John-Paul Pagano

Memorial (10)

2011-09-11T00:34:00.001-04:00

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Current Events

2011-06-17T17:35:00.001-04:00

Casey Anthony makes OJ look like Captain Dreyfus.

The Audacity of Shlock

2011-01-28T00:11:00.009-05:00

When a congresswoman is shot in the head in the very act of democracy, we should all pause.

Poseur alert! -- this pronouncement must be the choicest pseudo-profundity to emerge from the shooting in Tucson of Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others. For many, Andrew Sullivan is The Blogfather. If the "MSM" -- how pompous is that invidious classification -- is superseded, it won't be for reasons of quality.

Reading a book like Daniel Boorstin's The Image (1961) will tell you more about blogs and Internet media than the whole middlebrow masturbatory mandala spun by Sullivan, Clay Shirky and TED. The more information there is, the greater becomes the need to digest it. Perhaps it began with law. First the Roman ("Digests" of the Corpus Juris Civilis, 529), then later the English (1700-1900) and American (1823), codes were summarized for interested specialists. Literature followed suit in the 19th Century. Cheapening the production of printed matter brought great works to a wider and less rarefied audience, which led to bowdlerization and abridgment. Then came mass-produced encyclopedias, journals and magazines. Review of Reviews and The Literary Digest (1890) arose to suggest interesting articles so people could find their way to what they cared about. As with literature the enterprise of being informed became more middlebrow. Reader's Digest (1922) condensed primary material and surpassed it in popularity. In a sense, motion pictures (~1900, 1927) began to digest historical works and novels. Radio news (1920) summarized newspapers, and then television news (1940-50) emancipated the reader from having to reassemble the data in his head.

Blogs are just a contemporary part of this process; they mostly digest printed news. In ten short years blogs have proliferated to the point of opacity, which is why "microblogging" platforms such as Twitter -- mostly a digest of blogs -- have achieved prominence.

This relentless drive to abbreviate is a mixed blessing. On one hand, we have not so much democratic as demotic access to more information than ever. On the other, such atomization reduces the scope of our knowledge -- it shortens our perspective. That's why Sullivan and company can fool you into thinking they are some sort of information vanguard, when at best they are surfing today's minute of a centuries-long process. Contextualizing the information players casts the meagerness of much of their output in stark and sensible relief.

Footnote: This post, fittingly, is based on a digest of Chapter 4 of The Image, "From Shapes to Shadows: Dissolving Forms", especially pp. 118-149.

Memorial

2010-09-11T22:10:00.001-04:00

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David Mills -- RIP

2010-04-23T21:40:00.002-04:00

I'm stunned: the writer David Mills (The Wire, Treme), known online as Undercover Black Man, died late last month. It's rarely merited to interpret the person as well as his text, but Mills' decency and intelligence were palpable in his writing. I had a half-buried hope that one day I'd meet him, since we were both bloggers, writers and lovers of similar, rare improvised music.

He bought Javon Jackson's "Good People" on my recommendation, left in a comment on a post he made about the group Garaj Mahal. I checked in months later and asked him if he had listened to it, and he said he hadn't yet had time. I wonder if he ever did.

Liberation Theology

2010-01-23T18:24:00.002-05:00

Is there a way to blame Israel for this?

The Whited Sepulchre

2010-01-21T22:28:00.004-05:00

Although I wish to see some kind of socialized medicine in this country, I confess a wicked glee in watching the Mammon-idol of Ted Kennedy's corpse crash into the altar of health care reform in the whited sepulchre of the NPR liberals. It's salutary in a way. The triumphalism that buoyed Bush after 9/11, and helped produce the crimes and omissions of his presidency, wasn't significantly deflated until well into 2004. Chokely could course-correct the much better Obama administration and its movement after just one year.

Dead or Invisible?

2010-01-20T23:59:00.001-05:00

Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them. Upon the power which the greater part of the leading men, the natural aristocracy of every country, have of preserving or defending their respective importance, depends the stability and duration of every system of free government. In the attacks which those leading men are continuously making upon the importance of one another, and in the defence of their own, consists the whole play of domestic faction and ambition. The leading men of America, like those of all other countries, desire to preserve their own importance.

Adam Smith, describing in Wealth of Nations the practical underpinning of the American Revolution, and adumbrating today's Democratic fecklessness.

Grace, or Mammon

2009-11-14T15:02:00.006-05:00

British bankers are keen to redeem capitalism in the wake of the recession. Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs says he's "doing God's work", and others such as Barclays CEO John Varley are publicly spiritualizing money. Matt Taibbi tweaks out:

Goldman Sachs international adviser Brian Griffiths explains it this way: that Christ’s famous injunction to love others as one would love oneself actually means that one should love oneself as one would love oneself. This seemingly baffling outburst by a Goldman executive in what appears to have been a prepared speech — someone actually wrote this, and thought about it, before saying it out loud — gets even weirder when one tries to figure out what could possibly have motivated this person, and by extension his employer Goldman Sachs, to make such statements in such a place as St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Griffiths and Blankfein aren't talking as crazily as Taibbi seems to think. You may disagree with it, but this is all just a retransmission of the Calvinist spiritual view of money, later adopted by the Puritans and others. We associate Goldman et al with greed and ostentation, and those were reviled by Calvin and his predecessor Luther. But generating wealth as a fulfillment of God's purposes is the "Protestant ethic" to which Max Weber referred, and from which modern capitalism eventually emerged.

You may find this theology offensive, and I have no dog in that fight, but it isn't exotic Mammonism. It's as old as the Reformation.

Father Coughlin at His Pulpit

2009-11-08T10:53:00.008-05:00

Vaccines are always a lightning rod for populist lunacy, but here's a non-science fiction take:

NEW YORK — Some of New York's biggest companies, including Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, received doses of swine flu vaccine for at-risk employees, drawing criticism that the hard-to-find vaccine is going first to the privileged.

...

"Vaccines should go to people who need them most, not people who happen to work on Wall Street," Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut said Thursday.

"Wall Street banks have already taken so much from us. They've taken trillions of our tax dollars. They've taken away people's homes who are struggling to pay the bills," union official John VanDeventer wrote on the Web site of the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union. "But they should not be allowed to take away our health and well-being."

Dodd and the union official are making hay out of this. Vaccines going to Wall Street firms doesn't translate to vaccines being taken away from more eligible people to give to executives. Everyday schmoes at these companies -- admin services people, IT drones, mail room employees -- will receive the vaccines, and they are no more or less deserving than a guy in Local 32BJ. The vaccine shipments are vanishingly small, and they're going to these companies -- as well as non-Wall Street companies, and "Hospitals, universities and the Federal Reserve Bank" -- because they have medical staff. Finally, they are given first, and often only, to high-risk employees, like pregnant women and old people.

The Audacity of Schlock

2009-11-05T20:49:00.006-05:00

This is the second installment in what is now a series. Andrew Sullivan's bloodhound nose for the richest schmaltz teams with his neoplastic non-interventionism to deliver this, like a dead, shredded mouse, at our feet.

Touching and revolting, all at the same time!

Deep Thoughts

2009-10-31T18:35:00.001-04:00

Halloween is a strange holiday in that men show up to events dressed as 50 different things, and women show up dressed as 50 different whores.

Post-Racial Commentary

2009-07-23T18:32:00.001-04:00

It’s hard to injure the dignity of someone named “Skip”.

On Language

2009-02-20T07:56:00.001-05:00

Discursing on a topic often treated by linguist John McWhorter, Ta-Nehisi Coates nails this insight about opponents of the African-American dialect of English:

... the desire to patrol someone else's accent strikes me as deeply incurious. It is intelligence as artifice, a knowledge garnered to, at best, kowtow to equally incurious people or, at worst, preen over others who aren't as fortunate.

Goodbye, Medieval Asshats

2008-11-04T23:14:00.008-05:00

Unpacking Hitchens

2008-07-06T20:14:00.005-04:00

In this pregnant darkness, head downward, I waited for a while until I abruptly felt a slow cascade of water going up my nose. Determined to resist if only for the honor of my navy ancestors who had so often been in peril on the sea, I held my breath for a while and then had to exhale and —- as you might expect —- inhale in turn. The inhalation brought the damp cloths tight against my nostrils, as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me. I find I don’t want to tell you how little time I lasted.

Christopher Hitchens describes waterboarding in the way only a great writer can ("a huge, wet paw... suddenly and annihilatingly clamped..."). Surely though, there is something pompous about "Graydon Carter [asking] writer Christopher Hitchens if he would be willing to subject himself to the form of torture known as waterboarding" -- as if Vanity Fair was proposing to host a sommelier's sip-off of Istrian upstarts. But this is often how Hitchens is delivered to your doorstep: ensconced in a cheese paper wrap of boomer pretension. In turn I think this overlays a greater flaw: Hitchens' inadequate public reckoning with his support for Bush's Iraq war. George Packer unpacks this and more here.

From Andrew Sullivan.

Zero Sum

2008-06-07T19:51:00.001-04:00

Andrew Sullivan sums the Hillary campaign:

I think history will show that she didn't quite have the talent to do it on her own steam, but that she made it much easier for another woman to become president one day. Her two biggest problems: She first married a man who was her political superior and was then defeated by one. She is a very talented politician but it was her fate to find her career hemmed in by two even more talented ones: Bill and Barack. She made up for it all with enormous hard work, diligence and ruthlessness. At any other moment, she would have won. But this is history and politics at the highest level. You cannot defeat such a moment if you are a Salieri. And she had to deal with two Mozarts.

Buh-bye.

"We Thank God for Father Mike"

2008-06-01T16:25:00.004-04:00

Wow, this fruit cup is ten times crazier than Jeremiah Wright:

It doesn't matter if you're black or white, if this provides you with "uplift", spiritual or otherwise, they really need to unhook your feeding tube.

Good for Obama.

Illegal Wiretapping, Indeed

2008-05-28T13:25:00.001-04:00

Glenn Greenwald's trial conduct found "unethical"

Glenn Greenwald is a self-made blogging phenomenon, for which you have to respect him, even though he is probably the single most obnoxious writer on the Internet. His prose style is a groaning Frankenstein of juvenile syntax -- Tourettic scare quotes, volume-11 hyperbole -- bolted onto sentences that have the grace of nose-diving zeppelins. And his ego is galactic.

On the other hand, Greenwald can be spot-on when he's taking down right-wing hypocrisy, such as here, and especially when mocking the office pantomime of masculinity performed by that doughy chorus of pundits led by Jonah Goldberg and James Taranto. He's also voluminous on the subject of Constitutional Law and its antagonist in the Bush Administration. I'm not able to judge these writings, but I trust them a lot more than his flatulent emanations on foreign policy, as Greenwald is a former Wachtell litigator. In particular, he's had a lot to say about the Bush Administration's extensive, illegal wiretapping.

Which is why I note with a sense of irony that during his pre-blogging career as a practicing lawyer, while he was defending the First Amendment rights of white supremacist Matthew Hale in a series of civil suits, Greenwald was found in court to have illegally recorded conversations he had with various of Hale's associates. I have no clue how to properly cite cases, but the document is entitled:

REVEREND STEPHEN TRACY ANDERSON, Plaintiff, vs. MATTHEW F. HALE, THE WORLD CHURCH OF THE CREATOR, an unincorporated association, and THE ESTATE OF BENJAMIN NATHANIEL SMITH, Defendants.

No. 00 C 2021

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS, EASTERN DIVISION

159 F. Supp. 2d 1116; 2001 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13001

and in it we find the following

I. Background

On October 13, 2000, Defendants' counsel's telephone rang. [**3] To Defendant's counsel's apparent pleasure, Kenneth Dippold, one of Plaintiff's witnesses, was on the line. Dippold voluntarily called Defendants' counsel in New York from a location in Illinois to answer any questions regarding Dippold's involvement in the underlying litigation. Dippold had received a subpoena from Defendants' counsel earlier that day.

Defendants' counsel served the subpoena on Dippold immediately upon discovering his identity on October 7, 2000. At that time, Plaintiff identified Dippold as the sole witness to support the allegation that Hale encouraged Smith to engage in the July 1999 shooting spree. Before that date, Plaintiff [*551] had not identified a witness to support this allegation.

Seizing the opportunity, Defendants' counsel hit the record button and commenced surreptitiously taping the conversation with Dippold. The conversation lasted for some time, covering in detail Dippold's contacts with Hale, the WCOTC, and various other parties having an interest in the underlying litigation. Dippold never asked if Defendants' counsel was taping the conversation. Nor did Defendants' counsel make any representations to Dippold suggesting that the conversation was or [**4] was not being taped.

The existence of the tape remained undiscovered by Dippold and Plaintiff until Dippold's deposition approximately two months later. After three hours of questioning, and allegedly a few too many inconsistent statements, Defendants' counsel revealed that the October telephone conversation was surreptitiously taped. Because Defendants' counsel proceeded to use a transcript of the tape to impeach Dippold, Defendants' counsel immediately provided Plaintiff's counsel with a copy of the tape. Any work-product protection no longer applied.

Approximately one month later, Plaintiff discovered the existence of another tape. This tape pertained to a conversation between Defendants' counsel and Ian Sigel, another witness in the case. Similar to the circumstances surrounding Dippold's tape, Sigel was in Illinois at the time of the telephone conversation, while Defendants' counsel was in New York. Sigel had also received a subpoena from Defendants' counsel.

In view of Defendants' counsel's tactics, Plaintiff served a Fourth Request for the Production of Documents and Things on Defendant. Among other things, Plaintiff requested "any and all audio tapes and/or written transcripts [**5] reflecting any conversation(s) between [Defendants] and/or [Defendants] attorney(s) and any third-party referring or relating to the [underlying lawsuit]." (Pl.'s Consolidated Mem. Supp. Mot. Compel & Protective Order at 4.) Days later Defendants responded, asserting the work product doctrine and refusing to produce any tapes.

...

As it turned out, Plaintiff quickly determined that it was necessary to brief the issue. More tapes, in fact, existed. Moreover, Defendants' counsel refused to discontinue making additional tapes...

Greenwald and Hale lost both motions relating to Greenwald's misconduct, and lost again on appeal.

Plaintiff moved to compel disclosure of these tapes, arguing that this conduct was unethical and therefore vitiated any attorney work-product privilege that may have attached to these recordings, and sought a protective order prohibiting any further recordings. The magistrate judge granted both motions, finding defense counsel's conduct unethical under two separate rules: Local Rule 83.58.4(a)(4), prohibiting "dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation;" and Local Rule 83.54.4, stating "a lawyer shall not … use methods of obtaining evidence that violate the legal rights of [another] person." [Emphasis mine]

After disclosure was eventually made, the elaborateness of Greenwald's deceit came to light:

A 52-page transcript of one conversation showed defendants' counsel steered the conversation by eliciting particular responses to detailed questions, leading to more detailed questions, to lure the witness into damning statements for later use.

This hardly raises to the level of a Constitutional violation of privacy by the Executive, but Greenwald is never so strident as he is when exposing what he perceives to be hypocrisy. I suppose, though, we wouldn't receive the bounty of our self-anointed protectors if they were encumbered by the lofty sense of ethics they bear down on others.

Illiberal Guilt

2008-05-26T23:01:00.003-04:00

Ezra Klein praises Ron Rosenbaum's praise of liberal guilt. He laments the convervative "sleight-of-hand... [that has] recast feeling guilt as a character flaw, as political weakness, as soft-headed emotionalism." Then he renders this revealing formulation.

People don't like to feel guilt, particularly over actions they didn't directly commit.

I myself don't feel guilt over actions I didn't commit, because there is no reason to. Klein appears to allow for guilt arising from indirect culpability. The notion that I should espouse a politics that seeks to make me -- the product of an Italian immigrant and Jews who fled the pogroms -- indirectly responsible for Jim Crow and similar crimes is offensive without the help of conservative legerdemain.

WTFF - A Million Melons!

2008-05-24T19:38:00.003-04:00

The Undercover Black Man provides the best-yet installment of the What The Fuck Files:

I'd rahthah have lots of breast milk than a million melons!

Gratuitous Adjectives

2008-05-24T19:04:00.005-04:00

Were Greenwald to hold himself to his own standards for accountability, he might have acknowledged that in retrospect he was wrong. Yet there were no such mea culpas in the article. If he didn't have the space to get into this matter, he could at least have saved a couple words by dropping gratuitous adjectives.

This is Michael O'Hanlon citing, among other things, Glenn Greenwad's logorrhea. I remain amazed that such a piss-poor writer (and obnoxious turd) can churn out a popular, hosted blog, three trade books, including one NYT Best-Seller, and be asked to contribute to the National Interest. I don't envy the editors charged with Herculean task of flushing the shit out of those stables.

The National Interest is a magazine that has published the likes of Francis Fukuyama ("The End of History"!), Richard Pipes, Robert Conquest and Saul Bellow. Either we've plummeted into empire-ending cultural decay, or I'm missing something.

The Drunken Dragon

2008-05-24T02:07:00.002-04:00

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Jim Black, the drunken dragon:

Obama, the Jews and Israel

2008-05-13T00:42:00.002-04:00

There's a persistent, nasty notion that Barack Obama is bad for the Jews. It crests and falls rhythmically in public discourse, and I hear it expressed by Jews I know. The sense is Obama places somewhere on a spectrum between a latte-drinking, liberal milquetoast and a black anti-Semite. Wherever the dart sticks, it will be bad for Israel.

As someone who has spent years writing about foes of Israel, subtle and overt, and specifically these two types that supposedly bookend Obama, I'd like to go on record saying this is top-shelf, triple-distilled horseshit.

Over the next months, we'll come to see the fullness of Obama's foreign policy vision. We already have a fairly good sense of what it will be like. Some of it strikes me as vaporous, some of it seems groan-inducingly soft. Some of it makes sense. Most of it -- even stuff I don't agree with -- is fair enough after seven years of calamity at home and abroad.

As a policy package, it may ultimately fail, but none of it will be inimical to the Jews or Israel. Understandably, a lot of Obama supporters wanted to brush aside the Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle, but I thought it was fair to ask why the hell he would associate himself with a half-crazy demagogue like that. However, I'm satisfied that Obama was simply trying to shore up his cred with African-Americans, understand their milieu better, and above all find his faith. I simply don't think he has the slightest time for the victimology, the street-scholarship or the Jew-baiting buffoonery of the incredibly selfish man who was his pastor.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the New Yorker staff writer, is one of the more interesting working journalists. He's got a new Atlantic blog that I'll be reading (link added, left). Here's Obama speaking to him about this issue.

Look, we don’t do nuance well in politics and especially don’t do it well on Middle East policy. We look at things as black and white, and not gray. It’s conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, “This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein, and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he’s not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush,” and that’s something they’re hopeful about. I think that’s a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they’re not confused about my unyielding support for Israel’s security.

Obama also says some considerably heartening things about the complimentarity of the African-American and Zionist narratives. Think about that for a moment. This blog's abiding theme is that for a variety of reasons, utopian politics lead algorithmically to anti-Semitism. Victimology and identity politics are powered off that grid. This is the marrow of Jew-hatred among African-Americans, who can see themselves as domestic Palestinians, preyed upon by owner-Jews or upstaged by the moral legatees of the Holocaust. Obama, however, invokes a classic, American liberalism:

So when I became more politically conscious, my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves. And obviously it’s something that has great resonance with the African-American experience.

One of the things that is frustrating about the recent conversations on Israel is the loss of what I think is the natural affinity between the African-American community and the Jewish community, one that was deeply understood by Jewish and black leaders in the early civil-rights movement but has been estranged for a whole host of reasons that you and I don’t need to elaborate.

Obama, in his perspicacious and articulate way that is an elixir after 8 years of Bush's cud-chewing, rhetorical chyme, has turned this precisely on its head. This is no accident. If Obama becomes President, his foreign policy might fail, but he's no enemy of the Jews or Israel.

Inside the Bunker!

2008-05-11T20:21:00.002-04:00

The Audacity of Schlock

2008-03-27T08:11:00.001-04:00

You know Andrew Sullivan is administering doses of soulful truth when he begins using stop-and-start sentence fragments. It’s like the shibboleth of his soul.

Marty does not excuse some of the indefensible comments of Wright that have now been bludgeoned into our consciousness to the exclusion of all else. And those comments should not be excused. And they have not been excused by Obama. But Marty does say this:

...

Read the whole thing. It matters. Because the truth matters. Because in these complex, volatile areas, Martin Marty is a far more reliable guide to it than Sean Hannity.

Either that, or the post leads with a contemplative picture of something beautiful.

(Don't take this wrong; I like Sully.)

Glenn Greenwald: Liar Again

2008-03-23T19:12:00.012-04:00

Building on the theme of Glenn Greenwald being a liar, my previous post puts me in mind of the hectoring nudge's conduct during the controversy he ginned up about Joe Klein's misunderstanding of FISA in a column for Time Magazine. Like all bloggers who bulldog the "mainstream media", Greenwald is a serial self-aggrandizer who seeks to gain readership at the expense of the journalists he imitates and on whose work he almost entirely relies. In this he is no different from frauds like Little Green Footballs' Charles Johnson and the Powerline clowns.

Greenwald browbeat Klein for getting key facts wrong about FISA in this piece. Unlike Greenwald, whose writings on foreign policy are thin gruel, I try not to produce endless skirls on topics I know nothing about, so I'll take the former Wachtell litigator at his word that Klein fucked up. (Both Klein and Time admitted as much.) Seeking, like water out of a desert gourd, to wring all he could out of his gotcha, and once again wishing to perform his fantasy of being a journalist, Greenwald then teamed up with Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake to browbeat Priscilla Painton, the editor at Time responsible for failing to vet Klein's erroneous column. Remember, this whole thing was about Glenn Greenwald protecting your interests as news consumers...

Here is how Hamsher described that endeavor:

I've spent all morning on the phone trying to figure out who the editor at Time Magazine was on Joe Klein's FISA column (the one Klein has now written about five times, fully admitting he never read the original bill). I finally confirmed that the editor was Priscilla Painton, and called her and identified myself. I asked her what the editing process was, and how a piece with so many errors made it into print.

"That assumes that there are errors," she said. And hung up on me.

Pretty perfunctory. You could guess Painton was being churlish or evasive, or you could guess she wasn't ready to go "on record" with an amateur journalist about facts she wasn't certain of, or you could guess she didn't much care for being waylaid on her private line by some blogger who had badged herself as an investigative journalist. Either way, the exchange doesn't communicate that much.

Greenwald was Hamsher's second in this, observing via video conference, and this is how he described it:

I spent the morning working with the tenacious and resourceful Jane Hamsher on finding out exactly which Time editors were responsible for the wildly inaccurate Joe Klein FISA article. Numerous people at Time vigorously insisted they had nothing to do with it. Finally, Jane was able to ascertain that the person responsible was Time Editor Priscilla Painton.

As Jane details here, she called Painton in an attempt to find out information about how these false claims made it into Klein's article, what Time was planning on doing to correct it and whether they would account for what happened. I happened to be conversing with Jane by video when she was finally able to speak by telephone to Painton and thus heard Jane's end of the discussion.

The call lasted roughly 10 seconds. Jane asked one or two questions in the most polite and professional manner possible -- whether Painton was Klein's Editor and how such errors made their way into the article. As Jane describes, after she asked Painton how such inaccuracies could make it into the Time article, Painton snapped: "That assumes that there are errors." She then slammed down the phone in Hamsher's face.

Compare the two accounts. Hamsher's is like a healthy limb: formed and utile, featuring necessary detail. Greenwald's is like a limb stricken by elephantiasis: deformed and lumbering, cauliflowered hideously with unnecessary detail. But this is not just an aesthetic issue; Greenwald's embellishments are dishonest. Hamsher describes a fruitless encounter with Joe Klein's editor at Time Magazine. Greenwald transmogrifies this into the "tenacious and resourceful Jane Hamsher", who, in sussing out the culprits responsible for Joe Klein's "wildly inaccurate" column, bushwhacks her way through "[vigorous]" denials, to be confronted "finally" by an establishment functionary who "[snaps]" at her and "[slams] down the phone in [her] face".

This would be bad enough if Greenwald had actually witnessed and simply embellished these details. But he didn't. In his incontinence as a writer, he reveals a detail he probably should have kept to himself:

I happened to be conversing with Jane by video when she was finally able to speak by telephone to Painton and thus heard Jane's end of the discussion.

So Greenwald only heard Jane's side of the conversation, but he knows Painton "snapped" at Hamsher and "slammed the phone down in [her] face", and all the rest of it.

Glenn Greenwald is a polyp on the colon of public debate that should be removed.

Glenn Greenwald: Liar

2008-03-23T17:57:00.020-04:00

As is customary, Andrew Sullivan courtesy-links the meta-obnoxious Glenn Greenwald. This time it's in reference to what at first appears to be Greenwald making an insightful critique of the racial double-standards of movement conservatives. In his gouty, larded prose, Greenwald indicts a blog called Instapunk, which Glenn "Army of Corkies" Reynolds appears to appreciate. Reynolds has linked to it occasionally, most recently here to an Easter meditation. Through his snot-plug, Greenwald snorts:

Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds today linked to what he called "EASTER THOUGHTS" from one of his favorite right-wing blogs ~~gers~~, his namesake, "Instapunk." That Easter post has a large picture of a crucified Christ along with a lovely religious poem.

Immediately beneath that righteous celebration of Easter is a somewhat less charitable post purporting to take up Barack Obama's invitation to speak about race. After listing a few black entertainers and sports figures he says he likes, here are some of the thoughts Instapunk offers on race...

What follows is an excerpt of a truly nasty post extending the old Gut Rumbles saw that some black people really are niggers, and all of us know it and might as well admit it if we want to take Barack Obama up on his call for a candid discussion about race. Suffice it to say this garbage is the right-wing inverse of the victimological identity politics of Jeremiah Wright, both of which Obama held up to censure in "A More Perfect Union", his brilliant speech in response to the Wright kerfuffle.

The problem -- now please go back and reread the Greenwald quote before continuing -- is Greenwald implies the Easter Meditation and the "nigger" excrescence are by the same author. They're not; Instapunk is a group blog. This in turn implies Reynolds' assent to or endorsement of the racist post. He gave no such thing.

Yes, you are absolutely right that guilt by association can be deserved. A political movement is by definition a group of ideas that coheres across many people. I myself wrote about the unsavoriness of Ralph Nader trying to court radical Muslims and far-Leftists in 2004 by invoking the specter of Jewish control of the White House. I also pointed out how M. Shahid Alam, the fool academic who compared the 9/11 hijackers to the American Revolutionaries, had published his piffle on Iviews.com, a radical Muslim web site that also published cartoons in the style of Der Sturmer and sold Henry Ford's The International Jew through an affiliated web site.

I did these things, however, while taking care to differentiate between the primary sources I was discussing and the secondary material with which they chose to affiliate. I took care to emphasize this was the nature of my observation -- that it was guilt by association I thought germane. Greenwald did neither, although later he made one of his supernumerary "updates" trying to set things straight. Instead Greenwald plays the smarmy lawyer's trick of making a factual recitation that is carefully worded to fool casual and lazy listeners into believing the facts are different, and more damning, than they are. Using Google, I can only find one post on all of Instapunk by "Oldpunk". It's therefore unlikely this author's oeuvre has much to do with Reynolds' admiration of the blog.

Greenwald might have written: "Glenn Reynolds links to an Easter Meditation on Instapunk, a namesake blog of his that he's praised before, by a blogger named 'Chain Gang'. That's troubling, because right underneath that post is a nasty racist screed about 'niggers' by some other guy named 'OldPunk'. Don't you think this calls into question Reynolds' judgment?" If so, I would have wholeheartedly agreed with him. But he didn't. He made it seem like Glenn Reynolds personally endorses Oldpunk's post.

Update: In this Rube Goldberg Machine of a sentence, in which he tries to extenuate the dishonesty on which his whole post is predicated, Greenwald lies again:

The original purpose in pointing out that Instapunk is a favorite blog of Glenn Reynolds was not to suggest that Reynolds is directly responsible for the particular racist screed I quoted, but rather, to demonstrate that I did not select some obscure unread blog nor go searching deep in the comment sections in order to find something inflammatory -- the typical method used to generate almost every liberal blog "controversy" -- but instead had found this written by a principal contributor on one of the most heavily-promoted right-wing blogs.

Greenwald refers to "Oldpunk" as a "principle contributor" to Instapunk. Again, this is factually true, if you interpret "principle contributor" as someone who contributes a post to a blog that happens to be on its front page right now. But Google and Technorati searches show that "Oldpunk" is not a principle contributor to anything, let alone Instapunk, which gives the lie to the interpretation Greenwald means you to make, which is Reynolds' appreciation for the blog is based on its racist oeuvre.

Separated at Birth?

2008-03-22T17:48:00.012-04:00


Elliot Spitzer	Quark the Ferengi

Me on Sirius Radio

2008-03-18T18:43:00.002-04:00

I just got done being interviewed by Joe Salzone for the Blog Bunker, a blog-centric talk radio show on Indie Talk, Sirius 110. Joe was great and I had a lot of fun. We discussed Ron Paul and his defunct campaign in light of my writings about the strange convergence of the antiwar Left with the isolationist Right, here and here. The program will rerun tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM and afternoon at 1:00 PM; I appear in the last twenty minutes of the hour-long show. Check it out if you're a subscriber.

Update: If you're coming by after having listened, feel free to leave some comments.

Looking Forward

2008-03-09T21:40:00.005-04:00

One of the more disheartening things about the Bush Administration has been its contempt for expert opinion in policymaking, and its supersession of experts with incompetent cronies wherever possible. That's why it's invigorating to see the caliber of people Barack Obama is surrounding himself with. I think the Hillary-is-a-monster kerfuffle with Samantha Power has helped rather than harmed the Obama campaign. It has allowed us to see what intelligence, integrity and accountability in government looks like.

Update: Alex Massie, who had a long-term affiliation with the Scotsman as a journalist, comments on the controversy attending that paper's decision to publish Power's "monster" comment in spite of her after-the-fact attempt to shoo it off the record:

It may well be that Power's comments came at the end of an interview which mainly focused on her new book. I don't know. But I do know that you don't really get to take a mulligan when you make a blunder in an interview. If power had prefaced her characterisation of Hillary as a monster with the phrase, "Now, what I'm about to say is off the record..." then that would be one thing and it would be a breach of trust or etiquette for the paper* to print her comments. But you don't normally get to determine what is and what is not off the record after you've said your piece or simply because you realise you've made a blunder.

Now, even allowing for that, you can say that this still a marginal call but there's a long distance between a marginal call and a shameful breach of trust.

I don't like the fallout of what the Scotsman did, but Massie is right.

Knave's Gambit in the Jewish Press

2008-03-05T17:44:00.001-05:00

My apologies for the break in posting. I do have a good reason: besides my 9-to-5, I've been working on refining the original Knave's Gambit for publication in the Jewish Press. A 50%-condensed version appears on the front page of today's issue. Enjoy.

Quote of the Day

2008-03-03T20:53:00.002-05:00

From Jackboots and Whole Foods, Michael Tomasky's review of Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism in The New Republic:

Goldberg no doubt believes that he has written something that will provoke, traduce, and infuriate liberals everywhere. (For all his supposed fearlessness, though, he pulled one haymaker of a punch: the original subtitle of the book was The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. I'm mildly curious about the logic by which a writer who insists that Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy were fascists thought that the original subtitle violated some canon of judgment or taste.) For about fifty or sixty pages, I confess, I took the bait, and did my best to work myself into a lather. By page 200--there are 405 pages of actual text--offense was beside the point, and I was mentally imploring the author to get it over with. By page 300, I was bored out of my skull. And by the time I made it to the final pages, I was wishing that I had been invited instead to review a multi-volume history of farm subsidies.

D'Angelo on Speed

2008-02-19T20:22:00.004-05:00

Andrew D'Angelo, newly diagnosed with cancer, writes about the steadfast friendship of the great sax and clarinet player, Chris Speed:

... the night after having my head operated on, my friend Chris Speed stayed with me in the ICU (Intensive Care Unit) for the evening. Sleeping there even. In fact, I'm not even sure how he achieved this because it was suppose to only be family allowed in the ICU. But there he was. Sitting in what I'm sure was THE most uncomfortable chair watching me try to deal with the pain I was having and of course, watching me try at [sic] get some rest. That being said, I don't think there is anyway to explain to you what it was like to be able to open one eye (not sure if both eyes would open at that point) and see him sitting there for me. That, is something you have to experience first hand I think to really understand.

Best Wishes to Andrew D'Angelo

2008-02-14T20:17:00.013-05:00

I used to follow New York downtown jazz pretty closely. It's great, aesthetically regenerative music, but it's annoyingly bifurcated. There's really great shit -- like Tim Berne's various projects and people like the pianist Uri Caine and the drummer Jim Black; and there's really awful shit -- like John Zorn's various excrescences and the people who buzz around him like flies tending the ass of a mule pissing in summer.*

Saxophonist and composer Andrew D'Angelo is one of the good guys. I'm not a fan of his personally, but he's collaborated with people (like Jim Black and Chris Speed) I admire greatly. I found out today that he was suffering from a brain tumor. He just had it removed. I wish him a strong recovery and all the best.

Postscript: I learned this from Darcy James Argue's blog. I had never heard him before. He's written some great music.

* Thank you, Catullus. I'll always be grateful.

Update: I should say I'm aware some great musicians have collaborated with Zorn and appeared on the Tzadik label. I always wondered why people like Uri Caine and Marc Ribot would give him the time of day. I suspect these guys just sucked it up and did what they had to do to work and network downtown.

Update again: Fuck. The biopsy shows it's cancer, a nasty, aggressive kind.

Obama and Race

2008-02-09T10:48:00.004-05:00

Christopher Hitchens writes:

People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with. One does not banish this specter by invoking it. If I would not vote against someone on the grounds of "race" or "gender" alone, then by the exact same token I would not cast a vote in his or her favor for the identical reason.

...

Far from taking us forward, this sort of discussion actually keeps us anchored in the past. The enormous advances in genome studies have effectively discredited the whole idea of "race" as a means of categorizing humans. And however ethnicity may be defined or subdivided, it is utterly unscientific and retrograde to confuse it with color. The number of subjective definitions of "racist" is almost infinite but the only objective definition of the word is "one who believes that there are human races."

I think this trends too far toward a tone-deaf inappreciation of the meaning of race in American politics. You can't just shroud its significance with a pedantic deconstruction of the word "race". My friend's sister is a teacher in the NYC public school system. She says she marveled recently that a gifted black student of hers who lives 25 blocks from Columbia University literally had no idea that school existed and that he had a good shot of getting in. An Obama presidency would have a galvanizing effect on those blacks today who are without real ambition.

But you can acknowledge the significance of race without promoting political pathology. Hitchens has a point when he writes, "People who think with their epidermis or their genitalia or their clan are the problem to begin with." Another friend of mine has been a high school teacher in NYC for some years, and he dismayed me by approving something one of his Education professors said: "It doesn't matter where you came from or what your self perception is, when you get off that boat you're either black or white."* This is soft-Marxist pablum oviposited in liberals' heads by New Left hecklers of the civil rights movement.** It's refried historical determinism with class superseded by race.

One of the reasons I would vote for Obama is because he would propel us into a kind of "postmodern" phase of our history with regard to race. There is no question inequalities persist in America, but nothing I observe demonstrates that more than a handful of extreme examples -- literally, the few people each year who are murdered in hate crimes -- are caged by race, ethnicity or anything. This endless and needless detour from the mountain top would cease to make sense, both to the quiet racists and the members of the NPR class who piously accept its inevitability. An Obama presidency will banish determinist cant about race to the academic realm, where it will maunder like an underworld ghost with the rest of the Marxian geegaws. This sure as hell ain't the only reason to vote for Obama, but it's a good one.

* What boat is he talking about? The Mayflower? The Stugots?

** Here I'm borrowing from Stanley Crouch, who often aptly refers to Malcolm X as a "heckler" of the non-violent and civil rights movements.

Quote of the Day

2008-02-05T23:07:00.001-05:00

“How She Move”? I’d much rather see a movie called “How She Conjugate Verbs.”

Well, this is the quote of a few days ago, by journalist and screenwriter David Mills.

Thanks to Steve Silver.

Dead Fish

2008-02-05T22:52:00.001-05:00

Does anyone else think Glenn Greenwad has jumped the shark? At this point the guy is so repetitious and boring you no longer notice his supererogatory, corpse-heavy prose.

The Totalitarian Stupidity of Bobby Fischer

2008-02-01T13:30:00.000-05:00

I've got a new essay up at The Socialism of Fools, exploring what I think was omitted from the public reactions to Bobby Fischer's death. Take a look.

My Favorite English-Language Novelists

2008-01-26T19:04:00.001-05:00

I've responded to Norman Geras's latest poll soliciting the ten favorite English-language novelists of its respondents. You're supposed to rank the first three and follow up with an additional, unranked seven. Here are mine.

Vladimir Nabokov
Herman Melville
Martin Amis

William Faulkner
John Dos Passos
Ralph Ellison
Shakespeare
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ernest Hemingway
Roald Dahl

You Talkin' to Me?

2008-01-18T07:39:00.000-05:00

Moral of the story: don't be AOL mall-trash, get zooted and taunt a tiger:

Both Dhaliwal brothers were hospitalized with head wounds after the maulings. Matthews said in the warrant application that Paul Dhaliwal's blood alcohol level had been measured after the attack at 0.16 percent, twice the legal level for drunkenness. She did not indicate exactly when the test had been conducted.

Kulbir Dhaliwal's blood alcohol level was 0.04 percent, and Sousa's was 0.02 percent, Matthews said.

All three also had marijuana in their systems, Matthews said. The drug can stay in blood for several days, but Kulbir Dhaliwal told police that the three had smoked marijuana and had each had "a couple shots of vodka" Christmas Day before leaving the brothers' home in San Jose, the affidavit said.

...

According to the elder Sousa's account to police, Dhaliwal told him that he, his brother and the younger Sousa had been "waving their hands and yelling at the tiger" just before the animal bounded up a 12 1/2-foot wall from its dry moat and attacked them.

Paul Dhaliwal - referred to in affidavit by his formal name, Amritpal - "said the three of them were standing on the railing looking at the tiger," Sousa told police.

...

Dhaliwal told Sousa that "when they got down they heard a noise in the bushes, and the tiger was jumping out of the bushes" on Paul Dhaliwal, the affidavit said.

...

An autopsy conducted by a zoo veterinarian on the Siberian tiger after police shot it to death showed that the animal had been "very determined to get out," Matthews said. Its claws were broken and splintered by clambering up the concrete moat wall, Matthews quoted the veterinarian as saying.

"This behavior may be consistent with a tiger that has been agitated and/or taunted," Matthews said.

Regressive Progressives

2008-01-17T17:05:00.000-05:00

Kevin Drum nails it with respect to the Ron Paul racism controversy.

It's plain that Paul knew what was being published in his newsletters. It's plain that he was familiar with the well-developed strategy that inspired the early-90s turn to racist demagoguery. It's plain that he knew it was a key part of his fundraising appeal. Paul can weasel all he wants, but it's plain that he endorsed a strategy of overt appeals to racist sentiment in order to build support for his political career. If he's given all that up since then, it's only because he no longer needs it.

This whole affair highlights one of the reasons that I wish everyone would stop swooning over minor candidates who play the part of bold truthteller. When you have no chance of winning and therefore nothing to risk, it's cheap and easy to stick to your guns. But as Ron Paul has shown, back when it actually mattered he was willing to do whatever he needed to raise money and rekindle his political career. I don't doubt that he'd do it again if anything serious were on the line.

I wrote about this here, in light of the irony of so-called progressives flocking to Paul because of his "bold [truth telling]" about Iraq (and, inevitably in the penumbra of Iraq, our alliance with Israel). There have always been self-styled progressives who are really reactionaries, favoring isolationism, conspiratorial superstition and the scapegoating of Jews, among other intellectual pathologies. French socialist suspicion of Leon Blum and the Jews in the lead-up to war with Hitler is a good historical analogue. Cognate forces were at work prior to American involvement in World War II, and now the Iraq War has again separated regressive progressives from their comrades of better conscience and driven them into alliance with the far-Right fringe they mirror.

This Day in Pwnage

2008-01-15T22:57:00.000-05:00

I hate to cannibalize James Wolcott again so soon, but it's irresistible.

Michael Medved -- or as I prefer to think of him, Mr. Mediocrity -- is demanding that Mitt Romney idolator Hugh Hewitt (half man, half icicle) apologize (!) for Romney's air barrage of sleazy, inaccurate, demagoguic ads directed against John McCain over illegal immigration and Social Security.

...

Medved's wasting his garlic breath. Won't happen. Hewitt has his head so far up Mitt Romney's ass he can see the world through Mitt's clicking eyes, achieving complete parasitic identification with his host.

Half-man, half-icicle!!!

He's Not One of Us

2008-01-13T13:11:00.001-05:00

I don’t see how such a man wins the Republican nomination. I’m second to none in praising him on his surge leadership. But on a whole host of issues — including water boarding, tax cuts, and the freedom of speech — he’s not one of us.

-- Torture-loving Jabba Kathryn Jean Lopez on John McCain

Nouveau conservatism has come a long way since 2003, when it was mainly concerned with establishing the notion that Islam, not Islamism, was evil, and thus Muslims were inherently dangerous, any one of them liable at any time to produce a Kalashnikov and shoot up an El Al counter. Years pass, concerns change, and gestural politics become even more superficial and base. As Andrew Sullivan points out, and floating fatbody Kathryn Jean Lopez affirms, we have now entered the era in which medieval torture is a key Republican value, such that a Republican candidate who has endured it himself, and thus opposes it, "is not one of us". Absolutely surreal.

Quote of the Day

2008-01-08T23:21:00.000-05:00

You can imagine the response if a candidate were to suggest anything like this in regard to Israel: Abe Foxman's tie would spin around, Commentary's server would crash, and Marty Peretz would order James Kirchick to crush a paper cup.

Matthew Duss, sketching the perfect vignette in response to more informed and nuanced commentary on the Middle East by Mike Hickabee, in which the Presidential candidate channeled Macaque Ahmadinejad when asked if he supports the creation of a Palestinian state (emphasis added).

WTFF

2008-01-08T23:16:00.000-05:00

From the What the Fuck Files:

"You are approaching coalition warships," the USS Hopper's crew warns. "You are straying into danger and may be subject to defensive measures. ... Request you alter course immediately to remain clear."

It is at that point that a heavily accented voice can be heard over the radio, apparently coming from the Iranians.

"I am coming to you," the voice says. "You will explode after a few minutes."

An American voice can be then heard repeating the words, incredulously, "You will explode in a few minutes."

The video shows the Iranian speedboats getting so close they are inside the wake of the American warships. Senior defense officials told ABC News the USS Hopper's gunners were within seconds of firing on the Iranians' boats when they suddenly backed off.

At the White House today, President Bush was asked about the incident.

"We viewed it as a provocative act. It is a dangerous situation. And they should not have done it, pure and simple," the president said. "And my message today, to the Iranians, is they shouldn't have done what they did."

The Iranian Foreign Ministry, however, called the incident "ordinary" and denied using threatening language.

The Obama Orgasmatron

2008-01-07T18:22:00.000-05:00

Ezra Klein on Obama:

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

This is such a spoogetastic verbal blow-job. If Obama actually wins the nomination, will the entire NPR class don hospital gowns and wander the streets openly masturbating?

This Week in Bitchslaps

2008-01-01T22:38:00.000-05:00

As the ecstatic debris settles on another New Year's Day, I'm enjoying two well-earned smackdowns. James Wolcott lays into the absurd Lee Siegel, the pompous fraud who in the course of an excruciating essay about steroids in baseball, has had the balls to bemoan Stephen Glass, Scott Thomas Beauchamp and the lack of authenticity on the Internet!

Given Siegel's unfortunate foray into sockpuppetry, he might want to rein back on the snot drops secreted from on high against fake-fact self-injectors and avatars with secret identities and agendas. His own writing has no need for steroids, metaphorical or otherwise. His prose is always already so pumped up with grandiose pretention that artificial inflators would be redundant.

Over to the great Oliver Kamm, who on the subject of Enola Gay pilot General Paul Tibbets and the bombing of Hiroshima, is batting around real-life Simpson's character Eric Alterman like a turd in a cat litter.

I see little purpose in being diplomatic about this performance, if only because Alterman does explicitly present himself as an expert on US foreign relations and US history. From my observation, he's not up to it. If he wishes to persist in his statement of what the historical evidence "clearly" shows on the A-bomb decisions, then I invite him to demonstrate it, at long last. I shall be glad to debate that evidence publicly with him, online or in person, at any time.

That I would like to see.

Unusual Activity of Pakistanis

2007-12-28T12:26:00.001-05:00

I guess one thing you can say in response to criticisms of Giuliani’s naïve, ignorant and crazy (and ghostwritten) ideas about foreign policy is at least he’s not Mike Huckabee. In response to the Bhutto assassination, Huckabee counsels:

"We ought to have an immediate, very clear monitoring of our borders and particularly to make sure if there's any unusal activity of Pakistanis coming into the country. We just need to be very, very thorough in looking at every aspect of our own security internally because, again, we live in a very, very dangerous time."

I'm going to delegate this one to Todd Hockney: "Did you put that together yourself, Einstein? Got a team of monkeys working around the clock on this?"

From Andrew Sullivan.

La Putain Verte

2007-12-22T16:58:00.000-05:00

Absinthe is legal again. While the legalization of substances that inflame prudery gives me reflexive joy, I'm shocked now to learn all that magical Green Fairy shit is a hoax.

Amiri Barakaism long predates the Internet: for years I and countless others uncritically retransmitted folk wisdom about the Absinthe Shuffle and the supposedly hallucinogenic properties of wormwood. While I was in Prague in 2001, just days before 9/11, I burrowed into a bar and conspiratorially ordered a shot of it. That and two follow-ups did little more than usual. The thing is, even if wormwood did what Poe, Rimbaud and Van Gogh thought it did, in absinthe it's steeped in such a sulfurous bath of alcohol -- 120 proof -- that unless you were part of the Bum Fights stable of regulars, you couldn't possibly drink enough to get anywhere near la putain verte. You'd puke your liver out.

Andrew Sullivan naively wonders, "Hippies like absinthe?" Who more than hippies and Aleister Crowley impersonators with unkempt fingernails likes absinthe?

Righteous Excrement

2007-11-19T20:26:00.001-05:00

Ezra Klein dumps some righteous excrement on the crazed cotillion of vigilantes whirling around Graeme Frost and his family for daring to advocate SCHIP:

This is the politics of hate. Screaming, sobbing, inchoate, hate. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to drive to the home of a Republican small business owner to see if he "really" needed that tax cut. It would never, not in a million years, occur to me to call his family and demand their personal information. It would never occur to me to interrogate his neighbors. It would never occur to me to his smear his children.

The shrieking, atavistic ritual of personal destruction the right roars into every few weeks is something different than politics. It is beyond politics. It was done to Scott Beauchamp, a soldier serving in Iraq. It was done to college students from the University of California, at Santa Cruz. Currently, it is being done to a child and his family. And think of those targets: College students, soldiers, children. It can be done to absolutely anyone.

This is not politics. This is, in symbolism and emotion, a violent group ritual. It is savages tearing at the body of a captured enemy. It is the group reminding itself that the Other is always disingenuous, always evil, always lying, always pitiful and pathetic and grotesque. It is a bonding experience -- the collaborative nature of these hateful orgies proves that much -- in which the enemy is exposed as base and vile and then ripped apart by the community. In that way, it sustains itself, each attack preemptively justifying the next vicious assault, justifying the whole hateful edifice on which their politics rest.

Boo yeah. You cannot possibly have enough contempt for these people. Readers of Fightin' with Grabes have known where they've been headed for years now.

Update: Wow, this has veered off the cliff into a ravine: Challenging Ezra Klein

Debate Round Up

2007-09-27T21:30:00.000-04:00

I watched about half of the Democratic debate at Dartmouth. These debates are interesting to a degree, but ultimately they’re like the executive dog-and-pony shows we’re subjected to every Quarter at the Fortune 100 company I work for, where upper management gets up on stage and makes positioning statements and you’re supposed to read the tea leaves, but half of it is full of shit and the other half is diluted, so in the end it’s just provender for the bovine sots at my level. I feel insulted and like I’ve wasted my time.

My impressions were that Hillary is surprisingly arrogant -– how dare she explicitly refuse to answer two important direct questions? I'm shocked she didn't take a call from Rudy in the middle of the thing. Obama is a beautiful man who don’t need no $800 haircut. I imagine a lot of legs were rubbing together during his opener. Edwards is appealing. I liked his zeal about health care, but his stance on the social normalization of homosexuality -- expressed in his answer to the question about the children's book in which a prince marries a prince -- was bizarre. It was all like, "Hey, whatever the people want is cool, whatever my kids want to read is cool, I don't tell them or my wife what to think. I'm not really into gay marriage myself, but yeah, someday it will all be cool [Breck Girl twinkle]". Does this kind of thing really play with voters?

Joe Biden was pretty funny and tough; he talked a good game on foreign policy. Kucinich is an unelectable muppet. Bill Richardson is useless. Chris Dodd is inoffensive. Mike Gravel is insane.

Separated at Birth?

2007-05-28T23:04:00.000-04:00


Charles Krauthammer	Meerkat

Airbrushing Anti-Semitism

2005-11-16T22:29:00.000-05:00

Emma Brockes has interviewed Noam Chomsky for al Guardian, in light of his being named today's top public intellectual in a poll of Foreign Policy magazine's readership. In an avuncular moment early in their exchange, Chomsky rebuffs Brockes' suggestion that his memory might be photographic:

It's the other way round. I can't remember names, can't remember faces. I don't have any particular talents that everybody else doesn't have.

Through the rest of the interview, Chomsky debunks this assertion by showing that his mendacity is preternatural. It is often discussed whether Chomsky is some sort of Holocaust-denier. This is fallout from his bizarre decision in 1979 to add his name to a petition defending Robert Faurisson, a vicious French anti-Semite and practitioner of this dark art. The petition lamented the "crude attempt to silence" Faurisson's "research into the 'Holocaust' question." Chomsky then added an avis to Faurisson's Memoire en defense that described him as a "relatively apolitical liberal of some sort." This, about a man whose "findings" (as they're called in the petition Chomsky signed) include the observation that in requiring Jews to wear the yellow star from the age of six, "Hitler was perhaps less concerned with the Jewish question than with ensuring the safety of German soldiers" (Faurisson, Vérité, p. 190).

In spite of this, Chomsky is not a Holocaust denier. He has explicitly affirmed its existence, referring to it as "the most fantastic outburst of insanity in human history". But although he is not a capital-H Holocaust revisionist, Chomsky has long vacillated between the minimization and denial of lower-case holocausts. His infamous attempts to downplay and delete the Khmer Rouge autogenocide are the piece de resistance of this disgusting pattern. His subordination of the 9/11 atrocities to Bill Clinton's silly decision to bomb Sudan's Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant is a lesser but still outrageous example (see Hitchens on this).

In the Brockes interview, we have a real treat: Chomsky's revisionist reflex fires repeatedly. Take this lunatic passage about Bosnia and Serbian national socialism:

These days, [Chomsky's wife] Carol accompanies her husband to most of his public appearances. He is asked to lend his name to all sorts of crackpot causes and she tries to intervene to keep his schedule under control. As some see it, one ill-judged choice of cause was the accusation made by Living Marxism magazine that during the Bosnian war, shots used by ITN of a Serb-run detention camp were faked. The magazine folded after ITN sued, but the controversy flared up again in 2003 when a journalist called Diane Johnstone made similar allegations in a Swedish magazine, Ordfront, taking issue with the official number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre. (She said they were exaggerated.) In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone's "outstanding work". Does he regret signing it?

"No," he says indignantly. "It is outstanding. My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough. It may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding work."

How, I wonder, can journalism be wrong and still outstanding?

"Look," says Chomsky, "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It was like old-fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from the party line, you're a traitor, you're destroyed. It's totally irrational. And Diane Johnstone, whether you like it or not, has done serious, honest work. And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was false, is outrageous."

They didn't "think" it was false; it was proven to be so in a court of law.

But Chomsky insists that "LM was probably correct" and that, in any case, it is irrelevant. "It had nothing to do with whether LM or Diane Johnstone were right or wrong." It is a question, he says, of freedom of speech. "And if they were wrong, sure; but don't just scream well, if you say you're in favour of that you're in favour of putting Jews in gas chambers."

Chomsky's performance here, and its chilling recollection of the Faurisson affair -- the petition or letter in defense, the eager legitimation of a pseudo-scholar with evil motives, the navel-gazing about an unthreatened freedom of speech -- will be ably explored by other commentators, in particular the indefatigable Oliver Kamm, who has made a cottage industry out of incisive and readable critiques of Chomsky. I would rather focus on another part of the interview, in which Chomsky further succumbs to his revisionist reflex. I can only guess that he felt the comparative obscurity of the topic would enable him to so grossly distort it.

Brockes renders some biographical detail about Chomsky, in which his Jewish origins are discussed. It contains the following passage, which concludes with Chomsky making a startling aside:

Chomsky's activism has its roots in his childhood. He grew up in the depression of the 1930s, the son of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, Russian immigrants to Philadelphia. He describes the family as "working-class Jews", most of whom were unemployed, although his parents, both teachers, were lucky enough to work. There was no sense of America as the promised land: "It wasn't much of an opportunity-giver in my immediate family," he says, although it was an improvement on the pogroms of Russia, which none the less Chomsky can't help qualifying as "not very bad, by contemporary standards. In the worst of the major massacres, I think about 49 people were killed."

Chomsky is referring to the First Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which indeed killed between 47-49 Jews in what is modern-day Moldova. It is true that by ancient or contemporary standards of slaughter, this is not a high body count. But taken all together, the pogroms were probably the most devastating phenomenon in Jewish history besides the Holocaust. And as with many historical phenomena, they came to be associated with a signal event whose peculiar character positioned it to represent the whole. Although it shouldn't (you'll see why a few paragraphs later), Kishinev has filled this role. An account in the April 28, 1903 New York Times gives an idea why:

The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia, are worse than the censor will permit to publish. There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Russian Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, "Kill the Jews," was taken-up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.

New York Times reporters had accuracy issues then too -- the numbers are off -- but there is no doubt that this account is representative of the greater bloody ouevre. The randomness and savagery of these attacks on Jews, and the great length of time over which they were carried out, were major factors in both the spread of Zionism and the pioneering Jewish involvement in socialism. The impact of the pogroms on Jews was seminal.

Chomsky distorts the historical narrative by atomizing and thus decontextualizing a single event. This is a common feature in his argumentation, and perhaps not for nothing, a key technique used by professional revisionists like Faurisson. But Chomsky is also wrong in the particular claim that Kishinev was the "worst of the major massacres" in its harvest of dead. Consider these statistics:

Bialystock, Russian-controlled Polish territory, 1906: A pogrom possibly inspired by the Okhrana kills 70-100 Russian Jews
Odessa, Russian-controlled Ukraine, 1905: 299 dead
Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917-20:

75,000 killed in the Ukraine (Bernard Lewis)
150,000 killed in Russia and the Ukraine (Orlando Figes)

During the years 1917-1920 (assuming 1095 days), if 49 Jews were killed by mobs every day the number of dead would amount only to 53,655. You would need at least 137 per day to reach the Figes figure. A daily tally of Chomsky's "worst" estimate doesn't even attain the Lewis number for the Ukraine.

On pages 677-679 of A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (Penguin), Orlando Figes describes the kind of violence that claimed those 150,000 Jews. An excerpt:

On seizing a town from the Reds, it was common for the White officers to allow their soldiers two or three days' freedom to rob and kill the Jews at will. This was seen as a reward for the troops and a just retribution for the part played by the Jews in supporting the Reds. There were no recorded cases of a White officer ever halting a pogrom, but several cases where even senior generals, such as Mamontov and Mai-Maevsky, ordered them. One of the worst pogroms took place in Kiev, right under the noses of the White authorities. From 1 to 5 October the Cossack soldiers went around the city breaking into Jewish homes, demanding money, raping and killing. The officers and local priests urged them on with speeches claiming that 'The Yids kill all our people and support the Bolsheviks.' Even Shulgin, an ardent anti-Semite was disturbed by the climate of 'medieval terror' in the streets and by the 'terrifying howl' of the 'Yids' at night 'that breaks the heart'. Yet General Dragomirov who ruled the city, did not order a stop to the pogtrom until the 6th, the day after the orgy of killing had finally burned itself out.

Many pogroms were accompanied by gruesome acts of torture on a par with those of the Red Terror. In the town of Fastov the Cossacks hung their victims from the ceiling, releasing them just before they choked to death: if their relatives, who watched this in terror, could not pay up the money they had demanded, the Cossacks repeated the operation. The Cossacks cut off limbs and noses with their sabres and ripped out babies from their mothers' wombs. They set light to Jewish houses and forced those who tried to escape to turn back into the fire. In some places, such as Chernobyl, the Jews were herded into the synagogue, which was then burned down with them inside. In others, such as Cherkass, they gang-raped hundreds of pre-teen girls. Many of their victims were later found with knife and sabre wounds to their small vaginas. One of the most horrific pogroms took place in the small Podole town of Krivoe Ozero during the final stages of the Whites' retreat in late December. By this stage the White troops had ceased to care about world opinion and, as they contemplated defeat, threw all caution to the winds. The Terek Cossacks tortured and mutilated hundreds of Jews, many of them women and young children. Hundreds of corpses were left out in the snow for the dogs and pigs to eat. In the midst of this macabre scene the Cossack officers held a surreal ball in the town post office, complete with evening dress and an orchestra, to which they invited the local magistrate and a group of prostitutes they had brought with them from Kherson. While their soldiers were killing Jews for sport, the officers and their beau monde drank champagne and danced the night away.

Very bad, by contemporary standards. There's more. Most people refer to an erroneously truncated epoch when they mention "the pogroms" -- roughly the years 1881-1917. They also focus on Russia. It is more accurate, however, to date and source the phenomenon in mid-17th Century Ukraine. At the time, that country was under a feckless and dying Polish rule. A local Cossack leader, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, led a successful rebellion with Muslim Tatar allies against the Poles. The ensuing chaos permitted the subjugation of Ukraine by Sweden and Russia. Jews had comprised a class of middlemen that interfaced between the Ukrainian peasants and their Polish masters, and were thus widely reviled. Seizing the opportunity, Khmelnytsky goaded his European forces on to the slaughter of between 50,000 and 200,000 Jews in Europe's first series of pogroms. (Khmelnytsky's Tatars were more inclined to sell their Jews into slavery.)

The first two years of this decade-long epoch (1648-58) were the most ferocious, suggesting that per-incident body counts were rather more than ~50. 6,000 Jews were killed in Nemirov alone by Cossacks disguised as Poles. As formative in Jewish history as the late 19th Century slaughters, the Khmelnytsky pogroms in no small part provided the psychological impetus for the birth of Hasidism.

Pogroms took place leading up to and during the Holocaust. Around two weeks after the Nazis took the northern Polish town of Jedwabne from the Soviets, its Gentile inhabitants rose up and beat, drowned and burned to death 1,600 of their long-time Jewish neighbors in a single day (the Polish Institute of National Remembrance disputes this figure, offering an alternative count of ~800). Jan Tomasz Gross, the Polish-born Princeton professor who wrote the definitive account of this episode, explicitly called it a pogrom.

Chomsky's belittlement of Kishinev and the phenomenon of the pogroms is a continuation of a tendency to minimize the importance of anti-Semitism. As far as I know, Chomsky began doing this in a talk he gave to the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign about "Anti-Semitism, Zionism and the Palestinians" (again, see Oliver Kamm). In it, Chomsky described the status of anti-Semitism in American society today:

By now Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population. You find occasional instances of anti-Semitism but they are marginal. There's plenty of racism, but it's directed against Blacks, Latinos, Arabs are targets [sic] of enormous racism, and those problems are real. Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It's raised, but it's raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That's why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there’s no critical look at the policies the US (and they themselves) support in the Middle East.

Chomsky is right that religious and racist-Right anti-Semitism are marginal in American society. Of course, he omits mention of the left-wing variety rife among intellectuals of whom he is a cynosure. Notice the callowness of his argument, reminiscent of his cheap facsimile Norman Finkelstein, that anti-Semitism, the one mirage among plenty of "real" racism today, is merely an arrow in the quiver of the ruling claque of Jews and their supporters!

The minimization of Jewish suffering and the traducement of Israel and Zionism combine to form a pattern wearily recognizable on the Left. Chomsky's revision of the pogroms is useful to this enterprise, because it blurs the historical record of the exigency driving the spread of Zionism. The pogroms might otherwise serve to arouse sympathy for the Jewish pioneers, or at least broaden the ambit of the Arab-Israeli conflict beyond the Manichaean passion play with which Chomsky seduces his followers. Over the pogroms, one can now easily patch the paleo-Left thesis that Israel is just an imperial cancer, a Middle East metastasis of the West, of America, of international finance and the Jews.

One might also consider this latest episode in Chomsky's troubled relationship with mainstream Jews in light of his psychology. Oliver Kamm, whose analyses of Chomsky have been helpful in the composition of this piece, rails against "adducing psychological explanations for political views". I understand and respect this position; as Kamm rightly points out, it is uncivil to force people to respond to unfalsifiable charges. On the other hand, I think psychology is the substrate of politics, and it would be dishonest and harmful to ignore this on principle.

I'll compromise by leaving the reader to make up his mind about what fuels Chomsky's animus against Israel (one that has expanded lately to include the notion of Jewish/Zionist control of American politics). I will conclude, however, with an observation. For a man who thinks Bill Clinton's bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant in which one person died is worse than 9/11 -- because the downstream damage of lost medicine and monies theoretically resulted in "killing unknown numbers of people" -- it is telling that he views the Kishinev massacre in such an absurdly discrete fashion.

Nick Berg and the Nouveau Conservatism

2004-05-12T22:05:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, made a couple of posts about the savage slaughter of Nick Berg. One of the posts, Berg Family Angry with US Government, illustrated that Michael Berg had made some statements inculpating US officials in Iraq in part for his son's murder. Berg also made the following statement:

"'I think a lot of people are fed up with the lack of civil rights [the War on Terror/Iraq] has caused,' he said. 'I don’t think this administration is committed to democracy.'"

Now, as I mentioned yesterday, I watched the mujahideens' video. Johnson, whose interpretations of events I am not always fond of, deserves a lot of credit for describing in laconic, horrid terms the nature of the film. It conveys a sadness and barbarism that defies abstraction. Beset by the awesome emotions it bestirs, you can imagine my horror after reading several comments at LGF in which visitors began to bash Michael Berg for being a "Leftist"!

"The LLL [Loony Liberal Left] are amazing even after having his sons head literally choped off by these Radical Muslims the loyal anti-war dad finds the time to blame his own country in the form of Bush and the Military holding him."

"I can understand Mr. Berg's outrage and anger over the death of his son; therefore, I'll forgive him for his stupid, moronic, politically-motivated, un-American, ignorant, un-Patriotic, brainless, dim-witted, foolish, idiotic, reckless, careless comments about how it twas the fault of the U.S. Government for the killing."

So I posted some vituperative comments, my main one being, in excerpt:

"What I'm shocked by are the several execrable moral idiots here who watched the video, harvested the kid's slaughter for the orgy of righteous rage it bestirs, and then denounced Berg's father for being "LLL", for expressing bland anti-Bush sentiment because his kid was massacred. Do you have any clue how classless that is? Do you think Nick Berg would want that? Is it possible to be this fathomlessly unaware?"

An LGF visitor named Ron rebutted me, saying in part:

"If he [Michael Berg] makes a public statement, he gets answered. You get a free pass for your personal life if it's in the realm of personal. But you do not get a free pass when it affects everyone else."

Then, he was kind enough to come here and leave a thoughtful comment elaborating on his views. I decided to post what he wrote and my response here for two reasons. One, the free version of the Haloscan commenting system sucks. Two, I'm getting rather tired of the elements on the Right, which, as events in Iraq seem to degenerate more and more, are devolving into a complimentary state: intellectual chaos borne out of a wooden inability to appreciate mistakes and evolve. I call this nouveau conservatism. It is the New Right's answer to its own concept of idiotarianism.

This strain is exceedingly important to notice and combat as we approach the election that will make or break the War on Terror.

Here is Ron's comment. These prefatory remarks are not meant to set Ron up as an example of this element of the Right. Look to the quotes about Michael Berg above for that. I am merely trying to provide context.

JP, I'm glad I came to your website.

I saw your post on LGF re: Berg and it enraged me. Why? Because every time one of these outrages is perpetrated, I am convinced that I cannot take any more, and then I am told some preachy blah. As well as seeing the people who attempting to defend me get attacked in a very opportunistic way. Read the New York Suns May 10th, James Tarantino [Taranto] re: Eleanor Clift to get an idea of what I'm discussing.

She considered Abu Grhaib to be the biggest news story of the war, and Tarantino asks "bigger than the lightning fast victory? Bigger than the battle in which Udai and Kusai were killed? ... the reason it is so big for her is b/c it gives her a chance to demolish the war effort". the people you were posting to are not idiots or moral cretins. They are decent people who are getting fed up. Please remember that they are human. They have human reactions. Such as fear, anger, and guilt.

Guilt, that we are in some way responsible for this atrocity. Lets face it, we were the ones who propped up that sick bitch Hussein to begin with. So really, the deaths of many Iraqis are on our hands.

Anger over what was done to an innocent man. He [Nick Berg] was a good man who meant only well to others.

Fear that it will be done to us.

These are all perfectly reasonable reactions to an insane situation.

I'm glad I didn't jump all over you, b/c looking at your site, I see that you are sincere and intelligent. But I felt that I have to explain what happened, not b/c I don't think you can figure it out.

Ron,

For what it's worth, I would like to say that I feel it's perfectly legitimate to have feelings of rage in response to obscenities like Berg's slaughter. When I watch shit like that, my thoughts run from inarticulate disbelief to profane and barbaric revenge fantasies. I'm hardly beyond reproach.

That said, I was making a simple argument at LGF: it is utterly classless to use Nick Berg's massacre as a jumping-off point for crapping on his father as a stand-in for some "Leftist" strawman. I use Reuters-style quotes and the term "strawman" here because Berg's father has done barely anything to merit the calumnies some "patriotic fundamentalists" are throwing at him. He merely made a couple of bland anti-Bush pronouncements. Now, it may turn out that he is indeed a Leftist, some ANSWER guy, for instance. I say, who fucking cares? I will not spit on Nick Berg in the wake of his death by spitting on his father. Doing so is disgusting and morally idiotic.

You implied that because Michael Berg made a public statement, then it is ok -- no, mandated -- to respond to him publicly. This is a more pragmatic argument, although it is ideological too: Michael Berg's rhetoric needs to be combatted lest he vitiate the war effort. Short of his becoming a career apologist for terror, like Rachel Corrie's parents are doing, I exhort you, with all due respect, to get a grip. The guy was suffering paroxysms of rage, and he had a covey of media vampires bustling in his yard, shoving microphones in his face while he learned that a video of his son's decapitation was playing on porn-loop across the world. He did not seek to make a public statement, he got brutally suckered into giving one at the worst possible time. Give the guy a break.

This is the gist of what I was saying over at LGF. Some posters there truly are idiotic moral cretins, and this bashing of Berg Senior was a good example of that, but hardly the only one. There is something I call "nouveau conservatism", a cheap, distilled ideology that grew out of post-9/11, pop neoconservatism, and which is often on display at LGF. Inevitably, all organic and powerful movements produce a shallow, gestural simulacrum of themselves. The hippies of the late '60s eventually became a smelly cotillion of kids at a Phish show. The culture of nouveau conservatism, like that of the nouveau riche, is obnoxious and noisome, a parody of its progenitor. And it is doing a lot more damage to the neocon undertaking in Iraq and elsewhere than any despairing statements by Nick Berg's father.

This Christian Love

2004-04-26T01:37:00.000-04:00

A Review of The Passion of the Christ

It's way overdue, but I just saw Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. I will comment on it at length, but let me start by saying, in reference to the controversy attending the film, I was predisposed disfavorably to making rash conclusions about it. First, I have always liked Mel Gibson. More important, I am aware that elements of the Gospels, considered today, are simply anti-Semitic, and there's not a lot an interpreter of the Passion can do about that if he intends to be true to the story. Also, I knew that many Christians were greatly moved by the movie, and had respect for that. To be honest, on some level it moved me. But The Passion is a violative nightmare of a film, and it convinced me of this long before it was over.

Let's get the good stuff out of the way: the movie is beautifully shot, viscerally moving (to say the least), and I think the choice to script it in Aramaic, Hebrew and "street Latin" was brilliant. This latter element lends the movie a profundity it could not have had otherwise. Have you ever heard an opera sung in English? When I do, it sounds cringingly awkward and silly to me; whereas hearing an opera in Latin or Italian or French sounds mysterious and beautiful, the voice really becoming an instrument in its own right in the absence of understanding. Scripting The Passion in ancient languages does the same. As one reviewer observed, it allows the film to avoid the dated feel of other Passion movies that are written and performed in stage English by graying actors. It effectively removes us from that contrived theatrical milieu.

Now, the bad stuff. There are a number of areas in which the movie is deeply disturbing. To begin, I will use Leon Wieseltier's laconic summation, from his wonderfully written review in The New Republic:

"The only cinematic achievement of The Passion of the Christ is that it breaks new ground in the verisimilitude of filmed violence."

I don't agree that this is the only cinematic achievement of the movie, but Wieseltier's claim about its precedential violence is true. For the first time in my life, I was actually made to feel nauseous by a work of art, and I am not a squeamish person -- I have forensic wound atlases in my library. I was also exhausted by the end of the film. There is scant scriptural reason for exaggerating the violence of Jesus' torture to this extent. People argue that Gibson wanted to realistically portray the enormity of the debt Jesus was shouldering on our behalf. Fine, but none of the Gospels nor any of their interpreters throughout two millenia saw fit to dumb it down like this. Plus, no human could survive 25% of what Jesus endures in The Passion.

Some people say that medieval depictions of the Passion and the martydom of saints can be grisly, and that is true, but the comparison cannot be sustained in terms of the intensity of the individual examples or the media themselves. I have been to Rome and seen some scary, wall-sized paintings of Biblical slaughters -- The Massacre of the Innocents comes to mind. The medium of paint just doesn't approach that of film, and Grunewald amounts to a workplace-safe Get Well card by comparison with The Passion.

Wieseltier argues:

"The Passion of The Christ is an unwitting incitement to secularism, because it leaves you desperate to escape its standpoint, to find another way of regarding the horror that you have just observed."

He's right. This is Christian love Taliban-style, a Grand Guignol of such mind-numbing luridness that it would sicken those in the highest seats of the stadium. That so many Christians have cited the ability of this movie to inspire love in them is utterly confusing and frightening.

I believe the movie is anti-Semitic. As I said before, there is a certain amount of anti-Semitism baked into the story of Jesus' betrayal, scourging and crucifixion. It's unavoidable, as the Jewish establishment was not kind to the inchoate Christian movement, and I think the impression rendered by many depictions of the Passion that "the Romans are brutish, but the Jews are evil" is justified by the original texts. This doesn't invalidate the narrative foundation of Christianity for me, even as a Jew, because it's anachronistic to consider it in terms of modern or even medieval anti-Semitism, and anyway, it's really not the point of Christ's travails. The writers of the Gospels, while conscious of Jewish rejection and persecution, did not intend to compose revanchist propaganda. That we are all responsible for the necessity of Christ's sacrifice is the message they were trying to convey.

Gibson, however, moves resolutely beyond this into an imagistic and narrative realm in which Jews are portrayed in a classically anti-Semitic way. Early in the movie, a covey of Rabbis, led by Caiaphas, the Temple high priest who architects Jesus' torturous death, meets with Judas. A dour Caiaphas casts a filthy bag of coins at him, and it bursts open in his fumbling hands in slow-motion. Judas is gripped by crapulent lust for the silver and nervous apprehension of his treachery. The message is unmistakeable and unreconstructed.

The rabbis, as Wieseltier puts it, are otherwise "gold and cold":

"The figure of Caiaphas, played with disgusting relish by an actor named Mattia Sbragia, is straight out of Oberammergau. Like his fellow priests, he has a graying rabbinical beard and speaks with a gravelly sneer and moves cunningly beneath a tallit-like shawl streaked with threads the color of money. He is gold and cold. All he does is demand an execution."

Yes, but even more dangerously:

"[Caiaphas] and his sinister colleagues manipulate the ethically delicate Pilate into acquiescing to the crucifixion. (You would think that Rome was a colony of Judea.) Meanwhile the Jewish mob is regularly braying for blood. It is the Romans who torture Jesus, but it is the Jews who conspire to make them do so."

Gibson's most anti-Semitic statement is his insistence that the Romans are either loutish gorillas or conflicted over the persecution of Jesus, but that the Jews outside his coterie keen en bloc for his blood. They gladly pull the lever on him. (The insertion of sympathetic Simon later into the narrative doesn't mitigate the contrast.) Yes, again, to a degree this is justified by the original texts. But as many reviewers noted, the Gospels are not reliable historical documents, and consequently, interpretations of them vary greatly. Examining those variations reveals much about the maker and his audience. Charles Krauthammer writes:

"... Gibson's personal interpretation is spectacularly vicious. Three of the Gospels have but a one-line reference to Jesus's scourging. The fourth has no reference at all. In Gibson's movie this becomes 10 minutes of the most unremitting sadism in the history of film. Why 10? Why not five? Why not two? Why not zero, as in Luke? Gibson chose 10."

And as I said, the Gospels are not revanchist propaganda. Gibson embellishes them, even adds to them, and proudly turns them into that. A decidedly modern rendering of the figure of Satan trolls through the film, and is used to harrowing effect. One of the ways in which she is deployed is as a foil for Pilate's wife, Claudia. Aware of the scourging of Jesus and watching his show-trial by Pilate and the Jewish mob, Claudia is reduced to tears through phases of burgeoning piety. She comforts Mary and Mary Magdalene, giving them towels; all three are ensconced in maternal love. By contrast, Satan, who is depicted as an androgynous woman with a man's voice, lurks among the braying Jews as the skin is literally flogged off Jesus, watching, carrying an albino baby with an old, dwarven face and hair on its back.

This brings up another nasty facet of the movie: its homophobia. It has been noted less, but this hatred is only marginally less present in the film. Herod is portrayed as a preening queen, interrupted from a Sodomite orgy to pass judgment on Christ. (I can find no historical justification for this.) He simpers and sends Jesus back to Pilate. Satan, the locus of evil, is a dual-gendered freak who births snakes and demonic, progeriac children. Matt Zoller Seitz writes in the New York Press:

"For no apparent reason, the film depicts King Herod as a bewigged, Dom DeLuise-style fop lording over a court full of decadent queens. Gibson also casts the role of Satan with an actress, shaves her eyebrows, masks her in albino-white face paint, dresses her in a black hooded gown and hires a man to dub her voice. The implied opposition could not be more obvious: Goodness is exemplified by Jesus -- a macho man who chose not to kick ass; a stud who chose not to have sex with Mary Magdalene -- while evil is represented by a creature of indeterminate gender."

To be fair, I don't think Gibson emphasizes the theme of repressed lust for Mary Magdalene, or really treats it at all. Seitz seems to mention it only because Monica Bellucci is really hot. But he's right about the use of gender in the film. There is a scene during the procession through the Stations of the Cross in which Jesus, having been clobbered to the ground, is shot at an upwards angle rising with the impossibly heavy cross on his shoulder like, well, Sylvester Stallone. It is gratuitous and cheesy, and revelatory of Gibson's (and unfortunately, our) sensibility. Gibson is clearly not a stupid man, but his aesthetic often is. It is literalistic, folkish, and above all juvenile. His movie is a breviary of lowest-common-denominator appeals: ultra-violence, sinister Jews, fags, dykes -- even albinos and dwarves!

But, hey, it also works. I liked Braveheart and again, on some level I admit I liked this too. The movie soils you on both visceral and cerebral planes, but somehow becomes tolerable without actually relenting in its assault on the viewer. And mostly, you have to think about what is hateful about it. In the absence of that sort of reflection, I can see why the average Christian would be knocked on his ass by this movie. There is a captivating moment, upon Jesus' death, when a rain drop symbolizing the tear of God envelops the scene at Calvary. It provides a brief, quiet and sublime respite. But then it crashes to earth, and, wait for it... hysterical rabbis watch the Temple split down the middle.

There are other times when Gibson spells things out for you. Besides leaving the Aramaic utterance of the original "blood libel" in the script, whose subtitle will surely reappear in foreign and DVD releases, consider this dialogue, a narrative centerpiece of the film:

Pilate: Do you not know that I have power to crucify you, and power to release you?

Jesus: You could have no power at all against me unless it had been given you from above. Therefore the one who delivered me to you has the greater sin.

That couldn't be more clear in Gibson's fundamentalist rendering. After witnessing the most relentless violence ever filmed, and a photorealistic crucifixion, we see Jesus on the cross, dolorous, excruciated. Caiaphas ambles over, gloating, to taunt Jesus. Jesus tells Caiaphas that he prays for him. When asked whether he is anti-Semitic, Gibson responds: "I don't want to lynch any Jews... I love them, I pray for them." Sure, it's horrifying that Jews would be targeted in or outside of this movie. But that anyone might be targeted by this Christian love, which drove the maker of this savage, unremitting holocaust of a film, and which "exalted" so many of the Christians exposed to it, is something worth considering at length.

Who Am I?

2002-11-28T23:59:00.001-05:00

My name is John-Paul Pagano. I run the infrastructural engineering group at a media company in New York City. In my quite unrelated shadow life, I double as a writer on politics, culture and intellectual history. I often focus on utopian and totalitarian ideas, mostly as they find expression in antisemitic reaction to Israel, Zionism and modernity, but I don't confine myself to those topics. This blog is for general material that might not click in to place on Socialism of Fools.

I grew up in the Boston area and have been living in Brooklyn for almost a decade now. I also like photography, mom-and-pop ethnic food and down-home die-like-a-dog jazz.