I recently read two memoirs: Luis Buñuel’s Mi último suspiro and Reinaldo Arenas’ Antes que anochezca. Buñuel’s memoir ends with the word tumba and Arenas’ ends with the word noche: words that are like broken talismans or coins that have lost their value with the vertiginous inflation of illness and the regime change that is death.
World
Does the Past Repeat Itself?
I have been reading the first volume of Churchill’s history of World War II, The Gathering Storm. How can one not be impressed with his relentless, hawkish criticism of the appeasing Chamberlain and the weak-kneed continental powers that were disarming while German was arming in the 1930s? Is there a lesson for today?
Song For My Father
When his father died last month, Fr. Frechette felt under an “obligation, which was also a privilege” to speak clearly about what his father had “learned by a long and full life, by illness, and by accepting death as his teacher.” Here is Fr. Frechette’s attempt to express his father’s earned wisdom.
Beast of No Nation
What follows is Francisco Goldman’s introduction to Oscar Martinez’s The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail, which was published in the USA by Verso in 2013. First thanks Verso for allowing us to reprint Goldman’s tribute to Martinez’s audacious and skillful reporting on “the terrifying lives of Central American migrants.”
The Debacle
The greatest danger to Israel is not the putative Iranian nuclear bomb. The greatest danger is the stupidity of our leaders.
Mandela’s Eyes
Don’t play around the course he got the took
the rook the crook the snook all were
pasted upon him like a long vicious learning
there is all of Africa all of night all the
every trace of sweet hurt distilled like
cobalt turned into night the distant moon
a door to where no one wants to go Mandela’s
face is naturally political like the disposition
of an Angel the smile a postage stamp of
verifiable desire Love glowing & objective
What amazes our enemies is that we all
fit into his suit so elegantly
and alive
Originally published in First of the Month in 1999.
The Syrian Civil War: What Is to Be Done?
The government shutdown and debt ceiling mess deflected attention from the Syria crisis. But Eugene Goodheart’s careful analysis of that situation is still on time. We begin his latest dispatch on Obama’s “trimming” with a forward-looking “postscript” the author added to his original piece.
As for Obama’s ambivalence about going to war and his openness about it (unusual in a president), I find it admirable in its authenticity. In acting in a crisis, however, one has to overcome ambivalence. Obama has already shown himself on other occasions capable of acting decisively. Our role in the Syrian civil war has not yet played itself out. Final judgments are premature…
To Intervene or Not to Intervene
Eugene Goodheart’s analysis of the Syrian quandary doesn’t take in the story’s latest twists, but it comprehends the president’s humane, cautious approach to the issue. Goodheart’s piece amounts to an addendum to the case he makes in his new book, Holding the Center: In Defense of Political Trimming, which places Obama’s default stance within a specific Euro-American tradition of liberal thinkers and politicians. A short review of Goodheart’s deeply informed text follows this piece.
History Twist
Yesterday’s Papers
An elderly friend of mine—a white southern liberal—once told me a tale that helped me grasp how far his kind traveled in the 60s. He came from a close-knit military family and he’s never doubted his father was one of the wisest—and bravest—of men. Yet one day, as my friend was reading a New York Times report on a firefight in Viet Nam, he was shocked to find he was siding with enemies of his country (and his daddy).
The Revolution Is Dead…Long Live the Revolution
On my last visit to Cairo in March, I was hit by a post-revolutionary reality when I arrived at the airport. The planes coming from Europe are much smaller now, as if proving the country’s stature has somehow diminished. I was through passport control in under five minutes, an unheard phenomenon in the past. I’m usually put off by the swarm of men offering their help with my luggage, for some meandering tips. But this time what struck me, as I looked around the baggage carousel, was the absence of tourists. There were just a couple of courageous ones, who against all odds, decided to take the trip they had been dreaming about for years.
Then I cried for how desolate and pitiful the airport looked.
The Gatekeepers
What follows is a compaction of an interview with Dror Moreh, director of the Israeli documentary, The Gatekeepers.
In The Gatekeepers, Dror Moreh speaks with former directors of Israel’s secret service, the Shin Bet, about Israel’s war on terror, Rabin’s murder, targeted assassinations, and the Jewish Underground. The film has caused a furor because these men, who have devoted their lives to Israel’s security, all believe Israel should end the occupation. They favor a two-state solution.
The Great Divide
The “Cool Britannia” of the noughties has now become Cruel Britannia – a country ruled by a coalition of parties, one as bad as the other for dividing its population into “skivers” and “strivers.”
State of Play
J.M. Shaw has now published a second novel, Ten Weeks in Africa. It feels significantly bleaker and also more intricate than his first, but it is also an often-satirical novel of politics. Ten Weeks In Africa is set in an imagined and renamed version of Kenya with a bit of Uganda added to the mix, and its non-African characters are mostly British or Pakistani, but the kind of pseudo-politics Shaw is satirizing have an unhappy relevance for Americans. Professed and even sincere good intentions mean much less than we hope they do, a point Shaw makes repeatedly in Ten Weeks In Africa: his novel’s most effective hero is a businessman who, among his other enterprises, bribes police officials to allow his employees to steal tourists’ luggage from an international airport. This businessman’s newest employee, a small boy unhappily resolved to help notorious thieves in order to buy medicine for his dying mother, seems on first encounter to have fallen into an African Fagan’s hands, but we slowly realize that the boy is now working for a man who is in effect an unsentimental, wholly modernized and absolutely plausible version of one of the Cheerybles, the benevolent merchants from Nicholas Nickleby…
Takeaway: My Lunch with Osama bin Laden
Watching the movie Zero Dark Thirty, I kept thinking about my own time with bin Laden, in 1994. It involved no torture. No drama. The hunt was not yet on. Instead, like him at the time, I was searching for answers in Khartoum from the preeminent enabler of Radical Islam, Hassan Al-Turabi. Through his writings and sermons, Turabi had transformed fundamentalism into a dramatic theology of liberation that millions bought into—Yes, yes, of course, once purity is reestablished, Mohammed’s voice fresh again, social problems will melt away, pharaohs will die, and Allah’s soldiers will reinstall sharia from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas.
I was working for a Rock-n-Roll magazine; bin Laden was on his own and on the lookout for talent to join his gang, Al-Qaeda.
Harmonica Jean’s Christmas Spirit
The author is a physician and priest who has been working in Haiti for a generation, running hospitals and social programs in Port au Prince as well as a Nuestros Pequenos Hermanos orphanage on the outskirts of the capital. Fr. Frechette was awarded this year’s $1,000,000 Opus Prize.
A Provisional Dictator in Cairo
The newly democratically-elected president of Egypt, Mohamed Morsi, redefined democracy when he announced a constitutional decree that puts him above the law. Granting himself quasi-divine power and preventing all legal actions against his forthcoming decisions, Morsi explains that his actions are temporary until the constitution is written and the People’s Assembly is formed.
Demos & Generosity
This spring St. Francis College presented a forum on “the virtues of liberal democracy compared to its Islamic rivals.” Panelists were asked to respond to the argument in Ibn Warraq’s new book, Why the West Is Best. Paul Berman was one of the panelists and here’s a slightly adapted transcript of what he had to say. (Moderator Fred Siegel intervenes at one point in the course of Berman’s remarks.)