Modernism, beginning at some point in the past 250 years and ending for the past 70, is usually used to refer to that cultural historical period in which artists, writers, musicians and designers experimented ruthlessly, in which tradition ceased to be a source of authority, and in which aesthetic rules were violated and radicalised. Little wonder Picasso called modern art a ‘sum of destructions’. But modernism remains a vexed term – what exactly it designates, and consequently how it is periodised, is always being contested.
Faced with a term in constant dispute, some critics, in search of the quiet life, content themselves not with a singular definition but with a set of modernisms - as myriad as the categories allow, be it geographical or disciplinary. Others prefer to abstract a principle so general – irony, say – that modernism loses any historical specificity at all. In this regard, Peter Gay’s Modernism is admirably ambitious: it attempts to preserve the particularity of the artworks themselves, be it Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse or Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, while gesturing to that general modernist sensibility they embody.
As Gay makes clear in his opening chapter, ‘the manifestation of modernism’ ought to be treated as ‘a single historical epoch’. This, he says elsewhere, ‘dates roughly from Baudelaire and Flaubert to Beckett and beyond to Pop Art and other dangerous blessings’. What the artists, writers, composers and architects share is not only a ‘climate of thought, feeling and opinions’ but two principles in particular: ‘the lure of heresy that impelled their action as they confronted conventional sensibilities’ and a commitment to ‘principled self-scrutiny’.
With these two elements marshalling his interpretation of a vast array of cultural artefacts, Gay proceeds to present a narrative of modernism, tracing its history through periods of pugnacious self-confidence and impending defeat. Each artist, each grouping – be it Picasso, the disparagingly named Fauves, or the Hitler-worshipping, Nobel prize-winning Knut Hamsum – becomes a character, better still, a hero in Gay’s epic tale of modernist derring-do.
Each of Gay’s dramatis personae exhibit his two key modernist traits – that is, the desire to challenge the cultural establishment (Ezra Pound’s ‘make it new’) and to give expression to hitherto unencountered depths of the self, be it the ‘monologue interieur’ of Joyce or the near pathological self-portraiture of Max Beckmann. It is breathless in its telling. We encounter the Impressionists, including a certain Claude Monet, scandalising audiences at a group exhibition in Paris in 1874; we’re given a snapshot of the Dadaists offending the orthodoxy at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1915; and we’re presented with a sombre portrait of the postwar years, especially in Germany. Gay quotes Thomas Mann: ‘Books that could be printed from 1933 to 1945 in Germany are less than worthless, and they are not good to handle. An odour of blood and shame sticks to them. They should all be pulped.’
And so it continues. Marcel Duchamp’s ‘fountain’, Jackson Pollock’s abstract expressionism, Roy Liechtenstein’s depthless surfaces, Samuel Beckett’s post-human dramas – all of them testaments to unrelenting innovation. Hence at every stage of Gay’s modernist adventure the protagonists are shown striking out on their own, defying the conventions of the moment, and exploring formal possibilities that previous generations had been unable to imagine.
There is no doubt that Modernism is often compelling. And its central thesis – that modernists were characterised by ‘the lure of heresy’ – does capture not just the widespread interrogation of artistic convention, but also its subjective counterpart: the sovereignty of the artist. This is something that Gay rightly contextualises in terms of the burgeoning art market and levels of tolerance available under relatively liberal regimes.
But there is also something missing in Gay’s hymn to the lure of heresy. For all that artistic autonomy had been won, there was an equally powerful sense that something had been lost. In 1923, the great Viennese writer, Robert Musil, observed ‘the feelings of decline today, which are grey, ashen and passive and joyless...’ (1). Elsewhere, Marcel Proust, one of Gay’s ‘four modern masters’, while talking of the world beyond his bedroom, indeed, outside his mémoire, surveyed ‘the inhuman emptiness of this deconsecrated forest.’ (2) Franz Kafka captures well the sense of God forsakeness with characteristic chirpiness: ‘there is infinite hope but not for us.’ For Gay, however, Kafka’s ‘unflinching bleakness’ is little more than an oedipal maladjustment. And where Eliot experienced the wasteland of modern civilisation, of high culture brough low, Gay sees merely elitist disdain. He reserves his praise, ideed, his enthusiasm for the heretical posture. Depriving modernism of its lacerating melancholy, he renders it a countercultural parody of itself – which by the 1960s it was.
Modernism, for its constituents, was experienced not simply as liberation, but as crisis. It bespoke something profound: the cultural experience, indeed, the disillusionment of modernity’s promise of autonomy. The emancipation of individual subjectivity, encouraging self-scrutiny as Gay sees it, if bereft of social bonds becomes as much a prison as a promise of freedom.
This is writ large in the development of literary modernism. As Gay notes, the mimetic, realistic component typical of nineteenth-century realism was increasingly experienced as a formal inhibition. But he fails to tell us why this was the case. What had changed between the time of Balzac and that of Flaubert and Baudelaire, the two progenitors of modernism identified by Gay? As the Marxist critic Georg Lukács explained, between these two generations of French writers ‘lies the year 1848 and the bloody days of June, the first independent action of the working class, which left so indelible an impression on the ideology of the French bourgeoisie, that after it bourgeois ideology ceased to play a progressive part in France for a long time’ (3). In other words, universal aspirations were abandoned in favour of the protection of particular interests.
This is crucial. For the realist writer, the ability to narrate, to find meaning in social praxes, rests, as Lukács argues, on the artist having a ‘living relationship to the real life of the people’ (4). Be it Balzac or Walter Scott, the vital problems of the time are experienced as their problems; the life and struggles of the community as their struggles. Modernism’s emergence depends on the dissolution of just such an involvement. As Peter Nicholls notes, it is with Baudelaire, writing during the 1850s, that ‘a cleavage begins to open up between bourgeois modernity, on the one hand, and aesthetic modernity on the other’ (5).
The sovereignty of the artist, his autonomy, is set against the political sovereignty and autonomy won in 1789. Although free to experiment, to push the boundaries of their art, the artist loses those with whom he had previously found common, if problematic cause. His professionalisation becomes a burden. Bereft of something like solidarity, he is left before his fellows – the market – as before an antagonistic mass: ‘Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!’
For all its erudition, Modernism can never quite capture the profundity of the modernist moment, its intense disillusionment with the social world, and its concomitant yearning for its re-enchantment - or, paraphrasing Baudelaire, to find the ‘beauty’, ‘the eternal’ and ‘the immutable’ in ‘the transient, the fleeting, the contingent’. Reducing the modernist sensibility to something that often seems no more than a psychological impulse – the lure of heresy – Gay misses the great historical, existential crisis that modernism expresses
About Me
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30.4.08
1968
May 1968 - a watershed in French life
By Steven Erlanger
NANTERRE, France: Forty years ago, students in neckties and bobby sox threw cobblestones at the police and demanded that France's sclerotic postwar system change. Today, students worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits are marching through the streets demanding that nothing change at all.
May 1968 was a watershed in French life, a holy moment of liberation for many, when youth coalesced, the workers listened and the semi-royal French government of President Charles de Gaulle took fright.
But for others, like the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, only 13 years old at the time, May '68 represents anarchy and moral relativism, a destruction of social and patriotic values that, he has said in harsh terms, "must be liquidated."
The fierce debate about what happened 40 years ago is very French. There is even a fight about labels - the right calls May '68 "the events," while the left calls it "the movement."
While a youth revolt became general in the West - from anti-Vietnam protests in the United States to the Rolling Stones in swinging London and finally the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany - France was where the protests of the baby-boom generation came closest to a real political revolution, with 10 million workers on strike and not just a revulsion against stifling social rules of class, education and sexual behavior.
For André Glucksmann, a prime actor then and still a famous "public intellectual," May 1968 is "a monument, either sublime or detested, that we want to commemorate or bury."
It is a "cadaver," he said, "from which everyone wants to rob a piece." Glucksmann, 71 and still with a mop of Beatle-like hair, wrote a book with his filmmaker son, Raphaël, 28, called "May 68 Explained to Nicolas Sarkozy."
In a stinging campaign speech a year ago, as he ran against the Socialist candidate, Sarkozy attacked May 1968 and "its leftist heirs," whom he blamed for a crisis of "morality, authority, work and national identity." He attacked "the cynicism of the caviar left."
In 1968, Glucksmann said, "the hope was to change the world, like the Bolshevik revolution, but it was inevitably incomplete and the institutions of the state are untouched." Now, he said, "We commemorate, but the right is in power." As for the French left, he said, "it's in a state of mental coma."
For Raphaël Glucksmann, who led his first strike at high school in 1995, his generation has nostalgia for their rebel fathers, but no stomach for a fight in hard economic times.
"The young people are marching now to refuse all reforms, to defend the rights of their professors," he said. "We see no alternatives. We're a generation without bearings."
The events (or movement) of 40 years ago began in March at Nanterre university to the west of Paris, where a young French-born German named Daniel Cohn-Bendit led demonstrations against parietal rules - when young men and women could be together in dormitory rooms - that got out of hand. When Nanterre was closed in early May, the anger spread to central Paris, to the Latin Quarter and the Sorbonne, where the student elite demonstrated against antiquated university rules, and then outward, to workers in the big factories.
Scenes of the barricades, the police charges and the tear gas are dear to the French, recaptured in every magazine and scores of books, including one by the photographer Marc Riboud, now 84, called: "Under the Cobblestones," a reference to a famous slogan of the time from the leader-jester Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament, "Under the cobblestones is the beach."
Known then as "Dany the Red" for the color of both his politics and his hair, Cohn-Bendit is also thought responsible for other famous slogans of the time: "It is forbidden to forbid" and "Live without limits and enjoy without restraint!" - with the word for enjoy, "jouir," having the double meaning of sexual climax. The injunction was especially potent in a straight-laced country where the birth-control pill had been authorized for sale only the year before, said Alain Geismar, another leader of the time.
Geismar, a physicist who spent 18 months in jail - but later served as a counselor to government ministers - wrote his own book, "My May 1968." Now 69, the former Maoist uses an Apple iPhone. He happily displays his music catalogue, which is mostly Mozart.
The movement succeeded "as a social revolution, not as a political one," Geismar said. While the de Gaulle government responded with police and mobilized troops in case the students marched on the presidential palace, the idea never occurred to student leaders, who talked of revolution but never intended to carry one out.
Most significant, Geismar said, the movement was "the beginning of the end of the Communist Party in France," which deeply opposed the revolt of these young leftists who it could not control, but who managed in important ways to break the party's authority over the big industrial unions.
French society in May 1968 "was completely blocked," Geismar said. A conservative recreation of pre-World War II society, it had been shaken by the Algerian war and the baby boom, its schools badly overcrowded.
"As a divorced man, Sarkozy couldn't have been invited to dinner at the Élysée Palace, let alone be elected president of France," Geismar said. Both the vivid personal life and political success of Sarkozy, who has foreign and Jewish roots, "are unimaginable without 1968," he said. "The neo-conservatives are unimaginable without '68."
André Glucksmann, who still supports Sarkozy as the best chance to modernize "the gilded museum of France" and reduce the power of "the sacralized state," is amused by Sarkozy's fierce campaign attack on May 1968. "Sarkozy is the first post-'68 president," Glucksmann said. "To liquidate '68 is to liquidate himself."
But there is also a fashionable absurdity to the commemoration. The designers Sonia Rykiel and Agnès B discuss their views of May 1968 in every magazine, there are documentaries and discussions on every channel and a Parisian jeweler, Jean Dinh Van, born in Vietnam, has reissued a silver cobblestone pendant he made at the time "to celebrate 40 years of liberty" - and, in his case, success. (The smallest, with chain, sells for $275.)
By Steven Erlanger
NANTERRE, France: Forty years ago, students in neckties and bobby sox threw cobblestones at the police and demanded that France's sclerotic postwar system change. Today, students worried about finding jobs and losing state benefits are marching through the streets demanding that nothing change at all.
May 1968 was a watershed in French life, a holy moment of liberation for many, when youth coalesced, the workers listened and the semi-royal French government of President Charles de Gaulle took fright.
But for others, like the current president, Nicolas Sarkozy, only 13 years old at the time, May '68 represents anarchy and moral relativism, a destruction of social and patriotic values that, he has said in harsh terms, "must be liquidated."
The fierce debate about what happened 40 years ago is very French. There is even a fight about labels - the right calls May '68 "the events," while the left calls it "the movement."
While a youth revolt became general in the West - from anti-Vietnam protests in the United States to the Rolling Stones in swinging London and finally the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany - France was where the protests of the baby-boom generation came closest to a real political revolution, with 10 million workers on strike and not just a revulsion against stifling social rules of class, education and sexual behavior.
For André Glucksmann, a prime actor then and still a famous "public intellectual," May 1968 is "a monument, either sublime or detested, that we want to commemorate or bury."
It is a "cadaver," he said, "from which everyone wants to rob a piece." Glucksmann, 71 and still with a mop of Beatle-like hair, wrote a book with his filmmaker son, Raphaël, 28, called "May 68 Explained to Nicolas Sarkozy."
In a stinging campaign speech a year ago, as he ran against the Socialist candidate, Sarkozy attacked May 1968 and "its leftist heirs," whom he blamed for a crisis of "morality, authority, work and national identity." He attacked "the cynicism of the caviar left."
In 1968, Glucksmann said, "the hope was to change the world, like the Bolshevik revolution, but it was inevitably incomplete and the institutions of the state are untouched." Now, he said, "We commemorate, but the right is in power." As for the French left, he said, "it's in a state of mental coma."
For Raphaël Glucksmann, who led his first strike at high school in 1995, his generation has nostalgia for their rebel fathers, but no stomach for a fight in hard economic times.
"The young people are marching now to refuse all reforms, to defend the rights of their professors," he said. "We see no alternatives. We're a generation without bearings."
The events (or movement) of 40 years ago began in March at Nanterre university to the west of Paris, where a young French-born German named Daniel Cohn-Bendit led demonstrations against parietal rules - when young men and women could be together in dormitory rooms - that got out of hand. When Nanterre was closed in early May, the anger spread to central Paris, to the Latin Quarter and the Sorbonne, where the student elite demonstrated against antiquated university rules, and then outward, to workers in the big factories.
Scenes of the barricades, the police charges and the tear gas are dear to the French, recaptured in every magazine and scores of books, including one by the photographer Marc Riboud, now 84, called: "Under the Cobblestones," a reference to a famous slogan of the time from the leader-jester Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament, "Under the cobblestones is the beach."
Known then as "Dany the Red" for the color of both his politics and his hair, Cohn-Bendit is also thought responsible for other famous slogans of the time: "It is forbidden to forbid" and "Live without limits and enjoy without restraint!" - with the word for enjoy, "jouir," having the double meaning of sexual climax. The injunction was especially potent in a straight-laced country where the birth-control pill had been authorized for sale only the year before, said Alain Geismar, another leader of the time.
Geismar, a physicist who spent 18 months in jail - but later served as a counselor to government ministers - wrote his own book, "My May 1968." Now 69, the former Maoist uses an Apple iPhone. He happily displays his music catalogue, which is mostly Mozart.
The movement succeeded "as a social revolution, not as a political one," Geismar said. While the de Gaulle government responded with police and mobilized troops in case the students marched on the presidential palace, the idea never occurred to student leaders, who talked of revolution but never intended to carry one out.
Most significant, Geismar said, the movement was "the beginning of the end of the Communist Party in France," which deeply opposed the revolt of these young leftists who it could not control, but who managed in important ways to break the party's authority over the big industrial unions.
French society in May 1968 "was completely blocked," Geismar said. A conservative recreation of pre-World War II society, it had been shaken by the Algerian war and the baby boom, its schools badly overcrowded.
"As a divorced man, Sarkozy couldn't have been invited to dinner at the Élysée Palace, let alone be elected president of France," Geismar said. Both the vivid personal life and political success of Sarkozy, who has foreign and Jewish roots, "are unimaginable without 1968," he said. "The neo-conservatives are unimaginable without '68."
André Glucksmann, who still supports Sarkozy as the best chance to modernize "the gilded museum of France" and reduce the power of "the sacralized state," is amused by Sarkozy's fierce campaign attack on May 1968. "Sarkozy is the first post-'68 president," Glucksmann said. "To liquidate '68 is to liquidate himself."
But there is also a fashionable absurdity to the commemoration. The designers Sonia Rykiel and Agnès B discuss their views of May 1968 in every magazine, there are documentaries and discussions on every channel and a Parisian jeweler, Jean Dinh Van, born in Vietnam, has reissued a silver cobblestone pendant he made at the time "to celebrate 40 years of liberty" - and, in his case, success. (The smallest, with chain, sells for $275.)
Garrison Flies
A cabdriver picked me up outside the Waffle House in Little Rock, Ark., last Sunday and said so sweetly, "I hope you enjoyed your breakfast" -- elongating the "joy" slightly and slurring the k in "breakfast" -- and I said yes, but honestly, I don't really associate breakfast with enjoyment. It's chow. It's a standardized meal meant to fortify you for the day's maneuvers and you square your shoulders and sit down and eat it. This particular breakfast was grits, eggs over easy, country ham, and biscuits with gravy, a meal that will fuel you right through 5 o'clock, but enjoyment?
In my parents' home we sat down to our Cheerios and toast and ate it and conversed in small declarative sentence fragments and jumped up and out the door, and I still do, and that's why I don't intend to retire: What do you do after breakfast? Do you have to hang out for hours with other geezers and geezerettes and reminisce about the days when it was fun to fly from place to place -- remember? When you walked through the airport and out the door onto the tarmac and up the stairs to the plane, just like Ingrid Bergman in "Casablanca"? I don't care to.
Although when I went through airport security in Minneapolis on Monday, it was an object lesson in something -- a line of a hundred people twisted around in the cattle chute, 16 men and women in the white TSA shirts with the epaulets, an obese young woman shouting at us to take our laptop computers out of our cases in a voice she learned from a prison camp movie; one metal detector in operation, two closed, and the guardian of this narrow gate was a man who carefully read each boarding pass as if proofreading it for misspellings, though it had already been checked by his colleague at the head of the line. And then a poor old guy rolled up in a wheelchair who had to be made to walk through the metal detector, though he could not walk. But he could sort of shuffle, an inch at a time, so we got to watch him do that.
The line inched along, four supervisors stood watching blankly, the fat lady barked, the gentleman operating the scanner was very jittery about shaving kits and computer batteries and needed to have every other bag checked, and in the lifetime it took to go through, you started to sympathize with all the Republicans who've complained about government inefficiency over the years, except it is a Republican administration that runs this operation, but never mind. Details, details.
I wanted to tell the shirts not to treat us with such extravagant contempt, but you should be careful about mouthing off to people who have the power to detain you and order a body search.
And also it seemed to me that I was the only one in line who was grinding my teeth. Everyone else was quite chipper, as if they were heading off on the class trip to Excelsior Amusement Park. So if I had spoken up and the shirts had thrown me to the ground and Maced me and stuffed me into a holding cell to await arraignment under the Patriot Act, I doubted that anyone would've come to my defense. They would've figured I must have had a shoe bomb on me or something.
These were my fellow Minnesotans in line and we are docile in April, at the end of our long winter. On Sunday the 20th of April, temperatures were in the 70s and the crocuses were about to bloom, and then on Friday the 25th, a half-inch of snow fell. People didn't talk about it. There it was, plain as the nose on your face, but it was just too awful to discuss. It was like your old husband getting blitzed at your parents' 50th anniversary and trying to get everyone to sing "All You Need Is Love." It's like your child announcing that she's written a memoir called "Spirals of Shame." Don't talk about it. Move on. Change the channel. Talk about your tomato plants and your good children, the ones who do not write memoirs, who don't remember the terrible things you did to them, they just remember your birthday and when it comes time, they will pick out a wonderful nursing home for you. Breakfast is from 7 to 10 and they serve nice omelets and all the coffee you can drink. Nobody rushes you. What were we talking about? Little Rock.
In my parents' home we sat down to our Cheerios and toast and ate it and conversed in small declarative sentence fragments and jumped up and out the door, and I still do, and that's why I don't intend to retire: What do you do after breakfast? Do you have to hang out for hours with other geezers and geezerettes and reminisce about the days when it was fun to fly from place to place -- remember? When you walked through the airport and out the door onto the tarmac and up the stairs to the plane, just like Ingrid Bergman in "Casablanca"? I don't care to.
Although when I went through airport security in Minneapolis on Monday, it was an object lesson in something -- a line of a hundred people twisted around in the cattle chute, 16 men and women in the white TSA shirts with the epaulets, an obese young woman shouting at us to take our laptop computers out of our cases in a voice she learned from a prison camp movie; one metal detector in operation, two closed, and the guardian of this narrow gate was a man who carefully read each boarding pass as if proofreading it for misspellings, though it had already been checked by his colleague at the head of the line. And then a poor old guy rolled up in a wheelchair who had to be made to walk through the metal detector, though he could not walk. But he could sort of shuffle, an inch at a time, so we got to watch him do that.
The line inched along, four supervisors stood watching blankly, the fat lady barked, the gentleman operating the scanner was very jittery about shaving kits and computer batteries and needed to have every other bag checked, and in the lifetime it took to go through, you started to sympathize with all the Republicans who've complained about government inefficiency over the years, except it is a Republican administration that runs this operation, but never mind. Details, details.
I wanted to tell the shirts not to treat us with such extravagant contempt, but you should be careful about mouthing off to people who have the power to detain you and order a body search.
And also it seemed to me that I was the only one in line who was grinding my teeth. Everyone else was quite chipper, as if they were heading off on the class trip to Excelsior Amusement Park. So if I had spoken up and the shirts had thrown me to the ground and Maced me and stuffed me into a holding cell to await arraignment under the Patriot Act, I doubted that anyone would've come to my defense. They would've figured I must have had a shoe bomb on me or something.
These were my fellow Minnesotans in line and we are docile in April, at the end of our long winter. On Sunday the 20th of April, temperatures were in the 70s and the crocuses were about to bloom, and then on Friday the 25th, a half-inch of snow fell. People didn't talk about it. There it was, plain as the nose on your face, but it was just too awful to discuss. It was like your old husband getting blitzed at your parents' 50th anniversary and trying to get everyone to sing "All You Need Is Love." It's like your child announcing that she's written a memoir called "Spirals of Shame." Don't talk about it. Move on. Change the channel. Talk about your tomato plants and your good children, the ones who do not write memoirs, who don't remember the terrible things you did to them, they just remember your birthday and when it comes time, they will pick out a wonderful nursing home for you. Breakfast is from 7 to 10 and they serve nice omelets and all the coffee you can drink. Nobody rushes you. What were we talking about? Little Rock.
AFROTHENTICY
The list of Afrocentric “educators” whom Reverend Jeremiah Wright has invoked in his media escapades since this Sunday is a disturbing reminder that academia’s follies can enter the public world in harmful ways. Now the pressing question is whether they have entered presidential candidate Barack Obama’s worldview as well.
Some in Wright’s crew of charlatans have already had their moments in the spotlight; others are less well known. They form part of the tragic academic project of justifying self-defeating underclass behavior as “authentically black.” That their ideas have ended up in the pulpit of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ and in Detroit’s Cobo Hall, where Wright spoke at the NAACP’s Freedom Fund dinner on Sunday, reminds us that bad ideas must be fought at their origins—and at every moment thereafter.
At the NAACP meeting, Wright proudly propounded the racist contention that blacks have inherently different “learning styles,” correctly citing as authority for this view Janice Hale of Wayne State University. Pursuing a Ph.D. by logging long hours in the dusty stacks of a library, Wright announced, is “white.” Blacks, by contrast, cannot sit still in class or learn from quiet study, and they have difficulty learning from “objects”—books, for example—but instead learn from “subjects,” such as rap lyrics on the radio. These differences are neurological, according to Hale and Wright: whites use what Wright referred to as the “left-wing, logical, and analytical” side of their brains, whereas blacks use their “right brain,” which is “creative and intuitive.” When he was of school age in Philadelphia following the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision, Wright said, his white teachers “freaked out because the black children did not stay in their place, over there, behind the desk.” Instead, the students “climbed up all over [the teachers], because they learned from a ‘subject,’ not an ‘object.’” How one learns from a teacher as “subject” by climbing on her, as opposed to learning from her as “object”—by listening to her words—is a mystery.
One would hope that Wright’s audience was offended by the idea that acting out in class is authentically black—it was impossible to tell what the reaction in the hall was to the assertion. But one thing is clear: embracing the notion that blacks shouldn’t be expected to listen attentively to instruction is guaranteed to perpetuate into eternity the huge learning gap between blacks on the one hand, and whites and Asians on the other.
Wright also praised the work of Geneva Smitherman of Michigan State University, who has called for the selective incorporation of Ebonics into the curriculum in order to validate the black experience. Wright gave another shout-out to the late Asa Hilliard of Georgia State University, who told us, Wright said, “how to fix the schools.” Like Hale, Hilliard argued that disrupting the classroom through “impulsive interrupting and loud talking” is inherently black. His bogus Afrocentrism, propounded in his “African-American Baseline Essays,” metastasized in educational circles during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hilliard argued that Western civilization was at once stolen from black Africa and crippling to black identity. As the late Arthur M. Schlesinger recounted in his 1991 alarum about multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America, Hilliard urged schools to teach black students that Egypt was a black country; that Africans invented birth control and carbon steel; that they discovered America long before Columbus; that Robert Browning and Ludwig von Beethoven were “Afro-European”; and that the Atlantic Ocean was originally named the Ethiopian Ocean. (City College of New York laughingstock Leonard Jeffries—he of the infamous distinction between materialistic, aggressive European “ice people” and superior African “sun people”—contributed to Hilliard’s Essays, asserting therein that slavery was undertaken as “part of a conspiracy to prevent us from having a unified experience.”)
Approving of self-destructive behavior in school is just one part of the vast academic project to justify black underclass dysfunction. The academy has also singled out crime as authentically black, another poisonous idea that Wright appears to have embraced. In his NAACP speech, he mocked the tendency of “those of us who never got caught” to treat “those of us who are incarcerated” with disrespect. In other words, we all commit crime, but only some of us get nabbed for it.
This leveling argument recalls the bizarre doctrines of University of Pennsylvania law professor Regina Austin. In a widely reprinted California Law Review article from 1992, Austin asserted that the black community should embrace the criminals in its midst as a form of resistance to white oppression. People of color should view “hustling” as a “good middle ground between straightness and more extreme forms of lawbreaking.” Examples of hustling include “clerks in stores [who] cut their friends a break on merchandise, and pilfering employees [who] spread their contraband around the neighborhood.” It never occurs to Austin that these black thieves may have black employers who suffer the effects of black crime—as do the larger neighborhoods of which they form the essential fabric. Officially incorporating crime into the black identity, as Austin and Wright do, is a pathetic admission of defeat and marginalization.
To understand how such ideas become mainstream, one need only read the front page of today’s New York Times. There, television critic Alessandra Stanley thrills to the authentic voice of black America: Wright “went deep into context—a rich, stem-winding brew of black history, Scripture, hallelujahs and hermeneutics,” Stanley effuses. “Mr. Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, was cocky, defiant, declamatory, inflammatory and mischievous.” One might think that Wright’s promotion of the idea that black kids can’t sit still in class would raise some worries, even in a television critic. Surely Stanley would expect her own children to listen to their teachers. But the white elite’s desire to avoid charges of racism cancels out all reasonable reactions to dangerous nonsense when such nonsense comes out of black mouths. The coverage of Wright’s speeches beyond the Times has been just as silent about their crackpot Afrocentric pedagogy, meekly following the agenda that Wright set by asking instead whether the black church, and not Wright, was under attack.
Wright’s speeches have shown how quickly academic insanity becomes incorporated into practice. And now we may be on the verge of seeing such madness spread into the White House. The mainstream media have had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into questioning Obama’s affiliation with Wright. By now, Wright’s 9/11 and AIDS diatribes are well-worn—and Obama’s repudiation of them a no-brainer. It is imperative that someone at CNN or the New York Times ask Obama whether he, too, believes that the way to “fix the schools” is through Afrocentric curricula and double standards in student discipline, and whether he, too, believes that blacks only think with the “right side” of their brains.
Some in Wright’s crew of charlatans have already had their moments in the spotlight; others are less well known. They form part of the tragic academic project of justifying self-defeating underclass behavior as “authentically black.” That their ideas have ended up in the pulpit of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ and in Detroit’s Cobo Hall, where Wright spoke at the NAACP’s Freedom Fund dinner on Sunday, reminds us that bad ideas must be fought at their origins—and at every moment thereafter.
At the NAACP meeting, Wright proudly propounded the racist contention that blacks have inherently different “learning styles,” correctly citing as authority for this view Janice Hale of Wayne State University. Pursuing a Ph.D. by logging long hours in the dusty stacks of a library, Wright announced, is “white.” Blacks, by contrast, cannot sit still in class or learn from quiet study, and they have difficulty learning from “objects”—books, for example—but instead learn from “subjects,” such as rap lyrics on the radio. These differences are neurological, according to Hale and Wright: whites use what Wright referred to as the “left-wing, logical, and analytical” side of their brains, whereas blacks use their “right brain,” which is “creative and intuitive.” When he was of school age in Philadelphia following the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision, Wright said, his white teachers “freaked out because the black children did not stay in their place, over there, behind the desk.” Instead, the students “climbed up all over [the teachers], because they learned from a ‘subject,’ not an ‘object.’” How one learns from a teacher as “subject” by climbing on her, as opposed to learning from her as “object”—by listening to her words—is a mystery.
One would hope that Wright’s audience was offended by the idea that acting out in class is authentically black—it was impossible to tell what the reaction in the hall was to the assertion. But one thing is clear: embracing the notion that blacks shouldn’t be expected to listen attentively to instruction is guaranteed to perpetuate into eternity the huge learning gap between blacks on the one hand, and whites and Asians on the other.
Wright also praised the work of Geneva Smitherman of Michigan State University, who has called for the selective incorporation of Ebonics into the curriculum in order to validate the black experience. Wright gave another shout-out to the late Asa Hilliard of Georgia State University, who told us, Wright said, “how to fix the schools.” Like Hale, Hilliard argued that disrupting the classroom through “impulsive interrupting and loud talking” is inherently black. His bogus Afrocentrism, propounded in his “African-American Baseline Essays,” metastasized in educational circles during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Hilliard argued that Western civilization was at once stolen from black Africa and crippling to black identity. As the late Arthur M. Schlesinger recounted in his 1991 alarum about multiculturalism, The Disuniting of America, Hilliard urged schools to teach black students that Egypt was a black country; that Africans invented birth control and carbon steel; that they discovered America long before Columbus; that Robert Browning and Ludwig von Beethoven were “Afro-European”; and that the Atlantic Ocean was originally named the Ethiopian Ocean. (City College of New York laughingstock Leonard Jeffries—he of the infamous distinction between materialistic, aggressive European “ice people” and superior African “sun people”—contributed to Hilliard’s Essays, asserting therein that slavery was undertaken as “part of a conspiracy to prevent us from having a unified experience.”)
Approving of self-destructive behavior in school is just one part of the vast academic project to justify black underclass dysfunction. The academy has also singled out crime as authentically black, another poisonous idea that Wright appears to have embraced. In his NAACP speech, he mocked the tendency of “those of us who never got caught” to treat “those of us who are incarcerated” with disrespect. In other words, we all commit crime, but only some of us get nabbed for it.
This leveling argument recalls the bizarre doctrines of University of Pennsylvania law professor Regina Austin. In a widely reprinted California Law Review article from 1992, Austin asserted that the black community should embrace the criminals in its midst as a form of resistance to white oppression. People of color should view “hustling” as a “good middle ground between straightness and more extreme forms of lawbreaking.” Examples of hustling include “clerks in stores [who] cut their friends a break on merchandise, and pilfering employees [who] spread their contraband around the neighborhood.” It never occurs to Austin that these black thieves may have black employers who suffer the effects of black crime—as do the larger neighborhoods of which they form the essential fabric. Officially incorporating crime into the black identity, as Austin and Wright do, is a pathetic admission of defeat and marginalization.
To understand how such ideas become mainstream, one need only read the front page of today’s New York Times. There, television critic Alessandra Stanley thrills to the authentic voice of black America: Wright “went deep into context—a rich, stem-winding brew of black history, Scripture, hallelujahs and hermeneutics,” Stanley effuses. “Mr. Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, was cocky, defiant, declamatory, inflammatory and mischievous.” One might think that Wright’s promotion of the idea that black kids can’t sit still in class would raise some worries, even in a television critic. Surely Stanley would expect her own children to listen to their teachers. But the white elite’s desire to avoid charges of racism cancels out all reasonable reactions to dangerous nonsense when such nonsense comes out of black mouths. The coverage of Wright’s speeches beyond the Times has been just as silent about their crackpot Afrocentric pedagogy, meekly following the agenda that Wright set by asking instead whether the black church, and not Wright, was under attack.
Wright’s speeches have shown how quickly academic insanity becomes incorporated into practice. And now we may be on the verge of seeing such madness spread into the White House. The mainstream media have had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into questioning Obama’s affiliation with Wright. By now, Wright’s 9/11 and AIDS diatribes are well-worn—and Obama’s repudiation of them a no-brainer. It is imperative that someone at CNN or the New York Times ask Obama whether he, too, believes that the way to “fix the schools” is through Afrocentric curricula and double standards in student discipline, and whether he, too, believes that blacks only think with the “right side” of their brains.
29.4.08
The "DUKE"
On today's date in 1899, Edward Kennedy Ellington was born in Washington, DC.
The son of a former White House butler, Elllington was born into a comfortable middle-class African-American household. After some piano lessons from an aptly named Miss Klinkscales, Ellington composed his first original piece, "The Soda Fountain Rag." As early mentors, Ellington credited a local dance bandleader, Oliver "Doc" Perry and a high school music teacher named Henry Grant, who introduced him to contemporary classical masters like Debussy.
"I had a kind of harmony inside me," Ellington later recalled. "a harmony which is part of my race, but I needed harmony that has no race at all but is universal. So you see, from both these men I received freely and generously. I repaid them as I could, by playing piano for Mr. Perry, and by learning all I could from Mr. Grant."
Always a stylish dresser, Ellington was nicknamed "The Duke" by friends, and after a stint with Doc Perry's band, while still in his teens, he took a five-man dance band to New York. That ensemble grew to 11 men by 1930 and to an orchestra of 19 by 1946. It was an ensemble of jazz virtuosos, and for them Ellington would compose some 2000 original compositions, a body of work extensively documented in public and private recordings, and now regarded as one of the most astonishing musical accomplishments of the 20th century.
The son of a former White House butler, Elllington was born into a comfortable middle-class African-American household. After some piano lessons from an aptly named Miss Klinkscales, Ellington composed his first original piece, "The Soda Fountain Rag." As early mentors, Ellington credited a local dance bandleader, Oliver "Doc" Perry and a high school music teacher named Henry Grant, who introduced him to contemporary classical masters like Debussy.
"I had a kind of harmony inside me," Ellington later recalled. "a harmony which is part of my race, but I needed harmony that has no race at all but is universal. So you see, from both these men I received freely and generously. I repaid them as I could, by playing piano for Mr. Perry, and by learning all I could from Mr. Grant."
Always a stylish dresser, Ellington was nicknamed "The Duke" by friends, and after a stint with Doc Perry's band, while still in his teens, he took a five-man dance band to New York. That ensemble grew to 11 men by 1930 and to an orchestra of 19 by 1946. It was an ensemble of jazz virtuosos, and for them Ellington would compose some 2000 original compositions, a body of work extensively documented in public and private recordings, and now regarded as one of the most astonishing musical accomplishments of the 20th century.
LIT CRIT
AFTER a touch football game on a recent Saturday in Prospect Park, and an impromptu post-game salon on Don DeLillo, Keith Gessen warily brought up the subject of his own debut novel, “All the Sad Young Literary Men.”
Having scored three touchdowns for his victorious squad, Mr. Gessen, an author and editor, announced that this game would be his last of the season, as he was about to resume his book tour.
Some of the athletes — a literary agent, a blogger, Mr. Gessen’s roommate — already knew of this impending departure; others were surprised by the news and its implication that Mr. Gessen’s literary pursuits were actually serious.
“I didn’t even know he had this whole thing,” said Dan Lichtenberg, a bond trader who met Mr. Gessen in January. “We just played football.”
Mr. Gessen, 33, boyishly handsome and possessing the self-assurance of a writer twice his age, has never had an easy relationship with literary fame, even as he has gradually amassed it.
In confident, forceful criticism written for publications like The Nation and The New Yorker, Mr. Gessen has been unsparing in his assessments of which authors deserve their glossy reputations (Philip Roth) and which do not (Ian McEwan).
As a founding editor of n+1, the literary magazine whose vocal fan base belies its twice-yearly 7,500-copy print run, Mr. Gessen and his colleagues have assailed other publications they believe have squandered their eminence (The New Republic) or never merited it (McSweeney’s and anything else associated with the writer Dave Eggers).
And the idea of literary fame is central to “All the Sad Young Literary Men.” In rotating chapters, the book tells of three young strivers who are frustrated in ambitions great and small: they bungle sexual conquests, struggle to finish writing books and dissertations, and are buffeted by larger historical forces. Tantalized by the potential of greatness, they fear it will perpetually elude them.
“What if it was happening, in New York, not a few blocks from them,” Mr. Gessen writes, “what if they knew someone to whom it was happening, or who was making it happen — what if they were blind to it? What if it wasn’t them?”
In a way, Mr. Gessen’s novel is an extended dark joke on his literary career. At the football game, he admitted to monitoring his novel’s Amazon.com sales obsessively. And he lamented the fact that more visitors to his novel’s Amazon page chose to buy Sloane Crosley’s essay collection, “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” than his book.
Of course, Mr. Gessen’s book is also the latest articulation of his belief, much expressed, that legitimacy and fame need not go hand in hand. “If you’re going to be a writer, you have to not make a living,” he said over a recent dinner at a pizza parlor near the ascetic n+1 offices in Dumbo.
“You have to be prepared to live on $20,000, which is not impossible, even in New York.” (Mr. Gessen, who lives in Prospect Heights with two roommates, said he never earned more than $25,000 a year until he was 30.)
His comic novel has also elicited a serious — and seriously polarized — response. In The New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates called it “mordantly funny, and frequently poignant,” while New York magazine, which previously published Mr. Gessen’s criticism, wrote that the novel delivers “the ecstasy of watching a much-hyped young littérateur fall flat on his face.”
THAT bitter glee may be payback for Mr. Gessen’s own acts of critical savagery. In the past, he has dispatched, with equal fervor, crowd-pleasing veterans (a Stephen King essay was “annoyingly philistine”) and highbrow newcomers (Jonathan Safran Foer’s debut novel “Everything Is Illuminated” was nothing but “a work of Jewish kitsch”).
Mr. Gessen, who emigrated from Moscow at the age of 6, has his own literary achievements to buttress his convictions. His translation of “Voices From Chernobyl,” a nonfiction account of the nuclear disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, won a 2005 National Book Critics Circle award. And since 2004, he has been editing n+1, along with his fellow Harvard alums Mark Greif and Benjamin Kunkel, and a fourth friend, Marco Roth, a graduate of Columbia.
They had invested $2,000 each to start the magazine, intending to publish the kinds of writing they said were unavailable in more established literary and political journals.
“A lot of the best intellectual magazines are oriented toward the past,” Mr. Gessen said, “and we wanted to be oriented more toward the present.”
Beyond the simple red cover of its first issue, n+1 defined itself by the magazines it denounced, and all but challenged them to a duel. A front section sneered at the cultural criticism of The New Republic and The Weekly Standard. But n+1 held special contempt for Mr. Eggers and his cohort (“Eggersards”) who publish McSweeney’s, which to n+1 represented irony in the extreme (“an end-run around a class-based problem of sentimentality”), and The Believer, which pleaded for a snark-free approach to literature (“its overt criterion for inclusion is not expertise, but enthusiasm”).
In his first feature for n+1, Mr. Gessen wrote about Gary Baum, a young blogger whose admiration for Mr. Eggers turned to disdain as Mr. Baum chronicled how Mr. Eggers’s fame was supposedly enhanced and amplified by his connections in the New York publishing industry. Mr. Gessen’s piece did not romanticize Mr. Baum (whom the author tries to talk out of pursuing a career in journalism) nor pull its punches against Mr. Eggers (who, he wrote, “handled fame admirably, but it handled him more”).
With its well-timed attacks on old-guard stodginess as well as young-Turk mawkishness, n+1 quickly made itself heard. “It seemed like a necessary, Oedipal clearing of the undergrowth,” said James Wood, the New Yorker literary critic and occasional sparring partner of n+1. “We all have to make ourselves orphans at some point.”
The magazine also yielded its first authentic literary star, Mr. Kunkel. His semiautobiographical first novel, “Indecision,” a comic tale about a young man paralyzed by the world’s possibilities, was published in 2005 to largely positive reviews.
It is against this backdrop that Mr. Gessen has published his novel, “All the Sad Young Literary Men,” a distillation of his own years in the wilderness: a youthful marriage soon followed by divorce, and his inability to finish an M.F.A. program at Syracuse University. (Mr. Gessen said he completed the course work, but never turned in a final original work of fiction.)
The book is also a further unpacking of Mr. Gessen’s personal philosophy on the proper function of the novel: to hold up an honest mirror to society, no matter how frivolous and unserious that society may be. Young people in big cities like New York, Mr. Gessen said: “are willing to acknowledge that they’re a class only ironically. So they’ll have their ironic kickball games. Their ironic magazines.”
“They’re willing to have the privileges of their class,” Mr. Gessen added, “to go to a good college, and be subsidized in their New York lives by their parents, but maybe not willing to be written about.”
The result, Mr. Gessen said, is that the everyday lives of young urban adults are no longer considered appropriate subjects for ambitious novels.
To the extent that his novel has been criticized for a solipsistic fixation on characters much like himself, Mr. Gessen blamed the Eggersards for fostering this literary bias. “The idea that you should not write about educated people in big cities, that’s a McSweeney’s idea,” he said. “That idea is crazy to me.” (A publicist for McSweeney’s said its editors would not comment.)
But even admirers of Mr. Gessen say he and his n+1 colleagues cannot defend their work by condemning other publications.
“They’re so defined by their opposition to a kind of flabby literary crowd,” that n+1 has cultivated its own reputation for taking itself too seriously, said Eric Banks, the former editor of Bookforum magazine and a member of the National Book Critics Circle board. “They can come off sometimes as sore winners.”
Perhaps the larger dilemma facing Mr. Gessen and his n+1 colleagues is whether their quest for a proper literary life is different from their predecessors.
Give or take the odd arcane literary reference, Mr. Wood said, n+1 “doesn’t seem that different from the Partisan Review.” Plenty of people, he said, “just look at something like n+1 and think, what’s the big deal?”
Mr. Gessen seemed uninterested in explaining his literary pursuits to such critics.
“People who are older than we are find the idea of n+1 very sympathetic and very recognizable,” Mr. Gessen said. “They say, ‘This is like these things that we knew, way back when.’ ”
But the tone of the magazine, he said, is very strange to them.
“They can’t tell if we’re kidding,” he said. “They can’t tell how much of it is in earnest.
“It’s all in earnest.”
Having scored three touchdowns for his victorious squad, Mr. Gessen, an author and editor, announced that this game would be his last of the season, as he was about to resume his book tour.
Some of the athletes — a literary agent, a blogger, Mr. Gessen’s roommate — already knew of this impending departure; others were surprised by the news and its implication that Mr. Gessen’s literary pursuits were actually serious.
“I didn’t even know he had this whole thing,” said Dan Lichtenberg, a bond trader who met Mr. Gessen in January. “We just played football.”
Mr. Gessen, 33, boyishly handsome and possessing the self-assurance of a writer twice his age, has never had an easy relationship with literary fame, even as he has gradually amassed it.
In confident, forceful criticism written for publications like The Nation and The New Yorker, Mr. Gessen has been unsparing in his assessments of which authors deserve their glossy reputations (Philip Roth) and which do not (Ian McEwan).
As a founding editor of n+1, the literary magazine whose vocal fan base belies its twice-yearly 7,500-copy print run, Mr. Gessen and his colleagues have assailed other publications they believe have squandered their eminence (The New Republic) or never merited it (McSweeney’s and anything else associated with the writer Dave Eggers).
And the idea of literary fame is central to “All the Sad Young Literary Men.” In rotating chapters, the book tells of three young strivers who are frustrated in ambitions great and small: they bungle sexual conquests, struggle to finish writing books and dissertations, and are buffeted by larger historical forces. Tantalized by the potential of greatness, they fear it will perpetually elude them.
“What if it was happening, in New York, not a few blocks from them,” Mr. Gessen writes, “what if they knew someone to whom it was happening, or who was making it happen — what if they were blind to it? What if it wasn’t them?”
In a way, Mr. Gessen’s novel is an extended dark joke on his literary career. At the football game, he admitted to monitoring his novel’s Amazon.com sales obsessively. And he lamented the fact that more visitors to his novel’s Amazon page chose to buy Sloane Crosley’s essay collection, “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” than his book.
Of course, Mr. Gessen’s book is also the latest articulation of his belief, much expressed, that legitimacy and fame need not go hand in hand. “If you’re going to be a writer, you have to not make a living,” he said over a recent dinner at a pizza parlor near the ascetic n+1 offices in Dumbo.
“You have to be prepared to live on $20,000, which is not impossible, even in New York.” (Mr. Gessen, who lives in Prospect Heights with two roommates, said he never earned more than $25,000 a year until he was 30.)
His comic novel has also elicited a serious — and seriously polarized — response. In The New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates called it “mordantly funny, and frequently poignant,” while New York magazine, which previously published Mr. Gessen’s criticism, wrote that the novel delivers “the ecstasy of watching a much-hyped young littérateur fall flat on his face.”
THAT bitter glee may be payback for Mr. Gessen’s own acts of critical savagery. In the past, he has dispatched, with equal fervor, crowd-pleasing veterans (a Stephen King essay was “annoyingly philistine”) and highbrow newcomers (Jonathan Safran Foer’s debut novel “Everything Is Illuminated” was nothing but “a work of Jewish kitsch”).
Mr. Gessen, who emigrated from Moscow at the age of 6, has his own literary achievements to buttress his convictions. His translation of “Voices From Chernobyl,” a nonfiction account of the nuclear disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, won a 2005 National Book Critics Circle award. And since 2004, he has been editing n+1, along with his fellow Harvard alums Mark Greif and Benjamin Kunkel, and a fourth friend, Marco Roth, a graduate of Columbia.
They had invested $2,000 each to start the magazine, intending to publish the kinds of writing they said were unavailable in more established literary and political journals.
“A lot of the best intellectual magazines are oriented toward the past,” Mr. Gessen said, “and we wanted to be oriented more toward the present.”
Beyond the simple red cover of its first issue, n+1 defined itself by the magazines it denounced, and all but challenged them to a duel. A front section sneered at the cultural criticism of The New Republic and The Weekly Standard. But n+1 held special contempt for Mr. Eggers and his cohort (“Eggersards”) who publish McSweeney’s, which to n+1 represented irony in the extreme (“an end-run around a class-based problem of sentimentality”), and The Believer, which pleaded for a snark-free approach to literature (“its overt criterion for inclusion is not expertise, but enthusiasm”).
In his first feature for n+1, Mr. Gessen wrote about Gary Baum, a young blogger whose admiration for Mr. Eggers turned to disdain as Mr. Baum chronicled how Mr. Eggers’s fame was supposedly enhanced and amplified by his connections in the New York publishing industry. Mr. Gessen’s piece did not romanticize Mr. Baum (whom the author tries to talk out of pursuing a career in journalism) nor pull its punches against Mr. Eggers (who, he wrote, “handled fame admirably, but it handled him more”).
With its well-timed attacks on old-guard stodginess as well as young-Turk mawkishness, n+1 quickly made itself heard. “It seemed like a necessary, Oedipal clearing of the undergrowth,” said James Wood, the New Yorker literary critic and occasional sparring partner of n+1. “We all have to make ourselves orphans at some point.”
The magazine also yielded its first authentic literary star, Mr. Kunkel. His semiautobiographical first novel, “Indecision,” a comic tale about a young man paralyzed by the world’s possibilities, was published in 2005 to largely positive reviews.
It is against this backdrop that Mr. Gessen has published his novel, “All the Sad Young Literary Men,” a distillation of his own years in the wilderness: a youthful marriage soon followed by divorce, and his inability to finish an M.F.A. program at Syracuse University. (Mr. Gessen said he completed the course work, but never turned in a final original work of fiction.)
The book is also a further unpacking of Mr. Gessen’s personal philosophy on the proper function of the novel: to hold up an honest mirror to society, no matter how frivolous and unserious that society may be. Young people in big cities like New York, Mr. Gessen said: “are willing to acknowledge that they’re a class only ironically. So they’ll have their ironic kickball games. Their ironic magazines.”
“They’re willing to have the privileges of their class,” Mr. Gessen added, “to go to a good college, and be subsidized in their New York lives by their parents, but maybe not willing to be written about.”
The result, Mr. Gessen said, is that the everyday lives of young urban adults are no longer considered appropriate subjects for ambitious novels.
To the extent that his novel has been criticized for a solipsistic fixation on characters much like himself, Mr. Gessen blamed the Eggersards for fostering this literary bias. “The idea that you should not write about educated people in big cities, that’s a McSweeney’s idea,” he said. “That idea is crazy to me.” (A publicist for McSweeney’s said its editors would not comment.)
But even admirers of Mr. Gessen say he and his n+1 colleagues cannot defend their work by condemning other publications.
“They’re so defined by their opposition to a kind of flabby literary crowd,” that n+1 has cultivated its own reputation for taking itself too seriously, said Eric Banks, the former editor of Bookforum magazine and a member of the National Book Critics Circle board. “They can come off sometimes as sore winners.”
Perhaps the larger dilemma facing Mr. Gessen and his n+1 colleagues is whether their quest for a proper literary life is different from their predecessors.
Give or take the odd arcane literary reference, Mr. Wood said, n+1 “doesn’t seem that different from the Partisan Review.” Plenty of people, he said, “just look at something like n+1 and think, what’s the big deal?”
Mr. Gessen seemed uninterested in explaining his literary pursuits to such critics.
“People who are older than we are find the idea of n+1 very sympathetic and very recognizable,” Mr. Gessen said. “They say, ‘This is like these things that we knew, way back when.’ ”
But the tone of the magazine, he said, is very strange to them.
“They can’t tell if we’re kidding,” he said. “They can’t tell how much of it is in earnest.
“It’s all in earnest.”
Boris & Ken
London's Personality Contest
By Anne Applebaum
First, a disclaimer: I have known Boris Johnson, the Tory candidate for mayor of London, for 15-odd years. During that time, I've met his first wife, his second wife and his mistress, though I don't think the latter merited that title when we were introduced. I worked for some of the same editors as he during his earlier career as a journalist, and I can remember many of his columns. One -- concerning the dubious legal status of one of his children ("Congratulations, it's a Belgian") -- still makes me laugh when I think about it.
And a second disclaimer: I first met Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London who is seeking reelection, 15-odd years ago, too, when he was still a member of Parliament. I don't know his mistresses -- though I gather there are several -- or his colleagues. But I do recall one memorable dinner, organized by a London newspaper, during which we argued at some length about whether Stalin was evil. I said yes. He disagreed. No one laughed.
Given that I know both candidates, I should probably be disqualified from writing about the London mayoral election, which takes place Thursday. But in this case it doesn't matter. Although there are some actual issues at stake -- police, traffic, housing -- this particular campaign has been completely dominated by discussion of the candidates' remarkably different, and remarkably vivid, personalities. This is no sober clash of ideas, a race between Mr. Livingstone of the Labor Party and Mr. Johnson of the Conservative Party. It's a contest between "Ken" and "Boris," a race in which, from the start, personal anecdotes have mattered more than policies.
The candidates haven't exactly gone out of their way to discourage this kind of commentary, either. Though he's been more staid than usual during the campaign, Boris can't stop telling jokes, whether at the expense of the aforementioned mistress or the people of Portsmouth (a city of " drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs"). Adjectives such as "mop-haired," "blustering" and "old Etonian" appear in just about every profile of him. So does his most famous quotation-- "If you vote for the Conservatives, your wife will get bigger breasts and your chances of driving a BMW M3 will increase" -- though that line is misleading, as his sense of humor is usually far more self-deprecating. "Beneath the carefully constructed veneer of a blithering buffoon," he once remarked, "there lurks a blithering buffoon."
Ken, by contrast, isn't funny or self-deprecating. His need to attract attention manifests itself in other ways: the expensive celebration he had planned to commemorate 50 years of Fidel Castro's dictatorial rule, for example, or his public embrace of a Muslim cleric who defends suicide bombing and advocates the death penalty for homosexuals. Like Boris, Ken often offends people, though his insults are less likely to have started out as jokes. He once called the American ambassador to Britain a "chiseling little crook" and informed a Jewish journalist that he was behaving "like a concentration camp guard." I'm told he sometimes makes good decisions about transportation, though traffic in central London still seems pretty bad to me.
This is a personality contest, and a deeply unserious one at that: If the good people of London really thought their traffic mattered that much, Boris wouldn't be a candidate and Ken would never have been elected in the first place. But it's a competition nevertheless worth watching. This campaign could well be a blueprint for future elections since it is "post-modern," and post-ideological, in the deepest sense: In a world in which "issues" are not the issue and no one takes political parties seriously anymore, there's nothing left to talk about except who said what to whom and whose tongue was sharper while doing so.
Usually, we don't have this problem in the United States, our politics being too partisan and our nation too divided to allow for it. But a glimpse of what it could be like is available in the form of the Democratic primary, which has also deteriorated, unsurprisingly, into a particularly nasty personality clash. Any long-drawn-out contest between two people who don't -- let's face it -- differ that much on fundamental issues will invariably turn into farce; whether it's an amusing one, as in London, or a "bitter" one, as in Pennsylvania, depends on the characters of the candidates involved.
So three cheers, then, for ideological politics or at least for real clashes of ideas, and let's hope our presidential election, when we get to it, includes some: At least ideologically divisive elections make everyone talk about things that matter. And, yes, I do hope Boris wins.
By Anne Applebaum
First, a disclaimer: I have known Boris Johnson, the Tory candidate for mayor of London, for 15-odd years. During that time, I've met his first wife, his second wife and his mistress, though I don't think the latter merited that title when we were introduced. I worked for some of the same editors as he during his earlier career as a journalist, and I can remember many of his columns. One -- concerning the dubious legal status of one of his children ("Congratulations, it's a Belgian") -- still makes me laugh when I think about it.
And a second disclaimer: I first met Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London who is seeking reelection, 15-odd years ago, too, when he was still a member of Parliament. I don't know his mistresses -- though I gather there are several -- or his colleagues. But I do recall one memorable dinner, organized by a London newspaper, during which we argued at some length about whether Stalin was evil. I said yes. He disagreed. No one laughed.
Given that I know both candidates, I should probably be disqualified from writing about the London mayoral election, which takes place Thursday. But in this case it doesn't matter. Although there are some actual issues at stake -- police, traffic, housing -- this particular campaign has been completely dominated by discussion of the candidates' remarkably different, and remarkably vivid, personalities. This is no sober clash of ideas, a race between Mr. Livingstone of the Labor Party and Mr. Johnson of the Conservative Party. It's a contest between "Ken" and "Boris," a race in which, from the start, personal anecdotes have mattered more than policies.
The candidates haven't exactly gone out of their way to discourage this kind of commentary, either. Though he's been more staid than usual during the campaign, Boris can't stop telling jokes, whether at the expense of the aforementioned mistress or the people of Portsmouth (a city of " drugs, obesity, underachievement and Labour MPs"). Adjectives such as "mop-haired," "blustering" and "old Etonian" appear in just about every profile of him. So does his most famous quotation-- "If you vote for the Conservatives, your wife will get bigger breasts and your chances of driving a BMW M3 will increase" -- though that line is misleading, as his sense of humor is usually far more self-deprecating. "Beneath the carefully constructed veneer of a blithering buffoon," he once remarked, "there lurks a blithering buffoon."
Ken, by contrast, isn't funny or self-deprecating. His need to attract attention manifests itself in other ways: the expensive celebration he had planned to commemorate 50 years of Fidel Castro's dictatorial rule, for example, or his public embrace of a Muslim cleric who defends suicide bombing and advocates the death penalty for homosexuals. Like Boris, Ken often offends people, though his insults are less likely to have started out as jokes. He once called the American ambassador to Britain a "chiseling little crook" and informed a Jewish journalist that he was behaving "like a concentration camp guard." I'm told he sometimes makes good decisions about transportation, though traffic in central London still seems pretty bad to me.
This is a personality contest, and a deeply unserious one at that: If the good people of London really thought their traffic mattered that much, Boris wouldn't be a candidate and Ken would never have been elected in the first place. But it's a competition nevertheless worth watching. This campaign could well be a blueprint for future elections since it is "post-modern," and post-ideological, in the deepest sense: In a world in which "issues" are not the issue and no one takes political parties seriously anymore, there's nothing left to talk about except who said what to whom and whose tongue was sharper while doing so.
Usually, we don't have this problem in the United States, our politics being too partisan and our nation too divided to allow for it. But a glimpse of what it could be like is available in the form of the Democratic primary, which has also deteriorated, unsurprisingly, into a particularly nasty personality clash. Any long-drawn-out contest between two people who don't -- let's face it -- differ that much on fundamental issues will invariably turn into farce; whether it's an amusing one, as in London, or a "bitter" one, as in Pennsylvania, depends on the characters of the candidates involved.
So three cheers, then, for ideological politics or at least for real clashes of ideas, and let's hope our presidential election, when we get to it, includes some: At least ideologically divisive elections make everyone talk about things that matter. And, yes, I do hope Boris wins.
Why Does Islam Frighten Us?
Bruce Bawer
An Anatomy of Surrender
Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia.
Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.
What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, KhoÂmeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.
The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.
Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.
The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys. After the late Dutch sociologist-turned-politician Pim Fortuyn sounded the alarm about the danger that Europe’s Islamization posed to democracy, elite journalists labeled him a threat. A New York Times headline described him as marching the dutch to the right. Dutch newspapers Het Parool and De Volkskrant compared him with Mussolini; Trouw likened him to Hitler. The man (a multiculturalist, not a Muslim) who murdered him in May 2002 seemed to echo such verdicts when explaining his motive: Fortuyn’s views on Islam, the killer insisted, were “dangerous.”
Perhaps no Western media outlet has exhibited this habit of moral inversion more regularly than the BBC. In 2006, to take a typical example, Manchester’s top imam told psychotherapist John Casson that he supported the death penalty for homosexuality. Casson expressed shock—and the BBC, in a dispatch headlined imam accused of “gay death” slur, spun the controversy as an effort by Casson to discredit Islam. The BBC concluded its story with comments from an Islamic Human Rights Commission spokesman, who equated Muslim attitudes toward homosexuality with those of “other orthodox religions, such as Catholicism” and complained that focusing on the issue was “part of demonizing Muslims.”
In June 2005, the BBC aired the documentary Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, which sought to portray concerns about Islamic radicalism as overblown. This “stunning whitewash of radical Islam,” as Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson put it, “helped keep the British public fast asleep, a few weeks before the bombs went off in London subways and buses” in July 2005. In December 2007, it emerged that five of the documentary’s subjects, served up on the show as examples of innocuous Muslims-next-door, had been charged in those terrorist attacks—and that BBC producers, though aware of their involvement after the attacks took place, had not reported important information about them to the police.
Press acquiescence to Muslim demands and threats is endemic. When the Mohammed cartoons—published in September 2005 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to defy rising self-censorship after van Gogh’s murder—were answered by worldwide violence, only one major American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined such European dailies as Die Welt and El País in reprinting them as a gesture of free-speech solidarity. Editors who refused to run the images claimed that their motive was multicultural respect for Islam. Critic Christopher Hitchens believed otherwise, writing that he “knew quite a number of the editors concerned and can say for a certainty that the chief motive for ‘restraint’ was simple fear.” Exemplifying the new dhimmitude, whatever its motivation, was Norway’s leading cartoonist, Finn Graff, who had often depicted Israelis as Nazis, but who now vowed not to draw anything that might provoke Muslim wrath. (On a positive note, this February, over a dozen Danish newspapers, joined by a number of other papers around the world, reprinted one of the original cartoons as a free-speech gesture after the arrest of three people accused of plotting to kill the artist.)
Last year brought another cartoon crisis—this time over Swedish artist Lars Vilks’s drawings of Mohammed as a dog, which ambassadors from Muslim countries used as an excuse to demand speech limits in Sweden. CNN reporter Paula Newton suggested that perhaps “Vilks should have known better” because of the Jyllands-Posten incident—as if people who make art should naturally take their marching orders from people who make death threats. Meanwhile, The Economist depicted Vilks as an eccentric who shouldn’t be taken “too seriously” and noted approvingly that Sweden’s prime minister, unlike Denmark’s, invited the ambassadors “in for a chat.”
The elite media regularly underreport fundamentalist Muslim misbehavior or obfuscate its true nature. After the knighting of Rushdie in 2007 unleashed yet another wave of international Islamist mayhem, Tim Rutten wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any.” Or consider the riots that gripped immigrant suburbs in France in the autumn of 2005. These uprisings were largely assertions of Muslim authority over Muslim neighborhoods, and thus clearly jihadist in character. Yet weeks passed before many American press outlets mentioned them—and when they did, they de-emphasized the rioters’ Muslim identity (few cited the cries of “Allahu akbar,” for instance). Instead, they described the violence as an outburst of frustration over economic injustice.
When polls and studies of Muslims appear, the media often spin the results absurdly or drop them down the memory hole after a single news cycle. Journalists celebrated the results of a 2007 Pew poll showing that 80 percent of American Muslims aged 18 to 29 said that they opposed suicide bombing—even though the flip side, and the real story, was that a double-digit percentage of young American Muslims admitted that they supported it. u.s. muslims assimilated, opposed to extremism, the Washington Post rejoiced, echoing USA Today’s american muslims reject extremes. A 2006 Daily Telegraph survey showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain—yet British reporters often write as though only a minuscule minority embraced such views.
After each major terrorist act since 9/11, the press has dutifully published stories about Western Muslims fearing an “anti-Muslim backlash”—thus neatly shifting the focus from Islamists’ real acts of violence to non-Muslims’ imaginary ones. (These backlashes, of course, never materialize.) While books by Islam experts like Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer, who tell difficult truths about jihad and sharia, go unreviewed in newspapers like the New York Times, the elite press legitimizes thinkers like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, whose sugarcoated representations of Islam should have been discredited for all time by 9/11. The Times described Armstrong’s hagiography of Mohammed as “a good place to start” learning about Islam; in July 2007, the Washington Post headlined a piece by Esposito want to understand islam? start here.
Mainstream outlets have also served up anodyne portraits of fundamentalist Muslim life. Witness Andrea Elliott’s affectionate three-part profile of a Brooklyn imam, which appeared in the New York Times in March 2006. Elliott and the Times sought to portray Reda Shata as a heroic bridge builder between two cultures, leaving readers with the comforting belief that the growth of Islam in America was not only harmless but positive, even beautiful. Though it emerged in passing that Shata didn’t speak English, refused to shake women’s hands, wanted to forbid music, and supported Hamas and suicide bombing, Elliott did her best to downplay such unpleasant details; instead, she focused on sympathetic personal particulars. “Islam came to him softly, in the rhythms of his grandmother’s voice”; “Mr. Shata discovered love 15 years ago. . . . ‘She entered my heart,‘ said the imam.” Elliott’s saccharine piece won a Pulitzer Prize. When Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes pointed out that Shata was obviously an Islamist, a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review dismissed Pipes as “right-wing” and insisted that Shata was “very moderate.”
So it goes in this upside-down, not-so-brave new media world: those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are “moderate” (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are “Islamophobes.”
The entertainment industry has been nearly as appalling. During World War II, Hollywood churned out scores of films that served the war effort, but today’s movies and TV shows, with very few exceptions, either tiptoe around Islam or whitewash it. In the whitewash category were two sitcoms that debuted in 2007, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Little Mosque on the Prairie and CW’s Aliens in America. Both shows are about Muslims confronting anti-Muslim bigotry; both take it for granted that there’s no fundamentalist Islam problem in the West, but only an anti-Islam problem.
Muslim pressure groups have actively tried to keep movies and TV shows from portraying Islam as anything but a Religion of Peace. For example, the Council for American-Islamic Relations successfully lobbied Paramount Pictures to change the bad guys in The Sum of All Fears (2002) from Islamist terrorists to neo-Nazis, while Fox’s popular series 24, after Muslims complained about a story line depicting Islamic terrorists, ran cringe-worthy public-service announcements emphasizing how nonviolent Islam was. Earlier this year, Iranian-Danish actor Farshad Kholghi noted that, despite the cartoon controversy’s overwhelming impact on Denmark, “not a single movie has been made about the crisis, not a single play, not a single stand-up monologue.” Which, of course, is exactly what the cartoon jihadists wanted.
In April 2006, an episode of the animated series South Park admirably mocked the wave of self-censorship that followed the Jyllands-Posten crisis—but Comedy Central censored it, replacing an image of Mohammed with a black screen and an explanatory notice. According to series producer Anne Garefino, network executives frankly admitted that they were acting out of fear. “We were happy,” she told an interviewer, “that they didn’t try to claim that it was because of religious tolerance.”
Then there’s the art world. Postmodern artists who have always striven to shock and offend now maintain piously that Islam deserves “respect.” Museums and galleries have quietly taken down paintings that might upset Muslims and have put into storage manuscripts featuring images of Mohammed. London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery removed life-size nude dolls by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer from a 2006 exhibit just before its opening; the official excuse was “space constraints,” but the curator admitted that the real reason was fear that the nudity might offend the gallery’s Muslim neighbors. Last November, after the cancellation of a show in The Hague of artworks depicting gay men in Mohammed masks, the artist, Sooreh Hera, charged the museum with giving in to Muslim threats. Tim Marlow of London’s White Cube Gallery notes that such self-censorship by artists and museums is now common, though “very few people have explicitly admitted” it. British artist Grayson Perry, whose work has mercilessly mocked Christianity, is one who has—and his reluctance isn’t about multicultural sensitivity. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art,” he told the Times of London, “is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”
Leading liberal intellectuals and academics have shown a striking willingness to betray liberal values when it comes to pacifying Muslims. Back in 2001, Unni Wikan, a distinguished Norwegian cultural anthropologist and Islam expert, responded to the high rate of Muslim-on-infidel rape in Oslo by exhorting women to “realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”
More recently, high-profile Europe experts Ian Buruma of Bard College and Timothy Garton Ash of Oxford, while furiously denying that they advocate cultural surrender, have embraced “accommodation,” which sounds like a distinction without a difference. In his book Murder in Amsterdam, Buruma approvingly quotes Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen’s call for “accommodation with the Muslims,” including those “who consciously discriminate against their women.” Sharia enshrines a Muslim man’s right to beat and rape his wife, to force marriages on his daughters, and to kill them if they resist. One wonders what female Muslims who immigrated to Europe to escape such barbarity think of this prescription.
Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and one of Britain’s best-known public intellectuals, suggested in February the institution of a parallel system of sharia law in Britain. Since the Islamic Sharia Council already adjudicates Muslim marriages and divorces in the U.K., what Williams was proposing was, as he put it, “a much enhanced and quite sophisticated version of such a body, with increased resources.” Gratifyingly, his proposal, short on specifics and long on academic doublespeak (“I don’t think,” he told the BBC, “that we should instantly spring to the conclusion that the whole of that world of jurisprudence and practice is somehow monstrously incompatible with human rights, simply because it doesn’t immediately fit with how we understand it”) was greeted with public outrage.
Another prominent accommodationist is humanities professor Mark Lilla of Columbia University, author of an August 2007 essay in the New York Times Magazine so long and languorous, and written with such perfect academic dispassion, that many readers may have finished it without realizing that it charted a path leading straight to sharia. Muslims’ “full reconciliation with modern liberal democracy cannot be expected,” Lilla wrote. For the West, “coping is the order of the day, not defending high principle.”
Revealing in this light is Buruma’s and Garton Ash’s treatment of author Ayaan Hirsi Ali—perhaps the greatest living champion of Western freedom in the face of creeping jihad—and of the Europe-based Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan. Because Hirsi Ali refuses to compromise on liberty, Garton Ash has called her a “simplistic . . . Enlightenment fundamentalist”—thus implicitly equating her with the Muslim fundamentalists who have threatened to kill her—while Buruma, in several New York Times pieces, has portrayed her as a petulant naif. (Both men have lately backed off somewhat.) On the other hand, the professors have rhapsodized over Ramadan’s supposed brilliance. They aren’t alone: though he’s clearly not the Westernized, urbane intellectual he seems to be—he refuses to condemn the stoning of adulteresses and clearly looks forward to a Europe under sharia—this grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and protégé of Islamist scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi regularly wins praise in bien-pensant circles as representing the best hope for long-term concord between Western Muslims and non-Muslims.
This spring, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine, actually gave two cheers for sharia. He contrasted it favorably with English common law, and described “the Islamists’ aspiration to renew old ideas of the rule of law” as “bold and noble.”
With the press, the entertainment industry, and prominent liberal thinkers all refusing to defend basic Western liberties, it’s not surprising that our political leaders have been pusillanimous, too. After a tiny Oslo newspaper, Magazinet, reprinted the Danish cartoons in early 2006, jihadists burned Norwegian flags and set fire to Norway’s embassy in Syria. Instead of standing up to the vandals, Norwegian leaders turned on Magazinet’s editor, Vebjørn Selbekk, partially blaming him for the embassy burning and pressing him to apologize. He finally gave way at a government-sponsored press conference, groveling before an assemblage of imams whose leader publicly forgave him and placed him under his protection. On that terrible day, Selbekk later acknowledged, “Norway went a long way toward allowing freedom of speech to become the Islamists’ hostage.” As if that capitulation weren’t disgrace enough, an official Norwegian delegation then traveled to Qatar and implored Qaradawi—a defender of suicide bombers and the murder of Jewish children—to accept Selbekk’s apology. “To meet Yusuf al-Qaradawi under the present circumstances,” Norwegian-Iraqi writer Walid al-Kubaisi protested, was “tantamount to granting extreme Islamists . . . a right of joint consultation regarding how Norway should be governed.”
The UN’s position on the question of speech versus “respect” for Islam was clear—and utterly at odds with its founding value of promoting human rights. “You don’t joke about other people’s religion,” Kofi Annan lectured soon after the Magazinet incident, echoing the sermons of innumerable imams, “and you must respect what is holy for other people.” In October 2006, at a UN panel discussion called “Cartooning for Peace,” Under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor proposed drawing “a very thin blue UN line . . . between freedom and responsibility.” (Americans might be forgiven for wondering whether that line would strike through the First Amendment.) And in 2007, the UN’s Human Rights Council passed a Pakistani motion prohibiting defamation of religion.
Other Western government leaders have promoted the expansion of the Dar al-Islam. In September 2006, when philosophy teacher Robert Redeker went into hiding after receiving death threats over a Le Figaro op-ed on Islam, France’s then–prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, commented that “everyone has the right to express their opinions freely—at the same time that they respect others, of course.” The lesson of the Redeker affair, he said, was “how vigilant we must be to ensure that people fully respect one another in our society.” Villepin got a run for his money last year from his Swedish counterpart, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who, after meeting with Muslim ambassadors to discuss the Vilks cartoons, won praise from one of them, Algeria’s Merzak Bedjaoui, for his “spirit of appeasement.”
When, years after September 11, President George W. Bush finally acknowledged publicly that the West was at war with Islamic fascism, Muslims’ and multiculturalists’ furious reaction made him retreat to the empty term “war on terror.” Britain’s Foreign Office has since deemed even that phrase offensive and banned its use by cabinet members (along with “Islamic extremism”). In January, the Home Office decided that Islamic terrorism would henceforth be described as “anti-Islamic activity.”
Western legislatures and courts have reinforced the “spirit of appeasement.” In 2005, Norway’s parliament, with virtually no public discussion or media coverage, criminalized religious insults (and placed the burden of proof on the defendant). Last year, that country’s most celebrated lawyer, Tor Erling Staff, argued that the punishment for honor killing should be less than for other murders, because it’s arrogant for us to expect Muslim men to conform to our society’s norms. Also in 2007, in one of several instances in which magistrates sworn to uphold German law have followed sharia instead, a Frankfurt judge rejected a Muslim woman’s request for a quick divorce from her brutally abusive husband; after all, under the Koran he had the right to beat her.
Those who dare to defy the West’s new sharia-based strictures and speak their minds now risk prosecution in some countries. In 2006, legendary author Oriana Fallaci, dying of cancer, went on trial in Italy for slurring Islam; three years earlier, she had defended herself in a French court against a similar charge. (Fallaci was ultimately found not guilty in both cases.) More recently, Canadian provinces ordered publisher Ezra Levant and journalist Mark Steyn to face human rights tribunals, the former for reprinting the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, the latter for writing critically about Islam in Maclean’s.
Even as Western authorities have hassled Islam’s critics, they’ve honored jihadists and their supporters. In 2005, Queen Elizabeth knighted Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain, a man who had called for the death of Salman Rushdie. Also that year, London mayor Ken Livingstone ludicrously praised Qaradawi as “progressive”—and, in response to gay activists who pointed out that Qaradawi had defended the death penalty for homosexuals, issued a dissertation-length dossier whitewashing the Sunni scholar and trying to blacken the activists’ reputations. Of all the West’s leaders, however, few can hold a candle to Piet Hein Donner, who in 2006, as Dutch minister of justice, said that if voters wanted to bring sharia to the Netherlands—where Muslims will soon be a majority in major cities—“it would be a disgrace to say, ‘This is not permitted!’ ”
If you don’t find the dhimmification of politicians shocking, consider the degree to which law enforcement officers have yielded to Islamist pressure. Last year, when “Undercover Mosque,” an unusually frank exposé on Britain’s Channel 4, showed “moderate” Muslim preachers calling for the beating of wives and daughters and the murder of gays and apostates, police leaped into action—reporting the station to the government communications authority, Ofcom, for stirring up racial hatred. (Ofcom, to its credit, rejected the complaint.) The police reaction, as James Forsyth noted in the Spectator, “revealed a mindset that views the exposure of a problem as more of a problem than the problem itself.” Only days after the “Undercover Mosque” broadcast—in a colossal mark of indifference to the reality that it exposed—Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair announced plans to share antiterrorist intelligence with Muslim community leaders. These plans, fortunately, were later shelved.
Canadian Muslim reformist Irshad Manji has noted that in 2006, when 17 terrorists were arrested in Toronto on the verge of giving Canada “its own 9/11,” “the police did not mention that it had anything to do with Islam or Muslims, not a word.” When, after van Gogh’s murder, a Rotterdam artist drew a street mural featuring an angel and the words thou shalt not kill, police, fearing Muslim displeasure, destroyed the mural (and a videotape of its destruction). In July 2007, a planned TV appeal by British cops to help capture a Muslim rapist was canceled to avoid “racist backlash.” And in August, the Times of London reported that “Asian” men (British code for “Muslims”) in the U.K. were having sex with perhaps hundreds of “white girls as young as twelve”—but that authorities wouldn’t take action for fear of “upsetting race relations.” Typically, neither the Times nor government officials acknowledged that the “Asian” men’s contempt for the “white” girls was a matter not of race but of religion.
Even military leaders aren’t immune. In 2005, columnist Diana West noted that America’s Iraq commander, Lieutenant General John R. Vines, was educating his staff in Islam by giving them a reading list that “whitewashes jihad, dhimmitude and sharia law with the works of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito”; two years later, West noted the unwillingness of a counterinsurgency advisor, Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, to mention jihad. In January 2008, the Pentagon fired Stephen Coughlin, its resident expert on sharia and jihad; reportedly, his acknowledgment that terrorism was motivated by jihad had antagonized an influential Muslim aide. “That Coughlin’s analyses would even be considered ‘controversial,’ ” wrote Andrew Bostom, editor of The Legacy of Jihad, “is pathognomonic of the intellectual and moral rot plaguing our efforts to combat global terrorism.” (Perhaps owing to public outcry, officials announced in February that Coughlin would not be dismissed after all, but instead moved to another Department of Defense position.)
Enough. We need to recognize that the cultural jihadists hate our freedoms because those freedoms defy sharia, which they’re determined to impose on us. So far, they have been far less successful at rolling back freedom of speech and other liberties in the U.S. than in Europe, thanks in no small part to the First Amendment. Yet America is proving increasingly susceptible to their pressures.
The key question for Westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperiled—or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled. As for Muslims living in the West, surveys suggest that many of them, though not actively involved in jihad, are prepared to look on passively—and some, approvingly—while their coreligionists drag the Western world into the House of Submission.
But we certainly can’t expect them to take a stand for liberty if we don’t stand up for it ourselves.
Bruce Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. He blogs at BruceBawer.com.
An Anatomy of Surrender
Motivated by fear and multiculturalism, too many Westerners are acquiescing to creeping sharia.
Islam divides the world into two parts. The part governed by sharia, or Islamic law, is called the Dar al-Islam, or House of Submission. Everything else is the Dar al-Harb, or House of War, so called because it will take war—holy war, jihad—to bring it into the House of Submission. Over the centuries, this jihad has taken a variety of forms. Two centuries ago, for instance, Muslim pirates from North Africa captured ships and enslaved their crews, leading the U.S. to fight the Barbary Wars of 1801–05 and 1815. In recent decades, the jihadists’ weapon of choice has usually been the terrorist’s bomb; the use of planes as missiles on 9/11 was a variant of this method.
What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, KhoÂmeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies’ basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.
The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.
Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission.
The Western media are in the driver’s seat on this road to sharia. Often their approach is to argue that we’re the bad guys. After the late Dutch sociologist-turned-politician Pim Fortuyn sounded the alarm about the danger that Europe’s Islamization posed to democracy, elite journalists labeled him a threat. A New York Times headline described him as marching the dutch to the right. Dutch newspapers Het Parool and De Volkskrant compared him with Mussolini; Trouw likened him to Hitler. The man (a multiculturalist, not a Muslim) who murdered him in May 2002 seemed to echo such verdicts when explaining his motive: Fortuyn’s views on Islam, the killer insisted, were “dangerous.”
Perhaps no Western media outlet has exhibited this habit of moral inversion more regularly than the BBC. In 2006, to take a typical example, Manchester’s top imam told psychotherapist John Casson that he supported the death penalty for homosexuality. Casson expressed shock—and the BBC, in a dispatch headlined imam accused of “gay death” slur, spun the controversy as an effort by Casson to discredit Islam. The BBC concluded its story with comments from an Islamic Human Rights Commission spokesman, who equated Muslim attitudes toward homosexuality with those of “other orthodox religions, such as Catholicism” and complained that focusing on the issue was “part of demonizing Muslims.”
In June 2005, the BBC aired the documentary Don’t Panic, I’m Islamic, which sought to portray concerns about Islamic radicalism as overblown. This “stunning whitewash of radical Islam,” as Little Green Footballs blogger Charles Johnson put it, “helped keep the British public fast asleep, a few weeks before the bombs went off in London subways and buses” in July 2005. In December 2007, it emerged that five of the documentary’s subjects, served up on the show as examples of innocuous Muslims-next-door, had been charged in those terrorist attacks—and that BBC producers, though aware of their involvement after the attacks took place, had not reported important information about them to the police.
Press acquiescence to Muslim demands and threats is endemic. When the Mohammed cartoons—published in September 2005 by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten to defy rising self-censorship after van Gogh’s murder—were answered by worldwide violence, only one major American newspaper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, joined such European dailies as Die Welt and El País in reprinting them as a gesture of free-speech solidarity. Editors who refused to run the images claimed that their motive was multicultural respect for Islam. Critic Christopher Hitchens believed otherwise, writing that he “knew quite a number of the editors concerned and can say for a certainty that the chief motive for ‘restraint’ was simple fear.” Exemplifying the new dhimmitude, whatever its motivation, was Norway’s leading cartoonist, Finn Graff, who had often depicted Israelis as Nazis, but who now vowed not to draw anything that might provoke Muslim wrath. (On a positive note, this February, over a dozen Danish newspapers, joined by a number of other papers around the world, reprinted one of the original cartoons as a free-speech gesture after the arrest of three people accused of plotting to kill the artist.)
Last year brought another cartoon crisis—this time over Swedish artist Lars Vilks’s drawings of Mohammed as a dog, which ambassadors from Muslim countries used as an excuse to demand speech limits in Sweden. CNN reporter Paula Newton suggested that perhaps “Vilks should have known better” because of the Jyllands-Posten incident—as if people who make art should naturally take their marching orders from people who make death threats. Meanwhile, The Economist depicted Vilks as an eccentric who shouldn’t be taken “too seriously” and noted approvingly that Sweden’s prime minister, unlike Denmark’s, invited the ambassadors “in for a chat.”
The elite media regularly underreport fundamentalist Muslim misbehavior or obfuscate its true nature. After the knighting of Rushdie in 2007 unleashed yet another wave of international Islamist mayhem, Tim Rutten wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “If you’re wondering why you haven’t been able to follow all the columns and editorials in the American press denouncing all this homicidal nonsense, it’s because there haven’t been any.” Or consider the riots that gripped immigrant suburbs in France in the autumn of 2005. These uprisings were largely assertions of Muslim authority over Muslim neighborhoods, and thus clearly jihadist in character. Yet weeks passed before many American press outlets mentioned them—and when they did, they de-emphasized the rioters’ Muslim identity (few cited the cries of “Allahu akbar,” for instance). Instead, they described the violence as an outburst of frustration over economic injustice.
When polls and studies of Muslims appear, the media often spin the results absurdly or drop them down the memory hole after a single news cycle. Journalists celebrated the results of a 2007 Pew poll showing that 80 percent of American Muslims aged 18 to 29 said that they opposed suicide bombing—even though the flip side, and the real story, was that a double-digit percentage of young American Muslims admitted that they supported it. u.s. muslims assimilated, opposed to extremism, the Washington Post rejoiced, echoing USA Today’s american muslims reject extremes. A 2006 Daily Telegraph survey showed that 40 percent of British Muslims wanted sharia in Britain—yet British reporters often write as though only a minuscule minority embraced such views.
After each major terrorist act since 9/11, the press has dutifully published stories about Western Muslims fearing an “anti-Muslim backlash”—thus neatly shifting the focus from Islamists’ real acts of violence to non-Muslims’ imaginary ones. (These backlashes, of course, never materialize.) While books by Islam experts like Bat Ye’or and Robert Spencer, who tell difficult truths about jihad and sharia, go unreviewed in newspapers like the New York Times, the elite press legitimizes thinkers like Karen Armstrong and John Esposito, whose sugarcoated representations of Islam should have been discredited for all time by 9/11. The Times described Armstrong’s hagiography of Mohammed as “a good place to start” learning about Islam; in July 2007, the Washington Post headlined a piece by Esposito want to understand islam? start here.
Mainstream outlets have also served up anodyne portraits of fundamentalist Muslim life. Witness Andrea Elliott’s affectionate three-part profile of a Brooklyn imam, which appeared in the New York Times in March 2006. Elliott and the Times sought to portray Reda Shata as a heroic bridge builder between two cultures, leaving readers with the comforting belief that the growth of Islam in America was not only harmless but positive, even beautiful. Though it emerged in passing that Shata didn’t speak English, refused to shake women’s hands, wanted to forbid music, and supported Hamas and suicide bombing, Elliott did her best to downplay such unpleasant details; instead, she focused on sympathetic personal particulars. “Islam came to him softly, in the rhythms of his grandmother’s voice”; “Mr. Shata discovered love 15 years ago. . . . ‘She entered my heart,‘ said the imam.” Elliott’s saccharine piece won a Pulitzer Prize. When Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes pointed out that Shata was obviously an Islamist, a writer for the Columbia Journalism Review dismissed Pipes as “right-wing” and insisted that Shata was “very moderate.”
So it goes in this upside-down, not-so-brave new media world: those who, if given the power, would subjugate infidels, oppress women, and execute apostates and homosexuals are “moderate” (a moderate, these days, apparently being anybody who doesn’t have explosives strapped to his body), while those who dare to call a spade a spade are “Islamophobes.”
The entertainment industry has been nearly as appalling. During World War II, Hollywood churned out scores of films that served the war effort, but today’s movies and TV shows, with very few exceptions, either tiptoe around Islam or whitewash it. In the whitewash category were two sitcoms that debuted in 2007, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Little Mosque on the Prairie and CW’s Aliens in America. Both shows are about Muslims confronting anti-Muslim bigotry; both take it for granted that there’s no fundamentalist Islam problem in the West, but only an anti-Islam problem.
Muslim pressure groups have actively tried to keep movies and TV shows from portraying Islam as anything but a Religion of Peace. For example, the Council for American-Islamic Relations successfully lobbied Paramount Pictures to change the bad guys in The Sum of All Fears (2002) from Islamist terrorists to neo-Nazis, while Fox’s popular series 24, after Muslims complained about a story line depicting Islamic terrorists, ran cringe-worthy public-service announcements emphasizing how nonviolent Islam was. Earlier this year, Iranian-Danish actor Farshad Kholghi noted that, despite the cartoon controversy’s overwhelming impact on Denmark, “not a single movie has been made about the crisis, not a single play, not a single stand-up monologue.” Which, of course, is exactly what the cartoon jihadists wanted.
In April 2006, an episode of the animated series South Park admirably mocked the wave of self-censorship that followed the Jyllands-Posten crisis—but Comedy Central censored it, replacing an image of Mohammed with a black screen and an explanatory notice. According to series producer Anne Garefino, network executives frankly admitted that they were acting out of fear. “We were happy,” she told an interviewer, “that they didn’t try to claim that it was because of religious tolerance.”
Then there’s the art world. Postmodern artists who have always striven to shock and offend now maintain piously that Islam deserves “respect.” Museums and galleries have quietly taken down paintings that might upset Muslims and have put into storage manuscripts featuring images of Mohammed. London’s Whitechapel Art Gallery removed life-size nude dolls by surrealist artist Hans Bellmer from a 2006 exhibit just before its opening; the official excuse was “space constraints,” but the curator admitted that the real reason was fear that the nudity might offend the gallery’s Muslim neighbors. Last November, after the cancellation of a show in The Hague of artworks depicting gay men in Mohammed masks, the artist, Sooreh Hera, charged the museum with giving in to Muslim threats. Tim Marlow of London’s White Cube Gallery notes that such self-censorship by artists and museums is now common, though “very few people have explicitly admitted” it. British artist Grayson Perry, whose work has mercilessly mocked Christianity, is one who has—and his reluctance isn’t about multicultural sensitivity. “The reason I haven’t gone all out attacking Islamism in my art,” he told the Times of London, “is because I feel real fear that someone will slit my throat.”
Leading liberal intellectuals and academics have shown a striking willingness to betray liberal values when it comes to pacifying Muslims. Back in 2001, Unni Wikan, a distinguished Norwegian cultural anthropologist and Islam expert, responded to the high rate of Muslim-on-infidel rape in Oslo by exhorting women to “realize that we live in a multicultural society and adapt themselves to it.”
More recently, high-profile Europe experts Ian Buruma of Bard College and Timothy Garton Ash of Oxford, while furiously denying that they advocate cultural surrender, have embraced “accommodation,” which sounds like a distinction without a difference. In his book Murder in Amsterdam, Buruma approvingly quotes Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen’s call for “accommodation with the Muslims,” including those “who consciously discriminate against their women.” Sharia enshrines a Muslim man’s right to beat and rape his wife, to force marriages on his daughters, and to kill them if they resist. One wonders what female Muslims who immigrated to Europe to escape such barbarity think of this prescription.
Rowan Williams, the archbishop of Canterbury and one of Britain’s best-known public intellectuals, suggested in February the institution of a parallel system of sharia law in Britain. Since the Islamic Sharia Council already adjudicates Muslim marriages and divorces in the U.K., what Williams was proposing was, as he put it, “a much enhanced and quite sophisticated version of such a body, with increased resources.” Gratifyingly, his proposal, short on specifics and long on academic doublespeak (“I don’t think,” he told the BBC, “that we should instantly spring to the conclusion that the whole of that world of jurisprudence and practice is somehow monstrously incompatible with human rights, simply because it doesn’t immediately fit with how we understand it”) was greeted with public outrage.
Another prominent accommodationist is humanities professor Mark Lilla of Columbia University, author of an August 2007 essay in the New York Times Magazine so long and languorous, and written with such perfect academic dispassion, that many readers may have finished it without realizing that it charted a path leading straight to sharia. Muslims’ “full reconciliation with modern liberal democracy cannot be expected,” Lilla wrote. For the West, “coping is the order of the day, not defending high principle.”
Revealing in this light is Buruma’s and Garton Ash’s treatment of author Ayaan Hirsi Ali—perhaps the greatest living champion of Western freedom in the face of creeping jihad—and of the Europe-based Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan. Because Hirsi Ali refuses to compromise on liberty, Garton Ash has called her a “simplistic . . . Enlightenment fundamentalist”—thus implicitly equating her with the Muslim fundamentalists who have threatened to kill her—while Buruma, in several New York Times pieces, has portrayed her as a petulant naif. (Both men have lately backed off somewhat.) On the other hand, the professors have rhapsodized over Ramadan’s supposed brilliance. They aren’t alone: though he’s clearly not the Westernized, urbane intellectual he seems to be—he refuses to condemn the stoning of adulteresses and clearly looks forward to a Europe under sharia—this grandson of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and protégé of Islamist scholar Yusuf al-Qaradawi regularly wins praise in bien-pensant circles as representing the best hope for long-term concord between Western Muslims and non-Muslims.
This spring, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine, actually gave two cheers for sharia. He contrasted it favorably with English common law, and described “the Islamists’ aspiration to renew old ideas of the rule of law” as “bold and noble.”
With the press, the entertainment industry, and prominent liberal thinkers all refusing to defend basic Western liberties, it’s not surprising that our political leaders have been pusillanimous, too. After a tiny Oslo newspaper, Magazinet, reprinted the Danish cartoons in early 2006, jihadists burned Norwegian flags and set fire to Norway’s embassy in Syria. Instead of standing up to the vandals, Norwegian leaders turned on Magazinet’s editor, Vebjørn Selbekk, partially blaming him for the embassy burning and pressing him to apologize. He finally gave way at a government-sponsored press conference, groveling before an assemblage of imams whose leader publicly forgave him and placed him under his protection. On that terrible day, Selbekk later acknowledged, “Norway went a long way toward allowing freedom of speech to become the Islamists’ hostage.” As if that capitulation weren’t disgrace enough, an official Norwegian delegation then traveled to Qatar and implored Qaradawi—a defender of suicide bombers and the murder of Jewish children—to accept Selbekk’s apology. “To meet Yusuf al-Qaradawi under the present circumstances,” Norwegian-Iraqi writer Walid al-Kubaisi protested, was “tantamount to granting extreme Islamists . . . a right of joint consultation regarding how Norway should be governed.”
The UN’s position on the question of speech versus “respect” for Islam was clear—and utterly at odds with its founding value of promoting human rights. “You don’t joke about other people’s religion,” Kofi Annan lectured soon after the Magazinet incident, echoing the sermons of innumerable imams, “and you must respect what is holy for other people.” In October 2006, at a UN panel discussion called “Cartooning for Peace,” Under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor proposed drawing “a very thin blue UN line . . . between freedom and responsibility.” (Americans might be forgiven for wondering whether that line would strike through the First Amendment.) And in 2007, the UN’s Human Rights Council passed a Pakistani motion prohibiting defamation of religion.
Other Western government leaders have promoted the expansion of the Dar al-Islam. In September 2006, when philosophy teacher Robert Redeker went into hiding after receiving death threats over a Le Figaro op-ed on Islam, France’s then–prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, commented that “everyone has the right to express their opinions freely—at the same time that they respect others, of course.” The lesson of the Redeker affair, he said, was “how vigilant we must be to ensure that people fully respect one another in our society.” Villepin got a run for his money last year from his Swedish counterpart, Fredrik Reinfeldt, who, after meeting with Muslim ambassadors to discuss the Vilks cartoons, won praise from one of them, Algeria’s Merzak Bedjaoui, for his “spirit of appeasement.”
When, years after September 11, President George W. Bush finally acknowledged publicly that the West was at war with Islamic fascism, Muslims’ and multiculturalists’ furious reaction made him retreat to the empty term “war on terror.” Britain’s Foreign Office has since deemed even that phrase offensive and banned its use by cabinet members (along with “Islamic extremism”). In January, the Home Office decided that Islamic terrorism would henceforth be described as “anti-Islamic activity.”
Western legislatures and courts have reinforced the “spirit of appeasement.” In 2005, Norway’s parliament, with virtually no public discussion or media coverage, criminalized religious insults (and placed the burden of proof on the defendant). Last year, that country’s most celebrated lawyer, Tor Erling Staff, argued that the punishment for honor killing should be less than for other murders, because it’s arrogant for us to expect Muslim men to conform to our society’s norms. Also in 2007, in one of several instances in which magistrates sworn to uphold German law have followed sharia instead, a Frankfurt judge rejected a Muslim woman’s request for a quick divorce from her brutally abusive husband; after all, under the Koran he had the right to beat her.
Those who dare to defy the West’s new sharia-based strictures and speak their minds now risk prosecution in some countries. In 2006, legendary author Oriana Fallaci, dying of cancer, went on trial in Italy for slurring Islam; three years earlier, she had defended herself in a French court against a similar charge. (Fallaci was ultimately found not guilty in both cases.) More recently, Canadian provinces ordered publisher Ezra Levant and journalist Mark Steyn to face human rights tribunals, the former for reprinting the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, the latter for writing critically about Islam in Maclean’s.
Even as Western authorities have hassled Islam’s critics, they’ve honored jihadists and their supporters. In 2005, Queen Elizabeth knighted Iqbal Sacranie of the Muslim Council of Britain, a man who had called for the death of Salman Rushdie. Also that year, London mayor Ken Livingstone ludicrously praised Qaradawi as “progressive”—and, in response to gay activists who pointed out that Qaradawi had defended the death penalty for homosexuals, issued a dissertation-length dossier whitewashing the Sunni scholar and trying to blacken the activists’ reputations. Of all the West’s leaders, however, few can hold a candle to Piet Hein Donner, who in 2006, as Dutch minister of justice, said that if voters wanted to bring sharia to the Netherlands—where Muslims will soon be a majority in major cities—“it would be a disgrace to say, ‘This is not permitted!’ ”
If you don’t find the dhimmification of politicians shocking, consider the degree to which law enforcement officers have yielded to Islamist pressure. Last year, when “Undercover Mosque,” an unusually frank exposé on Britain’s Channel 4, showed “moderate” Muslim preachers calling for the beating of wives and daughters and the murder of gays and apostates, police leaped into action—reporting the station to the government communications authority, Ofcom, for stirring up racial hatred. (Ofcom, to its credit, rejected the complaint.) The police reaction, as James Forsyth noted in the Spectator, “revealed a mindset that views the exposure of a problem as more of a problem than the problem itself.” Only days after the “Undercover Mosque” broadcast—in a colossal mark of indifference to the reality that it exposed—Metropolitan Police commissioner Sir Ian Blair announced plans to share antiterrorist intelligence with Muslim community leaders. These plans, fortunately, were later shelved.
Canadian Muslim reformist Irshad Manji has noted that in 2006, when 17 terrorists were arrested in Toronto on the verge of giving Canada “its own 9/11,” “the police did not mention that it had anything to do with Islam or Muslims, not a word.” When, after van Gogh’s murder, a Rotterdam artist drew a street mural featuring an angel and the words thou shalt not kill, police, fearing Muslim displeasure, destroyed the mural (and a videotape of its destruction). In July 2007, a planned TV appeal by British cops to help capture a Muslim rapist was canceled to avoid “racist backlash.” And in August, the Times of London reported that “Asian” men (British code for “Muslims”) in the U.K. were having sex with perhaps hundreds of “white girls as young as twelve”—but that authorities wouldn’t take action for fear of “upsetting race relations.” Typically, neither the Times nor government officials acknowledged that the “Asian” men’s contempt for the “white” girls was a matter not of race but of religion.
Even military leaders aren’t immune. In 2005, columnist Diana West noted that America’s Iraq commander, Lieutenant General John R. Vines, was educating his staff in Islam by giving them a reading list that “whitewashes jihad, dhimmitude and sharia law with the works of Karen Armstrong and John Esposito”; two years later, West noted the unwillingness of a counterinsurgency advisor, Lieutenant Colonel David Kilcullen, to mention jihad. In January 2008, the Pentagon fired Stephen Coughlin, its resident expert on sharia and jihad; reportedly, his acknowledgment that terrorism was motivated by jihad had antagonized an influential Muslim aide. “That Coughlin’s analyses would even be considered ‘controversial,’ ” wrote Andrew Bostom, editor of The Legacy of Jihad, “is pathognomonic of the intellectual and moral rot plaguing our efforts to combat global terrorism.” (Perhaps owing to public outcry, officials announced in February that Coughlin would not be dismissed after all, but instead moved to another Department of Defense position.)
Enough. We need to recognize that the cultural jihadists hate our freedoms because those freedoms defy sharia, which they’re determined to impose on us. So far, they have been far less successful at rolling back freedom of speech and other liberties in the U.S. than in Europe, thanks in no small part to the First Amendment. Yet America is proving increasingly susceptible to their pressures.
The key question for Westerners is: Do we love our freedoms as much as they hate them? Many free people, alas, have become so accustomed to freedom, and to the comfortable position of not having to stand up for it, that they’re incapable of defending it when it’s imperiled—or even, in many cases, of recognizing that it is imperiled. As for Muslims living in the West, surveys suggest that many of them, though not actively involved in jihad, are prepared to look on passively—and some, approvingly—while their coreligionists drag the Western world into the House of Submission.
But we certainly can’t expect them to take a stand for liberty if we don’t stand up for it ourselves.
Bruce Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West from Within. He blogs at BruceBawer.com.
Who Ows Antiquity?
The oldest printed book known is not the magnificent Bible produced by Johannes Gutenberg in 1455 but a translation of the "Diamond Sutra," a Buddhist treatise on the illusory nature of reality. The word "sutra" means "thread" in Sanskrit but came to designate any pithy statement; the Diamond Sutra -- more accurately, the Diamond-Cutter Sutra -- was so called because the sharp facets of its aphorisms slice through the illusions of both mind and senses.
The Elgin Marbles at the British Museum.
Sometime in the fourth century, when Buddhism made its way from India into China along such well-traveled routes as the Silk Road, the text was turned from its original Sanskrit into Chinese. The book, produced by wood-block printing on separate pages that were then stitched into a scroll some 16 feet long, is dated 868 A.D. Discovered in 1907 in the Mogao Caves of northwestern China by the scholar and explorer Aurel Stein, it was one of several thousand manuscripts and artworks that he deposited in museums from New Delhi to London. For more than a century now, this earliest of imprints has been one of the most prized possessions of the British Library.
The Diamond Sutra is important for the history of Buddhism in China; it is also an irreplaceable record of human spirituality in general. Should it be considered the "cultural property" of the Chinese people or does it in some sense belong to us all? The question, as James Cuno makes clear in his excellent and outspoken new study, isn't about provenance but about rightful possession. To put the matter another way: If antiquities, whether the Diamond Sutra or the Elgin Marbles, form part of what he calls "our common heritage," is it right to treat them as embodiments of some particular modern nationality, whether Chinese or Italian or Turkish?
The sixth-century-B.C. vessel known as the Euphronios Krater, returned from the U.S. to Italy earlier this year.
The question may appear disingenuous. After all, Mr. Cuno is himself the director of the Art Institute of Chicago and hardly a disinterested party. And since American and European museums hold many of the most famous and priceless antiquities known -- some acquired in ways that wouldn't be allowed today -- it seems self-serving, at this late date, to invoke lofty notions of the "heritage of humanity." The real issue is ownership, legal as well as ethical. Both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Museum have in recent years ended up returning disputed antiquities, such as the Met's sixth-century-B.C. ceramic vessel known as the Euphronios Krater, to Italy. And claims continue to be made not merely over objects whose provenance is murky but over ancient artworks increasingly seen as the inalienable "cultural property" of a nation.
Mr. Cuno minces no words. In his view, "antiquity cannot be owned." By setting the stringent cultural property laws of such countries as China, Italy and Turkey in historical perspective, he is able to show how contradictory, and often unjustified, such claims of ownership tend to be, driven as they are by constantly shifting political agendas.
Mr. Cuno is a passionate advocate of "the encyclopedic museum." By this he means a "museum dedicated to ideas, not ideologies, the museum of international, indeed universal aspirations." This ideal, inherited from the 18th- century Enlightenment, drives his argument throughout. Against this stand ranked nation-states, many recently constituted, whose policies favor museums governed narrowly by "nationalistic limitations."
• Read an excerpt1 from the book.Possibly the most famous wrangling over the ownership of antiquities involves the Elgin Marbles, removed from the Parthenon in Athens between 1801 and 1805 by Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin and British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Greece was then under Turkish rule and -- with the consent of the Ottoman authorities -- Elgin had the sculptures sawed from the Parthenon frieze and transported to England. Ten years later, when he fell into debt, he sold the marbles for £35,000 to Parliament, which deposited them in the British Museum, where they have remained for the past 200 years. The Greeks have passionately petitioned for their return but the British Museum has repeatedly rejected the request, refusing to lend them "even for a short period of time," in the words of Museum trustees. According to Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum: "This is where they can do the most good." Mr. Cuno shares this view.
If Mr. Cuno opposes the pressure to repatriate antiquities, which is mounting, it's not only because he espouses lofty "universalist" ideals. His own Art Institute, and museums like it, catalog, conserve and exhibit antiquities for the benefit of all. And they safeguard them for the future. The looting of the Iraqi national museum in Baghdad, which he describes in shocking detail, stands as a grim example of the alternative.
Excellent as his book is, Mr. Cuno makes some surprising factual errors, especially about early Islam. Thus he calls Mu'awiya, the founder of the Umayyad Dynasty in Syria, the "fourth caliph," when in fact that office was held by 'Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law. Nor did 'Ali "challenge" Mu'awiya for the caliphate, as Mr. Cuno states; rather, Mu'awiya was the challenger. The author further describes 'Ali's supporters as the "Shia I-Ali," an impossible construction in either Arabic or Persian; the correct term is Shi'at 'Ali, or "party of 'Ali" (from which the present-day term "Shi'a" derives). The Abbasid Dynasty, which supplanted the Umayyads around 750, did not endure for two centuries, as Mr. Cuno states, but lasted a good 500 years, until obliterated by the Mongols in 1258. Sometimes he uncritically recycles the errors of others. Describing an ivory casket made in medieval Sicily by a Muslim craftsman, and now in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, he says -- following the misreading of earlier catalogers -- that the calligraphic inscription on this lovely little masterpiece reads: "May glory endure." In fact, the inscription is nothing more than a conventional formula of blessing on the owner of the casket and means "lasting honor." In Islamic belief, "glory" belongs to God alone.
No one, of course, disputes that the looting of archaeological sites or the trafficking in antiquities should be prevented. But for Mr. Cuno, the enforcement of sweeping cultural property laws, as in China (which claims all antiquities from prehistoric times to 1911, when the Qing Dynasty fell), isn't the best approach. He advocates a return to the practice of "partage," whereby archaeologists who excavate an ancient site divide their finds, according to agreed percentages, with the host country. It was through partage, for example, that the rich collections of cuneiform tablets unearthed in Iraq in the late-19th and early-20th centuries were apportioned between the University of Pennsylvania and the British and Iraqi national museums, to the ultimate advantage of the institutions and the general public.
In a final chapter, Mr. Cuno sets aside polemic to describe his first visit to the Louvre as a young man. There he was surprised to experience an unexpected kinship with vanished peoples; their artworks inspired a deep sense of wonder in him. He felt momentarily part of immemorial human endeavor. That kind of wonder may still be possible only in an "encyclopedic museum," where antiquities from all cultures are assembled to reveal the full range of human genius. As the French poet Paul Claudel wrote: "For the flight of a single butterfly the entire sky is needed."
Mr. Ormsby is the author, most recently, of "Ghazali: The Revival of Islam" (Oneworld).
The Elgin Marbles at the British Museum.
Sometime in the fourth century, when Buddhism made its way from India into China along such well-traveled routes as the Silk Road, the text was turned from its original Sanskrit into Chinese. The book, produced by wood-block printing on separate pages that were then stitched into a scroll some 16 feet long, is dated 868 A.D. Discovered in 1907 in the Mogao Caves of northwestern China by the scholar and explorer Aurel Stein, it was one of several thousand manuscripts and artworks that he deposited in museums from New Delhi to London. For more than a century now, this earliest of imprints has been one of the most prized possessions of the British Library.
The Diamond Sutra is important for the history of Buddhism in China; it is also an irreplaceable record of human spirituality in general. Should it be considered the "cultural property" of the Chinese people or does it in some sense belong to us all? The question, as James Cuno makes clear in his excellent and outspoken new study, isn't about provenance but about rightful possession. To put the matter another way: If antiquities, whether the Diamond Sutra or the Elgin Marbles, form part of what he calls "our common heritage," is it right to treat them as embodiments of some particular modern nationality, whether Chinese or Italian or Turkish?
The sixth-century-B.C. vessel known as the Euphronios Krater, returned from the U.S. to Italy earlier this year.
The question may appear disingenuous. After all, Mr. Cuno is himself the director of the Art Institute of Chicago and hardly a disinterested party. And since American and European museums hold many of the most famous and priceless antiquities known -- some acquired in ways that wouldn't be allowed today -- it seems self-serving, at this late date, to invoke lofty notions of the "heritage of humanity." The real issue is ownership, legal as well as ethical. Both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Museum have in recent years ended up returning disputed antiquities, such as the Met's sixth-century-B.C. ceramic vessel known as the Euphronios Krater, to Italy. And claims continue to be made not merely over objects whose provenance is murky but over ancient artworks increasingly seen as the inalienable "cultural property" of a nation.
Mr. Cuno minces no words. In his view, "antiquity cannot be owned." By setting the stringent cultural property laws of such countries as China, Italy and Turkey in historical perspective, he is able to show how contradictory, and often unjustified, such claims of ownership tend to be, driven as they are by constantly shifting political agendas.
Mr. Cuno is a passionate advocate of "the encyclopedic museum." By this he means a "museum dedicated to ideas, not ideologies, the museum of international, indeed universal aspirations." This ideal, inherited from the 18th- century Enlightenment, drives his argument throughout. Against this stand ranked nation-states, many recently constituted, whose policies favor museums governed narrowly by "nationalistic limitations."
• Read an excerpt1 from the book.Possibly the most famous wrangling over the ownership of antiquities involves the Elgin Marbles, removed from the Parthenon in Athens between 1801 and 1805 by Thomas Bruce, the seventh Earl of Elgin and British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. Greece was then under Turkish rule and -- with the consent of the Ottoman authorities -- Elgin had the sculptures sawed from the Parthenon frieze and transported to England. Ten years later, when he fell into debt, he sold the marbles for £35,000 to Parliament, which deposited them in the British Museum, where they have remained for the past 200 years. The Greeks have passionately petitioned for their return but the British Museum has repeatedly rejected the request, refusing to lend them "even for a short period of time," in the words of Museum trustees. According to Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum: "This is where they can do the most good." Mr. Cuno shares this view.
If Mr. Cuno opposes the pressure to repatriate antiquities, which is mounting, it's not only because he espouses lofty "universalist" ideals. His own Art Institute, and museums like it, catalog, conserve and exhibit antiquities for the benefit of all. And they safeguard them for the future. The looting of the Iraqi national museum in Baghdad, which he describes in shocking detail, stands as a grim example of the alternative.
Excellent as his book is, Mr. Cuno makes some surprising factual errors, especially about early Islam. Thus he calls Mu'awiya, the founder of the Umayyad Dynasty in Syria, the "fourth caliph," when in fact that office was held by 'Ali, the Prophet's son-in-law. Nor did 'Ali "challenge" Mu'awiya for the caliphate, as Mr. Cuno states; rather, Mu'awiya was the challenger. The author further describes 'Ali's supporters as the "Shia I-Ali," an impossible construction in either Arabic or Persian; the correct term is Shi'at 'Ali, or "party of 'Ali" (from which the present-day term "Shi'a" derives). The Abbasid Dynasty, which supplanted the Umayyads around 750, did not endure for two centuries, as Mr. Cuno states, but lasted a good 500 years, until obliterated by the Mongols in 1258. Sometimes he uncritically recycles the errors of others. Describing an ivory casket made in medieval Sicily by a Muslim craftsman, and now in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, he says -- following the misreading of earlier catalogers -- that the calligraphic inscription on this lovely little masterpiece reads: "May glory endure." In fact, the inscription is nothing more than a conventional formula of blessing on the owner of the casket and means "lasting honor." In Islamic belief, "glory" belongs to God alone.
No one, of course, disputes that the looting of archaeological sites or the trafficking in antiquities should be prevented. But for Mr. Cuno, the enforcement of sweeping cultural property laws, as in China (which claims all antiquities from prehistoric times to 1911, when the Qing Dynasty fell), isn't the best approach. He advocates a return to the practice of "partage," whereby archaeologists who excavate an ancient site divide their finds, according to agreed percentages, with the host country. It was through partage, for example, that the rich collections of cuneiform tablets unearthed in Iraq in the late-19th and early-20th centuries were apportioned between the University of Pennsylvania and the British and Iraqi national museums, to the ultimate advantage of the institutions and the general public.
In a final chapter, Mr. Cuno sets aside polemic to describe his first visit to the Louvre as a young man. There he was surprised to experience an unexpected kinship with vanished peoples; their artworks inspired a deep sense of wonder in him. He felt momentarily part of immemorial human endeavor. That kind of wonder may still be possible only in an "encyclopedic museum," where antiquities from all cultures are assembled to reveal the full range of human genius. As the French poet Paul Claudel wrote: "For the flight of a single butterfly the entire sky is needed."
Mr. Ormsby is the author, most recently, of "Ghazali: The Revival of Islam" (Oneworld).
28.4.08
GEORGE SOROS
The following is an edited and expanded version of an interview with George Soros, Chairman, Soros Fund Management, by Judy Woodruff on Bloomberg TV on April 4.
Judy Woodruff: You write in your new book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets,[1] that "we are in the midst of a financial crisis the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Depression." Was this crisis avoidable?
George Soros: I think it was, but it would have required recognition that the system, as it currently operates, is built on false premises. Unfortunately, we have an idea of market fundamentalism, which is now the dominant ideology, holding that markets are self-correcting; and this is false because it's generally the intervention of the authorities that saves the markets when they get into trouble. Since 1980, we have had about five or six crises: the international banking crisis in 1982, the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois in 1984, and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, to name only three.
Each time, it's the authorities that bail out the market, or organize companies to do so. So the regulators have precedents they should be aware of. But somehow this idea that markets tend to equilibrium and that deviations are random has gained acceptance and all of these fancy instruments for investment have been built on them.
There are now, for example, complex forms of investment such as credit-default swaps that make it possible for investors to bet on the possibility that companies will default on repaying loans. Such bets on credit defaults now make up a $45 trillion market that is entirely unregulated. It amounts to more than five times the total of the US government bond market. The large potential risks of such investments are not being acknowledged.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Woodruff: How can so many smart people not realize this?
Soros: In my new book I put forward a general theory of reflexivity, emphasizing how important misconceptions are in shaping history. So it's not really unusual; it's just that we don't recognize the misconceptions.
Woodruff: Who could have? You said it would have been avoidable if people had understood what's wrong with the current system. Who should have recognized that?
Soros: The authorities, the regulators—the Federal Reserve and the Treasury—really failed to see what was happening. One Fed governor, Edward Gramlich, warned of a coming crisis in subprime mortgages in a speech published in 2004 and a book published in 2007, among other statements. So a number of people could see it coming. And somehow, the authorities didn't want to see it coming. So it came as a surprise.
Woodruff: The chairman of the Fed, Mr. Bernanke? His predecessor, Mr. Greenspan?
Soros: All of the above. But I don't hold them personally responsible because you have a whole establishment involved. The economics profession has developed theories of "random walks" and "rational expectations" that are supposed to account for market movements. That's what you learn in college. Now, when you come into the market, you tend to forget it because you realize that that's not how the markets work. But nevertheless, it's in some way the basis of your thinking.
Woodruff: How much worse do you anticipate things will get?
Soros: Well, you see, as my theory argues, you can't make any unconditional predictions because it very much depends on how the authorities are going to respond now to the situation. But the situation is definitely much worse than is currently recognized. You have had a general disruption of the financial markets, much more pervasive than any we have had so far. And on top of it, you have the housing crisis, which is likely to get a lot worse than currently anticipated because markets do overshoot. They overshot on the upside and now they are going to overshoot on the downside.
Woodruff: You say the housing crisis is going to get much worse. Do you anticipate something like the government setting up an agency or a trust corporation to buy these mortgages?
Soros: I'm sure that it will be necessary to arrest the decline because the decline, I think, will be much faster and much deeper than currently anticipated. In February, the rate of decline in housing prices was 25 percent per annum, so it's accelerating. Now, foreclosures are going to add to the supply of housing a very large number of properties because the annual rate of new houses built is about 600,000. There are about six million subprime mortgages outstanding, 40 percent of which will likely go into default in the next two years. And then you have the adjustable-rate mortgages and other flexible loans.
Problems with such adjustable-rate mortgages are going to be of about the same magnitude as with subprime mortgages. So you'll have maybe five million more defaults facing you over the next several years. Now, it takes time before a foreclosure actually is completed. So right now you have perhaps no more than 10,000 to 20,000 houses coming into the supply on the market. But that's going to build up. So the idea that somehow in the second half of this year the economy is going to improve I find totally unbelievable.
Woodruff: So how long will this last?
Soros: Well, it depends on when the authorities wake up, because you need to reduce the number of foreclosures. You need to keep as many people as possible in their houses so that they don't come onto the market. You need to arrest the decline in house prices, but you also need to prevent human suffering and social disruption because it's going to be very, very severe. Certain communities are already hurting and it's going to get a lot worse. So action will have to be taken, but I don't think it's going to happen during this administration.
Woodruff: You said the Federal Reserve had to step in to engineer the buyout by J.P. Morgan of Bear Stearns to prevent a much bigger catastrophe. You've also said that to do this, the Fed had to take on considerable risk. Is this an unhealthy amount of risk that the Fed has taken on?
Soros: This is their job, whether unhealthy or not; I don't think it's actually so severe. But that is their job, to save the system when it is in danger. However, because that is their job, it ought to be their job also to prevent asset bubbles from developing. And that task has not been recognized. Greenspan once spoke about the "irrational exuberance" of the market. It had a bad echo and he stopped talking about it. And it's generally accepted that the Fed tries to control core inflation, but not asset prices. I think that control of asset prices has to be an objective in order to prevent asset bubbles because they are so frequent.
Woodruff: And that's more than what the Fed is doing.
Soros: It's more than what it's doing now. You have to recognize that just controlling money doesn't control credit. You see, money and credit don't go hand in hand. The monetarist doctrine doesn't stand up. So you have to take into account the willingness to lend. And if it's too great—if borrowers can obtain large loans on the basis of inadequate security—you really have to introduce margin requirements for such borrowing and try to discourage it.
Woodruff: When you talk about currency you have more than a little expertise. You were described as the man who broke the Bank of England back in the 1990s. But what is your sense of where the dollar is going? We've seen it declining. Do you think the central banks are going to have to step in?
Soros: Well, we are close to a tipping point where, in my view, the willingness of banks and countries to hold dollars is definitely impaired. But there is no suitable alternative so central banks are diversifying into other currencies; but there is a general flight from these currencies. So the countries with big surpluses—Abu Dhabi, China, Norway, and Saudi Arabia, for example—have all set up sovereign wealth funds, state-owned investment funds held by central banks that aim to diversify their assets from monetary assets to real assets. That's one of the major developments currently and those sovereign wealth funds are growing. They're already equal in size to all of the hedge funds in the world combined. Of course, they don't use their capital as intensively as hedge funds, but they are going to grow to about five times the size of hedge funds in the next twenty years.
Woodruff: How low do you think the dollar will go?
Soros: Well, that I don't know. I can see the trend, but I don't know its extent, and I don't know when something might happen to turn it around. Once the economy stabilizes, probably the overshoot on the currencies would also be corrected.
Woodruff: Few people know more about hedge funds than you do. You've been enormously successful with your own hedge fund. Should hedge funds be more regulated by Washington?
Soros: I think hedge funds should be regulated like everything else. In other words, you have to control leverage—credit obtained for investment purposes—somewhere. Excessive use of leverage is at the bottom of this problem. And there have been hedge funds that have been using leverage excessively and some of those have gone broke. The amount of leverage that people are allowed to use has to be regulated. I think it's best done through the banks. In other words, the banks' reserve requirements—the amounts of money they are obliged to hold—should be tailored to the riskiness of their customers. So investment funds that use a lot of leverage ought to be seen as very risky; and therefore they would not get the amount of leverage they seek because the banks wouldn't give it to them.
Woodruff: New regulation, though: Could that impede the ability of hedge funds to be the big players that they have been in these markets?
Soros: Yes, I think that there has been excessive use of credit and it does have to be limited. So we are now in a period of very rapid deleveraging and I think that in the future we ought not to allow leverage to be used to the extent that it has been in the past.
Woodruff: You write, "We are at the end of an era." When this current credit crisis ends, will the US still be, no doubt about it, the world superpower when it comes to the economy?
Soros: Not at all. This is now in question. And you now have entered a period of really considerable uncertainty and turmoil because of the general flight from currencies, which manifests itself in the commodities bubble that has developed. The price of gold hasn't yet gone as high as it might. So what comes out of this turmoil is very open to question. I think that you will have to somehow reconstruct the global financial architecture because you have recognized that, in effect, the economic weight has changed considerably among the different countries. China has become much more important and also India, and so on. What kind of system will evolve from this is, I think, a very open question.
Woodruff: What about China? How much of an economic competitor could it end up being?
Soros: Well, China is rising. It's been the main beneficiary of globalization. Their currency is significantly undervalued and for various reasons they have to allow it to appreciate, recently at a rate of 10 percent. And it's been accelerating now to 15, 20 percent, which makes the situation more difficult for the Fed because you now have the prospect of core inflation in the US accelerating because if our imports coming from China go up in price by 15 percent, it will come through in core inflation. The price of goods at Wal-Mart is rising and will probably continue to rise and then accelerate.
Woodruff: So while people are thinking that goods are cheaper from China, you're saying the prices go up. It affects so many things that we buy in this country. What of Russia and how its economy is doing?
Soros: Basically, the country is benefiting from the high price of oil, but, at the same time, it is reestablishing a very authoritarian regime where the rights of investors are not respected. Now it is British Petroleum that is being chased out. So you invest at your own risk. I've done it and I'm not going to do it again.
Woodruff: So what you see in Russia tells us that political freedom and economic freedom are separable after all?
Soros: Well, the lack of political freedom also impinges on the rights of shareholders. So it's not a suitable area for investing exactly because you don't have the rule of law. China is improving a great deal. The rule of law is getting stronger in China, even though you don't have democracy.
Woodruff: The most attractive emerging market?
Soros: At this time, the outlook for India is also very good.
Woodruff: Let me mention two other points because they are so much on the minds of our leaders today. One is fighting the war on terror. Should the next president be prepared to sit down with the leaders of organizations like Hamas, like Hezbollah, countries like Iran?
Soros: Absolutely. I wrote another book arguing that the entire idea of a "war on terror" is a misleading concept that has got this country off on the wrong track.[2] It is responsible for our invading Iraq under the wrong pretenses and for a decline of our political influence and military power that has no precedent.
Woodruff: Where do you see the "war on terror" ten years down the road?
Soros: I hope that we will put it behind us. If you think in terms of human security and you say that the role of governments is to make the people secure, then it leads you to a completely different line of action. And even in Iraq, the surge, which was quite successful militarily, tried to provide protection for civilians, instead of just chasing terrorists whom we couldn't find after breaking into houses and terrifying the people. Concern for human security, making us feel safe and making the people in other countries feel safe: I think that would get you to a totally different line of action.
Woodruff: Bringing us back to this country in the midst of this economic credit crisis that you write about and that you've been describing, we are also in the middle of a presidential election. You endorsed Barack Obama the day he announced. Why him rather than your home state senator, Senator Clinton?
Soros: Well, I have very high regard for Hillary Clinton, but I think Obama has the charisma and the vision to radically reorient America in the world. And that is what we need because I'm afraid we have gotten off the right track and we need to have a greater discontinuity than Hillary Clinton would bring.
Woodruff: You have no concern that he lacks the experience to lead in this dangerous time that we live in?
Soros: I think that he has shown himself to be a really unusual person. And I think this emphasis on experience is way overdone because he will have exactly the same advisers available as Hillary Clinton, and it will be a matter of judgment whom he chooses. And actually, he is more likely to bring in new blood, which is what we need.
Woodruff: Recently, Senator Obama has endorsed some of the things we've been talking about: greater financial regulation, having for example the Federal Housing Administration insure unaffordable mortgages against default. Do you think this goes far enough, what he's talking about? Did he talk with you at all?
Soros: No, I've had absolutely no contact with him or any of the Democratic leadership on this issue. Now that my book is out, maybe I will in the future. But these are my ideas and they are not responsible for them.
Woodruff: From what you know about what he's saying about the housing crisis, do you think he goes far enough?
Soros: No, nothing right now goes far enough and Representative Barney Frank, who really understands the issues, is not pushing that far because, in order to get bipartisan support, you can't. So if you want something done, you have to set your sights lower. And that is what he has done and I think he is getting a few things through. But they are not enough.
Woodruff: A larger question on the campaign—you gave, I believe, something like $23 million in 2004 to various Democratic efforts: MoveOn.org and candidates. Far less than that so far this year—why the change?
Soros: Well, because I think that was a unique time when not having President Bush reelected would have made the situation of this country and of the world much better. I think now it's less important. And, in any case, I don't feel terribly comfortable being a partisan person because I look forward to being critical of the next Democratic administration.
Woodruff: What of your book and the philosophy that comes of it?
Soros: In human affairs, as distinguished from natural science, I argue that our understanding is imperfect. And our imperfect understanding introduces an element of uncertainty that's not there in natural phenomena. So therefore you can't predict human affairs in the same way as you can natural phenomena. And we have to come to terms with the implication of our own misunderstandings, that it's very hard to make decisions when you know you may be wrong. You have to learn to recognize that we in fact may be wrong. And, even worse than that, it's almost inevitable that all of our constructs will have some kind of a flaw in them. So when it comes to currencies, no currency system is perfect.
So you have to recognize that all of our constructions are imperfect. We have to improve them. But just because something is imperfect, the opposite is not perfect. So because of the failures of socialism, communism, we have come to believe in market fundamentalism, that markets are perfect; everything will be taken care of by markets. And markets are not perfect. And this time we have to recognize that, because we are facing a very serious economic disruption.
Now, we should not go back to a very highly regulated economy because the regulators are imperfect. They're only human and what is worse, they are bureaucratic. So you have to find the right kind of balance between allowing the markets to do their work, while recognizing that they are imperfect. You need authorities that keep the market under scrutiny and some degree of control. That's the message that I'm trying to get across.
Judy Woodruff: You write in your new book, The New Paradigm for Financial Markets,[1] that "we are in the midst of a financial crisis the likes of which we haven't seen since the Great Depression." Was this crisis avoidable?
George Soros: I think it was, but it would have required recognition that the system, as it currently operates, is built on false premises. Unfortunately, we have an idea of market fundamentalism, which is now the dominant ideology, holding that markets are self-correcting; and this is false because it's generally the intervention of the authorities that saves the markets when they get into trouble. Since 1980, we have had about five or six crises: the international banking crisis in 1982, the bankruptcy of Continental Illinois in 1984, and the failure of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, to name only three.
Each time, it's the authorities that bail out the market, or organize companies to do so. So the regulators have precedents they should be aware of. But somehow this idea that markets tend to equilibrium and that deviations are random has gained acceptance and all of these fancy instruments for investment have been built on them.
There are now, for example, complex forms of investment such as credit-default swaps that make it possible for investors to bet on the possibility that companies will default on repaying loans. Such bets on credit defaults now make up a $45 trillion market that is entirely unregulated. It amounts to more than five times the total of the US government bond market. The large potential risks of such investments are not being acknowledged.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Woodruff: How can so many smart people not realize this?
Soros: In my new book I put forward a general theory of reflexivity, emphasizing how important misconceptions are in shaping history. So it's not really unusual; it's just that we don't recognize the misconceptions.
Woodruff: Who could have? You said it would have been avoidable if people had understood what's wrong with the current system. Who should have recognized that?
Soros: The authorities, the regulators—the Federal Reserve and the Treasury—really failed to see what was happening. One Fed governor, Edward Gramlich, warned of a coming crisis in subprime mortgages in a speech published in 2004 and a book published in 2007, among other statements. So a number of people could see it coming. And somehow, the authorities didn't want to see it coming. So it came as a surprise.
Woodruff: The chairman of the Fed, Mr. Bernanke? His predecessor, Mr. Greenspan?
Soros: All of the above. But I don't hold them personally responsible because you have a whole establishment involved. The economics profession has developed theories of "random walks" and "rational expectations" that are supposed to account for market movements. That's what you learn in college. Now, when you come into the market, you tend to forget it because you realize that that's not how the markets work. But nevertheless, it's in some way the basis of your thinking.
Woodruff: How much worse do you anticipate things will get?
Soros: Well, you see, as my theory argues, you can't make any unconditional predictions because it very much depends on how the authorities are going to respond now to the situation. But the situation is definitely much worse than is currently recognized. You have had a general disruption of the financial markets, much more pervasive than any we have had so far. And on top of it, you have the housing crisis, which is likely to get a lot worse than currently anticipated because markets do overshoot. They overshot on the upside and now they are going to overshoot on the downside.
Woodruff: You say the housing crisis is going to get much worse. Do you anticipate something like the government setting up an agency or a trust corporation to buy these mortgages?
Soros: I'm sure that it will be necessary to arrest the decline because the decline, I think, will be much faster and much deeper than currently anticipated. In February, the rate of decline in housing prices was 25 percent per annum, so it's accelerating. Now, foreclosures are going to add to the supply of housing a very large number of properties because the annual rate of new houses built is about 600,000. There are about six million subprime mortgages outstanding, 40 percent of which will likely go into default in the next two years. And then you have the adjustable-rate mortgages and other flexible loans.
Problems with such adjustable-rate mortgages are going to be of about the same magnitude as with subprime mortgages. So you'll have maybe five million more defaults facing you over the next several years. Now, it takes time before a foreclosure actually is completed. So right now you have perhaps no more than 10,000 to 20,000 houses coming into the supply on the market. But that's going to build up. So the idea that somehow in the second half of this year the economy is going to improve I find totally unbelievable.
Woodruff: So how long will this last?
Soros: Well, it depends on when the authorities wake up, because you need to reduce the number of foreclosures. You need to keep as many people as possible in their houses so that they don't come onto the market. You need to arrest the decline in house prices, but you also need to prevent human suffering and social disruption because it's going to be very, very severe. Certain communities are already hurting and it's going to get a lot worse. So action will have to be taken, but I don't think it's going to happen during this administration.
Woodruff: You said the Federal Reserve had to step in to engineer the buyout by J.P. Morgan of Bear Stearns to prevent a much bigger catastrophe. You've also said that to do this, the Fed had to take on considerable risk. Is this an unhealthy amount of risk that the Fed has taken on?
Soros: This is their job, whether unhealthy or not; I don't think it's actually so severe. But that is their job, to save the system when it is in danger. However, because that is their job, it ought to be their job also to prevent asset bubbles from developing. And that task has not been recognized. Greenspan once spoke about the "irrational exuberance" of the market. It had a bad echo and he stopped talking about it. And it's generally accepted that the Fed tries to control core inflation, but not asset prices. I think that control of asset prices has to be an objective in order to prevent asset bubbles because they are so frequent.
Woodruff: And that's more than what the Fed is doing.
Soros: It's more than what it's doing now. You have to recognize that just controlling money doesn't control credit. You see, money and credit don't go hand in hand. The monetarist doctrine doesn't stand up. So you have to take into account the willingness to lend. And if it's too great—if borrowers can obtain large loans on the basis of inadequate security—you really have to introduce margin requirements for such borrowing and try to discourage it.
Woodruff: When you talk about currency you have more than a little expertise. You were described as the man who broke the Bank of England back in the 1990s. But what is your sense of where the dollar is going? We've seen it declining. Do you think the central banks are going to have to step in?
Soros: Well, we are close to a tipping point where, in my view, the willingness of banks and countries to hold dollars is definitely impaired. But there is no suitable alternative so central banks are diversifying into other currencies; but there is a general flight from these currencies. So the countries with big surpluses—Abu Dhabi, China, Norway, and Saudi Arabia, for example—have all set up sovereign wealth funds, state-owned investment funds held by central banks that aim to diversify their assets from monetary assets to real assets. That's one of the major developments currently and those sovereign wealth funds are growing. They're already equal in size to all of the hedge funds in the world combined. Of course, they don't use their capital as intensively as hedge funds, but they are going to grow to about five times the size of hedge funds in the next twenty years.
Woodruff: How low do you think the dollar will go?
Soros: Well, that I don't know. I can see the trend, but I don't know its extent, and I don't know when something might happen to turn it around. Once the economy stabilizes, probably the overshoot on the currencies would also be corrected.
Woodruff: Few people know more about hedge funds than you do. You've been enormously successful with your own hedge fund. Should hedge funds be more regulated by Washington?
Soros: I think hedge funds should be regulated like everything else. In other words, you have to control leverage—credit obtained for investment purposes—somewhere. Excessive use of leverage is at the bottom of this problem. And there have been hedge funds that have been using leverage excessively and some of those have gone broke. The amount of leverage that people are allowed to use has to be regulated. I think it's best done through the banks. In other words, the banks' reserve requirements—the amounts of money they are obliged to hold—should be tailored to the riskiness of their customers. So investment funds that use a lot of leverage ought to be seen as very risky; and therefore they would not get the amount of leverage they seek because the banks wouldn't give it to them.
Woodruff: New regulation, though: Could that impede the ability of hedge funds to be the big players that they have been in these markets?
Soros: Yes, I think that there has been excessive use of credit and it does have to be limited. So we are now in a period of very rapid deleveraging and I think that in the future we ought not to allow leverage to be used to the extent that it has been in the past.
Woodruff: You write, "We are at the end of an era." When this current credit crisis ends, will the US still be, no doubt about it, the world superpower when it comes to the economy?
Soros: Not at all. This is now in question. And you now have entered a period of really considerable uncertainty and turmoil because of the general flight from currencies, which manifests itself in the commodities bubble that has developed. The price of gold hasn't yet gone as high as it might. So what comes out of this turmoil is very open to question. I think that you will have to somehow reconstruct the global financial architecture because you have recognized that, in effect, the economic weight has changed considerably among the different countries. China has become much more important and also India, and so on. What kind of system will evolve from this is, I think, a very open question.
Woodruff: What about China? How much of an economic competitor could it end up being?
Soros: Well, China is rising. It's been the main beneficiary of globalization. Their currency is significantly undervalued and for various reasons they have to allow it to appreciate, recently at a rate of 10 percent. And it's been accelerating now to 15, 20 percent, which makes the situation more difficult for the Fed because you now have the prospect of core inflation in the US accelerating because if our imports coming from China go up in price by 15 percent, it will come through in core inflation. The price of goods at Wal-Mart is rising and will probably continue to rise and then accelerate.
Woodruff: So while people are thinking that goods are cheaper from China, you're saying the prices go up. It affects so many things that we buy in this country. What of Russia and how its economy is doing?
Soros: Basically, the country is benefiting from the high price of oil, but, at the same time, it is reestablishing a very authoritarian regime where the rights of investors are not respected. Now it is British Petroleum that is being chased out. So you invest at your own risk. I've done it and I'm not going to do it again.
Woodruff: So what you see in Russia tells us that political freedom and economic freedom are separable after all?
Soros: Well, the lack of political freedom also impinges on the rights of shareholders. So it's not a suitable area for investing exactly because you don't have the rule of law. China is improving a great deal. The rule of law is getting stronger in China, even though you don't have democracy.
Woodruff: The most attractive emerging market?
Soros: At this time, the outlook for India is also very good.
Woodruff: Let me mention two other points because they are so much on the minds of our leaders today. One is fighting the war on terror. Should the next president be prepared to sit down with the leaders of organizations like Hamas, like Hezbollah, countries like Iran?
Soros: Absolutely. I wrote another book arguing that the entire idea of a "war on terror" is a misleading concept that has got this country off on the wrong track.[2] It is responsible for our invading Iraq under the wrong pretenses and for a decline of our political influence and military power that has no precedent.
Woodruff: Where do you see the "war on terror" ten years down the road?
Soros: I hope that we will put it behind us. If you think in terms of human security and you say that the role of governments is to make the people secure, then it leads you to a completely different line of action. And even in Iraq, the surge, which was quite successful militarily, tried to provide protection for civilians, instead of just chasing terrorists whom we couldn't find after breaking into houses and terrifying the people. Concern for human security, making us feel safe and making the people in other countries feel safe: I think that would get you to a totally different line of action.
Woodruff: Bringing us back to this country in the midst of this economic credit crisis that you write about and that you've been describing, we are also in the middle of a presidential election. You endorsed Barack Obama the day he announced. Why him rather than your home state senator, Senator Clinton?
Soros: Well, I have very high regard for Hillary Clinton, but I think Obama has the charisma and the vision to radically reorient America in the world. And that is what we need because I'm afraid we have gotten off the right track and we need to have a greater discontinuity than Hillary Clinton would bring.
Woodruff: You have no concern that he lacks the experience to lead in this dangerous time that we live in?
Soros: I think that he has shown himself to be a really unusual person. And I think this emphasis on experience is way overdone because he will have exactly the same advisers available as Hillary Clinton, and it will be a matter of judgment whom he chooses. And actually, he is more likely to bring in new blood, which is what we need.
Woodruff: Recently, Senator Obama has endorsed some of the things we've been talking about: greater financial regulation, having for example the Federal Housing Administration insure unaffordable mortgages against default. Do you think this goes far enough, what he's talking about? Did he talk with you at all?
Soros: No, I've had absolutely no contact with him or any of the Democratic leadership on this issue. Now that my book is out, maybe I will in the future. But these are my ideas and they are not responsible for them.
Woodruff: From what you know about what he's saying about the housing crisis, do you think he goes far enough?
Soros: No, nothing right now goes far enough and Representative Barney Frank, who really understands the issues, is not pushing that far because, in order to get bipartisan support, you can't. So if you want something done, you have to set your sights lower. And that is what he has done and I think he is getting a few things through. But they are not enough.
Woodruff: A larger question on the campaign—you gave, I believe, something like $23 million in 2004 to various Democratic efforts: MoveOn.org and candidates. Far less than that so far this year—why the change?
Soros: Well, because I think that was a unique time when not having President Bush reelected would have made the situation of this country and of the world much better. I think now it's less important. And, in any case, I don't feel terribly comfortable being a partisan person because I look forward to being critical of the next Democratic administration.
Woodruff: What of your book and the philosophy that comes of it?
Soros: In human affairs, as distinguished from natural science, I argue that our understanding is imperfect. And our imperfect understanding introduces an element of uncertainty that's not there in natural phenomena. So therefore you can't predict human affairs in the same way as you can natural phenomena. And we have to come to terms with the implication of our own misunderstandings, that it's very hard to make decisions when you know you may be wrong. You have to learn to recognize that we in fact may be wrong. And, even worse than that, it's almost inevitable that all of our constructs will have some kind of a flaw in them. So when it comes to currencies, no currency system is perfect.
So you have to recognize that all of our constructions are imperfect. We have to improve them. But just because something is imperfect, the opposite is not perfect. So because of the failures of socialism, communism, we have come to believe in market fundamentalism, that markets are perfect; everything will be taken care of by markets. And markets are not perfect. And this time we have to recognize that, because we are facing a very serious economic disruption.
Now, we should not go back to a very highly regulated economy because the regulators are imperfect. They're only human and what is worse, they are bureaucratic. So you have to find the right kind of balance between allowing the markets to do their work, while recognizing that they are imperfect. You need authorities that keep the market under scrutiny and some degree of control. That's the message that I'm trying to get across.
27.4.08
Flogging Brewskis & other stuff
Since the early 1970s, sales of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer had plummeted steadily. Then, in 2002, the beer became the beverage of choice in hipster haunts everywhere. Sales rose 5.4% that year, followed by a 9.4% increase in supermarket sales in the first quarter of 2003. Marketwatchers initially scratched their heads at this sudden and inexplicable uptick. The beer hadn't been actively advertised in years, but that's precisely what worked in its favor. With ads from the competition (typical T&A showcases, burping frogs, and the ubiquitous catchphrase "Wassup?") as foils, PBR was automatically imbued with an anti-corporate aura that couldn't be bought.
Except that it was.
As it turns out, a savvy marketer had decided to forgo mainstream advertising, instead targeting his pitch at those bastions of corporate culture, bike messengers. And that's just one of the many tales of corporate marketing firms plundering the underground Anne Elizabeth Moore tells in Unmarketable.
Moore herself is somewhat of a sellout. In 2002, the Chicago-based writer (and Bitch contributor) was producing her own zine and co-editing the now-defunct Punk Planet when a local arts festival approached her to run a zine-making workshop. Moore jumped at the chance to fly in zinesters from across the nation, and to run free-of-charge workshops with a full cache of fresh supplies. But due to the arts festival's sponsorship deal, Moore's paycheck ultimately came from that king of corporate behemoths: Starbucks. Despite successfully fighting the last-minute request that the Starbucks logo appear on the back of every zine, Moore confesses it did end up "on the programming guide, in all promotional materials, and in several locations within the venue...[so] the zine-making space was branded, even if the zines themselves were not. "
It's unlikely that readers will judge Moore too harshly, though. Using her own experience as a jumping-off point, she conducts Unmarketable as an intelligent, funny, and frequently dispiriting study of the ways in which the mainstream has repeatedly pillaged the underground, repacking what they find before setting it afloat in the sea of mass consumption. The book is a clever roadmap of the techniques most habitually applied: brandalism ("vandalism that is committed as an advertising campaign"), graffadi ("graffiti that is advertising"), copyfighting ("activist projects that take on copyright and intellectual property issues"), and mocketing (â??product placement that is integrated into parody-based entertainment media content").
It's clear something insidious is happening in cases like that of the artist sued by Matell for using Barbie in his work (he won in appeal, as the work was clearly parody), or Nike's co-opting of the images and design from a cover of a Minor Threat album for their "Major Threat" campaign. But Moore is at her best treading the blurrier lines of demarcation, as when she speaks with the artists who contributed to Tylenol's "Ouch!" campaign, in which executives commissioned work by indie artists hoping to make the brand relevant to the younger generation. The Tylenol logo and depictions of bottles were rarely used, and reluctant artists were assured the corporation would be hands-off as they created artwork, including comics, depicting every-day incidents of pain. So was collecting a paycheck from a large corporation essentially telling you to do whatever youâ??d like really selling out? (Ultimately, of course, some editorial tweaks were requested by Tylenol in the end, making it not entirely hands-off, but thatâ??s beside the point in this debate.)
Parts of Unmarketable may be impenetrable to those unfamiliar with the ways of DIY art and activism, but that's precisely why the book works. Instead of a "don't-always-trust-what-you-see" tome targeted at the masses, Moore talks straight to the artists producing the work, passionately prodding them to think about integrity, ownership, and meaning. In doing so, she's created an authentic work about the collisions of corporate and counter cultures that everyone who cares about culture should read.
Except that it was.
As it turns out, a savvy marketer had decided to forgo mainstream advertising, instead targeting his pitch at those bastions of corporate culture, bike messengers. And that's just one of the many tales of corporate marketing firms plundering the underground Anne Elizabeth Moore tells in Unmarketable.
Moore herself is somewhat of a sellout. In 2002, the Chicago-based writer (and Bitch contributor) was producing her own zine and co-editing the now-defunct Punk Planet when a local arts festival approached her to run a zine-making workshop. Moore jumped at the chance to fly in zinesters from across the nation, and to run free-of-charge workshops with a full cache of fresh supplies. But due to the arts festival's sponsorship deal, Moore's paycheck ultimately came from that king of corporate behemoths: Starbucks. Despite successfully fighting the last-minute request that the Starbucks logo appear on the back of every zine, Moore confesses it did end up "on the programming guide, in all promotional materials, and in several locations within the venue...[so] the zine-making space was branded, even if the zines themselves were not. "
It's unlikely that readers will judge Moore too harshly, though. Using her own experience as a jumping-off point, she conducts Unmarketable as an intelligent, funny, and frequently dispiriting study of the ways in which the mainstream has repeatedly pillaged the underground, repacking what they find before setting it afloat in the sea of mass consumption. The book is a clever roadmap of the techniques most habitually applied: brandalism ("vandalism that is committed as an advertising campaign"), graffadi ("graffiti that is advertising"), copyfighting ("activist projects that take on copyright and intellectual property issues"), and mocketing (â??product placement that is integrated into parody-based entertainment media content").
It's clear something insidious is happening in cases like that of the artist sued by Matell for using Barbie in his work (he won in appeal, as the work was clearly parody), or Nike's co-opting of the images and design from a cover of a Minor Threat album for their "Major Threat" campaign. But Moore is at her best treading the blurrier lines of demarcation, as when she speaks with the artists who contributed to Tylenol's "Ouch!" campaign, in which executives commissioned work by indie artists hoping to make the brand relevant to the younger generation. The Tylenol logo and depictions of bottles were rarely used, and reluctant artists were assured the corporation would be hands-off as they created artwork, including comics, depicting every-day incidents of pain. So was collecting a paycheck from a large corporation essentially telling you to do whatever youâ??d like really selling out? (Ultimately, of course, some editorial tweaks were requested by Tylenol in the end, making it not entirely hands-off, but thatâ??s beside the point in this debate.)
Parts of Unmarketable may be impenetrable to those unfamiliar with the ways of DIY art and activism, but that's precisely why the book works. Instead of a "don't-always-trust-what-you-see" tome targeted at the masses, Moore talks straight to the artists producing the work, passionately prodding them to think about integrity, ownership, and meaning. In doing so, she's created an authentic work about the collisions of corporate and counter cultures that everyone who cares about culture should read.
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