Clausewitz in Wonderland by Tony Corn - Policy Review

But, I wonder -- have we learned?

Amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics.” In the five years since the 9/11 events, the old military adage has undergone a “transformation” of its own: Amateurs, to be sure, continue to talk about strategy, but real professionals increasingly talk about — anthropology.
In Iraq as in Afghanistan, real professionals have learned the hard way that — to put it in a nutshell — the injunction “Know Thy Enemy, Know Thyself” matters more than the bookish “Know Thy Clausewitz” taught in war colleges. Know thy enemy: At the tactical and operational levels at least, it is anthropology, not Clausewitzology, that will shed light on the grammar and logic of tribal warfare and provide the conceptual weapons necessary to return fire. Know thyself: It is only through anthropological “distanciation” that the U.S. military (and its various “tribes”: Army, Navy, etc.) will become aware of its own cultural quirks — including a monomaniacal obsession with Clausewitz — and adapt its military culture to the new enemy.1
The first major flaw of U.S. military culture is of course “technologism” — this uniquely American contribution to the phenomenon known to anthropologists as “animism.” Infatuation with technology has led in the recent past to rhetorical self-intoxication about Network-Centric Warfare and the concomitant neglect of Culture-Centric Warfare. The second structural flaw is a Huntingtonian doctrine of civil-military relations ideally suited for the Cold War but which, given its outdated conception of “professionalism,” has outlived its usefulness and is today a major impediment to the necessary constant dialogue between the military and civilians.2
Last but not least, the third major flaw is “strategism.” At its “best,” strategism is synonymous with “strategy for strategy’s sake,” i.e., a self-referential discourse more interested in theory-building (or is it hair-splitting?) than policy-making. Strategism would be innocuous enough were it not for the fact that, in the media and academia, “realism” today is fast becoming synonymous with “absence of memory, will, and imagination”: in that context, the self-referentiality of the strategic discourse does not exactly improve the quality of the public debate. At its worst, strategism confuses education with indoctrination, and scholarship with scholasticism; in its most extreme form, it comes close to being an “intellectual terrorism” in the name of Clausewitz.


Clausewitz in Wonderland by Tony Corn - Policy Review

CAUSE CÉLÈBRE - A soiree with a serious agenda

Bill Cinton is coming back in a big way. Here a report on his 'Oscar Night'


calendarlive.com: CAUSE CÉLÈBRE - A soiree with a serious agenda


Also, don't miss his dustup with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/9/22/211041/433

Axis 'of the South'

"There's a new sense of the oppressed versus the oppressor," said a senior U.S. official, who asked to remain unnamed. "What they have in common is their hatred of the U.S., and it's created this solidarity across Third World lines." That solidarity hasn't been seen in the developing world since leftist liberation movements faded after the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said.The fallout from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and other Bush administration policies may be particularly visible in the new bonds between many Muslim nations and populist regimes of South America, an alliance that some call the "axis of the south."

Anti-Americanism Is Providing a Glue - Los Angeles Times

THE KILLERS

Here is a band you can get into. Led by a Mormon from Vegas no-less.

THE KILLERS

America's new age of anxiety

Telegraph Entertainment America's new age of anxiety:

"With the image of the United States at rock bottom, it seems a perverse time to bring a large exhibition of American art to London. The banner outside the Serpentine Gallery's group show of young Americans artists simply reads: 'Mission Accomplished'. By compressing into two words all the cynicism and contempt so many Americans feel for their president, the artist Paul Chan suavely disassociates American art from American policies and so disarms the potentially hostile audience likely to visit the show.
The exhibition itself is too big and too uneven in quality to be able to make many generalisations about trends in American art, but an undertow of melancholy runs through a lot of it, and some of the best work in it is about America itself."

Roger Scruton on the Cocktail

The effect of the cocktail is not so much physical as moral. People learn to divide themselves in two. There is the pre-cocktail person, who rises early, works industriously and thinks constantly and kindly of the folks at home; and there is the post-cocktail person who, once the first dagger has been stabbed down the throat, falls into a stunned abstraction. The speech that eventually emerges is slow and deliberate, and although the folks at home are frequently referred to, it is with a distant and slightly mournful affection, as though remembering people long since dead. The cocktail drinker is carried home to dinner at some unconscionably early hour, and with a fixed smile on the face, divested of all the habits of the workplace. It is hard to learn to drink cocktails in moderation. Like chocolates, they are designed to tempt you, with every stop pulled out. Nevertheless, the cocktail culture has overcome the demon alcohol in a way that the whiskey culture of the hill-billies has not. Murders in rural Virginia occur between consenting adults in private; and rye is almost always the catalyst. Cocktails, by contrast, belong to the world of people who have to get up in the morning - people who slice their day in two, so as to be alone with themselves for the better part of it. When unable to bear the chatter of their intimates, such people do not shoot them, but approach them with an eerie smile and silence them with an irresistible drink.

New Statesman - Drink: In the mix

The spiritual hinterland of abstract art

What did Wassily Kandinsky, W. B. Yeats, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Piet Mondrian, Alexander Scriabin and Kasimir Malevitch have in common? Two were abstract painters (eventually) and three were Russian avant-gardists but what links them to the Irish nationalist poet and the Indian philosopher and spiritual teacher?

The answer (or one answer – maybe you can think of another) is theosophy, that strange mixture of progressive social thought and mystical religion (or a union of neoplatonism and Indian religious and philosophical thought) pioneered by the eccentric Madame Helena Blavatsky. She always sounds half charlatan (her claims as a medium were exposed as fraudulent by the Society for Psychical Research) but Blavatsky must have had something. Yeats, according to his biographer Roy Foster, “enjoyed her mixture of sardonic Russian wit and all-embracing mysticism”.

It would be tempting to dismiss theosophy as a “fad” (Foster’s word) – but if so it was a fad that attracted many of the most creative minds of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By the 1910s the Theosophical Society, based in magnificent premises outside Madras, had tens of thousands of adherents spread all over the world. After Blavatsky’s death, its leading light was Annie Besant, a formidable socialist and feminist, friend of Shaw and Gandhi, campaigner for Irish and Indian independence, and a woman with none of Blavatsky’s air of the fortune-teller’s tent.

FT.com / Arts & weekend / Weekend columnists - The spiritual hinterland of abstract art

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/23/opinion/23mccall.html?th&emc=th

Travel Writing

Travel writing can be splendid. Think of Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux. Here is a more esoteric compilation of 'five best'.

OpinionJournal - Five Best

Oprah for President?

Kinky Friedman (yes, the same of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jew-Boys) is running for the office of Governor of Texas with a slogan of "WHY NOT". Well, why not indeed as applied to Ms. Winfrey. Is it possible that she might bring some common sense to the office. ......and she does make a fascinating 'anti-Hillary'.

Independent Online Edition > Americas

The new titans: India & China

This survey will argue that all of these puzzles can be explained by the growing impact of emerging economies. For instance, low bond yields and the dollar's refusal to plunge are partly due to the way these countries have been piling up foreign reserves. Likewise, higher oil prices have mostly been caused by strong demand from developing countries rather than by an interruption of supply, so they have done less harm to global growth than in the past. And their impact on inflation has been offset by falling prices of goods exported by emerging economies. This has also made it easier for central banks to achieve their inflation goals with much lower interest rates than in the past.
All this will require some radical new thinking about economic policy. Governments may need to harness the tax and benefit system to compensate some workers who lose from globalisation.
Monetary policy also needs to be revamped. Central bankers like to take the credit for the defeat of inflation, but emerging economies have given them a big helping hand, both by pushing down the prices of many goods and by restraining wages in developed countries. This has allowed central banks to hold interest rates at historically low levels. But they have misunderstood the monetary-policy implications of a positive supply shock. By keeping interest rates too low, they have allowed a build-up of excess liquidity which has flowed into the prices of assets such as homes, rather than into traditional inflation. They have encouraged too much borrowing and too little saving. In America the overall result has been to widen the current-account deficit.
The central banks' mistake has been compounded by the emerging economies' refusal to allow their exchange rates to rise, piling up foreign-exchange reserves instead. Bizarrely, by financing America's deficit, poor countries are subsidising the world's richest consumers. The opening up of emerging economies has thus not only provided a supply of cheap labour to the world, it has also offered an increased supply of cheap capital. But this survey will argue that the developing countries will not be prepared to go on financing America's massive current-account deficit for much longer.
At some point, therefore, America's cost of capital could rise sharply. There is a risk that the American economy will face a sharp financial shock and a recession, or an extended period of sluggish growth. This will slow growth in the rest of the world economy. But America is less important as a locomotive for global growth than it used to be, thanks to the greater vigour of emerging economies. America's total imports from the rest of the world last year amounted to only 4% of world GDP. The greater risk to the world economy is that a recession and falling house prices would add to Americans' existing concerns about stagnant real wages, creating more support for protectionism. That would be bad both for the old rich countries and the new emerging stars.
But regardless of how the developed world responds to the emerging giants, their economic power will go on growing. The rich world has yet to feel the full heat from this new revolution.

The new titans Economist.com

ARMANI

Sorry, no discount here for the EMPORIO. Today the Independent published its issue with the design and input of Giorgio Armani and some of his friends such as George Clooney and Ashley Judd. Half the proceeds are being devoted to Aids charities so I suppose this self-indulgence may be excused. Mr. Armani's A-Z of fashion is quite amusing to read. On the one hand I have enormous respect, bordering on awe, for what he has achieved. He is the sole shareholder, chief executive and designer of the biggest private fashion company in the world, with sales of €5bn last year. There are more than 350 stores and multiple lines: Armani Privé, the couture; Giorgio Armani, men's and women's ready-to-wear; Armani Collezione, a slightly less expensive line; Emporio Armani, the diffusion line; Armani Jeans; Armani A/X, a licence directed at the teenage market; and Armani Casa, the line of home furnishings.
He has a deserved role in fashion history for his deconstructed power suit, which changed the way both men and women dress. And he has a place in the pantheon of pop culture for introducing Hollywood to high fashion and in effect creating the modern red-carpet experience.

Independent Online Edition > This Britain

Britain and France need to lead, together - International Herald Tribune

ROSBIFS & FROGS -- UNITE!

Britain and France need to lead, together -International Herald Tribune:

"At that moment (Suez) Britain and France took diverging paths in their respective quests for post-imperial influence. Britain vowed never again to cross the Americans, France never again to be humiliated by them. The battle lines were drawn in a conflict between London and Paris in and over NATO and the European Union that has raged on and off ever since, and that has become as futile as it is dangerous on both sides of the Channel. It must now end.

The recent war in Lebanon and the attempted destruction of thousands over the Atlantic demonstrate that the world in which Europeans live is dangerous in the extreme. Europeans cannot hide, even though many try. There are only two countries that can save Europe from the self-deluding isolationism into which it is tipping: Britain and France.

In the wake of the Suez crisis, Britain's elite handed over to Washington their nation's grand strategy and abandoned any pretense of strategic self-confidence. U.S. strategic leadership remains vital, but that very leadership must be open to the shaping of powerful European allies. And, as America's dangerously one- dimensional policy toward the Middle East demonstrates, Israel enjoys a far stronger special relationship with America than Britain does.

Indeed, Britain has now reached the very limits of 'poodle-ism,' the greatest tragedy of which is the lack of belief in Britain that it demonstrates on the part of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

France, in turn, has reached the limits of Gaullism, which was always founded on the need to aggregate European power in support of French aims. The rest of Europe is simply no longer prepared to pay for France's strategic ambitions."

The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonathan Franzen, reviewed by Esquire

It begins witha perfectly crafted opening paragraph and goes on to describe,in six elegant chapters, Franzen's maturation from a "small andfundamentally ridiculous person," to the kind of successful, childlessadult who enjoys activities like birding. He seems at times tobe setting up his life as emblematic of the changes the countryhas undergone during it; for instance, he ends a long paragraphdescribing the environmental recklessness of the last ten yearsby saying that it occurred "in the decade when I left my wifeand took up with a twenty-seven-year-old and really started havingfun." Franzen seems, alternately, to be detailing his aesthetic.From the assertive averageness of his practical, Midwestern familyto his love of the sad-funny comics of Charles Schultz to hisknowledge of the German language, this book reads like a map ofthe sensibility that made The Corrections so entertaining andimportant. Even in his minor scenes and ordinary descriptions,Franzen employs a cartoonish flair that catches the reader's eyeand signifies that it all really is about something greater thanhimself.

Powell's Books - Review-a-Day - The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonathan Franzen, reviewed by Esquire

The Believer

A Dave Eggers/McSweeney's production, if nothing else, Nick Hornby has a monthly column here which ought to be called "What I have not Read".

Believer is a fun read.


The Believer - September 2006

MUSLIMS ARE AT WAR WITH THE WEST

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-harris18sep18,0,1897169.story


Liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism."

It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad.

The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

...and more on the Pope,

Ironically, this increase in the oppression of Christians in Muslim countries follows the well-publicised attempts of Pope Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, to seek reconciliation with Islam. To the dismay of the Vatican’s own historians, Pope John Paul II made his historical ‘apology’ for the sins of the Crusades. This has not been reciprocated by any Muslim apology for the centuries of jihad that took Muslim armies as far as Poitiers in 732 and to the gates of Vienna in 1683; and there are signs that Pope Benedict has had enough of these double standards. Archbishop Fitzgerald, the Curial Cardinal responsible for relations with Islam, has been sent off as Papal Nuncio in Cairo.
Yet those who read the full text of Pope Benedict’s lecture will see that it was not primarily about Islam. Addressed to an audience of academics, it was also crafted for delivery in Regensburg, a city at the very heart of Europe, once the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and a command post of the Counter-Reformation. Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Prefect of the Holy Office, had kept alive the concept of a Church militant in the face of the relativism of the modern world. Now as supreme commander of a spiritual army he is waging war on two fronts — in the West against scientific materialists and in the East against religious fundamentalists — the first holding that the very idea of God is a nonsense, and the second that God transcends reason and can therefore be known only through what has been revealed in the Bible or the Koran.

Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?

A rather sad commentary from Mark Oppenheimer.

One might say there are two kinds of people: those who were deeply saddened by Barbara Epstein's death in June and those who had never heard of her. A co-founder of The New York Review of Books, Epstein was an obscure American, relatively speaking, an editor first of books and then of the long essays that have filled The New York Review since 1963. She was famous in literary circles, but in the wider world, she was hardly known — not compared with, say, Eminem or Paul Auster. The reminiscences I read about her were myopic in this respect: Written by her admirers, they tended to take for granted that she was widely known, because among the writers' friends she was. As for me, I knew scarcely anybody who knew her name.

The Chronicle: 9/22/2006: Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?

The New York Review of Books

I hope that this journal thrives after Barbara Epstein's death. It has been a splendid addition.

Two years ago, a lengthy piece in The Nation heralded “The Rebirth of The NYRB.” Written by a young journalist named Scott Sherman, it argued that the Review had once again become “a powerful and combative actor on the political scene.” Week after week, it carried dispatches from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Guantánamo Bay. Mark Danner and Orville Schell reported from Iraq. That courageous warhorse Norman Mailer, still contributing to the Review 40 years after his appearance in the first issue, wrote a piece denouncing the United States under Bush as “a monumental banana republic.”

But what is the Review’s place in that republic? Is it read beyond the confines of New York—by which I mean Manhattan and its cosmopolitan outposts Berkeley, Cambridge, and the university-dominated villages of Ann Arbor and Madison, New Haven, and Hyde Park? How much influence does it have in the Real World? Silvers points to the article by Mark Danner on the “dodgy dossier” that justified Tony Blair in joining the invasion of Iraq. “We were the only publication to run the full text of the Downing Street memo!” he says. Elizabeth Drew’s piece on the Bush administration’s pursuit of unchecked executive power “had an amazing effect. People in Congress read it.” Whether this constitutes influence is hard to say. “I have no great confidence that anything is influential,” says Silvers. “If it is, great.” But he values influence far less than independence—both ideological and financial.

It is a sad fact of life in America that the general audience for so-called intellectual publications, both left and right, is so small that most of them require subsidies in order to survive. Rupert Murdoch owns the neocon Weekly Standard; a consortium of prominent liberals, including Paul Newman, owns The Nation; and a consortium of no fixed ideology that includes Harvard associate professor Martin Peretz and Roger Hertog, a major donor to the conservative Manhattan Institute, owns The New Republic. The Review, too, now has a wealthy owner, Rea Hederman, whose family owned the Jackson, Mississippi, Clarion-Ledger.

The New York Review of Books After Barbara Epstein -- New York Magazine

Classical Music (Want something new?)

I was quite fortunate in that my parents loved classical music. They treated me to live performances when I was very young. Since we lived in Palo Alto and most of the music then was in San Francisco, this was a highly commendable effort of my folks to drag me around at age five and up, mostly to the venerable War Memorial Opera House. My interest matured when I had have had full years of music appreciation in both prep school and college. I say all this because it is difficult for me to understand why the appeal of clasical music is not broader or at least more broadly taught these days. So, it is with enthusiasm that I see someone taking on the task of providing an introductory syllabus for the budding afficiando of La Scena Musicale.



A new spin Alternatives suggested to woo listeners to classical music

By Andrew Adler aadler@courier-journal.com

I'm going to take a nontraditional approach to what has often been a very traditional kind of story. I want to talk about what sort of recordings could entice, beguile and otherwise persuade a relative newcomer to classical music to seek more of the form that so many of us love and cherish.
The usual strategy would be to lay out a collection of CDs, with plenty of Beethoven and Mozart symphonies, sonatas by Schubert and Schumann, a smattering of Tchaikovsky here, Wagner there. In other words, rope new listeners with lots of stuff that they may have heard, or at least heard of. Call it the power of the standard and familiar.


What would happen if instead of sticking to all this tried and true stuff, I took a kind of anti-normal take on this whole business? I thought it would be fun to pick out pieces and recordings that wouldn't exactly be the typical introductions we make to classical music. I'm not trying to be arbitrary, or contrary simply for the sake of being contrary. All of these suggest that classical music neophytes can be served just as well with material that might be called alternative as they can with the absolute mainstream.
Let's begin with a B. Not B as in Bach, Beethoven or Brahms. But B as in Berwald. Franz Berwald was a Swedish composer who lived from 1796 until 1868 and who wrote quite a bit of music covering quite a number of genres. He was a Romanticist in the best sense of that term: free in his melodies, rhythms and harmonies, consistently imaginative and fresh. His best-known work is the Symphony No. 3, called "Singuliere," a fine score that deserves far more recognition than it usually gets. You want great tunes? It has them. You want romanticism without syrupy excess? Here's your puppy.
There are a fair number of recordings of this work, but the one I have on my shelf features the Stockholm Philharmonic from 1962 led by Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt, himself a sadly neglected, first-caliber conductor. (Accord 149150)
John Corigliano certainly must be counted as among the most significant composers of the last 20 or 30 years. One of his best large-scale works is his Concerto for piano and orchestra. You'd have to go a long way to find a better account of that work than the 1994 recording by the Louisville Orchestra under its then-music director, Lawrence Leighton Smith.
The pianist is James Tocco. The combination of pianist, conductor and orchestra provides the kind of visceral excitement that makes you want to listen to the piece over and over again. The First Edition recordings CD also includes five of Corigliano's shorter scores, most notably his "Gazebo Dances." (LCD008)
Not too many years ago, Louisville audiences were fortunate enough to hear the Louisville Orchestra perform a concert featuring the music of American composer Michael Daugherty, who is celebrated for his musical translations of such pop icons as Marilyn Monroe and, in this 1996 Argo recording by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under David Zinman, Superman. Daugherty's five movement "Metropolis Symphony" bears such titles as "Lex," "Krypton," "Oh Lois! " and my favorite, "Red Cape Tango." It's great fun, but it's also extremely well-crafted music: distinctly American with an always tantalizing edge. (ARGO 452 103-2)
Well, I said I wasn't going to give you any Bach, but I simply couldn't resist sticking at least one disc of Johann Sebastian in this round up. It's a CD featuring George Ritchie, one of the very finest organists I've ever had the pleasure of hearing, performing a collection of works under the heading of "German Virtuosity & Italian Elegance." Two performances stand out: those of the toccata and fugue in F Major, BWV 540; and the Fantasy and Fugue in G minor, BWV 542. It's no exaggeration to call these accounts stupendous. Played over an audio system with a good subwoofer, the effect is remarkably powerful. (RAVEN OAR-250)
You may be able to tell that I love big symphony orchestras playing equally big symphonies. One of my absolute favorites is Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 8 in C minor, which for me is a score that approaches transcendental satisfactions.
Now, some people complain that Bruckner goes on for too long and is far too thick. I could not disagree more vehemently. For me, this composer is at least as essential as Mahler in the late romantic scheme of things, and in a work like the Eighth Symphony, occupies a universe all his own.
There are many recordings of this work, but in a modern stereo version the account by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Herbert von Karajan is especially distinguished. This is monumentality in the best sense, a melding of performance and score that moves from the affecting to the genuinely spiritual. (Deutsche Grammophon 427 611-2)
Henry Purcell, the extraordinary English composer who lived from 1659 to 1695, is best known for his opera "Dido and Aeneas." But the music he wrote in honor of Queen Mary often is at least as compelling, and in a work like the birthday ode "Come, ye sons of Art," the vocal glories are unmatched.
A recent EMI Classics CD offers a generous presentation of Purcell's Queen Mary tributes, performed by the Choir of Kings College, Cambridge and the Academy of Ancient Music, all conducted by Stephen Cleobury. Call it an example of authentic performance practiced without a hint of stuffiness. (EMI 0946 3 44438 2)
Merely mentioning the name Arnold Schoenberg can strike fear and trembling into listeners who associate that composer with ear-bending, atonal rigors to be endured, not enjoyed. I could debate that notion, but I won't do that now.
Instead, I'm going to hold up one of Schoenberg's earliest substantial works: "Gurrelieder," a gigantic work for very large orchestra, chorus, six vocal soloists and narrator. I first encountered a complete "Gurrelieder" in 1991, when Zubin Mehta conducted it as his farewell program as music director of the New York Philharmonic.
No recording can adequately reproduce the effect of a live performance, when the scale of sound coming off the stage can literally hurl you back in your seat. Still, the 1990 effort conducted by Ricardo Chailly captures a fair proportion of this astounding creation. Remember, this is not the steely 12-tone mature Schoenberg, but the lushly indulgent work of the young man steeped in the world of Mahler and his circle. (DECCA/London 430 321-2)

SHOCK & AWE

Tolstoy once said that, although all happy families were pretty much alike, each unhappy family was miserable in its own peculiar way. Today it is becoming clear that although each genocide has its ghastly specificity, the west's responses are remarkably similar. The population of Darfur now faces an attack on its existence, not only by the infamous Janjaweed militia, but also by Sudanese regulars. This is not a religious conflict, because both "sides" are Muslim. Rather, the black Africans of Darfur are being subjected to calculated ethnic persecution by the Arab - and Islamist - government in Khartoum. Western governments' responses to this crisis closely follow a pattern established with Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, when radical Serb nationalists sought to carve an ethnically "pure" Greater Serbia out of the ruins of Yugoslavia. Then as now, the first line of defence was denial, accompanied by attempts to blur ethnic distinctions, though Khartoum makes no secret of its desire to create an Arab-dominated state. Its agents traffic black people as slaves and literally brand women. The second line of defence is "moral equivalence". With Bosnia, our government refused to accept a real distinction between the legitimate government in Sarajevo, upholding a multi-ethnic ideal, and those seeking to destroy it. Today's spokesmen for the Department for International Development often suggest that the Darfur rebels are equally responsible for the violence, though we know that Khartoum and its proxies are to blame for more than 90 per cent of the deaths in the region's conflict. Then comes something we'll call "humanitarianisation". In Bosnia, western governments tried to turn a crime that required a military response into a humanitarian "tragedy", which could be alleviated by sending aid. So the international community has provided various "band aids" for Darfur, but not the major surgery needed for a resolution to the crisis. Only military intervention by western countries can provide security now, but again we hear echoes of Bosnia. While important parts of the proposed Anglo-US resolution on Darfur fall under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, implying a mandate to enforce, all the rhetoric stresses the need for consent from Khartoum. This relegates the resolution to a "consent" mandate under Chapter Six. Some of these same western governments used similar jiggery-pokery to reinterpret Chapter Seven mandates on Bosnia as "Chapter Six and a Half" resolutions, which left them powerless to stop ethnic cleansing. Western governments are not doing this out of deliberate moral turpitude. An important factor is a presumption in favour of strong states, even harsh ones, and against separatist movements, which are perceived as agents of instability. This is a misunderstanding. The core problem in Sudan is not separatism, but Khartoum's attempts to marginalise groups in Darfur as it builds a state on Arab chauvinism and Islamism. It is yet another echo of the former Yugoslavia, where the west failed to grasp that the main problem was not peripheral nationalisms but "central secession" - the Serbs bailed out of Yugoslavia first.

MUSIC LOVERS: Meet your Match

Very challenging test on your knowledge of classical music. Fun to take. Post your score.

Guardian Unlimited Arts National Youth Orchestra fundraising quiz

HACKATHALON

Courtesy of David Remnick's recent profile in the Guardian(and if you have not read that -- then now -- no, quicker -- see below) here is SLATE's spectacularly brilliant take off on the style of a New York Times Op-Ed piece, a New Yorker Talk of the Town offering, a Vanity Fair celeb puff piece and a breaking news story. Wonderful stuff. Slate ran this in 1997. It remains simply acute.


By Michael Specter, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Hanna Rosin and Malcolm Gladwell - Slate Magazine

DUBAI Osama's Nightmare

Now here is a Muslim country we can love.


Print - Osama's Nightmare: Las Vegas in the Arabian Desert - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

A Spot of Bother

But Haddon is too gifted and too ambitious to write a hacky second novel. In fact, he’s so wondrously articulate, so rigorous in thinking through his characters’ mind-sets, that “A Spot of Bother” serves as a fine example of why novels exist. Really, does any other art form do nuance so well, or the telling detail (“the pig-shaped notepad on the phone table”) or the internal monologue? A dust-up with her fiancé prompts Katie to consider her checkered romantic past: “They took up so much space. That was the problem with men. It wasn’t just the leg sprawl and the clumping down stairs. It was the constant demand for attention.” A church funeral provides George with the occasion to ponder the role of Christianity in his life, or its lack thereof: “He looked round at the stained-glass lambs and the scale model of the crucified Christ and thought how ridiculous it all was, this desert religion transported wholesale to the English shires. Bank managers and P.E. teachers listening to stories about zithers and smiting and barley bread as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”

A Spot of Bother - By Mark Haddon- Books - Review - New York Times

A DITCH? Can We Be Serious?

Has someone been reading up on the Middle Ages?

The Washington Post and The New York Times lead with the huge effort underway to secure the perimeter of Baghdad with trenches and checkpoints, an attempt by the American military and Iraqi government to quell the surging violence there.

What's next? Valium in the water supply?

ART in IRAN

Today, some of the most original contemporary Iranian artists, such as Shirín Neshat, whose work is now banned in Iran, are living and working in exile in the U.S. And an exhibition of contemporary Iranian photography, organized by the Tehran museum, is touring U.S. museums without the blessings of either government. In this ironic and unwitting cultural exchange, Iran owns historic U.S. paintings that American museums cannot afford and the works of gifted Iranian artists are celebrated by American museums as the cutting edge of the avant-garde. No one knows what will happen to the masterpieces of modern Western art in Tehran. They are said to be worth billions of dollars now and are too expensive to be destroyed. Will they be sold or traded?

OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts

THE WIRE

This show is simply too well done to miss. Here from SLATE:

In The Big Idea, Jacob Weisberg shares his love for The Wire, which he calls "surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America." The HBO drama confronts the political realities of the black underclass with the subtlety and eloquence of literature, prompting many critics to compare it to Charles Dickens' work. "In our civilized age, we do not send 12-year-olds to work in blacking factories as the Victorians did. Today's David Copperfield is instead warehoused at a dysfunctional school until he's ready to sling drugs on the corner, where his odds of survival are even slimmer." Starting Sept. 18, Slate will hold weekly roundtable discussions of the latest Wire episodes

The Geniuses

Have you ever coveted one of those McArthur "Genius" grants? Sometimes, I view such largesse as one of my only rapidly diminishing alternatives for survival. Here the CHITrib examines how some of those fortunate grantees have spent their stipends.


The Geniuses Chicago Tribune

INCONVENIENT TRUTHS

Independent Online Edition > Environment:

"Arctic meltdown is speeding up... sea ice is vanishing faster than ever before... polar bears face extinction... and America's top climate scientist warns we only have a decade to save the planet "

Muslims seek apology over Pope’s remarks

Have we become so insanely PC that one cannot suggest that 'conversion by the sword' is perhaps not the best way to proseltyze? Let's fire up the Templars!


It is ironic that a papal visit remarkable for its lack of controversy in Christian terms should have stirred up a hornets' nest in the Islamic world.

During his tour this week of his native Bavaria, Benedict XVI referred only obliquely to issues such as women's ordination, priestly celibacy and joint Communion for Catholics and Protestants. But his quote from a late 14th-century dialogue on Christianity and Islam between a Byzantine emperor and a learned Persian has led to Pakistan's National Assembly unanimously demanding a retraction, and the chief cleric of India's biggest mosque calling on Muslims to "respond in a manner which forces the Pope to apologise". Just as it was last year over cartoons of the Prophet in a Danish newspaper, the Islamic world, from Indonesia to Morocco, is in uproar.

Given the sensitiveness of the issue, and the potential for violence, it is essential to examine the text of the lecture which Benedict gave at Regensburg university last Tuesday. In it, he describes Emperor Manuel II Paleologus as turning "somewhat brusquely" on his interlocutor and saying: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Manuel goes on to detail why propagating the faith through violence is unreasonable, and to state that failure to act in accordance with reason is against God's nature.

FT.com / World / Europe - Muslims seek apology over Pope’s remarks

That so many in the Muslim world joined the protests against the pope merely show just how influential Islamist extremist groups have become. The political goal of the Islamists is clear: any dispute between Christianity and Islam must obey the rules handed down by political Islamism.

Bending to this demand would be a mistake -- indeed it would be tantamount to turning one's back on freedom of expression and opinion. What will come next? Perhaps a complaint that Allah feels insulted by the numerous European women who don bikinis during a summer trip to the beach. It could be anything really -- militant Islamists will always find something. But the response needs to be firm. Freedom of speech, after all, is a vital value and needs to be defended. Any attempt to make political speech hostage to some imagined will of God must be resisted.

The Black Dahlia

The reviews have been a bit off, but Ms. Johannsen, well, she is capable of......


The Black Dahlia - Movies - Review - New York Times

CLINTON ON BLAIR

.......& McCain on the Tories.

Here from the 16 September SPECTATOR is comment on Bill Clinton's views of Blair/Brown. Clinton will speak to the Labour Party conference next month. John McCain will hector the Conservatives. Cross-pond alliances?

"The question I had asked him (Clinton) was whether he had a message for Tony Blair. But the former US president chose not to mention the Prime Minister by name or to refer to his accomplishments in anything but general terms. But he brought up Brown unprompted. ‘You’ve got a great economy, better growth than America has and less inequality than America,’ he said. ‘Gordon Brown has been a great Chancellor of the Exchequer. They just have to work this out. You can make too much of the politics and too little of the substance. The point is that New Labour has served the British people well.’
Later this month Clinton is expected to be the headline act in another arena half a world away — the G–Mex Centre in Manchester. Four years after he left delegates spellbound at Labour’s party conference in Blackpool, he is being enticed back.
With the Conservatives having bagged John McCain for their October bash in Bournemouth, expect the transatlantic party relationships to begin to revert to their traditional axes of Labour/Democrats and Tories/Republicans — David Cameron’s criticism of Bush notwithstanding — after the Blair/Bush years

WILL THERE ALWAYS BE?........

There are other pressing problems—the vanishing Sunday roast, the reform of the Anglican liturgy to make it more “user-friendly” and the tragic disappearance of the milkman. Most worrying are the changes to children's parties, which now cost over £200 a pop, according to a survey in February. Once sprogs would sit in a circle, play pass the parcel and leave (after saying thank you) with a squashed piece of sponge cake in a napkin. Now many have contracted “Posh Party Syndrome” as they struggle to keep up with Posh and Becks (the footballer and his wife), who spent some £10,000 on a birthday celebration for their son.
But all is not lost. Bovril, a traditional hot beef drink served to men in sheds, is back, now the European Union has lifted its ban on Britain's beef products. Tea-time has never been more popular—London hotels are booked up for months in advance. Although the music show “Top of the Pops” has disappeared from the BBC's schedule, Auntie has graciously brought back “Dr Who”—and a new generation can enjoy the deliciously spine-chilling experience of hiding behind the sofa whenever the Daleks appear.

Economist.com

The Possibility of an Island

Houllebebecq is well worth the time it takes to penetrate the occasional obscurity. Read the review of The Possibility of an Island.

This dual story, obviously enough, allows Houellebecq to frame his customarily sardonic, pornographic, and dispiriting human narrative in a moral context; it is the moment at which the novelist can move away from his characters, and tearfully judge them. Daniel may be a bastard, Houellebecq seems to say, like all the bastards in my other novels, but at least the bastards are fighting, however gracelessly, to exercise the fundamental human capacities -- chief of which is not sex, in fact, but love. "I continued all the same,in my heart of hearts, and in the face of all the evidence, to believe in love," says Daniel. For despite apparent evidence to the contrary, Houellebecq is not a nihilist but a moralist -- and a moralist who consistently idealizes heterosexual love. This is why, though it is often hard to like his fiction, it is possible to admire the strange tortured creature who writes it. Houellebecq was born Michel Thomas, on the French island of Réunion, in 1956, where his accomplished mother, a reader of Mann and Dostoevsky, worked as a doctor. His father, René Thomas, had left school at thirteen, but was a keen reader. (He liked Céline.) He worked as a grocer, a gardener,and finally as a mountain guide.

The History Boys

Can it be a film?

The History Boys - Movies - Theater - New York Times

Bush's Useful Idiots

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

LRB Tony Judt : Bush�s Useful Idiots

Here is Xerxes at the Hellespont. Since the noble king is my nom de plume, I thought it only fitting that I periodically give you a depiction of the good fellow. This painting is by Jean Guignet. Perhaps Persia could use him now.

A DICTIONARY TEST

For a snap judgement on a dictionary, I use the Pavlova test. Turn to the entry for this antipodean confection, a muscular structure of meringue and fruit with a tutu of whipped cream, and see whether your favourite lexicon tells you the dates of Madame Pavlova’s visits Down Under. Observe whether it favours New Zealand or Australia as the origin (several thousand bloggers are happy to give their opinions); a dictionary with unlimited space would discuss the rival claims of Henry Sachse (Perth, 1935) and Davis Dainty Dishes (Davis Gelatine Co, NZ, 1927) together with the outsider claim of Dr Pavlov, a tribute to the specialist in mouth-wateringness. Further study would record whether it specifies the fruit content. I like to think that the choice of strawberry, kiwi fruit (erstwhile Chinese gooseberry), mango, or passion fruit might relate to a balletomane chef dreaming of the Dying Swan, dying of, respectively, TB, chlorosis, jaundice, or a broken heart. And at the very least let it not omit “pav” (Aust. informal). The Chambers Dictionary’s score on this scale is subminimal. No location at all, no mention of rivalry, no specification of fruit, no pav; though it does give the dancer’s dates (not perhaps of prime lexical significance), and in passing I acquired the valuable “ockerism” (“or Ockerism”), defined curtly as “boorishness in Australians”.

A logophile's asylum - TLS Highlights - Times Online

Edward Tufte, Offering 'Beautiful Evidence'

Good design can be its own reward or it can be damn useful.

NPR : Edward Tufte, Offering 'Beautiful Evidence'

EUROPE:IMMIGRANTS

A muzzein at St. Peters? Enoch Powell's 1968 speech in retrospect.

The New Criterion � Should he have spoken?

DAVID REMNICK

Thank God for David Remnick! Thank God for the New Yorker.
l
In a profile he wrote many years ago of the legendary Post editor Ben Bradlee, Remnick remarked: 'Generalship is not about fighting the battle; it's about inspiring the enlisted.' It's a notion Remnick has clearly kept in mind in his own work as General. Asked to illustrate his editorial methods, Remnick reaches for a baseball analogy: Joe Torre, the manager of the Yankees, 'gives players the confidence they need to play their best, then he gets the hell out'. He adds: 'I don't believe in swagger. I think it's infantile.'

EPHRON ON DINING

To Ms. Ephron, it's all so obvious. A wonderful piece on the restaurant experience.

What to Expect When You�re Expecting Dinner - New York Times

SPAMALOT

Eric Idle re-takes London as Spamalot opens on 30 September. Dave Eggers does a splendid interview demonstrating how needed this diversion is at this moment on both sides of the Atlantic.

Guardian Unlimited Arts Arts features And now for something completely difficult ...

FOOD - GLORIOUS FOOD

A wonderful site for foodies, list after list of people making their choices for their five 'must-eats' before they die.

http://www.travelerslunchbox.com/journal/2006/8/21/calling-all-bloggers-things-to-eat-before-you-die.html

Realism, Reconsidered (Reinhold Neibuhr)

It seems that Mr. Neibuhr's views are becoming fashionable again. Pity they ever went out of fashion. they should be required reading before taking an oath of office.

The Bush years are a fine time to rediscover the place of self-criticism in patriotism, the corruption of nationalism by self-love. And yet the liberal construction of Niebuhr's idea disturbs me. A connection is angrily made between the heartlessness of much of Bush's domestic policy and the thoughtlessness of much of Bush's foreign policy, to the effect that we have no right to make Iraq a better place until we make America a better place. Our power is neutralized by our imperfection. Now, whatever one's opinion of the Iraq war, this was not Niebuhr's view of the relation of morality to force. More generally, it is an erroneous view of the relation between domestic policy and foreign policy. The one does not, or should not, shape the other. A state that treats its citizens justly sometimes behaves abominably beyond its borders, and a state that treats its citizens unjustly sometimes is a force for good abroad. When we fought Hitler, we were a Jim Crow country. Colonialism was to a large extent the odious project of liberal states. If Bush's foreign policy is scandalous, it cannot be because his environmental policy is scandalous. So I do not see what bearing the reform of Congress or the repeal of the tax cut will have upon the objectives and the methods of our struggle against Islamism. Green yourselves all you want, they will still wish to kill you. When I hear liberals synchronizing all things, I am reminded not of Reinhold Niebuhr but of his very opposite among the intellectuals of his time, the charismatic and repulsive Simone Weil. She wrote in 1939 that France's colonial possessions could disqualify it from the fight against the Third Reich, because "there must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France." In 1939! Weil hated totalitarianism, but she loved purity. Niebuhr insisted that in politics purity is a sin. The new Niebuhrians should be wary of their own wholeness, and of the satisfaction that comes from the belief that everything is connected to everything else. Policy is not the work of monists. The exercise of American power, when it is right, cannot wait upon the attainment of American perfection. America will have to use force against its enemies even if many millions of Americans are without health care.

Realism, reconsidered

We are getting close to Autumn. As soon as the last shot is played at the USOpen, it seems that all the energy of a new season is upon us. A bit early for the leaves, but a bit of cider would not be bad at all!

Empires with Expiration Dates

Is America today an Empire? Is the West today in decline? Professor Ferguson approaches these questions in a splendid piece from Foreign Policy.

Foreign Policy: Empires with Expiration Dates

Hitchens & Amis on 9/11

Christopher Hitchens has some nice observations about 9/11 and what we in the West represent to the fundamentalist/terrorist. What they despise and fear is what we value the most. From the Wall street Journal.

OpinionJournal - Featured Article

But the best, I save for last. Martin Amis has given us a splendid analysis in the Guardian:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,,1868734,00.html

The New Tastemakers -- Pandora

A sort of, no a very scarry notion that one's tastes in music could be so predictable. But, I must say the result works. Sign up for Pandora.

The New Tastemakers - New York Times

TANT PIS

Bin Laden's Victory

By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, September 12, 2006;

NEW YORK -- I hear Osama bin Laden laughing. I heard him all day on Sunday and Monday as the mass murder of Sept. 11, 2001, was memorialized at the Pentagon and in that field in Pennsylvania and especially here, where the most people died and where countless cameras recorded it all for posterity and an abiding, everlasting anger. He laughs, the madman does, whenever George Bush says, as he has over and over, that America is "winning this war on terror." Bin Laden knows better. He has already won.

It is not merely that bin Laden has not been captured or killed and that videotapes keep coming out of his hideout like taunts. It is, rather, that his initial strategy has borne fruit. It was always his intention to draw the Americans into Afghanistan, where, as had been done to the Soviets, they could be mauled by the fierce mujaheddin. He tried and failed when he blew up the USS Cole off Aden at 11:15 a.m. on Oct. 12, 2000, killing 17 sailors and crippling the ship. But he succeeded beyond his wildest expectations when the United States responded to the Sept. 11 attacks by invading Afghanistan and, in a beat, then going to war in Iraq. It remains mired in both countries to this day.

From bin Laden's standpoint, this has been a glorious victory, made possible, it has to be said, by the totally unforeseen incompetence of the Bush administration. It was so intent on going to war in Iraq that it would not finish the job in Afghanistan. So, to bin Laden's absolute amazement -- I am guessing here -- the United States took on his enemy, the secular and ungodly Saddam Hussein, whom bin Laden himself would gladly have murdered. It has to be a wonderful thing when your enemy vanquishes your enemy.

On "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Dick Cheney said that if he had it to do all over again, he would still go to war in Iraq -- "we'd do exactly the same thing," he said. Why? Is the man incapable of learning from experience? We now know from umpteen reports that there was no link between bin Laden and Hussein. We now know, the Weekly Standard notwithstanding, that Mohamed Atta did not meet in Prague with someone from Iraqi intelligence. We now know that Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and that the Iraq war -- which has cost America more than 2,500 lives, 20,000 casualties, the respect of the world and billions of dollars -- is for naught. Talleyrand said of the Bourbons that they forgot nothing and learned nothing. It will be said of Cheney that he forgot everything and learned nothing.

How did bin Laden get so lucky? How did he get so fortunate in his choice of enemies? The Bush administration not only validated his wildest dreams -- dreams that even some of his aides thought were unrealistic -- but went even further. By using torture, by the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, by employing "extraordinary renditions" of suspects to countries where they could be tortured, by insisting on going it almost alone in Iraq, by telling the international community to shove it, by declaring a war for an idée fixe -- this fierce obsession with Hussein goes back a long way -- the United States has made itself reviled in much of the world.

And here at home, here in the United States of America, it will be a long time before lots of people trust their government again. Little wonder that 16 percent of respondents said in a recent poll that it was "very likely" that the government played some role in the Sept. 11 attacks to justify a war in the Middle East. This is a shocking figure, a measure not just of irrational thinking but of the cost of the Bush administration's mauling of the truth in its mad march to war. Bush has damaged his country more than bin Laden ever could on his own.

I was here on Sept. 11, 2001 -- downtown when the twin towers collapsed. My instantaneous reaction -- the thought that came to my mind as I heard the sound of the buildings coming down -- was for revenge. I would, to this day, kill Osama bin Laden with my own hands. But as much as I hate the man, I have to recognize that from his vantage point, from his mountain fastness somewhere on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, he has won. What he had set out to do, he has done. That is more than we can say.

Maud Newton: Blog

Here is a blog that will entertain you. Though she speaks mostly to the literary, her appeal is broad. wonderful stuff.


Maud Newton: Blog

BUSH/KATRINA

Hurricane Katrina was the downfall of the George W. Bush presidency, said Reymer Klüver in Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung. The massive storm that destroyed New Orleans and ravaged the Gulf Coast last year also “cost Bush his credibility as guarantor of the nation’s security.”

After the 9/11 attacks, the president looked strong and forceful, addressing firefighters through a megaphone at the smoldering rubble of the World Trade Center. Frightened Americans needed to feel protected, and Bush told them he would keep them safe. But Katrina blew away that facade. “Americans realized that the government was still unprepared for a catastrophe.” Katrina was a natural disaster, but something similar could have happened if terrorists had blown up the levees, or attacked another major city. The president’s approval ratings plummeted, and they have never recovered. Bush had a chance to salvage the situation, said Spain’s El Pais in an editorial. When he toured the disaster zone a few weeks after the storm, the president pledged that the government would launch “one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen.” He promised to rebuild New Orleans better than ever—just as he promised to rebuild Iraq.

But “as the Iraqis discovered, allocating money and using it effectively are two different things.” A full year after the hurricane, half the residents of New Orleans are still displaced. Demolition hasn’t even begun on the rotting houses in the mostly black Ninth Ward. It’s just another in a long string of Bush failures, said Ray O’Hanlon in Northern Ireland’s Irish News. “The man who talks so much about missions and completing them is surrounded by the wreckage of uncompleted missions.”

Iraq is the most obvious, of course, but let’s not forget Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Osama bin Laden still walks free. Even the domestic initiatives Bush tried to push, such as immigration reform and Social Security reform, are dead in the water. The real shocker would be if he had actually delivered for New Orleans. The blame for New Orleans’ misery is not Bush’s alone, said Andrew O’Hagan in Britain’s Daily Telegraph. American aid agencies are incompetent, if not actively corrupt. Having witnessed international relief operations in Sudan, Mozambique, and India, I can honestly say that the much maligned U.N. is far more effective—and far more caring—than American-run relief efforts. It took UNICEF less than a year to build new hospitals in Mozambique after a severe flood. Yet Gulf residents are still “wallowing in mud,” and the U.S. government simply shrugs. When I went out on patrol with National Guard troops after Katrina, “I was amazed by their inefficiency and unwillingness when it came to helping people.” That indifferent attitude comes from the very top, said Britain’s The Mirror. The president is guilty of “criminal neglect” of the hurricane victims. “And if cowboy Bush is so callous toward U.S. citizens in his Mississippi backyard, God help Iraqis and all the others he vows to bomb into freedom.”

ART & 9/11

A pretty interesting compilation of opinion occurs in SLATE on the subject of art originating in 9/11 experience.

http://www.slate.com/id/2149194/

Two exceptional novels come to mind. First, Orhan Pamuk's Snow, which illuminates the world of political Islam in much the way Dostoevsky and Conrad illuminated the revolutionary-terrorist politics of their eras. Second, Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, which captures, in all its comfortable fatuity, the New York City that, in retrospect, seemed poised for disaster.

FRAYN on the UNIVERSE

The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe

by Michael Frayn

Admirers of Michael Frayn’s work, such as his sublime satire on journalism, Towards the End of the Morning, his theatrical study of moral ambiguity among physicists, Copenhagen, or the glorious farce Noises Off, may find The Human Touch a surprising, perhaps even unsettling, addition to his oeuvre.

It is a philosophical discourse, an extended soliloquy - penetrating, often whimsical and sometimes downright irritating - on the relationship between human consciousness and the nature of the universe.

The universe will still be there whether the human race exists or not, Frayn contends, before going on to question whether - without human minds to measure and wonder at its size and scale - the universe exists at all. The world only has form and substance, he suggests, because of our contribution: “We are active agents in the traffic, co-originators in it, autonomous members of the great co-operative.”

Put another way, Frayn’s essential question is: “Is the world in one way or another out there, or is it in here?” (his italics). This is a paradox that has puzzled thinkers for centuries, so it’s no surprise that even as clever a writer as Frayn comes up with no definitive answer.

The centrepiece of Frayn’s elaborate piece of intellectual architecture is that human awareness is based on analogy: we can comprehend the new only in terms of what we already know. Now take a deep breath: “If in the end,” he argues, “we come to understand something about the quarks that compose the protons and neutrons that compose the nuclei at the heart of the atoms that compose the molecules that compose the cells that compose the bacteria that keep us alive, or about the quasars that blaze in conditions entirely removed from any we have ever come across, even in the depth of our own galaxy, and upon principles which seem to subvert the physics of the world we know, at the very edge of the perceptible universe and the very beginning of reconstructable time, then that understanding comes at the end of a long chain of analogy which has its beginnings in our most humble dealings with the everyday world around us.” Phew! That’s a sentence that even Bernard Levin, master of the multiple-dependent clause, would have strained to emulate.

Fortunately, there are not too many sentences like that in The Human Touch, although Frayn is fond of ramming his points home with a kind of circumlocutory wilfulness which at times had me reaching for my metaphorical shotgun.

It’s reasonable to ask why such an accomplished writer should have chosen to write this provocative but difficult book. Perhaps there is a clue towards the end where Frayn, now 73, writes: “Soon I shall close my eyes not temporarily and experimentally, but permanently and in earnest. I shall cease to keep my eye on things - cease even to dream them. So it will be up to you to keep the whole performance going. “

Perhaps The Human Touch is Frayn’s testament, an expansion of thoughts about life, the universe and everything which cannot live within his books or plays. And a marker of that inevitable sadness which comes with the knowledge that no matter how much one reads or writes, no matter how far back in time the telescopes peer, no matter how we learn about the mechanism of the mind, the fundamental secrets of the universe will remain just out of reach. Frayn is passing the baton.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2006

I think it was P.G. Wodehouse who observed that the English strike Americans as funny when they are just being English. Similarly, philosophers strike the laity as funny when they are just being philosophers, and that makes it hard to be as funny about them as they are when they’re left to their own devices. But Michael Frayn is among the honoured few who have succeeded. I fondly remember a piece of his from the 1960s (about fog) that purported to be a newly discovered fragment of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein generally writes with a transcendental pomposity that makes parody seem superfluous, not to say impossible. But Frayn pulled it off. For years Frayn’s Wittgenstein was to be found pinned to the bulletin boards of anglophone philosophy departments ! all round the world.

Read more at: http://www.lrb.co.uk/12all/lt/t_go.php?i=137&e=NDI5Nzc=&l=http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n18/fodo01_.html

9/11 FIVE YEARS ON

Although something very important clearly happened on 11 September 2001, it is far from clear what has changed as a result. Most people in the West have not directly experienced the past five years as a New Age of Terror. In the US, for example, there have been many terror alerts but no one has died in a known terrorist incident since September 2001. Nor does anxiety about terrorism monopolise people’s fearful imaginations. As was the case before 9/11, we continue to live in a culture concerned with a multitude of fears. Anxiety about terror competes with fear of crime, incivility, global warming and various other routine, ambient worries. For most people, everyday routine has changed very little, if at all.
Nonetheless, the perception that 9/11 represented an historical turning point is significant. It is also striking that people find it difficult to give a coherent and plausible explanation for this watershed event. It is this inability to account for apparently historical changes that is the most noteworthy thing about our post-9/11 world. In fact, what really marks out the post-9/11 era is not so much that it represents a new phase of global violence, but rather the palpable sense of moral disorientation and bewilderment in the Western cultural imagination. This sense of confusion was strikingly expressed in US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s warning in 2002 about ‘unknown unknowns’: terrorist threats we don’t even know about. His speculation about the ones ‘we don’t know we don’t know’ represented a rarely expressed acknowledgement that Western leaders find it difficult to give a name to what we fear.
This idea that the world faces ‘unknown’ problems is not confined to Washington. The UK Intelligence and Security Committee’s Report into the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005 contains a section titled ‘Reassessing “the unknown”’. It cites a leading British security official who notes that, ‘[As we] have said before July, there are probably groups out there that we do not know anything about, and because we do not know anything about them we do not know how many there are’ (3). Time and again, the report emphasises just how little is known about the threat to Britain. It openly admits that the security services lack the basic capacity to interpret or make sense of today’s terror threat.
Often, ‘unknown unknowns’ are said to be the outcome of a failure of intelligence or lack of information about global threats. ‘You can’t analyse intelligence that you don’t have – and our case studies resoundingly demonstrate how little we know about some of our highest priority intelligence targets’, concluded an official report into the intelligence capability of the US (4). However, the problem of ‘unknown unknowns’ is not so much a failure of intelligence as a profound inability to interpret or make sense of the problems facing society. Western societies do not know less than they knew before 9/11 – but knowledge, past and present, cannot be used effectively without a framework of meaning. That is why Western elites seem unconfident that the existing stock of human knowledge can help to interpret events and throw light on the problems we face.
Some of the questions raised in the post-9/11 era – such as ‘why do they hate us?’ or ‘what do they want?’ or ‘how can they be so evil?’ – expose a certain cultural naivety. But they also highlight the difficulty we have in endowing contemporary events with meaning. From the standpoint of the traditional vocabulary of public life, many events today do not make sense.
The real unknown
The most important unknown is what society stands for. Many have noted that Western governments are not very good at spelling out who is the enemy in the war on terror. But what is often overlooked is that public officials also seem at a loss to explain who we are. That is why the ‘unknown’ threats posed by an unimaginable enemy have not helped to forge a strong sense of common identity or resistance. Whatever US president George W Bush has done, he has not succeeded in mobilising a powerful base of support for the war on terror. His critics, who habitually accuse him of manipulating the politics of fear, often fail to realise that there is very little substance behind his periodic outbursts of flag-waving.
The absence of any genuine enthusiasm for the war on terror in the US is not simply symptomatic of war weariness; it also shows up the lack of meaning the conflict has for the general public. In such circumstances, it’s not surprising that there is not even any consensus on the facts about what happened on 9/11. A significant section of the American public even questions who bears responsibility for the atrocity. In August 2006, a survey of 1,010 adults found that 36 per cent of the American public suspects that federal officials assisted the 9/11 attacks, or took no action to stop them, so that the US could justify going to war in the Middle East. According to this Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll, a significant number of respondents refuse to believe the official version of events (5).
That more than a third of the American public buys into various conspiracy theories about 9/11 illustrates the crisis of meaning afflicting the West in the post-9/11 world. Today, as in the past, the embrace of conspiracy theories is motivated by a sense of incomprehension towards the workings of the world. Typically, the rise of conspiracy theories mirrors the decline of any sense of causality regarding who is responsible for what; it also signifies the erosion of official authority.
This lack of clarity about what the West stands for also influences events in Iraq and Afghanistan. If soldiers are successfully to pursue their campaign they need to know what they are fighting for and against. If this is ‘unknown’, a military campaign can become fatally flawed. So it isn’t surprising to discover that coalition troops in Iraq will now get ‘values training’ in ‘core warrior’ values. Peter Chiarelli, the No2 US general in Iraq, argued that troops must take ‘time to reflect on the values that separate us from our enemies’ (6).
If the experience of the past three decades is anything to go by, it is unlikely that training courses will do very much to enlighten coalition troops about their core values. Indeed, ‘diversity training’, ‘the citizenship curriculum’, ‘sensitivity courses’ and other values-oriented schemes that flourish in institutions across the West are entirely symbolic and ritualistic. They symbolise the absence of any common purpose or value, and advertise the fact that in Western societies people gain their values through training courses rather than through the experience of life.
Struggle for ideas
Probably the most significant and unexpected legacy of 9/11 is the decline of the moral authority of the West. Since 9/11, the West has felt self-consciously defensive and discredited. In contrast to the experience of the Cold War, it has not been able to establish itself on the moral high ground. Instead, it feels internally insecure and increasingly lacks domestic legitimacy for its action.
As one report on the state of British public diplomacy noted, ‘Effective policies for dealing with these new security challenges are quite different from those of the Cold War, and publics require much more active persuasion’. It added that ‘responses to the threat of nuclear war or Russian invasion had much broader and less questioning support than do responses to the threat of terrorist attack, which are coloured by deep popular scepticism about pre-emptive wars and about the principle of regime change for “terrorism-sponsoring” states’ (7). The relatively weak public support for the war on terror suggests that, for a variety of reasons, the short-term legacy of 9/11 is a decline in social capital. If Washington and London are indeed pursuing a self-conscious strategy of the ‘politics of fear’, it’s not working.
The inability of the Western elites to give meaning to their global policies means they are losing the battle of ideas with their own publics. This is most evident in Western governments’ estrangement from the Muslim populations in their societies. Surveys continually reveal that secular and liberal values have a feeble influence on Europe’s Muslim communities. Despite numerous initiatives built around ‘dialogue’ and ‘multiculturalism’, a recent survey suggested that Muslims in Britain are the most anti-Western in Europe (8). Blair’s critics claim that this is a result of Britain’s involvement in Iraq. However, such a criticism overlooks the wider mood of animosity towards the West that prevails throughout most of the Islamic world.
For a brief moment, many observers believed that 9/11 would represent a rallying point and provide the West with a sense of mission. However, in the absence of a coherent system of meaning, the West struggles to promote its own values; instead, it relies on tawdry advertising and marketing. In October 2001, advertising executive Charlotte Beer was appointed US secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. Her mission was to gain the assistance of Madison Avenue public relations firms to help rebrand and sell the US to a hostile Muslim world. This focus on improving ‘the image’ indicated that the US was not prepared to engage in a serious battle of ideas.
In Britain, too, impression management is the order of the day. British public diplomacy relies on loyal moderate Muslim leaders to curb the extremists. According to one British foreign minister, Lord Triesman, ‘international Islamic scholars are undertaking a series of roadshows to towns and cities with important Muslim communities to counter the extremist message’ (9). This outsourcing of the fight against the extremists springs from the idea that there is little point in promoting a positive vision of Western society. In February 2003, Donald Rumsfeld asked ‘are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists everyday than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?’ (10) The evidence strongly suggests that the answer to this question is a resounding ‘No’. Experience shows that, without a clear message, the kind of advertising techniques currently being used by Western officials will prove ineffective.
Catastrophes, wars and major historical events have important material, geopolitical and economic consequences. They also challenge a society’s capacity to make sense of the unexpected, and its belief in its own way of life. In material terms, 9/11 was a minor incident: economic disruption soon gave way to an upturn, and in terms of daily routine people showed that they possessed the resilience to carry on. For most of us, it was business as usual. However, 9/11 exposed and brought to the surface the difficulty Western society has in giving meaning to its way of life. Ever since the end of the Cold War, this problem was bound to force the West to account for itself in positive terms; it took 9/11 to force Western elites to acknowledge that they regard their futures as an ‘unknown unknown’. As a result, little today can be taken for granted. That is probably what people really mean when they claim that 9/11 changed everything.

from SPIKED 8 September 2006 Footnotes omitted.

http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/earticle/1603/

CHARLES SAATCHI

Here is a really splendid piece on Charles Saatchi.

http://arts.guardian.co.uk/yourgallery/story/0,,1865902,00.html

But Charles Saatchi possessed two things nearly as rare as that foresight: the wit to realise, 16 years ago, that something extraordinary was happening in the British art world, and the savvy to buy it up fast. He got the jump on the art market once. Has he the wit to do it again? Will his exhibitions of new American and Chinese art show that Saatchi has still got it, and can flaunt it to the despair of rival collectors, disaffected artists and press critics? It seems unlikely that there is a new Damien, Jake, Dinos, Tracey or Sarah awaiting those who are keen to see what Charles bought next. Unlikely, but not impossible. Over the next few months, we will find out for sure.

EUDORA WELTY

Check out the September 21 issue of the NEW YORK REVIEW of Books for a marvelous piece on Ms. Welty.

That Eudora Welty had charismatic friendliness in abundance—her combination of shyness and gregariousness won over everyone—was never in her lifetime in doubt. She was a natural storyteller, a wit, and a clown. "If this sofa could talk," she said once to Reynolds Price, looking at the bedraggled plastic furnishings of the only rental room Price could find for them in Tuscaloosa, "we would have to burn it." All of Welty's endearing qualities are underscored by Suzanne Marrs's recent biography of her, the only one ever authorized by Welty.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19299

9/11

Mr. Schott has given us a marvelous object. No better way to remember the fifth anniversary of a critical day in our history. it is well worth copying this PDF file.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/07/opinion/07schottintro.html?th&emc=th

BRANLY

Perhaps, in some ironic sense, M. Chirac will be properly remembered in this unfortunate new museum in Paris. This review from the NYTimes/IHT is a splendid tutorial on what a museum can be (and often is not).

http://www.iht.com/bin/print_ipub.php?file=/articles/2006/07/03/news/kimmel.php

PROMS, (Last Night of)

Gerard McBurney, composer, writer, broadcaster

It would take a buffoon to interfere much with the Last Night of the Proms, but there are a few elements I would like to see thrown into the mixture. One would be a moment of intense stillness. The lights would be lowered to a single spot; all we would see and hear would be a lone counter-tenor and a lutenist doing one song by Dowland. That would be real British music and a real British tradition to believe in. Also, how about a regular spot for that dreaded item, the new orchestral piece?

But with rules:

1) Every year, the new piece has the same place in the programme;
2) The new piece must never last longer than 4 minutes, 33 seconds. If the composer goes over, the orchestra should just stop playing;
3) The piece must be VERY LOUD and VERY FAST (most modern composers are chicken about writing real fast music: they just bounce up and down on the spot instead);
4) The prommers should mark it out of 10 at the end (he who shouts loudest wins).
Also ... Elgar. How about reviving those outrageous patriotic pieces from the first world war, written for speaker and orchestra: Carillon, Une Voix dans le Désert and Le Drapeau Belge? They are so beautiful and such fun, and no one ever does them.

Otherworldly Gregorian chants calling once again

Hey, maybe now we can go back to church!

Gregorian in. Guitars out.

calendarlive.com: CLASSICAL MUSIC - Otherworldly Gregorian chants calling once again

Our magnificent isolation

Thus sayeth Mr. Keillor:

I don't get much hope from Democrats these days, a timid and skittish bunch, slow to learn, unable to sing the hymns and express the steady optimism that is at the heart of the heart of the country. I get no hope at all from Republicans, whose policies seem predicated on the Second Coming occurring in the very near future. If Jesus does not descend through the clouds to take them directly to paradise, and do it now, they are going to have to answer to the rest of us.

Thus endeth the lesson.


Salon.com Our magnificent isolation

Mark Haddon

Please read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It is a splendid book. I shall not say more because it is a book that one truly should come upon with as little pre-judice as possible. But afterwards, share your thoughts.

Mark Haddon's Home Page

MUSIC IN OUR GENES

It seems that the human being is hard-wired for music.

Survival of the harmonious - The Boston Globe

A One-Day Respite

We need vastly more free time! Hear, hear -- three cheers for the NYTimes.

A One-Day Respite - New York Times

More Amis, More 9/11

Readers should prepare themselves for a festival of gullibility. Asked in a recent survey to explain their presence in Iraq, 85 per cent of American soldiers said that the “main mission” was “to retaliate for Saddam’s role” in the September 11 attacks.
About two thirds of American civilians, it’s true, share that misapprehension; but it is implausible that frontline troops are so incuriously risking their lives.

This near-consensus on the question cannot be due to ignorance. It comes from the same wishfulness that fortifies the majority belief among Muslims that September 11 was the work of Mossad.

The real conspiracy behind 9/11 - Books - Times Online

SHAWN

It's the birthday of the second editor of The New Yorker magazine, William Shawn, born in Chicago, Illinois (1907). He dropped out of college and started working as a reporter for a small newspaper in New Mexico and then began contributing pieces for the "Talk of the Town" section of The New Yorker.
After Harold Ross chose him as managing editor, Shawn began working eighteen-hour days, seven days a week. Up until that point, The New Yorker had been known for its humor and its fiction, but Shawn helped turn it into one of the best non-fiction magazines as well. Shawn edited and published the work of Truman Capote, John McPhee, J.D. Salinger, Pauline Kael, and many others. He was known for his attention to detail, and he read every story three times before it was published in the magazine.
He resisted putting a table of contents in the magazine, because he didn't see why there needed to be some special announcement of what was inside. He also didn't think the magazine should include any photographs. He disliked air conditioning, never rode on an airplane, and avoided automated elevators. He was rarely photographed, he didn't give interviews, and even after he became editor of The New Yorker, he once never gave a speech in public.
When a new publisher purchased The New Yorker in 1987, Shawn was asked to retire because the magazine wasn't profitable enough. One hundred and fifty writers signed a letter of protest, but Shawn resigned. On his last day at the office, he made a short speech to the staff about what had motivated him as an editor over the years. He said, "The controlling emotion was love, and love was the essential word."
Four days before he died in 1992, Shawn had lunch with Lillian Ross, and she showed him a book cover blurb she had written and asked if he would check it. She later wrote of that day, "He took out the mechanical pencil he always carried in his inside jacket pocket, and ... made his characteristically neat proofreading marks on a sentence that said 'the book remains as fresh and unique as ever.' He changed it to read, 'remains unique and as fresh as ever.' 'There are no degrees of uniqueness,' Mr. Shawn said politely."

Muhammad Atta/Martin Amis

The Observer here publishes a portion of Martin Amis' latest. It imagines the last days of Atta. As we approach five years since 9/11, Amis' insights are fascinating.

Muhammad Atta's last days from Observer Blog

Head Butler

YIKES!......here is a great site. Manned by a Harvard man ('55); which without a doubt accounts for the quality. And he will email his daily choices.

Head Butler

Guitars

So....the guitar is a fascinating instument. Please check out this absolutely splendid and brilliant interpretation of Pachabel's Canon available on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjA5faZF1A8 This performance is the subject on interesting comment in the New York Times of Sunday 27 August 2006. It does show the rather amazing range of the instrument.

This brings up the subject of favorite riffs. Here are Planet Rock's top ten guitar solos of all time:

1. Comfortably Numb - Pink Floyd 2. Sweet Child O Mine - Guns N Roses 3. Freebird - Lynyrd Skynyrd4. Eruption - Van Halen 5. November Rain - Guns N Roses6. Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin 7. Sultans of Swing - Dire Straits8. Aqualung - Jethro Tull 9. Hotel California - The Eagles 10. Child In Time - Deep Purple

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml;jsessionid=WN0WDIXYWLMKRQFIQMGCFGGAVCBQUIV0?xml=/arts/2006/08/31/bmaxe31.xml&site=6&page=0

NATIONAISM/TRIBALISM

Here is a fascinating study of the impediments to globalization set by our fixation with 'the tribe'.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=12616&R=ED9A394EF



Globalization isn't new, but the power of local beliefs, rooted in native earth, is far older. And those local beliefs may prove to be the more powerful, just as they have so often done in the past. From Islamist terrorists fighting to perpetuate the enslavement of women to the Armenian obsession with the soil of Karabakh--from the French rejection of "Anglo-Saxon" economic models to the resistance of African Muslims to Islamist imperialism--the most complex forces at work in the world today, with the greatest potential for both violence and resistance to violence, may be the antiglobal impulses of local societies. From Liège to Lagos, the tribes are back.