• 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.}
Reading Roger Cohen in the New York Times is an edifying experience because it teaches how to make a persuasive argument for foreign policy without even realizing what that argument is. In his latest attempt to arrogate to himself wisdom and prescience on all matters Persian, the unembarrassable columnist suggests that not only are Iranians "weary" of cataclysmic events in their own country and suspicious of the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that what they really need instead of revolution is a shepherding reformist similar to Ayatollah Sistani, the primus inter pares of Iraq's Shiite clerisy:
It is time for Iran to look West to the holy Shiite cities in Iraq, Najaf and Karbala, places from which Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani exercises precisely the kind of moral authority and suasion -- without direct executive authority -- that Montazeri favored for Iran.
How, exactly, a nation of dissidents and students who every week risk murder or imprisonment to chant "Death to Khamenei" or "Death to Russia" is tired of "tumult," Cohen does not deign to say. But the real gem in this observation is the implication that Sistani's easily exercised moral authority and suasion was itself the result of some kind of Baathist perestroika. Weary of tumult, indeed!
He allows no chance that the current Iranian convulsion was seeded or accelerated by the violent overthrow of Saddam Hussein, an action that Cohen previously supported and then turned against with the same manic-depressive vehemence he has exhibited in his Iran analysis. Having formerly held that Khamenei was rationale and capable of being "engaged" by the West on a host of questions including the nuclear, now our man in Tehran depicts the theocracy as only slightly less brutish and intractable as the American neoconservatives campaigning for its elimination. But had Cohen had things his way, any Iranian glance westward would offer no solace or instruction for how to proceed with a Shiite thaw. Prior to 2003, Sistani was under house arrest and his mosque was closed for worship. Any liberal political opinions he then entertained, such as his exhortation for women to vote or his belief in a separation of mosque and state, were kept to himself for fear of imprisonment or death at the hands of a regime that truly did earn the title totalitarian. There is no reason to believe that these circumstances would be any different now without the liberating effects of revolution.
Just in time for the New Year, might Roger Cohen be the Patient Zero pundit of a dawning pandemic--a pro-war-turned-anti-war-turned-unintentional pro-war theorist? If not, then what he does seem to advocate without any irony or sense of self-amusement is a new law of geopolitical spacetime reserved for the New York Times opinion page, one in which major historical occurrences are only as spontaneous as a columnist's need for them to be and logical consistency is another name for hawkish conspiracy.
For a more significant and impressive about-face on Iran in light of recent events, see Ray Takeyh's commentary in the Washington Post. A twilight of policy intellectuals surely commences when the man who was previously the Obama administration's most forceful voice for engagement ends up sounding like a seder conversation from Andrew Sullivan's darkest nightmare:
Even if the regime accommodates international concerns about its nuclear program, the United States must stand firm in its support for human rights and economic pressure against the Revolutionary Guards and other organs of repression. And Tehran's clerical rulers should know that in no uncertain terms. Reagan had no compunction about denouncing the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" while concluding arms control treaties with the Kremlin. The Islamic Republic, like the Soviet Union, is a transient phenomenon. America's embrace of individual sovereignty will place it on the right side of history as the fortunes of history inevitably change.
As of 1977, the platform of the right-wing Likud Party in Israel was quite clear on the matter of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank: "The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judaea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty."
It would be understating the case to say that this policy has been quietly subject to revision and attrition over the past decade. Beginning in 1998 with the Wye River Memorandum, which saw a first-term Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hand over most of Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank, to the then-nascent Palestinian Authority, and continuing into 2005 when Ariel Sharon brought off his unilateral disengagement plan from Gaza, dismantling the very settlements he had once encouraged, the establishment right in Israel has, through fits of ideological bluster and resignation, adopted a pragmatic position on the occupied territories, however difficult it may be for some to acknowledge the fact.
Last June, Netanyahu, now in his second administration, announced his acceptance of the two-state solution. Though grudging, overdue, and more or less forced by President Obama's Cairo address a month earlier, the speech Netanyahu gave at Bar-Ilan University stood in marked contrast to the grumblings of a finance minister who not long before resigned from Sharon's cabinet over the Gaza withdrawal. He's also removed a record number of outposts and checkpoints in the West Bank, lending his tacit support to the enormous material strides made by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, another U.S-educated economist and in many ways Netanyahu's natural interlocutor -- if only Fayyad were entitled to deal.
"It may take years, or even decades, for Democrats to relearn the lessons we thought, naively, they had learned for good under Clinton. But one day, Joe Lieberman's warnings in this campaign will look prophetic. And the principles he has espoused will once again guide the Democratic Party. It will be the work of this magazine, to whatever small degree possible, to hasten that day."
My, how things change. The above assessment, made amidst the Democratic primary in 2004, appeared in the pages of The New Republic, a serious liberal publication that for the last decade has spent half of its time taking bold positions and the other half begging apology for them. The editorial TNR ran endorsing Lieberman for the nomination was likely authored by the magazine's now former editor Peter Beinart, egghead par excellence of liberal interventionism, who believed in the Connecticut senator when the latter was a reliable yellow dog Democrat who happened to be an Orthodox Jew with a streak of moralism running through his social attitudes. But now that the serene party canine has transformed into a disruptive mangy mutt--the spoiler of healthcare reform--it's not a campaign of challenge that Lieberman's erstwhile defenders at the magazine have waged against him but rather a war of vilification, where even the Jewish Question need not be spared. Here is TNR's Jonathan Chait, a writer of some talent, desperately trying to account for what went wrong with Joe:
I think one answer here is that Lieberman isn't actually all that smart. He speaks, and seems to think, exclusively in terms of generalities and broad statements of principle. But there's little evidence that he's a sharp or clear thinker, and certainly no evidence that he knows or cares about the details of health care reform. At one point during the 2000 recount, the Gore campaign explained to Lieberman why lowering standards for military ballots would be totally unfair and illegal, and Lieberman proceeded to go on television and subvert the campaign's position. Gore loyalists interpreted this as a sellout, but perhaps the more plausible explanation was that Lieberman -- who, after all, badly wanted to be vice-President -- just didn't understand the details of the Gore position well enough to defend it. The guy was taken apart by Dick Cheney in the 2000 veep debate.
I suspect that Lieberman is the beneficiary, or possibly the victim, of a cultural stereotype that Jews are smart and good with numbers. Trust me, it's not true. If Senator Smith from Idaho was angering Democrats by spewing uninformed platitudes, most liberals would deride him as an idiot. With Lieberman, we all suspect it's part of a plan. I think he just has no idea what he's talking about and doesn't care to learn. Lieberman thinks about politics in terms of broad ideological labels. He's the heroic centrist voice pushing legislation to the center. No, Lieberman doesn't have any particular sense of what the Medicare buy-in option would do to the national debt. If the liberals like it, then he figures it's big government and he should oppose it. I think it's basically that simple.
"I never liked him anyway"--the refrain of sullen apparatchiks faced with retrospectively excusing their inability to predict future heresy--competes with "He was never a substantial member" for bad faith memoir writing. If this is how the American left chooses to cannibalize itself, it's going to be easy laughs for conservatives all the way into 2010. Yet it hardly speaks well of Chait's own candlepower that he's taken to arguing such a non-kosher plaint against Jewish intelligence and numeracy in a sheet owned and operated by Martin Peretz; also one that features Steven Pinker bearing out some of this "cultural stereotype" with sociobiological research on endogamous genetic groups. But this is shul politics. The broader consideration is what, exactly, Lieberman's Judaism has to do with his take on socialized medicine?
A fashion is now vaguely discernible. Another migratory fowl from the TNR aviary, Lee Siegel, who hitherto has been an incisive critic of the Obama administration, uses the same methods of intra-tribal bullying from his new perch at the Daily Beast. Siegel's beef amounts to this: Lieberman justifies his financially motivated positions (oppose Iran to appease the "Israel lobby," oppose healthcare reform to keep the insurance industry money pouring in) as the outcroppings of Jewish messianism--he's right because he thinks God is on his side. Thus, the Torah portion equivalent of evangelical hubris. Here's Siegel:
Let me be appear [sic] to be even more vulgar. What makes Jews cringe about Lieberman's sanctimonious opposition to the only clause in the health-care bill that actually is worth [sic] the name "reform" is that, to be blunt, it is so close to an anti-Semitic caricature. Lieberman is greedy, arrogant, venal, and vindictive. He recalls the New Testament's vicious caricature of the ancient Jewish Pharisees--who were, in reality, rational, charitable and humane.
Goodness. This barely literate emission is curious for several reasons, the most obvious being the Freudian. Siegel, too, is guilty of venality, arrogance and vindictiveness of an admittedly more ridiculous variety: masquerading as a fan of his own blogged musings on culture at TNR, taunting non-fans, and doing so under the pompous handle "sprezzatura." He was sacked suspended for making a fool of himself. I have no idea if the cringing this episode induced in his fellow Jews was of a piece with rootless cosmopolitan embarrassment or the product of 3,000 year-old tradition, nor do I much care. However, if I wished to appear to be vulgar, I might add that Siegel's farce of self-congratulation had much in common with the kind of perfected liberal Hebraism he seems to prefer, that embodied by Rabbi Michael Lerner, who once wrote pseudonymously to his own magazine Tikkun about how wonderful Rabbi Michael Lerner was. Though really, what would be the purpose of pointing that out?
Portraying Lieberman as the Fagin of Congress might be one way to endear oneself to the "Fast for Gaza" contingent on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. One can hardly be counted a left-wing intellectual these days without indicating that one isn't the sort of Jew anti-Semites think of when they make their category indictments or draw up their hook-nosed caricatures. But does Siegel, who moonlights as a literary critic, not quite grasp the reactionary nature of this historical criticism? This is the same language with which Philip Roth was lambasted in the 1960's by the American Reform establishment for the crime of writing comic fiction; the same demented logic that had the Commentary crowd depict Hannah Arendt's thesis of the banality of evil as not just incoherent but the culmination of a decadent assimilationist tendency in Central Europe. Semiticist was Dwight Macdonald's withering term for this inquisitorial style, which he associated with the right and yet which has only grown more deranged and exhibitionist as it's become a commodity traded on "progressive" (typically anti-Zionist) exchanges. No, it's not enough to oppose a contrarian legislator or call him out for mercenary motives or moral depravity, clearly the purview of Gentile politicians alone. He must be dismissed as the idiot who disproves the rule about Jewish genius, if not characterized as ripe fruit for Der Sturmer.
Who knew the Medicare buy-in was worthy of such High Holy Day psychosis?
The president accepted his Nobel Peace Prize last week on the grounds that in some case it is necessary to go to war to preserve the peace, a nice act of philosophical jujitsu that, had it been tried by George W. Bush, would have met with charges of sinister doublespeak. But Barack Obama's undeserved award, coming as it did when the country he leads is mired in two "hot" conflicts in the Middle East and a protracted "cold" one against the ideology of jihad, was only further scandalized by the fact that December 10 is Human Rights Day -- the anniversary of the signing of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, which has served for over half a century as modernity's most comprehensive, most translated, and most ignored covenant on civilization. That this doctrine has been consistently flouted and scorned by world tyrannies is the fault of no one commander in chief, and yet, just a year into his term in office, Obama has already proved a busted flush on human rights from China to Sudan to Iran.
In October, the Dalai Lama -- who ought to rightly be seen as a greater political dissident than "spiritual leader" -- was given the first Lantos Human Rights Prize, named for the late Rep. Tom Lantos of California, who first invited the Dalai Lama to Congress in 1987. The expectation was that the most prominent voice for Tibetan independence would be granted an audience with the leader of the free world. Ah, but Obama's trip to China was forthcoming and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had already sowed the Nixonian field by publicly declaring that Chinese human rights were secondary to global economic considerations. So lest Communist recrimination interfere with American realpolitik, His Holiness was asked to wait it out a spell until bilateral relations faded from the headlines.
"Now, you might perhaps feel," wrote Martin Amis well over a decade ago, "that having one girlfriend is happenstance, having two girlfriends is coincidence, but having three girlfriends is enemy action." By this logic, Tiger Woods stands a one-man Stalingrad of faithless chutzpah. How many girlfriends is the golfer up to now? A baker's dozen or so at last count. Though Amis was referring to Philip Larkin, of whom it may be said without disparagement to poetic legacy or overindulgence in political correctness, was a man less than sound on matters of race and far more adept than Woods at keeping his ladies away from one another. This was the same article in which Amis had to call that unreliable mistress, historical context, to his defense by way of explaining Larkin's bigotry: "I am a racist; I am not as racist as my parents; my children will not be as racist as I am."
It's a progression of enlightenment that John McWhorter appreciates in the New Republic:
To wit, what we have seen lately is a golfer who has turned out to be a philanderer. What we are not seeing is a Black Athlete who has turned out to be a philanderer. There isn't anything meaningfully "black" about Woods' "transgressions," nor is there anything about what he has done that corresponds to any racial "narratives" that the usual dutiful suspects are typically trotted out to "remind" us of on a regular basis.
Without patting myself on the back, I can admit that I only lately considered the counter-narrative which McWhorter spends the rest of this piece rebutting, confined as it has been to a few black websites and magazines. As far as the mainstream tabloids and shameless non-tabloids ("Click here for all of Slate's Tiger Woods coverage") are concerned, they haven't reported even a trace of innuendo or bad faith on the part of those many "disappointed" fans who'd like to interpret a minor handicap on the green as a nonexistent shortcoming in their hero's private life. Perhaps the sheer quantity of Woods' paramours ("Look, there's another one behind the sofa!") was enough to preempt any malicious mutterings about race and promiscuity in this case. Or maybe athletes as a category--see under Namath and Chamberlain--have cynically yet multiculturally inured us to this form of misbehavior. But McWhorter's point is well taken: tolerance can be measured as much by a negative reaction to vice as it can by a positive reaction to virtue. This is progress, all right. Just don't tell poor Mrs. Woods that....
My girlfriend and I were walking around our West Village neighborhood the other night when we spotted a nativity scene erected outside a local church. The baby Jesus was missing from the display and I wondered aloud if it might have been stolen. (So often are these holiday tableaux stripped or vandalized around the country that many infant Nazarenes now apparently come swaddled in GPS tracking systems.) "No, you idiot," my beloved, a lapsed Methodist, responded. "He hasn't been born yet."
My error was less the result of a calendar mix-up than a lifelong disregard for religious ritual and iconography -- an attitude more humdrum than humbug. The product of a mixed marriage between a Catholic and a Jew (both agnostics), yet exposed to the odd Christmas tree or menorah, I've happily entered adulthood without baptism or bar mitzvah. John Stuart Mill wrote that he never really abandoned religion but rather grew up, thanks to his skeptical father, in a "negative state" to it -- a condition that more or less describes my own experience, although I should admit that my negativity has only increased in this demoralizing decade.
I consider myself an ally of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and I attribute not the slightest merit to the argument that these "new atheists" (really old atheists with new royalties) are themselves inverted religious extremists. Both Hitchens and Dawkins have indulged in boyhood nostalgia for the elegance of Protestant evensong; Harris has profited from Buddhist meditation; and Hirsi Ali, whom the historian Ian Buruma shamefully denigrated as an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," can bring herself, in her memoir Infidel, to appreciate the beauty and awe of the Golden Mosque of Saudi Arabia. The equivalent of such "fundamentalist" generosity would be Osama bin Laden's concession that the fossil record has its charms, too.
I bring this up both to affirm my secular bona fides and to pick a fight with my fellow atheists on aesthetic and strategic grounds.
Sam Leith, writing in the respectable magazine Prospect, has a fun analysis of the latest trans-Atlantic craze for vampires and zombies. To understand bloodsucking and brain-munching, he says, you need to know your Marx:
Vampires are monsters of the right; zombies are monsters of the left. Vampires are toffs; zombies are proles. Vampires are individualists; zombies are the mindless, nameless, faceless mob.Vampires are about hierarchies, tradition, bloodlines. They have mittel-European honorifics, live in castles, dress up and have manners. Vampires are the blood-and-soil nationalists of the undead world. Literally. Kipping in the soil of their native land is, in most versions of the myth, vital to vampiric survival.
Allowances made for the noticeable drop in occult quality since the Romantic Age, there's some merit to this argument. The grandfather of the zombie film, George Romero, is seen as a left-wing social satirist whose Night of the Living Dead cult classic was a schlock-and-gore parable about the 60's. The sequels had motives, too. Dawn of the Dead was a joke at the expense of 70's strip-mall consumerism, Day of the Dead was a commentary on the military-industrial complex, and the latest zombie installment, Land of the Dead, was an examination of class conflict, with a miscast Dennis Hopper trading in his Easy Rider hog for corporate domination. Or so claims Romero's Wikipedia entry.
The "hot or not" test here is to inquire how Brecht or Nabokov might have handled such subject matter. Zombies are echt-Brecht, I think we can all agree, while vampires--my sin, my soul--are way more Vlad's speed. But as with all trivial pop culture theories, Leith's has its wrinkles. After all, the first modern "vampire" (if we use the term loosely, although some did literally) was Lord Byron, a blue-blood with the best of them but also a radical revolutionary. Additionally, though this doesn't necessarily contradict Leith, if you consult (ahem) the following exegesis of the HBO series True Blood, you'll note that vampires have more in common with a subtle mythopoetic form of anti-Semitism, purview of the right and the left:
Any talk of glowering immortals stomping the earth in a state of High Romantic sturm und drang always puts me in mind of a different allegory -- that of the Wandering Jew. Perhaps you're familiar with this apocalyptic, anti-Semitic myth, which tells of a Jewish shopkeeper who, upon seeing cross-carrying Christ pause on his way to Golgotha, mocks the rebel rebbe: "Go on quicker, Jesus! Go on quicker! Why dost Thou loiter?" For his insolence, the merchant is admonished by Christ: "I shall stand and rest, but thou shalt go on till the last day," an incantation that condemns him to an eternity on earth. The inspiration for this fable of Hebraiophobic comeuppance derives from vague mutterings in the Gospel of Matthew as to the presence of those who "shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."
[...]
Elsewhere in literature the image or palimpsest of the Wanderer has been "reclaimed" to self-aggrandizing effect, anticipating today's sexy cool of angsty or amoral immortals. Benjamin Disraeli, England's first and only Jewish prime minister, was equally assailed and envied in his time as a sinister "magician," the Tory arriviste whose outsize ambition resulted in his owning the exclusive attention of one the most influential monarchs in history. Disraeli winkingly satirized himself-not to say his popular reputation-in the fictional character of Sidonia, a behind-the-scenes power broker who appears in three of the parliamentarian's late novels: Sybil, Tancred, and Coningsby, in which he plays a major role. As Adam Kirsch points out in his recent, brilliant biography of Disraeli, Sidonia is the uncanny archetype for every post-Protocols "international Jewish mastermind." He physically mirrors his creator in Iberian pallor, with an "impressive brow, and dark eyes of great intelligence." Despite having the ear of every European diplomat, a bank account capable of rescuing gross national products (a task that often falls to him), and a sexual demeanor to parody Orientalist stereotype, Sidonia is afflicted with an acute disorder: "He might have discovered that perpetual spring of happiness in the sensibility of the heart. But this was a sealed fountain to Sidonia. In his organization there was a peculiarity, perhaps a great deficiency. He was a man without affections." From Dracula to Barnabas Collins, vampires have warned their swooning prey not to get too attached....
The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, was sharing his vision for the future. "The key requirement for a Palestinian state," he began, speaking on a cellular telephone from his office in Ramallah. Then the line went dead, a dropped call. "You'll have to excuse," he said when he rang back. "We have a lot of competing cellular networks here, and sometimes our signals get crossed."
He could just as easily have been talking about his political fortunes. A Western-trained economist praised by many in Israel and the United States, Fayyad has emerged in recent years as an unlikely Arab visionary--the "Ben Gurion of Palestine," as Israeli President Shimon Peres recently called him. To hear most observers tell it, Fayyad governs like the Michael Bloomberg of Palestine--managerially, with seemingly little interest in politics over policy. But his ability to implement his vision is being hindered by old-guard interests on both sides of the Green Line, the demarcation that separates Israel from the West Bank. It's one of those paradoxical realities of the Middle East that the heralded technocrat of Palestine has no democratic legitimacy but serves entirely at the pleasure of P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas, who appointed Fayyad to his position. Abbas last month announced his intention to resign as the Palestinian Authority president, citing Israeli intransigence on the peace process. If Abbas--Fayyad's constituency of one--leaves, many observers of the region agree, that could create a power vacuum in the P.A. and lead to a third intifada, unraveling all of what Fayyad's administration has accomplished. But, until then, his leadership provides what seems to be Palestinians' best hope for a more functional future, and the prime minister seems unfazed that progress is being held hostage to factionalism. "We have competing ideologies and concepts," Fayyad said. "But there are two ways of doing things: to sit on our hands and do nothing until we figure it out by talking, or to get on with it and act in a manner that's consistent with a shared, broader outlook. I prefer to get on with it."
And so he has. By all accounts, in the two years since Fayyad was named prime minister, the West Bank has been transformed from a besieged and impoverished bantustan into a rough sketch of what a functioning Palestinian state might look like--if it ever comes to fruition. In August, Fayyad laid out the most ambitious, bottom-up plan ever devised for Palestinian nationalism, "de facto statehood," which is spoken of respectfully even by Israeli officials who oppose it (and most do). Meanwhile, Fayyad's homegrown critics say his proposal conforms a little too nicely to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's own designs for the occupied territories. He's still combating cynical and entrenched PLO interests, held over from the Arafat era, who don't like transparent government. He's also jockeying to reunify Gaza and the West Bank, two regions separated in the midst of an internecine civil war in 2006 and now governed, respectively, by the Islamist party Hamas and the secular party Fatah.
A man apart and an agent of change in a territory with a 40-year status quo, Fayyad has, unsurprisingly, accrued enemies and skeptics, though his biggest cheerleaders are Americans. "He's a real revolutionary," said Jeffrey Goldberg, national correspondent for The Atlantic (and a Tablet Magazine contributor). "He's done more to improve the quality of life in the West Bank than anyone else." Indeed, concrete progress been made so rapidly under "Fayyadism"--New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman's term for the prime minister's ultra-pragmatic style of governance--that one former Bush administration official asked not to be identified for this article because "I don't want to make Salam's life more difficult by having someone like me praise him."
Switzerland's decision Sunday to adopt a referendum banning the construction of minarets - the tall spires with variously adorned tops that accouter some mosques - is hard to see as anything other than an act of bigotry against Muslims.
Ostensibly sold to voters as a weapon against Islamism, an all-too-real political phenomenon in Europe, this new law in fact makes no distinction between religion and ideology, instead choosing to alienate the primary victims of Islamic fundamentalism and the best allies of Western liberals - moderate Muslims.
The minaret ban also marks the first instance in which a European constitution has had to be revised for purposes of civil architecture. Take that, Osama.
As ever, context is important. The referendum was the brainchild of the Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union, which must be the only xenophobic parties on the Continent to express themselves quadrilingually. The populist right in Switzerland may position itself as anti-immigrant, but it will inevitably confront an electorate consisting of German, Italian, French and Romansche communities - muddy terrain indeed in which to launch a war of bourgeois cultural purity.
Despite assurances from the Swiss Justice Minister Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf that the referendum, passed by 57.5% of voters, "reflects fears among the population of Islamic fundamentalist tendencies," the posters lobbying for the ban were not so much Islamophobic (a meaningless term) as they were Islamoridiculous. In one, a veiled woman stands athwart a Swiss flag dotted with missile-shaped minarets, as if Katyusha rockets were being launched from call-to-prayer towers in Montreux. (Though there are hundreds of mosques in Switzerland at present, there are only four minarets, a statistic that makes the new law as pointless as it is provocative.)
Another poster features a trio of white sheep booting their one black cohort off the flag. If this is a metaphor for anti-jihadism, it's too euphemistic to be taken seriously. If this is racist propaganda, it's too inclusive to work, evoking a cliché description of an obnoxious or unruly family member rather than an enemy alien.
The Swiss minaret proscription has been likened to the French government's decision to "oppose" the burka, the head-to-toe garment worn by many Muslim women by choice or, as is more likely the case, by male coercion. It is a false analogy.
For starters, France has so far passed no law prohibiting the burka; a National Assembly inquiry was inaugurated in late June, and its findings may or may not lead to actual legislation. But there is also the fact that classical Islam carries no justification for the burka, which predates the religion itself, appears nowhere in the Koran, and is rightly seen by many modern Muslims as a theologically improvised form of sexual slavery (the idea is to keep women under wraps and men away from temptation). There is nothing anti-social or oppressive about minarets, which occupy a place in the Islamic tradition tantamount to basilicas in Christianity or bimahs in Judaism.
No doubt Europe has been too quiescent toward homegrown confessional threats: See, for instance, the British government's persistent indulgence of imams and Islamic "charities" and "inter-faith" groups that espouse the tenets of the Muslim Brotherhood or Jamma'at Islami, the Pakistani terror cabal, and promote anti-Semitism, homophobia and the mass murder of civilians. But the sensible alternative to runaway multiculturalism is not reactionary exclusion.
Passing laws that target Muslims for being Muslims is not part of any clash of civilizations, it is a failure of one.
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...
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