Talking to conservatives

The New Neo Posted on by

This comment on a previous thread intrigued me (the first question, that is—although the second was a bit intriguing, also).

The query posed: back when I was a liberal Democrat, if I’d met a group composed mostly of conservatives, and had talked politics with them (or anything else, for that matter), what would my reaction have been?

Interesting question, impossible to answer with total knowledge, of course, since one can’t take a trip back in time. I’ve been critical here of liberals who are intolerant of conservatives or centrists (I consider myself one of the latter). So, did I used to be equally intolerant? How would I react were my previous self to meet my present self—would I slap my own face and walk off in a huff?

Like Pauline Kael, I’ve indeed traveled in a bit of a liberal bubble. But you may recall that during Vietnam I had a boyfriend serving there. He wasn’t a conservative, as far as I know–in fact, we hardly ever discussed politics, although we did discuss the war itself. I attended a hugely liberal school and yet, despite the fact that my friends knew I had someone serving in combat in Vietnam, I never heard a word directed against me—or him, for that matter—from anyone I knew.

Yes, I suppose that although I traveled in liberal circles, they weren’t especially radical ones. But I think it’s noteworthy that even back in that time of such discord, somehow the discourse around me seemed civil enough.

Later, I always had a few centrist or even conservative friends. A few. We just didn’t discuss politics, or if we did, we did it in a very amicable way. Was this because the issues of the 80s and 90s seemed more removed and tangential, as compared to the intensity of the post-9/11 era in which we now live? I think so.

Therefore I’ll have to say that I believe, had I been transported to some sort of “conservative” get-together back then, I wouldn’t have disliked the people or been tremendously uncomfortable there—not that anything they said to change my opinion would have worked at the time (speaking of which, I guess it’s time to start working on that next “change” post…)

Maybe I’m fooling myself, but I have no recollection of demonizing the right back when I was a liberal. I didn’t see any person as a bigot or a Scrooge—unless that individual actually said something bigoted or Scrooge-like, that is. My training as a therapist was part of it, I suppose—although that came later, in the 90s. A therapist, in order to be effective, must actually listen, and listen hard and without preconceived notions, to the person sitting in the chair opposite. Therapists need to come at that process of listening with the attitude of trying to get into the head of the client and be respectful of him/her. It requires a sort of doubling; an imaginative leap into the world of the other while still retaining one’s own self, perspective, and judgment. A therapist needs to hold both things in the mind at once, and use all these sensibilities together to help the client.

Of course, some of the most rabidly politically intolerant people I know are therapists, as I’ve learned to my sorrow since I left the liberal circle, so that argument falls down somewhat (I can’t imagine that such people could be very good therapists, but that’s another story for another time).

I think there’s still another source of my attitude towards talking politics; and surprise, surprise! it comes from my childhood. I grew up in a family where there was an ongoing political war between my father and his brother, my uncle. Ours was a small family, and this was our closest relative, who lived nearby and whom we saw very often.

From earliest childhood (cue violins here) I can remember the bitter arguing that went on at every social gathering, small or large, when they were together. Especially bad were dinners at our house, when it was just us, and they could give full vent to their frustration with each other. My uncle was not only a pro-Soviet pro-Communist, he was a politically involved fanatical pro-Soviet pro-Communist—although not, as far as I know, a member of the Party. It was clear to me even as a tiny child that nothing was ever going to come from these “discussions” but more of the same; no mind was ever going to be changed by them. And I hated it.

Somewhere quite early in the game I must have taken a vow, without realizing it, to try not to be like my uncle. To try to listen respectfully and not dismiss the arguments of the opposition out of hand, to try to evaluate the assertions of opponents with an open mind and the use of reason rather than emotion, and to change the subject if it’s clear the discussion is going nowhere and never will go anywhere.

I’m sure I’ve violated these rules at times—but I’ve tried very hard not to. The echoes of those terrible and utterly fruitless fights of my youth still ring too loudly in my ears to ever want to emulate them.

My uncle was a world traveler, and he often met people in his journeys who later came to New York and visited as they passed through. I remember one evening in 1968 having dinner with my family at my uncle’s house. He was hosting a gentleman he’d met in Czechoslovakia. It was right after the Soviet crackdown on the “Prague spring,” and it turns out my uncle had been visiting Czechoslovakia at the time of the arrival of the tanks, or shortly thereafter.

I was sitting opposite the Czech gentleman, and I watched him as my uncle discoursed on how the Czech people had welcomed the Soviets with open arms, and other assorted pro-Soviet tales. I watched the man’s eyes; he was a guest in my uncle’s house, practically a stranger, and he tried mightily to control himself, confining himself to the clenched-tooth utterance, “That’s not true; that’s not the way it was.”

My uncle was neither listening nor watching; he continued to wax rhapsodic on the joys of Soviet life. I looked at the man, trying somehow to convey with my eyes my youthful sympathy and empathy. I will never ever forget the look of bitter sorrow in his as he looked back at me.

A big sigh of relief on getting back into something more comfortable

The New Neo Posted on by

This is good. This is very good: the name OSM (Open Source Media) turns out to have had a brief but unhappy life, and is being tossed into the dustbin of history, exactly where it belongs, IMHO. Welcome back old friend, Pajamas Media!

I wish I could say “I told you so.” (Actually, I could say “I told you so”–along with most other bloggers–but my earlier criticism of the name change was never expressed in print.)

Pajamas Media was a great name, and it’s still a great name. Whether the entire concept is equally great, and will ultimately fly, remains to be seen. But I’m certainly willing to wait and see.

I’ve seen the flak from others within the blogosphere and without: criticisms of the name (agreed on that score), the business model (don’t know enough about it), the writing on the site (I’m giving that one time).

Call me shallow, call me social, call me a touch-feely-therapist type, but my main motivation so far in joining PJ Media has been to meet other bloggers, and that’s been realized, in spades. How else and where else would there ever have been the opportunity to get so many bloggers in one room together?–after, all, herding cats is a notoriously difficult enterprise.

As far as the money goes, I’m more than satisfied. I could have started some blogads here, but really hadn’t done the research yet to do so. So I’m more than happy to let PJ do it for me and pay me a tiny bit of money in the bargain. I have the right of refusal; I can quit at any point I wish and be right back where I started, having lost nothing, including my autonomy.

As far as all the anger towards OSM/Pajamas from Ann Althouse and Dennis the Peasant and others goes, they have their own concerns. Included in the mix are their own stories of having been dissed by the powers that be at PJ. Who’s right and who’s wrong is one of those things I won’t comment on unless I’ve heard the full tale from both sides–and I wish I had, actually, because my therapist self somehow thinks maybe I could have mediated, at least at the beginning.

That’s probably the height of hubris on my part; perhaps the differences and anger were just too great even from the start (and if anyone hasn’t a clue what I’m talking about and is interested, just go to each person’s blog–listed on my blogroll–and start scrolling down. You’ll find a bunch of posts on the subject soon enough).

It’s sad when people who were formerly friends (or at least, formerly civil!) end up dishing out so much vitriol at each other. I know, or at some previous point have had correspondence with, everyone involved (some very slightly and tangentially, and some rather better), so I’ll draw the veil of silence now on the subject, put my apple over my face, and go slinking off.

I hope I don’t sound cold or disinterested when I say this, but I don’t think my blog –or the blogs of any of us, including its founders–will live or die by the success of PJ Media. We all define success differently; right now, I consider this blog to have been successful, if not beyond my wildest dreams, then certainly beyond what I considered any realistic expectations. Great readers, and plenty of them–what more could a person want?

I certainly didn’t go into blogging for the money–that would have been like going into poetry for the money. I may be economically illiterate, but I’m not financially balmy. I can only speak for myself, but I know why I blog, and I don’t think that reason will ever change. I knew from the start what my niche would be–what the story was that I felt internally driven to tell.

What is it I needed to say, and why am I so compelled to tell my tale? Well, it just so happens that I once wrote a post on that very topic. So if you want the best answer I can give, see here for more.

Follow the leader

The New Neo Posted on by

A while back I received an e-mail from a reader who made the following request:

I am writing to ask if you could use your insight to explore a subject that fascinates me, and that is leadership, and why, I feel, it is a subject that liberals are loathe to examine.They will sniff about intellect and articulation, but never approach the core component called leadership, and without that, what is there in a politician?

I read the daily moanings about Bush from all parts of the Right, and it alienates me, and I’m confused why so many lack my patience or perspective on what is and isn’t important about politics during this WoT. I’m puzzled by the lack of faith in his leadership, or the doubts about its usefulness.

My first reaction was: nah, doesn’t interest me enough to write about it. Besides, it wasn’t something I’d thought very much about before.

But I found the question stayed in my mind. Then I read this post at Sigmund Carl & Alfred, which got me to thinking more about this curious lack–not just the lack of leaders, but the lack of talk about leadership, and the lack of desire for leaders.

I’m interested in why we (and I include myself here) are somewhat averse to the very word “leader.” One of the commenters on SC&A touched on what I consider the heart of the answer, and that is that leaders require followers. Or at least we think they do, in the common understanding of the word “leader.”

Now, who in American wants to be a follower? Practically no one. Individualism was built into this country from the start, and the distaste for a leader in that sense is not limited to the left–it’s very strong on the right, too. The idea of “leader” is too close to royalty on the one hand and to dictatorship on the other.

What comes to mind when you hear the word “leader”–in the political sense, that is? One image it conjures up for me is that of a vast Nazi arena, row upon rigid row, standing as one and giving a rousing “Sieg Heil” and that straight-armed Nazi salute. Another image I have is of the defendants in the Nuremberg dock saying to a man that they were just good Germans, following orders. Leadership took a big hit post-WWII, when it became horrifyingly clear where the extremities of leadership could take human beings. For what, after all, does the word “Fuhrer” mean in German, but “Leader?”

And then there is Big Brother, another iconic image–fictional, this time, but very powerful nonetheless. Anyone who has ever read Orwell’s 1984 is probably chilled by the memory of the leader whipping the workers up into a frenzy in the Two Minutes Hate.

Then there is the Soviet example of near-deification of Stalin and Lenin, which rushed in to fill the gap when religion was discouraged by the Soviets, as evidenced by the preservation of their corpses as a sort of secular/political equivalent of holy relics.

So we must be careful. And indeed, we have been. Since Vietnam and Watergate, the press has made it its business to tear down every possible idol, to expose our leaders’ feet of clay at every step. This has the benefit that we are not likely to follow blindly or to idealize our leaders. It has the drawback that, blinded by cynicism, we often don’t see their positive traits or credit them with any good intentions.

This tendency is particularly pronounced in that notorious cohort to which I must confess I belong, the Baby Boomers. Raised by parents who had renounced some of the authority of their own parents; encouraged by our numbers, prosperity, and the press to take our adolescent rebellion to extremes; many of us have taken the charge “Question Authority” to heart. Some never stop questioning it and rebelling against it, often just for the sake of rebelling.

This may indeed also be part of those leftist attitudes towards the military, a mixture of condemnation (“baby-killers!”), victimization (“poverty-stricken tools of the ruling class”) and patronization (“robots”).

It’s the latter trait (“robots”) that I believe ties into what I’ve been saying here: because the military must follow orders (except illegal ones) and is overtly and explicitly hierarchical, with clear leaders and followers, many boomers on the left who like to continue to think of themselves as free spirits have a special contempt for those who volunteer for it.
But in fact a military would be impossible without such a structure–and I assume that those who volunteer for it are well aware of why they have assumed the burden of needing, at times, to follow, as well as needing to act on their own initiative at other times.

I agree with SC&A that the ability to be inspirational is a big part of political leadership in general. But that inspiration can’t just be emotional; it should be hard-headed, based on a calculation of the decisions that leader has made, and always reserving a portion of skepticism. If one has a real reason to admire what a person in a position of leadership has done, it isn’t as hard to be a follower when necessary, or to trust that things are in generally capable hands. Nowadays, however, the deck is stacked against this sort of attitude towards a leader from either party, in part because the press (and the opposition) is determined to cut all potential leaders down to size.

That refusal to put a leader on too high a pedestal is a good thing, and it has a long and illustrious history in this country–starting with Washington’s refusal to go for a third term. But, as with so many things, balance is important. I believe the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction, and makes it hard to see whatever good really does exist in our political leaders.

How can a politician convince that he/she can lead? Churchill was an acknowledged wartime leader whose power to do so came at least partly through his stunning oratory. But we have seen that oratory is a double-edged sword–after all, Hitler is said (at least by Germans) to have been one of the greatest orators of all times, and to have exerted a strange and hypnotic spell on his listeners. I’m not a German speaker, but I find it hard to believe that Hitler’s rhetorical power had anything in common with Churchill’s except its power.

Of course, one of the criticisms of Bush, right from the start, has been his lack of verbal communicative skills. He’s given some good speeches, but there’s something in his delivery that is profoundly lacking, and it’s especially lacking when he’s speaking extemporaneously. Can a person exert leadership in the absence of such rhetorical abilities? I don’t know, but it certainly makes the battle far more uphill.

A leader has to give off an aura of trustworthiness and strength, and I don’t know exactly how that’s done. Eloquence can certainly be part of it, although it can also deceive. And of course, words have to reflect more than the aura of strength and trustworthiness, it has to be the real deal. When you listen to a recording of Roosevelt actually speaking those famous words “The only thing we have to fear is, fear itself!” you can hear his own buoyant optimism come through loud and clear in his voice, and it lifts you up. Like a good parent (or leader), he comforts and reassures when it’s needed the most.

Churchill was of a different sort: he spoke the worst and asked for sacrifice. Somehow, he got away with it. His personal courage was legendary, his voice an extraordinary and complex instrument that conveyed the deepest sorrow and yet the strongest determination possible. He fit the mood of his country and let them know they could endure anything, which was exactly what was needed at the moment.

When Lincoln was assassinated, the grieving poet Walt Whitman wrote the famous poem “O Captain! My Captain!” It’s a lament for a leader fallen when the prize is so close at hand, a crie de cour on behalf of a nation bereft.

I’m not sure it would be possible anymore for this sort of metaphor and emotion about a leader to be expressed–or perhaps even felt–about a President. The feeling is composed of many things, but one of them is love.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up; for you the flag is flung; for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths; for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

Criticizing the war critics

The New Neo Posted on by

Cathy Young responded to yesterday’s post of mine about Iraq with a post of her own, from which I’ve excerpted the following:

Now, there is another argument being made: that critics of the war, should they succeed, will be responsible for the death and misery and will befall the Iraqi people…I myself strongly oppose a pullout before the Iraqis can defend themselves, but I think that the “their blood will be on your heads” argument is a below-the-belt tactic that should be off-limits in civil discourse. True, the Anchoress’s ire is ostensibly directed at those who talk about a quick pullout, but how many war critics are really in that category?…

What’s more, the “blood on your heads” argument is too easily turned around. There is little doubt that at present, the war in Iraq has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqis who would have been alive had the war not taken place. Yes, of course other Iraqi lives were saved from the killing machine that was the Hussein regime…

Cathy devotes most of her post to the Anchoress’s comments rather than mine, so I’ll leave it to the Anchoress to respond if she cares to.

But I wanted to clarify something for Cathy (and others) about my own post: I am not talking about war critics in general. I was speaking of one thing only: those critics who want to leave Iraq before it is ready to defend itself. Those critics who want to set a timetable for that pullout. Those critics who, like Tom Hayden, truly do consider the Vietnam abandonment by the US as something of which they are very proud, and who’ve been planning almost from the start to attempt a repeat in Iraq.

In my post I offered some links: to two previous posts of my own as well as an article about the end of the Vietnam War and a piece by Tom Hayden. I can’t speak to whether Cathy Young has read them or not. But in case she hasn’t, I suggest it. They’re long, I know. But I don’t think yesterday’s post of mine can be understood without reading them.

My main point is quite a simple one: advocating a pullout–or even a timetable for a pullout–without understanding or recognizing the probable consequences of such action is utterly irresponsible. And it is an irresponsibility that ought to be familiar to those who remember what happened at the end of the Vietnam War. I can’t really understand what would be “below the belt” and uncivil about saying so.

When I wrote yesterday’s post, I fully expected that my argument–which was actually more about “blood on your hands” than “on your heads“–would be turned around and directed at war supporters. My answer? Yes, indeed, there’s enough blood to go around. There always is in war; wars involve blood on everyone’s hands, including pacifists, who are responsible for some of the blood involved in feeding the crocodile.

The important question is: how much blood is on whose hands, and to what end? To me, it seems clear that a pullout would be the greater of two evils, as I have come to believe it was in Vietnam. If eggs have already been broken, you better try to stick around till those omelets have been made.

Those who cannot learn from history are condemned…

The New Neo Posted on by

The Anchoress has written this wonderful post, so I don’t have to.

Read the whole thing, please, but most particularly this:

Right now, the insurgents are being vastly encouraged by what they read coming out of the mouths of Democrats and reporters, and even, sadly the Republicans. The message they are being given is: Just be patient. Just hold out a little while, and America will be gone, and you will re-gain control.

You who want to play politics with this war, wishing to abandon the people of Iraq merely to shame a president you hate and do a bit of crowing, just be ready to take responsibility for what comes after. Understand that when the inevitable deaths occur in Iraq, and elsewhere, at the hands of these insurgents, and at the hands of a rejuvenated Al Qaeda, that the blood of every victim thereafter will then be on your heads, as will the blood of all 2065 of our service people whose sacrifice will be rendered meaningless by your action.

If America pulls out without victory – without the Iraqis being capable of defending themselves – then every death from insurgents or terrorists – all over the world – will have to be a death counted upon the heads of those who would not allow a serious War on Terror to continue and succeed, simply because to do so would reflect too well on a man they hate.

The blood of innocents is a heavy, heavy stain – it will not easily be washed away.

I wish I could agree with the Anchoress, however, about that last sentence. The left and liberals, in particular, are no Lady Macbeths. In fact, as far as the results of our pullout from Vietnam goes, they don’t need all the perfumes of Arabia to wash their hands clean:

Doct. What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands.
Gent. It is an accustom’d action with her, to seem thus washing her hands. I have known her continue in this a quarter of an hour.
Lady M. Yet here’s a spot.
Doct. Hark! she speaks. I will set down what comes from her, to satisfy my remembrance the more strongly.
Lady M. Out, damned spot! out, I say! One: two: why, then ’tis time to do ‘t. Hell is murky! Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
Doct. Do you mark that?
Lady M. The thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now? What, will these hands ne’er be clean?…Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, oh, oh!
Doct. What a sigh is there! The heart is sorely charg’d.

It is not my impression that the left–or even most liberals–have been walking in their sleep over the Vietnam pullout, much less considering the stain unremovable. In fact, one of the reasons an Iraqi pullout is being pushed so hard now is that many in the left consider the Vietnam pullout to have been their finest hour.

I spent quite a few words and a great deal of thought on the issue a while back, here, when I attempted to answer the following, based on some musings of Dean Esmay:

Where were you in the mid- to late-70s, oh bleeding-heart Vietnam War protesters? Didn’t the terrible aftermath of the Vietnam War convince you that you had been wrong to work so hard for US withdrawal? And, if so, why not?

In my attempted answer, I linked to this article about the fall of Vietnam. I’m highlighting it again, and putting it in bold, because I can’t recommend it highly enough; please, please read it.

If the history of the Vietnam exit has been supressed, unknown, or denied, how can we ever learn from it? But please be assured that those on the left have learned that history very very well–the history of their success in getting the US to pull out of that war, that is.

If you don’t believe me, please read still another post of mine, here (I’m starting to feel as though I’m repeating myself, but I think these things bear repeating right now–unfortunately), based on an article written by Tom Hayden (does the name sound familiar?) one year ago, detailing the left’s plans to recapitulate the Vietnam pullout and providing a blueprint for doing just that. You will see that Mr. Hayden finds no blood on his hands, no blood whatsoever.

As David Horowitz has written in his book Radical Son:

Assisted by radical legislators like Ron Dellums and Bella Abzug, Hayden set up a caucus in the Capitol, where he lectured congressional staffers on the need to end American aid. He directed his attention to Cambodia as well, lobbying for an accommodation with the Khmer Rouge guerillas. Nixon’s resignation over Watergate provided all the leverage Hayden and his activists needed. The Democrats won the midterm elections, bringing to Washington a new group of legislators determined to undermine the settlement that Nixon and Kissinger had achieved. The aid was cut, the Saigon regime fell, and the Khmer rouge marched into the Cambodian capital. In the two years that followed, more Indochinese were killed by the victorious Communists than had been killed on both sides in all thirteen years of the anti-Communist war.

It was the bloodbath that [the Left’s] opponents had predicted. But for the Left there would be no contrition and no look back.

Radical Son was published in 1998, so we can forgive Horowitz for not seeing the future with total exactitude. He is right about the “no contrition” part. But the left is looking back, to the days of its greatest triumph. They have learned the lessons of history, and are proud to repeat them. But if the rest of us fail to learn those lessons, we–and the people of Iraq–will be condemned to repeat them.

And then I’m afraid there’ll be an awful lot of sleepwalking and handwashing to be done.

Breaking the contract: New York Review of Books

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m visiting relatives who subscribe to the New York Review of Books, a publication that isn’t ordinarily my favorite reading matter. But whenever I’m here I can’t resist the temptation to pick it up, despite the fact that I know if I read anything about politics there I’m probably going to end up frustrated and angry.

This time I consciously (and conscientiously) tried to read it without any preconceived notions of what I’d find, and without any sort of chip on my shoulder. I chose Pankaj Mishra’s book review of two books: No God but God: the origins, evolution, and future of Islam by Reza Aslan, and Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: gender and the seductions of Islamism, by Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson.

One of the questions Mishra’s book review tackles is of obvious interest to all neocons: are the tenets of the religion of Islam compatible with democracy? According to Mishra, Azlan finds nothing in the Koran incompatible with democracy; the Koran says nothing very specific about what sort of government Moslems ought to have. It is not the Koran itself, but fundamentalist, traditionalist Islam, according to Azlan, that cannot be reconciled with “modern conceptions of democracy and human rights.”

So far, so good. Agreed; there seems to be nothing fundamentally incompatible between Islam and basic human rights–except for Islamicist fundamentalism itself.

But then Mishra writes:

Certainly, events in the Muslim world continue to surprise–especially those who believe that most Muslims, when given the choice, would opt for Western ways. Despite its growing economy, Iran elected a hard-liner as its president in June.

At that point I put the paper down and paced around the room, wondering how a person could be considered qualified to write this book review and yet be so abysmally ignorant as to believe that the recent elections in Iran represented the will of its people, any sort of “choice” they have made. Then I picked up the paper and finished the article, looking for more, but that’s the sum total of what Mishra wrote about the Iranian elections.

Mishra doesn’t seem to feel the need to explain what he means by these extraordinary statements; apparently, it’s self-evident to him that “an election is an election is an election.” The elimination of the slate of reform candidates in Iran, the organized boycotts of the election by many people because it was a sham–Mishra says nothing at all about these factors. Either he doesn’t know about them (shocking) or thinks he can get away with not addressing them because his audience doesn’t know about them (shocking), or he thinks somehow an election can be valid despite them (shocking).

When reading an article or book review such as Mishra’s, the reader relies on some sort of implicit contract between him/herself and the writer. The writer is presumed to be both expert and truthful. If one or the other assumption breaks down, that’s the end of the story, because it’s the end of the writer’s reliability and trustworthiness. And this is exactly what happened with me and Mishra when I read these two sentences–he became an untrustworthy source of information/opinion.

But if I hadn’t followed the Iranian elections in my new role as political junkie and blogger, I would have read the sentences and not even blinked. I would not have realized that Mishra had just broken our contract. I would have gone on to finish the article, nodded, and the information imparted therein (“Iranian democratic elections indicate the will of the people is for a hard-line theocracy”) would have become part of my knowledge base and my belief system. And if I never read other articles that convincingly contradicted that idea, it would continue to be part of my belief system. That’s the way political positions are built, one brick at a time, until there’s a strong structure that’s often quite resistant to change.

So, just who is Pankaj Mishra, anyway? He’s an Indian writer sometimes living in London, the author of a novel set in India entitled The Romantics, as well as a nonfiction work about his own search for Buddha, and a book of travels through India. Mishra seems, in fact, to be the New York Times Book Review’s resident expert on India, since he’s written a great many of their reviews of books on that country, as well as a few about Afghanistan.

That’s it. He doesn’t seem to have any special experience or knowledge of Iran, politics, or history; he’s a novelist, reviewer, and writing of philosophical/travel books about India. In other words, another predominantly literary guy, at least as far as I can tell. And here, once again, one finds that strange naivete of the literary in the face of totalitarian and authoritarian states.

Don’t sit on a hot stove until you see a correction in the New York Review of Books.

The well-rounded blogosphere of OSM

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, I don’t think you’ll get the definitive report on the OSM (I still think of it as Pajamas Media) get-together here.

But I have no guilt about that–there are plenty of other bloggers who can easily fill you in. I haven’t had a chance yet to check out what others have written, but I’ve no doubt the event was well-documented, since I could see close to a hundred laptops blooming around the room. Not me, though–I’ve never developed the art of writing about something as I’m experiencing it; not good at walking and chewing gum at the same time.

So this will be my quick impressionistic take on what it was that I really came for, if the truth be known–the chance to meet a whole crowd of bloggers. And what a crowd it was! The following pre-conference theories of mine seemed generally to be borne out:

1) bloggers can talk; in fact, most bloggers would rather talk than eat

2) bloggers tend to be intense

3) bloggers include a high proportion of night people and/or people who don’t sleep all that much

4) most bloggers look like their photos–except me. I actually don’t have an apple in from of my face.

5) Roger Simon wears a fedora

Things that were surprises:

1) a higher-than-expected proportion of bloggers are smokers

2) you can’t tell who’s short and who’s tall from a photo

3) Roger Simon wears a fedora

(Actually, I already knew that you can’t tell who’s short and who’s tall from a photo. But it was still a surprise.)

Further observations:

1) When I say bloggers can talk, I mean talk. We’re talking serious talk here. Stamina, breadth, depth, decibel level. Get a group together, and it’s not for the faint of heart–if you don’t jump in quickly and vigorously, you may never get the floor, because the competition is hot and the topics change at the speed of light as one thought follows another, like group chain-smoking. Those with natural projective qualities of voice have an advantage here; those of us with naturally quieter voices stand in danger of getting hoarse.

2) New York restaurants have gotten ever more expensive as the portions have gotten smaller.

3) There are no elevator operators in Saks anymore. I stopped in there today to get out of the cold for a few minutes, and discovered the lack of elevator operators as well as the fact that there is not an item in the store that I could possibly afford. Which is fine since there’s not an item in the store that I’d care to buy, so there.)

I could not possibly mention all the bloggers I met, although they all deserve mention. So the following is an almost random snapshot of people I’d never met before but felt I already knew:

Glenn Reynolds is measured, articulate, unaffected, incisive, and possessed of a dry wit–as well as the patience to put up with being buttonholed by every blogger who wanted to meet him, which was all of us.

Charles Johnson is still very much the charming and laid-back musician I imagine he was before 9/11 and its aftermath set him down such an unexpected path.

Richard Fernandez, heretofore the mysterious Wretchard, is a man who projects utter calm and a powerful quality of being deeply-centered, and whose words are unusually reflective and thoughtful.

Austin Bay was our fearless and intrepid leader, charging into a drenching downpour with the rest of us following behind (rain? what’s a little rain?), his Renaissance mind discoursing at dinner with great animation on such widely-ranging subjects as politics, war, literature, history, writing, and more.

Vodkapundit is as elegant and intelligent as one might imagine, even on the brink of impending fatherhood (best of luck, Steve, to both you and your wife).

Clive Davis not only has a charming British accent (there’s that “charming” word again), but the wit and kindness to go with it (although, unfortunately, Clive actually had to work at his day job during his visit, and therefore missed a few of the festivities).

I could natter on–and on and on and on–because there are, quite literally, a hundred other people I could (and should) write about. But I won’t–too tired. Suffice to say it was a great deal of fun.

I find it an extraordinary experience to meet people backwards: that is, to meet their minds first and their bodies second. You get to know people in a totally different way as, day after day, you read what they are thinking without ever having met them in the flesh.

You don’t even realize how many preconceptions (and perhaps misconceptions) you are building up until you meet the person him/herself. Sometimes the meeting shatters those preconceptions utterly. Far more often, however, the person you meet is both similar and somewhat different from the one you had expected: younger, older; livelier, shyer; more fidgety, calmer; funnier, more solemn. Then you superimpose the new template on the old and merge the two, and now you know the person in a fuller, rounder sense.

And so it is that I am very happy to have met these and so many other old friends (and new), and to have made the pictures of them in my mind’s eye more complete.

About that word “Islamofascism”

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Don Surber has pointed out that recently–first on October 6, and then again yesterday–Bush has begun to use the word “Islamofascism” in his speeches to name the enemy.

I have a bit of history with that word myself, and so I have some advice for him.

I was reminded of this by accident the other day when I was looking in my old e-mail files and came across something I’d sent to a friend way back in the spring of ’04. It was written during a time when I’d just “outed” myself at a party where a group had been speaking in glowing terms of none other than Michael Moore and “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

After I had piped up and let them know I didn’t consider MM and his movie to be the repository of truth, a stunned and shocked silence ensued, and then a variety of reactions followed. Some people were angry and argumentative, some quiet. But one or two of my friends came up to me afterwards and said they wouldn’t mind if I e-mailed them some more information, and maybe some links.

In the end, though, it didn’t work out too well–both of them asked me to cease and desist after a month or two. One of them took great umbrage in particular at my use of the term “Islamofascism” in one of my e-mails. She wrote to me asking whether I would ever use the terms “Christianofascism” or “Judeofascism,” and why I didn’t condemn skinheads as well as Islamofascists.

So, if Bush runs into the same sort of trouble with the word that I did, perhaps he’d like to take a look at my answer to my friend:

The word doesn’t mean “Islam” and it doesn’t mean “Moslems.” It’s simply a shorthand expression to signify “the current crop of people who quote the Moslem religion to justify terrorism and other types of violence and who purposely target innocents such as women, children, and other bystanders with the goal of being a minority who rule over the vast majority of peace-loving people (including the vast majority of Moslems) who would prefer nothing better than to be left alone to live their own lives in peace; and who have a declared agenda to take over the rule of all Moslem countries and the rest of the world, imposing a very strict, repressive, intolerant, illiberal, anti-woman regime on all of mankind.” Think Taliban, ruling the world–that’s the goal.

That’s quite a mouthful, I know, so I use the term “Islamofascist” to cover it. Why “fascist?” Well, the connection to “fascist” is that it is a totalitarian and tyrannical group seeking power over a wide area of the globe, and these people don’t care what they do to get it–it’s no-holds-barred. The particular group I’m speaking about does this in the name of Islam, but if in fact there were some Buddhists, Christians, Jews, or any other sect with such an agenda in the name of their religion, I would call them “whatever-fascists,” also (as I call Nazis fascists; but they were secular fascists). White supremacist fascists (I assume that’s what you mean by “skinheads?”) are to be condemned also, of course, and in no uncertain terms–but right now they don’t seem to have purposely and premeditatedly blown 3,000 people to kingdom come and are not threatening to do it again and again, so my primary concern is with the people who have done just that.

By the way, another reason I use the term “fascist” to refer to the current crop of terrorists and their followers and sympathizers is that, historically speaking, they are actually the direct heirs of the Nazis. I don’t mean that in the metaphorical sense–although I do mean that, as well–I mean it in an actual sense. The Arab countries in general were allies of the Nazis in WWII and were, unfortunately, fed vast reams of Nazi propaganda, which, just as unfortunately, took root. Skinheads or neo-Nazis are unusual in the US, although of course they exist—but admiration of Nazis and their agenda became almost mainstream in the 30s in the Arab world as a direct result of Nazi influence, propaganda, and involvement there, and it has not gone away.

Reasonable minds may differ on what is to be done. I’m only writing about what my own study has led me to believe, and of course it’s possible I’m wrong. Perhaps we don’t disagree as much as you might think, because I, too, would love for the young men of that area, as you write, “to change their minds before they are poisoned.” That is actually what the whole idea of liberating Iraq was about–and you may laugh, or think I’m wildly naive to still use the word “liberated”–but I mean what I say. The Iraqi bloggers whom I’ve been reading are trying to do just that: change minds before they are irrevocably poisoned. They are the ones who have given me hope that a liberation is slowly but surely happening there, in a way that they say was utterly impossible before the war, and in a way that our media has hardly ever written about (and in a way that won’t be possible if we don’t stay the course until things are more stable there).

Well, now that I look at it, it may be a tad long and convoluted to put in a speech. But I did get a good response from my friend, who seemed to understand when I put it that way. And we’re still friends, although I stopped sending her anything political.

My heart is not broken; no, not at all

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It’s official; neo-neocon will not become a playing card in aaron’s Deck O’Bloggers. However, thanks to your valiant efforts I made a respectable showing despite my eleventh hour entry into the game.

But, no excuses (although come to think of it, didn’t I just make one?), no regrets. Upward and onward, excelsior, keep on keeping on, look for the silver lining, my HEART will go on…

Congratulations to the top winners, and Dr. Sanity and I will just go and lick our wounds in private.

Bush-hatred revisited

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Dr. Sanity tackles that old bugaboo, Bush-Derangement-Syndrome (BDS), and tries to drive a stake into its vigorously beating heart. Her post is a good description of how the psychological mechanism of displacement functions in deflecting the hatred and fear of terrorism onto Bush.

Dr. Sanity doesn’t pretend to explain the whole phenomenon of Bush-hatred, however, nor do I. I’ve felt for quite some time that there’s something quite mysterious and “extra” about it, something very difficult to explain.

Perhaps it’s merely that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. In addition to the process Dr. Sanity describes (which I think is key), there are other intangibles that feed the beast of BDS.

I’m not talking about mere disagreement with Bush. I’m referring to the sort of visceral demonization of the man that clearly seems out of touch with any reality, and which has gripped so many people I personally know and turned them into something unrecognizable and ferocious when they even mention his name–which they do with some regularity.

A while back I wrote a bit on the subject, which I’d like to repeat now as an addition to Dr. Sanity’s thoughts. Although I’m talking about something relatively superficial here, I believe that for some who hate Bush it is at least a part of what drives them:

…many people hate Bush for stylistic reasons. The way he talks, the way he smirks, the frat-boy persona–he represents the kind of person they simply detested in high school and college (particularly if they were the intellectual or literary sort). They distrust and dislike him in a very visceral way.

I am old enough to remember the reaction among Democrats to Lyndon Johnson after Kennedy’s assassination. They detested him–his good ol’ boy accent, his picking up his dog by the ears, his showing off his surgical scars–man, they just hated him; he had no class. Kennedy was the absolute personification of smoothness and class, so witty and bright and charming, and that New England accent!

But, in the end, that’s all surface stuff. Was Kennedy’s actual record as President much better–or really all that much different–than Johnson’s? Of course, we can’t know whether Kennedy would have done any better with the Vietnam war than Johnson did, but from books such as The Best and the Brightest, I think the answer is at least “probably not.” Perhaps, though, he may have ultimately done better because he would have had a more friendly press.

FDR and Kennedy were also children of great privilege–as great, or greater, than Bush. But they had that Eastern style, and great personal magnetism, that he lacks. And, of course, many people hated them–but not the press, and not academics.

Personal style is part of this. We relate to people in many ways, some of them quite subtle and even outside of our awareness: body language and facial expressions and clothing, as well as accents and speech patterns. The utter revulsion some feel towards Bush, both here and abroad, is partly a reaction to such signals that he gives off. In the end, these feelings are neither political, rational, nor amenable to argument–they simply are.

Literary leftists–Part I: “Reading Lolita in Tehran” (be careful what you wish for)

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Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran has scored a surprising amount of popular success, currently ranked around #300 at Amazon, and amassing close to 300 comments there as well. For a fairly literary and even somewhat didactic work subtitled “A memoir in books,” that’s pretty good.

I think part of its success (aside from its great title) is that it’s the type of book that especially appeals to women’s book groups—in fact, that’s how I came to read it. Most of the members of my book group talked about the book’s main theme: the shocking and depressing ways in which Iranian women’s lives have been stunted and twisted by the authoritarian and misogynistic theocracy in charge in Iran, and how Nafisi and her students somehow managed to feed their spirits by the clandestine study of some of the classics of Western literature.

Apparently, literature can help keep people who live under a totalitarian system sane—the Soviet dissidents also provided evidence of that. But, although of interest, that was not the theme I kept noticing and marveling at when I read the book; no, a very different aspect of Reading Lolita in Tehran kept grabbing my attention: the tendency of literary and intellectual youths in free societies to gravitate towards leftist causes that would end up curtailing that very freedom.

Author Nafisi is currently a literature professor at Johns Hopkins. The biographical blurb on the flyleaf of her book states that she had formerly been an English professor at the University of Tehran but was expelled for refusing to wear the veil, and that she later emigrated to the United States in 1997.

But Nafisi’s story, and her relationship to the revolution that devastated her country, is far more complex and ironic than that. The year 1997 was not her first emigration from Iran; she had left at the age of thirteen and been educated in England, Switzerland, and the US, only returning during the pivotal and fateful year 1979 to her beloved and much-longed-for homeland.

And what a homecoming it was! She writes:

The dream had finally come true. I was home, but the mood in the airport was not welcoming. It was somber and slightly menacing, like the unsmiling portraits of Ayatollah Khomeini and his anointed successor, Ayatollah Montazeri, that covered the walls. It seemed as if a bad witch with her broomstick had flown over the building and in one sweep had taken away the restaurants, the children and the women in colorful clothes that I remembered. This feeling was confirmed when I noticed the cagey anxiety in the eyes of my mother and friends, who had come to the airport to welcome us home.

Nafisi learned through bitter experience that you can’t go home again, although you can try.

The terrible irony of her story arises because Nafisi herself was part of the revolution that ended up destroying her country. Her tale resembles that of so many youthful visionaries, dabbling in politics like a bunch of naive Mickey Mouses (Mice?) in Disney’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” not realizing until too late the horrors their machinations will conjure into existence.

Nafisi married early, at eighteen, and attended college at the University of Oklahoma during the 1970s. Her plunge into political activism was as casual (and as literary) as it was leftist:

I joined the Iranian student movement reluctantly. My father’s imprisonment and my family’s vague nationalist sympathies had sensitized me towards politics, but I was more of a rebel than a political activist–though in those days there was not much difference between them. One attraction was the fact that the men in the movement didn’t try to assault or seduce me. Instead, they held study groups in which we read and discussed Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and Marx’s The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In the seventies, the mood—not just among Iranians, but among American and European students—was revolutionary. There was the Cuban example, and China of course. The revolutionary cant and romantic atmosphere were infectious, and the Iranian students were at the forefront of the struggle.

So, revolution was a mood, an essence, something infectious in the air—rather like bacilli, as it turns out. Nafisi describes the group as markedly Marxist in philosophy and in style, sporting “Che Guevara sports jackets and boots…and Mao jackets and khakis.”

For Nafisi herself, romanticism and literature seem to have been the primary motives, passed somehow through the alchemy of her homesickness and transmuted into political activism:

[I] insisted on wearing long dresses outside the meetings…I never gave up the habit of reading and loving “counterrevolutionary” writers—T. S. Eliot, Austen, Plath, Nabokov, Fitzgerald—but I spoke passionately at the rallies; inspired by phrases I had read in novels and poems, I would weave words together into sounds of revolution. My oppressive yearning for home was shaped into excited speeches against the tyrants back home and their American backers.

Once in Tehran, Nafisi began to realize that the unsettling airport scene had been only the tip of the iceberg. She soon came to bitterly regret the mindless revolutionary zeal of her youth, and to realize that her revolutionary dream had turned into a nightmare, as they so often do:

When in the States we had shouted Death to this or that, those deaths seemed to be more symbolic, more abstract, as if we were encouraged by the impossibility of our slogans to insist upon them even more. But in Tehran in 1979, these slogans were turning into reality with macabre precision. I felt helpless: all the dreams and slogans were coming true, and there was no escaping them.

Although the revolutionaries back in Oklahoma and elsewhere had been decidedly leftist, the revolution they helped birth was a restrictive theocracy. One of the most interesting portions of the book describes how those leftists, at least in the early stages, managed to rationalize and excuse such clear signs that things had gone sharply awry as the imposition of the veil and the subjugation of women.

Nafisi was not one of those excusers, however; she describes her horror at the relentless approach of the suffocating clasp of the mullahs, a chill embrace undreamt of in her leftist days in Oklahoma.

And it got worse, much worse; there are many passages in the book that reminded me uncannily of what it must have been like for French revolutionaries to have watched the unfolding of the Reign of Terror (those who survived, that is), not to mention Stalin’s ex-comrades viewing the purges of their ranks:

In later months and years, every once in a while Bijan [Nafisi’s husband] and I would be shocked to see the show trials of our old comrades in the U.S. on television. They eagerly denounced their past actions, their old comrades, their old selves, and confessed that they were indeed the enemies of Islam. We would watch these scenes in silence…I turned and asked Bijan, Did you ever dream that this could happen to us? He said, No, I didn’t, but I should have.

“No, I didn’t, but I should have.” What quiet words of chilling despair! And indeed, one wonders how it was that smart people could have been so dumb; by the mid-to late-1970’s, when Nafisi and her friends were supporting a leftist revolution in Iran, surely the jury was no longer out on the fact that this was a road that would lead to the revolution swallowing its own as well as many others. But we see such a phenomenon again and again, as history repeats itself in its winding, twisting path.

In Nafisi’s case, she seems to have been mainly a romantic, interested in literature almost to the exclusion of other topics—such as history, apparently. Unfortunately for her, she had to learn the lessons of history the hard way, from personal experience. And so, too, did her revolutionary Iranian comrades-in-arms, unfortunately for them—and for us, and for the world as well. They could never have guessed at the trajectory their lives would follow from those long-ago days of sartorial playing at being revolutionaries, sporting Che and Mao jackets, to their final moments in the executioner’s chamber.

And, if you can believe this interview, the Iranian students who took the Americans hostage in the last year of Jimmy Carter’s administration were hardly more serious or more focused than Nafisi herself. Read it and weep.

Nafisi’s story underscores the fact that there does seem to be something in the literary mind that is especially susceptible to romantic ideals of revolution, that doesn’t accept that institutions of government will always be flawed, that seeks a sort of misty perfection, and that believes in the power of youth to proclaim those ideals merely by taking to the streets and wishing it very, very hard.

[ADDENDUM: I’m well aware that all major political change is susceptible to being overtaken by unplanned and unwanted forces. That included our American Revolution, for example, and that’s why the drafting and adoption of our Constitution was so vitally important. That’s also why, as a neocon who had advocated regime change in Iraq, I waited with trepidation to see what the results of the Iraqi elections and constitution drafts would be.

So far, I am cautiously optimistic about the future of that country, as long as forces in the West continue to protect Iraq in its process of establishing some sort of true representative government, with checks and balances and guarantees of liberty and human rights that are unusual for that part of the world. Those things are our only hope against tyrannnies on both left and right.

But as Nafisi describes them, the leftists who wanted so much to overthrow the Shah did not even seem to care about those petty little details when thinking about what would take his place. They broke quite a few eggs, but instead of an omelet they got Humpty Dumpty. Are there any horses and men who can ever put him back together again?]