• 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.}
A crowd of onlookers gasped as the small explosion echoed through the transportation complex just after 10 a.m. Witnesses had described a package with wires and tubes protruding out of it stuck on a steel support girder underneath the interstate about 12 to 15 feet above the bus depot, said MBTA spokesman Joseph Pesaturo.
...
Transit police Lieutenant Salvatore Venturelli said that a passenger had noticed the object at 8:05 a.m. and alerted authorities. The object did have some components consistent with an improvised explosive device including an electronic circuit board, but it was not a bomb, Venturelli said.
Last time I checked, a bag of wires and spare computer parts was neither explosive nor really a device. But hang on, maybe we can learn from several other packages:
Investigators found a device on the BU Bridge today "similar to the Sullivan Square" package that forced the closure this morning of northbound Interstate 93, said Jennifer Mieth, spokeswoman for State Fire Marshal Stephen Coan, whose office oversees the State Police Bomb Squad.
...
Mieth said State Police bomb experts are now examining a another suspicious item -- similar in construction to the items found at Sullivan station and on the BU Bridge -- that has been discovered attached to the Longfellow Bridge, which spans the Charles River from Boston to Cambridge.
Boston police are separately investigating suspicious items at Columbus and Stuart streets and near the New England Medical Center, Boston police said.
The packages are almost certainly hoaxes. Any terrorist worth anything would detonate a bomb, not under some bridges, but in the Big Dig, which is not only a major transportation nexus but also underground and ready to collapse with the slightest nudge.
The ship runs on Max Blumenthal's partisan rage. But hey, the last time Richard Dreyfuss was in the water, things turned out peachy.
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Mr. Biden is equally skeptical—albeit in a slightly more backhanded way—about Mr. Obama. “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” he said. “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
"One of the main mistakes the Americans have made in fighting terrorism is tying our hands and the hands of the Shiites, while at the same time the terrorists are free to do what they want. If they let us, within one week we will clean all Kirkuk and adjacent areas... 'No-o, Kurds must not move to the Arab areas, this is sensitive.' If they let the Shiites clean the road from Najaf to Baghdad, they can do it within days. If they permit the people of Anbar to liberate their area, they will do it, but they say, 'Ah, no, this is another kind of militia.' They don't understand the realities of Iraq. From the beginning, we have had this problem with them. Wrong plan, wrong tactic, wrong policy." -- Jalal Talabani in Jon Lee Anderson's New Yorker profile of him, sadly not available online
It's very hopeful for someone who trafficks in rational skepticism to make the following forecast:
It seems profoundly unimaginative-and, frankly, dangerous-to think that we cannot possibly overcome the religious divisions in our world. What is the alternative? Do you really think that the 23rd century will dawn, with unimaginably powerful technology having spread to every corner of the earth, and our thinking will still be governed by sectarian religious certainties? Muslims eager for jihad? Rapture-ready Christians holding political power?
Sam wrote earlier in this installment of his ongoing "blogalogue" with Andrew Sullivan that, sitting on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee he had what under different circumstances might be termed an "awakening." For Sam, it was nothing more than a momentary flash of Freud's "oceanic feeling," which drives all varieties of religious experience. (That Sam's quasi-feeling took place near the water gives this concept added semantic value, one would think.)
Does any of us really believe that faith will be eradicated even in some technocratic Star Trek future? Sam's case elsewhere hinges on the current abundance of scientific evidence for disproving religious myth, and yet, as he alarmingly reports, the vast majority of Americans still believe in angels. This contradiction hints at an inextinguishable human compulsion to believe in God, and I doubt that two more centuries will be enough time to allow us to evolve to the more self-assured plane where the earthly is precious and, indeed, good enough.
When Roy Jenkins, one of the four founders of the Social Democratic Party of Britain and lately yet another acclaimed biographer of Winston Churchill, was asked his opinion about the covert funding of Encounter magazine by the CIA, he replied: "Good for the CIA." That a Western espionage agency was enabling a reputed cold war journal of opinion might have been cause for concern, or genuine scandal, save for the fact that Encounter still printed excellent stuff and its contributors (not to say editors) knew nothing of where the money came from. And even if they did know, so what? The Kremlin's repression of internal dissent and its suffocation of art and culture in Russia and the nations of the Warsaw Pact remained unchanged even if the CIA was the organization issuing the J'accuse.
A moral take-away very much like this applies to the news that Boris Pasternak's masterpiece, Doctor Zhivago, had its Russian edition bank-rolled by Langley, too:
"Pasternak's novel became a tool that was used by the United States to teach the Soviet Union a lesson," Tolstoy said in a telephone interview from Prague, where he works as a Russian commentator for the U.S. government-funded radio stations. The novelist knew nothing of the CIA's action, according to Tolstoy and the writer's family.
Tolstoy said his book, "The Laundered Novel," is based on more than a decade of research and will be released later this year, the 50th anniversary of the publication of "Doctor Zhivago." He previewed its contents in a recent lecture in Moscow.
Again, good for the CIA. This diminishes Pasternak's accomplishment not one iota.
Even Valerie Plame might be a more competent judge to have in Stockholm than the sorry lot picking the laureates these days.
Didn't take long for Nick's book to set les bien-pensant hopping. Norm Geras anatomizes one obsession of the left:
One confirmation of the fact that Nick Cohen's target is a real one wider than the SWP, is the intense hostility there has been, way beyond that organization, towards the pro-war left. Dip into any relevant comments thread on the Guardian's Comment is Free for a dose of such poison; note that there is a mini-industry in the blogosphere obsessed (some of its denizens to the point of appearing half-crazed) with those they contemptuously call 'the decents'; give some time, if you can bear it, to re-reading through the comment and opinion pages of the liberal press for the last four years. That you were of the left and supported regime change in Iraq has just been unthinkable, unassimilable, for many - hence the hostility and the anathemas. It could not be that there was a difficult issue and a difficult choice, with weighty reasons on both sides. If, on the other hand, you consider what volume of critical animus and commentary has been directed from the same quarters at the rank apologists in the anti-war movement, you'll find that it pales by comparison.
The alliance of Islamists and Leninists that makes up the Respect coalition is not a dalliance born of opportunism. It reflects an extraordinary process in which part of the left has ended up arguing for what by any objective standards are reactionary positions: promotion of religious obscurantism in place of secularism; segregation of the sexes at public events; abridgement of free speech in deference to the sensibilities of those who claim themselves victims of the phantasm of "Islamophobia"; and most pernicious, the resurrection in political debate of some highly traditional motifs of antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Clearly the most arresting paragraph in Laura Secor's dispatch from Iran:
No elected leader can serve, let alone execute a policy agenda, without the acquiescence of the supreme leader and his associates. But was Ahmadinejad one of the leader’s associates? Or was he, like his predecessor, Khatami, something of a political rival? The answer to this question should determine the extent to which Ahmadinejad’s foreign-policy extremism and authoritarian tendencies are taken seriously as a political program. But it is a puzzle that has vexed political analysts since the president took office in August 2005, bringing with him a faction that was largely new to the post-revolutionary political scene. Composed partly of military and paramilitary elements, partly of extremist clerics like Mesbah-Yazdi and partly of inexperienced new conservative politicians, those in Ahmadinejad’s faction are often called “neoconservatives.” But to the extent that they have an ideology, it is less new than old, harking back to the early days of the Islamic republic.
Michael Oren's new book, Power, Faith and Fantasy, charts the history of American involvement in the Middle East, an involvement almost as old as America itself. Thomas Jefferson may have had his own conspicuous problems with domestic slavery, but he was a stalwart abolitionist when it came to protecting U.S. merchant vessels off the shores of modern-day Libya. These dirigibles were frequently plundered, and their crews held as chattel, by Islamic Barbary pirates acting on Koranic prescription. (This seldom remembered episode of Ottoman rule gives the lie to anthropologists and post-colonial historians who claim that a tendency for belligerence and slave-holding does not cut evenly between East and West.) Yet American resolve to take a muscular approach toward sharia marauders was never -- surprise, surprise -- a sure thing. Here is Hillel Halkin in Commentary:
And yet, as Oren shows, the war against the Barbary pirates was fought inconsistently, had its share of setbacks, and suffered from domestic criticism. Throughout most of it America continued to ransom captured sailors, to pay protection money to Muslim warlords, and sometimes even to build gunboats for them that were later used against American ships, just as did many European countries whose pusillanimity Americans scorned. Moreover, there were prominent politicians, including Albert Gallatin, Jefferson’s Secretary of the Treasury, who recommended calling off the military campaign and reaching an accommodation with the pirates. Such a course, Gallatin reasoned, would save both money and lives, and many Americans agreed with him, especially when the occasional disaster, like the loss of the frigate Philadelphia in 1803, made things appear to be going badly. Jefferson himself wavered at crucial moments and once, deciding at the last minute to negotiate, ordered the recall of a military force that was already fighting its way overland in order to depose the imperious Tripolitanian ruler, Yusuf Qaramlani.
Something Freudian on multiple planes appears to be taking place in the comments section of an otherwise so-so Gawker post about a thinly veiled critique of Donald Trump's management style. Sounds as though somebody thinks there's another hotshot New York property developer, of the virtual variety, who's a micromanaging, ego-crushing nutcase. And there's (probably metaphorical) talk of you-know handling his employees genitals, which makes it even more appropriate to both Gawker and Trump.
Have you hired Steve Case or something? Did Terry Semel join the Gawker Media board? Maybe you took on some venture cash and the wingtips are nitpicking your websites?
Because this sort of annoying, obvious tactic should be beneath someone like Nick Denton, assuming he hasn't started snorting coke or developed a Charlie Sheen-scale high-class hooker problem.
Unhook your electrodes from the editors' nuts/ovum, Nick, they're afraid of getting fired like the last guy, and the result absurd, spammy tactics that will drive many of us to leave, or at least pass out sooner from too many additional morning whiskys as the "contine reading" madness pushes us deeper and deeper into the depression that brought us here in the first place. (Or maybe it's just me.)
(Disclosure: Mike had something or other happen as a guest editor for Wonkette once; I've never had anything like that, but I did just blog about the comments on a blog post about a Daily News piece about Donald f'ing Trump. And Echo's claim to fame was watching Narcissus drown, okay?)
Shall I go out on a limb and say that Nick Cohen's What's Left?, which I haven't read yet because it hasn't been published in the states yet, might be the most important polemic you'll come by this year?
Finally, one of the drafters of the Euston Manifesto and a social democrat, who stayed angry but salubrious after 9/11, puts all his thoughts between two hard covers and his own political allegiance between a rock and a hard place.
Cohen's brief is simple: The left has abandoned its principles for fashionable anti-Americanism and anti-Ukanianism. Radicals with hoary Marxist and socialist credentials care little for the plight of Muslims (Bosnia? Kosovo?) but everything for the plight of Tony Blair and George W. Bush.
Their rancid and inverted ideology does not, to be fair, encompass all of the anti-war movement, but it does delimit the motives of old 'activist' hands who know better about the Baath Party and its criminal history, yet find higher favor with them than with any policy that could ever emerge from 10 Downing St. or 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Read these paragraphs and try to keep your powder dry:
On 15 February 2003 , about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime. It was the biggest protest in British history, but it was dwarfed by the march to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in Mussolini's old capital of Rome, where about three million Italians joined what the Guinness Book of Records said was the largest anti-war rally ever. In Madrid, about 650,000 marched to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime in the biggest demonstration in Spain since the death of General Franco in 1975. In Berlin, the call to oppose the overthrow of a fascist regime brought demonstrators from 300 German towns and cities, some of them old enough to remember when Adolf Hitler ruled from the Reich Chancellery. In Greece, where the previous generation had overthrown a military junta, the police had to fire tear gas at leftists who were so angry at the prospect of a fascist regime being overthrown that they armed themselves with petrol bombs.
The French protests against the overthrow of a fascist regime went off without trouble. Between 100,000 and 200,000 French demonstrators stayed peaceful as they rallied in the Place de la Bastille, where in 1789 Parisian revolutionaries had stormed the dungeons of Louis XVI in the name of the universal rights of man.
In Ireland, Sinn Fein was in charge of the protests and produced the most remarkable spectacle of a remarkable day: a peace movement led by the IRA. Only in the newly liberated countries of the Soviet bloc were the demonstrations small and anti-war sentiment muted.
The protests against the overthrow of a fascist regime weren't just a European phenomenon. From Calgary to Buenos Aires, the left of the Americas marched. In Cape Town and Durban, politicians from the African National Congress, who had once appealed for international solidarity against South Africa's apartheid regime, led the opposition to the overthrow of a fascist regime. On a memorable day, American scientists at the McMurdo Station in Antarctica produced another entry for the record books. Historians will tell how the continent's first political demonstration was a protest against the overthrow of a fascist regime.
Maybe it's just the camera angle, but Ari Fleisher's face seems to have magically acquired huge jowls in the few short years since Bush's first question-deflector burnt out. (Old Ari at right, new below, center.) His consulting company must be literally riding the gravy train. Or maybe the stress finally broke him after he was out of the job. I wonder what he'd look like without the slimming black suit.
I look forward to this March's appearance at South by Southwest of Scott McClellan, naked, crying and unable to explain why he crawled under Iggy Pop's trailer.
I know only a couple of these people -- Mike, I believe, won't recognize any -- but it's nice to see the humor organization we've both edited at one time making trouble on such an elaborate scale. This video is pretty funny. And safe for work.
When American officials were debating whether to send more troops in December, I went to see an Iraqi government official. The prospect of more troops infuriated him. More Americans would simply prolong the war, he said.
“If you don’t allow the minority to lose, you will carry on forever,” he said.
Here's a scenario to contemplate: No distraught websites; no marches on Washington; no television ad campaigns; no energy whatsoever committed to stopping the genocide in Iraq because when it comes to human rights, "been there, done that" prevails in the American consciousness.
On a good day, you'll actually get those who recommend a pull-back of coalition troops to Kurdistan and Shiastan to concede that this amounts to an open invitation to Shiite death squads in Baghdad to commence a full-fledged ethnic cleansing project. That this is eventuality is even tossed into a pros and cons list of opposing the surge indicates just how disaffected and sclerotic the erstwhile hawks have become about this war. Meanwhile, those who have always opposed the war -- and now demonstrate for an end to American involvement in it -- are in effect giving license to yet another American president to become complicit in yet another crime of American foreign policy. All in the name of peace and justice.
Sullivan made a vague allusion to the mystery of mathematics, but Godel's achievement was anything but mysterious. It was a thorough debunking of positivism, the early 20th century philosophical movement that took empiricism to a radical and wholly absurd level by stipulating that nothing that isn't tangible exists. His incompleteness theorem was a confirmation of a priori truth -- the kind of Nature Spinoza spoke of -- not of religion. And even though Godel's elegant proof specialized in paradox and sinuous self-referentiality, it was perfectly traceable according to the known laws of logic. By definition, a theorem is only as good as the next genius who comes along to demonstrate how bogus it really is. Would that religion said, "this may all be nonsense, wait until we learn more."
So Sullivan is still grasping at straws to place his faith in the same august company as neo-Platonic philosophy. When Einstein spoke of the great "out-yonder," he meant a cosmological order that had yet to be sussed out. There are no laws of heaven except those we invent to make peaceable our time on earth, which is of course our only time, anywhere.
Lucky us, my esteemed co-blogger. Just as I was thinking about how consciousness could be unmoored from matter, I happened upon Steven Pinker's illuminating essay in Time magazine addressing that very subject. He defines the so-called "Hard Problem" of cognitive science like this:
The Hard Problem... is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know."
The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.
Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.
Harris is in the extreme minority, then, by denying the "meat chauvinism" that drives most of his field. Maybe as a post-doc he'll locate the totality of cognitive experience in gray matter.
Though just because Sam expresses doubt about the mind-body problem doesn't mean Andrew's any closer to justifying religion as one way of reconciling it (by adding a soul into the mix) that's as good as any other.
P.S. Last August I had a fun little email dialogue with Rebecca Goldstein about her Spinoza book. It should be up at Jewcy in the coming weeks.
With all due respect to my coeditor, I'm going to have to step in and disagree with him regarding Harris' meaning. (Mike's post here.) Harris brings up the materiality of the mind within the context of his own doubt regarding an afterlife. It's not a matter of a "cold forensic trail," because science has established pretty decisively that to the extent the mind and soul are epiphenomena of cells pinging electrons off each other, the forensic trail points to the brain.
A more likely explanation of what Harris meant (although presumably Harris will speak for himself, if he decides to address the issue) would be found in Sullivan's appeal to mathematics as a source of non-empirical truth. Mike and I have both read Rebecca Goldstein's engrossing book about Godel's incompleteness proof, which established that formal mathematical systems -- which were an attempt to divorce mathematics from insoluble metaphysical issues by scrapping conceptions of what number "is" and teasing everything out of process-driven axioms -- will always have true statements that cannot be proven using the rules of the system. Godel (says Goldstein) interpreted his own proof as evidence of a Platonic metaphysical world of ideals. Out there in the ether is a number two, here on earth is its instantiation in various pairs, and the mind isn't using some sort of homegrown evolutionary rule of thumb; there is such a thing as "two," and whatever it is, the mind just apprehends it.
Once that door is open, it's a short leap to a neo-dualism where everything is the instantiation of (several) eternal Platonic entities, including the mind. We accept the existence of numbers greater than the number of subatomic particles that exist, even though they can't be instantiated. Why not say that my brain is an instantiation of some Platonic thing, in which consciousness actually inheres? And that my "mind" will continue existing even when it has no material representation, just like those fantastically huge numbers?
Of course, Godel also starved himself to death because he was afraid someone would poison him, so we won't ask too much of him. I'm curious to hear more of Harris' thoughts on this. I may have to get his book out of the library.
There was a time when I was ready to write off McSweeney's. But their work has ranged from interesting failure up to consistently excellent. This web list is one of the funniest things I've seen in a while. Fair use says I can quote it, and it's so short, here's the whole thing; please spare the copyright rod and go read other stuff on the site of which this is a fragment.
Things That Get
Way More Fun When
You Add a "G"
to Them.
Now his literacy is being threatened by his piety:
I believe science is one, important, valuable and respectable mode of thinking about the whole. But there are truth questions it has not answered and cannot answer. What I found insightful about your book was your openness to this possibility. You repeat that openness in your recent posting:
"While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us."
So you allow for a space where the logic of science and of materialism does not lead us toward truth, but may even mislead us about it, and lead us away from it. This is a big concession, and it undermines the certainty of your entire case. Such an argument must rest on a notion of ultimate truth that is deeper than science, beyond science. It must rest on a notion that allows for the rational legitimacy of my faith.
It's extremely clear from Sam's phrasing that he means the reducibility of consciousness to matter has not been established because we may be following a cold forensic trail. The alternative is not religion or metaphysics but a different scientific approach to understanding cognition.
In what way does this concession leave the door open to the possibility that a) a man born over 2,000 years ago was miraculously placed inside the womb of a virgin, b) he was the son of an invisible man in the sky whose nature and will is, conveniently to those who respect logic and verifiable fact, unfathomable to human minds, c) said son died for humanity's sins and was resurrected three days later, d) the founding text of his biography is true on these points but may not be true on other ones, depending upon how much they make us wince in the 21st century?
Also, I fail to see how it's permissible to trust someone whose definition of "truth" is so promiscuous:
Take, for example, the question of historical truth. You rely in your books on a lot of historical facts to buttress your empirical case. But these facts are not true - and could never be proven true - by the scientific method that is your benchmark. There are no control groups in history. There are no experiments. But there is a form of truth. Discovering that historical truth is the vocation of a historian - and it is a different truth than science, and reached by a different methodology and logic.
Spoken by a man compared after 9/11 to George Orwell. Orwell, you may remember, famously remarked that there were certain things that happened in war-ravaged Spain that happened none the less because The Daily Telegraph failed to report them.
Enough ink has been spilled -- some of it on this blog -- about the deadly fusion between the postmodern Left and the medieval forces of Islamic reaction. Perhaps now would be an excellent time to point out that conservatives who routinely blast moral and historical relativism succumb to exactly these vices when it suits their own interests -- particularly when those interests are religious. "Don't judge me, this is my truth. You're intolerant if you call my beliefs ludicrous or hold them to the exacting empirical standards that you (and I) hold everything else." How is this different from sickly syllogisms about not stopping the practice of sati in India because it conforms to local Hindu customs, or condoning female circumcision in Africa for the same reason?
G.K. Chesterton, beloved geyser of aphorisms for the faithful right, said that a man who ceases to believe in God doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything. You'll hear this trotted out at feverish moments in the current culture war between atheists and theists as a last sally of condescension, as if moral superiority and wisdom were rooted in superstition. Yet as the breadth and scope of human knowledge expands, it's another Chesterton insight that one finds applying to the adherents of an antique dogma, who are becoming increasingly desperate and defensive: when a man thinks any stick will do, he reaches for a boomerang.
Ken Mondschein interviews Molly Crabapple -- a superb neo-Victorian artist, the fusion of R. Crumb and Aubrey Beardsley -- for Jewcy. Brains and beauty, people:
When you were 18, you were briefly detained in a Turkish jail for sketching in Kurdistan. What did you make of the region? And as a Jew, were you sympathetic to the Kurds’ longing for their own homeland?
I love the Middle East generally, and Kurdistan specifically. I studied Turkish and Arabic for years—being just fluent enough in Turkish to get me into trouble, though not fluent enough to get me out of it. I dug the relaxed Kurdish take on Islam, their language, their raw, throaty music, the wild green hills near Dogubeyazit with the silver roads that went from nowhere to nowhere, how you could walk around, and within a few hours, women would invite you over for food, and how easy it was to talk to anyone. I even liked the guns and tribalism and sulfur whiff of violence.
But Southeastern Turkey five years ago was very recently a war zone. The Turkish government, despite being moderate by Middle Eastern standards, is no ideal democracy. Since Ataturk, the official party line is that minorities don't exist. Kurdish language and music were banned. Textbooks referred to Kurds as "mountain turks." "How Happy is He Who is a Turk" was written in thirty foot letters on the side of mountains.
I stayed with people who had posters of Ataturk in the front rooms, and Kurdish nationalist posters in the back. I spent a long time in a village called Hassankeyf, all ancient and honey-colored, which the government was flooding to build their new dam. Of course, they didn't make any provision for the folks living there. You can check out Amnesty International for Turkey's dismal human rights record. Police in the East also constantly hassled me for talking to locals.
While I'm not sure about splitting Turkish Kurdistan off to make a Kurdish homeland (for one thing it would be vastly poorer than the more modernized West), the Turkish government could learn a lesson about multi-cultural tolerance from the Western democracies whose trappings they try to emulate.
P.S. My Semitic home away from Snarksmith must be doing something right. Not only has Denis Dutton linked to our "Dear Mr. Ahmadinejad" letter series on Arts & Letters Daily, but he's also added Jewcy to his list of favorite websites.
My favorite third wave feminist (actually, the only third wave feminist with whom I'm on nodding terms) gives me even more reason to love her with this enjoyable review of Patricia Marx's new novel. The piece also poses as a less successful take-down of Hitch's "women aren't funny" thesis:
Clearly, when it comes to sexual politics, Hitchens likes to get the ladies hoppin'. His argument is that men are simply more motivated than women are to be funny since men want sex from women (whereas we can all get it any time, on demand). And if a guy can get a girl to laugh, real open-mouthed, teeth-exposed, "involuntary, full and deep-throated mirth … well then, you have at least caused her to loosen up and to change her expression." You know what he means. Deep throated. Women also aren't funny because women are the ones who have to bear the children, these children might die, and you can't really make jokes about that.
Now, this is a rather fascinating portrait of female nature and relations between the sexes, though it's unclear to which decade it applied—it has the slightly musty air of 1960-ish Kingsley Amis, wrapped in nostalgia for the merry days when sexual conquest required an arsenal of tactics deployed by bon-vivantish cads on girdled, girlish sexual holdouts. "Oh Mr. Hitchens!" you imagine one of the potential conquests squealing at an errant hand on nylon-clad knee.
Citing Kingsley was shrewd and to the point, not just because Hitch is an avowed fan: Amis pere once told Amis fil that Hitch was his ideal reader. Linking to Take a Girl Like You was also clever of Kipnis, though this doesn't quite do justice to either its author or to the one responsible for that notorious Vanity Fair essay.
I've lately had ample time to think about my favorite comic novelist and his role as the champion stag trampling over the tilled soil of modern feminism. I think the old boy gets a slightly bum rap. It's not that Kingsley didn't find women absurd. He clearly did. (In The Old Devils, for which he won the Booker, he says they go about as if they're always drunk, a condition shared only by adolescents and homosexuals.) There's no point defending him against the charge of misogyny, which is valid. However, the more you read him the more you realize he got domestic comedy exactly right, was so uproarious, not in spite of this shortcoming but because of it.
No one proved a better analyst of the heterosexual interaction, in all its thwarted passions and simmering antagonisms, because no one was truer to the base instincts that guide 85% of waking male behavior. Odd that Kipnis takes such a tone: she's almost as unflinchingly candid about the actuating impulses of female conduct, despite being far less romantic in her approach. Kingsley at least believed in love and could demonstrate its sentimental effects on the curmudgeonly soul -- not so for the Marxist-Freudian pop anthropologist who wrote a polemic against the very concept.
Kingsley never cared a whit about correct-thinking opinion -- much less its more humor-resistant strain, political correctness -- except to subvert it, and when he wanted to portray the unalloyed selfishness of raw masculinity, he spared no detail. (Part of Martin's ability to channel the cruelty of the Y-chromosome derives in part from an ongoing feud with papa.)
There is a famous passage from Difficulties With Girls, the sequel to Take a Girl Like You. Patrick Standish is the 1960s-ish cad Kipnis evidently takes for Hitchens' preferred model. He's married to Jenny Bunn, whom he treated callously in the predecessor book, and on whom he still guiltily cheats. This is the conversation Patrick has with his latest conquest:
"Then, Patrick, you do feel it too? You do feel...something? It would be so bleak if you felt nothing. That's what scares women, you know."
"I do know, and you needn't be scared. I feel something all right."
"Promise me you'll always treat me as a person."
"I promise."
"Promises are so easily given."
"I'll fulfill this one. Let me show you."
After a shaky start he was comfortably in the swing of it, having recognised he was on familiar ground after all. Experience had brought him to see that this kind of thing was nothing more than the levying of cock-tax, was reasonable and normal, in fact, even though some other parts of experience strongly suggested that what he had shelled out so far was only a down payment.
It would be an untrustworthy bore who didn't see that this exchange is both hilarious and brutal. As it happens, however, Hitch employed it exclusively for its latter quality as the epigraph to a chapter in No One Left To Lie To that dealt with Bill Clinton's atrocious way with the ladies. (This culminated in the unanswered rape charge issued by Juanita Broderick, who wasn't even a vague parody of a "bimbo eruption.")
NOW's favorite commander-in-chief was no "mere" adulterer or cad in his "private life;" he wasn't satisfied until he had slandered and libeled everyone who had ever accused him of sexual coercion, the overdue collective cock-tax of which was his impeachment and an ensuing national embarrassment.
So say what you will about the mirthfulness of the fairer sex. Even poison-pen contrarians know when to stop laughing and get serious.
Now let me briefly address your primary charge of "intolerance." The sentences that you appear to have found most troubling are these:
Anyone who thinks he knows for sure that Jesus was born of virgin or that the Qur'an is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe is lying. Either he is lying to himself, or to everyone else. In neither case should such false certainties be celebrated.
What if I told you that I am certain that I have an even number of cells in my body? What are the chances that I am in a position to have actually counted my cells (there are on the order of 100 trillion) and counted them correctly? Would it be unfair (or worse, "intolerant") of you to dismiss my assertion as either a product of self-deception or outright dishonesty? Note that this claim has a 50% chance of being true (unlike claims about virgin births and resurrections), and yet it is patently ridiculous. Some claims to knowledge-even about facts that have a high order of probability--immediately brand their claimants as intellectually dishonest. Please forgive me for saying that it is extraordinarily obvious that neither you, nor the pope, nor any other Christian is in a position to know that Jesus was actually born of a virgin or that he will one day return to earth wielding magic powers.
Apart from the concession that he needs faith in order to cope with the harsh reality of life -- which would of course give away the game of religion's smoke-and-mirrors deception -- there's really no way for Sullivan to respond without seeming a perfect fool.
Evelyn Waugh was an empurpled nasty, but he could be quite funny about his adherence to Catholicism when he wanted to. Recall his most autobiographical fiction The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold, particularly the lines:
The tiny kindling of charity which came to him through his religion sufficed only to temper his disgust and change it to boredom. There was a phrase in the 'thirties: "It is later than you think," which was designed to cause uneasiness. It was never later than Mr. Pinfold thought. At intervals during the day and night he would look at his watch and learn always with disappointment how little of his life was past, how much there was still ahead of him. He wished no one ill, but he looked at the world sub specie aeternitatis and he found it flat as a map; except when, rather often, personal annoyance intruded.
That's how I like my believers. "Fuck off, you should see me without the Christ-love." Infinitely more palatable than the easy-listening casuistry of the St. Sebastian of the right.
Now I'm using the King's English with bullshit: not as in worthless or disreputable, and not as just an adjectival grunt of disapprobation modifying the word reactionary. I mean it as in false.
I'm not saying Dinesh D'Souza isn't at core a petulant and pea-brained ideologue, but there are a few things to consider about his latest book The Enemy Within, a summary of which is nicely provided by Alan Wolfe in the brutal Timesreview making the rounds:
At first Dinesh D’Souza considered him “a dark-eyed fanatic, a gun-toting extremist, a monster who laughs at the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians.” But once he learned how Osama bin Laden was viewed in the Muslim world, D’Souza changed his mind. Now he finds bin Laden to be “a quiet, well-mannered, thoughtful, eloquent and deeply religious person.” Despite being considered a friend of the Palestinians, he “has not launched a single attack against Israel.” We denounce him as a terrorist, but he uses “a different compass to assess America than Americans use to assess him.” Bin Laden killed only 3,000 of us, with “every victim counted, every death mourned, every victim’s family generously compensated.” But look what we did in return: many thousands of Muslims dead in Afghanistan and Iraq, “and few Americans seem distressed over these numbers.”
[...]
Dreadful things happened to America on that day, but, truth be told, D’Souza is not all that upset by them. America is fighting two wars simultaneously, he argues, a war against terror abroad and a culture war at home. We should be using the former, less important, one to fight the latter, really crucial, one. The way to do so is to encourage a split between “radical” Muslims like bin Laden, who engage in jihad, and “traditional” Muslims who are conservative in their political views and deeply devout in their religious practices; understanding the radical Muslims, even being sympathetic to some of their complaints, is the best way to win the support of the traditionalists. We should stand with conservative Muslims in protest against the publication of the Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Muhammad rather than rallying to the liberal ideal of free speech. We should drop our alliance with decadent Europe and “should openly ally” with “governments that reflect Muslim interests, not ... Israeli interests.” And, most important of all, conservative religious believers in America should join forces with conservative religious believers in the Islamic world to combat their common enemy: the cultural left.
It's true that long-running religious zealots such as William F. Buckley and Ann Coulter do have a semi-acknowledged sympathy with Islamism for its violent enforcement of piety and bronze age standards of private and public behavior. (Coulter has a knack for carefully weighing the options of today's hysterical culture warrior: Should we convert all the wogs to Christianity, or just adopt their method of dropping walls on queers?) But D'Souza, up until now, has been more of a secular cold war triumphalist of Indo-American vintage. So what's up with this about-face? How did he arrive at coloring Osama a misunderstood freedom fighter so long after the Red Army skedaddled from Afghanistan?
I have a theory.
Like so many other conservatives with interests in journalism and think tank sinecures, D'Souza got his start at Dartmouth College (Nic's and my alma mater), and more specifically, on the editorial board of The Dartmouth Review.
You may remember this outside-campus newspaper for the headlines it generated outside its own pages: the destruction of a mock shanty town erected on the Dartmouth center lawn to protest South African apartheid; its frequently updated and ever-expanding enemies list of leftist professors; its enduring crusade to reinstate the long-forgotten Dartmouth Indian mascot; etc.
Well, one of the undisclosed ironies of this paper is that a good number of its editors, spanning years and probably decades, are not actual conservatives. Or at least they're not as conservative as the Review would have them appear. (One friend of mine jumped masthead and washed up at a prominent liberal monthly.)
Indeed, many write for it because the prose has always been leagues above that of the campus daily and other school-funded magazines and because the gig guarantees future placement in more restrained journals of traditionalist opinion.
Why, then, do Reviewers -- and presumably ex-Reviewers -- ham it up? I think this has to do with getting swept up in the collective momentum of a national corp of wing-tipped wingers, all of whom channel Papa Buckley, and thrill at the chance to write a humor magazine where they're the only ones in on the jokes. (Very Skull and Bones.) Also, isn't there something terribly in loco parentis about redoubling an unpopular conviction at the precise moment its object -- be it turning back the clock on political correctness or the latest fad of multiculturalism or even the decay of a third world ancien regime -- has been lost?
D'Souza strikes me as the platonic ideal of this mindset, except that he's older, dumber, and enjoys a cushy enough position at the Hoover Institution, which means he's got more to lose. Maybe self-hatred -- never forgiving himself, say, for the demise of Ronald Reagan -- plays a stronger role in his case. Like Coulter, he begs the question of whether or not he buys into his own bullshit (and here I'm using the farm definition of that multipurpose term). But unlike Coulter, D'Souza comes from a proud and self-satisfied tradition which all but brandishes a sign reading, "Wah Hoo Wah, No Fucking Way."
We didn't do a good job of that either. Though perhaps now the stoppers' favorite example of imperial plunder can be put in better perspective:
While the Bush administration once thought that Iraqi oil revenue would cover occupation and reconstruction costs, the Iraq government still relies heavily on U.S. technical and financial aid. Placke estimated that Iraq produced 1.85 million barrels a day last year, less than the year before, less than the prewar output and well below the U.S. target of 3 million barrels a day.
Placke, who was part of the Iraq Study Group, estimated that 200,000 barrels a day is siphoned from the main export line through southern Iraq, put on barges, and loaded onto tankers waiting in the Persian Gulf. What's left after discounts and bribes goes to militias or insurgent groups, he said.
In other words, militias and insurgents have created an industrial black market that trades in Iraq's largest natural resource.
So the old canard that the war on terror will be unlike any conventional war the U.S. has ever engaged in is being proved more and more wrong with each passing day. If we do fail in Iraq and these murderous elements inherit the country, they'll be a state-bound threat, same as any other. They're already halfway there.
The stupidity of Wesley Clark's recent statement to a Huffington Post journo about "New York money people" (i.e. wealthy Jews) exerting pressure on Israeli politicians for a military confrontation with Iran is made absurd by this defense of the general by Matt Yglesias:
This, of course, is true. I'm Jewish and I don't think the United States should bomb Iran, but Thursday night I was talking to a Jewish friend and she does think the United States should bomb Iran. The Jewish community, in short, is divided on the issue. It's also true that most major American Jewish organizations cater to the views of extremely wealthy major donors whose political views are well to the right of the bulk of American Jews, one of the most liberal ethnic groups in the country. Furthermore, it's true that major Jewish organizations are trying to push the country into war. And, last, it's true that if you read the Israeli press you'll see that right-wing Israeli politicians are anticipating a military confrontation with Iran. (For example, here's an article about the timing of the selection of a new top dog in the Israeli Defense Forces; Benjamin Netanyahu is quoted as saying that the new leader "will have to straighten the army out, rebuild Israel's deterrence and prepare the defenses against threats, first and foremost, against Iran.")
Everything Clark said, in short, is true. What's more, everybody knows it's true. The worst that can truthfully be said about Clark is that he expressed himself in a slightly odd way. This, it seems clear, he did because it's a sensitive issue and he worried that if he spoke plainly he'd be accused of trafficking in anti-Semitism. So he spoke unclearly and, for his trouble, got … accused of trafficking in anti-Semitism.
I hadn't realized until now that the Jewish community consists of Yglesias and his hawkish friend. And might coughing out a reminder of one's tribal affiliation at the get-go be for another purpose than to confirm Clark's supposedly objective point? (Nice try, Matt. If that was all it took to preempt the Foxmans, Clark could have cited his matrilineal bubbe instead of instantly recanting and groveling in apology.)
Also, mentioning influential Jewish organizations -- with AIPAC of course leading the implied pack -- is a non sequitur here, given that most of these organizations with any say on U.S. foreign policy are centered in Washington, D.C., not in New York. So we're still left with Clark's imputation that rich Jews who lives in the Big Apple wield disproportionate power over peace-loving Jews everywhere, and further have the ability to spark wars overseas. Not a bad day's work, all told, in just a short bull-session with the bien-pensant rag of the blogosphere.
Do I think Clark's comment was made with sinister motive? No. He's shown himself to be as susceptible to idiotic judgment as any candidate for president -- especially one who thinks that epaulets confer the status of commander-in-chief-in-waiting. I knew this when I first saw that notorious photograph of him swapping chapeaus with Ratko Mladic at the height of the Balkan crisis. (Quite a few "money people" had some saying in putting the Nato Supreme Allied Commander on the scene in the first place.)
Of course, admitting there was something more than simply "odd" about Clark's phrasing is well beyond the ken of the American Prospect writer who has an award for ideological self-criticism named after himself on Andrew Sullivan's blog.
If you haven't seen Pan's Labyrinth yet, you should before it wins its Oscar and then the lines get long again.
Not quite sure what it is with Mexican cinema at the moment but there's no question the sons of Moctezuma are leading the new New Wave, and in an unmistakably international sense.
Children of Men may have invoked the Christ myth (and done a better job of it than Mel the Apostle) but it also had urban battlefield sequences straight out of Anbar Province.
Pan's Labyrinth rewinds the clock and reverses the longitude to the Spain right after the Civil War and the consolidation of Francoism.
As naive as it may be to think of a child's imagination bringing down a small woodland suzerainty of fascism, we should remember that the subtitle to Animal Farm was "A Fairy Story." Also, Auden's remarkable poem memorializing the Spanish Civil War has open verses with numinous imagery, too:
Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants,
The fortress, like a motionless eagle, eyeing the valley,
The chapel built in the forest;
Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles.
The only shortcoming of Del Toro's political fable is that his valiant resistance fighters were probably Stalinists, or least were until Moscow cut off their funding. Too bad a reference to Andres Nin or the POUM wasn't smuggled in somewhere to settle the conscience even further.
Anyway, if you thought Meryl Streep was a bitch to answer to, try an ageless faun with rolling Catalan locutions.
Kurdish peshmerga, who were being dispatched to Baghdad to quell the Sunni-Shia fratricide, are deserting from the Iraqi Army.
"I joined the army to be a soldier in my homeland, among my people. Not to fight for others who I have nothing to do with," said Ameen Kareem, 38, who took a week's leave with other soldiers from his brigade in Irbil and never returned. "I used to fight in the mountains and valleys, not in the streets."
Who can blame him? Frankly, there ought to be a reconciliation or "memory" project devoted to the kind of battered wife syndrome the Kurds have suffered at the hands of U.S. capriciousness... When we're not betraying them, we're asking our most stoic allies to bail us out of our own mess and to fight a war under not just one but two foreign flags. That Irbil or Suleimaniyah would even let a U.S. garrison onto its own soil at this point is astounding.
But if the U.S. withdraws, as many are suggesting, to those peaceful mountains and valleys, then this soldier's opinion will become the norm among the Kurds but also among the coalition. Intervention will be a byword for best-case scenario passivity and we'll have betrayed another set of peoples in the Middle East and absented ourselves from what looks to be the next great humanitarian crisis of our age, one which we helped unleash. Will there be no consequences or "chickens coming home to roost" from such a decision?
We cannot associate the Iraqi nation with the regime of Nouri al-Maliki, or the death squad goons of Muqtada al-Sadr. Issuing threats of American abstention from this engulfing conflict alienates the one segment of the population we'll have to rely on if this country is in fact put back together again.
This one's almost too easy. If you've ever run the sink over a Quaker rice cake, you'll get an idea of the kind of mulchification that happens to Andrew Sullivan's intellectual integrity when he starts writing like this:
My sense of the fallibility of human reason and the ineffability of God's will leads me not to dismiss these "extremists" as fools or idiots, but to wonder what they have known that I may not know, even as I worry about their potential for evil as well as good (a potential we all have, including you and me).
And does he likewise wonder with such equanimity what elusive truth is known by those water-boarders at Guantanamo Bay? Surely they must believe their wager with the possibility of another attack on American soil is at least as urgent as the more famous one advanced by Blaise Pascal? Or can Andrew summon a stronger term than "fool" or "idiot" to describe the "extremist" state torturers he nobly denounces in between those fatuous photographs of leaves turning and beach-scapes awaiting Jesus' footprints?
Taste the full flavor of warmed-over Catholic belief. God's will has, for some undisclosed reason, addled so many of his "flock" that they can advocate the preaching of fairy tales in science class, picket the funerals of homosexuals, sign off on genocide (when it's of the right people), talk as if those who aren't their co-religionists are morally inferior and damned to hell -- and the worst this gets out of Sullivan is a head-scratching bewilderment. The Lord sure does work in mysterious ways. Don't judge: Leibniz thought so, and he invented the calculus!
Thanks, but I prefer Spinoza. And the grand achievements of true believers had everything to do with human ingenuity and the triumph of reason and nothing at all to do with the ontology of God. (Does any of us think, say, Martin Luther King would have been more comfortable with segregation and bigotry had the Rev. honorific not shared equal place with the Dr.?)
You may say that faith helps motivate people to do extraordinary things, but the divine spark is fungible with, and quite indistinguishable from, the neurological kind. It could be the love of a good woman, an early role model whose influence becomes a lifelong inner daimon, or anything else that forces us to struggle for the improvement of the species (and there's a word you won't find in either Testament). To exalt religion as prime mover of anything but convenient self-deception is to be remarkably... parochial.
The deep and many failures of George Bush's certainty have truly humbled the primus inter pares of journo-bloggers. Sullivan's more in touch in with his relativist side now. He's found "doubt" and made peace with the huggable Joseph Ratzinger. He's died for conservatism's sins, with Michael Oakeshott wielding the funeral censer. In his book, see...
Apparently, the following source and quote have been excised from mainstream media coverage of the assassination of the brave Armenian editor and Turkish dissident Hrant Dink:
NTV television said Dink had been shot three times in the head and neck.
Muharrem Gozutok, a restaurant owner near the newspaper, said the assailant looked about 20, wore jeans and a cap and shouted “I shot the non-Muslim” as he left the scene.
Yes, well it is quite embarrassing for Turkey, which is doing everything possible to avoid joining the EU, to find itself overrun by jihadist hooligans, even as its government is being taken over by their political counterparts. The irony of this gruesome scenario is that the assailant's audience for such a boast were also "non-Muslims" in the only meaningful sense of the term to a holy warrior in the state built by Kemal Ataturk. But wait a minute. Haven't we been told before about the non-alliance between Bin Ladenists and "secular" Arab regimes? Why should the former get so bent out of shape if a journalist talking truth about a genocide of a Christian minority when the genocidaires were themselves kufr?
From the killer's own mouth:
Ogün Samast, suspected of murdering Hrant Dink, Editor-in-chief of Agos newspaper, said in the statement to Samsun police following his arrest, “I shot him after I said my Friday Prayer”.
Hrant Dink’s murder suspect was arrested yesterday night in Samsun after his father recognised his son on camera footage and informed the police. Brought to Istanbul this morning, Samast was interrogated by police. Four other suspects were arrested in Trabzon and brought before Istanbul police for questioning.
Samast admitted to murdering Dink in his first statement given in Samsun. This is what he reportedly said his statement: “I read the news on the internet. I saw that he said, ‘I’m from Turkey, but Turkish blood is dirty’. That is why I decided to kill him. I do not regret it.”
The house has essentially been bet on Moqtada al-Sadr's taking whatever punishment we mete out. If he gets restive, Baghdad cannot be contained and the war is lost; furthermore, Sadr would risk losing the sympathetic Maliki regime for an unknown level of influence. If Sadr doesn't remain convinced that the risks of undermining order right now outweigh the potential gains, he can ruin everything for us and the Iraqi government.
Arresting his (rather trivial) aide then seems to be a signal that the government will be playing a delicate game of chicken to determine how much power Sadr will keep in a pacified Baghdad. Without a check, his thugs will become a shadow authority and user of force, undermining government. Pushed too far, he'll probably rebel.
Of course, this assumes that Sadr, Maliki and the US government are all behaving as rational, reasonably well-informed actors. With Petraeus in command that hopefully is no longer a fantasy.
I really can't think of anyone I'd rather read on the post-millennial White tsar and the new Russia than Perry Anderson. Reach for the dictionary all you want on terms like Gleichschaltung (Nazi Germany's version of "synergy": how great is that?) -- there's no arguing that the Marxist UCLA historian has got one of the most lapidary styles now gracing the people's republic of letters. His latest book Spectrum -- one essay on Hayek, Schmitt, Strauss and Oakeshott (Andrew Sullivan's got nothing on Perry here) -- is a triumph of academic scholarship doubling as real literature. Anderson also wrote what is, for my money, the ablest deconstruction from the left of both sides of the war debate leading up to the invasion of Iraq.
Here is a precis of a Russian intellectual's systematic view of post-Soviet Russia, which I'm quoting not because it's the finest paragraph but because it's the gist of this London Review of Books piece:
The country is a ‘managed democracy’: that is, one where elections are held, but the results are known in advance; courts hear cases, but give decisions that coincide with the interests of the authorities; the press is plural, yet with few exceptions dependent on the government. This is, in effect, a system of ‘uncontested power’, increasingly similar to the Soviet state, but without any ideological foundation, which is evolving through a set of stages that parallel those of Russian Communism. The first phase sees the heroic destruction of the old order, a time of Sturm und Drang – Lenin and Yeltsin. The second is a time of consolidation, with the construction of a new, more stable order – Stalin and Putin. The leader of the second phase always enjoys much broader popular support than the leader of the first, because he unites the survivors of the original revolution, still attached to its values, and the anti-revolutionaries, who detested the anarchic atmosphere and the radical changes it brought. Thus Putin today continues Yeltsin’s privatisations and market reforms, but creates order rather than chaos. The successor to Putin in the third stage – comparable to Khrushchev – is unlikely to be as popular as Putin, because the regime, like its predecessors, is already becoming more isolated from the masses. Putin’s high ratings in the polls are entirely a function of his occupancy of the presidency: the rulers of Kazakhstan or Azerbaijan – Nazarbaev or Aliev – can match them, because their systems are so similar.
Call me crazy, but I think the evidence is there. For starters:
The most common mischaracterization of the new war plan comes from a basic misreading of a paper by American Enterprise Institute scholar Frederick Kagan. In Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq, Kagan argues that we would need 150,000 additional troops to contain all of Baghdad.
Pundits such as Frank Rich and Joe Klein gleefully assert that the surge's proposed escalation of 21,500 troops thus falls farcically short of the recommendations in Choosing Victory. Yet Kagan explicitly states that we need not retake all of Baghdad, but only Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shia neighborhoods. Thus, as he points out in a Weekly Standard piece published yesterday, his figures and those of the president do achieve a rough parity.
Consumer Reports -- the venerable, if you're the venerating type, consumer quality and research journal that grew out of Ralph Nader's name-making reportage on unsafe auto engineering -- has issued a product recall for a badly conducted safety seat research study. In an especially painful twist of the knife, it was the government that figured out the magazine's safety standards were crap. All that, and Consumer Reports was the spoiler that put Reader's Digest ahead of Time in Florida subscription counts.
Consumer Reports made the announcement, the magazine said, after receiving information Tuesday night and Wednesday morning from NHTSA that raised questions about whether the tests conducted by the non-profit group accurately simulated the conditions they were supposed to.
...
"The organization's data show its side-impact tests were actually conducted under conditions that would represent being struck in excess of 70 mph, twice as fast as the group claimed," said Nason.
...
Consumer Reports said it will publish a new report with "any necessary revisions" as soon as possible.
In the meantime, Consume Reports urges motorists to remember any child seat is better than no child seat and to suspend judgment on the merits of individual brands until the new report is released.
During the cold war, one of the common mistakes foreign policy wonks and Sovietologists made was to filter the adversary's thinking through their own cultural matrix. This was termed "mirror-imaging." It was comprehensible, according to this flawed logic, that the Russians could be so steeped in the dogma of Marxism-Leninism that they might act in ways we ourselves would not given the identical vantage point or set of circumstances. A lot of revisionist spadework has been performed since the Berlin Wall came down suggesting that the beetle-browed comrades in the Kremlin were cool-headed pragmatists after all, simply keeping up appearances with that tough talk about international revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yet there was Andrei Gromyko and Eduard Shevardnadze, years later, maintaining that, actually, Communist expansion was always on the agenda. The paranoia that the Reds were coming may have been hysterically exploited, but at bottom there was something perfectly legitimate about it. It was only when the Soviet state became unaffordable, and one of the few cool-headed pragmatists became its premier, that doctrine took the flame before reality and World War III was narrowly averted.
If this seems like an oblique way to introduce an ancient Greek historian, you might read Robert Kagan in this month's Atlantic on the enduring value of Herodotus. Herodotus also argued against mirror-imaging -- when done by the Athenians to apprehend the motives and moves of the Persians. To understand the enemy, be it in war or in a world-historical struggle, one must appreciate the subtle differences in his approach toward death and mythology:
Writing about Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, D. H. Lawrence suggests that the story is deeper than metaphysics or ordinary symbolism. The same goes for many of Herodotus’s accounts. The Persian army that disappears in an Ethiopian sandstorm. The lions that kill all the camels in a Persian encampment, leaving the other animals and human beings alone. A prisoner’s chopped-off hands, left clinging to the gates of the Temple of Demeter the Lawgiver on the island of Aegina. Here are images and cultural revelations in brushstrokes of the most glittering oils. The Trausi, a Thracian tribe, who surround a newborn baby and lament for it, for all the ill it must endure, even as they bury their dead with “joy and delight.” The blind Egyptian pharaoh, who is told by an oracle that he will be cured by washing his eyes with the urine of a woman who has known only her husband: after trying the piss of one of his wives after another, he is cured only by that of his last wife; and he kills them all except for her. The Babylonian women, who must go to the temple of Aphrodite “and sit there and be lain with by a strange man”; beautiful women depart the temple quickly enough, but the ugly ones sometimes wait years, veritable prisoners of the temple, before a man agrees to lie with them.
It would be naive to think that our world is not, in its own way, just as fantastic, just as unreasonable. Given the adversaries we have fought, and are likely to fight still; given the mirages that cloud our own judgment about distant places about which we think we know much, but in fact know little; given all of that, the dreamlike delusions and psychoses revealed in the stories of Herodotus provide a richer insight into what we are up against than does much contemporary analysis. Coping with the world of the coming decades will require an arresting imagination. Leaders who cannot mentally escape their own narrow slots of existence will fail. Herodotus will be as valuable as Thucydides.
How nice that the exemplars of Western civilization teach us all over again how to save it.
Now here's the kind of talk we blues staters don't like to hear from Chappaqua cowboys:
"[We should] make very clear that not only those who harbor terrorists but those who in any way give any aid or comfort whatsoever will now face the wrath of our country...You are either with America in our time of need or you are not.”
That that was then, when Manichean worldviews sold better on Madison Avenue (even if they had trouble being peddled on 1st). This is now. But there can be no question that Hilary Clinton, for all her poll-tested prefabrication, gives good soundbite when she wants to. In six short years, she's proved a quick study in existential fear and loathing and their attendant global hellspots. Jeffrey Goldberg reports on the troika of Dems running in '08. For those arriving late to the show, that'd be Hilary, Barack and John, the first sounding the most (quick question: does a conceptual novelty cancel a verbal cliche?) presidential:
“You know, if you look around the world, Islamists have had to be defeated by internal military forces, in such places as Algeria and the Philippines, or by external military forces, in places like Afghanistan. We want to be able to continue to export democracy, but we want to deliver it in digestible packages. We want to be smart about this. Take the Palestinians, where we had an election. Don’t you think it would have been smart to make sure that the election was run in such a way that everyone knew how to compete? Hamas certainly knew how to compete. They ran a modern election. They knew enough to run only one person in each constituency, unlike Fatah, which we apparently didn’t tell. Hamas had a cell-phone system to get everyone to the polls. It’s not enough to say, ‘Let’s have an election.’ If you’re going to do it and install democracy, democracy means rule of law, it means democracy education, democracy means opening up the media.”
She went on, “That’s what we did during the Cold War. We had a multi-pronged agenda against Communism and the Soviet Union, we worked with candidates and parties in Europe, we worked to persuade people to be part of our alliance, we used every tool at our disposal.” Clinton seemed just moments away from naming individual Hamas precinct captains.
"'Nasirya's a pimp,' Suha Arafat told me once when we went shopping for minks in Calais..."
The trouble is, she's a divider not a uniter. And I'm still not convinced the moral turpitude she made chief accessory of those Chanel suits in and out of the White House hasn't been overwhelmed by current events. There is some evidence Hilary's just as calculating and on-demand in her politics as ever.
For starters, she's made Robert Byrd, he of the ex-Klan bona fides, her mentor in senatorial pomp and procedure simply for no other reason than he's the backward-looking good ole boy to see about learning how to fit in quickly in that august chamber. Also, Clinton's rhetoric about being "deceived" by the president on prewar intelligence on Iraq is laughable given that most of that intelligence came from former officials in her husband's administration, and we all know she didn't spend eight years crotcheting Roger mittens. John Edwards candidly admits the assumptions of Saddam's WMD guilt were universal in this article -- good to hear, too, since he comes off sounding a grown-up twelve everywhere else. (Gravitas sprouts as slowly and patchily as chest hair, apparently.)
Anyway, it may all end tomorrow with ice cap meltage, my upstairs neighbor telling me to turn down the T-Rex at 3 a.m., or nuclear annihilation or whatever. But is it too much to ask that we stick around long enough to see Hilary pronounce "Obama" as sibilantly as New Hampshire microphones can register?
On the agenda for the Venezuelan president's new term:
* allow him to rule by decree for a year
* lead to socialist constitutional reforms
* reinforce popular education
* change the "geometry of power" or the way political, social, economic and military power is distributed across the territory
* lead to the "explosion of communal councils"
Then the Beeb buries the lede:
In the same address, Mr Chavez also announced he would nationalise key businesses, declared himself a Trotskyist and cited the ideas of Marx and Lenin.
Never mind that "Bolivarianism" is, by bluster and by defintion, the equivalent of "great Russian chauvinism," which is associated with Stalin, as is "rule by decree." (Lenin at least adhered to some flimsy version of democratic centralism within the Soviet regime, though Trotsky was never equable about outlawing the Workers Opposition and other non-Bolshie groups.)
I have to admit, I love hearing Hugo talk Third International to me. I wonder from what SparksNote pamphlet he culled permanent revolution.
After correctly predicting that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, Janeane Garofalo has moved on to smaller beer:
She said she now spends her time taking copious notes while watching the History Channel, ruminating on the Big Bang Theory, finding Rachael Ray’s $40 A Day “horribly offensive,” and swooning over any and all incarnations of Pride and Prejudice’s Mr. Darcy. (“I’m not made of wood, people. Come on!”). And Garofalo has even discovered beading; she tossed out handmade necklaces to the eager yupster crowd.
"I'm not made of wood, people" was funnier applied to George Clooney in the mid-90's. Now she's just using cliches to describe 300 year-old cliches.
Bartley's, the landmark burger joint in Harvard Square, has dropped Sen. John Kerry from its celebrity-themed menu.
."How long has he been my senator, and what's he ever done except embarrass me?" [owner Bill] Bartley said yesterday. Also banished from Bartley's big board of mouth-watering burgers is former Harvard president Larry Summers, who's all-beef patty topped with Swiss cheese and honey mustard was not popular with patrons. "When was the last time you heard the guy's name," said Bartley. "You gotta bring something to the table to get on the menu, and Larry's stealing from the table. . . . You see his severance deal?" (The only Harvard holdover on the menu is professor Skip Gates.)
Kerry will be replaced on the menu with a burger named in honor of Barack Obama.
Norman Mailers Greatest Hits, Phillipics, Stabbings, Etc.
New York magazine outdoes itself this week with a potted history of Norman Mailer's Literary Brawls. Some color commentary by your obedient servant:
Adele Morales Mailer
Crime: Calling her husband a “faggot” when he was drunk and stoned at 4 a.m. at the tail end of a party to launch his mayoral campaign.
Action taken: Stabbed her twice with a penknife, nearly killing her.
Blowback: Though she refused to testify against him, he did spend seventeen days in Bellevue’s psych ward. They finally divorced two years later. She wrote a book about it in 1997.
For some reason, Mailer has always been preoccupied with male-on-male sexual attraction posing as brute aggression. (A queer theorist could kick-start a career exploring the Baldwinian undertones of "The White Negro.") He once appeared on British television and was asked collectively by Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis and Ian Hamilton why his fiction so often honed in on, as it were, the masculine derriere. Mailer later rattled off a hot and petulant letter to some newspaper saying that his on-air inquisitors represented the unholy triumvirate of scribbling English pansies. Hitchens and Amis drafted, but did not send, a reply to the editor arguing that this was being very unfair to Ian Hamilton.
Gore Vidal
Crime: Comparing “The Prisoner of Sex” to “three days of menstrual flow” and Mailer to Charles Manson.
Action taken: Head-butting him in the green room of The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, then telling him, on-air, that he ruined Kerouac by sleeping with him. Six years later, he threw a drink at Vidal—and punched him—at a Lally Weymouth soirée.
Blowback: Still on the floor, Vidal said, “Words fail Norman Mailer yet again.” Days later, Vidal went on Cavett’s show to assert that Mailer had—literally—stabbed his second wife in the back. They, too, reconciled in 1985.
Their spats are legendary. Not long ago, Mailer confronted Vidal at a cocktail party in Manhattan and told him, "Gore, you look like an old Jew." "So do you, Norman. So do you."
For more on the punchy Lord of the Flyleaf, see Dwight Macdonald's essay about Mailer's disorderly conduct arrest and trial in Provincetown, MA in the sixties.
Are Christian fundamentalists who believe only in the separation of church and heaven worthy of the term "fascist"? According to Chris Hedges, they are. But more than that, they're analogous to the Nazis in 1933, poised with as much lethal determination to rise to power through democratic means. Right? Not quite:
There are problems with this analogy. First, democracy in America is much stronger than it was in Weimar Germany in 1933. Nor is the Christian right as widespread or powerful as Hedges suggests. Among conservative Christians who are working class or lower class, "a dramatic majority" voted for Bill Clinton for president — that's the finding of sociologists Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout in their recent book "The Truth About Conservative Christians." A 2004 survey for "Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly" on PBS found that a majority of evangelicals have an unfavorable view of Falwell and that a significant minority of them are more concerned about jobs and the economy than about abortion and gay marriage. And it isn't as if conservative Christians are the only obstacle to gay marriage: Yes, 85% of white evangelicals oppose gay marriage, but in the general population the figure is 61%. In fact, the differences between today's Christian right and the movements led by Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini are greater than the similarities. Hitler was more pagan than Christian. Street violence was a key tactic of Mussolini's Brownshirts; the Christian right has focused on nonviolent demonstrations outside U.S. abortion clinics and on changing laws at the ballot box. And there's a big difference between supporting laws against gay marriage and putting gays in concentration camps.
And unlike in Weimar Germany, there are no Communists in America declaring the evangelical movement the last gasp of bourgeois capitalism that must first "run its course" before the revolution comes. Here, talk of the impending threat of the Dobson Brigade is as loud as talk of the impending threat of Hitler was muted when he methodically ground his way to electoral victory in the Reichstag. Also, there was no palpable "thumping" of National Socialism until Dresden.
Those who fail to study history are doomed to use it as a caricature for fashionable political purposes.
"Police state" is not a term one wishes to apply to post-Saddam Iraq, and yet policing is exactly what the strained sinews of state will be tasked with for the foreseeable future. Time reports on the tepid "surge" option:
There is a big debate about how many troops would be needed to execute that mission successfully. Some experts think 100,000 might be the right number; Keane and Kagan say it can be done with 35,000, which is about the limit that would be available. It does not appear that the White House will be sending that many.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't a difference of opinion amounting to 65,000 soliders seem less than confidence-inspiring? That's like saying the safest place to land a crashing plane is on top of that mountain or at the bottom of that ravine. Add to this the fact that almost half of the Keane-Kagan figure is what the president actually plans to send to Iraq and you've got pre-production on We Don't Know What the Fuck We're Doing: The Legend Continues.
Any temporary military proposal at this point -- let alone one vetted endlessly in international magazines, which the Sunni insurgency and Al-Qaeda at least glance at once in a while -- is unlikely to yield long-term stability in Iraq. What is needed most is change at the political and civil levels. We might start by cracking down on roving Shiite goon squads and arresting those known to be involved in them; publicizing names of suspected criminals and mass murderers and offering hefty rewards for information leading to their capture; employing a zero-tolerance policy on working for the government by day and setting off car bombs by night. These changes will of course require an alteration in policing methods and greater expertise as to how to integrate the military into urban and rural infrastructures. How daunting is such a mission?
At present there are 50,000-plus American troops stationed in Western Europe, 2,000 in Bosnia, and 20,000 Marines in Okinawa. Would some of the personnel from these garrisons -- which, with the possible exception of Bosnia, today seem otiose -- be better suited for colonial civil service in Iraq, knowing, as they must, how to navigate native populations? (The idea of "plainclothes" soldiers is not that outlandish, particularly when informants put their lives on the line by being seen with Americans in broad daylight. That so many career officers have never seen combat in historical theatres of war is not such a deterrant to their usefulness in a raging one: They've spent ample time learning the social concomitants -- people skills, for lack of a better term -- of permanent duty abroad.)
The administration has the right idea about beefing up the Iraqi job market and deploying "Provincial Reconstruction Teams," which consist of State Department officials charged with assigning construction contracts to Iraqi companies and helping rebuild blasted-out civil facilities. This should have been done three ago.
But a reform of central authority such that it actually looks, well, authoritative, is what's needed most right now. Even before an addition of more feet on the ground in Iraq, we should make sure the ones already there know the right beat to be marching to. Nothing outlined in the "surge" proposal indicates we do.
The estimable John Burns gives a comprehensive account of what happened in the days and hours leading up to Saddam's lynching. The key question that emerges from this five-page chronologue is: Why did Zalmay Khalilzad and Gen. Casey choose last week, of all times, to take their vacations? They were the only Americans capable of dissuading Maliki from going forward with the execution, and yet both men seemed eager to quit their posts -- their resignations and replacements were announced this week. But couldn't they have held out a bit longer, especially with word that the "appeals" process fell somewhere between a rubber stamping and a steamroll?
Khalilzad's 11th-hour phone call to Maliki to forestall the hanging was meek and pro forma, whereas had he been in Baghdad to negotiate face to face... A Sunni neocon's intervention might have been effective.
More disturbing still is the following:
Mr. Khalilzad had suggested that the Iraqis get a written ruling approving the execution from Midhat al-Mahmoud, the chief judge of Iraq’s Supreme Judicial Council; Mr. Mahmoud refused. Then, the Iraqis played their trump card: a call to high-ranking Shiite clerics in the holy city of Najaf, asking for approval from the marjaiya, the supreme authority in Iraqi Shiism. When his officials reported that they had it, Mr. Maliki signed a letter authorizing the hanging. It was 11:45 p.m
.
Now death warrants are being notarized by Shiite clerics. How can anyone maintain that this grim proceeding had even a veil of juridical legitimacy?
The history of Catholic opposition to Communism has been greatly exaggerated. "How many divisions has the pope," Stalin, in one of his frequent fits of hubrisitic stupidity, once remarked, thus arming half a century's worth of cold warriors -- and the now the mournful obituarists of Pope John Paul II -- with their favorite irony. Never mind that Communism had begun rotting from within well before the Georgian monster regurgitated a small fraction of the blood he'd sucked out of Russia and Eastern Europe. The best leftist response to the triumphalist credit still being awarded to les clercs for bringing down the Berlin Wall came from the brilliant Marxist historian Perry Anderson, who, tweaking Timothy Garton Ash, asked, "How many masses has Kremlin?"
Graham Greene split his loyalties between Rome and Moscow and may have once been approached by a charismatic whorehouse-frequenting KGB agent in Estonia to do some "dry work" in England and elsewhere. The same liturgical socialism infected, to varying degree, the literary theorist Terry Eagleton, who remains fond enough of the totalitarian mindset to place the crown of thorns upon the heads of Al-Qaeda and compare suicide bombers to Rosa Luxemburg in the pages of the Guardian.
I bring this up because it appears that Holy Mother Church is intent on replaying a miniature in-house version of the Hitler-Stalin pact. The divine election of a pope who was once a member of the Nazi Youth was first; now comes the news that the Archbishop of Warsaw was an informant for Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa (S.B.), Poland's Communist secret police apparat:
Archbishop Wielgus acknowledged today that in 1978, he signed a cooperation statement with the secret police — under pressure, he said, from a “brutal intelligence officer” — when he was seeking permission to travel to Munich, Germany. He insisted that the only cooperation he ever gave was to inform the secret police of his agenda during foreign academic meetings and to promise not to take part in anti-Communist activities.
“That was my moment of weakness,” he wrote in his statement today.
The documents published by Rzeczpospolita and other newspapers suggest a much greater role for Father Wielgus. They indicated that he was recruited by the S.B. more than a decade earlier — in 1967, when he was a philosophy student at the University of Lublin in eastern Poland. It cited other documents in which the S.B. claimed Father Wielgus gave them information about activities at the university, where he later taught medieval philosophy.
The newspapers claimed that some of the documents refer to Father Wielgus by the code names Grey, Adam and Adam Wysocki. They said he received training from the S.B. and was rewarded for his collaboration with a grant to study in Munich.
The "president-for-life," who recently held a Potemkin election in Egypt to show that his title is more than an honorific, thinks Saddam Hussein's execution merits the m-word:
No-one will ever forget the way in which Saddam was executed - they turned him into a martyr, and the problems in Iraq remained.
Normally, one wouldn't demur -- assuming one were pro-death penalty -- against such an act of state undertaken on a religious holiday. (Least among the objections to the bloody Yom Kippur War was that it occurred in the midst of the Hebrew Day of Atonement). But offing Saddam on Eid al-Adha, the Sunni holiday that marks the end of the hajj, was a matter of tribalist revenge-taking masquerading as condign punishment. The calendar date only rubbed things in more. It also contravened Iraq's constitution, which prohibits capital killings during holy periods, and mandates the signatures of the president and two vice-presidents before such killings can occur. (These offices represent all three ethno-religious factions in Iraq and so the provision is designed as a check on exactly what transpired.) Now add to this the shouts of "Muqtada, Mudtada" just before the trapdoor opened, a hosanna which may not have riled Saddam as much as it did the Sunni minority that is daily targeted for mutilation and execution by Mahdi riffraff.
So now one is faced with the appalling fact that a still-living Middle Eastern dictator trumps the "official" word from the United States on this single point of humanity and justice. Well done indeed.
Focusing on one example to symbolize the stunning failure of the Bush administration's plan for a post-Saddam Iraq is like lancing a single boil on a leper. Still, we all have our favorites. Mine is the following.
Sometime in 2003, it occurred to the CPA proconsul Paul Bremer that however much the Kurds had aided the toppling of the Ba'ath and any American-led effort to rebuild Iraq, they were not going to be allowed to maintain a standing "sectarian" militia of their own. This meant that the peshmerga, the well-armed and well-trained Kurdish army, would have to go. Bremer appointed a consultant from the RAND Corporation to negotiate its disbandment with Masour Barzani of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Irbil. (Masour is son of Kurdistani Democratic Party's leader Masoud Barzani, whose father was to the idea of an independent Kurdistan what George Washington was to America.)
"Look, we'll let you have mountain rangers, a rapid reaction force and a counterterrorism strike force, but no Kurdish army," said the RAND consultant, proceeding to explain the problems of martial division in a federated democracy to a man who'd helped hold together the only democratic polity Iraq had ever known up to then.
Keep in mind that the peshmerga were for twelve years, along with the U.S. and British fighter jets patrolling the No Fly Zone, the only line of defense between the Kurds and Saddam's forces of genocide. After a few seconds' deliberation, Barzani agreed. Hand-shakes and wiped brows all around. But just as the RAND consultant was boarding the plane that would shuttle him back to the Green Zone, it occurred to him to ask what the Kurdish translation of "mountain rangers, rapid reaction force and counterrorism strike force" might be. With a wry grin on his face, Barzani replied: "peshmerga."
This story is recounted by Peter Galbraith in his excellent book The End of Iraq to illustrate the incompetence, arrogance and cynicism of the American custodians of Iraq, who not only failed to earn the confidence of the Iraqi people but wasted no opportunity to alienate our staunchest allies among them. (Keep in mind also betraying the Kurds is something of a Washington specialty -- "peshmerga" means "those who face death," just to give an indication of the grim stoicism required of this people -- and so asking them to lay down their arms just as they'd be freed from fascism was an especially nice insult.)
Ken Pollack has a readable potted history of the reconstruction and its discontents at the Brookings Institution, most of it a retreading of old arguments and second thoughts that now have become third and fourth thoughts. But the later paragraphs reflect current events:
In conventional warfare, the goal is to go on the offensive, take the fight to the enemy, focus on killing "bad guys," and put the enemy on the defensive. In unconventional warfare--including counterinsurgency and stability operations--the only way to win is to do the exact opposite: remain mostly on the defensive, focus on protecting "good guys," and create safe spaces in which political and economic reform/reconstruction can take place--thereby undermining popular support for the "bad guys." The U.S. military, and particularly the U.S. Army, has never liked unconventional warfare. The small number of officers who understood it were typically relegated to the special forces and rarely ever rose to prominent command positions. Those who did rise to the top were those steeped in the principles of conventional warfare, which Army ideology insisted was universally applicable, including in unconventional operations, even when centuries of history made it abundantly clear that this was not the case.
[...]
To make matters worse, not until 2006 did the U.S. military even acknowledge that their strategic concept--and tactics--in Iraq were not working. Despite numerous criticisms from both inside and outside the armed forces arguing that a conventional approach to the unconventional mission of securing Iraq was bound to fail--and was manifestly failing--the military refused to give up its strategy. Only at the start of 2006, when Lieutenant General Peter Chiarelli arrived in Baghdad to take over the corps command there, did the U.S. military command in Baghdad devise a true counterinsurgency/stability operations approach to dealing with the security problems of the country. This effort began with what became known as "the Baghdad Security Plan," which was designed to concentrate large numbers of Iraqi and Coalition troops in Baghdad and employed the proper tactics to secure the capital and allow political and economic reconstruction efforts to begin to take hold there.
It was a brilliant plan, the first that could have actually accomplished what it set out to, but when it was finally approved in the summer of 2006, Chiarelli was given only about 70,000 mostly Iraqi troops--and then mostly Iraqi police, the worst of their security services--not the roughly 125,000 that he would have needed (and reportedly requested). Moreover, Chiarelli's plan called for a fully integrated military and civilian chain of command with adequate numbers of civilian personnel to match their American military and Iraqi civilian counterparts--two more things sorely lacking in Iraq from the very beginning--but none of this was forthcoming. As of this writing, the Baghdad security plan appeared to be enjoying some real success in those pockets of Baghdad where mixed formations of Iraqi and American units were present, but accomplishing little everywhere else. It too seems likely to fail as a result of the too little, too late approach Washington has taken toward the reconstruction of Iraq from start to finish.
When Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet poet who gave the world "Babi Yar" ("There is no Jewish blood that's blood of mine, / But, hated with a passion that's corrosive / Am I by antisemites like a Jew. / And that is why I call myself a Russian!") was touring Cambridge University, he struck up an unlikely friendship with the august curmudgeon-in-residence Kingsley Amis, whom I mention here about once a week. Amis would later protest, after oscillating between personal affinity and political morality, awarding Yevtushenko the Chair of Poetry at Oxford Unversity due to the poet's coarsened rhetoric about his fellow Russian liberals and his subsequent transformation into a paid stooge of the Kremlin. But during that Cambridge jaunt, Yevtushenko asked Amis, "You believe in God?" to which the ex-Communist author of Lucky Jim replied, "Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him."
For those who still have trouble deciding between atheism and belief, active, convulsive hatred of the Almighty -- perhaps accompanied by your best "crazy peasant face" -- might serve as a healthy in-between position. Ron Rosenbaum (fan of Snarksmith!) says I.B. Singer founded a whole career in Yiddish literature on what he (Rosenbaum) terms "anti-theism." A new biography of Singer has just been published and in it you'll find these and other theodiciously delicious tidbits:
“I have written a little book which I call Rebellion and Prayer, or The True Protester. It is still in Yiddish, untranslated. It was written at the time of the Holocaust. It is a bitter little book, and I doubt that I will ever publish it. Yes, I am a troubled person …. If I could, I would picket the Almighty with a sign: ‘Unfair to Life.’”
There's a phrase from Auden's "Spain 1937" that I don't think I'll ever read the same way again: "Nipped off from Africa." The great poet of twentieth century political disillusionment was symbolizing continental shift ("soldered so crudely to inventive Europe" is what was done to the African fragment) but now we can associate another sort of nipping with the land of gazelles, Serengeti sunsets, and epidemic retroviruses:
A Ugandan paper reports that last year of 2,500 people circumcised at various clinics, half of them were male adults, compared to less than 400 in 2005.
And to think Haile Selassie's Solomonic iconography in Ethiopia used to be the be-all of Africa's love affair with Jewish custom...
The real question is: Will HIV-averse, bell-end dongs become selected for in the future without the need of circumcision? All the moyels in the room feel like humans after dolphins develop posable thumbs. "Oh shit," they say.
I didn't know until the venerable Harry's Place mentioned it that greying glam rocker-cum-U2 producer Brian Eno is co-sponsoring the latest attempt at a "boycott" of Israeli culture. (He joins the even hoarier British novelist John Berger, who announced the intention in the Guardian a few weeks ago.) Eno's best song is "Needle In the Camel's Eye," which has, to my stardust-starved mind, very little to do with the odds of rich men getting into heaven, though one nonetheless appreciates the violent inversion of Biblical metaphor.
Anyway, the odds of a Palestinian intellectual speaking out against a stupid and highly suspect attempt to isolate all arts and letters from the Jewish state, and speaking out against it in the Jewish Chroncile, seemed pretty slim. Until now. Here is Samir El-Youssef (the Chroncile is pay-only, but HP helpfully reprints the op-ed):
Many Israeli writers, artists and scholars have, in various ways, supported negotiations and peace. Some have bravely embraced the Palestinian right of self-determination and statehood — and been branded “bleeding hearts” and “Arab lovers”.
To boycott such individuals would certainly not force the Israeli government to loosen its grip on the Palestinians. The Israeli government is not in the habit of listening to “bleeding hearts” and “Arab lovers”. Nor would it help Palestinians to face up to the reality of their internal conflicts. If anything, it would only weaken a constituency which, more than any other in Israel, has been committed to the cause of peaceful co-existence.
Good for Samir. The biggest irony of anti-Israel activism has long been that the best of it comes from within Israel itself. (A smaller one would be that hard-core leftists, forgetting their Marxism all over again, confuse the state with the people and come off sounding anti-Semitic, which is what quite a lot of them of course are.)
Samir's point is especially well taken now that the grim innuendo that Jews are able to "silence" all criticism of their behavior has once again found a foothold in U.S. foreign policy circles and Tony Judt's outbox. (To cite just one example of flouting the "not in front of the goyim" rule in the land of milk and honey, the great Israel Shahak would have had Abe Foxman holding self-pity tele-a-thons on PBS had Shahak written about the dark history of Judaism on these shores.)
Not sure whether "Arab lover" or "bleeding heart" is worse than "Palestinian Uncle Tom," but you can bet your bottom dollar that that is what brave Samir will be called, probably behind his back, by Peace Now types suffering from a with-us-or-against-us mentality.
"Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman who's interested in Mozart, James Joyce and sodomy." Woody Allen more or less got it right decades ahead of it not feeling so wrong anymore. Though now it's not just the cognoscenti grabbing ankles:
The survey, released last year, showed that 38.2 percent of men between 20 and 39 and 32.6 percent of women ages 18 to 44 engage in heterosexual anal sex. Compare that with the CDC’s 1992 National Health and Social Life survey, which found that only 25.6 percent of men 18 to 59 and 20.4 percent of women 18 to 59 indulged in it.
But have you read Toni Bentley's The Surrender? Is the question. That I'm asking.
Apparently, anal sex is more frequent among older, married couples, which only reaffirms my take on hazards of early marriage. Oh, and now more men are getting rectum-rammed -- or "pegged" -- by their all-too-willing female penetrators and claiming the act wards off prostate cancer. So does Propecia and you might actually grow hair with that.
Courtesy of New York magazine, which won't be reporting next week that ingesting semen reduces the occurrence of ovarian cysts.
Where was this content when I guest-edited Wonkette and might have kept my first (paid) blogging job?
Add to the list of strategic errors in this war the entirely understandable -- but nevertheless catastrophic -- misidentification of Ahmad Chalabi as the wily amoral mastermind. Apparently a mathematics PhD from U of C does not a genius make. Rather, the party we've consistently underestimated has been Muqtada al-Sadr, who has proven to be less Al Capone and more Kaiser Soze.
It is an abiding paradox of contemporary Iraq that the Mahdi Army and the Sunni Arab guerrillas are slaughtering each other daily, but that young Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr (the leader of the Mahdi Army) has a better political relationship with Sunni Arab MPs and leaders than any other Shiite.
During the first siege of Fallujah in late March and April of 2004, Muqtada's Sadrists sent aid convoys to the besieged Sunnis there. In spring of 2005, the Association of Muslim Scholars (hardline Sunni) accused the Shiite Badr Corps paramilitary of having formed anti-Sunni death squads inside the special police commando units of the Ministry of the Interior. This open accusation caused a political crisis between AMS and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Shiite fundamentalist party that sponsors the Badr Corps. It was Muqtada al-Sadr who engaged in shuttle diplomacy to calm the two parties down. He could play this role because he had credibility with both sides.
...
The hardline Salafis in the mold of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the hardline neo-Baathists, both ethnically Sunni, reject this strategy of talking to Muqtada.
In contrast, the National Dialogue Front led by secularist Salih Mutlaq is said to be tight with Muqtada. Some elements of the Sunni fundamentalist Iraqi Accord Front are also relatively friendly to him. A politically connected Iraqi explained all this to me as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
Cole is pessimistic about the possibility of a Sadr-Sunni alliance surviving an American withdrawal, but at this point Sadr, if not the lesser of two evils, is not the most evil of many, many evils. Furthermore, he has monotonically grown his untouchability with every twist and turn of Iraqi events and every attempt allied forces make to disempower or kill him. It seems likely that he could become a new totalitarian autocrat. It also seems possible that he'll become a kingmaker, but that Iraq will remain too multipolar for him to take over, no matter how many rivals he tries to kill. Or, he could be one actor in a bloody civil war. But it seems increasingly likely that the future of Iraq hinges more on what Sadr does than what US forces do.
Wikipedia | Muqtada al-Sadr
Mullah Sabir: Look at the news reports. Half of Afghanistan is again under our control. We have advanced to just outside of Kabul. President Hamid Karzai is a prisoner in his own palace. True, he constantly flies around the world and spends time with the powerful leaders of the West. But in his own country he does not even dare to travel around. You can well imagine that, at our meeting of 33 Taliban chiefs, the mood was anything but sombre.
The Kurdistan Observer offers a terse editorial about the premature execution of the man who made their lives miserable for three long decades:
The hanging of Saddam for the Dujail killings will go down in history as a major setback for Kurdistan. The premature execution will deal a severe blow to Kurdish aspirations for justice, freedom, and independence. The opportunity to record in detail the atrocities of the Arab regime in Southern Kurdistan is now in doubt. Without a Saddam trial, the chances of documenting the genocide in court are now diminished and with it the prospects of having this documentation as an internationally recognized legal basis for an independent Kurdistan free of Arab oppression.
An alarming possibility for the rush to hang Saddam might be that the execution had to be carried out as a milestone to set the stage for George Bush to declare a new phase and direction for Iraq. In this new direction, the main goal will be for an Iraq that is simply able to govern and sustain itself. All other aims including aspirations for self-governance in Kurdistan will go by the wayside. So, as we mark another failure for Kurdish desires for freedom and liberty, all we can hope for is that we are better prepared to avoid blunders in the bumpy road ahead in the year 2007.
Hitch actually called the rush to snuff part of a Shia-orchestrated "coup d'etat" (his term). It may well be, as I heard one legal expert tasked with training the Iraqi magistrates put it, that Saddam's trial was an exercise in serious jurisprudence despite its outward appearance as a circus. However, there's no arguing that another major opportunity was lost in not having a tyrant answer for his worst crimes. Slobodan Milosevic denied the world the pleasure of hearing a "guilty" verdict, as did Augusto Pinochet and Saparmurat Niyazov, but Saddam was physically healthy enough to carry on a years-long adjudication of his dictatorship, which would have forced those who now mourn Iraq's descent into chaos and carnage to realize that the preceeding conditions were not the stuff of kite-flying desert idylls. An early image of the waste and recklessness that has characterized so much of this war was one of artifact robbery and vandalism, the physical erasure of Iraq's history. What a shame that with the simple snap of a rope we should meet the sequel to this erasure three years on.
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.}
This morning, Interstate 93 northbound was temporarily closed until police could detonate a mysterious package tucked under a Charlestown ramp's girder.
The ship runs on Max Blumenthal's partisan rage. But hey, the last time Richard Dreyfuss was in the water, things turned out peachy.
It's very hopeful for someone who trafficks in rational skepticism to make the following 
When Roy Jenkins, one of the four founders of the Social Democratic Party of Britain and lately yet another acclaimed biographer of Winston Churchill, was asked his opinion about the covert funding of 
Michael Oren's new book, Power, Faith and Fantasy, charts the history of American involvement in the Middle East, an involvement almost as old as America itself. Thomas Jefferson may have had his own conspicuous problems with domestic slavery, but he was a stalwart abolitionist when it came to protecting U.S. merchant vessels off the shores of modern-day Libya. These dirigibles were frequently plundered, and their crews held as chattel, by Islamic Barbary pirates acting on Koranic prescription. (This seldom remembered episode of Ottoman rule gives the lie to anthropologists and post-colonial historians who claim that a tendency for belligerence and slave-holding does not cut evenly between East and West.) Yet American resolve to take a muscular approach toward sharia marauders was never -- surprise, surprise -- a sure thing. Here is Hillel Halkin in Commentary:
Shall I go out on a limb and say that Nick Cohen's What's Left?, which I haven't read yet because it hasn't been published in the states yet, might be the most important polemic you'll come by this year? 
Maybe it's just the camera angle, but Ari Fleisher's face seems to have magically acquired huge jowls in the few short years since Bush's first question-deflector burnt out. (Old Ari at right, new below, center.) His consulting company must be literally riding the gravy train. Or maybe the stress finally broke him after he was out of the job. I wonder what he'd look like without the slimming black suit.
Sullivan made a vague allusion to the mystery of mathematics, but Godel's achievement was anything but mysterious. It was a thorough debunking of positivism, the early 20th century philosophical movement that took empiricism to a radical and wholly absurd level by stipulating that nothing that isn't tangible exists. His incompleteness theorem was a confirmation of a priori truth -- the kind of Nature Spinoza spoke of -- not of religion. And even though Godel's elegant proof specialized in paradox and sinuous self-referentiality, it was perfectly traceable according to the known laws of logic. By definition, a theorem is only as good as the next genius who comes along to demonstrate how bogus it really is. Would that religion said, "this may all be nonsense, wait until we learn more." 
With all due respect to my coeditor, I'm going to have to step in and disagree with him regarding Harris' meaning. (Mike's post 
Now his literacy is being threatened by his piety:
Ken Mondschein 
My favorite third wave feminist (actually, the only third wave feminist with whom I'm on nodding terms) gives me even more reason to love her with this enjoyable review of Patricia Marx's new novel. The piece also poses as a less successful take-down of Hitch's "women aren't funny" thesis:
Sam Harris 
Now I'm using the King's English with bullshit: not as in worthless or disreputable, and not as just an adjectival grunt of disapprobation modifying the word reactionary. I mean it as in false. 
We didn't do a good job of that either. Though perhaps now the stoppers' favorite example of imperial plunder can be put in better 
The stupidity of Wesley Clark's recent statement to a Huffington Post journo about "
If you haven't seen Pan's Labyrinth yet, you should before it wins its Oscar and then the lines get long again.
Kurdish peshmerga, who were being dispatched to Baghdad to quell the Sunni-Shia fratricide, are 
On one hand, the Kagan is arguing that the surge will work because we'll be pacifying 
I really can't think of anyone I'd rather read on the post-millennial White tsar and the new Russia than Perry Anderson. Reach for the dictionary all you want on terms like Gleichschaltung (Nazi Germany's version of "synergy": how great is that?) -- there's no arguing that the Marxist UCLA historian has got one of the most lapidary styles now gracing the people's republic of letters. His latest book Spectrum -- one essay on Hayek, Schmitt, Strauss and Oakeshott (Andrew Sullivan's got nothing on Perry here) -- is a triumph of academic scholarship doubling as real literature. Anderson also wrote what is, for my money, the ablest %20(archive).jpg)
During the cold war, one of the common mistakes foreign policy wonks and Sovietologists made was to filter the adversary's thinking through their own cultural matrix. This was termed "mirror-imaging." It was comprehensible, according to this flawed logic, that the Russians could be so steeped in the dogma of Marxism-Leninism that they might act in ways we ourselves would not given the identical vantage point or set of circumstances. A lot of revisionist spadework has been performed since the Berlin Wall came down suggesting that the beetle-browed comrades in the Kremlin were cool-headed pragmatists after all, simply keeping up appearances with that tough talk about international revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Yet there was Andrei Gromyko and Eduard Shevardnadze, years later, maintaining that, actually, Communist expansion was always on the agenda. The paranoia that the Reds were coming may have been hysterically exploited, but at bottom there was something perfectly legitimate about it. It was only when the Soviet state became unaffordable, and one of the few cool-headed pragmatists became its premier, that doctrine took the flame before reality and World War III was narrowly averted.
Now here's the kind of talk we blues staters don't like to hear from Chappaqua cowboys:
On the agenda for the Venezuelan president's new term:
After correctly predicting that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, 
New York magazine outdoes itself this week with a potted history of 
Are Christian fundamentalists who believe only in the separation of church and heaven worthy of the term "fascist"? According to Chris Hedges, they are. But more than that, they're analogous to the Nazis in 1933, poised with as much lethal determination to rise to power through democratic means. Right? 
"Police state" is not a term one wishes to apply to post-Saddam Iraq, and yet policing is exactly what the strained sinews of state will be tasked with for the foreseeable future. Time 
The estimable John Burns gives a 
The history of Catholic opposition to Communism has been greatly exaggerated. "How many divisions has the pope," Stalin, in one of his frequent fits of hubrisitic stupidity, once remarked, thus arming half a century's worth of cold warriors -- and the now the mournful obituarists of Pope John Paul II -- with their favorite irony. Never mind that Communism had begun rotting from within well before the Georgian monster regurgitated a small fraction of the blood he'd sucked out of Russia and Eastern Europe. The best leftist response to the triumphalist credit still being awarded to les clercs for bringing down the Berlin Wall came from the brilliant Marxist historian Perry Anderson, who, tweaking Timothy Garton Ash, asked, "How many masses has Kremlin?"
The "president-for-life," who recently held a Potemkin election in Egypt to show that his title is more than an honorific, thinks Saddam Hussein's execution merits the 
Focusing on one example to symbolize the stunning failure of the Bush administration's plan for a post-Saddam Iraq is like lancing a single boil on a leper. Still, we all have our favorites. Mine is the following.
When Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the Soviet poet who gave the world "Babi Yar" ("There is no Jewish blood that's blood of mine, / But, hated with a passion that's corrosive / Am I by antisemites like a Jew. / And that is why I call myself a Russian!") was touring Cambridge University, he struck up an unlikely friendship with the august curmudgeon-in-residence Kingsley Amis, whom I mention here about once a week. Amis would later protest, after oscillating between personal affinity and political morality, awarding Yevtushenko the Chair of Poetry at Oxford Unversity due to the poet's coarsened rhetoric about his fellow Russian liberals and his subsequent transformation into a paid stooge of the Kremlin. But during that Cambridge jaunt, Yevtushenko asked Amis, "You believe in God?" to which the ex-Communist author of Lucky Jim replied, "Well, yes, but it's more that I hate him."
There's a phrase from Auden's "Spain 1937" that I don't think I'll ever read the same way again: "Nipped off from Africa." The great poet of twentieth century political disillusionment was symbolizing continental shift ("soldered so crudely to inventive Europe" is what was done to the African fragment) but now we can associate another sort of nipping with the land of gazelles, Serengeti sunsets, and 
I didn't know until the venerable Harry's Place mentioned it that greying glam rocker-cum-U2 producer Brian Eno is co-sponsoring the latest attempt at a "boycott" of Israeli culture. (He joins the even hoarier British novelist John Berger, who announced the intention in the Guardian a few weeks ago.) Eno's best song is "Needle In the Camel's Eye," which has, to my stardust-starved mind, very little to do with the odds of rich men getting into heaven, though one nonetheless appreciates the violent inversion of Biblical metaphor.
"Thirtyish academic wishes to meet woman who's interested in Mozart, James Joyce and sodomy." Woody Allen more or less got it right decades ahead of it not feeling so wrong anymore. Though now it's not just the cognoscenti grabbing ankles:
Add to the list of strategic errors in this war the entirely understandable -- but nevertheless catastrophic -- misidentification of Ahmad Chalabi as the wily amoral mastermind. Apparently a mathematics PhD from U of C does not a genius make. Rather, the party we've consistently underestimated has been Muqtada al-Sadr, who has proven to be less Al Capone and more Kaiser Soze.
Who reads only the Koran?
The Kurdistan Observer offers a terse editorial about the premature execution of the man who made their lives miserable for three long decades:
