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Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire "You Can't Run the Fed If You've Never Bedded Ayn Rand"...  On the date of Alan Greenspan's final meeting with the Fedral Open Market Committee, I was surprised to read this piece in Slate accusing the Chairman (and, disclosure, my boss's boss's boss's boss) of stifling discussion on the committee and steering other governernors away from dissenting votes by any means he can.Greenspan has seen less dissent in voting than his predecessors not only because of his alleged charisma but because the man who came before him, Paul Volcker, inherited a post-oil shock inflationary mess at a time when Milton Friedman's Nobel-bagging work on the role of inflation expectations had just begun to penetrate Republican ideology and not yet that of the Democrats who preceded Volcker on the committee. It was Volcker who committed the Fed to containing the rate of inflation before its other responsibilities, and who constructed the Fed's reputation for fighting inflation regardless of political pressures. This was good for long-term economic prosperity, but did not go down well with dissenters who had been taught that high inflation reduced unemployment, and thought Volcker was moving too hard, too fast. As for Volcker's predecessor, George Miller, he faced a barrage of dissents because he was incompetent. Greenspan has been accused of leaving interest rates too low, too long to boost the electoral prospects of his party. But he had no compunction about raising rates when leaving them down would have helped the current president's father remain in office. And it cannot be denied that he has continued to bolster the trend toward transparency and credibility in interest rate decisions initiated by Volcker. For the man on the street, this may be boring stuff, but it has been good for the economy at the expense of the chairman's power and prestige. All indications are that Greenspan's replacement, Ben Bernanke, will continue to increase institutional transparency at the expense of his own ego and any political goodwill he might want from politicians up for reelection. Whatever Greenspan's economic legacy, I expect that history will judge these three men to be among the cleanest politicians of their era. --Nic Duquette [link] Justice Alito... Confirmed. It was close, too: 58-42. Gay cowboys and unready teenage moms high-tail it to Canada. --Michael Weiss [link] The Stay-Off-the-Lawn Prophet... George Will is a real conservative's conservative, a stickler for the status quo -- or better say, the status quo ante -- and someone who is simply having none of this poppycock about the "blessings of liberty" or the "march of democracy" in the Middle East. Nor is he so inclined to mock at the president's slight infelicity with the English language by neglecting to compare his speechifying to that of the esteemed godfather of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke.
"The beginnings of reform and democracy in the Palestinian territories are now showing the power of freedom to break old patterns of violence and failure." Replace "Palestinian" with "Iraqi" in that first citation, and you have something a lot less "gotcha"-seeming, even with all the chaos and misery in present day Mesopotamia. It's no longer a source of teeth-clattering agita that Shi'ite fundamentalists are some of the most progressive elements in the spheres of Iraqi renewal which matter most; and whether or not this leads to civil war or theocracy is something that the country would have experienced anyway, sooner or later, once Saddam and his sons were gone.
The success of the terrorist organization Hamas in the Palestinian elections is but the latest proof of what happens when the forms of democracy are severed from what the president, with a cosmopolitan shrug, dismissively called "our own Western standards of progress." Now comes wishful thinking, and then cynicism. If you're waiting for the other shoe to drop, you'd have better luck hooking up with Godot. A column about political sclerosis in the Middle East engendering cynicism in the United States offers no alternative theory to democracy on-demand. (The next paragraph lapses into a sensible but desultory attack on the horrible Jimmy Carter, who has all the stations of the cross paid to him as tribute in this month's New York Review of Books, in a stupendously silly piece by George's monogrammatic twin Gary Wills.) But what does Will propose in lieu of timely elections that props up a hideous regime? And is the existence of such a regime necessarily the consequence of the perpetual menace and "untaught feelings" of the Palestinian constituency rather than that of historic and indeed "watery" materialist factors? Edmund Burke was no Adam Smith, as Thomas Paine correctly indicated in The Rights of Man, and George Will is no Edmund Burke. Hamas, by turns, is cause for alarm and reproach but not just alarm and reproach. To quote Paine,
[E]verything we see or hear offensive to our feelings, and derogatory to the human character, should lead to other reflections than those of reproach. Even the beings who commit them have some claim to our consideration. How then is it that such vast classes of mankind as are distinguished by the appellation of the vulgar, or the ignorant 'mob', are so numerous in all old countries? The instant we ask ourselves this question, reflection feels an answer. They arise, as an unavoidable consequence, out of the ill construction of all old gouts... The next two words are "in Europe." Old gouts exist everwhere, and it might be one of history's inspiring ironies that has a Hamas "mandate" serve as the first real incision to remove the pathology in Palestine. After all, once the worst of the worst has been legitimized only to then be discarded, what will there be left to try? --Michael Weiss [link] Cue the Drudge Siren... Woo-woo! Woo-woo, Matty said!
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. -- The cowboy love story "Brokeback Mountain" led the Academy Awards field Tuesday with eight nominations, among them best picture and honors for actor Heath Ledger and director Ang Lee. You want to know the definition of "taboo" or "forbidden" love? Two high school sweethearts getting engaged at 18 and making it work. There it is. "They said it couldn't last, we had to prove them wrong." They did. The love that dare not speak its name is high-functioning domestic dysfunction. More scandalous than anything in Lolita. And talking of that meretricious minx, who turned a staggering fifty this year, this is from one of Nabokov's post-hubbub epilogues to the novel. He's descibing early attempts at publication and the hysterical to creepy responses he'd received, which led him straight into the asphyxiating, Quiltyesque embrace of Olympia Press. How germane is this revelation of might-have-been man-boy prairie love to the current Oscar race?
"Some of the reactions were very amusing: one reader suggested that his firm might consider publication if I turned my Lolita into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, 'realistic' sentences ('He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy.' Etc.)" I think that was original dialogue for Giant. --Michael Weiss [link] Posner on Hamas... Here come da judge:
With Hamas in power, its members are paradoxically much more vulnerable to Israeli military power than they were when Fatah was in power. The Hamas leaders then were scattered and hidden and efforts to fight them risked killing innocent civilians and discrediting the Palestinian government, with which Israel was trying to make peace. Given Fatah's inability to suppress Hamas, Israel could not crush Hamas by bombing the government buildings occupied by Fatah. Once Hamas is the government, however, further violence toward Israel by Hamas members can be met appropriately by massive military force directed against the organs and leaders of the government. This threat may cause Hamas to avoid attacks on Israel. Hamas's victory may be the best thing that has happened to Israel in years. This is true. What has long been the complaint about waging war against Al Qaeda? They haven't got a country with a regime to demolish and sovereignty to forfeit by their open campaigns of mass murder against citizens of other countries. (They were, at best, a mercenary proxy for the Taliban, just as they were fast becoming one for Pakistan, and just as Hamas has been one for the PA.) Well, now Hamas has got a country and a much more visible center of operations to expose to retaliative strikes. They will have to claim total responsibility for suicide-murders and diplomatic intransigence which will lead to the further immiseration of the Palestinian people. So comes the question: Will parliamentary leadership temper their furor or grant them an illusory carte blanche to escalate attacks against Israel? I have to say, I'm leaning more towards the former outcome if only because of the restrained and technnocratic calm by which they attained office. If you read that New Yorker snippet with Hariri I linked to below, you'll see some conspicuous PR differences between Hamas and Fatah. The bloodier and more truculent advertising belonged to Abbas' outfit, probably because they felt they had more to "prove" in this department. The cliche hope here is that Hamas will undergo a kind of "Nixon-in-China" metamorphosis. While history is glutted with examples of steely pragmatism masking an inner -- and soon to be outer -- sanguinary nightmare of reaction, Hamas is by no means a novice to geopolitics and jihadist cause-and-effect. Their very victory last week attests to this fact. (Was it just the anti-Zionism that did it, or did organization and competence in quotidian realms not also help?) Who knows what's really going on inside the heads of their vanguard; what quiet stirrings of reform might not soon be in evidence now that administrative potential has been realized as administrative opportunity? --Michael Weiss [link] Developing Excitement In Boring Governance...  In a strange announcement that would probably garner more interest at any other agency, Bush' nominee to head the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Diana Taylor, has been abruptly withdrawn from consideration shortly before she was to be officially nominated for the post. The reasons for the withdrawn nomination are not known -- nor is it known whether it was the Administration or Ms. Taylor whose mind changed. It does seem to be the case that there is no replacement for her ready to be nominated. Googling reveals scant information about Taylor. She's currently New York's banking regulator, she has a track record as a financial hotshot, and -- hmmm -- Mike Bloomberg is her boyfriend. For a man as prominent as Bloomberg, there's strangely little gossip about the relationship which might shed light on any really scandalous explanation for the Taylor's withdrawl. There is this juicy tidbit, however, from the Village Voice, dated December 2002.
While Ed Koch, Dinkins, and Giuliani all wound up at war with the [Citizens' Budget Committee], boycotting its conferences and, at some points, barring mayoral staff from attending, Bloomberg actually met his current girlfriend, Diana Taylor, at a CBC event and brought her there this weekend.Their eyes met over revenue projections, and the electricity in the room spoke volumes about desire and the sales tax. Forget Angelina. Where are the hard-hitting journalists at US Weekly on this? --Nic Duquette [link] Theory of the Ten-Year Regression: Redux... Two things happened in 1987 which this week's New Yorker juxtapose in the "Talk of the Town" section: Alan Greenspan picked up his maestro's baton, and Hamas was founded: Only two things can make the pinstripes misty: losing other people's money, and the Field of Dreams-like exeunt of what a Whit Stillman character would call the "last of the greats." Is this heaven? No, it's Fannie Mae.:
Paul ONeill, Bushs first Treasury Secretary, has suggested that he and Greenspan secretly hoped to rein in the White House tax cutters. If thats true, the secret was well kept. But a Fed chairmans primary responsibility is his conduct of monetary policy, and it cannot be denied that Greenspan presided over almost two decades of low inflation and surprisingly strong economic growth. When he took office, the Politburo still occupied the Kremlin, the Dow was under 3,000, and few people outside the Pentagon and university science departments had heard of the Internet. Greenspan recognized that technology was upending established relationships among inflation, unemployment, and growth. The dramatic rise in productivity that was accompanying the information revolution, he said in 1997, was a once or twice in a century occurrence. So instead of raising interest rates, to head off inflation, as some colleagues recommended, he kept them low, and the economy recorded its longest-ever expansion. And on the ululating, we're-all-going-to-die side of the ledger:
Last Thursday night, just hours after it was announced that Hamas had crushed Fatah in legislative electionsan event that caused some right-wing Israeli politicians to declare the birth of a terrorist HamastanHarari welcomed a visitor to his home, in the town of Yavne, near the Mediterranean. While most Israeli and Arab-language news channels were broadcasting scenes of Hamas supporters in the Gaza Strip waving green flags as they celebrated their stunning victory, Harari had tuned in to a seemingly tedious military ceremony on Egyptian state television. Look at the wives of the generals, he said. Many of them are wearing traditional head scarves. This was not so ten years ago. And this tells you where we are heading. When the women of Egypts pro-Western military ιlite are dressed like that, you know that the Hamas victory is not about Palestine. Its about the entire Middle East. The best antithesis to such high dudgeon is that other Hariri of the Middle East, whose assassination might just be the downfall of the House of Allawi in Syria...
But look around, Harari said: In Jordan, too, wherever there are free electionstrade unions, student unions, professional guildsthe Islamists have the upper hand. If the Hashemite kingsHussein and Abdullahhad not played all kinds of tricks, the Islamists would have had a large representation in parliament as well... No mention that one of these "tricks" was a mass reprieve-giving to jailed Salafist nutters in Jordan in 1999, one of whom high-tailed it to Afghanistan and then to Iraq: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. It's not so good to be the king these days. --Michael Weiss [link] Theory of the Ten-Year Regression... Manchester New Wave came back in the late 90's -- that low, dishonest decade -- just as younger brothers the East Coast over were discovering their older siblings' Joy Division and Happy Mondays LPs. Then, Saddam Hussein became public enemy number one, once more with feeling. A scrubbed-up druggie memoir made headlines this month. Now... "Going postal" earns its deja vu all over again:
GOLETA, Calif. -- A female ex-postal worker opened fire at a mail processing plant, killing six people before committing suicide, authorities said early Tuesday. Even the camp quotient of this story is miniscule. That shark got jumped many moons ago. VH1's got nothing. --Michael Weiss [link] Poison Ivy Gets to Rummy... From Page Six:
IF President Bush unveils strong environmentally conscious initiatives in tonight's State of the Union speech, credit (or blame) goes to Nora Maccoby. At the end of the year, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was seen at a holiday party in Georgetown genially locking horns with the enviro-babe and screenwriter. After a half-hour of Maccoby lecturing Rummy that energy independence through renewable clean sources should be the heart of a national security strategy, a grinning Rumsfeld bleated to those nearby, "I can't believe this - this girl's kicking my ass, and she's right." Then to Maccoby, "Call the Secretary of Energy. You can use my name. By the way, how old are you?" Maccoby: "Why?" Rumsfeld: "I have a son, actually." Rumsfeld then sent out a "snowflake" - a memo to friends and associates with ideas he believes will "snowball." Meanwhile, Maccoby has just delivered "The Believer," a feature script about controversial Iraq figure Ahmad Chalabi and his young right-hand, Francis Brook, a former Rumsfeld employee and the only American member of the Iraqi National Congress. Word is her derived-from-the-record depictions of post-9/11 national security cabinet debates are as grimly funny as the war room scenes in "Dr. Strangelove." As funny as Dr. Strangelove. That's like a blurb on Joseph Epstein's Snobbery: The American Version which mentioned the word "De," followed by the word "Tocqueville," as way of endorsement. --Michael Weiss [link] Monday, January 30, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Dimmer Lights, Same-Size City... Has Jay McInerney delivered the first good non-Ian McEwan post-9/11 novel? Louis Menand thinks so:
Still, The Good Life is an intelligent venture in a tricky genre: the 9/11 novel. Its the attack on the World Trade Center that brings Luke and Corrine togetherhes visiting his accountant in the World Financial Center that morning, and she lives just up the street. They meet, and soon afterward become volunteers in a soup kitchen for rescue workers at Ground Zero, which is where, in the absence of nosy spouses, their intimacy develops. The historical situation may be part of the reason for the mutedness of the book, but mutedness, in this context, is preferable to showiness, and McInerney gets a lot of credit for tact. He does not, for instance, attempt to describe what happened on September 11th itself. The story begins on the evening of September 10th, and it resumes on the morning of the twelfth, when Luke, after a night on the pile searching for survivors, staggers out of the dust and smoke and runs into Corrine. It is also sensible that Luke and Corrines relationship is not, in the end, so terribly star-crossed. The distance from Hudson Street to the Upper East Side seems vast only to the people who live on Hudson Street and the Upper East Side. The rest of humanity would have a hard time telling those worlds apart. But this makes the connection simpler and more plausible. We are not asked to accept the spectacle of Luke moving to Staten Island, or Corrine running off with a fireman. Ain't that the deuced thing with these bad boy it-lit shits of yesteryear? They go and get themselves married, have a couple kids, dabble in nose candy only after "The West Wing," and then go all soft on ya. --Michael Weiss [link] A Problem From Hell, All Right... The most miserable foreign policy failure of the Bush administration has occurred in the same locus as its greatest triumph: Sudan. Nicholas Kristof's unignorable piece in the New York Review of Books this week states the case plainly:
As the killings began, the Bush administration was in a good position to take the lead. President Bush had given high priority to ending the war in southern Sudan (which is entirely separate from the war in Darfur), and he achieved a tentative peace agreement to resolve the northsouth war after twenty years and the loss of two million lives. That is one of Bush's most important foreign policy achievements, and this means that his administration and the conservative Christians in his basewere particularly aware of events in Sudan. They were among the first to make strong statements about Darfur, and it was conservatives in Bush's own Agency for International Development who led the way in trying to stop Darfur's violence when it first erupted. Yet as it turned out, the White House couldn't be bothered with Darfur. The Democrats couldn't either for a long time, until finally John Kerry made strong statements about the situation there in the summer of 2004. Then, perhaps worrying about his legacy, Colin Powell began taking a personal interest in Darfur. Finally, in early 2005, the Bush administration declared that genocide was unfolding in Darfur and sent large amounts of aid but it refused to do anything more. In effect, the US had provided abundant band-aidsso that when children were slashed with machetes, we could treat their wounds. But we did nothing about the attacks themselves.This is not to say that the international community has not earned its share of the blame for allowing the Janjaweed to distill a toxic cocktail of genocide and ethnic cleansing, while referring to their victims in a Sudanese slang term that translates to "niggers." Unlike with Rwanda, the barbarity is not being broadcast on live television, and yet will anyone argue that this somehow lessens the enormity of world responsibility to intervene? The estimable Johann Hari has recently written that this problem from hell, to use Samantha Power's simple but powerful phrase for the worst form of species abasement, will soon be over because -- good news! -- black Muslims of Darfur are almost entirely dead or in diaspora. And see if you can keep your breakfast down to read this (it's only positive value is that instills in me the desire to get beyond the Times' ridiculous pay-for-service barrier and read Kristof's stuff every week again):
Maybe the authorities had no time to stop the Janjaweed because they were so busy trying to prevent journalists and aid workers from seeing what was happening. At one checkpoint, the secret police tried to arrest my local interpreter. They told me to drive on and leave him behind; I refused, fearing that that might be the end of him. So they detained me as well (they eventually summoned a higher commander who freed us both). It's clear that if the Sudanese government simply applied the current restrictions on foreign journalists to the Janjaweed, the genocide would quickly come to an end. Funny Nic Should Mention... It's true some of the lustre's worn off The Onion after eighteen years of writing media parody, but this article, "Second-Graders Wow Audience With School Production of 'Equus'" is great:
"The kids loved it," teacher and director Michael Komarek said. "Once they stopped screaming about horses getting their eyes gouged out and realized that it was just a launching point for more complex ideas about alienation from the modern world, they rolled up their sleeves and dug right in."--Michael Weiss [link] Dear Frank, Dear Koba... Where do they find these people? From a new book of collected correspondence between Roosevelt and Stalin:
[Susan Butler] beliefs, based on partial truths, are simplistic, if not naive. Roosevelt is the noble idealist, the only man that Stalin, the great Soviet leader, respects. Butler goes on about Roosevelt and his great vision of the United Nations, but Stalin, as the Yalta discussions showed only too clearly, was prepared to humour Roosevelt on this side issue provided that he got what he wanted over Poland and Central Europe. The editorial spadework is not made any nimbler by Arthur Schlesinger's foreward wherein we're told -- as millions of Balts, Poles and Ukrainians were so nobly reminded by the court historian of "Camelot" on half-centennary of Yalta -- that Poland and most of Eastern Europe's absorption into the Soviet imperium was a foregone conclusion. Yet consider: if Stalin was so antsy to get the US and UK to redouble or treble their military sacrifices in the war (and it's true that the Red Army was put through almost ayatolloid injunctions to mount "human wave" attacks against the Wehrmacht, thus guaranteeing the highest possible casualties on the Russian side), then how plausible is it that Stalin "held all the cards" for a postwar carve-up of Mitteleuropa? After the fact, when Russia's losses had to be compensated, maybe. Although even then, there was what the kids now like to call "wiggle room." But no one ever thought a postwar scenario too premature to go into right after Hitler made his ultimate blunder and invaded the steppes... Lend-Lease was a firesale of British imperial holdings, and indeed the correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill (not quite the warm and cousinly special relationship most revisionists enjoy portraying it as) deserves at least as much attention as the present volume. Stalin was always more reliant on Anglo-American materiel than Hitler ever was on Soviet naval manufacture during the Nazi-Soviet "friendship." He was also in less felicitous a bargaining position after the war than he was before it, when he renegotiated the terms of his alliance with the Reich in order to gobble up the Baltic states as a Soviet "buffer zone" against outside -- predictably German -- aggression. And of course Stalin was also an intransigent thug who responded best to his mirror image, a fact which only Churchill discovered too late, and much to the chagrin of imminent Warsaw Pact nations. (Remember that a capitulation of Poland to any form of hegemony invalidated the whole Allied casus belli of '39.) Roosevelt was an easy and almost willing dupe of the Generalissmus; perhaps the only one in his administration to see through Stalin's rhetoric and stone-faced bargaining position was former Soviet ambassador (the first one, in fact) and Free French antifascist William Bullitt, whose sepulchre can never be burnished to brilliant enough a sheen. --Michael Weiss [link] Snarksmith on The New York Times on The Onion on The New Yorker... Can you hear the echo chamber now? Good. (good. good.)
WHEN Joe Garden, the 35-year-old features editor of the satirical paper The Onion, thinks about the publication's move five years ago this month from Madison, Wis., to New York, he thinks about his first encounter with a staff member of The New Yorker. The emissary from the sleek Condι Nast building had traveled to The Onion's cavelike office in West Chelsea.The Onion's move to New York was sort of a mixed blessing. On one hand, it brought the satirical paper to the attention of the otherwise oblivious City media. (Can nobody in the copy editorial chain at the Times have been aware that the "Volume 16" of compiled Onion articles is, in fact, notthe sixteenth Onion collection, but only the sixth?) Now the newspaper gets picked up by major institutions ranging from the federal government to the Xinhua news wire, who once reported as fact that the US Congress would move if it weren't build a Capitol with a retractable dome. On the other hand, the Onion pretty much peaked in its satricial brilliance right around the time of the move, and its last truly great moment was its writing on 9/11. Since then, the Onion has been good, but it hasn't taken any of the risks that made their early material less consistent but more interesting. (See, for example, the op-ed in their first collection written by an orange traffic cone.) Maybe the calm, steady middle age of funny would have come for them in Wisconsin as well as in New York; more likely, the commercial and artistic influences of the City brought the paper's voice more in line with the national media uptown from them with whom they go out to bars. All of this is easy enough to say, but when it comes right down to it, I'd rather write for the Onion than any other extant publication. Their insularity is notorious, however, and as the Times notes, their staff is pretty much as it was five years ago, albeit slimmer. It is possible to write them a letter begging for permission to clean their toilets, free, and watch them work, and be politely declined. (I say this because I know someone who offered.) What's their secret? How did the people on the Onion get on the Onion?
"None of us have a background in comedy, none of us have a background in journalism," said Mr. [Todd] Hanson, the head writer. "Most of us don't have a background in anything at all, to be honest. We were just punching the clock, working cash registers, and all of this happened to us accidentally."I've done it all wrong. Shit! --Nic Duquette [link] Saturday, January 28, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Olga's Bend Sinister... It's only fair. Pushkin has an Olga whose "eyes are lowered, but ablaze, / and on her lips a light smile plays." Wry modesty smothering an inner gem-like flame seems to be the consensus on Olga Grushin, the latest Russian wunderkind of fiction, whose first novel, A Dream Life of Sukhanov is getting raves in all the majors. The Times this week:
Despite the initial repellence of her main character, Grushin attracts the reader with evocations of places and people, even foods, that reflect the mingled sentimentality and abhorrence of the willing exile from Moscow: the toast that arrives tasting "vaguely of herring"; the stairwells that "split the gray monstrosity of the building in half, laying it open like an enormous, overripe fruit, with the imposing, leather-padded, nail-studded doors, two on each floor, embedded in its yawning pulp"; the housecleaner, a "big homely woman in an unbecomingly tight blouse, her hair untidy, her round, kind face anxious with a desire to be useful." Grushin writes with a polyglot's overprecision in language that calls attention to itself for its studied effort at beauty - like a woman who manages, just barely, to walk smoothly on high heels. But sometimes a simple sentence glides eloquently through the artifice. ("Summer seemed to have tiptoed out of Moscow while no one was looking.") I wouldn't trust this reviewer on "studied" or belaboured anything given her introductory paragraph, but you can tell from these excerpts whom young Miss Grushin is playing at, and to pretty good effect. Sukhanov's about aesthetic and moral compromises of the Soviet years, and how when the moment of reprieve comes, "institutionalization" doesn't begin to account for the difficulties encountered by the surviving dead souls of totalitarianism. By a nice coincidence, I recently watched this Clive James bookchat with Martin Amis at James' compulsively navigable website, wherein the author of Koba the Dread tells of what would have become of him as a writer under Stalinism:
I would be called in after a while. Then I would write three or four short stories about love under the tractor... Then I'd committ suicide. (Though technically he'd never have been born at all if he was still allowed Kingsley as a papa.) Gushin's starting her satire at around the time of her girlhood, which means in a book or two, we'll be up to Putin's White Russia, which has been deserving of a lyric vivisection for quite a while... --Michael Weiss [link] Woebegone on Lιvy... Now see how this works. You get one agonizingly unfunny, schmaltzophilic heffalump of an NPR host to throw a hissy fit over a preening rock-star frog with his mildly condescending notions about culture and cant on these shores. What will you prove? That folksy baritone liberals in the red states can take the idea of America away from the jingos and the neoconservatives and Jesse Ventura? Or perhaps that someone whose prairie home arrogance -- of which Mark Twain would have made mincemeat in about thirty seconds -- is a tough, no-bullshit patriot who can raise 'em high for the beautous contradictions of Old Glory while resorting to cheap cracks about Gallic tendencies. (If all the children are above average, surely they'll understand a menu consisting of "freedom fries.") Garrison Keillor, if you Bernard Henri-Lι-please:
Bernard-Henri Lιvy is a French writer with a spatter-paint prose style and the grandiosity of a college sophomore; he rambled around this country at the behest of The Atlantic Monthly and now has worked up his notes into a sort of book. It is the classic Freaks, Fatties, Fanatics & Faux Culture Excursion beloved of European journalists for the past 50 years, with stops at Las Vegas to visit a lap-dancing club and a brothel; Beverly Hills; Dealey Plaza in Dallas; Bourbon Street in New Orleans; Graceland; a gun show in Fort Worth; a "partner-swapping club" in San Francisco with a drag queen with mammoth silicone breasts; the Iowa State Fair ("a festival of American kitsch"); Sun City ("gilded apartheid for the old");a stock car race; the Mall of America; Mount Rushmore; a couple of evangelical megachurches; the Mormons of Salt Lake; some Amish; the 2004 national political conventions; Alcatraz - you get the idea. (For some reason he missed the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, the adult video awards, the grave site of Warren G. Harding and the World's Largest Ball of Twine.) You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title. I've no doubt that all these things are included in American Vertigo, just as I've no doubt they're not all that is included. I wasn't so much a fan myself of Lιvy's multi-part sojourn in The Atlantic -- out of which this book was cobbled -- however, I do recall terribly more interesting and well-handled tableaux than the foregoing. Might they have been carefully elided from this review to fulfill a need to see an unbuttoned philosophe with the fly-away do undone because he forgot to chat up even one supporter of the late Paul Wellstone? Lιvy has earned a reputation, or better say notoriety, in France for being an anti-anti-American. While the characteristic porkers and gun nuts may spring up in his journalism on the United States (and does any of us deny the existence of such?), he is by no means reducible to the caricature of the Left Bank nasty depicted in this stupid and self-congratulatory emission. --Michael Weiss [link] Oh, the Dizzying Middles of the Downtown Comedy Scene... When the New York Times covers the kids, the kids seem somehow less funny.
"Hitler; Dice," the narrator continued as the two images morphed. "The two most important people of the 20th century are about to combine as one. This summer Andrew Dice Clay is Adolph Dice Hitler Clay!" The venus is Rafifi, but if it were Pianos you'd know how the lead would read, don't you? "The Lower East Side hipster bar Pianos, which ironically used to be an actual piano repair store..." Some of the highlights aren't bad, though:
At "Thursday," Liam McEneaney explained his reasons for pursuing romance in Internet chat rooms: "I was tired of women rejecting me for the way I looked. I wanted them to reject me for who I really am." Or this:
And at "Invite Them Up," Demetri Martin, who recently began doing occasional comedy segments on "The Daily Show," gave the audience advice on how to speed-read autobiographies. "I just go to the 'about the author' section," he said. I once saw Demetri Martin do an entire improv monologue on the basis of having not purchased a necessary red lightbulb to do his regularly scheduled show. At first, it seemed contrived and bogus. The UCB Theatre started handing out free passes to next week's performance, where said lightbulb would be procured and emplaced. Demetri killed. --Michael Weiss [link] Are You There, Jesus? It's Me, Naomi... With her milky-twit talk radio voice, her cuddy homilistic prose, and her otherwise totally fucking ludicrous persona, Naomi Wolf seemed a perfect candidate for Christian conversion. The moment, like the saviour, has arrived.
I wasnt myself in this visual experience, she continues. I was a 13-year-old boy sitting next to him [Jesus] and feeling feelings Id never felt in my lifetime, of a 13-year-old boy being with an older male who he really loves and admires and loves to be in the presence of. It was probably the most profound experience of my life. I havent talked about it publicly. In lieu of a Porsche, this was all she got out of her lousy midlife crisis. And yet Germaine Greer ain't biting. Check out this on-air BBC drubbing, and tell me if for the next six months Naomi won't be applying lipstick the way Diane Ladd did in Wild at Heart.
 So those footprints on the beach belonged not to Mary Wollstonecraft but to the King of Kings. Who'd have thunk it? --Michael Weiss [link] Lost in Translation?... Maybe this is an Arabic word with no close English cousin, but threatening to not give somebody money unless they do your bidding doesn't sound like any definition I've ever heard of "blackmail". --Nic Duquette [link] Friday, January 27, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire March of the Polar Bears... Getting diplomacy off on the right foot, the new, Conservative PM of Canada snapped at the American ambassador for undermining Canada's sovereign right to a patch of barren ice cap.
"It is the Canadian people we get our mandate from, not the ambassador of the United States." Mr Harper had criticised election opponents for attacking the US in a bid to win votes.So the Canadians mandated him to be nice to us? Or because he got a minority government, they mandated him not to be? How does this parliametary thing actually work? Nobody really thinks the ice is worth much, now, but Canada is thinking well into the future on this one.
The BBC's Lee Carter in Toronto says Canada has only recently woken up to the fact that, with global warming being blamed for melting ice in the Arctic, the so-far-mythical northwest passage, which could link the Atlantic and the Pacific, may in fact become a reality.So that's why he wants to withdraw from Kyoto. Anyone up for a luxury cruise from Prince Edward Island to Vancouver? --Nic Duquette [link] Palestinian Burnout Syndrome... I've been asked several times what I think of yesterday's Hamas victory in the Palestinian elections, but aside from a few obvious observations it's been difficult to care. At least Hamas has a track record of competent local governance and legitimate popular support; Fatah was nothing but the rotted trunk of Yasser Arafat's xylem and phloem of corruption. At the same time, it means little for the peace process to exchange a noncredible negotiating partner for one who, credibly, demands your country be eradicated. At the very least, the USA should find a way to demonstrate that it is willing to work with Hamas, if only to convey that we don't support democratization only when our allies win. Overall, though, I see little reason to get excited about Hamas switching from de facto to legitimate control of Palestinian security and governance. With Sharon out of the game, the Israeli peace process was already plunging into the unknown. Hamas may be seated across the board, but it's still Israel's turn. --Nic Duquette [link] Thursday, January 26, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Don't Be Evil, But Don't Be Good, Either... It was a major public relations blunder on the part of Google to agree to censor Chinese searches in the same week it pretended to stand up for US users' privacy. But Google's resistance to federal subpeona is more unusual for the firm than its weakness in the face of government censors. Google has already complied with censorship policies in France and Germany, where they block access to neo-Nazi and other racist web sites; briefly capitulated to a lawsuit by Scientologists who wanted a site blocked; and is indirectly constricted in many other regimes, such as Saudi Arabia and Singapore, who prefer to block IP addresses of offending sites themselves rather than lean on Google to do it. I frankly don't see why national governments have been going after Google in the first place, rather than putting agents on the track of finding child pornographers (or dissidents) and shutting them down or jailing them. If the US government wants to know how easy it is to find child pornography using Google, it could learn a lot more by trying a few of its own searches than sifting through aggregated keyword tallies, and even the cleverest search engine censorship can be worked around by searchers. Try this: search Google China for "galun fong". --Nic Duquette [link] Tuesday, January 24, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Bashir and Hafez Go To White Castle... Frankly, the news today off Reuters that love of battered chicken transcendes international politics doesn't surprise me at all.
The U.S. flag serves as a doormat to an office and nearby merchants announce "we boycott American goods," but some Syrians can't seem to keep away from American fast food at the new KFC fried chicken restaurant. Although there were a few surprises. I don't think any American would ever say this:
[As Syria] worries about bird flu, surely KFC "examines its chicken before cooking it ... I trust KFC chicken more than any rotisserie," said Farzat. It's not hard to find an opponent of globalization at your local university campus or labor union, but one of the potential benefits of an increasingly meshed global economy -- besides the rapid erosion of global poverty -- is that our vices will be our amassadors. Don't like our racy movies? Have a burger. Don't eat beef? Perhaps you'd enjoy a California merlot. Don't care for alcohol? Professional wrestling. As our common culture grows, nationalism and its violent tendencies will be subsumed by World Cup matches, not bloodshed over commodities. In a global economy, it's no longer necessary to think about whether or not a given company is "American" or "Arab."
KFC opened its first outlet in Damascus this month, becoming Syria's first fully licensed American food franchise. It belongs to Kuwait Food Co. (Americana), which owns and operates KFC and other American food chains like Pizza Hut and TGI Fridays throughout the Middle East. Wait, what happened to Kentucky?! --Nic Duquette [link] Monday, January 23, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Ford's Stock Ticker Is "F." But It Doesn't Stand For "Ford"...This post is about six hours late, due to personal reasons. Sorry, but poetically, at least my subject is just as late to market as I am. In the headline story on CNN.com, Bill Ford explains plans to return Ford to profitability by reducing manufacturing capacity. "Our product plans for too long have been defined by our capacity. That's why we must reduce capacity in North America." Yes, that's the problem with Ford's vehicles: the ability to produce to many of them. Meanwhile, the second-highest story on CNN.com details steps Ford has failed to take to prevent its gas tanks from igniting. --Nic Duquette [link] Sign of the Week... Sure, it's the wrong spelling of "you're," but whom would you rather have a beer with - the printer or the graffitist? Courtesy of Gothamist.
 Friday, January 20, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Iraq Election Results... This is far from a seedbed for Iranian-style theocracy:
Iraq's Shia-led United Iraqi Alliance has won the country's parliamentary elections, but failed to obtain an absolute majority. These figures have the look, at first glance, of rough parity with the demographic split in the country. Not boycotting this election gave the Sunnis almost a fourfold increase in seats, and if anyone cares to view things along purely confessional-sectarian lines, since most Kurds are Sunni, 102 -- against 128 -- is not a whimpering minority, to say the least. Meet the new "coalition": it's parliamentary. --Michael Weiss [link] Beisbol!... Someone in the Treasury Department isn't crazy -- permission has been granted to the Cubans to play in the World Baseball Classic this March. Treasury had blocked the Cubans' participation in the for-profit event, even after Castro offered to donate any team winnings to Katrina victims. I hope to see the two biggest baseball fans in world politics in the stands at the finals. For a great short story about Fidel Castro's baseball career, read this. Or read about Bush's first pitch strike at the 2001 World Series -- the acme of his presidency -- here. --Nic Duquette [link] Damn The Critics. Albertu Akbar...  John Ford, and then Tony Wilson, said it best: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." I'm printing the legend:
Hello and how are you? We are too. And so is comic artist Albert Brooks, who is about to embark upon his very first PLAYBOY Interview. We wish him well. Albert Brooks, it has been said, is the funniest white man in America. Actually, someone said that right here in this magazine sixteen years agoback when Richard Pryor was working more. Last year, Entertainment Weekly said Albert Brooks was the fifth funniest living personafter Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, Roseanne and Jim Carrey, all of whom are white and would have certainly voted Albert Brooks ahead of them. Comedians, in fact, revere him in outsize fashion. David Letterman has said: "He's above all of us." Steve Martin has said: "He is someone you respect and fear at the same time, because of his brilliance." Such fear is justifiable. Carrie Fisher was once trapped for a weekend on a boat with Albert Brooks and reported: "He never slept and he was never not funny; and, finally, I was scared that he'd follow me everywhere and keep me laughing until I got physically ill and died." Albert Brooks himself has admitted: "My biggest fear is of being too funny and murdering people by making them cough and then winding up in a lawsuit. Very first and never-fucking-published Playboy interview, available for repeat perusals here. Now here's The Onion A.V. Club current interview with Brooks on the publicity crest of Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World, which doesn't sound or look so hot from the occidental vantage. (Also, he must have had a falling-out with Carrie Fisher. See the bit about Mother):
And by the way, there are such things as bad audiences. I've heard people say, "There are no bad audiences," but that's just not true. There are people who just shouldn't be together in a room, who produce a really bad audience. Drunks, people who don't want to be there and that's no reason to judge a piece forever. So I think that comedy can and should be done as many times as the comedian wants to do it, and I don't even know that laughter should be the main consideration. It should be how it feels coming out of him, if he feels it's a good bit. I was talking to this interviewer in New York. We were just talking in general about the restrictions of modern-day show business, and I haven't done stand-up in a long time, but I said to him, I felt very lucky that I was not starting as a stand-up now, because even in the comedy clubs, there are guards at the gate going, "I don't think that's funny." And he said, "My God. You don't know! I do stand-up on the side. There's a club in New York, and they're focus-grouping my five minutes." And I just, man, I'm telling youI don't know how you get a Sam Kinison out of that world. I don't know where Bill Hicks comes from. I don't know how anyone special can go anywhere, because the guards are right in the very embryonic stage. To me, the whole point of comedy is to just go fucking crazy and try things that are as wild as your brain can think ofand do 'em again if they don't work. Do 'em again! Believe me, the audience comes to you.--Michael Weiss [link] You'll Never Believe What Simon Says... You know, just once I'd like to hear a foreign correspondent report on the thriving young conservative movement inside Iran at present. Every despatch one scans is yawningly indistinguishable from the next: the exultant pro-American source with the illicit satellite dish disguised as an air conditioner; the samizdat and highly haram nightstand reading; if a female, the Levis and decolletage under the hijab, which is barely a wisp of occlusion of her burning Weimaresque sexuality... Surely there must be some authentic ACs and yellowing Korans and pious shy chicks with acid-spraying appliques on or around their adamantine chastity belts, somewhere left in the whole damned country. These are the "hearts and minds" old Strangelove Simon Jenkins ought to send himself over and cover. Nuclear escalationism sis-boom-bah-ed at The Huffington Post. Do we even begin to exhaust the ironies?
I would sleep happier if there were no Iranian bomb but a swamp of hypocrisy separates me from overly protesting it. Iran is a proud country that sits between nuclear Pakistan and India to its east, a nuclear Russia to its north and a nuclear Israel to its west. Adjacent Afghanistan and Iraq are occupied at will by a nuclear America, which backed Saddam Hussein in his 1980 invasion of Iran. How can we say such a country has "no right" to nuclear defence? Now appreciate this: Jenkins has got little truck with the "hypocrisy" of preventing one of the most virulently hostile and belligerent regimes on the planet (its chief competition was recently removed, much to his chagrin) from acquiring a nuclear arsenal because -- wait for it -- we have already allowed other countries to do just that. I must say, even for a Tory twit feted by the foreclosed excuse of a left "opposition," that has got to trump any brief Ahmadinejad himself could put forth in favor of our whistling our way through an atomic ayatollahism. What happens to bullshit when it's spun like this in a centrifuge, I wonder? --Michael Weiss [link] Cell Phones and Brain Cancer... Another red-alert correlation goes out with a whimper. Can you hear this now? Use of concealed headsets and perceived schizophrenia, next up. --Michael Weiss [link] Dragooned Drooges and Modern Psychopathy... Being trained as a physician gave Chekhov the insight he needed to write his best short story, "Ward Number 6," wherein the silly and complacent philosophy of a blithe psychiatrist is mocked at and ultimately undone -- in high Greek ironic fashion -- by a cynical head case. Dr. Theodore Dalrymple has been tending to Britain's down-and-out for decades, and his essays on the state of physical and social degeneracy are always informed by hard thinking on these subjects, which perforce come with the territory of his dayjob. How nice, then, to see him reviewing Anthony Burgess' dystopian cult classic A Clockwork Orange in City Journal:
Burgess intuited with almost prophetic acuity both the nature and characteristics of youth culture when left to its own devices, and the kind of society that might result when that culture became predominant. For example, adults grow afraid of the young and defer to them, something that has certainly come to pass in Britain, where adults now routinely look away as youngsters commit antisocial acts in public, for fear of being knifed if they do otherwise, and mothers anxiously and deferentially ask their petulant five-year-old children what they would like to eat, in the hope of averting tantrums. The result is that adolescents and young men take any refusal of a request as lθse-majestι, a challenge to the integrity of their ego. When I refused to prescribe medicine that young men wanted but that I thought they did not need, they would sometimes answer in aggrieved disbelief, No? What do you mean, no? It was not a familiar concept. And in a sense, my refusal was pointless, insofar as any such young man would soon enough find a doctor whom he could intimidate into prescribing what he wanted. Burgess would not have been surprised by this state of affairs: he saw it coming. Leaving aside for a moment the susceptibility of "youth culture" to run rampant with nihilistic frenzy (I've heard plenty of adults make fall-down stupid rationalizations about destructive acts of disobedience committed by homicidal nuthatchers of all ages), this strikes a peculiarly plangent chord on the day after not a few fools have been giving credence to Osama bin Laden's offerings of "truce." As if such a thing were possible, desireable, or anything other than a petition for volunteered servility -- the ultimate goal of monotheism, and thus actually a capitulation to, rather than cease-fire with, the forces of jihadism. A novel that was once taken up by social conservatives as a Cold War tocsin of the ever-steepening "Decline of the West" can still be read today as a warning against a phenomenon much more alarming because of its timelessness and universality. Back-alley English hooliganism of the early sixties, or cave-borne Islamic terrorism of the early aughts share a common cistern of derangement and toxicity. In lieu of soppy orientalist notions when considering external conditions for bad behavior, it might do to retire the motif of "winning hearts and minds" and wonder about what really separates a mass-murdering member of the industrialist upper class of Riyadh from one of the industrial working class of London. --Michael Weiss [link] Thursday, January 19, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire French Unilateralism... So Jacques Chirac isn't exactly being coy when he threatens military action that could either be "conventional" or of a "different kind" in response to state-sponsored terrorism. It only makes sense, of course. He builds Middle Eastern autocracies nuclear reactors which then engender illicit warhead programs -- he might as well revoke his gifts in the same coin. --Michael Weiss [link] The Nighttime Is The Right Time... The fringe benefit is that your prose style only gets pithier and shorter as your career advances:
NYC Bars and Nightlife Writer Wanted Sully on Rumsfeld and Bush... Supporters of regime change in Iraq have long had to defend the decision to remove a blood-bolted fascist dictator from power as an undertaking worthy in and of itself. The moral argument for scotching three decades of Baathist rule in the keystone state in the Middle East needs no revision or "sexing up," and yet the importance of reaffirming it seems otiose in the extreme in the wake of seemingly limitless revelations about how incompetently postwar renewal was administered. The plus side of the "What Went Wrong" publishing blitz is that "wake," as I used it in the previous sentence, has now become synonymous with anticlimactic aftershocks, the attention devoted to which is increasingly, refreshingly less than what is now being devoted to the progress of an embyronic democratic republic in Mesopotamia. (Amazing how swiftly talk of "timetables" diminishes as talk of Iraqi military size and acumen is amplified; these do, apparently, bear some sort of inverse proportion to each other.) Nonetheless, the devil is in the details, and history is recorded at demoniacal pace with its unfolding. So... George Packer's Assassins' Gate, written from the perspective of an unsure liberal hawk, is probably the most comprehensive and panoramic portrait of the impressionistic mess of occupation and reconstruction. And this week comes former CPA head Paul Bremer's memoirs, as well as a fawning tribute to the the "rebel-in-chief" who employed him, to shade in still more white spaces on this Pollack-like canvas. Here is Andrew Sullivan on both in the Sunday Times:
Rumsfeld, after all, had never been a neocon. He loathed the idea of using large numbers of American forces to reconstruct a broken society. So he deflected responsibility and ordered the crudest tactics against the insurgency: torturing large numbers of innocent Iraqis in Abu Ghraib, sending troops into combat with insufficient armour, engaging in a cat-and-mouse game with Iraqi and jihadist terrorists who knew the terrain intimately. I suppose none of this -- apart from some previously undisclosed but recognizably glib quotations -- qualifies as newsworthy. However, as a supporter of the war (and here I speak only for myself), I find it easier to get beyond the dudgeon and disappointment over wasted opportunities by having all the FUBAR facts drummed into my head whenever possible. Here I speak for all supporters, though I think the point is self-evident: "Means" and "ends" are our responsibility as much as they are the president's. We should not have to feel like hostages to fortune just because he is one to his own ego. --Michael Weiss [link] Wednesday, January 18, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Hillary and Plantations... Now that Ray Nagin has provided the world with a much needed Hershey hermeneutic (incidentally, read Jonathan Yardley's review of a new bio of the magnate of the sweet tooth), it's seems eerily coincidental that the former First Lady would take the same national occasion - the birthday of Martin Luther King - to wink, nudge and primarily pander to her black constituents in Harlem. The Gawain of political incorrectness John Leo at HuffPo is right in noting that there isn't anything intrinsically outlandish in using "plantation" as a metaphor or analogy to describe a shameful contemporary milieu -- but he fails to add that this is only kosher if such a milieu is filled with belligerent racist overseers, every one of whom would consider Jim Crow laws a folly of progressivism. At its absolute worst (and quite frankly, I think we've yet to see it), can the current Republican-run House of Representatives really be described as such? The person to read here is the eminently commonsensical and calm Robert George (a friend of mine, as it happens) at his blog Ragged Thots:
The plantation rhetoric is the manipulation and exploitation of American racial tropes that are better of dead and buried. Yes, the left-wing will often use it against black conservatives. (We've been down that road before; no need to dredge all THAT fun stuff up again.) But that is hardly an excuse. This country will never move beyond its history until it decides to leave noxious racial references dead and buried -- especially on King's birthday. Since Hillary chose as her venue the Canaan Baptist Church of Christ to draw this moral equivalence, it might have profited her to recall that one doesn't get into heaven by mere acquaintance with the virtuous and true. Nor does having the "first black president" for a husband, a 9-to-5 neighbor to the Canaan Baptist congregation, make her any more immune to the charges of demagoguery or condescension. Though if there is one thing eight years with this family has taught us, it's that to even raise issue with them about their shabby stump tactics is little more than encouragement to see just how low they can go the next time. And just think, it could've been worse: she might have called the GOP cronies of Jack Abramoff "articulate." --Michael Weiss [link] Got Health Insurance?... Or a good doctor? This kid makes a convincing case. --Michael Weiss [link] Brooks Bombs... There must be a relationship between the "Woody Allen of the West Coast" and the East Coast original tantamount to that of inflation and unemployment (Nic can elaborate). Whereas the former has precipitously drooped in the quality of his last two feature films, the latter has steadily climbed. As it went in Defending Your Life -- "What about you, sir, how'd you die?" "On-stage, like you" -- so it goes for Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World: "Why is there no Halloween in India? Because they took away the Gandhi!" (Get wincing or die trying.) This TNR review is firewalled, so allow me to highlight (or lowlight) for you:
It's not just Brooks's choice of destination that troubles; it's his choice of jokes. He expects us to laugh at animal-powered transport and the confusion between American Indians and Indian Indians. He also mines the outsourcing phenomenon for humor, showing heavily accented Indians answering the phones for everyone from U.S. insurance giant State Farm to the White House. Unsurprisingly, this drew laughs from audience members. After all, they know from Kerry's 2004 convention speech where such jobs should be: "[K]eep good-paying jobs right where they belong, in the good old U.S.A." Brooks's attempt to find an Indian assistant could be a commercial for a "Buy American" campaign, and a crass one at that. The candidates he interviews either can't type, don't know what shorthand is, or are such Muslim anti-Semites that they won't work for a Jew. Maybe Brooks should just have hired one of the many Indians doing office jobs that American firms have outsourced in the interest of efficiency... Et tu, Albert? --Michael Weiss [link] Drezner on Liberals and Iran... A nice synthesis of snafus. (Although he might have pointed out that one of the reasons Bush has pursued this policy is because of the dialectical blowback from the left on his handling of Iraq. Though much of that rhetoric has been starvation cheap as well, it's had an unintended consequence of making the administration more cautious, if not quite history yet itself.) --Michael Weiss [link] They Spied on Hitch... Host Salman Rushdie in your own home, at great peril to yourself and your family, when moral majoritarians start sounding like anthropology professors about the relativistic justice of his attempted murder. Invite the Ayatollah Khomenei's pro-regime change grandson to sit in the same chair once occupied by the author of The Satanic Verses. Remain on a familiar terms with Ahmad Chalabi when even his former Pentagon cheering section has abandoned him. Inveigh against that figurehead of the hardest core and oldest school of neoconservatism, Henry Kissinger. What will this get you? A pasty and over-flouresced NSA wonk with a headset, listening in on any number of your phone calls. Don't fuck with the Hitch:
Although I am named in this suit on my own behalf, I am motivated to join it by concerns well beyond my own. I have been frankly appalled by the discrepant and contradictory positions taken by the Administration in this matter. First, the entire existence of the NSA's monitoring was a secret, and its very disclosure denounced as a threat to national security... Tuesday, January 17, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire More MLK Analogies... Ray Nagin defends his remarks that New Orleans should be a "chocolate city." "How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That is the chocolate I am talking about," said the mayor. He then continued, "You then flow the delicious liquid chocolate through Lake Pontchartrain and over a waterfall. The waterfall churts the chocolate, making it light and frothy. Did you know New Orleans will be the only city that froths its chocolate by waterfall?"
 The new crystallized sugar levees probably won't hold the water back given another storm; however, they are installing a light rail system. For more on Wonka and racism, click here. --Nic Duquette [link] Head Games... If you've seen Mean Girls, you've no doubt ascertained one of the variations on the "cool mom" theme in modern culture. Stay-at-home stalactite tits. Pink velour jumpsuits. An accessory chihuahua that might as well have come from last season's line of Paris Hilton pedigree discards. A vicariousness of youth so perversely bound up with one's own children that husbands, if they're still faithful, are practically committing incest. There isn't very much beyond the anything-goes sadness of this phenomenon. And when the Queen Bee finally comes home pregnant, gonorrheic or worse, "I told you so" will seem yawningly bathetic as, indeed, it already does. Now meet another variation: she's grown up, she's funny, she's nobody's fool, she's proud to brandish her feminist credentials without special pleading, and you'll never, ever catch her wearing her daughter's outfits. She's Caitlin Flanagan. Sure, there's a touch of moral uptightness about the United States of Fellatio -- at least it seems that way to yours truly, someone not yet old enough to have a daughter of his own, yet still young enough to date other people's. Her eloquent cri de coeur about how the kids are not all right can put one in mind of the precious nostalgia of Leon Kass's "The Death of Courtship." And yet...
The Rainbow Party, an offering from Simon Pulse, a young-adult division of Simon & Schuster, takes place on a single day, in which a tough little sophomore named Gin issues invitations to a party at which she and five of her friends will perform oral sex on the lucky guests, a group of popular boys. The girls will each wear a different color of lipstick, so that when a boy has completed the circuit, his penis will bear the colors of the rainbow. The party is to take place after school, to last about an hour and a halfincluding time for chitchatand to conclude before Gin's father returns home from work.Forget about the obvious mimetic lapse -- the chromatic "smear factor" -- of the above addition to teen lit. The Hardy boys get down to business at long last. Portnoy ain't complaining anymore. Where were these chicks when I was in high school? (Probably off behind the bleachers with my more fortunate guy friends, is where.)
We've made a world for our girls in which the pornography industry has become increasingly mainstream, in which Planned Parenthood's response to the oral-sex craze has been to set up a help line, in which the forces of feminism have worked relentlessly to erode the patriarchywhich, despite its manifold evils, held that providing for the sexual safety of young girls was among its primary reasons for existence. And here are America's girls: experienced beyond their years, lacking any clear message from the adult community about the importance of protecting their modesty, adrift in one of the most explicitly sexualized cultures in the history of the world. Here are America's girls: on their knees. Whoof! Meghan O'Rourke's got her work cut out for her reacting to this in Slate. Though if she can keep a straight face scanning the alarmist documentary entitled "The Lost Children of Rockdale County," she's a better naughty-minded sociologist than I. As it happened, I was reading Flanagan's Atlantic piece at my dad's house, where my brother (still in college, born and raised in Ice Storm-like conditions in Westport, Connecticut) and a female friend of his and her platonic male chum were visiting. I showed them this extract of a rap song called "Love in Ya Mouth," which Flanagan quotes, less than approvingly, in full:
I take 3 little bitches and I put 'em in a line They were all doubled-over (in laughter, you filthy animal) by "dick split." Help save the youth of America. --Michael Weiss [link] Death and Taxes... Today California executed a 76-year-old blind man, after a panel of judges "dismissed Allen's claims that the death penalty being imposed on an elderly, sick, frail and legally blind prisoner would constitute cruel and unusual punishment." The execution is widely seen as a victory for conservatives and a defeat for liberals. Also today, a different, Supreme panel of judges ruled that Oregon's assisted suicide law is legal and that the federal government overreached against "a medical standard for care and treatment of patients that is specifically authorized under state law." The ruling is widely seen as a victory for liberals and a defeat for conservatives. Government rubbing out the old and sick: the social security cost-cutting plan both parties might agree on. --Nic Duquette [link] This Highway Bill Is A Second Trail of Tears!... In an MLK Day speech that I hope sounded better in person, Sen. Clinton compared to the current climate of Washington politics to a "plantation," in the sense that it "has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard." To be fair to the Senator, it sounds as though the largely African-American crowd was appreciative. Still, watch for Hillary comparing Sam Alito's confirmation to the Rape of Nanjing, in the sense of "dismissing women's rights to make decisions about their bodies, without the government getting involved, pushing them around." --Nic Duquette [link] Saturday, January 14, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Why Does Brian Greene Get All The Royalties?... When Leonard Susskind is the godfather of string theory?
Although Susskind's title and central motivation are drawn from this fascinating debate over design, most of "The Cosmic Landscape" is structured not around philosophy but around the nuts-and-bolts concepts of modern particle physics. Here Susskind's long years as a theorist and lecturer at Stanford University prove a mixed blessing. He is a good-humored and enthusiastic tour guide but he clearly does not know how baffling he sounds much of the time. He coaxes the reader along with rhetorical questions and charmingly corny allegories. Still, this isn't much help when it comes to material like "Let's suppose that the Calabi Yau manifold has a topology that is rich enough to allow 500 distinct doughnut holes through which the fluxes wind. The flux through each hole must be an integer, so a string of 500 integers has to be specified." Um, is this going to be on the exam? Every few months I like to take a brief refresher in which is the specific, and which the general, theory of relativity. Those two you can explicate using a guy in a box and a rubber ball. Lines like the above make Susskind the killjoy of popular physics. A shame, too, because he runs right back into 17th-century Spinozism with all-that-is-possible-is philosophizing like this:
He proposes that those 10500 possibilities represent not a flaw in string theory but a profound insight into the nature of reality. Each potential model, he suggests, corresponds to an actual place - another universe as real as our own. In the spirit of kooky science and good science fiction, he coins new names to go with these new possibilities. He calls the enormous range of environments governed by all the possible laws of physics the "Landscape." The near-infinite collection of pocket universes described by those various laws becomes the "megaverse."--Michael Weiss [link] I Am Skeptical, Burnt Sienna...  "Indigo" children, say women who carry a dominant "kooky ex-wife" gene, are the wave of the future: empathic, telekinetic, hyperintelligent, misunderstood, disruptive and evolved. The New York Times takes this diagnosis seriously enough to dribble on about it for two online pages, so I guess that means we'd better start acting nicer to breastfed 18 year-olds who wet their pants whenever a sparrow flies into a window -- because sooner or later, an Ian McKellan will rise up amongst them and destroy us all.
Indigo children were first described in the 1970's by a San Diego parapsychologist, Nancy Ann Tappe, who noticed the emergence of children with an indigo aura, a vibrational color she had never seen before. This color, she reasoned, coincided with a new consciousness. Are you, Alice, menstruating right now? What has that got to do with it? Back off, man, I'm a scientist.
"To me these children are the answers to the prayers we all have for peace," said Doreen Virtue, a former psychotherapist for adolescents who now writes books and lectures on indigo children. She calls the indigos a leap in human evolution. "They're vigilant about cleaning the earth of social ills and corruption, and increasing integrity," Ms. Virtue said. "Other generations tried, but then they became apathetic. This generation won't, unless we drug them into submission with Ritalin." There's a woman in the UK who's in PR whose name is Faith Popcorn. No shit. Dorie Virtue gets the slightly scuffed silver prize.
Yet Jasmine too is an indigo child, Ms. McCoy said: "I always knew there was something different about her. Then when I saw something about indigos on television, I knew what it was." Like many other indigos Jasmine is home-schooled. Ah. Say no more. --Michael Weiss [link] Jane's Defense... Milan Kundera has been called an unconventional novelist for good reason. Smuggled into The Unbearable Lightness of Being, as if narrative contraband in a fictional medium too repressive for his grand philosophical purposes, is the following set piece highlighting "American kitsch." It occurs in a section entitled "The Grand March" and concerns a variegated protest parade -- made up of intellectuals, academics and one peremptory starlet from the States -- aimed at scandalizing the Khmer Rouge:
Something was in the air. People were slowing down and looking back. If you knew nothing else about the divagating style of Kundera, and if you were born well beyond the Vietnam generation (and are decidedly glad of the fact and blissfully ignorant of that generation's tragic history), you would still be able to guess at the identity of the above "American actress," wouldn't you? While I think many of Rick Perlstein's notions about Jane Fonda in this London Review of Books essay are perfectly ludicrous and self-parodying (redeemed only by his final paragraphs which deal in the hazards of pop martyrology, to which he, as much as the author he criticizes, has succumbed), there is nonetheless something fascinating about what he calls the "cult" of Barbarella. Intelligent but also twitty. Susceptible to frequent coronaries up and down her sleeve, yet also miserably un- (or mis-)informed about the motives and tough moral stances of the noble antiwar cause she took up and acted as bubbleheaded megaphone for. Gorgeous and charming and witty (according to Jonathan Yardley, who's taken the trouble to read My Life So Far), yet also subject to nasty displays of unselfconscious embarassment, which also happen to be unmercifully languorous, as indicated by the very title of that memoir. (So far? You mean there's going to be more to remember later on, Jane?) Last year, the Fonda cult allowed thousands, even millions of anguished veterans and their sympathisers to hold onto their shaky faith in American innocence, while acting as the conduit for the character assassination of the Democratic presidential candidate. Theyre the men who served with John Kerry in Vietnam, the announcer said in the notorious TV commercial produced by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. And theyre the men who spent years in North Vietnamese prison camps. Tortured for refusing to confess what John Kerry accused them of . . . of being war criminals. The tropes come straight from the Fonda mythology. A doctored photograph was circulated (it showed up in several newspapers) showing Kerry on a speakers platform with Fonda. The picture was found to be a fake, but the association had already been planted. John Kerry with Tits: five syllables full of implications for the politics of gender, power and anxiety in America. Give a guy a thesis and a few thousand words with which to substantiate it, and even a hapless Vietnam nostalgic presidential campaign and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth will emerge "straight from the Fonda mythology." (Does the accusation that group made about John Kerry gunning a Viet Cong soldier in the back as he retreated into the surrounding jungle of the Mekong Delta also adhere to this same mythology? If so, wouldn't it find itself more attuned to Jane's own vibes than to those emanating from her naysaying "cult"?)
Hershberger writes in detail about these early months of Fondas anti-war activism. She never pulled rank as a celebrity. She sat on the floor of student lounges when she visited universities listening, mostly. She was drawn to anti-war GIs and former GIs, not revolutionary ideologists: the most working-class part of the movement, the unglamorous, empirical witnesses. She gave her first formal speech only when begged to do so, under the pressure of events, after four students were shot dead at Kent State in Ohio on 4 May 1970. She would appear anywhere she was asked, no matter how small; she stuffed envelopes, manned phone banks, moved to grey Detroit when that was what it took to get the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings off the ground, in which a procession of veterans described the atrocities they had seen or committed. I was a little surprised by her manner no dramatics, no hip slang, no affectation, a journalist is quoted as saying. She conveyed optimism and faith in the democratic process. She got a standing ovation. Hershbergers Fonda is not particularly radical, determinedly non-chic. "She never pulled rank as a celebrity" transcends even the Kunderaesque definition of kitsch and runs smack into all-out camp. I like that. What epaulets come with celebrity, I wonder... Perlstein pendulates from grandiose talk about the "loss of American innocence" into fodder for the sequel to Team America. I'd also very much like to know who "begged" Jane to give her first speech, and under what conditions he or she did so. This is Hollywood gutter romanticism mixed in with prolier-than-thou leftist sentimentality. Frankly, should we care if Jane was strategizing with Lo Duc Tho himself if her thinking was cheap and her rhetoric positively bargain-bin, as they indeed were?
Her visit to the pows provided the occasion. Fonda, who was carrying 200 letters from the pows families, was asked if she would like to meet any prisoners personally. All the captives she met were volunteers, all openly critical of the war. Of course this was the opposite of what the urban legends suppose: that they were tortured into seeing her. But that is the reason the urban legends exist. They are a prophylactic against the anxiety that these pows, the symbolic stand-ins for American innocence, had stabbed themselves in the back. That indomitable American innocence again. (And prophylactic implies it's going to get fucked sooner or later.) No mention, however, of what these volunteer captives thought of Jane after their heavily invigilated grok sessions with her, nor of how any opportunity to speak of their imprisonment to a fellow American -- be it to someone whose antiwar credentials they admired or some celluloid sob-sister high on her own supply -- would have been seen as a blessing, and not, ipso facto, an endorsement of the actress's particular intercession. When Maxim Gorky toured the Solovki labor camp in the Soviet Union, Potemikinized inmates that met with him -- one of whom, a child, was brave enough to attempt a recondite relaying of the truth, which Gorky was brave enough to dismiss at the slightest challenge from camp authorities -- were not necessarily tortured into doing so, either. It's what they understood as their first and perhaps only chance of getting word out to the rest of the world about their wretched slave condition -- even if this meant dealing with a notorious propagandist for Stalinism. --Michael Weiss [link] Who Discovered America?... I thought Leif Erikson did, a whole half millennium before Columbus. Now Chris moves to the back of the line, if this map, an 18th century copy of one putatively drawn in 1418, proves accurate. If so, then Admiral Zheng He, a Chinese explorer, got to the New World 74 years before the Italian:
 From the Economist:
The detail on the copy of the map is remarkable. The outlines of Africa, Europe and the Americas are instantly recognisable. It shows the Nile with two sources. The north-west passage appears to be free of ice. But the inaccuracies, also, are glaring. California is shown as an island; the British Isles do not appear at all. The distance from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean is ten times greater than it ought to be. Australia is in the wrong place (though cartographers no longer doubt that Australia and New Zealand were discovered by Chinese seamen centuries before Captain Cook arrived on the scene). The copy part is what will keep this an open issue, perhaps forever. Still, how much more exciting than ecclesiastical nonsense about what lies underneath apostolic robes in Da Vinci's "The Last Supper." --Michael Weiss [link] Gawker Dropping Bellow Refs... Fast on the heels of Virginia Postrel's defense of the literacy of bloggers comes a Great American Easter Egg at Gawker, complete with Nabokovian pun:
Stephen Hastings leaves The New York Sun; Augie marches in from the 30s to replace him. Nice, except --
His replacement is former marketing and circulation VP Augie Fields; Augie comes from Depression-era Chicago and has worked as a soap salesman and boxing coach. -- it was glue salesman and no boxing (dog grooming at one point, though). Still, I feel like a small, stuttering Dan Rather of new media derision just resigned somewhere. --Michael Weiss [link] Friday, January 13, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire The Tap Dance, Kinsley Style... The chief vice among intelligent liberals has always been the desire to puff out their chests and play at the kind of steely resolve that comes as second nature to their conservative counterparts. (This is why that gentle lion of negative and positive liberty, Isaiah Berlin, became a founding member of the "Three of Hearts" war-machine during Vietnam; it was as close as a Wolfson College don could get to real "action.") Michael Kinsley is acutely sensitive to this moral and aesthetic failing among his now oppositional sodality, and, as ever, he's the voice of reason calling for a new tactic in the war on Bush's war on terror:
The current debate about government wiretapping of U.S. citizens inside the United States as part of the war on terrorism, like the debate before it about the torture of terror suspects, and the debate before that one about U.S. government prison camps at Guantanamo and in Eastern Europe, are all framed as arguments about the divisibility of freedom. They are framed that way by the good guysmeaning, of course, the side I agree with, which is the side of the civil libertarians who oppose these measures. That is part of why the good guys are losing. The arguments all seem to pit hard practicality on one side against sentiment, if not empty sentimentality, on the other. There are the folks who are fighting a war to protect us from a terrible enemy, and there are the folks getting in their way with a lot of fruity abstractions. You can note all you want the irony of the government trampling American values in the name of protecting them (yes, yes, like destroying that village in Vietnam in order to save it). The hard men and hard woman who are prosecuting this war for the Bush administration can turn that point, rather effectively, on its head. If the cost of losing the war and the cost of winning it are both measured in the same currencyAmerican values, especially freedomthen giving up some freedom in order to avoid losing all of it is obviously the right thing to do. But hard practicality can easily be offset by something other than soft sentimentality. No protein is lost from the red meat arguments against unchecked presidential privilege if a keen study of history is replaced with the weepy "Live Free or Die" sermonizing to which Kinsley alludes as a failed strategy of liberal dissent, and which, it should not go without saying, is also employed by the Bushies whenever soft sentimentality suits their purpose in the opposite direction. Lincoln's constitutional tramplings during the Civil War appear, to all but the most toothless revisionists, as necessary measures given what was then seen as the larger and more exigent and hopefully temporary goal of preserving the United States. Bush has yet to prove that such an objective is even remotely at stake in his justification of warrantless wiretaps, retention of prisoners or "enemy combatants" without due process, and a whole host of other because-I-said-so measures brokered on the unpleasant necessities of war. I've yet to see anyone cogently make the case that a matter of minutes or hours -- the time it would take to get FISA approval for tapping a suspected terrorist's phone line -- can dramatically improve our side's chances in this conflict. (This isn't the same as saying that such a case can't very well be made; but the burden of making it lies on the White House and its defenders.) Most people think that the "ticking-bomb" scenario used as a basis for allowing torture is hysterical and fantastical in the extreme. Where does that leave the mega-immediacy of transatlantic chitchat, I wonder? And what can be done to ensure that we aren't getting in on a useful conversation at the last and direst moment? Kinsley goes on to ask, "Is the enemy in the war on terrorism really worse, justifying greater violations of civil liberties and human rights, than the enemy in World War II?" -- to which I would answer, yes, insofar as jihadists have zero battlefield regard for their antagonists (never mind for the nonce their ideological regard), whom they broadly define as every man, woman and child living within our borders. Let's remember that a few of those sections of the Geneva Conventions which Alberto Gonzales scandalously abjured dealt with the provision of scientific and research equipment for POW's: clearly an "outmoded and quaint" holdover from World War II, unless anyone thinks Khalid Shaihk Mohammed has, or should be allowed to have, a part-time interest in examining the genome of fruit flies. The debate about torture has more or less been settled by the president himself, who publicly claims to abhor the practice while privately giving his generals and soldiers in the field every opportunity to engage in it. The hypocrisy of this has been laid bare, and we now have the McCain Amendment and a very legitimate American outcry to make a universal moral determination of torture at, or very near, a "tipping point." Not so for warrantless wiretaps. The debate continues. --Michael Weiss [link] But Will He Get Along With Blackmun?... According to Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago law professor, Alito is "someone who is more likely to vote with Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas than Justice O'Connor." If confirmed, Alito will replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the court, making the probability that they will concur in a court opinion zero by necessity. --Nic Duquette [link] Zhirinovsky to Condi: Get Laid... Liberal and Democratic Party of Russia pol Vladimir Zhirinovsky may not see "soul" in Condoleeza Rice's eyes, but he spots a Tartarean hunger all the same:
Condoleezza Rice released a coarse anti-Russian statement. This is because she is a single woman who has no children. She loses her reason because of her late single status. Nature takes it all... Interestingly enough, Zhirinovsky comes up empty on Jeanne Kirkpatrick's ovaries-of-steel style of American politics. "That one is as inscrutable as a snow-covered muzhik." --Michael Weiss [link] Thursday, January 12, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Finite Jest... I have to admit, I feel a little sorry for James Frey. At least Ewan McGregor fishing through The Worst Toilet in Scotland for his quaaludes had a pleasant marine fantasy of serenity and inner-directedness to distract himself with. If one thing is going to drive the author of A Million Little Pieces into rehab for real, it's all the pressure. Oprah wouldn't have such michegas if she invited George Eliot back on the show. I haven't read Frey's novelistic memoir (movel? novoir?) and I don't plan to because the binge-and-redeem trope is so late 90's, and because the excerpts from it make Chuch Palahniuk look like Bertrand Russell. Still, in the blogosphere, you're either a megaphone for hoopla or you're hoopla itself. So away we go:
Based on all the evidence, it seems Frey's weird, macho fear of seeing himself as a "victim" led him to fabricate a life that was painful and extreme enough so as to explain the sadness and despair he felt. Instead of a crack-binging street fighter, ostracized by both his peers and society, the Smoking Gun investigation indicates Frey was more likely a lonely, confused boy who may or may not have needed ear surgery as a child and felt distant from his parents and alienated from his peers. He drank too much, did some drugs, got nailed for a couple of DUIs and ended up, at age 23, in one of the country's most prestigious drug-and-alcohol treatment centers. When Frey writes that, after one of his fictitious arrests, he hated himself, saw no future, and wanted to die, I believe him. I grew up in a well-off suburban household with loving parents and no clear traumas in my past. I was popular enough in high school, I joined the newspaper and acted in plays, and I got into a good college. I was also miserably, sometimes almost suicidally, depressed, and, from the age of 15, I was taking drugs and drinking almost every day. Frey must have felt that his real, very scary, and very lonely feelings would have seemed weak if it was only preceded by standard-issue suburban teenage angst. Denis Leary had a nice way of summing up the life and times of Jim Morrison: "I'm drunk, I'm nobody; I'm drunk, I'm famous; I'm drunk, I'm dead." The next time someone aims to profit off his addiction, whether genuine or bogus, I suggest David Foster Wallace be given the job of pelting the sinister methadone merchant back into submission with tennis balls. --Michael Weiss [link] Botched Hajj... Everybody talks about the haji stampede tragedy, but nobody does anything about it -- even though it happens every year. As just about every news agency mentioned after the hotel collapse a few days ago (but seem to be afraid to mention now), if you die on the hajj, you're a martyr and go straight to Allah's embrace. Cruel, perhaps, but it saves Saudi spending on better infrastructure for the pilgrims. --Nic Duquette [link] Irony Watch... Of the dramatic kind, specifically, when an unflattering biopic speeds to DVD with hardly a stop in the theater after its subject drowns his sorrows in drink, and its small audience watches late former Rep. Tom Delay hoisted with his own petard. O, Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow!
Representative Tom DeLay is in the toughest re-election campaign of his 11-term House career, a battle that might be decided not only by his legal problems, but also by the Congressional redistricting plan he spearheaded in 2003.--Nic Duquette [link] Wednesday, January 11, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Wheatcroft on Parliamentary Venal Fun... I had enate Irish grandfather who died of natural causes (his liver turned cirrhotic after years of marinating it in whiskey, naturally) and I have a summa sine laude diploma from Dartmouth College, so I hope it won't seem impudent or presumptive of me to claim some small sliver of knowledge about the merits of alcoholism. Geoffrey Wheatcroft, judging by the tonic sobriety of his writing, must also chase deadlines with a warm glass of something. How nice it is indeed to see him conjoining the dayjob with afterhours festivity. Here he is in Slate, on the sad decline of Charles Kennedy, a Liberal Democrat whose last name probably saw him as the shadow out from under which it had to crawl.
On Capitol Hill, as well as Westminster, drink once oiled the political process. "Cactus" Jack Garner, the genial Texan reactionary who was FDR's vice president in the 1930s and who famously said that his job wasn't worth a bucket of warm piss, confined his work to asking senators in to "strike a blow for liberty" over a flask of bourbon, so much of which flowed that Cactus Jack had a malodorous urinal installed in a corner of his office. If he wasn't the best advertisement for the virtues of booze, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan was a notably serious drinker who was also several cuts morally and intellectually above most of his Senate colleagues. I'd rather have a beer with Moynihan now than with Bush while he's still alive, to be perfectly honest. Never understood that recommendation of the lever-pulling volk: drinking is a serious business to be engaged in only with serious and interesting parties. The whole point, after all, is to loosen the tongue, which civilization keeps unpleasantly fettered at other times and to varying degrees of success. Bush doesn't strike me as someone that requires help in that department, even if he chose to resort to it again. Moynihan was brilliant but polite and a proven stalwart when it came to hooch -- this is the best troika of characteristics for a social popping of the cork, in my opinion. (Two out of three ain't bad, either. The teetotaler's cherry-popping experience can prove, well, fruitful. Recall the Market Snodsbury scene with the orange juice and Gussie Fink-Nottle, or "Spink-Bottle" as Aunt Dahlia once aptly called him, in Wodehouse.) Byron has the most salient and astute meta-toast on record; it comes to us as a floating, so to speak, strophe from the first Canto of Don Juan:
I would to heaven that I were so much clay Wheatcroft loses a step, though, when he gets to sex.
Did the American public know too little about John Kennedy's infidelities at the time? Did we know too much about Bill Clinton's? And how much did either matter? My late friend and compatriot Auberon Waugh said that Clinton's sexual recklessness was the only likable thing about the man, but William Ewart Gladstone put it another way when he, the most high-minded and devout of 19th-century premiers, once said that he had known 11 other prime ministers, of whom seven, to his knowledge, had been adulterers. He did not by this suggest that only the other four had been fit for high office. Americans -- but definitely not Europeans -- are what I'd call private Cavaliers and public Roundheads about these things. We all know who's got something to hide because everyone is really an open secret sharer, and yet shocked, shocked reactions to bedroom indiscretions are still yawningly de rigueur for the national "forum" (where the Penthouse variety is what most people would rather be paying attention to, anyway.) However, even this is changing. One of my biggest drawbacks as a State Assembly candidate was the conspicuous absence of sex scandal -- and not for lack of trying, I might add. It wasn't that I didn't get up to (if I do say so myself) what other politicians take a fall for doing on -- or underneath, or off to the side of -- the stump, but at my age and marital status it's called dating. BFD. --Michael Weiss [link] Concerning the Concerned... Today the Alito hearings, or at least commentary on the hearings in the liberal blogosphere, focused intently on the extent of the nominees membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton; Senator Kennedy has been hitting this issue particularly hard. My question: why? The group doesn't seem to have any relevance to Alito's qualifications, nor does it reveal anything already known about him -- he's very conservative. Why not ask about issues special interest groups actually care about? It's a reflection of the Looking Glass world that is Congress that its resident Mad Hatter, Tom Coburn, is the only guy who can say Roe without hiding it under a fake cough. It's hard to form an opinion of a guy who's so obviously uncomfortable in the glare of any attention whatsoever, but people who are concerned about Alito's politics don't seem to need to be. Unlike Rehnquist, who could wander out onto legal limbs when it suited his agenda, Alito's methodology seems to more algorithmic. Buried somewhere in his mind is a complex legal-Google with an I'm Feeling Lucky button that looks at precedent and statute and spits out the best-looking answer, and if that means strip-searching a ten year old, the law is the law. Without being excited about it, I can get behind having one meek jurispudential robot on the bench. He'll do. --Nic Duquette [link] Galloway on Celebrity Big Brother... They got Al Capone on tax evasion. Clinton went down for being gone down on. George is going to stick his finger in the wrong drag queen's peanut butter jar and that'll be that for him. New cycles of tragedy and farce for a baby '06. You can't make this shit up:
 This is from the Independent: "He's taken on Tony Blair and won a seat in Parliament for the anti-war Respect Coalition. He's taken on a US Senate committee and won. But has George Galloway's decision to go on the reality television show 'Celebrity Big Brother' damaged his reputation irreparably?" "Irreparably" has got to be the justest mot you'll see all month.
It is a busy week in the deprived but vibrant inner-city community of Bethnal Green in east London. Yesterday was the important Islamic feast day of Eid al-Adha, which was being observed by the majority-Muslim population while tomorrow sees a major parliamentary debate on the cross-London rail link, a crucial factor in the economic future of such a deprived area. And many local people are still gravely concerned about the implications of the Department of Health's decision just before Christmas to put a hold on plans to re-build the prestigious but crumbling Royal London Hospital on the Whitechapel Road.I'm up to loving other countries. Before noon. --Michael Weiss [link] Irony Watch... Daniel Gross, America's most consistently interesting business writer, posts on his blog about this news item:
Natural-food grocer Whole Foods Market Inc. said Tuesday it will rely on wind energy for all of its electricity needs, making it the largest corporate user of renewable energy in the United States. Notes Gross, "So Whole Foods is going to pay above-market prices for energy that doesn't burn fossil fuels, in the hopes that customers who like the policy will burn more fossil fuels by driving past several other supermarkets to get to Whole Foods." --Nic Duquette [link] Anthony Lane's Blah Year at the Movies... Every week not a Denby week is a good week by me.
If you were out of the country, or out of your mind, for the past year, you may wish to know what you missed. One glance at the titles of the most admired films, and you will wonder what the hell was going on. Brokeback Mountain, Broken Flowers, Crash: thats an awful lot of breakage. Yes, you might say, but those are fancy pictures. How about the rugged weekend viewers, hauling their good sense to the multiplex? What did they pay to watch? Wedding Crashers. Ouch. Broken Flowers was really more of a Man-Childe Donald's Pilgrimage:
The forthright Bill Murray of Ghostbusters (This chick is toast) was anesthetized into the Bill Murray of Broken Flowers, cast as an unfeasible Don Juan in search of former belles, and urged to sit perfectly still in a tracksuit, with the lights turned down, until we saw in him our common nullity. Ever see the only flick Murray directed, Quick Change? He robs a bank dressed as a clown, and when the hapless old geezer of a guard (played by one of Bill's ever-available relatives) asks him, "What the hell kind of clown are you, anyway?" he replies: "The crying on the inside kind, I guess." Don't you just love it when an actor's evolution is prefigured by one of his lines in a less mature film? (I bet that breathless guest-blogger Ross at Sullivan's loves it.) File Broken Flowers under "Interesting Failures." Although the scene with "Lolita" -- "that was quite an outfit you had on earlier" -- makes it at least worthy of a Netflixing. --Michael Weiss [link] Alito's Fetus Foibles... Up spake the intellectual titan of modern conservatism:
Judge Alito, evidently prepared for the question [about Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey], tried to dismiss the notion of "categorizing precedents as super-precedents or super-duper precedents." He said that cases like Roe, which have been reaffirmed many times, had a greater claim to survive further review. Super-duper precedents. I'd Bork him just for that. The Times should take a Strunk and White refresher, too.
With the dance over abortion having become well choreographed over the years... The old Potomac pas de deux with a partial birth plie. I loved this country at 9:30. An hour later, I'm not so sure. --Michael Weiss [link] Because It Isn't News Until We've Covered It Late... James Frey lies and Oprah cries. Also, Ana Marie Cox does have a gadget abuse problem with her BlackBerry. God, I love this country. --Michael Weiss [link] Tuesday, January 10, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Since Sliced Bread: Eating the Heel... I've made fun of some of the cranky ideas being posted on the SEIU's ordinary folks' idea contest, Since Sliced Bread. But now that the contest has narrowed to a few finalists selected by the union, there's one idea that leaps out from the expected Better, Faster, Stronger socialism most of the site has been bandying about.
Issue: Maintaining US household income in face of across-the-board global competition for income-producing vocations. Climbing the value chain ultimately fails - India and China can train more of any profession, including engineers, marketeers, CEO's, based on sheer population. We are not leveraging the US' strongest competitive advantage - efficient capital markets and entrepreneurship - which is stubbornly difficult for other countries to duplicate. US small and medium businesses (SMBs) provide 90% of jobs, yet have no efficient capitalization mechanism - so 90% of SMB failure is from lack of capital. SMBs are not efficiently serviced by stock exchanges, venture/angel funding, or local banks. This writer is correct. It's not just the developing world that can't match our financial markets; only London comes close to the depth and range of the New York/Chicago exchanges. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are quasi-federal agencies which buy home mortgages from local banks, aggregate them into large mortgage-bundles, then sell shares of the bundles, which are traded like any other bond on the open market. They open local housing markets to the huge reserves of national cash, and make mortgages an attractive, liquid investment. Sallie Mae does the same thing for student loans. While some of the details would need to be worked out -- I'm not sure how a Mac-like organization would handle small business equity -- opening up local, small businesses to the power of our financial markets is a breathtakingly beautiful idea. I hope, regardless of which lame health care idea wins the contest, that the SEIU runs with this one. --Nic Duquette [link] Nice Work If You Can Get It... The jury more or less decided a few years ago that Joe Esterhaus' ludicrous screenplay for Showgirls was little more than a huffing, tit-jiggling parody of a classic note on camp, as opposed to an earnest and thus instantly perishable footnote on same: the stripper with the heart of gold, destined for "mainstream" success after being beaten and coercively wised up by a heartless world. For my money -- and I've done the hard thinking about this -- the best line from the movie is, "It must be great to have a job where people don't cum on you." (Dennis Miller once said that he wanted a t-shirt with that written on it; I wonder if it doesn't carry more poignancy now, after the way MSNBC treated him.) Anyway, if I ever become a grown-up journalist, I'll rob and kidnap and kill to be able to cover the AVN Awards. Whomever Matt Ritchel is, he doesn't deserve this:
"Speaking in front of people is hard," Ms. Wynn said, cradling her award, called the AVN. What a weekend the Times Public Editor would have had had the award been more accurately described as a plaudit for Best Strap-On Double Penetration Scene Filmed on a Tuesday. I guess the joke's on us, after all. Elizabeth Berkeley's character is mainstream. She even completed that Masters in Comp Lit. Just listen to how deconstructionist these professional humpers are:
"Take the sex out of this movie [Pirates, whether Caribbean or not is unspecified], and it's Walt Disney," said Mr. Stone, who declined to give his real name... Her own pet peeve. Stormy's got a point, though. It's so predictably political, like with doctors: the internists hate the surgeons, the surgeons hate the pathologists, etc., etc. I've never been much for the blog reader-response game, but the AVN's have got me feeling adventurous. E-mail me your best porn titles (real or made up) and I'll post them Friday. --Michael Weiss [link] Monday, January 9, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire That Darn Jew... I have to admit that the trailer for Albert Brooks' Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World left me lukewarm, but then even The Muse, his worst film to date, was comparatively better than most of what comes out of independent or big-studio Hollywood. And this Times interview is worth the price of admission:
At the Dubai premiere, Mr. Brooks said: "We were told right before the screening that Sheik Abdullah bin Zaid al-Nahayan, who's the minister of information of the United Arab Emirates, would be flying in from Abu Dhabi to see the film. And people are saying: 'Do you know what this means? He never goes anywhere.' O.K., all right, good - now, I'm even more worried. I thought, oh, my God - if the sheik walks out, that means they all have to walk out together, you know? I asked the theater manager if he had a CD of 'Exodus' just in case - we could play the theme while everyone leaves. He didn't know what I was talking about." Yeah, he's only got the 'Exodus' remake 'We Jizzles Be Bouncin' by Ludacris on his iPod. --Michael Weiss [link] Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Shill Me... P.J. O'Rourke somewhere -- I think it was in his essay "So Drunk" -- describes a friend who got into a spectacularly well-remembered and detailed car accident that involved every form of offroad metallic involution and reconstructive surgery before all the raconteur fun could begin. Of course, the whole joke was that the feat was worth it just to be able to later indulge in all the raconteur fun. The din at parties turns into a baited silence. Pupils dilate and mouths go wide, or perhaps unconsciously lip-sync the expectant words of shock and awe coming from the center of attention. "And then the steering column gave and the dash caught fire, and you see this scar along my torso?" One thing we didn't need Steven Pinker or sociobiology to demonstrate is that boys will not only be boys; very often they make a robust attempt to never become men.
"Risk-taking - and thrill-seeking, which is related - is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, the force that created the modern world," said Frank Farley, a Temple University psychologist and former president of the American Psychological Association. "Willingness to enter the unknown, creativity, inventiveness are what brought us out of the caves." I've never been able to do shit like this and I can't tell you how much I envy those who do. In college I was on the Chernobyl-minted skin medication Accutane (the start, not the end of my problems, believe me) and I won't lie to you to say that I didn't feel a slight effervescent hope in learning that one of the more serious side effects, apart from Mayan-dry skin and liver damage, was clinical depression and the attendant loss of superego. Perhaps mimicking the Russian kid mentioned in the Times piece, one poor pepperoni-faced bastard wound up flying a small Cessna plane into the side of a building in a glorious -- if far too creative to be taken seriously -- attempt at suicide. And this was after 9/11. That's balls, assuming he still had any when they pulled him out of his minor and unfatal mess. So while Johnnie Knockville and the gang at FOX's "When [blank] Attack" may be tiresome and well past their pop cultural sell-by dates, at least they represent a breathing, semi-sentient lab catalogue of the male genome in progress. Also, they give us wusses something to talk about and something to cry about, in a manly sentimental kind of way. "You did what? God bless you." --Michael Weiss [link] The "Ketman" Option for Hamas... With Ariel Sharon permanently incapacitated and struggling for what is left of his diminished vitality, the questions abound not just pertaining to the future of Israel but to that of Palestine. This harrowing Times article demonstrates just how fucked up the Palestinian Authority is at present, fiscally as well as factionally:
The Palestinian Authority is in deep financial trouble regardless of how the elections proceed. It is spending almost its entire yearly revenue of some $1 billion on salaries, which were recently raised despite cries of alarm from donor countries and the World Bank. According to the authority's former finance minister, Salam Fayad, who quit in protest to run for election, it is essentially out of money, and unable to raise more funds from banks... "Change and Reform" may be seen as a quaint double-metonym for "War and Messianism," but don't mind too terribly much about that because it's always been the case. However, do worry about Fatah's sclerotic leadership because unlike Kadima on the flip side of Arik's wall, it's been around far longer and a vote of "no confidence" in it, at this stage, may be more definitive than any baby party's shambling first steps in the Knesset. One Israeli analogy affords another. Who is to say that there aren't by now closet pragmatists or moderates within the ranks of Hamas? Is everyone necessarily in total agreement with the monomaniacal platform of driving Jews into the sea? (This is to draw but one equivalence with Israel which is really a universality among all polities: that with time and repeated frustration even the nastiest conventicles begin to develop shades of moral and political complexity, often in the unlikiest of characters. Jalal Talabani's government meets at the table thuggish jihadist groups in Iraq under this hopeful pretext, and Hamas' very participation in Palestinian democracy means that Israel must necessarily negotiate with its most blood-bolted enemies.) The term "Ketman" comes from a medieval Islamic practice of progressive dissimulation under theocratic censorship; the pretense that one is still outwardly adherent to the old guard position while covertly insinuating radical or revolutionary ideas that will gradually morph into the predominant vanguard position. This is essentially what Ariel Sharon managed to accomplish before his ill-timed demise, and if all goes well, his schismatic "Forward" movement will grow disembodied from its popular founder and become simply popular in its own right. Is it really that utopian to ask if the same can't be pulled off by former hard-liners on the other side? And might there not be some means of trying to root them out, if they do exist? If so, it would be an excellent way to finally use realpolitik in the Middle East to a hygenic advantage -- by encouraging the more amenable successors of a dangerous and possible successor party in Palestine. --Michael Weiss [link] Beck on n+1... Our friend Stefan Beck at The New Criterion purees a smoothie out of the cognoscenti's latest "It" journal, and comes away smacking his lips in not very appetized fashion at all:
What kind of person -- other than a Teaching Assistant, who has no choice -- would subject himself to hundreds of pages of what Keith Gessen jokingly called a critical mass of stuff that nobody would want to publish? Who could endure all that flashy, empty-headed prose? Only someone very keen to reassure himself that hes wise, that hes a step ahead of the game, that he perceives and appreciates what others cannot. The kind of person whod happily walk the Trail of Tears from Manhattan to Red Hook just to drink Schlitz in an old factory building. A real intellectual. It can often be a sign of a guilty conscience, or occluded envy, to rebuke an intellectual circle on the basis of its collective aesthetic, its after-hours schtick. But there's nothing unfair or low about that "Trail of Tears" satire above; indeed, Beck hardly plays at satire over a face-value synopsis of the n+1's gang's own declared metier. I rooted for them when they debuted because I thought that their claim to want re-embody the long dissipated soul of the Partisan Review, while silly and nostalgic, at least hinted at a genuine concern for the state of intelligent inquiry and cultural criticism among twenty- and thirtysomething Americans. Instead, what we got was just another echo chamber of Derridan Dittoheads, or Herzogs without the charm, who think it's highly original and radical to compare the president's physiognomy to that of a simian. Their flagship issue cleverly reprehended The Believer for its faith in the power of permanent adolescence, but n+1 has sadly become an exponent of the same old bullshit under a different denomination. As Philip Larkin once had it about another "smart set" that was dangerously high on its own supply, "The papers call them the 'brains trust;' I don't trust their brains. No, not at all." --Michael Weiss [link] Friday, January 6, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire More Bad News for Bashar... Now the exiled vice president of Syria, Abdel-Halim Khaddam, says the Baathist regime murdered Rafiq Hariri to keep Lebanon under Syrian dominion. The response from his old bosses says it all:
"Khaddam has no power and no followers either inside or outside the Baath Party," Muhammad Salman, a former information minister and confidant of Mr. Khaddam's, said in an interview on Thursday. In other words, as fascists, we don't trust this guy. Khaddam ought to send a fruit basket to Damascus for such a sterling endorsement. --Michael Weiss [link] This Land Is Your Land... A stroke is such a blase way to be smitten, don't you think? In 15th century Florence, the Dominican monk Savonarola asked God to challenge his earthly appointment as a vatic deliverer of Christian reformation by striking him down with fire from the heavens if such an appointment did, in fact, prove false. When the hot stuff came not from above, rival Franscican monks suggested that the Frate -- who was also nominally the head of Florentine government after the ejection of the Medicis -- take the more proactive approach and walk willingly through a flame that was manmade. How he'd come out on the other side -- well-done or anointed tartar -- would determine the validity of his self-prophecied "mission." Yet the Good Lord, to say nothing of contemporary interpreters of his Will, seems to have lost a theatrical step somewhere along the Renaissance and Enlightenment and Postindustrial way. Ariel Sharon "divides God's land," says Pat Robertson, and is stricken with a debilitating stroke no different from that which took out not even the real Spartacus, but the guy who played Spartacus in the movies. This is anticlimactic and dull, to say the least. Moreover, the Rev. Robertson has got his red state scripture mixed up again:
"God says, 'This land belongs to me, and you'd better leave it alone." Woody Guthrie said that, you holy fool. Like Clapton, he was God to some people, true, but he also thought Jesus Christ was a socialist. --Michael Weiss [link] Another One Bites The Dust?... Mel Brooks' definition of comedy: "If I cut my finger, it's a tragedy. I'll howl with pain, I'll go to the best surgeon at Mt. Sinai, I'll tear at the cosmos. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole and die." Jackie Mason on the possible closing of the 2nd Avenue Deli: "A sandwich to a Jew is just as important as a country to a Gentile... If the pastrami sandwich goes down the drain, there's no hope for this country at all." When they're gone, who will care about the little big things? --Michael Weiss [link] Judt's Fall and Rejuvination of Europe... It might be stretching the fabric too thin to suggest that the good professor has endeavored a Gibbonesque task in his hulking, exhaustive study of postwar Europe (Postwar, it's called), a time that runs only to about 55 years. But then, the twentieth century was known for its telescopy; for days amplified into macrocosms, for decades compressed into weeks. Charles Maier is equally thrilled and wiped after the encyclopedic romp:
What makes Postwar particularly laudable, aside from a narrative stamina sustained over sixty crowded years and nearly 900 pages, is that it explicitly sets out to treat the two halves of Europe as a single continent. Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland belong to Judt's Europe as integrally as France and Germany. He tells the story of Eastern Europe's subjugation by the Soviets with detail and clarity, from the purges just after the war (notably in Hungary, where one-tenth of the population faced arrest, interrogation or far worse), to the thaw under Khrushchev, to the disintegration of state socialism in the 1980s. Yet despite his preoccupation with the ghosts of Stalinism, Judt is also attentive to the ways in which Europe's economic and social revival from the mid-'50s to the late '80s--the subject of the book's splendid middle sections--transcended, and often defied, any neat division between the capitalist West and the Communist East. The treatment of Europe as a longitudinally vast, variegated whole is right. All joking aside about Old v. New and coalitions of the willing and the shilling, there is a remarkable capacity among the former Warsaw Pact nations to reduplicate Western democratic models at a much faster clip than anyone would have expected, assuming anyone would have expected the disintegration of Soviet Communism. Prague isn't just the "Paris of the East" anymore -- it's practically Paris. While Warsaw, Budapest, Tallinn, etc. are all becoming their own "second cities" of economic expansion and cultural renascence. --Michael Weiss [link] Modern Drunkard on Kingsley... No one else did the hard thinking about the exact point at which "getting drunk" became "being drunk." Though no one should do without this sterling apothegm pasted onto the decanter:
When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. You are not sickening for anything, you have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at your job, your family and friends are not leagued in a conspiracy of barely maintained silence about what a shit you are, you have not come at last to see life as it really is.--Michael Weiss [link] Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't... Only Pat "My Remarks Have Been Taken Out of Their Equally Batty Context Again" Robertson would dare suggest that Sharon's debilitating, probably fatal stroke was God's punishment for withdrawing from Gaza.
"He was dividing God's land, and I would say, 'Woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the [European Union], the United Nations or the United States of America,'" Robertson told viewers of his long-running television show, "The 700 Club." Robertson really is made in the image of his God, then; when a head of state doesn't follow his political interests, Pat and his Lord reach for the blowdarts. But more staggering is the Israeli ambassador's response, unfortunately not quoted directly here:
Daniel Ayalon, Israel's ambassador to the United States, compared Robertson's remarks to the overheated rhetoric of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. One religious fundamentalist nutjob's God wants to "wipe Israel off the map"; the other's God is getting all Pentateuchy for de facto wiping a little bit off the map. Well, which is it? Can we poll the Hindus on this? --Nic Duquette [link] Thursday, January 5, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Poem of the Day... I'll be naturally selecting at the Museum of Natural History today, so this be the verse. Make of it what you will.
Love, we must part now: do not let it be Wednesday, January 4, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire New Criterion Down... The New Criterion's web site seems to be down, and their web host wants me to do something about it.
Looks like one of those new old critics has been measuring out the hosting fees with coffee spoons. Pay your bills, NC! I want to hear how much Roger Kimball hated MoMA's Pixar exhibit. --Nic Duquette [link] Tuesday, January 3, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Meet The New Crime Boss... Italians making nice with the Irish; Italians making nice with the Albanians. Who says the only thing that melts is the pot? I'm sure a few kneecaps and pinkies get tossed in there eventually.
Beginning in the 1990's, the Corporation, led by a man named Alex Rudaj, established ties with established organized crime figures including members of the Gambino crime family, the authorities say. Then, through negotiations or in armed showdowns, the Albanians struck out on their own, daring to battle the Luchese and Gambino families for territory in Queens, the Bronx and Westchester County, prosecutors say. They got priced out of Manhattan and Williamsburg, natch. --Michael Weiss [link] Notes on Wonkery... Buzz is Ana Marie is riding off into the sunset on her Butterstick in pursuit of a book tour. Her novel, or blovel, Dog Days has just been published. The replacement is rumored to be David Lat, former Article III Groupie from the saucy "Underneath Their Robes" blog the New Yorker wrote about a few months ago. (I guess that DCeiver guy is slated to do stealthy ninja neocon recon around AEI.) --Michael Weiss [link] That Can't Be Good For Business (That Can't Be Good For Anybody)... The most e-mailed Times article is still Larry David's unfunny New Year's Day column about gay cowboys. Worst of all, it rewards him for shamelessly pilfering from himself, lapping at the prime time spiggot of pop culture he stuck into television's sap phloem a decade ago. "Not that there's anything wrong with it" is the painfully obvious and bathetic punchline of this whole piece, which was probably written just to be able to cite it. It's also one antecedent away from a sad harlequinade of self-referentiality, which means that the Seinfeld finale didn't preempt the possibility of executive cancellation after all:
If two cowboys, male icons who are 100 percent all-man, can succumb, what chance to do I have, half- to a quarter of a man, depending on whom I'm with at the time? I'm a very susceptible person, easily influenced, a natural-born follower with no sales-resistance. When I walk into a store, clerks wrestle one another trying to get to me first. My wife won't let me watch infomercials because of all the junk I've ordered that's now piled up in the garage. My medicine cabinet is filled with vitamins and bald cures. Yeah, yeah. Who's this guy's agent? Tom Cruise's sister has more regard for image subtlety. Obligatory bald yuk coming 'atcha. And despite the zero sales-resistance mentioned above, a paragraph on and there's some smuggled Catskills schitck about Jew-gality over picking up a check. How can someone whose dovetailing plotlines reach new heights of comic ingenuity be so awful as a prose humorist? (His Passion of the Christ episode was contrived and belabored and absolutely genius.) I guess this is why S.J. Perelman's plays are long forgotten, while his New Yorker casuals are still anthologized. You can't have both. If you try, you get "Look at me! Look at me! I'm still master of my own domain! I'm still an unspongeworthy beddy beddy bad man! I'm on HBO Sundays at 11!" --Michael Weiss [link] Plus c'est la mκme chose... Marx went to the grave nursing some severe agita about the capabilities of Russian communism. He knew some messy elisions would have to be made between necessary and sufficient conditions, and you can't really time-warp from imperial peasant feudalism into an exploitive critical mass of embourgeoisment. So "Go West, young comrade" was the mantra of international socialism, even of its Russian exponents like Lenin and Trotsky, since the farther east you got the more nightmarish and groaning the revolution would be and the more the children of it would perforce suffer. "Permanent" revolution was the fingers-crossed safeguard on this problem, which indicated that Bolshevism would fail if German and French Social Democracy did. Now do the corpse calculus starting with Tito and work your way through Stalin on to Mao, longitudinally. Also consider the post-Cold War voltes faces that have occurred in these places. Yugoslavia went from socialism to national socialism. China down-shifted from communism to corporate fascism. And Vladimir Putin is showing that, despite unsavory innuendo about the good old days, he's really only a nostalgic for the "command" part of his country's former economy. Like a slumlord, he turned off the gas in the middle of winter, and all because the double vice of price-fixing for twilight puppet regimes was made single by the upstart election of Viktor Yushchenko and the precipitous nightfall on Ukraine's being one of those regimes. As our own head of state likes to phrase it, democracy is on the march -- only it had better bundle up tight.
Mr. Illarionov [Putin's former Kremlin economic advisor] said in a radio interview that Ukraine's subsidized rate was essentially a problem of the Kremlin's own creation. Gazprom had agreed to the $50 price in 2004, he said on the Ekho Moskvy radio station, to help a Kremlin-backed candidate in Ukraine's presidential election. Non-Soviet satellite statelets pay upwards of $200 per 1,000 cubic meters of gas. This means that by getting high-balled, Ukraine has officially popped its cherry (if you'll pardon the potentially unmixed metaphor) as an independent nation. Way to vindicate the materialist conception of history. Luckily, it was sublimated energy that caused the fuss last week. Had it been oil, the world community would have been mums. Lord knows the last thing we need are more pipelines of that stuff running willy-nilly through third world lands the Red Army once parked its tanks on... --Michael Weiss [link] Holy Shit... When was the last time you read an Op-Ed in the New York Times and agreed with every word of it? Joseph Loconte's "Nearer, My God, to the G.O.P." is a tocsin of political intelligence and secular decency for the infant new year. After skillfully chopping his way through some very ominous indications of how the establishment left plans to counteract the religiosity of the right -- chiefly by becoming it, in downier but no less sickly-shameful forms -- we get this:
Democrats who want religious values to play a greater role in their party might take a cue from the human-rights agenda of religious conservatives. Evangelicals begin with the Bible's account of the God-given dignity of every person. And they've joined hands with liberal and secular groups to defend the rights of the vulnerable and oppressed, be it through prison programs for offenders and their families, laws against the trafficking of women and children, or an American-brokered peace plan for Sudan. In each case believers have applied their religious ideals with a strong dose of realism and generosity. That's exactly right. If God-bothering bears any felicitous relationship to "activism," it's in the blighted parts of the world where UN resolutions and timorous interventionists fear to tread. (The very least that can and should be expected of these groups is that they monitor such brave evangelical counterparts to ensure that missionary work doesn't amount to exortion, as it so often has done throughout history.) I might have been slightly unfair in my opening sentence to this post: Nicholas Kristof recently acknowledged some unpaid dues to the devil, so to speak, and located what was salvagable in the metaphysics of William Bennett and Sam Brownback -- before running right smack into the necessary line between progressive and archconservative irreconcilable differences. But if you think a monopoly on holiness is held by the Republicans, think again. A few months ago a reverend named Jim Wallis made headlines and bestseller lists by trying to shove the parched humps of Democratic camels through the needle's eye of electability. (Mark my words, this guy is going to be Hillary's handpicked "spritual advisor" in '08, and the abortion debate is going to get a whole lot friendlier.) If the so-called opposition party has learned anything other than the worst lessons from two years ago, it will avoid filtering the treacle of the tabernacle to levels more amenable to correct-thinking constituents whose only fear is a sequel to George Bush. In Hollywood, the Dalai Lama's cuddly eminence is enough to make most liberals misremember the wised-up and worldly characteristics which they fall just shy of proclaiming as their own sacred entitlement to condescension towards "fly-over country," sometimes also referred to as that more colorful shibboleth of provincial stupidity, "red state America." There's more than a double standard at play here, since those wised-up and worldly characteristics belie a hypocrisy even less attractive than the Aderol-addicted DAR housewife, or the sulphuric homophobe with a major gambling problem which today seem like cliched social self-parodies. We know what to expect from this lot; it's those who routinely say things like "I can't believe the idiocy of my own country" that then go out of their way to prove their own case by embodying Exhibit A of it. --Michael Weiss [link] Monday, January 2, 2006 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire The Laker... Keats had a faun-like naivete, good humor and exceedingly early death to redeem him; and it isn't going too far at all to say that F. Scott Fitzgerald -- a big Keats man himself, who proved truth is beauty and vice versa in his own sad, poetic way -- was his modern reincarnation. Bob Southey is hardly remembered, if at all. Samuel Taylor Coleridge eventually made nice with Byron, so that Wordsworth is really just the one burnished monument to what the martyr of Missolonghi sneeringly referred to as "Lakers."
You--Gentlemen! by dint of long seclusion "What daffodils were to Wordsworth," said Philip Larkin, "solitude is to me" -- a nice compression of the worst of two worlds, and yet one that comes at the expense of Byronic romanticism -- extolling the fusion of the man of ideas with the man of action -- as much as anything else. (There's a lot to be said for flora and isolation, after all.) James Fenton on the Barker biography of the pastoral pimp:
What about Wordsworth's poetry? Barker is an unreliable judge. She is enthusiastic about his blank-verse tragedy, "The Borderers," calling it "always powerful, alternately shocking and moving." And she agrees with its author in attributing its rejection to "the deprav'd State of the Stage at present." But the fact is that none of the English Romantic poets succeeded in writing for the stage, although most of them tried. Not one of their works has since entered the repertory. A modern London audience that is happy to go to see Schiller should have nothing against "The Borderers" in principle. Mark Twain's empirical evisceration of James Fenimore Cooper was anticipated by this:
We learn from Horace, "Homer sometimes sleeps;" The Brooklynite... My friend Daniel Treiman edits this feisty partisan review, which debuted in March of last year and is up to its second issue. n+1 can't give you restaurants or tell you anything about slavery in that other colonial Williamsburg. Check it out. If they get enough subscribers, I'm told the The Queensisant is next. New York boroughs: they're the new faction fights. Only with more icepicks. --Michael Weiss [link] Text Messaging... A friend of mine whom I hadn't seen in a while was in town a few weeks ago and sent me a text message that read something like, "Mike Parkave soireee tom nite frum 7 to 9 cocktails and lively convo fellow travellers welcome." I have an oldish Sprint cell phone which is to this rampant new technology what the abacus was to the calculator, and so I don't see names listed on mobile IMs unless the sender is courteous enough to sign them himself. Instead, I get a phone number, which I then have to use to decipher who, exactly, is too fucking lazy to use the phone for the purpose for which it was originally invented. "Fellow travellers" tipped me off, as did the European extra "l" in "travellers," but I felt taxed into doing detective work just to figure out whose free hooch I'd be filching and in whose select Manhattan digs. Mystery solved -- eventually. Still, "text" is now a conjugatable verb, which means a state of affairs has grown unruly and made curmudgeons of many. People are proposing and breaking up through this emotionally void medium. Unblinking heads in jars is the goal, and we're already halfway there.
"There is something different about communications that are mediated by a piece of technology; it is easier to talk about difficult subjects, and that is both good and bad," said Amanda Lenhart, senior researcher at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, who has interviewed many teenagers about how they use technology. "You don't see the person's upper lip tremble. You don't hear their voice quiver. You don't get those external, non-textual cues," so delicate subjects might be easier to broach, if also sometimes easier to misunderstand, she said. You don't get those external, non-textual cues. "i cheated on you with your sister. sorry. she's right here. im right here. sorry. :(" --Michael Weiss [link] Unavoidable Double Meanings in Science... I did not know this until now, but at New Year's Eve they added a leap second to sync solar and atomic clocks. They should have had the Times Square ball bounce, or something. Anyway:
The group said more time was needed to form a consensus, and suggested that this year's leap second offered a welcome opportunity to determine whether change is necessary. More time is needed -- but only a smidgen. --Nic Duquette [link] Antonioni's Antoinette... I mean Sofia's. She's nuts like a fucking genius. (The trailer looks like what you see below but sounds like New Order's "Age of Consent.") Get ready for "How Soon Is Now" piped in over the October Revolution. Gorgeous scenery, though.
Saturday, December 31, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire "Russia!" at the Guggenheim... I caught it yesterday, as did everyone else in Manhattan. ("Oh, no one will be at the museums the day before New Year's...") There were some fantastic pieces, although the 15th and 16th century ikons left me cold; combine religious iconography where humans more resemble the aliens from Close Encounters with a soft fabric medium grandmother prefers, and you'll have everybody sprinting for socialist realism in no time. Talking of which, this was the biggest lacuna of this post-Cold War exhibition. Almost an entire century of Soviet art and I counted one mini-sculpture of Lenin ("confronting," in more of a Czech fashion than a Russian, yet another Spielbergian xenomorph, this time metallic), and one ironic rendition of Stalin as if Koba had sat for an Old Master. This was in the main rotunda; some of the side galleries, which were too crowded and claustrophobic to get into, may have broadened the selection (as indeed the program indicated they did), but this is to beg the whole question: why such slim pickings center stage, where the "theme" of the show ought to be as cohesive as possible? You can't really appreciate the satire of Sots Art unless you have good representation of the conventions being subverted by it. Space surely can't have been the excuse because there were two rings of the rotunda devoted to the dearly departed century. Jamey Gambrell at the New York Review of Books smells a rat named Putin.
An unpleasant suspicion hovers over the exhibition that the art and its history were secondary considerations for the organizers and that the main point was that the "exhibition was realized under the patronage of Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation." Was it all, in effect, a big advertising campaign, a mammoth photo-op designed to establish the bona fides of the new Russian patrons of the new Guggenheim global museum while providing America's former rival with a glamorous opportunity to exorcise fifty years of stereotypes (unsmiling commissars, the Gulag, the KGB, bad teeth, long lines, admirable but irritating dissidents, mafioso "New Russians" in leisure suits dripping with gold jewelry, commandos in black masks, tanks on city streets...)? Could be. But never underestimate the power of intelligentsia stupidity:
The twenty-five paintings from the private collection of Raymond and Susan Johnson, now housed in the Museum of Russian Art established by the couple in Minneapolis, are a random selection of lackluster realist canvases by official artists (including Gelii Korzhev, who is in "Russia!") that seem to have been rescued from the trash heap of Socialist Realist history. Nevertheless, the Guggenheim's Web site says that they demonstrate Next up: Some warm exegesis from Goebbels for the Guggenheim's "Germany! A Thousand Years of Laughs" --Michael Weiss [link] Wiretap Dance... The kerfuffle over Wiretapgate or whatever you choose to call it -- last night Hardball was referring to the headlines collectively as the "Bag O' Scandals," but I think they could be collectively called the "-Gated Community" -- has veered amazingly quickly from concern about the constitution to arguments about the usefulness of domestic spying. A wide swath of commentators from Mickey Kaus to Powerline to my esteemed co-blogger have been untroubled by the revelation(s) of domestic spying. I'm not, but I had frankly assumed it was happening, anyway. What concerns me more is that the searches without warrants are almost certainly unconstitutional under the Fourth amendment. You needn't care about your own civil liberties to want the Fourth preserved. Wanting the war on terror to be effective is reason enough.
''If they'd been smart, they would have only used [illegal wiretaps] to stop terrorist attacks from happening and not in prosecutions," said Michael Greenberger, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Health and Homeland Security in Baltimore. ''Defense lawyers are obviously quite alert to the fact that they've got to go back and look at this: whether their defendants were charged based on evidence illegally obtained"...My libertarian tendencies aside, illegal searches are an ineffective way to jail terrorists. A Hezbollah fundraiser, and others remaining to be seen, almost certainly will have their convictions thrown out on the basis of this tainted evidence. It's a get out of jail free card for the worst of the worst, and people will die for it. --Nic Duquette [link] Irony Watch... Sony has offered to settle the spyware scandal -- wherein it attempted to spy on users who might be downloading Sony's music for free -- by giving claimants free downloaded music. I wonder when Judge Alighieri will have a gig on UPN.--Nic Duquette [link] Friday, December 30, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire My Contribution to the War on Christmas... Who knew I was a redeemer? From Jossip:
From today's Corrections in Slate: And behold a black horse, and on him was a semi-educated atheist. And hell followed with him. --Michael Weiss [link] Spike TV's 008 Days of 007... For those of you whose New Year's is always a complete bust, Larry Summers' answer to the Oxygen Network -- SpikeTV -- is running a week and a day worth of Bond movies. Newsworthy would be that they're not exhibiting Bond movies, but since we get all our stuff from A&L Daily and Sullivan and Gawker anyway, no harm in pointing out the obvious. --Michael Weiss [link] But They've Been In The Neighborhood for 54 Weeks... After 24 Hour Party People, I wanted to open another Hacienda. After years of Cheers, I wanted one of those. After You've Got Mail, I wanted them both dead. Coffeeshop I've never considered because of... well, here, let Michael Idov tell you.
The dream of running a small cafe has nothing to do with the excitement of entrepreneurship or the joys of being one's own bossnone of us would ever consider opening a Laundromat or a stationery store, and even the most delusional can see that an independent bookshop is a bad idea these days. The small cafe connects to the fantasy of throwing a perpetual dinner party, and it cuts deeperall the way to Barbie tea setsthan any other capitalist urge. To a couple in the throes of the cafe dream, money is almost an afterthought. Which is good, because they're going to lose a lot of it. It's Mom n' Pop the way Tom and Katie are Mom n' Pop. --Michael Weiss [link] Thursday, December 29, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Why Won't My Imprisoned Oil Magnate Fuckbuddy Committsky?... If this article were written by Alessandra Stanley, Dostoevsky's prostitute with a heart of gold would surely not be "harked back to," although her neurotic underground man might make good on that appellation as a "sub" in a Moscow S&M dungeon. Welcome to Sex and the City, big Ruski style.
"Balzac Age, or All Men Are Bast ... " (as in bastards; the Russian short form is a common term here), a popular television program whose second season just began, may be a comedy about sex in a big city, but many aspects of the lives of its four female leads might be a bit of a shock to the fabulous quartet from Manhattan. Like how? you ask.
At first Sonia enjoys her life as a widow, taking young lovers for pleasure, but when the money runs out, she becomes a call girl to an oligarch who is sick of his Barbie-doll wife. She has sex with him in a dark, empty apartment, without seeing his face, and he begins to confide in her. Yay capitalism.
Yulia tries to comfort her, then cries when Sonia points out that she is in the same boat. Alla hires male strippers to clean up the apartment, and then all the girlfriends get depressed because they realize that if they were young and desirable, men would clean up for them for nothing. Leave it to the land of the midnight dialectic (and darkness at noon) to merge the shadowy sidestreet of American subtext into its sodium-lighted textual thoroughfare. Patty and Selma on The Simpsons once invited Marge to watch what was clearly a Sex and the City spoof, enticing her with, "You'll love it. It's about four single New York women who sit around and talk like gay men." Strap a couple of thongs onto those stripping Swifferers, and there you Gogol.
The hunky strippers in thong underwear washing the dishes and vacuuming the floor... And there you Gogol. --Michael Weiss [link] Moon Colonies Could Expand Property Tax Base... The EU has started launching satellites that will eventually form a global positioning system similar to the US military's GPS. The main point of the project seems to be pride, as there is no explanation I can find in any articles explaining why the system is superior to GPS except that the US is reluctant to let non-military users have more than 25 feet or so precision. But that's not all; after spending tens of billions of euros building the system, the EU can use it to levy taxes:
The precision and availability of the Galileo signal would facilitate the application of charges according to the distance travelled by a vehicle, along with other parameters. Ah, the romance of high technology. --Nic Duquette [link] Wiretaps and Moral Equivalence... When the Hungarian writer and dissident Tibor Szamuely was safely ensconced in London, as a new-minted citizen of the great nation of England, he claimed to have still had trouble falling asleep at night. It wasn't until he saw the sun come up that he truly felt "safe" from arrest by the Stalinist secret police. (They always came for you in the darkened hours.) Now, if one were looking for a serviceable definition of the psychological costs of totalitarianism, that might be a good place to start: the inexorable conversion of legitimate terror into justified paranoia as one changed hemispheres and countries of residence. It was not just the absence of civil liberties, it was the pervasive, round-the-clock fear of doing anything to even hint at the unlawful reclamation of one's civil liberties -- not to mention natural rights -- that attested to the state of the captive mind, a state that transcended time and space. To listen to some people, the United States is already a holding cell for such captivity. Ours is a republic of fear with multiplying encroachments on the free and easy passage of our lives, and no justification of wartime exigencies can be made because war is a shibboleth used to further the expansion of executive power. One collapsible absurdity of this assertion is that the preceding two sentences could not have been written if it were true. No media in such a country would be allowed to have out this discussion, with hysterical claims being made on both sides, from ACLUists, whom the recent revelation of warrantless wiretaps has only reminded that warranted wiretaps are a constitutional menace, to right-wingers, who see nothing that the president or vice president does as dangerous or arrogant. William Kristol is certainly no fan of the former lot, and can't quite be said to adhere to the latter one, either. Still, one form of hysteria has reminded him of another repressive regime whose nightmare history is elided by its comparison to present-day USA:
Consider Arlene Getz, senior editorial manager at Newsweek.com. She posted an article Wednesday-also after Gen. Hayden's press briefing-on Newsweek's website ruminating on "the parallels" between Bush's defense of his "spying program" and, yes, "South Africa's apartheid regime." Add to this the fact that the New York Times, which broke the NSA domestic surveillance story two weeks ago, held off on publishing what it knew for two years and held off at the mere request of the White House, which was worried about having the efficacy of the program diminished once terrorists were made aware of its existence. Now the Times has come out against warrantless wiretaps in tones not quite as histrionic as those of Ms. Getz, but nonetheless loud and clear and with the same prevailing worry of an overmighty state. Yet its earlier accomodation of the secrecy of the NSA program implies that it could at least appreciate the arguments in favor of it... This is a long way to go to Warsaw Pact Budapest or 80's J-burg. --Michael Weiss [link] Steyn on Tsunami Relief... At first I thought "Bongo" was a typo, but since it's reused as the name of U2's frontman -- and Time's 33.3% Person of the Year -- I guess that's just Mark's and Reverend Moon's way of being derisive... more derisive than one can be when confronted with a straitened SAT question-name like "Bono." He's right, however, that billions of dollars in disaster relief aren't just misallocated, they're pilfered by third world kleptocrats who aren't nearly as accountable, in first world bureaucrats' eyes, as are Americans guiltily claiming their tax refunds on donated income to tsunami victims. David Rieff on the Left has been banging on about this for years, too, much to the chagrin of the Girl in the Cafe, who finger-snaps her way into the War on Want.
Next time it might be easier just to eliminate the middle man and have Bongo and Sting and Sir Bob Geldof and Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney hold an all-star fundraising gala for the Indonesian Customs Inspectors' Retirement Fund. Or just give the frumpy F-listers who work in these hellholes year round a makeover. That way, help won't just be on the way, it'll be in the way. --Michael Weiss [link] Wednesday, December 28, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire It's Not The Load-Swallowing That Gets You, It's The Lie... It was when a woman in New Orleans began showing her tits in order to get Katrina rescue workers to pick her up that an old joke about The Onion finally metamorphosed into a starchild of cultural truism: we can no longer decipher parody from news. As if to make this concept even more involuted and "meta," the world's funniest satirical newspaper runs a syndicated sex column called "Savage Love," scribbled by a gimlet-eyed homo who just doesn't give a shit. Sometimes -- just sometimes -- the people that write in with their uncle-fucking, rabbit-wanking, necro-fecal-philiac troubles go ahead and do one better than the "front-of-the-book" staff. This week is just such a sometime.
I love my husband SO much, but I have this male friend at work that I just really click with. He is really funny and nice and witty. He was really down in the dumps a couple of weeks ago because his grandmother, whom he was really close with, had just died. He came into my office and I was talking to him about it and comforting him. I started hugging him, and the next thing you know, I was giving him a handjob. I wasn't even thinking about itI just did it. Then I honestly thought, "I don't want to make a mess in here," so I swallowed his come. Now I don't know what to do. We are still just friends, but I can't decide if I should tell my husband about the "incident." Can you help me? The reply from Dan is priceless, too. This guy's grandmother has died eleven times since the Carter administration. --Michael Weiss [link] And Now for Bob Geldof's Conservatism... Kidding! He's in no one's pocket. He's in no one's pocket. He's in no one's pocket.
Bob Geldof has defended his decision to join a Conservative party policy group on global poverty, saying he was "in no one's pocket".--Michael Weiss [link] Jeffrey Hart's Conservatism... Is more or less Goldwaterism, with just a wee rightward crank on the old stay-off-the-lawn curmudgeon dial. He had few fans at Nic's and my alma mater, and those he did have were mainly confined to the empurpled conventicles of the Dartmouth Review. A lot of the reptuation of that paper was undeserved, but a lot of it wasn't. Even those who managed to restart the engines on their arrested development had to play along with the heavily endowed exercise in turning back civilizational mileage. The masthead -- which didn't lack for closet progressives -- was simply "doing" DR (God and man at nap), while afterhours they were busy undoing it. (Billy Bragg's lyric, "He was trapped in a haircut he no longer believed in," is the aptest description of such a phenomenon, albeit from the other direction, and without an Alex Keaton cowlick in mind.) Still, never before had I seen so many cordovan hushpuppies tapping out the demerits of homosexuality as the upperbody limbs pouring out of salmon-colored iZods furiously gripped Brideshead Revisited and apple martinis. Hart places a higher premium on cultural conservatism (Homer: good, Toni Morrison: please) as opposed to social conservatism. But even for those of us who aren't yet eagles but liberal hawks, he does a service by tracing the diverse pinions of America's vast right wing. His own non-idealistic idealism -- free markets, tolerated abortions, skepticism of major global undertakings that have the words "nation" and "building" in the same sentence -- is what might charitably be described as the boldly snoring future of the past.
The Conservative Mind is a work in progress. Its deviations and lunges to ideology and utopianism have been self-corrected by prudence, reserved judgment as an operative principle, a healthy practical skepticism and the requirement of historical knowledge as a guide to prudent policy. Without a deep knowledge of history, policy analysis is feckless.--Michael Weiss [link] The Virgin Mary Did It... A cinnamon bun shaped like Mother Teresa (and baked with wholesome RU-486-blocking enzymey goodness) was "stolen" from the pastry shop where it was first annunciated.
The Nun Bun gained worldwide attention in 1996 when a Bongo Java customer nearly took a bite of it before recognising the revered nun in the folds of flaky pastry. The poor proprietor -- who was "in journalism once" and therefore understands how some might think he executed this as a coax himself, but really, his reporter chops have taught him you can't control the spin cycle on features like these -- was on the Today Show this morning, practically fighting back tears. Fortunately, he has his St. Christopher churo to fall back on. The Lord hath provideth well. --Michael Weiss [link] Tuesday, December 27, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Edelstein's Movie Picks for '05... Better squeeze that blood from the E-Stone while you still can. He leaves for New York magazine this week. Not that you care or anything, but here are my Top Five for Oh-Five (conveniently, five out of the seven films I saw this year):
1. The Aristocrats Syriana doesn't make the cut because I think Stephen Gaghan is the most overrated screenwriter in Hollywood, and as a director he's playing at Soderberghiana too much to warrant distinction. That Academy Award-winning verite style of his could profit from a few touches of actual verite. Note to all lefty conspiracy theorists trying to say something urgent about globalization and the energy industry: even in the shadow world of neocon foreign policy, it is impossible to have two oil companies whose merger is awaiting approval by the SEC advertise themselves by their conjoined brand-names before the merger has been approved and effectuated by the SEC. Gaghan's characterization demands only the subtlest shades of Crayon. Matt Damon had a better handle on geopolitics in Team America. George Clooney was the world's dumbest CIA agent: "Why am I being investigated?!" Uh, because your cover was blown and your life is about as expensive as that Members Only jacket you think passes for harmless Farsi-speaking American weapons salesman. Tim Blake Nelson's evil corporate executive was Yosemite Sam with a Milton Friedman bookshelf. Jeffrey Wright was the sullen arbitrageur looking like Groucho Marx waiting for a punchline to turn up. And Uday and Qusay Lite were the Middle Eastern princelings trafficking, so to speak, in the most time-honored Orientalist cliches -- were we watching a taut political thriller or a commercial for Two Tribes hummus? Of course the nincompoop scion who excels in fey menace would be in favor of a US-friendly status quo. Of course the elegant and intelligent reformist would be a smoldering anti-American planning to enrich "his people" by re-routing the emirate's pipeline to more democratically hygenic countries like Russia and China. Anything to stave off Western hypocrisy and corruption. No blood for oil gets away clean. The truth is out there. Or something. --Michael Weiss [link] More Mass Graves Found in Iraq... Dozens of decomposed bodies in Karbala.
"The remains of dozens of victims were found in the pit - some 500 metres from the mausoleum of Imam Hussein," Abdul Rahman, a Karbala police spokesman, told news agency AFP.--Michael Weiss [link] Schwarzenegger Hometown Renames Stadium... It used to read "Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadion Graz-Liebenau; now it's minus the A.S. bit. Why? Because he didn't give clemency to Stanley Tookie Williams. Axis power countries: they grow up so fast, don't they? --Michael Weiss [link] Cycles of Violence, Alms for Bombs... People who prefer to sweat their way through the moral ambiguities of the Arab-Israeli war by reading the New York Times would be shocked, shocked to learn how that paper of record originally covered Zionism as a political force. (Let's put it this way: Yasir Arafat at his ululating worst was given more tender moments of understanding than a former Viennese journalist named Theodore Herzl.) In more rarefied conventicles, however, there used to be a sly way of phrasing the question of repatriating European Jewry to a citadel-nation in the Middle East: "When the Europeans say, 'Jews, get out,' the Zionists offer to be the travel agents." Well, now the ironies about the wisdom and legitimacy of a Jewish "homeland" pertain only to small, unironical segments of the population. These include orthodox Jews in Crown Heights and Mea Sharim who spit on the Israeli flag because no "secular" Jewish state will ever be lawful in their eyes; radical leftists who see the founding of the state as globally sanctioned irredentism that came at the expense of Palestinian dispossession; and Palestinian terrorists who routinely board buses and blow them, themselves and their passengers to smithereens. Clearly the last category is the most worrisome, and the major question has become, How do we stop this? Edward Rothstein of the now very correct-thinking New York Times is skeptical of Steven Spielberg's solution:
How does he propose to undermine terror? Simple: by eliminating injustice and increasing understanding. Mr. Spielberg has said that he will be buying 250 video cameras and distributing them to Palestinian and Israeli children so they can share films about their own lives. Perhaps there will be peace, then, at the end of that? Somewhere water ripples in a glass. What's that? The elimination of injustice and increase understanding. --Michael Weiss [link] The Tags Are Red Because We're Hemorrhaging... A while back I noted that General Motors was worth barely $20 billion, about as much as video game developer Electronic Arts. After sliding 6% yesterday and 4% today, the total value of GM stock is now worth $10.7 billion. For purposes of comparision, the market value of condiment maker H.J. Heinz Co. is $11.4 billion. --Nic Duquette [link] Tuesday, December 20, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Comments Down... The TWU comments page is down, after being spammed with the message, over and over, "ROGER TOUSSAINT, SADAM HUSSEIN AND OSAMA BIN LADEN LOVE YOU!!!!!!!!!!" --Nic Duquette [link] The Strange British Palate... Today the BBC runs an article analyzing whether life imprisonment without possiblity of parole is "cruel," and wanders into some strange causal territory.
The Howard League for Penal Reform calls whole-life [imprisonment] cruel... The system can make people into criminals. But people become zombies out of their own initiative. --Nic Duquette [link] Strike Looks to be a Poor PR Move... Via Gawker, Politicker notices that the comments on the TWU's strike blog are genenerally not very favorable to the union, and culls some highlights; but I think he missed some of the best ones.
" Hey guys this is Bono. Do you know all of Africa has AIDS? AIDS! and you are fucking striking like a bunch of limp dicked pussies. I hope you all go to Africa and get gang raped by 4 large black men with advanced HIV. Those come with a blanket sic. And then there's this. --Nic Duquette [link] Rooting for the MTA... Given that the MTA caved on every issue except the pension contributions of future employees -- including raises and age-55 full pensions -- it's apalling that the transit union would not even postpone a strike. Of course, Toussaint is painting their course of action as a strike for all working-class people. What a load of crap.
Christopher Williams, a 44-year-old maintenance worker, was waiting on the corner of 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem, wondering how to get to his job at 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. He had gotten up at 4 a.m. instead of 6 a.m. because he anticipated problems. The union bosses are calling this strike not because the contract offered them was unfair, but because conceding future pension payments will undermine their own power. It has nothing to do with the welfare of their constituents. If anything, it's hurting the working class to bolster their own careers. If this strike lasts, it will deliver a shock to the New York economy that will wipe out several working-class jobs. I hope the MTA sticks to its guns. --Nic Duquette [link] Monday, December 19, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Creative Destruction... If every advertisement were as good as this, I would buy a TV. Unfortunately, Gap didn't even use the version I'm linking to. --Nic Duquette [link] Nothing Says Happy New Year Like Getting Evicted in Canada... I don't think this couldn't possibly be a scam -- nobody looking for a jackpot would be looking for deep, gullible pockets in Buffalo. If you have about $US 67,000 to invest in rental property, this poor woman sounds like she could use your help. Could make a great Christmas present for the would-be Donald Trump in your life. --Nic Duquette [link] Peas In Our Time... Tony Blair handed a bigger piece of the pie to the EU in return for astonishingly small potatoes. Finance Minister Gordon Brown is suffering sour grapes.
The Treasury is said to be "quietly fuming" about the deal agreed by Blair, which will see Britain paying 60% more to the European budget and the UK rebate cut by £1 billion a year for seven years, in return for a mere review of farm subsidies. Nobody had expected to see an agreement in Brussels sprout, as the Eastern bloc countries balked at a cut in development pork. More here. --Nic Duquette [link] Friday, December 16, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire The War on Christ(mas)... Benny Hill-style. (Courtesy of now-defunct Radar magazine):
 E's not 'uh messiah. E's a very naughty boy! --Michael Weiss [link] The System on Trial... As it should be:
Judge Metin Aydin's insistence that the ministry first approve the case against Orhan Pamuk for insulting national honor is forcing Turkey's politicians to grapple with whether they are willing to press forward with a high-profile trial despite opposition from the European Union. Bertie Ahern furiously waiving pomegranite price support vouchers and giving the judge the Evil Monkey stare. That'll do it, all right. --Michael Weiss [link] Him? Oh, He's Nobody... Working the dimmer on post-electoral afterglow, the media announced today that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was captured last year by Iraqi security forces. And released last year by Iraqi security forces.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, America's most wanted man in Iraq, was arrested last year but released because his captors did not know who he was, an Iraqi government minister has claimed. Must have been the "Rock Out With Your Cock Out" t-shirt that threw 'em for a loop. --Michael Weiss [link] NSA Wire Taps... See what happens when I make myself a hostage to fortune and resort to vicarious lefty baiting of John Burns? A five-page New York Times expose on how the most covert intelligence agency of all is now listening in on Americans' phone conversations, without having to go through the ordeal of obtaining warrants. Civil liberties and Fourth Amendment concerns abound. More important, the NSA charges $0.50 the first minute, $1.99 each additional minute -- and it's mainly fat trailer park housewives doing all the raspy breathing on the undeclared other line.
The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted. It's words like "Traditionally" in the above context that bothers me the most. It's fine to pretend we don't know that our government snoops on foreigners making domestic calls in their own countries. The Main Street barricades are only thrown up and ACLU cris des coeurs are only heard when a Vonage user hitting "Send" from Pensacola to Aleppo becomes a transcript dialogist in some sub-basement in an unprepossessing building in Virginia. A number of Congressional Democrats -- including House Intelligence Committee Chairman John Rockefeller, who first signaled his agita with the breadth and scope of unmonitored conferencing -- have known about this since its inception in 2002, which of course doesn't scupper the chances of a gleeful Dubya pile-on. I can't quite see this as newsbreaking as it's surely going to be. (Oh, the foul-smelling fan blades whirring in the blogosphere this morning... I don't envy whichever one of my colleages has round-up duty on Slate today.) Our government is already entitled to know how much money we make, where we make it, how many people live with us (and by extention, whom we're not sleeping with), what chemicals we put into our bodies, what books we check out of libraries, what websites we visit, where we travel to when we leave the country, etc., ad infinitum. Ethical and legal justifications can be found for all these invasions of privacy. On a day to day level, how do they affect a citizen's psychic well-being, and senses of freedom and autonomy? If intelligent members of libertarian and liberal and conservative groups can debate the modern relevance, original intent and implied nuances of the Second Amendment, can and should not the same be done for the Fourth? Especially when this country finds itself at war against an antagonist perfectly fitting the description of what Alexander Herzen in the 19th century adumbrated as the worst nightmare for civilization: Genghis Khan with a telegraph. One piece of information you needn't feel possessive of: The same people who shrieked that the public had no right to know what a CIA agent did at her desk all day will now be shrieking that the public has every right to know what an NSA agent does at his. And no contradiction or irony about this fact will be made the acquaintance of. --Michael Weiss [link] Pamuk's Trial... Sorry, what with Iraqi elections and freezing ice storms and backlogged book reviews, I completely forgot to write about the legal travails of Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist on trial for discussing the Armenian and Kurdish genocides of World War I, a subject that qualifies -- unless one sticks to the novelist's metier of fiction, and not the historical kind -- as "insulting to Turkey." Yes, well, this "case" pretty much adjudicates itself. Pamuk has a rather shrugging and stolid piece in this week's New Yorker. And here is the BBC on this underreported farce:
Olli Rehn, who oversees Turkey's moves to join the EU, described the trial as a litmus test as to whether Turkey was committed to freedom of expression. I've used this virtual soapbox before to argue that Turkey ought to be admitted to the EU because its repressive lunacies and post-Kemalist Islamic retrogressions are anathema to internationalization, and because these things are not going to diminish themselves without external influences. (As far as these go, the 101st Airborne is a close third to the euro and pettifogging legislation from Brussels about the shape of exportable bananas and whatnot.) However, it might not be too hysterical to suggest that the amount of that per diem fine exacted on striking transit workers be instead exacted on Ankara: $25,000 for the first day of Pamuk's trial, and doubling every day consequent until he's acquitted and reimbursed for his legal expenses and given state funds with which to promote his next book, tentatively titled, The Zionist Bellydance Verses. --Michael Weiss [link] The Next Stop Is... Le Revolucion!... Stand Clear of the Closing Doors, Please The New York City Transit Workers Union has a leader named Toussaint who speaks in man-has-no-property-in-man Paineisms like this:
"They have to get away from the notion that in this round of bargaining the T.W.U. will give up its young, will give up its unborn," he said. The union insists that the MTA is hiding a $1 billion surplus and trying to saddle its workers with unfair premiums on health care. Additionally, pensions are not to be increased (to the mere level of current salary) or made available earlier to those who now run perhaps the highest daily risk of losing their lives in a terrorist attack. And then there's this ridiculous and outsize penalty against a worker who dares resort to the only time-honored method of improving his condition (sorry, I'm in the middle of the Eighteenth Brumaire): The state's Taylor Law of 1967 bars strikes by public employees and calls for a fine of two days' wages for each day on strike. The city has asked a judge to issue an injunction that would fine the union $1 million and each worker $25,000 on the first day of a walkout, with the fines doubling every day thereafter. $25,000 for the first day and doubling every day after that. What's the average salary of an MTA worker? A strike lasting one week would cost each one $3,200,000. At that rate, it would take 312.5 transportation personnel to double the Authority's current surplus and thus replace every subway conductor and bus driver in the metropolis with androids or unemployed Baathists or Pataki's Greek relatives or whatever. I'd rather walk. --Michael Weiss [link] Good News In Iraq - That Can't Be Good... Ariana Huffington, Howard Dean, Kos, Janeane Garofalo, Josh Marshall: look no further, the new twilight struggle has commenced. With torture on the wane and executive self-criticism on the rise, the days ahead only appear cold and dark, comrades. But ours is not the nature given to the easy concession of despair. There's a new serpent in the garden, and - wouldn't you know it? - he has been here the whole time. Someone has got to investigate who's breakfasting with John Burns at the St. Regis. He claims to be in Baghdad, but can we really be sure? Has anyone verified this with credit card receipts, travel stubs, etc? Surely Wonkette can at least train the Butterstick PandaCam onto this Chalabiesque wraith to track his movements. I mean, there must but some shady, neoconnish conspiracy behind transmissions like these:
Only months ago, the prospect of crowds of voters lining up in Adhamiya and hundreds of other Sunni neighborhoods across the country would have seemed illusionary to American officials and military commanders who have been asked to find a way toward political stability here, and toward the start, sometime in 2006, of a withdrawal of United States forces. Chocolates and roses and fairy fucking gumdrops from heaven all over again. Note the conspicuous absence of Uzi-toting Shiites drenched in lamb's blood and claiming to be the reincarnated twelfth imam. Puh-leeze, Burns. Who you trying to fool, anyway? --Michael Weiss [link] Thursday, December 15, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Black Gold Rush... On being asked for a list of famous historical events to which he would have liked to have been a party, Vladimir Nabokov cited, somewhere around the bottom, "The Russians leaving Alaska, delighted with the deal. Shot of a seal applauding." That's why he's the Sage of Montreux and Greenpeace is just a throwaway joke on South Park ("Hippies... they try to save the world but all they do is smoke pot and smell bad.") Still, those seals are now giving every actual or solecistic Caucasian around the joint the finger. Home to humiliated Jewish doctors from Brooklyn, lesbian cruises, and whales more and more diagnosed with voyeurophobia, the state of Alaska has also, on occasion, been known for its oil. At least the prospect of its oil, if only those damned dirty apes or caribou or whatever would let us the fuck drill for it. There's a teensy schmeken of hypocrisy in les bien-pensant who think that House of Bush, House of Saud is the last word on US energy policy, yet who maintain that any and all efforts at becoming energy self-sufficient -- which don't include sticking a Flexi-straw into the eye of the sun and sucking hard -- are off-limits. George Will sees flaming Commies everywhere, and it's for the best that he's been guarding his precious bodily fluids as just a precautionary measure since the Berlin Wall came down. However, like the hedgehog of legend, or even some brighter caribou, he is right about one small thing:
Area 1002 is 1.5 million of the refuge's 19 million acres. In 1980 a Democratically controlled Congress, at the behest of President Jimmy Carter, set area 1002 aside for possible energy exploration. Since then, although there are active oil and gas wells in at least 36 U.S. wildlife refuges, stopping drilling in ANWR has become sacramental for environmentalists who speak about it the way Wordsworth wrote about the Lake Country. But in his winger worrying about the "collectivist" tendencies of the modern environmental movement, Will is pushing against an open door. WWMD: What Would Marx Do? Drill away, is the answer. --Michael Weiss [link] Esquire's "What I've Learned"... Self-help responsibly. Friends don't let friends misuse romantic celebrity nostalgia. Salman Rushdie:
"I left college in 1968, and Midnight's Children was published twelve years later. In between, I was essentially floundering about. I worked in adveterising two or three days a week in order to have the other four or five to stay home and write. Advertising was very tempting because they were cosntantly trying to bribe me to do it full-time. When you've had no success as a writer, the bribes start looking good. You start thinking, Who am I kidding? I think I want to be a novelist, but I'm not getting anywhere, and meanwhile her are these people offering me a comfortable living to do something that I actually can do. "Don't be an idiot!" a voice says. The thing that I think was very brave of my younger self was that he decided he would be an idiot. Just persevere. That feels brave to me: deciding that I'm going to damn well be this person that I've set my heart on being. Tony Curtis:
It's not hard to understand America's fascination with Marilyn Monroe. She was the first girl to wear see-through blouses. I met her in '49 at Universal. I was already under contract. She was looking for a contract. I must've been twenty-three or twenty-four. We met a the stuido and started to go out. We were together for six or seven months. Steady. Fucked our heads off--you'll excuse the expression. At the time, nobody knew how big she'd become. I never felt her figure was so proper; I thought it was a little lumpy in places. She was a redhead back then, and at the time she seemed no different from al the other young women with nice knockers trying to get into movies. But then she developed that stupid-woman--no, I don't want to call it that--it was more like a naive, little-girl quality. In movies, she started to talk slowly, as if she was thinking of the words she was going to say, and that became her magic. That and the see-through blouse fit together perfeclty.--Michael Weiss [link] The Vote... Half the daily attacks and an estimated turnout of 11 million (70 percent of the country).
For a day, at least, many Iraqi Sunnis seemed won over, if not to the American presence in their country, then to the idea that they could realize their interests by the ballot and not the gun. The big Sunni turnout was helped along by the declarations of several insurgent groups, like the Islamic Army, that they would refrain from attacking polling centers. Even a declaration by several hard-core militant groups like Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia denouncing the election included no threats to attack on election day. My guess is that Al Qaeda is waiting to evaluate the country's interest in democracy; if turnout was poor, they'd have considered that a sign of victory, that their intifada was working. But if all early indicators prove accurate and these elections come off without a hitch, we can still expect another surge in violence as Zarqawi and Zawahiri and Co. realize they've got a long way yet to go in winning "hearts and minds." Still, it's nice to know we never had to win these ourselves (another fact which makes US propaganda in native newspapers scandalous and ridiculous and self-defeating.) The Iraqis hip to their own autonomy just fine. --Michael Weiss [link] Irony Watch... Borat -- one of British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's ethnicity-bending personae -- has made plentiful headlines in the past few months for arousing the ire of the Kazakhstani government. Borat is portrayed as a Kazakh B-list celebrity and is used by Cohen to satirize racism, as well as to mock the central Asian backwater country, from boasting that Kazakhstan had raised the age of consent to eight to getting a group in a bar to sing "Throw the Jew down the well so my country can be free." But a presentation at the MTV awards finally angered the Kazakhs enough to shut down his web site, borat.kz, and precipitate a lawsuit.
Cohen riled Kazakh government officials last month when he was host of the MTV Europe awards in Lisbon. He was accompanied by a rumpled group of low-kicking performers, who milled below a giant sign: "Official Kazakhstan Government Dancers." By the time the show ended, he had introduced a one-eyed, drunken Kazakh pilot, insulted Uzbekistan and showered Madonna with effusive praise: "That singer before me. Who was it? It was very courageous of MTV to start the show with a genuine transvestite. He was very convincing." Cohen has played the situation masterfully, appearing as Borat in a video approving of Kazakhstan's decision to "sue this Jew." But the last laugh may be on the first feature length Borat film, which decided to recreate Borat's ancestral village in Romania -- and not because Kazakhstan didn't offer to let them film.
In the meantime, Kazakh officials have invited Borat to visit to his would-be home. Mazur, who could not be reached for comment, has told others that the production group did consider going to Kazakhstan. But technical problems prevented such a visit, Mazur said in an interview with the unofficial fan Web site, Borat Online. Instead, the group went to Romania to create Borat's mythical home village. So: (1) Cohen's entire act is built around pretending to be a grotesque parody of an alien ethnicity, either rapper Ali G or Borat, and using that character to expose people's racist preconceptions. (2) Kazakhstan was selected as Borat's target because it's especially obscure to most people and a holdout for the unprogressive attitudes Cohen wants to target. (3) Cohen isn't filming a Borat movie in Kazakhstan because Kazakhs don't look white enough. I give Cohen's career another two years before the hypocrisy implodes him. --Nic Duquette [link] Wednesday, December 14, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Counter-Insurgent Insurgents... Whether or not tomorrow's election in Iraq goes well or badly, one bit of good news has already come out of it, via the BBC.
In fact, even the insurgents are split over whether or not to take part.The Iraqi insurgency has always been a collection of independent groups with conflicting ideologies who all happened to share an interest in sowing mayhem; there is no unitary body to divide. Still, if democracy itself becomes a wedge issue, we win. The Zarqawists cannot continue without material support from the Saddamists. Better yet, once in the democratic process they will push hard to get Iraq's security established in domestic forces so they can kick us out. --Nic Duquette [link] Tuesday, December 13, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire The Pros of Neocon... Well, that's that. One straw house was left to fall, and it has done. A.J.P. Taylor, can you hear me now? The New Statesman, former literary-political journal of Britain's Trotskisant Left, publisher (at the same time) of Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, James Fenton, Julian Barnes -- has a review entitled, "Neoconservatism: why we need it." We all know the English can't hold their irony, but woss going on here?
Tony Blair's distinctively neoconservative foreign policy preceded that of the Bush administration - it did not follow it. His leadership on air strikes against Saddam Hussein in 1998, the turning-point interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone, and the post-9/11 conflicts of Afghanistan and Iraq have been - from the point of view of neoconservatism - exemplary . . . What Blair has resuscitated (particularly during Kosovo and Sierra Leone) is the sense that Britain can lead, not follow, global trends in foreign affairs - that, as a global power, Britain's interests are best served not by selfish isolationism or abnegation of responsibility, but by being a world leader with a humanitarian urge. Has not that very same enchanted snow globe been dashed to shards on the jagged rocks of realpolitik? Of course not:
I cannot believe that Gordon Brown, if he becomes the next prime minister, will seek to withdraw British troops prematurely from southern Iraq; nor do I think his natural instincts in foreign policy are those of a Douglas Hurd/Malcolm Rifkind realist - both of whom, as foreign secretaries in John Major's cabinet, stood pat on Bosnia. And equally, I doubt that David Cameron, if he were to be elected prime minister, would return to that discredited passage in his own party's history: he voted for the invasion of Iraq and appears to agree with the pro-interventionist line taken by Liam Fox, the incumbent shadow foreign secretary. This past fall I attended the New Yorker Festival's Town Hall meeting on Iraq. This was right after Hurricane Katrina and the definitive start of Bush's nadir with public opinion. After much chivvying from the likes of Mark Danner and George Packer and Bob Baehr (a cynical CIA agent who is almost intelligently designed to meet the business end of a boiled-over Harrison Ford's fist), and after much seat-shifting from Mssrs. Woolsey and Feith, the question became: Is Neoconservatism a Dead Ideology? The answer was yes, but what, exactly, is neoconservatism? Advocacy of rescue operations for Sudan, Sierra Leone, Bosnia and Rwanda? "Zero tolerance" on acts of genocide? Or "wars of choice" with scanty troop committment and lousy postwar planning? Which is to imply that "wars of choice" without those things are a-okay, or at least entertainable. There's no domestic agenda to this ideology because it now encompasses everything from the flat tax to universal socialized healthcare; gay marriage to school prayer; Vince and Jen to Brad and Angelina. When Susan Sontag made her famous PEN speech in the late Eighties, warning the American Left against a febrile anti-anti-Communism, a writer for the Soho News (or was it the Village Voice?) described her as playing at "Norman Podhoretz with a human face." That was nasty then, and no less so now. But given the curious alignments of late -- alignments which have still held despite the one true non-neocon's bungled intervention in Iraq -- is there not at least a hint of truth to that calumny? Lacking a Tennis Court Oath or Platform of the Left Opposition to call its very own and thus codify neoconservatism, and because its parameters are and shall remain broad and easy, like Irish on St. Patrick's Day, everyone's conscript to the cause. --Michael Weiss [link] Radio Killed the Radio Star... I'm generally conflicted about satellite radio. I first listened to XM on a four-hour road trip three months ago, and my expectations were surpassed at the quality and breadth of its programming; some of it was terrible, sure, but for the most part the disc jockeys did a good job silently picking music I hadn't heard and that I did like. At the same time, it seems a bit much to pay $15 a month for a service that requires an expensive piece of electronics up front to listen to, and which until recently was not available using a handheld device. (Sirius' portable device can't even receive a signal; it records your favorite channels like an iPod for later use). Still, as free radio becomes more unlistenable I expect satellite radio to do pretty well, mostly because both providers are willing to take outrageous risks. XM announced today that it's contracted ur-folk-rock mystical hermit Bob Dylan to host a weekly hour-long show, playing songs of his choice, interviewing special guests and even taking emails from the public. I have no idea what convinced Dylan, who normally loathes giving interviews let alone conducting them, to become a media personality. It surely involved a breathtaking sum of money and creative permission to play an hour-long block of "Boy Named Sue" on continuous repeat if that's what he feels like doing. More heavily discussed has been Sirius satellite radio's contract with Howard Stern of one hundred million dollars per year to program two entire channels. I've never listened to Stern or to Sirius, but it sounds like a bet of questionable judgement to spread Stern's novelty act out over forty-eight hours per day. Especially considering the ideas he suggests in a New York profile.
Howard's radio world will be a red-light district. "Wouldn't it be brilliant if my audience could all lie down at night together and come together?" he wonders. "Cum together?" Howard's idea is "Tissue Time With Heidi Cortez," a 24-year-old Playboy model and "orgasmer" who will offer phone sex to Howard's audience. He's also working on a show called "Confessions From the Bunny Ranch," a Nevada whorehouse. Howard plans to tape a room 24 hours a day. "You've heard of Taxicab Confessions, but that's bullshit," he says. "You'll be right in the prostitute's room. You'll hear the negotiation. You'll hear the screwing. You'll hear the after-sex conversation. And that fascinates me. I want to be in that room." Howard hopes to launch a show called "I Want to Fuck a Porn Star," a send-up of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. "It's going to be difficult," cautions Howard. "If you can answer the questions, you will get to fuck a porn star. So many guys from my audience would love that opportunity." A send-up of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or Taxicab Confessions) is a sure sign that Stern's reaction time, like Weird Al Yankovic's, has slowed to the point where he's satirizing cultural moments that are long past. On the other side of the scale: dangling a chance at porn star fornication.
He has other self-serious targets. "You've heard of The View," Howard says. "We're going to round up four crack whores, and every night, we're going to take the exact topics that The View talked about. I can't stand those women on The View, but to hear 'The Crack-Whore View' girls talk about those same topics? It will be ten times better." Howard has an idea for another talk show, the genre of, say, Meet the Press, except with girls from Scores, Howard's favorite strip club. "One of the things that I love are these Scores girls get drunk about four o'clock in the morning, wasted," he explains. "We want to have a round table, 'The Drunken Scores Girls Show.' I want to throw them topics of the day and just hear them." That's getting warmer, but can it really stick? A talk show of drunk strippers has great potential as a comedic project, but how long can it sustain itself before the novelty wears off? Can any of these shows hold people's attention without Stern's personality involved? (He can't be on every show on two channels 24/7, after all.) And how many of the regular commuters who listen to his show in rush hour traffic are going to pay $15 a month to listen to what was once free? How many people like Stern enough to listen to whatever he has programmed for the 2 a.m. slot on Stern-2? In all, this looks like a risky bet that might give Sirius the momentum it needs but will probably bankrupt the company and destroy Stern in the process. --Nic Duquette [link] Monday, December 12, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire And Minitrue Grew Three Sizes That Day... John Dickerson at Slate debunks the RNC's latest domestic war strategy of divide and conquer -- a web ad featuring embarassing video footage of Howard Dean, Barbara Boxer and John Kerry sounding off on Iraq. Dickerson's first problem? That the television onto which these Democratic images are superimposed -- and at which an anonymous solider appears to be gazing -- had originally broadcasted the comparatively cockle-warming morality tale, How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Is this some sinister transformation of Dr. Seuss into Dr. Strangelove, or just pathetic reactionary PR as usual? Dickerson tends toward the former explanation:
It goes almost without saying that some of the quotes from Democrats are taken out of context in a way that completely distorts their meanings. In the statement excerpted in the video, Kerry was not accusing U.S. soldiers of war crimes in Iraq. He was saying local police and militarynot American forcesshould be doing the difficult work of going into Iraqi homes in the dead of night, which is also the president's wish. This is the sentence Kerry uttered after the one the RNC uses: "Whether you like it or not, Iraqis should be doing that." Kerry likes to make his own selective criticisms of the president, but this libel is especially vicious in light of the insinuations that Kerry made unjustified accusations about American atrocities in Vietnam. Well, by defintion all advertisements that excerpt writings or speeches made by the enemy are "taken out of context;" otherwise those selfsame snippets could and should be used by their originators as a literal counterargument to the one they're being ironically appropriated for. No matter what Kerry meant to say, or how he followed up the comments that have now been gleefully transmitted by the GOP, he visibly flails and sounds ridiculous. Here's what he says:
There is no reason, Bob, that young American soldiers need to be going into the homes of Iraqis in the dead of night, terrorizing kids and children, uh uh uh, women... American soldiers do do exactly that, although "terrorizing" is an obtuse word choice for someone who would enlist those very soldiers in a more vigorous prosecution of a war on terror. If he meant that Iraqis should bear the burden of that responsibility, couldn't he -- or you, or I -- have thought of a smarter way to get that across? And the pleonasm of "kids" and "children" makes the Senator look not only traitorous, which he plainly is not, but also stupid. That's a double-stuffed Oreo for a Republican media blitz. Low, dishonest and entirely within the bounds of party propaganda. It would be cheap to say that the "other side does the same thing," but I don't think it's pharisaical to indicate that this "thing" is exactly what an industry is founded on. As to Dickerson's other plaint, that a faceless solider (or his back and rifle, anyway) are being misused, that's certainly the case. He should sue, if he objects to the message he's been coopted to convey. But no one can seriously think that it's ignominious to replace the Grinch and Whoville with an obviously doctored montage -- complete with the fade-out accompaniment of the white flag of surrender -- of even more animated and grumpy cartoon characters. Does anyone believe that a self-humiliating triumvirate of Dean, Boxer and Kerry was ever original programming to some GI in Baghdad? This is only deceptive to fucking fools. Now you might argue that given the "base" being pandered to with this ad, it's extraordinarily deceptive, but you'd just be bringing the game back around again to its starting point: the petty politics of the short attention span. --Michael Weiss [link] Open Sesame...  "Sesame Street" occupied a pride of place in the fully constituted Weiss household up until that household's fracture, by divorce, when I was two years old. My dad used to wake up exactly when I did, at 6 AM, to watch the only valuable programming on PBS, brought to us by the Helena Rubinstein Foundation and the alternating letters A through Z. And while I was reared on pedagogical pabulum like the bleeping window aliens and Oscar the Grouch and that original Brokeback Mountain of the Backalley, Bert and Ernie, my favorite segment was always "Which of These Things Does Not Belong." In the Eighties lineup of cognitive dissonance for the American toddler, you'd get an apple, an orange and a terrier. Today, in Kosovo, they must get Wesley Clark, Susan Sontag and Ratko Mladic.
Thirty-six years after the original "Sesame Street" had its debut in the United States, Elmo has left his familiar neighborhood for a fresh wave of globalization, bound for countries that are discarding dubbed American versions for homegrown productions inhabited by characters with names like Nac, Khokha and Kami. As opposed to a Weasel named Axis. Muppets in wheelchairs, muppets with AIDS, muppets with Oil-For-Food escrow accounts... Tom Lehrer retired his ivories, if only temporarily, when Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize because he thought satire had officially died. He was wrong. It just attached a "self" to it. --Michael Weiss [link] Crip Crippled... Arnold has denied clemency to Crips co-founder Stanley "Tookie" Williams, thereby ending a long non-debate about capital punishment which changed no minds. I'm opposed to the death penalty, even for serial killers -- that's why we have secret torture shacks in Poland -- but Williams doesn't sound like a worthy candidate for clemency. His appeal was largely resting upon his change of heart into an author of anti-gang children's books which, at least on Amazon, sounds preachy and boring, with an emphasis on the scatalogical:
But now, after 16 years on San Quentin's death row for the murders of four people, Williams, co-founder of the notorious Los Angeles Crips gang, knows that prison "is no place you'd ever want to be." In this slender volume, he explains why: the cramped quarters, lack of freedom and privacy, homesickness, violence and daily indignities (strip searches, having to use the toilet in public). Williams often goes beyond mere description, asking readers to imagine or emulate his experiences ("To get a feel for what it's like to live in a prison cell, test yourself. Spend ten hours -- nonstop and alone -- in your bathroom"), an effective technique. Though the book's stated goal is to warn kids away from Williams's path, its matter-of-fact, often homogenized tone connotes more of a plea for sympathy than a caution intended to frighten kids.--Nic Duquette [link] When the Grassy Knoll Is Your Desktop Background... You've heard about the guy who smuggled through a little democratic-flavored truth on Wikipedia, that Alexandrian library you just can't seem to burn down. Apparently, USA Today editor John Seigenthaler was behind the Kennedy assassination. It was all of a shock to Seigenthaler, who's neither Cuban nor connected nor LBJ nor a Communist nor even a fan of Oliver Stone's work. It was also a prank, the originator of which has since resigned from his job at a Nashville delivery company after his scandalous outing and after Wikipedia incurred media flak for allowing, in essence, the losers to write the history books. But Seigenthaler's being a true mensch about l'affair Spamalot:
Mr Seigenthaler said he would not take legal action over the entry and urged Mr Chase's boss not to accept his resignation. I smell a no-bid contract for DoD-friendly propaganda in Iraq. --Michael Weiss [link] Stay the Course But Change Lanes... Well, one of the advantages of subterranean poll figures and a national weariness about the one policy decision for which he'll be remembered is that these things furnish a president with a natural immunity against that most debilitating fear of all: candor. Bush makes (I think) administration history today by citing the number of projected dead, on the Iraqi side, in the war at 30,000. He also agrees to take questions that haven't been scripted or veted before a public appearance in one of his favorite echo chambers. This is progress on the public relations front; now if only it yielded dividends "on the ground." A commander-in-chief is allowed to exude an attitude of "Deal with it, this is war" provided he's upfront about what the stakes, losses and gains are. Frankly, I wouldn't trust a president who routinely tugged at his forelock with plebiscites on his own military strategy, which is not quite the same thing as saying that a president should be deaf to criticism or abandon failing or disproven strategies. However, it's not fortitude or stoicism if he continues to deny reality; it's adolescent escapism, which is at least as equally disgraceful as commanding by public temperature-taking. But who's been teaching Dubya that owning up to the bad news and thus potentially encouraging pessimism about his own leadership can actually have a dialectical effect and bolster that leadership?
Asked how many Iraqi troops were now able to stand alone without the backing of U.S. troops, Bush said there were "about 200,000-plus capable" forces. He said the training of Iraqi troops was "going much better than it was in the first year." If only he'd admitted that training wasn't going well in the first year. And "I don't think we're safe" is neither alarmist nor irresponsible. It's a marked improvement on "We're fighting them over there so we don't have to over here." --Michael Weiss [link] More Syrian Intrigue... When a man thinks any stick will do, observed G.K. Chesterton, he usually reaches for a boomerang. Swapping a stringless yo-yo for a car bomb tends to subtract some of the breezy wit from that formulation, but the core wisdom still holds. Syria (excuse me: Strugglers for the Unity and Freedom of the Levant) is still killing people, this time a brave Lebanese lawmaker and general manager of an independent newspaper.
The legislator, Gibran Tueni, was killed along with his driver, bodyguard, and another person, Reuters said. The attack came just hours before Detlev Mehlis, the United Nations investigator into the assassination of Lebanon's former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, released his presentation to the Security Council on who was behind the assassination of Mr. Hariri on Feb. 14. Relax. That ticking sound is the egg-timer on Bashar al-Assad's government. --Michael Weiss [link] PETA's Shabby Press Kit... No problems with Anna Wintour's face decorating the business end of chic urinals around town. Even less of a problem I consider the arctic smile such a prospect must engender on the real version of that face. But let's get our agitprop manifestos in order first. Please:
"PETA has attempted to educate Wintour for years about atrocities in the fur industry, but fur peddlers' presents have left her with deaf ears and a cold heart," a PETA spokesman told PAGE SIX. "Educate." Warm bucket of seal's blood: it's this season's lux et veritas. --Michael Weiss [link] Friday, December 9, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Up, Up and Oy Vez... One of our more gifted novelists, Michael Chabon, had a very funny exchange of dialogue in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a historical fiction which chronicled and celebrated the "Golden Age" of American comics. The artist behind the popular superhero and nimble, death-defying allegory of anti-fascism, "The Escapist," is one Joseph Kavalier, a rather ponderously named (Joseph K.?) Czech refugee from the Nazis. After years of absence, which include an Antarctic stint in World War II, he returns at the close of the novel and presents his American-born cousin Sammy Clay, the "ideas-and-stories man" of their once fruitful collaboration, with a sketch for a new character he believes deserving of benday dots: the Golem of Prague, a saviour of Hebrew mythology. "Jewish superheroes?" Sammy asks. "What, they're all Jewish, superheroes," replies Joseph. "Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself."
 I stake no tribal claim for the Man of Steel, who "returns," after a long absence of his own, to his rightful place on the silver screen next summer, under the expert stewardship of Bryan Singer, the director of the X-Men movies and The Usual Supects. However, it is worth observing that in the sequel to the first movie adaptation of the most famous Intro to Nietzsche Course in history, as Superman swoops down to save a child that's fallen into Niagara Falls, a female (and unmistakably New York/Metropolitan) voice is heard to announce over the swelling bombast of the theme music, "Of course he's Jewish." And with a Thirties provenance, a birth-name like Kal-El, a job in media, and a taste for the raven-haired shiksas... It's a wonder Mel Gibson's father hasn't formally denied the existence of him yet. --Michael Weiss [link] Harold Pinter Takes a Bow... There's a precise if ineffable relationship between the death bed and the madhouse. Those who have spent the better parts of their lives being silly -- whether in their ideology, or in their society, or in their art, or in all three -- tend to breath one last sigh of relief comingled with despair before pitching over the knife-edge of civilization, upon which they'd been precariously balanced, and into balls-out fucking lunacy. Indeed, for all the vogue talk these days about "freedom," when one truly considers the semantics of the term, it is only ever tempting at the individual level as inhibition. Inhibition can be safely indulged once the Grim Reaper is spotted somewhere not too far off in the distance, once all debts have been cancelled or foreclosed with enough time remaining to look around and ask, "What now?" This is when the mask can be ripped willy-nilly from the face; when the pretense of sanity one had been playing at can be given the middle finger; when the dying of the light can be raged toward, in full confidence of at least attracting some final attention, rather than against. I think it was Nabokov who said that the collected works of Dostoevsky represented "Bedlam turned back into Bethlehem." Well, that equation factors both ways for the expiring author of apocalypse, no matter how buried or covert his own "saving grace" may be. Those allowed to tread down this elect path of which I speak do so to the wincing pity of the rest of us. Harold Pinter (and shouldn't that be "Sir Harold" by now?) is currently on it, and even in self-parody, even in absentia, he manages to distinguish himself before the Stockholm Grand Council. Here's his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Catch the gracious -- and, at this stage, wholly gratuitous -- doffing of the cap to the award's host country, Sweden, in his litany of ignoble states allowing US garrisons. Whoever the sitemaster is for nobel.org, he or she should emplace a hyperlink every time Pinter says "gulag" (and means the American prison system, and not Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay) that takes the browser directly to Solzhenitsyn's speech in 1980. Some favorite bits, for those living in a century whose time is no less expensive than the last one's:
Everyone knows what happened in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe during the post-war period: the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought. All this has been fully documented and verified.--Michael Weiss [link] Messin' With a Broke Nikkei... The Tokyo Stock Exchange must bow politely to Koizumi before honorably disembowling itself for throwing away $225 million dollars of a major bank's money.
The trouble began Thursday morning, when Mizuho Securities tried to sell 610,000 shares at 1 yen (less than a penny) apiece in a job recruiting company called J-Com Co., which was having its public debut on the exchange. "In America, you reward knowledge. In Japan, we punish ignorance!" The Japanese market plunged over 2% on fears that the people running it are all dicks. The really scary thing is that Mizuho sold the entire company several times over.
Worse still, the number of shares in Mizuho's order was 41 times that of J-Com's true outstanding amount, but the Tokyo Stock Exchange processed the order anyway. In other words, the exchange sold the shares from the company, borrowed shares at a high rate of interest from the persons who just bought it, and sold it again and again, over forty times the worth of the company had trading not been halted until they figure out what to do. The fun part will be when the bank has to buy the company forty times just to dig itself out of the hole. Maybe they can convince J-Com to just go suddenly bankrupt. Wednesday, December 7, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Irony Watch 2... More Dantesque fates, this time in the other billion-plus-teeming nation.
Imprisoned Falun Gong and Christians are forced to manufacture Christmas lights for export, according to Friends of Falun Gong and human rights activist Harry Wu. (emph. added) Q: What Will Be Leno's Punchline About This Headline?... "Mel Gibson Plans TV Miniseries on Holocaust". Hint: Jews. --Nic Duquette [link] Irony Watch... Few fates sound more tragic that going through life as a eunuch and dying of AIDS anyway. --Nic Duquette [link] Monday, December 5, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire Turnaround, Bright Eyes... I'm not normally one to forward strange Internet ephemera, but this video is simply one of the funniest things I've ever seen. (Directions: Click on the WATCH button under the second video, titled "School House Rockers.") Band's official web site is here; lyrics are here; official corporate site of Whirlpool, here. --Nic Duquette [link] Ignorance on Parade... Mine, specifically. My musings on the distribution of major league sports francises was notably light on correctness; last time I trust the Internet. From the mailbag:
1. Minnesota has a hockey team for most of the post-war period -- the Northstars -- but they moved sometime in the last 10 or so years to Dallas (where they became the Lone Stars). The Wild are a team the NHL gave to minnesota to replace the Northstars. Oops. It's nice to know that the NHL is maybe no stupider than Major League Baseball, which took the Dodgers and Giants for the west coast before giving the huge Long Island boroughs the Mets. I bet some fool couldn't let go of the idea of making the Northstars into the Lone Stars and made America's Ontario give up their team for no good reason. The Minnesota "Wild"? Sounds like an MLS team. At least if I'm ignorant of football team distributions, every coach in the NCAA is equally ignorant of optimum player distributios. Mike Lewis has a great article in the Times magazine today on Texas Tech coach Mike Leach, who is reinventing the very concept of a playbook (and of the offensive line). Even for someone like me who misses the strategic layer of football can enjoy the hand-holding blow-by-blow description of the underdog Red Raiders systematically dismantling the Aggies 56-17. Though Lewis quips that "'Thinking man's football' is a bit like 'classy stripper': if the adjective modifies the noun too energetically, it undermines the nature of the thing," the article is very much about the inscrutable mental life of the coach and the strategic opportuities he exploits. Somewhere between Ender's Game and Rainman. I may have to read Moneyball next.--Nic Duquette [link] Friday, December 2, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire If You Can't Stand the Heat... Bjorn Lomborg, the Cassandra who prophesies the best-case scenario for global climate change, says the Kyoto Protocol is like ordering a Diet Coke to go with your bacon cheeseburger. By 2100, the end of the world will have been postponed by a piddling 6 years, and to great expense at the present:
[T]he economic models tell us that the cost would be substantial -- at least US$150 billion a year. In comparison, the UN estimates that half that amount could permanently solve all of the world's major problems: It could ensure clean drinking water, sanitation, basic health care, and education for every single person in the world, now. So, then, what is to be done?
The parties in Montreal should rule out more Kyoto-style immediate cuts, which would be prohibitively expensive, do little good, and cause many nations to abandon the entire process. Rather, they should suggest a treaty binding every nation to spend, say, 0.1 percent of GDP on research and development of non-carbon-emitting energy technologies. Now how the fuck is 0.1 percent of GDP on R&D going to send my copy of No Logo through a Starbucks window in Seattle? Or fill Laurie David's word count at the Huffington Post? In your calm rush to be reasonable and systematic, did you ever stop and think of the damage you're doing to the angry green people, Bjorn? --Michael Weiss [link] Capital Punishment Batting 1,000... Kenneth Lee Boyd, 57, of North Carolina was killed by lethal injection today, an event which cut the ribbon on a monument of triple zeroes for US state executions since 1977. Actually, make that "tape," not ribbon, and keep in mind that 77 for a spell, won't you:
Mr. Boyd's attorney, Thomas Maher, had hoped to win a stay for his client, who he said had an I.Q. of 77. The cutoff for mental retardation, a mitigating factor in some capital cases, is 75. Two points, in most calculations, qualifies as percentage error. In this case, a man was methodically snuffed out by a government that couldn't brook having a difference of copus mentus split. (Boyd could have guessed right on one question.) Makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it? --Michael Weiss [link] When Life Gives You AIDS, Make Lemon-AIDS... Looking back on it, Will Smith and Tom Hanks probably didn't need to turn down all those gonorrhea awareness ads in the early days of their careers. They proudly "have AIDS" now. Yeah, yeah, says Andrew Sullivan:
The genius of the South Park writers is that their glorious parodies are so often too close to reality. Gay cowboys with chocolate pudding? Coming up ... And then there was that amazing scene from last year's best movie-comedy, "Team America." It was a parody of the dreadful musical, "Rent," called "Lease!" One of the show-stoppers was a big musical number called, "Everyone Has Aids!" My favorite lyric: "C'mon, everybody, we got quiltin' to do!" And then in this morning's NYT, we got a full-page pull-out with the slogan: "WE ALL HAVE AIDS" (Funny, even I don't have AIDS. I was unaware that Will Smith, Tom Hanks and Bishop Tutu did, but I hope they're doing well on their meds). Glamor Vanity Fair-style pics of the usual AIDS groupies and hangers-on. But this time: with no shoes on! You can get your "WE ALL HAVE AIDS" t-shirts here. Available at Barney's. Where else? As an atheist, I'm not above -- or below -- believing in numinous phenomena: life's little ironies, prophecies that get fulfilled with little to no help of a "self" prefix, deja vu, and the media-coordinated PR campaign topping my own metaphysical "how'd they do that?" list. Books on the Spanish Civil War, polymorphously perverse babysitters on the Upper East Side, Alexander Hamilton, and twee wunderkind coping with 9/11, for instance, all have a tendency to "appear" at roughly the same time. Who makes this happen? Who decided that everyone will simultaneously hip to the Freemason-like shadow influence of Chrisitian evangelism, Saudi Arabia and Johnny Cash on American culture, so much so that a bestselling volume had to be published describing this occurrence as a "tipping point"? Hollywood absurdity is especially adept at signposting its creepy power to penetrate the tinfoil helmets and control public consciousness. Consider that on the same day the West Coast's collective immune system took a turn for the worse, Arianna Huffington received a new profile in Vanity Fair. Repent. --Michael Weiss [link] Thursday, December 1, 2005 - snarktip@snarksmith.com Instant Messenger Screenname: HangOnVoltaire When Deadlines Call... Tina Brown, ventriloquist of a maddened media age:
Woodward works from home! Sometimes Woodward's editors don't hear from him for months! Woodward gets to write books without taking a leave! Woodward knows everybody! Everybody knows Woodward! Time to send Woodward to the woodpile! It must be the crowning irritation to smaller woodland animals that once again the Big Beast knew the name of a prime leaker before anyone else -- and that, once again, he wasn't talking till he was good and ready. Lord Evans gets wood just thinking about his little sparkplug on a punning rampage like that. --Michael Weiss [link] Ten Best Books of 2005... If the New York Times says so, it must be true. Zadie and Ian and Joan and George were shoo-ins. But you can almost hear the white powder going up the nose of one very dejected Bret Easton Ellis. --Michael Weiss [link] High Technology With a Low Purpose... Soon, you'll be able to load your vehicle's NavTek computer-direction system with the voices of celebrities, who will insult and pester you.
In our test, the snide asides became stale long before the first short drive was over. It was kind of funny at first, but there are only so many times I want to hear Mr. T, without apparent provocation, threaten to come out of my navigation device and beat me.--Nic Duquette [link] Hitch on Cyrpus and Kofi Annan... 9/11 used to mean something entirely different -- for Chileans. 2003 might have been a signal year for Cypriots, if people even knew where and how to apply pressure outside of Mesopotamia. (The Falklands fiasco was probably all about timing.) But, as ever, when world-historical attention is undivided elsewhere, it's the little guy who gets counted out of the 24-hour news cycle:
Claire Palley, a renowned Anglo-South African expert in constitutional law, takes up this dismal story at the point where Kofi Annan decided to involve himself personally [in the affairs of Cyprus]. Winston Churchill once said of some luckless opponent that he had "sat on the fence so long that the iron had entered into his soul." Kofi Annan's genius for compromise and for splitting differences without regard to principle is of the same order. An extraordinary opportunity presented itself in 2003 when, against all expectations, the Turkish Cypriots--the supposed beneficiaries of partition--rebelled politically against their imposed leadership and demanded to be part of the wider Cypriot accession to the European Union. The Turkish authorities were obliged to open the sealed checkpoints at the border and to permit visits and exchanges to take place from either side.--Michael Weiss [link] From The Onion... Just in time for post-Thanksgiving calorie counting. Impersonal Trainer Couldn't Give A Fuck What You Do With Those Free Weights
LOS ANGELESWes Orth Jr., the man considered to be the standard-bearer for a new breed of strong and aloof impersonal trainers, could not care less about the workout regimen of his clients, many of whom say his indifference powers their adrenaline-charged, spite-filled workouts. "Sure, wave those dumbbells around, whatever," Orth said during a typically hands-off training session at his L.A. gym this weekend. "Or just sit on your fat assI get paid either way." Orth's newest workout video, Wes Orth Jr. Doesn't Give Two Damp Shits If You Live Strong Or Die Young, debuted at the top of the Amazon DVD sales charts on Monday.--Michael Weiss [link]
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