Snarksmith: new york. art. gossip. politics. pop culture. literature. etc.

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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

Friday, September 30, 2005, - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Suck... Kingsley Amis and his youngest son, who I hear also writes, used to bond over the uses and abuses of the English language. One of their favorite solecisms -- and by favorite I mean discussed somewhere in print and for the benefit of a take-it-or-leave-it, mildly literate posterity -- was the popular deployment of the word "jejune." I suspect this was because the Francophone adjective attained a new ironic coinage after Woody Allen spat it out satirically in Manhattan to describe the late seventies New York art scene*. But "jejune" originally meant "undernourished." Look it up in any saleable dictionary today and you'll find that this is now the tertiary definition; the vernacular (and imprecise) one, meaning "dull," presently takes top billing.

I'm always reminded of the Amis dialogues on language whenever a linguist tells me that this strictly human capacity is ever-changing. That's certainly true in the scientific sense, and anyone with an elementary power of observation already knows it, but comes the question: What happens when language changes for the worse? Isn't there also a qualitative coefficient which measures what sounds pleasant to the ear, or what deserves codification because it pays tribute to a noble literary and rhetorical tradition? Better yet, is there to be no complaint when a once robust lexical item is starved, by too much idiomatic exercise, to the point of -- erm -- "jejunosity?" Take the word "suck," for example.

By a nice coincidence, the same linguist with whom I used to burnish my curmudgeonly inner Safire once stepped out of her descriptivist mode to point out to me -- probably because we were dating -- that it was rather stupid of men to say things like, "You suck." What kind of insult is that? Presumably the target of it, if deserving of such a pronouncement, would be engaged in very decent activity indeed, at least judging by what most men would like to have done to themselves. She knew (my then linguist girlfriend did) that there was some aspect of sexual abasement involved in the slight, but this did nothing to militate against the fact that we normally show affection to those who apply just the right amount of oral pressure -- assuming of course "pressure" takes the primary definition and foregoes any potentially nagging forms of grammar-bound communication. Where's the sting, in other words, in "suck?"

Here are more professional tongue surveyors who won't make me sleep on the couch for defending the King's English (and Martin's English, too):

"The word sucks was an innocent word that developed a powerful and vulgar sexual connotation related to the taboo subject of fellatio," e-mails David Fertig, director of language programs at the University of Buffalo. "That connotation is now weakening for a couple of reasons.

"One is that young people today use other explicit terms for sexual acts, and many relate only vaguely to the sexual implications of the word 'sucks' that so offends their elders. As that vulgar connotation becomes weaker and weaker in people's minds, it is considered more acceptable for common usage..."

"This is very common," e-mails Robert Leonard, professor of linguistics at Hofstra University. " 'Enthusiasm' used to mean, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, 'spirit possession.' Meanings change. 'Rock 'n' roll' and 'jazz' both started as terms for sexual intercourse and were slangy ways to refer to the musical forms. Now they just refer to the musical forms for the vast majority."

* I'm not 100% sure about this, although I'm more confident the film was Manhattan and not Annie Hall. In the former, Diane Keaton's character is a Radcliffe graduate, which is as good as any provocation for Woody to have epater-ed this kind of argot. E-mail me if I'm wrong. --Michael Weiss [link]

Judy Miller: Hero, or Moron?... Let's look at the headlines.

Times Reporter Testifies in Leak Case After 85 Days in Jail - New York Times

NYT Reporter Agrees to Testify in CIA Leak Case - Los Angeles Times

CIA agent case reporter in court - BBC

No More Miller Time - Washington Post

So there you go. The big tossup for today's headline writers was whether to accent (a) the heroism of a fellow journalist staying in jail for so long, or (b) the stink wafting from the CIA's top brass and other top officials. The choice came down to which the news outlet dislikes most: the New York Times, or the Bush administration. (Except for Howie Kurtz, who's probably had that line on a napkin for weeks.)

By the way, the Philidelphia Inquirer beat the Times to its own story. Their headline? "NY Times reporter testifies before grand jury." From the way that reads, Maureen Dowd could be in for grand theft auto. Nyah Nyah.

So far, the only paper I've found to put a notice at the top of the page of how very stupid Miller is has been the St. Petersburg Times, although there are surely others. They subtitle their article, "Judith Miller will reveal her source in the CIA leak case. The source says he told her to months ago." The source, Scooter Libby, didn't even realize she thought she was protecting him.

Libby and his lawyer, however, both say that they gave their voluntary waiver to Miller's lawyers more than year ago. In fact, Libby wrote to Miller in mid September, saying he believed her lawyers understood that his waiver was voluntary.

Miller contends she was not sure the waiver had been freely given and did not accept it until she had heard from him directly, the New York Times reported.

If I were a grand jury -- or a paying Times subscriber -- I'm not sure I would trust a single word spoken or written by this batty Thoreauvian nuthatch. First Miller runs with bad data on concealed weapons of mass destruction, then stays in jail for three months waiting for one more reassurance that her waiver is really, truly, cross my heart legal? I can't think of any reason she would have stayed in jail so long with a waiver in hand, unless she was milking Sulzburger for work without pay, a trick she probably picked up from Pauly Shore. --Nic Duquette [link]

Thursday, September 29, 2005, - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Katrina, Crack and AIDS... Leaving aside the subjective reasons for the government's bumbled rescue of a predominantly black American city a month ago (as if incompetence weren't an equally opportunity offender), there's an objective problem that most discussions of the "racial aspect" of Hurricane Katrina have scanted on thus far: What's this going to do to the urban conspiracy theory? A few flickering sparks have yet to catch into an all-out flame, and yet... At least one rap star that I know of has already thundered and grumbled on live network television about Bush's preference for the monochrome, much to the amusing "No, baby!" discomfiture of fellow on-screen talent Mike Myers. Jesse Jackson has flexed his usual 'mainstream' innuendo muscles. And Louis Farrakhan... well, I can only imagine what kind of frenzied rate of chauvinist rotation that bowtie of his has reached in the last few weeks.

David Remnick traveled to New Orleans, dug up 40 year-old history, and heard a lot of disquieting chatter about root causes of the lousy disaster relief coming from the African-American man-on-the-street -- or man-in-the-drink, as the case tragically was, especially in the French Quarter and Ninth Ward.

The link between conspiracy theories and oppression is as old as racial conflict. Some early American slaves were convinced that their new owners were cannibals bringing them to the New World to eat their flesh. In Washington in the nineteen-eighties, there was often talk in poorer black communities about The Plan. This was a belief that the ãwhite power structureä had a secret scheme to inexorably move the black population out of the District. Similarly, in shelters in Louisiana and Texas you heard the suspicion that the ãhigher powersä of New Orleans wanted to employ a policy of citywide gentrification through natural disaster, that a mass exile of poor African-Americans was ãthe silver-lining scenario.ä For most, it hardly seemed to matter that some wealthier neighborhoods in New Orleans, particularly Lakeview, did not escape damage.

At the Houston Astrodome, for instance, people made statements and asked questions that mixed the logical with the conspiratorial.

ãWhere were the buses?ä

ãWhy is it, do you think, that the French Quarter and the Garden District are high and dry and the Ninth is flooded and gonna get bulldozed?ä

ãIn Betsy I know the mayor blew up the levee to save those big homes on the lakefront. A lot of people believe that, especially the people who were on their roofs!ä

ãI couldnât leave. I was terrified. I didnât have any money, no car, nothing. Where was I supposed to go? They shoulda had some buses. Itâs me and my five kids. I live in Desire, the Ninth Ward. I think it was a setup to get black folks out of New Orleans forever. Look around. Whoâs here? Nobody but the black and the poor. They ainât got but ten white families in the whole Astrodome.ä

Alarming stuff, to be sure. But it should also be noted that just a few paragraphs before this, Remnick demonstrated the hopeful antithesis to such feverish assumption. Once again -- and consistent with the history of civil rights in this country -- the reprieve of the broad-minded rode in on a bus:

Walter Hays and the others knew they had to get out of town, but there was still no transport. A police officer told them they should break into cars and see if they could steal one. Hays and his best friend, a grocery-store manager named Chester Pye, went to a nearby bus barn. ãA guy there showed me how to hot-wire a school bus. We got our hands all slashed up from pulling wires, and it seemed like all the batteries were dead. Finally, Chester finds a good battery, and we went looking for keys.ä They found one that fit bus No. 9322 and picked up the rest of the extended family and headed out of town. Along the way, near the Fisher housing project, in Algiers, someone shot at the bus and demanded to be let on, but there was no room. They kept going west on Route 90, getting as far as Houma, Louisiana. On the road to New Iberia, a police officer pulled them over. ãI was scared,ä Hays went on. ãAfter all, weâd boosted the bus. The cop, a white guy, looked inside and saw it wasnât hot-wired. There was a key. And what did he do? He gave us a police escort and called another police escort as we left Raceland and we got the escort all the way to New Iberia. And in New Iberia an officer said to me, and I will remember this forever, he said, ÎI want you to understand something. You think this is the end of life as you know it for you. But this is a new beginning. You have a lot of people pulling for you.âä --Michael Weiss [link]

All Right: Uncle... Changed my mind. Stop the War! Bring 'Em Home -- Now! No Blood For Oil! What'd Saddam Ever Do To You, Anyway? Tim Robbins, Loved You in High Fidelity! Peace with Honor!

From this week's Savage Love:

Before I went to Iraq, my wife used to love it when I would eat her pussy. Since my return, she has stopped letting me do it, saying that it now feels uncomfortable -- even gross. This is often the only way to get her to come. Why would she stop wanting to be satisfied? And no, she's not getting it somewhere else; we've already been through that. I'm going nuts because I want it to be mutual and wild like it was before. Help!
Wanna Eat Tang

Give it time, WET. While your time in Iraq was no doubt stressful for you, I can't believe it was a cakewalk for your wife either. While you were gone, you were less her husband (and her considerate, giving lover) and more this abstract source of nearly constant worry and stress. It may take a few months before whatever subconscious anger or resentment she feels÷toward you for going, toward W for prosecuting this war ineptly÷melts away. Let her know that you're looking forward to your sex life returning to normal, WET, and then give her the time she needs to decompress. --Michael Weiss [link]

Remember: He Likes Stare Decisis and White Zinfandel... And black makes him look fat. John Roberts confirmed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. 78 to 22 was the vote. Both senators from New York went nay. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Worst Comment About Tom DeLay So Far... It comes from someone who's got tenure:

"Tom DeLay was like Tito in Yugoslavia," said James A. Thurber, a professor of government at American University. "He ruled with fear and also resources to reward people. Now without DeLay, the House will be balkanized."

Until, of course, the Milosevic that is David Dreier establishes a Greater Bushia on the Hill.

Between finding sources like these and the handling of the recent Jeff Goldberg kerfuffle, WaPo needs its own 'Select' cap on its website -- to stopper stupidity. --Michael Weiss [link]

Enough of This Nonsense. Where's Toph, Asshole?... What the hell is wrong with Dave Eggers these days? I can't figure out whether the scraggly, petless, Franciscan author of last moment (a) thinks anything he touches is genius, (b) is peddling artistic wares like Duchamp's toilet which may or may not be a pratical joke on the consumer, or (c) is a genius, maybe, but doesn't know how to write ad copy for his own work in a way that doesn't make it sound like a waste of time.

First, there's Eggers' participation in an eBay auction to benefit the First Amendment project. (Via Gawker.)

The winner will be featured in a strange illustrated story I’m working on called The Journey of the Fishes Overland. The winner, or someone of her/his choosing, will be encountered by the traveling fish in question, as they travel over land. It could also be a family, a house, an address, whatever. I get to decide why the fishes see this person/place, and what’s said by/to or done by/to the person/place. This story will be finished and published in the fall. That name/s have to be tasteful and undisruptive to the narrative. I reserve the right to refuse using a name I find offensive.

Keep in mind, this is a benefit for free speech. What if I find Eggers offensive? Traveling fish, jumping sharks... eh.

As if this censored fish comicbook weren't terrible-sounding enough, the latest McSweeney's magazine is apparently going to be a bag full of junk mail:

Issue 17 is not an ordinary issue of McSweeney's. It is, however, an ordinary-looking bundle of mail, stacked and rubber-banded, containing the usual items: a recent issue of Yeti Researcher; a large envelope, called Envelope, containing fine oversized reproductions of new art; a sausage-basket catalog; a flyer for slashed prices on garments that are worn by more than one person at a time; a new magazine of experimental fiction called Unfamiliar; a couple letters... the usual. This might be the strangest and most pleasure-giving issue yet.

Not if I throw it out when it comes through the mail slot, it's not.

Thank goodness for John Warner -- no, not that John Warner, this John Warner -- who took over the McSweeney's web site two years ago and made it the one fiefdom in the Eggers empire that can be consumed with pleasure and not ibuprofen. Yesterday's must-read entry was "Jim Jarmusch's Notes for a Ghostbusters Sequel."

Bill Murray moves into haunted apartment. Sits in chair, impassive. What is he thinking? Possibly about dead friends. He almost gets up. He doesn't. His face is blank, unreadable. Sounds offscreen. Flying plates? Bleeding walls? Ghosts? Perhaps. We never find out. Slow fade to black. --Nic Duquette [link]

Wednesday, September 28, 2005, - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

The Goldberg Variations... I nearly opted for my own fling with alliteration and titled this post, "Sentenced by Semi-Literacy," because Jack Shafer's column in today's Slate is just too good to miss.

The skinny: New Yorker scribe Jeffrey Goldberg tells a reporter at the Washingtonian magazine that he was once passed over for a job at the Washington Post due to that position's having been slated for a Hispanic. Here's the offending passage in the reporter's article, which caused a minor scandal within the bien-pensant blogosphere yesterday:

Jeff Goldberg's career at the Post was doomed by diversity. He came as a Post intern in 1986 and covered the police beat. "It was the center of the journalistic universe," he says. "I rode around covering murders. I had old-fashioned editors yelling, 'How old is that dead body?' "

Goldberg was up for a full-time job, he says, when an editor took him aside and said, "We would like to hire you, but we have to hire a Hispanic for that slot." He went on to report from the Middle East, but when he returned, editor Milton Coleman said the Post had no jobs. Metro editor Jo-Ann Armao told him to send some clips. He got his clips working for the New York Times Magazine for several years before joining Remnick at the New Yorker in 2000.

The timestamp on the dead body line might have come right out of Scoop ("machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window -- you know"), and I bridle to think what the hell Evelyn Waugh would have made of that second observation about a felicitously shuffled ethnography of hacks. But what is transmitted here by the first source is pretty tepid stuff, even by today's standards. One can even surmise how such a near-miss employment scenario went down, if it indeed did: "Look, Jeff, we'd love for you to come join the WaPo team, but -- well, between ourselves..." Human beings, especially messengers of bad news, don't make apologetic palaver like class action civil attorneys. If Goldberg was told this, who can blame the teller? One certainly can't blame Goldberg. And yet...

After an initial round of histrionics from the Romenesko crowd (Goldberg was blamed), the Post felt obligated to involve itself in 16 year-old anecdotal history. See if you don't wish it hadn't.

By yesterday, the row had spilled over into a Post internal message board. There, executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. and managing editor Philip Bennett responded to a posting by a staffer who had ripped Goldberg for feeling "his career at the Post was 'doomed by diversity' or so it said in the article" and wanted to hear from management on the topic.

Goldberg felt no such thing, as can be established by reading the above extract. But no matter. Pounce on a glib catchphrase conjured up by a deadline-harried writer, and that's all you need for a corporate Katrina in a watercooler.

Here's Downie, Jr. verbatim:

We do not designate slots for minorities, although we seek diversity in candidates for all of our openings. In Goldberg's case, I was part of the decision-making. We decided that we did not want to hire him, period. We had enough openings on the Metro staff (as we often do because of its size) that his candidacy was not affected by the hiring of anyone else, minority or otherwise.

Whether or not this is true it does nothing to discredit Goldberg's claim that Post city editor Mary Jo Meisner told him the ostensibly real reason he wasn't hired. Nor is Meisner's own pipe-in on the subject -- "I do not remember this" -- any kind of vindication the other way. If it isn't true, if the Post does actively hire on the basis of race (or gender, or whatever besides talent), then should the paper be afraid to hide this fact? And should advocates of affirmative action leap into the fray in a high pique of defensiveness? Goldberg's own case seems to be a perfect object lesson in how this policy doesn't, in the long run, handicap whites with the goods. And why do I think that much of the antipathy has more to do with envy over Goldberg's current masthead than with revisiting his inability to make the D.C. daily an old one?

One of life's distinct pleasures is what I like to call a "Garp moment." This is when the comeuppance is so sweet, the former offender hands you the weapon of choice himself. (If you've read the Irving novel, you know exactly which set-piece I mean). A real-life counterpart would be that noble killjoy C. Everett Koop relating how he was once rejected by Columbia Medical School. After he became surgeon general, the school invited him to deliver a lecture on the state of American healthcare. He gladly RSVPed, and I'm inclined to think it was just for the sake of his opener: "I didn't get in here when I applied. Too bad. Imagine where I'd be today if I had..." --Michael Weiss [link]

Google Book Searching... A teensy, sunken-chested irony of this Times editorial about allowing Google to do what Amazon has already been doing -- create a free Alexandrian library of digitally searchable texts -- is that it's the only searchable expository essay available, for free, on the Times website. How's that for having one's cake and being able to pop out of it, too? Bill Keller: he's a regular David Foster Wallace of the fair and balanced meta carnival.

But Tim O'Reilly is right:

I'm with Google on this one. It would certainly be considered fair use, if, for example, I circulated a catalog of my favorite books, including a handful of quotations from each book that helps people to decide whether to buy a copy. In my mind, providing such snippets algorithmically on demand, as Google does, doesn't change that dynamic. Google allows click-through to the entire book only if the book is in the public domain or if publishers have opted in to the program. If it's unclear who owns the rights to a book, only the snippets are displayed.

He goes on to hint that this mechanism will also be like a hot rapier through the hearts of aspiring plagiarists. "Where have I seen that footnote about Lincoln's fondness for nipple-clamps before, Ms. Kearns-Goodwin? Hang on just a second..."

Now if Google is really savvy, it'll encode an option that allows any string to be run through the entire database, not just one book. In other words (or in the same ones, so to speak), you won't need to rely on T.S. Eliot's annotations for "The Waste Land." You can make your own, and find out whence he politely pilfered his best (and worst) stuff.

Joyce and Nabokov still elide such easy detection, however. They tinkered to the point of genius occlusion with what they stole, as I'm still finding in my long, delightful slog through Lolita again. --Michael Weiss [link]

Service DeLay... I love the smell of indictments in the afternoon. (Mornings are for waggishly sloganed coffee mugs and civil subpoenas, silly).

What is it about Republican majority leaders and the refresh option? I passively endorse segregation, you skim from the top of illicit and badly laundered campaign funds. Tom DeLay's in official trouble now. And a Texas grand jury says so.

The indictment accused DeLay of a conspiracy to "knowingly make a political contribution" in violation of Texas law outlawing corporate contributions. It alleged that DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority political action committee accepted $155,000 from companies, including Sears Roebuck, and placed the money in an account.

The PAC then wrote a $190,000 check to an arm of the Republican National Committee and provided the committee a document with the names of Texas State House candidates and the amounts they were supposed to receive in donations.

The indictment included a copy of the check.

Don't these naughty PAC contributors know by now that if you're going to buy a wind-up politico of your very own, you don't pay by check. You use the Corporate Malfeasance American Express card -- the one with the Roman centurion twirling his curlicue villain mustache.

Well, whatever the case, I'm sure the indictment has nothing to do with prosecutorial retribution by a partisan Democrat .

"This indictment is nothing more than prosecutorial retribution by a partisan Democrat," Madden said, citing prosecutor Ronnie Earle, a Democrat.

Sorry, I meant it is not the latest example of how Republicans in Congress are plagued by a culture of corruption at the expense of the American people.

"The criminal indictment of Majority Leader Tom Delay is the latest example that Republicans in Congress are plagued by a culture of corruption at the expense of the American people," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California.

Fine. It's all about the Etch-a-Sketch iron filings haircut on Tom. There. --Michael Weiss [link]

Tuesday, September 27, 2005, - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Please, Sir... Imagine being poor David Denby. A vague cloud of disappointment hovering over you wherever you go. A gnawing inner demon of schlubiness consistently fucking up what should be the sweet life, and which no self-derogating memoir about losses financial and sexual can ever fully exorcise. And Lane. There is always Lane. It might not have been so bad being the number two film reviewer at the New Yorker if number one weren't the imported golden boy with the honey-dipped tongue, heir apparent to Pauline Kael, and someone for whom a thin runny stew like Star Wars can be turned into a critical Feast of All Saints. And yet when it's real literature that's been transmitted onto celluloid, and it's Anthony's week to write... why, that's when Denby reaches for his shrink on speed-dial.

On Oliver Twist and Dickens' less-than-philo-Semitism:

What you cannot do is equip Ben Kingsley with the false nose and the red wig and pretend that nothing is amiss. If you are going to elide any reference to Faginâs Jewishness, as Polanski does, then why go to the bother of burdening him with the garments, stoop, and accent of the cartoon Jew? Why not reinvent him as a less encumbered villain÷update the story, switch the setting, turn the workhouse into a Malaysian sweatshop, say, where Oliver stitches Western sneakers for half a bowl of soup? Kingsley, who threatened more with one scene of ãSexy Beastä than he does in the whole of ãOliver Twist,ä drifts slightly to the margins, as does Oliver himself, who arrives at happiness, with plastered-down hair, like an exhausted ghost. If the film does tighten its grip toward the end, that is because of Jamie Foremanâs shark-eyed Sikes, and, above all, because of Leanne Rowe, whose Nancy, against all odds, pulls us to the heart of Dickensâs darkness. As you watch Rowe and Foreman together, you suddenly realize why Dostoyevsky admired the novel so much. This Nancy is bustling and bosomy, as she should be, but her tigerish will to do one good deed in a naughty world is desperate and majestic. Without Nancy and her demon lover, Polanskiâs ãOliver Twistä feels handsome, steady, and respectful; it has that touch of mummification which wins awards. But Dickens had murder in mind÷women killed for their kindness, children for lack of food÷and he wanted us to howl and hyperventilate. He asked for more. --Michael Weiss [link]

Slate Goes to Fallujah... In one of those weeklong diary features they sometimes do. As with most stories coming out of Iraq, this one reads like chirascuro of head-cradling American incompetence and mounting Iraqi confidence. The good news? The incompetence tends to be past, the confidence tends to be present.

Boy, the way Paul Bremer played:

A year was frittered away in training the Iraqi army because the administration violated unity of wartime command. The administration created a Coalition Provisional Authority that set policy and allocated money for the Iraqi security forces, while the U.S. military remained responsible for security on the ground until the Iraqis could take care of it themselves. That separation between authority and responsibility was corrected about a year ago. Currently, when an Iraqi battalion is finished with basic training and assigned to an area, it is linked to an American battalion for mentoring and to ensure it will not disintegrate when first experiencing combat.

Now everybody pulls his weight:

Those present for duty in Fallujah perform the same tasks as the Marines÷perimeter defense, checkpoint searches of vehicles and people, cordon and search of areas, residential patrols, and night raids aimed at specific individuals. In the estimation of the Marines, Juwad's troops are learning by on-the-job training. Their patrol techniques and aggressiveness are improving. But they have not been in a heavy or sustained firefight. Sooner or later, the Marines will leave and the city will see who has learned more÷the insurgents or the soldiers in the new Iraqi army. --Michael Weiss [link]

Zarqawist No. 2 Killed in Iraq... Sooner or later it's going to be Iraqi military forces that take credit for raids like this one. Abu Azzam, the operational commander for Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, was killed in a high-rise building in Baghdad today. He was also a senior financier to Zarqawi. --Michael Weiss [link]

Monday, September 26, 2005, - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Donate 'Em to the Iraqi Military and Police Force... For 're-commissioning.' I'm serious.

General John de Chastelain: "We are satisfied that the arms decommissioned represent the totality of the IRA's arsenal."

The arms included a full range of ammunition, rifles, machine guns, mortars, missiles, handguns, explosives, explosive substances and other arms including all the categories described in the estimates provided by the UK and Irish security services, he said.

Why should terrorist groups with new, becalmed public relations only run guns to the Zarqawists? If Sinn Fein were really savvy -- not to mention worthy of the great Hibernian love affair with irony -- they'd have offered Blair this materiel, free of charge. (And have had increased their chances for receiving material benefits). --Michael Weiss [link]

Everbody Complains About the Weather, But Nobody Is Doing Anything About It -- Except the Mob... Behind the curve a little, but this just has to be repeated.

To the rest of the country, Scott Stevens is the Idaho weatherman who blames the Japanese Mafia for Hurricane Katrina. To folks in Pocatello, he's the face of the weather at KPVI News Channel 6.

Sounds like your typical local news station. This guy claims that Soviet storm-generating technology was used by the Yakuza to make a killing in futures markets and as revenge for Hiroshima. Stevens claims that there is "a chess game going on in the sky" and that "I was left trying to forecast the intent of some organization rather than the weather of this planet" when he discovered the existence of this Soviet weapon. And people say weathermen are unreliable -- yet here's one looking out for the little guy.

Bill Fouch, KPVI's general manager, compared Stevens' musings to political or religious beliefs that journalists suppress on the job. "He doesn't talk about it on his weathercast," Fouch said. "He's very knowledgeable about weather, and he's very popular."

I bet. At least as it's a crime syndicate doing the hurricaning and not Al Qaeda. "Psycopaths kill for no reason; I kill for money." --Nic Duquette [link]

Drudge Linguistics... It looks like it might rain today, and you know what that means... It's time for stay-at-home word games!

Here's one:

1. Look up "spoonerism" in the dictionary.

2. Scan a few random paragraphs of Finnegan's Wake (any chapter or page will do).

3. Vide this Drudge headline (screen capture courtesy of Wonkette):

4. Bonus applied learning joke! "What's the difference between Barbra Streisand and the statue of Eros in Piccadilly?" (The statue of Eros is a Cupid kind of stunt).

Thanks for playing! --Michael Weiss [link]

Spanish Al Qaeda Agents Jailed... If George Bush really wanted to add some rich tawny hues to the relative monochrome of the Supreme Court, he'd forget about Alberto Gonzales and remember Baltasar Garz—n. This would entail a potentially sticky relocation and naturalization project, but I think Baltasar's worth it. (And I know of no restriction on foreign-born jurists donning the baddest of stateside black robes). More than any other counterterrorism magistrate, this brilliant and fearless Spaniard has been the matchmaker for European Al Qaeda operatives and the prison cells that love them.

I figured he'd be involved in the cases of those Syrian-Iberian (Syberian?) plotters of 9/11. Sure enough, his name floats into this Guardian piece like a healing zephyr. No more inexpensive cracks about the Spanish and appeasement, please. If you switched onto coverage of recent farcical events in DC, you'll have noticed we have own feverish mob mentality to deal with first.

Tayseer Alouni, a journalist for the Arabic news channel al-Jazeera, was sentenced to seven years in jail for collaborating with a terrorist group, but was acquitted of being a member of al-Qaida.

Alouni interviewed Osama bin Laden shortly after the attacks. Prosecutors accused him of carrying money intended for al-Qaida members during visits to Afghanistan for his journalistic work. He denied the allegations.

No, no. That money was for hos and bling in Tora Bora. Cause you know how the 'Zeera do when it come to its boys, yo.

--Michael Weiss [link]

With Friends Like These, We Could Use More Friends... One of the unintended consequences of regime change in Iraq has been an infusion of discrimination in the process of selecting popular revolutionary allies in the Middle East. Everybody by now can write the 'dirty hands' script in his sleep: The United States maintains a catalogue of suicide pacts with a wretched dictatorship; the United States then about-faces only to embrace a less than salutary 'resistance' group, the seedling of future trouble if for no other reason than it embodies the narcissism of the small difference between itself and what it claims to be resisting. Are there no alternatives between two toxic poles? There definitely are, but first a new addition to the larger category of accidents waiting -- if not clamoring -- to happen:

Meet Maryam Rajavi, proxy leader through marriage of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, one of the most well-organized dissident diaspora groups. They colloquially refer to themselves, a trifle unoriginally I think, as the Mujahedeen. Their mission statement reads more progressive than our own Bill of Rights, and they were spot-on before anybody else was about the Khomeneist science projects being conducted deep within Persian mountains and free from the purview of roving satellites or nosy UN weapons inspectors. But don't let the tranquil blues of Mrs. Rajavi's chador and eyes fool you. This cookie's not so much tough as just plain stale.

HER smile takes on a steely glint when she discusses the mass divorces ordered by the group's leadership, which split the movement's families in 1989 and sent their children into foster care abroad. The policy has focused energy on the cause instead of personal relations, she said.

"Our members can't have, because of the circumstances, the normal marital status in life that everyone else in the world can enjoy," Mrs. Rajavi said, arguing that the movement faces a "ferocious" enemy and followers cannot afford to be distracted.

Tomorrow the rediscovery of romantic love, the tax credit, the 1.5 children, the white picket fence. But to-day the struggle? Not quite.

A few years ago the Times ran another, more enlightening, story on the Rajavists. The reason it's still available for perusal is that it's been reprinted on the indispensible Rick Ross's cult-busting website.

Though for years the Mujahedeen preached a Marxist-Islamic ideology, it has modernized with the times. Today, one of the standard lines of the Mujahedeen's National Council of Resistance to politicians in Europe and America is that it is advocating a secular, democratic government in Iran, and that when it overthrows the regime, it will set up a six-month interim government with Maryam as president and then hold free elections. But despite its rhetoric, the Mujahedeen operates like any other dictatorship. Mujahedeen members have no access to newspapers or radio or television, other than what is fed them. As the historian Abrahamian told me, "No one can criticize Rajavi." And everyone must go through routine self-criticism sessions. "It's all done on tape, so they have records of what you say. If there's sign of resistance, you're considered not revolutionary enough, and you need more ideological training. Either people break away or succumb."

Break away or succumb. Where have I heard that before? I think it's the new ad slogan at my gym.

For space reasons, I set myself the task of choosing whether to include the mandatory sessions of "self-criticism" (the mandatory bit making it just "criticism" to you and me), or the dozens of self-immolations (the "self" is applicable here) of enlistees too distraught over the arrest of their matriarch. What I left out can be read at Ross's site.

But lest the high dudgeon over democracy set in prematurely -- relax. The Kurds have wincingly distanced themselves from the Stalinoid-terrorist PKK and Abdullah Ocalan for years. If this is nuthatcher contingent of the Reading Lolita in Tehran crowd and it's managed to wriggle out from under a crumbling mullahocracy, then imagine how many sane rebel movements there must be in country. --Michael Weiss [link]

Friday, September 23, 2005, - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Endeavouring to Give Satisfaction No More... AskJeeves.com regrets to announce that it no longer requires the services of a valet.

Citing "user confusion" over what the butler character represents the search site has said that Jeeves will soon be phased out.

That's the most depressing thing I've heard all day. Good thing the real one ascended to that great big Junior Ganymede (club for gentlemen's personal gentlemen) in the sky when his creator bought it. "User confusion." Yes, quite. That'd have had even a sangfroid Spinoza-scanner writhing like an electric fan all over again. --Michael Weiss [link]

Oil... As Rita bears down on a huge swath of US refining capacity not destroyed by Katrina, it's worth keeping in mind how very bad the oil situation is getting. This is the price of a barrel of oil since 1990:

Scary, isn't it? This won't just affect what it costs to gas up the minivan, either. It means higher heating bills for the winter. It means higher shipping costs on the diesel trucks that move America's freight, and that means higher prices for food, for clothing, everything. If people get raises to keep up with the price surge, it will be an inflation spiral. If they don't, it means a recession. Either way, the price of oil is bad news for everybody.

Help keep the economy on track and stanch the cash flow to international petrotyrants: as Rita comes ashore this weekend, stay home or ride a bike. Grill some burgers, watch some TV and play Monopoly. Your kids can go to soccer practice some other time. --Nic Duquette [link]

Thursday, September 22, 2005, - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

How to Keep Sullivan and Wonkette Busy for Hours... Show 'em a picture of the new hurricane. They're in their peejays, spinning dorsally round and round on the floor, I tell you.

Isn't Florida the cause of enough pain and suffering? Y'ouch. --Michael Weiss [link]

Unintentionally Funny Headline of the Day... The BBC:

EU drops hardline stance on Iran

Well, thank God cooler heads prevailed in Brussels for once, huh?

Only in Europe can threatening to refer a country to a UN commission be considered a "hardline" position. --Nic Duquette [link]

The Second Oldest Profession in the First Workers' State... Strange though it may be to consider, stranger still is the truth of the following assertion: the history of the KGB is 99.9% unwritten. More than a decade after the collapse of the Soviet Union -- and probably a whole 15 minutes since the last time "we" tried to spy on "them," or vice versa -- the apparat of eastern intelligence still remains shrouded in negative assumption and liminal apprehension. We know plenty about the CIA and MI6, what they did and how they did it. And we figure that the KGB sort of did the opposite; but the details have always been murky and to a degree more remarkable than what one would expect from a society ruled by the hulking Hobbsean precept of Freedom From Information. The intrigue-aesthetics of spycraft suffered on that side of the Wall, too. The pomaded urbanities of the plainclothes Reds never much ventured beyond a fish-mouthed, slab-cut automoton always half a step ahead or two steps behind 007, and the Moscow film commission never signaled that this impression was objectionable on socialist realist grounds. There's a lot of catching up to be done. Ralph Fiennes isn't currently starring in The Constant Kulak.

But enough about the question marks. It's time for a few exclamation points:

In the Centre, the Indo-Soviet special relationship was also celebrated as a triumph for the KGB. The residency in Delhi was rewarded by being upgraded to the status of ãmain residencyä. Its head from 1970 to 1975, Yakov Prokofyevich Medyanik, was accorded the title of ãmain residentä. In the early 1970s the KGB presence in India became one of the largest outside the Soviet bloc. Indira Gandhi placed no limit on the number of Soviet diplomats and trade officials, thus allowing the KGB and Soviet intelligence as many cover positions as they wished.

Oleg Kalugin, who became head of Foreign Counter-Intelligence in 1973, remembers India as ãa model of KGB infiltration of a Third World governmentä. He recalls one occasion when the KGB turned down an offer from an Indian minister to provide information in return for $50,000 on the grounds that it was already well supplied with material from the Indian foreign and defence ministries: ãIt seemed like the entire country was for sale...

During 1975 a total of 10.6 million roubles was spent on measures in India designed to strengthen support for Mrs Gandhi and undermine her political opponents...

To ensure success, the KGB mounted a major operation involving more than 120 meetings with agents during the election campaign. Nine candidates at the elections were KGB agents. Files also identify by name 21 of the non-Communist politicians (four of them ministers) whose election campaigns were subsidised by the KGB.

Beats water fluoridation. Or covering the advertising budget for Encounter.

But don't thank me, or even the Times Online. Thank Vasili Nikitich Mitrokhin, a senior archivist at the First Chief Directorate of the KGB, who in 1992 took with him to a British embassy in one of the Baltic states the kind of top secret briefcase Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy used to transmit the crop reports in Trading Places. What he gave, freely and willingly, to the West is considered the most explosive tranche of counter-intelligence documents ever leaked. Cuba, Afghanistan, the extreme makeover of Brezhnev for the ex-Rajettes -- it's all in there, and now condensed into book form as The Mitrokhin Archive II: The KGB and the World, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin.

Time to warm up the samovar, Ralph. --Michael Weiss [link]

Then I Caught A Glimpse of Rita, Standing By a Parking Meter... The evacuation of Houston as Category Five hurricane Rita approaches has demonstrated that Houston residents can flee a natural disaster in the same calm manner they commute every day: by choking off the city's highways in a nightmare of bumper-to-bumper, immobile gridlock and plumes of smog.

Hundreds of thousands of people were frantically trying to escape the nation's fourth-largest city Thursday as Hurricane Rita approached the upper Texas coast. But interstates were at a standstill for up to 100 miles and gas shortages were already being reported.

Just another day in East Texas, really. --Nic Duquette [link]

Wednesday, September 21, 2005, - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Robert Trivers: Bad is the New Good... The banality, when discussing the private lives and political beliefs of sociobiologists -- or ecological behaviorists, as they're now known -- is to say, "Actually, he's rather left-wing and caring himself." What effects the preemptive apology? The rooted idea of the field itself: human beings do what they do for selfish, gene-propagating reasons. This evidently requires chugging a few stops past "compassionate," and a whole township beyond "conservative," as compensation in one's private life.

We might have done without knowing, from this otherwise enviable Guardian profile, where Dr. Trivers stands on the current administration, or about his curious-to-unsettling friendship with Huey Newton. (Look, the real dirt on Leonard Bernstein would have been a closeted jones for the Mamas and the Papas or Jefferson Airplane -- the radical chic tendency became dull the moment it began). However, the "color" material on Trivers that is worth reproducing -- probably much to the chagrin of Steven Pinker, who loves to keep the fight clean and above the waist -- reads like this:

Trivers says of his old enemy Stephen Jay Gould's theory that the female orgasm was merely a by- product of the fact that the opposite sex has them, "It makes you wonder just how close Steve had ever been to that blessed event if he thought it was a side-effect ..."

Now there's a feast of reason and a flow of the soul from a no-bullshit genius. This is what you'd expect from the man who introduced the delightful paradox 'altruistic selfishness' into the lexicon, and gave it a laboratory seal of approval. ('Enlightened selfishness' is the older, seedier metaphysical cousin; he's got the endowed chair at the Cato Institute). But give me this stuff any day over the Beautiful Good Will of Bobby Fischer's Proof. --Michael Weiss [link]

Talabani in WSJ... Now, I really can't balk at the Journal's being pay-only on the web (it'd scare me more if it were free). But here's what a lifelong lefty thinks about quagmires and timetables:

Without foreign intervention, the transition in Iraq would have been from Saddam's bloodstained hands to his psychopathic offspring. Instead, thanks to American leadership, Iraqis have been given an opportunity of peaceful, participatory politics. Contrary to the new conventional wisdom, Iraq and the history of 20th-century Europe demonstrate that force of arms can implant democracy in the most arid soil.

***

Creating these Iraqi forces has not been easy, but Iraqis have been undaunted by the difficulties. Every terrorist attack on Iraqi forces leads to a surge in military recruitment -- the opposite of the appeasers' myth that resisting terrorism causes more terrorism. For all the short-term problems, the soundness of the long-term strategy of building up Iraqi forces was demonstrated in recent days when Iraqis took over sole control of security in the holy city of Najaf.

***

There are also two practical, policy reasons to avoid such a scheduled reduction in foreign troop numbers. First, a timetable will aid the terrorists and tell them that all they have to do is wait. Second, military plans must be flexible. We should have the suppleness to respond to the often-changing level of terrorist threat. Indeed, we will require ongoing security assistance in many forms for many years to come.

***

Without American forces, the vision of American leadership and the quiet fortitude of the American people, Iraqis would be almost alone in the world. With its allies, the United States has provided Iraqis with an unprecedented opportunity. Iraqis have responded by enthusiastically embracing democracy and volunteering to fight for their country. By giving us the tools, your troops help us to defend Iraqi democracy and to finish the job of uprooting Baathist fascism.

***

Mr. Talabani is president of Iraq.

With all the fine narrative skill in Hollywood, you'd think an eye-moistening, pilgrim's progress type story might someday make it to celluloid, starting with the improbablility of that last line. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Latest Problems In Gambian Transit... The Peruvian government is furious over a jet full of soccer players, chartered by the president of Gambia, which made an "emergency landing" at the stadium where the team arrived just in time to beat Qatar 3-1.

Meanwhile, Senegal is growing frustrated that the Gambia -- a 20 mile wide strip of land almost cleaving Senegal in two -- is providing expensive and bad ferry service between northern and southern Senegal, while the main road connecting the two halves of the country via Gambia remains closed. He's thinking of just digging a big tunnel under Gambia. Don't do it, Senegal. Don't do it. --Nic Duquette [link]

A Crying "Shame"... One of the defenders of high culture Armavirumque, James Piereson (a new guy?) takes the New York Times to task for overusing the word "shameful" to describe sundry Republican political acts. In the process, he forgets the rich vocabulary that makes the English language so exciting:

What adjectives are left to describe the actions of Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden once we have applied [the word "shameful"] to a temporary suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act?

I'm not sure "shameful" would even have come to mind to describe those persons and their acts, at least not until I'd already considered "abhorrent," "despicable," "horrific," "contemptible," and "evil," among some others. "Shameful" is pretty good for, say, armed robbery, but it comes across as a little weak for mass murder. --Nic Duquette [link]

Tuesday, September 20, 2005, - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Orange Update... The international media attention has withdrawn, and with it, the magic. In Ukraine, upstart-turned-president Viktor Yushchenko has been embroiled in parliamentary sniping since firing his prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko.

As his parliament undermines him, it's worth wondering: why did Yushchenko fire Tymoshenko, a prominent politician who was one of his strongest and most helpful allies in the Orange Revolution? Is it really because he believes Tymoshenko has been compromised by allegations of corruption? Is it because of the plotting of another Yushchenko ally, millonaire Petro Poroshenko?

Or is it really because Yushchenko, a man whose movie-star face was permanently disfigured in an assassination attempt, can't stand to be upstaged by a woman who may be Earth's hottest politician? --Nic Duquette [link]

Monday, September 19, 2005, - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

The Book That Keeps On Giving... Wherever you swing your pick-axe around Vladimir Nabokov, you can't help but crack into a deep and coruscant geode. The Joycean puns, the anagrams, the subtle allusions to old Joycean puns and anagrams. Forget temples of doom or lost arks; the real perspiring quest can be embarked on at home. Or at Columbia University this evening, where Azar Nafisi (author of Reading Lolita in Tehran), Stacey Schiff and Alfred Appel dissect the most convincing love story of the twentieth century.

Columbia University, Miller Theater, 116th St. and Broadway, (212) 854-7799. 8 p.m. $15.

--Michael Weiss [link]

What's Underneath that Brooklyn Town House, Chuck?... From the Roberts confirmation hearings, here's a pretty specific question from Sen. Charles Schumer, D-NY:

SCHUMER: OK. Let me ask you, then, this hypothetical: And that is that it came to our attention, Congress', through a relatively and inexpensive, simple process, individuals were now able to clone certain species of animals, maybe an arroyo toad. Didn't pass over state lines; you could somehow do it without doing any of that. Under the commerce clause, can Congress pass a law banning even noncommercial cloning?

ROBERTS: I appreciate it's a hypothetical, and you will as well, so I don't mean to be giving bindings opinions. But it would seem to me that Congress can make a determination that this is an activity, if allowed to be pursued, that is going to have effects on interstate commerce. Obviously if you were successful in cloning an animal, that's not going to be simply a local phenomenon. That's going to be something people are going to...

SCHUMER: We can leave it at that. That's a good answer, as far as I am concerned.

"Say I've got this... friend... this friend with a lab that may or may not be legal..." Is Schumer afraid that people are going to be cloning the arroyo toad? Why the arroyo toad, which lives only in California? Why not some species of New York toad, or a pigeon or something?

The answer can only be that Schumer is afraid that somebody will clone, specifically, the arroyo toad -- or that somebody else will. And we all know what cloned amphibian DNA is good for. --Nic Duquette [link]

Same as the Old Boss... Bill Clinton, in an interview with George Stephanopoulos (!) last night, called for taxes to be raised to cover the widening deficit, especially our two wars and major disaster. This interview, and others, has Power Line outraged over the violation of the tradition that former presidents don't criticize sitting presidents. (I always thought it was the other way around. Or is it both?)

Anyway, it's interesting that Clinton said this. He may be the only man in America who could call for something as responsible and unpopular as a tax hike right now, and be heard, since he's (a) not running for office anymore, and insulated from unpopularity, yet (b) it's an open secret that he is running for office, vicariously, in 2008. For eight years this man was politically unkillable. Now, he's like a political zombie: he cannot be hurt, but he's still walking and talking and still dangerous to his enemies.

What if Hillary Clinton does become the next president? Then George W. Bush will feel free -- in an interview on Fox News conducted by Karl Rove -- to criticize her performance in public, and Bill Clinton will be obligated to come to her defense. George H.W. Bush -- if he's still alive -- will then defend his son, but mildly, because he's also made peace with Bill Clinton. After that? Jeb Bush will become president, Bill Clinton will seduce the chubbier Bush twin, and somebody can finally shoot Teddy Kennedy just before he leaves office.

No way they're going to raise taxes, though. --Nic Duquette [link]

Why I Like TimesSelect... I think it was back in the eighties that Noam Chomsky was informed by his oral hygienist that he was a teeth-grinder. This came as something of a shock, as Chomsky swore that he neither willingly nor semiconsciously condoned face-sponsored denticide, let alone engaged in the practice himself. Even his wife, after agreeing to inspect his sleep patterns, was able to attest that at no point during the night did Noam do anything that might erode his enamel. Still, the hygienist clung to the diagnosis. Then it occurred to the theorist of generative grammar that he might not be aware of his own degenerative habit because of a preoccupied emotional state during its execution. He was grinding his teeth while reading the New York Times.

I have my differences with Professor Chomsky, but I can't say that lack of sympathy for this plight is one of them. I suppose we can both rejoice now that the Times has affixed a sort of surgeon general's warning, or better say sin tax, on its own offensiveness. This is good, this is progress in the best nanny-state definition of the term.

Not that I'm not laissez-faire about most things that ail you. I recently got into a good-natured but ridiculous debate with a friend of mine who (seriously) suggested that the government levy an el gordo surcharge on twinkies because people like him have no self-control. On a therapeutic level, this would be like telling a narcissist that she is beautiful and expecting the sidelong glances into the mirror or lake surface to stop. Added to which, the cessation of harmful behavior should be arduous and painful and as unassisted as possible if one hopes to make that cessation permanent. Whereas high levels of exposure to a thing characteristically lead to inurement to it, in the case of addiction -- be it to partially hydrogenated oils, nicotine, heroin, or ethanol -- high levels of exposure lead either to self-destruction or to an unbearable sensitivity to the repulsiveness of that thing. The latter outcome is desired since it's the conditio sine qua non before the cold turkey or the twelve-steps can begin. (Even an "intervention" only formalizes an already arrived-at interior decision of the addict).

But some kicks take the masochism to a livable, and therefore worse, plane of constancy. A penalty on reading Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich every week. Now why didn't Mike Bloomberg think of that? --Michael Weiss [link]

The Cunning of History... So: a dŽclassŽ Social Democratic government in Germany struggles for continued relevance after an upstart, semi-anonymous conservative cashes in on a decade of unemployment and economic stagnation. A Stalinist slave state mutes the rhetoric which made it seem like the lone redoubt of militarized "worker's" revolutionism in the world, offering instead, and out of necessity, the chance for "peaceful coexistence" with its capitalist neighbors. And the month is September. And it's only Monday. --Michael Weiss [link]

Friday, September 16, 2005, - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

When Bad Jokes Prefigure Worse Realities... I had no idea when I woke up this morning and titled my post on the great Iranian nuke dodge, "Next Up: Consensual Rape," that I'd be proven right at all, let alone within the same 24-hour news cycle... Well, I suppose this story technically broke on Tuesday, but I swear I've only just read about it this evening.

Here's Pervez Musharraf staying popular with the ladies:

"You must understand the environment in Pakistan. This has become a money-making concern," he said.

"A lot of people say if you want to go abroad and get a visa for Canada or citizenship and be a millionaire, get yourself raped."

So that's why the Pakistani version of The Accused hit the marquee as Hey, You Never Know. --Michael Weiss [link]

More in Boredom than Anger... This was P.J. O'Rourke, circa 1987, generally in his Republican Party Reptile days and specifically in "An Alphabet for Schoolboys." I don't have to check the record for the accuracy of this strophe; it was committed to memory in high school:

Z is for Zany, eternal class clown,
Who won't stop kidding, who won't sit down.
Bane of the Boys' Dean, cursed by the teachers,
Source of amusement in classrooms and bleachers.
Zany is cute in a kitten or pup.
But as an adult, please shut the fuck up.

This is P.J. now:

The sum and substance of politics was expressed in the 1860s by Nicholas Chernyshevskii, a prescient Russian radical: "Man is god to man." And politics violates the other nine commandments as well. Politics could hardly function without bearing false witness. Likewise, without taking the Lord's name in vain. This is especially true given that, in politics, the Lord who is so loosely sworn by is Mankind. In the modern era politics has taken the place of mere tyranny. The result has been more killing in one century than in all the preceding centuries combined. Covetousness and stealing define redistributive politics. Without redistribution politics would have no political support. Graven image is as good a name as any for the fiat money by which politics operates. Politics' insistence upon involvement in every human activity, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, is more anti-Sabbatarian than golf. The Social Security system is no way to honor thy father and thy mother. And as for adultery, there was, and there may be still, Bill Clinton.

To claim that one's political activities are the will of God is to worship Beelzebub, as Osama bin Laden has demonstrated. To loudly call for separation of church and state is to miss the point. Why is there never a call for separation of state and coven?

This is a fine object lesson in what is not to be done, as it were, in humor writing. Sententious phrasemaking, offered up by a monument of inflated prestige (Nabokov once had delicious fun with Chernyshevsky in The Gift), turned literal, liturgical and into a series of inductive yuks. The Ten Commandments. Yes, well, I suppose the Peej was always more "Old Testament" in his conservatism than he was "neo" Good Book or even, as is often said of him, secular humanist and libertarian. But as with Waugh, as with Chesterton, and as with everybody who deploys the thundering earnestness of the confessional argument to sound, of all things, funny, the face has grown to fit the mask. The results aren't so pleasant to behold. That "coven" line might have come from Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, either of them being just as hilariously "on."

Indeed, I think a power higher than the liquor cabinet must have been found in the O'Rourke household. I can already hear the background thigh-slappers attending the transformation of an acidulated gadfly into an empurpled WASP: "Oh, there you are, Lord! What the heck were you doing under the sofa?" (And this from the man who once wrote that the "reborn Jesus creeps" should have done to them what the "conservative Romans did, with lions.") Perhaps with more kids and lower interest rates comes greater responsibility. Whatever the case, the coke-snorting, bra latch-fumbling Mesozoic Reaganite is severely past. I'd quite like to see him back again, defrocked and debauched, which have always been his two best states. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, September 15, 2005, - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Up Next: "Consensual Rape"... I once passed by a car that had just been broken into. The sign on the unshattered window was a futile attempt to ward off potential hazard, as most signs on most in-tact windows attached to expensive objects are wont to be. It read, "No Radio." This impressed me much less than the note on the driver's seat, obviously left by the thief. It read, "Just checking."

Iran's "diplomacy," which refurnishes futility and hazard with even more depressing definitions, has been one long declaration of "No Nukes." Everyone with two IQ points to rub together, on two major continents, is still, for some reason, inclined to check.

But the farcical element in what is quite clearly a race against time between bad liars and bad disciplinarians is never far from the table at which any real negotiating has yet to commence. Just look at this sentence in this BBC report:

Earlier Mr Ahmadinejad said Iran was ready to share peaceful nuclear secrets with other Islamic states.

Peaceful nuclear secrets. I can't tell if those are three oxys in search of a moron, or a sign of just how low the language has to sink before the bombs begin detonating. At least during the cold war the source for parody was euphemism, which tried to assuage and comfort ("acceptable risk," nuclear "exchange"), or synedoche, which tried to chill and terrify ("holocaust," "apocalypse"). Now the parody has become the source. There really is no fighting in the war room now. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Afternoon After... Because you know it wasn't going to be in the AM that I awoke today...

Don't want to spoil all the fun since I'm slated to write about the debate for a different forum -- which is admittedly like borrowing someone else's child to tell it how much you love it in front of your own -- but suffice it so say: no one spat in my face. Even the lobotomized hebephrenes who've been losing their own debate with reality for many years were polite (out of doors, anyway); the leaflets went quickly and in vast quantity; and I learned that wearing a jacket for agitprop street theatre is only good for covering up the saddlebag sweat stains that form underneath.

Oh, and Nick Denton is a very nice man with a very nice apartment. Going toe-to-toe with the Hitch in an exchange of dirty limericks is like an Irish peat moss merchant trying to outbid Exxon for an energy contract. And Roger Kimball does indeed like the bowtie.

Ex-Trotskyist Vanity Fair scribe roughs up UK fascist, then mingles the night away with New Criterion masthead and Gawker/Wonkette impresario. Eat your fucking heart out, Tom Wolfe. --Michael Weiss [link]

What's the Matter with Kansas... Working at a Federal Reserve Bank, I get to see the new state quarters before almost everybody, since my cafeteria is one of the main means of disseminating new currency. And I've got to say: the Sunflower State has the least interesting state quarter design to date, even compared to South Carolina's palmetto, wren and state map. Kansas has nothing on their quarter but a few runty sunflowers and an American bison:

I've got a fistful of these metallic ruminants in my pocket right now, and have since last week. And every time I look at them, the more pathetic they appear to be. Aside from being plain, the quarter's design makes an ill-advised stab at perspective and instead makes the bison's hind leg appear to be withered and dangling in midair. It's not only the worst design yet committed to a quarter; it doesn't even explore new territory for American coinage design, essentially being a poor imitation of the majestic buffalo nickel.

Come on, Kansas. You had potential for so much more. Even Indiana, America's worst state, at least had a Formula One car. Get it together. --Nic Duquette [link]

Wednesday, September 14, 2005, "Fight Night" - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Baruch College. Mason Hall. 7 o'clock... Well, it's not the Upper West Side, but so far as the orbit of a former Trotskyist popinjay is concerned, it will have to do. (And City College really is the next best thing, you know.)

The debate has been sold out for at least a week, and I know they're looking into overflow capacity and standing room-only and other assored euphemisms for "Jesus fucking Christ, it's crowded in here." But you will be able to watch it on C-SPAN BookTV (eventually), and hear it webcast (live) at KPFTX.org.

For those of you who can't make it, you can still do your part. Trolling around on RESPECT's website a little while ago, I discovered the party had adopted a cover of Erasure's "A Little Respect" as their official "theme." Now, leaving aside the toll this must take on an embattled gay disco community, I do happen to know a little bit about copyright law, and I know that a word-for-word rendition of intellectual property, MP3ized, and made available for free download on a public website is a no-no unless you've been given written authorization by the owner of said property. I also know that Galloway is something less than stoic when it comes to speed-dialing his civil action attorney. So, in the spirit of fair play, here's a letter I dispatched to Erasure's record label Mute, which hasn't responded yet (must be entangled in chains of love.)

Hi,

I was wondering: Is Mute Records aware that the RESPECT Coalition has a cover of Erasure's "A Little Respect" on its official website, and that the song is made available for free download as either an MP3 or WMV file? It's being trumpeted as the party's "theme," too.

http://www.respectcoalition.org/mp3/alittlerespect.mp3

http://www.respectcoalition.org/audio/alittlerespect.asx

Has the use of the song been sanctioned by your label, and by the band?

Sincerely,
Michael Weiss

Knock out the me-signature, and stick in your own. And why not e-mail Mute Records yourself? The chances are probably slim and none that this isn't kosher, but wouldn't it be nice to see George spend some of that hard-earned Telegraph money, in kind? --Michael Weiss [link]

Support Our Troops... Don't forget, in the midst of the hurricane catastrophe, that there are thousands of brave men and women doing difficult and dangerous work in Iraq for America's armed forces. It transcends pro-war or anti-war to support these people, who probably are feeling a little forgotten right now. To help a soldier out, consult AnySoldier.com. --Nic Duquette [link]

Tuesday, September 13, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Another Reason Not to Pay for Times Select... That would be the cringeworthy Nick Kristof. First paragraph of today's op-ed:

The biggest gathering of leaders in history unfolds this week at the United Nations, as they preen and boast about how much they're helping the world's poor. In short, it may be the greatest assembly in history - of hypocrites.

--Nic Duquette [link]

Presidential Illogic... Who dreamed up this quip?

"The storm didn't discriminate, and neither will the recovery effort," Bush said. "When those Coast Guard choppers -- many of whom were first on the scene -- were pulling people off roofs, they didn't check the color of a person's skin, they wanted to save lives.

I don't think anybody has suggested that the Coast Guard was rescuing white people first. (Or that weather systems hate black people.) But it has been the suggested that racial and economic inequality in America combined to put more black people in the most affected neighborhoods on the Gulf Coast; that poor blacks were less likely than other groups to have the means to evacuate in the absence of decent state and local planning; and that maybe the Bush administration would have responded faster in, say, Florida, than in a Democratic stronghold within a reliably Republican state.

To be fair to the president, I do not think the last bit is true. Bush has consisently shown that he's race-neutral in his cabinet appointments and the relationships he seems to have with African-American cabinet secretaries. He's also consistently shown he has no idea how to lead in a crisis or organize a massive operation of any sort, war or otherwise. Therefore, the sluggish federal response was probably not a function of callousness but of incompetence. --Nic Duquette [link]

Monday, September 12, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Goodbye, Paul Krugman... The Times is finally moving forward on its plan to place some content behind a subscriber-only wall, including its op-ed columnists. From now on, those who pony up fifty dollars a year will be able to "engage with our columnists through video interviews and Web-only postings," while the rest of us are denied any access to the columnists at all. Or vice versa. (Does "Web-only postings" sound to anybody else like a blog you must pay to read?)

Considering that the value of op-ed columnists is to some extent the influence they weild, as well as the cash they bring in, it's a curious business proposition to make their content paid subscribers only. Opinions are the only things the Wall Street Journal gives away, and for good reason. The only explanation for the Times' decision to do this is that it agrees with P.T. Barnum on the demographic preponderance of suckers. Considering Times readers seem to think Frank Rich is the third most valuable columnist the Times has, that might not be totally crazy.

But anyway: I'm not paying for this bullshit. Does anybody want to make book on when they start making their op-ed page available for free again? --Nic Duquette [link]

Hitchens v. Galloway... Don't ask me to roll the kind of rock you've been living under if you haven't by now heard about the forthcoming debate between Christopher Hitchens and George Galloway... Oh, all right, a brief Sisyphus moment: It's this Wednesday, September 14, in this great city, at Baruch College, and everyone from the Guardian, to the New York Post, to the New Criterion has been describing it as a rhetorical replay of Ali and Foreman (which, if we're talking about the same Ali who was on good terms with the Nation of Islam, and also had kind things to say about third world tinpot dictators, might not be such a facile analogy after all.)

One of the reasons this site hasn't been maintained very well of late is that for the past few weeks I've been helping Christopher compile a dossier on his opponent. Following what the easily duped in the media took to calling a "performance" before the Senate Subcommittee in May, it became clear that too few on this side of the Atlantic know what kind of thug, liar and criminal -- and no, I don't use that term metaphorically -- Galloway is. To add to Christopher's deft indictment of him in the Weekly Standard (which I hope you've all read), we thought it might be helpful to let the Bethnal bruiser give it to you straight from his own mouth, on everything from Saddam Hussein, to Iraqi self-determination, to the collapse of the Soviet empire, to jihadism, and to that last "castle of Arab dignity," Syria -- as it languishes under a disintegrating national socialism headed by the "learned" Bashar al-Assad.

So here's Galloway, "In His Own Words," in PDF format. (The fonts were a bit screwy in the last version I saw, but this is being worked on.) Verbum sat, "unairbrushed" doesn't begin to describe the accuracy of this portrait.

But, since I am an American, New York-born, and don't like letting demagogic, moralistic foreigners get the last word on anything, I overextended myself beyond the requirements of a cut-and-paste jockey. The more I dug up on Galloway's involvement in the Oil For Food program, the more I thought a brief synthesis of all that we now know about the inner workings of that program, and its covert exploitation by hired contractors of the Ba'ath regime, was in order. One would hate to see anemic Q&A sessions at every leg on Boy George's "tour" of these United States. (Jane Fonda, at the prodding of Eve Ensler, was slated to be Galloway's lecture buddy, which is both hilarious and terrifying. But Jane's since pulled out of that Stop the War car-pool. Even Barbarella, it would seem, has scruples -- or can afford to pay someone to have them for her.)

So here's a mini-Volcker report on Galloway, also in PDF format, with a few carefully worded questions the Senate subcomittee neglected to ask when it had the chance. You might ask them yourself, if you're in attendance on Wednesday.

The idea is to disseminate these materials before the debate; and also to have people download them for future printings which can trail Galloway all the live-long day until his travel visa expires. Spread the word. There should be a Slate column doing just that by the time you read this. --Michael Weiss [link]

Friday, September 9, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

The Onion's Fact-Is-Fiction-and-TV-Reality Tipping Point... Thus spake satiric sheet of genius ("Government Relief Workers Mosey In To Help;" the image caption):

FEMA representatives call out to survivors, 'Show us your tits for emergency rations!'

Now the New York Times (9/9/05: "Holdouts on Dry Ground Say,'Why Leave Now?'"):

In the French Quarter, Addie Hall and Zackery Bowen found a unusual way to make sure that police officers regularly patrolled their house. Ms. Hall, 28, a bartender, flashed her breasts at the police vehicles that passed by, ensuring a regular flow of traffic.

Special thanks to Max Gross. --Michael Weiss [link]

While I Was Gone... What the fuck happened in the Gulf Coast? When I left, a really bad hurricane hit shore and dozens of people were dead. I chastised Kos for comparing this to 9/11. But nauseating incompetence at all levels of government -- not to mention large cohorts of New Orleans citizens who have been killing and raping each other -- this has become the great disaster of our generation. Five times the economic damage was caused by this hurricane as compared to 9/11; many more people are probably dead; and, to the extent this hurricane saps the spare capacity of the American economy and ties down our National Guard forces, it has not inconsiderable geopolitical consequences, as well, if those effects are neither direct nor an, er, watershed.

Other blogs have been doing a great job tracing the incompetence and political finger-pointing going on here. I wonder what will happen in the war on terror now. Other than this badly written Friedman column which calls America Iraq's levee, nobody seems to be wondering what's likely to happen next. Three things seem apparent to me: (1) Iraq has to take control of its own security right away, because Americans are going to essentially withdraw attention to focus on the domestic tragedy. The insurgents will probably win. (2) America is very vulnerable right now to terrorist attacks on refinery capacity, not only domestically but, as we don't refine all our own gasoline, abroad. If al-Qaeda can pile refinery shortages abroad, one after another, on top of the shortages already created by the hurricane, they can plunge the world's superpower into a severe recession, and thereby actually drive America from the world stage to tend to its own needs. (3) In the long run, these high gas prices might be the boot in the ass Americans need to change their energy consumption habits -- a boot that should have been administered in the form of higher gas taxes offset by income tax cuts, but whatever. This surge is going not to our government's coffers, but it isn't going to petrotyrants and terrorists, either -- it's going to multinational oil firms, who aren't a force for good but at least have as strong an interest in quelling Middle Eastern unrest as we do.

That's a quick take. Any readers who see other possibilities and problems on the horizon, please send them to me. --Nic Duquette [link]

Irony Watch... O America: land of contradictions. I just got back from spent several days in Ohio, where the highways are lined with field after field of soybeans, yet you're hard-pressed to find tofu on a menu. Shortly after this occurred to me, we were passed by a silver Audi with a vanity plate: "RED VLVO."

This was on my mind as I read this in the Washington Post. (via Atrios).

Organizers of the Pentagon's 9/11 memorial Freedom Walk on Sunday are taking extraordinary measures to control participation in the march and concert, with the route fenced off and lined with police and the event closed to anyone who does not register online by 4:30 p.m. today.

The march, sponsored by the Department of Defense, will wend its way from the Pentagon to the Mall along a route that has not been specified but will be lined with four-foot-high snow fencing to keep it closed and "sterile," said Allison Barber, deputy assistant secretary of defense. Let's hear it for freedom, and our self-evident right to life, sterility and pursuit of safety. --Nic Duquette [link]

Wednesday, September 7, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Light Blogging This Week... Sorry for the inconvenience. Change of season, change of priorities. Back in full force by next week. Promise.

Meanwhile, if you haven't already done, go to Instapundit and donate to Katrina Relief (sounds like a Nick Hornby gimmick about an ex-girlfriend). Or, if you're a Citibank user, you can allocate funds straight from your checking account to one of many charities -- just found this out last night. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, September 1, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Self-Promotion (Room) 101... My very, very long review of Robert Service's Stalin biography is posted on Stop Smiling magazine's website. Weeks of Koba the Dread, plus now plumbing the depths of oil-for-food and Gallowayana... No better way to kick off Labor Day weekend. --Michael Weiss [link]

B.H.L. and the End of History Lost Boys (with One Exception)... Bernard Henri-Levy has taken some flak for failing to live up to the lofty expectations set forth in a Continental sojourner's tale entitled, "In the Footsteps of Tocqueville." The style is too breezy, too meditative, too -- French. Now, I happen to think that the French are second only to the English in observing and commenting on American culture -- assuming, that is, that they approach their specimen with something ranging from mild indifference to tempered optimism. But what's next for The Atlantic? "In the Nothingness of Sartre?"

That order may have also been filled by B.H.L., who's probably the only journalist-intellectual to ever get Richard Perle to say "Althusser," and to make Bill Kristol sound like a soixante-huitard trapped in a darkened alley of reality-muggers.

On the Prince of Darkness (no, not Satan or Nick Cave):

This conversation has the effect of reviving my old questions not about the war itself÷of which I disapproved from the first day, and of which my analysis hasn't varied at all÷but about these strange characters whom we in France stubbornly persist in demonizing ("princes of darkness") or ridiculing with simplistic epithets ("neo-cons," which can also mean, in French, "neo-dummies"), but who aren't quite as uni-dimensional as they may seem.

Sometimes, listening to this Bush follower who, among other peculiarities, has remained a registered Democrat and boasts about it, I say to myself, Of course he's right. How can one be against the overthrow of such a tyrant? How can one spend a lifetime, as I have done, deploring the inaction of rich countries, their pusillanimity, their recurrent Munichism when faced with enemies bent on destroying them and willing to try anything to acquire the means of doing so, and not be delighted when in the most powerful democracy in the world there finally appears a generation of intellectuals who get close to the top and concretely work for the universalization of human rights and freedom?

On the grand poobah of the Weekly Standard:

What links us: history, intellectual genealogy, a certain number of formative experiences, the oldest and perhaps most essential of which seems to be his long rebellion against the way the West had consented to the enslavement of the countries in "captive Europe." When I hear Kristol talk about how his youth was formed by the great antitotalitarian thinkers of the twentieth century; when I see him get carried away about the cultural relativism and the historicism that were used to excuse the most horrible dictatorships; when I imagine him laying siege, as he did in the 1990s, to America's foreign-policy decision-makers in order to persuade them to intervene in Bosnia and then in Kosovo; and finally when I imagine him pleading against the Taliban and, even more, against our silent assent to the iron rule it imposed on Afghanistan, it's my own history I find. These are the dates of my own intellectual biography I see quickly pass by; I want to say that though our positions diverge, our axioms are shared...

A neo-conservative? No÷he is a Platonist without the ideas. An adviser to princes without detachment or reservations. An antitotalitarian who at bottom, and whatever he may say, is not as faithful as he would like to think to the heritage of Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt÷and who, for this reason, deprives himself of the necessary freedom that the status of intellectual should imply.

On Francis Fukuyama:

...Hegel plus Leo Strauss · Hegelian providentialism chilled, almost reduced, by the "Greek" skepticism of the author of The City and Man · That is the Fukuyama equation. Those are the metaphysical÷thus political÷coordinates of this agnostic-universalist, this pessimistic progressive. And it's more than a variation÷it's actually a new position on the American political chessboard.

And, of course, on Hitch -- not that he qualifies as a neoconservative, which would imply a sustained a third act of political self-repudiation after having been a Marxist right on through to middle age. (And nobody who puts the metaphysical term "evil" through a materialist dry-rinse by calling it "the surplus value of the psychopath" can have grown completely, resentfully unmoored to his Marxism.)

It always takes a kind of courage to run the risk of disappointing or alienating your own followers; and in this case it takes courage to stand firm on both fronts÷to stand in front of these 150 leftists for whom Hitchens used to be a hero, and who ask nothing more than to go on celebrating him as one, and tell them, "I am and I am not one of you. There is Hitchens No. 1, who is responsible for this film, and who, ten years later, wouldn't take one word or shot away from it. But there is Hitchens No. 2, who continues the fight without you, by supporting the war in Iraq."

That's not the essential point, though. The essential point is this: I see him active on both fronts at once, and not lowering his guard on either of them. I see him, unlike Kristol, not giving in about Vietnam on account of Iraq, and thus taking the risk, necessarily, of losing on both counts. I listen to him try Kissinger on two charges, because he reproaches him for his role in Indochina in the 1960s but also for his far too flabby involvement, like that of so many of the realpolitik people, in this war against Islamic fundamentalism. And I tell myself that here, between the two branches of what from afar seems like the American conservative movement, is a debate, even a gulf, of which we have only the faintest conception in Europe. --Michael Weiss [link]

Dear Network Executives... Please produce this sitcom. I'll watch it. My friends will, too.

ð Abu, Ahmed, Musab and Salar, a cell of Islamic terrorists sent to Chicago by a nefarious network resembling Al Qaeda, are getting chewed out by their murderous boss, just in from Afghanistan. (They have been spending the organization's money like crazy but haven't blown anything up.) Just then, two deliverymen knock on the apartment door, bearing a huge flat-screen TV.

ð Ahmed, whose cover is a job as a bike messenger, falls in love with a neighborhood florist - who turns out to be Jewish - but can't get up the nerve to ask her out. "You're bright, you're funny, you're talented," Musab says, urging his comrade on. "Who made the best nail bomb in training camp? You did!"

ð Abu blends in by joining a bowling team, and becomes a fanatic: "We will dance in the blood of the losers from Hal's Body and Paint Shop!" he vows. But he is a hapless terrorist. A fertilizer bomb in his trunk accidentally goes off outside when he is bowling for the league championship - toppling his last two pins and clinching victory.

Pretty please. --Michael Weiss [link]

More on the Stampede... There seems to be some confusion as to what caused the stampede on the Baghdad bridge yesterday. The Evening Standard reports that a mortar attack on the Shiite shrine precipitated the "rumor" of a suicide attack, which led to the fatal trampling. But the Times still maintains that it was a spontaneously generated rumor -- yet one that has led to more injuries as gunfire was exchanged between protestors and police near the Tigris today.

Police said the trouble started when Shiites in the Kazimiyah district approached the bridge from their side, shouting slogans protesting the Wednesday deaths.

No one had told the Iraqi soldiers guarding the bridge about the demonstration, so they started shooting in the air, police said. The three injured were hurt in the ensuing panic.

Lack of preparedness seems to be a global problem this week. But that Iraqi soldiers were surprised by something that ought to have been easily foreseen doesn't exactly reduce the complaint that the government is ill-equipped to stopper civil chaos -- not quite the same thing as combating terrorism, but almost as important.

''This is a result of the inadequate performance of the interior and defense ministers, which has caused such a loss of life,'' said Baha al-Aaraji, a Shiite lawmaker affiliated with radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

''They should stand in front of the national assembly and be questioned. If it is proven that they have failed to fulfill their responsibilities, they should be dismissed and stand trial,'' he said.

The hell with the "stand trial" bit, but it's when an acolyte of al-Sadr starts sounding rational and responsible that you know a major fuck-up has occurred. --Michael Weiss [link]

Asshole of the Week... Was going to go for "month," but the more you stretch out the calendar, the more it becomes a bidding war. Where does Sully find these people?

"Although the loss of lives is deeply saddening, this act of God destroyed a wicked city. From 'Girls Gone Wild' to 'Southern Decadence', New Orleans was a city that had its doors wide open to the public celebration of sin. May it never be the same. Let us pray for those ravaged by this disaster. However, we must not forget that the citizens of New Orleans tolerated and welcomed the wickedness in their city for so long..."

Michael Marcavage, Repent America: the Website (not to be confused with the film, book, or animated series.) --Michael Weiss [link]

Chomsky: "U.S. Foreign Policy Brought Down the Wrath of Katrina"... Just kidding. He hasn't said that. (Yet.) But that hasn't stopped intercontinental smugness about chickens coming home to roost, or Poseidons coming home to swim. Some honorable guy at Der Spiegel has called out the German Minister of the Environment JŸrgen Trittin for suggesting that a hurricane is linked to global warming (and that global warming, as we all know, is caused by Ahmed Chalabi, or Halliburton, or oil emissions or something.)

At a moment when the dead on the Gulf Coast are still being counted, the German minister of the environment could think of nothing better to do than -- in an essay published Tuesday in the center-left daily Frankfurter Rundschau -- to blame the US itself for the catastrophe. The piece is 493 words long, and not a single one of them is wasted to express any sort of sympathy for the victims of the storm. The worst of it is that Trittin isn't alone with his cold, malicious tenor. The coverage from much of the German media tends in the same direction: If Bush had only listened to Uncle Trittin and signed the Kyoto Protocol, then this never would have happened.

Bullshit. Trittin's article is a slap in the face to all the victims. Let's just assume that the environment minister is right, that there is a direct relationship between greenhouse gases and Hurricane Katrina. Even still this would hardly be the time for yet another round of America bashing and finger pointing.

Question: A less-than-Joschka Greenie becomes a spiggot of ice cold stupidity as hundreds, probably thousands, are submerged underwater in a major American city. How long does it take for nostalgia to set in for those lazy Axis of Weasel days, when the language blushed a positively dunnish hue? (Sorry, sort of a wife-beater of me to have asked. The answer is the same paragraph.)

Three years ago, just before the US election, former Minister of Justice Hertha DŠubler Gmelin compared US President George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler. This time, with German elections looming, the environment minister is using a natural catastrophe as an excuse to once again campaign with subtle anti-Americanism and to unabashedly pat himself on the back. A "Kyoto Two" is "desperately needed" screamed the headline over his insensitive attack.

I'm just going to go ahead and bury the lede on this one and say that all Europeans think Hurricane Katrina is Hitler. It's up to them, individually, to disprove this. Note: Some variation of, "We'd all be [wearing/licking/trading in for Jimmy Choo's] Nazi boots now if it weren't for the Americans" is prerequisite in any attempt to do this.

It's not the American people's fault that the storm hit and they couldn't have stopped it. The Germans, on the other hand, could have done a lot to prevent World War II. And yet, care packages still rained down from US troops. Trittin's know-it-all stance is therefore not only tasteless, it is also historically blind.

OK, he's cool. Next. --Michael Weiss [link]

Tragic Relief... Is there anyone not willing to call the situation in New Orleans what it is: an absolute scandal? Four days have gone by and no food or water has been sent by the federal government. Even Fox News's Shepherd Smith was willing to confront a police officer to ask him just what the hell was going on. I remember seeing the head of FEMA before Katrina hit bragging about how prepared they were for it, and how great the President was for bolstering their budget. Well, where are they? Thousands of people are dead or dying on the downtown streets of New Orleans while media camera crews have managed to make the arduous trip to document the carnage. If only the government relief teams could do the same. --Mark Grueter [link]

Nightmare in Baghdad... Imagine the hideous smile that crept across Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's face yesterday morning upon discovering that free speech is a suicide pact, after all. Another self-cannibalizing trait of the democracy he so loathes and will do anything to prevent from taking shape in Iraq? Maybe. Does he -- do we -- deserve the satisfaction of finding this out definitively? Never.

The largest death toll in a single day since the Anglo-American led invasion occurred not with a bomb, or a phalanx of masked, Kalishnikov-toting psychopaths, but with a whisper -- or maybe a scream. 950 Shiite Muslims, paying pilgrimage to one of their holiest of sites, were crushed or suffocated or drowned in a panicked flight from what they now accept as a daily occurrence. But it had to happen on a bridge. The New York Times:

Insurgents have often struck at Shiite religious processions in the past. But the stampede appears to have started with unfounded rumors of a man wearing a suicide belt on the bridge.

The pilgrims were among a throng of hundreds of thousands of mostly poor Shiites from northern Baghdad and the surrounding area who had converged on the shrine bearing colored banners and symbolic coffins to mark the anniversary of the death of Imam Musa Kadhim, one of Shiite Islam's holiest figures.

If "suicide belt" has a vernacular meaning to us, will "suicide rumor" be next? Is that all it's going to take from now on?

This is the true vulgarity of the "low-tech" but "high-concept" murder, which became a cliche when box-cutters felled buildings, and then a banality when shoes started being removed at airport security terminals (God knows what they'd do). It's made no less vulgar by the fact that the alert may have been signaled genuinely, not by a jihadist masquerading as a terrified innocent, but by a terrified innocent acting on instinct.

Is it the sickening number of corpses, or the effortless production of them that will serve as a tipping point in the universal realization that the worshippers of Death are also the biggest missionaries going?

Al-Sistani blames the terrorists. Of course he does. Let someone else be the first to find "accident" an acceptable metonym for "stampede." --Michael Weiss [link]

Wednesday, August 31, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Hurricane (Media) Watch... It wasn't just "someone" who labeled Katrina America's Tsunami - it was the NY Post. Take a look at today's sensational cover and then reflect upon just how long we'll have to endure this sort of awful coverage. Counterpunch is posting articles lambasting the media for placing emphasis on the "looter" angle of the story. Cockburn and St. Clair conclude that our governors and media are more concerned with protecting the property of such wonderful institutions as The Gap and 7-11 than they are with actual people. I don't see how anyone can know for sure exactly what the hell is going on down there. Multiple towns, cities, states are affected one might suspect circumstances vary.

However, watching MSNBC all day, it did occur to me that nobody bothers to mention that the hardest-hit by these storms are the poor. The hundred or so thought to be dead are almost certainly those who were too strapped to leave town or otherwise woefully uninformed about the dangers of the situation. I would take Counterpunch's argument one step further and suggest that looting in this case is morally justifiable. People generally don't take shit unless they need it. If the poor and the destitute feel as though they need slurpees and button-fly jeans, I'm all for it. --Mark Grueter [link]

More Horrible Analogies... What is wrong with people? First the tsunami comparison, now we have the governor of Mississippi remarking that " I can only imagine that this is what Hiroshima looked like 60 years ago," while superblogger Kos says of Katrina, "This is the greatest disaster to hit our nation in most of our lifetimes. Worse than 9-11. " Fuck you, Kos. Anybody want to top this one in tastelessness and inaccuracy? Do I hear an Auchwitz?

For a truly heartfelt, mournful discussion of the hurricane's devastation, read this essay by Josh Levin. --Nic Duquette [link]

Here's the Story of the Hurricane... I heard someone call it America's Tsunami on the news, which the flattening of Biloxi and probably hundreds of deaths aside was one of the most inaccurate and repellent things I've ever heard. First, the death count will be three to four orders of magnitude smaller; second, there was advance warning and plenty of it; third, huge tsuamis are freakishly unusual, whereas hurricanes on the Gulf Coast aren't an event, they're a season.

Maybe if we rehash the Problem of Evil every time a twister strikes a trailer park, people would finally admit that these tearjerker theological Rubik's Cubes are insoluble by design. But then, that would be popular philosophy's equivalent of that entire season of Dallas that turned out to be a dream sequence, wouldn't it? So forget it. Bathe in the pathos. Brian Williams, please cut to whichever field reporter has dug up another sobbing widower. Thanks, old sport.

[For something subject to less diminishing returns, visit InstaPundit for a list of ways you can contribute to Katrina Relief.] --Nic Duquette [link]

Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Good News in Lebanon... Three top Lebanese officials have been detained as suspects in the ongoing investigation into Rafiq Hariri's murder back in February.

In separate dawn raids this morning, investigators working with the Lebanese police detained Jamil al-Sayyed, Lebanon's former head of general security; Ali Hajj, the former chief of police; and Raymond Azar, the former military intelligence chief. Armed with search warrants, the investigators searched their homes before bringing them in as suspects for questioning.

So some big-name satraps in the employ of Bashir Assad's regime are going to be interrogated amid a velvet-ish textured democratic revolution. Any bets on where the Ba'athist buck stops in this crime? And can we expect full cooperation and disclosure from Damascus, or more subterfuge and covert killing?

The United States and the United Nations (with special guest star, the Ukraine) should do everything they can to provide security for Saad Hariri and other high-profile oppositionists.

"The mood in Beirut is that this is just a first step, and one that is mainly directed against the Syrians," said an editor at the Lebanese Daily Star, Michael Young, who is a pro-opposition analyst. "You bring in people like this for a reason. The point, I think, is to give them a big slap and say the winds have changed and you had better start talking."

One thing that simply must go when Beirut's remote fascism does is all this talk about "winds of change." John Buchan, I think, rode the first zephyr all the way to the bank in his master spy novel Greenmantle, but it's become a real problem ever since. At least "Cedar" has a more, well, rooted elemental connotation.

What do we want? Elections! What else (if we get a chance)? New Orientalist metaphors! --Michael Weiss [link]

Salman Stream... Imagine an exceptionally intelligent and gifted young boy growing up in a third world country, enamored of Hollywood (completely overcome by The Wizard of Oz), and already for some reason acutely perceptive of the razor's edge of fame -- the permanent wobble between love and death which takes place on it. Now imagine that boy grows up to write novels, not act in movies. One of these novels catapaults him into instant global fame, though not the kind he might have chosen for himself, and the designated terminus of which is not an Oscar or a brilliant colorization of his old work. He's known love (not to mention comradeship and solidarity) and he's certainly known death, but he's known them in hypertime, in intense, chemically mixed clots. What's this going to do to his writing? If you're John Updike, you say:

Rushdie as a literary performer suffers, I think, from being not just an author but a cause cŽl?bre and a free-speech martyr, thanks to the fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in the wake of ãThe Satanic Versesä (1988), a playful work that precipitated riots in India and Pakistan, and gave American and English publishers and booksellers an early taste of heightened security. The fatwa, which invited any good Muslim to kill Rushdie, was withdrawn in 1998, but a decade of living in hiding deepened this previously gregarious authorâs expertise on two subjects: celebrity and human cruelty. His fascination with fame and theatricality, movies and rock music predated the fatwa, and gives his fiction a distracting glitter, like shaken tinsel. --Michael Weiss [link]

Existential Pursuit... Snoopy or Michel Houellebecq?

He feeds on Schopenhauer's cosmic pessimism, to which he is more than happy to relate. His style is not to have a style. Casually and indifferently, he describes life as an endless scream of suffering, combining the obscene, the banal and the visionary, often without any transitions. His irony is so dark that it seems almost imperceptible.

Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock... --Michael Weiss [link]

Tuesday, August 30, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Yeah, But Little Trotsky Made It Over Okay... Now here's a pargraph you don't see every day:

JosŽ Zhunio, who worked at Gibson's Steakhouse in Chicago, said he encouraged his son, Stalin, to join him. When Mr. Zhunio saw news of the sinking on Telemundo in Chicago, he feared the worst.

Uh, pardon me. Como se llama el muchacho?

Ecuadorian migrant workers en route to Chicago drown off the coast of Guatemala. Sad, especially for some fluorescent-bathed pencil-pusher in the United States Bureau of Name Changes. --Michael Weiss [link]

Or "The Shakespeare Code"... Next the NYT and I will simultaneously bend over to pick something up and bump heads. Then we'll show up to a cocktail party wearing the same outfit. We'll buy each other the same gift for Christmas. Then -- oh, never mind.

I've been ripped off by the Leviathan -- and not even for choice merchandise.

But since they brought up the subject of the Bard Identity this time, and since Lolita turns a hot-flashing 50 this year -- while Nabokov still hasn't aged a day -- it's worth pointing out that not too long ago the original 'nymphesto' was said to have been unearthed. And un-written by the sage of Montreux. Gasp! Tum-tee-tum, and once more -- TUM! Did Nabokov "plagiarize" the only convincing love story of the twentieth-century, as Lionel Trilling rightly called it? (If so, how very twentieth-century of him.)

The idea for a Dolores Haze and a Continental roue with a liquid tongue who destroys her is as old as pedophilia itself. The Enchantress was Vlad's rough draft, in short story form, for his eventual blue book. But even before that, and well within a White Russian's emigre period, some European had scribbled something uncannily similar. Did Nabokov read it and steal? Or perhaps "semi-consciously absorb" a big theme from whence he derived his own scintillating variations? Ron Rosenbaum devoted not one, but two New York Observer pieces (sorry, archived for paying customers only) to the latter proposition, tricked out as Nabokovian "cryptonesia" -- though it should have been called Speak Up, Memory. As the second Rosenbaum piece demonstrated, the whole thing was an elaborate non-scandal filled in by some naughty scholar, the literary equivalent of a cold fusion physicist. But it had us going for a whole week.

Whereas Will's been putting up with this shit for centuries:

Shakespeare had to have read a lot of books. Books were valuable. But in his will, where he was very specific about a second-best bed for his wife and about who should get plate, a sword and various rings, there is no mention of books.

Ever see that episode of Friends where Rachel is trying to date a nice-looking gynecologist? Only... he doesn't seem too inclined to get her number. Why? Well, take Rachel's job as a coffee waitress, for instance. "You know when you get home from a long day's work? The last thing you want to see is -- another cup of coffee."

Coffee, vagina, folio. Same difference. Oh, and let's don't forget the bibliophobic market factor involved:

In "1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare" (Faber & Faber, 2005), James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia, notes, "There's no way that Shakespeare could have bought or borrowed even a fraction of the books that went into the making of his plays."

Swing and a miss. Again. Why hasn't this sluggish game been called already? --Michael Weiss [link]

Monday, August 29, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Charles Murray: Late to the Party... Ultraconservative Charles Murray weighs in on the Larry Summers scandal... what, a year late? Ten months? But he still got a prominent and approving link from Andrew Sullivan in a new essay that rehashes his old arguments in light of the sex-differences debate. The gist: there are innate differences in the distributions of cognitive abilities between groups and between the sexes which explain the relative performance of those groups better than environmental factors or social norms. Murray has the advantage over Summers in that his argument is more carefully phrased and argued, but whereas Summers was focusing on extreme cohorts and very specific skills, Murray is painting the distirubtion of human intelligence with a very broad brush. He is the most articulate member of the "it's not racist if it's true" school of thought, but articulation can only take one so far.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Murray is correct, and that there are significant differences in intelligence between sexes or races, statistically. Since this is a statistical phenomenon, he reminds us, it tells us little about individual persons, and " a few minutes of conversation with individuals you meet will tell you much more about them than their group membership does." True -- but there's ample evidence that human beings of all types fare poorly in the application of subtle shades of probability. We misunderstand the probability of winning the lottery or being struck by lightning. And if we are told that there is real, hard scientific evidence that, say, Asians and Jews tend to be more intelligent than other groups, that could have a strong impact on hiring practices far more distortionate than the alleged myth of group equality. Murray's famous book on this subject was called The Bell Curve, and you need look no farther than the plentiful Amazon reader reviews, which are composed mostly of repelled liberals and smug racists. I am not able to muster evidence to refute Mr. Murray's claims, but if racial groups and the sexes are unequal, whatever politically correct silliness may result is far less damaging to society than the centuries of cruelty, abuse and even genocide perpetrated when one group convinced itself it should dominate the social order. People are not sophisticated enough to distinguish between political or moral equality of all men and equality in skills and intelligence. If equality did not exist, it would have to be invented. --Nic Duquette [link]

Friday, August 26, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

OK Computer... Radiohead are blogging the recording of their next album. Sort of. Called Dead Air Space, the blog looks and reads like it was meant to mimic a 14-year-old girl with a thing for Radiohead and e.e. cummings. Thom Yorke's postings are the most texutal, with observations ranging from

ch
glu d
to a room
in a skyscrapER
idontSpeakTheLAnguage
no st
IMulAtion

to "ed is having a drink. alert the authorities."

The rest of the band mostly seems to post photos of each other, mostly playing instruments or standing around awkwardly. --Nic Duquette [link]

Thursday, August 25, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

The Shakespeare Code... The funniest parody of anti-Stratfordianism I have ever come across occurs in Vladimir Nabokov's Bend Sinister. The machinery is cleverly rigged to self-sabotage, but if that weren't enough, it's followed by an ecstatic tribute from a Russian genius to an English one. It's a tribute which has embedded within itself an abiding reverence for the arduous process of literary translation (which Nabokov knew well enough), not to mention humility before the Muse of literary creation, spontaneous in her charity as she is consistent in her stinginess. Part One goes like this:

A fluted glass with a blue-veined violet and a jug of hot punch stand on Ember's bedtable. The buff wall directly above his bed (he has a bad cold) bears a sequence of three engravings.

Number one represents a sixteenth-centuy gentleman in the act of handing a book to a humble fellow who holds a spear and a bay-crowned hat in his left hand. Note the sinistral detail (Why? Ah, "that is the question," as Moniseur Homais once remarked, quoting le jounral d'hier; a question which is answered in a wooden voice by the Portrait on the title page of the First Folio). Note also the legened: "Ink, a Drug,: Somebody's idle pencil (Ember highly treaures this scholium) has numbered the letters so as to spell Grudinka which means "bacon" in several Slavic languages.

Number two shows the rustic (now clad in the clothes of the gentleman) removing from the head o fhte gentleman (now writing at a desk) a kind of shapska. Scribbled underneath in the same hand: "Ham-let, or Homelette au Lard."

Finally, a number three has a road, a traveller on foot (wearing the stolen shapska) and a road sign "To High Wycombe."

And thus the inventor of the scientific method, Sir Francis Bacon, is said to have also been the mover of so much pungent unpleasantness in Denmark, Verona and (on more than one occasion) Venice, to name just a few Continental locales that are inextricable from their theatrical renderings.

Part Two, the tribute, reads like this:

Nature had once produced an Englishman whose domed head had been a hive of words; a man who had only to breathe on any particle of his stupendous vocabulary to have that particle live and expand and throw out tremulous tentacles until it became a complex image with a pulsing brain and correlated limbs. Three centuries later, another man, in another country, was trying to tender these rhythms and metaphors in a different tongue. This process entailed a prodigious amount of labour, for the necessity of which no real reason could be given. It was as if someone, having seen a certain oak tree (further called Individual T) growing in a certain land and casting its own unique shadow on the green and brown ground, had proceeded to erect in his garden a prodigiously intricate piece of machinery which in itself was as unlike that or any other tree as the translator's inspiration and language were unlike those of the original author, but which, by means of ingenious cominbations of parts, light effects, breeze-engendering engines, would, when completed, cast a shadow exactly similar to that of Individual T—the same outline, changing in the same manner, with the same double and single spots of suns ripping in the same position, at the same hour of the day. From a practical point of view, such a waste of time and material (those headaches, those midnight triumphs that turn out to be disasters in the sober light of morning!) was almost criminally absurd, since the greatest masterpiece of imitation presupposed a voluntary limitation of thought, in submission to another man's genius. Could this suicidal limitation and submission be compensated by the miracle of adaptive tactics, by the thousand devices of shadography, by the keen pleasure that the weaver of words and their witness experienced at every wile in the warp, or was it, taken all in all, an exaggerated and spiritualized replice of Paduk's writing machine?

Paduk is a dictator. At the novel's beginning, we find him lording over a Soviet-like society under the command of a faction known as the Party of the Average Man. Average man... How could William Shakespeare, who was so seemingly average, without a formal education, without "breeding," without any of the presumed requisites for becoming a good writer, let alone the best writer -- how could he have done it all, and done it so effortlessly? Surely this is the greatest hoodwink known to man?

Nope. All rubbish. --Michael Weiss [link]

Rise of the Nice-Guy Comedian... I don't know what it is -- Jonathan Livingston Seagull books, the sociology of Thomas Szaz, or a culture that tends to wave self-esteem into a white padded cell of unmolested serenity -- but mainstream comedians have lost their core cynicism, even when making a career out of faking the superficial kind. Amazingly, this seems to be a step in the right direction...

Remember when Tom Hanks, launched into post-Wild 'n Crazy leading manhood, started being labelled the consummate "nice-guy" of Hollywood? Out of what state of pop cultural amnesia did the first Variety hack who wrote that emerge? Hanks got his start by being an insufferable prick of stand-up: a smarmy, diarrhea-mouthed, collar-loosening, counter-heckler, even where there was no unamused audience to harangue. Then he did a Meg Ryan movie or twelve, died of AIDS, and saved Gary Sinise's life, and everyone loved him. He could do no wrong. He was nice, nice, nice, nice. He deserved another Oscar for Lifetime Achievement Gemutlich Backslappery. (And even if he did make some vaguely revealing hint at his true nature, like he did at the 25th SNL Anniversary Special, when he joked about keeping one of his statuettes in the bathroom, just to stay "humble" -- it didn't matter. Still nice!)

Now comes genuinely agreeable guys like Will Farrell, Ricky Gervais and Steve Carrell. Not that being a true-blue mensch testifies any innate reserves of talent (which in their cases is are many and deep), but they all seem like husbands who still buy flowers for their wives, hold doors open for little old ladies, and otherwise spend a lot of off-camera moments engaged in random acts of neighborliness.

Read this Onion A.V. Club interview with Steve Carrell, and see what I mean. --Michael Weiss [link]

It's Good to be the...Tenured... The Sargents can have high tea in the Pierre's sumptuous rotunda or, if heading to the park, phone downstairs for a picnic basket stuffed with grilled pencil asparagus salad, cherry tomato and Bermuda onion salad, cold sliced fillet of beef with horseradish sauce, and cheese, fruit, and crackers. The pampering isn't free. The picnic basket itself costs $65 and requires a $100 deposit for the china, cutlery, napkins, and blanket.

Mr. Sargeant is an Economics professor at NYU, Ms. Sargeant is Provost. The Pierre is where they live.

If you think the Mahdi Army has got beef with their neighbors, wait'll you see what Sociology and Linguistics do to the Ayatollah Greenspanei. --Michael Weiss [link]

New Yorker Festival Tickets On Sale at Noon... Reminder. They sell out fast, so order 'em faster. Here. --Michael Weiss [link]

Worse Than TiVo... You watch one episode of Sex and the City and you're marked for life.

If you liked this program, TiVo also recommends: "Queer as Folk," "Angels in America," "CHiPs," "360 with Anderson Cooper," "SpongeBob Squarepants," "Desperate Houseboys from Planet South Beach," and a stronger childhood homeffather figure.

Fine. Algorithms are a harsh mistress. Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes, she eats you. I can handle that. But now there's Logo, the basic cable gay channel, and what do they go and list on the digital TV Guide menu? "Morrissey: Live from Manchester."

Un-fucking-believable. Can't we go back to the halcyon days when the Pope of Mope was "all about the music," and weirdly, who-are-we-really-kiddingly asexual? Why only now choose to acknowledge the kitschy elephant in the room?

Look, I've heard the lyrics: "Billy Budd," "Piccadilly Palare," "This Charming Man." And I've glimpsed the album covers. I understand things all went downhill once the heterosexual overtones started to creep in... But it was always such an agreeable state of wafer-thin ambiguity and denial; the cliche for The Smiths was romantic misanthropy, and that was good. That was "big-tent" outcast. Now there's ads for Mario Cantone stand-up specials, something called "Take My Life Partner -- Please!," hairloss and diet pills, cruises, and an eco-friendly SUV called The Tribeca -- and this just to hear -- gulp -- "The Queen Is Dead."

Who the hell handed over Moz without a fight? Anne Heche re-drank the Kool-Aid. So too will he. --Michael Weiss [link]

Wednesday, August 24, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

The Good News, Sir, Is You Haven't Passed on Tay-Sachs To Your Child... British researchers have found that roughly 1 in 25 pregnancies screened for genetic diseases don't have the, er, expected paternity. Their quandary: given that revealing this unexpected information has a tendency to shatter marriages and reduce the self-esteem of the child, should they not tell Dad that Mom is screwing around?

I'm inclined to say no. I can't imagine anybody would prefer to remain blissfully ignorant in these circumstances, and if it makes a few children's lives more difficult, it will also undermine the "what they don't know won't hurt 'em" principle that many sexual cheaters rely upon. Also, imagine the daytime talk show possibilities. "It's not your baby. It's your father's baby! And you're heterozygous for cystic fibrosis!" --Nic Duquette [link]

Because They Can... "Harlem Globetrotters Keep Basketball Just Out Of Reach Of Make-A-Wish Kid." And this. --Michael Weiss [link]

Ramsey Clarke: Too Nuts for Saddam... "No way that prick's defending me," says former Iraqi dictator. The whole Kuntslerite Captain Planet legal team has been sacked, save for hometown honey Khalil Dulaimi. Damn, and we were so hoping Saddam would defend himself just so we could crack a "fool for a client" joke... You know, add to the guy's list of personal shortcomings, 'n all. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Rage and Pride... The real reason Shi'a Islam is becoming such a nuisance in Iraq. Easy enough. Problem solved. The ayatollah feels your pain. --Michael Weiss [link]

Tuesday, August 23, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

The Fall of Rome... One could always find Operation Barbarossa occupying a special pride of historical place within the annals of the American Right. Those who opposed US entry into World War II, not so much because of isolationism as a sympathy for Hitlerism, had hoped that a Nazi invasion of Russia would put an end to international Marxism, and secure the triumph of Fascism -- an instantiation of a "New World Order" even a hidebound paleocon could love. But, as we know, history tends to repeat itself, and it's the footnotes you really ought to watch out for. Terminology gets revisited, outmoded allusions attain new vintage... "Barbarossa" was probably picked by Hitler as the code word for what became his fatal folly because it was the surname of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I. As Mike Myers' Linda Richman once stated it, the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor a proper empire, but Frederick distinguished himself by famously challenging papal authority, on political-dynastic grounds, in the 12th century. This was followed by his capitulation and abasement -- not to mention the scuttling of any Byzantine notion of separation between church and 'state' -- which occurred when he applied his lips to the outstretched hand of Pope Alexander, in Venice's Piazza San Marco, in the grace year 1177.

Well, in the heathen year 2005, the Act I, bad boy Barbarossa is resurrected in the person of George W. Bush. This is to judge by Pat Buchanan's American Conservative, which features an article this month entitled "Bush v. Benedict."

I should probably confess that whenever I flip through this rag, I always feel like Alvy Singer fantasizing at the dinner table about how Annie Hall's family must view him. Can't say my paranoia is mitigated any this go-round. Would you just listen to some fucking fool called Daniel McCarthy waving in all those wayward Catholic neocons from the Jew Ship Lolly-pop:

Michael Novak, George Weigel, and Richard John Neuhaus are three of the most prominent Catholic neocons whose reading of Just War doctrine clashes with the views of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Novak and Neuhaus fit the classic mold: they were radicals in the 1960s and early 1970s, both involved in protesting the Vietnam War. Neuhaus—a Lutheran pastor before his 1991 conversion to Catholicism—founded Clergy Concerned About Vietnam alongside Fr. Daniel Berrigan and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel; Novak co-wrote with Heschel and Robert M. Brown Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience. By the 1980s, both had moved rightward, trading social democracy for Novak's "democratic capitalism." Today, they and Weigel, a biographer of John Paul II whose ideological background is less exotic, champion an interpretation of Just War theory that strongly favors the foreign policy of George W. Bush.

Ignore, for a moment, the complete and utter absurdity in suggesting that political commentators should put their views on foreign policy through an encycical dry-rinse. The cabal innuendo hardly qualifies as that any longer:

Writing in National Review Online—a venue not explicitly Catholic or neoconservative but colored by both—shortly after the death of John Paul II, University of Reading philosophy professor...

Now, what kind of odds would one give to the possibility of that University of Reading philosophy professor turning out to be Protestant, or Muslim, or Shinto? As it happens, his name is David Oderberg, which will teach me never again to double-down on a Buckleyite sure thing. And I just love the use of "not explicitly" in that sentence. Very subtle.

First Things has, by contrast, been more genteel, even publishing a debate on war and statecraft between Weigel and the Church of England's Rowan Williams. But a recent article by the journal's new editor, Joseph Bottum, suggests the underlying tendency. In "The New Fusionism," arguing for an alliance between neoconservatives and social conservatives, Bottum laments, "Much of the Roman curia seems to have fallen into a functional pacifism that threatens a damaging loss of the traditional Catholic theory of just war."

Joseph Bottum was the former books editor of the Weekly Standard, so you can imagine the Judas kiss he bestowed on his co-religionists by truckling to Bill Kristol's Sermon on the Mount Preemption. A fulsome cover-story obit on Pope John Paul II, authored by Bottum in the in-flight magazine of Air Force One, hardly qualifies as penance. But to then go and hijack the most intelligent Catholic theosophical journal on the market... My God, are there no 'un-chosen' corners of the media left? Apparently, there are. And yet...

There is, however, a conservative alternative, one that does not have the financial reach or media savvy of the neoconservative press but which has a long and venerable history and which agrees with the pope on hot wars and the culture wars alike.

Is there nothing we can do to stop the Gentiles from finding employment in print and on television? Has the Gentleman's Agreement with Murdoch not been signed yet? Who's in charge of that, some idiot Litvak, I bet.

Look, even I can't help thinking of Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom and Paul Wolfowitz all in the same associative blink sometimes, especially when I come across a thing like Auden's haunting elegy on decadence and hubris, "The Fall of Rome." Particularly the lines --

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

-- but that's not the "Rome" Auden meant, boys. --Michael Weiss [link]

On the Other Hand... I really like this idea in the Iraqi draft consitution:

1. A region consists of one or more provinces, and two or more regions have the right to create a single region.

2. A province or more has the right to set a region according to a referendum called for in one of two ways: (a) A demand by one-third of all members of each of the provincial councils that aims to set up a region. (b) A demand by one-tenth of voters of the provinces that aim to set up a region.

Article 117

A region's legislative authority is made up of one council, named the National Assembly of the region.

This Build Your Own Autonomous Region approach is brilliant in its flexibility. Aside from the obvious Kurdish region and probably Southern Shiite one, we may see political molecules in Iraq form in interesting patterns. Whom will Kirkuk join up with? Anybody at all?

As for the initial promise that no laws will contradict Islam, or democracy, or constitutional rights, from our own experience I expect we will see some ingenious contortions (see interstate commerce). --Nic Duquette [link]

The Draft Constitution... It's not looking so hot, even as an armature for a vaguely constructed document. It also contradicts itself as earlier as Article Two. (What is it, I wonder, about sloppy seconds in federal convenants? Why are they so designed to entrap posterity in interminable legal confusion?)

1. Islam is a main source for legislation.

-- a. No law may contradict Islamic standards.

-- b. No law may contradict democratic standards.

-- c. No law may contradict the essential rights and freedoms mentioned in this constitution.

A woman is seen, juridically, as something less than a man, according to "Islamic standards," if we take these standards to be defined by the Koran ("Women shall with justice have rights similar to those exercised against them, although men have a status above women.") And yet, further on in the text we get the assurance that no less than twenty-five percent of the National Assembly will always be compromised of females legislators, whose votes (one would assume) count just as much as those of their male counterparts. This is a progressive improvement on the U.S. Constitution, which of course guarantees no gender plurality in Congress, but still... How does this not intrude even on sharia-lite?

The Pakistani liberal Fazlur Rahman had a famous line in his scholarly history of an entire religion, Islam. He chided the ulama -- or clerical interpreters of Islamic law -- with wasting their lofty stations by "writing commentaries on the commentaries" of previous generations of ulama. These original commentaries had become fossils, and Islamic law perforce entered into a sort of fugue state from which it remained disconnected from an advancing historical reality. "What went wrong" was that, as modernity went, orthodox Islam did not.

How the Iraqi founders purport to solve this problem (assuming that they indeed do) remains to be seen in what looks to be a very uninspired launch of a republican government. --Michael Weiss [link]

Download This Hot Sex Tape From Your Mind's Eye... Stunningly beautiful Eva Longoria is bald where it counts, according to Page Six (I'd find yesterday's link, but why don't you just go ahead and trust me on this one.) And Tommy Lee's... Well, tune into the Pamela Anderson roast on Comedy Central if this sentence doesn't quite write itself.

Now they're fucking. Great. Not since Catch a Rising First Lady a few months back have words so eloquently painted a thousand bedroom pictures. --Michael Weiss [link]

Our Man in Tehran... Withhold all sniggering until you've actually read the Penn in Persia dispatch. Please.

Confronted by tough questions about the jailing of dissident journalists, the mullah megaphones offer a defensive tu quoque. Judy Miller, anyone? Now, you can argue that this is food for thought at the inter-faith potluck of moral equivalence. But to make it a Super-Sized Happy Meal, and in a West Coast rag, to boot?

I chose to diligently consider this proposition, and was mindful of the cases against Matt Cooper and Judith Miller, and separately, the suspicious umbrella over Robert Novak back home.

Diligently consider. I need to do this more often. And shouldn't that be, "umbrella of suspicion?" Unless the guy holding the only prophylactic that ever got that close to Bob Novak is also shifty-eyed and fingering a guitar-case with his free hand...

While I have said there is a great warmth toward Americans, it's never far from your mind that you're one bedside book in the toilet away from death.

Yes, they do love their Bret Easton Ellis in Iran. Good call.

While the regime's behavior has been suspicious, Iran consistently claims compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (of which it is signatory), and the International Atomic Energy Agency seems to concur. Any reckless action on the part of the United States or Israel may lead to Iran dropping out of the treaty.

Oooh, I'd say that dead man done walked a while ago, Spicoli. But thanks for indicating the official Iranian position. You read the Times and WaPo and all you get is, "Muahahaha!" --Michael Weiss [link]

We What Have Here is a Failure to Communicate (Among Other Things)... If anyone seriously believes that the president's inability to "connect" with the American people over the war in Iraq is due to media bias, then the solution is quite obvious: the White House should hire better tendentious journalists. Scrapping the current defense secretary was the Weekly Standard's advice a few months ago -- and the roar over it apparently has yet to subside. But what about axing the abysmal press secretary, too? Scott McClellan is a man who has achieved the rarest of miracles by making his predecessor look like a golden-tongued Paul Revere by comparison.

The vice president must slaver over the taste of shoe polish to have suggested that the Iraqi jihadist campaign was in its "last throes." (Even Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might have toned it down a bit that day out of wincing pity for Cheney's b'tise.) And then there's the problem with Bush himself...

Former presidential speechwriter and NRO diarist David Frum has some tough love for Dubya:

Again and again during the Bush presidency - and yesterday most recently - the president will agree to give what is advertised in advance as a major speech. An important venue will be chosen. A crowd of thousands will be gathered. The networks will all be invited. And after these elaborate preparations, the president says ... nothing that he has not said a hundred times before.

If a president continues to do that, he is himself teaching the public and the media to ignore him - especially when the words seem (as his speech yesterday to the VFW seemed) utterly to ignore the past three months of real-world events. --Michael Weiss [link]

What Jihadists Really Want... Trying to decipher Osama bin Laden's short-term material objectives (we all know what his long-term metaphysical ones are) has been an exercise in futility, if only because those objectives keep changing, as does the pitch and intensity with which they're propounded. Case in point: 9/11 was said to have been a direct result of an American alliance with Israel. Yet that alliance has not much changed in the past four years, while this same casus belli has not much been cited since 9/11 -- notwithstanding the de rigueur stuff about "Zionist-Crusaders," where Zionist and Crusader refer to anyone and everyone. This has remained true even though Al-Qaeda terror attacks, aimed at countries both with and without formal peace treaties (or other proclamations of "solidarity") with the Jewish state, have increased in number. If bin Laden were truly so concerned about his Palestinian co-religionists (his "spiritual mentor" Abdallah Azzam came from a Palestinian refugee community in Jordan), then why remain silent about last week's Gaza and West Bank pull-outs? Should this not have been interpreted as a "concession" to the will and might of global jihad? (Other groups, like Hamas, certainly interpreted it as just that.) Or, if bin Laden is a rational diplomat tricked out as anti-imperialist warrior, should this climb-down on the part of Israel not have been enough to draw him, at long last, to the negotiating table? And what of the presence of US military bases in Saudi Arabia, formerly described as yet another unpardonable Western offense to Islam and the reason for our countrymen's deaths? Those bases are no more, thanks in part to their transplantation to more convenient Middle Eastern locales like Qatar, Bahrain, and now Iraq. Yet the Saudi monarchy, which had previously allowed their existence, finds itself under attack by the very toxic strains of Salafist-Wahhabist radicalism it has for years been mollifying through money and state protection.

The curious case of jihadist foreign policy. Olivier Roy in Le Monde Diplomatique:

In general, it is easy to demonstrate that Osama bin Laden, whatever he may claim, always takes the initiative rather than reacting [sic] to events. He has been an internationalist fighter since the early 1980s and has never concealed his hostility to the West, even when fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. While he was shocked by the Saudi royal family's appeal to the US in 1991, that changed his attitude to the Saudis (with whom he was previously on good terms), rather than to the US, which he has always hated.

Ordinary Muslims undoubtedly see the Middle East conflicts as western aggression and proof of the West's double standards. But the Muslim population in the West has been concerned to express its opposition in political terms, and has joined together with a European public strongly opposed to the war in Iraq. The joint anti-war demonstrations are tangible proof of the integration of Muslims in the political life of Europe. The protests of Europe's Muslim communities are not couched in terms of religion. They are founded on respect for international law and the rejection of imperialism.

By invoking these conflicts, al-Qaida seeks to acquire legitimacy among Muslims and pose as its avant-garde, whereas it actually recruits on the margins of Muslim society (and on its most westernised fringes at that). Most of all, al-Qaida is concerned to smash the political common front and confine Muslims to a purely religious or ethnic identity that most of them want nothing to do with. It is deliberately out to provoke a clash of cultures, perhaps because, at bottom, the real problem of the radicalised youth is their relation to culture of any kind.

So the war in Iraq is not the prime cause of the radicalisation of terrorists. But, for the same reasons, it is not a means of fighting terrorism. To claim, as Tony Blair does, that there is no link between the London bombings and the presence of British troops in Iraq, is simply to pose the question of the ultimate purpose of the war.

--Michael Weiss [link]

Reminder: New Yorker Festival Tickets... They go fast, and they go on sale at NOON, TOMORROW (AUG. 25). Click here for more information.

Later today Nic and I will post up our "picks" for the thing -- like it was some kind of fantasy baseball league for the pale and unloved. --Michael Weiss [link]

Michiko Kakutani Finally Loses Her Shit -- And It Is Glorious... Pop quiz, hot shot. What's worse than having the scythe-wielding sylph of popular lit crit give a young novelist reason to hide under the covers until his paperback rights are sold? Answer: Having that young novelist not know what the hell to make of his most important book review. For starters.

The hanging chad here in this farcical dreamscape is what M.K. thinks of J.D. -- Salinger, that is. Voice of an obsolete generation, or justifiably reclusive, tin-eared hack? Dig her far-out ventriloquism of the loneliest boy in the most crowded room in the world:

If you really want to hear what I think about this guy Dwight Wilmerding, the first thing I should tell you is that he kind of reminds me of me.

In "Indecision," Dwight - or this ghostwriter he got, Benjamin Kunkel - goes into a lot more of all that David Copperfield kind of stuff than I ever would, and he's a helluva lot older than I was when I went through my madman phase, but still, you've gotta admit we're coming from the same sort of place.

That's right. Holden Caulfield writes the review. That's the tone of the whole fucking thing.

If I were Benjamin Kunkel, and I were editor of a thus-far-unimpressive magazine billing itself as the Partisan Review reborn, and I woke up to that this morning -- I'd have a Herzogian wig-out all up in my Wheeties. --Michael Weiss [link]

Hitchens v. Galloway... It's gonna be a killa and a thrilla and a chilla. Two British masters of skull-smashing polemics and black-belt rhetoric, facing off:

New York, NY: Wednesday, September 14, 7:00 PM

A debate between George Galloway and Christopher Hitchens on Iraq and U.S. and British foreign policy.

$12 at the door, or catch it on pay-per-view. --Nic Duquette [link]

Monday, August 22, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Best Quietly Condescending British Headline All Day... "Virgin comedy charms US filmgoers."

Charms. Yes, quite.

"Help the culturally famished poor, madam. I haven't had any sonnet sequence to eat all day." "Oh, my dear fellow, you must force yourself." --Michael Weiss [link]

The Doctor Is Airborne... Hunter Thompson, in grey atomized form, gets blasted into the stratosphere, as per his request. On hand to see the good doctor slip the surly bonds of earth and enjoy his final explosion: Bill Murray, Johnny Depp, Sean Penn (Special to the San Francisco Chronicle) and Lyle Lovett.

I'm convinced that the Thompson spirit lives on in Hebraiobronco mystery writer and country music sensation Kinky Friedman. A week late and a shekel short, but here's the New Yorker profile on the Kinkster, now gubernatorial candidate in Texas.

Earlier in the day, he had lectured the Society of Professional Journalists on America's divided culture ("I grieve that NASCAR people never go to the lesbians' tea-houses, and the lesbians never go to NASCAR") and outlined his policies on education. "I say, No Teacher Left Behind. The teachers are getting screwed," Kinky said. "Every appointee to the education system in a Friedman administration will have an education degree and classroom time." In addition to the No Teacher Left Behind program, he has proposed financing public education through the legalization of video poker terminals in bars: Slots for Tots. The journalists seemed a little disturbed by his support for nondenominational prayer in schools: what sort of prayer would it be? Kinky didn't know, but offered an explanation for his position: "Well, I confess that I get bored with the Lord on occasion, and, when I do, my spiritual adviser, Billy Joe Shaver, who has an affinity for the divinity, has convinced me that prayer is an excellent idea."

Funny side note: When I interned at the Forward, a story broke about a Texas woman who ran over her lowdown, cheatin' husband with an SUV. Repeatedly. Too Glatt-juicy to pass up, even for a niche weekly, the writers sat around a conference table trying to uncover the Jewish angle. Was the philandering hubby a Brother Schmulic? No, sadly. The wife? N'uh-uh. The mistress, the SUV mechanic? Sorry. Well, was there any fucking human being in the God damned state of Texas who was... Say no more, cowboy. Saddle up your roast beef and raise them kippas high. There's a new sheriff in town.

He cut his foreskin for God. Imagine what he'll to sales tax. --Michael Weiss [link]

Late To Their Own Funeral... Overrated! Too precious by half! All cant and cadavers! Never got into Six Feet Under, though I did see the last few minutes of last night's finale, where everyone bought it under the bad lighting used to film A.I. Someone please explain to me what the genius of this show was; why Alan Ball understands suburbia better than David Lynch; and why stuff like this happens to good Arts sections (hat-tip, Gawker):

But that precious ratio - which recalls the balance of silliness and beauty in Trollope and some of Hardy - has always been the show's strong suit, a 19th-century tone ingeniously invented and confidently maintained over five seasons. It's rare that a sensibility remains so unified and so unshy on a fancy soap opera; melodramatists too often get scared of being called hysterics and betray their genre, blowing it off for dumb stunts or trying, in some 11th hour, to sober up and turn manly. But the producers of "Six Feet Under" never cared about impressing the "Wire" or "Deadwood" audiences. They had their ratio, and they saw it through. "Six Feet Under" was a beautiful series, and its finale will suffice.

"But the producers of 'Six Feet Under' never cared about impressing the 'Wire' or 'Deadwood' audiences." Is this more euphemism from the Times editorial board, like what they did to Ricky Gervais's Yiddish a few days back? The sentence, "This show was gay as a fucking maypole," must have been too risque for the Kellerites?

Last night's Entourage had the only instance of charisma-development for Andre Grenier this season. A whole show premised on his being the epicenter of a free-revolving universe of bullshit, and they finally give the guy a personality. Even I thought he missed his physical to spoon with Mandy Moore, who'll be knocked up by Labor Day, just you wait. And if Turtle becomes a rap mogul, he should be harpooned with that Aquaman claw.

Beverly D'Angelo. Still hot.

In the interest of sharing my cranky Monday with everyone, a friend sent me this Amazon customer review of the new Coldplay album. Someone out there please hire this man or woman for something. Enjoy.

If you really enjoy lounging in a pair of Dockers on a Sunday afternoon with your girlfriend that won't put out as much as you wish but you smile because you're happy, Coldplay is for you. If you find yourself saying, "God, my life is just so busy", this is your album. If the Cure are too depressing and Slayer are "just too loud" and Swans are just another pretty bird, this is your soundtrack. If you find your mailbox containing more wedding invitations each year, bring this along for the trip. You will love it, the wedding party will love it and you can all clink your Heinekens together as you laugh and collectively wonder when the next Abercrombie and Fitch catalog is coming out." --Michael Weiss [1980 - 2005] [link]

Weekend Edition - August 20 - August 21, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

More Power To You?... Clauses 11 through 16 of Section 8 of our fine Constitution read as follows, with "Congress shall have the right" acting as prologue for each:

Clause 11: To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

Clause 12: To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

Clause 13: To provide and maintain a Navy;

Clause 14: To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

Clause 15: To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

Clause 16: To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

Well, it depends, you see, on what you, erm, mean by "declare." A few other verbs in here that sound so, so -- definitive.

In 1815 James Madison needed Congressional approval to dispatch ships to Algiers to stop Barbary Coast corsairs from abducting and enslaving American citizens. The legislative branch responded with an inch of deference and vagary, and the executive branch has been gobbling up miles ever since.

In 1861 Lincoln ordered the arrest of secessionists obstructing the transport of Union troops to Baltimore. If Maryland went Confederate, there's good reason to believe Washington, D.C. would soon be lost, along with the central government. So the commander-in-chief, required to act while Congress was out of session, famously "suspended" the writ of habeas corpus against the offending party, holding them without access to the courts -- and either inaugurating the "tyrannis" to which the "sic semper" would later be applied, or doing justice and letting the skies fall, depending upon your "reading" of hinge moments in American history. (Though considering that habeas corpus would cease to exist entirely if the United States did so -- and secession or dissolution of the national convenant and its inalienable rights was not entertained in the Constitution -- Lincoln excised a tumor before it could grow cancerous.)

Then again, abuse of this de facto presidential privelege has been just as rampant as its necessary deployment has been: Mexico, Vietnam, Sudan.

But if Peter Irons, author of War Powers: How the Imperial Presidency Hijacked the Constitution, had it his way, there'd be no exceptions to by-the-parchment protocol. Emily Bazelon in the Times Book Review:

Irons acknowledges that a declaration of war and the use-of-force grants that have preceded some invasions can be seen as "functional equivalents." But then he simply repeats his antiwar argument: except in the event of a sudden attack on American soil, military response "should await the deliberations of Congress, and debate over a formal declaration of war." When the president overreaches and Congress lets him, the courts should step in. If you're a dove, that argument will seem timely as well as worthy. But unless you also believe in strict adherence to the Constitution's text -- a rarity among liberals like Irons -- you also need to consider why the Constitution's division of war powers has never consistently worked as the framers planned. --Michael Weiss [link]

There Are Some Who Call Me... Kim... "Look, you stupid bastard, you've got no arms left." "Yes, I have."

Whenever talking about the failed slave state overseen by Kim Jong-Il, one is immediately situated in a different sort of historical farce -- ghastly rather than funny -- but featuring its own memorable scenes of denying the obvious. There are plenty of ludicrous set-ups (heroic biographizing of "Dear Leader;" a Christo-Confuciano-Stalinoid immaculate conception myth of statehood) and twisted idiosyncracies (court jestering with human life; the satisfaction of refined palace palates amid mass starvation). And yet... "Arms" are probably the only things the Black Knight in this shoddy stage production does still possess. Which brings us to the following question: Why wouldn't changement de regime work in North Korea? Ian Buruma states it plainly:

Kim, although bound to lose a war against better-fed, better-led, and better-equipped American and South Korean troops, has enough artillery, missiles, chemical weapons, and, quite possibly, nuclear bombs to carry out the threat of turning the South Korean capital, Seoul, into a "sea of flames." He has up to a million men in uniform, a dozen chemical-weapons factories, and about a hundred thousand special-operations forces ready to be unleashed. Nor is he likely to get rid of these weapons, for the threat of mass killing is all that he has to bargain with, and is probably the only means of insuring his personal survival. Richard Perle, quoted in Becker's book, maintains that the threat of U.S. military force will push the Chinese to "bring the North Koreans to heel." It's true that China supplies the state with most of its fuel and food. But it benefits from having a Communist buffer state, and fears the consequences of North Korea's collapse—not least a stampede of refugees. Indeed, in the two years since the regime served notice of its nuclear-weapons program, trade between China and Korea has doubled, to $1.4 billion.

South Korea's preferred "Sunshine Policy" -- an appliance of external diplomatic warmth at a lower temperature than that of internal perestroika, but conceived in a similar spirit -- isn't working out too well, either.

The usual alternative to military action is "engagement." This was the favored tactic of the Clinton Administration and of South Korea's last two Presidents, Kim Dae-jung and Roh Moo-hyun. During the eighties, South Korea's expanding and increasingly prosperous middle class had broken the back of military authoritarianism. Kim Dae-jung, a longtime dissident, was a key figure in this democratic transformation, and he might have hoped to achieve the same in the North. His so-called Sunshine Policy was designed to winkle the North out of its failed autarky by offering business opportunities, a railway link, and large amounts of cash. Kim Jong Il himself pocketed a secret gift of five hundred million dollars from the Hyundai corporation just before agreeing to grant Kim Dae-jung an audience in Pyongyang. (Hyundai was allowed to build a fortified holiday resort just across the border for South Korean tourists, who are prevented from meeting any locals.) Much else was promised at the meeting of the two Kims in 2000; little so far has materialized. But then the South Koreans, like the Chinese, are essentially committed to sustaining and stabilizing their neighbor; they fear the chaos and the expense if the North should implode (let alone explode). Accordingly, Seoul dramatically increased its trade with the North this year, even after diplomatic talks with Kim Jong Il faltered. In one recent poll, forty per cent of South Koreans named the United States as the country that posed the biggest threat to them; only a third named North Korea. --Michael Weiss [link]

Friday, August 19, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Fetuses: Rich in Vitamins and Minerals, Too?... It's a little shocking that the Washington Post's article about the uses of aborted fetus skin on burn victims in Switzerland doesn't mention the obvious con side of the issue until the end of the article, and then dismissively.

One fetus could theoretically provide material for hundreds or thousands of burn victims, although Hohlfeld said he suspected that would not remove some people's objections to the use of tissue from an aborted fetus.

Well, no, it wouldn't. This therapy echoes a little too closely the theoretical dystopian utilitarian society where hospitals kidnap people and kill them for their organs, since one life can be sacrificed to save dozens. Fetuses don't have the same moral status as people, and I'm pro-choice enough to support doing medical research on stem cells and other biological artifacts that can only be derived from aborted human fetuses. But only as a transitional step that will allow us to synthesize whatever factors in fetal tissue stimulate the sponaneous regrowth of mature skin or nerves or other tissues. The untroubled tone of this article filled me with visions of a society where abortions are viewed as some sort of natural resource. Yes, the aborted fetus would have just been discarded anyway. But "waste not, want not" was the same philosophy behind totalitarian labor camps and the various uses those regimes put corpses too. --Nic Duquette [link]

Whither the Picts of Arabia?... Self-determination of ethnic and religious minorities has been History's most consistent hostage to fortune. What else reads with this rap sheet of broken promises, severed ties of convenience, and multiple stabbings -- both in the back as well as the front? A tough, embattled people ask for nothing more than a homeland, whether adventitiously designated or justified by supposed geographical origin. To attain this they must truckle to world superpowers, make compromises other populations would not dream of even being asked to make, and maintain a measure of stoicism, and a sense of irony rooted in long-term memory, that borders on the preternatural. Is it any wonder, then, that this hostage suffers from what must be the most lamented case of Stockholm Syndrome on the books? Lord Balfour was a vicious anti-Semite who wanted the tribes of Israel in Israel so they'd be out of Europe -- but his "Declaration" wasn't faulted by Jews not afforded the option to stay in Europe in 1939. The United States has enjoyed an almost uninterrupted post-partum relationship with its former mother nation, yet it has also been on the receiving end of a robust and successful Diaspora of Irish, decidedly more resentful "children" of the same colonizing parent who can't have overlooked the permanent Atlanticist entanglements of their adopted home.

I've left out some pretty conspicuous contemporary stories, but fortunately Shlomo Avineri does not in this fantastic essay, "Self-Determination and Realpolitik: Reflections on Kurds and Palestinians," in Dissent.

Rudyard Kipling may have been the most famous -- or notorious -- apologist of British Empire, but he was also keenly aware of what unheralded and unglorified losing struggles felt like. One could argue such seemingly paradoxical powers of appreciation reinforced each other dialectically. "Recessional" is a sober reminder ("Lest we forget! Lest we forget!") that every tradition of "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" has its price. And that poem's sentimentality may indeed have accounted for the slightly more sinewy sentiment bolstering "A Pict Song," the greatest tribute ever paid to Seething Underdogs and Scotsmen.

Rome never looks where she treads.
Always her heavy hooves fall,
On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads;
And Rome never heeds when we bawl.
Her sentries pass on—that is all,
And we gather behind them in hordes,
And plot to reconquer the Wall,
With only our tongues for our swords.

We are the Little Folk—we!
Too little to love or to hate.
Leave us alone and you'll see
How we can drag down the State!
We are the worm in the wood!
We are the rot at the root!
We are the taint in the blood!
We are the thorn in the foot!

I can't not think of the Iraqi Kurds when I hear these stanzas today, and I "hear" them quite a lot -- on my iPod. This is because their original intent, to be sung, was brilliantly fulfilled by Billy Bragg (an unlikely carrier of the Kipling torch), who provided just the right snarling guitar licks to the ballad on his poetically titled album William Bloke. But, my God, the prescience -- or do I mean, endurance? --- of those lines. "Leave us alone and you'll see / How we can drag down the State!" What John Burns or Dexter Filkins story in the New York Times about civil feuding in Kirkuk would that not serve as fitting headline? What delicate balancing act over the constitutional option of Kurdish secession from republican Iraq would that not encapsulate? I'm not so sure about "too little to love or to hate," though. U.S. marines at the start of the war took, at the very least, a strong liking to peshmerga forces who were unquestionably willing to fight along side the coalition in the north, and advise on how best to navigate that region's semi-mountainous terrain. Saddam certainly hated the Kurds enough in 1988 to gas them by the thousands in Halabja; and in 1991 to suppress their rebellion with helicopter gunships, which were given take-off permission by General Norman Schwarzkopf under the command of a government that had told the Kurds -- as the government of Henry Kissinger had -- to "rise up" against the fascist dictator. Another sad year for the truth and consequences of Stockholm Syndrome. Yet there are rare but palpable up-sides to this affliction...

What might that dictator have thought, cowering in one of his garish palaces or fortified bunkers in the spring of 2003, if he chanced to think at all about the ones who can, unlike himself, claim lineage from the Muslim warrior Saladin? Hopefully something like, "I should have known."

Mistletoe killing an oak—
Rats gnawing cables in two—
Moths making holes in a cloak—
How they must love what they do!.
Yes—and we Little Folk too,
We are busy as they—
Working our works out of view—
Watch, and you'll see it some day!

No indeed! We are not strong,
But we know Peoples that are.
Yes, and we'll guide them along,
To smash and destroy you in War!
We shall be slaves just the same?
Yes, we have always been slaves,
But you—you will die of the shame,
And then we shall dance on your graves!

--Michael Weiss [link]

Rick Gervais is a [Yiddish Word Meaning Stand-up, Honorable Kind of Guy]... Gawker's already nibbled at the bit of the Times's bowdlerization of "schmuck" in this otherwise readable interview with Ricky Gervais, the comic genius behind The Office. We should probably add to the oh-come-on list of verboten terms in the Grey Lady, "asshole," which needed five replacements: "earthy word for major jerk." I give credit to the writer for trying to earn ironically buttoned-up style points in circumventing the short, sweet and completely obvious. But then there's this:

So to a more pressing matter: how does this fellow from Reading, Britain, whose father was a French Canadian, even know this bit of Yiddish?

Asking a Brit from an industrial working-class town in the UK, in the 21st century, how he can know Yiddish is unpardonable for a journo who cashes the same company check as the author of The World is Flat, no matter how taxed she is for a catchy lede. But these are quibblets.

"When I start feeling sorry for myself, sitting in an air-conditioned hotel doing two hours' work, I remember he used to get up at 5:30 in the morning and never missed a day's work," Mr. Gervais says. "I think that's why money gives me the creeps. It's embarrassing enough to get paid a thousand times a nurse's wages for just mucking around; the best I can do is take it deadly seriously, the actual work, put everything I can in it."

There's absolutely nothing jaded or nasty you can say about someone who talks like that and means it. (Ricky's already proved himself finely attuned to thinly veiled displays of sanctimony, not to mention a host of other postures adopted by misguided but decent human beings. I doubt he's the physician that needs to heal himself.)

And what about being offered a part in The Merchant of Venice?

"It wasn't Pacino who asked, it was the director," Mr. Gervais says. "It was the part of Lancelot Gobbo, who if I remember is the fool. I went and read and they said it was perfect. And walking home, I thought I don't know why I'm doing this. It's a fine film and Al Pacino is one of my five favorite actors, but I didn't know why it sounded perfect, and if I don't know why, it's like getting the right answer by a guess, it doesn't count. I wouldn't have been fulfilled because I didn't know why it was right."

Now if Samuel L. Jackson leaves the audition for what would be his 87th film of 2005 a slightly changed man because of this article... Gervais will have done as much serious good as he's already done the frivolous variety. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Kerfuffle of Trafalgar... Here's a determined buzzkill on a sacred masculine legend or three:

'Twas on a Grecian autumn's gentle eve
Childe Harold hailed Leucadia's cape afar;
A spot he longed to see, nore cared to leave:
Oft did he mark the scenes of vanished war,
Actium--Lepanto--fatal Trafalgar;
Mark them unmoved, for he would not delight
(Born beneath some remote inglorious star)
In themes of bloody fray, or gallant fight,
But loathed the bravo's trade, and laughed at martial wight.

These lines, plucked from "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," come to us courtesy of Lord Byron, a man both moved and unamused by the bloody fray and gallant fight that made him something of a masculine -- and even more of a Romantic -- legend at Missolonghi. "Wight" means "creature," which is certainly one kind of rhapsodic metonym to apply to world historical figures like Napoleon and Horatio Nelson, whose intertwined fates collided on October 21, 1805 in the Battle of Trafalgar.

This drink-borne skirmish is to the Brits what, say, Valley Forge is to us, with Washington being no less of a monument to national honor and indomitability than Nelson is to them: the Admiral was the daguerrotype for Patrick O'Brien's Captain Jack Aubrey -- written in as a fictional protege of the real man himself -- in the Master and Commander series.

Yet before you go daubing the mist from the eye and humming a few bars of "Rule Britannia," you should read Adam Nicolson's new study of Trafalgar, Seize the Fire. Don't let the Promethan title fool you, either. The book's another buzzkill. The whole engagement, argues Nicolson, was one short, floating anticlimax of foregone conclusions, which might explain all the pigeon shit dotting the London square which bears its name. The Grimes of our Times:

The battle, in Mr. Nicolson's account, was over before it began, as an incoherent, dispirited French and Spanish fleet reluctantly turned to face a numerically inferior but in every other way superior British force that could afford to throw tactics overboard. Before the battle, Horatio Nelson, admiral of the fleet, simply hoisted signal flag 16 - "Engage the enemy more closely"- and left it there.

Simply? Och, next he'll be telling us the affirming flame of English heroism was nothing more than an inner homonculus of material ambition.

Mr. Nicolson's more intriguing digressions, however, deal with "the half-conscious preoccupations" that explain, in his view, the fighting behavior on both sides and the eventual outcome of the battle. The zeal that characterized the British navy in battle originated, he argues, in the energies of a commerce-minded nation with a hungry, ambitious middle class. Its officers, many of fairly humble background, knew that only by securing victory and seizing prizes could they advance in life. For them, "victory is neither a luxury nor an ornament," Mr. Nicolson writes, adding, "It is a compulsion and a necessity."

Are there no morality tales left in popular history? Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? (And please don't say to beat up Marilyn.) --Michael Weiss [link]

Just Think: She'll Remember Daddy When He Was Out of Wings... Paul McCartney hanging with his new beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful girl. --Michael Weiss [link]

You Hate Gas-Guzzling SUV's Slightly Less Than -- The New York Post... Or one of its writers and someone described in its gossip column this morning as a "musical genius."

HOW funny is the new Fringe Festival show, "SUV: The Musical?" It's so funny that even an executive at Ford Motor Corp., which is repeatedly ridiculed in the play over its behemoth-sized cars and trucks, called it "hilarious."

Calling it all home now:

Collins singled out the work of Kenny Wade Marshall, who plays at least four roles in the play written by The Post's Gersh Kuntzman and musical genius Marc Dinkin.

Remember when Michael Moore made the GM CEO change the oil in one of his cars? Or when Caspar Weinberger requested from Berke Breathed the original "Bloom County" cartoon that made sweet loving fun of his juicy, medium-rare last name? Same thing.

(Eco-friendly propaganda on a Friday. The Post: that liberal media, Alterman.) --Michael Weiss [link]

Thankless Job Deserves Your Thanks... Snarksmith is now accepting (fully refundable) donations through Amazon.com to pay for server costs, and also provide a safety for Nic and myself should we suddenly find ourselves jobless as a result of on-the-clock blog-related offenses. Help us qualify for what might have been Eugene Debs' tax cuts if an income tax system existed when he might have been elected president.

Thanks. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, August 18, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Now That Infalliblity's Out... The pope is asking George Bush to grant him immunity, as a head of state, from a lawsuit that alleges that when he was merely citizen Ratzinger he conspired to cover-up allegations of child molestation in -- how divine is this? -- Texas.

Joseph Ratzinger is named as a defendant in the civil lawsuit. Now Benedict XVI, he's accused of conspiring with the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston to cover up the abuse during the mid-1990s.

At least let's wait until his term as pope expires before taxing His Eminence with legal entanglements that might distract from his conduct of church and "state." --Michael Weiss [link]

"The Shins Will Change Your Life" Treatment of NY Magazine's Clinton Cover-Story... The original blog that taught us how best to comment through a cut-and-paste keyboard function + silence is no more. In memoriam, then. (Bold only where absolutely necessary.)

His unscripted conversation is a combination of highbrow and bawdy, shrewd and reassuringly profane. It's also Arkansan once again—over the course of this week, I will hear "It's the darnedest thing," "I wouldn't take a nickel to see the cow jump over the moon," and (my favorite) "That guy's lower than a snake's belly," among other regional aphorisms.

***

One gets a perspective now that Ken Starr's cloying legion of moralists could never fully appreciate: To Clinton, the world's a seascape of temptations.

***

So what does a man do with all this feral hunger—to do more, to set the record straight—and all this hurt, God, so much hurt, which steams off him with such intensity it practically blurs the air?

***

The cost of attending the CGI, $15,000, has also raised more than a few eyebrows, considering so much of it dwells on eradicating poverty (Clinton's people say the fee will be waived for those invitees who can't afford it).

***

"I think there are three people who are universal, whose prestige truly extends way over borders," says Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist and author of The Mystery of Capital (and a key participant in the CGI). "There's Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan, and Clinton. The problem with Kofi is that he leads the world's biggest bureaucracy. And Mandela is basically an African. He's never had something to say about Asia. He's never said, ‘I like mambo.' Strangely, the only one who does this is Clinton, and he doesn't even speak a foreign language."

***

"During that time [Lewinsky-gate --ed], a lot of world leaders would ask, What is going on? Is this serious? That kind of stuff. I kept assuring them that nothing bad had happened to America, but that we periodically went through"—he rummages for a word—"spasms."

***

Back in Stonetown, Clinton is trying to help the local economy in his own small way: by shopping. "Say, look at this!" he exclaims, fiddling with a beaded, wooden object. "I love folk instruments."

***

"I thought that if I had six more months," he tells me, "I could make peace in the Middle East. I'd have figured out what was really keeping Arafat from saying yes."

***

"I also wish," he continues, "I desperately wish, that I had been president when the FBI and CIA finally confirmed, officially, that bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Then we could have launched an attack on Afghanistan early. I don't know if it would have prevented 9/11, but it certainly would have complicated it."

***

"The whole thing was just one more lie," he says, giving his cigar clipper an emphatic snap. "I was really angry."

***

I ask Clinton why the Bush administration has gotten much softer press coverage than he did.

***

As Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator and current head of the New School, points out, "Presidential candidates would have to phone and ask, ‘Say, have any good ideas about how I can beat your wife?' " He pauses for a minute, reconsidering his syntax. "Wait. Please say defeat your wife. I meant defeat."

***

At lunch with President Paul Kagame, the Tutsi rebel who ultimately ended the butchery, he suggests that perhaps Steven Spielberg could do for the Tutsis what he did for the Jews through the Shoah Foundation—record their stories. Kagame, a surprisingly slight man with intense eyes, seems intrigued. Clinton says he'll phone Spielberg when he gets back to New York.

***

At the end, when Alexander the Great saw there was nothing left to conquer, he supposedly wept. Clinton doesn't seem much like a weeper.

***

"Every time you talk to him, you sense he misses us all sitting around the table," says Donna Shalala, his former Health and Human Services secretary. "Lots of smart people talking, as opposed to individual conversation."

***

"I just don't know," Clinton says, stammering a bit, as he leaves the genocide memorial and heads back into his SUV. "There's never been an American secretary-general. So you know, I just, I, I can't imagine it would ever really happen." He considers. "I mean, if Hillary weren't in politics, if we didn't have anything else to do, if I were lucid and strong, if someone really wanted me to do it, I guess I'd think about it."

--Michael Weiss [link]

Osama, Prose Stylist... O.B.L. sounds a little too collegial, a little too B.H.L.-ish for my tastes (and what a world apart the rock star philosophe with the coif is from the folk-and-country Bearded One). Nevertheless, Osama bin Laden has an even more 'devoted' readership than Bernard Henri-Levy. He's also something of a scintillating quillsman:

"Osama may be the world's worst terrorist, but he's also one of the best prose writers in Arabic." (The historian Bernard Lewis has called bin Laden's prose "eloquent, at times even poetic.")

The first bit under inverted commas is from Bruce Lawrence, a professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, who's just edited and written the introduction for the first ever English-language Osama Reader, forthcoming from Verso Press.

Some real pleasure to be had in it, too, because

"His language is like Chaucer's in its archaic expression," Lawrence said.

Yeah, but can the guy think?

Bin Laden's rhetorical arsenal also includes casuistic logic (while he claims not to approve of killing innocents, when asked about killing Americans he reasons that, since Americans pay taxes, there's no such thing as an American innocent)...

Actually, that's consistent, not casuistic. He's all hellfire to all men, why not be the tie that binds death and taxes?

But Verso should be thanked for doing what the government press that published the 9/11 Commission's Report ought to have done a long time ago. --Michael Weiss [link]

Which Side Are You On, Camille?... Confronted with the image of the unaffiliated public intellectual, the stand-alone cultural critic who loathes predictability -- except where script requires acknowledging that everything is going, or has already gone, to hell -- is the loyal factionalist more than a little fed up. This is Lee Siegel reviewing Camille Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn in the Nation:

"Attacking the stale orthodoxies of both left and right" has itself become a stale intellectual franchise, a contrarian orthodoxy. You can be left, and you can be (I guess) right without being stalely orthodox. The "issues" Paglia was railing against were a lot less well defined beyond the parochial realm in which she debated them. Campus campaigns against free speech, a university's attempts to police the nebulous zone of sex and dating--such trends seemed sensationally oppressive inside the claustrophobic space of the university, and in the hungry eyes of op-ed page editors, book publishers and television producers.

But standing outside the university and looking in yielded a different perspective. People, especially young people, really were feeling more vulnerable. Self-esteem really was a vital psychic quality worth talking about. Society was changing. Commercially fabricated permissiveness was not the same thing as genuine human freedom, and people hadn't yet developed--we still haven't--new defenses against new types of injury created by the marketplace. So younger people were looking for new ideas and new sentiments that would help them become persons, or simply to help them survive. Naturally there were going to be outrageous excesses, careerist hangers-on, charismatic charlatans along the way. That's the price of progress.

Considered in this broader social context, Paglia's Emersonian pronouncements on the inestimable value of the individual began to sound as adolescent as Emerson at his most solipsistic. And celebrity started exacting its usual toll on Paglia in the form of self-exaggeration and self-parody. The thoughtful gadfly became a performing gabfly; her provocations declined into insults; her once-gratifying affirmations of individuality, imagination and incalculable experience began to sound like playground shouts of Look at Me. Paglia's vituperative ranting against hate-speech laws now seemed like arguments for why they should exist. She seemed to be precisely the kind of old-fashioned bully who had given rise to the new fragility and its search for protection, and for its own sources of power.

Whether or not you agree with his diagnosis, it doesn't fall under the rubric of "backlash." There's an underlying sense of disappointment, a perception of unrealized potential, in such a rebuke, coming as it does from a critic whose proud of his own ideological moorings. (There's no cant in that so long as he's honest about what those moorings are; yet who doesn't sympathize with Siegel's alienation from the perpetually self-alienating?) Paglia has earned a deserved place of popular recognition -- on chat shows, on bestseller lists -- for her unsentimental feminism, her campaigns against non-standards in education and the rote, jargon-laden critical apparatus which poisons real feeling for art and literature. And yet... There is something slightly annoying about a maid of Sargossa dining out on her own war stories.

How many times in this interview with Robert Birnbaum was Sexual Personae dropped? How many times was the more recent poetry book situated in the constellation of her own celebrity? When Camille's on, she's terrific. The bits on Robert Lowell and Thomas Frank are tonic. But how is someone who accepts calmly the inevitablist idea of civilizational collapse and rebirth simultaneously "concerned about the cultural future of the United States"? Isn't that trying to have it a number of different ways, digging multiple trenches just to find the one she can be alone in? --Michael Weiss [link]

Wednesday, August 17, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Walter Kirn on the Press and Its Open Secrets... This is one of the best posts any of Andrew Sullivan's guest bloggers have written (and I say that as a big Dan Savage fan.) The ostensible subject is Plame-gate, but as a broader commentary it should be handed out to every visitor signing the ledger at Judy Miller's prison. Sorry for the lengthy quotation, but I think it's worth it:

What big-time Washington journalists largely do these days, in my experience, is to get as close as possible to power, socially and in every other way, while maintaining the legal fiction that they aren't implicated in its workings. They send their kids to school with power's kids, they marry it, they go to parties with it, they jabber with it on the phone, they watch the game with it from adjoining seats, and, as a natural result, they keep its confidences - until, that is, some secret leaks out anyway and they have to pretend that they didn't already know it but will get to the bottom of it immediately or that they knew it all along and just weren't telling their audiences because they were bound by some lofty code of ethics that allows them to do the jobs they rarely do. They're profound double-dealers, is what I'm saying, who pay for their access, influence, and by going along and getting along until it's simply too embarrassing not to. They reserve their best stories for one another, publishing them only when they have to and feeling very nervous when they do, because it might screw up the Great Arrangement. And afterwards, once the secrets are on the street, it often comes out that they were common knowledge among the people whose jobs it was to tell them.

Quick story. In the mid 1980s I went to a fancy Fifth Avenue party for Senator Ted Kennedy. There were journalists there and lots of other bigwigs. The only time I'd seen Kennedy before was at a campaign stop in 1979 when he'd been seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. He might have won, but I realized at the party that it would have been a terrible thing because he was the drunkest human being I had ever encountered in my life, and chances were that it hadn't just started that night. Sure, he already had this reputation, but it was a vague reputation, all myth and gossip, while the intoxicated wreck in front of me was as vivid and specific as a car wreck. How many thousands of times, I wondered, had such behavior as I was witnessing been quietly countenanced by journalists, and how much other wild, scary stuff pertaining to other movers and shakers who had a shot at ruling the free world, say, had they deftly slipped into their back pockets in return for the right to attend such parties as this one? --Michael Weiss [link]

Cold Trail on Afroze?... Edward Morrissey of the Weekly Standard is basing his case on the media's misreading of Al Qaeda motives on weak evidence. He has a lengthy piece dissecting the capture, trial and sentencing of Mohammed Afroze, an Indian citizen and alleged Al Qaeda operative, who was recently convicted by an Indian court of plotting to fly aircrafts into several prominent locations in Britain, Australia and India. Afroze and his team of would-be pilots were prepared to the do the deed on September 11, 2001. What went wrong? Apparently, they all simultaneously lost their nerve and never bothered to even board their planes.

Nevertheless, Morrissey concludes: "The case of Mohammed Afroze puts all claims that Western opposition to reasonable goals of Muslims caused September 11, the London bombings, or any of al Qaeda's other attacks going back into the early 1990s."

I think he meant to write "puts to rest all claims..." And while such a thesis is stated innocuously enough -- the Bali bombing of 2002 occurred, according to Osama bin Laden, because it was "unreasonable" for Australia to help liberate East Timor from Indonesian occupation -- it's not done much justice by using the shady case of Afroze as its Exhibit A.

Despite the confession of guilt Indian authorities managed to extract from the suspect, Morrissey conveniently leaves out a crucial part of the story: that guilt may not be true. For starters, Afroze's attorney Mobin Solker, quoted in the Times of London, insists his client's confession was beaten out of him: avowing to challenge the conviction, Solker said: "The confessional statement was taken in custody where Afroze was pressurised and tortured . . . My client, who was pursuing a career in flying, happened to be a Muslim and happened to come back to India not long after September 11."

If this is mere legal craftiness, more curious are the following facts: Afroze was released on bail shortly after he was detained in 2001. The Tribune of Chandigarh, India, wrote a 2002 editorial which cast serious doubt on the competence of Indian police, citing numerous snafus under evidence-gathering circumstances similar to those in the Afroze case:

For the period Afroze was in jail as a dreaded terrorist the Mumbai Police kept up a sustained campaign that it was about to break the backbone of major underworld crime syndicates and terrorist outfits. However, it failed to submit a simple chargesheet before the special court to justify the arrest and detention of Afroze. Had India been a banana republic the court might have played ball with the inefficient set of investigators. Afroze is now out on bail, but Mumbai Police Commissioner M. N. Singh is having to pay the price for the inefficiency of his men. He has been asked to proceed on leave by an embarrassed Maharashtra government. The release on bail does not mean that Afroze's worries are now over. He should, in fact, brace himself for a furious backlash from a humiliated police force. So what even if the CBI has said, after going through the evidence collected by the Mumbai Police, that the case against Afroze was cooked up?

Moreover, why hasn't any country said to have been targeted by Afroze not asked that he be remanded to its custody for further questioning? From the same Times article: "Police from Britain, Australia and the US had been to India to see evidence against Afroze, but had not requested extradition."

Surely Morrissey can do better if he wants to make the case that material circumstances, like the war in Iraq, don't precipitate terrorist attacks. --Mark Grueter [link]

Reading Lolita in Baghdad... If you're of the opinion that Iraq is being engulfed by Iranian-style Shi'ite fundamentalism, there's at least one countervailing force that ought to give you some hope: Iraqi women. Dr. Sabah Salih, a Kurdish expat professor of English at Bloomsburg University, paints a grim picture of the "other war" being waged on the streets of Basra and Najaf, that of primitive religious sexists versus tough, secular-minded women who won't accept legislation by sura, especially where that would make them juridically "half" a man.

At the street level, women who dare to question male power or who refuse to subjugate their bodies to the dictates of crude and brainless men find themselves verbally abused, harassed, spat at, and even killed; and, in an ultimate act of savagery against the female body, some even have had acid thrown at their faces and legs[...]

Iraqi women have taken to the streets because they know exactly what this is all about: in filtering everything through Islam, in continually carping about Western conspiracies against Islam, in insisting that every choice one makes has to be purely Islamic no matter how impossible or ridiculous that may be, today's Islamists want to preserve and solidify power in the hands of men.

Now, how are the prospects looking, at least on paper, for a federated republic of Iraq? Depends on whom you ask. Lawyer and author Allan Topol, writing in yesterday's Washington Times, says balkanization -- or "disintegration," to use his term for it -- is inevitable:

For months, the words federalism and autonomy have been euphemisms for this process. The United States has been pushing hard, prodding the constitutional draftsmen to insist on unity. We've been like the builders of a sea wall resisting the incursion of the waves. All of that was brought home with a vengeance last week with the statement of one of Iraq's most powerful Shi'ite politicians.

Abdul-Azizal-Hakim threw a live grenade on the table as the constitution drafting process was nearing its completion. In a speech, Mr. al-Hakim supported other Shi'ite leaders demanding autonomy for southern Iraq. This region, inhabited almost exclusively by Shi'ites, also happens to be the locale for about 80 percent of the country's oil.

Yet a more "powerful" Shi'ite politician, Prime Minister al-Jaafari, claims that the ongoing negotiations over the constitution are a matter of "details," which, if you don't know anything about al-Jaafari -- or make a pastime of reflexive cynicism when any vague but promising press release emerges from Iraq -- might include everything from zoning laws to, say, the rights of women not to have acid thrown in their faces.

A man I'm more inclined to take on his word is President Jalal Talabani. On the question of the role of Islam in the consitution, he says, literally, "[n]ot a problem."

We'll see soon enough. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Feel-Good Holocaust Movie of the Year... Whatever happened to the Nick Hornby script for A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius? Gentiles. So lazy.

--Michael Weiss [link]

Deep Throat's Lag Reflex... How much has the weight of literature on a current Republican president's high crimes, misdemeanors, verbal infelicities, war plans, extra war plans with cheese, and knackered shambles into history strained the legs of John Q. Outraged's nightstand? So much that Bob Woodward's latest non-fiction potboiler -- a wistful little throwback to the boy-the-way-Glen-Miller-played days of White House intrigue -- ain't selling.

[C]ompared with sales of Mr. Woodward's recent books, "The Secret Man" is a laggard. "Plan of Attack," about the Bush administration's preparations for the war in Iraq, sold 183,000 copies the week it went on sale in April 2004, according to BookScan, and it sold about six times as many copies in its first five weeks as "The Secret Man" did.

It starts out with anemic hardcover sales, then Colin Powell acts all cool and distant. Next thing you know, Bob, you're waving goodbye manically from the lip of a helicopter on the South Lawn.

"Obviously the publishers, because of historical curiosity or the significance of it, I think expected more," Mr. Woodward said. "It obviously was not as much as some of my other books, but I don't know how much a writer can get involved in trying to second-guess that."

Obviously it has nothing to do with a writer who says "obviously" a touch much. Locust years, indeed. The Woodettes will each have to make do with an E-350 series this Arbor Day. --Michael Weiss [link]

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

The Onion's Pitch-Perfect Week... If humor could make you orgasm, we'd all be Meg Ryan in the diner right now. Except that, um, we wouldn't be faking it.

"Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory."

That, the Rumsfeld, and the Iraqi soldier moonlighting as a terrorist. Hurt so good. --Michael Weiss [link]

Mullah Mollification... Fareed Zakaria argues that the sensible US policy toward Iran would be to give an inch and see if we don't get a mile in return.

There are lots of reasons to be suspicious of Iran. But the real question is: Do we want to try to stop it from going nuclear? If so, why not explore this path? Washington could authorize the European negotiators to make certain conditional offers, and see how Tehran responds. What's the worst that can happen? It doesn't work, the deal doesn't happen and Tehran resumes its nuclear activities. That's where we are today.

Except that the potential back-fire of this scenario is stated in Zakaria's opening paragraph:

Two things are very expensive in international politics, the game-theorist Thomas Schelling once observed: threats when they fail and promises when they succeed. President Bush appears to be headed on a path that could teach him this lesson.

The failed threat alluded to here is the president's extraordinarily stupid statement that were Israel to attack Iran to try and knock out its nuclear development sites, the US would nod in solemn approval. (The US would, of course, do just that if an Osiraq re-play were to happen at a more eastern longitude, but admitting this preemptively, in public, is worse than a crime.) Yet the fulfilled promise would be... what, exactly? Zakaria doesn't go into detail by citing "conditional offers." Though if we are to assume that these are within reason and are gestures of diplomatic goodwill, will the mullahs not read them as signs of vulnerability? Iran's nuclear program depends right now on two things: the status quo, and time. It has China and Russia too locked-in financially to need to worry about a major campaign of "multilateral" strong-arming. It sees itself rather like Japan must (albeit without Japan's hitherto noble restraint): threatened on all sides by nuclear powers, yet dangerously without club membership. It's run by deranged, monomaniacal theocrats who everyday come up with new ways of reminding us that earthly existence is but a prologue to paradise and that all human life is expendable in attaining this heavenly end goal. Neoconservatives may have been waiting for the Godot of democratic revolution to sweep Tehran for 15 years, but will submitting to mullah demands -- or anticipating those that haven't even been made yet -- really give the US more leverage in thwarting Persian WMD? --Michael Weiss [link]

Hitch on Sheehan... Absolutely right, as he was in taunting and shaming those who think that if you've not gone to Iraq yourself or "sent" a son or daughter there, your opinion on the war is weightless. I have a friend from college serving in Iraq right now. He was one of three or four ROTC students enrolled at Dartmouth while we were there. We've debated politics before, and I don't expect we'll stop when -- yes, hopefully when and not if -- he returns. I wouldn't expect him to even want to monopolize the conversation on the justice or exigency of this war, or think that his epaulets somehow bestow "moral authority" on anything whatsoever. (Actually, the latter consequence would negate the former since, if he were an authority, there'd be no conversation for him to monopolize; it'd be a one-way lecture.)

The fact that Wilfred Owen was killed at the Sambre-Oise canal a week before the bells of Armistice were tolling in Shrewsbury may inject an element of personal tragedy into a corpus of poetry that was already quite elegiac and 'political' enough. But would World War I have been any more legitimate or righteous a war had Owen never even lived? Or were Rudyard Kipling and Theodore Roosevelt entitled to longer attention spans from the public because each lost a son in the service of inter-imperial conflict? If the answer is yes, then pacificism is in a bind because both the former president and the author of the phrase "thinking with the blood" had their belligerence redoubled by such losses...

Now comes Cindy Sheehan, whose paranoid ravings are stamped less toxic because she's next of kin to a dead soldier. And since Ms. Sheehan brings up the subject of Israel -- which is a non sequitur even her fans like Maureen Dowd must be wincing through -- let's conduct a parallel thought experiment. Let's imagine a group of tearful Israeli mothers with children that have just been immolated by a Palestinian suicide-bomber. They want good, old-fashioned, Old Testament revenge and they want it transacted in emotional, not ideological, currency. Imagine them petitioning Ariel Sharon for an audience on how to best conduct foreign or domestic policy. And now imagine he obliged them this audience, which carries with it the implication that what they have to say might influence him. What would Dowd and her co-thinkers be scribbling after such an event, and scribbling even at the dreaded expense of giving a recalcitrant head of state an incidental "pass" on his weekly denunciation in print?

How pathetic and thuggish these displays of sentimentality are coming from either the permanently antiwar, or the conditionally, retroactively antiwar camps. Frank Rich, I see, isn't quite over his fondness for Vietnam analogies, which fail not only on objective historical terms but also on subjective historical ones: the sixties ethos he thinks he's channeling distinguished itself not by the easy demand -- which anyone, at any time, can make -- that the US government "bring the troops home now," but by the serious argument that the troops ought not to have been sent to Indochina in the first place and for reasons more than obvious in the first place. If he and others were so easily duped into thinking that an American military presence in Mesopotamia was necessary when Saddam was thought to be mere inches away from possessing a nuclear arsenal, then what's his advice worth now on the setting of "timetables" for a categorical withdrawal of that presence? For that matter, what's it worth on anything at all? --Michael Weiss [link]

Mary and the Madame... Being mother to the author of Frankenstein -- a woman married to a pretty unbound domestic Prometheus -- might have been enough to claim of Mary Wollstonecraft that hers was "a life lived to some purpose." Except of course that she "also" wrote; she more germanely fulfilled the requirement for that lofty honor of curriculum vitae, first hymned by Thomas Paine, by having partaken in at least one revolution, bloodless though it may have been; and her flame was prematurely extinguished by very act of parentage already mentioned. This gadarene gadfly and swinging Anti-Austen gets her due in a new biography, penned, promisingly enough, by someone with the same last name as Lord Byron.

Now, Madame de Sta"l had famous family ties, too. Her papa was Jacques Necker, the man whose royal termination from the job of French Finance Minister may or may not have pushed a nation to its revolutionary tipping-point. He was eventually restored but, as we know, faith in the court of Louis XVI was not. (An interesting sidenote: the salve of Neckernomics needed to be applied in the first place because of the emptying of France's coffers in aid of our own "misunderstanding" with her historic enemy, England. See Simon Schama for more on this.) De Sta"l also had some independent resume points to boast. She coined the term "Romanticism." She was a Swiss Sor Juana Ines commingled with an inveterate Donna Juana who preferred the company of mimbos -- and suffered her own Commentatore hinge-moments as a result.

The ever-reliable Carlin Romano gives a portrait of both chicks in The Chronicle of Higher Education. And if you object to the word "chicks" used in this context, don't go reading him or his opinion of women in academe:

Both biographers take pains to imply that the enormous need for love, romance, and children that we see in Wollstonecraft and de Sta"l, far from delegitimizing them, makes them role models for timid academic women intellectuals today, too often cowed by bureaucratic propriety or the tenure clock into becoming the kind of "dead-from-the-waist-down" scholars who love mankind in general, but no one in particular.

Oh, man. That weakly offered "imply" is the only thing keeping Carlin from waking up at NYU with Camille Paglia's severed head under the sheets. --Michael Weiss [link]

Bob Dole Likes the First Amendment, Too... Losing the presidency was the best thing that ever happened to him. (Well, that and the little pill that could from Pfizer.)

As someone with a long record of government service, I must admit that I did not always appreciate the inquisitive nature of the press. But I do understand that the purpose of a reporter's privilege is not to somehow elevate journalists above other segments of society. Instead, it is designed to help guarantee that the public continues to be well informed. --Michael Weiss [link]

Best Headline, Worst Story... The good: "A blow for the 'Prince of Pot.'" The bad: There's such a thing as the British Columbia Marijuana party. The ugly: Its leader, Marc Emery, has been arrested or fined on petty charges for selling herb in his native Cananda. But when he started selling it over the Internet to clients around the world, Canada left him alone -- until he found a market in the United States. Now our noble and mighty Drug Enforcement Agency is demanding his extradiction here, where he could face as many as ten years in prison. I'll try to avoid the Michael Moore-ish sentimentalism about free, lolly-pop laned Canuckistan, but this is a clear-cut case where, if they accede to this US demarche, we should not only 'blame' them, but abase ourselves for having become a whole fucking continent of narcs and paternalist mellow-harshers. (Throw in a "man" at the end of that last sentence; I couldn't bring myself to do it.)

Here's a photograph of my younger brother in Amsterdam. It was taken a few weeks ago. (Yes, that vending machine dispenses exactly what you think it does.) Now, he's not much into politics or arguing the merits of regime change, but when he ordered a completely legal -- downright banal, really -- bag of pure, smooth-burning Afghan hash at that coffeeshop featured in Ocean's Twelve and proceeded to call the transaction "a gesture of solidarity with our new democratic allies," I knew exactly two things: 1. He was full of shit; 2. I now loved him with some justification.

Look, anything beyond high-functioning, recreational stuff and you should be made to hang out with the characters from Less Than Zero and The Ice Storm, which, for all you chapter-and-verse priggish types out of a John Lithgow casting call, is a fate worse than jail. --Michael Weiss [link]

Inventor Ben... Here's another lede interred six feet under in the NYT:

Mr. Dray does note that "self-evident," Franklin's editorial change for Jefferson's "undeniable" in the preamble to the Declaration, comes straight from Newton's characterization of scientific truth.

William Grimes reviews Mr. Dray's new potted study of Benjamin Franklin the inventor, but you might think that given the current contretemps between reason and faith, a historical footnote like that -- which illuminates the one sphere in which the empirical and the metaphysical do meet -- would get top-billing. Not only does it not, but Grimes dismisses like "digressions" at moments when the Franklin laboratory isn't at its busiest and so the Franklin biographer must be at his. Pity. As much as kite-flying ingenuity and good old proto-American elbow grease is fascinating to rediscover, better still is the conflict between the forces of self-evidence and common sense and those of superstition and common sensibility. --Michael Weiss [link]

Yeah, Yeah!... Nice Times wrap-up of the current season of Entourage thus far. I don't know what parody parroting example is worse: Ari Emanuel saying, "Hug it out, bitch!" over contract renewal talks, or that Burnt Sienna blowfish Harry Knowles channeling his more svelte and suave little screen incarnation by referring to actual plans for "Aquafag": The Movie.

The writers on the show sound like they know whereof they fake-it. Ed Burns' brother, a former Sundance sensation... --Michael Weiss [link]

Monday, August 15, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

You Might As Well Live... A few weeks ago, my friend and Snarksmith contributor Mark Grueter informed me that I had won a hat-drawing at Me Three magazine -- my name having been entered through a charitable contribution I made to that fine literary journal -- and that I was entitled to $60 worth of free drinks at the Algonquin Hotel. Of little concern to us here is the fact that such a contest bears the faint tincture of corruption, given the relationship of masthead to self (although I have every reassurance that I was plucked from the mix in strict objectivity and am the beneficiary only of chance.) Nor does it matter that $60 is about what an olive in a martini costs in New York these days. Mattering slightly more, in my opinion, is how that chunk of change (not adjusted for inflation) would have gone a long way in liquifying some already pretty sluiced tongues in the twenties and thirties, the decades responsible for making the Algonquin a place-album of cultural and literary images. In the interests of Quiz Show-ing things up even further, and also of paying a small tribute to a relevant professional courtesy of hackdom, I invited Mark to be my co-boozer at the venerable haunt of "Roundtable" wits. We had a blast, too, complete with the performance of two very sluiced girls from Florida trying to outbid each other for most regrettable holiday decision. (Whatever you do, do not get Mark started on them.) But to swing back to the twenties and thirties for a moment...

Dorothy Parker once wrote a friend, "Sorry I haven't gotten back to you this week, but I was fucking busy. Or the other way around, if you prefer."

About a fellow chef of short-order genius, she once observed:

If, with the literate,
I am impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit.
We all assume that Oscar said it.

She may or may not have replied, to a vicious competitor for the same male affection and also a co-worker at Vanity Fair who once held a door open for her with the unequivocal remark, "Age before beauty": "Pearls before swine," before charging right on through.

But she did leave all her money to the NAACP. And she was one of the few members of her generation who made it impossible to claim that opposition to U.S. entry into World War II was necessarily right-wing or isolationist in spirit. Now the glossy sheet that helped make her famous has reprinted an old Hitch piece on this grand dame of devastation. Read it, why don't you. --Michael Weiss [link]

Stop the Press... Don't you just hate it when the New York Times buries its non-lede in the middle of an un-story?

Hillary Clinton and the New York Post have made up. As was the case with Alec Baldwin eating his own words on politics only to have them go straight to his ever-expanding waistline, all the mean fun has been bled out of the guilty-pleasure rag's coverage of the former president and her desperate house-hick husband.

And never mind for the nonce that Murdoch, no matter whose muckraking checks he signs, has enjoyed warm personal relations with the Clintons, a social coup he can't quite boast of vis-a-vis the current commander-in-chief, with whom his news network consistently finds little to no fault. The obvious needs the black and white treatment from a real avatar of "fair and balanced" journalism:

MUCH has been made of Rupert Murdoch's willingness to express a deeply conservative agenda through his worldwide newspaper holdings and most prominently Fox News, but his primary ideological allegiance is to winning.

Wait, wait, wait, wait. You mean all this time he's just been out to -- make money? My Drudge Report shrank three sizes that day.

And the television network that weekly brings you Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie sadistically eye-fucking corn-cloyed churchgoers into states of vexatious retardation is "deeply conservative" the way the Reagan era was deeply conservative. Anarchically, ironically so, or just not at all. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Israeli-Israeli Conflict... As unpleasant as it is to watch messianic Jews fight their own state to retain control of a territory that is not theirs, one unexamined benefit may come of the Gaza and West Bank "pull-outs," which began this morning. What kind of effect, I wonder, will the spectacle of IDF troops policing their own citizens have on those who think beggared Muslims are the only unwilling participants in a militarized colony? The law of unintended consequences -- which officially hit the books when Ariel Sharon had his unexpected Nixon-in-China epiphany a year and a half ago -- has real potential here. One hopes that at least some of the more cynical Palestinians will realize that self-criticism isn't entirely outcast from the "holy land," if only by virtue of its being a bold-faced term in the lexicon of democracy. Even if the "settlers" staring down Israeli soldiers aren't quite advocates of a two-state solution, the fact that they, too, are pitched to antagonize the guys with the guns starkens the distinction between government and governed. This will be food for thought, perhaps, the next time some psychopath suggests designating a Jerusalem bus a battlefield. --Michael Weiss [link]

This One Goes to Eleven... "It's basically all about art. I'm an artist."

Yeah, yeah. What Movie of the Week self-parody or MFA twit hasn't spoken those exact words? But what gynecologist has?

Dr. Matlock -- I kid you not, the office is even in West Hollywood -- makes vaginas. Well, touches 'em up a bit. Welcome to the burgeoning industry of pussy plastic surgery.

"Some women will say, ‘Hey, you take this picture and hang it up in the operating room and refer back to it when you're sculpturing me,'" he said in an interview in his clinic overlooking hazy Los Angeles. "I say, ‘Okay, all right, fine.'"

Would you just listen to that affectless, worn-out response? This is the reason why you also don't go to school study English lit. All that theory and technique, next thing you know, your original jones for the good stuff has been massacred.

Still, a husband of a woman with stress incontinence in the mid-1990s played a large role in Dr. Matlock's inadvertent realization of the demand for vaginal reconstruction, which builds on decades-old surgical techniques. Some physicians have long quietly added an extra stitch "for the husband" while repairing new mothers' episiotomies.

Ever see that David Spade bit about the proud papa in the delivery room, watching mom's episiotomy and playing 21 with the Ob-gyn? "Hit me." "Good?" "..." "Well?" "Hit me!" "Look, pal, you're showing 19 here..." This is why some people can say "Culture of Life" with a straight face. They mean the fringe benefits.

There's a segue somewhere in here that I'm not caffeinated enough yet to point out, but if you haven't seen the Comedy Central roast of Pamela Anderson, you're the poorer for it. Jeffrey Ross deserves a Nobel. --Michael Weiss [link]

Saturday, August 13, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Sea-Rugalach... Ahem, and if we do say so ourselves. Recent Snarksmith contributor and not-so-recent good friend of mine Max Gross rockets into megastardom this morning on Page Six. His feat of gossip-worthy derring-don't? Winning a reporters-only horse race in the Catskills. All for charity, of course. The cause? Prostate cancer; the fight against it, that is. (And what else in the Borscht Belt, if you please?) The competition? Fierce, with a lower-case f. We're talking such worthies as George Whipple and Anthony Haden-Guest, erstwhile flame-fanner of assorted bonfires of vanities. Read all about Max's (aka, the Hapless Jewish Writer's) dexterous side-jockeying here, in The Forward, and practically feel the shrug of ironic pessimism. Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Kofax, you're God damn right he's living in the fucking past.

As the reporters were eating their breakfast, one of the organizers of the event came over to their table and said that a reporter for the Daily News had not shown up. "Anyone want to race who's not already signed up?"

It turned out that the reporter who dropped out is named Christian Red. Since the HJW is something of a Jewish Red, it seemed like fate. The HJW was assigned to a horse named City Final.

First time I read that penultimate sentence, I thought "Red" meant something else (this is the Forward, after all, still located at the Jewish Workman's Circle.) But then I remembered the unforgettable, the Gross trademark. Gene Shalit's an hors d'oeuvre at Supercuts.

--Michael Weiss [link]

The Kinsley Report... Michael Kinsley's departure from the editorial page at the Los Angeles Times wasn't exactly going to occur quietly, but some hosannahs are just too loud to ignore. Take Nikki Finke's piece, "The Michael Kinsley Experiment Ends" in LA Weekly:

A more accurate description of his tenure at the LAT would be a pretty horrible job that's proved disastrous both to Kinsley's persona and to the paper's prestige.

The less accurate description was PR white noise amped up by Kinsley in the pages of the -- New York Times. But better still is Mike's reply, which LA Weekly has had the good grace to also publish:

I knew that Nikki Finke is an idiot, of course, but I had no idea that she was such a fuddy-duddy. Among the malevolent non-sequiturs and damned-if-you-do-or-don't accusations in Nikki Finke's appreciation of my tenure at the LA Times ["The Michael Kinsley Experiment Ends," July 29 - August 4], my favorite passage is this one, scolding me for moving too fast. "Normally, any change at a newspaper happens slowly amid much careful thought and laborious planning so as not to upset subscribers." It's a pity that Finke finds the torrid pace of change at the LA Times so upsetting, since she is the only person to have noticed it...

In all of this, Finke peremptorily attaches her own odd views to the entire city of Los Angeles. If the Times or I were to portrayed the citizens of Los Angeles as Finke does in her article -- humorless, easily upset, provincial, intolerant (not to mention demagogic and deranged) -- Nikki Finke would be the first to throw a fit.

Who says all lefty journos have had their eye-teeth filed down? Rumble on the Paramount Lot at noon. Be there, or be square. --Michael Weiss [link]

Friday, August 12, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Forgiven for Anti-Semitism, But Not Cats... Along with the Surrealist Manifesto and what should, by rights, be called its ideological companion piece, the "Platform of the Left Opposition," there exists another edge-singed declaration of hot defiance issued by a related but divergent vanguard group of twentieth century movers and shakers. The only difference is, their declaration was never actually written down. If one were to compose this phantom mission statement now and start with a retroactive title, a nice ironic tribute might be paid to the person largely responsible for it, its poet-muse, who knew from mythology and the simultaneous hazards and charms of the "chorus." I'm thinking, "The Doctrine of the Waste Land Cassandrics."

Amazing when you consider it, but there's just no getting around it: The Partisan Review would not have been The Partisan Review without T.S. Eliot. Royalist, God-fearing, Anti-Semite, Missourian. Well, it hardly compromises the presumed resumé of the animating light of America's premier smart sheet, shepharded into cultural relevance as that was by dissident Jews from the outer boroughs of New York. But lost in much of the nostalgia for the legendary "PR Crowd" is the fact that literary modernism, more than revolutionary socialism, was seen as a volatile but bracing solvent -- even more bracing and even more volatile than Marxism -- for thinning the intellectual and spirital clots of bourgeois society. Eliot published his Four Quartets in PR. Saul Bellow once performed a Yiddish version of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" that parodied the cocktail-hour company he used to keep in those days; instead of Michelangelo, in the room the women came and went talking of Karl Marx. And it's somewhere around here that we already detect the lineaments of every climb-down, self-repudiation and slow, painful process of deradicalization undergone by the New York intellectuals of the thirties and forties. Which is all to say that the "politics" of the modernists -- and let's do remember we're dealing not just with the silly spectrum calibration of the plus anglais que l'anglais Eliot, who thought "Whiggishness" was a put-down, but also with the reactionary Waugh and the downright sinister Pound -- mattered less than the passion or root alienation which sprung their tormented, masterful art. (More tormented than masterful in Pound's case.) And talking of "roots," one needn't dig too deep to uncover the ones that clutched for the rootless cosmopolitans of the Upper West Side.

Irving Howe, literary-critical imago of this "set," and someone who managed to emerge from the pupal stage of political transformation with an uncommon grace and dignity, once wrote that

[r]eading Eliot's poetry a half-century ago I felt so strongly (if not always lucidly) attuned to its inner vibrations that I had little desire to be critical, especially of what might be passed over as a few incidental lines of bigotry. With a supreme hauteur, Eliot had made the journey from provincial St. Louis to cosmopolitan London. The New York writers could not match his hauteur, but perhaps they could negotiate a somewhat similar journely from Brooklyn or the Bronx to Manhattan. I doubt that this comparison occurred to many of the New York writers, but I am convinced that it figured in our feelings.

It's a shame that the essay in which this passage originally appeared -- it was in a review of Christopher Ricks's T.S. Eliot and Prejudice, and the venue was a newer smart sheet, the New York Review of Books -- was published two decades after Eliot's death. Otherwise, we might have had some deliciously stuffed-shirt comment from the poet himself in one of the many pieces of his personal correspondence, which, to return to the subject of cultural relevance, have just been put up for auction by the Eliot-friendly family and franchise of Faber & Faber.

There's apparently some sad bits in here about "Viv" Eliot, whom many said Tom drove to Zelda-esque madness and premature death. Also some good digs at Virginia Woolf's overrated corpus. But the real question on this side of the Atlantic (at least as far as Zabar's is said to be located somewhere East of Suez) is the following: Did the spats-wearing expat Tory ever get around to chivvying the homegrown Trotskysant left that lionized what he stood for, while still remaining wary of where he stood? --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, August 11, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Hate the Emancipator, Not the Emancipation?... If history really is a tragedy and not a morality tale, then where does the Pantheon of Great Men, those cracked and chipped monuments that a cynical revisionism aims to powder into a wind-caught dust? Abraham Lincoln still gets called the greatest American president from time to time, but who by now is unaware of the real story of why the Union was saved and with what determination slavery was ended?

Dinesh D'Souza sews a manly undergarment out of the weak threads of Lincoln's opportunism and demagoguery, stitched together in this essay as political "artfulness," but I think he's right about some heroes being worth retaining. A nice litmus test of deciding which ones should be can be performed by taking an inventory of unlikely admirers and well-disposed critics. Lincoln's ultimate goal of keeping the United States in tact -- and concomitantly ending its morally repugnant, as well as anachronistic, economic system of feudal agrarianism in favor of an expanding industrialism -- can have had no greater supporter than Karl Marx. (Look up sometime what the good Doktor of dialectical materialism had to say about the Civil War in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune.) And not for nothing, nor without an equable sense of irony, did Gore Vidal once compare Lincoln to Bismarck, or did quite a few radical social revolutionaries in the 20's and 30's see in him the thrilling-to-scary flickers of a Leninist monomania.

Whatever the case, the fissures and knicks in this monument do little to topple or vaporize the whole. Though for the best protein in American abolitionism, look further back than Lincoln, but no further than Thomas Paine. After reading D'Souza I dug up a polemical tract Paine wrote on the slavery "question" before there was even a United States -- or, to be more precise, were even United States -- to preserve. And in this case the uncertainty of national existence had an even louder resonance on the shame and scandal of human bondage:

1. With what consistency, or decency they [Americans] complain so loudly of attempts to enslave them, while they hold so many hundred thousands in slavery, and annually enslave many thousands more, without any pretence of authority, or claim upon them?

2. How just, how suitable to our crime is the punishment with which providence threatens us? We have enslaved multitudes, and shed much innocent blood in doing it; and now are threatened with the same. And while others' evils are confessed, and bewailed, why not this especially, and publicly; than which no other vice, if all others, has brought so much guilty on the land?

3. Whether, then, all ought not immediately to discontinue and renounce it, with grief and abhorrence? Should not every society bear testimony against it, and account obstinate persisters in it bad men, enemies to their country, and exclude them from fellowship; as they often do for much less faults?

Points 4 and 5 get a little "policy" orientated and can be left out here without, I hope, giving too much offense to the author. They touch on a kind of rough pension plan for elder slaves, as well as on slavery's imperilment of Christian missionary work (what black man would join a church that would allow that to happen to him?) To be clear: the latter point was an argument he made in the political language of the other camp; he was hypothetically defending a major concern that every iteration of the status quo in this country has never quite shaken (the "faith-based" variable), a concern which Paine, though not exactly an atheist himself, assuredly did not share. --Michael Weiss [link]

In Business News... A record bank robbery, $68 million dollars in 50-real bills, appears to have been pulled off in Brazil, but not with guns. Instead, a team of robbers set up an artificial turf company as a front and tunnelled two blocks over the course of three months until the dug their way into the bank vault. Because the vault was uninsured, the government will probably pick up the bill. Needless to say, I think this is awesome -- Brazil is drenched in gang-driven gun warfare, and for a caper of this magnitude to take place with patience instead of spilled blood is wicked. It also makes me suspect that the perps are not, as the government has assumed, the drug gangs who rule the slums with paramilitaries. They would have stormed in, don't you think? I prefer this is the first act of a criminal mastermind who draws inspiration from classic detective literature. It's all there, right down to the break in at the beginning of the weekend so nobody will notice until Monday. Awesome. --Nic Duquette [link]

From the Mailbag...

Wow, talk about two posts working at crosspurposes. Your most recent, on Iran, undermines your former, on Iraq.

Since, if we lose in Iraq, the most likely outcome is an Iran friendly Shia government with folks like Sistani at the head. And probably a Kurdish autonomous zone in the north, while the Sunnis get fucked. which would be bad, sure, but you undercut your point by in your very next entry pointing out that Iran isn't so bad- especially compared to the really screwed up states. (funny how US allies uzbekistan and pakistan didn't make condi's list, btw). Also, mark my words, the Aug 15th constitution will have a bunch of hoo-rah about it, it'll be seen as turning the corner, and by late September we'll be saying, "Well, just wait for the elections!" again as people continue to die.

Of course, they're both pretty superficial analyses, and while "Islamofacism" is a nice catchphrase, but it's about as meaningful as the term "War on Terror." I'd disagree with the assertation that we win just by sticking around, and that the causes and goals of various hardline Islamic groups are that simple.

Wow, there's a lot here. But quickly:

- Islamofascism is unsustainable in the long run. But I meant that in the same spirit that John Maynard Keynes observed that in the long run, we are all dead.

- Islamofascism is a pretty tacky word, I admit, but the only other word I've heard neatly encapsulate the part of Islam that is doing all this is "Islamist," which sounds a little too much like "Islamic" for my comfort. At least Islamofascist is a distinct expression. - I don't see the contradiction between my posts. We need to win in Iraq, but a "win" can include a scenario where Iran takes over Iraq and we get egg on our face. At this point, I'll accept anything that produces a stable, quasi-democratic, peaceful Iraq. That's because these Islamic-whatevers are defined by how little they care about risking it all. They are nihilists. They have nothing to lose. Iran, if a major enemy, at least has values. Sick, perverted values of a totalitarian state, but I'll take what I can get. As the Coen brothers so memorably wrote, contrasting German nihilists to the Nazi party, you can say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, but at least it's an ethos. I have no delusions about how bad the Iranian government is, but look who their neighbors are, and look at how much more unattractive Iraq could become if Iran also declined to get involved. At the very least, we want an an Iranified Iraq to be our worst-case scenario. Right now, it isn't. And if the Sunnis get screwed by the new order, at least the Kurds and Shia will be able to breathe. That's progress. Kinda.

-Wait for the elections: well, yeah. As tired as I am of "hoo-rah," it'll be a big deal to see a real democracy of some kind installed in Iraq. The big question is whether it will have the balls to (a) quash the insurgents and (b) throw out the USA without so much as an air base. Could go either way, still, but I'm worried. --Nic Duquette [link]

Why Wait For the Blog to Filter For You?... Those rightwingers at ("The severed head of Dan Rather has been brought to you by...) Power Line have rolled out a new site, Power Line News, also known by its sesquipedalian domain name, www.powerlineblognews.com (Was powerlinenews.com already taken? How about news.powerlineblog.com?)

The "Top Political Blogs" section in the middle is a joke, condensing a wide swath of unquestioningly, sometimes frighteningly, conservative blogs without even throwing in a few liberal tokens like an inverted HuffPo, which is baffling when you consider how many bad liberal blogs there are out there waiting to supply prefab straw men. But in general the news site looks rock-solid if you want streaming, conservative-slanted news. It's certainly less hideous than the shitshow established by Fox News.

Still, this raises the question: if you can establish a news portal that will present everything in a conservative light, and interpolate the entire conservative blogosphere, why would anybody go to individual blogs? Will this put Power Line proper out of business? If so, let me say I'll be the first to crack puns on that safety commercial with the MC Hammer track. --Nic Duquette [link]

Wednesday, August 10, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Not So Great, Less Than Satanic... As Iran playsdiplomatic headgames with the EU, we should keep a clear perspective on what we hope will be accomplished. America has good reason to bear a grudge against Iran, but I wonder whether we're neglecting more pressing cases to keep the pressure on them. I don't want Iran to get nukes, mind you, but there are regimes that scare me a lot more.

Consider the six nations listed by Secretary Rice last year as "outposts of tyranny": Cuba, Burma, North Korea, Iran, Belarus and Zimbabwe. Iran is obviously the odd duck on this list. If not exactly a free society, it does have a relatively clean election system to choose its leaders once the ayatollahs have given each candidate permission to run; the others are unsophisticated, brutal autocracies. Iran has a class structure and a cosmopolitan capital city, and a per capita GDP of $7,700; the other five are squalid backwaters, with p.c. GDP ranging from $6,800 (Belarus) to $3,000 (Cuba) to below $2,000 (the other three). Iran has a rich cultural and historical tradition; the other five have spent the span of human time as colonial shuttlecocks.

As a big enemy in a very sensitive place, we need to watch Iran and manage its every move carefully. But it's counterproductive to bunch Iran with Orwellian dystopias like North Korea when it's more like China -- a regime that will do whatever it takes to keep its leaders in power and its system of government unchanged, even if that means human rights abuses. But they aren't sadists like Hussein or Kim. Let's start thinking of Iran like we do China. Or some other country like China, except with huge oil reserves and leaders who hate America. --Nic Duquette [link]

Yellow Magnetic Ribbons: Not Enough, Dude...Bruce Reed's new Slate blog finally seems to be coming into its own. Others have already observed the government's failure to ask all citizens to sacrifice for a war effort, but as the President decamps to Texas for one of his epic vacations, this may be the most succinct and pointed outline of the argument I've heard yet.

[After 9/11] we were ready for four years of Liberty Bonds and Victory Gardens. Instead, over the last four years, our biggest collective sacrifice has been watching reality shows on television [...]

It's no surprise that a national tragedy like September 11 would make the President feel a divine calling. It's harder to understand why, when the moment cries out for another FDR, Bush thought God was calling him to be Calvin Coolidge.

The war on Islamofascism will be won, sooner or later, even if we do nothing, because the supply of oil is finite and the tenets of Islamism so devoid of any real ethos beyond destruction and its excuses that it's unsustainable. What is far from certain is victory in Iraq. The constitution now being drafted in Iraq is our last good chance at a win, or at least a not entirely humiliating defeat. If Iraq fails to govern itself, we'll have little left we can do but give up and focus our remaining credibility on other projects. I may not like the Iraq war, but we can all agree that losing it would bad for us and terrible for Iraqis. As annoyed as I am by the government's reluctance to ask us a favor, the blame in the end belongs not with Mr. Bush but with the electorate, us. If you haven't started cutting back on your driving, now's the time. --Nic Duquette [link]

Tuesday, August 9, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

"Every Man Has His Price" Bargain Bin... The outrage over the Oil-For-Food corruption scandal reignited yesterday when the latest Volcker report alleged that the program's director, Benon Sevan, took cash bribes. I don't know what's the bigger scandal -- that this man was complicit defrauding millions of Iraqis of food and medicine money, starving many and prolonging their subjugation under the worst possible sort of government, or that he did so for so little. The alleged sum of the bribery in this multibillion dollar oil sales program? $147,184. Less than the cost of a Manhattan condo, or a yacht, or a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, or one really good coke party. This guy sold out for the cost of a classic Corvette, with a few bucks left over for a kickin' HD flatscreen television and a few good bottles of wine. I'm not saying that's chump change, but considering the sheer magnitude of both the treachery and the flow of oil, couldn't he have held out for half a mil? --Nic Duquette [link]

Land of the Free...We may be a nation of consumers, but we're also a nation of givers. Here's a selection of what Americans are trying to give away today.

A four-foot ball of tinfoil (Reading, Mass.)
Lots and Lots of Bamboo (Austin)
Monster truck tires (Las Vegas)
A jacuzzi (Miami)
FREE DIRT! Plus some beer. (Pilsen, Ill.)
Betamax tape player with tapes (SF bay)
8' Tall fake cherry tree (Brooklyn)
Dissection kit, inc. gloves and goggles. (Flushing, NY)
Baby rats (Oceanside, Cali.)
A Hammond organ (Burien, Wash.)
--Nic Duquette [link]

Monday, August 8, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

A Delicious Project... As Mike mentioned, I'm editing Snarksmith this week and want your suggestions for good articles to link to. What Mike didn't mention is that my home Internet has been going in and out for a month. I'd go upstairs and complain, but my neighbors might not appreciate it that I've been freeriding off their wireless signal since my messy divorce from Verizon last month. So I'm going to take this a day at a time. The upshot is: if you log onto this site one morning, and don't find fresh new grumpy blogging to pass the minutes, it's not because I don't want to but because Verizon has started dicking over the rest of the apartment building, too. When that happens, I want you to try this balkava recipe. Honest. Even if you've never lit an oven in your life. It's easy, and so, so good. And it will keep you busy when I can't be there for you. We made it a week ago, and all week long I've been going into the balkava in the fridge, just scooping my fingers in and ripping out a messy handful of sugar, butter and nuts. Oh, God. Try it. --Nic Duquette [link]

All the News That's Fit to Almost Print... The New York Times probably spends enough on graphic design and layout to feed a few African villages every year. So who came up with this impossibly ugly cover?

That says "The Struggle To Create The Good Death," by the way. I suppose somebody at the magazine realized that nobody buys the Sunday New York Times based on the magazine, so therefore they didn't have to rope you in with a cover the way they do over at Time and Newsweek. Indeed, they could sacrifice not only an image with human interest but even readability. The effect of this cover is like an ill omen. You sift through the paper, lobbing the Style, Travel and Book Review sections at the recycling bin -- as well as the unavoidable eight-page History Channel advertette -- to get at the magazine. You immediately see "The Struggle to Create..." Create what? Slowly, your eyes trace the outlines of the smoky letters beneath. The... Good... Death. The Good Death? Holy Ides of March, Batman. Then the magazine, too, is lobbed at the recycling. Looks like you'll have to read another pompous Ben Stein column in the Business section if you want to get your money's worth this week.

The article is, of course, a post-Schaivo meditation on death that avoids mentioning Schaivo until halfway through the article and pretends that, months after that Florida drama ended (putting us all out of our misery) that the Times isn't responding to it. But I wonder whether this article isn't a little bit of a jouralistic Cobainism, a cry for help from an institution that's lost its way. After all, this the same magazine that's recently published an ethics column unable to make a ruling on adultery; an interminable march of columns of columns from Bill Safire who, in his post-columnist days, comes on like a march of crochety, etymologically correct Sorcerer's Apprentice broomsticks submerging colloquiality; and a befuddling piece of criticism on films made by dubbing video game footage, which apparently gets a million downloads a week. The screenplay:

Simmons: "I have a lock on the distress signal."
Sarge: "Good job! Everyone in the jeep!"
Simmons: "I call shotgun!"
Grif: "Shotgun! Ah, man."
Donut: "Shotgun's lap!"
Simmons: "Ah, maaaaan!"
Sarge: "There's not room for four people. Someone will have to jog alongside. Grif?"
Grif: "Jog? I don't even know what that means."
Donut: "I'll do it! Who wants to hold my ankle while I stretch my hammies?"
Sarge: "No one is going to fall for that twice, Donut."

Somebody needs to get the Times into counseling, pronto. --Nic Duquette [link]

Friday, August 5, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Menand on Wilson... One of the finest introductions to any book I've read this year was Louis Menand's essay in the New York Review's reprint of To The Finland Station. Exactly the kind of thing you'd want in a critical appreciation of one of the golden oldies of American journalism, it offered a bonus pleasure of correcting some of the common misapprehensions about the philosophical history of socialism -- misapprehensions from which Edmund Wilson himself was not immune. So imagine my disappointment when I opened up this biographical sketch, of the same dead writer by the same living one, in this week's New Yorker. It reads like a star pupil's book report, and one with a guilty conscience about itself, too:

Hyman's discussion of Wilson's work suggests an obsession, the kind nursed by a writer who knows himself to have a superior intellect, a person whose teachers have always told him how smart he is, and who cannot understand why everyone is reading this mere plot summarizer who has never bothered to rigorously interrogate the philosophical underpinnings of his discourse.

Why does that strike me as just a little too florid a psychological insight? Mere plot summarizer. As Albert Brooks' character in Defending Your Life might have phrased it, "I've just come from a world filled with penis envy, now I have to deal with hermeneutic envy." The misfortune of this observationis is that Menand does, for the most part, rigorously interrogate the philosophical underpinnings of his discourse. See the Pulitzer Prize-winning Metaphysical Club, or his book of essays, American Studies. Then read that Finland intro if you really want to know learn about Bunny Wilson. --Michael Weiss [link]

What Happens on Snarksmith Stays on Snarksmith... I'll be in Vegas for a week or so, and Nic's editing again. Send all letters and submissions to him. --Michael Weiss [link]

Thursday, August 4, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Robert Novak Sets Timetable for Pull-Out of Stuffed Shirt Adulthood... Mmmm, now. He can dish it, he can run and hide from it -- but can he take it? --Michael Weiss [link]

Maybe She's Born With It, Maybe It's Photoshop... Well, whatever it is, please make it go away. Who the hell put Jackson Pollack in charge of Katherine Harris's make-up? Would you just look at this quickly and through a piece of black cardboard with a pin-sized hole cut out of it?

The mean liberal media strikes again, apparently.

"Oh, and Senator, just one more thing: love your suit."

--Michael Weiss [link]

Wolcott Hits Rock-Bottom... I read James Wolcott every chance I get, and I still find him as sharp as a mamba's fang when commenting on television, or celebrity culture, or easy-pickins FOX News blowhards. But one arena in which our caustic Maximus seems almost to be yearning for a consistent thumbs-down verdict is that of the war in Iraq. Vide Jimmy Jazz's latest salvo, cloaked -- or should I say, cloyed? -- in enough vaporous sentimentality and swing-low-sweet-chariot banalities to short even a few discriminating fuses over at Air America. Commenting on the very sad and wasteful deaths of Michael Kelly and Steve Vincent, Wolcott writes:

Kelly and Vincent were willing the pay the price of their convictions. But I can't help but think of Bush and Cheney and the neocons and the war rooters at The Weekly Standard and The National Review and the liberal warhawks and all those loudmouths on talk radio and at Fox News, who have been spouting their WWII battle cries and analogies and vilifying an antiwar movement that barely exists and spotting traitors wherever they train their bloodshot McCarthyite eyeballs and cheerleading for rendition and torture, and wonder as the memorial flags are planted in the grass in Ohio: How do you like it now, gentlemen?

Understand this for what means logically and for what Wolcott plays at deceptively. Kelly and Vincent "pay the price of their convictions" by dying in a country in which a war they adamantly believe in is being fought. Another chin-dribbling cliche here might have been, "they made the ultimate sacrifice," which, by implication, retroactively transforms their arguments for regime change into more morally credible versions worthy of attention from an antiwar movement that now finds itself having to "respectfully" disagree. However, no such respect or attention need be paid to the 'chicken hawks' in this debate, those who opt to sit out their favorite struggle; they do not "pay the price of their convictions." So does a contributing editor of Vanity Fair mean to say that the president and vice president of the United States, William Kristol, Jonah Goldberg and Paul Wolfowitz can only make good on their support for this same war by giving up their lives in the prosecution of it? Would another gruesome carbomb or overturned Humvee be enough to turn their "WWII battle cries and analogies" into the stuff of such warm and self-serving eulogies? Also, if such people did suddenly decide to join up and die, how would fulfillment of this single requirement for being taken seriously diminish the integrity of Kelly and Vincent, the ones who required no reactionary baiting to hop the first available flight to Baghdad?

How do they like it now? About as much as they liked it before, which is not quite enough to be exploiting famous fatalities to further some pathetic primal scream of an opinion. --Michael Weiss [link]

Bill Frist: Pro-Choice?... A tepidly heralded Golden Boy of the Republican Party, Bill Frist made something of an ass of himself during the Terry Schiavo mess by trying to insert medical doubt, via satellite, as to the certainty of her persistent vegetative state. Though before you write him off as just another tubthumping God-botherer, Slate's Bill Saletan has the real deal on the Senate Majority Leader's culture of life, both in and out of the scrubs. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Islam Quartet... You didn't have to open Tariq Ali's Clash of Fundamentalisms to absorb all you needed to know about that book's, and that author's, "rendering" of post-9/11 society. George Bush is ragged up like Osama bin Laden on the front cover, while Binny gets a Dubya makeover fit for an Iowa caucus on the back. Well, that's surely one maneuvre in sensationalism to save the reader from a long, hard slog through intellectual decline and fall. Now compare Ali's polemical output to that of his ideological opponents: Clash of Civilizations, What Went Wrong?, The Crisis of Islam... (Prompting the less histrionic initial responses of: "What clash?," "A lot," and "It sure has seen better days.") For the mild-mannered and inter-disciplinary few, the crackling white noise of the latter set -- "triumphalist" and vaguely pro-Bush though they may be -- is more than enough to ask, Would somebody please turn down the volume in here? Somebody has. Wouldn't you know it, it's Tariq himself, this time writing through the more refining alembic of historical fiction.

Though I think Charles Foran over at Goo Goo G'joob magazine misses a rather plangent sultanic drum-beat in his failure to recognize the Orientalist kitsch poured into Ali's "Islam Quartet" titles. Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree: to my ear that sounds like Trey Parker and Matt Stone doing a Proust-Al Qaeda cross-over. But for all Foran's can't-we-all-just-get-along genuflection, he's definitely onto something about fantasy illuminating truth:

[A] more cerebral ambition underpins how history unfolds in the books. When lined up beside each other, the novels constitute a compare and contrast of the fates of those societies. As well as excavating the secret Islamicization of Europe, Ali is posing a question: why did Islam, once so pluralistic and intellectually progressive, ossify and withdraw to such a degree that it wound up isolated from the continent it helped civilize? In Moorish Spain, he identifies the force and animosity of external enemies as the principal cause. In other cases, the fault is largely internal. --Michael Weiss [link]

Wednesday, August 3, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Unacknowledged Legislator Has Chunks Bigger Than You In His Stool... Meet my new hero August Kleinzahler. He's a poet who writes bad poetry, at least judging by what the Times warrants worthy of excerpting. But better still, he lives at an acute, distinctively American, angle to Stephen Spender's rather breathless formulation of what it's like to "be a poet." This is the go-fuck-yourself versifier of the Jersey shore. Look out, Bukowksi.

"If you're a poet, you've earned the right to blow off whoever you want," he said. "There used to be dozens of cranks and scolds, but there aren't any anymore."

Go tell it from Mahogany Ridge, brother.

Oh, and did I mention he absolutely loathes Garrison Keillor? Come see, come see! --Michael Weiss [link]

Who'll Guard The Guardian?... Prominent British left-wing paper hires a "trainee journalist" who's a card-carrying member of Hiz ut-Tahir, an organization that sounds scary because it is scary (Death to the West, God is Great, women shop and menstruate too much -- you know the drill.) A conservative/libertarian blogger not only outs the faulty HR selection, but then writes his own parodic application for the same position at the now-scandalized rag. Rag responds, where it reluctantly chooses to at all, by posting this parody -- as a perceived earnest plea for work -- on its website in order to paint its clever antagonist as a jilted rejectee.

Just another day at the races. Tech Central Station has the scoop. --Michael Weiss [link]

Form, Meet Content... Sony is slaving away at a film adaptation of publishing phenomenon The Davinci Code. The novel is a historical fiction/theological thriller about a Roman Catholic conspiracy to cover up the fact that Jesus had a child by Mary Magdalene and to distort the interpretation of the Bible to build its status and influence as an international institution. Now, lest it avoid Catholic and other Christian viewers, Sony is excising the climactic revelation that Jesus had a child by Mary Magdalene and distorting the main themes of the book to build its profitability and influence as an international institution.

But "Da Vinci," set for release in May, is shaping up as one of the movie world's more complicated exercises - so much so that Sony has dropped a scrim of secrecy over the affair, refusing to discuss anything but the barest details. The script has been closely controlled. Outsiders have been banned from the set. And those associated with the film have had to sign confidentiality agreements.

That sounds pretty much like the plot of the book, as I understand it. (Haven't read it.) For "The Sony Code," look forward to a movie about the suppression of a plot point about a suppressed plot point about Jesus fathering a child who turns out to be trapped in Charlie Kaufman's head. --Nic Duquette [link]

It's Not TV, It's Horny Boy Opium... Since Curb Your Enthusiasm and The Sopranos took a couple of those self-discovery walks through the wilderness that last many moons, two new compulsively watchable series have entered the HBO arena. Curiously enough, they both cater to the young, dumb and full of cum demographic that's been in need of its own Che Guevara of a premium cable channel to spearhead a revolution doomed to failure. (Sorry, SpikeTV. That's mighty funny, TNT.) I'm talking about Entourage and Cathouse. They're terrific -- the first in a legitimate, well-written and well-acted sort of way, and the second in that... well, see above demographic. I've on-demanded every episode of the current seasons of either and I'm well nigh hooked on both. In the interest of starting one of those nasty blog-fights like Judge Posner does, Entourage hinges almost entirely on the let's-not-do-lunch-babe charisma of Jeremy Piven and the pluck of that little Irish guy he locks horns with. Eric, I think is his name and he reminds me of Sean Astin's mini-bruiser in Rudy: All heart, kid. (With, you know, a Miata and access to the Playboy mansion.) An added bonus is that the schlock entertainment side of the business is kept to a merciful low boil, while the business side of the business bubbleth over joyously. As a friend of mine recently put it, they've finally found Sex and the City for men. Best exchange of dialogue so far this season:

Eric: Tom Cruise is going to play Pablo Escobar? C'mon, the guy's not even Hispanic.
Ari: Yeah, and Hilary Swank has a vagina, but she won an Oscar pretending she has a dick. That's what actors do. They pretend.
Eric: All right, I got it. So what if Cruise passes?
Ari: Then they go to Brad Pitt. He passes, they go to Keanu Reeves, and on down the list.
Eric: Where is Vince on that list?
Ari: He ain't on the list.
Eric: Well, how do we get him on the list?
Ari: You do "Aquaman," you stupid fuck!

It's cool, I hate me more than you do.

Like David Mamet without the metronome. Popular culture's (intended?) inter-textual leapfrog of the season: In Episode One, Vince teases Ari that instead of returning to blockbuster fare after Queens Boulevard (Queens Boulevard!), he thinks he'd like to go back to New York to do a "Neil LaBute play for 300 bucks a week." Ari's less than gruntled reaction to this is perhaps heightened by Piven's having just done a Neil LaBute play, in New York, for that exact salary (for all I know), which was titled, in a rather Ari-esque turn of phrase, "Fat Pig."

The merits of Cathouse are precisely those which send Todd Solondonz into a sermonistic furor over exploitation in vérité. Not to be confused with HBO's abandoned skankfest Hookers at the Point, these hookers kind of get the point, and they've got only a mildly self-delusional sense of comfort about the oldest profession that's been professing, for some time now, quite legally out of Nevada. The cutest is easily Isabella Soprano, which is yet another (possibly deliberate) cross-reference of pop culture, amusing or irritating, depending on your disposition. Though if you're watching Cathouse in the first place, your disposition is probably about as choosy as mine. To tax a cliché as much as all the fucking, she's the "girl next door" type. She's also the brightest and most charming and really seems to enjoy her work on a super-transactional level, though I wouldn't go picking out curtains or anything... Isabella's already developed a healthy resentment of the calculating and faux-prissy new girl Chantel Lace (yup, like the song, y'all) who claims that even in her admittedly short tenure at the "Bunny Ranch," she (Chantel) has yet to have actual intercourse with a john. Most men target her, speaketh the devious delilah, strictly for the fetish work. This despite the girl's apparently religiously-codified inability to talk dirty -- relax, they've done a seminar, things are looking up -- and an added layer of CV contradiction in her having had every sliver of skin on her person pierced. And I do mean every sliver. Regarding the lack of coitus, Isabella responds: "I can't believe what you're telling me." Right on, girl. You can't keep 'em down on the farm, but you can keep 'em cant-free and honest.

Isabella Soprano cares.

The obligatory pimp of the show is a man named Dennis Hof, listed each week without so much as a wet spot of irony, as "owner/proprietor." Dennis tries hard at being the loveable giant who effortlessly commands respect along with employee blow jobs, however, true to occupational tendency, he strikes one as a classic sex authoritarian of particularly flinty and Flint-ish vintage. He's already broken one heart -- Sunset Thomas, who left the Ranch but at least has porn to, erm, fall back on -- with a callousness that frankly betokens conservatism more than it does no-strings hedonism. The Not-Ready-For-Primetime moral leaves you hating the player but not the game. --Michael Weiss [link]

Tuesday, August 2, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Classic "Savage"... For those of you new to this website or, what's slightly less likely, to The Onion's consistently underrated "A.V. Club," or to the Village Voice, or to San Francisco's The Stranger, Dan Savage is the best sex advice columnist in the country and probably history. Every so often he phones it in or gets pissy about going on an extended vacation. The result is usually an act of shameless syndication. However, this week's "From the archives of the fucking sick" is an absolute classic. It's about sufferers of HTH, or "How'd that happen!?" syndrome. A taste, if that sort of thing's your bag.

What rings false, of course, is her responsibility-avoiding HTH presentation. The HTH, in this case, is so laughable it almost discredits the rest of the letter: She fell asleep on the floor, wearing only a T-shirt, and "awoke" to find the dog lapping away at her pussy? What probably happened was this: She was dog-sitting, feeling horny, and Mr. Dog was doing those wack horny-dog things horny dogs do (sticking its nose in her crotch, following her around, humping her leg). The dog's behavior was similar to the behavior of males of her own species, and Help Me was intrigued. Tempted. So she did this wack thing, and it felt really good, so she did it again. And now she's freaking out.

So she writes me a letter, but just can't take responsibility for her actions. She can't bring herself to write a letter that begins, "I fuck dogs..." So, she attempts to pass dog-fucking off as something that "happened" to her, not something she did. She fucks dogs. How'd That Happen?! She was innocently taking a nap on the floor, with no pants or panties on, and woke to find the dog between her legs—why, that could happen to anyone! Twice!

Not by a long shot, Help Me. Anyway, in answer to your questions:

1. Yes. 2. Yup. 3. Pretty fucking sick.

Read her questions or don't, it hardly matters. The guy who gets head from his masseuse is pretty priceless, too. I once seriously suggested Savage as the next Secretary of Health and Human Services, but now I realize the flaw in that nomination: we get the government officials we deserve, and we just don't deserve him. Meanwhile, another generation of coprophagus, zombie-fucking bisexuals will go unhelped. --Michael Weiss [link]

Genius or Criminal... Slate's headline for its ad-deconstruction of Dove's new "skin firming lotion" for the junk-in-the-trunk masses: "When Tush Comes to Dove." Or better yet, this snippet:

I even have a favorite Dove chick: Stacy (the student). She's the one who poses with her backside to the camera, showing off her ample bottom. I see Stacy every day—she's on the bus stop shelter next to my house. "Check out this fiiiiiiiine bedonkadonk," she seems to say to me, grinning slyly over her shoulder. I think I may have a crush on her. But I've said too much already. Yes, you have. Genius or criminal. We report, you decide. --Michael Weiss [link]

Anti-Martyrology 101: Same Vices, Different Tune... Apart from possessing a wondrously Le Carre-ish last name, Agnes Smedley had something else that served her profession as an American agent for the Comintern: she was slippery despite her best efforts to get caught. Always arraigned, always beat it. Right-wingers have had a hard go of trying to prove that many of the factitiously scrubbed-up and posthumously worshipped "pariahs" of the Red scares were, in fact, lying baddies -- or at least less-than-truthful sub-goodies -- in the employ of the Soviet Executive Committee, or the GPU. I choose that latter term carefully because the Russian secret police organization that, among other things, was responsible for assassinating Leon Trotsky may not have been as intrigue-mature as its superior heir, the KGB, but it did have spies around the world who didn't yet experience any "cold" to come in from.

Ruth Price is not exactly out to "redeem" Smedley, though she's not exactly out to indict her either:

Unlike most of the other Americans whose lives warrant further scrutiny in light of the documentary evidence now available, Smedley worked for the Soviet Union, but her activities were not directed against the United States. She was a spy, but not a traitor, although Smedley herself would not have cared for such distinctions. The work she was doing, she believed, ultimately transcended the boundaries of nationalism and ideology to embrace humanity's more universal struggles. In her finest moments, and even in some of her worst, she acted from a truly generous heart, inspired not by anger, theory, or a desire for personal gain, but by an abiding love and faith in ordinary people, to resist with all the force of her being the misery and evil she saw around her and to do what she could -- in her headstrong, often damaging fashion -- to move humanity forward.

Christopher Hitchens recently minted a term that I think applies nicely here: "Easy-listening moral cretinism." Let's be clear: Working for the Soviet Union could not have been other than engaging in activities directed against the United States, which really means the United States government. This is because at no point in the existence of the Soviet Union was a campaign for a world revolution and planet-wide dictatorship of the proletariat ever scrapped as the ulimate end game of state socialism (this goes for Stalin's "socialism in a single country" platform, which was an inner party rationalization for economic shortcomings, and for the so-called Comintern "Fifth Period," which declared a "revolutionary upsurge" to be at a temporary end.) Whether or not you retain an ideological sympathy for those who believed in such a revolution and in such a dictatorship -- and there are plenty examples of radicals and left oppositionists that warrant something greater than just sympathy -- is objectively besides the point. But progressives who advocate, not without a tinge of personal sanctimony, that members of their own faction face up to painful historical revelations about their supposed forebears would do well to really study up on the history and the forebears under consideration. Or at least refrain from putting down such steaming piles of bullshit like, "The works she was doing, she believed, ultimately transcended the boundaries...", if you plan to sell any books. One article by Ms. Price and I'm already over the idea of reading her Smedley biography, the only banality-free sections of which probably consist of the declassified Moscow documents that prove her subject's guilt. (And when Moscow docs are a breath of fresh air...) --Michael Weiss [link]

When In Doubt, Blame the Stepmom... Why did Lachlan Murdoch precipitously skeedaddle from New Corporation last Friday? The Guardian thinks it might have to do with his half-sibs from Dad's third (or as we scions of the triptych like to call it, "current") marriage to Wendi Deng.

(Don't) meet the new boss:

A family rift centering on Rupert Murdoch's third wife Wendi Deng and her two daughters was a key part of Lachlan Murdoch's decision to quit News Corporation, according to US reports... Lachlan Murdoch quit his post partly due to his father's attempts to get his two infant daughters Grace, 3, and Chloe, 2, included in the family trust that will control the massive media group after Rupert, 74, dies or steps down, according to the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

OK, so the Guardian didn't think anything originally, but in the relevant interest of bolstering little alternative media that could, we'll credit them with the scoop.

On a personal note, I made up with my stepmom last summer when, on the first ever post-alimony family vacation, she forced my father to give up their first-class return tickets from Acapulco to my half-sister and me. Twenty-four years of awkwardness, alienation and simmering hostility down the drain in the time it takes a Mexican airline official to sniff my sneakers. This proved every Marxian precept of the materialist conception of history that I'd ever come across, but I can only imagine what it'll take (a satellite network, at least) for Wendi to make nice with Lachlan and get him to accept his baby sisters as future VPs in Charge of Agita.

Foster's: Australian for power struggle. --Michael Weiss [link]

Gore-TV... I watched about two hours of Al Gore's new network, Current, this morning. It is abysmally bad. If you haven't seen it, I would say it's sort of like PBS for retarded people. The "hosts" are all twentysomethings who do their worst to be cool. Much like Gore's very own performances, the segments are overproduced, brazenly phoney, and almost completely lacking in substance. And if this weren't bloody bad enough, Words of Wisdom from some crackpot Indian spiritualist are interspersed throughout each program. We are told that life is spirituality. "If you're not spiritual, then you are not alive," says the Sage. Leave it to Al Gore... --Mark Grueter [link]

The Poverty of Yasir Arafat... "What kind of revolutionary hangout is it where the people watch The Golden Girls?" Try the PLO headquarters in Tunis, circa 1993.

Yasir Arafat may have 'globalized' the Palestinian cause, but his cynicism, greed and opportunism -- which were merely the mail fraud vices of his far more lethal Al Capone disposition -- left his beggard and state-less people no better than they otherwise might have been. And for all the uncompromising rhetoric, Israel has been a clandestine bedfellow, protecting the billion-dollar finances of the deceased "chairman" even as it fought the bloody intifada he never ceased to suborn.

David Samuels in this month's Atlantic. --Michael Weiss [link]

Know What's Really Good?... Plain yogurt and Lucky Charms. The things you learn when the fridge starts to get empty. It's amazingly good. Much better with yogurt than milk. Mix it in a volumetric ratio of about 60% Lucky Charms, 40% yogurt, so the yogurt is enough to coat everything but not so much that the tang of the plain yogurt overwhelms the sugar of the cereal. Delicious. --Nic Duquette [link]

Thomas Paine... The whole idea of "Jeffersonian democracy" would be sapped of some of its wistful irony, and its utopian banality, if it clocked in under a different title altogether: "Painean democracy." Though it should be noticed from the start that the latter doesn't quite make love to the tongue the way the former does. Of all the Founders worthy of historical revivification, Paine is the radical most neglected six feet under (actually, the sad story of his smuggled earthly remains is enough to try men's souls.) The schoolboy who scans Common Sense -- and probably not even the whole thing -- can't have the proper understanding of one the most forward-thinking and prophetic writers of the embryonic United States. Though one gets the sense Paine wouldn't have minded posterity's short shrift. From humble beginnings as a mediocre staymaker from Thetford, his evolution into bureaucratic reformist (like Trotsky, his first work was a practical argument for improving the lot of the tax-collector) and then into agitator-general for American independence was no more glamorous than the journeyman's "falling into" his proper trade, in this case pamphleteerism. Let the well-born farmers and frilly upper managers have their glory; Paine did more on the popular level to manufacture the ultimate commodity of a small sliver of land that was inextricably tied up with an Enlightenment 'project.' He also left us a greater well of one-liners and catchphrases than anyone else from the greatest generation. On Edmund Burke's gone-to-pieces panegyric for Marie Antoinette: "He mourns the plumage but forgets the dying bird." On the nobility: "Men of no ability." On the exigency of colonial separation over reconciliation: "Youth is the seed time of good habits, as well in nations as in individuals." And in a paragraph that op-ed columnists would do well to remember inaugurated one of the most vigorous pro-war polemics in history: "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, sink from the service of their country..."

Harvey J. Kaye has written a new biography of the man, and Joseph Ellis in the New York Times Book Review says it seconds what plenty of Jefferson biographers have lately been conceding: Kaye's core argument... goes far beyond the claim that Paine was a great journalist. Writing with the passion of a defense attorney whose client has been wrongfully sentenced to obscurity by what he calls a plutocratic phalanx of "the powerful, propertied, prestigious and pious," Kaye contends that Paine, alone among the founding generation, saw to the very heart of the American promise embodied in the principles of 1776. Even more than Thomas Jefferson, whose revolutionary vision was blurred by the stigma of slavery, Paine was a cleareyed radical. --Michael Weiss [link]

More on Time... After years now of being told America is a latter-day Roman empire, now we're going to start hearing comparisons to the Canute comparison for fiddling with time. In addition to Congressional experimentation with Daylight Saving Time, the Wall Street Journal (subscribers only) reported today that the USA is considering the abolition of "leap seconds," smidgens of extra time tacked onto the ends of some months to make sure the earth's rotation continues to mimic the 24-hour day. Because, apparently, a day actually lasts marginally longer than 24 hours.

Because the moon's gravity has been slowing down the Earth, it takes slightly longer than 24 hours for the world to rotate completely on its axis. The difference is tiny, but every few years a group that helps regulate global timekeeping, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, tells governments, telecom companies, satellite operators and others to add in an extra second to all clocks to keep them in sync. The adjustment is made on New Year's Eve or the last day of June.

But adding these ad hoc "leap seconds" -- the last one was tacked on in 1998 -- can be a big hassle for computers operating with software programs that never allowed for a 61-second minute, leading to glitches when the extra second passes. "It's a huge deal," said John Yuzdepski, an executive at Symmetricom Inc., of San Jose, Calif., which makes ultraprecise clocks for telecommunications, space and military use.

On Jan. 1, 1996, the addition of a leap second made computers at Associated Press Radio crash and start broadcasting the wrong taped programs. In 1997, the Russian global positioning system, known as Glonass, was broken for 20 hours after a transmission to the country's satellites to add a leap second went awry. And in 2003, a leap-second bug made GPS receivers from Motorola Inc. briefly show customers the time as half past 62 o'clock.

The issue I can't quite figure out from this article is what an hour is if it isn't one 24th of a day. I thought that the time it takes the earth to rotate was the basis of these units. What is it, then? It's not an insignificant question. As I recall, a most of the metric system is defined in terms of seconds. E.g. a meter is a certain fixed fraction of the distance light travels in one second in a vacuum. Isn't it? If seconds aren't tied to the rotation of the earth, how exactly do we know what a second is?

But the U.S. proposal, which an ITU committee will consider in November, has upset some of the most powerful people in timekeeping -- including the Earth Rotation Service's leap-second chief, Daniel Gambis, of the Paris Observatory. "As an astronomer, I think time should follow the Earth," Dr. Gambis said in an interview. He calls the American effort a "coup de force," or power play, and an "intrusion on the scientific dialogue." A 2002 survey of his subscribers found that 90% were content to keep leap seconds, he said.

It's rather remarkable that the society with a government body that determines which words are and are not part of its national language, contrary to actual usage, is more tethered than Americans to reality on an issue of scientific importance.

The U.S. effort to abolish leap seconds is also firmly opposed by Britain, which would further lose status as the center of time. From 1884 to 1961, the world set its official clocks to Greenwich Mean Time, based on the actual rise and set of the stars as seen from the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, just outside London.

When countries moved to the current Coordinated Universal Time, which uses extremely precise atomic clocks, they agreed to insert leap seconds in order to keep the official time within one second of the old Greenwich time. Even though Big Ben -- and the time broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corp. -- now follow Coordinated Universal Time, Parliament has declined to change the country's official standard away from Greenwich time, which remains a point of English pride.

So it's one time on Big Ben and a different time in the chambers of the Houses of Parliament?

Ending leap seconds would make the sun start rising later and later by the clock -- a few seconds later each decade. To compensate, the U.S. has proposed adding in a "leap hour" every 500 to 600 years, which also accounts for the fact that the Earth's rotation is expected to slow down even further. That would be no more disruptive than the annual switch to daylight-saving time, said Ronald Beard of the Naval Research Laboratory, who chairs the ITU's special committee on leap seconds and favors their abolishment. "It's not like someone's going to be going to school at four in the afternoon or something," he said. This sort of thing already goes on under the Gregorian calendar, as February 29th is skipped in any leap year divisible by 100 but not 400. (As in, 2000 was a leap year, but 2100 will not be.) Frankly, it sounds like an easier solution than adding seconds here and there. But the USA should seek consensus on this issue. When the Catholic church decreed the Gregorian calendar, Britain stayed on the previous Julian calendar for quite a while, until in order to catch up with the rest of the world eleven days were dropped from September, 1752. If Parliament remains on GMT and America goes with this new calendar, it'll cause trouble. --Nic Duquette [link]

Thursday, July 28, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Embattled Rove Seeks Asylum in Scarborough Country... Douglas Feith on excellent terms with Culture of Life Minister.

Like the Downing Street Memo, slap-bracelets and Kaiser Soze, like that -- whoosh -- it's gone. --Michael Weiss [link]

How Long Can We Sing This Song? Not Very, Laddie... So Gerry Adams -- whom, last I checked, is still given a Secret Service detail when traveling stateside -- has renounced the violence for which he always maintained he wasn't responsible. This is progress, and one would hate to have Osama to thank for it. But we do live in an age where, as the Onion so mordantly phrased it, even the Germans are reluctant to go to war. What's to stop the group that made the car bomb fashionable from offering a mutated olive branch in cold realization of what 'sacred' terror can really get up to if only it applies itself?

I'm not one inclined to give much credit to Bill Clinton or his former administration, but the Good Friday Agreement may have been the only unalloyed good to come out of it on the foreign policy front. Now witness the harvest, as B. Wooster would say.

The leadership of Oglaigh na hEireann (the IRA) has formally ordered an end to the armed campaign. This will take effect from 4 p.m. this afternoon. All IRA units have been ordered to dump arms. All volunteers have been instructed to assist the development of purely political and democratic programmes through exclusively peaceful means.

Man. And Harrison Ford didn't even have to break a sweat over that one. [link]

Rodriguez... That's Not Chilean, Is It? Nope. Dominican. A shame there's no one in that banana republic worth assassinating except the cigar-makers. From Page Six, which sucks at the teet of Herr Doktor with determined assiduity:

DR. Henry Kissinger (above) — a Yankee fan who used to watch Joe DiMaggio from the bleachers — was thrilled to have lunch with Alex Rodriguez at The Four Seasons restaurant on Tuesday. The former Secretary of State told Rodriguez, "a very nice young man," that he and his wife were going to the Yankee-Twins game that night. "I said, 'you better get a home run for my wife.' He just laughed," Kissinger told PAGE SIX. "He didn't promise anything. But the first time he got up, he hit a home run on the first pitch." Fashion designer Oscar de la Renta — who shares his Dominican heritage with Rodriguez and who put the lunch together — told WWD: "Alex was unbelievably impressed by how much Dr. Kissinger knew about the game."

Yeah, but General Pinochet promised to hit two homers for Henry tomorrow. Well, Alex? Can you beat that? Huh? --Michael Weiss [link]

Wednesday, July 27, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Support Extra Daylight Saving... The surest sign that a someone has had a really good idea is that somebody at the Boston Globe will write a snide op-ed piece condeming it. In this case, the Congressional plan to save a substantial amount of oil by expanding Daylight Saving Time has been slagged by Alex Beam, who calls Rep. Ed Markey, of all things, a "silly-billy." In the first sentence. I wish I were kidding.

The plan is being opposed by those who believe children will be at risk walking to school in the morning darkness, even though the last time Daylight Saving was expanded, the extra accidents with children were offset by the accidents that didn't happen after school. At least Paul Martin has a sense of humor. He remarked that "most people -- excluding vampires -- favor more daylight." Sounds like a certain North American premier is immersed in the new Harry Potter. --Nic Duquette [link]

Tuesday, July 26, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

The And in Anderson... God fucking damn it. What is it about Slate and the top-shelf movie criticism? Even when David Edelstein's wrong, he's pleasurably so; and whenever the Hollywood ego-puncturing is outsourced to freelance writers, perforations are usually also made around a bullseye. Field Maloney gets the unbearable lightness of Wes Anderson exactly right in "The O Factor." Noting the precipitous drop-off in coastable auteur charm (which more often than not compensated for content), and speculating that the real talent behind the pre-Aquatic films was co-writer Owen Wilson, Maloney writes:

One of the good things about old friends is they never tend to be that impressed with you, because they knew you way back when. Judging from the DVD commentary, Baumbach seems a little in awe of Anderson, his superstar director pal, or at least more inclined to second Anderson's vision than to challenge it, as Wilson had seemed to. You're left thinking that the Anderson-Baumbach partnership is not letting much new air into Wes Anderson's world.

Now I happen to like Noah Baumbach's stuff. (Kicking and Screaming went nowhere because it was a film about going nowhere, but it had compulsively repeatable lines. And Mr. Jealousy may have been overfed with in-jokes, New Wave fade-outs and whimsy-for-whimsy's sake, but no one who's ever dated someone who's dated many can deny its humor or insight.) But the fact is, when the Chad and Jeremy of celluloid team up, the result can only be extremely proud, incredibly posed, and just plain boring. The Life Aquatic even had Bill Murray, who once managed to spin comedic gold out of a swinging microphone cord and the Star Wars theme "Dankeschoein"-ed, so Wes and Noah should abase themselves.

Owen Wilson, however, is an innately funny person, the kind of hop-along red stater you would, in fact, like to sit down and have a beer with. Also, his learning seems applicable without the obligatory wink in the direction of the Glass family, or reference to Joyce Maynard's ovulation cycle, or whatever. --Michael Weiss [link]

Idle Hands... The Huffington Post is not only still around, but still churning out... content. (You can decide which syllable to accent on that one.) Hit and Run has been doing a hilarious job cataloging the blog's most memorable one-liners here and here and here. My personal favorite is Thomas de Zengotita's post today postulating that suicide bombers are repressed dramatists yearning for time in the limelight. But they're all good.

I must complain, though, that Hit and Run this gem today from Sarah Stillman:

Now, imagine that the man running the session starts doling out handcuffs instead of Krispy Kremes. What the hell's going on? Well, it turns out that when he announced, "Welcome to the safety training!" what he actually meant to say is, "I'm here to arrest you and have you deported...but feel free to grab a glazed cruller on your way out!"

Actually, that's pretty much how safety training always felt to me, and I'm documented. --Nic Duquette [link]

The Other Iraqi 'Revolution'?... So rather than remove the most recalcitrant player in the so-called Axis of Evil, George Bush has facilitated the advent of an even more ominous rogue hyperpower: Iraq-Iran. (Combined, as Denis Leary once observed, they might clock in under the more descriptive name, Irate). Peter Galbraith in the New York Review of Books thinks that the threat posed by the 'insurgency' -- comprised, demographically, of a minority of a minority -- is nothing compared to the mounting ayatolloid influence in northern Kurdistan and southern Iraq. And this could mean an eventual Islamic state governed by sharia law.

Real power in Shiite Iraq rests, however, with two religious parties: Abdel Aziz al-Hakim's Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) and the Dawa ("Call," in English) of Iraq's Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari. Of the two, SCIRI is the more pro-Iranian. Both parties have military wings, and SCIRI's Badr Corps has grown significantly from the five thousand fighters that harassed Saddam's regime from Iran in the decades before the war; it now works closely with Iraq's Shiite interior minister, until recently the corps' commander, to provide security and fight Sunni Arab insurgents.

There are a few problems with this analysis, and two are happily imbricated upon each other. The first and most obvious is that Iran cannot exist as an Islamic republic for very much longer, and all but the most willfully blinkered mullah in Tehran knows this. (It partly explains why its nuclear weapons program was so easily exposed: the regime took the headlong approach with a deadline for building a bomb within the next five years. It might have played it safer and gone undetected by waiting ten. Yet it won't be around in ten years.) Ayatollah al-Sistani, who really does call the shots in the hoi polloi Iraqi Shi'ite community -- so much so than even David Rieff credits him with single-handedly thwarting a sectarian civil war in country -- is quite aware of the perils of letting mosque become state. He has spoken and written on numerous occasions to this effect and, what's more important, has couched his argument in confessional terms. An irony undisclosed in Galbraith's article is that to Sistani the "unintended consequence" of an Islamic revolution sweeping Iraq the way it did Iran would not just be undesirable; it'd be sacriligious. Even if we take seriously the suspicion that Sistani is merely "biding his time" before revealing his true end game, it would be strange agitprop indeed for someone to miraculously rise to theocratic power by subverting the very anti-theocratic precepts he now promulgates. And his help in disarming Muqtada al-Sadr and discouraging Shiite revenge killings (they do occur, but not as frequently as one might have thought they would) suggest we have every reason to believe his sincerity when he says that Islam and government must remain mutually exclusive.

Jalal Talabani, the former Secretary-General of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, may find himself in common cause with the Iranian antipathy for Sunni Baathism, but he is in no way amenable to legislating through the Koran, suppressing women's rights or secularism, or to the censoring of literature; to be any of these things would be to violently dismantle the protectorate-state he and his party have created in northern Iraq over the past 14 years. It's worth keeping in mind that this is also the man who categorically opposes capital punishment even for Saddam Hussein. Out of such powder Khomeneism is not detonated. --Michael Weiss [link]

We Wish to Inform You That Tom and Katie Are Engaged, and Jennifer Aniston Did Not Want a Family... Someone has to have the unfortunate job of quietly removing the needle from the Victrola and reminding everybody they've got work in the morning and examples to set for their kids. Enter Nicholas Kristof, a one-man Amnesty International (without the scandalous gulag analogies) and least "sexy" scribbler of the NY Times. I don't know anyone who feels happy to read his stuff so much as required to do. And like so many other tireless humanitarians who, in the age of satellite-relayed genocide, devote themselves to saving the lives of the wretched, the flipped-past, and the ignored, Kristof can't quite get the world to listen. The sarcasm and simmering outrage could have been laid on a bit thicker, but this will do.

If only Michael Jackson's trial had been held in Darfur. Last month, CNN, Fox News, NBC, MSNBC, ABC and CBS collectively ran 55 times as many stories about Michael Jackson as they ran about genocide in Darfur.

Next week in Star: David Rieff gets a make-over and Samantha Power's real problem from hell: "Varicose Veins: Exposed!"

We get the media we deserve. --Michael Weiss [link]

Didja Hear the One About the Famine?... Nietzche had, I think, the best definition of a joke: it's the epitaph on the death of a feeling. I actually learned that from Martin Amis, who made the serious mistake in Koba the Dread of presuming that while Stalin-centric anekdoty abound, no one ever cracks a gallows zinger about the Holocaust. (Big Mustache, fair game. Little Mustache, don't go there.) Well, I mean to say, really:

Two Jews in a Nazi ghetto get wind of a story that Hitler is touring the place tomorrow at noon. They plot to assassinate the Fuhrer by sharp-shooting him from a nearby rooftop. Early the next day they lie in wait. Noon comes, no Hitler. 1 o'clock comes, no Hitler. 2 PM arrives and still no Hitler. Finally, one Jew turns to the other and says, "Gee, I hope nothing happened to him."

The tastelessness of that is out-marshaled by its life-affirming irony, much more so than a mincing Charlie Chaplin who didn't -- because he couldn't -- even allude to the genocide coefficient of his satiric quarry. And it's a shame that amid all the toilet paper queque setups and dunderheaded GPU agent punchlines, there's not much to choose from Sovietische comedy. Which is probably as it should be. The Borscht in the famous Belt had to come from somewhere.

"What is Khrushchev's hair-style called?"

"The harvest of 1963."

Wah-wah.

This one's not-half bad, though.

"Brezhnev begins his official speech opening the 1980 Olympics: 'O! O! O!'

"His aide interrupts him with a whisper: 'The speech starts below, Leonid Ilich. That is the Olympic symbol.'"

And this one's not so much a joke, though the speed at which the "official" position is capitulated is funny in itself. The "present writer" is Robert Conquest.

A Russian in [St. Petersberg] once said to the present writer, in late Soviet times:

"Our roads our bad."
"...Yes. Why is that?"
"It's our weather - an isotherm runs down the Finnish border." "And seriously?"
"They were built by the state."
"Yes, but we have roads in England which were built by the Roman state nearly two thousand years ago, and some of them are still sound."
"Ah, but then the centurion would check that the six layers of stone had been laid down. Here, the inspector asks the foreman if they have been laid down and is answered with a bottle of vodka."

--Michael Weiss [link]

Monday, July 25, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Don't Blame Her, She Voted For Bush... Jessica Simpson's new video for "These Boots are Made for Walkin'" is red state the way Hogs and Heffers is red state. Hurt so good. (And it ain't inertia that's keeping that beer bottle planted firmly to the tray.)

I just read in Esquire's wonderful, regular "What It Feels Like" feature that Willie Nelson has smoked up with Snoop Dogg. That and this video are grounds for bestowing the Life Lived to Some Purpose certificate Thomas Paine once talked about. Willie can die now. --Michael Weiss [link]

The Road to Surfdom... What saffron is to tumeric, that's what Richard Posner is to fellow legal eagle "polymath" Alan Dershowitz. While the Dersh hugs the shore by defending Hollywood scumbags and plagiarizing bien-pensant bestsellers, the other sexes things up by arguing that the blackmarket baby trade is a-okay (even for the babies). Proof if proof were needed that the brains is behind the bench in popular JD-ese: Posner's latest NY Times exposition on the absorption of all the news that's fit to debunk. Presenting the fatuity of "objectivity" in the mainstream media -- now with authoritative statistics and a dino buddy. And while we're on the subject of implied subjectivity, if it pleases the court to indicate the most eyebrow-raisingly personal paragraph in this cogent seven-page think-piece:

We saw this in the coverage of the selection of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's successor. It was played as an election campaign; one article even described the jockeying for the nomination by President Bush as the "primary election" and the fight to get the nominee confirmed by the Senate the "general election" campaign. With only a few exceptions, no attention was paid to the ability of the people being considered for the job or the actual consequences that the appointment was likely to have for the nation.

Why do I think that "the ability of the people being considered" is something less than Christian Science Monitor-ish in its phlegmatic distance from the main thesis? All my law school friends more or less concede that on this point alone, appointing Posner is like the two-state solution in the room: something everybody agrees on but can't quite coax into a pleasant reality.

No matter. Our ego postively purrs from all this stroking. Here come da judge.

What really sticks in the craw of conventional journalists is that although individual blogs have no warrant of accuracy, the blogosphere as a whole has a better error-correction machinery than the conventional media do. The rapidity with which vast masses of information are pooled and sifted leaves the conventional media in the dust. Not only are there millions of blogs, and thousands of bloggers who specialize, but, what is more, readers post comments that augment the blogs, and the information in those comments, as in the blogs themselves, zips around blogland at the speed of electronic transmission.

Now, I just got back from Prague -- which, with apartment rents ranging around $300 (US) a month, is currently experiencing capitalism with a human face -- so perhaps I'm biased when I say that His Honor is dead-on about the online market figuring itself out. (That "300" could really be 1,000 for all you know or care. Warning: Facts and figures in this blog may appear smaller than they actually are.) --Michael Weiss [link]

Saturday, July 23, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Red Rover, Red Rover... Slate uber-blogger Mickey Kaus thinks my GM-China hypothesis is reasonable. And why not? After pulling out of a deal with MG Rover, and letting Rover go bankrupt, Nanjing Automotive just bought the failed British carmaker after all. Probably at quite a discount, too. [Ford manufactures the Land Rover in the U.S. Might they bid on Ford next? -- ed.] I don't think so. Ford has some kind of weird stock structure where common shareholder have no real power and Henry Ford's heirs can block anything they don't like. And I'm not sure the MG Rover and Land Rover have any parts in common anymore -- it might just be a brand name thing. I'm not saying they wouldn't make an offer. But I doubt Ford would sell. --Nic Duquette [link]

Friday, July 22, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

RSS Feed Working Again... Sorry this has been down. All Snarksmith technology is now fully functional. --Nic Duquette [link]

General Motors: Made in China?... Check out the new essay,posted at right, in which I argue China's yuan revaluation may mean a shift toward acquisition of iconic American firms. --Nic Duquette [link]

Thursday, July 21, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

The Worst Possible Song, Ever... I haven't heard it yet, mind you. But I'd give good odds that no worse song has every been recorded in the history of music, if this description is any clue. From the Dukes of Hazzard soundtrack:

..."These Boots Are Made for Walkin' " (Columbia), a jumbled-up cover of the old Nancy Sinatra hit. The singer is [Jessica] Simpson, who delivers many of the rewritten lyrics in the heavy-breathing style usually associated with [Britney] Spears. She is joined by [Willie] Nelson, who sounds as if he's amused by his garish surroundings. The song gets a staccato dancehall-reggae beat, interspersed with snippets of guitar and harmonica, with an aim toward pleasing both the country and dance-pop constituencies.

What is this, Hollywood's contribution to our Gitmo interrogation techniques? Not to mention that the still from the music video of Jessica Simpson is definitely free of boots. Shoot me now.

They were given al lthe foods of vanity / And all the instant promises of immortality /But they bit the dust screamin' insanity! / Four Horsemen! --Nic Duquette [link]

China Relaxes its Exchange Rate... Today China adjusted its exchange rate for the first time in ten years. The Chinese currency -- called the yuan or the renminbi and featuring the face of noted capitalism-hater Mao on its bills -- will appreciate about two percent relative to the dollar, less than the Bush administration wanted, but Beijing is hinting that this is the first step in a gradual readjustment. This should make a negligible improvement to the America's Chines spending binge.

More importantly, the yuan will no longer be pegged at a fixed rate to the dollar, but to a basket of international currencies. That means the dollar can now rise and fall without prompting a huge movement by the Chines government to buy quite so many dollars, since it can also make its adjustments using euros, yen, the pound, whatever currencies they decide to work with. I honestly don't really know what this will mean for the U.S. It probably means the dollar will weaken, U.S. manufacturing will get a boost, and consumers will pay more for imported goods. It might give the stock market the blues as the dollar becomes less attractive. If China buys fewer bonds, maybe our long-term rates will go up, although that's hard to say. A lot could happen, and the market's reaction today has been hard to read in the wake of the London bombing confusion.

One thing for certain: I think the move to decouple the Chinese and American currencies will provide important slack in the case of a major economic crisis, but without ruining the economic codependence that provide a disincentive for any kind of Sino-American war. The nightmare scenario imagined by the Atlantic Monthly ($$ link, sorry) should be less likely. --Nic Duquette [link]

Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Confirm Him, You Fools!... Can somebody please give John Roberts some sort of confirmation EZ-Pass? He's going to be confirmed anyway. Why don't those special interest groups just keep their powder dry for Rhenquist's replacement, or give their money to orphans or something? I don't know jack about this nominee, but look at what people are saying across the political spectrum. Chuck Schumer likes him. Power Line loves him. Daily Kos sounds confused but unperturbed, and willing to look at Roberts as a media head fake rather than an outrage in its own right. And Ann Coulter hates him. In fact, she's angry he didn't pick a token minority. (I know. Huh?)

Any guy who pleases everyone except Ann Coulter is all right in my book. Rubber stamp this guy and get on with things, please.--Nic Duquette [link]

Tuesday, July 19, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

From the Snarkmail... A reader responds to Mark's recent post on the motivations of the London bombers (and other shrapnel-vest wearers):

Mark's contention is to clarify that these killers are not just blood thirsty murderers well thought out serial murderers. To this end he is correct. While we will not(and cannot) debate Grueter's unsubstantiated assumption that more terrorists exist now than, say, the day before three commercial jets plunged into U.S. landmarks killing thousands of innocents, let us look at motive.

Grueter quotes University of Chicago academic Robert Pape in an attempt to further clarify the motives of these Islamo-Fascists. It seems to be the fault of U.S. (and World) foreign policy. Are we to believe military actions in Haiti and Kosovo caused embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania? "Ninety Five Percent" argues Pape "of every suicide bombing since 1980 can be traced back to having resulted from foreign occupation" PapeÕs uncanny ability to poll the dead(assuming, as one should, there are no exit polls for suicide bombers) would be of great use to the Gallup Organization.

So what, pray tell, are the motives of these young, motivated murderers? Let us focus less at a corner office at the University of Chicago and more towards the writings read by our young Hitlers. In Jihad in Islam, Sayeed Abdul A'la Maududi concurs with Grueter that the motive of Jihadists are in fact motivated by foreign policy and world issues:

"In reality Islam is a revolutionary ideology and programme which seeks to alter the social order of the whole world and rebuild it in conformity with its own tenets and ideals. 'Muslim' is the title of that International Revolutionary Party organized by Islam to carry into effect its revolutionary programme. And 'Jihad' refers to that revolutionary struggle and utmost exertion which the Islamic Party brings into play to acheive this objective."

We've been pleased by the sudden surge in angry missives from our readers lately, by the way. If any of you want to send them in for publication, by all means do so. The snarkier the better.

As for this discussion, I'm too concerned about the nomination of John Roberts to the SCOTUS, and the Karl Rove scandal, to pay attention to these petty foreign policy issues, such as war and the survival of the West. Mark, the ball's back in your court. --Nic Duquette [link]

Next Week, Hitler Similes... Did I just read Christopher Hitchens compare Karl Rove's critics to Joseph McCarthy? I think I did. In Hitchens's latest Slate piece, he says there isn't "any evidence of any victim" resulting from the identification of Valerie Plame as a (covert) CIA agent. Well that's just plain false since Valerie Plame herself was obviously a direct victim (and not only just evidence of one) as she was no longer able to do her job at the CIA after she was "outed" in print by the ghoulish Robert Novak.

Hitchens may have "caught" Joe Wilson in a lie when the latter (apparently) suggested that his wife had nothing to do with him being dispatched by the CIA to investigate the supposed Niger-Iraq connection on uranium. But as Hitchens himself acknowledges by way of a sneer, Joe Wilson is merely a out of work bureaucrat, and so essentially powerless stacked up against the Bush White House.

Hitchens asserts Wilson is the "most exploded" figure of this whole episode. Hardly. What about WH spokesman Scott McClellan, who said that the idea of Karl Rove having any role in the leak at all was "ridiculous"? Or President Bush himself who promised to "take care of" anyone in his administration that had "anything to do" with the leaking of Valerie Plame's name. In light of McClellan's ghost-faced press conferences where he was compelled to stand silently and look stupid while David Gregory and Terry Moran rightfully badgered him on the point that Rove's own lawyer admits that Rove was involved, I would say McClellan's reputation is fairly well exploded (or at least it should be). President Bush, likewise, backpedalled on his earlier boast to get rid of whoever was involved in the leak and is now only saying that anyone who convicted of a crime will be gone. This is such an obvious reversal of his previous position that it doesn't require an argument. "It's like they're ! making it up as they go along," complained Chuck Hagel about the Bush, in another though not entirely unrelated context.

Now, arguments about the merits of the 1982 legislation or even the war in Iraq, while related, are separate from these simple fact that the only reason Plame's name came up in the first place in conversations between Novak, Rove and Libby was because these lovely men didn't like Joe Wilson's report. Why else drag her name into it and how does her connection to Wilson have anything at all to do with the merits of his report? Either there is value in Wilson's report or there is not, and the answer has nothing to do with Valerie Plame.

Hitchens was more persuasive when he attacked the powerful, rather than the weak. --Mark Grueter [link]

Time Is On Our Side (Yes It Is)...As part of the new energy bill, it seems Congress will push to expand Daylight Saving Time by two months. The idea is that we'll use natural daylight more, have the lights on less, and save an astonishing 100,000 barrels of oil a day. For that kind of sweet, sweet crude, I say let's expand regular Daylight Saving Time as planned and push clocks back an additional hour June through August. That would get confusing sure, but it's not like the way we do Daylight Saving Time now makes any sense whatsoever. --Nic Duquette [link]

Monday, July 18, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Massachusetts: We Hate Marriage Here...The Boston Catholic archdiocese closed several churches last year to cut costs in the runup to settling several costly cases of priest pedophilia scandals. I don't know why the archdiocese didn't have any spare cash, considering it had been pilfering its priests' pension fund, but I do know how to save my parish should I ever become observant and actually care: find an ex-priest who's been expelled from the priesthood for getting hitched, and invite him to minister to a rogue parish. The church big shots have decided to reopen two churches in Quincy and Brookline.

While I'm aware there are longstanding dogmatic rationalizations for the prohibition of priestly marriage (you're married to the church, effectively), it is appalling that the same organization that bankrupted itself trying to cover up for child molestors -- child molestors -- is falling over itself to keep a couple married heterosexuals from getting back to work. If the church is planning to dispose of child molestors, ease out celibate homosexuals as well, and refuse to ordain women, who will be America's Catholic priests? There's a pretty small supply of faithful, heterosexual Catholic American men, and most of them are going to take some persuasion to become celibate priests when there are so many less sacrificial spiritual opportunities available. --Nic Duquette [link]

Friday, July 15, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Defeat Terrorism and Get Rich: Sell Your Mansion, Buy a Ranch... This is the second installment of a series in which I will suggest simple ways Americans can improve their lives and help defeat terrorism at the same time. My advice to today to all those middle-class parents out there who own spacious homes in the suburbs and commute into the city: sell your house and get a smaller place for the same price closer to where you work, in a densely populated area as close to downtown as you can afford, hopefully near rapid transit.

How it defeats terror: In a word, oil. The connections between the oil industry and Arabic terrorism are complex and multifarious, and much more sophisticated than the "No Blood For Oil" crowd realizes. But there is no doubt that the huge amount of oil money going to Arab regimes winds up in the hands of these organizations, while disenchantment with petromonarchs and high unemployment rates supply the angry young men terrorists need to make trouble. Oil that creates both discontent and the wealth to buy it off is a recipe for trouble. Every barrel of oil we don't import not only drops the amount of oil that these regimes get, but reduces the price they see for what they do sell. For this reason, the last barrel of oil you don't use is the most important one.

By choosing a small house near the city over a large one with an hour commute, you save oil in two ways: first, by greatly shortening the length of your commute by car, and possibly making rapid transit an option; second, by inhabiting a domicile with less space to heat in the winter and cool in the summer, you will consume less energy. There is also the added national benefit that resources currently being consumed to build houses and maintain their utility connections and subdivision roads can be directed to more pressing needs.

How it helps you: In direct cash terms, a smaller home and shorter commute means less money on gas, less auto maintenance, a smaller lawn to mow, less home to maintain, and possibly reduced property taxes. More importantly, happiness studies suggest that you will be happier for your given level of wealth in the smaller, short-commute house. Studies of human psychology how found that we can adapt very well to most circumstances with no long-term change in happiness. If we move increase or reduce our living space, we have a temporary increase or decrease in our happiness, and then we adjust. The exceptions to this rule are certain irritants to which we never can quite adjust -- pollen allergies, for example, or lack of sleep. A long commute is one of these irritations to which we cannot adjust. All things being equal, you will be happier and wealthier in a smaller house with a short commute than a large one far from work. --Nic Duquette [link]

"Ooh, and Suck It! Yeah!".... I came across this review of the novel The Historian in last Sunday's NYT Book Review as I was on my way to recycle it. Reviewer Henry Alford clears a new bar for sheer snarkiness. Is Elizabeth's Kostova's novel about historians in search of an undead Vlad the Impaler, still roaming the earth, actually bad? It's hard to say from these five paragraphs. But it's still a pleasure to read Alford's mean-spirited review, titled "Stayin' Alive":

[T]he 16-year-old daughter, sitting in a cafe at a Mediterranean resort, envies the simple lives of some children she espies because she's sure ''these creatures were never threatened by the grimness of history.'' Then there it was again, with the revelation that the daughter's bedtime mantra is a former teacher's comment: ''You show extraordinary insight into the nature of historical research, especially for one of your years.'' And yet again, with the line of dialogue, ''Excellent questions, as usual, my young doubter.'' When, after many other allusions to historians and historicism, Kostova introduced a character whose last name is Hristova, I was tempted to run out to a pharmacy for some antihristomine.

This is precisely the sort of attitude that pervades the piece and most of the Times' book reviews. I enjoy reading the reviews, especially the mean ones, because they're entertaining. But I learn very little about the books from them. What is Alford trying to say? Don't read this? Do, but with a sort of Gen X eye to its hackneyed bits? I don't know, because he'd rather clown. This paragraph made me laugh, and then I almost (almost) felt guilty:

I'm no historian, so I'll have to take it on faith that the novel is, as its author claims, the product of 10 years of writing and research; that neither of two Oxford scholars who are investigating Dracula would bother to buy Bram Stoker's novel and would instead take turns borrowing an Oxford library's one copy; that it would take a boat, albeit a medieval one, a week to sail from the Dalmatian coast to Venice; and that anyone who is not wearing tights would ever utter the statement, ''Adieu until the morrow.'' If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. So be it. Bite me. .--Nic Duquette [link]

Thursday, July 14, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Fighting Islamic Fundamentalists With Pork... Interesting article in Foreign Policy via Hit and Run on the probability of being killed in a terrorist attack. (E.g.: you're more likely to be killed falling off a stepladder.)

The larger point of the article is that our allocation of anti-terror spending is both excessive and wasteful, both points I would have expected regardless. This is a government department, after all. The hypothesis that Americans are exaggerating their fears of terrorists is not, I think, entirely justified however. Terrorist groups are not directly comparable to stepladders or auto accidents or cancer for two reasons. First, the probability of death by terrorist attack in the past is not a good predictor of terrorist deaths in the future, unlike most causes of death. Second, terrorism is the action of intelligent actors and not poor choices or random chance.

The number of people who will be killed by terrorist acts is not certain. Foreign Policy suggests that a WMD attack is very unlikely; but it is an improbable event of severe costs. It is far more likely that conventional attackers will strike our cities. But we cannot know the death toll; a large part depends on their ability to capitalize on our security oversights and infrastructure, as in 9/11, which was accomplished with a few knives and clever planning. The number of people who will be killed by terrorism is highly uncertain, and highly elastic. Auto fatalities will not change dramatically based on dollars thrown at road safety propaganda (although they're trying that too). Billions of dollars spent intelligently on security could change the probability of dying in a terror attack by orders of magnitude.

As for terrorists as actors, it's pretty clear that stepladders don't want to kill their users. They might be defective ("Unsafe at Any Step"?), but if you die by falling of a stepladder, then it's probably because you stepped on the top step, or failed to secure the bottom, or another common and foolish ladder safety rule. You have nobody to blame but yourself, and nobody but you is hurt. On the other hand, if you die of cancer, you have nobody to blame, period. You got a short straw. Terrorism is a malevolent danger posed by other intelligent humans, however, and must be compared to comparable threats, such as war and crime. Compared to what we spend on defense (about $800B a year now) and emergency services (I mean at the local and state levels -- this must be tens of billions) the $3.4 billion proposed for anti-terror emergency response gear seems proportionate, if not well-spent.--Nic Duquette [link]

London Bombers Led "Double Lives"... Just a few nice, young chaps who liked to play cricket and, oh yeah, they vacationed in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Again, the question: Should we care how and why these young British Muslims chose to participate in terrorism? In other words, are their acts completely irrational and therefore not worth trying to "understand" or are we compelled to consider why they're being lured over to the Dark Side in the first place? I suggest the latter. Obviously the acts were reprehensible and unjustified but surely that shouldn't preclude attempts to explain why it happened or discuss what can be done to prevent more crimes. Analyzing "causes" does not equal making excuses.

Robert Pape, author of "Dying to Win", and professor at the University of Chicago, argues that 95% of every suicide bombing since 1980 can be traced back to having resulted from foreign occupation. It seems to me almost self-evident the London terrorists were inspired by the ongoing war in Iraq. The killers were trying to make a statement (we know they were involved in anti-Iraq war demonstrations). We probably have no way of knowing now, but does anyone really believe London would've been targeted by these guys if Blair had bucked Bush on Iraq?

Far more troubling is the notion that the US-led War on Terrorism post 9-11 has created more Islamic Fascists (many more) than existed beforehand. I remember Hitchens saying that if targeting and killing bin Laden spawned a new generation of bin Ladens then we would just have to "kill them all over again." Doesn't sound so easy now, does it? Recruitment is way down, so unless the young neocons of the world rise up and take arms against the Fascists, what are we going to do? The Draft? No, that will not do. What, then? Consider altering US foreign policy, not to "appease" the Islamic Fascists, but to refrain from needlessly pissing them off wherever possible? I can already hear the echo: 'No, we have to fight them all off and stay on the offensive because they're going to attack us anyway because they're psychotic and determined to kill us no matter what'. That's a pretty grim picture, but after we try this, run out of troops and fail, can we try enacting a more humane and le! ss interventionist foreign policy? Can we please give it a shot and see what happens? Humor us. These Islamic Fascists are still human beings after all and just might change their tune if we suprised them by withdrawing support for Israel while strategically and carefully pulling out of Iraq.

Recognizing that religion and an extreme interpretation of Islam are the "root" causes of these terrorists acts shouldn't prevent us from also realizing that clumsy and often reckless US foreign policy is a proximate cause and something, of course, we have far more control over.

--Mark Grueter [link]

Wednesday, July 13, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Enough about Karl Rove... I thought the whole story about Valerie Plame had just disappeared a few months ago, and I didn't miss it. Now it's back, and it sounds like Karl Rove outed the CIA agent. So this whole thing began when Joe Wilson made up a fib about his trip to Niger to support an administration story about yellowcake uranium that was a falsehood, and then Rove outed his wife as an undercover agent, then two reporters were leaned on, one sent to jail, turns out Rove was the anonymous source... blah, blah, blah.

If Karl Rove didn't go to jail for smearing John McCain with the most vile and racist sort of slander in the South Carolina primary, I don't see why I should get upset that he outed an agent, probably by mistake. It's also been astonishing to see many of the same leftist sites who supported the journalists' freedom of the press now clamoring for Rove's head to roll. You know, anything to get the guy you hate. It's just like the Clinton years all over again, only more sterile.

If I need to have an opinion on this, it is: let Judith Miller go, or jail them all. All of them. Matt Cooper, Karl Rove, Robert Novak, Wilson, Plame, and 10% of the Time magazine staff chosen at random, and any highly partisan blogger who's just started calling Rove "Turd Blossom" in the past week. That'll do. --Nic Duquette [link]

Summer: Tank Tops, Ice Hockey, the Beach... According to the New York Times, the 300-day labor dispute that cancelled the entire 2004-05 NHL season has finally been resolved after "10 straight days of virtual round-the-clock negotiations." How nice that the owners and players finally sat down to talk in earnest... in July. With three months left until another season starts and five months after the remainder of last season was called off.

Why all the negotiation now, of all times? Maybe they had some kind of paperwork to file to get the next season off the ground, but if they needed to have "round the clock" discussions, why not in time to save the last season? And why three months before this one? Do they really have three months of work left to do before the next season can happen? What do they need to do, teach the players how to skate again? --Nic Duquette [link]

Tuesday, July 12, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Fight Terror and Get Rich: Savings... Over the past decades, Americans have decrease their savings rates until, as a nation, we now spend more than we earn. This is the sum of our spendthrift ways both as a nation and as private citizens: our government is running a cavernous deficit, and Americans are living beyond their means on home equity loans and credit cars. Of course, this money can't be coming out of thin air, and it isn't: while the government and the people spend, private corporations and developing countries have been stockpiling cash and lending it to Americans. That's bad. That's money that can and should be invested in employment-creating enterprise both here and abroad. We need to start saving money now to make sure there's enough cash to go around in the financial system.

What you can do: First, if you have credit card debt, pay it off. Live on rice and beans until you've dug your way out of the hole. Once you've done that, start saving in a Roth 401(k) or Roth IRA.

Why it helps you: If you want a surefire stock tip, it's that tax rates will have to go up and stay up within a few years. As reluctant as politicians are to raise taxes, they're even more loathe to cut spending or destroy the entire economy. Buy into a safe, diversified mutual fund now, and you will get to watch your Roth savings grow free of income, dividend or capital gains taxes. It's like the government is putting stock on sale.

How it helps defeat terror:In the short run, the war on (and its concomitant invasions) have been financed at a low interest rate because of the Asian banks. Whether you think the war on terror is being fought well in Iraq, or would rather see the focus put on container searches and nonproliferation, the next administration won't have the scratch to pay for it without a severe economic crisis, continued Asian funding, or a change in our saving habits. To cause big trouble, the Asian central banks don't have to sell our government bonds or even stop buying them. They could just slow down buying them a little too quickly. If Americans invest more in our own capital markets, that will give the Asian central banks the slack they need to gradually ease off on dollar purchases, and might head off a fiscal crisis.--Nic Duquette [link]

Cell Phones Were Off in NYC... I'm not the only one who thinks cell phones should be blocked in sensitive areas. The Port Authority switched off underground transponders in four tunnels after the London bombings. Mayor Bloomberg wondered whether the temporary move was appropriate; I wonder whether it shouldn't be permanent. Bloomberg says people want to be able to call 911. How about taking in the $400 million unspent security funding and buying a couple call boxes, for crissake? --Nic Duquette [link]

Monday, July 11, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Defeat Terrorism and Get Rich, Part 1... I realized sometime after the London bombings that we have been asked to fight a war of World War II proportions using a Vietnam level of committment. It's taken four years of distance between me and 9/11 to realize how foolishly our government reacted. On one hand, they told us that we were at war with enemies of capable of acts so evil we could not believe them humanly possible -- and they were right. But their advice to us was to pray a little bit and then go on as if nothing happened. Because you know, stiff upper lip, the best way to show defiance is to go on to the shopping mall and buy a Cinnabon as if it were any ordinary day.

Well, London will do all right by that strategy, but that's not how America works. When we were attacked, the government could have asked us to do anything -- join the Army, carpool, buy Liberty Bonds, anything. Instead they left us to our own devices, and we wasted our time donating unneeded blood and putting red white and blue string lights on the porch. And then we cut taxes and run the whole thing on borrowing? Even now, the Bush administration's stance is so half-assed I find it hard to believe there's a war going on, let alone two.

We can do better, and we can contribute to the fight against these people right now, simply by taking actions to make our country stronger. And out of respect to the president, I won't suggest you do anything that won't make you better off, too. Talk about a great deal, right? No need to melt down alloyed crockery or send urchins picking through the junkyard for rubber. You can improve your life, strengthen your nation, and facilitate the defeat of jihadist terror all at once.

I'll start tomorrow by talking about saving: how you can get rich on the stock market, save on taxes, keep the economy growing and pay for the war. --Nic Duquette [link]

Live from Amsterdam... Anyone who has ever overpaid for the cliche that Europeans are by nature milder and more sophisticated than Americans has never heard the portentous breeng-breeng of a flying Dutchman on a pretzeled snake of metal short about two wheels. "Amsterdam is a seventeenth-century city," says my city-map, "so parking is scarce. You'll find that many of our natives prefer the ease and convenience of a bicycle." I'll also find that many of your natives like running me over without so much as a Doppler-ed "Vroopsch! Schorry!," or an apologetically offered bong-hit or clog dance or something. (I pay retail for my cliches, too.) But the traffic rudeness here is extraordinary. New York cab drivers at least have the excuse of a century's worth of industrially refined engineering behind their monopoly of the road. Try watching a family of six, snugly fit on a seat not even meant for one, pedal with demoniacal speed toward a full-baked tourist looking for Anne Frank's house.

Prague tomorrow. --Mike Weiss [link]

Sunday, July 10, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

More on Cell Phones... A reader writes in on my recent cell phone post:

Minor problem with your cellphone disruptor idea: generally they don't work in subways anyways, making them a poor choice for any terrorists looking to blow stuff up.

The brits are saying that they were probably timers or suicide bombers with sync'd watches. which your idea wouldn't be able to stop. As for buses, that might be better, but i'd think it'd be really hard to get it working, considering buses have windows that'd let the signal through.

And you can't use a disruptor on a bus, as the signal would affect other people's cell phones in the street, which would probably be seen as an overreach on behalf of security.

The problem isn't so much with your idea, but rather that it'd be fairly easy to get around- giving it a less effective cost/protection ratio. and considering we still lack the money to even check 2% of all containers coming into our country, we have some things that might be a bit more important to take care of. give me a dozen 9/11's before we let a nuke go off in a container on a port in LA or NYC.

Fair enough. Two unspoken assumptions I was working with were that Al Qaeda will continue to target public transit with simultaneous explosions, and using the same sort of weapons they use now. The bombs on the Tube were probably set with synchronized timers, not cellular phones. A suicide bomber with a wristwatch also would have done the job. If the bombs were set to timers, then that makes their timing precise but their location hard to pin down. (E.g., can you be sure a specific train will roll into Grand Central at exactly 8:52?) A suicide bomber would be your best bet on an American subway.

However, cell phone repeaters have been placed underground on the Paris subway so phones will work there; and in Madrid, the attacked trains were above ground, at least in all the photos I've seen. It may be the same in other cities in Europe. I was more concerned about bus systems and elevated rail systems. Important government or financial parts of New York, Washington and Boston would be safe from a cell phone rail attack, but Chicago is very much not, nor are the outer boroughs, nor a large number of smaller American cities like Pittsburgh or Columbus where a lot of people ride buses. If 9/11 didn't disrupt our financial system for long, no subway bomb could scratch it. If terrorists were to detonate ten bombs in half an hour in a smaller city with a dense downtown, the human casualties could be as bad as in a large city, but the fear would spread to the most rural parts of America in a way that attacking obvious big-ticket sites didn't do after 9/11.

As for WMD, it's worth remembering that this is indeed where we want to worry the most. But attacks on US public transit are virtually certain to happen, whereas a nuclear attack is maybe less so. These Islamofascist thugs will clearly go very, very far, and I expect a dirty bomb at some point. But a nuke? Against the USA? I'm not so sure. To the extent that Al Qaeda is not a pure death cult, it would be hard for them to order their millions of brainwashed pan-Arab caliphate citizens to pray daily to the vast expanse of radioactive glass that would be all that remained of Mecca if they ever blew up an American city (or an Israeli one, for that matter). I don't know whether these terrorists have the will to deliver a bomb or how close they are to the means to obtain one. Bus bombs will happen, and cell phones are one popular detonation tool. I may be making a bad recommendation here, but I'd like to see some back-of-the napkin figures on human cost, dollar cost and probability before I concede. --Nic Duquette [link]

Saturday, July 9, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Regime Change... Mike Weiss has decided to extend his ongoing vacation, or spiritual crisis, or bout of sloth -- whatever it is. All I know is he's supposedly somewhere in Mexico, doing falconry with a bald eagle and playing poker for Swiss francs.

As a result, Mark and I will be trying to match his output for the next couple weeks, or month, or however long it takes Interpol to find him. Please send either of us a tip if there's anything you'd like to see discussed here. Otherwise it might just be all economics, all the time. --Nic Duquette [link]

Friday, July 8, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

Can't Hear Me Now? Good... Authorities in London should have more information soon, but they have not yet ruled out that these attacks were not suicide bombs but old-fashioned abandoned packages. With that in mind, I would like to make a humble suggestion to ensure this sort of tragedy, while certain to happen again, not be so easily pulled off. Kill the cell phones.

Our mass transit is vulnerable. Public transit is economically vital, dense with people at rush hour, and by its function must necessarily have many people going and coming in the system with minimum surveillance. A determined suicide bomber will always be able to bomb these. But suicide bombers are hard to come by in Western terror cells. A more common technique of Al Qaeda seems to be the simultaneous detonation of bombs wired to cellular phones.

I propose planting radio-shielding materials, such as lead, and active cellular signal jammers on all metropolitan trains, buses and stations in the USA. These devices are currently illegal here, but they exist, are simple to produce. They're legal, not surprisingly, in Israel, where bus travelers and theater goers are worried about more than an irritating ringtone.

There is no reason not to cast mobile telephony out of Grand Central Station, the Port Authority bus terminal, and maybe even to jam signals near important bridges and tunnels. The inconvenience would be much smaller than what we currently endure to get on an airplane, and the potential benefits far greater. The next attack on public transit -- a matter of when, not if -- will depend on less reliable mechanisms or on suicide bombers. It will be smaller and less dangerously synchronized than the Madrid and London bombings. We cannot cave to terror in the name of text messaging. --Nic Duquette [link]

Thursday, July 7, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com
AIM: "snarksmithy"

UK to Osama: Fuck Off... When Evelyn Waugh was sent to Abyssinia to cover Mussolini's invasion of the country in 1936, a rumor went round that an American nurse had been killed in a Fascist bombing of a hospital in Adowa. Rumor is actually the wrong word. The "story" was promulgated and substantiated by foreign journalists scribbling lavish whole-cloth inventions of what they didn't see but surely meant to do. Such "on-the-ground" training in wartime correspondence -- not to mention the un-correspondence between fact and its dissemination -- would later give Waugh the seedling from which sprouted the most hilarious novel ever penned about the hack trade, Scoop. But before fabricated follies in Ishmaelia, there was one real white whale of the black shirts that demanded nabbing. Asked by his commissioning rag, the Daily Mail, to write up a moist profile of the slain Yankee healthcare provider, Waugh, a pure Santa Ana wind of combustible dryness, wired back: "Nurse unupblown."

This is very funny in its own right, but even more so when one thinks of the sterile modernism and staccato newswire style ("Timesman shot. Why you unshot?") of which Waugh would become the undisputed master and commander. It's also the lighter side of the horrible fusion of twentieth-century technology with rote savagery.

I've been thinking about this episode all day as I've been reading Londoners' testaments of steeliness and sangfroid in the wake of the immolation of 37 of their fellow metropolitans. There's nothing invented or embroidered about what happened this morning, but the reaction to it from the very locus of the disaster has been an object lesson in the kind of public demeanor necessary for facing down the twenty-first century's foremost reactionaries.

This is from London News Review:

"What the fuck do you think you're doing? This is London. We've dealt with your sort before. You don't try and pull this on us.

Do you have any idea how many times our city has been attacked? Whatever you're trying to do, it's not going to work."

This is from a blog called Europhobia:

So, what's this "bang" on the tube all about then? Anyone got any clearer idea than "either a bomb or a big crash"? And does this count as Sod's Law, coming the day after the Olympics announcement?

This is from Brit blogger Tim Worstall (numinously named, I think, under the circs):

Yes, we'll take an excuse for a day off, throw a sickie. But you threaten us, try to kill us? Kill and injure some of us?

Fuck you, sunshine.

We'll not be having that.

No grand demonstrations, few warlike chants, a desire for revenge, of course, but the reaction of the average man and woman in the street? Yes, you've tried it now bugger off. We're not scared, no, you won't change us. Even if we are scared, you can still bugger off."

Like Orwell in Homage to Catalonia ("So-and-so was shot dead, poor chap") or Monty Python in Holy Grail ("I've chopped your arm off!" "Flesh-wound!")...

Today we're all English. --Michael Weiss [link]

The 'Apostates'... So Abu Musab al-Zarqawi claims credit for the alleged murder of Ihab al-Sharif, an Egyptian envoy dispatched to Iraq as part of a multi-national Arab effort to recognize a liberated and democratic country in the Middle East. That'll show 'em how much we loathe US imperialism. Though such ostensibly 'materialist' motives for this beheading -- or, at any rate, the advertisements for this beheading -- are by no means exhaustive. Iraqi police and soldiers are said to be "apostate" forces in the service of a Crusader-Zionist proconsulship, or transliterated for the rest of us, opposed, in arms, against the establishment of shari'a law in Iraq. Worse than being a Jew, Christian or secular Westerner -- whereupon the imprimatur of Satan is presupposed -- is being anything less than a fanatic Muslim. Evidence, it seems, that bombings in major European cities are gruesome sideshows to the larger civil war now raging on almost every continent and within the world's fastest-growing religion. --Michael Weiss [link]

James Wood on the Perfect Ending... He's one of three Brits that redoubled my love for Saul Bellow, so I suppose it's only fair that he dig the Before Sunset ending as much as I.

What most interested me, however, was that it was a film improved by a beautiful ending, so that as soon as it was over it began to seem a better film than it had seemed while it was running. (And this wasn't just because it was over...) Jesse has agreed to go to Celine's apartment. She puts on a particularly lovely Nina Simone song, "Just in Time", and dances along to it. Suddenly she turns to Jesse and says, "Baby, you're going to miss that plane." Jesse shrugs, says: "I know," and then gives a foolish smile. The film ends here, as Nina sings those ravishing words: "You've found me just in time / And changed my lonely nights / that lucky day." Whether these lovers have indeed found each other just in the open question of the film's ending, as it is the open question of the last, luminous paragraph of Chekhov's "Lady with a Little Dog".

Yeah, I had the Chekhov ref in my first draft, too. But I mean, so ostentatious. Why not just cut to the chase and say that an Ethan Hawke goatee that appears in Act One will not go unshaved by the end of Act Three? --Michael Weiss [link]

Horror in London... Well, I suppose the sight of additional soldiers and bomb-sniffing dogs at Grand Central indicated something like this had happened, or was about to. The general consensus so far is that Londoners have been commendably stoic and calm about the attacks, whether because this is the type of event that tests legendary British phlegm or because this is the type of event that had been expected since 9/11.

About a week ago I saw and purchased Oriana Fallaci's Interview With History, which was sitting sandwiched between a ragged bicycle repair guide and a LeCarre novel in the outdoor dollar rack at the Strand. I figured it was about time to give this tough, battle-hardened Diana with a tape recorder her due, since she may well leave this world, at the age of 70, stricken with cancer, from a jail cell. I scanned the following passage last night. It's from a 1972 interview Fallaci conducted with Golda Meir, another indefatigible woman, though one it's distinctly harder to admire than it is to respect:

"But let's get back to Europe and the fact that terrorism has its headquarters in Europe. In every European country are offices of so-called liberation movements, and you know very well it's not a matter of harmless offices. But you do nothing against them. You'll be sorry. Thanks to your inertia and your indulgence, terror will be multiplied and you'll pay the price of it too...."

That's almost Trotskyist in its haunting prefiguration.

We have been sorry. But no one can say Tony Blair has been inert or indulgent of Islamic fascism. And the fetid gas now being sublimated and about to be leaked out over the airwaves and fiberoptic cables in the coming hours, days and weeks as to "why" this miserable bombing took place (hey there, Mr. Galloway) -- such stuff will do nothing to shake those Europeans who understand that allowing Osama bin Laden to dictate foreign policy is the first step to allowing him to dictate domestic policy as well. No casuistry about 'globalism' or Iraq or Afghanistan alters the intent of those who, when not bothering with the transparent propaganda of a demented realpolitik, are too busy idealizing a 7th-century desert with a single language and a single book. --Michael Weiss [link]

ENDNOTES, REVIEWS & NOTICES

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.

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]

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!"

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: 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]

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 ÈmigrÈ 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 is my mind -- a perfect fit."