buffett Way?

*Originally posted as Into Thin Air (a better title, in my humble opinion) and corrected by David Schleicher.

The Blink campaign isn't far off: In Gladwell's book, there was a grizzled old Vietnam vet who consistently out-marshaled the supercomputer the Pentagon had war-gaming various scenarios; John Henry for the regime change era, I think I called it in my review of Blink. Anyway, that this was a case of natural genius over honed "thin-slicing" never occurred to the doyen of the who'd-a-thunk-it awe-gasm.

The cliche is that Iraq was done "on the cheap," which is only true if one discounts the decades of multi-billion dollar research and development which gave us a new and largely automated method of waging war that minimized civilian casualities as well as military ones. This was the direct product of antiwar campaigns past, and so the irony is that the now-reviled Rumsfeld Doctrine was originated to preempt the very criticism and scorn it finds heaped upon itself now. It was breathtaking in its success to depose the Baath regime, and would have stayed breaktaking if the postwar situation hadn't called for more troops and more "human intelligence" (love these military coinages) and a greaterbreadth of what might be called on-the-ground intuition. There is always a techtonic, as well as technologic, shift in the conduct of war after previous attempts at it have failed or sustained losses too severe not to have compromised their success.

In the late 40's Allied forces amounted to no more than 7 or 8,000 garrisoned in West Berlin. This is extraordinary when one considers the overwhelming presence of the Red Army just across the city. Occupations have changed, and you can bet you the next one (depend on there being a next one, pace Will, Fukuyama, Buckley, et al) will have absorbed fully and adjusted for the indictments of the last one.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

He awards John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt merit badges for bravery, but otherwise isn't overmuch impressed with their conclusions:

But recognizing that M-W took a courageous stand, which merits praise, we still have to ask how convincing their thesis is. Not very, in my opinion. I've reviewed elsewhere what the record (historical and documentary) seems to me to show about the main sources of US ME policy, in books and articles for the past 40 years, and can't try to repeat here. M-W make as good a case as one can, I suppose, for the power of the Lobby, but I don't think it provides any reason to modify what has always seemed to me a more plausible interpretation.

"Courageous" because exile publication and the attendant self-martyrdom had them all broken up about becoming embodiments of their own pisspoor thesis, I'm sure. Chomsky once observed that you didn't really need to speak truth to power because power knew exactly what the truth was: such knowledge was prerequisite for attaining power in the first place. He was talking about governments, but couldn't international media fit the same bill? Does anyone think the London Review of Books lose more subscriptions than it gained in the last few weeks?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Ex-Gawkerissimo Choire Sicha gets a front-page exclusive with Jared Paul Stern in this week's New York Observer. Forget the DeLorean-esque sting operation and the declassifying of the open secret that Page Six takes care of those who take care of it -- what I want to know is, how did a freelance fashion designer specializing in aesthetique du schlock get Whit Stillman for a friend?

Mr. Stern said that his real friends had stuck with him since the story broke last week. He said his friend, the director Whit Stillman, had told him, “This is going to be the best thing that ever happened; this is great for the clothing line. And I want the movie rights.??? The cartoonist Tony Millionaire had been there for him too. “He’s one of my favorite guys,??? Mr. Stern said. “And he was saying, ‘I wanna do your portrait for the book.’ Stuff like that got me through the dark parts, before I got a handle on things.???

Friends. Mr. Stern, in his account, only wanted to be Ron Burkle’s New York friend. What is a friend? On April 7, the author Toby Young e-mailed Mr. Stern his own friendship: “Sorry to hear about your troubles,??? he wrote. “Don’t believe a word of it. And I still want you to co-host my party, whatever the outcome.???

(One day about two years ago, I was in the bathroom of my apartment, on the phone with Mr. Stern; we were talking about one of the half-dozen book reviews he assigned me at the Post. I mentioned that the gallery that I co-owned was being closed. “Is that an item???? he asked. “No, I don’t think so,??? I said. Quotes from that conversation ended up in Page Six anyway. We were New York friends.)

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EU extends visa ban on Lukashenko and the nomenklatura of Belarus. No more glo-stick raves in Tallinn, I guess.

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Did you know that it is not only a felony to get or perform an abortion in El Salvador, but that the state actively chases offenders.

There are other countries in the world that, like El Salvador, completely ban abortion, including Malta, Chile and Colombia. El Salvador, however, has not only a total ban on abortion but also an active law-enforcement apparatus -- the police, investigators, medical spies, forensic vagina inspectors and a special division of the prosecutor's office responsible for Crimes Against Minors and Women, a unit charged with capturing, trying and incarcerating an unusual kind of criminal.

For those who were wondering how a penumbral right to privacy becomes a right to abortion, "vagina inspector" pretty much serves as a logical bridge. I wonder, does a Salvadoran vagina inspector need a warrant? Or is a badge and probable cause enough?

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Surveillance-happy UK arrests a man for singing along with songs those free speech statutes ought to require you to sing along to.

British anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash, police said Wednesday.

Detectives halted the London-bound flight at Durham Tees Valley Airport in northern England and Harraj Mann, 24, was taken off.

The taxi driver had become worried on the way to the airport because Mann had been singing along to The Clash's 1979 anthem "London Calling," which features the lyrics "Now war is declared -- and battle come down" while other lines warn of a "meltdown expected."

Did Mann go with his hands on his head, or on the trigger of his gun? This is important.

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I generally root for the bad guys (Doc Holliday, Bonnie and Clyde, Dirty Harry, Paul Wolfowitz), and so I actually have to lower my toast-making goblet to Judas Iscariot for being, at least according to some questionable Egyptian codex, more of a groupthinking mensch than previously thought. (Now we know why Bush named the King of Kings his top philosophe. The only disloyalty they both brook is the kind that's really more of a recondite act of falling on one's sword. Let history judge.)

"The Gospel of Judas turns Judas’ act of betrayal into an act of obedience," said Craig Evans, the Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

"The sacrifice of Jesus’ body of flesh in fact becomes saving. And so for that reason, Judas emerges as the champion and he ends up being envied and even cursed and resented by the other disciples."

Jealous harpies! It was then that he carried me, and you know it!

"It contains a number of religious themes which are completely alien to the first-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which did become popular later, in the second century AD. An analogy would be finding a speech claiming to be written by Queen Victoria, in which she talked about The Lord of the Rings and her CD collection."

"Mister Disraeli informs me that there exists a more than passing tendency within the Realm for a curious little device known as the 'iPod.' Where, pray, may one obtain such a thing? My 'Jenny From the Block' Extended Play disc has, of late, been worn down to a most unfortunate state of disrepair."

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Hugo Chavez would very much like Latin Americans to believe he's Simon Bolivar reincarnated. He throws bushels of oil-garnered cash at the poor, improving their daily lives for demagogic brownie points, but doing precious little to secure the long-term economic equilibrium of his country. He has courted every rogue regime and fascistic antigen to "US hegemony" he can find, including the rotted mullahocracy of Iran, Fidel Castro, and Saddam Hussein (before the war). He speaks regularly of an imminent and prolonged military confrontation with the US, for which he constantly prepares by purchasing materiel and weapons from countries like Russia. He ostentatiously makes common cause with Cindy Sheehan, Cornel West, Harry Belafonte and other fashionable nitwits on what it would only be too generous to call the improvisational American left, and he does so in the same spirit of geopolitical grandstanding. He cracks down on the domestic opposition in Venezuela by inflicting social and professional death upon those who challenge his presidency, which he has endeavoured to extend beyond its designated term limits by rewriting electorial provisions and by stocking the Supreme Court with magistrates who are amenable to his rule. He buys up other Latin countries' debt from globalist entities like the International Monetary Fund in a seeming gesture of hemispheric solidarity, only to then hold these countries to account at an even higher rate of interest.

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You know where Matt and Trey stand on the matter of free speech in Denmark.

If you haven't seen this week's episode, you must.

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Second-rate pinstriped yenta no more! Stand back while reading this New York Daily News expose on a Page Six payola scheme. You might take a squirt in the eye of ecstacy juice, if you'll pardon the metaphor (which I don't think William Sherman and Jonathan Lemire would mind, to be quite honest.)

Jared Paul Stern -- either a "freelance" writer for Page Six twice a week, or the gossip column's "longest-serving writer" as well as the editor of Page Six Magazine, depending upon which city tabloid you consult -- is under investigation by the FBI for extortion. He allegedly told playboy billionaire Ron Berkle that his coverage in the catty society sheet would be positively kittenish for the trifling lump sum of $100,000, plus a $10,000 retainer. God love New York media scandals, and the DEFCON-like stratification of press whoring:

"There are various levels of protection," Stern begins, saying for "level one," Burkle would be a source for Page Six and provide items about his celebrity friends as a way of getting immunity for himself.

"If there are any stories you can throw our way, we can establish you as a source," said Stern, but Burkle refused.

He is a major Democratic Party fund-raiser and is a senior adviser to former President Bill Clinton. Sean (Diddy) Combs, Leonardo DiCaprio, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hillary and Bill Clinton, former Calif. Gov. Gray Davis, former Vice President Al Gore and Bundchen are just a few of his acquaintances.

"Should I hire Richard's wife?" Burkle asked after Stern mentioned that another financier had followed that route. In fact, Stern was referring to Johnson's fiancee. Stern didn't answer directly but rather took a third tack.

"You find some way to be in business with the paper, more of a colleague," said Stern. At another point, Stern asked Burkle to invest in his clothing line, Skull and Bones.

"You want me to buy part of the clothing line? I want to be sure you can be helpful with this," Burkle said.

"I have to tell these guys that you're working with me on the clothing line right now," Stern tells Burkle.

"I'll send a letter, but I don't make investments like that. I'll document it. I like your shirts," said Burkle.

"If you want to buy in, I'll implement all this stuff," said Stern, adding firmly "there won't be any written agreement."

The talk turned to how to deal with other Page Six staffers.

"If I hire Chris [Wilson] and Fernando [Gill], that would be level two [protection]?" Burkle asked.

"Yes," said Stern.

"If I hire Richard's wife that would be level three protection?" "Right," said Stern.

I'd have paid just to have someone explain all the levels to me again. But I absolutely love the Daily News stylistic revanichism:

While known for his overwhelming arrogance during interviews, Stern stumbles in his speech, seems nervous, wrings his hands, and talks in circles while laboriously explaining the operations of Page Six.

What, no "Stern, who has a receding hairline and is impotent..."?

Cf. the Post's own self-exposure:

The Post broke the story on its Web site yesterday.

Federal prosecutors requested a meeting yesterday to ask for The Post's cooperation in the probe and help in preserving evidence. The paper agreed to cooperate with the investigation.

The Post's editor-in-chief, Col Allan, issued a statement: "Jared Paul Stern is a freelance reporter who sometimes worked two days a week at the New York Post. He has been suspended pending the outcome of the federal investigation. Should the allegations prove true, Mr. Stern's conduct would be morally and journalistically reprehensible, a gross abuse of privilege, and in violation of the New York Post's standards and ethics."

Burkle is a big Democratic Party supporter and a friend of Bill Clinton. Burkle, who is divorced, is known for his lavish parties and for his friendships with fashion models. He was recently photographed with Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen.

This is the we-never-liked-him-anyway defense, always as bad for business as it is for future ethical conduct.

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First the "shot heard round the world," now the one that got away through Bill Buckner's legs in '86. Underworld man resurfaces in his screenwriting debut about a down-and-out playwright rooting for the Sox during Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. The movie's called Game 6 because Fuck You, You Fucking Fucks! didn't make it pass the MPAA.

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My friend Chris (who once stood glassy-eyed in front of a $15,000 first edition of Gravity's Rainbow at the Strand) e-mails, "Deadpan didn't exist before this guy wrote this: 'The band Yo La Tengo is on board for musical contributions that are heard mostly as transitional, mood-setting electronic drones.'"

Well said, in a David-Foster-Wallace-and-Jonathan-Franzen- as-dogs-playing-poker sort of way.

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Hat tip to Daniel Gross for catching this story in the Times, which confirms my back-of-the-envelope suspicion that the American automakers are already underwater.

Using information in the footnotes of Ford's 2005 financial statements, Ms. Pegg said that if the new [pension accounting] rule [being considered by the Financial Accounting Standards Board] were already in effect, Ford's balance sheet would reflect about $20 billion more in obligations than it now does. The full recognition of health care promised to Ford's retirees accounts for most of the difference. Ford now reports a net worth of $14 billion. That would be wiped out under the new rule. Ford officials said they had not evaluated the effect of the new accounting rule and therefore could not comment.

Applying the same method to General Motors' balance sheet suggests that if the accounting rule had been in effect at the end of 2005, there would be a swing of about $37 billion. At the end of 2005, the company reported a net worth of $14.6 billion. A G.M. spokesman declined to comment, noting that the new accounting rule had not yet been issued.

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