Author: Andrew Sullivan

Tate City, Georgia, 11 am

In the best review I've read so far of Hitch-22 – which I found very hard to put down – is this appreciation by Michael Weiss. Weiss sees consistencies where others less intelligent see contradictions. This passage on Larkin is spot-on:

So far from being ‘quintessentially English,’ Larkin was a wry and melancholy observer of postwar English anxieties and insecurities. Resentful of how his generation had been made to foot a historic bill that in low moments could seem unworthy of the cost (though he didn’t fight in World War II), wary of the entitlement and decadence that had come to define that generation’s offspring (not that he had any kids himself), Larkin was at least disciplined in his resentment and wariness where it mattered most. His poems were ironic and wistful and in places surprisingly heartfelt.

Larkin was the eulogist for a bygone England, one that had paved over and abandoned to ‘bleak high-risers’, M1 cafes, parking lots and ‘concrete and tyres’. How curmudgeonly could a man be who apostrophized the native rabbit population, which had been cruelly reduced by means of a manmade virus called Myxomatosis: ‘I'm glad I can't explain / Just in what jaws you were to suppurate.’

Larkin was possessed of an uncommon self-awareness that preempted even the harshest animadversions leveled against him by a smug literary commissariat after he was long gone. To uncover his supposed nastiness–the mental barks and growls–they had to rummage through his correspondence, his diary. Christopher’s plaint was that the poet demanded was a proper historical study, not self-righteous condemnation. It fell to the lot of the Left to see Larkin as emblematic of a little-investigated substratum of English sociology. E.P. Thompson gave us the The Making of the English Working Class; The Making of the English Petty Bourgeoisie was still forthcoming. The failure to comprehend the fundamental seriousness behind the Larkinesque generational posture is what ultimately caused that Left to experience cataclysmic shifts — the Falklands War and the rise of Thatcher — as bewildering shocks. A true student of Orwell, Christopher was never so cosmopolitan as to miss the idiosyncrasies and discreet charms of his own native land.

The “and that will be England gone” Tory provincial is perfectly caught in an anecdote Christopher relays about his father, who was once asked by a superior to co-host a party for naval officers that hadn’t been invited to the livelier dos because they were all bores. The Commander’s withering and self-abnegating reply, which nearly brought Christopher to tears, was: “I believe I have already received my invitation, sir.” Something toad-like squatted in him, too.

Not as large as you might think.

“It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of reason is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs,” – Aristotle.

The unintended consequences were catastrophic and yet the doctrine of neoconservatism survives like a zombie in Washington. Justin Vogt:

As a result of the Iraq fiasco, the direct influence of neoconservatism has clearly waned. But nearly two years into the Obama era, it has become clear that its most lasting legacy is not a set of policies or strategies, but a reframing of debates about American foreign policy around a number of neoconservative assumptions. To a surprising degree, those assumptions – among them, that the current threats facing the US are unprecedented; that, in a time of war, military strategy must guide diplomacy, and not vice versa; and that even modest compromises with opponents would call America’s “credibility” into question – continue to dominate the agenda in Washington and the mass media. The last decade has shown, again and again, the failures of this line of thinking – and yet it continues to haunt American discourse, a zombie ideology that refuses to die.

My rare departure from skepticism about an HIV vaccine appears to be misguided.

From a reader in Mansfield, Ohio.

Yes, two individuals have been fired for being too anti-Muslim:

Ann Coulter was not only fired after an anti-Muslim rant she was fired by a conservative publication, National Review; and radio talk maven Michael Graham lost his job at an ABC affiliate in DC  after Muslim American pressure.

Of course, Coulter lost nothing by being cast out of NRO career-wise, but the point stands, especially with Graham. But both said things far beyond Octavia Nasr's artless tweet – subsequently explained.

A reader writes:

I have only one thing to add to this argument: To me it seems obvious that there is a range of sexual experience – from random drunken sex with someone whose name one cannot remember to passionate sex between two people who love and trust each other. I've had both of these, and many kinds in between. I have no moral commitment to monogamy, but my experience has been that the latter kind – sex between two people who truly love each other and genuinely want to bring each other pleasure above all others – is so much better than any other kind of sex that it's almost qualitatively different.

That's why, in my eventual marriage, I will insist on monogamy. I don't think I could be that free, sexually, with someone if, in the back of my mind, the possibility existed that they were thinking of someone else. I don't know that total intimacy is possibly without monogamy. For myself at least, I don't think it is possible. And being that filled with another consciousness is so overwhelmingly pleasurable that it's worth controlling my baser urges in its service. The choice isn't even that difficult.

Maybe once I've been married a decade, that equation will change, but maybe not. In any case, that's no reason to preemptively give up on the incredible power of human commitment to enrich our lives.