Who we are, apparently

A few days ago Newsweek rolled out its assessment of the last decade (click here—if you dare!). The last ten years of our lives—which do not actually constitute the first decade of this century, but whatever—are bandied by essayists, categorized by listmakers, and crunched into a seven minute video (very depressing; click here). Things like this should, of course, be taken as entertainment and little else (and, admittedly, this one thrives in that capacity). They’re kind of an easy target for hardcore socio-cultural criticism, but I did want to mention a couple of things . . .

First, the “Cultural Moments” list (click here). For starters, I seriously question Newsweek’s definition of the word “culture.” What Angelina Jolie’s baby, The Lord of the Rings, Tina Fey, Halle Berry, and American Idol have to do with what was once the purview of mating rituals and dinner party etiquette, I have no idea. I think what they mean by “culture” is a mix of “society” and “art” (not that any of this is art, but this list is the only one that comes anywhere close to the artistic realm). That having been said, there’s something really scary about this as a list of events that were important to us as a group. Culture is a compendium of the things that matter—mores and the events that shape them. And with a few exceptions, no one is going to remember any of this stuff. Yet, this is what Newsweek is saying mattered. Which makes me really wonder what kinds of things are bouncing around in all of those little American brains out there.

The other thing I noticed is that these lists make no attempt to chart what has been done well, last year’s election (lest we forget!) notwithstanding. The closest they come is the “Newly Minted Tycoons” list (seriously, who gives a FUCK about that list?) and the “People Who Died Too Young” (big downer) list. The rest is a mix of kitsch (“Celebrity Mugshots,” etc.) and unrelenting irony (“Worst Predictions,” “Tactical Blunders,” “Overblown Fears”). Actually, the more substantive of the lists are just thinly disguised slams on the Bush years—which, in case the Newsweek editors are wondering, does not make up for being asleep at the switch for the first half of his time in office. Anyway, isn’t it kind of strange—or at least telling—that they’ve forsaken the model of rating a decade based on accomplishments? I think it’s strange . . . which is a good place to stop this before it becomes a ridiculous rant. For now I’ll just say that Americans really have a problem with striving for greatness, and this is yet another sign of it.

Scozzafava you!

Dede Scozzafava, the local New York politician who got railroaded by the GOP during her recent congressional bid, has become, in the words of a recent postmortem, a “problem child for a dysfunctional Republican Party.” Read the full analysis here.

‘Security theater’

This is a short but very good post by David Frum, questioning, in the light of the Fort Hood shooting, how many of our domestic anti-terrorism policies actually keep us safe (and how many are just for show). I’m not staking a side in the debate, but this is one of the reactions to the shooting that really caught my eye. And, for better or worse, here’s Charles Krauthammer doing his thing on how the media played down the religious nature of Hasan’s rampage.

Corrections & amplifications

Jason Linkins talks about the real way to retract a story (click here). Maybe I don’t read enough online journalism (I can’t imagine that’s possible), but I’ve never seen this done before. News to me!

At it again

Dana Milbank’s column earlier this week (click here) profiles Newt Gingrich’s “return” to religion. Not a bad piece. I agree with Gingrich that there’s a great identity crisis—a teleological crisis, actually—in this country right now. Afghanistan is the most obvious example of our inability to decide where we are going and how we would like to get there. But I’m pretty sure a reactionary embrace of American evangelicalism isn’t the solution to the problem. Coincidentally, I just finished editing a really great piece for the upcoming issue of World Affairs that states quite eloquently how foolish it is to get locked into a particularly goal-oriented view of history. Sadly, I can’t quote it. You can all read it soon, though!

Armistice Day

Woke up this morning thinking of this—the opening lines of A Farewell to Arms. A beautiful illustration of the tragedy of war—no matter how you interpret that phrase—and, on a personal note, my favorite passage in all of literature.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

Plot thickens for Ft. Hood shooting

I have a feeling this Fort Hood thing is going to get worse before it gets better. Today an American imam with ties to al Qaeda (born in the States, now lives in Yemen) praised Nidal Hasan as a “hero” (click here). Hasan also woke up today (click here and here). Who knows what he’s going to say, but if it isn’t on the conciliatory side it might only inflame the kind of persecution and general cultural turmoil that he apparently accelerated his own breakdown. The Feds are busy trying to sniff out a link between Hasan, who lived in the DC area for a time, and the iman, Anwar al Aulaqi, who ran the Falls Church mosque that Hasan and his family attended (click here).

MANY people have thoughts about 1989

But this is one of the best articles I’ve seen thus far, by George Packer of the New Yorker (click here). Apparently the happy events of this day twenty years ago recovered the date from the historical notoriety it previously held for hosting the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm, the Beer Hall Putsch, and Kristallnacht. Packer also has a great line about the actual prompt that lead to the “fall.”

The wall came down not because Ronald Reagan stood up and demanded it but because on the evening of November 9th, at a televised press conference in East Berlin, a Party hack named Günter Schabowski flubbed a question about the regime’s new, liberalized travel regulations. Asked when they took effect, Schabowski shrugged, scratched his head, checked some papers, and said, “Immediately,” sending thousands of East Berliners to the wall in a human tide that the German Democratic Republic could not control.

Let’s play our game

The Times has a really good brief this morning (click here) on the Congressional haggling going into the health care legislation that passed the House Saturday night and will soon head to the Senate. It’s time for Harry Reid to be the man. God help us . . .

Look at that old grizzly bear

God, I love old newshounds. Check out this interview (click here) that Morning Edition did with old balls newsman Harold Evans, formerly of the Sunday Times and author of a new memoir of his days in the trenches (My Paper Chase; Little, Brown; 592 pp; $27.99). I really recommend listening to the interview itself—his delivery is delightful. And the gesture he’s making on the front cover of the book? Priceless! He also makes the heartbreaking point, once again, that real gumshoe investigative journalism is vanishing in the era of infotainment. This almost rivals the fistfight at the Post (click here) for best news-related news story of the week. 

AND SPEAKING OF things falling by the wayside in the world of ink and paper, here’s yet ANOTHER article about the fate of storytelling, this time from across the pond (click here). I can’t help but wonder if Mr. Macintyre was “inspired” by Joel Achenbach’s article from last week’s Post (click here), which this blog discussed earlier (click here) and which said almost exactly the same thing—except in a much better tone. He even makes the same joke at the end, only he points up John instead of Genesis. I also don’t know what to think of Mr. Macintyre’s classification of a nearly year-and-a-half-old article as “recent.” Part of me thinks maybe we all ARE moving too fast if we think of a magazine article from last summer as old; part of me thinks Macintyre is just nuts.

Wingnuts visit the Hill

Dana Milbank has a pretty good column about the teabaggers amassed on the Capitol lawn yesterday (click here). Actually, it’s not a very good column, but it was my source on this news, so I’ll give Mr. Milbank his propers. These folks who were out yesterday (click here and here) are such an easy target—and, in their diminishing numbers, hardly the harbinger of doom that so many pundits want to make them out to be. If there were such a thing as behavior unbecoming of a House member, then at least the pols who were out fanning the flames would have been out of line. But the Republicans are in such disarray, and their moderates so threatened (click here), that it’s hardly a surprise, although no less a disappointment. As Andrew Sullivan wrote this morning (click here), however, there is such a thing as behavior unbecoming of a national political party, and in that respect the Republican leadership is really out taking a shit on this one. This is no way to wage a debate—especially over such an important piece of legislation. A few months ago, who would have thought it NORMAL for every one of these protest to include some comparison to the Holocaust (complete, in this case, with pictures of emaciated corpses)? One rep compared the fight to stop the bill to battles fought during the Revolutionary War and Vietnam. And another (a few days earlier, on the House floor) said the heath-care legislation was a greater threat than terrorism (click here). I mean, seriously, what the fuck is going on? The only hope that lies in all of this (for supporters of the bill, anyway) is that the embrace of extremism signals the death throes of the opposition. But I don’t think anyone will believe that till they see it.

The Slatkinator

Can we talk about what a fucking baller Leonard Slatkin is? For those of you who don’t know, he used to run the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, then he came out here to lead the National SO. He’s based in Detroit now, but was in the Netherlands over the weekend conducting the Rotterdam Philharmonic when he suffered a heart attack in the middle of the performance. AND KEPT GOING. He dismissed his chest pains as INDIGESTION and finished the show—a Beethoven piano concerto and a Rachmaninoff symphony (click here and here for details). Apparently he’s so hardcore that his people have to keep him away from laptop so he doesn’t work too hard while recovering from the angioplasty and stint procedure he underwent after his little episode.

The Library (it’s a bar)

I walk by this place pretty often. It’s between the Foggy Bottom Metro and the Georgetown strip, right by the GW Trader Joe’s (click here). I finally went in for a few beers last night. It’s definitely not a place to “see and be seen.” There was practically NO ONE ELSE THERE. However, as I am not looking to be seen, I rather enjoyed having the place to myself. The chairs at the bar are basically lounge chairs, too. You can just slink back and think about nothing. (Well, not quite—Lou Dobbs was growling incessantly about the shooting at Fort Hood; other than that, though, there was a nice tranquility to the place.) Speaking of shooting, the bartender looked like he was about at the end of his rope, too, and yet, somehow, that really didn’t hurt my picture of the place either. Let’s be honest: this bar is called THE LIBRARY: I’ll FORCE myself to like it if I have to. See you there! (By the way, there are no cool pictures of this place. Apologies.)

Avoiding barbarism

Speaking of language, there’s a new book out about the making of The Elements of Style. (Click here for the Times review and here for the book itself.) The number of people writing today—professionally—who don’t understand parallel structure alone more than justifies the persistence of this “little” book. Strunk and White (as its known to its friends) is a testament to the belief, articulated by Orwell and others, that good writing is a reflection of comprehension, which should be the continual goal of every thinking person.

Language death revived

The linguist John McWhorter has an article in the current issue of World Affairs (click here) that’s been getting a lot of attention lately. It made the Times’s Idea of the Day blog and page 2 of Week in Review (click here and here), got picked up by Arts & Letters, and was mentioned by Andrew Sullivan on his Atlantic blog (click here). It’s also floating around on Newsweek’s site somewhere but we can’t seem to find where exactly. In the wake of all this attention, McWhorter drafted a defense of his piece for The New Republic, which you can read here. This is all by way of saying that if you don’t read World Affairs already, you should, because everyone else already does!