• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}
• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}
• The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}
• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}
• Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}
• Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}
• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}
• Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}
• The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}
• The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}
• Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}
• Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}
• The War Against Cliche and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}
• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}
• The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliche. And get a dictionary.}
• The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}
• Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}
• Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}
• Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}
• The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children�s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}
• The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}
• Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}
• Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}
• My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}
ALBUMS:
• You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}
• Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}
• Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}
• Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}
• Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}
• Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}
• Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}
• These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}
• SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}
• The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}
• It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}
• Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn't usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}
• Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}
• The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it�s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}
• The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}
• The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}
• No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}
• The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}
FILMS & TV:
• Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}
• Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}
• Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}
• The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}
• Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}
• Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}
• Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}
• The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}
• Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modeled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}
• Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}
• Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}
A Mickey Mouse lookalike who preached Islamic domination on a Hamas- affiliated children's television program was beaten to death in the show's final episode Friday.
In the final skit, "Farfour" was killed by an actor posing as an Israeli official trying to buy Farfour's land. At one point, the mouse called the Israeli a "terrorist."
I will hand it to those loyalists to Vladimir Putin who will at least cop to his being a strongman in the Great Russian Chauvinist tradition. When George W. Bush declared, after a visit with the ex-KGB premier in 2001, that he managed to glimpse Putin's "heart and soul", fans of "managed democracy" in Moscow couldn't stifle their laughter. That Volodya took to wearing a crucifix on his state visit to Texas was a very fine touch indeed. Worthy of Gogol.
But now Putin is coming to Bush the Elder's domain in Kennebunkport, Maine, raising a number of interesting questions about what else besides lobster and imported Caspian caviar will grace the menu of this odd holiday gathering. It seems like only yesterday the cold war was in revival. The BBC states the matter as coyly as possible:
"This really can be considered to be the Bush family's inner sanctum," one former senior official told the BBC News website.
Putin is the first world leader to be invited by George W to the family home during his presidency, he says, and this in itself can be seen as a "symbolic gesture."
In other words, let's do away for a spell with the neo-Brezhnev bluster and the Scoop Jackson homilies about spreading democracy. The murder of journalists and exiles, the elimination of regional elections, the imprisonment of politically antagonistic oil tycoons and sundry other measures of a consolidated autocracy are small beans in comparison to a mutually administered missile shield in Europe. (Given that our enemies are Russia's friends, I'd pay real money to sit in on the war games this installation gets up to.)
The Bush administration has not lacked for tragic historical ironies of its own making. The most tragic, however, may turn out to be that its hard-nosed brand of neoconservatism has finally given way to the more tender-headed variety of dictatorships and double standards. Only this time it's the fascists in the Middle East we're rightfully opposed to, while toward the bigger and more powerful Stalinoid regime in Russia, we're all smiles.
Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons has got everyone talking of the prose gene that must have been transmitted down through at least three generations of this scabrous line. The latest laudatory review comes from Joan Acocella in the New Yorker; she seems to have done her homework -- or at least she's been given more word space to dilate on Evelyn and Auberon:
The first thing one notices about Evelyn Waugh’s fiction is his breathtaking prose. He seems to have had a richer vocabulary, a keener ear, a wider range of effects—all of this supported by the firm bones of a Latinate syntax—than any English prose writer before or since. Even his smallest, transitional passages are exquisitely worked. Here, from “Vile Bodies,” is a carful of drunks returning home from the races:
Darkness fell during the drive back. It took an hour to reach the town. Adam and Miles and Archie Schwert did not talk much. The effects of their drinks had now entered on that secondary stage, vividly described in temperance hand-books, when the momentary illusion of well-being and exhilaration gives place to melancholy, indigestion and moral decay. Adam tried to concentrate his thoughts upon his sudden wealth [he thinks he’s won some money], but they seemed unable to adhere to this high pinnacle, and as often as he impelled them up, slithered back helplessly to his present physical discomfort.
Waugh was young (twenty-five) when he wrote this, and so he is spreading his plumage a little. Later, his prose became simpler, and more beautiful.
Such writing could become heavy after a while, but it is constantly refreshed by tart dialogue. Waugh, it seems, could do any voice—of any nationality, social class, age, profession, temperament—and make it sound as if it were speaking, that very moment, two feet away. Another balancing factor is Waugh’s extreme economy in laying out his story. As good as what he tells us is what he doesn’t tell us, or only reveals later, through the mouthpiece of someone who witnessed the event, or heard about it. (See Philbrick’s account of the murder of Prendergast.) His use of point of view could pass inspection by Henry James. But his most striking gift is his sheer writerly tact. He knows exactly when to cut something off, and he never explains a joke.
This is a good assessment, and that hangover passage anticipates the more hilarious -- and more philosophical -- one in Lucky Jim. But for my money, Evelyn's most lapidary sentences were in Put Out More Flags, one of his lesser novels about the period "between the wars." And this stave from Vile Bodies has, I think, his full talents on display. He was brilliant at making absurd names (Miles Malpractice, Mr. Outrage, Lord Monomark) seem normal. Also at juxtaposing tradition and modernity, which he hated as much as he defined it:
That same evening while Adam and Nina sat on the deck of the dirigible a party of quite a different sort was being given at Anchorage House. This last survivor of the noble town houses of London was, in its time, of dominating and august dimensions, and even now, when it had become a mere "picturesque bit" lurking in a ravine between concrete skyscrapers, its pillared facade, standing back from the street and obscured by railings and some wisps of foliage, had grace and dignity and other-worldliness enough to cause a flutter or two in Mrs. Hoop's heart as she drove into the forecourt.
"Can't you just see the ghosts?" she said to Lady Circumference on the stairs. "Pitt and Fox and Burke and Lady Hamilton and Beau Brummel and Dr. Johnson" (a concurrence of celebrities, it may be remarked, at which something memorable might surely have occurred). "Can't you just see them--in their buckled shoes?" Lady Circumference raised her lorgnette and surveyed the stream of guests debouching from the cloak-rooms like City workers from the Underground. She saw Mr. Outrage and Lord Metroland in consultation about the Censorship Bill (a statesman-like and much-needed measure which empowered a committee of five atheists to destroy all books, pictures and films they considered undesirable, without any nonsense about deference or appeal). She saw both Archbishops, the Duke and Duchess of Stayle, Lord Vanburgh and Lady Metroland, Lady Throbbing and Edward Throbbing and Mrs. Blackwater, Mrs. Mouse and Lord Monomark and a superb Levantine, and behind and about them a great concourse of pious and honorable people (Many of whom made the Anchorage House reception the one outing of the year), their women-folk well gowned in rich and durable stuffs, their men-folk ablaze with orders; people who had represented their country in foreign places and sent their sons to die for her in battle, people of decent and temperate life, uncultured, unaffected, umembarrassed, unassuming, unambitious people, of independent judgment and marked eccentricities, kind people who care for animals and the deserving poor, brave and rather unreasonable people, that fine phalanx of the passing order, approaching, as one day at the Last Trump they hoped to meet their Maker with decorous and frank cordiality to shake Lady Anchorage by the hand at the top of her staircase. Lady Circumference saw all this and sniffed the exhalation of her own herd. But she saw no ghosts.
"That's all my eye," she said.
But Mrs. Hoop ascended step by step in a confused but very glorious dream of eighteenth-century elegance.
means to be shot or arrested on false charges. Jamey Gambrell in the New York Review of Books on Putin's latest assaults on press freedoms:
One of the most recent victims of the Putin bureaucracy has been an NGO called the Educated Media Foundation (EMF), formerly known as Internews Russia. Over the past decade, this nonprofit organization has trained more than 15,000 Russian broadcast journalists, mostly from the provinces, in the best practices of journalism. It has, for example, conducted seminars, workshops, and classes for news writers, editors, managers, advertising directors, and program producers that have helped them to establish independent television and radio stations. It has given awards for documentaries of high quality, and worked out arrangements for sharing originally produced material among regional radio and television stations, thus encouraging the regions to report on themselves while achieving financial independence. The only "ideological" aspect of their work has been to explain and encourage internationally recognized ethical standards for fair reporting.
It's a shame Arthur Schlesinger is gone. I'd have had a turducken party to see how he'd handle these late-confirmed revelations about his hero:
The degree to which senior officials were involved in authorizing the spying is powerfully evident in tape recordings of White House meetings led by President John F. Kennedy on Aug. 1, 1962, and Aug. 22, 1962. In the first session, Kennedy approves a plan proposed by two advisers, James R. Killian Jr. and Clark Clifford, to establish a special investigative group to spy on reporters. In the later meeting, Kennedy presses the director of central intelligence, John McCone, and Gen. Maxwell Taylor to update him on planning for the spy unit. In both meetings, Kennedy endorses the idea.
Courtesy of the CIA's "Family Jewels." Izzy Stone said it best (and I paraphrase and conflate here): All governments lie, but they also on occasion tell themselves the truth.
Negar Azimi has a highly discussed piece in the New York Times Magazine on the dangers of U.S. financial support for Iranian opposition groups. Azimi's thesis is more or less: "Please don't show us the money." Given the heightened paranoia of the Iranian regime about attempts to undermine it, pro-reform groups such as Voice of America and Radio Farda, which receive do their employees small favors by cashing checks from the U.S. State Department. Fair enough, but the alternative is what, exactly?
Letting these groups raise funds from domestic Iranian sources will hardly cause the regime to react in a more kittenish manner, especially as its latest crackdown on dissident elements is a sign of its insecurity and weakness -- tied as much to economic woes as to political ones. The Great Satan is quite right to be shoveling dollars into Tehran, just as opposition groups are quite right to abjure any affiliation with their true bankroller. (If it was a matter of their not wanting the cash, they could simply refuse it.)
What seems especially silly in Azimi's implicit critique of what I'll call the Persian high wire transfer is that the Bush administration's supposed advocacy of regime change jeopardizes the situation any more than a modest advocacy of reform would do. How are the two mutually exclusive in a state lorded over by theocratic fanatics? Reform means undermining the regime; it means revolution, be it bloody or velvet.
Azimi writes: "The administration now finds itself in the curious situation of having its allies — potential and existing — feeling that they must publicly distance themselves from the White House, the State Department and America in general." The administration would find itself in that position, regardless of its democracy-or-bust foreign policy.
Or does anyone think that if the advice of the ever-fallible realist Lee Hamilton were followed, and we cozied up the mullahs on the shared objective of stabilizing Iraq, that we would be performing a service to the Iranian opposition? Their grievances would be the first brushed into the pragmatic dustbin.
Amnesty International, among other human rights organizations, sponsored a vigil today at Dag Hammarskjold Plaza for Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, an Iranian-American scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Institute, who has been incarcerated in solitary confinement for over a month in Tehran's gruesome Evin Prison. The charge against her? Spying for the United States. She had traveled back to Iran to visit her ailing mother and was arrested by Iran's secret police.
Below are some photos I took this afternoon of what turned out to be a pretty impressive event, given the time of day and also the oppressive heat.
I managed to speak briefly with Shaul Bakhash, Dr. Esfandiari's husband. Had the Iranian regime issued any statement as to Haleh's treatment and well-being? Mr. Bakhash said she's been interrogated around the clock, denied visitors and contact with legal representation. He personally has not spoken to or communicated with her since her arrest. She's apparently been allowed to talk to her mother over the phone for a total of two minutes per week. I asked Mr. Bakhash if he thought the United States was doing all it could to hasten his wife's release. He replied that given the status of U.S.-Iranian dialogue, there wasn't much Washington could do except pressure other international actors to lobby on Haleh's behalf, something they have been doing dutifully, if to no avail.
Here's a portion of the letter Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Prize-winning Iranian human rights lawyer, who's taken Dr. Esfandiari as her client, wrote to the head of the Iranian judiciary Ayatollah Sharoudi:
The punishment for rape according to the criminal law is death. How is it that a researcher and university professor, Haleh Esfandiari, and a translator and journalist, Parnaz Azima, have come to be regarded by the angel of justice as more dangerous than a criminal [taxi] driver, so that one of them has to remain in prison in solitary confinement, while the other remains banned from traveling even after posting bond [fifty] times the amount set for a law-breaking driver. [Note: As reported in an Iranian newspaper, the clipping of which was attacked to Ebadi's letter, a taxi driver raped a female passenger earlier this month. The victim took the driver's registration papers, and he was easily apprehended by the police. He went to prison after being unable to post a modest bail of 100 million rials, or $12,500. Dr. Esfandiari's bail is set at 500 million tomans, or $600,000. --ed]
Unfortunately, similar examples are not few in the judiciary and suggest that the politically accused are treated even more harshly than ordinary accused; and that the rights extended to the ordinary accused are denied the politically accused.
This reflects the intrusion of politics in the administration of justice. I hope that, in the order that you will issue, such practices will end and that my clients will be freed immediately and can return to their houses and homes.
Other politically accused captives of the Islamic Republic include:
Dr. Kian Tajbaksh, an urban planner and social scientist affiliated with the New School for Social Research in New York City. He's been held in Evin Prison since May 11 after being arrested at home in Tehran.
Ali Shakeri, a businessman and peace activist native to California. In March 2007, he also traveled to Iran to visit his ailing mother who died while he was there. Shakeri was "disappeared" shortly after her funeral, as he prepared to board his plane back to the U.S. The Iranian government is holding him in Evin Prison for "conducting activities against national security."
Parnaz Azima, an employee of Radio Farda, Persian language division of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. While visiting her family in Tehran, she had her passport and suitcases confiscated by the authorities. She was told to visit a government office in 10 days to reclaim them, and upon her arrival there she was asked to cooperate with the Iranian intelligence services. She refused. The charge against her is related to her work with Radio Farda, which the regime claims "spreads propaganda against the Islamic Republic." Azima posted bail of $440,000 and remains under house arrest.
Free Haleh protesters: Outside Dag Hammerskjold Plaza.
Freedom for Muslims: A representative of the American Islamic Congress demands Esfandiari's release.
Free Kian, Too: A protester calls for the release of jailed Iranian-American Dr. Kian Tajbakhsh.
Haleh's Husband: Shaul Bakhash (on left) talks to a supporter.
To show your solidarity with Esfandiari and others, visit www.freehaleh.org.
I've got worse news for you: I dig Laurie Anderson, too. What's wrong with me?
This song, "Cloudbusting," is about Wilhelm Reich, psychoanalyst, anatomist of fascism, and inventor of the orgone box, which Albert Einstein, Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and William Burroughs all apparently spent time in. Reich was run out of Europe by Hitler, who thought he was a commie Jew.
Donald Sutherland is Reich here and Bush is his son Peter, who wrote A Book of Dreams, his eccentric father's life story. The cloudbusting machine is based on Reich's work, too. He believed he could harness orgone energy -- sex ether -- from the atmosphere and make rain. Hey, it beat dancing like a Mohican.
It's an old news phenomenon by now, captured best in the made-for-TV movie Live From Baghdad, which was adapted from CNN producer Robert Wiener's memoir about the struggle for "access" during the first Gulf War. In the lead-up to the repulsion of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the 24-hour cable news channels were never without scenes of anti-American denunciations throughout Iraq -- supposed "evidence" of the pro-Saddam furor into which the United States and its allies were foisting themselves. But as Wiener's celluloid chroncile made plain, once the cameras were switched off, the mobs disbursed and the "Bush Bosh" placards were returned to their easy-access state-owned cubby holes. What happened? Wasn't this is the country that would later re-elect President Saddam with 100% majority and no opposing candidates on the ballot? (Those who scoffed at the notion of Iraqis greeting U.S. servicemen as liberators with chocolates and flowers were usually the first to point to these broadcast rallies as proof of the widespread support the Baathist tyrant enjoyed among "his own people.")
Well, yesterday's Potemkin Saddamists are today's Rage Boys. Hitch sums up the case against the Zelig of Muslim disdain:
The acceptance of an honor by a distinguished ex-Muslim writer, who exercised his freedom to abandon his faith and thus courts a death sentence for apostasy in any case, came shortly after the remaining minarets of the Askariya shrine in Samarra were brought down in shards. You will recall that the dome itself was devastated by an explosion more than a year ago—an outrage described in one leading newspaper as the work of "Sunni insurgents," the soft name for al-Qaida. But what does "Rage Boy" have to say about this appalling desecration of a Muslim holy place? What resolutions were introduced into the "parliament" of Pakistan, denouncing such shameful profanity? You already know the answer to those questions.
You just know there's some competition in an Islamabad madrasa that states if you attend 20 apoplectic Islamist protests in a single year, you get to sample a few of the virgins in this life. Rage Boy's earned 'em.
The voice of Princess Fiona in the animated "Shrek" films visited the Incan city of Machu Picchu in Peru's Andes on Friday carrying an olive green bag emblazoned with a red star and the words "Serve the People" printed in Chinese, perhaps Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong's most famous political slogan.
The bags are marketed as fashion accessories in some world capitals, but in Peru the slogan evokes memories of the Maoist Shining Path insurgency that fought the government in the 1980s and early 1990s in a bloody conflict that left nearly 70,000 people dead.
Although I hear Hernando de Soto named his two dogs Marx and Engels because they're hairy and have no respect for property.
Sam Tanenhaus has a brilliant essay in this week's New Republic (not yet available online) about the slow, sad decline of American conservatism as a philosophy. If Andrew Sullivan wonders why his book The Conservative Soul caused an ocean of yawns on the right when it debuted months ago, it's because our body politic has had little need for the Oakeshottian dichotomy between enterprise and civil associations. (Andrew's native Tories evidently have little need for one these days, too.)
Conservatism as a galvanizing movement has always been one of negation rather than positive assertion. Leo Strauss, discoursing on the favored twin in Isaiah Berlin's Gemini category of liberties, referred to "negative liberty" -- the blessed absence of state compulsion -- as "liberty with a minus sign." American conservatism has always been ideology with a minus sign. The cold war gave it its reason for being; it was religious in both the literal and metaphoric senses of the term, with the god-fearing waging their "twilight struggle" against the godless. As Tanenhaus writes, American triumphalism, which was postwar conservatism avant la lettre, was a "purifying doctrine" pitted against the "Soviets' derived from Marx by way of Lenin," yet it consisted of... "what exactly?" Nothing. It didn't need to consist of anything beyond a transcendent and apocalyptic repudiation of "Marx by way of Lenin."
So if George Bush has failed to take up the mantle of Whittaker Chambers -- correctly if conveniently identified by Tanenhaus, Chambers' biographer, as the founder of American conservatism -- it is because Bush has failed to understand the true menace of Islamism the way Chambers did that of Communism. (That not many Republican strategists were once Kalashkinov-toting jihadists who eventually saw the light may delay further the necessary comprehension.)
I'm not sure I buy Tanenhaus's thesis that conservatism is on the wane, but I do agree that Chambers is still worth taking seriously if for no other reason than those farcical defenders of Alger Hiss continue to view him as a threat. Here's a post I wrote a few months ago about tragic Baltimore bullfrog of the twentieth century:
"I have sometimes been asked at this point: What went on in the minds of those Americans, all highly educated men, that made it possible for them to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience? The question presupposes that whoever asks it has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is not Communist, including their own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized, expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence. Therefore, ultimately the problem of espionage never presents itself to them as a problem of conscience, but as a problem of operations. Making due allowance for the differences of intelligence, nerve, background and political development among the individual men involved... the answer to the question must still be: no problem of conscience was then involved. For the Communists, the problem of conscience had been settled long before, at the moment when they accepted the program and discipline of the Communist Party."
-- Whittaker Chambers, Witness
I shall never forget the feeling of a missed opportunity when I began my first job out of college at the Queens Museum of Art. A few months before my hire, Alger Hiss's son had been invited to speak at the museum about how his poor, beloved papa was turned into a falsely accused victim of a national bugbear responsible for the insidious advent of Joseph McCarthy and the age of the "loyalty oath." It's easy to trick yourself out as a martyr -- or, in Hiss, Jr.'s case, a vicarious one -- when every schoolchild has been taught that America's relationship to Communism was nothing more than a series of reactionary witch-hunts. There was no real threat to national security, Communists did not infiltrate the State Department. And if you need moral surety on this question, just look who interrogated Hiss -- Richard Nixon.
Political myths die hard. We now know the following about Hiss: He was a spy attached to the Washington "Ware group," who copied sensitive State Department documents and passed them along to Moscow. (His typewriter was matched with the ink on the documents, microfilms of which were buried for years in a pumpkin on Chambers' Maryland farm.) Though never a CP member (that wouldn't have looked good on his government job application), Hiss volunteered his automobile for above-ground Party use, despite being told that this was irregular and dangerous -- an underground agent was not supposed to let anything that could be traced back to him come out in the open and tinctured Red. Hiss was just that eager to advance the struggle. He also thought Franklin Roosevelt, whom he publicly adulated, was a craven bourgeois guilty of resuscitating capitalism just as the revolution looked to be imminent. Whittaker Chambers, who endured no small amount of obloquy and was the target of decades-long character assassination, was telling the truth. Richard Nixon was right.
It's taken a great deal of revisionist spadework and meticulous investigation to establish these facts, or better say, to jam them through clouds of leftist disbelief and denial. Yet the VENONA decrypts, which were released by the F.B.I. in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act, prove that Hiss was known by Moscow Central as "ALES." There were also Soviet records recovered from Hungarian archives that indicate his espionage.
It's not nice to see a gentleman hero take a fall, as anyone who's seen Quiz Show, which chronicled just one of many reputed "losses" of American innocence, can attest. Alger Hiss was a gentleman hero to everyone from Harry Truman to I.F. Stone. He had his doubters early on, however: Dwight Macdonald and Murray Kempton, most notable among them. Actually, the most elegant rendering of the Chambers-Hiss affair can be found in Kempton's breathtaking work of literary journalism Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties. For Kempton, the tie that bound both men to each other, and created a Cain and Abel-like limelight tragedy, was their mutual shabby-genteel upbringing in Baltimore. You can study Hegel and Marx, you can skulk around with beetle-browed Russian "generals," but in the end, you always go home again.
N.Y.U. has recently established an archive of literature relating to the American Communist experience that will inhabit the school's new Center for the United States and the Cold War. Ron Radosh, whose knowledge on the CPUSA and its discontents is unsurpassed, has a slight problem with one of the events the center is hosting next week:
The inaugural event on April 5 will be a conference called "Alger Hiss and History." One might guess that such a gathering would have featured one of the two major scholars and writers who have worked on the Hiss case. Our current archivist of the United States, Allen Weinstein, ended the debate over Hiss's claim that he had not spied for the Soviets with the publication of Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, in 1979. Weinstein proved that Hiss was guilty of perjuring himself in court and before the House Un-American Activities Committee when he claimed he was innocent. More recently, Sam Tanenhaus, now editor of the New York Times Book Review, provided further evidence in support of Weinstein's conclusion when he issued Whittaker Chambers, the definitive biography of the other key figure in the case, who testified against Hiss. Of this book, Christopher Hitchens wrote: "Sam Tanenhaus has closed the case of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss, and thus put to rest one of the most persistent (and repelling) myths of the fellow-traveling Left." When Weinstein (as a government archivist) and Tanenhaus turned down their invitations, why didn't the organizers try to find replacements to represent their (well-documented) views? Presently, they have only one such person--law professor Edward White of the University of Virginia. And he will have limited time to make a comment on a panel.
In 24 Hour Party People, Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan) has the following exchange with a music journalist:
"How do you respond to charges that Joy Division are a neo-Nazi band?"
"Are you not aware of situationalism? Postmodernism? Haven't you heard of the free play of signs and signifiers?"
But it wasn't so much the naming of the post-punk quartet after a squad of female sex slaves in Nazi concentration camps, or giving dun-colored uniforms worn by a cropped and hard-featured Ian Curtis on stage in Manchester in the late seventies, that evokes ominous politics as much as "World in Motion" by Joy Division's successor band, the no less provocatively titled New Order (minus Curtis, who committed suicide.)
The song was commissioned by the Football Association in 1990 to celebrate English patriotism -- if not quite populist nationalism -- for the World Cup, which was staged in Italy that year. You may recall some of the media hiccups over German ruffians nostalgic for the Hitler-hosted Olympics in last summer's World Cup. The allusions to the Allied/Axis conflict replaying itself all over again through sport were even more nail-bitingly made in 1990.
The English team was actually sequestered on the island of Sardinia -- home to the most feral species of boar, mind you -- due to the fear that heavy boozing and drug-use would make them violent. Italian counter-terrorism forces were actually enlisted to monitor the Anglo strikers, with the full consent of the Conservative Minister of Sport back in London who fretted that his countrymen, whose clubs had been banned in 1985 from competing in European games after the notorious 'Heysel disaster' in Brussels, were to once more become pariahs and personas non grata on the continent.
The climate was ripe for an "incident." Margaret Thatcher's regressive poll tax had galvanized class antagonism at home; the twilight of Soviet dominion signaled at least one loss of postwar English purpose abroad; and the first rattles of the strange death of Tory England were beginning to be felt -- all combining to create a frisson in English society, especially in the working-class industrial Midland cities of Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.
The Union Jack and soccer hooliganism are more or less bywords for the BNP-style neo-fascism that's still quite visible and smellable in Albion. It was good of a band juggling enough complicated iconography as it was to insist on keeping the sports anthem -- which became a veritable national anthem -- all about love. Here is Barney Sumner, lead singer of New Order:
At one stage, the Football Association came to us and made it clear that the song really had to distance itself from hooliganism. Hence our line, 'Love's got the world in motion.' It's an anti-hooligan song. There's a deliberate ambiguity about the words which don't have to refer to football. I think you're right when you say that pop and football culture are nearer than they've been in years. And from our point of view, there's been a football element in our fans for about the last six years. Even so, there was no way I could have written the lyrics. I really couldn't write a football lyric.
Here's the chorus of "World in Motion":
Love's got the world in motion
and I know what we can do;
love's got the world in motion
and I can't believe it's true.
There's also an anti-hooliganism rap midway through the tune. The video is extremely low-grade and camp, but that's far better than something a po-faced Leni Riefenstahl might have come up with.
For more on "World in Motion" and the 1990 World Cup, check out this learned essay on the New Order website.
From the Times' cover story, "Muslims’ Veils Test Limits of Britain’s Tolerance." A number of Muslim women donning the niqab -- the full face covering, which Labor politician Jack Straw said out to be banned in Britain -- are native-born to Britain. What probably won't receive the attention it deserves in that Times article is the following paragraph:
“For me it is not just a piece of clothing, it’s an act of faith, it’s solidarity,” said a 24-year-old program scheduler at a broadcasting company in London, who would allow only her last name, al-Shaikh, to be printed, saying she wanted to protect her privacy. “9/11 was a wake-up call for young Muslims,” she said.
Interesting that she should feel "solidarity" after 9/11, in'it? Solidarity with whom, dear?
I've never been one for mandating English language instruction in the U.S. or any other means of coerced assimilation. Frankly, I think if a naturalized citizen, or tenured immigrant, wishes to remain a social alien, he or she should be allowed to do so. If I ever moved to France or Russia, I should find it a matter of obligation and courtesy to acquire the language of my adopted country, and I would call anyone who didn't do likewise rude and solipsistic.
However, there is something inherently disturbing and menacing about a head-to-toe black cloth covering teachers, lawyers, IT programmers, etc. They look like ninjas. And they are capitulating to the more primeval tenets of Islam, which say that the feminine enticements of a woman's face are too powerful for men to overcome and therefore all women must go about their public lives in a state of purdah. Whither the cries of patriarchy and subjugation from feminists here? At least the glass ceiling was always see-through. (By the way, and since you asked, I would add that the aesthetic requirements of Orthodox women differ only in scale, not moral legitimacy.)
Modern society doesn't allow nudity on the streets for reasons of indecency and, one might argue, the hazards of distraction. A cracking bust can precipitate a 10 car pile-up; a particularly unfortunate ripple of "back fat" can call up an unsuspecting diner's expensive lunch; the pendulous swing of a middle-aged scrotum can't be good for anybody. Yet nudists are just as entitled to partake of their breezy moments of transcendence and "identification." They have colonies for that.
What happens when -- and it's only a matter of time, statistically speaking -- a niqab-wearing woman in London commits a crime for which she can't be identified as the perpetrator? You'll hear the multiculturalists rushing to her defense then as well, claiming that the real criminals are cultural imperialists who think the Sykes-Picot Agreement mooted the social contract.
Is the niqab antisocial? You bet. Is it possibly dangerous? Yes, it is that, too.
If I open up a program on my Mac called "Acquisition" and type in the name of most any major box office movie, I can easily call up a list of downloadable files. Digital film piracy is the new music piracy, and the tipping point for this phenomenon might have been reached when the last Star Wars installment was being sold in Southeast Asia weeks before its international theatrical release.
These facts are discoverable to anyone with a Google search engine or a subscription to Time or Newsweek. Yet Michael Moore will tell you that the only reason his new documentary Sicko has found its way onto the internet is because of those conniving corporate interests looking to keep universal healthcare down and animated tales of gourmet French rats way, way up:
Moore was ready for the piracy questions. "Let's talk about that," he said, sporting his trademark hat, jeans and sport coat. "The film that leaked on the Internet is not taken in a movie theater with a home video camera, the way its usually done. This is an inside job. Now, if you were a police detective, what's the motive? Who has a vested interest in destroying the opening of the film? Of ruining the opening weekend box office?" By those parameters, a conspiracy to sabotage Sicko could involve anyone from the head of Pfizer to the folks behind Pixar's Ratatouille, which opens on June 29, when Sicko is scheduled to open nationwide.
Not that this is the first time our Zarathustra of demagoguery has spoken of "inside jobs" to account for all the evils inflicted upon the world and, more importantly, himself. He recently told the nutters from 9/11 Truth that there was more to the Al Qaeda attack on the Pentagon than meets the eye.
This of course doesn't going far enough for the "truth movement," which has evidently thrown its weight behind the increasingly farcical Ron Paul candidacy. But this video beats anything you'll see courtesy of the Michigan militiaman this year. One conspiracy theorist feeling tetchy and awkward at the crazy talk of another... It's like watching two inmates jockey for the position of medical director at the insane asylum.
Still, who doesn't trust Michael Moore these days? He's arrived, baby. He's mainstream now.
When it comes to New York monuments, we are all gynophiles. The Parisian bod lurking under Lady Liberty's toe-length frock has long been the source of febrile speculation and intrigue. Fortunately, an eccentric Russian has gifted the world's largest vagina to Jersey City, as if to fill in the blanks of our imagination.
For those coming in from the Atlantic, through the Narrows, the Russian gift now heaves into view well before Lady Liberty. That is intentional, according to Zurab Tsereteli, the Moscow-based sculptor who created the monument. “To the Struggle Against World Terrorism” stands at the end of a long, man-made peninsula in Bayonne, New Jersey, and it looks from a distance like a giant tea biscuit. As you get closer, however, you will begin to make out an immense, stainless-steel teardrop—the Tear of Grief—hanging in a jagged crack that runs down the middle of the main slab. That’s when you’ll know that you’re not looking at some ordinary bronze-sheathed, hundred-and-seventy-five-ton afternoon snack.
George Orwell once remarked of an idea or statement that it was so stupid, only an intellectual could have come up with it. If somewhat reductive itself, this observation gets at what makes deep thinkers so silly half the time -- they try to force reality into the procrustean bed of their own theory. It'd have been all well and good for the thesis of Orientalism if the Western media had been hopelessly condescending and naive about the Iranian Revolution. However, taking Ayatollah Khomenei at his word (and how condescending and naive is that?) was only ever unfathomable to Edward Said and les clercs. David Zarnett explains:
Said's analysis marginalized Khomeini in two ways. First, when defending Khomeini, Said showed no understanding of the major themes that were at the centre of many of the Ayatollah's writings and lectures. In effect Said ignored Khomeini's ideas. Second, when Khomeini could no longer be defended, Said resorted to simply bracketing his existence and preeminent role in the new Iranian state. In 1982, Said, alongside Richard Falk, personally endorsed a public statement by the 'The Emergency Committee for the Defense of Democracy and Human Rights in Iran' which, while lambasting the Iranian regime for its human rights abuses and anti-democratic practices, curiously makes no mention of Khomeini.[32] And it was in a 1984 eulogy of the French post-modernist Michel Foucault, who had a great influence on Said, in which he dedicated only a few sentences to the philosopher's very public endorsement of Khomeini and his revolutionary politics that was by no means marginal to his intellectual career, as Said himself admits.
When Karl Marx famously said that events and figures appear twice, first as tragedy, then as farce, he might have been referring to today’s glut of hand-me-down Marxist kitsch. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, pseudo-radicals had long prostituted the socialist revolutionary tradition as a cheap reference for bumper sticker fatuities. The revolution will not be televised. Yes, well, it wasn’t ever supposed to be. The situation is even worse now that so-called “anti-globalization” activists blithely don Che Guevara t-shirts yet think Das Kapital – the most pro-globalization text ever written – is the latest post-punk sensation out of Hamburg.
Fascism in its worst, most medieval form is once again an ideological menace, and indigence has kept apace with exploding populations that are still too fettered by venal regimes to benefit from the market economy. It’s vital that there are socialists and social democrats in our midst serious about helping the working class, rescuing victims of genocide, and establishing parliamentary democracy on the ruins of lethal dictatorships. The left owes it to itself to identify and root out today's species of buffoonish and sinister politicos claiming Marxist discipleship but demonstrating only moral and philosophical poverty. What follows is a troika of the worst poseur Marxists—faux-cialists, if you like—plus three world leaders who are actually literate in radical politics and willing to put their knowledge to good use.
All filmgoing males have a complicated relationship with Kevin Costner. You don't need to appreciate the romance of baseball (and I don't) to hallelujah to dialogue like this:
I believe in the soul, the cock, the pussy, the small of a woman's back, the hanging curve ball, high fiber, good scotch, that the novels of Susan Sontag are self-indulgent, overrated crap. I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. I believe there ought to be a constitutional amendment outlawing Astroturf and the designated hitter. I believe in the sweet spot, soft-core pornography, opening your presents Christmas morning rather than Christmas Eve and I believe in long, slow, deep, soft, wet kisses that last three days.
And no commie son of mine has ever managed to sit with a dry eye through Field of Dreams either. Too bad the leathery Midwestern everyman has flagged outside the dugout. It looked for a while as if Costner had reached the point of diminishing cinematic returns. His performance in JFK was the least plausible thing about that frenetic and ill-paced tribute to conspiracy theory. Robin Hood? Is this Sherwood Forest? No, it's Iowa. "He has feathers in his hair," wrote Pauline Kael of Dances with Wolves, "and feathers in his head."
My question, however, is this: Why didn't anyone ever think of casting Costner as a serial killer before? He's great in Mr. Brooks.
Costner plays a Catholic millionaire box manufacturer who moonlights in Portland, the city that has just named him man of the year, as a homicide fetishist with an obsessive-compulsive attention to avoiding capture. (And to think I almost wore my high concept today, too. Wouldn't that have been embarrassing.) To outward appearances, he's a devoted husband and father. But he attends AA meetings in the hopes that a little universal twelve-step discipline can quell the "hunger" to kill, embodied by his warped alter ego "Marshall" (William Hurt, having way too much fun). Apart from his losing struggle with a messy addiction, life seems to be going smoothly for Mr. Brooks until he caps a fornicating couple who leave their curtains open, an infraction worthy of their punishment. He's photographed and blackmailed by an unwashed schlub played by Dane Cook, who wants neither justice nor money but in on all the psychosexual fun. He shadows the elusive "thumb-print" killer to mounting dissatisfaction: Brook is all foreplay, no orgasm. The trouble is, he works alone and only when he's inspired -- you can't force the art of offing. But try telling that to Dane Cook.
I won't give too much else away except to say that Costner's ho-hum blankness (the box-making profession might have been a casting agent's idea of parody) excels here the way Adam Sandler's manchild did in Punch-Drunk Love. Inner menace is matter-of-fact with lousy actors.
The success of Mr. Brooks also hints at a new trend in dark entertainment: underplaying the cold-blooded killer rather than camping him up. Anthony Hopkins never even thought about sucking his teeth as the jilted but breezy husband in Fracture. Michael C. Hall's tortured forensic investigator in Dexter is the kind of night slasher you might like to have a beer with. In this case, it helps that Costner's permanent equilibrium is part of Mr. Brooks' problem: he knows better and genuinely wants to quit. He's not given to ultraviolent rages or deranged speechifying. He's morally complicated and, well, not particularly scary as a sociopath. Almost a nice guy, really.
I guess in the age of sacred terror, the corpse-making nextdoor neighbor, the genius cannibal, and the chainsaw-wielding mutant fail to send shivers up the spine the way they used to. Either that or, after decades of splattered karo syrup congealing into box office lucre, movie murderers have finally come into their own in American culture. They're way ahead of those poor Geico cavemen. They've raised consciousness and blood pressure, and they've been accepted.
The next meeting we'll see Mr. Brooks attending will be for Concerned Serial Killers of America.
Given the ease with which the term "banality of evil" is tossed around today, one would think that intellectual history never had a problem with Miss Hannah Arendt. So pervasive is her legacy as a preeminent political theorist and diagnostician of the totalitarian psychosis that we forget how polarizing a figure she once was. Friendships were ended over opinions on Eichmann in Jersualem when this landmark work appeared in 1963. Arguing that the Nazi architect of Judeocide was little more than a workaday drone, morally illiterate in the language of his extraordinary task, and that Jewish Council leaders were complicit in their own people's extermination, Arendt herself became doused in obloquy. Everyone from Lionel Abel to Irving Howe was disgusted by her thesis. Unconveniently, her defenders almost all neatly fell into the Gentile camp (notable exceptions being Raul Hilberg, Alfred Kazin and Bruno Bettelheim), while her critics were mostly Jews. Make of that what you will, and bonus points if you can avoid attributing the obvious motives of anti-Semitism and chauvinism.
Michael Ezra has a helpful essay compiling the loudest and nastiest voices in l'affaire Arendt in the latest issue of Democratiya:
It was in Partisan Review that the most widely discussed debate by the 'New York intellectuals' took place. The literary critic Lionel Abel was invited to open up the discussion, and – as the editors conceded - his article was submitted as a 'frank polemic.' Abel launched an outright and full frontal assault on the book. The review was so hostile that William Phillips, the editor, who was a friend of Arendt, sent her a copy with a covering letter that betrayed his embarrassment.
Here are some of the text messages I received at around 10:05 last night:
"WTF?"
"Worst. Finale. Ever."
"Who took Jr's dentures?"
"Meadow..Mmmmmm."
"I just stopped believing."
In case you live at the bottom of the Hudson River, you're still trying to understand the anti-climax that was last night's series finale of The Sopranos. How many guys that look like Paulie just lost a bundle in Vegas after Tony didn't get whacked, didn't turn state's, didn't get assumed into heaven by the winged Borderline Livia?
Actually, the abrupt screen blackout that ended the diner scene was, unless I'm mistaken, supposed to convey an ambiguity as to who walked through the chimed door just a second before. Was it Meadow heading in from the parking lot, or some button-man Tony recognized that caused him to shoot that look of mild consternation as the ultimate frame of this landmark drama? Not even David Chase knows for sure.
People have already begun to bitch. They wanted bloodshed, mayhem, RICO indictments, closure! But they forget their sense of disappointment is moored to their fanatical love of a show that trafficked in the ultra-mundane at least as much as it did in the extraordinary. These characters slept with the fishes just as a sure as they got singing trouts for Christmas. Did anyone really expect Tony to have his Analyze This moment and, mirabile dictu, be cured by Dr. Melfi? Has any of us ever actually been cured by a psychotherapist? Don't some mob bosses end their days waiting for pasta night in prison, instead of drying out on the slab?
In fact, there was one unlikely character turnaround and its constituted my favorite joke of last night's episode: Agent Harris's. The G-Man who you once would have thought was either going to slap the handcuffs on New Jersey's elusive don or be disappeared in the Pine Barrens came to empathize with his former suspect and delivered the vital intel that saved Tony's life. He gave up the whereabouts of Phil Leotardo. When another FBI agent walked into Harris's sub-basement office, aglow with Al Qaeda footage, and told him of Leotardo's whacking, Harris, channeling all of us, shouted, "We're going to win this thing!"
You're a no-good lying rat if you tell me you didn't secretly share that wish all along. If hearing a federal agent sound off his criminal abetment like that had your disbelief crashing double-quick, consider that a running conceit of this series was that sociopaths are notoriously charismatic. They'd have to be for us follow the ups and downs of this one for close to a decade. More dramatic than Dr. Melfi's stamping out of her guilty clinician's impulse to reform the incorrigible was her stamping out of her even guiltier thrill-seeking hope that incorrigible was exactly what her favorite patient was.
No better lesson was nail-gunned home last night than the following: The Sopranos earned its reputation for defying the expectations of television by cleaving so tightly to those of reality. Like another famously ill-received but perfectly apt finale, Seinfeld's, this one carried its genius for the frayed and humdrum to a self-satirizing conclusion. The Sopranos wasn't a show about nothing; nothing was just what happened in between murders.
My Anglophilia knows no bounds. One of the reasons I assiduously follow the political spats on the other side of the Atlantic is because they're so much more candid about ideological differences than what passes for partisan debate or controversy over here. You will still find the odd editor of a liberal broadsheet in London going moist in the orbs to remember the glory years of Leonid Brezhnev, or to recall how Stalin and Mao's nationalist pas de deux might have ended more amicably if it weren't for the machinations of Tito. These are old feuds that should be bygones, and they scarcely resonant with, say, the AARP readership of The Nation, a greybeard demographic that preoccupies itself more with the revisionist innocence of Alger Hiss, meaning it still denies that he was a fellow traveler and Soviet spy.
I've had my problems with Robert Service in the past, chiefly because I thought his Stalin biography was mediocre where it was orthodox and bad where it was heterodox. But look at what happens when a scholar of Russian history writes a book called Comrades! that attempts to trace the lineaments common to all Communist regimes in the 20th century. Look at what idiot Kremlin lickspittles at the Guardian go and do to him:
All this I mentioned repeatedly in my book, but it was not quite what one reviewer, the Guardian's Seumas Milne, wanted. He denied that I stated that communist leaders unleashed a drive towards industrial and cultural modernisation. Next, he alleged that I followed a "neoconservative" agenda. He also maintained that the so-called "revisionist" school of Soviet history was not getting a fair wind in the western media.
His Stalinoid form and content of argument involved deliberate misrepresentation. It would seem that Milne and his like consider it fair game to denounce anybody who comes to a considered anti-communist standpoint as a neocon. This is a shoddy way to handle a serious political discussion. If this farrago had not come from the editor of the comment pages of one of our national newspapers, it would not be worth bothering about. What is more, Milne is typical of a more general trend that retains a nostalgia for communism, and it is a trend that ought to be repudiated.
There's barely even a conventional school of Soviet history in the western media since most of the stuff we know about the USSR comes from evidence that has only just been released and siphoned through.
What a shame Service didn't go on record one way or the other about the Iraq war. Then Milne and his Hundred Acre Wood of Red hacks would have had easier epithets to hurl at him.
Ian Buruma has lately become a specialist in emitting bland fatuities that provoke stronger reactions than a Dutch liberal intellectual might like to see. I’ve used this space before to declaim against his ridiculous assertion that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an “Enlightenment fundamentalist,” echoed by Buruma’s co-thinker Timothy Garton Ash.
This nonsense term has now become the multiculturalist’s answer to the “social fascist” theory developed by the Comintern in the mid-thirties to indict any European democrat who prepared for inevitable war with real fascism. In other words, it purports to paint a noble ally in the ideological struggle of our time as a threat while rendering actual, albeit cloaked, threats—such as the rock-star Islamist Tariq Ramadan—as welcome moderates. Buruma embodies an impossible Third Way in the clash of civilizations.
Though his attention to nuance and detail is conveniently tossed over the side of the bumpy off-ramp he now travels. Hirsi Ali has consistently shown him up by paying far more respect to her Muslim opponents than they pay to her. For instance, she invites Tariq Ramadan to speak his mind about the Prophet Mohammed and the Egyptian Brotherhood on U.S. soil, from which he is currently banned. She also writes of the beauty inherent in the foot-bathing ritual at the Grand Mosque in Saudi Arabia in her fervidly atheist memoir Infidel. What would be the analogous Islamist gesture to Hirsi Ali’s “fundamentalism”? Osama bin Laden saying that the fossil record is also not without its charms...
Since Buruma went back to his home city of Amsterdam in 2005 to try and understand the cultural “root causes” behind the brutal murder of documentary filmmaker Theo van Gogh, he’s become, if not quite a useful idiot of European Islamism, then surely a utopian milksop of secular democracy. Buruma expects alienated and increasingly radicalized Muslims to enjoy the pragmatic blessings of faith-based politics—a trapdoor in the separation of church and state that I highly doubt he'd swing open for evangelical Christians in Kansas.
But can’t we all just get along?
Evidently not, since those who are most concerned with the plight of Muslims in the rest of the world receive the least of Buruma’s largesse. Here is he is at full-tilt stupid in the pages of the LA Times:
Another intriguing question is why there is such a remarkable, sometimes even fawning, trust on the part of some of these pro-interventionist intellectuals in the U.S. government to save the world by force. But perhaps even that trust is less mysterious than it seems. Here's one thought: Many neocons, and liberal interventionists as well, emerged from a leftist past, when a belief in revolution from above was commonplace — "people's democracies" yesterday, "liberal democracies" today.
Among pro-intervention Jews in particular (and it is of course true that not all Jews are interventionists, just as not all interventionists are Jews), another historical memory may play a part: the protection of the imperial state. Austrian and Hungarian Jews, for instance, were among the last and most fiercely loyal subjects of the Austro-Hungarian emperor because he shielded them from the violent nationalism of the majority populations. Polish and Russian Jews, at least at the beginning, were often loyal subjects of the communist state because it promised (falsely, as it turned out) to protect them against the violence of anti-Semitic nationalists.
Got that? Pro-interventionist Jews– said to be recovering Trotskyists with permanent revolution on the brain – are now depicted as nostalgic quislings of World Empire! How far and how quickly a cold war scholar has fallen.
In what way were the most savvy and outward-looking Hungarian Jews thankful for the Hapsburg dynasty?
Has Buruma never heard of the proto-fascist Miklos Horthy, an admiral in the Austro-Hungarian fleet, who established a dictatorship in Budapest after the expulsion of Bela Kun’s Communists? Indeed, the brutal Soviet Republic of 1919 only ever emerged—largely through Jewish support—out of the smoldering wreckage of that imperialist mash-up known as World War I, where the “interventionists” were almost all antiwar, and certainly anti-Prussian.
Bernard Kouchner, the ostensible subject of this witless editorial, is a socialist, which means that his “historical memory” is more attuned to the radical doctrines Jean Jaures and Rosa Luxemburg. Shall we compare their attitudes toward international human rights to the ethnic safeguarding offered by Franz Joseph I or Prussian Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, who later, as president of the Weimar Republic, handed Germany over to Hitler?
Though Polish and Russian Jews indeed aligned with Stalinism in great number, they did so precisely because they found no protection under the tsarist imperial state that was responsible for pogroms, university quotas and other classically anti-Semitic horrors, not least of all the publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
History is clearly no longer Buruma’s strong suit as he erroneously suggests that Kouchner supported the war in Iraq. Funny, given that the new French foreign minister published an essay in Le Monde in 2003 entitled, “Ni la guerre ni Saddam.”
The Jewish impulse to rescue Darfur may, as Buruma elsewhere states, derive from what Strauss called the redutio ad Hiterlum. However, one notices that the grand neoconservative and liberal interventionist “architects” for war in Iraq have dragged their feet when it comes to plucking Sudan out of the genocidal soup. Why? And would not most of the “Save Darfur” activists chanting "Never again" abandon the cause, or at least tone down their rhetoric, if they thought for a second that their agitation would lead to the 101st Airborne touching down in Khartoum? The tribal reliance on American military muscle is overblown and also well past its sell-by date.
Had this op-ed been a one-off in Buruma's otherwise outstanding curriculum vitae, it might have been both forgotten and forgiven. As the matter stands, however, it reflects the sorry ideological glaucoma that has befallen a once gimlet-eyed observer of the world scene.
One thing we can credit Ivan the Terrible with is candor. When his dissident political advisor Kurbsky fled Moscow for exile in Lithunania in the mid-16th century, Ivan struck up a blistering correspondence with him, a kind of running Machiavellian dialogue but in which the cynical philosopher was also the sovereign. Kurbsky had repeatedly castigated Ivan for his unmitigated autocracy, to which the dread czar replied:
"Is this then the sign of a 'leperous conscience,' to hold my kingdom in my hand and not to let my servants rule? And is it contrary to reason not to wish to be possessed and ruled by my own servants? And is this 'illustrious Orthodoxy' -- to be ruled over and ordered about by my own slaves?....
And as for the godless peoples--why mention them? For non of these rule their own kingdoms. As their servants order them, so too do they rule. But for the Russian autocracy, they themselves from the beginning have ruled all their dominions, and not the boyars and not the grandees...
And is this 'darkness' for the tsar to possess his kingdom and for his slaves slavishly to fulfill his orders? How, pray, can a man be called autocrat if he himself does not govern?...
And we are free to reward our slaves, and we are free to punish them... Hitherto the Russian masters were questioned by no man, but they were free to reward and to punish their subjects; and they did not litigate with them before any judge...
Am I vainglorious in that I order my slaves, who are subjected to me by God, to carry out my wishes?
The instructions for absolute self-rule here outlined were followed dutifully throughout centuries and vicissitudes of the Russian experience. One can easily state with some assurance that the only thing that has vanished from Moscow -- and did so in the early decades of the 20th century -- is the open acknowledgement that autocracy is the preferred mode of governance. What made Communism so alluring to fellow travelers and Western dupes was that it presented its actual state of existence as one of popular consent and social liberation when in fact the exact opposite was the case. Russia is unlikely to elect, or simply be ruled by, a man who claims he alone should wield total power over his "slaves," but don't be fooled by the liberal pretenses that try to mask that inner conviction. The more meretricious the dictator's boast, the worse the reality.
Here is Vladimir Putin, sounding like Stalin at his lying best:
"Of course I am an absolute, pure democrat. But you know the problem? It's not even a problem, it's a real tragedy. The thing is that I am the only one, there just aren't any others in the world."
Putin said the West's record on democracy was less than perfect.
"Let's look what happens in North America -- sheer horror: torture, the homeless, Guantanamo, keeping people in custody without trial or investigation," Putin said in the interview ahead of this week's summit of the Group of Eight (G-8) industrial nations.
"Look what's going on in Europe: the harsh treatment of demonstrators, the use of rubber bullets, tear gas in one capital or another, the killing of demonstrators in the streets."
Khodorkovsky, Gasparov, Litvinenko, Politkovskaya, Yushchenko... Fantasists and anti-democratic subversives, every one.
"It's a very hard thing to be a very rich, handsome athlete these days."
-- Peter Gammons, in all sincerity, on ESPN last night during the Sox-Yankees game, explicating the heavy burden of having the money and looks to run around with strange women yet the public profile to get caught by the tabloids.
My review of Zach Leader's biography of the King is now up at the Weekly Standard (I think you have to have a subscription to read it):
To look back on this outsize life is to witness enormous appetites fulfilled and, more impressively, popularized for mass consumption. If the merger of "high" and "low" culture ever had a grace period, it was while Amis was at the typewriter. He compared Ian Fleming to Homer and published the first critical study of the James Bond series, even clapping out a not-bad 007 adventure himself. The man who missed his day in court to help get the ban lifted on Lady Chatterley's Lover because he was busy bedding a gamine admirer also memorably panned Nabokov's salacious masterpiece: "Do not misunderstand me if I say that one of the troubles with Lolita is that, so far from being pornographic, it is not pornographic enough." Amis exalted science fiction into something worthy of serious consideration, and tried to do the same for page-turning genres like the ghost story and murder mystery, both of which he experimented in. He penned a highly consultable, indeed philosophical, chapbook on the varieties of alcoholic experience, for which he did the long, hard thinking.
Angry Young Man? Not quite. Amis was the founder of Men's Studies.
[I'm currently working on a piece for Jewcy about the new wave of international socialist kitsch that attempts to dress up reactionary politics in the frayed garb of revolutionary rhetoric. This means light blogging from me this week. However, on a relevant note, this recycled post from February about Trotsky's definition of fascism shows how New Leftish types and soi-disant socialists (including epigones of the Old Man himself) now glorify the ideologies of the far right, from Islamism to Peronism. --MW]
When Orwell, in his imperishable essay "Politics and the English Language," said that the term fascism had degenerated in the hands of the correct-thinking but sloppy-writing public to mean anything that is undesirable , he was surely onto something -- in 1946. But there came a moment in history when fascism dropped out of the lexicon of abused catchwords, indeed, out of the lexicon entirely. After Hitler and Mussolini were defeated, and after the postwar dictators -- Franco, Salazar, Metaxas, even De Gaulle -- died off naturally, who wielded the epithet except a few graying manes on the left who'd experienced fascism first-hand, or a new generation of pseudo-radicals who'd simply wished they had for enhanced credibility?
In the late 80's, Susan Sontag's notorious formulation that Soviet Communism was "fascism with a human face" did a great thing for reviving the term with ironic dash. Then came 9/11 and the democratic call of the hour was to fight "fascism with an Islamic face," as Hitch termed it, or "Islamofascism," the portmanteau -- and slightly denatured -- version of this.
Eustonistas, myself included, now use the term fascism with consistency and, I hope, specificity. Yet rarely has a working definition of the phenomenon been offered. The danger here becomes that overuse will again bring us to a point where an invaluable and arresting term begins to connote anything undesirable. Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah are surely undesirable, ergo, they're all fascist. (You can judge the energy of any side in a world-historic struggle by the anemia of its rhetoric.)
In "Democracy and Fascism," Trotsky battles the self-negating and improvisational Stalinist definition and offers a proper anatomy of the ideology:
At the moment that the "normal" police and military resources of the bourgeois dictatorship, together with their parliamentary screens, no longer suffice to hold society in a state of equilibrium -- the turn of the fascist regime arrives. Through the fascist agency, capitalism sets in motion the masses of the crazed petty bourgeoisie, and bands of the declassed and demoralized Lumpenproletariat; all the countless human beings from finance capital itself has brought to desperation and frenzy. From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital gathers into its hands, as in the vise of steel, directly and immediately, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive, administrative and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it doesn't only mean that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance with the patterns set by Mussolini--the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role--but it means, first of all for the most part, that the workers' organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism.
Useful here are the Marxist categories, which the modern left has either forgotten or ignored in its attempt to equate Bin Ladenism with liberation theology. Roughly translated, Al Qaeda is the vanguard or militant wing of the latter-day wretched of the earth in the Middle East. Yet as any sociological study of Islamic terrorist groups will attest, most Al Qaeda members are well-educated and quite "petty bourgeois" in background. They might try to exploit working class, or better say impoverished, sensibilities in their propaganda, but one has only to remember Bin Laden's famed relationship to Communism to see that his is hardly an attempt to empower those who aren't Saudi industrial billionaires or believers in the One True God.
As for other militias and terror groups saddled with the f-word, it's interesting that leftists overcome with nostalgia for old struggles fail to remember the platforms upon which those struggles were waged. Nor do they apply the materialist lessons of the past to the present. Tariq Ali, for instance, celebrates Trotsky, yet thinks of Haniya, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad as champions of the downtrodden, not bothering to spot the contradictions in their economic imperatives and the class segments of their populations to which they most appeal.
Indeed, Ahmadinejad's toughest opponents are the Iranian proletariat, which are organized into exactly the kinds of democratic-civil trade unions mentioned above. In December, prominent members of the Public Bus Transportation Company Union in Tehran were jailed for their dissidence. Organized labor in Iran has also been out front in its denunciation of the mullah regime, and has likewise paid a high price for it. But of course you won't hear a peep from the old comrades about this stifling of democracy, which is homegrown and not in the least influenced by American intervention.
Hamas -- or its precursor organization, the Mujamma' -- more or less sprung right out of the Palestinian university system and aims to control the entire apparatus of the state, including the army, press, municipalities and education of the Palestinians. (Sharia law mandates such comprehensive integration of civic and religious institutions.) As for its relationship with the workers, just a few days ago the Deputy Secretary General of the Palestinian Federation of General Trade Unions had his home attacked by terrorist gunmen. Of course, the current PA is not lifting a finger over this domestic crime. Might it be because the PFGTU, internationalist in scope and solidarity, has been resistant to infiltration by Hamas, a "national" liberation organization?
All of which doesn't even address the "declassed and demoralized" gangster and criminal elements which comprise these groups' natural and most violent constituencies. Plus, the main thrust of Trotsky's great polemic was to discredit the Comintern's shabby and sinister moral equivalence of Bruning with Hitler. The official Stalinist line during the rise of Nazism (when German social democrats were known as "social fascists") can't help but remind of what you now hear about Bush being the identical twin of Bin Laden...
Of course, one doesn't have to buy into every facet of a dead revolutionary's analysis of a 20th century political pathology. But a left that fails to see certain classical trends recapitulating themselves in the 21st century is a myopic and doomed left, to say the least.
The best thing that could happen to evangelical Christianity -- not to mention orthodox Judaism or, deo volente, radical Islam -- would be the arrival of an ironical and winning antagonist of evolution. Listening to the faithful grow ever more insecure, make a complete hash of science, and furiously try to Brillo away the color and brilliance of 300 years of Enlightenment thinking, has got me wishing that some charismatic rabbi, the one from Northern Exposure, say, will infilitrate the op-ed pages and cable news channels to argue from wit as much from design.
Instead, what we get are photos of serene beachscapes, turning foliage, righteous white noise read as wisdom, and essays like this one from Sen. Sam Brownback:
It does not strike me as anti-science or anti-reason to question the philosophical presuppositions behind theories offered by scientists who, in excluding the possibility of design or purpose, venture far beyond their realm of empirical science.
A theory developed according to the scientific method has no philosophical presupposition; philosophy follows from the aggregration of determined fact. Steven Pinker may say that evolutionary psychology is actually an uplifting explanation for human behavior, but he'd be a bad scientist if it were not uplifting and for that reason alone he discounted it as an explanation.
Faith seeks to purify reason so that we might be able to see more clearly, not less. Faith supplements the scientific method by providing an understanding of values, meaning and purpose. More than that, faith — not science — can help us understand the breadth of human suffering or the depth of human love. Faith and science should go together, not be driven apart.
Reason says that human beings are conceived through sexual intercourse and birthed after about a 9-month gestation period in the womb of a post-pubescent female. Faith says a winged apparition descended from the sky and implanted a human fetus inside the virgin womb of a bronze age Jewess. Here's what the word "supplement" means:
1 a : something that completes or makes an addition b : DIETARY SUPPLEMENT
2 : a part added to or issued as a continuation of a book or periodical to correct errors or make additions
3 : an angle or arc that when added to a given angle or arc equals 180°
I need a vitamin supplement after this graph:
While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order.
The number one film at the box office this weekend is likely to be about how man is repeatedly an accident, brought on by alcohol, low inhibitions and even lower feminine standards. And Brownback has enough physiological attributes in common with a Silverback gorilla that even the most fanciful definition of "likeness" cannot disqualify them.
Is there any doubt that Francis Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis has been reduced to a bloody pulp? His forecast of the universal adoption of democracy and free markets after the fall of the Soviet Union now ranks somewhere between "peace in our time" and "nothing will ever become of the Beatles."
Not only do we have to contend with another murderous and ideological menace, but old ones have a way of popping up when they're least welcome:
In the speech, Mr. Kramer said that recent Kremlin actions “reflect negative trends on human rights and democracy inside Russia itself,” and that “suppression of genuine opposition, abridgement of the right to protest, constriction of civil society and the decline of media freedom are all serious setbacks.”
“A bumper sticker of our Russia policy,” Mr. Kramer said, would be to “cooperate wherever we can; push back whenever we have to.” An advance copy of the speech was provided by an administration official who wanted to make sure Mr. Kramer’s remarks received broad attention.
The real bumper sticker is: "10 minutes to cold war again."
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.}
Take a 
I will hand it to those loyalists to Vladimir Putin who will at least cop to his being a strongman in the Great Russian Chauvinist tradition. When George W. Bush declared, after a visit with the ex-KGB premier in 2001, that he managed to glimpse Putin's "heart and soul", fans of "managed democracy" in Moscow couldn't stifle their laughter. That Volodya took to wearing a crucifix on his state visit to Texas was a very fine touch indeed. Worthy of Gogol.
Alexander Waugh's Fathers and Sons has got everyone talking of the prose gene that must have been transmitted down through at least three generations of this scabrous line. The latest laudatory review comes from 
It's an old news phenomenon by now, captured best in the made-for-TV movie Live From Baghdad, which was adapted from CNN producer Robert Wiener's memoir about the struggle for "access" during the first Gulf War. In the lead-up to the repulsion of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, the 24-hour cable news channels were never without scenes of anti-American denunciations throughout Iraq -- supposed "evidence" of the pro-Saddam furor into which the United States and its allies were foisting themselves. But as Wiener's celluloid chroncile made plain, once the cameras were switched off, the mobs disbursed and the "Bush Bosh" placards were returned to their easy-access state-owned cubby holes. What happened? Wasn't this is the country that would later re-elect President Saddam with 100% majority and no opposing candidates on the ballot? (Those who scoffed at the notion of Iraqis greeting U.S. servicemen as liberators with chocolates and flowers were usually the first to point to these broadcast rallies as proof of the widespread support the Baathist tyrant enjoyed among "his own people.")
In 24 Hour Party People, Tony Wilson (played by Steve Coogan) has the following exchange with a music journalist:
When it comes to New York monuments, we are all gynophiles. The Parisian bod lurking under Lady Liberty's toe-length frock has long been the source of febrile speculation and intrigue. Fortunately, an 
When Karl Marx famously said that events and figures appear twice, first as tragedy, then as farce, he might have been referring to today’s glut of hand-me-down Marxist kitsch. Even before the collapse of the Soviet Union, pseudo-radicals had long prostituted the socialist revolutionary tradition as a cheap reference for bumper sticker fatuities. The revolution will not be televised. Yes, well, it wasn’t ever supposed to be. The situation is even worse now that so-called “anti-globalization” activists blithely don Che Guevara t-shirts yet think Das Kapital – the most pro-globalization text ever written – is the latest post-punk sensation out of Hamburg.
All filmgoing males have a complicated relationship with Kevin Costner. You don't need to appreciate the romance of baseball (and I don't) to hallelujah to dialogue like this:
My Anglophilia knows no bounds. One of the reasons I assiduously follow the political spats on the other side of the Atlantic is because they're so much more candid about ideological differences than what passes for partisan debate or controversy over here. You will still find the odd editor of a liberal broadsheet in London going moist in the orbs to remember the glory years of Leonid Brezhnev, or to recall how Stalin and Mao's nationalist pas de deux might have ended more amicably if it weren't for the machinations of Tito. These are old feuds that should be bygones, and they scarcely resonant with, say, the AARP readership of The Nation, a greybeard demographic that preoccupies itself more with the revisionist innocence of Alger Hiss, meaning it still denies that he was a fellow traveler and Soviet spy.
Ian Buruma has lately become a specialist in emitting bland fatuities that provoke stronger reactions than a Dutch liberal intellectual might like to see. I’ve used this space before to declaim against his ridiculous assertion that Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an “Enlightenment fundamentalist,” echoed by Buruma’s co-thinker Timothy Garton Ash.
One thing we can credit Ivan the Terrible with is candor. When his dissident political advisor Kurbsky fled Moscow for exile in Lithunania in the mid-16th century, Ivan struck up a blistering correspondence with him, a kind of running Machiavellian dialogue but in which the cynical philosopher was also the sovereign. Kurbsky had repeatedly castigated Ivan for his unmitigated autocracy, to which the dread czar replied: 
"It's a very hard thing to be a very rich, handsome athlete these days."
My review of Zach Leader's biography of the King is now up at the 
