Christopher Caldwell paints a dire portrait of Holland. Theo van Gogh’s murder at the hands of Islamists has shattered the multicultural consensus, and the country is in the grip of what might be called a 1930s moment. Political certainties have been undermined. Populist resentment of foreign-born Muslims, many of whom have built a kind of authoritarian counterculture in the home of “post-Christian” avant-garde tolerance, resonates widely. The threat of low-level civil war hangs overhead as outspoken opponents of the Islamists surround themselves with armed guards. It makes you think America’s woes are pretty damn manageable.
This is the nightmare flipside of the West’s acquiescence in tyranny outside its own charmed circle. President Bush, whatever else you may think of him, has broken with this, if only out of necessity. For many in Europe, this acquiescence has, bizarrely, become a source of moral vanity. These dictatorships we can’t hope to understand, their sovereignty sacrosanct, beget chauvinism and desperate poverty, which in turn begets the emigration of spiritually battered, xenophobic, and occasionally violent people. The chickens are coming home to roost.
Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a good friend, approached the issue from a very different angle two and a half years ago in The American Prospect. See what you think.
THEORY OF GRAMBO: I’ve been puzzling over Whatevs.org. I’ve been struggling to understand exactly why this website is so transcendently dope. Is it the endless hilarity? Of course, that’s a part of it, but there’s something else. Consider that celebrity gossip has long been seen as the province of women. Because said gossip is central to Grambo’s beat, you can say there’s something “feminine” about his work. At the same time, he clearly lusts after a wide array of “gamtastic” celebrity stunners, as evidenced by the many salacious snapshots that pepper Grambo’s electric prose. This is classically coded as “masculine.” His synthetic language-call it the “Grammar of Grambo,” “Gramboese”-represents an unlikely fusion of girlish tween-speak and frat-boy argot. He represents The D with a ferocity unmatched by the most formidable Kabbage Patch Piru or Ujima Village Blood, and yet I understand him to be a college-educated advertising executive. What gives?
I’ve determined that Whatevs.org represents a sustained assault on our collective mind-state, and that it threatens to reverse the technicization of the lifeworld, in the process obliterating industrial civilization and restoring the planet to a prelapsarian state, when man lived peacefully with dinosaurs in “clans” not unlike the “Clan of the Cave Bear.” The process is, by this point, irreversible.
Or it could be that Grambo, by reversing our deep structure polarities, heightening the contradictions, and making a mockery of our binary loboto-brainwaves-urban/rural, highbrow/lowbrow, master/slave, hightop/lowtop, Portman/Knightley-will hasten the Millennium, which is to say the Apocalypse. Either way, I suggest you wear a hat. Bovs on your tees, tchotchmikas. Bovs on your respective tees.
— Reihan
The Dish 