• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}
• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}
• The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}
• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}
• Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}
• Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}
• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}
• Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}
• The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}
• The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}
• Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}
• Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}
• The War Against Cliche and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}
• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}
• The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliche. And get a dictionary.}
• The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}
• Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}
• Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}
• Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}
• The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children�s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}
• The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}
• Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}
• Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}
• My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}
ALBUMS:
• You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}
• Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}
• Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}
• Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}
• Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}
• Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}
• Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}
• These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}
• SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}
• The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}
• It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}
• Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn't usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}
• Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}
• The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it�s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}
• The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}
• The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}
• No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}
• The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}
FILMS & TV:
• Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}
• Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}
• Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}
• The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}
• Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}
• Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}
• Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}
• The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}
• Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modeled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}
• Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}
• Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}
By now you've seen Hillel Neuer's necessary rebuking of the Potemkin tribunal known as the UN Human Rights Council. Its chair, Luis Alfonso De Alba, sputtered a non-defense that refused to recognize or thank Neuer for his statement.
Adding insult to injury, the Council just voted to cease any further investigation into ongoing human rights violations in -- wait for it -- Iran and Uzbekistan. Shocker on that last one, actually: Uzbekistan's president Islom Karimov is, apart from a blood-brutal Caligula of the Asia Minor, a willing helpmate of the United States. He offered Uzbek landing strips for American war planes during the routing of the Taliban. What, couldn't the UN at least have mentioned this sordid alliance? Surely the august supranational body is losing its step.
Well, if you're new to the Neuer-induced spectacle, you can watch it here, together with a congeries of statements -- from dignitaries of Sudan, Cuba, Iran -- that are, apparently, deserving of gratitude from De Alba.
Faye Turney, the one female hostage in the Iran-UK standoff, who was to have been released imminently must apparently pay the price for her country's pointing out the obvious fact that Iran trespassed into Iraqi waters and then kidnapped, at gunpoint, fifteen British sailors. The Islamic Republic's stupidity outdoes itself:
The Vice Admiral also disclosed that the Iranians had changed their account of where the incident had taken place after it was pointed out that the first set of co-ordinates they gave were in Iraqi waters. The Prime Minister, who spoke to George Bush yesterday about the growing crisis, told MPs: 'It is now time to ratchet up the diplomatic and international pressure in order to make sure the Iranian government understands their total isolation on this issue.'
Come to that, why not just ask the Vice Admiral where on the map Britain would have done something illegal and name the spot right there?
More disturbing, however, is how Al Alam media has been parading Turney in a headscarf and citing her obviously coerced admission that it was her side that infiltrated Iran's territory. Frankly, this strikes me as the most hubristic provocation by the mullahs yet. One way not to spell appeasement in the UK is to foist religious head coverings into the conversation.
Now I'd quite like to hear how forcing an Englishwoman into Islamic garb violates the Geneva Conventions as well as all standards of cross-cultural decency. Perhaps the UN Council on Human Rights has a word or two they'd like to share? The Socialist Workers' Party? RESPECT? Anyone?
Here's what you do if you're a heterosexual male with an apartment: Go minimalist. Let her decorate.
I recently upgraded from a cloying, dorm room-like studio apartment in a very nice building in Brooklyn Heights to a spacious, entertainment-friendly 1-bedroom in the same building. (You really know who your friends are when they start showing up unannounced with -- but ALSO WITHOUT -- drink.)
My philosophy is one self-abnegation when it comes to home furnishing. A couch, a few chairs (no more than three, though; a good fuck-off number for tagalongs and uninviteds) and enough book shelves to keep the autographed Kingsley in fit condition, and I'm fine. I like the cavernous feel of my own space. If there's no echo, you've been had by Ikea.
A few indulgences obtrude: There's a projection television in the corner (purchased on sale years ago), a Bose radio on top of that, and a very slim, skip-free DVD player of recent vintage that came courtesy of a year's worth of collected loose change and an overwhelmed CoinStar machine at Duane Reade.
Did I mention my bed is a pull-out couch (yes) from the studio era? This one minor drawback is being eliminated, as my sister has generously donated her bed, en route to casa as we speak, from her recently vacated Manhattan apartment. (Breakups hurt, sublets heal, brothers benefit.)
In my place you won't find any of the following:
1. Stuffed game (hunted, inherited or store-bought);
4. Figurines or Legos (there are Spinoza, Machiavelli, Trotsky and Jefferson fridge magnets from the Unemployed Philosopher's Guild, but the aw-shuck kitsch element is cancelled by the utility here);
5. Bad wall art (I have Whit Stillman movie posters in the closet, which is where they'll stay);
6. Powdered liquid substances in the pantry;
7. Shoes costing more than $100, or younger than 6-months
Do I have my own dealbreakers for running screaming from a woman's domicile?
1. Cats - plural (how frightfully unerring they are as a badge);
2. Framed photographs of ex-boyfriends because "we're still friends";
3. Ayn Rand novels prominently displayed (my heart's still recovering from hearing Anne Hathaway talk about The Fountainhead);
4. Crucifixes displayed anywhere but directly over the headboard that, when noticed, are not met with a knowing wink by the owner;
5. Shoes numbering more than 100 pairs.
Now, I'm not rich, and I don't write advice columns for match.com, but even I have enough savvy to know not to go telling the New York Timessomething like this:
Ever hear the words rent stabilized? says Mr. Podell, whos paying $702 for a one bedroom in SoHo. What do I need a fancy place for? A lot of people want to show off their wealth. It aint me, baby.
Forget that he's 70, not only does this make Podell look insufferably cheap, but it makes every reader demonaically incensed about the price he's probably been paying since the Ford administration. And he's a millionaire.
Yet it's the trans-fats and cigarettes that are endangering public health in Gotham.
Funny how signal terms like "traison" and "revolucion" are intelligible without translation.
For those interested, however, Daniel Duquenal has glossed Hugo's speech:
The national revolutionary government wants to take a decision against something that, for example, must go through a judicial process and they start to move on the contrary, in the shadows. And many times they manage to neutralize decisions of the revolution through a judge, or a court, or even in the very TSJ, behind the back of the leader of the revolution, acting from inside against the revolution. This is, I repeat, treason to the people, treason of the revolution. And this is one of the biggest threats that we have from inside.
"In the shadows," "threats that we have from inside." It really is a 21st century parody of 20th century Stalinism.
I have to admit, I feel a twinge of longing for the good old days when our enemies were an increasingly isolated faction within a Central Committee, not a ramified squadron of raving, cave-dwelling psychotics. But it's times like these that I'm glad I'm not all that conservative because if you wait long enough as an inhabitant of either side of the political spectrum, you find yourself nodding along with your counterparts on the other side. Mark Steyn thinks the one diplomat to have figured Iran right was the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko:
Back at the start of Jimmy Carters hostage fiasco, I think it was Andrei Gromyko who remarked that, if the students had pulled the same stunt at the Soviet embassy, Tehran would have been a crater by lunchtime. The Iranians believed him so he never had to do it (though, as Chechnya indicates, the Russians are generally prepared to walk the walk crater-wise). Obviously, if Blair or Bush were to threaten to reduce Tehran to a crater, the mullahs would most likely conclude, on balance, that we didnt mean it.
Now, as it happens, Gromyko (along with Eduard Shevardnazde) was very useful in his candor about Moscow's intentions right up until the fall of the Berlin Wall, intentions that were never not Marxist-Leninist in the long term. But one admires the pluck of a pundit who would flirt with powdering the one city in the Muslim world where philo-Americanism is as rampant as covert satellite televisions and samizdat editions of Western literature. What kind of message would it send to our Iranian allies in the youth and opposition movements in Tehran that we'd even bluff about reducing them all to grease spots because of the actions of a fundamentalist government they hate even more than we do?
Also, that concession that Russians will "walk the walk crater-wise" is value for money. Will Steyn's follow-up book to America Alone be titled Russia Fuck Yeah?
All one needs to know about the goggle-eyed gulag lover:
This perversityand he was perverse, whether he realized it or notmade him the most conspicuous single example in the 20th century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization.
To this I might add that Nabokov had existentialism pegged in his review of La Nause. It was "a fashionable brand of cafe philosophy and... for every so-called 'existentialist' one finds quite a few 'suctorialists.'"
Sometimes you could actually hear the slurping as a fitting physical concomitant of existentialist thought.
It's become the work of a moment to dismiss horrible political thinkers of the 20th century as good-for-nothing cranks, tout court. Just when you think a totalitarian style and substance have merged seamlessly into one pleasing, repulsive whole, you find, damn it, that there is a tiny germ of redemption in those you'd quite like there not to be. Ezra Pound was a fascist and a bigot and a lousy poet and an even lousier translator, but he knew talent when he saw it as an editor, which is T.S. Eliot appears in more anthologies and critical journals today. Pablo Neruda wrote odes to Stalin ("the sun and the moon") and predicted, upon the tyrant's death, that all would be well with the Soviet experiment because "Malenkov would finish [his] work." Still, Czeslaw Milosz was generous enough to say that Neruda knew the plight of impoverished Chileans better than most, and if his death galvanized a public opposition to Augusto Pinochet, then perhaps the Latin was not so easily consigned to the dustbin of history, after all.
Sartre's an altogether trickier customer for the simple fact that we already have his more salubrious twin in the postwar French tradition: Camus. This is the Hobsbawm/Orwell split in terms of continental heroism. You want glamour? Check out the bookjacket photo of the author of L'etranger: that trench coat, those dark-circles under the eyes, that cigarette dangling from the lips. (Clive James said he got into the business of writing just so he could one day embody this incandescent cool.) You want moral courage and honesty? Camus said he opposed French imperialism in his homeland of Algeria, but that wasn't enough to make him forget about his beloved mama when the NLF took to the streets.... You want resistance? Combat did more to excise the intellectual rot of Nazism than all of Sartre's go-nowhere colloquies in the "underground." And when it came time to say goodbye to all that and repudiate Stalinism for what it was, Camus witnessed for the virtues of humane liberalism, prefiguring the next wave of great anti-ideology philosophes like Raymond Aron and, yes, Bernard Henri-Levy.
No Exit was a groundless fear of a debased and compromised mind: the exit was merely another man.
Have I ever shared with you my theory that Nick Cave is the Anti-Mel?
One of the most underrated films of last year was the Cave-scripted Aussie western The Proposition. Sort of an Unforgiven in the Outback, it featured an Irish crime family in the 19th century, at a time when Australia was still "god-forsaken land" and not even remotely capable of graduating a Clive James, Robert Hughes or Germaine Greer. Anyway, Guy Pearce plays Charlie Burns, one of the baddie brothers who's given a choice by a grizzled and world-weary British constable with the distinctly Conradian name of Captain Stanley. (Ray Winstone, looking like he hasn't seen the business end of an air conditioner since the Sexy Beast rap party). The choice is this. Charlie can either hunt down and kill his far more psychopathic brother Arthur (the brilliant Danny Huston), or watch their little brother Mike whipped to death. What to do.
Well, as it turns out, choose both options, as Charlie is soon saved from the aboriginal ravages of the bush by the very man he's tasked to deliver up to the Law. Charlie and Arthur lead a hypnotic and sun-stroked charge back into budding Sydney (or wherever the one-horse town of the film is set) to avenge poor Mike's use as a bargaining chip in selling out the fam, but not before Mike is in fact lashed by the now-morally tortured Cpt. Stanley.
Here's where Cave's anti-Mel bona fides come into play. The whipping scene is easily one of the most haunting and unnerving moments of corporal punishment committed to celluloid since The Passion of the Christ. However, unlike Gibson's messianic snuff film, The Proposition is not violent for violent's sake and instead of fetishizing Karo syrupy gore and gashes, the camera pans away from the victim during the worst moments of brutality to show the pained look on the flagellator's face: Stanley obviously hates doing what he's doing, and thinks such an act has compromised his law-and-order principles beyond measure -- certainly beyond his civil servant's charter of establishing a sliver of civilization in the Antipodes.
Fancy that, then. Two Australian expats. One's a gothic punk demon who quotes Byron (I recently discovered that "red right hand" is a line from Byron's epic vampiric poem The Giaour) and is internationally known as a hollow-featured Prince of Darkness. Yet he, it turns out, is infinitely more humane and mentally sound than the chiseled, Jew-baiting Braveheart of Malibu.
I'd like to see a Senate subcommittee address MPAA ratings and pop culture indeceny by making mention of this irony. In the meantime, here's Cave singing the heavens-shaking power ballad, "Straight to You."
"Do you know that your son is going to Iraq?" That was only comment I remember emerging from the fug of a hangover this past Christmas. It was made by my older half-sister to our father with the hush-hush travel plans that I'd just confided in her. Going to K-stan is a major goal of mine, and if I can scrounge up the scratch and rolling freelance opportunities, I plan to make good on it by next fall.
How batpiss insane must I be to want to visit the north of a country on the verge of civil war and where Muslims are daily being beheaded, let alone atheist Jewish Micks from New York?
Well, Hitch took his kid to Kurdistan this past holiday season and a good time was had by all. As Michael Totten has been chronicling for some time, cities like Erbil, Dohuk and Sulemaniah are ever-expanding metropolises with booming real estate markets, shopping malls, universities, and excellent opportunities for foreign investment. A democratic statelet cordoned off from Saddam Hussein's horrific dominion after the first Gulf War, Kurdistan is -- or should be -- a major tourist attraction for Westerners curious about what a microcosm of secularism, pluralism and peace might look like in today's Middle East. Why aren't more leftists taking up this theme as one of a failed war's only redeeming qualities?
The Kurds are the largest nationality in the world without a state of their own. The King of Bahrain has, in effect, his own seat at the United Nations, but the 25 million or so Kurds do not. This is partly because they are cursed by geography, with their ancestral lands located at the point where the frontiers of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria converge. It would be hard to imagine a less promising neighborhood for a political experiment. In Iraq, the more than four million Kurds make up just under a quarter of the population. The proportion in Turkey is more like 20 percent, in Iran 10 percent, and in Syria perhaps nine. For centuries, this people's existence was folkloric and marginal, and confined to what one anthropologist called "the Lands of Insolence": the inaccessible mountain ranges and high valleys that bred warriors and rebels. A fierce tribe named the Karduchoi makes an appearance in Xenophon's history of the events of 400 B.C. Then there is mainly silence until a brilliant Kurdish commander named Salah al-Din (Saladin to most) emerges in the 12th century to unite the Muslim world against the Crusaders. He was born in Tikrit, later the hometown of Saddam Hussein. This is apt, because Saddam actually was the real father of Kurdish nationhood. By subjecting the Kurds to genocide he gave them a solidarity they had not known before, and compelled them to create a fierce and stubborn Resistance, with its own discipline and army. By laying waste to their ancient villages and farms, furthermore, he forced them into urban slums and refugee centers where they became more integrated, close-knit, and socialized: historically always the most revolutionary point in the emergence of any nationalism.
Courage and stoicism in the face of historic omni-national betrayals (continuing to the present day) attending a collective philo-Americanism not seen in Israel, England or France... What's not to love about the Kurds?
Actually, plenty, if the only people without a homeland you're concerned about is the Palestinians.
In the wake of all this recrudescent AIPAC nonsense, it's occurred to me that much of the selective and exclusive condemnation of Israel is not rooted in antisemitism but a kind of denatured inverse of it: the high expectation people have for Jews to do the right thing all the time. (A corollary of condescension is the free pass Muslims have to kill civilians in the name of social injustice, which, when such a pass is not taken advantage of, is so unexpected as to precipitate no comment from "activist" types who can rationalize anything else away.)
Those who argue that history's perennial victims, the Jews, have now become "aggressors" are really saying, "We knew they had it in them all along. Now it's time to catch them up to the empowered bad guy status the rest of us having been enjoying forever."
This turns the antique Jewish Question into a fetish that's not quite as pathological as antisemitism, but not quite as objective as universalism, either.
The Kurds are a standing rebuke to the notion that grievously maltreated Muslims cannot soldier on without resorting to suicide-murders or the election of fascistic religious parties that promise civil services at the price of civil liberties. The left is scandalized by the persistence of the Kurds for the same reason it's dejected about the plight of the Palestinians. If only another Halabja were still possible, and if only Saddam were still in power, then protesting crimes against humanity while proposing to do nothing about ending them would be a no-brainer. You might then even see a banner or two in the streets of New York, Paris and London that read, "Free Kurdistan."
My colleague at Commentary Daniel Johnson has called the English columnist Geoffrey Wheatcroft the "British equivalent of Pat Buchanan" for this hose of abuse turned on the pronounced neoconservatism of the Tory party. Wheatcroft's style has always been one of provocation and an unabashed blood-and-soil Burkean conservatism, which parses slightly better on the other side of the Atlantic than it does over here. However, this latest Guardian essay does paint a baleful portrait of dual or triple national loyalties among the new wingers of Albion that recalls the worst Judeophobic bilge of the postwar English tradition -- a tradition which, it's worth remembering, did not stop Anthony Eden from joining with France and Israeli in a disastrous colonial rescue operation in the Suez Canal in 1956.
Wheatcroft is an odd bird in several respects. He's written a highly engaging book called The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma, which argued that the conventional wisdom of Jewish subjugation of Palestine was far worse at Israel's founding -- when there was wide international support for a Jewish homeland -- than it is today. A distinctly un-Buchananite train of thought, which is perfectly cohabitable with a reactionary's desire not to see his bygone party of isolationism turn into the ward of Yank overseas adventuring. Wheatcroft hates Tony Blair and New Labour with a passionate intensity that overshadows his current intramural scuffles, whereas Buchanan's raison d'etre is to save American conservatism from the dread minions of Leo Strauss and Leon Trotsky that have hijacked it.
Here Wheatcroft sounds like Evelyn Waugh declaiming the inability of modern British conservatives to turn back the clock so much as a minute:
There was once a vigorous high Tory tradition of independence from - if not hostility to - America. It was found in the Morning Post before the war, and it continued down to Enoch Powell and Alan Clark. But now members of the shadow cabinet, such as George Osborne (whom even Cameron is said to tease as a neocon), vie in fealty to Washington - and this when US policy is driven by neocon thinktanks and evangelical fundamentalists, with whom Toryism should have nothing in common.
There was once... Lest we forget, lest we forget. Daniel Johnson expends a lot of energy in his contentions post trying to show that Alan Clark was a vicious anti-Semite and Hitler sympathizer. (Not being familiar with Clark's book Barbarossa, which Johnson uses as the basis for these accusations, I'll leave it to others to judge of their merits.) However, Powell is the more intriguing figure of the Tory old guard because he is plainly the one with whom Wheatcroft most identifies.
"Who's this English cunt?" was Kingsley Amis's first reaction upon seeing Powell's clipped and donnish mien turn up unannounced one day at Casa Lucky Jim. (Amis was friends with Powell's estranged and more literary brother Anthony, who pronounced the family surname differently -- sounds like "pole" -- and better captured the elegant and elegiac strands of Little Englander syndrome in his gorgeous Proustian novel sequence, Dance to the Music of Time.) That Kingsley was already well into his Falstaffian curmudgeon phase when this encounter took place, and that Powell still managed to come off too fusty by half, goes a long way towards explaining just how retrograde is Wheaty's moist-hanky treatment of the Righties of Old. (Would anyone more conservative than Margaret Thatcher have a penguin's chance in Sicily of getting elected now? David Cameron may be an insufferable, eco-friendly wet, but he's no fool as PM-in-waiting.)
Powell was anti-immigrant and anti-"Them" with a bullet. He wasn't quite racist, though. His notorious Rivers of Blood speech in 1968, which presaged a civil war in Britain between Anglo-Saxons and a growing (dark-skinned) immigrant class, has been taken up by much of the Anglo-American right in recent day to account for the very real threat of entrenched Islamism in London. Prophetic in Powell's speech was the following strophe:
The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members. Now, at all times, where there are marked physical differences, especially of colour, integration is difficult though, over a period, not impossible. There are among the Commonwealth immigrants who have come to live here in the last fifteen years or so, many thousands whose wish and purpose is to be integrated and whose every thought and endeavour is bent in that direction. But to imagine that such a thing enters the heads of a great and growing majority of immigrants and their descendants is a ludicrous misconception, and a dangerous one.
This is Mark Steyn's America Alone thesis in a paragraph.
Frankly, I much prefer to see the Wheatcroft/Derbyshire trend of opposing an automatic Atlantic alignment with the only liberal democracy in the Middle East than I do to seeing The American Conservative deal with the issue. Buchanan's rag really does write "neocon" when it means to write "Jew" (how else to account for an entire article, by one Daniel McCarthy, that noted the remarkable fact that some neocons were -- gasp -- Catholics!)
Still, Wheatcroft's vices of hyperbole do him little credit:
Iraq might have made Tories hesitate before continuing to cheer the US, but Stephen Crabb does just that. The MP was in Washington at the time of Cameron's speech, where, he said, there was "disappointment expressed". Many would have taken that as a compliment, but not Crabb, who says in best Vichy spirit: "We do need to be careful about how the Americans see us."
See how the far right and the far left have merged when both openly compare the United States with Nazi Germany. The irony is that this merger suggests we're in a bit of Weimar moment right now, all the more reason to err on the side of political caution and avoid paranoid screeds about an ethnically inflected cabal's takeover of venerable institutions.
Last week I attended a reading of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herberts poems at the New School in downtown Manhattan. At the podium were the poets Edward Hirsch and Adam Zagajewski, Herberts translator Alissa Valles, the journalist and dissident Adam Michnik, and New Yorker poetry editor Alice Quinn. This event marked a long-awaited occasion: the publication of Herberts collected works in English. Collected Poems, 1956-1998, in Valless sensitive translation, makes an important addition to our understanding of post-war literary modernism, and of post-war poetry in general.
On the occasion of Herberts death in 1998, his compatriot, translator, and friend Czes?aw Mi?osz wrote a short, understated poem about their shared art form and how the deceased unfailingly attended it:
He, who served [poetry],
is changed into a thing,
delivered to decomposition
into salts and phosphates,
sinks
into the home of chaos.
Today Slate's resident stock market expert, Henry Blodget, takes Jim Cramer to task for an interview that appeared to endorse stock manipulation -- feeding the media false information to cause a security's price to lurch in a desired direction. That's illegal.
I'm all in favor of second chances, and it's pretty clear from his resume that Blodget always wanted to be a journalist, but come on -- if you don't know, Blodget is himself one of the major skins on Eliot Spitzer's wall. For stock manipulation (or something like it). In the heady dot-com days, Blodget made his name by making wildly optimistic predictions about the value of stocks like Amazon.com which then became true. But the predictions he fed the media were very different from his internal communications. He is barred from stock analysis for life. Nowhere in his piece on Cramer does he bother to disclose this.
And now he's a journalist for Slate.com, while Jim Cramer is just shy of a billionaire and has a hit show on CNBC. Better let in a little sunshine, Henry, because this grape crop came out kinda sour.
[Note: The link below has been fixed. You can also access this exchange by clicking here.]
Baruch Spinoza is one of the most revered and scrutinized philosophers of the Enlightenment. An atheist at a time when witches were still burned at the stake, his treatises on democracy, free speech and free inquiry were branded as unpardonable heresies by Jew and Christian alike. Spinoza was a Portuguese Jew whose family had fled the Inquisition and established itself in the relatively open society of Amsterdam during the height of mercantilism. An extraordinarily gifted student of the Talmud, he began questioning the conventional wisdom of Judaism, and religion itself, in his adolescence and was excommunicated by his own mentor and rabbi. Spinoza thus became, at an early age, a minority of a minority, or a double-exile of 17th-century Europe.
That the radicalism of his philosophy was tied into the radicalism of his life is Rebecca Newberger Goldsteins subject in her excellent philosophical biography, Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. One of the enticements of this book is that it places The Ethics, Spinozas most self-revealing disquisition on nature and human conduct, center-stage. How do we account for the experiences and material conditions that shaped one of the most important minds since antiquity? To even endeavor such a task is to run counter to Spinozas objective philosophy, which has it that human behavior is predetermined by nature; our only challenge while were still breathing is to understand the sheer necessity of our being. Thats how reason can liberate man from superstition and myth.
Rebecca had kindly agreed to participate in a dialogue with me that, as I explained it, would be a sort of epistolary book review and kibitz on Spinozas life and philosophy, and how both are still relevant today. (Theo van Goghs murder in 2004, and Ayaan Hirsi Alis flight from Amsterdam, both caused by the forces of religious reaction, spring immediately to mind.)
More than that, however, I also wanted to know about the author of Betraying Spinoza, who Ive been reading for years, both in fiction and non-fiction. (Rebeccas novel The Mind-Body Problem is probably the best academic satire since Lucky Jim.) Her profile of Baruch is a kind of cerebral love affair at a distance. As a work of biography, its tinged with Rebeccas own intimate experiences, beginning with her girlhood as a skeptical and precocious yeshiva student who first heard the name of this dead heretical Jew pronounced with accented scorn by an orthodox instructor.
I had no idea how enjoyable this exchange would be when I began it, or that Id manage to coax a little one-act play out of Rebecca in her second letter, a gratis contribution to Jewcys pages that had us rethinking our No Fiction policy.
Michael Weiss
To: Rebecca Goldstein
From: Michael Weiss
Subject: Laughter of the Mind and the Original Non-Jewish Jew
Dear Rebecca,
I should probably say at the outset that Id been looking forward to your treatment of Spinoza ever since I read your engrossing book on Kurt G?del's incompleteness theorem. This is a profound accomplishment since you're talking to someone with absolutely no aptitude for mathematics. (As far as I'm concerned, once a formula exists, the tedious spadework has been done; I'll take the textbook's word for it that it works, thanks all the same.)
Without getting too much into the arcana of G?del's theorem, its probably worth mentioning that he employed a very ironic and witty method for legitimizing his Neo-Platonic worldview. G?del believed in certain immutable truths that could not be substantiated by empirical investigation alone. He used the tectonics of the famed Vienna Circle to cause the epistemological earthquakes that brought down the entire edifice of logical positivism. Isn't that the most charismatic kind of genius, to debunk somebody else's wisdom on its own terms and turn reason into an intellectual satire? Incompleteness is laughter of the mind.
Which brings me, if a bit obliquely, to your latest biography of another cosmic comedian, Spinoza. Why do I say comedian? Because in retrospect, there is something distinctly amusing about one man's ability to turn even the most progressive elements of 17th-century European society into fire-breathing reactionaries. Spinoza may have been the godfather of modernity, but he also negatively characterized his age, proving that to be ahead of one's time is also, inevitably, to be "of" one's time. The original non-Jewish Jew, the rootless cosmopolitan par excellence, got so much right long before the world was ready to appreciate him indeed, if it even is ready now. And despite his notorious asceticism, Spinoza strikes me as having a much more winning personality than G?del. He wasn't cracked and tortured, and even when chivvied by the hidebound and medieval, he managed to keep his powder dry (except once, but more on that later). Meet the brooding loner of the Enlightenment, a Clint Eastwood for the life of the mind crowd.
You write early on that you were won over by Spinoza you loved him because despite the baleful portrait Mrs. Schoenfeld, your yeshiva teacher, painted of him, he still had an abiding respect for his family and their reputation. He stuck by his motto of Caute ("caution") until the truth elbowed its way out of his study and into the gossip-crazy streets of Amsterdam, where it became a scandal. Before this, he was willing to keep up appearances until the only sacrifice he'd make would be of himself, alone. Shalom bayis (peace within the house) and "not in front of the goyim" are harder orthodoxies for a nice Jewish boy to shake than belief in the souls immortality or in the existence of angels. Spinoza didnt have ice water in his veins, however icy his rationalism may have been.
It's amazing to me that, for someone who didnt get out much, and didn't have too many people over, he was also a brilliant psychologist. Spinoza knew human folly and passion with the kind of intuition you don't expect from hermetic bookworms. His definition of cruelty, for instance endeavoring to injure someone who loves you if hatred is your prevailing emotion is on the same plane as Dostoevsky's insight in The Brothers Karamazov that we sometimes can't forgive the ones we've wronged.
I developed my own affection for Spinoza when I read the circumstances surrounding his excommunication. "Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up." This is like that t-shirt they sell in the Village with the shit-happens precis of all the religions. Judaism is "Why does shit always happen to me?"
Now, its precisely these biographical details, which are few but extremely telling, that give you the paradoxical challenge of writing a biography of Spinoza. By trying to understand what motivated a purposefully inscrutable philosopher you fly in the face of the "radical objectivity" of his philosophy. This is your betrayal of him. He thought human beings were nothing but the piddling q's implied by the august p's of the logical superstructure of the universe, whether that superstructure is defined as the Mind of God, the Presumption of Pure Reason, or Einstein's a priori "out yonder." Our only task is to use our eyes of the mind to try and glimpse as much of that superstructure as possible, to approach its true nature asymptotically.
Rebecca, you're a novelist as well as a scholar of rationalism and its history. I'm wondering how great the temptation must have been to see Spinoza as that near-perfect invention of fiction, a character not just molded by his surroundings, but whose entire legacy might be thought of as its own conscious rejection of them. His personality obtrudes in certain ways: "absurd" is a common adjective used in The Ethics, and it sounds to my ear like the haughty sigh of a pissed-off double exile. Is Spinoza sometimes protesting too much? Are those "eyes of the mind" of his smiling just a little too indulgently for their own good?
I remember your closing line of the G?del book, where you guess at what a horrifying but exciting awareness of being the smartest guy in the room must have been like for an adolescent prodigy:
"There are always logical explanations and I am exactly the sort of person who can discover such explanations. The grownups around me may be a sorry lot, but luckily I don't need to depend on them. I can figure out everything for myself. The world is thoroughly logical and so is my mind a perfect fit."
This is not betraying G?del because he'd have been indifferent to such a surmise of the motives behind his metaphysics. You're allowed inside his head. Not so Baruch, which makes me wonder if it was purely "objective" of him to place imagination behind reason and observation in his three-part catalogue of knowledge.
You were easier on your subject than you might have been. Compare your treatment of Spinoza to the way Nabokov went to work in The Eye on another famous free-thinking and Hellenized Jew of modernity:
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.
I caught this article today in the New York Times "National Report" (page 25... what's the front page, then?) about Utah's new state law laying out strict rules for high school club formation, including reams of paperwork and a prohibition on any sort of sexual discussion. The article alleges that it's a backdoor way (heh) to ban gay-straight alliances in spite of the equal access laws Orrin Hatch drafted to protect religious clubs. Actually, I think it passed as a way to teach kids to be libertarian bureaucracy-haters as they file in triplicate with the state government to certify that their outing club is gay-free in triplicate, but take your indoctrinal pick.
Anyway, I laughed at this:
State Senator D. Chris Buttars, a Republican from the Salt Lake City suburbs and the laws co-sponsor, said in an interview that he saw the need for the measure after parents from a high school in Provo, Utah, protested the formation of a gay-straight club in 2005.
Forget about a conservative mountain state rep named Buttars for a moment. Provo's city flag was ranked 143 out of 150 by the North American Vexillological Association. (Not only are there city flags; there are flag hobbyists.) Provo, Utah's ugly flag looked like this:
There are two objects on that big white space, and one of 'em's a rainbow. Provo, you're either a gay enclave or a manufacturing center of vitamin supplements. Decide.
The novelist Peter De Vries once observed that there are certain people who appear profound on the surface while deep down they remain superficial. This seems a fair characterization of anyone who could take seriously as an indictment the term Enlightenment fundamentalist, coined by Timothy Garton Ash to describe the fearless critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. As an act of verbal jujitsu, Enlightenment fundamentalist seems arresting at first. But just try to locate the intellectual and moral ties that bind, say, Sayyid Qutb to Baruch Spinoza, and you will come up empty-handed.
Hirsi Alis unapologetic preference for rationalism over revealed truth is not rooted in her own bone-chilling experiences, as she emphasizes in her new memoir, Infidel. (She was subjected to genital mutilation, arranged marriage, and regular beatings delivered by both kin and cleric.) Rather, through reading and common sense, she concluded that the open, secular society, where women are not treated as divinely licensed sex slaves, is self-evidently better than the closed, Islamic one, where they are.
According the kinds of polls I don't trust to tell me anything about American opinions, a black lesbian septuagenarian has a better chance of becoming president than an atheist. So I guess all Toni Morrison has to do is get photographed exiting a church, and she's golden.
Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.), a member of Congress since 1973, acknowledged his nontheism in response to an inquiry by the Secular Coalition for America. Rep. Stark is a senior member of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee and is Chair of the Health Subcommittee.
Although the Constitution prohibits religious tests for public office, the Coalition's research reveals that Rep. Stark is the first open nontheist in the history of the Congress. Recent polls show that Americans without a god-belief are, as a group, more distrusted than any other minority in America. Surveys show that the majority of Americans would not vote for an atheist for president even if he or she were the most qualified for the office.
Herb Silverman, president of the Secular Coalition for America, attributes these attitudes to the demonization of people who don't believe in God. "The truth is," says Silverman, "the vast majority of us follow the Golden Rule and are as likely to be good citizens, just like Rep. Stark with over 30 years of exemplary public service. The only way to counter the prejudice against nontheists is for more people to publicly identify as nontheists. Rep. Stark shows remarkable courage in being the first member of Congress to do so."
I'll help Zogby and Pew out on the next question: How many of you really think Stark is the first person to hold national office who thought God was a fairy tale?
Adam Krzeminski, the editor of the Polish magazine Polityka makes an eloquent but muddled case for splitting the difference between Timothy Garton Ash and Ian Buruma's multiculturalism and what I prefer to call Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Presumption of Pure Reason. (It's much more savory to group the brave Somali with Spinoza than it is to pay heed to the meretricious term used by her detractors, "Enlightenment fundamentalist," which gives me kooties even to see it under inverted commas like that.)
Krzeminski is of the "a little from Column A, a little from Column B" mentality, but his bone of contention with Hirsi Ali's has to do with her comparison of Islamism and Communism. In a speech she delivered in Berlin in September of last year, she rightly described both isms as violent, totalitarian movements whose opponents are ridiculously labeled reactionaries by fellow travelers and feather-headed relativists. To Krezminski:
Even if one were to argue that communism - at least in the Russian-Orthodox variation, is an instrument of political theology, it would still be a gross oversimplification to compare it this still-born theory with a millennium old monotheistic religion. And whatever the differences between Stalinism and communism even in the Soviet Union it was never a deeply internalised religion that was carried by the people. It was a social promise and a belief system that was imposed top down and with force. And it imploded by itself like a soap bubble after just 70 years. The reasons for this were manifold: the pressure from within for which the dissidents and mass revolts like the Polish Solidarnosc, and the Hungarian, Czech, East German, Baltic, Ukrainian and all the other protest movements over the years deserve recognition as well as the pressure from outside, the involvement in dialogue, the cooperation and finally through what Ulrike Ackermann so disparagingly refers to as "change through rapprochement".
The first thing to notice about this paragraph is that it suffers from a clumsiness of prose: to what does Krezminski refer when he writes, "even in the Soviet Union it was never a deeply internalised religion that was carried by the people" -- Stalinism or communism? In either case, the evidence is solidly against him.
The rise of the nomenklatura, or "New Class" of bureaucratic elite, and the instantiation of Marxist-Leninist epistemology in later generations who grew up without a memory of tsardom -- these aspects of Soviet life prove that ideology was a deeply internalized religion carried by the people.
After the Berlin Wall came down, misguided liberals were no less triumphalist than cold warriors. "Ah ha," they said. "So it was all bluster and brinkmanship, not ideology, since the reformists within the Kremlin always knew the Soviet experiment was operating on borrowed time." That there were reformists is not in dispute, but that ideology was not paramount is just plain wrong. Of course the plan was world revolution, right up to the very end, admitted Schevernadze and Gromyko, both foreign ministers who went on to enjoy rocky post-Soviet political careers. The socialist ideal was never for a minute discarded by those middle-ranking bureaucrats who'd had it drummed into their brains since childhood, much as a Catholic who becomes agnostic never fully forgets her catechism, or the guilt that goes along with it. It took the extraordinary shift in historical conditions to win -- or, at any rate, convince -- hearts and minds in Moscow.
Krezminski then goes on to say that, well, the real dissidents of Communism -- Koestler, Silone, Milosz -- all returned to their "European, Judeo-Christian-Enlightenment cultural roots," unlike Hirsi Ali, who has abandoned her Somali traditions altogether in favor of adopted Western ones. This is also a false dichotomy.
Koestler grew up during the "Golden Age" of Budapest, where he marched in Communist rallies as a boy, before turning to Zionism, then back to Communism, and finally ended up an apostate (there is no other adequate term for it) and a believer in crackpot paranormal theories (falling under no configuration of the Judeo-Christian-Enlightenment rubric I can think of). Koestler never returned to Hungary, so nor can it be said that he came full circle, unless one is ready to believe the Danube ran through Savile Row and Clubland London in the late fifties.
Milosz gave up his native Lithuania for Poland, where he became the unofficial poet laureate, whose verses reflected a Europe that would never fully recover from the ravages of the 20th century. (We can also include Milan Kundera in this pessimistic category.)
And in a way, Silone never completely abandoned his engagement with the forces of Progress and the Future because he later declared that the battle of human existence could only be fought between the Communists and the ex-Communists -- a far cry from humble mezzogiorno roots in the Abruzzo region of southern Italy, one has to admit.
So just because Hirsi Ali said goodbye to all that -- where "that" was more than just the self-aggrandizing hallucinations of a seventh-century epileptic and the monotheism he founded -- doesn't make her any less of a dissident in an equally wrought struggle for civilization. That a religion is a millennium old only means that trenchant criticism of it has been around longer. Hirsi Ali is doing nothing that Spinoza, Mill, even Marx haven't done before. And it should be remembered that Koestler and Silone edited a volume of ex- and anti-Communist essays entitled, The God That Failed, which might as well have been the working title for Infidel, too.
The moral dilemmas I found in books were so interesting that they kept me awake. The answers to them were unexpected and difficult, but theyu had an internal logic you could understand. Reading Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, I understood that the two characters were just one person, that both evil and good live in each of us at one time. This was more exciting than rereading the hadith. -- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Infidel
Also more exciting than reading anything written by Garton Ash or Buruma on Hirsi Ali.
The girlfriend and I took in The Lives of Others, by far the best film of the year, let alone best Foreign Language Film, and and I knew it was going to be that within about ten minues. The bloated and venal culture commissar offers a speech of congratulations to the conformist playwright whose life he's about to destroy out of sexual jealousy (he's sleeping with the playwright's attractive actress/girlfriend).
"A great Soviet once said, 'Writers are the engineers of the soul,'" the commissar says, with as much pseudo-profundity as you'd expect of someone ideologically required to think Alexei Tolstoy was a good novelist.
I thought to myself, "Now, even if they do get around to attributing that quote to Joseph Stalin, thus killing the subtlety of the remark, well done."
The Lives of Others was not cooked up by a CNN-educated fabulist of cold war moral equivalence, but by a German (albeit a West German) who knew the style and feel of real Communism. At the 'cultural' level, life was at its worst during the Zhdanovshchina, named after the horrific bureaucrat, Andrei Zhdanov, who chivvied and murdered writers and artists after World War II. His influence bled into the GDR and everywhere else the Red Army set up its semi-permanent presence outside of Russia.
I've made the Soviet Union and its history of mayhem and falsification my bag these past few years. Among Western journalists with infinitely greater credibility than I have who have done the same, there's no one I respect more than Anne Applebaum. This leads me to believe that the headline of her latest Slate essay, "Engineers of the Soul," was either intended ironically (in which case, the provenance of the quotation deserved mention in the essay) or was thought up by an editor who saw the film, remembered the line, but forgot the source.
A niggling detail, perhaps, but one that matters if the names Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Babel and Grossman mean anything to us today. And how paltry a compliment to call them "engineers" of anything!
This is becoming a bad habit with me. I think Shvitz stewardship and the Slate gig, which has me culling the best of the blogosphere twice a week ("Bush is not necessarily Hitler," "Here's a Siouxie and the Banshees video"), has turned me into something of a blog sadist. Movable Snipe is my sweet form of release.
For those new to the game, Movable Snipe is the Jewcy feature where two pen-pals spend a week reading five blogs and offering valentines or vivisections.
Your Snipers this week are Jonathan Ames, bestselling author What's Not To Love?, My Less Than Secret Life and Wake Up, Sir! (a semiconscious neo-wastrel's homage to Wodehouse), and Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon fame and lately the John Edwards '08 blog contretemps. (Both Jonathan and Amanda are unloved by Bill Donahue of the Catholic League. Not that there's anything provocatively self-promoting about that...)
This week's line-up:
1. Jewlicious: All right, this amounts to Jewish web incest, but fuck it. Jewlicious is the endearing garage band you hope never really makes it happen because that would rob them of their entitlement to make fun of the sell-outs like us.
2. The News Blog: Steve Gilliard's answer to the netroots phenomenon. Hey, if that "No Surge" banner reminds you of Sheryl Crow's less-than-influential "No War" guitar strap back in '03, that's probably fine by him.
3. Gothamist: This is what people who were too cool to watch Sex and City read to get that same "God, I wish I lived in New York" jones satisfied.
4. The Revealer: More incest. We're pretty gemutlich with Jeff Sharlet and his little online experiment in religion and media coverage. But Jeff doesn't like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and we do. It's on, bubbelah.
5. Maud Newton: Dig that American Typewriter font and that liberal use of the paragraph symbol. Less twee than The Believer, more subtle than Bookslut. If James Agee were still around, he'd be reading Maud.
Here's how it works: 1) We commission an interview with you, an intriguing comer with good web presence; 2) Our writer returns with gobsmackingly clever responses about traveling through Kurdistan at 18 and admiring the Russian poets; 2) It takes your humble servant all of 3 seconds to decide that we must hire you to do something for Jewcy.
Roughly how it went down in getting the burlesque-loving artist Molly Crabapple, who's in between cross-country jaunts to promote Dr. Sketchy's Official Rainy Day Colouring Book, to guest edit the Shvitz. Ken Mondschein did an iSpy with Molly back in January, describing her as
like a heroine out of Nabokov: perched on the fault-line between the Belle ?poque and the postmodern, comfortable with Symbolist poetry as she is with the demimonde of the skin trade.
Her voluptuary-funny sketchwork is what you'd hope might result from a night of shoptalk between Robert Crumb and Aubrey Beardsley.
Truly is there an argument to be made for the fashioning of a supranational body -- to counterbalance, if not quite "check" the monolithic influence of European Union -- that would consist of those nations which fall under the heading "Anglosphere."
Such may seem like an exercise in linguistics as geopolitics, and I suppose, to a certain extent, it is. But one need only recall Churchill's august trilogy, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, to see the implicit rationale for such an organization.
Robert Conquest alludes to the "law-and-liberty" traditions of Great Britain (including the commonwealths and her former colonial holdings), Australia and the United States, traditions which bind these countries together in a kind of everlasting special relationship. Is it not time to codify that relationship with an agreement somewhere between the Nato charter and Maastricht?
Even the politics of division is a source of unity. See this review of a collection of Eustonian Left tracts and polemics, publishing in The Australian. How nice to see Hannah Arendt playing well in Canberra:
"If the dictatorial leaders of a foreign state or radical movement, or the usually unelected leaders of a 'community' or religious group said that their culture demanded the oppression of women and homosexuals, for example, 21st-century liberals were tripped over by the thought that it was racist to oppose them," Cohen writes.
The flip-side of this debased coinage, he argues, is that democrats, feminists and socialists in the poor world get no support from their Western comrades.
This is particularly and most painfully evident in the Left's inability to support those Iraqis attempting to build a civil society and to condemn in a more than perfunctory way the wicked campaign of terror and mayhem being waged by the so-called insurgency.
For Cohen, this is the clinching disgrace: "For all the atrocities and follies committed in its name, the Left possessed this virtue: it would stand firm against fascism. After the Iraq war, I don't believe that a fair-minded outsider could say it does that any more."
Cohen echoes Hannah Arendt's theory that terror is the essence of totalitarianism and this is the pivotal insight of the anti-totalitarian Left. Indeed, the notion of a war on terror only makes sense when set within a liberal context.
It's a line, based on mistranslation, from Whit Stillman's Barcelona (also germane tagline: "Americans. Anti-Americans. In Love."), though I think the term applies to the truly bizarre spectacle of seeing President Bush getting chummy with Lula, the Marxisant president of Brazil, who was just re-elected to office without all the viva la revolucion fanfare of someone else we might name...
Guess how Hugo whiled away his time while the White Devil shook hands with a comrade across the continent, which must have been the political equivalent of being uninvited to dinner between your girlfriend and her visiting ex? The Times does a little research about the Venezuelan autocrat's bedfellows:
The stadium rally with Mr. Chvez was sponsored by union groups with ties to the Peronist government in Argentina, and a faction of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, a human rights group led by Hebe de Bonafini.(She has expressed satisfaction at the Sept. 11 attacks, saying that Americans deserved a taste of their own medicine, and has also recently made anti-Semitic remarks.)
Now, you really do have to love this scene. A moon-faced "socialist" with an almshouse political economy rallies against the environmentalist-friendly energy reforms being advocated by George W. Bush. He enlists someone whose first name is Hebe but with less than Hebraiotrophic tendencies and a fondness for Al Qaeda to co-sponsor the gig; ditto the Peronist government in Argentina, which, last I checked, is rooted in the first "third way" ideology whose founder offered safe haven to Nazis before and after being cuckolded by Che Guevara.
Late last summer I engaged in an email-based exchange with Norm Geras, a professor of Government at the University of Manchester and a prolific Marxist intellectual with one of the most widely read blogs in the UK. Like Oliver Kamm and Nick Cohen, author of the new polemic Whats Left? How Liberals Lost Their Way, Norm has made a name for himself as a leading spokesman for leftists with no truck for what passes for left politics in Britain these days. Along with Cohen, he drafted the Euston Manifesto, a declaration of progressive principles for the post-9/11 era. An explanation of whats in the often misunderstood (and more willfully misinterpreted) document follows in the pair of letters below, but suffice it to say that Euston has been the source of no little controversy and ridicule in the UK, while remaining something of a little-mentioned curio on this side of the Atlantic. As a signatory, and an avid reader of the Euston blogs (of which this site is one), I was most interested to hear what Norm thought about the Left in the United States, which he had just visited for the first time prior to this discussion, and where Euston and its supports might go from here.
To: Norm Geras
From: Michael Weiss
Subject: Self-Evident Truths As the New Radicalism?
Dear Norm,
Not that such a friendly exchange about the state of the modern Left should begin with a loyalty oath, but I should probably admit upfront that I am both a signatory of the Euston Manifesto and an avid reader of normblog. Before we get into things, I'd like to give our readers some background on what Euston is as well as the motivation for drafting it.
The goal of the manifesto, named for the area in London in which it was conceived and composed, is straightforward enough. It demands pluralism and democracy for all peoples. It denounces reactionary regimes no matter in what former colonial outpost they inhabit or under what confession they claim to govern no confession being preferable, as the guiding principles of 1776 are reaffirmed in the manifesto.
Egalitarianism is given as the ideal mode of political economy, yet Euston has a non-exclusive membership policy, which would allow like-thinking conservatives and libertarians to add their names.
An unequivocal respect for human rights, including a firm opposition to the enslavement of women and the murder of homosexuals under sharia law, is also enshrined.
And though the crimes of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay as well as the practice of "rendition" are justly abominated, Euston deplores the double bookkeeping of much of the Left, which uses these incidents to eclipse the horrors of Ba'athism or jihadism, or to draw moral equivalence between George Bush and Tony Blair on one side, and genocidal dictators on the other.
A point that has been repeatedly distorted by the media is that Euston is "pro-war" when in fact it takes no position on the wisdom of regime change in Iraq. However, as regime change is a fait accompli, the document is firmly in favor of the budding democratic and, indeed, socialist and trade unionist elements there. It has no truck with the jihadist and Saddamist "insurgency" looking to hobble the formation of a postwar democratic state.
(If I may go out on a limb and address the realities in Iraq a year after Euston was written: an incipient civil war between religious sects is no reason to abandon the foregoing commitments to human rights and secular and progressive principles.)
So where did this all come from? And why are such self-evident propositions suddenly in need of a new covenant?
Though polarities on the Left had been widening during the crises of Bosnia and Kosovo, 9/11 really marked the point at which they became irreconcilable. Independent leftists, mainly in the UK, found themselves strangers in the same land with former comrades who were now nodding along with the slogans of theocracy and fascism.
The effusions from some quarters are now notorious and the stuff of verbal and mental clich: 9/11, in one frigid formulation, represented America's "chickens coming home to roost." Slightly more generous in syntax is what you refer to as the "yes-butter" argument: "Yes, the attack on the World Trade Center was awful, but hadn't decades of U.S. foreign policy lit the fuse?"
As you've noted, this rhetoric failed on two separate levels because not only did it apply to the victims in Lower Manhattan, it also applied to victims of other man-made nightmares around the globe, from the desaparecidos of Pinochet's Chile to the Tutsis of Rwanda to the black Muslims of DarfurWhat are they to make of such blithe treatment of human suffering? Is there no universal outrage against mass murder? (As somebody whos looked into the Holocaust, and also criticized leftist scholarship on the subject, you seemed particularly well poised to demand an answer to this question.)
Christopher Hitchens has remarked that the Lefts automatic response to such a world-upending and worldview-shattering event recalled the line from The 18th Brumaire, the one about how acquiring a new language can be a tricky business because the inclination is to translate everything back into the native tongue. In politics, this inclination can be lethal.
This is why outspoken intellectuals like Tariq Ali openly compare the "resistance" in Afghanistan and Iraq to the guiding lights behind the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences footnote assemblies to mainstream historians, perhaps, but to radicals with long memories, the most esteemed antiwar gatherings of the World War I generation. (And what might Trotsky, who later had Hitler pegged, have made of al-Qaeda? His phrase to describe the origins of Nazism, "undigested barbarism," sounds about right.)
Actually, Ali isn't alone in dipping into the archives of 20th-century revolutionism to account for the ongoing war against Islamism. I've found another example of more recent vintage, one which I think youll enjoy. Here is Terry Eagleton writing in The Guardian last year:
Ordinary, non-political suicides are those whose lives have come to feel worthless to them, and who accordingly need a quick way out. Martyrs are more or less the opposite. People like Rosa Luxemburg or Steve Biko give up what they see as precious (their lives) for an even more valuable cause. They die not because they see death as desirable in itself, but in the name of a more abundant life all round.
Suicide bombers also die in the name of a better life for others; it is just that, unlike martyrs, they take others with them in the process. The martyr bets his life on a future of justice and freedom; the suicide bomber bets your life on it" [Italics added.]
So we have reached the point where a well-regarded Marxist literary theorist can mention Rosa Luxemburg in the same breath as suicide-bombers in Jerusalem and Baghdad. And their mutual objectives "justice and freedom" differ only quantitatively in terms of a willingness to sacrifice... Can you actually hear the chorus of "The Internationale" fade into absolute silence?
As a reconciled Marxist, you've argued very elegantly that the Left both deserves credit for past accomplishments and bears a responsibility for past failures. Many socialists, of factions too diverse and many to mention here, fought and died combating Stalinism, a pathology they were able to diagnose earlier than anyone else. But precisely what allowed them to diagnose it that it was a recognizable distortion of their own system also added a responsibility to remain self-critical and ever vigilant of future distortions.
As late as 1994 you observed in the New Left Review that Marxism
"will continue as a programme of research, a tradition of enquiry, and take a more modest place in the democratic cultures it finds, with all those still fighting under darkening skies for a world for everyone. It will contribute what it can to strengthening those cultures and that fight, as one voice amongst many in a coalition wider than the working class, if not as wide or shapeless as mere 'discourse' would imply. And it will know that the horizon really is open. There have already been, goodness knows, more than enough defeats, and the infamies continue to pile, irredeemable, on one another. But there is no guarantee of a final victory."
Is the Euston Manifesto, then, an attempt to split the difference between old principles and new historical conditions, a way of returning to the heritage of noble radicalism rather than abandoning that heritage altogether? I wonder if your enduring optimism for the materialist conception of history is not your saving grace after all, especially when those claiming to march under the red banner of socialism have grown so jaded about their roots as to also swath themselves in the green flag of jihad.
One vindication of the dialectic, however grim.
Thank you, Norm. Eagerly awaiting your reply.
Best,
Michael
To read Norm's reply, and the rest of our exchange, please visit Jewcy.
Who Can Forget the Episode Where Moe's Lost its Adult Entertainment License?
The Simpsons Movie is holding a contest among the USA's Springfields -- a city name found in 34 states, some with more than one -- to see which one gets to hold the movie's "hometown premiere." The city where I was born, and in whose suburbs I grew up, is a contender, or at least thinks so.
Homer once had a pet lobster. In one episode, same-sex marriage was legalized so the city could attract gay tourists. And Mayor Joe Quimby has an accent that sounds, oh, so much like a Massachusetts politician.
Having become so accustomed during our hobnobbings of the previous day to seeing this uncle by marriage in genial and comradely mood, I had almost forgotten how like the Assyrian swooping down on the fold he could look, when deeply stirred.
Uncle Percy had crumpled like a wet sock.
His whole attitude recalled irresistibly to the mind that of some assiduous hound who will persist in laying a dead rat on the drawing-room carpet, though repeatedly apprised by word and gesture that the market for same is sluggish or even non-existent.
He spoke with a certain what-is-it in his voice, and I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled...
Well, if I met the Mona Lisa at this moment I would shake her by the hand and assure her that I knew just how she felt. You see before you, Jeeves, a toad beneath the harrow.
First, the bad news: Much as I admire the cranial comedy of Stephen Fry, I never took to his portrayal of Jeeves in the BBC series Jeeves and Wooster, which at least got right the marquee order of personages in the Wodehouse miniverse. Those familiar with the novels and short stories about the Edwardian feudal spirit know that it was the butler what done it, saved his jelly-brained master from innumerable scrapes and social disgraces. They also know that Jeeves was older than his employer by about a generation and a half, and that the guileless narrative, with its burnished pastoral and modern metaphors (see above), are incapable of transfer to celluloid. I once asked Hitch if he'd seen Fry's adaptation of Waugh's Vile Bodies, Bright Young Things. Ice formed on the old man's upper slopes, and answer came there in the profound negative. "He knows better."
So should we, and yet... There's something enjoyable in its own right about watching the subtle subversion of the English class system, by showing that the below-the-stairs help had above-board IQs, which Wodehouse managed to show with unrivaled aplomb. His trick was to render his protagonist likable and winsome withal. No one takes issue with Bertie, not even his sage gentleman's personal gentleman, because Bertie is fundamentally a nice bloke. Lazy, entitled and boyish, but kind-hearted. Another way to put this would be to say, he's nothing at all like the characters Hugh Laurie plays best.
Who'd have thought that the ferrety wastrel being plucked out of Aunt Agatha's garden pond would go on attain TV Guide sexual charisma in the eyes of middle-aged housewives everywhere? Laurie's performance on House, easily the smartest and funniest medical "drama," is exactly what we've come not to expect from Prime Time television. He's not just haggard and tortured but really in it for the kids like Clooney. And he's certainly not empty and preening like those twits on Gray's Anatomy. House is mean. A regular stethoscope-wielding misanthrope who happens to be the ace diagnostician in the place. If his chill heart melts from time to time, you can bet it wont be pretty, and you can also bet that its because Jeff Zucker at NBC decrees it. The writers of the show, with their Jeevesian intellects and shrewd talent for last-minute rescue operations, most likely do not.
The title of the show and the name of its antihero must come from a tacit irony of Laurie's ever finding himself in an urgent situation where the question, "Is there a doctor in the house?" might even be asked. He got into medicine for the gallows humor. But sure, while hes at it, he'll perform that Bic pen tracheotomy on the sidewalk. Just give him some room to thunder and grumble about it first.
As this is the regular TV I take in anymore Entourage back next month, thank the Lord I thought a well-directed link to Lauries alter ego would be in order. Mind the plummy accent and clubland haircut. The voice has gone deeper and geographically indistinct, and the five oclock shadow seems viral at this point.
Here's Laurie on Inside the Actor's Studio, looking like he's in on more jokes than the audience is:
But if snipe is the order of the day, here's a steaming pile of snark (and let me preface this with a Don Ricklesque admission that I admire both writers' work in various ways): Pay special attention to the Derb's author photo, which seems alternately to conjure the mug shot of an unrepentant serial killer who finally cracks after days of interrogation and an unmasked British triple agent, who's about to go into one of those, "Don't you see, it's all a game?" speeches at the end of a Graham Greene "entertainment." As for the Merk: check out the link above re: spanking lady, which includes a 2006 pic of her and then check out the sepia-toned shot at Jewcy, which appears to be from the days when she rode with Butch Cassidy & The Sundance Kid.
I had such fun getting called a urinal cake of wannabe hipsterism by Crooked Timber a couple weeks ago, that I decided we should do the blog criticism again soon. So it's time for another coruscating installment of Movable Snipe, the Jewcy feature where two hierophants of ink-stained journalism spend a week reading five blogs of our choosing and offering their harshest or gentlest verdicts. ("Internet, schminternet. I was writing notes on camp when Steve Jobs still had hair.")
This week's Snipers are John Derbyshire, our favorite cant-hating National Review Tory who thinks Humbert Humbert wasn't that bad, and Daphne Merkin, the spanked feminist of belles lettres, for whom the expression "tell all" -- not to mention "safety word" -- might have been invented.
Their quarry:
1. James Wolcott: It's been said that Jimmy Jazz lost his touch until Adam Gopnik came along to replenish the Midas quotient. What's it like clicking "Publish" without Graydon looking over your shoulder? Are liberal hawks just costumed attack poodles pissing and shitting in front of landmark property in Sutton Place? Is it cool for a former Village Voice chronciler of punk rock to have so many cats lying around the house?
2. Reason's Hit and Run: The Cato Institute meets the Sex Pistols under the leather-dudded stewardship of Nick Gillespie (full disclosure: he's a bud of mine and was very kind to me during my abortive D.C. stint at Wonkette a year ago). Reason specializes in collective editorial blogging and unity of voice. Not like 'round these parts with the Trotsky-this, K-Fed-that.
3. Design Observer: A graphic arts and culture hodepodge run by the people who bring you shiny and new publications by NextBook. For some reasons, visions of SoHo, glass blocks and brushed steel furniture and a little something to get you started, love mom and dad -- flit through my head.
4. Kesher Talk: Where John Bolton's cookie-duster mustache is damned sexy, Moynihan and Glazer's Beyond the Melting Pot was too hard on the blacks, and Israel may also be mentioned.
5. Matt Yglesias: Andrew Sullivan names an award for political self-criticism after him. Because admitting your side is wrong is now as laudatory as letting that call from Judy Miller go straight to voicemail.
Boo-ya kasha and good on Slate for hiring Ron Rosenbaum to write the biweekly culture column that made the New York Observer compulsively readable every other week for so many years. Call him the Edgy Enthusiast or the Spectator, Ron doesn't disappoint with his first submission on Norman Mailer and what, exactly, made Hitler such a rampaging psychopath. Burnt pot roast? Mommy issues? Not quite. Like Gandhi, "Uncle Alf" had a highly questionable relationship with his niece, Geli Raubal. Unlike Gandhi, Hitler might have killed his.
Is this fertile ground for Stormin' Norman to be tilling? Nein. For one thing, even if Hitler did have incestuous relations with his kin before offing her, such does not a gateway to genocide become.
There's also something faintly meretricious about unlocking the unified field theory of world-historical tyranny. Pedants who obsess about psychological "root causes," and isolate a single root like one molested and murdered niece, deserve to hear the one funny joke in Sarah Silverman's repertoire, about her own niece who comes home from school one day and says that 60 million Jews died in the Holocaust. Historical accuracy is important, Auntie Sarah replies, because 60 million would have been unforgivable.
There's a reason, I think, we prefer Silence of the Lambs to Hannibal Rising, and it has more to do with mythic appeal of the incomprehensible than it does with Thomas Harris' declining prose standards. Jurassic Park was a snooze when that lab technician removed the integument of yoke from the hatchling velociraptor's eyes, and did we really care about the amberized mosquito DNA-donor? No, we sat up when that bad boy's older brothers started opening doors in the kitchen, hunting for the kids.
Likewise, Hitler needs to be whole-grown and capable of realizing his full potential for evil before we're ready to give him the time of day. One victim won't do; six million will. It's the hypothetical power he still wields over us, who might have lived in Europe in the thirties, that holds and terrifies.
Don DeLillo parodied the pathological obsession with the pathology of the Fuhrer with the Hitler Studies Department in White Noise. But however silly reductionism like this may be, it ought not to lead to its inverse: seeing the enormity of the criminal as grounds to keep our minds shut as to how he came to be, if only raw, unexamined biography is our resource. Stay away from Freud and we'll be okay:
So, here are the temptations: Will Mailer be tempted by the murder narrative or the intimations of paraphilic sexuality, or both?
Will he attribute Hitler's moral deformity to his sexual proclivities? Or will they be the promptings of a devil as such promptings are in Castle in the Forest? Will he underpin it with some Maileresque version of the Freudian interpretation of Dr. Norbert Bromberg, an NYU professor who, in the first book-length "analysis" of Hitler by a credentialed psychoanalyst, Hitler's Psychopathology, attempts to link Hitler's exterminationist anti-Semitism to his relationship with Geli Raubal and the discredited "Jewish blood" legend (the rumor that Hitler was obsessed with the possibility there was a Jew in his family tree)?
Here's Dr. Bromberg's strained link:
In 1928, "Hitler was deeply and more openly involved with ... his niece Geli. About the same time he was preparing a work which became known as Hitler's Secret Book published for the first time thirty-three years later. In this book he associated his hatred of Jews with ideas about blood and race for the first time. His sexual interest in his niece must have inevitably stirred in Hitler thoughts of incest and fears of harming her and possible progeny by what he believed might result: the corruption of her blood [by the putative "Jewish blood" Hitler believed he'd been tainted within Bromberg's view]. All these ideas and wishes he projected onto the Jews ..."
Kipling's phrase "thinking with the blood" was actually coined to account for his loathing of the "Hun" in World War I. But it also gets at the studied and codified race hatred of Nazism that was underwritten by 19th century German pseudo-scientists like Max Nordau. (Nordau, ironically, was a Jew who went on to become a vigorous Zionist after creating his theory of "decadentism." No luftmenschen, highbrows or queers.)
"Thinking with the cum" is what the repressed-loser explanation of Hitler amounts to.
My defense of Wystan is now posted at Commentary's blog contentions:
Out to sea, hunting Nazi war ships, Saul Bellows Augie March encounters a sailor, a brilliant autodidact, who tells him, Pascal says people get in trouble because they cant stay in their rooms. The next poet laureate of EnglandI figureprays to God to teach us to sit still. It would take W.H. Auden, who might well have become Englands poet laureate had he sat still, half his career to arrive at a similar conclusion about the mischief men do in pursuit of lofty goals. The centennial of his birth fell on February 21st of this year; most of the comments on this sadly muted occasion focused on the distinction between his early and late stages, which also happen to coincide with his Communism and his regained Anglicanism.
Self and Michael Morlitz, Jewcy's art designer, at the after-party for At Least It's Pink, which runs at the Ars Nova theatre, home of the mag's offices.
Michael and I are both halfsies, but combined, we make a whole Jew. And about quarter of a livable wage.
Call a woman who ran away from Islamic fundamentalists a distorted mirror-image of her former persecutors and you get thumped:
Garton Ash and Buruma would once have made short work of any apologist who accused the critics of the U.S.S.R. or the People's Republic of China of "heating up the Cold War" if they made any points about human rights. Why, then, do they grant an exception to Islam, which is simultaneously the ideology of insurgent violence and of certain inflexible dictatorships? Is it because Islam is a "faith"? Or is it because it is the faithin Europe at leastof some ethnic minorities? In neither case would any special protection from criticism be justified. Faith makes huge claims, including huge claims to temporal authority over the citizen, which therefore cannot be exempt from scrutiny. And within these "minorities," there are other minorities who want to escape from the control of their ghetto leaders. (This was also the position of the Dutch Jews in the time of Spinoza.) This is a very complex question, which will require a lot of ingenuity in its handling. The pathetic oversimplification, which describes skepticism, agnosticism, and atheism as equally "fundamentalist," is of no help here. And notice what happens when Newsweek takes up the cry: The enemy of fundamentalism is defined as someone on the fringe while, before you have had time to notice the sleight of hand, the aggrieved, self-pitying Muslim has become the uncontested tenant of the middle ground.
Orwell and the Spanish Civil War are all the rage again. Perhaps brought on by the fusion of fantasy and reality that was the international box office success Pan's Labyrinth, Western intellectuals have swooped down on the warmed-over carrion of Catalonia and waged the kind of factional combat over the historical truth and memory of that conflict that hasn't been seen since the Berlin Wall fell.
First, Anthony Daniels penned a notorious essay in the February issue of The New Criterion which claimed that in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell proved himself to be a totalitarian-minded socialist who -- and I'm not making this up -- made Joseph Stalin look like a "freedom-fighter."
March brought with it Auden's centennial, and the inevitable re-evaluation of the more contentious verses of this one-time Communist poet, especially the couplet from his gorgeous mosaic of word-pictures, "Spain," which runs: "To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, / The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder." Critics including Orwell have read these lines as a sinister endorsement of killing when performed in the quest for social democracy -- even if it was suborned and then betrayed by the Comintern.
Lastly, the "Red don" of Cambridge, Eric Hobsbawm, recently offered to the Guardian this pathetic tribute to the conventional wisdom of 1936 about the fight against Iberian fascism.
Knowing that Jewcy contributor Stephen Schwartz is a leading expert on the Spanish Civil War, fluent in the Catalan tongue and culture, and that his scholarship has helped turn post-Soviet revisionism into the accepted narrative of how Catalonia was lost, I've asked him to submit a rebuttal to the Hobsbawm piece. Here it is.
My review of Vasily Grossman's masterpiece appears in this month's New Criterion, a platform I'm happy to be sharing with Mark Steyn (on Kingsley), Hitch (on Orwell) and Stefan Beck (on Richard Ford).
You have to be a registered subscriber to TNC to read the piece, but here's an excerpt:
Grossman's largest treatment, however, is of the ineradicable virus of anti-Semitism, both the Teutonic and Caucasian strains. Indeed, the most famous sentence in the book shows how one dialectically merged with the other. A triumphant Stalin raises over the heads of Russian Jewry, ten years after saving it, the "??very sword of annihilation he had wrested from the hands of Hitler." If that overstates the case, the parallels Grossman draws between the twin vilifications of class and race remain persuasive. Robert Conquest has often cited the following passage from Forever Flowing, the pessimistic sequel to Life and Fate, to underscore the similarity of dehumanizing scapegoats deployed by both National Socialism and Communism: The Soviet hierarchs
had sold themselves on the idea that the so-called "kulaks"? were pariahs, untouchables, vermin. The kulak child was loathsome, the young kulak girl was lower than a louse. They looked on the so-called ??kulaks as cattle, swine, loathsome, repulsive: they had no souls; they stank; they all had venereal diseases; they were enemies of the people and exploited the labour of others. And there was no pity for them. They were not human beings; one had a hard time making out what they were...vermin, evidently.
Replace the word "??kulak" with the word "Jew,"? and what have we here but the mindset behind the Nuremberg Laws? As for the Soviet answer to the Jewish Question, after the war it was buried in an encyclopedia of synecdoche and euphemism. "??Doctor'??s Plot,"? "??rootless cosmopolitan"? -- ??such bywords denote a people in a rather subtler but no-less-sinister way than the caricatures found in Der Strmer. And yet, as Conquest has dutifully maintained, Stalin was not bound to pathological race theory so much as to Judeophobia, of a piece with his suspicion of any likely subversive elements. (Nazism and Communism are separated by another crucial difference: being sent to the Solovetsky labor camp because you were a kulak or a Jew was not necessarily a death sentence, whereas being sent to Auschwitz was.)
Well, one thing I learned from the Times' predictably necrophiliac tribute to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. is that his father provided the intiial boost to what has become one of the most overrated and under-criticized careers in American scholarship. This should immediately signal a point of affinity between Schlesinger and his favorite boy-president, who also had a interested and zealous papa fond of ministering to the budding careers of his male issue.
The word "scholarship" in the above paragraph is actually fungible with the word "politics" when considering the life and influence of Schlesinger. He became, in the unironic words of the Times obituarist, a "loyal soldier" of the Kennedy White House while also acting the part of court stenographer to "Camelot."
Yet this dogged liberal anti-Communist has been heralded as the Macaulay of the New Frontier "brains trust." A reassessment is in order. What we now know, based on multiple freshets of revisionist myth-busting history, is the following about Arthur Schlesinger and his favorite commander-in-chief:
1. Schlesinger convinced the New Republic to kill a correct story on Kennedy's training of Cuban mercenaries in Miami;
2. He mendaciously claimed that those mercenaries amounted to no more than 400 disgruntled residents of Miami, when in fact the number was closer to 4,000;
3. He maintained warm relations with John Newman, Oliver Stone's hand-picked Pentagon whisperer for consultation on the ridiculous and paranoiac film JFK. Newman had argued that Kennedy kept a contingency plan for pulling out of Indochina and was thus committed to peace even before honor when it came to a criminal American bail-out of French colonialism. Schlesinger later insisted that such a plan was proof that had 'Jack' survived past '64, the first "quagmire" of national consciousness -- also sometimes known as our "loss of innocence" -- would have been widely averted. There is substantial reason to disbelieve this.
Gary Wills, who himself is an excellent historian when not performing the stations of the cross on behalf of Jimmy Carter, has shown that the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 was an American-orchestrated sequel to the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. Soviet thundering about a planned U.S. attempt to overthrow the Castro regime was grounded in fact, not ideological menace, although of course Kennedy would never admit to this in public. Instead, the dire Russian response of a missile build-up in Cuba -- itself designed to get the U.S. to withdraw its own Jupiter arsenal from Turkey -- was signaled as an act of unprovoked Communist aggression in the Western hemisphere. The Cuban Missile Crisis was of Kennedy's own making, in other words, and that a nuclear "exchange" never commenced has been falsely attributed to this fawned-upon president's non-virtue of forbearance and shrewdness under apocalyptic pressure.
As a side note -- if only because the following events had regional, not global, repercussions -- the general under whom Schlesinger served as loyal soldier also targeted for premature extinction Patrice Lumumba, the first legally elected prime minister of the Congo; Rafael Trujillo, the right-wing autocrat of the Dominican Republic, whom Kennedy feared might spark another Marxist revolution in Latin America; and Ngo Dinh Diem, the repressive president of South Vietnam, whose assassination strengthened Ho Chi Minh's perception that Saigon was a defunct satrapy of Washington and led to a decade-long war in which everyone but Kennedy has been blamed for involving the United States.
Schlesinger, who had previously served in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner outfit to the CIA, always condoned or pardoned regime change when it took the form of a coup, where American sponsorship could be plausibly denied and where executives didn't even have to bother with presentations before the U.N. Security Council, let alone an authorizing vote in Congress.
As to his other great allegiance to another monogrammatic Democrat, Schlesinger's Roosevelt hagiography is only slightly less free and easy with facts and events, albeit bound by an interpretation of them that might be described as "my country, right or wrong."
In 2005, President Bush issued what I thought was a quite noble and honest apology to the peoples of Eastern Europe for their subjection to fifty-plus years of Soviet rule, inaugurated at Yalta. How did Schlesinger respond? With a not-so-fast note to the Huffington Post, arguing that Stalin's gobbling up of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary and Romania was a fait accompli by the time Roosevelt and Churchill convened with the Red Tsar about postwar spoils. The Great Game was decided by the sheer deployment of forces at battle's end, not by anemic Western diplomacy.
The best response to this act of moral cretinism -- at a time when it was Eastern Europe showing the most loyal commitment to defeating the fascism of Saddam Hussein -- came from Anne Applebaum, author of Gulag and the wife of Rados?aw Sikorski, Poland's former Minister of National Defence. Talking of the "small crew of liberal historians and Rooseveltians" who think America needn't apologize for its complicity in Russian hegemony, she wrote:
Their charges ignore the breadth of the agreement -- was it really necessary to agree to deport thousands of expatriate Russians back to certain death in the Soviet Union? -- as well as the fact that Yalta and the other wartime agreements went beyond mere recognition of Soviet occupation and conferred legality and international acceptance on new borders and political structures.
Add to this the sinister nod of acquiescence the part of the Anglo-American leadership when it came to the Katyn massacre, wherein more than 22,000 Poles were summarily shot dead, which event Stalin blamed on the Nazis when it was actually carried out, at his behest, by the Red Army.
Roosevelt was a dupe, plain and simple. The only official in his administration who was prescient about both Hitler and Stalin was the sadly forgotten proto-cold warrior William Bullitt, an ex-Bolshevik who, as U.S. ambassador to Russia, became a dogged anti-Stalinist. He was also a member of the Free French: Bullitt penned some of the most fiery condemnations of Petain and Vichy. He informed FDR that Stalin was not to be trusted, that Generalissimus was an inveterate double-crosser who'd bully the U.S. into supplying him with munitions and aid and later return the favor by demanding half a war-ravaged continent. In exchange for Lend-Lease, Bullitt argued, a guarantee should be given to Washington and London that Moscow would not seek territorial gains in Europe or Asia -- a proviso that stood a better chance of being confirmed and enforced after Operation Barbarossa caught only the Kremlin master unawares and all Russia came close to becoming the most important possession of Berlin. To this Roosevelt responded:
"I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins] says he's not... I think if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return... he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace."
The rest, as they say, is history. But how sad that the only ones who would never bring themselves to recognize it as such were the shameless partisan purveyors of conventional wisdom like the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Since (late) 2004, satisfying your jones for political and cultural commentary, day-old scoops and late-breaking marginalia, and whatever else finagles its way into the cyber-planetary potluck...
• Civil Disobedience on the Web By Michael Weiss {British bloggers stand up to threats of libel lawsuits., originally published in Slate.}
• Spray-Fire Atonement By Michael Weiss {How cognitive behavioral psychology can help High Holy Day Jews who repent too much., originally published in Slate.}
• Mutiny on the Manifesto By Michael Weiss {Spineless scalawags are sabotaging the most promising leftist doctrine in decades. Don't let them., originally published in Jewcy.}
• Rise of the Faux-cialists By Michael Weiss {Three poseurs who would have Marx spinning in his grave (plus their real-deal counterparts), originally published in Jewcy.}
• Stepson of the Time By Michael Weiss {A reconsideration of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, originally published in The New Criterion.}
• The Surge Can Work By Michael Weiss {Everyone's wrong about the president's new war plan, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Kibitz on Pure Reason By Michael Weiss {The author of Betraying Spinoza on rationalism, passion, and great 17th-century hair, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Brainwashing's Nemesis By Michael Weiss {How Rick Ross became a cult buster extraordinaire, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Whiz Kid of Warfare By Michael Weiss {How Noah Shachtman has revolutionized military reporting, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Blacklist The Left Could Use By Michael Weiss {Meet the Christopher Hitchens of postpunk, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Is Marriage the New Dating? By Michael Weiss {A divorcee, a young married, and a singleton debate wedded bliss, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Jewish Jihad for Jesus By Michael Weiss {Why converts are leading the evangelical movement, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Tribal Threads By Michael Weiss {The designer of Gytha Mander on the holy land, holsters, and honeys, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Some Kind of Republican By Michael Weiss {The real legacy of John Hughes, published in Slate.}
Faye Turney, the one female hostage in the Iran-UK standoff, who was to have been released imminently must apparently 
All one 
Have I ever shared with you my theory that Nick Cave is the Anti-Mel?
"Do you know that your son is going to Iraq?" That was only comment I remember emerging from the fug of a hangover this past Christmas. It was made by my older half-sister to our father with the hush-hush travel plans that I'd just confided in her. Going to K-stan is a major goal of mine, and if I can scrounge up the scratch and rolling freelance opportunities, I plan to make good on it by next fall.
My colleague at Commentary Daniel Johnson has 
A great Pole and poet, remembered here:
Today Slate's resident stock market expert, Henry Blodget, takes Jim Cramer to task for an interview that appeared to endorse stock manipulation -- feeding the media false information to cause a security's price to lurch in a desired direction. That's illegal.
Dear Rebecca,
You write early on that you were won over by Spinoza you loved him because despite the baleful portrait Mrs. Schoenfeld, your yeshiva teacher, painted of him, he still had an abiding respect for his family and their reputation. He stuck by his motto of Caute ("caution") until the truth elbowed its way out of his study and into the gossip-crazy streets of Amsterdam, where it became a scandal. Before this, he was willing to keep up appearances until the only sacrifice he'd make would be of himself, alone. Shalom bayis (peace within the house) and "not in front of the goyim" are harder orthodoxies for a nice Jewish boy to shake than belief in the souls immortality or in the existence of angels. Spinoza didnt have ice water in his veins, however icy his rationalism may have been.
You were easier on your subject than you might have been. Compare your treatment of Spinoza to the way Nabokov went to work in The Eye on another famous free-thinking and Hellenized Jew of modernity:
My latest post at Commentary:
How the BBC reporter managed to bang 
According the kinds of polls I don't trust to tell me anything about American opinions, a black lesbian septuagenarian has a better chance of becoming president than an atheist. So I guess all Toni Morrison has to do is get photographed exiting a church, and she's golden.
The girlfriend and I took in The Lives of Others, by far the best film of the year, let alone best Foreign Language Film, and and I knew it was going to be that within about ten minues. The bloated and venal culture commissar offers a speech of congratulations to the conformist playwright whose life he's about to destroy out of sexual jealousy (he's sleeping with the playwright's attractive actress/girlfriend).
This is becoming a bad habit with me. I think Shvitz stewardship and the Slate gig, which has me culling the best of the blogosphere twice a week ("Bush is not necessarily Hitler," "Here's a Siouxie and the Banshees video"), has turned me into something of a blog sadist. Movable Snipe is my sweet form of release.
It's a line, based on mistranslation, from Whit Stillman's Barcelona (also germane tagline: "Americans. Anti-Americans. In Love."), though I think the term applies to the truly bizarre spectacle of seeing President Bush getting chummy with Lula, the Marxisant president of Brazil, who was just re-elected to office without all the viva la revolucion fanfare of someone else we might name... 
Late last summer I engaged in an email-based exchange with Norm Geras, a professor of Government at the University of Manchester and a prolific Marxist intellectual with one of the most widely read 
The goal of the manifesto, named for the area in London in which it was conceived and composed, is straightforward enough. It demands pluralism and democracy for all peoples. It denounces reactionary regimes no matter in what former colonial outpost they inhabit or under what confession they claim to govern no confession being preferable, as the guiding principles of 1776 are reaffirmed in the manifesto.
Though polarities on the Left had been widening during the crises of Bosnia and Kosovo, 9/11 really marked the point at which they became irreconcilable. Independent leftists, mainly in the UK, found themselves strangers in the same land with former comrades who were now nodding along with the slogans of theocracy and fascism.
This is why outspoken intellectuals like Tariq Ali openly compare the "resistance" in Afghanistan and Iraq to the guiding lights behind the Zimmerwald and Kienthal Conferences footnote assemblies to mainstream historians, perhaps, but to radicals with long memories, the most esteemed antiwar gatherings of the World War I generation. (And what might Trotsky, who later had Hitler pegged, have made of al-Qaeda? His phrase to describe the origins of Nazism, "undigested barbarism," sounds about right.)
As a reconciled Marxist, you've argued very elegantly that the Left both deserves credit for past accomplishments and bears a responsibility for past failures. Many socialists, of factions too diverse and many to mention here, fought and died combating Stalinism, a pathology they were able to diagnose earlier than anyone else. But precisely what allowed them to diagnose it that it was a recognizable distortion of their own system also added a responsibility to remain self-critical and ever vigilant of future distortions.
The Simpsons Movie is holding a contest among the USA's Springfields -- a city name found in 34 states, some with more than one -- to see which one gets to hold the movie's "hometown premiere." The city where I was born, and in whose suburbs I grew up, is a contender, or at least thinks so.
Ah hem.
Boo-ya kasha and good on Slate for hiring Ron Rosenbaum to write the biweekly culture column that made the New York Observer compulsively readable every other week for so many years. Call him the Edgy Enthusiast or the Spectator, Ron doesn't disappoint with his 
My defense of Wystan is now posted at Commentary's blog contentions:
Orwell and the Spanish Civil War are all the rage again. Perhaps brought on by the fusion of fantasy and reality that was the international box office success Pan's Labyrinth, Western intellectuals have swooped down on the warmed-over carrion of Catalonia and waged the kind of factional combat over the historical truth and memory of that conflict that hasn't been seen since the Berlin Wall fell.
My review of Vasily Grossman's masterpiece appears in this month's New Criterion, a platform I'm happy to be sharing with Mark Steyn (on Kingsley), Hitch (on Orwell) and Stefan Beck (on Richard Ford). 
Well, one thing I learned from the Times' predictably necrophiliac 
Gary Wills, who himself is an excellent historian when not performing the stations of the cross on behalf of Jimmy Carter, has shown that the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 was an American-orchestrated sequel to the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. Soviet thundering about a planned U.S. attempt to overthrow the Castro regime was grounded in fact, not ideological menace, although of course Kennedy would never admit to this in public. Instead, the dire Russian response of a missile build-up in Cuba -- itself designed to get the U.S. to withdraw its own Jupiter arsenal from Turkey -- was signaled as an act of unprovoked Communist aggression in the Western hemisphere. The Cuban Missile Crisis was of Kennedy's own making, in other words, and that a nuclear "exchange" never commenced has been falsely attributed to this fawned-upon president's non-virtue of forbearance and shrewdness under apocalyptic pressure.
Roosevelt was a dupe, plain and simple. The only official in his administration who was prescient about both Hitler and Stalin was the sadly forgotten proto-cold warrior William Bullitt, an ex-Bolshevik who, as U.S. ambassador to Russia, became a dogged anti-Stalinist. He was also a member of the Free French: Bullitt penned some of the most fiery condemnations of Petain and Vichy. He informed FDR that Stalin was not to be trusted, that Generalissimus was an inveterate double-crosser who'd bully the U.S. into supplying him with munitions and aid and later return the favor by demanding half a war-ravaged continent. In exchange for Lend-Lease, Bullitt argued, a guarantee should be given to Washington and London that Moscow would not seek territorial gains in Europe or Asia -- a proviso that stood a better chance of being confirmed and enforced after Operation Barbarossa caught only the Kremlin master unawares and all Russia came close to becoming the most important possession of Berlin. To this Roosevelt responded:
