The Jewish world is in a tizzy over the reemergence of far-right parties that were elected to the European Parliament. The neocon Michael Weiss quoted Marx, “Once again the English working class has disgraced itself.” The JTA article was replete with offical condemnations.

But perhaps, instead of merely condemning, we should ask ourselves why this is happening.

Weiss offers that voting for the BNP is:

one way to piss off the bourgeois city-dwellers who plundered the economy, brought the country under the yoke of the European Union, and acquiesced—this is the uncomfortable part—to the influx of so many unassimilable immigrants.

 

Yes, Michael, that is the uncomfortable part, isn’t it? So uncomfortable, in fact, that few are willing to address these issues beyond platitudes that preempt a change in policy, as to do so inevitably incurs vicious condemnation for merely raising such challenges.

To publicly question mass immigration is to ensure being labeled a right-wing extremist. And therefore the only people willing to do so are often… right-wing extremists. And therefore the only electoral avenue for protest of mass immigration is by voting for these right-wing extremists.

In the U.S., it has often been elements within the Jewish community that have taken the lead in labeling all whom question mass immigration policies as right-wing extremists. Just ask Stephen Steinlight what happens. He was made quite uncomfortable, wasn’t he, Michael?  But if Europe is any indication of what we face here—and I think it is--perhaps we need to stop letting our discomfort preempt a serious addressing of these questions, and stop making others who are willing to do so uncomfortable as well.

Or our situation will truly become quite uncomfortable indeed.

As a former Jewcer, I'm pleased to call your attention to Tablet Magazine, the new and newsier incarnation of Nextbook. We launched at midnight last night after four not-so-grueling months of redesign and reconceptualization. (Just to preempt any confusion: Nextbook is still the name of our media holding company; think of it as the Conde Nast to Tablet's Jewish New Yorker, if that's not a redundancy.)

Tablet is edited by Alana Newhouse, the wunderkind behind the Forward's old Arts & Culture page, with assists from Jesse Oxfeld of Gawker and New York Magazine, and Gabriel Sanders, also of the Forward and Vanity Fair. I handle our politics coverage, which includes editing our two op-ed columnists Victor Navasky (The Nation) and Seth Lipsky (the much lamented New York Sun).  If that's not a highbrow form of Crossfire in digital media, I don't know what is.

Jeff Goldberg, too, is slated to write a regular column for us, serializing his forthcoming book from Nextbook's Jewish Encounters series, on Judah Maccabee. (I'm also the liaison between the magazine and the publishing arm, overseen by the excellent Jonathan Rosen).

What else? Oh yeah, our spiffy design is explained in a slideshow here.

It occurred to me halfway through listening to Elizabeth Alexander's narcoleptic and thoroughly "bureaucratic" verse, as Adam Kirsch so aptly put it, that there is in fact one area in which a celebrated golden age lies behind, forcing us to inhabit one of so much rusty aluminum. Poetry is not what it used to be:

When Horace produced his Carmen Saeculare at the command of the Emperor Augustus, as part of the festivities for the Secular Games in 17 B.C., he was happily placing his gifts at the service of the new imperial regime, much as Virgil did when he wrote the Aeneid. So, too, with the Elizabethan poets, who poured their lyrics and masques at the feet of Gloriana. In a monarchy, there is no shame for a poet, or for anyone else, in being the monarch's servant.

And there is usually no shame in the poetry produced at court; truth gets spoken, if only whispered, to power in subtle yet unmistakable ways. "You knelt a boy, you rose a man / And thus your lonelier life began" was the closing stave of the ballad John Betjeman was commissioned to write to mark the occasion of Prince Charles's investiture in 1968. Can you imagine a similar chord of caution or pessimism being struck by a democratic flatterer in the hope-besotted coronation of Barack Obama? (It was the new president himself who sounded gloomiest.)

I've only just learned, courtesy of Steven Isenberg's hilarious essay in the American Scholar about his lunches with famous poets, that upon meeting Queen Elizabeth in Northern Ireland, Philip Larkin told an Irish joke, "which he said was sort of a triple faux pas—telling the Queen a joke, an Irish one, and doing it in Northern Ireland."  Yes well, the "quintessentially English" poet of the postwar years was nothing if not a self-saboteur of his own reputation. Larkin also effectively prevented his favorite prime minister Margaret Thatcher from naming him poet laureate because of all the dour bawdy he'd written, particularly "This Be the Verse" ("They fuck you up, your mum and dad.... Get out as early as you can / And don't have any kids yourself.").

Part of the problem, I would venture, though I claim none of Kirsch's expertise in the matter, is that poets today are not actuated by extreme politics or extreme metaphyics as their forebears once were. George Orwell noted in a characteristically shrewd essay that in the early decades of the 20th-century, in order to be a writer of note in any genre, one had to be a communist, a fascist or a Catholic. Slightly before him, Edmund Wilson hit upon the same theme, observing that T.S. Eliot's imagination was trapped in a world of "seventeenth-century churchmen," John Dos Passos (though a novelist) was the bard of "an army of workers, disinterested, industrious and sturdy," while Ezra Pound -- who provided a fine example of immature ideology gratifyingly seconded by immature poetry -- bethought himself a troubadour in medieval Provence, speaking in a Babel-like hodgepodge of unintelligible tongues. Modernism, in other words, was a wild oscillation between the distant past and the distant future; that's why it resounded in the immediate present.

But bureaucratic verse is firmly rooted in a bureaucratic present, and so it is ungripping and banal. Alexander's is the poetry of warm consensus--stock thoughts and stock emotions workshopped into a pureed nothingness. The following wasn't her inaugural doggerel, but it's a fine example of decline all the same:

I dreamed a pronouncement
about poetry and peace.
"People are violent,"
I said through the megaphone
on the quintessentially
frigid Saturday
to the rabble stretching
all the way up First.
"People do violence
unto each other
and unto the earth
and unto its creatures.
Poetry," I shouted, "Poetry,"
I screamed, "Poetry
changes none of that
by what it says
or how it says, none.
But a poem is a living thing
made by living creatures...
and as life
it is all that can stand
up to violence."

If she's shouting and screaming through a megaphone, there's small chance that what she has to say will endure--although it certainly can capture the moment of a platitudinous campaign rally, or a scripted anti-something protest. This is the postmodernist's laboratory of reanimated dead imagery. Alexander's main sentiment in the above extract is a third-rate imitation of one that emphasizes poetry's superficial fecklessness but then concludes that maybe it does have a certain contradictory or rebellious quality. Thanks, but I knew that already:

For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

A modest proposal for Obama 2.0: Hire Christopher Plummer or Ian McKellen or Frank Langella (if it must be an American) to recite some Auden or Yeats at your next big do, and get on with the prose already.

The New York Times has compiled a roundup of former presidential speechwriters' receptions of Barack Obama's inaugural address, and all are rather ho-hum, both in the form of their rhetorical analysis and the ultimate judgments they make of common subject matter. (One exception: William Safire relating that the phrase "we cannot stand pat" occurred exactly once in a Nixon speech, given within earshot of the first lady.)

But I knew this would happen: John McWhorter, by far the most original and incisive observer of race matters, has written the post-address linguistic essay you should read. What is that special x-factor, that secret ingredient in Obama's oratory? Can we all take a deep, post-p.c. breath now that it's official and he's in charge and admit the obvious: it's the blackness. Here's McWhorter:

Black English is a matter not just of slang, but of sentence structure and sound (why you can tell most black people's race over the phone, which is proven in studies). Some blacks use all three; Obama is one of the many who wields mostly the sound. Listen to the way he often ends sentences on a higher pitch than, say, Tom Brokaw would, with that preacherly hang-in-the-air. Or the way he often pronounces "history" as "historih," "ability" as "abilitih." His rendition of the word responsibility was indicative: with a cadence typical of Black English, capped by a final "ih." No President has ever intoned sentences in this way, because they were not black.

And no president, McWhorter's shrewd enough to add, had the cultural advantage of hearing this beguiling patois pouring from the lips of young people of every race and ethnicity, and more in earnest tribute (or envy) than in mocking irony. What untold debts Obama owes to Eminem and Tarantino.

"That brother can spout" was the all-business email I received from my cant-immune father at around 2 p.m. yesterday. Courtesy of a fellow Obama voter who, having grown up a secular Jew in Queens in the 1950's, has lived long enough to detect the orotundity of the black church tradition -- and probably wish that most New York rabbis had a verbal rep of their own that didn't immediately call to mind Jackie Mason or Ed Koch.

Unlike, say, Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, Obama can aurally pass for white, but he knows just when, and to what degree, to infuse his rhetoric with the pulpit cadences that send thrills up the thighs of cable news anchors. And here's the meta appeal of that: Smatterings of demotic speech in brilliant, erudite speakers is a very clever way to remind one's audience where one came from, and just how extraordinary one's arrival has been. The New York intellectuals used to self-consciously refer to each other as "Oiving," an easy way to gauge the feat of a bunch of working-class, City College Jews transforming themselves into men of letters and serious political thinkers. (If you've ever heard the Oiving whose last name was Howe pronounce the word "perfervid," you'll appreciate the trick of this shtick even more.) It's like hearing Lionel Trilling recite Kaddish.

Obama's Black English may be more of an acquired trait than George Bush's Texas twang ever was, but "Yes we can" sounds rebellious in a way that "Bring 'em on" does not. This owes less, in my view, to any major difference in semantic sophistication. If a man who normally spoke in public as an Ivy League-educated scion of a great American family got a little rough and tumble, but only rarely, and as occasion called for it, then phrases of reckless bravado might now be remembered as phrases of stirring defiance. (Being a better president might have helped, too.) Perhaps more ennobling than his frequent citations of "hope" is the subtle manner in which Obama makes them.

This is why I think Chris Rock might be wrong about the impossibility of parodying him. With all the speeches (in all the locales) the new president will have to give in the next four years, might there not at least be the chance for a lurch into the verbal terrain hilariously mapped by Eddie Murphy in an otherwise dud comedy about making it as a minority in Washington?

 

Someone close to the now-former president once explained to me his (the president's) most debilitating character flaw. A rather crowded field, you might think, but the answer, rooted in George W. Bush's overindulged demand for absolute loyalty, did manage to envelope all the other usual suspects like arrogance, dismissiveness, anti-intellectualism, and parochialism. This well-connected person phrased it like this: "When you decide that six or seven people have turned on you, and that they're now your mortal enemies, that's not a problem. But when you get up to a 100 million or so Americans who've become mortal enemies--that's a problem."

History will do its work in evaluating the Bush Era once the furies and recriminations have ebbed. (The late Samuel Huntington would have eloquently termed the last five years of angry opposition to this administration a "creedal passion period," now giving way to the level-headed pragmatism that is our nation's state of equilibrium.) But if vice can be transmuted into virtue, and if Bush can be said to have got anything right during his time in office, surely his defiance of the "realist" prescription for salvaging Iraq in 2006 must record as a triumph.

Recall the almost universal criticism that the "surge" elicited when it was first announced, against a then almost universally embraced Hamilton-Baker plan for quitting Iraq militarily and letting unprepared Iraqis--and other regional dictatorships--sort out a mess of our own making. Andrew Sullivan said the surge was a lost cause, something that should have been tried three years earlier, when we first invaded. Joe Klein and Frank Rich had little time for a rethink of a counterinsurgency policy wedded to an injection of more young servicemen, even though Klein was the most perceptive in analyzing the true nature of that policy. Even Christopher Hitchens, later a champion of the surge, was, as I recall, initially dour about its prospect for success, although he was and has been steadfast in defending the moral and strategic imperative of ending the regime of Saddam Hussein.

I bring all this up for two reasons. The first is that Peter Beinart took the occasion of this week's Goodbye to All That gleefulness to give credit where he rightly saw it was due, noting that since Gen. David Petraeus' brilliant war plan--really a local policing one--was implemented, the number of Iraq war dead has dropped from a staggering 3,475 to 500, and American troop fatalities have fallen to nearly a sixth of what they were. Adds Beinart: 

[I]f Iraq overall represents a massive stain on Bush's record, his decision to increase America's troop presence in late 2006 now looks like his finest hour. Given the mood in Washington and the country as a whole, it would have been far easier to do the opposite. Politically, Bush took the path of most resistance. He endured an avalanche of scorn, and now he has been vindicated. He was not only right; he was courageous.

The second reason I bring this up is amour propre--both the institutional and personal strains. Noxious little neocon that I am, I spent a few solid hours of my time trying to convince my fellow editors that the surge had a chance and should be given one. The result was a piece in Jewcy that elicited its own share of scorn and derision--though not, thankfully, from those editors--when it first appeared:

In Counterinsurgency, Petraeus describes an effective clear-hold-build mission as more akin to urban policing than battlefield combat: Think New York City’s “broken windows” anti-crime initiative. The central paradox of counterinsurgency is that it applies proportionately less force with greater numbers. The goal is to safeguard the native population from pitiless and desperate aggressors without actively hunting down and killing them. For this reason it’s known as “war at the graduate level.”

Here’s how it will work: In the “clearing” phase, Iraqis and Americans will share planning and reconnaissance responsibilities. They’ll establish surveillance routes together and then “sweep” local housing and apartment blocks searching for signs of insurgent activity. Civilians prefer to have their doors knocked on by Yanks than by fellow Iraqis, who may moonlight as sectarian partisans or death squad riffraff. Iraqi troops will serve as cultural and linguistic liaisons and learn the delicate art of questioning civilians. Peace, in other words, will have to be a polyglot phenomenon.

[...]

The lessons of Tal Afar, Petraeus’s expertise in clear-hold-build tactics, and Kagan’s proposals as to the necessary number of troops and where those troops should be focused—all of these are crucial planks of a program that has been dismissed as uninsipired and feckless rather than honestly assessed.

Still, when the president warned that the year ahead would be “bloody and violent,” he acknowledged the grim reality that the emergence of a viable post-Saddam state will require extreme forbearance on the part of the American and Iraqi peoples. And so it will.

This isn't intended as a nyah-nyah (well, maybe a little), but rather as a mild suggestion. It took Democrats too long to acknowledge the obvious success of the surge because doing so, as Beinart points out, might have compromised their candidate's chances in November. Yet this denial might also have done something far worse: encourage a hasty and irresponsible withdrawal from Iraq at a time when the war looked to be finally going our way.

The rate at which the politics of the negative can become conventional wisdom has increased exponentially since the creation of the blogosphere. Conservatives should take heed from the faults of liberal excess, or what is sometimes known as Bush Derangement Syndrome. If Nemesis should stalk future Obama policies, or look as if it's doing, don't succumb to partisan pettiness or wishful defeatism because you don't don't like the man pedding the policy. We may not be driven to other "quagmires" by the current president, much less to ones that result in the loss of American lives, but you can be sure that we will be presented with initiatives that are hotly contested and reviled in some quarters. The president's willingness to take the necessary risks to see them through will be susceptible to popular opinion.

A leader who goes against consensus because he's adopted a siege mentality or a martyrdom complex is no healthier than one who goes with consensus because he's afraid his aura will fade. Honesty and dispassionate appraisal from his constituents, and the pundits they rely on for their information, are useful checks on either executive shortcoming.

Good news out of Algeria -- an al Qaeda training camp, believed to be the incubator of biological weapons, has gone kaput because all the jihadis got infected with whatever they were cooking up:

The story was first reported by the British tabloid the Sun, which said the al Qaeda operatives died after being infected with a strain of bubonic plague, the disease that killed a third of Europe's population in the 14th century. But the intelligence official dismissed that claim.

AQIM, according to U.S. intelligence estimates, maintains about a dozen bases in Algeria, where the group has waged a terrorist campaign against government forces and civilians. In 2006, the group claimed responsibility for an attack on foreign contractors. In 2007, the group said it bombed U.N. headquarters in Algiers, an attack that killed 41 people.

Black Death would have had a certain ring to it, although the last time it caused trouble on a massive scale was still about seven centuries too late for the age Al Qaeda wants to bring back.

An aged Jew dies and ascends to heaven. Upon meeting God, he asks, "When will there be a Jewish president?"  God answers: "Not in your lifetime."  "And when will there be a black president?" inquires the recently deceased. "Not in my lifetime," replies the deity.

A joke, said Nietzsche, is the epitaph on the death of a feeling, and that feeling of shrugging hopelessness is, we can all agree, long gone. It may well be the case that in four or eight years time, Obama will leave office with many clamoring for the end to presidential term limits. Alternatively, there may be a large and loud chorus wishing him well but in a hurry to welcome the first female chief executive, or yet another prosaic but genial male WASP.  Today's ceremony has all the uncomfortable features of a royal investiture; little acknowledged amid the kitsch trinkets, the Top 40 serenades and the endless queques of hungry historical witnesses in Washington is that this is an employee's first day on the job. The man himself is still very much a blank canvas, which is why his many votaries -- as well as recent converts -- can find whatever it is they're looking for on it, owing to their own individual brushstrokes.

I wasn't entirely sold on Obama when I voted for him (I bought in a foreclosure market), and it still remains to be seen whether his dual defeats of a formidable primary rival, and a not-so-formidable general election rival, were indications of great political skill or harbingers of true leadership. (More than one shrewd commentator has remarked on Obama's unmistakable gift of good fortune; just try tallying up all the eerily near-miss events that led to this moment.) One advantage he has right from the start is knowing almost exactly what he'll be up against: two wars, an economy in ruin, a nuclearized North Korea and Iran, the refurbishing of the American "brand," and... what else?  Oh yes, the inevitability of another act of hideous holy violence on these shores, which may, through no immediate fault of his own, happen on his watch. What surprises after the blood-brutal dawn of the 21st century apart from the landing of extraterrestrials?

Next stop, optimism rehab. I say this copping to my own feelings of sentimentality, knowing that on this frigid winter's day, a major stain on our republic is effectively washed clean, almost two hundred years after the birth of Abraham Lincoln, and forty-five years after the moral ascendancy of Martin Luther King.

Poetry can do justice, it's true, but any critic worth his salt will tell you it more often specializes in bathos. Let us hope that our most literary modern commander-in-chief never loses sight of the fact.

From a former IDF solider:

Dear Soldier,

Here's the thing. You've got to help the children. You're not Hamas. You're better than Hamas. So act it. I once asked Abdel-Aziz Rantisi, the late, unlamented Hamas leader, if he would help an injured Jewish child if  he came across one lying on the street. He said no. And he was a pediatrician by training.

You're not Rantisi. So when you operate, operate with the children in mind. It's a burden Hamas has placed on you -- it's no joy to fight an enemy who hides behind his children. But that's what you're facing. And when you come across scenes like the one described in this Washington Post story, help the children. Yes, I'm sure the Red Cross makes things up from time to time -- they don't like you and never have -- and I'm sure some of the Palestinian self-reporting isn't accurate, but, really -- horrible things still happen, and it's your responsiblity to protect innocent people, not make their lives even more miserable. I would refer you to this Jewish prayer for the children of Gaza. Understand its message!

If you haven't read Jeff's book Prisoners, take your cyber self to Amazon right now and buy a copy. In addition to being a terrific foreign correspondent, Jeff has a talent for spotting the absurdist details of war, a trait I can't help but add is probably genetically overdetermined in writers whose ancestry derives from the Pale of the Settlement (one thinks of Isaac Babel, Vasily Grossman).

I remember hearing him speak about his experiences over a year ago in Manhattan. If you want a sense of the surrealism of the modern Middle East, consider the following anecdote he related. As a guard at Ketziot Prison in the Negev, Jeff had struck up a few odd but rewarding friendships with Fatah militants, one of whom carried the amity well beyond the walls of his cell (I'm not sure if holiday cards and birthday announcements were exchanged, but they might have been).

Years later Jeff, now an established American reporter, was traveling through the Gaza when he realized he was being followed by a car carrying some farouche, gun-wielding toughs, and that his own driver was making all the wrong turns. Having been kidnapped once before, and being well aware of how these things usually go down in Palestine, he panicked. Then he hit upon a good idea: Call his old inmate friend, who was now in a senior security position in the PLO. The guy answered right away (how's that for Jeff's press clout?), and started laughing. I have to paraphrase the conversation since my memory isn't what it used to be:

"You know I'm being followed."

"Don't worry about it."

"No, this is serious."

"I said don't worry about it."

"Wait... Did you... Are these your men? Is this my bodyguard detail?"

Laughter.

"That's so sweet!"

 

My former employer Pajamas Media has decided to dispatch Joe the Plumber to Israel as a roving correspondent to, as he puts it, let "Average Joes' share their story."  The inevitable fallout when a PR neutron bomb like this goes off always puts me in mind of the Wolf and Sheepdog cartoon series Warner Bros. used to run. You know the routine, provided your childhood wasn't stunted and deprived: two permanent adversaries clock in each day and exchange morning pleasantries ("G'day Ralph, G'day Sam") before setting to their predictable work. The so-called "liberal elite" must snigger and snark about a duplicitous, posturing everyman who shilled for John McCain pretending he has any credentials whatsoever to be a war reporter. Conservative populists must then rail against said elite, citing the duplicity and unabashed political bias of the "MSM" (that's mainstream media to you laymen), while claiming that Joe represents a silent majority of Americans and is thus every bit as entitled to cover the Gaza conflict as are, say, Wolf Blitzer and Ted Koppel.

Lost in the melee is the graver question of whether or not a time of war is a time for cultural point-scoring. There is simply no way that PJM didn't prefigure the tongue-in-cheek headlines that would follow this announcement, which has unintentionally vitiated the blog network's stated purpose of standing up for Israel. Joe's become the story, if not the spectacle.

This is not is not to say that a plumber might not do good work as a war reporter, or that, conversely, opposition to his appointment reflects latent or manifest class antagonism. Thomas Paine was a staymaker before he was a pamphleteer, but he was not taken seriously by publishers--nor did he expect to be--until he had actually produced a pamphlet worth reading. He was also a radical revolutionary on two continents.

But gone, it seems, is the skepticism of classical conservatism, which saw the extolling of boldness and defiance for their own sake as hazardous traits of adolescence, designed to be outgrown--and where they weren't, out-argued. What would Allan Bloom think about Joe on the frontlines?  Does it even matter anymore?

Fortunately, at least one member of the right intelligentsia, Commentary's Eric Trager, is not so enthused about Conservativism 2.0's descent into tabloid punditry:

[I]t seems as though Joe will only contribute to the very problem that so many in the blogosphere have harped on for so long-namely, that Middle East reporters frequently arrive in the region with no frame of reference and/or obscene biases.  Indeed, will Joe be any more capable than the average MSM correspondent of reading an Israeli newspaper; or interpreting a mosque sermon on Palestinian television; or assessing the strategic significance of a given Israeli operation or Hamas rocket-attack?  It seems highly improbable, to say the least.  And then there’s his prior claim that a vote for Barack Obama is a “vote for the death of Israel” - is this the kind of thing that credible reporters typically say?

And this hints at the paradoxical nature of the blogosophere. It has set itself up as a dynamic and formidable media anti-establishment, unencumbered by corporate prejudices or even standards of style and tone. Though its virtues have been over-sung -- blogs haven't spelled the end of newspapers anymore than television eclipsed radio's appeal, and there will always be a place, pace Jeff Jarvis, for trained and skilled investigative reporters, without which blogs would have nothing to fisk, praise or seeth against -- what has happened has been a kind of mixed-bag synthesis. Corporate financing, wouldn't you know it, kicked in (see HuffPo's market-immune windfall) and with it came a host of new prejudices impelling the upkeep of the "brand," if often at the expense of truth or intellectual honesty. Also, the advent of blogging as an extended arm of the dead-tree press now signals that the citizen journo has been coopted by the professional corps he purports to hate, though this has seldom led to the professionalization of the citizen journo. Claims of knowing what the hell one is talking about are at least as grossly exaggerated in cyberspace as they are in the op-ed page of the New York Times.

Trager's colleague Abe Greenwald, who I should add is a friend as well as a former Jewcy contributor, defends the plumber selection, writing "if there’s anything we can afford less of in discussing the Middle East it’s 'expertise.'" Greenwald has in mind John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, whose joint thesis was widely discredited in print publications and by other "experts" (Walter Russell Mead doesn't blog yet, does he?)  But he might have also mentioned Juan Cole and Marc Lynch, two names previously unknown outside of the Arabist quadrants of the academy who have since attained a measure of celebrity owing exclusively to their personal blogs. This is the new form of "expertise," and guess what?  It's no less suspect than the old.

There used to be a joke around London that if Martin Amis ever got round to writing his autobiography, it'd have to be called My Struggle. The implication here was that nepotism and the law of succession would do their part in ensuring that an ambitious young litterateur got his first book deal. Whatever merit there may have been in that observation -- and there was also a lot of envy and scorn -- it did nothing to ensure that Amis wrote well, or that he secured his second and third book deals. He had to rely on talent at some point. In any case, his debut fiction The Rachel Papers won the Somerset Maugham Award, which, as if taunting his hyperdemocratic jeerers, was precisely the same honor bestowed on Kingsley Amis some two decades earlier for his masterpiece Lucky Jim. And if anyone remains in doubt about exactly what kind of reliance fils still has on pere, then consider that the autobiography Martin did in fact write was all about his father, and it was one of his best books.

Genetics, we've long known, plays a dominant role in determining our abilities, and so there may be something to the argument that the apple never falls far from the tree, though that's hardly the apple's fault, is it?  Yet the notion of a hereditary mathematician or a hereditary politician is still a profoundly silly one to our republican ears. What great figure has emerged from the British House of Lords in recent memory? Do we believe that any beamish member of the young Windsor clan is fit to manage a night club in Southhampton, much less govern a people?  What I mean to say was much better said by a founding father of the United States:

The more aristocracy appeared, the more it was despised; there was a visible imbecility and want of intellects in the majority, a sort of je ne sais quoi, that while it affected to be more than citizen, was less than man. It lost ground from contempt more than from hatred; and was rather jeered at as an ass, than dreaded as a lion. This is the general character of aristocracy, or what are called Nobles or Nobility, or rather No-ability, in all countries.

Thomas Paine didn't have Google, where terms like "American Royalty" and "Camelot" spring right up whenever the query is the name of one of the most mediocre and over-indulged families to ever sully these fine shores. How is it that, in an age where a mixed-race man from a broken home, the product of international upbringing and no inherited fortune, can be elected president, we are still talking about the fucking Kennedys?

Former first daughter Caroline's latest bid for the New York senate seat soon to be vacated by Hillary Clinton is at least being subjected the kind of real-time scrutiny and audible whisper campaign her father's White House never was. That deserves the title of progress. But there's one holdout institution which seems intent on making the society philanthropist's assumption of office as painless as possible: the New York Times. "Kennedy, Touring Upstate, Gets Less and Less Low-Key" was the title of the Times' Thursday piece on Caroline's image-doctoring, except that it actually hit the paper's website on Wednesday afternoon. If you bothered to read it then, the lede you got was as follows:

In a carefully controlled strategy reminiscent of the vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin, aides to Caroline Kennedy interrupted her on Wednesday and whisked her away when she was asked what her qualifications are to be a United States senator. 

Which is surely one way to stamp "Not Ready" on the dauphiness' forehead. Well, the Times will do many things, apparently, such as run letters from fake French mayors in aggrieved reaction to America's aristo tilt. But one thing it won't do is allow a comparison between Sweet Caroline and the Wasilla Wehrmacht. By Thursday, in the print edition, the lede had been scotched, replaced with the much more copacetic:

The first day of Caroline Kennedy’s tour through upstate New York on Wednesday was meant to be a low-key, decorous excursion, mindful of the skepticism surrounding her bid to be appointed the state’s next United States senator. Fat chance.

Gone too was any mention of her being "whisked" away from the inquisitive throng by her handlers, lest she embarrass herself by explaining why she deserved to be a senator without even being elected one.

How to explain this watering-down other than in terms of blatant bias from on high?  

Pinch Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times, was shamelessly for Hillary Clinton when she still had a chance to be president. He more or less forced the editorial board of his paper to endorse her. And what do you know: he's also great good friends with Caroline, who spoke at a roast of Sulzberger years ago, and whose company with him grew so frequent that it prompted rumors in New York about the nature of their relationship (he had left his wife, she's still married). Would a bracketed "full disclosure" line in coverage of Kennedy's political aspirations be too distracting? Isn't that news fit to print, maybe only in tiny little letters at the bottom?

In a way it's heartening to see that with Democrats on the ascendant, the same old Tammany-style crap wastes no time in bubbling to the surface. It's also heartening that most liberals and Democrats I've spoken with think this appointment would be a very bad idea, fusing all the populist bilge of the Palin pick with the species of noxious cultural elitism Palin got so horribly confused on the stump. One way to erect a tombstone on the Bush years is with the epitaph: Here Endeth the Family Business. It has universal appeal.

And to think, Teddy has also intimated that he wants his permanent perch in Massachusetts to go to...his wife, Victoria. I say, why not? Bourgeois financiers rob us blind, and the dissipated heirs of a degenerate, lace-curtain second estate bequeath Congress to themselves.

See you at the next Tennis Court Oath.

All of a sudden, and quite out of the blue, life expectancy has lengthened -- to forever. Vampires are everywhere again, from the high-haired matinee idols driving tween box office in the form of Twilight -- a film written by a Mormon who thinks the beautiful are the damned, and forbidden love can wait -- to the HBO series True Blood, which tries to reconcile a fabled genus of social outcasts with a very real one. In executive producer Alan Ball's rendering, vampires are like gays (some of them even are gay), who have "come out of the coffin" to declare themselves your friendly neighborhood nightstalkers, thanks to a synthetic Japanese-manufactured blood cocktail that sustains them in lieu of the warm, vein-delivered stuff. It's a clever political trope, even if flagrantly pilfered from the X-Men series. Though who among us would argue with Anna Paquin's ability to finally get laid?

Any talk of glowering immortals stomping the earth in a state of High Romantic sturm und drang always puts me in mind of a different allegory -- that of the Wandering Jew. Perhaps you're familiar with this apocalyptic, anti-Semitic myth, which tells of a Jewish shopkeeper who, upon seeing cross-carrying Christ pause on his way to Golgotha, mocks the rebel rebbe: "Go on quicker, Jesus! Go on quicker! Why dost Thou loiter?" For his insolence, the merchant is admonished by Christ: "I shall stand and rest, but thou shalt go on till the last day," an incantation that condemns him to an eternity on earth. The inspiration for this fable of Hebraiophobic comeuppance derives from vague mutterings in the Gospel of Matthew as to the presence of those who "shall not taste of death till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom."

Sightings of the Wanderer throughout history have been said to presage the End Times, and so naturally sightings have been scattered and frequent. In the lead-up to the last millennium, and in reply to the chiliastic rumblings emanating from the ranks of fundamentalist Protestantism, Free Inquiry's Martin Gardner wrote a well-researched essay about this subject, explaining that, as the clock ticked closer toward 2000, "it would not surprise me to see a picture of the Wandering Jew on the front page of one of the supermarket tabloids." Eat your heart out, Bat Boy.

There are plenty of variations on the Wanderer theme, beginning with one explaining that Joseph of Aramethea was the death-thwarting wraith, whose real name was Cartaphilus. Aramethea, said to be one of the last persons to see Christ alive, was rumored to be tromping around Europe by the 13th century when an Armenian archbishop relayed his sorry tale to Roger of Wendover, who duly recorded it in Flores Historiarum.

Since then, the Wandering Jew has come into continental vogue cyclically, usually at times of cultural and political crisis. Eugene Sue French's serialized novel Le Juif Erant (1844-1845) came out in Paris just in time for revolution, and well within the actuarial windows of future eyewitnesses to Alfred Dreyfus's notorious unpleasantness. In England, George Macdonald's Thomas Wingfold, Curate (1876) envisioned the Wanderer as an Anglican minister overcome with grief about the Crucifixion and clearly in the wrong line of work since he could not pass a cross without wanting to mount and hug it until he collapsed to the ground unconscious. Wingfold finds true love, only to then agonize over the object's impending demise. They both try to off themselves by self-immolation in an active volcano-it works for her, but not for him. Nevertheless, Jesus returns to pardon his erstwhile catcaller and carries Wingfold off to heaven to be reunited with his girl in what may be the Book of Revelation's sole answer to the happy ending.

Continue reading...

In 2004, Nicholson Baker, lately celebrated in some quarters for his argument that World War II wasn’t quite worth the trouble, published a rather creepy, inconsequential novel entitled Checkpoint. The entire narrative consists of one character confiding in another his plan to assassinate George W. Bush. Any reader of feverish left-wing blogs – and Baker’s grim hero professed to be one – can’t have been so terribly shocked four years ago by this fictional premise, which also doubled as an electoral gimmick.  Leon Wieseltier, in an otherwise splenetic review in the New York Times, noted that at least Baker was caricaturing his own cohort of rabid Bush haters by making his would-be Oswald look and sound deranged and under-medicated. 

There’s some value in that, you might say. With Captives, however, first-time novelist Todd Hasak-Lowy hasn’t even got the courage of his convictions to articulate a nutty case for why his protagonist envisions a similar revenge fantasy, this one involving a roving sniper who picks off malfeasant CEOs and relatives of high-ranking administration officials. The result is a stillborn amateur effort that isn’t half as sensationalistic as its author thinks it is.

Daniel Bloom is a mediocre Hollywood screenwriter of big-budget action schlock. His greatest success to date is a psychological shoot-‘em-up called Helsinki Honeymoon (which he still prefers to refer to by its original title, Captives), about a reverse case of Stockholm syndrome: the onscreen hostage murders her smitten hostage-taker. This is one way to telegraph the crashing high concept.

Married to a loveless wife, father to a distant 13 year-old awaiting his bar mitzvah, Bloom claims at the outset to be by nature an apolitical everyman, driven to a “certain intractable rage at those responsible for this state of affairs”—the “this” of course referring to what’s gone on in government and the world of high finance for close to a decade. Yes well, haven’t we all?

Though I bet most of us could do better in the way of zeitgeist exposition than our troubled hero, whose rage is not only intractable but also ineffable: “things were really very, very bad and getting much, much worse,” Blooms says, sounding like Police Academy's Commandant Lasard.

To exorcize Bloom’s vague fear and loathing he must unleash his dark progressive id and pen a dirty little fable about killing all the country’s “bad guys” and their presumably innocent but much more accessible kin. Oh, and  – are you sitting down for this? – there is to be no judgment about the amoral deeds perpetrated in Bloom’s bloody pulp fiction. The federal agent assigned to investigate the string of headline-relevant slayings will find himself, for very personal reasons of course, humanizing the avenging killer, then abetting his escape.

Not that Bloom is so sure how his new project will fly with studio heads, much less a national audience. So he relies on the creative encouragement of an insipid Hollywood agent, who keeps changing his name as if to underscore his and everyone else’s lack of memorability, and a smarmy, Weinstein-type producer. Both insist upon Bloom's sapience and artistic prophecy.  Here’s the producer: “I started reading the papers after 9/11. And these guys are a goddamn disaster. Should we shoot their relatives? Probably not. Should we make a movie about someone shooting their relatives? Fucking A-right we should. Fuck them. Let them deal with it getting out in the open.”

Now here’s Bloom explaining to his son why he wouldn’t mind seeing the chief executive cut down in real life: “He’s a very, very bad president. The worst ever, I think. I think he’s a very dangerous person, and I think he’s responsible for a lot of people dying. Americans and people in other places. Plus he’s a liar.”

If it's satire drawn with a crayon you seek, look no further. But even as liberal primal scream therapy, the above must rank a distant second to Philip Roth's exceedingly minor effort, Exit Ghost, in which the token Upper West Side shiksa becomes so livid over Bush's re-election that she demands, eggs unfertilized, to have a protest abortion.

I won’t bore you with the abstruse plot of Bloom's film, but I suppose I’m duty-bound to bore you with that of Hasak-Lowy's book’s. Bloom seeks the wisdom of a strung-out and sociopathic rabbi, he takes a wholly useless trip to Israel – now the destination for all of contemporary fiction’s perplexed Jews in search of “meaning” – and kibitzes with a wannabe sabra Tarentino who talks like a badly messed-with Zohan, and he gobbles a generous helping of psychotropic drugs along the way.

All of which might have been pardoned if the dialogue weren’t so inspid and reminiscent of the big-budget pabulum the characters keep trying to parody. “We should have no illusions about our industry’s ability to speak truth to power,” Bloom’s agent tells him, mistaking ideological pornography for radical candor. “We speak nonsense to indifference.”  

So do some novels.

The Thanksgiving season is all about gratitude. But when we're sitting around the table with our families and someone asks what we're thankful for, we usually just say 'my health' or 'our family all being together' or something else that's technically true but not terribly edgy. So we asked some of Jewcy's contributors to tell us what they're thankful for--their guiltiest pleasures. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Stefan Beck: American Chain Restaurants

You never miss a good thing til it's gone. When I lived on the Peloponnese in the summer of 2007, my dining options were limited, as at a bad wedding, to salad, chicken, and beef. By July I would have given Athens to the Turks for a plausible cheeseburger, so I made a bus trip to the Applebee's in Αμπελόκηποι. Anybody convinced of the superiority of continental European cuisine should give this a shot. "Tartare" would be a generous description of the beef, just as "gym teacher's insole" would be a generous description of the bacon. The lettuce was seaweed. The tomatoes were, of course, outstanding.

There are some things we Americans alone do well, and the crappy chain restaurant is one of them. Last summer, after driving the long way from Kadoka, South Dakota, to Casper, Wyoming, I found that every motel in town had been booked solid by the Germans of Russian Descent Convention. Every motel but one-which had literally one room left open. It shared a parking lot with Outback Steakhouse, on the aptly named Miracle Road. It was one of the most welcome and memorable meals of my life, like a Dasani dispenser in the Gobi.

These places get a bad rap. Sure, they're "generic" or "lowbrow"-so what? There's less variation in the home-cooked food of the Greek mainland than there is in the strip-mall hellholes of the United States. And some of them are pretty awesome. Just tonight, for instance, I was at a P. F. Chang's. It's more than worth the "Changover," my term for the inevitable morning-after salt and MSG headache. I've never been to Outer Mongolia, but I bet the "Mongolian Beef" at P. F. Chang's is significantly less likely to give you fatal diarrhea than the real thing. And at least P. F. Chang's has a customer feedback card.

Craig Glazer: Good Times

OK, so I still watch Good Times on late night TV, partly because I'm friends with Jimmie "Dy-no-mite" Walker and also because I still find it funny. Maybe because running Kansas City's Stanford and Sons, one of the top comedy clubs in the country, keeps me up late and his old show tends to air after midnight a lot. Maybe it's because I get a kick out of seeing Janet Jackson playing his little sister. By the way, the star was supposed to be John Amos but he got jammed by Jimmie's enormous popularity as "J.J." Amos never got over it. I know that because Jimmie and I email each other every week and he updates me on the lives of other baby boomer stars from back in the day, like comic David Brenner, who filled in for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show so often. Jimmie started his comedy career on The Tonight Show with original host Jack Parr. But that's before my time. Maybe I like "Good Times" so much because we're both so stuck in the '70s.

Marty Beckerman: Paul McCartney's Solo Years

After the Beatles called it quits in 1970 John begged us to give peace a chance, George explored the immaterial world, Ringo... well, Ringo doesn't count... and the critics damned Paul for singing unbearable, syrupy schlock which offended anyone who was not technically deaf, as well as deaf people who actually read his lyrics.

However, McCartney's solo catalog is the most genuinely ass-kicking of all four, despite its many cringe-inducing flaws. Yes, "Ebony and Ivory" is a more sinister torture than anything that occurred at Abu Ghraib, "Freedom" makes you wish the government would outlaw music, and synth-laden ‘80s holiday anthem "Wonderful Christmastime" inspires thoughts of self-immolation, but McCartney had the lowest lows and the highest highs: "Maybe I'm Amazed," "Live and Let Die," "Band on the Run," "Junior's Farm" and "Jet" rock as hard as any Beatles song, and his acoustic tunes such as "Junk," "Distractions," "Jenny Wren," "Here Today" are deeply peaceful and even poignant.

In a morbid way, Lennon's solo work benefits from his 1980 death because he was unable to ruin his music with awful ‘80s production values and middle-aged nostalgia, but there are plenty of gems-alongside the unforgivable (yet catchy!) abominations-in McCartney's later work: "My Brave Face," "Your Way," "Lonely Road," "Calico Skies," "She Is So Beautiful," "Gratitude," and "No Other Baby." I would never, never play these songs with friends in attendance, and there is no dignity in admitting Paul is your favorite Beatle-actually there is quite a bit of shame, horrible shame-but as a wise man once said: "Everybody gonna dance tonight, everybody gonna feel all right, everybody gonna dance around tonight, woooooooooo." Listen to what the man said.

Lilit Marcus: The View

The View is the worst thing on television, and I'm including According to Jim in that count. Originally concieved as a show where four women from different age groups and backgrounds would discuss the day's major issues from a female perspective, after ten seasons it has devolved into the worst kind of self-parody: the kind that thinks it's high art instead of self-parody. Grande Dame Barbara Walters--who I'll admit is a pioneer, but really needs to retire rather than reduce herself to appearing on this dreck and being pulled into the infighting--loves to insist as loudly as possible that all the show's cohosts (Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Sherri Shepherd, and Elisabeth Hasselbeck) love each other and make friendship bracelets and braid each other's hair at slumber parties. No one seems to buy it, least of all the ladies themselves.

The reason the show is offensively bad rather than just plain mediocre, however, is Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Depending which viewer of the show you ask, Hasselbeck is either 'the young one,' 'the blonde one,' or 'the stupid one.' A onetime Survivor also-ran who landed on The View when they sought a young conservative to join the show, Hasselbeck is the wife of a D-list professional football player and an adamant, diehard Republican. Lest you think that I, an admitted liberal, hate Hasselbeck simply for her beliefs and affiliations, let me clarify. There are plenty of well-spoken conservatives out there who manage to make their points by using reason instead of yelling. Several of them write for us. But Elisabeth Hasselbeck is shrill, illogical, compassionless, smug, unable to see nuance, and cries and crawls into her boss (Walters)' lap when she doesn't get her way. I utterly, utterly dislike almost everything about her, from the way she almost never talks about her kids in a positive way and yet says her best quality is 'being a mom' to the way that she deflects any actual fact hurled in her direction by saying she's going to Google it later. And yet I cannot stop watching her. Maybe she's fallen from the 'hate' category into the 'love to hate' one. Or perhaps I'm just waiting for the day when one of her cohosts (please, please let it be Joy Behar) finally has heard too much of Hasselbeck's argument that if we let gay people marry each other the next step will be letting people marry toasters and tells her off on live television. I think that's why I keep tuning in every day--because maybe, just maybe, today will be that day.

Max Gross: Adam Sandler.

I admit that Adam Sandler is sort of retarded.

There are plenty of stupid movies out there that have a self- awareness making them somewhat forgivable -- but Sandler doesn't qualify.

For instance, Todd Phillips' movie Old School is almost artistic in how it culls all sorts of college movies and franternity movies and male-midlife-crisis movies into one great big slobby comedy. There's a kind of genius behind it.

Likewise, there's a kind of art behind stoner movies like Dude, Where's My Car? and Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. They're stupid as hell -- but they fit so artfully into their genre, that all you can do is marvel at them.

I don't think the same can be said about Sandler movies. There's really no subtext. The jokes are as simple and lamebrained as watching Curly get hit in the face with a hammer. (Another guilty pleasure of mine.)
But I must admit, I sort of love Billy Madison. And Big Daddy. And I thought that the opening scene of Anger Management was a classic (even though the last twenty minutes sucked). And the fight between Sandler and Bob Barker in Happy Gilmore is one of the most hysterically funny things I've ever seen.

Not all Adam Sandler movies are created equally -- I didn't find Little Nicky particularly amusing. And I absolutely hated I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry. And The Waterboy is a dreadfully unfunny movie.
But I defy anyone not to laugh when they see Happy Gilmore headbutt Bob Barker with the memorable line, "The price is wrong, bitch!"

Michael Weiss: Gossip Girl

This serialized Cruel Intentions affords glimpse into what my little sister’s high school years were like at the Professional Children’s School (alma mater of Scarlett Johansson, Mischa Barton and, for about a year, Paris Hilton), except that the characters are richer, nastier and less plausible. I’m a Serena man, or at least I was until it was disclosed in the course of a single, erratic season that she stole the Lindbergh baby and fomented a coup in Uruguay. Nothing is predictable, and a major ripple exists in the bitch-sweetie spacetime continuum. Serena not drinking to impress her dippy emo artist boyfriend? Never fear: by Christmas she’ll be slaloming off mountains of blow in Gstaad with Medusa hair and lipstick applied like Diane Ladd’s in Wild at Heart.

Each episode is sort of a stand-alone pubescent debauch, which is why I laugh whenever someone tells me they haven’t watched the show because they’d have to start from the “beginning.” No one goes to class on the Upper East Side, 15 year-olds start their own fashion lines, and college is just another status symbol for the Betty-and-Veronica female leads to pull each other’s hair over.

Chuck Bass makes this demimonde go round, and although he’s dressed and pomaded like a ventriloquist’s gay dummy, his unexpected heterosexuality goes to eleven. He’s fucked more Maxim cover models than Tony Stark and John Mayer, and he’s collected email passwords and social security numbers for insurance. (I always wanted to be born into a family with a private eye on retainer.) Yet there is a kernel of humanity smothered in that outer husk of sleepy womanizing evil. Bass sticks up for his kith and kin: witness his role in slaying Georgina, Serena’s arch-“frenemy,” and his facilitation, in last week’s Thanksgiving special, of his father and stepmother’s inevitable divorce (he loosed all the secret files on the family to the family).

As for the rest of the ho-hum cast, Dan and Nate should commit thwarted-love double suicide, and Rufus should stay on tour with Collective Soul.

Everything that has come out of the Judd Apatow comedy industrial complex is a variation on the theme of romantic implausibility. A sexually inexperienced man-child who collects action figures will win the heart of a lissome granny (The 40 Year-Old Virgin). A financially insolvent porn database stoner will impregnate a buxom E! reporter (Knocked Up). Two homoerotically bound high school nerds will win the hearts and loins of two precocious cuties who would almost certainly be fucking college guys, with nary a computer-generated Kelly LeBrock in sight (Superbad).

Hot chicks dig us: Jonah Hill and Jason Segel in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall"The premise of Forgetting Sarah Marshall is so shopworn that the movie has no right to be as entertaining as it is. Jason Segel’s Peter Bretter is a soundtrack musician for a silly Law and Order-type crime drama in which his girlfriend, the eponymous Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell) stars. She dumps him while he lolls around naked and confused in their modest L.A. home, and the first fifteen minutes or so of plot development are devoted to Peter’s coping mechanisms: weeping uncontrollably, eating cereal by the cubic meter, and sleeping around with mute-orgasming models and sadomasochistic bar skanks (nice work if you can get it). He decides to take a holiday in Hawaii to get his mind off his recently departed beloved, but, lo and behold, Sarah’s booked the same trip with her new English rock star boyfriend, Aldous Snow (Russell Brand), lead singer of my favorite band name in ages, Infant Sorrow. Peter spends about the next fifteen minutes bearing inconsolable witness to their public displays of lewdness. Were it not for an unfathomably kind and unspeakably beautiful hotel concierge, Rachel (Mila Kunis, whose bath water I’d gladly drink), Peter would have likely hanged himself by his lei.

You can pretty much figure out the remaining hour or so from here: Peter discovers new love and confidence in Rachel; Sarah begins to doubt having left him; Peter’s dilemma becomes one of choosing between two girls a man who looks like Judge Reinhold sculpted from porridge and subsists in a mid-level tax bracket would never be given the option to choose from outside of a fratboy screenwriter’s imagination. Not that there’s any real choice in fantasyland, either: I’d have been over the vapid TV twit the minute my moist eyes alighted on Kunis. Any feminist gripe with the earnest, joke-missing feminine dramatis personae of Knocked Up is hereby nullified. Rachel looks like she knows who Doc Brown is, and she’s great fun to be with.

As with most Apatovian fare, there are unexpected turns along the road of male redemption banality. Aldous, played by a Jagger-swaggering Russell Brand, is actually a very likable stage-mincing debauchee, particularly when he calls his groupies “Sorrow Suckers,” thinks genital herpes isn’t a sexual dealbreaker when it isn’t “inflamed,” and swats down an obsequious hotel maître d' (the inexplicably underused Jonah Hill) who proffers a demo tape by saying, “Yeah, I was going to listen to it, but then I decided to carry on with my life.” Gentlehearted laughs are also mined from a frustrated evangelical couple on their honeymoon discovering the joys of beginners’ tantra. Even a throwaway montage of Peter’s late emergence from a cocoon of self-loathing and depression manages to be both touching and real.

Our protagonist’s renascence coincides with the production of a whimsically tragic Dracula musical staged with puppets. Avenue Q with heart might in fact be the best emotional metaphor for this genre of masculine romantic comedy.

9:04 PM: What the hell, it's between this and American Idol tryouts. NBC News projects Romney wins Michigan. "Dearborn Awakening" no help to John McCain, evidently.

9:06 PM: Did Hillary just say that MLK died so she could run for president?

9:14 PM: I want to say that Obama is being gallant to answer that race had no part in his New Hampshire loss, but really, how can he presume to know that?

9:16 PM: Hillary's evasiveness on the BET founder Robert L. Johnson's winking allusion to Obama's wayward youth is later invalidated by her admission that Johnson's statements were out of bounds. What he said: "I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton who have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood that I won't say what he was doing but he said it in his book." He "clarified" that he was talking about Obama's days as a "community organizer." Uh-huh. And the most memorable scene in Basic Instinct was the opening credits.

9:19 PM: Cute question to Edwards about his insecurities as a white male running for president.

9:23 PM: What'd that heckler say? And why does John Edwards think it's impressive to point out that monied interests damage domestic legislation?

9:24 PM: Hillary said it was "pathetic" for Bush to beg the Saudis to reduce the price of oil. Good point. No one would want to see Hillary beg.

9:25 PM: Obama's greatest weakness: he'd lose the briefcase with the launch codes.

9:29 PM: Edwards's greatest weakness: he cares so damned hard. Lucky that being president would keep him away from the down-at-heel hoi polloi. That upper lip ain't going to get stiff by itself.

9:30 PM: Hillary mentions cronyism without any visible cracks in her Lancombe foundation. What a pro.

9:34 PM: Brian Williams just asked Obama about being a pledge-thwarting Muslim. Is John Edwards' Freemasonry up next? Where's Ron Paul when you need him?

9:37 PM: I'm watching this on Windows Media Player. What commercials are they running? I ask because I'd like to learn something about this country and the people who run it.

9:39 PM: True confession: American Idol is playing in the background. A guy in a Princess Leia bikini just showed up. So far the most winning executive personality this evening.

9:40 PM: Citibank agonistes. Subprime mortgages are the new missile gap. Snore.

9:44 PM: The curious thing about Edwards is that he speaks in timeless homilies. Children, parents, responsibility, growth. If the whole White House gambit doesn't pan out, he'd make a fine Royal Proconsular Authority of Tobacco Farming at Jamestown.

9:49 PM: Hillary tries to take credit for the failure of a bankruptcy bill she voted for. Bill claps his trotters backstage.

9:54 PM: OK, I learned something. Warren Buffett still pays taxes.

9:58 PM: Hillary gives the most technical and comprehensive answer to our economic woes. I still can't pay my Capital One bill. Also, she gibbers too long, says Brian Williams.

10:00 PM: Edwards's goofy-toothed smugness challenges Obama on insurance executives giving to his campaign. Obama has that about-to-take-you-school look on his face. It delivers.

10:03 PM: Hillary in deep bullshit mode now. Question: How can Bush "bind the hands" of the next president by bypassing Congress in fashioning a deal with the Iraqi government to maintain U.S. troop presence until whenever. If this is peremptory executive whim, then the next executive can de-whim it, he can't he?

10:04 PM: Obama goes along with her.

10:05 PM: All troops out by the end of the year, says Clinton. Excuse me?

10:06 PM: Russert calls them on this. Obama clarifies his position: "end the war as we understand it." All three most disingenuous and delusional on this point. Now they're outjockeying one another to promise to do what they cannot feasibly do, nor what the military commanders say is necessary for maintaining basic security. (See this WaPo article on the window the surge has afforded for political reconciliation, which is now proceeding at a sluggish--as opposed to glacial--pace given the new de-Baathification law passed by the Iraqi government.)

Edwards wants "quick reaction force" in Kuwait. A garrison there somehow different from the "occupation" in Iraq.

10:19 PM: Now comes the liberal chest-pounding about federal funding for colleges that deny ROTC programs. All in favor.

10:22 PM: Look, any place called Yucca deserves toxic avenging. Why no one bringing up how we're losing the mutant warrior race to the Russkis?

10:30 PM: Enough with the fission already.

10:34 PM: English as a national language. Hillary in favor because "it will likely make it harder for Senator Obama's paymasters in Al Qaeda to coordinate themselves."

10:35 PM: Am I the only one creeped out by Hillary's continual recourse to "black-brown" as an identity politics category?

10:44 PM: Assault rifles, Second Amendment. As Edmund Wilson wrote in his diary shortly before he died and just after seeing The Godfather and The French Connection: "Bang bang."

10:49 PM: John Dickerson at Slate: "Romney ran in Michigan the way many people thought he should have from the start: as a man from the business world who could fix their problems. He also pandered robustly. Romney told Michiganders he would protect them from the business cycle and save their jobs." The Managerial Revolution begins and ends here, methinks.

10:59 PM: My live feed crapped out on me. Here's what happened anyway: John Edwards mentioned Tom Maller, a one-legged longshoreman he had the pleasure of meeting yesterday. Unfortunately, Tom doubled down on eleven two weeks ago, in a rare moment of excitement at New York New York, and frittered away his and his wife Geraldine's nest egg. This is why we need to fix social security before our children suffer. Hillary said Osama bin Laden is hoping that a President Obama misplaces the executive memo to bomb Waziristan. Meanwhile, the Senator Obamam slowly smoked a cigarette on camera and proceeded to explain to Tim Russert that he was against ingesting cloned animal meat long before any of his other esteemed colleagues were. The end.

I've been with Jewcy since April, 2006 -- before there was a Jewcy, and before the worst stain that you could attach to the name Michael Weiss was that he landed on his ass at the Winter Olympics, or made an unconvincing Pretender on NBC.

I'll be leaving these parts in mid-January to become Pajamas Media's new New York and D.C. editor. Rollicking Peloponnesian days with Victor Davis Hanson, wild Dylanesque nights with Ron Rosenbaum. Or so I'm told.

One wants to avoid sentimentality at times like these ("I'll miss you all terribly. Except you, Craig. I never liked you and your lunches always smelled.") but it's an uphill battle, really. I've had the privilege to work with some of the funniest, most talented people in journalism -- not ghettoized Jewish journalism, mind you, but journalism. We will all answer to Izzy Grinspan in a matter of years. Tahl Raz took a vague idea, borne of the hash and decadence of Amsterdam, and made it material. And I'm actually sticking around another couple of weeks because I want to see Joey's unkept mug one last time in person before I hop it. At the very least, Leinoff needs more schooling at Ping-Pong.

I don't plan to be a complete stranger to Jewcy or to the Cabal. I'll still post my glowering neocon screeds from time to time. And I hope friendly antagonists like Ismail, and not-so-friendly ones like that creepy asshole who keeps telling me I'm not a real Jew because my mother isn't, follow me wherever I go. I could use the comic relief.

It's been real. Now here's a picture of my English Cocker Spaniel in front of the Christmas Tree. Just for you, creepy Jewish chauvinist commenter (my squeeze is Korean, too, just like Noah Feldman's. Viva la intermarriage!):

This week's New York magazine is the annual "Reasons to Love New York" issue. Last year, Jewcy mocked. This year, we were asked to contribute:

Last year, Michael Weiss, an editor at the hip online magazine Jewcy.com, thought that our list of “Reasons to Love New York” was, to use his word, “malnourished.” So he solicited his friends to come up with their own. Their reasons ranged from simple, straightforward appreciations—“Because New York has the highest per capita rate of beautiful women on the planet”—to decidedly backhanded ones—“Because even the most obnoxious, shallow, empty-headed dickwads around here are at least pretty intelligent.” We asked him to solicit more for 2007. Here’s what he and his readers/friends came up with.

80. “Because understanding the dullness and poverty of contemporary art is made easier once you know that it gestates in Chelsea. But mostly I love New York because there are few places that can make you suspicious of high proportions of 'cool' people, where everybody has an informed opinion about Proust or Gravity’s Rainbow, owns records by Brian Eno or John Cage, and endorses the politics of Noam Chomsky. Once such refinement is revealed as canonical, you’re in a great spot to do the work of locating the space where something truly radical might emerge.”
—Josh Strawn, lead singer of Blacklist

81. “Because of the Partisan Review crowd and how the Ansonia reminds me of Bellow’s Seize the Day. Because of the British expats in Brooklyn Heights who try to blend but still occasionally talk as if Zabar’s were located somewhere east of Suez. Because of the late senator Pat Moynihan and the fishbowl-size Bloody Marys at Sarabeth’s (oddly related in my mind). Because Morrissey just decides not to show up at the Garden one night and everyone’s cool with it. Because the subway series extends to presidential races, too. Because my older sister took the Preppy Killer’s high-school-yearbook photo and knew then he was no damned good.”
—Michael Weiss, your humble compiler

82. “Because when I’m on the subway trying to read a book about zombies, and a man gets on and starts talking really loudly about how he’s found Jesus and Jesus is what’s kept him from performing fellatio on the side of the BQE, and I say to him 'Excuse me, I’m getting toward the climax of this book, so do you think you can ‘reel it in’ a bit, like, you know, ‘take it down a notch’?' he nods and says, 'Why, certainly, I meant in no way to disturb your reading pleasure,' and continues his spiel in a delicate whisper.”
—Eli Valley, cartoonist

Norm Geras, one of my favorite British bloggers, asked me to fill out one of his famed profiles. Only too happy to oblige:

What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > Orwell's famous line about the Spanish Civil War can and should be applied to any historical circumstance or news organization: 'The raping and butchering in Chinese cities, the tortures in the cellars of the Gestapo, the elderly Jewish professors flung into cesspools, the machine-gunning of refugees along the Spanish roads - they all happened, and they did not happen any the less because the Daily Telegraph has suddenly found out about them when it is five years too late.'

If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > Socialize healthcare.

What would you do with the UN? > Get it to uphold its own resolutions.

What do you consider to be the main threat to the future peace and security of the world? > The fusion of religion and technology.

Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > I am, but I never have to sleep on the couch because of it.

In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > 'I absolutely loved your interpretative dance sequence.'

What would you call your autobiography? > Why Should You Care?

Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > London or Prague.

What would your ideal holiday be? > After my over-insured yacht sinks off the Italian Riviera, I'm invited to stay with Monica Bellucci at her villa while Vincent Cassel is away shooting Ocean's Fourteen.

normblog: The normblog profile 218: Michael Weiss

Jewcy Folk,

Tonight Jewcy and the Armenian-American community's No Place for Denial campaign co-sponsor a rally outside the national ADL headquarters in Manhattan. For the next few days, the national ADL will be meeting somewhere in the City to consider, among other things, whether to continue supporting Turkey's ongoing campaign to deny recognition to the survivors of the Armenian Genocide.

I wish I could be at the rally rather than out here on the West Coast, but Michael Weiss will be there along with other Jewish speakers to represent Jewcy and all those of us in the Jewish community who believe that genocide denial is not a Jewish value, and that the ADL can never represent the Jewish tradition of social justice so long as it seeks to deny recognition to the survivors of genocide and to the descendants of those who perished.

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Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:56 AM
i think im voting for hillary. the more the other dems pick on her, the more i want her to win

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:57 AM
my landlord -- who literally watches CNN from 7 AM to 11 PM every day -- thinks she's going to win. and i assume anyone who watches that much CNN probably has a good handle on the election

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:57 AM
i do too. it'll be hillary v giuliani and giuliani is just too dim on the stump. he doesn't play in peoria.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:58 AM
yeah. also, he's terrifying. you think it'll come down to New York vs New York?

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:58 AM
yup. subway series!

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:58 AM
because hillary doesn't necessarily play in peoria either

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:58 AM
yes she does. i mean, not to the far right, who will always hate her. but her biggest base in ny is upstate farmers. she's very, very shrewd. actually pretty conservative, which can't help but come across, even as she's attacked by both parties for essentially the same behavior.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:59 AM
well, but those farmers have had her as senator for a while

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:59 AM
which is why she's still a hawk on foreign policy

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 11:59 AM
yeah, she really is

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 11:59 AM
yeah but in that time she's learned to speak their language. she's nestled up to the status quo as much as she can without actually turning republican. i still think - despite the anti-hillary sentiment - that people will vote for her wanting her husband back

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:00 PM
right. but do you think that given the choice between a thrice-married Republican and a Clinton Democrat, conservative rural types will vote for the Democrat?

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:00 PM
and he will be back if she gets elected.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:00 PM
yeah, he totally will

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:01 PM
well, it depends on the segment of conservative rural types. if thomas frank's "what's the matter with kansas" argument has any legs, then hillarycare, etc. should play well in the sticks. giuliani isn't reagan the way thompson also isn't but wants to be. rudy will have a tougher time convincing the cultural conservatives that he's not too new york, a john lindsay with a testosterone surfeit. whereas hillary's never suffered from island-itis. her unspoken appeal to moderates in the heartland is her metro-phoneyness. if she can fool yankees fans into voting for her, anything's possible.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:01 PM
that's true

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:01 PM
so really it'll come down to one of the most hawkish senators following 9/11, and the guy who ran the country on 9/11. rudy has more cachet as a muscular leader, no question. but that's not all he needs. and hillary's not willowy enough to make it all he needs

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:02 PM
yeah, she's tough enough to give him a run for his money

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:03 PM
also, it'll be one of the most entertaining administrations.... all the corruption, double-dealing, memory lapses before senate subcommittees. vince foster flitting through the west wing like banquo's ghost. i can't wait.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:03 PM
hee. yeah, it'll be good. also fun to have a lady president. i'm excited for four years of gender commentary -- "what does it mean that the President wore a mauve pantsuit to the peace talks?" that kind of thing. i'm also just excited to see what happens to Colbert and the Daily Show

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:04 PM
my mom hates her which is funny because she reminds me of my mom (with anger management classes under her belt)... i think he jumped the shark with that, to be honest

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:04 PM
yeah, it's sort of a dumb stunt. but what i'm wondering is how their audiences will deal with them satirizing a Democrat

Michael Weiss 10/31/07 12:04 PM
let's see: robin williams makes a box office bomb about a colbert-type late night news satirist running for president. colbert decides to put williams' dead script to work for himself...hmm.

izzygrinspan 10/31/07 12:04 PM
ha ha

“I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” The Song of Solomon makes it sound so simple—hot, even. But as Jewcy’s sex and dating coverage has amply proven over the past six months, love is never that straightforward. For some of us, it’s more like “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is about to dump me for being an American imperialist pig.” Or “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is Lexapro.” Or “I am my beloved’s and my beloved’s is mine, but we aren’t going to touch until our non-halachic gay marriage.” Below, some select articles, personal essays and blog posts in which our authors agonize about everyone's favorite four-letter word.

One of the Offending Images: BobsYerUncle's effigy of SierraPrompted by my post below about l'affaire Sierra, Izzy engaged me in a Skype conversation. As always, it was more fun than either of us have any right to be having on the clock:

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[Late to this conversation? Don't sweat it:  A Kibitz on Pure Reason (Day One); A Kibitz on Pure Reason (Day Two)]

[Continuing the discussion with Rebecca Goldstein on her book Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity. Access the whole exchange here.] 

Baruch Spinoza is one of the most revered and scrutinized philosophers of the Enlightenment. An atheist at a time when witches were still burned at the stake, his treatises on democracy, free speech and free inquiry were branded as unpardonable heresies by Jew and Christian alike. Spinoza was a Portuguese Jew whose family had fled the Inquisition and established itself in the relatively open society of Amsterdam during the height of mercantilism. An extraordinarily gifted student of the Talmud, he began questioning the conventional wisdom of Judaism, and religion itself, in his adolescence and was excommunicated by his own mentor and rabbi. Spinoza thus became, at an early age, a minority of a minority, or a “double-exile” of 17^th-century Europe.

To: Rebecca Goldstein
From: Michael Weiss
Subject: Laughter of the Mind and the Original Non-Jewish Jew

Dear Rebecca,

Logician/Magician: Incompleteness theorist Kurt GődelI should probably say at the outset that I’d been looking forward to your treatment of Spinoza ever since I read your engrossing book on Kurt Gődel's incompleteness theorem. This is a profound accomplishment since you're talking to someone with absolutely no aptitude for mathematics. (As far as I'm concerned, once a formula exists, the tedious spadework has been done; I'll take the textbook's word for it that it works, thanks all the same.)

Without getting too much into the arcana of Gődel's theorem, it’s probably worth mentioning that he employed a very ironic and witty method for legitimizing his Neo-Platonic worldview. Gődel believed in certain immutable truths that could not be substantiated by empirical investigation alone. He used the tectonics of the famed Vienna Circle to cause the epistemological earthquakes that brought down the entire edifice of logical positivism. Isn't that the most charismatic kind of genius, to debunk somebody else's wisdom on its own terms and turn reason into an intellectual satire? Incompleteness is laughter of the mind.

Which brings me, if a bit obliquely, to your latest biography of another cosmic comedian, Spinoza. Why do I say comedian? Because in retrospect, there is something distinctly amusing about one man's ability to turn even the most “progressive” elements of 17th-century European society into fire-breathing reactionaries. Spinoza may have been the godfather of modernity, but he also negatively characterized his age, proving that to be ahead of one's time is also, inevitably, to be "of" one's time. The original non-Jewish Jew, the rootless cosmopolitan par excellence, got so much right long before the world was ready to appreciate him – indeed, if it even is ready now. And despite his notorious asceticism, Spinoza strikes me as having a much more winning personality than Gődel. He wasn't cracked and tortured, and even when chivvied by the hidebound and medieval, he managed to keep his powder dry (except once, but more on that later). Meet the brooding loner of the Enlightenment, a Clint Eastwood for the life of the mind crowd.

Free Radical: Baruch SpinozaYou write early on that you were won over by Spinoza – you loved him – because despite the baleful portrait Mrs. Schoenfeld, your yeshiva teacher, painted of him, he still had an abiding respect for his family and their reputation. He stuck by his motto of Caute ("caution") until the truth elbowed its way out of his study and into the gossip-crazy streets of Amsterdam, where it became a scandal. Before this, he was willing to keep up appearances until the only sacrifice he'd make would be of himself, alone. Shalom bayis (peace within the house) and "not in front of the goyim" are harder orthodoxies for a nice Jewish boy to shake than belief in the soul’s immortality or in the existence of angels. Spinoza didn’t have ice water in his veins, however icy his rationalism may have been.

It's amazing to me that, for someone who didn’t get out much, and didn't have too many people over, he was also a brilliant psychologist. Spinoza knew human folly and passion with the kind of intuition you don't expect from hermetic bookworms. His definition of cruelty, for instance – endeavoring to injure someone who loves you if hatred is your prevailing emotion – is on the same plane as Dostoevsky's insight in The Brothers Karamazov that we sometimes can't forgive the ones we've wronged.

I developed my own affection for Spinoza when I read the circumstances surrounding his excommunication. "Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down and cursed be he when he rises up." This is like that t-shirt they sell in the Village with the shit-happens precis of all the religions. Judaism is "Why does shit always happen to me?"

Now, it’s precisely these biographical details, which are few but extremely telling, that give you the paradoxical challenge of writing a biography of Spinoza. By trying to understand what motivated a purposefully inscrutable philosopher you fly in the face of the "radical objectivity" of his philosophy. This is your betrayal of him. He thought human beings were nothing but the piddling q's implied by the august p's of the logical superstructure of the universe, whether that superstructure is defined as the Mind of God, the Presumption of Pure Reason, or Einstein's a priori "out yonder." Our only task is to use our “eyes of the mind” to try and glimpse as much of that superstructure as possible, to approach its true nature asymptotically.

Rebecca, you're a novelist as well as a scholar of rationalism and its history. I'm wondering how great the temptation must have been to see Spinoza as that near-perfect invention of fiction, a character not just molded by his surroundings, but whose entire legacy might be thought of as its own conscious rejection of them. His personality obtrudes in certain ways: "absurd" is a common adjective used in The Ethics, and it sounds to my ear like the haughty sigh of a pissed-off double exile. Is Spinoza sometimes protesting too much? Are those "eyes of the mind" of his smiling just a little too indulgently for their own good?

I remember your closing line of the Gődel book, where you guess at what a horrifying but exciting awareness of being the smartest guy in the room must have been like for an adolescent prodigy:

"There are always logical explanations and I am exactly the sort of person who can discover such explanations. The grownups around me may be a sorry lot, but luckily I don't need to depend on them. I can figure out everything for myself. The world is thoroughly logical and so is my mind – a perfect fit."

This is not betraying Gődel because he'd have been indifferent to such a surmise of the motives behind his metaphysics. You're allowed inside his head. Not so Baruch, which makes me wonder if it was purely "objective" of him to place imagination behind reason and observation in his three-part catalogue of knowledge.

Eye of Skepticism: Vladimir Nabokov loved to tweak Marx and FreudYou were easier on your subject than you might have been. Compare your treatment of Spinoza to the way Nabokov went to work in The Eye on another famous free-thinking and Hellenized Jew of modernity:

It is silly to seek a basic law, even sillier to find it. Some mean-spirited little man decides that the whole course of humanity can be explained in terms of insidiously revolving signs of the zodiac or as the struggle between an empty and a stuffed belly; he hires a punctilious Philistine to act as Clio's clerk, and begins a wholesale trade in epochs and masses; and then woe to the private individuum with his two poor u's, hallooing hopelessly amid the dense growth of economic causes. Luckily no such laws exist: A toothache will cost a battle, a drizzle cancel an insurrection. Everything is fluid, everything depends on chance, and all in vain were the efforts of that crabbed bourgeois in Victorian checkered trousers, author of Das Kapital, the fruit of insomnia and migraine.

I look forward to your reply,

Michael

To: Michael Weiss
From: Rebecca Goldstein
Subject: The Intoxicating Passion of Abstract Thought

Dear Michael:

The Giggler: Kurt Gődel had an Amadeus-like laughYour reaction to my book on Gődel certainly tickles me. "Incompleteness is laughter of the mind." That's very good. Want to know the precise tone of that laughter leaking out of the corrugated frontal lobes? The “heir to Aristotle” with the air of a sagacious child had a high-pitched giggle. That's right, a giggle. The few visitors who sought him out in his hermitage at the Institute for Advanced Study were always utterly taken aback by Gődel's laugh. Isn't that perfect?

A giggle is just the right kind of noise bubbling up from the man who used the tools of the logic trade in order to construct a Mőbius strip of a proof that left the logic world not knowing its up from its down. The problem for Gődel was that he came to feel, especially after his best pal Einstein died and left him stranded and lonely on the Olympian Heights, that nobody else really got the joke, not the way he did. If people saw a joke at all they thought it was an altogether different one, with a punch line punching holes in the whole idea of truth and rationality, whereas that wasn't what the man had meant at all.

In the end the joke was on him, and he became one of the most profoundly lonely of men, locked up in his own increasingly paranoid take on the uncomprehending world. That delightfully inappropriate giggle is one manifestation of him--the proof for the incompleteness theorems itself has a sort of Alice-in-Wonderland playfulness, gleeful and wild. But the over-plotted delusions that made him think that there was a conspiracy afoot "to make men stupider" and that therefore wanted to rub him out, well, that's also a manifestation of the noises inside that incomparable cerebrum, a hysterical chatter just below the surface of his silence.

But anyway I like it that you confess that mathematics doesn't exactly make your heart beat faster and yet you got the book. It's one thing for me to get the stacks of blandishments from MIT types using words they haven't seen fit to use since blackening the last ovoid on their verbal SAT's with their sweaty number 2 pencils. I don't actually get those stacks, mind you, but that would be one thing. What I like is hearing from people who look for the nearest exit whenever they hear the word “theorem.”

Showing the passionate side of the most abstract thought—mathematical logic, quantum mechanics, metaphysics— is sort of my beat, in fiction and non-fiction. I'm a novelist who certainly knows the tug of pure reason. Literary types, if they deal with the mathematical personality at all, often present it as being in terrified flight from the passions. What often is missed is that abstract thinking itself can be the most intoxicating passion of all. Of course, it can also be a terrified flight from the passions.

Not Made of Concrete: Spinoza's was a burning passion for abstract thoughtSometimes abstract thinking really does serve as an elaborate defense mechanism constructed by nervous thinkers who can't figure out human relations and can't accept the lack of control that being human entails and who seek to hide their fear and trembling in the rarified atmosphere of logical relations. Which of course brings me to Spinoza.

Spinoza is philosophy's most ardent advocate for the intoxicating passion of abstract thought. This is the only passion that's truly good for us, he argues, the heady passion that just keeps on getting headier, unlike all the others that deliver their rush and then leave you limp. But, as you point out, this was not a man who was clueless about All Things Human. Quite the contrary.

The part of The Ethics that discusses human psychology is studded with mini-portraits of various psychological types, so faithfully rendered that the "originals" almost jump out at you; or rather you're able to supply "originals" out of your own stock of acquaintances. He's an absolute fiend at peering beneath the psychological vestments, lifting the skirts of all sorts of behaviors to reveal the unwashed soul.

For example, he spots the narcissism that besmears various forms of depression:

"Though dejection is the emotion contrary to pride, yet is the dejected man very near akin to the proud man . . . Hence none are so prone to envy as the dejected; they are specially keen in observing men's actions, with a view to fault-finding rather than correction, in order to reserve their praises for dejection, and to glory therein, though all the time with a dejected air."

I read that description and I immediately see some of my most lugubrious friends, astutely cataloguing how nobody lives up to their own high standards, "though all the time with a dejected air." That last phrase is just fantastic. This is an observer of human nature on whom nothing is lost.

Spinoza is a rationalist who doesn't shrink from the emotions, the mess of our inner lives, as a subject not fit to think about, escaping into the transparency of logic because that's the only thing he truly gets. No, he really gets the emotions and he tells us we should get them, too, especially our own. We should look at them with coldly analytic objectivity, study them, he famously says, as if they were the "lines, planes, and solids" of the Euclidean geometry whose methodology he usurps in The Ethics. We should get them so that we can get passed them, at least the irrational ones.

Of course, one can see him as just one more of those essentially terrified thinkers unable to face up to the essential powerlessness of the human condition, cowering behind his hyper-rationalism, much weaker than the rest of us miserable slobs who at least don't aspire to being anything but miserable slobs. This leveling view of Spinoza was the one Nietzsche took, at least part of the time; he also praised Spinoza, in a postcard, as being the only one in the history of philosophy worthy of being called Nietzsche's predecessor.

Heir to Spinoza?: Nietzsche was a tough critic of the Dutch philosopherBut in another mood Nietzsche views Spinoza as a craven charlatan: "Or consider the hocus-pocus of mathematical form with which Spinoza clad his philosophy . . . in mail and mask, to strike terror at the very outset into the heart of any assailant who should dare to glance at that invincible maiden, Pallas Athena: how much personal timidity and vulnerability this masquerade of a sick hermit betrays."

I don't agree with this view of Spinoza at all. I don't think that his hyper-rationalism cloaks personal timidity and vulnerability, but rather is his extreme solution to an extreme problem. For Spinoza, unreformed human nature is a problem to be overcome, on both an individual and societal level.

Unreformed human passion wreaks terror within the individual and in society at large, where it assumes monstrous shapes that roam the streets in the form of bullying ideologies, most especially religious ideologies, vicious gangs that claim to get their orders straight from the Big One. If anything, I think Nietzsche's take on Spinoza sheds more light on Nietzsche's psyche than on Spinoza's.

Still, it's possible to look with skepticism at anyone who maintains, as Spinoza does, that we can use rationality to cure ourselves of our all-too-humanness. You want to cure yourself of being human, buddy? You must be one hell of a freaking mess inside to think you've got to go to that kind of length just so that you don't have to take a good hard look at yourself. But then, Spinoza would respond (not even deigning to address the slight to his innards): What's the alternative, my friend? A world constantly shattered by jihads of one form or another?

Having just finished scanning today's New York Times I chime in, as I do almost every morning, "Baruch, my man, you got yourself a major point there."

Best,
Rebecca

The next series of letters to this dialogue will be published Tuesday, first on the Daily Shvitz.

RELATED:

Why Spinoza was a "real radical" of the Jewish world [Jewcy Wiki]

The following is an excerpt from our just-published iSpy with Rick Ross. Click here to read the whole thing.

Kangol Rabbi: Yehuda Berg, son of the founder of the Kabbalah Center The Kabbalah Center could teach a course in brilliant marketing strategies. What do they do right, and can legitimate businesses or religions learn a thing or two from them?

First of all, what the Kabbalah Center does to a large extent is tell people what they want to hear, which can be very appealing. This includes various magical means to supposedly stop or slow aging, ward off evil and generally gain greater control over the world around you. This is not something the organized Jewish community can ethically offer.

Having said that, there are some things the Kabbalah Center does that may make sense, such as targeting demographic groups with specifically relevant programs, making holiday events such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur generally accessible through a per event ticket price. The Kabbalah Center also tailors its courses, classes and seminars to fit themes within popular culture and to answer common questions concerning people’s daily lives.

The various branches of the Kabbalah Center also offer a sense of community through constant ongoing activities. This appeals to many people, in a world that increasingly includes fractured families and a growing sense of individual isolation. A tight-knit small group structure affords more intimate personal connections and is the key to success for many so-called “cults.”