Is it because there is always delight in the semitranslucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colorful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace, and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon the haggard masturbator; Duncan the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving for whom I am sorry. And there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing on a pencil, detested by teachers, all the boys' eyes on her hair and neck, my Lolita.

I find the budding scandal, as it were, of Ms. Miley Cyrus's photo spread in Vanity Fair to be as ridiculous as the fact that no one would touch V. Nabokov's manuscript in 1955 except The Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias's hothouse imprint located on the Isle of Wight, and future publisher of Valerie Solanas's S.C.U.M. manifesto, which would have made Humbert Humbert cackle. Now that the unfinished and malformed Original of Laura looks well on its way to being typeset, thanks to Ron Rosenbaum and Vladimir's spectral influence in his son Dmitri's decision-making, it seems as if the creator of Lolita is still needed to satirize American culture's titillated puritanism and faux outrage. A week ago I didn't know who Cyrus was ("Hannah Montana" sounds like an Orthodox right-wing militia), and now I know that she's three years too old to be ranked a proper nymphet but mature enough to milk an "I have sinned!" PR kerfuffle for all it's worth:

"I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be 'artistic' and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed. I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about."

As for those new fans in truck stop men's rooms and dentist's offices, Miley thinks this grape-juice tastes funny. What's more newsworthy, that Disney has some explaining to do to a phalanx of angry mommy bloggers or that the New York Times had to append this correction to its story about the whole pre-fab controversy?

A headline and an article on Monday about a Vanity Fair photograph showing the actress in a suggestive pose left the incorrect impression that she was bare-breasted. While the pose was indeed revealing, she was wrapped in what appeared to be a bedsheet; she was not topless.

Now how many eager beavers rushed right out and bought a copy of Graydon's glossy after running their eyes over the misleading headline?

Also, a word to the Cyrus household: Annie Leibovitz doesn't do wholesome.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Pajamas Media got John Derbyshire to rebut David Berlinski:

After some routine slandering of scientists as having "acquired" the "authority" of Soviet commissars -- I await with interest the demarcation of ZiL lanes for the sole benefit of atheistical biologists heading for their country dachas -- I see this: "It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism."

Now I recall why I disliked David's book so much. There was something like this on every page -- something that fires off the chain of reactions: Is it? ... What does this actually MEAN? ... Does it, in point of fact, mean ANYTHING? ... Oh, the heck with it!

What, in that particular sentence, does David mean by "recently"? Since the seventeenth century? Since that rash of atheist books came out a couple of years ago? The only clue David gives us is a list of physicists in the following sentence. It's a pretty random list, with a 200-year jump from Newton to Maxwell, so let's try to be a bit more systematic.

Bang on, boyo. The selection of the author here could not have been better. Derbs is a genuine Little Englander reactionary, and I don't mean that metaphorically. He's straight out of the Larkin mould, and carries with him all the same complications and contradictions that made the best 20th century postwar poet worth reading. Larkin had no use for religion, and made an art form out of fearing death because he knew it was the end (From "Aubade": "No sight, no sound / no touch or taste or smell; Nothing to think with / Nothing to love or link with / The anesthetic from which none come round.")

As it happens, Derb is on an anti-creationism tear lately, with a brilliant and hilarious take-down of Ben Stein's absurd documentary Expelled at -- wait for it -- National Review:

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world -- that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he's not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: "Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!"

The "intelligent design" hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)

He rightly calls Stein's claim that Darwinism was responsible for the Holocaust a blood libel on civilization, and he enlists Evelyn Waugh and Rudyard Kipling to his defense! The former was an High Church Anglo-Catholic who loved to remind people that if they thought he was nasty as he was, they should try imagining him without the kindling of humanity afforded him by his religion. Waugh would have had little time for cartoonish lab-coat theology; he would have seen it as a clumsy attempt at being "modern."

And frankly, more men of faith should look askance on pseudoscientific attempts to legitimize what is meant to be an act of supreme courage. Belief rationalized and falsely certified by later traditions requires that much less effort on the part of the believer. God-minding was never supposed to be so easy.

That Derb's polemic on behalf of secularism and science and sanity occurs in one of the most conservative magazines in America is, I think, worthy of the title "event journalism." So hat's off to Jewcy's house goy, to whom I dedicate this cut-and-paste job of "Church Going," Larkin's gorgeous hymn to an alien rite:

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:29 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

One of the brainier conservatives to emerge from the Bush White House (and he's a Canadian Tory of all things) is David Frum, who famously gave us the much derided "axis of evil" coinage and in his spare time writes learned essays on George Eliot. Why much derided? Because an axis denotes a partnership or alliance, usually a nefarious one, and Daniel Koffler would sooner compliment Chelsea Clinton on her parentage at a dinner party at Leon Wieseltier's house than a Stalinist would collaborate with a mullah, or a Sunni help a Shia work the detonator on an IED. I read that on the Internet so it must be true.

Yes, well, I believe the relevant Latin is de te fabula narratur -- the joke's on you:

For years we have heard that it was impossible, inconceivable, that states such as Syria, North Korea, Iran or Saddam Hussein's Iraq could ever co-operate with each other. We were told that Shiite Iran could never possibly ally with Sunni terrorist groups such as Hamas or al-Qaeda. Yet again and again, over the past half dozen years, we have witnessed just that. North Korea did help Syria. Iran and North Korea did exchange technology. Iran did subsidize Hamas. Al-Qaeda leaders did find refuge in Iran.

You know, it's almost like they form an axis or something.

Syria wasn't even in the original Iran-NoKo-Iraq troika, so I guess it's an alternate if one of the regulars can't live up to its mustache-twirling malevolence on the designated day. Unfortunately, Barack Obama's go-to man on nukes, Joseph Cirincione, last September sounded more like Seymour Hersh when he dismissed the possibility that North Korean scientists could be helping Syria build a plutonium processing facility:

"This [early news of the Syrian facility] appears to be the work of a small group of officials leaking cherry-picked, unvetted 'intelligence' to key reporters in order to promote a pre-existing political agenda. If this sounds like the run-up to the war in Iraq, it should. This time it appears aimed at derailing the U.S.-North Korean agreement that administration hardliners think is appeasement. Some Israelis want to thwart any dialogue between the U.S. and Syria."

The leftist response to this, judging from how Talking Points Memo, et al. have alighted on Damascus's similarly themed "nothing to see here, folks" denials of wrongdoing, is to say that even if the Assad regime were guilty, it's all the fault of the Bushies for creating an atmosphere of plausible deniability after their Iraq caper. No one now believes the official intelligence -- except of course when it gives Iran a clean bill of health, or otherwise thwarts the "hard-liners" from arguing anything that could be used to make a case for military intervention.

What a shame, too. Had Israel not destroyed Syria's almost-completed reactor, we would have had another rogue state with WMD for the White House to confront in a cowboyish manner, demonstrating yet again its blatant disregard for negotiation and dialogue. Think of all the missed editorials and blog posts, then weep.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:26 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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New@ Jewcy:

File this in the Shit Where You Eat Department. My other digital stomping ground, Pajamas Media, has run a rather silly piece by one of the cleverer sophists of the Intelligent Design movement (do I mean to say 'moment'?), David Berlinski. A trained mathematician with a doctorate from Princeton and author of the just published The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions, Berlinski is a high-profile member of the Discovery Institute, a religious think tank that sets upon Darwin's theory the way lions used to set upon Christians, and whose primus inter pares David Klinghoffer has had multiple outpourings in these pages, most recently comparing evolutionism to Nazism.

Slate's inestimable David Engber recently profiled Berlinski in a series of pieces about the conspiracy-mongering paranoids of pseudoscience:

Berlinski's radical and often wrong-headed skepticism represents an ascendant style in the popular debate over American science: Like the recent crop of global-warming skeptics, AIDS denialists, and biotech activists, Berlinski uses doubt as a weapon against the academy--he's more concerned with what we don't know than what we do. He uses uncertainty to challenge the scientific consensus; he points to the evidence that isn't there and seeks out the things that can't be proved. In its extreme and ideological form, this contrarian approach to science can turn into a form of paranoia--a state of permanent suspicion and outrage. But Berlinski is hardly a victim of the style. He's merely its most methodical practitioner.

What distinguished Berlinski from the pack is that he is not a believer himself; only an enemy of what he sees as belief's arrogant opponents. As one of his book jackets says, his ambition is to "turn the scientific community's cherished skepticism back on itself." He doubts the Big Bang could account for the origins of the universe, and he is unimpressed with the fossil record as a document of man's development into the lowly, febrile creature you see in the mirror each morning. So Berlinski is more of a fellow traveler and jujitsu artist of Intelligent Design than a true keeper of the flame.

I should add that my friend and fellow Nabokovian Ron Rosenbaum, who is the kind of literary journalist I want to be when I grow up, has called Berlinski "that rara avis, a True Skeptic, one of the most provocative--and
courageous--of contemporary writers and thinkers. To me, Mr. Berlinski
is a genuine intellectual hero." Now Ron has met the man in the flesh and so may have glimpsed a gem-like flame I keep missing in my investigations of Berlinski's scholarship. I should also admit that I'm capable of little commentary on advanced calculus beyond the Barbie-like assertion that it's "hard," but I do know something about logic and the fashioning of an intellectual argument. I can also affirm that Steven Pinker, one of Berlinski's foils, is not a fraud, nor does he present his theses as "dogmatically established, beyond the purview of doubt." Pinker recognizes that science still has much more to learn than it has to teach, but, unlike Berlinski, he does not believe existing epistemological lacunae are sufficient explanations for the existence of the divine.

Insane moral equivalence seems to be a trademark characteristic of this latest Great Awakening of cranks and fantasists, and Berlinski provides a good example at Pajamas, likening atheist scientists to Soviet commissars:

The commissars having vacated the scene, it is the scientific community that has acquired their authority. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Weinberg, Vic Stenger, Sam Harris, and most recently the mathematician John Paulos, have had a look around: They haven't seen a thing. No one could have seen less. It is curious that so many scientists should have recently embraced atheism. The great physical scientists -- Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein -- were either men of religious commitment or religious sensibility.

This comes as a kind of evidence against interest throat-clearing before introducing a supposed snatch of "gotchas" in the new Ben Stein-produced documentary Expelled, which is to Intelligent Design what Michael Moore was to Saddam Hussein, and which makes much the same case as Berlinski does here -- that practitioners of junk science have been hounded like Zionist-Trotskyist-CIA-deviationists out of the workers' paradise of the scientific community. Did you know that if asked Richard Dawkins can't certify for 100% certain that there is not a prime mover in the universe? Q.E.D. there is one.

I'm not sure if Berlinski knows less about science or about Communism, but I certainly know more about the latter than he, so let's begin there.

It is of course untrue to say that the Soviet citizenry believed the Politburo to be "infallible;" it had been indoctrinated to believe that under Marxism-Leninism the Party itself was infallible and greater than any one man or collection of men. The Russian word for this was Partiinost, and it is why high-ranking Communists were routinely purged without any threat posed to the larger totalitarian system that produced and replaced them as interchangeably as cogs. One might make the case that Stalin was, in the popular imagination, an unerring supreme leader, but that historical observation comes at the expense of religion, not materialism. Indeed, many scholars of Russian political history have traced Stalin's personality cult back to the time of Golden Horde. The autocratic political imprint left by the Mongolian conquerors of infant Russia was then fused with Byzantine Caesaropapism, which is why the czars were not just secular heads of state, but godheads anointed and certified by the Eastern Orthodox Church. (As Peter the Great was given to remark when told Russia needed a holy Patriarch, Russia already had one -- himself.)

As for classical Marxism, apart from being so greatly at odds with the messianic or ecclesiastical tradition, it was, as the French philosopher Raymond Aron once put it, a "Christian heresy;" a political movement that foreordained Providence on earth, where class took the place of sin. An apter comparison for Berlinski to have made, then, would be between the Soviet commissars and the clerisy during the Inquisition, both in terms of the brutal methods of interrogation employed and the interrogators' core objectives. (Dr. Dawkins's very participation in a shambolic documentary like Expelled is proof of his willingness confront and challenge adversarial thinking, a willingness which the commissars and the priestly agents of Torquemada were not known for sharing.)

Communism, it must also be said, was not favorably disposed to the kind of science understood and practiced by the atheists Berlinski cites. One need only look at Lysenkoism or some of Stalin's sillier linguistic theories to see how vulgarized and ideologized science was in the former Soviet Union -- the Baconian method of inquiry and trial and error never had a fighting chance. Nor would anyone trained even at the elementary level in the philosophical underpinnings of that method fail to spot the problem with a question like this:

"[W]hat reason do we have to suppose that God might not exist?"

One can't prove a negative proposition, and the burden of providing evidence still falls to Berlinski and his contrarian cohort. Why should we suppose God does exist? Mention of the awe and mystery of the universe only begs the question.

As for Albert Einstein, he was once asked if he believed in the divine and replied, "I believe in Spinoza's god," which is as polite an admission of atheism as anyone has ever given. Unless of course believers wouldn't mind replacing "God" with the word "Nature" as the great Jewish sage was tellingly given to do -- after being excommunicated by a rather commissar-like Dutch rabbinate.

Related in Jewcy: Philosopher and biologist Sahotra Sarkar explains that "'Intelligent Design' Creationism is an Immoral Fraud."

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New @ New Criterion:

Jonathan Rauch of The Atlantic has written an intriguing essay on the Burkean conservatism of John McCain, most of which I find astute:

As eclectic a reformer as [McCain] has been in the Senate, he has been consistent in his incrementalism. Though he was known to sound hot-headed on campaign-finance reform, his legislative work produced a reform that was mostly modest in its aims and that mostly attained them. He has been an old-fashioned budget balancer, not a newfangled supply-sider. He defends his global-warming efforts as gradualist and as modeled on emissions-trading systems that have already been tested. In the presidential primaries, he showed little interest in grandiose promises.

Where I think the analogy flounders is in its almost total disregard for the one policy to which McCain has been and will be forever tethered -- the war in Iraq. Of this seismic event, Rauch correctly observes that Edmund Burke, though a foe of tyranny, would have blanched at the "[forcible] uprooting the authority structures," with the attendant promise that "a mini-America [would] spring forth." The short way of putting this would be to say that regime change is an intrinsically revolutionary project, and the prescient critic of revolution would almost certainly have opposed it. The bringing of parliamentary democracy to a hitherto autocratically ruled country -- and a non-Christian one -- riven by religious sectarianism and besieged on all sides by aggressive neighbors would have struck Burke as a headlong folly "built upon a theory" and anathema to the hard lessons of patience and experience. He was a man of the law-and-liberty tradition, par excellence, and to him Iraq would have been a darker shade of France.

Burke favored and facilitated the American Revolution in his capacity as a member of the House of Commons not because he thought it was a radical endeavor but -- and here is where he agreed with his future celebrated antagonist Thomas Paine -- it was the timely and logical conclusion to a long-frayed colonial relationship. The metropole had denied fundamental rights to its faraway subjects and thus forfeited the right to rule them.

The revolution in France was different, according to Burke, because it made a vice of abstraction and cant (talk of "Liberty" and "The Rights of Man" being cover for the sanguinary activities of the godless mob), and because it attempted to upend the ancien regime without due consideration of the consequences for the future, or due reverence for the institutions of the past. Also, it was only the beginning: Burke disdained the term "French revolution," which implied an isolated event. The revolution, rather, was now "in" France but could very well spread beyond its borders and engulf all of Europe -- as indeed it did, in denatured or counterrevolutionary form, under the generalship of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose advent Burke predicted with uncanny exactitude. His greatest fear was that domestic sympathy with the Jacobin cause would lead to a similar cataclysm in England, and it is worth remembering that he wrote in his masterpiece polemic in 1790 in response to Dr. Richard Price, a Unitarian minister and leader of London's Revolution Society, which had called for solidarity with the French National Assembly and the followers of Danton.

Well before Thermidor and the executions of King Louis and Marie Antoinette, Burke had observed, "The spirit in [the revolution] is not impossible to admire; but the old Parisian ferocity has broken out in a shocking manner. It is true, that this may be no more than a sudden explosion... But if it should be character rather than accident, then that people are not fit for Liberty, and must have a Strong hand like that of their former masters to coerce them."

To the contemporary reader, such a pronouncement prefigures one underlying trope of the current antiwar sentiment in America, which believes the Iraqi -- not to say "Arab" -- character is unfit for representative government and requires a strongman to keep it in check. McCain's paeans to the universal longing for democracy and freedom, themselves echoes of President Bush's rhetoric, would have had struck the wrong chords in Burke's overcautious ear. History and peoplehood mattered to him profoundly, and it was with the utmost disappointment that he took stock of the blood-stained chaos to which a "a nation of gallant men...men of honour, and of cavaliers" had since descended.

In the post-Thermidor period, and shortly before his death, Burke wrote a series of Letters on a Regicide Peace, in which he warned the Pitt government not to enter into a treaty with the Directory of France, which was headed by morally bankrupt men who were still apt for war:

"Whatever were the first motives to the war among politicians, they saw that in its spirit, and for its object, it was a civil war; and as such they pursued it. It is a war between the partisans of the ancient civil, moral, and political order of Europe against a sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists which means to change them all. It is not France extending a foreign empire over other nations: it is a sect aiming at universal empire, and beginning with the conquest of France. The leaders of that sect secured the center of Europe; and that secured, they knew, that, whatever might be the event of battles and sieges, their cause was victorious."

Thus does the forefather of modern conservatism warn against his country's involving itself in a fratricidal foreign dispute hijacked by a sect of messianic participants who dream of world conquest... McCain's thoroughgoing argument for not quitting Iraq is based on this same minatory premise, where Al Qaeda is a stand-in for the "sect of fanatical and ambitious atheists," and the grim aftermath of the country's implosion would surely affect the United States.

There is at least one more irony in comparing Burke to McCain. The 18th century Irishman was not merely defending the church in France out of an a fortiori defense of monarchy as being inextricable from divine right. Apart from his general esteem of the ecclesiastical tradition, Burke was acutely concerned with the denomination of church in question. His mother was a Roman Catholic and his father, as Conor Cruise O'Brien has brilliantly argued, was in all probability something of a "closeted" one, too. Richard Burke may well have been confirmed to the Protestant Established Church of Ireland only to protect his legal practice and to indemnify himself and his family against England's viciously anti-Catholic Penal Code. Burke fils spent the better part of his political life agitating for Catholic rights and suffering no small amount of obloquy and persecution for it. He at one point lost his Parliamentary seat in Bristol following the passage of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which was the fruit of his singular labors. Burke was also personally blamed by the psychotic Lord George Gordon, imago and populist egger-on of the anti-Catholic riots which swept London in 1780 and bore the aristocrat's name.

In short, then, he was well attuned to the anti-Papist subtext of the banners of 1789. The Revolution Society was after all founded to celebrate England's Glorious Revolution of 1688, in which the Catholic King James II was ousted in favor of his Protestant daughter Mary and her Dutch Protestant husband William III. Here is O'Brien:

"This particular combination of defending 1688 while attacking Roman Catholicism hurt Burke deeply, for it hit him along a fundamental fault line in his political personality. Burke was a Whig, and thus ex officio committed to the principles of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, including the Protestant succession. But at the same time he was disqualified from sharing the feelings of normal English Whigs toward that Revolution: Burke needed to play down its anti-Catholic elements. When the Revolution Society played up the latter, Burke suffered and needed to strike back."

As the descendant of a long line of Scotch-Irish Protestants, McCain hasn't the motive or inclination to wed his philosophy to so covert an "agenda" for the safeguarding of a religious minority. Rauch mentions that Burke would have found more to choose among the current crop of Democratic candidates for president than he would the highly radical movement conservatives who have never gelled to McCain because he is too temperate and respectful of old, if imperfect, state institutions -- he is a "liberal," in other words, in the classical sense of the term. We may look skeptically on this proposition as well. But it is true that the president whose arraignment over his publicly suspected religion Burke would have instantly responded to with solicitude and dread was a Democrat: John F. Kennedy. And here it may be worth recalling the most forgotten point of Burke's biography: He was never a Tory but a Whig.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:27 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New @ PJM:

According to the New York Times, Barack Obama's new strategy in the wake of a double-digit defeat in Pennsylvania is to ignore Hillary Clinton's persistent presence in the race and focus squarely on John McCain. Obama's chief campaign strategist David Axelrod was quoted as saying, "There is a sense of urgency about the time we're losing and a sense of urgency that we not savage each other to the benefit of Senator McCain." Indeed, Clinton's name occurred only once in Obama's concession speech Tuesday night, whereas McCain's occurred six times. In other words, Obama has begun presenting himself as the presumptive nominee immediately after losing his once famed momentum and also, judging by the cable television networks' coverage of his latest defeat, the media-blessed heir apparency. McCain and Clinton should be hugging themselves with glee to behold this ill-starred move.

Read more here.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New @ PJM:

The conservative "realist" school of foreign policy does not lack for sinister fools, but Scott Ritter owns a coveted place near the top of any list. He is a stalwart Republican who has nevertheless become the doyen of the antiwar community for his correct prediction about the neutered state of Saddam Hussein's prewar WMD capability. Yet lest one instance of being right lend him a reputation of defense policy soundness, there are many items in his resume that must be weighted against any comment he offers in the field of international relations.

Ritter resigned from his position as the UN weapons inspector for Iraq, which he held from 1991 to 1998, because he thought that the erstwhile US policy of containment was insufficient in preventing Saddam Hussein from developing WMD. Ritter's team had been denied access in 1998 to various weapons-making facilities in Iraq, and so he was well poised to pass judgment that the regime had something to hide -- whether actual WMD material or a proven desire to manufacture it at a later date.

Ritter was always doggedly opposed to the military removal of the Iraqi dictator; instead, he advocated the resumption or "normalization" of US-Iraqi relations - despite the Ba'ath's unequaled record of genocide, foreign aggression, and domestic totalitarianism. When Ritter resigned from his UN post in frustration, he told interviewer Elizabeth Farnsworth:

"The investigations had come to a standstill, were making no effective progress, and in order to make effective progress, we really needed the Security Council to step in a meaningful fashion and seek to enforce its resolutions that we're not complying with."

And:

Iraq still has prescribed weapons capability. There needs to be a careful distinction here. Iraq today is challenging the special commission to come up with a weapon and say where is the weapon in Iraq, and yet part of their efforts to conceal their capabilities, I believe, have been to disassemble weapons into various components and to hide these components throughout Iraq.

A year later, he published a book entitled Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem - Once and For All, in which he restated the failure of the international community to get Baghdad to start complying with the law and acting transparently.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 9:14 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

New @ Jewcy:

Everything that has come out of the Judd Apatow comedy industrial complex is a variation on the theme of romantic implausibility. A sexually inexperienced man-child who collects action figures will win the heart of a lissome granny (The 40 Year-Old Virgin). A financially insolvent porn database stoner will impregnate a buxom E! reporter (Knocked Up). Two homoerotically bound high school nerds will win the hearts and loins of two precocious cuties who would almost certainly be fucking college guys, with nary a computer-generated Kelly LeBrock in sight (Superbad).

The premise of Forgetting Sarah Marshall is so shopworn that the movie has no right to be as entertaining as it is. Jason Segel's Peter Bretter is a soundtrack musician for a silly Law and Order-type crime drama in which his girlfriend, the eponymous Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) stars. She dumps him while he lolls around naked and confused in their modest L.A. home, and the first fifteen minutes or so of plot development are devoted to Peter's coping mechanisms: weeping uncontrollably, eating cereal by the cubic meter, and sleeping around with mute-orgasming models and sadomasochistic bar skanks (nice work if you can get it). He decides to take a holiday in Hawaii to get his mind off his recently departed beloved, but, lo and behold, Sarah's booked the same trip with her new English rock star boyfriend, Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), lead singer of my favorite band name in ages, Infant Sorrow. Peter spends about the next fifteen minutes bearing inconsolable witness to their public displays of lewdness. Were it not for an unfathomably kind and unspeakably beautiful hotel concierge, Rachel (Mila Kunis, whose bath water I'd gladly drink), Peter would have likely hanged himself by his lei.

Read more here.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:08 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (2)

New @ New Criterion:

In terms of literary or intellectual rallying points, geography has always seemed to me the least persuasive. Doree Shafrir's article "The Brooklyn Literary 100" in the New York Observer only underscores my prejudice against thinking that enough writers occupying a neighborhood does a "community" make. She begins like this:

The idea of a Brooklyn literary "scene" is one that has become so ingrained in the city's consciousness that, in true Brooklyn style, it has now become fashionable to consider writerly Brooklyn in an ironic manner, to comment on the ridiculousness of the idea that a place can, in fact, be said to help define a literary community.

That idea is ridiculous, as most things defined in an "ironic" manner tend to be. We don't speak of a plumbing community or an attorneys' scene, and so the implication here is that those who live by their pens and laptops somehow share a common sensibility, even if they do all hang out at the same bars. Yet what connects Paul Auster to Jonathan Safran Foer other than mortgages in Park Slope? It's not as if National Book Awards or gushy write-ups in the Times are dispensed like MetroCards at the Bergen Street 2/3 stop (it only seems that way sometimes).

Modernism may have hit a high mark in the Paris of the 1920's, but again, as to the differences in style and talent between, say, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, one of them might as well have spent the louche interwar years in Papua New Guinea. Saul Bellow once had an apartment in my hometown of Forest Hills, Queens, which was the birthplace of David Horowitz and is the current residence of fired Page Six reporter, gossip novelist, and book party pugilist Ian Spiegelman -- writers all, but strangers bound by zip code alone.

Still, when it comes to the life of the mind, we do tend to think in terms of cartography, if only as shorthand for a more complicated area of congruence. "New York" became the preferred prefix before "intellectuals" because of the ethnic and cosmopolitan associations with "the city," which, in the thirties, referred to the bustling, Gentile-occupied island of Manhattan exclusively. In the cultural imaginations of the radical sons of Jewish immigrants who grew up in various parts of the Bronx and Brooklyn, the city constituted a separate country to which they all yearned to gain admittance. If they wound up on the Upper West Side it was because it was cheap back then. But the New York Intellectuals never especially agreed or got along with one another; they founded Partisan Review to prove it.

The truth is, writing is a depressingly solitary activity. Discussion and debate in cafes and salons may provide germs of inspiration, but the maddening spadework is up to the lone individual when the Starbucks XM radio and the clangor of familiar company die down. This is why some of the best essays and novels of the last century have been composed in disordered flights from tyranny and stultification, or in states of isolated squalor. The Adventures of Augie March got done in various ports of call in Europe. Orwell eschewed the cocktail party. Koestler's Rubashov worked out his theory of history in between bouts of commissar interrogation, while his author worked him out in a Spanish prison cell.

Whenever I hear of a "scene" or supposed congeries of great artists and minds, I'm reminded of Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies. Adam and Nina sit on the deck of a boat party to which absolutely everyone who's anyone is invited:

"Can't you just see the ghosts?" [Mrs. Hoop] said to Lady Circumference on the stairs. "Pitt and Fox and Burke and Lady Hamilton and Beau Brummel and Dr. Johnson" (a concurrence of celebrities, it may be remarked, at which something memorably might surely have occurred). "Can't you just see them-in their buckled shoes?"

Lady Circumcumference raised her lorgnette and surveyed the stream of guests debouching from the cloak-rooms like City workers from the Underground. She saw Mr. Outrage and Lord Metroland in consultation about the Censorship Bill... She saw both Archbishops, the Duke and Duchess of Stayle, Lord Vanburgh and Lady Metroland, Lady Throbbing and Edward Throbbing and Mrs. Blackwater, Mrs. Mouse and Lord Monomark and a superb Levantine, and behind and about them a great concourse of pious and honourable people... people who had represented their country in foreign places and sent their sons to die for her in battle, people of decent and temperate life, uncultured, unaffected, unembarrassed, unassuming, unambitious people, of independent judgment and marketed eccentricities, kind of people who cared for animals and the deserving poor, brave and rather unreasonable people, that fine phalanx of the passing order, approaching, as one day at the Last Trump they hopes to meet their Maker, with decorous and frank cordiality to shake Lady Anchorage by the hand at the top of her staircase. Lady Circumference saw all this and sniffed the exhalation of her own herd. But she saw no ghosts.

"That's all my eye," she said.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 8:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New @ New Criterion:

Tom Stoppard owns the patent on English dramatization of 19th-century Russian revolutionaries. But the Irish one belongs to Oscar Wilde, whose flop of a first play, "Vera, or the Nihilists," was loosely based on the story of Vera Zasulich, about whom a new unconventional and thoroughly tantalizing biography has been published. In Wilde's drama, a comely peasant girl discovers her brother, sent off to Moscow to train as a lawyer, has been arrested and dispatched to Siberia for joining a revolutionary cadre of Nihilists. She later joins up with this same group and falls in love with an unlikely member, the disguised Czarevitch Alexis, whose sympathies are with the people against his paranoid and tyrannical father, Czar Ivan.

Wilde depicted the bloody-minded throng of rebels as he would any mob; for them a rush to judgment was reason in itself, and means and ends were as confused as the grammar of their many turgid manifestos. (Of particular note is that the "Wildean" character in this play is Prince Paul, one of the Czar's wittiest and most opportunistic ministers who sells out to the enemies of his erstwhile court.) Yet there was no mistaking the socialist republican playwright's own sympathies in this cri de coeur loosed by his lovelorn and politically fraught protagonist:

O God, how easy it is for a king to kill his people by thousands, but we cannot rid ourselves of one crowned man in Europe! What is there of awful majesty in these men which makes the hand unsteady, the dagger treacherous, the pistol-shot harmless? Are they not men of like passions with ourselves, vulnerable to the same diseases, of flesh and blood not different from our own? What made Olgiati tremble at the supreme crisis of that Roman life, and Guido's nerve fail him when he should have been of iron and of steel? A plague, I say, on these fools of Naples, Berlin, and Spain! Methinks that if I stood face to face with one of the crowned men my eye would see more clearly, my aim be more sure, my whole body gain a strength and power that was not my own! Oh, to think what stands between us and freedom in Europe! a few old men, wrinkled, feeble, tottering dotards whom a boy could strangle for a ducat, or a woman stab in a night-time. These are the things that keep us from liberty.

Vera goes on to assassinate the governor of Archangel, shortly before Michael, another member of her radical groupuscule, kills the Czar himself-mainly to impress her since he's had a thing for her ever since their shared peasant youth. Then, in a highly un-Russian and all-too-Shakespearean twist, she commits suicide rather than plunge a dagger into the heart of her beloved, who now wears the Imperial crown with the intent to emancipate his subjects, release all political prisoners from jail or exile, and usher in an age of democracy from the steppes to the taiga. Vera thus violates the "oath" she pledged to Nihilism never to pardon monarchy and always to fight for the revolution. (That Nihilists had such an oath to begin with was an irony tailor-made for Wilde, and later the Coen brothers.)

The real Vera was not so successful in her attentat, nor was she ever so soft or conflicted as her theatrical counterpart. In the Moscow Times, Virginia Rounding reviews Ana Siljak's Angel of Vengeance: The "Girl Assassin," the Governor of St. Petersburg, and Russia's Revolutionary World:

Comrades of Vera, but not Vera herself, now ended up at St. Petersburg's House of Preliminary Detention, a model prison based on London's Pentonville, where political prisoners were detained prior to their trials and where occurred the event that sparked Vera's decision to assassinate the city's governor. Trepov had arrived unexpectedly one day for an inspection, been horrified by the lax regime he found in place and, almost as a reflex action, ordered one of the inmates, a man called Bogolyubov, to be flogged. Such treatment was normally never meted out to the young intellectuals held in the "Prelim," and riots ensued. Vera herself had never met Bogolyubov, but she decided to avenge him anyway, and to become a martyr for the revolution in the process.

Siljak recounts the story of Vera's trial in detail and with a lively sense of drama. In his summing up, the judge asked the jury to consider not only whether Vera had shot Governor Trepov (about which there was really no doubt), but also whether she had intended to kill him. It took only 30 minutes for the jury, sympathetic to Vera's stated aim "to prove that no one should be sure they are beyond punishment when they violate human dignity," to clear her of all charges. Pandemonium broke out, and the stunned Vera found herself cast in the role of heroine and founding mother of Russian terrorism.

Siljak's book is unconventional because its climax -- Zasulich's attempted murder of Trepov and her subsequent trial -- are treated as a narrative post script on hundreds of pages of historical backstory. The author is more concerned with the intellectual-political firmament out of which Zasulich fell to earth and into bloody immortality.

Left out of Rounding's review is that after Zasulich repudiated terrorism and retired to Geneva, she joined the editorial board of a vibrant little Russian exile newspaper called Iskra, the "Spark." The rest of the masthead included Georgi Plekhanov, father of Russian Marxism and coiner of the term "dialectical materialism;" Julius Martov, the future ill-starred head of the Menshevik Party; and Vladimir Lenin. (Trotsky joined later).

Zasulich was thus the knot that bound two tendencies of Russian revolutionism: the frayed disorder of Nihilism and the taut organization of Bolshevism. She was a disciple of Sergei Nechaev (1847-1882), the disaffected student cum terrorist high priest of the so-called Raznotchinsky or "Generation of the Sons." They were the violent upstarts who, impatient with top-down reform or a milder form of village socialism, set about undoing the humane legacy of great radicals and moralists like Alexander Herzen and Vissarion Belinsky. Together with his comrade Peter Tkachev -- who later prefigured the strategies and tactics of Leninism -- Nechaev drafted the Program for Revolutionary Action, which defined the role of the "professional revolutionary" as that of a self-abnegating agent of social upheaval; the member of a hive, in other words, in which the individual was utterly and completely subordinated to the revolutionary collective.

Nechaev fled Russia in 1869 in order to drum up money and support for a non-existent revolutionary committee of which he was the self-proclaimed head. Though he had disavowed all ties to kith and kin, he was charismatic and intelligent enough to prey upon the gullibility of a few sympathizers. The historian E.H. Carr, in his brilliant, tragic history of the Herzen family, The Romantic Exiles, summarized Nechaev's short but influential life like this:

He deceived everyone he met, and when he was no longer able to deceive, his power was gone. His audacity was unbounded; and he carried personal courage to the extreme limit of foolhardiness. He is an unparalleled and bewildering combination of fanatic, swashbuckler, and cad.

Chief among his admirers and dupes was Mikhail Bakunin, whom he met in Switzerland. Nechaev persuaded the shaggy mastodon of anarchism to revert to a colder, steelier course of revolution. Bakunin's politics was the stuff of clownish whimsy, yet he had a rare ability to raise resources for his many fool adventures (Herzen was an indulgent, if wary, benefactor in this regard). Now that he had a vicious machiavellian guiding his actions, Bakunin could do great harm indeed. He and Nechaev co-wrote the famous "Catechism of a Revolutionary," which hymned destruction for its own sake and famously began:

The Revolutionist is a doomed man. He has no private interests, no affairs, sentiments, ties, property nor even a name of his own. His entire being is devoured by one purpose, one thought, one passion - the revolution. Heart and soul, not merely by word but by deed, he has severed every link with the social order and with the entire civilized world; with the laws, good manners, conventions, and morality of that world. He is its merciless enemy and continues to inhabit it with only one purpose - to destroy it.

Bakunin eventually extricated himself from this doomed friendship and claimed "[t]he man of [his] dreams turned out to be a figure from a nightmare." But while back in Russia, agitating for yet another phantom cadre, this one with alleged cross-continental reach, Nechaev managed to ensnare the next generation of intelligentsia in his flame-and-steel messianism. His rhetoric captivated the young Zasulich, who said she was made to feel weak against the older outlaw's decisiveness: "He could and would act - wasn't he the ringleader of the students? ... I could imagine no greater pleasure than serving the revolution. I had dared only to dream of it, and yet now he was saying that he wanted to recruit me...."

Nechaev murdered his own comrades, most notoriously I.I. Ivanov, who refused to truckle to his authority. Ivanov's body was discovered days later in a lake, and Dostoevsky fictionalized the event in The Devils. No doubt this eagerness to devour his own contingent lent legitimacy to Nechaev's historical status as an ideological godfather to Bolshevism. Ironically, he was anathematized in the Soviet Union when Stalin had his name erased from the Russian "family tree" -- because surely there was no room on any of its branches for a mendacious killer and impostor. Soviet psychologists might have termed this "projection," and the great Russo-Hungarian historian Tibor Szamuely (about whom I wrote for TNC last October) concluded:

It is one of the minor ironies of the Russian Revolution that the final destruction of Nechaev's reputation should have occurred at the height of the Great Purge of 1936-1938: an event which he would probably have wholeheartedly approved, conducted in accordance with the principles he himself had formulated. The possessed had devoured their prototype.

Zasulich opposed the October Revolution, having become something of a moderate Marxist in the decades prior to her demise in 1919. Trotsky wrote of her that she "remained to the end the old radical intellectual on whom fate grafted Marxism. [Her] articles show that she had adopted to a remarkable degree the theoretic elements of Marxism. But the moral political foundations of the Russian radicals of the '70s remained untouched in her until her death."

So of the parturition of the totalitarian monster that engulfed Russia in the 20th century, Zasulich acted as both midwife and failed abortionist.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:41 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

New @ Jewcy:

No publisher will touch a manuscript with the word "intellectual" in the title, or so goes one chestnut about how stupid our culture has become. When British studio heads were looking to adapt Alan Bennett's play "The Madness of George III" for celluloid, they felt it necessary to change the title to The Madness of King George lest too many Americans wonder what had happened to Parts I and II. Still, give us a chance and we may just lift our knuckles off the floor long enough to sit through cerebral entertainment. Sideways proved that an intelligent script featuring a sadsack oenophile snob - and Thomas Hayden Church! - could galvanize a national market for Pinot Noir. Smart People isn't nearly as good, but it's heartening to know that even a lackluster script featuring a sadsack literary snob - and Thomas Hayden Church! - can strike a foothold in Hollywood.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

New @ TNC:

The late E.P. Thompson is not a man I would imagine finds much favor in these pages. The reformist Communist who needed the Soviet invasion of Hungary to give up the Party; the founding editor New Left Review, who fell out with that sodality after an arcane spat with its younger generation; the loser in a major intellectual debate with the great Polish anatomist of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski. Yet Thompson is also remembered for a phrase which conservatives might consider stealing: "the enormous condescension of posterity." The context of this cutting remark is seldom given. It occurs in the preface of Thompson's seminal history, The Making of the English Working Class:

I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite, the cropper, the "obsolete" hand-loom weaver, the "utopian" artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.

Every historian should have as his guiding principle so generous an estimation of his subject. Note that Thompson neither stoops to flatter his with hagiography ("deluded," "foolhardy," "backward-looking"), nor assail it with the easy benefit of hindsight. Part of the reason for this is that he understood intuitively what the Left routinely forgets: in order to represent the working-class one must first take it seriously.

Here is how not to take it seriously:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Thus in one fell swoop does Barack Obama label a good portion of the electorate (those "small towns" are not confined to Pennsylvania) resentful, racist, gun-toting Bible nuts--misguided souls in need of someone like himself to shepherd them out of their miserable condition.

Read more.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:09 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My first post is a response to Robert Kagan's essay in World Affairs: "Neocon Nation: Neoconservatism, c. 1776," which does a lot to rubbish some of the more fanciful (and feverish) notions about an intellectual-political movement far too complicated to be left to, say, Justin Raimondo to analyze:

The Monroe Doctrine, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Vietnam, and then three (1991, 1998, 2003) wars against Saddam Hussein. The arguments for and against are all were uncannily similar, writes Kagan, implicitly rebuking those commentators on the left and right who seem to have a historical memory that extends as far back as President Bush's perusal of My Pet Goat.

Trotsky and Strauss may be on the reading lists of some enterprising members of the American Enterprise Institute, but it is the height of absurdity to deduce "permanent revolution" or the "noble lie" from our current efforts in Mesopotamia. (For Trotsky's theory to work, neighboring Arab proletariats would have to join with Iraq's in order to liberate its peasantry -- a contingency remote from the minds of Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, we can be sure. As for Strauss, who in Pentagon do you suppose would encourage religion as an emollient for the masses in Baghdad?)

Read more here.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:03 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Martin Amis has a line in Night Train, his postmodern murder mystery, about the victim: "She had it all, and she had it all, and then she had some more." This is how I've long felt about Julie Delpy, France's most accomplished manufacture since the Concorde. 2 Days in Paris, her charming if slightly uneven debut as a writer-director (she also scored the film), is Woody Allen's answer to Before Sunrise: a peripatetic talkfest between two neurotics adrift in a European city and at the very probable end of the affair. Indeed, that it all begins on a train suggests Delpy has seen a few too many romantic comedies--namely, her own.

More here.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New @ NY Post:

April 6, 2008 -- When n+1 magazine was started four years ago, it boldly declared it was going to restore seriousness and a love of ideas to the cultural landscape. "We're angrier than Dave Eggers and his crowd," co-editor Ben Kunkel told the Observer.

"Well, that's promising, kind of," said the Times Literary Supplement. "Angry about what? The war? Religious fundamentalism at home and abroad? Race and its discontents? . . . No. Kunkel is angry about dating."

Keith Gessen, the other founding editor of n+1, is angry about the war (and dating). Though he is a writer and literary critic of great promise, there is something a little too self-conscious and self-promotional about this new metropolitan smart set, of which Gessen is already said to be the eminence grise.

Gessen's "All the Sad Young Literary Men" is the tripartite story of a small herd of codependent minds. Keith, Max and Sam all have ambitious cerebral plans, exasperating political concerns and complicated girlfriends, and they all find how quickly each can be lost and replaced.

Keith is the aspiring pundit of liberal outrage, with a few well-received clips and a plan to write "The Damage Done," a history of the current administration's foreign policy. He's not unlike Philip Roth's Nathan Zuckerman in "The Ghost Writer." He wants to do something extraordinary before middle age, but like his fellow protagonists, he can be a bit high on his own supply, and boring: "I did not come to Harvard so that my roommate could sleep with, or almost-sleep with, the Vice President's daughter." Waste of an education, if you ask me.

Max is a divorcee and graduate student in Soviet history, working on a slender and undersourced dissertation about a forgotten Menshevik witness to the October Revolution. Finally there's Sam who wants to write the "great Zionist epic," be the uptown Leon Uris, despite having no Hebrew and even less specialized knowledge about Israel. If Fitzgerald set out to prove that there are no second acts in American lives, Gessen wants to prove you can easily squeeze in five or six before you turn 30.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:21 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

I'm now doing movie reviews for Jewcy. First one is of Stop-Loss.

Ryan Phillippe's acting ability has fallen, according to popular judgment, somewhere between Hayden Christensen's in Star Wars and Hayden Christensen's in Jumper. An unfair verdict, I would submit, since Phillippe has been more burdened by poor role choices, almost all of which have resulted from his career-making one as Sebastian Valmont in Cruel Intentions. This was the teen-cast remake of Les Liasons Dangereuse, set on the Upper East Side, and it was both better than the book and better than all cinematic adaptations prior or since. Will someone please smelt an Oscar for Best Age-Defining Plot Motive? Phillippe may not be the Olivier of the guilty pleasure, but who else can say he spent the fin de siecle destroying Reese Witherspoon's heart in order sodomize Sarah Michelle Gellar ("You can put it anywhere")?

Read more here.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

It's taken me a while to get to this, but at the risk of another protracted debate with someone who already owes me $100, here goes:

"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."

I suspect what happened was this: Daniel came up with the term "Bushido" first. He thought it was very clever, which it is -- worthy of David Axelrod himself. But in looking to apply it relevantly to McCain, he has either willfully or unintentionally misread an important foreign policy speech and rendered it lower than a caricature, which at least bears some resemblance to the filigreed original.

The claim that McCain looks beyond the borders of the United States and sees only a single, amorphous entity with the same history and "agenda" is patently absurd. He talks of eradicating malaria and HIV in Africa, adopting free trade agreements with countries in South America, fostering market development in Asia, and disciplining "pariah states" such as Sudan, Zimbabwe and Burma. Such diversity of aims, albeit only limned in the context of a campaign speech, cannot be boiled down to Daniel's imaginative paraphrase.

Above we're told that McCain's "transcendent challenge of our time" is a single foreign policy problem represented by "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."

Curious, then, that Russia is mentioned only with respect to the G-8 and McCain's proposed League of Democracies as a "revanchist" nation (which it is) that poses a challenge (not the "transcendent" one) that both the U.S. and Europe must once again face united. Vladimir Putin has more or less said the same thing, except he draws comparisons to the Third Reich in coloring the behavior of Russia's erstwhile ally during World War II (I mean the one before the Third Reich itself.) Nowhere is Moscow's bad behavior tethered to a clash of civilizations thesis; it is treated separately and distinctly as a foreign policy problem in itself. As for conventional Middle Eastern autocracies, McCain mentions these in light of failed strategies of the past (propping up the Shah, Saddam) and observes that such former client states served as insufficient stop-gaps on Islamic terrorism. They could no more provide lasting stability to the region than a renascent caliphate would do: "The oppression of the autocrats blended with the radical Islamists' dogmatic theology to produce a perfect storm of intolerance and hatred." This is one way to define the post-9/11 conventional wisdom, which everyone from Juan Cole to Paul Wolfowitz shares. One seeks in vain here for the encoded call for permanent regime change:

"We must not act rashly or demand change overnight. But neither can we pretend the status quo is sustainable, stable, or in our interests. Change is occurring whether we want it or not. The only question for us is whether we shape this change in ways that benefit humanity or let our enemies seize it for their hateful purposes. We must help expand the power and reach of freedom, using all our many strengths as a free people. This is not just idealism. It is the truest kind of realism. It is the democracies of the world that will provide the pillars upon which we can and must build an enduring peace."

Daniel also elides McCain's specific and clear definition of the "transcendent" challenge:

"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."

Here is what McCain actually says:

"[The assembly of a global coalition of peace and freedom] will strengthen us to confront the threat of radical Islamic terrorism. This challenge is transcendent not because it is the only one we face. There are many dangers in today's world, and our foreign policy must be agile and effective at dealing with all of them. But the threat posed by the terrorists is unique. They alone devote all their energies and indeed their very lives to murdering innocent men, women, and children. They alone seek nuclear weapons and other tools of mass destruction not to defend themselves or to enhance their prestige or to give them a stronger hand in world affairs but to use against us wherever and whenever they can."

Is it not clear from this that by "unique" McCain was qualifying the challenge, not defining it? He does define it a moment later when he says that the enemy we face devotes itself to killing innocent men, women and children, and pursuing nuclear weapons not for the sake of deterrence or geopolitical brinkmanship but for nihilistic use against us. Not only does this not satisfy Daniel as being extraordinary from, say, gibbering to Hugo Chavez about oil prices, but it, too, is a fanciful construct cooked up in some feverish corner of the American Enterprise Institute:

"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.)"

A short time ago, there was a global panic over the political chaos in Pakistan and the very real possibility that Pervez Musharraf's successor would be a radical Islamist regime (my own cutesy formulation for this: "going from Islambad to worse"). Had that happened, we would now be confronting the spectacle of Daniel Pearl's beheaders being able to split the atom. Shall we inquire as to how they might use their newfound technology, or why? The Taliban came perilously close to obtaining the bomb, courtesy of its sympathizers in the Pakistan scientific community, one prominent member of which, A.Q. Khan, was caught smuggling lethal know-how to Libya (whose advanced program we were unaware of until Gaddafi announced and relinquished it), North Korea and Iran. Iran's Quds Brigade of its Revolutionary Guard has been designated by Congress a terrorist organization because it is suborning the insurgency in Iraq and killing Americans there: that makes one state actor in desire of nuclear weapons also a non-state actor by traditional standards. As for the prohibitive difficulties in building and detonating a nuke, since when must one be attached to an intercontinental missile? The "dirty bomb" scenario doesn't exist solely in Jack Bauer's mind.

It is disingenuous to accuse McCain of dividing the world into "two intractably opposed camps." The analogy to the Cold War here actually tells against this facile calculus, as during that fifty year conflict, there was a third camp of "non-aligned" or neutral players. There were also countries that took a little from Column A and a little from Column B, such as India. McCain allows plenty of wiggle room for nations that would, under the kind of Manicheanism Daniel envisions, be unthinkable.

For instance, we would all agree, I hope, that China is a handmaiden to radical Islam in the form of the janjaweed genocidaires of Sudan. Yet here is how McCain rattles his saber before that economic and military superpower and Olympic host everyone on the left and right is now calling to boycott: "China and the United States are not destined to be adversaries. We have numerous overlapping interests and hope to see our relationship evolve in a manner that benefits both countries and, in turn, the Asia-Pacific region and the world. But until China moves toward political liberalization, our relationship will be based on periodically shared interests rather than the bedrock of shared values."

Sounds almost like an Obama line, doesn't it?

I could go on. I will, in fact: "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."

McCain explicitly endorses a "successor to the Kyoto Treaty, a cap-and-trade system that delivers the necessary environmental impact in an economically responsible manner," so he is self-evidently not that limited in "reincorporating the US into an international system." What strange Zen koans yield such green, multilateral wisdom from the paladin of Bushido.

And Daniel's description of the League of Democracies suffers from an interpretative fallacy; namely, that by advocating the creation of another supranational body McCain seeks to "circumvent" a host of pre-existing ones. I'll leave it up to others to determine how the United States each and every day circumvents the EU, or how that body's currency policies have anything at all to do with the UN, which didn't bat an eye at Russia and China's "strategic partnership." Suffice to say, in Article 1 of NATO's charter, it is established that members must "refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations." Why couldn't McCain's brainchild do the same, without the outmoded constraints of cold war enlistment procedures?

What I gather McCain means by a League of Democracies is a variation on the "Anglosphere" idea, or a formal alliance of natural allies, bound to one another by a common law-and-liberty tradition, mutual economic and cultural interests, and, perhaps most important, a shared language. McCain is much less conservative and much more prescient in his willingness to expand this alternative compact to include non-English-speaking nations like Brazil; any, in fact, that would meet requirements I'm inclined to think are less prohibitive than those of Maastricht. The terms of the compact needn't violate any of the others currently on the books and to which we are a party (as Daniel points out, McCain is rather a stickler for the Geneva Conventions and other international accords). It would be premature to judge too harshly of McCain's proposition without his further exposition of it.

Daniel ends by depicting McCain as a warmongering triumphalist drunk on such antiquated concepts as "honor" and "piety." (Piety has gotten Barack Obama into more trouble of late, so I'll chalk that up to projection.)

Now it is true that the candidate hails from a Kiplinesque line of naval officers, and he can grow sentimental -- "soppy-stern" is Philip Larkin's unimprovable phrase -- in an unflattering, 19th century manner about the role of a powerful military in any great nation. (I've taken issue with McCain's worship of Teddy Roosevelt; see here. Though it's worth noting that the only presidents he cites in this speech are Democrats -- Truman and JFK.) However, the man who went up against the Clinton administration in 1993 and argued for a complete withdrawal of American forces from Somalia is hardly a "fight first, ask questions later" type jingoist. Daniel reduces all of McCain's reasons for opposing a troop withdrawal from Iraq to this closing peroration: "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."

Daniel's only reply to the serious question of a genocide is to say, well, we shouldn't have been there in the first place. Excellent. He's fashioned a cogent, partial case against John McCain's presidential candidacy -- in 2003. As for the reality of 2008, you can argue with the dire prognostications offered below, but you will admit there is nothing weepy or "lest we forget" about any of them:

"If we withdraw prematurely from Iraq, al Qaeda in Iraq will survive, proclaim victory and continue to provoke sectarian tensions that, while they have been subdued by the success of the surge, still exist, as various factions of Sunni and Shi'a have yet to move beyond their ancient hatreds, and are ripe for provocation by al Qaeda. Civil war in Iraq could easily descend into genocide, and destabilize the entire region as neighboring powers come to the aid of their favored factions. I believe a reckless and premature withdrawal would be a terrible defeat for our security interests and our values. Iran will also view our premature withdrawal as a victory, and the biggest state supporter of terrorists, a country with nuclear ambitions and a stated desire to destroy the State of Israel, will see its influence in the Middle East grow significantly. These consequences of our defeat would threaten us for years, and those who argue for it, as both Democratic candidates do, are arguing for a course that would eventually draw us into a wider and more difficult war that would entail far greater dangers and sacrifices than we have suffered to date."

Part and parcel of Barack Obama's "dignity doctrine," so nebulously yet exultantly captured by Spencer Ackerman in the American Prospect, is the complete annihilation of Al Qaeda. How is this to be done when Al Qaeda still persists in Iraq, but we do not?

Getting beyond the "Iraq War mindset" can be headache-inducing indeed. Obama fired Samantha Power not for calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" but for hinting at the likelihood that he might come to a similar determination as McCain has done and foreclose on the promise of immediate troop withdrawal. He has also chided McCain for being correct about the pragmatic, murderous collusion between Sunni and Shia sectarians. (See the Pentagon's latest disclosures about the promiscuous prewar activities of Saddam Hussein, or Amir Taheri's excellent precis of the "Sunni-Shiite Terror Network" in the Wall Street Journal.)

There is also the next question of how, exactly, to withdraw from Iraq so as to incur the lowest number of military and civilian losses. I've not heard either Democratic candidate address this. For a glimpse into what a horror show our getting out will look like, I direct you to this well-reported piece by Kim Nash. By adopting the most prudent measures of extracting personnel and materiel, an exit strategy, Nash concludes, will take two years. Contrast this against legislation Obama introduced in January 2007 that would have removed all combat troops by March 2008 -- last month. The politics of fear, meet the travel agency of hope.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:44 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Too funny:

9/11 Conspiracy Theories 'Ridiculous,' Al Qaeda Says

Hat tip: Will

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:53 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)