Matt Zeitlin

Over the weekend, I’m going to be guestblogging, along with some friends, at Attackerman.

Paul Berman has a new book coming out, the Flight of the Intellectuals, where, according to Ron Rosenbaum’s Slate piece, he accuses liberal intellectuals of failing “to offer wholehearted support to Muslim dissidents today, people such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali-born author and Muslim apostate, whose lives are similarly threatened.” The comparison Berman makes is with Salman Rushdie who garnered the support of basically the entire liberal intelligentsia when Ayatollah Khomeini ordered Rushdie’s death for a book he published.

Berman is right that there have been many more liberal intellectuals who have been cool or even slightly hostile to Ali — though none actually agree that it’s right, good, fair or just that she has to be hidden away because of violent threats – but Rosenbaum, in his his defense of Berman, seems to ignore just what the difference between Ali and Rushdie were. Namely that many of Ali’s defenders are not just defending her right to speak and be free from intimidation and threat, but wrap up that laudable stand with much more questionable points — like saying that Islamism is a “new global totalitarian threat.”

It’s understandable why those who think that Islamism is not the second coming of Nazism or communism and who may not think that it’s the best idea to declare open hostility to the beliefs of Europe’s large Muslim immigrant population aren’t throwing themselves on the barricades to defend Ali. More generally, many of Ali’s most prominent defenders invoked all the same language of the enlightenment and liberal values as a justification for the war in Iraq, which has poisoned their reputation among their potential liberal allies. When Christopher Hitchens and Paul Berman portray the defense of Ali and the invasion of Iraq as part of the same struggle, those who think that the invasion of Iraq was an unmitigated disaster are going to look coolly and the war’s defenders other enthusiasms.

I wish it hadn’t turned out like this. Ali’s right to criticize Islam in a reductive, inflammatory way is incredibly important. Freedom of expression means nothing if we let violent fanatics impose their will so that the only way apostate Muslims can criticize their former religion is to do so under heavy police guard or in the United States. But Ali’s most vocal defenders and advocates can’t ignore how their efforts to expand his cause into something more than the protection of the freedom of expression and conscience alienated many who should have been their allies.

Starting before the 2008 election, Ed Whelan, President of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center and go-to conservative legal writer/activist, wrote a bunch of stuff attacking then-Yale Law School dean Harold Koh. It was widely thought that Koh, who has nearly unmatched credentials among liberal legal scholars, was a potential Supreme Court pick. Whelan spends a whole lot of his time going on the war-path against liberal judicial nominees and so, after the election, he continued attack Koh at the National Review‘s Bench Memos blog and in articles for National Review Online. For instance, in one post, he said “Koh has the policy preferences of a hard-left ideologue, and there is little if any space between the policies that he favors and his positions on what the Constitution requires” [emphasis Whelan's].

When Koh was nominated to be the State Department’s legal advisor, Whelan summed his opposition to Koh by arguing that Koh would use his important position to advocate for his liberal legal views and to further bring America under the influence of international law:

Given Koh’s fervent commitment to his transnationalist views, it’s a sure bet that Koh, as State Department legal adviser, would work “inside [the] bureaucracies and governmental structures” of the United States government “to promote the same changes inside organized government” that he has long been “urging from the outside” in his activist capacity as a “transnational norm entrepreneur.”  He would be “so committed to using [his] official position[] to promote normative positions” that he would become a powerful “governmental norm entrepreneur” in his own right.

But wouldn’t anyone else that President Obama nominates for this position be equally bad?  Not at all.  Among the dozens (if not hundreds) of lawyers who are amply qualified (by narrow objective criteria) for the position of State Department legal adviser and who broadly share President Obama’s internationalist outlook, Harold Koh is very likely the worst possible pick.  And even with a generous allowance for deference to the president’s ability to select his own advisers, Koh’s radical transnationalist views–and his apparentwillingness to resort to deception to advance them–place him well beyond the bounds of what United States senators, and the American people, should consider tolerable.

Whelan’s crusade failed and Koh was eventually confirmed by the Senate and is now the State Department’s legal advisor. And, in that capacity, he recently defended the legality of administration’s drone strikes against Al-Qaeda figures. National Journal‘s Scott Harris has a write up of Koh’s remarks that he gave at the American Society of International Law, here’s what Harris quoted:

…[I]t is the considered view of this administration…that targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war….As recent events have shown, al Qaeda has not abandoned its intent to attack the United States, and indeed continues to attack us.  Thus, in this ongoing armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks….[T]his administration has carefully reviewed the rules governing targeting operations to ensure that these operations are conducted consistently with law of war principles…

If this is the work of a legal scholar who was going to use his power as State Department Legal Advisor to “advance and implement his dangerous transnationalist views,” then I really wonder what a conservative or even moderate lawyer would do in this case. Or maybe Ed Whelan was being a little sensationalist. Just maybe.

UPDATE:  Adam Serwer also has a post on Koh up at TAPPED. He reminds of us of former Bush speechwriter Meghan Clyne’s absurd accusation that Harold Koh wanted to allow for Sharia law to be imposed in American courts. I was thinking of mentioning that accusation, but I’d rather deal with a GOP ideologue who can at least gloss up his partisan attacks with some knowledge of the law instead of just a purebred hack.

Among my Google contacts, there are some smart libertarian and conservatives, and two of them thought that this post from “Coyote Blog” which bills itself as “dispatches from a small business” was quite smart. The first bit of it is relatively unconvincing — it’s him complaining that his bare-bones insurance policy which covers catastrophic care but otherwise leaves routine medical expenses up to him is now no longer an option because of federal mandates for a certain level of comprehensive insurance. I’m sympathetic to the value of these high deductible plans which force people to actually pay for much of their own health care, but I’m not convinced that such a system is a working model for a comprehensive policy that ensures everyone has access to decent care and can’t be bankrupted by medical expenses.  A slightly regrettable part of any plan of that nature is to ensure a certain level of comprehensiveness for everyone.

His second argument, however, is much more worrying:

There will certainly be a mad rush of special interests to Congress to get their pet procedure or drug included in national must-cover rules.  I discussed this rent-seeking process, which used to have to proceed inefficiently state by state but now can be achieved single-source, here.   Naturopath coverage, anyone? (already required under coverage rules in 4 states).   Already a lot of so-called medical research is really just thinly disguised pleas to have a certain procedure in must-cover rules.

This really is worrying. Doctors and other medical interests are quite well respected and it’s easy to combine their power as an interest group with sympathetic cases of people for whom some necessary treatment wasn’t covered and then get the insurance mandate expanded to cover that treatment/device/disorder/disease/whatever. And then we have an upward cost spiral and everything goes to hell. And when HHS or Congress or whomever tries to hold the line on keeping the insurance requirements sensibly limited, we will hear the cries of rationing.

I don’t think that things will necessarily get that bad, but it’s going to be a constant battle in which the side that stands to gain will have a lot to gain and everyone else probably won’t care enough to fight them. Eventually, those little victories could add up to high costs for everyone else. I obviously still think this bill is a good idea and was well worth passing, but this is something of a substantial worry for any plan that involves mandating and subsidizing the purchase of health insurance.

One thing looking forward is how the basic model of passing health care can be applied to other bills. Although health care was, in many ways, sui generis, we can expect going forward to have many cases where House bills are farther to the left and have more progressive funding mechanisms and bills in the Senate which are more centrist and are funded in a less progressive way. Also expect lots of House/Senate squabbling, where the  House feels like they’re being rolled because many Senators seem to care more about moving legislation to the center for the sake of moving it to the center.

One of the reasons health care was able to pass was that the House could partially bypass centrist Democrats by passing the bill and then passing a fix through reconciliation. This looks like it will be a one-off thing. If I’m Ben Nelson or Mary Landrieu, I’m not going to be trying to extract any favors to vote for certain legislation knowing that 52 democrats and the majority-rules House can just amend it out of the legislation.

This meme has been going around the blogosphere, and since I spend a lot of my free time reading books, I thought I would chime in. There is, of course, something fairly absurd about a 20 year old saying which books have influenced his thought. There are lots of books for me to read, and because I’m in college and reading a lot of books, there are surely works I’ve read recently that will probably have a profound influence on 25, 30, 40 and 60 year old me. More generally, there is an a priori question about why anyone would care about what a 20-year-old thinks or how he thinks or what has influenced how he thinks. But what’s a blog for if not overly intellectualized navel-gazing?

What’s interesting about my list is how much it’s weighted towards non-fiction. I don’t much like reading non-fiction books – they tend to be too long and can usually just be long magazine or journal articles. My true passion is for fiction. If this were a list of my favorite books, you would see nearly exclusively novels.

Orientalism/How Natives Think – Edward Said and Marshall Sahlins

There is no way around the central fact that these books are opposed. Orientalism is Said’s scathing attack on centuries of interaction between scholars and imperialists where soi-disant scholarly work on the Middle East justified European imperialism and where European imperialism justified certain scholarly practices. It’s a story of how the assumption that those in the East were the opposite of those in the west – irrational where we are  rational, sensuous where we are puritanical, hierarchical where we are egalitarian – lead to lazy scholarship and horrendous politics. Now, Said went a bit overboard, overgeneralized and, more generally, has a politics and scholarly project that I object to. I don’t think Israel is as bad as he does and I don’t think that all of 19^th century British literature was yet another pillar in the edifice of Empire.

But when you see people like Marc Thiessen justifying torture because it allows Muslims to more effectively serve Allah, when people say that Arabs only understand force and so the best way to effect political change in the Arab world is through violence or when we’re told that throwing your shoes at someone is something uniquely disrespectful among Arabs, Said is vindicated. More generally, the book told me just how easily it was for supposedly neutral descriptions of people and societies can be so thoroughly corrupted by certain ideological and political commitments.

How Natives Think, on the other hand, is a firm defense that “natives” and non-westerners have a different way of thinking. The book is part of a long and fierce debate between two anthropologists: Marshall Sahlins and Gananath Obeyesekere. Sahlins,  an expert on Polynesian society and history, argued that Hawaiians really did think that Captain Cook was their god Lono. He gives a detailed description of how Cook’s actions and route around the islands corresponded to how Hawaiians’ belief about Lono.

Obeyesekere, on the other hand, is an expert on South Asia and Buddhism. Unlike Sahlins, he hadn’t field work in Hawaii. He argued, however, that Sahlins narrative was absurd. To think that Hawaiians believed that Capitain Cook was their God Lono was to traffic in the worst imperialist stereotypes of natives as irrational children who assumed that the first white person they saw was a God. To put it uncharitably, Obeyesekere relies on his own identity as a non-white, non European to say with confidence what exactly Hawaiians thought.

Sahlins makes a detailed and convincing argument that Hawaiians really did think this way and points to the actual historical record and to the structure of Hawaiin religious belief. Obeyesekere, on the other hand, is the bizarre mirror image of the Orientalists Said ruthlessly critiques: he has a political commitment to seeing indigenous peoples as “equal” – and equivalent – to Westerners, he does not want to accept that the indigenous could be truly and deeply different because his ideology won’t allow it.

Both works have a commitment to seeing the world as it is, and more importantly, taking seriously the claims of those people in the world. This is a commitment that is always good to take seriously and uphold politically.

The Worldly Philosophers – Robert Heilbroner

I probably read this book 3 times, cover to cover, between the ages of 13 and 15. A wonderfully written group biography of economic thinkers from Smith to Keynes, this book is responsible for my interest in economic thought and in seeing the tradition as much broader than what is usually discussed today.

Achieving Our Country – Richard Rorty

I have a deracinated, removed technocratic and cosmopolitan temperament when it comes to politics. I have a visceral distaste for populism, particularism and many instantiations of patriotism. What Rorty’s book does is show just how important a pragmatic, localized,  populist, patriotic and proud spirit is to real progressive social change. Although I still have a fondness for academics, dry abstractions and techoncrats – thus my constant apologias for Tim Geithner – Rorty has balanced this out with some appreciation for how good policies have actually come into existence.

Catch-22/Slaughterhouse 5 – Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut

It’s easy to say that much of war is absurd, perverse, nonsensical and counter-productive. For as long as there have been wars, there have been criticisms of them along basically those lines. But the real bravery of Heller and Vonnegut is to say the Good War, the War that liberated Europe and ended the Holocaust, the war that, above all other wars, can make a real claim to moral legitimacy and justice was still a war, with all the attendant absurdities and atrocities. If the Good War could still be so banal and horrendous, then most other wars probably don’t pass moral muster. These books are also incredibly funny.

War and Peace/Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

Quite simply the two best novels ever written. They come the closest to representing the whole spectrum of human experience. Isaac Babel once wrote that “If the world could write by itself, it would write like Tolstoy,” and he was basically right. But since this is a list of influential books, not my favorite books, I should say that the main influence these books have had on my thinking is in how I’ve approached literary criticism. Whenever I hear an author go on and on about how Philip Roth can’t portray women or how Alice Munro can’t represent men or how Joseph Conrad reduces black people to stereotypes, my instinctual response is to say “cut Roth/Munro/Conrad/whomever slack, they’re not Tolstoy.”

A Theory of Justice – John Rawls

For as long as I could be interested in such things, I’ve loved politics. When I got into high school, I became interested in philosophy. And it seemed like whenever anyone talked about political philosophy, they talked about Rawls. So, when I was 16, I bought the book and during a vacation in a Mexican beach town, I read the entire thing. There are stiff, dried out pages and even sand in my copy. I didn’t quite get everything (I had to read Samuel Freeman’s invaluable guide to Rawls’ thought). Although I’m not sure if I’m a Rawlsian, his core ideas about fairness and about how we’re not responsible for our own successes have helped make the committed egalitarian I am today.

Homage to Catalonia – George Orwell

First of all, it is a wonderfully vivid and affecting piece of journalism – his descriptions of the squalor, misery and boredom of war are unshakable. Politically speaking, the way Orwell is able to, at the same time, hate fascism, support democratic socialism and recognize the brutality and dishonesty at the core of Stalinist communism is an inspiring example of how one can maintain their moral commitments amidst a confusing political situation. Many of Orwell’s contemporaries thought that opposition to fascism meant that they had to support the Soviet Union. And even though this was true in World War II, there were way too many who became enchanted by the Soviet Union and blind to its essential horrors and lies. Orwell wasn’t blind and figured this out in the 30s, when fellow-traveling was at its peak.

When, for instance, people opposed to colonialism became blind and enthusiastic supporters of vicious third-world revolutionary regimes, they were making the same error Orwell diagnoses in Homage. When those opposed to terrorism became blind supporters of imperialistic war and the rolling back of the rule of law, they are becoming the moral simpletons Orwell so effectively dismembers.

The Accidental Theorist – Paul Krugman

I’m somewhat cheating by including this book. That’s because it’s a unified work; it’s a collection of articles and essays. But there’s a unified method and approach. Krugman does what Orwell, Said and Sahlins do. Whether it’s absurd right-wing claims that inequality wasn’t increasing or that balanced budgets could be achieved through spending cuts alone or lefties who didn’t recognize that low-wage “sweatshop” labor is often the best opportunity for the world’s most poor, Krugman goes after those who think there are no tradeoffs or who erect ideological castles in the sky in denial of basic economic laws and realities.

As Brad Delong put it in a review of the book, “[The Accidental Theorist] has a single method: think clearly, look at the facts, and remember that people respond to incentives, that supply balances demand, and that there are a lot of politically-motivated ideologues making shabby arguments out there.”

Hamlet – William Shakespeare

My junior year, for English, I had a brilliant, Yale PhD teacher. Among a number of canonical works, we read Hamlet. What Dr. Enelow showed me was just how deep and rich great literature could be. Every sentence was full of references, allusions, puns, ironies, poetry and a variety of meanings. Now, not every work can withstand intensive, analytic scrutiny like Hamlet, but Dr. Enelow demonstrated that one might be able to spend a lifetime reading and studying those works that can.

Megan McArdle, in a post whose tone may have been unfortunately influenced by the immediacy of events, has some interesting things to say about just how the health care bill was passed:

One cannot help but admire Nancy Pelosi’s skill as a legislator.  But it’s also pretty worrying.  Are we now in a world where there is absolutely no recourse to the tyranny of the majority?  Republicans and other opponents of the bill did their job on this; they persuaded the country that they didn’t want this bill.  And that mattered basically not at all.  If you don’t find that terrifying, let me suggest that you are a Democrat who has not yet contemplated what Republicans might do under similar circumstances.  Farewell, Social Security!  Au revoir, Medicare!  The reason entitlements are hard to repeal is that the Republicans care about getting re-elected.  If they didn’t–if they were willing to undertake this sort of suicide mission–then the legislative lock-in you’re counting on wouldn’t exist.

Oh, wait–suddenly it doesn’t seem quite fair that Republicans could just ignore the will of their constituents that way, does it?  Yet I guarantee you that there are a lot of GOP members out there tonight who think that they should get at least one free “Screw You” vote to balance out what the Democrats just did.

If the GOP takes the legislative innovations of the Democrats and decides to use them, please don’t complain that it’s not fair.  Someone could get seriously hurt, laughing that hard.

But I hope they don’t.  What I hope is that the Democrats take a beating at the ballot boxand rethink their contempt for those mouth-breathing illiterates in the electorate.  I hope Obama gets his wish to be a one-term president who passed health care.  Not because I think I will like his opponent–I very much doubt that I will support much of anything Obama’s opponent says.  But because politicians shouldn’t feel that the best route to electoral success is to lie to the voters, and then ignore them.

We’re not a parliamentary democracy, and we don’t have the mechanisms, like votes of no confidence, that parliamentary democracies use to provide a check on their politicians.  The check that we have is that politicians care what the voters think.  If that slips away, America’s already quite toxic politics will become poisonous.

What McArdle seems to be saying is that the President, who won a big victory running on a platform that included something very similar to the plan that passed the House, should not have pursued health care reform because Republicans “persuaded the country that they didn’t want this bill.” First of all, that’s not so clear. This Gallup poll, which came out a week and a half ago, says that 45% of respondents “would advise their member of Congress to vote for a healthcare reform bill similar to the one the president has proposed” and 48% would advise voting against. That’s hardly overwhelming.

More generally, I’m confused by McArdle’s vision of how the President and Congress is supposed to govern. Democrats and the President ran on health care reform, won supermajorities in the House and Senate and then passed the bill they ran on. Republicans decided it was their best bet to totally oppose the bill, thinking that they could prevent its passage and drag down Obama’s presidency and the Democrats’ majority with it. Since Americans tend to support legislation if its seen as bipartisan, this strategic move necessarily made the bill less popular.

It seems like for a piece of legislation to pass muster with McArdle, it would have to have some patina of bipartisan support and something like a clear majority of public opinion support. This, however, is quite difficult to achieve when you get large congressional majorities and the opposing party is both small enough so that you don’t have to get their votes to pass anything and more ideologically extreme because of its small numbers.

McArdle also points out that we’re not a parliamentary democracy and don’t have any ways to force mid-stream corrections in government when the current leaders are pursuing an unpopular agenda. And this is true — we’re not a parliamentary democracy — but the House goes up for reelection every two years, so if you’re worried primarily about the president and the Congress pursuing an unpopular domestic policy, then we have a very quick way to correct (much quicker than in nearly every parliamentary democracy). And the Democrats will probably lose a bunch of seats! Democracy is maintained, we have some refuge from the tyranny of the majority!

Finally, McArdle seems to imply that if Republicans, once they have Congress and the White House again, will be emboldened to force through radical, unpopular policy change. I doubt it. In the case of Social Security, we already know what happened when Republicans control the legislature and the White House and try to implement a radical change: it flounders because they can’t even get every Republican to endorse their plan. No matter how much, say, Paul Ryan wants to pass radical conservative social policy, the chances that he’ll be able to convince his entire party to go along with it is rather slim.

Mitt Romney is done. He has to be, right? The entire Republican party and conservative movement is united against this bill and the bill is basically a large-scale version of the Massachusetts plan with more cost controls. Republican primary voters and, most importantly, the other candidates, will figure this out and Romney will spend his entire campaign trying to explain how he opposes legislation that he signed as governor.

By the way we judge presidents’ place in history, Barack Obama has assured himself a place in the pantheon, especially among Democratic presidents. And he deserves it: under his watch, the social safety net will have expanded in ways that it hasn’t since the Johnson administration. This is what Democrats are supposed to do and he’s done it.

But anyone who has actually watched this process unfold in real time, starting with the Democratic primary campaign, will notice how Obama was only one player among many in getting this legislation passed. Every major Democratic candidate had essentially the same plan and, assuming it wasn’t John Edwards, a Democrat was going to be in the White House with large majorities in both Houses and with a Congressional leadership utterly devoted to passing health care legislation. Once things got started, Obama largely ceded drafting the bills to Congress and when things were looking dire after Scott Brown’s victory, it was Congressional leaders who were forceful proponents for continuing with large-scale legislation.

This is obviously a narrative specifically designed to underplay Obama’s role, which really was quite significant. And while it’s unavoidable for people to look back on complex legislative processes and simply give credit to the President who oversaw everything and eventually signed the bill, we should take this moment and use the benefit of immediacy to give credit to other figures — namely Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid — whose efforts were invaluable.

A weird tick in the Obama campaign was that, despite (or maybe because of) the fact that he was the most personally magnetic, charismatic and inspiration candidate in a generations, he also the most careful to talk about his supporters as the real source of change, hope, inspiration etc. And, it turns out, for his major legislative achievement, it was largely those voters — who also elected a liberal-enough governing majority — who enabled the passage of health care reform. Maybe we really were the change we were waiting for.

Like other landmark dates, I see the first day of spring as a good excuse to post a widely anthologized poem that everyone has probably already read in any introductory English lit class or maybe even high school. And so here is the poem that any other poem about spring written in English must either reference, allude to or explicitly try to overcome: the first 34 lines of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales:

1                  Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

2                  The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

3                  And bathed every veyne in swich licour

4                  Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

5                  Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

6                  Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

7                  The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

8                  Hath in the Ram his half cours yronne,

9                  And smale foweles maken melodye,

10                That slepen al the nyght with open ye

11                (So priketh hem Nature in hir corages),

12                Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

13                And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,

14                To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

15                And specially from every shires ende

16                Of Engelond to Caunterbury they wende,

17                The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

18                That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

19                Bifil that in that seson on a day,

20                In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay

21                Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage

22                To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,

23                At nyght was come into that hostelrye

24                Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye

25                Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle

26                In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,

27                That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

28                The chambres and the stables weren wyde,

29                And wel we weren esed atte beste.

30                And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,

31                So hadde I spoken with hem everichon

32                That I was of hir felaweshipe anon,

33                And made forward erly for to ryse,

34                To take oure wey ther as I yow devyse

How sweet and sensuous those lines are! It’s no wonder that when Eliot wrote his poem about an infertile, hollowed-out modern West, he first had to slay the Chaucerian father (sorry for the cheap Freudianism, but sometimes it’s the most effective way of explaining this type of relation between poets). Here are the first eight lines of the Waste Land.

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Andrew Seal has a characteristically thought-provoking post arguing that, in American literature, the New York novel and the Chicago Novel are the two poles of the genre, and everything else is somewhat peripheral. Or as he puts it: “Chicago and New York are to U.S. fiction what Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are to the Russians.”

His argument for why this is seems at first quite strange and then totally plausible, especially if you look at (what I consider to be) the two foundational works of American literature. Pointing to Sister Carrie and The Corrections (which aren’t, to be clear, the two foundational works of American literature), the latter of which especially thinks of itself as a novel about America as a whole, Seal notices that both authors seem to think that the Midwest is West is enough.

In the case of The Corrections, Franzen seems to think that he can get away with putting his characters in three cities that, east-to-west, seem to get less “cool”: New York, Philadelphia and then, finally, St. Jude (aka St. Louis).  Seal points out that, at least for Sister Carrie, this cultural or imagined or mental geography makes sense. For much of American history, the “West” was Chicago, or Missouri or, at most, Denver. It wasn’t San Francisco or Los Angeles, which were until the 20s, relatively small cities that had a large share of people who were for some reason not fit for life in the East or Midwest. And, many Midwesterners seem to think this way too, they see standard America as stretching from the Atlantic to the Rockies.

But why does this imaginative geography have such sway over the American novel and consciousness? If you look at the two foundational American novels, ones that contain in them the templates, more or less, for most what came after them, you see this exact same geography. Huckleberry Finn starts in Missouri, and we see the Mississippi almost as a line between civilization and barbarism — which in antebellum American, it sort of was (and even sort of was in the 1880s when Twain actually wrote the book).  If you were a New Historicist, you could talk about how, at the time, the American military that had rendered obsolete the Southern antebellum society so effectively mocked by Twain was, at the time of Twain’s writing, doing its best to civilize the American West (by moving around and killing Native Americans). But even if that’s not your style,Twain’s imagined geography is still quite suggestive.

We then have the Great Gatsby, another novel where American seems to stretch from Long Island Sound to Minnesota and North Dakota, with little reference to or interest in what lies farther West. But even so, the underlying conflict in the story is between West and East. Locally, there is West Egg and East Egg, the former representing the ambitions and delusions of the nouveau riche, the latter standing in for the identity that could not be acquired through the simple accumulation of wealth. On a slightly larger scale, the most tormented characters are all “westerners” — as in, not from the East Coast. Daisy is from Louisville, Nick is from Minnesota and, most disastrously, Jay Gatsby né Jimmy Gatz, is from North Dakota. This conflict is something, to say the least, the characters are quite aware of.

Nick, for instance, after his service in World War I, says “Instead of being in the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe – so I decided to go east and learn the bond business.”

And, near the end of the book, when Nick returns home for Christmas, he remarks to himself, “I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all – Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

This is an attitude — the Midwest as West and fundamentally at odds with the East — that even made sense in the 20s. But why would it persist past then? One reason perhaps is that California and the “real” West does not exist in some sort of subordinate, tormented relationship to the East Coast, while the Midwest may see itself as a square province of the glistening East. In the West, we watch our TV shows at their programmed time and, more seriously, there is a self-conception of the West as, even today, being a fundamentally new place where someone really can reinvent themselves (which one obviously can’t in West Egg). Another of way of looking at this — and this will be, I’m sorry to say, mildly insulting to Midwesterners — is to think of the United States as being something of a U of coolness.

The coolest parts of the U.S. are the East and the West and the Midwest is the lowest point on the U. So, if you’re an author like Franzen and want to stage a contrast between a postmodern, cosmopolitan thoroughly deracinated character like Chip, the lecherous college professor who becomes an advisor to the Lithuanian government, and Enid, the throughly sentimental and proudly square housewife, you only have to go from New York to St. Louis.

This is obviously a fairly narrow view of both America and of the American novel (after all, I’ve mentioned all of four books), but I think this conception of America as East-to-Midwest with the West as some sort of strange annex is one that shows up fairly commonly and is, at least, somewhat interesting.

Apparently, it’s offensive to Irish people to identify with Joseph McCarthy the tendency to smear your political opponents by gay baiting them and calling them communists without any real evidence. Even though that’s what Joseph McCarthy did and was lauded by conservatives for doing it.  And it was a tendency that he took so far that his own party and most of the U.S. Senate condemned it for it. But McCarthy is an Irish name and liberals are, to be consistent, supposed to just buckle at every accusation by conservatives that we’re being insensitive. Or something.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day.

Why not excerpt some more great Irish writers? Or, one more great Irish writer.

I have nothing interesting to say about James Joyce, except that anyone who tries to write short stories after reading Dubliners – especially “The Dead” — can not helped but feel overwhelmed by their own inability to match what, to my mind, is near-perfect writing. It is highly unoriginal to point to the final paragraph, especially the final sentence, as some kind of summit in the history of English literature, but sometimes saying some thought is unoriginal is just another way of acknowledging its truth.  Here it is:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

If you want to read more — well, you should probably just buy a cheap paperback — but if that’s not your style, here’s the entire Dubliners from Project Gutenberg.

I have this dream that the Irish — by which I really mean Irish Americans — could fashion an ethnic self-identification that had less to do with mindless brawling, boozing and blowing up English train stations and had more to do with recognizing and appreciating the stunning artistic achievements of Irish writers in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Although Wilde, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Seamus Heaney are a group that can only really be grouped together on account of their relative chronological proximity and common nationality, they are all still undeniably Irish writers and represent an invaluable contribution to English literature, one that every Irishman should be proud of.

Yeats also just so happens to be my favorite poet, so picking one poem to post in honor of his country is difficult. Yeats, of course, is a difficult figure to view in light of the understandably uncompleted nationalistic feelings that St. Patrick’s Day evokes. Artistically, Yeats had a singular commitment to the Irish nation. Yeats strove to create Irish poetry that wasn’t simply an Irish gloss on British or French forms. His use of Irish folklore, mythology and locations in his work displays an inspiring, genuine love of his country.

He was an ardent nationalist, but for much of his career, he was at a certain remove from the nationalist independence movement. “Easter, 1916,” for example, is concerned with how Yeats’ personal contempt for the leaders of the Easter Rising (many of whom were subsequently executed by the English) had inhibited a proper admiration for what they had achieved. And even though he sought to immortalize the names of the dead leaders in verse, he saw the complications and tragic ironies of any violent revolution. After all, the refrain of the poem is “a terrible beauty is born.”

Even so, Yeats always supported the Free State even if he occasionally got into conflict with the Catholic hierarchy and leadership — he was himself Protestant. And so, on the holiday during which we celebrate all things Irish, it seemed appropriate to celebrate a true giant of the 20th century and a true Irishmen. Here are two of his poems, both of which are some of his greatest and most Irish.

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death”

I know that I shall meet my fate

Somewhere among the clouds above;

Those that I fight I do not hate,

Those that I guard I do not love;

My country is Kiltartan Cross,

My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,

No likely end could bring them loss

Or leave them happier than before.

Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

A lonely impulse of delight

Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

I balanced all, brought all to mind,

The years to come seemed waste of breath,

A waste of breath the years behind

In balance with this life, this death.

Alex Massie points out that Ian McEwan’s new novel apparently contains some entirely predictable and cliched bashing of censorious, politically correct academics. And while I’m sure that there has been and still is all sorts of academic silliness going on, isn’t the ridiculing of people who say things like  ”hegemonic arrogance” and  who have a “well-developed antennae for the unacceptable line” gotten impossibly old? Is there any new territory to chart here that hadn’t been amply explored by David Lodge in the 1970s? Can’t we find new targets for satire other than a small number of hopelessly irrelevant self-satisfied, left-wing intellectuals?

Roger Cohen’s most recent Washington Post column at the is concerned with two things that happened recently. In the past week, Palestinians and Israelis did things that did not bring a two-state solution any closer to existence. Israeli Interior Ministry Officials announced the approval of more housing in East Jerusalem and Fatah officials named a school after a female terrorist who was part of an attack that killed some 38 Israelis. One may notice a slight difference here. The Israeli housing announcement indicated a policy of the Israeli government to build homes for Israelis in an area that Palestinians think should be part of their eventual state. Fatah named a school after a terrorist. Cohen, for some reason, is mortally afraid of ever just condemning the Israelis for doing something he admits is stupid and counterproductive. This is a fear that, say, Hillary Clinton doesn’t seem to share.

Now, it’s obviously true that in a structural sense, the Palestinian attitude towards terrorism and the existence of the Israeli state is a huge obstacle to peace, but Cohen seems to be making the argument that literally the naming of a school after a terrorist is significant in the same way that approving housing in the city that Palestinians consider to be their capital is:

The incessant march of West Bank settlements and housing has to stop if there is to be any chance of reaching the vaunted two-state solution. At the same time, though, one of those states has to stop exalting terrorists.

Stop the settlements. Rename Dalal Mughrabi Square. Now let’s talk.

This is pretty silly. Insisting that Israeli can’t make peace with a government that actively supports terrorism against it makes a lot of sense. Insisting that Israeli can’t make peace with a government that doesn’t do enough to stop terrorist against Israel makes sense. But Cohen is literally concerned with low level Fatah officials “venerating” decades old terrorism by naming a school after someone. But that’s just absurd.

In the United States, we “venerate” James Knox Polk — he who launched an unjust war based plainly on lies to steal nearly half of Mexico’s territory — and our relationship with Mexico seems to be fine. I doubt Cohen actually thinks that a school named after a terrorist is a literal obstacle to peace, but since he seems to think that his readers need to be reminded every time he writes about the conflict that Israel has a right to exist and that terrorism is really bad, he ends up implying such silly things.

Instead of another map — which have an interesting tendency to be in misleading in a consistently pro-Palestinian way — Andrew Sullivan links to a good write-up of the research done on the population of the British Mandate from the late 19th century until the establishment of Israel. What’s interesting is the conclusion: “The nature of the data do not permit precise conclusions about the Arab population of Palestine in Ottoman and British times.”

Best I can tell, there was both large growth in the Jewish and Arab populations of the geographic area of Palestine which then became the British Mandate. By 1948, there were two large populations. After 1948, much of the Arab population ended up as refugees, lived in Jordanian or Egyptian land or ended up as refugees. It seems like one can get into endless debates about how many people lived where and when and the conditions under which this great mass of Palestinians became displaced, but in 2009, I doubt the utility of these debates.

On a basic structural level, it is just impossible to trust anyone. There are scholars who are deeply invested in painting the events before, during and after 1948 (not to mention 1967 and 2000) in the worst possible light for the Israelis and there are plenty of people interested in doing the same for the Palestinians and the Arab nations.

And while I think most can agree with Jeff Goldberg and Matt Yglesias that everyone — especially the Palestinians — would be much better off had the Arab states simple accepted the U.N. partition without launching a war of elimination against the nascent Israeli state, the fact is that there is a large, displaced, stateless population, many of whom are living in squalor in a bizarre second-class citizen legal and political status. This situation, irrespective of the historical circumstances, is a problem. And the final status that everyone seems to agree on — two states that basically match up with the pre 1967 borders with some trade-offs in land –is one that does very little to reckon with the maximalist historical claims of the Palestinians (there is never going to be a full return of Arabs to pre-1948 Israeli land). But it’s one that could solve the real problem going on right now. No states were founded in a completely just way, no claims to land are not without their legacy historical violence and no nations (especially Palestinian and Jewish ones) areorganic, natural entities. The world is what it is. Those who obsess over 60 year old maps have no place in it.

Basically everyday, some conservative hack says something silly. Usually I don’t comment on this because A. I don’t blog very much and B. it would hardly seem worth my limited posting to track down examples of silly conservative hackitude. For Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundation, I’l make an exception. Here he is in the Washington Examiner:

“If they pull off this crazy scenario they are putting together, they are going to destroy a lot of the comity in the House,” said Brian Darling, a congressional expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “Even in the current, highly partisan atmosphere, it can get a lot worse.

Nevermind that the Republican house caucus voted unanimously against the stimulus and only one House Republican voted for the health care bill. Or that, more generally, the explicit Republican congressional strategy is to obstruct even those bills they end up voting for just so the Democrats waste their sure-to-dwindle majority doing as little as possible. I’m wouldn’t usually get angry about a former Republican Senate staffer who now works for the most partisan Republican think-tank spinning out on-face absurd talking points. But this is Brian Darling.

In 2005, Brian Darling was  Mel Martinez’s (R-Fl) legal counsel. During the Terri Schiavo fiasco, he wrote an infamous memo saying that GOP demagoguery could make the entire mess “a great political issue … and a tough issue for Democrats.” Not only was this obviously offensive to many, he was also totally wrong. Darling resigned and went straight to Heritage.

Among other things, he coaches the Heritage softball team, or at least did in the summer of 2009. During the annual, and highly anticipated, Heritage-CAP softball game, Darling’s squad lost by an embarrassing margin. I don’t quite remember the exact score, but it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 24-6. And while it is certainly true that CAP had superior talent, Heritage’s coaching was noticeably inferior. Darling put sub-par in key fielding positions which allowed CAP to turn what should have been routine fly and ground ball outs into singles, doubles and lots of runs. He also instigated a childish shouting match with some CAP players over a not-really-in-dispute call.

To evoke Lieutenant Daniel Kaffee, “you’re a lousy fucking softball player, Brian!”

Peter Graves was more than just Airplane, but it’s not a bad way to remember his entire career. The utterly Gravesian gravitas he brings makes his most famous scene all the more hilarious. Notice how it all pivots off the just-barely-suggestive pronunciation of cockpit. From there, it’s golden.

I hardly want to get into the minute back-and-forth concerning how and why Andrew Sullivan went from an intense, passionate supporter of Israeli expansionism and moral superiority into a critic of Israel who sees their recent behavior as counterproductive and immoral and even flirts with endorsing the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis about the Israel lobby’s domestic political influence. But it should still be remarked just how strange it is.

Now, I understand how someone could have gotten less pro-Israel and more critical in light of the Lebanon and Gaza wars along with the Netanyahu’s government provocations regarding settlement expansion and construction in East Jerusalem. But Sullivan’s recent change of face becomes harder to explain as a reaction to recent events when he starts posting maps that show the relative Arab/Jewish population mix in major cities in the British mandate in 1946.

Obviously, there are many different interpretations of this data. Palestinian sympathizers will say that this depopulation was the result of something close to an ethnic cleansing campaign during the 1948 war; pro-Israel types will say that the depopulation was both the natural result of what happens when you lose a war of aggression and that Arabs were told by their leaders to leave those cities during the war. And, in the middle, you’ll get doves and New Historians who will say that there was some deliberate Arab depopulation in the 1948 war but that it wasn’t really an official policy of the Israelis and that it can only explain a small part of the population shifts since then.

The point is that this is something people have been concerned with for a long time and it’s an issue that people of various persuasion on the issue have been using to support their cause for a while. That Andrew Sullivan all of the sudden discovered the Naqba strikes me as evidence of him being a passionate, mercurial  dilettante as opposed to someone who comes to these issues through some sort of rational contemplation. This is not to say that everyone besides Sullivan manages to excise emotion from their political arguments, only that Sullivan’s variant emotional responses to events explain the positions he takes more than they do for most other public intellectuals.