I really did think—naively, I guess—that this was over and done with, a triumph indicating at least an inkling of collective dignity, when Rupert Murdoch caved to outside pressure and pulled the thing from the presses. 

Oh but no. The American people will get their "If I Did It", courtesy of—wait for it—Ron Goldman's family, which seized the manuscript in a lawsuit. Some of the proceeds will go to the Ron Goldman Foundation for Justice, apparently. The rest, to the devil. 

I mean for God’s sake: they could have had a public ceremony and burned the thing. They could have kept it in a safe in a room in the basement. But no: the bullshit self-consuming therapeutic ethos that dominates so much contemporary fiction says: “the people must know”. For Ron’s sake. Because the truth—which, by the way, this isn’t—will set you (yes, You) free. Ah, closure. What dividends it pays to us poor among the living.

The idea that "exposing this confessional” to the rest of the world bravely—self-sacrificingly!— does justice to OJ's victims is so bogus it hurts. For starters, it is nothing the rest of America doesn’t already know, and know, and know. This is redundantly cruel, like a Shrek 3 with murder. 

 Anyhow, Timothy Noah has a multi-part review of the book’s actual merits:

 "Sit back, people," O.J. writes on the book's first page. "The things I know, and the things I believe, you can't even imagine."

"And I'm going to share them with you. Because the story you know, or think you know—that's not the story. Not even close. This is one story the whole world got wrong."

By even half-considering the book seriously, as, you know, literature, Noah manages to send several frissons equal parts anger, disgust, and fear down your spine.

The New Statesman reports that Saudi society is beginning to rebel against the country’s infamous religious police, or mutawwa'in, which have long served as enforcers for the seriously-named Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice:

 …public outcry has encouraged others to come forward and protest abuse by the committee. The most prominent case has been that of a 50-year-old Riyadh woman who was kidnapped, along with her daughter, by two committee members who then crashed her car. As a result, three lawsuits have been lodged against the committee, which has never been legally challenged before.

Established as part of the pact between the religious establishment and the House of Saud, the mutawwa'in have symbolised the quid pro quo arrangement of Saudi Arabia - religious sanction in exchange for religious influence. Their special status has protected committee members from criticism and given them virtually unlimited power. Even as recently as 2003, the editor of a prominent Saudi newspaper was fired for daring to challenge the committee.

Yet in the past few weeks, outrage against the committee has burst forth from almost all corners of Saudi society. Editorials critical of the religious police have abounded, even in the historically censored Saudi press. A controversial online poll on the mutawwa'in, conducted by the Saudi-owned news outlet al-Arabiya, attracted the highest number of votes since the website was founded. Almost 35 per cent of respondents supported dismantling the committee.

As one Saudi blogger who runs a satirical site called the Religious Policeman [muttawa.blogspot.com] puts it: "They are the no-hopers, the social misfits, the failed imams . . . ugly in nature, ugly in behaviour." Indignation is so high that there have been physical attacks on the religious police, with 21 incidents reported last year.

Official critiques of the police have also been forthcoming. The National Society for Human Rights, officially sanctioned by the rulers, has taken the committee to task. A recent report by the group condemns various mutawwa'in practices, including "humiliating people during interrogation" and "beating people and using force to arrest suspects". Dr Muhammad al-Zalfa, a member of the advisory Shura Council, recently lashed out at the committee, saying: "Those who make mistakes must be punished, and we must lift the religious, political and social immunity off them."

…the outcry has clearly had an effect: the interior ministry recently published a directive pointedly reminding committee members to transfer suspects to the police, rather than holding them in detention centres. The committee has also hired a public spokesman for the first time and established a legal department to be known as the "Department of Rules and Regulations" - moves that illustrate the extent to which the committee has lost its infallible status…

 Five years ago, the mutawwa’in  prevented a group of schoolgirls from exiting a burning school in Mecca because they weren’t wearing the proper religious dress, a move which was defended by the House of Saud even after 15 of the girls were killed and 50 others injured. Catholic priests—there are 100, 000 Catholics in SA—have been arrested for saying mass. And in May of this year, a man was beaten to death for being suspected of having alcohol in his home.

Time reported this month that a campaign is sending text messages to a million Saudis to declare that “2007 is the year of liberation”. Without being there, it’s impossible to sense what’s prompting this change in SA—it’s more than just the internet and technology—but it’s worth tracking whether a refomation of the religious police will actually be realized, if , according to al-Watan columnist Khalid al-Ghanami, everyone will realize “that such practices, which did not bother many people in the past, are by no means acceptable today."

Angry Blog:

Christopher Hitchens: “Of the suicide bombing population, 100% are faith-based.” (at 52 min)

"Wrong. Prior to 2003, the leading suicide bombing organization was the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lankda, a secular, Marxist-influenced separatist group."

 Robert Pape, the leading American scholar on suicide bombings, shows in an absurdly illuminating article that the origins of terrorism are not in Islamic fundamentalism but rather in firsthand experience of foreign—particularly US—occupation. He writes:

 “The evidence shows that the presence of American troops is clearly the pivotal factor driving suicide terrorism. If Islamic fundamentalism were the pivotal factor, then we should see some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world, like Iran, which has 70 million people—three times the population of Iraq and three times the population of Saudi Arabia—with some of the most active groups in suicide terrorism against the United States. However, there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Iran, and we have no evidence that there are any suicide terrorists in Iraq from Iran. Sudan is a country of 21 million people. Its government is extremely Islamic fundamentalist. The ideology of Sudan was so congenial to Osama bin Laden that he spent three years in Sudan in the 1990s. Yet there has never been an al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from Sudan. I have the first complete set of data on every al-Qaeda suicide terrorist from 1995 to early 2004, and they are not from some of the largest Islamic fundamentalist countries in the world. Two thirds are from the countries where the United States has stationed heavy combat troops since 1990. Another point in this regard is Iraq itself. Before our invasion, Iraq never had a suicide-terrorist attack in its history. Never. Since our invasion, suicide terrorism has been escalating rapidly with 20 attacks in 2003, 48 in 2004, and over 50 in just the first five months of 2005. Every year that the United States has stationed 150,000 combat troops in Iraq, suicide terrorism has doubled.”

Tim Lee at The American Scene adds:

"It’s fascinating how close the correlation is between the 9/11 hijackers and US deployments. 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, which hosted thousands of American troops at the time of the 9/11 attack. Two more were from the United Arab Emirates, which is currently host to about 1100 American troops. Another is from Egypt, which has 384 American troops as part of a peacekeeping force on the Sinai Peninsula, and also carried a Saudi passport. And the final hijacker was from Lebanon, a country that doesn’t currently have any American troops, but he was seven when Israel invaded Lebanon and eight at the time of the barracks bombing, two events that could easily have made a big impression on him.Among the hijackers there were no Iranians, Syrians, Sudanese, or residents of other countries where radical Islam flourish but the United States did not have a troop presence. No Iraqis either."

I hope that this will be the beginning of the end for all those that find comfort—and an excuse not to seriously confront the issue—in the generalization that Islam, the religion, is the source of today’s evils. It might be of use to novelists, too, who'll have to go beyond the Wikipedia page on Islam in order to create the believable psychology of a suicide bomber.  

In May, Mickey Mouse’s Islamofascist cousin—the one that’s never invited to the weddings—was beaten to death by an Israeli terrorist. But never fear, never fear, for the Disney franchise is stocked with willing martyrs…and so it was that last week Simba, the Lion King himself, was shown on Hamas’ al-Aqsa television network fighting an evil army of rats, wielding Israeli guns and adorned by US dollars—Fatah, of course. Do listen for the actual dubbed-in voice of Mohammed Dahlan, former Fatah leader, here incarnated as the chief rat.

Among the 500 entries for the Blake Prize for Religious Art in Australia are a painting depicting Osama bin Laden as Jesus Christ and a statue of the Virgin Mary covered in a blue burqa familiar to Afghani women that lived under the Taliban. The outrage and the debate—if you can call it that—is predictably stale, because the anti- side if reflexively offended but also because the art itself isn’t good. I don’t know how some artists get away with claiming provocativeness to be the supreme goal of art, especially since—by these standards, at least—anyone out of ideas and marginally shameless can be provocative. If you’re going to get people talking, you should be able to answer them. Otherwise, stun their sleeping asses into woken silence. Also: how is this “religious art”?

Damien Hirst, the obscenely rich and famous British artist, is more complicated. His diamond-encrusted platinum skull was sold today for US $ 10 million. If you’ve ever seen Hirst speak, or even read what he’s said, it’s clear that he’s a performance artist, that the man’s responses to the (eagerly awaited) criticisms of his art are as much a part of the art, more so, even, than the inanimate spectacles themselves. The art never stops, and Hirst is clearly calculating, if not always consciously. The fact that richer he gets the better an artist he becomes is, as far as I can tell, a new one for history. Worse, weirder, is that if you try to protest, you add to it. 

This past summer, I discovered Roberto Bolano (somewhat embarrassingly, since Latin America had long since proclaimed him the most important writer of his generation, but US literary critics were only just catching on to the already overdue English translations). I read his book of short stories, Last Evenings on Earth, and two of his short novels: By Night in Chile, which is a dying priest-literary critic’s monologue, and Distant Star, which is about a fascist poet-pilot who writes poems in the sky, among other things. Naturally, the recommendation came to me blogospherically, through blogs like S. Esposito's Conversational Reading and the Literary Saloon.

Indeed, the first inklings of attention became viral, widespread anticipation for the upcoming translation of The Savage Detectives, which anticipation, now that TSD is in hardback on the front table of B & N, has been translated into a veritable orgy of Important attention (the Wood is behind Select). The hype at this point is almost too much (and you have to wonder at how free people feel to praise posthumously: Bolano died in ’03 at 50), so that I’m not even sure if I loved Bolano as much as I thought I did and I’m paralyzed into sort of saving The Savage Detectives like I saved Infinite Jest.

It’s merciless, and now the indecisive B. Kunkel of N+1 has a review in the London Review of Books. At first, it’s necessarily heavy on straight info that’ll be familiar to anybody who’s been trying to keep up, but the discussion of TSD, which I wish I had resisted reading, is, like the other reviews by Kunkel I've read, diverse, serious without being self-congratulatory, and occassionally unabashedly passionate (TSD "is something of a miracle" and "appallingly lifelike"). This cuts to the essence of RB:

 Bolaño’s desperado image is a large part of his appeal. His revolutionary politics and the personal risk they entailed, the movement he founded, his poverty, exile and addiction, his death in his prime: the combination of these elements is foreign to the increasingly professionalised career of the contemporary writer. Bolaño’s dishevelled, wandering characters are, more profoundly than they are left-wing, anti-bourgeois, which is to say disdainful of comfort, security and success: an attitude more than a politics, but the attitude is deeply felt. Even to write ‘marvellously well’, Bolaño declared, was not enough; ‘the quality of the writing’ depended on the author’s understanding ‘that literature is basically a dangerous calling’.

But Bolaño would not be so strange or significant a writer if he had not found a way of handling his dangerous calling with simultaneous reverence and irony. And ‘calling’ is the word: there is never any question in Bolaño of another vocation. He is a writer for whom what Nietzsche said about music would seem to go without saying about literature: without it, life would be a mistake. But there is also an important sense – as Bolaño demonstrates again and again – in which both he and his narrators are without literature, in the desolate way that a religious person might find himself without God. Part of this is simply that these stories and novels narrated almost exclusively by and about poets don’t contain (with one notable exception) any examples of the poets’ verse, and Bolaño often invites us to doubt how much a poet writes or how well. But it’s not just that his fiction about poets excludes their poetry; his fiction excludes many of the familiar components of fiction. Sponsored and sustained by devotion to literature, these books nevertheless abstain from what we think of as literary writing. In Bolaño’s fiction, it is as if – but only as if – literature were what he was writing about, but not what he was doing.

One thing I’ve been thinking about Bolano is the absence of any discussion of drugs or addiction in his writing, since he was a recovered heroin addict; if he were an American, you can bet he’d have at least one fictional memoir, and many more talk show apperances. Instead, though, you get the sense from his writing that literature really was a religion for Bolano, something for him to be saved by—what makes it so moving is not the strength of his conviction but the fact that as much as anything else he seems to be trying to convince himself by convincing us that he means what he's saying, that "a poet can endure anything". There is the former addict's tentative irony right there on the surface, actually. And there’s also this threat of indifference, a sort of menacing ominous placidness, in his character’s voices that I don’t think is the result of any sort of energy lost in translation (which, having read some of By Night in Spanish, are mind-bogglingly good). Enough--and get ready: the even bigger 2666 is on its way.

Sometimes I feel like criticizing Bill O'Reilly is so easy I must be falling into a trap, like he designs what he says not to actually say anything but to elicit the sort of impassioned immediate rebuttals from the left that can often end up sounding self-righteous, hysterical. That said, this gem written for the Jewish World Review is ridiculous—and not even really because of my politics, but because Bourne was actually an awesome movie. But I refuse to quote him. At Slate, Mickey Kaus defends O’Reilly’s claim that The Bourne Supremacy is a typically anti-American movie:

 I wish I could say Bill O'Reilly was wrong about Paul Greengrass' Bourne Ultimatum being an anti-American film, but I saw it last weekend and O'Reilly's right. It's not just that the script plays on opposition to Bush anti-terror tactics--waterboarding, etc. Or that in a moment of calm hero Matt Damon utters maybe 15 of the 40 words he speaks in the film and explains that he's simply trying to apologize for ... well, the CIA's sins, or maybe America's. Just because you oppose waterboarding and believe the U.S. has a lot to apologize for doesn't make you anti-American. The problem is the film is unredeemed by any sense that America or the American government ever stands for or does anything that is right. It is a big hit overseas. ...

 The film also made me feel guilty, because I watched Greengrass' United 93 and left convinced it was a searing indictment of Bush's behavior in the hours after 9/11. (Air controllers spend much of the film trying to locate the AWOL President so they can obtain an order to shoot down the hijacked jet.) I didn't know anything about Greengrass, and the film looked like it had been based on actual records by a meticulously dispassionate observer. But Greengrass' Bourne film undermines his credibility and retrospectively dissolves United 93's anti-Bush power. I don't trust anything the man makes. ... P.S.: Has Big Hollywood made a single non-anti-US post-9/11 film I missed? I can't remember one (aside from Team America: World Police, which was a self-mocking puppet cartoon).. ... And don't say World Trade Center. That passed up several potentially epic patriotic moments (e.g. the Dave Karnes story) in favor of a soggy tribute to the fraternity of New York transit cops. ... Next up: In the Valley of Elah, a well-made version of the Scott Beauchamp Story. ... Is it the international market that makes our studios behave this way? I sense an underserved domestic niche. …

It being several days later, Christopher Orr has pretty much said what needed to be said in response to the “jingoistic nonsense” claims that the movie’s anti-American, here and here and here. I’d only add that at this point you’d think it was obvious that the conflation between the American government and institutions and America itself is something that should be deconstructed, not perpetrated, by Americans. The “this isn’t Us” line is clearly, and justifiably, anti-CIA, which really is the patriotic position to take. As Orr notes, the movie does put forward an alternate version of America, which is one in which Bourne the individual reclaims morality from bureaucracy—the fact that he only says 15 or 40 words is a nice alternative to shrill empty protest, too.

Also, I would hope that the international market pressures our studios to make self-critical films. World Trade Centert did try to be patriotic, and thought it was responding to American demand, but failed and failed boringly (bring on Any Given Sunday II, Stone!) finding out it wasn’t (so did Greengrass' United 93, I think, which, somewhat understandably, wasn't brave enough to tell any sort of made-up story, hiding in the robes of objectivity, instead). O’Reilly was, however, sort of right about his “impressionable audiences”: movies shape the sentiment as much as (probably more than) they reflect them, which is why 50 years later a movie like The House on 92nd Street, which I saw as part of the NYC Noir series at Film Forum a few weekends ago, has us laughing, and unusually loudly, where our parents seriously hooted and cheered. 

Oh and right: if you  love/hate America, read these. 

As funny as this and this may be, it gets tiresome really quickly. It’s not that Rebublican hypocrisy re: homosexuality shouldn’t be publicized, but the immediate and widespread glee buries the actual seriousness and does Liberals a disservice in the long run.  Think about it: wouldn’t absolute silence, or, since  that’s impossible, simply straightforward reporting, be a curious but effective way for Liberals to say what they need to say without saying it, gain steam, Move On? Republicans are taking care of themselves, anyway.

Leave it to Jamie Kirchick, guest blogging for A. Sullivan, to dig beyond the headlines and continue to show compassion—even when many will argue it’s unwarranted— for Craig. It’s an almost Christian, unbearably wise, move on his part:

 In the fall of 1955, 12 men were arrested in Boise, Idaho for "infamous crimes against nature." Over a decade, it had been alleged, some of the city's most prominent men operated an underworld gay prostitution ring with hundreds of teenage boys. A story in Time, published after the scandal emerged, characterized the feelings of the day : "Boise, Idaho (pop. 50,000), the state capital, is usually thought of as a boisterous, rollicking he-man's town, and home of the rugged Westerner." How shocking, then, that there could be gay people living there. One of the more humane participants in this episode was the chief of the state's Department of Mental Health, who, rather than advocate that the men face jail time, offered that, "One alternative might be to let them form their own society and be left alone."

 There's a documentary film about this episode called "The Fall of '55."

 Initial claims that over a hundred boys were abused were exaggerated; only four or five boys were involved. But lives were ruined, gay men fled the city, and the sexual witch-hunt left a stamp on the state. Larry Craig is just one of the more public victims of the cultural atmosphere in this country that portrays homosexuality as disgusting and something of which to be ashamed. There are many, silent sufferers like him. You could see his shame in yesterday's press conference, and that the specter of Boise, 1955 has hung over Larry Craig all his life.

 Shit. Maybe he is human, after all. 

Daniel Rothschild as an informative piece on the 2nd anniversary of Katrina, the first of three to delineate three myths about the rebuilding efforts in Katrina. Today’s myth: “The main impediment to rebuilding the Gulf Coast is a lack of federal money.” The argument is that the efforts are not wanding for funds but, well, effort. This being Reason, it is an intelligent indictment of "all levels of government". Searching the web, there seems to be a relative quiet about this the 2nd anniversary of Katrina. Only the most hardcore of college students are still down there, let alone thinking about it. At least the Spike Lee documentary still on HBO on demand.

In preparation for next year’s Olympics, the Chinese government has made a concerted effort to crack down on “chinglish." Now it is confronting the more serious problem of reducing the incredible amount of pollution in Beijing.

Considering that these developments have clearly happened in anticipation of international attention, it’s clear that the Chinese government’s motivation is not to improve communication with foreign countries or ensure the health and comfort of Olympic athletes (forget its own people) but to pretty up its image—that is, sheer stubborn pride (which is why when it comes to iPhones, say, they'll giddily flout international patent laws).

Logically, then, this really ought to work. Why does it feel like wishful thinking? (And why is it semi-embarrassing to make obvious points, even when they’re right? The banality of talking about evil?)

As the Olympics approach, people with all sorts of beef with China will seize the opportunity, not just those concerned with the genocide in Darfur, but China’s support of the genocide in Darfur is the most important protest for Americans, athletes and spectators alike. That said, here’s hoping that Spielberg, Johnny Cheek, and anyone else who decides to protest resists the impulse to go all Live Earth on China—all they have to do, and, really, this is the most effective protest, is show up, shut up, and refuse to play along.

Good news for Brazilians seeking a sex-change: your national health care system has you covered. The Brazilian government is, in fact, opposed, claiming that it doesn’t have enough money to pay for the operations (the Ministry of Health estimated that about 1 in 10, 000 Brazilians would sign up for the surgery, which costs about $1000 US dollars), but a court ruling is the thing, asserting that a safe (the chief judge said that the ruling would prevent transsexuals from self-mutilation in attempting to perform the surgery themselves) and publicly-subsidized surgery is a constitutional right.

Of course, in order to receive the subsidized surgery patients will have to be approved by a panel of doctors after extensive medical and physical examinations have taken place. Still, this raises all sorts of interesting questions. Is feeling like a woman trapped in a man’s body, or vice-versa, a physical condition (“I am a woman”) or a mental condition (“I feel like a woman”)? Does one type of condition take primacy over the other? Is it unfair that, as it stands in the US and elsewhere, sex-changes (like psychoanalysis) are generally a luxury? Should—can—the government protect you from yourself?

By using public health care to fund sex changes, people—patients?—would be implicitly defining their pre-operation states as an illness*, which I’m pretty sure many of them would be uncomfortable with, if only because it damns those that don’t have the operation. In less ambiguous, more insidious, matters, Brazilians have shown a purely ugly and physical approach to sexuality—trends which have indeed affected American culture. If the US ever achieves national health care, will we cover sex-changes? What about cosmetic surgery? Therapy? Who gets to decide? The experts (often influenced by factors other than their expertise) or the people-patients?

*Personally, I’m with Hamm: “We’re on Earth. There’s no cure for that.”

Was it inevitable? As of Monday, the Vatican has its own airline. Of course, this isn't your usual commercial undertaking; it's a practical response to spiritual matters.  Sounding a lot like a CEO (or is it the CEOs that sound like him?), Father Cesare Atuire of the Vatican pilgrimage office explained: "The spirit of this new initiative is to meet the growing demand by pilgrims to visit the most important sites for the faith". How much to the Holy Land? Unclear, undecided. However, noted Father Atuire, it is important to “bear in mind that the customers will be pilgrims and do not have a great deal of money to spend.” 

 Certainly this is part of the continued attempt by the Vatican to reconcile its rootedness in tradition with modernity, expressed in Benedict’s first encylical, “Deus et Caritas” ("God is Love"). More saliently, however, it seems like a response to the central religious experience of Islam, the Hajj, which sent two million Muslims to Mecca in December 2006, and even, maybe, to the more familiar—and incredibly successful—Birthright, which sends many of us financially fortunate pilgrims to Israel for free.

 What’s the difference between sightseeing and soul-searching? When does a religious pilgrimage become spiritual tourism? Or has modernity rendered the two the same thing? Is the Vatican doing this for the pilgrims or for itself (or is that really the same thing)? Religion can certainly seem like shopping—though, really, I think that it’s the other way around, that shopping can seem a lot like religion.

Cardinal Camillo Ruini, who will serve as the official tour guide for the tour group making the inaugural flight to the shrine in Lourdes, France, justified the Church’s newest accommodation, saying that “the way to make pilgrimages can change over time, but their deepest meaning remains the same: to look for a deeper contact with God.” Whether the Vatican can keep up with competing airlines like Dublin-based Ryanair—which boasted in a staement:  “Ryanair already performs miracles that even the pope’s boss can’t rival, by delivering pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela for the heavenly price of 10 euros”—remains to be seen.  I suppose it’s the consumer’s choice.

NY Mag writer Philip Weiss has a long piece on Matt Drudge. It is weird to find the portrait of Drudge--which paints him as barely educated, possibly gay, probably libertarian, and conspiratorial to his core--so fascinating, if only because (as Drudge proves he knows too well) he has always been the window into the bedroom, not the shady figure at the dresser himself.

The article offers a man nearly literally made of the internet as Drudge's reality; whatever hint of a future demise there is in Weiss's portrait links Drudge, whose substance is News, to the internet itself. I'm not sure that Drudge is "the most powerful journalist" in the US, but after this I'd argue he may be the most interesting. Maybe when the movie comes out it'll go straight to YouTube. Anyhow, the article is worth it, if only for Drudge's self-description of himself as a "failed Bar Mitzvah" and for his--there's no other word--sweet plea to a radio listener to let him have his Hillary Clinton.

Jason Zengerle has a really worthwhile piece posted at TNR online (subscription required, I think) in which he details the growing number of converts to the Orthodox Church in the US, a large number of which are former Evangelicals. He charts a general disillusionment with the materialism, politics, and anti-intellectualism of the Evangelical church that has a lot of younger believers turning to the Orthodox Church: 

 This is an appealing idea, particularly to younger Orthodox converts who view evangelicalism as corrupted by the generation born right after World War II. "Baby boomers had an overweening confidence that our creativity and spontaneity was fascinating and rich," says Frederica Mathewes-Greene, a one-time charismatic Episcopalian who's now a prominent Orthodox speaker and author. "The following generation sees it as not all that rich. They find the decades of the rock band onstage performing songs kind of shallow. They're looking past their parents for something earlier."

 In the past year, two friends of mine, both from reform (if that) Jewish families, have graduated rabbinical school and, to the confusion and chagrin of their parents, become conservative rabbis. Along with Zengerle's article, I think this too hints at a nascent conservatism in my generation that is not so much political as it is private and personal. It's not necessarily at odds with political liberalism, though I think that's because one aspect of it is a disillusionment, if not a disgust, with political promises (which is often then realized as a sort of reactionarily willed ignorance). Zengerle writes of one young convert:

 But it wasn't just the foreignness of the Orthodox Church; it was its bigness that appealed to DeRenzo, as well. Indeed, as she continued to talk, it became clear that, as an evangelical, she had felt very small and alone. It was a surprising sentiment to hear from someone about the evangelical movement. After all, ever since the rise of the Moral Majority, American evangelicals have arguably been the most politically powerful religious group in the country. But perhaps the most telling revelation of the Orthodox conversion trend is that this political power has not translated into a sense of spiritual power--or belonging. For these converts, it seems, the Orthodox Church has solved the unbearable lightness of being evangelical. "When I was in [an evangelical church], I was thinking, This is great, I love this,'" DeRenzo said. "But I thought, and I don't mean to be morbid, but eventually some day this pastor is going to die or I'm going to move away, so if this is the only place in the world where the truth is, that's tragic." DeRenzo paused and looked around the sanctuary at the icons and the candles. She went on, "Coming to the Orthodox Church means that I am in communion with that church no matter where I am in the world, that I can go into that church wherever I am and have the same liturgy and celebrate the same way. I'll be in communion with other people. And that is so huge. That hugeness is so exciting."

 In truth, I think that the thirst for this "hugeness" is much more evident in the careerism, obsession with dating and marriage, and general "life plans"--which evoke an undynamic and conformist conservatism more in tune with the political Evangelical brand--that mark my generation than in any sort of general turn towards a deeper, more meaningful, more individual religious experience rooted in the authority of tradition. Still, it has me rethinking my initial contempt for my ex-hebrew school buddies turned conservative rabbis, though also wondering whether their new conservatism (which lets them wear NY Yankee yarmulkes) shouldn't be considered next to the more drastic, and, arguably, subversive, turns towards Orthodoxy. 

PZ Myers, blogger and science writer for Seed, is being sued 15 million dollars by Dr. Stuart Pivar for panning Pivar's book (okay, twice). The Panda's Thumb reports:

The plaintiff of the case is none else than Dr. Stuart Pivar, NYC businessman and art collector, who burst on the evolution/creationism scene a couple years back claiming that, based on conversations he had with the late Stephen J Gould, he could assert for a fact that Gould really opposed the basic tenets of modern evolutionary theory, and the role of natural selection in particular. According to Pivar, Gould only endorsed evolutionary theory (in dozens of books and hundreds of articles, not to mention sworn court testimony!) under some sort of duress from the iron fist of the enforcers of “Darwinian orthodoxy”.

The obvious nonsense was discussed in various articles here at PT and elsewhere, but of course the absurdity of that canard was not enough to deter the usual peanut gallery of gullible Creationists, Denyse O’Leary foremost among them, from getting all excited about the matter.

Anyway, besides liberally reinterpreting Gould’s entire scientific opus, Pivar’s other personal involvement with evolutionary matters at the time was that he had published a well-illustrated tome called Lifecode, in which he apparently proposed some sort of structuralist/developmental interpretation of evolution. In a rather incautious move, Pivar decided to send his book to a real developmental biologist for review: PZ Myers. PZ read it, soundly criticized it at Pharyngula, and apparently never thought of it again until earlier this year, when Pivar sent out some grandiose-sounding press release together with an updated version of the book, both of which PZ once again trashed.

Thus did Pivar proceed to sue Myers for the “emotional and mental distress”, among other things, caused him by Myers’ reviews. From the complaint:

16. On July 12, 2007, Defendant Myers maliciously, and without cause, defamed Plaintiff by referring to him as "a classic crackpot."

17. Upon information and belief, Defendant Myers' references to Plaintiff as "a classic crackpot" were necessarily intended to disparage Plaintiff's abilities as a scientific enquirer and were intended to hold Plaintiff up to ridicule and embarrassment in this specific area of Plaintiff's professional endeavors.

The Texas Department of Corrections is afraid its prisoners will get ideas.

 After reading Dave Zirin's book, "Welcome to the Terrordome", Texas death row inmate Kenneth Foster, who was sentenced for abetting a murder, wrote Zirin a letter detailing his thoughts on sports and prison: 

"I have never had the opportunity to view sports in this way. And as I went through these revelations I began to have epiphanies about the way sports have a similar existence in prison. The similarities shook me. Facing execution, the only thing that I began to get obsessive about was how to get heard and be free, and as the saying goes — you can't serve two gods. Sports, as you know, becomes a way of life. You monitor it, you almost come to breathe it. Sports becomes a way of life in prison, because it becomes a way of survival. For men that don't have family or friends to help them financially it becomes a way to occupy your time. That's another sad story in itself, but it's the root to many men's obsession with sports."

While it’s easy to fall in love with the genius (relative to expectations of barbarousness) of a prisonmate (see: Norman Mailer), the prison system should still readily encourage a correspondence between Zirin and Foster. Instead, when Zirin sent Foster a copy of his first book, "What's My Name Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the US", the Texas Department of Corrections quickly proclaimed the book ill-suited, even dangerous, to its system. Writes Zirin:

A form titled "Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice, Publication review/denial notification" issued to Kenneth on August 9 reads that What's My Name Fool? Was banned from the row because, "It contains material that a reasonable person would construe as written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption such as strikes or riots." They specifically write that "pages 44 & 55" met this criteria.

After lifting my jaw off the ground, I went to those dangerous palindromic pages.

On 44, the radioactive quote in question comes from that seditious revolutionary Jackie Robinson — you know, the guy whose number is retired by all of Major League Baseball. I quote Robinson's autobiography when he writes about suffering racism early in his rookie season. He wrote: 

"I felt tortured and I tried to just play ball and ignore the insults but it was really getting to me. For one wild and rage crazed moment I thought, 'To hell with Mr. Rickey's noble experiment. To hell with the image of the patient black freak I was supposed to create.' I could throw down my bat, stride over to that Phillies dugout, grab one of those white sons of bitches, and smash his teeth in with my despised black fist. Then I could walk away from it all."

On page 55, the offensive passage was about Jack Johnson's defeat of the "Great White Hope," Jim Jeffries. It reads, "Johnson was faster, stronger and smarter than Jeffries. He knocked Jeffries out with ease. After Johnson's victory, there were race riots around the country in Illinois, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Texas and Washington, D.C. Most of the riots consisted of white lynch mobs attacking Blacks, and Blacks fighting back. This reaction to a boxing match was one of the most widespread racial uprisings in the U.S. until the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr."

In China, they've reverse engineered the iPhone to create the miniOne. The miniOne isn't just a clone; it is actually an improvement on Apple's original model, working with cell phone carriers worldwide, not just AT&T. It'll cost half as much as the iPhone and be available to ten times as many prospective consumers. I'm debating whether to put in an order for one with my friend in China. Here's an interesting article on China's cloning industry.

There's an article in today's NYT about the resurgence of kibbutzim. The author attributes this renewed popularity to the fact that today's kibbutzim are "less about pure socialism than a kind of suburbanized version of it." The article further describes "urbanites looking to escape the rat race", which effectively evokes a long weekend camping in the Catskills.

Reading this, I was reminded of Peter Beinart's article in TNR several days ago about the progressive netroots' movement, which pointed out the curiously mainstream rhetoric of leading progressive bloggers, defended their pragmatic choice to work from within the system but also suggested the importance of impractical "radicals" like Mike Gravel to the movement. In both instances, post-socialist wisdom is at work, and the question of whether progressivism is fundamentally and forever at odds with the mainstream, whether anything meaningful can come from within the system, is brought to the fore.

Which brings me, by a small leap, to something I know more about. Namely Charles Mee's new play, "Iphigenia 2.0", which I saw several nights ago. Charles Mee is the kind of playwright people choose to call "radical" for his claim, among others, that there is no such thing as an original play, and for his resultant theatrical technique of using blogs, instruction manuals, hip-hop lyrics, et al, to create his scripts, which critics have compared to sampling. Mee said he started writing this play by rereading Euripides' "Iphigenia at Aulis" and making notes in the margins, but rather than really make it new he played it safe, dressing the old thing up in a Gap commercial. The result recalls a precocious college student who sets out to please everybody, happily imagining that the speed with which he cuts and pastes from the internet is the same thing as the fluid stream of inspiration from within, and ends up pleasing no one.

Which is not to say that most of the audience didn't pretend to love Mee's play, because they did. The segment on what makes a "good leader" reaffirmed that, among other things, Bush has been terrible for theater, hijacking the imaginations of lazy artists. And the Chippendale routines performed by men playing soldiers partnered with the Playboy bunny acts for the women were about as interesting (and sexy) as a Calvin Klein billboard testified to the fact that people are still eager to let overt titillation pass for actual subversion (leaving gender roles out of it, for now). The all-out noisiness of the thing is worth contrasting to the restraint of an actually unsettling "political" play like "Masked".

Really, "Iphigenia 2.0" proves that using only elements from the mainstream produces something mainstream. Accommodation is a practical technique for politicians, a cop-out for playwrights. But if theatergoers keep on clapping the entertainers, like the politicians, won't have any reason to budge. If you consider the "renewed"--in the euphemistic words of one leader--kibbutzim and the cries of self-proclaimed revolutionaries like Daily Kos for the dismissal of Mike Gravel, I think it's fair to ask what the point of participating in anything is at all.

James Wood, the former book critic for The New Republic, is moving to the New Yorker. His new position will give give him almost twenty percent more potential readers, and it will introduce his unflinchingly academic approach to criticism to a lot of Upper East siders who'd prefer not to think so hard in their shrink's waiting room.

Wood, who is British, has received a lot of criticism of his criticism. The criticism often seems written by people who don't actually finish Wood's reviews. There are those that claim he's a book critic who hates books, but they are wilfully ignoring his gushing (sentimental?) paeans to the likes of Saul Bellow. Admittedly, TNR can be contrarian for it's own sake, but more often its contrarianism is undergirded by a belief in something better (and more often,traditional); Wood is the best example I know of the latter. And those that say he's stuck in the past ignore his recommendation of WG Sebald, for example, whose "Rings of Saturn" is absolutely confounding in the best possible way.

More interesting are those that say he "he just doesn't get America" (Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the humanities at Harvard University Press). Indeed, most of the outrage at (and subsequent fear of) of Wood is in response to his attacks on writers like Don DeLillo and Toni Morrison in the spirit of his greater crusade against (his phrase) "hysterical realism". True, Wood's takedown of Morrison's "Paradise"--which "is a novel babyishly cradled in magic...sentimental, evasive, and cloudy"--is a triumph for humanity. But he has also levied serious criticisms against British writers like Zadie Smith ("Autograph Man" is a "a flailing, noisy hash of jokes, cool cultural references, pull-quotes, lists and roaring italics. It is like reading a newspaper designed by a kindergarten.") and Salman Rushdie, that overrated arrogant pseudo-hero, most notably in an essay titled "Salman Rushdie's Nobu Novel". Wood's best reviews are purely literary while resonating politically.

At the NYER, Wood will write more, shorter pieces; he says he hopes to write about writers unknown to the New Yorker's readers, perhaps even hitherto unknown to Wood himself. Here's hoping that the NYER's weirdly uniform style doesn't kill Wood's own measured exuberance, and that he can scare those in the world's literary community who've made a living rallying around noise rather than individually mining for style.

Hi. I'm Josh. I'm been shvitzing all summer, though this week it's official. Since I am a nice Jewish kid from Manhattan it is going to take a concerted effort for me not to constantly link to the New York Times. In that spirit, I had planned to start safe and make a day out of Time, where Mother Teresa's dark night is given the cover treatment and Rudy Giuliani is sufficiently panned. I was all set to reiterate the Giuliani panning, maybe even explore Hitchens' hypocrisy re: Teresa's hypocrisy, when, bam!, my NYT homepage refreshed to reveal the remarkable: the Gonzales resignation.  When I watched Gonzales testify on television re: the attorney firings he looked like a murderer protected by double jeopardy. But then Rove, and now this. Both Rove and Gonzales have been with Bush since his reign in Texas. I'm sure Bush'll stick with the "unfair treatment" line for Gonzales. 

Anyhow, I'm already really late to the party in blog years, and so now that the palpable (and justified) glee is subsiding, I think it's fair to ask, who's next? There's nowhere to go but up from here, and that means Cheney. If that seems absolutely unlikely, so did this. Then, also, there's this important question: Is the world watching? And what do they think? I ask because several minutes after the NYT broke the news, I got a text message from a friend from Germany which read: "Come to Berlin. Ur ship is sinking, homey." Forgetting that the German called me homey, it was both surprising and worrisome to me that rather than see this as the rightful purging of all that has ailed our great country for the past seven odd years, my friend triumphantly indulged in schadenfreude at the further disintegration of the Bush administration. How are the Democratic candidates going to respond to this? And how are Liberals in general--the blogosphere especially--going to translate their celebration into a serious moving-forward?

Further reading: Besides the cover story which asks "What took you so long?" over at Slate, John Dickerson has a short and interesting piece laying out the psychology of the Bush administration. He claims, among other things, that "the more radioactive his aides become, the more Bush embraces them." Maybe Bush has a death wish. Has he ever been in therapy?