It's hard to believe this record was made in 1977 UK, when nobody was making good rock music, other than the Clash and this short alcoholic Scot stealing his name from Presley and his corrective lenses from Buddy Holly. Oh -- and his lyrical sensibility from Bob Dylan, and his anger management deficiency from The Who. One of the convincingly pissed-off and splenetic records ever made.

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BOOKS:

-- 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.}

-- Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven {A sorely forgotten modern classic. Leven has since swapped the galley for the camera, directing such keepers as Don Juan Demarco and The Legend of Bagger Vance. Satan has relapsed.}

-- 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 Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, by E.W. {Nasty, brutish and short, in short form.}

-- 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.}

-- Saul Bellow: Novels 1944-1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March, [Library of Congress Hardcover Edition] {Look: it's his world, we all just live in it.}

-- 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 ClichŽ 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 ClichŽ. 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?"}

-- The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, by James Wood {The bling to Dale Peck's blah.}

-- 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.}

-- The Persian Mirror: The Elusive Face of Iran, by Elaine Sciolino {For those with short odds on the next war of choice.}

-- 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 childrenâs 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 Chicago Manual of Style, by the University of Chicago Press Staff {and the ghost of Allan Bloom.}

-- 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.}

-- Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, by the Unicorns {Morbid, tinny, wildly innovative and beautiful.}

-- Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesnât 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 itâs 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 (modelled 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.}

-- The Office - The Complete Collection (First And Second Series Plus Special) {Creator, writer, director and star Rick Gervais used to manage Suede and now this. That's enough laurels for one lifetime. He can die now.}

-- Arrested Development - Season One {To think that Teen Wolf Too was just a glimpse of Jason Bateman's potential.}

07/06/05 - 09/30/05
05/05/05 - 07/05/05
03/31/05 - 05/04/05
2/24/05 - 3/30/05
1/16/05 - 2/22/05
12/3/04 - 1/15/05
9/1/04 - 12/2/04
7/14/04 - 8/31/04
6/23/04 - 7/13/04
  Tuesday, July 5, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Whatever... What set Russell Crowe off last month at the Mercer Hotel like a crack-addled nit from the crotch of an Australian pole-dancer? One word: "Whatever." Nick Paumgarten has the scoop on this shiftless, disaffected term of a rotten youth generation.

Now had the bellhop with the Bell Atlantic imprint on his forehead said something like, "Gladiator sucked and go fuck yourself" -- well, no worries, mate; he'd now be the bassist for that band Crowe's in. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Most Visible Blind-Item... Page Six:

WHICH leading man landed his fiancŽe by giving her a five-year contract for $10 million? Now, she's giving an Oscar-worthy performance acting as if she's really in love with him . . .

Surely not. --Michael Weiss [link]

Catskills G-8... Oh, when those Asiatic-Continental scamps get together, it's yukkier than the Borscht belt in late August. If only those British could cook as well as they govern with stability for multiple centuries! Eh, bien:

Chirac to Schršder and Putin: "The only thing [the British] have ever given European farming is mad cow."

"Take my Fifth Republic -- please!"

"You can't trust people who cook as badly as that," he said. "After Finland, it's the country with the worst food." (Putin wistfully remembering the Soviet invasion of Finland from his boyhood. Yup. The worst "appropriated" Red Army diet, ever.)

Then in chimes our Ed McMahon of the Urals:

"But what about hamburgers?" said Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, referring to America.

"Oh no, hamburgers are nothing in comparison," Mr Chirac said.

Mr Putin and Gerhard Schršder, the German chancellor, laughed. Mr Chirac then recalled how George Robertson, the former Nato secretary general and a former defence secretary in Tony Blair's Cabinet, had once made him try an "unappetising" Scottish dish, apparently meaning haggis.

"That's where our problems with Nato come from," he said.

Scariest sentence this news cycle: "Mr Schršder and Mr Putin laughed again."

Wunderbar. Anyone in the house remember the last time Germany and Russia made nice like that? The French comedy hour took a breather.

--Michael Weiss [link]

The Most Visible Blind-Item... Page Six:

WHICH leading man landed his fiancŽe by giving her a five-year contract for $10 million? Now, she's giving an Oscar-worthy performance acting as if she's really in love with him . . .

Surely not. --Michael Weiss [link]

Two Hearts Bleed As One... Well, here's something you don't read everyday:

Those who care about Africa tend to think that the appropriate attitude toward President Bush is a medley of fury and contempt.

But the fact is that Mr. Bush has done much more for Africa than Bill Clinton ever did, increasing the money actually spent for aid there by two-thirds so far, and setting in motion an eventual tripling of aid for Africa. Mr. Bush's crowning achievement was ending one war in Sudan, between north and south. And while Mr. Bush has done shamefully little to stop Sudan's other conflict - the genocide in Darfur - that's more than Mr. Clinton's response to genocide in Rwanda (which was to issue a magnificent apology afterward).

Dubya and Bono. Best F 4Ever. --Michael Weiss [link]

Friday, July 1, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Yet on the Other Side of the Atlantic... The original Prospect magazine redeems its Yankee cousin. David Rieff has a must-read essay on the smallpox-infected blanket that was Live Aid to Ethiopia in the 80's. Much as I admire Bono and Bob Geldof -- who court an Irish good humor where plodding earnestness might have consumed other activist celebrities of such a scale -- the Stalinist depredations that were only helped by their magnanimity cannot be ignored, especially as the sequel to Pop-relief gears up this weekend.

There is no smoking-gun evidence demonstrating that Live Aid achieved nothing, or only did harm. But there is ample reason to conclude that Live Aid did harm as well as good. It is also arguable that Live Aid may have done more harm than good.

(And that's only talking about use of the money. Never you mind the music.) --Michael Weiss [link]

Results and Prospects... So Stephen Hayes writes a book suggesting that Saddam did have a connection to Al Qaeda (which would certainly explain Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's high-tailing it to Baghdad before the fall of the regime). And on the heels of the president's speech this week, in which 9/11 was mentioned multiple times, Hayes writes two relevant and complementary pieces in The Weekly Standard. The first is debunking of such bald statements as "There was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq" from talking heads on CNN. The second is an exposure of the late revisionism of Senator Jay Rockefeller, who inveighed against Bush's rhetoric in fairly underwhelming terms, while perhaps forgetting that he not only signed off on the war bill making clear the terrorist nexus through Mesopotamia, but that he also explicitly, and in public, certified the probable existence of such a nexus himself. Well, pretty humdrum stuff so far as the Potomac two-step and the dusting off controversies of Christmas past are concerned. But apparently not to the bloggers at American Prospect Online, who've got nothing to say against the evidence presented in Hayes' articles, except to point to a month-old editorial by one of their own (which says even less) and to drip with sarcasm about "going there" again.

BUT I HAVE A BOOK TO SELL! I kind of feel like Iâm debating whether the earth is flat, but in two Weekly Standard pieces Stephen Hayes seems to have taken George W. Bush's cue that it's time to revive that old canard that Saddam Hussein was some how in active league with Al-Qeada [sic].

As this debate is so spring 2004, Iâll just invite readers to take a journey back in time with me to those halcyon days when we had only just learned that Ahmed Chalabi might be an Iranian spy and when deputy defense secretaries still took hits off the Laurie Mylroie pipe. Reread Peter Bergen's and Judith Yaphe's comments from the transcript of a June 2004 AEI event promoting Hayes' book on the supposed connection (also discussed in our pages by Matt). You'll notice that Hayes neglects to offer a plausible explanation of why the administration would remain intent on keeping ăevidenceä of this explosive information so close to its chest.

--Mark Leon Goldberg

Ah, so the halycon days when Ahmed Chalabi "might" have been an Iranian spy are worth of revisiting, but tranches of documents indicating Saddam's gemutlich dealings with bin Laden are nothing more than today's fish-wrap. (And never mind that Dr. Chalabi is now an elected representative of the Iraqi National Assembly and has not been indicted by either an American or Iraqi court. Less prima facie stuff to go on than Zarqawi's naming of his own organization "Al Qaeda in Iraq," don't you think?) There are a bunch of links in this noisome but passing web-belch, all of which I'm too lazy to reproduce for you here. Though I suggest going to the original and seeing for yourself. And be sure to read Matthew Yglesias's piece (oh, all right, one reproduced link), which actually does more justice to the opposition's thesis than it would have liked. (Hayes' never claims the data he has amassed is definitive proof, but he does argue that it should not have been, or continue to be, dismissed as empty calories for energizing neocon windmill-tilts. It is, by any definition of the word, "evidence." Whereas, say, the testimony of Dr. Barham Salih that Ansar al-Islam was redoubling its activity in Iraqi Kurdistan as early (or as late) as October of 2001 -- that's just a "coincidence." Surely.)

I shall certainly be keeping watch for the next time Mark Leon Goldberg writes a book whose content is ripped straight from the headlines, which I'm guessing he'll gallantly refrain from commenting on further so as not to tarnish the noble money-mouth relationship with something to "sell." --Michael Weiss [link]

Gitmo and Beyond... Reuel Marc Gerecht strikes me as everything that's right with the neoconservative critique of the war on terror. A few months ago he had an excellent front-page polemic in The Weekly Standard against "rendition," whereby the United States ships enemy combatants overseas to countries that yawningly condone torture as de rigueur and not even worth arguing about. Now he looks at our own domestic counterterrorism practices and is no more enthusiastic.

[M]uch of what has been said, even by thoughtful critics of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and the secret CIA prison facilities--on how they have aided our enemies and damaged us in the Middle East--is dubious. But the attacks on the Pentagon and the CIA are not without merit. It is clear the Bush administration hasn't thought through what it's doing in these prison facilities. It hasn't yet appreciated the fact that its mishandling of this issue could seriously damage America's resolve against Islamic terrorism. More important, the administration's continuing ineptitude four years after 9/11 will surely make it more difficult for the country to remember why it must persevere in Iraq and in the democratic transformation of the Middle East.

Gerecht, who has made something of a professional study of the psychological and materialist components of bin Ladenism, rightly argues that a scale-down of American military resolve in Iraq would be devastatingly helpful for the recruitment of more Islamists.

Many in the American elite are beginning to revert to a pre-9/11 worldview, where U.S. aggression or "unilateralism," not American weakness or self-doubt, is seen as the fuel for bin Ladenism. Yet this is a reversal of history. It was the fearful U.S. withdrawal from Lebanon in 1984 and from Somalia in 1994, not the original incursions there, that bin Laden saw as proof that determined Muslims could best the United States.

He goes on to say that the Six Day War in 1967 wasn't nearly the rallying cry for Palestinian suicide-bombers as was the haphazard Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, an even that just preceded the onset of the most recent intifada. It isn't a reductive cultural cliche to notice that messianic reactionaries in the Middle East are spawned and encouraged by perceived Western weakness. Who wouldn't be more lured into a battle that appeared winnable if only because of the timidity of one's opponent? The real problem, I think, is that of latent versus expressed might. When bin Laden famously remarked before the 2004 election that his quarrel was localized and against very specific countries, that there was good reason why Al Qaida had not attacked, say, Sweden -- what this meant was not that Sweden was immune to the bin Ladenist wish to see all secular liberal states destroyed; it meant that Sweden posed a low to zero combat threat to the would-be destroyers. A country like the United States, however, will always be a fatal check on bin Laden's ambitions. This is true even when the US tacitly complies with his 'foreign policy' by removing airbases from Saudi Arabia, and even when the United States does not requisition its other bases for the purpose of routing him and his faction altogether. A stationary aircraft carrier in the Gulf -- or, indeed, in the Atlantic -- is even more vulnerable to attack than a mobilized one.

Gerecht also has some insightful suggestions for recrafting American interrogation procedures. One of these is what Senator Patrick Leahy and David Frum and Richard Perle have already put forth: Give Congress the chance to sign off that procedure, in public and without lies or executive-level occlusiveness. I agreed with Alberto Gonzales when he called the Geneva Conventions "outmoded" and "quaint" -- because the items to which he was referring when gave every news outlet its overplayed soundbite for that week were those relating to the allocation of scientific and research equipment to POWs. This was clearly a hold-over from World War II, when our enemies actually had scientists whose work might have been co-optable or exploitable by the Allies, as it often was. Yet discarding worn-out covenants does nothing to mitigate the need for clear and humane new guidelines for dealing with the prisoners we've got now. Furthermore,

Guantanamo really ought to be in Leavenworth, and the CIA's counterterrorist interrogation centers that don't pertain to the tactical requirements of ongoing joint operations with U.S. Special Forces ought to be at "the Farm," the espionage training facility in the swamplands of Virginia. (Training city-based spooks in this environment has always been bizarre; incarcerating jihadists among so much greenery has a certain poetic appropriateness.)

And the last thing we'd want is to bundle counterterrorism with endless -- and dangerous -- litigation:

If the CIA believes it's necessary to "water-board" a chief al Qaeda operative who may have information about a devastating terrorist strike, then the administration should make the case before Congress, or at least before the intelligence oversight committees, that simulated drowning is morally and operationally justified. It should have done this prospectively, starting in September 2001, since the CIA must have the right to respond immediately, without lengthy outside review, to captured jihadists who may have information about a terrorist strike. The administration should also consider challenging Congress to make membership in several Islamic extremist groups punishable by death or life imprisonment. If the administration intends ever to try senior members of al Qaeda for terrorism, war crimes, or whatever, then it ought to clarify beforehand with Congress the laws that would allow American intelligence officers to interrogate these men aggressively, as well as the laws under which they could be convicted. And if that is an insurmountable hurdle--which it may well be--then the administration should obviously be exceedingly selective with its rougher interrogations. It would be a pity to catch Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's brainy number two, and have his conviction overturned because we'd "water-boarded" him. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, June 30, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Write for Us... If you'd like to write for Snarksmith, we'd love to have you. We're currently looking for freelance reviews (books, films, albums) or short essays on whatever to go in our venerable Black Box way over yonder (--->). Submit story ideas or fully executed pieces to Nic or me. (I'll be in Europe for two weeks starting next Wednesday, so maybe better make that just Nic.) --Michael Weiss [link]
All Tuckered Out... Tucker Carlson's The Situation gets unmercifully destroyed by Alessandra Stanley, who does not -- underscore not -- like the bow tie. She thinks it's kind of gay, in fact:

These kinds of programs may not hurt the country, but they do seem to weaken the intellectual standing of their hosts. When Mr. Carlson, who started as a writer at The Weekly Standard, began on "Crossfire" he seemed like a brainy young contrarian, brought in to challenge liberal pieties - a Junior Miss version of George Will. Time and the ever-shortening attention span of cable news have turned him into a George Will o' the Wisp; his opinions are loud but ever more vaporous.

Junior Miss. That's enough to make Manderson Cooper throw down, y'all. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Finkelstein-Dershowitz Debate... Things aren't looking so hot for Alan Dershowitz, the overactive and underenlightening polymath who might just need a polygraph after Norman Finkelstein's done with him. Finkelstein, a self-righteous and thoroughly obnoxious critic of what Philip Roth once called "Shoah business," frequently suffers from the added vice of being right. Much of his scholarship on the exploitation of the Holocaust as Israel's auto-immunizing raison d'etre (and also raison d'etat) is widely seen as both meticulous and morally sound, even by those less inclined to agree with his overall hard-left 'politics.' (He's uttered more than a few embarassing hosannahs for Hezbollah and gone on to justify them with exquisite Chomskyean casuistry about the "real axis of evil," etc. He also keeps an ever-brimming catalogue of his many scuffles with journalists and intellectuals on his website.) Christopher Hitchens and Edward Said based their co-edited anthology Blaming the Victims on Finkelstein's adroit debunking of Joan Peter's From Time Immemorial, a troublesome tract that has apparently made for an interesting sequel. Among the many minuses Finkelstein attributes to Dershowitz's The Case for Israel is that the thing is often plagiarized, whole cloth, from Peters' book. In response -- or better make that, retaliation -- Dershowitz has tried to block the publication of Finkelstein's formal hatchet-job, the forthcoming Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, and has even petitioned the governor of California to stop the state university press from minting it. (For those just joining the world of pet causes and vanity projects, the governor of California is Arnold Schwartzenegger, who, it must be said, has behaved wisely by telling the Dersh, normally such a plangent booster for free speech, in effect, nein.)

The Nation has the full scoop of this meshugana tribal faction-fight here. --Michael Weiss [link]

Unsettling the Settlers... Israeli troops storm a Gaza hotel to remove Jewish extremists protesting the planned pull-out of the settlements. Sharon:

''This bothers me exceptionally. This is an act of savagery, vulgarity and irresponsibility...The country's citizens must understand this danger, and every measure must be taken to end this rampaging."

--Michael Weiss [link]

Saddam's Fourth Novel... Get Out, You Damned One (guess who's damned, guess out of where) is not being published in Jordan where there may or may not be a market for it.

Within hours of the ban on the book, Mr. Horani says, he sold 50 bootleg copies. "His popularity is increasing because of the success the resistance is now having in Iraq."

Hedging his bets, Saddam refers to Michiku Kakutani as that "charming, God-anointed lotus flower with epicanthal folds." --Michael Weiss [link]

Is It Really So, Really So Strange... Spain legalizes gay marriage. Brazil languorously lifts it head up off the pillow, smiles, goes back to sleep.

(This'll show bin Laden who's a purring Iberian kitten of appeasement.) --Michael Weiss [link]

Great Underpayed, Overmediated Minds... Gawker on TIME, Inc.'s high and mighty press release about handing over docs relating to the Valerie Plame leak: "Itâs a nice civics lesson." Wonkette on same: "a nifty civics lesson." Matt Drudge slathering up Nick Denton in midnight oil. --Michael Weiss [link]
Advertisements for Himself... Norman Mailer catching heat for calling Michiku Kakutani "Asiatic." Wow, that's old-school solecistic. Norm took the Oriental Express back to "Mohammedan," "Negro" and "Hun." Last person I heard called Asiatic was Stalin (and I think it was Lenin who did the calling.)

After Hunter's death, it's just not charming anymore when a raging white alpha male makes Jenn Wenner cancel his insurance. Page Six:

In a letter to Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner, who published Mailer's remarks, Esther Wu, president of the Asian American Journalists Assn., calls Mailer a racist who "essentially diminishes the accomplishments of all women and journalists of color. It insinuates that media companies keep people like Ms. Kakutani on staff simply because they are women and minorities ÷ a dangerous, dismissive and, certainly, misguided notion. On a side note, with Mr. Mailer's firm grasp of the English language, we're sure he knows that 'Asiatic' ÷ like 'Oriental' ÷ has long been considered an offensive word to describe Asians or in the case of Ms. Kakutani, a Connecticut native, Asian-Americans . . . we'd like to thank Rolling Stone for exposing the bigotry of one of America's prized authors. To Mr. Mailer, we'd simply like to say: Shame on you."

The question on your anti-defamation suit is: What's the president of the Asian American Journalists Assn. doing called "Esther"? I think it's a frameup. You know, Mailer's wife pretends to be all "stabbed;" Mailer's half-sister pretends to be all "offended" and "Asian." That Norm, he's a sly one. --Michael Weiss [link]

Wednesday, June 29, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

A Nation of Isaacs...God forgive me, I'm defending Michael Moore against Christopher Hitchens.

The latest column from Hitch at Slate has him slamming people who see hypocrisy in those who back war without a kid in the forces.

The most recent cycle--not that this isn't a consistent undertone--began for me with a Washington Post column by Richard Cohen. In a reminiscence that he doubtless thought was affecting, he recalled a spat between himself and the late John Gregory Dunne. Declining to attend a Cohen dinner party in the year 1991 (and here we sense the real echoes of a life-and-death struggle), Dunne had said that he wouldn't break bread with a man who favored war but was not willing to sacrifice his own son. Cohen went back and forth in agony about the justice of all this, while never betraying any sense of disproportion or absurdity. Should Saddam Hussein have been allowed to add the wealth of Kuwait to his slave state at a time when he most certainly did possess a WMD program? Quite a good question for debate. But the debate comes to an end when one participant says that the other is disqualified because of a refusal of son-donation. (I pause to note what Cohen may have been too delicate to point out: John Gregory Dunne did not have a son.)

It sounds great, but he doesn't explain Cohen's column correctly. The version of this argument Hitchens is confronting is analogous to "You can't be against abortion if you're a man." It is a proposition worth defeating, if anybody worth arguing with ever tried to defend it. But the other guy's sons argument is more subtle. It's closer to, "It's easier for men to oppose abortion because they have less to lose." If you read Cohen's column, you see he isn't called a hypocrite by Dunne because he won't "send" his son to the Gulf War, but because he admits he would not want his son to go if it were up to him. Which undercuts the entire point about autonomy Hitchens makes at length. Then Hitchens connects it to:

Recall Michael Moore asking congressmen whether they would "send" one of their offspring, as if they had the power to do so, or the right?

Michael Moore is stupid, but he wasn't suggesting, per se, that congressmen are hypocrites if they vote for a war without their children enlisting. But he is observing that a moral hazard exists for congressmen whose children are at no risk. Were there a draft with no exemptions for college or marriage or other Vietnam-era conditions, Congress would have to weigh the personal risks as well as the public ones. Because Congress doesn't have children in the forces, they don't have the same personal costs of war as parents who do. So why not pressure them to enlist? And then you stick a mic in their faces to keep the groundlings happy. Is Hitchens glossing over this because it fits the polemic mode, or has he managed to miss the few subtlties Farenheit 9/11 had?

It is quite possible that if we think of the deposition of Saddam Hussein and democratization of Iraq as being a thing of some value (A), then compare it to (B) the public costs of funding a war through taxes, debt and other means, and (C) the personal cost paid by the men and women who fight it, the cost-benefit value (A - B - C) is negative, or not worth it to society. Yet if Congressmen face no risk of paying the personal cost because their children will not volunteer to fight, they can view the cost benefit as being (A - B), which could be positive, or worthwhile. In this case, a war that's bad for society as a whole will be fought because it's good for Congress. In this case, we would want to find a way to bring Congressional incentives in line with the public's.

A better test of the value of a war, at the personal level, is whether we would be willing to take a draft number to fight it. This is a thought experiment, of course, since more people than not would be turned away in a draft for age or sex or whatever, and the draft itself will probably never be reinstated. But if every American citizen, including us, had to take a stub for a conscription lottery, would we agree? For Afghanistan, no doubt. I wonder, ex ante, what I would have chosen for Iraq. --Nic Duquette [link]

Kolakowski and the Cunning of History (and Roger Kimball)... Giving Roger Kimball space to expatiate on the merits of anti-Commie par excellence Leszek Kolakowski is like taking a hypoglycemic kid to Willy Wonka's factory. Sure, it's loads of fun for the kid and not-bad entertainment for the rest of us, but damned if it doesn't always end with a portentous brown ring caked around the little bugger's mouth:

No academic is more distinguished than Leszek Kolakowski. He boasts a string of glittering honors and prizes that includes÷I confine myself to a few A-list American awards÷a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called ăgeniusä award, justified for once), the Jefferson Award, and, in 2003, the first Kluge Prize for ălifetime achievement in the humanities,ä a commendation that carries a purse of $1 million.

Justified for once. Someone at the New Criterion call the sentimental police. But hold the receiver:

Here's Kimball on a contretemps Kolakowski had with E.P. Thompson. Something about refusing to break bread together because of the latter's unrepentant Communism as late the 1970's, which actually made Thompson as reactionary as he'd need be to gain the approval of the present editorial board. But which also meant, all but for the most pathological and stupid, that the tinny megaphone of the apparat was broadcasting tokens of muffled diffidence like this one: ăWe were both voices of the Communist revisionism of 1956... we both sought to rehabilitate the utopian energies within the socialist tradition.ä We're told Thompson "sniffed" the foregoing line, and then asked, "What happened?"

Kolakowskiâs response is a salvo that would have made Cato the Elder proud. Recalling Thompsonâs refusal to sit down at a table with Robert Cecil because he once worked in the British diplomatic service: ăO blessed Innocence! You and I, we were both active in our respective Communist Parties in the â40s and â50s, which means that, whatever our noble intentions and our charming ignorance (or refusal to get rid of ignorance) were, we supported, within our modest means, a regime based on mass slave labor and police terror of the worst kind in human history. Do you think that there are many people who could refuse to sit at the same table with us on these grounds?ä

So Thompson's hand of friendship is extended to an ex-comrade and not just slapped away, but then filled with a hot little igneous pebble of defiance, one that would -- what was that again, Rog? -- "have made Cato the Elder proud." Another self-critical CP man I.F. Stone once observed that a critic who can suck like that need never dine alone. And you just knew "old GKC" couldn't escape this bowtied sermon:

In his book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton championed freedom of thought, but wisely noted that ăThere is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.ä Our society is extraordinarily accommodating of diverse points of view -- especially, it sometimes seems, to those that are hostile to the ideal of diversity.

As opposed, to say, the thought that dictates the existence of an invisible man in the sky who invigilates and judges all human behavior on earth. Or is Chesteron's Catholicism somehow immune from the label 'totalitarian'? Putting up with his church, especially its latest theodicial plunges into the sanctity of child-rape, also strikes one as a conspicuous symptom of what favored TNC novelist Evelyn Waugh might call "Too Much Tolerance." --Michael Weiss [link]

Tony Judt on Intervention... Probably the smartest piece to come from an antiwar scribe -- especially one scribbling in the New York Review of Books -- that questions the role of the US and the UN in the age of potted Pol Pots. Up on the slab this month: David Rieff, son of Susan Sontag and pretty disgruntled categorical interventionist himself:

Rieff's disillusioned tone can thus take on a cynical edge -- "the imperial dreams of American neoconservatives like [Max] Boot or [Robert] Kagan make so much more sense than the vacillations of the humanitarian left."

Oh, I wouldn't be taking that at face value, Tony. These Sontags have a way with old-school irony (unlike the NYU prof who thinks an Israeli polity sapped of Judaism is ever going to happen.) --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, June 23, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Boy, the Way Glen Miller Played... A foul-mouthed English "nationalist" has been harassing his local MP with phone calls, the content of which are mainly screeds against "wogs, Pakis and black bastards." High court judges in England have decided that this guy's language amounts to "Alf Garnett style rants" and not "grossly offensive" hate speech (though it's not called hate speech in the sceptr'd isle.) Alf Garnett, the prole protagonist of an old BBC series called Till Death Do Us Part, might be more recognizable stateside as the character he inspired in the mind of Norman Lear: Archie Bunker. Now imagine any magistrate here tossing out a case where the defendant was seen as little more than a political cousin of a racist lowlife from 1970's Queens. "Meathead" would be the least of the epithets hurled against his hypothetical honor. --Michael Weiss [link]
The Macher of the Megadeath Intellectuals... Herman Kahn literally wrote the rulebook on the American theory of thermonuclear warfare. If he's not exactly a household name, that might be because we're still living in households and not mineshaft fall-out shelters. Louis Menand on a new book about the "Fat Man" of the RAND Corporation. It's less a biography and more a macabre cultural study, demonstrating how fifty years after "acceptable losses" and "surviveability" entered the lexicon, Kahn's strange love of the species still, thankfully, remains the unrequited kind. --Michael Weiss [link]
So Good It Hurts... Multitudes and contradictions is how I'll reconcile giving a guest columnist for the New York Observer raspberries for being obsequious before gladly strolling into the tongue sprinklers myself by saying this: Anthony Lane goes genius again this week. With Popean flourish, to boot. Can't spoil with excerpt. Read. --Michael Weiss [link]
The Apple That Feel Far From The Tree... I don't know why the daughter of the most respectable and intelligent man to occupy the United States Senate in decades feels it's a tribute to Daniel Patrick Moynihan that he "never had an unkind word to say about any of his colleagues." This is not Ms. Moynihan's claim, it's Robert Dole's. But she can't possibly confirm the veracity of it, since her father presumably said many things to which she was never privy.

However, it's the stuff Maura was privy to that has her incensed over Ed Klein's new Hillary-bashing volume:

Mr. Klein puts quotes around statements that were never uttered. I can confirm this because the only other persons present during this meeting were myself and our Tibetan cook, who speaks about 10 words of English. Mr. Klein has now gone on the record to say that he spent "several hours interviewing Mrs. Moynihan." Puzzling indeed, in that Mrs. Moynihan÷my mother÷hasnât seen Mr. Klein in over 20 years. Iâd like to see the transcripts or hear the tapes of his on-the-record talks with Mrs. Moynihan. And it would have been difficult for him to interview Senator Moynihan, because heâs dead.

I can't be the only one wondering what the cook's 10 words are. And "seen" by itself and without accompanying past participles ("heard from," "been in contact with," "talked to on the phone") strikes me as a near-Clintonian elision of the whole story. But if it is not, then this is surely pretty damning evidence against Mr. Klein, who might have learned better how to cower before the multiple fact-check while he was editor of the New York Times Magazine.

Elsewhere, though, the child of a brave and tough-minded gentleman-stateman (who else would have told the pope, to his face, not to "forget our friends the Jews"?) shows the symptoms of an acquired case of Potomac Servility Syndrome:

New Yorkers are weary of the incessant Clinton-bashing that the national media seemingly never tires of. We have seen Senator Clinton become a powerful legislator, orator and advocate for New York. She travels from Buffalo to Montauk, listening to her constituents, and then she goes back to Washington to fight for them.

For which New Yorkers does Ms. Moynhian expect to be retroactively okayed as a mouthpiece? And the national media either never tires of something, or it does tire. "Seemingly" is a reprimand used by someone who must believe that striking a "nonpartisan" or neutral chord of conciliation will send all those nasty hatchet-jobbers into early retirement. "Seemingly" also seems like one of those hankie-dropped innuendo terms, like "characteristic," which Bellow's character Shawmut, in the story "Him With His Foot In His Mouth," describes as the "way the liberal American vocabulary is used as a torture device: By 'characteristic' [one] means, "You are not a good person..."

Hardly a conceivable opprobrium from the author of the following:

[Hillary Clinton] has endured years of personal attacks on herself and her family, and has somehow managed to bear herself with dignity and grace throughout. A lesser person would have abandoned politics and retired to the Gulf of Siam years ago.

Or, you know, run for office herself. --Michael Weiss [link]

Karl's Big Night... Bush's Boy Genius gets it right, pisses off those that already hate him:

"Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers," Mr. Rove, the senior political adviser to President Bush, said at a fund-raiser in Midtown for the Conservative Party of New York State.

He also took the opportunity to justly criticize Dick Durbin's cretinous comparison of Guantanamo Bay to -- let me know if I've left one out -- the Soviet gulag, Nazi concentration camps, and Pol Pot's killing fields. Rove: "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

Plenty more, as a matter of fact. Wonkette flails to point out the sinister hypocrisy of publicizing Durbin's remedial history lesson, citing the reiteration of it in a hot new Republican ad campaign and on the party's official website.

The same words that are putting our troops in greater danger, and yet the RNC is emailing the ad to "15 million grassroots supporters" and posting it at GOP.com, where terrorists, Al Jazeera producers, and the liberal saboteurs who want to undermine this great country of ours and put our troops at risk have access to it!

Well, Durbin's stupidity has already been loosed, as he knew it was going to be. (Or was he acting on quiet ethical impulse alone? Did the PR coefficient of his "outrage" never occur to him?) No one who can have had any interest in his comments is just now finding out about them. Does it matter where else they're being debated and pored over in syndication? People were well within the realm of moral responsibility to condemn Mel Gibson for not only Jew-baiting but distributing his awful film in Middle Eastern countries where Jew-baiting is at its worst. Were the condemnations themselves adding "fuel to the fire?" If so, should discussion of the global reprecussions of The Passion of the Christ have been censored in print and on cable chat shows? (If the answer is yes, then Frank Rich has just as much explaining to do as Karl Rove.) Al Qaeda will tune into CNN faster than they'll dial up GOP.com or hack the post of "grassroots" Republican addressees. So accusing the conservative political strategist of exploiting the senator's blunder for -- are you ready for this? --political purposes does nothing to either exculpate the senator or bruise the strategist with a swift recall of his own boomerang tactic.

However, I would add that the Republican Congressman Walter Jones, by demanding that the United States set a timeline for handing over sovereignty to the terrorists in Iraq, is just as much of a fucking fool as Durbin. Shouldn't he get a good rebuke from his own team, and even if that means mass mailings and TV spots which further disseminate his scandalous remarks? --Michael Weiss [link]

The Age of the LittleBlue SmurfBoyú... Matthew Wilder's style may be a little overfed with PopRocks sugar, but no one can deny his point: tow-headed homonculi moppets are the Iron Johns of the new millennium. The main offenders: eminently cock-punchable Conor Oberst (even the last name sounds like an anti in search of a climax); bedheaded Jimmy Neutron of the Angelika, Wes Anderson; and Saul Bellow's number one reason to pull the covers tighter round his corpse, Jonathan Safran Foer. Alternative weeklies in flyover country are giving us pearls here:

Why are these boy-men ascending all at once? I can only quote one of the brightest LBSB's I know, an aspiring screenwriter and pushing-30 dweller in Mom's guest room, who casually dismissed Raging Bull by sniffing, "That movie doesn't matter, because masculinity isn't like that any more!" He's right, it isn't. (To gauge whether I'm right: Utter the words "Clive Owen" to a heterosexual woman and watch the pupil dilation.) Also: Especially in the world of blue-state liberal-arts grads, and most especially in the world of movie/book/music criticism, there ain't a lot of Big Bruising going on. In this Blue Smurfy climate, the outsized obsessions, red-hot rhetoric, and violent argument of the Bruisers would give the tastemaking class a panic attack. And to be painfully blunt, LBSB art makes critics and editors feel...relaxed, the way '80s decadents like David Salle and Jay McInerney once made them feel rich and hip. In our Age of Terror, educated art consumers and taste arbiters want nothing more than for Mom to make them a grilled cheese with some Swiss Miss Instant Cocoa on the side. The hand-carvings of the sensitive son--sexless, multi-allergic, bubble dwelling--represent a return to comfort, to nonresponsibility, to sleep.

Of course, conspicuously absent from this bill of indictment is lycra-encased, wall-crawling bug of arrested development Tobey Maguire, who, to judge by recent tabloid photos, even wants to look like a plump and parboiled infant. Compare to the icy menace of our latest post-9/11 Christ figure Christian Bale and you wonder if there isn't yet a flickering cave shadow of promise for reconstructed masculinity.

Help us, Obi-Wan Amis. You're our only hope. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Pod Is Not Amused... John Podhoretz strains himself to infuse the page-turning pulp of the New York Post with a bit of nonpartisan classiness. Demonstrating that the son of a famous decorated intellectual (two, if you count the vial of Rumsfeld-sweat Midge Decter wears around her neck) had better have some discriminating literary tastes of his own, Pod fils has just panned Edward Klein's new shit-smeared portrait of the con artist as a young Rodham.

This is one of the most sordid volumes I've ever waded through. Thirty pages into it, I wanted to take a shower. Sixty pages into it, I wanted to be decontaminated. And 200 pages into it, I wanted someone to drive stakes through my eyes so I wouldn't have to suffer through another word.

Tough talk from someone who's presumably read his father's memoir Ex-Friends. (Then again, maybe he hasn't.)

Despite a distinguished journalistic pedigree including stints as the editor of both Newsweek and The New York Times Magazine, Klein has chosen to emulate the works of the highly dubious bio-defamer Charles Higham, who with the slimmest of evidence wrote books claiming that Errol Flynn was a gay Nazi spy and Howard Hughes was a bisexual.

Look, no one who dressed up like Errol Flynn could have been a straight socialist. And suggesting that Howard Hughes' propeller spun in both directions is only defamation in the less relevant paleo-neo-con groupuscules. Go ask dad.

Klein may offer a few words here or there about Whitewater or Travelgate, but what really floats his boat is the Higham-like notion that Sen. Clinton is secretly a lesbian.

He has no proof whatever for this claim save that she has had some lesbian friends. (So do I. Does that make me a lesbian?)

Parenthetical Gatorade like that, and you go and leave us hanging! Who? I want names, John -- this is something for which your geneaology might have also made a better tutorial. --Michael Weiss [link]

When the Saudi Government Says More Than It Means To... From the Guardian:

Jamal Khashoggi, media adviser to the Saudi ambassador in London, said yesterday he agreed in part with the US assessment.

"It will be worse than Afghanistan," he said. "We are talking about a very brutal type, a very weird version of Islam in Iraq. It is very scary."

Mr Khashoggi predicted the approach of the Saudi government towards jihadists returning from Iraq will be very different from those returning from Afghanistan and Chechnya. "Any al-Qaida coming back from Iraq will be hunted. It is not like they have gone to Chechnya and will be coming back as heroes. If they come back from Iraq and brag about it, they will be snatched by security in a day or two."

The "US assessment" was that the Zarqawists in Iraq have picked up deadly new urban warfare skills and will inevitably use them in other countries and cities (an assessment which comes courtesy of the CIA, which not only boasts of attempting to brown-bag bin Laden's head, but also boasts of having failed to do just that.)

But note the blunt admission in Khashoggi's statement: Terrorists from Iraq, be warned. The Saudi government won't coddle and suborn you like it has the Taliban and those responsible for the Beslan school massacre. You're uninsurable and now on our most wanted list. (The "weird version of Islam" is the un-buyable kind, I suppose.)

How about for every Iraqi terrorist the House of Saud delivers to the United States, we give it back five copies of its execrable state-minted Koran, which is still in circulation in American prisons? --Michael Weiss [link]

Where the Twain Met (and Collected)... Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk awarded a prize and a rather nice check by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association. --Michael Weiss [link]
Stalin's Stupidity... David E. Murphy has got a new book out showing just how refractory and foolish Stalin was about the prospect of Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. Every notice delivered to the 'Red tsar,' telling -- in some cases with uncanny calendric accuracy -- of the planned contravention of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was declared "English provocation," and the spies who reported it were found guilty of treason. Of particulary interest is the fact that Stalin had confided to his inner circle that the "nonaggression" with Germany -- later to be renegotiated for better territorial spoils for the Soviet Union, and also renamed the lexically aggressive "friendship" with Germany -- was tailormade for a more felicitous Soviet double-cross. At one point Stalin turned to Molotov and said something like, "Hitler's tricky, but I think we got the better of him."

Stalin also thought he was going to be arrested himself for his incompetence and prolonged absence from "duty" after the Wehrmacht had in fact breached the Soviet border. Molotov and Malenkov finally approached him, self-isolated in his Kuntsevo dacha under a fog of depression, to request that he form a military council and begin mobilizing the Red Army, something that should have been done weeks before. Stalin's reply to this was, literally, "All right," which adds a whole new modernist dimension to the cliche of fiddling while Rome burns. (Actually, that cliche accounts only for a tyrant's manic sociopathology; it does nothing to adumbrate his arrogance and sheer idiocy.) --Michael Weiss [link]

Weekend Outage... The site was down due to our domain expiration (and our provider's "oh, yeah"-ish response to this). Sorry for any inconvenience. On the brighter side, this means Snarksmith turns a gurgling, healthy one. --Michael Weiss [link]
Monday, June 20, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

High Marks for Marx... The greatest philosopher of all-time, or so he will be judged if the Zogbyists monitoring this election in Britain are anything to go by. Beats out Kant, Hobbes, Mill and Plato. Even Hegel, from whom the Bushy One of the British Museum cribbed his dialecticism. --Michael Weiss [link]
Metcalf on Hornby... That aborted albino mole Michael Wolff recently claimed that Slate was little more than another online salon (or Salon) of uninspired milquetoast leftishness. He couldn't have been more wrong, even though I'm sure he tried and was only reproved by an already too-tolerant Greydon Carter. Consider Stephen Metcalf's excellent review of the new Nick Hornby novel, The Long Way Down (made mercifully shorter by a sharp and pithy critic.)

The wind-up:

Sublime banality and self-centered mediocrity and a pitiful moonlit pining: Hornby captured perfectly the voice of the Baby Boomer more or less permanently fixed to the emotional vocabulary of his own pubescence.

And the pitch:

A feeling of something÷not quite as acute as despair, not quite as chronic as the shit-hum÷runs throughout the novel: In a time of exponentially proliferating images of the luckier-than-thou, self-possession is not wholly possible, and the specter of our many unlived lives can be debilitating. It is a shame that Hornby feels this way about his own remarkable talents and has grasped instead for someone else's.

Without even reading the book, one sees only a single potential "not-so-sublime banality" on Metcalf's part: his cliched rebuke of Hornby's cinematographic, or "greenlit", style. Why not go straight to the celluloid since that's where all of your stuff winds up eventually? This is more kosher as a market critique than it is as a literary one. Contemporary novelists who, to varying degrees of success (from the alpha of Hornby to the omega of Crichton), employ a clipped, moving-right-along narration inevitably come in for this censure. But all one has to do to recognize the unfairness of it is to realize that under more blockbuster-friendly circumstances the same would have been argued against Joyce, or Woolf, or Waugh, and was in fact argued against Greene in his "entertainments." It's not the writer's fault that in lieu of Clarissa Dalloway's buzz-ominous airplane or Adam Fenwick-Symes' cruise ship the modern pop antihero of the twenty-first century has got a whole new order of grinding, mechanized behemoths standing between himself and his denouement: the Weinsteins. --Michael Weiss [link]

Rice in Cairo... A pungent little number from the Secretary of State. Now I forget exactly under which anti-Bush doctrine this speech would fall: The one that says we alienate all of our allies to our own peril and global humiliation; the one that says we've no right to speak about democracy and liberalism when we're capable of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and The Apprentice; or the one that says we court double standards for dictatorships of convenience? Not to worry. I'm sure DailyKos is hot on the case. (Because kifaya is Arabic for enough foreign hypocrisy, not enough domestic authoritarianism.) --Michael Weiss [link]
How to Fix the CIA... Hire writers for television. I'm not kidding. The average bleary-eyed, overcaffeinated scribe for 21 would stand a much better chance of "plotting out" the capture of Bin Laden than the current McDonald's playground ball pit of gumbies overseeing things. Two BBC articles for you: Someone named Gary Schroen, who sounds like he never leaves home without his Bic scalp razor and an Oliver North potboiler, says the CIA ordered him to travel to Afghanistan after 9/11 for a single purpose: To bring back Osama's head in a box of dry ice. Comes the question: If this story is true, then why is Cofer Black, the counterterrorism chief who allegedly gave the order, still receiving a federal paycheck? Comes the next question: If the decapitation and refrigeration scenario is just Schroen's idea of tough-guy hyperbole, why is National Public Radio, which quoted him on it, putting him on national public air to the further (unsubstantiated) embarassment of the American intelligence apparat?

And if this weren't enough for one news cycle, we're also informed today that the CIA actually knows where Bin Laden's hiding. How does it know this? Because Pakistani TV has just interviewed a senior Taliban leader who affirms Osama and Mullah Omar are both alive and well.

"If a TV station can get in touch with them, how can the intelligence service of a country which has nuclear bombs and a lot of security and military forces not find them?" asked [US ambassador to Afghanistan] Mr [Zalmay] Khalilzad in an interview with an Afghan television station.

Yes, quite. And why isn't the subcontinental Geraldo who spoke to the fact-hemorrhaging fundie not being interrogated for his "get" methods? --Michael Weiss [link]

Sunday, June 19, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore (Nor Was It Ever)... The Smiths: The Musical. No shit. --Michael Weiss [link]
Saturday, June 18, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Robert Hopkins at Yalta... Harry Hopkins sounds like the name of a brash flyboy Michael Bay would employ in one of his ghastly films sets in the 30's or 40's. Closer to the mark would be just the brash bit. Hopkins was one of the more gushing fools taken in by Stalin after the Soviet Union joined the Allied side in World War II. Lord knows how his son Robert managed to finagle the photographer's gig at Yalta. (Nepotism is a petty bourgeois sickness, comrade). But left out of this stale "witness to history" account is his beloved papa's blunders on the foreign relations 'front.'

Former American ambassador to Moscow William Bullitt (once again, nomenclature plays college fraternity pranks on history) had informed Roosevelt that Stalin was not to be trusted and that now, after his prostration by Hitler's double-cross, would be the best time to drive a hard bargain for postwar concordats. In exchange for Lend-Lease, Bullitt argued, a guarantee should be given to the US that the Soviet Union would not seek territorial gains in Europe or Asia. To this Roosevelet responded,

"I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins] says he's not... I think if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return... he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace."

It's little-replayed sentences like the above that cause our own Macaulay of Camelot, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to wake screaming in the night for fear of any unauthorized ad libbing from the script of conventional wisdom. It also causes him to pen to moral reinforcements of the Western shrug that defined Yalta and Tehran. See Art's latest fuck-you to Eastern Europe in the Times Literary Supplement, precipitated -- rather shamelessly, I think -- by the president's noble insistence that Vladimir Putin apologize for his country's former wrongs. --Michael Weiss [link]

Dave Roemer... My friend Dave Roemer (he's a photographer) is shooting New York magazine and something he tells me is the it-book of fashion in the world, ID. Anyway, he's extremely talented and has a new website up, here. Check it out. (Also check out the uncanny Marielle Hemingway lookalike he has for a model.) --Michael Weiss [link]
Global Network of the Devil... Yet another reason to support online writing - The Archbishop of Canterbury, "Doctor" Rowan Williams, doesn't like it: "He described the atmosphere on the world wide web as a free-for-all that was close to that of unpoliced conversation. And there's some truth in that. But what the hell is wrong with an "unpoliced" exchange of ideas? His Eminence, I'm sure, would love to be the one doing all the policing.

Reactionary growls against the Internet as a means of communication only strengthen the Internet as a means of communication. Won't they ever get it? --Mark Grueter [link]

Friday, June 17, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Tom and Katie: Playing for Keeps...


To further hammer home the authenticity of their relationship, Cruise will later re-propose at the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Las Vegas.

--Michael Weiss [link]

The Persian Version... Almost forgot: another groundbreaking Mideast election today. Pretty plum sinecure, being president of Iran. Lot of grape eating and concubine fanning, I'd imagine. Here's a handy BBC guide to Democracy on the March (In Place). It's going to be all right, though. Sean Penn is our man in Tehran. --Michael Weiss [link]

Manohla Dargis Gunning for Katie Holmes... From the ayatollah to a subtly expressed death wish of a global celebrity in the pages of the New York Times. Someone has got a bad case of the Fridays.

That said, she's right. Batman Begins was terrific. And why oh why did I wait until today to read David Edelstein's hilarious review?

But there's a lot of stuff in Batman Begins that doesn't measure up. The adorable Katie Holmes twitters civics lessons ("Justice is about harmony") as a crusading assistant D.A.÷she looks and acts like a know-it-all student council president. (A colleague cracked that the performance should please her boyfriend, though: She plays a woman who can keep a secret.)

Surely, he's talking about the hidden location of the Scientology cave. What other secrets could Tom Cruise possibly have? --Michael Weiss [link]

Foucault and Iran... Sometimes I really do wonder if there's not a secret ritual lobotomy performed upon completion of one's doctorate. Consider: a pair of academic translators do the world, and the ever-popular museum exhibition of sinister intellectuals, a favor by giving us Michel Foucault's pathetic soundings on the Iranian revolution. (Surprise, surprise, he thought it was glorious, anti-imperialist and, one would image, the surest way to getting electrified nipple clamps wholesale in the Middle East.) Then one of them says something like this:

"It's not that radical Islamism is getting a pass from Western progressives and liberals, but it is the case that many are not being critical enough," says Anderson. When certain polemicists are spreading simplistic ideas about "Islamo-Fascism," he continues, "there's a tendency to say that this isn't so. But the fact is that while radical Islamism has many features and faces, everywhere it is antifeminist, everywhere it is authoritarian, and everywhere it is intolerant of other religions and other interpretations of Islam."

"These conservative, reactionary movements," Anderson says, "may be in conflict with a conservative Bush administration ÷ but that doesn't make them any less conservative or reactionary. The debate on Foucault helps to throw all this into high relief."

Note the little cough (like a sheep caught in the mist on a mountaintop, as Bertie Wooster would say) of moral equivalence "put into perspective": These Koran-thumping mullahs who want to imprison women, murder atheists and secularists and homosexuals and Jews and Christians, and then somehow get Allah to give the divine thumbs-up on atomic fission -- hell, even Bush isn't that crazy. Thanks for the clarification, professor. Stick to translating tongues, not giving your own. And by the way, I know exactly whom you mean by "certain polemicists." The only thing simplistic is your thinking that you've elided responsibility for your unsolicited political opinions by not naming names. --Michael Weiss [link]

Wednesday, June 15, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Baby Jane... Was Jane Austen a Burkean Tory or a Painean Girondin? A subtle propagandist for women's liberation, or a fervid believer that a woman's place is in the home -- behind a writing desk? Frankly, the question couldn't matter less. It's all about the novels. Venture too far beyond them and what you get is head-clutchingly awful stuff like,

For Emily Auerbach in Searching for Jane Austen, this view of Austen the politically correct emerges everywhere, for instance in Sense and Sensibility in the scene where Edward Ferrars's foppish brother Robert picks out a bejeweled toothpick case with great deliberation, and Auerbach feels that

this passage perhaps hints at the devastating effects of "empire" on those who decadently reap its rewards without possessing any awareness of the labor and injustice supporting their own luxurious lifestyle.

Yes, perhaps. For a minute I thought that was Eric Auerbach, celebrated author of Mimesis. Truly has literary theory zipped past the point of diminishing returns when the theorists' names are being recycled and abused by their epigones. Though even Emily has got the goods on William:

It is improbable that she supported slavery; our sense of the person who wrote Pride and Prejudice would find that incredible, though as William Deresiewicz, in Jane Austen and the Romantic Poets, says, "Personally, I don't find it credible that Pride and Prejudice was written by anyone, at any age."

And I don't find it credible that The New York Review of Books wastes ink citing such sub-tenure track piffle as that, yet neglects to mention the most insightful comment ever penned on the quiddity of Ms. Austen.

Here's Auden in his Letter to Lord Byron:

There is one other author in my pack:
For some time I debated which to write to.
Which would least likely send my letter back?
But I decided that I'd give a fright to
Jane Austen if I wrote when I'd no right to,
And share in her contempt the dreaded fates
Of Crawford, Musgrove, and of Mr Yates...

She was not an unshockable blue-stocking;
If shades remain the characters they were,
No doubt she still considers you as shocking.
But tell Jane Austen, that is, if you dare,
How much her novels are beloved down here.
She wrote them for posterity, she said;
'Twas rash, but by posterity she's read.

You could not shock her more than she shocks me;
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle class
Describe the amorous effect of "brass",
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.

--Michael Weiss [link]

In Defense of Tucker... I think I've figured out why people on both left and right so despise Tucker Carlson: he's essentially smarter than they are and he makes it a point to rub this fact in. So, it's not really the bowtie after all; it's that he's a pretentious prick. Good for Carlson, I say. Fuck rubes like Don Imus, who cut Carlson off his radio program Tuesday morning after Carlson challenged Imus on the subject of Contessa Brewer. Who is Contessa Brewer? An MSNBC reporter who once worked briefly doing news on the Imus show. I don't know exactly what happened between Imus and Brewer, but I tuned in one morning to hear Imus calling her a "fat idiot" and a slew of other niceties all of which were variations on the theme that Brewer was both "fat" and "stupid". She is, of course, neither, but that didn't impede the flow of Imus's sexist tirade. Imus has no interest in truth or fairness; he cares only about who is with him and who is against him. Anyone who challenges his tiny intellect has 'crossed' him and will be subject to witless invective: Tucker Carlson is now a "bowtied pussy and a punk".

Howard Stern claims Imus used to call all his black secretaries "niggers" to their faces, in front of everyone else. Shame on all the DC/NYC cocktail circuit suck-ups like John McCain for feeding Imus's undeserved ego.

If Imus was nearly as tough and important as he thinks he is, he wouldn't feel the need to cut his guests off the air and then go on for the next 10 minutes by himself about how much of an idiot that person is. Don Imus is a peasant come home to the barnyard; let us hope Tucker Carlson's own MSNBC show succeeds, if only to spite Imus's predictions of immediate failure. --Mark Grueter [link]

Tuesday, June 14, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Travesty International... David Bosco, backed up by Anne Applebaum, in The New Republic on why the human rights group's comparison of Gitmo to the Gulag is an insult to history; and Hitch in Slate on why it's also an insult to AI's history.

Penny for your poor moral equivalence thoughts:

Gulag: Opposition to the Soviet regime's forced collectivization, including efforts to hide grain in cellars; owning too many cows; need for slave labor to complete massive industrialization and mining projects; political opposition to the Soviet system; being Jewish; being Finnish; being religious; being middle class; being in need of reeducation; having had contact with foreigners; refusing to sleep with the head of Soviet counterintelligence; telling a joke about Stalin.

Guant‡namo: Fighting for the fundamentalist Taliban in Afghanistan; being suspected of links to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. --Michael Weiss [link]

Meanwhile, On The Dangerous Frontiers of Jewish Rap... Well, at least the comedy is unforced now. Brother Schmulic "50 Shekel" has decided he's no longer the most "Kosher MC" in rap after taking fondly to Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

Now calling himself the "Jewish Jesus Freak," the rapper says he became a Jew for Jesus after seeing the controversial movie and listening to evangelical Christian radio, reports the Jewish Forward's Web site.

The zombie subway cult can have him. --Michael Weiss [link]

Jacko: Guilty!... Oh, like you're going checking here for news about that. Another evil white man evades the gnarled arm of the law. At least he can stop dressing like Jeeves now and go back to raiding Liz Taylor's warddrobe. --Michael Weiss [link]

Saturday, June 11, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

The Correspondence Course... Kingsley Amis, writing to Philip Larkin in one of his trademark fits of hauteur commingled with irony, once noted that "What a feast is awaiting chaps once our letters come out." A feast indeed, and one whose leftovers can still be picked at with great satisfaction, even by someone without a single novel or poem from the dynamic duo under his belt. That's literary accomplishment enough for one -- no, make that, two -- lifetimes.

Well, now Robert Lowell's letters have just come out, and they seem a lot more earnest and melancholy than one would want for a good 852 page slog. A lot of scribbles from the looney bin, some overcooked unrequited this, bathetic that. Nonetheless, when your salon of versifiers includes John Berryman and Delmore Schwartz and Elizabeth Bishop (whose Sapphic muse couldn't do much to stay the chest-pounding desire of this Brahmin Bob), your collected epistolary output warrants at least a quick scan.

Nothing in Charles McGrath's review about Vietnam, curiously enough. (Lowell can't have not written about it.) Though this may be worth the price of admission alone:

Lowell at his most manic had visions and hatched political schemes. At one point he even considered running for the Massachusetts State Senate and tried to recruit [Ezra] Pound, of all people, as an adviser.

Can you imagine? What the hell kind of ticket would that have been on? --Michael Weiss [link]

So You Wanna Write About Hemlines and Shit... When drama critics used to serve up a finely pan-seared Broadway ham, the sanguinary blowback would typically lie somewhere between "Miserable queen!" and "I saw who you did, and I know what you are." But now that theatre criticism has been lamentably declawed (Ben Brantley, kinda likin' what he sees), where's all the hissing and shattered china migrated to in the Big Apple? The Fashion Page, but of course.

Real women have curves, but real designers have no mercy.

For the first time since my early 20's, I can wear a size 8. People in the industry have noticed and complimented me on the change. But the picture wouldn't be clarified until I went to see Andy Port, a friend and editor at The Times Magazine, to ask if she thought there was an article in any of this.

"Oh, definitely," Andy said. "Especially given your job and the way the fashion industry views weight." She added, on the verge of a shriek, "I mean, just think how many times a designer, after getting a bad review from you, said, 'That big fat bitch!'"

Two things: "Bitch" appearing in the NYT is not a milestone, but it is cause to sit up and take notice. (When Cheney told what's-his-filibuster, "Go fuck yourself," the coverage was a bowdlerized scandal to out-measure the ostensible one.) Also, a longtime friend of Snarksmith has it one good authority that that "bitch" made it all the way up to Bill Keller himself before getting the go-ahead. Only Maureen Dowd requesting book leave can say the same... --Michael Weiss [link]

Sympathy for the Devil... The Church of Satan suffered a more or less copasetic loss in 1997 with the decease of its founder and guiding darkness Anton LaVey. (It's all right, he's gone to much worse place now.) Though that didn't mean the Church's espirit de corps went ahead and tanked, too. Meet the new Boss: a perfectly Rotarian-named Peter Gilmore, LaVey's liquid-tongued Khruschev in all things perfidious and unholy. The Church's biggest gripe these days? That New York City, former Babylon in hot pursuit of some major divine salt treatment, has become one giant, gaping fucking heavenhole. The Gilmore gargoyle:

"Times Square used to be the most potent vista for viewing this entire spectrum in one glance," he said. "If one stood on Broadway and 42nd, simply by looking around you could see human passions embodied: base sexuality in the venues for all facets of pornography, the restless mind hungry for information in the endless electronic crawl of headlines and in the publications cramming the newsstands. Our need for fantasy was served by the many theaters showing every level of film being produced and a similar range of live performance from the splendid to the sordid. There were shops which sold exotic weaponry and tacky souvenirs. The cuisine ranged from street vendors of dubious cleanliness and the quintessentially American Howard Johnson's to the second-floor exotica of the Chinese Republic."

Dad... is that you? (Scatch that: the Old Man would have said, "Thai Republic.")

Though Peter could be a serviceable stand-in for Camille Paglia on a "high-hormone" day:

"So long as there is a profitable market for a 'Manhattanland' experience amongst visitors who think that visiting safe simulacra is preferable to something more 'spicy,' these spots will remain 'improved' and resistant to the surroundings which haven't yet been 'redeemed,'" said Gilmore.

Paradigm shift this, you walking fleshbucket of the apocalypse. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, June 9, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Self-Promotion 101... Mark's review of The Road to Airstrip One (old and re-released Orwell biography), now up on Stop Smiling's website. --Michael Weiss [link]

By the By, Humble Apologies... Sorry for the extended hiatus. Wasn't lying dead in a ditch by the NJ Turnpike or anything. Just a little prolonged primal scream therapy to ring in the quarter-century mark (that and a month and a half of Stalin research doesn't make for a get-up-and-go attitude in the morning.) But expect daily updates from now until eternity.

Also: No one ever sends us submissions of things they see on the Internet that we might want in on, too. This should be corrected. Send us mail. Projectile kitten videos, lonely and desperate cries for help, "Don't Blame Me, But Yeah, I Voted For Bush" confessions. We'll write back. Promise. --Michael Weiss [link]

Bull Messed With, Horns Not Got... Eliot Spitzer, immortal no more. Bank of America shows New York its full-colored redness as one of the "formerly alleged" (have to say that now) oleaginous mutual fundies lives to steal another day. And check this out from the new and verbally improved right-wing:

"Looks like the so called 'Sheriff of Wall Street' had a gun full of blanks."

Ugh! That's Stephen Minarik, New York State Republican chairman, in a Greed-is-Good Cialis throw-down if ever there was. (And the Spitz's hairline receded three inches that day.) --Michael Weiss [link]

When Gawker Met Tucker... Now who the hell could ever in his right fucking mind be asexual when Gawkerette Jessica Cohen's around, and she's armed with a camera? Not even his royal bowtiedness, tc. (Capitalization is for tele-liberals like Jon Stewart.)

TuckerGate. Crashed.

The one with the "jumping on the grenade" -- I mean, come on. Cohen gets a blogified book deal for that. --Michael Weiss [link]

Syphilibuster... That's the latest activity of Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn, according to The WaPo. The family doctor-turned-senator showed a presentation on save sex to Washington staffers. If the Post is to be believed, the show included lame Star Wars jokes and free pizza. But the Post may be trivializing Sen. Coburn due to a thinly veiled liberal bias. Seriously, how else do you explain this sentence?:

Conservative Christian leaders and STDs are in many ways a natural match.

How many editors approved that? --Nic Duquette [link]

Fucknots of the World, Unite!... Asexuality is a trend so hip, even the New York Times (who isn't called the 'Grey' Lady for nothing) has deigned to write about it.

Asexual people often say they have been aware of their lack of interest in sex since adolescence and that while it may have troubled them, they never knew anything different. "I realized I was asexual about the same time I realized I was short, when I was about 15," said Miss Morgan of Edmonton, who is 5-foot-1. "I realized I was short when everyone grew taller than me, and I realized I didn't have sexual feelings when everyone else started expressing and experimenting with theirs."

Man, that's like a Randy Newman double threat right there.

Find out next week about the hidden ravages of the fucknot community. The multiple tease victims in a single night, the crippling addictions to those chewing gum cigarettes (the sugar high lets you listen to They Might Be Giants for hours.) Remember: just because they look clean doesn't mean they still aren't. --Michael Weiss [link]

Tuesday, May 24, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Part-Time Blogging... I turn a soul-crushing 25 this week, and as a kind of present to myself I'm ignoring global media. A few posts here and there. Back full time in June. --Michael Weiss [link]

When in Rome -- Sue... Poor Orianna Fallaci. The only woman who can get away with calling Ariel Sharon "fat" to his face can't thunder and grumble about the rage and the pride. A judge has ordered her to go to court for "defaming Islam" in her new book The Strength of Reason (must be a low-protein day for that Thomas Paine faculty.)

"I have expressed my opinion through the written word through my books, that is all."

Thus spake the Camilla of the Clash of Civilizations. --Michael Weiss [link]

Fuck It, Send In Beckham... The planners of Live Aid 2 have expressed hope that the Spice Girls will reunite for the charity.

Hasn't sub-Saharan Africa suffered enough? --Nic Duquette [link]

Tuesday, May 24, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Kristof on China's Real Cultural Revolution... Nicholas Kristof has an excellent piece in The Times today about Chinese bloggers doing in their country (with infinitely greater significance and personal risk) what bloggers do in this one (with increasing self-importance and bathos.) Most enlightening bit is Kristof's cleverness in massaging the snout of the censor with one hand, while neutering his check-signers with the other:

I tried my own experiment, posting comments on Internet chat rooms. In a Chinese-language chat room on Sohu.com, I called for multiparty elections and said, "If Chinese on the other side of the Taiwan Strait can choose their leaders, why can't we choose our leaders?" That went on the site automatically, like all other messages. But after 10 minutes, the censor spotted it and removed it.

Then I toned it down: "Under the Communist Party's great leadership, China has changed tremendously. I wonder if in 20 years the party will introduce competing parties, because that could benefit us greatly." That stayed up for all to see, even though any Chinese would read it as an implicit call for a multiparty system.

They just don't make authoritarianism like they used to. "Under the Communist Party's great leadership" is like a toggle key on the Chinese iMac. No panache to real dissidence anymore. This is probably why Ben Stiller is the culture's first choice to consult about the "death of irony." --Michael Weiss [link]

Retirement Update... I wrote here about Social Security and retirement, and though my points still hold, I broke down into incoherence when trying to pin down what, exactly, is the difference between a 401(k), an IRA and a Roth IRA. No more.

Though functionally similar, the difference between a 401(k) and an IRA is intellectually pretty strong. An IRA is a tax-advantaged way for individuals to sock money away for retirement. A 401(k) is called a "defined contribution" pension, and is administered by large corporations and organizations as a modern alternative to the "defined benefit" plans that have characterized the auto and airline industries and civil services, among others. With a defined benefit plan, you're promised a certain amount in the future by your employer as a reward for a lifetime of service. With a defined contribution plan, your employer still thanks you by adding some of its own money to the money you contribute to the plan. As of next year, both the IRA and the 401(k) will come in Traditional and Roth varieties. A Traditional IRA or 401(k) is funded with pretax dollars, and no taxes are paid on it until withdrawl. A Roth version is funded with after-tax dollars, but no tax is paid on the money ever again. If your income is above a certain level, you may not fund a Roth IRA.

The latest Krugman column is scattershot, but the gist is that the people's will consistently is for stability in their pensions, not risk. They want their Social Security benefits, and they want their pensions, and many people will be in for a rude surprise when both corporate pensions and Social Security come up short. Daniel Gross also does a good job detailing the way public and private administrators have squandred pensions entrusted to them. They're good columns, but neither writer quite makes that extra step: there's more stability in a defined-contribution program than a defined-benefit one.

As I understand it, with tradtional pensions your benefits are consistent, but you only get them if your firm remains solvent. Your Social Security is the same program. You might get benefits, but maybe you won't. But if you have employers matching funds in a 401(k), the money is in your pockets -- not theirs. If the stock market has a weak decade, at least your cash will be there, albeit diminished.

I suggest all mid-20s Snarksmith readers consider a Roth IRA. I'm considering one, as remote as old age seems to me. It is a certainty that income and payroll taxes will have to rise very sharply, very soon, to pay for our deficits, our wars, our retiress and probably universal health care. And if we don't have Social Security or corporate America on our side, we do have time and the magic of compound interest. To have a million dollars after forty years at a very conservative six percent rate, you'd need $90,717. Since we have no reason not to bet on riskier investments, a twelve percent rate could get to a million starting with $8300. Fifteen percent would just need $2479. Obviously, you can't trust the stock market. But at least in forty years there will still be a stock market. --Nic Duquette [link]

Monday, May 23, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Photo of the Day... Laura Bush on Egyptian Sesame Street.

Photo

--Nic Duquette [link]

Sunday, May 22, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Weekly Standard on Uzbekistan, Galloway... Last year I attended a Vanity Fair-sponsored debate, the title of which was a proposition: "George Bush Has Made the World Safer." Among the panelists (in the "yes" column") were Christopher Hitchens, former CIA chief James Woolsey, and (in the "no" column) Bernard Henri Levy and a Tory peer whose name I wish I could remember, but whose only salient moment that evening came when he affirmed his "very right-wing" bona fides as a way of "situating" his own opposition to regime change. After a little seated give-and-take about the hideousness of Saddam Hussein and US complicity in preserving him for so long, the Tory whipped round to Hitchens and barked: "You didn't seem to have a problem when Bush made nice with the Butcher of Uzbekistan for the use of his airfields!" Some minor applause and a few unsure titters from the crowd followed this "gotcha" charge of moral equivalence, prompting Hitchens to re-direct his gaze to the cheap seats and remark: "Oh, come on. I bet you don't even know who the 'Butcher of Uzbekistan' is." Nor did they, judging by the swift climb-down giggling this produced.

Well, now we can all know who Islam Karimov is. Good for Bill Kristol and Stephen Schwartz at The Weekly Standard:

Less than two weeks ago, Karimov ordered his troops to the eastern Uzbek city of Andijon, where economic discontent had stirred the local populace to protest. They opened fire in a spasm of official bloodshed reminiscent of Tiananmen Square. The death toll remains unconfirmed, perhaps unconfirmable, but apparently exceeds 500 and includes women and children. Karimov and his servants have sought to explain away this atrocity with charges that the Andijon demonstrators were, or were inspired by, Islamist radicals. But such claims seem to be mendacious propaganda, which, left unchallenged, could undermine the real and indispensable effort against radical Islam.

President Bush should lead the international pressure on Karimov to allow journalists, legitimate relief workers, and trustworthy investigators to travel to Andijon and render a verdict on the events there. That verdict will likely be harsh for Karimov, and it should have consequences for U.S. aid to and support for the regime. Washington cannot turn a blind eye to massacres in a country where U.S. troops are based and that receives U.S. assistance. Here as elsewhere, the principle of linkage between a regime's behavior and relations with the United States must be reestablished. And if not in Uzbekistan, where we have so much leverage, how seriously will others take our promises and our warnings?

And while you're there, check out Hitch's revealing piece on George Galloway, the Tailor of Tikrit:

At the hearing, also, Galloway was half-correct in yelling at the subcommittee that he had been a critic of Saddam Hussein when Donald Rumsfeld was still making friendly visits to Baghdad. Here, a brief excursion into the aridities of left history may elucidate more than the Galloway phenomenon.

There came a time, in the late 1970s, when the Iraqi Communist party realized the horrific mistake it had made in joining the Baath party's Revolutionary Command Council. The Communists in Baghdad, as I can testify from personal experience and interviews at the time, began to protest--too late--at the unbelievable cruelty of Saddam's purge of the army and the state: a prelude to his seizure of total power in a full-blown fascist coup. The consequence of this, in Britain, was the setting-up of a group named CARDRI: the Campaign Against Repression and for Democratic Rights in Iraq. Many democratic socialists and liberals supported this organization, but there was no doubting that its letterhead and its active staff were Communist volunteers. And Galloway joined it. At the time, it is at least half true to say, the United States distinctly preferred Saddam's Iraq to Khomeini's Iran, and acted accordingly. Thus a leftist could attack Saddam for being, among other things, an American client. We ought not to forget the shame of American policy at that time, because the preference for Saddam outlived the war with Iran, and continued into the postwar Anfal campaign to exterminate the Kurds. In today's "antiwar" movement, you may still hear the echoes of that filthy compromise, in the pseudo-ironic jibe that "we" used to be Saddam's ally.

But mark the sequel. It must have been in full knowledge, then, of that repression, and that genocide, and of the invasion of Kuwait and all that ensued from it, that George Galloway shifted his position and became an outright partisan of the Iraqi Baath. There can be only two explanations for this, and they do not by any means exclude one another. The first explanation, which would apply to many leftists of different stripes, is that anti-Americanism simply trumps everything, and that once Saddam Hussein became an official enemy of Washington the whole case was altered. Given what Galloway has said at other times, in defense of Slobodan Milosevic for example, it is fair to assume that he would have taken such a position for nothing: without, in other words, the hope of remuneration. --Michael Weiss [link]

Saturday, May 21, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Frank Rich Lets It All Out... It's all about putting things in perspective, isn't it? I said a little while ago that one of the potentially hazardous side effects of Newsweek's fuck-up would be the escape clause now provided for Bush administration whenever allegations of the abasement and torture of inmates arise. What I should have said was that it'd first become an opportunity for the New York Times to flex its professional courtesy muscles and rush to the defense of a guilty news competitor. This weekend Frank Rich nominates himself for the unglorified task of burying a true instance of presumption and stupidity, by one of the weekly magazines "of record," under a mountain of sodden holy book mulch. Bill Maher might make it a "new rule" that if the editorial subject takes a holiday for more than two paragraphs, the author's officially distracting from the hunt for Al Qaeda:

It's also because of incompetent Pentagon planning that other troops may now be victims of weapons looted from Saddam's munitions depots after the fall of Baghdad. Yet when The New York Times reported one such looting incident, in Al Qaqaa, before the election, the administration and many in the blogosphere reflexively branded the story fraudulent. But the story was true. It was later corroborated not only by United States Army reservists and national guardsmen who spoke to The Los Angeles Times but also by Iraq's own deputy minister of industry, who told The New York Times two months ago that Al Qaqaa was only one of many such weapon caches hijacked on America's undermanned post-invasion watch.

Unless Rich is trying to demonstrate, as opposed to argue, the perils of having one's eye lured surreptiously away from the ball, the point that bloggers can get things wrong is a non sequitur from the point that Newsweek did get something wrong. Since he at one point makes use of the word "Freudian," I can't help but wonder if any Viennese witchdoctor worth his DSM-IV manual wouldn't be able to spot the telltale signs of "projection" posted throughout this piece. From the preceding Al Qaqaa caca, Rich wastes no time at all before passing the ultimate self-diagnosis:

This steady drip of subterfuge and news manipulation increasingly tells a more compelling story than the old news that Newsweek so egregiously botched.

Now that's what I'd call a "breakthrough." --Michael Weiss [link]

Friday, May 20, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

China in 500 Words... I remember now why Paul Krugman has a job at The Times. When he has an economic issue to explicate, he's actually, really, really good. (It is what he does at his day job.) His column today on the Chinese foreign exchange report is excellent and on the mark. Everybody who's worried about outsourcing, or the deficit, or anything, should read it. Krugman's editor should sit him down and prohibit any column containing the word "Bush." Make him work for it. --Nic Duquette [link]

Secrets Revealed... "I Get All My Blog Posts From Andrew Sullivan."

Some of these prove the medium is the message. "I tell my husband that he's a good lover -- but he isn't." Put that on a postcard featuring Oscar Wilde and you or your husband's got a bigger secret to tell, angel.

This one's just clever.

Funny but mean. (Reminds me of a car I once saw that'd been broken into. Sign said "No Radio." Note left by thief said, "Just checking."

Genius.

--Michael Weiss [link]

Love Anne Applebaum... On the Newsweek scandal:

Now, it is possible that no interrogator at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed pages of the Koran down the toilet, as the now-retracted Newsweek story reported -- although several former Guantanamo detainees have alleged just that. It is also possible that Newsweek reporters relied too much on an uncertain source, or that the magazine confused the story with (confirmed) reports that prisoners themselves used Korans to block toilets as a form of protest.

But surely the larger point is not the story itself but that it was so eminently plausible, in Pakistan, Afghanistan and everywhere else. And it was plausible precisely because interrogation techniques designed to be offensive to Muslims were used in Iraq and Guantanamo, as administration and military officials have also confirmed.

What Newsweek and the rest of us really should be concered with is how the administration has been waiting for exactly this kind of fact-check fuck-up. What better point of reference for automatically discrediting future reports of torture and abasement of detainees? I have no quarrel with a major magazine printing a story that may further "tarnish" the Islamic perception of the United States. If the stuff in that story is true, then it deserves to be told and heard. But scooping Sy Hersh is a lower priority to making sure nasty revelations like this are indeed revelations and not patent bullshit.

And conservatives needn't take much comfort from this. They've not exactly got their hands clean in gauging global reaction to incendiary claims. I didn't hear much hue and cry over Mel Gibson's shameless portrayal of a rabbi inculpating present and future Jewry for Christ's crucifixion in what has now become the most widely viewed film in history. And widely viewed in places like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran... (That "item" Gibson could not have established as fact even if he'd wanted to.) --Michael Weiss [link]

The Filibuster Question... I'd quite admire the Democrat who came out and said, "Yeah, we were against it when it was in our favor to be against it and we're for it now because we don't like the looks of Bush's nominees, and neither should you. So here's the compromise: give us this now and the next time we're on top and want to panzer through our agenda, we won't cry foul play about the rules of our own game." Senators of a losing party fight another losing struggle with pathetic, see-through rationalizations. Way to take up the cause of the opposition. Liberals might learn something from the judges conservatives routinely accuse of "legislating from the bench." At least they know how to legislate.

Bob Shrum on Hardball. How many gallons of water and at what temperature to cleanse this unclean feeling... Linda Ellerbee has a new book called Take Big Bites. That's just too easy. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, May 19, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Suedehead... James Dean's GEICO claim matures to a venerable 50 this year. And you know what that means. Chop up the liver, cause here come da schmaltz:

"Dean died before he could fail, before he lost his hair or his boyish figure, before he grew up," Donald Spoto writes in his admiring biography. Fair enough.

Fair enough? My God, man, have you seen Rebel Without a Cause? I still think it's the David Lynch film that time forgot. (Let's count the seconds before this article mentions "poster-boy.") Here's my theory: the real goods can only come in the second or third re-issue of the teenage wasteland outcast -- the boilerplate is just an iconographic warm-up. This is why Sean Penn is Mickey Rourke without the mouth-shut dignity but with the Oscar. Morrissey, who in his twenties wrote a dry-as-his-own-linens potted biography of Dean, understood the phenomenon apart from his own worship of it. The genius was in the life, not the art. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Other North American Political Showdown...While something about Senate procedure is happening in DC, a genuine political crisis may be about to explode in Canada. Premier Paul Martin has been implicated in a financial scandal in which Liberal Party cronies were paid C$100 million for not doing much. The Conservatives are trying to use a budget bill to push through a no confidence and call new elections.

What makes it interesting is that the pro-government and anti-government sides have apparently lined up 152 votes each in the 306-member parliament. That leaves the outcome up to two Independent MPs who have not made up their minds, and the ability of each side to keep its members alive and well enough to get to the vote -- according to the Globe and Mail, one MP is too sick to make it and two are on the cusp. If this is the kind of health care the Canadian parliament gets, maybe the rest of us should be skeptical about switching to a universal system after all. (The Medical Mettle award goes to MP Carolyn Parish: "Come hell or high water, there's no frigging way I'm going to let one ovary bring the government down.") --Nic Duquette [link]

Tuesday, May 17, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Donald Trump, Classical Rhetorician... Real estate's Coriolanus suddenly breaks out the speechifying today to promote "his" design for Ground Zero and slag the Freedom Tower:

"In a nutshell, Freedom Tower should not be allowed to be built, it's not appropriate for downtown Manhattan, it's not appropriate for Manhattan, it's not appropriate for the United States and it's not appropriate for freedom," Trump said.

"The only thing good about the building, from an architectural standpoint, is the name Freedom Tower," he added.

Let's see, that's anaphora, asyndeton, climax, irony? Any other Greek words we can slap on this little press conference? I come not to build the Freedom Tower, but to bury it. --Nic Duquette [link]

Spaghetti Western Space Fascism the Critics Like...


("Jude Law told me letting the Republic lapse into inter-galactic despotism wasn't your best trick, lass.")

David Edelstein in Slate:

So when does Revenge of the Sith really grab you? As the heroes of Ghostbusters might put it, it's when Lucas "merges the streams." It's when Anakin takes off after every Jedi and Jedi ally in the galaxy, while Obi-Wan lops light-saber-wielding limbs off a special effect called Gen. Grievous and Yoda joins forces with a hairy old friend.

I'll forgive the bungled Ghostbusters quote ("cross the streams," you ignorant slut), because you've come through before, David. (And the "hairy old friend" is not Gene Shalit, by the way.)

Keith Phipps in The Onion:

A sure sign your film franchise has taken a wrong turn: When the tone of fan anticipation shifts from "How great is this one going to be?" to "Will this one at least be good?" The quick answer for Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge Of The Sith is that, yes, by the terms established in the new series, this one's the good one. But is it good enough? The quick answer is, again, yes.

And of course the tortured Lando of The Times, A.O. Scott:

This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That's right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it's better than "Star Wars."

Now, out of these three journals -- the first a snarky liberal online magazine, the second a countercultural satiric weekly, and the third tomorrow's cocktail party opinions formulated a day early -- which do you think just couldn't refrain from drawing hamfisted comparisons between the Emperor and George Bush? Big quandary you have, yes, mmmm. --Michael Weiss [link]

Curious George... I've been hashing it out with Mark over e-mail about crediting so sinister a figure as George Galloway with any measure of noble defiance. (And the Democratic party taking a note from Galloway's rule book would be like watching a recently neutered dog drink from the toilet.) But rather than drag a comrades' tiff into plain view, I'd just like to direct our readers to the following Guardian profile, written in 2003, on Mr. Have You No Decency, Sir. Money quote:

He says his political position is no different now than it was then; that while there are so many politicians marching across the ideological spectrum without explanation, he has stayed put. What is that position? "I am on the anti-imperialist left." The Stalinist left? "I wouldn't define it that way because of the pejoratives loaded around it; that would be making a rod for your own back. If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life. If there was a Soviet Union today, we would not be having this conversation about plunging into a new war in the Middle East, and the US would not be rampaging around the globe."

Taking a deep breath to ready yourself for obfuscation when asked the fairly straightforward question of whether or not you're a Stalinist... Reminds me of that Onion headline: "Genocide Is Such a Harsh Word." --Michael Weiss [link]

Tell Us What You Really Think, Sir... Other than that he was booted from the Labour Party for opposing the war in Iraq and insulting Tony Blair, I honestly don't know much about British MP George Galloway. I do know I wish American oppositional politicians spoke as candidly and asĘbluntly as this guy. Testifying in front of a Senate subcommittee that is accusing himĘof essentiallyĘtaking oilĘbribes from Saddam Hussein (Galloway, patronized the chairman of the committee, Norm Coleman: "Now I know that standards have slipped over the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer, you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice."

Ę Under testimony, he alsoĘadded, "This group of neocons is involved in the mother of all smokescreens. I want to turn the tables on this neocon, pro-Israel, pro-war, Republican lynch mob." And for good measure: "The real sanctions busters were your own companies...I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one, and neither has anybody on my behalf.ä

ĘĘ Ę Earlier, as he arrived in DC, speaking to reporters, Galloway declared, "I come not as the accused, but as the accuser...Itâs Mr. Coleman whoâs been all over the news and heâs a lick-spittle, crazed neocon who is engaged in a witch hunt against all those he perceives to have betrayed the United States in their plan to invade and occupy Iraq."

Ę What's appealing about his rhetoric (regardless of where you stand on the war)Ęis that it's clear the guy passionatelyĘbelieves what he's saying. It also seems likely the original accusation isĘoutrageous nonsense. Galloway is asĘmad as hell andĘhe won't let the bastards push him around. It's precisely the sort of energy the Democrats need to display if they want to win next time around. --Mark Grueter [link]

Tuesday, May 16, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

What Scalia Could Learn From Sistani... Talk about everybody having a web site: welcome to the wonderful world of www.Sistani.org. There's no weblog, yet, but there is an outstanding alphabetical guide to what is and is not acceptable for Muslims, according to Sistani's a href="http://www.sistani.org/html/eng/main/index.php?page=4&part=1" target="_blank">theological rulings. A sampling:

The Ayatollah says plastic surgery is fine, but no chess, cufflinks, or pet dogs.

Organ donation is okay, but it's better if another Muslim is getting the organs.

Oral and anal sex are frowned upon, but technically up to your wife, and she can't swallow. If no penetration happens, it isn't adultery.

And then there's this answer. --Nic Duquette [link]

Supremes Ask: Vine Not?... The Supreme Court has ruled that the amendment repealing federal prohibition and turning alcohol regulation over to the states does not override the consitutional ban on interstate protectionism. Many states banned direct door-to-door shipment of wines from out of state, while permitting it for in-state wineries. The Court has ruled that all wineries must play by the same rules in each state. Amazingly, the decision split 5-4, with Clarence Thomas writing some blather about protecting children from booze. Because, you know, so many teenagers these days are getting wasted on $19 bottles of cabernet (plus $7 s/h), and they can only be stopped if limited to the vineyards in their state.

Which may be appropriate, since this CNN article has oenophiles with a "serious jones" for a certain bottle. Isn't a jones a heroin craving? Has this word become mainstream, and mild? Somebody call Bill Safire, before his chum Brooks winds up in the grape juice clinic. --Nic Duquette [link]

Friday, May 13, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

A Nation Rolls Its Lonely Eyes At You... Tom Friedman's latest column bemoans lazy Americans who "show up and expect to win" in the new, "flat" world of global competition and get caught napping, be it the Olympic basketball team or engineers. Ironic, then, that this article was written by a ToFro who apparently slaps a column down and gets it in the New York Times and thinks he's "only competing against himself." The title of the column is "Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?" But nothing in the column has any bearing on DiMaggio, baseball, Simon and Garfunkel, The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman, Marilyn Monroe, or sugar mamas. What happened here? Did an editor cut the paragraph that justified the title? Did an editor make up the title to go with the column? Or is this all a package from Tom himself, and this title somehow makes sense to him? Or maybe this is some sort of theme week. We'll get to read David Brooks' "I'd Love To Turn You On" about the filibuster and Paul Krugman's "Been a Long Lonely, Lonely, Lonely Time" about health care reform. Maureen Dowd is on vacation. But then, her columns are kinda always like this. --Nic Duquette [link]

Anne Applebaum on the Lingering Politics of Yalta... When the celebrated recent chronicler of Stalin's vast "sewer system" of state terror and oppression writes about the postwar carve-up of Eastern Europe, one is inclined to take notice. Sorry for the length of the following excerpt, but if you don't read Anne Applebaum's whole column, just read this:

Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Bush's comments is that they constitute an apology for a historical disaster most Americans don't remember. I certainly knew nothing of the bitterness that many East Europeans felt toward the United States and Britain until I was personally accused of "selling out" Poland at Yalta -- a deal done 20 years before I was born -- during my first trip to Warsaw in the 1980s.

Less surprising is the tenor of the reaction. On the left, a small crew of liberal historians and Rooseveltians have leaped to argue that the president was wrong, and that Yalta was a recognition of reality rather than a sellout. Their charges ignore the breadth of the agreement -- was it really necessary to agree to deport thousands of expatriate Russians back to certain death in the Soviet Union? -- as well as the fact that Yalta and the other wartime agreements went beyond mere recognition of Soviet occupation and conferred legality and international acceptance on new borders and political structures. But on the right, no one -- certainly not Tom DeLay -- has objected to Bush's statement because it took place on foreign soil.

Applebaum is right to argue that historical self-criticism is a medicine both sides of the spectrum routinely refuse to take. The playing-it-safe liberal intrepretation of World War II suffers from a guilty conscience commingled with a (not unjustified) fear of drawing moral equivalences. No one now contests the necessity of going to war against Hitler. The sepulchral means and end of his ideology -- Auden once wrote that the truly scary thing about fascism was the honesty with which it discussed its goal -- destroyed any illusions about what later became for the art of modern statecraft a shivering term of ridicule and scorn: "Appeasement." No, confrontation was the only recourse against the Third Reich. But against Stalin? "Containment" still has a satiric retrospective quality in today's more influential parlors of neoconservativism, but it's a term which is nonetheless deployed, straight-faced, by people with responsible opinions about the twentieth century. The questions over the exigency of the Soviet Union's collapse and what ultimately led to it have not been unanimously settled (or so we're constantly reminded by such responsible purveyors of unanimity as The New York Times and CNN.) The show trial, the Five-Year Plan, the Gulag, "revolution from above"... Cranks, orthodox clerics of lost causes, and revisionists ("Revisionists can't win -- that's not surprising / For if they win it isn't called revising") try to get away with diminishing the enormity of these crimes, but few are those on the other side of the ledger who would argue that after Hitler the United States and Britain had a moral obligation to turn to their erstwhile ally and mutter the words, "You're next." Yet twenty million Russians and who knows how many Eastern Europeans had to die as a result of that remission of Western defiance.

Marx's famous formulation that the first go-round of world-shaking events is a tragedy, and the second a farce, is itself being turned into a kind of macabre burlesque by the joint smugness of Vladimir Putin and his American apologists. Meanwhile, history to the defeated cannot help nor pardon, but there is still time for the historians to do some serious explaining. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, May 12, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

More Thoughts on The Huffington Post... First, there are too many fucking people writing for it. Arianna, nobody gives a shit what Sherry Lansing or Representative John ConyersĘthinks. Second, there really should be a 'comments' option - a way for readers to respond to these celebrity pontificators, otherwise, my bet is that everyone willĘstop reading it (assuming for purposes of discussionĘeveryone or anyoneĘhas started). Third, Dennis Prager is an ass. His post today isn't worth the paper it wasn't written on. He says that the student who asked Ann Coulter what she thought of man-woman marriages that involve anal sex is a "barbarian" and our version of "Hitler youth." The man is not kidding. --Mark Grueter [link]

The Edmund Wilson of Camp... Dale Peck, fresh off his show-stopping puree of Rick Moody, quits his cushy backpage job at The New Republic, takes a little time off to cool the snarky jets, writes a not-bad novel or two, then picks up pen (or keyboard or Sadean quill or whatever) and heads back to work deconstructing blockbluster film events for The New York Observer. It's the kind of inexorable media arc that lands Brigitte Nielsen in the stubby embrace of Flava Flav.

The result in this instance is worse. And by worse, I mean better. Because bad is good, up is down, bitchy is insightful, Sontag is dead, and because Star Wars, like E.T., rattles the critics' procrustean bed in demoniacal want of cultural exorcism.

Let me spoil all the fun for you:

It was Liberace÷an early genius of cross-platform branding, and one of its first victims÷who coined the showmanâs retort about "crying all the way to the bank" before dying in his mirrored Las Vegas palace, wig still firmly glued to his bald head and God knows how many rings on his fingers. Itâs hard to imagine any other inscription will appear on George Lucasâ tombstone other than "May the Force be with you," yet I would suggest a more telling line, one that Queen Padme says to Anakin Skywalker after his inevitable but still incomprehensible turn to evil: "I canât believe what Iâm hearing." Beneath which, perhaps, some dissenter can one day scrawl the only appropriate answer:

Ka-ching.

Well, at least he didn't recommend shotgun-sodomy, as he did for David Foster Wallace, as the cure for what ails a galaxy far, far away. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, May 12, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Al Jazeera On the Take... Al Hurra, the satellite network created by the Bush administration to help promote a more independent and less, shall we say, "raveningly anti-American" platform for reality TV in the Mideast, has airred a shocking documentary showing that rival network Al Jazeera used to enjoy a juicy quid pro quo arrangement with Saddam's regime.

Recipients of this Baathist largesse appeared to include a former managing director of the influential Qatar-based government-subsidized satellite network Al Jazeera, Mohammed Jassem al-Ali. The videotaped meeting between Uday and al-Ali occurred on March 13, 2000, when al-Ali still worked as Al Jazeera's managing director. Their conversation makes clear that this was not their first meeting, but that they had met on prior occasions--and that Al Jazeera had put into effect the directives that Uday had proffered in those previous meetings.

Gee, you'd have never guessed it from their broadcasts... And Uday and Qusay -- the bag men in this, as in almost every, of their daddy's global hornswoggles -- must have paid up well into the future. Pro-Saddam quickly became pro-insurgent.

Reuel Marc Gerecht -- whose anti-"rendition" piece in the same issue of The Weekly Standard is a must-read -- has suggested an Arab C-SPAN as the ultimate experiment in bias-free reporting in a part of the globe that desperately needs it. The trouble is, bias-free also usually means viewer-free. Why this truism is routinely absent from the stateside debate over "fair and balanced" journalism is beyond me. But speaking of which, why not just open up CNN and FOX News bureaus in Baghdad and Beirut? What greater nostrum for a democracy still taking it on the chin than the warm, zombifying glow of a 24-hour news cycle? (To properly establish the cultural photo-negative effect of this enterprise, Christiane Amanpour would have to be a Spanish chick from the Bronx. Muammar Qaddafi can be Bill O'Reilly.) --Michael Weiss [link]

Bewitched Goes To the Movies... The Good: The movie, coming out this summer, pairs Will Farrel and Nicole Kidman, which might just work.

The Worrisome: The adaptation of this piddling little sitcom for the movies has taken thirteen years and nine screenwriters. The plot has been "updated" with a story about an actor who takes a role in a screen adaptation of Bewitched with an unknown actress who turns out to be an actual witch. (SPOILER: the movie ends with the entire Green Acres cast crawling through a wormhole into Charlie Kaufman's head.)

The Stupid: The city of Salem will allow a 9-foot statue of Samantha Stephens, over the protests of residents, who object that the statue trivializes the deaths of twenty-odd women three hundred years ago. Apparently nobody is worried about having a larger-than-life statue of a TV sitcom character in the middle of town. --Nic Duquette [link]

Wednesday, May 11, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Pinker v. Spelke... Bushy-haired evolutionary psychologist goes empirical on agreeable colleague's data slides. (You can watch the whole thing on the web or read the transcript. The video file is AVI, which should be compatible with the Quicktime protocol installed in your web browser. If not, blame women in science.) --Michael Weiss [link]

The Captive Mind That Couldn't Be Helped... Slate's David Greenberg seems to think that mumbling a few belated, contrite words about Soviet imperialism is a sinister sequel to fascist historiography. I exaggerate? Listen to this, if you please:

Along with the myth of FDR's treachery in leading America into war, the "stab in the back" interpretation of Yalta became a cudgel with which the old right and their McCarthyite heirs tried to discredit a president they had long despised.

This is the kind of non sequitur that, if you'll pardon the unintentional D-Day imagery, operates on two "fronts." The first is the assumption that an inevitable but unpleasant event in the past -- Stalin's getting to keep a few countries he thought were his, FDR and Churchill having to accept this fact -- requires no moral accounting or atonement in the present. One could make the case that the Catholic Church was "compelled" by the breadth and weight of the Third Reich to (at best) remain silent while Europe's Jews were systematically slaughtered. This does not mean that today's presiding pope should not offer a mea maxima culpa for such horrific ecclesiastical silence, does it? (And by the way, there's no settled definition of "inevitable" for the above sentence. Stalin's subversion of the very rights of colonial self-determination -- rights he once himself co-authored with Lenin as Soviet state policy -- was not one of the a priori pities of war. Nor was it the culmination of mystical Hegelian forces. It was a conscious choice.) The second idiotic move Greenberg makes is to imply that the Lindbergh-Coughlin right of the 1930's is axiomatically embodied in any American who's ever regretted the totalitarian horrors related by Czeslaw Milosz -- or, indeed, by Milan Kundera, Tibor Szamuely and countless others. Stating that Eastern Europe got the rawest of raw deals following WWII is not a diplomatically "insensitive" gesture from a US president, especially one so concerned about spreading freedom and democracy in other parts of the world. Nor is asking the Russian premier, whose rumored to have a spottable "soul," to do likewise.

The link to that irrepressible Macaulay of the Establishment, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. -- in full potted bloom, I notice, from the comfort of his new greenhouse at The Huffington Post -- says it all about Greenberg's concept of one damn thing after another... Stay tuned for next week's stunning revelations about "Camelot." --Michael Weiss [link]

Tuesday, May 10, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Red Souls... From an alphabet soup of Communist bureaucracy -- where, tellingly, the only acronym never employed was FUBAR -- to a "banana republic that imports its bananas from Finland," the absurdity of the Russian state for the past hundred years has been most acutely gauged by the satire conjured around and against it. There's an argument to be made that the more inhospitable one makes this great Gogolian form, the better the end results. Illegality is the black soil out of which springs Russian literary masterpieces. The trouble is, once a ruling class has been slyly and sublimely punctured, it generally tends to stay punctured. (Has a celebrated samizdat ever made the smooth transition into a legitimate press?) Just take the case of comrade Voinovich:

[Vladimir] Voinovich's early novels can be seen as his attempts to work within the limits of socialist realism while also suggesting the moral failures of Soviet life. A well-known novel from that period, Ia khochu byt' chestnym (I Want to Be Honest, 1963), is the tale of a building foreman who stands up to cynical planners and managers. The story has elements of agitprop, but Voinovich's preoccupation with morality and integrity in a society that valued neither was already becoming evident...

Indeed, one of Voinovich's problems is that his first novel [The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin] so effectively satirized the Soviet system's ineptitude and cruelty and, in the character of Private Chonkin, so perfectly captured the personality of the Russian common man that he made his own future treatments of these subjects in some ways redundant. A fitting comparison might be with Joseph Heller, who was never able to match the brilliance of Catch-22.

Gary Shteyngart in The New York Review of Books. --Michael Weiss [link]

Conservatism as a Disease... Timothy Noah at Slate, just not trying anymore. --Michael Weiss [link]

Monday, May 9, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Honey, Lower the Partition, Tell the Driver To Take a Left Onto "Hard-Hitting"... It's probably a bad sign that most of Arianna Huffington's new bloggers think the fiercest political showdown one can have is with Harvey Weinstein.

A fine and early example of the kind of indolent Nerf jousting we can expect from the lefty Hollywood polemicists is Jeff Greenland's stern talking-to of "hip hop mogul" (you get dental with that?) Russell Simmons. Here's the beef as it's been canned so far: Simmons kowtows to Louis Farrakhan, who, as we all know, regularly def jams about how the Jews are vampires and whatnot. For this, Simmons gets criticized by the ever-piquant Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (quick question: what happens if anti-semitism ever does go away? Does Foxman then fade, Marty McFly-like, from existence?) Simmons boldly continues to kowtow to the Bow-Tied imam, citing Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ as an object lesson in anti-chauvinism PR backfires. Oy gevalt. All this "No, you be quiet" oneupmanship ringing out over the Land That Spielberg Built. What are the bien-pensant to do in such riven circumstances? Call in the B-list playwrights, of course!

Russell Simmons is a good guy and has worked diligently to promote dialogue between blacks and Jews. But like many in his position, he has a blind spot when it comes to Louis Farrakhan. Unless you want to talk about the Beastie Boys, the depredations faced by the black community in America today donât have a lot to do with the Jews. To think that Farrakhan should be allowed to sing that old song without a response is perverse.

For the record, I am rooting for the Millions More Movement to be a huge success, and would like to believe it will contain the seeds of ăconstructive dialogueä that Russell Simmons is working to cultivate. Failing that, I hope they scare the bejesus out of any Republican left in Washington that weekend.

And Crown Height's communal conscience grew three sizes that day. Yes, yes, a "blind spot," just like Kelsey Grammar's problem on the L.A. Freeway. But I thought the Beastie Boys were Buddhists now? Ah well, by all means, the Fruit of Islam can cause as many lillywhite pairs of Fruit of the Loom to be soiled, so long as the wearers are all -- registered Republicans! Whew. Crisis averted. Way to show those Jim Crows which party spiritually appointed the first two black secretaries of state.

My friend Max and I are planning a Million-to-One Exodus from Midtown to the 2nd Avenue Deli this Friday. I invite all tribal delegates with impeccable race "dialogue" credentials to attend. --Michael Weiss [link]

Wheatcroft on WWII... The absent-too-long Geoffrey Wheatcroft adds some sane Anglo-empiricist perspective on the Allied tubthumping that accompanies yearly commemoration of VE-Day. Resisting the urge to mythologize the defeat of Hitlerism doesn't undermine the world-shaking importance of that defeat -- it amplifies it. And with Bush rightly giving Putin the treatment eye for acting like Yalta was nothing more than a friendly game of Risk, it's only fair that the Western powers should practice a little historical self-criticism, too.

Some of these legends are more obvious than others. The French suffered a catastrophic defeat in 1940, and the compromises many Frenchmen made with their conquerors thereafter ranged from the pitiful to the wicked. More Frenchmen collaborated than resisted, and during the course of the war more Frenchmen bore arms on the Axis than on the Allied side. Against those grim truths, Charles de Gaulle consciously and brilliantly constructed a nourishing myth of Free France and Resistance that helped heal wounds and rebuild the country.

Yup. I'm currently working on a review of Robert Service's new Stalin biography, which every rag from the Moscow Times to Salon sees as the unearthed vindication of the Red Tsar's "charisma" and intellectualism. (Even if you find those attributes to be pejorative rather than complimentary, they're still not attributes Stalin possessed). Anyway, as a tonic reminder of the real charisma and intellect of the spirit of "October," I went back to Isaac Deutscher's magisterial biography of Trotsky, The Prophet Armed, and spotted for the first time this juicy little footnote. To color the background a bit, Deutscher is alluding to how the United States and Great Britain became active -- albeit covert -- "participants" in the Russian Civil War, suborning the White Army, under the command of the odious General Kolchak, to great embarassment and failure. (Another sacred cow tipper: Trotsky was the only other man, apart from Kemal Ataturk, to ever outmatch Winston Churchill on the battlefield):

In the Second World War the western powers, confronted by the defection of France, also intervened in French domestic affairs. While Russia's withdrawal from the war in 1917-1918 was inspired by revolutionary elements, it was under conservative, right-wing leadership that France withdrew in 1940. A comparative study of allied policy in these two cases would reveal striking similarities and differences. It would also show more clearly to what extent the anti-Bolshevik policy of the Entente was a reaction against the defection of an ally and to what extent it was prompted by class antagonism.

You could balloon around the world on the hot air that's been pumped into the annals of La Resistance. Sartre, De Gaulle, Malreaux... Probably the least alloyed instance of "Free France" defiance is the "Marseillaise" scene in Casablanca. And that was orchestrated (literally) by a Czech. --Michael Weiss [link]

First Annual Snarksmith PR Contest... Win your very own Snarksmith e-mail address [you@snarksmith.com] by doing one of the following ridiculously easy things:

1. Convince The Huffington Post that The Huffington Post is the only headline news worth mentioning on The Huffington Post;

2. Convince The Huffington Post to link to Snarksmith;

3. Make David Mamet cite Snarksmith in one of his celebrity guest-blogs on The Huffington Post (increased storage space for your email guaranteed if said citation is accompanied by liberal use of MametSpeak ("Baby, they're so cool, Disneyworld visits them);

4. Cause Laurie David to cry and admit to it in blog format (bonus opportunity to guest-blog on Snarksmith if said weeping is due to false rumors of an impending factory recall of the Toyota Prius, or somesuch "hybrid" car).

Good luck. Proof of fait accompli can be mailed to mike@snarksmith.com [Autographed "Cusack for President" t-shirt optional.] --Michael Weiss [link]

About Something, Good for Nothing... My favorite TV show - HBO's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" - has sadly been on hiatus for over a year now. But it seems creator Larry David has a new gig: he's blogging for Arianna Huffington's new website (which opened today) called "The Huffington Report."

David's first post is a sarcastic endorsement of John Bolton - he claims to identify with Bolton's penchant for yelling at inept underlings. Though mildly funny in it's own way, David's humor and perspective does not come through nearly as well on the page as it did on the early and mid years of Seinfeld and on Curb. Recent articles he penned for the New York Times and Rolling Stone make the point even clearer. Hey Larry: where's season 5 of Curb? --Mark Grueter [link]

Say It Ain't So... I haven't heard the new Weezer album, but bad as the last one was, I'm astonished that Pitchfork has decided to award them an abysmal 0.4 out of ten. Rob Mitchum's reaction to Make Believe is so visceral that he claims to be afraid to listen to the band's first two albums, lest he find that he retroactively doesn't like anything Weezer has done. I don't believe it can really be quite so bad. But then, I can't believe the first track (and single) is a Joan Jett cover.

The one half-decent song on the record, "This Is Such a Pity", fails to even maintain its status as a pleasant Cars homage, interjecting a guitar solo that sounds like it was cut from the original score to Top Gun.

Ouch. --Nic Duquette [link]

The Day After Cinco de Mayo, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

So Getting the Gourmet Tea Tonight... No, really. Not a euphemism.

Howard quits. "I'm too old for this shit." --Michael Weiss [link]

Simultaneous Site Redesigns... Both The New York Times and The Nation undergo web make-overs almost on the same day. Coincidence or vast liberal media conspiracy? As Gore Vidal said or wrote or just symbolically smirked, the only people adamantly opposed to conspiracy theories are the conspirators themselves. ('Course Gore's got good reason to take refuge behind that apothegm these days.) --Michael Weiss [link]
Thursday, May 5, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

It's the Stupidity, Economists: Part IV ('A New Hope')... I've been writing about Social Security for the last few days, here and here and here. Today I'd like to point out that something like privatized Social Security already exists, and consider what the success of these programs means.

The president would like to put about four percent of our pre-tax income into private accounts. But you don't need him to put a gun to your head to do it. It's easy to put four percent of your pre-tax income into a private savings account. Depending on where you work, what your income is, and what you think is the best bet for you, you can open an IRA, a 401(k), or a Roth IRA.

If you're like most Americans, you don't know what these actually mean. I'm in the same boat -- I've been trying to find a good summary all day, and the link above is the best I can find. But all function on the same principle: your income grows tax-free within the account. You never have to pay taxes on dividends and capital gains once your money is in the account. You can reinvest that extra money and not pay taxes on the dividends or capital gains earned with the taxes you didn't pay. Over decades, that small difference in the effective rate of compounding means a lot of extra money. And there are other tax advantages as well. Up to a certain limit, what you put into a traditional IRA is tax deductible. (It's line 25 on the 1040). You don't pay income tax on it until you withdraw it as a retiree, presumably in a lower tax bracket than while working. The 401(k) seems to be a corporate variation on the theme, often with matching funds thrown in by one's employer for free. (E.g., I get an extra $.35 in my 401(k) for every dollar I put in. If I worked there long enough, I could get a full dollar.) The Roth IRA works on the opposite principle -- you deposit after-tax money, but it grows tax-free and you don't owe anything on it when you retire and start withdrawing. All of these plans have severe tax penalties if you withdraw your money before you reach a minimum age.

Figuring out which of these plans works best for you would require time, a thick mass-market paperback, a couple pencils, and patience. There are rules and regulations I'm sure I'm failing to address in this quick summary. I'm not a financial planner. But the basic principle of the IRA is comparable to the basic principle of the private Social Security account. I think. I am flying blind on this comparison, so if there are any accountants out there, let me know where the gap lies.

So here is the true situation: we have been sold a debate on private Social Security accounts that pretends to be between the New Deal, protosocialist pay as you go system where big government runs the show, versus an "ownership society" where autonomous individuals have some choice in the investment of their federal pension funds. But the debate is really more comparable to the one over socialized medicine. The pay as you go system can't be scrapped, so private accounts would be a new program, not a replacement. The Democratic side would preserve the current patchwork system of tax-deferred investment, a patchwork where some people get great benefits from work (401k), some people buy their own plans (IRA), and some people just go without -- similar to our system of health insurance. Under the Bush plan, everybody would be forced to participate in such accounts, and would pay for it with a mandatory payroll chunk -- just like socialized medicine.

The best reason to set up private Social Security accounts, then, is not because it will make us an "ownership society" where even the poor own a piece of the market. That potential is already out there. The best argument is actually a big government one -- we're too stupid to save if nobody makes us do it.

How stupid are we? A growing body of economic literature has been studying companies with 401(k) plans with matching funds. The main determinant of particpation in these plans is not age, income, the generosity of the matching program, or education. It's the default action. The percentage of employees who particpate tends to be about forty percent if employees are asked if they would like to enroll. It's about seventy percent if they're asked if they would like to not enroll. The difference is whether they have to check a box.

You might think that gap is mostly young people who don't think about retirement much. But once you hit a certain age, you can begin to withdraw from your 401(k) without penalty, and even these older employees still participate at only about an eighty percent level if they have to opt in when they're hired -- even though they could withdraw their savings and matching funds any day without penalty. They're giving away FREE MONEY. We don't need to be turned into a society of owners. We might need big government to save us from our own stupidity. --Nic Duquette [link]

"Architect's" Digest... Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader of the Lebanese independence movement, had this to say of Paul Wolfowitz, shortly after the deputy defense secretary was targeted by "insurgents" who had fired mortar rockets into the al-Rashid Hotel in October, 2003:

"We hope the firing will be more precise and efficient [next time], so we get rid of this microbe and people like him in Washington who are spreading disorder in Arab lands, Iraq, and Palestine."

This is Mr. Jumblatt, reflecting on the subsequent change in Lebanese politics to Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, in Februrary, 2005:

"It's strange for me to say it, but this process of change has started because of the American invasion of Iraq," he said. "I was cynical about Iraq. But when I saw the Iraqi people voting three weeks ago, 8 million of them, it was the start of a new Arab world."

Things are far from equable and tidy in Iraq today, but for the man who was sufficiently fed up with the blood-bolted entropy that ruled the country for more three decades, this was never going to be an "easy" war to win. Nor was it ever exclusively about WMD. --Michael Weiss [link]

Saddam's Defense... Trying to top Ramsey Clark as personal counsel to Saddam Hussein is like trying to do one better than a pitbull for the mauling of toddlers. Yet it's apparently been done.

"He will take over again! Remember the case of Charles de Gaulle. De Gaulle with the Vichy government was like Saddam with the Allawi government. And history is everything!"

Indeed it is. And that's just one sally in the Brechtian duologue that ensues in William Langewiesche's bit-tongue profile of Ziad al-Khasawneh, the Jordanian lawyer heading up -- ahem -- "The Defense and Support Committee of President Saddam Hussein, His Comrades, and All POWs and Detainees in Iraq." (By the time the mere credentials in this case are read in court, Ratko Mladic will be on slow rotisserie roast in a tandem electric chair with Milosevic.)

Among the many amazing facts and figures established by the defense:

1. Saddam was actually captured months before December, 2003, in a house in his hometown of Tikrit. He'd been drugged and let to waste away into his farouche "Prime Time Live" resemblence to a back-up drummer for Phish.

2. Last December's tsunami in Southeast Asia killed 20,000 American soldiers, the lives and deaths of which have been concealed by the Pentagon.

3. The invasion of Iraq was a Zionist plot to wipe out the Iraqi people. (Snore. I get this beamed into my PDA over Corn Flakes every morning, Ziad. Come on, bubbe. There's no "there" there. Why not sex things up a bit? A Franciscan plot hatched by the Vatican to convert Iraqis into strict Roman Catholics? I like.)

4. Yassir Arafat had been fatally poisoned by the CIA. (About fucking time.)

--Michael Weiss [link]

Long Live Trotsky! Err, Yushchenko!... Natalia Dmytruk was the sign language interpreter for Ukraine's state-run television network. Last November, during the first rumblings of what would later be dubbed the "Orange Revolution," she had to go on the air and relate to her deaf countrymen the government's boilerplate bullshit about the electoral victory of Viktor Yanuchovyk, corrupt merchant of the status quo and Vladimir Putin's draft pick for maintaining an unruffled Russian suzerainty. One day, however, Natalia signed the following:

"I am addressing everybody who is deaf in the Ukraine. Our president is Victor Yushchenko. Do not trust the results of the central election committee. They are all lies... And I am very ashamed to translate such lies to you. Maybe you will see me again -- "

Now she's an honored hero who courageously spoke truth to power. (You know, just like Bill Maher.) --Michael Weiss [link]

Liberal Contradiction?... John Walsh warns that Air America is becoming nothing more than a "shill for the Democratic Party" and takes aim specifically at Al Franken. Franken, a presumed opponent of the war, makes it clear that he "supports the troops" and believes we need to "stay the course." Walsh argues that the idea of a withdrawal from Iraq is no longer debated even on Air America. I don't often listen to Air America (I once tried to listen to Jerry Springer... couldn't stomach it) but it is disturbing to hear that the radio network is being taken over by the Democratic Party.

Anyway, I've always wondered how those who so adamantly oppose the war in Iraq can still "support the troops" as if our military wasn't an all-volunteer brigade. Why would you support the very individuals who are willfully committing the very acts of violence you so ostensibly abhor? --Mark Grueter [link]

Paula's Scandal... First off, Paula Abdul is not a judge on American Idol. The vox populi decide the winners of each contest. So, Abdul and the others are in fact just hosts, not judges. And unlike Simon what's-his-name, Abdul is not opinionated. She's just a pretty face that sort of sits there for the hell of it. Whether or not she slept with contestant Corey Clark or even offered him suggestions for his on-stage performance is irrelevant, especially since he didn't win anything. ABC can run all the investigations they want; they're just wasting their time along with everyone else's. The "people" are going to vote for whomever they want, regardless of whether or not Paula Abdul happens to be fucking them. --Mark Grueter [link]
No, We Won't Vote Conservative (Because We Never Have)... It's a Morrissey lyric, followed up by the chorus, which is the title of the song: "Everyone lies." Let's hope everyone doesn't today and Labor wins.

Hitch and The Weekly Standard endorse Blair. You should, too.

Couple years back, when Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial win had everyone talking about altering the Constitution to let foreign nationals run for president, I told Hitch they ought to do this for Blair instead. He'd have had my vote in '04. He'd have had Hitch's, too. --Michael Weiss [link]

 
ENDNOTES, REVIEWS & NOTICES
Stalin, by Robert Service  
Servicing Stalin
by Michael Weiss
(Originally published in Stop Smiling magazine) [link]

Someone at this stage should do for Joseph Stalin what Don DeLillo, in his novel White Noise, did for Adolph Hitler: Give him his own academic department. Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall, assorted articles and monographs have disgorged the goods on the former Soviet Union and its miserable ruler of three decades. Most recently, Simon Sebag Montiefore's Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar examined what can only be called the methodical caprice of the modern -- and fully modernized -- authoritarian. Here, at last, was Stalin's Satyricon: decades of after-hours Politburo meetings, with food fights, adolescent pranks, and creepy man-on-man waltzes, where the head of Polish security presses his lips to the ear of a foreign minister and whispers sweet somethings about “infiltrations” -- and not the kind you'd expect under the circumstances. [Read more...]

Galloway  
Fascism With the Face It Deserves
by Michael Weiss
[link]

Tune in to Hitchens v. Galloway, Wednesday, September 14, at 7 PM, broadcast live from Baruch College in Manhattan. But first read up on the awful truth about Boy George:

-- George Galloway & Iraq's Oil For Food Program: Facts, Falsehoods, and Misconceptions

-- Galloway In His Own Words

Darwin  
If Children Don't Understand Evolution, Maybe It's Because We Don't Teach Them Science
by Nic Duquette
[link]

Neither side of the evolution debate is able to address the issue usefully in the classroom. When President Bush suggested that "intelligent design" be introduced in schools so students could understand the vital cultural debate we are having, he was denounced as a political opportunist and scientific philistine. But the president is correct on this issue: schoolchildren should be introduced to the principles of so-called intelligent design theory and encouraged to hammer out the scientific and theological issues at stake. A spirited, ugly debate on intelligent design from coast to coast is the best way to make sure Darwin's insights are introduced to students well. All participants in the evolution debate seem to believe that the school system is training children to be evolutionists, and that the introduction of intelligent design will undermine unquestioning belief in natural selection. That's absurd. The opposite is true. [more...]

Nusle Bridge  
The Prague Fall: Communism's Death Hasn't Stopped the Self-Inflicted Kind
by Orli Sharaby
[link]

Even in the warmest of months, life can seem cold and dreary. So it was, presumably, for some anonymous fellow on a bright and sunny Tuesday morning a few weeks ago. As I made my way unsuspectingly to the tram at 8:10 that day, incidentally, without yet having had any coffee, I suddenly came face to face with self-inflicted death, splattered unsympathetically across the tram tracks directly underneath the Nusle Bridge. A shocking sight, to be sure, and one which made me rather unfashionably late to work, not to mention the fact that it's haunted me ever since. The crude outline of the victim has long since faded from the pavement, but it remains forever etched in my memory, from time to time bringing to the surface ruminations on suicide and what would cause a person to end his own life. I mean, it's a harsh world out there. Leaving aside the uncertainty of living in a major city in the age of "sacred terror," millions of horsepower zoom past us everyday as we cross the street; diseases threaten to gobble our t-cells; earthquakes rend holes in the very ground beneath our feet...Isn't it enough to leave death to chance?

Apparently not for the hundreds of thousands of people who kill themselves every year, citing -- presumably in suicide notes -- marital problems, depression, mental or physical disease, or fear of police (yes, really) as reasons for their "take no prisoners" attitude toward their own lives. In the Czech Republic in 2003, the last year for which records are available, approximately 1700 people committed suicide, thankfully not all from the bridge above my house. When one researches global trends in suicide, which I discovered is a much less repulsive task than one might imagine, certain interesting facts emerge. One is that women are anywhere from 2 to 6 times less likely to die at their own hands then men are (except in China, where women are more inclined), but that they're at least two times more likely than men to try.

The statistics on suicide also point to the high numbers in European countries versus Latin American and Middle Eastern nations. This would seem to lend truth to the popular opinion that a religious commitment all but inoculates a person from committing the act. Church and other religious leaders claim that integration in that kind of social network provides worshipers the necessary support system and sense of belonging to choose life. More likely, fear of burning eternally in hell is the predominant deterrent for conscientious churchgoers. Whatever the case, the claim that atheists and agnostics are more likely to kill themselves out of desperation falls apart when one takes into consideration Poland, a country that boasts a population wherein 97% of citizens are strictly Catholic. Poland has a comparable suicide rate to that of the Czech Republic, a country, as we all know, that is one of the most atheistic in the world.

Moreover, neighbors Czech Republic and Poland share their status as high-suicide-rate nations with the entire region of Eastern Europe, including Lithuania, which lays claim to the highest global rate of suicide. So maybe it's not about religion, and it's not about girls and boys; maybe suicide is just another social phenomenon to be put neatly in the "it's because of Communism" box. And true enough, Prague's Suicide Bridge, giving fatalism an inconvenient potential energy just above my apartment, was built from 1968-1973 by Communist authorities not only to alleviate traffic congestion but also as a grandiose display of military and cultural authority. But as the thousands who jump, hang, shoot, suffocate, and overdose to their deaths in the former Eastern Bloc can attest, Big Brother left his legacy in the region in far less showy, but just as pervasive, ways.

The Aristocrats  
Peer Review: The Aristocrats, In Theory and Practice
by Michael Weiss
[link]

Within the vernacular of modern show biz there exists a system of taxonomy that sounds as if it were dreamt up by a Variety editor with an annoying speech impediment: "director's director," "actor's actor," "comedian's comedian." Whatever the species under consideration, the genus is instantly recognizable as much by its implied shortcomings as by its signaled attributes. The limelight has probably been elusive for the comedian's comedian despite a white-hot talent which only the pros can appreciate and, to coin another commonplace of the industrial lingo, "hope to work with someday." Not for him is the blockbuster weekend or household celebrity. The best he can hope for is his name whispered in hushed tones, in moist magazine profiles of his box office betters; a moment of amplified applause during an embarassing cameo in some award show montage; or, now that the success of independent film is largely brokered on the success of the semi-anonymous underdog, a documentary all about his little old self...

The Aristocrats is not about a comedian's comedian, but it is about something slightly more elect and revealing: a comedian's comedy. As with any mercantile guild or philosophers circle, the closed circuit of the entertainer is worth investigating on social merits alone. Who are these people and what do they do when they're not working? Even if the answer is, Still working, what's different when the cameras aren't on? This is why old Friar's Club and Dean Martin roasts are now available on DVD and why books like Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live top the bestsellers lists. It's not the ham schtick, bad haircuts, or parade of bold-faced (and mostly dead) names that fascinate us; it's the access to a rare-glimpsed culture of comity or commiseration, how those bold-faced names intimately know one another, or pretend to do, anyway. It's the cant-free chaos of shoptalk, the personnel abuse -- whether ironic and well-meaning, or sincere and irate -- that makes these spectacles no different than those of a vaguely functional family that drinks together. From scripted intentionality to failure-friendly improvisation. All certificates of inauthenticity have been voided as a little something extra for the fans. Actually, failure-friendly doesn't quite cut it: failure, and a temporary immunity to it, is the whole point. David Letterman's monologue would have been consigned to the dust-bin of Nick-at-Nite reruns a long time ago were this not true.

And this is pretty much the conceit behind a legendary inside joke of vaudeville that's been passed down through the ages and told mostly offstage as a form of self-entertainment. It's built upon the thinnest and most shiftable armatures of form, a Zen-like rock garden of humor. Ready? Here goes: A family visits a talent agent. The father tells the agent they've got this amazing, must-see act. "What is it you do?," asks the agent. Now insert the vilest, most elaborate thought-images of carnality, incest, bestiality and scatology you can dream up on the spot and sustain indefinitely. (Grandmas and newborn infants aren't just fair game, they're de rigueur.) Finish with one justifiably horrified agent who has a single follow-up question, the name of the act, and you've got the whole shebang of The Aristocrats, which is also the punchline. The same hoary set-up is told and retold and with alternating levels of gusto and flourish by everyone who's still alive and ever made you laugh. Or never made you laugh, but will do so here. George Carlin, Gilbert Gottfried, Bob Saget, Drew Carey and Cartman from South Park all spray their own brand of liquid filth to enormously hilarious effect. (That Gottfried, the Patron Saint of the Onstage Reincarnation, and Saget, who charitably donates his Frankenstein rendering of the joke to the "kids from Full House," are two of the funniest in this capacity is another testament to the you-only-thought-you-knew world of professional stand-up.)

You might say that such a documentary, which is the badly molested brainchild of Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza, depends on a one-trick pony, but given what ponies are rhetorically put through for two hours, you'd only court banality with that description. Instead, what's been produced here is a very smart and engrossing work of history, deconstruction and reconstruction of a near-Iliadic text by academics you wouldn't mind reading even when they do get a touch pedantic. I suppose it was inevitable that the gender and race distinctions of "blue" comedy would get its exegesis, but even this is handled skillfully by Chris Rock, Whoopi Goldberg and Phyllis Diller, charmingly buttoned-up about the obscene, all the while wearing a muu-muu. "I fainted the first time I heard it" -- which leads you to wonder what poor Phyllis must have made of Sarah Silverman's exquisitely tasteless interpretation of the bit, ending in the slow-dawn realization of her own rape.

A few years back Jerry Seinfeld made a documentary called Comedian. The problem with that compulsive peak behind the curtain was that it attempted to take a wildly inordinate success story -- about the richest and most high-profile master of observation, ever -- and boil it back down to its humble, on-the-road essences. The duds remained duds because of a complete lack of self-consciousness about them, not to mention a too-literal presentation of the agonies of invention by a mediocre supporting cast. Whereas with The Aristocrats no one hogs the mic, if only because of the deliberately thankless material everyone has to work with. That's the fun. Small and formulaic imperceptibly building to outsize and unpredictable climax is also one definition of artistry. Indeed, it says more about the true nature of comedy that a shit-soaked, uncle-fucking mongoloid girl of seven somehow represents the more attractive side of an industry filled with bank-breaking personality disorders like Jerry, and self-obsessed primadonnas like Orny Adams.

Before Sunset  
Freaky Deaky: A Rogue Economist Has Fun, and So Do We... Up to a Point
by Max Gross
Buy it from Amazon
[link]

Probably the best thing that can be said about Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything is that it makes for excellent cocktail party nibbles.

Who wouldn't like to regale one's friends with some of the weird avenues Levitt and Dubner explore? The book tells why public school teachers might encourage their students to cheat on a standardized test; why a real estate broker would gladly sell a house for less than its market worth; why sumo wrestlers are willing to fix matches; why a swimming pool is more dangerous than a handgun. And so on.

Freakonomics is essentially an expansion of a fawning article that Dubner wrote for The New York Times Magazine a few years back about Levitt, a young economist at the University of Chicago, who specializes in economies that have little to do with money. (The article is quoted -- embarrassingly -- throughout the book.) The research is all Levitt's, and the book is a pop-rewrite of Levitt's academic papers.

Since it has come out, Freakonomics has been collecting nothing but lavish praise from a lot of highbrow reviewers. "If Indiana Jones were an economist, he'd be Steven Levitt," wrote Steven Landsburg, in the Wall Street Journal. The New Yorker's science writer, Malcolm Gladwell, lent the book a blurb for its cover: "Prepare to be dazzled." There were many others.

But I would advise against preparing oneself to be dazzled; on the contrary, I would say that one should prepare to be slightly disappointed. It would be ridiculous to say that there is nothing worthwhile in this book, but I found the book to be scattershot and unconvincing, in which serious topics (such as abortion, crime and drugs) were looked at in a somewhat sophomoric way.

In what should have been the most engaging chapter, "Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?" Levitt and Dubner look at the economy of the crack-cocaine world:

A few years back one of Levitt's colleagues befriended a Chicago crack gang and, in the process, managed to obtain one of the gang's ledgers. (Yes, apparently crack gangs keep accounts.)

It turns out that crack gangs are run very similarly to Fortune 500 companies; the gang had an enforcer, a treasurer, a CEO (who was a college educated business major) and dozens of junior-level dealers, who earned pitiful wages working a highly dangerous job (less than minimum wage; many dealers had to supplement their incomes working at places like McDonald's).

The economy of crack dealing is, of course, fascinating, and the chapter smells of what could have been first-rate journalism, but Levitt and Dubner choose to ask the wrong questions; the chapter asks why, if crack dealing is so profitable, most dealers live in the slums? (With their mothers, no less.) It is as if Levitt and Dubner watched movies like "The Godfather" and "Goodfellas", and took them for literal truth.

It's no surprise to anyone who has ever walked through a slum (or even picked up a newspaper) that most crack dealers lead Hobbseian, squalid lives. It almost goes without saying that crime would obey a certain pecking order -- that the Pablo Escobars and John Gottis of crime do very well, and the foot soldiers would not do nearly as well.

Most of us would respond, "Duh."

This chapter only serves to emphasize the overall slightness of the book as a whole.

More troubling is the chapter entitled, "Where Have All the Criminals Gone?" which explains why the legalization of abortion might have led to reduced crime rates.

This chapter begins by asking why crime went down during the 1990s when all experts were predicting it would go up. Some attribute the dip to the booming economy; others say it has to do with stricter gun laws; a few said that it was because more police were put on the force.

But Levitt posits that the dip came almost exactly 16 years after Roe v. Wade took effect -- exactly the same years that most thugs enter their criminal prime. Maybe there was less crime because fewer criminals were being born...

For both liberals and conservatives, the implications of this argument are horrific; for conservatives -- who have always prided themselves on believing in law-and-order -- Levitt's argument would validate abortion. For liberals the argument smacks of a soft form of eugenics; that poor people -- and all the minorities that live in poverty -- are criminals, and that they are being weeded out.

The book has facts to back itself up; in the states where abortion was legal prior to Roe, crime rates went down sooner. And in 1966, after Ceausescu made abortion illegal in Romania, the reverse happened: crime started to go up about 16 years later. (These facts seem a little wispy when making such a startling claim. I would have liked to have seen much more evidence.)

Levitt and Dubner have remained proudly noncommittal, politically speaking, about this chapter -- which, no matter what side of the political aisle you come from, is a major cop-out. At a time when a new Supreme Court Justice might well decide the fate of abortion (as well as the legislation that has been chipping away at a woman's right to an abortion) it seems too important an argument to treat as neutrally as Levitt and Dubner.

But, then, that seems to be the general gestalt of the book. Freakonomics might flirt with serious topics, and maybe that's the only way to write a best seller these days, but it will ultimately be relegated into a quaint anecdote.

A Revalued Yuan Means a Cheaper Dollar. Will China Buy General Motors?
by Nic Duquette
[link]

The very idea that one of the iconic corporations of American manufacturing could be bought up by Asians may strike most Americans as impossible. However, it is not only feasible, but the recent revaluation of the Chinese currency suggests that this may be exactly what China is planning. Like the auto worker in the Johnny Cash song, China's government and manufacturers may be assembling all they need one piece at a time. [more]

Before Sunset  
In the Gloaming: Before Sunset on DVD
Buy it from Amazon [link]

Of the many virtues of seeing Julie Delpy do anything for roughly ninety minutes, her strutting Nina Simone impersonation in the very last frame of Before Sunset was easily the sexiest thing committed to celluloid in the last year. "Baby... You are gonna miss. That. Plane." I know. Planes, trains, automobiles, Vienna, Paris. Who wouldn't write a bestselling novel, thinly disguised as an all-points enchantress bulletin, and tour the Continent with it just to find her again? There's absolutely no reason why a sequel to a self-contained story of circadian rhythms should have turned out better than the original. But then, your thirties are supposed to be more interesting than your twenties. And it makes sense that not having seen each other for a decade (oh, come on, if they had met six months later, would there be a sequel?) has almost estranged them back into first encounter mode. So we get another day, another peripatetic chatfest with some tingly, but also prickly, catching up to do. Are they both presently with other people? Yes. Does one of them now have a child? Uh-huh. Does any of this matter remotely? Maybe. Kudos to Linklater for resorting again to the flickering neon question mark of a denouement, which for these two characters obviously works. Though plenty of that older-and-wiser badinage can drift back into post-college Eurorail banality ("How can you possibly think that the world is not going straight to hell?" belongs to a different French Celine, in a different decade), this generally occupies the realm of how real, flawed human beings talk to and seduce each other. I can't believe I'd live to say this, but a director's instinct to let his actors write their own dialogue has finally paid off. Hawke and Delpy have a frightening natural chemistry (I even hear one of them is single these days) and you get the sense -- and ain't it always the reaffirmingest kind -- that they derived as much pleasure making the film as we do watching it. Until 2014 in the land of the midnight sun. And make it fucking work this time. --MW

Revenge of the Sith  
Evil Will Always Win Because Good Is Dumb: Episode III
by Michael Weiss

A lot of the trouble George Lucas has faced since going down the long slide into bathos and shattered expectation stems from the very phenomenon he helped create: the Movie Event. I'm probably wrong about this (it's my lede, bite me), but before Star Wars I don't think American cinema had quite attained the degree of cultural inescapability it has now -- what Don DeLillo in another context calls the 'world-hum.' (Where were you standing when Alec Guinness phoned it in?) Radio peaked with Orson Wells' Martian invasion hoax; television inaugurated the age of historical simultaneity via the live broadcast; but Star Wars alerted everyone to the news that from now on, going to the movies was no longer just a mode of "passive entertainment." No. It was democratic mythmaking in progress.

So it's ironic that Lucas's long-awaited return to the franchise that invented the modern consensus fable was met, in 1998, with almost unanimous hostility. Let's see, the first installment: a disposable children's cartoon best remembered for a talking upright fish for whom the seemingly inevitable line, "No woman no cry," was just an anti-defamation lawsuit away. Round two: a saccharine love story sprinkled liberally over a bland admixture of human cloning and "separatist" rebellion. Let simmer until plot thickens.

The good news is Revenge of the Sith -- or Episode III, or Bush in Space, or whatever the fuck it's called -- does pay down some of the deficit amassed by Lucas's latter-day gambles. No, it's not better than the original Star Wars, but it is well-paced, well-acted -- especially given the moody, brooding circumstances of the western/samurai trope -- and far more attentive to the unities of dramatic storytelling; it actually draws you in this time. Like the last scene in the final episode of Seinfeld, a giddy nostalgia is generated by the distinct impression of having "been here before," except that in this case we know exactly where we're going: back to the future of 1977. Oh, and a Promethean fall from grace, a prophecy betrayed, and something about the struggle for the fate of the universe -- all that shuffles things along, too.

To bring us up to speed, then: Anakin Skywalker is now secretly married to Padme, much to the contravention of an austere (and vaguely homoerotic) honor code for Jedi journeymen. Yet domestic life in an Ikea-furnished apartment seems to have only heightened his abilities as a fighter pilot and lightsaber swashbuckler. As a result, Anakin is now the Page Six apprentice of the galaxy, best known for saving the lives of other heroes and plenipotentiaries, not least of which belongs to Obi-Wan Kenobi, his (ahem) "master." The film opens with dizzying space battle that is shot and edited by someone who's been begging us to hear him out on the glories of CGI and has finally provided the key evidence for his case. Skywalker and Kenobi are on a mission to rescue Chancellor Palpatine, believed to have been kidnapped by the nasty Count Dooku, played by Christopher Lee who looks like an advertisement for the undead he once was. But of course the droll, froggy-voiced chancellor -- imagine Gore Vidal, only funnier and with better politics -- moonlights as the "Dark Lord of the Sith," prime mover of cosmic misfortune and chief villain of all six films. He's orchestrated a phony civil war, with nary a Jabba the Moore having hipped to him, the better to facilitate the transformation of the republic into his very own totalitarian empire. This is a project in which Anakin will, unwittingly at first, serve as helpmeet.

Now the Sith is either a schismatic sect of the Jedi order founded on a kind of alchemical interpretation of The Force, or else it's Douglas Feith's old department at the Pentagon. I'm really not so sure since the macedoine of ancient and contemporary histories and contradictory philosophies makes for a befuddled morality play indeed. Leaving aside the idea of a chancellor winding up a genocidal baddie dressed in black (forget ham, that's just spam-fisted), at one point a Dark Side-lured Anakin remarks to Obi-Wan: "Either you're with me, or you're my enemy." To this comes the sententious reply that "only a Sith thinks in absolutes." Yet Obi-Wan will soon thereafter invoke the giveaway Manichean term "evil," against which Anakin submits a claim to relative "points of view"! "Fanatical obscurantism" is something that even the arcane Leo Strauss deplored. I've got to wonder what the hell the "noble Wookie lie" must sound like.

I'd also like to take a moment and give credit to the wrongfully defamed Hayden Christensen. He learned from Shattered Glass that overwrought post-adolescence needn't package itself as a cardboard cutout set to bleat every five minutes, and he's proven under more demanding conditions that this is a knowledge he intends to keep. Good for him. His pissiness has matured into a respectable angry young man's grumble (that bulge in the forehead is genetic -- have you no heart, A.O. Scott?) which leaves you half sorry for the chap as he suppurates and smolders on the volcanic shore where Darth Vader is satanically born.

Despite what you've read, the dialogue in this installment isn't nearly as face-coveringly embarrassing as it was in the other go-rounds. Some of Yoda's Yiddish left-dislocational syntax would trip up Noam Chomsky on a good day, but otherwise the signs are all there of Tom Stoppard's cautious, and no doubt gleefully self-contained, script-doctoring. (C-3PO and R2-D2 Are Dead might have made for an interesting failure in its own right.) When Natalie Portman says, "Hold me like you did by the lake on Naboo," I winced more out of memory of her having opened her mouth at all in Closer. And the other critically celebrated clunker, "She's lost the will to live," is delivered by a medical droid who couldn't order 300 cc's of Penzoil Plus without sounding ridiculous. So no harm there, either.

But would it have killed Lucas to give Samuel L. Jackson the adieu his being zapped out the window of a multi-storied government building requires? "You God damn right I sense a disturbance in the Force!"

FDR Stamp  
It's the Stupidity, Economists: The Debate Over Social Security
by Nic Duquette
[link] [Click New Dealer to read.]

The whole four-part series has been compiled and edited together. You can now view it here as The Tractatus Fiscalo-Deepshiticus.

Nouvelle Vague  
Nouvelle Vague: Putting the High-Concept Into "Concept Album"
by Nic Duquette
[link] [Click album cover to buy.]

Lately I've been listening to Internet streams of Santa Monica's iconic public radio station KCRW, which might as well drop the syndicated news programs for an "all covers and remixes, all the time" format. I don't think I've heard an original version yet, except for one song from Guero that sounded like it was a rimix of a different Beck song. But one day, rising from the seamless sea of trip-hop was a thoroughly unironic lounge jazz cover of "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

If you're anything like me, you double-took that sentence the way I did the song itself. It's the leadoff track from the self-titled debut Nouvelle Vague, a French band that recorded an album of British post-punk in a Brazilian bossanova style with a half-dozen guest chanteuses. ("Nouvelle Vague" translates to "new wave" in English and bossa nova in Portuguese.)

Had I never heard the album, I would have stayed away from it. After all, these sort of experiments usually have the Cakey toxicity of those "ironic" punk covers of TV theme songs that circulate through freshman dorms, or at least the one-shot novelty of that Flaming Lips cover of the Kylie Minogue song. (You know, the version with the tympani.)

But this is one such idea that actually works more often than not. If anything, the arrangements generally strip the songs of hipster smugness and lay bare the emotional core in a way synthesizers and depressed British dudes often didn't. It doesn't always work. But what works is as surprising as what doesn't.

Songs that should be unkillable come off mediocre. Teenage Kicks doesn't even sound especially different. Guns of Brixton sounds stiff. (What kind of time signature do you put on a French band's bossanova cover of an English reggae tune?) Friday Night Saturday Morning and Sorry for Laughing give up on the bossa nova thing for the most part and are unexciting. Killing Joke's Psyche stands out on the only song on the album that is worth getting up and crossing the room to skip over.

But there's a lot of gems, too. Depeche Mode's "I Just Can't Get Enough" is positively giddy. The Cure's "A Forest" is very good, with jungle sound effects deployed well on top of the mix. "Making Plans For Nigel" is better than the original. "I Melt For You": who would have thought Modern English could ever sound cool again? Weirdest of all, "Too Drunk To Fuck" actually turns the Dead Kennedys into a maddening cocktease.

It's a pretty good album with excellent moments. If nothing else, hop over to iTunes and drop a buck for "Love Will Tear Us Apart" and "Just Can't Get Enough." Throw them onto an iPod shuffle and wait for these songs to come from nowhere on some subway ride.

Affirmative Conservatives II: David Horowitz and "Academic Freedom"
by Michael Weiss
[link]

Before I matriculated at college, I was out at a bar with my sister's friends from medical school, one of whom had brought a date. I don't remember much about this woman except that she seemed very interested in the post-adolescent limbo I was in, having just graduated from high school and occupying the threshold of a supposedly "formative" experience in life. Which cask would I be maturing in? Brideshead Revisited or Animal House? Or someplace in between? One of the worries I brought up to her was that I didn't much see myself as a frat guy, yet I was going to a school where Saturday nights (not to mention Monday through Friday nights) were measured in kegs of cheap beer and gallons of more costly vomit. How was I going to avoid this scene? "Oh well, if you're against all that, that's good," she said. "It'll be four years of learning how to deal with people and conditions you'll be dealing with your whole life." Fucking twit, I thought as I smiled and mumbled false appreciation for this unglimpsed bright side. [more]

Affirmative Conservatives
by Nic Duquette
[link]

Russel Jacoby's new article in the Nation ponders the growing pressure on universities to hire more conservative professors to balance the longstanding leftism of campuses. The argument is usually phrased in terms of "intellectual diversity." The piece is typical Nation rinse-and-recycle, with sentences that begin, "Conservatives claim that..." The ironic knife-twist promised in the title barely appears, and then not until the end of the third page. In the interim, Jacoby drools remarks like, "Angst besets the triumphant conservatives. Those who purge Darwin from America's schools must yell in order to drown out their own misgivings, the inchoate realization that they are barking at the moon." I thought this was sarcastic until I reread it a couple times. [more]

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Goedel, by Rebecca Goldstein  
A Beautiful Mind: Rebecca Goldstein's Goedel
by Michael Weiss
[link]

It surely says something about the slanted, flickering halos we place atop the figures of twentieth-century "genius" that Rebecca Goldstein's wonderful new study of the life and mind of Kurt Goedel doesn't get around to the math that made him famous until around page 150. This is no fault of Ms. Goldstein, who artfully and engagingly carpenters a stage of historical and philosophical preconditions that led to the eventual discovery of "incompleteness."

Goedel, Escher, Bach. Einstein, Goedel, Heisenberg. The umlaut hovers over that "o" like the twin theorems over the head of the agape initiate. What's an obscure Austrian name doing in troikas of such forbidding company, anyway? Goedel is the third tenor, the "other guy." There never was a Philip Glass opera called Goedel on the Beach. No taut, world-traveled Michael Frayn duologue ever clocked in as Vienna. A poster of the ferrety logician's hand imperceptibly tracing itself will not become a staple of the computer desktop background. And when tortured prodigies of number theory do gain some measure of popular recognition, they get Ben Affleck as their confidant in the suburbs, not the nimbus-domed author of the most famous equation in history.

The man in the street may have heard of Kurt Goedel, but that man is on wobblier footing than when terms like "relativity" or "uncertainty" or "fugue" are invoked. Like each of these schema-altering concepts, Goedel's theorems have been misunderstood and misappropriated by all the usual suspects in cerebral larceny: postmodernists, creationists, people who think "It all depends on what you mean by genocide" is a moral argument. "Incompleteness," then, also seems to be referring to Goedel's legacy, which is... what, exactly?

In 1930, at the age of twenty-four, a University of Vienna graduate student quietly, and to yawning initial reception, established the following: 1. There are provably unprovable but true propositions in any formal system that is consistent and contains arithmetic; 2. The consistency of such a system cannot be proven.

These discoveries may look bite-sized enough to fit comfortably inside a nutshell, but they shook modern epistemology, in all its kingdoms of infinite space, to the core and blew the living daylights out of regnant Continental notions about objective reality. Not bad for a pre-doc.

Goedel's proofs scuppered the positivism of the famed Vienna Circle, which was embodied most charismatically by Ludwig Wittgenstein, actually more of a tangential member. Founded on the Protagorean, or Sophist, idea that "man is the measure of all things," the Circle held that nothing beyond sensory experience was truly "meaningful." Touch, taste, smell, etc. -- that's all we should ever bother to work with as everything else is metaphysical bunkum. In Goedel's opinion, which was fundamentally Platonic, man was not the measure of all things. There was indeed a pure absolute reality, albeit one which could only be apprehended through the tenebrous lenses of probability and presupposition. Nothing wrong with them, however, since they formed the bases of a priori reasoning and hence all mathematics. (When Einstein later formed his peripatetic friendship with Goedel at the Institute for Advanced Research at Princeton, the physicist confessed to sharing this belief in a "higher," semi-translucent realm. Einstein dubbed it the "out yonder.")

The positivists' favorite mathematician, the one they believed they could trust not to futz with their worldview, was the formalist David Hilbert. This was because his bete noire, like theirs, was intuition, that unreliable gatekeeper of the "out yonder." Hilbert's desire was to create what he called "consistent formal systems" which would drain mathematics of any descriptive relation to external phenomena: numbers, sets of objects, etc. Like the recent ads for Las Vegas, "What happens here, stays here," formalism decreed that mathematical systems should only consist of stipulated rules governing symbols that were internally "meaningful" (having semantic value within the system, but no mundane representation to upset the positivists.) Simple enough, except that no math is an island; even in formalism, to get from one system to the next requires a point of origin, a hub system from which all others can be then be accessed. Axioms and the rule of inference, which logically allows any pre-proven theorem to act as "given" in the proof of a new one, traditionally served as the bridges for convenient systems-hopping. But what happens when an axiom is divested of its real-world significance? Where one used to rely on a fingers-crossed "best guess" assumption, now the spadework had to be done using the "provability" of symbols worth nothing outside their own domains.

The hub was arithmetic. The first challenge was proving its consistency, i.e. showing that no logical contradictions could be found in the stuff everyone learns in grade school. A contradiction proves anything; it's the anarchist monkey wrench tossed into a well-oiled machine. The second challenge was proving arithmetic complete, that its logic was tautologous. Accomplish these two things, and formalist revolution could begin.

Goedel stopped the revolution in its tracks. Through metamathematical legerdemain, he was able to use the very syntax (the rules) of a uniquely designed, number-based formal system to both compute and comment upon the meaning (semantic value) contained therein. The numbers he used symbolized starting-point logical propositions that, although not actually paradoxical, were weird and entendre-loaded enough to be saying something about themselves. E.g., "This very statement is not provable in this system." When this self-cannibalizing logic worked itself out, Goedel had produced contradictions of Russian doll-complexity, one integument of meaning masking another.

Goldstein elegantly compares Goedel's winning style of being able to have his cake and pop out of it too to the dramatic conceit of the "play within a play." Specifically, the kind where the characters of the one become "actors" within the other and then use that medium say relevant things about their character selves. She cites Leoncavallo's opera I Pagliacci as she might have done the season of Seinfeld where George and Jerry work on a television series a lot like the one Jason Alexander and the real Jerry Seinfeld had been appearing in. And while I suppose Hamlet technically doesn't qualify because the "players" in Shakespeare's tragedy were all out-sourced allegorizers, Tom Stoppard's paradox-loving comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead most certainly does. The syntactic-semantic barbershop pole around which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern coil their celebrated "question game?" Very Goedelian. Indeed, the filiations between mathematics and literature were never more finely exampled, especially at the self-referential and meta levels. Goedel's theorems are said to consist of a logical "double speak." Letting aside the coincidence of another "Goldstein" who factors significantly in 1984, is Orwell's novel of thwarted political revolution itself not brokered upon a clever plot involution? Winston Smith is handed a book encoded within a book: a fabricated essay theorizing the motives of a factitious society, stuck between the pages of that society's updated "formal system" of grammar. Elsewhere we hear of the "Alice-in-Wonderland" model Goedel braided around Einstein's field equations for relativity; or the "rigorous rule-bound logic" he admired in Kafka's writing.

Actually, Kafka affords an easy segue into the kind of psychic distress that would come to define Goedel's life following his annus mirabilis. Goldstein uses a good chunk of her book exploring the logician's chronic bouts of paranoia and delusion. His fear of being poisoned by refrigerator fumes and food ultimately led to his demise: the medical record indicated "malnutrition and inanition" as the causes of death. A no less acute, if slightly more justified, sensitivity lay in Goedel's hearing his unorthodox ideas -- which only grew more unorthodox and less remunerative as he got older -- ridiculed in public. This led to reclusiveness and the mournful, too-familiar symptoms of a heavyweight intellectual losing his shit. Some of these read like plagiarism of Bellow's Herzog: the tranches of go-where notes; the unpublished papers and unposted letters; the mounting agoraphobia and anthrophobia.

We know from Douglas Hofstatder that an overactive imagination can produce "swirly, twisty, vortex-like" patterns of rational and creativity marvels. But we also know from the historian Richard Hofstatder that there's a much darker side to this synaptic industry. In his classic essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," this second Hofstatder made an observation by no means exclusive to styles American or political: "The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms; he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds" [Italics added].

The cartel ran out for Kurt Goedel at a rather unripe age.

So we get Noam Chomsky once running into the "greatest logician since Aristotle" and asking him what he was working on. The MIT linguist "received an answer that probably nobody since the seventeenth-century's Leibnitz had given: 'I am trying to prove that the laws of nature are a priori.'" Yeah, any day now.

A less melancholy anecdote involves Goedel's precarious navigation of the a posteriori laws of naturalization. Having obsessed over his US citizenship exam, he uncovered a "logical contradiction" in one of the clauses of the Constitution, a loophole he believed could eventually be exploited for the purpose of transforming democracy into dictatorship. The incompleteness of "It can't happen here" would have to wait, however, if the ČmigrČ wished to remain here. Einstein and the economist Oskar Morgenstern agreed to calmly distract their friend from bringing up this alarming matter before the New Jersey justice, who, having presided over Einstein's own case, turned out to be a lot more sympathetic than Goedel was distracted:

"'Up to now you have held German citizenship.'
Immediately, Goedel corrected the judicial error: 'Austrian citizenship.'
Duly corrected, the judge continued.
'In any case, it was under an evil dictatorship. Fortunately, this is not possible in America.'"

The look on the Bavarian sage's face at this moment should have been photographed and sold as the pop art complement to the shots of him on the bicycle or sticking out his tongue.

Ernest Gabor Straus once wrote that "Goedel had an interesting axiom by which he looked at the world; namely, that nothing that happens in it is due to accident or stupidity. If you really take that axiom seriously all the strange theories that Goedel believed in become absolutely necessary." And Goedel's silly-to-sinister regard for the status quo becomes explainable, if not quite excusable. Try to avoid wincing through the chapter in which he travels back to Nazified Vienna preoccupied only with his "rights" as a certified academic. Possessing a Wodehouse-like obliviousness to current events -- even after being roughed up by a gang of brownshirts for his ostensible resemblance to a reviled race -- Goedel had to take an enormously detoured return trip to the lush and secure quandrangles of Princeton. What news of home did he bring with him for his info-starved fellow exiles? "The coffee was wretched."

In that same letter, Straus indicates that the normally indulgent and avuncular Einstein was given -- just once -- to write his daily walking partner off as "completely crazy." "Well, what worse could he have done?" inquired Straus. "He voted for Eisenhower."

From Plato's disciple to Plato's Republican.

I began by alluding to the fetish our culture seems to have for slowly morphing eccentric geniuses into genius eccentrics. If there is a "strange axiom," or telos, which guides these fantastic anomalies of the species, "legend" occurs somewhere between awe and condescension, between the whispered campus rumor and the Time magazine cover story. It's a real credit to Goldstein that her book does not contain a passage of greater endeavor than the one in which, drawing on all her skills of characterization as a novelist, she hazards this cant-free, and un-Hollywood portrait of the logician as a young man:

"When the random permutations of genetic blending produce an offspring whose intelligence far outstrips that of his parents that child faces a special sort of predicament: he both recognizes his utter dependence, being after all only a child; and he also clearly perceives the sever limits of his own parents' understanding. Most people come to the latter recognition only during adolescence, when the normal reaction is an explosive mixture of hubris, contempt, and outrage (how can they be so dumb?). But the reaction of a young child is more likely to be blind terror (how can they be trusted to take care of me?) It would be comforting, in the presence of such a shattering conclusion, especially when it's reinforced by a serious illness a few years later, to derive the following additional conclusion: There are always logical explanation and I am exactly the sort of person who can discover such explanations. The grownups around me may be a sorry lot, but luckily I don't need to depend on them. I can figure out everything for myself. The world is thoroughly logical and so I is my mind -- a perfect fit."