• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}
• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}
• The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}
• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}
• Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}
• Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}
• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}
• Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}
• The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}
• The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}
• Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}
• Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}
• The War Against Cliche and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}
• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}
• The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliche. And get a dictionary.}
• The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}
• Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}
• Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}
• Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}
• The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children�s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}
• The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}
• Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}
• Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}
• My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}
ALBUMS:
• You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}
• Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}
• Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}
• Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}
• Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}
• Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}
• Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}
• These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}
• SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}
• The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}
• It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}
• Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn't usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}
• Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}
• The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it�s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}
• The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}
• The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}
• No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}
• The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}
FILMS & TV:
• Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}
• Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}
• Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}
• The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}
• Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}
• Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}
• Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}
• The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}
• Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modeled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}
• Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}
• Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}
Brought to you by the same guy who found a way to lose the 2004 presidential election: a way to lose the 2006 congressional elections.
Then, Mr. Kerry said: �You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don�t, you get stuck in Iraq.�
I knew the Dems would find a way to turn people against them: insult the troops. Perfect. I didn't know how they'd one-up underage man-boy Internet sex, but I knew they'd find a way.
And speaking of doing well in school:
In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year.
Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for his four years, according to a transcript that Kerry sent to the Navy when he was applying for officer training school. He received four D's in his freshman year out of 10 courses, but improved his average in later years.
If you've lived in the lesser New York community these past 18 months, then you'll surely have heard of a promising young bang called Bravo Silva. Named for a line in Chekhov's "The Seagull," the quartet was founded by Henry and Joel, my fellow Dartmouth classmates and old dorm co-residents. (The "Choates" were designed by whomever Stalin had liquidated for sticking too closely to the socialist realist blueprint in '30s Moscow architecture. The moody Russian overtones were not wasted, even though the band sounds more like early Police.)
Anyway, Bravo Silva has apparently broken up -- "indefinitely," according to their well-trafficked MySpace page. I don't think they ever signed a record deal but I do know for a fact that Jeff Price of SpinArt Records (my older sister's best bud from college) was dying to have them on the label. So if there's any possibility of a reunion, please inquire within. For the rest of you: check out the dearly departed Bravo on that MySpace page. A few good sample tracks.
BRAVO SILVA 2003-2006
hi everybody,
bravo silva has decided to disband indefinitely. we are deeply gratefull for all your love and support over the last three years and wish you all the best. we'll miss you.
The Iowa markets jumped ten points recently, pegging the probability of a Democratic house takeover at 75%. Suck it, Dow.
The probability of the Democrats taking the Senate but not the House is pegged at virtually zero, making 3-out-of-4 our current estimated chances of sweet, sweet gridlock. Finally, a chance that the government will stop fucking everything up.
Iowa Electronic Markets | House 2006 Chart
I guess the post-coital nap is unheard of in Canada. Kurt Kleiner of the Toronto Star on other reasons for the stolen snooze:
A nap distils the sweetness of a whole night's sleep down to a few minutes. Ideally, it starts on a soft bed, in a dark room, with a warm blanket. At first your mind lingers on what you've done that day, and what you still need to do. Then your thoughts start to unravel a little, become less coherent, more dreamlike. You feel your breathing deepen, your body relax. You lose yourself; you're asleep. After a few minutes you gradually become aware again of the bed, the room. You open your eyes, gather your thoughts, throw off the blankets. You're a new person.
I don't know that I'd go that far. I usually want to sleep longer than 15 - 20 minutes, especially after a big lunch. I find adherents of the calorie restricted diet to be Jonestown nuthatchers, at least judging by last week's New York magazine profile of a handful of them. But one thing their regimen does accomplish is the erasure of the "food coma": the mid-day meal sometimes known as lunch, after which you're as good as mickey-slipped sloth in Cadeira.
Consider that in an era before the camera phone made transmitting visuals the work of a moment, pictures like these faded from public consciousness as fast as any news cycle. Where is this going to leave pixelated snapshots of the Twin Towers, or the King's Cross Tube station in fifty years' time?
As usual, the C.I.A. got it wrong, declaring in a 1955 National Intelligence Estimate that �most of the resistance in Hungary is of a passive character. ... There are few underground leaders.�
-- Jacob Heilbrunn, in the Times reviewing three books about the Hungarian revolution
Compliments from Robert Conquest are not things lightly trafficked. So when I had the honor to meet the Grand Old Man of Sovietology (and history, and literary criticism, and science fiction, and light verse, etc. etc.) I took careful note of those he praised. There were two, to be exact. The first was David Remnick for dispensing with some revisionist fool who thought that a Stalinist stooge was actually a better egg than he had been -- than he could have been . The second was Clive James. "His poetry is getting better," said Conquest. And surely anyone who can discover the lineaments of Monica Bellucci in Mancini's "Resting" is deserving of plaudits, if not for Most Improved then for Still Relevant. James is coming out with his third memoir (nuts to you, Robert Hughes) and looks and sounds like an advertisement for life. Also, he's hip in the way that a sexagenarian with as firm a handle on nostalgia as on today's pop culture can be:
"Marriage to a beauty had done nothing to blind me to the beauty of all the women I had not married: far from it. If my libido could have been given a face, it would have been the face of Robbie Williams singing a one-night date at a training camp for cheerleaders."
Misogyny that explodes on impact. Nice.
Speaking of: There's more on how Germaine Greer can't be beat for charisma, Australia can hold its own for a storied past of shrewd politicos, and Conor Cruise O'Brien is not, as it happens, dead yet (could've fooled me, too.)
Well, it's nice to know one neoconservative has some fresh ideas on what to do about Iraq. Too bad he's editor of Newsweek and not chair of the Defense Policy Review Board. Fareed Zakaria decides not to make the best the enemy of the good in a rapidly deteriorating landscape; if anything, he concedes that we're now working with "fair" and "miserable" as the variables for a future democratic Iraq. Citing the U.S. strategy at the end of the Korean War, Zakaria thinks a similar "grey" victory feasible and advisable for a country that is now riven by a binary civil war. (Binary because the Kurds, who have long been included by the media in any mention of the tripartite struggle for tribal dominance, really shouldn't be counted as combatants any longer. Their northern statelet is clearly the best thing about this war, just as it was the best thing to come out of the end of Gulf I. Though they have sent to Baghdad able national leaders in President Jalal Talabani and Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, the Kurds' understandable policy with respect to the remaining 80% of Iraq has been -- notwithstanding a continued interest in Kirkuk -- one of, "Screw you guys, we're going home." If any group has earned the right to such coerced isolationism, it's them.)
Here is Zakaria's bulleted list of urgent policy shifts for the U.S., though the whole article really deserves to be read:
Battle Al Qaeda. In fact, the fight in places like Anbar is largely not a jihadist crusade against America, but a Sunni struggle for control of the country. The chances of Iraq's being taken over by a Qaeda-style group are nonexistent. Some 85 percent of the population (the Shia and Kurds) are violently opposed to such a group. And polls have consistently shown that the vast majority of Sunnis dislike Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The real jihadists in Iraq are a small and unpopular band that relies on terror and violence to gain strength. They do not have heavy weapons�tanks, armored vehicles�and cannot hold territory for long. Were a deal between the Shia and the Sunni to be signed, Al Qaeda would be marginalized within months. In the meantime, U.S. Special Forces could harass and chase Qaeda terrorists just as they do in Afghanistan today.
Secure Kurdistan. The Iraqi Kurdish region is the one unambiguous success story of the Iraq war. It is stable and increasingly prosperous. Its politics are more closed and corrupt than most realize�the place is essentially carved up into two one-party states�but it has aspirations to become more market-oriented and more democratic. Perhaps most crucially, it is a Muslim region in the Arab world that wants to be part of the modern world, not blow it up. The simplest way for the United States to ensure the security of Kurdistan would be to give it a security guarantee.
There are various proposals to redeploy U.S. forces in the region. Beyond a token force, this seems unnecessary. The troops would be far from the problem areas of Iraq. And what would their mission be? To stop Kurdish secession? To get involved in battles between Kurdish separatists and the Turkish Army? Kurdistan can be defended quite easily with a political guarantee. And Kurdish leaders seem to recognize that, as with Taiwan, their de facto independence depends on their not demanding de jure independence.
Prevent a bloodbath. This is the most difficult task. The United States will not be able to stop all sectarian fighting in Iraq. It cannot do so even today. Our goal must be to ensure that any such violence remains localized and limited, and that national institutions like the Army and police work to stop it rather than participate. That will require some ability to control movement along Iraq's roads and highways. It will also require monitoring the Army and police. The strategy of pairing Iraqi Army units with U.S. advisers has worked well thus far. Iraqi forces don't fight superbly in the presence of Americans, but they fight much better and more professionally. Most important, they tend not to commit major human-rights abuses when we are around.
Draw down troops and ramp up advisers. To preserve these interests, the United States should begin drawing down its troop levels, starting in January 2007. In one year, we should shrink from the current 144,000 to a total of 60,000 soldiers, some 44,000 of them stationed in four superbases outside Baghdad, Balad, Mosul and Nasi-riya. This would provide a rapid-reaction force that could intervene to secure any of the core interests of the United States when they are threatened. To preserve the basic security of Iraq and prevent anarchy, U.S. troops must also act as the spine of the new Iraqi Army and police force. American advisers should massively expand their current roles in both organizations, going from the current level of 4,000 Americans to at least 16,000, embedding an American platoon (30 to 40 men) in virtually every Iraqi fighting battalion (600 men).
Let's skip right past the hazards of presumption and just grant that Barack Obama remains a cool customer well into May, 2008. We can expect more easy-listening ambiguity on public displays of religiosity, where it just goes without saying that an awesome God is worshiped in red and blue states. We can also anticipate that the same idiotic piety will be reaffirmed that politics is not, by definition, a matter of division and polarization. Unity will be the vision thing, as ever.
Conceding that these characteristics won't change in an Obama candidacy because they never do in any, the only other incentive to vote for this junior senator for president which I'd add to the Economist's list is the following: His father is a lapsed African Muslim. That is just about as lethal a double threat to Osama bin Laden as the United States is likely to produce in a commander-in-chief. (A person is not always hostage to his heritage, but when he is, a little Stockholm Syndrome can go a long way.)
The first criticism of Obama is that he's young and in a big rush to go somewhere; he should pace himself with a Senate chairmanship or cabinet placement first. But this criticism is not so different from the second one commonly directed at his candidacy in two years:
How would a man who has no foreign-policy or military background fare against John McCain, the Republican front-runner? And how would someone with no executive experience deal with Mitt Romney, a successful entrepreneur and Republican governor? Mr Obama's political philosophy is all about blurring boundaries where it is not pure waffle. Politics involves making difficult decisions, not dodging them.
George Bush answered the first question, and "blurring boundaries" you'll find in Merriam-Webster's Clintonoid Thesaurus under the term "triangulation." Neither of which exactly bolster an endorsement of an untested pol, but they do prove that one is eminently electable.
Former Wonkette "third man" Holly Martins has a brilliant top ten list of our stupidest fucking legislators. There are so many burnished gems to choose from here, so in the interest of bipartisanship I'll give one from each camp. Here's Barbara Boxer (D-CA):
"Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, 'Thank God I'm still alive.' But of course those who died, their lives will never be the same again."
And here's Doug Young (R-AK):
The scene: Fairbanks, Alaska, 1994. Congressman Don Young, already in office for 20 years, is on the stump preaching the virtues of Newt Gingrich's Republican revolution to a group of high school students. Just look at all the wasteful things the federal government does with taxpayers' money, he tells them. The National Endowment for the Arts, for example, funds art involving "people doing offensive things ... things that are absolutely ridiculous." One student asks, "Like what?"
"Buttfucking," replies the great scourge of obscenity and instructor of youth.
If you were born on this side of the Atlantic too many fucking decades too late, and this sort of thing keeps you up nights, now you know. A mixture of Hal from 2001 and Brando's Jor-El. Thank me later.
It comes as little surprise that Luiz In�cio Lula da Silva ("Lula" to those who can pull off the pastel string bikini) has won re-election in Brazil after a vaguely contentious run-off ballot yesterday. The systemic corruption of Brazil's Workers' Party (PT), of which Lula is the iconic head, is mitigated slightly by the fact that he represents the kinder side of South American statism. His popularity is such that both el diablo Bush and Hugo Chavez both consider him a friend; since his time in office Brazil's foreign trade has been healthy enough to turn some minuses into pluses; and the country has managed to pay its IMF loans back years ahead of schedule -- surely impressing both Bono and Greg Palast.
However, the most important job in Lula's cabinet, and in all Brazilian cabinets, belongs to the Finance Minister. This position used to be held by a guy called Ant�nio Palocci, an ex-Trotskyist with zero economic experience. (Palocci always reminded me of an old anecdote from the Cuban revolution: In one of the many hot little post-coup bull sessions held to try and feel out the levers and pulleys of statecraft, Che Guevara asks if there are any economists in the house. Nearly every hand goes up. "What? Oh, sorry, comrade -- we thought you said communist.")
Palocci managed to perform adequately until he was exposed as a leading figure in the Mensal�o bribery scandal, the real cause for Lula's run-off troubles and Brazil's overall leftist platform. PT functionaries -- including party head Roberto Jefferson -- were caught paying off national legislators with handsome monthly installments. (How quick the lessons of the market are gleaned by some socialists. Jeffersonian Marxism, etc.)
But lest you think Lula's narrowly averted downfall was the machination of some smoky, Cheney-mumbled policy meeting in the West Wing, it's worth considering that PT's most trenchant critic has been Brazil's radical Green Party, at the head of which is the muy carismatica polymath Fernando Gabeira. (Gabeira had formerly tried to work with the Workers Party, only to grow disillusioned with Lula's rightward and cynical tilt. He represents the attractive face of Brazil's Left Opposition.)
Just how ensconced is Lula and how certain was his Sunday victory? Put it this way: his capitalist rival was reduced to trying to steal el presidente's Nascar anti-market showmanship, and looked quite the twit doing so. Here is The Economist:
Most of all, [Lula] found a way to turn the pro-business leanings of Mr Alckmin and his Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB) against them. Lula's predecessor as president, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, privatised electricity distribution, the telecoms monopoly and a mining giant. Mr Alckmin has overseen S�o Paulo's own privatisation programme. Such is the PSDB's addiction to sell-offs, Lula suggested, that it would sell parked cars off the street.
Brazilians tend to forget the successful sell-off of telecoms, banks and many industries. They remember that electricity privatisation was rushed and incomplete, and followed by blackouts (most power-generation remained in state hands).
In response, Mr Alckmin copied Lula's habit of wearing silly hats. He donned a Banco do Brasil baseball cap to show that he had no intention of privatising the bank or any other state enterprises, whose logos were plastered on his jacket. This gesture summed up Mr Alckmin's mistakes over the past month. He should have defended privatisation or changed the subject.
"We don't take too kindly to Kremlin boys runnin' down Tito round these parts." Four Russian diplomats hurt in a bar cafe brawl in Skopje, Macedonia. Best part:
"Soon afterwards, between 10 and 12 people were taking part in the attack on the four diplomats," said Russia's ORT television.
You know, just pile on there. Russia can make more.
Unfortunate Mixture of the Metaphorical and the Literal
When American servicemen and -women lay down their lives for their country, is it necessary for the attendant news coverage to contextualize it in extramilitary events? I don't think any sane newspaper editor would run an article headlined "IED Kills Two Marines as Dow Sets Record." At best, this sort of pairing of two items of interest is irrelevant; at worst, it denigrates the ultimate sacrifice a soldier can make by embedding the story in some less consequential event.
Add in election politics and a heavy administration of cliched metaphor, and oops:
Five US troops killed in Iraq as Bush under fire
I certainly hope they were able to convey the president to safety. What was the threat? Shells, sniper fire?
The military said on Thursday five more American troops were killed in Iraq, bringing the U.S. death toll for October to 96, as President George W. Bush sought to deflect mounting election-year pressure over the war.
Oh, even worse. That election-year pressure has been changing the game on the ground. Thousands of military and civilians have been crippled by pressure. Unfortunately, appropriate election-year pressure-deflecting body armor has been underfunded by the Pentagon.
Voter discontent driven by growing U.S. casualties and spiralling sectarian violence in Iraq have become top issues ahead of the elections, and have prompted calls among some Democrats and other critics to start withdrawing the 140,000 troops still in Iraq more than three years after the invasion.
It would be one thing if we were losing the war (or if the war were already won) and troops were dying for no good reason. But voter discontent -- that'll drive the Democrats into action. The Democratic Party will never forget the ordinary Americans who enlist in the armed forces, as long as remembering them in public will be good for votes.
If terrorists do nuke DC, that would be tragic, because the Smithsonian is irreplaceable.
Boy or girl, you know you feel Bret Easton Ellis' hot, coked-over breath right up against your face when you read copy like this. Alexandra Jacobs on Spy: The Funny Years:
And yet, you didn�t even read Spy in its heyday! (To linger in the second-person tense of late-1980�s Brat Pack novelists, so roundly mocked by the magazine.) You grew up in New York City, but weren�t nearly cool or �savvy� enough for Spy. Your parents subscribed to The New York Times and The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books and�yes�The New York Observer, all stacked up in tidy little rows on the dark-wood living-room coffee table in front of an aging leather sofa (pre�Yuppie Porn, p. 100). Not Spy, which managed to be both refined and rude. But the magazine was so smart, so influential, so zesty and zeitgeisty, you must have absorbed its ideas by osmosis. It was the one toted around by your sardonic, slightly older friend, the one the boys unjustly considered �fast� (this was the conservative Reagan-Bush late-80�s, pre-�fuckbuddies�), the one who took you to the now-defunct nightclub M.K. on lower Fifth Avenue one night when you were 16, where you sat in a plush armchair, applied a fresh coat of L�Or?al Rose Potpourri lipstick and wondered what exactly all the fuss was about. Maybe the raffish Atlantic Monthly Press publisher Morgan Entrekin was there that night�a frequent gleeful target of the Spy reporters, who trailed the city�s most energetic nightcrawlers in a cherry-red Ford Tempo (�A Hard Day�s Night: A Documentary Account of the 1988 Celebrity Pro-Am Ironman Nightlife Decathlon Championship,� p. 132)�but you wouldn�t have recognized him or known why he mattered.
Iowa Markets are Calling for Narrow Democratic Victory
The University of Iowa has been running futures markets on election outcomes now for years, usually with more accurate predictions than polls provide, for a variety of reasons (not least the networked intelligence of several people with skin in the game).
Right now the market is calling a roughly two-thirds chance of a Democratic house and a thirty percent chance of a Democratic senate. The probability of the Republicans holding both houses is being called at about thirty-one percent. If I were a Democratic activist, I'd be happy with that, but it's a far cry from 1994-style wave I've seen called on some blogs.
My own expectation is that both chambers will be very close to an even split. Committee assignments matter, but not that much -- mostly to lobbyists and pork projects. The power consolidated in the hands of potential defectors should mean a shift to a regime of centrist compromise, regardless of who nominally controlls each chamber.
I've been pondering the '56 Hungarian revolution and its implications today. There was not one but two pieces in the Times recently which drew an uninterrupted if wobbly line from Budapest to Baghdad. I was able to trace it for a bit, but the more I consider the circumstances of either revolution the less convincing seems such an equivalence. For starters, the so-called New Left was born out of the twin upheavals of Nagyism and the Suez crisis. What has that movement given us in the latest round of historical convulsions? Tariq Ali declaring common cause with the "resistance" in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the unimpeachable authority of the "People's Democratic Republic of North Korea" to defend itself against Western hegemony. Nice. And wasn't '56 seen among most radicals as a missed opportunity after Khrushchev's "secret speech" to the 20th Party Congress, and the implied (though only partially realized) promise of de-Stalinization? One can't quite argue that Baathism ever held any hope for a 'thaw' or internal reform. The only wall that might have come down had Saddam Hussein been left to expire of natural causes was the one that would fall on secularists, women and homosexuals in the likely event that the country became Talibanized by exactly the sorts of fundamentalist nasties we're trying to save the place from now.
Other incongruities and contradictions abound. Bundled in with the campaign to break Hungary free of Warsaw Pact dominion and declare, if not "communism with a human face" then at least a more humane form of statism, was the rehabilitation of the murderous and tyrannical figure of Laszlo Rajk, falsely turned into a martyr when he, too, was devoured by Moscow for "Titoism." What would be the analogue in Iraq? Propping up Tariq Aziz as a maligned hero of the opposition to Saddam?
'56 was also one of the last acceptable moments for 'lost illusions,' on a timeline well bestrewn with them, for die-hard American and European Communists and fellow travelers ... E.P. Thompson and Leszek Kolakowski both broke with the Kremlin line after the fifty-sixers were crushed by Soviet tanks. (Thompson became an inner party reformist while Kolakowski morphed into a full-on apostate of Marxism, not to mention the most trenchant critic of same as a philosophy and political program.) I.F. Stone actually went to Russia to see how bad things were for himself in '56. In ascending order of funny pinkos, Kingsley Amis never could atone enough for having waited so long to abandon the CP.
Hungary had also given the world something that Iraq has yet to deliver in impressive measure: a steady stream of brilliant intellectuals and writers and entrepeneurs. Arthur Koestler (who was cosmopolitan in every definition of that important term) had fought for the "republican" cause in Spain in the famed "Rakosi Battalion" comprised of Hungarian Communists. (Matyas Rakosi went on to play the central casting apparatchik villain in the '56 revolt). Tibor Szamuely, himself the namesake and nephew of Bela Kun's most brutal functionary -- tree-hung corpses of slain "enemies of the people" in the 1919 terror were known as "Szamuely fruit" after his charming uncle -- was a great chronicler of the Russian tradition, and also a legendary conservative expat to the British isles. (Szamuely was close friends with Robert Conquest and Amis, and he is reported to have had lifelong problems with insomnia due to the fact that night was when the secret police made their arrests. A fine example of Captive Mind Syndrome that even multiple time zones away from where this might prove a problem for him he was still terrified of being spirited away by totalitarian goons.)
We can't rule out the chance that a Mesopotamian disapora will emerge to rival that of Hungary's. Personally, I'd derive no small joy from the prospect of Ahmad Chalabi being known as the Soros of the East, or Omar at Iraq the Model as the Nick Denton -- another famous Hungarian Jew -- of the Babylonian blogosphere.
Bill Crozier, a Union City Republican going against incumbent Democrat Sandy Garrett, said he believes old textbooks could be used to stop bullets shot from weapons wielded by school intruders.
He used an AK-47 against two back-to-back books and guess what happened? Yes, even Soviet-era Kalashinkovs can penetrate the finest hard covers of what the kids are reading.
Watch the video of Crozier putting his theory to the test. Kudos to him for going live with a failed experiment, by the way. If it had worked, Rumsfeld might have shipped all those P.C.-drenched civics texts to Iraq.
And don't you absolutely love the selections? Calculus, Earth Science and... wait for it... Invitation to Languages. (Take it away, Lou Dobbs!)
Do you think that if the devil told Nancy Pelosi she could undo the scandal, save these 17-year-olds from the trauma of e-mail from a sicko congressman, and give up her hopes of being speaker, that she would find such an offer tempting? I don't.
Sort of spoiled by the next sentence, which insists that Pelosi is a perfectly nice woman, really.
Funny thing about these suckers. They tend to adjust our target demographic according to our latest posts. So dare I write the term "neoconservative" and suddenly Snarksmith shills something called "Limbaugh Ringtones." (I haven't looked into this but I'm guessing -- hoping? -- they're ironic.)
For a while we were displaying a recovered Wodehouse novel and literary workshop classes. That was nice. But now we're onto God and theological studies, which frankly has got this atheist heathen stumped. Must be all the Jewy-ness. Occupational hazard working where I work nowadays. I'll tone it down some.
My new favorite GOP candidate apparently came out swinging again yesterday in a debate that will hit CSPAN tonight. Why isn't this man the front runner? Reports MyDD.com (pro-Lamont), Schelsinger and Lamont started attacking Lieberman together:
Schlesinger: If you had someone doing a job for eighteen years, and after eighteen years, their record was one of complete failure, what would you do? What do you think should happen with that person?. . . Ned, you're a businessman: what would you say about someone like that?
Lamont: I'd say, "It's time to go, Joe!"
The game apparently now works like this: Lieberman is hoping to have enough Republicans, independents and centrist Democrats to hold onto his seat. Lamont is hoping to capture the Democrats and anti-war independents. Schlesinger is hoping to rebrand Lieberman as a Democrat and split the vote on that side, leading to a narrow plurality. With nothing left to lose, Schlesinger seems to be betting that he'll win most of the votes he can knock off Lieberman.
Should Schlesinger pull it off, what would be more hilarious? The gasps of the "netroots" who kept the Senate in firmly Republican control by dislodging Lieberman, creating this circus? Or having Alan Schlesinger in the Senate for six years?
Also, think we could get him to run for President?
Well, that was tragic. I saw an advanced screening of Marie Antoinette at Lincoln Square last night. Let�s put it this way: by the end, the only ones clapping were doing so out of noblesse oblige for an auteur they�d quite like to admire more than they do.
Sofia has cornered the market on boredom as an art form, which might be more agreeable if there were an underlying point to her films other than rebellion against the tiresome by way of a cute girl�s retreat inwards. (Never has a �party� seemed more deliberate and belabored.)
Marie Antoinette is a film about waste on an imperial level, and it doesn�t take long into the thing to see that its director has grown overfond of her subject by squandering a splendid opportunity to say something about the way we live now. Lady Fraser�s biography came out in 2003, and whatever you may have heard to the contrary, it bore the distinct mark of nostalgia for the ancien regime � this at a time when regime change still appeared promising. Marie may be �Sofia�s movie,� but it is so in the way a rainy and depressive Sunday afternoon is my unfortunate weekend. Do you really want to know about it unless I can make it relate to something you've experienced or care about yourself?
Ennui and disaffection as the hangovers of self-indulgence have had better pick-me-ups. About halfway through watching Kirsten Dunst scoop up so many whist chips and dollops of pastel-colored cream, I remembered Adam Fenwick-Symes� famous monologue in Vile Bodies:
�Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties.
(� Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St. John�s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at scoop where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris � all that succession and repetition of massed humanity�. Those vile bodies�)�
That was before Adam was shipped off to war. Even with the Versailles mob at her doorstep and a midnight spiriting away in a brougham, our Marie seems more sentimental about her fading manicured universe � one which existed solely in her own head � than she is worried about, oh, the fate of the country, her children, her husband, and that pretty little head itself.
The word for this is solipsism. By definition it�s already lost in any attempted act of translation.
Man, Paul McCartney -- first he gets divorced around his sixty-fourth birthday, finally establishing that his care and feeding will be his own damn responsibility. Now Heather Mills is declining to comment on allegations that McCartney beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved.
[Slate recycles, so do we. Peter Berkowitz takes up the cudgel on behalf of Leo Strauss in this week's Weekly Standard, reviewing a British defense of neoconservatism. Since googling Strauss vomits forth all kinds of malicious and fascistic responses, I figure I might do what I can to at least give his philosophy a better hearing. Anyway, I much prefer Team Euston making common cause with the likes of Douglas Murray than hearing Andrew Sullivan snuggle up to Markos Moulitsas. The following was written in response to a book -- itself reviewed by the admirable Adam Kirsch in the New York Sun -- released in May that attempted a similar rescue job of Strauss.]
But hear the morning's injured weeping, and know why:
Cities and men have fallen; the will of the Unjust
Has never lost its power; still, all princes must
Employ the Fairly-Noble unifying Lie.
-- Auden, "In Time of War"
"Not even wrong" is how scientists dispense with bullshit and incoherence in their field; it's a riposte tantamount to telling a feverish and windy fool at a bar, "You may be right," and then walking away to drink in peace. In the last five years Leo Strauss has had his legacy put through every lens of distortion and every mind given to feeble falsification -- a sad but interesting occurrence, to be sure, for the philosopher who thought that one of the greatest dangers to modern culture was "fanatical obscurantism." (Strauss' own untenderized prose, often believed to demonstrate how murky and sinister was the man behind it, is explicable by something much less sexy than his alleged promulgation of lying with good intent: He was German. The sentences are long and difficult. Even in translation. Ask a German.)
It's nice then to see the New York Sun's Adam Kirsch, fast becoming one of the most unignorable literary critics around, do his part to rescue Strauss from a mob of misinformed -- or willfully self-deceived -- opinion:
Strauss's sense of the fragility of democracy, reinforced by his experiences in Weimar Germany, did not make him an enemy of democracy. Just the reverse: It made him aware of the tragic vulnerability of modern liberalism, whose commitment to freedom and complexity makes it tempting prey for the unfree and the uncomplex. This awareness, as Mr. Smith writes, is what links Strauss with the great "cold-war liberals of his generation - Isaiah Berlin, Lionel Trilling, Walter Lippmann, Raymond Aron." Like them, Strauss taught that liberalism has real enemies, and that moral judgments are inescapable in political life. The real question today is not why this message has important admirers. It is why so many self-proclaimed liberals are so unwilling to hear it that they would rather stop up their ears with lies and hatred.
The word missing in the above paragraph, but not in the rest of this review of a new intellectual biography of Strauss, is "neocon." What distinguished neoconservatism above all other political alignments is its zero tolerance for relativism: the idea that, say, clipping a woman's genitals is fine when it conforms to an age-old tribal custom, or that genocide can be overlooked when it is perpetrated by someone who claims to be mounting a defensive campaign against post-Cold War imperialism. (Allan Bloom said one of the easiest ways of telling who the real headache would be in an Intro to Western Philosophy class was to ask about the obligation of English civil servants to prevent the practice of sati in India. The one who replied, "But the English shouldn't have even been there in the first place!" was your man -- or woman, as was often, bizarrely, the case.)
Another way to broadly define neoconservatism is as the militant opposition to the abolition of a priori or self-evident principles. And here I find I can't help referring to that other tenebrous bugaboo of our current foreign policy to illuminate some interesting areas of congruence and consistency within this curious belt of fellow traveling...
Trotsky's greatest fear about the creeping Stalinization of the Central Committee in the 1920's was the spread of what he termed the "soul-uplifting lie." (This phrase was first put down in the inaugural tract of what we now call Trotskyism: The New Course.) Worse for the long-term degeneration of the revolution than collectivization or the New Economic Policy was the a torrent of Potemkin nonsense denying "on-the-ground" realities of infrastructure and gross national product, etc. The soul-uplifting lie sounds like "noble lie," and yet it had a distinctly Russian tincture since there are two words for "truth" in the language (a reason for some historical hiccups in any survey of how the steppes spent the twentieth century, as can well be imagined.) These are pravda and istina: the former means metaphysical, capital-t Truth, the latter means empirical, self-evident truth. Pushkin, parodying the idiocy of some contemporary, apostrophized him by saying, "The pravda that uplifts is worth a thousand of your petty little istinas," and this is almost an exact prefiguration of what Stalin based his dictatorship on a hundred years hence. When pravda is defined as the erasure of istina, you have a society in which anything goes and all knowledge is subject to the caprice of the few -- or the one. The name we now give this system of unsystematic tyranny is totalitarianism, the resistance to which might be thought of as the common pinion that binds the ex-Trotskyist and Straussian wings of neoconservatism. As Leo himself put it in Natural Right and History, which I commend to anyone who might suspect that Tim Robbins is not the nimblest interpreter of New School weltanschaunng:
According to our social science, we can be or become wise in all matters of secondary importance, but we have to be resigned to utter ignorance in the most important respect: we cannot have any knowledge regarding the ultimate principles of our choices, i.e., ultimate principles have no other support than arbitrary and hence blind preferences. We are then in the position of beings who are sane and sober when engaged in trivial business and who gamble like madmen when confronted with serious issues--retail sanity and wholesale madness.
Where's the conspiracy or cabal-wrangling in there? Not even Strauss' "epigones" (another favorite term of Trotskyist obloquy, by the way, when it was applied to Lenin's sinister and muddled disciples) would quibble with the idea that without presupposition and the defense of a universality of the known, history and its attendant subjects are negligible.
The rest, as Mearsheimer and Walt might say with a dual upward tilt of the eyebrows, is commentary.
The senatorial race between Lieberman (I-Stern Disapproval) and Lamont (D-Unbearable Lightness) got a lot more interesting yesterday, as third party Republican Alan Schelsinger finally got some media attention in a debate. And guess what? There's finally a GOP candidate for national office I wouldn't mind seeing win. Reasons to get on the Schlesinger bandwagon station wagon: (1) In debate, he's a sharp-tongued wiseass, (2) he used an alias while trying to count cards at Connecticut blackjack tables, (3) he apparently sucked at it, because those casinos sued him for their winnings.
It's about time we had Senate Republicans who try to beat casinos at their front end and fail, rather than take their lobbying money and stiff them on the floor. I'll be paying attention to this race, as it probably represents the best GOP hope of turning over a Democratic Senate seat. (New Jersey, my ass.)
WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 -- Hours after vowing to conduct a second nuclear test, the North Korean regime stirred more international confusion when leader Kim Jong-Il appeared on television wearing a full-faced Islamic veil, or niqab.
The Stalinist dictator remained silent throughout the 3-hour broadcast on the state-owned television channel, content to show himself at leisure reading, playing SuDoku, and watching The Maltese Falcon on DVD.
Diplomats and foreign policy analysts rushed to interpret the act as one of redoubled defiance in the face of mounting global pressure on North Korea, including sanctions passed on it by the United Nations over the weekend.
"I think we can expect more provocation from Kim Jong-Il in the coming days and weeks," said White House spokesman Tony Snow in an ad hoc press conference convened hours after the satellite transmission from Pyongyang. "Clearly this is a very dangerous and mercurial individual we're dealing with. Who knows, really, what his next move might be?"
Others see the niqab as a carefully chosen symbol that North Korea is now ready to make common cause with Islamists in an ongoing effort to antagonize the West.
"Make no mistake, this his way of putting us on notice that we're now engaged in a far-reaching clash of civilizations," said British House of Commons leader Jack Straw, a vocal opponent of the female Islamic headgear as it is worn by Muslim citizens in the United Kingdom. "Politically, Kim is declaring his allegiance to the forces of religious reaction, while metaphorically he's established that a wall of separation now -- and quite possibly forever -- exists between the free world and his rogue slave state."
Al-Qaeda issued a statement shortly after the broadcast saying that it would gladly welcome Jong-Il into the "glorious ranks of Allah's warrior-sons" but for the fact that he now dresses like a woman.
One of the reasons I admire Bragger is his willingness to take up quixotic -- and surprisingly not-so-quixotic -- campaigns on behalf of radical democracy and secularism. On the more knight of the sorrowful countenance side of the ledger is his suggestion that the English national anthem be William Blake's "Jerusalem." Here it is:
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
And on the more no-really-this-might-work side is his elaborated scheme for reforming the House of Lords. (Psst: Don't tell him it slightly resembles the structure of the Federation Council of Iraq.) Here he is on that:
As ever, Harry's Place has been all over this and growing increasingly skeptical. All the following information comes courtesy of them.
It seems that had the Lancet chosen to rest on its much-bruited and much questioned 2004 conclusions, it might have spared itself the embarrassment of contradiction two years later. Commenter Mike H at the science blog Deltoids sums this up better than I could:
" That these two surveys were carried out in different locations and two years apart from each other yet yielded results that were very similar to each other, is strong validation of both surveys."
The problem is, the two surveys didn't yield " very similar results."
The authors are basing this supposed mutual corroboration entirely on the similar excess death figures derived from the studies, for the time frame covered by the 2004 survey (100,000 excess deaths in the 2004 survey and 112,000 from the 2006 survey).
However, the composition of the excess death tolls differs radically from study to study. As I argued here in 2005 when comparing Lancet 1 to the UNDP survey, deaths from various causes are not interchangeable when using one study's bottom line to bolster the bottom line of another. In other words, one can't simply say " we'll make up for a shortfall in coalition air strike deaths in one study with some heart attack deaths from the other."
Recall that in the 2004 survey, the headline-grabbing 100,000 excess death figure owed much of its punch to the 40,000-plus excess deaths attributed to non-violent causes. The 2006 survey tells an exceedingly different tale of mortality in Iraq during the first 18 months of the war. Not only is all of the excess death toll in the 2006 survey the result of violence, it's actually greater than the entire 112,000 excess death figure, because the death rate from non-violent causes is significantly less than the base line non-violent death rate. My rough math indicates an extrapolated violent death toll of more than 130,000 for the second survey, for the same time frame covered by Lancet 1.
As I recall from the 2004 discussions and debates, the study authors and their supporters here and elsewhere attributed the large non-violent excess death toll to the inevitable effect on infrastructure, health care, etc arising from the chaos of invasion and subsequent insurgency.
That sounded reasonable enough at the time, assuming one accepted the premise that the invasion and occupation had severely degraded and impaired Iraq's domestic infrastructure. But now, in a complete contradiction of the defence of their earlier work, the study authors are telling us that said chaos of war had no effect on the overall post-invasion non-violent death rate until the beginning of 2006, and in fact the post-invasion non-violent mortality rate was actually lower than the pre-invasion rate for more than two years after regime change.
Obviously, there are two serious problems arising from the comparison of the data sets for the two studies. First, unless I've completely botched the math, the 2006 survey extrapolates approximately 75,000 more violent deaths and 63,000 fewer non-violent deaths than the first survey. This is a monstrous discrepancy, when considering the base line annual mortality figure is approximately 120,000 deaths.
Second, if there is a correlation between extreme violence in a society and an increase in the non-violent death rate, why does one study confirm the correlation, while the second rebuts it?
After the jump, Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of the Lancet, speaks at Stop the War coalition events. Not that his ideological bias necessarily invalidates his scientific findings, but let us assume that a very dubious study of the Iraqi death toll had been conducted by, say, the American Enterprise Institute, with Richard Perle commissioning it. What would be the reaction in cyberspace, do you suppose?
I await the same jokes to be made about a respected British journal's use of murky non-terms -- "other" and "unknown" -- that were made of Rumsfeld's Zen koan-rationalizations for lousy war planning.
600,000 Million Brain Cells' Death Attributed to Iraq
Even as my co-editor has been contributing more and more to Snarksmith, I've been waylaid by late nights at work trying to beat some crucial policy deadlines. (Oh man, the economy next year is going to be... no, never mind. I don't want to ruin the holidays. You'll see.)
I meant to address the Lancet study that claims a credulity-defying number of Iraqis have died as a result of Allied military action. The study uses clusters to estimate deaths since the invasion by talking to random families within sectors of Iraq, and generalizing those deaths to the populations of the cluster to estimate a number. This is the same methodology that has been promoted in recent years as a way to improve the U.S. Census, which currently doesn't count heads that aren't manually counted (therefore risking undercounting of people in general and the relative proportions of groups less likely to fill out Census forms accurately -- the analogue in this case being the Iraq Body Count).
I bring up last week's news because Hitchens -- who readers know is beloved in these quarters -- has written an astonishingly badly considered critique of the study. Hitch doesn't attack the methodology, which is sound in theory, but appears to have been either implemented badly or to have by chance obtained a result which deviates from any reasonable estimate by more than its margin of error, which is unlikely but does happen. Instead, he focuses on issues of ultimate moral responsibility for the deaths of Iraqis; the media reports of the study have paid scant attention to the distinction between Iraqis killed by Allied military action, insurgency action, and degraded infrastructure (e.g. decline in quality of health care).
It's an empirical question, and one that should be approximately answerable, how many Iraqi citizens have died who would otherwise be alive had the invasion never occured. I would also be interested to know how many are alive today who'd otherwise be dead, but that's tougher. Also how many births would have happened that didn't.
Whether the Lancet study is correct or incorrect is entirely distinct from the question of whether the moral responsibility for those deaths belongs to the USA, to insurgents, to some combination of the two or to other agents (or nobody at all). The authors of the study are anti-war and were previously anti-sanction. Mr. Hitchens is and has been pro-war and -sanction. But these views are irrelevant, provided the study is accurate. The study purports to estimate the number of deaths caused by the USA as a proximate causal actor, without distinguishing those killed by US troops from those killed under the conditions created by the invasion. If you believe the invasion was not only strategically but morally wrong, then the USA bears moral responsibility for all of those deaths, just as, e.g., North Korea would bear proximate responsibility for any American deaths caused by a nuclear device sold to terrorists who perform the actual detonation.
Hitchens' argument then essentially boils down to disagreement about which doorstep responsibility should be laid at. But that is not a new topic, for Hitchens or pretty much anybody else. A more interesting discussion might be of a paper attempting to quantify how many Iraqi, and American, deaths were likely to occur under a well-planned post-invation strategy, and how many can be attributed to strategic blunders. I suspect nobody on either side would like to see those numbers.
I mean, where does it leave the rest of us, his being this good?
The question has to be: what does Coppola know? Was �Lost in Translation� really, as it first appeared, a wistful commentary on the plight of Americans abroad, who shut themselves in their hotel rooms and fell lightly in love because it was sweeter, and less scary, than venturing outside? Or was it, as a later viewing suggested, in hock to that same trepidation, creating an insular chic out of xenophobia? A similar uncertainty pervades �Marie Antoinette,� borne along on a wave of anachronistic rock. Is the movie somehow contending that the Queen was, with her gang of cronies and her witless overspends, the Paris Hilton of the late eighteenth century? If so, then the catcallers of Cannes were even more misguided than they knew, since any decent French Marxist would be happy to deconstruct the film as a trashing of the idle rich.
On the other hand, I spent long periods of �Marie Antoinette� under the growing illusion that it was actually made by Paris Hilton. The exploits of Madame du Barry (Asia Argento), the old King�s mistress, are unpeeled with a schoolgirl�s sneer. �That is so Du Barry,� one of Marie�s pals says. Snuff is snorted like coke. There are hilarious attempts at landscape, but the fountains and parterres of Versailles are grabbed by the camera and pasted into the action, as if the whole thing were being shot on a cell phone and sent to friends. The young Queen builds a faux-pastoral paradise in the grounds, where she and her little daughter sport like shepherdesses, but, rather than raise an eyebrow at this make-believe, the director treats it as just another white-linen moment, like an outtake from �The Virgin Suicides,� and, for good measure, tosses in a few shots of nodding flowers and ickle bouncy lambs. That is so Coppola. It is hard to hate the film, whose silly fizz makes it simpler and less creepy than her earlier projects. If it does drop larger hints, they have less to do with the vanished culture of Versailles than with the fretful stasis of our own. The movie�s approach to the world beyond, to everything that one doesn�t know or wouldn�t care to buy, is like the look on Kirsten Dunst�s face: a beautiful blankness, forever on the brink of drifting, with a smile, into sleep.
[Note: Since Snarksmith is now over two years old, I've realized there's a lot of material in our archives which has, for one reason or another, become relevant again. The following is a post from last Spring about Rachel Corrie, a 23 year-old American activist whose death in Gaza (she was run over by an Israeli bulldozer) became a cause celebre for pretty much everyone -- left, right and center. A one-woman play was produced by Alan Rickman and journalist Katharine Viner based on cobbled-together entries from Corrie's years-spanning journal. The details of her demise and its co-option by Palestinians rights activists -- and by Yasir Arafat -- are still more interesting than the play itself, judging by Ben Brantley's review of in the New York Times. I'd done a little independent research into the (known) circumstances of Corrie's involvement in the International Solidarity Movement (the unimprovably acronymed ISM), her possible witting affiliation with terrorists, and the likelihood that her death was not an accident. My findings and comments are reprinted below. Also, I was fresh off an interview with Billy Bragg when I wrote this, and Billy, too, is back in the headlines with the release of his memoir/treatise The Progressive Patriot. I don't always agree with Ole Big Nose on the issues, and I find him much more temperate and thoughtful one-on-one than he is on stage when he's tubthumping for his indie rock lefty audience. But there is no denying his charisma, intelligence and wit. He's a very principled guy in an industry where merely mouthing the words "grassroots" and "activism" get you dining car access on the Chomsky Express. And as a modern political songwriter - even when the muse dips No-Blood-for-Oil low - Bill remains pretty much peerless.]
Now here would be an excellent time for conservatives -- who, I must say, have been out front and plangent about free speech in a way that should shame mainstream liberals -- to assert the wideness of that Enlightenment category. Rachel Corrie was a pro-Palestinian activist, member of something called the International Solidarity Movement (the acronym might very well say it all), and by most counts, one fucked up and misguided and possibly pharisaical 23 year-old. She was also run over and killed by an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza in 2003, an event that was labeled either "tragic" or not-so-very-tragic by hard-right types who, as ever, were in small possession of facts and great possession of blood pressure. She was also disgustingly and alarmingly turned into an overnight "martyr" by Yasir Arafat and a farouche jihadi constituency that was said -- and not just by hard-right types -- to have been abetted and gladly provided with protection and savehaven by ISM. Came the questions: Did the driver of the bulldozer "see" Corrie before he (vainly) applied the brakes? (His recorded dispatches to his superiors indicate that he had thought he ran over a man; if this was a contrived response, then reckless endangerment becomes first degree murder, a charge that Corrie's thoughtful defenders -- and by thoughtful I mean those outside of ISM, which has now taken to calling her the "new Anne Frank" -- are queasy to make.) Was there a cover-up by the IDF and Israeli investigators? Just how frazzled-innocent was the young Ms. Corrie to begin with, and does this matter in connection with her demise? And does any of this, intriguing though the forensics of it may be, usefully remind us, or distract from, the encompassing question of whether it's wise and just to plow down the homes of immiserated Palestinians? (The argument in favor suggests this is the only way of plugging up the underground tunnels which run through some of these homes, and which transport suicide-murdering terrorists to and from Jerusalem.)
Going on the "evidence against interest" assumption that those with the greatest degree of sympathy for Corrie's cause might have some interesting things to say about her outfit's true raison d'etre and methods, I read this Mother Jonespiece:
Was it murder? Corrie's colleagues believe that it was. "I never dreamed it'd be like this, the intentional crushing of a human being," ISM eyewitness Joe "Smith" wrote in an affidavit filed with Palestinian human-rights attorneys. "I do believe it was intentional. I saw it, and I know he saw her, I know he did, and I know he knew she was still under the bulldozer when it backed up without raising its blade. I don't know if he wanted to kill her, or if he was just focused on doing his work and didn't care if he killed her or not, I don't know which is scarier." Five other activists testified that the driver must have seen Corrie before mowing her down. A damning sequence of photographs shot by ISM activists and almost immediately released by Reuters appears to show Corrie standing before the bulldozer and addressing the soldiers with her megaphone seconds before being crushed.
Yet "Smith" later gave an interview in which he acknowledged that the bulldozer operator could well have lost sight of Corrie after she tumbled down the dirt pile. And the infamous photo series turned out to be misleading. In fact, the megaphone photo was taken hours before Corrie's death; she had handed the loudspeaker to a colleague some time before she was run over, and she was kneeling, not standing, in front of the machine when she was killed. As newspapers ran corrections, the activists claimed that Reuters had "miscaptioned" the photographs. The episode probably did more to mute anger over Corrie's death than anything else. The ISM activists were widely dismissed as frauds. In reality, they were probably just too young and inexperienced to know that if the media feels burned, it'll turn on you, or worse, ignore you.
The author goes on to cite some more trigger-fidgety incidents on the part of the IDF, involving the deaths of five more foreigners in the occupied territories -- deaths which received whimpering comparative media coverage. But then we get this:
ISM has also found itself placed on the defensive by its own recklessness. During a raid on their Jenin office on March 27, Israeli soldiers arrested Shadi Sukiya, an alleged Islamic Jihad guerrilla found hiding with two ISM activists. The idf says that Sukiya, 20, was a "senior militant" who'd sent four suicide attackers into Israel. ISM insists he was an innocent, terrified teenager who'd asked for refuge during an Israeli sweep. But following the incident, the International Committee for the Red Cross, which occupies an office in the same compound, asked the ISM to leave the premises. In late April, two Pakistan-born Britons posing as activists stopped in for tea at the group's office in Rafah. Five days later one Briton blew himself up at the entrance to a Tel Aviv pub called Mike's Place, killing three and wounding dozens. (The other escaped; his battered body later washed ashore near Tel Aviv.) The ISM denied any link to the bomber. "Their sole contact [with us] was a brief social encounter in Rafah in the Gaza Strip and no �links' were �forged' in such a short time," a spokesman said. Still, the perception has lingered that the group is a sympathizer -- and even a harborer -- of terrorists. "These unsubstantiated allegations about their involvement in terror have tarred all human-rights groups," says Sissons of Human Rights Watch. "Some of them are dedicated and disciplined, but in a difficult environment you also need to be smart. They've got a problem keeping control of their people."
Now, when I groked with Billy Bragg last weekend, he was very much conscious of what I hope it's not too bland or arch to label the "Rachel Corrie Question." But perhaps more important than the circumstances surrounding her death is, or was, a seaping miasma of self-censorship that has attended any open discussion of it, at least beyond the sphere of usual suspects shouting at one another across a thick, red line. A play, "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" (unfortunately resonant in its declarative urgency with Tom Wolfe's last novel), was cobbled together from her writings and directed by Alan Rickman in London. It was scheduled for trans-Atlantic debut in this fair city, but the producers of the New York Theater Workshop decided -- and here we'll have to dip into another grab-bag of cop-outs and euphemism -- that the issue was just too raw, what with the Bulldozer himself planning "pull-outs" of Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, and a war on in Iraq, and everything.
Bill's written a new song about the whole episode, the armature of which song has been lovingly swiped from Bob Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll." This is "The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie":
An Israeli bulldozer killed poor Rachel Corrie
As she stood in its path in the town of Rafah
She lost her young life in an act of compassion
Trying to protect the poor people of Gaza
Whose homes are destroyed by tank shells and bulldozers
And whose plight is exploited by suicide bombers
Who kill in the name of the people of Gaza
But Rachel Corrie believed in non-violent resistance
Put herself in harm's way as a shield of the people
And paid with her life in a manner most brutal
But you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.
Rachel Corrie had 23 years
She was born in the town of Olympia, Washington
A skinny, messy, list-making chain-smoker
Who volunteered to protect the Palestinian people
Who had become non-persons in the eyes of the media
So that people were suffering and no one was seeing
Or hearing or talking or caring or acting
And the horrible math of the awful equation
That brought Rachel Corrie into this confrontation
Is that the spilt blood of a single American
Is worth more than the blood of a hundred Palestinians
But you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears,
Take the rag away from your face.
Now ain't the time for your tears.
The artistic director of a New York theatre
Cancelled a play based on Rachel's writings
But she wasn't a bomber or a killer or fighter
But one who acted in the spirit of the Freedom Riders
Is there no place for a voice in America
That doesn't conform to the Fox News agenda?
Who believes in non-violence instead of brute force
Who is willing to confront the might of an army
Whose passionate beliefs were matched by her bravery
The question she asked rings out round the world
If America is truly the beacon of freedom
Then how can it stand by while they bring down the curtain
And turn Rachel Corrie into a non-person?
Oh, but you who philosophise disgrace and criticise all fears,
Bury the rag deep in your face
For now's the time for your tears.
Bad as music, but even worse as politics. (I very much doubt FOX News holds sway at the scheduling conferences at the Theater Workshop. Nor does even an obstreperous editorial like this one in the Wall Street Journal contribute to the Orwellian erasure of Corrie's identity, any more so than bookstores banning Dane cartoons diminish the impulse to get one's hands on those selfsame cartoons, post haste.)
Another thing I was much disappointed to hear at the first of Bill's concerts I attended last week was that the lyric in "Help Save the Youth of America" that goes "They�re already shipping the body bags / Down by the Rio Grande / But you can fight for democracy at home /
And not in some foreign land" was altered for the live performance. I shuddered at the expected mutation, but when it came I wish I'd done more than shudder: Bill changed "Rio Grande" not to "Iraq," but to "Afghanistan." I know for certain that he supported the military removal of the Taliban, which makes you wonder if the use of the term "non-person" in the above stanzas isn't really the airing of a guilty conscience.
And as one of my comrades at the indispensible Harry's Place has shrewdly pointed out, "The implied comparison of Hattie Carroll to Rachel Corrie is as ridiculous as the implied comparison of William Zanzinger to the Israeli army." (Also vide Gene's -- the poster's -- noble outlawing of all readers' comments at Harry's Place that would callously mock the way in which Corrie perished.)
Nevertheless, the play's the thing, and it surely deserves it's run-time in Manhattan, which not-too-long ago hosted the Tim Robbins Follies known as Embedded. So what of the graces of the stage? Matt Wolf in the New York Times, reviewing the swift and originally unintended revival of "My Name Is Rachel Corrie" in London:
If this play doesn't exactly sanctify its subject, it still functions as a staged requiem that can't help but be both partial and partisan. One could take issue with Rachel's comment late on that the Palestinians are for the most part "engaging in Gandhian nonviolent resistance." But it's hard not to be impressed � and also somewhat frightened � by the description of her as a 2-year-old looking across Capitol Lake in Washington State and announcing, "This is the wide world, and I'm coming to it."
Perhaps thanks to the controversy, Mr. Rickman's production has gathered power since I first saw it last April, and the material actually suits its current 750-seat West End berth better than it did a Royal Court studio space about a tenth the size. Ms. Dodds, an American whose London theater credits include Neil LaBute's "This Is How It Goes," is a decade or so older than Ms. Corrie was when she died. But the actress subtly moves from a shining-faced earnestness to something darker and more dangerous, as the fire in Ms. Corrie's belly builds into a conflagration. (One can only imagine what a young Vanessa Redgrave might have made of the role.)
Apt conduit that Ms. Dodds is, it remains fitting that a piece driven by Ms. Corrie's own language concludes with a brief film of her. There she is, age 10, arguing for the eradication of hunger by the year 2000 and to give "the poor a chance." Unexceptional sentiments? Perhaps, at least to anyone who has heard (or sung) any of a thousand comparable protest songs. But that doesn't diminish the singularity of Ms. Corrie's death or of this paean to her, which gives activism a necessary center stage without quite arriving at the realm of art.
To answer any questions that might be forthcoming, yes, I'd proudly demonstrate to get this play produced in New York. But that doesn't mean I'd do the same for brightening the flame of Ms. Corrie's questionable legacy.
Don't get me wrong: I think Sofia's an object lesson in deshabille cool. I loved Lost in Translation up until the fourth time I saw it. And if she singlehandedly brings back the New Romantics in music, then it's been a good day's work all around.
And yet...
Kirsten Dunst's Marie Antoinette on the cover of Vogue as the "teen queen" strikes me as a touch declasse for our supposed democratic virtues. Carlyle and Burke might have mourned the plumage of the dauphine (and forgot the dying bird that came attached to it) but that was in the 18th and 19th centuries when things were still a bit up in the air. Helen Mirren amply demonstrates that in the 21st we should be well past the point of glorifying solipsistic and corrupt monarchy.
Alarming in this news cycle is that second thoughts on the ancien regime are being had -- with "Lady" Antonia Fraser's revisionist biography serving as the literary equivalent of a Bastille moment -- just as disillusionment with regime change is mounting. (This coincides with a period in which the White House has arrogated "executive privileges" to itself that even Lincoln might have thought unwise, unnecessary, and unprincipled in a time of war.)
It's as old as Paris' sex tape that celebrity is our aristocracy, but when did lounging empresses become the standard-bearer of mopey hipness? The whole point of People and Us Weekly is to over-expose and perform a sort of reverse alchemy on the gilded wastrels of American culture. The scandal-mongering feels healthy because squeezed in between Brad and Angelina's bedsheets is the where-they-came-from paragraph that reminds you that you, too, may someday experience the joy of adopting third world children that live on more per day than your last box office take.
That a Coppola chooses to extol a divine-right sovereign who deserved, if not to quite lose her head, then to at least lose her liberty is a bad sign. What's next? A Romanoff in a "Go Metric" t-shirt tapping his foot in rhythm to Echo and the Bunnymen?
And who says you won't fool the children of the revolution?
'I guess I was lucky because I was always surrounded by interesting adults,' she says now. 'People like Warhol and [Werner] Herzog. It wasn't a regular childhood, whatever that is, but family was everything to my father. It's an Italian thing, I guess. We were always there with the adults, playing, talking, listening.'
The family moved west in the Seventies from New York to California's Napa Valley, where her father now owns a famous vineyard. It produces a champagne called Sofia, which is described on the label as 'revolutionary, petulant, reactionary, ebullient, fragrant, cold, cool'. The real Sofia once described it simply as 'embarrassing'. Before he moved sideways into wine production, her father lived and breathed movies. 'Everyone in my family is in the film business,' she once said, 'and that's all we talked about... I had a 20-year tutorial on film in my own home.' Her earliest childhood memories are of sitting on Andy Warhol's knee and helicopter rides over the Philippines jungle, where she lived for nearly two years while her father almost killed himself and bankrupted a major studio while making Apocalypse Now in the early 1970s. 'It was fun,' she smiles. 'I didn't really think of my father as a famous film director. He was just, you know, my dad.'
First off, this closing paragraph on the slow, painful death of CBGB has caused a major case of deja vu:
�When I go into a rock club in Helsinki or London or Des Moines, it feels like CBGB to me there,� Mr. Kaye said. �The message from this tiny little Bowery bar has gone around the world. It has authenticated the rock experience wherever it has landed.�
Where else have I heard this before? The 2nd Avenue Deli obit? The most depressing aspect of this whole affair is that Hilly Kristal, the club's owner, is shopping around in... wait for it... Las Vegas. As Scarlett Johansson's character in Ghost World said: "That's so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again."
Anyway, I'd have refrained from commenting at all but for the fact that I have an idea. Let's start a new Hacienda in Red Hook. (24 Hour Party People came out a few years ago, it's cool. The nostalgia/revisionism is already retro.) In the land that Irish Westies once ruled the real estate's cheap-ish, the space is plentiful, and the best part? You really do have to want to be there, bussing it in and all.
Most of the Lower East Side bands worth following already live in the neighborhood. Though I've yet to venture forth myself, I'm told the roof space is pretentiously delapidated and the old folks don't seem to mind very loud noise erupting into all hours. Oh, and there's a Fairway! Soy Chips for emos! Johnnie Walker for the rest of us!
It all begins with a dream. And corporate financing. Who's with me?
Mark the careful insertion of the word "potentially" into this pathetic and auto-fellating review by Henry Kissinger of a new biography of Dean Acheson:
The position of secretary of state is potentially the most fulfilling in the government short of the presidency. Its scope is global; ultimately it rests on almost philosophical assumptions as to the nature of world order and the relationship of order to progress and national interest. Lacking such a conceptual framework, incoherence looms in the face of the daily task of redefining America�s relationship to the world via the thousands of messages from nearly 200 diplomatic posts and the constant flow of communication from the Executive Department � all this against the backdrop of Congressional liaison and press inquiry.
"Potentially," if you repeatedly defy international law, broker illegal and recondite state deals with autocratic and genocidal regimes, and otherwise act as zombified colossus bestriding the globe for two agonizing presidencies... Tell it to the Kurds, the East Timorese and the Cambodians. (By the way, the Washington Postcolumn Hitch cited in his latest Slateeviseration of the good doctor -- the one in which Kissinger spoke of a "Sunni majority" that governed pre-war Iraq -- was hysterically inept enough to cause freelance journalist Frank Smyth to label it an example of "magical realism." That satire should be better known than it is, I think.)
I'm becoming addicted to the New York Times video section (probably because I keep hoping those hooded eyes of A.O. Scott will close narcoleptically on screen), and the latest is one on a company called Image Metrics, which has developed a truly breathtaking technology. Instead of hooking up actors' faces to sensors in order to "map" the musculature and transform it into the moving, mannered faces of CGI characters, all they do is take a video of you and, voila, insta-Shrek.
Sharon Waxman of the Times narrates partly as a WarCraft-looking baddie, but that's not what chills me about this new toy. What are state governments -- or, indeed, terrorist groups -- going to be able to do now that long-dead actors can be resurrected by living ones? How would we know for sure that Osama had been offed if Zawahiri could mimick the Turbaned One with a little Al Jazeera'd iStudio action? (I'll leave it to Firedoglake and company to trace the same ominous logic back to the White House Press room.)
1984 is the obvious cliche here and one we needn't even consult. The Soviet archives have shown how the Politburo ordered countless re-doctored photographs of the revolutionary period that had featured Old Bolsheviks no longer worth sanctifying. An arm of Trotsky wiped here, a head of Bukharin scratched out there.
This was using basic photolab techniques of the 1930's. Can you imagine a Stalinist with a PowerBook?
David Aaronivitch narrates and presents an excellent program which aired on BBC Channel* 5 titled, "Don't Get Me Started: No Excuses For Terror." Some familiar faces and names are scattered throughout, including those of Norm Geras, co-author of The Euston Manifesto and editor of Normblog, and Alan Johnson, editor of Democratiya. Though one should pay extra special attention to the mother of a 24 year-old girl immolated in the King's Cross tube station on 7/7 -- not because she's a victim but because she's right. So is Abdullah Muhsin Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. This is him on the international left which tries to "understand" the motives of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia -- if not declare common cause with it -- while the tireless enemies of Saddam have now become the tireless enemies of Bin Laden:
They need to go to our country, to Iraq and to assess the situation and stop plugging sentences from books and grand theories and trying to impose them on our country. Stop being cultural imperialists. Give us the solidarity, give us the support. We are the same people who fought Saddam Hussein, we are the same people who are now fighting for democracy, for social justice, for equality, we are the same people, we haven't changed, we are still wearing the same clothes. Support us, while there is a chance. Stop supporting these extremists and fundamentalists who will not bring only chaos into Iraq but will in the future - they will haunt you because they are not your friend, they are your enemy.
The show is broken up into four installments on YouTube, so here they are. Thanks to my friend and comrade Josh Strawn at End Credits and New Hymns for bringing my attention to this:
*David P left the comment below correcting my Yank ignorance about which station premiered the series.
Somewhere in his delightful collection of essays and polemics Discriminations, Dwight Macdonald writes about attending a White House arts and literature function shortly after the Gulf of Tonkin fiasco. What to do? Cosy up to LBJ and Lady Bird on the heels of an American betrayal of incipient peace in a criminal imperialist war, or play the role of ironically-minded journalist as only a self-described "conservative anarchist" could? He went. About halfway through the event -- and halfway through the piece -- Macdonald bumps into another greying mane of the New York intellectual establishment, Saul Bellow. Bellow was more amenable to donning a tux and kibitzing in and around the South Lawn, war or no war. This was because he was already tilting toward the neoconservatism that would come to define all his nonfiction writing, especially on Israel and domestic race relations. (I always think of Augie March getting mugged by reality and turning into a saner, quieter Moses Herzog). Dwight chivvied, and Saul chivvied back. I wish I had the essay to hand, but one great ex-Trotskyist says to another: "We had the kind of argument you never hear outside New York, or better yet, outside a five block radius on the Upper West Side."
Now Dwight was always something of an honorary Jew, or a Jewish non-Jew (to invert Isaac Deutscher's famous category.) And one thing his Marxist training taught him well was that time provides degenerate sequels and parodies of all things. So, real estate prices being what they are now, the Upper West had been replaced by the Village; Vietnam by Iraq; Macdonald and Bellow -- like two hyperions to infinite satyrs -- by Tony Judt and his lefty antagonists. The latest of these is Judt's on-again-off-again friend Leon Wieseltier, who writes in The New Republic about the Polish consulate kerfuffle:
I wonder whether the shahid of Washington Square and his champions have spoken or signed anything against the boycotts of Israeli academics; but I will leave the double-standards research to others. The more significant point is that what Judt was prevented from delivering at the Polish consulate was a conspiracy theory about the pernicious role of the Jews in the world. That is what the idea of "the Lobby" is. It is Mel Gibson's analysis of the Iraq war. It is not just an analysis of the impact of AIPAC on particular resolutions and policies: such an analysis requires a detailed knowledge of American government, specifically of Congress, that I suspect Judt does not possess and that his fellow heroes Mearsheimer and Walt have been shown to lack...Tony Judt is not an anti-Semite, and bully for him. But here he is, on October 6, describing Joe Lieberman as "very ostentatiously Jewish." What the hell does that mean? Is Barack Obama very ostentatiously black? A person's politics is not just a reflection of a person's origins, of course; but Judt's writing about Israel and its Jewish supporters is icily lacking in decency, in hesed, a word that even an unostentatious Jew can understand. No amount of sympathy for the interests of the Palestinians requires this amount of antipathy to the interests of the Israelis. There are more scrupulous, more humane, more complex, and more helpful things to do with one's freedom.
For the most part, Wieseltier gets it right, even if he does transform virtue into vice by offering up this deflation of an academic ego as a cheap apologia for signing a letter in defense of Judt's right to chatter at the podium about his delusional opinions. (I say delusional, by the way, not because I disagree with Judt's criticisms of Israel, but because the M-W thesis was halfbaked and hollow and written with the same suspect motive that Judt elsewhere claims to be able to identify intuitively. Also, his "alternative" for a single-state solution in the Levant is utopian in a kindergarten way. Does anyone think Israel is going to allow itself to be overtaken by an Arab political majority, especially at this moment in history? What else you got, Professor?)
Leave aside the plain and funny fact that one member of the tribe can get away with calling another Yiddier-than-thou or "ostentatious." Leave aside also that Wieseltier reverts to the bad-faith misdirection of telling an unfairly harassed writer that his plight is footling compared to what others have to go through in Eastern Europe or the third world. (It'd have been nice if Leon saw fit to mention Anna Politkovskaya for its own sake, not as a case study in contrastive martyrdom.)
The whopping irony lost on all coverage of l'affaire Judt and the whole yawning Israel "Lobby" discussion is the following: Self-critical Jews far more radical than he on the subject of the Jewish state operate from within Israel itself, and are virtually unmolested by Israeli media. Israel Shahak comes to mind; he came right out and said that "classical Judaism" was just another form of totalitarianism, on par with fascism and communism. And he did the hard investigating of Jewish history, not to mention the tireless exegesis of the Pentateuch, to support his position. Unlike the lot of "activists" on the East Coast, Shahak was also riotously funny in his polemical writing. Yet that didn't stop the U.S. press from paying him zero attention until the Washington Post decided to run his obituary many years too soon. (Edward Said recalls that not even Shahak's showing up at the Post's offices to prove he was still among the living could get the paper to print a retraction of his greatly exaggerated death.) Now, Judt is a well-published and well-paid doyen of the liberal intelligentsia. He writes a pretty shallow here's-how-we-all-can-get-along brief in the New York Review of Books and seconds a vaguely sinister call for change in the London one. Suddenly he's on everyone's "radar." (The whole episode should actually be covered in Radar. Roshan Maer, as an Iranian Jew, is best poised bring a refreshing and hilarious take on these stateside semitic skirmishes.)
This just goes to prove A.B. Yehoshua's recent comment that American Jews and Israeli Jews are worlds, not oceans, apart. Joyce said the same thing about the Irish and their emigre counterparts at a time when Irish self-determination and "awareness" was riding high. In a weird way, Judt contra omnes is good for the Jews.
Why is everybody in Buffalo freaking out about the two-foot snowfall they got yesterday? 140,000 people are without electricity, thousands of calls to the police, nonemergency driving prohibited in several towns, 80 percent of the roads impassable -- I know it's October, but it's not like Floridians wouldn't be prepared to deal with a hurricane in July. You live in Buffalo. Everybody knows the Eastern edge of Erie gets dumped on annually. You have plows. You have snowblowers. Fix it!
Up to 2 Feet of Snow Falls Near Buffalo | New York Times
Here's a secret of the "netroots" establishment you might want to pass on: Why do they hate Karl Rove so? Because he's got the brains they can't have but the body they can.
Check out this farcically inexpert smear campaign Team Lamont has conducted, or at the very least suborned, to show that Joe Lieberman sat out the civil rights movement:
Earlier, the Connecticut Federation of Black Democratic Clubs, which includes 20 clubs across the state, endorsed Lamont and questioned whether Lieberman had marched for civil rights. Lamont attended the event.
Lieberman's campaign responded by producing a 1963 college newspaper clip that cites Lieberman's reporting from Jackson, Miss., about the arrests of civil rights workers. Lieberman was chairman of the Yale Daily News.
Lieberman said he led a group of Yale students to Mississippi. He also recalled being part of the Washington, D.C., crowd at the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s famed ''I Have a Dream'' speech in August 1963.
''Was I there?'' Lieberman said on Wednesday. ''You bet I was there.''
Lamont's campaign has tried to distance itself from the charges. Campaign manager Tom Swan said Lamont was not questioning Lieberman's civil rights background. However, Lamont's campaign paid for a flier the group distributed at the event.
Ain't that sweet? Not only is Joe a warmonger, but he's a racist one at that.
Lamont's candidacy was of course conceived and incubated by DailyKos, who's founder's most memorable statement to date was about the private contractors murdered and mutilated in Fallujah: "[I] feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren't in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them."
Horace Mann, Princeton, Harvard Law, Paul Weiss. Swap the undergrad with another Ivy -- one known for its boozing and football game losing -- and you have the CV of all my friends. I love each and every one, but the sheer ambition and career opportunism has always been a point of division between them and myself. See, I'm the lazy one with the blog and the perpetually vague state of employment. (Though I managed to run for public office without the law degree or tony private school education. And I got Minnie Driver's numba. How do you like them apples?)
I bring this up because Eliot Spitzer is the next governor of New York, and I sort of have ambivalent feelings about him, too. On the one hand, he's clearly very bright and shrewd and he knows how to get things done with the corporate malfeasance types. On the other -- well, just you read:
Eliot was something of a jock at Horace Mann, captaining the tennis team and playing soccer. When his teams played Trinity, he crossed paths with John McEnroe, who plays tennis with the same abrasive intensity with which Mr. Spitzer approaches politics. Mr. Spitzer has often told the story of going home after seeing Mr. McEnroe whiz serves past one of his classmates and telling his parents �I had seen the kid play who would be No. 1 in the world.�
�My parents said, �Eliot, just because he beat you doesn�t mean that he�s the best in the world,� he remembered.
Along the way, Eliot suffered setbacks, or what for him counted as setbacks. His ambitions of going to Harvard were derailed when he was not accepted, so he went to Princeton instead. In an interview, his father also let forth a family secret: that his son had scored a perfect 1,600 on the SAT. Confronted with this, Mr. Spitzer winced, and conceded imperfection.
�I think it was 1,590,� he said, adding that his father must have confused the SAT with his perfect LSAT score.
There's also a twice papa-bankrolled campaign for attorney general and a mien that I always read as: "Spitzer Smash!" (See inset photo to this post.) The above Times profile comes to us on the same week that Gawker has given ample coverage to Douchebag extraordinaire Aleksey Vayner, who would have only foregone the "I think" before giving his recollected SAT score.
I'll still vote for Spitzer, but seeing this hopelessly poll-tested and charmed rise to power has got me nostalgic for the days of Pat Moynihan, a megalopolitan gentleman and scholar in the Old World sense of the term. Paddy wasn't afraid to do a little working-class tramping through Europe as a lad, or to set the pope right on apologizing to the Jews for that whole World War II blind-indifference-to-extermination business. He could also hold his booze, stand up to Stalinism and rattle off bons mots about healthcare legislation, to boot.
Even at the more parochial state level, however, Spitzer seems like his gubernatorial predecessor: a shore-hugging cipher who'll give lousy soundbyte and even worse heed to the other guys in the room. Then again, the other guys all live in Albany and have no problem running the joint like a banana republic. Maybe he's just what they needed.
Denying the Armenian genocide now stands a good chance of becoming a violation of French law, punishable by jail time and a hefty fine. That'll teach people to respect history.
"Does a genocide committed in World War One have less value than a genocide committed in World War Two? Obviously not,'' Philippe Pomezec, a parliamentarian with the ruling Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), said during the debate.
The French government did not support the motion and promised on Thursday to oppose it when it gets to the Senate, but Turkey said the damage had already been done.
"French-Turkish relations ... have been dealt a severe blow today as a result of the irresponsible false claims of French politicians who do not see the political consequences of their actions,'' the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
In his not-bad debut novel The Catastrophist, Douglas Lawrence has his main character Daniel Wellington, an art historian and consultant on Holocaust memorials, get into a heated debate with an Armenian counterpart who instead wants a universal selpuchre to victims of genocide erected in Berlin. The back-and-forth amounts to an auction of ethnic self-pity and particularism, but the comic climax occurs later, when the now-exclusively Jewish monument runs into yet another round of trouble, this time courtesy of its German hosts. What about the Teutonic slain of the Thirty Years War, they ask? Weren't they victims, too? "I don't understand," replies Wellington, "victims of... themselves?"
Mel Gibson Wants All The Toasters In Malibu Put On Trains
I really don't know how anyone who watches this first segment of Diane Sawyer's interview with The Mel can maintain the guy made a lamentable boo-boo or, you know, isn't batpiss fucking insane. Would you just listen to him, for chrissake? And look at his manic expressions. I think South Park toned it down some:
Any takers on getting him pissed again to see what he would, in fact, say to a black arresting officer?
This Saturday marks the centenary of the woman W.H. Auden offered to marry (what a Will & Grace sitcom that'd have made), and who drove the Upper West Side cognoscenti mad with self-criticism. Hannah Arendt's legacy has survived pretty well for someone who schtupped Heidegger both before and after his affiliation with Nazism. (My boss at Jewcy puts it like this: "Banality of evil? Evil's pretty exciting." And is there not a slight double standard at work in those followers of Arendt who don't take as deep a breath before uttering "Gotcha!" about the exchanged letters between Carl Schmidtt and Leo Strauss?)
Totalitarian Studies never had a more tough-minded matriarch. Although her expertise was in the 20th century, it's pretty obvious that Arendt is not about to go out of fashion in the 21st.
I was reading one of her essays last night entitled "The Fascist International." It might have been written yesterday. The main conceit of it was that, apart from anti-Semites viewing the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as sinister proof of a global Jewish conspiracy, they actually read it as a primer for how to undertake just such a conspiracy themselves. You want a successful movement of subversion and intrigue and millennia-long endurance? Look to the Jews. (One need only recall the Malaysian prime minister's speech a few years ago to realize this idea is not in the least silly or ex vogue.) Germany may have been ground zero for Nazism, but judging by how Hitler allowed the country to become a cynosure of chaos and destruction, it was expendable: the ideology of Hitler's fascism was not nationalist but internationalist by design. Just like Communism. (Hitler admired Stalin, and the feeling was mutual. "What can we learn from each other?" was the dispassionate question either asked of the other, even after their "friendship" pact was dissolved.) Hitler's greatest feat was to turn a paranoid fantasy into reality: If Jews were not the beggared parasites sucking from the economic lifeblood of Europe, then he'd make them so by beggaring and scattering them, wretched and homeless, throughout the continent. World War II never had to be won militarily for fascism to take root, as it surely did after 1945 in South America, Western Europe and, of course, the Middle East.
From here it's easy to see how Baathism and pan-Arabism were mutually intelligible under the reign of Saddam Hussein, and continue to be under that of Bashar al-Assad. I often wonder whether Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's highly publicized denial of the Holocaust is not founded on his vicious admiration for global Jewry: How could they have lost six million when they control the world?
For those of you Manhattanites with a car, there's an Arendt conference taking place the weekend of Oct. 27 at Bard College. Hitch will be there, along with Mark Danner:
Now here's a selection by Stockholm that doesn't turn the stomach even before the artistic merits have been weighed. One interesting rumor I've heard is that Orhan Pamuk's ridiculous prosecution -- for "insulting Turkishness" by pointing out the very real Armenian genocide and subjugation of Diyarbakir's Kurds -- was a frame-up by Ankara designed to nab the dissident novelist, and his nation, the world's top literary prize. I doubt it, but it'd make a good Slate piece.
What are the immediate benefits of this bestowal? Turkey will now have an even harder time scaling back the liberal reforms required of it to join the European Union. Pamuk, in all likelihood, will now feel freer to write more candidly about his country's black history. It will bring attention the plight of Turkish Kurds, and at a time when the ones in Iraq are feeling more warmly disposed toward the Erdogan government. (An independent Kurdistan with a major American garrison as a certain outcome of the disintegration of Iraq, and Turkey knows and fears this.)
Of course, we've reached a point in this overblown prize's public relations that these are the first concerns to be run through before even asking, "Can the man write?" and "Does he really do it better than everyone else on the planet?"
Then Homeland Security fucked up again. How can any aircraft that isn't a local news weather chopper be permitted to get within crashing range of any building in New York City?
A Fire Department spokeswoman, Emily Rahimi, told The Associated Press that the aircraft struck the 20th floor of the building, 524 E. 72nd St., near York Avenue. However, television reports said the aircraft hit closer to the 40th floor.
The Guardian and HuffPo's token Tory twit swallows a dram of smart-juice today. Or something:
If this relaxed view is not viable in North Korea's case (as opposed to Iran's), there is only one sensible alternative. It is not to drag out a conflict through economic sanctions to eventual war, but to curb North Korea's ambition in the simplest possible way. Sophisticated air power, useless in counter-insurgency, has a role in the "coercive diplomacy" of non-proliferation. Israel used it effectively against Iraq's nuclear plant in 1981 and the US repeated the exercise with Operation Desert Fox in 1998 (though Bush and Blair later refused to believe it had worked). If Kim is the unstable menace he appears, his bomb-making capacity and missile sites should be removed at once with Tomahawk missiles. Fewer people would die that way than with any other pre-emptive response.
Two problems with Osiraq gone east: the first is that Kim, like Khatamei, might have secret weapon sites our satellites don't know about, in which case we run the risk of not getting all his naughty toys and leaving him pissed and still-armed. The second is that, even if we do categorically remove North Korea's nuclear status, its Stalinist military can still invade and wipe out most of Seoul with the use of conventional weaponry. The Pentagon has war-gamed this scenario and not even the scrappiest, John Henry-ish human hero out of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink can figure out a way to better the computers' conclusion: "Fucked."
We are the 90's. The blowjobs this time around are IMed and man-on-boy, but the bombing runs of rogue states feel just like late Clintonia. Let's let VH1 decide what to do.
Readers of Snarksmith know that I have my problems with Professor Tony Judt. But more disturbing than his occasional dip into intellectual and moral murkiness is his increasingly thinned lecture calendar. This is due to bureaucratic cowardice, which sees a popular academic�s critical stance on Israel, and a rather silly one on the dread Jewish �lobby� in America, as grounds for denying him a platform to speak about just these subjects. The Polish consulate (it might as well have been the German or Austrian one) has just cancelled an invitation to Judt to speak about AIPAC�s reign of terror on U.S. foreign policy-making. According to the Washington Post, an hour before Judt was due to arrive, Polish Consul General Krzysztof Kasprzyk put the kybosh on the talk, saying that the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee had suggested this as the wise course of action:
"The phone calls were very elegant but may be interpreted as exercising a delicate pressure," Kasprzyk said. "That's obvious -- we are adults and our IQs are high enough to understand that."
Jews can't let go of the Holocaust, Poles always bring up IQ. You know how it is.
For the life of me, I'll never understand why Jewish cultural reactionaries who make their raison d'etre the "outing" of Jewish gadflies (or loudmouths, if you prefer) squeal in horror whenever just such a gadfly offers to make a fool of himself on stage. Foxman, et al. pretty much do one better than Judt himself by strongarming a foreign country into implementing more Hebraiophilic policy within its own borders (the Polish consulate is legally Poland on U.S. soil). Nor does Foxman fail to adhere to his characteristic standard of honesty in saying that "[Judt�s] taken the position that Israel shouldn't exist. That puts him on our radar.� Judt�s position on Israel is that it�s undemocratic by design and that it should allow Arabs an equal voice, and an equal stature, in all aspects of government and society � something which will inevitably translate into the end of Israel�s existence as a �Jewish state� as opposed to a �state for the Jews.� I�d say that you can argue with this, but clearly the ADL and AJC would rather you didn�t.
The same stupid logic has applied to an even more self-parodying figure Norman Finkelstein, who's spent a career making up for one thing he got right by doing everything else wrong. I don�t know what�s worse anymore: seeing Finkelstein turned into a martyr for academic free speech (NYU treated him just as badly), or hearing his most hysterical and vicious critics label him a Holocaust-denier when both his survivor parents instructed him in the the grim reality of the Shoah.
How about the following as a symposium topic: �Never Again: The Squelching of Unconventional Opinions of American Jews by American Jews.�
I had no idea Means was writing for the Daily Show. (He's also apparently contributed to the Onion, New Yorker, and Saturday Night Live.) When I was editing my college humor magazine, Means appeared to be a reclusive genius, who would pencil, submit, reclaim, ink, submit and reclaim beautiful and understated cartoons without ever introducing himself to me. To this day I can't help but wonder whether he staked out the office for my periodic trips for tea before taking or leaving artwork. At least the blurry wire photo of him in the link above means now I know what Means looks like. He's a truly talented individual, and I'm delighted to see him succeed.
And Mindy Kaling, another sort-of-acquaintance from my college comedy scene, is now part of the cast and writing team for the American Office, which has pulled off the unlikely feat of improving on the British original. My uncle, who follows the show slavishly, was very excited when I told him I had exchanged words with her a couple times. "You know Cookie Cookie?"
In other news, fellow editor emeritus Mike Weiss and I have a blog.
If you're a fan of hopelessness and long odds, you might try running for State Assembly in Queens as a Republican. I did. Now, so is this kid, just a year younger than I was, but with an infinitely more promising campaign platform:
A video making the rounds on the Internet shows Chris Migliaccio, a 23-year-old Assembly hopeful from Flushing, Queens, arguing that masturbation should be part of the sex-education curriculum.
"You are less stressed and a generally happy person and less aggressive when you masturbate on some sort of regular basis," Migliaccio, clad in a black shirt and a white tie, told a group at a Smith College meeting of the American Parliamentary Debate Association late last month, drawing approving thumps on the tables.
The best part? He says that only 1 in 10 blowjobs in high school are reciprocated with guy-on-girl oral, horribly teaching young women not to expect equal rights.
A not so minor tragedy of 9/11 was that it preempted what should have been a moment of historical reckoning. The Soviet archives had become accessible to academics and cold war partisans, and here, at last, was the corpse of Communism laid out on the slab for all to examine. The much-bruited "end of history" should have held out for a little longer (notwithstanding the interruptions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, etc.)
We know a lot more now than we did in 1991 about the Soviet Union, and it's true that similar acts of imagination and interpolation -- which defined "Kreminology" at its best -- will be of service to us now in the struggle against jihadism. But no less important is remembrance of the definitive ideological conflict of the dearly departed century.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Depending on whom you consult, this is either the absolute last moment for a Communist to have lost his illusions and joined the opposition � or it wasn�t. (The Kronstadt Rebellion in 1921 was one; the kidnapping and execution of Andres Nin in Spain in 1937 was another; the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 was another; and so it went right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.)
Between 1948 and 1953, about 1 million people in Hungary were subject to arrest, prosecution, jailing, or exile. Many were vicious apparatchiks who had faithfully served Moscow up until their branding as mini- Titos of "National" Communism rather than compliant comrades of international socialism. Laszlo Rajk was the most famous of these in Hungary. He was a hard-line Stalinist, who'd served in the Spanish Civil War in the muscular republican "Rakosi battalion," and thus had made contact with various "imperialist" elements outside of the Soviet sphere of influence. He was poised for a show trial and public example-making. (Rajk's counterpart in Czechoslovakia was Rudolph Slanksy; in Romania, Anna Pauker; in Bulgaria, Traicho Kostov.) His lead persecutor was Matyas Rakosi, an equally hard-line Stalinist who had ruled Hungary as a brutal Interior Minister until Khrushchev's de-Stalinization period, whereupon Imre Nagy was installed as the more liberal-minded head of state.
Rakosi and the Stalinist nostalgics argued to the Kremlin that any "thaw" would be destabilizing for the satellite, especially with NATO troops amassed in nearby Austria. Rakosi regained power briefly during an interlude of Presidium michegaas, but his estimation proved correct once Nagy was reinstalled. The liberal loudly demanded an end to Soviet hegemony, and insisted on the immediate withdrawal of the Red Army from Hungarian soil. This precipitated the formation of Workers Councils and student organizations and the drafting of the "Sixteen Point" manifesto, demanding industrial and agrarian reform, freedom of speech, democratization and the termination of petty alphabet-soup bureaucracy. Nagy declared Hungary to now be officially out of the Warsaw Pact and asked for UN legitimacy as a neutral player between East and West. And, well, that was that.
On November 4, Soviet tanks entered Budapest. After several days of fierce fighting, Soviet control was restored. In the battle, several thousand Hungarians were killed; many more thousands were deported to the Soviet Union. The revolution�s leadership�including Imre Nagy, who had previously served as prime minister but had been expelled from the Communist party for liberalizing tendencies, only to become prime minister again during the upheaval�was seized by the Soviet military, placed on trial, and, in the case of Nagy and a few others, executed.
Diplomatically and politically, the fallout was mixed. The Kremlin found itself on the defensive at the United Nations, and suffered a further hemorrhaging of support from leftist circles in Western Europe. Khrushchev, who had won international praise for his de-Stalinization initiatives, became known for a time as the �Butcher of Budapest.� But, for Moscow, such public-relations setbacks were more than offset by the salutary impact of the invasion on the Soviet position in Eastern Europe. The action sent an unambiguous signal that the USSR would employ all necessary means to protect �socialism.�
This Is The Coastal Town That They Forgot To Close Down
I can think of worse places for Biblical plague and destruction to begin than in Margate, where Penny Woolcock is filming a movie about Exodus:
As for the lice and locusts, they came in the happily less tangible form of a cycle of songs, performed by Margate locals but written for the occasion by Rufus Wainwright, Laurie Anderson and Brian Eno. Mr. Eno did the flies (a lot of buzzing) and Ms. Anderson the death of livestock (not so easy).
So... How'd you spend your weekend? Scanning the Times for more on Mark Foley's pederastic designs, or at the fifth annual Lebowksi Fest reminiscing about John Turturro's? What is this Day of Atonement bullshit? It don't matter to Jesus!
Timothy Noah's retrieved IMs between Foley and the Mystery Page (hey, think Ana Marie Cox is too well past her sell-by date to out this D.C. flunkie, too?) comprise the Most Read article on Slate.
"If you want to learn about Stalin, study Henry VIII. If you want to learn about Mrs Thatcher, study Henry VIII. If you want to know about Hollywood, study Henry VIII.... History nowadays is not a matter of conviction. It's a performance. It's entertainment. And if it isn't, make it so."
Not since Bellow shoehorned Paul Wolfowitz into Ravelstein has fiction served as the definitive gloss on the intellectual stature of a leading academic with political influence. Niall Ferguson transformed into Irwin in Alan Bennett's The History Boys isn't much more complicated than what the above suggests, at least not since he wrote a sprawlingly blah profile of George W. Bush as -- who else? -- Prince Hal for Vanity Fair two years ago.
Ferguson's work on empire is interesting for its own sake, and as careful a fusion of entertainment and conviction as one is likely to find from a Scottish conservative who seems to think that Britain's found role after World War II is historical revisionism. Though his mode of argument about the contemporary scence, peppered with a few choice footnotes and quotations, wears a bit thin. Here is Ferguson on the detainee bill:
[E]ven if you don't see any resemblance between Bush's "administrative regulations" and Imperial Japan's "necessary amendments" of the Geneva Convention, consider this purely practical argument: As Winston Churchill insisted throughout the war, treating POWs well is wise, if only to increase the chances that your own men will be well treated if they too are captured. Even in World War II, there was in fact a high degree of reciprocity. The British treated Germans POWs well and were well treated by the Germans in return; the Germans treated Russian POWs abysmally and got their bloody deserts when the tables were turned.
Few, if any, American soldiers currently find themselves in enemy hands. But in the long war on which Bush has embarked, that may not always be the case. The bottom line about mistreating captive foes is simple: It is that what goes around comes around. And you don't have to be a closet liberal to understand that.
First of all, the Russians treated Russians as well as Axis POWs. And does anyone think that Al Qaeda will be swayed by the model behavior of even Pakistan in the treatment of captured combatants?
The pragmatic rationale for opposing the Military Commissions Act is rooted in the present, not in World War II. We have been more misled in our intelligence-gathering by the uses of torture than we have been effectively tipped off. I've yet to encounter a single example of the "ticking bomb" justification, and I doubt I ever will because a jihadist willing to immolate himself in order to kill hundreds or thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of civilians is probably committed enough to withstand simulation drowning without loosing the detonation site or launch sequence code in the nick of time.
The opposition to Bush must get its facts straight and its historical analogs in order, lest it descend down the pathetic path Andrew Sullivan seems to fancy these days, of comparing the U.S. government to Lavrenty Beria's NKVD. (If you want to know my reasons against this sorry moral equivalence, click here.)
Part of Alberto Gonzales' now-infamous "torture memo," which first addressed part of the Geneva Conventions as being "outmoded" and "quaint," had actually addressed those provisions which dealt with things like the allocation of scientific equipment to POWs. Again, this was clearly a holdover from WWII. I highly doubt that Abu Zubaydah will be conducting groundbreaking research into the mating patterns of fruit flies anytime soon, and so I had -- and continue to have -- no problem at all labeling this section of a necessary humanitarian document as hopelessly suspended in an era when airplanes were not being used as missiles against exclusively civilian targets.
I find it increasingly odd that those who see 1945 as a moral palimpsest for confronting 2006 are usually the ones who rubbish any comparison between Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin, as if acts of genocide and totalitarian repression were themselves outmoded and quaint.
Let us all grow up already. Churchill might well have firebombed Waziristan by now. And how might that conservative doyen Barry Goldwater have reacted to Osama? (A blog post about this from Sullivan might come in handy.)
The age of the dirty bomb requires more originality of thinking and much less reference to a century when one's enemy announced itself at international conferences, not during live broadcasts on CNN.
Mark Foley likes the little boys, and the DNC can't wait to roll up their sleeves for a midterm campaign blitz that only a NAMBLA member could love. From NYT:
The Democratic National Committee seized on the scandal, sending out a scathing statement that raised pointed questions about Mr. Hastert and other Republican leaders. In bold red type, the dispatch asked: �What did Coach H and his buddies know and when did they know it?�
"Put me in, coach, put me in!"
"No, Timmy. I want you right here in the dugout with me for a couple of innings. You know, Old Coach Denny's been eyeing your progress this season. Damn fine hustle out there, m'boy. Damn fine. In fact, I have some pictures of you rounding third that I think we should go over together..."
I can already see this week's Onion headline: "House Ways and Means Committee Cancels Subscription to Tiger Beat."
Since (late) 2004, satisfying your jones for political and cultural commentary, day-old scoops and late-breaking marginalia, and whatever else finagles its way into the cyber-planetary potluck...
• Civil Disobedience on the Web By Michael Weiss {British bloggers stand up to threats of libel lawsuits., originally published in Slate.}
• Spray-Fire Atonement By Michael Weiss {How cognitive behavioral psychology can help High Holy Day Jews who repent too much., originally published in Slate.}
• Mutiny on the Manifesto By Michael Weiss {Spineless scalawags are sabotaging the most promising leftist doctrine in decades. Don't let them., originally published in Jewcy.}
• Rise of the Faux-cialists By Michael Weiss {Three poseurs who would have Marx spinning in his grave (plus their real-deal counterparts), originally published in Jewcy.}
• Stepson of the Time By Michael Weiss {A reconsideration of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, originally published in The New Criterion.}
• The Surge Can Work By Michael Weiss {Everyone's wrong about the president's new war plan, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Kibitz on Pure Reason By Michael Weiss {The author of Betraying Spinoza on rationalism, passion, and great 17th-century hair, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Brainwashing's Nemesis By Michael Weiss {How Rick Ross became a cult buster extraordinaire, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Whiz Kid of Warfare By Michael Weiss {How Noah Shachtman has revolutionized military reporting, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Blacklist The Left Could Use By Michael Weiss {Meet the Christopher Hitchens of postpunk, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Is Marriage the New Dating? By Michael Weiss {A divorcee, a young married, and a singleton debate wedded bliss, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Jewish Jihad for Jesus By Michael Weiss {Why converts are leading the evangelical movement, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Tribal Threads By Michael Weiss {The designer of Gytha Mander on the holy land, holsters, and honeys, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Some Kind of Republican By Michael Weiss {The real legacy of John Hughes, published in Slate.}
Brought to you by the same guy who found a way to lose the 2004 presidential election: a way to lose the 2006 congressional elections.
Compliments from Robert Conquest are not things lightly trafficked. So when I had the honor to meet the Grand Old Man of Sovietology (and history, and literary criticism, and science fiction, and light verse, etc. etc.) I took careful note of those he praised. There were two, to be exact. The first was David Remnick for dispensing with some revisionist fool who thought that a Stalinist stooge was actually a better egg than he had been -- than he could have been . The second was Clive James. "His poetry is getting better," said Conquest. And surely anyone who can 
Let's skip right past the hazards of presumption and just grant that Barack Obama remains a cool customer well into May, 2008. We can expect more easy-listening ambiguity on public displays of religiosity, where it just goes without saying that an awesome God is worshiped in red and blue states. We can also anticipate that the same idiotic piety will be reaffirmed that politics is not, by definition, a matter of division and polarization. Unity will be the vision thing, as ever. 
It comes as little surprise that Luiz In�cio Lula da Silva ("Lula" to those who can pull off the pastel string bikini) has won re-election in Brazil after a vaguely contentious run-off ballot yesterday. The systemic corruption of Brazil's Workers' Party (PT), of which Lula is the iconic head, is mitigated slightly by the fact that he represents the kinder side of South American statism. His popularity is such that both el diablo Bush and Hugo Chavez both consider him a friend; since his time in office Brazil's foreign trade has been healthy enough to turn some minuses into pluses; and the country has managed to pay its IMF loans back years ahead of schedule -- surely impressing both Bono and Greg Palast. 
I've been pondering the '56 Hungarian revolution and its implications today. There was not one but two pieces in the Times recently which drew an uninterrupted if wobbly line from Budapest to Baghdad. I was able to trace it for a bit, but the more I consider the circumstances of either revolution the less convincing seems such an equivalence. For starters, the so-called New Left was born out of the twin upheavals of 
Well, that was tragic. I saw an advanced screening of Marie Antoinette at Lincoln Square last night. Let�s put it this way: by the end, the only ones clapping were doing so out of noblesse oblige for an auteur they�d quite like to admire more than they do.
The senatorial race between Lieberman (I-Stern Disapproval) and Lamont (D-Unbearable Lightness) got a lot more interesting yesterday, as third party Republican Alan Schelsinger finally got some media attention in a debate. And guess what? There's finally a GOP candidate for national office I wouldn't mind seeing win. Reasons to get on the Schlesinger 
WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 -- Hours after vowing to conduct a second nuclear test, the North Korean regime stirred more international confusion when leader Kim Jong-Il appeared on television wearing a full-faced Islamic veil, or niqab.
One of the reasons I admire Bragger is his willingness to take up quixotic -- and surprisingly not-so-quixotic -- campaigns on behalf of radical democracy and secularism. On the more knight of the sorrowful countenance side of the ledger is his suggestion that the English national anthem be William Blake's "Jerusalem." Here it is:
I mean, where does it leave the rest of us, his being 
Don't get me wrong: I think Sofia's an object lesson in deshabille cool. I loved Lost in Translation up until the fourth time I saw it. And if she singlehandedly brings back the New Romantics in music, then it's been a good day's work all around.
First off, this closing paragraph on the slow, painful death of CBGB has caused a major case of deja vu:
Mark the careful insertion of the word "potentially" into this pathetic and auto-fellating 
Somewhere in his delightful collection of essays and polemics Discriminations, Dwight Macdonald writes about attending a White House arts and literature function shortly after the Gulf of Tonkin fiasco. What to do? Cosy up to LBJ and Lady Bird on the heels of an American betrayal of incipient peace in a criminal imperialist war, or play the role of ironically-minded journalist as only a self-described "conservative anarchist" could? He went. About halfway through the event -- and halfway through the piece -- Macdonald bumps into another greying mane of the New York intellectual establishment, Saul Bellow. Bellow was more amenable to donning a tux and kibitzing in and around the South Lawn, war or no war. This was because he was already tilting toward the neoconservatism that would come to define all his nonfiction writing, especially on Israel and domestic race relations. (I always think of Augie March getting mugged by reality and turning into a saner, quieter Moses Herzog). Dwight chivvied, and Saul chivvied back. I wish I had the essay to hand, but one great ex-Trotskyist says to another: "We had the kind of argument you never hear outside New York, or better yet, outside a five block radius on the Upper West Side."
Horace Mann, Princeton, Harvard Law, Paul Weiss. Swap the undergrad with another Ivy -- one known for its boozing and football game losing -- and you have the CV of all my friends. I love each and every one, but the sheer ambition and career opportunism has always been a point of division between them and myself. See, I'm the lazy one with the blog and the perpetually vague state of employment. (Though I managed to run for public office without the law degree or tony private school education. And I got Minnie Driver's numba. How do you like them apples?)
This Saturday marks the centenary of the woman W.H. Auden offered to marry (what a Will & Grace sitcom that'd have made), and who drove the Upper West Side cognoscenti mad with self-criticism. Hannah Arendt's legacy has survived pretty well for someone who schtupped Heidegger both before and after his affiliation with Nazism. (My boss at Jewcy puts it like this: "Banality of evil? Evil's pretty exciting." And is there not a slight double standard at work in those followers of Arendt who don't take as deep a breath before uttering "Gotcha!" about the exchanged letters between Carl Schmidtt and Leo Strauss?)
Now here's a selection by Stockholm that doesn't turn the stomach even before the artistic merits have been weighed. One interesting rumor I've heard is that Orhan Pamuk's ridiculous prosecution -- for "insulting Turkishness" by pointing out the very real Armenian genocide and subjugation of Diyarbakir's Kurds -- was a frame-up by Ankara designed to nab the dissident novelist, and his nation, the world's top literary prize. I doubt it, but it'd make a good Slate piece. 
The Guardian and HuffPo's token Tory twit swallows a dram of smart-juice today. Or something:
Readers of Snarksmith know that I have my problems with Professor Tony Judt. But more disturbing than his occasional dip into intellectual and moral murkiness is his increasingly thinned lecture calendar. This is due to bureaucratic cowardice, which sees a popular academic�s critical stance on Israel, and a rather silly one on the dread Jewish �lobby� in America, as grounds for denying him a platform to speak about just these subjects. The Polish consulate (it might as well have been the German or Austrian one) has just cancelled an invitation to Judt to speak about AIPAC�s reign of terror on U.S. foreign policy-making. 
A not so minor tragedy of 9/11 was that it preempted what should have been a moment of historical reckoning. The Soviet archives had become accessible to academics and cold war partisans, and here, at last, was the corpse of Communism laid out on the slab for all to examine. The much-bruited "end of history" should have held out for a little longer (notwithstanding the interruptions in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, etc.)
