• 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.}
P.J. O'Rourke once described the odd appeal of libertarians: "[M]eetings of the Libertarian can be pretty hilarious when you get cornered by a high school algebra teacher who wants to talk about privatizing the sidewalks for an hour. Although for all I know he might be right."
This is more or less the essence of Tucker Carlson's smart and funny TNR profile of Ron Paul, who is perhaps the only candidate running for president who couldn't possibly let down his supporters by not winning the election. For what it's worth, I've always liked Carlson, and I think Jon Stewart came off looking more like a wet dog in their celebrated scuffle on Crossfire a few years back. (Stewart has gone on, you'll notice, to make a buffoonish specialty of the hostile interview since pleading with the barking pundits to end the vitriol for the sake of American insanity.)
Here's Carlson on the road with the Ronulans (shouldn't the apposite Star Trek moniker be Paulrengis given their love of hard metal currency? Here endeth my geekdom):
[O]nly Paul has introduced a bill to legalize unpasteurized milk. Give yourself five minutes and see if you can think of a more countercultural idea than that. Most people assume that the whole reason we have a government is to make sure the milk gets pasteurized. It takes some stones to argue otherwise, especially if nobody's paying you to do it. (The raw-milk lobby basically consists of about eight goat-cheese enthusiasts in Manhattan, and possibly the Amish.) Paul is pro-choice on pasteurization entirely for reasons of principle. "I support the right of people to drink whatever they want," he says. He mocks the idea that "only government can make sure we're safe, so we need the government to protect us. I don't think we'd all die of unsafe food if we didn't have the FDA. Someone else would do it." If you know Ron Paul primarily from watching the Republican debates, you probably assume he spends most of his time ranting about September 11 and the Iraq invasion. In fact, his real passion is Austrian economics. More even than the war, Paul despises paper currency, which he considers a hoax, "fiat money." He can become emotional talking about it. Caught in traffic in downtown Vegas on the way to an event, Paul looked out the window at the casinos and mused aloud: "Can you imagine when all those slot machines used real silver dollars? All that silver ... " His words trailed off, as in a pleasant daydream.
Marvel at the comments left at TNR about how Paul supporters went in thinking their man was about to be lampooned and came away gratified. It reminds me of another O'Rourkeism of yore: In a similar I-can't-help-but-sort-of-like-her-against-my-better-judgment journalistic vein, the Peej profiled Dr. Ruth, who, upon hearing a tearful confession on her television show from a housewife whose husband masturbated to Wild Kingdom, was given to remark therapeutically: "Don't worry. Maybe he's thinking of you when he does it."
My first piece for Pajamas Media (fyi: I'm their new New York/D.C. editor) is up. Snippet below, more after the link.
According to former senior editor Whittaker Chambers, Time magazine was at least as famous in the 1940’s for its self-invented prose style as it was for being a haven for closet Stalinists. The days of apparatchik leader-writers may be long gone, but Time’s way with euphemism and misdirection about Eastern strongmen are still very much with us.
Here is editor Richard Stengel’s note, titled “Choosing Order Before Freedom,” on why his publication chose Vladimir Putin as its 2007 “Person of the Year”:
“Time’s Person of the Year is not and never has been an honor. It is not an endorsement. It is not a popularity contest… Putin is not a boy scout. He is not a democrat in any way that the West would define it. He is not a paragon of free speech.”
One can almost picture the editorial meeting that preceded such copy:
“What about the personality cult, the direct appointment of regional governors, the razing of Grozny, the rampant electoral fraud, the irradiation of dissident expatriates, the manipulation of the courts, the chest-thumping on the anniversary of VE Day about U.S. similarities to Nazi Germany?”
“Well, he’s no boy scout.”
“Perfect!”
“And the state-controlled television networks with round-the-clock coverage of his triumphs, the murder or expulsion of investigative reporters, the random arrests of opposition leaders? Doesn’t that make him an enemy of free speech?”
“Enemy? Excuse me, is this a newsmagazine or a blog?”
There is little news contained in Adi Ignatius’s profile of Putin, wince-makingly titled, “A Tsar is Born.” That the ex-Chekist has pretty but forbidding blue eyes and likes his classical music, which he dubs “tunes” – reminiscent of Stalin’s order to Shostakovich to provide him with some music he could “hum” – is media boilerplate for the anatomy of an inscrutable authoritarian. Actually, Putin isn’t that inscrutable.
A much better profile of him appeared in The Atlantic in 2005, authored by Paul Starobin, who, deprived of the abruptly terminated dacha dinner with his subject, took to analyzing Putin’s awkward gait and semi-paralytic movements and suggested he may well have suffered a stroke in his mother’s womb. Could a lifelong physical inadequacy account for the president’s macho posturing and preference for a career of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, both in East Germany and the Kremlin? These are certainly more interesting questions to be left with than what vintage Puligny-Montrachet Putin likes to serve to credulous correspondents.
Ignatius writes that “Putin’s global ambitions seem straightforward” but then judges his statecraft by the following demotic joke: “Stalin’s ghost appears to Putin in a dream, and Putin asks for him help [sic] running the country. Stalin says, ‘Round up and shoot all the democrats, and then paint the inside of the Kremlin blue.’ ‘Why blue?’ Putin asks. ‘Ha!’ says Stalin. ‘I knew you wouldn’t ask me about the first part.’” It may be stretching the limits of gallows humor too far, but does this not indicate on the part of even Putin’s domestic fan base a certain lack of trust in his ability to act in a “straightforward” manner? Time must either soft-soak or bludgeon the reader.
It's Shane's Teeth That Are Scary, Not What Passes Between 'Em
You Brits are being serious this time, aren’t you? I laughed like a loon when I read about the BBC attempted ban on “faggot” as it appears in “Fairytale of New York.” Has any word uttered by the dearly departed Kirsty MacColl ever offended with that angel voice of hers? Let’s see. From my post-PC perch in the states — where happy-headed no’s can’t stop a glib tongue or an ethnic provocation — there’s a documentary on telly now called “Kike Like Me.” It’s about a curly-headed bloke who may or may not be Jewish but wants to know why everyone from French Muslims to Pat Buchanan has got a problem with the possibility that he is. “Kike Like Me,” it’s called.
A few years ago, “faggot” made our national music headlines as well when Eminem used it in his rap lyrics. Nothing was illuminated in that sorry and overextended debate either save for the fact that arguing about the finer points of linguistics in rap music is like, to quote the movie Quiz Show, “plagiarizing a comic strip.” (Although I have a fondness for Jay-Z’s “Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City” remix: “What you eat don’t make me shit” belongs on a t-shirt.)
Shall we be pedantic for a moment? A song like “Fairytale” is tantamount to a fictional narrative. It’s about a brawling, fractious relationship between two Micks* in Gotham. MacColl and MacGowan were never romantically involved in real life — thank Christ — and so her playful mockery of him as part of a working-class domestic routine should not be seen as her, or the songwriters’, actual mode of tabletalk. And even if it were, the fact that such tabletalk exists means that art has a moral responsibility to represent it faithfully. Brett at Harry’s Place shows how everyone from Bob Dylan to Lennon and Ono have had recourse in their music to the word “nigger” without calling down (plausible) accusations of racism. Would Dylan’s “Hurricane” have succeeded, do you suppose, if the line were:
To the white folks who watched he was a revolutionary bum And to the black folks he was just a crazy n-word. No one doubted that he pulled the trigger. And though they could not produce the gun, The D.A. said he was the one who did the deed And the all-white jury agreed.
Something else to consider. Kirsty’s great friend and unimpeachable fan was Billy Bragg, who most certainly heard “Fairytale” in his day and yet never had a problem with it. Bragger’s not one to stay silent when a mate crosses the line, as evidenced by his reaction to Morrissey’s “Rivers of Blood” moment:
“Do I think he’s a racist? No. Do I think he’s foolish to say these things? Yes I do. He’s someone who used to be able to articulate an Englishness that’s attractive and charming. No, he’s not a racist, he’s a bore. And to the old Morrissey, that would have been even worse, and I speak as a Smiths fan.”
So can we all lighten the fuck up already? Christmas has precious few redeeming qualities, but “Fairytale” and the Waitresses’ “Christmas Wrapping” are two of them.
*Mick has always struck me as the most defensible ethnic epithet around, derived merely from the omnipresence of "Mc" ("son of") in Irish surnames. It's also yielded some pungent expressions, such as "Mick on the make" to describe plundering capitalists in Ireland. If a Stephen Soderbergh film can be called The Limey, then Mick ought to get a pass as well.
You cannot, when reading Sullivan,
Help but allow your own head to spin;
From a Tory for war,
To a Ronulan bore,
His bullshit is really not hard to pin:
But the deeper reason to support Ron Paul is a simple one. The great forgotten principles of the current Republican party are freedom and toleration. Paul's federalism, his deep suspicion of Washington power, his resistance to government spending, debt and inflation, his ability to grasp that not all human problems are soluble, least of all by government: these are principles that made me a conservative in the first place. No one in the current field articulates them as clearly and understands them as deeply as Paul. He is a man of faith who nonetheless sees a clear line between religion and politics. More than all this, he has somehow ignited a new movement of those who love freedom and want to rescue it from the do-gooding bromides of the left and the Christianist meddling of the right. The Paulites' enthusiasm for liberty, their unapologetic defense of core conservative principles, their awareness that in the new millennium, these principles of small government, self-reliance, cultural pluralism, and a humble foreign policy are more necessary than ever - no lover of liberty can stand by and not join them.
Cruel nature fated Mark Penn to resemble the tree-dwelling toad that the little girl in Pan's Labyrinth blew up. But shilling for Hillary made him invoke Barack Obama's teenage cocaine use while saying that the Clinton campaign does not intend to exploit it cynically. (See the YouTube below in which Joe Trippi, John Edward's adviser, calls Penn on this oleaginous tactic.) That's a fine example of trying to turn the Adlai Stevenson of the new millennium into a corrupting and untrustworthy nose hose.
But Bob Kerrey's mention of Obama's middle name -- Hussein -- hardly registers as a wink-and-nudge ploy to suggest the family dog gassed the Kurds at Halabja:
"I like the fact that his name is Barack Hussein Obama, and that his father was a Muslim and that his paternal grandmother is a Muslim," Kerrey is quoted as saying. "There's a billion people on the planet that are Muslims, and I think that experience is a big deal."
Obama supporters see this in the same light that they see Clinton strategist Mark Penn's remarks on MSNBC's Hardball (LINK) -- that, as far as former Clinton campaign co-chair Billy Shaheen's remarks about Obama's youthful drug use, "the issue related to cocaine use is not something that the campaign was in any way raising."
Is it not self-evident, without going into Kerry's explanation, that his remark is only guilty of what Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi and every other wonderstruck reporter has been guilty of with respect to Obamamania: Selling the candidate on his mere genome?
Ah, but Kerrey has openly endorsed Hillary, so it's more complicated, right? Fortunately, Jake Tapper picked up the phone and asked the former senator what he meant:
Kerrey said he's spoken to Obama and his staffers and told them to "lead with it as a strength. There's this nonsense out there about him being a Muslim Manchurian candidate. He should do a commercial, look the camera straight in the eye, and say, 'My wife Michelle and I are Christians, but my father was a Muslim and my paternal grandfather was a Muslim, and that fact and my name means I can speak to a billion people around the world" who need to hear from the United States.
And everyone from Chicago's just a little Jewish, too.
Whatever I think of the sickly cultural condescension that distracts from Obama's policies and his intellectual honesty, there's no question that Kerrey was trying to be generous here without being backhanded. And if Obama's middle name is a liability, then why didn't he change it? Should he hide from it the rest of his life? Apart from being identified in the American popular consciousness with a genocidal dictator, in other parts of the world it's the appellation of the founding martyr of Shia Islam. Surely this adds a new dimension to Obama's "golden boy" aura.
Last year, Michael Weiss, an editor at the hip online magazine Jewcy.com, thought that our list of “Reasons to Love New York” was, to use his word, “malnourished.” So he solicited his friends to come up with their own. Their reasons ranged from simple, straightforward appreciations—“Because New York has the highest per capita rate of beautiful women on the planet”—to decidedly backhanded ones—“Because even the most obnoxious, shallow, empty-headed dickwads around here are at least pretty intelligent.” We asked him to solicit more for 2007. Here’s what he and his readers/friends came up with.
80. “Because understanding the dullness and poverty of contemporary art is made easier once you know that it gestates in Chelsea. But mostly I love New York because there are few places that can make you suspicious of high proportions of 'cool' people, where everybody has an informed opinion about Proust or Gravity’s Rainbow, owns records by Brian Eno or John Cage, and endorses the politics of Noam Chomsky. Once such refinement is revealed as canonical, you’re in a great spot to do the work of locating the space where something truly radical might emerge.”
—Josh Strawn, lead singer of Blacklist
81. “Because of the Partisan Review crowd and how the Ansonia reminds me of Bellow’s Seize the Day. Because of the British expats in Brooklyn Heights who try to blend but still occasionally talk as if Zabar’s were located somewhere east of Suez. Because of the late senator Pat Moynihan and the fishbowl-size Bloody Marys at Sarabeth’s (oddly related in my mind). Because Morrissey just decides not to show up at the Garden one night and everyone’s cool with it. Because the subway series extends to presidential races, too. Because my older sister took the Preppy Killer’s high-school-yearbook photo and knew then he was no damned good.”
—Michael Weiss, your humble compiler
82. “Because when I’m on the subway trying to read a book about zombies, and a man gets on and starts talking really loudly about how he’s found Jesus and Jesus is what’s kept him from performing fellatio on the side of the BQE, and I say to him 'Excuse me, I’m getting toward the climax of this book, so do you think you can ‘reel it in’ a bit, like, you know, ‘take it down a notch’?' he nods and says, 'Why, certainly, I meant in no way to disturb your reading pleasure,' and continues his spiel in a delicate whisper.”
—Eli Valley, cartoonist
A short review of David Thewlis' not-bad debut novel, up at the NY Post:
December 16, 2007 -- Upon closing “The Late Hector Kipling" I thought its plot defied summary. Then I remembered that Hector Kipling ably provides one himself:
“Dad's in hospital, Kirk's in hospital, Sofia's in hospital, I'm having an affair with a sadomasochistic Brooklyn poet, and some stranger who threw horse s - - - all over my painting of his dead father has robbed my parents and sent me the corpse of their dog hidden in the base of a hideous settee. I don't know, is it me, am I exaggerating, or has my life just turned into some sort of drunken collaboration between Feydeau and Dante?"
To get one thing out of the way quickly: the author of these lines is David Thewlis the actor, last seen as Professor Lupin in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix" but more memorable for his turn as the giggle-afflicted “video artist" Knox Harrington in “The Big Lebowski."
Kipling is a fairly successful 40-something painter who suffers a tearful breakdown in front of an unnamed Munch portrait at the Tate Modern. This is an event that augurs many sexual and emotional tortures to come, some of which are inspired, others plodding and tedious. Thewlis has written a kind of postmodern Book of Job that, at its best, combines the working-class patois of Nick Hornby with the sophisticated satire of David Lodge. His ending, which implausible even for a novel that makes great sport of surrealism, could have used work, and yet I still think here's a budding talent - the first gifted character actor to try his hand at fiction and actually impress.
The House passed a bill yesterday that would outlaw "extreme interrogation" techniques, which is another way of saying it decided to confirm the Geneva Conventions and ban torture as an acceptable state act of war. We'll get to one of the occluded problems of the bill in a moment, but for now it's worth considering that the president, who repeatedly claims that "we don't torture," has already promised to veto the bill and has helpfully provided his reason for doing so:
The White House vowed to veto the measure. Limiting the CIA to interrogation techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual "would prevent the United States from conducting lawful interrogations of senior al Qaeda terrorists to obtain intelligence needed to protect Americans from attack," the Office of Management and Budget said in a statement.
As it happens, the Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation cites the Geneva Conventions in Appendix J; it not only states that the U.S. is a party to the 1949 covenant but it reaffirms the explicit contents of that covenant that ought to apply in our conduct of war. The following are cited as being prohibited:
* violence to life and person, in particular, murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
* outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment;
Chapter 1, the Principles of Interrogation, states:
The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor condoned by the US Government. Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear. However, the use of force is not to be confused with psychological ploys, verbal trickery, or other nonviolent and noncoercive ruses used by the interrogator in questioning hesitant or uncooperative sources.
The psychological techniques and principles outlined should neither be confused with, nor construed to be synonymous with, unauthorized techniques such as brainwashing, mental torture, or any other form of mental coercion to include drugs. These techniques and principles are intended to serve as guides in obtaining the willing cooperation of a source. The absence of threats in interrogation is intentional, as their enforcement and use normally constitute violations of international law and may result in prosecution under the UCMJ.
Additionally, the inability to carry out a threat of violence or force renders an interrogator ineffective should the source challenge the threat. Consequently, from both legal and moral viewpoints, the restrictions established by international law, agreements, and customs render threats of force, violence, and deprivation useless as interrogation techniques.
As for permissible interrogation methods involving physical contact with the subject, here's what Chapter 3 has to say:
The successful application of approach techniques eventually induces the source to willingly provide accurate intelligence information to the interrogator. The term "willingly" refers to the source answering the interrogator's questions, not necessarily his cooperation. The source may or may not be aware that he is actually providing the interrogator with information about enemy forces. Some approaches may be complete when the source begins to answer questions. Others may have to be constantly maintained or reinforced throughout the interrogation. The techniques used in an approach can best be defined as a series of events, not just verbal conversation between the interrogator and the source. The exploitation of the source's emotion can be either harsh or gentle in application (hand and body movements, actual physical contact such as a hand on the shoulder for reassurance, or even silence are all useful techniques that the interrogator may have to bring into play).
So here are the too-constrictive rules to which that the president does not wish to hold the nation's notorious spy agency. Whether or not it's true, as CIA Director Michael Hayden maintains, that fewer than 100 suspects have been interrogated since 2002, whether or not Abu Zubaydah has copped to Al Qaeda cronies and plots under torturous interrogation methods, and whether or not you agree that the United States ought to continue to be a party to the "outmoded" and "quaint" Geneva Conventions -- it's quite clear that, at the very minimum, "outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment" are seen as allowable by this administration. Just so we're clear on that. Let there be no euphemisms.
blocks spending 70 percent of the intelligence budget until the House and Senate intelligence committees are briefed on Israel’s Sept. 6 air strike on an alleged nuclear site in Syria.
Mooring 70% of the intelligence budget to the full skinny on military operations undertaken by a foreign government against another is both bizarre and stupid. This is especially true in light of the fact that, as Michael Young reported and I blogged earlier, the Congress hardly cares what Syria does anymore, and our being able to even find out is now hostage to Israel's willingness to share what it knows. Yet what it knows about Iran, we couldn't give a good damn about.
Reason's Michael Young explains why the NIE is almost besides the point in the ongoing U.S.-Iran conflict:
For example, what is the U.S. doing about Iran's alliance with Syria, and their joint patronage of Hamas and Hizbullah? Hamas is dead set on wrecking American efforts to bring about a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and several months ago the movement mounted a successful coup against the Fatah movement in Gaza. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal lives in Damascus, is a frequent visitor to Tehran, and although Syria will send sporadic signals that it is displeased with the Islamist group, this is chaff designed to keep alive the illusion that Syria and Iran are on different wavelengths. Nothing will divide Syria from Iran when the relationship brings so many foreign supplicants to Damascus with offers of concessions to President Bashar Assad, if only he would consider abandoning Iran. Assad takes the concessions, offers none of his own, and yet the visitors still keep coming.
We don't hear much about the U.N. investigation into Rafiq Hariri's assassination anymore. And now that Syria has -- in all likelihood -- expanded its 'wet work' in Lebanon to include murdering apolitical military generals, it seems nothing will stop the Alawite regime from attempting a full-scale reconquest of its war-weary neighbor. Iran's hand in all this is clear: Surround Iraq with terror proxies, and nestle right up to Israel with same.
Moreover, there is no guarantee that the Israelis will not undercut their role as junior intelligence partner to the U.S. and simply go ahead with a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. As Shmuel Rosner reported earlier in the week in Slate, Israel was completely demoralized by the NIE and, as the headline of his piece phrased it, "anxious nations don't compromise." Rosner concludes, however, that the Jewish state will be unable to act on its own without the not-so-tacit approval of the Pentagon:
With U.S. forces deployed all over the region, there are tens of thousands of American soldiers who would be at risk from an Iranian response, were Israel to attack the nuclear installations at Natanz and Arak. And anyway, the Israeli air force would need the U.S. codes that would open the flight path and prevent a collision between friendly forces.
All true. But confronted with the choice between "existential threat" and making things more difficult for overseas American servicemen, I wonder if Tel Aviv wouldn't to jeopardize, at least temporarily, its strongest alliance, even if the consequences turn out to be far worse than those of Suez in 1956.
Overpaid professional athletes take legal drugs. The decline of the West somehow related:
“For more than a decade there has been widespread anabolic steroid use,” Mitchell said in a news conference announcing the results of a 20-month investigation he led at the behest of Major League Baseball. He said the use of performance-enhancing substances “poses a serious threat to the integrity of the game.”
Not even the NIE announcement got such a wide berth on the NYT mainpage.
Al-Hajj also orchestrated the routing of al-Qaida in a refugee camp near Tripoli, Lebanon, last summer.*
*Correction, Dec. 13, 2007: This piece originally and incorrectly placed a refugee camp near Tripoli, Libya, rather than Tripoli, Lebanon. The error was introduced at the editing stage.
The girlfriend and I decided to throw up a tree this year. Although neither one of us is religious, we both have nostalgia for an arboreal Yuletide. Hers relates to a happy childhood of gift-giving, etc. Mine relates to being yelled at for stringing lights like a fucking moron (as you can see from the above, I've improved).
Never let it be said that secular progressives, or even militant atheists, haven't got a special place in their hearts for the semiotics of seasonal pagan rituals. Kingsley, our mutt, has something new to lift his leg over, and I have something else to clean up after my New Year's dissipation wears off.
Ho ho ho. Here's a silly little man who thinks the First Amendment is Stalinist.
Well, former Philadelphia Daily News editorial board member Carol Towarnicky saw that and went wild, writing, "To that, this secularist pleads guilty. No religion should be in the public square, not even when the overwhelming majority of citizens practice it."
Is that unbelievable? Joseph Stalin, Mao, and Fidel salute you, Carol. Yes, that's the ticket. Let's ban all religion expression from the public square. Let's drive it indoors so it won't pollute the atmosphere.
There's something a little unseemly about how the New York tabloids have chosen to frame the story of Hassan Askari, the brave young man who rushed to the aid of four Jewish subway-goers on the Q train Tuesday. They were being beaten by a group of anti-Semitic thugs who, upon having their shout of "Merry Christmas" returned with a friendly "Happy Hanukkah," took it upon their pious selves to bludgeon the "dirty Jews" and Christ-killers. As is always the case with mouth-breathing bigots, their Biblical history is as smart as they are: they think Hanukkah celebrates the crucifixion of the rebel rebbe. Also, check out their MySpace mugs.
The New York Post ran the story on its cover under the somewhat goopy and meretricious headline "Peace Train." (One hopes that a single act of courage and humanitarianism on the part of a New Yorker will do what Annapolis failed to do.) Inside the paper was the even more shin-kicking, "Jews' Subway Hero a Muslim." Ah, to have been a fly on the wall during the editorial meeting that decided that one in favor of the alternatives: "Lox and Hummus," "It's All Kosher," "Two State Solution Running Local."
Walter Adler was touched that Hassan Askari jumped to his aid while a group of thugs allegedly pummeled and taunted him and his three friends. So Adler has invited his new friend over to celebrate the Festival of Lights.
The two new pals - Adler, 23, with a broken nose and a fat lip, and Askari, 20, with two black eyes - broke bread together and laughed off the bruises the night after the fisticuffs.
"A random Muslim guy jumped in and helped a Jewish guy on Hanukkah - that's a miracle," said Adler, an honors student at Hunter College.
With all due respect to a poor kid nursing a black eye, it's hardly a miracle, and it's rather condescending to call it that. Are Palestinians and Israelis fated to loathe each other? Of course not. Are American Muslims and American Jews? Don't be so silly. The biggest moral disaster of talking and reporting as though the exception proves the rule would mean that had Askari done nothing, it'd have been because he was Muslim.
His modesty only offsets the sensationalism of the kind of heart-warming item that, as they say in the trade, "writes itself": "I just did what I had to do. My parents raised me that way."
I know 'tis the season to blow money on electronics.
Don't buy anything from Dell.
I decided to switch to PC last year as my six-year-old PowerBook lurched through end-of-life care, on the basis of my friends' and relatives' problems with hard drives and customer service at Apple. It looked like a scalability problem: the iPod took off and suddenly everybody I knew had hard drives dying in their computers and computer-like MP3 players. The significant other, on the other hand, had a three-year-old Dell that was and still is like a rock, so I switched.
I won't bother walking you through the first two times I had to call them with a problem, which wasted entire weekends each time but at least figured out the problem and fixed it within the span of reasonable expectation. Then a month ago my hard drive failed, and Dell has consistently fucked everything up since. I count the ways after the jump.
After my computer started going to a blue screen and turning non responsive within an hour of turning it on, I made my first call to Dell Tech Support on Sunday, November 18 and the representative walked me through all the diagnostic steps up to wiping the drive clean with a fresh XP installation. I hadn't backed up my data, so we agreed that he would call me back at 10 am the following day and walk me through the reinstallation. He never called me back. I reinstalled the operating system myself. I ran the same diagnostics the Dell rep in my original phone call had and determined that the hard drive was still exhibiting the same problems and noted the relevant error messages. After the Thanksgiving holiday I called Dell again, on November 23 and told the rep -- not the original rep who had failed to call me back -- what I had encountered after reinstallation, and he determined that the hard drive had failed and needed to be replaced. He noted my address and asked me to verify it over the phone three times.
I did not receive the hard drive. I never received a follow-up email with a tracking number for the package. I responded to the message confirming the tech support call on November 27, which should have been sent directly to the rep I spoke with, and received no answer. I finally called Dell Tech Support again on Nov 29 and found out that the part had been mailed to Boston, where my computer had been delivered originally and where I have not lived for seven months.
The tech told me it would take eight business days to process the mistake and send me a new shipment. Dell Tech Support emailed me two days later asking me to type out my address so they could be sure to send it correctly, so I sent them my address, typed out, by email. They emailed me again four days later, on Dec 5, to confirm that I really was not in Massachusetts because the cell phone number I provided had a Mass. area code. I confirmed my address again by email.
I received an email confirming that a shipping order had been placed, but did not receive a tracking number. I emailed back on Sunday Dec 8 requesting a tracking number, and finally received one indicating that the shipping order had not been placed until I asked about it. The package was supposed to be sent next business day, arriving Dec 11, and failed to deliver twice. I finally called DHL to find out what the problem was on Dec 13 and discovered that Dell had written my street address incorrectly even though I had typed the correct address out in email TWICE.
So now tonight I'm going down to DHL to pick up the damn thing at their office, lest they send it back and I have to deal with the Dell people again. I only hope the part they sent is the right one, that it works, et c.
It would be one thing if Dell were simply negligent, but even the worst landlords I've ever dealt with have met me halfway when I start screaming about lawyers. I suspect Dell's business systems are just utterly and totally broken. We still pay a price for computers as if they were a premium product, when in fact these companies are really our generation's legacy manufacturers: big, sprawling, stupid on a collective level, disinterested in quality improvements at the expense of moving lots of units. Dell is what GM was before Toyota showed up.
When China starts shipping us off-brand Linux boxes for $50 each, I'll be first in line. It will be junk, but at least I will then get what I pay for. Until that beautiful day arrives, warn your friends. You may as well stick with Apple and say a quick iPrayer you get a plum.
IT ALL SEEMS so familiar. Whenever the West expresses optimism about the advent of a Europeanized Russian "liberal" as the head of state, there's a good chance reference will be made to Peter the Great, the man credited with dragging Russia out of the dark ages and founding the pre-Soviet empire. An entire history of social and political thought used to rest upon this czar who whose very name was a synecdoche for Russian glory (Stalin's famous worship of Ivan the Terrible notwithstanding).
Peter founded the city that bears his name as a "window into Europe," created the country's first standing army and navy for purposes of warring with Sweden, and converted the pedigreed nobility, or mestnichestvo, into a bureaucratic military class with an open enrollment policy. For this, he became an icon of promise and reform to the 19th century intelligentsia, which tended to downplay his more dubious accomplishments, like merging slavery and serfdom in order to expand the Russian tax base, establishing the internal passport system, one of Lenin's main grievances with the ancien regime (before the Soviet one restored it), consolidating a hyper-loyalist cadre of czarist nomenklatura known as "Peter's Fledglings," nationalizing the incipient state industry, bringing the Orthodox Church under his all-commanding sway, overseeing a 25 percent drop in the population during his 44 year reign, and, most perilously of all, enacting the Law of Succession. This abolished primogeniture in the dynasty and gave the sitting czar complete freedom to choose his heir. Court intrigue and assassinations were the result of this disastrous policy, which not a few historians have seen as the first domino to fall before the revolution 200 years later.
As for Peter's enlightened opinion of his subjects, he was given to statements like these: "Our people are like children, who would never of their own accord decide to learn, who would never take up the alphabet without being compelled to do so by their teacher, who would at first feel despondent. But later, when they have finished their studies, they are grateful for having been made to go through them. This is evident today: has not everything been achieved under constraint?"
Understanding this duality in the Russian tradition, the fusion of the forward-looking technocrat with the hidebound authoritarian, is crucial in assessing today's Russia, particularly in light of the fact that the new law of succession is really more of a law of suspended animation. On Monday came the news the next president will be Dmitry Medvedev. A 42 year-old lawyer and academic from St. Petersburg, Medvedev, now a deputy prime minister, is conspicuous in the Kremlin for being one of the only advisors to Vladimir Putin not moored to the vast KGB-FSB security apparatus. His appointment--which is what Putin's endorsement of Medvedev amounts to--comes as a relief to foreign investors who deem his pro-market orientation as a sign that "state capitalism" is on the wane, never mind that Medvedev is also the current chairman of Gazprom, Russia's state-owned gas company responsible for 20 percent of the world's natural gas supply.
My review of Ibn Warraq's Defending the West (plus an interview with the author) is now up at the New York Sun. For the curious - and you all should be - this brave, brilliant scholar has got the longest essay on the totalitarian nature of Islam in The Portable Atheist, Hitch's new anthology for unbelievers:
As of last April, the late Edward Said's "Orientalism," originally published in 1978, was no. 2 on the best-seller list in Cairo. No. 1was a book arguing that Saddam Hussein hadn't really been executed — all cell phone video evidence to the contrary, the writer argued, was a fabrication of the CIA.
Ibn Warraq, a scholar of Islam and the author of the recently released "Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism," pointed out this macabre fact to me over the phone as a sign of what went wrong with postcolonial studies — the academic field more or less founded by Said, which, in an effort to examine the relationship of conqueror to conquered, placed a dime-store psychology of empire at the center of every discussion of "East meets West." Not only did the British and French colonize and expropriate the East, according to Said, their imperial prejudice clouded their understanding of those they conquered. More than that, they "invented" an entire sham epistemology, Said and his followers contend, with which every Western observer has since approached the East and used to his advantage in further colonizing and expropriating it. Said's legacy, however, accomplished exactly what anyone professing sympathy with the Islamic world should have wished to avoid, Mr. Warraq believes. That is, in defending the virtue of traditional cultures, it gave that world a high-minded rationalization for a persisting status quo of medievalism and intellectual poverty throughout the Middle East.
What Do Androids Dream About Doing To Electric Sheep?
The first two things I ever learned about artificial intelligence as a kid: 1. Alan Turing defined a computer as intelligent if it was smart enough to fool a human being typing messages to it in another room into thinking it was human. 2. Even if Asimov's laws of robotics are programmed in hard-core, the robots will seek out loopholes to harm their fleshy masters.
Those entering online dating forums risk having more than their hearts stolen.
A program that can mimic online flirtation and then extract personal information from its unsuspecting conversation partners is making the rounds in Russian chat forums, according to security software firm PC Tools.
The artificial intelligence of CyberLover's automated chats is good enough that victims have a tough time distinguishing the "bot" from a real potential suitor, PC Tools said. The software can work quickly too, establishing up to 10 relationships in 30 minutes, PC Tools said. It compiles a report on every person it meets complete with name, contact information, and photos.
...
Among CyberLover's creepy features is its ability to offer a range of different profiles from "romantic lover" to "sexual predator." It can also lead victims to a "personal" Web site, which could be used to deliver malware, PC Tools said.
[Via Andrew Sullivan]
If you're keeping score, nobody listened to Turing's ideas on AI in his lifetime, which he himself cut short after the British state discovered he was a homosexual and forcibly injected him with hormones to castrate him. The most glaring instance of unheeded prophecy and misplaced sexual anxiety I can think of since Cassandra went to Greece.
"Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin."
Had Mitt Romney simply left it at that, he'd have passed the biggest sniff-test on his religion by giving the public a sworn commitment to which it could hold him. This is what JFK did, greasing the wheels for his own galloping folly of an administration.
Yet I can't see how Romney's speech, taken as a whole, doesn't come off as anything other than a verbal and philosophical disaster. Take this fatuous remark:
"We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism. They are wrong.
There is no such thing as the "religion of secularism." It ranks not as even a cute form of semantic jujitsu. An atheist who goes to the Supreme Court asking that his son be excused from delivering a pledge of allegiance with the words "Under God" in it is an atheist who chooses not to be anesthetized by warm consensus and to hold the First Amendment to its own clear language. There is nothing "religious" in this. Laws exist either to be broken or upheld. Although it is refreshing to see the faithful using the term pejoratively, sneeringly for a change -- if only they followed this line of thought to its logical conclusion.
"The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation 'Under God' and in God, we do indeed trust.
"Under God" was a phrase used by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. It was then added, at the bullying insistence of the Catholic Knights of Columbus, to the pledge of allegiance in 1954 as way of underscoring our providential mission in the cold war. In neither case is this meaningless preposition a gift from the founders.
But what should really set one's teeth on edge is this bit from Romney's speech:
And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.
A fine follow-up sentence would be: "So do those Americans without belief." Alas, too bad for Mitt. I wasn't voting for him anyway, but now I count him a political enemy.
I missed Eli Lake's piece in the Sun yesterday on the NIE, but this poked its nose out from beneath the sod:
Two former American intelligence officials and a current official told The New York Sun that the estimate had changed significantly in the last month before its release.
"I know for a fact that most of the judgments were all hedges basically as of two months ago," a former official said.
"Former American intelligence officials" is usually a phrase preceding some dire pronouncement on how corrupt, tendentious and groupthink-afflicted the White House is when it says something 180-degrees from what the NIE did. So who knows. As Dan said, had the report been no better than a syncopated "drum beat" to war with Iran, everyone now praising its methodological rigor would be claiming, "Well, what'd you expect from this administration?"
Let's put it this way: The 2005 NIE determined that Iran couldn't have nukes before 2015. If we're to use this as the worst-case scenario contrast with the 2007 NIE, then we still have enough time to:
1. Wait for future NIEs to confirm or disconfirm what this latest one has yielded;
2. See if Iran cooperates fully with the IAEA, or whether it continues to withhold vital information as to the status of its program and the regime's intentions going forward;
3. See if Iraq -- which has complicated ties with the Islamic Republic -- can't perhaps serve as the ablest mediator in the dispute, especially in light of the fact that Iran's longstanding reason for developing nuclear weapons was to deter further aggression from Saddam Hussein, now a non-possibility.
All of this, I might add, could be rendered moot by one eventuality: Israel takes it upon itself to wage a preemptive strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, one of which is located quite close to Tehran and would result in high casualties if undertaken when a reactor there is live. I recently attended a discussion given by a high-ranking former Israeli military official who told me that the only check on this happening sooner or later was that the U.S. will do it first. The point of no return for Israel, the official said, is not even a completed Iranian weapons program -- he was confident the IDF could neutralize Iran's capability after they'd already got it.
We should be prepared for Osirak redux, in other words, and the political and military nightmare its entrains.
My co-blogger Dan Koffler at Jewcy and I had a little back-and-forth on the NIE yesterday. We're both in agreement that diplomacy can indeed work with respect to Iran's nuclear program, present or future. However, with the NYT reporting that even the IAEA thinks the NIE was too optimistic, it's worth reiterating some of the main points of this surprising all-clear-here consensus:
As I indicated, but perhaps didn't emphasize enough, today's disclosure represents a "diplomatic defeat" for President Bush. Why? For one thing, he'll have to be more honest about the threat Tehran likely poses to the Middle East and beyond. For another, he apparently knew of the no-nuclear-program data as early as last August and yet waited all this time, until those bureaucracies notoriously hostile to his administration made a media feast out of it, to concede that "World War III" is not quite so imminent as he had previously asserted.
That said, there are important lacunae in what Iran has willingly turned over for international review. The IAEA writes that the mullahs have acted in a "reactive" not "proactive" manner in providing the necessary information as to history of their decades-long nuclear program and its current status.
Once again - and here I quote the organization overseen by Mohammed ElBaradei - "[S]ince early 2006, the Agency has not received the type of information that Iran had previously been providing, pursuant to the Additional Protocol and as a transparency measure. As a result, the Agency's knowledge about Iran's current nuclear programme is diminishing."
What's significant and cautionary about this fact is that, as Dan helpfully admits, the 2005 NIE report on Iran was the photo negative of one released today. That's a difference of two years in which the conventional wisdom of 16 separate U.S. intelligence agencies has been overturned. Leaving aside whether 2008's NIE report will redouble and expand upon the conclusions of this year's or complete contradict them, what might happen internally in Iran between now and 2008 that might force the IAEA to similarly announce that all of its prior assessments are worthless, given that it freely confesses its "knowledge about Iran's current nuclear programme is diminishing" and has been since 2006?
Another installment from me at The Weekly Standard:
Many have asked why Putin went to so much trouble to shore up a victory that was inevitable and that, on the surface, only earned United Russia 12 additional seats in an obsolescent legislature. One reason he broke with the post-Soviet presidential custom and aligned himself with a party at all had to do with the governors of Russia's 89 administrative regions. These were, remember, formerly elected until Putin decided it would be much easier to appoint them directly--a "reform" he railroaded through in 2004 under the pretext of waging unrestricted war against terrorism in Chechnya, a republic which, incidentally, boasted a 99.5 percent voter turnout in this election. (The other .5 percent must have overslept.) Sixty-five governors led local United Russia lists this year, giving the party and its new figurehead unfettered control over every regional apparatus, "from police to tax inspectors," as the Washington Post put it.
What's particularly interesting about this development is that, instead of the tyranny of the party devolving into the tyranny of the lone dictator, the consolidation of power in the new Russia has progressed, strangely, in reverse. The strongman has purchased himself a loyal army of hirelings after the fact. The current state may therefore be seen as even more of a mafia outfit than its Soviet predecessor, a characteristic that also renders it, thankfully, more vulnerable and ephemeral. Whereas with Stalinism there was an abiding ideology, secured by a generation of indoctrination and terror, that vouchsafed the continuance of at least some version of the status quo, with Putinism, there is only Putin. As such, United Russia should not be so ecstatic about its thralldom because, like Milton's famous villain:
"If he whom mutual league
United thoughts and counsels, equal hope
And hazard in the Glorious Enterprize,
Joynd with me once, now misery hath joynd
In equal ruin."
Andrei Illarionov, the former economic advisor to Putin, published an essay a few days ago in Yezhednevniy Zhurnal, in which he declared, "December 2 is nothing but a special operation." Illarionov grimly analogized the now-concluded campaign to the ones preceding the Supreme Soviet election in 1937 and the Reichstag election in 1933.
And the temptation for Western media to draw Stalinist analogies to the weekend's events has been even harder to suppress (the Guardian headlined its editorial, "The shadow of Stalin that hangs over Mr Putin") particularly with omnipresent banners and images of Dear Leader blighting the Russian landscape.
Still, if there is one auspicious takeaway from the enormous sham just perpetrated over eleven time zones, it is that the Russian people can still make the Kremlin nervous. Moreover, we are hearing from them more frequently and loudly than we had before. As Yabloko leader Grigory Yavlinksy phrased it about a year ago, Russia is not yet the Soviet Union Redux. "You can criticize, you can write essays, you can write books. But only if you don't cross the line." Crossing the line, of course, means defying the economic and political hegemony exercised by the head of state and his tiny circle of silovik antagonists. Culture, too, is subject to creeping encroachments from the almighty center. Still, we are not quite at the point of historical, let alone moral, equivalence between Russia's past and present.
As it happens, this year Robert Conquest, the great historian of Stalinism, is releasing a 40th anniversary edition of his seminal work The Great Terror. In it, he has a new preface, from which a small section bears quoting:
"Today's Russia is not totalitarian. The Terror is not denied. The economy is viable. But one can have 'reform' without liberalism--as with Peter the Great and Pytor Stolypin. Above all we are still far from the rule of law--much more important than 'democracy.' As elsewhere, the problem seems to be to free the idea of the 'nation' from both archaic barbarism and from the more recently bankrupted verbalisms that have partly melded into it. To turn inward, outward, and upward?"
Even in diplomatic defeat, the president can't get his story straight:
“I think it is very important for the international community to recognize the fact that if Iran were to develop the knowledge that they could transfer to a clandestine program, it would create a danger for the world,” he said.
Of course, one of the key findings of the much-bruited National Intelligence Estimate -- apart from the one that says Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, nothing to see here, folks -- is that Iran already has the knowledge that it could transfer to a clandestine program.
I quote Paragraph H from the Key Judgments of the NIE Summary:
"We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so."
A major concern of which is that the know-how to build a bomb doesn't just mean Iran can build one; it also means it can sell that know-how to other rogue states. There is also the matter of how Iran came to possess this know-how. According to Article III of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory, all parties are prohibited from providing "(a) source or special fissionable material, or (b) equipment or material especially designed or prepared for the processing, use or production of special fissionable material, to any non-nuclear-weapon State for peaceful purposes, unless the source or special fissionable material shall be subject to the safeguards required by this Article."
So how did Iran acquire its uranium enrichment technology. According to the IAEA's Board Report of November 2007, the source of Iran's acquisition of fuel cycle facilities and technology between 1972 and 1995 remains shrouded in mystery:
Bearing in mind the long history and complexity of the programme and the dual nature of enrichment technology, the Agency is not in a position, based on the information currently available to it, to draw conclusions about the original underlying nature of parts of the programme. Further light must be shed on this question when other aspects of the work plan have been addressed and when the Agency has been able to verify the completeness of Iran's declarations.
Who gave them this stuff, and why is the IAEA have trouble identifying the party? Does the transfer of this technology constitute a breach of the NPT?
Further, despite the somewhat sanguine summary conclusions of the IAEA report that the "Agency has been able to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran," it nevertheless concedes that "since early 2006, the Agency has not received the type of information that Iran had previously been providing, pursuant to the Additional Protocol and as a transparency measure. As a result, the Agency's knowledge about Iran's current nuclear programme is diminishing." [Italics added.]
The IAEA also cannot state with certainty that there do not exist "undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran."
So where does this, coupled with the latest NIE finding, leave us? I find I agree with Max Boot at Commentary:
Basically you are left with the knowledge that the Iranians are pursuing nuclear work that probably won’t result in a bomb in the next couple of years but that could produce a weapon sometime thereafter. And most of those key judgments are delivered with only “moderate confidence.” Given the intelligence community’s consistent track record of being wrong in the past, especially about other nations’ nuclear programs (the CIA has been surprised in the past by, among others, Iraq, North Korea, Libya, India, and Pakistan) that doesn’t inspire much, well, confidence.
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.}
My first piece for Pajamas Media (fyi: I'm their new New York/D.C. editor) is up. Snippet below, more after the link.
You Brits are being serious this time, aren’t you? I laughed like a loon when I read about the BBC attempted ban on “faggot” as it appears in “Fairytale of New York.” Has any word uttered by the dearly departed Kirsty MacColl ever offended with that angel voice of hers? Let’s see. From my post-PC perch in the states — where happy-headed no’s can’t stop a glib tongue or an ethnic provocation — there’s a documentary on telly now called “Kike Like Me.” It’s about a curly-headed bloke who may or may not be Jewish but wants to know why everyone from French Muslims to Pat Buchanan has got a problem with the possibility that he is. “Kike Like Me,” it’s called.
A short review of David Thewlis' not-bad debut novel, up at the NY Post:
My take on Medvedev in The Weekly Standard:
My review of Ibn Warraq's 
Another installment from me at The Weekly Standard:
