Herod Archelaus

I find it interesting that during the brokered cease-fire, Palestinians stopped launching rockets but Israel didn't stop the expansion of its settlements. I'm not implying a causal relationship--West-Bank settlements certainly weren't the proximate cause of the breakdown in Gaza. It says something about good faith, though, no? Anyway, one does wonder what Israel's endgame is in all of this. I mean, short of eradicating the Palestinian people, an option they don't have the stomach for (yet), what benefit do they hope to gain? Neither air power nor ground assaults, up to and including physical occupation, stop bombings and rocket launches. Cf. Iraq, Afghanistan. And if the plan is to topple the Hamas pseudogovernment in the Gaza Strip, who is to replace them? Clearly Fatah is in no position to step in.

A guy like Gerson is actually right to note that proportionality in warfare is an odd concept and that the mere taking of life for life is just revenge. The fact he conveniently elides, however, is that none of the goals in his fantasia are achievable through war. Israel is just engaging in some good, old-fashioned collective punishment. You don't even have to compare them to the you-know-whos. In that part of the world, there's plenty of older precedent. Everyone's a damn Roman these days.

Belief You Can Change In

I was having trouble capturing the Zeitgeist of 2008 for a year-end post, but fortunately Digz did it for me:

There's been a lot of speculation about how responsive the Obama administration is going to be toward their supporters and a lot of work is going toward the "change.gov" mechanism to facilitate it.

Which is to say that the theme of the year just-past is the persistence of illusion in the face of contradictory reality. Not that that hasn't been the persistent theme of . . . America, since its founding.

In a way, I admire the temerity inherent in her denial, even as he disappoints the gang at every turn, behaving with a calculating crassness that would be stunning if there weren't already a word for it in the political lexicon--Clintonian. Oh well, Digby. Ah feel yer payun. The hope remains alive that he will be a, what is the word, transformational figure in American politics, although from my bench beside the playground I see a seesaw that's all board and no fulcrum. Obama is supposed to work his hocus-pocus, but if you trawl the currents of contemporary liberal-progressivism, you find that these "supporters" of which La Digz speaks can't decide if he is supposed to be grand conciliator or a partisan dictator. Change.gov indeed. The Donk speaks of Change in politics the way his conservative playmates speak of Victory in Iraq--objects without attributes.

Israel is destroying Gaza, we're still occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, Pakistan is moving troops to its Indian border, the card-house global economy finally went a floor too high, and no one can do anything about it, least of all His Youthfulness. I'd call it squalid were it not so amusing. Horrors beget catharsis, and 2008 was tragedy as the Greeks intended it: full to brimming with inevitability.

Blawgasm

Oh. My. Word. Any dude who thinks women only want to bang once a month needs to watch more Gossip Girl.

Santa, Stop!

I was a good boy, but I don't deserve this. Too much!

Okay, Santa

Now I got everything I wanted for Christmas.

Savaging the Detectives

N+1, if you're unfamiliar with it, is a rather precious literary-intellectual journal that eructs politely from Brooklyn a couple of times a year, proposing to rescue Culture from the culture. I'm not sure of the utility of the effort. It has the peony-scented air of a grad-school aesthete engaged in idiosyncratic atavism just to piss of the cult. studies crowd in seminar. But it has plenty of useless charm as a weak preppy counterpart to the old Bucklean inclination to stand athwart history, asking it nicely to slow down just a bit. The latest issue puts on its sailor suit and unleashes a fusillade against the good ship Bolaño. It takes a while for the unidentified author to work himself into full hysteria, but when it arrives, girl, it arrives:

Our problem in America is hardly that our worst politicians speak too well, or that we lack for plain stylists. What is our problem, then—to which Bolaño seems a solution? American critics and regular readers alike usually don't care for sweeping literary-historical arguments. And yet in recent years we have been celebrating Sebald and Bolaño as if we really do believe in some big metanarrative about the novel—one that proclaims that, even post postmodernism, the form remains in crisis. Sure, Sebald and Bolaño deal with fascism, and both died at the height of their powers. More decisive is that neither fiction writer writes as if he believes in fiction. Our canonization of these writers implies a sense, even a conviction, that you can't be a really important novelist anymore unless you can't really write novels.

Given the high esteem for guys like Pynchon and Delillo, I'm not so sure about the assertion that American readers and critics don't care for grand-goofy literary historicism. The more central, unintentionally [?] hilarious idea here is that "fiction" is something in which one believes, like God or astrology. The charge, repeated throughout the essay, would apply in some commensurable fashion to Tristram Shandy or Robinson Crusoe or, for that matter, War and Peace, none of which, I imagine, the literary conservator behind this attempted excision would see struck from the canon, whatever that is. The novel--whatever that is--has never been some singular thing. Don Quixote doesn't read like 19th-century realism either, and yet there it is.

The critique, then, goes something like this: Bolaño (nor Sebald) doesn't write like Hardy.

Whereas ordinary novels, epistemologically unruffled for two centuries, have mostly delivered unimpeachable accounts of events that never took place.

This would come as quite a shock to Woolf and Joyce. To Ford Maddox Ford. To Mark Twain, for that matter. Like all conservatives, our critic longs for a time that never really existed. It's true that Bolaño's characters don't appear in passages of virtuosic, third-person description like Gwendolen Harleth in the first paragraph of Daniel Deronda, but "mushing after some fugitive poet or novelist," uncharitably phrased but accurate as a description, reveals some very real and extraordinary characters, from the senescent Father Urrutia in By Night in Chile to the horny Juan García Madero in The Savage Detectives. That our critic fails to note them speaks more to his (her?) attention span and quality as a reader than it does to Bolaño as a writer. And, note: Daniel Deronda is not an "ordinary novel" either.

The penultimate paragraph opens with a concluding dismissal:

Bolaño's incoherence—books mean everything and nothing; the writer is hero and jerk—has come to seem one of the few plausible literary attitudes these days.

Somehow this put me in mind of a famous observation by another writer, an American, whose epistemologically ruffled novels delivered impeachable accounts of events that never took place:

[T]he young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

I challenge anyone to read By Night in Chile and tell me that it is not, at last, the story of the human heart in conflict with itself. Bolaño populates his novels with characters who are heroic and hideous, triumphant and bereft all at once because his novels are populated by human beings, and the "incoherence" of their (and Bolaño's) attitudes toward their literary calling is in fact the great achievement of Roberto Bolaño; it captures over and over the heart-rending agony that accompanies the discovery of a true vocation. Replace books with God and his writers with doubting priests (a neat trick that he performed, ya know) to see how that works. I always imagine him working with the odd dictum from Graham Greene's priest in Brighton Rock:

You can't conceive, my child, nor can I or anyone the . . . appalling . . . strangeness of the mercy of God.

So go read some Bolaño to see who does and who does not believe in fiction.

Reading List

This is faintly hilarious. The former propaganda manager for the President writes a valedictory column on a sympathetic op-ed page informing us that George W. Bush is, in fact, an avid reader. Richard Cohen, a creature from a mythical land called The Washington Post, pens a complementary piece explaining that the President's fictitious reading list holds counterintuitive characterological insights, if only we hold it at a certain angle to the light.

Box Turtle

Watch bisexuals make Mona Charen's brain pop like bubble wrap here. There is a hint of an idea, though, a deliciously rummy cherry under all that waxy chocolate. The gay-marriage movement is disingenuous in the way it presents itself as a co-participant in monogamous coupledom. It does ignore bisexuality. It certainly doesn't want to talk about the trannies, move right along, nothing to see here, thanks for visiting. Not long ago, I would have been tempted to give the usual boilerplate about the state getting out of marriage and civilly recognized unions for all sorts of different household units etc. etc. etc. etc. Increasingly, however, I come to the conclusion that it's problematic for the state to confer any additional privileges and rights on anyone just because they form a household. What about the singles, yo?

This love is different because it's ours . . .

Abstinence education leads to buttfucking! I may have to revise my, uh . . . position. I've always found the debate about sex education in public schools to be a little perplexing, but only because I had parents who actually did talk to me about sex, plus cousins and older friends to fill my head with astonishing lies--an important rite of passage for any adolescent. Hey, if people were really concerned with teenagers having safer sex, they'd let condom companies market and vend in schools, like Coke and the Frito-Lay company. The problem even with "comprehensive" sex education is that it still treats sexual desire as some kind of pathology, to be controlled and routed and overcome and so on. Not until you love someone blah blah blah. But for most adolescents there is a huge, yawning window between the onset of physical maturity and the experience of that kind of real love. That's not a commentary on emotional maturity, lord knows. Parents and adults love to believe that children remain sentimentally unformed until, I don't know, graduation? Whenever. But fifteen- or sixteen-year-olds are surely capable of really loving each other. For most teens, the problem is more simply one of demography, the limits of an offline social world confined largely to one's classmates. Anyway, the point: teens is fuckin', to paraphrase the lategreat Richard Pryor. So if we're really going to teach them about sex, we must put aside moral qualms and teach them about recreational sex as well.

Teutonic Knight

My good friend J.A. and I once had the idea of making a sequel to Spielberg's Schindler's List. It was going to be called, Schindler II: Schindler's Pissed! For obvious reasons, including but not limited to the amount of cough syrup we'd drunk that night, we never got past the title. And then I saw Valkrie. You know, the public scandal of Bryan Singer's 1998 film Apt Pupil was how he ogled boys in the shower room, but the real scandal was how he ogled the Third Reich. So I understand why he made Valkyrie, even though I sat in the dim theater for two hours wondering why this movie ever was made. 90 million bucks is a big budget for fetish porn.

While perhaps redundant to spend too much time establishing that Hitler was evil and Nazi Germany scary and bad, movies succeed and fail in their own terms, by their own narrative logic, and in Valkyrie Hitler is a broken, bent, frail old man. This may in fact be the film's perversely magnificent achievement: it makes Adolph Hitler into a sympathetic character. On the other side of the plot, Cruise's Stauffenberg is mostly affectless, and his moral rectitude and general nobility are established, in classic American fashion, by making him into an officer and gentleman, good posture standing in for good character. Never mind that his supposed-to-be-sympathy-inducing injuries (the only thing America loves more than a soldier: an heroically wounded soldier) were obtained as this officer of the fucking Wehrmacht beat a retreat from conquered North Africa.

Never mind a lot, actually. The real Stauffenberg was an aristocrat, a holdover from the aristocratic and Prussian-dominated military of Germany ante-Hitler. One gets the sense that his principle objections to the Führer were that Hitler was coarse and that Hitler was losing. The latter, interestingly, is the sensibility that saturates the film and Stauffenberg's filmic doppelganger, despite the requisite throwaway lines about evil or injustice or, you know, whatever. Late-war assassination plots were motivated by an urgent desire to establish a government that could negotiate with the Allies--the British and Americans in particular--and thereby subvert the doctrine of unconditional surrender and, more pressingly, stop the march of the Red Army in the East. In fact, this is the central theme of Valkyrie, of von Stauffenberg, of the 20 July Conspiracy: if Stalin is coming, you might as well try to kill Hitler. What have you got to lose?

The Final Solution

At this point, the only way to eliminate the threat of rocket fire into Israel from the Gaza Strip is to kill 1.5 million people. So, Israel, there you go. Your move.

The Wholey Land

Here is the truth of the situation. The logic of fault is irrelevant. Only Israel has the power to make peace with the Palestinians, and it can only do so by making a deeply concessionary agreement involving land and reparations. Whether you believe that to be just or not is irrelevant. It is the only way.