Category: Old Dish

SCHMALITO

I guess I should say something. I’ve long been a believer in deference to presidential court appointees (check TNR archives and way back in the 80s, I wrote one of the first pieces outraged by the Borking of Bork). I have a marginally less expansive view of executive power in wartime than Alito, and probably despise Roe vs Wade more than he does, but these are quibbles. He seems perfectly fine to me: the kind of uber-nerd you want on SCOTUS. He reminds me of Milhous on the Simpsons, all growed up. He spent one vacation learning how to juggle. The hearings are a great opportunity to explore the meaning and role of constitutional executive power. But the blather yesterday – and the fact that I don’t think either Roberts or Alito are going to satisfy the fire-breathers – reminds me why I’m not glued to the TV screen. That, and a book deadline.

RIGHT-BLOGGERS AND MEHLMAN: Hugh Hewitt has an interesting account of conservative bloggers grilling Ken Mehlman. At times, it’s an impressive display of journalistic independence and skepticism on the rightwing blogosphere about the administration. More, please.

FOLGER ON ROBERTSON: Here’s a fascinating exchange from Fox News. It concerns Pat Robertson’s orthodox fundamentalist view that Ariel Sharon may have been targeted by God for death because of his decision to divide the land of Israel as forbidden by the Bible:

John Kasich: Now, Janet, what I need to know from you is, when Pat does things like this or says things like this — and I think you would agree, it wasn’t the appropriate time. Agree with that? It was just not the right time to be talking about this.

Janet Folger: Look, the time you make statements like that is when you can do something about it — don’t divide the land.

John Kasich: So, inappropriate time. The question is, does Pat sort of undermine the movement when he makes a statement like this — that he might — which he says was taken out of context or whatever — does it undermine the movement, the Christian movement? People say, I’m not gonna listen to that.

Janet Folger: You know — again, I’m not gonna be another voice to bully up or beat up on PR. He’s free to defend himself and he’s very capable of it —

John Kasich: Yeah, but I want to know what you think.

Janet Folger: — but I don’t think we should blame him for reading from the bible. And I’ll be honest with you — the way I read the Bible, it talks about — nations that bless Israel are gonna be blessed, nations that curse Israel are gonna be cursed — and I’ll be honest with you, where I worry about the judgment being cast is that I think we need to look in the mirror — because we’re one of the groups, the nations that actually strong-armed the prime minister into giving up land, making Israel less secure. And —

Good for Folger for sticking to her beliefs. Just like Falwell after 9/11, she also fears that it’s America that will actually experience the wrath of Jesus if we don’t get our Israel policy right. Kasich’s main worry, of course, is not that what Robertson said is obscene or lunatic, but that it might cause trouble for what he calls the “Christian movement.” Kasich apparently believes it’s important that most Americans are kept in the dark about the actual tenets of the core activists who now control the Republican party. More about Folger here.

– posted by Andrew.

PICKING UP THE PIECES

I’m of two minds about the apparent unraveling of James Frey, the Oprah-canonized memoirist whose tales of drugs, crime, and personal tragedy have turned out to be more than a little embellished. On the one hand, Frey has always come across as a poseur – a wannabe tough-guy, a dime-store Mailer – and it’s nice when poseurs turn out to be frauds as well. Also, I didn’t much care for his first book – and of course, I share in the pathetic-yet-delightful schaudenfreude that any would-be writer feels while watching an overpraised (and overpaid) author go down in flames.

But then again, there was something occasionally bracing about the Frey pose, even when you could see right through it – the hard-case persona, the “F.T.B.S.I.T.T.T.D.” tattooed on his arm (for “fuck the bullshit it’s time to throw down,” which was my motto for a while too), the boasts about becoming the greatest writer of his generation, the profanity-laced attacks on other writers’ mediocrity. Sure, it was fake – but it was a relief to encounter Frey’s brand of fakeness in a literary world where too many writers seem to follow the Dave Eggers/Jonathan Safran Foer “let’s-all-be-nice” approach to the writing life. I’ll take a phony tough guy any day, for instance, over this kind of pious crap (from Eggers):

It was our hope . . . that the literary world could be one of community, of mutual support, of spirited but nonviolent discourse-all in the interest of building and maintaining a literate society. It’s what we teach . . . that books are good, that reading is good, that everyone can and should write in some capacity, and that anyone pissing in the very small and fragile ecosystem that is the literary world is mucking it up for everyone-and sending a very poor message to the next generation.

The gang at N+1 – who are neither as great as they’ve been made out to be, nor as bad as Stefan Beck suggests in this month’s New Criterion – offered an excellent response to this theory of literature in their latest issue:

The final, insidious manifestation of the reading crisis is the way it gives cover to the hostility to criticism. One’s critics “piss in the fragile ecosystem that is the literary world” (Eggers); or they are merely “resentniks” (Foer). The real trouble of course is that if “books” are “good,” as the mantra goes, you don’t have to face how good or bad your book actually is. The criterion is only to “make readers.” I make readers, the writer deludes himself, waving his sales reports-surely these millions came into existence only for him? It no longer matters what he wrote. In this way the novelist becomes as protected as the poet is today, a member merely of an endangered species (in the “fragile ecosystem”), or say of an identity group, who cannot be disagreed with, to whom certain months of the year will be dedicated, who is not only tolerated but encouraged and petted by the powers that be, not because of the content of what he writes (there is no content), but because, well, what sort of powers would they be, to discourage the flowering of such an art?

Social work is important, and so is novel-writing (at least if your novel is any good). But the two really aren’t the same thing. James Frey is a poseur and apparently a liar, but at least, I think, he understands that much.

– posted by Ross

BROKEBACK IN LUBBOCK

Variety has an update:

“Brokeback” came out ahead of several new pics on twice or four times as many playdates, including “Casanova,” “Bloodrayne” and “Grandma’s Boy.” Among the new markets where the critically acclaimed pic opened strong were Tulsa, El Paso, Des Moines and Lubbock, Tex.

Lubbock, Texas, is the place the president often refers to when he talks about the heartland of America, and it’s where his library will be sited. The Mickster hasn’t mentioned the movie he hasn’t seen in quite a while. He predicted it would bomb in the heartland. Does Lubbock count? As for the mainstream, on “Desperate Housewives” last night, there were three separate graphic scenes of two late-teenage boys french-kissing, waking up naked in the same bed together, and mauling each other’s necks. Brokeback is tame in comparison.

(CORRECTIONS: Although Lubbock is favored to house Bush’s library, the decision has not yet apparently been taken. And, although he hasn’t mentioned it on his blog, the Mickster has indeed seen Brokeback Mountain. And says he wasn’t grossed out.)

– posted by Andrew.

PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION

Doubt won the Pulitzer Prize for drama this year, and after seeing it this weekend (the last weekend with the original actress, Cherry Jones, in the lead role, unfortunately) I think it richly deserved the win. The play deals with the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church, and what’s particularly remarkable about it, in this year of hectoring works of art (most of them involving George Clooney), is it’s steadfast refusal to filter its story through an ideological lens. Set in 1964, Doubt follows a nun who suspects that a priest in her parish is molesting students, and given that description, it’s easy to imagine a bad, fashionable play about a heroic feminist nun taking down an evil, repressed, pre-Vatican II priest. But the playwright, John Patrick Shanley, is smarter than that: he makes the nun a tough-minded, old-school Catholic who sees the world in black and white, and the priest a young, hip, progressive figure who embodies all the ideas about religion that a Broadway audience is likely to find appealing. She seems heartless, tyrannical, and prejudiced; he’s questing, broad-minded, charismatic. But over the course of the play, the audience is invited to recognize the virtues contained within her old-fashioned attitudes, and the weaknesses at the heart of his charm.

Not that the priest ever entirely forfeits the audience’s sympathy, or that the nun is without her faults – again, the play is too intelligent to fall into a schematic view of its protagonists. What it does instead, more effectively than any work of art I’ve seen, is dramatize both the weaknesses of old-fashioned, pre-Vatican II Catholicism – the legalism, the occasional cruelty, the seeming heartlessness – and the ways that the 1960s reforms went so quickly wrong, good intentions and all. It dramatizes, as well, the central paradox of the entire sexual abuse scandal, which is that it partook of the worst of both “liberal” and “conservative” Catholicism – the former’s sexual permissiveness and contempt for time-tested traditions, rules and safeguards; and the latter’s clericalism, its insistence that the hierarchy knew best and the laity should just “pray, pay and obey,” its willingness to use authority as a screen for irresponsibility. In the name of freedom and progress and experimentation, priests justified their own sins and those of their fellows; in the name of order and tradition and obedience, their superiors protected them.

And everybody meant well. True monsters like Fathers Geoghan and Shanley aside, this the reality of the sex abuse scandal, but also of nearly every great historical tragedy – and it should be written in gold letters on the wall of every screenwriting workshop and creative writing class in these United States. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but not nearly enough to justify the number of “serious” works of art that take an absurdly Manichean view of the world, and never even attempt to plumb the motives, or the humanity, of their villains. Terry Teachout (who loved Doubt) summed up this tendency earlier in the year:

. . . great art “takes you out of yourself.” By definition, it then puts you into somebody else, and in so doing enriches your understanding of reality. To do this successfully, it must be in the deepest sense sympathetic. The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines sympathy as “the fact or capacity of sharing or being responsive to the feelings or condition of another or others.” Such a capacity is a sine qua non of all serious art. It is what makes Shakespeare’s villains believable: We feel we can understand their motives, even if we don’t share them. It is also central to the persuasive power of great art. Without sympathy there can be no persuasion. Even a caricature, however cruel, must acknowledge the humanity of its subject in order to be funny. The artist must create a whole character and not simply show the side of him that will most convince us of his villainy.

What I find striking about much of today’s political art, by contrast, is its unwillingness to make such acknowledgments. Instead of seeking to persuade–to change the minds of its viewers–it takes for granted their concurrence.

Teachout was talking about plays, for the most part, but his comments are even more telling after our autumn of Good Night, and Good Luck and Syriana and The Constant Gardener – all skillfully-made movies that would have been worlds better with some bare acknowledgement that not every anti-communist was a McCarthyite, and not everyone who works for an oil company, a pharmaceutical company, or the CIA has knowingly sold their soul to the devil. Doubt is a welcome exception to this depressing habit. May there be more like it.

– posted by Ross

MOORE AWARD NOMINEE

“No matter what the greatest tyrant in the world, the greatest terrorist in the world, George W. Bush says, we’re here to tell you: Not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of the American people … support your revolution,” – Harry Belafonte, buttering up Venezuela’s president.

MALKIN AWARD NOMINEE: “My friends, don’t fool with the church because the church has buried a million critics. And those the church has not buried, the church has made funeral arrangement for.” – religious right leader, Herbert Lusk, appearing to threaten those who disagree with him. Every now and again, you see the violent and intolerant subtext of fundamentalist Christianity – especially with respect to their opponents – emerge into the mainstream daylight.

HALF A MILLION: That’s how many troops Paul Bremer believed were needed to fight the Iraqi insurgency in mid 2004. He was ignored, of course.

– posted by Andrew.

MOORE AWARD NOMINEE

“Most great figures in world history are remembered for their compassion. [Martin Luther] King shared this trait with the Ghandis, Mother Teresas, and Mandelas of the world. He also shared this trait with the late Stanley Tookie Williams.” – Renford Reese, associate professor of political science at Cal Poly Pomona University.

– posted by Andrew.

ROBERTSON’S GAFFE

Plenty of evangelicals and Republicans have dumped on Pat Robertson for saying that Ariel Sharon’s stroke is related to his decision to divide the land of Israel. I’m baffled. It would be astonishing if Robertson did not believe something like that. Robertson’s version of Christianity is fundamentalist pre-millenarianism. He believes, as do most members of the religious right, that the world is soon coming to an end, and that the unification of Israel is integral to that story-line. (The Jews who don’t accept Christ will all die in a second and more extensive Holocaust, orchestrated by Jesus.) He also believes, as do millions of Americans, that God directly involves himself in our lives, as does Satan, and that He is a terrifying God who has committed mass murder and genocide in the past against those who flout his will (the Bible proves it) and will do so again. A mere stroke for Sharon? He should count himself lucky.

THE FUNDAMENTALIST REALITY: It’s also absurd to describe Robertson’s views as somehow out of the mainstream of contemporary Christian fundamentalism, or Republicanism. His 700 Club reaches more people than most CNN shows and has more viewers, as Laurie Goodstein points out, than CNBC or MSNBC. That’s why establishment conservative Fred Barnes was on the show last week; and why Karl Rove checks in with Robertson over judicial nominees. Moreover, the only reason anyone got mad at his statement about Sharon is because somone at PFAW is paid to listen. Do you think any of his 800,000 “Christian” viewers would be in any way discombobulated? This is their faith. As the Derb points out, it’s clear from the Bible what the consequences of ceding the West Bank are. Robertson is not alone in his beliefs about the looming end-times – indeed, the most vivid depiction of what current evangelicals believe, the “Left Behind” series, is the bestselling adult series of books in the whole country. In a recent installment, Jesus is an unrelenting future mass murderer of those who do not accept him. When he speaks at the end of time,

“Men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood. It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin … Even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated.”

Why should Robertson be singled out for saying what he believes? This is the faith that animates the religious right, and that propels every electoral victory for the current Republican party. Why on earth should he apologize?

MANSFIELD ON THE EXECUTIVE: My former teacher is, as always, worth reading. The American executive is indeed designed to be able to act as a unitary actor in emergencies. War is such an emergency. Secrecy is, in part, essential in that function. The difficulty in our current moment, however, is that the emergency has been defined as permanent. And so instead of ceding extra-legal power to the executive in extremis, we are in danger of shifting the entire emphasis of government toward a routine executive power unrestrained by law. There is a balance we need to restore here – because this war is indeed different, in its longevity and involvement of American citizens. I see no reason why a revised FISA law wouldn’t be a prudent response to this problem. Especially when we have a war-president deeply distrusted by around half the country.

ZYGOTES: More discussion over at the Corner. I think all we can say with absolute certainty is that a majority of zygotes never make it to become grown-ups. I call them “human beings” and “unborn children” because, according to natural law philosophy, that’s what they are. To quote Robert P. George, the grandfather of theoconservatism:

A human being is conceived when a human sperm containing twenty-three chromosomes fuses with a human egg also containing twenty-three chromosomes (albeit of a different kind) producing a single cell human zygote containing, in the normal case, forty-six chromosomes that are mixed differently from the forty-six chromosomes as found in the mother or father.

All I’m doing to taking the arguments of the theocons and following their logic.

– posted by Andrew

THE PARTY OF THE COUNTRY CLUB

Somehow, I don’t think this, from Time, is exactly the message that George W. Bush wants to be sending to his base:

The President’s inner circle always treated DeLay as a necessary burden. He may have had an unmatched grip on the House and Washington lobbyists, but DeLay is not the kind of guy-in background and temperament-the President feels comfortable with. Of the former exterminator, a Republican close to the President’s inner circle says, “They have always seen him as beneath them, more blue collar. He’s seen as a useful servant, not someone you would want to vacation with.”

Via Matt Yglesias and Michael Crowley, who are loving every minute of it. As they should.

A DOWN YEAR AT THE MOVIES?: You better believe it, says Anthony Lane.

MORE ZYGOTES: Because you can’t get enough of the tiny little blighters, can you?

– posted by Ross