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"Through no wish of my own I have become the protagonist of a Jamesian problem. Do you ever read any Henry James, Mr. Schultz?"
"You know I don't have the time for reading."
"You don't have to read much of him. All his stories are about the same thing--American innocence and European experience."
"Thinks he can outsmart us, does he?"
"James was the innocent American."
"Well, I've no time for guys running down their own folks."
"Oh, he doesn't run them down. The stories are all tragedies one way or another."
"Well, I ain't got the time for tragedies neither. Take an end of this casket. We've only half-an-hour before the pastor arrives."
-- The Loved One

I am about embark on a trans-Atlantic adventure in part to see if my Anglophilia withstands actual Anglos at close proximity. "You don't understand," said my expat friend Ben, who's lived in New York for five years. "You like the ones you meet here fine, but we're the ones that got away." Maybe. But then I've also liked, at distance, the ones who chose not to get away and rather made a point of pride of the fact. Both Amises (one who alighted in Tennessee--of all places--for an academic stint and one who called America, borrowing a line from Bellow, "the moronic inferno"), at least three Waughs, a Larkin (who said that the United States was two cities interrupted by "vast deserts of bigotry"), a Stoppard, a Bennett, and only the one Powell (who pronounced it "pole.")

But from Paine to Dickens, there have been Brits who've toured our humble little experiment in exceptionalism and found much of interest and comfort but not quite enough to keep them from returning home. To this category we must now add Stephen Fry who, like his great mentor and on-screen embodiment, has nothing to declare to Customs except his genius:

"Stephen Fry in America" is an outgrowth of a six-part BBC miniseries of the same name, and organization of the book is closely related to the show. Through nine months of filming, on and off, he at least sets foot in all 50 states, and often navigates American waters. He works a lobster boat off Eastport, Maine; sails off Newport, R.I. in an America's Cup winning vessel; canoes the Mississippi River; tours a nuclear submarine in Connecticut; ferries across Lake Champlain to New York; and swims with dolphins off Florida.

He also descends into a West Virginia coal mine, ascends in a hot-air balloon over North Carolina, goes hunting with plaid-wearing weekend warriors in upstate New York, canvasses New Hampshire with presidential hopeful Mitt Romney and does turning doughnuts on a Texas beach in his trademark London big black cab.

The coal mine was an act of all too obvious homage:

Then I had to open a new vein, or lode, which with a silver drill I brilliantly performed, amidst unanimous applause. The silver drill was presented to me and the lode named "The Oscar." I had hoped that in their simple grand way they would have offered me shares in "The Oscar," but in their artless untutored fashion they did not. Only the silver drill remains as a memory of my night at Leadville.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:49 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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If you believe, as I do, that with the retirement of Daniel Patrick Moynihan from the U.S. Senate the brightest flame in government was snuffed, you might also marvel at how the seat that once belonged to the distinguished gentleman from New York has been eyed and picked over by only the least worthy successors. Clinton, Kennedy, Gillibrand -- two beneficiaries of their own surnames with a shared sense of entitlement the size of the Hudson River, and one gubernatorial appointment who has so far made cheerful consensus and a perfect NRA rating the fresh face of New York exceptionalism.

To this sad assembly it seemed natural, not to say foreordained, that Harold Ford, Jr., a former representative from Tennessee and lately an MSNBC news analyst, Merrill Lynch executive, and Democratic Leadership Council chairman, should announce his membership.

If you read closely Ford's extensive interview with Michael Barbaro of the New York Times this month -- no easy feat in itself -- then you came away with the following understanding of the prospective legislator:

1. Even though he donated to Kristen Gillibrand's campaign two days after she'd been appointed senator in 2008, and did so solely at the request of an unnamed mutual friend, Ford sees no contradiction in opposing her now or in mildly assailing her legitimacy as unelected.

2. Most of Ford's time in Manhattan has been spent being driven from his home to the MSNBC studio on 42nd Street and 5th Avenue -- except when it's too cold and difficult to hail a cab; then he takes the subway.

3. Ford took a guided tour of the five boroughs with Sir Harold Evans and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, and because their helicopter landed in Staten Island, he can safely say he's been there.

4. Ford's appreciation of New York football is limited to the time he's spent at either team's home venue as the invited guest of the respective owners of the Jets and Giants (the Jets win by that metric).

5. Ditto baseball (the Yanks take it).

6. Ford became a supporter of gay marriage because of the political pressure he faced as an opponent of it.

Just as your mandible begins its slow ascent back into place, Ford outdoes himself as a shameless carpetbagger in yet another hometown newspaper, the Daily News, announcing that he's a regular Joe Chardonnay, chauffeured to work only once a week, and on strict network executive orders. Oh, and he "loves the smell of New York," a claim that not even the Tammany princeling Al Smith, who professed to be educated at the fish markets of Fulton Street, ever hazarded.

As the blogger Adam Holland reminded me recently, there are other, more sobering reasons why Gotham doesn't need Ford.

Read more...

Posted by Michael Weiss at 10:56 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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Perhaps uninhibited by a victory they seldom thought possible, liberals wasted no time at all, upon the election of Barack Obama, in writing the obituaries for their vanquished opponent ideology. Numerous claims that the U.S. was now a "center left" nation were speciously advanced in print, but none so boldly as Sam Tanenhaus's essay in the New Republic, unambiguously titled, "Conservatism is Dead," which actually began with a dialectical observation about the past that subsequent paragraphs seemed to foreclose for the future: "In the tumultuous history of postwar American conservatism, defeats have often contained the seeds of future victory." How true.

Although Tanenhaus's analysis was historically rooted, his conclusion was premature in the extreme. He argued that, having forsaken the meliorist principles of Burke and Disraeli, American conservatism had transformed itself into a Marxist-style all-or-nothing warrior politics, abetted by intellectuals and at the mercy of "revanchist" impulses, chiefly being suspicion of big government, resentment of cultural "elites" and an unwavering faith in laissez-faire capitalist dogma. These impulses, said Tanenhaus, culminated in the presidency of George W. Bush but now, definitely with the election of a Hyde Park liberal and the dual failure of trying to transport democracy to Babylon and Milton Friedman to Wall Street, depleted themselves as electoral forces.

That was one year ago, before town hall meetings, "tea parties," Glenn Beck, Going Rogue and countless other examples of demagogic affronts to what Tenenahus, borrowing from Whittaker Chambers, termed the "Beaconsfield position" of classical conservatism, named for Disraeli's earldom. (Queen Victoria's favorite prime minister, it should be noted, inaugurated more social reforms favorable to the industrial working class than his Whig rival Gladstone ever could or that Marx and Engels were prepared to stomach from an arriviste Tory.)

Scott Brown is closer to the Beaconsfield position than he is to the "movement" politics of the Tea Party, however much the latter faction chose to ignore this glaring discrepancy. Indeed, no Republican who spoke as effusively of the late Ted Kennedy as Brown did at his victory celebration on Tuesday night could ever truly be mistaken for second coming of Sarah Palin. And yet, is there any doubt that revanchist impulses helped this unknown state legislator dislodge a 50-year partisan hold on a Senate seat in one of the "bluest" states in the union?

Timothy Noah of Slate points to one irony of the Massachusetts upset that was unforeseen by the liberal establishment: Fifty-six percent of those polled by Rasmussen Tuesday said that healthcare was their top priority while fifty percent of the same sample pool professed to want no healthcare bill at all over the one now in consideration in Washington. Even if these voters are misinformed as to what is in the Washington bill, they can afford to be as the recipients of a popular statewide health plan, carpentered by former Massachusetts governor and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney (another centrist Republican), which has served as a tacit model for ObamaCare and which the senator-elect is said to support.

Was it hubris or stupidity, then, that caused Democratic establishment to pin the hopes of its most ambitious piece of domestic legislation on a regional electorate it presumed to have the interests of the entire nation in mind? The only conclusion that can be drawn from Brown's victory is that healthcare was not an overriding concern for most Americans until it was turned into a controversy that begat a political liability. The president has compounded the problem by going back on his word to make the debate over a sweeping social reform transparent (broadcast live on C-Span) rather than occlusive. He has also intimated that voters hostile to his plan need only wait until it's implemented, with or without their consent, before appreciating its full effects. ("We are the ones we've been waiting for, except those of us too dumb to wait.")

The special election also reflects a justifiable animus against Democratic vices. No voter in Massachusetts wished to listen to John Kerry, spousal heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune worth an estimated $750 million, sound off about Brown's five residences, two of which are adjacent condominiums in a low-income neighborhood. Nor did any constituent want to be treated as if a special election were no more meaningful than a game of touch football at Hyannisport, and that campaigning out in the cold quite was too uncomfortable for the designated heir of the party apparatus.

Of such incidents are revanchist impulses rekindled.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:29 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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In this illuminating profile in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Tony Judt seeks and indulges no sentimentality about his terminal condition (he suffers from Lou Gehrig's disease, diagnosed about a year ago, which has all but incapacitated him). A life of the mind can be hindered but not stopped by wheelchairs and breathing mechanisms, and I found myself coming away with admiration for how Judt still seems only to care about social democracy and European intellectual history despite his debilitation. As a chronicler of the latter subject, he has attained a level of mastery that even his strongest detractors must concede.

Judt's undoubted masterpiece is Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, a book whose continental scope is belied by its incredible attention to the telling national detail. I learned a great deal about Central European Stalinism from Postwar, and it's a rare achievement for an encyclopedic history to allow a reader to breeze through 900 pages of Displaced Persons camps, Romanian Central Committee purges, and nationalized healthcare schemes, only to leave him only desiring more. The book arrived on the heels of a couple of intriguing volumes on French socialism and the twilight of intellectuals in the face of Soviet tyranny. Indeed, had Judt confined himself, at the apex of his justly earned celebrity, to what knew best -- the menacing shapes of political fevers in the second half of the twentieth century -- his legacy would be that of a hawk-eyed archivist of heady but purposeful debates, the Isaiah Berlin of Special Collections. But it is perhaps inevitable that one who had made a life's study of engage intellectuals should risk becoming a lesser specimen oneself.

Judt is the most popular stateside proponent of the so-called one-state solution in the Middle East, which is to say a fully democratic, secular country in which Arabs and Jews get along just fine, no matter what the demographic or parliamentary split. Whether you regard this project as a fairy tale out of Scheherazade or an anti-Zionist feint intended to eliminate the Jewish state altogether, may depend on how closely you parse this paragraph:

Judt was born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family of Marxist anti-Communists. They lived in London's East End, a historically Jewish section of the city. "Anti-Semitism at a low, polite, cultural level was still perfectly acceptable," Judt recalls. Fearing that their teenage son was too socially withdrawn, his parents, in 1963, sent him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel. Judt became a committed Zionist. "I was the ideal convert," he says. A leader in left-wing Zionist youth movements, he even delivered a keynote address at a large Zionist conference in Paris when he was only 16 years old. (A smoker at the time, he seized the opportunity to denounce smoking by Jewish adolescents as a "bourgeois deviation.") In 1967, a few weeks after the Six-Day War, Judt volunteered as a translator for the Israel Defense Forces on the Golan Heights. He was surprised to find that many of the young Israeli officers he worked with were "right-wing thugs with anti-Arab views"; others, he says, "were just dumb idiots with guns." Israel, he came to believe, "had turned from a sort of narrow-minded pioneer society into a rather smug, superior, conquering society."

Unless this is poorly rendered by the article's author, who happens to be my friend Evan Goldstein, Judt appears be saying that a few rough run-ins with obnoxious sabras disillusioned him of the merits of Ben-Gurion's project, a plaint that, even in nostalgia, belongs more to an Evelyn Waugh reactionary than to an ivory tower social democrat. Let me inquire, then: were he today to spend a few hour in Gaza talking to Hamas militants about topics as diverse as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the proper attire and educational prospects for Muslim women, would Judt be prompted into a re-evaluation of his current integrationist model for peace in the Middle East?

I think I can say with confidence that he would not, but not because that would make him politically inconsistent. There's a whole narrative at stake here. Like many sound thinkers distracted by the din of the Levant, Judt has turned his attention to a complicated and well-populated field, been found wanting in his analysis by those who've been at it longer and know more than he, and come away feeling martyred for his trouble. It's a familiar story in which Judt seems to think himself an original protagonist

"The Shahid of Washington Square" was how Leon Wieseltier not long ago described Judt's narcissistic agonies when, in 2006, the Polish consulate of New York decided to disinvite him from a speaking engagement because, as its diplomat said at the time, Judt's views on Israel didn't quite mesh with those of the Polish government. It wasn't that simple; it never is when it comes to Israel, and dark motives were apprehended by the Voltaireans of the New York Review of Books, who would sooner die than give up the right to RSVP.

Odd, though, that Judt should have seen in this otherwise forgettable episode the dark hand of conspiratorial Semitic censorship: the elegant, Kundera-esque theme of Postwar, after all, was how Europe was only able to reinvent itself in the aftermath of the Second World War by "forgetting" its shameful participation in it. Poland, much like Germany, has maintained a soft spot for Israel for reasons rooted to ethics as much as to international relations. If Judt had been snubbed by anything, it wasn't the Anti-Defamation League; it was his own thesis.

His decline on matters of political economy has been steady ever since. To what pasted-together philippic against the legitimacy of Jewish statehood has Judt not lent his imprimatur? His warm appraisal of the Mearsheimer-Walt school of foreign policy, which argues that the United States will invade Iraq on Ariel Sharon's say-so--was that really a function of his intimate knowledge of Aipac lobbying efforts in Washington, or is it a way of sketching a tenuous line between the personal and the political? Judt may think Shlomo Sand's book on the "myth" of Jewish peoplehood is a vital contribution to ethnography and Sorelian illusion, but chances are that, as Jeffrey Goldberg put it, this volume will go the way of Arthur Koestler's The Thirteenth Tribe for being yet another stale entry in the anti-Zionist's bibliograhic answer to Leon Uris. (Anita Shapira and Hillel Halkin have dealt with the substance of the book, here and here.)

Elsewhere in the landscape of current affairs, Judt has proved equally coarse and unreliable. 2006 was clearly his annus horribilis, the year he published "Bush's Useful Idiots" in the London Review of Books. Here, Judt reveled in making lists of dissidents and intellectuals he thought scandalized by their shared belief that removing a genocidal totalitarian was both wise and necessary:

In Europe, Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish intellectual resistance to Communism, has become an outspoken admirer of the embarrassingly Islamophobic Oriana Fallaci; Vaclav Havel has joined the DC-based Committee on the Present Danger (a recycled Cold War-era organisation dedicated to rooting out Communists, now pledged to fighting the threat posed by global radical Islamist and fascist terrorist movements); Andre Glucksmann in Paris contributes agitated essays to Le Figaro (most recently on 8 August) lambasting "universal Jihad", Iranian "lust for power" and radical Islam's strategy of "green subversion". All three enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq.

Might the first two men, having grown up bullied by commissars and secret police, be expected to harbor natural sympathies with those living under the same conditions in a warmer climate? And before George W. Bush became president, what does Judt suppose Michnik, Havel and Glucksmann thought of Iraqi Ba'athism and the sanity of its continuance? As Goldstein notes, the rebuttal to this lame J'accuse of non-interventionist purity was authored by Todd Gitlin and Bruce Ackerman, both leftists opposed to the Iraq war, who called Judt's essay "nonsense on stilts." But no matter. Facts in the London Review of Books can be promiscuous as the commissioned prose:

But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in "Islamo-fascism", Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant -- and comfortable -- with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms.

I still eagerly await Peter Beinart's forthcoming memoir: Against the Grain: My Youth as a Trotskyist Revolutionist. And as for Berman, Kronstadt wasn't even his Kronstadt: he subscribed to an anarchism derived from the decidedly anti-Bolshevik Peter Kropotkin and best embodied in organized form by the IWW.

How curious that a fellow historian of the left would be so poorly conversant -- and comfortable -- with the manifold divisions of a radical tradition. Then again, you would expect the founder of the Remarque Institute to be able to draw the most basic distinctions between soldiers and the societies they inhabit, wouldn't you?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:30 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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I can't claim immunity to the lure of assessing popular culture through an ideological lens, but sometimes the sort of case studies that might inspire book-length exegeses by David Foster Wallace can seem dull and pointless. Consider the brouhaha over James Cameron's visually impressive but substantively void film Avatar, which, after making $1 billion internationally in three weeks, has got some U.S. conservatives grumbling as to its supposed theme of anti-Americanism. The fictionalized Mark van Doren in Quiz Show put this kind of failure of cultural proportion best when told about his son's duplicitous intellectual sportsmanship on NBC: "That's like trying to plagiarize a comic strip."

Not that science fiction can't be both wondrous and intelligent. Robert Conquest is a scholar and practitioner of the genre, and his handle on twentieth-century politics, he might insist, deeply influenced both leisurely pursuits. But as far as sci-fi parables go, Avatar is no 2001: A Space Odyssey, nor, come to that, does it contain any sophisticated or Strangelovean quotient of political commentary relevant for our time.

The film concerns 10-foot cat people inhabiting an enchanted but perilous jungle planet and the human-run private enterprise looking to mine that planet, at the expense of its indigenous population, for an expensive element with untold industrial uses. For this, Cameron is said to dilate pessimistically on the Iraq war in particular ("No Fur for Unobtainium!") and Pax Americana in general. Are those Blackwater mercenaries cutting down ancient animist plantlife before setting their helicopter gunships on the ill-equipped feline subalterns? Before one tries to locate the Saddam Hussein of the Na'vi, it is worth mentioning that phrases like "shock and awe" occasionally pop out of Cameron's CGI imaginarium, already rendered in some theatres in the third dimension, which is exactly two more than the film's dialogue. Indeed, carping about Cameron's politics is like guessing at what George Lucas had in mind about the philosophy of Leo Strauss in the last Star Wars fiasco. Conservatives would do better to discuss the merits of a relevant and important film like The Hurt Locker lest they give some earnest counter-critics, like Slate's Tom Shone, reason to await the Goldstone Report on Avatar. Here's Shone:

Cameron has an uncanny feel for asymmetrical fights: It's what gives his films such a vicelike grip on the national unconscious and makes him a useful filmmaker to have around right now. If I were on the right, I'd be celebrating the director for his keen-eyed, conservative critique of Wilsonian foreign adventurism. Yes, its regrettable that the pivot point of the final battle hinges on the incursion of a deity, no less, but I also learned some interesting stuff about how to subdue any huge flame-colored dragons I see flying around the skies: You attack from above, where he least expects it. "Tarouk is the biggest, baddest boy in the sky," Jake Sully informs us. "He never gets attacked." With yet another airplane bomber in American custody, it would seem we cannot get enough of that lesson.

This is one way to put it. Another way would be to say that middlebrow entertainment is in over its head again, as is Shone when it comes to contemporary politics. (Wilsonian foreign adventurism typically does not mean genocide at the hands of private contractors). I'm also not sure how the abortive attack of Christmas Day, coming as it did more than nine years after air travel entered a state of permanent bureaucratic siege, represents anything other a near-miss victory for Islamist nihilism.

Now the real question is this: Did the Na'vi bring it all on themselves for making a pact with the devil?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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The Onion once ran a headline: "Neighbors Remember Serial Killer as Serial Killer." In its own grimly hilarious way, this counters so much of the stupidity with which an international media now wonders how a seemingly polite graduate student from Nigeria could become the unsuccessful mass murderer Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.

In fact, the would-be bomber spent years as a blissfully unmolested radical in training - not in the deserts of Yemen but on the cosmopolitan streets of London.

Here is Malcolm Grant, provost of University College London, where Abdulmutallab studied mechanical engineering and business finance from 2005 to 2008 - and where, for about a year, he also acted as president of the school's Islamic Society:

"The events of Christmas Day came as a complete shock to the UCL community.... [H]is tutors observed no aberrant behavioural issues. The same picture is painted by his fellow students - here was an ordinary student."

Either Grant has no idea what goes on at his own school, or British standards for "aberrant behavioral issues" are today remarkably low.

One of Abdulmutallab's accomplishments as Islamic Society president was to coordinate a so-called "War on Terror Week" - a five-day series of conferences in 2007 at which only the most well known anti-American and pro-jihad figures were invited to speak. These included Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist who was captured by the Taliban in 2001. Having emerged as a "fierce critic of the west," as the Guardian phrased it, who defended future Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's bombing of three Jordanian hotels in 2005, Ridley now draws a salary from Press TV, the English-language channel that is owned and operated by the Iranian regime.

Read more...

Posted by Michael Weiss at 11:07 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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The summary of White House review of the abortive Christmas Day massacre of a planeful of Detroit-bound travelers leaves no room for debate as to accountability. The main points are:

1. Although Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was cited in the Terrorist Identities Datamark Environment (TIDE), he was not placed on the Terrorist Screening Database's watchlist--which would have prevented him from boarding a U.S.-bound aircraft--because he did not "meet the minimum derogatory standard to watchlist." This was due to a failure by National Counterterrorism Center and Central Intelligence Agency personnel to "correlate" all the available derogatory data on Abdulmutallab;

2. An initial search that would have identified the U.S. visa-holding Abdulmutallab with the man his father indicated to the CIA had been "radicalized" was the result of a misspelling of Abdulmutallab's name;

3. Nobody in the U.S. intelligence community seems to have appreciated the potential of Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

"Failure to connect the dots," "systemic failure," "the buck stops with me" -- such are the phrases produced by the president today to explain the second major act of terrorism -- excuse me, "foreign contingency operation" -- to occur within U.S. borders since his inauguration. As bureaucratic and euphemistic as these phrases are, they certainly beat his earlier non sequitur that Yemen, the country where Abdulmutallab is said to have first thrilled to jihadism, is a poor and backward nation, the implication being that the son of one of the wealthiest Nigerians was driven to set his crotch alight by poverty.

At a press conference a few minutes ago, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano actually managed to say that had Abdulmutallab landed in Michigan, well, then, we'd have surely nabbed him.

I have an op-ed in Monday's Daily News showing how the Underpants Bomber ought to have raised eyebrows while president of the Islamic Society at University College London. Never mind that M15, much like our own valiant CIA, had the goods on him yet failed to impede his itinerary....

Posted by Michael Weiss at 12:59 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)