• 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.}
It's May in about ten hours and you know what that means -- the end of the cruelest month in the calendar, the start of the summer blockbuster season. First up for frittering away your stimulus packet is a film about a hairy foreigner with a terrific immune system, strong bones, and indestructible claws (interestingly enough, this is also the description of an aged Irish uncle of mine). Hugh Jackman embodies Wolverine in what promises by its very title to be the first in a long line of prequels to the immensely popular X-Men series. Lord knows Jackman can use all the career assistance he can get after last appearing in a critically and commercially reviled epic about Crocodile Dundee at the Moulin Rouge in World War II. Or something.
Grady Hendrix at Slate recounts the long, overwrought origins of the primal scream mutant, and makes the rather obvious point that characters such as Wolverine are thinly disguised social archetypes:
The genius of Chris Claremont was that he made mutants a generic stand-in for all minorities and made Wolverine their Malcolm X. Black, gay, disabled, and Jewish readers could project their own experiences onto the trials and tribulations of the X-Men, but so could misunderstood teenagers, nerds (who only started being cool once the 2000 X-Men movie raked in big bucks), fat kids, skinny kids, kids with braces, kids with glasses, and anyone who ever felt persecuted (read: everyone). Wolverine refused to apologize for his identity, he refused to compromise, he refused to hide.
Except that, with the possible exception of Elton John, people who feel persecuted don't get to fly around in supersonic jets and wear yellow spandex. That said, I think Hendrix's point here about feral furball exceptionalism is little more than the beneficiary of a news peg because the real mutant of interest in the X-Men catalogue is the bad guy, Magneto. I have no idea what his authentic comic book provenance is, but in the movies Magneto, who has the eminently Wolverine-susceptible power of being able to manipulate metal, is a Holocaust survivor turned militant mutant nationalist seeking enfranchisement for his genetically outre brethren by any means necessary. In other words, he's the Vladimir Jabotinsky of the X-Men, or a reason for Caryl Churchill to feel relevant.
The Jewish subtheme of comic books is of course very well explored in our culture now that hardly anybody reads books without pictures in them. And you can easily see Lower East Side wish fulfillment of the 1930's made manifest in this distinctly American form of mythology. In Michael Chabon's excellent novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the two Jewish cousins who write and art comics for a living get into a witty discussion about the Semitic tropes of their trade: "What, they're all Jewish, superheros," one tells the other. "Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself." (As it happens, a different uncle of mine -- this one on my father's side, now long dead -- changed his name from Weiss to Kent when he married a rich West Coast heiress.)
Then again, as Ben Plotinsky recently elaborated in a fascinating essay for City Journal, the latterday Superman, envisioned by Bryan Singer, who also directed the first two X-Men installments, is played as an altogether different kind of nice Jewish boy:
In one scene, as Superman floats above the Earth, we hear his alien father in a voiceover. Human beings "can be a great people," Jor-El says. "They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all--their capacity for good--I have sent them you, my only son." The line, of course, echoes John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son." When Marlon Brando first spoke it in Superman (1978), it was the earlier movie's only explicit Christian reference.
The recent installment not only resurrects the line; it piles on further biblical allusions. "You wrote that the world doesn't need a savior," Superman himself tells Lois, "but every day I hear people crying for one." Isaiah 19:20: "When they cry to the Lord because of oppressors, he will send them a savior." Later, as Superman tries to save the world from Luthor, the villain plunges a Kryptonite dagger into his side. John 19:34: "One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear." And then, after saving the day by hurling Luthor's death machine--a rapidly expanding new continent that threatens to destroy the United States--into outer space, a poisoned and exhausted Superman plummets to earth, his arms outspread at right angles to his body and legs, a crucified figure lacking only a cross. He remains in a coma until his son (Lois Lane is the unwed mother in this updated Superman: don't ask) restores him to life. He leaves his hospital room empty until a nurse discovers it, just as Mary and Mary Magdalene find Jesus's empty tomb.
I'm sure this won't be the last time I apologize to the president:
The Defense Department twice asked Obama for permission to use military force to rescue Capt. Richard Phillips from a lifeboat off the Somali coast. Obama first gave permission around 8 p.m. Friday, and upgraded it at 9:20 a.m. Saturday. Officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations said the second order was to encompass more military personnel and equipment that arrived in the Indian Ocean to engage the pirates.
It was still a failure of leadership to keep completely mums about Phillips' plight -- would it have really sent "mixed signals" to the pirates to express concern for his safety and denounce his abduction? -- but this is gratifying indeed. (And if it's later disclosed that this attribution of credit was the invention of Rahm Emanuel looking to cash in on "looking presidential," then I'll be back here to point that out, as well.)
However, if this brief but illustrative episode is an indication that gone are the days when the White House withheld from authorizing deadly force due to lawyerly compunction (as it did when a convoy likely carrying Mullah Omar sped out of Afghanistan in 2001), then Obama may prove to be a more capable commander-in-chief than many conservatives originally thought. He seems to have already won over Fred Kagan and Bill Kristol on his Afghan strategy.
The U.S. Navy, originally financed by John Adams and Thomas Jefferson for the purpose of defeating the Barbary pirates, claims another victory against terrorism on the high seas:
The captain of an American cargo ship held hostage by armed Somali pirates was rescued on Sunday by United States Navy personnel, who killed three his captors, government and shipping officials said.
Three of the four captors were killed; the fourth jumped into the drink and suffered once he saw what he up against.
"You're no James Bond," a dissolute Tom Hanks tells a portly and bewhiskered Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson's War. "And you're no Thomas Jefferson, either. Let's call it even."
We could use more of both, one feels, now that our chief executive, said to be cooler than 007 by the actor currently incarnating him on screen, has been caught bowing before the Wahhabist sovereign of Saudi Arabia, keeping absolutely silent about the high seas kidnapping of an American by Somali pirates, but giving ample photo time to the Washington Post for a story on his family's new dog, Bo. (The three-page online version concludes informatively: "Staff writers Howard Kurtz and Rob Pegoraro contributed to this report.")
The adorably floppy and piebald Bo is a Portuguese Water Dog, which may mean he's the most equipt in the Obama administration to go save Capt. Richard Phillips, now floating in a covered lifeboat in the middle of the Indian Ocean after valiantly offering himself as hostage to the pirates who raided the Maersk Alabama (his sacrifice allowed the crew to repel the pirates from the ship). Richards is surrounded in his adrift prison by four armed men, who previously wanted $2 million, but will now apparently settle for an easy getaway. One would think that this imperiled citizen's heroism would be enough to get some word of encouragement from the leader of the free world. Instead:
The president himself has yet to speak publicly about the incident near the Horn of Africa. He brushed off a reporter's question Thursday. Instead he has let his top surrogates do the talking, although their comments have been brief, perhaps mindful that their words could influence the sensitive negotiations with the hostage-taking pirates.
Also, negotiations between the U.S. and the pirates have broken down.
In other news, Bo likes his tummy scratched, except around the stitched area where he was just neutered (can someone get Kurtz a fact-check on the Portguese word for "ouch"?).
Yes, according David Samuels in what is probably the smartest and most cool-headed essay yet written on the subject:
The key fact of the American-Israeli alliance that most commentators seem eager to elide is that Israel is America's leading ally in the Middle East because it is the most powerful country in the Middle East. Critics of the American-Israeli relationship love to conflate American support for Israel before 1967 with America's support since then by citing statistics for tens of billions of dollars in U.S. military credits and aid given to Israel "since 1948," when the Jewish State was founded. In fact, Israel's rise to becoming a regional superpower was accomplished without any significant help from United States. Israel's surreptitious program to build nuclear weapons was accomplished with the aid of the British and the French, who joined with Israel to seize the Suez Canal from Egypt's rabble-rousing President Gamal Abdel Nasser, and who were then forced to give it back by Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Israeli air force pilots who destroyed the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian air forces on the ground flew French-made Mystère jets--not American-made F-4 Phantoms. The U.S. Congress did not appropriate a single penny to help Israel accommodate an overwhelming influx of Holocaust survivors and poor Jewish refugees from Yemen, Iraq, Egypt, and other Arab countries until 1973--25 years after the founding of the state.
To which litany Samuels might have added that in 1981 Ronald Reagan proceeded with the sale of five surveillance aircraft to... Saudi Arabia. The so-called AWACS affair saw pro-Israeli lobbyists pitted against the White House for Congressional approval of supplying one Israel's dogged enemies with military equipment -- a battle that the pro-Israel lobbyists somehow managed to lose. (But what are facts against the suasive subtleties of what Samuels rightly calls "dim-witted theories about an all-powerful Jewish conspiracy"?)
The analysis on offer here would do Machiavelli proud (I mean no disrespect in describing it that way), and Samuels' main point is that, as in any traditional client-patron relationship, what is made public and what is concealed depends on either side's correlated -- but by no means identical -- national interest. It's in the American national interest to pretend to act as a restraining force on Israeli belligerence, while it's in the Israeli national interest to pretend to heed this force. A pas de deux -- or folie a deux, as is often the case -- ensues in which the patron estimates the client as only good as its ability to "project destabilizing power throughout the region" and offer territorial concessions as bargaining chips to keep the relationship relevant and justifiable to the rest of the world (see formerly the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza, or still the Golan Heights and the West Bank).
Part of the elegance of Samuels' theory is that it also explains the Bush administration's failure to stop Iran's centrifugal dreams militarily, despite an approval rating that could not have gone lower if it had, a rather convenient flight path from right next door, and a sworn commitment not to leave this grave concern to the next administration (which it has done).
Israel is perfectly poised to do the deed. It has the overwhelming popular domestic support to protect itself from a threatening neighbor. It knows that no charm offensive is going to improve its image in the world, especially now that it's elected an eccentric and overstocked right-wing government and has heard and seen, post-Gaza, that anti-Semitism is once more "understandable" in Europe (to quote British playwright Ken Loach). No other Arab state wants the mullahs to have the bomb, and if we use the term "state" loosely, this includes the Palestinian Authority, or at least the reasonable Fatah-led sections of it. (A vaporized Jerusalem is a vaporized Ramallah, unless the hidden imam turns to be Dr. Manhattan of the Watchmen.) A nuclear Iran means that of all of Israel's outward attention will be diverted from the subject of the Occupied Territories, whereas, as Samuels puts it, eliminating the former keeps the attention firmly on the latter. (One notes that the Netanyahu government can easily downplay Palestinian statehood while up-playing Persian WMD.) Israel's intelligence is much better than ours, and its pilots have got the experience and know-how when it comes to waging preemptive strikes on reactors, so much so that the present writer was not long informed (by an Israeli who would know) of just how far along a reactor could be before being bombed with no threat of radiation fallout to the surrounding civilian population.
But Samuels' most important point is also his most cynical one. In the event that Israel struck Iran's bomb program and effectively eliminated it, a display of overwhelming conventional military force -- the inevitability of which is the only leverage against a therefore not-so-likely Iranian counterattack -- would signal Israel's primacy in the Levant again after two bad, consecutive wars (one a humiliating catastrophe in Lebanon, the other a Pyrrhic victory in Gaza). Buffeting Iran means hitting Hamas and Hezbollah where they cash their checks; in effect, taking the war to the Soviets instead of to its marginal but rebarbative guerrilla proxies. It also means destroying the illusion of Iran as a real counterweight to Israel's supremacy. (A country that, as one of my friends puts it, has the conventional military force of the Rhode Island National Guard is easily shown to be a paper tiger.) Last but not least, Israel's authority in global chancelleries would be more or less the equivalent of what it was in the wake of the Six-Day War.
The proposition can be stated negatively, too. If Israel tries and fails, what does it lose? The world still hates it. The Iranians still want to see it "wiped off the map, or "erased from the pages of time" (in either translation, upsetting most Israelis' weekend plans). The Iranians get a bomb they would have got anyway. The Palestinians still suffer. Its client state relationship with the U.S. is just as fraught as it would have been had it done nothing.
When Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six-Day War, retired to teaching at the staff college, he would propose problems to his students with the injunction, "And I want no Jewish solutions here." "What he meant," as Geoffrey Wheatcroft has written, "was that he wanted his battles, in the field or on the sand table, won through daring, dash and ferocity, rather than through the traditional Jewish virtues of subtlety, cunning and patience."
If Samuels is to be believed, Israel will exercise both options on the nettlesome Iranian problem.
A brisk little essay by Jim Holt in the New York TImes tells of the ease with which verse can be burned into one's cortex:
[T]he key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits. I knock a couple of new lines into my head each morning before breakfast, hooking them onto what I've already got. At the moment, I'm 22 lines into Tennyson's "Ulysses," with 48 lines to go. It will take me about a month to learn the whole thing at this leisurely pace, but in the end I'll be the possessor of a nice big piece of poetical real estate, one that I will always be able to revisit and roam about in.
The trick that worked for me -- and unlike Holt, a Baby Boomer, I wasn't instructed to memorize poems in high school, and so had to rely on my own devices to figure out how to do it -- is to actually type the lines out, two by two at a time, in a Word document. So:
The piers are pummeled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
The piers are pummeled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
It may take about ten repetitions before a couplet is committed to memory, but as you gain experience, they'll come faster than that. (Pay attention to punctuation, too, as this will come in handy for rhythm later.) Each time you learn another set of lines, you retype the ones you already learned to put the whole lot of them together. By some weird hand-eye osmosis, this technique usually works, and once learned, it's extraordinarily easy to retain a poem. (If you forget some of it, a brief glance over the text is all that's required for a refresh.)
You may think that mechanically transcribing poems robs them of their musicality and thus defeats the whole point of knowing them by heart. You're right; but the object at first is to learn them. Musicality comes upon successful recitation.
Or perhaps Mel Gibson. After posting to his blog an unflattering photograph of Larry Summers, Sullivan fielded a reader's email that helpfully instructed him to compare the image of the NEC chair to a figure in this Hieronymous Bosch painting.
"See if you can find him," Sullivan invites, if only because the Where's Waldo? supplement in Der Sturmer was a broken link.
Now, I could understand Sullivan's failure to recognize a reference to the Dearborn Independent when it was made -- unfairly, I thought -- to suggest that he suffered from less-than-philo-Semitic tendencies. A British expat who has not made a study of American anti-Semitism may be forgiven much of its esoterica. But to claim innocence about a daubed medieval atrocity like the one above is to take Borat at face value on the Jewish Question.
And that this association between a black hatted moneylender (who actually more resembles Marlon Brando) and Obama's top economic adviser should be made on the day that Sullivan's faith commemorates the crucifixion of the main character in the painting is sickening, even by blogorrheaic standards.
UPDATE: Evidently, I wasn't the only one struck by the tastelessness of Sullivan's post. Another reader mailed in to point out the obvious, to which Sullivan replied:
Oy. In my survey of Getty photos for the Face Of The Day, I thought that one of Summers was a gripping and surprising portrait. Then a reader emailed me the Bosch and I too was struck by the similarity. I can see now why you might see things the way you did. But it was in no way intended. I'm sorry if anyone was offended. I'll try and be more conscious of these things in future.
Leaving aside the unctuousness of that oy, I'm afraid this doesn't do to explain how a Harvard- and Oxford-educated journalist could fail to see what any junior school student could see. There's no wiggle room for interpretation here. Israel and its organized defenders and critics do not factor, and unless a thermal scan of the Bosch canvas reveals the word "neocon" to have been feverishly scrawled beneath the oils, I fail to see how anyone professing to be an intellectual cannot have been "conscious" of the intent of this notorious rendering of the long march to Calvary.
As it happens, I'm in the midst of an essay on Benjamin Disraeli, and I've noticed that one of the more admirable aspects of this eminent Victorian's career was his ability to deflect instances of Jew-baiting with wit and irony, virtues that scandalized the vices of his haters more than any call for tolerance -- a term meaningless at the time -- could have done. (During his fifth campaign for parliament, Disraeli's radical opponent taunted him with flamboyantly pretending not to know how to say his exotic name: "Mr. Disraeli--I hope I pronounce his name right." Came the fleet-footed reply: "Colonel Perronet Thompson--I hope I pronounce his name right." I'll take such a clever fuse-snuffing to the earnest alarmism of the Anti-Defamation League most days.) And yet, Dizzy's milieu was one in which cultural anti-Semitism, still inexorably tied to snobbery, had yet to give way to the full-blown political variety for which the 20th century is rightly lamented.
Others may find Sullivan's apology plausible and be on their merry way. Allowing even that the disappearance of his cogency and toughmindedness has been a cause of speculation for some time, his blunder seems indicative of a broader and more worrisome phenomenon.
It was enough for Juan Cole to strike the original name for his proposed lobby of neo-isolationism ("America First") once he discovered it had been used already. There was no hue and cry from the Jews over that grimly hilarious lapse because, well, only bloggers take Cole's insights seriously, and he copped to the ever-cited charge against him -- ignorance -- by revising his original blog post without affixing a mea culpa or correction to it. (Martin Kramer points out that Cole's academically sound m.o. is to commit some howler of fact or analysis, get called out on it, then cover up his mistake on his site, curiously titled Informed Comment, through the coarse art of "retro-editing.") But that only raises the question: What is a so-called progressive scholar of Middle Eastern history doing writing or talking about anything other than the scansion of Persian poetry if he doesn't know who the hell Charles Lindbergh was? (The America First movement was recently the subject of a much-discussed Philip Roth novel and can't quite be counted as the sort of esoterica I alluded to earlier.)
I think this actually represents the next stage in sophistical anti-Semitism, beyond even the obsessive and giveaway form of anti-Zionism to which John Mearsheimer, Stephen Walt, Charles Freeman, Michael Scheuer, and plenty more succumb in the name of "realism" (while of course endorsing the brute "facts on the ground" in Bosnia, Saudi Arabia and China). A kind of historical amnesia married to political autism now persists among shabbier members of the intelligentsia, who breezily traffic in all the familar tropes of Jew-hatred, but then claim to have had no cognizance of them. Rather like one of those proverbial monkeys tapping away at a typewriter and unintentionally hitting upon a diary entry by Wagner, they would have us believe that blind coincidence was all that was involved in their noxious recalls. And maybe it is, but that only raises a further question of how they became members of the intelligentsia in the first place without having grappled with one of the oldest and most toxic questions of modernity.
Internet discourse is a race for the lowest common denominator. That we'll have to accept. But language, even produced in an overcaffeinated fug while still in one's pajamas, can alter the way a person thinks and perceives -- oh, what's that phrase again? -- "what's in front of one's nose." It seems to have done just that, at much too great an expense, to a once noble mind.
In February, the Pakistani Army and the Taliban signed a truce that, in effect, granted the latter an unencumbered right to impose Sharia law on Swat, formerly a tourist-friendly region of Pakistan located about an hour away from Islamabad. The stated aim of this marriage of convenience (and cynicism) was to drive a wedge between the more reactionary jihadist element and the so-called "moderate" exponents of Islamism. What this deal amounted to was an acquiescence to barbarism, and it didn't take long before the fetid yield was apparent to all. According to the New York Times, days after the truce was signed, "a member of a prominent anti-Taliban family returned to his mountain village, having received assurances from the government that it was safe. He was promptly kidnapped by the Taliban, tortured and murdered."
Hundreds of thousands of Swat residents have fled since the Taliban gained de facto -- and now de jure -- control over key parts of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). This means that Pakistan is not just faced with the problem of an Islamist statelet metastasizing within its own borders; it also faces a mounting internal refugee crisis. Seventy percent of Swat is today governed by a self-appointed clerisy that has instituted a total ban on music, alcohol, female education, and non-Islamic literature. Despite reassurances from Taliban leader Muhammed Molana Izzat Khan -- who must have been laughing as he made them -- that Sharia law would not equal the dispensation of Islamic justice, all evidence to date has contradicted this quaint prognosis.
His first week on the job and the new Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is all smiles, reaffirming his commitment to a lack of commitment to a two-state solution."Those who think that through concessions they will gain respect and peace are wrong," Lieberman told the New York Times. "It is the other way around; it will lead to more wars."
One of the strangely unremarked aspects of Lieberman's ascendancy is that he has a vested interest in ensuring settlements in the West Bank aren't dismantled anytime soon. He lives in one. But that raises an interesting question: Assuming that by some miracle of geopolitics a Palestinian state did emerge on Netanyahu's watch, would that make the foreign minister for Israel from... another country? How would that go down amongst a constituency that wants Israelis to swear upon loyalty oaths?
The first major thought yielded by Gershom Gorenberg's lengthy essay, "The Missing Mahatma: Searching for a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King in the West Bank," which appears as the cover story in the current Weekly Standard, is, roughly speaking, this: What in the hell is the Israel correspondent for the liberal American Prospect doing writing for the flagship journal of neoconservatism? This unlikely alliance will have many a greybeard progressive inquiring if yet another comrade has defected to the right after repeated muggings (or Grad missile bombings) of reality. But as if to preempt any feverish speculation, Gorenberg reassures readers at his South Jerusalem blog:
The reasons the essay appeared there have everything to do with boring technicalities of publishing schedules and magazine staffing, and nothing to do with politics. Suffice it to say the WS was absolutely respectful of my perspective and writing.
Which is about where the Imperial March procession led by a black helmeted Bill Kristol should give way to a cool realization for progressives. The Weekly Standard has always approached the Arab-Israeli conflict with a level of complexity and sophistication that one won't find in, say, The Nation, or even The New Republic during stormier news cycles. (The prominent Middle East analyst Martin Kramer has always maintained that his skepticism of Arab democracy is what keeps him from buying into the neocon kit and kaboodle; remember this the next time you hear the label affixed to "Likudnik" by some beetle-browed and frenzied contributor to The American Conservative.) It's also important that a writer like Gorenberg receive a high-visibility perch among the brainier members of Obama's loyal opposition. If there is to be any movement toward a two state solution in the Levant, what are the odds that the Wolfowitzes and Perles will not have a say in how it plays out?
Journalistic meta-narratives aside, Gorenberg's essay is wholly rewarding. He starts out by projecting one of his own fantasies of an MLK- or Gandhi-like figure who might emerge from the Occupied Territories to gallantly face down the guns of the IDF and Hamas alike, by means of pacifist civil disobedience. Gorenberg's own imago is man he calls Sheikh Nasser a-Din al-Masri, who will lead a crowd of 20,000 southward from Ramallah in 2012 to try and pray at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. He and his cohort will be dispersed by tear gas canisters and rubber bullets, but they will carry on, undaunted. The fantasy concludes with this parting-of-the-waters moment:
Early on the third morning, a Friday, the Israeli cabinet met. Afterward, the brigade commander got orders to let the march proceed. Trucks arrived with food. Al-Masri's followers lifted him onto a stretcher. At Qalandiya checkpoint, where the road passed through the Israeli security wall around Jerusalem, soldiers stood aside, watching the procession pour into the city. It reached Al-Aqsa in time for the sheikh to speak at noon prayers. News websites reported that the Israeli prime minister would address his nation before Sabbath began at sundown, amid rumors he would offer to meet the wounded sheikh to begin negotiations.
In fact, there is a real-life counterpart to al-Masri, a man of enormous humanity and ambition, but too little charisma and luck, called Mubarak Awad. One American scholar of the region said Awad was the "uniquely influential midwife of a nonviolent revolt," and the depressing events of the last decade or so attest to why he's not a household name. Inspired by unpopular ideas (if only because they are non-Muslim ideas; like many notable defenders of Palestinian self-determination, from Edward Said to Rashid Khalidi, Awad is a Christian), his pilgrim's progress is modest but effective: Awad gains a smallish following, unnerves the PLO, and is ultimately blocked by then Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's decision to expel him from his home in East Jerusalem just as the First Intifada kicks off.
The closest historical event to the grand idyll Gorenberg envisions came in the mid-80s:
An old man came asking for help in getting back several acres of his village's land, fenced off by the neighboring Israeli settlement of Tekoa, east of Bethlehem. Awad recalls, "He said, 'You told us that if we are not afraid, anything is possible.' I said, 'Oh my God, did I say that?' " Awad thought of himself as an educator. For someone to act on what he said terrified him. Still, he agreed to lead the villagers in taking down the fence, if they agreed not to bring guns or throw stones and not to run away even if shot at or arrested.
By one account, 300 people showed up, confronting armed settlers. "We refused to run. We turned numb. We were hugging each other," Awad says, recalling the strange ecstasy of the moment. The military governor arrived--and allowed the Palestinians to remove the fence.
The remainder of the essay is devoted to the history (and historiography) of the two intifadas. Gorenberg also examines the competitive arguments of how a national resistance movement should work -- what's the difference between unarmed and non-violent struggles? -- to better understand why a viable one so far hasn't.
According to a March 24 e-mail sent by the Office of Management and Budget to various speechwriters and personnel in the Obama administration, the term "Global War on Terror" (GWOT) is no longer sanctioned as government-speak. Yes, the new White House has actually abolished the idea of a broad title for the defining American military engagement of the post-9/11 era and instead undertaken to refer only to the epiphenomena as "Overseas Contingency Operations."
After some initial media confusion as to whether or not this was in fact official policy, Secretary of State Clinton confirmed it on Tuesday. GWOT has indeed been retired. "The administration has stopped using the phrase," Clinton told reporters, "and I think that speaks for itself."
So it does.
The first response to any attempt by the state to invent overlong and silly-sounding euphemisms for things that are quite clear and dangerous to its citizens is to parody it. A "Campaign Against Extremists Who Wish To Do Us Harm" (CAEWWTDUH) wants for a punchy acronym, so how about laying bare our true motive with the "International Need to Stop Eager Cadres of Uneasy Religious Entities" (INSECURE)? Or maybe doing away with whole unpleasant mention of combat altogether: "Possible Efforts to Avoid Confessional Excesses" (PEACE)? We can always package the new climate of change, audacity and hope on the domestic scene for export abroad: "Yearnings to Eliminate Several Worldwide Elements with Colorful Aims and Notions" (YESWECAN).
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.}
