Holocaust Remembrance Project For French Kids Sparks Ire

President Nicolas Sarkozy has enraged the French with his recently proposed plan to educate schoolchildren about the Holocaust:

Sarkozy told France’s Jewish community on Wednesday that every 10-year-old schoolchild should be “entrusted with the memory of a French child victim of the Holocaust.”

The proposal unleashed a storm of protest from teachers, psychologists and his political foes who said it would unfairly burden children with the guilt of previous generations and some could be traumatized by identifying with a Holocaust victim.

This hue and cry may be unintelligible to Americans, many of whom grew up “unfairly burdened” with The Devil’s Arithmetic and The Diary of Anne Frank without succumbing to shell-shock. And how is one to argue with the children’sNicholas Sarkozy with Ehud Olmert rights group spokesperson who said (we can only assume with a straight face) that “[n]o educational project should be constructed on death”? I’d love to see what a French history textbook looks like: Napoleonic paintball wars? Nerf guillotines?

But is the real problem that children might be traumatized—or that this project was originally proposed in tandem with a call for faith to be returned to public discourse? It’s unsurprising, given the nose many of us have developed for even a whiff of the theocratic, that the French have been put on the defensive by Sarkozy’s recent speeches. But Sarkozy’s clarification is more or less satisfactory: “I never said that secular morality is inferior to religious morality. . . . My conviction is they complement each other and that, when it is difficult to discern good and evil . . . it is good to take inspiration from both of them.”

It’s worth keeping in mind, too, that the group most likely to be upset about nationwide Holocaust remembrance is also the group most due for a reminder that France is a religious composite, not a religious vacuum to be filled.

Radar reports that “nearly 40 percent of Americans believe that the government conspired in, or had precise foreknowledge of, the 9/11 attacks.” That figure may sound like something only a conspiracy enthusiast could believe, but it comes to you not from late-night college radio but from a Scripps Howard poll. Cut it in half, if you like: One in five of your fellow citizens is completely bananas, and he votes. (Here and here is some recommended reading on why.)

Granted, it’s likely that a much smaller number are as far gone as the boys and girls of 9/11 Truth goon squad (Josh Strawn wrote about the “Truthers” here), but, if I may paraphrase Margaret Mead, never doubt that a group of thoughtless citizens who ought to be committed can change the world. The unholy union of camcorders and YouTube has made it easier than ever to disseminate misinformation and propaganda, especially if your day job is sitting on the couch eating Funyuns and drinking Red Bull.

The Nation is worried about the rise of the “homeland security campus”:

From Harvard to UCLA, the ivory tower is fast becoming the latest watchtower in Fortress America. The terror warriors, having turned their attention to “violent radicalization and homegrown terrorism prevention”—as it was recently dubbed in a House of Representatives bill of the same name—have set out to reconquer that traditional hotbed of radicalization, the university.

Usually this sort of paranoia—the Nation’s, not the government’s—is nothing more than a fun and harmless way for student groups to feel more influential, I daresay threatening, than they really are. The belief that his views are important enough to repress is as indispensable to the campus activist as his Pink Floyd poster and well-thumbed copy of Manufacturing Consent.

The times must be a-changing, though, because the measures the article describes really do sound draconian, if not outright illegal. The University of Florida taser incident, which is mentioned in the article, is emblematic of the triumph of “procedure” over restraint and common sense. (Not to mention that there’s something both pathetic and sinister about a politician who keeps droning on while a twenty-one-year-old showboat is electrocuted in front of him. If you listen hard enough, you can almost hear him asking “Is it safe?” over and over again.)

These developments are worth keeping our own watchful eyes on, but it’s also worth bearing in mind that sometimes the government has a point.

“Everyone’s entitled to his opinion!” How often do we hear this—and from those whose entitlement is most in doubt? Laura Ingraham squeezed an entire book out of the slight thesis that entertainers should Shut Up and Sing rather than soak us with their spittle-flecked rantings about international affairs. Curiously, she included “UN elites” in her herd of bêtes noires, though political figures aren’t generally known for their crooning abilities. Dancing abilities, maybe. But what about novelists?

That’s the question the Guardian poses in its review of Martin Amis’s The Second Plane, a collection of writings inspired, or perhaps fired, by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. (Amis disdains the use of the short form of the infamous date: “There is a long argument about the inappropriateness of the contraction ‘9/11’ to describe the enormity of that day.”)

I think the question is misguided, but not because I feel, in that most irritating formula, “entitled to my opinion.” There are those whose work never draws them into the realm of political thought—the Dixie Chicks, for instance—but the novelist makes his living considering what makes people tick, and no one ticks quite so literally as the suicide terrorist. As Amis writes, “Geopolitics may not be my natural subject, but masculinity is. And have we ever seen the male idea in such outrageous garb as the robes, combat fatigues, suits and ties, jeans, tracksuits and medics’ smocks of the Islamic radical?”

This is not to say that novelists invariably get it right, or even half-right. John Updike didn’t, though his attempt was more than admirable and nothing if not sincere. All the same, there’s a big difference between someone who sings other people’s words, and someone who’s always had his own keenly rendered psychological portraits at the ready, weighing in on the heaviest issues of our day. If novelists feel compelled to delineate this problem, I can think of few more qualified to do so than Amis.

As I noted elsewhere last week, Iran’s Mehr News Agency has reported that a contingent of Columbia University professors plan to travel to Iran to apologize “officially” for the rudeness that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffered at the hands of Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger. As the news service left all of these professors “anonymous” and didn’t provide a statement from Bollinger, I had to write that I “sincerely hope [the report is] incorrect,” though I couldn’t bring myself to say that I sincerely believed it was.

Now The New York Times reports that “[o]fficials at Columbia University were taken aback on Tuesday” by the Mehr News Agency’s claims, and one professor commented that it was probably a “metropolitan legend.” That’s a bit silly, as one is surely more inclined to believe that it’s an Iranian fabrication than that Iran has its finger on the pulse of the Upper West Side rumor mill.

The sad fact is that whether or not the story is true, it is perfectly plausible and consistent with the behavior of professors at Columbia and other schools. Once you’ve invited a dictator to your institution and then drafted a letter, signed by dozens of professors, condemning your own university president, is it any wonder the public is quick to believe that a Sean Penn-style fact-finding mission is next? (Note also that Victoria de Grazia, a professor who simply denied all knowledge to the Times, told the Columbia Spectator, “I am abroad and I know nothing about what promises to be a fine adventure.”)

The truth is paramount, but this contretemps is a good opportunity for the professorate to reflect on what it would like its reputation to be. When some shoddy Middle Eastern state propaganda organ has got your number, might it not be that you’ve grown a little . . . predictable?

I can’t pretend that I had the highest hopes for Jason Reitman’s new movie Juno. Its aesthetic looked a little too Wes Anderson for my tastes; I’ve had more than my fill of Anderson, and won’t even touch stylistic carpetbaggers like Napoleon Dynamite. I saw Juno because I could watch Michael Cera play video games for 92 minutes and would still laugh myself to the brink of asphixia. Throw in Cera’s Arrested Development co-star Jason Bateman, as well as The Office’s Dwight Schrute (sorry, I can’t bring myself to learn his real and presumably less funny name), and I’m there with the proverbial bells on.

Juno confirmed many of my worries. From its cartoonish, quasi-rotoscoped opening credits to the Kinks song on the soundtrack to the indulgent final scene, the movie owes a great debt if not an apology to Wes Anderson. The wisecracking, allusion-laden dialogue is often hilarious, but leans more toward the Gilmore Girls than Judd Apatow end of the spectrum, by which I mean the viewer isn’t always convinced. Other than that, though, Juno was mostly pleasant surprises. (A spoiler for the noir-savvy: Seeing Bateman in his Juno role is nearly as jarring as seeing Jimmy Stewart in After the Thin Man.) Nevertheless, I’m unpleasantly surprised to find its most unambiguous message being ignored, or given a disappointingly cursory treatment, by some critics and commentators.

For Slate’s Ann Hulbert, for instance, the movie is all about declawing the family-values debate by having something for everyone, though the something is as often a question as an answer:

Her take on the roster of family values issues is as heterodox as her image. Consider her sendup of the term sexually active, a trope of the sex-ed wars. Liberal advocates of honest, open sexual communication with teens embrace the epithet as though it were part and parcel of puberty. Abstinence promoters invoke it as the plague to be avoided at all costs. For Juno, it’s ridiculous, an Orwellian phrase that in no way speaks to her actual experience (sex, once, in a chair)—as is surely true, when you stop and think about it, for the majority of high-school juniors who aren’t virgins.

The real flashpoint issue in the film, of course, could have been abortion. Here Cody’s politics (presumably pro-choice) are at odds with her plot needs (a birth) and, who knows, maybe commercial dictates, too, if studios worry about antagonizing the evangelical audience. It’s a tension the screenplay finesses deftly, undercutting both pro-life and pro-choice purism. . . .

With Juno as with Knocked Up, there has been an oddly protesting-too-much character to these reassurances that there’s nothing anti-abortion in the details. (Pay attention to the film’s repeated reminders that babies at X stage of pregnancy already have fingernails. And that Juno’s stepmother runs a nail salon. What’s it all mean?) I can’t help wondering whether Hulbert’s assertion that screenwriter Diablo Cody’s politics are “presumably pro-choice” has anything to do with her comment, earlier in her essay, that Cody is a former stripper, which is misleading. She’s in fact a well-educated Midwestern writer who took up stripping for a while and also blogged about it. There are enough contradictions in that history to make Cody’s politics, as well as her intentions, anybody’s guess.

But it’s a mistake to think that teen pregnancy or abortion are Juno’s biggest questions. The “unambiguous message” I mentioned earlier is that adulthood is, to some extent, a state of mind, not an age. Diablo Cody’s genius is to take something that we’ve come to regard as an unthinkable, insurmountable tragedy—a pregnant teen! the stuff of Lifetime movies!—and to wonder if maybe we don’t feel that way because we’re not really behaving like grown-ups ourselves. Juno handles her situation with more intelligence, aplomb, and, above all, imagination than just about anyone else in her orbit. The unthinkable is the difficult but also the historically and statistically mundane, and she seems to understand this. A. O. Scott gets it, too, but before you know it he’s back to condescending to the littluns:

Juno also shares with Knocked Up an underlying theme, a message that is not anti-abortion but rather pro-adulthood. It follows its heroine—and by the end she has earned that title—on a twisty path toward responsibility and greater self-understanding.

This is the course followed by most coming-of-age stories, though not many are so daring in their treatment of teenage pregnancy, which this film flirts with presenting not just as bearable but attractive. Kids, please! Heed the cautionary whale. But in the meantime, have a good time at Juno. Bring your parents, too.

Like Scott, I don’t want to say, “Three cheers for teen pregnancy!” I want to look at the movie allegorically, as a reminder that we’re adults as soon as we decide to be. That’s why one of the best lines in the movie is one of the least memorable, the least scripted, and it’s Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) to her would-be rock star husband Mark (Jason Bateman): “Your t-shirt is stupid. Grow up.”

In response to Daniel’s post below, I’d like to note that I intended “New Atheism” only as a convenient shorthand for the gaggle of God-botherers (I mean that in my own new and improved sense) lately dominating the bestseller lists. As to whether they are so different from the Old Atheists discussed in Linker’s article and Daniel’s follow-up: I don’t possess anything approaching Daniel’s command of philosophy, but I do know that one is unlikely achieve the timeless renown of those Old Atheists by writing books like Sam Harris’s The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.

David Strauss commented that it’s “absurd to require that someone who proves something wrong also provide something ‘right.’” His apparent belief that Harris has proven anything is very mistaken. I write all this as one sympathetic to Harris’s suspicions and frustrations, even as one who favorably reviewed the far superior God Is Not Great. But I was raised Catholic, and to me Harris is just another bright but intellectually lazy kid trying to freak out the volunteer CCD teacher.

Hitchens’s book is enormously entertaining, whether or not one is inclined to buy its argument. Harris’s books are grating and disrespectful—and I don’t mean disrespectful of belief, but of the intelligence of the believer. Jeffrey Hart once wrote about respect for the “perceptions” of others: “If a person tells you that he ‘perceives’ that the moon is made out of green cheese, the only reply that respects him is that sorry, it is not.” Hitchens’s book is that kind of reply, while Harris’s wants to cart the believer off in a straitjacket. Sadly, even Hitchens is moving in that direction these days. His “takedown” of Hanukkah is a good example.

Thus, to celebrate Hanukkah is to celebrate not just the triumph of tribal Jewish backwardness but also the accidental birth of Judaism’s bastard child in the shape of Christianity. You might think that masochism could do no more. Except that it always can. Without the precedents of Orthodox Judaism and Roman Christianity, on which it is based and from which it is borrowed, there would be no Islam, either.

People seem to have missed or disregarded the point of my previous post, and here we have as good an opportunity as any to revisit it. If radicals of a particular religion pose a threat to liberal democracy, do you form an uneasy alliance with the many, many people who belong to more peaceful “faith traditions”? Or do you write an attention-mongering essay about a harmless and also heavily commercialized holiday? (Nothing says “moderate” like commercializing your most sacred days!) If the so-called New Atheism differs in any way from the Old, this is it: It seems to have more to do with self-promotion and too-clever-by-half provocation than with forestalling an imminent religious encroachment on our political and intellectual freedom. It has lost sight of the goal—preserving culture and saving lives—because it wants nothing more than to look smart and feel superior.

It has also lost all interest in distinctions. Josh writes with a straight face that “our time has just finally come to recognize centuries-old superstition for the intolerable danger it is,” as though some superstitions (no meat on Friday, no washing the lucky jockstrap) aren’t more dangerous than others (no honor if we don’t gang rape a dishonorable woman!). For the record, Josh, superstitions may be irrational and irritating, but only crimes are intolerable. Preserving that kind of difference is one of the most important duties we can perform on behalf of not soiling or own nest.

I’ve started to wonder whether this “New Atheism” isn’t more a fad than an authentic movement, one generating light without heat and sound without fury. Christopher Hitchens remarked that “high on the list of idiotic commonplace expressions is the old maxim that ‘it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.’” I’ll concede that it’s about as compelling a needlepoint pattern as “Footprints in the Sand,” but what does Hitchens mean by this? He goes on to explain, “You would only be bitching about the darkness if you didn’t have a candle to begin with. Talk about a false antithesis.”

How right he is. Sam Harris, for instance, has squeezed two books—number two the mere dribbling dregs of the first effort—from his hysterical complaints about the darkness of religious ignorance. Lord knows that Harris doesn’t have so much as a post-Halloween stub of candle to offer in its stead. It’s too bad for him that effective persuasion is not as easy a game as Stump the Yokel, and doubly so that people with brains, like Damon Linker, are paying attention.

In the penultimate chapter of his best-selling book The God Delusion, biologist and world-renowned atheist Richard Dawkins presents his view of religious education, which he explains by way of an anecdote. Following a lecture in Dublin, he recalls, “I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.” Lest his readers misunderstand him, or dismiss this rather shocking statement as mere off-the-cuff hyperbole, Dawkins goes on to clarify his position. “I am persuaded,” he explains, “that the phrase ‘child abuse’ is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.”

Why Dawkins refuses to take this idea to its logical conclusion—to say that raising a child in a religious tradition, like other forms of child abuse, should be considered a crime punishable by the state—is a mystery, for it follows directly from the character of his atheism. And not just his. Over the past four years, several prominent atheists have made similarly inflammatory claims in a series of best-selling books. . . . In The End of Faith, writer Sam Harris argues that “the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.”

This is just the sort of approach that made some people call Ayaan Hirsi Ali a “fundamentalist.” In her case, I’d argue that having suffered the most brutal treatment available to a woman in an Islamic country—short of being burned alive—is an acceptable excuse for rhetorical overkill. As for Sam Harris, I doubt that readers will find me too cynical in asking whether his bombast is more about upping his Amazon sales ranking than it is about convincing believers to stray from the fold. There’s something in Harris’s vituperative style that makes me doubt he could be civil to a former believer, much less a believer straddling the fence between the clouds and the sulfur.

I hasten to add that Damon Linker is far from perfect, as David B. Hart wrote about Linker’s Theocons some time ago in The New Criterion. When someone hell-bent on sniffing out religious fanatics falls on his face doing so, only to turn hard on his hooves and go after hellions like Dawkins and Harris, you can bet something’s gone wrong. I do have some appetite for the bitter fruits of the New Atheism—but keep in mind that Hirsi Ali has endured great evil, whereas Sam Harris has “endured” the snuffling pique of wishing everyone would shut up and listen to him.

I’d like weaponized Islam to shape up or get shipped out. I won’t encourage the ridicule and alienation of the many religious voters, including Muslims, who share that hope.

Even so, I won’t shy away from an important footnote: This piece, by the Asia Times’s “Spengler,” about Hirsi Ali, Islam, and atheism. It helps to have a pseudonym when you make statements like these: “The empty and arbitrary world of atheism is far closer to the Muslim universe than the Biblical world, in which God orders the world out of love for humankind, so that we may in freedom return the love that our creator bears for us. Atheism is an alternative to Islam closer to Muslim habits of mind than the love-centered world of Judaism and Christianity.”

The December 5 massacre at the Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska, wasn’t a school shooting, but from the sounds of things it might as well have been. This nearly seasonal horror has accustomed us to several telling elements—most importantly, the trivial pretext followed by a burning desire to achieve infamy on the scale of the Hindenberg disaster. Sure enough, the killer “had . . . recently broken up with his girlfriend, and then lost his job.” In a news report worthy of a mockumentary (you can almost see Parker Posey snapping gum and twirling her hair), a local muses: “I had no idea that he was this troubled. I don’t know if it was because he got fired from McDonald’s.”

The treatment of “troubled” as something akin to “good at baseball,” albeit less palatable, is an unmistakable sign of the times. “Desensitized” doesn’t begin to cover it. The fact that an ordinary person can credit losing a fast-food job as a plausible, if not exonerating, defense for opening fire at a shopping mall is disturbing, but hardly surprising. When Seung-Hui Cho killed over two dozen people at Virginia Tech, the Wall Street Journal reprised a painful, disconcerting editorial called “No Guardrails,” which deserves to be quoted at length:

The gunning down of abortion doctor David Gunn in Florida last week shows us how small the barrier has become that separates civilized from uncivilized behavior in American life. In our time, the United States suffers every day of the week because there are now so many marginalized people among us who don’t understand the rules, who don’t think that rules of personal or civil conduct apply to them, who have no notion of self-control. We are the country that has a TV commercial on all the time that says: “Just do it.” Michael Frederick Griffin just did it. . . .

As the saying goes, there was a time. And indeed there really was a time in the United States when life seemed more settled, when emotions, both private and public, didn’t seem to run so continuously at breakneck speed, splattering one ungodly tragedy after another across the evening news. How did this happen to the United States? How, in T. S. Eliot’s phrase, did so many become undone?

I’m reluctant to draw major sociocultural lessons from the deeds of a sad little man with a gun in his hand, but every time this happens it gets clearer that “marginalized people,” and not the inexorable forces of randomness, are to blame. The murderer, Robert A. Hawkins, wrote that he was “going to go out and be famous.” It’s impossible not to assign some responsibility to our overblown celebrity culture, so at variance with shame that a Christmastime butchery is more likely to elicit creepy soul-searching than the simple disgust and sorrow it deserves.

Pay attention to Hawkins. He is terrorism in microcosm—the vicious, malevolent imposition of infantile will upon everyone else. Put aside the conviction that he was mentally ill; he knew what he was doing all along. We’ve made it something less than pitiful, something interesting, to be violent:

It may be true that most of the people in Hollywood who did cocaine survived it, but many of the weaker members of the community hit the wall. And most of the teenage girls in the Midwest who learn about the nuances of sex from magazines published by thirtysomething women in New York will more or less survive, but some continue to end up as prostitutes on Eighth Avenue. Everyone today seems to know someone who couldn’t handle the turns and went over the side of the mountain.

These weaker or more vulnerable people, who in different ways must try to live along life’s margins, are among the reasons that a society erects rules. They’re guardrails. It’s also true that we need to distinguish good rules from bad rules and periodically re-examine old rules. But the broad movement that gained force during the anti-war years consciously and systematically took down the guardrails. Incredibly, even judges pitched in. All of them did so to transform the country’s institutions and its codes of personal behavior (abortion, for instance).

In a sense, it has been a remarkable political and social achievement for them. But let’s get something straight about the consequences. If as a society we want to live under conditions of constant challenge to institutions and limits on personal life, if we are going to march and fight and litigate over every conceivable grievance, then we should stop crying over all the individual casualties, because there are going to be a lot of them.

We’ve just had a few more as an early Christmas present. It’s time we decided not to celebrate this kind of atrocity.

At first glance, the interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the current London Spectator seems slight, a rehash of the innumerable articles that have written about her since she became the face of anti-Islamic courage and the target of Islamic fury. There’s plenty to recommend such a rehash, of course; the more who know about Hirsi Ali, the better. But throughout this piece the reader finds hugely important questions and refreshingly “divisive” answers, and the result is a forceful reminder that these aren’t just debate club prompts. These are things we’d better figure out soon. When even Morrissey is willing to stick his neck out on behalf of “basic identity,” you know the time for hypersensitivity has passed.

The most important question, which I touched on yesterday, is what it means to be a “moderate” Muslim. Hirsi Ali has at times been accused of fundamentalism for denying that there’s any such thing. If that sounds either uncharitable or merely crazy, consider her explanation:

‘I find the word “moderate” very misleading.’ There’s a touch of steel in Hirsi Ali’s voice. ‘I don’t believe there is such a thing as “moderate Islam”. I think it’s better to talk about degrees of belief and degrees of practice. The Koran is quite clear that it should control every area of life. If a Muslim chooses to obey only some of the Prophet’s commandments, he is only a partial Muslim. If he is a good Muslim, he will wish to establish Sharia law.’

But I don’t call myself a ‘partial Christian’ just because I don’t take the whole Bible literally, I say. Why can’t a Muslim pick and choose his scriptures too? . . .

‘Christianity is different from Islam,’ says Hirsi Ali, ‘because it allows you to question it. It probably wasn’t different in the past, but it is now. Christians—at least Christians in a liberal democracy—have accepted, after Thomas Hobbes, that they must obey the secular rule of law; that there must be a separation of church and state. In Islamic doctrine such a separation has not occurred yet. This is what makes it dangerous! Islam—all Islam, not just Islamism—has not acknowledged that it must obey secular law. Islam is hostile to reason.’

This is an interesting, not to mention inflammatory, tack to take: Muslims can only be moderate insofar as they’re not really Muslims. Still, it’s strange to see Hirsi Ali use it as a cudgel with which to beat Muslims, because, as Mary Wakefield points out, it applies to every religion. In order to be a moderate anything (except maybe a Unitarian), one has to stray from the stricter points of doctrine. Some people frown on this premise, but I suspect that most rely on it.

If any part of Hirsi’s argument about Islam is correct, the best hope of those who believe in liberal democracy is that Muslim faith will weaken, that Muslims will come to ignore some of Islam’s more unsavory teachings the same way Catholics, for example, by and large ignore the Vatican’s views on contraception. It’s not for us to worry about whether “moderate” Muslim means bogus Muslim. If that’s the way it’s got to be, fine: Self-preservation should interest the West more than the preservation of a tradition in its original intensity. All the same, one struggles with the fact that some of the allies in the fight against religious totalitarianism have no time for faith, period:

During a recent debate with Ed Husain, as Husain was explaining his moderate Islam, she began to laugh at him, saying: ‘When you die you rot, Ed! There is no afterlife, Ed!’ And it makes me wonder whether, for Hirsi Ali, Islam’s crime is as much against reason as humanity; whether she sees the point of spirituality at all.

If Hirsi Ali can praise Christianity for allowing one to question it—I suppose in the sense that most Christians won’t kill you for questioning it—why can’t she understand that the people doing the questioning, many of them quite “spiritual” in their own right, are squarely on her side against the worst abuses of both humanity and reason?

Several days ago, my old friends at The New Criterion clued me in to a source of considerable water-cooler hilarity: an interview with the poet August Kleinzahler in the latest Paris Review, in which he makes this reply to a question about why he doesn't write more negative reviews:

Journals, or the few I write for, don't really like negative reviews. Also, there's a real argument that they're not worth writing. Sure, wannabe poets like William Logan and Adam Kirsch make their living that way, but they come off, even when more or less justified in their distaste or indignation, as sour fuddy-duddies, reactionary buffoons trotted out by the Times or whomever to provoke and exasperate. What interests me very mildly about such characters--The New Criterion seems to indulge this sort of thing--are their affinities with the neo-cons in politics. It's a strange sort of temperament and worldview that seems informed by what I imagine to be some thwarting or traumatic psycho-sexual event early on that has turned them into disappointed old men at twenty-five. I think many of them attended Dartmouth at some point and wear bowties, no?

What interests me--very mildly, of course--about this passage is how badly it gets the critical mentality wrong. Twenty-five long and disappointing years have familiarized me with the sort of argument or pseudo-argument Kleinzahler makes. I've spotted it most recently in reviews of this book, and in some unhinged replies to this essay by Roger Kimball, many of which were preoccupied by Roger's bowtie. (Kleinzahler is mistaken about the Dartmouth Bowtie Axis of Crabbiness, but I can forgive him that. I used to believe that all liberals wore hemp ponchos and played with devil sticks on lunch break.) If I had to compress Kleinzahler's reply, the first half, with apologies to Thumper, would read, "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all," and the second, "These guys just need to get laid."

In other words, the critic is like Frankenstein's monster: He only wants to wound because he's never been loved. A genuine interest in standards doesn't enter into it, and why should it? As one commenter wrote below my Mailer post, "Prevailing critical standards, high or otherwise, have nothing to do with classics, future or past." We expect great works to appear by magic, much as we go on expecting a magical solution to our oil crisis. Or, lest I stray too far off track, our reading crisis:

Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey's, book club aside, Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills.

That is the message of a new report being released today by the National Endowment for the Arts, based on an analysis of data from about two dozen studies from the federal Education and Labor Departments and the Census Bureau as well as other academic, foundation and business surveys. After its 2004 report, “Reading at Risk,” which found that fewer than half of Americans over 18 read novels, short stories, plays or poetry, the endowment sought to collect more comprehensive data to build a picture of the role of all reading, including nonfiction.

In his preface to the new 99-page report Dana Gioia, chairman of the endowment, described the data as “simple, consistent and alarming.”

So Americans don't read, and the ones who do don't criticize. I don't think it's a stretch to say that the two problems are related. As it has become "fuddy-duddyish" to have a frank opinion--even a "more or less justified" one--the spirit of debate and competition that animates literature has waned. (How telling, by the way, that Mailer's defenders are shocked, shocked to see his pugilistic approach turned against him. They adore the pose, but only when it's struck by a safe, familiar cartoon character.) The thing about that spirit is that it's fun, not "sour" or "disappointed." It's what many of us signed up for. It may not have everything to do with the cultivation of genius or the production of great works, but it certainly helps, as criticism surely does for literature what shame once did for behavior--that is, keep it in line.

We hear an awful lot, mostly at the grade-school level, about "making reading fun." At the adult level, that's what criticism is for: It puts the honest conscience of a reader on the page, and you either identify with it or you don't. Nothing makes reading less fun than turning it into some kind of therapy session where everyone gets points just for trying. Mailer may have been so self-absorbed that he wrote his own obituary, but I'll give him this much: He wouldn't have whined about bad reviews. He would have come back swinging, and that, for better or worse, is a matter of record. 

Lest anyone think I shrank in shame or defeat from Abe's thoughtful response to my Mailer note, be advised that I just flew across the country to catch up with a host of New York pals I haven't seen in ages. (For my money, there's still nothing quite so entertaining as watching the bar patron nearest Roger Kimball go from pasty to lobster the minute Mr. K opens his mouth.) I plan to reply to Abe at some point--and he shouldn't worry too much about mispelling my name, as I am a peaceful man--but I'll have to put that off for now, because I've been meaning to point readers to this:

What do these modern memorials to heroism and sacrifice have in common?

* The Vietnam Veterans' Memorial. Designed by college student Maya Lin, it was unveiled in Washington, D.C. on Veterans' Day 25 years ago. It's a black granite thingy-a long, plain wall that lines a big hole dug 10 feet into the ground. It lists the names of the war's 58,000 fallen Americans and . . . nothing else.

In her first proposal to build the memorial, Miss Lin explained its purpose: "We, the living, are brought to a concrete realization of these deaths." That's it. Not to honor what they did. Just a reminder that they're dead. Thanks.

* The Flight 93 National Memorial. The National Park Service has decided to erect the "Bowl of Embrace," in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, where United Flight 93 crashed to earth on September 11, 2001. Here's the plan: For their heroism in overpowering four Islamic hijackers and foiling their attempt to destroy the White House or the Capitol, the passengers are to be honored with . . . an empty field. It's little comfort that the field is surrounded by a stand of red maple trees planted in an arc that eerily resembles the crescent of Islam. The design's original name: "The Crescent of Embrace."

Like the Vietnam memorial, the monument itself has no inscription honoring anyone's actions-just 1970s-style wind chimes and the names of dead people inscribed on glass cubes.

* The National September 11 Memorial. On the spot where New York's mighty World Trade Center stood, the Lower Manhattan Development Corp.'s anointed designer, Michael Arad, decrees that there be . . . an American eagle? How about a statue of the three firemen raising the American flag over the rubble? Heck no. Just two huge, square, "reflecting" pools. Maybe you can gaze at your navel through them. In a complex slated to cost $1 billion, this urban swamp is called "Reflecting Absence."

The piece, by Duncan Maxwell Anderson, is well worth a read, but I'd also like to suggest this essay, a year old and no less relevant, by Michael J. Lewis. (Apologies for the subscriber wall; I'll try to persuade the fellows at TNC to make the piece free.)

The last century offers countless examples of how one might treat a great monument destroyed by war. One might repair and rebuild it (as was done with the Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino), preserve it as a ruin (Coventry Cathedral), or even replace it with a scrupulous facsimile (the Frauenkirche in Dresden). Where there is will, knowledge, and energy, there is little that cannot be done; the destroyed city of Warsaw was practically reassembled from the ground up in the wake of World War II. Then why has it been so difficult to replace the twin towers of the World Trade Center? Four years after the attacks of 9/11—four years of design competitions, planning studies, and public forums—the design that has emerged is an unlovely and unloved fortress of a skyscraper, which seems to inspire no emotion deeper than a kind of resigned chagrin. This was to have been the building of the century: what went wrong?

Lewis ultimately concludes that the task at hand is an impossible one: "Throughout the long, sad process, architects and public alike have looked in vain for designs that matched the pizzazz and punch of the original towers, when they were really looking for something that matched the graphic punch of their collapse. And this no building can provide."

That may be the case, but, as his piece makes clear enough, there are designs that leave something to be desired and then there are designs that distort and insult memory. The "Bowl of Embrace"--formerly "Crescent of Embrace," a lapidary masterwork of tone-deafness--with its studious stripping-away of context, is the latter. Death may be a great equalizer, but memory isn't. We all know what happened on United 93, and the Kindergarten-teacher approach of "Bowl of Embrace" isn't going to change that. But that point hardly needs making. The more troubling theme is "Reflecting Absence," because its apparent popularity suggests that many people don't understand what a memorial is for.

Consider one of the most potent memorials in history, the Marine Corps "battlefield cross." It has dotted every corner of the globe. It requires no government grants, no panel discussions, no oleaginous "statements of purpose"--just a pair of boots, a helmet, and a rifle. Is it meant to reflect absence? In one way, of course it is. In another way, it's meant to remind you of who's absent: not just anybody, but a person who needed to use things like boots, helmets, and rifles. So it also reflects a presence, a fighting spirit that isn't adequately expressed by, say, wind chimes. Is it too much to ask that at Ground Zero, our collective spirit be represented by something that doesn't look for all the world like a pair of dead and sightless eyes?

It was at The New Criterion that I internalized the pitiless conviction that De mortuis nil nisi bonum is a lot of sentimental twaddle. So it didn’t surprise me at all to see my former boss’s name on Arts & Letters Daily in this context:

Norman Mailer, American novelist, is dead at the age of 84 . . . NYT . . . AP . . . LAT . . . Nation . . . Guardian . . . Reuters . . . Telegraph . . . Salon . . . Chic Trib . . . BBC . . . Newsday . . . Boston Globe . . . NPR . . . Time . . . CNN . . . NYT . . . USAToday . . . Wash Post . . . London Times . . . dissent from Roger Kimball

Most people pass unremarked from this world, and those lucky enough not to shouldn’t begrudge the living their honest assessment. Here’s just a taste of Roger’s:

The news that the novelist Norman Mailer died earlier today at the age of 84 has already elicited little hagiographical murmurs. That hushed choir will doubtless turn into a deafening chorus of praise in the coming days and weeks—how much space do you suppose The New York Times will devote to its (I predict) front-page obituary? What grand superlatives will be dusted off and rolled out to commemorate the polyphiloprogentive wife-stabber and booster of homicidal misfits? “Genius” will be paraded early and often, I’ll wager, as will the extended family of adjectives emanating from the word “provocative.” One early notice described Mailer as “the country’s literary conscience and provocateur” and characterized The Armies of the Night as one of his (presumably many) “masterworks.” Perhaps, before the celebratory paeans entirely drown out critical judgment, there is room for a few dissenting observations.

Mailer epitomized a certain species of macho, adolescent radicalism that helped to inure the wider public to displays of violence, anti-American tirades, and sexual braggadocio. . . .

Read the whole thing here. Roger makes the best case we are likely to encounter that Mailer’s reputation has been grossly inflated by the reading public’s ignorance or gullibility. I will allow that reading Armies of the Night was a mind-blowing experience, but only in the sense that it suggested a time when the public was embarrassingly susceptible to self-promotion and self-mythologizing. And the title Advertisements for Myself is downright Barnumesque: It tells you it’s a ketchup popsicle and you reach out your white-gloved hands anyway.

It is fitting, then, that Mailer’s death gives us the chance to reflect upon something other than Mailer. What I refer to is the free pass that our literary culture gives to those who have achieved a certain level of status. This may seem like a no-brainer: Don’t certain privileges always follow fame? Isn’t that the point? Yes, but I wouldn’t consider it a privilege to have my worst work cheerfully disseminated by opportunistic publishers. I’d argue that Mailer was given this free pass right from the beginning: He managed step one—getting famous—by acting out instead of by writing several very good books. Other writers of considerable merit are just now beginning the slide into their late and not-so-great periods. Consider Cormac McCarthy’s dreary, one-dimensional bestseller The Road, or John Updike’s hilariously inept (though at times beautifully written) Terrorist, or Philip Roth’s auto-satirizing Exit Ghost. Why is this happening? How can we encourage a return to the high standards required to midwife the classics of the future?

When we idolize mediocrities, or let great writers get away with mediocre works, we give younger writers much less to aspire to. Considered sub specie eternitatis, saying you want to be “the next Norman Mailer” is like saying you want to be on a reality TV show—which, incidentally, was Dave Eggers’s first big goal in life. Welcome to the decline.