• 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.}
Only the sorts of people who probably shouldn't be allowed to vote in the first place thought that the election fo Barack Obama would put an end to all the trouble in the world, particularly racism. Lafayette French Pastry, a celeb-frequented shop in the heart of Greenwich Village, has come out with "Drunk Negro Cookies" in odious honor of the new president. (What, no Kike-a-doodle strudel tribute to Bernie Madoff?) Watch the following video, then consider boycotting this shabby little tart shop.
It occurred to me halfway through listening to Elizabeth Alexander's narcoleptic and thoroughly "bureaucratic" verse, as Adam Kirsch so aptly put it, that there is in fact one area in which a celebrated golden age lies behind, forcing us to inhabit one of so much rusty aluminum. Poetry is not what it used to be:
When Horace produced his Carmen Saeculare at the command of the Emperor Augustus, as part of the festivities for the Secular Games in 17 B.C., he was happily placing his gifts at the service of the new imperial regime, much as Virgil did when he wrote the Aeneid. So, too, with the Elizabethan poets, who poured their lyrics and masques at the feet of Gloriana. In a monarchy, there is no shame for a poet, or for anyone else, in being the monarch's servant.
And there is usually no shame in the poetry produced at court; truth gets spoken, if only whispered, to power in subtle yet unmistakable ways. "You knelt a boy, you rose a man / And thus your lonelier life began" was the closing stave of the ballad John Betjeman was commissioned to write to mark the occasion of Prince Charles's investiture in 1968. Can you imagine a similar chord of caution or pessimism being struck by a democratic flatterer in the hope-besotted coronation of Barack Obama? (It was the new president himself who sounded gloomiest.)
I've only just learned, courtesy of Steven Isenberg's hilarious essay in the American Scholar about his lunches with famous poets, that upon meeting Queen Elizabeth in Northern Ireland, Philip Larkin told an Irish joke, "which he said was sort of a triple faux pas--telling the Queen a joke, an Irish one, and doing it in Northern Ireland." Yes well, the "quintessentially English" poet of the postwar years was nothing if not a self-saboteur of his own reputation. Larkin also effectively prevented his favorite prime minister Margaret Thatcher from naming him poet laureate because of all the dour bawdy he'd written, particularly "This Be the Verse" ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad.... Get out as early as you can / And don't have any kids yourself.").
Part of the problem, I would venture, though I claim none of Kirsch's expertise in the matter, is that poets today are not actuated by extreme politics or extreme metaphyics as their forebears once were. George Orwell noted in a characteristically shrewd essay that in the early decades of the 20th-century, in order to be a writer of note in any genre, one had to be a communist, a fascist or a Catholic. Slightly before him, Edmund Wilson hit upon the same theme, observing that T.S. Eliot's imagination was trapped in a world of "seventeenth-century churchmen," John Dos Passos (though a novelist) was the bard of "an army of workers, disinterested, industrious and sturdy," while Ezra Pound -- who provided a fine example of immature ideology gratifyingly seconded by immature poetry -- bethought himself a troubadour in medieval Provence, speaking in a Babel-like hodgepodge of unintelligible tongues. Modernism, in other words, was a wild oscillation between the distant past and the distant future; that's why it resounded in the immediate present.
But bureaucratic verse is firmly rooted in a bureaucratic present, and so it is ungripping and banal. Alexander's is the poetry of warm consensus--stock thoughts and stock emotions workshopped into a pureed nothingness. The following wasn't her inaugural doggerel, but it's a fine example of decline all the same:
I dreamed a pronouncement
about poetry and peace.
"People are violent,"
I said through the megaphone
on the quintessentially
frigid Saturday
to the rabble stretching
all the way up First.
"People do violence
unto each other
and unto the earth
and unto its creatures.
Poetry," I shouted, "Poetry,"
I screamed, "Poetry
changes none of that
by what it says
or how it says, none.
But a poem is a living thing
made by living creatures...
and as life
it is all that can stand
up to violence."
If she's shouting and screaming through a megaphone, there's small chance that what she has to say will endure--although it certainly can capture the moment of a platitudinous campaign rally, or a scripted anti-something protest. This is the postmodernist's laboratory of reanimated dead imagery. Alexander's main sentiment in the above extract is a third-rate imitation of one that emphasizes poetry's superficial fecklessness but then concludes that maybe it does have a certain contradictory or rebellious quality. Thanks, but I knew that already:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
A modest proposal for Obama 2.0: Hire Christopher Plummer or Ian McKellen or Frank Langella (if it must be an American) to recite some Auden or Yeats at your next big do, and get on with the prose already.
The New York Times has compiled a roundup of former presidential speechwriters' receptions of Barack Obama's inaugural address, and all are rather ho-hum, both in the form of their rhetorical analysis and the ultimate judgments they make of common subject matter. (One exception: William Safire relating that the phrase "we cannot stand pat" occurred exactly once in a Nixon speech, given within earshot of the first lady.)
But I knew this would happen: John McWhorter, by far the most original and incisive observer of race matters, has written the post-address linguistic essay you should read. What is that special x-factor, that secret ingredient in Obama's oratory? Can we all take a deep, post-p.c. breath now that it's official and he's in charge and admit the obvious: it's the blackness. Here's McWhorter:
Black English is a matter not just of slang, but of sentence structure and sound (why you can tell most black people's race over the phone, which is proven in studies). Some blacks use all three; Obama is one of the many who wields mostly the sound. Listen to the way he often ends sentences on a higher pitch than, say, Tom Brokaw would, with that preacherly hang-in-the-air. Or the way he often pronounces "history" as "historih," "ability" as "abilitih." His rendition of the word responsibility was indicative: with a cadence typical of Black English, capped by a final "ih." No President has ever intoned sentences in this way, because they were not black.
And no president, McWhorter's shrewd enough to add, had the cultural advantage of hearing this beguiling patois pouring from the lips of young people of every race and ethnicity, and more in earnest tribute (or envy) than in mocking irony. What untold debts Obama owes to Eminem and Tarantino.
"That brother can spout" was the all-business email I received from my cant-immune father at around 2 p.m. yesterday. Courtesy of a fellow Obama voter who, having grown up a secular Jew in Queens in the 1950's, has lived long enough to detect the orotundity of the black church tradition -- and probably wish that most New York rabbis had a verbal rep of their own that didn't immediately call to mind Jackie Mason or Ed Koch.
Unlike, say, Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, Obama can aurally pass for white, but he knows just when, and to what degree, to infuse his rhetoric with the pulpit cadences that send thrills up the thighs of cable news anchors. And here's the meta appeal of that: Smatterings of demotic speech in brilliant, erudite speakers is a very clever way to remind one's audience where one came from, and just how extraordinary one's arrival has been. The New York intellectuals used to self-consciously refer to each other as "Oiving," an easy way to gauge the feat of a bunch of working-class, City College Jews transforming themselves into men of letters and serious political thinkers. (If you've ever heard the Oiving whose last name was Howe pronounce the word "perfervid," you'll appreciate the trick of this shtick even more.) It's like hearing Lionel Trilling recite Kaddish.
Obama's Black English may be more of an acquired trait than George Bush's Texas twang ever was, but "Yes we can" sounds rebellious in a way that "Bring 'em on" does not. This owes less, in my view, to any major difference in semantic sophistication. If a man who normally spoke in public as an Ivy League-educated scion of a great American family got a little rough and tumble, but only rarely, and as occasion called for it, then phrases of reckless bravado might now be remembered as phrases of stirring defiance. (Being a better president might have helped, too.) Perhaps more ennobling than his frequent citations of "hope" is the subtle manner in which Obama makes them.
This is why I think Chris Rock might be wrong about the impossibility of parodying him. With all the speeches (in all the locales) the new president will have to give in the next four years, might there not at least be the chance for a lurch into the verbal terrain hilariously mapped by Eddie Murphy in an otherwise dud comedy about making it as a minority in Washington?
Someone close to the now-former president once explained to me his (the president's) most debilitating character flaw. A rather crowded field, you might think, but the answer, rooted in George W. Bush's overindulged demand for absolute loyalty, did manage to envelope all the other usual suspects like arrogance, dismissiveness, anti-intellectualism, and parochialism. This well-connected person phrased it like this: "When you decide that six or seven people have turned on you, and that they're now your mortal enemies, that's not a problem. But when you get up to a 100 million or so Americans who've become mortal enemies--that's a problem."
History will do its work in evaluating the Bush Era once the furies and recriminations have ebbed. (The late Samuel Huntington would have eloquently termed the last five years of angry opposition to this administration a "creedal passion period," now giving way to the level-headed pragmatism that is our nation's state of equilibrium.) (The late Samuel Huntington would have eloquently termed the last five years of angry opposition to this administration a "creedal passion period," now giving way to the level-headed pragmatism that is our nation's state of equilibrium.) But if vice can be transmuted into virtue, and if Bush can be said to have got anything right during his time in office, surely his defiance of the "realist" prescription for salvaging Iraq in 2006 must record as a triumph.
Recall the almost universal criticism that the "surge" elicited when it was first announced, against a then almost universally embraced Hamilton-Baker plan for quitting Iraq militarily and letting unprepared Iraqis--and other regional dictatorships--sort out a mess of our own making. Andrew Sullivan said the surge was a lost cause, something that should have been tried three years earlier, when we first invaded. Joe Klein and Frank Rich had little time for a rethink of a counterinsurgency policy wedded to an injection of more young servicemen, even though Klein was the most perceptive in analyzing the true nature of that policy. Even Christopher Hitchens, later a champion of the surge, was, as I recall, initially dour about its prospect for success, although he was and has been steadfast in defending the moral and strategic imperative of ending the regime of Saddam Hussein.
I bring all this up for two reasons. The first is that Peter Beinart took the occasion of this week's Goodbye to All That gleefulness to give credit where he rightly saw it was due, noting that since Gen. David Petraeus' brilliant war plan--really a local policing plan--was implemented, the number of Iraq war dead has dropped from a staggering 3,475 to 500, and American troop fatalities have fallen to nearly a sixth of what they were. Adds Beinart:
[I]f Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush's record, his decision to increase America's troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour. Given the mood in Washington and the country as a whole, it would have been far easier to do the opposite. Politically, Bush took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous.
The second reason I bring this up is amour propre--both the institutional and personal strains. Noxious little neocon that I am, I spent a few solid hours of my time trying to convince my fellow editors that the surge had a chance and should be given one. The result was a piece in Jewcy that elicited its own share of scorn and derision--though not, thankfully, from those editors--when it first appeared:
In Counterinsurgency, Petraeus describes an effective clear-hold-build mission as more akin to urban policing than battlefield combat: Think New York City's "broken windows" anti-crime initiative. The central paradox of counterinsurgency is that it applies proportionately less force with greater numbers. The goal is to safeguard the native population from pitiless and desperate aggressors without actively hunting down and killing them. For this reason it's known as "war at the graduate level."
Here's how it will work: In the "clearing" phase, Iraqis and Americans will share planning and reconnaissance responsibilities. They'll establish surveillance routes together and then "sweep" local housing and apartment blocks searching for signs of insurgent activity. Civilians prefer to have their doors knocked on by Yanks than by fellow Iraqis, who may moonlight as sectarian partisans or death squad riffraff. Iraqi troops will serve as cultural and linguistic liaisons and learn the delicate art of questioning civilians. Peace, in other words, will have to be a polyglot phenomenon.
[...]
The lessons of Tal Afar, Petraeus's expertise in clear-hold-build tactics, and Kagan's proposals as to the necessary number of troops and where those troops should be focused--all of these are crucial planks of a program that has been dismissed as uninsipired and feckless rather than honestly assessed.
Still, when the president warned that the year ahead would be "bloody and violent," he acknowledged the grim reality that the emergence of a viable post-Saddam state will require extreme forbearance on the part of the American and Iraqi peoples. And so it will.
This isn't intended as a nyah-nyah (well, maybe a little), but rather as a mild suggestion. It took Democrats too long to acknowledge the obvious success of the surge because doing so, as Beinart points out, might have compromised their candidate's chances in November. Yet this denial might also have done something far worse: encourage a hasty and irresponsible withdrawal from Iraq at a time when the war looked to be finally going our way.
The rate at which the politics of the negative can become conventional wisdom has increased exponentially since the creation of the blogosphere. Conservatives should take heed from the faults of liberal excess, or what is sometimes known as Bush Derangement Syndrome. If Nemesis should stalk future Obama policies, or look as if it's doing, don't succumb to partisan pettiness or wishful defeatism because you don't don't like the man pedding the policy. We may not be driven to other "quagmires" by the current president, much less to ones that result in the loss of American lives, but you can be sure that we will be presented with initiatives that are hotly contested and reviled in some quarters. The president's willingness to take the necessary risks to see them through will be susceptible to popular opinion.
A leader who goes against consensus because he's adopted a siege mentality or a martyrdom complex is no healthier than one who goes with consensus because he's afraid his aura will fade. Honesty and dispassionate appraisal from his constituents, and the pundits they rely on for their information, are useful checks on either executive shortcoming.
An aged Jew dies and ascends to heaven. Upon meeting God, he asks, "When will there be a Jewish president?" God answers: "Not in your lifetime." "And when will there be a black president?" inquires the recently deceased. "Not in my lifetime," replies the deity.
A joke, said Nietzsche, is the epitaph on the death of a feeling, and that feeling of shrugging hopelessness is, we can all agree, long gone. It may well be the case that in four or eight years time, Obama will leave office with many clamoring for the end to presidential term limits. Alternatively, there may be a large and loud chorus wishing him well but in a hurry to welcome the first female chief executive, or yet another prosaic but genial male WASP. Today's ceremony has all the uncomfortable features of a royal investiture; little acknowledged amid the kitsch trinkets, the Top 40 serenades and the endless queques of hungry historical witnesses in Washington is that this is an employee's first day on the job. The man himself is still very much a blank canvas, which is why his many votaries -- as well as recent converts -- can find whatever it is they're looking for on it, owing to their own individual brushstrokes.
I wasn't entirely sold on Obama when I voted for him (I bought in a foreclosure market), and it still remains to be seen whether his dual defeats of a formidable primary rival, and a not-so-formidable general election rival, were indications of great political skill or harbingers of true leadership. (More than one shrewd commentator has remarked on Obama's unmistakable gift of good fortune; just try tallying up all the eerily near-miss events that led to this moment.) One advantage he has right from the start is knowing almost exactly what he'll be up against: two wars, an economy in ruin, a nuclearized North Korea and Iran, the refurbishing of the American "brand," and... what else? Oh yes, the inevitability of another act of hideous holy violence on these shores, which may, through no immediate fault of his own, happen on his watch. What surprises after the blood-brutal dawn of the 21st century apart from the landing of extraterrestrials?
Next stop, optimism rehab. I say this copping to my own feelings of sentimentality, knowing that on this frigid winter's day, a major stain on our republic is effectively washed clean, almost two hundred years after the birth of Abraham Lincoln, and forty-five years after the moral ascendancy of Martin Luther King.
Poetry can do justice, it's true, but any critic worth his salt will tell you it more often specializes in bathos. Let us hope that our most literary modern commander-in-chief never loses sight of the fact.
Adam LeBor on War Crimes, Haim Watzman on Israeli Democracy
Two highly readable essays now up at Jewcy. The first is the inestimable Adam LeBor on the definition of war crimes, and how they apply to Gaza:
Whether or not a war crime is committed is governed by the laws of war, which include proportionality. Other key questions include how is the fighting conducted? How much care is being taken to minimize civilian casualties? Is there access to the wounded? Are prohibited weapons being used? The basic principles were set out in the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which introduced rules about protection of civilians, and in the additional protocols of 1977, which further defines questions of military targeting. Israel has not ratified the 1977 protocols but its courts have recognized some of their key provisions as part of customary law.
Only enemy fighters can be intentionally targeted, that is, those engaged in hostilities. These can include uniformed soldiers, but civilians may also be targeted if they take a direct part in hostilities. Israel apparently seeks to expand this definition. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) spokesman Captain Benjamin Rutland told the BBC: "Our definition is that anyone who is involved with terrorism within Hamas is a valid target. This ranges from the strictly military institutions and includes the political institutions that provide the logistical funding and human resources for the terrorist arm." This is a significant broadening of the definition and ironically, partly mirrors the justification of Palestinian terrorist groups that attacks on Israeli civilians are justified because all Israelis serve in the army, or will grow up to do so.
Only partly. One implication of the terrorist's rationale is that children are legitimate targets because, under Israeli law, they will eventually serve in the military. Rutland's definition applies only to autonomous adults who select to join whatever arm of the Hamas apparatus and are thus complicit in the party's crimes. However, he's nowhere near specific enough: is a secretary to a low-level civil functionary who is many degrees removed from the military wing of Hamas a valid target? (The policies and revisions of de-Baathification in Iraq might prove instructive in better clarifying what echelons of the Islamist group one must belong to in order to be deemed culpable.) One thing is clear: Children of Hamas who may grow up to follow in their fathers' footsteps are not included in this fair game category, as evidenced by the fact that the IDF disapprovingly publicized how Hamas's now-slain leader Nizar Rayyan made his family stay with him in a location he knew was likely to be bombed. He wished to "martyr" his many wives and children, whereas the Israelis would have preferred to spare them.
Otherwise, Adam's piece is a much-needed tonic of both legal and moral analysis on a subject that, understandably but also dangerously, has passions inflamed and is not being dealt with soberly in real-time.
The other piece I wish to call to your attention is Haim Watzman's defense of keeping anti-Israel Arab parties eligible for parliamentary election (the Israeli Election Committee recently decided to nullify their eligibility; the case is now going to the Supreme Court, which may well overturn the decision on grounds that it is undemocratic):
After all, none of the ranters accusing the Arab slates of treason thinks that these parties are running guns for Hamas, and the Arab ranters would not be so stupid to do so and then field a slate for the Knesset. The real issue is whether advocating that Israel be a state of all its citizens--rather than a Jewish national state--constitutes sedition in and of itself. That Israel should not be a Jewish state is the official position of Balad and of a part of the Ra'am-Ta'al list.
This is a question with no easier answer because, as Benny Morris and others are wont to point out, the end of a "Jewish state" -- as opposed to a "state for the Jews" -- can occur violently but also demographically. If an Arab majority is attained (estimates have this inevitability occurring, given current birthrate trends, in around 2040), then Israel will face a dilemma once faced by Christian Lebanon when it became a Muslim-predominant country. Will it enshrine in its constitution certain permanent representative posts in government for the religious minority (in this case the Jews)? And will this guarantee be enough to prevent a bloody civil war, as pluralist Lebanon has been undergoing for decades and sectarian Iraq may still yet? Or will Israel become an increasingly less democratic state, effectively capping the size and enfranchisement of its Arab population?
The Trade Union Congress is raising money for humanitarian aid in Gaza. Please note that the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions and the International Transport Workers' Federation are not just independent entities--they are considered enemies by Hamas. Whatever your politics, there is no denying the human suffering in Gaza. Please consider donating money here.
All proceeds will be forwarded through the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) and the International Transport Workers' Federation (ITF) to support emergency humanitarian relief operations carried out by them in Gaza. All trade union relief operations are co-ordinated through Red Crescent in Jordan, Egypt and Gaza and focused on the identified needs of the people affected by the events. The first ITF-PGFTU humanitarian flight is due to leave for Gaza on 08 Jan 2009. The TUC supports an immediate ceasefire by both sides, and the pursuit of a political solution to the problems of the Middle East based on two states.
My former employer Pajamas Media has decided to dispatch Joe the Plumber to Israel as a roving correspondent to, as he puts it, let "Average Joes' share their story." The inevitable fallout when a PR neutron bomb like this goes off always puts me in mind of the Wolf and Sheepdog cartoon series Warner Bros. used to run. You know the routine, provided your childhood wasn't stunted and deprived: two permanent adversaries clock in each day and exchange morning pleasantries ("G'day Ralph, G'day Sam") before setting to their predictable work. The so-called "liberal elite" must snigger and snark about a duplicitous, posturing everyman who shilled for John McCain pretending he has any credentials whatsoever to be a war reporter. Conservative populists must then rail against said elite, citing the duplicity and unabashed political bias of the "MSM" (that's mainstream media to you laymen), while claiming that Joe represents a silent majority of Americans and is thus every bit as entitled to cover the Gaza conflict as are, say, Wolf Blitzer and Ted Koppel.
Lost in the melee is the graver question of whether or not a time of war is a time for cultural point-scoring. There is simply no way that PJM didn't prefigure the tongue-in-cheek headlines that would follow this announcement, which has unintentionally vitiated the blog network's stated purpose of standing up for Israel. Joe's become the story, if not the spectacle.
This is not is not to say that a plumber might not do good work as a war reporter, or that, conversely, opposition to his appointment reflects latent or manifest class antagonism. Thomas Paine was a staymaker before he was a pamphleteer, but he was not taken seriously by publishers--nor did he expect to be--until he had actually produced a pamphlet worth reading. He was also a radical revolutionary on two continents.
But gone, it seems, is the withering skepticism of classical conservatism, which saw the extolling of boldness and defiance for their own sake as hazardous traits of adolescence, designed to be outgrown--and where they weren't, out-argued. What would Allan Bloom think about Joe on the frontlines? Does it even matter anymore?
French public television network France 2 on Tuesday revealed they had aired photographs that allegedly showed destruction caused by the Israel Air Force during Operation Cast Lead, which were in fact taken during a different incident in 2005, one in which Gaza civilians were killed by an explosion caused by militants in the Strip.
The footage aired on Channel 2 on Tuesday afternoon showed dozens of dead bodies, including Hamas gunmen and citizens, which the channel said were killed by an IAF bombing raid on January 1st. It later came to light that the channel had instead aired footage of the devastation caused after a truck full of explosives blew up in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp.
A news editor at France 2 told Le Figaro Tuesday that they had "made a mistake by airing those pictures," which he said depict events from 2005.
I will in all seriousness credit France 2 with acknowledging its mistake, even if it means that the original images it broadcast have already been propagated and have already done their unavoidable damage. I'll also go so far as to not draw any definitive conclusions about the current integrity of a television network whose Israeli bureau chief, Charles Enderlin, has, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary -- last legitimized* by the Paris Court of Appeal -- maintained his position that the IDF was responsible for the alleged shooting death of Mohammed al-Durrah, a 12 year-old Gazan whose "martyrdom" has been called the Palestinian Dreyfus Affair. Reporters are not necessarily defined by their news organizations (Marx wrote for the New York Tribune), and vice versa.
War reporting, it must also be said, is prone to errors, and some errors carry heavier consequences than others. Whatever the truth behind France 2's admission of an honest mistake, it does emphasize an important point raised recently by Jeffrey Goldberg about the stupidity of the IDF's decision to disallow foreign correspondents into Gaza. There are good, honest print, TV and photo journalists from all countries--not least of all, ours --willing to expose the very real tragedies of war, and also the heinous propaganda efforts which seek to fabricate new tragedies for ideological purposes. (As Jeff points out, Hamas is unconscionably adept at doing just that.)
Still, that this snafu comes at a moment that demands great sensitivity and fastidious attention to detail, whatever one's politics or sympathies, indicates a gross dereliction of duty on the part of France 2. Whoever is responsible for running old images of dead Palestinians--killed, no less, by detonated Hamas explosives--should at the very least be kept away from the newsroom for the remainder of the conflict.
* Please note the appended correction at Jewcy. The original term "substantiated" was misleading. The Court did not uphold Karentsy's case as proof of forgery, but it did defend his right to call France 2's coverage of the al-Durrah episode a fake based on what it saw as the seriousness and sincerity of his investigation.
Foreign Policy blogger Marc Lynch (a.k.a. Abu Aardvark) has an interesting post up at FP's new-minted digital playground, which has already drawn lurid attention to itself for its inclusion of Israel Lobby theorist Stephen Walt and his dubious "thought experiments." Lynch is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, and, much like his cheerleader and confrere-at-the-keyboard Juan Cole, has built a reputation as a Mideast analyst who sees almost every effort to stamp out jihadism as an unintentional bolster to jihadism. Case in point: His latest claim that Israel's buffeting of Hamas is sweet music to the ears of Al Qaeda:
Israel's assault on Gaza has really created an almost unbelievable no-lose situation for al-Qaeda. If Hamas "wins", then al-Qaeda gets to share in the benefits of the political losses incurred by its Western and Arab enemies (Zawahiri mentions Mubarak and the Saudis in this tape, but not the Jordanians) and can try to take advantage of the political upheavals which could follow. If Hamas "loses", al-Qaeda still wins. It will shed no tears at seeing one of its bitterest and most dangerous rivals take a beating at Israel's hands or losing control of a government that they have consistently decried as illegitimate and misguided. Either way, the Gaza crisis guarantees that a far more radicalized Islamic world will face the incoming Obama administration -- potentially severely blunting the challenge which al-Qaeda clearly felt after the election (hence Zawahiri's attempt to pre-emptively discredit Obama by declaring the attack Obama's "gift" to Muslims).
The way this crisis is playing out shows the bankruptcy and strategic dangers of trying to simply reduce Hamas to part of an undifferentiated "global terrorist front". The Muslim Brotherhood, from whence Hamas evolved twenty years ago, is no friend of the United States or Israel but is nevertheless one of al-Qaeda's fiercest rivals. Zawahiri himself penned one of the most famous anti-Brotherhood tracts, Bitter Harvest. Over the last few years, the doctrinal and political conflict between the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda's salafi-jihadism has become one of the most active fault-lines in Islamist politics. As 'Abu Qandahar' wrote on al-Qaeda's key al-Ekhlaas forum in October 2007, the "Islamic world is divided between two projects, jihad and Ikhwan [Brotherhood]."
Lynch's reason for how Al Qaeda "wins" if Hamas loses is that the latter terror group's monopoly on Gaza would effectively be broken, thus allowing the former to finally infilitrate (cf. "Up to now, AQ-minded groups have had little success in penetrating Gaza, because Hamas had it locked. Now they clearly have high hopes of finding an entree with a radicalized, devastated population and a weakened Hamas."). If this does in fact happen, then I wonder if Lynch has extrapolated the likely consequences, which tell against his implied thesis that military incursions such as these are inherently self-defeating. Al Qaeda's setting up shop right next door to Israel would almost certainly do two things: 1. Give Israel even greater legitimacy to wage war there, if not invite a U.S./international military presence; 2. Change the world's perception of the zone of conflict from that of a colonial-nationalist struggle into that of a... "global terrorist front." (What price immediate cease-fires when the premier enemy of our time, with a trail of carnage stretching from New York to London to Madrid, is doing the fighting?)
What Lynch doesn't acknowledge -- at least not in this post -- is that Al Qaeda's flagging popularity is due in large part to its military and political defeat in Iraq, where it (foolishly) decided to create a cynosure of Islamist terror and test out the prospects of a neo-caliphate. If it should try to do this again, and in the one place it can ill afford to have Muslims grow more disillusioned with its activities, might we expect the realist school to indulge us with the following headline: "and the winner is... America!"?
I have already tried to show how Hamas has failed the people of Palestine politically, and how even the most optimistic appraisal of the organization's supposed "pragmatism" has failed to pan out, even under exigent circumstances in which pragmatism should surely trump ideological purity. However, lest one come away with the narrow assumption that Hamas's theocratic fascism represents a direct long-term threat only to Jews, I invite you to consider the following speech made by Ahmad Bahr, the Acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (and a Hamas member), on April 13, 2007. Coming as these words do from the political equivalent of Nancy Pelosi in Palestine, they should not be easily dismissed as mere rhetoric:
"You will be victorious on the face of this planet. You are the masters of the world on the face of this planet." Yes, [the Koran says that] "you will be victorious," but only "if you are believers." Allah willing, "you will be victorious," while America and Israel will be annihilated, Allah willing. I guarantee you that the power of belief and faith is greater than the power of America and Israel. They are cowards, as is said in the Book of Allah: "You shall find them the people most eager to protect their lives." They are cowards, who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah. That is why America's nose was rubbed in the mud in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and everywhere. America will be annihilated, while Islam will remain. The Muslims "will be victorious, if you are believers." Oh Muslims, I guarantee you that the power of Allah is greater than America. We saw to them that with the might of Allah, with the might of His Messenger, and with the power of Allah, we are stronger than America and Israel.
I tell you that we will protect the enterprise of the resistance, because the Zionist enemy understands only the language of force. It does not recognize peace or the agreements. It does not recognize anything, and it understands only the language of force. Our jihad-fighting Palestinian people salutes its brother, Sudan.
The Palestinian woman bids her son farewell, and says to him: "Son, go and don't be a coward. Go, and fight the Jews." He bids her farewell and carries out a martyrdom operation. What did this Palestinian woman say when she was asked for her opinion, after the martyrdom of her son? She said: "My son is my own flesh and blood. I love my son, but my love for Allah and His Messenger is greater than my love for my son." Yes, this is the message of the Palestinian woman, who was over 70 years old--Fatima al-Najjar. She was over 70 years old, but she blew herself up for the sake of Allah, bringing down many criminal Zionists.
Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, vanquish the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent His Book, the mover of the clouds, who defeated the enemies of the Prophet, defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them.
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.}
An aged Jew dies and ascends to heaven. Upon meeting God, he asks, "When will there be a Jewish president?" God answers: "Not in your lifetime." "And when will there be a black president?" inquires the recently deceased. "Not in my lifetime," replies the deity.
