Monthly Archives: February 2014

Is a Human Life a Narrative?

26 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Philosophy

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Julian Barnes“Perhaps because my professional days are spent considering what is narrative and what isn’t, I resist this line of thought. Lessing described history as putting accidents in order, and a human life strikes me as a reduced version of this: a span of consciousness during which certain things happen, some predictable, others not; where certain patterns repeat themselves, where the operations of chance and what we may as well for the moment call free will interact; where children on the whole grow up to bury their parents, and become parents in their turn; where, if we are lucky, we find someone to love, and with them a way to live, or, if not, a different way to live; where we do our work, take our pleasure, worship our god (or not), and watch history advance by a tiny cog or two. But this does not in my book constitute a narrative. Or, to adjust: it may be a narrative, but it doesn’t feel like one to me.

My mother, whenever exasperated by the non-arrival or malfeasance of some goofy handyman or cack-handed service engineer, would remark that she could ‘write a book’ about her experiences with workmen. So she could have done; and how very dull it would have been. It might have contained anecdotes, scenelets, character portraits, satire, even levity; but this would not add up to narrative. And so it is with our lives: one damn thing after another—a gutter replaced, a washing machine fixed—rather than a story…”

Julian Barnes, writing in his memoir about mortality Nothing to Be Frightened Of.

“Experience is the only thing we share equally, and everyone senses this… I am a novelist, trained to use experience for other ends. Why should I tell the story of my life?

I do it because I feel the same stirrings that everyone else feels. I want to set the record straight… The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctibly trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning; and the same ending … My organisational principles, therefore, derive from an inner urgency, and from the novelist’s addiction to seeing parallels and making connections.”

Martin Amis, in a section from the introductory chapter of his memoir Experience.

Martin Amis

__________

There’s something spurious about the metaphors we use as shorthands for life. Unsolicited advice-givers and glib bumper stickers will tell you life’s a race. It’s a game. A dance. A journey. A beach.

So could life also be a narrative?

As with other such comparisons, this seems to me to be a half-baked utterance of pseudo-philosophy – an indicator not of life’s simplicity or our grand comprehension, but of our simplicity and of life’s fundamental opaqueness. Life is a ______. There have been forests felled to produce libraries to try in vain to fill in this blank; still we want a noun. Barnes hits on le mot juste when he calls this impulse atavistic. It’s the same reason we call God a Father or a Shepard: without these metaphors we are as stupefied as children.

Though as quick fixes for men with metaphysical headaches, these metaphors do serve to obscure as much as clarify. In a stunning utterance scrawled in his journal in 1897, Jules Renard reprimanded himself at the moment of his father’s death. “I do not reproach myself for not having loved him enough,” Renard lamented, “I do reproach myself for not having understood him.” So too I fear will be our assessments as we look back on lives lived as jauntily as if they were dances: enjoyable, sure, but what kind of a party was it?

“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves” was the response Wittgenstein gave to Renard’s quandary. Easy for a suicidal genius to say, but what about for the rest of us? Implicit in Wittgenstein is the assumption that we are here to discover truth about ourselves and the world before we leave it; after all, apart from the transcendental, what other “why” could we have? But notice Wittgenstein’s initial qualifier. That trepidation is compacted into the paragraphs from Barnes and Amis above, and maybe it’s actually the essential clause. Perhaps, next time you hear someone say “life’s a _____,” the proper response is to shrug and simply repeat that mad Austrian’s first three words.

The Miracle that Saves the World

24 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by in Philosophy

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Hannah Arendt

“Action is, in fact, the one miracle-working faculty of man, as Jesus of Nazareth, whose insights into this faculty can be compared in their originality and unprecedentedness with Socrates’ insights into the possibilities of thought, must have known very well when he likened the power to forgive to the more general power of performing miracles, putting both on the same level and within the reach of man.

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon human affairs faith and hope, those two essential characteristics of human existence which Greek antiquity ignored altogether… It is this faith in and hope for the world that found perhaps its most glorious and most succinct expression in the few words with which the Gospels announced their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has been born unto us.'”

__________

A surprising pronouncement from the end of the fifth chapter (“Action”) in Hannah Arendt’s 1958 book The Human Condition.

It’s striking how frequently Jesus and Socrates are compared or counterposed, especially in works of philosophy. Perhaps this trend stems from the fact that each figure works as a respective stand-in for Tertullian’s Jerusalem-Athens paradigm, though there’s probably more to it. One of the more worthwhile recent musings on this matter came from Cornell West, who when presenting his testimony spoke of a historico-philosophical question which he found particularly interesting: “I sometimes wonder why Jesus never laughed and Socrates never cried.”

Hannah Arendt4

Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens: What Country Would You Live In?

23 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Journalism, Politics

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Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens

Brian Lamb: If you had to choose a country to live in, besides Great Britain and the United States–

Christopher Hitchens: India. I love India. It’s the only place I’ve ever felt sort of instantly at home. It must seem incongruous when you look at me.

Brian Lamb: And Andrew?

Andrew Sullivan: I would die. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.

Brian Lamb: You would not pick anywhere else?

Andrew Sullivan: No.

__________

Two British transplants, Andrew Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens, reflecting on where they would live and their love for the United States during a joint interview with C-Span in February, 2002. Both men, though born in the United Kingdom, became American citizens in the last decade.

Watch the whole thing — but this particular segment is below.


What Kipling’s “Recessional” Can Teach Us

21 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by in Original, Poetry

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Rudyard Kipling

In 1897, Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was held in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of her reign. Rudyard Kipling, who had previously turned down the post of Royal Poet Laureate (he disdained official honors), was hounded by a public who wanted to see their greatest bard craft a work memorializing the hallowed day. But Kipling was reluctant. At first he replied with a shrug; writing about the Queen, he said, was outside his “beat.” And anyway, he argued, shouldn’t the sitting poet laureate, the now-unknown Alfred Austin, do the honors?

It was only a few days before the celebration that Kipling sat down to compose what would become one of the most famous poems in the English language. The work bristled with the splendid self-satisfaction and imperial pomp which marked the Jubilee. Kipling titled it “The White Man’s Burden”.

But just as soon as he’d written it, Kipling consigned his “Burden” to the wastebasket. He would later rework and publish it in 1899 – this time as an ode to American imperialism, featuring the subtitle “The United States and the Philippine Islands” – but at that high moment in 1897, Kipling read the words with apprehension. There was in the air “a certain optimism that scared me,” Kipling would later recall, a sense that settled him into a more solemn, even brooding, mood.

Galvanized by this silent anxiety, Kipling wrote a replacement. A reminder. A step back and deep breath, a long look in the mirror. A Recessional, which Webster defines as, “a hymn sung while the clergy and choir process out of church at the end of a service.” Kipling’s “Recessional” would have been read at the close of the Jubilee as the royal procession was to depart, but that was not the only reason for its title. Kipling had originally called the poem “After” – a modest name which would have sufficed for this purpose – yet he also sought to infuse the text with a gravitas that, as his successor Philip Larkin would so keenly recognize, could only be found in the context of religious liturgy.

“Recessional” is imbued with language and a refrain fitting of a hymn. Kipling repeatedly entreats his countrymen to avoid imperialistic hubris, so as to be spared by a God who holds true dominion over all mankind. The poem would eventually be sung as a chorale on Anzac Day in Australia and New Zealand, but we will have to be content reading it.

God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle-line,
Beneath whose awful Hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;
The Captains and the Kings depart:
Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,
An humble and a contrite heart.
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust
In reeking tube and iron shard,
All valiant dust that builds on dust,
And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,
For frantic boast and foolish word—
Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Some clarifications:

  • Here “awful” does not connote the negative set of emotions with which we associate the word today. Rather, just as the original meaning of “awesome” differed from its modern parlance, so too did “awful” once primarily refer to the emotion of awe.
  • “Dominion over palm and pine”: a nod to England’s possession of territories spanning the globe
  • “Ninevah and Tyre”: two fallen empires which may serve as warnings that earthly power is transient
  • The “Gentiles” here were the Germans and the Russians, two nations which embodied, at least to Kipling’s mind, godlessness and imperial hubris. In contrast, the British were ordained to be the “chosen” inheritors of the promise of the Biblical Jews.
  • “reeking tube and iron shard”: instruments of war which, like idols and smoking altars, represent the false gods of human power

Rudyard Kipling by Walter Stoneman, whole-plate glass negative, 1924

__________

A background on Rudyard Kipling’s 1897 poem “Recessional”.

This commentary is sourced from The Long Recessional: The Imperial Life of Rudyard Kipling by David Gilmour and Rudyard Kipling: A Life by Harry Ricketts, as well as the Kipling Society’s notes, written by Mary Hamer.

Talent Is a Question of Quantity

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Literature

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Jules Renard

“Talent is a question of quantity. Talent does not write one page: it writes three hundred. No novel exists which an ordinary intelligence could not conceive; there is no sentence, no matter how lovely, that a beginner could not construct. What remains is to pick up the pen, to rule the paper, patiently to fill it up. The strong do not hesitate. They settle down, they sweat, they go on to the end. They exhaust the ink, they use up the paper. This is the only difference between men of talent and cowards who will never make a start. In literature, there are only oxen. The biggest ones are the geniuses—the ones who toll eighteen hours a day without tiring. Fame is a constant effort.”

__________

From Jules Renard’s journal, in an entry from 1887. Renard would have been 23 years old at the time of this writing.

In one of his more cryptic jottings, which appears eight years later in these same journals, Renard wrote: “There are good writers and great ones. Let us be the good ones.”

You can find that epigram, along with other highlights from the first half of Renard’s journals, at the link below. Later this month, I’ll publish selections from the second and arguably more remarkable half of his largely overlooked masterwork.

Jules RenardThe Brilliant, Unread Journals of Jules Renard

‘Addiction Is No Respecter of Persons’: Will Self on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Demise

18 Tuesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Current Events, Film, Interview

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Will Self


Jeremy Paxman: Do you understand [Philip Seymour Hoffman’s] involvement with drugs?

Will Self: Well addiction’s no respecter of persons. You know there’s hardly anywhere you can point a finger, high or low in our society, and not hit somebody who’s got addiction issues. Heroin is a drug that we associate most strongly with addiction, but people can be addicted to all sorts of things. I think the fact that heroin was involved with his death is what people find very shocking, largely because of the image that heroin has in our culture…

The old sawhorse of whether the fact he was such an amazing actor was in some way connected to his drug use – or the pressures of his life led to his drug use – I dare say that’s in the mix, but you know, you can go to any poor or deprived part of our country, and throw a stick and you’ll hit somebody who’s got a heroin habit.

JP: It’s interesting, it’s often represented as a sort of loser’s drug, which is the environment that you are talking about there. By no stretch of the imagination was this man a loser.

WS: No, and as I say, you will find heroin addicts in every walk of life. But I think in America, in particular, there’s a very strange culture surrounding opiate drugs, which is the broader family of drugs of which heroin is one.

JP: What’s heroin like?

WS: You’re asking me personally?

I think that for people who don’t have a kind of need to be anesthetized, it probably is experienced as, yes, euphoric, but they wouldn’t necessarily feel a pull towards taking it again.

One of the strange things is that most of the people watching us now, at some time or other, will take medical diamorphine, which is heroin. And if they’re in pain, they’ll experience simply the removal of the pain.

JP: But it’s not instantly addictive though.

WS: No, it takes a fairly concerted effort to get addicted to opiate drugs, so you can say that people who do become addicted, maybe they’ve got a predisposition to it, but they have to make some decisions. They have to kind of decide to take it…

JP: But apparently he spent 20 years clean.

WS: Yes, that may well be true. Of course we don’t know whether he had other addictive behaviors that, so to speak, kept the addiction dormant.

I think that the way this story is being reported suggests this idea that addiction’s like a kind of ugly spirit that was cowed and pushed into the background, and then it reared up again in that way. I’m not sure that’s a very useful approach; it seems a rather medieval perception of it. But we don’t know what lead to him being in that situation. Again, very sadly, and this is only supposition, often with people who return to using heroin after a long period of abstinence, they can’t judge the dose. This happens quite frequently…

Philip Seymour Hoffman

__________

Will Self and Jeremy Paxman, talking last week on BBC Newsnight about the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

I recommend watching the remainder of this five minute interview for two primary reasons. First, Self is one of the more naturally expressive cultural commentators out there — and not only that, he’s a former heroin addict. Because of this, we must be extremely careful when weighing his words on this topic, especially those on the question of whether Hoffman’s creative genius was tied to his drug use, given that this riff could be a thinly veiled absolution of Self’s own related sins.

While I understand those who may take it this way — as a bit of self-justification designed to soften any critiques of his parallel personal history — I am inclined to take Self’s analysis as instructive, if also with a large grain of salt. His experience with the stuff colors his perception of it, sure, but it also means he knows more about it than I do. This is why the testimonies of sinners are always more powerful than those of saints: only they can say “I’ve been there” with a straight face.

I think it is also worth commending both Self and Paxman for the sobriety and gravity which they lend to this topic. So often, untimely celebrity deaths mark occasions for saccharine tributes and tabloid prying. So rarely do we recognize what we’ve lost and what we can learn. Yet notice how Paxman says “By no stretch of the imagination was this man a loser”; his voice registers the brilliance of Hoffman, the brutality of his demise, and how these two facts combine to cast a piteous shadow over the entire event. Hoffman’s death is devastating because he was a father, a son, and one of the most incandescently brilliant actors of our time. But it is also a moment for reflection because tragedies, unlike happy endings, are also the most dramatic lessons.

The Importance of Oscar Wilde

16 Sunday Feb 2014

Posted by in Literature

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Oscar Wilde

“It was really Oscar Wilde who awoke language in my head in a way like nobody else, and I think also discovering the kind of man Oscar Wilde was, was an enormous influence as well. The fact that you could be such a towering intellect, such a lord of language and be charming and graceful, kind, good natured, but also unhappy and unlucky was a great discovery for an adolescent — because one of the traps of adolescence is the sort of paranoid resentment that somehow you’re never going to match up and that everybody else’s life is going to be better and finer and fuller. That everyone else attended some secret lesson in which how to live was taught and you had a dental appointment that day or you were somehow not invited.

And the point of great writers like Wilde is that they make that invitation to you. They welcome it. Perhaps the greatest definition I think of character and quality is people who when they’re truly great rather than making you feel they’re tall, they make you feel you’re tall, that they’re greatness as it were improves you. They used to say of Oscar Wilde that when you got done from a dinner table you felt funnier and wittier and cleverer. Now a lot of brilliant people make you feel less funny, less clever, less witty because they’re so clever, witty and funny, but he had the opposite effect. A bit like what Shakespeare said about Falstaff, not just a wit, but a cause of wit in others.”

__________

Stephen Fry, speaking with Big Think about the influence of Oscar Wilde.

As with Fry, Oscar Wilde — specifically in his lone novel The Picture of Dorian Gray — was for me among the first writers who stirred that epiphany, “This is someone whose voice I understand.” Reading that book as a teenager, I found an author who simultaneously connected with, and transcended, my conception of the world.

Wilde’s seminal comedy The Importance of Being Earnest was first performed this week in 1895 at St James’s Theatre in London.

On Life with a Death Sentence: Reflections on 25 Years Since the Salman Rushdie Fatwa

13 Thursday Feb 2014

Posted by in Freedom, Literature, Original, Politics

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Salman Rushdie Fatwa

On February 14th, 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwā against the Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie, in retaliation for Rushdie’s allegedly blasphemous book The Satanic Verses. Stripped of context, what this event signified was the theocratic leader of a foreign country openly offering money for the murder of an author living 3,000 miles away, as punishment for the crime of writing a novel.

But with that declaration, the distance between London and Tehran took on darkly allegorical shades, too. In this twisted reworking of the Athens-Jerusalem paradigm, forces of barbarism and fanaticism around the globe were quick to riot against Rushdie, burning copies of his book and effigies of him. Judging by sales, a majority of these rioters had not read the novel, and a large majority of that majority probably couldn’t have read it if they’d tried. Nevertheless, Rushdie immediately went into hiding as Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, was stabbed to death, and Ettore Captiolo, its Italian translator, was gravely wounded. Rushdie’s wife Marianne Wiggins would later recall that in just the first three months after the fatwā, the couple moved 56 times.

In 1998, the newly inaugurated Iranian President Mohammad Khatami revoked the fatwā. That decade, which was in certain ways a prelude to the events of 2001, had begun with one of the most momentous events in modern literary history. A field of battle had been cleared, and down its center a line was drawn. On one side, a culture that sections off certain sacrosanct ideas, censoring them from inquiries and perceived insults; on the other side, a culture that categorically affirms no individual can be killed for what he or she says or writes.

Yusuf Islam

Below are two striking personifications of this split. First, Yusuf Islam’s (née Cat Stevens) response to the fatwā. Second is Rushdie’s response, 20 years later, to Islam’s (the musician) take. While short, their responses are enormously suggestive about where ethical and free people must stand in this ongoing struggle for the freedom of expression.

On February 21, 1989, Yusuf Islam was asked by a student at Kingston University about whether the fatwā against Rushdie was Quranically justified. He replied, “[Rushdie] must be killed. The Qur’an makes it clear. If someone defames the prophet, then he must die.”


Two months later, Islam was a panelist on the BBC program Hypotheticals, which was moderated by Geoffrey Robertson. There the two men exchanged the following words:

Robertson: You think that this man deserves to die?
Islam: Who, Salman Rushdie?
Robertson: Yes.
Islam: Yes, yes.
Robertson: And do you have a duty to be his executioner?
Islam: Uh, no, not necessarily, unless we were in an Islamic state and I was ordered by a judge or by the authority to carry out such an act – perhaps, yes.
Robertson: Would you give him shelter?
Islam: Yes, I’d try to phone the Ayatollah Khomeini and tell him exactly where this man is.
Robertson: Would you go to a demonstration where you knew that an effigy was going to be burned?
Islam: I would have hoped that it’d be the real thing; but actually, no, if it were just an effigy I don’t think I’d be that moved to go there.

Salman Rushdie

Two decades after these remarks, Salman Rushdie, now out of hiding and promoting his memoir about those harrowing days, sat for an interview about about Yusuf Islam and the fatwā with George Stroumboulopoulos.

Stroumboulopoulos: The “Rally for Sanity” just happened, with Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, and Yusuf Islam performed… he kind of laid it on you during the fatwā. How did you feel about that?

Rushdie: Not good. Not good. Actually, you know, he’s dropped the ‘Islam’ now for mysterious reasons. Yes now he’s just ‘Yusuf,’ like Cher or Madonna, except with a very big beard.

No, but I actually think it was a mistake to have invited him, and I called up Jon Stewart and we had a couple of conversations, and I think that, by the end of it, he was pretty clear that is was probably a misstep.*

Because he’s is not a good guy. It may be that he once sang “Peace Train” – and there was a point when I was a college student when I had a copy of Tea for the Tillerman – but he hasn’t been Cat Stevens for a long time. He’s a different guy now.

Stroumboulopoulos: Are you a different guy from the guy who wrote that book?

Rushdie: I’m older. But I’m the same writer. You know, I feel very proud of that book. And I think one of the great things about the time having passed, is that now people can read The Satanic Verses as a novel… And so now some people like it, some people don’t like it, but that’s the ordinary life of a book.

Stroumboulopoulos: Is there any fear in you that now you’re going to reprint and relive that stuff?

Rushdie: No. I think we have to stop thinking like that. That’s pussy thinking.

*In 2012, Stewart commented on Rushdie’s allegations, saying, “I wouldn’t have done [the bit], I don’t think. If I had known that, I wouldn’t have done it. Because that to me is a deal breaker. Death for free speech is a deal breaker.”

__________

For more on this subject, take a look at two recent works by Rushdie: Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002 and Joseph Anton: A Memoir.

Salman Rushdie at 9/11 Memorial

The great voice on this subject, as with so many other topics, was Christopher Hitchens’s.

Dennis Perrin, a friend and protégé of the Hitch, recounts a moment in 1991 when the two men were conversing in a D.C. pub and Cat Stevens’s “Moonshadow” began to waft from the jukebox:

Hitch stops talking. His face tightens…

“No,” he said, shaking his head, exhaling Rothman smoke. “No–get rid of that!”

Bartender asks, “Excuse me?”

“Get rid”–gesturing to the music in the air–“of that.”

“Can’t. Someone played that song.”

“Well, fuck it then.”

Don’t know if Hitch is serious. Yes, his anger about the fatwā is real and understandable. And the fact that the former Cat Stevens, Yusef Islam [sp], endorsed the mullahs’ death sentence clearly enraged him. But getting shitty over “Moonshadow”?

“You know,” I say, “Yusef Islam [sp] renounced everything about his past. He hates Cat Stevens more than you do. He gave away or destroyed all his gold records. If you really want to show your disgust for him, embrace Cat Stevens. Play his stuff loud and often. Whistle ‘Peace Train’ or ‘Oh Very Young’ when you pass the local mosque.”

Hitch listens, head down, fresh Rothman lit.

“No. Never. Fuck them both.”

In one of Hitchens’s smoothest rhetorical flourishes, he riffed on this issue as a guest on Question Time in 2007. His argument is a full-throated defense of not only Rushdie, but absolute free expression and the value of our language. (London Mayor Boris Johnson’s more comical take is also worth a listen.)

Original Sin and Future War

12 Wednesday Feb 2014

Posted by in Current Events, Politics, Speeches, War

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Andrew Bacevich

Questioner: I have a bumper stick on my car that says, “War is not the answer”… But of course the question is, if war is not the answer, what is the answer?

Andrew Bacevich: I’m actually a conservative. Look… let me cut to the chase: as a Catholic, I believe in original sin. I think that we are, in our nature, fundamentally flawed. And that peace, probably, is beyond our capacity to achieve. Therefore, to my mind, a more modest goal is more realistic: to minimize the occurrence of war, except in those circumstances when the highest values are at risk and there is no alternative but to resort to violence in order to defend those ideals. And even then, always, always, always to be cognizant of the fact that war occurs in the realm of chance, and that the consequences that will stem from war will defy your imagination.

So, therefore, one needs to be extraordinarily cautious, careful, and wary. And… especially since the end of the Cold War, we as a people — and in particular our political leaders in Washington — have entirely lost sight of these historical realities. They’re far too casual about going to war; they’re oblivious to the adverse consequences. They work on the most optimistic assumptions — that it’s going to be easy, that it’s going to be cheap, that once you achieve some goal you set for yourself, all other problems will vanish.

And so, from a conservative’s perspective, I say, “No, there’s no reason to think along those terms.” And therefore, we should be cautious, and again minimize rather than expect to eliminate armed conflict.

__________

West Point graduate, Vietnam War veteran, and Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich, speaking during the Q&A portion of a recent panel on how the wounded come back from war. Below, watch a short clip of Bacevich testifying before Congress in 2009.

In 2010, Bacevich wrote a morally flawless piece in the Los Angeles Times that was published on Memorial Day, three years to the month of his son’s death while serving in Afghanistan. Bacevich summoned Americans to regard that day not as a holiday heralding the start of summer, but as a moment in which we solemnly memorialize fellow citizens who have come home draped in American flags. Let the article’s penultimate paragraph detonate in your mind:

How exactly did we get ourselves in such a fix, engaged in never-ending wars that we cannot win and cannot afford? Is the ineptitude of our generals the problem? Or is it the folly of our elected rulers? Or could it perhaps be our own lazy inattention? Rather than contemplating the reality of what American wars, past or present, have wrought, we choose to look away, preferring the beach, the ballgame and the prospect of another summer.

This issue of how our society processes its role in armed conflict, and armed conflict’s role in world affairs, is becoming something of a preoccupation of mine. Now that a half dozen of my friends have seen deployments and my brother-in-law has been awarded a Purple Heart for his service in Afghanistan, I have come to see their valor as fundamentally travestied by the quixotic missions for which they bravely sacrificed. More embarrassing, however, is the craven egotism of a society which has sacrificed nothing for the cause, leaving the immediate burden to a mercenary army and the bill to generations who were not alive when the war began.

As someone born the year the Cold War ended, I’ve now lived half my life as a citizen of “a country at war,” and I can remember skimming (when I was thirteen) Gore Vidal’s 2002 anti-imperial polemic Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. I loathed almost every page of Vidal’s cynical, careless screed, but I loved the title. It was so prescient, though the war’s peace would materialize most conspicuously in the minds of a civilian populace of which I am a part.

In the next week, I am going to publish a short reflection on Sebastian Junger’s tour de force WAR. In the meantime, I recommend watching Bacevich on how the wounded come home as well as reading his searing book Breach of Trust. If you are looking for more journalistic takes on our efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, check out Dexter Filkin’s The Forever War or Chris Hedges’s War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.

Andrew J. Bacevich

Jerzy Kosiński on How Aging Shapes One’s Outlook on the World

10 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by in Interview, Philosophy

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Jerzy Kosiński

Interviewer: You have looked at the world from both ends of its ideologies — Soviet totalitarianism and American capitalism. Also from both ends of the class ladder. When you first arrived in this country, with no English, you were scraping ships, cleaning bars, parking cars, chauffeuring in Harlem. You were a truck driver and lived in the YMCA. By 1962, in four short years, you became a known author, you met and married a woman who was one of the largest taxpayers in the United States… At which end of your experience of fear or freedom, rich or poor, did you find the greatest sense of being alive?

Jerzy Kosiński: At both ends – and in between. As I have no habits that require maintaining – I don’t even have a favorite menu – the only way for me to live was always to be as close to other people as life allowed. Not much else stimulates me. I have no other passions, no other joys, no other obsessions. The only moment when I feel truly alive is when, in a relationship with other people, I discover how much in common we all share with each other. Money and possessions – I care little for the first, hardly for the second – were never necessary to experience life as I live it. As greatly as my wife, her wealth, and our marriage contributed to my knowledge of myself, of America, and of the world, they contributed just so much – no more, no less – as all other moments have contributed to my curiosity about myself, others, society, art – and to my sense of being alive.

Of course I’ve always known moments of loneliness when I felt abandoned, rejected, unhappy – but in such moments, I also felt alive enough to ponder my own state of mind, my own life, always aware that at any moment this precious gift of awareness of the self might be taken away from me. That state of awareness has always been, to me, less a possession than a mortgage, easily terminable.

Interviewer: Do you find you are becoming less dispassionate as you grow older?

Jerzy Kosiński: More compassionate, more attentive to the voice of life and more forgiving of its various failures, in myself as well as in others, but also more critical of a society so cruel to the old, sick, infirm. And I begin to perceive certain periods of my past, like certain skiing tricks I used to perform, as not available to be reproduced by me anymore. From now on, they will reside in me only as memory – and as a play of my imagination. Nostalgia and sentimentality – this is new.

Interviewer: Sentimentality?

Jerzy Kosiński: Yes. Once, I considered it merely a mood undefined. To be sentimental was not to be clear about oneself or others. Now I feel it as a minor but necessary shade, a mixture of regret and of desire.

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From Gail Sheehy’s illuminating 1977 interview with Polish-American novelist Jerzy Kosiński.

This piece was originally published in Psychology Today with the heading, “The Psychological Novelist as Portable Man,” a hysterically pretentious title that mischaracterizes what is otherwise a candid and illuminating piece. It’s certainly worth a read, and can be found alongside other insightful discussions in Tom Teicholz’s 1993 collection Conversations with Jerzy Kosiński.

Will It Be Clinton vs. Bush in 2016? (Probably So, Says John Heilemann)

10 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by in Interview, Journalism, Politics

≈ 2 Comments

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Hillary Clinton

Andrew Sullivan: Look, obviously apart from the Clinton machine sitting there ready to take over, I don’t see anything on either side right now that seems even faintly in the game.

I mean I might have said Christie, but I think at this point no sane person would want that kind of personality in charge of any greater sort of power. Because once you’re wired that way, you’re just not a President. And I say that as someone who was kind of hoping for some kind of moderate, Northeastern Republican in 2016.

But I just can’t see [Ohio Gov. John] Kasich, or [Wisconsin Gov. Scott] Walker; or on the Democratic side, who’s going to go up against it? [Maryland Gov. Martin] O’Malley? [New York Gov. Andrew] Cuomo?

So what’s going to happen, John? Predict. Because if we’re going to face another Clinton era, I’m gonna need some help.

John Heilemann: Tell me something I don’t know. It’s a very unusual circumstance.

Just as a matter of brute political reality, in many ways she is better situated to be the Democratic nominee than a sitting President would be, in the sense that she has almost all the assets for incumbency and yet she doesn’t actually have to run the government. She is free to be a candidate, but she has all the pro weight of incumbency – she has the record, now, of an incumbent. She’s very much attached to this administration; she’ll be seen as part of it if she runs, with all the attendant benefits in terms of the nomination that that entails.

Much of the Democratic party, having nominated an African-American, now thinks it’s time for there to be a woman nominee. She has extraordinary, extraordinary amounts of loyalty from the constituencies that choose Democratic nominees: women, Latin Americans, African Americans, gays and lesbians, union households – she has strength in all of those communities. Pick an important Democratic nominating constituency, she is incredibly strong with all of them.

She is the only Democrat who can really raise money, if she’s in the race. If she’s not in the race, the donor class is all over the place. But if she runs, she locks up a vast chunk of the Democratic voter base. Beyond health issues or some self-inflicted scandal — or Bill’s health or some potential scandal he could be involved in — she effectively will win the Democratic nomination by acclamation.

But I don’t think that anyone will run against her. Biden will not run if she runs, I believe. Cuomo will not run if she runs. Martin O’Malley has said he will not run if she runs… Who is going to take her on? It doesn’t mean she’s going to be President, but it means that if she wants to be the Democratic nominee, she is close to unstoppable.

AS: How psychologically crippling would it be for the Republicans to lose two elections to Obama, and then lose the next one to Hillary Clinton? Would you not want to just pack up and go home at that point?

Jeb Bush

JH: The talk of there being a Republican “Civil War” is not radically exaggerated. It has lost five of the last six general elections at the level of the popular vote, and if you look at where the Republican party stands right now with the American electorate, the only thing that’s keeping it afloat is Obama’s weakness, which is real… The party is radically out of touch with the rising demographic forces in the country, and with what the policy implications of those changes are.

I think that most of the Republicans that people talk about as potential nominees are a joke compared to Hillary Clinton.

Who’s the strongest Republican candidate right now? You know, it’s probably Jeb Bush. And there are big issues with Jeb Bush.

But if the Republican party is going to win, they have to find someone who the establishment donor class wing of the party is really behind, and believes can win; and that the Tea Party cultural wing of the party can be energized for. Someone who fuses those two things together, and someone who can talk to the so-called “coalition of the ascendant” (minorities and single women) – not necessarily get a majority of them, but still not get only 27% of the Hispanic vote. Because you can’t win a national election with 27%; you have to get 37, 38% of the Hispanic vote, and Jeb Bush is someone who can conceivably do those three things.

I’m not saying he’s a perfect candidate, but right now, he is someone who could conceivably do those things. Can Paul Ryan do those things? I don’t think so, and I don’t think he’s going to run. Can Scott Walker do those things? That’s kind of a stretch. I mean, have you spent much time with Scott Walker? His a fine Midwestern governor – “fine” in the sense of his political skills, just as a candidate. But is he a major league ball player who can go toe-to-toe with Hillary Clinton?

This is like during the last cycle when people would say Tim Pawlenty may have a shot; and I would say, ‘have you been with Tim Pawlenty?’ Like, he’s a really good guy, and he was a successful governor of Minnesota, but you watch him – and I hate to use sports analogies – but it’s like a really good AA player, and you’re going to go out and play against Barack Obama? It’s ridiculous. A very good minor league player, who you’re going to put out on the field to hit against Sandy Koufax.

Rand Paul? Ted Cruz? Obviously not plausible to win.

John Heilemann and Mark Halperin

AS: Not plausible?

JH: Not plausible to win a national election. Could one of those guys, in a very fragmented Republican field, and especially now with the way they’re building the Republican nomination process, could one of them win the nomination? It’s not impossible. But they will not be President of the United States.

AS: But if you win Iowa and New Hampshire [in the primaries], you’re kind of set.

JH: Yeah, you can run the table.

AS: I’ll end on this — what does it say about America that we could be looking towards the most plausible scenario, of the most viable race in 2016, is a Clinton against a Bush?

JH: It says that America, very firmly, deeply, profoundly, and broadly believes it’s time for a change.

[Both crack up laughing.]

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A selection transcribed from last week’s ‘Andrew Asks Anything’ with John Heilemann, posted on The Dish.

This new feature is exclusively for subscribing members of the site, and along with the additional resources offered by The Dish, it is well worth the $20 price of a yearly subscription. The site is a current events and cultural hub that covers issues deeply and widely, and is serious but does not take itself too seriously. It’s among the first news resources I check each day. Plus, Sullivan is, in addition to an almost perfectly fluent writer, a commentator whose opinions are decidedly fresh, attentive, and apartisan. His conversation with Heilemann runs over an hour and a half, with this particular portion being just the final 3 minutes.

Above: Heilemann, left, with his Double Down and Game Change co-author, Mark Halperin.