|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
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.}
|
|
|
 New @ Jewcy (links are there, too):
Foreign Policy blogger Marc Lynch (a.k.a. Abu Aardvark) has an interesting post up at FP's new-minted digital playground, which has already drawn lurid attention to itself for its inclusion of Israel Lobby theorist Stephen Walt and his dubious "thought experiments." Lynch is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University, and, much like his cheerleader and confrere-at-the-keyboard Juan Cole, has built a reputation as a Mideast analyst who sees almost every effort to stamp out jihadism as an unintentional bolster to jihadism. Case in point: His latest claim that Israel's buffeting of Hamas is sweet music to the ears of Al Qaeda:
Israel's assault on Gaza has really created an almost unbelievable no-lose situation for al-Qaeda. If Hamas "wins", then al-Qaeda gets to share in the benefits of the political losses incurred by its Western and Arab enemies (Zawahiri mentions Mubarak and the Saudis in this tape, but not the Jordanians) and can try to take advantage of the political upheavals which could follow. If Hamas "loses", al-Qaeda still wins. It will shed no tears at seeing one of its bitterest and most dangerous rivals take a beating at Israel's hands or losing control of a government that they have consistently decried as illegitimate and misguided. Either way, the Gaza crisis guarantees that a far more radicalized Islamic world will face the incoming Obama administration -- potentially severely blunting the challenge which al-Qaeda clearly felt after the election (hence Zawahiri's attempt to pre-emptively discredit Obama by declaring the attack Obama's "gift" to Muslims).
The way this crisis is playing out shows the bankruptcy and strategic dangers of trying to simply reduce Hamas to part of an undifferentiated "global terrorist front". The Muslim Brotherhood, from whence Hamas evolved twenty years ago, is no friend of the United States or Israel but is nevertheless one of al-Qaeda's fiercest rivals. Zawahiri himself penned one of the most famous anti-Brotherhood tracts, Bitter Harvest. Over the last few years, the doctrinal and political conflict between the Brotherhood and al-Qaeda's salafi-jihadism has become one of the most active fault-lines in Islamist politics. As 'Abu Qandahar' wrote on al-Qaeda's key al-Ekhlaas forum in October 2007, the "Islamic world is divided between two projects, jihad and Ikhwan [Brotherhood]."
Lynch's reason for how Al Qaeda "wins" if Hamas loses is that the latter terror group's monopoly on Gaza would effectively be broken, thus allowing the former to finally infilitrate (cf. "Up to now, AQ-minded groups have had little success in penetrating Gaza, because Hamas had it locked. Now they clearly have high hopes of finding an entree with a radicalized, devastated population and a weakened Hamas."). If this does in fact happen, then I wonder if Lynch has extrapolated the likely consequences, which tell against his implied thesis that military incursions such as these are inherently self-defeating. Al Qaeda's setting up shop right next door to Israel would almost certainly do two things: 1. Give Israel even greater legitimacy to wage war there, if not invite a U.S./international military presence; 2. Change the world's perception of the zone of conflict from that of a colonial-nationalist struggle into that of a... "global terrorist front." (What price immediate cease-fires when the premier enemy of our time, with a trail of carnage stretching from New York to London to Madrid, is doing the fighting?)
What Lynch doesn't acknowledge -- at least not in this post -- is that Al Qaeda's flagging popularity is due in large part to its military and political defeat in Iraq, where it (foolishly) decided to create a cynosure of Islamist terror and test out the prospects of a neo-caliphate. If it should try to do this again, and in the one place it can ill afford to have Muslims grow more disillusioned with its activities, might we expect the realist school to indulge us with the following headline: "and the winner is... America!"?
 New @ Jewcy:
I have already tried to show how Hamas has failed the people of Palestine politically, and how even the most optimistic appraisal of the organization's supposed "pragmatism" has failed to pan out, even under exigent circumstances in which pragmatism should surely trump ideological purity. However, lest one come away with the narrow assumption that Hamas's theocratic fascism represents a direct long-term threat only to Jews, I invite you to consider the following speech made by Ahmad Bahr, the Acting Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council (and a Hamas member), on April 13, 2007. Coming as these words do from the political equivalent of Nancy Pelosi in Palestine, they should not be easily dismissed as mere rhetoric:
"You will be victorious on the face of this planet. You are the masters of the world on the face of this planet." Yes, [the Koran says that] "you will be victorious," but only "if you are believers." Allah willing, "you will be victorious," while America and Israel will be annihilated, Allah willing. I guarantee you that the power of belief and faith is greater than the power of America and Israel. They are cowards, as is said in the Book of Allah: "You shall find them the people most eager to protect their lives." They are cowards, who are eager for life, while we are eager for death for the sake of Allah. That is why America's nose was rubbed in the mud in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Somalia, and everywhere. America will be annihilated, while Islam will remain. The Muslims "will be victorious, if you are believers." Oh Muslims, I guarantee you that the power of Allah is greater than America. We saw to them that with the might of Allah, with the might of His Messenger, and with the power of Allah, we are stronger than America and Israel.
I tell you that we will protect the enterprise of the resistance, because the Zionist enemy understands only the language of force. It does not recognize peace or the agreements. It does not recognize anything, and it understands only the language of force. Our jihad-fighting Palestinian people salutes its brother, Sudan.
The Palestinian woman bids her son farewell, and says to him: "Son, go and don't be a coward. Go, and fight the Jews." He bids her farewell and carries out a martyrdom operation. What did this Palestinian woman say when she was asked for her opinion, after the martyrdom of her son? She said: "My son is my own flesh and blood. I love my son, but my love for Allah and His Messenger is greater than my love for my son." Yes, this is the message of the Palestinian woman, who was over 70 years old--Fatima al-Najjar. She was over 70 years old, but she blew herself up for the sake of Allah, bringing down many criminal Zionists.
Oh Allah, vanquish the Jews and their supporters. Oh Allah, vanquish the Americans and their supporters. Oh Allah, count their numbers, and kill them all, down to the very last one. Oh Allah, show them a day of darkness. Oh Allah, who sent His Book, the mover of the clouds, who defeated the enemies of the Prophet, defeat the Jews and the Americans, and bring us victory over them.
 New @ TNC:
The New York Times Magazine devoted itself this past Sunday to short squibs about famous figures who died in 2008. Among the memorialized deceased was Philip Agee, the CIA agent turned tell-all memoirist, who in 1974 published a list of the spy bureau's active field agents and informants, thus compromising American security and very probably getting a good number of erstwhile comrades killed. Agee's treason led to the passage in 1982 of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Rick Perelstein wrote the Agee entry in the Times Magazine, though I have a quibble over this citation:
The next time Agee showed up in the papers, it was 1974, and he was about to publish "Inside the Company: C.I.A. Diary," very much against the wishes of his actual former employer -- which was not the Olympics section. "I did not write this book for the K.G.B.," Agee, who worked for a decade as a spook, announced. "I wrote it as a contribution to socialist revolution."
How generous. Except that he did indeed try to sell American secrets to the K.G.B because the former archivist of the organization, Vasili Mitrokhin, explained in his book The Mitrokhin Archive that in 1973 Agee
approached the KGB residency in Mexico City and offered what the head of the FCD's Counter-Intelligence Directorate, Oleg Kalugin, called 'reams of information about CIA operations'.
Kalugin was skeptical of Agee's goods, however, and turned him down.
Agee then went to the Cubans [says Kalugin], who welcomed him with open arms...The Cubans shared Agee's information with us. But as I sat in my office in Moscow reading reports about the growing revelations coming from Agee, I cursed our officers for turning away such a prize.
Kalugin is now a well-sought lecturer on counterintelligence in the U.S. and a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin. He lives in Maryland. The turncoat who slipped through Kalugin's fingers died in Havana, a long-time guest of the Castro regime, in January.
 New @ Jewcy:
Commentators in the American and European press too often succumb to a solipsistic way of thinking of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as if only one side had any autonomy or agency. The debate between supporters and critics of Israel is typically couched in the same grammar: Either the Jewish state is acting defensibly, in its own self-interest, or it is not. Thus Tom Segev writes in Ha'aretz that while the latest assault on Hamas military and political infrastructure is morally justified, it represents a strategic blunder. A major fallacy ensues from this one-sided premise, which is that Israel is the sole stimulus for Hamas response, and therefore it alone bears the responsibility for the undeniable misery in Gaza. Those quick to point out how Olmert's miscalculations have hurt the people he governs will typically suggest that military incursions "radicalize" Arab sentiment, leading to more suicide bombers and more dead Israelis.
Assuming this is true, why is it that the corollary is never asked: namely, how does Hamas radicalize Israeli sentiment? A much remarked-upon fact of the last 72 hours is that Israel's ultra-left-wing party Meretz has endorsed Operation Cast Lead, a development that should concern partisans of both sides. If there is merit to the "root causes" argument, then surely it applies to the decisions undertaken by a Jewish polity as much as it does to those undertaken by a Muslim one. Or does a belligerent Israeli consensus form in a vacuum? Honest sympathizers of the Palestinian cause should inquire as to what culpability Ismail Haniyeh and Khalid Mashaal bear for the all-but-certain election of Benjamin Netanyahu, who is sure to continue - to coin another witless cliché of this ageless debate - the "cycle of violence." If, as Hannah Arendt once phrased it, Theodore Herzl and Bernard Lazare were "turned into Jews by anti-Semitism," why would their empowered disciples be any less susceptible to external threats?
From India to Northern Ireland, no colonized population has ever been deemed immune from having the pursuit of its own political interests held up to scrutiny. Indeed, complaints in the Western media about the staggering corruption and incompetence of Fatah have given way to an almost total absence of any serious evaluation of Hamas's many blunders and failures of foreign policy. Either this indicates an unpardonable bias, which many supporters of Israel allege, or the implicit acceptance of a disturbing reality -- that Hamas is still too recalcitrant a political entity to effectively barter with. Judging by its long-term objectives and its short-term behavior, the group is committed to withholding the minimum concessions to its enemy at the cost of incurring the maximum suffering of its people. Derived from an all-encompassing Islamist social movement, Hamas bears a striking resemblance in its political organization to 20th-century fascist parties, a point that must also factor in any assessment of Hamas's "pragmatic" capabilities.
Read more...
 New @ TNC:
Tim Tzouliadis's The Forsaken tells of thousands of American socialists and Communists who moved to the Soviet Union in the thirties to find work and a workers' paradise. They were quickly disappointed. Adam Hothschild reviews the book in the London Times:
From Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other Russians who have borne witness, we know about the midnight arrests, the interrogations and forced confessions, the trains hauling packed boxcars of emaciated prisoners to the labour camps scattered across the Arctic, Siberia, Kazakhstan and elsewhere. Tzouliadis traces the story of the Americans who got caught up in this madness through a wide range of letters and documents, and the published memoirs of two men who played on American baseball teams in Moscow in the mid-1930s, Victor Herman and Thomas Sgovio. Unlike many of their fellow players, whom they occasionally encountered in the gulag, they survived their imprisonment: Herman in central Russia and Sgovio in Kolyma. No one knows how many of the American immigrants were caught up by the Purge and perished either in execution cellars or in the camps, although one mass grave with more than 140 American bodies was found in 1997 near the Finnish border. Tzouliadis does not try to estimate the total American dead. My own guess would be that the figure is in the thousands; if we add victims among Britons and other Westerners living in USSR at the time, the total would be in the tens of thousands.
And it wasn't just Russia to whose siren call left-wing Yanks infatuated with proletarian dictatorship were inexorably drawn. In way, they commanded an odd respect; at least they put their money where their mouths were and picked up to go see socialism as it actually existed outside the cafes and salons of democratic cities. Bellow has a great set piece in his novella Mosby's Memoirs about a poor political innocent called Lustgarten, who moves to Yuglosavia hoping that Tito's alternative will be any alternative at all:
"They're asking interested people to come as guests to tour the country and see how they're building socialism. Oh, I know," he quickly said, anticipating standard doctrinal objection, "you don't build socialism in one country, but it's no longer the same situation. And I really believe Tito may redeem Marxism by actually transforming the dictatorship of the proletariat. This brings me back to my first love--the radical movement. I was never meant to be an entrepreneur."
Bellow wastes no time in bringing down the other shoe. On the next page:
"To say that in September the Lustgarten who reappeared looked frightful. He had lost no less than fifty pounds. Sun-blackened, creased, in a filthy stained suit, his eyes infected. He said he had had diarrhea all summer.
"And what did they feed their foreign VIPs?"
And Lustgarten shyly bitter--the lean face and inflamed eyes materializing from a spiritual region very different from any heretofore associated with Lustgarten by Mosby--said, "It was just a chain gang. It was hard labor. I didn't understand the deal. I thought we were invited as I told you. But we turned out to be foreign volunteers-of-construction. A labor brigade. And up in the mountains. Never saw the Dalmatian coast. Hardly even shelter for the night. We slept on the ground and ate shit fried in rancid oil."
"Why didn't you run away?" asked Mosby.
"How? Where?"
"Back to Belgrade. To the American embassy at least?"
"How could I? I was a guest. Came at their expense. They held the return ticket."
 New @ Jewcy:
I've had my disagreements with Johann Hari, but I've also had my agreements with him (on George Galloway and the rest of the gruesome galere of faux-cialists, Hari is extremely reliable). And his is the best cold water obituary on Harold Pinter I've yet read:
The tragedy of Pinter's politics is that he took a desirable political value - hatred of war, or distrust for his own government - and absolutizes it. It is good to hate war, but to take this so far that you will not resist Hitler and Stalin is absurd. It is good to oppose the crimes of your own government - but to take this so far that you end up serving on the Committee to Defend Slobodan Milosevic is bizarre.
When Serbian nationalism - stoked and stroked by Milosevic - began to ravage the Balkans in the 1990s, Pinter's response was simple and visceral: whatever the US and UK governments are for, I'm against. Blair and Clinton are condemning Milosevic? Right, sign me up for the defense. The Committee he sat on right up to Miolsevic's death - headed by Jared Israel, a friend of Milosevic - was not simply calling for the Serb to be given a fair trial, a demand all reasonable people supported. It called for Milosevic to be released on the grounds that he was not guilty. In fact, the website bragging Pinter's signature describes him as a "the strongest pillar of peace and stability in this region."
So when there was ethnic cleansing two days' drive from Auschwitz, Pinter's response was to defend the aggressor and attack the victims. While much of the left - good people like Peter Tatchell, Michael Foot and Susan Sontag - were calling for democratic countries to arm the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to defend the ethnic Albanians from racist murder, Pinter described the KLA as "a bandit organisation" that was "actually" responsible for the ethnic cleansing in the region. Watching the trial, Pinter said admiringly, "Milosevic is giving them a run for their money."
This is not to judge Pinter the playwright, only Pinter the activist (although it bears mention that his plays got worse and worse, too). We would be shit out of poets and novelists from the 20th-century if all we had to assess them on was their collusion with fascism, Stalinism or anti-Semitism. But the problem with departed writers is the obituarist's instinct to erase what damage they may have done in other areas, brokered on their literary celebrity. This is especially shameful when one considers that there is no necessary direct relationship between literary brilliance and political stupidity. Pinter imported Beckett to the London stage. Yes, well, Susan Sontag imported him to the blasted-out war zones of Sarajevo, and risked her life doing it.
Pinter's case is still useful, however, for diagnosing the upside-down world of what my friend Alan Johnson calls "post-leftism." This is the ideology of anti-ideology, of mere attitudes and prejudices and reflexes, most of which are reactionary in masquerade (one thinks of Chomsky's defense of Faurisson not merely on free speech grounds but on the substance of his Holocaust denial argument, or Naomi Klein's glorification of Muqtada al-Sadr). How comes it that a Thatcher voter, married to a titled woman who burnishes the reputation of Marie Anoinette, defends the slaughterer of Balkan Muslims as a "persecuted" anti-imperialist? And that an avowed foe of national interests, particularly when the nations in question are the United States and Great Britain, would then refer you to "Yugoslav law" in inveighing against the extradition and trial of an international criminal?
Where bickering Marxists once had a common lexicon, derived from common first principles, and could thus be scandalized for their fallacies of interpretation or their pig-ignorance, the post-leftist is wholly free to improvise and invent, using the glyphs he may still recognize from the ruins of Marxism. Like Milosz's Child of Europe, who
Let [his] words speak not through their meanings,
But through them against whom they are used,
he can be celebrated both by the hard left and the hard right, if for no other reason than his anatagonism of the vital center. And instead instead of being called out for his political autism and his acquiescence in atrocity, he will be awarded the Nobel Prize.
 New @ Jewcy:
There used to be a joke around London that if Martin Amis ever got round to writing his autobiography, it'd have to be called My Struggle. The implication here was that nepotism and the law of succession would do their part in ensuring that an ambitious young litterateur got his first book deal. Whatever merit there may have been in that observation -- and there was also a lot of envy and scorn -- it did nothing to ensure that Amis wrote well, or that he secured his second and third book deals. He had to rely on talent at some point. In any case, his debut fiction The Rachel Papers won the Somerset Maugham Award, which, as if taunting his hyperdemocratic jeerers, was precisely the same honor bestowed on Kingsley Amis some two decades earlier for his masterpiece Lucky Jim. And if anyone remains in doubt about exactly what kind of reliance fils still has on pere, then consider that the autobiography Martin did in fact write was all about his father, and it was one of his best books.
Genetics, we've long known, plays a dominant role in determining our abilities, and so there may be something to the argument that the apple never falls far from the tree, though that's hardly the apple's fault, is it? Yet the notion of a hereditary mathematician or a hereditary politician is still a profoundly silly one to our republican ears. What great figure has emerged from the British House of Lords in recent memory? Do we believe that any beamish member of the young Windsor clan is fit to manage a night club in Southhampton, much less govern a people? What I mean to say was much better said by a founding father of the United States:
The more aristocracy appeared, the more it was despised; there was a visible imbecility and want of intellects in the majority, a sort of je ne sais quoi, that while it affected to be more than citizen, was less than man. It lost ground from contempt more than from hatred; and was rather jeered at as an ass, than dreaded as a lion. This is the general character of aristocracy, or what are called Nobles or Nobility, or rather No-ability, in all countries.
Thomas Paine didn't have Google, where terms like "American Royalty" and "Camelot" spring right up whenever the query is the name of one of the most mediocre and over-indulged families to ever sully these fine shores. How is it that, in an age where a mixed-race man from a broken home, the product of international upbringing and no inherited fortune, can be elected president, we are still talking about the fucking Kennedys?
Former first daughter Caroline's latest bid for the New York senate seat soon to be vacated by Hillary Clinton is at least being subjected the kind of real-time scrutiny and audible whisper campaign her father's White House never was. That deserves the title of progress. But there's one holdout institution which seems intent on making the society philanthropist's assumption of office as painless as possible: the New York Times. "Kennedy, Touring Upstate, Gets Less and Less Low-Key" was the title of the Times' Thursday piece on Caroline's image-doctoring, except that it actually hit the paper's website on Wednesday afternoon. If you bothered to read it then, the lede you got was as follows:
In a carefully controlled strategy reminiscent of the vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin, aides to Caroline Kennedy interrupted her on Wednesday and whisked her away when she was asked what her qualifications are to be a United States senator.
Which is surely one way to stamp "Not Ready" on the dauphiness' forehead. Well, the Times will do many things, apparently, such as run letters from fake French mayors in aggrieved reaction to America's aristo tilt. But one thing it won't do is allow a comparison between Sweet Caroline and the Wasilla Wehrmacht. By Thursday, in the print edition, the lede had been scotched, replaced with the much more copacetic:
The first day of Caroline Kennedy's tour through upstate New York on Wednesday was meant to be a low-key, decorous excursion, mindful of the skepticism surrounding her bid to be appointed the state's next United States senator. Fat chance.
Gone too was any mention of her being "whisked" away from the inquisitive throng by her handlers, lest she embarrass herself by explaining why she deserved to be a senator without even being elected one.
How to explain this watering-down other than in terms of blatant bias from on high?
Pinch Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, was shamelessly for Hillary Clinton when she still had a chance to be president. He more or less forced the editorial board of his paper to endorse her. And what do you know: he's also great good friends with Caroline, who spoke at a roast of Sulzberger years ago, and whose company with him grew so frequent that it prompted rumors in New York about the nature of their relationship (he had left his wife, she's still married). Would a bracketed "full disclosure" line in coverage of Kennedy's political aspirations be too distracting? Isn't that news fit to print, maybe only in tiny little letters at the bottom?
In a way it's heartening to see that with Democrats on the ascendant, the same old Tammany-style crap wastes no time in bubbling to the surface. It's also heartening that most liberals and Democrats I've spoken with think this appointment would be a very bad idea, fusing all the populist bilge of the Palin pick with the species of noxious cultural elitism Palin got so horribly confused on the stump. One way to erect a tombstone on the Bush years is with the epitaph: Here Endeth the Family Business. It has universal appeal.
And to think, Teddy has also intimated that he wants his permanent perch in Massachusetts to go to...his wife, Victoria. I say, why not? Bourgeois financiers rob us blind, and the dissipated heirs of a degenerate, lace-curtain second estate bequeath Congress to themselves.
See you at the next Tennis Court Oath.
 New @ Jewcy:
As best I can tell, before today, there were three living nonagenarians who almost perfectly, each in his own way, embodied the 20th-century. All were born in that crucial year 1917, and two more or less carried on the key debate that began around then: Robert Conquest and Eric Hobsbawm. The third was Conor Cruise O'Brien, a brilliant and enigmatic Irishman, who died last night:
O'Brien, who led the United Nations operations in the Congo in 1960, was Ireland's minister for posts and telegraphs in the mid-1970s and who became editor-in-chief of the Observer newspaper in 1979 for three years, died last night. The cause of death was not revealed.
Irish Taoiseach Brian Cowen led tributes to O'Brien. "Conor was a leading figure in Irish life in many spheres since the 1960s. It is a reflection on his wide array of talents that he was able to make a sizeable impact in the public service, in politics, in academia and journalism," Cowen said.
He began his civil service career in De Valera's Catholic chauvinist government, but is best remembered for being one of the most persuasive critics of the I.R.A. As someone forged in the kiln of colonialism, O'Brien's insights cut across borders. He wrote what is probably the smartest series of studies of Edmund Burke, who was a distant relative, arguing that the founder of modern conservatism was very probably still a practicing Catholic (Burke's father had the family converted to Protestantism in order to avert the anti-Catholic penal laws of the day) and thus his concern about the bloody revolution occurring in France, and the imminence of one being preached in "certain societies in London," stemmed at least as much from self-preservation as it did from core monarchist principle. The anti-Papist cause could not, in 1789, be detached from the Jacobin one, and this was a concatenation Burke was better poised than most of his fellow parliamentarians to appreciate as a liberal defender of human rights abroad, most especially in India -- he led the charge in the House of Commons against Warren Hastings -- but also in the colonies in America. Indeed, Burke wasn't even a Tory, he was a Whig, and he was not opposed or unsympathetic to all revolutions, a further irony that has been lost to vulgar historical caricatures about Right and Left--caricatures that are equally hard to apply to his kinsman and sensitive flame-tender.
Not that O'Brien himself was an unstained son of Eire. He wrote a very bad book about millennialism in 1994, and his self-flattering and inebriated public appearances on British television long ago earned him the sobriquet (though I know there were others) Camera Crews O'Booze.
Still, one feels the loss of a great scholar and statesman.
My old coworker Izzy Grinspan, and her cat, The Colonel, have photoshopped a letter of appreciation for my DFW essay:
 New @ NY Mag:
When last we left Gossip Girl's Chuck Bass, he was having a rough time of it -- drunk, angry, and alone after the death of his father, he looked, literally and figuratively, to be on the verge of teetering into the abyss. But the manicured dandy of the Palace Hotel shouldn't let himself fall just yet, for he is loved: When last we checked, Chuck Bass's Facebook fan club was over 40,000 strong. Men want to be him and women want to ... well, you know. And while he may be feeling alone right now ("I don't have a family," he snarled at Lily on the church steps), he does, in fact, belong somewhere. Chuck is, after all, the latest in a long and illustrious line of wicked womanizers. And all he has to do to bring them back to life is crack a book. Or check out our slideshow.
Read more...
 New @ TNC:
What is it about communist kitsch that erases the historical memory of communist atrocity? asks Nick Gillespie in this ReasonTV segment, replying to Steven Soderbergh's new Sundance-claphappy epic about Che Guevara. Behind every lightly worn Che image lies a thousand unmarked graves, not to mention concentration camps (a symbol still mercifully immune to cutesy pop rendering) and an orthodoxy of political and cultural thinking which no stone-throwing anti-globalization rebel would long endure if it meant the difference between shattering a Starbucks windows and facing a firing squad. And yet, we shall never lack for Che t-shirts, Che-themed bars and restaurants and Che hagiographies, either in print or in cinema. Nor will demand ever outpace the supply of hidebound leftists eager to bypass brute reality in favor of a mythopoetic conception of their heroic caballero. Do I exaggerate?
When Walters Salles' came out with The Motorycle Diaries, another congratulated affair based on Guevara's tours through Latin America as a medical student, Paul Berman reviewed it, throwing a bucket of cold water on amnesiacs and revisionists. His argument was that the portrait of the totalitarian as a young man, though beautifully shot, reaffirmed the very type of religious cult the film's subject, mired in leper colonies and sadisitic nuns, actively reprehended. Diaries put Che in the position of secular saint. If for no other reason than pointing this out, Berman's piece counted as art criticism, athough it was leavened with plenty of evidence as to why Salles' premise was both misguided and sinister. That of course made Berman a "philistine," as the New Left academic blogger Chris Bertram and that great historian of revolutionary socialism Matthew Yglesias put it, using a term of abuse long favored by disapproving ideologists of the very type of regime Berman took issue with. Bertram's response in particular was telling:
Lack of success and damaging facts should not necessarily be enough to deprive a hero of heroic status: Achilles was flawed, and Achilles was cruel, and Achilles failed, but we still respond to him.
That Achilles never existed also aids our response, one would think, as does the fact that a Trojan Truth and Reconciliation Commission has yet to be uncovered by classical scholars. No witnesses to Achaean barbarity still draw breath to make us hold ours. But as for literal examples of mythopoetics winning out among the unreconstructed left, Bertram's could not be bettered. He continued:
And then there's the question of sympathetic identification with the cause. In his essay "How not to write about Lenin", Alasdair Macintyre argues:
For those who intend to write about Lenin there are at least two prerequisites. The first is a sense of scale. One dare not approach greatness of a certain dimension without a sense of one's own limitations. A Liliputian who sets out to write Gulliver's biography had best take care. Above all he dare not be patronizing.....The second prerequisite is a sense of tragedy which will enable the historian to feel both the greatness and the tragedy of the October Revolution. Those for whom the whole project of the revolutionary liberation of mankind from exploitation and alienation is an absurb fantasy disqualify themselves from writing about Communism in the same way that those who find the notion of the supernatural redemption of the world from sin disqualify themselves from writing ecclesiastical history.
Guevara wasn't Lenin, just as he wasn't Alexander, but he did personify a historical moment and he did turn his back on a comfortable future as a communist bureaucrat to pursue the goal of the revolutionary liberation of humanity.
Macintyre's essay is indeed eminently consultable, but one notes that both its title and subject are devoted to a single historical figure. Macintyre is not, in other words, giving a generic prescription for how scholars should engage all the world's tyrants and mass murderers. Why is that?
Like Guevara, Lenin used the state apparatus he constructed for wanton killing of perceived counterrevolutionaries and class enemies, and he was motivated, as numerous eyewitnesses to his behavior and his own journals attest, by an all-encompassing hatred of that enemy. He killed more people than Guevara, too. However, he was also a man of ideas whom even his ideological opponents, a full century on, find worthy of quotation. One need only think of how "useful idiots" has entered the neoconservative's lexicon to appreciate that Lenin was not a bantamweight of political strategizing. There is also the fact that the social and economic conditions under which he lived--semi-feudal, imperialistic, violently anti-Semitic--were noticeably worse than those of coeval nations. (Batista's Cuba could always claim in 1959 that at least it was not the Soviet Union.) And Lenin was capable of a sensitivity and subtlety of thought directly at odds with the manner in which he governed, a paradox he shared with another Soviet architect for whom Macintyre's challenges of biography are, or should be, paramount: Trotsky, who subsequently became a romantic martyr to some of the earliest and most perspicacious foes of the Soviet Union.
There is another essay waiting to be written that contrasts 20th-century intellectuals who admired Lenin and Trotsky with those who found Stalin was more their guy. It is a distinction with a difference that, for anyone versed in radical polemics (they only seem as old as Homer), resists easy caricature about the gullibility of les clercs. Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald were once in awe of a man they saw as nothing short of History pulling into the Finland Station, and yet both writers---Wilson a fellow traveler and Macdonald an bona fide socialist---gave up on Hegelian lyricism when confronted with Five Year Plans and the bloated bellies of the Ukraine. (Nabokov also helpfully chided Wilson for his warm depiction of Vladimir Ilyich: "this pail of milk of human kindness with a dead rat at the bottom.") Irving Howe was a self-described Trotsky acolyte all the way to the grave, having written a glowing biography of the Old Man and edited a collection of his essays. Still, the cold war could not have been fought as well as it was from our side without the founding editor of Dissent. The same holds true for Trotsky, who offered an insider's guide to the Stalinist school of falsification, and much else besides, even if his intentions were to rescue what he had begun. These are ironies that go some way in accounting for the halfbaked defenses of historical actors guilty of monstrous deeds.
Now consider the bloody-minded doctor who, befuddled at having a state to run after the Cuban revolution, once asked if there was an economist in the house (he was misheard, and every "Communist" in attendance raised his hand). Even the lifelong Red Eric Hobsbawm was inclined to admit in his memoirs that Guevara, whom he once met in the scraggly-bearded flesh, was thoroughly unimpressive. He made no contribution to the epistemology of revolution or to theoretical politics in general. Can you think of an apercu or epigram by him? What has Che, then, to fall back on besides his alleged "charisma" and the unintentionally funny commodification of his likeness? What I mean to say is, his left-wing cultists are slumming it.
It is a function of art--even some socialist realist art--to debase and lampoon the unjustly exaggerated, and to uncover the cloaca under which an edifice of cant, nonsense and apologetics has been erected. And it is an obligation of anyone pretending to be anything other than a pure fantasist to depict actual events and actual people as they actually existed, not as tributes to some world-historical idyll.
Would that Hollywood, ever eager to employ these techniques against Joe McCarthy and George W. Bush, turned its sights on a figure deserving of this treatment but recipient of the perennial whitewash instead.
 New @ Jewcy:
The Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq was ratified on Thanksgiving Day, and if the holiday weren't enough to drown it out of the news cycle, then the jihadist massacres in Mumbai surely were. Among those looking to certify Obama's electoral victory as a sign that our involvement in Iraq is all but over, and U.S. troops are due to return home soon, the sofa, as the agreement is colloquially known, superficially gives cause for celebration. It states that all American combat troops return to their bases by June 2009, and that all withdraw from the country by the last calendar date of 2011. So that's that, right?
Not so fast. Eli Lake at TNR reads between the lines, and echoes the conventional wisdom among both our own military establishment and Iraq's:
A good picture of the size and shape of America's future presence in Iraq can be found in a memo sent by retired General Barry McCaffrey earlier last month to the head of the social sciences department at West Point, Colonel Michael Meese. The "after action report" was written following a tour of Iraq that McCaffrey took in October, during which he met with Iraqi political and military leaders, as well as General Ray Odierno and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. McCaffrey has been a reliable weathervane of military thinking throughout the Iraq war (though his media career likely ended after The New York Times published an expose on his ties to defense contractors last week). He has also been a reliable surrogate for the thinking of Odierno and General David Petraeus, who understandably have tried to steer clear of the politics of the Iraq war.
In the report, obtained by The New Republic, McCaffrey writes, "We should assume that the Iraqi government will eventually ask us to stay beyond 2011 with a residual force of trainers, counterterrorist capabilities, logistics, and air power. (My estimate--perhaps a force of 20,000 to 40,000 troops)." This estimate of what a training and support mission would require was echoed in interviews with a State Department official and two military sources--who requested anonymity--when asked what kind of American presence they foresaw in Iraq following 2011.
McCaffrey's reasoning rests in part on his view of the Iraqi military, an institution he says has vastly improved yet still needs mentoring, equipment, and support from Americans on the ground. In his report, McCaffrey writes that Iraq's border-control service is "anemic" and that the army cannot currently conduct military operations without U.S. support and equipment. "The confidence of the Iraqi combat force is still dependant on US mentoring and backup," he writes. "Their officers are very explicit on this point--the iraqi security forces do not want the u.s. combat units to leave--yet." The capital letters are McCaffrey's.
Lest you think that a former national security reporter for the New York Sun has a bias, consider that Fred Kaplan -- whose views on the war went from liberal interventionism to the informed sophisticate's answer to Pandagon -- reported in 2006 on the physical realities of withdrawal for the Atlantic. His conclusion was that it wasn't as easy to perform as Obama and company had been making out on the stump.
As I wrote for Pajamas Media months ago, in response to Obama's out-of-date and alarmingly ad hoc campaign rhetoric on the war:
The bulk of our presence is Iraq is confined to what are known as Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), which are mostly located outside of cities and have excellent security. There are about 70 FOBs all across the country right now, and more than a dozen are giant military installations reminiscent, as Kaplan wrote, "of the West German garrisons from Cold War days," the removal of which, needless to say, will not be easy, swift or likely given the capital investments they represent. Nor should one expect these facilities to be left unattended or manned solely by Iraqis. John McCain was quite right when he spoke of a prolonged U.S. presence in the Gulf, provided - and Obama and McCain's liberal critics always fail to recapitulate this necessary condition - U.S. troops are not being targeted or killed. Most troops reside safely in these well-fortified FOBs, and they might continue to do so for the foreseeable future. As for the rest of the Pentagon's materiel - tanks, trucks, armored vehicles, etc. - this will have to be evacuated slowly and under duress, with most of it traveling by ground toward Kuwait down Route Tampa, a highway favored by insurgents for its murderous potential due to its narrowness. (Evacuations by air would occur at an even more glacial pace, as the largest U.S. cargo plane can carry only one or two tanks per trip. There are 1,900 tanks in total in Iraq at present.)
The probable Obama model for withdrawal, if he ever gets around to sharing specifics, will in any event call for 30-35,000 troops, or roughly five brigades, to stay behind. In April, the candidate tellingly queried David Petraeus on the feasibility of keeping roughly this number in country if "we had the current status quo" in terms of security. Kaplan, too, cited 30,000 as the most "stripped-down" contingent required to occupy the FOBs. But even Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the Iraq Study Group and has endorsed Obama, has scuppered the idea of setting any firm withdrawal date-it just isn't possible, says the reputed "realist." More notoriously, Obama's former foreign policy adviser Samantha Power was fired not for calling Hillary Clinton a "monster" but for telling another truth, namely that any cited plan for withdrawal is a "best-case-scenario" subject to revision once Obama becomes commander-in-chief. Another way of saying this is that his current crowd-pleasing peroration of "Bring Them Home Now" is a feint.
 New @ Jewcy:
Call it my dark and seedy Straussian neoconservatism at work, but in my downtime I like to collect instances of atheism or agnosticism, especially in those credited for the supposed strength of their religious fervor. The worst aspect of Barack Obama's former troubles with Jeremiah Wright was how they arose from his desire to amass "street cred" with black Chicagoans rather than from some burning sense of piety and Christian brotherhood. He may put stock in God and the Gospels (though my suspicion is otherwise), but a regular churchgoer he is not.
John Judis and Isaac Chotiner at the New Republic are weighing the merits of various reports on Obama's consistently secular Sundays since Nov. 4, and I tend to agree with Chotiner: it's not about the Godlessness, it's about the hypocrisy:
If Obama had only talked about his faith when he appeared on CBN, or visited churches in Iowa, that would be one thing. But it was an issue he chose to highlight. In fact, his only joint, public appearance with McCain--after the nomination fight and prior to the first debate--was with Rick Warren, if I remember correctly. And Obama's religious life also takes up (the weakest) sections of his excellent first book. If politicians want their religious lives to remain private, then they can do the rest of us the favor of not talking so much about them.
Too busy building a cabinet to attend services? He's had no problems making time for the gym, holding press conferences, and shopping for a puppy. What else you got?
Perhaps the greatest missed opportunity in an election celebrated for its risk and originality is that we might have actually been spared the purple overtures to the faith-based. Instead, even before announcing his candidacy, Obama spoke repeatedly of the importance of liberals' embracing religion in the public sphere, and he did so in in language barely distinguishable from that of George W. Bush. Now why do I suspect that these disclosures of his own apostate-like behavior will do nothing to change the minds of those who defended him reflexively during the Wright controversy, citing his commitment to an eccentric, racialist church as a recommendation of his character and his sense of "community"?
If and when it becomes noticeable enough to warrant redress, we should expect plenty of beamish photographs of the new president installed in the pews next to Pat Robertson, Jesse Jackson and the rest of old, familiar national clerisy. Also expect to hear rationalizations that the change agent is, and always has been, steadfast in his loyalty to the divine. Except when his abs need working on.
 New @ Jewcy:
All of a sudden, and quite out of the blue, life expectancy has lengthened -- to forever. Vampires are everywhere again, from the high-haired matinee idols driving tween box office in the form of Twilight -- a film written by a Mormon who thinks the beautiful are the damned, and forbidden love can wait -- to the HBO series True Blood, which tries to reconcile a fabled genus of social outcasts with a very real one. In executive producer Alan Ball's rendering, vampires are like gays (some of them even are gay), who have "come out of the coffin" to declare themselves your friendly neighborhood nightstalkers, thanks to a synthetic Japanese-manufactured blood cocktail that sustains them in lieu of the warm, vein-delivered stuff. It's a clever political trope, even if flagrantly pilfered from the X-Men series. Though who among us would argue with Anna Paquin's ability to finally get laid?
Any talk of glowering immortals stomping the earth in a state of High Romantic sturm und drang always puts me in mind of a different allegory -- that of the Wandering Jew. Perhaps you're familiar with this apocalyptic, anti-Semitic myth, which tells of a Jewish shopkeeper who, upon seeing cross-carrying Christ pause on his way to Golgotha, mocks the rebel rebbe: "Go on quicker, Jesus! Go on quicker! Why dost Thou loiter?" For his insolence, the merchant is admonished by Christ: "I shall stand and rest, but thou shalt go on till the last day," an incantation that condemns him to an eternity on earth. The inspiration for this fable of Hebraiophobic comeuppance derives from vague mutterings in the Gospel of Matthew as to the presence of those who "shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."
Sightings of the Wanderer throughout history have been said to presage the End Times, and so naturally sightings have been scattered and frequent. In the lead-up to the last millennium, and in reply to the chiliastic rumblings emanating from the ranks of fundamentalist Protestantism, Free Inquiry's Martin Gardner wrote a well-researched essay about this subject, explaining that, as the clock ticked closer toward 2000, "it would not surprise me to see a picture of the Wandering Jew on the front page of one of the supermarket tabloids." Eat your heart out, Bat Boy.
Read more...
 New @ TNC:
The Hitch calls it the only thing he's terrified of. Waugh thought it was the mood the worst people on the planet inspired. And for Wes Anderson, boredom was the enemy against which his best film's characters ranged themselves. Stefan writes at my digital shtetl Jewcy on the auteur's debut feature Bottle Rocket, now released in a handsome Criterion Collection DVD:
Bottle Rocket seems to have taught Wes Anderson that there is a market for mannered whimsy, an audience that wants the blueprints for Dignan's sweet cluelessness, so it can be told, "I could never stay mad at you." Anderson's imagination, once working full-bore against boredom, now struggles to fill an insatiable demand for emotional pornography. The most painful thing about Criterion's new Bottle Rocket is that it includes the black-and-white short on which the movie is based--thirteen minutes that show, like fellow Austinite Richard Linklater's 1991 Slacker, what kind of entertainment can be made out of the right kind of boredom.
For Linklater, however, lassitude is the natural state in which twenty- or thirtysomethings have their best conversations and, if they're lucky, fall in love. Anderson's real impetus since Bottle Rocket has been to excavate the supposed charms and idiosyncracies of arrested development; ironically, all of his later characters -- from Max Fisher in Rushmore to the entire Tannenbaum family -- are anything but bored because they haven't got the time. They operate in a frenzy of overachieving hyperactivity.
Texas is the tie that binds Linklater and Anderson. But whereas the former has a style that seems to embody all of that great state's cultural contradictions and ironies (the arty intellectualism of Austin filtered through a relaxed, Midwestern demeanor that suits a protagonist schlepping through Vienna or Paris), the latter has abandoned his roots entirely. Anderson's a New Yorker manque, and I mean that both in the geographic and journalistic sense of the term. He's the wised-up cosmopolitan prodigy that wants badly for Pauline Kael to love him (his introductory essay for the Rushmore script is in fact exactly about that urge), yet he's lost his authenticity in his move to the big city, even if we're more likely to tolerate his purple velvet suits here.
Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road, coming soon to a theatre near you, is the classic boredom-evading novel about a young married couple that quits bohemia for the burbs and soon realizes what a mistake they'd made. Yates was thoroughly epater in his approach, but in Anderson's case, the joke's really on himself: some bildungsromans work better in reverse.
 New @ TNC:
Well, sometimes it really is just too easy, isn't it? Much has been said about Sean Penn's latest cover story for The Nation in which he purports to offer a fair and balanced perspective on the regimes of Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro. It would be slightly unfair to characterize his piece as pure palace stenography in the ignoble traditions of Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Walter Duranty, if only because, amidst the tea and sympathy and shared laughter with his fraternal junist and bloviating Bolivarian hosts, Penn does actually get around to asking a tough question or two about human rights abuses. (These are followed, naturally, by claims of their being "exaggerated" in the American press, and then by recourse to moral equivalence about our own checkered record at Guantanamo Bay.)
Jamie Kirchick of the New Republic (with whom I'm friends) has a good video critique of the essay posted at TNR's The Plank, pointing to one of its central and tragic ironies. Penn is now starring in the critically acclaimed film Milk, which is a biopic of the first openly gay elected official Harvey Milk, and the unquestionably gifted actor is poised to receive an Oscar nomination for his performance as well as plaudits from the American gay community. Yet here is he is traipsing through his post-revolutionary idyll on an island nation that, since its current government came into existence, has imprisoned and murdered homosexuals for being homosexuals.
You won't find much of that, I bet, in another Hollywood production set to appear in theatres soon--the Sundance favorite Che, directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Benicio Del Toro as every poseur Marxist college student's favorite silkscreen t-shirt icon. Having not seen Che, I can't in good conscience claim that it's a hagiography, but it does tell somewhat against its dispassionate portrayal of history that the Havana brass have prescreened it and declared it sin problemas. (No such luck for Before Night Falls, directed by Julian Schnabel -- a man who hates tyranny as much as crockery -- and starring Javier Bardem as a gay poet who knew the perils of inhabiting both those identities in a country with such a reputedly bang-up education system.)
For a healthier side dish to Penn's overcooked and spoiled ham, be sure to read the various Web letters mailed in about it, which The Nation, to its credit saw fit to publish. Many are from former residents of Venezuela and Cuba, quick to reaffirm the conventional wisdom not about trade embargoes or missile crises but that ever-relevant concept of limousine liberalism.
My favorite so far comes from an El Salvadoran who reminds us that Penn's previous fact-finding sojourns to Iraq and Iran ended badly, and that as a foreign correspondent, Penn's sense of humor about himself is as healthy as that of his be-medalled subjects:
Journalists don't receive the kind of VIP treatment you received in Venezuela and Cuba--especially not in those countries. Journalists talk to people other than comandantes and presidents, and that makes them very suspicious to your friends Castro and Chávez.
There is something you obviously share with your friend Hugo: a deeply rooted allergy to criticism. When the paper that gave you the opportunity to write about your trips to Iraq and Iran, the San Francisco Chronicle, published an ironic piece about celebrities like you making fools of themselves by palling around with dictators and operetta presidents, you resigned from the paper. Which probably wasn't such a bad idea, if it meant resigning from journalism a | |
