The perfect book for August - or so it would seem. In fact, Tom Lutz demonstrates just how much work serious loafing requires.
This jolly book got a so-so review in the Book Review, and I duly took note in these pages. Mr Lutz got hold of me to tell me that, in his opinion, the review was completely wrong. How could I doubt him?
I am not a philosopher. I do not believe in systems, metaphysical or otherwise, that explain how the world works. If I believe anything, it's that we're far too unintelligent as of yet to be claiming to know how the world works. We're still working on building bridges that don't fall into the Mississippi.
In common parlance, "philosophy" denotes a way of living, an understanding of virtue. My "philosophy" is built on a single concept: decency. I believe, crazy optimist that I am, that everyone who has survived adolescence knows what decency is. I've written two pages about it; if you're interested, you'll find a link to the older page in the newer.
Have you got all day? Here's a very long page about art and art criticism. What's amazing to me is that I seem to know what I'm talking about. I read the page now with a gate-keeper's eyes (to which I'm not entitled, either): what incredible impertinence!
There's one sentence, though, that I really don't understand.
We're wired, sadly perhaps, to distinguish the things that happened before our parents' generations from the things that happened earlier. We seek a richness of detail about what's closest to us.
I think that the first sentence is missing a "not" - "We're not wired." But I'm not sure that the sentence means anything. Every once in a while, I fall into fatuity. If you can figure out what I'm trying to say, let me know.
It was not hard to decide which of this week's stories I wanted to showcase as a Friday Front, but it wasn't clear that I was ever going to get round to writing about it. Yesterday's podcast caused a tremendous upheaval in my already disorganized everyday life. If the equipment had been easy to install and stable once installed, that would have been one thing, but it was neither, and I won't be up to speed for a few weeks. I still don't have a clue about how to make it possible to download podcasts.
¶ Simon Head on Information Technology, in The New York Review of Books.
From Mark Schmitt's Op-Ed piece, "Too Much Information," about the ridiculousness of lengthy policy statements (eg health-care proposals) in electoral politics:
We don’t give our presidents total power to enact policy. They have to work with a Congress made up of people with their own views and constituencies. Does anyone really think that a plan cooked up by a bunch of smart 20-somethings after a couple of all-nighters amid the empty pizza boxes and pressures of a campaign is superior to what could be developed with the full resources of the federal government and open Congressional hearings and debate?
Kevin Baker's warning, in the current Harper's, about the unsuitability of Rudy Giuliani for the White House, ends with a fairly gratuitous basing of the current administration. That is, it's unnecessary to Mr Baker's essay. At the same time, however, it constitutes a magnificent if brief catalogue raisonné of Bush's crimes against civilization, charged with a stark power that, unimaginably, surpasses everything that one has already read and thought.
The worst excesses of the bush regime have stemmed directly from its leader's character - that is, its rampant cronyism; its arrogance and egotism; its peremptory, bullying tone and methods; its refusal to brook criticism from within or without; its frighteningly authoritarian impulses; its need to create enemies as a means of governing; its impulsiveness and naïveté; its outright contempt for the law; and its truly staggering ability to substitute its own versions of what it wishes the world to be for any recognition of objective reality.
As a technical amateur - nobody's paying me to do "this website thingy" - I felt morally obligated to read Simon Keen's somewhat screedish The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture. For most of the first half of the book, I thought I was reading a rant. For most of the second half, however, I was persuaded that the anti-authoritarian propensity behind so much "Web 2.0" talk is not only childish but damaging.
Mr Keen's book does not offer much in the way of solutions. Even he cannot conceal the fact that current delivery systems for creative cultural work are moribund. The Internet in general and the Blogosphere in particular have blossomed because established cultural institutions don't know how to reach young people - probably because the people who run them don't really understand computers or the Internet. I hope that Mr Keen's book will come to be regarded as the excellent diagnosis of a crisis that was ultimately contained and corrected.
Shortly after I put down Hermione Lee's Edith Wharton, I came across a something that Fran Lebowitz said about Philip Johnson: "He was very cultivated in a way that probably no American is now." (In the Times.) I realized that I hadn't heard the word "cultivated" in a while, and hadn't thought about what it means, either. And yet how clear it was that I've been cultivating myself since my teens. I was pretty fatuous when I was young, but as I got older and more honest, I pursued only genuine interests. I'm not brilliant If I were, I wouldn't have to work so hard at learning new things (and remembering old ones!)
Cultivation sounds precious today. It certainly takes a lot of time. I thought I would try to argue the case for cultivation as a pleasure, because that is how I've acquired such cultivation as I've achieved.
When it comes to books about current affairs, I bore very easily. I'm willing to put in a lot of thought, but I don't want to be raked over padded-out lists of problèmes du jour. Happily, there is no risk of tedium in Edward Luce's In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India. Written by an Oxford-educated reporter at the Financial Time, In Spite of the Gods crackles with wit and understanding. Mr Luce dispenses a boatload of information in a digestible drip, and his chapters are studded with portraits of interesting and notable Indians alike. Perhaps because he's English, Mr Luce writes as though everyone has already had enough of the British Raj, and there is very little about it. For someone my age, who grew up during India's first decade of independence, this account of the ever-more-powerful India makes sense of the great changes that have occurred in India's economic climate since the days of Jawaharlal Nehru.
If I recall correctly, Mr Luce does not once use the term "Subcontinent." I wonder what that's about.
Herewith I tip my hat to Édouard, at Sale Bête, for alerting me to the referenced phrase, which appears at John Rogers's blog, Kung Fu Monkey. Follow the link below to read the entire passage.
Do we on the left have the testicular fortitude to recognize the moment when fruitful stability becomes fatal sclerosis? I ask myself that question every day. So far, dreamlike as it is to say so, we live in fruitful stability. That is not an illusion. But as injustice and irresponsibility mount up, stability petrifies. How do we properly fear the corruption of the Republic when fear itself is so powerfully confusing?
The New Yorker is stuffed with good stuff this week. There's an article about the folly - well, that's what I think it is - of fMRI-based lie detection. There's a neat piece on hedge-fund simulation at bargain prices that I didn't quite catch the first time around. Joan Acocella writes brilliantly about the Waughs. But the indispensable piece is Ken Auletta's "Promises, Promises," an fair-minded report of Rupert Murdoch's courtship of The Dow Jones Company. For a link to the story and my two-cents' worth of Friday Front, click below.
¶ Ken Auletta on the Murdochs and the Bancrofts, in The New Yorker.
A funny cartoon has already appeared in The New Yorker. Man walks into his apartment with a bolt of lightning stuck in his back. Wife reminds him that she warned him against reading "the Hitchens book." The joke, of course, is that the man is still walking. He may have to see a specialist about removing the lightning bolt, and he may even experience some pain. As a killer, however, the lightning bolt is a dud. What the cartoon captures perfectly is the idea that it's not nice to be disrespectful about religion.
Christopher Hitchens is not nice.
What if our economics was humanist instead of "scientific"?
Has anyone ever even talked of a humanist economics?
If not, I claim dibs.
¶ John Lardner on Uchitelle, Bogle, and LeRoy, in The New York Review of Books.
With Memorial Day behind us, I have the empty feeling that nothing is going to change very much on the political front until Labor Day is also behind us. The Democrats may have recaptured Congress last November, but I can think of nothing that has changed since then. The Bush Administration continues to be arrogant and out of touch, and the Iraqi misadventure slogs on. Rudy Giuliani is consolidating his candidacy, while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton continue their kabuki. Why, when poll after poll shows that most Americans want an end to the war, does it persist? The other day, I wrote about the problem with polls, but even assuming them to be trustworthy there would still be something missing. What? Paul Krugman put his finger on what's missing in his column on Monday.
Democratic Party activists were furious, because polls show a public utterly disillusioned with Mr. Bush and anxious to see the war ended. But it’s not clear that the leadership was wrong to be cautious. The truth is that the nightmare of the Bush years won’t really be over until politicians are convinced that voters will punish, not reward, Bush-style fear-mongering. And that hasn’t happened yet.
Here’s the way it ought to be: When Rudy Giuliani says that Iran, which had nothing to do with 9/11, is part of a “movement” that “has already displayed more aggressive tendencies by coming here and killing us,” he should be treated as a lunatic.
When Mitt Romney says that a coalition of “Shia and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda” wants to “bring down the West,” he should be ridiculed for his ignorance.
And when John McCain says that Osama, who isn’t in Iraq, will “follow us home” if we leave, he should be laughed at.
But they aren’t, at least not yet. And until belligerent, uninformed posturing starts being treated with the contempt it deserves, men who know nothing of the cost of war will keep sending other people’s children to graves at Arlington.
Americans need to be roused to their better selves. Ideally, the Republican Party would act responsibly and stop manipulating anxieties for purely political purposes. Perhaps the Democrats could persuade a plausible presidential nominee to sit this election out and spend the campaign denouncing the fear-mongerers as such.
Not too long ago, I bought a copy of Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man, because I thought that Kathleen ought to know how ordinary men behave when there aren't any women around. I ended up reading the book first, and in one captivated day (I did nothing else). I expected a book about the adventures of passing as a man, but that's not what Ms Vincent wrote. As she herself says, passing was the easy part. The hard part was learning how tough life is for most guys. The alleged power and privilege of belonging to the dominant gender seems to be nothing more than smoke; in actuality, men are crippled by stoic homophobia on the one hand and the unrealistic expectations of women on the other. Ms Vincent was very surprised to find where her sympathies lay, and, when she recovered from the experiment, she was very happy to be a woman.
Until yesterday afternoon, I was going to write about Peter Hessler's immensely intriguing article about "The Great Wall of China," which, it should come as no surprise to anyone by now, is a Western construct. There is no "Great Wall." There are walls, here and there, but they are not continuous. What most people think of as "The Great Wall" is properly known as "The Ming Wall," because it was built by that late-medieval dynasty to protect Beijing, where the Ming emperors were installed in the Forbidden City (the Ming carried Chinese xenophobia to new and startling heights).
There is no body of academic scholars anywhere devoted to studying the Ming Wall. It has been left to amateurs, the most eminent of which - unbeknownst to many of the Chinese who also study the wall - is an American, David Spindler. Spindler, in the mid-Nineties was awarded a Master's Degree from Beijing University for his work on an ancient Chinese philosopher, Dong Zhongshu; after that, he went through Harvard Law and then worked for McKinsey & Company in Beijing. Now he just walks the wall. Quixotists will want to know about him. (Mr Hessler's piece is not on-line.)
Then, however, I read Michael Tomasky's piece in the current New York Review.
¶ Michael Tomasky on the Hope for Political Discourse, in The New York Review of Books.
As a rule, I regard David Brooks's presence on the Times's Op-Ed page as something of a Trojan Horse. Instead of Greeks, his column is often full of plausible conservative arguments that upon examination - examination by me, that is - turn out to be more clever than sound.
Today, however, I'm in complete accord. "Wolfowitz's Big Mistake" goes straight to the heart of what's literally maddening about the Bush regime, it's ironclad determination to cooperate only with itself. Mr Brooks points out that even though the World Bank staff is composed primarily of people who vote Democratic, it would have been easy for Paul Wolfowitz to win support, if only he had made nice. But he "forfeited that opportunity by being aloof." Then Mr Brooks goes on to the nature of scandal itself.
The conflict of interest charge is out of proportion to the hubbub. But scandals are like that - they are never about what they purport to be about. The Clarence Thomas scandal wasn't about a hair on a soda can. The Larry Summers scandal wasn't about comments at a conference. Most scandals are pretexts for members of an establishment to destroy people they don't like.
In most scandals, people adjust their standards of rectitude, depending on whether they support or oppose the person at issue. The subjects enemies whip themselves into a fever of theatrical outrage, and the subject's defenders summon up fits of indignation at the lies of the accusers. Scandals are playgrounds for partisans, and everybody gets to play the rose of the junior high school bully, ganging up on whoever seems weakest and most alone.
Although I have very little good to say of the American electorate, I wonder if it isn't scandal-fatigue that has rendered it so inattentive. I myself cannot get worked up about various eminence's awful but entirely incidental misdeeds - not, at least, while genuine problems, such as the debt balloon and the abrasion of our regulatory structures, go utterly unchecked. Is "popular culture" to blame for the normalization of junior high school behavior?
Although I agree with everything that David Brooks has to say today, I don't agree with some of his silences. I suppose I ought to be happy that he doesn't include the very real Alberto Gonzales scandal in his list. In an adjoining essay, "He's Impeachable, You Know," Frank Bowman writes,
The president may yet yield and send Mr Gonzalex packing. If not, Democrats may decide that to impeach Alberto Gonzalez would be politically unwise. But before dismissing the possibility of impeachment, Congress should recognize that the issue here goes deeper than the misbehavior of one man. The real question is whether Republicans and Democrats are prepared to defend the constitutional authority of Congress against the implicit claim of an administration that it can do what it pleases and, when called to account, send an attorney general of the United States to Capitol Hill to commit amnesia on its behalf.
It seems that we are all in agreement about murder: it's wrong. How to punish it may be unclear, but murder has no defenders.
Why then, are we in such disagreement about handguns, which have only one purpose: murder. ("Self-defense" is a delusion. As Adam Gopnik observes in The New Yorker this week, "If having a loaded semi-automatic on hand kept you safe, cops would not be shot as often as they are.) And yet, according a poll reported in today's Times*, 64% of Americans are opposed to a ban on handguns.
Surely there is no stronger evidence of the failure of American, and Democratic Party, leadership. If Americans cannot be persuaded that the civilian possession of handguns is as wrong as murder, then I don't much see the point of democracy in America.
*Not as of this writing online, but appearing on page A22 of the Late Edition.
The news this week has been, to say the least, demoralizing. Everything that I know about the Virginia Tech massacre I know from the Times and from the few Web logs that I've read that have mentioned it. There is really nothing to say that hasn't been said in response to other recent American disasters.
It was fun, sort of, to read the excoriating editorial about the Attorney General, "Gonzalez v Gonzalez," in today's paper. But then it stopped being fun. That such a doofus could rise to a position of eminence is proof that our political culture is both corrupt and demented.
So pardon me while I take refuge in my ivory tower.
¶ Cynthia Ozick on critics; Siddhartha Debs on Roberto Bolaño, in Harper's.
Although I've never listened to Don Imus on the radio, and have no intention tuning in, I believe that NBC's bow to the forces of political correctness is a terrible mistake. Mr Imus may make racist remarks, but the simple fact is that those remarks have an audience. So long as the entertainer's remarks steer clear of the imperative mood, openly urging listeners to act on their prejudices, market forces ought to be allowed to determine whether his show is viable. By acceding to the likes of Al Sharpton, NBC executives are showing that they don't know their own job, which is to keep the airwaves open to a diversity of voices.
This isn't to say that Don Imus oughtn't to be sanctioned. Banishing him from the airwaves for a couple of weeks - I've no problem with that. His fans need a time-out, too. Mr Imus said a bad thing, and he deserves to sit in the nuisance corner for a while. And then he deserves to be forgiven. To drop his show is to brand him with a permanent (or semi-permanent) stigma; it is to withhold forgiveness. And for what? For being rude and insulting. To say what he said about the Rutgers basketball players was uncivil and nasty. But it was not "racist." Quite the opposite! Can't anybody see that the remark was a lame attempt to sound like a bro'? If there's an issue here, it's low-grade Afro-American misogyny.
Don Imus is, on the evidence, a jackass. And so are his listeners. So are all the middle-aged white men who misguidedly cling to their youth by affecting the styles of the young, which they will never really understand. Hurt feelings aside - and I must say that I am very tired of living in the era of Hurt Feelings - Mr Imus's comment was what in the law is called a "harmless error." There was no real damage. To banish the talk-show host from MSNBC - to refuse forgiveness - is both childish and infantilizing. Taking Don Imus off the air is not going to raise anybody's consciousness. He ought to be on the air until, like me, no one listens.
You have to love social science. From the Tierney Lab at the Times:
Similarly, according to the study, a 5-foot-0 guy would need to make $325,000 more than a 6-foot-0 man to be as successful in the online dating market. A 5-foot-4 man would need $229,000; a 5-foot-6 man would need $183,000; a 5-foot-10 man would need $32,000. And if that 6-foot-0 man wanted to do as well as a 6-foot-4 man, he’d need to make $43,000 more.
Is it Valentine's Day? Or is there some other item in the calendar that I'm unaware of and that prompted the editors of the Science Times sections to barrage readers with several feature articles about Topic A?
Yesterday, I had lunch with my francophone friend and fellow carnetier, Édouard, at the Cornelia Street Café. I asked Édouard how he sustained his interest in politics, and he very lucidly explained that he's not so much interested in the wrongdoing of the Bush Administration as he is in the impact that a waspish Blogosphere is having on both Congress and the media ("the media" meaning, very largely, The New York Times). It is certainly true that Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo is a national hero, slugging away at such malefactors as Randy Cunningham and, now, Alberto Gonzales. But the feeling that American politics has altogether gone off the rails dispirits me greatly. If we have a system, it's broken. (My choice-du-jour of culprit is Buckley v Valeo). When I read this morning that the President has just resorted to three recess appointments of conservative clowns who would never be confirmed by today's Senate, I feel more than ever that I'm living in something that ought to be called post-America.
A big donor to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth will be our ambassador to Belgium. A vocal critic of government regulation will head the Office of Management and Budget. Andrew Biggs will be deputy commissioner of the Social Security Agency, whose services he would like to privatize. "All three are extraordinarily bad appointments," opines the Times, "- and all three more reminders of how Mr Bush's claims of wanting to work with Congress's Democratric leadership are just empty words."
Presidential shenanigans, however, are really nothing to worry about, compared with the resistance to doing anything about global warming.
¶ Behind Global Warming: John Lanchester in the London Review of Books.
Surely the greatest difference between the Vietnam War and the Iraqi misadventure is the realignment of the military's symbolism. The armed forces no longer provide a banner that only conservative supporters of the war are likely to wave. "Support the troops" has become profoundly ambiguous, as much an anti-war slogan as pro-. My primary objection to what we're doing in Iraq has always been the outrage of invading a country in order to effect regime change, but my concern for ill-equipped and poorly-trained soldiers is a very close second.
Robert Wright writes today about how growing up on Army bases informed his liberal outlook. ("My Life in the Army.") He also discusses the love that good officers have for their troops - a love that has been constrained by political interference in Iraq.
Sending people into battle isn't something a good person does with detachment. Before the Iraq war, when the Army chief of staff, Gen Eric Shinkseki, testified that the postwar occupation would require hundreds of thousands of troops, he was showing not just prudence but devotion. He didn't want his soldiers needlessly imperiled.
As a reward for his devotion, General Shinseki was disparaged by Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld wanted to show how cheap war can be, and now our soldiers are paying the price. I wish some people on the left had a deeper respect for the military, but lately the left isn't where the most consequential disrespect has come from.
The crowning indignity was Abu Ghraib, an outrage that was initiated by civilians high in the Bush administration and has stained the US military's hard-earned honor, strengthening stereotypes that I know are wrong.
In the Vietnam era, I would not have been likely to sympathize with the perpetrators of such an outrage, but now I regard the soldiers who ended up taking the rap at Abu Ghraib to have been no less victimized than the unfortunate prisoners by a situation in which remote corporate interests had placed them.
Abu Ghraib comes up in the Times's Science section as well. Claudia Dreifus interviews Philip G Zimbardo, the social psychologist who devised the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 - only to call it off when a colleague complained to him, "It's terrible what you're doing to those boys." Dr Zimbardo more recently testified on behalf of Sgt Chip Frederick, a soldier who was ultimately sentenced to an eight-year term as a prisoner himself. When asked if his was not, in effect, absolving Sgt Frederick of personal responsibility, Dr Zimbardo explains that
"... human behavior is more influenced by things outside than inside. The "situation" is the external environment. The inner environment is genes, moral history, religious training. There are times when external circumstances can overwhelm us, and we do things we never thought. If you're not aware that this can happen, you can be seduced by evil. We need inoculations against our own potential for evil. We have to acknowledge it. Then we can change it.
Louis XVI, Benedict XVI... can we arrange a switch? Louis was actually a good old boy who was true, in his way, to his school. Benedict is not so worthy.
The title of Elaine Sciolino's story, "Typical French Town Is Split Over Elections," is misleading. Ms Sciolino's report is all about voters who can't make up their minds about "Sarko, Ségo," or the self-styled Third Way, François Bayrou.
The indecision cuts across class and ethnic lines, uniting workers, merchants, union leaders, students, bureaucrats, the children of immigrants and the unemployed. Even voters who have chosen a candidate confess that their support is shallow at best.
Everyone Ms Sciolino talks to appears to have surrendered to a certain realistic cynicism: none of the candidates, if elected, will fulfill campaign promises.
Has Jacques Chirac's careerism been so corrosive as to undermine the French electorate's faith in representative government? Or does a Yoplait worker, Jean-Pierre Bertin, put his finger on the problem when he says, "France is always complaining. We always complain. But we never take action."
France today is like a guy who's sleeping in. He's very comfortable - oh! so comfortable. He would like to stay where he is forever. Trouble is, he has to pee. Five more minutes, he says. And keeps saying. Until finally he sweeps the bedclothes away and lurches to his feet. He knows that there's no point in going back to bed; that delicious comfort has been lost forever. Life goes on.
France has been dawdling in a bed of bloated public-sector employment and stringent job-protection regulation. It would seem that everyone in France must have a family member who works for the government, or who holds a job thanks only to laws that make it difficult to fire employees. Why, in other words, would anyone outside the functionally excluded pool of magrebin children want to change the system? But the system must be changed - who knows how.
Charles DeGaulle was the last man truly to lead the French, and even the slightest glance at his character and competence makes it painfully clear that there is no one like him on the scene today. French voters are probably going to have to learn to make do without magisterial authorities. They - the voters - are supposed to be the ultimate authorities. They're the ones who will have to decide to get out of bed - who ought to be making that decision now. Democracy goes on.
Rory Stewart is a young British diplomat who is redefining what it means to be a "British diplomat." A former soldier, he is now very much a man of peace, overseeing the reconstruction of civil society in the Kabul region. He was reluctant, he writes in an Op-Ed column today entitled "What We Can Do," "to help re-establish ceramics, woodwork and calligraphy and restore part of the old city of Kabul." But he found that these were objectives in which Afghans were keenly interested, and thriving markets emerged, at least according to him. He modestly asserts that there are many more successful projects running throughout Afghanistan.
My experience suggests that we can continue to protect our soil from terrorist attack, we can undertake projects that prevent more people from becoming disaffected, and we can even do some good. In short, we will be able to do more, not less, than we are now. But working with what is possible requires humility and the courage to compromise.
We will have to focus on projects that Iraqis and Afghans demand, prioritize and set aside moral perfectionism; work with people of whom we don't approve; and choose among lesser evils. We will have to be patient. We should aim to stop illegal opium growth and change the way that Iraqis or Afghans treat their women. But we will not achieve this is the next three years. We may never be able to build a democratic state in Iraq or southern Afghanistan. Trying to do so through a presence based on foreign troops creates insurgency and resentment and can only end in failure.
"You are saying," the politician replies, "that we ought to sit back and do nothing." On the contrary I believe we can do a great deal. But ought implies can. We have no moral obligation to do what we cannot do.
In other words, as has been clear to me since before the Iraqi misadventure was even undertaken, the problem lies not in the Middle East but in arrogant, apparently faith-based ideologues in Washington: the people who agree about "ought" implying "can" but who believe in the moral obligation to undertake the impossible. Especially the impossible. "Bring it on!"
Barry Schwartz in the London Review of Books, writing about Avner Offer's The Challenge of Affluence:
Offer points out how much we care about what he calls 'regard,' how we look to others. Status or regard can be derived from many things: virtues of character, occupation, acts of kindness or charity and of course wealth. In a society in which efforts are concentrated on increasing GDP, and life is oriented toward consumption, wealth becomes an increasingly important yardstick of status, and other things recede into the background. Thus the treadmill: how much wealth is enough? The answer is: more wealth than your neighbours. A rising tide that lifts all boats doesn't change your own relative position; you may be a better car, but you won't get more status. The result is a kind of arms race of wealth acquisition that thrives on inequality but leaves no one better off.
The disgust roused in me by this morning's House & Home story, "The Year Without Toilet Paper," is as visceral as the most rabid homophobe's response to the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Act (a bill that I support). I have an overpowering desire to exterminate (why beat around the bush?) preening and precocious urban environmentalists like Michelle Conlin and Colin Beavan, who ought to be thrown out of their Lower Fifth Avenue building for keeping a composter in their apartment.
Someday, I'm sure, the post-consumer life that the Conlin-Beavans are trying to lead will be forced upon all of us, but I expect an industrial, not a Thoreauvian, solution. That is, we will finally apply our enormously sophisticated technology to the task of minimizing its own impact. What the Conlin-Beavans are doing is a retrograde, autarkic form of playing house.
Those who did not experience the folly of the Sixties seemed doomed to repeat them. "If I was a student," Ms Conlin tells Penelope Green, "I would march against myself." The more telling quote is Mr Beavans.
Like all writers, I'm a megalomaniac," Mr Beavan said cheerfully the other day. "I'm just trying to put that energy to good use."
The far more urgent task is ridding Manhattan, and perhaps the entire Metropolitan Area, of diesel trucks.
It's not something that I'm proud of, but I rarely read the Letters to the Editor in the Times. (Lately, I haven't been looking much at the editorial page itself. I'm in agreement with most of the positions taken by the Times editorial staff, but that's just it: what's new?) Today, however, a passage from a letter from Daniel J Callaghan, of Manchester, New Hampshire, caught my eye.
The administration began this war four years ago with inadequate planning in Iraq and disregard for those who would serve. As a result, the war has become a quagmire in Iraq and more than a million veterans have returned home to face insufficient care and services.
I looked up and saw that Mr Callaghan's was one of six letters gathered under the rubric "On the 4th Anniversary of the War." I read them all and agreed with them all. Ita Hardesty Mason, of Kingston Spring, Tennessee, writes, "We have more enemies now, not friends." Meg Hillert, of Dallas, reminds us that "If America were in Iraq's shoes, we would fight to the death to protect our country, families, and way of life." Cy Shain, of San Francisco, regrets that "We are paying a heavy price for our haste to invade Iraq without having a full appreciation of the fatal consequences and painful complications or our actions." Judy Brewton, of Stamford, Connecticut, lashes out at the President. "From the outset of this falsified war, George W Bush has used America's soldiers cheaply - almost as if they were poker chips."
But if I had to choose only one of these letters to endorse as my own, it would be the one written by Rick Armstrong, of Brooklyn.
Frank Rich reveals that 71 percent of sampled Americans supported the war on March 19, 2003. He also mentions that on March 17, 2003, NBC cut short its news coverage to show "Fear Factor" because it knew that was where the ratings were.
Both of these examples show that in the end, American citizens deserve the blame for this war because politicians respond to perceive voter approval.
The buck stops here.
What exactly is critical thinking? There's a Wikipedia entry that suggests an approach to understanding the matter, but it's written at a fairly high level of abstraction. What it boils down to in my view is a corrective for the natural virtuosity at self-justification that accompanies average-to-superior intelligence. Most of "what stands to reason" generally doesn't, for the simple reason that reason hasn't been applied.
In The New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco reviews six books about the "Scandals of Higher Education." Which is worse, madly skewed admissions policy or the failure to educate the lucky ones who get in?
This week's Friday Front.
Because I never read the paper yesterday, I breezed through it this morning and didn't read Nicholas Wade's "A United Kingdom? Maybe" until Eric pointed to it this afternoon. The article reports findings that the DNA of the English and the Irish doesn't significantly differ. The English aren't a "later" people who forced the Irish, the Welsh and the Scots into the hinterlands. What if there were no Irish or British "people"? As in "race"; as in "nation." What if the Gaelic tongue came to the Atlantic Isles as part of the agricultural division of labor package? Unaccompanied by a handful of farmers from the Continent?
I was reminded of a wonderful little book that I picked up at the National Gallery (DC) bookshop a few years ago. In The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton, 2001, 2003), Patrick Geary more or less explodes the idea pf great throngs of biologically related Huns, Vandals and Visigoths, sweeping out of central Asia and forcing the current occupants of Europe to find somewhere to sweep to. It is a nightmare concocted by Roman historians and Christian annalists as they grappled with the disorders that followed the collapse, very much from within, of the Roman Empire.
As the boundaries between Roman and Barbarian dissolved, what today is called "identity politics" became one means of organizing and motivating followers. New constellations claimed names of "ancient" peoples. Old polities vanished into the melting pot of Gothic, Hunnic, or Frankish lordship. Some were never to reappear. Heterogeneous groups of adventures and defeated enemies agreed to accept a common leader and, in time, a common identity. In other circumstances, opposition leaders, claiming to embody the ancient tradition of a people, might lead their followers to conquest and a new future or else to annihilation.
This is all a reminder that the Europeans who embarked on the Age of Exploration were already exponents of highly developed racism.
A century ago, the United States was not a nation in the traditional sense. Its inhabitants came from all over. Time seems to have clouded that distinction. Americans whose families have occupied this country for four generations or more think of themselves as more "American" than other people. (The same thing happened in the early Nineteenth Century, before the great influx of European immigrants.) I wonder how many kids today are unaware that the United States was not established when Noah's Ark touched dry land.
I've no way of knowing how many North American Pompadourians tuned in to the second and final episode of Jeanne Poisson, Madame de Pompadour on TV5 this evening, but I hope that we'll all connect. It was a preposterous soap opera, not because it was wildly unfaithful to the facts - it wasn't, not wildly - but because it would have bored the Marquise to death. All that royal family contumely! Who knew that the dauphin (Damien Jouillerot, in a supremely unendearing performance) was such a pain in the ass? Until this show was made, he was simply a cipher who predeceased his father, making way for Louis XVI. Now he's someone to detest! In Jeanne Poisson, art and politics take second fiddle to tirades out of The Queen.
Hélène de Fougerolles turns out to be a magnificent Pompadour. You don't think so at first; she's much too easygoing and, in the American sense of the word, fresh. But she ages into the part, so to speak. She does her best with impossible lines and ridiculous, silent-movie situations. She manages to honor the woman she's reincarnating while playing to a gallery of people who have no idea of Pompadour's singularity. The best joke comes at the end, when the credits name the lady's surviving mansions. Dont, as the French say - in their abominable conceit considering it a complete sentence - the official residence of the French Président, Le palais d'Élysée. Imagine old Bushois, dying to get out of a house rebuilt by a woman. I mean young Bushois.
When I say that Charlotte de Turckheim is also fantastic, as Marie Leszczyńska - Louis XV's queen - it's quite as though, what with all these aristocratic names, the very court had come back to life to impersonate itself. Happily, there is Vincent Perez as Louis XV. M Perez is quite above the aristocracy - and abysses below it. I have never seen royalty played with such conviction. An extraordinarily handsome man (as Louis XV certainly was) puts more faith in his God than in his looks - now, that's sincerity! I don't know how M Perez kept a straight face, but perhaps it was remuneration in ducats.
The only thing wrong with Jeanne Poisson is that Joan Crawford isn't in it. Well, she is in it, somewhere, motivating the actors to do their best with ridiculous material. The show a raté les Énarques - precious few genuine locations were made available for filming. Les BCBG decided that the project was beneath them. It was - and their disapproval matters. Jeanne Poisson gives us a Pompadour whose primary legacy was the screwing up of a happy family, and the humiliation of a king who let himself be advised by a woman. I suppose it's not insignificant that TV5 is operated by Le Figaro. They'll let Catherine Deneuve sing the praises of France's second greatest arts patron (Pompadour would have been the first to hail Louis XIV). But when they address her life, she's just a powdered pute.
Which is wrong.
Jenny Diski, one of the great voices of the London Review of Books, reports on Second Life. If you are a regular reader of this site and the host of an avatar at Second Life, the time to speak up is now.
Ms Diski runs a moderately agreeable blog. She doesn't post very often, but when she does, the news is news. How about a red-brick university's taking To The Lighthouse off the syllabus because it's "too difficult"?
You're right. It's my generation that's supposed to be shot. Don't shoot me!
We can't know what we don't know; we can just have a good idea of some matters that have got to be cleared up in a way that will add to what we do know. For the earlier millennia of human history, what was known and knowable was set in stone, and philosophers busied themselves with interpreting it. Ever since the Renaissance, however, we have lived with a bang of increased knowledge that bangs louder and more frequently every year, so that now, for most of us, it is just a staticky hum. Most pessimists will tell you that we still haven't learned anything about the real human mysteries, but there's reason to believe that those have only recently begun to be studied in a meaningful way, through neuroscience. Pat and Paul Churchland are philosophers who have devoted their careers to scrutinizing neuroscientific concepts and applying them to life outside the laboratory. Larissa MacFarquhar profiles them in The New Yorker.
I need a drink. My dopamine levels
need lifting.
Read about the Churchlands at Portico.
Catching up on The Nation, I came upon a passage that had, for me, the effect of a bombshell in reverse: it created order where there had only been disarray. It's Terry Eagleton, reviewing Barbara Ehrenreich's new book, Dancing in the Streets.
Sport is one of the most formidable adversaries of the political left, one that offers ordinary people a uniquely powerful alternative to political engagement: cherished traditions, camaraderie, strenuous competition, a glittering pantheon of heroes and heroines, factual erudition, aesthetic appreciation, technical prowess and a good deal more. It is all rather more entrancing that the average cell meeting. The bad news for baseball-loving leftists is that they are going to have to choose.
I try not to write about sports, because I have nothing good to say about the subject. Sometimes I think, grand-inquisitorially, that it's just as well that the circuses keep the hoi polloi distracted, because who knows what mischief they'd get up to if it weren't for Super Bowls. Another inversion: whereas as racists usually get on well with individual members of the despised group by treating them as exceptions, I have no strong feelings about the mass of sports fans out there but am disappointed and hurt whenever a friend tells me that he's just enjoyed a game. My antipathy has grown much worse in the current century, because I am convinced that American sports madness is a sine qua non for the election of types the likes of George W Bush.
William Pfaff's ought to be a household name in the United States. I believe that he reflects our best traits: pragmatic, clear-eyed, constructively self-interested, and - not a widespread trait, although it is not uncommon - able to understand how we might appear to others. Mr Pfaff does not see what he wants to see; he is not about to tell you what you want to hear. You wouldn't want your doctor or your lawyer to mislead you, however sweetly, and you ought to expect the same leveling from your political analysts.
Interestingly, there are two articles in The New Yorker this week that feed the same thought, a reflection on human nature's preference for stable calm over rule of law. The longer is Michael Specter' indispensable survey of civil freedom in today's Russia; the shorter is a review, by Caleb Crain, of Matthew Warshauer's Andrew Jackson and the Politics of Martial Law (Tennessee, 2006).
Last October, journalist Anna Politkovskaya was shot and killed in her Moscow apartment building. A month later, Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB agent, died of polonium poisoning. Both were critics of President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent himself who has decided, it appears, that Russia does not need critics at the present time. In his Letter from Moscow (not available on-line), Mr Specter notes recent adulatory coverage in the the Russian press of Leonid Brezhnev's centenary and Augusto Pinochet's recent death. Both are thought to have made their countries "stable and strong."
Putin, who has called the breakup of the Soviet Union "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," clearly agrees. Sick of the lines, the empty shops, and the false promises of Soviet life, Russians looked to the West - and particularly to the United States - to provide an economic model. What followed was an epic disaster: the sell-off of the state's most valuable assets made a few dozen people obscenely rich, but the lives of millions of others became far worse. The health-care system fell apart, and so did many of the social-service networks. Russia became the first industrial country ever to experience a sustained fall in life expectancy. Russian males born today can, on average, expect to life to the age of fifty-nine, dying younger than if they were born in Pakistan or Bangladesh. It is not surprising, then, that by the time Putin became President most Russians were only too happy to exchange the metaphysical ideas of free speech and intellectual freedom for the concrete desires of owning a home and a car and possessing a bank account. They also wanted to feel that somebody was in control of their country.
The curious thing is that, according to publisher Alexei Volin and broadcaster Aleksei Venediktov, most Russians don't care about newspapers or TV news. They're even less important in Russia than they are in the United States, where hoi polloi do a magnificent job of keeping themselves ill-informed.
The imposition of martial law in New Orleans on December 16, 1814, on the eve of a Battle of New Orleans that would mean nothing, because the what we call the War of 1812 was officially over before it was fought, was unconstitutional, and Andrew Jackson was fined a thousand dollars for the offense. In 1844, his campaign to have the fine refunded finally met with success. The refund implicitly ratified Jackson's action (without making it any less unconstitutional), and it appears to have been the precedent for Abraham Lincoln's suppression of habeas corpus in 1863. And so on. But the Battle of New Orleans was the making of Andrew Jackson, and he became the first President to exploit his countrymen's love of a bold and robust, if occasionally ruthless, leader. When a big guy can get the job done, Americans will look the other way rather than hold him to account for misdeeds. In "Bad Precedent," Mr Crain writes,
The evidence certainly suggests that it has always been difficult to find a reliable base of support for habeas corpus in America; it's a vulnerable right, especially during emergencies and when a charismatic leader is involved.
Ironically, the only American branch that has the power to suspend habeas corpus - the Congress - has twice supported the expropriation of this power, first by refunding Jackson's fine and then, last year, by ratifying President Bush's suppression of habeas corpus at Guantánamo Bay. Mr Crain quotes F-X Martin, a New Orleans judge who went on to write a history of New Orleans. As an appeals-court judge, he had declined to penalize Jackson for imposing martial law; he argued that he lacked the jurisdiction. Later, in his history, he would write, "In free governments, dangerous precedents are to be dreaded from good and popular characters only."
In The Nation, Columbia historian Eric Foner reviews The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics, by James Oakes (Norton, 2007). Mr Foner's review (also not on-line - yet) is favorable, but what caught my eye were the two opening paragraphs, which I think that everyone ought to read closely, because they explode some very widespread myths about the Civil War, and do so quite neatly.
The abolition of slavery in the United States appears in retrospect so inevitable that it is difficult to recall how unlikely it seemed as late as 1860, the year of Abraham Lincoln's election as President. Slaveowners had pretty much controlled the national government since its inception. The 4 million slaves formed by far the country's largest concentration of property (their economic worth exceeded the value of all factories, railroads and banks in the country combined). Racism was deeply entrenched in the North as well as the South. Blacks, free as well as slaves, had few rights anywhere, and abolitionists were a despised minority.
Obviously, Lincoln's election and the civil war it triggered made emancipation possible. But Lincoln campaigned for President pledging to prevent slavery's expansion into the Western territories, while insisting that he had no intention of interfering with the institution where it already existed. It was by no means certain when the war began that it would become a crusade to destroy slavery.
It was very good news to learn that The Girls Who Went Away was nominated for a Nonfiction award by the National Book Critics Circle. It's good just to know that Ann Fessler's book appeals to a general audience. I read it with mounting obsession, but, then, I'm an adopted child.
The ball is in my court on the reunion front. I've received the "non-identifying" information that the New York Foundling Hospital could release, and I've been notified by the New York State Department of Health that when each of my parents registers with the Adoption and Medical Information Registry, then we can all get in touch.
I'm sorry, but that's profoundly unacceptable. The state has no business here. One of my parents is supremely unlikely to be alive - he would be one hundred ten years old - while the other is in her late eighties, living who knows where. Thanks to The Girls Who Went Away, I no longer believe that the State of New York had or has the right to hand me over to biological strangers while denying me access to information about my birth family, which may, as it happens, include as many as three half-siblings and their children. My daughter has a right to know her not-so-distant cousins.
That's why I'm happy about the nomination. The success of The Girls Who Went Away will be a step toward the repeal of New York State's inhuman adoption-records statute.
I'm back from a brilliant lunch with an old friend, and I have to share our findings. We discussed the difference between Help and Support. No etymology was involved, and you may switch the definitions if you like. We decided that, while Help and Support manifest the same behavior, they engender contrary expectations. When we Help, we look for positive results that reflect our efforts (change). When we Support, we risk a sort of no-questions-asked enabling. Much of the pain of life is attributable to the tremendous difficulty of deciding which to offer (Help or Support), and, just as important, how much of either we can afford.
Hrant Dink may not have died in vain. The assassination of the Armenian-Turkish journalist by a seventeen year-old "nationalist" has prompted massive outpourings of grief, not only in Istanbul, where one might expect it, but elsewhere in Turkey as well. The government is all but patronizing a big-deal funeral. Denial of the Armenian genocide isn't the biggest problem that Turkey faces (Kurdist separatism is), but it is the major obstacle to the final step of Turkey's secularist reformation: union with Europe. I wish I could join the crowds for this particularly sad but generally joyous observance.
Clear up one problem and another will appear in its place, as is shown Times coverage, "Armenian Editor's Death Leads to Conciliation," by Susanne Fowler and Sebnem Arsu.
Turkey calls the loss of life a consequence of a war in which both sides suffered casualties, and has suggested that a group of envoys from each country analyze the history. Armenia has expressed a willingness to participate but insists that the border must first be reopened to trade.
But many Armenians living abroad hold a much harder line and are lobbying the United States and European governments to deny Turkey entrance into the European Union until Ankara recognizes the killings as genocide.
I know that not all of the Armenian "expats" (many the grandchildren of emigré refugees) live in the United States, but a lot of them do, and they are among the hardest of hard liners. They have plenty of company: Irish-Americans who have supported Sinn Féin, Cubans who have plotted against Castro, and American Jews who have "settled" the West Bank - just to name three groups of powerful quasi-diasporans. The basic idea seems to be that you get thrown out of your homeland for one reason or another and come to America, where you prosper. But you do not forget the Old Country, for vengeance is yours!
The sad fact is that we all live locally, whether we want to or not. People living in California gradually cease to be Armenians, not because they abandon traditions but because actual Armenians, the people who live in Armenia, come to have different experiences, and probably don't see "tradition" in quite the same way as their collateral exiles. The very lack of an overall American "sentiment," or national feeling, makes it possible for newcomers to feel at home within a short space of time, but it also encourages them to hold on to and fetishize the more portable aspects of the culture they have left behind. The rest is money for guns.
For a bookish person, I'm perhaps unusually averse to spending time in or making use of public libraries. It's partly because I find it very difficult to focus on books when I'm in a crowded room (a crowded moving vehicle is something else). But it's also partly because of what Ellen Moody, in her entry about the Library of Congress, calls "institutional bullying." One of the most shameful things about the United States is the unwillingness of so many of its citizens to understand that the staffs of public institutions ought to be among the most highly-compensated workers in the land.
Now that the White House and the Pentagon are pushing for a "surge" of additional American troops in Iraq, it may be too late to mastermind a massive redistribution of Edward N Luttwak's "Dead End: Counterinsurgency Warfare as Military Malpractice," which appears in the February issue of Harper's.* Before reading this article, my resistance to the Iraqi misadventure was strong but intuitive. Taking the tack of failing to see any good reason for invading the country spared me the obligation to analyse my conviction that the invasion couldn't succeed - not in the long term. The dots were all there in my head, but I didn't bother to connect them.
Mr Luttwak has connected them for me, however, and now I know why I believe that our military undertaking in Iraq can never succeed - not, that is, so long as we remain a modern Western democracy. Our national commitment to humanitarianism means that we cannot continue to save villages in the only way that we know - by destroying them. We have tied one hand behind our back, and I am fairly certain that any attempt, by the president or anyone else, to untie that hand would rouse very considerable public outrage.
If only life could always be this simple.
Please watch this video. It packs the wallop of a feature film in an eggtimer of minutes.
And, by the way, if violinist Robert Thompson comes to New York to give a recital or a concert, I am there!
Thanks to Jason Kottke, who got it from Tom and Eric.
There are two must-read pieces in the current issue of Vanity Fair. After years of condescending dismissal, I've broken down and subscribed. As a devoted reader of Spy and a longtime (but no longer) subscriber to the New York Observer, I can tell myself that I'm just following editor Graydon Carter's star. As it happens, I'm in the middle of Spy: The Funny Years, by George Kalogerakis, with assists from Mr Carter and co-editor Kurt Anderson (Miramax/Melcher Media). Reading this handsome production is more than funny: it's a trip across time. The magazine's trademark was a wicked but attentively proofread mischievousness, and month after month it made me howl with laughter. I find from the newly published retrospective that it still can. Here's the weather squib from the top of a New York Times parody dating from 1992:
New York. Today, Sunny. High 85. Tonight, mostly dark, low 72. Tomorrow, canicular heat burns through early diaphanous clouds; aestival breezes expected. High 80. Yesterday, Tuesday. Details, page B14.
Observe that the piece is not immediately funny in any way, and doesn't have to be, because the seasoned reader of Spy loves to be lulled into thinking that there aren't any creatures under the bed, only to be transported into ecstasies by the sudden attack of a tickle-monster. The blend of fine writing, banality, and sheer irrelevance is sublime.
And before Spy, there was Esquire. Frank DiGiacomo's piece in the current Vanity Fair, "The Esquire Decade," sketches the steps that Harold T P Hayes took, once he became managing editor in 1960, to make Esquire the edgiest magazine going. I didn't come to that particularly party until it was half-over, but I remember the excitement with which the "Dubious Achievements" issue was greeted every year. Who could forget something that went like this:
oh, we thought it was at six oaks for the thousandth time. Mickey Rooney got married for the sixth time at his home in Thousand Oaks, California.
The simple genius of the "Dubes" was to print the comic reaction to a story before the story. Talk about pre-emption! Mr DiGiacomo writes,
As Nora Ephron says, Esquire and the 60s were "the perfect moment of a magazine and a period coming together - not trying to say the period was something other than what it was, but telling us everything about it." And though the decade climaxed in violence and hysteria that no monthly magazine could stay ahead of, Harold Hayes and his troops at Esquire not only cracked the code of the new culture but also engineered the genome for the modern magazine. Traces of its DNA can still be found in today's magazines, including this one.
I have the October 2006 issue of Esquire before me. Beneath a not-very-flattering picture of Brad Pitt (but that's the point, of course), there's a lot of print about "The Esquire 100." This is what George W S Trow might call "the format of no format." It permits a jumble of items and photographs on every level of importance (and unimportance), presented in apparently random order. "No 038: Omega-3's: The New Fluoride." "No 039: Misguided Expert of the Year: The Dog Whisperer Should Just Shut Up." It's hip, sort of, I suppose. But it isn't funny. There's an earnestness the writing that is almost desperate. Just as the writers of the old Esquire and Spy behaved like ace eight year-old cutups, today's young journalists aspire to the gravitas of greybeards. (And don't go blaming boomers. Esquire may have shaped the intelligent boomer's sensibility, but it was not at all shaped by it.) Esquire and Spy both demonstrated, moreover, that high humor lies not in particular subjects but in the way even the most ordinary subjects are handled. Spy, for example, specialized in insulting but not inaccurate Homeric epithets. If Homer's sea was invariably wine-dark, Spy's Shirley Lord was always a "bosomy dirty-book writer." It didn't stop there. Here's a gem from 1988: "... all across town there was voiced astonishment at just how dirty a dirty-book writer the bosomy dirty-book writer is."
As you can imagine, I hope it won't be long before someone with half a brain realizes that there's money to be made in DVD packages along the lines of the (amazing!) Complete New Yorker. I've spent a lot of my lifetime laughing at funny magazines, and I that nothing else makes me half so nostalgic.
The other must-read is "Ruthless with Scissors," Buzz Bissinger's report on reasons why writer Augusten Burroughs (né Chris Robinson - did you know that? I didn't) might be worried about landing in deepish doo-doo. A looming court case may Frey the memoirist alive. Members of the Turcotte family - the original's of the Finches of Running With Scissors - feel humiliated by the book, as well as grossly misrepresented. The author's claim that it is they themselves who have outed themselves is severely undercut by one little detail:
It was so easy to figure out who the Finches were that Burroughs himself, in a 2003 interview with the online publication Bookslut, essentially told reporters how to do it. "The doctor was notorious in that area, absolutely notorious, so I always felt it was laziness on the part of reporters to question [the veracity]," he was quoted as saying. "All you have to do is search western Massachusetts doctors in the '70s, in North Hampton [sic] - how many psychiatrists were there - and you can access a lot of stories, lots and lots of stories. In September of 2002, the real name of the family was used in a People magazine profile of Burroughs. When I interviewed Burroughs, he said that he had not given People the name and has never revealed it publicly.
Hmm. Mind you, I'm not going to get very worked up about that "veracity" issue. While I can't say that I'm indifferent to the truthfulness of a self-proclaimed memoir, I'm going to take the wilder and more entertaining ones with a grain of salt and wait for the inevitable fallout that sooner or later blankets frauds. At the heart of Running With Scissors there is an abandoned child, or a child who felt abandoned. The antics of the people around him, which may or may not be true, help us get the depressing story down. If Mr Burroughs projected his own misbehavior onto the Turcottes, as their complaint appears to suggest, that wouldn't be the strangest thing that I've ever heard of about a dysfunctional childhood.
If you want to watch a decrepit old dinosaur rattle off a squeak instead of a roar while grimacing with a mouthful of missing teeth, don't miss Christopher Hitchens's profoundly witless column, "Why Women Aren't Funny." For shame, Mr Carter; this is the sort of trash that Spy would never have published.
Here's what I did during my Christmas vacation: I read all the reviews in nearly twenty back issues of The Nation. Including the "Spring Books" issue from May. When I get behind, I don't fool around! The Nation's criticism is so much more substantial than the trash that too often appears in the New York Times Book Review that I feel somewhat foolish for taking the latter to task every week. At the same time, I have a terrible headache. All that brainy thoughtfulness!
I clipped five essays. David Thompson's warm appreciation (May 29, 2006) of Alan Bennett's Untold Stories will be tucked into the book. I don't know where to tuck William Deresiewicz's brisk dismissal (October 9, 2006) of Richard Powers's The Echo Maker, but I had to hold on to it because it sums up succinctly my dissatisfaction with the one Powers novel that I have read, Galatea 2.2.
The Echo Maker will tell you a great deal about neuroscience, environmental degradation and the migratory patterns of the sandhill crane, but like Powers's other novels, it won't tell you much about what its laboriously accumulated information and elaborately constructed concepts have to do with what it means to be alive at a particular time and place, or what it feels like. And that, crudely put, is what novels are for.
Mr Deresiewicz is particularly struck by the fact that Richard Powers wows his readers with unstinting displays of science. He's given a pass on affect because his material is "difficult." The review traces this back to a wistful yearning for science and literature to engage in fruitful conversation.
From Matthew Arnold to C P Snow to today, there's been a vague feeling afloat that if only somehow those two modes of knowledge could be made to talk to each other, science would be humanized (whatever that means) and art made relevant to the scientific age (as if it weren't already).
I doubt this demand will ever be satisfied, for the simple reason that no one really knows what it means, least of all the people who make it. But certainly one way it won't be satisfied is by treating the novel as a container for scientific ideas.
Jon Wiener's review of Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, by David S Brown (October 23, 2006), is valuable for cutting Hofstadter down to size, or at least for stressing the distorting effect that a dread of American fascism had upon the writer's work. Another reassessment of received truths, Eyal Press's "In God's Country (November 20, 2006), reviews nine recent books under a "church and state" rubric. Mr Press reminds us that strong religious convictions have done far more good than harm to American life, as the single issue of civil rights for Afro-Americans makes perfectly clear, and he thinks that secular liberals are too easily scared by extreme fundamentalists. In any case, religious conviction must be respected; it was to ensure that respect, for any and all creeds, that the Founders proscribed an established religion. Mr Press quotes Madison, who wrote that religion
"flourishes in greater purity without [rather] than with the aid of government." He was right. The level of religious observance in America has long dwarfed that in various European countries where official churches still exist.
One cannot hope to change the religious conviction that, say, homosexuality is wrongful without first taking it very seriously indeed.
Finally, Lynn Hunt's review (May 29, 2006) of two books about the Terror seemed worth keeping, because it makes a very important point that I hope that it's not paranoid of me to regard as extremely important these days. Writing of Ruth Scurr's Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, Mr Hunt observes,
Scurr sets out to answer the same wrong question that has bedeviled so many accounts of the Terror. She asks how Robespierre could have come to incarnate the Terror and with it the entire French Revolution. The question rests on a double fallacy - that Robespierre is the Terror, that the Terror is the French Revolution - whose lure is easily understood.
In fact, Mr Hunt argues, Robespierre became a tyrant not by main force but by the consent of the Convention.
Robespierre undoubtedly turned many a memorable phrase because he believed that he spoke for the Revolution's most profound principles. But the other deputies only tolerated this pretension as long as the situation demanded what he offered: an ability to keep popular violence in check while indefatigably pursuing victory on the Revolution's multiple fronts and obscuring the fact that the "regime" lacked all the basic elements of rule. Once the French gained the upper hand in both the foreign and civil wars, Robespierre's days were numbered.
Mr Hunt concludes with chilling relevance.
Rumor, conspiracy, constant harping on imminent dangers, accusing political opponents of being unpatriotic, internment camps, even lists of suspects vaguely defined have all made a shocking reappearance in the US "war on terror," along with torture, a practice repudiated by the French even though they had grown up under a monarchy that routinely administered it under court supervision. If the leaders of the most powerful nation in the world can react in this fashion to the threats, albeit real, of small cells of terrorists financed by foreign powers, is it really so hard to imagine that the French responded as they did?
Well, one thing we know: you're no fake. You're a genuine idiot! (North By Northwest)
One of the most refreshing Op-Ed pieces in ages appeared in yesterday's Times. In "Our Overrated Inner Self," sociologist Orlando Patterson came out and dismissed the concern for "authenticity" as an impediment to the working of civil society. It's about time.
I couldn’t care less whether my neighbors and co-workers are authentically sexist, racist or ageist. What matters is that they behave with civility and tolerance, obey the rules of social interaction and are sincere about it. The criteria of sincerity are unambiguous: Will they keep their promises? Will they honor the meanings and understandings we tacitly negotiate? Are their gestures of cordiality offered in conscious good faith?
As Professor Patterson says, the American warp on authenticity has led the electorate to support George W Bush as somehow "real," while it has prodded the pundits and the press to suspect that Hillary Clinton is a "fake." Beyond foolish consistency, I can't see what distinguishes "real" from "fake" in these cases. Mr Bush is a genuine bully whose mind has been genuinely sealed shut as an alternative treatment for alcoholism. Ms Clinton is a politician, that is, someone whose compromises are informed by core values. (Otherwise, she would just be an opportunist.) Mr Bush is utterly insincere - you might even say, authentically insincere. Ms Clinton is obviously trying.
Trying is good. Setting out to be a better person means accepting that one is not yet a better person. "Authenticity" would prohibit self-improvement. "Authenticity" has enabled hundreds of thousands of loutish males to complain to their better halves, "You're trying to change me!" Well, yes, that is the idea: you can't become a better person without changing. And you can't change without trying to change.
Eventually, at least with persistence, the attempt produces a real transformation. Why get lost in the semantics of authenticity? Genuine transformation is good; it's more than good: it is enough. Who you were when you started out is simply not important. And there is no better example of the beauty of deliberate personal metamorphosis than the late Cary Grant.
In later life, the actor would say, "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." A balder admission of inauthenticity cannot be conceived, and yet the record of Grant's life - not just his films, but his personal dealings as well - could hardly have been more admirable, short of helping out Mother Teresa. He worked on himself constantly, grooming his character as scrupulously as his hair, and eventually - as Aristotle assures us will happen - his good habits made him a good man.
So take your pick. Are you happier with an inauthentic, self-made gentleman whose word is his bond and whose eagerness to make you comfortable is automatic? Or would you prefer an authentic lunk, incapable of pushing beyond the least resistance?
Historically, the concern for authenticity followed an era of widespread hypocrisy. But authenticity is not the antidote. Sincerity is. Sincerity brings hypocrisy to an immediate halt. Sincerity rules out opportunistic self-improvement. It legitimates change.
Although I'm not a religious person, I agree with the Christian proposition that we are all authentic sinners. And that, I would hope, is a point of departure.
The New Yorker never fails to surprise me. I'd have expected to see Orhan Pamuk's "Nobel Lecture" in, say, The New York Review of Books, but it sits very nicely in this year's fina issue of The New Yorker. As it's online, you ought to have no difficulty accessing and reading it. It happens to be an excellent introduction to the writer's themes, but it also makes an important declaration: Istanbul is the center of the world.
Having been lucky enough to visit Istanbul, I have no trouble going along with this proposition (which Mr Pamuk intends to be taken figuratively, as we'll see). Istanbul is a socket from which both the West and the Middle East swing. A Turkish, quasi-secular, quasi-Islamic city today, it has left many traces of the West uneffaced. There are, of course, the great Byzantine remains, most notably Ayya Sofia. There are also the souvenirs of more recent Western influence, dating back to the nineteenth century and the final decades of the Caliphate. The fact that Turkey's modern capital sits at Ankara has had a preservative effect on Istanbul as well - if too often, as Mr Pamuk points out in his book about the city, in the form of neglect. To a greater extent than any other city that I have visited (and I have never been to Rome), Istanbul appears to exist on several time-planes at once. Some of the bizarre things that theoretical physicists say about the world feel a little less unlikely by the banks of the Bosporus.
When Mr Pamuk was growing up, in the Fifties and Sixties, Istanbul happened to be about as backwatery as it is possible for a major city to be. No longer acknowledged by the rivals who begat it, the city limped along with a rudimentary, somewhat embarrassed cultural life. To be a Turk, one crossed the water to Anatolia. To be a writer, one went to Paris. Mr Pamuk's father, an amiable bon viveur who invested his inheritance in a string of failing enterprises, spent some youthful time in Paris, where he filled up notebooks with "poems, paradoxes, analyses." Two years before he died, the father gathered up his notebooks, put them in a suitcase, and delivered them to his son, in whose success as a writer he had never had any doubt, going so far as to predict that Mr Pamuk would win the prize that occasioned "My Father's Suitcase." The idea was that, at his convenience, the son would go through the notebooks, and see if there was anything that might - and this was left wide open.
In the event, Mr Pamuk did not find anything that might conceivably appear anywhere but in his father's notebooks. Reading them appears to have been a very unpleasant experience, because Mr Pamuk loved his father deeply but could not pretend that his writing was not that of an amateur. Early on in "My Father's Suitcase," Mr Pamuk writes,
By this time, I had been working as a writer for twenty-five years, and his failure to take literature seriously pained me. But that was not what worried me most: my real fear - the crucial thing that I did not wish to discover - was that my father might be a good writer. If true and great literature emerged from my father's suitcase, I would have to acknowledge that inside my father there existed a man who was entirely different from the one I knew. This was a frightening possibility. Even at my advanced age, I wanted my father to be my father and my father only - not a writer.
But, knowing what I know from Mr Pamuk's work, that "real fear" concealed a real hope. I expect that the contents of the suitcase were bitterly disappointing, because they were the work of a provincial writer, someone working far from the center. A writer without faith.
Orhan Pamuk has made Istanbul the center of the world by taking its complexity as seriously as possible and trying to set it in prose.
... for the past thirty-three years, I have been narrating its streets, its bridges, its people, its dogs, its houses, its mosques, its fountains, its strange heroes, its shops, its famous characters, its dark spots, its days, and its night, making them a part of me, embracing them all. A point arrived when this world that I had made with my own hands, this world that existed only in my head, was more real to me than the city in which I actually lived. That was when all these people and streets, objects and buildings seemed to begin to talk among themselves, interacting in ways that I had not anticipated, as if they lived not just in my imagination or my books but for themselves.
Equal parts courage and obsession, Mr Pamuk's identification as a writer of Istanbul constitutes exactly the commitment that every great writer makes to what we call his "material." His belief in its importance transcends argument; it even transcends love. And it signifies that, however familiar the writer may be with Dostoevsky or Kafka, he is not a provincial who wishes that he could write about Paris or New York, where the "real writers" are. The real writers, he knows, are wherever they believe in what they're writing about. There is nothing easy about this faith, because it is essentially a faith in one's own creative powers. Mr Pamuk doesn't write about Istanbul, he creates it. He displaces the physical city with the literary city, which is a thousandfold more accessible. It is a miracle that writers writers of his caliber conjure out of bravado and hard work.
The question remains: does accepting the greatest literary prize that the West has to offer make Orhan Pamuk a "Western" writer? Don't look at me. It's a litmus-test sort of question, its answer pre-determined by the prejudices of the inquirer. In a way, all writers whose work reaches the Swedish Academy's attention are "Western" writers, toiling in that capacious and cosmopolitan tent in which capturing life in words is the only real project. At the same time, the grain of Mr Pamuk's outlook is distinctly "foreign" - Turkish. That's the most important part of his faith: that he write as a Turk. Not as someone who, like his father, ran into Sartre in the streets of Paris. I expect that, at least to all fearful and ungenerous minds, Mr Pamuk will appear to aspire to both titles, "Western" and "Turkish," and to be unworthy of either.
Last Sunday, there was a gathering at my house. I hesitate to call it a "party" because it was so sober. Joe Jervis of Joe.My.God was there, as were the Farmboyz. Édouard, of Sale Bête, arrived with his copain, as did PPOQ - who as of this writing remains blogless. M le Neveu and Ms NOLA were on hand, too. Kathleen talked with everybody while I basically watched what happened happen. Never have I - all right - given a party that required so little fuss - no fuss, in fact. Never has giving a party been so satisfying or so agreeable. So sane! It left me in a trance. While entranced, I tried to take note of the epiphany. The results as published, I hope, have been optimally de-gassed.
By yesterday, I had recovered my composure, only to find myself restless. I had an appointment at three-thirty, so I headed off to the Met for lunch, in the cafeteria. I have been to the museum so often this season that I couldn't think of anything that I wanted to see, so I headed over to the American Wing with a view to tracking its mazes. The American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would make a very fine museum on its own. In addition to the conventional picture galleries and the period rooms, there is the Henry Luce Center for the Study of American Art, a kind of glazed attic, with racks and shelves of old chairs and china, and a few curios, such as the ivory pagoda, with its own pyramidal carrying case. There's a Childe Hassam, not behind glass I'm happy to say, that deserves a more prestigious mounting. There are even a few Sargents! But most of the paintings are portraits of venerable ancestors, many of them, unlike the sitters on the rack of Gilbert Stuarts, unidentified. The Luce Center is the Met at its barniest. I wouldn't want to fail to mention John Vanderlyn's panorama, The Palace and Gardens of Versailles. It's very woo-hoo.
Leaving the museum, I walked down Fifth Avenue in the watery, late-afternoon sunlight. It was rather gloomy, really, and very black-and-white. I felt old. How I wish that I could turn forty on my birthday, in two weeks, instead of fifty-nine. That's the bittersweet of discovering, in early antiquity, that my life makes complete sense. I'd have done so much more with my Forties if I'd known that! And I'd have known, it too. I think that I should have learned it from blogging just as quickly at a tenderer age as I have in fact.
What are you reading these days? I'm reading two books by authors appearing in From Boys to Men - a book that was much discussed and passed around on Sunday afternoon - Through It Came Bright Colors, by Trebor Healey (a novel), and You Are Not The One, by Vestal McIntyre. They are both absorbing books, but the latter is somewhat better-written than the former. More on that later. I'm also stalled at the beginning of Ward Just's new book, Forgetfulness.
First, the good news. An Australian Army officer and anthropologist, David Kilcullen, has an office at the US State Department, where he works on a strategy of "Disaggregation" that might prove as useful in the "war on terror" as the policy of containment was helpful in the Cold War. Item number one on Lt Col Kilcullen's list would presumably be to ditch the phrase "war on terror," and replace it with "effective counterinsurgency." The basic idea is to isolate potential jihadi hot zones from one another and to deal with each one individually, paying particular attention to local needs and complaints. Localizing insurgents makes it far easier to undermine them; just about the worst thing that you can do is lump all the bad apples together into something really dumb, like the "axis of evil." Henry Crumpton, Lt Col Kilcullen's boss, says,
It's really important that we define the enemy in narrow terms. The thing we should not do is let our fears grow and then inflate the threat. The threat is big enough without us having to exaggerate it.
The bad news is that this new way of dismantling insurgency - which is not very new at all - probably won't be taken seriously until the current incumbent is no longer President of the United States.
George Packer's report, "Knowing the Enemy: Can social scientists redefine the 'war on terror'?", does not, unfortunately, appear online at The New Yorker's site. It is very worth rustling up. For one thing, it's encouraging, and we can all use a little encouragement on the war front.
As an example of disaggregation, Kilcullen cited the Indonesian province of Aceh, where, after the 2004 tsunami, a radical Islamist organization tried to set up an office and convert a local separatist movement to its ideological agenda. Resentment toward the outsiders, combined with the swift humanitarian action of American and Australian warships, helped to prevent the Acehnese rebellion from becoming part of the global jihad. As for America, this success has more to do with luck than with strategy.
As always, the moral of the story is to ask "What would George do?", and then do the complete opposite.
Off the top of my head, I'd have to say that I've never had anything good to say about President Bush, not ever. His impact on events is, in my view, purely negative. It's only now, though, as the depths are being sounded by writers such as Bob Woodward, Ron Suskind and James Risen, that I'm getting a sense of how negative that impact is, and it surprises me that I am surprised. Suspecting that someone is up to no good is very different from finding out the ways in which someone has been up to no good. Mark Danner, reviewing books by each of the authors I've named in a very long essay, "Iraq: The War of the Imagination," has shaken me in a way that I didn't expect to be shaken. One passage in the review just won't go away. Both excerpts below appear on the same page of the current New York Review of Books.
Irresistible as Rumsfeld is, however, the story of the Iraq war disaster springs less from his brow than from that of an inexperienced and rigidly self-assured president who managed to fashion, with the help of a powerful vice-president, a strikingly disfigured process of governing.
Woodward tends to blame "the broken policy process" on the relative strength of personalities gathered around the cabinet table: the power and ruthlessness of Rumsfeld, the legendary "bureaucratic infighter"; the weakness of Rice, the very function and purpose of whose job, to let the President both benefit from and control the bureaucracy, was in effect eviscerated. Suskind, more convincingly, argues that Bush and Cheney constructed precisely the government they wanted: centralized, highly secretive, its clean, direct lines of decision unencumbered by information or consultation. "There was never any policy process to break, by Condi or anyone else," Richard Armitage, the former deputy secretary of state, remarks to Suskind. "There was never one from the start. Bush didn't want one, for whatever reason."
Yes, I thought as much - except that I didn't. The anatomy of the Administration's recklessness is a truly shocking sight. "Unencumbered by information or consultation" - what a phrase! For the sake of such convenience, thousands of people have died in Iraq, many of them GIs. I remember, years ago, comparing the Bushies to teenagers too young and unseasoned to drive the family car, but Mr Suskind's analysis is more devastating. Teenagers don't listen. Mr Bush and his cronies deliberately silenced the inputs.
Talk of impeachment is back in the air, and I won't be surprised if it gets positively noisy by the beginning of summer. I feel more strongly than ever that impeachment is the wrong way to go, because it mixes up the office of the presidency and its incumbent. I should like to wait until the government of the nation has passed to other, unavoidably more capable, hands before pursuing Mr Bush, preferably in a state with the death penalty, for the first-degree murder of several thousand American soldiers. There is no statute of limitation on murder, and I am convinced that a plausible case can be made. The president's reckless disregard for human life, amply hinted at during his governorship of Texas, is implicit in every Iraqi failure, from the decision to invade the country without a plan, to the de-Baathification program (for which no one currently takes final responsibility), to the shoddy state of our military's body armor - to name only three of the more egregious mistakes to which Mr Bush's willful ignorance has committed us. He has worked the levers of government without a shred of diligence, and brought deep shame upon his country.
Ever since the election of 2004, I've found it more useful to contemplate the electorate's seriousness than to fret about the Administration's incompetence. The more recent election, and the return to reality-based journalism that's ever more in evidence, didn't change my thinking. But Mr Danner has.
From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up, an anthology edited by Ted Gideonse and Rob Williams.
A few months ago, when From Boys to Men appeared, I bought a copy, because it's a print breakthrough for Joe Jervis, the author of Joe.My.God. But I was in no hurry to read it, and it languished on a shelf until just the other day, when I heard a clip of Joe talking about the book on Sirius Radio. I pulled it down and began at the beginning. I was hooked immediately.
It's important to note that this is not a collection of coming-out dramas. The stories told here are more delicate, as each writer attempts to trace the journey from childhood ignorance to adult self-acceptance. There are common themes, of course - coping with being called "faggot" in the schoolyard, surreptitious play-dates with Barbie, and no end of unrequited affection - but they are played with amazing variation. Eric Karl Anderson, in "Barbie Girls," uses the doll to characterize his utterly asexual relationships with middle-school classmates, cultivated solely to secure him a place among the cool kids. After a spellbound moment at summer camp, the young Mr Anderson "knew that these weren't the right friends anymore" when he went back to school. Aaron Hamburger, in contrast, always knew that he was interested in other boys, but he broke his own heart anyway, with assiduously-maintained friendships with boys who rarely gave him more than the time of day.
To what extent is this material dated? Will little boys always be warned away from homosexual leanings, even after most people understand that choice is not involved? Will beautiful gay boys ever arrive at their young triumphs with the heedlessness of their heterosexual brothers? Will we ever know where the "homosexual" ends and "being different" begins? So much of the pointless pain inflicted on the contributors to From Boys to Men seems to have been motivated by a fear of alien-ness. So much of it seems peculiar to ill-educated, lower-middle class America in the second half of the Twentieth Century. (Although in Tom Dolby, whose contribution is entitled "Preppies Are My Weakness," we have one alumnus of Hotchkiss.) The life of secrecy endured by so many of the writers here must surely have been somewhat deforming, even if only privately.
Good fathers are in extremely short supply here, something that suggest to me not a causal relationship between lousy parenting and homosexuality but the possibility that a broken or unloving father will create an atmosphere full of problems for his son to write about later. The unhappiness of living with an unsympathetic stepfather suffuses Jason Tougaw's "Aplysia californica," perhaps the most conventionally literary contribution to the project. Mothers, as you might expect, appear both more to the fore and in greater variety. There is the sweet slut of Michael Gardner's "The Competitive Lives of Gay Twins," and there's the clueless loyal wife of Trebor Healey's "The Upshot." For me, the most harrowing piece is David Bahr's "No Matter What Happens," which features two moms, Sadie, the writer's biological mother, a disturbed woman incapable of nurturing a child; and June, his foster mother, who turns on him after an aborted sojourn with Sadie. Lee Houck's "Inheritance" presents an instinctively hostile grandfather, a man who can somehow see that his grandson is queer. Remarkably, nobody reports extensive beatings or other serious abuse.
From Boys to Men offers a catalogue of narrative strategies. Blogger Francis Strand writes about himself in the third person in "Five Stories about Francis," and this alone makes his piece a little bit funnier than it would have been otherwise, by accentuating the "drama" of the boy's reactions and resolutions. Viet Dinh's "A Brief History of Industrial Music" poses as a learned note about a pop genre to which the author has appended footnotes devoid of scholarly apparatus but crammed with intimate snapshots. In "Peristalsis," Mike McGinty offers a suite of droll thumbnails taken from years five through seventeen. Raymonde C Green switches among moments from his past to delay the impact of his high-pitched self-discovery. Two stories, "Guide," by Austin Bunn, and "The Boy with the Questions and the Kid with the Answers," by Horehound Stillpoint, focus more on troubled older boys than on the authors. Michael McAllister begins his fragment, "Sleeping Eros," with a moment of sexual awakening, but the moment quickly fades into the remarkable story of his parents' divorce. In this, he's in a sad but altogether normal position; it's his parents who have discovered that they are gay.
Vestal McIntyre, in "Mom-Voice," and E M Soehnlein, in "The Story I Told Myself," show how their own creative work as adolescents led them to self-discovery. In "Dick," in contrast, Alexander Chee gets creative as soon as he makes that discovery, at the age of eight. D Travers Scott, in "Growing Up in Horror," took a little longer, perhaps, but the results are not only funnier but more concrete - I wonder if he still has the film. Todd Pozycki's "The Lives and Deaths of Buffalo Butt" project an amiable figure whose homosexuality is something like the relieving resolution of childhood OCD.
I've saved Joe Jervis's "Terrence" for last, because, since I know Joe somewhat, his contribution has a VistaVision intensity that puts it in a class by itself. Perhaps the piece would be vivid even if I didn't know Joe, because the star of this story is the title character. With his dyed-brassy hair and his southern-belle gestures, he is the most exuberant queen in From Boys to Men. I call him the star because, like the sun, he illuminates and nourishes life. When the story begins, Joe is in an interesting place, actively but discreetly gay. He has not yet come out to his mother. As it turns out, Terrence has nothing to do with the eventual change in status on that front, but it is Terrence who teaches Joe first the shame of trying to keep his sex life apart from his daily life, and then the pride of uniting them with brio. Still a discreet gentleman - that's just who he is - Joe has found his own way to be proud of himself. Who knew that that pride would make him into a published writer and one of the most popular bloggers in the 'Sphere?
In a perfect world, there would be a companion volume, entitled From Boys to Men: Straight Men Write About Growing Up. Books such as the gay version subtly suggest that straight men have an easy time of growing up, but the only ones for whom that's true are assholes. Everyone else has to figure out a series of moves that will take him from latency to manhood. Unfortunately, our culture encourages men to forget each step of the way as soon as it is completed, giving rise to a bad faith that has filled the land with sour Gary Lamberts. Gary's creator, novelist Jonathan Franzen, has been critically roasted for sharing his missteps and compromises; in The Discomfort Zone, Mr Franzen violates the code of omertà that silences discussion of adolescent insecurity. Once you make it into the world of salaried heterosexuality in our world, you're expected to bluff your way onward with phony bonhomie. This may be why I've encountered so few engaging straight male blogs.
From Boys to Men: Gay Men Write About Growing Up, an anthology edited by Ted Gideonse and Rob Williams.(Carroll & Graf, 2006)
The one article that you have to read this week is "Walled Off," John Lanchester's review, in The New Yorker, of The River of Lost Footsteps, by Thant Myint-U (FSG, $25). If you know anything about Burma, it's probably that a ruthlessly corrupt but notably incompetent military junta rules the country along severely isolationist lines, and that Aung San Yuu Kyi, winner of the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize, has lived under house arrest for years because of her commitment to democracy. And that's all correct. What you probably don't know anything about is the peculiar nature of Burmese nationalism, a toxic hormone that responds to international sanctions with a troublesome vibrancy.
One of the subtlest things in The River of Lost Footsteps is the connection Thant charts between Burma's current predicament and its colonial past. A deep sense of humiliation gave rise to a curdled nationalism that eventually made the military dictatorship possible. The great British experiment in regime change created a Burma that was, in Thant's words, "entirely different from anything before, a break with ideas and institutions that had underpinned society in the Irrawaddy valley since before medieval times" - a Burma "adrift, suddenly pushed into the modern world without an anchor to the past."
Hmm, might something similar have happened with all the post-World-War-I regime change in the Middle East? At least Burma is geographically Burma, notwishtanding its imperial pretensions. (Yes!) Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Saudi Arabia were all wrenched untimely from the womb of an Ottoman Empire that was too old to be giving birth; they are all profoundly bogus nations.
I used to be a big believer in sanctions. Just cut people off from the advantages of participating in the international community until they cry "uncle"! It seemed to be working with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, especially given the no-fly zones, under which certain cities prospered in peace. Mr Lanchester's essay suggests that I may have been simplistic (how American!). What one really wants to do, he points out, is to create a middle class, using whatever works.
A middle class. More and more, we recognize this property-owning but non-elite class as the binding force in any civil democratic society. But even in English, the "middle class" is contemptible for reasons having nothing to do with the care and feeding of civil societies. Anyone in a governing position has undoubtedly been subjected to an anti-bourgeois bias in the course of his or her education. We come back to a familiar Western conundrum: nobody from any background - aristocratic/plutocratic, bourgeois, or proletarian - can tolerate a "middle class" after a first-class education. It may be nothing more the crazy legacy of poets who romanticized the well-mannered ancien régime, but it clings like kudzu. Westerners have had a genius for creating middle classes. Why is it something that we understand so poorly that it's the last thing we think of exporting?
It's a bit creepy. The Wikipedia page for writer George W S Trow has registered his death, a couple days ago, of "natural causes." Why am I having such a hard time believing the cause of death?
There was a time when Trow was the coolest writer going, no question. "Within the Context of No-Context" came as a bombshell.
In the New History, nothing was judged - only counted. The power of judging was then subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do. In the New History, the preferences of a child carried as much weight as the preferences of an adult, so the refining of preferences was subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do. In the New History, the ideal became agreement rather than well-judged action, so men learned to be competent only in those modes which embraced the possibility of agreement. The world of power changed. What was powerful grew more powerful in ways that could be measured, grew less powerful in every way that could not be measured.
The piece appeared in the November 17, 1980 issue of The New Yorker, and I didn't really understand it. I had no idea that something called "popular culture" was going to occupy center stage in the coming decades. I thought that the Sixties were over. I didn't know that the Sixties were about to come back, in Living Dead format.
Looking at the essay today, I'm inclined to say that the old History is still vital in certain parts of the world, and that anti-Americanism is its hallmark. People still make momentous judgments there. Americans, in contrast, living in the New History, are almost ridiculous - and Trow was the first to show why. He sailed past the known poles of right and left, capitalist and marxist, to discover an awful new world, one in which the serious is relentlessly menaced by the inconsequential.
This wonderfully raunchy satire would be amusing even if it weren't for the drunkenly libinous "Oh, yeah..." right in the middle, but that one line lifts the whole piece to a higher level. Now turn over.
The cover of this week's New York Times Book Review bears the beginning of a serious essay by Michael Kinsley that pretends to review ten recent books about the state of American politics. The reviews are perfunctory in the extreme, however, sometimes consisting of no more than a sentence of comment. That's a disgrace on the part of the Book Review, perhaps, but the piece would be important wherever it appeared.
To cut to the chase, Mr Kinsley enumerates the things about American politics that need fixing. Voting machines. Electoral districts. Campaign finances. A more aggressive journalism. In the end, however, he concludes that there is only one thing that must be fixed. We need to put an end to our "enormous tolerance for intellectual dishonesty" - and for politicians who don't stand for anything but winning. The most brazen recent example that Mr Kinsley finds is the planning of the Bush campaign on the eve of the election of 2000. Fearing that Al Gore might win in the Electoral College, the campaign developed a plan for overcoming that outcome, arguing that it would be undemocratic. When in fact the election turned out just the other way, the Bushies because staunch advocates of the Electoral College.
Of all the things Bush did and said during the 2000 election crisis, this having-it-both-ways is the most corrupt. It was reported before the election and is uncontested, but no one seems to care, because so much of our politics is like that. And no electoral reform can fix this problem. Intellectual dishonesty can't be banned or regulated or "capped" like money. The only way it can be brought under control is if people start voting against it. If they did, the problem would go away. That's democracy.
When I read this, I understood something that had been bothering me. Why wasn't I paying attention to the campaigns this year? Surely they're as important as any mid-term elections could be. But I haven't had the slightest need for a campaign this time; my mind was made up before the season began. I will vote against Republican hegemony in any way that I can. And because I only have my one set of votes, it really doesn't matter to me what other people are planning to do. There is simply no news factor adhering to this election cycle. But the real reason for staying out of it is to avoid the appalling bullshit that, every once in a while, reaches up to the windows of my ivory tower. What is claiming that James Webb is unfit for the Senate because his novels have racy sex scenes in them but pure, unadulterated bullshit? Intellectual dishonesty isn't just a matter of bending the truth. It involves disregarding the concept of relevance. It short-circuits rationality. No matter how clever, it is fundamentally stupid.
As Mr Kinsley urges, try to vote against it.
There's a lot of good stuff in this week's New Yorker. The two pieces that stood out for me were John Seabrook's Profile of Will Wright, the designer of Raid on Bungling Bay, Sim City, The Sims, and Spore. Although Mr Wright never earned a college degree, he has filled a large corner of the computer world with food for thought disguised as fun. Mr Seabrook's portrait is complex and intriguing, but Mr Wright's world will never been my world. I jumped with sympathy at a remark of Joell Jones, a painter and Mr Wright's wife (from whom he has separated, it seems).
I think it frustrates Will that I don't play his games. Clearly, his games matter, on a deep level, to many people - take these online diaries people keep about their Sims. Wow. I don't know if they're avoiding their lives or learning about them. Me, I don't want to play a game to learn about myself.
The other piece was Steven Shapin's review of Steven Johnson's "vivid history," The Ghost Map: The story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic, and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. At the heart of this book is a map drawn up John Snow, a Victorian physician, who was sure that the cause of cholera - which even he thought must be some sort of "miasma" - was waterborne. He was right, but people were slow to listen. The real engine of London's great sanitation schemes was, as Mr Shapin reports, the flush toilet, which vastly increased the amount of effluent produced by Londoners and eventually brought the Thames to a high reek. Mr Shapin's conclusion is trenchant.
Victorian London illustrates how much could be done with bad science; the continuing existence of cholera in the Third World shows that even good science is impotent without the resources, the institutions, and the will to act.
The most astonishing news emerges from a parenthesis in Hendrik Hertzberg's opening Comment in "The Talk of the Town" "(... the reported two-million-dollar salary conferred upon a Republican congressman who became the pharmaceutical industry's top lobbyist immediately after shepherding into law a bill forbidding the government to negotiate prices for prescription drugs.)" I'd like to know more about that; it's another item for the album that I've started to keep about the privatisation of public wealth. Although perfectly legal, it seems, the two-step strikes me as falling somewhere between letters of attainder and treason. It certainly keeps the government out of the free market! But then, Republicans aren't as ideological as they seem; bottom line, they're kleptocrats.
Looking for something fun to do that costs only $25? Buy a book. (Jason sent me.)
Here is a portrait of the Democratic candidate for one of Virginia's two US Senate seats, James Webb.*
He saw himself as a creature of a pervasive but nearly invisible Scot-Irish subculture, descended from the warrior clans of Ulster who migrated to North America in large numbers in the eighteenth century. They came to live mostly in the Appalachian South - a stubborn, bellicose people, fiercely individualistic and egalitarian. They settled the frontiers, invented country music, and fostered a truly native form of American democracy. Most important, they bore the brunt of fighting the nation's wars. ,,,
In Webb's world, manhood was a standing, to be earned. When he was a small boy, his father, a bomber pilot in the Second World War, would clench his fist and dare his son to strike it, taunting him o keep punching until the tears flowed. But Webb accepted that a father's highest duty was to prepare his son for manhood by teaching to fight, to hunt, and to handle a weapon. He got his first gun when he was eight, and Jimmy [his son] did, too. In such a culture, going off to war is part of what Webb calls "the Redneck Bar Mitzvah." **
Reading this for the first time, I felt myself bristling, and not because I thought that it misrepresented Mr Webb. No; I stiffened because everything about Mr Webb's "subculture" repels me, right down to the country music. What I have to face, though, is that what Mr Webb sees in the Northeast elite subculture to which I belong is the very same thing that I see in his: a smug smirk that I want to smack. Anything that we can do to marginalize one another, we will do, because the dislike is bone-deep. I hate his people for breaking the elite American republic created in 1789 - a republic that offered a very limited franchise. And he hates mine because we tried to do everything to block the influence of his Founding Father, Andrew Jackson. I honestly don't believe that we were meant to cohabit the same sovereignty, not then and not now, and it's why I curse my Yankee forebears for not allowing the South to secede upon the election of Abraham Lincoln. (There would still, in all likelihood, have been a war over the West.)
To Webb, himself once a distinguished member of the Marine Corps, military service was not just a patriotic gesture but a test of honor and courage, an essential rite of passage.***
I cannot express how pathetically benighted I find the musky reflex that associates honor with warfare. And then to complain about bearing "the brunt"? Of wars that might not be undertaken were it not for Mr Webb's need for rites of passage? Sending rednecks to war while sparing Ivy Leaguers seems just about right to me.
But what if James Webb and his tribe were our only allies in the fight to subdue the corporate colonization of the United States?
* From "Southern Discomfort," by Peter J Boyer, in The New Yorker, 30 October 2006. ** page 43. *** page 42.
Because I read it, for the most part, in transit, I took a while to get through Thomas Blaikie's slim but heartening book about behavior, To the Manner Born: A Most Proper Guide to Modern Civility (Villard, 2005). Title notwithstanding, Mr Blaikie is not really very interested in being proper. He lays out his credo, appropriately enough, in his Introduction:
This book is a guide to modern manners. I say: Let's have manner based on common sense and reason; manners that bring people together rather than drive them apart; manners that make people feel comfortable and confident.
And then he proceeds to apply this thought to areas of modern life in which trouble arises. He couldn't, for example, care less about how to write a thank-you note, as long as you're agreeable about it, and everything except acceptances of wedding invitations and condolence letters can be sent by e-mail. In fact, he thinks that we just ought to forget about writing thank-you notes on most occasions: not imprudently, he saves this bombshell for a later chapter, which is subtitled "A Major Rethink." Mr Blaikie is also not interested in which piece of silver you use at dinner, as long as you use it to move food unobtrusively from the plate to your mouth. He does not care, in short, for any prescriptions that do not directly conduce to the general pleasure and comfort.
If there's one thing that Mr Blaikie insist upon, it's paying attention. Most of the lapses that he bullet-points occur not because someone doesn't know what to do but because someone simply isn't thinking.
Continue reading about To the Manner Born at Portico.
Connie Bruck has written an awfully interesting piece, "Millions for Millions," in the current New Yorker about the difference between microcredit and microfinance, both of which lend money to the poor. As you know, Muhammad Yunus, the Bagladeshi founder of the Grameen Bank, a microcredit institution, will be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in December, after several years on the speculative shortlist. Mr Yunus, and other advocates of microcredit, would like to eliminate poverty. Pierre Omidyar, the inventor of eBay, is a major force behind microfinance, which seeks to make banking available to hundreds of millions of unaffluent strivers. "Microcredit" signifies not-for-profit operation. Microfinance is frankly capitalist. According to Ms Bruck, the divide between the camps is becoming acrimonious. Microcreditors deplore the insertion of a profit motive, which rules out lending to the extremely poor. Microfinanciers complain that philanthropy distorts the market, keeping unsuccessful programs alive. Just to make things interesting, there's no evidence that microlending of any kind has altered the world's aggregate poverty - even though microlending is known to work in individual cases, and quite well at that. It follows that there is no evidence that one kind of microlending is more effective than the other. Enter the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (might it not have been better to title the piece, "Billions for Millions"?), and you've got some real excitement going. All that virtuous moolah!
Making an objective choice between microcredit and microfinance seems to me to be almost an impossibility, because the two varieties of microlending have been generated by very different mindsets. Mr Yunus believes in highly constructive charity; Mr Omidyar believes in the free market, "creative destruction" and all. Be sure to read the piece; at a minimum, it'll be good exercise for your brain.
Ms Bruck does not mention any microlending operations within the United States. You'd think there wasn't a need.
The other day, I went to see The Queen. This is a movie that everyone expected me to rush to see, but, perhaps for that very reason, I was dragging my feet. I'd concocted a perfectly good excuse - prophetic, really. "I'm going to like it so much that I'll want to watch it again and again, right away." True. I can't wait for the "window" - the gap between the release of films in theatres and their release on DVD - to close. But really, if I didn't rush to see The Queen the minute it came out, that was only because there were good movies opening in my neighborhood, where The Queen isn't showing.
I went the other day because an old friend wanted to see it a second time, and I owed him big-time for having brought a copy of Les Bienveillantes back from Paris, sparing me oodles of shipping charges and Amazon.fr's somewhat elevated price. We went to the first showing, at 11:20, and had lunch afterward. That was my treat, too.
Reviews of The Queen seem to me to have taken a strongly anti-monarchical edge, seeing the film as an argument in favor of abolition. Helen Mirren's Elizabeth II, never much of a fan of Diana Spencer to begin with, wants to regard the princess's death as a private matter. In her view - correctly, but only in the worst sense - Diana was no longer a member of the royal family at the time of her death; ergo, no fuss. Elizabeth is convinced that seclusion at Balmoral is best for her grandsons, and in this she is backed up by her dimwitted husband and her reactionary mother. It takes all of newly-elected Tony Blair's tact (Michael Sheen) to order her to come to London and make contact with Diana's mourners. For the first half of the film, Blair rolls his eyes and asks, rhetorically, how he can save "these people" from themselves.
He winds up a staunch admirer and a defender of the Queen. He talks to his entourage about her stoicism, and about the diligence with which she has done her job for nearly fifty years. What he does not express is any regret that the Queen's model - respectable dependability - has been junked in favor of Diana's - charming hedonism. I do not suppose that the princess was a tireless visitor of hospitals only because she knew that grim settings would transform her into a radiant, healing angel. Whatever one's motivation, it is always good to visit the sick. As a woman, however, Diana appears to have been little more than a classier Paris Hilton, living her life on remote beaches and private jets when she wasn't at Kensington Palace. Whatever gave anyone the idea that she was a "people's princess"? She was a celebrity who proved that she was not up to the job of princess, which, in England at least, is a matter of grinning and bearing.
What the outpouring of "grief" that flooded London during that week in 1997 speaks to me about is resentment. People whom Diana wouldn't have looked at in private, much less spoken to, could seize her extinguished life as an icon for the ordinary, and then project their own self-pity as a simulacrum of sorrow. Looking at the televised throngs that are clipped into The Queen, I was seized by a horror of the mob, stupid as a cow and dangerous as a bull. But I was not surprised when Her Majesty shows up at last and turns the tears into smiles.
The Queen is a smart, sophisticated movie that is stuffed with great performances and food for thought alike. It is greatly enlivened by Alexandre Desplat's formidable sound track.
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (Penguin, 2006), by Ian Buruma, is, if nothing else, a top-notch work of journalism. Mr Buruma, who was born and raised in the Netherlands but whose English mother assured that that he would be Anglophone, has put together a comprehensive dossier on the van Gogh case. As you may recall, filmmaker, talk-show host and social hatpin Theo van Gogh was horrifically murdered on the morning of 2 November, 2004 by a fellow Nederlander of Moroccan descent, Mohammed Bouyeri. Bouyeri fully expected to be killed in the aftermath, but he was taken captive, duly tried, and given a sentence of life imprisonment. The crime appeared to polarize the nation, but Mr Buruma's book makes it very clear that tensions and alliances alike run along multidimensional lines toward a pandemonium of inconsistency and contradiction. That is the great value of his book. Having read Murder in Amsterdam for the case study that it is, and chased the largely conflicted men and women who are its subjects toward some kind of resolution in your own mind, you will be in fine shape to deal with the Theo van Gogh show when it comes to a venue near you, as it very well may.
Continue reading about Murder in Amsterdam at Portico.
A friend recently asked me if I have any documentary evidence to support my theory that the principal goal of the Bush Administration is to transfer public wealth into private pockets. My answer was that I didn't; my theory is an inference from the facts. And I don't expect to find much documentary evidence, because I believe that the goal is less than conscious. It is the consequence of certain espoused philosophical views about free markets and invisible hands - views of which there is no end of documentary evidence. At the same time, I've gone on the lookout for statements that support my theory - which I'm sure is not just mine.
In a disheartening but unsurprising article about Senator Barack Obama in the current issue of Harper's, by Ken Silverstein ("Barack Obama Inc.: The birth of a Washington Machine"), Ted Patzek, of the University of California at Berkeley's Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is quoted as saying that ethanol production - something that Senator Obama supports - is based on "the massive transfer of money from the collective pocket of the US taxpayers to the transnational agricultural cartel."
In his attempt to become a viable progressive - that is, a legislator who can count on the contributions that will get him re-elected - Senator Obama has done a fair amount of trimming. I gave up on him a year ago, when he was nowhere in the public discussion of ethnic cleansing in New Orleans. I'm afraid that he's just another Kennedy.
The current, 16 October, issue of The New Yorker, devoted to media matters, is full of good stuff, but even more compelling than Malcolm Gladwell's report on computerized movie plots is Ian Parker's profile of Christopher Hitchens. Mr Hitchens belongs to the elite squadron of preposterously gifted English writers that also includes Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. I remember rather liking him when I first saw his byline, but I was brought up short by the piece in which he discussed the discovery that his mother, long dead, was Jewish. There was something not quite right about it; in Mr Parker's profile, Mr Hitchens is quoted as "being pleased to find that I was pleased" by the "tidings." That's the sort of thing that I might say to a friend, or even write in a letter; putting it in front of the public is reckless. Then I was startled by his campaigns against Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa. Again, I agreed with him - particularly about Mother Teresa - but I didn't share his passionate engagement. Most recently, of course, Mr Hitchens has tilted toward the neoconservatives, resigning as a columnist at The Nation and becoming a regular on Fox News. I have no use for the man now, at least as a commentator, although I shall probably have a look at his forthcoming God Is Not Great.
Although I am about the same age, Mr Hitchens's bluster gives me an insight into the revulsion that "baby boomers," taken collectively, inspire in younger people. There is the imperious idealism that can't be bothered with practical matters, such as driving carefully and giving up smoking. Mr Parker works in a few mild zingers, and the best of them is on point:
At times, Hitchens can look like a brain trying to pass as a muscle. He reads the world intellectually, but emphasizes his physical responses to it. Talking of jihadism, he said, "You know, recognizing an enemy - it's not just your mental cortex. Everything in you physically conditions you to realize that this means no good, like when you see a copperhead coming toward you. It's basic: it lives or I do."
Mr Hitchens is an ardent advocate of human rights; one might say that dedication to that cause is his leading edge. But his determination to force recognition of them upon various sovereign states is unlikely to foster something more important than human rights: human happiness. Idealists never seem to care about happiness other than their own.
In the current issue of The New Yorker, Milan Kundera has compiled some notes in answer to the question, which is also the title of his piece, "What Is A Novelist?" He begins by determining what the novelist is not, id est a lyric poet. The following passage rings true as a bell (never mind what it is that we can make deductions from - Hegel, actually):
From this we can deduce that the notion of lyricism is not limited to a branch of literature (lyric poetry) but, rather, designates a certain way of being, and that, from this standpoint, a lyric poet is only the most exemplary incarnation of man dazzled by his own soul and by the desire to make it heard.
I have long seen youth as the lyrical age - that is, the age when the individual, focused almost exclusively on himself, is unable to see, to comprehend, to judge clearly the world around him. If we start with that hypothesis (necessarily schematic, but which, as a schema, I find accurate), then to pass from immaturity to maturity is to move beyond the lyrical attitude.
If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a "myth," that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.*
It must be observed, first of all, that the world is awash in lyrical novels. I dislike them as a rule; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is one of the few exceptions that I can think of, and even then the extent to which that book is a novel is uncertain. Young writers, like young people, are self-absorbed because they're busy absorbing the world, or enough of it to convey a sense of their own place, their own limits, their own follies. The world is new, fresh, and exciting. And it's a struggle. Lyrical people usually have a somewhat difficult time building a career. (Better to outgrow lyricism in the natural way. Mid-life crisis, which is nothing but the eruption of stifled lyrical impulses in creaky middle age, can cause real damage, and it is usually fairly ridiculous.) Only irresponsible types find the conditions of youth amusing. But, as Mr Kundera goes on to say, it is only when we can make out the "soft gleam of the comical" on the surface of every human ego (especially our own) that we can call ourselves mature.
Sadly, the piece is not available online, so hunt down the October 9, 2006 issue in any way you can.
* Translated from the French by Linda Asher.
The news from the Deutsche Oper Berlin will make everybody crazy for a while, but I hope that something can be learned from the episode. Two things, actually.
First: it's time for opera directors to stop fooling around with operas, to refrain from changing the period of their settings and adding gratuitous (silent) bits just to make some sort of "point." The only point that opera has is beautiful singing that is also psychologically true, and the visual aspects of the experience are distinctly subordinate to the auditory. Every now and then, there's a true spectacle, but for the most part operas speak vividly to the blind - as thousands of opera lovers who have never actually seen an opera can attest. Larding a production of Mozart's Idomeneo - which tells a story related to the Homeric epics - with the severed heads of major religious figures (Jesus, Buddha, Mohammed, and the opera's own deus, Poseidon) is simply flabbifying.
Second, and much more important: it's time for a time-out on Western-Muslim critiques. Notice that I do not say "Christian-Muslim," for this is very definitely a post-religious argument on one side. Or, better, an argument about whether there can be a post-religious discussion at all. There is indeed a clash of cultures going on, even if it's not quite the one that Samuel Huntington writes about.
What's at issue is the right of an individual to determine his or her own sexual life. The sooner we all come to see this, the quicker we'll get to where we need to be next. Muslims deny the right, as human beings have done for most of their existence. The Western recognition of the right remains provisional: many in the West - many in the United States - do not recognize it. We need to consolidate our side of the argument, coming to terms with Westerners who persist in patriarchy. Until the West works out a deal with patriarchalists, whether by granting them a geographical territory in which to practice their beliefs, or, as sometimes seems likely, by simply reverting to patriarchy itself, we have no business spreading "democracy," which, currently in the West, necessarily means equal rights in most secular matters for women.
A good place to start would be convincing Europe's Muslim leaders that members of their flocks have the right to reject Islam, while at the same time allowing behaviors, such as the wearing of head scarves, that are obviously more cultural than religious in nature. The hard but more essential place to start is finding jobs for all those North African kids.
Changing my mind on the adoption issue has unleashed a lot of strong sentiment. Giving up one one lie - refusing to regard the American way of adoption, between World War II and Roe v Wade, as anything but monstrous - seems to have set off at least one other sudden switch. It's about the acceptability of American football.
I can understand wanting to play a game, dimly. Whether my poor hand/eye coordination is innate or inane doesn't much matter. I used to like to play Monopoly, but now I'm afraid that it would bore me to death, and the "original edition" set that I bought a few years ago remains shrink-wrapped. I don't relate well to games. And exertion for its own sake puzzles me. My fondness for conversational ballroom dancing might be a pointer to the kind of physical activity that appeals to me. I like to dance, but not with someone I'm not talking to.
I can't understand sitting and watching other people play a game. I can fake it. I can talk about crowds projecting themselves upon the teams that they're rooting for. But what's the point? I still don't get it.
So: I don't have a favorite sport. I'm absolutely indifferent to sports. I'm neutral.
Except, I'm not. I'm not indifferent to football. All the grace of a completed forward pass cannot redeem what is essentially a brutal game that domesticates violence. It doesn't transcend violence, as, say, basketball does. Football simply harnesses it to the line of scrimmage, and sauve qui peut.
Having received two degrees from the University of Notre Dame, I know a thing or two about the sociology of football. In my undergraduate career, I went to no games after my freshman year. As a law student, however, I went to most of the home games, because it was a hoot to sit with classmates and carry on. I'd have been perfectly happy if the teams had been playing soccer.
Why weren't they? What does that say? How can we be complacent about what's going on in the field?
Discretion forbids my discussing the background of this unforeseen enlightenment, but I can say that it has upset the foundations of an important friendship. That's why I am writing this. This entry is not an argument against football. It is simply a form of notice. Your elation about a football victory is only going to excite my disgust.
Little did I know that yesterday's Times would prolong the quandary that I spoke of in the previous entry. The front-page story was entitled "In Tiny Courts of New York, Abuses of Law and Power: Judges Without Legal Degrees or Oversight Rule in Arcane System Across State."
Does that sound, maybe, a little Iraqi to you? Let's not go into why it does. (If it doesn't, you're reading the wrong blog.) Let's just take a breath and sing "O Canada." Things are so much simpler there. There are so many fewer people, for one thing!
Why has no one written of the melodrama that yokes New York City, an international entrepôt that draws thousands of disaffected Americans-from-elsewhere to its bosom every year, to New York State, a red-meat outfit that, except for all of Ithaca and just the University of Syracuse, ought to be offloaded to Tasmania? Where are the witnesses to this atrocity? The non-New-York-City parts of New York State are just big enough to arm-wrestle the city to the ground. There ought to have been a "civil war" in New York, just to free the enslaved intellectuals.
The whole story about the baboon judges is great, but here is my favorite excerpt:
In an interview, Justice Pennington said the commission had treated him unfairly. But he may not have helped his case when he told the commission that "colored" was an acceptable description.
"I mean, to me," he testified, "colored doesn't preferably mean black. It could be an Indian, who's red. It could be Chinese, who's considered yellow."
There are probably lots of provincial Americans who think that "colored" is still a useful term. That's how we are. But we don't have to make them justices of the peace, capable of incarcerating strangers who don't gratify their expectations. And here is my question: if this is the state of things in New York State, why would we expect anything better in Guantánamo or Iraq? When on earth, people, are we going to clean up our own little mess? We're certainly not going to do any good abroad while "simple men, and their simple wisdom" are running the show in American localities.
Hearty thanks to Joan Didion, who has sat down with the record and concluded that Vice President Cheney's ideology, if he has one, could be summarized as effecting "the transfer of public wealth to the private sector." Those are my words, not Ms Didion's, and I published them last May. Once I'd reached that conclusion, I found that it made so much sense that I couldn't imagine any other. It is the only explanation that makes sense of White House policies.
Here are Ms Didion's words:
"Other priorities" suggests what the Vice President might have meant when he and the President talked about the "different kind of war," the war in which "our goal will not be achieved overnight." As a member of the House during the cold war and then as secretary of defense during the Gulf War and then as CEO of Halliburton, the Vice President had seen up close the way in which a war in which "our goal will not be achieved overnight" could facilitate the flow of assets from the government to the private sector and back to whoever in Washington greases the valves.
As Ms Didion notes, we won't need to send more troops to Iraq if we just contract out more of the war to private contractors. Ms Didion's essay, "Cheney: The Fatal Touch," covering sixteen books, appears in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. (5 October 2006)
A photo from Le Monde, 8 September. Our supine media gods would never let it run here. This man is a jerk.
At Sale Bête, I read that there's a march against Bush this morning, outside the UN. Édouard's going to be one of the marchers. "You can't just do nothing" is how I would translate his French - idiosyncratically, to be sure, because I can't imagine doing anything except sitting right here and writing. I'm still working out the personal consequences of Bush's second presidential victory. It forced me to recognize that there simply is no question about it: I'm living in a closet. I'm pretending to be as patriotic an American as anybody else. Well, I may like the idea of the United States, and think highly of the Constitution and so forth. But as for Americans - Gawd. Too many of them voted for the man.
As of right now, I am a member of United Professionals, an organization founded by Barbara Ehrenreich and others "to help white-collar workers, be they unemployed, uninsured, downsized, stressed out or merely anxious," according to Steven Greenhouse in the Times. I qualify as "merely anxious." The current dues are doable - ten cents a day, or $36.50 per year.
If and when the group achieves critical mass, Ms Ehrenreich sees it lobbying Congress just as AARP does, probably for universal health insurance and for requiring companies to provide severance when they lay off workers.
I don't think I know anybody who oughtn't to belong to this organization.
Well, Laura Bennett won. And Kayne Gillaspie got auf'd. Oh, the depths, the depths - that I know such things, because I just watched them with my very own eyes! Where's my Rolodex of excuses?
What? I threw it away? In the interest of better blogging?
I know that I'm a goner for the rest of this season, and I accept that. The question is, what happens when the next season starts? With luck, I will tune in dutifully (grrr!) - and realize that I just can't go through this again.
Project Runway is a brutal reality show, but the brutality is strictly professional. The designers have personalities, just like anybody, and they vent and carry on - or don't, like Michael Knight and Uli Herzner. But it doesn't matter: the grading is strictly on the fashion and its construction. Best line from last week's show: "Vincent, are you glueing?" Vincent Libretti got auf'd last week because of his really rather mistaken creation.
And what I mean by "brutal" is that the remaining five contestants thought they'd seen the end of him. Surprise! Vincent and Angela Keslar, the previous loser, were given second chances - with a twist. If they didn't win, they'd be out. Comebacks are always possible, but they're never probable, and I wasn't surprised when both designers fell into familiar traps - Angela was too strange, and Vincent just didn't plan very well. As Laura said, he's a genius in his own mind. You might think that he has Jeffrey's confidence, but what he really has is a bluster to compensate for it.
So - how demoralizing can it be: I got auf'd twice. That's something to tell the kiddies. The nephews and nieces.
But the experiment was far more demoralizing for the five who had survived the last round. The deflation was reflected on every face. Competitors love small fields. Anything can go wrong - so why have two ringers brought back from the dead who just might get something right? I couldn't have gone on. When Laura broke down, in her sharp, sort-of, way, I was totally with her. Why bother? Bringing Vincent and Angela back on the show was the most Sisyphean thing that has ever happened on television.
I am hoping that Laura will win. She's a tough broad, but I think that she combines a great design sense (that might work quite well outside of Project Runway's freakish time constraints) with an obvious command of the nuts and bolts, dollars and cents of fashion - as she showed last night, with the fewest fabric extras. I'm really wondering about the wisdom of this (now showing!) pregnancy, but, again, that's personal: it has nothing to do with her abilities as a designer. The failure of her Paris dress was striking, because what worked well on the bâteau mouche got sat on in cargo and looked tired in New York. (It was definitely a dress for an outdoor venue, not for the cave of Project Runway's studio.) But Laura's confidence has had a battering. Her dress for Jeffrey's mother ought to have fit a lot better. Tonight's dress couldn't have been a better fit. Good for her.
Given a good backer and a sane life/work environment, Michael will almost certainly be a successful designer, even if he's never a brand. As the judges said tonight, falling all over themselves, he knows how to dress a woman. That will never fail him. Uli knows how to dress a woman, too, but I worry that she's stuck on things she might have seen her mother wear twenty or thirty years ago. And Jeffrey doesn't like women. His winning dress for the last show was all about gift-wrap. It was a fun dress and I liked it. But it was a disguise, something that Edith Head might have dreamed up for someone with a poorly-proportioned body.
Although I never watch television - but never! (sob) - I do believe that the idea of fashion is central to the functioning of civilization. It gives the libido an opportunity to show up in polite society. A dress is not supposed to advertise what its wearer actually looks like without any clothes on; a dress is supposed to suggest how great she looks without any clothes on. Or, rather, how great she is. Plus (I can say "plus" in a piece about fashion, can't I?), human beings crave novelty, and the genius of fashion is to provide it inconsequentially, just for pleasure.
Next week: Heidi Klum in The Night Porter!
The Times Magazine this Sunday comes in two parts: a gruesome report of what Katrina has done to the children of the Gulf Coast, and a "New York Issue." The latter features excerpts from diaries that Susan Sontag kept between 1958 and 1967. The following comes from the last cited entry.
My image of myself since age 3 or 4 - the genius schmuck. I allow one to pay off the other. Develop relationships to satisfy principally one side or the other.
Sartre (cf. "Les Mots") the only other person I know of who had this "certainty" of genius. Living already a posthumous life, even as a childhood. (The childhood of a famous man.) A kind of suicide - with the "work of genius you know you'll do when adult your tombstone. The most glorious tombstone possible.
Sartre was very ugly - and knew it. So he didn't have to develop "the schmuck" to pay off the others for being "the genius." Nature had taken care of the problem for him. He didn't have to invent a cause of failure or rejection by others. As I did, by making myself 'stupid' in personal relations. (For 'stupid,' also read 'blind.')
Although one might just as well say that Sartre, as a European, did not feel the demotic pull to ordinary-ness that always seems to have needled Sontag, the line about the posthumous life, about the most glorious tombstone, is brilliant, if also slightly mistaken. I should think that the "certainty" is more widespread than Sontag thought. It might not be a certainty of genius, exactly, and perhaps "certainty" is not the word that I need. But to live as though what one wrote were certain to survive - even though one can't be certain of any such thing - the resolution to live "as if" is the key to all intellectual life. And by "intellectual life" I simply mean participation in some of the strands of thought that have come down to us from the past and that will continue to worked wherever life is stable.
In an earlier entry, Sontag confesses to a "morbid" appreciation of beauty. This may have been the cause, or it may have been a side effect, of a brilliant sense of surface. Surface is all that we get to see, but what we think about when we look at something is often something that we can't see, such as the thing's function. This obliquity prevents us from seeing other possibilities - a good thing most of the time, because who needs the distraction? But in order to invent or to understand, we have to strip away our half-conscious associations and deal directly with the elements at hand. And to begin, we have to see them. Sontag had very gifted eyes, and she saw things with a poet's rigor. Her writing is accordingly astringent. It forces us to squint and frown until we see what she sees - or until we give up, in which case she makes us feel the chill of her contempt.
Sontag had the good luck to be an aggressively self-centered beauty at a certain moment in time, one in which it was not intellectually acceptable to be "pleasant." She quotes Simone de Beauvoir: "To smile at opponents and friends alike is to abase one's commitments to the status of mere opinions, and all intellectuals, whether of the Right or Left, to their common bourgeois condition." Ah, the contempt of the bourgeois for the bourgeois! It runs through Sontag's prose like a strong electrical current - to question it is to make fatal contact with it.
The entries show what one might have guessed, that Sontag was a great bluffer.
I write to define myself - an act of self-creation - part of process of becoming - in a dialogue with myself, with writes I admire living and dead, with ideal readers.
But of course! Why else go to the trouble of writing? But how insincere and dishonest it can seem to more workmanlike minds. In the intellectual life - as in no other walk - the only way to grasp something new is to pretend that you can grasp it.
The entries published in the Magazine have been selected to compose an informal essay "On Self." What distinguishes the intellectual from the scholar and scientist, and from the artist as well, is that the intellectual's self, his or her person and character, is part of the equation. To a greater or lesser degree, the intellectual's way of life speaks of his work. How she lives, what kind of parent he is: these must accord with the published thought. Intellectuals don't, as a class, find it any easier to live up to their ideals than other people do, but they are never allowed to forget this. The pressure for intellectuals to live proper lives is bifocal. in one sense, they see themselves as social vanguards, understanding their society better than other types of professional. Very much against this smugness is the shame of knowing that their lives, like that of the people to whom they feel superior, are unspeakably privileged vis-à-vis the lives of the world's poor and disenfranchised. In her diaries, we find Sontag engaged in an unremitting attempt, sometimes breezy, sometimes miserable, to bring her life up to snuff. She may have been the smartest girl in the room, but success at this central task was elusive.
Bob Staake's adorable cover for the current New Yorker, "Back to Cool," got me thinking about phrenology, the "science" of determining character from bumps on the skull. Given what was known about neuroscience in 1800, when Franz Josef Gall's protoscientific work took off - next to nothing was known about neuroscience in 1800 - I wondered about just how given protuberances (or the lack thereof) were associated with particular traits and skills. I haven't been able to find an answer, but I do know that actual brains were never examined. One of Gall's theories was that the skull takes it shape from the brain that it houses (an idea that strikes me for some reason as perfectly backwards). His empirical findings were necessarily limited to taking certain measurements and assessing the characters of his first subjects. The rest was extrapolation and generalization, not research.
And yet Gall and his followers were so convincing that, by the middle of the nineteenth century, some employers demanded phrenological examinations in the way that they might demand background checks today. How perfectly ridiculous - given what we know now. And that's my point. What we know now, besides knowing that phrenology is not useful for assessing character and fitness, and besides knowing about axons and ganglia and SSRIs, is that we have a lot still to learn about brains. We have a lot to learn, and it's going to be painstaking work, not least because of the ethical issues involved in studying living brains - which of course belong to living human beings.
Within the space of two centuries, homo sapiens has gone from being a vulnerable creature to becoming a potential destroyer of life on Earth. That's not nearly enough time for the species' brain to evolve adaptive neurological structures. We're still wired to take what we can get while we can get it and hope for the best. We're learning that this is no longer a viable way to plan for our children's future, but you don't stop multi-millennial thought patterns in two hundred years. Thinking about the folly of phrenology this morning, I wonder if something exactly inverse is happening to the claims that we're willing to make about the extent of our knowledge. While acknowledging our mushrooming capacity to do harm, we admit that there is much to be learned about doing good. And we'll learn it: we won't make it up, as Dr Gall made up phrenology. We won't respond to the unknown with fine-sounding speculative plausibilities and then applaud our cleverness.
If nothing else, phrenology has served cartoonists well since its heyday. Its division of the head into "organs," each of which is associated with a mental propensity, can be readily hijacked for lampooning the private preoccupations that animate current fads. Mr Staake's bluff but confident middle-schooler is as up-to-the-minute as he could be.
To read the Daily Blague lately, you might think me unaware of the trouble in Lebanon. Aside from a conviction that it's foolish to have opinions about such a volatile situation, I see right and wrong on both sides, and I decline to play Solomon until formally invited to do so. I paused, nevertheless, over an Op-Ed piece in yesterday's Times by Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and a student of terrorism. In his work on terrorism during the last Israeli occupation of Lebanon, he writes in "Ground to a Halt," he discovered that, of thirty-eight suicide bombers whose backgrounds he was able to examine, only eight were "Islamic fundamentalists." Three were Christian.
What these suicide attackers — and their heirs today — shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation. Nearly two decades of Israeli military presence did not root out Hezbollah. The only thing that has proven to end suicide attacks, in Lebanon and elsewhere, is withdrawal by the occupying force.
Hatred of foreign occupation seems to be a universal human trait that in modern times has been given voice by communications and weapons technology. It was always there, but the strong could always overmaster the weak - until recently. It is taking the powers that be one hell of a long time to readjust their expectations, and, it may be, all of today's powerful men (and women) will have to die off in order to free us of a stubborn mindset. Occupation of foreign territory is always wrong. And you would think that Israelis know this best of all, having established their state with a healthy dose of terrorism (so to speak). Unfortunately, their determination to re-occupy their land two millennia after exile was contested. It does not seem to me that, in the past thirty years at least, Israel has done much in the way of coming to terms with its neighbors. I believe that Arabs and other Islamic people must accept the Israel of 1948, because I believe that a special case can be made for a Jewish state, reversing a wrong that ultimately sent millions of Jews to gas chambers. I also believe that Israel must end its occupation of the Occupied Territory - Palestine. I derive both positions from what I think we have all learned, if we would pay attention, about the grim determination of a certain kind of human dignity.
And perhaps I should make it clear here that I believe that there is only one race of human beings.
And as for us, the US - but my views on our Iraqi misadventure and other ill-advised actions can easily be retrieved by means of the search engine in the sidebar.
I picked up Kenji Yoshino's Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights when it came out, but I was very slow to get round to reading it, and did so finally because Ms NOLA had read it and liked it very much. I knew I was going to like it - and that was just the trouble. I thought I knew the book's contents, on the basis of an article in the Times Magazine and an interview with Leonard Lopate. Don't scoff - all too often, writers spill all the good beans that way, and there's nothing to discover in their books. But Mr Yoshino hasn't fallen into that trap. The last part of Covering is devoted to a magnificent concept, a real tool for getting from here to there. I couldn't believe it: a critic who delivers a solution! But first, a word about covering.
Everyone covers. To cover is to tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream. In our increasingly diverse society, all of us are outside the mainstream in some way. Nonetheless, being deemed mainstream is still often a necessity of social life. For this reason, every reader of this book has covered, whether consciously or not, and sometimes at significant personal cost.
That's how Covering begins, with a challenge to the reader to acknowledge the ubiquity and the inescapability of covering. Socialization requires it. We must learn to control our tempers in public - if we have them. We learn not to steal things that we want. Society requires a certain minimum of covering of each of us, and since we're taught to believe that we're better off for the habits that cover our antisocial urges so well that we hardly know they're there, we don't think of personal sacrifice. The covering that interests Mr Yoshino could be thought of as "optional" covering. Failing or refusing to cover won't land you in jail. If you're willing to forego the benefits that require covering, you're free to do so. But there is something vaguely theoretical about this freedom, because exercising it can be very lonely, and few people have the resources to live truly solitary lives. So we refrain from singing at our supper.
Everyone covers everywhere on earth, but the United States is a unique arena...
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The Times reported yesterday that radio station WNYC is about to vacate the premises in the Municipal Building that it has occupied since 1924, thus finalizing its separation from city government. In his story about the move, Glenn Collins quotes our own local Rambo, Curtis Sliwa, the populist host of a program at WABC.
"If you have a blue collar or no collar, and you listen to WNYC, you're going to turn the dial because you know they aren't talking to you; they speak the language of the suites, not the language of the streets."
Mr Sliwa's wordplay may be clever, but it's deeply wrong. The idea that all educated people share a certain political outlook is sheer nonsense, and I would venture that most of WNYC's listeners regard "the suites" with hostility even greater than Mr Sliwa's contempt. I don't know where else one might find local discussions in support of raising the minimum wage and in general improving the lot of Mr Sliwa's colored collars.
There ought to be a name for this maneuver - this dismissal of all educated conversation as "elitist," in the sense of being unconcerned about "the real world." It's the worst sort of demagoguery, not so much because it misidentifies college grads as the enemy of "ordinary" people but because it suggests that education itself is a sort of toxic transformative process. Get an education, it implies, and you'll be ruined for regular life. In fact, it is the lack of education that is toxic. To be an adult in our society without the resources that a college education opens up is to be hobbled by mental malnutrition. Trying to navigate the modern world without the intellectual training provided by higher education, intelligent people nonetheless fall for this or that conspiracy theory, this or that simplisticism. Such as Curtis Sliwa's notion that WNYC speaks "the language of the suites." What rubbish. WNYC speaks the language of "get an education!" Which, failing all else, the station's listeners can work on just by paying attention.
According to Glenn Collins' report, WNYC has not only the largest public-radio audience in the nation but also the largest share of Manhattan's radio listeners.
Tom Lutz's Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums in America (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), embodies a new type of book - new to me, anyway - one that I'm tempted to call the "California Monograph." The first exemplar of this sort of writing that I came across was Leo Braudy's From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (Knopf, 2003), which I read two years ago. I didn't write it up, because I didn't know quite what to make of it. Mr Braudy had lots and lots of interesting things to say about manliness, but I feared that I'd missed the message. Mr Lutz's book suggests that looking for messages in this kind of literature is superfluous, because messages are superfluous. The idea is to present the complexity of life while avoiding neat, reductive generalizations.
Doing Nothing is an engaging read, almost as stuffed with interesting details as From Chivalry to Terror. It is in one way a companion volume: where Mr Braudy looked at warfare as the defining masculine activity, Mr Lutz recognizes that idleness is the masculine daydream. (It's interesting to note that the two come together in the underworld of thugs, where extended idleness is punctuated by occasional improvisatory violence.) Doing Nothing delivers on its promise to trace the history of this daydream in America, and it does so by parading the various shapes and figures that have incarnated idleness over the past two centuries and more, beginning with the apparent philosophical difference between Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Johnson. Franklin exhorted his readers to be busy and productive; Johnson published The Idler. Right from the start, however, Mr Lutz is eager to muddy the picture. Late in life, particularly during his long mission at Paris, Franklin was a sybarite, spending his days and nights enjoying the pleasure of conversations with pretty ladies. Johnson, meanwhile, labored to produce the Dictionary, a monumental effort that indeed produced a monument. Which one was the worker, which the drone? In each of the seven subsequent chapters, we're presented with the equally puzzling archetypes of indolence that were associated with the age: the loungers and Rip van Winkles of the early Republic, the communists and bohemians of the Civil-War era, the neurasthenics of the Gilded Age, the Flappers of the Twenties and the bums of the Depression, the Beats, the hippies, and, finally, today's slackers - many of whom, such as the Japanese hikikomori, seem to me to be in serious need of medical attention.
Relying wholly on documentary evidence, Doing Nothing is necessarily a review of narratives. Only occasionally does Mr Lutz dig for facts and figures; his concern is with changing attitudes toward work and leisure, and these are for the most part reflected in writings (and in other media later) of some sophistication. I was intrigued to meet Joseph Dennie...
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The New York State Court of Appeals has not disappointed me. In denying the right to same-sex marriage, it has shown itself to be the organ of a backwoods state that just happens to have Gotham pinned to its edge.
More important than the right to gay marriage (for the time being): throwing those hicks off our back. The State of New York is composed of New York City and its watershed. The rest is the State of Erie Canal, or somesuch.
Lose the creeps!
It's as though I'd been handed a telegram announcing that I'd won a prize. Not a prizey-type prize, such as an Oscar or the Nobel, but a recognition, an honorable mention. The "telegram" is John Gray's review, in The New York Review of Books, of three books by or about Isaiah Berlin.
I've been drawn to Berlin for a long time, but because I'm not a student of philosophy I've had a hard time putting his work in any kind of context. Which is to say, understanding him. I think that John Gray has just handed me a context, however, and I look forward to reexamining The Proper Study of Mankind and Against the Current, the two Berlin titles in my library.
Not too far into his review, Mr Gray appears to complain that Berlin was not more precise, more systematic.
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Chapters Four and Five of Cities and the Wealth of Nations deal with complementary phenomena - regions that farmworkers leave, and regions that farmworkers get kicked out of - and show how the health of cities predicts which phenomenon will occur.
In "Regions Workers Abandon," Jacobs visits several regions where life hasn't changed much, except with regard to population. She gets right to the point.
The difference between stagnant regions that lose populations and stagnant regions where people stay put is simply that people from places like Scranton, Wales, and the deserted parts of Ontario can have realistic hopes of doing better somewhere else and have the means to get there, while people in such stagnant places as Haiti, where most people stay put, lack a way of getting out or a place to go.
Ingeniously, Jacobs hits on a perverse way of proving her point. She focuses on Napizaro, a town in Mexico, that (at the time of writing, at least) looks as though its economy is improving because so many houses are in good shape, and the public infrastructure has been greatly improved. But the economy of Napizaro must be subsumed within the economy of North Hollywood, California, because that is where Napizaro's men go to work, usually in clothing factories. Their abandonment of Napizaro is qualified. They themselves have left, but their families remain behind. living on remittances.
Like the men of Napizaro, you will be asking why, given such industriousness, they could not do the same work...
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Yesterday was Flag Day, not that you'd know it in Manhattan, and so it's time to remind readers of Anne Lamott's call for a "green revolution" on Bastille Day, a month from now. It's very simple: wear something green and get out into the crowds. Greet anyone who appears to be doing the same thing. I'm going to hang out at the Metropolitan Museum that Friday afternoon. Up on the roof, if it's nice.
Pelosi Murtha
It's taking me a while for the Huff Post habit to gain traction, but I want to share something that I came across yesterday: Craig Crawford's call for Jack Murtha to replace Nancy Pelosi. What a great idea! Ms Pelosi has been worse than useless as House Minority Leader; a noted backroom dealster, she patterns her public utterances on the advice of her marketing people, and it stinks. Well, that's my impression. She is manifestly no leader. Having a man as outspoken as Rep Murtha might remind the Democratic Party's congressional delegation that it's supposed to have some backbone. If nothing else, Mr Murtha is an outspoken proponent of the notion that the best way to "support our troops" is to bring them home.
If you haven't been urged by another blogger to read Kevin Baker's essay, "Stabbed in the Back!: The past and future of a right-wing myth," in the June 2006 issue of Harper's, then let me do so. Sadly, it is not online - Harper's content rarely is - and I hesitate to say that the essay is worth the $6.95 newsstand price, so let me urge you to subscribe today. Harper's comes right after The New Yorker in importance for me; it is always thoughtful, and never ideological. It has a leftish lean (in today's skewed climate, anyway), but it does not have a leftish agenda (as, say, The Nation does, quite openly). The monthly Essay almost always tells me something that I didn't know, or puts together pieces that I've been fiddling with in vain.
Kevin Baker's essay is a deconstruction of the Siegfried legend. In Die Götterämmerung, the final opera in Wagner's Ring tetralogy, the hero, Siegfried, is stabbed in the back with a spear. His killer, Hagen, has learned from the deviously betrayed Brünnhilde, that Siegfried is invulnerable except at one spot on his back, where a fallen leaf prevented Fafner's gushing blood from soaking his skin. (See "Achilles Heel.") Hagen has also treacherously set Siegfried up so that he will appear to deserve to die. The truth comes out soon enough, and Hagen is swept away by the flooding Rhine at the end.
According to Mr Baker, demagogues on the right have made use of the Siegfried legend to explain national setbacks since the end of World War I. While noble and tragic in Wagner's opera, the legend takes on a distinctly kitschy feel when put to work in a democratic setting. The nation is seen as a strong and virtuous youth. It is beset by internal enemies who know its secret vulnerabilities. Thus the nation is strong and at the same time weak. It is heroic; it is also victimized. Betrayal is made possible by the possession of speical knowledge. That citizens should be willing to buy into such an image of the nation tells us something about contemporary democracy. One would think that the adolescent and none-too-bright hunk would be an inadequate symbol of a complex body politic, and it is, but it appeals to voters who see themselves participating in democracy not as old, wise, and deliberate, but rather as young, untested, and at least a little bit hotheaded. Add to that the Anglophone mistrust of intellectual brilliance, and you have the perfect environment for rabid conspiracy theories.
Every state must have its enemies. Great powers must have especially monstrous foes. Above all, these foes must arise from within, for national pride does not admit that a great nation can be defeated by any outside force. That is why, though its origins are elsewhere, the stab in the back has become the sustaining myth of modern American nationalism. Since the end of World War II it has been the device by which the American right wing has both revitalized itself and repeatedly avoided responsibility for its own worst blunders. Indeed, the right has distilled the tale of betrayal into a formula: Advocate some momentarily popular but reckless policy. Deny culpability when that policy is exposed as disastrous. Blame the disaster on internal enemies who hate America. Repeat, always making sure to inscrease the number of internal enemies.
That's the start of Mr Baker's essay. He ends it on a quietly breathtaking note, citing an address in which George W Bush asserted that the Yalta Agreement was one of the greatest wrongs of history. This has been a claim of the right ever since the Iron Curtain went up after World War II: looking for a culprit, the right forgot its own intransigent opposition to foreign engagements (prior to Pearl Harbor) and blamed Roosevelt for handing Eastern Europe to Stalin on a platter. As an American myth, the "treason" at Yalta is a classic stab in the back (specifically, an ailing Roosevelt was stabbed by Alger Hiss, of all people). The funny thing about Mr Bush's address is that his audience was Latvian: he was in Riga at the time (May 2005).
The ultimate irony of Bush's perpetuating the ageless right-wing shibboleth is that for once it wasn't intended for home consumption. The Yalta myth has finally lost its old magic, here in historically illiterate, contemporary America. Nor did Bush make any special attempt to let his countrymen know that he was apportioning them equal shame with Stalin and Hitler for the greatest calamities of the twentieth century.
In so far as Latvia was wronged at Yalta, America itself loosed Hagen's spear. Leave it to our fine president...
That I liked one of the Domestic Adventure books that I mentioned last Tuesday much better than the other is not really of interest. I could try to explain why Stephen Clarke's A Year in the Merde tickled me, while John Grogan's Marley and Me: didn't (it did make me cry, though), but in essence I would just be talking about myself, not the books. Just.
What is "Domestic Adventure," you ask? The titles give some clues. Both tell stories that are purportedly encounters with something alien. In keeping with the promise of the Adventure genre, the adventurers present self-portraits that have been truncated to permit the peaceful co-existence of characteristics not often found in harmony in human nature. Sensitivity and "manliness," for example. (Each writer is politely but insistently heterosexual.) Both men are evidently mature and responsible adults, but they never miss a chance to let their inner adolescent make an appearance. The candor of true autobiography is deftly avoided, and neither guy is on the couch. Or, if he is, his feet are on the coffee table. That is at any rate what he wants you to believe. In fact, both men are professional writers, more clever and probably more complicated than their literary stand-ins.
In A Year in the Merde, the writer recounts his abbreviated year of ...
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The other night, a law school friend who followed the link from "Kathleen in the News," below, gave us a call. She lives with her daughter in the middle of nowhere, and has a daily round-trip commute of sixty miles. With gasoline approaching four dollars a gallon, she is beginning to feel a pinch.
In case you just tuned in, Kathleen and I live in New York City. We haven't owned a car in seven or eight years. ever since we decided that the country-house thing was not working for us. Every once in a while, Kathleen has a car service take her to work, as she does when she leaves the office after ten-thirty at night; but for the most part, she gets to work via public transportation. That's how I get around, too. The automobile, at least in its owned form, is not part of our life. Kathleen hates to drive, moreover, and I really oughtn't to, given the immobility of my neck. We're delighted, in other words, not to have a car.
Our friend's plight, while it reminded me of how lucky Kathleen and I are, because the majority of Americans share it to some degree or another. Assuming that the price of gas continues to rise, at what point will our friend have to find herself a place to live that's closer to her law firm's offices? And who will buy her house? I wonder who would be rash enough to buy her house even now?
The United States imports more than half of the oil that is consumed here, and the percentage will surely rise. The economies of China and India, meanwhile, are swelling their demand for oil. Our present course would appear to be set for a train wreck, even without the bad news previewed in Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, which opened yesterday in New York City and Los Angeles. The consequences of ignoring Mr Gore's slide show, of course, will be much worse than a train wreck, and I hope that its power inspires some creative discussion in our rather sclerotic public discourse.
In the third and fourth chapters of Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs distinguishes between two kinds of non-urban regions. The first, which she calls the "city region," is the inevitable byproduct of economically vibrant cities. The second, "supply regions," do not replace imports and tend to export one or more staple commodities. Neither type of region can be economically self-sufficient.
To recapitulate Jacobs's second premise, vibrant city economies excel at import replacement and export creation. They replace imports with locally produced goods, and through innovation they develop new types of goods which they then export to other regions. Transactions between cities and their city regions, however, do not constitute imports or exports. Indeed, one of the ways in which cities replace imports is by drawing on city-region production.
City regions are areas of activity that is intimately dependent upon their center cities. They lie beyond the cities' suburbs. (Jacobs also refers to such regions as hinterlands.) Not all cities sprout city regions. Jacobs's list of cities that don't is interesting. It includes many capitals and administrative centers. "Rome," she writes, "has an amazingly small and feeble city region, considering the city's own size." This makes sense, however, because symbolic cities, such as capitals (and certainly Rome) don't require active economies at all. The inhabits work in the city's symbolic industry, which either grows slowly over time or doesn't grow at all. Churches and legislatures don't produce more and more of something; they just go on reproducing and exporting the same sorts of things in the same quantities. Their populations are stable. Not that a capital need be stable. London, Paris, Copenhagen and Amsterdam are just four examples of capitals that double as active economic centers, and they all have vast city regions.
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Ms NOLA writes:
Please read and share this important article. It hits the nail on the head. While New Orleans, like many major global cities, has severe racial and class issues and a not so hot track record with local government, those things didn't destroy the city. The Army Corps of Engineers is largely to blame and this cannot be stressed enough. Who funds them? Congress. Not Ray Nagin, not Kathleen Blanco. It's all too easy to think that what happened during Hurricane Katrina was an act of God or a local failure, indicative of national perspectives on the South.
I would add that, insofar as prosperous New Orleanians may have seen the Corps's failure to protect their city as a good thing (that is, as a racial cleanser), it was the Federal Government's responsibility to counter and defeat such views.
The death of Jane Jacobs prompted me to do something that I ought to have done at least upon the inauguration of the Bush Administration: to re-read Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life. Reading this book when it came out in 1984 was a moment of startling political clarification, for its challenge to traditional economics was instantly persuasive, and for the first time in my life I could conceive of a truly desirable civil arrangement. There is no doubt that I already shared Jacobs's preference for the small and open-ended to the large and controlled, as well as a dislike of large corporations. The latter is only implicit in Cities, but there is no way that its principles can be reconciled with the furtherance of business organizations that hire more than, say, 150 people. What Jacobs could only guess was the role that computers might play in making her dream of a world of city-states come true.
This will be the first of several pages on Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Some of them will discuss things that Jacobs actually writes, while other will tease out implications and obstacles. The book's last three chapters read like a springboard into...
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At the recent White House Correspondents Association Dinner, the inimitable (o were it so) Stephen Colbert roasted President Bush, who was sitting at the dais, in his trademark fashion. "Every night, on my show, The Colbert Report, I speak straight from the gut. I give people the truth, unfiltered by rational argument." With "friends" like Steve Colbert, the president doesn't need enemies.
Édouard, at Sale Bête, has posted a link to Thank You Stephen Colbert, a shrine to Mr Colbert's heroism. The site also offers links to video clips of the performance. It hasn't been much discussed in the MSM for obvious reasons: the target of Mr Colbert's sarcasm isn't the Bush Administration but the supine, compliant press.
Thanks to Turtletek, at Embracing Chaos, for being the first to tell me about the event.
Contrary to first impressions, this entry is not about Israel. Not really.
In The New York Times on 19 April, Tony Judt published an Op-Ed piece, "A Lobby, Not a Conspiracy," urging Americans - insiders and regular folk alike - to debate this country's policies regarding Israel, which, as a recent report in the London Review of Books by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt makes painfully clear, have been protected from discussion by an extremely powerful "Israel Lobby." Mr Judt writes,
But above all, self-censorship is bad for the United States itself. Americans are denying themselves participation in a fast-moving international conversation. Daniel Levy (a former Israeli peace negotiator) wrote in Ha'aretz that the Mearsheimer-Walt essay should be a wake-up call, a reminder of the damage the Israel lobby is doing to both nations. But I would go further. I think this essay, by two "realist" political scientists with no interest whatsoever in the Palestinians, is a straw in the wind.
Having fallen behind in my reading, I hadn't got to the report, and it's very likely that I wouldn't have read it without Mr Judt's prodding. It's not that I'm not interested, it's that I'm long since convinced that our Near East foreign policy has been hijacked by a group of Americans whose loyalty to the United States is clearly not undivided. Messrs Mearsheimer and Walt (at Chicago and the Kennedy School respectively) back up their argument with a lot of facts and figures, but this only makes the blatancy of the operation more depressing. They conclude with the argument that it is the Israel Lobby, and nobody much else, that's behind the push to take some sort of pre-emptive action against Iran.
Well, I'm not going to belabor this point. Whether or not there's a powerful Israel Lobby is not a matter of argument to me, and, as a New Yorker, I'm used to ritual kowtowing to Jewish sensibilities on the part of all civic leaders. What I do fear is that the excesses of Israel Lobby policies is going to breed some genuine anti-Semitism in this country. The LRB report - what a scandal that, whatever its merits, it hasn't been published here! - brings one to the point of wondering if certain Jews and their evangelical sympathizers aren't out to fulfill the libels of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
This isn't what's really on my mind, though. What's on my mind is the fact, never quite stated by the report, that the Israel Lobby, like all lobbies, commands what power it exercises largely by means of campaign contributions. And where do these campaign moneys go? Dash me if more than half the money doesn't wind up on television spots (often produced by lobbyists who take a commission of the production costs, thus recouping part of their outlay). And television spots are only as important as the intelligence with which they are received by the public. In the course of my lifetime, I've watched television hone its powers of dumbing down even as it flatters. Flattery is arguably the most effective dumbing-down tool in existence.
So, don't flatter yourself. Don't suppose that you're clear-headed enough to resist the spuriosities of campaign ads. They're not aimed at your head. They're aimed much lower than that, especially at the insecurities that you don't like to acknowledge. They are wholly corrupt, and you can no more consume them without consequence than you can drink a shaker of martinis without getting drunk. To those who say, "But what can I do?" I reply, "Don't watch television." Yes - making campaign contributions, even writing letters and volunteering to canvass the wards sounds easier. But as a young man who was here the other night agreed with me, the longer you go without watching television, the harder it is to go back to. It becomes less tempting every day that you don't watch it, and inevitably you find other, more satisfying occupations. Television may be good for invalids, and for people of unusually low intelligence. Now you can flatter yourself.
(Tip: watching movies is a great substitute. Just stay away from anything pretending to be factual.)
Let's see how long it takes this bit of news to reform economics:
If one truth shines through, it is that people are not consistent or fully rational decision makers. Peter L Bossaerts, an economics professor at the California Institute of Technology, has found that brains assess risk and return separately, rather than making a single calculation of what economists call expected utility.
So reports Tyler Cowen in "Enter the Neuro-Economists: Why Do Investors Do What They Do?"* Predicating a world in which decision making is informed by rational self-interest is perhaps the greatest folly of academic economics. It may not differ much from the faith of pre-modern doctors in bleeding. As researchers are finding out, bleeding has its uses, but they're limited to a small class of wounds, more as healing accelerators than as actual fixes. "Rational self-interest" probably has just as limited a role in economic life. Perhaps in Adam Smith's day - The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776 - the pace of life was slow enough and sufficiently free of abrupt change to allow genuine deliberation. In those patriarchal days, men wealthy enough to make economic decisions lived in a world that was fairly tailored to their way of thinking. That world has vanished into relative chaos.
*The New York Times, 20 April 2006, p C3.
You had to admit that Secretary Rumsfeld can take the heat.*
Asked whether he saw any validity in the criticisms of his critics, who have said he has been dismissive and contemptuous of advice, and said that he committed strategic failures in connection with the Iraq war, Mr. Rumsfeld said he would prefer to "let a little time walk over it."
"I would like to reflect on them a bit," he said.
In other words, "Next question?" This isn't a story of how blindly incompetent Mr Rumsfeld is. It's a story about how conditioned the press corps has become to the Bush Administration's bland stonewalling. It's as though Karl Rove had advised senior personnel that American brains now rely exclusively on Google searches, so that their attention can be diverted by bold evasion and non-sequitur.
* Christine Hauser in The New York Times, 18 April 2006.
If I'm not doing quite as well as yesterday, it's because I gave up waiting for my New Yorker to arrive and read Seymour Hersh's article, "The Iran Plans," on line. Mr Hersh, you will recall, was dead-on right about the consequences of Secretary Rumsfeld's dismissal of the Pentagon's carefully constructed invasion plans, the TPFDL. Once again, Mr Hersh has made me feel like a doomed member of the chorus in a Greek tragedy, impotently commenting on the hubris enacted by deluded and incompetent leaders. And, as always, the problem of Israel, which may indeed be the "tragic flaw" that brings down Western civilization. In any case, impeaching George W Bush is suddenly something that I am no longer undecided about.
Thanks to a link at Joe.My.God, I've heard what the Dixie Chicks sound like. Their new song, "Not Ready to Make Nice," may prove to be something of a rallying call.
14 July will fall on a Friday this year. Anne Lamott has called for a peaceful manifestation on that day, and it occurred to me the other day that a great Manhattan site for the show-up would be the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I can't help chuckling at the idea of masses of anti-Bush souls thronging the usually deserted Old Master galleries simply because there's nowhere else to stand, while museum officials rake in the admission fees and wonder what the hell is going on. I am going to make a point of being there, and I urge you to do the same. In the alternative, choose something closer to home. Just be sure to wear green and bring some bananas!
Saboteur (1942) has never figured among Alfred Hitchcock's most beloved movies, and there are good reasons for that. If I have a weak spot for it, though, there are several explanations. There's Bob Cummings, who was a brilliant TV star in the Fifties. Here, he reminds me of my late Uncle John. There's Priscilla Lane, with whom John's parents were photographed on a studio tour not long after Saboteur was made. Mostly, though, there's the preview of North By Northwest. Anybody who loves that movie ought to know Saboteur just to see the seeds that would flower in greatness. Like North By Northwest, Saboteur is even more obsessed by monuments and great public buildings than the ordinary Hitchcock film. It also involves international espionage. And it hinges on an innocent man's cross-country attempt to clear his name. The most striking difference between the two movies is that it's the bad guy who's hanging by his fingernails at the end.
Actually, Saboteur is a party tape. Who can make the most connections between the two films? It's not as though North By Northwest has the more prestigious monuments, either. Saboteur boasts the Hoover Dam, Radio City, the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and the smashingly iconic Statue of Liberty - a gift, it is noted, from the French.
The Cold War - it was cold. Who could work up a lot of hatred for James Mason's Vandamm? He was just a bad guy. The bad guys in Saboteur are far more toxic. They hate America. They despise it even as they want to rule it. Sound familiar? Here's the exchange between the Wrong Man (Barry Kane) and the Bad Guy (Otto Kruger) in the last of the film's discursive scenes. Even James Stewart couldn't have made it more patriotic.
Barry Kane: Why is it that you sneer every time you refer to this country? You've done pretty well here. I don't get it.
Charles Tobin: No, you wouldn't. You're one of the ardent believers. The good American. There are millions like you. People who plod along without asking questions. I hate to use the word "stupid," but it seems to be the only one that applies. The "great masses." The "moron millions." Well, there are a few of us who are unwilling to just troop along. A few of us who are clever enough to see that there's much more to be done than just live small, complacent lives. A few of us in America who desire a more profitable type of government. When you think about it, Mr Kane, the competence of totalitarian nations is much higher than ours. They get things done.
Barry Kane: Yeah, they get things done. They bomb cities, sink ships, torture and murder so you and your friends can eat off of gold plate. It's a great philosophy.
Charles Tobin: I neither indent to be bombed nor sunk, Mr Kane. That's why I'm leaving now. And if things don't go right for you, if, uh, we should win, then I'll come back. Perhaps I can get what I want then. Power. Yes. I want that as much you want your comfort or your job or - that girl. We all have different tastes, as you can see. Only, I'm willing to back my tastes with the necessary force.
Barry Kane: You certainly make it sound smooth and easy. Well, that's a trick. I know the results of that power you believe in. It killed my friend and is killing thousands like him. That's what you're aiming at, but it doesn't bother you - I can see that. Because you really hate all people. Let me tell you something. The last four or five days, I've learned a lot. I've met guys like you, and I've met others. People that are helpful and eager to do the right thing. People that get a kick out of helping each other fight the bad guys. Love and hate. The world's choosing up sides. I know who I'm with. There are a lot of people on my side. Millions of us in every country. And we're not soft. We're plenty strong, And we'll fight standing up on our two feet and we'll win: remember that, Mr Tobin. We'll win no matter what you guys do. We'll win if takes from now until the cows come home.
Charles Tobin: Mr Kane, I think we've discussed the rights of man sufficiently.
There are days when I believe that William F Buckley should be dragged out à la lanterne while he's still alive, just to make clear the utter blackness of his sin against the republic of which he professes, quite without justice, to be so proud. He was never at any time very different from Charles Tobin, except in staying in situ, to oversee the plot that eventually made anybody who sounds like Barry Kane seem to be a radical leftist. Mr Buckley, father of modern conservatism, also hates the plodding millions. His message was always Charles Tobin's.
In any case, rent the movie. Put up with its starch. You will never forget the ending.
Be sure not to miss Malcolm Gladwell's summary of Charles Tilly's Why? in the current New Yorker. In "Here's Why," Mr Gladwell enumerates the four modes of explanation that Professor Tilly has distinguished. Each is as valuable in its own way as the others, and we make use of them according to the relationship that binds us (or not) to those to whom we're explaining something. First, there's convention, which is a form of dismissal. Second, there's story, which is just the opposite. Third, there's code; legal explanations are in code, which is why they're so frustrating to the parties involved in a lawsuit. Finally, there's expert analysis, which is pre-emptive and final, at least to the extent that the explainers are respected.
Corporations employ all four modes of explanation. Slogans quickly become conventions; warranties and "terms and conditions" are codes; instruction manuals appear to offer technical expertise. Corporate stories - ranging from advertisements to human resources - are not like normal stories, however, because everybody knows that they're not true. They can't be! How can an artificial person bind with a real one? How can an artificial person care about anything but itself? The only true story that corporations can tell is the one that they never do: "We're in this for the money."
Do the spokespersons who actually tell the stories on behalf of corporations expect to be believed? I don't think they really care. What a well-crafted corporate story does best is jamming the discourse. Creating an unanswerable position in the form of a story means that the time for explanations has passed, but without finality. When a corporation attributes an oil spill to a negligent ship's captain but insists that it is tightening its training and surveillance of ship's captains, that's that. Maybe it will follow through and maybe it won't. After enough oil spills, the time of explanation will be over in earnest, but meanwhile the corporation has bought time, time for the public's attention to drift on to something else.
It's the damage that corporate stories do to our language that bothers me.
Over the weekend, the Times published a report by Daniel Gross, "Invest Globally, Stagnate Locally." I urge everyone to read it. I wish I could propose something to do after reading it. A plan, perhaps, to bombard economists with demands that they think more creatively about avoiding the rendezvous with an iceberg of "democratic nationalism" that HSBC's chief economist in London, Stephen King, foresees. (And I suspect Mr King of seeing only the tip.)
Thanks to globalization and the opening of new markets, Mr. King said, "it's increasingly difficult to argue that companies themselves are attached to a country." He notes, for example, that Vodafone, the giant British telecommunications company, has more than 80 percent of its sales and employment outside of Britain. And as of 2002, Mr. King found, the 50 largest multinational companies had 55 percent of their employees and 59 percent of their sales outside of their home countries.
Let's say that Americans get fed up with being excluded from the benefits of capitalist prosperity at some point prior to the realization of Alan S Blinder's vision of a nation populated by investors and their servants. Let's say that "leaders" are forced to take protectionist measures against, oops, the countries that prop up the dollar. We cannot afford to take such protectionist measures, period, but that won't necessarily prevent their enaction. What if disgruntled French and German workers resolve to withdraw from the European Union? Nationalism is a deadly beast, fond of war. Human beings have not yet evolved to resist its appetite. Racial supremacists on both sides of the Atlantic keep the pilot light of hatred burning. Economic downturns threaten to take us right back to 1914, if not to something worse.
Has the air gone out of Western Civilization? Are we just coasting, comfortable for the moment but out of control? Every Monday morning, instead of a bleak office I confront this bleak prospect. I see a lot of good reporting - that's how I know that I've got something to worry about. Beyond that, however, I don't see much evidence of creative initiative. Much of the analysis that I see is spoiled by anger. Is this the inevitable consequence of a culture of "individualism"?
I myself am not angry. I've done the anger thing and gotten it out of my system. But I am unhappy. As Jeremy Denk noted a few weeks ago, the opposite of happiness is not sadness. The opposite of happiness is worry.
The March/April issue of Foreign Affairs is focused on Iraq; I found Joel Rayburn's "The Last Exit from Iraq" - about the British pull-out in 1932 - interesting and instructive. But it was an essay by Alan S Blinder, an economics professor at Princeton, that gave me pause. "Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution" seems to be an excellent analysis of the Internet's impact upon the world of work, but one from which the author fails to draw coherent conclusions. Or so it seems to this untutored mind.
Prof Blinder sketches the industrial revolutions of the past. The first turned farmhands into factory workers, while the second, after World War II, turned factory workers into office workers. The third revolution, if that's what it is, will turn office workers into people whose clients and employers may never see them, owing to thousands of miles of physical distance. Prof Blinder notes, for example, that radiologists are already feeling a competitive challenge from India. Having thought long and hard about this revolution, he sketches a prediction of the kinds of jobs that Americans ought to be training for.
But first, some figures.
Contrary to current thinking, Americans, and residents of other English-speaking countries, should be less concerned about the challenge from China, which comes largely in manufacturing, and more concerted about the challenge from India, which comes in services. India is learning to exploit its already strong comparative advantage in English, and that process will continue. The economists Jagdish Bhagwati, Arvind Panagariya, and T N Srinivasan meant to reassure Americans when they wrote, "Adding 300 million to the pool of skilled worker in India will take some decades." They were probably right. But decades is precisely the time frame that people thinking about - and 300 million people is roughly twice the size of the US work force.
Prof Blinder astutely draws a distinction between personal and impersonal services. Your barber and your divorce lawyer provide personal services involving face-to-face contact. Your bank and your answering service provide impersonal services. You want a barber who's nearby, but you don't care where your answering service is. The providers of personal services, according to Prof Blinder, have relatively little to worry about. It's the impersonal service providers whose jobs will be offshored.
This makes sense. It's in his what-to-do phase that Prof Blinder breaks down. Of course he is adamantly opposed to any attempt to hinder or prevent offshoring. Such interventions won't work - and perhaps Prof Blinder is right about that as far as today's world goes. But how long would today's world continue into a future populated by investors and their personal service providers? Prof Blinder never asks this question, but all of his (admittedly tentative) explanations point to the question.
Am I being naive? Am I wrong to assume that we don't already live in this world?
Prof Blinder blithely posits ever-falling transportation costs. It seems clear to me that we are going to have some serious reckoning about fuel allocation - the more serious the longer the reckoning is put off. How much of our oil to we commit to power generation? How much to industrial production (plastics, &c)? And how much to transportation? I don't believe in a free-market answer to this question, just as I don't believe in a free-market solution to the problem of smoking. Some things must be decided by society, pre-empting individual choice.
I was no socialist in my early life, and the extreme forms of socialism attempted by Russia, China, and other countries was demonstrably a failure. But the perils of the free market are not so modest, either. When are we going to hear reasoned, non-partisan discussion of them?
When Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer two years ago, I shrugged. It was awful, but Corrie was a troublemaker. I don't like troublemakers. Don't try telling me that troublemaking is effective. Patriots on the right can wail that it was lack of support at home that cost us the Vietnam War, but this is nonsense. The war ended when it became clear that it could never be won. Now we're on a similar trajectory in Iraq, only, this time, opponents of the war are careful to honor soldiers, not revile them. To people in power, demonstrators are unarmed terrorists - and all the more contemptible for that.
I say this knowing that the struggle for equal civil rights for all Americans required a lot of troublemaking. Trying to figure out how to respect people who fight for a good cause with my bone-deep, profoundly bourgeois dislike of disorder keeps me busy.
I make an exception, very characteristic, for troublemakers who are very amusing, but I don't believe that there was anything amusing about the idealistic twenty-three year-old Washingtonian who suffered such a horrific death. Whether I'd change my mind about Rachel Corrie is pretty much a matter of how I felt about My Name Is Rachel Corrie. Like most people, I didn't even know that a production had been slotted, if not scheduled, until the day its cancellation was announced. It was dreadfully discomfiting news, because it seemed that unnamed "Jewish interests" were pushing for censorship. Perhaps the play ought to have opened somewhere else in the United States. When I was growing up, they used to say that there were more Jews in the Metropolitan Area than there were in Israel. Is that still true? I somehow think not. But anti-Semitic folks can expect to be made very uncomfortable in the Big Apple.
And, as Bernard-Henri Lévy asserted at the end of January, anti-Semitism = anti-Zionism. By a quick equation, Rachel Corrie = terrorist supporter. In "Why These Tickets Are Too Hot For New York," Philip Weiss's clear-eyed account of the very much ongoing Corrie affair, in the current (April 3) edition of The Nation, playwright Tony Kushner explains his own reluctance to step forward in to denounce the New York Theatre Workshop's self-censorship, attributing it to fatigue. In part, he has just been through a similar brouhaha about Munich, which he co-wrote. But the longer perspective is daunting.
There is a very, very highly organized attack machinery that will come after you if you express any kind of dissent about Israel's policies, and it's a very unpleasant experience to be in the cross hairs. These aren't hayseed from Kansas screaming about gays burning in hell; they're newspaper columnists who are taken seriously. ... [They leave challengers] overwhelmed and in despair - you feel like you should just say nothing.
When Tony Kushner is too worn out by wingnuts to speak out, I conclude that my canary is about to give up the ghost, and that I'm in trouble.
Regardless of what I feel about Rachel Corrie, a play that memorializes her words - drawn from her diaries, the show professes her to be its playwright - should be mounted without hindrance. At a minimum, the NYTW's director, James Nicola, owes us a list of the names that brought pressure upon him not to open My Name Is Rachel Corrie.
Readers of Mr Weiss's story will discover that there is a constellation of New York theatre blogs. Oui bien sûr! The impatient can start reading Parabasis, Superfluities, and Playgoer right now.
Yesterday, I was exhausted. I could not really get up, and didn't make the bed until after dark. The dishwasher remained full of Monday night's dishes. I got dressed several hours after I cleaned up. I kept falling asleep over All Souls Day, the mighty Cees Nooteboom's novel, and it certainly wasn't the writer's fault. I re-read an unwittingly alarming piece in Foreign Affairs; I'll be sharing my thoughts about that presently. And then I watched Kinsey. I expected it to be distracting, and it was.
My first thought, after rewinding the disc to prove that, yes, that was Lynn Redgrave playing the "Final Interview Subject," was that I wish that everybody felt the way I do about other people's actual sex lives. I don't want to hear about them. That's my sex hang-up. If everybody shared it, then nobody would care much what other people did (and they'd know better not to entertain comparative guesswork), and, in that case, Kinsey's research would never have been necessary. Nobody would make anyone else's life a hell by proscribing certain acts. Aside from protecting everyone from any involuntary sexual encounters, society would simply not recognize sex. This would greatly improve flirting.
Sex for me becomes plumbing when I am not personally involved, and hearing about other people's plumbing alienates me from myself. We all work more or less the same, it's true, but unfortunately our nervous systems don't recognize this fact.
I suppose I'd better note that none of the foregoing means that I'm against sex education! On the contrary. Perhaps everybody ought to flip through the Kama Sutra and The Joy of Gay Sex. Nor am I against sex writing that's really well-written, where the artistry interposes a screen of discretion.
In any case, Kinsey made me squirm, because it was constantly running along the knife's edge of dissociating love from sex. Lots of people can keep the two distinct, but lots of people can't, and almost everyone around Kinsey seems to have discovered that the ability to do so can vanish in an instant, leaving dreadful hurt. The performances were as marvelous as everyone said when the movie came out, and the film was beautifully shot. But there was one expectation that Kinsey turned into a conclusion: I wouldn't want to watch it with anyone else in the room.
I share Maureen Dowd's indignation: if Harry Samit can provide evidence of the seventy memos that he sent to FBI superiors on the subject of Zacarias Moussaoui, then David Frasca and Michael Maltbie should be terminated at once. These gentlemen were the recipients of the memos, but declined to take action because to do so would be "troublesome" for the Bureau. Makes me feel safe and protected.
It's heartwarming, but not satisfying, to read further that, according to an "administration official," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld "does not hold the same sway in meetings anymore," but is regarded "as an eccentric old uncle who is ignored." One imagines an entire cabinet of eccentric old uncles, all being ignored. What a can-do country we live in.
In the Business Section, there's a dark little story about the so-called Wright Amendment, enacted some thirty years ago to stunt the growth of Southwest Airlines. Moral: democracy works, eventually. But O that Lone Star State. The Texans are different.
In Nickel and Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich at least got some jobs. They were lousy, no-collar jobs that didn't quite support her. She lived on the margin of poverty and reported a lot of her co-workers' very serious headaches. The grit was bearable partly because of her humor, but also because you knew that the author was going to experience a happy ending - you were holding proof, in the form of a printed book, in your hand. This good feeling is absent from Ms Ehrenreich's account of trying to get a better, white-collar job, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, because she never gets a job to begin with. The only people she meets are sadly laid-off people and the hucksters who "teach" them how to find their way back to work. The futility noted in the subtitle suffuses the entire book. There is still plenty of mordant humor. But there is also plenty of despair.
It's not easy to break into a line of white-collar work without some serious educational channeling. Ms Ehrenreich, an investigative reporter, figures that she can find something in reporting's evil twin, publicity. She legally resumes her maiden name and cobbles together a plausible resume. She devises a schedule, which ends every afternoon with a trip to the gym,
as recommended by all coaches and advice-giving web sites. I would work out anyway, but it's nitce to have this ratified as a legitimate job-search activity. In fact, I find it expanding to fill the time available - from forty-five minutes to more than an hour a day. I may never find a job, but I will, in a few more weeks, be in a position to wrestle and job competitors to the ground. On the downside, I have no clue as to how to use the gym as a networking opportunity. With whom should I network? The obviously unemployed fellow who circles the indoor track for at least an hour a day? The anorexic gal whose inexplicable utterances on the Stairmaster are not, as I first hoped, attempts to communicate but an accompaniment to the songs on her iPod? No matter how many inviting smiles I cast around the place, my conversations never seem to get beyond "Do you mind if I work in?" and "Whoops, I guess that's your towel."
As this passage suggests, the business of looking for a job involves a lot of pretense - and very active pretense at that. I'm not talking about the bland politeness with which I navigate formal social settings. I'm talking about always appearing to upbeat and interested in other people. For a happy few, such behavior comes ...
Continue reading about Bait and Switch at Portico.
Carl Elliott's "The Drug Pushers," in the current Atlantic, reminds me how important it is to disassociate our health care from free market ideology. The idea that people consume medical goods and services in the same way that they buy cars is imbecile. It doesn't make sense to anyone who has suffered a chronic illness or a serious crisis. The detached attentiveness required to make intelligent free-market choices plays no part in the psychology of an ailing and probably panicking human being.
Dr Elliott writes about drug reps, the salesmen who tout their medicines to doctors. There is almost always one of these people in the waiting room of my internist's group practice. Sleek and organized, they're usually dragging a small suitcase on wheels, like business travelers. They're certainly not sick, and if they look a little bit tense or stressed, they do so without the worry that creases the faces of patients and their companions. I know that my doctor sees the reps, because when he starts me on something new, he accompanies the prescription with a generous supply of samples. He has even, on occasion, had small shopping bags for carrying all the boxes, which typically contain only a few pills. I have to hope that he has chosen these drugs without considering anything but my health, and no sample drug has ever hurt me. But I don't like seeing the reps in the office. They wear their business like a cologne, and I don't want to think about business when I'm not feeling well.
Everything is not, in a word, business. Trying to make a business - a big business - out of everything is degrading the world we live in.
Heaven knows I've benefited from pharmaceutical research. But I wonder if the enrichment of stockholders is the only imaginable incentive to guarantee that such research is undertaken. Why can't universities develop and test drugs, receiving healthy grants into the bargain? These can then be licensed to mere manufacturers, whose only product costs would be ingredients and purity assurance. Why wouldn't that work just as well, if not better, than the current system. Bear in mind that conditions suffered by the poor and disadvantaged are said to go begging for treatments.
In the current New York Review of Books (LIII, 5), constitutional scholar Richard Dworkin delivers a brief and wise judgment on the Danish Cartoons, while cautioning against the spread of laws that prohibit insult and ridicule. It was wise of British and American editors to refrain from republishing the cartoons, because of the peculiar history of the conflict (which was beautifully laid out in The New Yorker last week). Noting that the European Convention on Human Rights is moving toward a ban on the criminalization of Holocaust-denying and religious insult, Mr Dworkin writes,
If we expect bigots to accept the verdict of the majority once the majority has spoken, then we must permit them to express their bigotry in the process whose verdict we ask them to accept.
And, by the same token,
No religion can be permitted to legislate for everyone about what can or cannot be drawn any more than it can legislate about what may or may not be eaten. No one's religious convictions can be thought to trump the freedom that makes democracy possible.
(NYRB LIII, 5 appears not yet to have been made available at the Review's site.Sorry!)
Today's scandal: federal aid and credit for virtual universities. According to Sam Dillon's story on the front page of today's Times, "Colleges will no longer be required to deliver at least half their courses on a campus instead of online to qualify for federal student aid."
The provision is just one sign of how an industry that once had a dubious reputation has gained new influence, with well-connected friends in the government and many Congressional Republicans sympathetic to their entrepreneurial ethic.
I sure don't want to board a plane designed by an engineer who never had to show up for class.
After a weekend away from the Times, I was sickened by the tenor of the news in general and by this first-page story in particular:
One of Halliburton's most persistent critics, Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat who is the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, said in a written statement about the Army's decision, "Halliburton gouged the taxpayer, government auditors caught the company red-handed, yet the Pentagon ignored the auditors and paid Halliburton hundreds of millions of dollars and a huge bonus."
What made this so appalling was something that I'd read over the weekend, in an amazingly instructive debate about health-care systems that New Yorker writers Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell conducted at the Washington Monthly. A fan of the generous French system, Mr Gopnik observes that
Although I should add that we pay in France almost to the penny the same amount of tax that we paid in New York City, because by the time you add in the state tax and the city tax and the taxes we pay to build weapons we will never see and will never be used, it comes out to be very much a wash.
(Read the whole discussion here). How did the Land of the Free get taken over by guys who are so into death? The title of Bob Herbert's Op-Ed piece in today's Times is entitled "Ike Saw It Coming." Remember Ike's warning about "the military-industrial complex?"
Lord, how long.
First it was $12,000 garage renovations. Now it's outrageous email written by students with poor ideas of boundaries. Jonathan D Glater's "To: Professor@University.edu Subject: Why It's All About Me" had me spluttering this morning. The students who, having missed class, request notes. From the professor! The students who pre-submit their term papers for comments. Consider:
Meg Worley, an assistant professor of English at Pomona College in California, said she told students that they must say thank you after receiving a professor's response to an e-mail message.
"One of the rules that I teach my students is, the less powerful person always has to write back," Professor Worley said.
I'd have thought that students raised in a house with indoor plumbing would have the sense to know what Professor Worley has to teach. The question may be whether students understand that they are the less powerful persons. As more and more families regard the university experience as a service that is purchased with the price of tuition, students will come to see themselves as customers, placing the burden of instruction squarely on the faculty. This is the ultimate trivialization of education, which can have no intrinsic value under such circumstances.
When I went to college, students proved themselves - or not. Nobody would have put it this way, but tuition bought the chance to fail. Where there's little or no chance of failure, degrees, including degrees from Harvard, don't mean a thing.
The cover story in this month's Atlantic is "How Do I Love Thee," by Lori Gottlieb. Here is the tag:
A growing number of Internet dating sites are relying on academic researchers to develop a new science of attraction. A firsthand report from the front lines of an unprecedented social experiment.
While interesting enough, Ms Gottlieb's piece strikes a somewhat underwhelming note after such an organ blast. "A growing number" turns out to be three. As for "academic researchers," I was more than a little dismayed to find Dr Helen Fisher, of Chemistry.com, has built her site's questionnaire on the familiar Myers-Briggs personality assessment test. Dr Fisher may be right to correlate each of the MBTI's four poles - Extroversion/Introversion, Sensing/Intuition, Thinking/Feeling and Judgment/Perceiving - to a specific hormone or neurotransmitter, but so long as subjects are presented with the test's grossly ambiguous questions, the results are destined to be oracular rather than empirical.
By chance, the very next thing that I picked up was Barbara Ehrenreich's Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream, a book that has languished in my pile for a disgraceful stretch of months. One of the very first things that Ms Ehrenreich has to do in the job hunt that forms the book's narrative spine is to take a Myers-Briggs text. This, she finds,
is marginally craftier than the [Wagner Enneagram Personality Style Scales], in that I am not asked simply to choose the attributes that fit me, but am given somewhat more roundabout questions, such as "Do you usually get along better with (A) imaginative people, or (B) realistic people?" Once again, the only sensible approach is a random one. Do I usually show my feelings freely or keep my feelings to myself? Hmm, depends on how socially acceptable those feelings might be. If it's a desire to inflict grievous bodily harm on some person currently in my presence - well, no. When I go somewhere for the day, would I rather plan what I will do and when, or "just go"? Again, it's somewhat different for a court appearance than for a trip to the mall. I race through the test with the mad determination of a monkey that's been given a typewriter and assigned to generate Shakespeare's oeuvre, hoping that some passably coherent individual emerges.
Having fiddled with the MBTI myself, I conclude that its predictive force will increase as the subject approaches language strictly as a utility. Such people are unlikely to be faced with Ms Ehrenreich's dilemmas; they'll see "going somewhere for the day" as a spot of vacation, and they'll have no trouble writing off "imaginative" people as unrealistic. For more nuanced individuals - writers especially, perhaps - the test is all good for only one thing: identifying abnormal constitutions. At the beginnin of her piece, Ms Gottlieb is told by Neil Clark Warren, MD, head of eHarmony.com, that his service has been unable to provide her with any matches because
You're too bright. You're too thoughtful. The biggest thing you've got to do when you're gifted like you are is to be patient.
Thanks, doc.
I don't mean to badmouth online dating services. I don't happen to know anybody who has actually found love, long-term or otherwise, through such a service, but then I don't get around much, and most of my friends are, well, like Ms Gottlieb. But Chemistry and eHarmony seem to operate on premises just as phoney as the hurdles in Ms Ehrenreich's fruitless search for a PR job. The point of tests like the MBTI is to weed out the oddballs. If corporations are less inclined than ever to leave this weeding to prospective employees themselves - Ms Ehrenreich notes that more and more large companies are running credit checks, which sounds like a great way to keep the unemployed unemployed - then the dating services probably aren't too far behind. eHarmony's Galen Buckwalter notes, "I don't think we'll be relying on self-report twenty years from now." What's that supposed to mean? In the end, a would-be suitor at Match.com is no different from a Human Resources staffer: both are in the market for a desirable commodity but hamstrung by incurious caution. Both appear to assume that there isn't enough time to get to know anyone the old-fashioned way.
What are we calling it? The Whittington Affair? Shotgungate? (Drop a 't' and a 'g' there, and you have the kind of regime Dick Cheney wishes he were running.) Whatever we call it, I hope that we all learn its lesson, which is that the Bush Administration regards public opinion with an indifference that masks fear and contempt. There was no good reason for Mr Cheney not to step forward with a prompt, sportsmanlike statement. Instead of which he's huddling in an eye of Utter Irresponsibility. Poor old Whittington stepped into the line of fire; the Armstrong lobby decided how and when to break the news. God only knows what Mr Cheney meant when he told Mr Whittington that he "stood ready to assist." "Don't let that asshole near me" would have been an apt reply. But the Vice President, however characteristically clumsy and maladroit, did nothing wrong. Accidents happen.
So, what held the Vice President back? I would say that it was an adherence to the CEO playbook that, so far as I can tell, is the only explanation of the Administration's behavior overall. CEOs fear public opinion because it can be surprisingly powerful. They have contempt for it because it is so often unintelligent and misinformed - no thanks to CEOs and their flaks. These uncomfortable responses are powdered by an indifference that almost but not quite sincerely wonders why a "personal" matter is of any interest to strangers. I am convinced that the Vice President believes that what happened at the Armstrong Ranch on Saturday concerns no one but the people who were present and (possibly) their families. The accidental shooting - O! how I'd like to believe that the trigger was pulled nefariously! (but I can't) - in no way amounts to an affair of state. The normal thing to do, if you're following the CEO playbook, is to wait to see how bad the damage is before going public. If the damage is slight, then there's no story and no problem.
Who knew how serious Mr Whittington's injuries were? The important thing, from the playbook point of view, was not to fly off the handle with lamentations and regrets. I can almost hear Mr Cheney patting himself on the back for "holding it in" while waiting for the doctors' report. Right. Sadly, Mr Cheney is not a CEO. He is employed by the most public company of them all, the government of the United States of America, and he was elected to that position by voters who are not to be confused with shareholders. Shareholders might be as interested in keeping mum about the shooting as Mr Cheney; who knows what such news might to do the share price. But American electors are not investors. They see themselves as the investment.
At last we have a scandal that parallels the Clinton debacle. The original sin was not so bad, and it would have been forgiven if the sinner had 'fessed up. But the sinner in question didn't and doesn't want to do that. Mr Clinton denied that he'd had sex with Monica Lewinsky because he was misguided by pollsters. That was not an impeachable offense, but it was a serious presidential failing (lying about the relationship was more serious still). Mr Cheney didn't lie about anything, but there seems to be a strong feeling that his letting a day go by before confronting the story in public was inappropriate at best.
I'm not calling for impeachment - please! I'm simply pointing out that Mr Cheney's behavior after the accident is identical in spirit to that of corporate desperadoes from Ken Lay to Martha Stewart. Treat the public like the fool that it usually is, and hope for the best!
In the not-too-distant future, Brokeback Mountain is going to be released on DVD, and it will probably win some Oscars, too. There will be a lot of talk about why this movie is such a big deal. As Daniel Mendelsohn points out in his essay on the reception of Brokeback Mountain (NYRB, LIII.3), much of this talk will be anxiously wrong-headed. The next time you catch someone in the act of assuring others that Brokeback Mountain tells the story of two lovers who just happen to be men, cough discreetly. Brokeback Mountain tells the story of two lovers who have been brought up to hate their love and to hate themselves for loving as they do. It is a story of the closet: of denial and repression and strangled family life. It's not the love-story part of Brokeback Mountain that makes for great film, but the long aftermath of furtive coupling and feigned romance. Mr Mendelsohn concludes:
The real achievement of Brokeback Mountain is not that it tells a universal love story that happens to have gay characters in it, but that it tells a distinctively gay story that happens to be so well told that any feeling person can be moved by it. If you insist, as so many have, that the story of Jack and Ennis is OK to watch and sympathize with because they're not really homosexual - that they're more like the heart of America than like "gay people" - you're pushing them back into the closet whose narrow and suffocating confines Ang Lee and his collaborators have so beautifully and harrowingly exposed.
In short, the "universal love story" approach simply doesn't hold up. Maybe it's useful as a permission for otherwise homo-averse people to see the movie. Certainly the film has done almost everything to shield tender sensibilities from direct contact with actual true love between two men, and perhaps we're still at the stage where it would have been foolhardy rather than courageous to cast openly gay actors. Having seen the movie, however, viewers ought to find the "beautiful love story" thumbnail empty and unfeeling.
This brings The Family Stone to mind. I've seen it again, and liked it even more - and decided for certain that the dinner-table scene will prove to be an important one for people to talk about. As Kathleen said afterward, of course Meredith (Sarah Jessica Parker) is right to say that no parent would wish a child to shoulder the burdens imposed on homosexuality in today's society (lightened though these may have been). But she is an ass not to recognize that the Stone family has created a world in which those burdens simply don't exist. It is not hard to imagine that sensitive parents would bend over backward to accommodate the needs of a deaf child, but it's not necessary to ask why it is that Sybil and Kelly Stone have flushed away any and every trace of reproach or disregard for the sexual preference of their son, Thad (Ty Giordano). (Kathleen didn't even recognize that Thad and Patrick (Brian White) were lovers until well into the action.) All we need to know - and what we take away from the dinner table - is that we're striving for a world in which Meredith's position really is nonsensical. A world in which Ennis Del Mar would grow up unashamed to love another boy. The more indignantly the high priests point to their sacred texts in support of their anathemas and abominations, the more clearly we see that their world makes no sense.
Sunday was a big day for "culture." There was MET Orchestra concert in the afternoon, and in the evening a discussion, at the 92nd Street Y, of Bernard-Henri Lévy's American Vertigo, conducted by the author and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik.
The place was packed - not a seat to be had (although the one to my left remained vacant). Mr Gopnik announced at the beginning that the discussion would also touch on M Lévy's thoughts about the implications of the Hamas victory in Palestine. At this moment, I sensed a presumption that everyone in the hall was Jewish. M Lévy (hereinafter "BHL") would shortly pronounce the 92nd Street Y "the beating heart of liberal Judaism in New York," or words to that effect. This was not your ordinary book talk.
In France, they still have overt intellectuals, and BHL is certainly one of them. Mr Gopnik would probably not put himself forward as an intellectual, but that's clearly what he is. What is an intellectual? Like a prophet, the intellectual critiques the morality of the moment, both as a standard and in its breach. But the intellectual eschews the prophet's stripped-down message; he would not agree that complication is necessarily bad.
It is a habit of American intellectuals to hedge their judgments with enough qualification to convince the ordinary man that they are incapable of making decisions. This is not a failing of postwar French intellectuals, most of whom have always been ready to interrupt their mandarin analyses unequivocal denunciations. BHL has concluded that the way to deal with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority is to refuse to deal with it, because while it is democratically empowered, it espouses an unacceptable program of anti-Zionism. Working up to this conclusion, he enumerated historical stages of ant-Semitism, noting a consistent displacement in their rationales. The latest brand of anti-Semitism, in BHL's view, is anti-Zionism. A century ago, Jews were hated ostensibly because they were an international group incapable of local allegiance. They didn't have a country. Now, according to BHL, Jews are hated ostensibly because they do have a country. What never changes is hatred of the Jews. Which is pre-eminently hatred of The Other, a premise that led to a neat discussion of the philosophy of Emanuel Lévinas.
But American Vertigo was not slighted. The discussion explored the difference between French and American conceptions of nationality, with America's seen as flexible and pluralistic; our country is currently inhabited by a hyphenated population. BHL was delighted to discover that the model for assimilation professed by the Arab-Americans of Dearborn, Michigan, is none other than the Jewish American. He also dismissed the idea of an "imperial United States." No - as he sees it, we're more like Carthage than Rome. A sobering comparison!
Mr Gopnik and M Lévy spoke very highly of one another; sincerely, I thought. Mr Gopnik's Paris to the Moon, a collection of "Letters from Paris" to The New Yorker, is to some extent a counterpoint to American Vertigo - although, unlike Vertigo, it appeared in book form in its writer's native language first. It will be interesting to compare the two volumes. Friendly and like-minded as they appeared to be, however, I saw not two Jews but a New Yorker and a Parisian on the stage of the Kaufmann Concert Hall. Two ways of being intellectual; two different cosmopolitan accents.
*
This afternoon, Kathleen and I will be flying to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where Kathleen will attend a conference, after which we'll retire to a seaside resort for a few days; we're to return on the eighth. I'll be taking the laptop that I haven't used in six months, but attaining connectivity may prove to be too much of a hassle for my somewhat low spirits. Having worked at my French for two years, I'm not a little miffed about traveling to a Spanish-speaking destination, but then I think I may have lost the taste for travel altogether. I have not set foot off the Island of Manhattan in over a year - since returning from Istanbul. (That can't be right, but neither can I remember anything to the contrary.) You'll probably attribute the touch of depression to that fact alone! But my Manhattan-bound year has also witnessed the greatest transformation in my life: discovering a vocation. Compared with writing here among my books, CDs, DVDs, and other scraps of information (beautiful and otherwise), anything that takes me away from it for more than a few hours feels worse than trivial.
Yesterday morning, I dragged myself out of bed only to pitch headlong into the slough of despond. Reading the Times only made things worse. It occurred to me to issue an SOS: can anybody out there buck me up? Gradually at first but then quite quickly, the malaise evaporated.
When I wake up, I think of all the things that I have planned for the day. Normally, they amount to something to look forward to, but on days like today they're empty burdens, chores to be performed for no good reason. Except for that best of all reasons: don't make things even worse.
What's causing this spontaneous negativity? A dread that I have to talk myself out of every day - a dread that the United States is in a rudderless little boat heading straight for Niagara Falls. Does it matter which particular rocks destroy the ship and its passengers? An oil shock? A debt shock? The evisceration of the Republic's vitals by theocrats? The rudderless little boat is, of course, the Administration. We're still too far from the precipice for outright panic. But the anxiety is wearing.
We liberals stand by uselessly while our countrymen swallow the line from Washington. Here's a sterling example of how stupefying that line is, taken from a Times editorial about the White House's refusal, so far, to do anything about New Orleans.
But the Bush administration refuses to support the plan of Representative Richard Baker, Republican of Louisiana, which would give everyone the capacity to rebuild and which had the backing of the mayor, the governor and the state's Congressional delegation. (To add insult to injury, two days after the White House shot down Mr. Baker's proposal, President Bush suggested at a news conference that Louisiana's problem was the lack of a plan.)
How does the man get away with it? Thomas Frank sheds some light on the problem in the current Harper's (February 2006). Mr Frank has been trying to understand how Bernard Goldberg's 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America has held onto its Best-Seller listing. After all, as Mr Frank is able to show, there is nothing, quite literally nothing, in Mr Goldberg's book that could not be cobbled together from popular conservative Web sites. How can it be that so many book-buyers lack the critical acumen to see that Mr Goldberg brings nothing new to the discussion? (And that they are really - unless they wish to support Mr Goldberg - wasting their money?) Mr Frank eventually hit upon an explanation.
Like so much of today's right-win thought, 100 People owes its success to the remaking of American consciousness by television. The book's episodic structure, for example, reflects TV's amnesiac style: Each little hit-piece flickers by, the previous installment's outrage instantly forgotten, the staggering, mind-stopping contradictions between them (were Goldberg somehow to critique himself, he would no doubt call them "hypocrisies") flowing without narrative consequence.
Mr Frank does not leave it at that, but goes on to suggest why television has such mindless impact.
A convenient rhetorical benefit of this emphasis on electronic speech is that it solves the difficult problem of real-world power - by which I mean a problem that is difficult for conservative populists who like to depict themselves as society's victims. If offensive speech is the raw material of politics, then things like ownership or wealth distribution are not worthy of consideration. Nor can the threat posed by liberals be minimized or made to seem less dire by pointing out those liberals' inability to win elections: as long as liberals exist, getting their ten seconds on TV or posting their liberalisms on the Internet, the danger to America is clear and present.
Just as speech trumps deeds, so do individuals trump larger social forces. In the world of the right, as in the world of TV, personalities rule. Character is king. "There is no such thing as society," Margaret Thatcher said; there are only individuals.
And so Bernard Goldberg scolds Kenneth Lay of Enron but has nothing to say about the moldy climate that has spread through the nation's executive suites as the sun of federal regulation has been dimmed. I want to take Mr Frank's point one half-step further, if only because I've never thought of this before and am feeling somewhat eureka-ish: television can't handle institutions. It can only reduce them to individual representatives or spokesmen. Institutions, insofar as they are more than rude collections of individuals, are necessarily abstractions. They're very real abstractions: they own property and file lawsuits about it all the time. But when television inquires into a bit of litigation, it can't see the abstraction that is, say, the General Motors Corporation. It can only see lawyers and executives - individuals all. You, meanwhile, following the camera and trying to understand what it's showing you - you will find it very hard to keep the abstraction in your mind, no matter how bright and sophisticated you might be. The only way to judge television footage critically - to discover, that is, what is being ignored or withheld - is to have seen it before.
The invisibility of abstract institutions, from the "Federal Government" on down, is dandy for conservative pundits, because if we could see institutions on television we'd be asking a lot of questions about how, for example, so few people own so much of the country. Instead of which we see the occasional plutocrat, on his way to prison or not as the case may be. We don't see his wealth, however. We see a few of the things that it has bought, but we will never learn from television that most of the assets of the rich are highly liquid, and therefore much too boring to look at. (Television is also constitutionally incapable of registering quality, obvious to the naked eye, on the screen. That's what makes the home-shopping networks so successful. Visit a TV set if you doubt me.) And we will never see "the rich." So they don't exist - on television. There are only rich people, and someday, if you're lucky, you might be one of them. Although that's highly unlikely, given the collective power of "the rich" to keep you right where you are.
Torture:Others :: Watching Television:Self.
In general, I'm very pleased with the education that I received at the University of Notre Dame in the late Sixties. The version of the Great Books program that the faculty had devised suited me down to the ground, and in all my later reading, I have never felt that anything fundamental, at least in Western thought, was omitted. Upon reading Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism, however, I can no longer claim such pleasant innocence. A book that had been in print for over fifteen years when I went to college, Totalitarianism is perhaps more important than ever, as the United States fumbles amidst reckless experiments and faces underestimated dangers in debt finance and fuel supply.
We are still too close to the twin dawns of the late eighteenth century - the industrial revolution and the inauguration of the nation-state - to understand how each effected the other. Nor, to follow the analogy to natural cycles, do we know where to put totalitarianism. (I'm inclined to regard it as an adolescent breakdown.) What we do know is that all three developments are related. It is possible that the nation-state might have eschewed totalitarianism, instead of steaming toward it, at least in Arendt's view, with deliberate speed, had there been none of the uprooting of the industrial revolution, filling the cities with superfluous people. I am only beginning to reassemble my grasp of modern European history from the rubble to which Arendt reduced it, but I do see that some sort of totalitarian episode was inevitable by the end of the old regime and the upsurge in scientific and technological expertise, both of which occurred in the late eighteenth century. Because I had not been properly grounded in modern European history, and also because I grew up in an exceptionalist America that has not suffered modern Europe's ongoing crisis of political legitimacy, I had a very hard time understanding Hannah Arendt until well into The Origins of Totalitarianism.
In the American view, the American and French revolutions put an end to monarchical tyranny and ushered in an era, perhaps more than just an era, of democracy. The proposition that democracy is a boon is one that Americans have a very hard time questioning, possibly because it means little more to them than the right to elect their own leaders. Democracy does indeed seem to be the least-bad political system, but its benefits are hardly unmixed with serious drawbacks. Local circumstances, however, worked to shroud these drawbacks in the United States. Take, for example, the very European problem of identifying the "demos" in the first place This was swept aside in the United States by degrading a slave class identifiable by skin color and facial features, compactly if erroneously recognized as a "race." Everyone who did not belong to this outcast group was included in the American demos. That's because the American "nation" (as distinct from the formal American state) consisted wholly of immigrants. Earlier-arriving classes invariably tried to lord it over late arrivals, but without long-term success. (It was perhaps vital for the persistence of racial bigotry that, from first settlement until quite recently, the American Southeast did not attract immigrants from outside the United States.) Regardless of personal prejudice, Irish-Americans are no better or worse than Italian-Americans, or Jewish-Americans, or any other kinds of American. Everybody is equally American. The struggle to extend this equality to the descendants of slaves persists, but it is under way.
From the moment of emancipation, however, the people of Europe had a hard time defining their nations - initially, races in the political and characterological sense, but soon enough racial in a voodoo biological sense - and the relation of those nations to states. France, the pre-eminent nation-state, declared that everybody living within French frontiers was...
Continue reading about The Origins of Totalitarianism at Portico.
Garry Wills's review of Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values: America's Moral Crisis is so favorable that I'm actually tempted to buy a presidential tome. The piece, "Jimmy Carter & the Culture of Death" (I'd have swapped the ampersand for a "vs"), appears in the New York Review of Books for February 9, 2006, and it is perhaps the strongest essay yet to contrast true religion with hateful religiosity. What few people knew at the time was that Jimmy Carter was awkward when he made religious statements because he didn't really believe that he ought to be making them, but felt badgered by the press. Mr Carter belongs to the Baptist World Alliance, an organization with which the more fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention has severed ties, the better, in Mr Wills's view, to promote its culture of death.
Mr Wills' deftly argues that the "pro-life," anti-abortion movement of the Religious Right maintains an anti-life agenda. When abortion is illegal, women desperate enough to get them not infrequently die, but that is only one part of a program that focuses on death. By refusing to limit the distribution of guns, this movement makes the United States a world hub of homicide; it is also among the top four sovereignties that inflict capital punishment. It insists on the United States' right to the first use of nuclear weapons; its myopic foreign policies reap a world-wide harvest of contempt for this country. Mr Wills winds up beautifully, with solid praise for the former president:
Carter is a patriot. He lists all the things that Americans have to be proud of. That is why he is so concerned that we are squandering our treasures, moral even more than economic. He has come to the defense of our national values, which he finds endangered. He proves that a devout Christian does not need to be a fundamentalist or fanatic, any more than a patriotic American has to be punitive, narrow, and self-righteous. He defends the separation of church and state because he sees with nuanced precision the interactions of faith, morality, politics and pragmatism. That is a combination that once was not rare, but is becoming more so. We need a voice from the not-so-distant past, and this quiet voice strikes just the right notes.
"Punitive, narrow and self-righteous" - a comprehensive description of patriarchs on the defense. I wish that Mr Wills had mentioned the word "patriarchy," but perhaps to do so would have raised an awkwardness. The "not-so-distant past" to which he hearkens was a settled patriarchy, with white men firmly in possession of all executive power,. Not only that, but their possession was not seriously questioned by most Americans. If you wanted a secure place in this patriarchy, you sucked up to it if you were a man and served it if you were a woman. Those who were drawn to alternatives could take their chances (in the big cities), but with no expectation of rescue in case of failure. Welfare wasn't wrong because it was expropriation - that just made it "unfair." What made it wrong was that it rescued folks who had opted out of the patriarchy. PS: It is understood, in a patriarchy, that those who haven't found a place within its structure have chosen not to, at least insofar as they haven't tried "hard enough."
Whether we are living through the patriarchy's last gasp, or whether natural and economic catastrophes will make the patriarchy look like the best chance for survival yet again, remains to be seen.
The current issue of The Atlantic contains the magazine's fourth annual State of the Union section. Arguably the most centrist periodical in the country, inclined these days to snort at the left while blandifying the right, The Atlantic publishes the occasional alarmist article (usually by William Langewiesche), but its editors seem determined not to get flustered about American life, and that in itself is a good thing, or at least a respite. In the kickoff essay, "The Values Racket," they make two very interesting points. First: the culture war
is between those who want a culture war - a vocal minority demanding political attention - and those who don't.
This is an idea that E J Dionne works out in his contribution, "Why the Culture War Is the Wrong War." The other point is well worth ponderation.
As Paul Starobin argues, the United States has become isolated by its values. Many of the cultural attributes that have made America attractive to outsiders - boisterous democracy, economic opportunity, respect for human rights - have proliferated abroad. Some have been tarnished at home. At the same time, many of the values that remain uniquely American do not endear us to most other societies. No other country is both as devout and as libertarian as America, and this unusual mixture has of late exacerbated mistrust of the United States.
Implicit here is the fact that there has been no real need for the United States to "export" its democracy; the citizens of other countries, admiring it from afar, have cleared the way for its welcome import. We're at our best when we're simply being our best and not worrying about the rest of the world. I would go so far as to say that the world would be a better place without official United States charity (always excepting Lend-Lease and the Marshall Plan, the latter of which reflected a cosmopolitan pragmatism rarely approximated in our aid schemes).
Good Morning again! It's a bright, cold Tuesday - perfect weather for "I told you so." Today's headline:
IRAQ REBUILDING BADLY HOBBLED, US REPORT FINDS
PROBLEMS FROM THE START
Understaffing, Infighting and Lack of Expertise Are Cited in Draft
by JAMES GLANZ
The first official history of the $25 billion American reconstruction effort in Iraq depicts a program hobbled from the outset by gross understaffing, a lack of technical expertise, bureaucratic infighting, secrecy and constantly increasing security costs, according to a preliminary draft.
Except, I didn't tell you so.
2 May 2003: Hurrah! The war in Iraq is over! Saddam Hussein hasn't been accounted for, and neither have his weapons of mass destruction, but military opposition to American troops has ceased. As our intervention in Afghanistan ought to have taught all thinking people, the American mission would come down to this: the war would be over when resistance to our invasion melted away. Installing a US-friendly person as the nominal head of local affairs (in the case of Afghanistan, 'local' means 'Kabul and environs,' no more), we would hale our troops home to a hero's welcome. The Administration could rest assured that no one except nigglers like me would fault it for having altogether failed to accomplish its trumpeted prewar objectives. Is it so hard to remember six-week-old headlines? (Link)
I truly had no idea what a disaster our Iraqi misadventure would be. I knew that it wouldn't succeed, but my conception of its failure was pretty limited.
Of course, it's not over yet.
"Problems from the start" will keep me chuckling all day. Oh! Almost forgot. The headline is from The New York Times.
The other night, I was reading The Origins of Totalitarianism and coping with the tangents that shoot forth from Hannah Arendt's pages like guided missiles. I wonder if the New School offers a course in this book. I'd love to be guided through it by a seasoned professor. Quite aside from the main thrust of Arendt's thesis, there is much historical interest in this book that is about as old as I am. Arendt's contempt for the bourgeoisie, for example, strikes a quaint note. It's quaint precisely because I can remember the prevalence of such an attitude among "thinking" people, among whom bourgeois values and, more vehemently, bourgeois hypocrisy were invoked to explain everything that was wrong with the world.
I can no longer recall just what it was in Origins that triggered a sudden recognition: to wit, that, because the implicit template for journalism in American life is the sportswriter or -caster, reporters will always struggle to reduce current events to some sort of contest between two teams. They will also root for whichever team performs better (not necessarily the winning team). And for the simple reason that sports are value-free - teams have no 'content,' no non-game agenda - media rooting will always tend toward the amoral. Hence today's "liberal" media falls over itself presenting right wing elemen