The New York Times is barely veiling how pissed off it is about a 40% reduction in counterterrorism funding to NYC and DC. Must be that liberal media thing.

Overall, New York State will get $183.7 million, which is a 20 percent drop from last year. That means New York State's per capita share of grant funds, which totals $2.78 per person, will drop to an even lower level compared to some rural states, like Wyoming, which will get $14.83 per person this year.

Okay, but say for the sake of argument that there are weapons labs or energy pipelines or something in Wyoming that need protection, and that the cost of that protection is higher per capita than the needs in New York or DC, which can be defended appropriately with less per resident than Cheyenne. But it gets worse.

According to the PDF of budget allocations, Guam, the Northern Marianas Islands and American Samoa will each get over $2.7 million, spending ttotaling $16, $33 and $42 per person, respectively, for these atolls.

Aside from some military bases -- which would presumably have their own defensive capability under the Pentagon's budget -- what are we defending from terrorists in these far-flung Pacific archipelagoes?

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Context is overrated anyway. So, who said the following: VP Dick Cheney in an address to the Naval Academy, or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in an interview with Spiegel?

Their goal in that region is to seize control of a country, so they have a base from which to launch attacks and wage war against governments that do not meet their demands. [They] believe that by controlling one country, they will be able to target and overthrow other governments in the region, ultimately to establish a totalitarian empire... Some might look at these ambitions and wave them off as extreme and mad. Well, these ambitions are extreme and mad. They are also real, and we must not wave them off. We must take them seriously. We must oppose them. And we must defeat them.

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Well, he couldn't have very well bequeathed his fortune to his family, now could he?

Albert Le Roy, a hardline Marxist who died two months ago at the age of 80, amazed his native Goudelin, in Brittany, with a handwritten will discovered in a drawer at his home that said he was leaving his property, valued at €140,000 (£96,000), to the village council “to prepare for communism???.

Hmm... Poetry magazine, "my darling cat Princess," or communism. Tough call indeed.

Village red-faced at butcher's late call to revolution - World - Times Online

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Seeing the franchise degenerate into the hands of Brett Ratner has me hoping that Bryan Singer's Superman turns out more Nietzchean than that trailer suggests.

Part of the problem is that Ratner luxuriates in being the juiciest cured ham on the market; he's Michael Bay with a lower-budget and no casting Afflecktion. But watching him inherit the latest installment of a popular, high-adrenaline series is like watching a bad connoisseur of magic try to explain Houdini's stagecraft. Red Dragon completely demystified Hannibal Lecter, assuming, that is, there was any mystique left after the premise of doing a remake of a prequel had already run riotous over one's suspension of genius cannibal disbelief.

The story of The Last Stand revolves around a mutant "cure," which has half the extraordinary populace vying for dibs whilst the other half thunders in rage over the very idea that they're suffering from a disease. This belabored allegory seems perfectly obvious to anyone who's lived through the last few election cycles, and yet I disagree with Michael Agger at Slate that the overtones of gay rights have been abandoned for a conventional (straight) love story. Rather, they've been so clangurously invoked and deharmonized in this movement that there's hardly any social value left to the X-Men franchise at all. Rather than eschewed, the civil rights motif has, well, mutated beyond all recognition.

Two equally obvious inconsistencies make this case. First, one can easily imagine someone like Rogue, who either absorbs the mutant power or human anima of whomever she touches, would want to rid herself of this particularly grim DNA of alienation. Rid herself she does, and yet the homosexual corollary would have it that she is misguided and self-hating, opting for a cure in the name of social acceptance through normalcy. Perhaps that's part of her rationale, but is it the whole of it? If anything, Rogue wants to realize a part of her true nature, which has been fettered by her more destructive part: she's in every way an average, hormonally volatile vixen looking for some long-deferred nookie with her boyfriend ("Iceman" to you and, I guess, the overtaxed metaphor department at Marvel.) Living a life of complete tactile solititude can't be glorified through any appreciable form of special pleading. The same would go, by the way, for Cyclops, who can't open his eyes without atomizing whatever object they alight on. Are these forms of mutation examples of benign difference, or personal hell experienced as such long before the bigots and bullies enter the picture? In this next plane of evolution, it seems that nature, and not intolerance, is the real detractor from the pursuit of happiness -- at least for those prohibited from doing what the bulk of their genome still wants them to do.

The second major difficulty in continuing to view the X-Men as levitating and wall-crawling carriers of moral instruction is embodied in Magneto, a character rescued from total absurdity only by the strictures of dramatic conflict. What was once a dangerous but sympathetic antigen to peaceful human-mutant coexistence has now turned into a genocidal megalomaniac. Oh, and did I mention he actively recruits members to his militant "brotherhood" of outcast revolutionaries, whose final pitched battle occurs in... San Francisco? (Exactly which strain of paranoia in the gay kulturkampf is being villified here?) Inverting his own status as a Holocaust survivor and opting for the Jabotinskyean line of mutant Zionism, Magneto shows no compunction about recycling cars with drivers still inside them, sending his pyrotechnic goon to immolate the ground level of the cure-distribution facility (and, presumably, whatever low-wage flunkies work inside), single-mindedly adjusting the trajectory of the Golden Gate Bridge and killing hundreds (possibly thousands) of people in the process, and generally declaring war on the "inferior" species at large. He's had how many run-ins with his amicable nemeses who are dedicated to "betraying their own cause," and yet both parties seem as blase as strangers in light of their storied mutual antagonism. (Agger was right that Wolverine should have been made into a paperclip necklace long ago, yet he's only ever halted and toyed with by Magneto.) Also, you'd think that with the foregoing acts of naughtiness to his credit, we non-telekinetic meatsacks would have set about apprehending such a preternatural megavillain, wouldn't you? Nope. Welcome to Ratnerstan. At film's end, Magneto is reduced to the status of a mere homo sapiens, consigned to a Members Only fate of sitting in a San Franscisco park playing chess by himself and looking about half an infarction away from relocation to the Seinfeld parents' retirement village in Florida. Ratko Mladic's on a conspicuous lam, too, but you won't find him searching for Bobby Fischer in Washington Square.

Everything in The Last Stand is underexplained and shuffled along to keep the pace frenzied and the supporting cast reminiscient of the comic. By now I think only Gambit has been absent from the celluloid (a minor mercy to the people of New Orleans, we can be sure.) The newbies are oldies with all the cartoonishness but none of the pizzazz: Juggernaut is a soccer hooligan with a head shaped like a petrified bell end; Beast is now Frasier as more physically attractive to Andrew Sullivan; and Angel has absolutely no relevance or purpose whatsoever save to parody a Freudian masturbation anxiety and then, as very awkward form of expiation indeed, rescue his own father from death.

All this might be forgiven for the fact that Famke Janssen has a scene wherein she uses her mouth-watering legs like she hasn't since GoldenEye. Still, the Usual Suspects treatment was eminently more worthwhile than Rush Hour on fantastical Darwinism.

X-Men: The Last Stand reviewed. By Michael Agger

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As it turns out, "I would have gotten away with it if it weren't for you pesky kids and that goshdanged dog" isn't a good defense ploy.

Other than that, the verdict was pretty dull. Upon learning that he faces something like 20 to 30 years in prison, Skilling's remark to the press was, "We fought a good fight. Some things work. Some things don't... Obviously I'm disappointed, but that's the way the system works." You couldn't have gotten a more sanguine response from an inanimate sack of O-negative.

But then, the whole trial has been an anticlimax since the defendants failed to go on a multi-state killing spree. I think of tabloid headlines screaming "Killing and Slay," and dream of what might have been.

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Recent evidence of superpowers of possibly divine origin:

• Pope's mere presence able to suck all signs of modernity from Polish villages.


• Pat Robertson able to leg press 2,000 pounds using quads of steel.


• Mysterious, inexplicable force field prevents dozens of grieving parents from beating the living shit out of Fred Phelps with baseball bats

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Most of Francis Wilkinson's American Prospect article on politics and balls in America is belabored, but put enough pressure on coal and you'll get some diamonds:

Orrin Hatch, perhaps the Senate’s most fastidious prig, with a proclivity for French cuffs and pink ties, declared Democrats “the party of homosexuals.???

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Chappaqua, N.Y. 9:21 AM

Washington, D.C. 9:21 AM

For Clintons, Delicate Dance of Married and Public Lives - New York Times

Andrew Sullivan | The Daily Dish: The View From Your Window

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Cesar Millan has a Malcolm Gladwell profile in last week's New Yorker and this Times attaboy to his credit. There's also that recherche note of having truly arrived: being parodied on South Park. All this for taming seemingly incorrigible pups? If it smells like rotten Alpo, it is. I've cracked the Millan Code:

He quickly discovered: no. Americans were letting the dogs, rather than the humans, be the pack leaders, in almost every respect. "Americans work against Mother Nature, and that's why dogs don't listen to the general population of America," he said. "Why are dogs growing up on a farm much happier than a dog living in the city? Because on a farm, it gets to be a dog. And in the city they become a child, they become a husband, they become a soul mate. They become something the human wants before they are willing to do what is best for them."

You don't have to be Machiavelli to realize the word "Americans" means "women" and the word "dogs" means "men" in Millanese. (He practically gives it all away with "husband.")

The backlash won't come from lawsuits or the first deprogrammed Rottweiler to chews through its muzzle. It'll come from the species that wishes it could lick its own scrotum. Cesar wasn't an illegal immigrant -- he was a chick.

Robert Bly, Caitlin Flanagan, you're on borrowed time. Be afraid, boys. Be very afraid.

From the 'Dog Whisperer,' a Howl of Triumph - New York Times

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ACLU silences internal criticism.

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Well, it took months to establish that Philip Larkin had some very unsavory views on things but was still a poet of unrivalled genius. How long 'til all the fuss about a new Jewish conspiracy dies down, do you think?

So much of Michael Massing's New York Review of Books essay recounting and analyzing the late (but apparently unlamented) kerfuffle over Mearsheimer and Walt's suggestion that a Jewish Lobby [sic] for Israel is jeopardizing America rests on an exhaustive but colorful use of tautology. It culminates in a Yellow Pages cross-section of major policy think tanks and journals and private endowments, in whose uppermost chambers lurks a congeries of machers that would... Hmm. How to put this without incurring the charge of "rank guilt by association?" Shall we say, the list compiled is slightly less than Schindlerian in its optimism?

Also, by now I bet you had no idea that stuff like this was going on in this country:

All the measures pouring out of Congress convey a very clear message. As one congressman put it:

We're so predictable, so supportive, so unquestioning, of Israel's actions that in the long run we've alienated much of the Arab world. We've passed any number of resolutions making it clear that we didn't want Clinton or Bush to put pressure on Israel with regard to settlements, or negotiations. If we passed a resolution that fully embraced the road map, it would make an enormous difference in the Arab world, and it would help undermine terrorists. But you would never get a measure like that through the international relations or appropriations committees. Congress would never pass a resolution that was in any way critical of anything Israel has done.

I asked the congressman if he was willing to be identified. He said no.

Forget Mearsheimer and Walt's ostensible "bravery." The real medal of honor goes to Massing for asking if his source wanted his or her name in print after all that.

The piece is nonetheless useful because it demonstrates (until it's disputed or debunked, anyway) the inner-workings of AIPAC, technically not a de jure political action committee but an organization whose name most people in the free-thinking world are now given to communicate the way the chubby girl's mother in St . Elmo's Fire said the word "cancer": through a whisper. Partly, I understand, this has to do with the manner in which AIPAC operates. Legally, it can tell a potential admirer of Israel running for office something like, "Look, we can't help you directly, but we'll put you in touch with those who can." This is circuitous and suspect only because election law is circuitous and suspect, and yet a faint aura of conspiracy automatically attaches itself to AIPAC. Very well, let's concede this point. But Massing makes a obvious fool of himself and his reader by continuing to prove it, practically with his own ham brand of mood music:

One congressional staff member told me of the case of a Democratic candidate from a mountain state who, eager to tap into pro-Israel money, got in touch with AIPAC, which assigned him to a Manhattan software executive eager to move up in AIPAC's organization. The executive held a fund-raising reception in his apartment on the Upper West Side, and the candidate left with $15,000. In his state's small market for press and televised ads, that sum proved an important factor in a race he narrowly won. The congressman thus became one of hundreds of members who could be relied upon to vote AIPAC's way. (The staffer told me the name of the congressman but asked that I withhold it in order to spare him embarrassment.)

Conversely, candidates who challenge AIPAC can find their funds suddenly dry up. Two well-publicized cases are those of Representatives Cynthia McKinney of Georgia and Earl Hilliard of Alabama, both African-Americans. In 2002, McKinney and Hilliard were alleged to have made statements or taken positions critical of Israel, and their primary opponents received large amounts of pro-Israel money. Both candidates had limited public support and ended up losing. Cases such as these occur infrequently: a candidate's position on Israel is rarely enough by itself to cause defeat. But it can have a very large effect on fund-raising. (McKinney was reelected to Congress in 2004.)

Here's a thought experiment for you. Imagine an over-powerful group controlled by archconservative financiers and scions ready to dole out bushels of cash to candidates willing to link up with its cause. The cause is the unquestioning defense of a nuclearized hyperstate in the Mediterranean. What the group is offering that candidate could surely use -- even if he doesn't necessarily require it -- to get into office. Yet he's a complicated wannabe pol with moral compunction about Palestinian rights and anything having to do with legislation whose passage is to be attended by a disposition of zero criticism. This is how a conversation according to such dynamics of enablement might occur:

"Hi, I was wondering if AIPAC could send out an announcement to its affiliate or sister organizations endorsing my candidacy for Congress. Donations to my campaign would also be greatly appreciated."

"We'd be happy to oblige. Here's some literature on our platform, which we'd expect you to support unwaveringly."

[Reading it over] "What a crock of shit all this is... Now when can I expect that check?"

There. And I didn't even have to cite Noam Chomsky.

The New York Review of Books: The Storm over the Israel Lobby

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Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Lila Zanganeh:

“My interest in Nabokov was really, purely a literary one. I just adore him,?? she said, adding that any parallels between Russia and Iran were not the source of her admiration. “It took me four months to read Ada, or Ardor, because I read every page five times. I can’t read it normally—I can’t help it. I remember, just to give myself a break while I was reading Ada, I began reading The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster, and it was like drinking water with a little bit of dust in it after having eaten the most exquisite kind of mille feuille, with all kinds of creams and the most refined pastry in the world.
“Just purely the language, the style … ,?? she continued, becoming all dreamy-eyed, “I really have the feeling that [Nabokov] is phantasmagorique—it’s an imaginative, phantasmagoric landscape that belongs to me. That speaks to me. That is me. And it had nothing to do with Iran.??

NYO - The Transom

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Buried in a hot-and-cold Slate dispatch from the 2006 Eurovision was this striking and underreported (in the USA, anyway) anecdote that may or may not have been a tipping point in the recent, very close, referendum that saw Montenegro choose independence from Serbia.

[Serbia and Montenegro] will be voting despite being unrepresented in Athens this year, after a political row that proved impossible to resolve.

The selection process for the 2006 Serbian entry was dogged by controversy, climaxing in a near-riot on live television when the winning song was announced. The victors, a boy band called No Name, who also represented their country in 2005, hail from the minority state of Montenegro. Their song was widely interpreted as a thinly veiled call for Montenegrin independence, much to the annoyance of the majority Serbian population. (On Sunday—just one day after the Eurovision final—Montenegro is holding a referendum on independence from Serbia; a "yes" vote will result in the country formally splitting in two.) After taking to the stage in Belgrade for the customary winner's encore, a storm of abuse from the studio audience—accompanied by a barrage of bottles and chants of "Thieves! Thieves!"—brought No Name's performance to a swift halt and sent them fleeing the venue under the protection of security guards. Immediately afterward, the second-placed Serbian act commandeered the stage for their own reprise, claiming victory by default. The incident relegated even the death of former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic to second place in the following day's news. And you thought that Eurovision was just some campy little piece of light-entertainment nonsense? Wars have been waged over less.

For those who've never seen it, the Eurovision contest is a long-running annual World Cup of lurid dancing and bad songwriting that unites the United Kingdom in gleeful hoots while the Continent takes it very, very seriously. I saw the 2003 edition in a hostel with some giddy Brits. It was hilarious. Though I have to admit that there's something compellingly Nouvelle Vagueish about this year's German entrant, a country and western (!) act named Texas Lightning (!?). Check out their web snippet honky-tonk Lou Reed cover. I might buy the album.

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Lending credibility to grassy knoll types everywhere who think the best cover for an assassin is another assassin in the same place killing the same person, UN investigator Serge Brammertz seems to be inclining toward the idea that the roadside bomb that appeared to kill Lebanon's Rafik Hariri was cover for a much larger, deadlier bomb buried under the road, detonated simultaneously. If true, the assassination must have been the work of someone with the authority to put stuff under the road, e.g. the Syrians or their Lebanese puppets, and not some fringe Saudi terror group.

Earlier this month, Brammertz set up a tent at the bomb site and reopened the crater that was carved by the explosion. The chief investigator and his team have been analyzing soil samples and carrying out a comprehensive survey of all underground tunnels, pipes and the sewage system at the site, Asharq al Awsat said.

It is almost certain now that there were two simultaneous bombings, the paper said. The first one, a charge hidden in underground pipes, was set off by remote control causing the second bomb placed in the Mitsubishi to explode.

The article said Brammertz also based his conclusion on eyewitnesses who testified hearing two explosions. Furthermore, he relied on the analysis of recently hired explosives experts who noted cracks in the foundations of the structures near the site and that large amounts of asphalt had landed on the top floors of the buildings in the vicinity, an effect that can only be caused by an underground blast.

(Hat Tip: Hit & Run.)

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I love the Federal Reserve. But I don't love it enough to enjoy this WaPo starter.

One of Wall Street's favorite sayings is that you don't know who's swimming naked until the tide goes out. Now, thanks to Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, we're starting to see some skin.

At least Glenn Hubbard isn't desperately whoring himself anymore for Greenspan's job.

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My mother belongs to the lapsed Catholic school of regurgitated pea soup and outre tongue slips: "This is a blasphemy!" she once told me about my cohabitating with a girlfriend, making me feel instantly more Byronic and sexually assured than I'd ever imagined I could do. Like Beetlejuice, she's seen The Exorcist about a hundred and sixty-seven times, and it keeps getting funnier every single time she sees it. This is to say nothing of her Rick Ross-like following of every other cult installment of celluloid devoted to demonaical mischief and stigmata and gothic crosses with an inconvenient tendency to hemorrhage on cue...

I guess one has to have taken communion to appreciate, at the soft and dewy age of 12 -- which is when I was first subjected to Linda Blair's stained glass-gargling headspin -- that Jesus is magic but Satan is blockbuster.

I absolutely refuse to read The Da Vinci Code because much more intriguing to me are the ecumenical cover-ups along the lines of: "Father Lemley regrets to inform the parish that he will be unable to coach the St. Francis of Assisi boys' softball team again this year due to a sudden committment in Uzbekistan," or: "Eek, someone has stolen the holy knish shaped like the Blessed Mother."

Still, a cultural phenomenon is a cultural phenomenon. And Anthony Lane is the courageous embed you're going to want on the scene:

There has been much debate over Dan Brown’s novel ever since it was published, in 2003, but no question has been more contentious than this: if a person of sound mind begins reading the book at ten o’clock in the morning, at what time will he or she come to the realization that it is unmitigated junk? The answer, in my case, was 10:00.03, shortly after I read the opening sentence: “Renowned curator Jacques Saunière staggered through the vaulted archway of the museum’s Grand Gallery.??? With that one word, “renowned,??? Brown proves that he hails from the school of elbow-joggers—nervy, worrisome authors who can’t stop shoving us along with jabs of information and opinion that we don’t yet require. (Buried far below this tic is an author’s fear that his command of basic, unadorned English will not do the job; in the case of Brown, he’s right.) You could dismiss that first stumble as a blip, but consider this, discovered on a random skim through the book: “Prominent New York editor Jonas Faukman tugged nervously at his goatee.??? What is more, he does so over “a half-eaten power lunch,??? one of the saddest phrases I have ever heard.

It gets better.

Heaven Can Wait - The New Yorker

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The major advantage the Iraqi military has over the Iraqi police force is that the latter is infiltrated by turncoats and closet insurgents, while the former* is generally more committed, loyal and robust -- after having got off to rather shaky start. William Shawcross reports in the Sunday Times:

Even those who were opposed to the invasion of Iraq should recognise that this is a whole new battle — between the values of a liberal civil society and nihilism, sometimes Islamic but always nihilism.

The coalition training of the Iraqi armed forces is proceeding well. The Iraqi army already has the lead in about 60% of the country. We can soon begin to draw down our troops and turn over more power to provincial authorities.

*This originally read "latter": Sorry, end of a longish, harrying day. And all my typos are destined to look like Freudian slips.

It's no time to quit Iraq — we're winning - The Times Online

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A group of Israeli diplomats wants to sue Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for incitement to genocide.

I much prefer the anti-Semitic cartoon contest method of dealing with the Persian Aspersion. Also, what will this suit do, assuming it gains any traction whatsoever, to substantive violations of the genocide convention? (I can't see this playing well in Darfur.) With the recent National Post implosion, isn't sticking to the serious (and true) stuff the smarter move on Iran?

Also, it'll mean another hop in the shower to wash off the sticky residue from Juan Cole's inevitable, pedantic exegesis of "incitement to genocide."

Israelis aim to sue Ahmadinejad - BBC

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Imagine, say, William Donohue, the sulfuric, vein-throbbing president of the Catholic League, reacting to Madonna's descent on stage from a giant mirrored cross. Now compare that to this:

"Why would someone with so much talent seem to feel the need to promote herself by offending so many people?" said the church in a statement.

Can any objection be phrased more politely than that? What I'd like to know is this: Who was so unkind as to disturb naptime at the vicarage with this unseemly spectacle, and so long before evensong and without the benefit of revitalizing biscuits and tea? Hmm?

Madonna's giant cross 'offensive' - BBC

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On the heels of the New York Times' annoying round of cultural arbitration, Meghan O'Rourke makes the case for the small but ruminative novel:

The bias against the short novel has deep roots. The American novel (and American canon-making) has always been a highly self-conscious enterprise. The aim of our early writers was not merely to write a great work of art, but to make a great American work of art. Yet early on American writers were anxious about what James Fenimore Cooper worried in 1828 was a "poverty of materials." It wasn't until Melville, Hawthorne, and Whitman seized on what Philip Rahv called "the tensions and hazards" of the American experience that our literature began to look robust, imaginative, and new to its own creators and early critics. They made up for the perceived "paucity of ingredients" with an impressively self-conscious gusto; their methods were as big as their vision. Consider Whitman's sprawling poetic line, his insistent use of anaphora; James' knotted, lengthy sentences, and his protracted epics of social mores, The Golden Bowl and The Ambassadors; or Melville's Moby-Dick.

In the decades that followed, our notion of the great American novel became entwined with a perception that shorter books weren't, somehow, as serious. Seriousness required self-consciousness, and self-consciousness required expansiveness. When F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby, he and Maxwell Perkins worried that it was too short; indeed, the book—a mere 50,000 words or so—did less well commercially than his earlier novels. Complaining that it never became a best seller, Fitzgerald wrote to a friend about his misjudgment: "It was too short. Remember this. Never write a book under sixty thousand words." Luckily for Fitzgerald, his closing pages draw back to meditate, self-consciously, on the nature of the tension between the private and the public in America, offering a prime example of what Philip Rahv once said was the ur-aim of American literature: to contemplate "the discrepancy between the high promise of the American dream and what history has made of it."

Then there's Bellow teaching a class with Martin Amis a few years ago. A student asked, with frightening non-anxiety, "So what's Augie March about?"

"It's about 200 pages too long."

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The war to protect America from radicals won another victory, as customs apparently made British/Sri-Lankan world music phenom M.I.A. literally missing in action, apparently sending her home instead of letting her show up for work in New York. On the spectrum of British musical threats to freedom and liberty, M.I.A. is now apparently more dangerous than than the Clash, who titled an album after a Nicaraguan leftist guerillas and opened Stateside sets with a song titled "I'm So Bored With the USA"; more dangerous than people-powered tax-dodger John Lennon; and about as dangerous as the Kinks, who were banned from the USA for the interesting half of the Sixties for abandoning two-chord protopunk in favor of acoustic vignettes about overweight cats.

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This Times piece should be framed and mounted on a West Wing wall next to James Fallows' Atlantic cover story "Why Iraq Has No Army." Interesting to see Bernie Kerik playing the retroactive Cassandra. In addition to his fulsome praise on the South Lawn for an incipient Iraqi police force, I remember his talking up the merits of his just-finished consulting project on all the chat shows a year ago; that is, when he was still angling for employment higher than Judith Regan's chewtoy.

Six months is what New York cadets have to earn their blues, by the way. Whether or not Kerik's nine year estimate is hyperbole or just face-saving bullshit, who knows.

At first, members suggested that Iraqi police recruits receive six months of academy training, the amount trainers settled on in Kosovo. Mr. Kerik said he "started laughing," and calculated that it would take nine years to train the force.

The team reduced academy training to 16 weeks, and eventually 8 weeks. Later, a 2005 State Department audit found that translating classes from English to Arabic ate up 50 percent of training time. With translation, Iraqi recruits received the equivalent of four weeks of training.

To make up for the shortened classes, the Justice Department team proposed a sweeping field training program similar to Mr. Mayer's. The team calculated that more than 20,000 advisers would be needed to create the same ratio of police trainers to recruits in Iraq as existed in Kosovo.

Deeming that figure unrealistic, they recommended placing 6,600 American and foreign trainers in police stations across the country to train Iraqis and, if necessary, enforce the law.

DynCorp, the Texas company that was to provide the trainers, had already located 1,150 active and retired police officers who had expressed interest about serving in Iraq.

Two weeks after the Justice Department team arrived in Baghdad, they submitted their proposal to Mr. Bremer. The administration now had a second plan for training the Iraqi police. On June 2, Mr. Bremer approved it, he and Mr. Kerik said.

A Plan Begins to Unravel

The 6,600 police trainers never showed up.

How sectarian wariness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: Had the CPA given the eminently able peshmerga fighters Iraqi uniforms, and thus the imprimatur of being a kind of civil guard for the immediate postwar period, would the "Arab street" in Baghdad have been more opposed to creeping Kurdish hegemony than to containing anarchy by the best means available? Evidently not, since the one thing most Baghdadis pined for in April and May of 2003 was more authority -- even at the expense of its slipping into a gentle imperial authoritarianism.

Yet another wasted opportunity.

Misjudgments Marred U.S. Plans for Iraqi Police - New York Times

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It was yesterday. And so far as I can tell, there is only one word in the following piece of light verse, contrived by a sadly forgotten American poet and humorist called Guy Wetmore Carryl, that casts doubt on Mill's having been its singular inspiration. The word is "Yankee." That he certainly wasn't, and yet the Oedipal teeth-gnashing, and the encyclopedism, and the comparison to Carlyle, and the pissing off everyone and everything -- these are just too uncanny for this to be any other "Jack."

"How Jack Made the Giants Uncommonly Sore"

Of all the ill-fated
Boys ever created
Young Jack was the wretchedest lad:
An emphatic, erratic,
Dogmatic fanatic
Was foisted upon him as dad!
From the time he could walk,
And before he could talk,
His wearisome training began,
On a highly barbarian,
Disciplinarian, Nearly Tartarean
Plan!

He taught him some Raleigh,
And some of Macaulay,
Till all of "Horatius" he knew,
And the drastic, sarcastic,
Fantastic, scholastic
Philippics of "Junius," too.
He made him learn lots
Of the poems of Watts,
And frequently said he ignored,
On principle, any son's
Title to benisons
Till he'd learned Tennyson's
"Maud."

(You can get an anthology of such tongue-in-cheek renderings of fables in the collection Grimm Tales Made Gay.)

Forced to learn Greek at 3: it's no wonder Mill hated authority - Times Online

"For these are the giants
Of thought and of science,"
He said in his positive way:
"So weigh them, obey them,
Display them, and lay them
To heart in your infancy's day!"
Jack made no reply,
But he said on the sly
An eloquent word, that had come
From a quite indefensible,
Most reprehensible,
But indispensable
Chum.

By the time he was twenty
Jack had such a plenty
Of books and paternal advice,
Though seedy and needy,
Indeed he was greedy
For vengeance, whatever the price!
In the editor's seat
Of a critical sheet
He found the revenge that he sought;
And, with sterling appliance of
Mind, wrote defiance of
All of the giants of
Thought.

He'd thunder and grumble
At high and at humble
Until he became, in a while,
Mordacious, pugnacious,
Rapacious. Good gracious!
They called him the Yankee Carlyle!
But he never took rest
On his quarrelsome quest
Of the giants, both mighty and small.
He slated, distorted them,
Hanged them and quartered them,
Till he had slaughtered them
All.

And this is The Moral that lies in the verse:
If you have a go farther, you're apt to fare
Worse.
(When you turn it around it is different rather: -
You're not apt to go worse if you have a fair
father!)

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Not sure about Nic, but in the royal Esquire sense of "we," we are indeed zapped something awful by the liebstod when it comes to Ms. Anne Hathaway.

I co-opt my co-editor preemptively because I already know this affection is contagious and is at least partly responsible for endangering relationships. A few months ago I went to dinner at my dad's house and caught him on-demanding Ella Enchanted, not, I hasten to add, for its snappy dialogue and knowing, postmodern take on the fairy tale paradigm... His wife, my stepmother, is English and thinks this sort of thing is sick and unseemly, and I tend to agree. Dewar's, nitroglycerin and Viagra lined up on any shelf belonging to my kin is not a lab assignment for which I'm inclined to do the homework. I've scheduled a summit with my y-chromosome over whether or not to break it to the old man that his own schoolboy vixen of choice Julie Andrews is in the Princess Diaries series...

But yeah, only slightly less pathetic is being on the cusp of 26 and smitten with someone whose chief demographic is 12 year-old girls. Though I suppose this is far superior to being twice that age and smitten with the chief demographic itself, eh, Derbs?

Perhaps it's the catscratch fever of industrial competition, but actress little sisters and actress ex-girlfriends alike don't appreciate drooling over this particular ingenue for some reason. Odd, too, because she seems to have wit and class and an enviable self-awareness and... well, now having written that, I wonder where the oddness comes into play at all.

Hathaway is the only thing that'll get me to see The Devil Wears Prada. I slogged through Havoc, I can put up with the Wintour of Non-Content. (And one of my job requirements at Jewcy is to be on nodding terms with chick-lit and its offshoots.)

Apple - Trailers - The Devil Wears Prada - Trailer B

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There are three ministry posts still unfilled -- Defense, Interior and National Security -- and so of course there are cries of illegitimacy going up already. However, anyone who inhales deeply today only to then use his breath to loose sarcasm and cynicism might profit from a gander at this remarkable interview with Iraq's re-elected president Jalal Talabani. I've used this space before to argue that what is almost unbelievably historic about this government is that it is now being led by a committed socialist Marxist, who has -- perhaps more than any other politician in the Middle East -- been versed in the tactics and gambits of democratic politics for close to two decades, as the former secretary-general of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. He's also had his fair share of civil war exposure since the PUK and Kurdistanti Democratic Party (KDP) drove each other out of northern Iraq in 1994 (and under the auspices of alternating but thoroughgoingly perilous alliances with Saddam Hussein and the mullahs of Iran), until a cease-fire agreement brokered by the US, UK and Turkey inaugurated a far more propitious era of power-sharing and federalism.

Never forget that despite the media's coarse lumpen-anatomy of Iraq's sectarianism, the definition "Kurd" encompasses more declensions and contradictions than "Democrat" does here. Even allowing the fact that most Kurds are also Sunni doesn't begin to suss these out or to make two citizens of Sulaimaniah agree with each other any more than two Jews in Manhattan do. The New York Times resorts to a common designation for divided identities, and men like Talabani have to work overtime restoring the divisions to their rightful places.

Anyway, I quote from the most urgent bits in this interview of him by Asharq Al-Awsat, reprinted in the Kurdistan Observer:

(Talabani) Let me tell you the reality. This is Iraq. It is made up of the Arab and Kurdish nationalities. This was stipulated in Saddam Hussein's constitution. There are the Turkoman and Chaldean-Assyrian nationalities besides these two. There are Muslims and Christians in Iraq. The Muslims are divided between the Sunni and the Shiite doctrines and there are the Hanafists and Al-Shafi'ists in the Sunnis. This is quite normal in Iraq and it is not imported or concocted. But what is lacking in Iraq today is the presence of parties spreading across the homeland as branches and organizations and extending from Zakho to Basra and where the party enters as a real list. Iraq lacks the democratic experience. When the Aflaqists took over power in Iraq, they put en end to the progressive movement in the country and also to the pan-Arabists who were unable to send a single deputy to parliament. The fact is that the political movement in Iraq is today divided into secularists and Islamists. The latter are the majority, whether they are Sunni or Shiite Arabs. They won the majority of seats in parliament as a result of the elections. It is therefore natural for the government to be formed from these lists that won the elections. Why do we not call it the lists' quotas between them and not sectarian quotas? Let us take the Kurdish list as an example. This list has five ministers and the ones we have presented include Muslims and Christians. We have a Christian minister, Fawzi al-Hariri. He was not nominated as a Christian but in the Kurdish list. We have a woman nominated to be a minister. These lists' representation reflects their reality. For example, Al-Iraqiyah list nominated Sunni and Shiite Arabs, men and women. This is its structure. It is the same with the other lists. There is nothing in the constitution indicating that this number is allocated for the Sunni Arabs, Shiite Arabs, or Kurds. We in the Kurdistan list lost four ministerial portfolios. We had nine and they gave us five. Yet we accepted this in order to facilitate matters. It is the elections' results that reflected the Iraqi society's political reality and distribution.

And the following should be crammed down the throats of people who presume to condescend to the notion of liberalism taking root in Mesopotamia; it's got our own bien-pensant progressives aced and routed:

(Asharq Al-Awsat) You have talked about meetings between you and Iraqi resistance leaders. What are the details of these meetings?

(Talabani) There are no more details than what I have already said. One day, my aides said person called Abu-Mustafa wanted to meet me here in this house. He was a former officer and I was searching for him because he was one of the officers opposed to Saddam. He came with four persons who introduced themselves and said we are leaders of the resistance and trust you and therefore came to your house. They told me they had met the Americans in Amman and here in Baghdad and were on the verge of reaching results but stopped the contacts because of what they heard about the US-Iranian contacts. Their emphasis was that they saw the Iranian danger greater than the coalition forces' danger. I advised them to continue the relationship with the Americans and said you might probably reach a result. I encouraged them to do so. The second time, persons from Al-Anbar came to me and said we too have relations with the resistance. I welcomed them as Iraqis. I am the president of all the Iraqis and my door is open to all. I received letters from Iraqi citizen Barzan al-Tikriti and Tariq Aziz about being treated while in jail and I sent a message to the prime minister and he responded to their requests. This is my duty to the citizen and they still have the citizenship right. This is my way in life.

(Asharq Al-Awsat) What would you do if you received a letter from Saddam Husayn?

(Talabani) I would read it well and if he needed help, like treatment, I would help him even though I fought him until the last day of his rule. He used to exclude me from all the amnesty decision and say all except this traitor agent Jalal Talabani. But this does not mean that we should abandon our humanity and our love for our people. We have to open a new page of tolerance in Iraq and end the era of butchering and repression. The former president has the right to talk in the court and the judge has the right to pass the fair sentence and implement it.

Iraqis Form Government, With Crucial Posts Vacant - New York Times

President Jalal Talabani Talks To Asharq Al-Awsat - Kurdistan Observer

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Mustafa Yucel Ozbilgin, a judge in the Turkish high court was murdered by an Islamist opposed to the banning of headscarves in schools and government offices. Turkey, despite its being run by a regime with strong Islamic ties, prides itself on its Kemalist secularism, and it's rather buoying to see 15,000 plus citizens line the streets in protest of the slaying of a jurist.

One can argue against the prevention of religious expression in a democratic society, but then one would first have to argue that Turkey is in fact a democratic society. As it stands, the corrupt and narcissistic regime of Recip Erdogan seems intent on doing eveything it possibly can to keep the European Union uninterested in the assimilation of the first Middle Eastern nation into its ranks. From the pathetic and failed trial of Orhan Pamuk to the thuggish suppression of Kurds (whose own language rights, to portray the second-class citizenship at its least offensive, should scandalize anyone who believes in either an "official" or "national" tongue), Ankara has proven that it rules over populace infinitely worthier than itself.

The BBC has a nice man-on-the-street roundup of Turkish opinion about this assassination, which is at least as demoralizing as that of Rafiq Hariri in Lebanon.

There are too many uneducated people here who can easily be convinced by any group – Islamic or otherwise – to do anything. Not all Turkey is like Istanbul and Ankara. This attack is a natural consequence of that.

The government supports Islamic groups, so at least indirectly they can be blamed for this attack. -- Mine Esmer, 27, Architect

Good. And let us not forget the brave Alaa Abdel-Fatah, an Egyptian blogger arrested May 7 for writing similar things about the dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak. Fortunately, there is something the online community can do about his plight: sign this petition for his immediate release. Also, check out his blog.

BBC News | In pictures | Turkey shooting aftermath | Mine Esmer, 27

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The New School should have awarded John McCain an honorary degree for keeping that notorious blood pressure of his at an impressive level of equilibrium during what was, by all accounts, a farce of a graduation ceremony at Madison Square Garden Friday.

Poor chromatically befuddled protestors wore orange armbands -- which might have been interpreted differently by a few Ukrainians in Brighton Beach -- as a sign of their unwillingness to the have the senator give the 2006 commencement address. (Frankly, I prefer the radical style of denouncing Mr. Rogers, that scary-happy, cardiganed automoton of bourgeois indoctrination of the young.)

I have no problem with people reprehending McCain's politics -- and there is plenty to reprehend, particularly his cynical theo-friendly tilt of late -- or even refusing to hear him out. The civilized thing would have been to boycott the ceremony altogether. But an obnoxious dual experiment in zoology and semiotics does not a powerful act of agitation make. Nor is it especially clever or sophisticated to point out that Osama bin Laden and WMD (two things which are, apparently, linked only as a non sequitur in a valedictory sentence) have not been found, as if McCain were unaware of this fact and the only forlorn loser at the war-on-terror Easter egg hunt.

Preventive war the students can't handle, preventive rhetoric is just fine.

(And by the way, to the owner of that arm in the photograph reproduced here: McCain never endeavored to speak "for" you, although "to" might have been more rewarding than you think. He tends to wield his prepositions more coherently, for starters...)

Graduates at New School Heckle Speech by McCain - New York Times

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It takes rodents to explain.

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It occurs to me I might have put this up sooner, but for those you with something less interesting to do in the next two and a half hours, may I strongly recommend my friend Josh Strawn's band Blacklist at the Knitting Factory? They're playing at 7:30. Tickets ($15) were on sale online, but now you can only get 'em at the door. Sort of The Church meets Joy Division, at least to my unrefined sensibilities. The Lost Boys soundtrack comes to mind, too.

Opening act is The Sweet and Tender Hooligans, which is not a heavy-handed homage to The Smiths so much as a cover band of The Smiths. They promise they'll never, never do it again - uh, not until the next time.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

It's about time the mad laddies at Maxim distilled their (greatest) genius into a separate subscribable form. Vide Shock, a new photo-driven tabloid featuring such camera-doesn't-lie highlights as "a rotting human head, deformed victims of Chernobyl, a woman who set herself on fire and an article on 'KKK Kids,' children growing up in white-supremacist households."

Imagine the editorial meetings where your objective is to scoop Faces of Death.

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Frankie Foer makes good on his promise to be Geritol for the tired blood of TNR in this essay on the eminence grise of contemporary American criticism... Simon Cowell. Maybe it's Dwight Macdonald's 100th, or maybe it's the insurgent N+1 pretensions, but there's a pleasant mixing of high and low in the air these days, and the only ones turning up their noses are the "Mean People Suck" milquetoasts:

[W]e now live in what The Believer's Heidi Julavits has called the "Teflon age of criticism," where reviews don't stick to either artists or consumers of art.

"American Idol," however, puts the lie to this nostalgic story line. Whatever influence Edmund Wilson may have achieved in his prime, it hardly compares with the power of Cowell. It is true that Cowell wasn't nurtured by the alcoves of City College or hardened by the rough-and-tumble of Partisan Review. He comes to criticism by way of the far less intellectually rigorous record industry, where he made a career of producing acts like the Spice Girls knockoff Girl Thing and songs like "So Macho," as well as churning out Power Rangers albums. This populist sensibility accounts for his preternatural gift for identifying the ineffable qualities of pop stardom. Call him the Robert Parker of Top 40. Unlike schooled critics, who can distinguish a major from a minor chord, Cowell understands how looks, persona, and "showmanship" can compensate for a competent but otherwise bland performance. And his career producing schlock has given him a superb eye for identifying it.

Edmund Wilson's most Cowellesque moment (and I can't believe I'd ever write that clause) came in Patriotic Gore, when he said that the worst thing that happened to Lincoln since being shot in the head by Booth was falling into the hands of Carl Sandburg. Meow.

When Cowell issues his judgments, he likes to begin by denying the obvious. "I don't mean to be rude," he apologizes. Then he will go on to say something like, "You have about as much Latin flair as a polar bear. It was horrendous." And, to be fair, he isn't truly rude. His comments more precisely fall within a subgenre of criticism known as "snark," to borrow a phrase from Julavits's widely discussed essay on the state of criticism. Snark, by her definition, is when "reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals." For Julavits, snark, which she denounces as both self-serving and nihilistic, has played an essential role in creating modern-day critics' impotence.

This definition of snark superficially captures Cowell. But it also gets Cowell profoundly wrong. His meanness is the source of his authority. When he keelhauls contestants, his favored terms of abuse are "karaoke," "cabaret," "cruise ship," and "wedding singer." These cut-downs capture the essence of "Idol." Contestants are singing well-known pop songs. Successful singers are those who transcend the artificiality of the format and become more than "some ghastly Xerox machine." And, while Cowell may be harsh, he is rarely strident. He has retracted criticisms that don't hold up on his second watching of the show. "We were wrong," he told contestant Katharine McPhee a few weeks ago after deciding that her rendition of Whitney Houston's "I Have Nothing" had something after all. Because he never fails to point out crap--and because he has the honesty to admit failure--viewers actually trust his opinions.

Bang on, Frankie.

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More fun with ambiguous movie scenes. 10 Things I Hate About Commandments, brought to you by YouTube. Now with Sam Jackson as the Burning Bush.

"I don't eat bacon 'cause bacon comes from pig and pig's a filthy animal."
"Are you Jewish?"
"You God damn right I'm Jewish, motherfucka. I'm also the shepherd and you're the weak. Now let my people go 'fore I go Nefretiri on yo' ass."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Apparently, you needed an unobtainable TypePad keypass to post comments on Snarksmith for the past week or so. This is my fault: I futzed with our site settings again, mainly to keep out one undesireable crank who reads us with a fervor I suppose I ought to admire more than I do.

But fuck it. My cabal is your cabal, and comments are now back online and hassle-free.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:18 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

One of two things has happened to the director of JFK in the last five years. Either he has come to repudiate his thoughts, which were given much ventilation and publicity -- a pretty even mixture of the negative and effusive variety -- on September 11, or he has, in the wake of an uninspired reconquest of the globe by Alexander the Eh, begun worry that he's not quite the guerrilla auteur of the paranoid style he once was. Assuming the latter proposition to be the case, it's clear that Stone is now going for the abundantly heroic, the non-feverish and strictly "feel-good," with his new film The World Trade Center. It depicts the imperiled rescue operation of two Port Authority police officers on "that day," and does so with little ambiguity as to their selfless glory, judging by the trailer. If we accept the former proposition, however, then a solid recounting is in order of what Stone actually believed about the combined terrorist assaults on the United States, and particularly the one against the New York financial center he has now seen fit to entitle his latest work.

Hitch participated in a panel discussion about political cinema shortly after 9/11 at the New York Film Festival. Stone was one of the other panelists. This is Hitch in an old Atlantic essay, in which he first registered his deeping fracture with the mainstream left. It's called "Stranger In a Strange Land," and these quoted or summarized comments have never been challenged or refuted by Stone or anyone else:

I ... sat on a stage with Oliver Stone, who spoke with feeling about something he termed "the revolt of September 11," and with bell hooks, who informed a well-filled auditorium of the Lincoln Center that those who had experienced Spike Lee's movie about the bombing of a Birmingham, Alabama, church in 1963 would understand that "state terrorism" was nothing new in America.

These were not off-the-cuff observations. I challenged Stone to reconsider his view of the immolation of the World Trade Center as a "revolt." He ignored me. Later he added that this rebellion would soon be joined by the anti-globalization forces of the Seattle protesters. When he was asked by a member of the audience to comment on the applause for the September 11 massacres in Arab streets and camps, he responded that the French Revolution, too, had been greeted by popular enthusiasm.

What else?

(And [the attacks were not just reprisals for American] foreign policy: Stone drew applause for his assertion that there was an intimate tie between the New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington attacks and the Florida ballot recount, which was, he asserted, "a complete vindication of the fact that capitalism has destroyed democracy.")

And:

As it happens, I know enough about Marxism, for example, to state without overmuch reservation that capitalism, for all its contradictions, is superior to feudalism and serfdom, which is what bin Laden and the Taliban stand for. (Stone, when I put this to him after the event, retorted that his father had spent many years on Wall Street, and thus he knew the topic quite well.)

So there you have it. The man who, by his own stumblebum historical analogizing, would equate Port Authority officers with the guardsmen of the Bastille now offers panegyrics for those same officers in the interests of... largesse? Non-judgment? Or broad empathy for the feckless and misguided defeners of the capitalist destroyer of democracy? Ah well. Nixon got off easy by Stone's hand. Why not downtown cops on one extraordinary Tuesday?

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More border fluidity embarassment for the xenocons: this time in Britain. It seems that some of the janitorial staff at the Home Office were -- you guessed it -- illegal immigrants, or better say Nigerians, who certainly had an even more exigent need to leave their country than do Mexicans. The Guardian:

A Home Office spokesman last night confirmed that five men had been arrested after security guards noticed they did not appear to have clearance to work there.

He said it was thought that the men, who were employed by a contract cleaning company, had not worked at the offices before. The spokesman added that "appropriate action" would be taken.

Imagine that in any other context: Non-employees showing up for work and planning to actually do some. Funnier than Ricky Gervais and Steve Carell combined.

Tony Blair and the International New Labor party. Has a nice ring to it.

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Well, one thing left out of the president's speech on the immigration crisis is how welcome a massive population of Iraqi emigres would be to the United States, and how swiftly they'd be naturalized. The New York Times has a heart-seizing piece on the flight of middle-class families from Baghdad due to the inescapable sectarian violence in the wake of the Golden Mosque bombing:

In Dawra, one of the worst areas in all of Baghdad, public life has ground to a halt. Four teachers have been killed in the past 10 days in Mr. Bahjat's area alone, and the Ahmed al-Waily primary school where the Bahjat boys, ages 12 and 8, studied, may not be able to hold final exams because of the killings. And three teachers from the Batoul secondary school were shot in late April.

Trash is collected only sporadically. On April 3, insurgents shot seven garbage collectors to death near their truck, and their bodies lay in the area for eight hours before the authorities could collect them, said Naeem al-Kaabi, deputy mayor for municipal affairs in Baghdad. In all, 312 trash workers have been killed in Baghdad in the past six months.

"Sunnis, Shiites, Christians," said Mr. Bahjat, a Christian who this month moved his family to New Baghdad, an eastern suburb, to live with a relative, before leaving for Syria. "They just want to empty this place of all people."

"We must start from zero," he said. "Maybe under zero. But there is no other choice. Even with more time, the security will not improve."

Omar at the ever-consultable Iraq The Model firmly believes that securing Baghdad, apart from any other jihadist stronghold in the other provinces, is key to precipitating an about-face in both tranquility and morale, from what he rightly considers the central nervous system of Mesopotamia.

The tragic irony of all this is that the most optimistic prognosis runs as follows. If the professional classes -- the ones we originally relied to on inherit and rebuild a free Iraq -- are now requesting passports and their own private "exit strategies" from the country, then the chances of waging a counterinsurgency as vigorously and methodically as possible become greater. Those that wish to leave are those most readily turned into hostages and human leverage by civil warriors and agitators for a failed democratic state. Remove the hostages and human leverage, and you grow more capable of rescuing the state.

My suggestion? Insofar as the Pottery Barn axiom does apply -- we "broke" Iraq and now we own it -- the US should do everything to accommodate an emergency diaspora until that diaspora's homeland is secure. If this means opening our borders to allow Iraqis a kind of pragmatic amnesty, so be it. In fact, the experience might be instructive for both parties. It'd certainly be an inarguable subversion of the border patrol isolationism that runs through some of the pro-war right, and it might also provide some of the antiwar left with enough eyewitness accounts of what life under Saddam Hussein was really like to keep the necessity of his removal an evergreen subject.

Just a thought.

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I wish I hadn't designated the Quote of Day already. From the Times Online:

For all those leftists who have responded positively to the manifesto there are at least as many who have been dismissive. What is interesting about much of this reaction is the themes it typically combines. In so far as the manifesto says anything true (so critics have said), it deals in well-meaning platitudes; and in so far as we are critical of others on the Left, our criticisms apply to only a small number of people on the very far Left. And yet despite this, the manifesto at once brought down upon itself a hostility from many that it is fair to describe as warm. Why? The document named nobody in particular in identifying some lamentable patterns of argument, evasion and apologia. If the cap doesn’t fit, no need to wear it. I would suggest that at least one of the reasons for the antipathy is that the cap fits rather more heads than just those of the Socialist Workers Party.

The best books are the ones that tell you what you already knew, and we know this from Orwell. The best covenants are the ones that recapitulate the obvious and self-evident but do so in a way that seem give inchoate sentiments a lucid draft articulation. If the Euston Manifesto did only this it would be worthwhile. Yet to what extent can it be said to be a mere exercise in synthesis and refinement of common knowledge when so many on the Left feel as though there's not a common word in it, that their entire worldview has been violently challenged by its "platitudes"?

The tragedy of the Left is that is has to return to its first principles, which through various mutations and declensions of thought -- be it postmodernism, anti-globalism, anti-Americanism, or antisemitism -- have been extinguished by its most vocal and least worthy epigones. So there might not be nothing new in such a document, but such documents themselves are nothing new. (One could easily have absorbed Marx's early works and done entirely without the Communist Manifesto to get at the gist of his ideology.)

There used to be a rather impressive Continental firmament, in the 20's and 30's, of intellectuals, journalists and philosophers known as the Vienna Circle. Their raison d'etre was what they called positivism, or the idea that the only knowable truths were those that could be experienced directly and palpated by corporeal existence. Generously, this might be described as a rather militant form empiricism; militant because even the most dogmatic British empiricists took certain things for granted, especially in the interactive realms of morality and political economy. (Samuel Johnson famously remarked that the study of history was moot without such preliminary endeavors.) Another name for conceding established truth is aprioricity, which was turned, as close as possible, into mathematical science by Kurt Godel and which then became the ultimate cure for radical positivism. Yet the metaphysical wellspring for aprioricity was found in Plato.

That is how far back one must go sometimes in order to be revolutionary.

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Re: the Religious Left being overcome with the vapours for Hugo Chavez:

Earlier this year, in gratitude for his brand of Christianity, some church groups helped organize a National Solidarity Conference for Venezuela in Washington, D.C. Sponsors included the Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns and the Methodist Federation for Social Action. In 2004 the Maryknollers sent a solidarity delegation to Venezuela, led by Fr. Roy Bourgeois. Bourgeois is perhaps best known for leading demonstrations against the U.S. Army's training school for Latin military officers at Ft. Benning, Georgia. While in Venezuela, Bourgeois met with Chávez and appeared on his daily television program, Aló Presidente.

Father Roy Bourgeois is a name Evelyn Waugh might have come up with on a bad day. But nice irony in his endorsement of the people's princeling.

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A creeptacular reminiscence not to be missed. De te fabula narratur: Nabokov would have slipped a disc laughing at the transparent vulgarity of this kind of thing:

Sixty percent of the women who reported having been raped were aged 17 or less, divided about equally between women aged 11 to 17 (32 percent) and those under eleven (29 percent). Only six percent were older than 29. When a woman gets past her mid twenties, in fact, her probability of being raped drops off like a continental shelf. If you histogram the figures, you get a peak around ages 12-14… which is precisely the age Lolita was at the time of her affair with Humbert Humbert. As Razib noted, my own “15-20??? estimate was slightly off. An upper limit of 24 would be more reasonable. The lower limit really doesn’t bear thinking about. (I have a 13-year-old daughter.)

Behind such sad numbers, and in the works of literary geniuses like Vladimir Nabokov, does the reality of human nature lie. It is all too much for our prim, sissified, feminized, swooning, emoting, mealy mouthed, litigation-whipped, “diversity???-terrorized, race-and-“gender???-panicked society. We shudder and turn away, or write an angry email. The America of 1958, with all its shortcomings, was saltier, wiser, closer to the flesh and the bone and the wet earth, less fearful of itself. (It was also, according to at least one scholarly study, happier.)

Which is why Nabokov only wrote in that time period once, and made his spatial setting the USA, and then proceeded to mercilessly lambaste its bourgeois pretensions, its popular culture, its semi-literacy, its suburban architecture, its off-ramp lodgings, its silly swooning over a Continental accent and pseudo-aristocratic demeanor...

The parenthetical disclaimer about a 13 year-old daughter is negligible; like witnessing a postal worker, fresh off the latest spree killing of his cohort, able to bring his pulse back down by reciting the exact weight-to-price ratio for transatlantic parcels... Even moral collapse has met with fey shrieks of correct-thinking, in contradistinction to its welcoming embrace in... the 1950's. Yes, that's right. When child rape was all the rage. You really do have to glaze your checked paints in nostalgia for the Eisenhower era to get a byline at National Review, no matter how absurd it makes you sound.

But I must say, that penultimate sentence reminds me of Nabokov's hilarious rendering of one of the American publishers who turned down the manuscript -- not because its contents were too lubricious, but because the pedophilic sex was strictly hetero. If the thing had been about Brokeback rape, wrote back this brill-cremed systolic valve to the heartland, his firm would have had fewer qualms about releasing it stateside. Closer to the bone and the wet earth, indeed. Evidently perceived as immune from censorship or recourse to flashlit reading under the bedsheets in the auric, Buckley-braced 50's was to see a young boy "...seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, 'realistic' sentences ('He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy.' Etc.)"

Clipped John Wayne locutions and love on the haystacks. And to what fresh hell our handbasket has traveled these days...

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Why is Buffalo in decline? According to someone on Craigslist, because people there aren't very bright.

Buffalonians, you are soooooooo stupid

Why would you sell a house to some one from California or New York City for sooo cheap, 10 or 15 grand.

They paying in there for crapy houses up to a million dollar and even more,

Buffalo is a nice place compare to the shit you get in the big cities

Listen up, buffalonias, hold on to your prices, these ass holes will pay your prices if they weren’t finding crazy owners competing with each other to reduce prices to pennies.

For a tour of Buffalo's real estate, try here.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 6:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Saint Bob (Geldof, that is) is sounding more like David Rieff these days. Look what a humanitarian gig with a New Labour cabinet will do for the prime mover of Live Aid:

Africa accounts for a pathetic 1-2 per cent of world trade. But a further tiny 1 per cent increase in trade from Africa would be the equivalent of five times the amount of aid the continent currently receives. Unfortunately this economic weakness is mirrored in the negotiating strength of Africa at the WTO, ie it doesn't have any. At the global poker table, Africa isn't holding any cards.

It is time to acknowledge that while we hope, for all our sakes, that the various negotiating interest groups grow up and complete a successful accord, the reality appears to indicate otherwise, and therefore perhaps we should consider a Plan B.

And guess what Plan B is?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:02 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Simon Bolivar kept pace only with George Washington in Lord Byron's field of Romantic admiration. So it's quite funny to see Hugo Chavez claiming to be the modern-day incarnation of the Latin American revolutionary. Chavez evidently thinks very poorly of such an estimation:

Most of the Latin American left look askance at a man who heaps praise on Robert Mugabe - "the Simon Bolivar of Africa" according to Chavez and has made openly anti-semitic remarks in a continent where attacks on Jews are a serious business. [...]

President Lula of Brazil wrote an article for the European press last week ahead of the EU-Latin American summit praising the European Union and arguing this model of integration could be copied in Latin America. (Of course, our supremely provincial press in London did not bother to publish it.) Chavez opposes any such lowering of trade barriers or any modernisation of economies along European lines.

[...]

There is a new social democratic and socialist left in Latin America which can be seen in Chile, in Uruguay, in Brazil, amongst the socialist opponents of Chavez in Caracas and in parts of Mexican politics. It accepts historic compromises to help economies grow and uses tax takes to invest in social justice. Chavez has oil revenue and thus thinks he had no need of economic modernisation. Like Peron he can keep being generous to the barrios. But Venezuela needs economic reform not Chavez hand-outs.

[...]

All of this largesse comes from the United States which takes about 50 per cent of Venezuela's oil exports and pays top dollar. When I was in Caracas in 2002, Hugo announced he was fed up with the unions running the state-owned oil company and wanted to Thatcherise the workforce. They went on strike which he denounced as a plot against him - the "enemy within" language dear to populist leaders. He won, the union leaders were busted and now Hugo does handsome capitalist business with his favourite enemy, the United States. He insults them in the morning and makes a fortune selling oil in the afternoon.

All this and petrol-drenched snugglebunnies with Saddam Hussein and the mullahs of Iran.

Viva la something, all right.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:42 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As the author of "Dictatorships and Double Standards," Jeanne Kirkpatrick fast became the godmother of neoconservatism. Only, not the kind you and I are now accustomed to. And she has her qualms with that:

She calls President Bush's foreign policy "a little too interventionist for my taste, frankly -- but not across the board. I am very much in favor of his actions in Afghanistan and have not opposed them in Iraq."

(See my essay on the movement's intellectual evolution, beginning with New Democrats and ending with cirque du Cheney. Here. FYI: The Woody Allen movie in which Dissentary is mentioned is Annie Hall, not Manhattan.)

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:02 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I know. It's very difficult to excuse the cunning and calculation displayed by a woman who, after being forced to undergo clitoral circumcision and life as a second-class citizen in her native country, lieson an immigration application to expediate her naturalization in an adopted one. The nerve. And this after multiple thousands of illegal immigrants, who never even bothered with the application hassle, are being rounded up and summarily expelled from the United States when they should be parading in the streets and demanding political representation of their own.

Ayaan Ali Hirsi is moving to Washington and joining the American Enterprise Institute. Meanwhile, pathetic apologists for the types that would sooner have her beheaded can only see fit to cite her sinuous course to Dutch parliament, her change of name, her family's take on her domestic bliss after an enforced marriage in Kenya, and her conservative cheerleaders in the West -- all as evidence against her.

Well, of course. Because working to expose the toxic sewer of sharia law, which poisons the lives of women and atheists and reformists and homosexuals, is no match for being feted by a dread neocon cabal in D.C. And because the prospect of a black flag of jihad being raised over Amsterdam (or London, or Paris) is so much more equable than Richard Perle hovering around the same CoffeeMaker as this brave and sworn enemy of jihad.

By a nice coincidence, I came across an old Arthur Koestler quote, delivered at a particularly tender moment during the cold war, just as news of Hirsi Ali's recent troubles -- and the question of her supposedly unsavory bedfellows in escaping them -- was hitting the airwaves: "You can't help people being right for the wrong reasons.... This fear of finding oneself in bad company is not an expression of political purity; it is an expression of a lack of self-confidence."

There are those, however, who readily exhibit a surplus of self-confidence. Too bad it's for other side in this urgent struggle for civilization.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:36 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Christopher Isherwood once said of Auden's High Anglicanism that the poet eventually dropped the Anglican bit but retained the height. A nice thing to keep in mind when navigating the oeuvre. Though chances are any book trafficking exclusively in Auden's relationship with God is going to skimp on his equally frought relationship with the ones that failed. And sure enough...

Auden himself believed he had rejected the Christian faith as a young man, but gradually found himself drawn back to it, partly in reaction to the brutal political realities emerging in the late 1930s, especially the rise of Nazism and the closing of the churches in civil war Spain, both of which shocked and dismayed him, and challenged the hold of left-progressive pieties. His chronic and tortured unhappiness in love also surely influenced him, as did an impressive encounter with the Anglican writer Charles Williams, who introduced him to the work of Kierkegaard and provided him a shining example of an accomplished intellectual who was also a thoroughgoing Christian.

Orwell -- who was always at his nastiest when reprehending the "fashionable pansies" of the Popular Front: Auden, Spender and Connolly -- said that "Spain" was the best verse to come out of the civil war, in which its author had served, however briefly, as an ambulance driver. Orwell also famously misinterpreted the line

To-day the conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder

as being literal and not apostrophic and ironic. There's also a pagan and materialist undercurrent throughout: "the abolition of fairies and giants;" "the installation of dynamos and turbines;" "the classic lecture / on the origin of Mankind;" "the inhuman provinces" comprising "the virile bacillus / Or enormous Jupiter finished."

And while a confessional self-hatred for "crooked" sexuality may have accounted for the scuppering of a few suggestive lines from "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," we still have "Lay your sleeping head, my love" and no less obvious "The Fall of Rome" as testaments to his being here, queer and not in the least discomfited by it. Also, this, which they don't teach you in freshman English:

The Anglican dean of Hong Kong
Had a thing that was nine inches long,
He thought that the waiters
Were admiring his gaiters
When he went to the loo.
He was wrong.

And then there's the Icelandic influence, the later stuff on the space program and astrophysics for the kids, suggesting at the very least a recalibration of theme and personal interests.

Multitudes and contradictions, sure, even though they're true of everybody. But eros and agape and gnosis all flew in close trajectory to one another in a poetic universe where "transcendence" was never confined to anything so humdrum as that vast, moth-eaten, musical brocade created to pretend we never die.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:54 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Yes, it's raining like fuckall in New England. But somebody should tell CNN that the roads in New Hampshire look like that every spring.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 8:40 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I guess I'm late to the festering discussion of Stephen Colbert's Correspondent's Dinner routine -- to the extent that I don't even know what encapsulating hyperlink I could put on that -- but the discussion has been relatively unenlightening in the media as well as in the blogosphere. The great problem with the controversy has been the tendency of all pundits to conflate the speech's courage and the speech's humor. This says something about our cultural beliefs about courage. Frankly, I'm with Bill Maher, who was excoriated (and fired) for pointing out that post-9/11 speeches calling the hijackers "cowards" lowballed the balls it takes to pilot a jet into a building. Courage is great, but it's not a virtue. (As a side note, Maher makes a decent benchmark for being funny and gutsy at once.)

Whether the point of Colbert's satire piercing a deserved target is irrespective of whether Colbert himself was funny or taking any risk in doing what he did. His coworker Jon Stewart was not someone who could go on Crossfire and wag his finger at their unseriousness without hypocrisy, but does anyone not agree that Paul Begala and Tucker Carlson televised was and is a cultural excrescense? If Colbert was unfair to anybody in the room, I wouldn't have picked on the president but on the press corps, which has been doing a responsible job breaking stories about the flagrant incompetence and wide-ranging shiftiness of this administration. (And before I start getting hate mail: when even USA Today has the journalistic chops to unearth your secret data-mining program, you need to go back to working on your governance fundamentals.)

Digression with a point: I just finished watching Good Night and Good Luck. A lot has been made of George Clooney's political crusading, but the artful touch in his movie was the decision to only use actual footage of the greasy, furrowed junior senator from New Batshit. A more two-dimensional character has never strutted the national stage than Joseph McCarthy. Letting the senator's words speak for him was not only a smart way to avoid a hack acting job but to echo Murrow's methods. The suggestions that Clooney's didactic intent with this film undermines its importance is a backdoor assault on the unseemly editorializing Murrow himself deployed to bring down a senator who was, we can all agree, an asshole. Whether or not the time was right with Colbert, there are moments when a media personality ought to mortgage his personality.

As for whether Colbert was funny: he had his moments, but the combative persona undermined the combative satire, and the lack of contrast washed out even his best material. Bill Clinton knew the secret to Correspondent humor: deploy Helen Thomas with a light touch.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 12:25 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Unfortunately, his proximate quarry -- a piece by James Wood on how Stephen Colbert gave a "speech" that, while unfunny, can and should be esteemed along literary critical lines for being ironic, satiric and "brutal" -- is unavailable to New Republic nonsubscribers. (Whither this glorious revolution of your, Frankie Foer?) However, Siegel's blog post is free of charge, and well worth a shufty -- not least because it shows him simultaneously at his best and worst:

It's not like Colbert had the guts to publicly decline his invitation to the president's--oops, I mean the White House Correspondents'--dinner and make a real speech denouncing Bush and his policies. He hid safely behind his Bill O'Reilly persona all night. That people think his routine was politically consequential in any way explains why, as liberals have sublimated Bush-hatred into cable-comedy, feature films, and spineless theater, the right has continued to make the politics that provokes all this toothless cultural catharsis.

First, a few facts before some pissants out there once again reply to my opinions about Colbert, Stewart et al. with their own dazzling polemic (some examples: "Siegel is a dick." "Siegel sucks." "Siegel should crawl off into the woods and die."). I address myself to said pissants. I was writing for magazines like Dissent, The Nation, and Radical History Review while you were still worrying whether it was safe to walk around the Upper West Side at night. (Maybe you still do.) Months before the last presidential election, I wrote an Op-Ed for the L.A. Times extolling Bush hatred. I excoriated Bush and his policies every chance I got, often in this magazine, which, unlike every lefty magazine I ever wrote for, doesn't just tolerate but thrives on dissenting views. Please don't get on your moral-political high-horse with me just because I don't like your favorite comedian. How do you react if someone doesn't like your favorite shoes?

I must say, I just love Radical History Review tucked in there as an estoteric leftist merit badge for the pissants to cower before... "I was fisking Bakunin while you all were in short pants!"

There's another unseemly sniffle in this squib about how the blogosphere is a mere farm league for thwarted "MSM" journos, which might have been more convincing if it were published instead of "posted." Though, having now myself been scratched by a few minor thistles from the Colbert-is-God squad, I find little fault with the overall plaint. The cyber-populist, or "netsroot," left has become daycare for the disgruntled, and in major need of a truth-to-power time-out:

One year, Paula Jones showed up at Clinton's. He and Hillary had to pretend to enjoy a barrage of jokes about Clinton's infidelity and sundry double-dealings. Another year, Don Imus was so insulting to Clinton that--this was before C-SPAN started broadcasting the dinners--the Clinton administration had to ask that the transcript not be released to the press. In 1971, Nixon had to sit through the dinner while one by one, the most vitriolic critics of his presidency were called up to receive awards. The citations were, indeed, pointed, and ironic and satirical. The inebriated press corps howled and howled as the paranoid leader sat, his mind spinning. There was every bit as much at stake in Nixon's time, and in Clinton's--the president's groin the embarkation point for the definitive upsurge of the country's right-wing revolution--as there is now.

There's also Tom Lehrer retiring the ivories when Kissinger won his Nobel Peace Prize, rightly recognizing that farce brooks no imitation. (Not that I compare Kissinger to Bush on the latter's worst day, although Siegel surely would do.)

In what contrastive light then, is Colbert the late messiah of dissent?

Chesterton famously remarked that when a man thinks any stick will do, he reaches for a boomerang. This is another way of observing how a low standard easily grades into no standard at all. There's nothing new in that, but the ones least amenable to being reminded of it are those who'll now tell you that Al Franken is a wit, Michael Moore is a documentarian, and Howard Dean is a candidate for president.

Anybody But Bush? Yes, well, anybody can do that.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (3)

As if Frank Gehry has time for the laws of physics, let alone the bitching of Division 2 Manhattan.

Nick Confessore of the Times shows us this prospective development for the Atlantic Yards project, which, as a new member of the Outer Borough Scientology, I suppose I must care about:

"They should've been picketing Henry Ford," Mr. Gehry said today, dismissing critics who oppose high-density development in the borough. "There is progress everywhere. There is a constant change. The issue is how to manage it."

This from the guy who says of his own design, "that is so stupid-looking, it's great."

Daniel Goldstein, a spokesman for Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, which opposes the project, said the new design "puts a Gehry sheen on top of repudiated 1960's-style urban renewal. It's still way too big, and does not change the fact of 16 skyscrapers slammed on top of and next to low-rise, historic neighborhoods."

Not since Judy Davis ("I wrote a paper at Radcliffe on how Bauhaus was the aesthetic equivalent of fascism") tried to fuck Liam Neeson in Husbands and Wives have New York Jews been so angry about architecture.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 8:46 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Assuming Matt Drudge isn't talking out of his snappy, Winchellian fedora, we have these quotes to go on from Professor Chomsky, currently in high glandhanding mode with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hizbollah:

"I think that Nasrallah has a reasoned argument and a persuasive argument that they (the weapons) should be in the hands of Hizbollah as a deterrent to potential aggression and there is plenty of background and reasons for that. So, I think his position, if I am reporting it correctly, and it seems to be a reasonable position, is that until there is a general political settlement in the region and the threat of aggression and violence is reduced or eliminated, there has to be a deterrent. The Lebanese army cannot be a deterrent."

"There is a meaning to the word terrorist, in fact you can read a definition of term terrorist is the U.S. code of laws. It gives a very clear, precise, adequate definition of the word terrorist. have been writing about terrorism for 25 years always using the official U.S. definition [of the word "terrorist"], but that definition is un-usable, and the reason is that when you use that definition it turns out, not surprisingly, that the U.S is one of the leading terrorist states, and the other states become terrorist or non-terrorist depending on how they are relating to U.S. goals."

"The regional superpower Israel is threatening to attack it [Iran], the U.S. is threatening to attack it. These threats alone are outright violations international law and of the U.N. charter. Iran is in difficulty. Iran has been trying for some years to negotiate settlement but the U.S. just refuses."

Letting aside the strategic reasons for a Lebanese terrorist militia keeping arms for the express purpose of "deterring" Israel, if international law and UN pronunciamentos are Chomsky's criteria for giving failed states and failed regional players a passing grade, what to make of this fact, courtesy of Michael Young at TCS Daily (the syndicator of Young's column in The Daily Star of Lebanon)?

A third difficulty is that by attacking Israel, Hizbullah would only reinvigorate international efforts to disarm the party. In September 2005, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1559, which, among other things, demands the disarmament of militias in Lebanon. The Lebanese government, fearing confrontation with a heavily armed Hizbullah, favors moving slowly. However, a conflagration between Hizbullah and Israel would push the disarmament question back to the top of the UN and American agendas, and this would be reinforced by the domestic antipathy toward Hizbullah an Israeli attack would arouse.

So Hizbollah's armament is already in violation of a UN Resolution. Cannot, by this logic, the US and Israel be capable of "reasoned argument(s)" and "persuasive argument(s)" for their statute-flouting decisions? I wonder what Noam's answer would be.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Toni Morrison's Beloved, the best book of the last 25 years? So sayeth a list of literatteur luminaries, many of whom were too shy to cast honest votes, by the admission of the New York Times adjudicant in this contest. Imagine A.O. Scott turning blue to write this:

The results - in some respects quite surprising, in others not at all - provide a rich, if partial and unscientific, picture of the state of American literature, a kind of composite self-portrait as interesting perhaps for its blind spots and distortions as for its details.

Then keep imagining:

(A few respondents, not content to state their own preferences, pre-emptively attacked what they assumed would be the thinking of the majority. So we received some explanations of why people were not voting for "Beloved," the expected winner, and also one Roth fan's assertion that the presumptive preference for "American Pastoral" over "Operation Shylock" was self-evidently mistaken.)

Now imagine poor Ralph Ellison -- or even Saul Bellow, the "Roth" in this case, who had Augie under his belt while nevertheless going on to become one of the biggest boosters of Invisible Man --having to put up with this:

It is worth remarking that the winner of the 1965 Book Week poll, Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," arose from a similar impulse to bring the historical experience of black Americans, and the expressive traditions this experience had produced, into the mainstream of American literature. Or, rather, to reveal that it had been there all along, and that race, far from being a special or marginal concern, was a central facet of the American story. On the evidence of Ellison's and Morrison's work, it is also a part of the story that defies the tenets of realism, or at least demands that they be combined with elements of allegory, folk tale, Gothic and romance.

I can't even bring myself to click on The New Criterion at a time like this...

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sullivan's got the prurient (and polygot) tab covered in Google Trends, and -- praise be unto him -- everything's coming up Islamic.

But in the interest of fair and balanced media, you might be more than a little surprised to learn that "chastity" is the big in a somber city that's clearly overcompensating with its Sears Tower...

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:06 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

We half-Irish half-Jews know from diaspora, and my faith in exodus -- or "screw you guys, I'm leaving home" -- as the preferred mode of cultural displacement is reaffirmed by this piece in the Kurdistan Observer about a recent Kurdish rally in southern Los Angeles:

Although they had not responded to the e-mail, on the day of the demonstration few of the [Turkish] consulate members were outside observing the event. Few of our demonstrators and I approached the consulate staff members to have a casual chat; this was my first encounter with a Turkish official since my last trip to Southern Kurdistan via Turkey three years ago. I assumed the Turkish consulate staff member’s were not too pleased with hearing Kurds and Kurdistan freely and I deliberately did not hesitate to use those words several times in our conversation.

In response to a question about my e-mail to meet with them to open a healthy dialogue and discuss the recent developments in Northern Kurdistan, one of the staff member stated, “We will never sit with the terrorists.??? I was not much surprised by his response, knowing that the Turkish officials usually reject any initiative taken by the Kurdish side, regardless of the intent or content. Unfortunately, the Turkish government considers everything Kurdish as terrorism. I felt obligated to ask; “didn’t the Turkish government recently host a high-ranking Hamas official, which was considered a terrorist organization!???? Well, being a Turkish diplomat, he tried to defend Hamas, and considered them to be a legitimate political party, where they democratically won the elections in Palestine. I wondered, if the same chance had been given to PKK in Turkey, what the result would have been. The consulate staff members left the scene and we continued with the demonstration.

Sort of like a Conference of Lausanne in Inglewood. At least they're used to the guns.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

From The Guardian (hat tip: Harry's):

President Chávez, who has been critical of the British government over the Iraq war, will address a rally in the capital during his visit. He will also attend a public meeting at Friends House, Euston, on May 15, to speak alongside Tony Benn, Tariq Ali, and the Labour MP Colin Burgon, who played a key part in inviting him to Britain.

What's worse? That "who has been critical of the British government over the Iraq war" is the most salient description of Chavez Duncan Campbell could find, or that Euston is the spilling-off point for this grab-bag of gits?

To see how socialism with a moon face really works, revisit Frankie Foer's profile of el presidente in The Atlantic.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Can we at least agree that Lion-O was just a precocious metrosexual?

The best part about rewatching He-Man, after the initial nostalgia-burst, was tracking the show's hilarious accidental homo-eroticism—an aspect I missed completely as a first-grader. In the ever-growing lineup of "outed" classic superheroes, He-Man might be the easiest target of all. It's almost too easy: Prince Adam, He-Man's alter ego, is a ripped Nordic pageboy with blinding teeth and sharply waxed eyebrows who spends lazy afternoons pampering his timid pet cat; he wears lavender stretch pants, furry purple Ugg boots, and a sleeveless pink blouse that clings like saran wrap to his pecs. To become He-Man, Adam harnesses what he calls "fabulous secret powers": His clothes fall off, his voice drops a full octave, his skin turns from vanilla to nut brown, his giant sword starts gushing energy, and he adopts a name so absurdly masculine it's redundant. Next, he typically runs around seizing space-wands with glowing knobs and fabulously straddling giant rockets. He hangs out with people called Fisto and Ram Man, and they all exchange wink-wink nudge-nudge dialogue: "I'd like to hear more about this hooded seed-man of yours!" "I feel the bony finger of Skeletor!" "Your assistance is required on Snake Mountain!" Once you start thinking along these lines, it's impossible to stop. (Clearly, others have had the same idea.) It's a prime example of how easily an extreme fantasy of masculinity can circle back to become its opposite.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

First they came for the cigarettes, and I was silent because I wasn't a smoker. Then they came for the sodas, and I didn't say anything because I don't like cola. Then they came for the fucking ice cream, and everybody was too cranky to speak up for me.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 8:28 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

This post is a kind of open letter to my co-editor to recall what, exactly, happened when our college humor magazine played along with one of these Nigerian e-mail scams, when such things were still in their nonage. (Did we actually get that guy to write us back, Nic? I can't remember.)

I quote from the most Arts & Letters Daily-friendly paragraph in Mitchel Zuckoff's enviable New Yorker profile of a Christian shrink who went to jail for playing along a little too well, to the tune of $40,000 of his own money. But the best factoid you'll find in here is that the psychologist who televisually diagnosed Reagan with Alzheimer's before anyone else knew he had it also fell hard for the easy money hornswaggle. (I see Malcolm Gladwell in a Ponzi scheme next.)

Every swindle is driven by a desire for easy money; it’s the one thing the swindler and the swindled have in common. Advance-fee fraud is an especially durable con. In an early variation, the Spanish Prisoner Letter, which dates to the sixteenth century, scammers wrote to English gentry and pleaded for help in freeing a fictitious wealthy countryman who was imprisoned in Spain. Today, the con usually relies on e-mail and is often called a 419 scheme, after the anti-fraud section of the criminal code in Nigeria, where it flourishes. (Last year, a Nigerian comic released a song that taunted Westerners with the lyrics “I go chop your dollar. I go take your money and disappear. Four-one-nine is just a game. You are the loser and I am the winner.???) The scammers, who often operate in crime rings, are known as “yahoo-yahoo boys,??? because they frequently use free Yahoo accounts. Many of them live in a suburb of Lagos called Festac Town. Last year, one scammer in Festac Town told the Associated Press, “Now I have three cars, I have two houses, and I’m not looking for a job anymore.???

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:54 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

With his prim demeanor, famed Francophilia, Saracen beak, and almost maddening moderation in habit (his pasta meals are a tribute to the carbohydrate base of the food pyramid, his wine is sipped, and his postprandial cigarette is always one), Julian Barnes is probably the best English critic to enlist for criticism on the life and work of Gustave Flaubert. Never mind that Barnes already fictionalized around a piece of arcana from the life of the creator of Madame Bovary and Bouvard and Pecuchet. Obessions come and go with spates of research, as Flaubert well knew. However, the beguiling genius himself, a colossus who managed to bestride two centuries of the novel, is a rather hard act to lose sight of, even in the most established modern literary career.

Pity the poor biographer tasked with tracing home every mot juste and epileptic seizure and eyebrow-raising billet-doux, and doing so with perfect historical accuracy, when Barnes is on the case. This is how he closes his latest essay in the New York Review of Books:

Couched between the Seine winding north toward its mouth and the steep green and white spurs of an immense chalk plateau called the Pays des Caux....

The river does wind, it is true; but its mouth lies exactly due west of Rouen, while the Pays des Caux is the Pays de Caux. Elsewhere, we have Flaubert giving Louis Bouilhet the "nickname" Hyacinthe, when that was the poet's middle name; and the novelist at Croisset hearing "the one o'clock ferry at La Bouille whistling its departure" (unlikely, since La Bouille is a good eight miles downstream). There is Mérimée's Columbo (for Colombo) and Diane de Poitier (sic) and the statement that "there are no images of Flaubert between childhood and middle age" (there are certainly three).

"A good eight miles" is probably not lightly tossed about like that without some undisclosed anecdote or Proustian mnemonic from Barnes' own romps through La Bouille. "In fact, there's a charming little cheese shoppe about a 5 minute walk from the rail station..."

Eat your heart out, James Wood.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:19 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Well, now I'm convinced that the Iranian president's mission in life is to get people to spell his name correctly in print. Even Rafsanjani didn't have this much PR, and he had the panache, the charisma, the espieglerie and the looks.

Kevin Drum at Political Animal has called the snailmail from Tehran "fairly mild," and that it is if, you know, you discount a few bottled shrieks of paranoia and fundamentalist insanity amid all the pedantic commissar questions. Rich stuff, this human rights eHarmony quiz, coming from a guy whose country hangs homosexuals, forces women behind tenebrous veils, and bans literature and film and sex and music like they were coming into style or something.

Anyhoo, it's clear from the awkwardness of these precision-torqued talking points -- which are the geopolitical equivalent of watching Sigfried and Roy mount a Bengal tiger onto a tricycle -- that Mahmoud is way into Western media. (The beard alone proves he reads Details.) Michael Moore, Sean Wilentz, Amiri Baraka -- they are taking an effect at the executive level, just not in the preferred time zone. Who knew?

Reportedly your government employs extensive security, protection and intelligence systems – and even hunts its opponents abroad. September eleven was not a simple operation. Could it be planned and executed without coordination with intelligence and security services – or their extensive infiltration? Of course this is just an educated guess.

"For instance, our new Minister of Sulantic Concubinage Charlie Sheen has spoken with great passion about the temperature at which steel girders melt in American skyscrapers... Just throwing that out there, Your Excellency. No judgment or anything."

Did we intend to establish justice, or just supported especial interest groups, and by forcing many people to live in poverty and hardship, made a few people rich and powerful – thus trading the approval of the people and the Almighty with theirs’?

Inflectional difficulties aside, "especial" makes the interest groups themselves specific, as opposed the objectives around which they coalesce. I wonder if there was any "lobby" in particular Ahmadinejad had in mind. Oh, wait. Speak of the horned devil:

Today there are hundreds of millions of Christians, hundreds of millions of Moslems and millions of people who follow the teachings of Moses (PBUH).

I consult my Emily Post's Guide To Nuclear Brinkmanship and what do I find but the following: "In polite, diplomatic company it is always decorous to avoid mention, by name, of unsavory or divisive subjects, which may include -- but are not limited to -- bodily functions, illness, the changing role of women in society, stark differences in religion, or, in a related vein, groups that engineer proxy wars and control world finance. Also, the salad fork may be set but unused."

Liberalism and Western style democracy have not been able to help realize the ideals of humanity. Today these two concepts have failed. Those with insight can already hear the sounds of the shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems.

Freudian slip there amidst all the mildness. Though I'm sure by "liberalism" he meant globalization, and by "Western style democracy" he was referring to Diebold voting machines in Ohio.

Still, I think we've got something we can work with... Finally.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:13 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Onion keeps unintentionally coming close to reality. This time, it's the wrong decaying Rust Belt city, wrong agent of despair, but otherwise not too far off. The satire:

Detroit, a former industrial metropolis in southeastern Michigan with a population of just under 1 million, was sold at auction Tuesday to bulk scrap dealers and smelting foundries across the United States.

"This is what's best for Detroit," Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick said. "We must act now, while we can still get a little something for it."

Once dismantled and processed, Detroit is expected to yield nearly 14 million tons of steel, 2.85 million tons of aluminum, and approximately 837,000 tons of copper.

The reality:

More than 80 reports of copper theft have been received by Buffalo police dating back to last year.

Paul Andrews learned first-hand. He left his East Delavan Avenue rental property late on a recent Friday only to return to a surprise early the next day.

"I went to use the water, and when I went to turn it on, all I could hear was gurgling noises because all of my pipes were gone," Andrews said. "They ripped the heart out of the house." [...]

[T]he damage left behind is often more costly than the copper. Take, for instance, Hazel Fisher's vacant boarded-up Pershing Street property. Thieves smashed through a door and stole all the copper baseboard radiators, copper water pipes and even the water meter itself, leaving the water to run and flood the basement.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 7:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

In the hands of the Wall St Journal via Wonkette comes one of the most circuitous, religiously tinted, tediously written pieces of epistolary fiction I've read in a while. Full text of the Ahmadinejad letter. Or, here is a quick summary:

p1: Dear George: Hello.
pp 2-3: As I understand it, Jesus would not approve of secret prisons.
pp 4-6: If six millions Jews died in the Second World War, would there really be enough left to populate a country?
pp 7: People hate the USA outside of the Middle East, you know.
pp 8-9: If the CIA didn't at least know about 9/11... well, fuck, that just seems impossible, don't you think?
pp 10-11: You're fucking up your legacy, man. Did you know some Americans are poor?
p 12: quotes Blowin' In the Wind at length
p 13: Christinan, Muslim, religions related to "followers of Moses," and should get along
p 14: quotes Koran at length
pp 15-18: George, I'm telling you, this democracy isn't working. You need to be more religious. Take a deep breath, pray for a while, and find Jesus (peace be upon him).

XOXOXO,
Mahmood

Posted by Nic Duquette at 7:19 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When Alan Bennett's brilliant play The Madness of George III was turned into a major motion picture and set for recolonization of these shores, whatever American studio was elected to distribute the film raised the following quibble: it'd have to be renamed The Madness of King George. Why? Because American audiences would be left wondering what had happened to Parts I and II...

You don't have to have any truck with fashonable anti-Americanism in Britain to appreciate this story for what it is: another glistening example of the short Yankee attention span, particularly where that span is meant to encompass history. (Also, I like the idea that arthouse fare about the temporary dementia of an English monarch would probably only get exhibited in the so-called "blue states." The Upper West Side, denizens of which pride themselves on locating Zabar's "somewhere east of Suez," could not handle the Hanoverian succession. This is the sort of thing that turns Tom Wolfe's wardrobe another shade closer to solar incandescence.)

Anyway, Alan Bennett is with us once more, with a new play and a new autobiography. He'll always retain a very special place in my heart for bringing Philip Larkin to vocal life again in a BBC-produced CD entitled, "Dear Philip, Dear Kingsley: The Letters of Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis."

Adam Gopnik shares coffee and pretzel croissant with him:

“When I first came here, with Peter Cooke and Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, with ‘Beyond the Fringe,’ in 1962, we didn’t really like it,??? he said one recent morning, over a pretzel croissant at City Bakery, on Eighteenth Street. “The food was awful. We wouldn’t have got anything like this.??? He gestured at the roomful of cappuccino and brioches. “We were sorry that we were going to have to stay here for a year and a half, which you had to do for tax reasons in those days. Shows how arrogant we were. We all signed leases on apartments and resigned ourselves to staying here for all that time. What if we had gotten terrible reviews? We took it for granted at that age that ‘they’ would either get it or be contemptible for not getting it.??? [...]

“I love Larkin’s language and his sadness,??? he said. “But his politics aren’t mine at all. I thought about writing a play about that generation, Larkin and Amis and Osborne, and how they all became more and more right-wing as they grew older, and how they were all too intelligent not to have an ironic sense of how the views they ended up with were exactly the views that they had mocked at the beginning.???

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:00 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I saw David Sedaris read at Boston Symphony Hall last week, but didn't feel compelled to offer up a full-blown review here, largely because the event was on the brief side. Sedaris read three uncollected essays -- all published or destined for the New Yorker -- and a draft of the speech he will be delivering at Princeton University commencement in about a month. The event was pleasant but unspectacular -- Sedaris's new essays were as good as anything he's already written, although perhaps a bit more inclined to black humor. But two points stand out:

(1) There is a perfect charity for everybody. When I noticed that the reading was billed as a benefit for Helping Hands, "a Boston-based non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for quadriplegic individuals by training capuchin monkeys to assist them with daily activities," I assumed it was a hoax, given Sedaris' numerous digressions about fantastical monkey helpers, and his own experiences with quadriplegics. In a twist that was simultanesously disappointing, uplifting and hilarious, no, the organization is for real.

(2) If you live in or near Princeton, consider going to the commencement. All commencement speakers are "humorous," at least before they get to the uplifting part about following dreams. But Sedaris's draft was not only a gut-buster, it was a nihilistic yarn of sex, drugs and violence only related to Princeton University in the loosest of ways. It can only become funnier when it is read on the same stage as whatever Nobel Laureates and foreign heads of state happen to be getting honorary degrees that day. Like Chris Rock at the Oscars or Daffy Duck swallowing dynamite, it will be (barring major revision) a dangerous perfomance that can only be done once.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 6:24 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Glenn Reynolds has the scoop here. And this is the contact info for the Egyptian embassy in D.C. Mubarak's regime buckles under this kind of pressure (it hates nasty PR, unless of course in documentary form and directed against world Jewry).

3521 International Court, NW, Washington DC 20008 Telephone: (202) 895 5400 Fax: (202) 244-4319 E-mail: embassy@egyptembdc.org URL: http://www.egyptembassy.us

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Louis Renza is leading Dylan scholar, and one small infusion of hipness into the moudly quadrangles of Nic's and my alma mater. (There's something for everybody here: Christopher Ricks can grok about T.S. Eliot with Jeffrey Hart.)

Previous conferences and symposia on Bob Dylan have addressed the complex composition of his works: their orientation toward (vocal, musical, live-concert, and/or recorded) performance; their links to and revisions of musical precedents; their social-historical significance; and Dylan’s own status as a cultural icon. But the singular quality of his imaginative art clearly lies as much if not more in his songs’ poetic density. The goal of the Dartmouth Conference is to give premier attention to this last side of Bob Dylan’s works--in short, to offer variant critical interpretations of them, lashed firmly to close readings.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Freud turns 150 today. And while you may happily splash around in Roger Scruton's sturm und drang, or gobble down Harold Bloom's poetaster's strudel, I much prefer Auden at a time like this:

When there are so many we shall have to mourn,

when grief has been made so public, and exposed

to the critique of a whole epoch

the frailty of our conscience and anguish,

of whom shall we speak? For every day they die

among us, those who were doing us some good,

who knew it was never enough but

hoped to improve a little by living.

Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished

to think of our life from whose unruliness

so many plausible young futures

with threats or flattery ask obedience,

but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes

upon that last picture, common to us all,

of problems like relatives gathered

puzzled and jealous about our dying.

For about him till the very end were still

those he had studied, the fauna of the night,

and shades that still waited to enter

the bright circle of his recognition

turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he

was taken away from his life interest

to go back to the earth in London,

an important Jew who died in exile.

Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment

his practice now, and his dingy clientele

who think they can be cured by killing

and covering the garden with ashes.

They are still alive, but in a world he changed

simply by looking back with no false regrets;

all he did was to remember

like the old and be honest like children.

He wasn't clever at all: he merely told

the unhappy Present to recite the Past

like a poetry lesson till sooner

or later it faltered at the line where

long ago the accusations had begun,

and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,

how rich life had been and how silly,

and was life-forgiven and more humble,

able to approach the Future as a friend

without a wardrobe of excuses, without

a set mask of rectitude or an

embarrassing over-familiar gesture.

No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit

in his technique of unsettlement foresaw

the fall of princes, the collapse of

their lucrative patterns of frustration:

if he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life

would become impossible, the monolith

of State be broken and prevented

the co-operation of avengers.

Of course they called on God, but he went his way

down among the lost people like Dante, down

to the stinking fosse where the injured

lead the ugly life of the rejected,

and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought,

deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith,

our dishonest mood of denial,

the concupiscence of the oppressor.

If some traces of the autocratic pose,

the paternal strictness he distrusted, still

clung to his utterance and features,

it was a protective coloration

for one who'd lived among enemies so long:

if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd,

to us he is no more a person

now but a whole climate of opinion

under whom we conduct our different lives:

Like weather he can only hinder or help,

the proud can still be proud but find it

a little harder, the tyrant tries to

make do with him but doesn't care for him much:

he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth

and extends, till the tired in even

the remotest miserable duchy

have felt the change in their bones and are cheered

till the child, unlucky in his little State,

some hearth where freedom is excluded,

a hive whose honey is fear and worry,

feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape,

while, as they lie in the grass of our neglect,

so many long-forgotten objects

revealed by his undiscouraged shining

are returned to us and made precious again;

games we had thought we must drop as we grew up,

little noises we dared not laugh at,

faces we made when no one was looking.

But he wishes us more than this. To be free

is often to be lonely. He would unite

the unequal moieties fractured

by our own well-meaning sense of justice,

would restore to the larger the wit and will

the smaller possesses but can only use

for arid disputes, would give back to

the son the mother's richness of feeling:

but he would have us remember most of all

to be enthusiastic over the night,

not only for the sense of wonder

it alone has to offer, but also

because it needs our love. With large sad eyes

its delectable creatures look up and beg

us dumbly to ask them to follow:

they are exiles who long for the future

that lives in our power, they too would rejoice

if allowed to serve enlightenment like him,

even to bear our cry of 'Judas',

as he did and all must bear who serve it.

One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave

the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved:

sad is Eros, builder of cities,

and weeping anarchic Aphrodite.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I know how it is. You see the neatly condensed and abridged Barnes and Noble edition of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire sitting on your shelf, and you just have to dig in. Sooner or later, Gibbon's milky, rococo sentences penetrate and you find yourself playing three-card monty with the position of subject, verb and noun like a courtier at Avignon. Fouad Ajami on Bernard Lewis:

We anoint sages when we need them; at times we let them say, on our behalf, the sorts of things we know and intuit but don't say, the sorts of things we glimpse through the darkness but don't fully see. It was thus in the time of the great illusion, in the lost decade of the 1990s, when history had presumably "ended," that Bernard Lewis had come forth to tell us, in a seminal essay, "The Roots of Muslim Rage" (September 1990), that our luck had run out, that an old struggle between "Christendom" and Islam was gathering force. (Note the name given the Western world; it is vintage Lewis, this naming of worlds and drawing of borders--and differences.) It was the time of commerce and globalism; the "modernists" had the run of the decade, and a historian's dark premonitions about a thwarted civilization wishing to avenge the slights and wounds of centuries would not carry the day. Mr. Lewis was the voice of conservatives, a brooding pessimist, in the time of a sublime faith in things new and untried. It was he, in that 1990 article, who gave us the notion of a "clash of civilizations" that Samuel Huntington would popularize, with due attribution to Bernard Lewis.

"We anoint sages" is a flag on the paragraphic play, there. I stopped counting the number of times "vintage Lewis" appeared in this paean.

I once had an Iranian professor, a very well-regarded historian of Islam, canvass the class for our spotty and inadequate knowledge of the religion in the semester immediately following 9/11. A few bestseller titles got mentioned, but it was only when the phrase "clash of civilizations" was invoked that her smile collapsed in an avalanche of musculature, and out of her mouth spewed a geyser of scorn for Samuel Huntington. Sensing, I think, that the prof's sympathies lay on the other side of the Orientalist divide, someone looking for an easy A shouted, "And what about Bernard Lewis!" The smile retook the thrown. "Bernard Lewis... Yes. No, I don't hate him." She admired his wit and learning and the non-polemical way in which he could make antique land squabbles relevant again. "I don't hate him" would go a long way in that class. And the "clash" line came from him, too.

I didn't know, and am glad to find out from Ajami, that the Muslim Brotherhood found in Lewis's work either a "candid friend or an honest enemy." The guiding intellectual light of that group of misfits, Sayyid Qutb, also spent some time in America, and also made us awaken, with violent impact, to "what went wrong." Nobody here celebrating his birthday, though.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The president has nominated a general for CIA director, which has led to outcry that the president has been too aggressively transfering follicular resources from intelligence to PR:

At this rate, he'll make a play for his legacy in 2008 by naming a third-trimester fetus to the CIA and a wookie to the spokesmanship. "The president is alleged to be engaging in shady activities. Would you characterize this as lying, or as a cover-up?" "RAAWWRRRRAR!"

Posted by Nic Duquette at 8:39 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sorry I didn't better frame the context of my last BNP post. Cinco de Mayo was also local election day in England, and the biggest news from our Atlantic cousins is that far-right and whacko-left fringe parties fared better than any sane person could have hoped. The bit of optimism is that George Galloway's Frankenstein party RESPECT looks to be soon tossing some of its own disposal peasant children into the lake. The self-identified "Trotskyist" groupuscule - the Socialist Workers Party - that has made common cause with them ran a candidate, who doesn't seem to be trying so hard not to resemble Vladimir Lenin, for Bethnal Green South. He lost. RESPECT did, however, take twelve seats in Tower Hamlets.

Just as alarming as this is the come-around success of the British National Party, which manages to be fascist with a special "third way" sheen all its own. Nick Griffin, the leader of this group, has been on trial for violating England's byzantine and self-defeating speech codes: he spoke ill of Muslims; not as practitioners of a faith he finds absurd, but as a "race" eating up all the good jobs and just generally lending an unwanted piebald tone to the pasty island population. It's probably safe to say the BNP inched forward as a result of Griffin's "martyrdom" in the press, and his triumphalist attitude about roiling in a London jury a dilemma of conscience.

Though "brownie" -- who really does do a heckuva job over at Harry's Place -- is much more choleric about the situation:

I fully understand that there are those who perhaps voted for the BNP last night who nevertheless eschew the racism of the BNP and look no further than the simplistic solutions to complex problems that characterize the economic policy of that party: a leaking roof and a giro that won’t stretch to a repair can do funny things to people…and there’s a reason the BNP don’t canvass in Chigwell. That said, for every white, working-class man or woman putting his/her 'X' against England's homemade neo-Nazi candidates, there are tens of thousands – a large proportion of whom are equally disaffected and for whom every day is a struggle to get by – who do not.

That roof on Mr Ahmed’s house at no.53….that leaks too, you know?

The Labour party must, of course, listen to the messages coming out of London’s East End and the former mill towns of the North West, but a pledge to address the concerns of one-time Labour loyalists who have fallen for the oldest trick in the book and bought into the scapegoat-ing of ethnic minorities, need not be accompanied by a mea culpa for the re-emergence of far-right hate politics in these areas. The people responsible for this are those who voted for the BNP and, lest there be any doubt, there is no excuse. If you vote for a party grounded in transparently racist ideology and which promotes nakedly sectarian policies, you legitimize it. For both genuine socialists and those with any progressive pretensions whatsoever, there ought to be no greater crime.

I’m a Labour activist (does it show?) and I’m in no doubt my party should work to regain the trust of erstwhile supporters who last night temporarily forgot what it means to be part of an inclusive, pluralistic and tolerant left. The fact remains that this morning, thousands of ethnic minority families wake to discover that the streets in which their children play are lined by neighbours, many of whom blame them, some of whom hate them.

It's a plaint heard all too often in the US that our politics is the curdled milk of consensus, and our parties virtually indistinguishable from each other. (Markos Moulitsas has a manic-depressive relationship with this: in one instance he laments the absence, or ineffectuality, of an ultra-progressive strain in modern liberalism, while in the next he says "anyone with a "D" in front of their name" is fine by him.)

But Europe demonstrates why the two-party system isn't always such an misfortune... We vote for sleaze-bags, fantasy-merchants, careerists, and lobby-beholden mountebanks with the best and worst of democracies, but the minute the scent of extremism is sniffed in either man or party, you can rest assured that the noisome offender will be returned to American anonymity, where he/it belongs. Inexpensive sarcasm and histrionics aside, we don't elect fascists in this country. (We write books about near-misses in this department, but elect them, no.)

The real trouble is, we do vote in Republican and Democratic candidates who, usually on the local and state levels, make cynical and self-serving alliances with obscure fringe groups that offer cash and additional arms for pulling levers. I can speak from mild experience, having spent some time on the other side of the stump in a state election, that "third" parties become a bane -- and squander whatever pluralist merit their very existence stands for -- when they act as non-transparent endorsements, or riders, on the big guns.

My opponent for New York State Assembly, a six-year incumbent, aligned himself with the Independence Party of New York, on whose executive board sat, up until 2005, a woman by the name of Leonora Fulani. Apart from being a fascinating character unto herself, she's also the protege of a guy called Fred Newman, who looks and sounds and thinks like the Ashley to Galloway's Mary-Kate. You know the routine: Stalinoid bruiser plaguing Union Square today, mind-blanked zombie cult jamboree master making Lyndon LaRouche look charismatic tomorrow.

Anyway, good luck trying to bang on about the sordidness of such link-ups when even Mike Bloomberg and -- gasp! -- Ralph Nader accept the Independence line.

At least the BNP is out front in its reaction, instead of being a front for reaction, something which, I hasten to add, makes the shame all the greater of certain English voters.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:52 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

His debut is more or less The Unforgiven in the outback.

And Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man being released at around the same time. Tom Waits, it's all you now.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

From a website called Spittle & Ink:

That would be a shocking viewpoint. Good call.

Nonetheless, I'm honored. Thanks for the link, Juan. You, too, Sonic. (Sorry, no redirect to HitchensWatch this time. You read Snarksmith enough as it is.)

Posted by Michael Weiss at 9:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I wrote earlier that just because the smoldering golem Dick Cheney opens his mouth doesn't make everything that comes out of it base and false. He was right to point out that the government of Vladimir Putin has become autocratic and suffocating, and he's right to reaffirm those sentiments now, even if the American administration to which he belongs is not immune from similar charges. (Though you will, I hope, notice that the CEO of Bechtel has not been thrown into a cage as the centerpiece of a ludicrous show trial convened to threaten all other hyper-capitalists into prostrating themselves before the almighty state. Even Halliburton is subject to audit.)

The vice president rejected the suggestion that his own remarks had been strident and described them as measured. He pointedly directed reporters to a speech delivered at the same conference by Andrei Illarionov, a former economic adviser to Putin who was sharply critical of the Russian president.

"The story of destruction of freedom in my own country, Russia, is sad," Illarionov said. "The fall of freedom in one country is a blow to world freedom."

If the vice president had kept quiet, or simply reiterated his boss' prized idiocy about the premier's "soul" being visible, and the US continued to pursue strictly warm relations with Russia -- which it is indeed doing on other front besides neoliberal economic policy -- then the same lot that now remonstrate against frank speech would be reaching for their double standard. "Just like with Karimov in Uzbekistan! Shaking hands with Caligula's blood-bolted mitt in order to crackdown on terrorism."

Sometimes it's beneficial when the one you don't like does something you can appreciate. And by the way, it's true that Illiarnov isn't the belle of the oppositional ball he's often made out to be stateside. But even this eXile magazine piece debunking his fiscal sagacity can't satisfactorily answer the accusation that dissent and self-criticism are being snuffed out in Moscow. Again, this is seen as an automatic cue to redirect the gaze westward and ask, "Yeah, well, what about you guys?"

Sounds familiar, dunn'it? The ones who decry Cheney's return to the "Cold War mentality" are more guilty of it themselves.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently, there's one in Israel pulling all the strings:

''Every Arab can buy a house in Hebron and no one will evacuate them, but because we are Jews they evacuate us,'' complained Orit Struk, a Hebron settler who was inside the building during the eviction. ''This is the direction the Olmert government wants to go: expulsion and evacuation of Jews.''

No matter what you do, you just can't help Muslims creeping into the upper echelons of power...

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:49 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You wish. I will say, however, that as an invitee to RNC soirees two years ago (some interesting things did come of my State Assembly run), I remember a few anecdotal gems about Larry Flynt's Hustler Club being overrun by pinstripes and Platinum Cards. This was second only to the one about good, God-fearing Christians in town wanting to see a wholesome Broadway show and coming up with... Fiddler on the Roof. Alfred Molina protested that he had no desire to sing "If I Were a Rich Man" in front of those who'd have trouble parsing the peculiar longing in Tevye's voice. ("He should really consider diversifying. I thought these people knew these things?")

Anyway, big shocker that the head of the CIA has been caught with his hand in the skeet-skeet jar at the Watergate Hotel. Democrats do strip clubs, cosmetics companies, and interns. Republicans do poker games, defense contracts, and whores. Film at 11.

Former Texas congressman Charlie Wilson told NEWSWEEK that he attended two or three poker games with federal contractor Wilkes and his cronies at the Watergate, but saw no hookers and quit going to the games because he was bothered by the cigar smoke. An eyewitness (who asked not to be identified commenting on sensitive matters) told NEWSWEEK that in 1999, Foggo, Cunningham and a former Goss aide and ex-CIA official known as Nine Fingers (identified to NEWSWEEK as Brant Bassett) attended an all-male Wilkes poker party at the Westin Grand Hotel in Washington. (Bassett and lawyers for Wilkes and Cunningham declined to comment; CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano told NEWSWEEK: "Mr. Foggo maintains that government contracts for which he was responsible were properly awarded and administered. If he attended occasional card games with friends over the years, Mr. Foggo insists they were that and nothing more.") The White House is expected to move quickly to replace Goss.

You know who's going to be unemployed soon enough? Vladimir Putin. Some experience in shadow-ops and taking care of these "turf wars," from what I gather.

Then again, I'd like to see Bush appoint George Tenet, just to see him see what he can get away with at this late stage.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Some of the most encouraging news I'd heard all year came from Billy Bragg. He told me he was more appalled by the electability of the BNP, in places like his own hometown of Dorset, than he was by the actual prospect of their being in power, however temporarily and to whatever small degree. Actually, this outcome was good for everybody because it'd reveal what a bunch of yobs and berks and wallies fill the ranks of England's new fascist party. (If one can imagine the fusion of B. Wooster's mental negligibility with Roderick Spode's hate-bursting apoplexy...) And unlike the Reichstag in 1933, there's small chance of the BNP overtaking the left or center-right factions beyond a few shameful anomalies of turnout, and so what could be more instructive than giving them enough rope to hang themselves?

In blows Nick Cohen, co-author of the "Euston Manifesto," like another healing zephyr at Comment Is Free:

Whenever the BNP gets into power, its councillors make the Home Office appear a model of administrative efficiency. In Burnley, one resigned after smashing a bottle into the face of another BNP member. A second left because he didn't have a clue about local government - 'There's meetings that go right over my head and there's little point in me being there,' the poor dear complained. In Stoke-on-Trent, the city's first BNP councillor spoke only twice during two years in office (and one of his 'speeches' was an interruption to ask what 'abstain' meant).

It is the same everywhere the BNP makes gains. Councillors stand as the representatives of poor areas with a glaring need for political help, then don't turn up to council meetings, or are arrested, or decide that what their constituents need most is to hear them deny the Holocaust.

To-day the expending of powers on the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting... And there goes the fucking struggle.

"Oi, what's vees memos doin' talking Arabian, mate? You sayin' that to beat the wogs we gotta speak their language first? Piss off! Back to the streets, boys!"

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:31 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

One way to quicken the psychic healing of Iraq is to send up armed and disarming authoritarians via Western satellite. From Page Six:

May 7, 2006 -- WHO knew they got Comedy Central in Iraq? The cable network's honchos were shocked when they got a request from Iraqi army troops stationed in Baghdad for merchandise from the spoof cop show "Reno 911!" So the obliging folks at Comedy Central sent over a whole load of stuff, and they're sponsoring a photo-essay contest that apparently involves placing the short-shorts worn by the Lt. Dangle character on old statues of Saddam Hussein. Even weirder: "The show is shown on an Arab station with Arabic subtitles," said a rep for the network, "and the Iraqis think it is a serious police drama."

Now I think Zarqawi's galumphing around in New Balance sneaks and gumming up the works in his AK-47 were purposive acts. He was auditioning.

Just wait'll they get Team America.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Putting an end to the notion that Jews control the media satire, Stephen Colbert has already gone down in White House Correspondents Dinner history as the guy whose schtick is eminently laudable or blasphemously kickable by those either desperate for seeing the president sweat, or those wishful that they'd got the job done first. At least, that's my interpretation after having read Salon go Mickey-Kaus-on-gay-cowboys about just how devastatingly funny the O'Reilly Double was on Tuesday. That evening's quarry's may still linger at around 30% approval rating, but the lefty bubble of correct-thinking is the one showing increased signs of desperation. Go figure:

Colbert's deadly [there's another adj. to watch out for: "deadly" -- ed] performance did more than reveal, with devastating [boo-yah -- ed] clarity, how Bush's well-oiled myth machine works. It exposed the mainstream press' pathetic collusion with an administration that has treated it -- and the truth -- with contempt from the moment it took office. Intimidated, coddled, fearful of violating propriety, the press corps that for years dutifully repeated Bush talking points was stunned and horrified when someone dared to reveal that the media emperor had no clothes. Colbert refused to play his dutiful, toothless part in the White House correspondents dinner -- an incestuous, backslapping ritual that should be retired. For that, he had to be marginalized. Voilà: "He wasn't funny."

Please. You had me air-jerking at "fearful of violating propriety." If you've ever been to a journo's home and not seen a copy All The President's Men lying around in either paper or celluloid form, you haven't looked hard enough. And that emperor's been dangling his meat and veg before every cliche-hugging hack since late 1999, when he was still the McCain-baiting governor of Texas.

Witness the new meta-heckle in cyberspace: Colbert must have been funny because the only people who'd say otherwise are administration apparatchiks, or abased and guilty newsmen in thrall to Beltway power. Guys like Lehmann (it's war!) and Cohen must fall into the latter grouping, but hey, anything's possible these days, right? Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of the unamused?

I thought Colbert's performance was leaden and obvious and brokered on one very simply conceit: "Can you believe these schmucks invited me here? What'd they expect?" Therein lies the irony: if anything, the first and most lasting blow was delivered by Bush in the shape of complete -- you might even say "deadly" -- unfamiliarity with Colbert's work. So master of ceremonies became milker of circumstance with a wounded ego, and the status quo has yet to recover...

But it scarcely matters because the bar on political wit has been so lowered in recent days that we actually have to start digging in order to surmount it. Meanwhile, the vast right-wing conspiracy can sit back and relax. The liberal media has got it beat at its own game and happily devours itself in paroxyms of manic cheerleading and silly paranoia.

The Daily Show was never that funny.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:53 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I think it's safe to say Juan Cole is headed for cast membership on Celebrity Big Brother, or maybe Real World: Natanz. His credibility and coherence drain by the second. Hitch has a way of antagonizing such sputtering nudniks back into primordial ooze, and this latest affair occasions no exception. Here is Cole, proudly advertising himself in correspondence with Jacob Weisberg:

For Hitchens then to publish early drafts of something I was working on, and to use them as a basis for a vitriolic attack on me was just wrong as a matter of law. (Again, I do not say this with litigation in mind, only as a matter of principle). It violated my copyright in my manuscript. and scooped me, reducing the value of the material. That the emails had not appeared publicly, and were not intended to be so, removes considerations of fair use. I append below, purely for your information, the reaction I got to all this from a friendly attorney.

Wrong as a matter of law bespeaks crime by any standard of language not languishing in intensive care. And yet in the next parenthetical breath we're told that only "principle" is at stake. Going beyond the law may not necessarily result in litigation, but it is quite distinct from a mere lapse in one's ethical or moral judgment. He says one thing in print, and then -- whisk! -- it erases itself from the page of time with the simple addition of new print. Also, what copyright and what manuscript? If such things were violated or pilfered, wouldn't it be the obvious next step for someone so put out as to carry this issue to magazine higher-ups to pursue civil action? And wouldn't it only then make sense to have a "friendly attorney" append his professional opinion? Cole issues a vague threat, mousily squeaks away from it, then returns to present it again under a different heading. Even Tehran's nuclear diplomacy is less erratic than this.

Another curious thing about this missive... Cole had previously argued that it was unfair for him to be held accountable for the excerpts from Gulf 2000 because it is understood by the participants in that forum that any and all statements made therein are subject to cancellation and revision. In other words, the e-mails are rough drafts, first responses, and brain-farts. This makes it quite telling that Cole should now cry he's been "scooped" by Hitchens. "Scooped" suggests being beaten to the punch on viable information. Assuming we are to take him at face value in the above (which he thought impressive enough to reprint on his own website), it's clear Cole had no intention of improving on his original translation of Ahmadinejad until that translation was used against him, and the poverty of its content made to collapse his already wobbly proficiency in Farsi. If he wanted to change anything, he'd stick to accusing Hitchens of using old and negligible garbage against him. But he doesn't.

So once more we're confronted with someone who contradicts himself from one sentence to the next, and then invites all to inspect the evidence, like a triumphant child after an especially robust bowel movement. Either that or Cole's grasp of vocabulary and logic in any tongue is enough to make the least discriminating mullah lament so shabby an unsolicited defender in the West.

EARLIER: Hitch and Cole [Snarksmith]

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:56 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

A friend and I have a running game of collecting all news stories that either sound like they were written by the staff of The Onion, or were written by them. China famously mistook a new Capitol stadium design as legit. Then America's finest news source said that women in Katrina-ravaged New Orleans were flashing their tits to get rescue workers to spirit them out of the drink. (They actually did do this after the satire was composed and printed.) So at a time when media parody has begn to dovetail seamlessly into media self-parody, it apparently takes a comedian who plays an already wildly hilarious sphincter muscle of a cable commentator to set us straight. Chris Lehmann, writing in the New York Observer, already tinkled on Stephen Colbert's morning-after parade, which, consisting mainly of overinflated balloons in the blogosphere, loudly honored him for puncturing his executive host before a captive audience. The reception was slightly different on the ground:

One D.C. bureau chief for a major paper was indeed chortling gleefully at nearly every breath Mr. Colbert drew on the dais; others were more restrained, most likely because the act was the opposite of ballsy confrontation. Safely delivered all in the stentorian, arrogant voice of Mr. Colbert’s late-night Bill O’Reilly knockoff persona, the material came off as shrill and airless, with little time or space left for jokes to sink in and seduce the listener before the next round of hectoring began.

Now comes Richard Cohen at the Washington Post, who says, inter alia, Colbert isn't a hero of sharp humor:

Why are you wasting my time with Colbert, I hear you ask. Because he is representative of what too often passes for political courage, not to mention wit, in this country. His defenders -- and they are all over the blogosphere -- will tell you he spoke truth to power. This is a tired phrase, as we all know, but when it was fresh and meaningful it suggested repercussions, consequences -- maybe even death in some countries. When you spoke truth to power you took the distinct chance that power would smite you, toss you into a dungeon or -- if you're at work -- take away your office.

The mind reels. Our celebrity dissidents don't suffer for the truth?

Bill Maher had his network series cancelled after Disney's sponsors didn't gel to the idea of Al Qaeda Captains Courageous being ventilated two weeks after 9/11. Where stands that moral pigmy Natan Sharansky now? John Stewart may have talked a serious game about what "hurts" America, but ask him what happened to the funny once CNN's lineup has been reshuffled and he'll tell you, hey, his show leads into one about prank-calling muppets. Just telling jokes, folks! Nothing to read into here! Rafiq Hariri must have wandered too far astray of that escape hatch....

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Many would argue that the US currently has negative credibility to be finding faults with the democratic rigmarole of other countries, especially those allied to it in the war on terror and with which it had once been engaged in a rather frigid geopolitical standoff.

The trouble with such anxiety over the tu quoque response, which I see the Kremlin wasted no time in issuing, is that it falls victim to its own warnings of one-sidedness. Fact: Russia has backslid into autocracy and statism since Vladimir Putin became president. Is this in the least changed by its having been declared by an American vice president whose own handle on transparent conduct, free enterprise unstained by the lipstick of the sweetheart deal, and civil liberties is tenuous at best? Of course not. Add to this a sadly forgotten foonote in the long career of the Darth Vader of the West Wing: Dick Cheney was one of the only members of the Ford administration to inveigh against the disinvitation of Aleksandr Solzhenistyn to the White House at a particularly tender moment in U.S.-Soviet relations. Henry Kissinger didn't want to upset Breshnev, and the author of the Gulag Archipelago had to retire his tux. One can say that this just goes to prove Cheney's a loose cannon on the "realism" front, but then one would be in no position to lecture about callous pragmatism when it is applied domestically.

"In many areas of civil society — from religion and the news media, to advocacy groups and political parties — the government has unfairly and improperly restricted the rights of her people," Mr. Cheney said in a speech to European leaders in Lithuania's capital, Vilnius. "Other actions by the Russian government have been counterproductive, and could begin to affect relations with other countries."

Jimmy Carter or Amnesty International wouldn't have said it better themselves.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:35 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Blogs today are laughing off denials of alcohol being the sense-numbing cause for Patrick Kennedy's car trouble. Now it looks as if maybe he was popping Ambien after all, albeit in Rip Van Winkle doses. But what's "pain medication" got to do with things?

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Rep. Patrick Kennedy will enter rehab for addiction to prescription pain medication Friday evening after a highly publicized car crash near the Capitol.

Demerol, Vicadin, Morphine? I'd think having Teddy as a father qualifies as its own Betty Ford rubric.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:11 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Nick Gillespie debated Lamar Alexander on the O'Reilly Factor, and the hilarious emails Gillespie got afterward are worth reading in their entirety. According to O'Reilly watchers, the Reason magazine honcho is a wop, a liberal, a ultra-left nut-job, a communist, a homosexual, a pedophile, and not particularly reasoning. El dios bendice América.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 8:59 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I've observed for a long time that women's clothing sizes have been deflating (or inflating, depending on whether your observational frame perceives label numbers or your hips to be the object in motion). Now the Boston Globe has noticed the trend, largely because it's accelerated as retailers try to convince women that they're skinnier shopping with them.

Inside the dressing room at Ann Taylor, Wendy Chao found herself at a loss.

''I tried on a size 0 skirt and it was too big," said Chao, a 30-year-old graduate student of molecular biology at Harvard University. ''To me, a size 0 is antimatter; it's something devoid of any physical reality."

Chao was already mystified by how she'd shrunk from a size 8 in high school to a size 2 today, despite gaining 15 pounds in the interim. But now at size 0, she realized something curious was afoot...

Bridgette Raes, an image and style consultant in New York.. notes that the sizes double zero and extra, extra small available at stores like Banana Republic and Old Navy are essentially negative sizes. Instead of putting a -2 size on the label, manufacturers use 00, which is the same thing.

I'm tempted to launch a screed about how our society has become addicted to number fudging -- I could daisy-chain Enron, the federal budget, inflation of money, clothing and grades -- but screw it. I've seen this coming since my mother the wiry long-distance runner went up three sizes on a vacation to Montreal, and no rant of mine could say anything that hasn't been said before. Instead, consider this: how many hipsters will start gaining those late-30s pounds before some yet unborn ironic shirt shop for the salt-and-pepper set starts sizing in complex numbers? If you can shed pounds until you fall to the square root of a negative number, well, hell, you must be skinny.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 8:41 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'm going to have to go ahead and say that the jury's still out on this one. Judging by Trailer 2 for the new Blueboy installment, Lex has gone swishy vaudevillean, Lois lacks that angular urban quality that made her a dangerous piece of shiksappeal, and the Man of Steel himself is an Abercrombie and Fitch cipher stuffed into too many pounds of foam rubber. Not that the original series didn't have its moments of high camp and benday dot bizarreness.

Swooping in to Niagara Falls to save that kid with the bad eighties hair, over the swelling Nietzcheesy bombast of John Williams' theme music: "Of course he's Jewish." Actually, one of my dad's relatives did, in fact, change his name from Weiss to Kent, proving Michael Chabon's apercu in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay that all superheroes -- especially Superman -- were in the tribe. ("Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.")

Still, some examples of this winking style overworked the eyelids, even for the celluloiding of a medium that once came with its own Congressional probes into the ambiguous surplus mateyness of certain sidekicks and wards. In Superman II, in prison, Lex Luther in the laundry room: "I want my Liberace records back." Yeah, yeah. And a babe like Ms. Tessmacher who looked like she never got mached. He'd have moved to New Hampshire by now, plotting Antique World Domination, for all that repression still seems relevant to the CGI-ed climacteric.

Still, in shimmies Kevin Spacey with his meta-narratives and self-deconstructing Dr. Evil schtick, and pallid Bushisms ("Bring it on!"), and it's enough to make you wonder that, in the age of sacred terror, United 93, and NYFD claims to bravery, what energy remains for searching the sky for saviors?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:00 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Jacob Weisberg thinks immigrants don't need the added difficulty in their lives of mastering the national anthem, which, he dryly observes, isn't mastered by any nameable living American.

Stop 50 people on the street of any American city, and you would be shocked to find one who could begin the second verse:

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?

And here I thought I was special because I knew Francis Scott Key leant his first two names to the author of The Great Gatsby, who was a distant relation (both in temporal and geneaological respects.)

The discarded cultural fracas of the Gingrich years -- whether we're a mono-lingual or bi-lingual country -- takes an interesting turn in the question as to whether Spanish speakers ought to a) learn English fluently, b) learn it well enough to feel stirred by the (tenth-rate) poetry of the "Star-Spangled Banner," or c) just learn that hoary tune by rote.

I fully agree that a transplant to French shores ought to, after a certain point, make some attempt to learn his adopted land's idiom. I also think it's just good etiquette that the same be not so much asked as expected of immigrants to the United States. Meeting someone who's lived here for decades and can't order a meal at a restaurant without a Fodor's or a pocket dictionary is a pretty sad spectacle indeed. It falls under the category of manners, not legislation. (And not that an E for Effort necessarily spells mutual intelligibility: when I was in Mexico two summers ago, I tried out my Spanish on the jetski rental-atti. I was gypped and didn't know why until a smiling beachgoer -- herself from Mexico City and capable of better King's English than I am -- kindly informed me that I'd be mistaking "five" for "fifteen." That would explain the price gauge, all right, if not quite excuse my stalled Yamaha out in the middle of Acapulco Bay. But still. Lo siento and my bad and all that.)

Actually, the language war is pretty silly in itself when you consider that English was arbitrarily chosen by the Founders as the "official" dialect of the ex-colonies, which were all nursing a rather raw wound on all things Anglophone. What was one of the other considered languages? Hebrew -- which makes you wonder how self-evident certain truths might have looked if the U.S. glorified life, liberty and the pursuit of retail electronics equipment, discounted because you have a nice face.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:27 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

And pretend like it doesn't give a shit what he does. That'd be a start to getting the rest of us to do likewise.
A co-editor at Jewcy just told me the whole week-long dunk leading up to the disconnection of Blaine's breathing apparatus is a kind of "method" acting for the self-serious stuntsman. But method actors don't stay in character for, like, 10,080 times the amount of actual performance required of them. They go about double. That means 18 minutes with pumped-in oxygen, 9 with tough little magician bronchial endurance. By the time you hopped in a cab from, say, East 31st street (my old apartment) to Lincoln Center, you'd have missed the whole shebang. Good. Fuck you for caring.

My other suggestion is, when he falls asleep (it'll happen eventually), we sneak over there and paste all around his bubble some photo-transparent backgrounds of a city immolated by nuclear holocaust. Then we skedaddle and let him wake up to End Days, see if he thinks his new post-apocalyptic roach overlords aren't too bright to buy into the idiotic PR he's sold us for years.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:02 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Behind every great man, there's a schtuppable helpmeet whose distorted features will amount to the GDP of small nations.

Dora Maar, who was also an artist, is said to have helped with the execution of Picasso's Guernica, his masterpiece depicting the horror of the Spanish Civil War.

We talk about art forgery like it's a high crime, but is the fact that this man could coin his own currency by doodling on cocktail napkins less than a misdemeanor?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:35 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here's how one cunning linguist, the hyperion to Juan Cole's satyr, responded to an accusation that his transliteration skills were not up to snuff:

A patient confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957, at one of our last meetings, we both realized with amused dismay that despite my frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian verse. Upon being challenged to read Eugene Onegin aloud, he started to do this with great gusto, garbling every second word and turning Pushkin's iambic line into a kind of spastic anapaest with a lot of jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that utterly jumbled the rhythm and soon had us both in stitches.

Let aside for the nonce the fact that Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson were "indeed old friends," and that Hitch would sooner agree to a vow of lifelong teetotalism before suffering the dour and po-faced company of Professor Cole for more than half an hour or so. We get a sense of the moral turpitude involved in someone's own peculiar abilities as a dragoman when, challenged as to the authenticity of his own Persian Version of declamation against Israel, we find him resorting to tactics like this:

Well, I don't think it is any secret that Hitchens has for some time had a very serious and debilitating drinking problem. He once showed up drunk to a talk I gave and heckled me. I can only imagine that he was deep in his cups when he wrote, or had some far Rightwing think tank write, his current piece of yellow journalism. I am sorry to witness the ruin of a once-fine journalistic mind.

Cole makes a boast of not deigning to refute "point by point" the original Slate essay that kickstarted this heavily trafficked cyber-smackdown; a convenient play on his part because his whole defense rests upon the difference between "off" and "page" and the one between "map" and "time" in the preferred clerical metaphor for making the Jewish state disappear. Here's what he says:

But the actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not imply military action, or killing anyone at all. The second reason is that it is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted Khomeini that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the page of time." It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks.

Well, let us agree at once that a medieval poem can't have alluded to "tanks" doing the serious spadework of annihilation any more than the word "genocide" can have appeared in Exodus, though surely any modern exgete recognizes what happened to the Pharaonic Egyptians as exactly that. It also seems to me that someone who isn't sure of the provenance of such an evocative turn of phrase as "wiped from the page of time" -- "probably" won't cut it in any dissertation bibliography I can think of -- is qualified to make an interpretation as to its "almost metaphysical" or mythopoetic or reifiable connotation.

Also, the above extract from Cole leans against an open door because this is what Hitchens alleged:

Quite possibly, "wiped off the map" is slightly too free a translation of what [Khomeini] originally said, and what it is mandatory for his followers to repeat. So, I give it below, in Persian and in English, and let you be the judge:

Esrail ghiyam-e mossalahaane bar zed-e mamaalek-e eslami nemoodeh ast va bar doval va mamaalek-eeslami ghal-o-gham aan lazem ast.

My source here is none other than a volume published by the Institute for Imam Khomeini. Here is the translation:

Israel has declared armed struggle against Islamic countries and its destruction is a must for all governments and nations of Islam.

This is especially important, and is also the reason for the wide currency given to the statement: It is making something into a matter of religious duty. The term "ghal-o-gham" is an extremely strong and unambivalent one, of which a close equivalent rendering would be "annihilate."

Now Cole claims he never referred to this particular speech, which was also shrewd of him because the Institute for Imam Khomeini is, one would imagine, a pretty forbidding source to quibble with. His gripe is with the supposed imprecision of the translation of that "map" phrase, whether passed through the megaphone of Ahmadinejad, or the lips Khomenei, or the original quill of whatever ostensible Omar Khayyam figure may have contrived it.

The dispute, then, boils down to not even how proficient Cole is in the "out of" language so much as how literate he is in the "in to" one. Reputation and past behavior matter, as evidenced by Cole's posting of gruesome war photographs, a non sequitur he hopes will magically transport the current debate with Hitchens from Iran to Iraq (either that or geography is another on a list of heavily mounting remedial studies for him to take up.) So perhaps it's worth establishing that the Middle East "expert" has had some difficulties in English before. This is what Cole wrote after the journalist Steven Vincent was murdered in Iraq, and while Vincent's widow -- the brave Lisa Ramaci-Vincent, whom I had the honor to meet at our Solidarity With Denmark rally -- was still in mourning:

Was American journalist Steve Vincent killed in Basra as part of an honor killing? He was romantically involved with his Iraqi interpreter, who was shot 4 times. If her clan thought she was shaming them by appearing to be having an affair outside wedlock with an American male, they might well have decided to end it. In Mediterranean culture, a man's honor tends to be wrought up with his ability to protect his womenfolk from seduction by strange men. Where a woman of the family sleeps around, it brings enormous shame on her father, brothers and cousins, and it is not unknown for them to kill her. These sentiments and this sort of behavior tend to be rural and to hold among the uneducated, but are not unknown in urban areas. Vincent did not know anything serious about Middle Eastern culture and was aggressive about criticizing what he could see of it on the surface, and if he was behaving in the way the Telegraph article describes, he was acting in an extremely dangerous manner.

One imagines the Arabic idiom for "he was asking for it" escaping out the side of Cole's mouth. But mark the sequel. Being challenged by Mrs. Ramaci-Vincent on the suprising confidence displayed -- yet curiously absent from that Telegraph article -- in as intelligible a statement as "he was romantically involved with his Iraqi interpreter..." Cole responded with this:

Note that I did not say, as Mrs. Vincent assumes, that he was sleeping with his interpreter, Nur al-Khal. That he was romantically involved with her is obvious from his blog, where he calls her "Leyla". I don't have any interest in their personal lives per se, but this relationship may have had something to do with his death and so is fair game for mention.

You see here why I've yet to refer to Cole as "Juan" on this blog. Apparently, it'd make me romantically involved with him, which, you'll note, is in a whole other semantic league from "having an affair" with him, or simply "fucking" him. (I'd rather be erased from the page of time, to be honest.)

Basic composition is compulsory for first-year undergraduates at the University of Michigan. Tenured professors, on the other hand, are evidently allowed some wiggle room in this department.

To recur, then, to the intial dispute: "vanish from the page of time" v. "wiped off the map." Which would you rather be, on a good day?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a nice way to end a review:

Who would have thought that, at the peak of the conservative movement's political success, its founding fathers would recoil from the Frankenstein's monster they created and end up as troubled heretics?

Jacob Heilbrunn gulps down -- with minor hiccups -- Professor Jeffrey Hart's overchewed masterpiece of what might have been and what has been of American conservatism. Trouble is, the dynamism of the Buckleyite agenda was always bound to turn to this sort of pessimism and dyspepsia once godlessness and Communism were defeated. Ronald Reagan -- still very much the eidolon of old-guard nostalgia on the right -- can't exactly be described as tightfisted and puritanical in his spending patterns and equally high-flown rhetoric about the blessings of freedom and democracy. So what's the central difference between him and Bush the Imposter?

One of them, it seems to me, is that the latter's evangelism is only as distasteful as it is hands-dirtying and, well, lower class. The calcified tradition of God and Man at Yale was never going to crust off to the Boomer princeling who gave us Sloshed and Hazed at Same. Witness in Bush the emergence of the first downwardly-mobile Republican president in history: the checking account is just as robust, but the style is distinctly more vulgate than daddy's. "Of the people," as Jeeves would call it. And even on the fetish of masculinity that the right so prizes in its commanders-in-chief, Bush never cut so rugged a figure clearing his brush in Crawford as the Gipper mounted on horseback did pretending to either round up a few rapscallion stragglers at the O.K. Corral, or liberate a Nazi death camp, in California. Reagan was no artistocratic intellectual, but he made a boast of skewering those that weren't on his own side. The old joke among the professoriat in 1984: "How did he win? No one I know voted for him." Bush doesn't even enter the arena as a combatant in the skirmishes of political correctness and kulturkampf (though his underlings do in recondite and roundabout ways.) And consider the "compassion" trope to his conservatism. Liberals like to discount this in light of the bombast and hauteur on other fronts, but Bush talks of treating AIDS in Africa and does more toward this end than his Democratic predecessor ever did. (A tipping point is reached when even Sir Bob Geldoff admits as much.) C. Everett Koop had to corner Reagan in a custodial closet during a bomb scare to get him to even acknowledge the epidemic, in his own country, in public. Bush appointed the first black secretary of state and the first black female secretary of state, in tandem. Reagan gave the world "constructive engagement" on apartheid South Africa.

Shall we continue to speak of an Oedipal rejection as against an expected and necessary and healthy civil war within the ranks of modern conservatism? (Anyone remember Harriet Miers? David Frum practically dispatched the fam to Fort Sumpter once he realized the former boss had finally gone one step too far.) In the age of the South Park conservative, the neocon, Leo-con, and the "crunchy con," where does that leave the empurpled, tweed-stuffed gentlemen of yore? Thundering and grumbling and nodding off in their sherry, at the club which would no longer have them as members.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Andrew Sullivan has always struck me as a culture critic masquerading as a political pundit. In this sense, the parallels between Orwell and him seem less kitsch and hand-me-down, and more unavoidable.

Despite the bilious loathing of the current American administration (bound by loyalty and principle to 10 Downing) and the current American mass culture (hey, our sleazoid pols don't go on Celebrity Big Brother) among our Atlantic cousins, there exists an alliance not necessarily entangling so much as natural:

I don’t mean simply the number of San Franciscans downloading Ricky Gervais podcasts, or the ubiquity in American pop culture of reality television created in Britain, or even the cross-cultural franchises of Harry Potter, Tolkien or The Simpsons. I mean rather a residual, tenacious sense that the individual is responsible for his own destiny. Some 82% of Americans ascribe lack of success in life to the individual rather than to society and 75% of Brits share this view.

Even on religion, the differences are less profound than you might think. Yes, Americans are much more observant, but not that much more godly. In fact 94% of Americans believe in God; but 61% of Brits do — not exactly the atheistic society sometimes described. Some 30% of Americans believe abortion is never justifiable, down 3% since 1990; 25% of Brits agree — up 6% in the same period.

The number of Americans who tell pollsters that religion is “not very important??? in their lives has doubled from 7% to 14% since 1965. A convergence? Bush isn’t the only national leader who speaks of God. And there’s no member of the American cabinet who won’t say if she is in Opus Dei.

Robert Conquest has said that the meeting point is the "law-and-liberty" tradition both countries share. It has nothing to do with written v. unwritten doctrines of law. The common "constitution" is in the soil and in the nerve fiber. Anti-Americanism in this case is just narcissism of the small difference.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Back to a dark, solitary hole, anyway. Zacharaias Moussaoui will not be executed. With his typical aplomb, Moussaoui shouted "America, you lost!" as the sentence was read. How long will it take for FOX to get this man a talk show?

Posted by Nic Duquette at 11:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Drawing on everybody's favorite Simpsonism, Slate's throwaway Doonesbury-affiliated poll today asks: is Bush the "worst president ever"? Like mose internet polls, it's a meaningless throwaway, but it's interesting to see that 80% of respondents ranked Bush below Buchanan and Hoover. Really, folks?

For those who deny any chance that Bush will be remembered better than he's generally thought of, his much-cited poll numbers are still beating the 25% Truman hit after he fire MacArthur. It would be nicely symmetrical if our modern-day psuedofolksy tough-guy president recovered in history's opinion after taking a beating for not firing a crochety, loose cannon military commander undermining the viability of his war in spite of his talents.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 8:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Brendan O'Neill makes a pretty persuasive case at Reason:

Bin Laden’s justifications for 9/11 also changed in tune with Western theories. At first, in September 2001, he disavowed responsibility for 9/11, instead pinning the blame on some dastardly conspiracy within America itself. He talked about “a government within the government in the United States??? that may have facilitated the attacks because “there are intelligence agencies in the U.S. which require billions of dollars of funds from the Congress and the government every year.??? Such theories will sound familiar to anyone who happened upon conspiracy theory Web sites or some of the wackier blogs in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

Bin Laden also said, “It is all too clear, then, who benefits most from stirring up this war and bloodshed: the merchants of war who direct world policy from behind the scenes.??? This is also a popular idea in the blogosphere: that a wicked cabal led by Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney (both of whom have big business links) is leading America to war. In his latest statement bin Laden spells out who these “merchants of war??? are, describing Iraq as “the ill-omened plan of the four—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.??? He has also adopted the “war for oil??? argument of various anti-war bloggers, arguing that the “black gold blinded??? Bush.

Bin Laden frequently drops the names of the anti-war blogosphere’s favorite authors and activists. In October 2004 he advised the White House to read “Robert Fisk, who is a fellow [Westerner] and a co-religionist of yours, but one whom I consider unbiased.??? In the same statement bin Laden chastised Bush for leaving “50,000 of his citizens in the two towers??? because he considered “a little girl’s story about a goat and its butting [to be] more important than dealing with airplanes and their butting into skyscrapers.??? This reads like a reference to Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which opens with footage of Bush reading The Pet Goat to a classroom of children on the morning of 9/11. Did bin Laden watch a pirate DVD of Fahrenheit 9/11? Or did he read about the Pet Goat incident on the Web, where images of Bush’s uncomfortable classroom performance were widely available even before Moore’s film was released?

The best comparison between Osama and the macabre and loony blogosphere is the unblinking contradictions both will resort to in advancing their "theories." If a "government within the government" plotted 9/11, then it makes perfect sense for Bush to have gone noodle-limp in front of My Pet Goat, which was really then a reaction of met expectation, not of shock and impotence. (Frankly, the Bush-knew trope has probably only jumped the shark because its proponents eventually figured it out ups the executive IQ by an unattractive margin.)

Posted by Michael Weiss at 9:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

The news cycle on John Kenneth Galbraith's death has already ebbed back into the sea, but I don't think it would be inappropriate for me to chime in on the man and his life today, briefly. Despite his colossal influence on the politics of his day and the intellectual life of ours, Galbraith has been gone from significant public attention for quite some time now, to the extent that I was surprised to read he had so recently been alive.

I am no expert on the man or his ideas, but I can attest that most of the obituaries published about him have been unfairly dismissive. He was not a sociologist or a moralist masquerading as an economist; he was an economist, but one of the last to see their role as one of reasoned argument and public advocacy over intricate, math-driven modeling. In that sense, his work is more like a philosopher's than the present-day idea of economic study, but then so is Adam Smith. The shift in focus from speculative reasoning into more scientific number-crunching has taken economics from the pan of influential bullshit into the fire of bad data and improbable statistical assumptions, with pros and cons either way. Suffice to say that Galbraith and George Akerlof are really the last two geniuses to resist quantification over simple, powerful idea.

Galbraith wrote many words and threw out many ideas, some of them ridiculous. His biggest contribution -- in my opinion, anyway, was the observation that institutions do not function according to classical economic assumptions. Where small businessmen and workers want to maximize their earnings, corporate technocrats want to increase their own status, and that comes by expanding their domain rather than increasing profitability. As such, huge companies with monopoly power do not trim down to maximize their earnings, but bloat into middle management kudzu. The upshot -- in Galbraith's view, anyway -- was that government should be active in breaking up large firms in competitive industries and should nationalize industries that are naturally monopolistic, such as transit and telecommunications.

Of course, Galbraith's criticisms were based on the assumption that public sector technocrats would somehow be seeking the public good rather than their own divisional sprawl, an optimistic view of democratic governance few subscribe to anymore. Paul Krugman made the point somewhat more gracefully in his book Peddling Prosperity, where he argued that with a "natural monopoly" like railroads, it's not entirely obvious from the get-go whether more of society's resources would be wasted on a bumbling, corrupt government or a blob-like private technocracy, so talk of privatization creating competition was silly. That Paul Krugman adopted Galbraith's arguments and made them more moderate and less hectoring shows how difficult Galbraith could be if he disagreed with you.

But Galbraith's view of government should be forgivable to his conservative enemies. Even though he was an unabashed leftist, it was for the sake of the same communitarian ethos that drives people to faith-based politicians and anti-government nutjobs. Right or left, justifiably or un-, we fear that our natural human bonds will be devoured by institutions with purpose and intertia independent of their individual members, and seek equally strong institutions to stop the creep.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 7:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Give the people enough wiggle room to line the streets and chant slogans, and don't be surprised if the slogans chanted aren't the ones you scripted.

The workers who had shown up at the ex-U.S. embassy due the Islamic regime's threats and intimidation of the loss of their jobs were meant to be nothing more than window-dressing for the Islamic regime's own self-promotion. They had been told to chant slogans about "nuclear power is our absolute right"; instead however, in defiance of their oppressors, they began chanting slogans such as: "Incompetent labor minister, resign, resign, strike, strike...is our absolute right" or "Imprisoned worker must be freed" or "Let go of the Palestinians and start thinking about us." At this point the regime's plans for a pro-regime seeming demonstration was dashed.

"Let go of the Palestinians and start thinking about us," you won't even find at Union Square.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:15 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Rev. Jim Wallis and his religious left, Peter Beinart and his Cold War left, now Nelson Lichtenstein and his May Day ethnic trade union left. Where the hell is Auden when you need him?

As in the crucial struggles that began more than a century ago, today's marches have forged a link among working-class aspiration, celebrations of ethnic identity, and insistence on full American citizenship. It's an explosive combination. And it could revive and reshape liberal politics in our time.

Could do. Nickel and Dimed meets Caesar Chavez. But it could also become just another exploited canard of liberal populism and conservative economic isolationism. How many Latino walk-outs are stumping for the material gains of trade unionism as against the social inclusion that, by rights, should attend their current material condition?

Nary a Haymarket sentiment on the streets today. What these protestors want is the ability to gentrify through the permanence of a situation that might be dubbed "actually existing citizenship."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

E.J. Dionne, author of Why Americans Hate Politics, wrote another book about a decade ago entitled, They Only Look Dead: Why Progressives Will Dominate the Next Political Era. Needless to say, the Washington Post columnist was a far more astute chronicler of proven disaffection than he was prophet of renewed optimism.

Now The New Republic's Peter Beinart has come along with his own forward-looking prognosis for the new American century, tricked out in book form as The Good Fight: Why Liberals — and Only Liberals — Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, and as last weekend's New York Times' essay "The Rehabilitation of the Cold War Liberal." There's quite a lot of fascinating stuff in Beinart's writing, which asserts that a muscular Democratic foreign policy is not by no means an oxymoron and, indeed, used to be a regnant paradigm in the pre-Reagan era of the Cold War. (Vietnam, to cite one unencouraging example of "hard Wilsonianism" within the actual party of Wilson, is historically classified as a hideous "liberal" war. It's also increasingly acknowledged by everyone except Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. -- and I don't envy him the nightsweats he must experience wondering if he ever even accidentally strayed from the orthodox court chronicles of Camelot -- as Kennedy's farewell gift to international relations.)

Anyway, Beinart's high estimation of Reinhold Niebuhr and George Kennan is worthy and understandable. Kennan especially had penetrated the fetid fumes of Stalinism -- and the personality cult of its architect -- right from the start of his career in the State Department, and straight on through his ambassadorships in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. (This is why The Weekly Standard wrote a fawning obituary of him.) Kennan's insights into Marshall-era diplomacy with Western Europe, and the ramifications of the fallout between Tito and the Cominform, are still deemed exemplars of state-actor psychology.

I would add to the list of tough, smart liberals the indispensible William Bullitt, a simultaneous anti-fascist and anti-communist, whose warnings about what the Kremlin Gorgon would do to Eastern Europe, and the larger Allied effort, during World War II went unheeded by Franklin Roosevelt, who, unlike his successor, thought Stalin was an fair-minded and agreeable sort of tyrant. Also, Henry "Scoop" Jackson may be considered the "father of us all" to a different contemporary sodality of Washington "PLU" society entirely, but it was as a Democrat that he went to his grave. The same can easily be said of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

Still, there are problems -- largely having to do with historic ironies -- in the "what now?" implications of Beinart's excavation of the past...

To address just one:

Kennan believed America's great advantage in the cold war was that the Soviet Union constituted an empire, which held its alliances together by force. By contrast, he argued, if the United States resisted the imperial temptation and built alliances that respected foreign nationalism, those alliances would endure. In 1947, when the Truman administration announced the Marshall Plan to help rebuild postwar Western Europe, he resisted using the aid to recast European economies in America's image. Indeed, his administration assisted socialist parties, recognizing that while they might not always prove ideologically pliant, they represented home-grown bulwarks against Soviet power. As one Truman State Department official put it, America should seek European allies "strong enough to say no both to the Soviet Union and the United States, if our actions should seem so to require."

For conservatives, this willingness to indulge governments that would not bend fully to American principles and American wishes was yet another sign that Americans did not truly believe in the righteousness of their cause. While Kennan saw the Soviet empire as brittle, Burnham envied its lockstep unity and urged America to build its own equivalent. "The reality," he wrote, "is that the only alternative to the communist World Empire is an American Empire, which will be, if not literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control."

It can't be said that the current crop of conservatives -- bolstered by "high self-esteem" or triumphalism about the extirpation of superpower Communism -- have not been seeding old and new socialist movements in the Middle East which find a common enemy in jihadism. Both the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Kurdistani Democratic Party have strong Marxist traditions and have gone to war with each other because of various "breaks" within, and realignments of, those traditions. The Iraqi trade unions -- or "trades union," to use the argot of the old British left -- are back in the business of criticizing business, thanks to the removal of the Ba'ath. And the Iraqi Communist presses -- unimpeded in their ability to inveigh against reconstruction efforts and a continued coalitional presence -- are rolling once again for the first time in three decades. (Nor can the two year-old sneer of pundits like Mark Danner that the US would never allow such elements to really come to power be taken seriously now that Iraq's first democratically elected president is a member of the Socialist International.) So a schema shift, of sorts, has occurred within the US conservative establishment, or at least within the wing of it that is said to have been "hijacked" by a faction to which William F. Buckley and George Will and Pat Buchanan were never a party.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:20 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

The callipygian TrimSpa bimbo just got one step closer to keeping her gazillions. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of her dead husband's probate case heading to federal court.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall of the meeting that established Clarence Thomas would not be the one to write the majority opinion this go-round.

"I think I'd have an unique perspective in adjudicating Ms., uh, Ms. Smith's plaint because I'm familiar --"

"Oh, we know what you think, Thomas!"

"Eat a dick, Souter!"

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:40 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Socialist Workers Party will tell you it's spook central in Belarus these days, what with bourgeois capitalists agitating against the dictatorship of Lukashenko. Now what better way for bourgeois capitalists to fly their counter-revolutionary banner than with -- a May Day parade!

The May Day march in the Belarus capital, Minsk - sanctioned by the city's officials - was nominally used to call for an end to short-term labour contracts.

But the main focus of the protest was to call for the release of opposition leader Alexander Milinkevich and other activists who were jailed for up to 15 days last week.

"Freedom for Milinkevich!" marchers shouted as they passed along the approved route, the AFP news agency reported.

"Not all our friends are here today. Many are behind bars," Alexander Dobrovolsky of the United Civic Party told protesters. "We need solidarity to keep us together every day."

I think I'm beginning to see the left's deep swoon over Langley.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:14 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

Via Normblog: The UN's World Food Program is cutting food rations for 6 million Darfurians due to a lack of budget. The caloric distribution will be halved from 2,100 per day to 1,050, which means Jennifer Aniston might try fleeing from helicopter gunships and vehicular desert marauders to stay lean, lissome and castable.

"This is one of the hardest decisions I have ever made. Haven't the people of Darfur suffered enough? Aren't we adding insult to injury?" WFP Executive Director James Morris said.

"This is a measure we should simply never have to take," said Morris, who heads the world's largest food aid agency, feeding 90 million people worldwide.

[...]

"There is probably some donor fatigue. The conflict has been going on a long time. And there is no solution in sight," Berthiaume said.

The United States was the largest donor at $188 million, it said, while Italy was the only major European country to contribute so far ($1.2 million).

"Donor fatigue." I like that. But only $1.2 million? Doesn't Silvio have some extra lire to toss around these days? And wassup with France, Germany, China, and Russia? Do they think human fossils putresce into petroleum faster than those of dinosaurs?

Hey, I got it: How about Donald Rumsfeld's old corporate haunt Amylin Pharmaceuticals gets awarded a no-bid contract to restock the Al-Shifa drug factory Clinton rocketed into rubble in 1998 in his own distraction from the hunt for presidue on Monica's blue dress? Too iffy, PR-wise? Yeah, probably right.

Let's just ship the garbage we give to Staten Island to Darfur and have done with it already. Oh, and Geraldo can embed with the janjaweed.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is funny. A site called "HitchensWatch," based out of Auckland, plumbs the depths of Christopher's defense of Euston for "lies" and comes up with a remarkably full net, as it does from everything he writes. So, for example, this paragraph from his Times Online article:

However, that professed sympathy does help us to understand the second motive. To many callow leftists, the turbulent masses of the Islamic world are at once a reminder of the glory days of “Third World??? revolution, and a hasty substitute for the vanished proletariat of yore. Galloway has said as much in so many words and my old publishers at New Left Review have produced a book of Osama Bin Laden’s speeches in which he is compared with Che Guevara.

-- produces this response:

New left Review are promoting Osama Bin Laden! that's unbeliveable if true.

It's not.

The book is actually published by Verso, it is called “Messages to the World –- The Statements of Osama bin Laden??? edited and introduced by Duke University religion professor Bruce Lawrence.

Verso is the book publishing arm of New Left Review. (Though I think if you hold up to a mirror during a lunar eclipse those sinister essays in The Weekly Standard about the legacy of Labor giant Nye Bevan and the poetry of Bob Dylan, you might be able to prove otherwise.)

And indicating that an editor at New Left Review has drawn a parallel between Osama and Che Guevara is a statement of fact open to interpretation only if you experience trouble in deciphering what mystique might still attach itself to the Argentinian at the journal which takes Kim Jong-Il's side in the North Korean nuclear standoff.

This also has little to do, by the way, with the prima facie legitimacy of disseminating Osama's dispatches, which I should think the defender of David Irving's right to write would only regret as having taken so long to accomplish.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:55 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Hat tip: Harry's. (That has a nice garage band sound to it, dunn'it?) There's a slight problem with the sequitur of those first two sentences: Norm Geras and Nick Cohen, the authors of "Euston," haven't exactly had a weak immune system to fascism in any of its pathogenic manifestations. They only just felt compelled to put down on paper what they'd been thinking all along, just as the late identification of a "decent left" didn't precede that congeries' actual existence. (The biggest incentive for me in signing the Manifesto was to proudly declare my allegiance with those who want to retrieve the left from its infantile and overloud exponents, who are too stupid to be affected by the knowledge that fellow signatory Francis Wheen is not the celebrated biographer of Edmund Burke or Benjamin Disraeli.) Also, "raises an eyebrow" is the kind of euphemism Hitch would raise both of his to see in reference to such muscular language about the enslavement of women and the burial alive of homosexuals.

That said, I guess we're back to being a "conservative" site again:

This hectic collapse in the face of brutish irrationality and the most cynical realpolitik has taken far too long to produce antibodies on the left. However, a few old hands and some sharp and promising new ones have got together and produced a statement that is named after the especially unappealing (to me) area of London in which it was discussed and written.

The “Euston Manifesto??? keeps it simple. It prefers democratic pluralism, at any price, to theocracy. It raises an eyebrow at the enslavement of the female half of the population and the burial alive of homosexuals. It has its reservations about the United States, but knows that if anything is ever done about (say) Darfur, it will be Washington that receives the UN mandate to do the heavy lifting.

It prefers those who vote in Iraq and Afghanistan to those who put bombs in mosques and schools and hospitals. It does not conceive of arguments that make excuses for suicide murderers. It affirms the right of democratic nations and open societies to defend themselves, both from theocratic states abroad and from theocratic gangsters at home.

I have been flattered by an invitation to sign it, and I probably will, but if I agree it will be the most conservative document that I have ever initialled. Even the obvious has now become revolutionary. So call me a neo-conservative if you must: anything is preferable to the rotten unprincipled alliance between the former fans of the one-party state and the hysterical zealots of the one-god one.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)