• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}
• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}
• The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}
• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}
• Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}
• Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}
• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}
• Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}
• The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}
• The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}
• Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}
• Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}
• The War Against Cliche and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}
• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}
• The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliche. And get a dictionary.}
• The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}
• Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}
• Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}
• Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}
• The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children�s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}
• The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}
• Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}
• Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}
• My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}
ALBUMS:
• You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}
• Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}
• Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}
• Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}
• Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}
• Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}
• Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}
• These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}
• SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}
• The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}
• It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}
• Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn't usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}
• Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}
• The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it�s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}
• The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}
• The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}
• No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}
• The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}
FILMS & TV:
• Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}
• Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}
• Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}
• The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}
• Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}
• Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}
• Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}
• The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}
• Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modeled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}
• Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}
• Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}
To balance out the horror show now unfolding in India, and which the New York Times believes is not the handy work of Al Qaeda, a hopeful sign of fraternal division has emerged from within the ranks of Osama's Murder, Inc. It seems that when Ayman al-Zawahiri referred to the president-elect as a "House Negro" and was subsequently condemned by the international media for it (because everything else he'd got up to in life thus far was pretty humdrum), he incited a minor race war among the jihadim. Evan Kohlmann at the Counterterrorism Blog writes:
Though hardcore Al-Qaida supporters have predictably dismissed any criticism of Dr. al-Zawahiri and are fiercely backing his choice of words, there is a rather ironic (if not entirely unfamiliar) twist to this issue. After observing international press reporting on the incident, these same supporters are now bitterly attacking the media for its "unfair" pro-Obama bias and for deliberately "confusing" the meaning of al-Zawahiri's message.
In related news, Zawahiri's audio statement also appears to have created a palpable, tense confrontation between Al-Qaida and a significant cross-section of African-American Muslims. Several U.S.-based Muslim organizations immediately held press conferences or issued statements to strongly criticize al-Zawahiri and his manipulation of the words of the late Malcolm X. Conversely, these conferences and statements of response have not gone over well within the jihadi community, with some Arabic-speaking commentators issuing angry rants about the apparent treachery of American Muslims, including specifically the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). One Al-Qaida supporter cautioned his quarrelsome online colleagues, "Brothers, this does not apply to all American Muslims. Do not forget our brother [Adam] Yehiye Gadahn, a naturalized Muslim and U.S. citizen."
It's too easy to laugh at the stupidity and confusion of one's enemies. Stalin once made a crack about the RSDLP, before the split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, that the minority faction was the one with all the Jews in it and so perhaps what the party really needed was a pogrom. That so many Russian Jews were drawn to revolutionary socialism because of the lethal anti-Semitism of the czars seemed lost on the peasant bandit from Gori, whom Lenin understandably kept away from the arena of public relations and assigned to the less glamorous duties of robbing banks and throwing bombs.
In any case, Al Qaeda has a long road ahead in convincing anyone who bothers to pay attention to its press releases that it is not, inter alia, a racist organization. It condoned and encouraged the janjaweeds' genocide of black Darfuri Muslims, who were killed, raped and dispossessed only because they were black and not Arab.
There is a good chance that Zawahiri's "House Negro" remark was furnished by the aforenamed Adam Gadahn, a homeschooled, death metal aficionado originally from Orange County, who exchanged the nihilism of the head banger for that of the head remover when he moved to Pakistan in 1998 and joined Al Qaedasometime thereafter . Gadahn is the lackey who lards Osama's seasonal greetings with references to the Green movement and fashionable lefty radicalism. In a parallel universe, he's a harmless but amusing blogger for Comment Is Free, clearly familiar with the writings of Noam Chomsky, William Blum (Osama's favorite author), Robert Fisk and George Galloway, the latter two Gadahn has praised for their "respect and admiration for Islam" and for "acknowledging that it is the truth." And let's not forget that the only other major figure to describe Barack Obama in Uncle Tom locutions was... Ralph Nader. (One pictures young Adam surfing every stateside web portal where the spoiler of the 2000 election is still taken seriously.)
Yet what makes this intramural Qaeda kerfuffle so ironic is that its cause is himself the quinessential wannabe, a pathetic outsider who cozies up to brutish authoritarians and is the first to accuse others of "betrayal." Revelation may be the going term for this pathology in a Waziristan cave, but had he stuck to the infidel provinces California, Gadahn would have heard it called by its proper name: projection.
Barack Obama's first major appointment -- Rahm Emanuel as chief-of-staff -- was a major disappointment for the hard-left, still hoping against hope that its perceived candidate would usher in a new dawn of American progressivism. Emanuel, after all, has been described as a "quasi-neocon hawk" and distinguished himself among Congressional Democrats for having refused to apologize for backing the Iraq war. (How to argue with the partisan who played an instrumental role in meting out the "thumpin'" of '06?) Since Rahmbo's return to Pennsylvania Avenue, a steady trickle of other job announcements from Obama has only further demoralized the left. Chris Hayes' honest but credulous complaint in The Nation stands a model of the "we were had" genre. And Ron Radosh and Jamie Kirchick's summaries of the various forms of resentment now setting in among Obama's quixotic online fanbase evoke nothing so much as the useful term schadenfreude.
Now comes Max Boot, a former McCain foreign policy adviser, pleased as punch about just how safe the president-elect has been playing it:
As someone who was skeptical of Obama's moderate posturing during the campaign, I have to admit that I am gobsmacked by these appointments, most of which could just as easily have come from a President McCain. (Jim Jones is an old friend of McCain's, and McCain almost certainly would have asked Gates to stay on as well.) This all but puts an end to the 16-month timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, the unconditional summits with dictators, and other foolishness that once emanated from the Obama campaign. His appointments suggest that, if anything, his administration will have a Reapolitiker, rather than a liberal, bent, although Clinton and Steinberg at State should be powerful voices for "neo-liberalism" which is not so different in many respects from "neo-conservativism". Both, for instance, support humanitarian interventions in places like Darfur and Bosnia.
I'm not so sure Clinton at State won't prove to be a mistake in the long term, however much neoconservatives now warm to her as a late-forged Iron Lady. My reservations are shared by Boot's Commentary colleague Shmuel Rosner, who, writing in Slate, explains the dubious position of the secretaryship and wonders if an over-ambitious pol with a proven record for putting career before country can reform herself, especially under the authority of the man who deprived her of her ultimate ambition.
As for the 16-month timetable for withdrawal, that was always feint, as I tried to demonstrate in this assessment of Obama's Iraq policy, which was almost Straussian in its dependence on dual narratives -- one for the antiwar coalition that ensured his primary victory, and one for anyone else who bothered to compare his will o' the wisp rhetoric to realities in Baghdad. Banging on about how certain political "benchmarks" were not being met when in fact they had already been met was one way to broadcast your improvisational, anything-goes style. Not for nothing did Obama recently win Advertising Age's marketer of the year for 2008. If he campaigned in jingles, he seems poised to govern in the literature of product recall. But conservatives aren't the emptors now faced with a host of unheeded caveats.
Because it would take a philosopher to do justice to Kingsley Amis's pensees on piss artistry, wouldn't it? Roger Scruton in the Observer delivers a fine review of Everyday Drinking, the King's collected writings on a lifelong subject that may have occasionally failed him but never let him down. I have Scruton to thank for reminding me of one indispensable essay in this book, which consists mainly of cocktail recipes with (very funny) commentary. It is on the hangover, a torment that will no doubt afflict many of us at this extended holiday weekend and that must be defeated with a coherent strategy. The hangover, as Amis games it, following on the magisterial example of a celebrated section in Lucky Jim, comes in two forms: the physical and the metaphysical. Winning the war against the physical is a somewhat easier endeavor, like felling a toxic but by no means insuperable tyranny, though timing is key (the morning after signals the opening of major hostilities) and the belligerent must come fully equipped with the latest technological weaponry (not, surprisingly, drams of bicarbonate soda but more acid). The metaphysical hangover, on the other hand, is in the tradition of peace-keeping and nation-building and, quite literally, securing "hearts and minds" after the ancien regime has been toppled:
When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is, and there is no use crying over spilt milk. If this works, if you can convince yourself, you need do no more, as provided in the markedly philosophical
G.P. 9: He who truly believes he has a hangover has no hangover.
A Nietzschean whoopsy-daisy of self-actualization to be remembered just as the tryptophan of turkey and red wine begins to take its narcoleptic effect, from which you will awaken transformed into a creature from another planet, terrified at the helplessness of your own wretched condition.
Not long ago you'd have been hard pressed to find a more universally admired head of state than Vaclav Havel, a man whose name is synonymous with dissidence and who, at least in contemporary terms, most closely approximates the ideal of the philosopher-king. Havel's essay, "The Power of the Powerless," in which he showed how the "post-totalitarian" society inculpates everyone who inhabits it, from the state official to the lowly greengrocer, became an instant classic of its genre as well as a founding document of the one revolution in 20th century Europe that went off without a single shot being fired, or a single drop of blood being spilt. And if Havel suffered from executive shortcomings -- the treatment of the Czech Roma has not reflected any ism with a human face -- then these were minor in comparison to his counterparts in other developing second world countries. It was Havel, let's not forget, who made the case for deposing Saddam Hussein on strictly humanitarian grounds, Saddam being just another genocidal fascist living well past his species' expiration date.
Things change.
George W. Bush, the least popular American president in several generations, is leaving office in fewer than two months, and his successor is most universally admired politician on the planet--with no record of lived or legislated accomplishment to recommend him as such. France, formerly a bete noir that birthed a thousand New York Post headlines, has a philo-American centre-right president of Jewish heritage with a wife worth going to war over. Britain, after more than decade of New Labor, is set to elect a bicycle-clipped, user-friendly Tory prime minister who loves to cook and recycle. Russia has rewound the historical tape and tried to see if 19th-century imperialism can't come out better this time. As for the Czech Republic, its current president is a thundering megalomaniac who worships Milton Friedman and Margaret Thatcher, snuggles up to Vladimir Putin, thinks global warming science is a dangerous ideology on par with communism, and sees the European Union, whose presidency he's about to inherit in the natural rotation, as an overextended joke:
[Vaclav Klaus's] anti-Europe credentials stretch back to his failed general election campaign in 2002, when he opposed the Czech Republic's entry to the EU. As president he refused to give any direction to the Czech electorate during a referendum campaign on the issue, except to say that joining the EU would significantly reduce Czech sovereignty. The vote was 77% in favour of joining.
Klaus has vetoed the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty and last week he again called on his party to oppose it.
The Lisbon Treaty, signed in December 2007 and still awaiting ratification, is the latest update of Maastricht would create a non-rotating EU Presidency and a High Representative of Foreign Affairs, who would essentially act as a secretary of state for the entire continent. When he last visited the UK, Klaus openly befriended Declan Ganley, who is known as one of the few Irish neoconservatives and Europe's most outspoken opponent of a United States of Europe.
So the Czechs, who have been done over by every major power with a roving army for centuries, are now in the rare position of being able to determine the course of European politics at the infancy of the age of Obama. That their elected spokesman should be a right isolationist with warm feelings towards revanchist Russia is only the latest sign that history never ends but proceeds like a drunken ironist.
This serialized Cruel Intentions affords glimpse into what my little sister's high school years were like at the Professional Children's School (alma mater of Scarlett Johansson, Mischa Barton and, for about a year, Paris Hilton), except that the characters are richer, nastier and less plausible. I'm a Serena man, or at least I was until it was disclosed in the course of a single, erratic season that she stole the Lindbergh baby and fomented a coup in Uruguay. Nothing is predictable, and a major ripple exists in the bitch-sweetie spacetime continuum. Serena not drinking to impress her dippy emo artist boyfriend? Never fear: by Christmas she'll be slaloming off mountains of blows in Gstaad with Medusa hair and lipstick applied like Diane Ladd's in Wild at Heart.
Each episode is sort of a stand-alone pubescent debauch, which is why I laugh whenever someone tells me they haven't watched the show because they'd have to start from the "beginning." No one goes to class on the Upper East Side, 15 year-olds start their own fashion lines, and college is just another status symbol for the Betty-and-Veronica female leads to pull each other's hair over.
Chuck Bass makes this demimonde go round, and although he's dressed and pomaded like a ventriloquist's gay dummy, his unexpected heterosexuality goes to eleven. He's fucked more Maxim cover models than Tony Stark and John Mayer, and he's collected email passwords and social security numbers for insurance. (I always wanted to be born into a family with a private eye on retainer.) Yet there is a kernel of humanity smothered in that outer husk of sleepy womanizing evil. Bass sticks up for his kith and kin: witness his role in slaying Georgina, Serena's arch-"frenemis," and his facilitation, in last week's Thanksgiving special, of his father and stepmother's inevitable divorce (he loosed all the secret files on the family to the family).
As for the rest of the ho-hum cast, Dan and Nate should commit thwarted-love double suicide, and Rufus should stay on tour with Collective Soul.
Name one amazing weekly party that hasn't been appropriated into a spectacle of bullshit within about a year. Here, we'll help you out: Peter Schoolwerth's Wierd night of cold wave, minimal synth, and experimental electronic/industrial noise, which has managed to keep its niche purity without stumbling on its own self-importance. On Friday the party turns five, so just for why-not's sake we asked the same four questions of all the bands playing the anniversary bash. Know how everyone is suddenly claiming interest in the dark side, slinking around town dressed like spooks and talking about how they've loved Coil forever even though we saw them wearing a giant Day-Glo T-shirt while dancing to happy hardcore last year? It's because of Wierd and their likes. They might be a touch in denial of what they've started, but if our life's work was lumped in with some wacky Edward Scissorhands goth regalia we might put our blinders on too.
"What's it about?" a no-nonsense undergraduate once inquired of the author of The Adventures of Augie March. "It's about 200 pages too long," Saul Bellow replied. This anecdote came rushing back to me as I scanned the numerous obituaries and literary remembrances of David Foster Wallace, who hanged himself this fall at the age of 46. His most celebrated work was Infinite Jest and, like Augie, it was a depth charge that went off to either ecstatic or uneasy reviews. James Wood's career-making essay on "hysterical realism" may have been primarily addressed to Zadie Smith's White Teeth, but there was no question as to who occupied the largest padded cell of the genre. It was all in Jest: the punning allusiveness of character names (Hal O. Incandenza), the fetish for the superfluous detail (never such fugue states over the clipping of toenails), the unregulated style of narration (try Danubes of consciousness). Broadly, the novel was about addiction--be it to sports, drugs, or lethal entertainment--and at 1,079 pages, with a hundred or so given over to footnotes and footnotes within footnotes, it demanded the addict's devotion. Also two bookmarks: something Joyce never asked of his readers, and Nabokov did only once (Pale Fire), well after his stature had been secured. Infinite Jest was Wallace's second novel. Just who the hell did he think he was?
A genius, as it turns out--and he was right. That he never quite fulfilled his potential is the guilty subtext of much of the current eulogizing, though that non-fulfillment can now be blamed on the unbearable lifelong depression he seems to have battled. A trained mathematician and philosopher, Wallace seemed to assimilate all branches of knowledge into his stories, which often read like abstract logic equations, or experiments in behavioral science. I discovered after his death that he very nearly came to write a book on Godel's incompleteness theorem (he was assigned Cantor's infinity instead), an uncanny near-miss for the publishing industry because, like the mad Austrian who was Einstein's favorite walking partner at Princeton, Wallace incarnated laughter of the mind, that Alice-in-Wonderland-like exuberance for where self-collapsing thoughts and paradoxes and involutions (a favorite term of his) can take you. DFW, as his fans were wont to call him, frequently had his cake and popped out of it, too.
He also made one lasting contribution to cultural studies, though it wasn't emphasized enough in the obituaries. If you read no other essay by Wallace, read "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction," originally published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction and later anthologized in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, the more celebrated ornaments of this collection being a chronicle of life aboard a cruise ship and a dispatch from the Illinois state fair. Written in 1993, still early in the effulgence of his career, "E Unibus" established the nexus between two naturally voyeuristic media, but also showed how they were in competition with each other, and television was winning. Wallace wasn't the first to take television and commercials seriously ("I Do Have a Thesis" should have been one of Marshall McLuhan's interruptive subheadings), but he was the first to explain why they'd led to a dead-end for irony and self-consciousness in literature--a bold conclusion for a litterateur who depended heavily on both.
At the age of twenty-six or so, having noticed that he was obviously not a particle more grown-up or less reckless than he had been at thirteen, he had been greatly relieved to come across a newspaper article by some fashionable psychologist saying that adolescence among human males could be a drawn-out process, lasting in some respects and cases until the age of twenty-five or even thirty. This assurance had given him intermittent hope and comfort of a sort until about ten years later, when it had come back to him in a moment of what had been, even for him, an outstanding act of goatish irresponsibility. Thereafter, he had clung to the consolation that there was nothing he could do about it.
-- Kingsley Amis, The Old Devils
Just how popular is Kay Hymowitz's City Journal essay, "Love in the Time of Darwinism," which decries the phenomenon of marriage-avoiding man-children? So popular that it was sent to me by no fewer than three different friends today (all males) and it's been featured on two different traffic engines this week: Arts & Letters Daily and Real Clear Politics.
Her brief is actually a mild apology for a previous essay in which she reprehended the jaded and loveless men of my generation for, as she puts it here, "whiling away their leisure hours with South Park reruns, marathon sessions of World of Warcraft, and Maxim lists of the ten best movie fart scenes" instead of humming Cole Porter tunes and throwing their jackets over puddles in the street for their intendeds. Courtship is dead, and mankind may well be facing extinction given how many men refuse to grow up, get hitched, and start procreating. What happened to Cary Grant? He turned into Seth Rogen.
As far as forays into contemporary masculine psychology go, Hymowitz's essay wasn't terribly original. Laura Schlesinger caterwauls about the same subject on her weekly radio program (there's nothing that a little wifely put-out can't fix), and Caitlin Flanagan has earned a reputation hovering somewhere between Cassandra and Queen Bee for writing about these domestic complications in much more elegant form in the Atlantic and the New Yorker. But what was original was just how much of a backlash Hymowitz herself incited -all of it from the boys. Her inbox overfloweth with righteous invective styling itself as the "Menaissance," which sure sounds as ridiculous as "Iron John" did in the '90s, but recommends an altogether healthier program than banging bongo drums naked in the woods. The Menaissance mantra seems to be, "We're mad as hell, and we'd rather be masturbating":
Read more...
If I were a Hillary Clinton supporter angered by Barack Obama's decision to select Joe Biden as his running mate, I'd be not only appeased but impressed. Can this not have been the plan all along? Win the election, with or without the support of the (largely mythic) "PUMA" faction, then give the old girl the better prize of the entire State Department. The Guardian has reported that Clinton has indeed accepted Obama's offer for the secretaryship, and may I be the first to point out that Sidney Blumenthal's editorial position at that newspaper no doubt had something to do with its breaking a major American news item?
Clinton, who still harbours hopes of a future presidential run, had to weigh up whether she would be better placed by staying in the Senate, which offers a platform for life, or making the more uncertain career move to the secretary of state job.
The obvious problem here is that she'd be allying herself with an administration whose success could very well facilitate her run for the White House in 2016, but whose failure would almost certainly doom it. Is it better to stay aloof but vaguely supportive, then cast yourself as the change agent who never trusted this president from the start? That option didn't quite work for John McCain. Moreover, Clinton will, as Secretary of State, finally attain a high-level foreign policy expertise that may well include dodging actual sniper fire in the next four years. But this will mean going along with executive decisions she won't agree with, and taking ownership of them when and if they prove blunders. At the very least, it'll be an interesting spectacle to behold, and the journalism profession (what remains of it, anyway) should be grateful.
Though a brief word about what this choice says about Obama. Judging by some of the orgasmic responses to this pick from the Yes We Can quarter, all's forgiven and forgotten, and the new man in charge has yet to be tagged with the label "cynic." (Andrew Sullivan, who not too long ago compared Clinton to "Glenn Close in the bathtub in Fatal Attraction -- whoosh! She's back at your throat" now calls her employment as the international face of the United States "inspired," "genius." Well, that was easy, wasn't it? If only Michael Douglas had hired the bunny-boiler as his nanny instead of letting Ann Archer blow her away.)
The nasty playbook of McCarthyite innuendo that originated with Clinton, who said Obama wasn't a Muslim "as far as I know," and then passed to the Republicans after the Democratic primary was resolved has evidently not fazed Obama overmuch, which is encouraging if you believe the current "Team of Rivals" he's amassing is as capable and honorable as the one Lincoln did. It's also somewhat disappointing and reminds me of Obama's unwillingness to keep a grudge on principle--by no means an unhealthy instinct in a politician.
I appreciate that there are only so many policy talents to choose from in Washington, but Rahm Emanuel, Robert Gibbs, John Podesta, H.R.C. and (in all probability) Larry Summers is more like Plus ca change you can believe in. And judging from the arctic smile afixed to John McCain's face today during his long-awaiting truce and reconciliation meeting with the president-elect, he seems to realize that the one barb his schizophrenic campaign failed to let fly was that a vote for Obama would be a vote for Bill Clinton's third term.
Slate wasted no time in throwing up a "What now?" quorum discussion for the right in the wake of the GOP's big bruising. Now comes a host of disclosures from the McCain camp itself that Sarah Palin was an accident waiting to happen to the country if their side was victorious.
Newsweek is reporting that Palin's wardrobe expenditures, paid for by the RNC, were even higher than first estimated:
NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin's shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain's top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family--clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent "tens of thousands" more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.
A Palin aide said: "Governor Palin was not directing staffers to put anything on their personal credit cards, and anything that staffers put on their credit cards has been reimbursed, like an expense. Nasty and false accusations following a defeat say more about the person who made them than they do about Governor Palin."
Even granting the Palin aide the benefit of the doubt only shows that McCain's staff had a bit of a solidarity and loyalty problem brought on by what it saw as a disastrous and ill-conceived choice of a running mate. What sort of interdeparmental leaks and surreptitious backbiting could we have expected to take place in such an administration? Alternatively, if the RNC audits confirm this embarrassing tale, then we're left with the picture of a classless woman stealing from her own cash-poor campaign. Someone had better check to see if all the original aluminum is still attached to the Straight Talk Express.
More troubling still is the news that Palin thought Africa was a country and didn't know which countries were in North America. What liberal gotcha media outlet has loosed these vile lies upon a grateful republic? Fox:
Conservative blogs Hot Air and Ace of Spades are already crying foul, and accusing the McCain apparat of "bullshit" and scapegoating. Of course, if these disgruntled wingers thought as strategically as they wish their party had, they'd keep quiet and let this item bombinate in the left-o-sphere, which is currently preoccupied with happier thoughts. Instead, it's to be recriminations and sour grapes galore.
So here's a question for that Slate roundtable: What can we do to ensure a comeback in the 2062 midterms?
Want to swish this around in your elite, chardonnay-soaked gob?
Among other things, Obama's pick of Rahm Israel Emanuel, whose father is of Israeli origin, gives the lie to an endless wild myths that political enemies have tirelessly spread during the campaign that he was supposed to be a closest America-hater and no doubt anti-Semite because of his Kenyan background and boyhood in Indonesia. Emanuel, nicknamed "Rahmbo" by his colleagues, is a quasi neo-con hawk on foreign policy, tough champion of the war on terror, and advocate of crackdowns on crime. Obama was accused of being a "socialist" and hater of big business, but Emanuel was managing director in the Chicago office of a major global investment bank, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, where he made millions.
A quasi neo-con hawk. I thought those were extinct? Also, Emanuel's still an unapologetic supporter of the Iraq war who thinks coffee's for closers.
If Obama was any kind of Manchurian candidate, it's the Nation-netroots left that should be worried...
What's happened since Rahm Emanuel was last in the White House, acting under assorted titles as a chief strategist for Bill Clinton? Well, he became a U.S. representative from Chicago. His brother Ari, the overcaffeinated Hollywood superagent, inspired the character of Ari Gold on Entourage, played to Emmy-winning perfection by Jeremy Piven, who's not so much a caricature as a Platonic ideal of the real thing. And Rahm is a lot like his West Coast sibling. He talks like a sailor spending shore leave at David Mamet's house, and his menacing-hilarious theatrics have earned him as many enemies as they have compulsively readable magazine profiles. Vide this golden oldie from the New York Times dug up by Alex Pareene at Gawker:
The best Rahm Emanuel story is not the one about the decomposing two-and-a-half-foot fish he sent to a pollster who displeased him. It is not about the time - the many times - that he hung up on political contributors in a Chicago mayor's race, saying he was embarrassed to accept their $5,000 checks because they were $25,000 kind of guys. No, the definitive Rahm Emanuel story takes place in Little Rock, Ark., in the heady days after Bill Clinton was first elected President.
It was there that Emanuel, then Clinton's chief fund-raiser, repaired with George Stephanopoulos, Mandy Grunwald and other aides to Doe's, the campaign hangout. Revenge was heavy in the air as the group discussed the enemies - Democrats, Republicans, members of the press - who wronged them during the 1992 campaign. Clifford Jackson, the ex-friend of the President and peddler of the Clinton draft-dodging stories, was high on the list. So was William Donald Schaefer, then the Governor of Maryland and a Democrat who endorsed George Bush. Nathan Landow, the fund-raiser who backed the candidacy of Paul Tsongas, made it, too.
Suddenly Emanuel grabbed his steak knife and, as those who were there remember it, shouted out the name of another enemy, lifted the knife, then brought it down with full force into the table.
''Dead!'' he screamed.
The group immediately joined in the cathartic release: ''Nat Landow! Dead! Cliff Jackson! Dead! Bill Schaefer! Dead!''
Toss in a deeply uncomfortable but funny line about cementing his assistant's asshole shut, and you've got Gold, baby. (The family's patriarch is a former Irgun militant, which explains the pugnacity, and also how Obama plans to close the gap with Israeli hawks.) Herewith a preview of how the new chief of staff will handle the coming drama of repping an international celebrity bigger than Vinnie Chase.
Read more...
Not to discount the intangibles of change, hope and Bush loathing, but...
"Shut up!" Mr. Pfeiffer said incredulously. "He said what?"
...should probably go down as the moment Obama won the election. Pfeiffer, his communications director, is responding to the news that McCain had said the "fundamentals of the economy are strong" on the day Lehman Brothers imploded.
Cold water on the left less than 24 hours later. From the Nation, on Obama's likely pick of Rahm Emanuel (brother of the man who inspired Jeremy Piven's character on Entourage, thank you) as White House chief of staff:
Emanuel is a militant advocate for free-trade policies; he was a point man in the White House in the fight to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement and similar deals that have been passionately opposed by the very labor, environmental and farm groups that were essential players in electing Obama. When he ran for Congress in 2002, major unions supported his Democratic primary opponent, former Illinois State Representative Nancy Kaszak.
Picking Emanuel would reassure Wall Street, but it won't give much comfort to Main Street.
It will also cause some head-scratching among Democrats who thought they were making a break not just with the Bush administration but with the compromises of the Clinton era.
Emanuel, a fearsome fund raiser, is closely aligned with the corporate-sponsored Democratic Leadership Council, the most "insider" of Washington-insider groups.
Don DeLillo has a good term for what happened last night: "world hum." Even if you think (as I do) that the messianic aura surrounding Barack Obama can only lead to disappointment, you'd have to be an ostrich not to have noticed the global reprecussions of his historic victory. I went to bed at 6, got up at 9, and have been scouring the Internet for the best morning-after items to share with you, dear reader:
WASHINGTON--African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."
[Un-indicted Co-conspirator] CAIR CONGRATULATES PRESIDENT-ELECT OBAMA
U.S. Muslims offer support for ensuring a safe and free America
"CAIR, America's largest Islamic civil rights and advocacy group, offers its congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama on his historic election to our nation's highest office. President-elect Obama's victory sends the unmistakable message that America is a nation that offers equal opportunity to people of all backgrounds.
"We look forward to having the opportunity to work with the Obama administration in protecting the civil rights of all Americans, projecting an accurate image of America in the Muslim world and playing a positive role in securing our nation."
Obama's victory speech ..... so empty. He was still campaigning. The same stale rhetoric, same vacuous message. He even had the audacity to intimate that his one term would not be enough. He'd need two. He is now campaigning for '12. Now that's audacious!
4. Best photo. Huffington Post, featuring Martin Luther King's sister, Christine King Farris, reacting to the called election from a church in Atlanta, Georgia.
5. Most unexpected news story overshadowed by the election. Michael Crichton died.
Crichton died Tuesday at age 66. He had been privately battling cancer, his family said.
6. Biggest reality check/portent of things to come. Russia likey to deploy short-range missiles to the Baltic in response to U.S. calls for an antimissile defense system in Eastern Europe:
In his speech a few hours earlier, Mr. Medvedev spoke of a "new configuration for the military forces of our country" that would include abandoning plans to dismantle some missile regiments and the stationing of missiles in Russia's Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad.
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning,
or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work,
or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day- at night the party of young
fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
-- Walt Whitman, "I Hear America Singing"
I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.
Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--
I, too, am America.
-- Langston Hughes, "I, Too, Sing America" (Can we agree, at least tonight, that Hughes' totalitarian politics doesn't take away from the above?)
UPDATE: Okay, so I have a big mouth. Read this piece by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (who should never have left the opinion page of the New York Times):
My colleagues and I laughed and shouted, whooped and hollered, hugged each other and cried. My father waited 95 years to see this day happen, and when he called as results came in, I silently thanked God for allowing him to live long enough to cast his vote for the first black man to become president. And even he still can't quite believe it!
You've got to have ice water in your veins not to be stirred by this stuff, left, right or indifferent.
I feel my critical faculties returning already, but I can't promise I won't be feeding you more of this in the days and weeks to come. Just to emphasize the difficulties ahead, today, of all days, Israel and Hamas exchanged rocket fire for the first time since June.
[Note: To read this post with embedded links and proper formatting, go here.]
In the last few weeks, I've seen an admirable conservative newspaper fold, a favorite writer hang himself, and a presidential candidate I assumed I'd be voting for tomorrow disappoint me in ways I hadn't anticipated. As to that dead writer...
The fact is that John McCain is a genuine hero of the only kind Vietnam now has to offer, a hero not because of what he did but because of what he suffered -- voluntarily, for a Code. This gives him the moral authority both to utter lines about causes beyond self-interest and to expect us, even in this age of Spin and lawyerly cunning, to believe he means them. Literally: "moral authority," that old cliché, much like so many other clichés -- "service," "honor," "duty," "patriotism" -- that have become just mostly words now, slogans invoked by men in nice suits who want something from us. The John McCain we've seen, though -- arguing for his doomed campaign-finance bill on the Senate floor in '98, calling his colleagues crooks to their faces on C-Span, talking openly about a bought-and-paid-for government on Charlie Rose in July '99, unpretentious and bright as hell in the Iowa debates and New Hampshire Town Hall Meetings -- something about him made a lot of us feel the guy wanted something different from us, something more than votes or money, something old and maybe corny but with a weird achy pull to it like a whiff of a childhood smell or a name on the tip of your tongue, something that would make us think about what terms like "service" and "sacrifice" and "honor" might really refer to, like whether they actually stood for something, maybe.
David Foster Wallace was one of the sincerest members of his generation (which also, by nice coincidence, happens to be Barack Obama's generation), and an encomium like this should not be discounted for its slightly hedged conclusion. Being wary of a person's honor and selflessness only means you've been on the planet long enough to know what to expect. Cynicism can be a snare, but pessimism is the scar on a broken heart. Still, it did once seem, long ago, as if John McCain would rather lose an election than compromise himself by stooping to the level of his opponent, whose "patrician smirk and mangled cant," as Wallace so aptly put it, was outdone by his base insinuations as to where McCain's dark-skinned daughter had really come from.
I don't consider the Vietnam War a great hour for our republic, and I don't go for flap-flapping nostrums in lieu of moral and intellectual arguments. On foreign policy, I want a president who won't allow his pragmatism or approval rating to eclipse the necessity of calling a thug a thug and a tyrant a tyrant. On many issues such as capital punishment, gay marriage and the role of religion in the public sphere, I'm to left of the Democratic establishment. I believe the last eight years have been a period of disastrous misrule and demoralization, out of which two unambiguous goods have managed to emerge: the end of Saddam Hussein, and the gasping chance for parliamentary democracy in Iraq.
Conservatism at its best means not being a "maverick," but taking principled stances when popular opinion is ranged against them, putting yourself in the path of history, which you know is likely to mow you down and your feckless little Stop sign. "I am a man who, reluctantly, grudgingly, step by step, is destroying himself that this country and the faith by which it lives may continue to exist." That's how Whittaker Chambers, a true patriot of Dostoevskian complexity, explained his choice to become a national pariah rather than allow the dangers of international Communism go unnoticed. If McCain held my attention this year, it wasn't only because of his Chambers-like willingness to destroy himself for his country in a southeast Asian prison cell long before I was born. It was also because of his willingness to destroy his political career by advocating an unpopular military policy designed to save a country other than his own, one that had been written off as lost to Hobbesian chaos. No revisionism, in light of the squalidness of his general campaign, will alter the fact that, had the surge failed, so too would have McCain in this year's primaries. He was at his most presidential in risking his chance to become president. He was also at his most conservative.
It would take a Sophocles or a Shakespeare to map the degeneration of a man who had got a handle on being "post-partisan" before it was fashionable or electorally remunerative. If I had to unearth the whole offence, I would say the trouble began in South Carolina, in 2000, when McCain witnessed just how nasty the game had got to be played, and just how badly he lost by choosing not to play it that way. Christopher Hitchens is wrong to say that McCain's late turn into a merchant of anything-goes innuendo is the result of creeping "senility." It's classical political resentment: in his mind, he's still losing to George W. Bush, just as Nixon thought he was losing to John F. Kennedy--in 1972.
I've defended McCain where I thought he'd been unjustly or hysterically maligned, but there's no arguing the point that his choice of a running mate has effectively squandered the public trust. What a blunder, and what a wasted opportunity. Does anyone now think the Republican "base," whose tendency to froth and foam has led to absurd but familiar analogies to fascism, would have voted Democratic this year had it been deprived of a cultural reactionary with a socialite's wardrobe? Rush Limbaugh would have declared for the man he calls the "Magic Negro"? Really? The bloc McCain needed to persuade was that of independents--his natural constituency--who would have found the combination of experience and integrity too alluring to pass up. We needed an Eisenhower with a steady hand, not a Preston Sturges of "right-wing screwball," as Leon Wieseltier unimprovably phrased it.
Here's another Greek misfortune of his own making: McCain's age and questionable health would have been overshadowed by his apparent energy on the stump had his VP been less of a Halloween costume and more of an insurance policy. Instead, these concerns became the stuff of actuarial office bets, and a disturbing aura of death and decrepitude has surrounded him during his final laps around the country.
As for Barack Obama, I'm worried his supporters are too ecstatic, and not chastened for the challenges he's about to face, which some of them, judging by conversations I've had, can't imagine to be worse than Hillary Clinton. I find his personality winning, and his intellect impressive. For good reason did Weber define charisma as one criterion of authority. I've recoiled in horror at the paranoid and sinister accusations leveled against Obama from the fever-swamps of blogland. Isn't it amazing how this charming young man manages to divide his time between battleground states and a cave in Waziristan?
When I hear the word "socialism," I remember the lonely, prophetic radicals who screamed bloody murder about the Soviet Union before liberals and conservatives stopped referring warmly to Uncle Joe. Until and unless the DNC espouses the belief in the government ownership of the means of production, then the rejoinder belongs to the author of Das Kapital himself, who famously demeaned the non-revolutionary varieties of redistributionism by saying, "If that is Marxism, then I am not a Marxist."
Actually, some of the most astute observers of this election have been Marxists, or recovering New Leftists. Sol Stern, former editor of Ramparts, has rightly assailed William Ayers as a greater immediate danger to the American education system than he ever was to the Pentagon. Paul Berman, echoing his hero Irving Howe, has reminded us that 60's left-wing authoritarianism is no alternative to the timeless right-wing brand, and that an unrepentant mad bomber does not need or deserve a burnished reputation or friendship society. In these very pages, Phyllis Chesler has shown how Sarah Palin has brought out the worst in modern feminism, causing cracks in the glass ceiling, and crack-ups in the movement.
Tellingly, however, none of these critics has rushed to denounce Obama as the second coming of Abbie Hoffman or Franz Fanon. Why is that, do you suppose, if he's as recondite and unreconstructed as some of my inbox material maintains? I find the graying 68ers more reliable in their judgments of sign-posted ideology than the collective wisdom of the National Review editorial board. In fact, one prominent black detractor, Professor Adolph Reed, has made the most salient case against Obama in the Progressive, arguing that the candidate isn't anything as glamorous as a secret radical, but rather a standard-issue opportunist who talks out of both sides of his mouth and is always looking to a cut a deal to advance his career. What more could we want from a graduate of the Daley machine of Chicago, that noble city? The Saul to consult to understand Obama's baptism in picaresque urban realities isn't Alinsky. It's Bellow.
Where I have covered Obama's policy prescriptions - namely for Iraq - I've found him improvisational and half-cocked. He doesn't confuse Sunni and Shia, but as late as May 2008 he thought Iraqis would bow to the constitutional re-drafting authority of the United Nations, the body responsible for a decade of immiserating sanctions, and which has not had a presence in their country since Al Qaeda blew up its headquarters in Baghdad in 2003. He also labored under a misapprehension that Iraq's parliament had not, as of last spring, passed laws for de-Baathification, political amnesty, and provisional elections when in fact it had passed them, and he had made the non-fulfillment of these and other "benchmarks" established by the Bush administration a major talking point of his antiwar rhetoric.
Nevertheless, Obama shows no sign of letting up on Al Qaeda where it still presents a lethal menace to civilization, and it's unlikely--given the price he's had to pay for even suggesting it--that he would now meet with the mullahs of Iran without preconditions. Verbal Vesuvius though his own running mate may be, Joe Biden has seen Russia by standing on its soil, not through magic binoculars; he has a proven record of doing something about genocide; and he has kept abreast of the headlines in Iraq enough to recommend a three-state solution that, however misguided in my view, has been endorsed by Peter Galbraith, a scholar and diplomat who ranks as one of the most serious American experts on Iraqi Kurdistan. Given Obama's likely appointment of Richard Holbrooke, advocate of Kosovo independence, to a high-level position in his cabinet, there is every expectation that muscular interventionism will indeed have a fighting chance in the next four years. My friend Eli Lake, a prominent neoconservative, has written cogently that Obama's foreign policy, judging by the people crafting it, would more resemble Ronald Reagan's than it would Jimmy Carter's. That means escalating dirty wars and black ops, ladies and gentlemen. Yes, we will.
Perhaps most important, given the way Americans are said to vote, Obama has demonstrated an equanimity during the financial calamity that, while not a sufficient condition for keeping the country out of a depression, is surely a necessary one.
Nothing would have pleased me more than to have been able to say that of his rival, under different circumstances.
Here's one way to keep hope alive: journalists are still more concerned with transparent journalism than they are with seeing Barack Obama cosseted all the way to the White House. Ron Rosenbaum and Jeff Goldberg have all come out against the L.A. Times' collapsible refusal to disclose a videotape of a 2003 banquet at which Obama spoke warmly of Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies' at Columbia University, and director of the Middle East Institute of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs. According to the Times' description of the piece it ran six months ago, "speakers expressed anger at Israel and at U.S. foreign policy, but that Obama in his comments called for finding common ground." Nothing especially shocking in that, one might think. So why can't we all see what's on the tape?
The Times is claiming that releasing the footage would compromise its source, which seems unlikely even if the source narrates the entire film. (Since when are video editing skills absent on the West Coast?) The newspaper's intransigence had led many on the right to presume that Obama sat in silence or approval as the worst type of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic rhetoric was loosed in his presence. Therefore, goes this logic, he's a covert sympathizer with the PLO who's just waiting to get elected before he invites AIPAC and American Jewry to join Jeremiah Wright and his white grandmother under what has got be the most merciless bus since Speed.
Since (late) 2004, satisfying your jones for political and cultural commentary, day-old scoops and late-breaking marginalia, and whatever else finagles its way into the cyber-planetary potluck...
• Civil Disobedience on the Web By Michael Weiss {British bloggers stand up to threats of libel lawsuits., originally published in Slate.}
• Spray-Fire Atonement By Michael Weiss {How cognitive behavioral psychology can help High Holy Day Jews who repent too much., originally published in Slate.}
• Mutiny on the Manifesto By Michael Weiss {Spineless scalawags are sabotaging the most promising leftist doctrine in decades. Don't let them., originally published in Jewcy.}
• Rise of the Faux-cialists By Michael Weiss {Three poseurs who would have Marx spinning in his grave (plus their real-deal counterparts), originally published in Jewcy.}
• Stepson of the Time By Michael Weiss {A reconsideration of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, originally published in The New Criterion.}
• The Surge Can Work By Michael Weiss {Everyone's wrong about the president's new war plan, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Kibitz on Pure Reason By Michael Weiss {The author of Betraying Spinoza on rationalism, passion, and great 17th-century hair, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Brainwashing's Nemesis By Michael Weiss {How Rick Ross became a cult buster extraordinaire, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Whiz Kid of Warfare By Michael Weiss {How Noah Shachtman has revolutionized military reporting, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Blacklist The Left Could Use By Michael Weiss {Meet the Christopher Hitchens of postpunk, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Is Marriage the New Dating? By Michael Weiss {A divorcee, a young married, and a singleton debate wedded bliss, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Jewish Jihad for Jesus By Michael Weiss {Why converts are leading the evangelical movement, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Tribal Threads By Michael Weiss {The designer of Gytha Mander on the holy land, holsters, and honeys, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Some Kind of Republican By Michael Weiss {The real legacy of John Hughes, published in Slate.}
Slate 
Conservatism at its best means not being a "maverick," but taking principled stances when popular opinion is ranged against them, putting yourself in the path of history, which you know is likely to mow you down and your feckless little Stop sign. "I am a man who, reluctantly, grudgingly, step by step, is destroying himself that this country and the faith by which it lives may continue to exist." That's how Whittaker Chambers, a true patriot of Dostoevskian complexity, explained his choice to become a national pariah rather than allow the dangers of international Communism go unnoticed. If McCain held my attention this year, it wasn't only because of his Chambers-like willingness to destroy himself for his country in a southeast Asian prison cell long before I was born. It was also because of his willingness to destroy his political career by advocating an unpopular military policy designed to save a country other than his own, one that had been written off as lost to Hobbesian chaos. No revisionism, in light of the squalidness of his general campaign, will alter the fact that, had the surge failed, so too would have McCain in this year's primaries. He was at his most presidential in risking his chance to become president. He was also at his most conservative.
As for Barack Obama, I'm worried his supporters are too ecstatic, and not chastened for the challenges he's about to face, which some of them, judging by conversations I've had, can't imagine to be worse than Hillary Clinton. I find his personality winning, and his intellect impressive. For good reason did Weber define charisma as one criterion of authority. I've recoiled in horror at the paranoid and sinister accusations leveled against Obama from the fever-swamps of blogland. Isn't it amazing how this charming young man manages to divide his time between battleground states and a cave in Waziristan?
