• 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.}
It is true that the only ones spouting things like "Oedipal complex," "castration anxiety," and "penis envy" in psychiatrists' offices today are the patients. What Freud giveth, Jung taketh away. The hip new subfield now is cognitive behavioral therapy, where repeating the same set of actions over and over again actually changes brain chemistry and thus, one's whole disposition.
If Freud endures, however, it's not for some ineradicable love of fascistic explain-it-all theory Ronald Dworkin argues in this Sun review of a new Freud bio. This is just plain silly:
Freud lies somewhere in between. When he writes, "We shall in the end conquer every resistance by emphasizing the unshakable nature of our convictions," he sounds like any fascist or a commissar. But, of course, Freud was a doctor and not a politician — he lacked police powers — and he could only hurt people so much.
First off, where would Wilhelm Reich or Max Weber be without Freud? And it's a little unseemly to compare his work as a doctor of the mind to the thugs of state who ran him out of Europe in the thirties.
The man may stand bruised and bloody before posterity (his unethical way with couchtrippers; his rocky personal relationships; etc.) but his work is still a testament to understanding the hidden wellsprings of human endeavor -- and human failure. Freud's influence on the liberal arts was worth the price of admission: Edmund Wilson got a lot of literary critical mileage out of Freud, not least from the allusions to Greek mythology. (See The Wound and the Bow.) And Wilson's old friend Nabokov never tired to mocking the "Viennese witchdoctor" whose "sick dreams" the author of Lolita never condescended to have himself.
Freud did not discover the unconscious. Other doctors had written on the subject before him. Nor did he discover phenomena like Freudian "slips," "displacement," and "transference." What he did was give these mental phenomena names, turn them into symbols, and then use these symbols to create road signs and boundaries in the vast infinite of the human mind. He was just one more man of letters who tried to tame that monster of energy: life.
Giving names to things have been around forever is the height of intellectual activity. Dworkin contradicts himself by stating in the paragraph just before this one that Freud's meaningless, chimerical concepts have value only for having names.
And our reviewer's not so original himself. Auden, in his lovely elegy on Freud, indicated how just how time-honored, though not prosaic, were the ideas the founder of psychoanalysis popularized:
He wasn't clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
like a poetry lesson till sooner
or later it faltered at the line where
long ago the accusations had begun,
and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged,
how rich life had been and how silly,
and was life-forgiven and more humble,
able to approach the Future as a friend
without a wardrobe of excuses, without
a set mask of rectitude or an
embarrassing over-familiar gesture.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that the author of this silly, nostril-wrinkled non-defense of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is also a contributor to The Nation. The left has long forfeited its belief that not only is the pen mightier than the sword, but it's worth wielding for its own sake.
Correction: If a text has the right politics, then literature is once again a force to be reckoned with. So Allen Ginsberg’s lousy and fifth-rate anti-Vietnam War poetry (compare to Robert Lowell if you get a chance) is labeled as brilliant and urgent at this, another imperiled moment in American culture. But Nafisi’s memoir of studying Western masterpieces in mullahified Iran is sneered at as “self-important” and saccharine. Here is Gideon Lewis-Kraus in Slate:
If Nafisi's book found such improbably joyful closure only at the expense of her own (presumably harrowing) emotional experience, we might merely shrug. What's much harder to defend is the implication that she's entitled to rejoice because of how much she's done for her students. The book's penultimate scene sees Nafisi at a coffee shop mulling over her decision to leave Iran when she is approached by Miss Ruhi, a former student. When we last encountered Miss Ruhi, she was a devout member of the revolutionary Muslim Students' Association and an icily disapproving member of Nafisi's course on Henry James at the University of Tehran. Now she tells Nafisi that she has an 11-month-old daughter, Fahimeh, whom she calls by a "secret name": Daisy, as in Miller, James' headstrong heroine (who, Miss Ruhi and Nafisi have both perhaps forgotten, is ultimately jilted before dying of malaria). "I want my daughter to be what I never was—like Daisy. You know, courageous." Nafisi, shored up by the knowledge that she has introduced some nominal courage into this young woman's sad life, can leave Tehran with an unburdened heart: Her life-affirming work there has drawn to a natural close.
Well, let us all agree that this is a great deal more influence than someone like Lewis-Kraus can ever claim to have on anyone himself if his purpose with this piece is to upend the conventional wisdom.
It’s obviously not the writing style (he cites a few terse, unadorned sentences to impugn Nafisi’s prose) or the personal reflections (Reading Lolita is a memoir, after all) that riles our author. Rather, it’s the fact that a yawningly dismissive treatment of her book has been done a disservice by exaggerated claims of one Hamid Dabashi.
A Columbia professor of no reputation or merit, Dabashi penned a famous indictment of Nafisi in the pages of Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram Weekly, calling her an evil pawn of the neoconservatives in Washington. Yes, that’s right. Her book should be read as a Defense Department memo, aimed at the Wolfowitz-Perle-Feith faction, for laying out the moral and psychological case for regime change in Iran. “Colonial agent” was Dabashi's preferred term for Nafisi's absorption and glorification of Western literature, which he sees as acts of “hegemony” against her native Persia -- ayatollah Khomeini being the standard-bearer for the tradition that gave us Scheherazade and Omar Khayyam.
Lewis-Kraus, driven by what I suspect are his own ideological sympathies, wants to split a difference that doesn't need to be split: to show that Dabashi may be a crank but that Nafisi is a tricky customer, albeit an un-profound and insignificant one. Her stuff is mushy and middlebrow, so what does it matter if it winds up the American Enterprise Institute’s Book-of-the-Month selection?
Nicely confusing two cultural paradigms, Lewis-Kraus calls her a “literary carpetbagger” because, as she implies throughout her volume, she could have left Iran at any time and was thus immune to the prevailing captive mind syndrome she claims to diagnose. Not much improving on Dabashi's "hegemony," Lewis-Kraus uses the word “touristic” to describe Nafisi's experiences, which certainly put me in mind of the epithet used by a handful few neocons to disparage Susan Sontag’s trip to Bosnia in the mid-90’s. Sure, Sontag could have left that Holiday Inn in Sarajevo at any time, too, but how inauthentic does that make her commitment to protesting a horrific genocide that was taking place, at the close of the twentieth century, on European soil? More Lewis-Kraus:
Rather than reading Nafisi's well-intentioned book…as a mostly inoffensive and well-marketed literary trifle—he is, after all, a professor of literature—Dabashi insists on seeing it as political perfidy. He writes that her book "pushes back the clock half a century" in promoting "the cause of 'Western classics' at a time when decades of struggle by postcolonial, black and Third World feminists, scholars and activists has [sic] finally succeeded to introduce a modicum of attention to world literatures." This sort of claim makes clear what ultimately binds Dabashi and Nafisi to each other: their shared overemphasis on the politically salutary effects of reading novels and writing literary criticism. Dabashi's purposes are not served by calling the book bad because it is cliché, which would be right but pointless. He must call it bad because it is dangerous. In the end, Dabashi must conspire with Nafisi to make the book more important that it is: The besieged Nafisi gets to preserve her fantasy that removing her veil to read Austen in her home was not only therapeutically powerful but politically noble, and Dabashi gets to preserve his fantasy that criticizing Nafisi makes him a usefully engaged intellectual. But those whose fingers are on the triggers of those targeted nuclear warheads couldn't possibly care about what either of them has to say.
Got that? Orientalism’s prosecution and defense have merged into one banal, theoretical whole. And that last sentence is almost too cynical and pathetic for words. I await any future comment on the necessity of protest literature from this guy.
As it happens, there is a very powerful and moving scene at the end of Reading Lolita that deserves mention. Nafisi’s husband is consoling her about the prospect of expatriating to the U.S. and leaving her gifted students behind (a decision that was not undertaken as lightly as Lewis-Kraus would have us believe.) Dejected by how the reactionary religious authorities have affected her life and destroyed her career, Nafisi’s spouse replies that this may well be true, but what of the effect she had on them? Would she really leave no indelible mark on the culture, even by allowing her girls the chance to doff their veils and discuss great books in an estrogen-heavy kaffeeklatsch setting? Any foreign correspondent who’s been to Iran would affirm that people like Nafisi have done just that – the country is defined as much by blue jeans, lipstick and punk rock as by enriched uranium and the imminent arrival of the occulted 12th imam.
Lewis-Kraus should grow the fuck up and realize that poetry – and novels and essays and, yes, even bestselling memoirs – can make something happen. Actually, I needn't wait too long for his ode to the power of the written word: He scathingly compares Nafisi as the Bridget Jones to Czeslaw Milosz's Elizabeth Bennett. So then: Does his closing remark about fingers on nuclear triggers also apply to that Lithuanian titan of anti-totalitarianism? If so, I’d like to nominate Lewis-Kraus and Dabashi as chairs of the welcoming committee for Vaclav Havel, who'll be a visiting professor at Columbia this winter.
Nafisi’s was a memoir about reading the best any culture has to offer, and about reading it in samizdat, under the threat of intimidation, arrest and loss of social and professional privilege. That’s testament enough to the transformative -- not to say, revolutionary -- capacity of art. Reading Lolita elegantly underscored just how pea-brained some arbiters of taste and correct thinking are in one country. It’s a lesson that Lewis-Kraus’ criticism of it seems intent on repeating in this one.
Most attention... has focused on Baker's anticipated "realism" with respect to third parties, specifically Syria and Iran. Dialogue with these former pariahs, he has hinted, may help to stabilize Iraq. But, if this is the best he can come up with, he should have stuck to dimpled chads. From a truly realist perspective, both of those notorious sponsors of terrorism have a clear interest in exploiting America's weakness. Opening channels to Damascus and Tehran will bring little joy to Washington--and much humiliation.
The solution instead is to "bribe" the insurgents by offering them employment if they'll, you know, gently put down their Kalashnikovs and IEDs. Hummus for guns. It's all very Churchillian, see:
Step two would be to implement what might be called a British-style strategy, in the spirit of Gertrude Bell. Leave Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki be. Concentrate instead on buying the support of tribal sheiks. Point to the most prosperous Arab countries in the region--all of which are monarchies--and ask the sheiks how much richer and happier they all would be if the Hashemites had not been overthrown in 1958.
Step three is to appease Germany and Japan. G'night, folks!
This episode of The Cunning of History was brought to you by The House of Rothschild: Making nation-states work for over two hundred years.
The "realists" sound like idealists mugged by reality:
“I think everyone felt good about where we ended up,” one person involved in the commission’s debates said after the group ended its meeting. “It is neither ‘cut and run’ nor ‘stay the course.’ ”
So what, then? "Melt and leak"? Sort of:
The bipartisan Iraq Study Group reached a consensus on Wednesday on a final report that will call for a gradual pullback of the 15 American combat brigades now in Iraq but stop short of setting a firm timetable for their withdrawal, according to people familiar with the panel’s deliberations....The report leaves unstated whether the 15 combat brigades that are the bulk of American fighting forces in Iraq would be brought home, or simply pulled back to bases in Iraq or in neighboring countries. (A brigade typically consists of 3,000 to 5,000 troops.) From those bases, they would still be responsible for protecting a substantial number of American troops who would remain in Iraq, including 70,000 or more American trainers, logistics experts and members of a rapid reaction force.
One benefit of keeping semi-permanent garrisons -- particularly in Kurdistan and southern "Shiastan" -- is that this will allow U.S. troops to further school Iraqi soldiers and civil police officers without the threat of anyone being killed during orientation week. If the goal is to protect Americans at the expense of Iraqis, then the only positive outcome short of a full or gradual withdrawal is to create a network of Fort Braggs throughout the country: fortified training bases where indigenous forces can study counter-insurgency tactics and then run right out and apply their knowledge. Peter Galbraith has been arguing something very much like this as part of his divide-and-wait scenario for a tripartite state: Keep U.S. forces in relatively safe outlying areas like Kurdistan, Kuwait, where they'll be ready at a moment's notice to rush back into main Iraq should another Fallujah or Amara convulsion take place.
They just don't make Le Carre-like international men of mystery like they used to. When 33,000 British Airways passengers are on mild alert for radiation poisoning, you begin to wonder if one outspoken critic of the Kremlin was worth all the trouble. How can Vlad The Impaler host a G-8 summit with a straight face? He can't even calculate cost-benefit ratios when it comes to "wet work."
More than 200 flights between Heathrow and Barcelona, Dusseldorf, Athens, Larnaca, Stockholm, Vienna, Frankfurt, Istanbul and Madrid from October 25 to November 28 could also have been affected.
As far as post-apocalyptic fascist police state-themed videos go, this one's pretty good. Just watch Suede's "We Are the Pigs" on loop instead of renting V For Vendetta.
Well, the day job has begun to pay off: Jewcy's first dialogue between Sam Harris and Dennis Prager - built around the question, "Why Are Atheists So Angry?", which was contrived by your humble servant - has become a mega-sensation on the Internet. Digg and Technorati are abuzz, and the consensus is that the End of Faith author thoroughly trounced the prominent Jewish talk show host.
The dialogue was based on a Newsweek essay, penned by Rabbi Marc Gellman, which column I read last spring. It was now the atheists, argued Gellman, who had become so peremptory and smug as to make God-botherers seem humble. Atheists were foisting their non-belief on everyone else, sighing with their eyes closed like eco-weenie San Franciscans as envisioned on South Park, treating the devout as either alien beings or developmentally disabled humans.
Now, it's certainly true Richard Dawkins spares no cherry-bomb of candor when it comes to exploding religion as not just the greatest self-deception, but the most stupid, vile and sinister self-deception.
For what it's worth, I think Dawkins is dead wrong to suggest that Bible instruction is tantamount to "child abuse." Raised in a secular (lapsed Catholic) household, I was first made to read the book in high school English class. I found it the most impressive act of collective authorship ever undertaken, and also the darkest fairy tale ever conceived. It's impossible to imagine of our canonical literature without both Testaments.
But let's be real. There is simply no way that atheists have out-marshaled the pious with it comes to fervor and arrogance. I know of few evolution martyrs crashing planes into skyscrapers, or strapping Semtex to their chests and blowing up megachurches... Nor is there a name invoked by atheists to account for their conception of global and private affairs, whereas Yaweh, Allah or Jesus all presumable have "work" that every earthly disciple of theirs has been vouchsafed to perform. Most atheists are excruciatingly deferential and polite in religious company. Why? It's because we're outnumbered and we don't presume to be able to shake such monumental conviction in the course of a single conversation or even a lifelong friendship. (It would be like an ADA lawyer trying disillusion a Communist in the forties; only Communism could do that.)
It takes a world of effort to explain the cosmos and even then there are no guarantees your case has been made persuasively enough. That's assuming we even know what we're talking about. How many of us have done the investigating into why, say, genes can be both "selfish" and altruistic at the same time? Orwell made the observation that upon confronting a flat-earther, one really does have to pause to remember all the evidence given for why the earth is round. You have to relearn a banal fact on the spot, which means betraying the weakness of hesitation in front of the one person who'll read that as validation of his own deluded belief.
However, it's not as if empiricism and the scientific method are not the provinces of the faithful as much as the infidel. Osama bin Laden knows more about structural engineering than does Daniel Dennett, or Steven Pinker, or Richard Dawkins. So if atheists are behaving more on the offensive these days, they deserve to. It's about time. This is war.
Not that religion need worry too much. It isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
"If you have any difficulties explaining our policies, please call me. I will come to you and together we will go to the masses and explain to them what is happening in our country -- and whether or not this is socialism."
That's Mikhail Gorbachev, sounding more like Czeslaw Milosz, putting the old East German CP leader Eric Honecker in his place.
Der Spiegel has a can't-miss piece on newly released Politburo "minutes" that coincided with the Soviet Union's collapse. Old Splotch Top comes out on top.
Of course according to Freud -- arguably a better theorist than therapist himself (He could get a little pushy with the patients) -- desire is regressive, and anti-social, and there's no cure, which is what makes it the wild card in our little human drama. (And also so much fun.) It screws up all well-ordered human plans and lives, and to be alive is to be fundamentally split, fundamentally ambivalent, and unreconciled to the trade-offs of what Freud called, just a little mockingly, "civilized sexual morality." But Freud was long ago consigned to conformist therapy's historical ash can, collectively pilloried for his crimes against decency and empiricism. (Philip Wylie: "Unfortunately, Americans, who are the most prissy people on earth, have been unable to benefit from Freud's wisdom because they can prove that they do no, by and large, sleep with their mothers.") So don't sign up for therapy if you're looking for radical social insights -- or social insights at all actually: what's for sale here is "self-knowledge." (Only a cynic could suspect it of being remedial socialization in party clothes.)" -- Laura Kipnis, Against Love: A Polemic
A few months ago I participated in an email dialogue entitled, "Is Marriage the New Dating?" About halfway through the thing, a (female) friend recommended Laura Kipnis' Against Love, saying it'd help turn my jaundiced dissatisfaction with "settling down" before 50 an even healthier shade of yellow. The friend was right, and I wish I'd read the book then. Kipnis is more fun and instructive than Marcuse: She's an orthodox Freudian when it comes to eros, but her take on civilization -- at least as far as the concept tiptoes its way to the door of the master bedroom -- is happily informed by classical Marxism. Kipnis argues that love becomes commodified and sapped of its thrilling, transcendent power the minute people start talking about relationships as being "work." (This is at once more obvious and elegant than Herbert's slightly fumbled "surplus repression" theory of not getting your groove on in bourgeois society.) This is not to say that she can't be a little clunky and cliched in her application of hot pink lipstick to drab symbols: "marital-industrial complex" performs the same smirking role that "feminine-industrial complex" does in her recent polemic The Female Thing. New rule: no more industrial-complexes in postindustrial society.
But a word of fraternal advice to my fellow clueless males: Read The Female Thing too. It's a bit desultory and disorganized -- third wave feminism's "smoke 'em if you got 'em" prescription for future progress, as Emily Nussbaum laments in New York magazine. But I came away from it wanting desperately to found a support group called Darling, I Had No Idea. (Our exclusivity policy would be denying admittance to any male who had like reaction to The Vagina Monologues.)
Not "getting it" is our genetic entitlement; not even trying to is our crime.
Thanksgiving is English movie week at Snarksmith, mainly out of gratitude to my Bristol-born stepmother who carries on the special relationship every year by cooking a feast in honor of an event that began her country's loss of imperial privilege. That's surely one kind of good sportsmanship, though this post is about another.
I haven't yet seen The History Boys but I was quite taken with the play. However, the critics have already missed a rather obvious feature of Bennett's brief against faddish and gimmicky academism in that this is also a story of masculine athletic competition.
Lamenting the decline of British teaching standards is as old as Lucky Jim, but rather than have us focus exclusively on the profs, Bennett gives us an equally compelling group of cocky, brash students, whose constant out-marshaling of one another serves as counterpoint to the quieter but more earnest rivalry going on in the faculty lounge. Among the boys there's the typical class hierarchy of heartthrob, fat yob and shy lad, all vying for limited Oxbridge acceptances the way their American counterparts might MVP trophies in the state championships. The struggle between Hector and Irwin is waged at least as much in the interests of idealism and utilitarianism, respectively, as it is for the sake of earning the boys' undivided affections. This theme, too, is fungible with the sports drama: The noble coach is getting a little long in the tooth but short on victories; the young, arrogant greenhorn is hired to replace him with dubious effect on team morale. Old coach is restored in the end to lead his boys to one last hurrah.
That "The History Boys" is set in a romantic adolescent aerie, where Auden, Hardy and homosexuality abound in more or less equal measure, only makes its macho games of oneupmanship and witty persiflage more hilarious. Bennett aimed for the classroom but also managed to hit the intellectual locker room.
I think this one of the reasons, apart from the natural Anglophilia of American theatregoers, that the play has performed so well in the country that produced Hoosiers and Bull Durham and The Replacements. All the analogies to Dead Poets Society and Goodbye, Mr. Chips are misleading, and not just because the Yank version of love and glory on the quadrangles traffics in wet nostalgia over arch derision, prefers the 'maverick' to the conservative teacher every time, and keeps any hint of forbidden sexuality a matter of innuendo rather than stolen motorbike gropes. What price dreaming spires when Dakin offers to blow you after school? (If you saw Tom Stoppard's "The Invention of Love" performed in New York, realize that Robert Sean Leonard took his Dead Poets character from latent to blatant in the figure of A.E. Housman.)
"The History Boys" has more in common with Chariots of Fire; its ensemble is in training for a kind of Olympics of pretension, where brains rather than muscles are being exercised, if not alarmingly hypertrophied, for the attainment of a badly-desired goal. The way the boys wield "gobbets" -- Irwin's term for the snatches of poetry they have ready on command or at the slightest free associative prompting -- is the way Jimmy Conners used to return a baseline shot between his legs at Wimbledon, or the way Tiger Woods still idles on the Augusta green by bouncing a golf ball in perfect stride on his five-iron. It's all male showing off. The plumage enters into it.
Stereotypical though it may be to say, the English do have a special skill at wowing with their rhetorical flourishes or instant recall of the printed word, which is why you'd better come modest matching dirty limericks with The Hitch. It's also why Stoppard threw down a faux volleyball court on stage for the playing of the Question Game in "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead." Martin Amis made his alter ego Charles Highway a leaky spigot of precocious but annoying Theory in The Rachel Papers, a novel that was also about the preparation for A-Levels, with a pre-Thatcherite Literature Boy discovering the difference between "learning" and education. Here is the don tasked with reading Highway's essays:
"For example. In the Literature paper you complain that Yeats and Eliot... 'in their later phases opted for the cold certainties that can work only outside the messiness of life. They prudently repaired to the artifice of eternity, etc. etc." This then gives you a grand-sounding line on the 'faked inhumanity' of the seduction of the typist in The Waste Land -- a point you owe to W. W. Clarke -- which, it seems, is just a bit too messy all of a sudden. Again, in the Criticism paper you jeer at Lawrence's 'unreal sexual grandiosity', using Middleton Murry on Women in Love, also without acknowledgement. In the very next line you scold his 'overfacile equation of art and life.'" He sighed. "On Blake you seem quite happy to paraphrase the 'Fearful Symmetry' stuff about
'autonomous verbal constructs, necessarily unconnected with life, but in your Essay paper you come on all excited about the 'urgency with which Blake educates and refines our emotions, side-stepping the props and splints of artifice'. Ever tried side-stepping a splint, by the way? Or educating someone urgently, for that matter?
"Donne is okay one minute because of his 'emotional courage', the way he seems to 'stretch out his emotions in the very fabric of the verse' , and not okay the next because you detect... what is it you detect? -- ah yes, a 'meretricious exaltation of verbal play over real feeling, tailoring his emotion to suit his metrics'. Now which is it to be? I really wouldn't carp, but these remarks come from the paragraph and are about the same stanza.
"I won't go on... Literature has a kind of life of its own, you know. You can't just use it...ruthlessly, for your own ends..."
Using liberal arts for one's own ruthless ends is of course the fashion these days. The British make themselves easy targets for lampoon because in the sixties they started convening their "brains trusts" around television audiences; they really did want highbrow endeavors to become a form of popular entertainment. Niall Ferguson now writes his documentary scripts before his bestselling books. And he complains that he was unfairly made the model for Irwin.
Bennett is a fan of America, if not so much its current political orientation. He had ample reason to turn his sites on us for dramatic parody: When his terrific older play "The Madness of George III" was set for a film adaptation, the U.S. producers wanted the title changed to The Madness of King George. How would moviegoers expect to follow the story if they thought they'd missed Parts I and II? We should therefore be grateful Bennett presented a land of the cheats, home of the knaves that wasn't, for once, the one you'd expect it to be.
He ventures to express his sense of your Majesty's most gracious kindness to him, and of the high honour which your Majesty has been graciously pleased to confer on him.
He can only offer devotion.
It will be his delight and duty to render the transaction of affairs as easy to your Majesty as possible; and in smaller matters he hopes he may succeed in this; but he ventures to trust that, in the great affairs of state, your Majesty will deign not to withhold from him the benefit of your Majesty's guidance.
Your Majesty's life has been passed in constant communion with great men, and the knowledge and management of important transactions. Even if your Majesty were not gifted with those great abilities, which all now acknowledge, this rare and choice experience must give your Majesty an advantage in judgement which few living persons, and probably no living prince, can rival.
He whom your Majesty has so highly preferred presumes to trust to your Majesty's condescension in this behalf.
Well, if Tony Blair had got off on that foot, The Queen would have been a different movie altogether.
The above is taken from Benjamin Disraeli's letter to Queen Victoria upon his first election as prime minister, although it reads today as if the Tory genius were celebrating her coronation or jubilee. This was not an accident. Disraeli was the most obsequious and attendant leader of parliament ever to court, as it were, the intimacy of a British monarch, who, with his enthusiastic consent, was named Empress of India, and to whom comparison with the present Elizabeth II seems almost de rigueur.
We know the tale by now: the enormous outpouring of emotion, the constant barrage of headlines, the perfunctory forelock-tugging, all of which followed one of the most dramatic events of recent memory.
Yes, Helen Mirren’s performance was that good. But if Stephen Frear's rendering of her character's climacteric leaves a sour taste in the mouth, it may be because we’re given a little too much sympathy toward an institution that is... how to put this mildly?... a batpiss anachronism of the highest order.
In A Child in Time Ian McEwan refers to daytime television as “the democrat’s pornography.” He got it wrong. It’s monarchy. And the hapless Hefner of the other side of the Atlantic is made to seem the real villain in the whole sordid advent of the Post-Diana epoch. Poor Tony Blair. Forget the sovereign whose upper lip is rimed with permafrost; it’s the guy given as fleetingly heroic in his attempt to precipitate a little moisture on the damn thing who comes seeming so tragic and Lear-like.
This was inevitable since prime ministers, unlike queens, have to answer to their constituency. And in England, they have to ask permission first. Fresh off his historic victory as the white knight of New Labour, Blair is tasked with humbling himself before someone he and his wife – especially his wife – view as a monument of nostalgia and age. If it weren’t enough to go on bended knee before Her Majesty to request the traditional by-your-leave to form a national government, Blair is immediately burdened with an added role that no one this side of Hollywood should ever have to inhabit – that of damage control artist. Who'd have thought that after eleven years of Margaret Thatcher, what England needed most was Ari Gold? "It's not like I have better things to do with my time," snipes the otherwise winsome PM, shortly after news of Diana's end is received by her former in-laws with the faintest and most notorious of whimpers.
The “bangs” are reserved for stag hunting, which is to be done the very next morning at Balmoral, the royal retreat in the Scottish Highlands, where that fateful summer was to be passed without interruption. (Disraeli, by the way, hated the place; he found it drafty, though now I wonder if he blamed solely the architecture.) The pretext for getting on with things right away -- the prospect of a royal jet-flight to France is swiftly nixed -- is to keep the heir and the spare distracted from dwelling on recent tragic events. The Queen would be nowhere in her set ways without the helpful reliquary that is her husband Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who suggests "stalking" an elusive estate deer, which will later serve as lame, symbolic stand-in for another fair creature stalked to death, as a way of initiating the private healing process. Never mind the public version underway in London and rest of the world. Philip’s “bumbling, ossified attitudes,” wrote Andrew O’Hagan in the New York Review of Books, “could easily, any day of the week, make Lady Macbeth look like Coretta Scott King.” Indeed, we know from first glance at this sorry and steely lot that Frears and his scriptwriter Peter Morgan must have stayed as true to actual events as humanly possible. Some families defy caricature because they’ve dedicated their whole existence to embodying one. What to make of the immediate Windsors? The gin-sipping Queen Mum looks like a wobbling calcium deposit; she balks at the suggestion that Diana’s funeral follow even a modified version of the prescripted and rehearsed protocol for her own long-awaited ceremony. The thoroughly wussified Prince Charles can’t bear to stand up to his mother and instead issues innuendos –- or has his secretary issue them for him –- to Blair signaling that however anchored in elite tradition he may be by birth, his heart is on the side of populism and progress. This is tired blood that coagulates instead of flows.
Which is all the more reason to wince at the spectacle of Tony the Pony (don't you dare call him poodle) ridden to utter exhaustion in his first month as liberal head of state. Played by the brilliant Michael Sheen, who was his own sort of queen as Miles Malpractice in Bright Young Things, Blair knows he's the beamish face of a "quiet revolution" in British politics. Now if only he can help the ancien regime get in touch with its feminine side. The stiff-haired old broad who knew Churchill and war rations as a girl just won’t swim in the same grief and sentimentality as her bereaved kingdom. Yet, ironically, the one resource Tony’s got at his disposal is the same one the Queen mastered eons ago: time. He really doesn’t have to do much except wait and let the people mount their own, noisier insurrection against establishment "values." The contemptuous tabloid covers (“Show Us You Care”) don’t seem to do the trick, but then it’s disclosed that 25% of the populace now favors abolishing the line begun by William the Conqueror, and that simply can't be tolerated. That’s when you begin to wonder how Edmund Burke, not Tony Blair, plans to save the day.
Magisterial appearances of indifference can only last so long under the true and solemn reign of Oprah. It's important to remember that Elizabeth came of age with television: She hadn’t even received the investiture when the appliance was invented and commercialized. We should feel lucky that there are still unmelted cathodes left in the Commonwealth after she became the first broadcast crown. It's over her dead body, not Diana’s, that she’ll be the last. After viewing so much fawning TV coverage of the fallen “people’s princess,” Liz finally caves. She follows Blair's suggestions for making amends with a tripartite gesture: 1. Allow the royal ensign to be flown at half-mast at Buckingham Palace (an honor that, as the Queen points out, she would not be accorded on the occasion of her own demise); 2. Meet and greet the flower-wielding commoners, share their pain; 3. Give The Speech.
You remember The Speech. The Queen’s prime time boohoo, memorably satirized by everyone from Johann Hari to Eddie Izzard, had her cringingly identify herself as "your Queen and a grandmother.” I did not know until this film that that second epithet was a late-minute addition by Blair’s cynical communications director Alastair Campbell, he of the "people's princess" phrase-mongering. Grandmother, did she say? That's certainly one way for a socialist to have redefined "nanny state," and it should go down in history as the real instance of Campbell’s sexing up an official document. No wonder he resigned in ignominy.
The Queen is, at bottom, about two ill-fated collisions: the one between Dodie Fayed's car and that Paris tunnel and the one between antiquity and modernity. It’s amazing to consider which survived the ordeal and how in tact is still remains. The throne has, in the last ten years, tried to hip to the changing times, particularly as that bridge to the 21st century morphed into a highway of superinformation. Check out the Queen’s personal website sometime. There she is, bopping through the decades like a soulless Forrest Gump. There’s even zeitgeist-appropriate fonts and yearbook quotes to match! This is not your grandmother's monarchy anymore. Though all mention of the unfortunate mid-nineties episode, which threatened briefly to bring down the whole creaking edifice, is kept to a dignified minimum. Madonna and the Sex Pistols get better coverage than Diana at royal.gov.uk.
And should David Cameron become the next premier, we'd have a cuddlier Conservative who recycles, approves gay marriage and sways at campaign stops to The Smith's "The Queen Is Dead." Maybe not quite yet, but she's come a long way, baby.
Rogue Poststructuralist With Psoriasis Seeks Multiorgasmic Goya Fan
Forgive that the following clause might actually be the opener for a personal ad, but I used to play a game with my sister. We'd read the Village Voice and try to spot the funniest call for romantic/sexual attention. Every configuration and fetish was assiduously explored, but the most points went to punch and pungency of delivery.
A lot were promising in their potential but horribly lame in execution. "PANTIES" was the single-word draw for one memorable dud, begging the question of just how undiscriminating New York tastes have become.
Better examples: "Japanese son seeks hairy dad," "Ex-evangelical making up for lost time before the world ends," "Fun-loving Israeli girl wants Arab occupier for a change," "Mountains of flesh, oceans of possibilities." You know the deal.
All that was nothing compared to the kinkified bounty I'd later happen upon in the back pages of the New York Review of Books. Tony rhymes with aloney, and the poor cerebral pituitary cases who advertised in that journal of note never failed to impress with their sheer candor:
"I am a wizened octogenarian Proust votive looking for someone to -- let's face it -- die with. Must prefer Toulouse to Nice, and must own summer villa in the former. I'm broke."
"I'm not much to look at, but I can translate The Bucolics and cook a mean Gratin dauphinois."
"I satisfied Lionel Trilling during office hours. What makes you think you're more of a challenge?"
"Are you the Borges that haunts my emotional labyrinth?"
"World Bank economist toys with inflation rates by day, other things by night."
"I know it's an Annie Hall line, but I really am into James Joyce and sodomy. Please call."
Well, so. Our Atlantic cousins at the London Review are apparently even better at the self-abasing cris de coeur:
Mr. Rose knew that something unusual was going on, he said, when the very first ad he received, after starting the column in 1998, began: “67-year-old disaffiliated flâneur picking my toothless way through the urban sprawl, self-destructive, sliding towards pathos, jacked up on Viagra and on the lookout for a contortionist who plays the trumpet.”
There's a book out that collects the best of the bunch. Will someone please buy me a copy?
Shall we start taking threats like these seriously, do you think? This article was published in the Kuwait Times just before Gemayel's murder.
BEIRUT: Anti-Syrian Christian leader Samir Geagea said yesterday efforts to topple Lebanon's Western-backed government of Prime Minister Fouad Saniora could lead to assassination attempts against cabinet ministers. Geagea, a former militia chief whose Lebanese Forces party has one minister in the cabinet, said Syria was determined to stop the formation of a UN-backed tribunal to try suspects in the killing of former Prime Minister Rafiq Al-Hariri. He did not say who might try to kill ministers. Lebanon plunged deeper into crisis this month when six ministers, including all five Shiite Muslims, quit the cabinet after the collapse of all-party talks over giving the pro-Syrian Hezbollah and its allies a decisive say in government. All the remaining ministers are members of, or close to, the anti-Syrian majority coalition.
If the government lost three more ministers, it would automatically fall. "There are no three ministers who will resign of course, but someone might think of 'sacking them', in quotes, by pushing them to a final resignation. Thus the government falls. Therefore we have big fears over the ministers," he said. "I think there might be operations targeting ministers and I take this opportunity to say it publicly and especially to tell the ministers to take all precautions," Geagea told Reuters in a telephone interview from his north Lebanon home. Saniora's depleted government approved this week draft UN statutes for the Hariri tribunal. The pro-Syrian camp, which includes the Christian president and Shiite parliament speaker, denounced the move, saying the session was unconstitutional. The UN Security Council is expected to adopt the tribunal document next week and return it to Beirut for ratification, although Russia, a friend of Damascus, has questioned the legitimacy of its approval by Saniora's government.
Russia would question it, of course. First item on the agenda is how poison should be the preferred method of nixing enemies of the state.
Worst 80's Video: Siouxsie and the Banshees' "Cities in Dust"
Because you can't trust a Sullivan to do a Snarksmith job:
Not sure if Siouxsie is supposed to turn into Darth Vader here, or how that molten lava must feel flowing into her anus. But low production value, cheesy high-concept, and warbling Anybody But (Kate) Bush vocals combine to make this a piece of bite-sized zeitgeist from the 80's.
You may now return to your regularly scheduled Pet Shop Boys blogramming.
How's that for Rupe and Judith's next publishing venture: a play-by-play "dramatic envisioning" of the Sonny Corleone-like assassination of Pierre Gemayel as carried out by Alawite goons? Such a volume might not fly off the shelves, but now that James Baker and Robert Gates are the twin toasts of Washington "realism," what are the chances a page-turner of international true crime will be produced by the United Nations? (Don't hear much about Rafiq Hariri since the brilliant German lawyer Detlev Mehlis was removed from the case.)
Pierre Gemayel's grandfather Bachir -- the founder of the Phalange -- was killed by the Syrian Ba'ath in 1982 for suggesting the Syrian Ba'ath had no business in Lebanon. The reason the one living high-profile member of this imperiled family is now calling for "calm" is that it was Bachir's killing which prompted the horrific Phalangist massacre at Sabra and Shatila in that same year. This bloody incident, you may remember, claimed the lives of 700-3500 Palestinian refugees in West Beirut and was either passively condoned or actively facilitated by the IDF (under the guidance of Ariel Sharon). I say "either" because it depends on whether you trust the Kahan Commission's report or Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk's meticulous disassembly of it.
But one would clearly require an O.J.-sized dose of self-delusion to argue that the House of Assad is not up to its old tricks. The Times marshals the facts in exactly the right sequence and style in its coverage of today's assassination:
Late last year, an outspoken Lebanese lawmaker and journalist known for his anti-Syrian views, Gebran Tueni, was killed in a car bomb attack. In June, 2005, a car bomb killed George Hawi, the former head of the Communist Party, who was also a sharp critic of Syria.
Also that month Samir Kassir,an outspoken journalist and opposition figure who railed against Syria’s presence in Lebanon, was blown up by a car bomb.
Earlier this month, the United Nations Security Council presented Lebanon with a draft framework proposal for a tribunal to pursue the case of the assassination in 2005 of the former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, who also protested Syria’s influence in Lebanon.
If tragedy can have good timing, then this is an example of it. We've been hearing all week about how cozying up to Iran and Syria is the best way to undo the mess of a neoconservative foreign policy. Very well. Expect more machine-gunnings of political leaders, zero movement on discovering the culprits responsible, and not a pathetic peep raised about any of it now that "stability" has regained her thrown in the Middle East.
So you're a rising young star in the world of political journalism, and you write for a venerable magazine dedicated to such. But you've grown increasingly disillusioned with a war your masthead supported. Not just disillusioned, downright cranky about it. You even start a blog entitled "Too Hot for [Venerable Magazine]" which doubles as a passive-aggressive resignation letter. It gets read and agreed with by the masthead. You seal the deal by declaring your anti-jihadist bona fides by shouting, "I'll skull-fuck Zarqawi's corpse!" to a stone-faced gathering of unamused editors. You get fired.
So what do you do? You contribute to an ethnic parvenu rag called Jewcy and start taking brickbat swings at your former employer.
"The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body, and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity."
I ABSOLUTELY HATE ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING we are about to go through.
Prediction: Despite Zachary Leader's best efforts to keep the upper lip tensile throughout his new and hotly anticipated biography of Kingsley Amis, we shall have another fucking row about the legacy of a postwar English writer of comic genius who held nasty opinions in the autumn of his life. Philip Larkin, Kingsley's best friend and fellow Angry Old Sod, had his corpse dug up and vivisected in all the glossy mags and quarterlies in the early 90's when his Collected Letters and his juvenalia and Andrew Motion's Life were published. Quelle horrifique! We knew the old boy was a reactionary, a racist, an anti-Semite and a woman-hater -- well, but I mean to say, we didn't know he was quite so bad about being all those things.
Now comes word that tranches of hitherto undisclosed letters and manuscripts and reminiscences of dinner party scrapes have been disgorged by the Amis Estate, all comedic treasure to the fans as they will no doubt be meow-mix to the identity theorists and Terry Eagleton.
Racist. Reactionary. Misogynist. Adulterer. No good son-of-a-bitch. One fat Englishman. Fucking beast. These epithets and more we can expect once stuff like this finds its way between hardcovers next year:
Now Amis was up for 'a big rumble'. He got on to South Africa, his position being, in Barnes's paraphrase, that 'white civilisation was under threat and the only solution was to shoot all black agitators, all of whom were Communists. That way white civilisation would be restored.' Barnes had been to South Africa, 'unlike Amis', and Kavanagh had spent the first 20 years of her life there. The discussion soon became rancorous. 'When Kingsley was arguing,' Barnes explains, 'he didn't just despise your opinions, he despised you personally.'
Brace yourself. I know from my own amateur excavations that this is by no means the worst of it.
Barnes is quite generous (and truthful) to say that the face had grown to fit the mask; that Kingsley was as much 'performing' here as he was bloviating. Wasn't there something just a little put-on and overweening about his notorious love for Margaret Thatcher? "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" -- didn't that landmark essay continue making a point it could have done in a third of the space? This Falstaff goes to eleven. Which of course is not to say that Kingsley was secretly signing Angela Davis petitions in his spare time. But we do have his son to thank for adding much needed perspective to the debate as it roiled around and engulfed Larkin, so literal-mindedly caricatured as "quintessentially English" when it was the caricaturists who came much closer to that banal mark.
Here is Martin in a 1992 New Yorker essay entitled "Don Juan in Hull":
P.C. begins with the very American--and attractive and honorable--idea that no one should feel ashamed of what he was born as, of what he is. Of what he does, of what he says, yes; but not ashamed of what he is. Viewed at its grandest, P.C. is an attempt to accelerate evolution. To speak truthfully, while that's still O.K., everybody is "racist," or has racial prejudices. This is because human beings tend to like the similar, the familiar, the familial. I am a racist; I am not as racist as my parents; my children will not be as racist as I am. (Larkin was less racist than his parents; his children would have been less racist than he.) Freedom from racial prejudice is what we hope for, down the line. Impatient with this hope, this process, P.C. seeks to get the thing done right now--in a generation. To achieve this, it will need a busy executive wing, and much invigilation. What it will actually entrain is another ton of false consciousness, to add to the megatons of false consciousness already aboard, and then a backlash.
And here is Hitch in New Left Review in a rejoinder to the mentality described above:
I have never had any difficulty in comprehending the appeal of Larkin to some part of the British (not so much the English) consciousness. This is because I recall, with very little trouble, the tone of my own father’s table talk. (Readings of the old Peter Simple column in the Daily Telegraph, or of the Denis Thatcher epistolatory parody in Private Eye, have the same effect upon me, and I simultaneously envy and mistrust those who fail to see the authentic seriousness of such jocularity.) What are the psychic and biographical ingredients here?
For the interwar petty-bourgeois and functionary generation, these would include a consciousness of life—indeed youth—passed in the exigencies of the Depression, the Second World War and the subsequent age of austerity. To this would have to be added the strain imposed by the ‘scholarship or nothing’ fork in the education system; itself very often an enforced choice between over-work and conformism on the one hand and relegation to menial or bureaucratic work on the other. With the privileged above and the forces of craft unionism below them, it is a mercy that more of this class did not turn to fascism than actually did. In the post-war period, though, their rancour was sublimated into a diffuse but persistent drizzle of complaint. End of Empire and Commonwealth immigration were disliked for their own sake, to be sure, but probably more formative was the sense that these momentous decisions had been taken without anyone’s permission—without, as it were, a by-your-leave. Juvenile delinquents and wildcat strikers were a Poujadiste staple, as, briefly, were ‘revolting students’ in the 1960s. (Especially painful to comrades of this journal will be Larkin’s August 1969 letter to Brian Cox, commenting on a contemporary piece of pedagogic repression by saying ‘Isn’t it splendid about that young swine Blackburn?’). The nearest this mentality came to acquiring a leader was in the advent of Enoch Powell, and its most acute anatomist has been David Edgar, most particularly in his play Destiny.
Beneath the unstable political manifestations lay a profound, inchoate sense of loss about the erosion of the English countryside, the diminished prestige of the nation and the amoral amnesia of the Affluent Society. No doubt there were elements of vicarious envy behind the scorn and disapproval: my father never read Larkin’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’, which locates the beginnings of sexual freedom ‘Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles first LP/(Which was rather late for me)’, but I can recall him saying wistfully that he was sorry to have missed the Permissive Society. Actually, I don’t think he read much poetry at all. But I could have given him ‘Going, Going’ (‘And that will be England gone’) or a half-dozen other mournful laments, and seen them strike a chord. As with Larkin himself, there were moments of antic subversiveness, where it was suddenly doubted that a dutiful life spent on the pursuit of traditional obligations had been worthwhile, or had been appreciated by those superiors in whose service it had been passed. Andrew Motion’s biography tells us, of that celebrated emblematic photograph, that it ‘shows Larkin sitting demurely, ankles crossed, on the large sign which says “ENGLAND”; immediately before posing he had urinated copiously behind the word.’
The adorably fusty aura never surrounded Kingsley such that a symbolic leak would seem so... perfect. But we will need to defend the art, if not quite the man, in much the same fashion.
Michael Richards exploded in anger as he performed at a famous L.A. comedy club last Friday, hurling racial epithets that left the crowd gasping, and TMZ has obtained exclusive video of the ugly incident.
Richards, who played the wacky Cosmo Kramer on the hit TV show "Seinfeld," appeared onstage at the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood. Kyle Doss, an African-American, told TMZ he and some friends were in the cheap seats and he was playfully heckling Richards when suddenly, the comedian lost it.
The camera started rolling just as Richards began his attack, screaming at one of the men, "Fifty years ago we'd have you upside down with a f***ing fork up your ass."
Richards continued, "You can talk, you can talk, you're brave now motherf**ker. Throw his ass out. He's a nigger! He's a nigger! He's a nigger! A nigger, look, there's a nigger!"
Hey, remember the episode where Elaine couldn't figure out whether or not the guy she was dating was black? He wasn't. Good thing for him, too.
Anyone want to guess which two of these cast members are actually glad The Michael Richards Show was canceled?
Finally, finally, finally! Peaceniks wake up to Rovian style agitprop. Meet Global Orgasm, a net-powered effort to get us all to climax at the same time (because two simultaneously is a breeze) on the Winter Solstice, thereby putting an end to war. Not just the one in Iraq, but all the bloody fuckers.
The campaign was organized by two aged, married hippies: the husband looks like the teacher from Head of the Class a puffier Richard Harris, and the wife's very attractive. (To think all my grandmother does is play bingo for personal profit.) Also, their website features the greatest countdown clock since the one that tocked away Ashley and Mary-Kate's status as minors.
The Event
WHO?
All Men and Women, you and everyone you know.
WHERE?
Everywhere in the world, but especially in countries with weapons of mass destruction.
WHEN?
Winter Solstice Day - Friday, December 22nd, at the time of your choosing, in the place of your choosing and with as much privacy as you choose.
WHY?
To effect positive change in the energy field of the Earth through input of the largest possible surge of human energy a Synchronized Global Orgasm. There are two more US fleets heading for the Persian Gulf with anti-submarine equipment that can only be for use against Iran, so the time to change Earth’s energy is NOW!
Putin's human rights record? Terrible. Governance? Mediocre. Skill at getting foreign leaders to dress with him in preposterous local garb and stand awkwardly?
I need say no more:
A classic from years past:
Perhaps the next summit will be held garbed in thongs in Rio.
Look who's coming to North America again. Good a time as any to revisit his oil-for-food thieving and some of his choice statements over the years.
Fascist Arab dictators’ favourite British MP George Galloway will be speaking on November 17 to Concordia University’s Syrian Students Association and on November 19, in Ottawa, to the Syrian Social Nationalist Movement on the occasion of its 74th anniversary which coincides with the 74th anniversary of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP).
Neither is the party name’s echo of the National-Socialist Party (the Nazi Party) nor is its insignia’s evocation of the Nazi-hijacked swastika a coincidence. It was founded in 1932 by Antun Saadeh, a Christian journalist from Mount Lebanon inspired by contemporary European fascist movements.
The secular party promotes the idea of a Greater Syria that would cover the territories of Syria proper, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, the Palestinian zones, and the Egyptian Sinai. Repressed since the mid-fifties, it joined the Baath-led National Progressive Front coalition in 2005 and has a bloody history of terrorist attacks.
In 1987, the Atlantic Monthly published a study of the SSNP by Ehud Ya’ari:
They greet their leaders with a Hitlerian salute; sing their Arabic anthem, "Greetings to You, Syria," to the strains of "Deutschland, Deutschland ?ber alles"; and throng to the symbol of the red hurricane, a swastika in circular motion.
These are the hallmarks of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), the oldest terrorist organization in existence today and one of the most secret and deadly. Despite its long history of violence, Western security organs were recently taken by surprise when they learned that a well-camouflaged arm of the SSNP had succeeded in setting up a large terror network in Western Europe-complete with safe houses, weapons caches, and forged passports-and that it was the SSNP that had set off a series of deadly explosions in the heart of Paris, to gain the release of Georges Ibrahim Abdallah. The United States, too, has felt the effects of the SSNP. The explosion aboard a TWA flight nearing Athens in April of 1986, which cost the lives of four passengers-one of them an infant-has been traced to May Mansur, of Tripoli, a veteran member of the SSNP, who debarked at a previous stopover after placing a bomb under her seat.
Dedicated to the principle of establishing Greater Syria-which extends from the Euphrates to the Nile, an area that today includes Syria, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and southeastern Turkey-the SSNP has little in common with the Shiite religious zealots of the Hizballah, who, operating from Iran to Lebanon, are trying to bring the kingdom of heaven down to earth, or with members of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who seek the redemption of their lost homeland at the end of a trail of blood. Although the SSNP may align itself with these groups for the sake of expediency, it regards them all as fighting for the sectarian interests of pseudo-national communities that are misguided in their failure to identify with the broader "Syrian nation." If the Islamic Jihad or the PLO indirectly or even inadvertently advances the "Syrian cause," the SSNP is glad to collaborate. But it will not support the Hizballah in its aim of founding an Islamic republic in Lebanon or help the PLO work toward the establishment of an independent Palestinian state, for these goals clash head-on with the SSNP’s goal of a secular Syrian state. And while it supports the present Syrian government of President Hafez al-Assad as the fulcrum of power in Syria, the SSNP is wary of the regime’s sectarian (Alawi) and socialist leanings and its support of pan-Arabism, which calls for an Arab state (as opposed to the Syrian state called for by the SSNP) spanning the area between the Atlantic Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Since the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader, pan-Arabism has become more a sentiment than a political movement.
I've been waiting patiently for someone to say that never has socialism had such an attractive human face. That would surely not be the worst sweetly condescending remark Segolene Royal has had to put up with over the years, especially during her recent ascent in the French Socialist Party, which culminated yesterday in her nomination for president.
There's every indication Royal is going to give Nicolas Sarkozy a run for his argent, and if she wins, she'll be the first female president the country has ever had. This is actually quite amazing when you think about it: the dual Gaullic stereotypes of effeminacy and radicalism were not enough to keep Margaret Thatcher and Andrea Merkel from becoming the first embodiments of European ovaries of steel. Why has it taken France so long to see the legitimacy of female rule?
Ali G once asked Newt Gingrich about the danger of someone like Hillary Clinton becoming chief executive of the United States. "But in'it a problem if a woo-man become preziden 'cause ven what if she fall in love wif Saddam Hussein?" This is closer to the prevailing wisdom about female authority than one cares to admit. Just consider that French MP and fellow Socialist Laurent Fabius asked what would happen to Ms. Royal's four children if she were elected. Who'd stay home with the les enfants? Never mind that their father is also a hard-working lefty MP Francois Hollande and that Royal, as former Vice-Minister for Family and Childhood, was a sponsor of paternity leave legislation. Sarkozy, too, takes her as seriously as Fashion Week:
"If I ever became a candidate for the presidency one day, I would be very happy to debate with her. From my point of view she's every bit as attractive a Socialist candidate as Henri Emmanuelli."
One look at Monsieur Emmanuelli and the misogyny of this crack vaporizes in laughter. Right?
I have no problem -- nay, I have a civic, Francophilic responsibility -- to point out the hotness of Segolene, who was famously featured, at 53, on the beach in a blue bikini with the bod plenty of 23-year-olds wish they had. No sexism here! Gavin Newsom: His phone number to the girl (or guy) who can describe San Francisco's education policy. Even Rumsfeld, judging by his early press clippings, might have been allowed to fuck up Iraq if only he'd done it in a muscle-tee.
But beauty does not diminish from an ability to govern any more than Royal's decision to wear high heels on a trip to Chile (scandal!) makes her un-statesman-like. Jacques Chirac probably had jarfuls of Brill Cream smothered into those six strands of hair when he inked the deal for Osirak, and both he and his sale were still butt-ugly.
Royal herself sounds very much like the kind of right-of-left Third Way candidate the Continent has been craving. She's a fan of Tony Blair. She's tough on French hooliganism and the insidious creep of Islamism into Parisian affairs. She also thinks fellow party member and ex-prez Lionel Jospin's 35-hour work week is no way to keep France competitive in today's globalized economy. (Marxists never were averse to labor, despite what your wan, bong-hitting roommate in college told you.)
When Hillary's elected, and I move to France -- Royal's got my vote.
Hypocrisy is grating enough when film stars, say, fly in private jets to anti-global warming events. But coming from a performer whose routine is predicated on an implicit moral position he himself fails to adhere to -- it stinks. It's only tolerable if Cohen is not really pursuing the agenda his fans are giving him. His comedy must be its own end...
When the day comes that Cohen starts to take his job as seriously as his critics, we should find a well, and quickly throw him down it.
In an interview with Rolling Stone, the comedian revealed he was a devout Jew, observing Sabbath and eating kosher foods, and he referred to the singing scene to defend his inflammatory comedy.
"Borat essentially works as a tool. By himself being anti-Semitic, he lets people lower their guard and expose their own prejudices, whether it's anti-Semitism or an acceptance of anti-Semitism. 'Throw the Jew Down the Well' was a very controversial sketch, and some members of the Jewish community thought it was actually going to encourage anti-Semitism.
"But to me it revealed something about that bar in Tuscon. And the question is: did it reveal that they were anti-Semitic? Perhaps. But maybe it just revealed that they were indifferent to anti-Semitism," he said.
It probably revealed more about group psychology than anything else. But what about the central Asian country Borat hails from, which looked a little too swarthy different for Cohen's filmic needs.
He also talked of his astonishment at hearing that the Kazakh government was thinking of suing him over the offence caused by his comic alter ego, and stressed that the "joke is not on Kazakhstan".
"I was surprised, because I always had faith in the audience that they would realise that this was a fictitious country and the mere purpose of it was to allow people to bring out their own prejudices. And the reason we chose Kazakhstan was because it was a country that no one had heard anything about, so we could essentially play on stereotypes they might have about this ex-Soviet backwater. The joke is not on Kazakhstan. I think the joke is on people who can believe that the Kazakhstan that I describe can exist - who believe that there's a country where homosexuals wear blue hats and the women live in cages and they drink fermented horse urine and the age of consent has been raised to nine years old...
Oh please. Kazakhstan is very much the butt of these jokes. Imagine if I went around pretending to be "Sacha Baron Cohen" and telling racist jokes about, say, Mexicans. People are aware that there's somebody named Sacha Baron Cohen, but they don't really know much about him as a person. So they assume I'm really Sacha Baron Cohen, and this Cohen must be racist against Mexicans. Then the actual Cohen becomes upset -- why? After all, the joke isn't on him. It's on the people who were stupid and unenlightened enough to believe that Cohen -- a B-list film star -- would be a knuckle-dragging racist. It's not a joke on him at all.
Cohen is a dissembler who doesn't want to face whatever demons lurk inside him. Someday, whatever part of his psychology coughed up Borat will be properly exposed. ("The Jews cause all the wars," a drunken Cohen told London traffic police. "Me, I started Darfur.") Or maybe he'll slip from rabble-rouser to self-important activist a la Michael Moore. I don't care. Let me be the first to say I'll be glad to see this hypocrite gone.
Milton Friedman, who died last night at age 94, today seems like such a always-was sage of economics and politics that it's hard for us to appreciate how deeply hated he and his fellows at the University of Chicago were in their heyday. Their vision of governance based upon individual choice and market-driven policies today seem like common sense, but at the time were radical.
When I visited the University years ago, my tour guide pointed out an huge, abstract metal sculpture composed of intewoven steel blobs, like a freestanding unbound lava lamp. It occupied a corner space on a block otherwise occupied by a tall white building, which we were informed once housed the firebrand economics department. Months after installing the sculpture, the university discovered that the artist who'd been commissioned for the sculpture, a devoted Communist, had calculated the declination of the sun so that the sculpture would cast a large hammer-and-sickle shaped shadow on the building every year on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. For a time, the university considered removing the sculpture. Instead, they moved the economists elsewhere -- and gave the building to the history department. The move, on an institutional level, symbolized the way the Chicago School was able to suffer the abuse of its rivals and often wind up with the last laugh.
Friedman was a champion of liberty and reason who transcended his discipline. Unencumbered by common assumptions and rebelling against state authority, he was in another sense a Freed Man. In a tragic irony, his two great achievements almost contradict each other. Friedman made his name by filling in the holes in an economic theory that had become the basis of bad economic policy. He also founded a school of policy which, in the hands of the Republican party, has become very much the opposite of what he intended.
In 1958, economist A.W. Phillips noticed that historical data on inflation and unemployment rates plotted very well on an inverse curve. Times of higher inflation had low unemployment, and vice versa. The Phillips curve was used as justification by politicians to let inflation run a little high, since decline in the value of a currency is annoying but managable, whereas job loss is a trauma. Unfortunately, as soon as policymakers began trying to use the curve, the inverse relationship died, leading to the Nixon-Carter era of accelerating inflation and stagnant employment.
Friedman had predicted this, because he correctly determined why such a relationship existed. It wasn't inflation itself that inversely correlated with unemployment; it was the gap between actual and expected inflation. When inflation was higher than expected, employers would interpret a surge in their revenues as a boom in business (not a cheapening of the dollar) and hire more people. Same thing in reverse when inflation was lower than they thought and times looked tough. When nobody was gaming inflation, a curve was the result. But once government began inflating the money supply, people adjusted to the new level of inflation as normal. The only way to keep the game going was to have increases in the inflation rate each year. The upshot was 20% mortgage rates, no jobs, and worthless dollars with which one was supposed to cut out the malaise and go buy a sweater. Reagan and Volcker took Friedman's idea and brought inflation down quickly; the reputation of Alan Greenspan was largely built on remembering all this and not screwing up.
Unfortunately, Friedman's larger vision of a society built on liberty and competition was lost on many of his supposed disciples. Friedman wasn't anti-government so much as anti-nannying. (To steal an analogy from his Chicago colleague Hayek, government is good at building roads and guardrails and telling you whether to drive on the left or right side; it shouldn't try to patch economic holes by forcing everybody to drive to the same place -- say Utica -- for vacation.) He opposed taxes and spending as two coequal encroachments on personal autonomy. He opposed drug criminalization. He invented the idea of education vouchers as a way to improve school performance.
The perversions of his ideas perpetrated on society by the GOP are spiritually the opposite of Friedman's ideas. Reagan's and Bush 43's tax cuts paired with spending increases not only expand the welfare state but create an artificial stimulus of the sort Friedman's nemesis John Maynard Keynes popularized. Vice laws such that Friedman hated are sold under the guise of being market-oriented, as in the argument that banning tobacco from most public spaces or motorcyclists from riding helmetless decreases health care costs for others (at the expense of freedom to be a public pest). Limited experiments with school vouchers typically award only students in the worst schools a fraction of the money allocated for their education, managing to drain these schools of funds and their least disadvantaged students without inducing the systemwide competitive incentives that were the entire reason for the proposal in the first place. His book about medical price-fixing, which depicted medicine as a cartel with no incentive to compete to cut costs, was delayed by AMA legal action; yet health care policy today is dominated by those who would socialize the industry and those who pretend it's a competitive market.
Curiously, Friedman played a strong role in changing the public perception of market economies as doomed to failure (though the collapse of the USSR didn't hurt) without changing the perception that those economies are cruel. The most remarkable interview I've read in a long time was a three-way discussion in Reason Magazine between Jeff Mackey, CEO and founder of Whole Foods; Friedman; and T.J. Rodgers, the prickly CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. It regarded the mission of Whole Foods beyond selling groceries. Mackey, who recently slashed his own salary to a dollar, argued paying a union wage, selling enviro-friendly products, and donating some profits to charities are part of a businesses duty to "stakeholders." Rodgers argued that any action that does not maximize profits was an immoral abdication of a CEO's fiduciary duties. Friedman, wryly, managed to mostly agree with both.
Whole Foods Market's contribution to society--and as a customer I can testify that it is an important one--is to enhance the pleasure of shopping for food. Whole Foods has no special competence in deciding how charity should be distributed. Any funds devoted to the latter would surely have contributed more to society if they had been devoted to improving still further the former.
Finally, I shall try to explain why my statement that "the social responsibility of business [is] to increase its profits" and Mackey's statement that "the enlightened corporation should try to create value for all of its constituencies" are equivalent.
Note first that I refer to social responsibility, not financial, or accounting, or legal. It is social precisely to allow for the constituencies to which Mackey refers. Maximizing profits is an end from the private point of view; it is a means from the social point of view. A system based on private property and free markets is a sophisticated means of enabling people to cooperate in their economic activities without compulsion; it enables separated knowledge to assure that each resource is used for its most valued use, and is combined with other resources in the most efficient way.
[Note: In honor of Jewcy's debut, I'm cross-posting between the Daily Shvitz and Snarksmith. Hey, we're all mishpucha.]
If, like me, you tend to think of "American poetry*" the way you would "great Canadian novel" then Rolf Potts' Nationtribute to Allen Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra" is interesting for reasons having nothing to do with its putative subject, the politics of language.
Because Ginsberg's revelations are difficult--because they seem to question the potency of poetry--it's no surprise that the anniversary of "Wichita Vortex Sutra" has been ignored this year, despite the poem's jarring relevance to the current American landscape.
Oh, please. Ginsberg's revelations are all antis in search of a climax, and they're couched in lousy verse.
Just as "terrorism" (another nine-letter word) has become an incantation that aims to blur all manner of failures and lies by "inferior magicians" within the Bush Administration, the word "Communism" was central to the alchemical formula for Johnson-era spin and manipulation--a drab reminder that language could obscure truth as readily as express it.
Wait a minute, I thought we were comparing Vietnam to Iraq? I guess "Baathism" with its 8 letters, and "insurgency" with its 10, sort of spoils the moral and lyric equivalence, huh?
Antiwar poetry is the exclusive demesne of the British, with Wilfred Owen as head groundskeeper:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Wielding cliches like daisy-cutters, Potts makes the obvious allusions to Shelley ("poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world") and Auden, who said "Poetry makes nothing happen" in mid-stride through his wonderful memorial to W.B. Yeats. As it happens, Yeats was once asked to deliver a war poem himself; the occasion was the same world war which made Owen famous before claiming his life. All the Irishman could come up with was the following strophe, which really does put Auden's career-humbling pronouncement in better perspective:
I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter's night
I can no longer tell if Thomas Friedman is the 21st century's Confucius, Marx or Sun Myung Moon. All that was left out of this New York Observer dispatch from China was a disquisition on the four modes of nano alienation and how "hurry-up time" is fast approaching for McDonald's:
He typed on an invisible keyboard. He extended his index fingers, then brought the tips together, touching: interoperability.
"It was when he asked me to pull one of them that I began to suspect Mr. Friedman was not the inscrutable prophet of neoliberal economics I'd imagined."
But Mr. Friedman had set off, defending himself from his unseen enemies. He stands accused, he said, of being “a prophet of globalization” or “the Panglossian avatar of globalization.” Not so. “I didn’t do this,” Mr. Friedman said. “I didn’t start this. I just wrote about it.”
"'Maureen Dowd,' Mr. Friedman added, 'believes in the semicolon. That is utopian dilettantism."
There is, in fact, a Friedmanian dialectic. It only appears to go: thesis—antithesis—thesis! Thomas Friedman appreciates the dark side.
"If Soros does not learn to master his fear, then fear will become his..." "Master?" I interjected. "No," said Friedman, eyes full of passionate intensity. "His Soros..."
For the curious. There ought to have been Bollinger corks popping on West 54th St. tonight, but we're all exhausted and we have a big day ahead of us tomorrow.
It's 8 o'clock on a Wednesday, and if you type "Jewcy" into Google Blog Search, we're already kinda famous.
"To keep one creed's a task grown quite Herculean / Is it not so, my Tory ultra-Julian?"
Byron was poking fun at the mercurial mediocrity Bob Southey. Andrew Sullivan deserves better. As it happens, I agree with him when he says that his principles haven't changed since 9/11, that he's only lost his illusions about the president's credibility, competence and morality. This is a pretty humble claim to make and it by no means distinguishes Sullivan. Every exiting administration official and neoconservative policy adviser now feels the same way, no matter how the National Review's masthead and Hugh Hewitt squawk and squeak to the contrary.
However, any regular reader of Sullivan's blog will have noticed a coarsening of rhetoric and a tendency toward solipsism over the last few months. Where he used to be thoughtful, if a touch triumphal in his salvos against the idiotic and improvisational left, he's now become whiny and shrill. Most days find him taking refuge as the lone defender of a conservative Bastille that's being stormed by religious reactionaries, Republican sell-outs, and blinkered toadies. I wish I could say the degeneration has been wholly a matter of style and not substance, but even the latter has suffered, too.
Among Sullivan's more collapsible claims is that real American conservatism is the yield of some felicitous mind-meld between Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, forgotten heirs to a tradition that's been hijacked by big-government "Christian socialists." Never mind that Goldwater toyed with a nuclear-driven eschatology in a way that would make Jerry Falwell and James Dobson quiver like Egyptian aspen. And never mind that Reagan was the one to enlist Sullivan's bete noir, the Christian Right, into the ranks of the GOP "base," stealing the revivalist thunder of that more awe-shucks and self-doubting evangelical, Jimmy Carter.
There is also Sully's shabby moral equivalence between the United States' shameful greenlighting of torture and the Soviet slave labor system, as grimly portrayed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. I won't eat up too much bandwidth here going over why such a Column A/Column B comparison fails on historical and intellectual levels; anyone interest in seeing the true extent of the Stalinist "sewer system," which Andrew thinks has transplanted itself to Cuba and Iraq and Eastern Europe, may click here.
As the leading political blogger, not to mention one of the first, Sullivan is more than entitled to defend himself against the chorus of Jonah Goldbergs, just as he's perfectly justified in hawking his new book on his site. But maybe he should limit the frequency of his posts. I don't think he'll outdo this observation in the next half hour:
As for the vitriol thrown in my direction, I may be beoming a useful Emmanuel Goldstein figure for the "movement."
If he does say so himself. Goldstein (modeled on Trotsky, by the way: how's that for a take-back-the-right analogy?) wasn't able to retaliate against Big Brother because he was a chimera, invented by the state to give its mind-blanked citizenry a distraction from their own miserable condition. Sullivan regularly takes aim against those who are now taking aim at him, and this does not a martyr make. If anything has been lost in the kind of Oakeshottian conservatism he advocates, it's the stiff upper lip and the ability to celebrate the individual without reducing him to a walking morality tale.
A critic who can suck like this need never dine alone:
On Broadway, The History Boys won the most Tony Awards of any straight dramatic play since Death of a Salesman. The film deserves to win even more: A special Academy Award should be created for ensemble work just to honor the entire cast. As the lost and lonely Hector, Richard Griffiths fills the screen with humor and girth, using his red-apple cheeks to mask the sadness and doom in his personal life. Frances de la Tour is splendid in her role as the outnumbered female instructor forced to match brains and wits with a school full of men. All eight of the boys are beyond perfection, especially Dominic Cooper as Dakin, the class stud with the self-assurance and sex appeal to seduce whomever he pleases, regardless of age or gender, and Samuel Barnett as Posner, the sensitive one who loves show tunes and Dakin. When he sings “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” looking directly at Dakin, or fights back tears and says, “I’m a Jew, I’m small, I’m homosexual and I live in Sheffield. I’m fucked,” these moments are nothing short of heartbreaking.
YYeah, I heard Bennett really gayed it up for the celluloid, which is a nice act of adaptation jujitsu (plays are usually more ribald than films), if ultimately distracting from the central genius of "The History Boys." Now we have: a little learning is a dangerous thing; drink deep, or submit to sack fondling.
Somebody once told me, that Dorothy Parker was good, at writing short stories. The other day I bought a book of hers for a shilling, and I am sorry now. It is not only that the stuff is TOO OBVIOUS AND ELEMENTARY TO BE WORTH SAYING AT ALL, nor that THE DIALOGUE THINKS IT IS SO FUCKING GOOD AND IS THE SORT OF THING YOU REJECT IF SOMEBODY WANTS TO PUT IT IN THE SCHOOL MAGAZINE, nor that YOU JUST DON'T CARE; no, not only that; there are a lot of FLAT LIES in it too:
"they hate you as soon as they are sure of you" (men-women)
NOOOOOOOOOO.
"yes here we are, she said; aren't we?" NO, we are NOT.
When I had finished looking at the book, and had closed it up again, I went and looked into the lavatory-pan.
Sorry for the little biographical interlude, but three things I thought I should impart:
1. Tomorrow, the magazine of which I'm associate editor -- Jewcy -- will launch (same day as English Al Jazeera!), which means that much of my blogging will henceforth be done there. The name for the blog is The Daily Shvitz (cute, no?) and despite the forbidding Yiddishkeit, it'll pretty much cover everything Snarksmith has been covering for the past two-plus years. Now I'll actually be paid to fisk New Left Review and bloviate about why Tony Judt is a gifted crank, why Anthony Lane's prose can turn your brown eyes blue, etc. Snarksmith will continue to be updated whenever I'm awake at 3 a.m. and can't help myself and my credit card's been rejected at Asian Pleasures. (Again.)
2. I was not, in fact, on CNN Sunday due to my segment being nixed late Saturday evening. Too much post-election, post-Rummy coverage, apparently. Who cares what Firedoglake has to say? Sorry to disappoint. Loyal Snark readers may use that data bloc on TiVo to record Dexter, which I'm told is pretty good.
3. Because I'm the type who asked how The Usual Suspects ended before even seeing the thing, I can't resist: For a 24-hour advance glance at Jewcy, click here. (We've been leaked to a bunch of tribal blogs already. Not like I'm the Daniel Ellsberg of ethnic media.)
Ned Lamont is probably still snuggled under the duvet, Brookstone universal remote in hand, and his victorious netrooted peers haven't even been sworn in yet. And here's Daily Kos, ready to take money from Chevron. Remember how the government has to check untrammeled corporate greed? Don't worry about it -- people-power will get you where you're going, but a diesel V-8 will make it fast and easy.
There was some pre-election controversy over my running a Chevron ad. (It may still be running, for all I know.)
I avoided talking about it then to prevent an ill-timed pie war.
[...]
Running an ad doesn't imply endorsement. But, if I start rejecting ads, THEN every ad that DOES run has an implied endorsement.
And you guys aren't idiots. The advertising purity trolls seem to think that site readers are moron automatons easily manipulated by advertising. I have a higher opinion of you guys. I actually think you're quite intelligent and capable of independent evaluation of the advertising you consume here and elsewhere.
Finally, I'm not afraid of money, and I'm putting it to good use -- the abandonment of Scoop and a massive ground-up redevelopment of Daily Kos to be the ultimate blogging platform in the world, and the establishment of a corps of "fellows" to do great activism.
More details on those projects will emerge in December, but bottom line is that I won't cry if Chevron or anyone else wants to help fund the rise of a professional netroots activist class.
Emphasis mine. Do I care if Kos takes money from businesses? Of course not. I'm not entirely sure that this is a shift for Kos, for whom commensensical expedience has always trumped ideological consistency. Nevertheless, it's a striking stance to take one week after his pet candidates, most of them steeped in xenophobic anti-business Lou Dobbs claptrap, to be in favor of using the resources of businesses to effect change. Only time will tell whether Kos is serious about this newly libertarian position, or is simply seeing dollar signs dancing in his dreams. "Ultimate blogging platform in the world" does have a publicly minded ring to it, now doesn't it?
By the way, Chevron, we're for sale too, and much cheaper.
The problem with Sacha Baron Cohen isn't that he's not funny. He has never made me laugh above the level of a chuckle, but as the famous Elvis compilation argued, a sufficiently large fan base is pretty strong evidence that a performer pleases somebody, somehow. The problem is that Cohen comes packaged as somehow engaging with bigotry in an enlightening way. If Cohen spends his days making bigoted people look foolish, and foolish people look bigoted, then we assume he must be doing so because he is against bigotry and ignorance. It's the Sarah Silverman fallacy: a joke that wanders into a social issue, and manages to be funny, therefore must be a satirical sword on the side of reason. I.E. Larry the Cable Guy make jokes about redneck stereotypes, and consequently can be explicated as a backhanded send-up of coastal elites' ignorance about red state anthropology. (Look for the CMT special on your Blue Collar Comedy Tour DVD bonus disc.)
Ron Rosenbaum, for instance, clearly wants to find some real power in Borat, and when he concludes (generously) that Borat used to be a magnificent investigator of racism, reduced in the movie to a series of poop jokes by, of all people, Larry David. (Making Rosenbaum, I suppose, a self-hating-Jew-managing-Jews-hating Jew.) British newspapers explicate the film in terms of how awful Americans are; Hitch in terms of how nice Americans are. And that's just what I get by reading Slate.
While art is what an audience finds in it, I think critics are finding more virtues in Borat they'd like to see than are actually present. Consider this report from an Australian publicity event:
WHAT does it take to become a comic genius? Plenty of help, it seems, if you're Sacha Baron Cohen, whose Kazakh journalist alter ego Borat is here to promote the film Borat: Cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan.
In a tightly controlled press conference yesterday, Borat took only pre-approved questions from the media and read prescripted answers from an autocue in his trademark mangled English.
The only time Baron Cohen dropped out of character was when a journalist, denied the opportunity to ask spontaneous questions, stood up and sat down several times. Baron Cohen fixed him with a stare and said: "I make the jokes."
This is on top of the extant irony of the film, documented here on Snarksmith almost a year ago (the permalink, sadly, rendered dysfunctional by our lazy archiving skills. It's here if you want to hunt.) Namely, the scenes of the Borat movie filmed in Kazakhstan were filmed in Romania because "we found that the people from Kazakhstan looked nothing like Borat," said executive producer Dan Mazur. Specifically, the people of Central Asia look -- Asian.
Cohen is therefore the guerrilla satirist of racial ignorance who ridicules a country of which he is racially ignorant, and only when he has tight control over the questions he will be asked. Hypocrisy is grating enough when film stars, say, fly in private jets to anti-global warming events. But coming from a performer whose routine is predicated on an implicit moral position he himself fails to adhere to -- it stinks. It's only tolerable if Cohen is not really pursuing the agenda his fans are giving him. His comedy must be its own end.
I haven't seen the Borat movie yet. I will probably not be able to avoid it, and when I do see it, I will probably laugh. But I'll do so without any delusions that what Borat does is honorable or somehow medicinal. When the day comes that Cohen starts to take his job as seriously as his critics, we should find a well, and quickly throw him down it.
One wants to avoid the anecdotal when arguing for or against the death penalty. Even the fully justified claim that innocent men, deprived of the benefit of DNA tests, are put to death doesn't quite cinch the case for abolishing capital punishment. Either one is opposted to state executions on principle, or one is not. "Thinking with the blood" is how Kipling described human rationalism tainted by sanguinary impulses, and Kipling knew whereof he spoke. People who oppose wars because they hear of horrific tales of fallen soldiers would do well to study the Bard of Empire: He lost his only son Jack in the First World War, a tragedy that only redoubled his conviction that the "Hun" was a blight worth eliminating from the civilized world. If you'll excuse the blog-friendly free association, this is the same poet who wrote "Mesopotamia," a strophe of which runs:
Our dead shall not return to us while Day and Night divide -
Never while the bars of sunset hold.
But the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died,
Shall they thrust for high employments as of old?
This can and should be read as one of Kipling's famous rebukes of colonial hubris. I think of it whenever I read that U.S. troops are without armor or the proper defenses against the crude weaponry used by our enemy in Iraq. Still, one thing our idle-minded overlings have got right about the postwar situation is the need for Iraqis to determine their own future, which perforce includes deadling with their recent past.
Part of the mission in Mesopotamia today is one of "reconciliation" and a gathering of personal testimonies about the crimes of Baathism. Saddam's dead will not come back to us, as they simply cannot. Does this mean a single act of strangulation will bring justice to the hundreds of thousands killed or orphaned or widowed by the abattoir regime ended three years ago?
Hitch, who keeps his powder dry on this and many other occasions, forwarded me the following story about an Iraqi journalist for The Observer who was murdered by Saddam for being a "spy." The guy's father shows no schadenfreude for the monster's fate.
Farzad Bazoft was a 31-year-old freelance journalist working for The Observer when he was put to death by the Iraqi regime on the grounds that he was a spy. In fact, Bazoft was simply what he said he was: 'a journalist going after a scoop'.
Because he was born in Iran, and deemed therefore a foe of Iraq, Saddam insisted Bazoft's corpse should be hanged multiple times.
His body was dumped in a box outside the British embassy in Baghdad. The Iraqi Information Minister crowed: 'Mrs Thatcher wanted Bazoft alive. We gave her the body.' Saddam ignored repeated protests from world leaders to release Bazoft. He showed no justice. He displayed no mercy.
It would perhaps be understandable then if his father, Sowaini Bazoft, a 77-year-old Muslim whose home town of Abadan in Iran was razed by Iraq, welcomed Saddam's fate. Perhaps he might even have rejoiced when the news came through that the dictator was to die - and not by the gun, as Saddam had requested, but by the rope.
The truth, however, is more complicated, more poignant. 'Even the wolf, the tiger and the shark are better than Saddam,' Mr Bazoft told The Observer from his home in London. 'He hanged my son. And because he was an Iranian he said the body had to hang 60 times. These people don't care for others; they just see their nose, their stomach. People will be happy he is to be hanged. When the news came through that he was to be executed many people phoned me saying, "congratulations". But this [his execution] is not in my blood.'
His voice becomes a whisper as he attempts to articulate his thoughts. 'I don't like to see pain. I don't hurt the birds or the ants. That is my personal belief. I will close my eyes and ears when they hang Saddam. I don't want to see anybody hang, not even him.'
Dick Cheney might, at any moment, turn the gun on an American eagle. Donald Rumsfeld, feeling the throb of professional defeat in his twilight years, might do something unseemly like bite the head off a baby seal. In the midst of such dire ends for the two dark knights of the Bush Cabinet, I feel the need to defend both men on one important and too-easily-forgotten point of principle. When they were both in the Ford Cabinet, and doing their best to unhorse Henry Kissinger, they once found themselves on the side of humanitarianism. The White House had invited Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to come pay a visit as the brave and brilliant Soviet dissident he was. Then realpolitik entered into things. Kissinger advised Ford not to vex Brezhnev. Invitation recalled. It was Cheney and Rumsfeld who made a stink about how this was a cowardly betrayal of the very freedom the United States had been calling for on the other side of the Iron Curtain since the days of Harry Truman.
How the mighty have turned grumbly. Here's how Donald Rumsfeld is remembered today, by one of his best friends:
“I suggested that we were losing the war,” Adelman said. “What was astonishing to me was the number of Iraqi professional people who were leaving the country. People were voting with their feet, and I said that it looked like we needed a Plan B. I said, ‘What’s the alternative? Because what we’re doing now is just losing.’ ”
Adelman said that Rumsfeld didn’t take to the message well. “He was in deep denial—deep, deep denial. And then he did a strange thing. He did fifteen or twenty minutes of posing questions to himself, and then answering them. He made the statement that we can only lose the war in America, that we can’t lose it in Iraq. And I tried to interrupt this interrogatory soliloquy to say, ‘Yes, we are actually losing the war in Iraq.’ He got upset and cut me off. He said, ‘Excuse me,’ and went right on with it.”
It's as if senility made a friendship pact with cold calculation. Failed states are produced by fugue states in bureaucrats and politicians.
Adelman would have been fired had not Rumsfeld been first.
I know there are a handful of gentile readers of this blog (one of whom happens to be its co-editor) and so I feel obliged to let those of you outside the tribe in on a little secret. We have a saying we like to deploy whenever an internal skirmish threatens to make us appear "colorful" in public, perhaps even lead us to talk with our hands below West 75th Street. The saying is: "Not in front of the goyim."
Alan Wolfe blows the whole operation with his mildly interesting but thoroughly silly essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education on Jewish "illiberalism." It's the same old bilge about doling out criticism for Israel from somewhere comfortably west of Suez, like Zabar's. Tony Judt may look a lot like Isaac Babel but not even the martyred author of Red Cavalry got this much press in his day:
Not content with angering New Republic liberals, just weeks before his talk was canceled, Judt had also written an essay in the London Review of Books. "Bush's Useful Idiots" criticized "the liberal intelligentsia" for keeping "its head safely below the parapet" by not opposing more vigorously both the foreign policy of George W. Bush and Israel's invasion of Lebanon.
In this time of petitions, Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law at Yale University, and Todd Gitlin, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, neither of whom writes for The New Republic, published yet a third broadsheet in The American Prospect. With the title "We Answer to the Name of Liberals," it was mostly a defense of liberals against conservative charges that their protests of Bush's policies have made them shills for Osama bin Laden and other enemies of America. But with a subtitle of "A response to Tony Judt," this petition began by refuting the charges of liberal complicity with Bush foreign policy that Judt had made in his September London Review article. You can be against Bush's war in Iraq, Ackerman and Gitlin argued, without also having to be either for or against his support of Israel and its actions in Lebanon. Forty-four people signed. Again, I was one of them. "True patriotism does not consist of bravado or calumny," Ackerman and Gitlin wrote. "It resides in faithfulness to our great constitutional ideals." They are right. As they pointed out, liberals are second to none in their desire to protect the United States against terrorism, but they are equally as vigilant in protecting the United States against the temptation to undermine its great commitment to freedom.
A few things to note here: Judt's London Review piece was a scandal not for its histrionic content ("Why can't we all be more like me?") but for its pisspoor assessments of prominent regime changers such as Paul Berman and Peter Beinart, both of whom, either by clumsy prose or by ill-learning, Judt describes as ex-Trotskyists. Was such a self-flattering indictment really worth all the huffing and puffing by manifesto-ready liberals who feel their collective honor has been sullied?
Also, I would not, as a rule (let alone as a professor of sociology) be claiming that an undifferentiated contingent of liberals are "second to none" in their desire to protect the United States. Name names, Alan. Otherwise you're telling me there's nothing to choose between Peter Galbraith and Alexander Cockburn.
The Onion ran a story years ago about leftist "outrage fatigue." I feel leftist guilt fatigue. Sometimes the unexamined life is worth living for just a spell. When bien-pensant aren't hugging themselves with glee over the collapse of a Republican president's war policy, they're hopelessly flexing their own muscles as the true heroes keeping the world safe for democracy. It's like watching Isaiah Berlin Boflex.
Then of course comes Wolfe's question as to why Christopher Hitchens wasn't more disgruntled (he can hardly have been gruntled) by having his invite to speak on the oil-for-food racket before a gathering of Jewish rightists rescinded. (This was due to the squawks of one Morton Klein, a convenient if infinitely shriller stand-in for Abe Foxman.) Wolfe writes: "Zionists who only want to hear from Zionists — like Israel's critics who never get to hear the views of its supporters — fail the test of open inquiry." They fail a lot of other things, too, and I'm sure they're crying all the way to the West Bank about it. So what?
Is it not implicit in the freedom Wolfe otherwise makes an elaborate show of defending that a private organization is entitled to remain an echo chamber for its own opinions?
Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International would not be questioned about keeping a steady pulse in, say, denying, Genocidaires Without Borders a sponsored platform from which to speak. What's to stop any interest group from sorting out its own guest list, whether by principle or cynicism?
Hitch makes no secret of being a sworn proponent of the blessings of Jewish diaspora, as well as of Israel Shahak, who argued that "classical" Judaism is a form of totalitarianism and that religious orthodoxy has corrupted the Jewish state from its parliament on down to its military. Gee, I wonder why hard-line Zionists ask him to keep his mouth shut. Frankly, if Hitch did lose sleep over such silly PR brouhahas, I'd worry he was going soft, beginning to seek a reconciliation -- or, heaven forbid, a "dialogue" -- with just the sort of people he's spent a career mistrusting and rebuking.
Capitulation before public pressure is the norm for corporations and governments and television networks. Why liberal intellectuals should expect any different from political lobbies only proves how out-of-touch liberal intellectuals are.
And it is me. Just a brief heads up that I'll be on CNN this Sunday at 10:30 p.m., discussing how the blogosphere has impacted the midterm elections, Rummy's overdue adieu and other seasonal mayhem.
I'm woefully underqualified to bloviate on camera, and I sweat like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News. Should be fun.
Speaking of the outgoing defense secretary, he's being prosecuted in Germany for war crimes:
Just days after his resignation, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is about to face more repercussions for his involvement in the troubled wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. New legal documents, to be filed next week with Germany's top prosecutor, will seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Rumsfeld, along with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior U.S. civilian and military officers, for their alleged roles in abuses committed at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Germany has "universal jurisdiction," just like other European countries with consciences. You may remember this phrase trotted out at the time of Augusto Pinochet's apprehension in London, in 1998, and Henry Kissinger's near-miss skeedaddle from Paris in 2001. If Rumsfeld hops it to Bonn anytime soon, he'll be served a subpoena.
American Airlines will have to start amending its brochure for ex-members of the Nixon and Ford administrations. "If you're wanted for human rights violations, we'd prefer it if you didn't come fly with us. Thanks."
According to this map provided by BBC news, the final result of this weeks election includes: nine Republican senate seats retained; six Republican senators lost; 16 Democrats, plus two Democratic-leaning independents, retained; and New Hampshire has seceded from the Union.
Orthodox Israeli Jews and West Bank Radicals Focus On Common Ground: Religion-Based Hate of Others
It appears a solution has finally presented itself to the Israeli-Palestinian divide: send more gays.
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish pop singer Benny Elbaz was so angry about the gay pride march planned for tomorrow [in Jerusalem] that he joined forces with a Muslim man he normally would consider an enemy, to sing a duet he composed denouncing the event.
"Jerusalem Will Burn!" Elbaz croons in Hebrew on the single, released the week before the parade. "There will be no gay march!"
"We are the world / We are the children / You are not"
"Only this onslaught of homosexual radicalism could bring together such disparate voices," said Rabbi Yehuda Levin, an anti gay activist from Brooklyn, N.Y., who has traveled to Israel several times this year to rally opposition to the gay pride parade.
Levin has joined forces with Tayseer Tamimi, the head judge of the Islamic Sharia court in the West Bank.
[...]
In June, Levin and four senior ultra-Orthodox rabbis shared a podium with two Arab-Israeli members of the Knesset to denounce the march.
Islamic religious leaders from the West Bank joined by video link because they are barred by Israel from visiting Jerusalem.
My friend Joseph Braude, author of The New Iraq, has a must-read piece on the late PLO chairman, and why The Dude may have unwittingly been lining the coffers of the Semtex Brigade all these years:
Arafat's money trail leads far beyond the smelly sands of Gaza Beach, to a rainbow coalition of shady figures—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—and as far west as New York's Greenwich Village, where the militant chieftain once secretly bought a stake in Bowlmor Lanes, a trendy bowling alley. You might say the closest the world ever came, in fact, to harmony and peace between all three monotheistic faiths was in the sleazy international campaign to siphon off Palestinian grant aid. It may be too early still to tell the full Where's Waldo–like tale of where the cash went. But several all-stars of Arafat's money laundering network have come to light—and the legacy of their greed still has grave repercussions across the Middle East.
When I was a very poor cartoonist for The Dartmouth daily newspaper, I loved to get myself in trouble. This was done by mouthing what are, in today's Gawkerized, Boratified world, pretty milquetoast observations designed to cause "offense." Offense usually meant someone, somewhere had to think about something and possibly even interpret it.
In one strip, my gay, frat-joining Moose Sammy (never shy from getting animals to do your dirty work: from Orwell to Bloom County, the dividends are obvious and many) "accidentally" got an erection while having his ass paddled in a routine Gamma Delt hazing ritual. Whoops. Sammy apologized, but the frat members were discomfited and, if you'll pardon the metaphor, groped for a seemingly enlightened but still kind of dumb explanation. "Dude, it happens." "Don't worry, bro. One time, during scrimmage..." Etc.
Oh, the hue and the cry the minute you drop Tori Amos or Erasure into a conversation as "stereotypes." There was outrage. Hand-holding did, I regret to inform, take place. Candlelight vigils may have also been threatened. A gay friend of mine wrote a letter to the editor in my defense. Of course the object of ridicule was a silly and archaic "initiation" ritual run by a sodality of guy's guys oblivious to the guy-on-guy overtones of said ritual. Of course Weiss was satirizing on behalf of progressive values. ("Tori hasn't put out a decent album since '99" might have been the evidence proferred for the latter claim.)
Anyway, the stupid little kerfuffle died down, as it always does when the driveling orge of political correctness finds more promising planes to stalk through. (He shares the attention span of the adolescents who revere him.)
Dartmouth's latest folly is a real winner. You may have heard about the trouble with Native American iconography that Nic's and my alma mater has had for the past three decades. You may also be aware that children, up until this very Dunkirk moment in the ensuing "war on boys," still revel in a game called "Cowboys and Indians." But have you ever heard anything like this?
Crew teams apologize for party theme
By Abraham Clayman '07, Captain, Men's Heavyweight Crew
Published on Thursday, November 9, 2006
To the Editor:
I write this letter on behalf of and with the approval of my co-captain, Jeremy Feldman '07, the captain of the Men's Lightweight Crew team, William Suto '07 and the captain of the Women's Crew team, Anne Kennedy '07. Over the past weekend, the Heavyweight, Lightweight and Women's Crew teams held a dance party in Collis with the costume theme "Cowboys and Indians."
At the dance, three rowers dressed up as "Indians." When confronted about this by a group of American Indian students and one young woman in particular, those costumes were removed. To the young woman particularly offended, an apology was offered at the dance.
Although we did not intend any disrespect toward American Indians or any other person on campus, we apologize for any offense caused by the event.
While this event could be a cause for the angry taking of sides, we hope to turn it into an educational experience.
We do not want to cause offense in the future, and to that end, we will be attending the dinner discussion on Saturday night regarding the history of the Indian mascot at Dartmouth and meeting with American Indian leaders on campus.
"President Bush will not flag in the pursuit of the war, and Senator Santorum is now available for a seat on the SCOTUS should one become available. GOP senators will have the chance to select leadership equal to the new world of politics which, as the past two years have demonstrated, does not reward timidity." -- Hugh Hewitt
Yes, that's right. Rick Santorum for Supreme Court.
Rumsfeld Falls: But Are We Going From Bad To Worse?
I had thought the instant I heard of Donald Rumsfeld's much-deserved and long overdue resignation that the president would pick the next Defense Secretary from his father's murky reservoir of foreign policy "realists." This didn't take a lot of effort because a) George Bush has a fondness for learning that the best cure for a mistake is to amplify it, and b) With a mid-term election largely replicating 1986, and Nicaragua doing the same, today's a hinge moment for a little bit of history repeating.
Bush has announced that Robert Gates, currently the president of Texas A&M University and formerly the deputy director of the CIA, will now head the Pentagon. Gates is likely to encounter some resistance from a Democratic Congress. How do I know this? Because he already has:
Mr. President, I also have doubts and questions about Mr. Gates' role in the secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq. Robert Gates served as assistant to the Director of the CIA in 1981 and as Deputy Director for Intelligence for 1982 to 1986. In that capacity he helped develop options in dealing with the Iran-Iraq war, which eventually involved into a secret intelligence liaison relationship with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Gates was in charge of the directorate that prepared the intelligence information that was passed on to Iraq. He testified that he was also an active participant in the operation during 1986. The secret intelligence sharing operation with Iraq was not only a highly questionable and possibly illegal operation, but also may have jeopardized American lives and our national interests. The photo reconnaissance, highly sensitive electronic eavesdropping and narrative texts provided to Saddam, may not only have helped him in Iraq's war against Iran but also in the recent gulf war. Saddam Hussein may have discovered the value of underground land lines as opposed to radio communications after he was give our intelligence information. That made it more difficult for the allied coalition to get quick and accurate intelligence during the gulf war. Further, after the Persian Gulf war, our intelligence community was surprised at the extent of Iraq's nuclear program. One reason Saddam may have hidden his nuclear program so effectively from detection was because of his knowledge of our satellite photos. What also concerns me about that operation is that we spend millions of dollars keeping secrets from the Soviets and then we give it to Saddam who sells them to the Soviets. In short, the coddling of Saddam was a mistake of the first order.
Mr. President, I've stated a very simple case for rejecting the nomination of Robert Gates to be Director of the CIA. The fact that he was wrong on major issues which in some instances led to foreign policy debacles. I haven't addressed concerns about the allegations of his politicization of intelligence analysis, his apparently poor managerial style or still unanswered questions about his role in the Iran-Contra affair. Regarding the Iran-Contra affair, I should mention that I was quite disturbed to hear testimony that portrayed Robert Gates as someone concerned about Agency's role and not sufficiently concerned about pursuing possible illegal Government activities. In his opening statement before the Intelligence Committee, Mr. Gates said that he should have taken more seriously `the possibility of impropriety or possible wrongdoing in the Government and pursued this possibility more aggressively.' I agree.
I should also mention, Mr. President, that aside from Mr. Gates' poor judgment in not pursuing the possibility of Government wrongdoing more aggressively, I still find it incredible that the Deputy Director of CIA was not aware of that major covert operation. How could such a high ranking official not know about the CIA's efforts to support the Contras? Did he purposely avoid trying to find out what was happening? The testimony seemed to indicate he did. Gates' selective lapses in recall about the affair by a man with a photographic memory raises serious doubts.
The above comes from the Congressional Record, dated November 07, 1991. The speaker is Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, inveighing against the appointment of Gates to the full directorship of the CIA under the first President Bush.
Do we never learn? A spook implicated in the Iran-Contra affair, and yet another shadowy suborner of the man about to be hanged as a genocidal monster, and over whom we have gone to war in Iraq. Again. This is the guy Bush picks to rescue a losing struggle in the same country? What's next? Oliver North replaces John Abizaid?
Chatter on liberal blogs and newspapers suggest anxiety about the outcome of tomorrow's election in the face of converging polls in key races, and nationwide, and reports of various turnout-suppression strategies. But the Iowa Markets -- which as a market-lover I believe to be a much more accurate predictor of election results than any poll, and its performance history is consistent with that -- the Iowa markets have seen an explosion in the House market, which is now calling an 82% probability of a Democratic House; meanwhile, the Senate, which has supposedly slipped away as Republicans make up ground in Montana and Tennesee, has remained at a 30% chance of a Democratic majority. The probability of the Republicans keeping both houses is priced at 21%.
Those who glibly say that a democratic and pluralist Iraq is already "lost" won't take comfort in the fact that they're probably more reactionary than the president of that embattled country. I've pointed out here before that Jalal Talabani, apart from being a brilliant and principled socialist, is opposed to capital punishment even for the one man who begs to cheat this and other categorical imperatives. Consider for a moment the importance of Talabani's position. If a Kurd can avoid thinking with the blood when it comes to justice for Saddam Hussein, where does that leave the guy who snuffs Kitty Dukakis?
We have much to learn from some of our Iraqi friends. It'd be nice if their forecasts for the region were as well transmitted as the dire ones coming from disillusioned and guilt-ridden quarters of the regime change camp, let alone from Frank Rich.
When Ceaucescu died, it took photographic evidence of his corpse to convince Romanians that had ceased to be, and that he was not the immortal vampire many even outside the greater Transylvanian area thought he was. It's now accepted as a missed opportunity among Marxists that 1917 started going the wrong way when the czar and his family were executed in Ekaterinburg, on Lenin's orders. More than a century before, in the prologue revolution to the Bolshevik one, Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson lost confreres within the Jacobin cause by arguing that Louis Capet and his meretricious little wife ought not to have been beheaded, just locked up.
The reason for offing autocrats in any revolution is to instill in the people a sense of security that the bad old days are not coming back. Before the present situation of anarchy in Iraq, it was easy to learn of one major source of queasiness among a stunned and discomfited society: Was it true, many Iraqis would ask journalists, that George Bush had already located Saddam and was keeping him hidden in order to return him to power just in case nation-building didn't go so well? (I was always surprised the Michael Moore brigade didn't make more of this paranoia. Bill Maher and others have openly admitted that they preferred Saddam to sectarian chaos, so I suppose the centimeter's leap of logic -- "hey, not a bad idea" -- isn't worth taking.)
One conspiracy theory vanishes this week. We should be glad of it. However, I still can't quite cheer the court's death sentence because I think it'd have been a greater symbolic victory -- if not internally then at least internationally -- to have thrown Saddam in jail for the short remainder of his miserable life. This would have given the Shia a moral upper-hand in their ongoing negotiations with the Sunnis, many of whom are nostalgic for their sect's minority control of the whole state. It would also have been excellent humanitarian press for Iraq, and a well-deserved tweaking of those industrialized Western nations that were against the war from the start and that view the death penalty as a dealbreaker on any other nation's entrance into Club Civilized. Since the question of what to do about Saddam largely hinges on PR, I can't help but regret that those who see the current government in Baghdad as some sort of quisling affair run by American "occupiers" might have witnessed the most un-American act of jurisprudence. A nice irony of history would have been that the former governor of zap-happy Texas would have been the one to take credit for it.
I haven't read the Stern report on global warming. I did open it up, but it was too much to wade through. I was struck by the Boston Globe's editorial on the report, however, which either was written by mathematical illiterates, or sets out an unintentional argument against global warming:
Unchecked, climate change could reduce global economic activity by 20 percent, Stern says. On the other side, the changes in transportation, power production, and other energy uses needed to avoid this disaster will reduce global economic growth by just 1 percent a year.
That makes it sound at first as though fighting global warming is 95% cheaper than doing nothing, but read it again -- the comparison is between a 20% drop once, and 1% less every year.
As I understand this estimate, if we do nothing about global warming, the GDP looking Y years from now will be
GDP(inaction) = GDP(now)*exp(Y*R)*0.8
where R is the rate of GDP growth (not in percentage terms) and 0.8 is to reduce by 20%.
If we fix global warming,
GDP(fix it) = GDP(now)*exp(Y*(R-0.01))
Algebraically, the future GDP will be the same if
exp(Y*R)*0.8 = exp(Y*(R-0.01))
which reduces to 0.8 = exp(Y*-0.01). This solves for zero at Y=22.314. In other words,if these assumptions are right then at any reasonable time from for global warming to explode on us (40-60 years) humanity is better off letting it happen than trying to fix it. Considering the report probably takes the low end of the likely cost of action and the high end of the likely cost of inaction, the case is even weaker.
I assume this isn't what Stern meant, but I can't find the actual numbers in the report. Can anybody out there show me a page number for these figures?
One among a handful of permanent foreign correspondents in Kazakhstan, Ilan Greenberg comments on the sudden influx of gaunt, Fleet Street hacks to the homeland of Borat;
The other day, stumbling into my favorite Almaty coffee shop, I noticed that several of the seats where Almaty's chattering classes usually perch with their laptops and their lattes were instead occupied by pale Englishmen. One was an English documentary maker who had rushed back from a project on the Aral Sea to film a Borat assignment for Britain's Channel 4. He told me he'd just run into a correspondent for London's Independent. I then took a seat next to a British freelance TV journalist named Inigo Gilmore, who told me he was visiting Almaty to shoot a Borat report for CNN. "My translator said there are 140 ethnicities in Kazakhstan and not one looks like Borat, but I found someone really lovely," Gilmore said defiantly. During a holiday celebration in Almaty's main square, Gilmore reported, he had spotted a man with a moustache, on a horse no less. The man quipped on camera that he treated his horse better than his wife. But then, unfortunately, the man qualified his comment: His wife had been dead for 10 years.
This is probably the funniest and sharpest holiday-in-hell dispatch I've read since P.J. O'Rourke took up God and put down coke. Alas, not all the necessary punch-holes we come to expect from Scoop-inflected journalism have been perforated here. No telegraphese complaints from the home office about a missing first-person element: "Mail man shot. Why you un-shot?" No falsely rumored reports of Western fatalities: "American nurse unupblown." Or the doorway blackened by the forlorn and crumpled figures, cigarettes as loosely held as their pens, ready at the first hint of a grieving widow's distraction to swipe the fallen soldier's photograph from the mantle. Or the feverishly-rendered copy about the strafed child lying spread-eagled in the dirt road, her corpse as limp as a ragdoll. Still, we get this:
Lemanski was sure he could locate Borat in some Kazakh place or in some Kazakh person. At a local restaurant, I recommended we order the marinated skewered meat called "shashlyk." "Lovely," Lemanski pronounced his meal when served. "Is this dog, then?" The waiter, taken by surprise, vigorously shook his head. "Could this come in dog?" Lemanski asked hopefully. The waiter looked apoplectic.
As much as I love disagreeing with my esteemed co-editor, I have to say that John Kerry is the victim of his own nightmare of incoherence, which has been shamelessly -- or perhaps just idiotically -- exploited by a desperate RNC looking to save as many House and Senate seats as possible. Here is the YouTube video of Kerry's now-infamous crack about a low GPA resulting in "getting stuck in Iraq."
Any student of stand-up -- or better say, any obituarist of the agonizing on-stage death of a stand-up -- can attest that this is dead-on-arrival humor delivered by a walking corpse of earnestness. What Kerry was getting at was that poor academic performance is as synonymous with Bush as is a failed military intervention in Iraq. It came out as: our troops are dumb. This has led to no end of trouble for the junior -- yes, can you believe it, still junior -- senator from Massachusetts, the culmination of which seems to be the front page of the New York Post today.
Let's hope this puts to rest all further attempts at humor at the expense of the president's IQ (it's trite and not funny), and also the old canard that having once donned a uniform makes you immune to criticism from those who do now. Kerry needn't have apologized; he just should have explained himself and left it at that. Instead, he's handed a free gift to the GOP at a time when they could use a dose of political reality in the form of lost real estate in Congress.
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.}
It is true that the only ones spouting things like "Oedipal complex," "castration anxiety," and "penis envy" in psychiatrists' offices today are the patients. What Freud giveth, Jung taketh away. The hip new subfield now is cognitive behavioral therapy, where repeating the same set of actions over and over again actually changes brain chemistry and thus, one's whole disposition.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that the author of this silly, nostril-wrinkled non-defense of Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran is also a contributor to The Nation. The left has long forfeited its belief that not only is the pen mightier than the sword, but it's worth wielding for its own sake.
The Highlander History Boy 
Well, the day job has begun to pay off: Jewcy's first dialogue between Sam Harris and Dennis Prager - built around the question, "Why Are Atheists So Angry?", which was contrived by your humble servant - has become a mega-sensation on the Internet. 
too. It's a bit desultory and disorganized -- third wave feminism's "smoke 'em if you got 'em" prescription for future progress, as Emily Nussbaum 
Thanksgiving is English movie week at Snarksmith, mainly out of gratitude to my Bristol-born stepmother who carries on the special relationship every year by cooking a feast in honor of an event that began her country's loss of imperial privilege. That's surely one kind of good sportsmanship, though this post is about another.
Forgive that the following clause might actually be the opener for a personal ad, but I used to play a game with my sister. We'd read the Village Voice and try to spot the funniest call for romantic/sexual attention. Every configuration and fetish was assiduously explored, but the most points went to punch and pungency of delivery.
How's that for Rupe and Judith's next publishing venture: a play-by-play "dramatic envisioning" of the Sonny Corleone-like assassination of Pierre Gemayel as carried out by Alawite goons? Such a volume might not fly off the shelves, but now that James Baker and Robert Gates are the twin toasts of Washington "realism," what are the chances a page-turner of international true crime will be produced by the United Nations? (Don't hear much about Rafiq Hariri since the brilliant German lawyer Detlev Mehlis was removed from the case.) 
I ABSOLUTELY HATE ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING we are about to go through.
Finally, finally, finally! Peaceniks wake up to Rovian style agitprop. Meet Global Orgasm, a net-powered effort to get us all to climax at the same time (because two simultaneously is a breeze) on the Winter Solstice, thereby putting an end to war. Not just the one in Iraq, but all the bloody fuckers.
I've been waiting patiently for someone to say that never has socialism had such an attractive human face. That would surely not be the worst sweetly condescending remark 
Milton Friedman, who died last night at age 94, today seems like such a always-was sage of economics and politics that it's hard for us to appreciate how deeply hated he and his fellows at the University of Chicago were in their heyday. Their vision of governance based upon individual choice and market-driven policies today seem like common sense, but at the time were radical.
[Note: In honor of Jewcy's debut, I'm cross-posting between the Daily Shvitz and Snarksmith. Hey, we're all mishpucha.]
I can no longer tell if Thomas Friedman is the 21st century's Confucius, Marx or Sun Myung Moon. All that was left out of this New York Observer dispatch from China was a disquisition on the four modes of nano alienation and how "hurry-up time" is fast approaching for McDonald's:
For the curious. There ought to have been Bollinger corks popping on West 54th St. tonight, but we're all exhausted and we have a big day ahead of us tomorrow. 
"To keep one creed's a task grown quite Herculean / Is it not so, my Tory ultra-Julian?"
A critic who can suck like this need never dine alone:
One wants to avoid the anecdotal when arguing for or against the death penalty. Even the fully justified claim that innocent men, deprived of the benefit of DNA tests, are put to death doesn't quite cinch the case for abolishing capital punishment. Either one is opposted to state executions on principle, or one is not. "Thinking with the blood" is how Kipling described human rationalism tainted by sanguinary impulses, and Kipling knew whereof he spoke. People who oppose wars because they hear of horrific tales of fallen soldiers would do well to study the Bard of Empire: He lost his only son Jack in the First World War, a tragedy that only redoubled his conviction that the "Hun" was a blight worth eliminating from the civilized world. If you'll excuse the blog-friendly free association, this is the same poet who wrote "
Dick Cheney might, at any moment, turn the gun on an American eagle. Donald Rumsfeld, feeling the throb of professional defeat in his twilight years, might do something unseemly like bite the head off a baby seal. In the midst of such dire ends for the two dark knights of the Bush Cabinet, I feel the need to defend both men on one important and too-easily-forgotten point of principle. When they were both in the Ford Cabinet, and doing their best to unhorse Henry Kissinger, they once found themselves on the side of humanitarianism. The White House had invited Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to come pay a visit as the brave and brilliant Soviet dissident he was. Then realpolitik entered into things. Kissinger advised Ford not to vex Brezhnev. Invitation recalled. It was Cheney and Rumsfeld who made a stink about how this was a cowardly betrayal of the very freedom the United States had been calling for on the other side of the Iron Curtain since the days of Harry Truman.
I know there are a handful of gentile readers of this blog (one of whom happens to be its co-editor) and so I feel obliged to let those of you outside the tribe in on a little secret. We have a saying we like to deploy whenever an internal skirmish threatens to make us appear "colorful" in public, perhaps even lead us to talk with our hands below West 75th Street. The saying is: "Not in front of the goyim."
My friend Joseph Braude, author of 
I had thought the instant I heard of Donald Rumsfeld's much-deserved and long overdue resignation that the president would pick the next Defense Secretary from his father's murky reservoir of foreign policy "realists." This didn't take a lot of effort because a) George Bush has a fondness for learning that the best cure for a mistake is to amplify it, and b) With a mid-term election largely replicating 1986, and Nicaragua doing the same, today's a hinge moment for a little bit of history repeating.
One among a handful of permanent foreign correspondents in Kazakhstan, Ilan Greenberg 
