For such a long time, the office of the presidency here was like the Pope or the Grand Ayatollah, a position with a lot of reverence and fear. I can see this barrier crumbling down. (via Iraq The Model)

Conservative Islam and American imperialism, she believes, complement each other. "Bin Laden and George Bush are twins," she said. "They serve each other's purpose." .....Her targets are the usual objects of Arab anger - the Americans and the Israelis. What makes her and a growing number like her dangerous is her willingness to include the Middle East's own rulers in the list of the culpable.

"...[A]ll through Easter Sunday, one had to be alert to the possibility that, at any moment, the late and long-dead Terri Schiavo would receive the stigmata on both palms and both feet and be wafted across the Florida strait, borne up by wonder-working dolphins, to be united in eternal bliss with the man-child Elián González."

Do you know that nearly every major disability rights organization in the country has filed a legal brief in support of Terri's right to live?

At last, Hirst admits that some of his art is "silly and embarrassing"

The vilification rang out across the world, but the British press was in a class all by itself. The Independent called the Israeli opera­tion "a monstrous war crime." A. N. Wilson, writing for the Evening Standard, called it a "massacre, and a cover-up of genocide." The Guardian, not to be outdone, ran a lead editorial opining that "Jenin was every bit as repellent in its particulars, no less distressing, and every bit as man made, as the attack on New York on September 11."

All believe that there is a problem with the quality of British journalism. One issue is its silliness—the obsession with celebrity gossip and manufactured scandal that has spread from the popular papers to the qualities. Last week, the British Press Awards, the industry's annual shindig, gave its “Newspaper of the Year” award to the country's most downmarket Sunday paper, the News of the World; “Scoop of the year” went for a story about a footballer's adultery, gained largely by use of the editorial cheque-book. Drunkenness at the awards, and their downmarket tone, have led 11 editors to say they will boycott them in future. Some backers of the new Oxford outfit would like it to have its own awards, on the lines of America's Pulitzer prizes.

For Congress and the president to then step in and try to override that by shifting the venue to a federal court was a legal travesty, a flagrant violation of federalism and the separation of powers. The federal judge who refused to reverse the Florida court was certainly true to the law. But the law, while scrupulous, has been merciless, and its conclusion very troubling morally. We ended up having to choose between a legal travesty on the one hand and human tragedy on the other.

Because his career was a fantastic feat of self-invention, it is little wonder that the predominant spirit he conveyed was a childlike awe and pleasure at living the high life. As the years piled up and he suffered from debilitating ailments that made walking increasingly difficult in his final years, he concealed his discomfort. Each performance became an act of self-transformation in which he threw off his troubles. Every time he sang Razaf and J. C. Johnson's racy announcement, "Guess Who's in Town," he conveyed the exuberance of someone who had just breezed into the room to give the party a lift.

In "Hannah and Her Sisters," Woody Allen's punk-addled date just doesn't get it. On the sidewalk outside the Carlyle, Mr. Allen berates her: "You don't deserve Cole Porter." One suspects that Bobby Short would have disagreed. With his elegant egalitarianism, Mr. Short treated everyone as though they deserved Cole Porter. And that was the most gracious gesture of all.

IT WOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED AT ONE OF HIS GIGS

No, I don't think anyone ever fired a gun at the Carlyle. Guardian critic Caroline Sullivan seems surprised to hear bullets fly at a rap concert in London:

Another member of the group I was with shouted "We're going right now!" and we joined the surge - though, really, we had little choice. The options were to be swept along or to stand your ground and be crushed by what were now scores of people, desperate to flee whoever was standing in the middle of the hall, calmly firing a gun. It's hard to tell what was more frightening: the thought that the "gunman" (who ever uses that word in real life?) was only yards away, or the prospect of being trampled in the bottleneck created by waves of punters as they forced their way to the door.

Responding to questions at a media conference in Colombo on Friday, Quiba claimed that two Israelis who met Arafat on the day he was taken sick "used a laser device to attack Arafat. "They tried to flee after using the device but
were wrestled down by the Palestinian Authority security personnel. Both men
were carrying Canadian passports."

Quiba was quoted as saying the Palestinian Authority immediately informed the Israeli government of the "attempt on Arafat's life." Samples of Arafat's blood were tested in 16 countries and it was revealed that he had been poisoned by high technology, he said. Asked about reports that Arafat's meals had been poisoned, Quiba said it was not possible since Arafat always shared the food served to him and was the last to partake of it."

(via James Taranto)

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ANOTHER REASON TO LIKE JOHN BOLTON

Fred Barnes spells it out in today's Wall St Journal:

Mr. Bolton has a trait much admired by the president: He doesn't care about being liked. At the UN, he won't be.

PS Not surprisingly, perhaps, TNR's Peter Beinart is less sanguine in his Washington Post op-ed. He thinks comparisons with Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick - two UN luminaries from the past - are over-stated:

Moynihan and Kirkpatrick were effective because their oppositional styles suited the time -- a time when there was little the United States could do at the United Nations other than oppose. Today the United States has an opportunity to lead. And by choosing Bolton, the Bush administration may be squandering it.

Stanley Kurtz is unimpressed with that reasoning:

It’s more likely that Beinart is cleverly positioning himself for his purge of Democrat doves. By opposing Bolton, Beinart gains the sort of credibility with the Democrat street that will allow him to turn against MoveOn.org. Whether or not the Arab street is a myth, the Democrat street is all too real. I can see why Beinart needs to kowtow to it on Bolton. I just don’t think he’ll ever be able to cross the Democrat street–without getting flattened.

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QUOTABLE

I doubt if many of the aces I will be extolling in this story went into journalism with the faintest notion of creating a "new" journalism, a "higher" journalism, or even a mildly improved variety. I know they never dreamed that anything they were going to write for newspapers or magazines would wreak such evil havoc in the literary world.

Tom Wolfe, "The New Journalism"

At this point it may also be apposite to note that, for all the scholarliness he was to display in the future, Klemperer never on the whole seems to have felt really comfortable with other academics, even liberal ones, or in conventional middle-class settings in general. Although he loved teaching he did not deal very well with the social aspects of his profession. In his diaries he often appears more at ease with "practical" people or with craftsmen.

You don't get to be an editor (admittedly of the News of the World) at the age of 28 without having talent in some form or another, and this particular prodigy, who went on to edit the Mirror for nine years, at least knows how to retain his reader's interest.

On the other hand, he has absolutely no use for thought or reflection. On the evidence presented here he hardly ever seems to have read a book and appears a total stranger to self-doubt. That disqualifies him from being a natural diarist in the way, for example, that Alan Clark was (though those Diaries he claims to have read not once but twice).

This book certainly cannot compete with them but it may be unfair to judge it by such high standards. For one thing, as the author freely concedes, the "private diaries" as reproduced here are essentially an artificial construct. What he, slightly unoriginally, calls "the daily grind of editing" prevented him from sitting down nightly, or even weekly, and looking back on what had happened. Instead (a prudent precaution as things turned out) he preserved all sorts of memorabilia from his life at the top of Canary Wharf: contemporary jottings, memos, letters, faxes, e-mails, even front pages of the Daily Mirror - all the detritus of a journalist's life.

For all his far-reaching influence, Said is not, where detail is concerned, an accurate commentator. There are websites devoted to his howlers (principally in Orientalism). And yet one cannot help feeling that, errors notwithstanding, Said is, more often than not, substantially right; or at least on the right track; or at the very least making points that one really ought to consider.

Said was on to something. But—irony of ironies—the effect of his teaching has been to enthrone a mirror image of Orientalism, whereby no one may criticize despotism, theocracy, burqas, honor killings or terror so long as they are perpetrated by Muslims. So the modern anti-liberationist fingers his 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and tells us that Johnny Wog is immersed in immemorial hatreds that will prevent him from taking part in such upsetting activities as voting.

The demographics are unmistakable: Europe is dying. The wasting disease that has beset this once greatest of civilizations is not physical, however. It is a disease in the realm of the human spirit. David Hart, another theological analyst of contemporary history, calls it the disease of “metaphysical boredom”--boredom with the mystery, passion, and adventure of life itself. Europe, in Hart’s image, is boring itself to death.

Yesterday, I was answering questions from Polish Eurosceptics which could have come straight from the UK Independence party. These opponents of the EU are as much Europeans as we pro-EU Europeans are. In fact, in their very nationalism they are more characteristically old-European than they know. The difference is this: we new, sceptically pro-EU Europeans have a great story to tell - a story that is about the past but also about the future. Our challenge to these old, doggedly anti-EU Europeans is: we hear your story about the past, but where's your story about the future?

Interviewer: I've been told Dinsdale Piranha nailed your head to the floor.
Stig: No. Never. He was a smashing bloke. He used to buy his mother flowers and that. He was like a brother to me.
Interviewer: But the police have film of Dinsdale actually nailing your head to the floor.
Stig: (pause) Oh yeah, he did that.
Interviewer: Why?
Stig: Well he had to, didn't he? I mean there was nothing else he could do, be fair. I had transgressed the unwritten law.
Interviewer: What had you done?
Stig: Er... well he didn't tell me that, but he gave me his word that it was the case, and that's good enough for me with old Dinsy. I mean, he didn't want to nail my head to the floor. I had to insist. He wanted to let me off. He'd do anything for you, Dinsdale would.

I've seen my neighbors murdered, beaten, tortured by the IRA. I have been picketed by Sinn Fein for speaking out against those very things. Myself and my husband have been vilified by your apparatus, yourself included and your cohorts in leadership precisely because we have attempted to raise our voices for justice. For democracy. For republicanism. For human rights.

Communications professionals in the Western world take for granted a certain kind of media infrastructure. Politicians speak knowing that their message will be repeated more or less as it is delivered. Though the media may be swayed by unconscious biases, a politician does not have to worry about deliberate deceit or active misrepresentation.

So nothing could be more natural--more unavoidable almost--for an American media profession than to think of her job as speaking through the media. That is precisely how Hughes did think when she was running America's international media campaign from the White House from 9/11 until her departure in 2003. She would search out attractive, presentable Americans of Arab or Muslim background and send them on to al-Jazeera or al-Arabiyya, or on overseas speaking tours to make the case that America was not hostile to Islam, was not a country of hedonistic infidels, etc.

In 2002 and 2003, that approach failed, and failed badly. In the Middle East, most important indigenous television broadcasters are actively managed agencies of governments. (Including, in the case of the new satellite station al-Hurra, the U.S. government.) The media in this part of the world are not more or less neutral channels of communication. They are weapons in an undeclared war. They are not there to be used by the West. They are there to be used against the West.

Instead of trying to speak through the local media, an effective communications strategy in the Middle East has to find ways to speak past them. The locals know that. When Lebanese patriots bring hundreds of thousands of flag-waving demonstrators into the streets to demand that Syria free their country, they are sending a message that not even al-Jazeera can pervert.

It is hazardous in today's Middle East to equate communication with words. This is a region in which words have been systematically corrupted, where dictatorship is called "nationalism," where stealing is called "socialism," and where murder is called "martyrdom."

In a memorable radio interview last year he declared that Western classical music was completed, and therefore "over": in his view there would be no more great works. Does he still adhere to that view? "Of course. Everybody knows that. There is a time to throw stones, and a time to collect them up." Come again? "Those words are from the Bible. Now we are collecting the stones. It means there is a time for everything. There is a time for ancient music, and a time for jazz." What music is it the time for now? "Probably pop." So when you compose, you are outside your own time? "Yes. I compose in the way I was brought up. In the language of Rachmaninoff. That is how people of our generation feel. There were certain circumstances which helped classical music to be born, then it hit the heights. It's like a mountain range you don't know exactly where it starts, but suddenly you are in the heights. Then you go on, then you are among smaller hills, then no more mountains - it is finished. For me the last great mountain was 30 years ago - Shostakovich's 15th Symphony."