The League of David

It Should Have Been Che

Mao just doesn't do it.

Chicago

I spent the weekend in Chicago, and enjoyed every minute of it.

I'm famous!

Mark Steyn's webmaster e-mailed me today to tell me that my request has been granted!!

I'm flattered. I'm blushing!

I may just swoon.

A Philistine Makes Good

The Philistine, er, Washington Post's Jonathan Yardley -- generally a paragon of Philistine sensibilities in things literary -- has a less than flattering opinion of that most Philistine of books, Catcher in the Rye:

Viewed from the vantage point of half a century, the novel raises more questions than it answers. Why is a book about a spoiled rich kid kicked out of a fancy prep school so widely read by ordinary Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom have limited means and attend, or attended, public schools? Why is Holden Caulfield nearly universally seen as "a symbol of purity and sensitivity" (as "The Oxford Companion to American Literature" puts it) when he's merely self-regarding and callow? Why do English teachers, whose responsibility is to teach good writing, repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one?

That last question actually is easily answered: "The Catcher in the Rye" can be fobbed off on kids as a book about themselves. It is required reading as therapy, a way to encourage young people to bathe in the warm, soothing waters of resentment (all grown-ups are phonies) and self-pity without having to think a lucid thought. Like that other (albeit marginally better) novel about lachrymose preppies, John Knowles's "A Separate Peace" (1960), "The Catcher in the Rye" touches adolescents' emotional buttons without putting their minds to work. It's easy for them, which makes it easy for teacher.

Ouch (and yeah!).

Now I know that for most of my three readers, Catcher is, like, the book. It's the book that most formed and informed their teenage view of the world (it was for me, although with reservations). It's remembered with fondness. To this I say, reread it. You'll be just as unimpressed as Mr. Yardley:

From first page to last, "The Catcher in the Rye" is an exercise in button-pushing, and the biggest button it pushes is the adolescent's uncertainty and insecurity as he or she perches precariously between childhood, which is remembered fondly and wistfully, and adulthood, which is the great phony unknown. Indeed a case can be made that "The Catcher in the Rye" created adolescence as we now know it, a condition that barely existed until Salinger defined it. He established whining rebellion as essential to adolescence and it has remained such ever since. It was a short leap indeed from "The Catcher in the Rye" to "The Blackboard Jungle" to "Rebel Without a Cause" to Valley Girls to the multibillion-dollar industry that adolescent angst is today.

You might say that Holden whines truth to power, but that would give the spoiled brat a little too much credit. The character, like the his creator, is a cipher. He perches himself on top of the hill of his own secular self-righteousness, making uninformed pronouncements on other people's limitations. After a while you lose all patience and goodwill and wish nothing more than to have the kid get a job folding jeans at the Gap.

Yardley concludes:

Whatever its shortcomings, "The Catcher in the Rye" is from the heart -- not Holden Caulfield's heart, but Jerome David Salinger's. He said everything he had to say in it, which may well be why he has said nothing else.

Double ouch.

An Unnecessary Presidency

I list below all the wonderful things that happened during Jimmy Carter's presidency. I did forget to add one thing to the list that the younguns probably wouldn't appreciate -- 14% interest rates on mortgages and 24-25% rates on credit cards (and those were the ones for people with good credit).

But this report from Little Green Footballs just reminds us of the historical oblivion prepared for this former American president. When asked about the Revolutionary War, Carter had this to say:

CARTER: Well, one parallel is that the Revolutionary War, more than any other war up until recently, has been the most bloody war we’ve fought. I think another parallel is that in some ways the Revolutionary War could have been avoided. It was an unnecessary war.

Had the British Parliament been a little more sensitive to the colonial’s really legitimate complaints and requests the war could have been avoided completely, and of course now we would have been a free country now as is Canada and India and Australia, having gotten our independence in a nonviolent way.

Question: If Jimmy Carter has a state funeral will anyone come?

Note to senseless Philistines: Nihilism is Dead

Yes, I'm obsessed with the death of Derrida. It has to do with the product of his life's work. Deconstruction is one of the most pernicious philosophies of the past 100 years. It is the source for so much of the nihilism and ugliness of the contemporary arts, from TV shows that denigrate the family to the ugly sex-obsessed nihilism of today's plays and movies, it all proudly displays the gene of deconstruction.

Derrida argued that words had no meaning. That even our idea of meaning was futile. Nothing in the broad and rich history of Western philosophy could be proven to be true. Now, that may sound like nonsense to you but to young academics -- who 30-40 years ago were looking for the next "cool" philosophy -- this was just too good to let go. It confirmed their own 60s-era campus rebellion. They wanted a new world order, and they found it in part in Derrida.

It's good to know that I'm not the only one who recognizes how very bad this man's ideas have been for the health and long-term survival of Western civlization, especially during a time of war when our civlization is under attack by very real men who do not put their words between quotation marks.

As Johann Hari explains:

Derrida wants to break down the naive belief that there is an objective external reality connected to our words that can be explored through language, science and rationality. Any narrative we construct to understand the world will inevitably be built on supressed violence and exclusion. So, for example, the narrative of 'madness' has been shown by Derrida's colleague and friend Michel Foucault to be a highly elastic concept that is used to stigmatize 'dissidents'; it is a categry that serves the powerful. None of our words is immune to these power-games. There is tension, opposition and power in even the most simple of concepts.

So there are, Derrida concluded, no universal truths, no progress and ultimately no 'sense', only "decentred", small stories that are often silenced by a search for rationality and consistency. The search for intellectual coherence is 'violent' and must be shunned.

He goes on to describe it's impact on every facet of our thinking lives:

The deconstructionist virus has swept through the humanities departments of universities across Europe and America. But the best way to demonstrate the intellectual collapse this has caused is by looking at the impact of postmodernism on fiction. The fiction the preceded postmodernism - for all its flaws - usually engaged with the world. At its best, it even tried to change it: John Steinbeck hitched a wagon across Depression-scarred California and found a family that became the subject for The Grapes of Wrath.

Compare that to postmodernist fiction, a form of torture so heinous that it surely contravenes the Geneva Convention. Look at the execrable novels of Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, trapped in self-referential Derridan word-games and irrelevance while a world warms and wails outside their pages. The critic Dale Peck has described the postmodern implosion of the novel perfectly: "This is a tradition that has systematically divested itself of any ability to comment on anything other than its own inability to comment on anything."

Now magnify that effect across the humanities: imagine this deflation happening in anthropology, sociology, philosophy ... you get the idea. There is nothing more depressing than meeting smart graduate students who should be researching really important subjects, only to find they are writing a postmodern deconstruction of the idea of happiness or wealth or human rights, or a thesis with a name like "Is Anthropology Really Possible in Post-Modern Space?". Of course we should always question the ctegories of our thought - but the wave of deconstruction seems to have reduced academics to doing nothing else. The passivity and irrelevance of European intellectuals and American universities over the past three decades is largely due to the wrong turn they have taken into masturbatory post-modernism; Derridan readings invariably in my experience encourage confusion and passivity in the face of injustice, rather than action.

Go read the whole thing.

A Quick Question

Do the Philistines get more repugnant every day, or am I losing my ability to laugh at them?

[Source]

This from a group called Fellowship for Reconciliation. When you take alook at their website, you see a perfect summation of the American Left -- or what's left of it . They're aging, angry Marxist.

Philistines in Frederick, MD

The League's brother send this e-mail to me a while back. Bro. lives in Frederick, MD, an exurbia pulled right out of a David Brooks article. There's lots of new development, lots of new and enormous strip malls, and every national chain restaurant with ten miles -- as the SUV drives (including a Golden Corral and Cracker Barrel side-by-side!). Frederick is also the home of Ft. Detrick, the home of America's anthrax supply and the source of a whole lot of looniness.

Before all these knuckledragging suburbanites moved out to Frederick (inclduing bro. & family), the area was populated with rednecks and...Philistines. Including the Peace Resource Center,

We are so "progressive" here in Frederick county, we just gave the "undocumented" aka illegals an "identification card" which was promoted as a way to open bank accounts and apply for housing benefits, as long as they stay in their neighborhoods.

The elites want those people to feel at ease when they cut their grass and clean their homes but we don't want them to move into our areas because they'll ruin the property values.

In downtown Frederick we have the Frederick "Peace Resource Center for Free Speech".They added the Free Speech part last year because they feel that Ashcroft is taking away their rights via the Patriot Act. I e-mailed them to find out exactly which rights they lost and they replied, "FREE SPEECH".When I asked how, I never received an answer.

In addition to making us aware that the capitalist system is oppressing the masses, they are the region's strongest advocates of the use of hemp products and have "teach-ins" every weekend at the local library to indoctrinate kids on the evils of driving SUVs, eating meat, wearing leather and voting for candidates that want to take away your rights to use medicinal marijuana and destroy the environment.

They protest outside Ft Detrick every week, even though most of Frederick works there and there hasn't been chemical or biological weapons programs there since the 70s. Detrick is home to the Signal Corp group that keeps the White House in touch with the Kremlin and a few operational units of the medical reserves and an MP company. Mostly they house medical logistics/procurement for all three services and an expanding NIH cancer research facility, but you wouldn't know it by the way these 50 and 60 year old hippies and college drop-outs hang out and scream,"1-2-3-4, don't send our children off to war"..

Pathetic.

Amen, brother.

UPDATE: Taking a closer look at the website, I notice that the Center supports Mumia Abu Jamal, the vile killer of police officer Daniel Faulkner . Would it be too much for a "peace" center to support the peace makers rather than the murderers of the innocent? Disgusting, filthy people.

The First Blogs

The National Library of Scotland has made its collection of broadsides available on the Net. Before the newspaper, broadsides were an anything-goes communication medium, that according to the Library was

The most popular form of this for nearly 300 years was 'broadsides' - the tabloids of their day. Sometimes pinned up on walls in houses and ale-houses, these single sheets carried public notices, news, speeches and songs that could be read (or sung) aloud.

Check out this one:

Why people don't read contemporary literature

Slate has the results of an very unscientific poll of contemporary American novelists, asking the ever-so important question: Who are you voting for?

The novelists, of course, rise to the occassion and show their Philistine bona fides: aloof, self-absorbed bloviation from politically uncouth sentimentalists.

What surprises me is how out-of-touch these men and woman are from day-to-day reality. Their social and political outlook has not changed with the times, and many seem to be stuck in the early 80s, still waiting for the great Soviet revolution. As most Americans have slowly but steadily shifted right, these are men and women who pride themselves on standing on the outside of the mainstream of American society.

That's fine, I guess. But what's happened is that practically all the novelists -- who are supposed to be writing for the American market -- are so blatantly out of touch that they populate a world all their own. In the end, who the hell wants to waste a day or two reading a novel written by someone who doesn't live in the real world.

In a different sort of election, I might have voted for a Green Party candidate, or some such, but I think the current time period represents a state of true desperation. -- someone named Dan Chaon

By Bush logic, I should vote for him, since he gave me a hefty tax cut. In fact, the greatest increase in our deficit comes—not from the Iraq war—but the tax savings to the upper income brackets, on average more than $50,000 a year. -- Amy Tan

Ms Tan is voting for Mr. Kerry because he'll raise her taxes. You want taxes? Here, take mine, bitch.

I look forward to voting for John Kerry, a man of exemplary intelligence who was brave in war and then brave in protest of war. -- John Updike

Mr. Updike still fighting the Vietnam War. He goes on to mention "voodoo economics." He's still fighting Reagan, too.

I actually voted for Nader in 2000...However, everything changed over the next four years. It became self-evident, I think, that the Bush presidency is the most corrupt in modern history. Under the cynical disguise of evangelical Christian moralizing (and don't even get me started on Bush's moronic theology), Bush conducted (and continues to conduct) a fire sale, in which he auctioned off the entire nation to the highest corporate bidder, piece by piece. -- someone named Rick Moody

Mr. Moody also seems to hate Christians. Now, that's the ticket for sellling books in the US!

Like virtually everyone I know, I'm voting for Kerry. And probably for exactly the same reasons. To enumerate these reasons, to repeat yet another time the fundamental litany of liberal principles that need to be reclaimed and revitalized, seems to be redundant and unnecessary. Our culture has become politicized to a degree that verges upon hysteria. And since I live in New Jersey, a state in which an "honest politician" is someone who hasn't yet been arrested, I have come to have modest, that's to say realistic expectations about public life. -- Joyce Carol Oates

Ms. Oates seems to be a reasonable leftist, who holds a modicum of insight, and who is, alas, simply suffering from a Pauline Kael moment.

Kerry, of course. He's the candidate whose defeat Osama Bin Laden (if he's alive) is praying for. I trust him not to pour additional gasoline on the fires that Bush has set overseas. Also, since he's a Democrat, I trust him to exercise a modicum of fiscal sanity and to show a little compassion for the unlucky. Also, his wife is hot hot hot. She'd be a first lady for the ages. -- Jonathan Franzen

It takes a mountain of aloof imagination to think that Osama bin Laden wants President Bush to win. How can you trust the insights of a novelist who doesn't understand the fundamental nature of evil?

I'm voting for John Kerry. Not just because the Bush administration has plunged us into an opportunistic war that has needlessly killed thousands, wrecked the economy, widened the chasm between rich and poor, savaged the environment, tried to mess with our Constitution, swatted away the international community, and caused me to wonder whether I really am an American, if being American means having to embrace a man like George W. Bush as my proxy, the avatar of my wishes and beliefs in the wider world—not, finally, for any of those reasons, but because I believe that John Kerry might be a great president. I hope to God he wins. -- someone named Jennifer Egan

You have to wonder what America this woman lives in. It's the alternative United States, call it a-U.S. It's the land of the Philistine's aloof imagination where anything conservative is bad, bad, bad, and everything liberal is wholesome and right.

Go read the rest, and then weep.

It's the reason why these people characterize 5 - 10 thousand-copy sales as a "best seller."

UPDATE: It looks like I wasn't the only one who thought Joyce Carol Oates had a Pauline Kael moment.