Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism
Penguin; $28; 487pp
In fact, in many respects fascism not only is here [in the US] but has been here for nearly a century. For what we call liberalism – the refurbished edifice of American Progressivism – is in fact a descendant and manifestation of fascism.
Thus does National Review’s Jonah Goldberg summarise the thesis of Liberal Fascism, invoking, not once but twice, the f-word. No, not that one – and no, not that one – but the innocuous-looking noun ‘fact’.
In fact, there are a great many facts in this 487-page book, though whether these facts add up to the ‘fact’ cited in the above quotation has caused a good deal of debate in the US, where Liberal Fascism has had the effect of so deepening the trenches in the culture war that a friendly kickabout in No Man’s Land is now a physical impossibility. And little wonder, when you consider the contents. They are, to say the least, explosive.
Essentially, Goldberg’s thesis is this. Fascism is not, as is often assumed, a phenomenon of the right but of the left, which has managed to successfully shift the blame by following the precedent set down by Stalin and describing all opposition as ‘fascist’. Moreover, the ‘Western fascist moment’ also spawned American Progressivism (as represented by the ‘fascist’ presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt), which morphed, in turn, into modern liberalism (as represented by Hillary Clinton). What fascism and liberalism have in common is a belief in social regeneration, a liking for the state and a distrust of big business. Oh, and vegetarianism.
No doubt Goldberg is right to deplore the invocation of ‘fascist’ and ‘Nazi’ as terms of abuse in political discourse, and right to identify liberals and left-wingers as by far the worst culprits in this regard. I also think he’s right to stress the left’s denial in respect of its past. But to say that fascism is a phenomenon of the left and not of the right is simply not true. All sorts of currents run in to fascism, some from the left and some from the right. All Goldberg has done is to stress those aspects of left-wing history that fit his thesis, ignoring, for example, Mussolini’s support for Franco in the Spanish Civil War, while emphasising certain of his social policies, or banging on about Liberty Cabbage in Wilson’s wartime administration (shades of Orwell’s Victory Gin?) and completely ignoring Freedom Fries. It is scholarship of a deeply dishonest sort.
In essence, however, this is not a work of scholarship but a dressing down dressed up as scholarship. On every page, Goldberg’s inner blowhard rattles the cage of objectivity. His favourite tactic is the dummy caveat – a deny-and-imply in which he initially pleads that of course he isn’t saying that liberals are morally equivalent to Nazis etc., before going on to insinuate just that. Note how, in the following sentence, the most egregious moral equivalence is couched in terms that ostensibly eschew it:
We do live in an ‘unconscious civilisation’ of fascism, albeit of a friendly sort infinitely more benign than that of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, or FDR’s America.
It’s a good job Liberal Fascism was written before the economic crash. Obama’s talk of a new New Deal might have sent Goldberg over the edge.
It used to be that moral equivalence was something of a left-wing speciality. After all, it wasn’t conservative commentators who described the 9/11 attacks as a blow for freedom from within the imperium. Goldberg’s silly and tendentious book is a sign that the madness is beginning to spread. Some reviewers have referred to its title as oxymoronic, which it certainly is. But the book itself is simply moronic.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Monday, March 16, 2009
Review of Byron in Love (The Weekend Australian, 14/03/2009)
Edna O’Brien, Byron in LoveWeidenfeld & Nicolson; $35; 228pp
In Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia (1993), a literary scholar called Bernard Nightingale attempts to establish that George Gordon, Lord Byron, left England for Europe in 1809 not in order to broaden his horizons and partake of the Continental crumpet but in an effort to escape the consequences of having killed one Ezra Chater. Staying at the fictional Sidley Park, Bernard treats a modest audience, which includes a rival literary scholar, to an advance reading of his sensational paper:
Bernard: Without question, Lord Byron, in the very season of his emergence as a literary figure, quit the country in a cloud of panic and mystery, and stayed abroad for two years at a time when Continental travel was unusual and dangerous. If we seek his reason – do we need to look far?
No mean performer, he is pleased with the effect of his peroration. There is a significant silence.
Hannah: Bollocks.
Bernard’s theory is indeed ‘Bollocks’: Chater died, not by Byron’s hand, but of a monkey bite sustained in Malta. But it is less Bernard’s mistake than his professional ambition that constitutes the comedy here. This, as it were, is his original folly – the folly of the academic desperate to make a name for himself in an area of study so well excavated that only a sensational new discovery has any chance of causing a stir.
In Byron in Love, Edna O’Brien offers no sensational new discoveries about the man whom many regard as the prototype of the modern celebrity. Nor does she change the angle on her subject in the manner of Hannah Jarvis (‘Bollocks’), who has written a book on Caroline Lamb, with whom Bryon had a turbulent affair. Nor, indeed, has she adopted the method employed by Lady Caroline herself and treated of her subject in fiction, though her reputation as a novelist is such that many would have been pleased if she had. Rather, she has produced a work which is, in many regards, traditional, while being in various subtle ways original and even experimental. It is a short book but by no means a small one.
‘Disappointment’, wrote the poet Thomas Moore, met Byron ‘on the very threshold of life’. Born with a badly malformed right foot and descended from a long line of brutes and lunatics – the latest of whom was his father, ‘Mad Jack’, a fugitive from responsibility – his early years were indeed no picnic. His relationship with his mother, Catherine, was, by any measure, atrocious, she referring to him as a ‘lame brat’, he to her, or to her ‘conduct’, as a ‘happy compound of derangement and folly’. Even in these early years, it was clear that Byron was going to be a handful and, to one acquaintance at least, that he was going to be something rather special: according to his headmaster at Harrow, the fastidious young aristocrat had ‘mind in his eyes’.
In 1808 he installed himself at the family pile in Nottinghamshire and the insatiable libertine whose notoriety was to peak with the publication of Don Juan began to take recognisable form. O’Brien’s picturesque, often lavish prose is a match for the tyro poet’s flamboyance. Here she is on Byron’s taste in decoration and furnishings:
[It] inclined towards the ostentatious, draperies, frills, tassels, valances, gilded four-posters, coronets, and true to his penchant for the macabre, he had skulls which had been found in the crypt, mounted on silver to be used as drinking cups.
It was what went on on those gilded four-posters (and, indeed, what went down on them) that lies at the heart of O’Brien’s book. By any standards you wish to employ, Byron was a prodigious lover, swapping locks with aristocrats (enough hair is exchanged to stuff a sofa) and STDs with prostitutes, while writing to friends that he intends to relieve a fifteen-year-old boy ‘of his last inhibition’. The publication of Childe Harold (1812–1818) appears to have been a catalyst, as women, conflating protagonist and poet, threw themselves at Byron’s feet. The love affair with Caroline Lamb, the marriage to Annabella Milbanke and the weeks of madness that followed it, the incestuous relationship with Augusta Leigh, the disgraceful treatment of young Claire Clairmont – all this is covered in fascinating detail. Nor is the detail lurid or gratuitous: Byron’s lovemaking is the key to his character, and you don’t need to be a psychoanalyst to see it as a form of compensation for feelings of inadequacy.
Sometimes a sketch set down in a flourish can reveal more soul than the most laboured portrait, and O’Brien’s little book does indeed breathe life into this most done-to-death of subjects. The key to her success is her reading of the letters, to which she brings a novelist’s subtlety, recognising that Byron’s correspondence is not just a storehouse of information but an ongoing exercise in self-dramatisation. His first letter is ‘arch and self-possessed’, the letters to his solicitor ‘peremptory and defiant’, his epistolary courtship of Annabella Milbanke a ‘marvel of eloquence, verisimilitude and staggering deception’. So utterly steeped is O’Brien in her subject that she almost seems to become her ‘characters’, changing from the past to the present tense at important junctures in Byron’s life.
Empathy is one thing; sympathy is another. ‘The more Byron is known, the better he will be loved’ said Teresa Guiccioli in 1873. But the Countess never felt the brunt of Byron’s astonishing capacity for malice. For Byron had a genius for cruelty almost as impressive as his poetic genius, and these two things, when taken together, make O’Brien’s rather brisk conclusion that the poet was a sort of Everyman look unconvincing to say the least. Nevertheless, her book brings Bryon alive in a way that is rare in biography, especially literary biography, which often gets lost in labyrinthine explication of the relationship between the work and the life. Beautifully written, it is lively and absorbing and, save for Byron’s hyperactive pair, entirely free from bollocks.
Monday, March 09, 2009
Review of Essentially Creative (The Weekend Australian, 09/03/2009)
Julianne Schultz (ed.), Griffith Review: Essentially Creative
ABC Books; $19.95; 251pp
In some ways the most significant sentence in the latest issue of the Griffith Review comes on the verso of the title page: ‘This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding and advisory body.’ Thus does the journal announce itself as a beneficiary of the very system of government grants and subsidies that it proposes to subject to robust analysis under the heading Essentially Creative. Needless to say, it will have to tread lightly if it isn’t to rouse the sleeping army of op-ed writers and talk-back blowhards dreaming restively of the next big stoush between the chattering classes and the moral majority. A journal funded out of tax-payers’ dollars dedicating almost an entire issue to calls for yet more tax-payers’ dollars! How’s that for an example of The Cultural Whinge!
In fact, the great majority of contributors seem to be thinking far more creatively about, well, creativity than was the case in previous years, or might appear to have been the case to someone following the arguments from a distance. Combining essays, fiction, poetry, autobiography and reportage, and drawing largely on the insights and debates to have emerged from ‘Towards a Creative Australia’ – the arts and creativity stream at the 2020 Summit in 2008 – this issue of the Griffith Review covers not only questions of funding but also the subject of creativity itself, as well as the various difficulties – depression and so on – to which it can give rise. Overshadowing proceedings, and enlivening them, is the recent furore over Bill Henson’s photographs. Here, indeed, is the ghost at the feast who reminds us that for all the first-rate art Australians have made in recent decades Australia remains in some respects a country ‘culturally prejudiced against culture’.
That rather skilful juxtaposition of two competing notions of culture is made by the screenwriter Geoffrey Atherden, who in ‘Art and Sport – Oh Yes, and Money’ puts what we might call the traditional case for increased government funding of the arts in terms that any red-blooded Australian can understand and appreciate. ‘[I]f artists were treated like sports people,’ he writes, ‘there would be talent spotters who would offer places to gifted individuals at a major training centre …’ What ‘a major training centre’ dedicated to the arts would entail I don’t know, but Atherden’s comparison is an interesting one. La Trobe University’s Julian Meyrick makes a similar point in ‘The River and the Boat’: ‘Athletes can be elite … Artists, however, are elit-ist. And in this abrupt and unexplained change of conjugation lies the fundamental expression of Australia’s bad ideas about art.’
For Helen O’Neil, the Executive Director of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, art and sport came together in style at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. For her, indeed, the opening ceremony represented the high point of what she calls the ‘conflation of art-making and national identity’. As for the current situation, O’Neil is rather less impressed. Her argument, put forward in ‘Ratbags at the Gates’, is that Australia needs a new cultural policy – one that regards Australian artists as ‘the vanguard of the new economy’. Citing the Cool Britannia policy pursued by the Labour Government in the UK, she advocates a cultural policy that does not treat art as separate from the economy but as fundamental to its long-term development. The splendid isolation of art is, by this reckoning, a thing of the past: ‘The economics of the creative industries mean artists must learn to live in the world of productivity growth and the knowledge economy as well as the more familiar world of personal enrichment and revitalisation.’
There are problems with this point of view, and these are brought out beautifully in what, for my tax dollar at least, is the most absorbing essay in the journal: ‘Industry that Pays, and Art that Doesn’t’, by the singer and writer Robyn Archer. Archer’s argument, carefully set out, is that the concept of the creative industries is, in essence, a rhetorical manoeuvre (‘a hoodwink in current language about the arts’), the effect of which is to conflate the notions of creativity and artistic endeavour, with the result that ‘the arts’ are defined so broadly that the concept ceases to have meaning at all. A division needs to be maintained between the art world and the creative industries in order both to protect the former and to ensure that the creativity needed to sustain the latter continues to be incubated in the best laboratory society has – which is to say, the traditional arts.
This, as I say, is a powerful argument. The problem with it comes when Archer tries to separate works of art from other forms of entertainment, and indeed from entertainment per se. Art, she writes, is not aimed at a market; nor is its ‘prime motive’ to make a profit. Rather, its role is to challenge expectations. But a market is merely a paying audience and the artist who doesn’t care about that is well on the way to art oblivion. Art that is edgy or demanding is one thing. Art that is nothing but edge is another, and as uninviting as a pizza with no topping. Great art both challenges and entertains.
There are interesting things in Essentially Creative, but much of the writing is of a depressingly low standard. Given the quasi-corporate, pseudo-precise verbiage that seems to have infiltrated Australian academia, locutions such as ‘creative inputs’ are, perhaps, to be expected, as is one contributor’s description of artists as ‘an under-utilised resource’. But what on earth is a sentence like this doing in the Griffith Review: ‘The stereotypical and often acommercial characteristics of the arts has led to society often granting an exceptionalist status to the artist, being allowed to live outside conventions’? Possibly it was the reputation of the veteran wordsmith who penned this atrocity that jammed the editor’s radar on this occasion, but really this sentence should have been recalled before it left the author’s airspace. I’m all for living ‘outside conventions’ but draw the line at the conventions of grammar.
ABC Books; $19.95; 251pp
In some ways the most significant sentence in the latest issue of the Griffith Review comes on the verso of the title page: ‘This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its principal arts funding and advisory body.’ Thus does the journal announce itself as a beneficiary of the very system of government grants and subsidies that it proposes to subject to robust analysis under the heading Essentially Creative. Needless to say, it will have to tread lightly if it isn’t to rouse the sleeping army of op-ed writers and talk-back blowhards dreaming restively of the next big stoush between the chattering classes and the moral majority. A journal funded out of tax-payers’ dollars dedicating almost an entire issue to calls for yet more tax-payers’ dollars! How’s that for an example of The Cultural Whinge!
In fact, the great majority of contributors seem to be thinking far more creatively about, well, creativity than was the case in previous years, or might appear to have been the case to someone following the arguments from a distance. Combining essays, fiction, poetry, autobiography and reportage, and drawing largely on the insights and debates to have emerged from ‘Towards a Creative Australia’ – the arts and creativity stream at the 2020 Summit in 2008 – this issue of the Griffith Review covers not only questions of funding but also the subject of creativity itself, as well as the various difficulties – depression and so on – to which it can give rise. Overshadowing proceedings, and enlivening them, is the recent furore over Bill Henson’s photographs. Here, indeed, is the ghost at the feast who reminds us that for all the first-rate art Australians have made in recent decades Australia remains in some respects a country ‘culturally prejudiced against culture’.
That rather skilful juxtaposition of two competing notions of culture is made by the screenwriter Geoffrey Atherden, who in ‘Art and Sport – Oh Yes, and Money’ puts what we might call the traditional case for increased government funding of the arts in terms that any red-blooded Australian can understand and appreciate. ‘[I]f artists were treated like sports people,’ he writes, ‘there would be talent spotters who would offer places to gifted individuals at a major training centre …’ What ‘a major training centre’ dedicated to the arts would entail I don’t know, but Atherden’s comparison is an interesting one. La Trobe University’s Julian Meyrick makes a similar point in ‘The River and the Boat’: ‘Athletes can be elite … Artists, however, are elit-ist. And in this abrupt and unexplained change of conjugation lies the fundamental expression of Australia’s bad ideas about art.’
For Helen O’Neil, the Executive Director of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, art and sport came together in style at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. For her, indeed, the opening ceremony represented the high point of what she calls the ‘conflation of art-making and national identity’. As for the current situation, O’Neil is rather less impressed. Her argument, put forward in ‘Ratbags at the Gates’, is that Australia needs a new cultural policy – one that regards Australian artists as ‘the vanguard of the new economy’. Citing the Cool Britannia policy pursued by the Labour Government in the UK, she advocates a cultural policy that does not treat art as separate from the economy but as fundamental to its long-term development. The splendid isolation of art is, by this reckoning, a thing of the past: ‘The economics of the creative industries mean artists must learn to live in the world of productivity growth and the knowledge economy as well as the more familiar world of personal enrichment and revitalisation.’
There are problems with this point of view, and these are brought out beautifully in what, for my tax dollar at least, is the most absorbing essay in the journal: ‘Industry that Pays, and Art that Doesn’t’, by the singer and writer Robyn Archer. Archer’s argument, carefully set out, is that the concept of the creative industries is, in essence, a rhetorical manoeuvre (‘a hoodwink in current language about the arts’), the effect of which is to conflate the notions of creativity and artistic endeavour, with the result that ‘the arts’ are defined so broadly that the concept ceases to have meaning at all. A division needs to be maintained between the art world and the creative industries in order both to protect the former and to ensure that the creativity needed to sustain the latter continues to be incubated in the best laboratory society has – which is to say, the traditional arts.
This, as I say, is a powerful argument. The problem with it comes when Archer tries to separate works of art from other forms of entertainment, and indeed from entertainment per se. Art, she writes, is not aimed at a market; nor is its ‘prime motive’ to make a profit. Rather, its role is to challenge expectations. But a market is merely a paying audience and the artist who doesn’t care about that is well on the way to art oblivion. Art that is edgy or demanding is one thing. Art that is nothing but edge is another, and as uninviting as a pizza with no topping. Great art both challenges and entertains.
There are interesting things in Essentially Creative, but much of the writing is of a depressingly low standard. Given the quasi-corporate, pseudo-precise verbiage that seems to have infiltrated Australian academia, locutions such as ‘creative inputs’ are, perhaps, to be expected, as is one contributor’s description of artists as ‘an under-utilised resource’. But what on earth is a sentence like this doing in the Griffith Review: ‘The stereotypical and often acommercial characteristics of the arts has led to society often granting an exceptionalist status to the artist, being allowed to live outside conventions’? Possibly it was the reputation of the veteran wordsmith who penned this atrocity that jammed the editor’s radar on this occasion, but really this sentence should have been recalled before it left the author’s airspace. I’m all for living ‘outside conventions’ but draw the line at the conventions of grammar.
Wednesday, March 04, 2009
Joker's Cough (Sydney Morning Herald, 28/02/2009)
Simon Gray, Coda (Faber; $39.95; 251pp)In the first and eponymous volume of The Smoking Diaries, Simon Gray’s hugely popular trilogy, Harold Pinter, a good friend of the author, announces that he has cancer of the oesophagus. In Coda, which carries on from the series but is not, strictly speaking, a part of it, Gray visits Pinter at his home in London. Now, Gray himself is dying from cancer, not of the throat but of the lung. Gray presents Pinter with a book on cricket, to which the conversation eventually turns, Pinter recalling an ill-fated fixture in which he managed to drop two catches, run out a team-mate and be bowled ‘neck and crop’ after occupying the crease for just a few balls. Gray concludes the chapter thus:
He finished with a broken cry of despair, as if he could still see the ball at his feet, hear the stumps rattle behind him, and we both laughed and laughed until we both coughed and coughed, laughed and coughed –
Both playwrights died in 2008 – Gray in August, Pinter in December – and the thought of them sharing a drink and a laugh towards the end of their respective innings is moving and oddly comforting. But what really strikes me about this passage is that it seems to sum up something in Gray’s outlook, especially as it manifests itself in this posthumously published volume. I suppose the dramatic and thus appropriate term for that something would be ‘tragicomic’; and yet that doesn’t quite describe it. Rather, it is a combination of amusement and existential angst: a sort of joker’s cough; or a smoker’s laugh.
When Coda opens, in 2007, Gray believes he has nine months to live. He and his wife, Victoria, hadn’t wanted to know the prognosis but a misunderstanding in the oncologist’s office – a misunderstanding that Pinter would have appreciated, since it arrives by way of an ambiguous pause – meant they received it anyway. The ‘death sentence’ comes as no surprise, Gray having smoked for fifty years at a rate of about three packets a day, but is none the less discombobulating for that, and it is partly and paradoxically in order to avoid the confrontation with what he calls the ‘true democracy’ of death that Gray begins to chronicle the slow descent of the final curtain.
Moving between the UK and Crete, he considers suicide, though never seriously, reflects on the recent deaths of friends, reads the novels of Stefan Zweig and records all the little indignities attendant on the process of dying. This last is the source of much of the humour, as Gray does battle with incoherent nurses and specialists with the strangest bedside manner. One often has the sense with this author that his physical decline is inextricably linked to the decline of the country of which he is a citizen and here the two themes come together in the theatre, as it were, of Britain’s NHS. ‘The next morning, shortly after Victoria arrived with newspapers, an oddly shifty little nurse, I took her to be, poked her head around the door and said something so incomprehensible that I knew it must be English.’
Though not as funny as Gray’s other books – how could it be in the circumstances, the tragic flaw of the playwright’s addiction having taken a hold in the final act – Coda is an enjoyable read. It is written in Gray’s familiar style, with headlined sections and rambling sentences (rambling but always exquisitely balanced). If anything, the style has come in to its own, as what seemed in the past like a distracted air is now revealed as a kind of avoidance. When the point at issue is the point of death, it is hardly surprising that one wanders from it.
A cigarette, said Oscar Wilde, is the perfect pleasure, because it leaves one unsatisfied. One certainly wouldn’t say that of Coda, but it does leave the reader wanting more. It is sad to think that in this regard no satisfaction will be forthcoming.
The Lucifer Effect (The Weekend Australian, 28/02/2009)
Wendell Steavenson, The Weight of a Mustard Seed
Text Publishing; $34.95; 305pp
On 22 July 1979, Iraq’s new president, Saddam Hussein, convened a meeting of Ba’ath Party officials in a Baghdad auditorium. In the grainy, black-and-white video of the meeting distributed over the following days, Saddam is smoking his trademark cigar as a list of names is read out by a lieutenant. The list is of senior Iraqi officials accused of involvement in a plot against the Party. On hearing their names, the accused stand up and are escorted from the hall by security officers. Sixty-eight men are denounced in this way, and of them twenty-two are sentenced to death. Perversely, ‘innocent’ members of the assembly were ordered to join in the executions.
It is, I think, this latter detail that goes to the heart of Saddam’s regime and of totalitarian regimes in general. As Hannah Arendt famously argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism, autocratic regimes consolidate power by wiping out all opposition (that, of course, is what Saddam was doing; it’s highly unlikely that there was any plot). But totalitarian regimes go further: they seek to control the individual – to control his mind, not just his movements. One of the principal ways they do this is by collapsing the distinction between victim and perpetrator, creating a new class of perpetrator-victims: people who are not evil themselves but who are implicated in the evils of the regime. The American psychologist Philip Zimbardo called this phenomenon ‘The Lucifer Effect’: the process by which good people turn ‘bad’ when subjected to pressure from those in authority and provided with a legitimising ideological framework.
In The Weight of a Mustard Seed, Wendell Steavenson presses both Zimbardo and Arendt into service in an attempt to better understand what she calls the ‘how-why’ of Saddam’s regime. Steavenson is a freelance journalist who spent around eight months in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004. In that time she conducted a series of interviews with people either related to or connected with General Kamel Sachet, a brave and purportedly famous soldier who served in both the Iran-Iraq War and the invasion/annexation of Kuwait. It is through this man and the various agonies, physical and spiritual, that he is forced to endure that Steavenson attempts to tell the story of Iraqi society over the last thirty years, with particular reference to the concepts of guilt and individual responsibility. (Hence her rather picturesque title, which is taken from Chapter 21 of the Qur’an and refers to the notion that on the Day of Judgment every fragment of goodness or badness, no matter how small, will be brought ‘to account’.)
To this end she talks to his wife, Um Omar, and such of his children as are willing to be interviewed. She also talks to the men who knew him, in a professional capacity and from a spell in gaol (an unremarkable circumstance in what has been dubbed ‘The Republic of Fear’). Particularly interesting are two psychiatrists, Dr Hassan and Dr Laith, who more than anyone else in the book reveal the absurdity of life under Saddam, required as they are to formally witness essentially arbitrary executions and report on the psychological state of front-line troops in the Iran-Iraq War in a way that neither annoys the President nor leads him to suspect that he’s being mollified. Indeed, I think Steavenson missed a trick in not making one of these men her focus. After all, you don’t study Field Marshall Rommel if you want to understand Nazi Germany, but the doctors and the bureaucrats.
The real problem with this book, however, is that it is trying too hard to turn journalism into literature. Needless to say, Steavenson is possessed of more than a mustard seed of courage. But her style is a crazy salad of infelicities. By turns portentous and novelettish, she attempts to shock and awe the reader with inappropriate poeticisms (‘His dark eyes were limpid like unfathomable pools of poetry’), irritating internal rhymes (‘F16 jets glinted like silver in the high-drawn dawn’) and the kind of imagery that makes you wince: ‘Saddam had gathered all his might and swollen pride into a great wave that crashed, shattering its kinetic tumult into spurts and spray of white noise, fizz and confusion.’ An unfathomable pool of poetry, indeed.
Still, and for all its stylistic atrocities, The Weight of a Mustard Seed does complicate a picture in desperate need of complication. Steavenson is good on tribal politics and the ways in which the parties of God are colonising Iraqi minds, and on the necessary doubling and ‘slippery prevarications’ that characterise the perpetrator-victim. Certainly there are things one can learn from this book. It’s just a shame that it’s written in a way that makes you wonder if you’ve forgotten how to read.
Text Publishing; $34.95; 305pp
On 22 July 1979, Iraq’s new president, Saddam Hussein, convened a meeting of Ba’ath Party officials in a Baghdad auditorium. In the grainy, black-and-white video of the meeting distributed over the following days, Saddam is smoking his trademark cigar as a list of names is read out by a lieutenant. The list is of senior Iraqi officials accused of involvement in a plot against the Party. On hearing their names, the accused stand up and are escorted from the hall by security officers. Sixty-eight men are denounced in this way, and of them twenty-two are sentenced to death. Perversely, ‘innocent’ members of the assembly were ordered to join in the executions.
It is, I think, this latter detail that goes to the heart of Saddam’s regime and of totalitarian regimes in general. As Hannah Arendt famously argued in The Origins of Totalitarianism, autocratic regimes consolidate power by wiping out all opposition (that, of course, is what Saddam was doing; it’s highly unlikely that there was any plot). But totalitarian regimes go further: they seek to control the individual – to control his mind, not just his movements. One of the principal ways they do this is by collapsing the distinction between victim and perpetrator, creating a new class of perpetrator-victims: people who are not evil themselves but who are implicated in the evils of the regime. The American psychologist Philip Zimbardo called this phenomenon ‘The Lucifer Effect’: the process by which good people turn ‘bad’ when subjected to pressure from those in authority and provided with a legitimising ideological framework.
In The Weight of a Mustard Seed, Wendell Steavenson presses both Zimbardo and Arendt into service in an attempt to better understand what she calls the ‘how-why’ of Saddam’s regime. Steavenson is a freelance journalist who spent around eight months in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004. In that time she conducted a series of interviews with people either related to or connected with General Kamel Sachet, a brave and purportedly famous soldier who served in both the Iran-Iraq War and the invasion/annexation of Kuwait. It is through this man and the various agonies, physical and spiritual, that he is forced to endure that Steavenson attempts to tell the story of Iraqi society over the last thirty years, with particular reference to the concepts of guilt and individual responsibility. (Hence her rather picturesque title, which is taken from Chapter 21 of the Qur’an and refers to the notion that on the Day of Judgment every fragment of goodness or badness, no matter how small, will be brought ‘to account’.)
To this end she talks to his wife, Um Omar, and such of his children as are willing to be interviewed. She also talks to the men who knew him, in a professional capacity and from a spell in gaol (an unremarkable circumstance in what has been dubbed ‘The Republic of Fear’). Particularly interesting are two psychiatrists, Dr Hassan and Dr Laith, who more than anyone else in the book reveal the absurdity of life under Saddam, required as they are to formally witness essentially arbitrary executions and report on the psychological state of front-line troops in the Iran-Iraq War in a way that neither annoys the President nor leads him to suspect that he’s being mollified. Indeed, I think Steavenson missed a trick in not making one of these men her focus. After all, you don’t study Field Marshall Rommel if you want to understand Nazi Germany, but the doctors and the bureaucrats.
The real problem with this book, however, is that it is trying too hard to turn journalism into literature. Needless to say, Steavenson is possessed of more than a mustard seed of courage. But her style is a crazy salad of infelicities. By turns portentous and novelettish, she attempts to shock and awe the reader with inappropriate poeticisms (‘His dark eyes were limpid like unfathomable pools of poetry’), irritating internal rhymes (‘F16 jets glinted like silver in the high-drawn dawn’) and the kind of imagery that makes you wince: ‘Saddam had gathered all his might and swollen pride into a great wave that crashed, shattering its kinetic tumult into spurts and spray of white noise, fizz and confusion.’ An unfathomable pool of poetry, indeed.
Still, and for all its stylistic atrocities, The Weight of a Mustard Seed does complicate a picture in desperate need of complication. Steavenson is good on tribal politics and the ways in which the parties of God are colonising Iraqi minds, and on the necessary doubling and ‘slippery prevarications’ that characterise the perpetrator-victim. Certainly there are things one can learn from this book. It’s just a shame that it’s written in a way that makes you wonder if you’ve forgotten how to read.
Review of The American Future: A History, by Simon Schama
Simon Schama, The American Future: A History
Jonathan Cape; $35; 392pp
To describe the election of Barack Obama as an ‘historic victory’ is not just a cliché; it is also a tautology. The election of a US President is always an historic event. For the historian Simon Schama, however, Obama’s election (or better say candidacy: The American Future: A History was written before the results were in) is ‘historic’ in another sense – a sense that goes decisively beyond such journalistic platitudes. For Schama, the recent US election was not just history; it was all about history.
Hence his rather clever title, the subordinate part of which, by the way, should really be accorded equal status with the three words to the left of the colon. For the future of the US, according to Schama, is always about history for precisely the reason that its history is always about the future. A bold experiment in breaking new ground, literally and metaphorically, the future is in its DNA. Indeed, Schama echoes Frederick Jackson Turner, whose ‘Frontier Thesis’ was that US exceptionalism can only be properly understood as the ongoing legacy of the interaction between civilised society and untamed ‘wilderness’. ‘In the Old World you knew your place; in the New World you made it. So American liberty has always been the liberty to move on.’
Schama takes a thematic approach rather than a chronological one, moving backwards and forwards in time in a way that underscores his thesis. Investigating how the early religious settlers continue to inform religion in the US, he casts a sardonic (and Semitic) eye over the megachurches of the Bible Belt (‘The signs on the seats of the vast amphitheatrical “chapel” were marked “SAVED” which was nice for a Jew like me …’), while in the chapter entitled ‘American War’, the establishment of West Point military academy by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 makes for an excellent point of access into current debates about elective wars, liberal intervention and nation building. Jefferson’s disputes with Alexander Hamilton about the role that military power ought to play in American life and beyond US borders are as relevant now as they ever were.
One of the most impressive things about The American Future: A History is the way in which Schama effectively collapses two historiographical approaches – the Great Man theory and People’s history – by focusing less on prime movers like Jefferson and more on what we might call sub-prime movers. For example, the story of the Civil War is largely recounted through Montgomery Meigs. A man whose own son was killed in the war and who, in an act of gruesome symbolism, turned the estate of Robert E. Lee into a burial ground for the Union dead, Meigs oversaw the construction of the Capitol, witnessed the first shots of the Civil War and the death of Abraham Lincoln and was Quartermaster General to the Union forces. (It also turns out that his great-great-great grandson teaches a university course on ‘Why presidents go to war when they don’t have to’.)
It is Schama’s own embeddedness, however, that gives this book its considerable charm. Resident in the US for half of his life, Schama’s passion for his subject is obvious and his folksy prose is a joy to read. Only occasionally does he go over the top and it is usually when he’s writing about Barack Obama. For example, Schama’s thrilled description of Obama in full oratorical swing – ‘the head still and slightly cocked to one side, as if awaiting the promptings of ancestry’ – teeters at the edge of self-parody.
Still, I think he’s right to suggest that the very fact of Obama’s candidacy is a vindication of US democracy, and that US democracy, for all its faults, is something for which the world should be grateful. Obama, with his roots in Muslim Kenya and Christian Kansas, is overdue, but as Schama writes in his introduction: ‘At the very time when the voters of Iowa were persuading each other, in Kenya voters were trying to kill each other.’
Jonathan Cape; $35; 392pp
To describe the election of Barack Obama as an ‘historic victory’ is not just a cliché; it is also a tautology. The election of a US President is always an historic event. For the historian Simon Schama, however, Obama’s election (or better say candidacy: The American Future: A History was written before the results were in) is ‘historic’ in another sense – a sense that goes decisively beyond such journalistic platitudes. For Schama, the recent US election was not just history; it was all about history.
Hence his rather clever title, the subordinate part of which, by the way, should really be accorded equal status with the three words to the left of the colon. For the future of the US, according to Schama, is always about history for precisely the reason that its history is always about the future. A bold experiment in breaking new ground, literally and metaphorically, the future is in its DNA. Indeed, Schama echoes Frederick Jackson Turner, whose ‘Frontier Thesis’ was that US exceptionalism can only be properly understood as the ongoing legacy of the interaction between civilised society and untamed ‘wilderness’. ‘In the Old World you knew your place; in the New World you made it. So American liberty has always been the liberty to move on.’
Schama takes a thematic approach rather than a chronological one, moving backwards and forwards in time in a way that underscores his thesis. Investigating how the early religious settlers continue to inform religion in the US, he casts a sardonic (and Semitic) eye over the megachurches of the Bible Belt (‘The signs on the seats of the vast amphitheatrical “chapel” were marked “SAVED” which was nice for a Jew like me …’), while in the chapter entitled ‘American War’, the establishment of West Point military academy by Thomas Jefferson in 1802 makes for an excellent point of access into current debates about elective wars, liberal intervention and nation building. Jefferson’s disputes with Alexander Hamilton about the role that military power ought to play in American life and beyond US borders are as relevant now as they ever were.
One of the most impressive things about The American Future: A History is the way in which Schama effectively collapses two historiographical approaches – the Great Man theory and People’s history – by focusing less on prime movers like Jefferson and more on what we might call sub-prime movers. For example, the story of the Civil War is largely recounted through Montgomery Meigs. A man whose own son was killed in the war and who, in an act of gruesome symbolism, turned the estate of Robert E. Lee into a burial ground for the Union dead, Meigs oversaw the construction of the Capitol, witnessed the first shots of the Civil War and the death of Abraham Lincoln and was Quartermaster General to the Union forces. (It also turns out that his great-great-great grandson teaches a university course on ‘Why presidents go to war when they don’t have to’.)
It is Schama’s own embeddedness, however, that gives this book its considerable charm. Resident in the US for half of his life, Schama’s passion for his subject is obvious and his folksy prose is a joy to read. Only occasionally does he go over the top and it is usually when he’s writing about Barack Obama. For example, Schama’s thrilled description of Obama in full oratorical swing – ‘the head still and slightly cocked to one side, as if awaiting the promptings of ancestry’ – teeters at the edge of self-parody.
Still, I think he’s right to suggest that the very fact of Obama’s candidacy is a vindication of US democracy, and that US democracy, for all its faults, is something for which the world should be grateful. Obama, with his roots in Muslim Kenya and Christian Kansas, is overdue, but as Schama writes in his introduction: ‘At the very time when the voters of Iowa were persuading each other, in Kenya voters were trying to kill each other.’
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
