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Issue 22 has been posted

PB's notebook will be my new blog of sorts as well as my newly created facebook account.

This will be the last post here.

If Words Could Kill

www.foreignpolicyjournal.com

Ever since WikiLeaks became a household name this past summer, following the release of 77,000 secret U.S. documents relating to the ongoing occupation and destruction of Afghanistan, many American politicians and pundits have been calling for blood. Despite then-top military commander General Stanley McChrystal’s own admission in March of this year, the U.S. military in Afghanistan has “shot an amazing number of people” even though “none has ever proven to be a threat,” the ire resulting from the activities of WikiLeaks is directed at the whistle-blowers themselves, rather than at those actually implicated in war crimes as shown by the leaked documents.


Wikileaks founder Julian Assange
In their eternal allegiance to government secrecy, aggressive imperialism, and American exceptionalism, numerous WikiLeaks’ critics have been outraged over the publication of U.S. government documents. While accusing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange of everything from espionage to terrorism to treason (Assange isn’t a U.S. citizen), they hold him responsible for the deaths of both soldiers and civilians and have even publicly suggested and supported threats to assassinate him.

The U.S. State Department claimed that the release of classified cables would “at a minimum…place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals”, and Attorney General Eric Holder stated his belief that “national security of the United States has been put at risk. The lives of people who work for the American people have been put at risk. The American people themselves have been put at risk by these actions that I believe are arrogant, misguided and ultimately not helpful in any way.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has described these hysterical reactions to WikiLeaks release as “fairly significantly overwrought” due to the continuing slow and calculated release of over 251,000 previously secret and classified U.S. diplomatic cables (fewer than 1,500 cables have been released so far). Still, there are increasing calls not only for Assange’s indictment, but also explicitly for his murder.

On November 29, Fox News‘s Bill O’Reilly declared on air that those responsible for the leaked documents are “traitors in America” and that they “should be executed,” adding “or put in prison for life,” as a dismissive afterthought.

The next day, Bill Kristol, in a The Weekly Standard article entitled “Whack WikiLeaks,” urged the United States government to “neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are” and hoped for a glorious, unified bipartisan effort “to degrade, defeat, and destroy WikiLeaks.” One need only recall what Senator Lindsey Graham said in early November about “neutering” the Iranian government to get an idea of Kristol is talking about.

Sarah Palin chimed in on Facebook, writing that Assange “is an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” who should be “pursued with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.” This very urgency was mentioned in a presidential debate in October 2008 by Palin campaign opponent Barack Obama, who made the following promise to Americans: “We will kill bin Laden; we will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.” One can assume that Palin meant that the WikiLeaks founder should be hunted with a similar kind of lethal force ...

On the same day, another 2012 Republican presidential hopeful wished for the assassination of Assange. Former Arkansas governor and Fox News host Mike Huckabee, speaking at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library, told reporters, “Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty.” Huckabee, who was signing copies of his new children’s book, “Can’t Wait Till Christmas!” at the time, was presumably referring to U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning, who is accused of providing WikiLeaks with the classified documents and is currently being held in intense solitary confinement the brig at the Marine Corps Base in Quantico, Virginia. Manning has been locked up in Quantico or five months now, after spending two months detained in a military jail in Kuwait. Manning, like Assange, has not been convicted of any crime. Kids, Christmas, and Capital Punishment. Thanks, Mike!

Fox News national security analyst Kathleen McFarland urged the United States to declare WikiLeaks a terrorist organization, kidnap Assange, and try him in a military tribunal for espionage. Furthermore, McFarland, who served in the Pentagon under the Nixon, Ford and Reagan administrations and is currently a “Distinguished Adviser” at the Iran-hating/Israel-advocating think tank The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, agreed with Huckabee that Manning should be charged and tried as a traitor for exposing American war crimes, criminal negligence, and diplomatic duplicity. “If he’s found guilty,” she wrote, “he should be executed.”

Also on November 30, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) – whose contradictory motto reads Securing America, Strengthening Israel – addressed the WikiLeaks release by musing whether the U.S. government would “try to hang Manning from the nearest tree?”

In a post on the right-wing website Red State on December 1, a commenter by the moniker “lexington_concord” fantasized about Julian Assange receiving the Abe Lincoln treatment. “Under the traditional rules of engagement he is thus subject to summary execution,” he writes, “and my preferred course of action would be for Assange to find a small caliber round in the back of his head.”

The following day, Washington Times columnist Jeffrey Kuhner published a vitriolic attack on Assange, whom he accused of being “an anti-American radical who wants to see the United States defeated by its Islamic fascist enemies.” Other goals Kuhner ascribed to Assange included the humiliation of America “on the world stage, to drain it of all moral and legal legitimacy – especially regarding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Kuhner wrote that Assange “is aiding and abetting terrorists in their war against America,” and suggested that the Obama administration “take care of the problem – effectively and permanently” by treating Assange as an “enemy combatant” and “the same way as other high-value terrorist targets.” It is no surprise, therefore, that Kuhner’s column was entitled “Assassinate Assange.”

Though it may seem strange that a Montreal native like Kuhner is disappointed that “America is no longer feared or respected,” he is not the only Canadian to harbor such violent visions of Assange’s murder. Tom Flanagan, a senior adviser to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said plainly on the Canadian TV station CBC, “I think Assange should be assassinated, actually. I think Obama should put out a contract and maybe use a drone or something.”

Speaking with Chris Wallace on Fox News, former House Speaker and paid Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich said on December 5 that “Julian Assange is engaged in warfare. Information terrorism, which leads to people getting killed is terrorism. And Julian Assange is engaged in terrorism.” As such, Gingrich suggested, “He should be treated as an enemy combatant and WikiLeaks should be closed down permanently and decisively.” If recent history is any indication, as an enemy combatant Assange would most likely be either murdered in his own country by U.S. soldiers and air strikes or kidnapped, tortured, and indefinitely imprisoned in inhumane conditions without charge or trial.

LEAKING II

One has to wonder how it feels to see one’s ineptitude or stupidity revealed in the world press. But if this whole episode is considered in the light of normal behavior, it is not what has been revealed but what still might be revealed that must frighten the good folks who govern us.

It’s like a Mob story. So, Sakvatore has snitched, says the Capo, so what’s next?

The importance of this or that leak is a matter of where you are and what you are hiding.

Take such juicy topics as the CIA budget for ‘covert actions’ in Pakistan. It would certainly be interest to read the memoranda (presidential and otherwise) that set out this ‘outsourcing’ of military action to our intelligence agency. Could that other shoe drop?

Or supposing that a-leak-to-come outlines all the links between Halliburton and the cabal headed by Dick Cheney?

The public (and even the government) absorbs the leaks we have already seen, but frantic must be those about which nothing is known. Yet. Imagine our embassy-bunker in Belgrade when the footloose Holebrook – de mortuis nil nisi bonum must prevail here – was acting as architect of a Balkan war that he so nobly later brought to Dayton and peace. Would there be indiscretions in the wrong hands about Austrians equipping the breakaway Slovenes? With weapons shipped via Portugal? Or is there a record of Elie Wiesel’s abortive ten limousine relief expedition to Sarajevo, subsequent to his visit to the CIA’s headquarters in Belgrade?

I am, of course, only speculating. But then so are those who anxiously await further revelations, and so is our government, which is doing all it can to prevent such information from being made public. Wikileaks differs from history only by its capacity to reveal documents for which historians have to wait decades, or even centuries. It is showing us history as it is being made and still hot stuff. The Dread factor is at work.

10.xii.10

I remember first coming across Paul Scott’s ‘Raj Quartet’ in New City or Sneden’s landing back in the days when Mike Wallace was still a ferocious reporter and Burgess Meredith a semi-reired nice-guy actor. Everyone spoke well of Scott and – as I was an avid reader on matters Indian, from Louis Bromfield to Somerset Maugham, from the miraculously funny G. S. Desani to Narayan and Chaudhuri, not excluding Tagore of E.F. Forster – I too read him, and with pleasure.

More recently I watched the 14 episodes of Granada’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’, an account of the love-hatred relationship between the British and the Indians. Intermixed with newsreel footage from Movietone, it is focused on that very difficult task, understanding. To know a country, you have to understand it; the failure to do so (‘Only connect’, wrote Morgan Forster) cost European nations their colonies throughout the world. The films, which contain some marvelous character-parts by Eric Porter and Peggy Ashcroft, were an anatomy of that misunderstanding: seductive in their portrayal of a three-hundred-year-old cohabitation, rueful in the depiction of the disintegration of the India that had been

But what weighed principally in my mind was the role of memory in retaining both love and insult. It is something ingrained in all of us. A wife leaves citing three instances of brutality or disregard; every detail she can go through, and does, in detail. Ask her about the years of marital hapiness and its very every-dayness she cannot really recall. Grudges are lodged ,in the safety-box of the mind; the good is amorphous in its benevolence..

In nothing is this as true as in the relationship between colonizer and colonized.

ON LEAKING

Curious, isn’t it, that leaks such as the Woodward/Bernstein ‘Deep Throat’ ‘revelations’ are the stuff of which heroes are made, and others, because they reveal the extraordinary ineptitude of our government (and our political appointee diplomats, that is big Party givers), should incur the righteous wrath of the government?

Leaking is, after all, a time-honored occupation in American life, and Wikileaks is no more than a platform. The IRS will actually PAY you to leak info on your neighbor’s hidden income. There’s many a politician who’d still be riding high with illegal nannies without leaks. But as politicians consider that the sky is no limit, the leak is a last line of defense. Would you not really like a leak inside Halliburton? inside Dick Cheney’s machinations? Without leaks, would Ollie North still be fixing things in Central America?

I am not a Conspiracy Theorist, so I won’t go so far as to say that the CIA sent two bimbos out to compromise Mr. Assange. Sweden is a country with very advanced views on sexual equality, and I am not surprised by the charge, as yet unproven.

But I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that the moves against him by the government, via Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard & so on, can hardly be viewed as innocent. The free and open Web is a menace to all governments and these are but the first moves by states to curb freedom of information. All politics is about concealing the real reason why a bridge must be built, a war waged, or public enquiry be avoided. Open discussion based on information is anathema to Big Government.

As the Republican leader has been reported to have said, if the Patriot Act can’t stop Wikileaks, we’ll change the Patriot Act so that we can! The worrying element in this is that not just our government can do this, but that obviously the political class around the world also can. By co-ordinating their actions they can bring down Wikileaks, and anyone who thinks that they would not be happy, too, to control the Web, lives in Cloud Cuckoo land. Big pharma attacks and closes down foreign competition, copyright-holders track down and extinguish downloads. That is the real world we live in now.

It happens that WWW, for all its weaknesses, is one of the greatest advances in Information since the Renaissance. To keep politicians’ and governments’ hands off it is the first battleground of the 21st century. We should all be girt for the fight. My cheque is on its way to Wikileaks: if I can find out how to pay it in.

Story-telling

The trouble with the Past is that we have to invent it. If you’re a Cherokee (or a Creek or Seminole or any of the other Indian nations we have degraded and wiped out), your history needs to be re-staged by contemporaries dressed up in rags and tatters. The same would be true for the life of small-town America that was such a subject in my youth. Illustrated by Norman Rockwell and others, the foibles of the local dentist or the adventures of two boys and a dog – all of which pastoral fantasies were already in the middle decades of the last century memories of their creators’ own childhoods – no longer have any real existence beyond television or cinema re-creations. In my own youth, people would still say, ‘Now, old Joe was a real character!’, and relate to you what made Joe distinctive, or the event in which he was involved that forever defined him in the minds of his neighbors. It was called story-telling, and it too has vanished.

But Albert Payton Terhune (in a Pompton Lakes ‘comment’, a reader notes sadly that Terhune ‘gave pleasure to three or four generations of readers’), Marilynne Robinson, and for that matter Wright Morris, Edgar Lee Masters and many others are the ball of wool from which most of us can imaginatively recover the small-town America that was. It is probably as much a lie as Fennimore Cooper’s tales, but it survives because it takes the place of what once was. It is, therefore, very much a part of the way in which America defines itself. Ike and Harry knew that world, but Richard Nixon was probably a manga comic imposed on us. Foreigners are always fascinated by the fenceless yards of New England houses, and no one builds Keep Out walls like the French. In England, a man’s home is his castle. Americans have had more space. Murder takes place ‘on the road’, not where butlers roam and Poirot sniffs.

Back from my slumber

A NOTE ABOUT TroL & TRL BOOKS


The Editor regret to inform subscribers, contributors to #22 and others that TroL itself is suspended for at least a few weeks more. The Editor is temporarily unable to perform his usual duties as other matters, of a personal nature, compel his entire attention.




THE IRISH QUESTION

Like much of Europe, where the air has turned bitterly cold and the general economy is in a state of crisis, Ireland is suffering. As in London, Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Paris, Athens and Brussels, civil servants, students, farmers, unions are demonstrating with the usual folderol: overturned buses, burning cars, placards, breakings-and-entries and so on. The police is reacting firmly and the Euro-Wallahs are meeting hither and yon.

The sources of the trouble are, however, quite evident. Most of us know that we should not spend more than we earn or what we have in the bank, in investments, etc.. The European Union, like the United States, does not seem to recognize this odd little fact.

On the same day in which all the above hullaballoo was going on, the BBC showed us the spanking new headquarters of the EU’s Diplomatic Services, and through it walked the absurd figure of Lady A, a professional Nobody appointed to the post of Foreign Minister of the E.U.. Explaining how useful and necessary it was for the EU to have a Foreign Ministry was a little man from Malta, a little country most of us probably had not often thought of as a member of the Union. He said, with a shrug, that his country couldn’t afford to maintain too many embassies abroad. That is understandable, as Malta does not have a pool of experienced diplomats. Or a pool of much else. It is a lovely place, but its population is only slightly over 400,000.

If we turn our minds back to Eire, those of us who follow such things will remember that Ireland is the country that regularly coaxed enormous subventions for an agriculture largely based on pigs, whether or not those pigs existed except on paper – rather like the olive trees in Italy that turned out to be imaginary. Germans, who like their Schwein, had bought up much of Ireland’s old estates; international companies had stepped in with spanking headquarters to exploit cheap native labor, the banks had a heyday lending left, right and center, the government couldn’t do enough for its people, so it employed civil servants by the hundred thousands. And now that the vultures are hovering overhead, there are protests. The basic sales tax (a regressive tax if there ever has one) is to rise to 27%. Hell, I would protest myself.

All of Europe overspends, as we do. Households are perforce thrifty in bad times, but Lady A. is not a housewife. She can afford to be as profligate as are members of the European Parliament or any of Sepp Blatter’s buddies at FIFA or, for that matter, our own members of Congress, or any bank you care to name. The 89 Greeks who use a notorious rail line with 600 civil servant jobs attached to it, may now have to walk. Such is Austerity. But will the civil servants be disappeared? Will the endless meetings of our World Leaders be curtailed? Where will the Photo-Ops come from? What will all those colorful troops who parade for and are inspected by our leaders do in their spare time? Back and forth doth Hillary Clinton scurry making her pronouncements; the Vice of the Maltese Turtle must be heard in the land.

And British students protest at having to pay ten grand for Oxford and Cambridge, while paying forty Big Ones for a high school education at American universities too many to name?

So queries Candide.

24.xi.10

ALARUMS IN THE EXTREME ORIENT

The last time I looked, that Far East – nothing like our own empty Far West – contained about three quarters of the world’s population. You would not be surprised, in what was Bombay and Peking or Colombo, in Jakarta, Hong Kong or Calcutta, to find yourself unable to move for the human press. In a restaurant I visited, the kitchen walls were hung with ducks drying; they served, they said, twenty thousand of them a day. Even given the sense of Japanese order, a square foot of pavement is honored if occupied; in Beizhing, if you took a car, eighty thousand bikes settled in front of you at every traffic light.

In those conditions, I take it that taking pot shots at a sparsely-populated island is good fun; it would relieve the tension. All the above places – everything East of Iran – have not had a moment of peace since at least a decade before their old colonial masters or their even more ancient imperial families, were removed from the scene. The wars fought in that vast territory have been among the most cruel mankind has ever endured, the longest-lasting and the most perilous to civilian populations. All of which I take to be consonant with extreme population pressures.

I don’t think, then, that it is insane, eccentric or racist, to point out that our tiny and rapidly- diminishing population of whites, is hardly likely to have any great influence on a part of the world that not only outnumbers us by a factor of about ten to one, but is also outgrowing us economically and entrepreneurially. For we are not talking here of a bunch of illiterate peasants; the populations of Asia are in fact part of our own DNA. Chess and mathematics are not ‘white’ inventions, though effective civil government and respect for the Law are. Nor so I believe that inventiveness is a ‘white’ trait. And it is becoming daily more evident that as entrepreneurs and capitalists, we are being outpaced by Asia.

So the idea that the Burmese government, the Sri Lankan, the North Korean, the Afghani and so on can and should accommodate themselves to that Johnny-come-lately ‘democracy’ strikes me as fatuous. We ourselves – in part due to our own large and miscegenated population – submit to constant weakening of the very stuff which once made us a proud nation. How can we expect to influence, shape or otherwise ‘interfere with governments which have vastly different problems from ours, whose populations (like those of the Indian sub-continent) required a bloody civil war and partition to come into independence? What experience do we have that could possibly be adapted to conditions in China or Afghanistan? These people do not even think as we do, much less act as we think they should. They neither can, nor should. The business of government is to keep any population in some sort of order, for anarchy is an even greater disaster than repression. This, Ireland, Greece and most of the European Union is beginning to understand. After all, soon enough, their demographics will soon rid them of those who dreamt up the Enlightenment.

Personally, I dread the Mass in any form. I suspect most governments and politicians do so too. But in Asia masses die, daily; and are replaced. Mao was a horror as vicious and corrupt as Hitler or Stalin, but the tasks faced by these governments today are not so very different from those that brought to power those totalitarianisms. Students riot in London and are not killed. That is good. If they riot in Asia they may well be killed, that is not good. I strongly believe in circumspection, and cultivate my own garden while I may.

A New Week

I am sure you will have been as delighted as I was to learn that la cuisine française, the French tradition of bang-up meals, convivial families around the table, the proper placing of cutlery and glass, has joined the Mediterranean diet and flamenco as a part of UNESCO’s ‘intangible world heritage’, the . . .er, less visible (say than the pyramids of Gaza or Stonehenge) part of what should be recognized as invaluable to our universal culture.

Over the years, I have had the pleasure of meeting many of the distinguished gentlemen who work at UNESCO. In fact, you bump into them pretty much everywhere. It is, after all, a pretty cushy job, and there are several posts available for each and every country, however uncultivated or unscientific it may be. Our own rep is Mr. David T. Killion; Kazakhstan’s is the mayor of Altana. Mr. Killion’s qualifications reflect his passion for legislative drafting in Congress; of our Kazakh, rather less is known. The Venezualan rep is Ms. Jennifer Josefina Gi y Laya, who is also the Bolivarian Minister for the People’s Power for Education.

These are largely working pols, God bless them. It is down below that the plums are distributed: the translation, the conferences, the working groups, the sub-contracts and arcane sub-divisions. One such was the acronymic group (French member, the appropriately named Yannick Vin) that met recently in Nairobi to deliberate.

Most of UNESCO’s sites are, as well know, as dead as those celebrated in Ozymandias:

‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
. . .boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

So, I fear, are these new, intangible ones. The last traditional French meal I ate (then with my French wife) was over a partage. The family property having been sold, what was left was to be redistributed, and argued over, at a crowded table. Such meals and such a cuisine are still to be found, but at a Parisian brasserie as lately as this summer, most diners watched the TV. How many French restaurants still have, by the Cashier, the boxes in which regular diners’ napkins were preserved from day to day?

Great efforts are made in Italy (and far fewer in places of catastrophic eating like Greece) to preserve the varieties of the Mediterranean diet, the ingredients simple and good. But it does require effort: to find or produce.

As for flamenco, the less said the better. The authentic stuff probably died at about the same time Garcia Lorca, an aficionado, was killed. Oh, there are still Sevillian ladies about to twirls their skirts and clack their castanets. But like most of my life, such expressions of culture as part of daily life are long gone and UNESCO cannot but despair.

Perhaps it should take up causes that can be salvaged? Paper bags in markets, books that don’t fall apart on reading, ocean liners, railways that go everywhere, marriage itself, thrift, respect?

Thoughts of the day

I note with pleasure that Mr. Tsiolkas’ ( 'much-acclaimed’ seems to be the epithet of choice) novel, The Slap! has been nominated for one of the Bad Sex awards. He should certainly be awarded the prize, for the sex in the book is what debases what is otherwise a fair-to-good anatomy of Australian society. The plot is simple, its working-out consistently interesting: man at party slaps an obnoxious child, eight characters react differently to the ‘outrage’. Unfortunately, to find out their attitudes towards the incident, the hippy, the pc, the perp, etc., you have to wade through pages of tediously detailed sex amongst them.

From my limited experience, though I do have a number of friends in Australia, I do not believe this to be a national trait; I suspect it may be generational or, worse yet, personal to Mr. Tsiolkas, in which case he’s got a problem.

My view is that all explicit sex in fiction is boring in the extreme. It has been eschewed by every major writer since literature began. Anna Karenina did not exude, drip, sigh, exclaim, sweat, smell or otherwise pass on the intimate details of her unhappy affair.

I have always liked that article of the French Code which addresses the atteinte à la pudeur of minors: literally, an assault on their (supposedly) inherent modesty. We also badly need a prize for Immodesty: Lady Gaga, James Ellroy & Co.. For what we call today ‘celebrity’.

Commonplace Books

There is much to cull from reading. Writers often kept Commonplace Books ,in which they recorded what they found striking or needing further explanation. There are a multitude of such things in Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia. He obviously notes everything down, as I have for years. He picks up on Jorge Luis Borges defending himself from accusations of kow-towing to the military regime’s by saying, No leo los diarios! I don’t read the papers! He recalls Cocteau with this cautionary tale: ‘There was once a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue.’

You can pick this stuff up anywhere.

The departing British Prime Minister is reported to have said, ‘I don’t regard any sex as pleasant.’ But then Isaac Babel claimed that he had made love to the ‘understandably unbalanced wife of Yezhov [the Nasty who headed the old Soviet Secret Police] and almost everyone who slept with either of the Yezhovs was shot in early 1940.’

I think there is a lesson in those two statements, but I don’t know what it is. For those of you who wonder, there is the Lewis Carroll defense. Children some to those who know ‘the simple art of giving them their whole attention.’ That one happens to be true, and all too few do.

I close with a wonder from the excellent Juan Ribeyro: ‘a new President has been elected. He doesn’t smoke, drink, gamble or womanize.’ This is worrying: ‘It would terrify me to be governed by a man who was won a prize for virtue.’

Some Thoughts on the Day

I had occasion today to correspond with a former student – he must now be thirty-something – who wished to go on to an MFA. Would I recommend him? I’ve done that for literally hundreds of students, who are a faithful bunch and after all have their way to make. But in this case, I growled, Writers Workshops and MFA problems are a plague and a pestilence. It is thanks to them that an excrescence like the New York’s Forty (or was is twenty) Young writers got cobbled together. They take up literary space, these people do; they chat, they tweet, they Face and above all they log-roll.

So I vented to the young man. I said that when I wound up in one, in Iowa, sixty years ago, it was because they laid on some money for me, which I lacked. I met a lifelong friend, Paul Engle was a generous prairie-fed maecenas, Robert Lowell shambled through poetry, the most talented boy in the program, Bob Shelley, killed himself, and Dylan Thomas blew through town, drunk, to get his teeth fixed. I was a lousy writer at 21 and Iowa didn’t do anything for me, or for anyone, at the time. It offered fellowship at a time when literature was taken seriously.

That is no longer the case. The joints proliferate the way literary festivals do, What can an MFA program offer but replicas of what the failed writers who staff them (or the occasional ‘name’) think is good writing? True writers know the art is unteachable. What a still-young writer needs is to write, to put stuff out, to get rejected; to read a lot; to learn what it is to tell a story that someone else will want to read; to know a lot, languages (plural) especially, so that his diet is not just stuff spawned from MFA programs; to see the real world and forget his own little special self.

Still, I will write his letter: the way he wrote his reply suggested he may know that already.



The University of Maryland and one other stateside institution, back a kind of ‘medical’ program offered by something called the Ibero-Americal University with its seat in Costa Rica. In this country where there is no real education or culture, such ‘universities’ spring up like hollyhocks. This is now quite common. Our universities are now just marketers, and the underdeveloped countries are the ‘huddled masses’ of the day: ripe for academic exploitation.

-----------------------------------------------

My London bookseller, John Sandoe, is usually very good to me. I patronize them because they have taste, because all writers should support independent booksellers, because they deserve our custom (at full price). I buy most of my books in England because I like well-produced books as objects, too, and America now binds in plastic, uses heavy paper, and is otherwise unattractive.

When I go into Sandoe’s, I let each of its staff pick a book I might like. They have batted at about .800, which is pretty high. Until this last time, when they passed off on me two novels that were complete disgraces. Both of them, of course, bore the usual accolades, Thomas Leverett’s The Exchange-Rate between Love and Money (which the Guardian found ‘dazzling) was simply unreadable. On the first page I was offered Frito, who’d ‘heard about this amazing thing love, had been trying to score for some years – He’d painted a target on every girl he met and shot himself out of a cannon at them, but none ever withstood the impact.’ Anyone who thinks that has anything to do with love is simply a smart-aleck. I did twenty pages of that one and then fled.

The second, Simon Mawrer’s The Glass Room (‘a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry’) had an unbearably turgid story line – a Jugendstil house – to which, as in those epitomies of history published by earnest divines in the nineteenth century, a set of ‘characters’ were marched through. There were Nazis and Jews and artists and women who smoked cigarettes in elongated holders, venal servants and nasty little communist bureaucrats. None with any life whatever.

That one I read all the way through. The author was so goddam earnest I would have felt it lacking in charity not to wave goodbye to him at the end.

Blog is up again

Apologies to my readers. It was not a good summer and I was ill and uncommunicative.

Also it seemed the Blog needed re-thinking.

It is now more a journal of what goes through my mind that I think might be of interest to others.

IRELAND & THE TROUBLES

I re-read as I read, a lot. Last week five novels by William Trevor, who is by a long shot the best living writer in English. Fools of Fortune which alas I will finish today, made me reflect the Great War, the Spanish Civil War in the mid-‘Thirties, and the more recent dismemberment of Yugoslavia are cut of the same cloth. They can’t be extirpated from Irish, Spanish or Serb memories; injustices, follies, were committed during these events and there will forever be family connections to those acts and crimes. They will all have lost something valuable.

The big totalitarianisms of the past century, in contrast, were vast, impenetrable and anonymous. It was talk one heard, or other peoples’ memories. The fouler for that, but not so personal.

OF BURMA

My memory was jogged by hearing of the release of Aung San Suu Kyi. An old friends from my Sunday Times days, Mihir Bose, had made me read a little twentieth century Burmese history, in which his father – mysteriously killed in a plane flying to Japan – played a part. If I remember rightly, this fetching lady’s father was the head of Burma’s communist party, which thought it better to collaborate with the Japanese invader than submit to British rule.

The lady cannot, then, be said to spring full-blown from. Jove’s brow. There, too, there is a family history.

It is curious that in moments of euphoria, democracy and whatnot, all sense of history is lost. Does anyone remember anything?

FROM SUBLIME TO RIDICULOUS

Now there is to be a Library (or something) Prize for homosexual literature for the young. Will it be literature, which is just that, with no adjective preceding it?

WHY FOOLS RUSH AND THE SMART WAVER

It took some time to get the actual words our President used in the press conference after the recent election. Here is the gist of what interested me:


“There is a inherent danger in being in the White House and being in the bubble. I mean, folks didn’t have any complaints about my leadership style when I was running around Iowa for a year. And they got a pretty good look at me up close and personal, and they were able to lift the hood and kick the tires, and I think they understood that my story was theirs. I might have a funny name, I might have lived in some different places, but the values of hard work and responsibility and honesty and looking out for one another that had been instilled in them by their parents, those were the same values that I took from my mom and my grandparents.

“When you’re in this place, it is hard not to seem removed. Those letters that I read every night, some of them just break my heart. But nobody is filming me reading those letters. And so it’s hard, I think, for people to get a sense of, well, how is he taking in all this information?”

A President who can both think and feel can’t be all bad. I’ve known presidents and nabobs and big shots, and there’s a part of most people that wants power. But ultimately my observation is in accord with Lord Acton’s. Exercising power over others will kill you. You live by it, you die by it. It is the biggest bubble there is: when no one’s left who dares say, ‘I don’t think you should do that.’ Power deletes thought in those around you.

I thought it was a pretty remarkable thing to say to the nation.

THE WORLD CUP BLOG FROM TROL

INTRODUCTION



Those who know this magazine and its Editor are aware that he has always been deeply involved in and written a great deal about Sports. Given the absolutely desperate level of writing about football (the world game, not the NFL which he also cherishes) as evinced by Sports Illustrated (the most ignorant), USA Today, ESPN, etc., this blog may also serve as a sort of corrective. It has been written day by day for a Polish newspaper and e-mailed to a few friends. Why deny it to others?

It is available here in reverse order: that is, the most recent report is also the first.

GOSSIP BEFORE ARMAGEDDON (July 1)

Should you think there are enough dictators about football, here's
fresh news for you:

1. The Paramount Chief (Sorry, President) of Nigeria, that excellent
footballer, has banned the entire Nigerian team from all competition
for two years. For dishonoring,the Nation! I truly love that, but do
not think that England is likelly to follow suit.

2. Ashley Cole, Chelsea and England fullback was so indiscreet to his
friends as to say that he 'hated England and its fans'. At least here
is a case of a player saying what he really thinks. I do not take it
for granted that athletes, in football or elsewhere, are intelligent.
They are bodies and minds hired for a decade and then replaced. The
new Italian team coach, Prandelli, was on holiday in Zanzibar during
the early stages of the World Cup. He took reading matter with him:
Jorge Luis Borges and Jean-Paul Sartre. That qualifies him in sporting
circles as a raging intellectual. In the US, that would be enough to
disbar him from public office.

But Ashley Cole? Well, most of the talk about him is about girls. Now, then, ex, current, future. All of them exceedingly boring. A good player on the way down.

3. Now that is certainly popular with the tabloids, so maybe it is not
so nutty to suggest that David Beckham should take Capello's place as
England's manager. Besides falling apart and faking injury during a
previous WC, the appointment of another cheat to a high position in
football would go down well in certain quarters. You could say Beckham fits. With Maradona, Henry, Zidane and company

4. Does anyone know the whereabouts or destinations of North Korea's
vanquished team? The last batch 'disappeared'. Or should that ve, 'were disappeared'?

5. I read in the Colombian press an urgent question: as Brazil is the
host nation in 2014, does that mean that South America will have only
four 'other' teams in consideration? Answer: So far, yes. Given the
number of football associations on that continent, S. America already
has the hghest proportion of participants.

6. Of the nineteen referees still in action (or available), few are
notable for their performances. Larrionda (Spain) and Rossetti (Italy)
have been tossed for egregious mistakes, though Rossetti was far less
at fault. But one other sent home was Swiss, Massimo Busacca. He
doesn't know why. No one does. There are suggestions that he was sent
home for daring to put the South African team out too soon.

7. Final Expectoration: by one C. Ronaldo, at or near the TV cameras.
They are not pleased with the Glamor Boy in Portugal. His predecessor,
Luis Figo, says the lad lacks respect for the team, the game and his
nation. The special one, Jose Mourinho, rushed to his aid, as he does
with all his players. If the team loses, Mourinho explained, I am to
blame; if it wins, the credit is theirs. More polish than spit there,
Joze!

.

MAGAZINE BUSINESS

TYhe Editor is currently in Europe obsessing with the World Cup. Regular business with be restored in late August.

We expect to launch TRoL books in the Fall. The first list will be advertised here.

ISRAEL AND 'HUMANITARIAN' RELIEF

Imagine, if you will, that along the Cote d'Azure of France some goodly portion of the Arab population of France -- perhaps rightly inflamed by the secular state's banning of the burkha -- has been running an enclave that includes Cannes. These French Palestinians, once citizens of France, have refused participation in the central (Israeli) government. They and metropolitan France have been at intermittent war for some years, especially since elections on the Enclave brought a more radically Islamic government to power. You may, and should, assume that there are rights and wrongs on both sides, and that the blockaded Enclave is suffering as a result of a French blockade.

Now imagine that five ships are organized to create a propaganda coup by friendly Islamic powers, not to speak of various do-goodies, and that these ships should -- despite endless warnings and alternative offers -- head straight for Cannes and are headed off by French troops (the famous paras) and in the resultant melee, ten allied Muslim men (mostly Turks) should be killed. Would France be condemned?

The parallel is fairly consistent with reality. I know of no tenet of international law that proscribes a sovereign state's defense of its own integrity. The blockade may be poor policy; it may even by some thought to be immoral, but it is certainly not illegal if a state of war exists between the Enclave and France. I have no doubt that there is suffering on both sides, but what state can tolerate being under constant attack? Who would support France if it failed to protect its own citizens?

Since its founding in 1947, Israel has fought many wars to preserve its integrity. It is a tiny country surrounded by hostile states. The Enclave's international 'support' has come only from other Islamic states: and from the academic Left and other elements of the old pro-Arab elements in the UK Foreign Office. Four ships were boarded safely, one was not. Those on board that fifth ship -- does it matter who fired first, when we know who first resisted the boarding? -- knew what the consequences of resistance would be. And resisted.

In a politically correct world, the ensuing brouhaha is predictable and no less wrong.

THE TRoL REVIEW OF OLD BOOKS

Here is a new and untimely feature: taking a look at books that I would guess are not much looked at.



Matthew Josephson: The Politicos, 1938



Lately I've asked a cross-section of friends and correspondents to name US presidents between U.S. Grant and the turn of the twentieth century. The record of correct answers belongs to a gent who was raised in Brooklyn's public schools in a period when kids still got educated. He reeled off four names. Most people are lucky to get one or two -- though Polk is a popular nominee, perhaps because no one can remember a damned thing about him. Wrong, however: his merited oblivion is pre Civil War.



Here is the Rogues' Gallery:



Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley.



It is possible they have been erased from memory because all but one of them (Cleveland) were Big Business Republicans in what constitutes a period of our history -- that of the Robber Barons and the political Bosses -- that we would rather forget.



I re-read these books because I thought I discerned a certain relevance between the aftermath of the Civil War and our own post-1989 world, the connecting thread, in a word, being Greed. As a kid coming to America in 1939, that was not a word I associated with the United States. Generous, yes; Greedy, no. Well, , we've come a long way, Baby!



The chances are that Josephson was a bit of a Lefty. During the New Deal, this was no crime. He is not much a man of words, but of hard facts: how the Republicans struck unionists from the rolls; how it contrived to defeat Andrew Johnson, because he thought the question of Negro suffrage was amatter for the several states; how that block of votes led to a party seizing control of the state, while leaving enfranchised Negroes nothing and sustaining, for electoral purposes, a military occupation of the southern states; how offices were bought and sold; how the thirty years of Republican dominance was maintained by funds handed the party by the trusts in an equable quid pro quo; how petty officials, beneficiaries of party patronage were taxed at election time; how the federal budget was regularly robbed by the party and its patrons -- in other words, all the sordid details of corruption and influence-peddling.

I don't think any of us need to be told that hypocrisy is a much-practiced art -- for politicians, the very heart of the matter is how they will be perceived. Nothing new about that. As professors of cant, few can equal the great Massacusetts abolitionists. On behalf of their mills they could see that the industrial supremacy of the North would best be advanced by the destruction of the agricultural South, hence abolishing its slave-owning economy, in the name of 'freedom', was something that would greatly benefit their own growth. It was a clarion-call of patriotism that did the job, and for forty-odd years, Republicans were nicely able to run the country without the southern-based Democrats: in the name of the Union.

And? you may well ask.

Well, I seem to detect in all that more than a whiff of What is good for General Motors is good for America: especially if we bail out the former and set the lawyers loose on the enemy -- those bloody Asians who actually own our country: a form of conduct which can only benefit the Lawyer Empire based on Tort. Back in the happy days of good business government (not Halliburton but the railroads, the iron barons, the whiskey circle) someone thought up a good caper: take over what is now the Dominican Republic; the only constraint was the notion that it wasn't really worth (financially) taking over. Oh, I am perfectly sure that making BP pay to clean up its mess in the Gulf has nothing whatever to do with the oil interests that governed, and still govern, our policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to speak of Iran. Very sure.

Reading old books puts you in old places. I commend the practice.

Next: Felix Frankfurter.

THE SIMPLE ARITHMETIC OF VOTING

There are some very simple facts about the recent UK elections that I think bear reflection; on this side of the Atlantic they are clearly not very well understood.

1. This is a 'hung' parliament, which means that no one party has a clear majority. Despite television's attempt to dumb us all down, UK voters were not choosing between three party leaders, Messrs Cameron, Brown and Clegg, but among 650 distinct parliamentary seats, most of them contested by between six and ten-plus candidates.

2. The final results were, in terms of seats: Conservatives: 306, Labor: 258, Liberal Democrats: 57, Others: 28.

3. In terms of popular votes, the results were: Conservatives: 36.1%, Labor: 29%, Liberal Democrats: 23%, Others: 11.9%.

4. Conclusion: A little over 1/3 of the popular vote is not a democratic mandate for a conservative government. Thus, two possibilities exist: (1) A coalition between one or more parties, or (2) a minority government which can be overthrown by any adverse vote.

5. If popular votes are what counts, then these offer tantalizing possibilities. Assuming that the 'Others', a host of nationalist parties, would split evenly (a big assumption), the two major coalitions possible would be: Conservative 36.1% + Liberal Democrats 23.0% + Others 6% would give Mr. Cameron the theoretical backing of 65.1% of votes cast. The alternative alliance would be: Labor 29% + Liberal Democrats 23% + Others 6%, or 58%. If politics were simple, that would suggest the first alternative would form the government, and in all probability, it will.

Buried in all this simple arithmetic is the main Liberal Democrat argument that the current first-past-the-post electoral system (winner takes all) is unfair. In this, they are absolutely correct. In fact, the Conservative 36.1% of the overall vote produced 47% of the seats; for their 29% of the vote, Labor got 39.6% of the seats; while for their 23% of the vote, the Liberal Democrats got only 8.7% of the seats.

Does this mean that it takes four times as many popular votes to elect a Liberal Democrat than a Conservative. NO! It just means that in a number of constituencies, a shift of a few hundred votes would have produced a far different result.

We are a first-past-the-post nation, and our system is every bit as inherently unfair as the UK system. But ours is a presidential system; the UK's is not. And God bless the UK system for that. The Prime Minister may have a cozy home at 10 Downing Street, but it has no swimming pool in the basement, its own tennis court, Air Force One and the kind of worship and importance we offer our president, worthy or not. When he goes to work, the PM is simply the chair of a cabinet meeting and the titular 'head' of his party. Unlike a president, he does not have to appear among the rowdies of the House or the Nodders of the Senate to advance his legislation.

One might think that Mr. Clegg's troops are the ones with the greatest grievance, and that is indeed so. That is why their part in any possible alliance rests on a 'reform' of the UK electoral system, so that the popular vote is better reflected in the distribution of representatives.

Here, another vital factor comes into play. Under the UK system, and most European systems of Proportional Representation, a government may fall when it is unable to obtain a vote of confidence on a critical piece of legislation, such as the Budget. The US government cannot fall. A president may fail to get his budget (or anything else) passed a dozen or more times; he and his legislators perforce have to work things out. That is because president and legislators have set terms of office, which is something Mr. Clegg would like to see, and I would not.

The UK's current system has its faults, but it also has many advantages: (1) it is very local and therefore responsive to the problems of each constituency; (2) it is fallible, and may readily be punished (by the dissolution of parliament) if its legislation is faulty or out of touch with public opinion -- how many times in the past year wished we could have a snap election and rid ourselves of certain noxious legislators? --; and (3) the absence of set terms means that election campaigns do not start the moment a legislator is elected, but are limited to thirty days, which essentially means that money has far less of a chance to influence the result.

The faults of PR are obvious. Italy, for instance, can be so unstable that as many as three governments may (and have) fall within a month. On the other hand, Italy's president is no monarch: as Messrs Sarkozy and Obama seem to think they are. The Italian president is trotted out to cut ribbons, inspect honor guards, and receive political leaders in search of forming a government -- functions performed ably, in the United Kingdom, by H.M. the Queen.

Could it be that democracy itself has its faults, and that it is, as was famously said, the worst possible form of government except for all the others?

LITERARY MAGAZ,INES

http//thefastertimes.com/fiction/2010/04/27/a-new-literary-magazine-ranking


This is a quite nifty and intelligent attempt to do the impossible.

It started out as a ranking and then became a list. In the earlier version, TRoL managed to be in the fifth tier, which I guess you might call the Honorable Mentions. In the subsequent listing, we are still there.

The author's criteria for selection seem to me sound, at least in part, the question being 'If you were a writer, to whom should you try to flog your merchandise?' The objective of most writers being to get themselves published, notice and (possibly) paid, there are an awful number of variables in the mix, but this is an honest attempt to give advice.

Here are some thoughts on the subject:

1. I don't think Pushcart or O.Hara awards are a sound basis for scoring. I know I wince when I have to send copies to Pushcart, though their hearts are undoubtedly in the right place. At best, publication in Pushcarft (and yes, we have won some, I think), is a sign of competence: not of originality or significance. As for O. Hara, I pass. I know nothing about it.

2. The fundamental error is that the list of magazines is parochial. TRoL is an international magazine. We publish the best literature we can find. Oddly enough, it's been some time since America led in the field, so we have to find mss among the French, the Italians, the Poles, the Russians, the Latin Americans and so on. Most of the magazines listed are pretty monoglot.

3. There is a generational gap among magazines, which is related to circulation, location, gossip and trivia. TRoL is my ninth magazine, and when I look back over a sixty-year career in the field, I think I can safely say that the anthology (Saul Bellow & Keith Botsford: Editors, available from the Toby Press) of this magazine and its predecessors, is ample evidence of our quality. But we are probably not as up to date as some. We just do our work. We don't Facebook or Twitter.

4. There are also peculiarities to TRoL which go unacknowledged in such a listing. We are the ONLY magaz,ine I know of that will publish texts up to book-length; we are the ONLY magazine that consistently revisits, in the Archives section, literature that has been forgotten or unjustly neglected.

5. The purpose of the listing is weighted towards magazines to which writers should submit. We are committed to publishing a magazine in which the intelligent Reader, be he writer or not, can find a sense of discovery.

6. It needs also to be said that in the magazines listed, some are commercial, and most are subsidized. TRoL owes nothing to anyone. We don't have 'student' readers, or juries to select what gets published. We don't apply for grants. One old man does all the work and foots the bill. I guess that makes us, however estimable, relicts.

AFGHANISTAN, AGAIN

The Italian bi-monthly LIMES, edited by Lucio Carracciolo, is perhaps the one absolutely indispensable geopolitical magazine in existence: well-informed, independent, clearly written by a world-wide array of expert scholars, and accompanied by excellent maps, it has -- despite its substantial sale -- only one serious defect: it is written in Italian, meaning that it is not as widely read as it deserves to be, in western intelligence circles.

Its current issue, on Afghanistan, raises some very interesting questions. I am quite sure that our 'authorities' know all about such questions; the problem is that we the citizens and voters, probably do not. Here, as a public service, I offer just one of many snippets in the issue: on the parlous question of Osama bin Laden.

To be completely transparent, let me state that I have been among the 'correspondents' of LIMES for at least the past twenty years.

The extract below is from an article by Margherita Paolini about Pakaf ( Pakistan/Afghanistan), in the author's words, the 'key' to the whole Afghan problem.

"The declared objective of the United States is, as a pre-condition for their political re-integration, to obtain from the Taliban a definitive guarantee that they have broken off their relations with Al-Qaeda. If this refers to the Zawahiri-bin Laden group of the second half of the 1990s, progressively reprived of its leadership from 2002 on and deprived of its political audience by decision of the ISI [the Pakistani intelligence agency] after 2004, there would be no problem. That Al-Qaeda belongs to a remote past. Just this last September [2009] Mullah Omar declared that the Taliban was willing to do so, and that the only remaining issue in its negotiations with the United States was the date by which foreign troops would leave the country, as in Iraq (the preferred model for Pakistan).

"If on the other hand the United States refers to the terrorist activities of other groups operating under the Al-Qaeda banner -- such as Paklistani groups -- and these other groups may not even be named, then the problem remains. The danger of such groups and their infiltration into the Pakistani government was clearly shown in the David Coleman Headley, alias Daud Gilani, affair. The son of a diplomat and at home in the right circles in the United States, Gilani was able to plan in detail the acknowledged attacks in Mumbai.

"In this context, the American challenge to terrorism, with its current intelligence strategy amd without an unconditional structural collaboration with the Pakistani government and the ISI, risk becoming as dangerous a pantomime as it was under Bush.

"The question as to whether Osama bin Laden is dead or alive is another oddity. It's not so much a matter of the videos and tape-recordings themselves, most of them quite obviously fake, but of their content, which in no way corresponds to Osama's known ideology: especially in regard to keeping the umma unified against its enemies, the United States, Israel and those nations in the Islamic world who betray Islamic principles. It was always a bin Laden priority not to exacerbate or broaden the religious divide between Sunni and Shia Islam. The exact opposite is what happen in Iraq with Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, whose true patrons are to be found among Sunni intengralist ideologues who consider Shiites heretics, a stance which coincided perfectly with Pakistani jihadism.

"Bin Laden was most probably liquidated in December-January 2001-2002 when Osama was residing in the secret hospital of the Binori madrasi in Karachi. The appropriate person, whom bin Laden trusted, was to hand: Omar Said Sheikh, who co-ordinated relations between Osama and the ISI (and who also turns up in the Bhutto assassination). This Omar was cited by the FBI as the man responsible for the killing of the American journalist Pearl; he was tried in Pakistan and condemned to death to take him out of American hands. The death-sentence was never carried out. In fact, Omar Said, safe in a military prison in Rawalpindi, was able to follow the Mumbai attacks and sought to precipitate a crisis between India and Pakistan with counterfeit telephone calls (using British sim cards) to isolate both the Pakistani president, Zardari and the Indian Foreign Minister Mukherjee. His objective, quickly frustrated, was to transfer Pakistani troops from the tribal areas to the Indian frontier.

"Sooner or later, Omar said will be freed if the lead terrorist in the trial of the Al-Qaeda Seven, the Pakistani Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, admits to being himself responsible for the murder of Pearl."