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BOOKS:
• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}
• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}
• The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}
• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}
• Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven {A sorely forgotten modern classic. Leven has since swapped the galley for the camera, directing such keepers as Don Juan Demarco and The Legend of Bagger Vance. Satan has relapsed.}
• Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}
• Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}
• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}
• Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}
• The Complete Stories of Evelyn Waugh, by E.W. {Nasty, brutish and short, in short form.}
• The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}
• Saul Bellow: Novels 1944-1953: Dangling Man, The Victim, and The Adventures of Augie March, [Library of Congress Hardcover Edition] {Look: it's his world, we all just live in it.}
• The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}
• Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}
• Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}
• The War Against Cliche and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}
• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}
• The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliche. And get a dictionary.}
• The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}
• The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, by James Wood {The bling to Dale Peck's blah.}
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}
• Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}
• Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}
• The Persian Mirror: The Elusive Face of Iran, by Elaine Sciolino {For those with short odds on the next war of choice.}
• Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}
• The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children�s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}
• The Chicago Manual of Style, by the University of Chicago Press Staff {and the ghost of Allan Bloom.}
• The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}
• Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}
• Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}
• My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}
ALBUMS:
• You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}
• Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}
• Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}
• Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}
• Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}
• Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}
• Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}
• These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}
• SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}
• The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}
• It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}
• Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, by the Unicorns {Morbid, tinny, wildly innovative and beautiful.}
• Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn't usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}
• Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}
• The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it�s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}
• The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}
• The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}
• No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}
• The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}
FILMS & TV:
• Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}
• Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}
• Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}
• The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}
• Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}
• Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}
• Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}
• The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}
• Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modeled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}
• Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}
• Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}
• The Office - The Complete Collection (First And Second Series Plus Special) {Creator, writer, director and star Rick Gervais used to manage Suede and now this. That's enough laurels for one lifetime. He can die now.}
• Arrested Development - Season One {To think that Teen Wolf Too was just a glimpse of Jason Bateman's potential.}
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 New @ Jewcy:
There's a New York you don't read about anymore but you should. It's the one in which the Ansonia is still a residence hotel on the Upper West Side, catering to dying salesmen, down-at-heel hucksters, and catchpenny gutter philosophers. It's the one where you walk into a Woolworth's to discuss Marx and Wilde while having your roast beef flooded with flour gravy. It's the one where middle-class poverty is not only livable but the cause for political fellowship, and where cigarettes are allowed everywhere, and you get a strange look if you ask someone to put his out. It's the New York of Leonard Schiller in bloom.
Sadly, when we meet him in Starting Out in the Evening, a subtle and fine film that was adapted from Brian Morton's novel of the same name and recently released on DVD, most of the color has gone out of his life and work. Played wonderfully by Frank Langella, Leonard is a forgotten novelist and who's been writing his fifth and, in all likelihood, final book for about a decade. His others, bearing titles such as Tenderness and The Lost City, have long been out of print, and he seems resigned to his status as a has-been until an ambitious and comely young graduate student Heather Wolfe (Lauren Ambrose) offers to help revive his reputation by writing her Masters thesis on him. This is the moment some older gentlemen of letters must wait for all their lives, but Leonard is reluctant. He wants to be left alone in his hermitage, and nothing about him, from his careful and precise speech to his outdated wardrobe, makes this request appear confected out of false modesty. After being told by a publisher that the industry is now all "celebrity confessions and self-help books," Leonard reconsiders. However, in agreeing to be interviewed and scrutinized, especially by a biographer-critic who wears her confidence as lushly as her lipstick, he is soon drawn into the kind of literary relationship that has felled less disciplined talents.
Read more...
 New @ PJM:
Listening to the chorus of fainthearted responses to this week's New Yorker cover, one gets the impression that satire, like everything else in our sad culture, must now come with a warning label and child-safety latch. Barry Blitt's slightly overwrought but still amusing illustration, which is even pedantically titled "The Politics of Fear," features the Obamas fist-bumping in the Oval Office. Michelle is rendered as an AK-47-wielding Angela Davis, Barack is tricked out as a pious Muslim, an Osama Bin Laden portrait hangs on the wall and an American flag burns in the fireplace.
Irony should cut like a rapier, not drop like a Steinway, but still, it's not hard to appreciate what this pictorial intends. Yet it has got a few supporters of the Illinois senator barking mad.
Obama himself had no direct response to the cover, presumably because the task of appearing dull-witted and earnest fell to his campaign spokesman Bill Burton, who said: "Most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree." How Mr. Burton presumes to know what most readers will think is a question for another day, but the McCain camp, likely fearing any other interpretation might be seen as darkly motivated, swooped in to second his artistic criticism.
Some outraged liberals have gone so far as to cancel their subscriptions to the New Yorker -- or at least claim that's what they've done until Seymour Hersh announces next month that the Pentagon already bombed Iran over the 4th of July -- while others are quick to insist they "get" the joke but still fear the reactionary hysterics and illiterate rubes it lampoons will not.
Eve Fairbanks at the New Republic is a particularly sensitive minder of low IQs. The Blitt pic, she says, is "no better than Perry Bacon's infamous Washington Post story, 'Foes Use Obama's Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him.' Both outlets claimed not to support the allegations they were visually or rhetorically putting forward -- obviously! -- and yet a reader would have to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of each outlet's ethos to immediately intuit the intended ironic distance."
 New @ TNC:
There is no better curator of the museum of American Communism than Ronald Radosh. Part of the pleasure to be derived from reading him lies in his intimate association with many of the antiquities and relics on display, and I mean no disrespect in phrasing it like that. A dispassionate scholar may unearth all the necessary evidence about 20th-century Reds and fellow travelers, but to have been one oneself lends a certain, shall we say, urgency to the subject. Once you've read Radosh's review of the new hagiographic documentary on Dalton Trumbo in the Weekly Standard, you know you can skip all the others.
Radosh is fair and expansive, giving credit where it's due to the most fascinating and perhaps most talented member of the Hollywood Ten, but not stinting on the dirt that was conveniently and expectedly left out of the celluloid:
There is a lengthy sequence in which Donald Sutherland reads from Trumbo's 1939 antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun. Nowhere do we learn that Johnny, touted by the Communists during the years of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and serialized in their newspaper, was withdrawn from circulation by Trumbo when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941. Literally overnight, the Communist party's peace campaign ended and was replaced by calls for intervention against Hitler.
Accordingly, Trumbo censored his own book, took the plates from the publisher, and let it go out of print. But the novel, which had gotten good reviews, was still popular, and readers wrote to Trumbo to find out where it could be found. Not satisfied that his book was no longer available, Trumbo-fearing, undoubtedly correctly, that many of those letter-writers were isolationists, and some even pro-fascist-invited the FBI to visit him at home in 1944, and turned the letters over to the agents. He informed on Americans who only wanted to read his own novel! It was the right wing, he explained, that was trying to make censorship of Johnny Got His Gun into "a civil liberties issue," so he had no compunction about informing on these people. After all, he told the agents, some of them were "organizing politically" and others had called Franklin Roosevelt a "criminal incendiary."
Apart from being a delicious irony in itself, there is an added value of this anecdote. One of the more outrageous and enduring pieties of the American left is the notion that McCarthyism was our very own Great Terror, blacklisted screenwriters our Old Bolsheviks, and a thuggish and mediocre senator from Wisconsin the Midwestern Vyshinsky. Historically illiterate and morally cretinous though this bit of equivalence was, is and forever will be (notice that the radical left is only interested in Stalinist abortions of justice when they can be used as cudgels for U.S. failings), here we have a case in which one of the heroes of McCarthyism plays the part of paranoid inquisitor and snitch. (Someone wake up Elia Kazan.) And yet Radosh is generous and mature enough to refrain from making the obvious -- and far more justified -- comparison between denunciator and denounced.
 New @ PJM:
There are two walls of separation that the United States holds dear. The first is that between church and state, and the second is that between civilian control of the military and the military execution of war policy, which carries with it the Clausewitzian understanding that war is simply the continuation of politics by other means. A corollary of this guiding principle is that competence or genius as a solider do not predetermine those same qualities as a commander-in-chief.
Despite the fact that our own history abounds with presidents who were once war heroes, there are plenty of pertinent examples that vindicate the saneness of this view. The Civil War might not have been won by the Union had Lincoln not removed the hapless and megalomaniacal general-in-chief George McClellan, who at one point made the boast to his wife, which no general should ever be allowed to make, that all that was stopping him from becoming a dictator was his own "self-denial."
As scandalous as Truman's firing of Douglas MacArthur was at the close of the Korean War, few historians would now argue that the cease-fire that MacArthur stubbornly and unconstitutionally refused to allow prevented the disastrous spread of fighting into China.
And of course, more recently, George W. Bush's replacement of Gen. George Casey with Gen. David Petraeus is widely credited with the tremendous reduction of violence and chaos in Iraq, a reduction that has surprised many members of the military establishment who would surely not have made the same staffing decision.
So Wesley Clark's comments two weeks ago that John McCain's experiences as a Navy fighter pilot and POW were not recommendations for his presidency should not have been, on the surface, controversial. Clark was speaking on Face the Nation in his capacity as an Obama campaigner, and however politically motivated or sneeringly phrased his remarks were, his very presence on that program was ample proof of his own proposition. Didn't Clark himself try in 2004 to pass off his tenure as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO as the only real measure of his fitness for high office? And didn't he discover the hard way that epaulets don't translate so effortlessly into votes? Indeed, as we saw that same year with John Kerry, a presidential candidate who bolsters his candidacy with his past military credentials can and should be expected to have those credentials scrutinized or dismissed as insufficient for civilian leadership.
New @ TNC:
By now you'll have heard that a handful of conservative blogs -- including Gateway Pundit and Little Green Footballs -- suspected at first or second glance that this image of Iran's recent missile launch had been doctored. It had been: one missile was reduplicated by some enterprising young master of Photoshop. Never mind that the New York Times' website, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times and scores of other daily newspapers ran with the original photograph published without much scrutiny by Agence France-Presse, which obtained it from Iranian state media. Noah Shachtman of the ever-reliable Danger Room compiles a slew of fun parodies here.
Now the Drudge Report discloses that tomorrow's NY Times will show there was further falsification by the Iranian regime:
The missiles tested DID NOT not have 2,000-kilometer range, the NEW YORK TIMES is planning to report on Saturday.
Iran DID NOT launch a Shahab-3 missile, able to reach Israel.
It was an older missile that was out of production, newsroom sources tell DRUDGE.
And a video showing what appeared to be many missiles being fired -- is actually one missile, filmed from different angles!
NYT's Bill Broad is planning to quote military insiders.
While it's encouraging that the mullahs feel insecure enough to want to embellish their displays of military prowess, one wonders if this gotcha won't lead to public skepiticism about their weapons capabilities and true intentions. Most Americans, not to mention a host of journalists, haven't yet realized that the 2007 NIE on Iran did not in fact give the all-clear on its continuing nuclear ambition. And consider how much linguistic attention has been paid to whether Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map" or "erased from the pages of time," when either outcome would probably upset Israelis' weekend plans. (Take a step back from that phrase, itself a holdover from the apocalyptic speechifying of Khomeini, and ask yourself if a Judenrein Levant wouldn't put a smile on Ahadminejad's already goofy face.) Now we have this clownish bluffing by a state that, try though it does to be taken at face value, can't help but be willfully misunderstood time and time again. A tyranny that toils in dead earnest has been made to look ridiculous, yet somehow it's hard to crack a smile.
New @ TNC:
In a way, it's almost comforting to know that terrorists who normally settle disputes with assassinations and suicide bombings resort to the English court system whenever their feelings are hurt. Or, to be more precise, whenever someone accurately represents their views in print.
My friend David T at Harry's Place, a popular social democratic blog in the UK, is being threated with libel litigation by one Mohammad Sawalha, a man the BBC has identified as the mastermind behind "much of Hamas' political and military strategy." Sawalha is also the president of a front organization for Hamas known as the British Muslim Initiative, and it is in this capacity that he has taken issue with David's post about a speech Sawalha gave at an anti-Israel rally in Trafalgar Square:
The reason that the British Muslim Initiate is upset with us is this. This weekend, Mr Sawalha attended a demonstration against a festival celebrating the re-founding of the State of Israel. He gave a speech, in Arabic, to Al Jazeera. In that speech, he stated that the purpose of his demonstration was to:
"express our resentment at the celebrations by the Jewish community"
He also made another statement, which has been the subject of some dispute. Al Jazeera initially reported the phrase in question as containing the word "الوبيل". That word translates as "evil" or "baneful", or some variant thereon. The next word was "يهودي ", which means "Jew" or "Jewish". We translated the phrase, as it appeared, as "evil Jew" or "Jewish evil".
The British Muslim Initiative then issued a bombastic "press release", which it pasted in our comments section, claiming that we had:
"deliberately skewed the word 'Lobby' to turn it into some other word and make it seem as though it means 'evil/noxious'"
It went on to describe Mr Sawalha as a promoter of "community relations and cultural dialogue", and object to him being "demonised" as a "'Jew-hater' and 'anti-Semitic'."
As I've written privately to David, my suspicion is that Sawalha can and will be easily shown up here. Let's assume he saw Harry's Place's original post about his speech -- or the speech's reprinting by Melanie Phillips -- and then put in a call to Al Jazeera to ask them to doctor the transcript. (If this is so, then David and many others have a fair case against the Arabic news network for willfully and tendentiously altering a matter of public record.) The original phrase "evil Jew," once published on Al Jazeera's website, remains forever, "cached" in some way traceable via Google or the WayBack Machine, which archives almost every iteration of every bit of HTML ever to appear on the web.
Sawalha might only be trying to intimidate honest chroniclers of his hate-filled oratory, or he might be like those Saudi billionaires who follow through on their thuggish threats. At any rate, he has chosen a British law firm, Dean and Dean, whose reputation suggests it would be advertising on late-night television on this side of the Atlantic. Take heart, David.
Another follow-up post at HP here. Also, see this blurb by Nick Cohen, who withdrew from this year's Islam Expo, another shambolic piece of Islamist theatre passed off as multiculturalism, which is run by -- you guessed it -- the British Muslim Initiative.
 Last Thursday, Phyllis Chesler and I hosted a party for my friend and editor Alan Johnson of Democratiya. We had planned to make it a fundraiser for the journal, but it wound up becoming the kind of literary/political salon New York used to be famous for hosting. Paul Berman, Ibn Warraq, Fred Siegel, Sol Stern, Austin Dacey and others were there. Phyllis has a nice write-up of the affair (though she flatters me only slightly too much) on her PJM blog:
Alan came in with Paul Berman-I said the gathering was glittering. Professor Berman's book, Terror and Liberalism, is a hugely important work and his incisive and wide-ranging mind takes no prisoners. Paul, who currently teaches at New York University, and I have met before but this evening he reminded me of no one so much as Pete Seeger-or of a 1950s style kibbutznik, in his jeans and open shirt.
Also gathered were: The-man-who-knows-almost-everything-and-is-willing-to-tell-you: My equally dear friend, History Professor and author Fred Seigel and his Professor wife Jan Rosenberg. Fred, Jan, and I all raised our sons in Park Slope, in Brooklyn, at the same time and they will always feel like family.
Professors Nahma Sandrow (Yiddishist, retired Professor and all-round lovely soul) and her husband, Bill Meyers, a true Renaissance man (playwright and photographer extraordinaire) also came-an honor indeed, since they are grieving the loss of their wonderful son. They brought their son Isaac's fiancée, Margot, (whose last name I can't recall: Margot, please forgive me), a lustrous young poet.
And, my dear friend Ibn Warraq, the author of Defending The West, came shyly in and stood most of the time, rather quietly. Even I could not get him to say much-not that there was any lull in the conversation. He brought his comrade-in-arms, Austin Dacey, philosopher and secularist who works with the Center for Inquiry, and who co-ordinated the first Islamic Dissident Conference in a very impressive fashion.
Nick Denton's invited me back to do high culture, which seems like an awful thing for high culture, doesn't it?
Here's where you can find my stuff.
 New @ NY Sun:
"When intellectuals can do nothing else they start a magazine." So spoke Irving Howe about his decision to launch Dissent in 1954. The dean of New York social democracy was drawing on reserves of nostalgia for Partisan Review, the literary journal founded 20 years earlier that had changed the way politically engaged intellectuals wrote for a general audience.
All smart sheets trace a lineage back to PR or one of its many offspring publications, and Daniel Johnson, the editor-in-chief of Standpoint, the new center-right British monthly devoted to culture and politics, is openly indebted to the American tradition of highbrow magazine publishing. In a phone interview, he ticks off a list of mentors and encouragers long enough to sound like he's giving an Oscar acceptance speech; among them, Neal Kozodoy of Commentary, Roger Kimball of the New Criterion, and Seth Lipsky of The New York Sun. "I wanted to emulate this very rich, very vibrant spectrum of magazines in America," he said. "I wanted to combine the best of these magazines, which represent a particular camp or orientation, and to have their arguments take place in our pages."
Standpoint's starkest model is Encounter, the brilliant Cold war journal edited by Irving Kristol and Stephen Spender that dealt in Anglo-American themes and survived the not-so-minor scandal of being secretly funded by the CIA for part of its tenure. "We're open to their calls," Mr. Johnson laughs, before answering my next question: Standpoint is put out by the Social Affairs Unit, a registered charity, and its main financier is Britain's largest shipping magnate Alan Bekhor.
This splendid and handsomely designed addition to the glossy firmament is committed to the upkeep of the special relationship, and it isn't tentative about using words like "civilization" as a rapier against the new ideological menace posed by radical Islam and its fellow travelers and apologists. "Since 9/11 and the Iraq war," Mr. Johnson tells me, "the transatlantic bridge had to some extent frayed. There were terrible tensions and misunderstandings and actual lies. One of the many functions of Standpoint is to rebuild that bridge, without which the West really is in big trouble." Enlisting the poetry of Robert Conquest is surely one way to fashion a rampart. So too is having an advisory board that attests to such heady cosmopolitan ambition: V.S. Naipaul, David Hockney, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Tom Stoppard are all godparents of Standpoint, which can claim, too, a proud genealogical heritage: Mr. Johnson is the son of acclaimed historian Paul Johnson, and the names Louis Amis, Alexander Hitchens, and Daisy Waugh dot the masthead, belonging to the families you think they do.
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 New @ PJM:
In his seven years as mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg has been the recipient of an almost uninterrupted spate of good publicity.
It's about all his legacy will amount to, and it is not an accident. His entire political career has been designed, down to the carefully released rumors about his presidential ambition, as an experiment in governance through public relations. Barack Obama loves him, John McCain loves him, Time magazine loves him, 70% of New Yorkers loves him, and yet if I stopped writing right here to ask what, exactly, Bloomberg has ever accomplished, not many people could come up with an intelligible answer. They might mutter something vague about "education reform" without being able to explain its manic-depressive vicissitudes, or cite any concrete evidence of its success. Crime? That's been down since the days of Giuliani, and anyone might have been able to maintain an already successful law enforcement program.
Behind the po-faced façade of a competent but bland CEO of America's toughest metropolis lurks a breathtakingly calculated mediocrity, a man who silences his critics with cash and is then the first to tell you just how popular he is.
It's worth remembering that Bloomberg, a fired Salomon Brothers partner who parlayed his $10 million severance package into a financial software empire, was a registered Democrat before he decided to enter public life in a year that seemed friendly to Republicans. In 2001, the year he ran as Giuliani's successor, Bloomberg donated $705,000 to the New York State GOP, its largest single-donor windfall since Nelson Rockefeller, and followed up that noticeable gift with another $500,000 a year later, ostensibly to ensure the re-election of Gov. George Pataki, but clearly also to ensure party loyalty.
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 New @ TNC:
My friend Jamie Kirchick published an op-ed in the New York Sun yesterday pointing out the cretinous rhetoric (and rhetoric is all it amounts to) of the U.N. with respect to Robert Mugabe:
"The Security Council regrets that the campaign of violence and the restrictions on the political opposition have made it impossible for a free and fair election to take place on 27 June," the proclamation read. A regret is something you send on nice stationary when you can't make a wedding. It hardly evokes the sentiment of free people toward the animalistic brutality the Harare junta has taken against the people of Zimbabwe. The strongest verb in U.N. nomenclature -- the one that the Security Council ought to have used -- is "demand." The Council should have demanded an end to the amputations, live burnings, and gunpoint executions that have now become an every day occurrence in Zimbabwe.
Damn right. However, Jamie believes that a military intervention is the only option for Zimbabwe now that the legitimately elected opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has been bullied out of participating in the run-off election, which is really just a second chance for Zimbabweans to vote for Mugabe lest they require a third and fourth. Jamie knows far more about this wretched and luckless country than I do but I find Paul Wolfowitz's argument in the Wall Street Journal more compelling. He says that a swelling chorus of criticism by individual countries -- including those in Africa -- is or will be enough to force the Harare regime to recognize its people's right to self-determination:
The international community should commit - as publicly and urgently as possible - to provide substantial support if Mugabe relinquishes power. Even if Mr. Tsvangirai were to become president tomorrow he would still face a daunting set of problems: restoring an economy in which hyperinflation has effectively destroyed the currency and unemployment is a staggering 70%; getting emergency food aid to millions who are at risk of starvation and disease; promoting reconciliation after the terrible violence; and undoing Mugabe's damaging policies, without engendering a violent backlash.
The international community should also say it will move rapidly to remove the burden of debts accumulated by the Mugabe regime and not force a new government to spend many months and precious human resources on the issue (as Liberia was forced to do to deal with the debts of Samuel Doe).
Given the strength and ruthlessness of the regime, change will not come easily. Nevertheless, developing a concrete vision for the future would help to rally the people of Zimbabwe around a long-term effort to achieve a peaceful transition. It would give Mr. Tsvangirai important negotiating leverage. And it could attract disaffected members of the regime.
Two questions that must be asked of a dictatorship before committing to a policy of its removal by a foreign military are as follows: Does the country have a strong political opposition with enough popular support to topple -- if only with outside encouragement -- the criminal regime peaceably or by use of its own forces? Is the international community prepared to isolate the regime and rob it of its usual band of accomplices?
That there was even an election with an alternative candidate on the ballot makes Zimbabwe different from Iraq. There is still the chance that inducements to leave office quietly will have their effect on Mugabe, who has had an embarrassing spotlight trained on him for months and only because of his myriad human rights abuses ("But I don't even sponsor Islamic terrorists!" must be among his pathetic final thoughts in office). And although the prospect of seeing a murderous tyrant "retire" in lush surroundings in South Africa, which is an inducement Wolfowitz commends, should not sit well with any person of conscience, one can't really envision an international military invasion further galvanizing neighboring African countries against Mugabe. This is one case in which pointing a finger, screaming at the top of your lungs, and letting a growing scandal do its nasty work may yet produce the right result.
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 New @ TNC:
If Martin Amis can be described as a worshipper of any sort, then his deity is language. One either finds his religion observed cloyingly or reaffirmingly. I'm in the latter category, which these days is the minority category. The man who declared war against cliche and once opened an essay with the sentence "Expect a lot from the next sentence" has me wishing I wouldn't let him down by yanking a familiar Auden gobbet off the shelf. But there's really no other apposite quotation than the great poet's memorial on W.B. Yeats, particularly the stanzas he later excised from the poem:
Time that is intolerant
Of the brave and the innocent,
And indifferent in a week
To a beautiful physique,
Worships language and forgives
Everyone by whom it lives;
Pardons cowardice, conceit,
Lays its honours at their feet.
Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well.
Martin Amis needs no pardon because his views are not as noxious as Kipling's (at his worst) or Claudel's (at his best). In fact, they are solidly in the liberal Enlightenment camp, which would seem boring today if these views weren't so radical. This has not stopped a certain semi-literate faction of p.c. ideologues from calling Amis a racist. Its evidence? In an interview he gave in 2006, he said the following:
There is a definite urge - don't you have it? - to say, "The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order".
'Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.'
I have an urge sometimes to cheat on my taxes. I am not a tax defaulter. If you are Terry Eagleton, not only would you claim that that's exactly what I am, but you would then point to a confession signed by me explaining my own guilt. It was Eagleton who, in a sloppy and lazy introduction to the updated edition of his book Ideology (a perfect concatenation of circumstances), accused Amis of putting down the foregoing in an "essay" and doing so as a matter of policy prescription. As even a non-literary critic will have ascertained, Amis was a) talking and not writing, b) insinuating his remarks as a "definite urge" and not an arrived-at conclusion, much less a morally defensible one.
Totalitarianism starts with a butchery of language, and it is worth noting that Eagleton's most memorable recent contribution to the genre of the essay was to compare the martyrdom of Rosa Luxemburg to that of Mohammed Atta. I find this perfectly amenable to his commissar tendency of falsification and hysterical denunciation. (Graham Greene's Frankenstein hybrid of Catholicism and Marxism may have been "problematic," as the tortured young students in an Eagleton seminar would no doubt phrase it, but at least Greene managed to produce some good novels.)
I bring this up because Eagleton's lying seems to have worked. In a new article addressing Ian McEwan's defense of his friend Amis, the Telegraph journalist Nicole Martin makes the same reheated and philistine mistake:
In an essay written the day before the fifth anniversary of the bombing of New York's Twin Towers, the novelist suggested "strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan", preventing Muslims from travelling, and further down the road, deportation.
Which at least proves the old assumption that reporters don't bother to read the subject material -- in this case spectral -- about which they aim to report.
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New @ NY Sun:
Encounter Books, the conservative publishing house run by Roger Kimball, will no longer send review copies to the New York Times. In an amusing and much-discussed item posted to the company's Encounter Intelligence Web log, Mr. Kimball explained that the Times has "studiously" ignored almost all of his titles, and so if it plans to review any in the future, it will have to buy them like any other reader.
In a phone interview with The New York Sun, Mr. Kimball said he doesn't think his decision will jeopardize the financial health of his company; if anything, it might serve as a "wake-up call" to Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhaus, whom Mr. Kimball describes as a "moderate left-wing opportunist" responsible for perpetuating the "travesty" that has become of a once justly celebrated organ of cultural criticism. The Times is now a clearinghouse of "press releases emanating from the p.c. seats of established opinion" and "metrosexual lifestyle stuff," Mr. Kimball said. (Mr. Tanenhaus did not return The Sun's phone call for comment.)
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 New @ TNC:
One can be very lucky in one's political opponents. Geoffrey Wheatcroft may be an ardent foe of Tony Blair and a blushing admirer of Ron Paul and, as one of his compatriots likes to phrase it, a "bleeding Tory" to boot, but he is always worth reading on pretty much anything. (His Times piece on the origins of Israel and the intellectual distinctions among 20th century Zionists was one of the finest specimens of its type.) So it was with great pleasure that I just finished his short but potent essay in the New York Review of Books on the cult of Winston Churchill. Actually, "cult" is going too far because two of the authors under discussion in this collective review are admirers of the Last Lion -- John Lukacs and Lynne Olson. The first provides a book-length exegesis and commentary on Churchill's "Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat" speech, the inaugural address he delivered as prime minister on May 13, 1940, just three days after the Nazis entered France. The second writes of the "troublesome young men," or rebel Tories (not so bleeding after all) who undercut Chamberlain in Parliament by voting against him and thereby faciliated Churchill's ascendancy, not to say bore minority witness to an event that in hindsight has made them all look delphic.
But the other two authors under review are the real trouble: Nicholson Baker and Pat Buchanan, both of whom argue against the legitimacy, necessity, and "goodness" of World War II and believe either that a cosmos of moral equivalence existed between the Allies and the Axis powers (this is Baker's pacifist claim in the bestselling Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II and the End of Civilization), or that Hitler was more victim than aggressor and was only cajoled into exterminating six million Jews because Churchill and Roosevelt decided to challenge him and did so, moreover, by joining with Stalinist Russia (this is Buchanan's isolationist and Spenglerian claim in Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost the Empire and the West Lost the World).
A blog post is not the medium for addressing the many and deep historiographical and moral failings of either thesis, nor can a single essay do full justice to the task. Wheatcroft is more restrained in his criticism of Baker and Buchanan than others have been (see especially Anne Applebaum's excellent review of Human Smoke in the New Republic, which does us the added favor of comparing Baker's style to that of bloggers and the online populist storehouse of knowledge known as Wikipedia). Though one observation bears reprinting:
Whether or not one follows Buchanan's apocalyptic vision of the West in terminal decline--like other conservatives, he doesn't seem to have noticed that communism has been routed--it is of course true that World War II led to the cold war and the forty-year subjection of Eastern Europe. But then much of what he is saying was said more concisely by A.J.P. Taylor long ago, in a throwaway line glossing the very speech that is Lukacs's main text, and the one phrase "victory at all costs." Taylor writes:
This was exactly what the opponents of Churchill had feared, and even he hardly foresaw all that was involved. Victory, even if this meant placing the British empire in pawn to the United States; victory, even if it meant Soviet domination of Europe; victory at all costs.
Here was the nub of the problem. To defeat Hitler meant paying a very heavy political price, and meant waging war, when there seemed no other way in 1940-1941, with methods which would have seemed atrocious not long before. "At all costs" for Churchill also meant the ruthless bombing of German and Japanese cities and the killing of their civilian inhabitants. Nothing is more chilling in Human Smoke than Churchill's language about this, especially since, as Baker puts it, Churchill saw bombing in pedagogic terms:
Let them have a good dose where it will hurt them most.... It is time that the Germans should be made to suffer in their own homelands and cities.... The burning of Japanese cities by incendiary bombs [will bring home their errors] in a most effective way.
Why, it might almost be Hillary Clinton threatening "to totally obliterate" a distant country.
I can recall Robert Conquest noting the grim irony of the cancellation of the war charter after Poland was not so much handed to Stalin on a platter as it was simply left there for him to take. But then, Conquest, like A.J.P. Taylor from the opposing ideological direction, has more than earned the right to point this out without sounding feverish or like he was peddling the kind of agenda one can download off the Internet. As for Wheatcroft, "chilling" is the right word -- not euphemistic or hyperbolic -- to describe Churchill's comment. Yet his bloody-mindedness fails to rattle the humanist instinct quite as much as it might otherwise have done when one realizes that these words were spoken after London had been subjected to a year of brutal aerial bombardment by the Luftwaffe, which killed approximately 43,000 British civilians. Here were the English being made to suffer in their own homeland and city and by a regime that largely kept score on the basis of how many innocents and noncombatants could be vaporized.
Though Wheatcroft doesn't mention it, the prelude to Churchill's dark prescription was that he should like to mete out "the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us," which is certainly "pedagogic" in one way but also less calculated in another. It is vengeful. However much war policy should not be determined by so low a motive, who among history's crop of statesmen or wartime leaders would be expected not to want to hit back just as hard, if not harder, than they have been hit? And would we desire any such person to be even remotely in reach of the reins of power (Wheatcroft's joke at Hillary Clinton's expense is also at his own since her maid of Saragossa militancy still allowed her to nearly get away with earning her party's nomination.)
Nicholson Baker is a pacifist and therefore believes war is never justified. His principles have made his tract tone-deaf, voulu, and slightly creepy -- but also, in its way, harmless. Even the untutored student of World War II can decide for himself, according to the in situ examples he provides, just how much there really was to choose between Hitler and Churchill. Baker's is the kind of sham argument, in other words, that doesn't improve by collecting evidence "out of context."
But Buchanan's cards are all showing, and they have been for years. He's made it his life's work to undo the established wisdom of the climactic event of the twentieth century and to offer this "alternative" history of the hot war against totalitarianism from the perspective of the lonely little America Firster who has been as hounded and excluded from the great debate as Germany was at Versailles in 1919. He'll find he's still got his work cut out for him. Some things are true and right even if every schoolboy has been taught to believe they are, and history to the defeated revisionists may say alas, but cannot help or pardon.
 New @ Slate:
Science traffics in the great unknowns, admitting that it has far more to learn than it has to teach. That hasn't stopped some from attempting to enlist it in the defense of religion. The pope puts out an encyclical trying to split the difference between evolution and the Book of Genesis. Intelligent design makes a mockery of both the method of induction and metaphysics. And scientists who use deistic language to describe the infinite mysteries of the cosmos are made out to be water-carriers for ancient dogmas--perhaps none more so than Albert Einstein. He's been a genius well worth stealing. The nimbus-domed father of relativity was, throughout most of the 20th century, held up as the most impressive example of a rationalist who left the door open a crack for the divine presence.
Yet a recently unearthed letter should cool any further desire to conscript him as a believer. In 1954, a year before his death, Einstein wrote a letter to Jewish philosopher Eric Gutkind that was sold at auction for $404,000. It's easy to see why Richard Dawkins was a losing high-level bidder for this extraordinary document:
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New @ TNC:
Sunt lachrymae rerum, says the poet. And the sudden and horribly premature passing of Tim Russert has been an occasion of many tears indeed. Everyone in journalism, from every pocket of partisanship, has turned out to mourn the death of this astute and knowledgeable pundit, who seemed too good for the medium of television by which most of America got to know him.
David Remnick writes: "Russert was no radical. He wanted the zing of confrontation but was always careful to withdraw at a certain point, the better not to cross the line between tough and hostile in the viewer's eyes. There were limits to his approach, and blogs both liberal and conservative sometimes purveyed the notion that he was nothing more than a cozy role-player in the Beltway drama. That notion was deeply unfair. His preparation insured that a politician could not drift long in a mental comfort zone. After one particularly contentious Sunday session, John McCain recalled that he told Russert, "I hadn't had so much fun since my last interrogation in prison camp." That expression of grudging admiration may well have been McCain's clever means of D.C. ingratiation, but one can guess it's not one he would have thought to extend to most of Russert's network and cable colleagues."
Noam Schreiber explains Russert's talent for making the banal platform dynamic: "Without the chance at some drama, the viewers wouldn't tune in (at least not in the same numbers). Russert's ingenious solution to this problem: The gotcha. The delicious possibility of seeing a secretary of state or joint chiefs chairman get that shifty-eyed, busted-for-filching-the-homeroom-Jolly-Rancher-stash look when they contradicted an earlier pronouncement kept us watching week after week. But the questioning was rarely so probing or aggressive or unpredictable that a reasonably agile guest couldn't study his way to a passing grade."
Joe Klein reminds us of Tim's senatorial boss, whose retirement from national politics was certainly a more noteworthy event than the election of his successor: "Tim did me a lifetime favor by introducing me to his boss, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in 1978. Moynihan became a mentor and inspiration to me, and gave me a graduate education in all things New York. Tim's favorite Moynihan story was about the time he had to pick up Pat at the Pierre Hotel in New York to take him to a dinner. Tim arrived at the hotel and heard the distinctive laugh, "Ah-ah-ah-ah-AH!" from inside the room. "Ah-ah-ah-ah-AH!" Just peals of laughter. Russert paused a minute, uncertain about bothering the boss. "Ah-ah-ah-Ah-AHH!" Finally, he knocked. "Moyns came to the door in his underwear," Tim recalled. "He'd been watching The Honeymooners.""
And Christopher Hitchens has a newish anecdote about Russert's up-to-the-millisecond fact-checking: "Not very long ago I was sitting opposite him in the studio during a break, and wanted to check some abstruse detail about the campaign. Out flashed his Blackberry and before the music came on for the next segment he had the relevant information for me and was asking someone to help print it out. I was impressed, not so much by his digital mastery, but by the amazing speed with which he could "access" anything that was germane to politics. Hard work was his secret: hard work and a certain commitment to honesty."
New @ TNC:
Deep sea divers have uncovered an extraordinary find at the bottom of one of the Great Lakes: the HMS Ontario, a 22-gun British sloop that sank in 1780 after seeing action in the American Revolution. From the BBC:
They claim HMS Ontario is the oldest confirmed shipwreck and the only fully-intact British warship to have ever been found in the North American Great Lakes.
[...]
Official records quoted by the team of explorers show HMS Ontario went down on 31 October 1780 with a garrison of 60 British soldiers and a crew of about 40, mostly Canadians. There could also have been up to 30 American prisoners of war on board
It's the only fully intact warship of its age to be discovered in the Great Lakes, owing, say shipwreck experts, to the extreme frigidity and absence of light in its submerged port of the last two centuries. Though the Ontario has been designated a war grave, there are no plans to remove it from the water (and it's worth noting the finders are keeping quiet as to which lake it resides in, and the exact coordinates), probably because that can't be done without compromising the integrity of the wreckage. A shame, then, to have a memorial at which only a handful of trained divers -- and maybe a material-starved James Cameron -- can ever pay homage. (That there were 30 Yanks on board makes it as much an American treasure as a British one.)
 New @ TNC:
If all goes according to plan, the new British literary journal Standpoint will become the Encounter of the new millennium. It's off to a good start. Out of a welter of linkable material in its debut issue, I've selected this group interview with Simon Sebag Montefiore (Stalin biographer), and Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Mao biographers) because I've an amateur interest in huge 20th century imagos that made psychopathic gods, and what they say about the past has eminent bearing on the future. Here's SSM:
If you talk to people, not just old people but young people, of Putin's generation, for example, and younger, they see Stalin as the most successful Russian leader. This is a quote from a Putin-endorsed textbook which says "Stalin was the most successful Russian leader of the 20th century" -- which of course is undeniably true if you measure power in the same way that you'd measure Genghis Khan as a great success in the old-fashioned way that people used before the 20th century, before we introduced moral measurements for such matters. And the textbook also says that Stalin had to use terror just to make sure that the bureaucracy and the elite obeyed orders. The empire he left, stretching from Berlin to Mongolia, was larger than any tsar's. And so I think Stalin, this Georgian who wasn't even Russian, will end up being "Stalin the Great" in Russian textbooks. I thought it would take 50 years but it's happening now.
And Felix Dzerzhinsky's name still adorns the offices of the FSB (successor agency of the KGB), and there has never been a Truth and Reconciliation Committee established to drum into the Russian soul the high crimes of Stalinism.
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