• 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.}
John McCain's Foreign Policy Exposes The Limits of Bushido Politics
(I suspect Michael will disagree with me here.)
There was a lot to admire in John McCain's foreign policy address to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council yesterday. The Arizona senator rejected the glib dulce et decorum est rhetoric of many of his supporters --- "[o]nly a fool or a fraud sentimentalizes the merciless reality of war," he said --- and called for the US to abandon torture of detainees and close down the Guantanamo Bay prison. McCain broke with his party's ostrich-like stance on global warming and implicitly presented the issue as a threat to national security. Most encouragingly, he committed a McCain administration to nuclear non-proliferation, pledging to lead "a global effort at nuclear disarmament consistent with our vital interests and the cause of peace."
McCain's speech was also helpful in that it outlined the fatal conceptual flaws of his approach to foreign policy. According to McCain, all the doctrinally and politically disparate Islamic terrorist groups, non-violent Islamism, the Iraqi insurgency, Iran, conventional middle Eastern autocracies, and even Russia and the confederation of states allied with it, are alternative representations of a single foreign policy problem. That problem, which McCain dubs "the transcendent challenge of our time," amounts to a contest of sheer will between the US and its loyal allies on one side, its enemies, the rest of the world, on the other. McCain recognizes neither distinctions among distinct individuals and groups with distinct histories and agendas, nor does he pay the slightest heed to weighing the goals and potential benefits of any foreign policy against its political and economic costs. The right policy is simply the one jibes best with McCain's sense of honor, which, in practice, always turns out to be war. McCain's alternative to Realpolitik is Bushido.
Naturally, by conflating all challenges into a single amorphous threat, McCain beggars any effort at producing concrete, useful policies. Thus the weaknesses of McCain's approach come to the fore the moment he stops trading in warmed-over Churchillian generalizations and begins to discuss a specific foreign policy issue.
"Radical Islamic terrorism," McCain argues, presents a "transcendent" challenge because it is "unique." But this is silly. No one problem in foreign policy is exactly alike any other. They are all unique. The uniqueness of Islamic terrorists, according to McCain, consists in their desire to acquire nuclear weapons and use them against the US and its allies. That's hardly a transcendent quality of terrorists. Anyone can want nuclear weapons; what's important is whether an agent has the means to acquire nuclear weapons. And any responsible foreign policy would place the highest possible premium on nuclear non-proliferation, even if there were no such thing as radical Islamic terrorism in the first place. Moreover, it's at best half-true that "the terrorists" seek nuclear weapons. Presumably, ceteris paribus, any extreme armed faction would desire to have nuclear weapons. That doesn't mean an outfit like Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood, or even, yes, al Qaeda, is in any sort of position to divert their scarce resources to an astronomically expensive project like nuclearization. (How, incidentally, would a terrorist group use a nuclear weapon if they had one? The capacity to build and launch nuclear-armed missiles requires an infrastructure far beyond anything any non-state actor possesses.)
Furthermore, McCain's fixation on dividing the world into two intractably opposed camps leads him to make proposals that will exacerbate the very problem he views as transcendent. Thus, though he pays some lip-service to the concept of multilateralism, McCain's only concrete proposal for reincorporating the US into an international system is to circumvent the UN, the EU, the G-8, and NATO, by creating a "League of Democracies" consisting in the G-8 countries excluding Russia but including India and Brazil. The idea is that other allied states could join along the way, provided they conformed to certain norms McCain fails to specify. But NATO already exists. All that creating a second NATO can do is heighten tensions between "The League" and its enemies. And in order for a global nuclear non-proliferation policy to have any efficacy at all --- in particular, in order to prevent nuclear materials from falling into the hands of rogue states and terrorists groups --- the US will have to find ways to work with Russia, China, and the central Asian republics, not fabricate pointless ways of antagonizing them.
But to make any of the foregoing objections is to miss McCain's point entirely. The success of a McCain foreign policy is not a function of successful outcomes, but of satisfaction of the demands of honor and piety regardless of outcomes --- an immoral and unserious outlook. Withdrawal from Iraq would be unthinkable, McCain argues, because:
It would be an unconscionable act of betrayal, a stain on our character
as a great nation, if we were to walk away from the Iraqi people and
consign them to the horrendous violence, ethnic cleansing, and possibly
genocide that would follow a reckless, irresponsible, and premature
withdrawal.
Yet in the absence of political reconciliation in Iraq, which appears now to be decisively out of reach, extending the war any longer than is necessary to withdraw safely will not save the Iraqis from the horrors McCain fears; but it will get more Americans killed and will physically and psychologically cripple many more. It was the reckless, irresponsible, and premature invasion of Iraq --- and not a rational effort to select a least bad option from among the terrible menu of choices George Bush has left for his successor --- that consigned the Iraqi people to horrendous violence and ethnic cleansing, and may still prove to have consigned them to genocide.
But McCain has no time for practical obstacles to upholding his vision of "national greatness" such as the concept of sunk costs. He would rather issue belligerent proclamations about countries like Iran and implement policies that strengthen their international position and weaken our own, than "stain our character" by employing an intelligent carrot-and-stick diplomacy that might actually succeed. International politics, for McCain, is the continuation of war by other means.
Daniel Koffler is a friend as well as my successor at Jewcy, but we have had this disagreement in private so I see no reason not to air it in public.
In his increasingly partisan and silly attempts to define down Barack Obama's disreputable decades-long association with Jeremiah Wright, he has now taken to comparing the fetid sermons of the pastor to statements made by two figures of moral and rhetorical genius: Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Not only has Daniel quoted extracts which are light years beyond the eloquence, probity and suasion of anything Rev. Wright is capable, but he has fashioned a rod for his own back in titling his post "Putting Jeremiah Wright in Context." Let us by all means do just that.
Judging from the first link he provides, it's clear Daniel did not bother to look up Douglass's full speech on July 4, 1852, choosing instead to lazily lift the extract from a reader's email sent to Andrew Sullivan, a blogger who, it is worth reminding ourselves, used to have an award named for Susan Sontag that he'd bestow upon anyone trafficking in exactly the kind of racist, ultra-leftist, anti-American blather he now contorts himself to apologize for on Wright's behalf. That extract reads as follows:
[Y]our celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy--a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.
Perhaps it was a space-saving measure that excised the first two sentences of this paragraph: "What to the American slave is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim." [Italics mine.]
And who could argue with that in 1852? I would no more have asked a white Northern industrialist to celebrate the birthday of the United States in its incomplete and hypocritical form, in which the Southern economy was based on human bondage and all states operated under a national covenant drawn from the highest principles of the Enlightenment, than I would a freed slave liked Douglass when the above was recited. As Douglass acidly and ironically opened his speech, making it plain that a request for his unbridled display of patriotism was made of him by some arrogant fool beforehand:
"Fellow citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and natural justice, embodies in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? And am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?"
So you might say that the Fourth of July had it coming. It should also be noted that Thomas Paine or John Brown wrote like this in their passionate attempts to erase the foundational stain of slavery. (Douglass himself maintained that his father was white, so I wonder at what point of diluted negritude an abolitionist's sane pleas for social justice would be immune from such sickening analogies to modern-day frauds.)
Here is how Douglass concluded his remarks on that day, offering a course of action that could redeem the young republic on its own terms -- precisely the sort of thing that Rev. Wright, in his unlettered, hate-filled and conspiracist harangues, chooses not to do:
"Fellow citizens! The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretence, and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad; it corrupts your politicians at home. It saps the foundation of religion; it makes your name a hissing, and a byword to a mocking earth. It is the antagonistic force in your government, the only thing that seriously disturbs and endangers your Union. It fetters your progress; it is the enemy of improvement, the deadly foe of education; it fosters pride; it breeds insolence; it promotes vice; it shelters crime; it is a curse to the earth that supports it; and yet, you cling to it, as if it were the sheet anchor of all your hopes.
Oh be warned! Be warned! A horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom; the venomous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away, and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destroy it forever!"
As for Dr. King's noble opposition to the Vietnam War, and his words to that effect -- these pilfered by Daniel from E.J. Dionne's latest column in the Washington Post -- nothing here strikes me as remotely comparable to Wright's effusions:
"God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war. . . . And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place." King then predicted this response from the Almighty: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."
King is right on the essentials: the U.S. was guilty of war crimes in Vietnam. The above may have been controversial for 1968, but today it is hauntingly close to the conventional wisdom about a disgraceful period in our nation's foreign policy. (I wish King hadn't had recourse to divine retribution, but nobody's perfect.)
I don't think, forty years on, the same will be said of Jeremiah Wright's bull session on international affairs. Here is how he accounts for the American response to 9/11:
"We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed enemies. We want revenge, we want payback, and we don't care who gets hurt in the process."
Wright grounds this malediction in the famous Psalm 137, which relates to the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 586 B.C and the retroactive Zionism of the Jews, now lamenting the state of their exile. The hymn ends thus:
O Daughter of Babylon, doomed to destruction,
happy is he who repays you
for what you have done to us-
he who seizes your infants
and dashes them against the rocks.
Wright quotes the gruesome final couplet (how moral are the teachings of religion) to argue that the United States, under the guidance of its "men of faith" (read: the president), murders women and children deliberately out of cold vengeance. This is indistinguishable from Osama bin Laden's pronouncements about our intentional collapsing of "mud villages" over the heads of Muslim mothers and their babes.
Wright is at once too general and too specific. He cites in this particular sermon -- helpfully added to YouTube by Trinity United Church itself, under the eye-catching heading "FOX Lies!!!" -- that the bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan claimed the lives of "hundreds" of civilians. There was one fatality. And however much the timing of that bombing may have resulted from Bill Clinton's "wag the dog" scheme to distract from the Lewinsky affair, it was later defended cogently by the counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke and David Benjamin and Richard Simon, authors of The Age of Sacred Terror, all of whom showed that viable U.S. intelligence indicated the factory was in fact being used by Al Qaeda to manufacture chemical weapons.
All told, Daniel picked a lousy day to defend Obama on his religious affiliations. Comes the news that on the "Pastor's Page" of the July 22, 2007 newsletter of the Trinity United Church, Wright chose to reprint approvingly an LA Times op-ed written by one Mousa Abu Marzook, the deputy of the political bureau of Hamas. In it, Marzook of course defends the use of terrorism against Israeli civilians (dashing infants heads against the rocks is selectively appropriate, one would assume) and rejects any precondition that Hamas recognize Israel's right to exist. What must have especially caught Wright's eye in this license for mass murder and Judeocide is the passage in which Marzook brings up the Declaration of Independence and American slavery. Good to know how Jeremiah Wright thinks Palestinian self-determination should work.
Context is everything, isn't it? Daniel may wish to argue that, at bottom, Wright is no different than Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, or any number of febrile leftists in our midst. But I suspect he knows what a pickle it would be to explain to voters why such a person has had the ear of, and served as metaphysical counsel to, the Democratic front-runner for president. So instead we get hastily assembled carnival comparisons to MLK and Frederick Douglass; insults to them and insults to history.
However, if Daniel is still not impressed by Jeremiah Wright, I have another humdinger of an Obama religious adviser that might just do the trick.
Meet the Rev. James Meeks. I quote from the gay rights website Queerty:
Rev. James Meeks is a close friend and spiritual consultant to Sen. Obama. Rev. Meeks appeared in TV ads for Obama's US Senate campaign; Obama campaigned at his church; and went there for prayer the night he won that primary. Meeks was on his exploratory committee for the Presidency, and his church choir performed at a rally for Obama the night he announced. Rev. Meeks is also an Illinois state senator who has aggressively campaigned against gay rights and complained about "Hollywood Jews for bringing us 'Brokeback Mountain'." He ran for governor on an antigay platform. He calls being gay an "evil sickness," and his gigantic church is one of those which sponsors a Halloween fright night in which, according to the "Chicago Sun Times," among those "consigned to the flames of hell" were "two mincing young men wearing body glitter who were supposed to be homosexuals." His church has also launched antigay petition drives for the Illinois Family Institute, and Meeks is also aligned with Antigay Industry powerhouses Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, the Alliance Defense Fund, and Americans for Truth that proclaims "fighting AIDS without talking against homosexuality is like fighting lung cancer without talking against smoking." We do not know if Sen. Obama was also too busy campaign for US Senate to "go after him" as he's said he can do to get others to do the right thing. We only know that his close friend and advisor, the Rev. & Sen. James Meeks voted against SB3186, against LGBT equality in Illinois, and is apparently, just like Donnie McClurkin, just as homohating as he was before ever meeting Barack Obama.
Here is how Meeks sings the body electric:
Just another angry black preacher. Never fear. I'm sure there's a photograph floating around somewhere of Meeks gladhanding the Clintons to make this sickly Obama association null and void, too.
Why Was Bill Clinton Shaking Hands With Jeremiah Wright?
Early this morning a photograph surfaced of Bill Clinton shaking hands with Jeremiah Wright. Two separate sources publicized the photo --- a blog dedicated to defending the Trinity United Church of Christ, and the Obama campaign. The implication is that Wright can't be all that far out of the mainstream, if Clinton was willing to associate with him.
Notice the date of the photo: September 11, 1998, "at the depth of the Monica Lewinsky scandal" in Ben Smith's words, which is probably a better way of putting it than "at the height." Notice the occasion: a prayer meeting in which Clinton sought absolution for his affair from the assembled Sanhedrin. Amazingly, no one reporting on the Clinton-Wright photo has yet managed to put two and two together. Clinton and Wright weren't photographed on a chance encounter. Clinton can't laugh off the photo as one of the many thousands of random meet-and-greets he did as president. Wright was standing with Clinton in the White House exchanging pleasantries because Clinton wanted him to be there. Because Wright actually is a figure of some prominence and stature in American black Christianity, and Clinton's MO whenever times got rough was to beg forgiveness from a prominent black preacher in order to demand that the rest of us forgive him, too.
So Wright was good enough for Clinton when he needed a confessor. Now the Clintons are engineering a whispering campaign to persuade Democratic superdelegates that Barack Obama's association with Jeremiah Wright should be the grounds on which they overturn the results of the primary. Classy outfit, no?
McCain's Real Gaffe: Embracing Christian Reactionaries
At the risk of flogging my own expired Seabiscuit of this election cycle, I continue to be disappointed by the insidious role faith plays in American politics. How is it that in a presidential contest that will soon feature two secularists -- if not two closet atheists -- both have managed to be brought low by their entanglements with backwater religious hucksters? My shelf groans under the weight of bestselling polemics and tracts which tell me the country should be well beyond this sorry point. Our current age of unreason is really an age of dissimulation, where rationalists who know better pretend not to do and true believers who might appreciate candor never get the chance to do.
I've given my brief against Barack Obama's unfortunate and insufficiently explained affiliation with Jeremiah Wright, but I suppose the "best" that can be said for the presumptive Democratic nominee is that his Republican counterpart has neatly canceled him out on the matter of dubious metaphysics.
Daniel Koffler has done an admirable job of highlighting John McCain's embrace of Rev. John Hagee, a man who blames anti-Semitism on the Jews' "disobedience" from their "covenantal responsibility to serve only the one true God;" who supports Israel because it's Jesus' heralded return depot; who calls Roman Catholicism "a false cult system" (I admit I'm rather in sympathy with him here) but also the "great whore" (if only); and who cites homosexuality as the inspiration of the flood that wiped out New Orleans. (Buggery used to cause earthquakes, so this leads me to suspect the gay community is a veritable Captain Planet of elemental disaster.)
You would think that were enough for McCain to endear himself to the evangelical right, which is neither as unified nor as partisan as years of tendentious poll-taking and Rove-making have led us to understand. Now comes word, courtesy of David Corn at Mother Jones, that McCain's new "spiritual guide" is another chiliastic sociopath called Rev. Rod Parsley, whose name reminds me both of a Price Is Right announcer and a foil for Bertie Wooster.
Here is what the good reverend says in his book Silent No More, itself titled like a memoir that might have been written by one of the fey wizards of Hurricane Katrina:
The fact is that America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore.
In point of fact, the American navy, whose history McCain is well versed in, was created to destroy Islamic slavery in the Barbary Coast, whereas the parturition of the country resulted from a famous quarrel with a fellow member of "Christendom." And:
It was to defeat Islam, among other dreams, that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World in 1492...Columbus dreamed of defeating the armies of Islam with the armies of Europe made mighty by the wealth of the New World. It was this dream that, in part, began America.
If you click on the Boggle button of fun but parochial revisionism, this almost sounds like Howard Zinn on a sluggish day.
But will any of it get discussed and denounced, I wonder, in the general election season? My guess is it won't because when it comes to religion and vote-mongering, one nutter pastor acts like antimatter to another. A gentleman's agreement to not "go there" persists. Watch as McCain stays mums on Wright and lets his ideological hatchet-men do the talking for him; ditto Obama on Hagee and Parsley.
Instead, McCain has taken a buffeting for his repeated "gaffes" of fingering Iran as a backer of Al Qaeda and Sunni extremist groups operating in Iraq. Sunnis and Shia cooperating! Dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!
It may come as news to Obama, Josh Marshall and the Huffington Post, but the (Shia) Alawite regime in Damascus has long aligned with Tehran to help fund Sunni Hamas. One would also think that after the Pentagon's latest disclosures of Saddam's prewar sponsorship for all recipes of global jihadism (Shia, Sunni, al dente), it's now common knowledge that violent pragmatism can and often does trump Islamic sectarianism in the Middle East. So an Iran-Al Qaeda nexus cannot be ruled out, a priori.
Nor should it be a posteriori because there is evidence of one. My fellow Billy Bragg-loving neocon weenie Eli Lake reported a year ago in the New York Sun that the leader of Iran's Quds Force was captured in Iraq, along with a bushel of Iranian intelligence documents:
An American intelligence official said the new material, which has been authenticated within the intelligence community, confirms "that Iran is working closely with both the Shiite militias and Sunni Jihadist groups." The source was careful to stress that the Iranian plans do not extend to cooperation with Baathist groups fighting the government in Baghdad, and said the documents rather show how the Quds Force -- the arm of Iran's revolutionary guard that supports Shiite Hezbollah, Sunni Hamas, and Shiite death squads -- is working with individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq and Ansar al-Sunna.
This was then substantiated last April by Gen. William Caldwell in testimony before Congress.
So McCain gets rung up on false charges, while the real crime of his own collusion with batshit messianic zealots goes unnoticed. Yes, that sounds about right.
In 1946, four years before his death, George Orwell wrote one of his most incisive essays. The subject was the conservative thinker -- and ex-Trotskyist -- James Burnham, who had just come out with The Managerial Revolution, a widely scrutinized book that predicted an age of political economy that would be neither capitalist nor socialist but ruled by bureaucrats, technicians and soldiers, all of whom controlled the means of production and lorded over their respective societies as a kind of Politburo of elites. One of Orwell's criticisms of the book, and of Burnham's analysis in general, was that the author tended to make forecasts that were no more sophisticated than a prolongation of current events. If an outcome looked likely at the moment, then that outcome would decide the future until a different outcome announced itself. This wasn't just Burnham's vice; it was a vice of the intelligentsia at large, which, at the close of World War II, was found to have got things more wrong than the hoi polloi, which at least made up in consistency of opinion for what they might have lacked in "nuance." As Orwell put it,
The English intelligentsia, on the whole, were more defeatist than the mass of the people -- and some of them went on being defeatist at a time when the war was quite plainly won -- partly because they were better able to visualise the dreary years of warfare that lay ahead. Their morale was worse because their imaginations were stronger. The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the possibility of victory." [Italics added.]
This strikes the reader today with especial force and urgency.
The argument is not that, five years on, the Iraq war has been won and we are assessing its historical merits with the benefit of safe hindsight; there are still 160,000 U.S. troops in the country, and the war may still be lost in the long term. The argument is that the intelligentsia -- writers and commentators both for against regime change in 2003, who underwent every permutation of revision and recantation of their views since then -- have suffered from a similar folly of arrogant projection.
There were moments of eloquence in Obama's speech, but I can't decide if solipsism or condescension accounts for his thinking that the very limited scandal surrounding his toxic pastor Jeremiah Wright is related to America's greater and permanent stain of slavery. It is an insult to blacks, not to mention the civil rights movement, to claim that vitriol, hysteria and demagogy are endemic to a community that has, quite without the help of raving religious charlatans, already given us two Secretaries of State and two Supreme Court Justices.
By this reading, we're expected to accept that a little bit of Jeremiah -- who thinks the government invented the AIDS virus, that 9/11 was a homegrown catastrophe -- resides in anyone made to ride in the back of a bus. Is this really the kind of message he wishes to broadcast? Obama also errs in comparing his preacher to members of his own family. He can't have controlled who his grandmother was, but no one forced him to join the Trinity Church twenty years ago, much less to remain a congregant when he discovered the kind of spirituality being hawked from its pulpit. (It was in 1984 that Wright traveled with Louis Farrakhan to meet Muammar Gaddafi, the dictator responsible for bankrolling "Black September," the hostage-takers at the Munich Olympics, and just two years shy of facilitating the bombing of a Berlin discotheque in which many U.S. servicemen were killed.)
My own suspicion is that Obama only ever discovered this shambolic God that failed because, as a bright young atheist from Hawaii, he felt that a pew-pounding minority church was a convenient entree into local Chicago politics. The word for this is cynicism, or to put it in the mushy-headed language his supporters prefer, 'You are the idiots I've been waiting for.'
P.S. It's not news that everyone contains contradictions and multitudes and has base moments.
"I am a racist," wrote Martin Amis once, accounting for the complicated psyche of his favorite poet and family friend Philip Larkin, then under mass literary indictment for what Larkin's biography and collected letters disclosed. "I am less racist than my father was, and my children will be less racist than I am." Good sense, in other words, is historical, rooted to what Peter Singer has called the ever-widening "moral circle" by which we grow more enlightened and humane as the centuries go by. Something like that.
Amis's point was refreshingly free of cant or homiletics, and it encompassed the kind of human frailty many believe Obama artfully addressed today. It also helped that Larkin had confined all of his racist, anti-Semitic filth to the realm of private correspondence -- the poems, the stuff that mattered, were blessedly free of it, which shows that even bigots and reactionaries can exercise good judgment or aspire to be better than they are, or, if you like, than their generation has allowed them to be.
My problem with Obama's speech is that he is lowering the bar to the floor, apologizing not for a celebrated postwar poet of great depth and feeling, but for a vulgar merchant of populist sleaze. Jeremiah Wright was not caught committing his many betises in casual conversation or in the semi-exclusive confines of the neighborhood barbershop, or around the kitchen table. He was preaching them from a pulpit, before a large audience, loudly and repeatedly, for decades. Shall we say this is reflective of the broader black experience in America even at its most uninhibited or flippant? (One thinks here of Chris Rock's stand-up about the friendly-seeming old codger at work who calls his white colleagues "crackers" behind their backs but is the picture of servile minstrelsy to their faces.)
Let me phrase my grievance another way: If a Jewish candidate for high office attempted to convince me that a little bit of Meir Kahane resided in all of us, I'd condemn him roundly. Not in my name, big boy. And how dare you?
The high-minded response to this kind of discourse is to say that one is trafficking in "sweeping generalizations." The liberal-left pundits, all stricken with the vapors today by Obama's long and admittedly brilliant speech, have raced to credit him with loosing a deep, dark secret about some supposed racial collective conscious. Isn't this intrinsically presumptuous and offensive to those who would argue there is no such thing to begin with?
I know I'm expected to say here that I've no right to speak for insulted African-Americans because I'm not one myself. However, I don't think it is naive or callow to say that Obama's success thus far indicates that the country has indeed reached a point where it no longer has to think in such prefab, codified categories. If he becomes president, then he will not answer to a demographic, he will answer to all of us. And by that measure alone, he has failed me.
Pajamas Media: In Focus: Obama's Lame Excuse for Jeremiah Wright
I'm reading Obama's speech about race right now, but this was posted at PJM yesterday. I can't imagine the candidate saying anything that will ameliorate the damage Wright has done:
"If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me," Jeremiah Wright told the New York Times in April of 2007. "I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen."
Well, Obama hasn't got past the primaries yet and already he finds the distance vanishingly small between himself and the odious Rev. Wright, head of the Trinity United Church of Christ of Chicago. Last week's YouTube disclosures of the kind of sermons Wright delivers to his flock have forced Obama to confront a host of uncomfortable questions. Does he share his God-whisperer's belief that the U.S. brought the terrorist attacks of 9/11 on itself by its own long, sorry history of state terrorism? That the government invented the AIDS virus as a plague for blacks? Or that a politician can know a preacher for twenty years, be married by him and have his two children baptized by him, without once having been privy to the preacher's nasty rhetoric?
According to Obama, we're expected to believe that the answer to that last question is a definitive yes...
I first wrote about Jeremiah Wright at Jewcy a year ago, predicting this toxic element in Obama's candidacy would not evaporate easily:
Any national candidate's religion is always legitimate grounds for inquiry but much has been made recently of Mitt Romney's Mormonism. Given that religion's 19th century cult origins and, shall we say, financially informed theodicy, there's good reason to expect the Republican candidate to be taxed on his real thoughts about Joseph Smith, polygamy and the revelations of the Angel Moroni. Romney's evasiveness or attempt to have it both ways will be used against him as evidence that he's loyal first to the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints, second to the U.S. Constitution. Also, that he's easily taken in by hucksters, rogues and con-man -- not the most encouraging sign of one's soundness for high government.
When asked what he thinks of his own reverend and baptizer and spiritual enabler, Obama lamely states that Jeremiah Wright is a "child of the sixties." That may well be true, but even reconstructed hippies should be held responsible for their meretricious alliances. So should candidates for the White House.
Penultimate scene from a hackneyed modern horror film: Hot girl and hot guy have finally put a stop to the monster/psychopath/psychopathic monster that's been after them. Sure, some of their friends died horrifically, and that's tragic, but the beast has been slain, the sun will be up soon, and they can finally take a deep breath and relax. No need to check on the fiend's corpse and make sure he's dead, let alone pay heed to the soft, ominous footsteps in the distance --- the worst is clearly over.
In defense of unintentionally, comically unaware horror flick characters, they need to be more naive than any actual person realistically could be, in order to advance poorly structured, uncompelling plots. What excuse is there for the hot girl-bald guy pairings of financial broadcasters, who, witnessing one of the oldest and largest banks in America get sold in a panic for less than the Yankees paid for A-Rod, are instantly satisfied that the moment of crisis has definitely passed?
Last Friday, Bear Stearns was nominally worth $3.5 billion. On Monday, under pressure from the Federal Reserve, JPMorgan bought Bear on Monday for $250 million, nearly one billion dollars less than the ostensible value of Bear's Manhattan office. The idea is that JPMorgan is big enough to absorb the huge writedowns yet to come on worthless or near-worthless Bear Stearns securities, and that by doing so, JPMorgan can prevent Bear's meltdown from metastasizing throughout the economy.
Maybe it will work. But the fact that the Fed concluded the health of the economy depended on Bear being sold off for a risible $2 per share is hardly cause for confidence. Bear Stearns was not the only bulge bracket holding massive IOUs on dumb bets; it was just the most reckless and most vulnerable of the banks. Which is why the Fed/JPM action on Bear is anything but a bailout. Many Bear employees and shareholders are going to be wiped out by the merger. What Chairman Bernanke is hoping to achieve is a bailout of everyone else. As Clive Crook puts it:
Bankruptcy would surely have recovered more value for shareholders than
this give-away--but the Fed evidently feared that closure and disposal
of Bear's assets would have jeopardized other parts of the country's
teetering financial system. Preventing that was the Fed's overriding
goal. The firm had to be acquired in a hurry, shored up, and then run,
so far as counterparties were concerned, as though nothing had
happened. By any measure, Bear Stearns was not that big: it was surely
not "too big to fail". Apparently, though, it was deemed too delicately
interconnected to fail. One wonders how many such institutions there
now are, and who will carry the burden of keeping them in business.
Crook is referring primarily to Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs, which face similar if not quite as pervasive exposure to credit market as Bear, and are seeing significant volatility in their stock prices in the wake of Bear's collapse.
This morning, Lehman and Goldman reported declines in first quarter income of 57 and 53 percent, respectively --- a terrible performance by any objective measure. But because investors expected the losses to be even more catastrophic, the banks' share prices are rallying for the time being. So never mind that no one knows with any precision just how much worthless paper the bulge brackets are holding onto, not even their own executives. Pay no attention to the footsteps in the distance or foreboding background music.
"Report Shows No Link Between Saddam and al Qaeda" is how ABC News headlined their item on the Pentagon's just-released report on the relationship between Saddam Hussein and terrorism. And John Holusha of the New York Times, who could not have read the document when he wrote this blog post because it hadn't been made available yet, went with the slightly punchier headline: "Oh, By the Way, There Was No Al Qaeda Link." (Holusha relied on the McClatchy newspapers to do his spadework for him).
Not that the mainstream media wish to give the impression that Saddam Hussein was "contained," of course. Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard has pardoned some of this fatuous and purblind coverage by saying that it can be blamed on journalists' having only scanned the Executive Summary of the new study, which synthesizes 600,000 captured documents on Iraqi intelligence. Yet had they done even that, what they would have found was this:
"This study found no "smoking gun" (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda. Saddam's interest in, and support for, non-state actors was spread across a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations. Some in the regime recognized the potential high internal and external costs of maintaining relationships with radical Islamic groups, yet they concluded that in some cases, the benefits of association outweighed the risks."
Note too that this report, being taken up by the "No Flies on Saddam" contingent as a vindication of their case, definitively disproves the notion that Saddam's "secularism" proscribed his alliance with Islamic jihadism. By any sane metric, he was a continuing threat to the international community.
Eliot Spitzer built his political career as a moral scold, parleying self-righteous prosecutions of financial malfeasance and prostitution into the governorship of New York. Now his career is over, thanks to a double-whammy of acquiring the services of prostitutes and paying for them with campaign funds (thereby extending the meaning of 'double-entry book-keeping' into unplowed fields).
So some good has already come of Spitzer's spectacular wipeout, what you might call poetic justice as fairness. More good may still come if we take the opportunity Spitzer has provided to rethink the moral and legal rationales underlying the criminalization of a widespread, victimless consensual behavior among adults.
There is a kind of first-principles argument for keeping prostitution illegal, which, like a common argument for banning pornography, manages to unite a certain brand of feminism with conservative religious prudery. The idea is that the exchange of sex for money is degrading to women, and that any kind of government sanctioning of that exchange would amount to an endorsement of the degradation of women. The difference between the prohibitionist feminist view and the religious conservative view is that the former locates the cause of degradation in the power structures surrounding prostitution, while the latter locates it in the act of sex, but in the end, the two views come out the same for practical purposes.
It's not common to hear this position enunciated publicly (though Ross Douthat gives it a sporting try) since we generally shy away from notions of intrinsic right and wrong in public policy debates. But since the utilitarian case for prohibiting prostitution is so weak, there must be some kernel of the first-principles argument standing in the way of public acceptance of legalization. In any event, the case for keeping prostitution illegal because of its inherent harmfulness or immorality is blatantly question-begging, since the inherent wrong of exchanging sex for money is precisely what's at issue. As Will Wilkinson puts it, there is "no interesting intrinsic moral distinction between brick- and other forms of laying."
In feminist terms, the 'intrinsic harm' case for criminalizing sex work looks even worse, since the linchpin of that argument is that various social structures --- particularly the differential ways in which society evaluates sexual experimentation among men and women --- ensure that female sex workers are deprived of their self-worth and autonomy. But there is no more effective means of reinforcing such inequalities than telling men who sell their bodies to lay bricks that what they do is a productive trade, while telling women who sell their bodies to lay men that they deserve to be in prison.
Alternatively, there is a utilitarian case for prohibiting prostitution, resting on allegedly telling facts such as the American Journal of Epidemiology's finding that "Women engaged in prostitution face the most dangerous occupational environment in the United States." Which isn't all that surprising, given that sex workers are forced onto the black market, where they are at the mercy of pimps and mobsters, and even have a disincentive against seeking protection from law enforcement, since, e.g., filing a rape allegation would be tantamount to turning oneself in.
Both arguments for keeping prostitution illegal fail on their own merits. The first-principles argument fails because it's not an argument, but an assertion, and an unpersuasive one. The utilitarian argument fails because the facts don't support it, and because, in any case, there are precious few people who truly oppose legalizing prostitution on utilitarian grounds. (For those who claim otherwise, try this thought experiment: The facts on the ground have shifted to the point at which there is clearly no utilitarian calculus that justifies keeping prostitution illegal. Would you support legalization then?)
Why then is prostitution still illegal? Because the two arguments operate in a tangled tandem. Put pressure on one, and the prohibitionist will leap to the other. Put pressure on the other, and she'll leap back, repeating the process as necessary. Legalization won't come until we get past the unstated, unargued assumption that prostitution is for some reason icky, which rests on the idea that sex itself is icky, which, in turn, rests on ages of cultural discomfort with female sexuality.
Nonetheless, there is no good reason anyone should go to jail for paying for something totally natural and healthy, that would be perfectly legal to give away for free. Except, that is, for politicians like Spitzer, who have the power to change the law but instead allow their fellow citizens to rot away in prison for non-offenses that they themselves engage in. Spitzer deserves the maximum penalty.
An English professor is walking along Broadway in the Village when he's approached by a homeless man asking for change. The professor instead imparts classical words of wisdom: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." And as if to underscore the pedantry, he adds, "William Shakespeare." The homeless man wears a sour expression on his face and after pausing a moment replies: "Fuck you. David Mamet."
Who really didn't see this coming in the American playwright who invented a discourse -- and used a metronome to do it -- to accommodate every shade of masculine barbarity? David Mamet has confessed in the Village Voice that he's no longer a "brain-dead liberal," and he describes his slow-mounting epiphany, as it was helped along by his wife, the unnamed but lovely actress Rebecca Pidgeon:
As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.
These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been--rather charmingly, I thought--referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."
Anyone who has read Mamet's penultimate book The Wicked Son: Anti-Semitism, Self-Hatred and the Jews is aware of his religious zealotry. And I can recall scanning his helpful guide to drama, Three Uses of the Knife, when I was playing Shelley "the Machine" Levine in a college production of "Glengarry Glen Ross" (half the cast was female!) and being surprised to find that even the smashmouth bad boy of the Great White Way reserved a saintly word for Theodore Herzl. If you will it, "Fresh Air with Terry Gross" is no nightmare.
The essay's written in Mamet-speak, which is a hard taste to acquire if you haven't got it already (I have, even though I enjoy parodying it as much as appreciating its staccato rhythms and intellectual abrasions: "Baby, I'm so cool, Disney Land visits me.")
What is it, though, about the stylists of heartburn prose that makes them all go public with their goodbyes to all that? Martin Amis had "The Age of Horrorism" in the Guardian two years ago, and there was Kingsley Amis' "Why Lucky Jim Turned Right" in the sixties. Mamet's stuff is pat ball to this father-son team's champion game.
And yet... Mamet has his moments, too. He reminds us that there is such a thing as a tough-minded, no-bullshit liberalism that takes a view of history longer than the Bush administration, and an assessment of human nature more complicated than the Halliburton tax returns:
Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.
Knowing the symptoms of Mamet's conditions pretty well (I've made a minor study of changing ideological fever-dreams), I'd wager that most of his policy prescriptions have not changed much since he came to the realization that the free market is better than the command economy, and that the United States is not reflexively vicious, but rather resilient against vice because founded on the best kind of pessimistic doctrine of government.
The Independent newspaper in Britain has taken the occasion of Mamet's piece to distinguish between the British definition of "liberalism" and the American one (the "brain-dead" adjective must have really upset the leader writers).
Mamet will of course be called a "conservative" by his ex-friends in Hollywood. Or they'll use the more convenient dread term "neoconservative," which is preloaded ammunition for fools. You're either with us or against, the lefties will tell him. Either you're scrawling Etch-a-Sketch political cartoons of Dick Cheney shooting his friend in the face for the Huffington Post, or you're calling the more pacifistic elements of the American Enterprise Institute "stupid fucking cunts." Which is it, David?
Gov. Eliot Spitzer was elected overwhelmingly in 2006 on his promise to finally bring transparency and efficiency to New York, a promise brokered on his glamorous Wall Street-busting successes as state attorney general. Well, it didn't take long for his administration to plow right over public expectations.
First came the disclosure last year that members of his staff had been spying on Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, and using tax-payer dollars to do so. (More distressing to New Yorkers with a nodding acquaintance with Mr. Bruno is that they didn't turn up anything good on him.) Spitzer took a fall, then rebounded, owing, I suspect, to his lantern-jawed, comic book hero visage which you just want to believe in, damn it. Now comes word that he was involved in a prostitution ring. (Batman never paid for chicks.) His career in politics is effectively over today.
The New York Times just posted this story to its website and Drudge and Fox News have gone all woo-woo in their inimitable ways:
Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved.
But a person with knowledge of the governor's role said that the person believes the governor is one of the men identified as clients in court papers.
The governor's travel records show that he was in Washington in mid-February. One of the clients described in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, the Emperors Club VIP on the night of Feb. 13.
Which of course doesn't prove anything except that Spitzer was likely getting fucked by someone who isn't his wife for $5,500. That's how much the Emperors Club charges for its finest ladies per hour, and everything the Spitz would have us believe about him suggests he's no compromising, part-time lover.
NBC is also reporting that cell phone records are the damning evidence that makes this a no-spin situation.
The Emperors Club website is down now. If it stays that way permanently, a balanced budget and the end to the Rockefeller drug laws can't be far behind.
UPDATE: Spitzer is apparently listed as "Client No. 9" in the prosecutor's brief against the Emperors Club. I just heard on CNN that the call-girl frequented by him said one of their sessions went "very well." So the day hasn't been all bad for the governor, after all.
Blast from the past: Below is a post I wrote for Snarksmith back in October, 2006. I'm not saying I predicted the Spitz would be caught with his pants down or anything, but can I at least take credit for not loving him as much as the rest of New York did when he was the Boy Wonder?
Horace Mann, Princeton, Harvard Law, Paul Weiss. Swap the undergrad with another Ivy -- one known for its boozing and football game losing -- and you have the CV of all my friends. I love each and every one, but the sheer ambition and career opportunism has always been a point of division between them and myself. See, I'm the lazy one with the blog and the perpetually vague state of employment. (Though I managed to run for public office without the law degree or tony private school education. And I got Minnie Driver's numba. How do you like them apples?)
I bring this up because Eliot Spitzer is the next governor of New York, and I sort of have ambivalent feelings about him, too. On the one hand, he's clearly very bright and shrewd and he knows how to get things done with the corporate malfeasance types. On the other -- well, just you read:
Eliot was something of a jock at Horace Mann, captaining the tennis team and playing soccer. When his teams played Trinity, he crossed paths with John McEnroe, who plays tennis with the same abrasive intensity with which Mr. Spitzer approaches politics. Mr. Spitzer has often told the story of going home after seeing Mr. McEnroe whiz serves past one of his classmates and telling his parents "I had seen the kid play who would be No. 1 in the world."
"My parents said," Eliot, just because he beat you doesn't mean that he's the best in the world," he remembered.
Along the way, Eliot suffered setbacks, or what for him counted as setbacks. His ambitions of going to Harvard were derailed when he was not accepted, so he went to Princeton instead. In an interview, his father also let forth a family secret: that his son had scored a perfect 1,600 on the SAT. Confronted with this, Mr. Spitzer winced, and conceded imperfection.
"I think it was 1,590," he said, adding that his father must have confused the SAT with his perfect LSAT score.
There's also a twice papa-bankrolled campaign for attorney general and a mien that I always read as: "Spitzer Smash!" (See inset photo to this post.) The above Times profile comes to us on the same week that Gawker has given ample coverage to Douchebag extraordinaire Aleksey Vayner, who would have only foregone the "I think" before giving his recollected SAT score.
I'll still vote for Spitzer, but seeing this hopelessly poll-tested and charmed rise to power has got me nostalgic for the days of Pat Moynihan, a megalopolitan gentleman and scholar in the Old World sense of the term. Paddy wasn't afraid to do a little working-class tramping through Europe as a lad, or to set the pope right on apologizing to the Jews for that whole World War II blind-indifference-to-extermination business. He could also hold his booze, stand up to Stalinism and rattle off bons mots about healthcare legislation, to boot.
Even at the more parochial state level, however, Spitzer seems like his gubernatorial predecessor: a shore-hugging cipher who'll give lousy soundbyte and even worse heed to the other guys in the room. Then again, the other guys all live in Albany and have no problem running the joint like a banana republic. Maybe he's just what they needed.
I have little love for Samantha Power's foreign policy prescriptions (which I find eminently worthy of a Harvard academic) but I will say that her lickety-split resignation from the Obama camp after calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" was probably the silliest episode yet in an overlong cartoon of an election season.
Power was giving an interview to The Scotsman newspaper:
"We f***** up in Ohio," she admitted. "In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio's the only place they can win.
"She is a monster, too - that is off the record - she is stooping to anything," Ms Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.
Ms Power said of the Clinton campaign: "Here, it looks like desperation. I hope it looks like desperation there, too.
"You just look at her and think, 'Ergh'. But if you are poor and she is telling you some story about how Obama is going to take your job away, maybe it will be more effective. The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive."
There's nothing out of sorts here, and Power's only moment of naivete came in announcing something was "off the record" in a transcribed audience with a member of the Ukanian press.
Clinton, of course, rampaged through Tokyo before demanding Power's ouster, which the Obama camp was all too willing to oblige. Here's Power's goodbye:
"With deep regret, I am resigning from my role as an adviser to the Obama campaign effective today," Power said in a statement Friday. "Last Monday, I made inexcusable remarks that are at marked variance from my oft-stated admiration for Senator Clinton and from the spirit, tenor, and purpose of the Obama campaign. And I extend my deepest apologies to Senator Clinton, Senator Obama, and the remarkable team I have worked with over these long 14 months."
Many pundits have credited Clinton's twin victories on Tuesday in part to her cheery appearance last weekend on Saturday Night Live. She clearly benefited from that show's trenchant mockery of the media's soft treatment of Barack Obama, which resulted in a tougher line of questioning of the candidate just before the Texas and Ohio primaries. (He stalked offstage in San Antonio like a wounded gazelle after being pressed about his questionable relationship with the Chicago sleaze merchant Antoin Rezko, and his lying populism over NAFTA.)
The week before, you'll recall, Tina Fey proudly called Hillary a "bitch" on air and demanded the country wake up to the fact that a shrill, unbearable woman is exactly what it needed right now. One might have expected, then, a shrewder Clinton reply to the Power remark along the lines of "I'm the monster who's ready on day one;" but alas, this touchy Mothra roared and the Obama mouse gave all.
His supporters have cause for real alarm. It's not "dignified" of their man to resort to defensiveness or automatic capitulation as a means of countering the well-oiled (and oily) Clinton attack machine. I suspect he will face a nicer audience from John McCain -- if not from McCain's uncontrolled phalanx of conservative backers -- but that doesn't distract from Obama's core wimpiness.
Indeed, in her shrieking and sanctimonious efforts to regain the front-runner status, Clinton has actually made a worthwhile point about her opponent: If he can't effectively stand up to her, how the hell can we expect him to stand up to Al Qaeda?
How crazy is John Hagee -- the anti-Catholic, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, anti-gay evangelical preacher who serves as official Louis Farrakhan to the John McCain campaign?
In a sermon on the coming Russo-Arab invasion of Israel (and really, what's the
difference between Russians and Arabs when you think about it?), which
will drown the Jewish state in rivers of blood, Hagee bolsters his prophecy with some (to put it mildly) tendentious biblical
interpretation, and ominously warns that if the US helps facilitate
Israel-Palestinian peace, we, too, will be subject to divine
wrath. Concluding his exposition of God's plan for middle Eastern politics, Hagee does the Lord's work of parting fools from their money. And he's got a unique marketing tool, namely this more than a little cracked take on symbolism of the one dollar bill:
George Washington wanted to do something to honor the Jewish people, so he put a tribute on the American dollar. It's over the head of the eagle, it's to the Jewish people. Right over the head of the American eagle is the star of David - that's a six-pointed star. Around that star is the shekinah glory of god that's a starbust. The shekinah glory of God that dwelt over the tabernacle. If you turn it upside-down this is the menorah - the flames of the menorah that are lifting up. For all of you who are now reaching for a dollar bill, we'll take an offering in just a moment and receive every one of them.
Just as Moses, our Orthodox friends would tell us, wrote the very Bible that describes his death, I suppose it's possible that Washington designed the original greenback. But he would have had to do so from beyond the grave, since the buck went into circulation in 1862 featuring a portrait of the distinctly goyish Salmon P. Chase. Also, the menorah Hagee descries on the back of the bill --- no kidding --- is the eagle's tail-feathers.
So a preacher who blames the historical persecution of Jews on the Jews themselves for their refusal to accept Jesus, who propagates the Whore-of-Babylon strain of anti-Catholic bigotry, who sees Muslims as mindless killers, and blames buggery for natural disasters, is actively lobbying the government to adopt policies whose announced goal is to bring about the end of the world, and in particular, the annihilation of the Jewish state. This same ridiculous, hateful figure has the ear of a major party presidential candidate, and the support of senior legislative officials like Joe Lieberman.
One would think that John McCain's slobbery embrace of Hagee and his subsequent, chickenshit non-disavowal, would merit some media attention. One would be wrong. According to Steve Benen, the "combined number of articles" on McCain and Hagee "from the New York Times, Washington Post,
Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, and Boston Globe is
zero." So, at least until Hagee puts on blackface, it looks like he's going to get a pass.
My review of Simon Sebag Montefiore's admirable biography, Young Stalin, is now up at The Weekly Standard. I've reprinted the whole thing below, as you need a login to access it at the TWS site:
Little Soso
For Stalin, the child was father of the tyrant.
by Michael Weiss
03/10/2008, Volume 013, Issue 25
Young Stalin
by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Knopf, 496 pp., $30
There's a grim irony in the fact that Joseph Stalin first made a name for himself--even if it was only one of his many pseudonyms--as a poet. It was the poets, after all, who understood him best:
But wherever there's a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of his weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.
Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.
It cost Osip Mandelstam his freedom and his sanity to compose these lines in 1934, the year of Sergei Kirov's murder, which furnished the paranoid rationale for the purging of Old Bolsheviks ("he rolls the executions on his tongue like berries") and the establishment of a one-man dictatorship in Russia.
"Red Tsar" is how Simon Sebag Montefiore described Stalin in his previous book exploring the Kremlin mountaineer's sanctum sanctorum of terrified toadies and sybaritic lieutenants. Having thus expertly dealt with the adult years, the historian now sets out to capture the totalitarian in bloom. Young Stalin is ambitiously introduced as a "pre-history of the USSR itself, a study of the subterranean worm and the silent chrysalis before it hatched the steel-winged butterfly."
Well, we live in an age of prequels, and so a project like this surely tantalizes. It also succeeds, on the whole. Sebag Montefiore has given us the most detailed and comprehensive portrait of the mass murdering ideologue just as he was getting warmed up. And if the author occasionally elides one of Bertram Wolfe's principal injunctions for historical writing--not to fashion a prologue with the end always in mind--then this can be forgiven since Stalin was in many ways a prototype of the adolescent villain. We can't help but notice the monster evolving.
"Soso" Djugashvili, born in 1879, was abused by his alcoholic father, and he in turn abused animals and other children. Diminutive, sickly, and something of a mama's boy, he viewed the woman who bore him--as he later did his wives, lovers, friends, and offspring--as eminently dispensable in the pursuit of his own megalomaniacal goals. As a seminarian he suffered the torments of a repressive and obnoxious priest, nicknamed Father Black Spot, who chased down every "forbidden" text and wayward student, instilling in Stalin the importance of "surveillance, spying, invasion of inner life, violation of feelings" (these are the dictator's own words) that would become the institutions of the Soviet state.
It's worth noting that Stalin's rhetorical style also took shape during his larval revolutionary period. He once exhorted a crowd: "Do you think we can defeat the Tsar with empty hands? Never! We need three things: one--guns, two--guns and three, again and again--guns!" Compare this reinforced troika with the methods Nikita Khrushchev claimed, in his 1956 "Secret Speech," that Stalin prescribed for investigators of the Doctor's Plot: "Beat, beat, and once again, beat!" The loss of a comrade during a bank robbery incited this pseudo-profound elegy from the sometime versifier: "What can we do? One can't pick a rose without pricking oneself on a thorn. Leaves fall from the trees in autumn--but fresh ones grow in the spring."
Pastoral shades of omelets and broken eggs.
Even as a star pupil of the Gori Church School, young Stalin could brook no rival for attention or physical prowess. He deadlegged a boy who danced the Georgian lekuri better and nearly drowned another by pushing him into the Kura River. When this second boy protested that he couldn't swim, Stalin told him, "Yes, but when you got into trouble, you had to learn to swim."
That this troglodytic Aesop won himself a small army of early admirers should teach us something about human frailty. Stalin knew that brutality captivates the ordinary man as much as it does the psychopath. He occupied a middle position between these two roles, and his great luck in life was to have been born with all the vestments of ordinariness--a "plebian without pose, uncommunicative by nature, even embarrassed by strangers," as the (sympathetic) journalist Emil Ludwig once described him. In a sense, then, it's quite easy to see why Stalinism became the opiate of 20th-century intellectuals: At bottom, the intellectuals envied its murderous, inscrutable figurehead, a man capable of doing what they could only rationalize away.
One could go on in this vein. Yet there are three underlying themes that distinguish the present volume as perhaps the best-yet resource on Stalinology. The first underscores the Georgian's capacity for konspiratsia and gangsterism, particularly in the fine art of sniffing out traitors. (It's true that all the Bolsheviks, Stalin included, missed the biggest traitor of them all, Roman Malinovsky, the Okhrana agent who was elected to the Bolshevik Central Committee and caused nearly every other member's arrest.) But not for nothing did Lenin refer to his "fiery Colchian" and judge Stalin "exactly the kind of person I need." By this he meant the consummate praktik, an inconspicuous but effective man of action who could rob banks and blackmail tycoons for a party that had officially outlawed criminal adventurism. Enter Stalin's Red Battle Squads, a half-terrorist, half-partisan outfit that was tasked with these sub rosa activities, which could really only take place in the Caucasus, long a locus of cosmopolitan banditry.
The mind reels at the fact that the future Five Year Planner once toiled for a Rothschild oil concern in Batumi. Stalin seems to have consolidated his terrorist leadership while incarcerated. Like Abu Musab al Zarqawi, he was a natural leader of the lumpen, semiliterate prison element, and reputation alone drove the success of his Bolshevik Expropriators Club, which procured weapons, facilitated jailbreaks for captured comrades, and executed party turncoats: "Stalin would order the delivery of a letter to a businessman, illustrated with 'bombs, a lacerated corpse and two crossed daggers,' then come calling with a Mauser in his belt to collect." Better still was the Expropriators' version of a Hallmark card--"The Bolshevik Committee proposes that your firm pay ___ roubles"--always delivered by Stalin's tall, armed bodyguard.
Sebag Montefiore is also quite good at showing how the seminary dropout never really abandoned biblical messianism. If Stalin was, in fact, an atheist, then it was mainly for show, to prove his mettle as a Marxist. His metaphysical opportunism could cut both ways. For one thing, a Christ-like self-conception was necessary for keeping in thrall a people that, for centuries, had thought of its sovereign as a demiurge. The czar used to be known as the Vicar of Christ on Earth, and Peter the Great once pounded his chest in defiance of someone who suggested the appointment of a holy patriarch. He was that already, said Peter.
In Russia, it has never been enough to proclaim, L'Etat, c'est moi; one has also to add, L'Eglise, c'est moi. This is why Stalin didn't sound so foolish to claim, "The working-class gave birth to me and raised me in its own image and likeness." During World War II, he forgave Winston Churchill for his erstwhile anti-Bolshevism, saying, "All that is in the past and the past belongs to God."
If, like Vladimir Putin, Stalin only used faith as a feint to dupe credulous Western statesmen, then how to explain the terms of his disillusionment upon first encountering the leader of the Bolsheviks? "Lenin had taken shape in my imagination as a stately and imposing giant. . . . Imagine my disappointment when I saw the most ordinary man, below average height, in no way different from ordinary mortals." The italics are mine, but the language is hardly that of a strict materialist. It inadvertently recalls Voltaire's observation that, given the whole that would be formed by all the gathered splinters of the cross, surely a giant Christ must have been crucified on it.
Finally, Sebag Montefiore offers what is, to my mind, the most persuasive case against the hoary allegation that Stalin was a czarist spy. Much of the controversy has rested on the only official-seeming document that has come to light: the so-called "Eremin Letter," which appeared in the 1920s and was purportedly written by the colonel of the Tiflis bureau of the Okhrana. The letter was likely forged and has never been corroborated by any other czarist record. True, Stalin may have ordered these destroyed, but Sebag Montefiore points out that many of the Bolsheviks who charged him with betrayal had their timelines confused.
Part of the problem is that Stalin was constantly in touch with gendarmes and spooks; it was his job to cultivate them as contacts. Thus, he did the bulk of the recruitment and was on the receiving, not the giving, end of the intelligence nexus. Given Stalin's way with spotting secret agents on sight, it's more than plausible that he knew which imperial authorities (almost all were hopelessly corrupt and greedy) to target for conversion.
Moreover, Okhrana agents were typically well compensated and lived lavish lifestyles, whereas Stalin was perennially poor and bedraggled. The state security apparatus also wanted its men at liberty, so how to explain that between 1908 and 1917, Stalin spent a total of 18 months free? Most convincing of all is the fact that he never managed to guess the real identities of (nevermind murder) "Fikus" and "Mikheil," the two spies who had infiltrated the Baku Bolshevik Party. Stalin liquidated countless others in false pursuit of these slippery figures, and Sebag Montefiore is right to conclude: "Here is the origin of the paranoiac Soviet mind-set, the folly of Stalin's mistrust of the warnings of Hitler's invasion plans in 1941 and the bloody frenzy of his Terror."
Young Stalin is not without its lapses. One of the book's more iffy objectives is common among today's revisionists, who argue that against Stalin's own cult of personality there has been erected a formidable cult of historiography that depicts him as a hapless provincial and intellectual featherweight. It was only through a tragicomic series of errors that he ever managed to inherit the throne of international Communism and destroy his more capable enemies, namely Trotsky. Sebag Montefiore, like Robert Service before him, aims to correct this interpretation, largely advanced by Trotsky and his followers, by showing that Stalin was actually a "deep thinker" and man of rare gifts.
Indeed, the "gangster, godfather, audacious bank robber, killer, pirate and arsonist" might well have become the Baudelaire of Georgia had he not discovered revolution. At 16, Stalin wrote romantic poems that earned the respect of the celebrated poet Prince Ilya Chavchavadze, who published them in the newspaper Iveria. So moving was the one entitled "Morning" that it evidently inspired an Armenian State Bank official to become Stalin's inside man for the infamous robbery at Yerevan Square in 1907--a heist that made international headlines and lined party coffers, to Lenin's delight.
And yet the mind and character presented in these pages never really rise above the banal, despite the unquestionably extraordinary deeds for which they were responsible. In trying to portray Stalin as an unheralded brain of Bolshevism, Sebag Montefiore fails to cite a single utterance or piece of writing that distinguishes his subject for candlepower. Stalin's contemporaries--not all of whom were ten-dentious antagonists--grasped his mediocrity better. Noe Jordania, a real Georgian intellectual, told him to study more before presuming to write for the radical newspaper Kvali; Lenin expressed shock that Stalin had written his paper on the National Question all by himself--never mind that Nikolai Bukharin and a Viennese maid had to translate the German sources for him.
At times, our author seems too easily impressed by a Russian of average learning from the turn of the last century: "[Stalin] knew Nekrasov and Pushkin by heart, read Goethe and Shakespeare in translation, and could recite Walt Whitman." Trotsky once referred to a comrade as "well-read but not well educated," a terse insight that contains a degree of sophistication Stalin could never approach.
So it's not quite accurate, although it makes for a more epic narrative, to deem the two archnemeses mirror images of each other. Even Stalin admitted his shortcomings once. As recounted in Georgy Dimitrov's diaries, in 1937 Stalin gave a toast at a Comintern dinner, laying credit for his and his cronies' success at the feet of the Soviet "middle cadres" who
choose the leader, explain our positions to the masses, and ensure the success of our cause. They don't try to climb above their station; you don't even notice them. Why did we prevail over Trotsky and the rest? Trotsky, as we know, was the most popular man in our country after Lenin. Bukharin, Zinoviev, Rykov, Tomsky were all popular. We were little known, I myself, Molotov, Voroshilov, and Kalinin, then. We were fieldworkers in Lenin's time, his colleagues. But the middle cadres supported us, explained our positions to the masses.
No doubt there are Philistines with a bit of verbal recall who envy the gem-like flame in others without quite knowing how to appreciate it, much less embody it, themselves. Stalin asked Boris Pasternak if Mandelstam was a genius or not, the question that decided the poet's fate. He also chose to leave the author of Dr. Zhivago alone for being a "cloud-dweller." Then there was his exquisitely fatuous comment--repeated to perfect effect by a ponderous East German apparatchik in The Lives of Others--that "writers are the engineers of the soul." The studious priest-in-training might have smuggled forbidden literature into his bunk at night, but someone who scribbled "ha-ha-ha!" next to Tolstoy's pensées on redemption and salvation required an eight-figure body count to be taken seriously by history.
Boris Souvarine, one of Stalin's earliest biographers and more fluent in the Marxist idiom for having been the founder of the French Communist party, conceived of the dictator as, primarily, the product of "peasant psychology" and theological instruction. Wrote Souvarine, the
age-long tradition which revives to-day the name of Spartacus finds no expression in [Stalin's] words, even though it is continued in his deeds. Nevertheless from a given moment he neither spoke nor wrote without quoting Lenin at every point, as if he owed everything to one book, a work in twenty volumes--just as Cromwell seems to have read only the Bible. If he should happen to quote another writer it is second hand, as if to create the impression, unwillingly revealed, of a modicum of erudition.
A little learning is a dangerous thing, all right, and one shouldn't be fooled by the thin integuments of civilization that mask the most lethal barbarism. W.H. Auden had it right in his "Epitaph on a Tyrant," composed in 1939, the year of the Hitler-Stalin pact:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets
My longish essay about Edmund Wilson's Marxism and its beneficial influence on his literary criticism is now up at Democratiya:
Edmund Wilson has been an object of saintly veneration and nostalgia by those old enough to remember when literary critics were arbiters of how people spent their time between meals and work. Who now, in the age of the hatchet job and the shrinking Books section, speaks of 'permanent criticism,' the criticism that endures because it ranks as literature itself? The Library of America has just published Wilson's collected works in an elegant two-volume set spanning the critic's most productive decades--the 20s, 30s and 40s. Coming a year after Lewis Dabney's definitive biography, the resurrection of such sorely missed volumes as The Shores of Light, Axel's Castle and The Wound and the Bow surely qualifies an 'event' publication. Now there's a term the owlish sage of Red Bank would have loathed to no end.
It's a shame, though, that Wilson's magnificent study of socialism, To the Finland Station, has been left out of this series because it represents not just the yield of seven years of hard study, for which he learned German and Russian, but also the culmination of one of the lesser examined leitmotifs of his interdisciplinary and breathtaking oeuvre: his political radicalism.
Wilson always preferred to think of himself as a journalist rather than a critic; writing for publications such as Vanity Fair, The New Republic and The New Yorker, he reported from the squalid underbelly of the Jazz Age as well the breadlines and courtrooms of the Great Depression, serving witness to many of the formative scandals and uprisings that impelled progressive opinion. Even his classic literary essays on the hierophants of the canon - Proust, Dickens, Flaubert, Joyce - were scarcely free from reference to Marxism, or the materialist conception of history, with which he had a longstanding and complicated relationship. Wilson began a tenuous fellow traveler of Communism and wound up an idiosyncratic left-libertarian, all the while never committing to any faction or party in either his struggle against current or historic injustices. His intellect was keen and rapacious enough prevent his lapse into any kind of ideological or critical dogma, and his slightly cultivated role as the aloof but opinionated observer of the major convulsions of his age, whether in art or revolution, made him one of the most perceptive chroniclers of it.
Also, check out the rest of the Spring '08 issue, and consider becoming a founding member of the most important social democratic journal in publication. Editor Alan Johnson's series of interviews is now out in book form, available for purchase here.
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.}
At the risk of flogging my own expired Seabiscuit of this election cycle, I continue to be disappointed by the insidious role faith plays in American politics. How is it that in a presidential contest that will soon feature two secularists -- if not two closet atheists -- both have managed to be brought low by their entanglements with backwater religious hucksters? My shelf groans under the weight of bestselling polemics and tracts which tell me the country should be well beyond this sorry point. Our current age of unreason is really an age of dissimulation, where rationalists who know better pretend not to do and true believers who might appreciate candor never get the chance to do.
I'm reading Obama's speech about race right now, but this was posted at PJM yesterday. I can't imagine the candidate saying anything that will ameliorate the damage Wright has done:
An English professor is walking along Broadway in the Village when he's approached by a homeless man asking for change. The professor instead imparts classical words of wisdom: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." And as if to underscore the pedantry, he adds, "William Shakespeare." The homeless man wears a sour expression on his face and after pausing a moment replies: "Fuck you. David Mamet."
Gov. Eliot Spitzer was elected overwhelmingly in 2006 on his promise to finally bring transparency and efficiency to New York, a promise brokered on his glamorous Wall Street-busting successes as state attorney general. Well, it didn't take long for his administration to plow right over public expectations.
I have little love for Samantha Power's foreign policy prescriptions (which I find eminently worthy of a Harvard academic) but I will say that her lickety-split resignation from the Obama camp after calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" was probably the silliest episode yet in an overlong cartoon of an election season.
