A Second Hand Conjecture

Brief except of a talk at the 92nd Street Y between Salman Rushdie and Irshad Manji, discussing the possibility of reform against extremism in the Islamic faith. Rushdie draws a fine parallel with the experience of the Western left during the Cold War. Specifically, its attempt to create a distinction between their non-existent idealized socialism, and the actuality of a destitute, totalitarian nightmarescape on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

At issue is the extent to which the Western left sought to resist criticism of existing socialism in the name of defending it as an ideal. Commendably, Rushdie has little faith in this project reapplied to Islam, much less as a promise to actualize reform.

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So we had an election. For those in the new opposition the outcome was variously enviable, troubling, or contemptible. For the victors it was…what else, an occasion for gathering an enormous outdoor rally at an urban theatrical stage to chant.

For my own part, I’m always somewhat reluctant to criticize the phenomenon of Barack Obama, because I cannot do so without confessing I miss the point itself. That’s because I possess a certain immunity to his allegedly irresistible charm. I miss the intimate personal connection supposedly conveyed through elaborately choreographed and cinematically lit mass spectacles, I find his celebrated speeches largely barren of purpose, and perhaps above all, I remain permanently unmoved by the emotional ecstasy his presence provokes in so many.

It should be acknowledged as true that if these impressions precondition your criticism, you do miss the point of Obama as political leader and cultural phenomenon on a profound level (and I surely do). For the critic, this can pose a difficulty that one must become an opponent of the phenomenon itself, rather than just its policy projects. And for the moment, that is to be the adversary of a powerful political tide.
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(photo: Tom LeGro)

Christopher Hitchens notices a pattern with anti-Palin rumors: their troubling tendency to turn out highly exaggerated or entirely fabricated, in a very short turn.

[A]s often as I have forwarded some alarming e-mail about her from a beavering comrade, I have afterward found myself having the sensation of putting my foot where the last stair ought to have been and wasn’t.
(Slate)

Hitch gets close to what’s happening there by recalling Walter Dean Burnham’s prescient 1960s prediction that Ronald Reagan would one day be president, based on Ron’s inability to exude hostility and thus not attract it. This is slightly misdirected. Reagan attracted as much hostility as any politician in the modern era from the political left, save perhaps Nixon. The trouble consisted in that the product of that hostility, criticism, didn’t seem to stick. Or even worse, seemed to possess a counterproductive property.

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(photo: Serguei Kovalev)

Christopher Hitchens once said that the trouble with biographers of Thomas Jefferson, is that there appears to be the collective assumption on their part that the great man was without a penis. I’m reminded of this truth in reading about the very hot water Mr. Al Franken –the all-but-certain Democratic nominee for US Senate in Minnesota– has gotten himself into, over a satirical and sexually explicit essay he wrote for Playboy magazine in 2000. Hot water originating not only from GOP women, but also from within the Democratic Party.

The piece is without doubt salacious, even enormously kinky (naughty NSFW excerpts available here). But one could be forgiven the crime of commonsense in expecting that a writer tasked with composing anything for such a magazine on contract, would tend to produce something somewhat sexually suggestive if he wished to be paid. One might even go so far as to posit that writing something entitled “Porn-o-Rama,” for an unabashedly pornographic publication, isn’t all that shocking. I mention the title because in defiance of reason we are told by Liza Porteus Viana that the title itself (and neither the publisher nor the substance of the essay), is what is most politically objectionable here.

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Michael Goldfarb denounced Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives as “disgraceful” today, for their open criticism of John McCain’s record and views. He labels it the result of a psychological condition he and other McCain apologists call “McCain Derangement Syndrome”:

I understand that some conservatives are uneasy about a McCain nomination, that he isn’t their first choice to carry the party’s standard. But there’s something truly unhinged–and at times spectacularly disgraceful–about the response of some on the right to this increasingly likely prospect.
(The Weekly Standard)

I can only echo his editor, Bill Kristol, who after Bush’s hopelessly misguided selection of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, lamented: “And what elected officials will step forward to begin to lay the groundwork for conservative leadership after Bush?” Apparently no one, since John McCain will be the non-conservative nominee of the Republican party. Far from the silent acquiescence Michael advises, I wish there was as much public indignation and outrage now as there was then. Were there, perhaps we wouldn’t have this problem to begin with.

I would also remind those McCain defenders who are urging a tactical silence for political purposes, that deep conservative opposition to McCain was not a secret until Rush Limbaugh weighed in on the subject last week. The Democratic opposition was not under the impression that conservatives loved the man, and it would not have been possible to conceal a lengthy history of dissent against him within the party. Nor is the current criticism being leveled against him (that he is not conservative), anything the Democrats could possibly use to their advantage, as they’re even less so.

I might also ask more generally, how it is somehow acceptable to urge conservatives to forfeit their views, but not to demand that the candidate they are supposed to elect to represent them, forfeit his own instead? We do not represent John McCain, he wishes to represent us. If he doesn’t represent us, then we should say so. For silence is the one thing no representative democracy can tolerate or long survive.

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