The Amazon reviewer sums up our latest book club pick thus: “While I don’t claim that everything [Bjorn] Lomborg says [in “The Skeptical Environmentalist”] makes perfect sense, or that all his data are correct (surely he won’t deny his readers the right to apply skepticism to his own claims as well, and it is quite easy to use the WWW to check out his opponents’ arguments), this is a rare book that attempts seriously to consider all facts from a variety of angles, which tries to answer objections or qualifications from opponents, and which carefully connects all the variables into a global picture, incorporating the temporal dimension both past and future. Lomborg is truly skeptical, in the sense of taking nothing for granted and approaching all the issues dispassionately. These are, as Descartes told us in his Discourse on the Method, some of the conditions for true knowledge. Reading Lomborg one sometimes feels like the light has been turned on or the mists have cleared on many topics.” So let’s turn the light on in the environmental debate. You have until May 6 to read the book before the discussion starts. Lomborg will take part; we’ll link to sites critical of his work, and those supportive. If you want to get to the bottom of the environmental debate, this is your chance. Buy the book here, support the site, and feed your mind.
THE ASSAULT ON THE JEWS: Don’t miss this riveting and moving diarist from Jerusalem by Yossi Klein Halevi in The New Republic. It describes in searing language what this second Intifada has done – is doing – to the promise that the Jews could one day have a home. He writes:
The fear has not only forced us into our homes; it has locked us out of our national, communal space. In our dread of public places, notes Israeli journalist Ari Shavit, lies a threat to our collective identity. Striking at a seder–which celebrates the founding of the Jewish people–is an unbearable symbol of the war against the Jewish collective. We are in the grip of an experiment testing how long a society can endure under relentless terrorism before it begins to disintegrate. If the experiment continues unchecked, we will become a completely atomized society–or no longer a society at all. A state founded on the survival instinct of the Jewish people risks devolving into the survival instinct of the individual Jew. Rather than see Israel as the answer to Jewish survival, we are beginning to see it as a threat.
That is why this terrorism must be defeated. It is also why we must not equivocate in defending the last refuge for the Jewish people to live in peace and freedom as a collective nation. Israel, like all states, is not perfect. Its treatment of many Palestinians has been cruel and wrong. The settlements policy is, to my mind, a foolish provocation. But I hope I can recognize in my own generation a moment when an attack upon the Jews is yet again an attack upon civilization itself. We are at another such pivotal moment. And the same forces – from Europe and the Vatican – are counseling moral equivalence. But there is no moral equivalence between a free country protecting itself from terror – and a terrorist organization, exploiting the misery of millions in order to foment nothing – nothing – but more violence. And make no mistake, Arafat’s only historic achievement is the perpetuation of violence and subsequently his own thugocracy. Halevi comments acidly on those who sympathize with Israel but who still counsel that fighting back is not a solution. Oh yes it is:
In one sense, it hardly matters that this military operation won’t stop the suicide bombers. (Indeed, nothing short of destroying the terrorist infrastructure known as the Palestinian Authority is likely to contain the terrorist assault.) In this war for the survival of our public spaces, reaffirmation of our collective identity is itself a victory. The Zionist revolution has long since forfeited its ideal of the Jewish worker and the Jewish farmer; now, it is the Jewish fighter whose existence is in the balance.
May he fight. And may we go on to fight with him against the same dark forces that lurk just over the horizon – in Tehran and Baghdad.
SHE’S STILL HERE: Rumors of Margaret Thatcher’s retreat from public life turn out to be somewhat exaggerated. She can do a mean book-signing.
SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE? This time, a poem.
UPDATE:Hang on a minute. Several of you think the poem might actually mean the reverse of the meaning I first ascribed to it. Reading it again, I think you could well be right, although, like many poems, its meaning is not literal and so open to more than one interpretation. Here’s a reader comment on the poem’s possible meaning:
In fact, there’s more evidence to suggest that the curse is directed at the high-jackers. The repetition of the word “rectitude” supports this interpretation. The poem attacks and inverts the “rectitude” of fanatics who slaughter in the name of religion. The power of the poem’s curse (the power of the poem, really) arises from its envisaging the fundamentalists’ being infiltrated, suffused, and possessed by the spirit of their victims. It is this spirit which the terrorist has either sought to negate or never acknowledged. The poem concludes then with two moves: first the power of imagination is figured as a means of vengeance to be used _against_ the terrorists; second, the perverted quality of the terrorists’ “rectitude” is implicitly demonstrated to stem from a deficient power of imagination, from a failure to grasp the “secret of morals, the imagination to enter the skin of another.” It’s this imaginative entering of the skin of another that the fundamentalist mind cannot perform, and thus the appropriate punishment for a fundamentalist terrorist is to have this failure of imagination (and thus morality) turned against him in the afterlife, as he loses his own essential or “fundamental” being and becomes fraught by the beings and essences of his victims. Part of the strength of the poem and a chief attribute of its seriousness of purpose lie in its understanding of how imagination at its best is the condition of possibility for morality and mutual understanding; but in times of moral extremity, such as these months after 9/11, imagination must be transformed into an agency of vengeance and then of justice. The poetic principle here is similar to that of the contrapasso in Dante. This assumes that there’s a direct referent for the poem’s curse, and that the poem is about something concrete. Op-eds and public policy essays must have direct referents, and should be about something concrete. But certainly we shouldn’t demand that all poems meet these stipulations. If I’m wrong about this poem, and you’re right, then I’m distraught. The poem, in such a case, would be utterly vile, far more so than Sontag’s claim about the courageousness of the terrorists.
Okay. I guess this is a classic lesson in how poetry is far more ineffable than prose. See what you think. And thanks for alerting me.
CORRECTION: Rod Dreher’s approving quote of a Vatican source describing the Patriarch of Jerusalem as giving a “false, lyi
ng, asinine statement” did not refer to the Orthodox Patriarch but the Latin Patriarch, of the Roman Catholic Church. My mistake. But it actually makes my point more forcefully. Imagine if a gay dissident had described a church official as making a “false, lying, asinine statement.” Somehow I think there would be more disapproval of cafeteria Catholicism from some quarters. Dreher subsequently argues that differing with Rome on politics is not the same as differing with it on morals. Well, if the war against terror isn’t a matter of morality, I don’t know what is. And if the death penalty isn’t also a matter of morals, I don’t know what is. But if your Catholic cafeteria is on the right, and you back Israel and capital punishment, no-one seems to care. Here’s my concession: I won’t call Dreher a “Catholic hobbyist” for picking and choosing what he agrees with the Pope about. I’ll call him a man with a brain and a conscience.
GIVE THE GUY CREDIT FOR CHUTZPAH: Here’s an amazing, splutter-over-your-coffee quote, in the New York Times today:
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, told a conference at the University of Oklahoma today that he was frustrated that the Israelis had spurned the Arab peace offer, a plan the administration gave its support. “We’re offering the Israelis full, total peace and security in return for ending the military occupation,” he said. “You still have the Arab leadership ready to stick its neck out and say, yes, let’s have peace,” he added. But he warned of dire consequences if the situation remains unchanged. “I cannot guarantee this down the road, when everybody becomes a suicidal bomber.”
So this guy, who represents a country which has financed Islamo-fascism, gave us the citizens who killed over 3000 people in New York City, now threatens that there will be more suicide bombers, if Israel doesn’t capitulate to terror. And he claims that he and the dictatorship he represents were “sticking their necks out” to offer Israel a plan that would effectively destroy that country’s security. Are we on the same planet or what?
EPHEBOPHILIA IN VERSE: Reading some errant poems last night, I stumbled across one I’d long forgotten, that seemed apposite to our current discourse on the evil of lusting after the young. It’s called “Senex” by John Betjeman, a wonderful and under-rated English poet of the twentieth century.
Oh would I could subdue the flesh
Which sadly troubles me!
And then perhaps could view the flesh
As though I never knew the flesh
And merry misery.To see the golden hiking girl
With wind about her hair,
The tennis playing, biking girl,
The wholly-to-my-liking girl,
To see and not to care.
I’m not sure I can reproduce the whole poem without copyright permission so I’ll stop there. Except for this wonderful metaphor:
Get down from me! I thunder there,
You spaniels! Shut your jaws!
Your teeth are stuffed with underwear,
Suspenders torn asunder there
And buttocks in your paws!
No I’m not approving of this. But it’s one of the best expressions of the ephebophile temptation I know of. At once empathetic and horrified. Easier said in poetry than prose, perhaps.
HITCH ON THE QUEEN MUM: I don’t agree with all of the caustic comments my friend Christopher Hitchens makes in this Guardian piece. But it has some great moments. Here’s one:
Not even Wyatt of Weeford disputed the essential facts in A N Wilson’s account of a dinner party that he, Wyatt, had given for the old girl. As the martinis and fine wines took hold, she reminisced about a poetry reading held at Windsor Castle in the old King’s day, when Edith and Osbert Sitwell had been present, and also an enigmatic other: “This rather lugubrious man in a suit, and he read a poem … I think it was called The Desert. At first the girls got the giggles and then I did and then even the King … Such a gloomy man, looked as though he worked in a bank.” Of course the author of The Waste Land did work in a bank, and was somewhat depressing, but some of us who have our quarrels with Mr Eliot might regard this episode as a poor return for his lifelong monarchism and anglophilia.
The Dish 