By Benjamin Kerstein

My First Novel

2011-08-01T01:26:00.000-07:00

My first novel The Mighty Quinn is now available via Amazon Kindle. It's a satire of environmentalism, Moby-Dick, samurai movies, Scientology, stupid hippies, nausea, and many other highly amusing things. Also, sex and violence. And whales. If you like it, spread the word. And if you don't have a Kindle, these apps let you read it on various other highly amusing devices. Enjoy!

Imperfect

2011-07-29T10:23:00.000-07:00

Before 1967 it was rarely the tendency of Zionists to cite God as their master. Even Zionists of a distinctly religious bent formulated an esoteric but highly effective theology according to which Zionists were—albeit unknowingly—serving God, not vice-versa.

Continue reading Imperfect - Tablet Magazine

The Test

2011-07-27T07:18:00.000-07:00

It is an accepted if oft-forgotten truism that political fortunes can change with dazzling speed, especially in a country as volatile and contentious as Israel. No one, however, could have predicted the sudden change in the fortunes of the current Israeli government. It has come, politically and metaphorically, out of left field.

Continue reading The Test

The Fallen Woman

2011-07-26T04:03:00.000-07:00

Media coverage of the sudden though not entirely unexpected death of British R&B singer Amy Winehouse mentioned only in passing that she was Jewish. This says something in and of itself, but the truth is that Winehouse’s Jewish identity was always just below the surface of her fame, particularly among her Jewish fans.

Continue reading The Fallen Woman

Tahrir in Tel Aviv?

2011-07-26T04:02:00.000-07:00

For a moment, at least, it felt as if – to steal a line from Albert Camus – all the guns of Tel Aviv were firing at once. The night of Saturday, July 23, 2011 marked the largest political demonstration in Tel Aviv in over a decade.Tens of thousands of people took to the streets, marching to the plaza in front of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, across the street from the Kirya, the underground headquarters of the IDF.

Continue reading Tahrir in Tel Aviv?

An Open Letter to the Arab Street

2011-03-19T01:34:00.000-07:00

First and foremost, congratulations. Even from our vantage point on the other side of a seemingly unbridgeable divide between our peoples, the extraordinary nature of what you have accomplished in recent weeks is obvious. The eventual outcome of your revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and elsewhere is clearly still in question, but there is no doubt that by your actions you have changed the Middle East, possibly forever.

From our point of view, two very ironic things have emerged from what you have done. The first is that, contrary to the widely held belief that the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the main reason for the "anger" of the Arab street, and the great impediment to political reform in the region, Israel's name has been all but absent from your demonstrations and protests. This, in and of itself, is a hopeful sign. The second is that Israel's own reaction to these events, despite their great promise, has been an ambivalent one.

Continue reading at An Open Letter to the Arab Street » Main Feature » Jewish Ideas Daily

Stieg Larsson, Lars Larson, and me

2011-03-18T03:21:00.000-07:00

Listen to my discussion with Lars Larsson about the libertarian politics of the Millennium trilogy.

The Objectivist with the Dragon Tattoo

2011-03-18T03:19:00.000-07:00

One of the strangest publishing phenomena in recent memory is the extraordinary international success of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. A semi-famous left-wing Swedish journalist who died young and relatively uncelebrated, the three mystery novels Larsson wrote before his death, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, have sold millions of copies worldwide, gained a dedicated cult of adoring fans, spawned a hugely popular Swedish film series, and set in motion a Hollywood remake directed by celebrated filmmaker David Fincher.

There is really only one reason for the massive success of Larsson’s trilogy: a fascinating, unique, and entirely fictional young woman named Lisbeth Salander. While the books’ Swedish setting, their overtones of political and social criticism, and their main character, the plodding journalist and obvious Larsson alter ego Michael Blomquist, are interesting variations on the conventional mystery, it is Salander who elevates the proceedings into something entirely new in crime fiction.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media » The Objectivist with the Dragon Tattoo

What J Street Means When It Says ‘Pro-Israel’

2011-03-18T03:13:00.000-07:00

There are certain terms whose meanings are — or seem like they ought to be — obvious. The term “pro-Israel” is one of them. One presumes that it simply means having positive sentiments toward the state of Israel and sympathy for its political or military position. In our strange day and age, however, this is no longer the case. Even the simplest terms have become hopelessly foggy.

Indeed, there is now something of a quiet but impassioned debate within the American Jewish community over what it means to be “pro-Israel.” This dispute has gone public with the emergence of the left-wing lobby J Street. Advertising itself as both “pro-Israel” and “pro-peace,” J Street both implicitly and explicitly attacks its rivals — especially the much older and more influential lobbying group AIPAC — as being neither. Critics of J Street attack the group as itself neither pro-Israel nor pro-peace, but rather pro-Palestinian or pro-Arab.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media » What J Street Means When It Says ‘Pro-Israel’

Peter Beinart’s Liberal Fantasies

2011-02-25T09:01:00.000-08:00

It is a difficult thing to keep one’s head when the world is in a state of euphoria. This is probably why so much of the coverage of recent events in Egypt, including the recent resignation of Hosni Mubarak and the installation of a military government, has lacked the kind of elementary skepticism that ought to be applied to any event of such potential magnitude. To a certain extent, this is understandable. The intoxicating power of revolutionary change is very real, and can overwhelm even the most cynical personality. It becomes problematic, however, when people become so addicted to it that, like any run-of-the-mill alcoholic, the suggestion that they might have a problem throws them into a defensive rage. The reaction toward Israel’s cautious skepticism in regard to the Egyptian revolution provides a case study in the phenomenon, with many apparently intelligent and worldly journalists throwing themselves into spasms of inchoate fear and loathing at the Israelis’ refusal to jump on the happy bandwagon. What this has revealed is not so much the childlike naïveté lurking beneath the sophisticated exterior of many commentators, but also their tendency to abandon their own intelligence whenever Israel is involved.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media.

Watching Egypt Burn: An Israeli Perspective

2011-01-31T13:36:00.000-08:00

Like the rest of the world, Israel doesn’t know what to think about the revolution in Egypt. We aren’t even sure if it really is a revolution. We certainly don’t know if it’s good or bad. And we have absolutely no idea what the eventual outcome will be. Unlike the rest of the world, what is happening now in Egypt has immediate and potentially disastrous consequences for the Jewish state.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media.

Is Israeli Democracy Finished?

2011-01-25T12:19:00.000-08:00

In a now somewhat notorious story published on January 11, Timemagazine announced that Israeli politics was taking an ominous "rightward lurch." Citing, among other things, a newly proposed law that would require an oath of allegiance from naturalized citizens, another that would strip Israelis convicted of espionage and terrorism of their citizenship, a motion to investigate local NGOs that receive funding from foreign governments, and statements made by certain rabbis calling on Jews not to rent property to Arabs, the magazine's Jerusalem correspondent concluded that the Middle East's only democracy is on the slippery slope toward something like . . . fascism. According to one source quoted in the article, Israeli society today is reminiscent of nothing less than "the dark ages of different places in the world in the 1930s."

While Israel-bashing of all kinds is much in style these days, the Time article was sufficiently inflammatory to elicit a vigorous point-by-point rebuttal from the office of Prime Minister Netanyahu. What the rebuttal did not mention is that the fascism charge was itself both the product and an echo of the rhetoric of Israel's own domestic Left. Indeed, over the last year or so, going well beyond the heated criticisms expected of a political opposition, the Israeli Left has exhibited signs of a serious derangement. Lately, however, it seems to have gone altogether around the bend.

Continue reading at JIDaily.

Loughner and How America Treats Its Mentally Ill

2011-01-11T02:31:00.000-08:00

When I was twenty years old, I smashed through a plate-glass tabletop with a hammer. It scared the hell out of my co-workers and, I must admit, it scared the hell out of me too. I did not do it for any logical reason. It was an eruption of raw emotion, mainly rage and frustration. The immediate cause was nothing less innocuous than hitting my thumb with a hammer. Almost immediately after it was over, and I looked down at the shards of glass and felt the eyes of other people on me, I felt nothing but confusion and shame. I had no idea what had come over me. But I knew that it was a sign that something was wrong. Very wrong. Looking back on it now, the fact that I was suffering from a form of mental illness is so obvious that I wonder how I managed to miss it, or deny it, at the time.

My illness is a relatively mild one, a form of chronic depression marked by occasional hypomanic episodes. It is somewhat more severe than ordinary depression, but a great deal less severe than bipolar disorder and other, far more terrifying diseases of the mind. It requires no more than two pills a day to keep it relatively under control, and the side effects, while irritating at times, are negligible. In many ways, I count myself lucky. It is perhaps for this reason that I found myself, somewhat against my will, identifying with Jared Loughner, the young man who shot and horribly wounded Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killed six others last Saturday.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media.

Obama’s Irrelevant Bid for Mideast Peace

2011-01-09T11:29:00.000-08:00

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not always a zero-sum game. Sometimes both sides win, and this is one of those times. It must be admitted that this is a somewhat counterintuitive idea, especially since most observers of the peace process seem to think that the breakdown in negotiations between the two parties is an unmitigated disaster for all involved.

In fact, it is a disaster only for the Obama administration, and both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas have the right to claim something like a victory.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media.

Christopher Hitchens’s Jewish Problem

2010-12-13T02:09:00.000-08:00

The fact that Christopher Hitchens has a problem with the Jews has been an open secret for years. No one much likes to talk about it, and for various reasons his journalistic peers have remained silent on the subject. But it is nonetheless the case, and there is little sense in denying it.

Continue reading at Jewish Ideas Daily.

Obama and Israel: What Now?

2010-11-16T02:11:00.000-08:00

Since the Obama administration's major defeat in the American midterm elections, commentators have been wondering how the new constellation of forces in Washington will affect the president's Middle East peace initiative. Among hopeful partisans of the administration's efforts, the favored position is that little is likely to change. They point out that the executive branch, not the legislature, makes foreign policy, and that the party holding Congress, whether Republican or Democratic, tends to have little say in such matters. In support of this point, they cite the lessons of history, especially the experience of Bill Clinton after the GOP sweep in 1994.

Continue reading at Jewish Ideas Daily.

NPR and the Liberal Subculture that Worships It

2010-10-30T11:18:00.000-07:00

Juan Williams’s recent firing from NPR has occasioned yet another in the perennial series of arguments about the public radio network and whether it should or should not continue to be government funded. The debate so far, it must be admitted, has not been an edifying one, consisting mostly of the regurgitation of clichés.

At The Daily Beast, itself a formidable organ of the liberal establishment, Peter Beinart provided an excellent example of this, writing that “NPR is elitist, and it’s a good thing too” before trotting out almost every cliché NPR’s defenders have ever employed in defense of the network. “The people who run the station,” he writes, “believe that Americans should know more about what is happening in China and less about what is happening to Britney Spears, which in today’s media makes them downright subversive.” As proof of this, Beinart claims that “NPR now has 17 foreign bureaus compared to four for CBS,” and “NPR devotes 21 percent of its airtime to international news compared to 1 percent for commercial talk radio.”Needless to say, these are not particularly helpful arguments. One is little more than openly acknowledged snobbery, and the other appears to make the bizarre claim that more coverage by definition equals better coverage, as if a patient were more likely to survive surgery with ten doctors in the operating room instead of one. Given the ready availability online of translated foreign media, moreover, one wonders why those interested would require their news filtered through an American radio network in the first place.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media.

Middle East Peace Talks Degenerate into Farce

2010-10-20T11:16:00.000-07:00

At the moment, the Middle East peace process appears to have descended into a bizarre impasse, more akin to farce than tragedy. Both sides are announcing demands and possible concessions, none of which seem to last longer than a single news cycle.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refuses a renewal of the settlement freeze, then says it might be renewed in exchange for Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. The Palestinians hint that they may be willing to recognize Israel as such, and soon after declare that it will never happen. Then they publicly declare that only a return to the ’67 borders will satisfy them, something that, given the facts on the ground, is impossible, as they are well aware.

Now, there is the controversy over Netanyahu’s issuance of building tenders in Jerusalem, which would normally not be a problem, but in the current atmosphere is generally being considered as yet another shot across the bow of the Palestinians.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media.

The J Street Scandal

2010-10-11T02:13:00.000-07:00

The recent scandal involving the lobbying group J Street, a liberal organization founded in 2008 that bills itself as "pro-Israel and pro-peace," may seem to some like a tempest in a teapot. In fact it is very significant, especially to anyone concerned about Israel, its future, and its relationship to the United States.

The scandal broke on September 24 with the publication of a Washington Times article by the reporter Eli Lake revealing that one of J Street's largest donors was the billionaire financier George Soros. The fact that Soros was funding a liberal organization was hardly surprising, given his well-known political views; but his stance on specifically Jewish issues has been controversial at least since 2003, when he asserted that the rise in global anti-Semitism was the result of policies being pursued by Israel and the United States.

Continue reading at Jewish Ideas Daily.

Martin Peretz and His Critics

2010-09-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

The pillorying of Martin Peretz continues apace these days, as the editor-in-chief of The New Republic continues to suffer the consequences of writing that “Muslim life is cheap, most notably to Muslims” on his blog, The Spine. The charge of racism is, of course, the default reaction of most liberals to nearly anything, and certainly to anything they oppose; and, lest we forget, Islam is not a race, making the charge of racism in this case a blatant absurdity. Still, the opportunism of Peretz’s critics cannot be wholly held against them. It cannot be denied that what Peretz wrote is an ugly, crude, and in many ways inaccurate claim.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Golem: Universal and Particular

2010-09-14T02:15:00.000-07:00

The most famous and enduring of all Jewish legends is that of the golem, the artificial man. Indeed, with the possible exception of the demon Lilith, briefly pressed into service as a feminist icon, the golem remains the only post-biblical Jewish myth to be widely adopted by non-Jewish culture. Among its recent incarnations are a computer game that bears its name and the army of humanoids who populate James Cameron's film Avatar.

The roots of the legend are ancient: the Talmud claims that Adam himself—and thus, theologically speaking, all of humanity—was a golem until God breathed a soul into his nostrils. But the creature as we know it today has a much later and remarkably precise genealogy. He was born in late-16th-century Prague under the auspices of Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, known as the Maharal, who, using kabbalistic magic, is said to have created a humanoid creature out of mud or clay to defend the Jews from their enemies.

Continue reading at Jewish Ideas Daily.

Gideon Levy and Uncomfortable Truths

2010-09-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

The political left in many countries has a long history of defending despicable acts of violence when they are committed by the right people. From Norman Mailer’s campaign to free murderer Jack Abbott, who upon release promptly went and murdered someone else, to Bernadine Dohrn’s effusive praise of Charles Manson, right up to today’s disgusting international campaign on behalf of cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal, there are few crimes too vile and horrendous for the left not to defend should the perpetrator belong to the correct movement or a fetishized oppressed minority.

Israel recently saw a particularly egregious example of this in the case of Sabbar Kashur, a Palestinian convicted of raping a young woman under false pretenses. According to initial media reports, Kashur was accused because he had claimed to be Jewish and the woman would not have slept with him had she known he was an Arab.

The Israeli left immediately rushed to Kashur’s side, accusing the entirety of Israeli society of racism and denouncing its justice system as akin to Nazi Germany or apartheid South Africa. Much of the foreign press quickly followed suit. But without question the most fervent defender of the convicted rapist was Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Greatest Collection of Nightmares on Earth

2010-09-01T11:43:00.000-07:00

Michael J. Totten interviews me on Israel, the Middle East, and other topics.

TEL AVIV — I learn most of what I know about the Middle East from the people who live here, and I was a bit shocked when I discovered, years ago, that many reporters—especially wire agency reporters—absorb most of what they know, think, and believe about the region from other journalists. I didn’t know anyone, local or foreign, in the Middle East when I first got here, and I initially had to rely on the people I met randomly in cafes and bars and in person via the Internet to teach me what’s going on and how the place works. All my information came from the street. Most of my understanding still comes from the street—not from on high, not from newspapers or press releases, and not from foreign reporters who do not live here. Eventually I worked my way up to the prime minister’s office in Lebanon, and I’ve almost gotten that far now in Israel, but my real education has taken place during long sessions in cafes and bars with Arabs, Kurds, and Israelis.

Benjamin Kerstein’s name will appear on the Acknowledgements page of my book when it comes out in the spring because he has taught me an enormous amount about Israel during the time I have known him. I met him five years ago when I first came here from Lebanon, when Israel was still a partially Arabized abstraction in my eyes. He was one of the first people who humanized the place for me, and he taught me more than he knows about the Israeli people and how they see themselves and their place on earth and in history. The parts of my book that take place here are better than they would be if I did not know him.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Tony Judt and Israel

2010-08-30T11:41:00.000-07:00

When a man dies, especially when he dies of something uniquely horrifying and grotesque, people always tend to remember him well, if for no other reason than pity for his suffering. This seems to have been the case with historian and essayist Tony Judt, who died this month from the degenerative disease known as ALS. The sight of Judt reduced, and reduced very quickly, from an intellectual in late middle age to a wheelchair-bound invalid incapable of breathing on his own would give even the most cold-hearted some pause when penning his obituary. In those last months it was, no doubt, a terrible life and, in the end, a terrible death.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Depredations of Roger Ebert

2010-08-22T10:47:00.000-07:00

Armond White of the New York Press, detractors have noted, seems to think he is the only real film critic in America. They may well be right, but probably so is he, and the Press’ house contrarian deserves thanks from all self-respecting cinephiles for doing the one thing most (perhaps all) other American film critics either refuse to do or are incapable of doing. Whether one disagrees with White or not, and almost everybody does at one point or another, there is no question that, whatever he writes, he is always thinking about cinema. What it is. What is can do. What it means. This is not much in the tradition of American film criticism, which has mostly been the domain of frustrated literary or theater critics, and sometimes simply the cub reporter nobody knows what to do with. It is far more in line with the extraordinary legacy of French film criticism, especially the avatars of the nouvelle vague like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, who later became groundbreaking filmmakers in their own right.

The great insight of the French film critics was that all cinema says something about cinema, even the usually dismissed movies like Hitchcock’s thrillers and Hollywood B-movies. But they did not hold simply that a B-movie could be great while an A-movie could be bad, but that all movies have something to say about cinema, and sometimes the B-movie can say something far more important and profound than an A-movie. White, it seems to me, writes according to this dictum, while most of his colleagues, if they ever encountered it, would probably have no idea what it means.

Foremost among these is unquestionably Chicago Sun-Times columnist, longtime television star, and all around face, voice, and personification of American film criticism, Roger Ebert.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media.

Max Blumenthal’s World

2010-07-21T11:38:00.000-07:00

As anyone who has ever lived in a New York apartment will tell you, when you suddenly turn on a bright light in a dark room, you find out very quickly where the cockroaches are hiding. The Gaza flotilla incident was just such a bright light, giving us an unprecedented glimpse of just how low many politicians, activists, and reporters are willing to sink in order to disparage the State of Israel. Without question, one of those most uncomfortably trapped in this spotlight was liberal pseudo-journalist Max Blumenthal.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Imaginarist

2010-07-18T03:12:00.000-07:00

Terry Gilliam, the former member of Monty Python and celebrated filmmaker, now nearing seventy, has spent much of the last few decades fighting a long and, one must admit, bruising battle against the real world. And while he has not always enjoyed success—indeed, he has tasted outright disaster several times—Gilliam has nonetheless earned his place as one of the great cinematic avatars of the imagination. If his return to form with the fascinating, frustrating, utterly original The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is anything to go by, the cult of realism has never had a more avowed and passionate enemy.

The imagination is not much in style nowadays, as the fetish of realism appears to have overwhelmed all other styles of filmmaking, bleeding into even such fantastical genres as fantasy and science fiction. The enormous success of Christopher Nolan’s rebooted, hyper-realist Batman series is a case in point. While the gritty Batman has enjoyed renewed box office domination, Bryan Singer’s attempt at restarting the far more inherently fantastical—that is, imaginative—Superman character was considered an embarrassing failure. Singer’s Superman Returns, it must be admitted, does suffer from serious flaws, but it is a far better film than it is given credit for, and the real reason behind its relative lack of success would seem to be its utter failure to capture the zeitgeist—the same zeitgeist which propelled Nolan’s The Dark Knight into the financial stratosphere.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

International Community and the Transnational Establishment

2010-07-18T03:11:00.000-07:00

One of the strangest terms in common use today is “the international community.” It is used endlessly, invoked as a moral arbiter, and proclaimed a transcendent ideal. But no one seems to have the slightest idea what it actually means, and it is regularly employed in so many different ways that arriving at a meaning would probably be impossible. It is probably long since time for the term to be retired, since it is essentially undefinable, and thus inherently misleading, but it is useful in that it points us toward the existence of a phenomenon which has been remarked upon before but never fully defined. Put simply, without anyone really intending to, and in some cases against the better judgment of all involved, we now find ourselves living in a world that is profoundly guided and influenced by an “international community” of a certain kind, one that would perhaps be better described as a Transnational Establishment.

“The Establishment,” like “the international community,” is a supremely popular and much abused term, but it is based on a fairly insightful analysis of power and the way power manifests itself. It was coined by a pugnacious British journalist Henry Fairlie, who wrote in 1955,

By the “Establishment,” I do not only mean the centres of official power—though they are certainly part of it—but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognized that it is exercised socially.

Fairlie realized something that goes beyond the British context he was describing. Namely, that power and the exercise of it is not merely a political and economic phenomenon, but also—perhaps primarily—a social phenomenon. Quite often, he realized, power is achieved, maintained and exercised socially, and not politically and economically. One need not be rich, titled, smart, or elected in order to be part of the Establishment and thus to take part in its power. One simply had to be socially accepted within its ranks.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Paper Greenwald

2010-07-18T03:09:00.000-07:00

The fallout from the Gaza flotilla incident has occasioned some of the most reprehensible writing that the anti-Israel establishment – which specializes in such things – has ever produced. Beyond question, however, one of the most egregious examples of this is the work of Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald, whose comically overwrought pseudo-jeremiads on the subject constitute a case study in the kind of intellectual corruption that now appears to be the inevitable result of the bigoted hatred of Israel typical of today’s American progressivism.

Greenwald himself is one of those bizarre figures who occasionally bobs to the surface of American intellectual life, someone who so encapsulates the dementia of a specific subculture that he seems to be more a satirical literary creation than a human being. Indeed, Greenwald is such a quintessentially anti-American, pseudo-pacifist, pro-terrorist, self-hating Jewish liberal that he essentially constitutes a living cliche. Nonetheless, his qualifications for the part are unquestionably excellent.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The March for Gilad Shalit

2010-07-18T03:08:00.000-07:00

“Leave no man behind” is a motto adopted by many armies around the world, but in Israel it has an emotional and political influence that often reaches unique extremes. Over the past month or so, while the establishment that refers to itself as the international community has gone on yet another of its regular episodes of anti-Israel psychosis, most of the world has forgotten that Gilad Shalit exists. Israel, however, most certainly has not. And the country remains painfully aware that the young soldier, who was kidnapped in 2006 and has been held illegally by Hamas ever since, remains somewhere in the Gaza strip, no closer, apparently, to release.

Over the four years that Shalit has been held, rumors of his impending release have swept Israel with unfortunate regularity. The anniversary of his kidnapping on June 25 occasioned new rumors, new complaints, and new demands; most especially on the part of Gilad’s parents, who are quite understandably determined not to allow their son’s plight to slip below the radar. Over the past few days, Shalit’s father, Noam, has led a march across Israel to the border with Gaza, the purpose of which is both to keep Gilad’s name on all our minds and to put pressure on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to agree to a prisoner exchange deal with Hamas.

The problem, of course, is that Netanyahu has no particular wish to pay the price Hamas is demanding. It will require the release of approximately a thousand prisoners being held in Israeli jails, many of them for very serious crimes, including terrorism.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Blockade Blunder

2010-07-18T03:06:00.000-07:00

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has achieved one of those rare political feats at which he is surprisingly and sadly adept – taking a difficult situation and turning it into an unmitigated disaster. Barely more than a week after the mob attack on a squad of Israeli commandos by the passengers of a flotilla bound for Gaza to break the siege, Netanyahu announced that the blockade would be partially lifted, and promptly declared to the Knesset that “Today, after we lifted the civilian blockade of Gaza there is no reason or justification for further flotillas,” as if there had been a justification for them in the first place. Or, for that matter, as if reason or justice made any difference to those who organize and participate in them. Moving from obtuse to embarrassing, the PM elaborated, “These flotillas are organized by those who oppose peace, not those who support it. These people just want to break the security blockade,” as though we were not already well aware of this.

Needless to say, Netanyahu’s words, as they usually do, failed completely to mitigate the obvious consequences of his actions. These became clear almost immediately, as those with Israel’s worst interests at heart rushed to announce their victory.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Inevitable Nuclear Iran

2010-07-18T03:05:00.000-07:00

It is now all but certain that the American administration has more or less resigned itself to a nuclear Iran. At the very least, it appears to have decided to take no military action against the Iranian nuclear program, nor even to support or encourage – publicly or discreetly – the Iranian popular opposition to the Ahmadinejad regime. The Obama administration will likely continue to pursue its policy of promoting engagement, either out of cynicism or naiveté, while simultaneously busying itself with the diplomatic give and take of arranging international support for sanctions which are unlikely to be effective. It is entirely possible, moreover, that American exhaustion from a decade of war and its public’s concentration on pressing domestic problems will effectively vitiate any political damage that might result from the emergence of a nuclear Iran. This, at any rate, is likely what Obama and the doves in his administration are counting on.

At first glance, this appears to be a disastrous state of affairs. But it need not be so. A nuclear armed Iran may be considered the lesser of possible evils by the United States, but it cannot be seen this way by others. To many Americans, the Iranian threat appears to be comfortably distant. This is something of a willful illusion, of course, but it is a politically influential and perhaps decisive one. For Iran’s neighbors, however, as well as many nations on their periphery, the threat is far more immediate.

Israeli concerns are naturally the most intense, given the Iranian president’s openly racist and genocidal attitude toward the Jewish state. But Israel is hardly alone in its concerns. If, as many suspect, the ultimate goal of the Iranian theocrats is the establishment of Iranian hegemony in the Middle East and thus the de facto seizure of the leadership of the Muslim world, then almost everyone in the region and many beyond have an interest in preventing such an outcome.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Israel’s Silver Lining

2010-07-18T03:03:00.000-07:00

Over a hundred years ago, the Zionist writer Ehad Ha’am wrote that the one silver lining to the blood libel was that it provided conclusive and irrefutable evidence that it was entirely possible for the Jews to be right and the world to be wrong. He was right then, of course. And he is right now. I think it is safe to say, however, that the blood libel is no longer necessary. Hateful, demented, conspiratorial, psychotic, and outright murderous lies are being told about the Jews on a fairly regular basis nowadays, and if there is any comfort to be taken in this fact, it is not so much the certainty as the irrefutable surety that the world not only can be, but usually is wrong when the Jews are concerned.

Unfortunately, last week’s incident on the high seas – in which the Israeli navy intercepted a flotilla of vessels attempting to run the blockade of Gaza, resulting in a vicious and unprovoked attack on the commandos involved by a gang of racist thugs – was not merely a case of the world being wrong. The reaction to the incident in media and political circles around the world exposed Israel’s critics, once and for all, as a sadistic, pathologically lying, morally bankrupt, and intellectually corrupted establishment whose attitude toward the Jewish state is not only unjust, but cowardly, hypocritical, racist, defamatory, delusional, inhuman, and at times simply sickeningly evil.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Over 1,000 Sign Petition in Support of Israel

2010-06-02T02:59:00.000-07:00

Over 1,000 people have already signed! Stand up and be counted!

To: Politicians, Media, NGOs, and Citizens of All Nations

We the undersigned, Jews and non-Jews, left and right, Israelis and citizens of many countries, hereby express our sympathy and solidarity with the State of Israel in regard to the May 31, 2010 Gaza flotilla incident for the following reasons:

BECAUSE the Gaza flotilla was organized, funded, and manned by—among others—anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, anti-democratic, and pro-terrorist organizations.

BECAUSE these organizations support the genocide of Israeli Jews and the destruction of the State of Israel.

BECAUSE the participants were armed with lethal weapons and prepared to use them against Israeli soldiers.

BECAUSE the participants were solely responsible for the violence that occurred, including grievous bodily harm to several Israeli soldiers.

BECAUSE the flotilla was in open violation of international law.

BECAUSE Israel is the victim of a global public campaign of racist incitement and hatred.

BECAUSE the portrayal of the incident by the world media thus far has been inaccurate, untrue, and clearly biased against the State of Israel.

For all these reasons, we the undersigned hereby demand the following:

WE DEMAND an immediate, fair, and unbiased investigation into the organizations behind the flotilla and their role in the violence that ensued as a result of their actions.

WE DEMAND the immediate prosecution and conviction of those participants in the flotilla responsible for the violence and especially those responsible for the injuries to Israeli soldiers.

WE DEMAND an immediate, open, and fair investigation into the role of various national governments in funding, equipping, and facilitating the flotilla and the ensuing violence.

WE DEMAND an immediate end to anti-Israeli incitement in the media and in the political arena.

WE DEMAND an immediate and unequivocal statement of support for Israel’s actions from world leaders and organizations, especially President of the United States Barack Obama, including an acknowledgement of the legality of these actions.

WE DEMAND that the media cease and desist its biased and misleading reporting of this incident and confine themselves to the facts at hand.

WE DEMAND an immediate public apology to Israel from the organizations involved in the incident and the governments that supported them.

We hope and believe that this time truth will win out over lies, and that those behind this incident will be exposed and prosecuted for their actions.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Sign the Petition Here.

Some Useful Addresses for Angry Israelis and Pro-Israelis Alike

2010-06-01T08:57:00.000-07:00

If you are appropriately outraged by the current treatment of Israel regarding the Gaza flotilla incident, here is some good contact information for expressing your sentiments (politely and stridently, of course).

Contact the British Prime Minister's office at https://email.number10.gov.uk/ or snail mail him at

10 Downing Street,
London,
SW1A 2AA

or use the contact page Email the Prime Minister’s Office.

To let Turkey know how you feel about their collaboration with the flotilla, the PM's office can be reached here webinfo@byegm.gov.tr.

To let France feel a little heat, the president himself can be reached at http://www.elysee.fr/ecrire/

Of course, there's no one quite like the United Nations for Israel-hating. Let them know they can't get away with it anymore by writing to http://www.un.org/en/contactus/

The president of the United States can be reached through this page http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact, while American citizens can contact their representatives easily through this page http://www.house.gov/, while senators can be located here http://www.senate.gov/.

The president of the European Union, which has already weighed in on the side of the flotillists, long before all the facts were in, can be contacted through its president web@eu2010.es or its ombudsman http://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/shortcuts/contacts.faces. EU citizens can find addresses for their MEPs through the site as well.

To criticize media coverage of the incident, there is always the venerable NY Times letters page letters@nytimes.com. Some of the nastiest anti-Israel coverage has come from The Times and The Guardian, two of Britain's largest newspapers. Give them a piece of your mind to the Times at letters@thetimes.co.uk and the Guardian at letters@guardian.co.uk. Nastier still is the Guardian's sister publication, The Observer letters@observer.co.uk. By far the vilest American reporting on the incident has been at Salon.com. Let them know how you feel about this here http://www.salon.com/about/letters/.

Again, be polite, be strident, be strong. And thank you.

Petition in Support of Israel

2010-05-31T05:20:00.000-07:00

Please read and, if you agree, sign and send to others. Many thanks.

To: Politicians, Media, NGOs, and Citizens of All Nations

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Sign the Petition Here.

The Man Who Stares at Other People’s Writing

2010-05-26T12:31:00.000-07:00

Jon Ronson is a noted British journalist, documentarian, and author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, which was adapted into a film by George Clooney. As far as I can tell from his latest article in theGuardian, he is also prone to using the words and ideas of others without attribution, a habit usually referred to as plagiarism.

I happened upon the article (“Whodunnit?”) by chance and would not have noticed anything untoward had its opening not rung a distant bell. The article deals with criminal profiling and its discontents, in particular a noted scandal of British justice from the 1980s. The opening section, however, which describes the founding of criminal profiling, is clearly lifted without attribution from Malcolm Gladwell’s article “Dangerous Minds,” published by the New Yorker in 2007 — albeit with some minor changes. The most striking similarities appear below.

Continue reading at Pajamas Media.

Allowing Chomsky into Israel is much more than a free-speech issue

2010-05-26T12:30:00.000-07:00

The recent fracas over Israel’s refusal to grant entry to Noam Chomsky, an MIT professor, leftist cult figure, and fervent opponent of the Jewish state, has revealed something far beyond the debate over free speech in Israel and who should and should not be a persona non grata. It reveals that an enormous amount of people, inside and outside Israel, have no real idea of who Chomsky is and what he stands for.

In a sense, this should not be surprising. Chomsky’s admirers regard him as something of a semi-divine figure, and they promote him as a relatively apolitical sort of liberal, a fervent partisan of peace and human rights, who has no interests or beliefs other than simple human justice. For the most part, this image has been accepted by those whose acquaintance with his career is, at best, casual.

The truth, however, is far uglier. Chomsky has been, throughout his long career, a consistent and dedicated supporter and/or apologist for tyranny, terrorism, political violence of all kinds, and sometimes horrifying acts of mass murder.

Liberalism and Zionism

2010-05-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

Early in World War II, George Orwell wrote that pacifism “is only possible to people who have money and guns between them and reality.” Much the same could be said of modern American liberalism, especially Jewish liberalism; that is, if Peter Beinart’s new article in the New York Review of Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” is anything to go by.

Beinart’s missive is the latest in what is swiftly becoming a literary subgenre in its own right, in which liberal Jews express their agonizing moral struggle with Zionism and Israel in deeply emotive and despairing language. This is not, quite frankly, a particularly new genre, as liberally inclined Jews have always had a somewhat awkward relationship with Zionism; whose partisans have, generally speaking, come from either the socialist left or the nationalist right, both of which have found a certain kinship with Zionism’s recognition of the limits and drawbacks of traditional liberalism.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Noam Chomsky and Israel

2010-05-26T12:01:00.000-07:00

It’s nice to know that my country of residence still has its head on its shoulders in certain cases, especially when it comes to admitting entrance to pseudo-intellectual antisemites and apologists for genocide. I owe this cheerful realization, ironically, to Amira Hass, a dedicated partisan of the Palestinian cause who has just announced in Haaretz that MIT professor of linguistics and radical leftist cult figure Noam Chomsky has been denied entry at the Allenby Bridge and thus far prevented from appearing at Bier Zeit University in Ramallah.

I have no doubt that legions of the liberal (some of them, no doubt, Israeli) will shortly be descending upon us to denounce the decision and to sing the praises of this perennially worshiped leftist icon, who wrote himself into the history of intellectual infamy by denying the Khmer Rouge genocide and then spending the next four decades denying his denial. Chomsky’s reputation was further burnished by signing a petition in support of French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. When French critics pointed out that the petition referred to Faurisson’s position that the Holocaust did not happen as historical “findings,” and that this was, needless to say, monstrous, Chomsky promptly accused them all of being agents of totalitarian oppression.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Banality of Evil and Anti-Semitism

2010-05-26T11:56:00.000-07:00

By far the most terrifying thing about encountering evil in real life is how innocuous it appears. Hannah Arendt may have gone a bit too far in her theory of the banality of evil, but there is no doubt that the phenomenon is quite real, and all the more terrifying for it. Put simply, once one has looked evil in the eye once or twice, the most striking aspect of it is how ordinary it is. Monsters quite rarely appear to be so, and monstrous things often seem terrifyingly meaningless and empty when witnessed first hand. Perhaps this is simply a defense mechanism, a way for our perceptions to minimize the potential emotional damage of horror, but whatever its origins, it remains a chilling and undeniable paradox.

This video of an appearance by conservative activist and ex-leftist David Horowitz at USC San Diego brought this home to me, thankfully at second hand. Challenged by a member of the Muslim Students Association, the following exchange ensues

Horowitz: Okay, I’ll put it to you this way. I am a Jew. The head of Hizbollah has said that he hopes that we will gather in Israel so he doesn’t have to hunt us down globally. For or against it?
MSA member: For it.

Perhaps others will see it differently, but for me there is a quiet terror in watching this moment. Perhaps it is the calm politeness, the terrible ordinariness, with which the student expresses her sentiments; as though she were voting “aye” on a question of raising municipal property taxes or repealing a law requiring dog leashes. Perhaps it is the despairing knowledge that the apologetics and excuses will be short in coming, and hundreds of the credentialed, intelligent, and liberal will shortly be explaining to us that she didn’t actually mean what she said or, if she did, it is nonetheless an understandable and relatively innocuous thing to say. Perhaps it is the realization that saying this sort of thing about essentially any other group of people would arouse a storm of institutional protest and censure which most certainly will not ensue in this case. And, of course, there is the undeniable fact that many will shortly be blaming Horowitz for the whole thing.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Human Rights Watch: Their Master’s Voice

2010-05-26T11:46:00.000-07:00

Having just returned from being locked for almost an hour in Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Center mall while a surprisingly large robot fired three 12-gauge shotgun shells into a suspicious package, which was then disposed of by a man in a Kevlar body suit, I was not, I confess, in a mood to indulge those who make light of Israel’s security concerns. Shortly after, my feelings were compounded by reading Benjamin Birnbaum’s excellent piece in The New Republic on the non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch and its treatment of Israel. It is doubtful that a better, or more important, piece of classic muckraking journalism will be published in the coming months.

The piece takes as its impetus the recent controversy between the organization’s staffers and some of its board members, in particular, its founder Robert Bernstein, who recently published a New York Times op-ed denouncing the organization’s attitude toward Israel. Its real value, however, is its exposure of the personalities behind the organization; the faces behind the impersonal reports and press releases that constitute the public face of HRW.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Israel’s Independence Day

2010-05-26T11:37:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it seems as if the world suffers from a collective case of schadenfreude in regards to Israel. Not only does the media evince an obsessive fascination with the minutest details of everything violent, horrifying, and depressing that occurs in this country, but often appears to feel the need to inject the violent, horrifying, and depressing into Israel’s more sanguine moments. Waking up from an evening of fireworks, music, and general enjoyment on the part of thousands at Rabin Square to celebrate Israel’s Independence Day, I was presented—along with many others—by Ethan Bronner’s recent missive, “Mood Is Dark as Israel Marks 62nd Year as a Nation”.

From his post in the Anglo-American Jerusalem bubble, in which most reporters for major English-language newspapers sequester themselves during their required tenure on the Middle East beat, Bronner informs us,

There is something about the mood this year that feels darker than usual. It has a bipartisan quality to it. Both left and right are troubled, and both largely about the same things, especially the Iranian nuclear program combined with growing tensions with the Obama administration.

There is, of course, some truth to this. Given that Iran’s psychotic leader regularly threatens to annihilate us, our anxiety on that count is fairly understandable; add to this the American president’s unwillingness to acknowledge that a man who threatens to annihilate an entire country will probably have to be confronted with the threat of force at some point, and that anxiety is compounded several fold. And certainly, the current impasse between Obama and Netanyahu is worrisome to anyone who thinks that the United States is the only country is the world that tends to treat Israel with anything resembling fairness or even sanity.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Avatar’s Worldview

2010-05-26T11:35:00.000-07:00

I resisted seeing Avatar for as long as humanly possible, as much out of sheer contrarianism as anything else, but ultimately I too succumbed to the phenomenon, and got my eyeful of James Cameron’s latest mega-blockbuster, now the highest-grossing film of all time. Cameron, I must confess, is one of those directors I have never known quite what to do with. His technique is impeccable; his technological innovations known to all; and his capacity for tapping into the collective cinematic unconscious, somehow knowing what people want to see before they do, undeniable. And yet, I have always felt that there is something missing from Cameron’s films. He is a Spielberg without the sense of wonder; Kubrick without the burning, uncompromising intelligence; Scorsese without the pervasive sense of Catholic pity. Often, he seems to be a mere sketch of a great director, calculating, obsessive, utterly in control, and yet oddly and persistently empty. Avatar, it must be admitted, is no exception to this.

Everything its admirers and its detractors have said about it is more or less true. The visuals are extraordinary, the action scenes stunning, the special effects flawless, and the pure splendor of it all at times transporting. At the same time, the story is absurdly derivative, the characters stick figures at best, the dialog lamentable, and its politics painfully didactic. There is no doubt that it is enormously effective on its own terms, but one cannot help feeling that everything about it except its special effects is oddly cursory and even amateurish.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Nuclear Security and the Church of Obamaism

2010-05-26T11:34:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent decision to avoid President Barack Obama’s much-hyped Nuclear Security Summit has been met with irritation and dismay by many. Given that Netanyahu’s motivations are reasonable enough, namely the fear that the Arab and Islamic nations attending would turn the conference into a public referendum on Israel’s ambiguous nuclear status, one would expect that his absence would not have raised many eyebrows, especially among the ostensibly worldly chattering classes.

That this was not the case, however, says a great deal less about Netanyahu and the issue of Israel’s decision to avoid a confrontation over its nuclear ambiguity, and far more about the rather desperate lengths to which Obama’s supporters will go in order to maintain the aura of transformative omnipotence that they have built around their hero. The intensity with which they do so would seem to indicate that they are not only trying to prop up the faith of others, but also their own.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Alice in Wonderland: Feed Your Head

2010-05-26T11:33:00.000-07:00

One can almost see the meeting of studio executives that preceded the production of Tim Burton’s new film of Alice in Wonderland. A half dozen cocaine-addled Bard graduates blinking through the aftereffects of yet another night of silicone implanted satyriasis and quietly musing on the possibilities inherent in Lewis Carroll’s century-old fairy tale. “What,” says one, “if instead of being a little girl, Alice is, like, a hot girl-power feminist teenager?” “Cool!” says another, “and what if like, everything that happened in the book happened, like, before.” “Yeah!” says another, “and what if, instead of just wandering around seeing weird things, she has to go Lord of the Ringson, like, something…?” “Awesome!” says a third, “and what if, like, at the end, the Mad Hatter dances like Michael Jackson? That would be so cool.” At this point, someone calls to find out if Johnny Depp is available.

And so it went, one imagines, until the big budget, 3-D, Dolby Sensurround travesty of one of the most beloved pieces of British whimsy literature was completed; leaving the Walt Disney studios a great deal richer and its viewers considerably poorer in every sense of the word.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Obama’s Israel Crisis

2010-05-26T11:32:00.000-07:00

Now that the rift between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu government has acquired the status of “crisis,” it is worth stepping back from the details of the spat and looking at the big picture. While the Ramat Shlomo announcement and its immediate aftermath were the immediate cause of the Obama administration’s ire, this was a crisis that was waiting to happen and was probably inevitable. The primary reason for this is the fundamental disconnect between Obama and Netanyahu, not only as personalities but, more importantly, in terms of their long term goals for Israel and the Middle East.

To a certain extent, Obama and Netanyahu deserve each other. As I have written before, they are, ironically, remarkably similar in many ways. They are both charismatic, articulate, extremely image conscious politicians whose capacity for visionary rhetoric often far outstrips their competence. Both have been accused of being essentially empty and shallow personalities, which is true in both cases to some extent, but ignores the fact that they are also ideologically driven idealists with very clear visions of the future they are striving toward.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Scorsese’s Element

2010-05-26T11:31:00.000-07:00

Roughly five minutes into Shutter Island, I knew more or less how it would end. For a film that invests another two hours and fifteen minutes in building to an ostensibly shocking twist ending, this is not a particularly good thing. All the more so when the film in question is the work of someone who many cinephiles (and I count myself one of them) consider to be the world’s greatest living filmmaker. Shutter Island is most certainly not a bad film, but from the likes of Martin Scorsese, it cannot be considered anything other than a disappointment.

One could argue, of course, that we should simply be grateful to see another Scorsese film at all. In an era when most of his contemporaries from the 1970s New Hollywood era have either burned out (William Friedkin, Peter Bogdonavich), died (Robert Altman), or retreated into comfortable mediocrity (Steven Spielberg, George Lucas), the fact that Scorsese is still making films, and still making them with something like the uncompromising intensity of his youth, often seems like reason enough to be indulgent.

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

Biden in Israel

2010-05-26T11:29:00.000-07:00

The Israeli press must have been happy to wake up this morning. While the arrival of American Vice President Joe Biden in Israel was an event, no one expected much more from it than the usual exhortations of goodwill and a few gestures toward reviving the peace process. Yesterday’s announcement by the interior ministry that it has approved the building of 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo, a religious neighborhood in East Jerusalem, however, handed our hapless press corps nothing less than a full-blown diplomatic incident.

The circumstances under which the plans were approved and announced remain unclear, with both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Interior Minister Eli Yishai claiming that it took place without their knowledge and professing their embarrassment over the timing of the announcement. According to Haaretz, Yishai professed on Israeli radio that “The district committees approve plans weekly without informing me,” and “If I’d have known, I would have postponed the authorization by a week or two since we had no intention of provoking anyone.”

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

The Jews vs. Joe Lieberman

2010-05-26T11:27:00.000-07:00

Hating Senator Joseph Lieberman has been a favorite liberal pastime for years now, but it recently reached new heights of invective, as Lieberman emerged both as a strong supporter of the Afghanistan surge and then as a possible obstacle to passage of the health care reform bill in the United States Senate. American liberalism has, since the 1960s, displayed a remarkable capacity for devouring its own, but the spectacle of an entire political movement engaging in a campaign of feverish character assassination against one of its former vice-presidential candidates was truly remarkably to see. More fascinating still was how the cavalcade of abuse seemed to return again and again, as if by some gravitational force, to the issue of Lieberman’s Judaism, which renders this latest round of hatred deserving of broader consideration.

It must be said that most of the corrosive rhetoric employed in this regard was relatively unremarkable—consisting mostly of childish insults and vaguely comprehensible outbursts of liberal antisemitism. Probably the most remarkable was a combination of the two posted at the semi-literate website Wonkette. Under the title “Monsters,” the author described Lieberman as “speaking from a bottomless pit of pain and sorrow, where he lives on the soul-vapors of crushed children.”

Continue reading at The New Ledger.

A People’s History of Howard Zinn

2010-01-29T09:01:00.000-08:00

One of the unwritten laws of opinion journalism is to never kick a man when he’s dead, at least, not until an appreciable amount of time has passed. The question is whether this can or should hold true for those who make their living by doing precisely that. The death at the age of 87 of pseudo-historian Howard Zinn raises this issue all over again, since very few academics have made a better living defaming the dead, with everyone from Columbus to Ronald Reagan, and thousands in between, being accused by the jocular old harpy of any number of hideous crimes, not one of whom, needless to say, being alive to answer the charges. It is, of course, the job of the historian to examine the acts of the deceased; and some consider it an equal part of their profession to pass judgement upon them. In the case of Zinn, however, he passed judgment with such slothful ease, and such obvious sadistic pleasure in issuing his condemnations, that one cannot muster up much sympathy at the prospect of the man’s memory dying by his own sword.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

Andrew Sullivan Crosses the Line

2009-12-01T09:34:00.000-08:00

“How we loved you then,” Jean-Paul Sartre wrote of Albert Camus during their acrimonious split in 1952. This simple but deeply sad phrase sprang to mind the other day when I was informed of Andrew Sullivan’s latest descent into unreason. The occasion was, of course, Sarah Palin’s new book; and Sullivan’s missive went, in part, like this:

This is only the second time in its nearly ten-year history that the Dish has gone silent. The reason now is the same as the reason then. When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her life…. She is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read. And the fact that she is now the leader of the Republican party and a potential presidential candidate, makes this process of deconstruction an important civil responsibility.

As many, including myself, expected, this “deconstruction” was in fact driven by what Sullivan called Palin’s “fantastic story of her fifth pregnancy”; that is, Sullivan’s conspiracy theory that Sarah Palin faked her pregnancy and the child known as Trig is actually someone else’s, most likely one of her daughters.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

The Losing Side | The New Ledger

2009-11-12T08:00:00.001-08:00

The Losing Side | The New Ledger

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Is Joe Klein Nuts? | The New Ledger

2009-11-11T05:16:00.001-08:00

Is Joe Klein Nuts? | The New Ledger

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Dispatch From Israel: Obama’s Hail Mary Pass? | The New Ledger

2009-11-09T08:36:00.001-08:00

Dispatch From Israel: Obama’s Hail Mary Pass? | The New Ledger

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Israel, Hillary, and the Juicebox Mafia | The New Ledger

2009-11-03T10:24:00.001-08:00

Israel, Hillary, and the Juicebox Mafia | The New Ledger

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Unanswered Questions: Why Are Jews Liberals? | The New Ledger

2009-10-28T06:48:00.001-07:00

Unanswered Questions: Why Are Jews Liberals? | The New Ledger

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Report From Israel: The Coming Intifada? | The New Ledger

2009-10-15T10:56:00.001-07:00

Report From Israel: The Coming Intifada? | The New Ledger

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Obama and Israel: Betrayal in the Broken Places | The New Ledger

2009-10-10T14:08:00.001-07:00

Obama and Israel: Betrayal in the Broken Places | The New Ledger

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Obama’s Nobel Prize: The World as Farce | The New Ledger

2009-10-09T08:58:00.001-07:00

Obama’s Nobel Prize: The World as Farce | The New Ledger

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Some Nonsense Verse

2009-08-22T04:17:00.000-07:00

(Pace Award Elder, Sir Cellar Owl, and Dowager Dyer.)

The Highly Disturbing Event

Mr. Cerberus Petulance was walking home one afternoon
When he noticed a highly disturbing event
He wasn't sure just what it was
But nonetheless, it was extremely unpleasant
And led him to contemplate certain other, unpleasant scenarios
Which, while perhaps unlikely, were nevertheless plausible enough
To cause him a certain indiscreet trepidation

Through no fault whatsoever of his own
This proved even more disturbing than the original, highly disturbing, event
Which, of course, somewhat defeated the purpose of the entire exercise
Leading to certain unforeseen consequences
None of them pleasant
And some of them highly disturbing in their own right
Which only goes to show why no one in their right mind
Goes walking in the afternoons
When, as everybody knows
Highly disturbing events occur

***

Someone or Other

Someone or other was usually very late in the mornings
Which was different from everybody else
Who tended to get up early
Because nobody likes to oversleep
Especially when they're somebody
Not just anybody
Which tends to complicate things
Because anybody could be somebody
And nobody wants to stay nobody
Which is precisely why everybody gets up early
And tries to be somebody
Except for someone or other
And nobody likes that

***

The Illustrious Feast

Before the dingly dangly dawn
They dined upon green figs and prawn
They did enjoy those salty fish
Especially in a Chinese dish
Which reminded them of times gone by
And in a squiggling, wriggling, sniggering cry:

"Oh the bestial benefits of brass!
That laid us low in cupid's grasp!
Oh iron, fire, shame, and steel!
Thy desperate tyranny repeal!"

So the long and lingering languid night
Did spare them all the motley sight
Of the churning, burning, yearning crew
Who marched the road from Xanadu
In the gurgling, spurgling, churgling rain
In wracking, cracking, distracting pain
Their wounds in festering odious state
Dying slow, by steady gait
They came upon the feasting few
And devoured them all, as such will do

***

The Biggledy Boggledy Boom

The scraggly, raggeldy, taggledy, haggardly hardly biggledy boggledy boom

Was confined to the corner of his room
Where all day long and to and fro
He sang his higgledy piggledy, wiggledy, woggeldy worldly woe
Alone for a time, he did his best
To take his snoringly, boringly, dreamily doggedly rest
Where else, you may say, could you see such a thing
As a boggledy boom dance, pray, and sing?
But no one was there to embrace the sad beast
Who in his lachrymose heart, hoped that at least
A pleasantly lovingly tuggingly hopefully mopefully heavenly song
Would pass by his door and take him along

The Age of Catastrophic Thinking

2009-08-22T03:35:00.000-07:00

"Probably,” Norman Mailer wrote in 1957, “we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious mind of almost everyone alive in these years.” Today, however, we have something like an answer: We are living in an age of catastrophic thinking. Our social and cultural discourse on any number of subjects—the environment, the economy, public health, technology—is defined by a vocabulary and a worldview that can only be described as apocalyptic. The world, we are constantly told, is in a state of mortal crisis, and unless we act fast enough to stop it, we are all facing disaster and oblivion. Everything, it seems, is swiftly accelerating toward a terrible end.

Read the whole thing at Azure.

Why Michael Bay Is So Incredibly Awesome

2009-08-06T09:06:00.000-07:00

Everyone who writes about movies is now apparently required to hate Michael Bay. The ex-director of commercials and music videos, who has made some of the most successful films of the last decade—Bad Boys, The Rock, Armageddon, Transformers, etc.—has become, without a doubt, the bête noir of modern cinema; or at least of modern movie critics. The critical establishment has never really liked Michael Bay, but the recent release of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which despite having been demolished by every respectable critic on both sides of the Atlantic, is hurtling swiftly toward the box-office stratosphere, was unquestionably the nail in the coffin....

It must be admitted that almost everything the critics have said about Revenge of the Fallen is true to a certain extent. It is not a particularly good film, even by Hollywood blockbuster standards, and Bay is most certainly unsubtle, lowbrow, and unapologetically mercenary. Ironically, however, the critics’ belief that Bay is also a threat to all things decent and civilized in the world, the unabashed critical contempt and hatred that has been directed his way from the beginning of his career, says very little about Bay himself. Instead, it says almost everything about the pathetic state of American film criticism.

It was probably dissident film critic Armond White who sounded the first alarm in 2000, when he went to the barricades for controversial director Brian De Palma and his much-maligned Mission to Mars.

Brian De Palma’s critical drubbing over Mission to Mars—reminiscent of the scene in Airplane! where passengers line up to smack an old lady—is the clearest evidence of the catastrophe that has befallen contemporary film criticism. Mission to Mars is a litmus test. It can be said with certainty that any reviewer who pans it does not understand movies, let alone like them. They’d be better off reviewing static, juvenile media like television or comic books.

White, while unquestionably correct, was somewhat premature. As has now been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt, the real litmus test is Michael Bay.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

Michael Mann’s Dillinger Debacle

2009-08-06T09:05:00.000-07:00

Every great director has at least one truly bad film in him, and Public Enemies is Michael Mann’s. It is not just a failure, but one of those movies in which the gap between its quality and its maker’s talent is so immense as to be nearly inexplicable. To be fair, it is possible that my expectations for Public Enemies, which chronicles the 1933 FBI manhunt for legendary Midwest bank robber John Dillinger, were unfairly high. But from the man who made Manhunter, Thief, Last of the Mohicans, Collateral, and the masterpiece Heat, a film this empty, dull, lifeless, and—most shocking of all—crudely made cannot be anything other than a major disappointment. This may not be fair, but it is a fact. We expect bad films from the likes of Brett Ratner. We expect great ones from Michael Mann. Such is the price of genius, and in Public Enemies, Mann pays it.

In all fairness, however, it must be admitted that Public Enemies is not just Mann’s failure. It is also another in a long line of equally inexplicable failures to successfully translate the myth of John Dillinger and his eventual demise to the screen. I use the term inexplicable because if the Dillinger legend is anything, it is unquestionably a great story. It has love, violence, friendship, irony, and death. It has a charismatic antihero and, in the person of straitlaced FBI agent Melvin Purvis, who led the manhunt, the stoic nemesis who eventually takes him down. It is a quintessentially American story featuring two classic American archetypes—the free-spirited outlaw and the upstanding sheriff—locked in a duel to the death in a world not unlike that of the Western but much more recognizably ours. In other words, it is a story that seems tailor-made for the movies. And yet, Hollywood has proven consistently incapable of doing it justice.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

Star Trek For the Masses: To Boldly Go?

2009-08-06T09:02:00.000-07:00

No one who did not grow up with a Trekkie can possibly understand the hold the series has on its true believers. While my father is, at best, a middling fan (he never, for instance, took the time to learn the Klingon language), I was nevertheless compelled to spend a great deal of my childhood in the presence of Star Trek and its seemingly endless parade of spinoffs, each more second-rate than the last. There was Star Trek: The Next Generation, then Deep Space Nine, then something else, and I’m fairly certain there was something else after that, and Wikipedia claims there was also an animated series (before my time) and, of course, the feature films (eleven at last count).

Despite, or perhaps because, of my long and reluctant relationship with the franchise, I must admit that the willingness of fans to sit through these endless hours of Trek upon Trek upon Trek still mystifies me. There seems to be an almost limitless appetite, on the part of some people, for such things as large, talking, malevolent clouds of gas, unbearably sanctimonious political bromides, often wretched special effects, endless variations on the complications of time travel, and actors in rubber suits pretending to be suspiciously humanoid aliens. The willingness of the rest of us to do so, however, seems to have been understandably declining over time, which is probably why J.J. Abrams was hired to perform the now ubiquitous Hollywood “reboot” that every moribund franchise must undergo in order to reenter the cultural mainstream.

Abrams’s efforts have been met, as everyone now knows, with immense success, mainly because he has dispensed with almost everything that made the series unbearable to semi-normal human beings—the endless complications of time travel remain, taken to their logical extreme. Star Trek in Abrams’s and his writers’ hands is the biggest Buck Rogers movie ever made; a rollicking thrill-ride through the space opera genre, with more starships exploding and lasers blasting per second than George Lucas ever dreamed of in his unfortunate CGI fantasies. It’s all highly enjoyable, and gives one the same giddy, childlike high that Lucas and his oft-accomplice Steven Spielberg specialize in. And yet, one cannot help feeling that something is missing from Star Trek in its new, MTV incarnation. The truth is that, for all its fun and games, Star Trek is not really a particularly good film.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

In Memoriam: J.G. Ballard

2009-08-06T09:00:00.000-07:00

Jonathan has always been completely frank,” James Graham Ballard wrote of his doctor in the 2008 autobiography Miracles of Life, “leaving me with no illusions about the eventual end.” That end came on April 19, 2009, when he died of prostate cancer, but Ballard, to his great credit, never had many illusions about anything. This fervent insistence that we ought not to lie to ourselves, however distressing the truth may be, is likely was made him the Anglophone world’s greatest if most consistently underrated novelist.

To most readers, Ballard is best known for his bestselling Empire of the Sun, a fictionalized retelling of his own childhood in a Japanese prison camp near Shanghai, later adapted into a fairly mediocre film by Steven Spielberg. To others, not all of them charitably inclined, he was creator of the notoriously transgressive novel Crash, which was made into a great but highly controversial film by David Cronenberg. Neither of these momentary eruptions into the mainstream, however, can really convey the depth of one of the most consistently fascinating literary legacies of the late 20th century. Love it or hate it, it cannot be denied that Ballard’s oeuvre retains a place in contemporary fiction that is genuinely unique. In describing it, one is almost forced to fall into quintessentially Ballardian formulations: he was a forensic scientist performing an autopsy on the psychoneuroses of post-war civilization, a psychogeographic culture jammer posing as an unassuming suburban gentleman, a compulsive cartographer of the psychotic topography of the near future, an impish prophet of the erotic catastrophes to come…. One can go on forever with such formulations, but it is perhaps best to recount what he considered the most complimentary review of his life: the reader’s note to the manuscript for Crash, which simply read, “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish.”

To some, this might suggest the kind of hell-bent, psychopathic literary showman typified by Hunter S. Thompson and resurrected as farce by the likes of James Frey. In fact, Ballard was, in life at least, almost preternaturally sane. He lived a quiet life in Shepperton, a suburb of London famous for its movie studios, and raised several children largely on his own. In speech and dress he was almost aggressively conventional, and at times seemed to delight in the incongruence between the hallucinogenic, apocalyptic world of his novels and the stolid, suburban lifestyle he maintained. This incongruence was illusion, however, because Ballard’s greatest talent was to diagnose the psychoses inherent in what is generally regarded as everyday life, and to explore the extraordinary new possibilities they offered for pleasure, beauty, and even love.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

The Awful Anti-Semitism of The Washington Post’s Pat Oliphant

2009-08-06T08:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve been living in Israel and writing about it for so long that very little people say or think about it shocks me anymore. Since the second intifada began in 2000, I’ve been both witness to and target of a veritable rainbow of invective from across the political and ideological spectrum. As a result, I’d become convinced that my jaded sensibilities were unlikely to be shaken anytime soon, something that, I must admit, made me vaguely uncomfortable. So, I must thank Pat Oliphant and the Washington Post for reminding me that I am, thankfully, not nearly as desensitized as I imagined.

When I sat down to write about the cartoon reproduced above, I felt the necessity of restraining my first instincts. As Pierre Vidal-Naquet said about writing his response to Noam Chomsky’s defense of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, “epithets came to my pen.” So I will simply explain, and hope the reader finds for himself the anger aroused by the imagery and its origins.

There is, unfortunately, nothing particularly original about the cartoon above. It is, in fact, one with a long tradition of antisemitic iconography, stretching back at least to the 1930s. The sword-wielding crusader; the shark-toothed Star of David; the hapless victim of Jewish cannibalism; none of this is new. It is, in fact, a series of reproductions, a collage of tropes drawn from various archetypes first employed by Nazi propaganda. This, in and of itself, is not shocking. The visual language of antisemitism has existed for a long time, and it will continue to do so for a long time to come. What is shocking about this cartoon is the fact that it was drawn by an acclaimed American political cartoonist—perhaps America’s most acclaimed political cartoonist—and published in one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the United States. While one should not labor under illusions about the prevalence of antisemitism in such circles, it is usually expressed esoterically enough to indicate a certain amount of doubt and discomfort on the part of those who engage in it. This cartoon, however, is without doubt or discomfort. Its violence is explicit, its hatred manifest, and its origins beyond doubt.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

The Lost World of the Watchmen

2009-08-06T08:56:00.000-07:00

Watching Zack Snyder’s new adaptation of the happily uncredited Alan Moore and the very-much credited Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen is somewhat like watching the CliffsNotes to Moby Dick. Regarding any other product of the comics medium, such a statement would be ludicrously pretentious. In the case of Watchmen, however, we are dealing with something very much like a great work, and films of great works are rarely successful. Made under conditions of extreme aesthetic intimidation, they are always caught between the desire to capture the success of the original by osmosis, i.e. imitation, and the knowledge that cinematic adaptations are almost always at their best when they are least faithful. Snyder’s Watchmen, unfortunately, tends to have the worst of both worlds. Its faithfulness undermines its power, and the moments when it is unfaithful are rarely an improvement.

Snyder has what many other filmmakers in his position have lacked, however, namely a good excuse. Watchmen has long been acknowledged—by director Terry Gilliam and Moore himself, amongst others—to be essentially unfilmable. Its plot can be described fairly simply: a group of retired superheroes, most of whom have no super powers, try to solve the murder of a former colleague in an alternative 1985, in which the world is poised on the brink of nuclear annihilation. This brief if accurate description fails to convey, however, anything of the intensity with which Watchmen assaults the reader. Dense, non-linear, and kaleidoscopic in structure, Watchmen is a book which defies and defines its genre while simultaneously deconstructing it. The comparison to Moby Dick is apt in that Watchmen’s power derives from the fact that it remains a genre piece even while it is subjected to an overwhelming concentration of forces which lead, ultimately, to the sublime destruction of itself and its own medium. Much as Melville set out to write a simple, above-average tale of adventure on the high seas, and ended up anticipating literary modernism by over half a century, Moore and Gibbons set out to create an interesting twist on the superhero genre, and ended up producing a tour de force of post-modernism. Watchmen is a book that got away from its authors and inadvertently became more than the sum of its many, many parts.

Snyder’s film, unfortunately, is nothing but parts. One senses while watching it that the filmmakers cherry-picked the book for its most impressive setpieces, which they then quite faithfully, and quite spectacularly, committed to film, sometimes almost frame-for-frame. Certainly, this leads to some extraordinary moments, but they remain only moments. In Moore’s book, by contrast, they lead inexorably, but completely without the reader’s awareness, to a stunning final reveal in which all the loose threads, all the bizarre twists and turns of his seemingly inscrutable narrative come together in a single, apocalyptic moment involving a vagina dentata straight out of a Freudian nightmare. This horror has, notoriously, been erased from Snyder’s film, along with most of the other small details which could not have been contained in a movie of any manageable length, but which are essential to Moore’s steady escalation toward something like the end of the world. Without its great magician’s reveal, and everything that leads up to it, Watchmen on film feels somehow partial, unfinished, and lost in its own web of homages to the formidable original.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

Anti-Semitism and Israel’s Critics

2009-08-06T08:48:00.000-07:00

The claim that criticism of Israel is not anti-Semitic has become something of a shibboleth. Indeed, the efficacy of the argument would seem to be borne out by the degree to which it is now essentially a cliché. At the same time, however, almost everyone tacitly acknowledges that there is at least some question about the matter, or the principle would not have to be so constantly invoked in the first place.

The argument over criticism of Israel, such as it is, seems to boil down to two irreconcilable propositions. The first claims that Israel is a country like any other which enacts certain policies. These policies are therefore open to criticism just like those of any other country. There is nothing, in fact, can be nothing anti-Semitic about criticizing specific policies, and the accusation of anti-Semitism is therefore little more than an attempt to muzzle those who point out unpleasant truths about Israel’s conduct.

This claim is fairly straightforward, but it has several serious problems. The first is that it is, self-evidently, untrue. Israel, like it or not, is a Jewish state, in fact the only Jewish state. It is therefore, by definition, not a state like any other. The idea that Israel’s identity as a Jewish state can be somehow – I hesitate to use the word “magically” – separated from how it is perceived and judged is a reassuring but nonetheless dubious fantasy.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

The Israeli Elections: A Primer

2009-08-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

To outsiders, especially Americans, the results of yesterday’s elections must appear to be a rather bizarre phenomenon. Barring any last minute surprises, it appears that Tzipi Livni and the Kadima party have received more votes than Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, but the right-wing parties in general have received more votes than the left-wing parties. As a result, Netanyahu, even from second place, may be called upon to form the next Israeli government. This is not necessarily unusual in Israel, where elections rarely mean what they’re supposed to mean, and the winner is never quite a winner. The reason for this is that Israeli democracy is of a decidedly unique variety, and almost the polar opposite of America’s stentorian, carefully constructed republic.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

Tintin, Herge, and the Shadow of Innocence

2009-08-06T08:42:00.000-07:00

The news that Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson will soon be producing a series of films based on the Belgian comics character Tintin has given more than a few of us — and in the Anglophone world, we are indeed few – some pause. We are those who, from our childhoods, have enjoyed considering ourselves the members of a rarified group lucky enough to enjoy the exploits of this enigmatic piece of European pop culture. Tintin has never taken off in America, and probably never will, despite the best efforts of Mr. Spielberg, who is, if he is nothing else, a master popularizer.

The truth is that Tintin has always been the Gallic hero par excellence. There is nothing remotely American about him. And what those of us who love the character and revere his creator — the melancholic and childlike Herge — have always responded to has been precisely that. For us, Tintin was our earliest window into another world. A world far older, more compromised, more frightening, and more pessimistic than the wide-open dreamscape of American pop culture. A world infused with the ever-presence of the political and that particularly European sense of crisis. Tintin’s world is a fantastic landscape that is always in danger of collapse before real-world forces and real-world violence. There could be nothing that is further from the phantasmagoria of the American superhero comics, with their ubermenschen laying waste to the forces of evil, always rendered, even in the supposedly “grim and gritty” genre, as incredulous grosteques, their evil made manifest by their physical deformity and the derangement of their actions.

This was Herge’s genius. His world of adventure is an inversion of the original. The traditional children’s tale brings the adult world into that of the child, so that it is forced to play by a child’s rules: the manic bursts of energy, the corrosive violence of an unfettered and unapologetic Id, authority and evil as mere caricatures of themselves. Herge brought the child’s world into that of the adult. In the person of Tintin, he creates a character who is neither child nor adult, but an interloper, an androgynous, sexless blank, a neutral center around which the mad, frightening spectacle of the adult world revolves.

Read the rest at The New Ledger.

Strange Goings-On at the Spine

2008-06-09T08:49:00.000-07:00

I think I'm a relatively intelligent person, but I find it difficult to understand exactly what Marty Peretz is trying to say in this particular blog post. First he says

Barack Obama's position on the future of Jerusalem is crystal clear.

Meaning

On Wednesday, Obama told the AIPAC conference in Washington that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."

Then, in the next sentence, he says

On Thursday, he told CNN that, of course, Jerusalem will be part of whatever negotiations take place in the context of a peace effort.

Finally asking

Does the second statement contradict the other, as Obama's critics have mobilized themselves into charging?

Well, yes. If Jerusalem is up for negotiation, that means its division is up for negotiation, as the Palestinians have wanted for decades. So, this isn't really that complicated.

Except it is, apparently.

So let's examine what Obama believes. One that Jerusalem is and will continue to be the capital of the Jewish state. There are no ifs or buts about that...

Obama also asserted that the city will remain undivided. This is his guarantee of American backing for a city map that will not cut off the Mount of Olives from the rest of Jerusalem and that Pisgat Ze'ev and Neve Ya'akov which, east of Arab neighborhoods, were added and annexed to Jerusalem after 1967 and will remain in Jerusalem.

But keep in mind that these intricate matters must be hashed out and ratified at the negotiating table.

My personal opinion is that if something is not up for negotiation, then you don't negotiate it. That is, if Obama believes what Peretz says he believes, then Jerusalem should not be an issue for future negotiations. The problem is that Jerusalem will be an issue for future negotiation, everybody knows it, and the presidential candidates are--yes--pandering to the Jewish vote when they say otherwise.

The fact that Obama is not alone in lying his head off when it comes to Jerusalem shouldn't come as any surprise to people who follow Jewish or Israeli politics. Every year the presidential candidates make this or that pledge regarding Jerusalem and never follow through on them. Its become one of those bizarre rituals of American identity politics in which everyone knows they're lying or being lied to and no one particularly cares, because what is important is not the actual policy in question but the due deference being paid to the concerns of the particular group involved.

Peretz's strange take on Obama's blatantly--but not surprisingly--contradictory statements on Jerusalem really says more about Obama and his supporters than it does about American policy toward Jerusalem or Israel in general. For whatever reason, those who have bought into the Obama phenomenon simply cannot seem to wrap their heads around the fact that he is, in fact, a politician, and is perfectly willing to say things he doesn't mean or believe in order to drum up more votes. Especially, its worth noting, among a community of voters who regard him with a fair degree of skepticism. There is nothing overly unusual about this, but Peretz's rather muddled attempt to pretend it isn't happening is a bit disappointing. If there is one thing above all which the Jewish people should have learned from our history, it is that, pace Orwell, messiahs, political or otherwise, should always be judged guilty until proved innocent.

Logos Macabre

2007-10-29T02:14:00.000-07:00

With Halloween nearly upon the non-Jewish world (its one of the few secular Western holidays which is essentially non-existent in Israel, presumably because its pagan roots are so blatantly obvious and so obviously foreign) I was drawn to this blog post by a fellow who doesn't particularly care for Stephen King. He seems conflicted about trying to explain why, since he adores the horror genre and appreciates King's often spirited defense thereof. I have to admit to being somewhat sympathetic. I also love the horror genre (at least, the best of the genre) and I believe it contains, in Poe and Lovecraft, two of the greatest and most consistently underrated modern writers. Nonetheless, I have to take an event less generous attitude towards the aforementioned King. The truth is, he is a terrible writer; and possibly the worst thing that ever happened to the horror genre.

In purely financial terms, this is obviously untrue. If King has accomplished anything, he's brought the horror genre out of the remainder bins and the pulp magazines and put it on the bestseller lists. Through the numerous adaptations of his work, he's also made horror cinema something more than a cult subset of genre cinema and turned it into blockbuster material. In the process, however, he has written some of the worst horror fiction of the 20th century.

When one says such things, it behooves one to be charitable at the outset. Not all of King's work is heinously bad. Some of his short stories (especially the early ones) are surprisingly brilliant, and are both genuinely frightening and stylistically interesting. The early collection Night Shift, in particular, contains some hidden gems, such as the hallucinogenic and marvelously manipulative "Strawberry Spring." His novels, however, and they have grown worse as he gets older, are barely readable, and reading them is often akin to literary root canal.

There are several reasons for this, one of them being King's godawful prose style. With the exception of New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, he writes the most excruciating prose in the English language today. Replete with meaningless clichés, belabored pop cultural references, desperate attempts to transcribe the vernacular, and a clumsy syntax which attempts to emulate interior thought processes through the redolent use of italics; reading King is one of those distinctly unhappy experiences in which the reader gets the rare sense that the author is not only dumber than he is, but isn't even trying to prove otherwise.

This shortcoming of King’s becomes particularly egregious when one considers his predecessors. Poe, for instance, created a prose style so original that he inspired, beginning with Baudelaire, an entire generation of French poets. Lovecraft’s pseudo-archaic style is equally unique; and in the moments of horror, Lovecraft’s torrents of rapturously heinous adjectives are so overwhelmingly terrifying that one barely breathes at the climax of his tales. To a great extent, the freedom that genre bequeaths to its practitioners allows them to anticipate innovations and perversions which mainstream writers will not achieve for decades to come. King, on the other hand, is not only pedestrian, but consciously and aggressively so. As such, he abrogates the one quality that makes genre literature so important and so bracingly original: because it is marginal, it is also liberated. King, I fear to say, is literature in chains of its own making.

To be charitable, however, King does have his virtues. As a friend of mine, and an ardent King fan, once put it; the man spins a great yarn; a quality often cited by his fans against his detractors. There is no doubt that it is sometimes difficult to put down a Stephen King book once one has started it. There is also no doubt, however, that it is sometimes difficult to pick up a Stephen King book once one is halfway through. The primary reason for this, in my opinion, is King’s insistence on character; an indication of his deference to conventional literary norms as well as, perhaps, a hint that he is not nearly as dedicated to his genre as he pretends.

The question of character is one of those literary phenomena which is accepted without thinking by most readers and most critics. Any great novel, it is assumed, must have good characters. In fact, character, or rather too much of it, is a dangerous thing, and should be dealt with cautiously by any writer; all the more so, in fact, when the literature in question is genre literature. And most especially, I think, in the horror genre.

The reason for this is that the horror genre is not about character. The horror genre is about fear. If it becomes about anything else; it becomes diluted, formless, and impotent. Consider, for instance, the shining light of the genre, Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death.” There are, for all intents and purposes, no characters in the story. Or, more precisely, there is a complete lack of characterization. The only named character in the story, Prince Prospero, is drawn in the sketchiest terms. We know nothing of his background, his psychological makeup, his possibly unhappy childhood, etc. We do not know this because we do not need to know this; and because were Poe to include it, it would turn his horror into banality. The truth is, it does not matter who Prince Prospero is or what he does, beyond his brief and desperate actions on the night in question. What is important, to Poe and to all the great practitioners of the genre, is, appropriately, horror; and the topography of horror, the architecture in which horror takes place. Poe’s primary concern in this story, as in most of his other masterworks, is the setting, the multi-colored rooms, the plague-ridden princedom, the macabre costumes of the doomed revelers, the clock inexorably counting down to the dark hour when darkness and decay and the Red Death will hold illimitable dominion over all. Poe understood, as did Lovecraft after him, that to impute character into horror would suffocate the horror itself. The lack of characterization allows the horror to breath; it allows fear to swell into the empty spaces of the tale, infusing it with the raw experience of terror. It is the violence of this immediacy that gives the horror genre its extraordinary power; without it, it is nothing more than macabre puppetry.

King, I fear to say, is the ultimate practitioner of such puppetry. He does have talent for the topography of horror. Whether it is the haunted townships of Castle Rock and Jerusalem’s Lot, or the hotel of horrors in The Shining; but these dark spaces are brightly lit by their egregious interlopers. King’s usual character, a dysfunctional writer grappling with his psychological demons through his experience of horror, is not only uninteresting; he is an obstacle to the true experience of fear. Obsessed as he is with alcoholism, loneliness, childhood traumas, and all the other banal neuroses of middle-class America; King seems perennially unable to simply allow the horror to do its job. The result, unfortunately, is that King’s novels are gripping until the moment they are put down or finished; afterwards, they disappear entirely, as though they never existed. The great ones, Poe and Lovecraft among them, grow more portentous and more horrifying in the recollection of them; and there are few indeed who will shake off Poe’s final image of the castle of corpses, presided over only by the omniscient hand of the final conqueror; or Lovecraft’s heinous revelations of other beings from the depths of infinity itself.

King, on the other hand, is instantly forgettable, not because we do not care about his characters, but because we do not care about his horror. The reason for this may be that King does not truly care about his horror either. His clumsy attempts at depth of character, psychological insight, and even the odd political theme, indicate an author deeply ambivalent about the virtues of his own genre, and a (barely) suppressed desire for mainstream respectability. This is perhaps, the secret to King’s extraordinary success, as well as his ultimate inability to escape mediocrity.

The Inscrutable Angst of Little Round Headed Kids

2007-10-13T03:22:00.000-07:00

Unlike some, I will not say that I was ever Charlie Brown. That is too easy a self-pitying look back across a troubled childhood. I was equal parts Linus and Snoopy, although I think some of my imaginative flights of fancy outdid even the great beagle. "Peanuts", thankfully, remains one of the few relics of my childhood which can still be enjoyed as something more than a guilty pleasure. Unlike the Star Wars trilogy or the Hardy Boys mysteries, which now appear mystifyingly dull and childish, there remains a marvelously deflated innocence in the "Peanuts" universe; one which often appears to me as some perverse, contradictory creation which is simultaneously utterly innocuous and near-terrifying in its implications. Looking at it now, it reads like an episode of the most odious, cliched sitcom imaginable which has been somehow rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Perhaps this strange contradiction is the secret of its wide appeal.

A new biography of the strip's creator apparently reveals a newly comforting look at the strip and its creator. The author of this review is disappointed by the destuction of her childhood illusions
Some readers may feel much the same after finishing Michaelis' biography. Not, however, about the affair with Claudius, which was heartfelt and, in its own small way, tragic. Schulz was no philanderer, though he was prone to crushes on "distant princesses" (c.f., Charlie Brown's little red-headed girl). Rather, it's learning about the depressive, anxious, detached, resentful, self-defeating and self-deceiving personality of the comic strip's creator that's likely to puzzle and sadden some of those who grew up with "Peanuts."
These revelations of lifelong unhappiness and extramarital dalliance may upset some, but I find them strangely comforting. It is somehow comforting to know that one's suspicions that there is something more than mere charming whimsy going on in a still admired piece of childhood literature are confirmed. Of course, some of these are not really revelations. Schultz never made much of a secret of the fact that the oft-noted despair of his work was deeply ingrained in his own psyche. Which was, of course, the secret to his creation's highly unusual success. Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of "Peanuts" success is the fact that it is nearly unique among the icons of American popular culture in that it is fundamentally pessimistic. While American literature has sometimes embraced pessimism, its popular culture is almost uniformly dedicated to optimism. Not only does "Peanuts" have no happy endings, it has no endings whatsoever. The Sisyphean cycle of missed footballs and kite-eating trees continues on infinitely. It is fitting that Schultz ended the strip without tying up any of its loose ends. A baseball game won or a Great Pumpkin seen would have untied the Gordian knot that made "Peanuts", even in its later years, a thing of mottled greatness.

Perhaps "Peanuts" remains popular because it touches on one of the unspoken anxieties of America, something that is rarely understood by foreigners: the sense of infinitude, of unendingness to a continent so vast that it can never be grasped or even truly concieved of. On the two coasts, perhaps, there is a sense of a world bordered by the sea. But in the vast, unknowable interior which is nine-tenths of the American land mass and thus nine-tenths of its soul, there is that sense of a horizon which never ends, of being wrapped about by an infinitude which echoes the infinitude of death and the universe beyond. Fitzgerald described it as the place where "the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night." Indeed they do, on midwestern nights, the land and the sky merge and one has the sense of traveling through an illimitable ocean without beginning or end.

To return to the mundane, it is clear that "Peanuts" takes place in that overwhelming interior, where the vast aimlessness of the land and the sky push the individual towards contemplation of a world which seems as indifferent and uncaring as it is impossibly enormous. The simple stone wall on which Charlie Brown and Linus regularly discourse on the meaninglessness of life's small degradations is a weak, artifical barrier against this feeling of an alien enormity.

But it is mistaken, and not merely pretentious, to see "Peanuts" as a kind of existential fairy tale. Existentialism proposes action before essence. "Peanuts" sees action as meaningless and degrading, a perpetual dash for a football which is always pulled away at the last moment. And really, if the football were finally kicked, what would it matter? Charlie Brown is beloved and heroic (he is undoubtedly a rare brand of hero, but a hero nonetheless) because despite his many humiliations, he is utterly and undeniably good. What saves "Peanuts" from being a flaccid morality tale is the fact that his goodness guarantees neither happiness nor success. Indeed, it often prevents him from achieving either of them. But Charlie Brown's goodness is unshakable. It is as real a part of him as his enormous, impossibly circular cranium. Charlie Brown's endless grief is nonetheless redeemed in the eyes of the reader because of how deeply touching it is to see good persist in the face, not of evil, but of emptiness and futility.

This futility is the source of the strip's humor. The truth is that "Peanuts" was never particularly funny. Its humor lies in the absurd; the absurdity of the situations and circumstances in which its characters find themselves. What gives the strip its primal force is the fact that, good or bad, each of its primary characters is possessed of an interior, incorporeal, unshakablesoul. They are, in short, undeniably and achingly human. The most prominent emotion in "Peanuts" is a sort of pleasurable sadness; a melancholy which leads us to a kind of warmth; a comfort which is all the more real for its unsparing despair.

In this sense, "Peanuts" may be the most truly American creation of the 20th century; and it is fitting that it should take place in such an aggressively democratic medium as the comic strip. Its fundamental image, that of a modest yet inescapable good faced with an implacable emptiness, may sometimes appear cliched, pat and arbitrary; but to rid ourselves of it would be a loss not only for the child within us, but also for the adult who has forsaken nostalgia without foregoing the willingness to look upon things with eyes not yet ready to accept a complete divorce from the possibility of a simple happiness.

The Inevitability of Neoconservatism

2007-10-09T02:37:00.000-07:00

Joshua Muravchik has a new article in Commentary defending the neoconservative movement from its many, often hysterical, critics. His argument boils down to this

In sum, the most persuasive criticisms of the Iraq war—that we sent too small a force, that we erred in dismantling the Iraqi state, that we would have been wiser to concentrate on Iran—do nothing to impeach neoconservatism. And as for the criticisms that do aim at the distinctly neoconservative tenets of the war—that we should have deferred to the UN, that we should have avoided resorting to force, that we should not have tried to bring democracy to Iraq—none is persuasive.

I'm not entirely convinced of this. There is certainly a case to be made that Iraq is not ready for and/or does not want democracy, which is their business to a certain extent. Of course, once that lack of democracy reaches the point where is foments terrorism it becomes very much the business of others who may be potential targets. But this does not really mitigate the essential issue, which is that the War on Terror or a war with terror is happening and will continue to happen. The neoconservative perspective on that war will likely continue to guide the policy of the United States -- and indeed of others who would be loath to admit as much -- because it is, in fact, the only stance that the democratic world can plausibly adopt.

A war such as the one we are now engaged in presents, if one looks at it honestly, with very few options. We can simply cease to fight it, which is what much of the anti-neoconservative argument boils down to, and take the inevitable consequences; none of which are particularly attractive. On the other hand, we can engage in a scorched-earth policy towards the Middle East, ending in either the total decimation of that region or the installment of various dictators who will use extraordinary violence to suppress terror and radical Islam as well. This option is not only doomed to failure but is politically and morally untenable for democratic societies, in their current form at any rate.

This leaves no option except, interpreted broadly, the neoconservative option; or, at least, the option now identified with the neoconservatives. That is, military action against terror and terror supporting regimes combined with a conscious policy of democratization in the Muslim world. This need not take place solely through mass warfare. There are numerous other, perhaps better, options. On the other hand, there will come points at which mass warfare will be necessary, and perhaps even preferable to any other course of action.

Ultimately, any war against terrorism is an intelligence war, and that is likely where things are moving in the post-Iraq era now taking shape. This will have its own challenges, and democratic nations are going to have to embrace certain policies -- such as targeted assassinations -- with which they are inherently uncomfortable in order to win it. Nonetheless, such compromises may not appear so daunting when we contemplate the reality of capitulation, which is not nearly so attractive in the real world as it may appear in the ease and comfort of the abstract.

To My Anti-Chomskyite Comrades

2007-10-08T01:26:00.000-07:00

My apologies for my long silence. The good news is that I have been recently hired as the new assistant editor of Azure magazine, an achievement that I owe, in large part, to my previous blog and your loyal readership. For that, I thank you. Unfortunately, between getting settled in my new job and moving to Jerusalem, it has left me little time for blogging. I hope to rectify that in the near future. I have decided to move all my writing to this blog, so that I can deal with issues above and beyond anti-Chomskyism.

Due to my other commitments, posts will likely be fewer and farther between than in the past. But I will endeavor to keep writing them. Everything I have achieved thus far has been due to the blogosphere and your loyal support. I have no intention of abandoning what I consider to be the freest and most exciting form of writing in the world today. I hope you will continue to read and enjoy my small contributions to it.