Dedicated, once again, to Tuesday Morning Quarterback:

Jameson: "Terror
cause--no Left in Middle East."
'Nasser' ring a bell?

As a cultural critic, Jameson is merely portentious and mandarin. As a political commentator, he is a disaster. Anyone who claims that the People's Republic of China is a hopeful, unfinished project (as he does in an aside in "The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism") without being bullied or threatened into doing so is either a fool or, well, a Communist.

Stalin was actually a very bad person, despite all the fiendish recent efforts to foist his evilness off on "the" "representations" "of" "totalitarianism." While it may be true that Americans have an irrational response to the name Stalin, I would have to nominate Poles, Czechs, and Ukrainians--who, after all, have much more experience with the old monster and his successors--as the most heatedly anti-Stalin peoples in the world.

Can anyone define economic class for me? G. A. Cohen gave it a decent shot, but otherwise people seem to use the word either assuming a known definition or hiding the fact that they don't have one.

The Sokal affair was not a big deal in my eyes, considering that Social Text was just doing what it always does--publishing fraudulent work. Academic prose, especially that which comes from English and Comp Lit departments, is an immense confidence game which is only lately starting to unravel. It was hardly the insecurity of the mass media that was on display during the Sokal affair.

THIS COULD JUST BE THE MICROCHIP THE MOSSAD PLANTED IN MY HEAD TALKING, BUT...

Patrick J. Buchanan is as splendid and choleric a prose stylist when writing to The New Republic as he is declaring war on homosexuals on national television. From his impressive rant in this week's paper issue:

Do you seriously believe that conservatism is now wholly encompassed by Norman Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg, Ramesh Ponnuru, Rich Lowry, our virtuous Teletubby William Bennet, Charles Krauthammer, and the Kristols, pere et fils?

In three paragraphs, Pitchfork Pat summons all the sarcasm, overstatement, and condescension for which he is justly both famous and entirely irrelevant. But combined with his ominous references to "subcontracting Mideast policy out to Ariel Sharon" and "nightsticking recalcitrant regimes according to a priority list drawn up for us by Bibi Netanyahu," his particular list of neocons--"Jew, Jew, gentleman of the colored persuasion...more Jews"--is a little suspicious given his flirtation with blood-and-soil nationalism.

I must admit, however, that I enjoy his truculence, especially the dig against that fraudulent blowhard Bill Bennet. That said, it never seems to occur to him that anyone might be internationalist and pro-Israel for anything but the basest, most craven reasons of manipulation and divided loyalty.

Maybe the Vatican is putting him up to this.

In honor of my idol, Gregg Easterbrook, Mr. So's reading list has inspired me to senryuize:

Lukacs, Jameson
Pair of rusty Stalinists
Try another class

Please take in the spirit in which it's meant.

Incidentally, I own the Strokes album (although "permanently borrowed" might be more accurate), and I'm pretty sure I only do so because I managed to avoid the kind of cultural second-hand that you've described. If I had read about the fashion shows and the supposed punkiness before hearing the album, I would have dropped it in a minute. Instead, I just thought of "Someday" that it's nice to hear a pretty straightforward, well-done rip-off of a classic soul progression (cf. "Don't Let the Green Grass Fool You").

About six months ago, I was reading a borrowed copy of the late W.G. Sebald's fascinating, beguiling novel Austerlitz. During the narrator's journeys through Europe, he looks at a building (I think a Beaux-Arts specimen in Brussels) and comments that it was the kind of building that could only be seen as an eventual ruin. In the margin, the friend who lent me the novel had made a line drawing of two tall, unmistakable towers.

Shortly after the fear, horror, and rage of one year ago, I personally felt a strange, awful kind of resignation. Sebald and my friend summed it up well for me, but much earlier I had spent too much time mulling Ecclesiastes and "Ozymandias" and T.S. Eliot. I had been infected with a sense, religious at bottom, of inevitability and, behind that, some kind of transcendent meaning. This is precisely the kind of thinking that Leon Wieseltier scolds people for--the perfectly human search for meaning in the face of immense, but plain, horror.

I really liked Wieseltier's column on how not to commemorate 9-11. The natural impulses of the media are to play up sadness, loss, grief, all adding up to a kind of self-pity: we, the living, were the victims. We suffered. This self-pity broadens into narcissism: we survived, we overcame. What we don't want to do, and what we won't be encouraged to do, is to empathize with the victims. Sometimes I try to imagine what it may have been like in those planes, as the Manhattan skyline came closer and closer, or on one of the doomed floors as the unthinkable choice between flames and falling presented itself. I usually can't try for long, because it's too awful. Wieseltier rightly points out that empathy would lead to anger, rage even, emotions we are not supposed to cultivate.

But I place myself outside of propriety--according to my favorite cultural commissar--by thinking about very different things from the same vantage point of (attempted) empathy. Without suggesting anything stupid or perfidious, it does seem to me that remembering and commemorating the attacks could help cultivate a certain humility. Not in the world-historical sense, certainly--the US is the greatest thing since the nation-state. But maybe in a metaphysical sense. Even the greatest nation-state is a ruin waiting to happen.

To climb back down to immanence: one of my first coherent thoughts a year ago was "What if this is just the first step? What if a jar of anthrax has been dropped on the subway tracks--we wouldn't even know for another three days!" Even more than anger, this is still what catches in my throat. Michael Crowley practically scared me into incontinence this morning, and Nicholas Lemann didn't reassure me. quoting Stephen Van Evera:

"It should have been a war on Al Qaeda. Don't take your eye off the ball. Subordinate every other policy to it, including the policies toward Russia, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Iraq. Instead, the Administration defined it as a broad war on terror, including groups that have never taken a swing at the United States and never will. It leads to a loss of focus. Al Qaeda escapes through the cracks."

This is why I'm still scared. We all know that the doves, if we listened to them, would put us in tremendous danger. What gets relatively little airing, however, is the dangers of hawkishness.

Some of you may have noticed that "the Reihan" has taken something of a "hiatus," and that several worthy subjects of a furious rhetorical assault have been given a pass. It's called the element of surprise.

Blammo.

"I'll be back."

SHOCKING--IN A GOOD WAY

There's a truly remarkable article on Iran in The Guardian. It left me dumbstruck, for more than one reason. For one thing, some of the quotes are almost unbelievable:

...after the fall of the Taliban in neighboring Afghanistan, many Iranians (including opposition clerics) had hoped that the mullahs would be put back in their mosques. "We had really hoped the US army would come and do for us what it did for them."

That discontent is widespread in Iran, especially among its burgeoning younger generation, is no surprise. That people actually had hoped for a liberatory invasion, and moreover were willing to say as much to a reporter, is stunning.

Just as surprising, perhaps, is the fact that this article appeared in The Guardian. If the quote above, and the others like it, appeared in an article by Michael Ledeen, it would look like cherry-picking (not that Ledeen isn't a good journalist doing very valuable work, but NRO is still NRO). But no, the world's leading bastion of fully-literate anti-Americanism published these anecdotes.

Nothing should be more obvious than the fact that Islamism, once it's in power, is drastically unpopular. Who could be thrilled about Calvin's Geneva with lousy weather? I'm not sure what to think about invading Iraq, but if it led to some healthy instability in Iran, we could have, among many other benefits, some very good PR on our hands.