My friend James Kirkchik reminds us of the real blood-for-oil superpower, China, which, because of all the unpleasantness in the Middle East, has been conducting its business with impunity:

When Hu visited al-Bashir in Khartoum, all he had to offer the genocidal leader on the subject of Darfur was a polite request that the Sudanese president play a more "constructive role in realizing peace." Just days earlier, a Sudanese government official had accused the United States of "dismantling the Sudanese government from within" and trying to spur "international pressure on Khartoum through human rights institutions and by bringing into the country elements opposed to the government." As long as the Sudanese keep their oil spigots open, they will continue to reap Chinese rewards: During his visit, Hu bestowed on al-Bashir a $13 million interest-free loan to construct a new presidential palace and cancelled $70 million in debt. In return, China receives 60 percent of Sudan's oil output and is the country's largest foreign investor.

Africa's New Hegemon

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The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among it's desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

Written in indignant response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

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Philip Weiss has been outspoken in his support of Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace not Apartheid at MondoWeiss, the New York Observer blog, so it should come as no surprise that he's found a new sponsor in The American Conservative, the in-flight magazine of all triumphantly domestic-bound air travel.

The fun with this rag comes when you find yourself playing neocon Mad Libs with its pieces on the dread cabal in Washington. Daniel McCarthy, one of the editors, once actually devoted pages and pages to exposing the unlikely Catholic contingent of this tenebrous ex-Trotskyist political movement, which we all know is controlled by the Shintos.

Anyhoo, here's Weiss on Jimmy the Brave:

Some of the fury hides an old-fashioned power struggle. For the first time since the State of Israel was created in 1948, a prominent American politician has publicly taken up the cause of the Arabs, describing Israel’s practices as oppressive. Such voices are common in Europe and in Israel itself. But they are uncommon here, where staunchly Zionist voices routinely assert that Israeli and American interests are identical, a view uniformly reflected in our politics and policies. The Carter groundswell seems to represent a real political threat to that claim. A recent batch of letters to the Houston Chronicle ran three-to-one in Carter’s favor. “Can’t Israel defend itself without subjecting all Palestinians in the occupied territories to such shameful conditions?” one asked. “Nothing justifies treating an entire group of people as if they were second-class human beings.”

If you take one thing away from this fawning tribute to a man who was never concerned with human rights as president, and who should therefore be disassociated from the worthy struggle for Palestinian enfranchisement, it is this: Weiss mercifully concedes that criticism of Israel is strong in Israel, which it is. It's also pretty strong in the U.S., if muted by a "not in front of the goyim" rule, which only gets reinforced when pious and noble "statesmen" write sentences like these:

"It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Roadmap for Peace are accepted by Israel."

Oh, I know he's apologized for it and said it'll get rejiggered in future editions. But such laziness of thought and morality, which have already exerted their influence at the top of the New York Times bestsellers list, are characteristic of the man who thinks Israel ought to be governed by more messianic-religious dogma, not less. And who encouraged Saddam Hussein to attack Iran in 1980, thereby inciting one of the bloodiest and most deadly wars in modern Middle Eastern history (yes, including the one that's on your mind). And who claimed that the people of North Korea really do love their Dear Leader. I could go on...One doesn't have to be an apologist for Israel to see that Carter is a lousy champion for anything.

Cuddly and fatuous though he may seem, shall we find a more cuddly or fatuous vignette rendered in print this week?

I soon found myself with 18 kids in a circle. Most were Jewish, ranging from liberal to progressive. Fearing anger and dispute, Danielle Sunberg, the group’s chairman, had brought a stuffed teddy bear. The rule was that you could only talk when you were holding the bear. When you were finished, you could throw it to someone else.

For the second or third time that day, I was surprised. A couple of students were sharply critical of Carter, but mostly they were enthused. “The campus is on fire tonight,” one remarked. It was exciting to them that the president had visited. “He was making a mea culpa to the Jewish community. To correct things, to move forward…” said Ari Fertig. They were moved by his largeness of spirit. They felt that they had a positive role to play in this discussion; they wanted to play their part as young people. “We need a few generations to die out,” one said.

[...]

The teddy bear was thrown this way and that until at the end it was passed around the circle for closing statements. When it came to me, I said that I hoped my generation’s attitudes died out and made way for theirs.

Evangelical reactionaries are said to be eagerly awaiting the return of the messiah, who has augured his material depot to be the exact spot where he skedaddled the last time. As the Buchananite Right's preferred chosen, Weiss awaits the day when a fusty old Jewry (with its bothersome long memory of the Holocaust and its wariness of continued genocidal fantasy) are all dead and buried and the kaffiyeh-wearing campus activists inherit the earth.

Hallelujah.

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New at Jewcy, and already burning up major bandwidth: "Is Kevin MacDonald Right About the Jews?", a dialogue between Joey Kurtzman (and what does he know, silly Galicianer that he is) and NRO's John Derbyshire:

Kevin MacDonald has been described as the “Marx of the Anti-Semites.” Google around the slimier regionsLucky Lindy: His American nativism lives onLucky Lindy: His American nativism lives on of the web and you’ll see that his trilogy of books on Jews—A People that Shall Dwell Alone, Assimilation and its Discontents, and Culture of Critique—is celebrated in the nastiest Jew-hating environs on the net. And MacDonald himself is a hardcore American nativist in the Charles Lindbergh mold.

None of which necessarily means that MacDonald’s academic arguments are wrong. He's a tenured professor of psychology, his theories have received some support from well-respected colleagues, and there’s no getting around the fact that his Jewish trilogy is as fascinating as it is alarming, a sui generis look at Jewish history and psychology with the help of modern evolutionary theory.

In this week’s Big Question, National Review columnist John Derbyshire and Jewcy’s own Joey Kurtzman mix it up over the question “Is Kevin MacDonald right about the Jews?”

Joey and Derbyshire take the query and launch into a whole host of questions related to Jews and race in America: can a gentile journalist criticize Jews without being “smashed to pieces”? Would Jews benefit from more WASP criticism of Jewish culture? Are politically correct liberals in fact hopelessly racist? And so on.

But all the time, the question lingers: might Kevin MacDonald be right about the Jews?

Is Kevin MacDonald Right About the Jews? | Jewcy.com

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I'm now half past dying to get a hold of Clive James' Cultural Amnesia. Judging by the sample essays that have been appearing daily in Slate, the book is like Eminent Victorians for the 20th century, except that James' subjects were not always so eminent, yet his treatments of them are far more illuminating than anything in Strachey's slender, supposedly epoch-defining volume, which managed to go from one cover to the next without mentioning Benjamin Disraeli or Oscar Wilde.

My only problem with James' latest installment on the Soviet feminist Alexandra Kollontai is that a feminist is not all she was, and the Opposition cited in the epigraph of this essay is not the Opposition she was best known for.

Together with Alexander Shylapnikov, Kollontai was a leading member of the Workers' Opposition, which pitched itself against the more ossifying elements of the Bolshevik regime in the years following the 1917 Revolution and Civil War. The Workers' Opposition represented one of three major factions in the dispute over trade unions. At one extreme were Trotsky and Bukharin, two brilliant and brilliantly flawed Marxist intellectuals who thought the unions -- really the only bona fide sodalities of organized proletarians in all of Russia -- should be incorporated into the machinery of state now that the successful bourgeois revolution was fast accelerating toward the establishment of a socialist political economy. At the other extreme were Shylapnikov and Kollontai who, as Isaac Deutscher wrote in Prophet Armed, the first volume of his magisterial three-part biography of Trotsky:

"denounced Trotky and Lenin as militarizers of labour and promoters of inequality. In quasi-syndicalist fashion they demanded that trade unions, factory committees, and a National Producers' Congress should assume control over the entire economy. While Trotsky argued that the trade unions could not in logic defend the workers against the workers' state, Shlyapnikov and Kollontai already branded the Soviet state as the rampart of a new privileged bureaucracy."

Lenin, as conciliator -- he thought trade unions were acceptable as independent organizations under the close scrutiny and, let's face it, control of the state -- represented the third faction.

This rather puts Kollontai's degeneration into a servant of unblinking Stalinism in more tragic perspective. It also gleams another, more notorious tragedy of a Cassandra of totalitarianism with blood on his hands who later paid for it in kind.

In 1922, Kollontai and Shylapnikov protested at the 11th Party Congress to the Communist International, at which Trotsky acted as prosecutor, upholding the Party's decision to expel the Workers' Opposition. He derided its plaint that Bolshevism was now a handmaiden of bourgeois capitalism and the kulaks, acting in contravention of the interests of the working-class. The founder of the Red Army won the day there, too, but as Deutscher points out with that special Shakespearean irony he made a regular occurrence in his biographical writing, nearly all the anti-Leninists who ranged themselves on the side of the Workers' Opposition would later become members of that other famed Soviet Opposition, the one cited by James and named for that marginalized prophet, now unarmed, who had formerly caused them such grief. Trotsky, too, would appeal to the Communist International when it was once again past the hour of possible victory.

The dialectic is about paradigms containing seeds of their own eventual destruction, and the many failures of Marxist history represent the ultimate tribute to this historical method invented by Marx. But, alas, gnomic observations like these are cold comfort to the betrayed worker and reviled peasant, no less to the brilliant theorist with an ice-pick in his skull.

A look at Soviet feminism. - By Clive James - Slate Magazine

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I'd been waiting for his critique, which is probably worth more than all the rest combined. He cites the too-ignored Kurdish problem posed by the surge:

Until now, US forces in Iraq have been fighting, almost exclusively, the Sunni Arab insurgency. Bush's new plan calls for the US military to initiate operations against the Mahdi Army (and related militias) as well, a measure that could mean US forces will become embroiled in all-out urban warfare throughout Baghdad, a city of more than five million. In addition, the Mahdi Army has members throughout southern Iraq, in the Diyala Governorate northeast of Baghdad, and in Kirkuk. While many Shiites do not support al-Sadr (the Mahdi Army has had armed clashes with the Badr Organization belonging to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution, or SCIRI, one of the two main Shiite parties), the Mahdi Army is a formidable force comprising as many as 60,000 armed men.[2] With Bush ratcheting up the rhetoric against Iran, the Iranian government may see a broad-based Shiite uprising against the coalition as its best insurance against a US military strike. It has every incentive to encourage—and assist—the Mahdi Army in organizing such an uprising. Iran has sufficient influence with Iraqi Shiite groups—including SCIRI—to ensure at least their neutrality in a clash with the Mahdi Army.[3]

The biggest problem with Bush's implementation of the Kagan-Keane plan (and I wish Galbraith sourced his essay better to make certain of that implementation) is in the second sentence of the extract quoted above: engaging the Mahdi Army. The AEI wonks are clear about the need to stay away from Sadr City and purely Shia districts in and around Baghdad, except in the worst-case-scenario that the Madhi attack us first. The reason for this is to secure Sunni confidence in the multinational forces and to rebuild the infrastructure of those areas which are not under the thrall of a sectarian militia, which, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, also provides vital municipal services. (The only way to wean the Shia away from Sadr is through the exertion of soft power; i.e., demonstrating how much greener the grass is over here, where the Americans and fellow Shia in the army are in charge.)

I have a sneaking suspicion, though, that simply advertising a willingness to confront the Mahdi is an end unto itself. Sadr, who may or may not be in Iran, has been notably pacific these last few weeks, even offering the U.S. tips on how to capture schismatic elements of his misfit outfit. Why the gemutlich approach all of a sudden?

Sadr is either a) cooperating with the Iraqi government because he realizes his grip on power is tenuous; b) now working much more covertly with Iran than we'd previously thought (or should ever want him to) in an effort to wedge the mullahs' support for his chief competitor at home, the Badr Organization; c) conducting an internal purge, reminiscent of Stalin and Saddam, to better consolidate his hold on the revolutionary force he hopes will inherit Iraq once the surge is over and all the Americans go home.

Whatever the case, Sadr's recent low-profile is beneficial. Time is not on his side because the more he betrays the messianic principles which have earned him the following of his inner circle, the more he cooperates with the national government and the once-dreaded "occupier," and the more he alienates splinter groups within the Mahdi -- the less influence he'll wield on the entire Shia community.

This is exactly the psychological/political scheme that underwrites the Kagan-Keane plan.

I suggested two weeks ago that there was indeed good reason to believe Sadr had fled to Iran because he'd struck a deal with our side and he to avoid the likely outcome of it -- his own assassination -- once it became known and there commenced a violent power struggle within his own militia. Now comes word that, with the non-arrests of the 30 members of Iraqi Parliament associated with Sadr,

American, Iraqi and British officials are engaged in classified negotiations with his envoys over how to address the Mahdi Army and its Sadr City stronghold, the neighborhood named for Mr. Sadr’s father.

When asked about the talks, Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV, the top military spokesman in Iraq, said the meetings represented a reasonable and appropriate attempt to avoid unnecessary bloodshed.

“Anytime you can find a political solution instead of a military solution,” he said, “it’s always better.”

Now here is Kagan in "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq":

It is not in Sadr’s interest to engage in a full-scale confrontation. His experiences in 2004 in Najaf and Karbala made clear that whatever political damage he might be able to cause through such violence, American forces will decimate his fighters. He cannot afford to lose his warriors. He is not popular within the Iraqi political system and draws much of his political strength from his militia. He also requires a strong military arm to confront the Badr Corps and SCIRI in the fight for control of a post-coalition Iraq. Whatever harm Sadrists might do to coalition hopes for success in Iraq by confronting coalition forces directly, this path would almost certainly be political suicide for Sadr. He is unlikely to choose direct confrontation with the coalition unless it is forced upon him.

So far so good, even if the chubby cleric in black can't be trusted in the long-term.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:35 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Now here's an interesting, if occluded, omission coming from a Tory intellectual of such eminence as Geoffrey Wheatcroft:

Blair himself is now far beyond reason, but Benn and Blears should begin each day by saying 10 times: We did not go to war to depose Saddam Hussein. That was indeed the object of those in Washington who dreamed up the war: destroying Saddam, or regime change for the sake of regime change.

Wheatcroft isn't doing any favors to his antiwar counterparts in the U.S. by averring that the casus belli was from the start the removal of a genocidal tyrant. This makes a hash of all the old excuses for either supporting regime change on the tenuous grounds of national self-interest, or for opposing it for the same reason. What were the old excuses? Iraq represented a clear and imminent threat; this was about a Halliburton oil plunder; Saddam was behind 9/11, or was at least a more gosh-wow scapegoat than the occupant of some undisclosed cave in Waziristan, etc.

Good to know some critics of the Bush-Blair Doctrine were never "deceived" for an instant. Then comes this:

Above all we have the evidence, as John Humphrys reminded Blair last Thursday, of the devastating "Downing Street memo" of July 23 2002. It was written in strictest secrecy for the eyes of Blair and a few close colleagues, summarising the latest meetings in Washington between the heads of British intelligence and their American counterparts.

"There was a perceptible shift in attitude," the memo says in completely unambiguous words. "Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." When they read that last sentence, how on earth can these ministers continue to maintain - how dare they still pretend - that the "intelligence was wholly wrong", as though this was an innocent error?

Leaving aside that Wheatcroft preempts criticism of seeming an old pub bore in the very next paragraph, the word "fixed" in idiomatic British English means "established," as he well knows. And what's so "devastating" about the above admission? Nowhere is it stated the intelligence and facts were presumed wrong or doctored -- only that a preformed plan to get rid of Saddam was being justified by them. Quelle scandale! Perhaps those who argue we should have invaded Saudi Arabia instead would not have searched for a legitimate case for war with intelligence on how the Saudi monarchs fund Wahhabist madrassas and al-Qaeda? Some people are just cowboys like that.

Then again, why play with hypothetical history when the present offers its own convenient thought experiment. Run the following statement through your "visceral reaction" processor:

Military action in Iran is now seen as inevitable. Bush wants to remove the mullahs, through military action, justified by Iran's conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts are being fixed around the policy.

As alarming as it'd be to read such a paragraph in tomorrow's New York Times, would our response be: What conjunction of terrorism and WMD? Of course not, even if it could be shown a year from now that Ahmadinejad was all talk and that those satellite-unfriendly facilities in Natanz and Bushehr were really underground sheep paddocks. Everyone assumes Iran is developing WMD, and it's become increasingly obvious that the Tehran regime is also suborning terrorism in Iraq. How to deal with these violations of international law may be controversial, but the suspicion of guilt with regards to Iran's intentions and activities, is not.

So it wasn't with regards to Iraq back in 2003, when every other country not part of the coalition to remove him thought that Saddam was nonetheless up to no good.

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | This was always a needless, immoral war. Yet still they won't admit it

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I'll be doing this once a day, maybe all month. You'll just have to cope.

Now is the time for the destruction of error.
The chairs are being brought in from the garden,
The summer talk stopped on that savage coast
Before the storms, after the guests and birds:
In sanatoriums they laugh less and less,
Less certain of cure; and the loud madman
Sinks now into a more terrible calm.

The falling leaves know it, the children,
At play on the fuming alkali-tip
Or by the flooded football ground, know it--
This is the dragon's day, the devourer's:
Orders are given to the enemy for a time
With underground proliferation of mould,
With constant whisper and with casual question,
To haunt the poisoned in his shunned house,
To destroy the efflorescence of the flesh,
The intricate play of the mind, enforce
Conformity with the orthodox bone.

You whom I gladly walk with, touch,
Or wait for as one certain of good,
We know, know that love
Needs more than the admiring excitement of union,
More than the abrupt self-confident farewell,
The heel on the finishing blade of grass,
The self-confidence of the falling root,
Needs death, death of the grain, our death,
Death of the old gang; would leave them
In sullen valley where is made no friend,
The old gang to be forgotten in the spring,
The hard bitch and the riding-master,
Stiff underground; deep in clear lake
The lolling bridegroom, beautiful, there.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

And who can argue with Tony Bourdain when there's performance anxiety on the colossal scale of Jeffrey Chodorow's NYT letter decrying Frank Bruni's review of Kobe Club? You know Kobe Club as the latest high concept in East-meets-West Side cuisine. Not that a busted China Grill is anything new. Former Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton remembers well the "full-page ad" revenge scheme:

Among full-page diatribes over negative reviews that I gave was one written as a letter to the owner of the Assembly Steak House, then at Rockefeller Center. It assured the owner how wrong I had been, and was signed, "Your loving father …" A bygone Chinese restaurant, Dish of Salt, sprang for a page declaring that I had never been there, thus creating a huge fight between the Times and me. Such copy was supposed to be vetted and anything that impugned the critic's integrity was to be deleted. The claim that I had never been to the restaurant had slipped by, but an editor's note correcting the ad soon followed. Shelly Fireman, owner of several New York restaurants repeatedly ran half-page ads over my review inviting—or, really, daring—me to review his now-extinct Fiorello on Third Avenue.

And just in case you forgot Bruni's review, here's a sampling: "If Akira Kurosawa hired the Marquis de Sade as an interior decorator, he might end up with a gloomy rec room like this. Will the last samurai to leave please turn on the lights?"

The food fight between Frank Bruni and Jeffrey Chodorow. - By Mimi Sheraton - Slate Magazine

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The Times's Marc Santora reports (via video) from Samarra, where the new security plan is show modest dividends and where the U.S. captain and colonel in charge of monitoring the city say the first thing they need is more time.

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Well, you don't go on about Trotsky and Kristol and the Congress for Cultural Freedom long enough without a polite knock at the door from Commentary.

My review of Kati Marton's new book on the tribe's most eccentric and brilliant exiles is up at this esteemed journal's new online section, contentions, edited by my chum Sam Munson.

Koestler once remarked that the Hungarian people were the loneliest on the continent because of their linguistic and ethnic solitude. To be Jewish and Hungarian meant living in a state of double exile no matter where you washed ashore (in Koestler’s case, Berlin, Mandatory Palestine, Turkmenistan, Catalonia, and London). But even great loneliness sometimes has its rewards. It seems rather likely that because Hungarian is a language virtually impenetrable to outsiders (Edmund Wilson once made a valiant effort to learn it), its brilliant Jewish speakers proved fluent in the ways of eccentric, clubbish secrecy, a characteristic that served bon vivant aristocrats like Sir Alexander Korda as well as it did the wartime scientists at Los Alamos.

contentions ? archive

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Isaac Chotiner at TNR's The Plank gets it exactly right:

The most telling/pathetic moment on a recent episode occurred when Ayaan Hirsi Ali blasted the Bush administration for attacking Afghanistan rather than Saudi Arabia after 9/11 (she apparently misspoke: Hirsi Ali was clearly in favor of military action in Afghanistan, too). Sure enough, the audience burst into applause. Why? I'd like to believe it's because the House of Saud runs an autocratic state and funds terrorism. I think it's a bit more likely, however, that the real reason has to do with America's closness to Saudi Arabia and the Bush family's closeness to the Saudi royals.

Still, you can be sure if Bush had attacked Saudi Arabia after 9/11, the same audience would be clapping for whatever guest was speaking out against the war.

Can't these shows function without a gallery of tiresome fans?

The fans are not just tiresome, they're irretrievably stupid. You could satellite-feed a message from Osama calling the president less than bright and still expect at least a few giggles and claps.

Anything said by Maher with a big-insight-coming-up deepening of timbre is met with yelps and cheers. (I once heard applause after Maher came right out and said Iraq was better off under Saddam Hussein. Even if you agree with this sentiment, and I don't, doesn't it call for solemn appraisal rather than trotter-flapping approbation?)

From that kitsch, CentCom soundstage (how's that for declaring antiwar bona fides?) to the groaning and predictable "New Rules," Maher has made a minor art out of getting people to believe that banality is radical and that he's a martyr for mouthing the opinions of every editorialist in the country. What's really going on here?

Recall that he lost "Politically Incorrect" after 9/11 for saying that Mohammed Atta and company were brave, not cowardly, for killing themselves along with thousands of American civilians. Cowardice, said Maher, is firing rockets from a battleship into some foreign ministry or third world citadel. Even Rush Limbaugh -- normally the point-man on tactical combat and just war theory -- found merit in this contrast.

Ari Fleischer was then asked about Maher's chatter and Fleischer's terrifyingly Orwellian reply (to a different question, by the way) was along the lines of, "We all should watch what we say." This was interpreted by our hero of late night as a genuine threat and the cause for his subsequent unemployment. That ABC, owned by Disney, lost advertising revenue because of Maher of course had nothing to do with the network's decision to lose him, too.

Check out some of his talk not just immediately following this incident, but long after it, and decide for yourself whether Maher's opposition to the administration is rooted entirely in principle and not in vendetta. Then ask yourself if the unfunny comic with a TimesSelect account has spent the last few years battling a bygone White House flack as a distraction from the real hunt for Mickey Mouse.

The Plank

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I know. I'm going to go on being a complete and utter bore about this, but having people remember who the hell you were and what good you may have done in the world after you've turned 100 is worth the price of boredom. Also, these bits are quite funny:

Auden once said to me: "Every woman wants to play Hamlet, just as every man wants to play Lady Bracknell." He often talked about Wilde, and clearly thought a lot about his fate. Ansen records him asking: "Did you see The Importance of Being Earnest? It's an extraordinarily good play. It's about nothing at all, which is what makes it so good. Lady Windermere's Fan has some social references, which makes it not so good. But The Importance of Being Earnest isn't a bit dated. The trouble with Shaw's plays is that they're all brain and no body, which isn't good for the stage. There may not be any body in Earnest, but at least there are clothes. Obviously you have to see it - you can't just read it." And in the next sentence he tells us that "Lear won't do on the stage". And in the one after that: "Wilde, after all, isn't important as a writer - he couldn't write at all - but as a behaver."

Here is Auden, at tea, in company, in 1947. Someone asks him what he thinks of Robinson Jeffers. Auden: "I don't express myself on people who are still living. I only talk about people who've been dead a long time." A little later someone asks: "Why is your work so obscure while Spender's is so clear?" Auden: "I don't talk about things like that." What he means is that he will not be trapped into making invidious remarks about his contemporaries in public (exactly what I tried to get him to do 20 years later).

In private, it was a different matter. Here he is on Scott Fitzgerald: "I've been reading This Side of Paradise. Chester gave it to me. Those long conversations between the Princeton man and his girl. One simply can't believe that he cared for her in the least. All American writing gives the impression that Americans don't care for girls at all. What the American male really wants is two things: he wants to be blown by a stranger while reading a newspaper and he wants to be fucked by his buddy when he's drunk. Everything else is society." One hardly likes to question so definite an insight.

A voice of his own | By genre | Guardian Unlimited Books

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Peter Nicholson, the poetry and culture editor of 3 Quarks Daily, sent me his lovely commemorative poem on Auden:

'Who,' the inquisitive will ask
'Was he?' A writer who spoke honestly
Of his time and character
On this abrasive satellite,
Acknowledging the muck
Words can make whole.

Don't get uptight
Or too plastered
As you prime your pals—
Chester, Igor, Rhoda;
Think of this poor planet,
Rotten with bad sorts
And horrors greater than any
Ever imagined before.

Click here to read the whole thing.

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Tim Noah wonders, based on Alexander Cockburn's Rumsfeld bio, if Dubya knows anything about the intellectuals in charge of American foreign policy.

It's possible that Bush fils was not asking Bush père to define a term whose meaning was unfamiliar to him, but rather inviting a ruminative conversation about the category's proper parameters. If Irving Kristol were to ask me, "What's a neocon?", he wouldn't be demonstrating ignorance of the term's meaning. He'd be initiating a lively give-and-take about the movement's nature and evolution. The problem with this interpretation, though, is that ruminative conversations really aren't Dubya's style (nor his father's, as his terse answer makes clear). The president is the kind of guy who, if he asked you what neo-Platonism was, would expect a simple declarative sentence and, if you went on longer than a sentence, would wander out of the room.

Bush, Sr.'s definition -- "Israel" -- is almost as funny as the hoopla over this mystery. I once heard Paul Wolfowitz give a not-very-descriptive answer to the same the question, when it was posed to him by Jeffrey Goldberg. The president surely doesn't know what a Trotskyist is, much less an ex-Trot; nor would I put good money on his being able to summarize the philosophy of Leo Strauss. But it doesn't take a subscription to Commentary to be able to figure out that some Republicans thought removing Saddam Hussein was urgent and necessary, while others did not. And for a guy who exercises next to Condoleeza Rice every day, what are the odds Bush never hipped to the reasons for that marked difference of opinions?

Does the president know what the word neocon means? - By Timothy Noah - Slate Magazine

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A great Q&A with the author of the book every American should be reading. Two choice extracts:

MJT: In your book you show how the Middle East was connected to our Civil War in some ways at the time. Yet it seems there should be no connection at all. Tell us about that.

Oren: Oh, there are many connections. During the Civil War about 500 Egyptian soldiers served with the French Army invading Mexico. It was the only time Arabic-speaking Muslims have fought on North American soil. One of the people involved in Abraham Lincoln’s assassination plot managed to escape to and was arrested in Egypt. There were Civil War officers – Union and Confederate officers – who went to Egypt right after the war to help modernize the Egyptian army. They ended up building a school system for Egypt, as well as exploring and mapping the Sudan.

The biggest impact of the Civil War was on the Middle East rather than the Middle East on the Civil War. The biggest impact was cotton. When the North blockaded Southern cotton the textile mills of Europe went dry. So they turned to the only other place in the world that had cotton of a similar quality and that was in Egypt. The price of Egyptian cotton went up about 800 times. Egypt made a lot of money. And with that money they built wonderful buildings and palaces, they built the opera house where Verdi used to perform, and they also built the Suez Canal which completely changed the face of the Middle East.

In 1869 the cotton market in the South came back and the Egyptian cotton market went bankrupt. Egypt went bankrupt and that led to the British occupation of Egypt that lasted for 70 years. There was actually a direct line between the Civil War and the Suez crisis of 1956 during which the Egyptians tried to nationalize the Suez Canal. Britain and France invaded. And so, really, the reverberations from the American Civil War in certain ways continue to course across the Middle East.

[...]

MJT: You have taken the long view of American involvement in the Middle East perhaps more than anyone else in the world. Having done that, are you more optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

Oren: As a historian I’m optimistic. Listen, I view the war in Iraq not as a war, but as a battle in a much more protracted war. Iraq is America’s Bull Run in the war in the Middle East. It’s our first losing battle.

It is not Vietnam. You cannot withdraw from Iraq and be confident that the enemy is not going to follow you. Because the enemy is going to follow you. America can’t detach from the Middle East because the Middle East is not going to detach from America. And America’s going to have to learn to fight this fight to win in a much more prudent and effective way. And there are ways America can fight it more effectively.

Pajamas Media: Power, Faith, and Fantasy in the Middle East

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The bulk of the escalated troops hasn't arrived in country yet, but the new counterinsurgency plan has been implemented. A pessimistic assessment by the Times:

The much anticipated effort to wrest Baghdad streets from the control of militias and insurgents has been presented in news conferences and public statements as an Iraqi-led operation. Iraqi officials have been out front, announcing arrests, weapons finds and other details, as well as new decrees intended to halt two years of so-called sectarian cleansing. But on the streets, the joint patrols seemed little different from those of the past few years: A handful of Iraqis, acting at the direction of a larger group of Americans, opening drawers and closets and looking behind furniture as they searched for banned weapons or other contraband.

The trouble with this take is twofold: 1) Not even the Kagan-Keane report, much less David Petraeus' field manual, claimed a few weeks is all it would take to see a marked turnaround in besieged city like Baghdad. 2) Sectarian cleansing has been going on for two years, but what about the years before that? Recall that the razing of the Golden Mosque, undertaken with brutal and effective calculation by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was what precipitated the Sunni-on-Shiite violence to the point where "civil war" began appearing in headlines. Before that event, however, a Shiite-controlled military was not spoken of in such dire terms. Why? Because the Shia had the confidence of their numbers, and thus little reason to slaughter their countrymen, who were disaffected and boycotting national elections.

Stopping the vicious cycle where one revenge killing begets another doesn't mean that the devotees of the 12th imam will not continue to "infiltrate" the Iraqi Army -- they plainly will in a country where they comprise 60% of the population. But it does mean they'll have good reason to rethink how they express their devotion. The whole point of the surge is to protect Sunnis and mixed-ethnic neighborhoods so that an anxious minority doesn't provoke, by suborning a guerrilla "resistance," a still-insecure majority.

How long will this take? More than a year.

Old Problems Undermine New Security Plan for Baghdad - New York Times

RELATED: The Surge Can Work | Jewcy.com

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Maybe I'm projecting my own insecurities, but this mediocre Onion headline piece seems like it may be funnier to... certain people.

Where has Scott Dikkers been the past seven years, anyway?

The Onion | Former Editor Can't Believe Shit College Newspaper Is Printing

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I have sick, sick friends. But I promise they're not responsible for this.

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This precious public discussion post by Markos Moulitsas -- complied in follow-up to something he apparently wrote elsewhere dismissing Dennis Kucinich with an "ugh" -- is worth reading to realize not just how far left, but how entirely, completely insane, Kucinich actually is. It's also delightfully funny (and the limp defenses of Kucinich in the comments section pile on the absurdity). The meatiest part:

"Higher evolution of human awareness"? "Transform consciousness"? "Paradign shift"? What the hell is this crap? I expect this kind of crap out of Deepak Chopra (or Tom Cruise), not a serious presidential candidate.

And by the way, the "Department of Peace" already exists. It's called the "U.S. Department of State".

The stuff above isn't even the worst -- check out this stuff from Kucinich's keynote address to something called the "Dubrovnik Conference on the Alchemy of Peacebuilding":

Spirit merges with matter to sanctify the universe. Matter transcends to return to spirit. The interchangeability of matter and spirit means the starlit magic of the outermost life of our universe becomes the soul-light magic of the innermost life of our self. The energy of the stars becomes us. We become the energy of the stars. Stardust and spirit unite and we begin: One with the universe. Whole and holy. From one source, endless creative energy, bursting forth, kinetic, elemental. We, the earth, air, water and fire-source of nearly fifteen billion years of cosmic spiraling.

Clearly, Kucinich resides in a higher plane of existence than I do. But my plane is on the planet earth. I want my president to reside here as well.

On more governance-related issues, Kucinich was ranked the 7th worst American mayor in American history for driving Cleveland deeper into ruin (and for no good reason).

I remember people promoting him on my New Hampshire campus during the last round of presidential primaries. Don't ardent primary politics aficionados know about this kind of stuff? Or did Kucinich just check all the right issues boxes for them?

The very first commenter asks Kos:

So, the lefties in the "big tent" really can go hang, eh?

No, sunshine, he's telling you Kucinich can out-crazy and out-unelectable Lyndon LaRouche.

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Josh Partlow answers readers' questions:

One thing I noticed when I went out with U.S. soldiers on the northern outskirts of the capital, was that they are really focusing on compiling more information about the villages they are patrolling, because identifying the insurgents can be difficult. They conducted a village census, photographing every adult male, taking GPS coordinates of the houses, swabbing people for explosive residue. One company commander with the unit called it an important baseline operation for counter-insurgeny. Some of the other moves they're making--operating from smaller bases in the city, maintaining 24-hour presence in neighborhoods--seem to me further attempts to close this understanding gap about who is responsible for the violence. In general, commanders say more troops will allow them to shrink the amount of area they cover to be more thorough.

From Baghdad, First Impressions of the Surge - washingtonpost.com

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"It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio's clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum with his two poor u's, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily no such laws exist: A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of Das Kapital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine."
-- Nabokov, The Eye

One smiles to see the sage of Montreaux at his grumpy, anti-Hegelian best. Nabokov had no time for History -- much less the uncapitalized variety, when filtered through the wrong alembic of fiction -- and we all know what he thought about his motherland after 1917. Still, being "Clio's clerk" might not make for bang-up political economy, but it has its uses in literature. Adam Kirsch makes a vigorous case for esteeming Auden's spirit-of-the-age poetry (I once heard someone describe this as "zeitfeisty") as much as his later disillusionment with it:

If the Auden centenary sees any major change in the poet's reputation, it is that such a dismissal of the later, American Auden now looks definitely mistaken. It is still tempting, reading Auden's work chronologically, to regret some of the changes that came in the train of his emigration, and to wonder what poems he might have written if he had stayed in England during World War II. The later Auden will never be as mesmerizing as the early Auden. But it is now clear that he was not, like Wordsworth, a poet who wrote himself out early but still kept on publishing.

Rather, Auden's breaking of his own style now looks like one of the key moral gestures of 20th-century English literature. Auden was one of the first great writers to recognize that, after World War II, the modernist vision — with its abstractions and myths, its glamorizing of danger and sacrifice — was no longer sustainable. Poetry, to be credible in a new world, had to be ethical in a new way: scrupulous about its claims, its concepts, even its language.

Auden was the keystone of that triumphal arch on the quadrangles of Oxford in the 30's, a group of poets collectively and derisively known as "Macspaunday," encompassing Louis MacNeice, Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. If the careers of many well-known conservative critics today are really second act repudiations of everything those critics once got up to in the sixties, then it can equally be said that Late Auden was a systematic undoing of the Macspaunday ethos.

What was that ethos? A deep, semi-mystical engagement with modernity and radical politics, but fed through a pastoral processor. His romantic verses were conscious emulations of Hardy and Wordsworth and also, I think, Shelley. I wish I had the specific line to hand, but there's something about a broken pillar or column lying in the sand in one of Auden's early poems that always reminds me of "Ozymandias": "'Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies." Even Edward Mendelson, Auden's executor and flame-tender, didn't know quite what to make of the obscure re-imaging of this scene of classical decay. If the poet's meaning was often elusive, then this was purposeful and satisfactory because symbolism loses its frisson the minute the symbols are explained away.

Auden was an internationalist who nevertheless had an abiding regard for the Anglo-Saxon idiom and well knew the linguistic history of it; he was said to have whiled away his university days in the library absorbing pre-Beowulf roots and etymologies.

The famed dissolution of his "set" was, then, exaggerated: work and play were at rough parity with each other. He once told a BBC interviewer that "fun" was his chief objective in composition. This probably contributed to the antagonism many critics had toward his on-the-page frivolity, to say nothing of his off-the-page kind.

Leaving England for America with Christopher Isherwood, just as war had been declared against Nazi Germany, earned the poet no small amount of scorn and condescension. Evelyn Waugh satirized the pair as Parsnip and Pimpernell in Put Out More Flags. Though getting abused for cowardice and fatuous party allegiances long predated the invasion of Poland.

"Fashionable pansies" was Orwell's animadversion on the rhyming Communists who thought that hopping it to Catalonia in '36 was tantamount to a trip to a day spa. Orwell was unfair and not just cruel on this point: Auden briefly drove an ambulance in Spain during the civil war, no lighter a task than doing so during World War I would have been. He may have eventually given up the Communism, but the homosexuality was a harder self-identification to shake.

"Lullaby" -- more commonly known as "Lay Your Sleeping Head, My Love" -- is probably the gayest poem in the English language. (Kingsley Amis apparently once met the boy this dreamy love song was written for.) Or perhaps I should say, it's the second gayest poem. There's always "The Fall of Rome." Try this on for size:

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Leaving aside the ominous fact this was written before the flu-infected cities became San Francisco and New York, would any care to guess as to the implied gender of that unimportant clerk or what it was that caused him to grow so disgruntled on the job? Auden was having coy fun at the expense of an old joke: What brought down an ancient empire -- Christianity or buggery? Some of his dirty limericks struck a less portentous note on the same ribald theme:

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

Homage to Auden - February 21, 2007 - The New York Sun

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My iSpy interview with Rick Ross, cult buster extraordinaire, is now up at Jewcy:

“I’m ready to disbelieve you” would be a good motto for the Egon of Cult Busters, Rick Ross. You’ll notice his name in bold on most any Page Six item about Britney’s red bracelet fad or TomKat’s natal nuttiness.

As the media’s go-to guy on Scientology and the Kabbalah Center, Ross has helped expose such these and other groups as creepy enterprises which prey on the psychologically vulnerable, rob them of their fortunes and get away with it all by packaging themselves as “new religions.”

He entered the cult monitoring and deprogramming biz in the early 80’s after witnessing a sinister Christian sect try to convert aged Jews in his grandmother’s Arizona nursing home. Ross now heads up his eponymous New Jersey-based institute, whose website features one of the largest and most comprehensive databases on controversial social movements, anywhere.

Ross’ quarry includes “everything from the power of miracles, mysticism to ‘God Men’ gurus and traveling prophets.” Al Qaeda, Nation of Islam, Chabad, Mormonism, Burning Man, even AmWay – all receive their own dossier.

But with such a widely cast net, he’s invited plenty of backlash, most of which depicts him as an semi-educated profiteer who’s as obsessive in his methods as the purported mind-fuckers he aims to take down.

Ross has been sued countless times, and was once tried criminally for “kidnapping” 18 year-old Jason Scott, whose mother had hired the deprogrammer to save her son from the clutches of the Life Tabernacle Church, to which she’d formerly belonged herself. Ross was acquitted, though the concomitant civil suit – which ordered him to pay $2,500,000 in damages – forced him into bankruptcy. (He later settled with the plaintiff for a much-reduced sum after Scott reconciled with his family.)

Ross’ consultation on the Waco fiasco of the late-90’s also had his tactics called into question, this time by the federal government. (The G-men of course otherwise did a bang-up job rescuing Branch Davidians).

Yet Ross responds that his slanderers are embarrassed apologists for cults, if not masquerading agents of them. See the extensive Scientologist-suborned campaign to discredit him, especially the Church’s front website Religious Freedom Watch.

After chatting with brainwashing's nemesis, I’m ready to believe him.

[Excerpted question]

On your website’s FAQ sheet, you give the Merriam Webster definition of “cult”: “1. A formal religious veneration 2. A system of religious beliefs and rituals also its body of adherents.” You also claim that the “cult mentality” consists of “black and white thinking, a low tolerance of ambiguity and a relentlessly judgmental attitude.” Taken together, these characteristics make every person alive a cultist, don’t they?

No.

There are three salient features that define the overwhelming majority of destructive cults and make them distinctly different. And these three features are common to most groups called “cults.”

First, there is an absolute authoritarian form of leadership without any meaningful accountability. A single living leader most often becomes the defining and binding element of the group. And members almost always submit to that authority without question. He or she becomes the locus of power and focus of attention, the hub of the organization and its driving force.

Second, there is a group process of indoctrination that generally denigrates critical or independent thinking and promotes a kind of group mindset. This mindset is based upon the leader’s value judgements, agenda and personality, rather than the individual thoughts and feelings of group members. This mindset can also be seen as the result of undue influence. The process used to achieve this mindset has been called “brainwashing.”

Third, the group does harm. The most extreme examples would be death due to medical neglect, suicide or violence prompted by the group. Cults often harm people through financial or sexual exploitation and also unfair labor practices. People involved may be damaged psychologically and emotionally because of the group’s demands and its practices.

Put these three things together and they make up the basic profile of most groups called “cults.”

Brainwashing's Nemesis | Jewcy.com

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The things that men count for happiness, seeking
The good deeds that lead to obscurity, accepting
With equal face those that bring ignominy,
The applause of all or the love of none.
All men are ready to invest their money
But most expect dividends.
-- T.S. Eliot, "Choruses from The Rock"

The best performance you'll see all year is not, alas, Helen Mirren's in The Queen but Chris Cooper's in Breach. The story of Robert Hanssen, captured in 2001 as the longest and most destructive Soviet spy operating with the United States (and within its oldest bureau of intelligence), has got to be one of the most fascinating psychological case studies tricked out as popular culture.

Hanssen was a member of Opus Dei and a sexual deviant (he'd film amateur pornos of himself and his wife, without her knowledge, and send copies to internet chums around the world), who evidently was "turned" by Moscow Central in 1984 for reasons that are still unknown, or ambiguous at any rate. The film and Cooper's electrifying performance suggest that Hanssen suffered from a paradoxical condition of megalomania fused with an inferiority complex. He thought he was the smartest guy in the room (most of the time, he was) and that he, not the FBI or American cause in the cold war, which he helped undermined internally, was being stifled. Hell hath no fury like the loser who never got a corner office.

What leads a cracked personality to such extremes? Ron Rosenbaum, who has written brilliantly on the conspiracy theory-bathed demimonde of espionage, has a post about this at his blog:

Selling out the lives of our agents in the KGB. For cash, not conviction.

It offers us something that we rarely see in films: non transparency. Someone who is not clear even to himself. Someone who is an apparently sincere devout Catholic who becomes a traitor for…merely money? For ego? So that he “matters”. He is essentially a multiple murderer; the information that he passed to the Soviets led to at least three deaths perhaps many more. And yet he goes about his business grimly but methodically. It’s haunting, chilling. In a way he reminds one of the kidnapper/murderer in the original Dutch version of The Vanishing. We don’t understand him because he doesn’t understand himself, and this is what touches on a nerve and makes the performance great.

T.S. Eliot is really Kafka baptized. However, the poet's eschatological symbolism applies with added weight to Hanssen, who may have navigated a fluorescent-lit labyrinth of bureaucracy his whole professional life, but was the last of the 20th century hollow men: a simulacrum of the pious good citizen waiting around for the world to end. Betraying his country came easy.

Ron Rosenbaum .com

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Because it's hump day. And because the greatest lyric ever penned might just be:

This man is dangerous
He just shot his load on your best party frock.
Before you enter the palace of wisdom,
You have to decide: Are you ready to rock?

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The old boy turns 100 today. Auden's poetry is a staple of this blog because when in search for a handy phrase, I find that he long ago provided it. Wardrobe of excuses. Ironic points of light. Anarchic Aphrodite. In the modern sense of an old-fashion word. The fairly-noble, unifying lie. The folded lie.

The "bloody crossroads" of politics and literature belongs to Lionel Trilling, but it's good to know this furrow-faced English import to New York did some good by writing the most haunting and memorable verses of the 20th century.

Were they also misguided or sinister verses?

There's a bit of controversy brewing in the blogosphere about Eric Hobsbawm's anachronistic and thoroughly Party-line revisit of the Spanish Civil War. (No surprises here: the Red don of King's College told Michael Ignatieff in the late 90's that he'd still have gladly served Soviet intelligence in the cold war, even if all the horrors of the purges and gulag had been as intelligible as they were when the Berlin Wall came down.)

One of the more interesting points I've seen made about this revisionist revisionism (for lack of a better term) is at Commentary's new blog contentions. Daniel Johnson writes:

Hobsbawm mentions that W.H. Auden “modified his great 1937 poem ‘Spain’ in 1939 and refused to allow it to be reprinted in 1950.” But he does not explain how and why. In fact, Auden rewrote two lines of the poem in response to Orwell’s criticism. What Orwell took exception to were the following lines, which he read as justifying Stalinist liquidation: “Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death, / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder.” Auden altered “deliberate” to “inevitable” and “necessary murder” became “the fact of murder.” Auden later claimed that Orwell had been “densely unjust” in his interpretation, but the fact that he excluded even the amended version of this poem from his Collected Poems suggests that he had a bad conscience about it. Indeed, the phrase “necessary murder” became notorious after Orwell attacked it, despite Auden’s attempt at self-censorship.

Actually, I think Orwell got the original lines horribly wrong and missed their purposeful vicious irony. That Auden modified them at his most viciously homophobic critic's chivvying says nothing about their semantic import: the poet also wiped out the most eyebrow-raising verses of his famous elegy to Yeats because of a later conversion to high Anglicanism, a faith which Auden rightly suspected wouldn't take kindly to his referring to another man's "beautiful physique."

Though more the powerful image in that great, unexpurgated poem "Spain 1937" is how "the life," which is invoked by the cry of nations, responds, if it responds at all:

'O no, I am not the mover;
Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the

'Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily -duped;
I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be
Good, your humorous story.
I am your business voice. I am your marriage.

'What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will.
I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic
Death? Very well, I accept, for
I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain.'

The bar companion, the yes-man, the easily duped. Has there ever been a more accurate description of the very radical intellectual class taken in by the Stalinist propaganda that claimed to be defending the Catalan Republic while really asphyxiating it?

As it happens, I've asked Stephen Schwartz, who's made a deft study of the Spanish Civil War, to fashion a rebuttal to the Hobsbawm piece for Jewcy. But to cite just two examples of how the Trotskyists and Anarchists and independent Left were sold out by Moscow: 1) It's now the conventional wisdom that the Canadian Republican volunteers in Catalonia were led into battle by a Kremlin stooge called Manfred Stern; and 2) the American Lincoln Brigade -- one of the only factions of American leftists to ever sign off on deployment overseas for service in a foreign war -- were just as infiltrated and hornswaggled by the Comintern.

Auden, who drove an ambulance briefly in Spain during the fight against Francoism, eventually gelled to these tragic facts. Too bad those who continue to glorify the Communist contribution to this lost campaign still have not.

RELATED: All Snarksmith entries featuring Auden.

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Using Tom Wolfe's Panama hat as his bong, and Hunter S. Thompson's ashes as his herb, Scott Raab found himself staring down the business end of a deadline...

Start in tight, Downey's puss full frame, like so: his creased Valentine of a face has some puff and scarification on it, some overtorqued, Dakar Rally, desert-of-the-soul mileage, but he's still hustling, still shape-shifting, still a man's man and a ladies' man, still a wanking matinee idol, liquid-brown boyish-shy eyes a-wobble, warm voice twanging from hoarse Jew's-harp burble to wheezing, pennywhistle laugh in a fingersnap. Words--thousands upon thousands of words--burst yawping from him, seemingly unfiltered and unbidden, overflowing an instrumental self whose sole means of control is a steady-Eddie self-surrender, hugging shores of work, Wing Chun kung fu, and love. Grinning prisoner in a loose-fit jailhouse of kinetic bliss, forty-one years ancient, Robert Downey's ripe and ready for his close-up.

May God Bless and Keep Robert Downey Jr. Esquire.com

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We should probably file this observation under Ironies of History:

The bloody mire of Mongol slavery, not the rude glory of the Norman epoch, forms the cradle of Muscovy, and modern Russia is but a metamorphosis of Muscovy... Katlita's whole system may be expressed in a few words: the machiavellism of the usurping slave... It is in the terrible and abject school of Mongolian slavery that Muscovy was nursed and grew up. It gathered strength only by becoming a virtuoso in the craft of serdom. Even when emancipated, Muscovy continued to perform its traditional part of the slave as master.

And so Karl Marx shall forever be known as the unapologetic Russophobe that time, and political economy, conveniently forgot.

What is it about Vladimir Putin's reptilian reign that has duped so many into thinking the ex-KGB agent is a "partner in peace" or happy helpmeet in the great democratic reshuffle that is the new world order? From his first day in office he has proven immune to all criticism and opposition, forging ahead on a kind of zigzag nostalgia trip that has fused the worst elements of Soviet bureaucratism with the worst nationalist reaction of tsardom.

Anne Applebaum wonders how comes it that every U.S. president goes weak in the knees for every venal Russian premier, much the way Cherie Blair says, in The Queen, every Labor prime minister does for the English monarch:

It is, if you think about it, an odd phenomenon. After all, American presidents generally don't campaign on behalf of their French counterparts or look deep into the eyes of German chancellors in order to divine their true nature. While at times very friendly, neither Clinton nor Bush appears to have felt a mystical connection to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Yet Russian politicians still seem to make American politicians grow starry-eyed and lose their bearings. Perhaps it's a secret longing for the glamour of those Cold War summits, for the days when it appeared as if the personal relations between superpower statesmen could ward off the destruction of the entire planet. Or perhaps they put something in the vodka—sorry, mineral water—at those elegant Kremlin lunches.

Applebaum also makes the relevant point that Putin is a major fan of Yuri Andropov. Why do I say relevant? Because the last time an Eastern Communist dissident was murdered, in a high-profile whodunnit on British soil, it was Andropov who resided in the Kremlin.

Georgi Markov was a Bulgarian journalist killed in 1978 while traversing the Waterloo Bridge; an unknown assailant apparently injected a ricin pellet into Markov's leg using the tip of a umbrella, thus giving ensuing criminal case (unsolved to this day) its James Bondish nickname, "the Umbrella Murder." Ex-KGB agents like Oleg Kalugin -- more famous for accusing I.F. Stone of being an "agent of influence" for Moscow Central right up until the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 -- have said that Markov's death was carried out by Bulgarian secret police, but given the go-ahead by Andropov himself. (Kalugin claims to have been in the room when the assassination plot was solidified.)

As with the recent irradiation of Alexander Litvinenko, another seemingly random body turned up in the Umbrella Murder, that of fellow Bulgarian Vladimir Kostov, who was shot in Paris ten days earlier, with elements of the same toxic substance used on Markov found in his bloodstream.

Would it be too much to suggest that Putin's admiration of Andropov has extended so far into emulation? And how pathetic does this then make his moralistic speech in Munich last week?

Putin may be a skulking Michael Corleone of global politics, as Niall Ferguson suggests in Time, but his gangsterism is very much out in the open and all the more shameless: Russia has built every one of Iran's nuclear reactors.

A little tough cold war rhetoric doesn't seem so regressive now.

Why do U.S. presidents fall in love with their Russian counterparts? - By Anne Applebaum - Slate Magazine

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Martin Amis dishes to Radar:

Was it mutually satisfactory? Yes. She was and is adorable. She sort of rescued me. I don't know if you've ever had one of those periods in your younger years when suddenly, not only are you not seeming to get a girlfriend, but it's as if the women all know that you can't get a girlfriend. The news has got around that you're not going to get a girlfriend. I was going to write about this in an autobiographical novel I'm doing. I was beginning to understand what it must be like to be Philip Larkin—the women all know. I didn't actually fear it then; well, no, I did. I was just feeling sort of grubby and exasperated, it just gets worse and worse. The women all—it's as if they've all been ringing each other up and saying, "Don't go near that guy." But Tina sort of saved me, because she was very pretty and ebullient and publicly affectionate. She got the scent off me and gave me confidence. That spell, she banished that. I don't think I've ever said this to a magazine before, but that's what I think about it.

Hey, Larkin had three girlfriends at one point. I guess once de-scented, you break 'em up like meringues.

Features : Radar Online

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Wow -- I unplug for a weekend and my co-editor becomes embroiled in some three-way blog shin-kicking. I'm sorry to admit that I was too impatient to dig through exactly what the kerfuffle concerned -- the blogging about comments about a blog's opinion on a blog's blogging about that blog's blog content is enough to induce metavertigo -- but I was curious enough to look up the quotation which gives Crooked Timber its name.

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made," appears to be a remark by Immanuel Kant, at least so says the I'm Feeling Lucky button. That seems both apt and unlikely. Apt because Kant was himself such a knotty individual; unlikely because his knottiness manifested itself in the form of a prose so clumsy that some medical historians think his great works are really just the occluded ramblings of a man with a brain tumor, that it seems impossible he could have written something so pithy (pun intentional).

It's also perverse in the sense that no timber is every really straight. The first thing one learns about lumber is that it has to be measured in all its dimensions, because the highly precise and automatic sawmill cannot control the expansion and contraction, let alone warping and bending, that even the cleanest board will exhibit. Furthermore, straight grain may be appropriate for the boxy projects we tinker with in sixth-grade shop class, but it's not useful for many woodworking projects. European hulls of the age of exploration were built using naturally curved lumber. Crooked and twisted grain, in addition to some useful structural properties, is visually attractive, and burls -- the lumps that grow on the sides of some trees -- have a complex grain that's beautiful when used as a veneer.

I learned all this in the past few weeks. I'm currently reading Harvey Green's Wood, which is pretty much what it sounds like. It's everything there is to know about wood. My girlfriend thinks I'm insane, but then, she's the one who recently couldn't put down Mary Roach's Stiff, a book concerned about all things cadaverous.

I haven't seen a word coined for these yet, but detached as I am from the currents of literary criticism that doesn't mean one doesn't exist: I'm talking about the nonfiction books that seize upon the most quotidian object and analyze it in every scientific, metaphorical, social and moral dimension that is fruitful. What makes Wood different from, say, Foxfire or a materials textbook is that the what and how are looked at solely as ways to unpack human behavior, broadly, while remaining anchored. For example, Henry Petroski's The Pencil used that humble writing instrument to explicate the history of engineering method, of human technological progress, and the evolving meta-process of idea-storage ideas. I loved it, and its prose was considerably more wooden than Wood.

Wood is (through what I've read, anyway) as well-written as it is well-researched. A chapter on the different types of wood that exist manages to pull into its ambit the ideas of Thorstein Veblen, Rachel Carson, James Polk, and countless anonymous workmen scattered over centuries. As wood has become scarce, we favor its perceived rusticated nature as a value, whereas our ancestors viewed it as a troublesome material, ready to decompose and warp. Many of the materials invented to remediate wood's weaknesses, such as veneers and plywoods (as well as synthetic wood made of plastics) are viewed as ugly as they are cheap, and yuppie renovators expose rough-hewn beams in their vintage houses which the builders left in such pockmarked shape because they never intended them to be in view. The beautiful scent of sawn wood which makes it a pleasure to putter around with masks particulates that can cause respiratory trouble, allergic reactions and in some tree species, toxicity.

In any event, I have had enough experience with wood in its multifarious forms to know the allure Green describes that hangs over the damned stuff. In college, I ran with a crowd that included the forestry team. There is such a sport as competitive forestry, which trains people to become loggers, the most dangerous occupation in the USA. While these people hacked down trees and smashed them into desired shapes, I worked for years in two different theaters, sawing low-grade pine two-bys and assembling them into false structures that just had to look pretty and stay up for two weeks. Though workmanship can become obsessive in just about any field from history to synthetic chemistry to juggling, wood is unique. It's a matter of muscle memory and artful judgements about humidity as well as spatial reasoning and basic geometry to master, as does metalworking or car maintenance. Yet the history of woodworking is centuries longer, and unlike other works of man's hands, woodworking can yield results with less capital investment, and with a considerably shallower learning curve.

By illuminating wood, Green is really illuminating mankind though its relationship to this material. It's fashionable to talk about the human condition (which, for the record, is as-is NIB no reserve!!!), but these books about human relationships with material objects can illustrate the changing condition of human living in a way that novels and history, which at bottom are largely psychology books, can't. (Moby-Dick being the notable exception.) I find them thrilling. The next book on my bedstand is likely to be The Secret Life of Dust.

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Byron and Disraeli had it right. The most important thing a man of conscience and passion can do in his life is cultivate friendships with older women. (In Disraeli's case, this meant marrying one: Mary Anne Evans, the widow of Wyndham Lewis and a famously quirky and frivolous woman who, I can't help adding, bore the exact original name of her feminine opposite: George Eliot.)

All the new sociology on female sexuality indicates that their lordships, renowned for rakish if overestimated behavior, were onto something. Libido fades, friendship endures. Appreciating women means appreciating them tout court and, eventually, sans the fun stuff. This, I think, is the banal but necessary feminist critique of male conduct missing from the current debate over what to do about the ladies. It sends a chill up my spine to hear post-menopausal women speak of an absolute non-interest in sex, but there you have it. The locust years are coming for all heterosexual men who find it unseemly to date nubile young things old enough to be Supreme Court defendants in probate cases.

In fact, rumor has it that the onset of the "change" isn't even necessary to kill the distaff sex-drive. Here's Sandra Tsing Loh, The Atlantic's Bizzaro World Caitlin Flanagan, reviewing a new book called I'd Rather Eat Chocolate:

[T]o judge from the continual roiling crises on Oprah and Dr. Phil, American women are experiencing an epidemic, today, of not wanting to have sex. Or at least not wanting all the sex they “should” be having—i.e., once or twice or even three times a week, depending on which sexpert is confidently throwing out the vague approximations. It is a particularly vexing problem for heterosexual married females, who—now that we and our spouses are living so long, what with all the improved medical care—can expect to face another several decades of domestic union with a man. And clearly we can’t just let the sex fall off like an unused appendage.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. Unless you're a guy.

So much for the paired-off. What about the singletons just learning about their bodies, their selves and why Catherine MacKinnon is, like, such a fucking buzzkill?

Girls are having wild, promiscuous, and possibly joyless, sex on college campuses. This is alarming to some. Not to me. And not to Meghan O'Rourke -- at least not for the reasons educed by Laura Sessions Stepp (there's a joke in that name, somewhere), author of Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both, which evidently reads as the non-fiction equivalent of I Am Charlotte Simmons.

O'Rourke nicely channels the materialist-Marxian plaint of her friend and my favorite third-waver Laura Kipnis in explaining why, if there is cause for concern about the reckless bed-hopping of today's young women, it has nothing to do with hoary concepts like "virtue":

if there is a problem, it isn't that young women are separating love and sex. It's that they are blurring sex and work: The hookup culture is part of a wider ethos of status-seeking achievement. As one girl puts it: "Dating is a drain on energy and intellect, and we are overwhelmed, overprogrammed and overcommitted just trying to get into grad school." So they throw themselves into erotic liaisons with the same competitive zeal they bring to résumé-building: "If you mention you think a guy is hot, your friend may be, 'Oh, he is hot. I'm gonna go get with him,' " Anna, a high-school student, reveals. The combination of postfeminist liberation and pressure from parents to "do it all"—as one kid puts it—has led girls to confuse the need to be independent (which they associate with success) with the need to be invulnerable. Thus, they frame their seemingly explorative sex lives in rigid, instrumental terms, believing that vulnerability of any sort signals a confusing dependence. The result? Shying away from relationships that can hurt them—which includes even fleeting obsessions that can knock them off balance.

The dreaded w-word: work. The minute pleasures of the flesh become industrialized, you can forget about simultaneous orgasms or even a nice post-coital cuddle. Who's got the time? Time is sex, people! If you're not having it, how the hell are you going to impress the admissions board at Stanford Law, much less keep up that 4.3 grade point average? The English-Econ double major down the hall? She's doing it twice a day with 8 different partners and sometimes on a PVC ceiling-swing she read about in Dan Savage.

And you thought interpretive bikram lacrosse made you special.

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Gordon Gecco never said, "Greed is good," although even if he had, it would have been a coy euphemism for the corporate raider mentality he exhibited in Wall Street. Also, "Play it again, Sam"? Once was quite enough for Ingrid Bergman, who left out the "again" on celluloid -- posterity ad libbed it -- probably because her stopover in Rick's Cafe marked a long time since unoccupied France, when she'd last heard "As Time Goes By."

Unfortunately left out of the misquoted and misattributed famous lines of history which are paraded, with no small enthusiasm, in this Louis Menand New Yorker review is the following: "A land without a people for a people without a land." Who said that?

Theodore Herzl might have, but not before Lord Shaftesbury did. A half-buried gem in Michael Oren's brilliant new history of American involvement in the Middle East -- Faith, Power, and Fantasy -- the original source of this imperiled slogan should be made the common knowledge of every schoolboy, especially John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.

Shaftesbury was an early 19th century "restorationist," or Gentile proto-Zionist, who believed that Israel was owed to the Jews because they were God's chosen people and thus the rightful station agents of the Biblically designated arrival depot of the messiah. Another forgotten restorationist was an evangelical Christian named George Bush, a professor of Hebrew at New York University, author of a tract entitled, The Valley of Vision: or, The Dry Bones of Israel Revived, and also, predictably, the forebear of the the two U.S. presidents who bear his name.

Sometimes a clever aphorism or throwaway remark that is of doubtful but famous provenance is also immune to factual verification. For instance, we're still not sure if Oscar Wilde said, on his deathbed, "Either those curtains go or I do," but it hardly matters because we can so easily imagine him saying it.

Ditto the supposed orator of this stirring charge to war in 1940:

We are a solid and united nation which would rather go down to ruin than admit the domination of the Nazis... If the enemy does try to invade this country we will fight him in the air and on the sea; we will fight him on the beaches with every weapon we have. He may manage here and there to make a breakthrough: if he does we will fight him on every road, in every village, and in every house, until he or we are utterly destroyed.

You can almost see the jowls quivering in Tory defiance, which would have been a rather impressive feat indeed for Neville Chamberlain, to whom the above broadcast on British radio belongs.

Churchill's other famous day-late-but-right-on-the-money construction involves a certain metallic fabric descending on Eastern Europe and the inaugural instance of the Cold War. And yet...

"You have done well to make up your mind - this was the last minute - the iron curtain of history is just coming down.”

Who said that? It was Nikolai Bukharin, egghead Bolshevik theorist, Right Oppositionist and erstwhile ally of Stalin, in 1926 -- a full twenty years before Churchill's famous pronouncement from the platform at Fulton, Missouri -- telling the party-expelled Zinoviev and Kamanev that they'd capitulated just in time, renouncing their allegiance to Trotsky's ultra-left campaign at exactly the last moment it'd have been possible to do so.

Bukharin was doubly wrong: he himself was later shot for his alliance with Stalin, just as Zinoviev and Kamenev were for their lack of one.

Here we see the deadly fusion of famous phrases with famous last words.

The New Yorker: PRINTABLES

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My previous post has sparked its own little feeding frenzy in the Comments section of Crooked Timber's original we've-been-sniped acknowledgment. Apparently, Scott McLemee is not, in fact, a professor of any kind, nor does he even have a BA. Someone called Henry writes:

It would have taken about 10 seconds Googling to discover that Scott has never held an academic position, and is rather an independent writer, critic, and recipient of the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian prize. This is surely the kind of intellectual laziness that annoyed Scott so much in the first place. I’ve seen Scott in reviewing mode – he takes a lot of time to write a several hundred word review b/c he takes care to do a lot of real research reading through the secondary literature on the subject of the review. He simply wouldn’t treat a topic that he was writing about with the sloppy incuriousness that these folks have displayed.

Sorry I didn't Google McLemee. I might have just contacted Henry, who appears to be his press agent. Nevertheless, can I plead that my generalization about the cultural condition of academic bloggers was so willfully over-the-top that I figured the trope to be obvious?

My generalization about the cultural condition of young Jewish writers was so willfully over-the-top that I figured the trope to be obvious, and it certainly will be so to any smart yJw’s who happen to read it.

Anyway, turns out Weiss took high school Latin, so I take it all back. He should be careful about figural language however. Referring to my display of “symposium bathroom break erudition” might be taken to imply that Movable Snipe is a urinal cake of wannabe hipsterism. And that would not be good.

That's McLemee defending his weird non-observation about the state of Jewish intellectual and prose standards, which Movable Snipe evidently inspired him to make.

I never took high school Latin, though I'm disappointed to see myself being misquoted by someone with such bruited rigorous research skills. Swapping "erudition" in for "pedantry" -- my high school Intro to Freud class might have termed that "projection."

Anyway, "urinal cake of wannabe hipsterism" made it all worthwhile for me.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:13 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Daniel Swift has a solid (and refreshingly un-bitchy) review of House of Meetings in The Nation, but there are three notes that strike discordantly:

Between the two novels that made him famous, Money and London Fields, Amis published The Moronic Inferno (1986), a collection of his travel writings about America. The title betrays his prejudice. Faced with success and sympathetic editors, Amis did what any proudly male writer would have done: He toured the trash, wrote what he liked, indulged his obsessions. The book is less travel reportage than an account of cultural oddity. He writes here like a rhetorical tourist: Isn't the Playboy family weird? Ain't Palm Beach the strangest place? Aren't American novelists and Hollywood directors all secret freaks?

Moronic Inferno was a great deal more interesting than that, and the title is a line from Bellow's Humbolt's Gift, so that "prejudice" actually commences with an American, Chicago-raised (also a Canadian, Lachine-born).

"The Last Days of Muhammad Atta" is an arresting story precisely because it domesticates a great demon, locating the object of so much fear and fantasy in real places--as in a cheap motel room where he cuts himself shaving. The problem is not that Amis has imagined Atta but that he has not imagined him enough. When Shakespeare and Milton came to give words to their great villains, they gave them the best speeches and forced the reader to the edge of sympathy for the devil. There's a marvelous liberty in the language when Iago and Satan speak: They have, quite literally, their way with words. Amis, however, is limited here by what looks awfully like his own prejudices, so his Atta is hellbent on destroying not only the Twin Towers but also the complexity of Islam.

Does Swift mean to imply that Atta's own voice bespoke the true complexities of Islam? I thought his mass-murdering fundamentalism was a brute simplification of the religion.

History is indeed an implacable force in House of Meetings, and it surfaces in a series of awkward footnotes that supply the nicknames by which Russia's leaders are known: "Joseph Vissarionovich is Stalin, leader of Russia, 1928?-53," and "Vladimir Ilich is Lenin." Footnotes imply specialized knowledge. We do not trust unfootnoted historical or scholarly works precisely because we demand expertise: Why read the work of a scholar who knows the same amount as we do? A novel, however, should build a complete world, so the converse is true. A novelist who needs footnotes either has failed to build this fictional zone or doesn't quite trust his reader enough to get it.

The footnotes were added by Venus, the narrator's stepdaughter. The whole novel is in her hands by the time we're allowed inside, which means what we read is unreliable, ab initio. Like it or hate it (and it isn't hard to surmise how most critics feel), this technique Amis stole from Nabokov, who used it in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and, to some degree, in Pnin, with its ludic and torturous Russian narrator giving his protagonist the treatment (though that satire skipped the footnotes).

RELATED: House of Blues [Snarksmith]

History Boy

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:22 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've refrained from mentioning the latest goings-on at Jewcy because I knew that if I waited long enough, some shiny bright gem would come skipping down my virtual mine shaft, and it has done.

We've been running a newish feature called "Movable Snipe." Designed to chivvy the Old Media mastodons like Nicholas Lehmann, Movable Snipe is an exercise in meta-blogging. What we do is candy-feed two writers into their own epistolary playground where they read and tweak five blogs for a week.

This week's playmates are Michael Helke, my editor at Stop Smiling, and Fiona Maazel, former managing editor of the Paris Review.

Stop Smiling is Jack Shafer's favorite magazine because it's bold and intelligent and avowedly nostalgic for the glory days of literary journalism, when Agees and Lieblings and Menckens roamed the earth. Paris Review you know. Keep both mastheads in mind for a spell.

On Sunday I sent out a notice to Michael and Fiona's quarry -- Daniel Drezner, The Elegant Variation, 3 Quarks Daily, Nerve.com's The Scanner, and Crooked Timber -- and all but the last one wrote back saying that this sounded like a great idea, they couldn't wait to be celebrated or vivisected on Jewcy's blog, the Daily Shvitz.

Additionally, Drezner and Variation wrote very good-natured posts about our little cyber experiment on their own sites, hipping to the implicit homage such a targeting represents. (3 Quarks wrote me a nice email back.)

Now comes one of Crooked Timber's academic bloggers -- Scott McLemee -- peaking his head up from under a gnarled Kantian branch, and wrinkling a nostril in a way that has to be seen to be believed:

Looks like everyone around here is just too shy to mention it, but all this week Crooked Timber has been among the blogs discussed and/or vivisected by “Movable Snipe,” a regular feature at the website Jewcy.com. The various CT-related entries are all conveniently located here.

To be honest, I found the comments (whether on CT or otherwise) somwhat puzzling. Not hard to understand, by any means, but…well, puzzling. And then it hit me.

In a classic essay called “The New York Intellectuals,” published almost forty years ago, Irving Howe described what he called the “style of brilliance” cultivated by one generation of Jewish-American writers:

It is a kind of writing highly self-conscious in mode, with an unashamed vibration of bravura and display. Nervous, strewn with knotty or flashy phrases, impatient with transitions and other concessions to dullness, willfully calling attention to itself as a form or at least an outcry, fond of rapid twists, taking pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle —such, at its best or most noticeable, was the essay cultivated by the New York writers. In most of these essays there was a sense of tournament, the writer as gymnast with one eye on other rings, or as highly skilled infighter juggling knives of dialectic.

But an older generation’s example can be a burden—one that, in this case, the Movable Snipesters have clearly shed. In response to a recent CT item on embodied energy, for example, we read this:

Next post: embodied energy. What the hell is that? I have to go to some other website to read about this thing—energy consumed in creating one unit of product X, wha?—and then back to the CT to read more? I don’t have time for this. Do you have time for this?

Not when there’s TiVo!

The “style of brilliance” that Howe described was forged in the 1930s and ‘40s by cerebral young writers who felt alienated from mainstream American culture. Fast forward a few decades, and all is transformed. Now, it seems, young Jewish writers feel free to be just like their fellow citizens: Unthinking yet unapologetic; averse both to dialectical juggling and to looking up the word “dialectics”; incurious and proud….

The melting pot works and don’t let anybody tell you otherwise.

One truly admires the symposium bathroom break pedantry on display here ("not hard to understand, by any means"). We're not even treated to a pro forma tribute to democratic tastes from this lectern, what with that remark about unthinking and unapologetic "fellow citizens." McLemee must have tenure already. Credat Judeaeus Apella, non ego, professor.

And hey, talking of Jews, what's with the lumping of all tribal scribblers into the category of thwarted New York Intellectuals? Some of us are entertainment lawyers, thank you very much. (Michael Helke's not so much as a Litvak; he's our shabbos goy, our Dwight Macdonald.)

I personally take offense at that "dialectics" jab. Here I am, sweating to the Partisan Review oldies, day in, day out... Guess I'll have to blog about Stalin and Trotsky and Kronstadt even more often.

Ah well. At least Scott got the orthography of "TiVo" right.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:20 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

Sad:

from a hip new club in NYC, called Bungalow 8. [italics added]

Sadder:

Next up was a blond woman in her late 30’s. She was wearing a black fedora from the men’s department at Bergdorf Goodman, a black Moschino dress and shoes by Christian Loubouton. I asked her about Iraq. “A rack? You mean titties? Like a really big rack?” Iraq. “Don’t ever waste a moment in life. Fly to the moon and play amongst the stars, be happy, understand how lucky we are—and don’t fight,” she said. “I feel personally connected in one way—I’m a mother, and every day in Iraq somebody is losing their child. My little girl will never go to Iraq. I’m sorry, she’ll go to Prada.”

The Onion used to have a feature called "Drunk of the Week." This was when they were back in Wisconsin. They'd troll local dive bars, finding the most shit-faced old soak in the place and hang a sign around his neck that said "Drunk of the Week." That was cruel. What the Observer did wasn't.

NYO - New York World - Bungalowing Iraq

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Burberry plans to shut down one of its Welsh plants, and lay off 300 workers in the process, for cheaper production opportunity in China. (Hat tip: Harry's.)

While the British market is not central to the company's growth strategy - it sells less than 10 per cent of its product in the UK - Burberry has traded heavily on its Britishness as part of its revival. The union and Chris Bryant, the Rhondda MP who has waded into the campaign, say that this is exactly why Burberry should not close its UK manufacturing operations.

[...]

About a third of the workers earn £5.35 an hour, the minimum wage, although it goes further in Treorchy than in London's West End where Burberry has its headquarters. Two years ago, the village was named the third least expensive place to live in Britain: a terrace home costs £60,000.

Now here's an interesting area of congruence between labor and consumerism: If anything saves these Welshmen's jobs, it won't be a genuine concern for their welfare but a snobbish nostril-wrinkle over the fact that bolts of famous a British tartan might be cut in a third world country. Placards reading "Keep Burberry British" are as likely to have been made in Notting Hill (or on the Upper East Side of Manhattan) as in Manchester.

For once anti-globalism and bourgeois cultural values are in perfect agreement.

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Of course the New York Times would emphasize how farcical this prewar slide show, contrived by Tommy Franks in 2002, appears in retrospect. 5,000 U.S. troops remaining in Iraq four years after the invasion; a philo-American and robust democratic Iraqi government; etc.

But what the "rosy" assessment also made a point of was the perceived threat of Saddam's WMD capability. The conventional wisdom today runs as follows: Only those dread neocon alarmists believed the Baath were cultivating chemical and biological weapons, and when they didn't believe it, they lied to "sell" the war. Every sane person -- from Sean Penn to Hans Blix -- knew Iraq's impotence to be its own slam dunk.

So why the following slide?

A Prewar Slide Show Cast Iraq in Rosy Hues - New York Times

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Will Saletan dishes about why brothers and sisters don't usually like to mate with each other:

A study offers new evidence that natural selection drives the incest taboo. On average, your level of disgust at the notion of sex with a sibling correlates with how long you cohabited with that sibling and watched your mom care for her as a small child. So does your level of altruistic behavior toward the sibling. These experiential factors correlate more strongly with incest aversion than does your belief that the sibling is genetically related to you. The researchers posit a mental "kinship estimator" that converts "maternal perinatal association" into altruism and sexual disgust, driving you to choose a mate outside your family. Old idea: Nature makes you horny for your sister, but faith teaches you it's icky. New idea: Nature tells you it's icky, and faith takes the credit.

Now this makes a lot of sense. Byron wasn't raised with his half-sister Augusta Leigh, which is probably why he had no compunction about diddling her regularly.

Ditto Nabokov's supposed cousins, then supposed halfsy siblings (who were really fullsies), Van and Ada in Ada or Ardour. A branching family tree and dislocation complicates the Darwinian proscription.

The family that eats together doesn't sleep together.

Why banging your sister is icky. - By William Saletan - Slate Magazine

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I didn't want him to let you watch it not knowing.

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Don't know if you've been following the dust-up between Pascal Bruckner and Tim Garton Ash and Ian Buruma, but it's a hoot. First, Bruckner wrote a fiery screed against the moderate center-right intellectuals for their tepid endorsements of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Bruckner called Garton Ash and Buruma "armchair philosophers" and multiculti myopics whose own species of "anti-racism" actually amounts to racism -- against the hopelessly backward cultures they purport to esteem. (Oui, oui, monsieur. C'est le dialectique.)

Garton Ash's response is worth the price of admission:

Pascal Bruckner is the intellectual equivalent of a drunk meandering down the road, arguing loudly with some imaginary enemies. He calls these enemies "Timothy Garton Ash" and "Ian Buruma" but they have very little to do with the real writers of those names. I list below some of his misrepresentations and inaccuracies, with a few weblinks for the curious.

[...]

Truly grotesque, to the point of self-parody, is this passage: "The positions of Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash fall in with American and British policies (even if the two disapprove of these policies): the failure of George W. Bush and Tony Blair in their wars against terror also result from their focussing on military issues to the detriment of intellectual debate." Never mind that I have been an outspoken serial critic of the Bush (and Blair) approach on precisely this issue. For Bruckner, white is black and words mean what he wants them to mean. Objectively, comrades, TGA agrees with Bush. Izvestia under Stalin would have been proud of his dialectical argumentation.

All good Leavisite fun and whatnot, but then there's this shambolic self-defense:

Having commented in my New York Review essay that "I regard it as a profound shame for Holland and Europe that we could not keep among us someone like Ayaan Hirsi Ali" I went on to suggest that her approach "is not showing the way forward for most Muslims in Europe, at least not for many years to come. A policy based on the expectation that millions of Muslims will so suddenly abandon the faith of their fathers and mothers is simply not realistic. If the message they hear from us is that the necessary condition for being European is to abandon their religion, then they will choose not to be European." I continue to insist that this is an obvious truth, and an important criticism of the position adopted by both Ali and Bruckner.

If you read that New York Review essay, which sanely advocates economic reforms as a means of pacifying the angry young "Inbetween People" -- Muslims living in Europe but culturally unmoored to it -- what you find is the following:

Having in her youth been tempted by Islamist fundamentalism, under the influence of an inspiring schoolteacher, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is now a brave, outspoken, slightly simplistic Enlightenment fundamentalist. In a pattern familiar to historians of political intellectuals, she has gone from one extreme to the other, with an emotional energy perfectly summed up by Shakespeare: "As the heresies that men do leave/are hated most of those they did deceive." This is precisely why she is a heroine to many secular European intellectuals, who are themselves Enlightenment fundamentalists. They believe that not just Islam but all religion is insulting to the intelligence and crippling to the human spirit. Most of them believe that a Europe based entirely on secular humanism would be a better Europe. Maybe they are right. (Some of my best friends are Enlightenment fundamentalists.) Maybe they are wrong. But let's not pretend this is anything other than a frontal challenge to Islam. In his crazed diatribe, Mohammed Bouyeri was not altogether mistaken to identify as his generic European enemy the "unbelieving fundamentalist."

Forgive me if I don't believe atheism is the diametric opposite of Islamic fundamentalism, one "extreme" between two. Hirsi Ali's is a defensive posture informed by a harsh but rigorous interpretation of an openly aggressive ideology -- not just a religion. Also, she is more generous than Garton Ash gives her credit for being.

Listen to this audio interview [link corrected: scroll to the left-hand audio option of the Times piece -- ed], recently conducted with her by the New York Times' Laurie Goodstein. Hirsi Ali makes plain that a dogged opposition to Islam and the teachings of the Koran is the right worldview for herself; she would be pharisaic to claim to find any redeemable or progressive motif in religion when she thinks it's all one big sinister fairy-tale. However, she freely acknowledges that other women might get something out of their faith and, provided they use it for the advancement of mutually shared goals (human rights, freedoms that are, or should be, universal rather than the province of any one hemisphere), those women are fine by Hirsi Ali.

Show me an Islamic fundamentalist who is as generous with varying or antagonistic opinions. Then tell me that Shakespeare apercu ("those they did deceive") was fair, since Garton Ash elsewhere concedes that Hirsi Ali's former allegiance to Islam was both genuine and full-throttled.

Of course, Garton Ash is not new to the game of crediting age-old monotheisms with liberalization campaigns. He made his career following the Red dissidents of Eastern Europe, never shying from overstating the effects the Catholic church had on Solidarnosc. (One of these days I'm going to write a monograph titled, "Winners Written Out of the History Books." It'll be all about the anti-Communist left, comprised of many committed and noble Marxists, who helped bring down the Berlin Wall and were then met by a wall of silence when legacies were being handed out.)

My favorite animadversion leveled against the tabernacle conception of history came from Perry Anderson, actually in a brilliant essay on Garton Ash. Citing Stalin's fatuous quip about the supposed clout of Papist anti-Communism --"How many divisions has the pope?" -- Anderson asked, "How many masses has the Kremlin?"

Let's put it this way: What encyclicals or priestly tracts can you name that denounced the Soviet Union? Compare to the Volga of secular literature, written by ex-adherents of the cause, that has entered the 20th century canon.

Garton Ash has imported his misplaced enthusiasm for piety to the current crisis within and without Islam. (Funny, given that piety is precisely the problem.) Muslim "moderates" like Tariq Ramadan and Ayatollah Sistani may carry mass appeal, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking that, in the choice between opposition and accommodation with reactionary Islamic elements, they're more likely to choose opposition.

If a medieval faith is going to be reformed, it is not the "people of the book" who'll be responsible for doing the thankless and tedious spadework. First comes excavations of ugly truths, and anostics and heretics are the only ones who can do that. They'll be hounded enough by the zealotry they've abandoned; they don't need added grief from a sideline intelligentsia that sneers and squawks about having them for members.

Timothy Garton Ash: Better Pascal than Pascal Bruckner - signandsight

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With all due respect to Robert Pinsky, it's not often that Shakespeare's glorious sequence to "W.H." is credited with lesbian overtones. Here's one example of suspected girle-on-girle action, at least according to the excellent Stephen Booth's annotated Sonnets.

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!
What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never!
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted,
In the distraction of this madding fever!
O benefit of ill! now I find true
That better is, by evil still made better;
And ruin’d love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
So I return rebuk’d to my content,
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.

The hell with "bed death." Limbecks foul as hell within is apparently code for cooter, which at least goes a small distance towards complicating that notorious marriage of two minds.

Middleton and Rowley read this sonnet and said, "How you doin'."

Great poems about sex. - By Robert Pinsky - Slate Magazine

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Juan Cole is usually the first to ominously indicate that more things change, the more they change, yet today he defers to history as evidence that the status quo is holding steady:

It is possible but not likely that Muqtada would go to Iran. He and his family have endlessly made fun of the al-Hakim clerical leaders for fleeing to Iran to escape persecution by Saddam Hussein, when the al-Sadrs insisted on staying in Iraq. Muqtada's father was killed in 1999 by Saddam's agents because he stayed and gave defiant sermons. So it would be a lot of crow to eat for Muqtada to go to Iran to escape the Americans. Plus, there is nothing in the Iranian press about him showing up in Qom, and an Iranian diplomat denied the story. Without more and better evidence, this account strikes me as suspect, and I would guess that if Muqtada disappeared, it is inside Iraq.

And so a radical Shiite cleric is apparently too committed to principle to engage in a little butt-saving hypocrisy. Cole cites an interview Sadr gave to the Italian newspaper La Repubblica suggesting that while he had moved his family to an undisclosed location Sadr himself was still very much reachable, presumably in Iraq. Yet the English translation of that interview doesn't say how Sadr was contacted, or, if it was in person, where. As to eating crow, one need only parse the almost humble tone the Mahdi avatar employed in answering questions about his chances in any hypothetical face-off with the multinational forces:

Some claim that the army and police have been extensively infiltrated by your men and that the Marines by themselves will never manage to disarm you.

It's really exactly the other way around: it is our militia which is swarming with spies. It doesn't take much doing to infiltrate an army of the people. It is precisely those people who by soiling themselves with unworthy actions have discredited the Mahdi. There are at least four armies ready to unleash themselves against us. A "shadow" about which nobody ever talks, trained in great secrecy in the deserts of Jordan by the American armed forces. On top of that, there is the private army of Allawi, the unbeliever who will soon succeed Maliki, which stands ready at the al-Muthanná military airport. On top of that, there is the Kurdish peshmerga and finally the regular American troops.

No one with a sustainable hubris or handle on power says that his organization is swarming with spies. He just sets about eliminating them. (This is like that old saw, if you have to declare you're a tough guy, that's the last thing you are.)

It makes perfect sense, what with the heightened state of security in and around Baghdad and the impending addition of more troops, that Sadr would take for the mountains of Persia right now. My question is: Was this part of some brokered deal between Maliki and the U.S.? "We stay out of the Shia districts, you send your thug-in-chief packing." Remember: the surge never was about clearing Sadr City or engaging the Mahdi Army -- those were seen as worst-case scenarios that would undermine the true purpose of the new mission, which was protect Sunni and mixed ethnic neighborhoods. However, the potential for a wide-scale military confrontation must have been psychologically daunting for the Mahdi, the ragtag guerrilla equivalent of gunboat diplomacy.

Add to this the barbaric bombings on the anniversary of the Golden Mosque destruction, and you have another reason for even hard-line Shia to signal a symbolic capitulation to disaffected Sunnis. If the public face of the death squads is no longer in country, reconciliation stands a better chance.

The concatenation of Sadr's flight with the crackdown on Iranian infiltration also seems logical. The mullahs realize they're operating on borrowed time in Iraq (if not in Iran itself), and are probably trying to consolidate all their die-hard supporters right now. Who better than the black-clad mini-ayatollah to call back to Shia Central?

Granted, this is speculation. But let's fall prey to the type of cynicism that relies on naivete demonstrated by Professor Cole and those who think the latest news cycle is all black-ops propaganda by an administration that never reports the truth. (Notice how the corollary to this thinking is that every statement from Iran and Sadr is more credible.)

Iraqi Militia Leader Sadr in Iran, Say U.S. Officials - washingtonpost.com

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Today is Valentine's Day, after the early Catholic saint about which little is known with confidence, except that February 14 was when the Romans had him executed; it doesn't sound apt for a national day of awkward, expensive dating, until one thinks about it a little. The "heart"-shaped valentine is actually modeled after the leaf of the violet, which legend holds grew outside Valentine's cell and which he'd use to write messages of reassurance to his loved ones. Seventeen centuries to go from "I'm being fed and haven't been put to death yet" to mandatory slivers of cheap cardboard with a starry-eyed SpongeBob slipped into one's crayon-coated paper bag.

In addition to being named after a wretched, probably celibate old priest who got whacked, Valentine's Day is also the anniversary of the most brutal mob hit in American history, not to mention the occasional crazy suicide pact.

Anyway, have a movie:

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"That myth, the Common Man, is the theoretical sovereign of democratic society, and when he turns up in a racist mob or a typical veterans' organization, ideology literally turns off our vision. Democratic political stereotypes remain stalwartly non- and pre-Freudian because you can't win elections by telling voters they themselves are at fault. It is easier to let them off the hook by blaming some abstraction. Adam's sins are still attributed to some serpent which crept into the Garden." -- I.F. Stone

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Here's how it works with Dad: I get drunken phone calls any night of the week (time not a consideration) reciting dialogue from Tombstone, The Godfather or any number of Eddie Murphy comedies up until The Distinguished Gentleman. There might be some tenuous context -- a new client who does a mean Brando, perhaps -- but more or less, it's just one silly old man trying to bond with the son who didn't like baseball. (The other one gave it up for the guitar. Nyah, nyah.)

Here's how it works with Mom: I get disturbingly sober phone calls over a two-day period in February explaining how "that hideous thing" doesn't deserve to win Best in Oral Self-Hygiene, let alone Group or Show. Yes, it's Westminster week, one of the few times in the year when eugenics is celebrated on national television and, judging by how they barber Standard Poodles, character is king.

The Weisses are dog people. We're extremely partial to the stoic and intelligent Tibetan terrier. Sorry, you won't get a photo of the dearly departed Lucie because I made a vow when I launched this digital dirigible three years ago that I wouldn't stoop to the level of Andrew Sullivan's beagle-mania. I'd like to keep one or two principles in tact.

Anyway, a Springer Spaniel, who's actually not that bad to look at and seems to be fairly charismatic, won Best in Show this year. It beat a lackluster septet of finalists, one of whom, a Dandie Dinmont terrier, is co-owned by Bill Cosby and seems to have been given Rudy's Season 2 haircut.

The handler seemed happy, and one of the announcers stupidly suggested the dog knew it had won. Yeah, just wait till those centerfold pics and clinic bills emerge and its ribbon is rescinded... "He was young and he needed the money!"

Sorry. Now back to your regular Trotsky-Amis-Neocon programming.

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In his masterpiece Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman explains the torturous process of the Baconian method it affects the life and work of his protagonist, the Soviet physicist Viktor Shtrum.

The laboratory experiments had been intended to confirm the predictions of the theory. They had failed to do this. The contradiction between the experimental results and the theory naturally led him to doubt the accuracy of the experiments. A theory that had been elaborated on the basis of decades of work by many researchers, a theory that had then explained many things in subsequent experimental results, seemed quite unshakeable. Repetition of the experiments had shown again and again that the deflections of charged particles in interaction with the nucleus still failed to correspond with what the theory predicted. Even the most generous allowance for the inaccuracy of the experiments, for the imperfection of the measuring apparatus and the emulsions used to photograph the fission of the nuclei, could in no way account for such large discrepancies.

Realizing that there could be no doubt as to the accuracy of the results, Viktor had then attempted to patch up the theory. He had postulated various arbitrary hypotheses that would reconcile the new experimental data with the theory. Everything he had done had been based on one fundamental belief: that, since the theory was itself deduced from experimental data, it was impossible for an experiment to contradict it.

An enormous amount of labour was expended in an attempt to reconcile the new data with the theory. Nevertheless, the patched-up theory still failed to account for new contradictions in the results form the laboratory. The theory remained as powerless as ever, though it still seemed unthinkable to reject it.

Although he doesn't go into much detail, it's clear Grossman's hero is helping to speed along the development of the Soviet atom bomb. (At one decisive point, when it looks as if the black marias are en route to haul him away to jail, Shtrum is saved by the personal intervention of Stalin himself. Even as a Jew, this doctor was too indispensable to a more exigent "plot" to be purged under the spate of postwar anti-Semitic hysteria.)

However, notice how craftily in the above paragraphs Grossman metaphorically anatomizes the mentality of Communism! The contradiction between the experimental results and the theory naturally led him to doubt the accuracy of the experiments. All the improvisational skill in the world can't save a debased theory.

Had this extraordinary Russian novelist been less brave in other parts of Life and Fate (probably the only book ever to get "arrested" for its "individualism" -- read "excellence"), he might have well smuggled in this coded criticism of ideology and gotten away with it. At the very least, Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera would have been proud.

If the absurdities of the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of science hadn't been so harmful and blood-soaked, they'd have been hilarious. Stalin ruled as a kind of armchair white-coat over a vast matrix of scholarship and laboratory research that might otherwise have yielded a few lasting monuments to a particularly dark era in Russian history. Instead, he celebrated crackpots, killed the real talent, and then -- because such is the caprice of despots everywhere -- "rehabilitated" the slain victims and proceeded to lock up all the old crackpots. Stalin took this tack with linguistics, believe it or not. (Hold your cheap Chomsky jokes, please.) Having bought into the charlatan N. Marr's theory that the totality of the Russian language emanated from exactly four sounds -- “rosh,” “sal, ” “ber,” and “yon" -- Stalin eventually decided that, no, that probably wasn't right after all. (His epiphany did not coincide with lending credence or stays of execution to Marr's sane antagonists, who'd gone out of their way to debunk such patent nonsense in the 30's.) Then Stalin wrote a book on "Marxist" linguistics, showed Marr to be the fool everyone knew he was, and all was right again with the dialectical Force.

A new book's come out about the Georgian monster's intellectual depredations on the scientific community. Although Communism is dead, we really must continue to hear about such totalitarian manipulations of falsifiable data, since creationism and "Intelligent Design" are still very much en vogue; the former apparently now influences paleontology.

Much has already been written about some of the most egregious cases of ideology run amok. Among the most famous is the "biological war" that was waged by pseudo-biologist Trofim Lysenko just after World War II. His condemnation of the "bourgeois" nature of the chromosome had a devastating impact not only on this science but on Soviet agriculture more broadly. So what was Stalin's motivation in supporting this semi-literate homegrown agronomist who tried to kill contemporary genetics? It would be too easy to attribute it to the conceptual contradiction between Marxism's unspecified environmental, evolutionary beliefs and Western-oriented genetics, which was based on the fundamentals of molecular biology. Stalin, Pollock shows us, never bought Lysenko's arguments on the "class nature" of this science. In the margins of a draft speech by the biologist, Stalin scoffed: "Ha-Ha-Ha!!! And what about Mathematics? And Darwinism?" Rather, Stalin and the Party's support for Lysenko was the outgrowth of the desperation that had set in once it was clear that collectivization had failed to transform Soviet agriculture. Stalin counted on Lysenko to provide practical, indeed miraculous, results for the food supply. This gamble, however, assured that vast armies of serious scientists would perish and that Soviet biology would be damaged for generations.

Interesting about that note, though I dare say it's doesn't prove Stalin was any more astute about distinguishing between ideological claptrap and empiricism. Rather, it shows the coarse and derisive schoolboy mind that laughed its way through everything -- politics, industry, war, central planning, terror, mass murder.

I wasn't a fan of Robert Service's biography of the Kremlin mountaineer, but one passage from that volume is worth reprinting to underscore the preceding point:

“Having recently re-read Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, [Stalin] was convinced that space and time were absolute, unchallengeable concepts in all human endeavours…. Einsteinian physics were therefore to be regarded as a bourgeois mystification. The problem was that such physics were crucial to the completion of the A-bomb project. Beria, caught between wanting to appear as Stalin’s ideological apostle and wishing to produce an A-bomb for him, decided he needed clearance from the Boss for Soviet physicists to use Einstein’s equations. Stalin, ever the pragmatist in matters of power, gave his jovial assent: ‘Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.’”

So. Stalin considers Einsteinian physics "bourgeois mystification," but he's also in a hurry to impress Truman with Soviet atom-splitting. It's a nervous roll of the dice. Heads, we get a bomb. Tails, bourgeois mystification, and we shoot the scientists.

And you thought Steven Pinker had it rough defending Larry Summers.

CONTEXT - This Week in Arts and Ideas from The Moscow Times

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How you gonna keep 'em down on the Quidditch field once they've felt up a horse on the farm?

Discussing J. K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the saga’s seventh and concluding volume, scheduled for publication on July 21, two days before Mr. Radcliffe turns 18 and has access to an estimated $35 million fortune, he told The Observer magazine in London what he thought would happen to the character he plays. Will he die? “I think I will,” said Mr. Radcliffe. “I sort of hope I will, really. I think that’s really the only way Jo can end it,” he said, referring to Ms. Rowling, “if Harry and Voldemort . . . Maybe one can only die if the other one dies. I don’t know that for sure. But I’m quite looking forward to doing a death scene, if I get that opportunity.”

Sheesh. He flings a condom at Diana Rigg and the world's a darker place all of a sudden.

Die, Harry Potter, Die - New York Times

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From Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (Hat tip, Norm):

YouTube - Les Parapluies de Cherbourg

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A virus like any other, anti-Semitism is subject to infinite mutations, the better to adapt to changing immunological conditions. Before World War II, it was a industrial-financial hold that the Jews were said to possess over world affairs. Hidden behind the scenes of governments and media organs, Jews were credited with starting and ending wars, making capital markets rise and fall on a whim, and generally wielding the reins of that colicky beast known as History. They weren't out front because they were (rightly) reviled and persecuted. That they operated in the shadows and out of some secret playbook made them even more sinister.

Then, Israel was founded and the paranoids were given a concrete target, one circumscribed by contiguous borders and heavily endowed by a guilty Western establishment.

Sure, anti-Zionism was a legitimate movement not necessarily run by anti-Semites -- in 1948. A lot of anti-Zionists then were themselves Jews, not even on nodding terms with "self-hatred," who simply couldn't see the point in a official homeland when a de facto one had already presented itself in the diaspora haven of America.

That was then, this is now.

If you're looking to distinguish between a long-held opposition to Israel on pragmatic grounds and a pathological antipathy against Jews, you might ask yourself the following: Do Zionists still exist? What happens to a movement once its goals have been attained? Those who continue to agitate beyond a pre-determined objective have either shifted the goalposts (and will probably keep on shifting them) or are closet utopians who never actually believed what they claimed to. They keep coming up empty, no matter how successful they are.

To be "anti-Zionist" at this point in history is to be selectively anarchistic; selectively because you want the end of one state and one state only. Why might that be? If it was purely out of concern for the past and present turmoil of the Palestinians, we might wonder, haven't historical injustices precipitated the founding of every modern nation? And haven't they been correctable by reform, not total annihilation? Why should one state be singled out for the rough treatment?

Here is Matthias Küntzel:

Just as Hitler sought to "liberate" humanity by murdering the Jews, so Ahmadinejad believes he can "liberate" humanity by eradicating Israel. The deniers' conference as an instrument for propagating this project is intimately linked to the nuclear program as an instrument for realizing it. Five years ago, in December 2001, former Iranian president Hashemi Rafsanjani first boasted that "the use of even one nuclear bomb inside Israel will destroy everything," whereas the damage to the Islamic world of a potential retaliatory nuclear attack could be limited: "It is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality." While the Islamic world could sacrifice hundreds of thousands of "martyrs" in an Israeli retaliatory strike without disappearing--so goes Rafsanjani's argument--Israel would be history after the first bomb.

[...]

Obviously, from a logical point of view, enthusiasm for the Holocaust is incompatible with its denial. Logic, however, is beside the point. Anti-Semitism is built upon an emotional infrastructure that substitutes for reason an ephemeral combination of mutually exclusive attributions, all arising from hatred of everything Jewish. As a result, many contradictory anti-Jewish interpretations of the Holocaust can be deployed simultaneously: (1) the extermination of millions was a good thing; (2) the extermination of millions was a Zionist fabrication; (3) the Holocaust resulted from a Jewish conspiracy against Germany that Hitler thwarted and punished; (4) the Holocaust was a joint enterprise of the Zionists and Nazis; (5) the Zionists' "Holocaust industry" exaggerates the murder of the Jews for self-interested reasons; (6) Israeli actions against the Palestinians are the "true" Holocaust--and so on.

Iran's Obsession with the Jews

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Here's what's going to happen to Dinesh D'Souza, in short order. He's going to find his filthy moral preference for jihadism lifted -- more in reluctance than glee -- by the hard left he so despises. He won't have seen this coming, but there it'll be all the same. The ink's probably being spilled at the New Left Review: "Even a few American reactionaries are beginning to appreciate the post-colonial grievances of Al Qaeda..."

Then, realizing he has successfully alienated all his old cronies on the Reaganite right, finding himself welcome only in the uninspiring pages of Human Events, D'Souza will turn against his new frenemies on the third worldist left with lightning speed and the kind of intellectual honesty we've come to expect from him. ("My arguments were taken out of context by precisely those elements I blamed for causing 9/11 to happen in the first place," etc.)

Then of course it'll be too late. Been there, done that, Dinesh. You were something, boy, back in the day, when we needed a subcontinental spokesman to defend empire and assimilation, but you've past your sell-by date. Thanks for the memories.

Then something about a dimly lit motel room, scattered Ecstacy pills, Coulter crying over her bedizened Chanel crucifix, redemption, televangelist tours, etc., etc.

Bruce Bawer sees it all coming:

Promoting his tract on TV, D’Souza has consistently softened and misrepresented its message. His January 28 reply to critics, which ran in the Washington Post, is a masterpiece of dissembling: he complains that Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert hounded him with the question “But you agree with the Islamic radicals, don’t you?”—but fails to mention that he finally replied “Yes.” Indeed, though he purports to disdain those radicals, he writes about them far more compassionately than about anyone on the American left: Among the images he strives to improve are those of Theo van Gogh’s murderer (he quotes out of context a sensitive-sounding courtroom remark the butcher made to his victim’s mother), of bin Ladin and Khomeini (both of whom, we’re told, are “highly regarded” for their “modest demeanor, frugal lifestyle, and soft-spoken manner”), of Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi (whose criticism of gay marriage he approvingly cites, while omitting to note that Qaradawi also supports the death sentence for sodomites), and even of the 9/11 terrorists (D’Souza excerpts the goodbye letter one of them sent his wife, which he plainly finds noble and poignant).

The Enemy at Home | Books | The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper

RELATED: Bullshit Reactionary [Why I think D'Souza's lying through his hush-puppies.]

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The enviable Stephen Metcalf on James Fenton:

Fenton has never relinquished his deep attachment to detachment, and such ruefully crooked smiles as “When your life is a chain of disasters / And your death you believe would be sameish,” from “Here Come the Drum Majorettes!” still get flashed in his mid-career work. When stationed in an exotic foreign locale, as in “The Ballad of the Imam and the Shah” and “Jerusalem,” he allows himself some degree of self-conscious importance; and when he feels, as in his elegy “For Andrew Wood,” or the love lyrics in “Out of Danger,” he feels deeply, simply and directly. But as one defense against the burdens of high expectations, youngish English poets now generally avoid burdening themselves with Deep Ideas, especially about poetry, and in Fenton this has created a secondary danger. He loves the use of refrains, and is highly ironical in his use of songlike repetitions, and, all ironies aside, this can make him read sometimes like a frustrated librettist. A nice, final turn of the ironical screw: “Selected Poems” includes his libretto for a project called “The Love Bomb,” a would-be opera about a woman taken captivity by a cult. Here we feel Fenton grappling with something large: the proximity of prophecy to violence, which allows him to write in an uncharacteristically Blakean mode. One cannot ask a poet, especially “the major British poet of his generation,” to be a different poet from the one that emerged from his early promise. Nonetheless, I can’t help hoping that Fenton will slough off a little more frequently the pose of left-handed diffidence that has admittedly served him so well, and accept the mantle of his greatness, overbearing as it might be.

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U2 caught heat a while ago for transferring ownership of its music rights to the Netherlands in response to Ireland's new tax on royalty income, which was previously tax-free. In the Netherlands, it is tax-free. Offshore holding companies are actually a very common tax-reduction trick. Most of Microsoft's patents are owned by a company in Ireland, which is wholly owned by Microsoft. Microsoft then licenses its own software from its subsidiary at a pretty high price and is able to write off the "cost" of the licensing as a business expense against its US income, while the Irish company doesn't have to pay much at all to the government of Ireland. Besides patents in Ireland, it's popular to hold financial assets in the Cayman Islands and copyrights in the Netherlands.

Of course, the difference between Microsoft and U2 is that Microsoft is seen as the profit-driven enterprise it is, whereas part of the U2 brand is convincing people to convince governments to give away more tax money as foreign aid. So the tax-slashing ploy made U2 look more than a little cynical, even hypocritical.

Raising the stakes, this month Bloomberg Markets has a cover article tracing the spiderweb of Bono's and U2's investments in an array of businesses, many held in various holding companies and clearly tax-driven.

Revenue from the Vertigo tour is funneled through companies that are mostly registered in Ireland and structured to minimize taxes. ``U2 are arch-capitalists -- arch-capitalists -- but it looks as if they're not,'' says Jim Aiken, a music promoter who helped stage U2 concerts in Ireland during the 1980s and 1990s.

...

The details of U2's money making are out of public view in a network of private companies and trusts. Most of these holdings are registered in Ireland, according to corporate filings in Ireland's Companies Registration Office.

The companies publish shortened accounts, which do not reveal cash flow details, while the trusts do not publish any accounts.

In 2005 Not Us Ltd., the main holding company, reported a net loss of 2.91 million euros ($3.76 million) after advancing unsecured, interest-free loans to subsidiaries. The companies handle income from ticket and record sales, which Bono shares equally with the other band members.

``The whole point of this structure is to minimize your tax and not show anything,'' says Cliff Dane, a Weston-Super-Mare, U.K.-based accountant who teaches music industry finance and economics at the University of Westminster in London.

Emphasis mine. Those "interest-free loans" to U2's own businesses are a tax dodge allowing income earned by the holding company to show up on the tax return of the subsidiaries, which are (presumably) in foreign countries where that income won't be taxed. The nested trusts and companies are clearly intended to keep the details of U2's money as far from the public eye as possible, though whether it's to keep the government, or the starry-eyed public, in the dark I don't know.

All this is possible because of the legal doctrine that corporations are separate entities in the eyes of the law. If I own shares of McDonald's and buy a Big Mac, I'm not buying a burger from myself; similarly, U2 can have their wholly owned businesses buy and sell from each other to shuffle tax liability between them. All this makes the name of U2's holding company -- "Not Us" -- especially cheeky, since it appears to be a reference to the not really justified legal illusion that it's U2 but not really U2. (Although "U2 Two" would have been funnier, in my opinion.)

For arch-capitalists, though, U2 seem to be in charge of a Zooropa menagerie of experiments they don't quite know how to manage.

Bono owns a 25 percent stake in the 50-room Clarence hotel on Dublin's Wellington Quay, whose rates start at $296 a night. The Edge also owns 25 percent, while two Irish investors, Derek Quinlan and Paddy McKillen, own the rest. The Clarence reported a net loss in 2005 of 611,271 euros.

Bono has an undisclosed stake in Nude, a chain of three Dublin cafes founded in 1999 by his elder brother, Norman... Nude lost 634,890 euros in 2005, despite its popularity with Dublin's student crowd.

With his wife, Bono in 2004 founded Edun, an Irish- registered company that describes itself as a socially conscious fashion label aimed at increasing trade and employment in developing countries... Edun CEO Christian Kemp-Griffin says the company -- which reported a first-year loss of $5.49 million in 2004 -- will be profitable in 2008.

If you've never read a press release from a Big Three automaker, "profitable next year" means "we're absolutely humiliated to be pissing away cash so quickly, but the deus will be popping out of the machina any minute now." Some of Bono's allies in the article brush off questions about how much of his personal money Bono donates to the charities he stumps for, arguing that his greatest value is as a spokesman, not as a cash-producer. Yeah -- so it seems.

Bonus: it's worth reading the article if for no other reason than to see how pissed Bobby Shriver is to be outfamoused.

Bloomberg News | Bono, Who Preaches Charity, Profits From Buyouts, Tax Breaks

Bloomberg News | Bono Riffs on Silicon Valley Buyouts With Video Games, Forbes

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Believe it or not, the French got it right. David Galula wrote the original (1964) counterinsurgency manual. Max Boot applies Galula's dicta to our current conundrum in Iraq:

"If insurgents, though identified and arrested by the police, take advantage of the many normal safeguards built into the judicial system and are released, the police can do little."

Captured Iraqi insurgents know they can remain silent and that most likely they will never be convicted because witnesses and judges can be bought or intimidated.

"Eight of 10 detainees are set free," write military analysts Bing West and Eliot Cohen. "One in 75 American males is in jail, compared to one in 450 Iraqi males." Since, as they note, "Iraq is not six times safer than the U.S.," the disparity is because of faults with the legal system that need to be fixed — perhaps by imposing martial law. Iraq will not become safer until more militants are behind bars, but they will never be convicted under peacetime rules of evidence.

The French also got it wrong, of course. In David Petraeus' updated manual for destroying and delegitimizing an insurgency, he similarly makes use of a military historian's long-term memory:

During Napoleon’s occupation of Spain in 1808, little thought was given to the potential challenges of subduing the Spanish populace. Conditioned by the decisive victories at Austerlitz and Jena, Napoleon believed the conquest of Spain would be little more than a “military promenade.” Napoleon’s campaign included a rapid conventional military victory over Spanish armies but ignored the immediate requirement to provide a stable and secure environment for the people and the countryside.

The French should have expected ferocious resistance. The Spanish people were accustomed to hardship, suspicious of foreigners, and constantly involved in skirmishes with security forces. The French failed to analyze the history, culture, and motivations of the Spanish people, or to seriously consider their potential to support or hinder the achievement of French political objectives. Napoleon’s cultural miscalculation resulted in a protracted struggle that lasted nearly six years and ultimately required approximately three-fifths of the French Empire’s total armed strength, almost four times the force of 80,000 Napoleon originally had designated for this theater. The Spanish resistance drained the Empire’s resources and was the beginning of the end of Napoleon’s reign. Despite his reputation for brilliant campaign planning, in this instance Napoleon had failed to grasp the real situation in the theater, and his forces were not capable of learning and adapting for the unexpected demands of counterinsurgency.

In other words, it's not just an "Arab problem." Byron, in "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," spoke of how death-averse and passionate the Spanish rebels he'd encountered were during Napoleon's siege. The great Romantic poet was rather a fan of the short Corsican general, but he couldn't refrain from extolling the truculence of a peaceable people when their land was invaded. This went double for the women. The maid of Saragossa is a figure of ovaries-of-steel, olive-skinned legend, sort of the Artemis of the Iberian peninsula:

Is it for this the Spanish maid, arous'd,
Hangs on the willow her unstrung guitar,
And, all unsex'd, the Anlace hath espous'd,
Sun the loud song, and dar'd the deed of war?
And she, whom once the semblance of a scar
Appall'd, an owlet's 'larum chill'd with dread,
Now views the column-scattering bay'net jar,
The falchion flash, and o'er the yet warm dead
Stalks with Minerva's step where Mars might quake to tread.

Now had Napoleon got the water turned back on and had his Gaullic battalions left a more delicate "footsprint," Minerva's step might have been toward that neglected guitar and not toward a cannon...

Keys to a successful surge - Los Angeles Times

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The Times has one of their great video essays on the transformation of Sadr City in the last three years. The Mahdi Army has taken on a Hezbollah-ish role in rebuilding infrastructure and doling out alms to the poor or families of war dead. As long as the Mahdi are seen as a civil support network -- the Guardian Angels meets the Red Cross -- their political clout will not diminish. However, as the video shows, some Sadr City residents know exactly how they're being held hostage by a messianic nutball.

Encouraging, even if it is still too soon to tell, is that most believe Muqtada al-Sadr will disarm his militia (or at least cap the violence) so long as the multinational forces don't try to do the job themselves. This is sticking pretty close to the counterinsurgency/surge script so far. Let's see if it pans out.

New York Times Video

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"Hell hath no fury like a postmodernist scorned."
-- David Foster Wallace, "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way"

As far as hysterical realists go, David Foster Wallace has always been able to have his cake and pop out of it, too. He's probably the best of that now-muted fin de siecle group of upstarts—Eggers, Franzen, Vollmann, Dixon—who specialized in arch emotion, self-conscious narrative and ambition to beat the band. A better short story writer and essayist than he is a novelist, Wallace is nonetheless thought of as inextricable from his titanic second novel, Infinite Jest.

Stephen Burns, who wrote the Reader’s Guide to this heavily footnoted doorstop, almost parodies the scope of his quarry by limiting his review of the 10th anniversary edition of Jest to such scant space:

For all its many branching offshoots, the structure of Infinite Jest is built on a narrative foundation that recalls James Joyce's Ulysses, an ancestor text that is specifically evoked in Wallace's use of the famous Joycean compound "scrotumtightening". Both texts have one foot in Hamlet, and both are organized around two narrative arcs that set a youthful prodigy who has problems with his father, next to an older man, who is less well educated but more humane than his son. In both books the author begins with the younger talent, but moves toward the older man as the story approaches its end. In Wallace's novel, the Leopold Bloom figure is provided by Donald Gately, an enormous former burglar who is trying to lead an earnest life and recover from his addictions at a halfway house. Balanced against this story is that of the Stephen Dedalus figure, provided by Hal Incandenza, a teenage lexical and tennis prodigy who is descending into addiction even as Gately makes his escape. Between the cynicism of youth and the developing sincerity of the recovering addict, Wallace attempts to explore what he calls "the soul's core systems", probing his characters' sometimes nebulous sense of self.

More Hamlet than Ulysses, I’d say, because the only aspect of Wallace that puts one in mind of Joyce is the recourse to onomatopoeia and impenetrability – if not, unintelligibility. There are whole chapters in Jest, many of them brilliant, written in a Faulkernian idiom apostrophizing the character whose exploits are being described. One memorable set piece involves a cross-dressing, drug-addled hustler running down the street having shit himself.

But consider Hal O. Incandenza’s* mother has taken up with her brother-in-law after the death of Hal’s father. Hal’s got a chemical dependence on marijuana, which, if it doesn’t quite make him go insane, makes him paranoid and verbose and, at the beginning (read: “end”) of the novel, convulsive.

I suppose here I should declare my interest, also my infinite patience in having actually read this monstrosity cover to cover – pair of bookmarks in hand, one for the text, one for the index – and absolutely loved the damned thing. Fancy a shelf-warper about addiction being so addictive. (Lisa Schwarzbaum at Entertainment Weekly famously wrote a review of Infinite Jest that was all about how hilarious she found it that Entertainment Weekly expected her to read Infinite Jest.)

I know, I know. Too clever by full. All “bells and whistles.” Onanistic, even. Didn’t you read that Onion story: “Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20”? As it happens, I have a term for the self- and reader abuse Wallace thrills in, yet which makes him so strangely readable. I call it Wallacio.

So much of the charm is in seeing just how much this prodigy thinks he can get away and still be thought talented. The truth is, he is talented. No one could who’s read his stories, “Good Old Neon” and “The Depressed Person” (a mind-refracted and involuted metafiction that’s shockingly insightful), could deny the fact.

And with his last collection of short stories, Oblivion, Wallace proved he was capable of cutting the fat and writing lean without any damage to his peculiar way we live now. A tale about a man who can sculpt his ordure straight from the colon sounds disgusting because it is disgusting. Though would you think me fatuous to say it’s also one of the most exigent works of “9/11 literature**” in print?

Wallace is a master of the underworld; his métier, what actuates the obsessive-compulsive and the niche extremists of post-industrial America (talk radio personalities, tennis players, twelve-steppers, ad execs, former child celebrities, mathematical theorists, David Lynch***).

And but so it’d be a shame to think his brightest days are already behind him.

Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, reviewed by Times Literary Supplement

* "Radiant angel," is this name supposed to connote?
** (!)
*** I owe my first viewing and subsequent devotion to Blue Velvet to DFW's essay on Lynch.

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The most haunting moment in Orwell's 1984 involves the best form of state surveillance: mind-reading. O'Brien has nearly destroyed Smith's body; all that remains is the erasure of the dissident's thoughts:

"When we navigate the ocean, or when we predict an eclipse, we often find it convenient to assume that the earth goes round the sun and that the stars are millions upon millions of kilometers away. But what of it? Do you suppose it is beyond us to produce a dual system of astronomy? The stars can be near or distant, according as we need them. Do you suppose our mathematicians are unequal to that? Have you forgotten doublethink?"

Winston shrank back upon the bed. Whatever he said, the swift answer crushed him like a bludgeon. And yet he knew, he knew, that he was in the right. The belief that nothing exists outside your own mind--surely there must be some way of demonstrating that it was false? Had it not been exposed long ago as a fallacy? There was even a name for it, which he had forgotten. A faint smile twitched the corners of O'Brien's mouth as he looked down at him.

"I told you, Winston," he said," that metaphysics is not your strong point. The word you are trying to think of is solipsism."

Everyone's talking about Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's film The Lives of Others, which is set in 1984 and which makes a bleak work of art out of the East German secret police's cunning methods for invigilating suspected heretics. You know how it goes. Commissar fancies ingenue of socialist realist screen. Ingenue dates stooge author. Commissar hires leather-clad Stalinist thug to watch the couple's every banal and law-abiding move.

Dana Stevens goes ga-ga for the flick:

Only a film crew with some experience of living in such a state could do such a merciless job rendering the joyless, yellowish-gray interiors of the pre-glasnost GDR. Never has on-screen food looked less appetizing: In the Stasi cafeteria, officers and recruits alike bolt down dingy bowls of gruel and hockey pucks of fried potato. The film's general atmosphere of drab anomie renders the rare moments of pleasure—including a scene in which Georg plays the piano, eliciting tears from the eavesdropping Wiesler—all the more moving. Von Donnersmarck's film is set in a world where freedom isn't an abstract concept to be taken for granted—it's a distant promise that is enough to make bureaucrats in headphones weep.

What's especially effective about these mad-with-jealousy, unrequited love stories from the far side of the Iron Curtain is that they both educe the cracked logic of party Communism and debunk it -- at the party level. You could almost do without the shadowed subjects here, who are by all accounts unprovocative conformists, not rebels. It's the bad guys we're interested in.

Love does not factor in statism, and it's always the statists who are the first to forget this rule. Pasha as a brutal Red Army commander in Dr. Zhivago: "The private life is dead - for a man with any manhood." This is immediately before he stares ominously out of the window of his armored train, following the retreat of a man he knows to be leagues better than himself and who probably rather enjoys his own private life. (He'll be enjoying Pasha's wife in due course.)

Nobody understood the dialectic between the historical imperative and the human impulse better than Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon:

Sometimes [Rubashov] would respond unexpectedly to a tune, or even the memory of a tune, or of the folded hands of the Pieta, or of certain scnes of his childhood. As if a tuning-fork had been struck, there would be answering vibrations, and once this had started a state would be produced which the mystics called "ecstacy" and saints "contemplation;" the greatest and soberest of modern psychologists had recognized this staet as a fact and called it the "oceanic sense." And, indeed, one's personality dissolved as a grain of salt in the sea; but at the same time, the infinite sea seemed to be contained in the grain of salt. The grain could no longer be localized in time and space. It was a state in which thought lost its direction and started to circle, like the compass needle at the magnetic pole; until finally it cut loose from its axis and travelled freely in space like a bunch of light in the night; and until it seemed that all thoughts and all sensations, even pain and joy itself, were only the spectrum lines of the same ray of light, disintegrating in the prism of consciousness.

The best surveillance movie since The Conversation. - By Dana Stevens - Slate Magazine

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I've added two new features to this blog: Stumble Upon and Technorati. One lets you recommend an individual post to a whole community of eager blog readers, just by clicking on that blueish button next to Trackbacks. The other lets you call Snarksmith one of your favorite sites in the internet's Alexandrian library of them. Make us famous why don't you.

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Anna Husarka gets it tragically right:

"At the moment, given the level of violence in Iraq, every single Iraqi should be considered a refugee [because they are] victims of violence," says Stéphane Jaquemet, UNHCR's regional representative in the Middle East. So, currently, repatriation is out of the question. Neither Syria nor Jordan is offering local integration to the refugees, and the difficult economic, political, and social situation in those countries doesn't favor local absorption. This makes the option of resettlement the most compelling. But it is not happening yet. In the first nine months of 2006, a total of 404 Iraqis were resettled worldwide, 151 of them in the United States. (In other words, in six months, the American government offers a chance to start a new life to as many Iraqis as are killed each day in the civil war that has followed the U.S.-led intervention in their country.)

It makes the skin crawl to assess a raging humanitarian nightmare according to the rules of historical equivalence. But we compare Saddam to Hitler and Stalin, so World War II, like it not, obtrudes once more into the debate. The United States has a poor to mixed record on opening its borders to war-ravaged and bedraggled masses when the chaos they're fleeing from was not of the United State's own making. How will posterity judge us if turn our backs on Iraqis escaping a civil war for which we're responsible? (You can argue its inevitability with or without regime change, but you can't argue that we've become the stewards of failed state and thus accountable to its citizens.)

Neoconservatives like Bill Kristol have said they little about immigration, perhaps having shrewdly anticipated that they'd need an updated Ellis Island homily to save the day in Mesopotamia. But I'd very much like to hear Lou Dobbs' nativist take on the Iraqi exodus. Or any yellow dog Democrat's, for that matter.

Iraqi refugees in Jordan. - By Anna Husarska - Slate Magazine

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Laurel Snyder's Faithhacker post about Jewish artists reminded me that I’d been wanting to comment on the Met’s terrific exhibit, “Glitter and Doom.” It’s a retrospective of Weimer impressionism, featuring the works of Otto Dix, George Grosz and Max Beckmann – without whom David Lynch is pretty well unimaginable.

I doubt I can improve on Ian Buruma’s excellent essay in the New York Review of Books about the paradoxical lure and repulsion of Germany’s brief Second Reich. Suffice it to say, a thin veil of decadence was draped over a ravaged society reeling from horrors of the First World War and well on its way toward the Second. Art cleverly (if scandalously) inverted this effect by embellishing the pathological the expense of the decadent. The central tropes here were not far removed from those of our own Gilded Age, plus sex. Blimpish, cigar-chomping tycoons; frivolous bourgeois playing cards or cutting a rug; graying Prussian aristos selling themselves and their country; hideously mangled and prosthesis-patched veterans; and whores – whores everywhere you turned.

Grosz was a rara avis, even for such a vertiginous time. He changed his name in 1916 to from Ehrenfried Groß out of an abiding enthusiasm for America, derived from his reading of James Fenimore Cooper (his judgment on the canvas far outmarshalled its counterpart on the page).

Something of a Luxemburgian socialist by nature, he was arrested during the Spartakus uprising – or abortive German revolution – of 1919, the same year he joined the Communist Party. Five months in Russia was all it took to disillusion him on this sordid affiliation. After adding more than his fair share to the prevailing Weimar aesthetic, he hopped it for the states shortly before Hitler became Chancellor, an eventuality Grosz and others of his set saw coming.

If you’ve read Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories, or perhaps seen Cabaret, you know about the whistled nihilism of the German twenties. Don’t think we’re quite “over” that decade’s cultural impact just yet. I remember being equally amused and shocked to discover in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind the true origins of the song “Mack the Knife,” whose shark teeth were so winningly yanked out by Louis Armstrong in his pop standard of 1954.

This cheery, Anglicized jazz number, used to great effect in closing scenes of Quiz Show, was composed by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill for their Threepenny Opera, which is now in revival on Broadway with ex-Cabaretman Alan Cumming in the lead role. Mackie Messer was a character based on a highwayman in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. He fatally slashed those who failed to pony up. Sort of a Natural Born Killer before his time.

Bloom thus traced the lineaments of our postmodern fascination with murder and celebrity sociopaths to a Europe dangerously poised “between the wars” and just at the cusp of world-historic disaster. Auden, who spent some time in Berlin with Isherwood, knew what he was talking about when, in summarizing Whitehead in the Portable Greek Reader, he wrote:

"Civilisation is a precarious balance between barbaric vagueness and trivial order. Barbarism is unified but undifferentiated; triviality is differentiated but lacking in any central unity; the ideal of civilisation is the integration into a complete whole and with the minimum strain, of the maximum number of distinct activities."

The philosophical hysteria of a tweedy cultural conservative this may be, but I wonder if “Mack the Knife” were re-written today that its title wouldn’t be, “If I Did It.”

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For those interested in posting feedback to the site, I've re-implemented Comments in the wake of a massive purge of all the spam that had accumulated over the last year. The only catch is, to ward off the Erectile Dysfunction links (not that I'm not sure Snarksmith's target demo couldn't use them), I've had to install a TypePad authentification thingamabob. So if it's worth your time to sign up to call Nic and me morons, do so. We're all social democrats here.

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[Here's another iSpy interview I conducted for Jewcy, this time with Noah Shachtman of DefenseTech.org]

Noah Shachtman is where grunt meets geek. As the editor of the hugely popular military blog Defense Tech, he writes daily about the tools and techniques of modern warfare. According to one anonymous testimonial, even Pentagon staffers peruse the site— and probably get a better sense of what’s transpiring in Iraq there than they do through in-house analysis.

Defense Tech is more than an ain't-it-cool playground for Rambo wannabes. For me, the summa of its cultural importance came after Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in Baquba by a carefully coordinated U.S. air strike. Within hours, the site had posted a readable primer on how the mission that ended the Al Qaeda thug’s earthly presence reflected a “revolution” in F-16 aerial combat. So it was a momentous day on two fronts.

Especially impressive is that the reigning Clausewitz of cyberspace has no formal military or science training. Shachtman began covering battlefield technology as an interested freelancer for Wired, the New York Times and the Village Voice. If there is a fanboy quotient to his reportage, it's only because he revels in the esoterica of tactics, strategy and materiel that Donald Rumsfeld must be saving for his memoirs.

Armchair general? Not quite. Shachtman has traveled to Iraq and Israel and, as this Forward dispatch demonstrates, he's probably the only foreign correspondent ever to witness a Kaddish for American war dead at Camp Victory, just outside of Baghdad.

Two years ago, Military.com—owned by Monster.com—bought out Defense Tech. Shachtman tells Jewcy that he’ll be stepping down as editor next week and moving to an undisclosed location (the only hint he'll allow us to give is that it's big media). Rest easy, though—his days of invigilating the military-industrial complex are far from over.

(Excerpted question)

You spent some time in Iraq recently. What was the most awe-inspiring display of martial prowess you saw?

I don't know about "awe-inspiring display[s] of martial prowess." But I can tell you about soldiers that are really, really brave. I spent three weeks last summer with an Army Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit—a bomb squad, in other words. These guys, as often as ten times a day, would be out in Baghdad's 138-degree heat, defusing bombs, avoiding insurgent booby-traps, and dodging attacks. And they did it all with a cool professionalism that left me totally relaxed, even when the IEDs were going off. Here's a story I wrote about one of those days. Check out the ending, when Staff Sergeant Mark Palmer is hovering over a smoking mortar, trying to render the thing safe with a garden hose and a bucket of sand, before it explodes and kills us all.

The Whiz Kid of Warfare | Jewcy.com

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Tremendous:

Though it would be foolish for an outsider to quarrel with his enormous creative achievement—one might as well take a tomahawk to a forest—there is reason to sympathize with those native Argentines, not all of them Philistines, who can't help feeling that it was an accumulation of trees designed to obscure the wood. Borges, alas, had no particular objection to extreme authoritarianism as such. The reason he hated Peronismo was that it was a mass movement. He didn't like the masses: He was the kind of senatorial elitist whose chief objection to fascism is that by mobilizing the people it gives them ideas above their station and hands out too many free shirts.

Borges' bad politics. - By Clive James - Slate Magazine

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This is utterly brilliant. Check out Zurnet NYC, a site that lets you download subway routes and local bars (complete with drink price indices!).

You could write a graduate thesis on how the most antisocial device since that rabbit dildo featured on Sex and the City is leading to more sex in the city.

Zurnet NYC - Zsubway - Zdrinks ? Demo

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"All war poetry is antiwar poetry," said Siegfried Sassoon. He was right. As my friend and this week's Jewcy blog guest editor Stefan Beck points out about Erich Maria Remarque's masterpiece, All Quiet on the Western Front:

Among those who support the war in Iraq, there is a tendency to dwell on how different it is in character and scale than earlier ones. Sometimes we hear about the Bulge in these arguments; less frequently, thank God, we hear about the Peloponnesian War. The distinctions aren't much to be grateful for. Most soldiers in Iraq today could describe scenes like the ones above. This alone shouldn't force us to oppose the war, but it should force us to remember what it is.

Wilfred Owen was not your typical soldier. Sensitive, obsessed with Keats and then with Sassoon, his mentor on and off the battlefield, Owen wrote the most memorable verses about the First World War. The advent of trenches and the chemical weapon, and how these made death a matter of advanced calculus, never had more poignant expression than from Owen's pen. His death was as dramatic and heart-wrenching as his art: it occurred just a week before the Armistice at the Sambre-Oise Canal, and the only reason Owen returned to the fray after earlier being hospitalized for shell shock was to impress Sassoon, with whom he was almost certainly in love. (Owen spent some quality time with Oscar Wilde's old circle of homosexual friends, including Wilde's estate executor Robbie Ross and that great Proust translator C.K. Scott-Moncrieff.)

His most famous poem is "Dulce et Decorum Est," which was an ironic animadversion of the old Latin saying about the glory of dying for one's country. (To be fair, the Romans also invented the expression about all mothers hating war, proving that a race of centurions and gladiators had their soft sides, too.)

But, personally, I think Owen's supplest stanzas are the following, from "The Greater Love":

Red lips are not so red
As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.
Kindness of wooed and wooer
Seems shame to their love pure.
O Love, your eyes lose lure
When I behold eyes blinded in my stead!

Your slender attitude
Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skewed,
Rolling and rolling there
Where God seems not to care;
Till the fierce Love they bear
Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude.

Your voice sings not so soft,—
Though even as wind murmuring through raftered loft,—
Your dear voice is not dear,
Gentle, and evening clear,
As theirs whom none now hear
Now earth has stopped their piteous mouths that coughed.

Heart, you were never hot,
Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;
And though your hand be pale,
Paler are all which trail
Your cross through flame and hail:
Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.

As you can see, the Biblical imagery -- complementing the faun-like pastoralia he inherited from that fellow premature corpse, Keats -- was never far from his mind either. Nor was the Freudian. If this isn't the most phallic invocation of gunnery ever committed to print, I'm St. Jerome:

Be slowly lifted up, thou long black arm,
Great gun towering towards Heaven, about to curse;
Sway steep against them, and for years rehearse
Huge imprecations like a blasting charm!
Reach at that Arrogance which needs thy harm,
And beat it down before its sins grow worse;
Spend our resentment, cannon,—yea, disburse
Our gold in shapes of flame, our breaths in storm.

Yet, for men’s sakes whom thy vast malison
Must wither innocent of enmity,
Be not withdrawn, dark arm, thy spoilure done,
Safe to the bosom of our prosperity.
But when thy spell be cast complete and whole,
May God curse thee, and cut thee from our soul!

"Whom thy vast malison / Must with innocent of enmity." That ranks fairly high in any chapbook of English eloquence, I'd say.

Anyway, consider this the first in a new series that will quaintly try to prove that poetry still matters.

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In space... no one can hear you fake it. (Click the image to watch.)

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"Also the invidiousness, and the awful pedantry. You yourself got a taste of this when I had that worryingly prolonged laughing fit, and you called Tanenbaum: I had just come across the locution "he had the cheek of taking my photograph" in Lolita. Still, I would claim that Anglophilia is not irrational. For this reason. You see, Venus, Russian literature is sometimes thought to be our recompense for a gruesome history. So strong, so real, grown on that mulch of blood and shit. But the English example shows that literature gains no legitimacy from the gruesome. In making claims for world domination, the English novel must look anxiously to the French, the Americans and, yes, the Russians."

If you've been reading the reviews of Martin Amis' new novel House of Meetings, you've undoubtedly come across the name Nabokov sprinkled liberally throughout. It’s as if it were the height of highbrow embarrassment to go one paragraph without mentioning this stylistic touchstone in the Amis oeuvre. Indeed, the ludic émigré who learned English at Cambridge and then went on to write it better than native speakers has been expropriated by the enfant terrible of postmodern British fiction. When Amis hasn’t been mouthing Joyce (Money: "If I stare into his face I can make out the areas of waste and fatigue, the moonspots and bone shadow you're bound to get if you hang out in the twentieth century"), he's been mouthing Nabokov (House of Meetings: "A fold of pudge, very low slung, like a prolapsus or a modern money-belt, between navel and groin; a bald patch, perfectly circular, resembling a beanie of pink suede." Don’t feel bad for looking up prolapsus.).

Also, he’s been spending too much time in the twentieth century, performing “moralistic” vivisections of male pathology all under the misleading subhead, Anti-Totalitarian Studies. Amis excelled with Time’s Arrow, a sophisticated continuum hop through the Holocaust, but he stumbled with Koba the Dread, which read like an incredulous homework assignment on the high crimes of Stalinism. Keith Gessen of n+1 hits a common criticism of the latest fare:

Amis might have adopted, as several reviewers have noted, some annoying Nabokovian tics, but the master's pedantry does not interest him; he does not pretend to be translating Russian into English, for example, when transcribing Russian speech, and for that matter he does not even pretend that Russian is his narrator's native tongue—of the old Russian distance marker verst, he writes that "given Russian distances, and the general arduousness of Russian life, you'd expect a verst to be the equivalent of—I don't know—thirty-nine miles. In fact it's barely more than a kilometer." This is funny, but it's not the sort of joke you'd make if you cared very much for your reader to think your character was real.

In fact, the person our purportedly Russian narrator most resembles is not any Russian or any character from Russian fiction but the rambunctious, drunken advertising executive John Self—Amis' greatest creation—who took readers on an extended, delirious tour of his own private hell in Money. "I am a vile-tempered and foul-mouthed old man," says the Self-like narrator of House of Meetings. Life has made him, naturally enough, a misanthrope: "Oh, and just to get this out of the way. It's not the USSR I don't like. What I don't like is the northern Eurasian plain." It is not impossible for a Western writer to create a work whose very verisimilitude is part of its power: Ken Kalfus' excellent short story collection Pu-239, for example, is remarkable for having the eyes of a Russian writer and the sensibility of a comic American Postmodern Jewish one. Amis is not that kind of writer, and he never has been.

First of all, John Self was a bovine antihero incapable of writing his own story, a fact wryly suggested by Amis’ own appearance as a deus ex machina in Money. (Amis once observed the same protagonist/narrator divide in Augie March, so there is some indication this formalistic trick is both studied and willful.)

The old man behind House of Meetings, however, is no fool. He’s just a brutal killer and a rapist like a lot of Amis characters have been (John Self earns the latter distinction, even if it must be prefixed by the term “attempted.”)

But how implausible, not to say disconcerting, is it for this sort of character to pop up yet again, and this time in Russia, in the work of an author who’s specialized in the XYY syndrome of the super-masculine sociopath? Not very when you consider that the Red Army graduated plenty of killers and rapists, some of whom may have gone on to peruse Mandelstam and Hardy and Larkin years later.

Why is it, critics like Gessen ask, that Martin Amis thinks he can give a former denizen of the gulag the breadth of literary knowledge typically possessed by people like… Martin Amis? This, too, isn’t unprecedented. When he was arrested for “parasitism” and sent for 18 months to a labor camp in the Siberian region of Archangelsk, Joseph Brodsky devoured Auden and decided that one could found a religion on the Englishman’s poetry. (This technically put Brodsky, like Solzhenitsyn, in the “True Believers” sodality of born-again Soviet inmates. Old Isherwood joke about Auden’s high Anglicanism: “He eventually dropped the Anglican but kept the height.” You see how Russophilic such a disposition can be.)

Yet the milky prose and cliché-crinkling moral meditations are only the half of it with Amis. The extract I quoted at the start indicates his artfulness with form as much as with language. Again, “Martin Amis” punctuated the scene in Money as an intentional act of self-parody. And if the wizened old thug who offers his intellectually overweening tale in House of Meetings is unreliable as a Russian, that may be because he’s unreliable as a narrator, too. This book cannot be trusted as a faithful depiction of one man’s experience in the arctic hell of Norlag any more than it can be trusted as a faithful biography of his half-brother Lev or the beauteous imago and apex of the brothers’ love triangle, Zoya.

De te fabula narratur. The joke’s on you. Here is Amis on Lolita:

I wonder how many readers survive the novel without realizing that its heroine is, so to speak, dead on arrival, like her child. Their brief obituaries are tucked away in the 'editor's' Foreword, in nonchalant, school-newsletter form.

I wonder how many readers survive House of Meetings realizing that from page one the narrator’s manuscript has not been in the hands of the narrator: it's been in the hands of Venus, his stepdaughter. As with The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the memoir we get has been vetted, edited and footnoted by another character first, someone for whom the gruesome history of the wolfhound age, and the rogue’s gallery of blood-boltered sons that age turned out, is supposed to appear "shocking." Yet Venus can't have really been that shocked, not if she saw fit to include casual explanations of what a Stakhanovite was, or who Yezhov and Beria were. Either she’s done her homework for us (and as expiation for the Amis of Koba), or she’s fucking with us about her ex-guardian’s sordid past.

The strange career of Martin Amis. - By Keith Gessen - Slate Magazine

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Clive James again today. What a happy Monday this is shaping up to be:

Akhmatova, to her credit, had always tried to stay aloof from the Revolution. But the Revolution was never likely to pay her the courtesy of staying aloof from her. As early as 1922, her poetry had been correctly identified as politically unhelpful. The ban on publishing new work was relaxed temporarily in 1940, but we need to remember that Akhmatova, as a poet, was never really allowed to function. She earned her living mainly from translation and journeywork in prose. (As a consequence, a threat in 1947 to expel her from the Writers' Union was tantamount to a sentence of death.) Praising Pushkin, as she did in the essay that mentioned his "lyrical wealth," was as close as she was allowed to get to saying something subversive. It was permissible to value a poet's specifically poetic gifts as long as the poet was accepted as exemplifying—or, in Pushkin's case, heralding—the correct political direction.

Now old Clive is paying occluded tribute to his fuzzy Marxist background with those two opening sentences, whose inversion of direct and indirect objects (x may not do something to y, but y will surely do something to x) is borrowed from Trotsky's famous apothegm that:

You may not be interested in the dialectic. But the dialectic is interested in you.

Quite clever of Clive to use the prosody of the author of Literature and Revolution to vindicate one of the most beguiling artist-victims of revolution.

Incidentally, here's what the founder of the Red Army thought of the "very talented" Akhmatova, whose poetry he lumped into the pre-Revolutionary category of versifying "Islanders," an archipelago of which stationed itself in the Moscow Art Theater:

One reads with dismay most of the poetic collections, especially those of the women. Here, indeed, one cannot take a step without God. The lyric circle of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Radlova, and other real and near-poetesses, is very small. It embraces the poetess herself, an unknown one in a derby or in spurs, and inevitably God, without any special marks. He is a very convenient and portable third person, quite domestic, a friend of the family who fulfills from time to time the duties of a doctor of female ailments. How this individual, no longer young, and burdened with the personal and too often bothersome errands of Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva and others, can manage in his spare time to direct the destinies of the universe, is simply incomprehensible. For Schkapskaya, who is so organic, so biologic, so gynecologic (Schkapskaya's talent is real), God is something in the nature of a go-between and a midwife; that is, he has the attributes of an all-powerful scandal-monger. And if a subjective note may be permitted here, we willingly concede that if this feminine wide-hipped God is not very imposing, he is far more sympathetic than the incubated chick of mystic philosophy beyond the stars.

Anna Akhmatova, assessed. - By Clive James - Slate Magazine

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The most eager adherent of a cause is not just a convert to it but a late heretic of its opposite. Joe Lieberman's unblinking Bush support might appear to be a self-parodying nyah-nyah against all his ex-buddies in the Senate. And yet...

Lieberman likes expressions of American power. A few years ago, I was in a movie theatre in Washington when I noticed Lieberman and his wife, Hadassah, a few seats down. The film was “Behind Enemy Lines,” in which Owen Wilson plays a U.S. pilot shot down in Bosnia. Whenever the American military scored an onscreen hit, Lieberman pumped his fist and said, “Yeah!” and “All right!”

Jeffrey Goldberg threw this anecdote into his New Yorker profile for comic effect but I wonder how would that unseemly fist-pumping jingoism read if, say, it was 1940 and Carey Grant were a downed American pilot awaiting rescue in Germany.

Say what you will about the redutio ad Hitlerum of the Jewish strain of American interventionism. For Lieberman, ending genocidal dictatorships doesn't have to be justified -- only choosing not to end them does. All else is commentary.

The New Yorker : fact : content

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About a decade ago there was a row over the legacy of Philip Larkin. Was he a scabrous old reactionary whose artistic merit had, like Ezra Pound's, been vastly overrated, or was the real deal? The elided headline during this locust moment in book culture was, I thought, "Major Poet, Minor Prick." Hard as it may be for the tidy-minded to accept, one can hold untenable opinions and still manage to make great art.

Auden, whose own opinions on everything from religion to politics ranged from the ridiculous to the profound, understood this perfectly when he wrote, eulogizing Yeats and invoking Kipling, that time "[w]orships language and forgives / Everyone by whom it lives; / Pardons cowardice, conceit, / Lays its honours at their feet." And Yeats and Kipling were, I'd wager, far nastier customers than even the owlish recluse of Hull.

We seem to have wandered into another mangy flea market of Dead Author bloviation. There was some hope that the life of Kingsley Amis, belonging as it did to a man whose quarry was the farce of human existence and who could therefore be excused exhibiting farcical tendencies himself, would pass re-examined without a replaying of the Larkin brouhaha. True, the reviews of Zachary Leader's new biography have been somewhat less sanguinary about the later John Bullshit/Little Englander shtick, the casual racism and anti-Semitism and misogyny. But we still find it necessary to enlist Clive James to set the Work categorically apart from the Man, no matter how the flaws and triumphs of the one became the flaws and triumphs of the other.

A deeper indication of Amis’s capacity for self-analysis on the matter of sexual attractiveness is that he was capable of making a subject out of what it might be like not to be attractive. In Take a Girl Like You, Jenny Bunn is the fully articulated version of Christine in Lucky Jim. Those who thought Christine unreal would have twice the reason to think that of Jenny, but in both cases, the combination of beauty and goodness is surely not impossible. You might even say that the beautiful find it easier to be good. It is certainly true to life that Jenny, with her looks, her practicality and her sense of fun, would touch the heart of any man, and especially a man like Patrick, who is heartless and knows it. But in the figure of Graham, the decent type who yearns for her hopelessly, Amis pushed analysis into a new area. There had been radiant young lovers in English novels before, from Tom Jones and Sophie Western onwards. And there had been stumbling, hopelessly yearning dim bulbs before: Dickens is full of them. Graham is not even the first of these to bare his soul: Leonard Bast in Howards End shows us what it might be like to be a loser. But Graham is the first to bare his soul with eloquence. The scene in which he tells Jenny what it is like to be a man who has no chance with a girl like her is like nothing else in literature before it, and would alone be enough to establish Amis as the moral writer that F. R. Leavis said he wasn’t. (I was at the lecture – on Dickens – when Dr Leavis, asserting that Amis had no interest in describing the behaviour of a gentleman, inadvertently defined Amis’s central literary interest as exactly that.)

In point of fact, Amis' women were often a lot stronger, smarter and, well, luckier than his men. Jake's Thing may have been about a spent middle-aged libido, unameliorated by its daily subjection to a fat and homely wife. But it was wifey who takes off with the nextdoor neighbor at novel's end, leaving Jake and his flaccid cock unmolested but alone on the sofa, absorbing mindless telly and idling away an eminently undistinguished academic career. This was Jim Dixon's worst nightmare come true.

The girls could be manic (all women run around all the time like they're drunk, says Alun Weaver in The Old Devils, a condition shared only by children and queers), but the old boys were unfailingly depressive. To read anything of Kingsley's middle-of-the-journey period, of his failed marriages and chronic fears (the dark especially) is to see that he was never more mordantly self-critical than he was in his fiction.

Feminists object to seeing ungentlemanly or laddish conduct depicted at all, but then they act as we live in something called the "patriarchy," in which such conduct is presumably the norm. What they could, if they let the blood pressure drop a bit, get out of Kingsley would be tantamount to what a Marxist gets out Wealth of Nations. Amis understood the slow-mounting disappointments of masculine sexual identity better than any writer before or since. And he was hilarious in his understanding. Anyone who tells you different is a staggering bore.

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We all have our favorites, and mine is only hindered by specificity of subject:

You cannot when dealing with Toynbee,
Just pay him back in his own coin be-
Cause talking such piss
Would seem rather a miss;
So how would a kick in the groin be?

Or how about this one, a fair bit more "accessible" (assuming most people don't remember Philip Toynbee):

When Gaugin was visiting Fiji,
He remarked, "Things are different here, e.g.,
While Tahitian skin calls for tan spread on thin,
You can splotch it on here with a squeegee."

As Hitch makes plain in this remarkable portrait of Robert Conquest, the above limericks constitute the non-ribald in what is otherwise a catalog of filthy genius. Imagine being a world-famous historian, a man who cannot walk down the street today in Moscow without being recognized and adulated by people my age, with always a classic verse, if not one of your own composition, at the ready. To be alternatingly droll or "offensive" with the uses of rhyme and meter, and to know when to occasion either effect, is a rare talent in a full-time poet, let alone someone tasked with pealing back the vestments of Soviet communism and getting everything more or less right.

A history here, an anthology of poems there, an assortment of limericks, a memoir, a lineup of contributions to learned journals and--I forgot to mention--a festschrift of essays in his honor to be edited by the Hungarian-born scholar Paul Hollander. This seems enough to be going on with. Meanwhile, his other great work on the Ukrainian terror-famine of the 1930s, "Harvest of Sorrow," is being produced and distributed, with no profit going to the author, by a Ukrainian charity associated with President Viktor Yushchenko. Is it sweet to be so vindicated? As always, I have to crane slightly to hear the whispery answer. "There was a magazine in Russia called Neva, which found its circulation went up from 100,000 to a million when it serialized 'The Great Terror.' And I later found that at the very last plenum of the Soviet Communist Party, just before the U.S.S.R. dissolved, a Stalinist hack called Alexander Chakovsky had described me as 'anti-Sovietchik No. 1.' I must say I was rather proud of that."

I had the honor of meeting the bete noir of the Politburo in Stanford last summer. I asked him to tell me about the time he fired a shot at a barn inhabited by Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. "I was backpacking through Catalonia then, and met a few rather nice Anarchists in a village tavern. I told them I was a good rifleman at university and they gave me one of their guns, which had been malfunctioning. So I cleaned it for them." And why it took Kingsley Amis so short a time to write his own memoirs: "Because he made it all up."

You can forget about the anemic and self-congratulatory attempts on these shores to try and "reclaim" conservatism from the dread pirates neocon. The cool English empiricism that is the envy of so many Burke nostalgics may just be stranded in the last century, when classical education was mandatory and a catholicity of interest and learning not nearly so noteworthy as it is now. Consider this paragraph and try to come up with a contemporary historian who might have written it:

To read some writers, one would think that the nineteenth century consisted largely of the Peterloo Massacre, the Todpuddle Martyrs and Bloody Sunday. All were exceptional rather than typical events, and even if they were not, they would contrast pretty markedly with experience in, for example, France. Six were killed in the Peterloo rioting; none of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, though they were all disgracefully victimized and "transported," was actually martyred in the normal sense; while Blood Sunday produced precisely one death, an accidental one. Indeed, the use of such a term for such an event shows a remarkable scraping of the barrel by those determined to find British parallels to Continental shenanigans. The total death toll in civil disturbances in Britain over half a century can hardly be much over a a hundred, or, to put it another way, the equivalent of a single busy afternoon on a Paris barricade.

Or this recounted exchange from the same volume, Reflections on a Ravaged Century:

A Russian in [St. Petersburg] once said to the present writer, in late Soviet times:

"Our roads our bad."
"...Yes. Why is that?"
"It's our weather - an isotherm runs down the Finnish border."
"And seriously?"
"They were built by the state."
"Yes, but we have roads in England which were built by the Roman state nearly two thousand years ago, and some of them are still sound."
"Ah, but then the centurion would check that the six layers of stone had been laid down. Here, the inspector asks the foreman if they have been laid down and is answered with a bottle of vodka."

OpinionJournal - Featured Article

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These men are now my heroes.

Absurd. Gloriously so.

Youtube | Boston Ad Prank Suspects Talk About ... Hair

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Rock music is littered with "supergroups" that sucked. (Traveling Wilburys? Blind Faith? Dylan and the Dead? Ugh.) But Damon Albarn's millionth band, The Good, The Bad, and The Queen, has been pretty good. KCRW's music stream had them playing in heavy rotation, and I like their single; Blur may yet turn out to be Albarn's least interesting body of work. But then I read this delightful concert review, complete with Martin Amis quote-dropping and a wry dick joke:

Simonon and Tong traded instruments. Albarn picked up an axe of his own, and started laying down rubbery blasts of distortion. Simonon unfurled a waxy little dub beat, took to the microphone, the band launched into "Guns of Brixton", and a stroppy little port town pretty much lost its collective mind. An Argentine standing behind me-- who had traveled 15 hours to make the show-- waved a soccer jersey Simonon had consented to sign. Though it had to be the first time Simonon has played the song in years, it was Albarn who seemed to relish the moment most. When you're never really anybody, there's no telling where you might end up.

Why is downtrodden postindustrial UK so damn fun? Meanwhile, my local arts scene is being publicly detonated by freaked-out Boston cops.

Pitchfork | The Good, The Bad and The Queen

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That's what Tim Garton Ash says Hirsi Ali suffers from, and Ian Buruma is only slightly less hyperbolic in his rhetoric about the Somali dissident. But French philosopher Pascal Bruckner begs to differ with both:

Those who revolt against barbarism are themselves accused of being barbarians. In politics as in philosophy, the equals sign is always an abdication. If thinking involves weighing one's words to name the world well, drawing comparisons in other words, then levelling distinctions testifies to intellectual bankruptcy. Shouting CRS = SS as in May '68, making Bush = Bin Laden or equating Voltaire to Savonarola is giving cheap satisfaction to questionable approximations. Similarly, the Enlightenment is often depicted as nothing but another religion, as mad and intransigent as the Catholicism of the Inquisition or radical Islam.

Added to which, the term "Enlightenment" encompasses too many varied - and often contradictory - philosophical concepts that cannot be reduced to a mutual set of fundaments. There'd be a world of difference between a Humean fundamentalist and Hobbesean fundamentalist. How does one square all of the Enlightenment?

Although all the monotheisms have their sects and splinter movements, there are some shared tenets that can't be argued with. A Catholic who denies Jesus was the son of God, or a Muslim who claims Mohammed's divine revelations were actually hallucinations brought about by epileptic seizures -- what then of the former's Catholicism or the latter's Islam?

One only has to consider the category "Leviathan literalist" to see how shaky the ground beneath Garton Ash's feet is. His act of semantic jujitsu here may be memorable, but it's not persuasive.

Pascal Bruckner: Enlightenment fundamentalism or racism of the anti-racists? - signandsight

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This is Peter Berdovsky, the artist who put bird-flipping cartoon glow boxes near transit centers in Boston, only to see them detonated by skittish cops weeks later. He's being charged with disorderly conduct, which it looks like he may very well be guilty of, if not necessarily in the context of cartoon shilling.

I think the signs are ironic.

Boston Globe | Men Accused of Hoax Plead Not Guilty

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Talking of querulous conservatives against the surge, here's a bucket of cold water on hot promise in Shiaville:

"There's absolutely no reason to believe that these groups have changed their tune in any significant way" since the 2004 battles, said a U.S. official in Baghdad who spoke on condition of anonymity. "You could make an argument that there's just a level of exhaustion that's set in, but I find that not believable."

A more likely scenario is that the militia leaders believe they can "win the whole thing" if they are not too damaged by the time the United States withdraws, the official said ...

Maliki is aware of concerns that the militias may be biding their time rather than sincerely taking peaceful steps, his aide said. "This is a classic insurgency tactic, to hide when the troops are around and then reappear when the troops are gone," the aide said. "This is very much understood by the government and by the prime minister, and measures are being taken to make it a failure."

Only a fool would credit Muqtada al-Sadr with good intentions, however, left out of this skeptical assessment of the Mahdi scale-down is any mention of a) just how long those U.S. troops plan to stay in Baghdad, and b) how long a schismatic militia is willing to wait it out before their capital has been severely depleted.

Again, the psychological concomitants of the surge are not to be underestimated. The whole point of counterinsurgency campaigns -- correctly termed "war at the graduate level" -- is to stay violence not indefinitely but just long enough to win the loyalty of the people. Sadr has yet to experience what a diminished political role feels like, and it's only natural of him to be arrogant enough to think it's our side alone that's operating on borrowed time. But if Iraqis begin to see major improvements in municipal services and employment opportunities courtesy of the coalition, then it will be to Sadr that the question of "what have you done for us lately?" is directed. It doesn't take a Marxist to realize that materialism trumps ideology except for the most fanatical adherents to a cause. Just because it looks like a Shia messianic doesn't mean it necessarily is one: many of the current followers of the Mahdi Army are just as likely to be cowed and fearful nonpartisans -- afraid of betraying the guys with guns -- whose allegiances are fungible.

Let's conduct a little thought experiment divorced from the fractiousness over what to do in Iraq. Imagine, if you will, a muscular UN troop deployment to Beirut. Instead of acting their characteristic role of "peacekeeping" cardboard cut-outs, the blue helmets actually intervene in the incipient civil war in that Mideastern capital. They stop Hezbollah bandits from establishing road blocks and riding around city streets with AK-47s, intimidating not only political opponents but also ostensible supporters. Violence goes down. Siniora government officials leave their bunker-like buildings and appear before their constituents in broad daylight. If this state of affairs were prolonged long enough, and if Hezbollah's propagandistic alms programs (its hospital and ambulance services, its contracting and engineering teams, etc.) were replaced by legitimate UN counterparts, what would become of Nasrallah's influence? If his hold on power is sustained by hordes of unwavering faithful, then why has his popularity never been greater than after Israel's humiliating defeat last summer?

There's a kind of negative idealism -- you might even call it hubris -- in the certainty that Baghdad is already lost. Let's by all means entertain the worst-case-scenarios and likely forms of blowback from the surge. But let's also keep in mind the pragmatic military-political strategy, developed by minds more sophisticated than the president's, that lies behind it.

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George Casey is saying that 21,500 troops (more, actually, if one factors in the support soldiers that accompany Brigade Combat Teams and Marine Regiment Teams) are about 10,750 too many.

Asked by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., why he had not requested the full five extra brigades that Bush is sending, Casey said, ''I did not want to bring one more American soldier into Iraq than was necessary to accomplish the mission.''

With many in Congress opposing or skeptical of Bush's troop buildup, Casey did not say he opposed the president's decision. He said the full complement of five brigades would give U.S. commanders in Iraq additional, useful flexibility.

''In my mind, the other three brigades should be called forward after an assessment has been made on the ground'' about whether they are needed to ensure success in Baghdad, Casey said later.

Interesting, given that so many critics of the surge -- or "Plus Up," as one unreticent conservative I've been picking on lately prefers to call it -- cite Casey as their expert naysayer before going on to argue that Bush is committing too few troops, too late in time.

Just send Aqua Teen Hunger Force to Baghdad already.

Casey: Only Half of Troop Boost Needed - New York Times

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At the News Corp. Christmas party, which I was, I might say that nobody within earshot really seemed to give a shit about the sacking of Judy:

At the Sixth Avenue Hilton, 8,000 News Corp. employees gathered in three floors of ballrooms, each ballroom decorated to represent a continent. Australia had a lifeguard, England had shepherd’s pie, and Asia had a lot of video games, karaoke, and dim sum. (There was no Africa.) Everybody was getting BlackBerry messages about Judith Regan—the drunker employees were telling their best Regan stories, and the drunker managers were saying that it was they who were responsible for canning her, didn’t you know. Friedman told editors that she had fired Regan—when she said it, people began to clap.

The clapping was for when the strobe lights ran out of juice in "Australia."

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Which you probably already read/heard somewhere but is news to me as I sit, mouth agape, reading Vanessa Grigoriadis' New York piece on Judith Regan, about whom I feel sexually the same way Howard Stern does about Kathy Lee Griffin:

Regan's original title for the O.J. memoir was I Did It. His lawyers made her add the If.

And James Wolcott's compound adjectives grew three sizes that day.

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Leo Strauss had major problems with Weber's breezy dismissal of the philosophical Ought in favor of the "non-judgmental" Is. (Also known as the difference between value and fact.) Nevertheless, Leo called Weber the greatest social scientist of the twentieth century. The man could also turn a phrase. Predicting, in that non-judgmental way of his, that the world was headed down a nihilistic slipstream at breakneck pace, Weber said the only two alternatives in the West were between a recrudescence of prophetic myth and what he called the "specialist without spirit, the voluptuary without heart." (That phrase could have been minted by Allan Bloom, Strauss' most famous disciple and the author of the highly judgmental The Closing of the American Mind.)

Anyway, a new bio of Max is out. We learn that he had mommy issues, thought the great Karl Liebknecht "belong[ed] in the madhouse "and the even greater Rosa Luxemburg "belong[ed] in the zoo." Also, he might well have kept that famous professional equilibrium of his had he lived long enough to experience Nazism, facilitated as that was by "charismatic" leadership.

Above all, it is the significance of politics in Weber’s life and work that threatens to disappear from view. Radkau provides some treatment of political events and contexts, and frankly relays some of the more distasteful, for contemporary sensibilities, of Weber’s pronouncements. However, Radkau’s narrative strategy and organizing thesis—perhaps chosen as a counterbalance to Marianne’s Lebensbild, which, understandably, placed much greater emphasis on her husband as a public figure and rather less on his extra-marital dalliances—mean that Weber’s political interventions are all too often used to supplement the main story of his struggle with his inner demons. By the end of this quest, politics appears as that which the hero had to overcome in order to be himself. Radkau seems to take Weber’s by and large unsuccessful forays into politics—attempting an alliance between social democrats and liberals, swaying between left and right rhetoric at the war’s conclusion, outnumbered in the German delegation to Versailles—as confirmation that he was indeed, ‘by profession: a scholar’, as Weber himself declared during the polarizations of 1920, when ‘insanity’ dominated politics ‘from the left to the right’.

Yet at another moment, he had told Mina Tobler that ‘the political’ was his ‘secret love’, and politics clearly played a rather more central role in Weber’s life—scholarly, public and emotional—than Radkau allows. The emergence of ‘charisma’ in Weber’s vocabulary in the immediate pre-war period, for instance, is integrally related to a position discontentedly subaltern to the political culture established by Bismarck, but without concrete alternatives; this may have intersected with, rather than resulted from, a contemporaneous personal experience of ‘grace’. The further development of ‘charisma’ may have occurred at a moment when Weber was blessed with a ‘second chance’ with Else; but it was also when Weber was advocating the need for a ‘charismatic leader’ capable of giving Germany a ‘third chance’.

This is as chilling to read now as is Burke's anticipation, in Reflections on the Revolution in France, of the rise of an imperious military general out of the morass of Jacobinism.

New Left Review - Peter Thomas: Being Max Weber

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An interview with my friend and comrade Josh Strawn, the "Hitch of postpunk":

Does your fan base turn away when they discover Blacklist is an exponent of the so-called “decent Left”? Your lyrics are allusive enough, but you have no compunction about wearing your pro-regime-change politics on your sleeve, at least offstage.

I couldn’t say whether or not our fan base knows about our politics, though in a way they already appreciate them by virtue of liking the music. We play the way we do because we’re sick of complacency. It’s no wonder that much of what passes for independent music today is drab and lifeless—the people who make it are often soft-headed postmodern liberals. We want the intensity that came with believing there was such thing as truth and shouting about it.

That shouldn’t be the exclusive enterprise of conservatives, but it has been of late. What must it have been like to hear razor-sharp, swirling guitars in a dank club in Leeds circa 1982? Likewise, what must it have been like to live in a time when the notion of fighting against dictatorship, genocide, theocracy, and totalitarianism was embraced by the Left? On these two seemingly different questions, the politics of Blacklist is the same, and we preoccupy ourselves with offering an answer.

I will say that I have had occasion to discuss political matters with friends and fans here and there, and I have not yet been excommunicated. I will also say that that’s the way I think it should be. Liberals, progressives, leftists, whatever your term of endearment, these are the people who should be having conversations and embracing disagreement and debate.

At any rate, I think most people I speak with are actually interested to hear that there is a current of thinking that does not force one to choose between blindly supporting an administration with an unhealthy romance for power and marching in the streets alongside fascists and friends of fascism.

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