One of the minor problems with being a reconstructed neocon weenie such as myself is the company I'm forced to keep. I don't much like the right-wing personality because it seems a funhouse distortion of the left-wing personality, only with better clothes. This is not an accident. How easy it was to renounce the core substance of communism and yet retain the dire style. A friend of mine, who has undergone every permutation of ideology imaginable, phrases it like this: All ex-radicals take something away with them from the 'movement,' whether it's the atheism, the loyalty to trade unionism, the love of god-awful folk music, or being a fucking asshole.

A good sign of membership in that last contingent is an obsession with the non-issue, a conspiratorial mindset that has the more even-tempered comrades rolling their eyes behind your back, or, since you're likely to suffer from an almost autistic lack of self-awareness and shame, right in front of your face. Worse still than the late-in-life-winger is the cradle-to-the-grave variety. Will someone please inform Michelle Malkin that Rachael Ray is not a jihadist? The insufferable Food Network hostess must want you to eat on $40 a day because the rest of your income should go to Osama bin Laden. Ray was caught on national television hawking ice lattes for Dunkin' Donuts while wearing a kaffiyeh, and the rest of this story some poor fool at the BBC must have written in crayon:

In a statement, Dunkin' Donuts said the silk scarf had been "selected by Rachael Ray's stylist and that no symbolism was intended.

"But given the possibility of misperception the commercial was no longer being used."

This has caused a fair amount of consternation in some quarters but the conservative blogger at the centre of the row has praised the decision.

"Fashion statements may seem insignificant, but when they lead to the mainstreaming of violence - unintentionally or not - they matter," Ms Malkin has written.

Now let us at once concede that Yasser Arafat wore this Arab headdress and had one of his strapping male Aryan lieutenants daily shape it to resemble the lost Palestine he would spare no drop of Jewish or Muslim blood to reclaim. Many beheaders and suicide bombers and illiterate adherents of a single book have been known to don the kaffiyeh as a symbol of their militant struggle, as have quite a number of secular followers of pan-Arab nationalism.

None of which eliminates the historical fact that centuries of harmless Bedouin traders, stifled not by irrendentism so much as by the unremitting heat of the desert, also wore kaffiyehs the way my fashion-backward Jewish father would his Panama Jack hat at the beach. It's the fanny-pack of the Orient.

T.E. Lawrence famously donned one while leading a popular revolt against Ottoman imperialism. Many of our Kurdish allies in northern Iraq wear the checkered garment and not out of solidarity with politically null hipsters in Williamsburg, who must think the mountain people's billowy pants intend ironic commentary of the career of M.C. Hammer.

This is the problem with iconography in general. There are only so many icons to go around. Many are bound to be hijacked and recycled, and thus their symbolism is bound to be muddled to the point of negation.

Before black became synonymous with Italian Fascism, or Ann Coulter's morning wear on the Today Show, it was the honorable hue of Russian anarchists who fought alongside the infant Red Army in the Russian Civil War. (The rather pure-seeming color white was reserved for the proto-fascist armies of czarist dead-enders.) Indeed, that the valiant liberators of the Crimea were later killed during the Stalinist terror for not being Bolsheviks only underscores the necessity of "taking back" certain banners.

More notoriously, the swastika was not just an ancient Jain glyph for fertility, it also furnished the name of Meyer Wolfsheim's dubious bond company in The Great Gatsby, a book published in 1925, when Hitler was still a reactionary house painter in the Weimar Republic. Anyway, we knew Wolfsheim was no good because he wore cufflinks made of human teeth.

But for those who presume to read clothes as manifestos, they should at least be well acquainted with the histories of both before holding forth on so-and-so's revolutionary aims.

America may run on Dunkin', but the conservative blogosphere runs on paranoia.

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The Mighty Boosh:

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New @ PJM:

John McCain and Barack Obama are now engaged in a long-distance dispute over whether talking to America's enemies is integral to America's security (with neither one wishing to talk to poor Hillary Clinton any longer).

McCain has not so subtly assailed Obama as an "appeaser" for his stated willingness to sit down with the Iranian leadership about its nuclear weapons program and sponsorship of jihadism in Iraq -- and never mind for now if that leadership consists of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Ali Khamenei. Meanwhile, Obama has repeatedly labeled McCain a kind of hyper-Bush militarist of the shoot first, sign treaties later school of foreign policy. McCain has hinted at Chamberlain and Munich, always a histrionic conversation-ender in matters of these sort, and Obama has sheepishly downplayed the Iranian threat by contrasting it against the Soviet one, and, without any hint of irony, indicating Kennedy's talks with Khrushchev in Vienna, and Reagan's momentous mini-summit with Gorbachev in Reykjavik as proof that toughness and diplomacy are not mutually exclusive concepts. (One witty editorial in The New York Times reminded Obama that Camelot's finest hour was not its Austrian kibitz with the Russian premier, an event that laid all the psychological bricks, so to speak, for the erection of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis.)

Oddly though, in their rush to analogize by way of chivvying each other, neither candidate has actually pulled an example relevant to the region of the globe now under discussion. The Middle East, a term coined by Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of McCain's boyhood idols, is where both American warfare and American diplomacy began in the late 18th century, as our infant republic faced its first post-Revolutionary struggle against the evocatively named Barbary States of the Ottoman Empire.

Read more.

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New @ Democratiya:

In 1959, Alfred Kazin wrote 'The Alone Generation,' an incisive and brilliant essay about the failures of modern literature. The critic who would later describe himself as a 'cultural conservative' and, semi-seriously, a 'literary reactionary' uttered this cri de coeur:

I am tired of reading for compassion instead of pleasure. In novel after novel, I am presented with people who are so soft, so wheedling, so importunate, that the actions in which they are involved are too indecisive to be interesting or to develop those implications which are the life-blood of narrative. The age of 'psychological man,' of the herd of aloners, has finally proved the truth of Tocqueville's observation that in modern times the average man is absorbed in a very puny object, himself, to the point of satiety.

Not many people write like this anymore, with daring subjectivity. Rare today is the freelance reviewer who sees compassion as an insufficient measure of aptitude in fiction. Kazin avoided the Marxian gloss or the close reading of the New Critics, preferring instead a full-blooded, fist-pounding approach to telling good books from bad. He was demanding, irritable and shrewd; and for almost half a century, he was well sought after for his opinions.

In fact, it would be hard to mistake the author of the above passage for a man of any other generation or milieu. 'Herd of aloners' sounds suspiciously like Harold Rosenberg's famous epithet for the detractors and unwitting apologists of mass culture - the 'herd of independent minds' - which Rosenberg applied as cuttingly to the highbrow Partisan Review crowd as he did to the purveyors of passive entertainment, for whom the common denominator could never be low enough. Also, 'psychological man' had been around a while before Jack Kerouac and Herbert Gold laid their unsure pens to paper, so we glimpse at once the longing of a recovering radical for the literature of size and social engagement; the literature of the 1930's, in other words. Finally, alone - it is a word that stalks like a golem through his entire oeuvre, from his first, career-making work, On Native Grounds, to his mature series of sensitive and meditative memoirs. If Kazin deploys it here to underscore the undesirable aspects of the novel - solipsism, or the puny object of the self, is denigrated because it ignores an engagement with the way we live now - then we should applaud him for self-criticism, too. Alienation was a sentiment he mistrusted most in literature because he mistrusted it most in himself.

A major achievement of Richard Cook's fine biography is the reconciliation of two contradictions in Kazin's life. How did one of the most temperamentally and spiritually isolated writers of his time become such an astute chronicler of it? And how did a man who hated tidy schools of thought, artistic or ideological, maintain an abiding belief in the liberating social possibilities of literature? The answer to both lay in Kazin's Jewishness, a lodestone to which his intellectual pursuits and personal torments kept returning.

Gallons of ink have been spilled trying to capture the peculiar blend of anxiety, optimism and self-doubt that defined the New York Intellectuals, those sons of Eastern European immigrants who discovered Marx and Shelley in their outer borough tenement kitchens in the thirties, waited for a revolution that never came, then went on to become grand old men of the cultural landscape - or at least a ten-block radius of the Upper West Side. 'Most were literary men with no experience in any political movement,' reminisced Irving Howe, a near contemporary with whom Kazin was inevitably compared, much to his chagrin. '[T]hey had come to radical politics through the pressures of conscience and a flair for the dramatic; and even in later years, when they abandoned any direct political involvement, they would in some sense remain 'political.' They would respond with eagerness to historical changes, even if these promised renewed favor for the very ideas they had largely discarded.' Most significantly, they would try to escape their humble working-class origins, whether by way of City College, agitational street theatre, or a gentlemanly assimilation into the Gentile mainstream--usually all three in due course. But see how well Kazin stakes a claim for himself and this whole milieu of comers in A Walker in the City, his first and best volume of autobiography, dealing with his perpetual flight from his hometown of 'darkest' Brownsville:

We had all of us lived together so long that we would not have known how to separate even if we had wanted to. The most terrible word was aleyn, alone. I always had the same picture of a man desolately walking down a dark street, newspapers and cigarette butts contemptuously flying in his face as he tasted in the dusty grit the full measure of his strangeness. Aleyn! Aleyn! Did immigrant Jews, then, marry only out of loneliness? Was even Socialism just a happier way of keeping us together?

Unbounded optimism enabled the brightest of this bunch to break free of the confines of their New World ghetto, not to say their neighborhood faction, and earn admittance into that reified idea of beyond. They started out and they made it. Without 'New York,' Kazin affirmed in 'The Jew as Modern Writer,' a 1966 essay for Commentary, 'there would have bee no immigrant epic, no America.' Fans of Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March will, allowing for the substitute of Chicago for New York, recognize the familiar cadences, as they probably will the perspicuity of this judgment: 'My quarrel with [Henderson the Rain King] has to do with my feeling, suggested to me even in so good a work of its kind as Seize the Day, that these Jacobs give up to life a little too eloquently, that they do not struggle enough with the angel before crying out in reverence and submission, "I will not let thee go, except thou bless me."'

Kazin's own experiences in this early line of endeavor were both typical and unique: He had a 'raging life-force' of an Orthodox mother who sewed homemade dresses during the Depression and kept the austere nuclear family intact; a silent and largely absentee father who read The Forward in Yiddish and bonded with his precocious son only in occasional discussion of Red politics. That covers the typical. But Kazin stood apart from the Trotskyist demimonde as well. Like Howe, Nathan Glazer, Irving Kristol, and Kazin's future brother-in-law Daniel Bell, Alfred attended City College but refused to participate in the high-calorie debates of the celebrated Alcove 1, which made ironical sport of chivvying its leaden Stalinist counterparts in Alcove 2 and was subsequently fingered as the incubator of neoconservatism.

Read more...

Readers also might be interested in my last contribution to the journal, "The Politics of Edmund Wilson."

As always, this issue is a must-read, with anniversary reflections on the '68ers and the founding of Israel.

Please be sure to buy a copy of the Democratiya interviews, available for sale here.

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Oliver Kamm directed my attention to this Economist item, proving what had long been suspected of the great renewer of Latin American "socialism":

Batches of the documents have been seen by The Economist and several other publications. They appear to show that Mr Chávez offered the FARC up to $300m, and talked of allocating the guerrillas an oil ration which they could sell for profit. They also suggest that Venezuelan army officers helped the FARC to obtain small arms, such as rocket-propelled grenades, and to set up meetings with arms dealers.

I don't know what else to call this but blood for oil.

It used to take decades to unearth documents like these. Had computers been around during the early years of Soviet espionage, I doubt Walter Krivitsky would have stepped off the ocean liner docked at New York Harbor before being collared. Whittaker Chambers might have only been remembered as the able translator of "Bambi."

Perhaps Steven Soderbergh's sprawling biopic of Che Guevara, said to clock in at about 5 and a half hours (or only a quarter of the length of the average Castro speech), can help revive a flagging fondness for commandante-style Red bravado.

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Manda Zand-Ervin and Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi, a mother and daughter team behind the Alliance of Iranian Women, have penned an excellent open letter to the Democratic nominee at Pajamas Media:

America led the world in supporting the Eastern European Solidarity Movement, by which ultimately the Eastern bloc was able to free itself from communist domination and dictatorships. The international community weakened the South African regime by supporting and empowering Mr. Mandela against South Africa's racial apartheid regime, which was eventually forced to step aside peacefully and allow change for the better to begin.

The Iranian government is, by all definitions and international laws and United Nation's resolutions, a gender apartheid regime. What would happen if you declare Iran a Gender Apartheid country and not the representative of the oppressed women of Iran? Support the millions of laid-off and destitute Iranian workers, students, and teachers, as well as the estimated 23,000 innocent political prisoners who are being tortured in prisons for speaking out against these tyrants. Support the average Iranian and not the Islamic regime. Put America's power behind what is right -- and watch the people of Iran usher out the Mullahs and democratically elect a government that truly represents the people of Iran.

Also, Haleh Esfandiari has just been awarded an international prize named after her. I quote from the Wilson Center's press release:

AMMAN, JORDAN--Dr. Haleh Esfandiari of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a non-partisan institution based in Washington, D.C., was honored on May 21, 2008 as the first recipient of an award established in her name. The Haleh Esfandiari Award was presented to Dr. Esfandiari by a group of businesswomen and activists from countries across the Middle East and North Africa region, on the occasion of a conference sponsored by the Wilson Center, Women Entrepreneurs: Business and Legal Reform in the MENA Region, held in Amman, Jordan, May 20-May 22.

The award depicts two outstretched arms, with palms facing in different directions, symbolizing Dr. Esfandiari's work in building bridges and encouraging outreach between countries and cultures. The award was designed by Nour Saab, an artist living in England.

Dr. Esfandiari, director of the Wilson Center's Middle East Program, was honored for her work and dedication in promoting dialogue and understanding between cultures in the United States and Middle Eastern countries, and for her efforts on women's rights issues in the region.

Haleh Esfandiari has directed the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center for the past decade. In 2007, she was held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison in Tehran, Iran for more than one hundred days, accused of working to destabilize the Islamic Republic. (For further details surrounding her situation and confinement, please visit www.wilsoncenter/middleeast.)

"During and after her confinement, Haleh continued to exhibit compassion, strength, and dedication in her efforts to promote equality, peace and dialogue," said the award initiator Hanan Saab, President and CEO of Pharmamed, a pharmaceutical company in Beirut, Lebanon. "She truly is a role model, not only for women, but for all people who are interested in ultimately working towards world peace. Determinedly non-partisan, she has sought to understand and bring together all sides of complex issues."

"We plan to present this award annually to women who exemplify Haleh's strength, resilience, and dedication," said Fatima Sbaity-Kassem, visiting scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Columbia University, and former director of the ESCWA Centre for Women at the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. "Her leadership, humanity and solidarity with women across the globe are exceptional and unique, and her concern and efforts in bridging gender equality gaps are instrumental and necessary to improving diplomatic relations between countries and worldwide."

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New @ PJM:

Scanning the daily press, an American voter is likely to come away with the following characterization of Barack Obama: he opposed the Iraq war from the start, he conscientiously opposed it even when public opinion was against him, and if elected president, he would withdraw U.S. forces from there immediately. There is every reason to assume that Obama's antiwar credentials have enabled his all-but-certain victory in the Democratic primary, and yet few have attempted scrutiny of those credentials (the New Republic and Commentary are the rare exceptions), let alone analyzed Obama's policy prescriptions for how to resolve a smoldering crisis in Mesopotamia. As with much of his electoral appeal, the stump catechisms of "hope" and "change" have eclipsed Obama's more wavering rhetoric about Iraq over the past five years. And as for what he plans to do going forward, his ideas are not just frighteningly ill informed and out of date, they're not even on nodding terms with the realities in a part of the world that, since 9/11, has held a monopoly on our attention.

In October 2002, the then-Illinois state senator addressed an antiwar rally in Chicago, where, describing himself as no pacifist, he affirmed, "I... know Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors... and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history."

Obama went on to campaign for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives as having been against regime change, ab initio. He lost that contest to Chicago favorite Bobby Rush, but has congratulated himself ever since for, as he put it in a debate at Dartmouth College in 2007, "telling the truth to the American people even when [it was] tough...standing up against this war at a time where [sic] it was very unpopular. And I was risking my political career, because I was in the middle of a U.S. Senate race." Left out of this courageous resume is the fact that it was in his proximate political interest to take the position he did. He was trying to appeal, after all, to what the New Republic's Michael Crowley called a "coalition of lakefront liberals and African Americans," and he was running in solidly Democratic state from a district - Hyde Park - that was heavily antiwar. Obama's own campaign manager at the time, Dan Shomon, admitted, "He knew, and I knew, that the liberal progressives were key in any Democratic primary." Obama may very well have been sincere in his opposition to the war, but he could not have adopted any other position and still have had a shot at winning a contentious primary. Also, his courage in telling harsh truths to the American people cannot account for why he twice removed his Chicago speech from his presidential campaign website - a curious elision for a man who claims to have had greater prescience and "purity" on Iraq than any of his opponents on either side of the aisle did.

Read more.

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New @ New Criterion:

One is unlikely to find a criticism of Barack Obama jotted in the pages of Jewcy magazine, my old digital shtetl up until a few months ago. But at the risk of interrupting the lovefest for a flawed national politician, allow me to add to what has already been said about Obama's interview on the Jewish Question with The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg. From a terse Q&A, Jewcy's Politics Editor Daniel Koffler has found a "deeper and richer understanding of the American Jewish and Israeli experience [sic] than any previous presidential aspirant" has hitherto embodied -- a statement that would be too silly to countenance were it not for the presumptuousness behind it. Koffler of Tea Neck, NJ might know something about the American Jewish experience, but how much? And what of the Israeli?

I've long thought that Obama needed rescuing from some of his more lock-step supporters, particularly those who credited him with moral maturity for not renouncing Jeremiah Wright in Philadelphia, then subtracted none of the credit after he did just that weeks later in North Carolina (and after nothing new was disclosed about the nasty pastor except the audacity of his booking schedule). This is a willingness, if not an eagerness, to be easily pleased and to have one's bias confirmed almost effortlessly.

But let's see now, Obama can namedrop Leon Uris and Philip Roth to a humorous American-Israeli journalist and suddenly he's an honorary member of Team Chosen! I can't wait until he compliments the continental breakfast at the King David Hotel and becomes the man to grab fate by the foreskin in Judea and Samaria...

I was rather struck by Obama's laughable assertion that a Jewish camp counselor gave him his short course in Altneuland utopia, and that the work of Roth and Uris filled in the rest of the blanks on Diaspora and Zionism. However, left out of Koffler's post is the fact that Goldberg cited both of those writers in his thoughtful Atlantic cover piece on the future of Israel, which Obama was good enough to admit he had read prior to sitting down for the interview. And even if he had come up with these allusions unbidden, what would that prove besides an ability to seize upon any proffered conversational trope for the sake of impressing his audience? Obama may well be the candidate to beat on ensuring Israel's security and keeping up antipathy toward Hamas, but the foregoing demonstrates his charisma and nothing more.

Though in saying so, I'm reminded of how dangerous that charisma can be when intellectuals who ought to know better find themselves in thrall to it.

John F. Kennedy's cultural tastes plumped in an easy-bake oven built for him by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and he famously collected artists and novelists and mandarins in order to strengthen his candlepower vicariously. Nothing like having a genuine brain in the White House with a real guest list. (One ingathering of Nobel winners gave posterity the not-bad line that the executive mansion hadn't seen such an assembly of intellects since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.) For the most part, though, the valets du pouvoir required little convincing to come running to the Round Table, which is why the whispers about "Camelot" took so long to expire after its knight errant did. The two honorable exceptions to this ignoble rule were the two finest literary critics then working in America: Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin.

Thus a 1962 dinner at the White House featured Kennedy inquiring of Wilson what his new book on the Civil War was about. Wilson referred him to the Introduction. Strike two came when the president then asked about another volume Wilson had authored on the Iroquois. Faced with an author's unlikely resistance to gibber on about his own work, particularly to someone who clearly hadn't read it, Kennedy added: "I suppose I'll have to buy it?" "I'm afraid so" came the cold reply from the owlish man of letters in what I would term the finest instance of Wilsonian idealism. (Wilson also joked, upon hearing Kennedy refer to Robert Frost as America's Virgil, that this made the meretricious president a modern Octavius. A real "knee-slapper.")

Similarly, in an effort to buck Kazin's forthcoming critical piece on him and his claque of dittoing eggheads, Kennedy and Schlesinger, who knew the number two critic, invited him over for state niceties. Offer accepted. But upon reading the only mildly toned-down result of their intervention -- Kazin's brilliant political essay, "Kennedy and the Other Intellectuals," which chided the cognoscenti's herd-like worship of a seeming bright young thing who nevertheless unintelligently invaded Cuba and brought the country to the brink of nuclear holocaust -- Jack joked to Schlesinger: "We wined him and dined him and talked about Hemingway and Dreiser with him, and later I told Jackie what a good time she missed, and then he went off and wrote that piece!" Some aren't so easily charmed by superficial learning or the throwaway reference, yet the temptation in intellectuals to abase themselves before executive power is strong and persistent.

The Goldberg interview might indeed have taken a more interesting turn had Obama furnished us with a few clues as to what, exactly, in Roth he found edifying about the Jewish American experience. Self-hatred? The transcendent nature of the handjob? Prostate cancer? (I'd seriously considering supporting him if he dilated at length on any of these promising topics.) As for Uris, how many discriminating yes-we-canners just threw in the towel in Hyde Park upon hearing the author of Exodus mentioned as a literary mentor? Elitist, heal thyself.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:57 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (1)

My latest column at PJM:

She knows that if Obama wins this year, her hopes of ever becoming president will vanish. She will be 69-years-old in 2016 and, unlike John McCain, who retained a special place in the popular consciousness thanks to Karl Rove's grand larceny of his initial run for high office, she won't be able to claim she was robbed the first time around. Her best bet would be to see Obama lose, thus vindicating her unheeded plaint that he was general election poison, and then run against the incumbent McCain in 2012, vowing to "take back the White House" after twelve years of Republican misrule.

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