Jeremayakovka

The Womanization Of America, c. 1962

Late Night Thought #231 re Norman Mailer (updated):

Often tagged as "reactionaries" or accused of being unthinking apologists for the "radical Right," many so-called "neoconservatives" simply (but doggedly) preserve or re-examine or simply call attention to sometimes forgotten, often virile strains of 20th Century American liberalism.

One thing that often gets lost in today's culture war over persistent claims being made for gender and sexual identity(-ies) is the fact that men need to become men. In the 1950s Simone de Beauvoir dared proclaim that One is not born a woman, one becomes one. In 1962 Norman Mailer offered an indirect reply (or simply restated the case) in "The Womanization of America," a series of comments that appeared in Playboy magazine:

Masculinity is not something given to you, something you're born with, but something you gain. And you gain it by winning small battles with honor. Because there is very little honor left in American life, there is a certain built-in tendency to destroy masculinity in American men. The mass media, for instance .... give people an unreal view of life. They give people a notion that American life is easier than it really is, less complex, more rewarding. The result is that Americans, as they emerge from adolescence into young manhood, are very much like green soldiers being sent into difficult terrain ignorant of the conditions. A lot of virility immediately gets massacred.

Particularly famous for the punch and circumstance that couched his career, it's also been pointed out that there wasn't a whole lot in Norman's oeuvre that was astonishingly original -- the originality, on the whole, was to be found in his life. His writing style could be indebted quite nakedly to recent precedents, as it was to Dos Passos and Drieser in The Naked and the Dead. This was true later, during his high-Beat and Camelot phases, when he cribbed a bit clumsily from an American literary scene claiming to know God through sex, drugs, and jazz, and an absurd French one which proclaimed God dead, then  moralized on every subject under the sun. A lack of originality lingered even later, as when he undertook long projects to re-examine Marilyn Monroe or Henry Miller or Pablo Picasso or Jesus Christ. 

Still, as the above quote suggests, this buffalo in the china shop of post-World War II American letters (in fact, he middle-named one of his sons "Buffalo") could spill shelves and smash dishware as much as any bull.

George W. Bush, Dark Knight

See Fausta's comments on the current summer blockbuster (with links).

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Update: Brightening a summer San Francisco evening (note the turtleneck), Fausta and I met for the first time after her recent area appearance at the BlogHer Conference.

"Terrorists Must Be Treated Inhumanely"

Steven Plaut spits it out.

Update (07/29): Pamela jumps the shark to feed the crocodile: We cannot worry about what the world thinks about us; we have to protect our own people.

Joe Lieberman - The Last Vestige of Liberal Manhood in the U.S. Senate

While the media fans tensions over Jesse Jackson's subpar "cut [Obama's] nuts off" comment, here's footage of the last man standing among Democratic Senators. Joe Lieberman lays out the case for investigating, at the highest levels of government, enemy, jihadist Muslim cells active within the United States. The facts speak for themselves: in our time Islamic terror is "home grown," it is often engineered by fanatics who enjoy citizenship of the countries they seek to terrorize and destabilize, it is spreading rapidly in American prisons, and UK intelligence services have discovered over 200 such cells in their country. Joe tells the truth about the times we live in. He'd make a great vice president.

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Here's the trailer from an "oppo" documentary being made by Stalinist Democrats who want to complete the purge of Senator Lieberman -- an otherwise liberal legislator -- strictly because he is committed to a strong military offensive strategy in Iraq, against Iran, against Hamas, and wherever else it may be necessary:

Lieberman endorses John McCain for president:

Race Matters

Montrealistan

Fabrice de Pierrebourg's book profiling fanatic, violent jihadist networks in North America's premier francophone city appeared last year. Currently available only in French, it's received a few notices in English, including at Canada's The Hour and the blog Covenant Zone.

From the former:

In the book, he profiles 20 of the 30 so-called suspects, some of whom he has met and interviewed, and others whose lives he has pieced together using documents obtained via Access to Information laws and other sources. He told the Journal that "Montreal is a harbour, a logistic base to plan, prepare and to finance terrorist attacks."

And the latter:

The author has also succeeded in meeting the alarming persons living in Montreal. Among them: Fateh Kamel, presumed overseer of Ahmed Ressam many years ago. Kamel had played a “central role in the wave of terrorist acts” in France during the 1990s, according to CSIS. He had been described as an “executive in international terror […] whose boss was none other than Osama ben Laden.” Back in Montreal after leaving prison in France in 2005, the man condemned for terrorist acts earns his living at the wheel of a taxi, without being recognized by his Montreal clients.

Runagates Club weighs in on Canadian willed ignorance:

Here we now have a Canadian expeditionary force in Afghanistan, fighting the Taliban and hunting the militant Sunni terror group Al Qaeda, and our news editors decide the first book of 2007 discussing Muslim terrorists in Canada is NOT worthy of attention? Isn't the taint of widespread journalistic appeasement too often the response to the bared terrorist blade?

Fabrice interviewed here (in French):

Like W.E.B. DuBois, Barack Obama Is Either A Genius Or A Fool

For those of us who oppose Senator Obama for president, his candidacy is a curious -- and absolutely necessary -- study. The very reasons why enthusiasts welcome and worship him are why the rest of us are wary and worried: opposition to maintaining the Iraq front against Islamic terror ... a resume reeking of Rules for Radicals Saul Alinsky (by whose tactics Obama seeks to reframe issues in terms of community "empowerment") ... and that "breath of fresh air" facade, behind which we skeptics sense, blowin' in Obama's wind, storms of soft jihad.

What to do?

Classical liberals and committed conservatives alike must plot Illinois's ambitious junior senator on a moral grid in the way he so richly deserves. This moral grid is formed by two axes, "Hope and Hype" and "Humility and Hubris," strains of which already reveal themselves. For my part, I've made sure to read his two memoirs, the aw-shucks Audacity of Hope and the unevenly introspective Dreams From My Father. Next I read Shelby Steele's A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. Recently I picked up David Mendell's Obama: From Promise to Power. Elegaic and informative, it is chock full of first-hand anecdotes (including access to all of Obama's men, and his woman) and offers occasional glimpses of his shortcomings and vulnerabilities.

Now on my plate is to discern just whose cloth Obama cuts himself from, including which swaths and what size. African-American history is the best place to start, I figure, since that's his primary identity. I've started with legendary NAACP-founder and Communist propagandist, W.E.B. DuBois. Like Obama, DuBois was partly of white ancestry but never shied from identifying with African-American community. Like Obama, DuBois completed (with distinction) graduate work at Harvard, which gained him immediate notoreity. Like Obama, DuBois was an educator as well as a political organizer.

Also like Obama -- such is the case his opponents seek to compile -- DuBois lent his name and his mind to the propagation of America's reigning sworn enemy. In DuBois's time that was Soviet Communism, and in ours imperial Islamic jihad. Leaving a finer comparison and contrast of the two men for another day (e.g., DuBois entered the political fray during the Jim Crow era, when lynching was rampant; Obama has done so in the post-Civil Rights era, when black-on-black crime is rampant), here's a brief excerpt of a notable passage from DuBois's Autobiography (aptly subtitled, "A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life..."). One of DuBois's reflections on turning 25, or something like it, has no doubt been thought by you know who:

I rejoice as a strong man to win a race, and I am strong -- is it egotism -- is it assurance -- or is it the silent call of the world spirit that makes me feel that I am royal and that beneath my sceptre a world of kings shall bow. The hot dark blood of a black forefather is beating at my heart, and I know that I am either a genius or a fool.

Did I say that Barack Obama is either a genius or a fool? What I meant to say -- to prudently, shrewdly not misunderestimate him -- is that Barack Obama may be both a genius and a fool.