Category: The Dish

John Freeman questions if reading about books has replaced the real thing:

In a way, pre-judgement is a necessary evil of criticism: there are far more books published than anyone could possibly read, busloads of awarded writers who aren’t actually worth reading. There’s no way to approach this forest gingerly. You need a buzz saw to clear some breathing room, gain a sightline, and criticism has to have enough teeth and ubiquitous availability to be that instrument.

Stepping away from the computer for just a day, though, it’s hard not to realise our habits create that crowded forest. In his book, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson talks about the way that nations are socially constructed imaginary worlds, in spite of all their inconsistencies. The growth of the internet has created, I think, a new imagined community of readers – a group who overlap and intersect and read about one another’s cultures.

The fed complains that wiretapping is too expensive.

Danby, New York, 3.28 pm.

Zimbabwe holds elections this Saturday. From Samantha Power’s 2005 essay:

Zimbabwe is as broken as any country on the planet, it offers a testament not to some inherent African inability to govern but to a minority rule as oppressive and inconsiderate of the welfare of citizens as its ignominious white predecessor. The country’s economy in 1997 was the fastest growing in all of Africa; now it is the fastest shrinking. A onetime net exporter of maize, cotton, beef, tobacco, roses, and sugarcane now exports only its educated professionals, who are fleeing by the tens of thousands. Although Zimbabwe has some of the richest farmland in Africa, children with distended bellies have begun arriving at school looking like miniature pregnant women.

How could the breadbasket of Africa have deteriorated so quickly into the continent’s basket case? The answer is Robert Mugabe, now seventy-nine, who by his actions has compiled something of a "how-to" manual for national destruction. Although many of his methods have been applied elsewhere, taken as a whole his ten-step approach is more radical and more comprehensive than that of other despots. The Zimbabwe case offers some important insights. It illustrates the prime importance of accountability as an antidote to idiocy and excess. It highlights the lasting effects of decolonization—limited Western influence on the continent and a reluctance by African leaders to criticize their own. And it offers a warning about how much damage one man can do, very quickly.

Not your everyday job:

I think that we experience thrill as a reward for the perseverance of human life. So, obviously, there’s an evolutionary driver – we evolved a sense of thrill because it helps us escape danger. But in modern life, things have become confused – we’re rarely in real danger, so we have to invent artificial situations in order to experience that reward. Extreme sports are quite obviously a replacement for running away from a lion, but it also becomes very psychologically complex with experiences such as bondage or other fetishes.

Not a single mention, so far as I can see, at the Corner of Bob Casey’s endorsement of Barack Obama aof now. Casey is a darling of NRO and a key socially conservative senator in the next critical primary. In fact, by a brief look at memeorandum, almost the entire far right blogosphere is AWOL. Nothing on Hewitt or Reynolds either. If I missed something, let me know. You’d think at least they’d try to grapple with a second pro-lifer’s endorsement of the hard-left stealth version of Louis Farrakhan, Senator Hussein from Illinois. Actually, you wouldn’t. Stanley Kurtz is still trying to argue that

Pre-Wright, it looked like an Obama nomination would avoid the refighting of the sixties Hillary would inevitably bring. Post-Wright, post-Dreams, etc. it looks as though Hillary and Bill were only the warm-up act for the great culture clash of 2008.

He can dream, can’t he? Either Kurtz is like one of those cliched Japanese soldiers who doesn’t realize the boomer war is over or Bob Casey is a fool.

Now selling for $32,204.

David Hockney on the church and images:

The church had social control. Whoever controlled the images had power. And they still do. Social control followed the lens and mirror for most of the 20th century. What’s now known as the media exert social control, not the church, but we are moving into a new era, because the making and distribution of images is changing. Anyone can make and distribute images on a mobile phone. The equipment is everywhere.

We do not have debates about images. The world of art is separate from the world of images, but the power is with images, not art. An obvious problem is seen. The world of images claims a relationship to visual reality – television and cinema – but this claim cannot now be sustained. We will get more confused if we don’t think about them.[…]

Parliament will discuss depiction, but not art. We are in a confusing time. The decline of religion in Europe is seen as part of the "scientific" revolution. I have begun to doubt this now; it is quite likely that it’s to do with images. The decline of the church parallels the mass manufacture of cameras. They are deeply connected. I noticed on a recent tour of Italy that not many Italians went in the churches to see pictures. They see them at home, not made by Botticelli but by Berlusconi. Think about it.

A reader writes:

Ross has drunk too deeply from the well of imperialism. His argument is simply a rehash of the oldest defense of imperial occupation known to mankind: protecting the wild, savage, occupied people from themselves. It was the excuse of Britain in India, of the Boers in South Africa, of the French in Algeria. That he has dressed it up in Colin Powell’s "you break it you own it" formulation does not change a thing.

That’s not to say I don’t understand his point. I do, and it has some feel-good, noble appeal. But let’s get to the point.

The "Iraqi people" have been at each other’s throats at least since Britain cobbled together the territory nearly 100 years ago. To think that we can outlast these ancient hatreds with our military presence is folly. And it is criminally unfair to American servicemen and women who are forced to endure tour after tour after tour so that people like Ross don’t feel bad about Iraqi self-destruction. It is unfair to their parents, their spouses, and their children. Throw continuing fiscal crisis, lack of military readiness for other threats, and endlessly eroding American soft power on the scale, and the balance tips sharply towards GTFO – harm to Iraqis notwithstanding, cold as that may seem.

If Iraqis are intent on killing one another, there is little America can – or necessarily should – do about it. The first step toward getting beyond this mess is to get out of it.

Yglesias backs Obama. Of course, I’m hoping Krugman is more right than wrong on this.