If you’re like me, you regret from time to time not reading enough good, serious, stimulating books. You don’t seem to make enough space for reading in your life; you don’t have enough time for a real book club. At the same time, the absorption of daily news and commentary sometimes feels like a diet of fast-food without the perspective of deeper reading. So here’s an idea. This website is launching an online book club today. Each month, I’ll pick a book that is short, serious, and related to current events and we’ll read it together for three or four weeks. After a couple of weeks, I’ll write my first stream-of-consciousness review of the first part, and then you pitch in with emails, discussion and debate. I’ll keep reviewing and responding to your posted emails in a manner more like the Daily Dish than a formal book review. In the fourth week, we’ll get the author in to answer our questions and respond to criticism. I think it’s a relatively new way to use a new medium for a very ancient practice – thinking, reading and talking.
WARRIOR POLITICS: The first book I’ve chosen is Bob Kaplan’s “Warrior Politics.” It’s been on my to-read list for a while and it looks like a highly stimulating argument for our current predicament. (It could be awful, of course, but that’s what we’re going to discover and argue about). If you feel like analyzing the current war on terror with input from Churchill, Machiavelli, Thucydides, Sun-Tzu and others, all of whom are cited in the book, then this is a project you should enjoy. If you miss the intellectual stimulation of your college days, give it a try. You’ll find all the details on the new Book Club page. There’s an extra bonus from our point of view: If you buy the book directly from the page, you’ll also help fund the site – since we get 15 percent of the net price. If the idea works – which is partly up to you – we may also have stumbled on a way to make web-journalism like this pay for itself without my begging for $50,000 “consulting” fees from Enron. So give it a try. You’ve got two weeks to get the book, and read the first couple of chapters before I kick off the discussion on February 18. See you there!
THE SUPERBOWL AT WAR: The culture surely has changed, hasn’t it? Last night’s football spectacle wasn’t just a great game, it was a picture of a culture in transition. The military graphics, the spots made by players for the troops, the satellite images from Afghanistan, the Budweiser ads, the Britney Americana: it was a testosterone-filled wartime pep rally as much as a game. I was particularly transfixed by U2’s performance. This is a group not known for its conservative politics – but they showed that a liberal politics is completely consistent (or should be) with a hatred of terrorism, a deep patriotism, and a love of what America stands for. I choked up a little. At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel a little uncomfortable at the sight of cheering, grinning pop-fans going wild beneath a huge graphic detailing the names of those killed by the terrorist murderers of September 11. The tone was off, don’t you think? But then, I guess, cultures in transition will likely have their fair share of incongruous moments. Is patriotism possible without occasional vulgarity? In the real world, probably not. But one can dream.
THE COWARDICE OF KEN LAY: After the sickening spectacle of his wife going on network television to describe herself as a victim of the Enron scandal, Kenneth Lay has the gall to withdraw from testifying before Congress. He’s appalled that some members of Congress have reacted to a report on Enron’s structure and organization by inferring that the company was a criminal racket. The impertinence of these mere Congressmen and Senators! Of course, Lay has a Constitutional right to withdraw. I also have a Constitutional right to say his inability to recognize the scale of the damage he has done to our entire capitalist system is contemptible.
THE SPLUTTERING OF OPPOSITION: The incoherence of the opposition to the war against terrorism has only deepened with time. Two of the most intelligent liberal critics of Bush’s foreign policy, Hugo Young of the left-liberal Guardian, and Bob Wright of the liberal magazine Slate, have just produced columns in response to the State of the Union that seem beyond weak to me. Wright makes what he doubtless thinks is a brilliant point by saying of Bush’s ultimatum to Iraq, Iran and North Korea, “[I]f we are one way or another going to strip the world’s three menacing “rogue states” of any weapons of mass destruction-then why will we still need missile defense in the end?” Duh. Maybe we won’t succeed with all three. Maybe others will emerge to take their place. It turns out that this is Wright’s only substantive complaint about the speech. He sticks to his odd view that we either have to fight terrorism or tackle the threat from rogue states. Why not both? He argues that there is no inherent connection between Iran, Iraq and North Korea. But what about their development of weapons of mass destruction? And in a world where terrorists can easily co-operate with such states, why should we not tackle the entire nexus rather than its constituent parts? Beats me. Then Bob echoes Young’s complaint that we should always be consulting with the allies. Well, aren’t we? Who’s peace-keeping in Kabul right now? What this consultation usually means is asking the French what they’d do and taking their advice. The right kind of multilateralism is taking a lead and inviting others to join and follow. That variety won the Cold War. Why won’t it win this one? The phony multilateral argument is made even phonier by a very good point made by Tom Friedman yesterday. What happens when your allies are so militarily weak or incompetent or archaic that their aid is virtually useless? I guess Young and Wright would prefer more blather to keep the allies happy. I prefer Bush’s straight talk.
DIVIDE AND CONQUER: The always-sharp Ryan Lizza of the New Republic comes up with the canniest assessment yet of Bush’s State of the Union. He sees how Bush’s domestic agenda has been designed in part to divide the Democrats: “A defense buildup. Deficit-spending. The dominance of national security. Welfare. The return of hard-hat Republicans. The year 2002 is starting to look like an enormous problem for the Democrats.” Lizza thinks the Democrats can counter and very smartly analyses the role of Enron in any coherent counter-attack. But the prospects look bleak. I’m beginning to think that we could see a Republican House and Senate next year.
EPIPHANY WATCH: This Brown university senior gets it about the new era and the true Clinton legacy. My favorite passage:
“If Clinton was a womanizer (the “if” is probably unnecessary) then I am a woman. He got me. He made me think that this country’s welfare was based on our sky-high stock market prices. He took me out to dinner, paid for everything, and told me that I had beautiful eyes. I was a fool not to notice the mischief going o
n beneath the table. We were all taken in by Clinton. Year after year, he gave the most boring, detailed, laundry-list State of the Union addresses, and yet we clung to his every word. We scoffed at critics such as John McCain, who rightly stated that Clinton conducted a “photo-op foreign policy.” We collectively stared into his eyes while terrorist camps were being armed in Afghanistan.”
A new generation is being born. A canny liberal commentator, Brendan Nyhan, also gets the sheer scope of what’s now going on in our politics and sees it presaged in the State of the Union:
“On its own, [Bush’s point] may seem obvious — America was self-indulgent in the 1990s, we did fail to take the threats against us seriously, and the war on terrorism is incredibly important. But just as Reagan broke from and stigmatized old-style liberalism, Bush can now frame Democratic opposition as representative of a discredited, Clintonian past. Call it “changing the tone” squared. Concerns about missile defense, civil liberties or the wisdom of overthrowing rogue regimes like Iraq can be portrayed as dangerous and self-indulgent, the echoes of a dying era.”
GREAT INSULTS, CTD: I’m still getting email with some classic vituperation from the past. Here’s H.L. Mencken’s 1926 obituary of William Jennings Bryan:
“This talk of [Bryan’s] sincerity, I confess, fatigues me. If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity. He was a peasant come home to the barnyard. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything he was not. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition — the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine.”
Keep ’em coming.
THE TORIES’ BIG TENT: A key Tory, former foreign affairs spokesman, Frances Maude, endorses the inclusion of gay people into the Conservative tent: “We have to be a party that credibly and genuinely seeks to represent everybody in the country and respects everybody, regardless of what side of the tracks they are from, their gender, sexual orientation, colour, origins or anything. We have got to be a party that is seen to be generous and broad and not narrow.” How long will it be before an administration official includes sexual orientation as a non-issue in Republican politics?
The Dish 