Jeremayakovka

True Whit Day

April 1st is True Whit Day, a day to remember so as not to be made a fool of by history.

"Just Ask Henry Roth"

Just Ask Henry Roth

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Humbly prevail
Or proudly fail,
Sly underdogs
Make good old dogs.

The enduring trick
(Healthy or sick)
Is: Do the time,
Not just the crime.
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Happy Birthday, Whittaker Chambers

** Update (04/10) ** New site! WhittakerChambers.org

For all the tricks Fate played on you -- you who labored so hard to take leave of trickery --  it's no surprise you were born on April Fool's Day.

Last year's commemorative post, "True Whit."

Contemplation

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Totalitarian tyranny is built not on the virtues of totalitarians
but on the vices of liberals.
-- Albert Camus

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The drawing I did back in 1993. (The model was written up most justly in the book The Undressed Art.) The quote is from Camus at Combat: Writing 1944-1947, "Why Spain?" (p. 301), reviewed by Erika Dreifus.

Wretched Gentile Becomes Righteous Gentile

In Claude Lelouch's version of Les Miserables (1995) Jean-Paul Belmondo (best-known as the young romantic thief in Breathless) plays an aging truck driver who tries to save a Jewish family during WWII.

Hugo's masterpiece is palpable and oceanic. It significantly affected Whittaker Chambers compelling him to seek out the Communist Party to try to do right in the world (which he confesses early on in Witness).

In contrast to the truck-driving desperados of Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear), it could also be titled Le Salaire de l'espoir (The Wages of Hope).

So what that the following video is French-only -- What are you, deaf? -- Let the mellow chanson roll over you....

And of course it's a little sentimental and lusty -- it riffs off of these posts

Yay for the righteous Yanks!

Cody's Books Shines Spotlight On Black Communist "Revolutionary" (i.e., Reactionary)

Cody's Books, which boasts of being the highest-profile and highest-quality bookstore in the City of Berkeley, reminds once more why that municipality is often referred to, by loyalists and defectors alike, as "The People's Republic of Berkeley." Whatever its offerings, Cody's is also, and always has been, a part-time intellectual rape room where genuine liberals are forced, willy-nilly, to copulate mentally with some of the most strident, most committed anti-American writers.

Fortunately, the changing nature of bookselling and Internet-era information distribution last year forced the original Cody's location -- a few blocks from the UC campus and, literally, a stone's throw from People's Park (right) -- to shut its doors for good after being in business for 50 years. I attended my share of left-wing author's events at the old Cody's, beginning with Rita Mae Brown in 1988 and ending, in 2006, with "Weatherson" Chavista, Chesa Boudin. (At the latter event I sat a just few feet away from Boudin's silver-spoon, earring-sporting, terrorist foster father, Bill Ayers.) Cody's has neither burned out nor faded away, however. In fact it has re-emerged in Berkeley's chic shopping center over on Fourth Street.

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This Saturday evening Cody's Fourth Street will host Nelson Peery (below), an otherwise obscure Black Communist who has a new memoir out. You probably have never heard of Nelson Peery, but that's no reason to continue to ignore him. For obscurity is no measure of the impact an individual or organization may have, not when the individual or organization, by definition, relies on stealth tactics to patiently and ruthlessly "bore from within." Then again, given that "these days being a conservative is cool," let's not hesitate to credit Communists like Peery with the other meaning of "bore"....
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With a CV that includes the following:

* Communist Party USA

* Provisional Organizing Committee to Reconstitute the Revolutionary Party

* Communist League

* Communist Labor Party

* League of Revolutionaries for a New America
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Nelson Peery is a grizzled poster child for a public relations campaign on behalf of a Paul Robeson/Joseph Stalin-brand of American Communist Viagra. Or should I say on behalf of prostate ("pro-state") cancer...? For unlike other Communists from previous generations who were made the profitable career move to, as the postmodernists say, "work within structures," Peery has remained an unrepentant, itinerant radical.

And Cody's plays it to the hilt. From its email announcement:

"Why am I who never harmed anyone, mistreated, segregated, assigned an unequal place in a country that promises equality?” Nelson Peery asks this question upon returning home to Minneapolis from fighting in the all-black 93rd Infantry Division in World War II....

“As I learned the truth,” Peery realizes in the face of rising tides of racist violence, “I became a communist, for I could do nothing else.”
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I became a communist, for I could do nothing else. There you have it, straight from the Trojan horse's mouth: will-to-power, nihilism, and a bald-faced lie dressed in confessional clothing. If there truly was nothing else to do, how come the civil rights movement wasn't a Communist movement through and through? That's what its opponents -- Democrats, Republicans, and American Nazis alike -- alleged. Is Peery saying that those 60s reactionaries were right all along? That's his implication which, although absurd, is not without some basis in fact. For the complicated history of that era teaches that certain activists in the civil rights movement (although surpassed for the most part in influence by "anti-anti-Communist" New Left activists) either were Communists or had had tangental Communist ties -- including Rosa Parks.
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I became a communist, for I could do nothing else. Don't fall for it, Gentle Reader! That single sentence -- featured by Cody's Fourth Street to promote their anti-American author -- belies the pettiness, not greatness, of Peery's vision, and the stinginess, not generosity, of his spirit. We're all forged by the battles of our first adulthood, no matter what the battles and no matter what side we're on. Yet only certain of us re-temper ourselves by adding new elements to the alloy. Why does Peery advertise himself as if he's still living in 1946? Because he is. Committed to an antiquated, ideological segregation from the American mainstream, he understands reform only as a postponement of and, at the same time, a provocation for some dialectical advance toward "the Revolution." Peery can only spit in the face of the patriotic, liberal reforms -- hard-won by black and white alike -- of the post-war civil rights era. He can only spit in the face of the hard-fought reforms that remain to be won on the guilt-ridden, and unfinished, matter of race in America. Because Communists don't have dreams; instead they infiltrate other people's dreams, corrupting them so that they always end in nightmares.

In the post-civil rights, post-9/11 era, Free thinkers of the world, unite! -- unite against Nelson Peery and all other left-over, left-wing reactionaries.

I Believe You, Anita!

(No, not Anita Hill.)

Further reading:

"The Gaycott Turns Ugly"
(originally published November 21, 1977 in Time)

"Exorcising the Ghost of Anita"
(originally published September 18, 2002 in the Chicago Free Press)

A Pie For A Pie Makes Whole World Blind, Deaf, Dumb

* Updated *

Well, at least it's a fruit pie.
-- Anita Bryant

This 1977 clip of two four gay activists hurling a cream pie in Anita Bryant's face is the earliest instance of which I am aware where a cream pie has been used (to attempt) to humiliate and silence a right-wing political personality and to quash free speech as we know it.

The "legend" lives on:

* Gay.com calls it "a historic document of political strategy." Riiight.
* "Fringe" theater show Pie Face melodramatizes it ad nauseam.
* "[I]n addition to pie parties throughout the gay neighborhoods of the city that evening, people took a moment of silence and bowed down and prayed to the new holy spot in the East, Des Moines, a new, gay Mecca."
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In the years leading up to the emergence, post-Stonewall, of radical gay activism, "anti-establishment" activists had innovated ways of using props for aggressive, agit-prop street theater. Father Philip Berrigan, apostle of the Catholic Left and convicted felon, protested American commitment to a free Vietnam by trespassing on private and government property and stealing and setting fire to draft records. Frequently he poured blood on his target of choice. (Left, Berrigan pours napalm on draft records, May 1968.) Whether it was human or animal blood, and how exactly the blood was obtained, I don't know.
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One of Abbie Hoffman's most noted stunts was to "nominate" a pig as for president outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. (Right, Abbie mugs your reality for the camera; below, the rather unimaginatively named "Pigasus.")

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In the Anita Bryant case, gay radicals perform street theater sleight of hand when they become ever more aggressive while at the same time seeming ever more harmless, even hilarious.  Their assault with a tasty weapon isn't just pushing on a door marked "open," it's ramming it -- left-wing radicals abusing Constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech by breaching all decorum and even commiting a crime. (Unfortunately neither Ms. Bryant nor her fellow spokesman pressed charges.) But there's neither redemption nor pride in the hilarity, only contempt and humiliation. It's yet another way the radical left tries to have its cake (or pie) and eat it too (or have you eat it).
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Left-wing pie-assaults of more recent note:

Coulter Horowitz (text only)

Intellectual Punk Speaks Up For Subject of Hillary Rodham's Thesis

* Update (08/21) * Michelle Malkin plugs Diana West's The Death of the Grown-Up

Regarding Hillary's thesis Nick Masesso, who wrote the deservedly obscure Walking the Midway In Purgatory (an incoherent, intellectually violent reminiscence of growing up in the 1960s), emails:

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We all started with Saul Alinsky. He and men like Studs Terkle [sic] taught us how to organize. Without them we'd have had no labor movement, no Teamsters and thus no middle class, ergo no america [sic]. Groking Saul doesent [sic] mean anything. There is only what we do.

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There is only what we do is a line Nick borrows from Aristotle on the formation of character, on excellence as habit. Yes, there is only what we do. Here There is only what we do is the amorality of those who have never given up on letting "the 60s" be their excuse for mediocrity perpetrated in the name of "protest" or "art" or "radicalism." For mediocrity can be a habit, moral equivalency can be a habit, evil can be a habit. In Nick's grubby hands the phrase becomes Nothing works so anything goes. It's what he had in mind last September when he equated me waving an American flag with shouting "Allahu akbar." That's neither a reasoning nor a reckoning with history or one's own life. It's a failure to reason and a failure to reckon (which may be my main complaint with the Clintons.)

Does Nick include Hillary Rodham in his pronoun We? Was she, is she, a "sister in struggle"? A struggle against what? and for what? Hillary Rodham was clearly fascinated American radicalism. The story of the rest of her career is the story of how, exactly, she has reasoned and reckoned with her fascination -- in her case, to what extent her manipulation of American radicalism has been her means to political power.

There is always more than There is only what we do.

A Roman Thought For All Time

At home there was peace and an abundance of wealth, which mortal men deem the chiefest of blessings. Yet there were citizens who from sheer perversity were bent upon their own ruin and that of their country.
-- Sallust,  The War With Catiline

Before Joseph McCarthy, There Was Robert Stripling

We never won the Cold War as decisively as we should have.
-- blogger "Fjordman," posted at Gates of Vienna

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Before there was Joseph McCarthy there was Robert Stripling.

The chapter whose excerpts appear at the end of this post is found in Robert Stripling's The Red Plot Against America. The Red Plot was published in 1949, but has long been forgotten due to the liberal memory hole that dictates our popular recollections of that era. Having served ten years as Chief Investigator of the bipartisan House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), Stripling provided a substantive primer on the precise nature of the Communist threat against the United States of America -- specifically, the threat from within the United States of America. The Red Plot narrates HUAC's meticulous work -- names and dates, details and wranglings  -- which had been underway since 1938 and in which Stripling had been a prime mover.

With America touched by the same totalitarian trends that had been blowing through Europe since the 1920s, HUAC was the premier governmental body to wage what I suggest we  regard as the "culture war" of what (perhaps too hastily) has since been lauded as "the Greatest Generation." More to the point, HUAC was the scene of that generation's most charged political theater. Congress had created the Committee in the 1930s to publicly gather information on, primarily, American Nazis, Klansmen, and other homegrown fascists. Only later, as Communism's wide scope and insidious nature became apparent, did HUAC set out to expose the vast leftwing conspiracy of its American operations, a conspiracy propagated by both card-carrying members and fellow-traveling sympathizers. (Above: Robert Stripling and HUAC member Richard Nixon examine subpoenaed documents)

Then -- as now -- moments of battlefield sacrifice and triumph could not, by themselves, efface grave civilizational uncertainties. On one hand, in 1946 Winston Churchill had delivered his Iron Curtain speech demarcating the line between the free and Communist worlds. Beginning in the summer of 1948 Whittaker Chambers had delivered ("more or less by chance," as Stripling relates) damning testimony about the Communist cell that had operated within successive Roosevelt Administrations and even in the newly-formed United Nations. On the other hand, that same fall breakaway Democrat Henry Wallace's presidential campaign with the "Progressive Party," which fronted for the American Communist Party, had received over 1.1 million votes (more than half, not surprisingly, coming from New York and California). Similar to today's neoconservative priorities -- of overhauling post-Cold War American attitudes to one-time geopolitical partners such as Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the Palestinian Authority, and the Saudi royal family -- Stripling sensed, during his own era of unsettling realignments, a gap in our discourse vis-a-vis Communism. And he raced to fill it.

Note well that when The Red Plot was being written, the junior senator from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy, was still just a blip on the national radar. Goaded, perhaps, by the force of Stripling's argument -- which voiced frustration at the many obstacles placed in HUAC's way, including those from the Roosevelt White House -- McCarthy went on the offensive in the year following the book's publication, delivering his famous "Enemies Within" speech in February 1950.

Yet The Red Plot Against America contains nothing that is "McCarthyite" and everything that is "Striplingite." It is a substantive rendering in plain, everyday English of the hard, often thankless, often vilified investigation into the American social fabric when European civilization was collapsing for the second time in 30 years. This work was undertaken -- transparently and vigorously -- by a small group of freedom-loving Americans in Washington, DC in order to preserve the integrity, viability, and endurance of the land Lincoln described as "the last best hope of Earth."

Similarities to today's fight against Islamist infiltration and subversion of the West, a fight waged in large part on the Internet -- and just a portion of the Internet at that -- will, or should, be self-evident. (If not, then click through the links in the "Top Shelf Reads" category in the right column, including the brave, trail-blazing online work of Cinnamon Stillwell, Debbie Schlussel, Pamela Atlas and more.) A revival of HUAC in our time, in spirit and perhaps also in form, should be on the table. It's a matter of hard-nosed common sense and good governance. My principal concern, frankly, would be not for the mission of such a federal committee, but for the mettle of the members selected (or who would offer) to serve on it.

Lifetime conservatives (of which I'm not) typically trumpet America's Cold War victory against the Soviet Union, a victory won despite decades of liberal opposition. Such conservatives have bragging rights, I guess. Thus Ann Coulter can pose for a photo at Senator McCarthy's grave and suggest, as she did at CPAC 2007, that student Republicans form "Joe McCarthy clubs" on college campuses. But bragging rights bring with them even bigger responsibilities. During our post-Cold War era there are many parallels to be observed and lessons to be learned from the "culture war" that was underway before the Cold War had even begun.
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From "Conclusions," Chapter 13 of The Red Plot Against America
[emphases and links added to suggest comparisons with contemporary issues]:

In this concluding article of my series I'd like to get a few things off my chest, things I could not say while working for the House Un-American Activities Committee.

I don't regret any of the years I spent with the Committee, though the work was neither easy nor rewarding. It was work that somebody had to do, and from its seed has sprung two tremendous Government programs, the $17,000,000 [1949 dollars] inquiry into the loyalty of Government employees and, directly or indirectly, the multi-billion dollar Marshall Plan....

But the House Committee, pioneers and forerunners in this work, at a meager fraction of the cost of subsequent development, has never known a period when it was not under attack. Vilification from Communists is understandable, for the Committee wields a tremendous weapon against them: exposure. Criticism from honest liberals has hurt the Committee much more. I know the morale of my own staff reached an all-time low when, after we unearthed the "pumpkin papers" which conclusively corroborated the spy-ring testimony of Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley, President Truman repeated his charge that it was all a red herring.

Yet Mr. Truman emphasized in his vigorous Inaugural Address the very differences between Communism and Democracy which the Committee had been revealing -- through the lips of willing or reluctant witnesses -- for more than ten years. Labor leaders who condemned us a decade ago for suggesting that their unions were being contaminated by Communism have since reluctantly conceded that we were correct.

President Roosevelt made at least two determined efforts to wipe out the Committee. Failing, for the simple reason the people want the Committee, he demanded of Martin Dies that the Committee thereafter confine its inquiries to Fascist activities. Committee members who tended to regard Communism with the same cold eye as they regarded Nazism were signaled out for especial scorn by pet columnists and commentators. The Committee was forbidden to reveal, six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the scope of Japanese subversion in Hawaii and on the Pacific Coast. It is unimportant but relevant that I, after being instrumental in exposing the fact that Joe Lash and other pro-Communist youth leaders were enjoying White House hospitality, was "railroaded" into the Army. I quote the word "railroaded" because it is not mine. It was said by two Army colonels in discussing with me the curious phases of my induction.

The legend has grown and has been carefully nurtured by clandestine and well-meaning interests, that the Committee has ignored Fascism to concentrate on Communism. That is a lie, as our records will prove. As the one more familiar with those records than anyone else, I know there are still many Fascists and fellow scum in the country, ready to pollute the American bloodstream. All they lack is a Fuehrer. Martin Dies fought the Ku Klux Klan in the face of six-shooters. My father campaigned against the Klan when it meant that he must face political ruin in his district and danger to himself and his family.

The Nazis lack a Fuehrer and a purpose. The Communists have both, and combine the fanaticism of Hitler's followers with remarkable guile. They are irrevocably charged with fighting almost every ideal which made this country great. In event of a war with Russia they will be infinitely more destructive saboteurs than were the comparatively clumsy Nazi subersives.

It is not easy to fight Communism. Communism, contrary to a popular phrase, IS something new under the sun. Its members and champions, many of them misguided liberals, can infiltrate, contaminate and dominate almost any field -- including the pulpit, though Communism is by rule a Godless calling. Graduates of Russian training schools are the world's leading authorities in the practices of disorder. It is incontrovertible that every key point, strategically, in the United States has been studied faithfully against the day when peaceful-looking American Reds will be called upon to come into the open and fight for Mother Russia. We have shown through testimony that they are past masters at working within the warp and woof of the United States Constitution. We have seen Henry Wallace, their befuddled sympathizer, come within a heartbeat of the Presidency [the Soviet dupe and "spiritual window-shopper" had served as vice president up until three months before FDR's death]. We know from the testimony of ex-Communists Whittaker Chambers and Elizabeth Bentley that many Communists and distinguished followers have risen high in Government circles.

We further know that between January 1, 1947 and December 16, 1948, 151 State Department people were removed from the Federal payroll, 91 of whose cases were classified as "of acute significance." And that is only one department. Coincidentally or not, it was State Department policy which abandoned China's 400,000,000 humans to the advances of Russian-controlled Chinese Red armies, and it is the considered opinion of men like Gens. Claire Lee Chennault [commander of the Flying Tigers, which included the author of God Is My Co-Pilot] and Patrick J. Hurley that we may one day be confronted by many of these millions, armed and thoroughly indoctrinated [one word: Korea]. Coincidentally or not, it was the State Department -- admittedly contaminated at that time -- which sold Poland, another ally, down the river.

One of the chief criticisms directed at the House Committee is that we have smeared the reputations of good citizens. As I said earlier, I am not the official apologist of the Committee. It has made its mistakes. But whenever I hear anyone use the word "smear" in connection with the Committee's efforts I must ask him to name those persons we have smeared (of the hundreds of witnesses we have heard and the thousands of names introduced).

The name of Dr. Edward U. Condon, director of the National Bureau of Standards, usually is brought up. Beyond his name there is usually silence. As I have pointed out, I made an effort to have Condon called as a witness in answer to his request. That he wasn't called, however, is comprehensible. This friend of many pro-Communists, who was not cleared by the Atomic Energy Commission to share A-bomb secrets at the time he was in charge of the Bureau's atomic scientists, was not heard because the Committee could not obtain from the White House the letter which J. Edgar Hoover had written suggesting that Condon was a poor security risk. I hope the Committee eventually gets that letter. I hope it hears Condon.

If Americans believed all they have read in anti-Committee papers they must believe we used rubber hoses to extract testimony. The Committee is not a judicial body and never will be by law. It cannot operate under the rules of evidence, cannot issue indictments, cannot hand down verdicts. It was established solely to hear witnesses and, from their testimony, to recommend legislation.

The Committee absorbed considerable punishment during its investigation of Communism in Hollywood, where the ideology has taken such a foothold that there are figures to prove that Party collections from members and their followers amount to $32,000 a week [1949 dollars]. It was held in many quarters that we had no right to ask witnesses whether they were Communists. It was said that a man's politics are his own business, as indeed they are.

But we were not asking for information on a political affiliation. We simply asked these people, by asking them if they were Communists, whether they were members of a conspiracy determined to overthrow this form of Government. The fact that ten of them refused to answer on constitutional grounds, knowing, perhaps, that the Committee was in possession of 33 Communist Party cards of Hollywood celebrities, is, I will continue to believe, most significant.

It is equally significant that ten of the 40-odd witnesses we questioned in the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers case stood on their constitutional tights, and that in his own testimony Hiss made 198 uses of the phrase "to the best of my recollection" or its qualifying counterparts.

The Committee hears, by and large, a type of witness completely foreign to other Congressional committees in search of information. More often than not it is faced with subversives and fellow travelers who are superbly well trained and well advised in the incitement of public sentiment. The reactions of some members to their type of testimony have been provoked very artfully.

What the Committee has revealed over the last ten years is hard for many Americans to believe. The average citizen cannot comprehend that one of the top officials of the super-important Board of Economic Warfare was a gamboling nudist whose literary output had to be confined to the pornographic division of the Library of Congress; that his successor was a kind of male strip-teaser dancer; that pressure enough was put on respectable authorities to cause the shipment out of this country of more than 1,300 pounds of uranium products at the time we were attempting to develop the A-bomb; that the chief Russian spy in the A-bomb espionage ring was impervious to arrest....

Ten years ago Joe Curran, of the Maritime Union, denounced the Committee vitriolically when we tried to bring out that his union was saturated by Communism. In 1946 he had to fight for his life against he Communists he had nurtured. We have seen the same things happen in many unions. But when one of our first witnesses warned against that peril, [HUAC member Martin] Dies was called to the White House and castigated by President Roosevelt for picking on the CIO on the eve of an election.

Leon Josephson, one of the few witnesses we've had who was prosecuted by the Justice Department and imprisoned for the contempt he displayed for Congress, once said to an American consular officer, "I consider the orders of the Central Committee of the Communist Party above the laws of the United States, and I would do anything short of murder to carry them out." Many others the Committee has heard might have been as frank.

The Committee, as constituted, is not equipped to deal with Communism. Communism has brought into being new techniques and tactics never envisioned by the founders of our Government. It may well be necessary to streamline even our judicial processes if we are going to cope with the menace. Gerhart Eisler's case is pertinent. He functioned for 20 years in this country, carrying out some of the most treasonable acts imaginable. The most closely organized group ever to appear on the American scene was at his command. He traveled back and forth to the U.S.S.R. on false passports; defied Congress. Yet he is still out of jail, and travels extensively over this country making speeches under the auspices of various front organizations whose leaders are dedicated to the destruction of this Government. [He would flee the U.S. clandestinely in 1950.]

Committee investigators were long encouraged by the White House to exterminate Nazis by exposing them, which we did to a great extent. But when two of our men raided Communist headquarters in Philadelphia and seized records of great concern to the interests of the people, they were arrested on the orders of a Federal judge and the Committee was ordered to return the files.

The F.B.I., if left alone, could clear up Communism in this country. I'd trust my life and the lives of my family in the hands of the F.B.I., if no political considerations were involved. It should be an independent bureau. Instead, it is hitched to the Department of Justice whose top men, politically appointed, are sometimes guided by political considerations. As extensive as are the files of the House Committee (files consulted by 20,000 accredited Government agents in the last decade) the F.B.I. files are of much greater magnitude. J. Edgar Hoover's men could round up at least 25,000 potential Communist saboteurs in short order, if war broke out with Russia. Some F.B.I. men, however, have discovered that their most comprehensive investigations of Communist subversives have been ignored when recommendations were urged for their prosecution. We know, for these men have come to us for support, and so have Civil Service Commission investigators, State Department men and others -- their morales cracked by frustration....

Personally, I seem to have committed the crime of attempting to expose people who seek to destroy our way of life. It is a job for which I was hired by chosen representatives of the people of the United States; a job to which I attended to the best of my ability. It is not a very good job, really, for the simple reason that it is now unfashionable, if that is the word, to be primarily interested in America and the preservation of its liberties. Apparently it is bad taste to expose the fact that Government documents of great importance are being stolen; that a President demanded the admission to this country of Mrs. Earl Browder [Earl Browder: socialist anti-draft agitator during World War I; Communist Party candidate for president of the United States, 1936 and 1940; imprisoned for passport violations, 1939; sentence commuted by FDR, 1942; died, 1973], over the protests of the State Department, because he did not want to be embarrassed by Joe Stalin's questions; that a number of Government officials, by their admission or refusal to answer, have been mixed up with a gang of cold-blooded subversives; that choice military secrets, including A-bomb data, have been passed on to the leaders of a country which since V-E day has overrun Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Albania and most of China.

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FTR, like almost every single book that has been decisive in my political maturation, no one and nothing in our contemporary American experience pointed me to The Red Plot Against America -- not one friend (many of whom are former friends), not one relative, not one teacher or college professor, nothing in popular or intellectual culture nor in the MSM -- nothing except my own disillusionment with leftwing politics, and my consequential efforts to come to terms with their legacy.

Into The Heart Of Primo Levi's Darkness

* Updated*

This post is a minor reflection offered in anticipation of the Fourth Annual Ariel Avrech ZT'L Yahrtzeit Lecture, to be delivered this Sunday at Young Israel of Century City (Los Angeles, CA). Professor David Shatz will be speaking on "Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik and the Problem of Evil." I'll be there.

Update (06/19): Ralphie posts his summary of Prof. Shatz's lecture at Kerckhoff Coffeehouse.
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By his indispensable works Survival in Auschwitz, The Reawakening, The Drowned and The Saved (and many more), Italian Jew Primo Levi ranks in the forefront of those who attempted to give literary expression to that ring of Hell on Earth known as Auschwitz. Levi was by trade a chemist who came of age, if not without a literary temperament, then apparently without literary ambitions. Yet through a dreadful and formidable combination of fate, history, and willpower Primo Levi, the nice Jewish boy from Turin, eventually became, as he is known today to millions, "Primo Levi" -- the world-class memoirist, novelist, poet, and essayist.
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Like most Jewish concentration camp survivors of a literary bent, Levi was far from a literal believer. Instead he essayed, for better or for worse, to recover traces of revealed truth through his own historical, and scientific investigations. His empirical method attempted to sketch (literally) an enlightened schema over the darkest reality of the univers concentrationnaire. This schema appears as the frontispiece to Myriam Anissimov's Primo Levi: Tragedy of an Optimist: between two poles of experience -- "Job" and "Black Holes" -- stretch (or rather, bulge) four literary contuinua: "salvation through humor," "man suffers unjustly," "man's stature," and "salvation through understanding." Several writers or personalities populate each continuum -- for example, Shalom Aleichem (humor), Paul Celan (suffering), Joseph Conrad (stature), and Charles Darwin (understanding).

What sticks in my throat most, Gentle Reader, about Primo Levi is the poetic legacy he bequeathed in "Almanac." It's the last piece he published during his lifetime, dating from January 1987, a few months before he died under mysterious circumstances (either by accident or by suicide). Ms. Anissimov describes it, almost pithtily, as a farewell to the world, a farewell in the form of a prophecy, proclaimed by a follower of the Enlightenment who detested both prophets and their prophecies. "Almanac" strikes me as the admission -- by a rationalist, a scientist, a humanist -- of the eternal presence of evil, of man's agency in propagating evil.
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Almanac
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The indifferent rivers
Will keep on flowing to the sea
Or ruinously overflowing dikes,
Ancient handiwork of determined men.
The glaciers will continue to grate,
Smoothing what lies beneath them,
Or suddenly fall headlong,
Cutting short fir trees' lives.
The sea, captive between
Two continents, will go on struggling,
Always miserly with its riches.
Sun, stars, planets and comets
Will continue on their course.
Earth too will fear the immutable
Laws of the universe.
Not us. We, rebellious offspring
With great brainpower, little sense,
Will destroy, defile,
Always more feverishly.
Very soon we will extend the desert
Into the Amazon forests,
Into the living heart of our cities,
Into our very hearts.

- from Collected Poems

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This oblique measure of moral honesty, of the Timeless shooting (seeping) through the Temporal may be Levi's truest, if inadvertent, literary legacy.

French Idol, Round 1 - The Battle of the Campaign Videos

And now for two things completely different.

On one hand ... the rockingest, most techno, most pop presidential campaign video you may ever see. From center-right, Union for the Popular Movement candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, it features his official campaign song, Sarko - Oh! - Oh! and is guaranteed to -- pump -- you -- up.

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And on the other ...  a polished conversation with performance by Socialist Party candidate Ségolène Royal. Here, in addition to her long record of public service, she emphasizes her reconciliation of private and public duties and her appreciation of voters' "concrete" concerns. [*]

Vive la République! Vive la France!

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[*]: Here also Ségo suggests that her true colors are red more than white or blue. "Concrete" (which she employs multiple times in this pitch) is a buzzword by which to insist on material evidence of socialist beliefs. In The God That Failed Arthur Koestler points out that German Communist Party members typically pestered him about whether his analyses of situations were sufficiently "concrete". That's how I conceive of politics, affirms Ségo.

The Day I Became A Republican

What the fly on the wall heard late in that day a year and a half ago, after I had registered as a Republican and decided to tell one of my then-best friends:
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- Guess what I did today?
- What?
- I registered as a Republican.
- (big, bright-eyed smile, as if waiting for a punchline) ....
- (nodding) I did.
- You're shittin' me!
- I really did.
- (smile still big, but not as bright) ....
- I've thought about it and ... there are some issues I really believe in ... that the Republican Party believes in.
- C'mon! You. Are. Shittin'. Me.
- As of today I'm a Republican.
- (another smile) ....
- Listen -- your best friend's a Republican.
- You're tellin' me -- you would have voted for Bush!?
- .... Yeah .... Probably.
- Now I know you're shittin' me!
- Well, I went to the county courthouse today so I could watch them process my registration.
- ....
- I did it. It's done.
- You know, they'll never accept you as you really are.
- Yeah, well. I'll figure that out. But -- will you?
- I don't get it.
- No, you don't.
- I know! You're going on the inside to do research. This is for some thesis of yours.
- No. No, not really.
- But -- !?
- That's the way it is now.
- That's not the Jeremiah I know.
- It is now.
- This can't be. Bring Jeremiah baaaack!
- Hey, I'm right here.

Gettin' Down With Dostoevsky

Each of us hangs always upon the cross of himself.
-- Whittaker Chambers

Fyodor Dostoevsky is one of the most astonishing minds ever to have travelled the long road from youthful revolutionary socialism to chastened conservatism. In his case it was a wickedly brooding, often suffering, always passionate conservatism. A death sentence for belonging to a socialist organization commuted at the last minute to eight years' hard labor in internal Siberian exile, during the prime of his manhood, was the beginning of the high price Fyodor paid for his knowledge and eventual wisdom. That price -- which James Baldwin called "the price of the ticket" -- was higher than the one paid by most who undergo "second thoughts," although not that ultimate price paid by so many dupes, dissenters, and martyrs.

Rather than a shabby, pathetic substitute for what should have been the most vital, most potent season of any man's life, Fyodor's years of exile, imprisonment, and soul searching eventually furnished the gestation of a heroic Western intellect. Upon his return to cosmopolitan Russia, the poverty and general ignominy through which he toiled proved no obstacle to -- indeed, proved a kind of preparation for -- the realization, in the novel form, of a kind of secular, born-again Christianity. Those years brought forth Fyodor's greatest works and rank among the most influential works of all modern literature, influencing to this day partisans of the Left and Right alike: Notes From the Underground, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and his masterpiece The Brothers Karamazov.

The following is excerpted from a little-known short story Fyodor wrote during that great, almost superhumanly productive period. "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" [*] is part science fiction (if you can believe that), part confession, and part barbed commentary on modern Western spirituality that, rather than transcendental, is instead as pretentious as it is naive. Frankly, I turn to it for clues as to what goes on in the wayward, fanatic intellects of the American, all-too-American John Walker Lindhs, Adam Gadahns, and Rachel Corries (and even the more rhetorically "moderate" conversos to Islam such as "Hamza Yusuf" (Mark Hanson)). Further, I turn to it because it presents me with clues as to what went on in my intellect when I tried to justify to myself (and occasionally to others) some vague, eventual good that would, in theory, result from Hamas's suicide bombing operations during the 1990s.

Like everything he wrote from Notes forward, "The Dream" is a record of Fyodor's prickly, often painful intellectual clash with -- and at the same time of his intellectual dependence upon --  a contemporary liberalism that is untested and unproven while at the very same time tried and failed. (The embedded links comment on a number of contemporary topics -- some worldly, some personal, some both.)
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At last these people grew weary of their senseless labours and suffering appeared on their faces, and these people proclaimed that suffering was beauty, for in suffering alone was there thought. They glorified suffering in their songs. I walked among them, wringing my hands and weeping over them, but I loved them perhaps more than before when there was no sign of suffering in their faces and when they were innocent and -- oh, so beautiful! I loved the earth they had polluted even more than when it had been a paradise, and only because sorrow had made its appearance on it. Alas, I always loved sorrow and affliction, but only for myself, only for myself; for them I wept now, for I pitied them. I stretched out my hands to them, accusing, cursing, and despising myself. I told them that I alone was responsible for it all -- I alone; that it was I who had brought them to crucify me, and I taught them how to make the cross. I could not kill myself; I had not the courage to do it; but I longed to receive martyrdom at their hands. I thirsted for martyrdom, I yearned for my blood to be shed to the last drop in torment and suffering. But they only laughed at me, and in the end they began looking upon me as a madman. They justified me. They said that they had got what they themselves wanted and that what was now could not have been otherwise. At last they told me that I was becoming dangerous to them and that they would lock me up in a lunatic asylum if I did not hold my peace. Then sorrow entered my soul with such force that my heart was wrung and I felt as though I were dying, and then -- well, then I awoke.
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And that, Gentle Reader, is not even the conclusion of the story.

[*]: from Great Short Works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. David Magarshack, trans. (Harper & Row, 1968).

Liberalism Delenda Est

* Updated and Expanded * (Jump into the Comments section, folks!)

[This post is a follow-up to "When In Sparta Do As A Spartan"; if you like this, you might love that.]

In the comments to the previous post a reader asks what I mean by "destroy an idea." As if there is something untrustworthy or dangerous about refuting -- beyond riposte and beyond reproach, where possible -- an idea. "Destroy an idea" has nothing to do with censoring thought or speech, but everything to do, whether in private discussion or public debate, with exercising thought and speech competently and morally.

For example, in an email a different reader told me he'd attended a lecture on the Roosevelt Administration's policy of not allowing mass immigration of Jews into the United States before World War II. This can be an anxious subject, of course, especially if you have or had (as I did) European Jewish kin who were slaughtered in World War II. He didn't pick my brain, but it turns out the subject is one I've thought about, sometimes been disturbed about, over the years.

The best single source on it I know of is David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. I came across it when I was a very young adult trying to draw conclusions about the United States' general worth or reliability. The "conclusions" I drew then led to anxiety and mistrust toward American power and American purpose. Stuck inside this Jewish refugee issue, I'd refused to weigh more complex and obvious factors: namely, America's subsequent support for the State of Israel. Instead of free thinking I'd settled for fear and trembling. The first is the essence of a confident and truly liberal education; the second, a temperamental foundation of the postmodern mindset. Before too long fear and trembling led precipitously to taking intellectual refuge in the very desperate hope of revolutionary commitment. I went to the extreme Left. Some, disturbed by the very same issues, go to the extreme Right, like former Meir Kahane devotee, the Israeli journalist and New Republic Editor Yossi Klein Halevi. (Today, like me, he is closer to the center.) A minor detail at the time, but one not lost on me, is that one of the lifetime Jewish communist cultists who influenced me was also familiar with Wyman's book. (Similar to the Russian Bolshevik movement, very many of the American communists I knew were Jewish, a fact from which we constantly drew righteous solace for our otherwise stubborn and self-selecting self-righteousness.) As a result, I felt confirmed in my mistrust of America and more confident in the political direction she provided. This may sound trivial, but when you're 20, as I was -- and in the absence of more fully formed, discriminating values -- such a detail can be pivotal.

Back to the reader who'd attended a recent lecture on the subject. He didn't offer me any details of its content nor his reactions to it nor whether there had been a Q&A session. But I do know that the reader is a lifelong Democrat who thinks rather favorably of  Howard Dean. (Howard Dean, who in public has sported a Palestinian keffiyeh and who during his presidential campaign met and was photographed (all smiles) with one of the most prominent politicians of my former Marxist group.) So I felt adequately informed and obligated to set out not just to destroy, but to pre-emptively destroy, any America-doubting anxiety the lecture might have either instilled in or elicited from this reader. This is what I wrote:

Here are the essential points on the subject I would impart to anyone: In a time of widespread antisemitism around the world (including in America), it was a heartbreaking and tragic historical episode. BUT -- had Western European powers, the Soviet Union, and America braved Hitler's rise to power --had they braved it and denied it instead of enabled it [*] -- there would never have been a mass exodus of refugees to worry about. Assimilated liberal Jews were, in fact, among the appeasers (such as Leonard Woolf, Virginia's husband). So the moral and political onus is widespread and by no means merely a stain on the reputation of the Roosevelt Administration(s). Further, the three generations since World War II have seen the most far-reaching social, economic, and political (and military) gains ever for American and Israeli Jewry. G-d bless America! and G-d curse the appeasers of evil!

A severe, lazy, and fatal flaw of contemporary liberal culture (including scholarship) is to revisit those tragic historical episodes in a way that generates pseudo-intellectual fodder for those who TODAY despise American values and American power and who TODAY appease America's and Israel's GENOCIDAL enemies (witness, Pelosi's headscarved, near-treasonous trip to Syria). It allows them to believe that because American institutions in the past were less than providential (in an almost Biblical sense) that they do not deserve our proud, fierce, and abiding loyalty. That lady in New York harbor is the Statue of Liberty, not the Statue of Exodus or of Utopia. Had I attended that lecture I would have lit into the speaker or any commenters who would not have made that point clear. Why? Because for its continuous complicity in the last century's most monstrous historical crimes, modern liberals have conceded whatever moral high ground they possibly ever had.

Liberalism delenda est ("Liberalism must be destroyed"). It's what the Romans said -- and did -- about Carthage.

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[*]: The simplistic, Marxism-derived version of the rivalry between Germany's Nazis and Communist Parties is that Germany's industrial classes cynically, aloofly, and deludedly preferred Nazi ascent in order to purge the nation of "those rabble-rousing (but nonetheless promising)" Communists and thus -- in an archaically conservative sense that would appeal to old money -- restore order. This now is almost conventional American cultural wisdom, as a single line of dialogue in Bob Fosse's "dystopian", (allegedly) anti-escapist Cabaret conveys quite economically (it's Max speaking from his limousine).

That history is more complex. While Communists ended up being among the Nazis' first political victims (among the very first concentration camp inmates, tagged with a red triangle, etc.), the German Communist Party -- under orders from Moscow -- for a time actually allied with the Nazi Party. This is merely the subterfuge routinely practiced by every totalitarian political movement -- the agenda behind the agenda, etc. -- whether Nazi or Communist, Hezbollah or Hamas, or even Democratic. (Fans of The Manchurian Candidate, take note!) See, e.g., the entries here on the Nazi-Communist alliance in Germany's 1931 elections.

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Here is what I mean by "destroy an idea" or, as I wrote yesterday:

Destroy not their persons, of course, but their ideas and their justifications for their ideas. Destroy utterly their concepts and let the people -- if they can, if they have the will -- build new ideas and justifications from their dusty intellectual rubble. But first those ideas and justifications really must be pounded into rubble.

When In Sparta Do As A Spartan

[This post grew out of a reply to an email in which an ex-liberal admitted his reticence in holding his ground politically around liberals he still knows.]

[Welcome, Fausta's Blog readers. Don't miss the follow-up post, "Liberalism Delenda Est".]

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With the new year I swore I'd "come out swinging." Like a boxer. What form it would take I wasn't sure, but I was finished with "agreeing to disagree" with liberals -- strangers, friends, relatives -- with saying, "Oh, I can see why you would think that," with being gracious while they held on to ideas, prejudices, misconceptions that I have come to feel in in my bones, are wrong. I was through with being gracious while they not just kept but sometimes boasted about their ideas, prejudices, misconceptions. If conservative writers and intellectuals (many of whom have taken the time to exchange ideas with me) can express so soundly much of what I have come to believe, then I should be able to also. This is out of a many-faceted obligation -- to them, to myself, to the pure intellectual pleasure of it -- and also, I'm not ashamed to say, out of ambition. I've spent so much time in recent years (in the past year, especially) interrogating my opinions that I'm just not going to take it on the cheek anymore. Nor in the ass. When you're in it to win it, you've got to take it on the chin. It smarts, but so what -- it inspires your allies (actual and potential) and intimidates (or at least annoys) your enemies.

The Republicans' election defeats and the White House's general directionlessness have been an unavoidable factor, although one I'm keen to say that should prove fruitful ultimately. Prove fruitful, that is, if truth in its many manifestations (moral and historical, not just factual) prevails. The defeats are forcing me to consider, in terms of ideas, what we believe and why, and, in terms of proposals, to come forward with criticisms of what went wrong and with prescriptions for what must go right. Do I really think I'm capable of having a say in the Republican Party's direction? Laugh now, Liberal Reader, if it makes you feel better (superior), but know that strategy and tactics follow naturally, even effortlessly, once one has fixed one's values, principles, and priorities.

Last year I purchased and just a little too eagerly read Hugh Hewitt's Painting the Map Red. It made the case for Republican legislative majorities for ten or more years. Hugh was and remains a prime pundit -- a 24/7 newshound and opinion-maker -- but he didn't, couldn't, or (worst of all) wouldn't foresee the subtle shift in the national mood and the aggressive, significantly internet-based organizing, that ushered in Democratic majorities in DC. I noticed that with The Shadow Party David Horowitz and Richard Poe raised crucial questions about liberal financial godfather George Soros, but doubt engendered about the Democratic Party did not by itself engineer confidence in the Republican Party. So last November the American electorate voted for change. Not necessarily "a change of course," but still -- for change. Over the winter I had in honesty to ask myself whether choosing in 2005 to become Republican had been premature. I wondered.... Had I overlooked the virtues of remaining Independent? or even ... Democrat? I really wondered.... I resolved No, this is where I want to be. This is where I want the country to be. And I realized that I have to make my case better.

Confident that American voters had spoken truly (as truly as is possible in our highly compromised political culture), I became disturbed that to some extent, the Republican leadership and conservative movement "heavies" had acted falsely from 2004 forward. Not evilly, but falsely. To some extent. I decided, in order to most effectively aim criticism beyond and even above my modest station, to direct that criticism within -- to seek the falsity within myself for not having been more (constructively) critical about DC-insiders, about "the conservative movement" generally, and even about some new, online friends. So I decided, for my purposes, to distinguish which conservative principles are non-negotiable, to identify Republican vices and Democratic virtues (where they exist), and to try differences among true friends. Now, having just barely begun that, I have begun to re-engage liberal strangers, friends, relatives in argument -- and, more than before, to destroy them.

When it comes to liberals my motto now is, If at first you don't persuade -- destroy. Destroy not their persons, of course, but their ideas and their justifications for their ideas. Destroy utterly their concepts and let the people -- if they can, if they have the will -- build new ideas and justifications from their dusty intellectual rubble. But first those ideas and justifications really must be pounded into rubble. Ah! Perhaps the Jeremiah component of Jeremayakovka is showing itself, at last. Or perhaps a newer, more Spartan component. For since seeing 300 I've turned to ancient sources to better understand our ancient warrior forbearers. According to Plutarch, Spartan success on the battlefield derived, at least a little, from a kind of second-tier martial virtue: Spartan armies refrained from unnecessarily slaughtering a defeated enemy, hence likely physical survival was an incentive for the enemy to surrender. Of course, if the enemy didn't surrender....

The authority with which I practice and preach the destruction of liberal thought comes from having sifted for the past ten, at times agonizing, years through my own intellectual rubble -- and having admitted that a one-time precious and passionate commitment to sophisticated, revolutionary politics had been not just wrong, but evil. Because in the name of a pretended, transcendent, idealistic good, I had committed evil. And when it comes to confronting evil, contemporary liberalism can't hold a candle to the wit, the wisdom, and the will of contemporary conservatism.

Correction: Horowitz Did Not Publish Guevara in Ramparts

A mass email I recently sent out led with a quote from Ernesto Guevara's Bolivian diaries. Unfortunately, I mistakenly attributed it to being published in Ramparts magazine when David Horowitz was its editor. Ramparts did originally publish Guevara's diaries in English; not, however, at a time when David was editor.

The quote struck me as so prophetically ironic, so appropriate to David's long road and my own, that it didn't occur to me to fact check his exact dates at the helm of the New Left's most influential subversive publication. The "rough" of finding the quote in an original paperback from that era (with an Introduction by Fidel Castro), and of finding the well-worn paperback in a bookstore in the Bay Area -- where so many radical antics and crimes have occurred -- made the single sentence seem that much more like a "diamond":

The most honest and combative men are with us, although some of them have occasional struggles with their consciences.
-- Ernesto Guevara

Cuba Commentary (Passover Sermon)

* Updated *

Following is a comment that I just added to the mix at Matt's recent blogpost on Cuba. For a guy who doesn't speak Spanish well and who's never been to Cuba, I didn't know I could get so worked up on the subject. Must be my happy childhood memories of "Guantanamera"! Don't neglect to read Matt's original post and the other comments, too. (What follows is edited slightly from its original form.) 
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Communist Cuba has been a pet cause of liberals and leftists for almost 50 years. It has hosted the Venceremos Brigade from the 1960s to the present day, harbors extremist fugitives from American justice (Black Panther Party honchos Huey Newton and Assata Shakur), and indulges mainstream fugitives from post-Soviet truth (Oliver Stone, Charlize Theron).

The New Left of the early 60s backed the revolution there from the get-go. Soft liberals -- as well as many Cuban Communists -- were taken in by Castro's pledge to institute democracy. Lee Oswald used the "Fair Play for Cuba Committee" as a cover to pose as a wacky leftist in order to assassinate John Kennedy. (In the opinion of many Republicans Kennedy was the last remotely honorable Democratic president -- to whom Richard Nixon and the Republican Party prudently ceded the 1960 presidential election despite having sufficient reason to contest and/or remain bitter about the results.) Personally, I was raised on career Communist Kulturkampfer Pete Seeger's recordings of the Cuban nationalist tune "Guantanamera" -- a non-Communist, patriotic song long exploited in the service of la lucha. In fact I attended the same summer camp in the 1980s which Pete Seeger had attended in the 1930s -- something of which I used to be proud.

Communist Cuba has been an enemy of freedom as we know it on at least three continents: at the first opportunity it installed (presumably) nuclear missiles aimed at North America, and it exported war to Bolivia in the 1960s and to Angola in the 1970s.

When la dictadura falls, there will be a vacuum of political leadership that will need to be filled. Hopefully that need is being addressed already. Yet the "culture war" as it relates to Cuba is already being waged. That is a good thing.

When I think of the prison that is Cuba I think of the description in Armando Valladares's Against All Hope of political prisoners being drowned in a shit-saturated sewage ditch under a baking sun on that Caribbean gulag aka Isla de Pinos. By comparison Camp X-Ray is a Travelodge (with room service) and The Shawshank Redemption a children's bedtime story.

It's up to the American and Cuban (and Cuban-American) Right to set the tone for this culture war, because if we allow types like Reinaldo Arenas and Wim Wenders to control the debate, we'll betray the Cuban people yet again.

- Un hombre sincero

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Let's see, the subject of last year's Passover post was the Soviet Union. This year it's Cuba. Next year in Tehran!

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ENDNOTES and AFTERTHOUGHTS:

* (Update 04/03) * My dear blogbuddy Fausta left a must-read comment about Reinaldo Arenas's work in the comments section. Please read it.

* Fausta, with whom I sometimes argue -- but always patiently, carefully, and constructively (and therefore, Gentle Reader, instructively) -- suggested in the comments that Arenas's life and work are a direct subversion of the Cuban regime. Indeed. When it comes to truth, Fausta and I are always on the same side of the debate. And we always root for each other, even when we're on opposing sides of the debate. It's just that here I'm keen to push the empirical and analytical envelopes in a certain way.

* My (first) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police, whom I expect to pound on my door because I mentioned Reinaldo Arenas as neither a hero nor a victim, although in many ways he was both (and both at the same time): My phrasing is deliberate, and I own it. I don't suggest banning from the cultural debate the import of Sr. Arenas's life and work and death (by suicide), nor diminishing their potential contributions to it. As if I'm capable (or desirous) of suppressing truth! All and everything I'm saying is that his life and work and death should not set the tone of the debate.

* My (second) preemptive statement to the PC Thought Police: Lest you accuse me of being barren of compassion for anyone who suffers and dies -- so wastingly and so wastefully -- from AIDS, or for anyone who lives on after loved ones have died from AIDS, you need to surrender the calculating portion of your intellect (if only for a moment) to my sonnet "When Late We Lie."

* My (third) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police: Now -- does "silence = death"? Or is silence golden? (Hint: that's a trick question.)

* My (fourth) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police: I've always got one finger pointed in your general direction. You'll have to guess which one, though.

* My (fifth) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police: I'm happy to debate any issue with anyone, it's just that -- by way of some kind of neoconservative "affirmative action" -- defectors from the PC Thought Police are encouraged to apply. (Need more encouragement? Go read Natan Sharansky's The Case for Democracy.)

* My (sixth) pre-emptive statement to the PC Thought Police: The blogosphere's on to your devilish masters!

* Found a suitable "Guantanamera" video!  After everything, este viejo's still got his moves. Just like the Cuban people. Take it away, papi!:

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True Whit

Today, April 1st, is the birthday of Whittaker Chambers, a man who deserves to be commemorated -- and studied -- as nothing less than the spiritual father of modern American conservatism.

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Chambers's confessional autobiography Witness is a modern classic and should be required reading in college level American history cirricula, as well as in courses on the history of Christianity in America. The title derives, first, from him being the federal government's most authoritative witness during Congress's investigations of Communist spies and sympathizers within the federal government during and after World War II. These investigations, conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), were meticulous, overdue, and -- as a republic's exercise in the preservation of the integrity of its highest institutions -- above all honorable. As a result, one of HUAC's members, the young Congressman Richard Nixon (R-CA), was catapulted into the nati0nal spotlight, going on twice to land the vice-presidential nomination of the Republican Party's victorious national tickets of 1952 and 1956. (Click here for a short list of some of America's unsung HUAC heroes.)
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The most wrangling (and partisan) consequence of HUAC's anti-Communist investigations was the Alger Hiss perjury trials of 1948-50. In these Chambers's testimony was pitted repeatedly against that of his former Communist Party "comrade" Alger Hiss. With degrees from Johns Hopkins and Harvard, Hiss enjoyed a stellar, if behind the scenes, career in government. Since the 1930s he had held several high-ranking posts within the State Department and after World War II was a founder of The United Nations. At first it seemed that Chambers, a college dropout and self-confessed political subversive, couldn't hold a candle to the career public servant. Yet Hiss's eventual conviction in a court of law -- on charges of perjury, not treason (and therefore subject to a risibly soft sentence) -- vindicated Chambers's HUAC testimony. The court of public opinion, on the other hand, would remain sharply divided for decades, with Hiss being hailed as a hero for the rest of his life, and even afterwards, by nearly all liberals and leftists. Post-Soviet archival discoveries of the 1990s prove beyond considerable doubt that Hiss had spied for the Soviet Union and against the United States of America.
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It should be noted that Nixon facilitated Chambers's HUAC testimony years before the Army-McCarthy hearings. Therefore the two should not be confused. The latter (often referred to as "a witch hunt") were conducted in the Senate at the strenuous behest of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI). They both of course shared important traits, but were and remain separate investigations. Their differences, in fact, were not lost on Chambers who, after publishing the account of his life, his HUAC testimony, and the Hiss trials in Witness, confided privately to William F. Buckley that he sensed McCarthy's theatrical tactics would, on balance, hurt the American anti-Communist movement. Above all, what the House and Senate investigative committees shared was to soldier on in the face of what was probably the most orchestrated obstruction and obfuscation ever brought to bear against the pursuit -- by the elected officials of a representative democracy -- of the unvarnished truth concerning native agents and abettors hard at work in the service of that democracy's sworn, mortal enemy. The obfuscation continues to this day: in the media, academia, professional letters, and popular culture.
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Alger Hiss had been an advisor to President Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference of early 1945. Whatever else it accomplished, Yalta is notorious for being where the liberal democratic West ceded influence over Eastern Europe to Communist tyranny. Yet during this time, as the American-Soviet alliance was drawing to a close, Chambers had become America's truest and highest-placed anti-Communist journalist. With a resume that included having written for and edited the Communist Party USA's leading journal New Masses, Chambers in 1939 had been brought on to the editorial board of Time magazine. There he quickly and habitually found himself at odds with a staff that was largely conciliatory towards the Soviet Union. Haunted by his past but undaunted by his present, he toiled to a tune he'd heard from a German ex-Communist: Hit them hard! This he did. Chambers emphatically lamented the Yalta Conference in his penetrating, prophetic essay, "Ghosts on the Roof." "Ghosts" broke the mould for editorial commentary when it appeared in Time's March 5, 1945 issue. In haunting tones it posited that the undead ghosts of Russia's assassinated Romanovs had gathered at Yalta to note, with wry brooding from beyond unmarked graves, the achievement by Soviet power of the fallen dynasty's own, long-coveted ambitions -- imperial domination over as broad a swath of humanity as possible.

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Decades later, when Harvard historian Richard Pipes set out (in his hefty study of the first years of Communist state power) to shift the public's understanding of those years from one of a popular revolution to one of a coup d'etat, he was granting, if only indirectly, an academic imprimatur to Chambers's long under-appreciated -- indeed, often scorned -- voice in the wilderness.
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James and Me

One can learn from one's errors. What one cannot survive is allowing other people to make your errors for you.
-- James Baldwin, No Name in the Street

One can learn from one's Eros. What one cannot survive is allowing other people to make your Eros for you.
-- Jeremayakovka
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James and I go way back, Gentle Reader. It's good to bring him into the present. Bringing him into the future will be even better.

Open Letter To Matt Sanchez

The following is a message of appreciation I recently sent to Matt Sanchez -- Marine reservist, Columbia University student, and recent CPAC honoree. In my opinion his conduct since last fall, when he first stepped into the public spotlight, is worthy of the admiration of all Americans. With Matt's permission I am openly posting my letter here.

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Hello Matt,

The first time I heard about you was two weeks ago when you were presented with the Jeane Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award at CPAC 2007. Congratulations on the honor and thank you for your commitment to our country. Then those tabloid stories broke. While I'm sure you are intent on putting them behind you, I would like you to know that they bring to mind issues that are important to me and, I expect, to the broader conservative movement.

You see, 15 or more years ago, when I was a very young adult, I too attempted to live "the gay lifestyle." This took place at UC Berkeley and in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the gay agenda figures especially prominently. Unlike you my prime motivation was not immoral and illicit sex but immoral and illicit politics -- a clear commitment to a vague concept of Marxist-Leninist revolution. Yet like you I "wasn't very good at being gay" either. More accurately, because my heterosexual tendency was never seriously in doubt, I wasn't very good at being bisexual.

An individual's motivations for entering into the gay scene can be complex. One of mine, certainly, was to earn the approval of my political "comrades," almost all of whom were significantly older than me and gay or lesbian. By campaigning in the Castro for gay and lesbian candidates, by marching in the Gay Pride Parade, and, yes, by pursuing and being pursued by other men, I was offering a certain solidarity. Yet -- and this is the kernel of virtue I extracted from that experience -- claiming "bisexual" status affirmed my intention to exercise an empirical, discriminating intellect within what, I was (and remain) concerned, was significantly a conformist, mind-numbing, and hazardous social scene.

Please don't be fooled because I might appear now, at age 37, to neatly summarize those ages, both formative and deformative, of 20, 21, and 22. That time in the gay scene was a time of trial and error, of heartache and heartbreak, of knowledge and even some wisdom. In hindsight, I could have parted ways from it at any number of moments; for example, when I fell deeply in love with a woman (which provoked mockery and resentment from my "comrades"). Since, however, I had entered into it as part of a broad political commitment -- a revolutionary commitment, a will to power -- it was only later, when resolving to disavow those politics, that I reckoned that my "lifestyle choice" had been part of a much graver error. When the vanity of revolutionary expectations vanished, so too did the vanity of bisexual pretensions.

Compared to such a colorful past, my recent interest in the conservative movement is rather plain. With the West embroiled in an all-too-real war of survival against a foreign (and increasingly domestic) enemy -- imperial Islam -- we have yet to find the national resolve that will guarantee that we prevail. Hence my interest in our nation's ongoing civil dispute, sometimes referred to as "the culture war." Having thought about it, core conservative values are, to me, our society's enduring, renewing, and winning values: those of initiative and responsibility, of law and life, of conviction and compassion. As I would point out to gay and lesbian Americans who are convinced that they have no choice but to be gay or lesbian, core conservative values offer an excellent choice as to how to be American.

Let me finish, Matt, by wishing you that the Jeane Kirkpatrick Academic Freedom Award remain your defining moment of March 2007. I regret not making it to CPAC this year, but assure you that I was, and remain, there in spirit.

Sincerely,

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* Update * Welcome, Conservative Grapevine readers! And thank you to John Hawkins of Right Wing News (and of the Duncan Hunter for President campaign) for linking here. It's an honor to be listed alongside such proven talents as Michael Medved, Amanda Carpenter, and Rush Limbaugh. Don't be shy about visiting my entire "Gay/Lesbian" category, which includes takes on  Anita Bryant , Ann Coulter, and Larry Kramer.

Somewhere In Washington A Conservative Political Action Conference Is Missing Its Idiot

With presidential campaign announcements dropping in recent weeks like fruit from trees, this year's CPAC conference is, of course, generating bunches of bloggy buzz. Everyone's noted that John McCain has opted out of CPAC 2007, predicting that his absence is ruining his ability to connect with "the base." I wouldn't be surprised. Ronald Reagan, for example, addressed CPAC 12 times between 1974 and 1988.

Here's a snippet from Reagan's first CPAC speech. It's the old Ronald Reagan -- and old John McCain -- that we remember with such reverence:

It was a year ago [1973] this coming February when this country had its spirits lifted as they have never been lifted in many years. This happened when planes began landing on American soil and in the Philippines, bringing back men who had lived with honor for many miserable years in North Vietnam prisons. Three of those men are here tonight, John McCain, Bill Lawrence and Ed Martin [see the end of this post]. It is an honor to be here tonight. I am proud that you asked me and I feel more than a little humble in the presence of this distinguished company.

Imagine what the applause sounded like following that humble acknowledgement then. I wonder how exactly John McCain feels today about this distinguished company.

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Hugh Hewitt has said that John McCain is a great American and a terrible Republican. That sounds about right. Truth be told, John McCain has made a difference in my life and my "political conversion."

His influence on me is small but significant. In February 2004, when I went on the road to Arizona to GOTV for Wesley Clark, I bought and read his memoir Worth The Fighting For. It's the first book by any Republican politician that probably I'd ever touched, let alone read. I didn't know what was behind McCain's reputation as a "maverick," and I still considered him "on the other side," but at the time it sounded appealing. I wanted to learn, not be ignorant about, the opposition. I wanted to respect, not maltreat, it. Besides, one of the few people I grew up with, who had crossed over from Democrat to Republican (around the time I had crossed over from Democrat to New Alliance Party), had backed McCain's candidacy in 2000.

Worth the Fighting For has a lot to teach about how to live in, learn from (and love) this country. His chapters include takes on Teddy Roosevelt's rugged individualism, on Ted Williams's exemplary military service (Barry Bonds is just a pumped up punk by comparison), and on Barry Goldwater's final days. I read it gratefully and, although not openly (that is, not among the  crop of Democratic activists, staffers, and players Iwas working with), I read it with an open mind. It didn't make me a Republican then and there, but it helped me take Republicans -- and our republic --  more seriously.

* * *

On Edward Martin: I couldn't find a link devoted to him exclusively; however, he is quoted at length at the end of this article about fellow POW Vice Admiral James Stockdale:

Still another man inspired by Stockdale is fellow POW Edward Martin, now a retired vice admiral. Martin's imprisonment began October 9, 1965, when his A-4 Skyhawk was hit by anti-aircraft fire 30 miles southeast of Hanoi. "He gave me inspiration and hope, told me what to expect, how to conduct myself," remembered Martin, who went on to command the U.S. Navy's Sixth Fleet and also served as deputy chief of naval operations for air warfare. "He had incredibly strong leadership that provided me with incredible inspiration at a bad time for me." Like Senator McCain, Admiral Martin attributed Stockdale's character to the values that were instilled in him at the academy. "Though I am reticent to speak of the effect anything had on someone else," said Martin, "I will attribute Jim Stockdale's courage to the humility we learned there." Martin also credited Stockdale's courage as the reason he and the other Vietnam POWs survived the brutality they endured on a daily basis: "I was able to leave prison holding my head up high. He is a giant example of what is right in America today."

"Idiot Wind" - My Neoconservative Anthem

Bob Dylan's "Idiot Wind" is "I Will Survive" for straight, white, ex-radical men.

Beyond, I'm sure, any of Bob Dylan's expectations for his thrumming, driving tune, "Idiot Wind" is my drop-down, bottom-out, fallout, rise up from the ashes, neoconservative anthem. Long before I decided to get some learnin' in conservative thinkin', I rummaged through my radical rubble to get a grip on the maddening disillusionment. "Idiot Wind" turned out to be the one rock from my Bob Dylan collection that still rolled. That steamrolled. The album's liner notes say He had remained, in front of us, or writing from the north country, and remained true. Amen, baby.

There was a righteous if still ridiculous phase during which I still believed that there was a wrong that could be righted. I believed the wrong was merely the wrong of "a wrong turn" and not the wrong of a wrong ab ovo, a wrong a priori, a throw-your-arms-up-in-the-air-and-say-"Aw, hell!" wrong. Equally ridiculous was the next phase when I believed that former friends would welcome me back, if not with open arms, then at least with open minds. Ha! In need ain' t the same as indeed.

Here's a strong live version. If this never-say-die, our-love-died-but-love-don't-die song calls out to you, Gentle Reader, well, I am sorry for what you've been through. But power to you for what I know you'll be able to go through from here on out!

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I woke up on the roadside
Daydreaming about the way things sometimes are.
Visions of your chestnut mare shoot through my head
And are making me see stars.

You hurt the ones that I love best and covered up the truth with lies.
One day you'll be in the ditch
Flies buzzing around your eyes,
Blood on your saddle....

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Now everything's a little upside down.
As a matter of fact the wheels have stopped:
What's good is bad, what's bad is good.
You'll find out when you've reached the top, you're on the bottom.

I noticed at the ceremony
Your corrupt ways had finally made you blind.
I can't remember your face anymore,
Your mouth has changed, your eyes don't look into mine....

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Down the highway, down the tracks,
Is down the road to ecstasy.
I followed you beneath the stars, hounded by your memory
And all your raging glory.

You'll never know the hurt I've suffered, nor the pain I rise above
And I'll never know the same about you,
Your holiness or your kind of love,
And it makes me feel so sorry.

Idiot wind, blowing throught the buttons of our coats,
Blowing through the letters that we wrote.
Idiot wind, blowing through the dust up on our shelves.
We are idiots, babe, it's a wonder we can even feed ourselves.

* * *

Here's an essay on Dylan's lyrics written by a professor at Williams College. Yeah, great. Anyway, "Idiot Wind" teaches, first, how to stare down the man in the mirror, and then how to stare down anyone else who would have it in for you.

Rowdy Thoughts For Rainy Days

[While much of the rest of North America is still shoveling out from heaps of snow, I blog from a corner of the continent that has undergone several days of rain.]

In addition to standing out on its own, almost medicinal, merits, a passage from Christopher Hitchens's Letters to a Young Contrarian will do double-duty today as a shout-out to a reader's recent comment by email on my recent "My Kampf" post. That post had identified some of the mini-epiphanies that, beginning in the late 1990s, swayed my sense of "Palestine" from one of an honorable cause to, at most, a misguided contention of the tragically well-intentioned. For my "secular democratic" dreams dissipated in the face of the phenomenal corruption and oppression on the part of the Palestinian Authority (of the Palestinians, by the Palestinians, and upon the Palestinians), of the ascent (through democratic means, no less) of "Kill Israel!" Hamas, and of a paramilitary pedagogy that would make a Hitler Youth instructor not proud but positively jealous. "Palestine," I admit, appears now as a paltry pawn in the mad, fanatic, two- or three- or four-faced Islamic game. In this game no matter who might prove the winner (Sunni Hamas? Shiite Iran? Wahabi Bin Laden?) the necessary losers would be, imminently, Israel, and ultimately, the United States. Recalling Golda Meir's once inflammatory and now instructive comment, whether or not a Palestinian people exists, what currently exists in "Palestine" is a declared, and obfuscating, enemy. To obfuscate matters even further, Hamas's jefe enjoys a 7,000-word "puff piece" in a major American magazine and a major American newspaper chides the American president for "saber-rattling" because he maintains a military option against nuke tech-importing and guerrilla warfare-exporting Iran. (The phrase "saber-rattling," in this instance, is as antiquated for editorial comment as the saber is for hand-to-hand combat.) A cinematic and emetic satire of all this could be called Dr. Strangefaith: Or How I Stopped Worrying And Learned To Love The Imam. I blaspheme you not.

On to the reader's emailed comment on the January 31 post. She offered this observation of feminist consciousness-raising groups : only the converted spoke, all else were silent or simply weren't there. It hones my critical assessment of the emotional, all-too-emotional, and rhetorically riddled Jewish-Palestinian "dialogue group" I'd attended some years ago in Berkeley, and had referenced in the earlier post. So thank you, Gentle Reader, for that breath of fresh air! For the will to power (or powerlessness -- as some people are "into") operates as handily within a closed circle as it does on an open, square stage. If the adjective weren't of the dumbed-down lexicon which that psycho-political institution has bequeathed the current generation, I'd praise your comment for being "validating." Or should I say, "liberating"? Better yet: clarifying. Thank you, Gentle Reader, for being clarifying.

As if commenting on her comment, Hitchens recalls the advent in the early 1970s of the flimsy ethic that issues from the forced equation of two linguistic variables, those adjectives pressed so unimpressively into service as nouns, "the personal" and "the political":

I remember very well the first time I heard the saying "The Personal Is Political." It began as a sort of reaction to the defeats and downturns that followed 1968: a consolation prize, as you might say, for people who had missed that year. I knew in my bones that a truly Bad Idea had entered the discourse. Nor was I wrong. People began to stand up at meetings and orate about how they felt, not about what or how they thought, and about who they were rather than what (if anything) they had done or stood for. It became the replication in even less interesting form of the narcissism of the small difference, because each identity group begat its subgroups and "specificities." This tendency has often been satirised -- the overweight caucus of the Cherokee transgender disabled lesbian faction demands a hearing on its needs -- but never satirised enough. You have to have seen it really happen. From a way of being radical it very swiftly became a way of being reactionary; the Clarence Thomas hearings demonstrated this to all but the most dense and boring and selfish, but then, it was the dense and boring and selfish who had always seen identity politics as their big chance. (Letters, pp. 113-114)
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No wonder, as the reader emailed, some people quickly learned to play that tune while others, sadly in their grievous silence, only learned to be played.

I wonder, too, whether Hitchens will ever see fit to reappraise the Palestinian cause, that is, to redirect his animus on Palestinians' behalf in a way that runs even a little less against democratic Israel and more against the Palestinian dictatorship. Even Hitchens's good friend Edward Said (the ultimate Palestinian man of letters) couldn't refrain, time to time, from openly castigating Yasser Arafat's domination over "Palestine." Now that Said and Arafat -- or "Chairman Arafat," as Hitchens intoned, more protectively than provocatively, in Tucker Carlson's show when the Palestinian dictator was dying -- have both passed from the scene, JMK hopes that Hitchens will rise to such an occasion. The window of opportunity for calling all the world's Dr. Strangefaiths by their too true name may be closing.

Happy Birthday, Ronald Reagan

This just in from Steve Beren, the 2006 GOP congressional candidate up in Washington's 7th CD. Steve forwards a series of links to several Ronald Reagan speeches in honor of his 96th birthday (below).

Like JMK, Steve once mistook Marxist chimeras for honorable imperatives. Yet after being shipwrecked on the lonely shore of Remorse, he set out toward the opposite, labored shore of Responsibility, riding the rip tides of electoral politics by campaigning against far left, Michael Moore talking-head Democrat, Jim McDermott.
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This former Marxist who is now conservative, former atheist who is now born-again Christian, and humble man who advocates the 21st Century's "good fight" against terrorism, Steve is a dutiful student of Reagan's example and a rightful inheritor of his mantle. To learn more about Ronald Reagan is to learn more about Steve Beren, and to learn more about Steve Beren is to learn more about Ronald Reagan. Steve's public commitment to helping deciding just what leadership American conservatism will provide to our rapidly-shifting 21st Century reality is an example to all of us. It was an honor for JMK to endorse Steve last year during his feisty, uphill campaign.

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Thank you, Steve, for these links, and even more for your spiritual and political rebirth. Ronald Reagan would be proud of you.

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Ronald Reagan in his own words:

Republican National Convention speech, 7/17/80
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/shownomination.php?convid=19

Debate with John Anderson, 9/21/80
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showdebate.php?debateid=9

Debate with Jimmy Carter, 10/28/80
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showdebate.php?debateid=10

Inaugural address, 1/20/81
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=43130

State of the Union, 1/26/82
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=42687

State of the Union, 1/25/83
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=41698

State of the Union, 1/25/84
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=40205

Republican National Convention speech, 8/23/84
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/shownomination.php?convid=1

Debate with Walter Mondale, 10/7/84
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showdebate.php?debateid=11

Debate with Walter Mondale, 10/21/84
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/showdebate.php?debateid=12

Inaugural address, 1/20/85
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=38688

State of the Union, 2/6/85
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=38069

State of the Union, 2/4/86
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=38069

State of the Union, 1/27/87
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=34430

State of the Union, 1/25/88
http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=36035

My Kampf: The Islamic Mein Kampf and A Mea Culpa

* Update (2/18) * Welcome Israpundit readers! Thanks, Ted, for the mention. Your feedback on this, or any "Second Thoughts" post, is welcome.

Arriving in this morning's email from my friend, David Horowitz, was this ten-minute audiovisual primer on the Iranian and Palestinian Holocaust threat, The Islamic Mein Kampf.

I watched it. The didactic advantage of The Islamic Mein Kampf is that it boils down into words and images the precise, deadly, and implacable intentions of radical Islam -- issuing primarily from Iran and Palestine -- vis-à-vis Israel and the United States.

Simply put: They will come for you.

They will come for you.

They will come for you.
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This generation, it won't be a knock on the door or a round up at the train station. Instead it'll be a dirty nuke or a poisoned water supply or more hijacked airplanes or missiles over Tel Aviv.

Learn more about The Terrorism Awareness Project.

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It's been a long intellectual road over the past ten years, and doing my part to inform people about The Islamic Mein Kampf is the latest step in what hopefully will be a long road to come -- a long road in a different direction. Here are a few words that begin to tell how I got from there to here.

Through the 1990s I dragged with me the remnants of the radical fantasies I'd imbibed while suckling, as a political babe, on the sour milk of Marxism. I actually used to believe that the imposition of a "Palestine" over all the territory of what's now Israel and Judea and Samaria was not only possible but the most humane and egalitarian resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. I projected my own, American creeds of fairness and republican egalitarianism onto Arabs (without ever travelling in Arab lands or undertaking to learn, seriously, its history and culture). I studied the die-hard American apologists for anti-Zionism of the 1980s and 1990s, Paul Findley and Noam Chomsky -- and of course Edward Said.

In addition I read very closely Jean Genet (left), the most celebrated French partisan of Arab "resistance" to Israel (and also a partisan of black American "resistance" to "Amerika"). In his last productive writing period he attempted to elevate the PLO to the status of ancient Greek warriors. I translated into English "Violence and Brutality," Genet's passionate but intellectually indefensible 1977 essay in which he gave his poetic blessing to terrorism. Not stopping there, I took this sentiment to its logical extreme by writing poetry modeled after Genet's -- and also East German Heiner Müller's (above, right) -- fascination with the subject, poetry that effectively endorsed the left-wing, pro-PLO terrorism of that era.

That was my "revolutionary" intellectual project: 1) enlist my native American progressive populism to building an intellectual bridge between European terrorism of the 1970s and Palestinian terrorism of the 1990s; and thus 2) making and penetrating a breach in liberal Western letters and forcing the reading public to accomodate itself to this new radical reality. I flattered myself that I would be the avant-garde in print while groups like Hamas would be the avant-garde on the ground.

How did I accommodate myself to the murder of Israeli innocents, you might ask? Simple. I would just mull an occasional phrase from Genet, Violence alone can put an end to the brutality of man.... or from Müller, When she walks through your bedrooms carrying butcher knives, you'll know the truth.... Like some little intellectual lozenge, it would reduce the irritation. For a little while.

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So, what happened? Well, I didn't exactly "go native"; I didn't, for example, join the International Solidarity Movement or start a family with a Palestinian woman (although the opportunities presented themselves). More modestly, I became conversant in a fair amount of Arab literature and film. I subscribed to Al-Jadid magazine. I bought and read the Koran. More practically, I became acquainted with certain Palestinian and pro-Palestinian activists here in America.

By coincidence (and later by cultivation) I became chummy with relatives of a former director of the Arab Film Festival, and frequently attended AFF programs. Through a mutual friend I met (and briefly worked for) the radical National Lawyers' Guild and American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee activist Nancy Hormachea. In her practice she often represents asylum seekers fleeing persecution in Iran and Pakistan, although in her political activism she's a staunch opponent of Israeli policies towards Palestinians. By coincidence I was a classmate of Fadia Issam Rafeedie, the author of "An 'Apologia of Radicalism'" who turned her 2000 UC Berkeley valedictorian speech into a most egregious breach of academic decorum when she served as the figurehead of a mass protest, speaking "from her heart" in defiance against the commencement speaker, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.
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In case you're wondering, there aren't any terribly racy tales of idealism and disillusionment to confess. I think I grew weary, then wary, then scared. I grew weary of hearing simplistic comparisons of the Israeli occupation to Nazism. Can't you do any better than that? I thought, eventually thinking, You know, you need to do better than that.... I grew wary when one of my Arab buddies "apologized" to me in the aftermath of a Hamas suicide (homicide) bombing. Do I really represent Jewry and Israel? For starters, I never, ever claimed to.... Does he represent Hamas(!)? He never claimed to, but -- beyond this being an obvious instance of a young man's conceit -- it seemed to reveal a continuity of opinion among Arabs. It seemed to reveal that possibly there was a divide (or at minimum, some vital difference) between me and them that I ought to not gloss over ... that I ought to work harder at figuring out ... that he also ought to work harder at figuring out....

Something else that added to my wariness was my attendance at a handful of sessions of a Jewish-Palestinian "dialogue group" that met in the Berkeley Hills. A derivative format of the feminist "consciousness-raising" group of the 1970s (which, as Andrea Dworkin states unapologetically in Heartbreak, was itself inspired by Communist China's Cultural Revolution) this "dialogue group" was overwhelmingly attended by Jews who endlessly professed their good intentions towards Palestinians. Typically a woman would make a somewhat strident speech about men being to blame for the escalation of violence (which, though partly true, is not the whole truth). One time a native-born Israeli woman tried to put into words her dread that Israel would no longer exist. One of the very few Palestinian attendees would affirm the need to understand how hard life under occupation was, and then make a pitch for the rest of us to purchase Palestinian olive oil. No one, however, (including me) dared ask perhaps the most pertinent question, How come so few Palestinians attended the "dialogue group"? The answer, as a Palestinian confidant told me, is that nearly all Palestinians she knew -- for the most part the secular Palestinian Left, the ostensible "partners in peace" -- nearly all of them despise such "dialogue groups." The "dialogue groups" don't accomplish anything. They're much ado about nothing. Or rather, they're very little ado about a whole hell of a lot.

What demonstrated definitively where my anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian sympathy was leading was a telephone conversation I had with Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh (right). Shortly after he founded Al-Awda, "The Palestinian Right to Return Coalition," I contacted him to suggest offering some outside support to his effort to secure for the surviving Palestinian refugees of 1948 and all their living descendants the right to patriate within the State of Israel. After confiding to Qumsiyeh my idealistic hope for a "secular, democratic Palestine" he in turn confided that indeed this one-state, not a two-state, solution was his ultimate aim. Here was a meeting of minds I had long hoped for, but it also served as a real (albeit puny) "little drummer girl" moment. There, clear as a bell, was the looking glass. However, I decided not to go through it, and shied away from any further involvement or contact with Al-Awda.

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Most of what I just described happened before 9/11.

Precisely how that day added to the mix I'm not going to get into in this post. By way of beginning to build an intellectual bridge, however, from Palestinian terrorism of the 1990s to neoconservative counter-jihadism of the 21st Century, here are select readings that have made a difference.

In alphabetical order (and, for that matter, in no particular political order):

Berlinski, Claire. Menace In Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too.
Berman, Paul. Terror and Liberalism.
Hanson, Victor. An Autumn of War: What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism.
Hitchens, Christopher. Love, Poverty, and War.
Horowitz, David. Unholy Alliance.
Nafisi, Azar. Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Rashid, Ahmed. Taliban.
Scheuer, Mark. Imperial Hubris.
Steyn, Mark. America Alone.
Wright, Lawrence. The Looming Tower.

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So here we are.

If you're already informed on the Iranian and Palestinian threat, then most of what's presented in The Islamic Mein Kampf will already be familiar. No sweat. Please then just take a minute and forward The Islamic Mein Kampf to all your contacts.

And if you believe that Iran, Palestine, and Islamic war against the West are not real, imminent threats, then I hope you watch The Islamic Mein Kampf. Watch it, consider it, and pursue its implications to their logical and moral ends.

May it bring you into a Vast, Classically Liberal Consensus -- which, by dispensing once and for all with left-wing apologies for terrorist tactics and terrorist ideologies -- is the only way the West will ever thwart Palestinian and, as Alexandra reminds, Iranian genocidal designs.

When Ronald Reagan quipped, "We begin bombing in five minutes," he was joking. Ahmedinejad, Nasrallah, Haniyeh -- they're not joking.

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Related: David Gartenstein-Ross's interview today in FrontPage Magazine, "My Year Inside Radical Islam."

JMK Supports Federal Funding For the Arts ...

... when it's this kind of federal funding for these kinds of arts: during the height of the Cold War the CIA reportedly funded the publication, in Russian, of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago. For once the manuscript had begun to circulate, a terrible intrigue pursued this novel along its harrowing high-brow itinerary -- straight through the KGB, the CIA, the Nobel Prize Committee, and points in between. Thank G-d for the CIA!

According to WaPo:

A CIA role in printing a Russian-language edition has been rumored for years. [Here is] the first detailed account of what would rank as perhaps the crowning episode of a long cultural Cold War, in which the agency secretly financed literary magazines and seminars in Europe in an effort to cultivate anti-Soviet sentiment among intellectuals.

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Dr. Z. is a tale of great sensitiveness and great sadness by one of the few, true literary survivors of the Russian Revolution. It chronicles, in the life of one man, the spiritual collapse of an entire society, through his imperfectly realized romantic needs and poetic output. Pasternak's attempt at the 20th Century's Great Russian Novel offers clues to what went wrong in the USSR and wherever any society comes under the sway of totalitarian dictatorship.

Another concern of mine is to what extent did Pasternak, as a thoroughly assimilated Jew who lent his bookish genius to the production and propagation of Western literature (including employing specifically Christian imagery), may have indirectly left behind traces of the spiritual collapse of one who has abandoned Judaism....?

A Hitchens-Chambers Connection

* Updated * [& bumped to the top of the page; btw, there are 7 posts today so pls scroll down to sample them. Tks!]

This Ron Capshaw item helps explain why Chris Hitchens resonates with me:

Hitchens too is an odd figure for the Right.  He writes now for the Weekly Standard but still considers Leon Trotsky a great man. He supports an administration peopled by born-agains, but is an atheist whose moments of reverential silence are reserved for labor union matyrs, not Christian ones. Like Chambers, he has carried considerable baggage with him.  His lifelong hatred of religion in all forms garners him allies who are fighting it in Taliban and al-Qaeda versions. But he also allies with Republicans based on revolutionary priorities he still carries with him from Troskyite times. It was while seeking revolution from the masses that he discovered it could come from above.

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Not that this passage describes me precisely. Trotsky, while formidable, is not "great": a dogmatic murderer who brings some people hope is still a dogmatic murderer. And it's not hatred of religion but a continuing aspiration toward reason, toward inquiry, which religion tempers -- sooths and smooths -- that animates me.

In any case, Ron's article is the first I've come upon that attempts to liken Chris Hitchens and Whit Chambers: Hitchens, to whom Oedipus would be, first, an authority-toppling (and -wielding) revolutionary, a king and a tyrant so arrived in this world; Chambers, to whom Oedipus was a broken and blinded, yet a pious, righteous exile so awaiting the next world.

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VERITAS ODIT MORAS
-- Seneca, Oedipus

"Truth hates delay": what's emblazoned on Hitchens's sword is etched on Chambers's shield.

Ryszard Kapuscinski, 1932-2007

RK's another one I came upon during "the lonely years":

“There is, I admit, a certain egoism, in what I write,” he once said, “always complaining about the heat or the hunger or the pain I feel. But it is terribly important to have what I write authenticated by its being lived. You could call it, I suppose, personal reportage, because the author is always present. I sometimes call it literature by foot.”

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His publicists calculated that he had lived through 27 coups and uprisings, but privately, he admitted to dozens more. To each he brought the view of the commoner; a white man who lived as close as he could to the lifestyle of the downtrodden or hapless locals. He carried his own flagons of water and waited for hours in overcrowded bus stations.

* * *

In his Travels with Herodotus, due to be published in the United States this year, Kapuscinski offers tribute to the Greek historian he considered the world's first great reporter. In a 2003 speech, Kapuscinski explained Herodotus' formula for successful journalism: First, be willing to submit to hard, painstaking travel to get information first hand. Then, be able to listen carefully and respectfully to people. Third, do your homework, be investigative and precise. Journalists must be "missionaries, translators and messengers."

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"Revolutions precisely begin when the man has stopped being afraid. He gets rid of his fear and feels free, without that there would be no revolution." ....

He shunned bluster when discussing his career. "Empathy is perhaps the most important quality for a foreign correspondent," he told the New York Times in 1987. "If you have it, other deficiencies are forgivable. If you don't, nothing much can help."

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Like his writing, Kapuscinski was spare, learned and thoughtful. He was occasionally criticised for his lack of formal involvement in Poland's reconstruction, but preferred to remain on the outside, abiding by his three rules of "no functions, no titles, no organisations".

Moral Imagination

Moral imagination is better than American Express: not only should you not leave home without it, you can't find your way back home without it, too. John Kekes elaborates on his new book, The Enlargement of Life: Moral Imagination At Work [couldn't find an image of his latest title, Gentle Reader, so a previous one will have to do]:
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We all start out in life with possibilities that are defined by our genetic inheritance, upbringing, personal experience, and education. The range of these possibilities is narrow, full of tensions and inconsistencies. It is hospitable to some of our needs, talents, and ambitions, and it is indifferent to or even antagonistic to others.

Many people remain stuck with the possibilities they start with, and since the possibilities often do not fit their personalities and characters, they end up living frustrated lives by trying to realize possibilities not suited to them. The great importance of moral imagination is that it is perhaps the most important means by which people can expand the possibilities of life they have available.

Moral imagination enables people to grow in breadth and depth, become acquainted with new, interesting possibilities of life, and thereby enrich the narrow set of possibilities with which they start out. And moral imagination does this by way of the intelligent and reflective reading of works of literature that have stood the test of time precisely because they depict different forms of life, different possibilities, and different ways in which lives can be become fulfilling or frustrating. Moral imagination is moral because it is one of the best ways to make a good life for oneself.

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This is the stuff I intuited but was never taught in college, and hence one of the reasons, despite the perks and opportunities, I resented and frankly loathed my undergraduate experience. This stuff -- let's call it "moral imagination" -- is what, after the political, professional, and financial shipwreck of the early Marxist commitment, I was reaching to recover during the "lonely years." Those were years of dutifully sitting down with many a book on my lap (literature and history, mostly), with my conscience on my back, and just maybe with an angel or two on my shoulder. I even set aside literary ambitions (for the time), trying just to relearn and retool -- morally as well as intellectually. The loneliness of those years was more spiritual than social or physical, although the years were lonely in all those senses. For when the spirit is unsettled, all else is unsettled. (That's what I was trying to get at when typing "find your way back home" at the top of this post: a less restless, more settled spirit.)

"Imagination" is funny to Chet Baker, but moral imagination sure isn't funny to Jeremayakovka!

Remember Betty Van Patter

All committed ex-Marxists can point to a signal event (or series of events) which usher in the first of their second thoughts and hence the beginning of the end of their radical commitments. For Whittaker Chambers it was two things: politically, the Hitler-Stalin Pact and, spiritually, screams -- screams of the tortures inflicted on loyal Russian Communists during Stalin's purges in the late 1930s.

For David Horowitz, son of Communist Party activists and an intellectual father of the 60s New Left, who today is one of America's premier public intellectuals, that signal event (personally, at least) was the murder of his friend, Betty Van Patter, at the hands of the very Black Panther Party to which each had dedicated many of their best efforts in the early 1970s.

David has written at length of the terrible guilt her murder inflicted upon him, guilt which thrust him into a personal, political, and professional "freefall" (his word) that lasted for several years. Yet true to his neoconservative nerve, he revisits her case from time to time, with special and labored force. For example, eight years ago he published a "Letter to the Past" in which he pled for justice for Betty and in fact all those murdered by the Black Panther Party:

Whatever the reasons, the fact remains that to this day not a single organization of the mainstream press has ever investigated the Panther murders, even though the story is one that touches the lives and political careers of the entire liberal establishment including the First Lady [now, junior senator from New York] and the Deputy Attorney General in charge of civil rights for the Clinton Administration. Both Hillary Clinton and Bill Lann Lee began their political careers as law students at Yale by organizing demonstrations in 1970 to shut down the University and stop the trial of seven Panther leaders who had tortured and then executed a black youth named Alex Rackley. This silence is even more puzzling since, despite the blackout by the national media, the details of the story have managed to trickle out over the years.

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Over the recent Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend (appropriately) he was visited by a little bit of hope that at last those responsible for both the murder and its continuing cover-up in the mainstream media and in political circles will be called to account. Hope, that is, in the form of Betty's daughter who confronted a former Black Panther who currently is promoting a book about the Panthers' "revolutionary" criminal exploits -- and who also happens to be a prime suspect in her mother's murder. David blogs about it here.

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Related:
"When the Chickens Came Home to Roost - The Nation of Islam's Serial Murders in San Francisco"

One or Two Second Thoughts on Anti-Zionism

During JMK's communist and then fellow-travelling decade of the 1990s, one lingering and consoling idea I sustained was a misty-eyed view through rose-colored glasses that a (pardon the expression) "secular, democratic 'Palestine'" was possible. Possible and hence -- with an iron-clad sense that only a Marxist, or former Marxist, can appreciate -- necessary.

Some fanatic naifs get "into" Cuba; I got "into" "Palestine" (or rather, FiluhSTEEN). At least I never wore a keffiyeh! No, I retained a minimum discriminating morality to know that solidarity does not equal identity. I was more solidaire et solitaire. More second thoughts about anti-Zionism later.

In the meantime, Sigmund, Carl and Alfred has a recent, straight-shooting post by Canadian journalist, blogger, and Laval U. law student (Québec City - brrr!) Adam Daifallah about the need to support Israel:

First, Israel must be supported. I have no problem saying this as someone who is of partly Palestinian ancestry. Israel is a democratic, pluralistic western outpost in the middle of a cesspool of tyranny and despair. [emphasis added]

Please also check out Mr. Daifallah's site, including the book of which he his co-author, Rescuing Canada's Right. He and Ms. Kheiriddin could be voices of reason in the Canadian wilderness.

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Nice to discover ya, Adam! Ftr, JMK aime Québec!  Jogging along the Plains of Abraham, dancing Chez Dagobert, and dining at this tasty restaurant on Rue Ste. Foy, Café Mille Feuilles: mostly vegetarian cuisine à la française -- it's win-win and yum-yum.

Victor Hanson and My Public Shame

* Update (01/2007) * Welcome, Zombietime readers! If you value this post, you will probably also relish my 9/11 tribute, my Halloween costume, and my Oriana Fallaci and Whittaker Chambers tributes. Thank you for visiting. Your feedback is welcome.

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Gentle Reader, I (almost) apologize for referencing him so often on this blog. It's just that I am loyal to the man. Loyalty stems from gratitude, and Victor Hanson has given JMK much to be grateful for. A powerful article by him appears today, called "Losing the Enlightenment."   

I first heard of Victor Hanson thanks to the Internet, from one of my first virtual inspirations, the Brooklyn-based, truly Judeophilic blog Fightin' With Grabes. "Who is this guy," I wondered, with wonder and a little jealousy, "who writes so confidently and so economically about ancient Western values?"

I wasn't comfortable with conservative thinking at the time, but a few years ago when I noticed Who Killed Homer? on a remainder table in a Berkeley bookstore I snatched it up. Co-authored with John Heath, it's a post-mortem analysis of post-modern Classical education at the American university. I'd had a worthy introduction to the Classics as an adolescent (three years of high school Latin), but had foolishly neglected them during early adulthood. WKH? single-handedly revived my interest in them -- an interest that had suffered in part, as I learned, from its emasculation by the university itself.

Perhaps the most fortifying component of all of Hanson's writing and thinking is his frequent references to "public shame." A time-honored value among the ancient Greeks, public shame has been waylaid by a contemporary individualism that is often micromanaged beyond belief and beyond even recognition. In my case, the phrase expresses a civic sentiment, or attitude, that arose during long reflections in the aftermath of renouncing a sworn Communist militancy. For saying "goodbye to all that" doesn't cut it when reckoning with such treasonous allegiance. Virtue and honor have to be learned and earned once again (or for the first time). Acknowledging a sense of public shame has been instructive and therapeutic in this new, ex- and anti-communist, patriotic mission. Hence the better part of my gratitude to Professor Hanson, and my loyalty.

Marxist art critic John Berger, whom I regard as humane (though drastically misguided politically), once wrote that "madness is revolutionary freedom confined to the self." The book in which that phrase appears had been recommended by an art instructor during the incipient radicalization of my early undergraduate years at UC Berkeley. It caught my attention then for a reason. For those years were blowing whiffs of such mad experience my way. That experience was comprised in no small part of an excited compassion towards groups whom I had heard of but of whom I had little or no firsthand experience -- the homeless, say, and people with AIDS, and Palestinians (and Jews, too, but dead European ones sooner than live Israeli ones...). This excited compassion sought, demanded an outlet. It could not be confined to the self. So the whiff became a mist, the mist condensed, and soon enough it hardened into an icy compulsion -- to enter the arena of committed, Marxist politics. Excited compassion had become excited passion. It could be neither dissuaded nor attenuated but, like an out of control fire, just be allowed to burn itself out as I watched -- helpless, fascinated, and consumed. Such is the passion for "social change" or "social justice" that, I intimated, would lead either to some (any) kind of revolution or, if left unrealized, even a species of madness. It was the pretty and precarious passion (not yet beauty and not yet potency) of a so ardent youth. At the time I hadn't studied enough history to know that even if such passion did tilt in the direction of revolution, that that would necessarily lead to its own species of madness as well.

Yet I contend that the unguaranteed outcome of Berger's meditated bon mot holds true for those of us who, persevering after excited passion has burned out, seek ex-revolutionary freedom. Extricating oneself, first, from the revolutionary commitment, and then, from the revolutionary worldview, entails moral and spiritual engagement. A whole soul is at stake. (For a poetic example, see my "Miserere" from earlier this year.) Should this engagement fail, then a kind of madness, or something slightly milder -- a kind of moral and civic idiocy -- will set in. (For a live example, just strike up a political conversation with any middle-aged habitué of any offbeat cafe.) Because an underground man cannot simply will himself into becoming an aboveground man. His will, he has learned, is far too untrustworthy; his will may be necessary, but it is not sufficient for leading an upright life.

Securing ex-revolutionary freedom is, ultimately, not just a matter of individual opinion or disposition or even party affiliation. It is a public matter, necessitating public sentiments, public expressions, and public commitments before it may become settled. If it ever becomes settled. This public matter necessitates a strong sense of public shame, a standard without which there can be no definite or confident sense of public pride. For these it is to Victor Hanson, more than to any other contemporary conservative writer, that I turn and return.

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So, Gentle Reader, perhaps you will read his latest article -- a tenacious reckoning laced with just a shade of mourning -- with a deeper appreciation than you might at first have anticipated. It begins:

Our current crisis is not yet a catastrophe, but a real loss of confidence of the spirit. The hard-won effort of the Western Enlightenment of some 2,500 years that, along with Judeo-Christian benevolence, is the foundation of our material progress, common decency, and scientific excellence, is at risk in this new millennium....

Try to read it without feeling ashamed.

Virtual Teshuvah

Update (10/3): Workin' on it. Some days it flows like molasses, some like honey, some like water.

I'm applying myself to a long post about my radical past that also is somewhat tailored to this time of the Jewish year. When it's done its word count will run into the thousands, though I may not finish before Yom Kippur. It begins:

One benefit of blogging has been to attract a loose network of readers and writers whose good graces are assisting me in setting down a burden I’ve carried for years. That burden is the guilt from having once adhered to an extreme Marxist-Leninist, anti-American and anti-Zionist organization, one which clandestinely (and pompously) refers to itself as the International Workers Party (IWP). Like any leftwing radical who undergoes “second thoughts,” years of misplaced and criminal loyalty and harms inflicted and suffered had to pass before the error of my ways became clear to me. Since then I’ve taken some steps to atone -- contributing information to the definitive ex-members’ web site, going on record in both the mainstream and independent media, and participating in an academic study -- but the guilt remains. So I ask you, Gentle Reader, in tandem with the values and observances of these Days of Awe, to join me in mining some of that radical experience, to extract its lessons and offer them up for the benefit of “our brave, new, neoconservative 21st Century.” ....

Book Marks

* Update (9/13) *: Welcome, Alarming News readers and thanks, Karol, for tagging me!  You provide the needed motivation for me to properly finish this annotated list. Hope you like the fare.

Oh, boy.  Blog-buddy Irina has "tagged" me to provide unique answers to "the book meme," that is, about books that stand out in my experience. Where to start? There are so many that didn't make my list.  There is so much to say about the ones that did.

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1.    One book that changed your life
        Whittaker Chambers, Witness

        * Update (04/2007) * Please, Gentle Reader, read my post of April 1, 2007 commemorating Chambers's 106th birthday, "True Whit - Part One (Homo Rei Publicae)".
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2.    One book you have read more than once
        Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

        Anna Karenina may be the wiser and more economically written of Tolstoy's two (two!) magna opera, but nothing I've yet come across knocks War and Peace out of the top slot for must-read modern books (as opposed to #3, below). Although, granted, I haven't undertaken Proust's Remembrance….

        While we were teenagers, a friend set out to read War and Peace before we graduated high school.  Unfortunately I mistook his aloof determination for a species of arrogance. My mistake. For what I discovered about 10 years later, when I finally picked it up in a college lit. course, is that War and Peace is concerned with vital questions every man should concern himself with when he's a very young man: whether to devote one's best efforts to mysticism or mundane affairs, why and how to perform military service, and when, whom, and how to marry. I read it again within a year (this time intimately familiar with the characters) and found it at least twice as engaging, entertaining, and elevating.

        Choicest Quote (from Pierre's diary):

        Human sciences dissect everything in order to comprehend it, kill everything in order to examine it.
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        btw, At the semester's end, on the instructor's evaluation form -- brackets and all --  I wrote, "[Comparative Literature] dissects everything in order to comprehend it, kills everything in order to examine it." Heh.

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3.    One book you would want on a desert island
        (tie) The Holy Bible (King James Version)
        The Koren Bible

        Why? Simply because either one assures that, although deserted, I am not alone.

        Choicest quote:

        Then I said, "Ah, Lord God! Behold, I cannot speak! For I am only a youth." And the Lord said to me, "Do not say, 'I am only a youth,' for to all to whom I send you you shall go, and whatever I command you you shall speak.  Be not afraid of them. For I am with you to deliver you," says the Lord. (Jeremiah 1:6-8)

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4.    One book that made you laugh
        Honoré de Balzac, The Duchess of Langeais

        This novella, little known among English readers, has few comic moments.  It's a romantic melodrama with many a lesson on how to avoid -- or survive -- what in the American idiom we call, “Good Lovin' Gone Bad.” But one section of it made me cackle like a loon, like someone who is, let's just say, still bitter after all these years.

        Choicest Quote:

        Religion, Love, and Music, aren't they the three-fold expression of the same fact: the need for expansion out of which is wrought every noble soul?

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5.    One book that made you cry
        William Styron, Sophie's Choice

        This isn't the only novel to embrace the twin inheritances of American innocence and Holocaust memory (e.g., The Devil's Arithmetic (novel; movie) and From a Sealed Room come to mind), but Styron's masterpiece is and will remain for years to come the genre's standard.

        That said, I admit a sentimental interest in an appreciative reckoning with all of Styron's œuvre, and in particular with Sophie's Choice. The narrator and plot approximate my mother's fresh arrival from the Protestant heartland to New York City and her own rough introduction to certain aspects of New York Jewish society.  Thus for me Sophie's Choice snatches from oblivion details of a bygone New York which otherwise I'd only heard tell of -- heard in fact around the time Styron was conjuring his novel -- at my mama's knee. In addition, he wrote another of his novels just a couple of blocks from where I grew up.  And for reasons I won't go into here, an Emily Dickinson poem he inserts near the end of Sophie's Choice served as a most apt tribute to my grandmother at her interment.

        I had the temerity once to track Styron down by telephone. You have an idea why, Gentle Reader, but don't ask me how! It was entirely legal, if (despite being handled with discretion) not quite ethical. Burdened with a need to confide certain thoughts to him and to try to elicit some (any) response, my only calculation was to get his address so I could mail him a letter. Little did I know that he would answer his own phone! The astonishment nearly took my breath away. Clueless as to this stranger's motives, Styron was naturally on guard. I sensed a degree of reticence in him so encompassing that no matter how much I professed my most unprofessional interest in placing the call, my intrusion into his domestic solitude seemed to me to leave him traceably wounded!  I was thrilled and mortified all at once, while he was, I fear, mostly mortified. After a brief introduction I cut to the quick and asked him if I could send him the letter I'd written.

        He said Yes. I said Thank You and Goodbye.

        I sent it. He didn’t reply.

        Despite subsequent raw disappointment, I knew that that was as it should be.  For me -- and for you, Gentle Reader -- let it serve as a lesson in the high degree of delicacy decency dictates when approaching an author whose work impacts you. And, frankly, a lesson in the slim chances that one’s gesture will amount to anything more than a cursory one.

        Over time I’ve become more exacting of my erstwhile idol (and of myself, too, let's hope!). For example, that he's placed his Albert Camus-derived opposition to the death penalty in the service of appealing the murder conviction of racist, anti-American cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal I find unconscionable. Still, Styron imposed on himself almost Flaubertian standards for his rich short story trilogy, A Tidewater Morning. I once read that his ultimate project is a novel set in WWII in the Pacific (where he served during that conflict). As with Sophie's Choice and the short stories, he intends to revisit a pivotal time from his youth. I've also read that his health has declined sharply in recent years.  For the duration of his remaining tasks, whose struggles are but the accumulated riches of love and loyalty, I wish him and his family all strength and comfort.

        Choicest Quote:   "What's Owswitch?"
       
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6.    One book you wish had been written
        (tie) Albert Camus, Islam's Existential Threat To the West (2002)
        Abraham Lincoln, My Country at 100, My Life at 67 (1876)

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[6a. One book you wish you had written (as I initially misread #6)]
        Charles Baudelaire, Flowers of Evil

        Dandified bohemians and ruthless revolutionaries are entirely at cross-purposes except for one profound, shared trait: each embrace and employ evil and in turn become enmeshed in it. Baudelaire's mighty verses conjure evil's power, corruption, and cruelty -- and its fascinating, terrible beauty.

        Knowing, as I do, a bit about bohemians and more than a bit about revolutionaries, I will say that no poet renders vivid more than does Baudelaire what I had become enmeshed in -- had become -- in the course of that most seductive and elusive (and illusory) radical attachment. Whittaker Chambers's Witness (of #1, above) is a testament of one man's agonized return from the spiritual brink to which Communism leads men; Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil is, for me, a vision of the brink itself.

        Choicest quote:

        Les sanglots des martyrs et des suppliciés
        Sont une symphonie enivrante sans doute,
        Puisque, malgré le sang que leur volupté coûte,
        Les cieux ne s'en sont point encore rassasiés!
        -- from "Le Reniement de Saint Pierre"

        (The sobs of martyrs and tortured men
        Make an intoxicating symphony, for sure,
        For despite the cost in blood of such pleasure,
        The heavens haven't yet had their fill of them!
        -- from "The Denial of Saint Peter"; trans. by JMK)

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7.    One book you wish had never been written
        V. I. Lenin, What is to Be Done?

Had there never been What Is To Be Done?, there would never have been a Bolshevik revolution in Russia -- and maybe never anywhere else. Q.E.D.

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8.    One book you're currently reading
        (concurrently) Allegra Goodman, Kaaterskill Falls
       The Book of Elijah
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9.    One book you've been meaning to read
        Adin Rabbi Steinsaltz, The Talmud, The Steinsaltz Edition: A Reference Guide
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Five other blogs "tagged" to answer "the book meme":

Dreams Into Lightning (Asher)
[Talk about provocative and engaging answers.  Go see for yourself!]

Roncesvalles (The Editrix)
[The voice of Germany in the West's 21st Century fight for survival.  A must-read blog!]

Pearlies of Wisdom (Pearl)
[Pearl has respectfully declined, but you should go read her blog anyway!]

Mad Zionist (MZ)
[His answers are in the Comments, below]

Crossing the Rubicon2 (Gail)
[Gail's thoughtful, tasteful posting makes her a "go-to" site to find out whether news is good for the Jews.  Soon we'll get to see another side of her.]

Free Thoughts (Stefania)
[One of the b-sphere's most energetic, dedicated bloggers she at first declined, but then said she's in.  I can't wait for her answers.  Now, that's Italian!  (Update (8/21) - Stefania's answers are in! see Comment #23)]