The Dish

The magazine of the website has a somewhat classic, fifth-year piece on how a president can get his mojo back – or if a nine-point decline in the polls in one year is an irretrievable position in a second term. What’s interesting is that, in order to sustain this narrative, you have to describe a scenario which would be success, so as to contrast it with what pundits would call failure. And so we get this sentence:

The next six months could be decisive: If the president can’t move past the Obamacare debacle to reset the agenda through executive action and targeted legislative campaigns on climate change, immigration and the minimum wage, he might never be able to regain his footing.

Now maybe Glenn Thrush is correct and these are the areas in which to judge this presidency over the next year. But it seems likelier to me that these are merely the areas in which the Beltway will try to judge his presidency, because they can posit something that should have happened that hasn’t. But, in reality, much has already been set. If the ACA survives and sticks and even works, then the next three years will not be about “moving past” the Obamacare debacle, but about making sure that near-universal access to healthcare is now standard for the US. By any measure in history, that would be a seismic achievement, a watershed in the social history of the United States. But within the Politico timeline, it means close to nothing at all. Ditto a potential detente with Iran – which will be decided in the next year or so. Again, if a comprehensive deal is achieved and sticks, the Middle East is transformed, and the full response of the Obama presidency to the crime of 9/11 – and the acute religious polarization that followed – will become clearer. But again, this defining event isn’t even in the sight-lines of Politico at all.

And what does a “targeted legislative campaign” mean?

If the GOP House wants to, it can stop anything the president wants – and it has, again and again and again and again. So is he going to sneak through a raise in the minimum wage? C’mon. Immigration reform, meanwhile, is still on the table, the president has clearly taken the side of reform, while the GOP has doggedly resisted any constructive change at all. And the Politico question of the next year is: what can Obama do to somehow make this happen? Surely the apposite question is what can the GOP do to make this issue less of a threat to their standing as a national party? And the odds there are that in the run-up to the next general election, the first real internal pressure will come to bear on the Congressional GOP on the issue. And if reform then gets passed in Obama’s final year, that will count against him?

Look: I know we have to churn out copy and I do so myself on a daily basis. But sometimes, what’s striking about Washington is how the long-term shifts in policy and culture we are now going through are almost perfectly mismatched with the press’ ever-more-intense short-term perspective.

The American Studies Association has voted to endorse an academic boycott of Israel:

The resolution approved by a plurality of ASA members cites as a rationale the lack of “effective or substantive academic freedom for Palestinian students and scholars under conditions of Israeli occupation” and calls for the association to boycott Israeli higher education institutions, which are described as being “a party to Israeli state policies that violate human rights and negatively impact the working conditions of Palestinian scholars and students.”

And we’re off! Goldblog asks why Israel is being singled out:

Another approach of the American Studies Association would be to study the reporting of such organizations as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, as well as make lists of the countries that violate human rights on a regular basis (100 or so come to mind with minimum effort) and boycott them. Still another direction would be to boycott institutions in the U.S., which is occupying Afghanistan and conducting assassination campaigns in five or six countries around the world. Many members of the American Studies Association teach at institutions that receive research funding from the Pentagon. The most appropriate response by these academics might be to ban themselves from the conferences they organize and cease to read their own papers.

Scott McConnell defends targeting Israel:

A corollary to this point is that America, because of its “special relationship” with Israel, has a particular obligation to stand up against the injustices Israel is responsible for.

Beinart weighs in:

This is the fundamental problem:

Not that the ASA is practicing double standards and not even that it’s boycotting academics, but that it’s denying the legitimacy of a democratic Jewish state, even alongside a Palestinian one. I don’t think that position is inherently anti-Semitic, but I do think it’s profoundly misguided. Britain is not illegitimate because it has a cross on its flag and an Anglican head of a state. Germany is not illegitimate because its immigration policy favors members of a dominant ethnic group. Jews deserve a state that takes a special interest in their self-protection, just like Palestinians do. And disregarding both peoples’ deep desire for such a state is not a recipe for harmonious bi-nationalism (if such a thing even exists); it’s a recipe for civil war.

That’s not just my view. It’s the view of the most popular Palestinian leader alive, Marwan Barghouti, who said earlier this year that, “If the two-state solution fails, the substitute will not be a binational one-state solution, but a persistent conflict that extends based on an existential crisis.”

Chait sees the boycott backfiring:

The ASA buoyantly predicts its boycott will pressure Israel into ending its occupation. I predict the opposite effect. In recent years, the context of the American debate has changed markedly, as Jewish liberals have grown openly frustrated and angry with hawkish Israeli governments. The ideological and generational split has created a novel opportunity for critics of Israel’s occupation. Absurdly discriminatory academic boycotts make anti-occupation (but not categorically anti-Israel) liberals — like, say, J Street — forget what’s so terrible about the occupation and remember what’s so terrible about the anti-Zionist left. It’s the best news Netanyahu has had in months.

But Matthew Kalman suggests that the ASA boycott could also backfire and help the Palestinian leadership:

“No, we do not support the boycott of Israel,” [Palestinian President Mahmoud] Abbas told reporters [at Mandela’s memorial last week]. “But we ask everyone to boycott the products of the settlements. Because the settlements are in our territories. It is illegal…But we don’t ask anyone to boycott Israel itself. We have relations with Israel. We have mutual recognition of Israel.” It wasn’t quite a denunciation of the BDS [boycott, divestment and sanctions] campaign, but the remarks threatened to transform the boycott from its self-image as the principled projection of native Palestinian policy to the bastard foreign child of freelance troublemakers. …

One of the motivating factors behind John Kerry’s current push for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is the belief of U.S. and European officials sympathetic to Israel that the BDS campaign is beginning to make inroads that will, left unchallenged, begin to nibble away at mainstream support for Israel in the democratic world. From Abbas’s point of view, this surely should be good news and strengthen his hand in the current peace talks, helping to speed up their glacial progress.

And the beat goes on.

Kathryn Hughes reviews a new book debunking the historicity of Merlin, the English wizard. “He is, in fact, a big fat hoax, made up by a writer who had run out of things to say and was getting desperate”:

“Geoffrey of Monmouth” sounds as if he should be a bank manager of scrupulous honesty. A man you could imagine wanting to count the daily takings twice. In fact, he was a 12th-century churchman who pulled off a textual forgery bigger than anything dreamt up by Macpherson or Chatterton at their most high-handed.

By the 1130s Geoffrey clearly felt that he was getting too big for the Marches and decided to do something that would make the world take notice. His bright idea was to write a History of the Kings of Britain. Into the slightly dull chronicle of battles and land grabs he embedded a big dollop of fiction about a character called Merlin, doing that classic thing of passing off his work as a translation of a long-lost ancient text. According to this confection, Merlin was a boy magician at the court of Vortigern, king of the Britons. Later, as an adult wizard, Merlin changes Uther Pendragon’s appearance so that he can sleep with the wife of the Duke of Cornwall. Out of this moment of magical pandering King Arthur is conceived. But Merlin, in Geoffrey’s version, doesn’t hang around to act as twinkly tutor to the marvellous boy. You have to wait until Thomas Malory, writing on the brink of the Renaissance, before you get the whole lovely dreamscape that is Camelot. …

It is, though, what happens next that is really extraordinary. Having got himself embedded in everyone’s consciousness as the maker of Britain, Merlin then managed to slip the leash and started popping up in European chronicles as a kind of international Mr Fixit. In the Italian tradition he morphs into a sibyl and hands out helpful hints on the future of Tuscany and Lombardy. In France he becomes a kind of Time Lord, able to advise Julius Caesar on some of his more troubling dreams while simultaneously urging an Muslim king to convert to Christianity. He even becomes a bit of a romantic hero, succumbing to a doomed obsession with wily Vivien, a story that would be revisited more than six centuries later by Tennyson in his Idylls of the King.

Update from a reader:

Is this author serious? It is news that Geoffrey of Monmouth lied when he claimed to have based his Historia regum Brittaniae on an ancient British text? Geoffrey’s deception was well known in the twelfth century, let alone in later years. (See William of Newburgh’s Historia rerum Anglicarum.) And one has to wait until Sir Thomas Malory – in the fifteenth century – for the full story about Merlin to emerge? Has this author ever heard about Robert of Boron, who represents Merlin as advising Arthur and comes up with the story of the sword in the stone, in 1200? Or of the Vulgate Cycle Merlin of the thirteenth century, which Thomas Malory basically translated? Yes, people like Alfred Lord Tennyson may have preferred to read Malory because Le Morte d’Arthur is in English, but there were three centuries of Arthurian romances written in French – with all of the central legends developed between the 1180s and the 1230s – before Malory got around to picking up a pen.