Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

--W.H. Auden, "Epitaph on a Tyrant"

You can boil an egg in the time it'll take some commentators to say that nothing has changed today, Iraq is just as bad as it's ever been, this is another empty gesture along the lines of "Mission: Accomplished." Better yet: a distraction from the hunt for George W. Bush.

I was against the execution of Saddam Hussein because I'm against capital punishment, tout court, and I don't think you can split a difference when it comes to principle. The worst aspect of today's pre-dawn hanging is that Saddam now won't be able to answer for his most grievous crimes: the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds, the helicopter-gunship slaughter of Kurds and Shia after an abortive uprising at the close of the first Gulf War, which was encouraged and then abandoned by the United States.

Iraq's first democratically elected president, a brave and noble Kurd with a Marxist background, also opposed executing the tyrant who, more than anyone else, made life hell for the largest stateless people in the Middle East. (Jalal Talabani's fortitude on this point is of a notably higher order than Michael Dukakis was ever asked to contemplate on the stump, and it's always worthwhile to see people's moral compass spin wildly to consider that those ungovernable, pre-democratic Iraqis are actually more civilized than a majority of Americans.)

However, there's no denying the sense of relief felt by Iraqis who know that this monster is never coming back. In the weeks to follow there will be an interminable snuff gallery on display on Arab television and in the press to make people sure of the fact. A common fear in the country, on par with a cultural superstition, was that the coalition would restore Saddam to power if the postwar situation deterioriated, which makes you wonder just how bad things would have had to have got to mitigate that fear had a death sentence not been decreed.

Now would be an excellent time to revisit everything from Kanan Makiya's Republic of Fear to Mahdi Obeidi's The Bomb in My Garden to the Volcker Commission's findings on the oil-for-food racket. It's a minor shame there hasn't been more literature produced on this 35-year nightmare. Now, perhaps, the Iraqi Solzhenitsyns and Miloszes and Sahkarovs will begin to emerge...

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

This is the most generous tribute an atheist ever paid to religion, or more specifically, to the rites and reliquaries of religion:

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Philip Larkin (the above strophe comes from his poem "Church Going") didn't need the "God delusion" to appreciate what was awesome and ineffable about ancient institutions. Other-wordly preoccupations of man have been around so long because there's something in man that causes them to be. Anyone who's ever used an ethereal metaphor to enhance language, who hasn't got ice water in his veins, knows that to step into a church or mosque or synagogue is to feel the weight of ages and thus something inextinguishable about human nature. This is a humbling experience regardless of whether or not you believe the attendant hocus-pocus of those robed compulsions.

Venerating the persistence of religious myth -- if not quite the myth itself -- is what made George Orwell abhor the communists' destruction of cathedrals in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. I can't quite remember if Orwell used the word "blasphemy" to describe these cretinous assaults on centuries-old art and architecture, but his reaction was more than visceral, it was akin to pious offense. I'd also wager that his opposition to totalitarianism was greatly aided by witnessing how blithely the agents of historical "progress" could erase ruins of the past to make way for the monuments of the future.

Being an atheist doesn't mean that you must submit, out of some hollow sense of decorum, to religious hubris or to what you find logically or intellectually bankrupt in a collection of religious tenets. "Have a little respect for tradition" from the mouth of a true believer can often mean "Keep yours shut because you insult me if you take issue with my idea of the cosmos" -- which is as preemptive and bullying as the worst "militant" or angry atheist will ever get.

Richard Dawkins has always struck me as an unfortunate megalomaniac, or self-appointed messiah, working to advance a necessary cause. As a polemicist, he's more than entitled argue that faith is a symptom of weak-mindedness and that in the secular vs. religious culture war, you're either with us or you're a fucking idiot. But he should know that this is hardly the way to enlist more numbers into the ranks of radical disbelief, which requires coaxing the doubtful into a state of pure skepticism.

But I have to wonder about a Times of London op-ed that takes on Dawkins for his immodesty when that op-ed has the modest byline of "God." Talk about metaphysician, heal thyself.

Whoever wrote the piece trots out all the prosaic defenses of religion and points, as if for the first time, to all the same elisions in the atheist's brief. At least one elision suffers from a severe category problem.

Hey now, did you know Josef Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot were nun-killers and an icon-smashers when they weren't busy liquidating millions of people? Ipso facto, the forces of godlessness murder at least as readily as the backers of the Almighty. Not quite. The materialism of communism placed more of an emphasis on the public ownership of the means of production than it did on the non-existence of the soul. What led to the shocking statistics of the gulag or the killing fields was actually the one thing Marxism had little time for: the role of the individual in history, in this case, the pathological dictator. Atheism, when invoked as a sidecar conviction of communism, is barely a correlation, and very definitely not a cause of that ideology's record of mayhem and mischief.

Dawkins argues that religion is the cause of violence and misery because those very things are justified in canonical religious texts. Keep in mind that Stalinism was inextricable from what Boris Pasternak termed the "reign of the big lie" (What gulag? Those shot prisoners were confessed enemies of the people, etc.) You won't find a nod to mass murder or genocide in any Soviet proclamation, but it's right there in the Old Testament, isn't it? So aren't those who claim to derive their morality from bronze age tracts either condoning what God gets up to in them, or trying to wish such activities away with fanciful PR? (Sorry, the nasty bits didn't happen. But the pleasant ones -- you're going to hell if you question those.)

Dawkins doesn't say you have to believe in the divine to murder millions or incite wars. You just have to be drunk on the certainty that you're serving a higher, infallible master who's established a predetermined end to human affairs, whether that master is God or History or dialectical materialism. All are contagions of Captive Mind Syndrome, yet only one has proven ineradicable and still eats up hours of analysis time in the lab. Explaining why religion endures is Dawkins' greatest, glibbest failure as an atheist. William James, Sigmund Freud, and now James Wood do the job infinitely better.

Although, "God" could use a little forensic coaching himself:

Biblical creationists believe that the Book of Genesis is a source of factual information about the origins of the world. They teach that I literally created all things in a series of instantaneous acts over six days some 5,000 years ago. Most sensible believers in the book subscribe without demur to Darwin’s theory of evolution while reading Genesis in the light of the mystery so well articulated by Martin Rees — “Why is there something rather than nothing?” And now, I am bound before I finish to comment on what you call the God Hypothesis. You define God as “a superhuman, supernatural intelligence which deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us”. This is typical of militant atheists who constantly define me purely in terms of the criteria of science alone, rather than in terms of a quest for spiritual contact that becomes a reciprocal loving relationship between creature and creator.

"Sensible" believers in the book, in other words, believe what they want to in their own improvised way, which means they're either apostates in denial, or dogmatists tricked out in the more fashionable wardrobe of reason. Since science hasn't got everything all squared away (and never will), sensible believers can still retain some kernel of piety while labeling the sillier portions of the Bible not as "revealed" truth but as allegorical lesson plans for the good life. How is morally instructive, and wholly man-made, secular literature any different to the "sensible" reader? Would we trust anyone who believed in the reality of a protagonist, or the infallibility of the author, or got so bent out of shape when it was suggested that neither exist?

The most convenient term to describe God is one that has relevance to both the pro-Dawkins and anti-Dawkins crowds because it has both a biological and mythopoetic meaning: imago. On the one hand, it's a fully formed, winged insect, a testament to the ancestor's tale of evolutionary trial-and-error; on the other, it's an idealized conception of another person or oneself. Nature or imagination. Does religious belief enter into it, or can either scenario work without that assumption?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

"Sickle-cell Armenia" was almost Monty Pythonish, but I have to wonder why "work ethnic" never caught on as a sober sociological term. (The Jamaican paterfamilias with six jobs; the Korean bodega owner who never closes shop, etc.)

Gerald Ford was certainly a top sprinter for dimmest chief executive ever in a race that would probably require a photo-finish to determine. This was the man who famously said "there is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe" and "Poland is not dominated by the Soviet Union," when only months before he'd made the United States signatory to the Helsinki Accords, the civil rights portion of which was designed to combat Soviet hegemony in the Warsaw Pact nations (including Poland). This was the man who thought individual accountability a paramount virtue but then pardoned a disgraced and criminal ex-president, rationalizing the act as the beginning of a collective "healing process." This was the man who repeatedly fell into history like a stagehand leaning against the scenery once an act. This was the man who, heeding the advice of his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, disinvited Alexander Solzhenitsyn as a guest to the White House out of fear of offending Leonid Brezhnev. (In the Ford administration, the two outspoken objectors to this cynical and cowardly rescission of state welcome were Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney). This was the man who thought Ronald Reagan was unelectable in 1980. This was the man who considered the offer of a second vice presidency in that same year, unless it amounted to an offer of a co-presidency, an insult to his stature and experience when he'd not been elected to either office before. This was a man who thought golf was a stimulating pastime. This was a man who thought Anwar Sadat was a back injury incurred from too strenuous a performance of said pastime. (Okay, I made that last one up.)

You can barely read this overlong and repetitive Times obituary without pitying the poor sod who had to cobble it together. There should be a Pultizer for obit writers taxed with sounding mournful when sounding truthful would be fall-down silly.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:10 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

"What time is it, Dr. Kissinger?"

"Stephen: it is time to rock."

Comedy Central | The Colbert Report

Posted by Nic Duquette at 9:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

What you won't find mentioned in the mainstream press coverage of David Irving's release is that this dark and univiting figure has tussled with actual Holocaust deniers. I say "actual" because, if you absorb some of the argot of the paranoid subfield of what I suppose should be called Shoah epistemology, you find that people of Irving's type fall into two categories: "Deniers" and "revisionists." Deniers believe that Hitler never endeavored to create a Judenrein (Jew-free) Europe, let alone came quite close to actually achieving it. Revisionists counter that, well, the Nazis have been given a raw deal this past half century but did indeed engage in some summary executions of Jews. No gas chambers were used, though, and most of the deaths were caused by camp epidemics, condemning the Third Reich to, at worst, the crime of malignant neglect (the initial crime of corralling an entire ethnic population into fenced-off areas is typically elided in these discussions).

Irving is a revisionist. He's a liar and a slippery customer on a number of questions, mostly pertaining to his own rhetoric about his continuing legal troubles (which began with Deborah Lipstadt). But he has provided evidence against his own pro-Nazi "side." For instance, his scholarship has revealed that Joseph Goebbels suborned the homegrown Fascist movement in Great Britain led by Oswald Mosley, putting paid to a small but significant lie propagated for decades by the British right that Mosley's cheques were not signed in Berlin. Irving also comes right out and grants that the SS killed thousands of Eastern European Jews in an "experimental" gas chamber in the Polish town of Chelmo, demonstrating that the intention of genocide was never far from the Fuhrer's mind. (In a contradictory vein, Irving's argued that Hitler personally never knew about Kristallnacht.)

However, in perhaps the most interesting twist of this weird tale, Irving's visibly tusseled with full-blown Holocaust deniers like the Frenchman Robert Faurisson, lately of the Ahmadinejad-sponsored meeting of the minds in Tehran. That Iranian Jew-haters have taken up Irving's free speech martyrdom is only slightly deserving, then, of being termed ironic.

For what it's worth, I think it's a scandal that Irving's books have been unavailable in this country for mass purchase except through recondite and inconvenient channels. You can easily walk into any Barnes & Noble and pull Mein Kampf off the shelf. And Manhattan boasts a handful of "radical" bookshops that sell everything from the farcically doctored Soviet encyclopedias (from whose successive editions more and more Old Bolsheviks were wiped clean from history) to Stalin's writings on nationality. There's more legitimacy in what Irving has printed on the German military campaigns of World War II than in much of the more morally comforting scholarship on the same subject.

It's revealing just how unsure our culture is of its own rush to censorship. The editor of St. Martin's Press, which was set to distribute Irving's 1996 biography of Goebbels, once described to Christopher Hitchens the firm's zero-hour cancellation of the project as "Profiles in Prudence." (Irving eventually self-published the book, a decision that has had him strapped for cash and probably in no better shape for that unenviable defense counsel's bill from Austria.)

Locking people up for nasty opinions has a way of becoming a form of self-punishment. Irving's release coincides with a news cycle in which David Duke and a gaggle of pea-brained anti-Semites have been given too much ink on their second thoughts about not-so-recent tragic events. Perfect. They'll think their cause has had an effect on international capitulation to Jewish sensitivity.

What kind of "message" would have been sent had Irving been allowed to continue his eccentric and marginal work unmolested?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

(The other- or non-religion gift-exchange ritual you happen to celebrate does too.)

Slate runs an article by Joel Waldfogel, a Wharton professor today explaining why ritualistic gift exchange is, from an economic perspective, a value-destroying event. I started to write a Snarksmith post explaining this the other day, but didn't get to it. I was too busy with Christmas shopping. As it turns out, somebody is already doing research on it anyway -- so I'm beaten to the punch on the idea at the academic, and popular, publishing levels. Damn.

Under the assumption that people are pretty rational and do what they want, it's hard to think of a case where they'd want something for themselves more than the cash required to buy it, yet not have it yet. Almost by definition, then, any gift you buy for somebody will be worth less than or equal to the cash paid for it, and whatever they get for you will be worth less to you than its equivalent cash. Therefore, the typical exchange of gifts between people will leave them both worse off than before, or at least, no better. Waldfogel's survey data supports this.

One exception he notes is that gift certificates are valued by recipients at their face value. But I can't help that think that this is a quirk of the survey data -- if someone asks you what a $25 certificate is worth, of course you would say $25. But a gift certificate is always worth less than the equivalent amount of cash, because the set of goods it can be applied to is always a subset of the goods cash can buy. Cash is a gift certificate that's good anywhere.

As far as I can tell, there's only a limited number of ways gift exchange can make both parties better off, on net:

Asymmetrical budgets. When one party is much, much poorer than the other, the wealthy party can buy the poorer party a good which the poorer party would purchase but simply can't. This is the case when children are given gifts by parents. Children may value, say, a Wii far more than the almost unobtainable amount of money necessary to buy one. The increase in their welfare therefore swamps the loss to their parents.

Limited Information. It may be that a good exists which a giver knows his recipient would like more than the cash cost, but which the recipient doesn't know about. In that case, the recipient is happier than with the money, since if he knew the good existed, he would have bought it. With the availability of the Internet, this is an increasingly difficult game to play.

Irrational Behavior. Not everybody makes choices in their own best interest. Most people I know refuse to give money to panhandlers, since they'll most likely be spending it on the vodka in the plastic jug. Last year I hit on the idea of giving away McDonalds' gift certificates, which constrain the recipient's spending to the sort of high-calorie food that will keep them warm (instead of warm-feeling) through the cold weather. I have no idea whether the panhandlers like this, or are merely polite, but I feel smart for having thought of it. And the warm glow of undeserved self-esteem is the greatest Christmas gift of all.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 1:47 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Andre Glucksmann remembers his friend in the New Republic:

Did Anna Politkovskaya die for nothing? She rang the alarm for the democratic world to hear. But Western Europe's political rainmakers have ungratefully thrown their support to Vladimir Vladimirovitch. This former officer the KGB dresses himself in the finery of a "pure democrat" before Gerhard Schröder (the former chancellor of Germany and the new employee of Gazprom), who pledges his undying friendship along with his cash. As for the president of France, he betrays not a single regret about pinning the Republic's highest honor on Putin's chest. Not one of these two, not one of their peers, ever buried his nose in Anna's writing: They were scared they would discover the pestilent truths for which she paid with her life.

You'd have to committ to early retirement to devote yourself to uncovering the stupidest comment ever made by George Bush. But somewhere near the top of the list would be his assurance that he once glimpsed Vladimir Putin's "soul" and that this meant Russia was with the United States in the defense of democracy and civilization. We know what the Kremlin line is on Islamism (and Islam). But now the old roost of Stalin and Brezhnev specializes in its own species of what Trotsky correctly pegged as National Socialism. (The Old Man was talking of the regnant ideology in Moscow in the thirties, not of Hitler.) It breast-beats "great Russian chauvinism;" it expropriates national resources without regard for national economy let alone any highblown notion of the "people;" it controls the media; it outlaws all forms of dissent; and -- in a quaint throwback to tsardom -- it truckles to the ancient superstitions of the Orthodox clergy.

So much for the End of History. It didn't even make a pit-stop.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:04 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Democratiya, Britain's pre-eminent social democratic literary journal, complicates the biography of the man everyone now associates with Jewish fascism:

While in Italy, Jabotinsky studied under Antonio Labriola, the pre-eminent Italian intellectual and Marxist, and the liberal economist Benedetto Croce. But perhaps the greatest influence was exerted by the anti-materialist syndicalist and founder of modern criminology, Enrico Ferri. From Labriola came Jabotinsky’s notion that individual will and the collective efforts of human beings determined the extent to which a society progresses. Croce fostered Jabotinsky’s preference for liberal over state-controlled economies as well as his support for liberal democracy. Like Labriola, Ferri insisted that revolution could be sparked and its success determined by the ‘will and enthusiasm of the people, not on materialistic parameters’ (p. 28). Yet, as a social scientist, Ferri attempted to explain human history with a scientific approach based on natural laws not metaphysics. For Ferri, modern science ‘starts from the magnificent synthetic conception of monism, that is to say, of a single substance underlying all phenomena—matter and force being recognized as inseparable and indestructible, continuously evolving in a succession of forms—forms relative to their respective times and places’ (p. 43)

Someone should really write a monograph on the strange, sinuous history of Italian socialism, particularly how it has influenced countless offshoot (and contradictory) movements in other parts of the world. Mussolini's tutor in Marxism was a woman named Angelica Balabanoff, later a secretary of the Comintern under Lenin, still later a valiant opponent of Fascism and Communism. "Crocism," named for the same Benedetto cited above, was the most liberal form of cultural Stalinism to emerge in Europe after World War II: it was to Italian art, literature and cinema what Togliattism was to party politics.

Also of interest in this review:

Intriguingly, Kaplan notes how the Revisionists found inspiration in the Black cultural renaissance occurring in the United States in the 1920s—in particular among Black poets—as a search for Black authenticity and racial consciousness through a rejection of the dominant (white) Western culture (p. 120). Jabotinsky admired another source of Black creativity and culture, jazz, ‘which he considered the true expression of the American pioneering spirit’ (p. 121). Yet while advocating the widespread flourishing of the Hebrew language and the development of Hebrew culture, his message to young Jews was expressed most clearly in his article ‘Affen Prippacheck, the New A B C’ (1933). He wrote, ‘For the generation growing up now and upon whose shoulders responsibility for the greatest turning point in our history will apparently be placed, the A B C has a very simple sound: young people—learn to shoot.’

Makes you wonder about the anti-Semitism of the Nation of Islam, many of whose latterday members started out as secular Black Panthers in the 60's.

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

Some over-the-hill novelist in Britain called John Berger is demanding a "cultural boycott" of Israel, and using the Guardian's Comment is free blog to do it. Now, if cultural boycott sounds as mushy and indistinct to you as "consciousness raising," you might be wondering what, exactly, its methods of application are. Berger:

For instance: an important mainstream Israeli publisher today is asking to publish three of my books. I intend to apply the boycott with an explanation. There exist, however, a few small, marginal Israeli publishers who expressly work to encourage exchanges and bridges between Arabs and Israelis, and if one of them should ask to publish something of mine, I would unhesitatingly agree and furthermore waive aside any question of author's royalties. I don't ask other writers supporting the boycott to come necessarily to exactly the same conclusion. I simply offer an example.

Interesting. A few paragraphs before, Berger explains that denying "state institutions" is the way to abjure Israeli hegemony in Palestine. Any guesses as to whether that mainstream publisher is owned by the government? (Actually, there's a nice chance of it given the Israeli penchant for unkosher pork in public spending; who reads John Berger in Jerusalem?)

If "boycotting" a private organization in a country whose policies you object to sounds vaguely familiar and more than vaguely sinister it might be because the same rationale is trotted out by native nutters like Ward Churchill, who defended the immolation of 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001 because they all paid taxes to the U.S. government and were therefore complicit in that government's crimes. Got that? Now add Jews, stir vigorously.

As Harry's Place points out, Berger stupidly misses the irony in his own hastily-adorned philo-Semitic flak jacket (mustn't let anyone think anti-Israel means anti-Jew after all):

Mr. Berger's petition states:

It is now time for others to join the campaign – as Primo Levi asked: If not now, when?

Actually that question was first asked by Hillel in the Pirkei Avot:

If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And when I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?

Primo Levi used the phrase for the title of his novel about Jewish partisan fighters in World War II. It's a refrain from the suspiciously Zionist song sung by the partisans in the story:

Do you recognize us? We're the sheep of the ghetto,
Shorn for a thousand years, resigned to outrage.
We are the tailors, the scribes and the cantors,
Withered in the shadow of the cross.
Now we have learned the paths of the forest,
We have learned to shoot, and we aim straight.
If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?
If not this way, how? And if not now, when?

Our brothers have gone to heaven
Through the chimneys of Sobibor and Treblinka,
They have dug themselves a grave in the air.
Only we few have survived
For the honor of our submerged people,
For revenge and to bear witness.
If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?
If not this way, how? And if not now, when?

We are the sons of David, the hardheaded sons of Masada.
Each of us carries in his pocket the stone
That shattered the forehead of Goliath.
Brothers, away from this Europe of graves:
Let us climb together towards the land
Where we will be men among men.
If I'm not for myself, who will be for me?
If not this way, how? And if not now, when?

Can you guess which land the song refers to?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:50 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I don't know what to call it -- high on long-deferred success? -- but Kos has begun to fantasize about knocking off moderate Democrat Ellen Tauscher in a primary challenge from a netroots true believer. And he's seeing what he wants to see, not what millions of other men, er, notice. In a web site purge, Tauscher eliminated photos of herself with Bush and other Republicans, "we are now seeing that Tauscher is also a coward, scrubbing pictures of Lieberman from her site in fear they'll be used against her." That's one plausible explanation, I guess, but if you were a female public figure, why would YOU take this photo down?

Lieberman makes a third, of course. But he's unexcitable, unexciting, and likes it that way.

Posted by Nic Duquette at 12:04 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I'd like to host my own New York-based conference this week: "Did Christmas Ever Happen?" You wouldn't know it from the headlines this December. Let's see now: Security Wall Beats Carter. Mahmoud's Counterfactual History of World War II. Prager Says No To Koranic Oath-Taking for Muslim Rep.

In case you'd missed the simmer soup our old friend Dennis Prager has found himself in, he recently said that Keith Ellison, the Muslim Congressman-elect from Minnesota, shouldn't be allowed to swear on the Koran when he takes office -- he should be made to so on the Good Book, like all Judeo-Christian pols.

If this sounds like bigotry plain and simple it's because it is. Ed Koch has responded publicly and in tones a little more plangent than "How'm I doin'?"

In a telephone interview yesterday, Koch said, "I believe that the great mission of the members of the [U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council] commission is to spread the word you may not engage in bigotry directed on the basis of religion or on the basis of sexual orientation or on the basis of political disagreement. For Dennis Prager to take the position on Mr. Ellison not using the Bible is wrong. That's the mission of we who are on the board and his statements are 180 degrees from that mission statement."

And to think, Tehran can't say no to anybody who wants in on their Holocaust-themed minyan.

Koch and Prager are to have a point-counterpoint pair of interviews published in tomorrow's Forward, but even the above-cited Washington Post piece misses the real story.

What sets Ellison's career apart from most representatives is not that he worships Allah (no greater offense that going on bended knee before Hashem) but that he was once aligned with the Nation of Islam and lied about how long ago the alignment ended.

As Scott W. Johnson of the conservative blog PowerLine demonstrated in the Weekly Standard, Ellison, upon becoming a candidate for public office in 1998, chose to fudge his level of involvement with the notoriously thuggish group, going so far as to assure local Minnesota Jewish leaders that he is not any longer, and only briefly ever was, a follower of its great Hebraiotroph-in-Chief Louis Farakhan. I'm only slightly exaggerating. Ellison has in the past defended Farakhan against charges of Jew-hatred, and he did so well after the point at which he insists the scales had fallen from his eyes about the good minister's true beliefs. Here is Johnson:

Ellison was born Catholic in Detroit. He states that he converted to Islam as an undergraduate at Wayne State University. As a third-year student at the University of Minnesota Law School in 1989-90, he wrote two columns for the Minnesota Daily under the name "Keith Hakim." In the first, Ellison refers to "Minister Louis Farrakhan," defends Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad, and speaks in the voice of a Nation of Islam advocate. In the second, "Hakim" demands reparations for slavery and throws in a demand for an optional separate homeland for American blacks. In February 1990, Ellison participated in sponsoring Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) to speak at the law school on the subject "Zionism: Imperialism, White Supremacy or Both?" Jewish law students met personally with Ellison and appealed to him not to sponsor the speech at the law school; he rejected their appeal, and, as anticipated, Ture gave a notoriously anti-Semitic speech.

[...]

Ellison first emerged as a candidate for public office in 1998, when he ran for the DFL nomination for state representative as "Keith Ellison-Muhammad." In a contemporaneous article on his candidacy in the Insight News, Ellison is reported still defending Louis Farrakhan:

Anticipating possible criticism for his NOI affiliation, Ellison-Muhammad says he is aware that not everyone appreciates what the Nation does and feels there is a propaganda war being launched against its leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan.

Ellison says now that he broke with the Nation of Islam when "it became clear to me that their message of empowerment intertwined with more negative messages." However, Ellison himself was the purveyor of the Nation of Islam's noxious party line in his every public utterance touching on related issues over the course of a decade.

None of which changes the fact that Prager's an idiot and a reactionary. But are we not handing a free gift of martyrdom to the first Islamic U.S. congressman by not taking a tougher approach in asking him about his past?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I will never understand why Jimmy Carter is deemed worth listening to on any subject whatsoever, let alone why he's considered a lightning rod for controversy. Former president of the United States? Will such an honorific be accorded equal weight when George W. Bush commands it? Nobel Peace Prize winner? Henry Kissinger tossed that award overboard like the Heart of the Ocean.

Now comes a New York Times piece explaining why Carter's new polemic Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid has got rabbis locked in prayer circles, pro-Israel critics declaiming against the most provocative word in that title, and Abe Foxman quivering with rage (because it's Thursday.)

Who cares? Letting Carter grow moralistic about the conduct of foreign states is like hearing Borat lecture someone about table manners. Camp David doesn't quite undo encouraging Saddam Hussein to invade Iran in 1979 the better to destabilize Khomeini's regime (and which act, you'll notice, is not frequently attributed to the Islamic Republic's present intransigence about bowing before U.S. pressure on denuclearization.) Carter followed up his roadmap for Mesopotamia by penning hot and sanctimonious op-eds in 2003 denouncing even the prospect of Saddam's forcible removal from power.

Only Garry Wills, who likes the face of his evangelical stupidity beatific and not smirking, thinks Carter has got the right idea for making the Middle East a more hospitable place.

The rest of us can and should treat this former White House occupant the way we treat most energetic retirees: with condescending silence.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Well, how else would you explain it? Always on the look-out for prominent probosci; always crediting the tribe with controlling the media and American foreign policy; willing to travel to the farthest sandy locale like Tehran (it's not so much the heat, it's the humidity that gets you) to be with his own kind... David Duke sounds like my grandmother.

Bienvenidos, macaca. Or whatever.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (5)

The following might have been lifted from any current edition of any political journal or op-ed piece, which models itself as an obituary on a recently imploded idealism:

This perspective on contemporary events is optimistic in the sense that it foresees continuing human progress; deterministic in the sense that it perceives events as fixed by processes over which persons and policies can have but little influence; moralistitic in the sense that it perceives history and U.S. policy as having moral ends; cosmopolitan in the sense that it attempts to view the world not from the perspective of American interests or intentions but from the perspective of the modernizing nation and the "end" of history. It identifies modernization with both revolution and morality, and U.S. policy with all three.

Two things immediately jump out here. The first is the allusion to the Hegelian construction "end of history;” the second is idea that the "long-view" of history has been the main coefficient in American geopolitical calculations and to the peril of short-term American interests. Where have we heard all this before? Or stating the matter in a slightly different way, from the lips of what dusky Minerva was such judgment about a heedless and messy foreign policy ever passed?

The answer is Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and the essay I quoted from is one of the inaugural texts of what everyone now calls "neoconservatism."

Latecomers to the game of second thoughts on wars of choice might be interested to learn that the title of Kirkpatrick’s essay, which originally appeared in Commentary in 1979 and brought this obscure political science professor to the attention of the Reagan White House, was "Dictatorships and Double Standards." That’s an arresting binary that might grace the cover of today’s Weekly Standard as an indictment of cynical realpolitik, the kind in evidence in the Iraq Study Group’s recommendation that the U.S. make nice with Syria and Iran, for instance.

However, in Kirkpatrick’s case, the realpolitik belonged to her, the double standards were good, and reactionary dictatorships were deemed beneficial as allies in the Western campaign against communist aggression.

Pause to appreciate the magnitude of this schema shift. Aren't neocons the monomaniacal Leninists, to use Francis Fukuyama’s hysterical comparison, engaged in plotting revolutions in the very regions of the world least amenable to change? Kirkpatrick was arguing that "moderate" autocrats like the Shah of Iran and President Somoza of Nicaragua were not only preferable to their vanquishers -- Khomeini and the Sandinistas, respectively -- but were really the only alternatives for promoting "stability" and earning influential American friends during the cold war. The best we could hope for was slow-motion regime changes in Latin America; fascism corroding from within and giving way to democratic reform, but not before the U.S. fully exploited that fascism to its own ends.

What's quite startling about Kirkpatrick’s formulation is that one now finds every improvisational leftist and antiwar critic agreeing, whether they realize it or not, with neoconservatism in its embryonic stage. This is the same Kissingerian thinking that colored Saddam Hussein as a containable tyrant.

There's quite a lot worth revisiting in Kirkpatrick's essay now that we’re said to be in the twilight of the ideology of which every obituary assigns her den mother. “Dictatorships and Double Standards” shows just how far neoconservatism has altered or mutated since its advent in the seventies. (The term itself was invented as a derisive epithet by Michael Harrington and, like suffragette or impressionist, was soon co-opted by its targets as a happy form of self-identification.)

Why is it that the best critics of the Bush Doctrine have been liberals like Paul Berman and the Englishman Oliver Kamm? Because they detect in modern neoconservatism – the un-Kirkpatrick strain of the movement – flickers of a hoary Marxist radicalism. The interventionist mettle exhibited by a handful of GOP policy wonks when it came to Bosnia, Kosovo and Iraq was more in keeping with the global purview of the anti-Stalinist left of the 1930’s than it was of the Reaganite right of the 1980’s.

The Kirkpatrick Doctrine would never have allowed for the election to the presidency of a democratic Iraq a Marxist Kurd whose party has active membership in the Socialist International. You might have actually heard Jeanne's ovaries of steel clanging together to consider how such wayward sons have unbottled Iraq’s Communist Party, which Saddam, as one of the “moderate” dictators, had all but annihilated.

The neocons we now most readily associate with the ideology – Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz – are precisely the ones who have been, so to speak, hoisted on their own soixante-petard; or as George Will and Fukuyama never tire of pointing out, the ones who are really closet leftists. They share more of an objective sympathy with Danny Cohn-Bendit and Joshka Fischer than they ever did with Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon – an astute observation made by Bernard Henri-Levy in American Vertigo.

The notion, or rumor, that Trotskyism plays a large part in the intellectual rhythms of neoconservatism is true up to a point, even though the theory of “permanent revolution” had absolutely nothing to do with regime change in Iraq. (The overthrow of Saddam was undertaken in the spirit of bourgeois nationalism, not socialist internationalism, and Iraq’s population was conspicuously lacking in a feudal peasant majority, the existence of which, in czarist Russia, was what compelled Trotsky and his mentor Parvus to articulate the theory in the first place.)

Still, this hasn’t stopped some critics from wondering about the radical past of those now whispering into the president’s ear. When Partisan Review folded in 2003, Sam Tanenhaus -- now the editor of the New York Times Book Review, but once the brilliant biographer of Whittaker Chambers, a credential that might have better informed his surfing of the vicissitudes of radical orthodoxy and conservative heterodoxy -- wrote in Slate of the "hilarious coincidence that the greatest of all Trotskyist publications should have announced its demise at the very moment that a belated species of Trotskyism has at last established itself in the White House."

It is true that Kirkpatrick used to employ in her office one or two influential "Shermanites," members of an obscure Trotskyist groupuscule that once included Irving Kristol and his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb – the paternal Ghost and, well, Gertrude to Bill's Hamlet. But what lasting impact these underlings had on their boss should be counted as negligible. Like Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Kirkpatrick was a prominent Democrat allied with the Republicans on taking a tough stance against the Soviet Union and not brooking any pathetic claims of moral equivalence between East and West. But that’s where her neoconservatism began and ended.

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"They don't mean what they say, they don't use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that's the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing's supposed to be about."

-- Kingsley Amis, Jake's Thing

Any guess to what that plural pronoun referred to?

Steady now, old boy. My colleague Izzy, who went absolutely Aztec-faced over Hitch's "Women Aren't Funny" thesis in this month's Vanity Fair, has just recently said that my enduring interest in, and exegesis of, Laura Kipnis signals what may be a "feminist awakening." I certainly hope so. Though perusing Installment Two of my favorite Slate dialogue has my false male consciousness leaking out all over the place again.

Ladies, correct me if I'm wrong, but there hasn't been a greater display of catty megalomania masquerading as cultural criticism than what Daphne Merkin has got up to so far this week. She chivvies poor Laura for no other reason than Laura is not, alas, Daphne Merkin. Here's a whole paragraph all about the latter phenomenon, in case you have no plan whatsoever to actually read The Female Thing:

For starters, I can't believe you were in the audience at that N.Y. Times panel, since I thought I saw only the faintest scattering of people out there in the mostly empty expanse of seats. The fact that the other three panelists all chose to dress like camera-happy CEOs on a hot Sunday in early June while I dressed in casual, wrinkled linens (my favorite look: The Devil Wears Flax) does not in itself, of course, make me either a contrarian or bratty. And in any case, I recognize only one of those adjectives as a legitimate description of my personal style. "Bratty" is certainly not how I wish to come across. What I think I was—and it undoubtedly showed, because I've never been good at hiding my reactions (although I've been working on becoming more inauthentic, per the recommendation of a close friend)—was impatient bordering on infuriated with Sheehy's flaccid pseudo-sociology, custom-designed Web sites, and general aura of well-accessorized bullshit.

She goes on to make the absurd claim that Kipnis couldn't possibly be parodying women's magazine prose because to do so would scupper the whole intent of having something to say -- never mind that a parody is, unavoidably, a statement about whatever it is you're parodying. Executed poorly, this literary trick can confuse the reader. So, for instance, I couldn't tell if Merkin was making herself the butt of her own joke when she wrote:

The Men—Mailer, Updike, & Roth Inc.—can natter away all they want about cunts and orgasms and the humiliations of desire, and no one takes that to be the sum of their parts.

Name me another sum for any of those writers. "Jew" would work if you removed Updike.

However, we get to the heart of the matter when it's disclosed:

As for your remarks about confessional writing, let me be honest in turn and say that I felt a wave of weariness come over me when I read your arguments about narcissism and self-styled bad girls, knowing even before I got to the end that they would lead inevitably ... sigh ... to yet another hauling up of my poor spanking piece.

Now it's personal. And boring.

I've learned nothing about women and far too much about Ms. Merkin.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Must be my lucky day. A feminist critic whose last name means "vagina wig" gets right to it in a Slate dialogue with my new pop heroine Laura Kipnis. Here's Daphne Merkin:

I like the way you tease out the flavor-of-the-month ideas that are taken as brilliant sociological insights rather than the most recent evolution of the cultural narratives we tell ourselves. (The notion of constructing narratives or stories out of our experience, the better to understand it, is one of your favorite conceits.) We need cultural critics like you, who pay close attention to low-brow appropriations as well as high-brow articulations, who recognize that ideological scripts can't leap over the "abyss between desire and intelligence" (although I'm not sure you really mean "intelligence" in this context so much as "rational thinking" or "the more evolved parts of our brain" or whatever it is that we place in opposition to our unmediated and resolutely unprogressive libidos), no matter how much we'd like to believe otherwise.

The problem of making cerebration intriguing to an elusive female audience who may prefer to watch Sex and the City reruns is one I'm all too familiar with as a commentator on books and culture for Elle, where I'm always worrying that I'll lose prospective readers to the more immediate gratifications of Jimmy Choo ads and Beyoncé interviews. But in being so intent on luring in the masses, you sell your thinking at too low a price of admission—if I may mix metaphors—with the result that you end up shoving some some of your curvier (or, if you prefer, knottier) qualifications into footnotes or passing over them in haste, so the reader won't notice the less glib references—to "compensatory" mechanisms, say, or to "category violations" (a concept I've always been fascinated by)—between the many allusions to vibrators and G spots. It is also to this end, I assume, that you insist on peppering your text with a Cosmo-like seasoning of italics and exclamation marks. (Do you know that Helen Gurley Brown once said that exclamation marks were the sexiest form of punctuation? Don't you just love it?!)

Kipnis, for her part, is less defensive than I'd be in having my reader-friendly prose sniffed at by someone who sounds as if she would rather hear terms like "sociologies of knowledge" and "queering the text" deployed in a book targeted at a mass female audience. However, as a man who makes it a point not to read women's magazines, even I hipped to Laura's game early on in Against Love (which is actually better than The Female Thing because it's more radical and risky):

In Against Love, given the subject (adultery), I tried riffing on the mode of the love letter: The writing was over-the-top and flirtatious, there were a lot of run-on sentences and excessive metaphors, a lot of playing around—you know, like adultery. I was trying to write to the cultural id, and I think people mostly understood that. In The Female Thing, I really thought it would be clear that I was parodying the style of women's magazines and girl culture—not because the publishers were hoping to land me on Oprah (though I'm sure they wouldn't have minded), but as an experiment in appropriation: refunctioning (in the Brecht sense) girly language and turning it on its head, into critique. OK, maybe it was a failed experiment, if that didn't come across. But it wasn't unserious. And the more obvious route—serving up anecdotes about my own life experiences, which I would proceed to explicate, thus enlightening my readers with hard-won lessons in progressive femalehood—this just didn't appeal to me. For one thing, isn't that a pretty tired-out idiom by now?

Marx was as satiric and playful at his best as he was sobering and trenchant. We would not still be reading him if he sounded like some of the gargantuan latterday bores claiming to uphold the materialist conception of history.

Kipnis argues that female "choice," inaugurated by first and second wave feminism, actually has the look and feel of female slavery all over again. The only thing that's changed since the two-option era of being a pregnant housewife or a secretarial spinster is that women themselves are now the wardens of their own psychic prisons. They want it all or don't know what they want, save to degrade one another through tyrannically high standards of body image, guilt about choosing family over career, etc. As Kipnis writes, once women asked men to talk about their feelings, we never shut about them; and even our magnanimous offers to do more around the house (or, say, college dorm) are met with cold resistance because we just don't do that more with sufficient degree of seriousness/efficacy. (Thus, in an especially illuminating chapter on "Dirt" in The Female Thing, Kipnis describes how women feel even more burdened by assuming both the role of domestic maid and breadwinner -- not because they have to but because they choose to.)

Kipnis can get too-clever-by-half: She tries to show how, paradoxically, the Dworken-MacKinnon school of repudiating sex as violent and oppressive to women is more of an obsession with the act than either Dworken or MacKinnon care to admit -- though admit this they do, almost by definition, since a forensic investigator can well be said to be obsessed with murder. (I also found it unseemly for Kipnis to write skeptically of Dworken's rape claim when she didn't even bother to bring up Juanita Broderick's accusation about jizzer-in-chief Bill Clinton.)

The Female Thing is also short on "thinking globally," not that this is a major failing in a book purportedly about the trappings of white, well-educated, middle-class women in America. But a little perspective might have helped where so many have found Kipnis diagnosing well but offering no viable cure for what ails the modern double-Xer. Reading this book alongside, say, Hirsi Ali's The Caged Virgin makes Kipnis seem frivolous or solipsistic. Also her own worst enemy since one surefire way to put an end to the bifurcated or muddled feminine identity in the West is to devote oneself to struggling for basic rights for women who are still treated as chattel in the third world. Am I being unfair? Not unless you think Cosmo really is a worthy distraction from The Economist.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:33 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One of the funniest Britcoms of the last decade was actually an Irishcom called Father Ted. It was banned in Ireland for its rather explicit Catholic sacrilege, but it was deliciously (and probably chauvinistically) eaten up by the English on BBC Whatever. Like all great comedies, its premise was gobsmackingly simple. Three priests live on an island -- Craggy Island, to be exact -- and get up to no good. One's the venal but well-meaning antihero Ted; one's the idiot manchild Dougal; one's the lascivious and senile old drunkard Jack, who says four things: Feck, drink, arse, girls. (There's also a tea-mad maid of the parish named Mrs. Doyle.) It may not sound hilarious on paper but it was on TV, and can now be all over again on DVD, which is how I first saw it, courtesy of my brother-in-law from Donegal.

If you find humor in illicit videotapes of bishops cavorting with their girlfriends and bastard sons on American beaches, or a camper getting tipped over by a hyperactive priest (played by Graham Norton) performing Riverdance -- then Father Ted's the show for you.

The actor who played Ted had a fatal heart attack at, I think, the rap party for the third and thus final season. Sad though that is, the show needed to end before it got stale.

Here's a clip.

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Poor John Betjeman. His life began with a German-sounding surname (it was Dutch), which did him no amount of good during an adolescence spent in an England's engulfed in its First World War against the "Hun." Nor did an enduring and altogether ridiculous obsession with a teddy bear named Archibald Ormsby-Gore, which not only recalled Sebastian Flyte's Aloysius in Brideshead Revisited but was likely the model for that stuffed tribute to arrested development. Charles McGrath sees a chummy parallel between Britain's most tele-friendly and "accessible" postwar (that's the second one) poet and its most hilariously nasty novelist:

Waugh and Betjeman were both middle-class, though Waugh’s father, a publisher, was more genteel than Betjeman’s, who had made his money selling something called the Tantalus — a drinks tray that could be locked up to prevent the servants from tippling and pilfering. After unpromising careers at prep school, both went to Oxford, where they slept with boys before gradually making the transition to women, and where they instinctively gravitated to the smart set that congregated around the legendary don Maurice Bowra — a group that included literary figures like Cyril Connolly, Henry Green, Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell — as well as the aristocratic Bryan Guinness and the Mitford sisters. Like Mary Lovell’s 2001 biography of the Mitfords, in fact, Wilson’s book is a reminder that British cultural life between the wars was almost claustrophobic in its smallness: everyone knew (and, in many cases, went to bed with) everyone else.

Philip Larkin wrote the best criticism of the poetry of "Betjers," who thought two very eccentric things for someone still stupidly yet inevitably thought of as a monument to something still stupidly yet inevitably thought of as "Englishness." They were 1) there is no such thing as a strict homosexual or a strict heterosexual, everyone's a bit of both; and 2) camp is the highest form of homage one can pay to the past.

Here is Betjeman's poem "Narcissus" about his boyhood love for a chap named Bobby. It takes as its symbolic pivot the eminent Victorian with whom Betjeman was also always obsessed:

My Mother wouldn't tell me why she hated
The things we did, and why they pained her so.
She said a fate far worse than death awaited
People who did the things we didn't know,
And then she said I was her precious child,
And once there was a man called Oscar Wilde.

It's true that A.N. Wilson, who wrote the requisite centennial biography, shoots out books like Ukrainian peasant women do babies, but he's got more troubling tendencies if McGrath came away from this "Life" with the unfortunate impression that Betjeman

had no deeper register, and when he tried for a more serious note, he frequently fell into mawkishness and doggerel. It didn’t help his writing at all when in 1972 he was appointed poet laureate.

As it happens, one such public occasion -- which admittedly took place before the laureateship -- evinced a register deep enough to include those gem-like flames of irony and pessimism. It was Prince Charles' investiture in 1968:

Then, sir, you said what shook me through
So that my courage almost fails:
"I want a poem out of you
On my Investiture in Wales."
Leaving, you slightly raised your hand--
"And that," you said, "is a command."
For years I wondered what to do
And now, at last, I've thought it better
To write a kind of rhyming letter.

Somehow I can't quite see Andrew Motion, who, as the current poet laureate, wrote the not-bad introduction to the Collected Poems, also just published, putting the matter like that. (Motion certainly didn't aim at anything so modest as a "kind of rhyming letter" for the occasion of Charles and Camilla's wedding.)

The rest of this "ballad" peters out, focusing mainly on the weather and environs, until we hear the man who would be king referred to as a "victim." Then we get this closing couplet:

You knelt a boy, you rose a man.
And thus your lonelier life began.

I won't end on such a trite note as to call that "Larkinesque" but... No, all right, I will. That's exactly what that is.

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Can you believe The Nation actually makes you pay for this stuff? Alexander Cockburn on why Darfur is a fashionable media crisis, whereas Israeli depredations in Gaza would cause yawns if anyone in the US were aware of such depredations in the first place:

Darfur is primarily a "feel good" subject for people here who want to agonize publicly about injustices in the world but who don't really want to do anything about them. After all, it's Arabs who are the perpetrators and there is ultimately little that people in this country can do to effect real change in the policy of the government in Khartoum.

Now, Gaza is an entirely different story. The American public as well as the US government have a great deal of control over what is happening there. It is Israel, America's prime ally in the Middle East, that is on a day-to-day basis, with America's full support, inflicting appalling brutalities on a civilian population. To report in any detail on what's going on in Gaza means accusing the United States of active complicity in terrible crimes wrought by Israel, as it methodically lays waste a society of 1.4 million Palestinians.

It's true. I feel great about wanting to end the genocide of 200,000 black Africans and the displacement of 2.5 million more. According to the outgoing U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland, Darfur's "free fall" now threatens to spill into Chad and Central African Republic and possibly lead to the starvation of the always-copasetic number of 6 million indigent refugees in total.

Cockburn's bait-and-switch essay about a bait-and-switch media culture is made even more pathetic by the fact that he then cites Ha'aretz for its "searing reports" about how cruel and inhumane Israel has been to the residents of Gaza. (He also argues that much of this information is inaccessible to American audiences, kept, as it is, in a strict state of purdah by Israel -- though apparently not so strict that his brother Patrick couldn't address the issue in the British newspaper The Independent, which is also quoted from in this piece.)

I don't know why the left makes such a virtue of its short attention span for global horror and misery. The rather facile answer Cockburn comes up with is that its comforting when the perps aren't U.S. or U.S.-backed forces but those shady A-rabs. Let's concede that a small (or not so small) segment of the American Jewish community, which has been screaming for intervention to stop the Darfur genocide for quite a while now, is acting out of bad faith, or at least mitigated good faith, because Khartoum is ruled by people closer in skin tone to Palestinians than, say, were Bosniacs when that same community demanded an end to their genocide on European soil. Does this mean that the behavior of the janjaweed is any more acceptable, or that Darfur any more ignorable a disaster? Why can't Cockburn entertain his suspicions without resorting to the sub-cretinous mode of "Sorry, nothing to be done in Africa. Now, directing your attention to the region where AIPAC takes an energetic interest..."

I think I prefer the feel-good activists of the New York Times to the feel-nothing shits of CounterPunch.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You'd be hard-pressed to find a poet less likely to engage in what the kiddies now call "historical relativism" than Robert Graves, he of I, Claudius fame. (Martin Amis, who knew Graves a little and even vacationed as a boy at the grand old man's house in Spain, said he was the Platonic ideal of what a poet should look, act and sound like. The anti-Larkin, in other words.)

However, whenever I read a story about the glorious "Western" victory over Persia at Marathon, or the not-so-ignominious Western defeat in the sequel at Thermopylae, I recall Graves' poem, "The Persian Version":

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon
The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.
As for the Greek theatrical tradition
Which represents that summer's expedition
Not as a mere reconnaisance in force
By three brigades of foot and one of horse
(Their left flank covered by some obsolete
Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)
But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt
To conquer Greece - they treat it with contempt;
And only incidentally refute
Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute
The Persian monarch and the Persian nation
Won by this salutary demonstration:
Despite a strong defence and adverse weather
All arms combined magnificently together.

Here is Brendan Boyle writing in the New York Sun on a new book about Spartan Freedom (caps in the original) versus Persian Slavery (ditto):

Mr. Cartledge is right to find something worthy in the Spartans' commitment, but for this to be the battle that "changed the world," these Spartans need to have been defending a way of life that can be said to belong to the world that inherited the Greeks. But by and large, Spartan "Freedom" has not belonged to this world. For this we should be grateful. Mr. Cartledge calls Sparta a "unique culture and society." "Unique" goes a bit easy on a society that was organized, in Mr. Cartledge's words, "as a kind of standing army," an army that helped Sparta satisfy its own imperial ambitions but, more importantly, keep a local, non-Spartan population in perpetual servitude. Unique, too, in its decision to remove each male child, at age seven, from his home and station him in a public dormitory-cumbarracks that served as a schoolhouse. It must have been in one of these barracks that the famous Spartan youth, who had stolen a fox and concealed it inside his tunic lest the theft be discovered by his superiors, stood silently and answered his superior's questions while the fox gnawed away at his intestines.

A new film called 300 (the number of Spartans fending off 100,000 Persians), based on Frank Miller's graphic novel about Thermopylae, banks on a kind of Sin City-meets-Gladiator approach to portraying one of the most glorious asymmetric wars in martial history. And here's the trailer for that:

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Anne Applebaum in Slate:

[T]hough it's doubtful that he ever gave an actual order to an actual thug, in this deeper sense, Putin is certainly responsible for Litvinenko's death: He presides over this web of old intelligence operatives; indeed he sits at its hub. And he approves of their methods. One of his first acts as prime minister in 1999 was the unveiling of a plaque to Yuri Andropov, the former KGB boss best known for his harsh treatment of dissidents. Last year, Russians built a statue to Andropov. No one should have been surprised when the former KGB's harassment of modern "dissidents" subsequently grew harsher with every passing year—or that it culminated in this strange murder.

Andropov presided over another infamous murder of an Eastern dissident living in London -- the so-called "Umbrella Murder" of Bulgarian playwright Georgi Markov, who was injected with a ricin pellet, discharged from an umbrella point, on his way to a BBC Radio broadcast in 1978. Three days later, he fell dead from a fever. The killer was a Dane agent of Italian extraction called Francesco Giullino, recruited by by the KGB equivalent under the regime of Bulgarian dictator Todor Zhivkov. The mystery took close to thirty years to solve, and was only done so by virtue of the release of Soviet-era archives.

What are the odds dossiers on Litvinenko still exist in the age of globalized e-commerce assassinations?

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A new study produced by an Israeli research group (and, unfortunately, disseminated by the AJC, which should stay out of this one) argues that Israel's military assault on Lebanon over the summer was not "disproportionate" given that moral ratios go out the window the instant one side starts using civilians as shields:

In several other instances, Israel bombed vehicle convoys that were trying to leave the combat zone in southern Lebanon, killing many civilians. Human Rights Watch, a New York-based advocacy group, said shortly before the war ended that it had documented the deaths of 27 Lebanese civilians killed while trying to flee.

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote shortly after the war that the Israeli military “seemed to assume that because it gave warnings to civilians to evacuate southern Lebanon, anyone who remained was a Hezbollah fighter.”

Nowhere in this Times piece is how the war might have been executed differently had Israel mounted a stronger and more comprehensive ground campaign. Instead -- and as any many pro-Israel bloggers and commentators have been banging on about for months -- the ineffectual and devastating air campaign not only spared too many Hezbollah fighters but made distinguishing them from Lebanese innocents all but impossible. (Phoning households where Nasrallah's goons were thought to be taking refuge and telling the owners, "You have 10 minutes to skedaddle before we powder the place," may seem magnanimous in theory but it doesn't quite work when a) those same goons can probably overhear the warning, b) your being held hostage by them axiomatically limits your possible escape routes.)

As it happens, months before those two soldiers were kidnapped and this whole conflict inaugurated, Israel had wargamed a scenario where it went to war with Hezbollah. The only difference between the rehearsal and the show was that deployed boots compensated for dropped payloads in the former. The result was an almost 5-to-1 loss of IDF troops to Hezbollah fighters, which was deemed unacceptable and which is why Lebanon now looks like Sarajevo.

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One truism of the cynic abroad is that she becomes unexpectedly patriotic and defensiveness the minute she hears someone from her host country denigrate her homeland. A strange but related phenomena might be the expat who puts on airs with her sophisticated new neighbors about how god-awful lowly and provincial "back home" is. By now you've heard that Gwyneth Paltrow thinks two things about America (which is exactly two things more than I care to know from her about anything):

1. "The British are much more intelligent and civilised than the Americans."

2. "I love the English lifestyle. It's not as capitalistic as America. People talk about interesting things at dinner - not about work and money."

Well, it's at least good to see that the native promiscuity of the Yank tongue hasn't quite left the Ice Queen of the Spence School since she almost certainly meant materialistic, not capitalistic -- unless your Thanksgiving dinner was full of talk about the private ownership of the means of production.

Anyway. Gwynie's getting it from both sides now: "Don't let the door hit your bony ass on the way out" seems to be the consensus here, while the Brits -- who love to revile American pretensions to Anglophilia almost as much as they love to revile the lack of them -- think Mrs. Chris Martin is pronouncing judgment without a cultural or intellectual by-your-leave.

My favorite blog in the universe -- Harry's Place -- may be democratic socialist by design, but even if its writers were to the manner born, they'd still manage to come up with a frost-covered reply like this one:

[W]hat does a woman who called her first child Apple and second one Moses consider intelligent dinner table conversation?

HP might have added that someone who considers Madonna fit sororal company in voluntary exile is NQOKD (Not Quite Our Kind, Dear).

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Bryan Ferry likes Bollinger and P.G. Wodehouse. It shows:

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How many readers of this blog would find themselves in agreement with Bill Kristol even outside the charitable space of the holiday season?

This is the editor of the Weekly Standard arguing, with his regime change doubles-partner Robert Kagan, against the Baker-Hamilton Commission's recommendations for Iraq:

It's not as if the Baker commission has accomplished nothing, however. Although its recommendations will have no effect on American policy going forward, they have already had a very damaging effect throughout the world, and especially in the Middle East and in Iraq. For the Iraq Study Group, aided by supportive American media, has successfully conveyed the impression to everyone at home and abroad that the United States is about to withdraw from Iraq. This has weakened American allies and strengthened American enemies. It has exacerbated the problems in Iraq, as all the various factions in that country begin to prepare for the "inevitable" American retreat. Now it will require enormous efforts by the president and his advisers to dispel the disastrous impression that the Baker commission has quite deliberately created and will continue to foster in the weeks ahead. At home and abroad, people have been led to believe that Jim Baker and not the president was going to call the shots in Iraq from now on.

That paragraph precedes one in which Kristol and Kagan pretty contentedly show that whatever the findings of this headline-generating body of "wise men," the president has given every indication that he will not a) play nice with Iran, b) do likewise with Syria. Big mistake, neocon dreaming, the Death of Diplomacy and all that, you say -- but here is Ha'aretz contributer Shmuel Rosner in Slate, discussing the one country, historically more amenable to democracy than Iraq, that K&K failed to mention:

Some Lebanese are waiting, somewhat anxiously, for the Baker-Hamilton committee's recommendations this Wednesday. They have zero confidence in the help they might get in the future from an American administration. "If the Syrians help Bush in Iraq, he could sell us out in a second," one of them told me. "Exactly as his father sold out the Kurds to Saddam 15 years ago."

Quite. What price, then, realpolitik, or the coddling of the only remaining Baathist government in the Middle East? (If a rapproachment with Syria is in fact in the works, then this would be not just a replay of the shameful sell-out of the Kurds and Shia in '91, but also reminiscent of the Churchill-Roosevelt concession to Stalin of Poland, whose violated sovereignty formed the basis for Allied intervention in the first place.)

Some principles are worth keeping and reaffirming, even at the cost of "stability." And what are the odds that a Hezbollah-controlled country south of Israel will be anything even remotely resembling stable?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:44 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

On Ted Kennedy's physique: "200 pounds of condemned veal." On Henry Kissinger, surveying some sculpture or monument of Dante's inferno: "Oh look, he's apartment hunting."

One can't help but admire Gore Vidal for these and many other reasons. He's a walking (though these days, mostly sitting) testament to the failed marriage between celebrity and talent, more a caricature of the elder statesman from what he used to half-affectionately like to call the "republic of letters." Though mostly thought of these days, when thought of at all, as a grand old liberal queen, Vidal's conventionality in style (studiedly Vespasian) and prose (Arnoldian) are much appreciated by those with a fondness for the past. Is it any wonder he's earned a devoted fan base for re-imagining it in series of brilliant historical novels about the United States? Newt Gingrich, who wants badly to be rechristened a fictionalist of the Civil War era, is quite the fan of Vidal's extraordinary Lincoln.

Someone might some day write a monograph entitled "Patriotic Gore." He's that in the old-school sense of the adjective; a relic of the kind of 20th century radical flag-flapping that made it acceptable for men like like I.F. Stone to support Dwight Eisenhower's presidency in 1950. (Vidal, as weary of the Truman Doctrine as he would be of every other, was an early speechwriter for Ike.)

Indeed, a shuddering opposition to the project of American empire and the runaway expansion of the military-industrial complex actually confirm Vidal's core conservatism, still a shade darker than the limousines most of his contemporary liberal chums travel in. He's long expressed his admiration for the proto-fascist Charles Lindburgh and for the "America Firster" school of isolationism, which, had it gained a stronger domestic foothold in the thirties, would have not only kept the U.S. out of World War II but have smiled graciously on the prospect of National Socialism reigning triumphant throughout Europe. (The greatest missed opportunitysince the millennium in the realm of literary criticism was Vidal's failure to review Philip Roth's The Plot Against America.) If such allegiances make the old boy a look a hypocritical fool talking about George Bush and Dick Cheney in tones reminiscent of the Popular Front, then it's good of him to have reclined back into his overstuffed easy chair of whispered celebrity gossip for what may just be his final book:

Garbo was very peasanty, very literal, very earthy and very funny. I would bump into her in Klosters every morning while out shopping. I once inquired what she bought and she said she bought pullovers. What, every day? Yes, yes, she said, only pullovers. But how many do you have? I asked. And with a note of pride in her voice she told me, ''I have every pullover the Swiss make." '

Are there other riches to mine here? There are:

As Vidal heads towards what he calls, 'The door marked Exit', so too does the species he represents: the famous writer. Nowadays, writers simply aren't famous any more – or rather 'to speak of a famous writer is like speaking of a famous speedboat designer. The adjective is inappropriate to the noun.' The reasons for this are twofold, Vidal believes.

'The French auteur theory of the 1950s had a lot to do with it. People who might have written books started trying to make movies instead. I remember all these terrible hacks in Hollywood coming up and telling me, ''I'm an auteur, you know." And I would say, ''I always knew you were by the way you parted your hair."

'Also, the GI Bill of Rights after the War meant that milllions of people who had never been educated before went to university. The trouble was they liked it so much they decided to stay there and become academics. And if you want to meet someone who really hates literature, then just talk to an academic.'

Kind of sad to see photos of this patriarch in autumn. T.S. Eliot once said of someone that he "looked like he was poured into his clothes and forget to say 'when.'" That's about right for Vidal, too. Not that he gives a damn.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:02 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)